Guanxi

Pale wisps of white steam trail alongside the narrow road that runs past Chongqing University’s “A” campus, where most of my teaching takes place (A lucky thing, as my other assignments are in “D” campus, located more than an hour away by bus).  My small band of Chinese grad student minions are theoretically available at my beck and call, but after the first few days spent confusing, aggravating and flummoxing them while getting a lay of the alien landscape, I humbly opt to resort to them only in worst case scenarios.

An outdoor food stand in Chongqing. The produce is (theoretically) fresh daily, though the prep area could use a little work. Unmatching tables and chairs are arranged on the sidewalk around it as needed by patrons. Fast, cheap food, and generally more tasty than any Chinese food in the States.

How hard can getting around Chongqing be, anyway?  Granted, this mega-city isn’t used to having many westerners, so passable English speaking is at a premium, and my own Chinese never quite got to a useful level of any sort.  Also, any advantage I might get from the natural politeness of the Chinese people (easily a hundred times more patient in trying to understand me than most Americans are to people that don’t speak English) is immediately foiled by just how much those same people suck at charades.  Because I know I’m pretty fucking awesome at it.

That’s why this aromatic, steam-filled street is such a godsend; Row after row of food arranged out on tables, with only the occasional errant point of my finger required to have food prepared directly in front of me.  There are plenty of restaurants with menus printed out upon their walls, but short of accompanying pictures or a translator servant at my side, this layout is incredibly problematic.  Granted, it gets easier once I discover that nearly all of them serve the same dishes, but in these early days, nothing sates my hunger with more ease than a giant table of fresh meats and vegetables kept safe from flies by steady fanning from a vigilant serving woman.

Today’s selection is a smoldering, blood red bowl of what look to be crayfish.  I’m fairly certain they’re what I selected, though one can never tell here.  Their aroma is reminiscent of shrimp, though they’re clearly saturated with enough sichuan chili oil that my eyes water up as I blink away the steam.  I test one in an attempt to discover the entry point to the multi-layered carapace, then drop it forcefully back into the bowl and suck on my fingers to alleviate the strong burning sensation.

“Fuck,” I say, to no one in particular.  No one can understand me here anyway.  I could unleash an execrable deluge of F-bombs upon the unsuspecting populace and still get a solid G-Rating.  But it’s clear, based on the middle-aged Chinese man who skitters over to my table, that I’ve gained the attention of at least one person.  His shirt is rolled halfway up his chest, exposing his sweaty stomach and he carries both a small bottle of baijiu (“BY-j’yo”, literally “white alcohol”) and a half-smoked cigarette in one hand, and what looks like a wad cellophane in his other.

He holds the clear plastic up to me with a smile and a series of drunken Chinese phrases that might not even make sense to someone with a full understanding of the Chinese language.  Gloves.  Disposable ones.  And so thin, they surely won’t offer most protection from the still sizzling shellfish.  I take them from him reluctantly, and smile back with just as much reluctance.  Putting the gloves on, I’m surprised to find the shelled bastards are notably more easy to handle than before, though the thin plastic isn’t enough to block all the heat, turning each excavatory evisceration into a mildly comic juggling act.  I learn quickly that the meat is all conveniently bunched up in the plated tails and — I’m glad to find — quite delicious.

This beer works on so many levels: It's named "Super Pure Beer." The pasty man on the front is, from the receding hairline to his facial expression to that tie, the worst possible choice for a spokesman. And lastly, said spokesman is actually holding the beer that he is featured on. Sadly, this beer was undrinkable. I bought a six-pack and threw away five of them.

My bare-bellied new friend laughs out a few more expressions and casually passes me the baijiu like it’s a dirty secret.  It is my first experience with the beverage, and sadly it won’t be my last.  Dirt cheap and ubiquitous, I learn quickly that baijiu has one particularly bad side effect: No matter how many things you eat or drink after taking a swig of it, every belch expelled for the next 24 hour will taste exactly like baijiu.  Baijiu, by the way, tastes like stale zombie farts.

I manage to hold down most of what I chug, sputtering out the rest as I cough “xie xie” (“thanks”) repeatedly to my new friend.  He laughs amusingly, and seems to be in a bit of awe as he watches my eyes tear up from his gift.  His hands dart quickly down to a pants pocket as though he’s just remembered something of the utmost importance.  Immediately, he holds a small burgundy pack of cigarettes featuring two playful panda bears that don’t seem to be suffering the ill effects of lung cancer on the front of the pack.

Warning labels have not yet reached China.  Cigarette price hikes also seem to be absent here, as I’m told packs of cigarettes go from three dollars for a premium pack (like Marlboro) to 30 cents for a pack of the local brand.  I guess when your country is this overpopulated, there’s no rush on the government’s part to halt any life-shortening bad habits.  I went to the local hospital once, which was immaculately maintained and looked no older than three years old, yet people still smoked with impunity in its hallways.

“No thanks, man.  No smoke-y.”  It’s clear he doesn’t know a lick of English, so why bother with proper grammar?

“Ughhh <mumble mumble mumble> duhhhh,” he says, as he waves the cigarette at me, confused.  Or he says something like that.  I might be paraphrasing a little.  But regardless, he seems mildly upset that I won’t take the cigarette, and still dangles it in the air in front of me, his expression now seeming a bit more worried by my unexpected rejection.

“No.  It’s cool, really.  You can keep it.”  In my mind, I’m helping my friend not be wasteful with his cigarettes, but he frowns so forcefully as he slowly lowers his offering hand, that I feel a confused sort of guilt.  ”But thanks!  Xie xie!  Really.  It’s cool.”  As an afterthought, I hold my hands up in the air.  ”Gloves great!”

He looks as dejected as a middle school kid being told the offer of his friendship is unwanted due to his being, in fact, a complete douche.  He mumbles something else at me as he holds out the baijiu once again.

“Aww man, now I feel bad because you seem so sad.  But I can’t drink anymore.  I just can’t.  It tastes like absolute asshole, man.  Also, it’s like one in the afternoon.”

He says a few more things before getting up, but each statement is only met by dumb expressions from me that only grow in more exaggerated simplicity as he remains at my table staring it me wistfully.  Eventually he rises to leave and he disregards my closing gratitude for the throwaway gloves as he stumbles off, and I’m left to a half-eaten meal of exotic shellfish, the nauseatingly inescapable aftertaste of baijiu and a confused sense that I’ve just caused a minor international faux pas.

“Oh sure he was insulted, mate,” explains my ever-helpful English neighbor.  ”You just had your introduction to guanxi.  It’s like ‘face,’ you know, how people see each other.  It’s like shame and pride and everything all rolled into one.”

“So by not smoking, I insulted his face?”

An arty shot my friend J captured of the "rolled-up-to-the-belly" style of shirt wearing in Chongqing

“Well, it’s not really like that.  Guanxi is more how people regard one another.  It pretty much sums up the entire relationship between them in one little word, all the love, hate, respect, and history between them.  What each side’s done for the other in the past, and who owes who what.  It’s how most business in China gets done.  And it’s also why, despite all the communist talk, the people in power still take care of each other first.  It’s not really different from how things are done in other countries in that regard — just much more hard coded into the culture.

At a Chinese engagement party months later, I was warned in advance that I would be given a cigarette by the groom and I was in no way to turn it down.  Later in the evening (after a surprisingly edible meal of spicy frog), the groom stood up and delivered a drunken speech to the room, then walked from person to person handing out individual cigarettes.  I accepted mine with an exaggerated glee that seemed genuinely appreciated.

“So if I took the cigarette from the dude,” I ask my English friend, referring to the drunken glove dispenser at the crayfish stand, ”I would’ve owed him something later on down the road because of this ‘guanxi’ thing?”

“Nah, just having a relationship with you — being seen interacting with you — would’ve been enough for him.  The Chinese can admittedly be a very racist people, but it works well in our favor.  They love white people.  Especially Americans, even if they don’t particularly like your government that much.  Just by being witnessed drinking and smoking with you, he would’ve appeared better to everyone around him, or at least felt like people respected him more.  I don’t entirely get it myself, but that’s guanxi for you.  Enjoy it, mate!”

And I do.  It’s the reason I almost never have to buy drinks for myself in clubs.

Gambei

Months later and I’ve got a lay of the land.  My friend J (who asked that her name never be used in any blog entries) from America’s in town and seems to revel in everything strange and alien about China that I initially found so fearful.  For instance, she doesn’t seem to mind that I’ve just been drunkenly handed a small Chinese child from a sweaty, drunken male stranger that may or may not have a crush on me.

Me and my new Asian child

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

“The drunk or the baby?” she laughs.  More than laughs.  She’s practically doubled over in uncontrollable cackling as I hold the young boy out at arm’s length.  The inebriated businessman speaks no English, but followed us out of the club after being a party to my own intoxication, and I felt as though I should let him tail us seeing as he paid for most of what I’d drank in the club.  No one shared any drinks with J, which possibly proves my point that there is an underlying sexism in addition to the racism with guanxi that makes giving drinks to a white man the highest form of honor.

“I can’t guarantee it, obviously,” I told J earlier in the evening as we first walk past waving Chinese in animal mascot suits into 88, one of the more popular clubs amongst laowais.  ”But almost every time I come here, at least some people will gambei with me.  We just need to make the rounds a little.”

There’s a crew of surly Russians in the ornate lobby; I recognize them, but they’re not among the Russians I’m friends with.  One of them goes by the name of “Destroyer” or “Annihilator” or some other ridiculous English nickname.  He’s notorious for beating up a cab driver, then taking the car on a joyride.  His father’s apparently some kind of foreign official here, granting him a form of diplomatic immunity he’s only too quick to take advantage of.  I do not acknowledge him.

Inside, a group of Africans have taken over a select section of the club.  They’re mostly friendly to me, either because they find me oddly charming, or because I am their instructor and they have to be.  The blanket of universal adoration that my status as a while male grants me does not seem equally distributed over them, and I’ve witnessed a few occasions of locals clearly attempting to pick fights with them, once ganging up unfairly on one of my students from behind as he obliviously attempted to get into a cab.  They’re fun company, but I won’t get any free drinks hanging out over here.

Nor will I get any from any of the other foreigners, or any of the younger patrons, or any of the women, unfortunately.  No, I’ve got a very specific target in mind.

“Hey!  America?  Gambei!” someone yells at me, as I pass.

“America!  Yes!  Ni hao!”  Bingo.

For some reason, these mascots occasionally greet club goers here in Jiefangbei

Five ebullient men that I peg as businessmen sit perched around the round bar table, each more excited to see me than the next.  At that weird age where any of them could easily be as young as 23 or as old as 40 (and let’s face it, I’m as good at guessing the ages of Asians as they are at guessing my age), some still wear dress shirts, while others have changed into more casual wear.  Upon the table are the requisite three bottles of pre-sweetened green tea, and one handle of Jack Daniels.  The Jack tastes funny here, and most of us believe they’re filled with locally brewed prohibition-era swill, but it at least tastes better than the stuff that doesn’t even bother pretending to be real whiskey.  That none of us have gone blind yet is a good sign.  A serving girl brings out a new pitcher of ice and takes the liberty of mixing together the whiskey and green tea.  While coca-cola is also frequently used, the green tea seems to be the most popular mixer, and thankfully becomes more drinkable with lots of practice.

Men like these don’t sip their beverages.  They gambei.  Literally, “bottoms up!”  Every so often, one of them will signal for another round and fill the cocktail glasses in front of each of them halfway, before shouting “gambei!” as they all lift and chug the potent mixture.  The alcohol is then forgotten about for a time, until an awkward silence demands another hearty gambei several minutes later.  Things play out differently with the addition of a laowai, however.

“Gambei?” asks the stylishly dressed one that initially brought me into their fold.  He speaks with a mix of excitement and nervous expectation, but he’s already placed an extra glass in front of me.

“Ok, sure.  Gambei!” I smile.

He pours a large serving out to me, and then slightly less into his own glass, in a fluid motion that only manages to spill a little fluid on the table between us.  Setting the pitcher down, he grabs his glass and holds it aloft, staring at me expectantly.  I take the other glass and clink it gently against his.

“Gambei,” I say calmly, as I stare at him with a smug look on my face.  You guys wanna drink with an over-confident American businessman?  I’ll give you your money’s worth.  The saccharine fire burns down my throat into my gullet, but I smile warmly as I set the glass down.  ”Ahh, whiskey and green tea.  My favorite.  Hao!”

“Ahhh–” says the man next to him, spouting off into a stream of Chinese aimed desperately at me, which I am only too quick to cut off.

Jiefangbei's eponymous tower, at night

“Ting bu dong [literally "I hear but do not understand"], my friend.  Ting.  Bu.  Dong.  Not a fucking word.”  He looks confused for a second as I stare into his eyes and smile sheepishly, granting him the slightest of shrugs.  He darts his hand out for the picture with lightning speed, as though a mere moment of indecision on his part might lose the opportunity to gain my company for a drink.  I’ve not yet mastered the art of guanxi, but I do know that if one of these men shares a drink with me, most likely they will all feel a burning compulsion to do so as well, and to turn any of them down would be an insult both to their pride and my sobriety.  Not wanting to shame any of them, I stick around through five grueling shooters.  Because I am a gentleman.

“He seems taken with you,” says J, nodding her head toward the fourth man in the group to gambei with me.  The allure of my foreign uniqueness has already worn off with the others, but the sloppiest looking of the lot, sweaty with matted down hair and an unbecoming grey shirt, continues to attempt communicating with me for some reason.  It’s clearly a lost cause since A) it should be obvious by now what a terrible student of the Chinese language I am and B) they are out of whiskey.  His sweaty arm drapes over me as he yells something that may or may not be an attempt at English, and his eyes seem out of sync either due to the alcohol or some early childhood malady.  He bounces subtly as he barks at me incomprehensibly, and I’m convinced that at least one of his parents was a television cartoon.  My presence seems to fill him with unbridled joy, though I’m fairly certain his devotion isn’t homosexually based in any way.

“What’s he saying?” J asks me.  She’s been beside me, taking in the entire scene with a sense of wonder, though none of the gambei crew appear to have noticed her at all through this entire interaction, nor offered her any gambeis.  I am wearing a particularly sporty jacket.

“No idea.  Dude’s creeping me out.  Here–” I say, shaking his hand in what should be the universal sign of farewell.  ”Dance!”  I point up at the stage where not all club-goers are allowed to perform, yet laowais are almost always welcome.  He laughs and nods his head vigorously.  This was probably a mistake.  He makes no move to follow, but if anything, my mounting the stage has only increased his adoration.  I can’t dance well, but by now I know all the songs by heart.  Poker Face by Lady Gaga.  A rousing, fist-pumping French hit by Nadiya called “Roc”.  German classic “Du Hast” by Rammstein, which is particularly beloved here for reasons unknown.  A Korean song called “Ave Maria” (whose only non-Korean lyrics are “Ave Maria”).  Another Korean song called “Nobody but You” (whose only non-Korean lyrics are the painfully infectious “I want nobody nobody but you I want nobody nobody but you I want nobody nobody but you.  Nobody nobody nobody nobody!”)  The DJ is nothing if not predictable.

The Wonder Girls – Nobody But You, the video. Not only is the song inescapable in clubs and on the radio, but this video plays on repeat wherever televisions are sold. It makes sense, as the girls are particularly hot. The video has a bit of an involved subplot, so the song itself doesn’t begin until about the three minute mark.

My terrible rendition of “Nobody but You” having done nothing to disturb the guanxi I’ve so clearly cultivated with my admirer, I grab J and dart out of the club toward the street, but my new friend is tenacious.

“He’s still coming!” J shrieks at me gleefully.  I get the feeling she is not this amused with anything life has to offer back in America.

A flower vendor outside the clubs. I don't know if Chinese girls like things being bought for them more than girls in other countries, but they're certainly vocal about it. One friend's ex always told him "I can tell you do not like me because you do not ever buy me anything." He bought her things more often than any boyfriend I've ever met.

“Hello again,” I say with resignation to my shadow.  He’s still babbling drunkenly in Chinese, but I just nod my head and smile in the hopes that he’ll wear himself down eventually.  There’s an odd tugging at my pant leg and I look down to see a toddler of no more than four holding his hand out to me.  In his other hand is a flower, which I can only assume he wants to sell me.  Parents set their children out alone in the club district from midnight onward in the hopes of gathering guilt-riddled charity from drunken club-goers.  The child looks up at me with large eyes that seem more disoriented than particularly sad.  It’s a shameful situation, but at least he’s not getting his feet bound somewhere.  ”Sorry, little guy, I don’t have anything for you.  And I’m definitely not buying my new friend here a flower.”

Without missing a beat, the smitten clubgoer who’s been unshakable up until now, reaches down and picks the small beggar child up, then unceremoniously deposits him into my arms (which is about where this story began).

“Dude, what the fuck?!”

J and my stalker are now laughing in unison, though I’m unsure if they’re in on the same joke.  The child, which I’m now awkwardly holding at a distance as though he were a delicate bomb, seems particularly nonplussed by the entire scenario, and stares at me as if he’s already decided that I’ll be an acceptable new parent.

“I don’t want– I mean, he’s cute and all but why are you giving me children?”  The man is babbling to me again, and he might be answering that very question, but I’ll never know.  I try to pass the child back to him, but after a bizarre, unplanned three-way hug, I end up holding the child by myself once again.  ”Sorry little fella,” I say, depositing the kid back on the ground, “but I really don’t want a scruffy little Chinese scamp.”  He stares up at me from the pavement and holds his tiny hand out once more, this time more confidently.  ”Ugh.  Fair enough,” I tell him, as I dig through my pockets for change, “but you’re the one that got the free ride…”

As he waddles off triumphantly into the busy street, I turn back to my stalker and shake his hand decisively.

“Good bye!  Zaijian!  Thank you!  Xie xie!”  I grab J and sharply turn my back on the man, and when I look back after a minute or so, he’s blessedly nowhere to be found.

“He loved you,” she tells me gleefully.

“I know.  It was very special.  We had a child together.”

"Dude, I don't want him."

There are a lot of street food vendors serving late-night jiefangbei (the most popular shopping/club district in Chongqing), but my favorite one is hidden away behind one of the smaller clubs.  The cart is made up of a single flat grill surrounded by baskets and baskets of food that may or may not have been sitting out in the warm Chongqing air for hours.  I select an assortment of meats, vegetables and dumplings and make a wide, circling motion around the collection of spices implying that I want them all.  There is nothing sanitary about this back alley stand, and it would fail food safety inspections in the States at almost every level.  And that’s a shame, because it’s probably the best-tasting street food that exists anywhere in the world.

Posing with my Chinese friend Daniel (note: not his Chinese name) amongst various stuffed animals for sale outside the clubs. I wouldn't think giant plush toys would be much in demand by drunken Chinese people at 4 AM, but I would be wrong. This particular one's name translates to "Angry Wolf" from the extremely popular show "Happy Lamb Lamb"

The Chinese sure love their candies gelatinous...

The Chinese equivalent of a food cart, sans cart. Guys like this literally carry their entire kitchens on their back. Usually one side is all noodles, while the other contains spices, sauces, toppings and other condiments.

Fresh meats and other grillables sit atop these food stands for hours on end, serving both the pre-club and post-club crowds. It shouldn't be sanitary, and maybe it isn't. But it tastes awesome, fills you completely for about two bucks, and I'm pretty sure I never got horribly ill from eating any of it.

Here's lookin' at you, kid.

The dizzying streets of Chongqing all look as identical to me as the people do through my foreign, laowai eyes.  I’m sure the locals see a unique richness and vibrancy to every street corner and noodle joint, but barring a few of the ritzier districts of the city, every block looks confusingly identical to me.  The 32 million stomachs of Chongqing have particular cravings that the uniformity of food selections at restaurants here surely attest to.  Granted, there’s a McDonald’s, a KFC and even a Subway, for young people feeling experimental and rebellious.  But good luck finding a pizza joint offering anything resembling what most westerners would describe as pizza.

A photo of the proprietor and myself. Â The restaurant may be in her apartment, but that doesn't mean she can't have fancy personalized boxes. Â Apparently you can get them made in bulk from China...

The best pizza in Chongqing, my small group of foreign cohorts all agree, can be found at Suzie Home Pizza, located conveniently enough, in Suzie’s apartment.  Suzie is a Chongqing native with fairly impeccable English skills who decided some time ago to turn her private apartment into a pizza restaurant.  We discovered the unlikely restaurant on a rare flier scribbled in English, and painstakingly followed her awkward directions into the back building of a large, brown, nondescript apartment complex and then up to its 18th floor.  Technically, we really only went to the 16th floor, but the Chinese collectively suffer from tetraphobia (fear of the number 4), due to the Chinese word for “four” sounding awfully similar to their word for “death.”  As such, most Chinese elevators omit the 4th, 14th, 24th floors, and so on.  I’ve never been to a Chinese building with more than 40 stories, so I’m uncertain as to how that nightmarish scenario would be addressed.

Florescent light bulbs looming overhead buzz with a nervous ineffectiveness as we navigate the thin, labyrinthine hallways past scores of identical brown apartment doors.  A pizza restaurant?  Here?  It’s surely a ruse or an elaborate joke, we surmise, until reaching room 1837 as the flier recommends and standing before the unmarked door timidly.

“Should we knock?” I ask.

“Of course,” says my more blunt and forthright Russian friend.  ”It says 1837 on the paper and now we are here at 1837.  Why should we not knock?”  Why not, indeed?

I knock softly, like a child tacitly coming forth to accept corporal punishment.

“No one’s here–” I say almost immediately, but the door repudiates my statement just as it finishes exiting my mouth.

“Hello?” the young Chinese man says, improbably, in English.

“Hi,” I say, followed by a long pause.  “Pizza.”  I tend to use as few words as possible when speaking in English to the Chinese, as I never expect anyone to know English here.  Being of college age, it shouldn’t surprise me greatly that he speaks fluently.

“Suzie moved her place.  She at 2613 now.”

“Oh.”

Re-energized by this positive break, we race back to the elevator and head up to the 26th floor (which is really the 23rd) to discover that Suzie actually treats her pizza restaurant quite seriously.  A large placard sits in the middle of the hall outside of her door, advertising the restaurant in both English and Chinese to anyone that passes.  How the neighbors feel about this intrusion into their otherwise domestic space in unclear.  The door itself is covered in pictures of pizza and fresh toppings, seemingly clipped from old magazines.

A pic from another visit to Suzie's, with a larger group.

It’s a standard apartment on the inside, though the one bedroom has been turned into a fine dining room, with two small tables and one large one, currently pressed against the wall to make the dining area seem bigger.  There are pictures of various diners displayed all over the walls, though we are the only ones here right now, and she gives us the table pressed against the room’s lone small window, complete with a lit candle.  The menu is a single piece of paper, covered in hard laminate, but fully in English which is practically a blessing at a Chongqing restaurant.

Twelve pizza options in various sizes greet us, along with a wide assortment of unexpected Italian fare like ziti and baked lasagna.  Suzie loves Italian food, and has even been to America (Italy would’ve simply been too much to hope for), and it was her dream to make this restaurant.  Lax zoning laws and an apartment board whose attitudes could be considered pococurante at best allowed it to happen, all in her own home.

“I really want more Chinese to like pizza.  To like this food.  I like it so much, but it is not very popular.  Chinese people only like Chinese food.  Maybe…” she pauses.  ”Chinese people like white people and want to be like them.  Maybe I take your picture with my food and they see it, and they will come here.  I will give you discount!”

We do not fulminate on this long.

The pizza is average for a pizza joint in, say, Idaho, but almost legendarily good compared to its counterparts here in Chongqing.  Suzie is definitely right about the Chinese having a very limited set of tastes.  There’s an Indian place that takes an hour or so to get to from my apartment, by bus (good naan, at least).  There’s a sushi spot, though the rice to fish ratio is about 100:1, with every sliver of fish being thinner than an American bagel joint’s typical serving of lox.  Oddly enough, there’s a Belgian restaurant in the city center, but while their frites are good, business never exactly seems booming.

If you’re in the mood for a fine Chinese meal, however, you’ve got limitless options!

Actually, I take that back.  You have two.  Standard and Hot Pot.

No Fours.

See, there are restaurants on every street, so one never need walk far in order to find a meal.  The problem is, there are really only two types of restaurants, and every restaurant of a given type has a nearly identical menu.  Sure, things like quality and location may vary, but when visiting a “Normal” style Sichuan restaurant, I know that I can sit down and order “Gung Bao Ji Ding” (kung-pao chicken) without even looking at the menu with no fear of rejection.  And though they may always laugh at my shoddy pronunciation, within three minutes (smoldering woks cook quickly) I’ll have a fresh plate of spicy chicken and peanuts sitting before me.  The lack of variety in restaurants may seem like a weakness, but as a foreigner with limited Chinese speaking skills, it’s most definitely a blessing.

Suzie ends up cutting the price of our meal in half in exchange for a five minute photo session of us laowais blissfully chowing down on her pseudo-Italian fare.  She doesn’t seem overly concerned about getting pictures of the two of us actually eating her food, instead opting to place us in playful poses that feature her apartment/restaurant prominently displayed in the background.  It’s a very low grade whoring out of ourselves, and probably unnecessary as the pizza was only three dollars to begin with, but who am I to refuse a bargain?

Understanding the needs of her clientele, Suzie serves not only the exotic Carlsburg beers, but serves them cold as well.  This is a deviation from the norm, though I never figured out if the Chinese believed cold beer to be a luxury or if they genuinely preferred the piss-like complexity that only a sun-baked cheap local beer can offer.  There seems to be ample fridge space throughout the myriad restaurants around town, but only those with frequent laowai customers tend to keep cold beer at the ready, even on the most sweltering of summer days.

Two Carlsburgs in, and it’s a must that I take advantage of the restaurant’s lone bathroom before we head back out into the eerily dim and uninviting hallway.  It’s abnormal for a Chinese bathroom in that there are several toothbrushes, a hairdryer and some intimate feminine wear strewn about, but fairly normal otherwise in that the toilet is simply a grooved porcelain indentation feeding directly into a shadowy pit in the ground.  Traditional Chinese insist that the “hole in the floor” style of defecating is far healthier for the body than our lazy western seated position.  But even if this is true, there are several drawbacks at work here that I consider dealbreakers:

1. There is almost always a yellow, glistening sheen of urine covering the interior porcelain, ranging from pungently fresh to stagnantly repugnant, likely due to the lack of any sort of flushing mechanism.  Often, this excretory polish has spread from the inner valley of the groove to the untidy flooring situated around it.  This segues nicely into my next point.
   

   A standard Chinese toilet. Apologies for the scatological nature of this photo, but obviously it was needed to illustrate my points on the left.

2. I have no idea how to cleanly defecate into a Chinese toilet without stripping down to full nudity below the waist.  Possibly, the agility it takes to master this skill comes with plenty of time and practice and I simply did not allow myself that luxury, but the few attempts I made at doing so were disastrous.  The problem is that it was nearly impossible for me to balance and expel without my legs being a bit spread, but pants tend to keep the legs locked together until they’re dropped down to almost the ankle level.  However, this maneuver places the pants mere inches from the floor, where the assistance of several hands is necessary to keep them from intimately mingling with the saucy ground cocktail.  As my male parts already preoccupy at least one of my hands, this situation is untenable, and except in the most dire situations, I simply opted to go with the “clench technique” until making it back to the safety of my westernized apartment.  On the rare cases where this was not possible, more often than not I removed both pants and underwear and hung them from any available hook.
3. About five inches in diameter, the narrow toilet hole turns the simple act of defecation into a game of Shit Basketball that suddenly requires finesse, strategy and an asshole with at least a passable ability at aiming.  Apparently it’s not as difficult as I initially imagined, as every payload I ever delivered reached its intended destination without leaving any stragglers behind at my feet, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t hold my breath nervously with each release.
4. The lack of a water trap separating the bathroom proper from the combined human waste of the local sewer system means that no matter how clean a floor toilet may be (and especially in nicer public places, the Chinese are quite fastidious about cleaning), the rank, muggy reek of a thousand excretions is always just wafting distance away.  To be fair, the smell generally favors urine over fecal matter, but seeing that even Berty Bott (purveyor of jelly beans such as “liver,” “tripe” and “boogey”) wasn’t willing to inflict “stale piss” on the general populace, it’s clearly not a popular odor.  I was in a few beautiful Chinese apartments, but the doors to the bathrooms were perpetually shut, and upon entry, the effluvium of urine was always there to greet me.
5. They are, quite literally, shit-holes.

At Suzie’s, I’m lucky enough to only have to urinate, saving me from the indignity of at least three of the above problems.  As we’re the only diners this evening, our hostess walks us out into the dim hallway with a giant smile locked on her face.

Lisa and me, posing for Suzie

“Come back very soon!” she exhorts, and we assure her that we will.  It’s likely not a lie, as I do enjoy pizza, and the only other option for it in town features an unidentifiable meat covered in sweet, neon orange cheese. Lisa, my Russian friend, lives at the Xuelin Binguan (literally “study-forest hotel” — I’m guessing something is lost there in translation), a hotel near the university that was turned into dormitories for the visiting students that arrived to find all the standard dorms already full.  The air is cool and wet — there aren’t many major rainstorms in Chongqing, but it’s regularly misty out in the non-summer months — and we hug each other goodbye under a full moon that no one can see.

The walk back to the foreign teacher’s building is about fifteen very repetitive minutes long past a series of similar storefronts and restaurant offerings.  Restaurant, brothel, convenience store, sign store, brothel, restaurant, internet bar (generally open 24 hours a day, these places are almost always packed with young Chinese people playing a variety of video games), convenience store, brothel, etc.  Some blocks are even lucky enough to have one of the ever-popular KTV establishments — large, expensive clubs filled with private karaoke rooms that are packed almost every day of the week.  There aren’t many options, but if your needs are mostly simple, they will always be met.

Normally, the most outlandish passer-by I come into contact with on my walks home might be a young mother that wants her child’s picture taken with a laowai (a rare occurrence, but not entirely uncommon), but tonight as I pass a series of food carts selling dan-dan noodles and what literally translates to “stinky tofu” (for good reason), there is someone a bit more out of place than usual.  Coming directly toward me on the sidewalk is a short Chinese man, likely in his early 50′s, wearing a long-sleeved olive green shirt and literally nothing else.

An internet cafe. World of Warcraft, Farmville, and a game that looks oddly like Ultima 7 seem to be the most popular offerings at this 24-hour mega-cafes.

Refusing to acknowledge an aberration so far beyond the norm, my eyes do a double take, zooming directly down to his impending crotch to verify what my peripheral vision so fearfully already alerted me to.  Tenuously wobbling between his legs like an arthritic thumb, the older gentleman’s penis practically slams into me as he approaches and I give it another befuddled stare against my will, while he stumbles up along the dirty sidewalk on bare feet.  Quickly I avert my eyes from the public disgrace, though he and his member are equally unconcerned with my attention, darting quickly past me toward the busy street.

Immediately I turn to the crowd around me for signs that this is unusual behavior, even in the strange, alien land of China.  Indeed, people give the man a wide berth.  Some even stop in their tracks, like me, to glare back after him, but most carry on about their business nonchalantly, as though his indiscretion stood out no less than a crying baby or a dropped cup of tea.  As I look forward, I notice a uniformed policemen shimmying toward me on the same path as the naked man.  At least someone is prepared to do something about the exposed nuisance! I think, as the officer saunters through the pedestrians in the narrow wake left by the unexpected penis.

Rather than carry on after the streaker, who has now walked up to a motorcycle taxi and seems to be negotiating something with the driver, the officer unexpectedly stops beside me and grants me a large smile.

“You America?” he asks.

“Wha?” I sputter out in confusion, looking from his face to the sagging buttocks leaning up against a motorcycle just 15 feet away, then back toward the officer.  ”I mean, yes.  American.  But, that man–”

“I go America, uhh, summer.  Chongqing.  Hong Kong.  California.  California!  Yes?”

Chinese sidewalk. I felt compelled to post this for two reasons. 1) these tiles are Everywhere, and incredibly slippery. This is a horrible combination in Chongqing in particular, as the city is both hilly and perpetually wet. 2) That little bastard of a raised area broke my sandaled foot once early in the year, and it was still sore when I left the country. I snapped this picture in anger.

“Sure sure.  California good.  But, man… naked…penis?” I say, craning my head back toward the bare ass that doesn’t seem to register on the policeman’s radar, either because he does not care or due to general obliviousness on his part.  The motorcycle driver mostly stares forward at passing traffic, turning back only sideways to talk to his potential patron.  It’s possible that the Chinese are less concerned about unclad invasions of personal space, but my money is on the driver having no clue just how close he is to the exposed genitalia.

He nods his head to the naked man in agreement at something, and suddenly they’re even closer than just moments before, as the exposed leg lifts up and over the smoking motorcycle engine and the bare, wrinkled ass slaps down on the cracked, black leather seat of the bike.  The motorcycle and its two riders slowly lurch back onto the road, and I watch as the rear passenger humps his way forward scant inches to be pressed up closely to the driver, reaching in and wrapping his arms around the driver’s stomach for support.  It’s a standard action on motorcycle taxis, yet now seems so much more intimate as the naked backside, now dimly glowing red from the brake light below it takes off down the road.

“Two weeks!” exclaims the officer.  ”Very good!”

“Sure sure,” I mumble.  “Well, California’s a crazy place…”

I glance back one last time as the tiny red circle of unusual but apparently not unexpected ass disappears off in the distance.  I turn back to the man and shake his hand as I depart, suddenly smiling very hard.  ”You should be ok, though!”

“Hah!  California!” the policeman calls out after me excitedly, but I just stare at the ground and walk faster and faster back to the relative safety and sanity of my westernized apartment.

The real best pizza in Chongqing? Â I made it in my apartment.

Another nightly occurrence on the walks home each night: Upwards of a hundred Chinese women dancing in near unison to modern or traditional Chinese music. Though I did hear Lady Gaga one night...

Language, Lessons and Barriers

“Can anyone actually explain what ‘Object-Oriented’ means?”

“Shit, I’ve got no idea what that is,” my father exclaimed, interrupting me, upon my recounting this story to him months later during a trip back to the States.

“Of course you wouldn’t.  You’re not a computer programmer.  These guys are in a class with ‘Advanced Object-Oriented’ in the title, so some prior knowledge is assumed.”

One of my classes, about midway through the semester. It was full on Day 1, though there were even less of them by the final class.

I had expected the sea of Chinese students arranged before me to fit my closed-minded, preconceived stereotypes: fervently studious, profoundly respectful of authority, inherently good at math and irreparably bad at fashion.  And while some of these traits hit close to the mark (Seriously, guy with the purple paisley polo shirt, does that monstrosity need to show itself at every class?  Do you even wash it?), the young classroom assembled before me today seems astonishingly like, well, a typical college classroom.

Granted, it’s a particularly crammed classroom — close to a hundred students in their late teens and early twenties — and it’s unlikely I’ll absorb most of their names given that I’ve yet to be able to pronounce a single one without garnering roars of innocent (yet soul-crushing) laughter.  But the general behavior patterns match those that I’m used to from classes in the States.  In the front, the bookish types grin up at me with undeserved respect, keeping their uncomfortable seats warm all semester even after all the slackers and those who’ve realized the futility of attending my class have long since given up.  To the rear, a typical rogues gallery of note-passers, cell phone video game players, magazine readers, sleepers and text messagers and a single loner who snaps his phone’s video screen shut with such force each time I walk by that I can only assume he’s watching porn.  And they all have ineffective study habits not terribly different from my own back in my early college days.  In a sense, this is my karmic payback.

It’s not that I’m a terrible teacher, though it became clear before class even began that I was terribly unprepared, unqualified, unassisted and unready for this task.  No, the most daunting aspect of my tenure was the complete impossibility of communication between the bulk of the class and the laowai with a rudimentary understanding of how to say “yes,” “no,” “kung pao chicken” and count to ten in Chinese.  Poorly.

After posing my question about “object-oriented,” a dank silence fills the air, weighed down by the thick Chongqing summer that is thankfully starting to recede.  I’m momentarily nervous that the silence will grow and consume the remaining hour and forty-five minutes left in my lecture.  It’s an unending and unwinnable staring contest between one man and the collective will of a linguistically uncooperative China, determined to learn despite my best efforts.  Long minutes stretch into a seemingly infinite battle waged between the unsaid and the unspeakable.

I’d been warned that the Chinese style of teaching involved very little interplay between student and instructor, but why go so far out of the way to import an English-speaking teacher if not to violently tear the clunky, consonantal sounds of the English language from their shy, unwilling throats?  I speak to them honestly, explaining that this is my intention.  Some of them seem rankled or intimidated.  Most have no reaction.  This is because they have no idea what I have just said.

Such an exciting class!

Sheepishly, a dainty, feminine hand finally raises like a cluster of rice noodles, al dente, to half mast in the front row as this class’s Joan of Arc bravely takes one for the team.

“Yes!” I say excitedly.  ”Liqiu, right?”

A torrent of raucous peals of laughter follows my simple question.  I could juggle, do card tricks and possibly even escort in a Russian bear on a unicycle wearing a pink tutu and guide it through rings of fire without providing as much entertainment value as I do by trying to say even the simplest of Chinese names.

“Oh, no teacher,” she laughs politely, with the soft, trebly giggle of a schoolgirl from an anime cartoon.  ”It is Liqiu.”

I hear no difference in tones, of course.  I never do.  Once I spent five minutes yelling the same four syllables– “Chong Qing Da Xue,” the name of my university — to a taxi cab driver using every possible combination of tones and emphases I could come up with.  Eventually a young student with some knowledge of English approached me as I stood there, practically in tears, and I explained to him where I wanted to go.  ”Chong Qing Da Xue” he casually said to the driver, who immediately nodded and waved me in.  China is not an easy place to live.

“Liiiiii-CHEW,” I repeat, dragging out the syllables and playing with tones.  To emphasize what I’m attempting to do, I use my hands to effetely draw which tones I’m attempting — a quick rise of my right hand into the air like a salute for “Li” followed by a U-shaped motion as though I’m mimicking a roller-coaster for the “qiu.”  There are far less combinations of letters used to create distinct syllables in Chinese than there are in most languages, including English.  This is compensated for, however, by the usage of a variety of tones attached to each syllable that create entirely new meanings.  Possibly the most famous teaching example is with the syllable ‘ma’.  For instance:

• mā – the bar over the syllable ‘ma’ calls for the neutral tone.  ”Maaaaaaa”.  No rise or fall in the speaking of the word.  Like this, it means, easily enough, “mother”
• má – the rising tone.  Start low, and go up an octave or two while pronouncing it.  ”maAAAAA“.  In this case, the meaning is “hemp.”
• mÇŽ – this tone drops, then rises.  ”MAaaAAAA“.  Probably the hardest tone, considering how close it sounds to untrained ears to the standard rising tone.  Keep in mind that each of these syllables are spoken so quickly that the tone changes are almost imperceptible to those not well-trained to recognize them.  I was not well-trained to recognize them.  The “ma” here means “horse.”
• mà – a sharply dropping tone, blasted out like an imperative.  ”MA!”  Probably the easiest to recognize.  In this case, it is a verb meaning “to scold”.

In addition to basketball courts and soccer fields, you can still spot a few ping-pong parks.

To my ears, the changes from tone to tone is almost non-existent.  To the Chinese, though, the difference is as stark as 媽, 麻, 馬 and 罵 (the Chinese characters for the above example).  Of course, this simple lesson ignores the fact that each different pronunciation of “ma” has multiple meanings beyond the four above.  Depending on the various tones, “ma” can also mean dragonfly, numb, toad, leprosy, mammoth, agate, morphine, a weight, pile, ant, curse, mark, headboard, sacrifice to the god of war or grasshopper.  Oh yeah: it’s also the Chinese spoken equivalent of a question mark.  Any sentence can be turned into a question by tagging “ma” onto the end.  Thus, should your Chinese girlfriend say:

“WÇ’ pàng”

She is stating “I am fat,” at which point you should of course console her and insist that this is not the case.  Whereas if she should say:

“WÇ’ pàng ma”

She is now asking “Am I fat?” to which, like their American counterparts, there is no acceptable answer and you should leave forthwith.

Back in class, my slaughtering of Liqiu’s name has the class in hysterics.  It’s good for waking and invigorating the classroom, but poor for my overall self-esteem.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, teacher.  You said a funny thing!”

“‘Liqiu’ is funny?”  

Uncontrollable peals of laughter erupt once again.

“When you say it this way, it is wrong.  It means something very different and is funny.”

“What does it mean?  Why is it funny?”

“Oh.  I think it would not translate into English.”

Me with two of my African students. By teaching them Masters levels courses, I assured them that, upon passing, they would have higher level degrees than I myself have.

Other students, particularly those with extensive English training, have “English names” they would rather be called.  These names were typically picked early on in their English studies, and represent what they thought were the best options in naming that the English language had to offer.  For some reason, girls often had names that typically go well with the stripping profession.  I had several girls named Candy, a Karma, a Brandy, two Desirees, two Jasmines, a Destiny and a Mercedes.  Boys were a bit less classy, opting instead to go with the name of pop culture icons.  Both Superman and Batman attended my Requirements Engineering course, for instance.  But my favorite male name came from a gawky young man that always wore the same purple shirt and sat in the back row, despite being one of my more talkative students.

“What’s your name,” I asked him, after he’d already participated in class with me on multiple occasions.

For the purpose of this story, I’ll type out his responses phonetically, and hope that it doesn’t look too much like I’m making fun of the Chinese:

“You wan’ … Een-grish o Chi-nee-seh?”

“It’s up to you!  Do you have an English name you want to use?”

“Yes-uh.  My … Een-grish is Nih-go-la-gayjh!”

“Hmm.  I don’t actually recognize that English name.”

“Nih-go-lah-GAYJH.  Yes.”

“Are you sure it’s an English name?”

“Very famous Holly-Wood!”

“Wait.  Are you saying ‘Nicolas Cage’?”

“Yes!” he says excitedly.  ”Nigolagayjh!!”

“Ahh, so you want me to call you Nicolas, then?  Got it.”

“No!”  He pauses and stares at me for a second, confused.  ”Nigolagayjh.”

“You want me to call you ‘Nicolas Cage’?”

“Yes.”

One of many basketball courts spread throughout Chongqing University's campuses

And that is how I spent the next four months teaching software engineering to Nicolas Cage.

Back in my Advanced Object Oriented class, Liqiu is ready to actually explain what the term “Object-Oriented” means to her; the definition reads like something lifted directly from a textbook, but she doesn’t seem to be reading from any book.  She also never misses a single class, sits up front every day, gets 100′s on every test and confides to the Irish foreign expert that teaches another class that she has an intense crush on me.  At the end of the year, when I pass out teacher evaluation forms asking what my weaknesses are and what are my strengths, her answers are, respectively, “none” and “so very handsome!”  Liqiu is my favorite student.

The girl sitting to her right, who I am only too glad to call Candy instead of risking the massacre of another Chinese name, responds to my follow-up question about the term “Inheritance,” and how it fits into the Object-Oriented methodology.  At the previous, introductory class, I spent about ten powerpoint slides going over the concept, so it should, theoretically, be an easy question.  She spars with the English like it’s a unfairly experienced kung-fu partner, but the terse, final response is serviceable enough that I shower her in praise as a means of pleasant encouragement.

“Yes, Candy!  Inheritance is when one class takes things from another!  Good, good!  Excellent even!  Oh sweet sweet Candy!”  

She beams up at me, wearing my compliment about her like a warm and fashionable new sweater, despite the sweltering temperature in the classroom.  This might actually work, I think.  I can do this!  O Captain, my Captain!  

“Ok, a hard one now.  It is a very long word, but I talked about the word “Polymorphism” in the last class.  Can someone try and explain this word?”

“Polymorphism” stands alone on the screen above them like an accusation, its dark text burning its way through a sea of fearful eyes.  The quiet that greets me at this request is powerful enough to halt mythical tigers from leaping across giant gorges.  Even the reliable hand of Liqiu fails to rise to the heavens in confident exaltation as the five clunky western syllables trudge through the vast, murky air of the classroom.

“Anyone even want to try?  Anyone?”

No one does.  At all.  No one wants to be there.  A few of them may actually be wishing me bodily harm.

These bizarre exercise contraptions are strategically placed around campus, and are manned at any time by either the health-conscious elderly or their infant wards

“OK.  So I think they want me to teach you not only so you learn software engineering, but also so you can practice English.  So really, I just want any student to try to talk to me about this.  It is practice.  You get in no trouble if you are wrong.  You can say anything!  So if no one will try, I will pick one of you.  But it will be OK, I promise!  It will be fun.”  With that last sentence, I have now established myself as a shameless liar.

This recent proclamation seems to evoke two distinct reactions: those that stare at me fearfully understood my veiled threat.  Those that are casually nonplussed did not.

“Alright then, how about you,” I say, pointing at a male student in the second row wearing a bright orange shirt, eyes glazed over from a subtle mixture of boredom, confusion and teenage hormones.

“Can you tell me anything about ‘Pol-ee-mor-phism’?”

His eyes widen a bit, suddenly aware that the attention of a frighteningly tall laowai teacher and 99 fellow students are focused entirely on him.  In shock, he turns to either side, then behind.  Surely Teacher speaks to another!

“No no,” I tell him, attempting to ease at least a little of his confusion.

“I’m asking you, in the orange shirt.”

He swallows uncomfortably and then sits up slightly, accepting his fate as an unwilling sacrifice.  Slowly, English-shaped words begin to escape his mouth like overweight cattle stubbornly resisting being herded.

“I … sorry … teacher.  I … no … know ……… ‘or-ange’.”

And with that final, stammered word, my fate here as an effective teacher of software engineering is soundly decided.

“Well if you don’t know ‘orange,’ I guess it’s safe to say you don’t know ‘polymorphism’!”

The statement is both depressing and hilarious to me, but I concentrate on the latter and immediately laugh out loud to the large group of students.  This time, no one laughs along with me.  Only nine months to go…

Freedom of Speech

Over a lunch of hoguo (Sichuan hot pot, where a vat of sizzling oil sits between my co-worker and me, unhealthily deep frying a rich mix of beef, pork, potatoes and lotus root), my Irish counterpart gives me a quick tutorial in the do’s and dont’s of casual conversation with students.  He’s been teaching here in China for five years now, so I figure his information is probably legitimate enough to keep me out of any awkward foreign prison.

“You can talk about whatever you want with the students, really.  Preaching any kind of religion is strongly frowned on, but they’re pretty open to talking about anything else.”

A particularly large serving of Chongqing hoguo (hot pot)

“What about ‘The Three Ts’?  I was warned to avoid those.”

“Eh?”

“Oh.  I thought that was a semi-official term.  But you know, ‘Tibet’, ‘Taiwan’ and ‘Tiananmen’.”

“Well, you can talk about all of those things, but keep in mind that the students have a very different perspective on those things than you do.  Tibet and Taiwan have, in their eyes, always been and always wanted to be a part of China.  The Dalai Lama or the Taiwanese leaders are small, insignificant separatist groups with presumably very little backing.  And Tiananmen?  Try doing a search on it on google.”

At home, I nervously type the nine letters into my keyboard, already knowing from several warnings that my every keystroke is logged and analyzed by a team of government officials.  I promise myself that this will be a harmless, one-time search through the Internet’s vast reserves of images.  Photos pop up immediately of the iconic square, bright and colorful, under the watchful eye of large banners of Chairman Mao.  Parades, babies, smiles and sunshine.  The central square in downtown Beijing at its best and most hopeful.  Page after optimistic page of a thriving and vibrant city square.

To compare, I load up a small VPN program that costs more to use per year than the Internet service itself, but is a necessity for almost all of the foreigners here.  What the Virtual Private Network service allows me to do, basically, is connect to another computer in London, or Sydney or Washington, and use that machine to bring up any website I wish to peruse.  Then I view those pages as though I were on those foreign computers, rather than on my strongly quarantined machine here in Chongqing.

All of these workarounds are sadly necessary due to The Great Firewall of China (TGFOC), the government’s attempt at fully maintaining control of what the citizens can and cannot access.  It’s supposedly the most intense country-wide filter of the Internet in the world, and has over 10,000 employees regulating what the people are reading at any given moment in real-time.  Sites that have already been given a thumbs-down are now permanently blocked across all of China.  Other sites are regularly scanned for new material, just to make sure nothing subversive is sneaked in.

Regularly searching for software terms as my job forces me to do, I’m constantly aware of when one of my search entries is something new and exciting to TGFOC.  Take for example a search for “horizontal prototyping,” which clearly must not be a popular pasttime in China — the page of results turns normally in my browser, but any attempt to access those results yields an error page as though my Internet connection is on the fritz.  But kosher, vanilla searches for words like, say, “kosher” or “vanilla” still speed through with no difficulty.

As my curiosity about “horizontal prototyping” grows boundlessly, I attempt to use the magical, entertaining powers of the Internet to distract me from my own impatience, as it’s done since 1995.  Facebook’s always good for a laugh, right?  Not in China!  Back in 2009, some protesters in Ürümqi (no idea how that one’s pronounced) used Facebook to plan out the protest and it was curtains from that point on for the social networking site in the Middle Kingdom.  Google “Pages” — a simple Google offering for designing simple webpages — seemed like an easy way to create online syllabuses and post class materials to my students.  It worked splendidly for the first two weeks of class; it was added to the ban list for the remaining 38 weeks.  Even wholesome, reliable pornography, possibly the primary reason for the Internet’s existence, can be incredibly difficult to find here, despite there being at least 20 obvious brothels in immediate walking distance of my dorm.

Foreign students gathered at A Taste of Singapore for one of my quiz nights.

Close to ten minutes later, a nameless bureaucrat has apparently decided that “horizontal prototyping” does not seem imminently threatening to China, and suddenly my page of google results click through unhindered.  Riveting!  I was just getting into that game of “Farmville” (as of 2009, the most popular online game in China, which isn’t, I guess, that surprising for an agrarian society).  Luckily my upcoming search for “vertical prototyping” is about to cause another ten minute drought in my productivity.

And so this VPN line to a shady, unremarkable computer in London is absolutely necessary.  It slows down the general speed of the Internet drastically, but at least it provides a lifeline to the world wide web as I know and love it.  Sure enough, search google images for the term “tiananmen” from a London computer and the screen immediately fills with a platoon of tanks bearing down on solitary individuals, broken up by the occasional cluster of bloody bodies.

Topics in class do tend to stray from things related to software engineering on a semi-regular basis, though; it’s fairly difficult to hold the attention of a large group of people that speak a different language from you for close to two hours with such dry material as ‘polymorphism’ and different styles of ‘prototyping.’  The students get more animated when discussing politics and world affairs, anyway.  They ask me about life in America, which I am only too happy to share. Information from the students about themselves is a bit more difficult to get out of them.

“So what will you all be doing this weekend?” I attempt to pry out of them.

“Teacher, we will be studying,” says Karma.

“All of you?  All the time?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying this because I am a teacher and you think it is what I want to hear?  Because you can tell me the truth!  You must be doing something fun this weekend, right?”

“Teacher, we have so many classes and so much work to do.  I think I will study for the entire weekend.  We must.”

“No breaks at all?  Not even an hour or two?  Maybe go to a park, or see a movie?  Maybe a small party even?”

“No parties, teacher, but… maybe…” says Desiree nervously.

“Yes?”

“If I have time, some friends and I will get together…”

“Excellent!”

“At the library!”

“Oh.”

“Sometimes we will watch television together on a computer there.  It is very fun!”

“Yeah, you guys rage…”

While the life of the average Chinese student doesn’t seem particularly fun, they explain that it’s a necessity to do perfectly in classes now, but the first few years post-college once they’ve achieved degrees tend to make up for lost time.  Go out to any club in the central district and there are hordes of young Chinese packing the clubs and vomiting profusely (young Chinese clubbers seem particularly bad at holding their alcohol) until dawn.  But for now, fun times are relegated to brief group visits to the library.

One of the more popular recurring topics is basketball, which has in less than a decade, become the number one sport in China.  One Yao Ming and suddenly the NBA gets over a billion new fans.  And there’s no doubt that the NBA is beloved — There are official seaweed chips of the NBA.  I tried the official pineapple beer of the NBA (the logo was real, but for some reason I’m skeptical), and then I spit into the sink and promptly never tried it again.  There seemed to be two separate channels displaying NBA games from throughout history, 24 hours a day.  On the way from my apartment to class, I pass no less than three outdoor basketball courts, each featuring anywhere from eight to 20 courts.

“Who is your favorite player,” I ask.  ”Yao Ming?”

The class seems to laugh at me derisively as a whole.  The consensus seems to be “No, we do not like Yao Ming.”

“I like Yao Ming.  But he is so tall.  And most Chinese people I meet, well, they are much shorter than me…”

The English speakers in class pause momentarily to take in this random statement, before Superman speaks up: “Teacher, China has one and half billion people.  There has to be one tall, right?”

I cannot argue with this.  ”So who are your favorite players?”

A surprising amount seem to like Allen Iverson, though he’s clearly not a bad choice.  One boy yells out “Kobe!” and the class erupts in a cacophony of English and Chinese exclamations.  It seems Kobe is quite beloved in China.

“Oh Kobe!” says Destiny.  ”He so beautiful.  I want to marry him!”

Without hesitation, Batman practically yells back at her in a genuinely perplexed tone: “How could you marry Kobe?  At night, all you would see are his eyes and teeth!”

She, and many of the other girls, pause to consider this while I consider explaining the impropriety of this statement.  In the end, I keep silent.

The students are only too happy to talk about the government, and while the talk is almost entirely positive, there’s an awareness to things I hadn’t expected.  For instance, Mao: Here’s a guy whose policies almost wiped out thousands of years of Chinese culture and did wipe out millions of his own people. I don’t offer this harsh perspective, but I do ask if he’s as popular as his ubiquitous presence on the money, in every park and public building and on clothing would make one assume.

“Teacher, it is known that Mao made some mistakes, but he did much more good.  We know that some rules are very strong here, and maybe there is not the freedom to do what people in America can do.  But in China, people are happy with the government because for Chinese people, this is the best that life has ever been.  Our grandparents remember not having food to eat and have always been so poor.  But now, there is much prosperity.  So I think people respect our government, even when they do things we might not like, because life is so good for us now.”

My neighbor’s Chinese wife told me a story about how her father’s life was systematically destroyed in almost every possible way after getting caught gambling.  A local friend explained why dogs, cats and the strangest and scariest parts of animals that I normally consider ‘food’ are still regular far in many restaurants: When millions of people starve, the definition of “food” tends to stretch a bit.  With such a horrendous recent past, the quote above explains a lot about what would otherwise seem like blind faith in a not always trustworthy government.  And I can’t really argue with it.

The Foreign Experts’ Administrative Coordinator

It was a unique, unexpected and timely job offer, received between hangovers and saddle sores in Cuzco, Peru.  Let us fly you to sunny (at least ten days per year!) Chongqing, China, O American Software Engineer.  There, you will instruct the next generation using your vaunted coding prowess which you have surely acquired from many years of revered capitalist field work.  Lodging, utilities and a massive paycheck (at least by local standards) will be provided.  Vacation days out the yin-yang!  (which, of course, means something completely different over there, yet still works within the context of this sentence).

An important notice (theoretically), posted inside the elevator of the foreign teachers' dormitory. From the three lines at the bottom, it's clear that most of the foreign teachers did not understand its content.

With little expectation of a response, I read a paraphrased variation of the above while slumped over at a public internet terminal in my Peruvian hostel, and blasted out an only mildly embellished resume electronically back to China, only to discover within the hour that paperwork was already being drafted for my work visa.  Cut to four months later, and the soft, wispy smog clears around Huang Yang, my steadfast employer, as he greets me just outside the gates of Chongqing International Airport.  There’s an innocence to his exuberant smile that would look hopeful and precious on the face of a child or puppy, but grants the grown man a look of exaggerated simplicity one could potentially mistake for feeble-mindedness.

Such is not the case, though.  When necessary, Huang Yang is indeed a shrewd and serious man, and I would later witness his dissatisfaction with other teachers and be glad not to be caught up in the path of his wrath. But generally I am solely the beneficiary of those simple, blank stares and overly enthusiastic smiles.  I am the lone American “foreign expert” in his employ and the supposed feather in the cap of Chongqing University’s roster of international teachers.  It is not that Huang Yong is good-natured, though that he may be; that hazy smile of his is a brilliant defense mechanism to be delivered in tandem with any sort of unfortunate news, which a neophyte instructor such as myself is sure to be receiving on a regular basis.

For instance, allow me to recount a conversation from my first day in Chongqing, in the close quarters of Huang Yong’s office where he has just lit a cigarette.  Judging from the brownish-yellow build-up on his teeth, it is not the first and I nervously note that the windows are sealed, trapping the both of us in close quarters as the smoke builds up to a soft smog to match the weather outdoors.

In many ways, modern China is like America in the 1950′s.  They’re going through unprecedented growth in almost all sectors represented by a growing middle class, they’re fiercely patriotic and they love cigarettes.  Upon a visit later in the year to Chongqing’s new hospital, I was amazed to find people smoking in the hallways, surrounded by what would otherwise be one of the nicer hospitals I’d ever visited.

Huang Yong brings something up on the computer and calls me over to examine it.  ”Here is your schedule,” he tells me, excitedly.  Questions arise almost immediately.  Five classes, but only one involving direct lessons in computer programming?

“Software Systems Design.  Systems Architecture.  Advanced Object-Oriented Principles.  Requirements Engineering.  Ah, here — Introduction to C++.  You have me listed for these five classes, but only one of them is the C++ class you told me that I would be teaching in the job description…”

“Yes, those are your classes,” he affirms, not acknowledging the heavy hint of a question I’d layered into my statement.  His smile is bright and expectant, clearly beaming from what he either believes to be extremely good news or terrifyingly bad news.  I smile back at him, doing my best to not let on that I perceive it as the latter.

“It’s just… I came here because the job description said you wanted someone that worked in C++ to teach C++.  Software Systems Design?  I don’t really even know what that means..?”

Though he doesn’t respond vocally, his eyes widen a bit, as though to say “I acknowledge that you have just spoken, but you have not provided me with enough material for a retort, so please continue speaking.”  The smile is larger than before, and oddly hypnotizing, which is typically a job left to the eyes.

“Maybe… Do you have a syllabus?  Or something that describes the class, so that I know what should be covered?”

At that, his eyes grow to maximum wideness in excitement as he exclaims:

“Ah, that is the good news.  YOU get to write syllabus.”

“Oh.  Good news.  Yes.  Also, most of these classes have ‘(M)’ written next to their title, see?  What does this mean?”

“Those are Masters level courses.  You will teach the Africans.”

A whole stack of interesting surprises piled on all at once.  It seems that only some of my classes will be taught to Chinese students; the others will be to foreign students from Ethiopia, Togo, Benin, Mauritania, Madagascar and elsewhere in Africa that have come to Chongqing to seek their Masters degrees.  A common source of irritation over the next year would stem from telling people I taught African students only to get the response “Uhhh, you know Africa’s a continent and not a country, right?”  Yes, smartass, I know this.  I just do not feel like listing off 14 countries every time I try to describe who I teach.  Regardless, nothing about the job description mentioned need of a certificate of higher learning, but suddenly I’m filled with a nervous sense of guilt as I unload my shame to Huang Yong.

“I am afraid that I do not have a Masters Degree.  I sent copies of my diploma to you — I thought you knew…”

“Oh, is fine,” he smiles.  ”You do not need Masters.  You are a foreign expert.”

My title has apparently granted me a reprieve from all other factors, despite my not having precisely earned the title in any way yet.

“I don’t need a Masters to teach Masters level courses?”

He simply smiles back at me with an almost imperceptible shrug.  This is not something of importance.

“But… ‘Software Systems Design.’  Could I at least see the book I am to use for this class?”

At this, his face seems to grow simply to contain the beaming smile that emanates from it.  Under its power, my head starts to grow light and fuzzy.

“Also good news!” he exclaims.  ”YOU–”

“–I get to pick the books.  Riiiight.  Great.  Are there even English books here at the school?”

For the first time since our conversation, his smile seems to dampen a little.  Perhaps it’s dropped down to an eight, on the standard scale of one to ten.

“Not very many English books here.  But you can pick book online and I will get them for you.  You give me the names of the books.  Is no problem.”  The closing expression is one that I would hear many times over the course of the year

“So I get to write the syllabus and pick the books.  Even though I have never taken or heard of these classes, you want me to fully design them?”

The smile is back in full force.  Is this not fantastic news?

“Yes!  You will do very well.”

A high-tech screen sits affixed to the main administration building at Chongqing University, where my office sits upon the 10th floor. When it works, the screen displays interesting videos and images related to Chongqing University's rising global prominence. When it doesn't work, it basically just displays a crash notice like this one all day. I always wondered why no one turned the screen off on these occasions, but no one seemed to mind...

I’m doubtful, but put on a confident face.  I’m doing this for America.  After several hours of intense research of different tomes that seems as though they might apply to the classes that I am teaching for which I still have nothing more than names.  He writes back immediately to give me a thumbs-up — I will be alerted immediately as soon as the books arrive.  Flash forward to a week before my class is scheduled to begin:

“Hello Huang!  I really need those books to prepare my syllabus and lesson plans.  I am getting pretty nervous.”

“No need to be nervous.  You will be fine!”

His smile is dizzyingly strong.  Maybe all will be well…

“You have the books, though, right?”

“No.  No, I have no books.  Soon!”

The day before class:

“Huang Yong, I am sorry to come by again, but I’m kind of freaking out.  You have the books, right?”

“Ah.  They still are not here.  No.  No…”

His smile is still cheerful, but as I am now an expert of sorts, I can sense that something is off.

“It is for my students also.  I cannot assign them to read without books.”

“Yes,” he nods, more as an acknowledgement that I have spoken more than as an acknowledgement about anything I have said.

A small saucepan and cutting board purchased from the local Trust-Mart (a miniature Chinese version of Wal-Mart). They are flimsy, but cheap enough that this doesn't bother me. What DOES bother me are the stickers that are affixed to the sides so strongly that they are impossible to remove, despite scrubbing, soaking and scraping.

“So, what should I do?”

He seems confused by the fact that I am having difficulty with this, but bears with me out of apparent politeness.

“Tomorrow is introduction.  No need for books.  Say hello.  Talk about class!” he smiles.

The combined efforts of google, wikipedia and youporn have given me less than a page’s worth of riveting information to impart upon these foreign scholars, and tomorrow I will be lecturing them for two hours.  Yet I get through it, somehow.  It’s uncertain whether my students appreciate being spoon-fed two hours of bullshit in lieu of actual erudition, but they seem to accept it silently; most of them have to accept it silently, as they speak almost no English.  But more on that later.  A week passes like this, and then another.

“Huang Yong.  I am sorry to complain to you, but this is terrible.  I have no books.  Students have no books.  Please tell me you have them now!”

“Ah, no.  The books–” he says, pausing as if to give his next point a bit more moxie, “–They are not here!  I checked, and we cannot get the books.”

I stare back with a slight grin, using all the energy and willpower within me to maintain composure while my eyes shoot beams of rage and madness at that unflappable yellow-toothed grin of his.  At once I sense that, like me, he is caught up in a large and generally inefficient machine that typically means well but disappoints more often than not.

“But..” I stammer, breaking down before him.  ”I need.. the students need books.  We all need them.  Books.  I mean, how can I teach Software Design Analysis–”

“You mean ‘Software Systems Design?’”

“Yes.  That.  Right.  How can I teach without books?”

His smile takes on a Buddha-like calmness as he delivers what is, in his mind at least, a perfect solution, and one that I will surely be pleased to hear: “Just use Internet.”

Not acknowledging this statement in any way, he adds an addendum just to make sure I truly understand the majesty of this explanation: “All information is on Internet.”

And with that, he forms an impossibly optimistic grin that is positively beaming at me.  How can there be doubt in my heart in the presence of such a smile?  All information really is on the Internet.  Classes resume the next day, not with books, experience or traditional knowledge, but with all the material google can provide me.  Sometimes, a question is asked to which I do not know the answer, but this is not a problem.  Sometimes, the answer to the hardest questions in life can be answered with a smile.

University-Appointed Tourguides to this Strange New World

Wei, the first of several female graduation assistants assigned to my service is already waiting outside the door of Huang Yong’s office for our meeting to conclude.  I’m not certain if Wei is her first or last name or if it matters or if my intonation is correct or if it is what anyone else in the world calls her.

Wei and I, under the protective shade of the ubiquitous all-purpose Chinese umbrella. Note festive pirates in background.

“Wei?” I ask.  ”Is that right?  I call you Wei?”

“Is Ok,” she responds quietly, looking down.  I’ve determined that the term “OK” might be the most universally used English phrase in the world.  In this case, I take it to mean “No, but it’s probably as close as you’re going to get, so let’s just go with it, laowai.”  Laowai is the Chinese equivalent of “gringo,” though outside of the worst tourist spots, it isn’t typically spoken with a derogatory tone.  Over the course of the year, I will hear this word many times.

As to why my well educated, short-term servants are always female, I quickly dismiss any ideas that I am being set up with potential lovers as all of them appear too intimidated by me (bordering at times on mortal fear) to succumb to any of my flirtations.  But Chinese is a strange and unfathomable language, and these shy, frail local women all speak it fluently, so my life is quite literally in their hands.

For the first month or two, they help me shop, buy a phone, set up my cable and internet, figure out mass transit, give me tips on etiquette and local customs and generally ease my way into the weird and wonderful world that is China.  Wei is mine for the afternoon, and I’m told we are to go on a brief tour of the city as well as stock up my home with basic needs I would otherwise be too overwhelmed to purchase on my own. Wei is overly polite and has a difficult time making eye contact with me, despite my generally pleasant demeanor and some almost needy attempts on my part at making banter.

The outside air is sweltering, with a palpable, damp mass to it that feels uncomfortably grippable at times.  The sky is a uniform, grey-ish blue with no hints of “normal” bulbous clouds or even general atmospheric health, and I feel for all the children of Chongqing that never got to look up and create shapes from the billows above.  As one of China’s hottest cities, Chongqing’s ancient accolade of being a member of China’s “Three Furnaces” (the other two hotspots being Wuhan and Nanjing) is well deserved.

Easing them from the intensity of this heat, Chongqing men roll their shirts up from the bottoms, exposing much of their clammy waists and stomachs.  How much gut is exposed seems to be directly proportional to their stomach size; fat men amble down the streets with bulging, sweaty bellies protruding for all to see like hard earned trophies.  At a cafe once, one of these stomachs came into contact with the side of my bare arm, and I fought hard to keep the contents of my own stomach in place as our stale sweat briefly mingled.

An example of beautiful Chongqing weather from a bridge over the Yellow River. In all fairness, this was a particularly bad day. However, there were worse days as well -- On one occasion, I crossed this river and couldn't see buildings on either shore from the middle of the bridge. Yechh.

Hordes of women clog the sidewalks with cheap umbrellas blocking out the sun, and the umbrellas blend together as one, forming a single canopy that hovers approximately six feet above the ground — just above the heads of 99% of the population here in Chongqing and directly at eye level with me.  The umbrellas are ubiquitous in Chongqing year-round.  They are used on sunny days to protect the fair-skinned girls, for whom a light complexion is so important that skin-bleaching products, regardless of health hazards, are still all the rage here.  And on rainy days (read: “every other day”), they are used for their more traditional purpose.  On either day, I am barraged with a never-ending assault of umbrella tines at or near my eye level.  Sunglasses are necessary protection here, though more from the threat of umbrella assault than from the muted, hazy sun.

“There’s lots of pollution in Chongqing,” I state, with just a hint of a question, staring up at the unwelcoming, gloomy sky above.

“Is fog.  Chongqing always foggy.”

This is not entirely inaccurate.  In World War II, Chongqing (then known as “Chungking”) became the capital of China after most of the country’s eastern territory was gobbled up by the Japanese.  Hidden within a valley, Chongqing was seen as the perfect spot for a base of operations, since its location kept it regularly cloaked in a bed of clouds.  But the overcast haze that hangs over the city now doesn’t match the color or character of any natural clouds I’ve known to have existed before.

Wei’s phone rings a familiar song and after she engages in a short, terse conversation in Chinese with the person on the other end, I joke with her about the ironic choice of ringtones.

“You know this song on your phone?  It is called ‘Winter Wonderland’.  This song is about winter and cold and snow.  Isn’t this funny?”

“I do not know.”

“No, I mean.  The song says it is so cold out, but here now in Chongqing, it is hot, right?  Very hot.  That’s funny!”

“Yes.  This is… very funny I think.”

The Jiefangbei clock tower for which this region of town is named. It's in the center of the cultural hub of Chongqing and was erected in 1950 to commemorate the communist takeover of China. Originally the largest structure in the area, fifty years later it's dwarfed by every building surrounding it.

Wei is not the last person I will meet here who acknowledges what I believe to be humor without even a hint of smile. On the phone was a friend that wants to meet us for tea near the city’s cultural center, Jiefangbei (pronounced, by me at least, “JAY-fong-BAY”), where the Yangtze River, so similar in name to my own, meets the Yellow River.  From the start, I’m disheartened by the fact that the Yangtze goes by a different name in China: Chang Jiang, meaning, appropriately enough, “Long River.”  It is the longest river in China, after all.  Apparently, “Yangtze” was the name of a local structure or port outside of Shanghai that some white foreigner was mistaken for pointing at whilst attempting to discern what the locals called the river.  The misnomer stuck.

Nearly a fleet of permanently docked riverboats perch along the banks where the two rivers meet, offering dining and entertainment at varying levels of quality.  The lower decks are loud with the combined sounds from a kitchen that seems too busy for the otherwise empty vessel and an engine room that seems unnecessary for a permanently docked riverboat.  The smell of seafood and brine is palpable, but the muggy air at least smells fresher on the top deck where we’re seated, and we’re given a pristine view of the convergence of water bodies below us.

The Yellow River, which is actually more of a dark green color, slowly churns its way into the fast-moving, milky brown waters of the Yangtze until it is dissolved and the two become one. Even with the river breeze, the air is thick and oppressive here, but with the dearth of other customers on the boat, each of us is granted our own industrial strength fan to stave off the heat.  The electrical fans are old and loud, and they make the already choppy conversation between us even more strained, but the broiling alternative is far worse.

Tea is brought to us with a wide assortment of strange grasses and flowers hovering in a clump at the bottom of the glass like fallen leaves caught in a pool filter.  Mine has been picked specifically by Wei and looks to be the most exotic (is that a dandelion?), though tastes no different to my simple pallet than generic packet teas I’ve sampled in the past.  While we drink, they share their favorite music with me via cell phone speakers; the upbeat, nasal Sino-Pop is painful at times for me to listen to, but probably no more so than lots of modern Western teeny-bopper music offerings would be.

Around us, the clustered buildings of this little known mega-city rise up and out and beyond from the riverbanks like a petri dish experiment gone wild.  Depending on where one draws its boundaries, Chongqing contains between ten and 32 million bustling people, and the metropolitan expanse explodes outward in every direction, dwarfing nearly every city I’ve ever visited thus far.  Immune to western views on tackiness, the skyline shimmers each night with flashing lights and colors on the buildings that create a spectacle similar to a city-sized 80′s video arcade decked out in Christmas lights.  The daytime view, while still somewhat daunting, is a bit more serene, though I point out to the girls how prolifically each building seems to be covered in compact Chinese characters.

Barges going down the Yangtze. The funky looking building on the right on the opposite bank is the fairly modern Chongqing Opera House

“Can you actually read that?  Those letters there–”

I point at four characters erected at the top of a particularly boxy skyscraper far in the distance that, to me, look like blurry white smudges.

“Of course.  It is Chinese.  And we are Chinese.  We learn these letters when we are very small.  It is no problem.”

“No, but I mean… They’re so far away, but each character has so many lines and boxes and squiggles.  It’s…  Let me explain a different way.  In English, letters like ‘D’ and ‘O,’ or ‘N’ and ‘H’ are similar.  So from far away, sometimes it is hard to tell these letters apart, even though they are simple.  I would think Chinese characters can also be mixed up from far away.”

“No, this does not happen.  I think that Chinese is a very good language and this is another reason why.”  She stares at me and it’s clear that this is as precise as her explanation will be.

“Oh.  Ok, then.”

Over the course of a long afternoon, the pair take me through a “tourist” market (I am the only non-Chinese visitor), a grocery store (where I pick up basic home supplies, like my very own wok) and a traditional style luncheonette.  The kitchen at the restaurant is only separated from the diminutive dining area by a small ceramic barrier, and the massive stove top only adds to the already stifling heat inside.  The walls, floors, tables and staff could all equally be described as dingy, but the flames licking nearly a foot up the sides of the large wok at least leads me to believe that no contaminant in any of the ingredients could possibly survive the cooking process.

Chinese food is typically flash-cooked over intense heat, with most meat dishes being fully prepared in under two minutes.  The quick method of wok frying is much to my liking and I’m pleased to see that the gas stove in my apartment kicks out similarly large flames unlike any I’ve ever cooked with before, which is useful, if a bit dangerous.  The downside to this is that the “low” setting on the stove is actually the western equivalent of “medium high,” making simmering all but impossible without manually holding the saucepan several inches above the fire.  Like most Chinese kitchens, mine also lacks an oven, as baking (without steam, at least) has only just caught on in China recently.

When asked by the girls whether I like spicy food or not, I answer in favor of it but the girls still warn me that my dish may be too fierce to manage.  The lamb that was ordered for me comes out in a small, rectangular metal dish with a small fire below it to maintain the heat.  The tingling of the fresh Sichuan peppers is a new sensation for my mouth, but it is not unpleasant, and I’ve had far spicier offerings in the past.  Like most Chinese food, the meat and vegetables have already been cut into bite-sized pieces; Chinese silverware is a simple set of chopsticks, and finely chopped food eliminates any need for knives to be kept along the standard place settings.

Wei's attractive (though similarly shy) friend, me and Wei, at the tourist market. I bought a lot of strange food here, though I only ended up eating a small fraction of it. None of it was particularly bad, though only a few things could've really been described as "good".

Another question I’ve always had about using chopsticks: How does one eat the tiny, elusive grains of rice, so omnipresent here in China, with those thin wooden sticks?  The answer, though seemingly unrefined, is fairly obvious: the bowl of rice is held aloft near one’s mouth, as the sticks work in unison, shoveling large clusters of rice inwards to compliment the meal.  Spoons seem to be available when needed, but it seems they are rarely used. Hard food in soup is eaten with chopsticks; the rest is quaffed from the bowl like a fine, savory tea.

Biting into a piece of lamb, I quickly discover the morsel is primarily made of bone and gristle.  It’s an unpleasant surprise, and I try to disguise my shock and extricate the gritty artifact from my mouth without either of the girls noticing, spitting it suavely into my small paper napkin.  If they notice, neither girl says a word, but I quickly find that the next bite, while meatier, still contains a fair bit of un-digestible mass.  Giving up on propriety entirely, I spit the sticky brown clump into my hand and mash it casually against the edge of my plate.

“Sorry,” I say sheepishly, “there was bone.  You don’t eat that here, do you?”

“No, it is ok.  Most meat have the bone in it.  You do not eat this.”

“Yes, but I do not know where to put this–” I say, pointing at the lump of almost-food perched along the side of my plate.

“Oh, you can put this on the floor.”  As if to demonstrate, she removes a small piece of sinewy mass from her mouth that I hadn’t even realized was there, and drops it softly onto the floor at her feet.  ”They will clean.  Also you can put on the table.  It’s ok.  No problem,” she smiles.

“Wait a minute,” I say, removing a chunk that my teeth had just recently stripped bare.  ”You’re saying it’s ok for me to do this?”  I place the chewed-up mess between my fingers and hold it aloft dramatically, before insouciantly dropping the moist chunk onto the dirty floor below.

“Yes, this is fine.”

“Wait,” I say, quickly chewing on another piece of the meat which is, by the way, succulent and filled with flavor.  Once I ascertain that there’s little benefit to keeping the used morsel in my mouth any longer, I spit it into my hand in preparation.  ”What about this?”  As though the used meat fills me with shame and disgust, I fling it low against the wall near me, where it silently bounces off and settles onto the ground.”

Barge restaurants and tour boats, lined up by Chaotianmen dock near where the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers meet

“That is fine also,” I am told. “You should not throw at other person though,” warns the second girl. “Yes, that is not a good thing to do.”

“Oh.  Damn.”  I stare down with a look of exaggerated dissatisfaction upon hearing this news.  I’ve gotten no laughter from these girls all day, so clearly this faux disappointment will be similarly confusing to them, but I can’t help myself.  It’s probably a terrible decision, as these girls already seemed intimidated enough by me before discovering that I apparently have a sick fetish for flinging used meat at people.

“Sorry,” says the first one, quite genuinely, meeting my eyes briefly with a confused sympathy.

There was a distinct language barrier when dealing with people throughout South America.  But at least there was always a sense that what we collectively found to be funny stemmed from the same presumably European root.

Here in China, people don’t simply laugh at things differently; they think differently.  Sarcasm (which oddly enough is quite popular with the Russians, who fully border the Chinese from east to west) seems to be a strange, alien concept here.  Around me, people laugh and smile and joke, but the language of their humor is as different as the language they speak with.  There is some foundation to western thought that leads to basic similarities in most Western art, philosophies, and basic conceptions of the world around us.  Whatever that intangible bit of Western-ness is, it is not present here in China.  And that’s going to take some getting used to.

“Did you like the food?” asks Wei.

“I did!  It was amazing.  Spicy and so much flavor.  I did not like the bone, but I do like throwing the bone on the floor, so that is good.  Thank you very much.”

“You are in the right city for food in China.  In all of China it is said that Chongqing has the best food and the most beautiful women.”

“Interesting,” I say.  ”Where are you from, Wei?”

“I am from Chongqing.”

“Oh,” I respond quietly.

I can't remember the name of this building, nor can I find references to it online, though it was a very popular tourist market built into an older Chinese structure. I love how well they've maintained the traditional look throughout all 14 stories of the building, only to place a Subway Sandwiches on the top floor.

There are at least four (some would break it down further into eight) distinct cooking styles in China that have evolved over time.  Dishes from all styles have of course spread throughout the nation (and world) though most regions have specialized tastes and stick to their own styles.  This disinterest in non-local food likely explains the lack of western restaurants (or even ingredients) in Chongqing.  A few pizza restaurants have opened, though none have flourished (with the exception perhaps of Pizza Hut, which is peculiarly a fancy — and expensive — restaurant in most large cities in China).

Fast food in Chongqing

Burgers are available at McDonald’s, though only at McDonald’s.  And KFC is both beloved and ubiquitous.  But that’s mostly it for foreign food here.  There’s apparently a single Indian food restaurant somewhere in town, but I never found it.  No Italian, other than some Chinese attempts at spaghetti with meat sauce.  And I tragically need to travel three hours to Chengdu to even think about ordering a burrito.  If you’re going to live in Chongqing, you better really like Chinese food. Thankfully, Chongqing food is the best in China.  Like  any Chongqinger will tell you: “Chongqing food is best in China!” Of course the Chinese, while humble at the personal level, tend to be quite boastful as a group, either when talking about their nation or even just their province.  So this forces me to be a bit skeptical when locals brag about how Chongqing is the best.  However, I started to notice a pattern traveling when I’d mention that I lived in Chongqing.  Whatever non-Chongqing person that I’d speak with would inevitably ask me about the food and upon hearing that I liked it explain: “Chongqing food is best in China!” Having now explored the country a bit, I’m inclined to agree.  Chongqing food is best in China!

The Sichuan peppercorn. It is also sometimes known as "pricklyash"

It helps that I prefer spicy food, as  Sichuan food is the spiciest in China.  Chongqing was once the largest city in the Sichuan province.  So large, in fact, that it was made into its own province of 32 million people.  It still seems to be considered the best Sichuan style food, even if it’s no longer a part of the province.  Sichuan food is best characterized by its prolific use of the Sichuan pepper, a unique, mouth-numbing spice used in tandem with the standard Chinese red pepper.  I’m addicted to the stuff, and desperately worried I won’t be able to find any once I leave Chongqing. Just to give them some lip service, there are three other primary styles: Cantonese, Eastern and Northern.  Cantonese emanates from the Hong Kong region and was the first style introduced to America when Chinese immigrants migrated to California in the 1800′s.  It includes Chop Suey and Dim Sum.  Eastern food is known for a liberal use of sugar and soy sauce and introduced the painfully bland rice soup Congee to the world.  Northern is the style of Beijing and beyond, the most famous dish of which is Peking Duck (which I’ve had many times this week, as I write this from a hostel in central Beijing). It’s also nice to require one less utensil at all meals; whether you use chopsticks or a fork, you’ll never need a knife to deal with any Sichuan food; it’s all stir-fried and bite-sized to begin with. I’ve already dedicated a post to my love of Baozi.  I’m going to try to capture the rest of my Chinese food experience entirely in this one entry.  Some things will be missed (like these awesome sandwiches on this incredible, english muffin-like bread — I never got a picture of it, dammit), but hopefully I’ll cover all the bases. Food Food Food

Chinese "family style" dinner. You need a group of at least six or more to do these justice, but it's a great way to explore lots of food. Dishes come out as they're ready and are rotated around to all on a lazy susan.

Crawfish, boiled in hot, spicy oil. Messy, and there isn't much meat in these things for all the effort, but they make a tasty enough snack. The restaurant that served these had large bottles of beer for the equivalent of 50 cents, so we'd order this from time to time to be good customers

Sizzling lamb, served in a chafing dish. Not bad, but too boney. Many dishes involve using a cleaver on a chunk of animal and then dropping the pieces into the wok, bones and all. Chinese custom is to place the used bones on the table next to your plate, or toss them directly on the floor, though it's hard getting used to this behavior (and I'd hate to get too comfortable with it and do the same back in the States.

Part drink, part jello. All weird. A friend of mine was eating/drinking this one night and it creeped me out enough that I had to grab a picture of it

Chinese moon cakes. I brought home cheap versions of them for friends the last time I went Stateside, but these are the fancy, expensive ones that the University gave me. They're sweet, chewy and rich, and are the primary food item of the Chinese mid-Autumn festival, which is almost as big a holiday as Chinese New Year. The insides of them are filled with a dense paste, generally made from lotus seed paste, though others use red beans or even peanuts. Â Really fancy ones include a salted duck egg, though I wasn't particularly down with it.

Zongzi: Special rice dumplings, wrapped in bamboo leaves. This was the University's other gift to me this year, this time for the April Dragon Boat Festival (or "Duanwu Festival"). The rice is sticky and mixed with either meats or sweet paste, then steamed. It's confusing not knowing whether you'll have a sweet dumpling or a meaty one, as they're identical on the outside. However, since I disliked both sorts equally, there wasn't much of a problem for me.

Gung Bao Ji Ding, or "Kung Pao Chicken." I'd been told all my life that food on Chinese menus in the States was totally different from that of China, so I was pleasantly surprised to find my favorite dish here in all its glory. A old Sichuan official named Ding had the title Gong Bao (meaning "palatial guardian") and the dish was named after him. It's on menus across the whole of China, though the Sichuan recipe (featuring its special pepper) is the best. Â I've yet to track down any chicken dish named after General Tso, though I'm still looking.

An assortment of local favorites: Kung Pao Chicken up front. Fried corn (yumi) on the right -- Sweet, spicy, crisp and addictive, I've only found this once since leaving Chongqing and it wasn't nearly as good. Back left is egg mixed with tomato. This dish is everywhere in China, and served at all times of the day. I don't think they even mix any spices into it; it's just eggs mixed with tomatoes

Pringles are everywhere, though flavors change to suit the needs of the locals. From left to right: Hot & Spicy (Barbecue flavor, really), Seaweed, Aromatic Crispy Chicken, Crab, Shrimp, BBQ Steak

A Kabob guy. Quick, easy street food. One Yuan (14 cents) per stick

Street noodles. Fried up quickly with sauce and green onions, typically, with other items added as requested

Stinky Tofu. That's the translation of its Chinese name, and the official English name. It's not a misnomer. Tofu is placed in a fermented marinade and then fried. The taste is apparently mild, but the smell is horrendous. With a slight wind, the manure-like stench can be whiffed from more than a block away. It's popular street food, though fully unregulated due to the nature of its fermented marinade. It smells really really bad.

Jiaozi (jYOW-zuh): More traditional steamed dumplings. Also pretty widespread

A random sampling of beer. Budweiser was available at a few bars, though my supermarket carried PBR Light (never normal) for some reason. Heineken and Carlsburg are the two most prominent western brews. The beer in the top left is actually orange flavored and terrible, though a more popular version uses pineapple instead of orange and is far worse. The beer in the top right is only noteworthy for its NBA endorsement -- NBA is EVERYWHERE in China, whether officially or unofficially. Basketball is without a doubt the most popular team sport in China.

Silkworm larva. My friend and I came across these once and dared each other to taste one. Sadly, they're only sold in paper bowls of about fifty of the filthy bastards (mixed with green onions and other spices). I've known some people that liked them well enough but we thought they were absolutely disgusting and found no Chinese people would take them off our hands. We finally dropped them by a hungry dog, though it promptly ran away after a single whiff.

Hotpot. THE dish of Chongqing, available on nearly every block with identical menus. It's less than ideal for one or two people, but it makes for a fun (if wholly unhealthy and entirely messy) group experience. Similar to fondue, a giant cauldron of boiling, spiced oil is placed in the center of the table and diners select meat and vegetables from an enormous list (only in Chinese -- be sure to bring a translator!). The oil is quite spicy, so some opt for a light, broth-and-mushrooms substitute, though I found it offensively bland in comparison. If you know what you're doing, you can boil up some fantastic cuts of meat along with quail eggs, lotus root, potatoes, bok choy, mushrooms and fish. Order wrong, however and you'll get the more popular (with the locals) selections: cow stomachs, kidneys, intestines, penises, feet, brains and every other sort of offal available. I grew to love hotpot early in my stay in China, though eventually had to cut down to once a month after considering how much oil I was guzzling. I also suffer from tremendous diarrhea every day after enjoying hotpot, which is usually a sign that something's not right...

Most Chinese people in Chongqing just eat noodles in broth for lunch each day. But that's not why I'm posting this picture.

Fried chicks on a stick. Yup. Â There's also some corn there in the background which is also wildly popular, though the corn here in China is terrible. Â It always ends up tasting kind of chewy and stale.

McDonald's Ice Cream stands -- People here seem to like the burgers a bit, but they love McDonald's desserts. Instead of the apple pie, they instead serve red bean pies.

Yu Xiang Rou Si: Literally "Fish-tasting meat". If it lived up to its name, I doubt I would've tried it more than once, but the sauce is actually a sweet and mildly spicy ginger sauce and it's a fantastic dish.

Wok cooking. I've grown spoiled by the stovetop in my kitchen for how much fire it generates. It sucks that I can't simmer anything (the lowest setting is about "medium" or higher in the States), but you can't really get much from a wok without the kind of heat they use here in China. Things are cooked extremely fast -- entire dishes usually cook for less than two minutes.

The same guy. It's not apparent here, but he's actually cooking outside. His wife brings him cuts of meat as needed and then he creates every dish with the various bowls of sauces he keeps next to him. Epic mise en place

Chao Shuo. If Taco Bell is my unapologetic American food obsession (which it is), then Chao Shuo is my Taco Bell of China. It's basically just a big bowl of wontons (around 30 or so) in a large bowl of spicy broth with some green leafy vegetables and peanuts. It's all over Chongqing, but one restaurant in particular served the best damned food in Chongqing. I probably had this for lunch about five times a week for most of my stay in China. I miss the ladies that worked there -- none of us could understand a damned word the others said, but that didn't stop us from trying.

Side Note: Chongqinghua A ‘hua’ is a language or dialect.  Mandarin is actually known as “putonghua” by the locals.  Chongqing’s dialect is so off from regular Chinese that the language spoken in town is officially called “Chongqinghua.”  This was one of the biggest barriers toward learning Chinese early on, since it made testing out new words learned in class (taught in putonghua) unnecessarily difficult.  I suppose that’s part of the reason I stopped. I mention this, though, because Chao Shuo is an excellent example of how Chongqinghua works.  It involves adding a ‘T’ sound to the beginning of many words with  no explanation, and a pirate-y “arr” sound just as randomly to the end of words.  Thus the putonghua “Chao Shuo” is actually pronounced “Tao Tserr.”  Hence my frustration! Shao Kao I’ll miss street food.  It exists around the world, sure, but not with the flavor, character and variety of Asian street food.  Most South American street food was more expensive and less tasty (except maybe the choripan, which I’ve been missing lately).  How late-night Americans would just gobble up Shao Kao — a series of meats, breads and veggies on sticks, covered in spices and then grilled — if only the health departments would let them get away with  it.  Sadly, it’s not the kind of presentation that could work in the US.

All sticks are the same price, though you tend to get a lot more vegetables on each stick than on the meat ones. Chicken and pork are always available -- I don't know if I've ever seen beef. Dumplings, baozi, noodles and breads add a bit of starch to each meal.

Shao kao chefs brush each serving with oil then fry it up for a few minutes. Once cooked, they brush it over again and then use scissors to chop the food into smaller bits before putting it into a bowl or take-away dish.

Some shao kao stands are take-away only, though others provide tiny tables and stools on the sidewalk, creating late-night restaurants that are completely barren and open the next morning

The remnants from a shao kao meal. I'm mostly just pointing it out to show the ubiquity of the plastic bag in Chinese food. Sandwiches are served in it, and shao kao uses them as a means of not having to wash their actual dishes -- simply cover each one over with a plastic bag and dispose when done.

Raining Cats and Dogs I thought I could do it.  Really.  I mean, I’m ostensibly against eating pets, but when in Rome, right?  I’d been told in advance that they don’t eat dogs and cats everywhere in China, but they do in Chongqing.  It is indeed possible, though not widespread — you need to know where to look.  I found one of these places and considered it until walking past the bathroom by a crate of young dogs barking and wagging their tails fiercely at me.  Poor placement for canine eating newbs, like me.  I bailed on the attempt, both at the time and permanently. Yangshuo, a city to the southeast of Chongqing, goes as far as putting dog on the menu, slipped in between pork and chicken dishes as though it’s in the same culinary ballpark.  ”Don’t go to the market,” I’m warned while there.  Apparently dogs are strung up with all the other cuts of meat.  ”I’m still having nightmares two days later,” a girl tells me.  I’m sure my constitution would prove stronger than hers, but I don’t opt to test this theory. You Want to Kill the Fish? I don’t like cooked fish, typically.  Definitely not your red fishes, like salmon.  Fantastic when served up chilly on a chunk of rice with sushi, but utterly unappetizing when cooked.  I also don’t like fish bones.  I still remember that my mom’s friend, who was my dentist as a child, had to go to a hospital due to a fish bone getting stuck in his neck, and that haunts me with every sliver of  bone my tongue glides across when downing a freshly cooked fish. So reluctantly I let Kelly, a gentleman of an Englishman — despite younger Brits pointing over his way when I ask them what hooligans are all about — who was one of my first friends here drag me to a local fish restaurant he’d been raving about.  And sure enough, the meal is addictively good, regardless of the high bone count and fish eyes staring up at me through the whole ordeal.  Like the lamb above, it’s served in a chafing dish with vegetables and sichuan pepper oil and my mouth waters now at the remembrance of it.

Kelly and Adrian enjoying the fruit of my labor

“You ever kill the fish?” asks Adrian, an Irishman and fellow software instructor who’d come along to dinner with us. “Nah,” I tell him. “I’ve never been fishing.  Well, I mean, I think I went once with my Dad but we didn’t catch anything.  I’d like to!” “No, mate, here.” “Have I ever killed a fish here?  At this restaurant.  No.   No, I have not.” Smirking. “Seriously man, you can go back there and kill the fish yourself.” “You’re fucking with me.  You’re saying I can just waltz back there, grab a fish and kill it myself?” “You wanna do it?  Come on…” We step back toward the kitchen and some words are spoken in Chinese.  The people in the back either laugh or look or with curiosity but the man that is clearly in charge shrugs his shoulder and guides me over to a large fish tank with a fairly low water level.  He points in. “What, just grab it? ” I stand there, useless, pondering a fish. He mutters something under his breath and then moves in, grabbing the fish securely with both hands and offering it up to me.  I take the fish with both hands. And it immediately bursts forth from my grip, somersaulting through the air before landing improbably on the top of a keg of beer.  Rather than falling off immediately as one would predict a fish of its size to do, the terrorized beast manages to lodge itself between the tap and rim around the keg’s top, locking itself into place.  Despite tremendous effort on my part, the position of the fish  and its viscosity (or lack thereof) make dislodging it impossible at my level of fishmanship. The head cook moves in, looking less than pleased at this turn of events, though his staff at least seems more than amused.  Grabbing the fish firmly, he pulls it (with some difficulty, I’m pleased to say) from its awkward position and reluctantly offers it back toward me again.  I grip hold, lodging the tips of my fingers strongly into the fish’s fleshy sides. “Just slam it?” I ask. He lifts his arms above his head and brings them  down abruptly.  ”Sorry, fish.”  Still squirming, I lift the fish above my head and slam it with as much force as I can muster down onto the ground, where it lays, lifelessly.  One of the Chinese serving woman claps, and the cook reaches down and picks up the still fish to begin cleaning it off.  All the fun of killing and eating one’s own meal, without any of that messy gutting process.  Brilliant.

The owner, attempting to dislodge a fish from a keg of beer. Happens all the time!

Excitedly (and blondly) holding my fish, this time with a much tighter grip

Celebrating with a (now) dead fish

Meal time

Food in Xi’an I’m not sure what official cuisine style is used in Xi’an — maybe it has its own entirely.  But there were dishes I didn’t manage to see anywhere else, so I’m posting them here.

Shizibing: Fried persimmon cakes, with sweet, sticky filling on the inside. These are sold all over the place in Xi'an, but I've never seen them elsewhere. Â Fairly tasty.

The inside of the shizibing

Fried meat pancakes. The meat fillings (I think there's a veggie option) are stuffed into the dough, then flattened and fried like normal pancakes.

This was a strange dessert made up of about seven or so different, multi-colored layers. Decent at best.

Tibet Our tour group decided unanimously that we didn’t much care for Tibetan food.  Most dishes seemed to be copies of food found elsewhere in China, only in Tibet the flavor was far less exciting.  They served some decent curries, but nothing that compares to Indian or Thai styles.  The major meat here in Tibet is Yak, and it’s not bad, but it is a noticeable step down from its bovine brethren.  The best option tends to be the momo, which has the shape of a jiaozi, but the thicker breadiness of a baozi.  I liked them, but I think we all were tired of them after about a week.

Cookie displays Tibetan white rice covered in sweet yak yoghurt. The yoghurt is slightly sour, though they pour enough sugar on top of the dish to counter it

The momo.

An entire roadside stand dedicated to yak jerky

Yak butter tea. Available everywhere in Tibet. Rich and creamy, there are both salty and sweet variants of it.

Shanghai Surprise My friend Jaimee was traveling with me through Shanghai and specifically sought out her favorite Chinese food while here: soup dumplings.  These small meat dumplings are made by dropping a dollop of jellied broth into each dumpling before cooking.  Once ready, the dumplings are bit into, which releases a single spoonful of soup, prior to being further devoured.

Dumpling chefs at one of the best soup dumpling restaurants in Shanghai (Jaimee did the research) work hard during the lunch rush.

An excited Jaimee is served a fresh batch of soup dumplings

Assorted fried, bready foods. The one on the left is a thin pancake filled with green onions. The circular ones are crisper and have meat inside

The meat cylinder is reminiscent of shwarmas, though the pork used here in these sandwiches (or wraps -- both options are available) is both sweet and spicy.

Fried baozi. Like the soup dumplings, these are filled with liquid as well as meat. They're insanely tasty, but I wasn't aware of the burst of soup inside until it came out and mildly scolded my face, hands and feet (and the feet of two others as well!) Despite this, I loved these dumplings. Once you grow accustomed to the danger, the flavor's incredible.

Beijing / Peking Even though no one calls Beijing by its old anglicized name anymore, the famous duck dish will always be associated with “Peking”.  I’m not nearly the duck fan Jaimee is.  In fact, I think the dish would be even more incredible with almost any other meat in place of duck, mixed into pancakes and served with hoisin sauce.  We had this about four times while Jaimee was in town; I didn’t go back for more after she left, though.

The standard Peking duck set up: Duck meat, duck skin, pancakes, cucumbers, hoisin sauce, assorted vegetables. For me, it's all about the hoisin

A duck close-up

Basically, I'll eat anything if it's made into a burrito

Sweet and sour pork and Beijing's version of Kung Pao Chicken. The latter is sweeter and more starchy here, but not as good.

Beijing's version of street food -- boiled rather than dry-fried. Also, the food remains on the sticks, rather than be placed into a bowl and cut into bite-sized bits.

Seahorses and Scorpions. Â As if this weren't enough of an image, the scorpions here were actually still alive and writhing, impaled on their little wooden skewers.

Starfish, squids and other things you wouldn't normally expect to have barbecued on a stick

Baozi (BOW-zuh): A small steamed bun, filled with meat and/or vegetables.  Ubiquitous on the streets in most Chinese cities, especially at dawn.

I’d loved these treats for some time in the States, though my time with them had been limited to occasional Dim Sum excursions.  Coming to China, I’d hoped to get more quality time with them, though I didn’t expect them to be quite as prevalent as they were.  Every city I’ve visited here (even Lhasa in Tibet) has hordes of street vendors armed with steamers (either modern ones or those of the traditional “bamboo and boiling water” variety).

The simple, pliant, white dough used to make the baozi steams well, allowing vast quantities of the snacks to sit around in hot steam for hours on end until the daily supply is depleted.  The most popular variant of baozi is “zhu rou” (“jew row” — ironically enough this means “pork”) and is often just a chunk of seasoned, ground meat inside the soft, hot bun, though sometimes small bits of vegetables (usually green onions) are mixed in as well.

An assortment of vegetable-filled baozi

Reaching into a massive pile of bamboo steamers for some pork baozi

Big Bucket o' Baozi

A monument to the Baozi and my appreciation of it

Baozi Night

It’s with this love of Baozi in mind (that still hasn’t much abated after a year of the little buggers) that I had some friends over for some homemade Baozi.  We all agreed that the steamed bread idea was fantastic, but that the Chinese were simply too limited in their ingredients.  Why not an  Italian Baozi, with marinara sauce, sausage, onions and mozzarella?  Why not a peanut butter baozi?  Why not a baozi inside another baozi?  Why not, indeed.

My lovely assistant Lisa helps prepare the dough before people arrive

The meat and vegetables table, where most of the Baozi magic happens

...and the sauces table

To make a baozi, flatten out the baozi dough (recipe coming up) into a circle and then pile ingredients into the center. Bring the dough together at the top and then twist it a little so that it closes nicely, or it'll burst in the steamer. Â This is a particularly enormous baozi, by the way

The "baozi inside a baozi" -- a fairly pointless exercise, but it seemed to amuse people. One small baozi filled with meat, and then a layer of barbecue sauce between the two layers of dough.

Eating the baozi inside a baozi

The inside of the baozi inside a baozi

How to Have Your Own Baozi Party

The key ingredient is the dough.  Once you’ve got that, any ingredients are possible.  If you’re trying to go traditional, recipes for the ground pork filling are everywhere online.  Otherwise, get as creative as you like.

What you’ll need:

The Giant Buddha of Leshan

Leshan. (luh-SHAN)

Emeishan. (UH-may-SHAN)

Shan.  ”Mountain.”  One of the easiest Chinese symbols to recognize, and a surprisingly ubiquitous character, even in non-mountainous regions.

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You can learn a lot about the mindset of a people by understanding how their language works (and thus how their thought patterns are organized).  Place the Chinese character for “cold” in front of 山 and you’ve got “iceberg.”  Use “hot” instead to make “volcano.”  Follow shan with the character for water (shui) and you’ve got the Chinese word for “landscape.”  Don’t ask me why.  It gets more complex, though: want to describe a vast crowd?  Put the symbol for “person” on either side of “shan,” and then end it with the character for “sea.”  The fun goes on and on…

Three to six hours north of Chongqing (depending on what collection of vans, trains, buses and rickshaws one takes) is the shan double hitter of Leshan and Emeishan.  Having already covered “shan,” I’ll skip to the prefixes and simply explain that “Le” (pronounced “luh”) means “Happy” and “Emei” (UH-may) means, well, “towering eyebrow.”  Both are major attractions in the Sichuan region for their millennia-old contributions to Chinese culture: Leshan hosts one of the largest stone Buddhas in the world and Emeishan (or “Mt. Emei”) is the highest of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China, and a spiritual pilgrimage to multitudes of Asian Buddhists.

There are direct bus routes from Chongqing to both attractions, though they’re actually slower than taking a speed train north to Chengdu and then busing an hour or so southwestwards to Leshan.  Buses from Leshan to Emeishan leave regularly (or you can be lazy and pay the equivalent of ten bucks for a taxi there).  Since, like most foreigners I’ve spoken with, I prefer Chengdu to Chongqing, I figure a night of exploring the northern city’s flashy nightlife again would be a worthwhile usage of my time.

The decision pays off.  While staying at the Mix Hostel again, I run into an assortment of travelers with a shared interest in Leshan’s famous Buddha.  Two Chongqing expat girls are also making Chengdu their temporary home for the weekend, and even though they won’t be coming to Leshan, they’re fine company for the evening.  As an added perk, they’ve both promised to take me around their home cities when I venture out west, and as those cities are Moscow and Riga (in Latvia), they’re good people to know!

Chengdu nightlife is a marked improvement from that of Chongqing.  For one, my temporary home city lacks a cohesive center, with hilly urban sprawl expanding out in every direction around the meeting of two particularly winding rivers (the Yangtze and the Yellow).   The layout, therefore is a slave to its surroundings, as roads, buildings parks and every other urban attraction is crammed in as the available land allows.  Not so, Chengdu.  Much like Xi’an, there’s a well-defined (over a thousand years) heart of town, with roads darting out from it in  all the cardinal directions.

Combined with being a far more foreigner-friendly town, it’s a helluva lot easier finding a good time at night in Chengdu.  Our makeshift group hits up a few clubs, though we unanimously decide to retire early given the morning’s 9 AM departure to Leshan.

The van ride back and forth from Chengdu is just over ten US dollars, though it doesn’t include the price of the park’s entrance (an additional ten).  The ride itself is about two hours long and gets us to Leshan just before noon.  For an additional fee, travelers can opt to take a quick boat ride that culminates in a few upwards at the giant buddha from the river that runs right by its feet.  It’s supposedly an incredible vantage point, allowing guests to first experience the Buddha ominously jutting out from the lush greenery that surrounds it, as those that re-discovered it a century or so back might’ve seen it.  But we’re all feeling particularly cheap, and gracefully opt out of the experience.

Leshan’s Giant Buddha Park is fairly expansive and lists a good 10-20 additional attractions on all of its signage, even if the massive Buddha is the primary reason for everyone’s attendance.  The long walk upwards (a foreshadowing of my upcoming hike at Mt. Emei) passes by and through multiple pagodas, fountains,  tea rooms and other assorted Chinese artifacts before reaching the massive line down to the Buddha.  The various features are all serenely beautiful and idyllic, but the top attraction here after the Buddha is clearly the English in the men’s rest room at the entrance of the park.

A small, dark unmarked cave next to the bathrooms led to this chipper fellow

One of the park's pagodas. I don't think we actually bothered to climb the steps this time, as anyone that's lived in China for more than a few months is usually pagoda'd out by this point.

A view of Leshan's clear, beautiful skyline from the park.

Pilgrims come here (and to Emeishan, as well as any of the thousands of Buddhist shrines in the country) to light candles as part of their pilgrimagee

Unfortunately, Leshan is a popular Chinese attraction, which means that on a weekend, the flag-waving tour groups are out in Full Effect.  Please see this article, if you haven’t already.  These groups are everywhere in Asia, and as more and more Chinese become prosperous, they’ll be coming soon to a town near you.  Remember how annoying those photo-snapping Japanese were in the 80′s when they first got the tourist bug?  Multiply that by the population of China and start getting ready for it.

A koi pond near the top of Leshan's park

The line twists and turns at the top of the mountain, before shrinking into a narrow staircase that goes down the mountain to the foot of the Buddha.  This narrow path, barely wide enough for a single person, causes a line that should’ve taken less than thirty minutes to last well over two hours.  Why?  Because the Chinese.  Cannot.  Stop.  Taking.  Pictures.

Trapped on the staircase, one’s initial awe and wonder quickly turns to boredom and listlessness before outright annoyance, as the people holding the line up take picture after picture.  Don’t get me wrong — the view’s fairly lovely.  It’s just that the view doesn’t change much from one step to the next.  But these people stop on EVERY STEP.  And they take MANY MANY pictures.  And then they turn around and take pictures of me, in all my Caucasian (and now disgruntled)  glory.  It’s a good time.

Outside the park the others board a bus back to Chengdu and I take my leave of them.  There are buses to Mt. Emei, but a taxi offers to take me directly to my hostel there for only ten bucks and I capitulate due to exhaustion, hunger and the heat.  An hour later, I’m dropped off at the Teddy Bear.

The long, twisty line to the bottom of Leshan's Buddha. It's the zig-zagging line down in the lower left that basically eliminated movement from the line

Wandering through the park, hair only slightly orange

After motorcycling over 2000 kilometers (something I still need to write about), 15300 doesn't seem quite so far...

Figures carved into the rock face as we (slowly) walk down through the line. Â People stick monetary notes into any available holes in the wall for good fortune.

The head of the giant Buddha...

...and its equally giant feet

Me, the giant Btddha of Leshan and someone's finger

A bridge at the base of Leshan's park

Thousands and Thousands and  Thousands of Steps

An early part of the climb. One of the larger monasteries is at the top of this bunch

The staccato tap of my bamboo walking stick on the cement steps leading to Emei’s peak clicks as rhythmically and reliably as a metronome by the morning of my second day up one of China’s most sacred mountains.  My steady pace isn’t in any way a sign of confident mountaineering (if one can even call it that when the path is fully paved and manicured); it’s a sign of my exhaustion.  My legs are cramping and the thinning air doesn’t work well at all with my less-than-healthy physique.  No, if anything, my clockwork zombie-like stride is a function of my exhaustion, as I count off a precise hundred steps at a time now between each break.  By now I’ve lost count of how many sets  of steps I’ve counted my way through.

But that is how I know this fucking bastard of a mountain has at least twenty thousand steps.

Day one started off far less painfully.  The Teddy Bear Hotel came recommended by the Mix Hostel in Chengdu, and their advice has always steered my right before.  The woman at the front desk lacked any semblance of English speaking ability, but she was able to point me toward a wall full of information for hikers, and my Chinese was just good enough to negotiate for a room and some hot meals.

A view of the large, mostly empty mountain

Emeishan’s path is comprised of a series of tall rounded hills, culminating in a monument-topped peak offering supposedly epic views of the surrounding countryside.  ”Supposedly,” I say, because upon eventually reaching the top, coated in two days of sweat and grime, I’m greeted by clouds so dense that not only are the vistas completely blocked off to me, but the top of its famous statue — four white elephants supporting… something — is lost in the mist.

Here would be an excellent place to state that getting to a place is half the fun, and in my experience with this mountain this is entirely correct.  But my guess is that the reaction of the millions of Chinese that make a pilgrimage to the top every year is completely different.  I say this because few Chinese people seem to actually climb the mountain.  Its base is of course clogged with an almost obscene amount of human traffic, and the top is similarly crowded.  But thanks to a bus route that leads almost to the top and a cable car that finishes the job, few locals can actually be found on the trail.

No complaints here.  I vehemently disagree with the prevailing attitude in Chinese tourism that “long lines mean an attraction is worth seeing.”  As such, it was extremely liberating to pass the cable car waiting line and immediately see the densely crowded path dwindle down to little more than four or five others per hour.  Even with public transportation doing most of the work for people, the few hundred steps required to get around prove too much for some locals, which leads to a strange rickshaw-like service where two green-vested Chinese men hoist a bamboo chair on their shoulders and cart people about for a small fee.  It’d be amusing if it weren’t for the fact that these human taxis share the same path as everyone else and have no problem barreling over humble walkers — like myself — to reach their destination.

Monkey! These little bastards are far less friendly than their cousins in Peru were

My bamboo walking stick is too nicely cut to have originally been for free, but that’s exactly what it is from my perspective, as I find the well cut rod leaning up against one of the many trash bins that have been placed upon the path.  It’s thoughtful that they’ve been placed here, but fairly futile; despite the few hikers out on the mountain, there’s a surprising amount of food wrappers and water bottles casually tossed out onto the ground.  The walking stick is a fine addition to the trip, though.  My thigh muscles are just about shot as I come across the small monastery that will be my home for the evening.

Twenty of such monasteries and temples are spread throughout the mountain, and most of them have no problem hosting pilgrims like myself for the evening, for a fee of course.  I’d originally planned to reaching a larger building labeled “Elephant Bathing Pool” on the map to stay there for the weekend, but as the air cools and the light begins to dim, it seems less likely I’ll reach my destination this evening.  I try not to let on to this (or my intense exhaustion) as I haggle the price of a room down from a ridiculous 150 Yuan a night down to 80.

Dinner’s included in the deal, and it’s a pleasant surprise to find the room endowed with an electric blanket for warmth.  I pass out almost immediately after dinner and sleep on straight until seven in the morning.  The monks are nowhere to be seen, and I unlock the door on my own and continue upwards.  Despite the lack of hikers, there are still plenty of small kitchens arranged throughout the mountain and I stop at one for a breakfast of cold, spicy noodles.

Up over 9000 feet, the landscape starts to change.  Snow covers large patches on the ground (and trail) and deciduous trees give way to evergreens.  It’s no doubt gorgeous, but the monotony of the steps begins to get to me.  I’m almost excited when a feisty monkey attacks me at the sight of granola, simply because it breaks things up a little.  Toward the top, there are suddenly thousands of people again, but the area at the top is large enough that it doesn’t feel cramped.

Sunrise at the Golden Summit is apparently not to be missed, but my pace doesn’t get me there until well after one in the afternoon.  The cloud cover here would’ve made a view of the sun impossible anyway.  On a good day, one can apparently see the “sea of clouds” below, but the sea levels have risen to the point where one can’t even see the entirety of the Buddha statue.  At the statue, monks and pilgrims both circle around the monument, always in a clockwise direction.  I grasp the gesture, even if not its significance, and make a quick circle around it myself before heading back down.  By bus.

Human rickshaws

Regular trash, recycled trash, happy cat

Steps...

...steps...

...more steps...

...and foggy steps (closer to the top)

A monkey family. There's actually a section of park toward the bottom called "Monkey viewing area," though I didn't actually start seeing any until much farther up the mountain

My monastery home for the evening

...and the same monastery disappearing in the distance the next morning

The largest monastery I passed along the way. Chanting played endlessly from a tape that was broadcast loudly across the grounds. For its size, I only saw two monks walking about.

Almost all the monasteries had at least one shrine like this one. The few pilgrims to visit leave anything from money to cookies and soda

The end, almost in sight

The Golden Summit, hidden in clouds. Â I think there's a Buddha on top of the elephants

Worn down, exhausted and filthy at the top of one of China's most sacred mountains

A stone map of the mountain near my hotel. The red X at the bottom is the approximate location of my starting point. The green circle midway through is where I slept the first night. The location of the Golden Summit should be obvious

Dinner at the Teddy Bear. Sichuan style cooking is my favorite in China (a good thing, as it's the style of Chongqing) and is almost always spicy.

Chinglish

As far as ostentatious male hair coloration goes, you can generally break the world down into three groups of people:

1. Those that never think mens hair should be bleached, dyed, frosted, highlighted or batiked.
2. Those that think such behavior is perfectly normal
3. Those that are cool with it until you reach 30, at which point.. really?

I can already tell from the subtle burning across my scalp that this is probably not a good idea

Those that fall into camps 1 and 3 (a significant portion of the world, I’m sure) probably don’t back some of my fashion choices this year, and as I typically am not a “camp 2″ guy in general, I’m not sure I do either.  I can’t fully explain my rationale for the travesty that would engulf my flowing locks like a perverse halo for a good portion of the year, other than to say that much like whitewater rafting or Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (I know it’s a classic, but I could rarely handle more than five minutes of it at a time), it’s something I never need experiment with again.

The idea for the change (the first one, at least) came about over a casual conversation with Adrian Daniel “Sully” Sullivan (who answers to all four of those names) about his dalliances with hair dye over the past four years he’s spent in China.  Upon my first meeting with the man, his hair had settled upon a subtle bleached frosting that seemed to complement him well, though he’s had blue and green periods in the past.  The primary explanation: If you’re a foreigner here in Chongqing, you already stand out more than a Phish-head at the Republican National Convention, so it’s not like any other peculiarities will cause you to stand out more.

Why not go a little blond?  Nothing drastic or crazy… just a little extra color to liven things up a bit.  And if it goes horribly awry, it’s not as though there’s an abundance of friends around to relentlessly torment you into getting a quick buzz cut.  Anything goes, right?

It would’ve been a perfect plan were it not for the fact that I speak no Chinese.  And the average Chinese hair stylist?  Not a master of the English language either.  So it is, that I ended up with this:

So this is what it's like to be a ginger

Yes, despite the assistance of multiple pictures of handsome men that pulled off hair dying much better than I, this rust-colored affront to nature is what the Chinese hair salon thought I was requesting.

It’s not a total failure.  Halloween is just around the corner, and Lisa and I had been racking our brains to come up with good costume ideas for the Singapore Restaurant’s holiday party.  Since nothing with this hair color could clearly have come from Earth, it provides us with a starting point for what would be award-winning alien costumes.

The award-winning alien costumes, and our prize -- a large bottle of champagne. Â Note how good this hair color actually looks with green skin. Â Sadly, my skin is normally of a pinkish-orange hue and the "champagne" was a sickly purple color and tasted like triaminic cough syrup. But the bragging rights were still good.

After a week as a ginger, I became bound and determined to make the most of my situation and return to the stylist for a more standard bleaching.  Why stop at ginger when there are so many brighter but equally unnatural colors available to me?

Problem solved?

Hair: Phase 2. Fish: About to die.

Yes, another great success!  My students are amused and I decide to roll with it for as long as I can to get the full experience.  Sadly (or thankfully), all good things must come to an end, and with only one month to go before a fairly respectable wedding, I decided it was time to end this little reindeer game and return to dark brown normalcy.

My attempts as seeking the assistance of the local Chinese thus far proving awkwardly unsuccessful, I recruited the help of Cookie AKA Jenny from London.  A steadfast ball of energy, social grace and interestingly colored hair, Cookie likely had more experience with this sort of thing than almost anyone else I knew here and was only too glad to assist.  I told her in advance of the importance of more “formal” coloring for my upcoming wedding and she assured me that I’d be back to brown in no time.

“Auburn, eh?  That doesn’t really sound like brown…”

“No, it totally is,” she said.  ”Oh my god.  You’ll look fabulous!”

“I’m kind of trying to look less fabulous these days.”  My spider sense tingled violently as she rubbed the not-at-all-brown dye into my hair, but the girl was just too excited about her current project for me to reject her and I allowed the travesty to ensue.  Brown dye should not froth in one’s hair like rancid grape kool-aid, should it?  According to Cookie, it should!

Auburn doesn't even seem to be a distant cousin of brown

Doing my best to rock the purple hair. Despite being the least natural color thus far, it looks the best I'd say

A week before the wedding I pay a final visit to a new stylist.  It’s not that I think one Chinese stylist might be better than another; I simply can’t get the laowai discount twice.

What is the laowai discount?  Simple.  Offer to let them take your picture to put on their door or in ads for a rebate.  It’s usually good for at least thirty percent off.  This time around, the brown finally settles in, at least under Chongqing’s omnipresent gray skies.  The warm, bright sun in Thailand permeates through my hair in odd ways, bringing out a bit more of the purple, though it takes a bit of focus to notice and looks only slightly unnatural.

No regrets.  But probably no need for any repeats either…

Just a small fraction of the spectacle that is Foreigner Street

It’s always interesting to peer through another culture’s looking glass onto your own and see just how perversely distorted things appear.  Without intending to be offensive, impersonations and approximations of things foreign to us rarely come off as complimentary to those being portrayed.  Think Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles for Hollywood’s skewed take on Asians for just two small examples.  It was only a matter of time before I found a few reverse examples of China’s view of the west, and apparently no place in China captures that view more bizarrely than Chongqing’s own Foreigner Street.

The lovely Lisa from Khabarovsk, Russia (where I would one day visit) quickly became one of my favorite foreigners in Chongqing.  Despite being one of my youngest friends, she’s sharp as a tack (top of her class this year, she managed to get a much-needed scholarship to stick around next year) and speaks English better than any of the non-native English speakers in China.  She managed to procure for herself a Portuguese boyfriend very early on, but being more serious-minded, he wasn’t interested in some of the things she wanted to do, leaving me as the surrogate exploring companion.  Fair enough — it’s good to have company when checking out new and perplexing environments.  She’s remarkably self-sufficient, confident and happy, despite her stories of growing up in Russia making it sound as though she was raised in what sounds to be near abject poverty.  In short, she’s been a good and interesting friend to have here.

Me, Lisa and our (only mildly reckless) motoche driver

Early on, we’d heard tales of the notorious “Foreigner Street,” where Chongqing attempted to recreate foreign architecture and lifestyles through a severely distorted mirror.  Little information is available about the place online, save for bizarre photos of surreal buildings and landscapes.  Originally a brainchild of the Mexin door company (one of the largest makers of doors in China if not the world), the theme park opened many years ago with little success.  It’s fairly out of the way for most foreigners to just stumble across it and the Chinese apparently (and with good reason) found it tacky.  Its popularity has picked up in recent years for some reason (maybe the birth of hipster irony in China?), though almost all foreign business have closed up shop, despite some incredible incentives from the owner.

Actual foreigners willing to open a business on Foreigner Street get three years rent-free — that includes both the storefront and lodging, leaving business owners to pay solely for basic supplies.  If it sounds too good to be true, it mostly is, due to one flaw that seems to be intrinsic to Chongqing if not to all of China: The Chinese don’t seem to like any food but their own.  Pizza restaurants, burger joints, and standard culinary styles from Italy, Mexico, Japan, India and other places that are well represented nearly everywhere else in the world all seem to fail here.  (God, I’ve missed burritos this year)  Anyway, visitors to Foreigner Street will find restaurants with pictures of pizzas and pasta emblazoned all over their doorways, and quaint-looking French cafes, as well.  Don’t be fooled — they’re Chinese noodle joints now, with almost identical menus (all noticeably lacking in anything remotely “foreign”).

And so, all western restaurants and stores inevitably close within months of opening, to be quickly replaced by Chinese tea houses, Chinese noodle shops and all the other Chongqing-style restaurants that can be found on every street in the city.  As for foreign fare, only an Indian food restaurant remains, though it’s been deserted both times I’ve visited the city, despite serving some fairly excellent curry.  Now, people only come to Foreigner Street for the ever-growing spectacle.  A miniature Great Wall twists along an entire side of the park with a replica of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue being erected off in the background.  There are pyramids here next to churches, and densely arranged treehouses juxtaposed against a copy of San Francisco’s twisty Lombard Street.  A disembodied pair of legs sticks out from the wall of a house that, for no particular reason, is upside down.

Beautiful Chongqing air, as seen from the window of our bus. "Chongqing always been foggy," say the locals...

Lisa had managed to track down the proper bus number, though our knowledge of bus station locations is still lacking.  The most exhilarating (and most dangerous method) of transportation in Chongqing is the motoche (pronounced moh-toh-CHIH) — “moto” is clearly lifted from western tongues, and “che” is the common Chinese word implying “vehicle.”  Just last week, one of the teachers had his leg busted in due to a motoche accident and we’d been dying to test one out ever since.  They’re not ideal for long rides, so we wouldn’t be taking one all the way to Foreigner Street, but he could at least take us the short distance from the university to the bus station.

Yet another thing to file under “fun and frightening thing I never need do again.”

The driver actually seemed quite competent, but as he zipped in and out of Chongqing’s notoriously dangerous traffic, I watched as my knees brushed within inches of cars, trucks, buses, railing and any number of other knee-cap busting paraphernalia.  Is he used to passengers with legs as long as mine, and is he taking all of the factors so pertinent to my health into account?  My guess is ‘No.’  But several minutes later, we arrive unscathed.  The bus journey is far less noteworthy, other than taking more than an hour to reach our destination in the far eastern end of Chongqing.

Foreigner Street is the final stop on our bus’s route and everyone gets dropped off at the faux Great Wall.  Roads wind off in different directions haphazardly over hilly land, making it difficult to fathom where you’re going (or where you’ve been) at any time.  It’s a large park, as well; Despite spending several hours there with Lisa, I’d discover entirely new regions of the park (like a miniature Venice) on future visits.  The pictures capture the essence of the place far better than I can describe them, but one chance encounter in the park does stand out.

As Lisa and I passed a film crew interviewing a Chinese man, the female interviewer looked up and spotted us and her eyes immediately went wide with excitement, likely due to our being the only actual foreigners in the park.  Walking away from her previous subject mid-sentence, she quickly brought her crew over to us and began talking.

Me, at the Great Wall. Sort of.

“HELLO!” she beamed, with the unnatural enthusiasm of a character from an anime cartoon.  ”Where are you FROM?”

“Meiguo,” I say.  America, in Chinese.  ”Elusi,” says Lisa.  Russia.

“OHHH.  AHH-ME-RI-CA!  Very Nice!  You are both very beautiful.  Do you like Chongqing?”

We tell her that we do.

“And,” she adds, looking at me, “Chongqing women so beautiful, do you think?”

“Ha!  Well, you’re from Chongqing, right?”

“No!” she laughs.  So much for trying to mix my answer with a compliment…

“Oh.  Well, yes.  Chongqing girls are very pretty.”

It’s not really a lie on my part, but I don’t think it’s a resounding truth either.  Lots of locals have told me that this city is famous for having some of the most beautiful women in China.  And there are indeed a lot of cute girls.  But as a teacher with students from all across the country, I really don’t see a marked difference between Chongqing and any other region, with regard to general feminine beauty.  She talks to us for a few more minutes, then says that we’ll be on a popular travel show some time in December.  I never see or hear anything more about it, but Lisa tells me that someone that works at one of her favorite restaurants saw her on TV, so I can only assume we got decent exposure.

In the end, there’s no justifiable reason why Foreigner Street should exist.  But any visit to Chongqing probably deserves a visit there.  Besides, it’s not like there are than many other tourist-friendly options around here.

Christ the Redeemer. Sort of.

A view of the park from one of its higher points

Just like Disney World, there's a daily parade of Disney characters. Unlike Disney World, this park is almost certainly not licensed to do so. Â Ditto the Incredible Hulk.

Mickey and Minnie Mouse are both almost ubiquitous here in Chongqing, though often they are listed as "Mikey" and "Minie". Whether this is to avoid trademark issues or simply bad English is uncertain.

San Francisco's Lombard Street. Again: Sort of.

Fun and racially sensitive!

New York City (sort of...), still under construction

The Upside Down House

And from the other side...

Finally, I get to see the great pyramids

Lisa and I on the sofa ride. A series of blue, plush sofas lift into the air and spin uncontrollably. It's really fun for about two minutes, followed by an additional eight minutes of nausea-inducing dizziness. I don't know if everyone gets the treatment, or if it's a torture method reserved for foreigners.

Chinglish

Large, multilingual banners and billboards are spread throughout the park with little concern for accurate translation.  Here’s a small sampling:

Kui Gate. Â It's money. Â It's On the money.

“So.  Do you know the Three Gorges?  I want to do a cruce and I am seeing who in the class would like to go.”

The girl inquiring is Russian, as is immediately apparent from her accent, and both remarkably beautiful and tragically too young, even for me.  Then again, almost all the foreign women here are outside of my typical age range, as the majority of them are college students.  There are plenty of Chinese women in a town of 32 million, of course, but dating the locals carries its own set of traps and snares, which deserves an entry of its own.

The “cruce” invitation isn’t specifically aimed at me, but rather at one of the other students in our Chinese class, a Portuguese man.  Still, despite her intent focus on the lone Portuguese, she carries a list of names and contact information, and did phrase the inquiry as open to the entire class so I feel no guilt in piggybacking in on the invite.  It’s early September, and since the start of the semester two weeks ago, we’ve been studying Chinese here in class together each morning for four hours, from eight to noon.

In Chinese Class

Some students take their studies more seriously than others.  The Russian girl is hoping for a scholarship next year, and for that, she needs extremely high marks (spoiler: she gets the highest marks in the class and successfully gets the scholarship).  Others are students here to study other topics, like psychology and engineering, except taught in Chinese.  For this, they receive one year of intense Chinese study followed by four years of normal education in their new language (a daunting situation, at best).

And then there’s me.  As a teacher of computer programming, my courses begin just three weeks after my arrival.  For those three weeks, my Chinese studies are free and encouraged, but after that, the classes coincide with my own, which means any other learning will have to be self-taught.  It’s safe to say I don’t take things as seriously as most of the others.

I’m curious about the visiting the Gorges, especially as they’re Chongqing’s top tourist attraction (despite being four hours away by bus, or more than a day if one leaves by boat from the city).

“What’s a cruce?” I ask.

“Hmm.  Cruce.  Croo-ees.  Umm…” she pauses, considering her pronunciation.

“‘Cruise,’” someone else chimes in.

Oh.  Duh.  Of course.  A tour whose sole intent is to travel down a river would likely take place on a boat.

“Yes!” she says excitedly, her eyes wide open.  ”Cruise!  Do you want to go?” she now asks me excitedly.

Her name is Lisa (well, Elizaveta) and she’s done an extensive job of organizing this trip, prior to even asking anyone else if they’d like to go along.  Cruise ships come in all shapes and sizes, depending on how much money one is willing to spend, and Lisa isn’t willing to spend much.  Having learned to give up the need for luxury or even, at times, comfort when traveling, I applaud the ticket price she’s arranged.

For the equivalent of eighty dollars, we share a squat riverboat with 150 Chinese tourists for three days and two nights.  Meals and drinks are most certainly not included, but the ticket does handle bus journeys out of Chongqing (and back into it), entrance into the Three Gorges Dam museum, a few incidentals and one of six thin mattresses per small cabin inside the boat.  I’d passively looked into similar tours already, but besides their prices being much higher, I also would’ve been traveling alone, which wouldn’t have been fun at all.  Already I’d discovered that traveling solo in Asia wasn’t nearly as easy as doing so in South America.  Language problems are the worst, but even smaller things like reliably using hostels to meet up with other travelers can’t be counted on as much here.

Our cabin aboard the boat. The (small) bathroom is just inside on the right.

On the negative side, some of my future students are in this Chinese class with me, and the idea of spending a weekend on a boat with them is a bit strange for my tastes.  As it is, I see them out at the same bars and clubs I frequent (for a town of 32 million, there are only a few foreigner hot-spots) and while there’s never anything but friendly conversation between us, I can tell it’s as weird for them as it is for me.  Often we bump into each other, chat politely and mutually seek the earliest exit possible that would allow us to go back to the irresponsible behavior that students and teachers can’t comfortably partake in in each other’s presence.

By the time Lisa’s discovered all interested parties, there are twelve of us with only one of my students among them.  Two Jamaicans, one Brit, two from Kyrgyzstan, one Kazakhstan (no Borat jokes, please), the Portuguese, an African (I forget the country), three Russians, and myself.

Three Gorges trips tend to last two days to a week, depending on how much one is willing to spend, levels of luxury and how much “gorge” you really need in your life.  Our trip leaves Chongqing on a Friday morning, getting us back into the city by Sunday night.  If that sounds like a lot of time to be on a cruise, don’t forget to subtract ten hours of total bus transport time to get to and from the starting city of Wangzhou, 200 miles east of Chongqing.  True, the Yangtze River flows directly through Chongqing, and there are some trips that leave from the city.  But getting to the interesting stuff requires that we either skip a massive chunk of river by busing past it, or give up a few more days of our lives to the river journey.

Bad, poorly-dubbed action movies play on the bus, and there’s not nearly enough space between seats for my massive laowai legs — it’s just like being back in Ecuador!  At a midway point, just as Transporter 2 is ending, we’re dropped off for a food-and-bathroom break.  Two of us desperately need the bathroom but can’t find it on our own, which leads to one of the worst games of international charades ever played.

Another foreigner and I constantly say, in different tones “tse-SU-oh NaHr Lee??” (supposedly, “where bathroom??”) and get blank stares.  Either I’m terrible at charades (which I’m not) or the two women working here have no idea what men look like when they pee standing up.  Before one of them finally groks what we’re asking for, I’ve stuck my thumb out of an open fly with a loud “pssssssssssss” sound and repeatedly mimicked a toilet paper-less ass-wiping while squatting unceremoniously at the front of the line.  The woman smiles at me with a sadly confused look, before her eyes suddenly light up and she points to a display of potato chips.  Luckily one of the patrons caught in line behind us seems to get the drift of my performance and, after a quick bit of Chinese dialogue, we’re sent back behind the store to the dimly lit restroom.

Our boat -- one of the few times we could access it without having to pass through another boat

Due to a side visit by bus to some waterfalls and historic sites, we don’t actually make it to the dock until dusk.  A shortage of docking room means that only one boat can be directly attached to the boarding dock at any given time.  However, the intense demand for cruises just like this one means that there are no less than five cruise ships by each dock at any given time.

Solution:  Arrange every boat parallel to one another so all tourists simply walk through a series of other boats to get to their own.  It’s either extremely ingenious or irritatingly confusing.  Lowering my (way too tall for China) head under archway after archway of each boat in the widely laid out fleet, I never quite figured out which.

My height is a consistent problem here in China, and moreso on a multi-platform ship like this one where the designers were clearly being economical with regard to ceiling height.  The hallways clock in at just about six feet high — four inches too tall for my extended frame to walk under comfortably.  The thin-mattressed bunkbeds are equally short, and almost too narrow for me to curl into a passable fetal position, though necessity forces the issue.  Each cabin holds six and comes with a sink/toilet/shower combination that’s smaller than most standalone toilets.  There’s an open, central area complete with an overpriced shop for souvenirs, snacks and alcohol, and there’s a restaurant as well, though no menu is provided.  Native Chinese speakers appear to have no problem ordering, but even with lots of pointing at other people’s food, the process proves too tricky for most of us.

By day, we take to the main outdoor deck while the boat is in motion, basking in cottony wisps of clouds painted against a piercing blue background.  After only a month in Chongqing, with its unrelenting gray haze, I’m amazed at how much I’ve missed this kind of weather.  I was warned that Chongqing’s air would “taste bad,” and happily I didn’t necessarily find this to be the case.  But only being able to see shades of blue about one day in twenty when looking upwards into the sky affected me more than I could’ve anticipated.

“How can you stand the pollution?” I sometimes ask.

“Chongqing always been foggy…” is a fairly standard response.  Sorry, but that fog mated with something evil and unwholesome long ago, which then passed out like a fetid, drunken hobo over your city.  But enough about Chongqing; here along the Yangtze River is still beautiful as long as you don’t look at the water.

I suppose I don’t blame the Chinese people for being so prone to littering; I know littering in the States is still an issue, and was much worse when I was a small child, before there were programs and PSAs in place to force into our heads to give a hoot, Don’t Pollute! But it’s really hard to look at someone taking pictures of the gorgeous scenery with what seems to be a genuine appreciation for nature’s grandeur, only to watch the same person thoughtlessly toss a candy wrapper into the river moments later.  At times, the boat sliced through the blanket of filth, leaving a thin streak of clean water surrounded by garbage in our wake.  At times, part of me came close to saying something.  But inevitably, the rest of me would remember that I can’t speak Chinese.

Random aquatic detritus

A heavy itinerary is planned for us, but most of our days are still spent in transit, and we’re blessed by almost cloudless weather that would almost be too warm, were it not for a steady breeze.  Back on shore, some of us had purchased paper kites, and the wind is just strong enough to hold them aloft as the boat makes its way down the Yangtse.  Chinese people take to the decks as well, but in much smaller numbers, so that things are never cramped, with the majority of them opting to stay indoors.  More than any other people I’ve encountered, the Chinese love to gamble on games of chance, and many doors are open to intense card games with stacks of Yuan piled up on the tables.  A larger, shared room opposite the restaurant is filled with specialized Mah Johng tables that are generally well occupied.  It’s an interesting game, but the rules change from region to region and few groups take kindly to laowais looking on trying to get a grasp of the local style.

But I’m fine with just sitting outside.

With my kite

In the Mah Jongg room. It wouldn't be as bad if it were just a little brighter...

The central cabin / snack bar

Me (American), Cookie (British) and Keroma (Jamaican) in our new silk robes. Â We could be a Benetton ad.

What are the Three Gorges? (三峡)

The third-largest river in the world, the Yangtze starts in the far northwest region of China and works its way south and eastward, passing my temporary home city of Chongqing, before emptying into the Pacific Ocean outside of Shanghai.

“With a name like Yancy, they must really appreciate you there for being named after such a glorious source of sustenance, right?” you might ask.

A Map of the Yangtze

Wrong.  The Chinese call it Chang Jiang (literally “The Long River”) and have no idea what I’m talking about when I try to relate myself to the waterway.  In actuality, the name Yangzi comes from a single ferry crossing of the river near Shanghai that foreigners had heard about and taken to be the river’s actual name.  The Chinese-sounding name stuck in the western world, despite the fact that no Chinese people actually seem to call it that.

While possibly an interesting journey for all 6300 kilometers from start to finish, most people skip all the fluff (Chongqing included) and head straight for the Yangtze’s money shot: The Three Gorges.

Qutang, Wu and Xiling.  Located in the Hubei province, the three combined take up barely 120 kilometers worth of space, though they’re easily the most well traveled section of the entire river.  If you haven’t heard of the gorges before, don’t feel too bad.  But if you have, there are three possible reasons:

1. Many groups (possibly all Chinese) list it as an “Eighth Wonder of the Natural World”
2. It’s such a famous part of the Chinese landscape that they added it to their 10 Yuan bill
3. The massive Three Gorges dam — the largest in the world — has evoked both awe and controversy since its inception.

The dam’s got its share of proponents and detractors, but it’s undeniable that its changed the landscape of the gorges forever, and raised the water levels there in places by over 500 feet.  Environmentalists are naturally concerned, and besides the 1.3 million people displaced by the project (with historic and ancestral homes now completely submerged), there are hidden risks like landslides and projected flooding as far west as Chongqing.  However, in a country with an intense need for power that will only continue growing as China catches up with the West, hydroelectric power is probably the cleanest and most renewable form of energy available to it.  Since coal (with its terrible effects on China’s environment) is the current source of most of the country’s energy, halting any of China’s hydroelectric projects is kind of a double-edged sword.

Looking at this map of a typical Three Gorges tour…

…one can make out a tremendous selection of possible tourist fare.  It’s quite possible we were alerted to many of these destinations as we floated on by, but as any explanations were only in Chinese, our entire group was oblivious to them.

However, we did manage to make about 1-2 significant stops each day where we’d exit the boat and get to look around.  Here’s a brief itinerary:

Day 1: Qinglong Waterfall by day, then Feng Jie, the White Emperor City, at night

Day 2: Dragonboat races and shows in the Little Three Gorges, in Wu Gorge

Day 3: A tour of Xiling Gorge by riverboat (about a quarter the size of our own boat) and a Tour of the Dam.  A long, tired bus ride home.

Day 1: Waterfalls and White Emperors

At this point it’s still more efficient to get us around by bus, as we’ve yet to even see the boat we’ll be spending the next few days upon when we arrive at Qinglong.   At over 500 feet across and 350 feet high (“like Niagara Falls in USA” says one touring website), the waterfall is clearly the main attraction here, though there are ancient style bridges and those ubiquitous pagodas.  Most impressive is the hollowed out area behind the falls, allowing those of us that don’t mind getting fairly drenched to pass behind it.

There are overpriced rafting rides and plenty of spots for photo ops…

Oh, that reminds me.  Chinese Pet Peeve #72:

I understand that you guys like taking pictures.  That’s a universal thing, and the Japanese are probably still mocked for being camera-happy more than any other culture (though maybe not for long…).  But if you’re at a scenic spot and there’s clearly a line of people huddled around you as you snap pictures of your mother/girlfriend/child/uncle/dog/etc, is it Really Necessary to take 46 different pictures?  I know you’re just trying to get the right shot, but there are twelve people around you also waiting to take just one.  Either there’s a mass epidemic of obliviousness, or people just don’t care about anyone else around them.  I’m going with the latter.  That’s all.

…but after the waterfall, most of us are ready to head back to the bus, stopping for the street food offerings of cold noodles and fried potatoes along the way.

Qinglong Falls

Getting misty behind the falls

Bamboo raft rides by the waterfall

An old bridge, one with the lush surroundings of Qinglong

We stumbled upon this "bridge" somewhere slightly off the beaten path. Whether or not it's actually possible to cross, this is about as far as I got.

From Qinglong, it’s still more than an hour to Fengdu where we embark, followed by another hour or more of getting settled and taking in Fengdu’s frenetic neon landscape while the boat prepares to make its move.  It’s already dark as we start to head east along the Yangtze, eventually stopping for a quick break at Fengjie to see the White Emperor Temple.  By night, it’s far more impressive from afar as the ancient temple is fully framed in powerful red neon.  Inside, each room houses an assortment of larger-than-life statues telling the sad story of Liubei, the King of Shu, and his final days.  Like most things here, it’s impressive but would be far more compelling with an English translation.

Far more interesting is the long row of cheap tourist kitsch and hot street food we pass as we make our way between the boat and the temple.  Shaozi (street BBQ) is available here, but that’s plentiful enough in Chongqing.  More unique are the fried dough and even-more-fried fish they’re hawking here.  It’s the only option for dinner, and we make the most of it.

The White Emperor City, at night

A statue of King Liubei (probably..)

An entrance to one of the older temples

The Chinese love a well lit skyline at night

Day 2: A Brush with the Law, Dragon Boats, etc

It’s hard not to get impatient as the throngs of Chinese passengers slowly huddle forward in a thin line off of the boat, merging with each other with no regard for the Western concept of personal space.  Ok, I’m not being entirely fair here.  The truth is, we were probably being stupid and should’ve expected that said stupidity would be a bad idea in China.

Ivan, a Russian and my sole student on this trip, stood just ahead of me by the railing as we ambled slowly through the line to disembark.  Our boat was firmly pressed up against the dock, with only the railing separating our group from the freedom that a neverending line of Chinese tourists seems to be denying us.  So, seemingly without putting much thought into it, he hops the rail and makes his way toward our group of friends that’d already congregated on the other side.  Following his lead, the Jamaican, Keroma (who stands out on this boat even more than I do, to the point where parents constantly bring their children over to him awkwardly for photo ops, even if the children are screaming out in fear) and I make our way over as well, with seemingly little fanfare.

Drumming, while waiting in line for the next available dragon boat. Our rhythm is almost entirely off and we seem to be confusing most of the Chinese people watching, though they at least appear to be mildly amused.

Unfortunately for us, an officer of some sort (what his actual role was is uncertain) managed to spot us and was less than thrilled by our flagrant disregard for disembarking policy.  Rather than simply chastise us, he sets us aside while everyone else on the boat, now smirking, makes their way off.  Some people even tap the officer on the shoulder, adding to the indignity by giving him a thumbs-up sign (and seriously, China, I’ve never had people ignore lines and cut in front of me anywhere in the world more than here, so don’t act too superior now, fuckers…) while gazing over at us.  Back on the boat, he wants our passports but we claim not to have them, which is a potentially dangerous bluff.

It ends up paying off, as he seems unsure what to do with us.  We’re likely the most exciting thing that’s happened at his job in weeks, so he’s clearly milking it, but there are times when the language barrier actually helps in China, and dealing with officials is one of them.  Unless you’ve done something significantly bad, it’s simply too exhausting trying to communicate with foreigners to spend too much time on it.  Eventually, he waves us off the bus with a warning tone and a shake of his finger.

“What are you boys doing??” probes Alecia, the Jamaican girl, when we finally catch up with them on the other side of the dock.  ”Police?  You’re not back at home.  You’re in China.  What were you thinking??”

We stare down at the floor, despite both being older than she is, quietly taking our verbal punishment.  It’s hard to argue when someone’s so obviously right.

Giant drums adorn the waterside waiting area as we put on our lifejackets and prepare to get into the narrow dragonboats.  The long row-boats, with fronts shaped like giant dragon heads, hold about 14 people comfortably with a guide.  Floating markers in the water make it seem as though we should be racing, though seeing that we’re the only boat, such a venture’s hardly compelling.  Overhead, a high wire runs over the entire gorge and a man on a bicycle slowly makes his way across.

The trip ends at a large playhouse where a traditional style show is going on.  The words are lost on us, though the meaning can mostly be garnered through the action and by seeing who yells at whom.  An old king is threatened by forces unknown.  A prince and his lover surreptitiously show their affection for one another.  Dance scenes and swordplay ensue.

Biking the tightrope over one of the gorges

Dragonboats, preparing to depart

From inside our dragonboat

All the king's men. Considering you had to take a boat just to get to this stage, it was a surprisingly large and well-decorated cast

One of the dance numbers

Day 3: A Quiet Ride, A Massive Feat of Engineering

We awake just before dawn, exhausted.  Despite rushing to exit, we’re still the last off the boat, but the upside is having virtually no line to deal with.  We’re quickly motioned across the dock to another boat, far smaller, that lays waiting for us.  This section of the gorge is too narrow for the large boats, so the temporary boat transfer is standard.  I’m starved, but the only food option on the boat is fried whole chicks (yes, baby chickens) and I can’t quite find the stomach for such unique fare this early in the morning.   Outside, the sun is only just starting to rise and I’m colder than I’ve felt for the entire trip.

Biking around with Lisa somewhere inside the massive dam's complex

We’re seated in rows listening to an enthusiastic woman drone on in Chinese for close to half an hour.  As the rest of the crowd sits rapt, hanging on her every word, our exhaustion and incomprehension work together to put most of our group back to sleep.  At some point, people start heading outside to admire the gorge as the sun makes its presence known.  The views here are amongst my favorite from the entire trip.

At another, much smaller dock, we’re unloaded once again as each group makes its way to even smaller boats for a quick journey down the narrowest gorge yet.  Our guide is lively, bordering on cartoonish, as he excitedly tells stories with his long fur smock and straw hat.  At one point it’s clear that he wants a volunteer and I make myself available.  He dresses me in the hat and smock and then gets a quick laugh by kissing me on the cheek.  I’m visibly clueless as to what he’s saying to me, but the crowd at least seems to enjoy it.   We shake hands and he’s done with me.

Back at the main ship, we’ve got a few hours to kill before reaching the dam and I spend my time either talking to the other laowai or reading up on materials for my classes.  In many ways, I’m unqualified to be teaching the classes they’ve set up for me to teach here, so a lot of cramming has to be involved for me to fake it with any degree of confidence.

Dressed up and entertaining the locals on our tour of the smaller gorges

Security at the Three Gorges Dam is no joke.  Guards amble down the aisle of our bus, searching purses and bags for anything that could be considered dangerous.  For some reason, the bulk of what they collect is make-up, though it’s all returned upon leaving.  We get the impression that there will be four different spots we’ll be visiting at the dam, though as with the rest of this trip, it’s impossible to tell if one doesn’t speak Chinese.  We stick together, following the crowd unquestioningly.

The first stop to do with the dam.  There are food stands and attractive fountains and gardens, though nothing is explained, even in Chinese.  The second stop is a museum of sorts, though the museum-to-gift-shop ratio, in terms of building allocation, is around 1:4, with the massive souvenir and trinket shops fully surrounding anything of interest worth visiting.  The remaining two spots allow for great views of both sides of the world’s largest dam, though.

Three Gorges Dam Stats

1. 

   It's true.

   Year started: 1994

2. Year completed: 2008 (though full power will not be generated until 2011
3. Length: 7,500 feet (close to one and half miles)
4. Height: 600 feet
5. Thickness: 115 feet
6. Volume of water processed: 51,402,459 cubic yards (next largest in Canada with 706,000 cubic yards)
7. Power generated: 22,500 Megawatts (2nd place is Itaipu in Brazil with 14,000 Megawatts)

Opponents of the dam have genuine issues with it, as mentioned earlier.  The project displaced at least 1.5 million people and buried over 1,300 historic sites, in addition to its effects on the local environment and wildlife.  In addition to being a worrisome target for potential terrorism, the dam is built on a seismic fault, making it vulnerable to planetary dangers as well.  However, it’s easy for all of these complaints to be brushed aside simply by pointing out that it’s the largest man-made energy source currently in existence, a crucial piece of information for a country of this size moving towards full industrialization.

The dam’s an admirable tourist attraction, though nature lovers out on a quick tour of the gorges will have a hard time not wondering how the stark cliffsides would’ve looked when the water level was over 600 feet lower.

Over 32 massive generators process the water of the Yangtze before passing the water onward toward Shanghai

Katya (Russia), Keroma (Jamaica), Cookie (England) and me (USA)

Between the haze and the sheer size of the dam, it's difficult to make out its far end

Outside the area of the dam, the women are given back their make-up products (and any other contraband) and we’re bused for close to an hour westward to where our boat waits for us.  Other than the scenic background beauty, there are no more official tourist sites to check out, so we kill time on the upper decks while waiting for the trip to end.  We’re picked up by another set of buses on the other end of the river and, after a massive Chinese-style dinner (several shared dishes on a large lazy susan), sleep our way the five hours back to Chongqing.

Just inside the city limits, I spot a massive billboard featuring a “Western Style” toilet (one you can sit down on, as opposed to a hole in the floor to squat over).  On the opposite end of the toilet in the advertisement is a small Chinese boy of around three, fully naked with a neon rainbow arching out from his penis to the toilet as though being urinated out of him.  Sadly, I fail to capture the magnificence of this ad in a picture and I’ve never seen the billboard again.  Even after being here several months, some things are just too damned bizarre for me to fully get a handle on.

Chinese Dinner. I have no idea what most of the things I ate were, but none were too frightening

Me, by the Kui Gate (the section of the gorges on the 10 Yuan note) holding a 10 Yuan note

The 10 Yuan note