MegDesk in Beijing
Observations of Meg's Life in Beijing
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The Joy of Cooking
The Limitations to Making Food in Beijing
A few weeks ago, we hit one of the major milestones for living in a new country - we cooked dinner at home! We've been here for a month and a half, and we have cooked at home once. I'm not counting cereal with milk or just-add-water noodle cups from the mini-mart downstairs. I'm talking about a real meal!
First of all, lunch has become our big meal of the day, since it's an excuse to get out of the office and take a break in the middle of the day. Also, in China, meals are served family-style, so dining out actually works better with a large number of people. More people just means more dishes to try.
Getting to the grocery is another limitation on eating at home. Gone are the days of having a fully-stocked HEB across the street, and the nearest supermarket is a moderate walk or a short taxi ride away. We do have a small ex-pat market near home that stocks all kinds of imported foods, as well as a bit of meat and veggies, but most of the Western temptations cost a small fortune. Unfortunately, with our history of overtime, most of my recipes I are designed to be fast and easy, so they rely on semi-prepared foods. While easy to find in the States, these are usuaully non-existant or extremely expensive. On top of that, over half of my recipes call for an oven, which we don't have in our apartment.
So dinner usually consists of eating out as well (with the complete justification that we literally don't have enough food at home). And staying in often results in mooching off our lovely friends upstairs who have an ayi to handle the tricky processes of shopping and cooking. We feel a little better when they tell us that in the four months they've been here, they've cooked only a handful of times. There's also the last temptation, which is to order Italian from the restaurant a block away. It's a little pricey, but they speak perfect English, know exactly where we live, and show up in under 15 minutes with lovely piping-hot pasta and pizza. Some menu items also show up with real dishes (that help build our stock of tableware), which just reminds us how much we're paying for the comfort and convenience.
But I finally managed to cook! I did take the easy way out and went to the ex-pat market, but it was mostly because I was pressed for time. It's closer, and I can read the labels on the jars and cans. However, I can't read the meat or vegetable labels, so it was a real test of my culinary identification skills! At the meat counter, my language skills, coupled with my sad reliance on the English measuring system, left me with more chicken breasts than we could possibly use, so hopefully the rest will be fine when I pull them out of the freezer. In the end, we had some nice chicken breasts, cooked with white wine, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, and black olives. Best served with a side dish of proud accomplishment!
Shortly after finishing this article, Lucas asked a few of our Chinese colleagues how often they cook at home. "What?! Never! There are so many great restaurants in Beijing, and they're all so cheap! Why would you bother to cook?!" I don't feel so bad anymore. I'm not lazy, I'm local!
Two If By Sea
Applying For My Passport Replacement
On Monday, the Asian Express representative met me at our apartment building and took me to the district police station to finish reporting the loss of my passport. This stop was a little more entertaining, because the station is in the middle of the embassy district (in fact, it's directly across the street from the Indian embassy), so they spoke some English. I filled out a simple form, where I got to explain how my passport went missing. That was actually a bit therapeutic, because I hate having people think that I lost my passport. I'm extremely protective of it, and really resented having to let them borrow it, so in my explanation, I was pretty heavy on laying the blame! I know it won't come to anything, but it makes me feel better. One of my Chinese colleagues has been telling me to complain and demand compensation, but I don't even know what to ask for!
Once we finished at the police station, I got my official receipt, and we headed to the US embassy. The embassy for the US is so much different than all the others I've seen. There are crowds of people outside, selling visa-assistance services and presumably waiting for friends/family inside. No one is allowed through the fence without the right paperwork, which meant I was free of my teenage guide for a while. On the other side of the guard, the fence continues, creating a long aisle down the side alley. Eventually it lets off at the door for visa applicants, but as a US citizen, I was directed around the back. There are no direction signs at all, but I eventually found a little building marked Entrance. After showing my passport photocopy again, I was allowed inside to coat-check my cell phone and have my purse X-rayed. Finally I found myself in the embassy compound itself. Now at least I had a sign directing me to Citizen Services.
Since I had all the forms filled out in advance, the application process was a breeze. The lady at the counter actually seemed surprised that I not only had photocopies of my passport and my Texas driver's license for ID, but I also had an original copy of my birth certificate. When they went to copy my photocopy of the passport, I stopped them, so I could give them my copy of the amendment page as well. They seemed really confused that I was making them wait while I thumbed through my papers for it, but once I handed it over they said, "Oh. Yeah, that's really important!" I don't know whether they just didn't realize it had been amended (they did notice the name was different) or if they just didn't think anyone would actually think to have a photocopy of the amendment!
I asked about having the replacement expedited (since the shipping company is paying the expenses), because they always say passport renewals, etc. take 6-8 weeks. But the lady explained that they couldn't do it any faster, because it has to be sent over to the States and back. She apologized and said that they really can't do it faster than the normal 7-10 days. 7-10 days?! I was shocked! That's amazingly fast! You can't even get it done that fast when you're in the US! But yes, after 7-10 days, I'm supposed to call them to confirm that it's arrived and then go pick it up! Next time I need to renew my passport, I want to do it abroad, because the 2 weeks it takes overseas is tremendously better than the 8 weeks they promise back home!
The Case of the Vanishing Passport
I Just Knew This Would Happen
So the Chinese shipping company that shepherds everyone's belongings through Customs on this side of the Pacific requires your original passport and work permit. Coming from places where letting your passport out of your sight is taboo, this certainly makes a lot of people uncomfortable. However, that's apparently "just the way things are done here," because everyone wants to see the original to make sure the copy hasn't been doctored. Plus, lots of other ex-Austinites have done this before me, and they all got their documents back fine. So, resentfully, I let them go, and they were whisked away by courier to the Asian Express office, which collected them safely.
Now, a week later, our belongings are out of Customs and happily installed in our apartment, which means that it's time for my passport (and work permit) to come home. I got a call yesterday:
Seriously, that was about all they said! My first reaction was actually, "Oh, God! I don't have time for this!" I pretty much hung up the phone, went to Personnel, and said, "Umm... Asian Express lost my passport and work permit. Can you deal with that, because I'm really busy." Unfortunately, since I have to show up in person at all these places, I'm pretty much stuck dealing with it anyway. All yesterday, the stupid Asian Express people kept calling me, explaining what I needed to do. I really didn't want to listen to their big to-do list, since I'd already checked the US embassy website, and I was quite busy at work.
Today, a guy from Asian Express (who I swear couldn't be more than 19) met me at the office and took me to the police station to report the loss. Basically, I just sat around reading a novel while he and the officer carried on in Chinese. The officer gave us some kind of typed statement (all in Chinese, except for my name), it was stamped, and we took that to another police station. More carrying on in Chinese, and it turns out that we have to go to the district police station. Fine. But not until Monday, because "they need 3 days to try to locate it." Why do they need 3 days? It's either at the Asian Express office somewhere, buried under a book or some papers, or it's floating around the black market. Since Asian Express already spent a day searching their office, I really doubt there's much the police can do.
Regardless, I have to have some kind of police receipt when I go to the embassy to report it lost and file for a new one. I guess we'll be doing that on Monday, when I meet up with my adolescent Asian Express chaperone again for the next part of this saga.
Oddly enough, I've been pretty unaffected by this whole thing. Clearly I'm annoyed by the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the wasted time, and the prospect of dealing with the US CIS again, but other than the administrative overhead, the thing that bothers me most is that I'm back to square-one in travel history. Lucas has a pile of passports with stamps and visas out the gills! I never got my passport back when I renewed it, so I have no record of my childhood trips, and I didn't even get a stamp when I went to live in Paris! However, with two Chinese visas and a few other random stamps, I was starting to feel a little more global. That's all gone. Oh, and obviously I can't leave the country until I get a new one. That's inconvenient.
Looking on the bright side: At least I get a new passport photo!
Mei You Decongestant
Getting Sick, and Then Getting Better
So the change in climate, the smog, the stress, and all the other things that come into play when moving from Texas to Beijing, finally got to me, and I developed a sinus infection last weekend. Based on years of battling every kind of cold or infection that found its way into my schools, I promptly self-diagnosed a bacterial infection, which meant I needed to find some antibiotics if I wanted to get over the illness quickly.
However, before I even attempted to cure myself, I needed to start feeling a little better, and unfortunately my remaining supply of US-bought cold medicine was in our household shipment, which was still working its way through Chinese customs. Our first stop was the convenience store in our building, which had a few random boxes labeled in Chinese and one that had enough English to indicate that it treated Congestion, Sneezing, and Runny Nose. Sadly, everything else was in Chinese, so we decided to check across the street at Jenny Lou's to see if they had something familiar (like DayQuil or Advil Cold & Sinus) or at least something with English packaging. No luck. We couldn't find so much as an aspirin at Jenny Lou's (the ex-pat import store), but we were directed instead to the pharmacy next door, which apparently keeps a comprehensive and specialized English-Chinese dictionary on hand.
At the pharmacy, I looked up "decongestant," because I was drawing a blank on remembering "pseudoephedrine." The lady looked at the Chinese words I pointed to and said simply, "Mei you." This literally means "Not have," and is probably the single sentence you hear most as an ex-pat in Beijing. Perhaps a more appropriately translation is, "What on earth are you asking for?! We don't have anything like that! You silly ex-pat!" I seriously doubt that the pharmacy doesn't carry any decongestant and can only assume that something was lost in translation. But rather than feel miserable until I could look up the magic word, "pseudoephedrine," we went back and bought the random partially-English multi-symptom pills in our building, which ended up working just fine.
Now it was time to actually get rid of the nasty little bacteria before they could spread to my other sinus. By the way, in case you were wondering, it's really disconcerting to be sick in only one half of your head. I knew that I could buy antibiotics without a prescription here, since our tiny building shop also stocked amoxicillin, but I didn't know what would work best or how much I'd need to take. Enter my savior, Katie, the soon-to-be-pharmacist! A few emails later, and I had full information on how much I'd need to take of the various types of antibiotics, as well as lots of details for handling other pesky cold symptoms in the future!
Back I went to the pharmacy, and this time I looked up "Zithromax." Just to be safe, I also looked up the general name "azithromycin" and tucked a finger by that page as well. Once again the answer was, "Mei you," but before I could flip to my "azithromycin" listing, a little glint of recognition appeared. The two shop ladies exchanged a few words, and one of them returned with a non-descript box (all in Chinese) and a questioning look. I returned their questioning look, and they opened the box and pulled out the little information sheet. There, amidst a sea of Chinese, was a single English word: "azithromycin." I was positively beaming as I paid my 38 Yuan (around $4) and took home my new treasure. I was feeling better already! And four days later, I was pretty much back to normal.
Editor's Note: I later ran into a post on Talk Talk China, which reminded me that it's not that they didn't understand. They just couldn't be bothered. This comment particularly amused me!
The Shaolin Mopper
Salesclerk Demonstrations at the Supermarket
It's a common opinion in the States that whenever you need help with something at a store like Wal-Mart, you're pretty much out of luck. Apparently, even the retail chains themselves agree with this, since so many of them have installed bar code readers for customers to perform their own price checks. This was certainly not the case on our Sunday shopping trip to Carrefour.
Weekend shopping at the groceries stateside does tend to bring out a plethora of salespeople, all hawking samples of various foods on special (or just overstocked) that week. However, Carrefour seems to have taken this to an extreme, with boisterous clerks encouraging customers to try not small bites of frozen fish and tiny cups of cereal, but exercise equipment, skillets, mops, etc! Noisy employees loudly tout the features of their selected products and entreat shoppers to come and try them out. Real food is available to best exhibit hot plates and kitchen knives, and in the mop aisle a bucket of water is on hand to show off the floor-squeegeeing, sponge-wringing benefits of the different products.
Even if your chosen item isn't out for display at the moment, the clerks seem to magically appear and begin gesturing wildly, trying to explain the unparalleled glory of the various models on display. On Sunday, I was shopping for an iron and headed to the appropriate aisle. After 30 seconds of pleasantly browsing the various models, no less than three Carrefour employees besieged me and began thrusting different irons at me, trying to explain their settings and characteristics through fervent waving and ironing motions. Each had a different model and seemed intent on my accepting their selection (oddly, I don't think they even earn commissions). After a few minutes of this, I ran away to consider my selection in peace while we did some other shopping, and later I snuck in to grab my chosen iron before anyone could corner me again!
When it came to buying a wok, the helpful sales associate practically forbid Lucas from choosing certain models, shaking her head vehemently and indicating other, presumably better, options. She clearly did her job well, because the wok was by far our most expensive purchase of the day!
Of all the enthusiastic clerks we encountered, our favorite was certainly one of the men in the mop aisle. As we stood confounded by the line of two-dozen dust mops, he leapt into action, showing off one of the samples. After the initial basic sweeping motion, he tapped his foot on a release button on the mop head, lifted the handle, and in a single fluid motion, brought the mop head out of its cloth dusting cover, spun it around in the air, and reinserted it back into place, re-securing the release mechanism. We watched him do this a few times, and it almost looked like some of the choreographed moves we'd seen in the Shaolin performance we attended. It was quite an impressive combination of domestic chores and martial arts, and I think we ended up buying his chosen dust mop model partly out of respect!
Win, Lose, or Draw
Art and Japanese Become My Most Useful School Subjects
I still don't know what it is about my Chinese pronunciation, but sometimes I can say something to a Chinese person, and they just can't (or won't) understand me. Then a Chinese speaker repeats what I wanted to say, and even though it sounds exactly the same, it now all makes sense. On a very few occasions, I have been understood, but I think when it comes to the spoken language, I'm well below a 50% success rate.
In the worst situations, I really feel like a deaf-mute. I have no idea what's being said to me, or how to respond. Luckily, there's one thing I can fall back on - a pen and paper.
Even when talking to someone with an amazingly good grasp of English, there are bound to be some pieces of missing vocabulary. In the case of our realtor, this happened to be furniture. After a brief attempt to explain the idea of a dresser, I pulled out a piece of paper and quickly sketched the basic idea of what we'd like to have. Immediately, a look of comprehension flooded over her, and she indicated that she understood what it was we were talking about.
Unfortunately a few years of drawing class can't get us through every situation. For instance, how do you create a drawing that indicates you want to know the incoming and outgoing rates for cell phone usage? In this case, my Japanese finally came in handy, since I was able to write out the characters for "one minute in" and "one minute out." When I handed the pen and paper to the store clerk, he was able to grasp what we wanted to know and filled in the answers for us. Although it is a little depressing to know that I studied for eight years and second-year kanji is the only knowledge I've been able to put to use!
After sorting out the phone rates, Lucas realized that his cell phone was still locked by the US service provider, and I was stumped for characters to ask about unlocking a cell phone. Instead I drew two locks, one locked and one unlocked. Handing the paper back to the shop clerk, he was apparently expecting more kanji characters, because when he saw my little drawing, he burst out laughing and proceeded to show it to all the other employees. We never did get them to unlock Lucas' phone, but at least I provided them with a little amusement!
Are You Going to Eat Beijing?
Learning Chinese Pronunciation
The tonal language concept comes up a lot when people try to explain how difficult it is to learn Chinese, but I think that's just because it's a completely foreign concept that doesn't show up when you try to learn most other languages like French, German, Japanese, etc. However (and I'm probably going to be in trouble with the Foreigners Learning Chinese club for saying this), the tones really aren't that bad! My biggest problem is actually just in pronouncing the various sounds.
They say that the part of your hearing-understanding mind that parses speech sounds pretty much shuts off at the age of 2 or 3, and that if you don't know a sound by then, you'll never understand it. So when adults try to learn new sounds in a new language and can't tell the difference between them, it might really be that they can't hear the difference. I don't know how true this is, but I can certainly identify with it, because in learning both Chinese and Hindi, there are some sounds I just can't figure out.
Thanks to a lot of patience from Lan and Songling, and having coached Japanese friends through the L vs. R issue, I know the difference in mouth shape and tongue position to form all the different consonants. While my kind coaches have said (on a particularly good day) that they can tell which letter I'm trying to produce, I still can't hear much difference between them myself!
Finally, after breezing through "bo po mo fo" and stumbling blindly through "zhi shi chi," I finally started to learn basic vocabulary and grammar. One of the first grammar points we learned was the formation of questions, so one of the first things we learned how to say was, "Are you going to Beijing" (). Unfortunately, with my miserable pronunciation, Songling laughed, and informed me that it sounded more like I was asking, "Are you going to eat Beijing" (). Pretty bad, considering "go" () and "eat" () not only have different vowel endings, they have different tones as well!
I've since decided that part of my problem stems from Japanese, where a U is pronounced vaguely like a Chinese E. A Chinese U would translate more like a in Japanese. With the many ways to recreate Asian sounds in English letters (Hindi has yet another version different from Japanese and Chinese), I've actually found that sometimes it's easier to write things out phonetically in Japanese characters to keep me from getting confused! Until I get a better handle on things, I'm certain that the Chinese will have to forgive me when I ask about eating their historical landmarks!
Hello, Mr. #%&@!
Fun with Tones - Our First Adventures Stateside
So everyone tells you that learning Chinese is really hard because of the tones. You're bound to hear all about how important it is to not just say things right, but to say things the right way.
There's a common example that shows up in our Chinese textbook, explaining that "ma" when pronounced with all the different tones means "mother," "horse," and some other random things. I find this example extremely misleading, since you can clearly pick up the meaning from context. One rarely talks about betting on the mother races or flying home to visit your horse.
This really isn't the case at all. From my own personal study, I've begun to realize that a lot of words with similar meanings also have similar sounds. The first example of this that we studied in our official class at work (although how "official" can a class be when Kapil and I are the only people who show up) was "" and "." These mean "buy" and "sell" respectively. I guess as a bumbling foreigner, there's plenty of context to indicate which one I'm interested in when I show up at the market, but it's still a little disconcerting to know that I could be easily misunderstood. Oh, and just for good measure, "" appropriately means business, aka "buying and selling."
The coup de grace of tonal misunderstandings, however, was explained to me buy a blushing Lan long before any of my Austin colleagues set foot in China. The personnel manager from Beijing had come to talk to us, and when he introduced himself, he asked us to just call him Di. That didn't really surprise anyone, since Schlumberger is very much a first-name culture, and also because his last name is Cao, and the C is one of the tricky consonants in Chinese that doesn't translate easily into the English alphabet (for anyone who happens to study Japanese, it's essentially a tsu). Later, Lan was explaining the pronunciation of the tricky C to me, and of course, when it came to tone, I defaulted to the typical American pronunciation, which is 4th tone, or falling tone. This made Lan raise her eyebrows and emphatically correct me that it should be 3rd tone, with a falling-rising sound. After a good deal of needling, I got Lan to explain that essentially means "fuck," often with a similar level of vulgarity!
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