Journal from the past two weeks

Okay, so for the past two weeks I have been really lazy with internet, and since blogger is really slow on my computer for some reason, I have just been journaling on my laptop and planning on posting all at once. And for the past week, my internet actually died, so now it’s fixed, and here are my ramblings for the past two weeks…

July 23, 2007 – Some changes are needed…

I went to the Beijing train station today to pick up one of my friends from Nanjing, who’s visiting me here in Beijing. It was just a good feeling going to a train station and knowing your way around the subway, like which stop to get off and which way to go for a transfer, because it felt like I know Beijing pretty well. Okay, maybe not pretty well, but well enough that I felt I am comfortable in the city by myself.

However, after thinking about how much I really know Beijing for a while on my way to pick up my friend, I realized I actually don’t know Beijing at all. Okay, I have been to Tian An Men Square and Summer Palace, visited a chaguan (or Beijing tea house), seen Beijing Opera, and shopped at various swap meet type of stores (very popular in Beijing and everywhere else in China). The few times I have been out with friends were to places for American/international students where the menus are all in English and things like sandwiches and whatnot are top choices. I realized that I really have not explored Beijing in the way I would like to see a foreign city. The only time I felt like I really connected with Beijing on a personal/explorative level was when I went to one of the Hutong with one of my interviewees for the field study project. He and I walked around the Hutongs for a couple of hours, looking at different constructions, talking to the residents sitting outside, walking inside people’s houses/yards (with their permission, of course) to get a feel of what is it like to live in a Hutong. That is how I connect with a city, not through it’s glamorous hangouts but very common yet essential places. So now I am taking the map that HBA has provided us with in the beginning of year, and I will planning a “Quing’s exploration of Beijing,” which will include lots of museums and quaint places that can best represent the modern Beijing.

July 26, 2007 – Exciting Arobatics and its dark side

Last Saturday, we went to see ZhaJi, which is Chinese arobatics, and my goodness, it was one of the most amazing things I have seen in China so far. There were people flipping through hops that are like two stories high, going up and down a staircase with one hand and feet up in the air, and circling plates on really long and thin sticks. I was clapping the whole time along with all the HBA students. My favorite performer was this little boy around the age of 8 or 9, and he was jumping up and down on a teeter-totter and doing flips on the air. I thought he was very skilled and brave, and he was born to be a performer. But at the same time, it made me to look at him performing because what he is doing is such a dangerous activity, yet he does it with such easy. I can only image the vigorous training that goes on backstage and all the pain that he must have gone through to achieve the level of professionalism that he has displayed on stage today. He might look like a child but the way he composes himself even excels that of a grown up. I do not know why his parents allowed him to be an acrobat performer at such a young age, maybe it’s something of their control. But I know that if I were his mother and saw this performer, I would blame myself for being such an incapable mother.

The front...


Lions in hoops!

Okay, this was absolutely amazing in terms of the level of difficulty, who would have thought a teeter-totter would have been so dangerously exciting?


14 or so people on three bikes connected by the riders' arms - I have no idea how that even works...

July 29, 2007 – What makes China the way it is today?

Today on my way home from Tiantan, I had a really interesting chat with the taxi driver. He’s an old Beijinger and knows a lot about various restaurants and good places to go in Beijing, and he’s very opinionated about various things we talked about. Sometimes during the first five minutes of the ride, the conversation shifted to the current condition of the Chinese population and the spirit of the Chinese people. Mentioning that he heard on the radio the Chinese chairman announced that the GDP of the Chinese population has gone to some ridiculously number that I don’t remember, the driver criticized the government for pulling a blind over Chinese people’s eyes. Gradually, the conversation or rather, at this point it was simply a rant, about how weak the Chinese people are, mentally and spiritually. Unlike the Western people, he claimed, the Chinese do not know how to resist and rebel. Trying to explain his view better, the driver compared the rights and benefits that a government is supposed to provide for its people to a bowl of rice and a plate of vegetables. He said that if the government only gives its people a bowl of rice, the Chinese population will take it. Something is better than nothing, that’s their mentality. On the other hand, he continues, a Western civilization will refuse to eat that bowl of rice and instead, demand their full rights. They will rather starve than swallow their pride along with that bowl of rice. That is the spirit that the Chinese population lacks.

“But why is that? Why are we this way?” I asked him. I know it was unfair to ask a question like that because the answer involves not only a cultural understanding of the Chinese traditional way of thinking but also psychological and other aspects as well, and not to my surprise, he was unable to utter a satisfactory response. He blame this problem on Confucianism, and how this school of thought cultivates a society of weaklings. I did not really understand what he meant and he could really explain it, but from I have learned about Confucianism, I know that it is a school of thought that emphasizes “liyi” or your mannerism/social faux/academic grace. It is not that way of thinking that promotes you to go against what is set as tradition, and maybe that was the taxi driver was talking about. Anyways, this is just some random ramblings, I can expand on this more later after I have read some books about Confucianism.

August 4, 2007 – Oh, and how they judge!

As I walking with one of my HBA friends to Lush around noon for the long craved American style breakfast, including bacon (humm….) and pancakes with syrup (oh my goodness was that good), we talked about our adopted Chinese families and our language partners. I mentioned that my Chinese family never contacted me or my sib for weekend outings like they were supposed to nor is my language partner really interested in helping me practice Chinese, and I was wondering how does another student in our class get to have such good language partner and Chinese family. My friend simply replied, “that’s because he’s white.” Now, under normal circumstances, that would have been a racial slur, but in China, it’s not and it’s actually very, very true.

Before coming to HBA, my parents have prepared me for some mental shock in China. Besides the regular that Chinese people might spit randomly on the street or push you in public transportation, they also mentioned that I might feel discriminated against in China. I did not really understand back then, what did they mean I was going to be discriminated against by my own people? But after living in Beijing for the last two months, I understood what my parents meant by discrimination. It’s a new kind of racial discrimination. People here don’t treat me badly because I am different from them (well, that’s because I am not…), and they don’t treat me with extra care because I am one of them (because even though I am, there is nothing special about that). Rather, people here make me feel discriminated against because how they treat “laowai” or people with blonde/red hair and blue/green/anything but not dark brown eyes. Many people here, whether it’s small business owners or just regular citizens, often see them as someone of importance. Maybe this is because it’s interesting to interact with someone of a different culture in such a homogenous country, or maybe it’s because some Chinese people have the impression that all foreign travelers are rich, or maybe it’s because some Chinese feel that the Western culture is somehow more elegant than the Chinese tradition, and that is elevates themselves to speak/interact with someone who’s foreign. In tourist spots, my friends and I often see bunch of European travelers being surrounded by a few Chinese who are asking for pictures. In tea houses or other performing places, it’s always the audience with the blonde hair who gets picked to participate in an on-stage act. One of my friends at HBA (who’s an ABC) told that when she went to a bar with her friend (who’s white), bunch of Chinese college students only talked to her friend enthusiastically but ignored her the entire night. A lot of Chinese American have realized that here in China, they are not held on the same platter as their “true-American” counterparts, and it’s this awareness that have provided me with some new grounds to think about my racial identity.

In the States, I have regarded myself as Chinese because I was born in Chinese and my family environment has always been Chinese. Getting into Yale and interacting with other Chinese Americans on campus, I have slowly come to see myself as Chinese American, and this summer in Beijing reaffirmed this point of view. Even though I look like and speak like a Chinese person (okay, maybe the speaking part is a bit stretching it because many people here tell me I actually do not speak standard Chinese but have a Taiwanese accent), I do not think like a pure Chinese person. There are many western influence in my way of thinking and in my way of acting, I cannot see myself with the same background as another Chinese person who’s grown up in China. There is a lot more I can type on this issue, but I feel it might be too personal, nevertheless, I am happy that I was able to in an environment where I am not the racial minority and explore more my cultural identity.