The Dumb Laowai

I’m finally a free man for a little while. Well, almost free. Final exams were a bitch. Just to make things a little rougher nerve-wise, I have to hang around town for a week to get my scores. We can retake any exams we failed on February 26^th, so I need to get the results before leaving town so I can adapt my itinerary to fit any additional studying.

I’m actually glad now that I reverted to form and procrastinated making my travel plans for the break. I’ve been planning on heading south to Hainan, Viet Nam, anywhere warm. The problem is that they don’t speak Mandarin down there. Where it is spoken at all, the accent is different enough as to make it near impossible for me. Depending on how much reviewing I need to do, I may just decide to pack warm and limit myself to a few short trips in the north.

The only exam I know I passed was the oral exam. Laoshi kept praising my progress and study habits, claiming that I learned like a woman. That stuck me as rather ambiguous praise until he explained that women seem to be much more capable of learning Mandarin than men. Apparently I’m the only guy who gets it.

Then why, after all of this smoke has been blown, do I feel like a complete failure? There were parts of the tests where I couldn’t even read the question, much less answer it coherently. Listening comprehension was the worst. Listening to a five minute story about six people and then having to answer ten questions about them afterwards was next to impossible. I started making up answers, hoping for a couple of humor points. Yet, that night, I head across town to see a friend and have a twenty minute conversation with the taxi driver in which I understand practically everything!

After the first day’s comprehensive exam, I headed home, toying with the idea of trying the Muslim restaurant across the street from me. I arrived to see numerous police cars, barricades and trucks. Approximately 100 yards of shops and restaurants had collapsed earlier that morning. They were already doing demolition. For some reason, maybe just because they were in the neighborhood, they took down another 100 yards as well, including the Muslim place. One week later and there’s nothing left but a few loose bricks, and they won’t last long. I saw the donkey cart salvagers out there this morning.

I don’t want to be a skeptic, but this stretch of road was the only one in the four miles between me and the Olympic Stadium that did not have new construction on it. It sure seems convenient timing for the beautification committee. I’ll just have to wait and see what happens to the similar strip across the street.

Forgive any lack of subtlety today, but getting up at 1am for a 2am Bears game has thrown my sleep patterns off a little. It was rewarding, but still a little strange. There were perhaps a dozen Bears fans, although most were in other rooms and I didn’t see them until the end. I only knew of two Seahawks fans and one other Bears guy, who turned out to be Irish, with an accent so thick I only caught about every other word.

Since FOX isn’t available through the local satellite feeds, we got the game as shown on a Phillipino sports channel. The only commercials we saw were for their programming, including such favorite shows as “Half Naked Women Washing Cars” and “Cock Fight of the Week”. Their commercial breaks are of various lengths, so there would often be extra time to fill before the FOX break was over. This was done by repeatedly showing a Sports Illustrated type bikini montage, accompanied by some cheesy soft rock song. It would show at the end of every commercial break, sometimes going for a minute, sometimes 14 seconds or anywhere in between. I’ve never been so tired of looking at beautiful women. Even when I was occasionally spurred back to interest, it would suddenly cut off and return to the game, leaving me feeling a little cheated. At least the Bears won, the beer was good and even the lasagna (served over mashed potatoes) was not bad.

My food challenges have changed slightly since getting an apartment. I don’t cook often, but you need to keep a few things around, which means that I have started going to the local grocery stores. It’s been a challenge to my sanity.

Since the average person does not own a car, groceries must be carried home. Combined with the fact that many people also do not own a refrigerator, it means that trips to the market are usually made on a daily basis. This causes unusually crowded conditions that are aggravated by both the store layouts and the Chinese method of shopping.

You have your choice of hand basket or miniature push-cart resembling ones you would get for a child to play with, both just small enough to barely allow two people to pass in the aisle. Wide aisles are considered dead space. It’s a simple matter to pick things from opposite shelves at the same time. This is where method comes in. Chinese like to shop in groups. Sometimes it’s a family group and sometimes it appears to be the neighborhood grandmother club, but the result is that they will stop every few feet and have animated discussions, either about their Tai Qi class or the quality of the chicken testicles – I’m never sure.

With small aisles and constant obstructions you get time to glance over the products more than you might normally. That’s not always a good thing. We have fish that look like they came from a horror film. We have ducks feet, pickled and vacuum-packed as on-the-run snacks. There are small meat bits that look like a rooster’s comb and are as tender as old tires. We have live fish, shrimp, turtles, frogs and crabs. We have feet, stomachs, ears, tongues, tails, and noses. “Would you like an entire pig’s head sir, or just half?” There are so many offerings of various round meatballs you just know that some of them were originally packaged in pairs.

Milk is sold in small, foil bags of approximately 6oz., never refrigerated and yet, good for months apparently. Roast duck is sold in large, lined bags, also not refrigerated. This is either some great new packaging technique or something I really don’t want to know about. 

Some of these I might try if offered. Come to think of it, I’ve probably eaten a lot of them already, but I’m not quite prepared to cook them myself. So far my purchases have been limited to prepared foods that I could vaguely identify or things like noodles and breads.    

Random Babblings:

Shoes are not considered part of the uniform here. I’m not talking about outfits for waitresses or students here, but full blown uniforms for security services and the military. It takes a little shine off the performance of 6-12 men marching down the street in sharp, dress uniforms when you look down and see just as many different types of ratty sneakers. I guess that even the waitresses should at least be given some guidelines. Seeing a beautiful, traditional, red silk dress with leg slits revealing knee-high fake suede boots with silver buttons just doesn’t cut it.

What kind of system would have nice, simple characters for every number from one to ten, none of which have more than five strokes, and then come up with a character for zero that has thirteen strokes?

Innovative law of the week – In order to promote the use of standard Mandarin (Putonghua, or common speech), officials in Chongqing have passed a law that allows any citizen to fine a bus driver and collect one yuan from him every time he is heard to speak in another dialect. Since these guys are barely squeaking by on about 1,000 yuan a month and Mandarin is not their first language, I’ll bet the bus rides are providing some entertaining drama.

Culture shock on a personal level – Having a beautiful woman in your apartment who after a few drinks, goes to the bathroom. She leaves the door open to continue the conversation and proceeds to stand on the toilet seat and squat. While I’m still trying to get over the visual, moments later she clears her throat like a coal miner and spits on the floor. Beijing is a single man’s paradise, but it does call for a few adjustments. It’s not easy to screen for these behaviors and even harder to predict who might exhibit them. I just don’t know enough yet to know for sure who is sophisticated and who just came down from the hills, so to speak.

None of my American bartender friends could hack it here. They’re worked like dogs and they are not allowed to drink! I bought a drink for a cute bartender to celebrate something (I forget what) and she was in shock. She waited until the boss couldn’t see and told me that no one had ever bought her a drink before. She made her own Jack and Coke and it was still too strong for her.  

Counterfeiters here have no scruples whatsoever! Moutai, the most famous Chinese brand of liquor, is often imitated. I have no idea how it was discovered and it bothers me a little that a popular brand would have this quality, but the bootleggers found that adding DDT to their moonshine duplicates the taste of Moutai. The government may not need to worry about the overpopulation issue much longer. The people seem to be addressing it themselves.