Day Two: Up and Running?

Day Two: Up and Running?

Today begins my first full day in Beijing and the true beginning of my summer spent here. I got over the initial jetlag surprisingly well (fingers crossed) waking up at 5am momentarily before sleeping again until 8. Not bad! My rule when traveling is that I am only allowed to sleep on the plane when I would be sleeping in my destination country and though it’s not a perfect science, it’s served me pretty well so far.

First thing, after I went grocery shopping, was going to the police station to “register” me with the local police. The government has begun to really crack down on foreignors staying beyond their visas here which has made for heightened security everywhere. My roommate awoke to the PSB (local police) knocking on her door yesterday morning. Better safe then sorry. I am now a registered temporary resident of Beijing.

Work began today as well. I am in a lovely little area near enough by subway ride (or bike perhaps?) to my apartment and everyone I have met so far is lovely and warm and inviting. Most everyone is a young 20-something and I cannot wait to get to know them, their backgrounds and their ideals better. I spent most of the afternoon “reading” documents for my research and I put reading in quotations because it is beyond difficult to read anything in Chinese if you don’t recognize the characters you are working with. As you can imagine, I am dealing with some pretty specific terminology (not to mention a little jetlag and a cold kindly given from the man in the seat next to me on the airplane) so it took me most of the afternoon to get through an embarrassingly small amount of type. Let me try to explain to you all how one looks up a Chinese character, I will try to be brief and feel free to skip over the next paragraph.

Step one: Realize you don’t actually know the character you see. This sounds easier than it is as many characters look painstakingly similar. I often waste a few minutes looking up characters I think I know only to realize that the dot is a line.

Step two: Find the radical. The radical is the part of the character which is the root of the word itself, there’s really no good explanation for this in English but think the “ed” in indoctrinated. There are over 150 radicals and some characters have a few but they are only listed under one. Good luck.

Step three: Count how many strokes are in the radical.

Step four: Look up the radical based upon the number of strokes. Once you have found your radical you will be given a number assigned to that radical. Go to that section of the dictionary

Step five: Count the number of strokes in the character MINUS the number of strokes in the radical.

Step six: Look under the number of strokes section under the number of your radical. Here you will find the pinyin (Romanization) of your character.

Step seven: Find the character, alphabetically listed and then listed by tone, in the dictionary.

Step eight: Read the English meaning and decide which of the 5 or so options best applies in your case.

Repeat these steps a few hundred times, add in extra confusion for names of places and people and figuring out which characters go together (imagineallwordswrittenlikethisandyoudon’tknowwhereoneendsandanotherbegins) and you’ve got my afternoon.

After work I walked to meet a friend of mine from the program I did here in High School. It is crazy how little I remember of Beijing. I used to bike from my home to school every day for nine straight months and I could not for the life of me tell you how to go any longer. Aside from the fact that the streets are demolished and none of the sight signs exist any longer. Cute cafes, design stores and English signs litter the streets along with HORDES of Laowai (the sorta slang for foreignors word that is used by Chinese in America to basically mean whitey, think gringo in Spanish). Hordes may be exaggerating but I saw at least a dozen today just in my walk, this may not seem surprising but it really was shocking back in the day to see a laowai anywhere outside of jiangoumen (the place where the aforementioned starbucks resided) back in the day. I swear I stare at them more than Chinese people do now. On that note, I am beyond impressed with the expat scene here, especially by what some of my friends are doing, one has opened up a chain of bar/pizza lounges that is expansive, delicious and clearly popular, another just got picked up by a corporation to travel around with a Chinese band, documenting the experience and recently published a book of photographs of the Chinese music scene. It’s nice to look around at your life and think that those who you’ve interacted with are active participants in the world which surrounds you.

And on that note my jetlag just seriously kicked in and I am headed to bed. I am currently reading “Mountains beyond Mountains” which I insist anyone looking for a summer read picks up. I’ve been bugged to read it for a couple years now but ignored those voices (as I so often do) because I feared it would be preachy. It’s actually remarkably engrossing and thought provoking, honest and delightful. Just in case you need something to do when you’re done reading my blog ;)

Day One

And we’re back.

Current soundtrack: Garden State

Here are the two different emotions I felt as my plane from Hong Kong made its descent to Beijing, falling from blue skies into a distinct brown dust surrounding the plane, as clearly separated from the cleaner air as oil and water.

1) AHHHHHHHHHH TURN AROUND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2) Mmmmm, mmmm Good. Warm blankets and Campbell soup.

When I was 17, after returning from living in Beijing for the better part of a year, I declared that I would one day become a citizen of the country. Perhaps it was partially for the shock value but there was a definite part of me that felt oddly at home in Beijing, a place where I rode my purple shiny (five times stolen) bike to school and felt guilty if I sipped on mocha frappicinos on the one coveted starbucks in jiangoumen, the main Laowai district, rather than dumplings with my host family. I relished flying kites in tian an men square, got used to and then learned to expect and sometimes even adore the constant stares following my every presence. I came back special, different, the girl who went to China. Although I had missed a year of high school I had also gained experiences which were given far more deference than those of my peers, merely by uttering the words “studied abroad in China”. In the very least, I had to espout love for the country which brought me so much uniqueness in the world.

Coming back my junior year of college was….to say the least, different. I spent a month of my time before my program in Yunnan began in Beijing, during the cold gray month of February. The butcher near my apartment, which I would bike by in disgust on my way to school, was replaced with a shiny supermarket, the hutongs were new apartment buildings, my host sister had a cellphone and I no longer had a go-to group of 40 american kids with which to relish the delights and pitfulls of being a foreigner in the middle kingdom. That month was one of the most difficult of my life, and I remember calling home to my parents, crying, sobbing, asking myself why had I come back? I later went on to spend an incredible three months in my program in Yunnan, followed by a less incredible three months doing an internship in Lijiang, yet the month spent at a rural school in namu village, has got to rank as one of life’s best.

But that was Namu, here I am in Beijing, again. In the hot sticky summer leading up to the Olympics, where political tensions are at an all century high and an earthquake has just ravaged the country. Foreigners are much more common, I saw half a dozen on the way to the supermarket after I arrived this morning, something that would have been unheard of when I lived here eight years ago. My cabbie was obviously unfazed by a white girl speaking Chinese though the salesladies as I picked up my very first Chinese cellphone and air conditioner complimented me in a manner not unlike that at the turn of the century.

So why am I back here again? I’ve thought about that question so little in the flurry that was benefits, fundraisers, classes, green cards, and graduations that have been my past semester that it surprises me when I think of it to myself. My work, clearly, is what brings me here though I am plagued by worried of what it can truly be. And the hard thing to admit after spending time working at The Door in the US is that great, important and necessary work can be achieved in America as well, something my international human rights frameworked mind hadn’t really considered until I entered law school. I had always assumed I would live abroad, be abroad, and that is where I could truly do the most important work. My experiences, however, have questioned that mindset and what is more, I LOVE my life in New York, particularly in the summers. Hugging Roma and Bea Goodbye, hearing them talk of swimming lessons and outdoor movies, receiving phone calls from my clients hours before I boarded the plane, made me think if I wasn’t just ignoring how good I had it.

In high school I clearly was running away, in college I needed to feel special again, and now? I am back in Beijing caught in the moments between jet lag and new-place-enthusiasm. I will be sharing a two bedroom apartment with an American girl who has been in China on and off for the last seven years. She just got a yet unnamed cat, the smallest 6 week old brown-black kitten I have ever seen, and who I call bug in my head as she paws over my computer and crawls up my neck as I type this. My clothes are unpacked and I have meetings scheduled for this week. I want to eat dumplings tonight. And yet, I am still confused about why I am here. Not because there isn’t work to be done, not because it isn’t incredibly important, not because I am not honored, excited, thrilled, blown away to be doing it, but because I no longer need convincing that it is. Regardless, the first thing I did in my jet lagged state was buy myself a grande mocha frappicino and smile at the cashier who complemented me on my Chinese.

(blog side note: I don’t love editing my writing in blogs, I have enough of that in law school, so apologies for unclear thoughts, unedited phrases, judge away ;)

Shipping Off

Hello all!

Welcome to Lanlan in Beijing, a mini chronicle of my ventures in China this summer! This will be the main way I can keep in contact/ keep people posted of my journeys and happenings. I ship out tonight and am feeling a whole host of emotions I can't begin to explain right now as my to do list is ominously longer than the minutes left before my departure but I wanted to give a brief intoduction and say hello. Love and miss you all!

Lanlan