Hey mom, I'm still alive!

Photo blog updated

2010-09-05T20:41:00.001+08:00

New pics from Taiwan and Xiamen
http://nickstember.com/heymom/1008/16/100816.html

New photos uploaded

2010-08-22T12:11:00.001+08:00

Xiamen -> Taoyuan, Taiwan -> Yilan -> Nan'ao -> Hualien -> Taroko
Gorge -> Taidong -> Kaohsiung -> Tainan -> Hsinchu
http://nickstember.com/heymom/1008/01/100801.html

Taiwan = Small, Oregon = Big

2010-08-21T09:21:00.001+08:00

Visual and numerical comparison:
http://nickstember.com/taiwan_oregon.htm

Also, I updated my travel itinerary to include the places I've visited
in Taiwan over the past two weeks:
http://maps.google.com.tw/maps/ms?hl=zh-TW&gl=tw&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=102115062882207396370.00048ca84c53c00aca0de&z=2&brcurrent=3,0x346ef3065c07572f:0xe711f004bf9c5469,1

Moving

2010-08-06T09:04:00.001+08:00

Hey!

For the foreseeable future I'm moving this blog to
http://nickstember.com/heymom/

Right now there are just pics but soon there will be more.

Haunted Hong Kong Hostel Part 1 of 2

2010-07-10T10:17:00.001+08:00

[fixed the images]

My Monday night arrival in Hong Kong is proceeded by a 5 hour flight
from Beijing which is proceeded by an 11 hour flight from Vancouver
which is proceeded by a 2 and a half hour flight from Portland,
leaving me feeling a lot like a banana that had been squished flat and
left in a dehydrator for 24 hours. Not wanting to brave the city or
pay $630 HK for a room at the airport hotel, I decide I will try to
find the SG David Bank Foundation Youth Hostel listed in my Lonely
Planet (11 ed. May 2009) on the other side of Lantou Island, near the
Ngong Ping bronze Buddha statue.

Normally there is a cable car, but since it 's already past 10pm when
I get out of customs so I have to take a Lantou taxi instead ($180 HK
+ 20 HK tip). The driver doesn't speak English or very much Mandarin.
Some of the other people waiting for taxis say, "Why do want to go
there? It's just a hill..." Haha I think to myself, that's what you
think. Luckily they are able to help me explain where I want to go to
the driver and, after wrestling my luggage into the car we get to the
hostel in about 45 minutes. Haha, I think, Backpacker 1, locals 0.

I rattle the gate and press the buzzer, labeled in sloppy handwriting
on the post it is attached to. 30 seconds passes without reply. I
press it again. Again, no reply. A chorus of cicadas begin to buzz
noisly. Strange bird calls echo through woods. Directly to my left
something rustles in brush. Just then I remember that someone once
told me you have to watch out for cobras in the forests around Hong
Kong. Great.

I scan the forest nervously with my flashlight and consider my
options. Walk to the road and try to hitch a ride back to the airport
hotel? Some dogs bark in the distance. Great. A pack of feral strays,
half-starved and mad with rabies coming to rip me apart, do doubt. I
consider climbing the gate of the hostel. About seven feet high and
topped with rusty barbed wire. Do-able, but not with my luggage. My
stomach rumbles. Cheap airplane food is making its way through my gut
in a hurry and before I can make any decision about what to do for the
night I need to go number 2, badly.
I look around. The pitch black woods around me are out of the
question. That would be like running through a poison dart factory
naked and blindfolded. I might as well paint a bulls-eye on both butt
cheeks and run across a minefield. I walk back down to the round where
I spy a large woodpile covered with a tarp. About 100 yards to the
right there is a single streetlight, creating a dark shadow in the
cleared dirt to the right. In front of the woodpile is a small pile of
sand.

I rush over to the dark area beside the woodpile and, after checking
as thoroughly as I can for cobras, pit vipers or sticks that could be
cobras or pit vipers I pull down my pants and assume the position. My
naked butt checks hum with anticipation in the humid night air,
clenched in anticipation of the cobra fangs that are about sink into
the sweaty flesh with a sharp, piercing shock of pain followed by a
slow and painful death. A local will find me in the morning, jaundiced
and swollen, pants around my ankles, beside an enormous pile of fecal
matter dotted with airline peanuts...
Amazingly, I finish my business without event. I head back up to the
hostel to see if I can wake someone up afterall.

<i>To be continued...</i>

Haunted Hong Kong Hostel Part 1 of 2

2010-07-09T17:04:00.001+08:00

My Monday night arrival in Hong Kong is proceeded by a 5 hour flight from Beijing which is proceeded by an 11 hour flight from Vancouver which is proceeded by a 2 and a half hour flight from Portland, leaving me feeling a lot like a banana that had been squished flat and left in a dehydrator for 24 hours. Not wanting to brave the city or pay $630 HK for a room at the airport hotel, I decide I will try to find the SG David Bank Foundation Youth Hostel listed in my Lonely Planet (11 ed. May 2009) on the other side of Lantou Island, near the Ngong Ping bronze Buddha statue.

Normally there is a cable car, but since it 's already past 10pm when I get out of customs so I have to take a Lantou taxi instead ($180 HK + 20 HK tip). The driver doesn't speak English or very much Mandarin. Some of the other people waiting for taxis say, "Why do want to go there? It's just a hill..." Haha I think to myself, that's what you think. Luckily they are able to help me explain where I want to go to the driver and, after wrestling my luggage into the car we get to the hostel in about 45 minutes. Haha, I think, Backpacker 1, locals 0.

The hostel turns out to be deep in the jungle on a one lane road with only the occasional street light every 50 feet or so to light the way. The path up to the hostel itself is completely unlit and somewhat overgrown. On the plus side, from the road I can see that there are lights on in the hostel. On the way there I had realized that if the hostel is closed for the night when I arrived I would probably have to spend the night at a coffee shop or internet cafe. I hadn't expected it to be quite so out of the way, however, and by the time I make it to the gate, which is locked, my ride has already taken off and I'm alone in the dark and spooky jungle.

I rattle the gate and press the buzzer, labeled in sloppy handwriting on the post it is attached to. 30 seconds passes without reply. I press it again. Again, no reply. A chorus of cicadas begin to buzz noisly. Strange bird calls echo through woods. Directly to my left something rustles in brush. Just then I remember that someone once told me you have to watch out for cobras in the forests around Hong Kong. Great.

I scan the forest nervously with my flashlight and consider my options. Walk to the road and try to hitch a ride back to the airport hotel? Some dogs bark in the distance. Great. A pack of feral strays, half-starved and mad with rabies coming to rip me apart, do doubt. I consider climbing the gate of the hostel. About seven feet high and topped with rusty barbed wire. Do-able, but not with my luggage. My stomach rumbles. Cheap airplane food is making its way through my gut in a hurry and before I can make any decision about what to do for the night I need to go number 2, badly.

I look around. The pitch black woods around me are out of the question. That would be like running through a poison dart factory naked and blindfolded. I might as well paint a bulls-eye on both butt cheeks and run across a minefield. I walk back down to the round where I spy a large woodpile covered with a tarp. About 100 yards to the right there is a single streetlight, creating a dark shadow in the cleared dirt to the right. In front of the woodpile is a small pile of sand.

I rush over to the dark area beside the woodpile and, after checking as thoroughly as I can for cobras, pit vipers or sticks that could be cobras or pit vipers I pull down my pants and assume the position. My naked butt checks hum with anticipation in the humid night air, clenched in anticipation of the cobra fangs that are about sink into the sweaty flesh with a sharp, piercing shock of pain followed by a slow and painful death. A local will find me in the morning, jaundiced and swollen, pants around my ankles, beside an enormous pile of fecal matter dotted with airline peanuts...

Amazingly, I finish my business without event. I head back up to the hostel to see if I can wake someone up afterall.

To be continued...

Avoiding the heat!

2009-07-22T10:46:00.001+08:00

New blog for learning Chinese

2009-07-04T01:24:00.003+08:00

I started a new a blog this month for people who are studying Chinese:
http://xuehai-fanzhou.blogspot.com/

Not sure what all I'm going to put up there, but I've got the first episode of 《奋斗》 3/4 transcribed, so that will probably be the next thing that goes up. I am also thinking about posting some tutorials for recording the audio from TV shows using Audacity, setting up Chinese input, finding things online, whatever else I can think of.

Haruki Murakami? I hardly know her!

2009-01-12T23:55:00.000+08:00

Er. Him. Anyways. It's his birthday today! Happy b-day, Haruki!

If you haven't read any of his books um um um Kafka on the Shore is a good place to start. It's about a boy named Crow and a man named Nakata, who can talk to cats, but not all cats, only certain colored cats, and Nakata's sidekick, Hoshino, a truck driving baseball fan turned classical music aficionado and a bunch of other odd folks that get together to save the world. Sort of.

What I've Been Up To For The Last Couple Of Months

2008-12-02T15:43:00.002+08:00

Not much. To be honest, I've been pretty depressed and unmotivated. Sometimes I get into funks that I just can't shake, like my brain is trying to tell me it needs to take some time off and reflect about things. I've been frustrated in school, mostly because I'm trying to do too much without investing myself in any one place. The idea of putting my energy into any one thing that I do terrifies me partly because I don't want any one thing to become my life and partly because I don't want to give up my other interests. I have this awful idea that now that I'm almost twenty-three that I'm reaching some sort of final destination with my education and whatever I do now I'm going to have to do forever and ever. That's what a career means to me right now: sitting at a desk and doing the same thing forever and ever. On the other hand, all I've been doing lately is sitting at a desk and doing the same thing over and over, that being surfing the web, when really, there are a million things I could be doing instead. It's like, the harder I try to get away from the that, the closer I end up to it.

I had a nice equilibrium of sorts going in Harbin. Maybe it was because my options were limited, only being able to study one subject like that. That, and I was drawing a lot too, and writing a lot. I could choose my own pace and the art classes I was taking were cheap. Somehow the idea of spending money on learning something I have at least some natural talent in bothers me more than spending it on something in which I don't, like math. Maybe I was happier because money wasn't such an issue, because I could eat out when I wanted and catch cabs and buy books and not feel like I was breaking the bank. Money feels so much more important here, where even simple things, like a meal at a food cart are a treat. Even if money can't buy happiness, having less of it than you used to is a drag.
And I miss Ding Ding...

The good news is that I've got some amazing friends and family here in Portland who've been doing there best to put up with my latest crisis. The consensus seems to be that I'm in my early twenties and that I need to get over myself. That's a something I need to hear more, you know?
A couple of weeks ago I finally got a cellphone. After traveling without one for the last month the I was in China I started to enjoy the novelty of being out of touch. But then I realized, actually, I sort of like being in touch. I mean, it's nice to know there are people out there who want to hear from you. (And that I'm kind of a ditz and at least this way people can call me and yell at me when I forget that we were supposed to hang out. )
I also realized I haven't been reading as many novels as I used to, so I've been trying to get in a book or two a week. A couple of weeks ago I read Pere Goriot by Balzac, which was pretty awesome. I just finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I liked it a lot, especially the parts with the character Nakata, although I think I'm going to need to read it a couple of more times to really get it though. And I haven't been writing nearly at all, although I have been drawing intermittently. Mostly I feel drained and most things I write, like this, seem painfully self-centered.

One thing that really inspires me is to look at pictures of the studios of artists that I admire. I still remember going to the Horst Janssen Museum in Oldenburg when I was 16 and walking through the mock up of his studio that they have there. It was a total disaster zone, piles of paints and brushes and printmaking supplies, exactly like you'd expect from a guy like Janssen. Seeing the place where an artist works can give you this immediate perspective on how they do what they do.
My mom said the other day, "You just want to sit in a cafe and write depressing poetry!" That felt so unfair to me but at the same time completely true. Okay, maybe I'd rather write uplifting poetry, but I'm still stuck in this idea of living the life of an artist, what that means, instead of what I need to do to make art.

Three For Thirty

2008-09-08T01:51:00.002+08:00

Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with this now that I'm back in Portland. Most of y'all live in Portland, so it's not like there's a whole lot I can write about other than, y'know, Dear Diary, Today I picked my nose and so forth. And it doesn't seem to make much sense to blog about my life here for friends in China, in English at least. Hrm.
In the meantime, check out the art blog I just set up at http://briskcement.deviantart.com! From now until Oct 6 I'll trying to post 3 (or more) drawer-ings a day. Maybe some comics too! Here's my first three:

Burritos Are Awesome

2008-08-10T07:59:00.000+08:00

Okay, so, okay. Back in Portland. Met with the folks...now I've got a pile of things to do. The culture shock hasn't been too bad so far, but I'm not really all here yet, if you know what I mean. Mostly I've just been too busy to think about much of anything.

Today I had my first burrito in a year. Wow. Burritos are awesome.

What Would Li Bai Do?

2008-07-22T10:09:00.002+08:00

So we climbed down one of the biggest mountains in China in the dark yesterday!
It wasn't what we planned to but given the choice between a) sleeping in a moldy tent on a basketball court or b) on the floor of a dorm with 20 strangers we chose to c) get the hell out of there.
Huang 'Yellow Mountain' shan is composed of a series of peaks, the highest of which are around 1,800 meters tall. The wind sculpted granite, warped mountain pines, lush bamboo forests, and wispy fog have inspired Chinese (and in turn Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) artists for centuries. The place looks like an honest-to-god brush painting. Click here for some pictures.
We decided to hike up the eastern steps, which our guidebook described as shorter and easier than the western steps, but also less scenic. For the first half hour or so we thought we were on the wrong path, because aside from porters carrying sacks of laundry and trash down the mountain we didn't see anyone else going up or down.
We'd gotten a late start, so by mid-afternoon we were still only about half-way up. We started to see a few people coming down, then a few more, and pretty soon the narrow stone steps were crammed with tour groups in matching baseball caps. The 'hello's and people stopping us to take a picture with a real live foreigner were fun at first, but had gone past old (into ancient?) by the time we got to the top.
Chinese tourist: (waves hand inches from your face to get your attention) "HELLO!"
Us: (smiling wanely) "Hi."
Chinese tourist: "Can we take a picture with you?"
Me: (in Mandarin) "First one free, second one 5 RMB!"
Which they ignore of course.
I managed to make friends with a young couple from Fujian, though. That's one of the advantages of being a curiosity (at least as a Mandarin-speaking one): almost everyone wants to talk to you! Honestly, all the conversations I've had with random strangers has been my favorite thing about this trip so far.
The scenery was gorgeous , but the prices, being not all that much cheaper than back home, and crowds, being about a factor of 10 of anything you might see back home, were all just too much. So we sat ourselves down with some twice what it costs at the bottom of the mountain top ramen and said, "Alright, what would Li Bai do?"
Li Bai was a Tang Dynasty poet who wrote awesome poems like this:

花間一壺酒
A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
獨酌無相親
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
舉杯邀明月
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
對影成三人
For her, with my shadow, will make three men.
月既不解飲
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;

影徒隨我身
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
暫伴月將影
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
行樂須及春
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.

我歌月徘徊
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
我舞影零亂
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
醒時同交歡
While we were sober, three shared the fun;

醉後各分散
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
永結無情遊
May we long share our eternal friendship,
相期邈雲漢
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai

Yeah. So anyways, Li Bai was reputedly an infamous drunkard who rarely wrote sober, a sort of Classical Chinese Bukowski. Something told us Li Bai wouldn't have jived with modern day Huangshan, with it's hoards of people crowding into 4-star hotels and cable cars all the way to the summit, not to mention sedan chairs for the truly decadent.
So we marched into the nearest tshotshke shop and bought a flask of something brown and 35 proof (and a flashlight) and headed down the west steps just as the sun was beginning to dip below the cloud banks. I can't say it was the smartest thing I've ever done, but it was definitely one of the coolest. The best part by far was lying on a massive granite outcropping watching the stars twinkle into sight, clear and unobstructed by light pollution and smog.
After a while I said, "Well, should we keep going?" and Kim said, "No, the big thing isn't down there...it's right here." Which was true, so we stayed for a while longer, just watching the big thing, feeling small and insignificant on our little mountain.
The moon rose a while later, emerging from the clouds like a second sunrise, illuminating the way down.
It was pretty awesome.

Wherever you go, there you will be hot and sweaty

2008-07-18T10:18:00.005+08:00

Click anywhere above to see the full size image. Original available here.

Adventures in the land of a million accents

2008-07-13T09:12:00.000+08:00

Arrived in Qingdao the day before yesterday on the overnight train out of Beijing, standing room only. That was a long 10 hours. I passed the time talking with what seemed like half the train.
There was a girl from Guangxi who had a wicked Southern accent, all ‘s’s and in this totally different register than what people use up North, and a guy from Qingdao who reminded me of a neighbor I had growing up named Mike, except speaking Mandarin in this soft Shengyang accent. There are some many different flavors of this language it makes my head spin sometimes. Yesterday I met a woman who I think was from Shandong. My friend who speaks perfectly fine Mandarin said he couldn’t understand a damn thing that she said. I thought it was kind of fun, parsing out the swallowed vowels from the stew of consonants.
The Qingdao dialect is literally unintelligible though. It sounds like backwards Mandarin to me. Wacky.
Once I got into Qingdao I hightailed it over to one of the coolest youth hostels I’ve ever heard of: an old observatory on the top of a hill in the middle of the historic part of town. The whole hill is actually a park, but with houses on it, which makes it look a little like a cross between Mt. Tabor and one of those Italian towns on the Adriatic coast. After taking a long, long shower, (woo! water heaters!) I walked down to the beach where I walked in the surf and bought a cheap shell bracelet.
My friend and classmate from PSU, Kim and her friend Martin, from Germany, met up with me later on in the day. They’ve been traveling for the past week or so, going up to Shenyang and then down to Dalian, and then catching a boat to Yantai, which is about 4 hours north of here by bus. The current plan is spend the next three weeks making our way to Shanghai and then Martin and I will going back to Beijing to catch flights home to our respective countries and Kim will heading to Taiwan by way of Hong Kong.

Beijing Redux

2008-07-09T22:07:00.004+08:00

So. I'm in Beijing. Facebook has been blocked in the PRC for the last couple of weeks, so I can't (easily at least) check my messages on what not on it. I'm not ignoring you, I swear! Email me instead, yo! Um, um, um. Both my parents forwarded this video to me. Talk about your hardcore travellers! :)
Right now I'm trying to find a place to stash two gig-normous bags so that I don't have to drag them half across China. Anybody got a long lost cousin who lives in the capital?
And yeah, okay, I was wrong. I was actually pretty sad when I left Harbin this morning. My ayi made me my favorite fennel potstickers and then she and shushu helped get my mountain of junk to the train station. Ayi was crying, told me not to be too sad, because it's easy to catch a cold when you're sad.
Just got here a couple of hours ago, so all I've done so far is get a room and take a shower. Once I log off, I'm going to walk over to take a peek at the 'bird's nest' stadium which is supposed to be right around the corner from here. Yup yup yup.

Ass Kicking Future

2008-07-06T18:50:00.004+08:00

I attended the graduation ceremony for Spring Term 2008 at HIT today. The ceremony hadn't changed much from last term. You'd think they'd have at least fixed the junky PA system. The thing has about as much oomph as a FischerPrice Say-and-Speak which is bad-news-bears when you've got a room full people shouting in at least 10 different languages and the one you're trying pick out through the static happens to be tonal. Fun fact of the day: because some the numbers sound alike on a bad connection Mandarin has 'noise resistant numerals' -- like substituting 'yao' for one, 'yi' so it doesn't get confused the number seven, 'qi', which itself can be substituted with 'gaui'. Cool, no?
Anyfrak, my year in China is drawing to a close, and I find myself reflecting back, trying to make sense of the conflicting emotions I feel. On the one hand, I'm happy I 'made it', and I'll be glad to be home soon. That's normal, I guess. On the other hand, it makes me a little that I don't feel more nostalgic for this place than I do. My life here in Harbin is comfortable enough, but now that Ding are broken up everywhere I go just reminds me of all the happy times we shared together. That kind of sucks.
Last night, walking back home from a karaoke bar, one of my classmates said, "I can't wait to come back in, like, 5 years and see all the things that have changed here!" I looked at the ground and, "Not me, I'm too scared." She laughed and said, "Of what? Your ex-girlfriend?" And I said, seriously, "No...I'm scared that it won't have changed at all, not in 5 years, not in 10 years, not ever."
It's not that Harbin is a bad place, really. There are lots of nice people who live here, a couple of big parks, lots of cool little restaurants and coffee shops and bookstores and, really, everything else you could want from a city. But it's not home, not even remotely. And a part of me knows it never will be, no matter how long I spend trying to make it to feel that way.
I love my city, I love the parks and trees. I love the rain and the grass and the cracked and wet pavement. I love my family, I love my friends. Sometimes you just have to go away for a while to realize what you're missing.

While I've learned a lot of lessons about life, I'm not sure how I will be using the language skills that I've picked up as well. After getting back the results from my finals and the HSK, I can say with confidence that my Mandarin is at a pretty solid intermediate level right now. That means I can make small talk, watch TV and read about 2000 characters. At this point what I really need to push me over the edge is to input and input and input until my brain falls out.
But I still don't have a clear plan for 'why' I'm learning. Originally, I was thinking I would get a job as a technical translator in China. But after this year, I can't really see myself wanting to live in China ever again. I know, I know, I might feel differently in a couple of years, weeks, days. But what if I don't?
To be honest, 'technical translator' has lost some of it's gleam as I've thought about the poverty and graft that goes on in what is one of the most politically repressed countries in the world, a country whose economy is being fueled by people like you and me, people who live in developed countries and just don't know any better.
So, in the future, I'd like to explore ways to let people back home know about the situation in China. If I don't use the 'mad skillz' I have to help people, then I'm no better than the people who are screwing them over.
Sticking it to the man, now there's a good reason to learn a language!

Ultimately, though, I'm trying not to think too much about *why* I'm studying what I'm studying. A lot of people, myself included, want to learn Mandarin because they think it'll help them get a better job or make more money. That's a pretty backwards way to look at things, though. Money is not the point of work. You need some, for sure, but the point of work is to do something you love.
Granted, I'm currently on the umbilical dole, but I've taken my fair share of crap jobs to pay the rent in the past. Everyone does it at some point. Some lessons are just harder to learn than others, I guess. Because a crap job, or even a good job, that you don't love doing, is never worth it.
The good news is that I love to learn languages. I really do. I was one of those kids who read the dictionary for fun and ended up with a bigger vocabulary than most college freshman by 6th grade. I'm not trying to brag here, I'm just saying: I'm good at this because it's what I like to do.
And I really, honestly believe that if I keep doing things that I enjoy, and doing them well, I'll eventually figure out a way to make an decent living at it too. It'll work out.
Meanwhile, I've got 2 and half months to mentally prepare for whatever my last year or two or college has in store for me. I don't, at this point, know what I'm majoring in. That's a little scary. But I'm open to ideas.
Any book suggestions for the wandering jew?
The important thing, as I see it, is to figure out where I really want to end up and fill in the gaps from here to there. I've been reading Corey Doctorow's sci-fi, which has gotten me excited about writing and working with technology again. The idea of creating a better tomorrow is something that resonates with me. I've been looking back, too, reconnecting with old friends, trying to get a better idea of where I've come from. Some of that has been painful, as I struggle with idea of who I want to be and how other people see me, based on my actions. I've been reading old comics like Calvin and Hobbes and new ones like Achewood. It's one big hot pot of ideas and emotions stewing around in my brain, and I like it. The past may be imperfect and the present may be a little hazy, but I'll be damned if the future doesn't look like one big opportunity to kick ass.

Did I type those in a dream?

2008-06-26T16:45:00.001+08:00

Last night I typed up a bunch of emails and other odds and ends into a text file, This afternoon I went to open it up and it didn't exist. At first I thought I must have saved them in the wrong place. But no. The file does not exist. And the excel spreadsheet I used to record the fact that I typed the emails (part of an experiment I'm trying) now looks like this:

I just started running a virus scan. And it's telling me that it can't read my boot sector and partition table, whatever the heck those are. Ugh. I think I might have a very expensive paperweight on my hands here.
I was planning for this post to be about having finished reading my first chapter book in Chinese. But the other day my girlfriend and I broke up and I'm having a little trouble getting excited about that right now.
There are good things in my life though...I picked up two random magazines at a used magazine shop and one turned out to have an article on Hiyao Miyazaki and the other had an article on Wong Kar Wai. Plus an another article on movie adaptations of comic books. And I picked up a copy of 'Science Fiction World'. So I've got plenty of geeky reading material in Chinese at least!
Finals are next week, which is a little scary.
Oh, and I somewhat accidentally converted to Buddhism last week. I have a card and everything. I would tell you my Buddhist name, but I think that's against the rules.

Bite-sized Blogging

2008-06-10T08:48:00.002+08:00

So, sorry about the itty bitty posts I've been writting the last couple of weeks. My brain was seized with a sudden compulsion to write as little as possible. I learned the bullet point strategy from a business writing class I took last spring. It:
- saves time
And I just realized if I changed the title of this blog to 'Am I still alive?' I could boil every single post I write down to one word: yes.
I've been suffering from historical overdosing, a term coined by the writer Douglas Coupland which means, "to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts." And now we have blogs, too. And podcasts. And Facebook. And Twitter.
Coupland also coined the term historical underdosing, which he defines as "to live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts."
You can read his blog here.
I like to write about my life, because it me makes me feel like a handle on what I'm doing with it. But writing about I do every week not only takes time, but it distorts the realities of what I do everyday by focusing on the more interesting events. There's just not a whole to write about if I spend the whole day sitting in class.
Sometimes I think this is a benefit of blogging, because it encourages me to do interesting things so I'll have something to write about. At the end of the day, though, it's still a lose-lose situation. It's like those people who are so busy taking pictures of their vacation that they don't ever stop and enjoy it.
So for the last month I've been blogging less and keeping a log of my daily activies. I took a break for the week I was in Beijing, which means it's not a very good representation of an average month for me, but that's not all bad, either. It's the same as the 'if I had studied for the test I would have done even better' thing.
I'm pretty proud of myself for having spent almost 18 hours reading in Chinese, a full hour more than I read in English. I'm not so proud of only having spent 6 and a half hours writing in English, but I spent 9 and half hours writing in Chinese, so I guess that's okay. Altogether I spent a little under 23 hours studying outside of class, which is pretty lame. And I only got all my homework done a grand total of 4 times. And even worse, I only spent 2 and half hours exercising. That doesn't include walking, though, which do a lot of and I didn't think to record. For example, this month I've been walking an average of a little over an hour a day. My average time to wake up was 6:15 AM, and it took me an average of 45 minutes to get up. My average bed time was 10:34 PM, which means I got an average of 7 hours and 41 minutes of sleep per night. I spent 4 hours playing video games, and I wrote in my journal 12 times. I got in 3 fights and complained 12 times. I felt tired 69% of the days, but I also laughed or smiled 69% of the days.
I'm logging my activities this month, too, but I've added some categories, one of which is 'wrote a post for my blog.' I've found that by recording my behavior, it encourages me to do whatever it is I'm recording more often than I would otherwise. The only hitch is most days I don't get around to filling in my log until right before going to bed, which means some things (like exercising) are less likely than others (like writing in my journal) to get accomplished. Also, the longer I wait to record, the more likely I am to fudge on times, so I've been trying to jot things down as I do them, either in my daily planner or on a piece of paper I keep in my pocket.
As far blogs go, I want to try to write less about things I do, and more about ideas I have that I think other people would enjoy reading about. And when I read other peoples blogs, I need to be skimming more than I do now.

Back in the USSA

2008-06-05T22:01:00.001+08:00

I will be making my triumphant return to the land of the (mostly) free in early August.

Things I want to do when I get back:

- go on a long backpack
- drink lots and lots of dark beer
- eat a pile of junk food and watch movies
- eat Indian food
- eat Thai food
- eat Italian food

So, in a nutshell, walking, drinking, sitting, eating. Woot!

The Korean Study Experiment

2008-06-03T21:59:00.001+08:00

Two weeks ago I started taking HSK prep classes after school with a couple of my classmates.
The HSK is a standarized test for students of Mandarin Chinese that you are required to pass to, for example, take undergraduate courses at a Chinese university.

My typical day is now:

6:00 - wake up
exercise, meditate, exercise
6:30 - hygiene-ate self
7:00 - get on the bus or start walking
7:20-7:45 - arrive at school
eat breakfast
8:00-12:00 - in class
lunch
13:00-14:45 - go back to school to study
15:00-16:30 - HSK class
dinner
17:30-20:00 - go back to school to study
catch bus homewards
20:30 - walk girlfriend home from art studio
21:00 - walk lonesome self home
get ready for bed, read, write letters, journal, etc
22:00 - go to bed

I don't like focusing on test taking this much. So why do it?
Well, I'm pretty spectaculary bad at taking tests my grades mostly depend on big finals tests not all that different from the HSK, so I figured it'd be worth spending a month pounding away at it and see if I get anywhere.

Le sigh...

Me and Takeshi Go To Beijing

2008-05-18T20:42:00.001+08:00

So last week me and a classmate skipped school and went to Beijing.
First impressions:
-clean (-er than Harbin)
-taxis are expensive
-lots of construction
-big
-lots of foreigners
-lots of people from different parts of China
-lots of people
-booze is expensive (about the same as back in Portland)
-food is cheap
Overall, I liked it. Although I don't think Beijing would be a very good place for me to study Chinese. There are enough English speakers, native and non-native living the Beijing that I really didn't seem to have to know more than a half-dozen words of Mandarin to get by. (On the other hand, you can learn a language just about anywhere if you're dedicated enough. You just have to be creative and find ways to trick your brain into thinking that it wants to learn [insert language here].)
Me and Takeshi were determined to do the city on the cheap. Round trip train tickets came to about $65. We lucked out and my buddy Wes, who I took Chinese with back in the States, offered up a couch in his dorm at 民族大学, so that saved us shelling out the big Maos for bunks a cruddy hostel. Thanks Wes! For breakfast (and lunch sometimes) we hit up the food stalls. To get around town we braved the public bus and subway system, which was actually pretty painless. It helps if you can read Chinese characters 'cause the bus maps don't have pinyin! And for the most part we stayed clear of the bars and coffee shops, and didn't buy a lot of crap either. Altogether I think we spent about $230 each.
The first day in town we met up with Kim, another awesome person I studied Chinese with back in Portland. She took us on a tour of Tiananmen, and then over to the Forbidden City. Afterwards we climbed up the mountain behind to get a nice birds eye view of the palace. The three of us grabbed lunch at a little greasy spoon and then walked over to Beihai Park, where we spent the rest of afternoon. For dinner we met up with Wes and a bunch of his friends at The Kro's Nest, a funky pizza joint that would fit right in back the US.
The next day Kim led us through the 胡同s around Houhai and Xihai and introduced us to Club Obiwan, one of her favorite bars in the capital, a hip little place with a dance hall, bar and lounge and roof top patio. Afterwards we stopped by a hole in wall restaurant to grab a bite to eat and ended up getting into a lively discussion with the owner about everything from politics to particulars of the Beijing dialect to the importance of drinking water. This was accompanied by an seemingly endless flow of 燕京啤酒 which left us all stumbling in an out of the squat toilet down the street.
On Monday we hit up 798, Beijing's trendy art district, and Wanfujing, one of main drags with big outlet stores crammed up next to stalls selling and assortment of bongs, painted fans, fake jade necklaces and other tourist junk. I also found a music store with 崔健 albums (so far next to impossible to find in Harbin) and discovered the awesome indie rock band 新裤子. For dinner we ate 饺子 with couple of Takeshi's former classmates who are studying Chinese at 人民大学.
Our main goal was to get up on the Great Wall, which we attempted on Tuesday but failed due to some bad information in our guide book, so we went to the Summer Palace instead. That turned out alright, although we probably could have done with out the 3 hour search for a bus stop that didn't exist. After dinner, we met up with Kim again at her school (清华大学) for a chat by the lake with more 燕京啤酒.
We made it to the Great Wall on our last day in town. Instead of going to 八达岭 which is the most popular section of the Wall near Beijing (complete with a Starbucks and KFC) we decided to walk from 金山岭 to 司马台. Unlike 八达岭, this section of the Great Wall is mostly unrefurbished, which came as a welcome relief after a week of new 'old' buildings. Wednesday night was a bit of a disaster involving wrong restaurants and a bar I did not want to go to, but we did suceed in getting our first ‘real’ Peking Duck, which was a pretty memorable experience for reasons outside of the duck itself.
All and all a fun trip, although Takeshi and I were both pretty worn out by the time we got back in Harbin on Thursday afternoon. On Friday we had a Chinese competition/performance at our school, Saturday I watched a German comedy about Hilter with my girlfriend and today I started studying Chinese brush painting. And now I’m very tired and there are probably a billion sloppy mistakes (not to mention un-pininated Chinese) but these will have to wait until later, but rather than let it turn to brain crack I’m gonna post it as is!
And, also, I’d like to point out that recovery efforts in Sichuan are on going and any money you put towards organizations like the Chinese Red Cross, etc, will help out!

Still Still Alive

2008-05-13T08:45:00.003+08:00

I guess it's a little repetitive, but yes, I'm still alive. Chengdu is way way way south of here (I'm actually in Beijing this week visiting friends and seeing the sights. More on that next week, though!). I'm having some difficulty tracking down the actual stats, but I've heard that they are reporting over 8,500 people are dead, more injured. So that's my addition to the rumor mill for today.

EDIT: Xinhua is now reporting over 9,000 people have died.

Bend Before The Ways Of Heavy Metal!

2008-05-03T16:52:00.004+08:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to a rock concert. For some reason, my brain translated the event, described as a 吉他表演, which literally means 'guitar show', to mean something like 'gun show' or 'comic con'. To be fair, it wasn't exactly an 音乐会 either.
First, to set the stage, the event takes place on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a spring heat wave. It's maybe 70 degrees outside, the sun is blazing. Ding and I are running late, the taxi is driving through a part of town I've never seen before, past towering condos still shrink wrapped in plastic and partially encased in cocoons of scaffolding.
When we get to the venue I discover I've actually been here before. I'm a little bummed -- Harbin really is as small as I thought it was after all. The crowd looks sparse to me, especially when I consider that I've been told 唐朝 will be preforming. Then again, China's first and, at least to my knowledge, only heavy metal band seems to be more infamous for being loud and fast than famous for playing music that your average 老百姓 would actually want to shell out their hard-earned Mao's to listen to.
Rock music occupies an odd space in China. It's not exactly unheard of, just heard less than pop and R&B, at least on TV and the radio. As far as home grown rock goes, outside of a couple of names, like 崔健, Beyond, and 风雷动, most rock bands here in China seem to be almost completely unheard of outside of a couple of clubs in Beijing. But I probably hang out with the wrong crowd to really know -- most of my Chinese friends are students or teachers, neither of whom seem to have much free time to rock out. On the other hand, China is absolutely addicted to bootlegged American movies and TV shows, which contain their fair share of 摇滚, so there's no doubt that the Mainland is getting exposed. I'd like to think this, plus concerts like this, suggests that the rock fans are out there, somewhere, building some crazy sort of underground scene that will break out and take the country by storm.
So when we enter the building the concert is being held it, I'm busy scanning the crowd for the future rock stars of China. The first thing I notice is a disconcerting lack of black clothing, tattoos and piercings. The median age is hard to guess, although men do clearly outnumber women. There's a crush at the door, and someone is pointlessly shouting 'Line up! Line up!' at the mass of people trying to force their way through the door.
We get through, finally, and find ourselves in a miniature auditorium that looks like it should be attached an elementary school. I find myself wondering where people put on plays in this town, if people put on plays. I remember the drama student I met a couple of months ago, who was looking for Mandarin-speaking foreigners to put on a play by Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright I'd never heard of. The original play, he explained, had been about men mistreating women, a ground-breaking statement against sexism from the late 19th century. At any rate, as far I understood it, the student had rewritten parts of the play, spliced in lyrics from Pink Floyd's The Wall and recast the female roles as male ones to make his own statement about the reverse sexism of the modern day.
I'm roused out of my reverie by Ding tugging on sleeve, telling me to sit down. Somehow we've arrived at our seats. The show is about to begin. The lights dim, and a band takes the stage. The guitarist is a short, stocky man, with a Elvis-like forelock and a serious expression on his face. The crowds cheers and claps. They start to play and the guitarist sets off on a non-stop riff that lasts for the whole song. The bassist, a smiling muscle man in leather pants and knee-high boots is dancing spastically while the other band members, a keyboardist and drummer, are busy flipping through sheet music in the background. Meanwhile, the guitarist is wandering around the stage, pausing every now and then to strike a rock pose, his knee on an amp, leaning way back, staring intently at his fingers as they dance up and down his wailing axe.
A couple of more or less interchangeable songs later, all without vocals, the next performer steps onto to stage. Instead of a band, he is accompanied by CD of pre-recorded backup music. He looks about 10 years younger than the first guitarist, in his mid-twenties I guess, wearing baggy camo pants and a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt. Before playing he jokes with the crowd, telling us about his guitar, a Chinese brand that he describes as pretty 牛比. How do you say 'product placement' in Chinese? His first song is a thundering heavy metal track that has me tapping my foot and smiling broadly. The next song is a lighter, soft-rock number that sends me back into la-la land.
The third guitarist is short man in a bright purple shirt that prefaces his performance with a short description of the the feelings that the first song he will play is meant to evoke. His music turns out to be a sort of mix of New Age and Motown that prominently features, yet again, earsplitting guitar riffs. He rocks back and forth, dipping and bouncing with the beat gleefully, but without smiling. I glance around the auditorium and wonder who built it. Was it the Russians? It looks Russian, I think to myself. But it also has that crude, faked-look that so many of the 'Russian' buildings here in Harbin have -- the result of decades of being maintained (or rebuilt even) by people who've never been outside of Mother China. It reminds me a little of Leavenworth, Washington a 'Bavarian'-themed town back in the States. Same concept, different countries.
By the fourth guitarist I've stopped trying to feign interest. He's skinny, with a buzz cut, a t-shirt and jeans that don't fit right. In fact, he looks a lot like me, I muse, or at least a Chinese, guitar-playing me. He plays more light rock, wielding his whammy bar with a deft hand. I'm so bored I can barely sit up. Ding is asleep, her head on my shoulder. The rest of the audience is watching the stage with rapt, or at least captive, attention. I try to read the foam characters hung up in the background, dancing slightly in the stale air of the auditorium. I get a couple and mentally pat myself on the back, cursing the rest that I don't.
Finally, the main event, it's the heavy metal group 唐朝's turn to rock out. Only, it isn't really 唐朝 after all, it's just their guitarist and another CD of backup music. He's a tall, slender man, with long, permed hair and a nice button-up shirt. He looks like he's just stepped out a Japanese rock n' roll manga; a fey, handsome young man with long slender fingers and tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. I gently nudge Ding Ding awake. She lifts her head slowly and smiles sleepily at me, then glances up at the stage. The music starts, a cacophony of drums that shakes us out of our stupor and back into the land of the living. After only a few minutes it's clear this guy can really play. I'm not a metal head by any means, but there is something I can't help but admire the skill with which he way he plays, his fingers a literal blur, the sounds of his guitar building into a crescendo that seems to threaten to overwhelm us and pull down the building on top of us. He has that infectious pulling quality of a really good musician, drawing in you regardless of whether or not you like the kind of music he's playing. It doesn't take long for the formerly semi-catatonic crowd starts to really get into it, clapping along to the beat as he shreds on a gleaming white Gibson.
Afterwards, the first band gets back up on stage to play a encore, accompanied by the skinny guitarist. We have dinner plans with Ding's folks though, so we end up sneaking out after the second song. In the cab on the way to her parent's place, ears ringing, eyes blinded by the late afternoon sun, Ding asks, "Well, what'dya think?"
I think for a second before laughing and saying, "Pretty 牛比, Ding, pretty 牛比."

吉他表演 jítā biǎoyǎn - guitar show
音乐会 yīnyuè huì - concert
唐朝 Táng Cháo - heavy metal group
老百姓 lǎobǎixìng - 'old hundred names', the man on the street, the everyday Joe, etc
崔健 Cuī Jiàn - rock musician
风雷动 Fēng Léidòng - rock musician
摇滚 yáogǔn - rock n' roll
牛比 niúbī - kickass

The Memory Of A Hug

2008-04-19T11:56:00.001+08:00

It's dusk as I get ready to get off of the bus, that perfect kind of summer twilight that traps motes of dust in sunbeams and brings back memories of playing tag on a million days just like this when I was I kid.
The bus ride had been long, crowded and jarring, leaving me feeling a little like I'd just gone for a hour long joyride on a paint mixer in the middle of a mosh pit. There is almost no, I reflect, polite way to get off a crowded bus. Today, I find myself elbowing some poor woman in the face, kneeing a man in the butt, planting one's foot squarely on another woman's foot as I shove small children out of my path trying to make my way out of back door before the driver slams the door shut again. I manage, just barely.
Just behind me I hear the driver rev the engine menacingly, glancing back to see the bus peel out like a Indy 500 race car. A young man is still scrambling to get on the bus, one hand planted firmly on the handrail, his foot on first step of the bus, leaving his other foot, hand and bulk of his person still swinging free in the rarefied evening air.
I walk past a newspaper kiosk and a woman selling greasy hotdogs that she's cooking on a electric hot plate. Moto-trike taxi drivers smile at me from beside their cheery red chariots seemingly held together with packing tape more than anything else. A kid just in front of me looks back and then quickly cups his hand to his friend's ear and whispers something. The friend looks back for a second, then says something the first kid that I don't catch. They laugh.
For the most, I think, I've gotten used to the stares I get, the friend-nudging and whispering followed by laughter. It's all part and parcel for a 6' tall white guy living in a place that's 99.9% Han Chinese.
A couple of Uyghur guys are selling meat kabobs on the corner, and I nod at the other 0.01% non-Han who live here. One pauses from shouting his wares in Mandarin with long trilling 'r's borrowed from his mother tongue to shout something at me in Russian. I laugh, shrug my shoulders and say 'Nope!'
My eyes lock with a man reclined on the seat of his tricycle. He's staring at me so intently he doesn't see the old man who's sneaking up on him. The old man wraps his arms around the younger man's neck and now I it's me who's staring as two old friends, or family members perhaps, embrace warmly on a crowded street. They both laugh loudly and happily and both begin talking at once, like excited teenagers.
The memory of the hug stays with me for a long time, making me smile even now as I think back on it. There are plenty of things I don't understand in China, and plenty of things I don't like very much about living here. But there are also things little things like this, simple gestures of people who clearly really care for each other that, for what it's worth, give me a lot of joy to experience.

Switch to Economics?

2008-04-17T17:03:00.003+08:00

...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right
and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves
of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air,
are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler
of a few years back.

-John Maynard Keynes (1935)

I've been thinking a lot about changing my major from Computer Science to Economics lately. Any thoughts?

Tew-na fee-ish Sa-na-da-weech

2008-04-11T20:35:00.002+08:00

Friday afternoon, class has just gotten out. I'm standing outside the Foreign Student's Center, waiting for a friend, chatting with classmates. They want me to tell them where we're going to eat lunch. I just grin and wave my hand what I guess to be the general direction of the restaurant. Ever since I let it slip that I knew a place in Harbin to where you could get chocolate fondue the girls in my class have been bugging me to take them. The wind is blowing but the sun is shining and everyone is smiling. Seul-Ki, one of my roommates from last term gives me a high five as he walks past. I wave to a girl from Poland I haven't seen since the beginning of the year. Helene, the friend we've been waiting for, comes out just after.
"Hey!" I shout, "Let's eat!"
Still chatting, I lead the group across the campus, feeling a little like the Pied Piper leading the children out of the village. We squeeze out of a narrow gate on the east of the school, a hole cut in the gate actually, shuffling down the sidewalk past gruff looking men in Army camo selling popcorn and a woman missing her bottom front teeth in a salmon-colored jacket and scuffed up Nikes. Dodging zooming taxis in a hurry to get somewhere else, we duck under a overpass. On the ground, someone has piled of bruised mangos on squares of red cloth; I have to stoop not to hit my head on the ceiling.
My friends laugh when they see this. I smile over my shoulder at them and shrug helplessly, again letting a gesture take the place of words.
When we get to the restaurant, I hold the door open for them, counting nationalities as they walk past. One, two, four Koreans, one Swiss, and one Japanese. Add one lanky American and that makes 4 countries in a all together in a fifth, I joke to myself. Heck, we could hold our own Model United Nations...
The restaurant is small and warm, a cozy little Western-style place full of tin robots and other knick-knacks. It's an island of familiarity in a sea of banquet-style Chinese joints. The prices are a little steep in comparison, but still a bargain compared to what it costs to eat out back home. We stake out a table and I kid the owner I should get a kickback for bringing him all these new customers. The menu is a mix of East and West, ham sandwiches alongside milk tea and curried beef and rice.
We don't end up ordering the chocolate fondue after all -- the girls want to wait until after we eat something more lunch-appropriate to indulge. There isn't much in the way of vegetarian dishes, so order a plate of spaghetti and mushrooms bolognese. It has meat, but not so much I can't eat around it. There are really two types, I think to myself, of vegetarians: those who will eat around meat, and who don't. When you split dishes, it's hard to be the latter kind of vegetarian, unless you want to be stuck eating rice every time you go out with meat-eating friends. Somewhere, a Buddha is rolling under his Bodhi tree.
While waiting for the food, Ah-rang, who sits in front of me in class, mock-faints from hunger on her friend, Na-ai. Qi-xie asks Jian-si about a Japanese pop-star. Helene wants to know when we're going to sing Karaoke next. Xu-ji is reading the English translations off the menu out loud, her accent making even the most simple words sound foreign and exotic.
"Tew-na fee-ish sa-na-da-weech..ba-nah-nah meelk sha-kuh...."
And I settle back in my chair, and think to myself: this is nice. This is really, really nice. Escapist? Hell, yes. Happy? You bet ya.

Putting Your Whole Heart And Soul Into It

2008-04-05T17:12:00.002+08:00

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life lately.
It's hard, because like most people, there are a lot of things I'd like to do. And a lot of things I want to do, things that I think are important, are not things that will make me a lot of money.
One of the things the most important things I've learned about life is that if you decide to do something, you've gotta put your whole heart and soul into it. If you can do that, you can find out pretty quick whether or not whatever it is you're doing is actually what you want to do with your life.
It's a lot harder than it sounds, though. The simplest solutions always are.
The sun is out today. I just watched a movie about George Hogg, an English guy who trekked across China with 60 orphans back in the 1940s, during the 2nd World War.
I found myself wondering if that's something I would do, if I were in his shoes. I think most people would like to think they could, but who can say for sure? You can't talk hypotheticals with a thing like that. All you can do it go out there and do it.

My Teacher's Teacher

2008-03-31T18:36:00.002+08:00

As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I often feel that I the first rain after a dry spell of more than a couple of weeks is a semi-religious experience. Rain is ingrained in my psyche, rain feeds my soul. Rain cleans and it refreshes, pours life back into the earth and swallows the stink and noise and the dust of the city. God, I love rain!
For the last couple of months, however, Northeastern China has been about as dry as James Bond’s martini. A couple of weeks ago the icy fist of Old Man Winter finally lifted and I found myself in the gentle caress of Lady Spring. Ms. Spring is a fickle lover, however, and more often than not frolicking and canoodling and making daisy chains and so forth in the sunshine has been replaced with gritting my teeth into gale force winds and stomping through drenching downpours. And apart from the mini-sandstorms, I couldn't be happier.
One thing I'd like to hear some science on is: what's up with smell of rain? Everyone knows water doesn't have a smell*, right? But rain does! Doesn't it?
The lack of sunny weather has also been a boon to my studies, although I've been having a little trouble getting my memorization method to scale. Basically, I've been finding at best I max out about 4 to 6 hours a day of sustained memorization with 10 to 15 minute breaks every couple of hours.**
Another thing I've noticed is that I'm most productive from about 6 AM to 12 PM. With my current schedule, most days I can get in at least a half hour of studying in the morning before I have to start getting ready for school, but that's about all I can do most mornings. I've started doing some of my homework and other less demanding work in class while listening to other students talk or recite texts, but I still can't help but feel like it would be way more efficient (for me at least) to spend the 4 hours we're spending in class studying on my own. And then have maybe a one to two hour class in the afternoon to get homework assignments, ask teachers about anything I'm not clear on and chat with classmates.
Which is basically what most college classes are like back in the States, d'oh.
So I've been trying to pep myself up a little in the afternoons by taking a short nap after lunch, which seems to help some. I'm only really just starting to realize how important sleep is to learning, thanks in part to a couple of articles I read on the website of the flashcard program, Supermemo.
I've also decided to go vegetarian again, thanks in part to being introduced a really awesome little all veggie restaurant just around the corner from Jiluosi, the main Buddhist temple here in Harbin. The menu looks just like one from a normal restaurant, with meat dishes and everything, but it's all actually made out of tofu. They even have tofu shrimp!***
The other reason I'm not eating meat right now is that I want to see if it improves my energy level, which is something that I've read about in a couple of different places.**** Also, when I think back on the periods in my life where I was eating vegetarian (about 6 years straight starting in the 4th Grade, and then off and on ever since) I seem to recall being more active than I was during the times when I was eating meat. Maybe just selective memory--I've always been a bit of a slacker when it comes to waving my gangly limbs about.

*Well, at least, most water... Check out this link: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question479.htm for a really awesome explanation of why rains smells!
**Or no breaks at all if I'm really going! The other day I discovered I've developed a honest-to-God callous on my right index finger where I hold my pencil...which of course made me think of the end of that song on the Beatles's White Album where Ringo (or somebody else) shouts, "I've got blisters on my fingers!"
***I first found out about the restaurant (and the temple) from an American classmate at HIT. A couple of days later, I was chatting with my art teacher and I casually mentioned I might want to check it out. Literally minutes later, we were on a crammed city bus headed temple-wards. Other than getting stuffed on tasty veggie pot stickers, I also learned the basics of paying respects to the various gods and Buddhas and was even introduced me an elder monk in a private room whom my teacher referred to as 'your teacher's teacher'. That was a very Karate Kid moment, looking back on it.
****Well, I've heard the best thing of all is just eating raw fruits and vegetables, but that's a little too sketchy for me living as I do in country that takes a liberal view on the whole night soil issue.

Rusty English

2008-03-24T15:54:00.002+08:00

Sorry about the little break there. A lot of things happened all at once last week, none of them very blog-worthy.
Reducing the amount I read and write in English hasn't helped my motivation to blog much, either. On the upside, I've noticed a definite improvement in my ability to read and write in Mandarin, so I guess it's a fair trade off for the time being.
Sometimes I like to joke that my goal in life is to be fluent in 7 languages -- that way I can use a different language each day of the week.
The hardest thing I've found in learning languages is not learning new ones, but keeping the ones I've already learned fresh. Even my mother language can get rusty if I don't use it!
On the other hand, studies on memory have shown that the amount you forget things you've already learned levels off over time, so even though your initial drop in what you remember is rather dramatic, the things you do still remember after a couple of days stick around.
And if you keep reviewing what you've learned you can remember even more!
Can you tell I'm really digging this spaced repetition concept?
One of the biggest drawbacks to spaced repetition is keeping track of what you need to review and when, which where software like the previously mentioned Mnemosyne* comes in. By using a spaced repetition system (SRS) you can let your computer schedule your review for you, saving you time and brain strain.
I've been using an SRS to study Chinese for a little over a month now and it's helped alot, not just in memorizing new vocab and keeping old vocab fresh, but also by giving me a better idea of how much time it takes me to actually a given number of words.
This can seem like a drawback, because I can run out of time just reviewing last weeks vocab and never get around to learning this week's, never mind doing my homework. But I think it will pay off in the long run, because I'm minimizing the amount of time I spend learning a new word by keeping it fresh by intermittently reviewing, rather than learning it once, forgetting it, and then learning it again when I run into again.
It also is helping me set realistic goals on what I want to learn. At some point I have to admit there is some vocabulary that just isn't worth memorizing at this point, if it means I won't have time for the stuff I'm supposed to be learning, too.
I'm trying not to think too hard about what I want to do when this term is over (like learning to play the guitar, or joining a gym or writing more often) and see what I can do meet the goals I've set while still finding ways to meet my long term goals in little ways.
Writing more often is definitely on my list, so I might end up bagging the whole 'less English' thing. Not sure yet, but I'm starting to feel like it's not about the proportion that I use one language or another, but more about the amount I use any one language, period. I need to use Chinese more, but as long as my goals are being met there, I might as well use English** more, too, if that's what I need to do meet my other goals.

* But also there are a bunch of others, like SuperMemo, Anki, and VTrain.
**And German, yeesh.

Hey Folks

2008-03-20T13:58:00.002+08:00

Sorry about the lack of post this week. I've been dealing with some personal stuff and just haven't had time to get a blog together. Sorry! Next week!

The 133 Meter Dash

2008-03-10T18:55:00.003+08:00

Every time a new school term starts it usually seems to take about a week for me to not realize that that means I'll be doing the same thing every day for the next 3 months. Or 4 months for all of us here in China. Having adjusted to a 3 month term back home, my first 4 month term at HIT totally messed with my internal clock. I did fine for the first three months, but felt exhausted for most of the last month. Part of it was not being used to being forced to keep the same schedule for that long, and part of it was trying to retain material for the final for an extra month. It was like I was an athlete that had spent the last 2 years training for the 100 meter dash, only to show up for 2008 Olympics in Beijing and find out everyone else has been training for the 133 meter dash. Not cool, yo.
Even though the week long transition period is something I've experienced over and over again it still catches me by surprise every time. I don't feel so much like an athlete anymore, I feel more like a character from a soap opera who went over a cliff and lost all their memories.* All of a sudden I'm waking every morning at 5 AM and wondering if I set my alarm wrong, wondering who packed my bag and did my homework. I look in the mirror and wonder who did such a lousy job shaving. I ride the bus to school and think, 'Dang, since when did people start getting up this early?'
Now that the transition period is mostly over, aside from lingering bouts of homework related amnesia, I'm glad to say this term is shaping up to rather awesome. First of all, I've finally figured out a way to get my brain to remember hanzi**. I haven't actually had much luck using the insanely cool memory room strategy I laid out in my previous post, although it feels pretty cool to have the ability to spout off all the sounds in Mandarin in alphabetic order. What's helped the most has been a little thing called Mnemosyne, which aside from having the coolest name ever, is an open source*** electronic flashcard program. It allows you to rate how well you remember a card on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (supercalifraglisticly easy) and then schedules the next time you'll see the card based on your response. I found Mnemosyne through Khatzumoto's blog on http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/, which aside from being an excellent resource for Japanese learners, also has occasional posts on learning Chinese. Also most of the strategies used for learning Japanese (or any language) can be adapted to work for learning Mandarin. Another tip on Khatz's blog led me to try out converting my texts into pinyin, chunking those out into logical-ish sentence fragments and pairing them up with their equivalents in hanzi on flash cards.
The difference in a) how much I remember and and b) my motivation to study has been nothing short of freaking incredible. No joke, I went from remembering two or three characters perfectly for daily vocab quizzes last term to one single error in my hanzi all last week, and three of four incorrect tones. No doubt this also has to do with the fact that my brain is more used to breaking down characters into component radicals and otherwise 'trained to retain' , but the difference in how much I enjoy studying alone has been enough to convert me. I can hardly believe it myself, but I've somehow gone from feeling like writing characters was one step down from thumb screws to well, enjoying it. A lot. Almost to the point where writing in English feels a little boring. I don't know how to explain it, but it feels really good to write in characters, like I'm working out my brain or something.****
In other news that's not news at all, the weather has finally lightened up! I'm officially down to one pair of long underwear, the down jacket has been retired to the coat rack and spring feels like it might be just beyond the hazy, smog-filled horizon.

* Or maybe an athlete who got Tonya Hardinged over the head with an ice skate?
** Chinese characters.
*** In other words, free!
**** I want to say it feels like a 'pedicure for my brain' but now that I think about I don't think I've ever actually had a pedicure...

Skiing on Mao Mountain

2008-03-02T12:44:00.003+08:00

Having spent the last two months of my winter vacation in Harbin, trapped in a sort of pseudo-cryogenic sleep like Walt Disney's frozen head, when I came to about a week ago I was struck with a sudden bout of wanderlust.
And then on Monday, in between registering for my next term of Chinese courses I found myself turning greener than a head of broccoli as friends casually mentioned their adventures and incredulously asked me if I had really spent the whole break in Harbin. So lame!
To be fair, I had a great time with hanging out with my Chinese friends and their families, making pot stickers and setting off fireworks and all the other typical Chinese New Years activities, not to mention reading a pile of books and rekindling my interest in the Chinese language. Sure, it would have been nice to get out and see a little bit of the rest of China, or even make a quick dash home, but then I'd have to, you know, go out in daylight. Not to mention possibly ending up stuck in a snow storm in some train station in Anhui province, eyeing the meatier of my fellow travellers for signs of fatigue.
I still had a week of vacation left, though, which should be enough to go somewhere, right? I was still scratching my head when a friend of mine mentioned that he had spent the last week at Maoer Shan*, a ski resort a couple of hours east of Harbin. Bingo! Not only would I get a chance to get out of the city, but I could get some skiing in, too!

Skiing for me is almost a form of meditation. I know it's not the best thing in the world for the environment** and it can get pretty expensive, which can make me feel a little guilty when I start thinking, man, I just spent $80 on a lift ticket and I couldn't even spare a dollar for the guy on the corner the other day...but if I can get past all that, there is nothing that really compares to the feeling of serenity I get from a good run.
I think it has something to do with the quiet contemplation of the chair lift up, especially when there's nothing to do but watching tree tops drift past under your ski tips. And then you have that big rush of adrenaline as you zoom downhill, cutting into the soft snow around moguls and sliding across icy patches. I love the way snow absorbs sound, leaving you in your own little world listening to the swish of snow under your skis and sound of your own breath. I know kids these days have their i-poops and cell phones, but for me silence is one best things about skiing.
The snow fall here in China was pretty abysmal this year, not to mention a general absence of big mountains like we have back home***, so Maoer Shan was keeping snow on the hill with a mixture of snow machines and funky-looking fans. Imagine the prop on one of those boats they have down in the Everglades, set on towers spaced every couple hundred feet up on either side of the runs.

To get up the hill, they had two t-bars for the beginner run and one for the half pipe, one old-fashioned two-seater chair lift for the intermediate run and one high speed quad chair for the two advanced runs. I didn't feel like they were that much above the intermediate level, though! I guess I'm just spoiled by all those cliffs we call ski runs on Mt. Hood!
The biggest surprise for me was the other skiers. Not were they all, or least appeared to be Chinese, almost every single person that I talked to was from Harbin. Now that I think about it, this probably has to do with the fact the most people are already back in school or working, but at the time it really threw me for a loop as I was expecting a lot of out-of-towners and foreigners like me. The other big shock was the quality of the ski gear. Because skiing is relatively new here, nothing looks much more than a couple of years old. Somehow I was expecting to see a bunch of beat up clunky straight skis in neon green and pink like the ones I learned on! Not only that, but most of the other skiers were wearing snazzy ski suits and anoraks, leaving me feeling a little out of place in my jeans and cheap down jacket.
Snowboarding was clearly more popular with the younger set, same as it is back home. At one point I tried to get on the snowboarder t-bar to check out the half pipe. The attendant waved me away, telling me that half pipes aren't for skiers. The gathered crowd of pre-teen snowboarders were very much amused. Bah! Snowboarders!
Although I only managed to get up to Maoer Shan twice, I'm glad I did. Both times I went with a couple of exchange student friends and the second time we went up Ding Ding came, too. She had been out to Maoer Shan for a week last summer to paint and sketch in the countryside with her class, but this was her first time on skis! Seeing her go from barely being able to stand to getting down the beginner hill (albeit holding my hand) was definitely the high point of both trips.

*When I first heard the name of this place I thought it was called 毛儿山 Máoér Shān , or 'Mao Mountain', as in 'Mao Zedong Mountain'. I even double checked with a local taxi driver! But alas, it was not to be. After checking my train ticket I learned we were in fact not going to Mao Mountain after all, but 帽儿山 Màoér Shān, which means 'Hat Mountain', the imaginative name for a mountain shaped (who'd have guessed?) like a hat.

**And not just because of the impact on the mountain due the salt, cutting down trees and human traffic! As the writer Douglas Coupland points out in Generation X, it will take forever for junk like ski gear to decompose, joking "ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They'll be around till the sun goes supernova."

***Well, I guess there's the Himalayas! Do they have ski resorts in Tibet? I guess you could always try to get a yak to pull you up the hill...or a PLO tank...

Using Memory Rooms

2008-02-25T11:53:00.005+08:00

One of the plus sides to memorizing massive amounts of information is that you can learn all kinds of neat mnemonic tricks while you're doing it. And not just simple ones either, like 'Kids Playing On Freeways Get Splattered' (Kingdom, Phylum, Order, Family, Genus, Species), but really cool complex ones like memory rooms.
The first thing I've learned about memory is that it's much easier to recall real life experiences than it is to recall facts and figures. This means that if you can come up life-like scenes to represent whatever it is you want to remember it will be much easier to recall the information after only a couple of quick repetitions. One book I recently read on memorization techniques* gives three simple elements that make up a memory: sense, emotion, and action.
So when I'm trying to remember the character 忍 ren3 which means 'to endure', which my character dictionary describes as a knife (刀 dao1) stabbing a heart (心 xin1) and a drop of blood coming out (丶 dian3), I visualize an actual knife in my heart, which is now spouting one massive, cartoony drop of blood and I think 'enduring something difficult can feel like there is knife in your heart'. That image and accompanying definition is much easier to bring to mind than if I were to simply write the character and definition over and over again.
This what I was talking about in my last post, where I wrote about using etymologies based on the radicals and other elements to help remember the characters. But what about remembering how to pronounce a character?
Believe it or not, but some people have suggested that the best way to study the characters is to first memorize the meaning of the most common ~3-6000 characters in English before ever learning the pronunciation of a single character. This is apparently based on the observation that students of Japanese already fluent in the Chinese characters (which form the basis for the Japanese characters, or kanji) learn to read and write in Japanese faster than those unfamiliar with Chinese characters.
There is a big difference in my mind, however, between a person who learns the Chinese characters as the more or less sole writing system for a language and someone who gives each character one and only one word to represent it in their own language which has no precedent for using the Chinese characters. English just isn't set up to work with Chinese characters. Not to mention the fact that Chinese characters and the various Chinese languages are a lot harder to separate than most people would think. One of the first characters you learn in Chinese, for example, is 日 ri4 which means 'sun' or 'day of the month' and is often used when writing the date. The most common word for 'day of the month' in spoken context, however is 號 hao4. Why? Because 日 ri4 is easier to write and 號 hao4** is easier to say.
As I've said before, my personal method so far has been repetition, repetition, repetition. I've had pretty mixed results when it comes to the tones, although I seem to be able to recall and distinguish the sounds of Chinese fairly well. I couldn't sing my way out of a bucket, so that probably has something to do with it. Actually, when it comes to hearing the tones, I do fine, but when I asked the tone of any given word I'm more or less hit or miss at this point. For the most part I've found if I used long enough words and speak fast enough people can usually understand me from context even if my tones are off. This of course is not going to cut the mustard in the long run, not to mention setting me up for a lifetime of bad tones.
So this week I started a new method, which is actually based on a centuries old technique used by orators in ancient Greece and Rome: the memory room.* It's a pretty simple idea that's based on same principle as above, that we remember real life situations better than random information. The best way to start is with a room that you know well, so you can clearly visualize it. As you get more familiar with the process basically any room will work as long you can distinctly visualize it.
This is how it works: close your eyes and imagine yourself entering your room. Look over your left shoulder and 'see' whatever piece of furniture, window, painting, or whatever that is usually in that that corner. That'll be the location of your first memory for any room you create. Your second spot to visualize will be the adjacent wall, then the next corner, next wall and so on until you have four corners and four walls for a total of 8 spots to stores your memories. Add the floor and ceiling for a total of ten spots. If you need more spots, you can add more rooms, always following the same pattern: 1) corner to your left, 2) wall, 3) corner, 4) wall, 5) corner, 6) wall, 7) corner, 8) wall, 9) floor 10) ceiling. I learned this particular method of creating memory rooms from Memory Power by Scott Hagwood, which does a far better job of explaining the process than I just did.
Furthermore, I've given each sound in Mandarin a distinct person from a movie, tv show, or comic book**** to represent it. To memorize this information, I've begun building a series of memory rooms in which I've been placing the people, imagining them producing the sounds that they represent and doing some sort of action related to the sound, location and personality of the character. This based on the 'Sytem Method', which I found on the long defunct website www.haoyao.com. You can still access that site through the Internet Archive, however, which what I did. For simplicities sake, here is my summary of the method:

The System Method for Learning Chinese Characters

- Give each letter a distinct building (23 letters = 23 buildings)
- Give each sound a person ('person peg', group persons by movie casts, tv casts, etc (409 sounds in Mandarin = 409 people, if you can remember 10 people from each movie then you'll need about 41 movies)
- Place persons throughout buildings based on what letter their sound starts with ('place peg'), following the path you would use if you were giving a tour of the building, with roughly 5 or 6 people per room
- Give each (common) radical an object to represent it ('memory symbol')
- For uncommon radicals (ie archaic ones) use the person who represents the sound of the radical
- Give each tone a memorable and symbolic person, ie 'tone peg' (5 people)
- To memorize a character: have the 'tone peg' for the character act out a story in the 'place peg' for the sound using the 'memory symbols' for the radicals or the 'person peg' for the sound if the radical is uncommon.

One thing I've found it I can fit far more 'person pegs' in a room than the suggest 5-6, using my 10-spot memory rooms. It is a little weird at first to imagine people on the ceiling, though! The benefits of this method are pretty amazing. After only a couple of passes I can recall all 37 sounds that start with the letter 'z' in Mandarin, using four memory rooms I created using an amalgam of memories of my childhood home and characters from the cartoon The Tick, and the comic books Spider Man and The Fantastic Four. And not only can I recall them with relative ease, but I can recall them forwards, backwards and by number!
The cool thing about this is once I built and filled the rooms, my mind kept chewing on it and I found it hard not to think about the sounds I'm trying to remember. And to keep it fresh I can review the info like mental flash cards whenever and wherever I want! So cool!
Once I finish building my memory rooms, the next step will be to start using the radical etymologies and tone characters (I personally plan to use Freddy Mercury, Patrick Warburton as the Live Action Tick, Jim Carey as Ace Ventura, Invader Zim, and Bug Eyed Earl from the comic Red Meat) in combination with person and place pegs to create memory stories that will help me memorize tone, sound, meaning and character.
I know this probably sounds like a lot of extra work, and it is, at least at first. As I get more I use the process, however, my brain is going to get used to it, and that will mean a heck of lot less work in the long run re-memorizing forgotten or misremembered characters. Additionally, the more I read and write with the characters, the less I will need to rely on this system to bring up the information I want, as the information gets stored in my long term memory and I'm able to bypass the intermediary step of the memory stories. I like to think of it as scaffolding, or the substructure of a building that nobody thinks about once the building is freestanding and complete. And it's actually really fun to do! That might be part of the reason it works so well -- if you make studying enjoyable, you end up doing it a lot more than you do when it feels like pulling teeth.
Any who, enough belabbering for today! Those characters won't memorize themselves!

*Memory Power by Scott Hagwood
**On the other hand, the simplified form of 號 is 号, which begs the question why this continues to be the case even (at least in my personal experience) in mainland China. I guess they're saving themselves one stroke at least?
***In Memory Power he calls refers to this as a 'Roman Room'. I've also heard it called a 'Memory Palace' and 'Method of Loci', in reference to the Jesuit missionaries who supposedly used the same technique for mastering the Chinese characters. I use 'memory room' because both of all those other ones sound too high falutin' for me.
****Well, almost. Still a work in progress, so to speak.

The Half Decayed Bones of A Murderer

2008-02-16T16:30:00.004+08:00

Having set my goal of being able to read a newspaper in Chinese by this summer I've come up with a couple of sub goals that I think will help me achieve my main goal less painfully.

1. Use English less, use Chinese more

I don't know much about about the hard science behind second language acquisition, but this just makes sense to me.
As one blogger points out the biggest difference between kids who learn a language 'naturally' and adults who study a second language in school is not in their brains, but in the amount of time they put into learning the language.
And from personal experience I also know that directly after even briefly using English I make more errors in Chinese and generally speak less fluently than I do otherwise. I think you can only get used to switching between two languages if they are both well established in your brain. To use my own personal experience, I find it much easier to switch between German and English, two languages which are both more embedded in my brain than Chinese, no doubt thanks to the fact I've spent substantially more time using both of those languages.
I'm not sure if I could handle simultaneous interpreting, though. Those guys have some serious linguistic cohones.
One of the concrete ways I'm meeting this goal is by using Chinese instead of English to write in my diary, which I do more or less daily. I actually tried doing this a couple of months ago but I just didn't know enough characters to manage it.* Another thing I'd like to try is starting a second weekly blog, in Chinese.
What I'm not going to do, however, is cut down the amount I post on here or otherwise stay in touch with all you folks back home. If anything I'll just be cutting back the amount of non-Chinese blogs, books, and TV shows. Less screen time means more time engaged in Chinese language and culture, which in turn means I'll have more to write about every week!

2. Memorize the radicals

This something that occurred to me in a 'oh yeah' moment a couple of weeks ago while reading about a technique that uses faces and personalities of celebrities in addition to places that you know well to memorize Chinese characters. **
The radicals are a set of 214 characters that most Chinese characters contain one or more of and are used in dictionaries to order the characters much as the alphabet is used to order English dictionaries. One hitch, though, with the radical system is that dictionaries traditionally place each character under one and only one radical no matter how many radicals a character might contain, so you're left guess which one it's under. And there are of course many many characters that have no readily apparent radical, especially with the simplified characters that are used in the PRC.
However, radicals really, really, really come in handy for learning new characters. To use a mountain climbing analogy, the radicals are kind of like the cracks in the mountain where you can stick the anchors that you attach your ropes to. It is much easier to remember, for example, that 想 xiang3 is written with a 木 mu4 in the top left corner, a 目 mu4 next to that, with a 心 xin1 underneath than it is to remember the same character not knowing those components beforehand. Furthermore, a bunch of the radicals are pictographs, unlike the vast majority (I've been told 97%) of the rest of the characters. To use the previous example, 木 mu4 is a pictograph of a tree and means 'wood or tree', 目 mu4 is a pictograph of an eye (turned sideways) and means 'eye', and 心 xin1 is a pictograph of a heart and means 'heart or mind'. And 想 also contains a phonetic-semantic element, that being 相 xiang1/xiang4, which means 'examine'. Add a 心 xin1 on the bottom and you've got 'examine (相) the heart or mind (心)', i.e. 'think or miss', which is the definition of 想.***
Unfortunately many of the radicals aren't used in modern Chinese on their own anymore or the meaning has changed, so for some of the radicals you have to learn the what the meaning of the character used to be to get the semantic information. For example, 儿 er2 means 'son' in modern Chinese, but was originally a pictograph of legs. Also, many radicals that are no longer used on their own don't have a single standard pronunciation, or the pronunciation has changed and so you have to learn how the character used to be pronounced to get the phonetic information. I've seen the second radical (丨) variously referred to as gun3, gen3 and shu4, for example.
And the simplified characters present another problem, as most simplified dictionaries use their own simplified radical systems which often somewhat arbitrarily divide full form characters and their abbreviations. In my simplified Chinese dictionary for example, the character 刀 dao4 and its abbreviation （visible as the second part of 到 dao4）are listed separately, whereas they are considered one radical under the traditional radical system. On the plus side, there are less radicals to remember (188 by my count) and many of the abbreviations, which sometimes have a different stroke count (the way the radicals themselves are organized) are cross-referenced to the original radical.
At any rate, now that I've started to learn the radicals I'm seeing some pretty immediate pay off in being able to guess and remember the pronunciations and meanings of new characters, which is pretty cool. And some of the etymologies are pretty funny, too, like 父 fu4, which can be remembered as 'hand (又 you3) enforcing rules with a stick (丨gen3)' and means 'father', or 歹 dai4 as 'bones (gua3 which is the top part of 骨 gu3) broken in half' which another source vividly describes as 'the half decayed bones of a murderer' and means 'bad or evil'.

3. Learn 10 to 20 new characters every day

This is one goal I'm not exactly sure yet how I'm going to keep. Based on my own estimation of being able to read about 750 characters right now, give or take a couple hundred, I need to pick up another roughly 2250 characters to reach the magical 3000 said to be necessary be able to read a Chinese newspaper. 2250 characters divided by 6 months or about 180 days gives me exactly 12.5 to learn every day. Knowing that I'll slack off at least some of those days, I'm aiming for more (20) most days and less (10) other days.
This is one I've still got to think on some. When school starts up again I'll probably be hitting my quota anyways, but I'd like some way to keep track just to make sure. Goals generally seem easier to keep for me if I set up a way to track them in some measurable way.
If anybody out there has got any ideas on this one shoot me an email, okay? I'm looking at you, Naomi! And you Kimber and Samantha! ****

4. Read at least one newspaper, magazine, or book in Chinese every week

Okay, so this seems a little counter-intuitive. If my main goal is to be able to read a newspaper in Chinese, how the heck am I going to manage to start doing that every week at the very beginning? Or, even crazier, how the heck am I going to be able to read books in Chinese when can't even read half the street signs that are out there？
The answer: I won't be able to, not at first. But I think it's important to try, for a couple of reasons.
One, it will give me something to read now that I'm trying to cut back on my English.
Two, it will expose me to real world Chinese, as opposed to textbook Chinese, which is more boring than the real stuff, anyways.
And three, it will give me a sense of how far I have to go to reach my goal.
Sure, a lot of the time it'll be discouraging, but I figure if I can get even a gist of what they're saying it'll be a big boost for my self-confidence. Just the other night I was eating 扬州炒饭 (Yangzhou-style fried rice) at my favorite greasy spoon and absent-mindedly looking up at an old poster of Chairman Mao surrounded by the smiling proletariat and bam! like that I realized understood most of the characters: 毛泽东是最伟大的马克思列儂者, or 'Mao Zedong is the greatest Marxist-Leninist'. That was a pretty cool moment, if you ask me.

* One of the biggest differences I've found so far between learning Chinese and learning Indo-European languages is the lack of cognates with my native language, English. This puts me in me the odd situation of being able to express more in Chinese than I can understand, which I would say is the complete opposite when learning to speak, say, German. This is because English shares so many words with languages like French, Spanish, and German that you can usually guess your way through a conversation with a native speaker of those languages (if they speak slowly and clearly enough). With Chinese almost every new word needs to be learned from scratch. On the other hand, as my vocabulary builds I'm finding I can guess the meanings of words that are composites of words I already know. And there are of course the occasional transliterations of English words, like 卡通 ka1tong3 (cartoon) and 伊妹儿 yi1mei4er2 (email) that become obvious after you say them a couple of times.

** Not sure how I feel about that method. I'm thinking I might give it a shot. It's a fun exercise at least to see how many characters from movies, TV shows, comic books and what not you can come up off the top of your head! Not to mention places you used to live, work or hang out. It's really amazing the stuff that sticks around in your head.

*** For this and other character etymologies I use the supremely excellent Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary by Rick Harbaugh. You can also get the same info for free from the online version at www.zhongwen.com/. He also has a bunch of information on the radical system and controversy surrounding using etymologies based on seal script characters (which are only 'pretty old') to discuss Chinese characters (which are 'really really really old').

**** Three of my four sisters who also study Chinese and can talk me under a table in it.

A Simple Enough Proposition

2008-02-10T21:00:00.000+08:00

I only made one New Year's Resolution for the Year of the Rat: memorize enough characters to read a newspaper in Chinese by this summer.
Unlike other languages with their fancy-dancy, new-fangled 'alphabets', Chinese is written using characters. Characters, in case you didn't know, are a huge pain in butt. Instead of representing phonemes like letters do, characters represent syllables.
At first it seems like a simple enough proposition: Mandarin Chinese has 409 distinct sounds and 5 tones (if you count the neutral one). So at the most they only need a little over 2000 characters, right? Actually, you don't even need that many, because not every sound exists in every tone, for example the sound gei is only ever spoken in the third tone, where it means 'give'.
Unfortunately someone way back when had the bright idea to cram in semantic as well as phonetic information. That means you can look at some characters and know not only how to pronounce it, but what it means too. A good example is the character 伞. Looks a lot like an umbrella, don't it? And hey, if you speak Chinese, you could even guess how to pronouce this character, cause you probably already know the word for umbrella in Chinese, which happens to be san3.
Great, right?
The bad news is that there are other words that don't have anything to do with umbrellas that are also pronounced san3, for example san3guang1 which means 'astigmatism' and san3wen2 which means 'essay'. So now you've got to either use your umbrella character to represent things that are not umbrellas, too, or whip up a new character that doesn't look like an umbrella to use for things that aren't umbrellas but are still pronounced san3. One solution to reuse your umbrella character in your new character, where it can represent a phonetic element of the character, telling you how to pronounce it, with another element that tells you what it means.
Sound complicated?
Okay, now add to this a couple thousand years of use with inevitable shifts in way words are pronounced and used, not to mention the way characters are written and you get a very pretty little mess.
One number you hear a lot is 3000 characters is enough to read your average newspaper. The problem with that number is the vast majority of words in Mandarin are two syllables long. To use the example above, when I read the word 散光, I recognize the first character as san4 from san4bu4, which means 'to stroll', and the second character as guang1, from gao1guang1 which means 'highlight', which my art teacher uses all the time. So I can read the character (albeit in the wrong tone on the first syllable, thanks to the fact that this character has two pronounciations), but I still have no way to know that it means 'astigmatism'. If I knew that the character 散 meant 'diffuse, scattered', and that the character 光 meant 'light' I might be able to make a guess, but I'd just as likely guess 'diffraction' as 'astigmatism'!
For native speakers, whose spoken vocabulary can fill in gaps like this as they learn the characters, this is less of a problem I would think. But us CSL learners there is almost nothing that compares that sinking feeling that, even though you can read every single character on the menu, you still have no idea what it is that you're ordering.
For this reason, a lot of foreigners who live or work in China and want to pick up some Chinese will completely skip the characters. I myself devised an elaborate system to avoid memorizing characters when I first started studying Chinese, where I entered the pronouciation, characters, and English definition for every single word we learned in class into an spreadsheet. When it came time to do my homework, I simply searched my spreadsheet and copied the characters as needed. This let me focus more on learning to speak Chinese (but left me in a bad spot when it came to tests!).
That worked for the first 9 months or so, while I was studying Chinese 5 to 10 hours a week, meeting a language partner once a week and learning maybe 20 to 30 new words a week in addition to a full course load and working part-time. But when I started an intensive summer course in Chinese, studying Chinese 16 hours a week in class and in my free time as well, my system fell apart. First of all, we started having daily vocab quizes, which really made me realize how much better a lot of my classmates were at recalling the characters than me. Second of all, we were learning a lot more vocabulary, around 60 to 80 words a week. And lastly, and most importantly, I had free time to devote to learning the characters.
Over the summer I mostly used flash cards, in combination with writing the characters a couple times right before the daily vocab quizes. This didn't work all that great for learning the write the characters, but my reading improved some.
When I started taking classes in China, spending 20 hours a week in class studying upwards of 120 words a week I started trying to at least write each character (with pinyin) we studied 5 times in one notebook, read the text, and write each character 5 more times in another notebook. I also started speaking Chinese in class, with language partners another 3 to 6 hours a week, with my roommates and friends outside of class, in addition to another 6 to 9 hours a week listening and speaking Chinese in my art school.
The last month I haven't done much of any of that, and although I have been speaking and writing Chinese daily, I've been mostly taking it easy while I decide whether or not to try to take my Chinese up to the next level. It may be hard to believe, but after this year and a half of somewhat half-assed studying, I can speak and write in Chinese well enough to discuss most topics, albeit awkwardly.
The next big step is learning characters well enough to read things like newspapers, and for a while I really wasn't sure I wanted to put in the time and energy it was going to take to do that. A couple things pulled me over, one of those being the blog Etchings From Granite Studio, which has some fascinating posts on Chinese history, culture and politics. Another was the thought that China will probably be opening up politically over the next couple of decades, making this a fascinating time to learn the language people speak here.
What has kept me going most of all though, has been all the encouragement I've gotten from friends here in China and at home, and my relatives who are crazy enough to think I know what I'm doing! Thanks everybody!
So that is why, in a nutshell, I've decided to learn how to read Chinese and why it is a big deal, at least to me! Next week I'll talk about some of my new strategies to tackle the mountain of characters that stand between me and the Beijing Daily News.

So It Goes

2008-02-03T15:11:00.000+08:00

Chinese New Year, or Chunjie* as it's known round these parts is the most important festival on the Chinese calendar. In that respect it's a lot like Christmas, but without all the Christmas stuff like Santa Claus and eggnog or whatever. And you get you get to set off fireworks.
In my admittedly limited travels I have observed that most countries have one, single, designated 'blow stuff up' holiday. In America, of course, we have the Fourth of July, or as I like to call it 'Thomas Jefferson Says 'Screw You, England' Day'. And on New Years in Germany, which they call Silvester, they efficiently combine the tradition of getting wasted with the tradition of setting off barrages of small mortars off their back patios.
What other countries do the fireworks thing?
I know in Iran they have a New Year's tradition that involves jumping over a bonfire. Maybe they could start jumping over piles of M80s? And in Southeast Asia they have Songkran, which is basically a big water fight. Hrm. Maybe they could throw M80s at each other?
Someone in the fireworks industry really needs to get on top of this. With the right PR we could really expand the market for small explosives. Just think: smoke bomb Easter eggs! Whistling Pete menorahs! Cards that go off in your unwitting Valentine's face!

***

I've been reading a lot over the past month of my vacation. I just finished Moby Dick. My favorite quote is said by Ishmael, the narrator, while explaining why he knows so much about whales:
"I try all things; I achieve what I can."
I also recently finished Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. My favorite quote from that novel:
"They are in love. Fuck the war."
I guess I've been feeling a compulsion to read classic novels lately. Last year I read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I thought it was pretty. I listened to Lolita and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on tape. I read Flan O'Brien and scarfed down A Brave New World by Adolous Huxley. I tried to read to Ulysses but couldn't get myself to keep going. I even bought The Annotated Guide to Ulysses so I could understand the parts in Latin and Greek and what not, but I could not, for the life of me, get interested in that book. The same for Sometimes a Great Notion.
As Vonnegut would say, "So it goes."
With a lot of these books, there comes a point where I find myself no longer reading because I'm drawn into the novel, but because I want to finish the damn thing. And once I'm done I can sit back and feel like I've bettered myself somehow. I wonder if that's a compulsion that many people feel nowadays, especially young people.
Apparently people are reading less and less. One poll I read about in the New York Times the other day said that 1 in 4 people hadn't even read one single book in the past year. On the positive side, they said, 2 in 25 people reported having over 51 books in the past year.
So after I finished Moby Dick last night I sat and thought for a moment about how few people can or want to read books like that.
It made me a little sad.

***

Sometimes when I'm writing entries for this blog, I get inspired by the idea that the more I write, the better I will get at writing. When I was younger, I don't remember wanting to be a writer, although I do remember immensely enjoying reading. I remember I used to go to the library and find the biggest books I could, under the assumption not that they would be most interesting, but instead that they would most impressive once completed.
I guess in that respect I haven't changed all that much!
Other than reading, I remember drawing a lot as a kid, which is probably why I can draw so much better than I can write. The secret to getting good at something, it seems, is doing it a lot. And I don't remember writing a lot as a kid. It wasn't until I went overseas and I started writing letters to friends and family back home that I really got started. And then a couple of months before I turned 18 started keeping a journal. At first I was pretty sporadic, mostly waiting for the muse to strike or things to happen. Now that I've been keeping a diary for over four years I find that I write in it almost everyday.
Sometimes it literally bores me to tears to read my old journals. Other times I'm encouraged by things I wrote in the past. The weirdest of all is when I find myself describing events I that I had completely forgotten had ever happened.
I don't know if I'm getting better at writing, but I certainly enjoy doing it much more than I used to.
As far this blog goes, I wish I was better at finding topics that weren't overly personal and had more to do with China. There's a magic mix out there, just within my reach, I know it.

* Lit. 'Spring Festival'

Buying Real Estate on the Moon

2008-01-27T21:32:00.000+08:00

So I was reading a blog written by an expat working in Beijing and I ran into a post he wrote about the tendency to make false generalizations about China based on your own or others experiences.
His own generalization that he cites as having inspired the post was 'Beijingers are quiet', which he concluded after an unusually peaceful subway ride to work one morning. Never having to been to Beijing (outside of the airport at least) I can't speak to the relative truthiness of this generalization, but apparently it's about as true as the Yangtze is straight.*
He goes on to make two pretty spot on observations of generalizations that foreigners living in China make: they are usually as false as they are true, and they are usually as applicable to somewhere else as to China.
Now, this guy came up with some pretty good hypothesises for why expats here in China do this, and I'll get to those in a sec, but first I want to say: people make generalizations like this everywhere. I don't think it a whole lot to do with being in China in particular, although I suppose and argument can be made that China is particularly susceptible to being exoticised as mysterious and foreign in Western countries.
I think people mostly generalize for a pretty simple reason: they're trying to predict behavior.
For example, as tipping isn't customary, many restaurants here in Harbin expect you to pay the waiter directly after ordering. At first this threw me for a loop, but nowadays when I find myself at a restaurant I'm not familiar with, I generalize my past experiences at restaurants here in China and get my wallet out after ordering just in case.
Okay, so that's a pretty dumb example, but my point is making generalizations is actually really useful for day to day stuff like that when you find yourself in an unfamiliar situation. Where people get into trouble is when they over do it.
Actually, I'm remembering a statistics class I took last year, where we learned about making predictions given a set of observations. I don't remember the actual rule (that would be so useful, brain! hurry up and think!), but it was something along the lines of: say you have a scatter plot, right? One of those graphs that look like a poison oak rash or the inside of your microwave after reheating spaghetti sauce. And if you draw a line that is as close as you can get to majority of the points on your graph, anything on that line is fair game as a prediction, even if it's not a point that's ever actually been observed. But once you get outside of the range of your observed values you might as well be investing in real estate in Florida, or the Moon, for that matter.
So if expats here in China overgeneralize now and again, it might just be because they find themselves in a situation that doesn't appear on their their own personal scatter graph of experiences in life.
As far as the blogger I wrote about earlier, he first makes the suggestion that expats in China generalizations possibly because of 'ethnocentrism', which he defines as the tendency to "see the whole people rather than individuals". That, I guess, would be in line with what I was saying earlier, about the tendency in the West to fetishize China.
The second suggestion he makes is that people jump to make generalizations that they've heard others make. This is one reason it can be a bad idea to read too much about China. You can try to limit yourself to more scholarly info, but that's not always a guarantee you'll be able to avoid old tropes and other misinformation. With China, this is especially the case, as many college professors back the States were educated in Taiwan and often have limited first-hand knowledge of the PRC. Also, a lot of the old guard of academia take a dim view of first-hand anything when it comes to China, ie it's better to memorize seal script than it is to learn a local dialect. On the other hand, many Chinese professors have their own axes to bury as regards Han nationalism and the oft-touted 6,000 years of continuous Chinese history.
The blogger finally concludes that expats in China like to make generalizations because it gives them a chance to stroke their egos assuming other expats agree, noting that “somewhere in all this, the Ego is looking for a chance to prove himself, to state a universal truth. He hopes others will band with it and give you a chance to play the role of Great Oracle About All Things China."
Well, that might well be the case for other waiguoren here in China. Me, I'm content being the nervous guy who pulls out his wallet the second the waiter shows up.

*Actually, I've never been to the Yangzte, either, so take what you will from this analogy.

Unicorn Butts

2008-01-22T14:08:00.000+08:00

Internet cafes or wangba in Harbin are mostly dim, smoky affairs, bringing more to mind a dive bar or strip club than a gateway to the modern world.
Time is prepaid, on entrance, and if unused, reimbursed, on exit. In some of them you are assigned a computer, in others you are given a card and can choose whichever machine suits your fancy. During the day it usually costs around 2 RMB an hour. If you're looking for a bargain, you can pay 10 RMB to use a computer from around 10pm to 7am.
The computers themselves are, like Spider Man, wimpy looking but with surprisingly souped up guts (for playing RPGs and other graphics heavy games). Flat screens are more common than you'd think, but a lot of the older ones are still using CRTS.
Some are already running Windows Vista, but most are still XP. I saw a couple of PCs with the Mac logo on their desktops, but like the rest of the world outside, Macs are about as common as pimples on a unicorn's butt. Firefox is also unheard of, but you can install it if you'd like.
The best thing about Internet cafes is the fast connection speeds for when I'm fixing for Battlestar. And Gilmore Girls of course.
The worst thing about internet cafes is smoking. Actually, I don't mind smoke that much, it just bugs me when I come home and the fumes coming off my clothes give me a nicotine buzz. I see only two solutions: 1) buy an old cosmonaut suit from one of the Russian military surplus stores, or 2) just not wear clothes in the first place.
There is one non-smoking Internet cafe near my house. The computers there junkier than most, reminding me more of Aunt May than Peter Parker. And it's always packed. Oddly there seem to be more women at this wangba than others.
Most people who go to wangba seem to be 18-32 year men. They spend most of their time grimly chain-smoking and playing World of Warcraft. There is also a Chinese Mario Kart ripoff that is popular.
The other thing people do is watch movies and TV shows. Korean game shows and soap operas mostly. Or chat.
Recently read Chinese Internet users are set to outnumber American ones by the end of this year. That's kind of nutty.
Haven't noticed many people reading. But one reportedly cool thing about the Internet in China is the online book community. Apparently a lot of books that are being published, and even some movies, are first getting published online. Once they have an established fan base they can prove themselves to financially viable. An interesting response to piracy. And censorship.
Because if the book is already available for free, nobody can steal it, right?
The newest Harry Potter book reportedly got translated in 3 days by a small army of guerrilla translators.
And there's an American author, named Corey Doctorow, who has put all of his books up online, free of charge under a Creative Commons License. Something about how you can't control bits anymore. And how he's more worried about being unknown than broke. Not sure how that would work for a more established author. And it seems like he's setting a precedent for himself that might be hard to maintain.
Actually, Scott Adams put up one of his recent books online for free. Didn't seem to work out so well for him.
People also seem to get pissed off if you put content up for free to attract readers, and then take it down when you want to sell it. Or decide to sell non-free content in addition to putting up free content.
Well, I guess mediocrity has it's upsides! I couldn't sell my left n--, er, hand, so nothing to worry about there!

EDIT: According to a recent survey of Chinese internet users, most of them are using the net to chat, play games, and listen to music. Damn, forgot about music! Interesting factoid, too: "23.5% users have their own blogs or spaces, that is about 49.35 million bloggers."

Untitled

2008-01-21T13:02:00.000+08:00

On the stairs one day,
I am thinking about my feet
about my socks
which were a gift from a concerned
aunt
and I which I wore
to my job
My shoes
were also a gift,
from my concerned
mother
who was afraid
my feet would freeze
my new insoles
are made of fur
and were given to me
the day before yesterday
by my
girlfriend
There is something pretty in that
I think

Getting Dumped On and Eating Nuts

2008-01-12T19:48:00.000+08:00

Because the weather here in Harbin varies from cold to, well, colder, there's about as much point in looking at a weather forecast as there is in putting Dockers on a donkey. So far it's snowed a total of two times. And one of those was all the way back in November. The other was a couple of weeks ago, leaving the sidewalks coated in a thick crust of grayish, frozen sludge. I've found the ease with which one can walk on the stuff depends largely on the amount of coal dust and other grime that happens to be layered on top combined with the frequency of little pits left by women's high heel shoes and other projecticles. I used to imagine it was like walking on frozen cookie dough. Then I ate some and decided that wasn't such a good analogy. It's more like lumpy cold stuff that gives you raging dystentary and makes you blind for a week.
Of course, there are places where people have gone to the trouble of shoveling (or pick-axing) the junk, resulting in a sort of patch work pattern of cleared pavement that meanders back and forth across the sidewalk creating a pleasing sort of Parisian summer garden effect, not unlike something you might see in a Monet or Van Gogh painting. Or better yet are the places where some incredibly bright individuals have repaved their front walks with bathroom tiles which, when combined with a light layer of snow on the tiles or the bottoms of ones shoes provide hilarious hip-and-wrist-fracturing fun.
Despite the ha-ha-Nick-God-is-laughing-at-you lack of icy white stuff falling from the sky, it has been unrelentingly cold for the past couple of months. On the other hand, locals tell me real winter only started a couple of days ago, so I suppose Old Man Winter might take a dump on us yet. Er. Right.
I have also been told many times that if I'm not careful, the cold will get into my knee joints and Totally F--- Them Up. My ayi, who has knees that sound like gearshifts, likes to remind me of this fact when she catches me walking around the apartment barefoot, sending me rushing back into my room to hastily don a pair of hard-soled slippers that require me to Geisha-step around on the uncarpeted floors to prevent sounding like a bunch of wood shingles in a dryer.
I for one have been feeling a powerful hibernation instinct kicking in. The other day I slept for 14 hours straight and woke up the next day still feeling a little kippered. I think I've been averaging at least 10 hours a night for the last week or two. Hard not to when the sun goes down around 4pm and creeps back up over the horizon a little after 7am, visible as a faint, yellowish blur. A gigantic pee stain on a pair of celestial tighty-whities, if you will. I've also been hoarding food in my room, like some sort of massive beer-drinking, potato-chip eating squirrel. Actually, now that I think about it, I've been eating lots of nuts lately, too. Clearly only a matter of time until I grow a tail and start cleaning myself with my tongue.

Thank Marx for Censorship

2008-01-07T21:35:00.000+08:00

Living as I do in one of the last socialist paradises left on this capitalist-ridden planet of ours, I am often struck by how truly different life is here, where Marx is more than just a smart talking guy with a cigar.
Violence is unheard of, sex is unspoken of and the street cleaners routinely break into spontaneous yet elaborate song and dance routines and for those who would wish to soil the hearts and minds of citizenry with degrading images and immoral stories justice is swift and fierce.
Recently, thanks to the hard working men and women of the State Administration of Radio and Film (SARFT) the film Lost in Beijing was banned here in China. Not only does the film feature rape and prostitution (both unheard of in the China since the rapists, pimps and prostitutes were driven into the sea by Chairman Mao in the 1950s), but those sneaky producers deigned to place an uncut version of their film in an international film competition!
I for one salute my comrades for shielding my virgin eyes from yet another smutty film, much as stepped up to the plate and cut out the 13 worst minutes of Ang Lee's latest film, Lust, Caution.
Okay, maybe I'm being a teeny, weeny bit sarcastic here. But censorship is a fact of life here in the PRC, so taking a cue from Dilbert's Scott Adams, who often argues for positions he doesn't agree with on his blog, I figure it couldn't hurt to exercise the old imagination and look at the ways censorship makes my life better.
For one, I don't have to worry about accidentally watching some dark, depressing film about horrible people doing horrible things to each other, a la 21 Grams. This, I am sure, has a net positive affect on my overall mental health. Life is depressing. Like a good, stiff drink, movies should be helping me forget that!
Also, since the movies and TV shows I watch are carefully vetted by a team of experts I can be assured that the characters I become attached are appropriate role models to be emulated freely without fear of developing socially undesirable characteristics like picking my nose or smoking crack.
Finally, and perhaps best of all, if the censors were paired up with film critics, I could be sure that only the very best films would be made available for my viewing pleasure. So, ideally, what we need is more censorship! Someone get Ebert and Roeper on the phone.
Anyways, I have to run. Earlier today I picked up a bootleg copy of Lost in Beijing, so I'm gonna pop some popcorn and see what all the fuss is about. This I suppose, is the ultimate irony of censorship in China: given the ubiquity of pirated DVDs and high speed Internet connections it's about as effective as dam made out of whiffle balls.

Oh Yeah, Christmas

2007-12-30T08:35:00.000+08:00

Celebrating the birth of Christ in a heathen land is a little strange. But thanks to Western movies, most Chinese people seem to have at least some idea of what Christmas should look like. You would think this would be comforting…and then you see something like this:

Aw, look kids, Santa... has pink-eye!? I mean, seriously, what the f--- were they thinking? Santa Claus, bringer of blight and pestilence? Santa Pox? SARS Claus? Or maybe he's supposed to look like he's been hot boxing the sled with Rudolf and the elves. I guess that would explain how he can eat all those cookies: wicked munchies! Weirder still is that these things were EVERYWHERE. One I could accept as harmless. Multitudes indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the magical flying fat man from the North Pole.
On the whole, Christmas over here seems to be thought of as a second Valentines Day. Flower shops do brisk business and young couples trade gifts and wish each other Shengdan Jie Kuaile (Merry Christmas). Restaurants break out their stoned inflatable Santas.
The interesting thing is: really, who am I to say this version of St. Nick isn't any more appropriate than the one that sits in the mall back home or collects change for the Salvation Army or fights evil Composite Santa in the Robot Chicken Christmas Special? That's the cool thing about Santa -- nobody owns the copyright on his likeness. Imagine if other cultural icons like Mickey Mouse or Snoopy were in the public domain. Sure, we might not like all the new versions that would start popping up, but it sure would be amusing, no?

Getting Naked with the Neighbors

2007-12-26T20:57:00.000+08:00

Saturday was my last day in Foreign Students Dorm #13, or as I've come to call it, 'Little Korea'. I proudly traded in my keys and stumbled out the door loaded down with the last bits and pieces of my life in China (jar of honey, toothbrush, two towels, running shoes, etc). Walking across the courtyard I realized how strange it was to be leaving a place that I had spent every day of the last 3 months walking in and out of. It really doesn't take long before you start taking things for granted.
My new place (drum roll) is less than a five minute walk to my art school in one direction and my girlfriend's house in the other direction. I don't have a roommate, but I do have a very friendly ayi (auntie), shushu (uncle), and meimei (little sister).
Living with a Chinese family steps up the living abroad experience a notch. For instance, like most people around here, we don't have a water heater. Well, that's not completely true. There is one on the wall in the bathroom, about the same size and color as a Super Nintendo. My rudimentary familiarity with physics indicates I will be taking very, very cold showers. Either that, or I need to start going to public showers, which I've been told is what most people here do. Talk about your cultural exchange! Getting naked with the natives! Hrm. I can see myself, years from now, explaining how I gained my absolutely stunning mastery of Chinese language and culture, saying, "But really, I don't think you can truly understand the multifaceted complexities of modern China until you have shared a bar of soap with a taxi driver after being towel whipped by old man Wang from next door."
This week is our last before finals. And then we have two months off for winter break.
Dear lord, I love this country.
I won't be completely off the hook, though. One of my language partners will be helping me prepare for the next term and I plan on at least trying to study on my own a little every day. Er. Doing. Not trying. I've also been looking at my options for traveling, but nothing is looking all that likely to pan out. Winter isn't the best time to travel in China, and not just because of the weather. Chinese New Year is an amorphous, blob-ular holiday that absorbs the better part of February and finds everyone at home, eating. Sounds kind of familiar, huh?
The last piece of news: I've traded in my Men with Facial Hair Card, cut the scruff, removed the chin fuzz, trimmed the face rug, got rid of the goatee. And yes, Ellen, I can hear you smiling all the way over here.

Super Awesome Tips For When You Go Abroad

2007-12-15T02:29:00.000+08:00

Last week I said I didn't think college seems like a very good time to go abroad. I've thought about that some since then and actually, scratch that. College is a GREAT time to go abroad.
First of all, college is not real life. Second of all, college is not real life. Third of all... Okay, okay, y'all get the point.
Get out there and see the world. Hell, doesn't matter how old you are, it'll be worth it.
Not that it will be easy. Far from it. But there are lessons to be learned from struggle. It's like eating a steak. You have to chew a lot, but it tastes good, so it's worth it. Point is, get out there and eat you some world-steak.
If you can, spend some time learning the language and getting familiar with the culture of the place you're going before you go. If you can't, go anyways. Having done it both ways, I can say the latter is more rewarding in the end, but in the starting-a-fire-in-the-rain-without-matches sort of way.
Accept the fact that you'll have good days and bad days. Or weeks. Or months. Think of it as an opportunity to get know yourself better.
Keep your expectations low, but put in the time. That doesn't necessarily mean chaining yourself to your desk. What's important is exposure to the language and culture you're trying to adapt to. Watching TV is a great way to learn a language.
Avoid your fellow countrymen like the plague. Yes, it will make you feel like a jerk. Yes, you may find yourself empathizing with Colonel Kurtz, writing blog entry after blog entry about those foolish OTHER exchange students, the ones illicitly talking English in the bathroom like high school girls trading cigarettes. But remember the world-steak. It will give you strength.
That said, a little BBC World Service every now and then does wonders for one's spirits. Also, have fun practising your Received Pronunciation. You can use this later on to trick French people and get compliments on your British accent.
If you go with an exchange organization make it your personal goal for the year to do every single thing they tell you not to do. Logically, these are the most fun. Just don't get caught.
And when you get back, remember: no one really cares about the life affirming nights you spent screaming out of car windows being young and alive. Read a couple of National Geographic articles about the country you lived in and summarize those instead. Save the real stories for fellows veterans of exchange.
Which is to say, China is a fascinating county that is both modern and ancient, shrouded in mystery--
Just kidding, guys.
Honestly, what stories do you guys want to hear? Are there any myths out there I can investigate? Things you've always wanted to know about China? A how-to guide for using squat toilets? (HINT: they're called 'squat' toilets for a reason. BONUS HINT: consider gravity and the location of your keys, wallet, loose change，cell phone etc in your pockets. SUPER EXTRA BONUS HINT: BYOTP.)

Three Drawings

2007-12-09T15:33:00.000+08:00

Ding Ding and Na Na flipping through a collection of student art work.

Many things went wrong with this sketch, but just as many things went right.

I wonder why she was so unhappy?

More new (and old) sketches here.

Wearing My Underwear On My Head

2007-12-08T20:56:00.000+08:00

So I find myself today sitting in my cozy dorm room, snacking on some sort of fruit-filled fried dough disks and reflecting on how incredibly lucky I am to be doing exactly that. Life lately has been incredibly fulfilling in completely unexpected ways. A part of me is fearing the cosmic backlash of bad luck and ill humor that would seem inevitable given my current spate of...happiness.

I am grateful for:

...my language partners, for all the advice and help they have given me, but most of all for listening to me think out loud.

...the novel Gravity's Rainbow, especially for the gigantic adenoid and Pirate's banana pancakes.

...my classmates Meifun and Helene for three-hour lunches and positive thinking.

...my girlfriend, for making me laugh on Friday when I was feeling glum.

...my Dad for supporting me in this most recent insane adventure.

...my Mom for still finding the time to worry about me.

...this song for reminding about this band and this one, too.

...my little sister's three sentence email (I miss u soooo much / hows doorbell? / talk to u later).

I guess there's a lot to be said for doing what you love and loving what you do, huh? Odd as it may sound, I actually feel more at home abroad than I do back in Portland. I've spent so much time growing up in odd corners of the globe, I get homesick for feeling homesick. But I don't actually like traveling that much. I just can't help but feeling like I'm wasting cash on the airfare if I'm planning on coming back in less than a month.
Sometimes I like to think of myself as specialist in living overseas. Every place I've lived, I've learned something new about myself, but also about how people in general adapt (or fail to adapt) to a new culture and language. But then, sometimes I like wear my underwear on my head, so maybe you'd better take my opinions about myself with very large grain of salt.
College doesn't seem like a very good time to study in a foreign country. Even by their late teens, most folks are already pretty set in their ways and have too many things pulling them back home. By college it only gets harder.
Here at Hagongda, the number of happy, well-adjusted exchange students seems to be in decline. The other day, I was grabbing a late dinner in the cafeteria and I happened to run into a couple gloomy-looking acquaintances from abroad. Both were grousing about the difficulty of Chinese, of the lack of a good night life here in Harbin, their boring classes and other similar might-as-well-be-banging-your-head-against-the-wall topics. I felt a little embarrassed, to be honest, because I really couldn't find it in me to join in. Not that I don't have things to complain about, but I've already been there and done that.
So I'm most grateful of all for having had the opportunity to learn from experience, grateful for knowing that it's always better to seek the good in life and avoid the bad. Hell, you'd think I'd have figured that out sooner after watching Stars Wars umpteen billion times.

Adopting Mountain Lions

2007-12-02T00:18:00.000+08:00

Lately I've discovered a new found love for techno. I mean, I really really like techno right now. Hands down the best thing to listen to while trying to memorize vocab. Also helps drown out Korean RnB and other background noise.
Life's been pretty much on autopilot lately.
Things are really extremely excellent.
Decided to stop drinking a couple of months ago. Strange little habit of mine, usually something like 6 months on, 6 months off.
Spent all Friday night and Saturday morning at an internet cafe with Ding Ding and friends. That was odd.
Teachers have been scolding me a lot lately for not doing my homework, but they say my spoken Chinese has improved a lot. I've been focusing more on being able to recall characters and using and recognizing new words in daily conversation and less on the actual assignments.
I think my method is more of a natural way to learn the language than correcting sentences and memorizing long texts, kind of like impressionism versus realism.
I've really been slacking in art class lately. Two weeks of shading a sketch of David's mouth has been a little demoralizing.
Maybe learning foreign languages is more like riding a one-speed. Sure, you can work extra hard and pedal up hill the whole way, but why bother when your legs spin just the same coasting down hill?
That said, I have resolved to work harder.
I'm starting to catch myself subconsciously reading characters. That's kind of scary. And kind of fun. It reminds me of when I first learned to read in English. But Chinese isn't really the same. A lot of times, I might only have a fuzzy idea of how to pronounce the characters, but I can guess the meaning from context and radicals. Phonetic (or more than marginally-phonetic, because Chinese characters do include a few phonetic clues here and there) written languages have that great instant recognition moment where you all of sudden realize you already know the word you're reading without anyone having to tell you. Those moments are pretty rare with Chinese.
Sometimes I wonder if studying this language will make me more humble or less so. It's hard not feel immensely proud of even the most minor successes, and everyone who studies Mandarin or another Chinese language has probably had that moment where they explain in great detail the process of learning the language to someone who gets glassy-eyed before you're less than half-way done.
For better or worse, I'm really starting to get attached to this language. Sometimes it feels a little like I've adopted a baby mountain lion. Sure, it's cute now, but just wait.
And as a native English speaker, there are times when I can't help but feel learning foreign languages is a little silly. Why bother when everyone's already learning English anyways?
Of course, this is coming from someone who's studied Spanish, German, Cambodian, French and most recently Chinese. No where near fluent in any of them other than maybe German. Actually, curiously enough, I would say I can understand more in German than I can in Chinese, but I feel like I can say a lot more in Chinese. I've been wondering if that's because German has more cognates with English, which makes it a lot easier to guess the meaning of a word you're not 100% on.
Listening to Chinese is more like playing an insane game of Memory, where you're trying to match each inflected syllable with one you already know. Knowing the characters actually seems to help with this, because you can sort out homonyms in your head by filing them under their respective characters. Of course, other people have pointed out that if they used pinyin or another romanization system instead, homonyms might become less common as a result.
Y'all glassy-eyed yet?

Operation Girlfriend

2007-11-24T02:03:00.001+08:00

I removed the content of this post!

Thou Shalt Not Let Shit Get To You

2007-11-18T18:03:00.000+08:00

So I find myself in the lobby of the foreign students dorm arguing with two close friends, Alfonso, a middle aged man from Brazil, and Helene, a young woman from Switzerland. The topic of the moment is the Chinese propensity and more over predilection for public expectoration. A common scene: you're walking down the street and out of the corner your eye you see a drop dead gorgeous gal in thigh high leather boots and skin tight capris. Her skin is perfectly white, her eyes are dark with kohl and her chestnut-brown permed hair falls across her shoulders in tight ringlets that rise and fall as she walks toward you. And just when you're about to stop this complete stranger, just when you're getting ready to bend down on one knee and propose, she pauses, leans forward ever so slightly and hocks up the biggest, most disgusting loogie you have ever seen.
Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little here -- I haven't seen any girls half this pretty yet. But I have seen plenty of less pretty girls and nearly all of them spit. It is more or less widely acknowledged spitting is the second national sport of China, the first being staring at foreigners. But back in the lobby we're not really arguing about spitting, or being stared at or any one thing that Chinese do that gross us out or make us uncomfortable or piss us off. No, we're arguing about the whole kit and caboodle, the whole slew of things that get on our nerves and how we should react.
One in particular is getting ripped off. Nothing makes you feel like more of a rube than showing off a recent purchase to a buddy and, after you tell them how much you paid for said knickknack or whangdoodle, having them raise their eyebrows and give you that soft, sympathetic look, the one that means you got totally screwed. More often than not though, you know when you're getting hoodwinked and this can be much much worse. Case in point: the other night, I'm walking back from an art class, generally doing my darndest not to freeze solid or slip and fall on the little frozen puddles of spit and other liquids that coat the streets. And out of the corner of my eye I spy, not a beautiful woman, but a fruit vendor. So I stop and ask for a jin of oranges. Now, I already now the price of oranges, because I've bought them before, from different vendors and in the supermarket. And, after filling a bag with what turn out to be pitifully dry and dinged up oranges, the salesman, grinning like a jack o' lantern with crenelated teeth to match, this jerk quotes me a price I know is double the going rate. But I want oranges, I'm tired, and for what amounts to maybe a quarter I'm really not up for calling him out. So I pay the man and go home, and yeah, the oranges are terrible. I eat one and throw the rest out. And I know I've been had, I knew he took one at my wide, trusting eyes, my fetching goatee and most importantly my skin, soft and pink like the underbelly of sow being led to market, and did some quick mental arithmetic. And maybe he even picked out the worst oranges from his cart, because he figured (correctly) that I wouldn't know any better.
But I really can't say it's really worth getting my long underwear in a bunch over. After throwing out the rest of the oranges I just shrugged my shoulders and went on with my day. I sure won't be going back to old pumpkin face liar liar pants on fire's cart any time soon, but that's pretty much where it ends. So I was telling my friends Alfonso and Helene this story and this is where the argument started. Like a lot of foreigners abroad, including a younger and more foolish me, their reaction was quick and furious moral outrage. If they were me, they tell me, they would have cussed the man out and refused to pay. They even go so far as to tell me that by not doing so I'm doing a disservice to other foreigners. I don't see it that way. The way I see it, I'm not here to change China. It's hard enough to understand the dang place, never mind attempting to change the way some people here treat us foreign devils. The same goes for spitting. Yeah, it's pretty gross. But hell, if they want to spit I say let 'em.
One of my teachers said Confucius said something like this, that if you let other people get you riled up then it's your problem. And sure, that doesn't mean you should walk into a used car lot and buy the first junker that Smiling Sam the Used Car Salesman ushers you into after duct taping the door back on, but it does make life a lot more fun. The way I look at it, my life here in China is like a bonsai tree; I've got to prune away the dead wood and rude saplings and encourage the branches I want to make up the bulk of my little tree of fruit vendors and friends and restauranteurs and whoever else I interact with.

On Doing Battle With The Ocean

2007-11-10T22:41:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I feel like deciding to learn Chinese was one of the stupidest things I could have done. Kind of like how I felt that time I was working on a wildfire crew and we all thought we were going to die, but less exciting than that. A wiser man than me once said trying to learn Chinese is like trying to swallow the ocean. A more vivid analogy might be that episode of Pete and Pete where Pete and Ernie fight the ocean.
But fear not, I'm not about to enumerate the many difficulties of learning Mandarin -- far more qualified folks have already done so here and here and here and here. Essays on the trials of tribulations of CSL learners are about as hard to find as bear poop in the woods. No, I'm just saying is all. Respect.
And I think there is an important lesson to be learned here, if you'll permit me to pull out the old soap box for a sec. Taking on really difficult, seemingly impossible tasks can be good for you. Makes you think twice about what you spend your time on. Lately I find myself looking at life a little bit like an episode of Jeopardy, where you never know what random fact or, in this case, skill might come in handy. Thesaurus.com tells me 'jeopardy' is a pretty good word to use when talking about life too -- all kinds of great synonyms like 'risk', 'accident', or 'vulnerability'. And what else is life but a series of random chances and calculated risks?
Lately I've also been thinking a lot about creativity, about where ideas come from. The Chinese people I've talked to don't seem to have a very high opinion of their own ability to think outside the box. The knee-jerk reaction of course is, well no duh, look at the school system. Memorization doesn't seem likely to encourage self-confidence or independent thinking. On the other hand, the American school system doesn't seem to impart the work ethic that even the most lack luster students seem to possess in China.
So the current set-up seems pretty good: the lazy creative folks in America and Europe create all kinds of cool stuff and the industrious Chinese mass produce the stuff for a fraction of the cost and sell it back to us.
But something seems really wrong with this way of thinking. Mostly because it's too pat. I'm rationalizing the way things already are, without really explaining why or where things are going. And there's the whole other issue of censorship, not to mention finding an audience here in China. But I like to to think that the more affluent China becomes, the more people there are going to be with time on their hands to goof off and create their own cool stuff, which they'll share with other people creating cool stuff, censorship or no.
Actually, there's already a lot of cool stuff out there, most of which we Americans have never heard of. Writers like Wang Xiaobo and Mo Yan. Rock stars like Cui Jian who act in underground films like Beijing Bastard. Or artists like Zhang Dali. Or, in my personal area of interest, indie comic book authors like Nie Jun!

Milks of the Orient

2007-11-04T21:07:00.000+08:00

Based on my previous travels in South East Asia, I came to China with the assumption that dairy products like milk and cheese would be difficult to find. Cheese, at least anything resembling what we call cheese back home, has indeed been pretty hard to find. They have butter at the supermarket, but I haven't tried it -- my previous experience with 'cheese' evaporated any and all desire to experiment. My roommate was however recently able to convince me to try milk. The first hurdle to overcome was the packaging.

This is the standard Milk Delivery System in China -- a plastic pouch. To get at the sweet bovine nectar inside, one makes a small incision in one of the four corners and proceeds to suck, or nurse rather, at what more a less amounts to a fake breast. This is all well and good in the relative seclusion of one's own breakfast nook, but feels really weird when other people are around. Really weird. This particular lactose containing fluid is chocolate flavored.

This is technically a yogurt drink. I'm hoping for a sort of strawberry Quik flavor here.

Totally Moomintroll. With cow spots. I know, weird, huh? Is it some sort of Moomincow? The package reads 榛子巧克力乳饮料 , or Hazelnut-Chocolate Milk. I see the hazelnuts, but where's the chocolate? And what does it all have to do with Finnish cartoon characters? I suppose we can only conclude Chinese scientists have succeeded in crossbreeding Moomintrolls and Holsteins. These Heifermoomins are then apparently fed a steady diet of Nutella, which as every school child knows was first introduced in China from Italy by Marco Polo back in the 1200s.

Green apple flavored cultured milk drink. A very selective translation of 酸乐乳 would be Happy Acid Breast. A good example as to why you shouldn't translate Chinese character by character. And while given the established tradition of apple pie a la mode I'm willing to accept apple as an acceptable flavor for milk, the next one is just takes the whole concept of artificially flavored dairy way too far...

This can't be good. I'm getting all kinds of gross combinations already. Imagine eating a grape snow followed by a tall glass of milk. Or sucking a grape jolly rancher while drinking a tall glass of milk. Or chewing grape bubble gum. With a tall glass of milk. Who do these milk manufacturers think they are anyways? Willy Wonka? And not just Willy Wonka, but Willy Wonka in some sort of alternate dimension where Tim Curry ala Dr. Frank-N-Furter got the roll of Mr. Wonka in the '71 version and the Umpa Lumpas did the Time Warp (again and again).

If this wasn't all bad enough the damn things are aseptically packaged and irradiated so technically they don't even need to be refrigerated. So when the apocalypse comes I'll be stuck drinking purple milk and talking to cockroaches.

That's just grape -- er, great.

Two Months In and Taking A Breather

2007-10-27T16:18:00.000+08:00

Over the last two months since I arrived in China things have been moving at a pretty breakneck pace. Last week I picked up my residence permit from the local immigration control, which should be the last time I need to deal with paperwork until February, when the permit expires. With my passport returned to me, I was able go to the bank and have them exchange the USD in my bank account to RMB, which I needed to do before I could pay my tuition for the year.
The process of paying my tuition was interesting. By 'interesting' I mean incredibly sketchy. Via hand gestures and shouting in my best Chinese through a plate glass window I communicated my need for a lot of cash to the bank attendant. Said bank attendant indicated understanding, through his own hand gestures and shouting. Documents were stamped. Passport was photocopied. Slips of carbon paper were signed. And so I found myself with a very large wad of cash, in a very poor country thinking about all the terrible things that are said happen to people in my position. I even got lost for a little bit. That was fun. Lost, in China, with my tuition for the entire school year in my front jacket pocket. Eventually I found the accounting office, where I handed over my grubby bundle of 100 RMB notes in exchange for a handful of not very reassuring and rather flimsy receipts. Still, the weight lifted from shoulders was palpable, no longer thinking about terrible things that may or may not have happened to my friend's roommate's classmate last term and where they supposedly found the body and so forth.
Another benchmark of sorts: as my last post I've written over 5000 words on Hey Mom I'm Still Alive. That's like 1000 words for each person who reads this!
To celebrate, I took my first official day off yesterday. For the curious, I spent most of the day reading Rebel Code by Glyn Moody and reading about various programming languages and figures in open source programming like Larry Wall and Richard Stallman. Also found some time to reconnect with Weezer's Blue Album and practice my cross hatching.
Studying Mandarin, taking art classes, now I just need to find some time to do some programming... If only I could program my teacher to give me less homework. Whatever happened to the idea of sleep learning? That sounds nice. I've tried osmosis, but no matter how hard I smack myself in the head with my textbooks, or how many times, it just doesn't seem to help me learn any faster. Weird, huh?
And if my time felt tight already, I'm half-seriously signing up for NaNoWriMo. For those not in the know, November is National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words in 30 days. Go here to find out more.
I've formulated a very simple theory: the busier I am, the happier I will be. This is based on the observation that a) very intelligent people are an unhappy lot and b) the less I sleep the stupider I feet. Shhh. Logic prevails.

How's China?

2007-10-20T19:38:00.000+08:00

China is feeling a little cranky today, how are you?
In a cruel act of weather-related irony, the thermometer had already started plummeting by the time I was able to post that last update. For reasons no one has yet been able to clarify for the first week of cold none of the buildings were heated. Was it to harden us for the winter ahead, like the leeks and cabbages that currently line the sidewalks and windowsills of Harbin? Or perhaps it was meant to show us how cold we would be with out heat? I for one certainly find myself with a newfound appreciation China's abundant coal reserves (and my forethought in packing a decent sleeping bag).
Last week Mrs. Liu introduced me to Mr. Liu (no relation) the older-brother of her former-classmate's husband, who teaches art part-time at Harbin Normal University and runs his own school not far from where I live. He chuckled at my sketchbook and said he would be willing to take my money in exchange for telling me what I do wrong three eight to noon three days a week. Most of my fellow students are preparing to take the entrance exam to so they can continue their studies at a university. Others have are already in college and come for additional practice and feedback. Others are not students at all and only come to use the restroom.
The entrance to the school is in a sort of alley that leads to a courtyard behind a block of apartment buildings. There's an internet café next door and in the early morning the street outside is clogged with shouting vendors hawking everything from insulated insoles to fresh seafood. Yesterday morning I showed up a little early and, with nothing better to do, decided to wander the market. I don't know if I have ever seen so many people in one place in my life. After twenty minutes of key chains next to whole pigs being butchered next to fortifications of sand-bag like sacks of root vegetables next to flat-bed trucks piled high with mustard greens (and so on to infinity) I had to turn back, still with no end in sight.
Tangentially related, the food has improved substantially. For lunch with fellow art students yesterday I was treated to a delicious spinach and lamb soup with a side of wild rice. The convenience store in the lobby starting stocking whole-wheat buns, each with a single raisin, for good luck I guess. Last night my Chinese class and I went to Hans', a Bavarian-themed restaurant where Lederhosen-clad waiters serve chicken hearts and cow tongues on massive sword like skewers. They aren't so great to eat, but they also have a buffet with decent bread and potato salad. Also, I've started boning up on my food vocab and trying out some of the Chinese eateries around campus. It did not take me long to realize that being able to translate a useful sentence such as‘京剧的服装也很美，我想买一套带回国去’ ('Peking Opera's costumes are also very pretty, I would like to buy a set to take back home with me') would help little with the average restaurant menu.

Around HIT

2007-10-11T17:47:00.000+08:00

A sign in the courtyard of the foreign students dorm:

Cherish the happy environment
Together create a harmonious campus

And just around the corner:

More pictures here.

Clubbing

2007-10-11T16:56:00.000+08:00

We've all had the past week off for National Day (Guoqing Jie). The weather has been warm in almost unsettling way. For a place known for subzero temperatures, I keep finding myself sweating in the thin jackets and hoodies I brought from the States and asking when the cold weather is supposed to arrive.
Jin-heng and his girlfriend, Li-Miao went to Beijing for the first half of the week while Seul-ki and his girlfriend, Seng-hi and I spent most of the break lounging in pjs watching pirated DVDs and eating ramen.
Earlier in the week, Du-jin, another Korean friend I met through a classmate, invited me out for wuhuarou. Wuhuarou is a sort of Korean bacon that I've seen prepared with kimchi and chilies, but most often it's served raw. A grill is provided, either a portable gas stove, or, as at one restaurant I went to last week that specializes in the dish, one is built into the table and heated with coal. Kimchi is also grilled, and placed together in a wrapper of lettuce with bean curd sauce. The best part about eating wuhuarou is that you get to use your hands to eat it--saving yourself from hand-cramping chopstick pincering.
Du-jin also invited her Chinese friend, Ya-qi. We met Ya-qi outside a KFC not far from campus in the midst of street vendors selling stuffed animals and bracelets from blankets spread out on the sidewalk. Further up the street there's a newspaper stand and around the corner fruit is sold from the back of pickup trucks and out of cardboard boxes.
We found our wuhuarou joint of choice full so we headed for another in the strip of Korean restaurants located along the railroad track. In addition to the food, Du-jin ordered a bottle of Korean liquor with a frog on the label, which we drank out of miniature shot glasses.
After eating, the girls asked me if I would like to go to dancing.
The club wasn't far, but we caught a taxi anyways. Box, or Tangguo as it's known in Chinese, is small and dark and features a dance floor and powerful sound system. Drinks are expensive, 15 RMB for a beer that costs 3 RMB anywhere else, but that's a bargain compared to cost of a beer at any club back in the States. Besides, when the closest alternative is a sketchy Russian club whose owner has a reputation for smashing bottles over his customers heads, you learn not to be too picky.
Music at Box starts out slow, mostly American and Korean hip hop. One of the most amusing things about going to clubs in non-English speaking countries is watching all sorts of normal people grinning while dancing to the most foul, offensive lyrics imaginable. As the night goes on they pick up the tempo, mixing in Latin and techno. Ya-qi, Du-jin and I had a great time, at first dancing as a threesome, then as a pair, trading off like a competitive sports team. When we left the club the sun was coming up and I was sore for (literally) days afterward.

A Virtual Tour of My Dorm Room

2007-09-30T10:04:00.000+08:00

Key features of this picture include the bed, the shower and toilet. Can you guess which is which?

Left to right: Mike and Barbara, Wendy and Joe, Frank and Alice, John and Sally, Alice and David, Patrick and Patrick, and Anton and Tilda Swinton.

The sink doubles as a soothing water feature. The gloves are good for challenging foes to duels. The electric teapot is made of the finest plastic. The dishrag is yellow.

Staple food of our people, freeze dried instant ramen sustains the men of our tribe on the long hunt. However, because it is made of mostly wax and toenails it is not very nutritious.

Underneath all this junk there is a trapdoor to our wine cellar. Totally not uh lying.

This is a toilet. Just imagine, from here is but a short length of pipe to the local water supply!

I originally mistook this for a shower. It is, in fact, a crude sort of telephone.

Bizarro me.

Note the albino 'sock' bats.

Invisible me making faces at you.

God is outside that window.

I really like my desk. It's very photogenic.

While living in the former Eastern Germany I learned of a family that successfully escaped to the west using a hot air balloon made of old clothing and rags.

Really, a must for any dorm room or parlor. Martha Stewart recently featured them on the cover of her magazine and Tucker Carlson is known to be an avid collector of the soused maritime gnomes. This particular dimunitive inebriated sailor was a gift from a certain gentleman with a shaved head who's name begins with 'Tr' and ends with 'ev'.

The gift was a pencil. The stuffed animal is 1/100000 replica of a well-known top-secret Japanese defense project.

See my previous entry for further explanation of this foul-tasting, yet alluringly packaged 'food'.

This map is also a portal to an alternate dimension where the Chinese characters were never created and people still wear hats.

The rare Portland Bugaloo caught on film at last!

I totally faked this picture.

I sleep here.

Notice god is no longer outside the window and in his place there is an entire country.

To the left, China.

To the right, more China.

What this is supposed to symbolize is not entirely clear. Perhaps a spaceship? Or a man with upraised arms? Freedom? There is also a bush that looks like a giant tongue. The other thing you can do when you look out this window is to laugh at the tiny ant people and imagine hurling thunderbolts down upon them like a vindictive Greek god. That is also entertaining.

The white building in the distance kind of looks like a leg. On the toe of the foot there is a giant metal soccer ball. The big empty space is a basketball court where they play tennis.

That's all for now! Tune in next week for more exciting tales of the mysterious far east!

Making Friends in the Foreigner Bubble

2007-09-23T11:48:00.000+08:00

I have two roommates, Seul-ki and Jin-Hyung, both Korean and both awesome. Jin-Hyung and I share one of the two bedrooms while Seul-ki rents both beds in the other room because, in his own words, "I snore too much!"
Seul-ki is a serious, chain-smoking young man of 25 years from Seoul, who likes to listen to a mix of Korean r&b and American alternative rock bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, and System Of A Down. He wears a simple earring in his right ear and is rarely clean shaven.
Jin-Hyung is from Pusan, the second largest city in South Korea after Seoul. Back home, he is a member of a dance group. Yesterday, while we were watching a music video on his computer his girlfriend, Lillian, pointed at one of the figures on the screen and then at Jin-Hyung. When I recognized my roommate, I laughed and asked him where he learned to dance so well. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"I don't know, I just can."
"Can you breakdance?" I asked, pointing to man breaking on screen.
"Yeah, a little, but this," he paused to pantomime a back flip," But I don't know anymore. I haven't tried recently. I might be too old! "
Jin-Hyung and Seul-ki have started to teach me a little Korean. For example, if I see my Korean classmates in the elevator I can say 'An-nyong!' They especially like to teach me how to curse in Korean. If I have a lot of homework, I can say 'kuni-**-**' and when our Russian neighbors are roaring up and down the hall way late at night I can mutter 'kei-**-**' under my breath.
More than half of my class comes from South Korea, 7 in total. There are also 4 Russians, one Swiss, one Swede, and one Japanese. I'm the only native English speaker, although Meifun, from Sweden, speaks nearly flawless English. Helene, from Switzerland, speaks German as her first language, so if I'm totally stuck I can ask her to explain a concept in German for me. Outside of class we communicate in a mix of Mandarin and German, with the occasional English word thrown in for good measure, which, as she pointed out the other day, would probably confuse the hell out anyone who happened to overhear us. The Korean students generally all speak Korean outside of class, and I have almost never heard the Russian students using Chinese unless speaking to a teacher.
In all, it's an odd place to be learning Mandarin, although I've been doing my best to expose myself to the language outside of class. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I've been meeting with Mrs. Liu, an Chinese teacher here at Hagongda who also teaches English in the evenings at a private school. For the first hour we go over my homework or chat in Chinese and then we switch to English for the second hour. Last Thursday, I met with another Chinese teacher, Ms. Lu, to try out a similar exchange. Ms. Lu teaches my speech class and approached me one day after class to see if I had any English-speaking friends who wanted to trade English for Chinese. This is something I personally get asked almost daily, so I was hesitant to call up the handful of other Americans I know here in Harbin to ask. Instead, I offered to meet with her myself.
When I first arrived in Harbin, I was initially opposed to trading English for Chinese. I had tried this a couple times before in the U.S. and had found it was difficult to make work. After the first couple of meetings, I often found there was little to talk about unless both partners had sufficiently prepared for the meeting with a list of questions or a stack of homework to go through. In most cases, we just ended up chatting, usually in English. Now that my Chinese is better, though, the exchange is a little more equal. It's also a great way to make Chinese friends, apparently a somewhat rare commodity in the foreign student community at HIT!

View From My Bed

2007-09-16T14:37:00.001+08:00

You Don't Go to China to Eat Hamburgers

2007-09-16T13:38:00.003+08:00

Two weeks in China and I'm having a little trouble adapting to the food. This morning I went to the campus supermarket in search of breakfast. My first stop was the bakery, where I discussed my options with a friendly clerk.
"Eh, not…sweet," I say helpfully.
The clerk points at row of circular discs of bread topped with onions and tomatoes and what very while might be cheese. I ask for one of the mini-pizza-like things, which she places in a small plastic bag with a pair of foot long stainless steel tongs. She points at a toasted sandwich, also topped with diced tomatoes. I shrug and she places the sandwich in another plastic bag.
In the dairy case I find what I hope is cream cheese. The package features a Dutch-style windmill and Chiba-style anime character making the peace sign with one hand and holding a spoon in the other. A sure sign of quality, I reassure myself. I pick out an intriguing gold-wrapped sausage from a display nearby, a familiar-looking red and yellow package of Ritz crackers and a thing of grape juice and head to the checkout. On my way out, I buy a hot dog on stick from the vendor in the doorway. Not a good choice in any country, but this one tastes like it's mostly corn so I don't worry too much about what else is in it.
At home I display my purchases with some hesitation to one of my roommates. He laughs and goes back to playing an online racing game that looks like a cross between Super Mario Cart and Bomberman.
The grape juice is alright. It looks and tastes a little like melted grape Popsicle but I'm okay with that. The baked goods turn out to be a big let down. The mini-pizza is slightly soggy and the crust has the texture of Wonderbread. It's also slightly sweet, which is an odd choice for a pastry that contains onions and might-be cheese. The might-be cream cheese with the anime character and windmill is the worst by far, though. Instead of the comforting bold flavor of cheese, my palate is greeted with a bland, slightly sweet white mush with a consistency only slightly thicker than that of whipped cream. My roommate tries some and says it's 'not bad'. I decide not to try my luck with the sausage, the smell alone of which is enough to steer me clear of further gastric experimentation.

--

There are three cafeterias on campus that I know of, only one of which that I've been inside of. The one closest to my dorm has been described to serve food 'only fit for a dog'. The next closest has three levels connected my escalators that are only turned on during peak hours. Each level is said to be slightly better than the one below it, although I have yet to prove this theory empirically. The third cafeteria has been described as expensive and possibly only for teachers, so I haven't tried it yet, partly out of fear of being driven out at ladle point.
The first and second levels of Cafeteria #2 both feature multicolored plastic tables, dim lighting and two walls of vendors. In the back left corner of the first floor you can buy hum bao, and on the second floor they sell handmade Chinese noodles, something I've never been able to find in Portland. Chu's downtown sells the manufactured version, but it really can't compare. Both floors feature vendors of various stir-fries served from steel bins and rice, neither of which are guaranteed to be served hot. These are mostly hit or miss, although usually not completely awful either. On the third floor they have boiled pot stickers** and beer in addition to the usual fare. You can also buy fruit, like grapes or watermelons (sliced into fourths). The third floor also has better atmosphere, with skylights and wooden tables.
During the lunch rush the place is crammed ceiling to floor with elementary aged students, which makes me wonder if my fellow college students are on to something I'm not. It's less embarrassing to ask for help ordering lunch from a 5th grader though, so I guess it works out alright.

--

It's Sunday three days later and my roommates and I decide to order in Korean food. We get kimchi soup with tofu, a diced pepper and carrot dish with 'fried fish oil' that tastes a little bit like tempeh, and an awesome lettuce and meat taco that you eat with fermented soy bean paste. Oh, and there's kimchi of course. Thanks to the huge Korean student population there are several Korean restaurants around campus, probably more than half of which we've been to. To be honest, I've probably eaten more Korean food over the last two weeks than anything else.
For dinner one night last week though, Seul-Ki took me to Hamamas Kofi Haus, an ~~African~~ Pacific Islander-themed coffee shop that, contrary to what you might expect, serves American-style burgers and sweets. I was skeptical. You don't to China to eat hamburgers any more than you go to New York to get Peking duck. Still, I figured it was worth a shot.
It's a little bit of a walk from our dorm, in a completely new direction for me. We go under an overpass, past a vacant preschool with the lights still on and abandoned looking building covered in advertisements. A little further on, around the corner, across the street and up a short set of stairs to sort of porch with single yellow light where the logo of the restaurant is painted on the wall: a grass hut with palm trees and sun in the sky. In Chinese their name literally means 'Happy Window Coffee Shop'***. Glass beads and shells have been placed in the cement floor and the walls are yellow and have been decorated with ~~African~~ masks and weavings. In the front two American women are having a quiet conversation and two Chinese couples sit in the back. Seul-Ki and I find a seat between the two and we are brought a menu.
The food isn't great but it really doesn't matter. Somehow, it works perfectly. It's a quiet corner in a heart of a strange and loud city. There are no screaming children queuing to order, no cold food and no might-be cheese. Added bonus: they make pretty wicked brownies.

*包子 bao1zi5 = hum bao
**饺子 jiao3zi5 = pot stickers
***快乐窗咖啡店 kaui4le4ka1fei1dian4 = Happy Window Coffee Shop

Chinese Madlibs

2007-09-08T08:56:00.000+08:00

It's Thursday morning, my first day in a new Chinese class. The teacher writes on the board:

Homework:

1. Memorize Text (2), p16-17

In your notebook: 2. Copy Text (2) (Chinese and Pinyin)

3. Exercise 6 p23

In your textbook: 4. Exercises 3, 4, 5 and 7

5. Prepare Chapter 48 Text p28

I have to look up the word for 'memorize' when I get home, because we'd never used it in my Chinese classes in U.S. In Chinese, you can use a single character 背, pronounced bei4, as in 背课文，or 'memorize the text'. The same character is also pronounced bei1 with the meaning 'to carry on one's back', for example, 'knapsack' is 背包. My initial response is one of disbelief. Memorize a whole page of text? In one night? No way! And even if I could manage that, why would I want to? It's not going to help my Chinese any if I don't know what it means!

The next morning my teacher asks me to recite with a Korean student. I balk. I say I'm not ready. I almost say, wait, you actually wanted me to do that? Another Korean student takes my place. The two of them slowly repeat the previous day's text word for word with occasional prompting from the teacher. Then she calls up another two students to do the same. By the third set of students I find myself staring in glassy-eyed disbelief.

The next activity for the day is similar. The teacher calls a student up to the board. She recites another text, from memory, using the vocabulary we’ve learned from today's text. The student writes transcribes the teachers spoken text in nearly flawless characters on the board. She repeats each sentence two or three times, says 'good!' and moves on to the next. We're supposed to be doing the same as the student on the blackboard in our notebooks, but mine looks more like Chinese madlibs than anything else:

Mary asks ______ see one little girl or not? ______ asks ______ what kind? Mary says she ______ , very big ______ , ______ ______, ______ ______ colored suit.

I understand most of the text fine, I just don't know how to write more than half of the words. My speaking and listening skills are way above my reading and writing skills. This has proved to be troublesome. The day after I arrived at HaGongDa I took a placement exam. It was actually optional, but I wanted to see how I'd do and then decide what level to start out in. I ended up testing into the second to lowest level, A+. After a couple of days of A+ classes, several of my teachers and friends suggested I move up to C level, which is what I did on Thursday. My vocabulary, grammar and accent are all decent enough to hold a conversation with somebody used to listening to a tone-mangling Chinese-learner, like my roommates or teachers, although I still haven't had much success with the average person on the street. Yesterday, for example, I spent five frustrating minutes trying to say 'hospital' in the correct tones to a woman signaling traffic. She ended up calling over a man who also seemed to have no idea what I was trying to say. The hospital I was looking for turned out to be several blocks away, and I suppose if I was walking down a random street in Portland and a young Chinese man came up to me and said ' one yard, one yard, one yard, where?'* I might be a little confused, too.

* 医院 yi1yuan4 = hospital，一园 yi1yuan2 = one yard or garden，议院 yi4yuan4 = parliament, 意愿 yi4yuan4 = aspiration

Departure And Arrival

2007-09-02T16:44:00.000+08:00

The goodbye dinner at my Dad's was bittersweet. Aunt Shannon and Grandma Patty bought enough food to feed a small country. Stood around the barbeque drinking stoic beers with Dan and Jesse. Nate came a little later. Jeff and Sarah stopped by. Dan Hannon and Scott Killops came to wish me luck. Eric looked bored. Ellie and Samantha looked really bored. Samantha teased me about an alledged girlfriend I supposedly had in Germany.
The next night I ate dinner at Mom and Lance's. Ellen and I watched South Park in her room in the basement. I recognized some of the posters in her room as ones I had collected from telephone poles when I was her age and left behind when I went to Germany. The furniture seemed out of place in the new house, like mismatched hand-me-downs from an older sibling. In a way it's comforting to know a part of the old house will stay with us, but right now it just seems to remind me of the empty house on 53rd street.
I said my last goodbye to Dad in the PDX airport. Even the most well planned trips have rough parts. We exchanged awkward hugs and I tried to say something memorable.
It took three planes and a little less than a day to get from Portland to Harbin. The first flew South to LA, the second North and West across the Pacific to Beijing, and the third North again to Harbin, tracing a gigantic W across the western hemisphere.
The flight to LA was full of tan, spandex clad Californians. During boarding and take off I tried to gain some emotional distance on the situation by listening to Godspeed! You Black Emperor on my discman. For a moment the slow building symphony in my headphones seemed to synchronize with the aircraft as it lifted off the ground and I tried to attach geographic and personal signifance to the green and blue blur that sped past just outside the miniscule window.
The LAX airport was confusing and full of old browned plastic and dim lights. I eventually found my way to Terminal 2, the one designated for international flights. On the bus ride there a young woman from Minisotta told me she was flying to New Zealand for a year abroad. I got a kick out of telling her I was going to China.
At the vacant Air China check-in an Air France employee leaned over the partition to tell me I probably wouldn't be able to check in for another 3 and a half hours. After that I would have to wait another 4 hours for my flight to Beijing.
"Well, what's there to do around here?" I asked.
He gave a short laugh.
"Here? Nah, Terminal 2 is a real hole in the ground. There's a Starbucks downstairs, though."
At the Starbucks I bought a sandwich and a juice for a jaw-dropping combined total of 15 bucks. Aunt Chris called me on my cell to tell me about a solar eclipse that was going to happen while I was flying over the Pacific. Mom called to say goodbye again. I staked out a couple of seats in the waiting area for arrivals where I was able to pick out a smattering of Mandarin in the thick cloud of English and other languages.
For reading material I had brought a book on Chinese-American intercultural relations and Peter Hessler's River Town. I alternated between the two of them, looking for common insights and alternate interpretations. Then I got bored and started doodling caricatures of people coming and going through the airport.
When it got close to to check-in time I wandered upstairs and sat glumly on what appeared to have once been a fashionable postmodern bench but now just looked like an old and ugly hunk of wood with a grey patina of grime.
A pretty girl in miniskirt with a designer purse and a wheeled carry-on was the first to get in line. The Chinese national volleyball team showed up next in matching tracksuits and luggage. I got in line behind them, awestruck to be in the presence of over a dozen uber-tall Chinese men. Things got even weirder when the team of Shaolin monks dressed in traditional grey-robes and saffron slippers showed up.
There were a couple of other Caucasians in line: Three or four older tourist types and a hip-looking couple with dred locks who gave me the occasional 'what-are-you-doing-in-my-unique-and-original-adventure' stare. I smiled politely and listened to Dead Prez on my discman.
Once I had checked-in and got my boarding pass I was able to enter the pre-gate food court and scarf down a couple of cheeseburgers at a McDonalds crammed in between a bagel shop and a surf-themed bar. Hunger sated I found my gate and settled in for the long wait.
The definite highlight of the flight to Beijing came just before takeoff, when the man sitting to my right proceeded to take out a complimentary barf bag, carefully unfold it and deposit the biggest, nastiest loogie you can possibly imagine.
Gin and tonics, my in-flight drink of choice, were sadly not available although I made a valiant attempt using a combination of English, Chinese and various hand gestures to convey the concept to the stewardess.
The Beijing airport was all freshly waxed marble and buffed chrome. Customs took all of several minutes and, just like that, I was in China. I checked in for my connecting flight to Harbin and soon found myself a lone caucasian on a plane bound for China's icy North-eastern corner.
In-flight entertainment included the requisite gag-show and for breakfast we were given the choice of rice gruel or eggs and sausage. Ever eager for the authentic Chinese experience I proudly ordered the congee. The stewardess didn't seem impressed by my culinary bravery, however.
From the plane, my first impression of Harbin: Man, it's really flat. Really really really flat. Like, Kansas flat. Taxiing up to the gate, I saw a man calmy bicycling along the tarmac. I thought that was kind of strange.
Mr. Wang from HYCC didn't have much difficulty picking me out from crowd. We got on a bus waiting just outside the airport and headed into town. Mr. Wang told me the aiport was built 5 years ago, along with a four lane highway that connects it to the city. Our conversation gradually shifted from English to Chinese. I was surprised at what I could convey with as little Chinese I have. Mr. Wang's wife is a political science teacher and his daughter, who is 17, is in highschool. They live in Jiamisu, about a 3 hour train ride from Harbin. I'm told this situation is relatively common in China: one spouse works in a big city, while his family live outside the city where the cost of living is lower.
For the first half hour we drove through fields of popular and corn until I suddenly found myself in the city proper. Our first stop in Harbin was the foreign student's dorm at Harbin Institute of Technology, the university where I'll be studying Chinese. The dorm itself is 16 floors tall and about 4 rooms wide.
It's hard to describe the scale of buildings in Harbin. Because land is so valuable everything, even apartment buildings, are extremely tall and thin. You start to feel a little bit like an ant in forest of wheat stalks. People are absolutely everywhere. In my dorm there is a woman who works inside the laundry room. She has a little plexiglass box inside which she irons pants and shirts. The only place I'm ever really alone is the bathroom. You don't think about it so much after a while, but it's pretty different from America where people place a lot of importance on 'getting away from it all', especially each other.
At the front desk I was presented with a book student IDs.
"They they want you to pick one," Wang explained. "Do you want an American roomate?"
"Or a Russian roomate?" they asked politely. "How about this one?" pointing to a sallow faced man with dark circles under his eyes. "His chinese is really good! He has a Chinese girlfriend!"
I nodded and explained I would prefer a roomate who didn't speak English, so we would be forced to speak Chinese. In the end we choose a friendly looking Korean man with an impressive fountain of gelled hair. They wrote down my information and handed over a small package containing two keys and my room number.
The dorm room turned out to relatively nice. There are two bedrooms, one of which I share with Jin-Heng. Another Korean student, Seul-Ki, rents both beds in the other room. The rooms are connected by a small room with a sink, refridgerator and dining table. We also have our own huge bathroom, with a water heater and shower that drains directly into floor.
The rest of my first day in China was spent running various errands: setting up a bank account, getting a cellphone, and registering for classes. On Thursday I took a placement exam and on Friday I bought my books and went to Walmart. Last night David, another American studying here at 'HaGongDa', and I checked out a couple of the local bars. Today I went running a park just around the corner from the college. With all the pollution it was little bit like breathing pea soup. Classes start tomorrow. I'm a little nervous, but I think I'm ready.

Still alive, still in Portland

2007-08-22T15:16:00.000+08:00

Dear Mom,

Yup, still alive. Also still in Portland.

Making the final preparations for China. Tomorrow morning I have an appointment to get any last minute shots out of the way and in the afternoon I have my last Chinese class before the final on Thursday.

It's been an odd week. No matter how many people I see or how much I do I still feel like I'm not making the most of it somehow. It's funny, but I never seem to appreciate all the things I can do in town until I'm thousands of miles away. Or show my appreciation for all the amazing people who I see every day. Yeah, sometimes I can be a grouch, I know. You wake up, you go to work, you go to school, it's a routine. You get so caught up in the little things that make up each day that you never really get a chance to stop and say 'Thanks for being there. It means a lot to me.'

Part of the reason I decided to go to China was to shake up that routine. It doesn't make it any easier, though. You and most of our family and friends know that I had a tough time deciding whether or not to go China. Something inside me is changing; I can feel it. A part of me wants to settle down. And when I think about it, Portland wouldn't be such a bad place to do just that.

Ironic, considering that a) I'm about to leave town for a year, and that b) for the longest time all I wanted was to get as far away as possible from this town. I still remember the first time I read Robinson Crusoe in the library at my elementary school. They had this illustrated version, with diagrams of all of his inventions and big full color paintings of the island he was marooned on. What I really liked, though, was the idea of transformation. I liked the idea that an average Joe could turn into this adventurer, out there in the world risking his life and writing home about it.

So out into the world I went, frequently risking my life, less frequently writing home about it than you might like. Okay, maybe it wasn't as dramatic as all that. But I'd like to think I've done pretty good for myself so far: I've explored jungle covered ruins that beat anything I've seen in an Indiana Jones flick, I can discuss the meaning of life in couple of languages, and once I was paid to light a national forest on fire using a crude flamethrower. I should not fail to mention that I am also adept in the arts of carrot weeding, burger flipping, change counting, and letter opening.

I know I haven't also been the best son, I know that sometimes I've scared you to death or come home with strange tattoos or piercings. But I hope you know how much I appreciate you and all you've done to help me succeed on my odd journey. I literally wouldn't be here without you mom, so thanks. I really appreciate you.

P.S. Dad, Ellie, Bug, Chris, Shannon, Pete, Jane, Josephine, Anthony, Jesse, Jeff, Emily, Tiiu, Nate, Trev, Katherine, Elena, Alia, Tiffany, everybody I'm forgetting, you guys rock, too. Going away BBQ at my dad's house on Saturday, August 26th at 6pm.