A Love/Hate Relationship, or something

Yesterday my roomie and I went downtown to WangFuJing. It's kind of the hoity-toity, rather pricey shopping area in Beijing, but I wanted to go there just to see it once, because it's pretty famous. The weather was supposed to be nice and warm, so I was like all right, we can walk to the subway station and walk around outside in WangFuJing and it will be nice, right? I had a little shopping list all made of things I was going to look for - in particular I wanted to get a scarf so I can wear it over my face if it's dusty out (Xinjiang, where I'm going over May break, is mostly desert, so I figured I'd need it). But what do you know, it turned out to be a day of dust storms, and before we had even gotten anywhere where I could get a scarf I was choking on dust. To make matters worse, I hadn't been able to sleep much the night before, and even before roomie and I got all the way to WangFuJing we were soooo tired and our throats felt awful and we were a little bit crabby. We walked around in WangFuJing a bit, and I looked in the bookstores there for the elusive Uyghur phrasebook we need for the May break trip, but my mission was unsuccessful. I looked around for the book, and then asked an employee if they had it, and she said of course and went to show me where it was, and then said actually it should be over there, and the employee over there told me they actually didn't have it. Good times. Although then a little man came up and said "Excuse me?" and when I turned to him he said "Maybe I can help you." We had a little Chinglish conversation about my book, but it quickly became clear that he only knew a little English, so we only had a short conversation until his English ran out. It was a kind of adorable little incident.

So I ended up not successfully buying anything in WangFuJing except food. Oh well. Although my roomie and I did discover a hilariously named and rather delicious cream puff place called Beard Papa's. I ate maybe the only vaguely legitimate chocolate dessert I've ever had in China, so maybe the day wasn't an entire waste. I collapsed basically as soon as we got home, and really didn't do anything more the rest of the day except sleep.

Today was totally different than yesterday, however, and pretty much surpassed it in all ways except the chocolate-dessert factor. I woke up this morning with the famous and delightful Beijing cough, and although it still hasn't gone away, I don't mind so much because my day was amazing! I headed out around 11:30 to go to the market by the Beijing Zoo, and on my way to the subway station I called After Hours, who were all together at the spring concert afterparty, and it was really awesome to talk to them and made me really excited for a cappella times next year! When I got to the subway station, however, I ran into a couple of people I knew from CIEE along with some other folks, and we chatted for a bit and they said that they were going
to teach at a school for the children of migrant workers and it still wasn't too late if I wanted to come. I said oh that sounded cool, but I was already going to the market by the Zoo, but then I thought, I can go shopping at that market anytime. I'll seize this opportunity to do something different.

So that's how I wound up taking the subway in the opposite direction that I had intended, up into the northern outskirts of Beijing, then catching a bus, then walking to a little concrete building with a makeshift school facility inside. The girl in charge had little lesson plans for us, and we actually spent the first session working with local teachers on their English. We went over their last week's homework and then we learned question words! Who, what, when, where, why, and how! It was super. We were pretty much one-on-one with our "students," and I worked with a woman named Rose (although she wasn't very confident in remembering/pronouncing her English name) who had brought along her little 4th-grade son and kept asking him questions to check how to say things in English. Her English was pretty limited, and she was very shy about speaking it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Chinese was up to the task of explaining things like when to use which conjugation of the verb "to do" and other various idiosyncrasies of the language. After the lesson, we even had a short game of Bingo! I loved every minute of it. Also, it came out in conversation on the way over to the school that a lot of adults learning English want to learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to help them get past the inconsistent English spelling system and learn to pronounce things properly. Now, most native English speakers who volunteer teaching don't know the IPA, but it just so happens that I am a linguistics major and I just might actually have a fair amount of experience applying the IPA to the phonemic systems of both English and Chinese, and might have done a fair amount of my own research about the relationship between the two when I first learned how to pronounce Chinese. So, I may be developing my own lesson on the IPA to teach in a couple weeks.

After the teachers, we had a session with kids, which was in Chinese rather than English. This week's topic was proper nutrition, and we drew a food pyramid and talked about the number of servings you should be getting in each food group, and then talked about what foods were healthy and what foods weren't. One of the volunteers had brought a stick of the processed meat, a ubiquitous Chinese snack that always sits out unrefrigerated and is probably more similar to Spam than anything else. Appetizing, no? But the kids love them, so we read the list of the ingredients together and talked about how if there are random weird filler ingredients in a food that we've never heard of, maybe we should think twice about eating that food. Afterwards we made no-bake cookies with purportedly healthy ingredients like peanuts and dried fruit, and the children were insanely hyper. I don't think the lesson sank in a whole lot, but they had fun. At one point I said "Zhende?" ("really?") in response to something, and I must have been very loud or dramatic or gotten my tones wrong or something, or maybe it was just because I am a silly white person speaking Chinese, but a couple little girls sat there and did imitations of me for a couple minutes. Good times. I've come to accept the fact that I will always be treated differently in China. It's incredibly un-PC, but you can't expect the Chinese to change their ways overnight, so whatevs. Hen hao!

After the classes were over, I thought about going to the market that was my original destination, and I thought about just going back to campus, and I thought about going to the art district with Meagan to see so-called "guerrilla theater" in the streets, but what I ended up doing was going with some of the other volunteers, some Chinese and some American, to Beijing Agricultural University to have dinner together on campus. During dinner we talked about random stuff, like different cultural attitudes towards vegetarianism, and the importance of ethnic background in America, and the negative consequences of Mao's Great Leap Forward, and it was a fun and interesting time, but after dinner we actually all got together and started planning a fundraiser to raise money for an education/community center with computers for the students of the migrant community. It's very hard for the children of migrant workers to get a good education, because since they aren't technically Beijing residents, the government doesn't have the same provisions for them as it does for Beijing children, so the highest level of education they can get is middle school, and that only if their parents have a fair amount of money. At the same time as tons of Chinese students spend hours upon hours studying every day from a very young age so they can pass the crucial test to get into a good college and get a good job, tons more are totally slipping through the cracks. Granted, education is nowhere near consistent for children of different socioeconomic backgrounds in America, but in China it's an even bigger difference. Anyway, the upshot of this whole thing is that out of pure coincidence, although I never got to the market today, now I'm involved with this migrant school and the NGO that runs it, and tomorrow night I think I'm going out to scout locations for the fundraiser, because (more evidence of the total un-PCness of Chinese culture) the people who are kind of actually in charge of this thing, although they are from Western countries, have Chinese parents and therefore Chinese faces and need a Westerner with them to have credibility. So basically, I volunteered myself, as the least Chinese-looking person ever, to be a figurehead. Hen hao!

Today in the subway I had the unusual experience of being blatantly stared at by a non-Chinese person, who by my judgment was definitely American and probably a college student, who was looking at me as if with the intent to ask a question, but when I asked him he just said he thought I was someone he knew from somewhere but maybe not. Later today someone else (Asian this time...back to normal) also thought they knew me from somewhere...I think maybe in China the frequency of curly-blonde-haired girls is so low that people assume we all must be the same one. Good times. I do admit, I feel instant kinship when I see other blonde women out in the city, especially if they also have curly hair. I always want to strike up conversations with them, because I know that we must share so many of the same type of experiences in China. We are all sisters, the Beijing Blondes.

Anyway, in conclusion, today was an amazing day. It didn't turn out anything like I expected, but when do I ever really know what to expect around here? Sure, yesterday sucked a little, and that dust storm left my throat feeling the urge to abandon my civilized ways and hock a loogie, Beijing style(I might have unabashedly spit in public today...whoops), but hey, suffering builds character. Didn't you learn anything from reading Calvin and Hobbes? With all of its silly pollution and complete lack of political correctness and small children peeing in the street (another one of my delightful China experiences of the day and another reason I will never ever touch the bottoms of my shoes or even think about them, if possible), at least Beijing never fails to be interesting. So it's not really a love/hate relationship between me and China...I just love it even when it sucks a little bit. That's just how I roll. It's hen hao.