FREEDOM!!!!!

Well, I've finally done it; I've finished my finals. I would apologize for not posting for a while if I felt bad, but right now I don't. I'm so numb from stress that I won't be able to feel anything, much less guilt, for at least another two days. Next to finals themselves, this is the worst time of the quarter: I've become so adjusted to running non-stop that now my body doesn't understand that there's nothing especially pressing that needs to be done. It's like getting off of a roller coaster. It's fun (or in this case, tolerable) while you're on it, but after you get off you feel kind of nauseous.

I completely BOMBED my Chinese Lit test this morning. Which makes me wonder: do I really want to be this educated? All I really wanted was to learn another language, maybe stretch my brain a little. But just a little. I don't really care what Xi Kang ate for breakfast in Fujian provice on April 12, 485 CE. The thing about all these 400-level classes is that suddenly, for the first time in my entire fifteen years in school, they want me to think. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen. No longer am I required to simply spew forth information previously spoon-fed into my eager young brain. Now - somewhat late in the game, if you ask me - I am actually required to think for myself, a practice at which I have virtually no experience. Why didn't anybody tell me I was going to have to do this? I'm disappointed and more than a little disllusioned.

Ode to a Si Bak

I found out late last Wednesday that my kung fu si bak, Taky, had a heart attack on the preceeding Sunday and had to spend Wednesday on the operating table undergoing a quadruple bypass surgery. I think it was a little bit of a shock to everybody; he's one of the most amazing people I've ever met, really kind and a genuinely kindred spirit. He's also shorter than I am and can throw a man twice his size across the room, which makes him truly my hero; I've spent so long thinking that I and my stubby legs could never amount to anything remarkable, at least in terms of the martial arts. Taky, however, has proven me wrong, and has welcomed chubby little old me into his kung fu family with open arms. I would appreciate it if everyone would keep him in your thoughts and prayers: he's doing well and coming home from the hospital today, but he's in for a long recovery.

Ryan and Stephen went over a few days ago and completely redid si bak's room, laid all new carpet and everything, which I think was so sweet. I just hope that he's not so surprised he has another heart attack...

Strange Happenings

Adventures abound of late in the Emerald City, where early yesterday afternoon a man ran into our car - with himself - in the middle of the block on a congested road in the center of the U-district. We were in the turn lane, John driving and I in the passenger's seat, when all of a sudden a face and a hand cracked the windshield inches in front of me. He flew backward and hit his head on the pavement. He was trying to sprint across one of the busiest roads in Seattle in the middle of the block in really heavy traffic, and -um - he hit us. We think he must have been high or something because the minute the cops showed up he split down a side alley, leaving a trail of blood that was dripping from a golf-ball sized lump in the back of his head. We were lucky, though, that no one was more seriously hurt. The worst damage of all was sustained by the car; the windshield has a crack shaped like an arm and the side mirror was ripped off when he slammed into us.

Easily one of the creepiest, strangest things I've seen in a long time.

A Disclaimer

[The owner of this blog apologizes profusely for the gross, absurd, and utterly uncultured use of emoticons (i.e. :-) :-P :-S) in the title of the following post. She in no way condones the use of said emoticons, and begs you not to fill your e-mails with them when you write.]

Thank God for Student Loans :-P

It's here again: the three-weeks-til-finals-I'm-going-to-pull-my-hair-out time of the quarter. I go through this every single quarter, too. Right about this time I start wondering why I do this to myself, because, let's be honest, who deserves this kind of stress? Sometimes I wonder if there really exists, in some other possible world (to use the philosophical term), a place where people actually live on more than PB&J and don't have to pull all-nighters twice a week. And while we're on the subject, are there really people who speak Chinese? Fluently? And, more importantly, are there really people who understand it? If I hadn't seen and heard it for myself I'm not sure I'd believe it. Sometimes I still don't.

So the only thing I can say - and I can't believe I'm saying it - is thank heavens for the ridiculous amount of my student loans. It's at these times, when I swear up and down that I'm going to drop out of school and go find me a paper cup (v. the styrofoam; I'd even be environmentally responsible as a bum) and a nice street corner, that they come in handy: quite frankly, I can't afford to drop out of school. I just owe too stinking much money, and there's no way I could make the payments on a salary from McDonald's. (Not that I'd work there anyway; it's kind of an exaggeration for the sake of rhetoric.) So I guess this is a classic example of how your worst curse can be your biggest blessing.

Of course, ask me again when I'm finishing grad school and you may hear a far less good-natured opinion...

My Friend the Scarecrow

So the mood in Seattle, and especially in the U-district, has been decidedly somber of late, owing in part to John Kerry's loss of the election and the sudden and constant onslaught of midterms. I remember a day not so long gone when they were called midterms because they were in the middle of the term. Now I can't seem to be rid of them, even though I'm only taking three classes. I feel as though I'm in some creepy episode of the Twilight Zone. You know, the one where you just keep taking tests and taking tests and taking tests...

In the quest to cheer myself up I found myself stumbling into Scarecrow Video, this gigantic video store in Seattle that specializes in indie and foreign flicks. I am now officially in a perpetual state of bliss. They have more Chinese movies and bad Hong Kong kung fu flicks than I could watch in ten years, literally just walls and walls of them. I'll never be bored again.

Pixar Rules

So, as Johnny promised (without consulting me first, incidentally, which I think was a plot to coerce me into posting something), I will now say something about "The Incredibles." I don't know why he couldn't just do it - he saw it with me and I'm pretty sure that there wasn't anything that I noticed and he didn't - but I guess until he gets a little more confidence in his writing ability (like that'll happen; what, a programmer write?) I'm going to have to pick up the proverbial slack. I guess it helps that I'm only literally the biggest Pixar fan that ever did walk the face of the earth...

In short, um, Pixar rules. This movie was so cool. Kind of a generic cliche of a description, but it works so well for this one. I've been waiting for over a year to see it, and boy howdy was it worth the wait. The animation was amazing and the story cute (if not entirely cartoonish). Incidentally, this is also my one and only complaint about the movie: half the time I didn't even feel like I was watching a cartoon. It was more like a spinoff (is that one word or two?) of Spiderman or something. I think they're just trying to confuse us; with more live-action movies using computer graphics and computer animation looking more and more like live action, how are we supposed to know which direction is up anymore? It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

I'm more excited than ever now to see what Pixar will do with itself once it's shed the restrictive yolk of the Disney empire (Pixar's next film, "Cars," is slated to be its last under Mickey Mouse's domineering demands) and struck out on its own.

Jumping up and down...

It seems almost tasteless to start my first post in two weeks by bragging, but I'm too excited to care right now. I just got a letter telling me that a short story that I sent in to the Writer's Digest annual writing competition received an honorable mention, and this out of 18,000 entries. I am sooooo stoked. I just can't believe it. Of course the perfectionist in me wants to have won the whole darn contest (the winner gets a trip to New York to meet literary agents), but considering this is only the second short story I've actually finished, let alone submitted anywhere, I feel relatively justified in telling my inner critic to just shut up.

On a more morbid note, I was eating the most delicious tofu teriyaki for dinner tonight when I bit into -surprise- a piece of chicken (and yes, dad, you can tell by the texture). I promptly spit it out, but by that time I'd had dead animal in my mouth and the damage was pretty well done. This is the second time it's happened at two different restaurants; I'm afraid I may have to give up my beloved tofu teriyaki altogether, which somewhat tempers the excitement of the day.

Go See Hero

Just a brief plug..."Hero," for so long in limbo in the U.S. due to a contract between Zhang Yimou and Miramax, is now playing in theaters nationwide. If you're a martial arts fan (you know who you are!) and/or you like a little eye candy, I highly recommend this movie. I was surprised to find out in Beijing that the movie's actually a little bit controversial among Chinese film critics, but hey, I'm not Chinese, so I can enjoy it without the slightest bit of guilt owing entirely to my blessed American ignorance.

A Short Apology and a Lot of Blabbing

Well, hello again. I don't know if anyone's even reading the blog anymore, since I've been home for a little over a week now. Truth be told I'm surprised anyone's reading it at all, given I posted so little. I really have to apologize for that: I was so busy in Beijing, and when I could get to a computer it was truly a pain to try and get anything posted. It's just one of the things about going to a communist country. You can type in a web address, but it's a crap shoot as to whether you'll be able to go there or not. Who knew John's 'blog would be full of anti-socialist sentiment?

Some more promising news: I've created a photo album with pictures of the trip, accessible at http://beccamozart.zoto.com, so you can finally see some of the stuff. Here comes another apology: when I uploaded the pictures I added descriptions on all 150+ pictures, but for some reason a lot of them didn't save. I'll be going back and fixing them, but it'll take some time so if you're curious about a certain picture it might be worth your while to check back a couple of times.

My trip home was decidedly better than the one to Beijing; all luggage made it safely to Seattle, I got three very filling vegetarian meals on the flight, and no one gypped me out of anything substantial, as long as you don't count the guy who charged me ten yuan to carry my luggage from the taxi to the customs gate. I also made several new friends on my oh-so-adventurous flight, including a guy who grew up in Beijing but now lives in Fremont, CA (and kindly saved me from misguidedly getting on a flight to Singapore instead of the one to San Francisco); a girl who's studying at Stanford and was taking her mother to the States for the first time; and a professor from Fudan University in Shanghai, who offered to help me get into the school should I choose to pursue graduate studies in China. I'm starting to think that when you're a white girl in China and you can speak just enough Chinese to get yourself into trouble it's really not too hard to make friends, because everybody around just finds you so darn amusing.

The last week away was a little difficult, just for the fact that my dizzy little brain was starting to remember that there was a world where I understood other people and knew whether I was being complimented or insulted when someone told me I had such very white skin (in Beijing, by the way, it's apparently quite the compliment). I started feeling a little homesick and anxious to get back to my husband and my little apartment still full of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. It didn't help that the class schedule was starting to wind down, so I had more time to myself, all of which I used to wonder where John was and what he was doing, even though the majority of the time it was the middle of the night in Seattle. We did do a few interesting things with the group, however, including eating at a very fancy Peking duck restaurant and taking a boat out on the lake. We met with an urban planner and an expert on public art (rather scarce as yet in the New China) and all the rest of the seminar-y stuff that we had to do to qualify the trip as a "class," but for the most part we spent the last week winding stuff down and - dare I say it - shopping.

Oh, but this is getting long. I may actually post a couple more times; there are some stories and things about my trip that I still want to share, since I had so much difficulty posting when I was there. Let me know if you like the pictures!

Becca

Hello Everyone

Hello, everyone.I guess I have to apologize for the sporadic postings; I wonder if anyone's evenreading them anymore. Truth is I have difficulty spending any significant amount of time in the internet cafe here in Beijing, the air quality is so bad. I'm sitting right under a "no smoking" sign, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Even the guy at the front desk has a cigarette in his mouth. It's eight o'clock on a Sunday night, and the place is so full up of wacky video game junkies that I got the last computer here. It's crazy.

My second week in Beijing has been slightly less exciting than the first, which I'm actually grateful for. Last week was so hectic that I hardly had the opportunity to sit down for five minutes at a time. I'm finding ways to fillthe extra time, though, and the whole experience just seems to be going by soquickly. I've done so much shopping it's embarrassing, had the best manicure of my life, and even went to see Zhang Yimou's latest film (ever seen "Hero"?) called "House of Flying Daggers." I was really excited, since "Hero" is hands-down my favorite movie. "Flying Daggers" is a pretty controversial film on this side of the globe; Zhang Yimou used to be a dissident filmmaker, but people are regarding him as a little bit of a sell out now. When "FlyingDaggers" opened the government promoted the film so heavily that they wouldn't let any Hollywood movies screen in the entire country for the first twenty days after its release. I have to admit that the plot was at once! slightly thin and layered on way too thick, but the cinematography is gorgeous in true Zhang Yimou style, and all in all it was fun. Besides, like I was telling my friends last night, since when does a Kung Fu movie have to have a plot at all, much less a believable one?

We've had a pretty exciting line up of speakers and such here this week,including two of China's most prominent fifth-generation directors and an"Americanist" from Beijing University. We also went shopping at Wangfujing, which is so outrageously expensive I couldn't believe it. It was very eye-opening as to the enormous chasm between the rich and the poor in this city; where we're staying near the Hutongs (old neighborhoods) a shirt in a littleclothing shop will cost maybe 30 yuan ($3 USD) if you don't bargain too hard, and from what I understand we live in a part of town that "normal Chinese" (I still haven't quite figured out what that means, but Beijingers use the phrase constantly) have difficulty affording. At Wangfujing a good shirt will run you a good 300 yuan (about $35 USD) at the cheapest, and there is no haggling. It's very western. We even ate dinner at Pizza Hut, which in China is a fancy restaurant, go figure. There are also McDonald's all over the city! , but here McDonald's is a status symbol, as are the Starbucks. It's comparable to what you would pay in the states, but when you're paying the price of a nice shirt for a cup of coffee or a hamburger it kind of throws you for a loop. In the US, nobody ever complains that McDonald's is too expensive.

The thing about Beijing is that it just simply accosts your senses: there's so much going on here at once that it's hard to get your bearings. The streets never have the same buildings two days in a row. There's the smell of overflowing sewers (you have to watch where you step) and the smell of Budweiser from the brand-spanking-new American-style bars. On Friday I had traditional flat bread from a street-stand for breakfast and Schlotzky's Deli for dinner. Then I had Chinese candy, green tea, and Pringles for dessert. People drive their cars like they're still on bicycles, driving in between lanes on thefreeway and going wrong-way down the one-way streets like that's the way you're supposed to do it. It's noisy and it's dirty and it's poor but it's also lavish and exorbitant and over-the top. I'm having a hard time getting my bearings here, always feeling like I'm floating around, and I've only lived here for two and a half weeks. I can't even imagine what it must be like to have lived here for sixty years and suddenly feel like the world is being pulled out from underneath you. How can anybody call this place home? Doesn't the very word imply that there's something there that you recognize?

Second Week

Well, the start of the second week finds me pretty well exhausted; we've been moving non-stop since I got here last Saturday(or Friday, in Seattle time). We've watched several movies, toured parts of the old city, shopped at anenormous antiques market filled with tourists, etc. etc. etc. The past coupleof days I've been kind of keeping to myself. My body's starting to rebelagainst the sudden change in diet (although it wasn't so dramatic, since I ate mostly rice and veggies before I came), the upside-down sleeping times, and the stress of being around so many people ALL the time. I'm normally pretty congenial, but I need my alone time. And I just haven't been getting it.

We went to the Great Wall yesterday. Frankly, Richard Nixon's infamous quote("It sure is a great wall") pretty well sums it up. It is pretty cool, though,and quite a tickler for the imagination to think that you're walking on astructure that was there before Jesus. That's pretty old. And I'll tell you what, that sucker is STEEP. In some places there's a good 60% grade at least, I'd be willing to guess steeper in some areas. Sometimes it looks like it just goes straight up. And there were so many people! At one point I was trapped against a wall inside a guard house, pressed at from all sides by a flowing river of people, unable to move. Once outside I actually cried; I think I just narrowly missed an all-out panic attack, as absolutely claustrophobic as I am.

That's one thing about the Chinese: they really aren't afraid to shove you. I'm not sure it's so much that they're rude, but when you live in a city this large you get used to just going before someone else does. That and I'm sure that the fact that I'm a foreigner doesn't help much. For the most part they've become pretty accepting of a blue-eyed stranger, but there are still a few people who look at you distrustingly. And of course there are always those who will jack aprice up 500% because they think you don't know any better, which of course you usually don't. I'm embarrassed to think of all the times I've probably been taken. They always get a little surprised, though, when I start speakingChinese, and once I start haggling in their native tongue the price usually drops pretty dramatically. Either way, they're still a pushy people. I've hadpeople cut in line in front of my five or six times at the grocery store (which is pretty much every time I've gone). And you should see the way they drive!

This week I have:
1. spent an exhorbitant amount of money on shamelessly tourist-oriented crap
2. been hit on by a guy with a camel at the Great Wall, who told me in Chinese that he thought I was very beautiful, and whose friend followed me up the walltelling me the camel-guy wanted to kiss me
3. become a tourist attraction at the Wall in my own right: people wereliterally lining up to have their picture taken with me
4. slaughtered the Mandarin language more than any tourist ever had a right to
5. interpreted for a German family who didn't know how to order dinner and
6. not slept, studied, or done anything else even remotely useful, except forgorge myself on Chinese food. And, of course, shop, although whether it's actually useful or not could probably be debated. Here's hoping everyone at home is happy and in good health. I can't wait to get home so that I can get some pictures posted for everyone to see.

Zai Jian!

Hello (finally) everybody!

Sorry for the delay in posting. I can't get onto the blogger website from theinternet cafe here in China (local controls or something?) so I'm having to e-mail the posts to John and have him post them for me. It's been quite a week- I can't believe I've been in China for a week, how's that for wild - and rightnow I'm a little tired.
My first couple of days here were pretty difficult. After THE LONGEST FLIGHT INTHE WORLD, and of course one on which my vegetarian meals were never ordered soI had to go fifteen hours without eating, I finally got into a very quietBeijing airport. Then the airline lost my luggage. Then I somehow got scammedinto a taxi ride to my hotel that cost 450 RMB (about $50). The actual runningrate should be somewhere closer to 100 RMB. I went for two days without any ofmy things, and although things are remarkably cheap here - and I do mean CHEAP -the Chinese just don't seem to make underwear in my size.
But I finally got my luggage back a couple of days later, thank goodness, andthings have kind of been looking up since then. China is an amazing place; ourhotel is right on Lake Houhai, Beijing's latest hip night spot - who knewBeijing had hip night spots? - and it's a really beautiful neighborhood. Itbacks up to one of the oldest neighborhoods in Beijing, rows of courtyard housesthat you'd probably recognize from Kung Fu movies called Hutongs, which has beenreally fascinating. Some of these houses are 600 years old. I've never seenanything 600 years old. Unfortunately one of the biggest hot-button issues hereis that these neighborhoods are quickly disappearing as Beijing makes a bee-linefor modernization. Every day we see crews demolishing houses, and a streetnever has the same buildings two days in a row.
We went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square on Monday, which was trulyone of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. Especially the ForbiddenCity, which is awe-inspiringly vast and ornate in spite of the fact that it'skind of crumbling away. I kind of get the sense that the Chinese are in such aflux right now that they just don't know what to do with themselves. Trying tofind a balance between modernization and their own identity can't be easy,though to tell the truth they've been struggling with it in one form or anotherfor a couple of centuries now. These days it's just taking a different form, onethat's sort of hectic and stressed out because of the fast-approaching Olympics.
One final note before I bore everyone to death: the food here is seriously todie for (which is a good thing, because when you buy stuff on the street you'renever really sure what you're going to get). I really think that AmericanChinese food is ruined for me now; how will we ever go back to Bamboo Garden?
Ha ha.

Love to all of you,
Becca

I'm leaving tomorrow!

Well, it's the nineteenth of August, the day before I leave. I'm VERY excited, but at this point I'm feeling a little nervous about being away from John this long. We all know what happened the last time we were separated for any length of time...

I think that everything's packed and ready to go, but who knows? When you're travelling there's always at least one thing you forget; it's Murphy's other law. I hope to keep this blog updated with all of the events from my trip, and hopefully some pictures as well if I can figure out how to make the Chinese-language computers work, so keep checking back!

Becca