38: The End

When I try to put into words how I feel about my time in China, I reach a block. I simply can’t. You know when you watch an amazing movie, or read some book that leaves you with this weird feeling that you want to bottle because you know it’s only when you put in that much time and effort that you can feel it? And you want to share it with people because it feels so amazing, but you can’t? That’s exactly how I feel right now.

All I can do now is thank the people who have made my time here worthwhile. Thank you to the old men who beat themselves while walking down the street. Thank you to the waiters who giggle whenever I order in Chinese. Thank you to the 串老板 who remembered my order and told me not to worry that I always came out alone, because a lot of people do that too.  Thank you to the dude who asked for my number from my friend after I blacked out from drinking too much and hurt my ankle. Thank you to my teachers who put up with all my ridiculous questions, like “can 大量 also mean something flirtacious? Like when a guy looks you up and down?” Thank you to those teenagers in Guiyang who told us that they were surprised that we knew Chinese because they thought only Chinese people spoke Chinese. Thank you to the old ladies who ignored me as they walked down the street (my favorite people!). Thank you to that kid in my English class, Barton, who told me a joke and then after I laughed, asked me to explain it. Thank you to this nation who welcomed me (and sometimes yelled at me), and let me grow, learn the culture, and mature so much.

That’s it.

(Not really. I’m starting a new blog for my time in San Diego. Email me at matthewhsampson@gmail.com if you are interested in getting the link after I set it up!)

37: 重庆

Before I came to China, I saw a picture of a gorgeous city. It was Chongqing, and I quickly became obsessed with the Chongqing skyline. As a matter of fact, the specific reason why I wanted to go to Southwest China over winter break was to see Chongqing. So, after we visited Guiyang, we hopped on a bus to Chongqing. Despite my utter excitement, I fell asleep. The next time I woke up, we were in a brightly lit plaza in Chongqing.

In the weeks leading up to my trip, I talked to some of the staff members about my upcoming destinations. I would tell them that I was going to Yunnan, Guizhou, and then Chongqing. Their reactions would start off as excited for Yunnan, confused for Guizhou (why are you going to China’s poorest province? There’s nothing there to see!) to absolute shock for Chongqing. Why would you want to go to Chongqing? It’s too hilly. The rice there is terrible. There’s so much crime. The mayor wants to revert the city back to a Mao Zedong era. Unfortunately, these people didn’t realize they were talking to someone who wants to live in Venusville in Total Recall or the Capital in Hunger Games. The more I heard about how Chongqing was the hub for drug trafficking and human trafficking due to its location and how ignored it was by the Sichuan government, the more it fed into my urban dystopia fantasies.

Of course, the Chongqing I experienced was not full of drug trips and journeys into the seedy underbelly of gang society. But Chongqing was still an amazing time for me. The tall high-rises scraping the sky, the Liberation monument sandwiched between two gigantic new buildings marking the Chongqing World Trade Center, and the fish market across from the new Carrefour all delighted the Asian Studies major in me. The expressways built precariously over the river, and the monorail system perched up on the cliffs made the city much more unique in my mind. I loved that the city felt like New York City, San Francisco, and China all rolled into one.

One of the things that I owe to Chongqing was a realization that popped into my head while I rode on the cable car across. If you look at a map of Chongqing, the urban area, as well as the historical area, is concentrated in the Yuzhong Peninsula. I was struck by how undeveloped or recently developed the areas across the river from the Peninsula were. As a matter of fact, there are only 4 bridges connecting the Yuzhong Peninsula to the Jiangbei and Nan’an Districts across the river, and all bridges were set further back than would be expected (from a Westerner’s point of view). There were two new bridges being built in the forward part of the Peninsula, where one would expect bridges. My realization was this: the quirk of the Chinese city was that the Chinese saw a specific outline of a city as the only place where a city could exist, and never thought anything outside of it could be developed as part of the same place. It wasn’t until the 21^st century, when there was an influx of money and people that governments started reaching out to the neighboring areas to develop and expand. After the development, the most expensive property is always within the old city, despite new buildings. In Beijing, the most expensive property is within the Second Ring Road. In Chongqing, it is the Yuzhong Peninsula. It was also around this time that I pretty much decided I was in love with cities and I wanted to study cities for grad school.

The fact that Chongqing was still the last Guomindang stronghold ensured that it would be an important historical site for anyone obsessed with the GMD. In a weird twist, all the GMD sites are now propaganda sites for the Communist party. For example, Laurence and I trekked out to Gele Mountain Martyrs’ Memorial. It did not disappoint. Gele Mountain was where the GMD held all its Communist POWs, and then brutally massacred them as the Communists were invading. We toured where the POWs were kept and where various GMD generals were staying. The creepiest part of the tour was the graveyard, with poetry by the individual carved onto the gravestones. We toured the museum, which displayed each individual Communist, with a personal history and name. Later, we went to where Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai lived during the Communists’ alliance with the GMD. There was no GMD sight that was untouched by the Communists.

All I really wanted to do in Chongqing was to take in the city. My favorite moment was taken directly out of a hipster Zooey Deschanel movie moment. Laurence and I got out at the Liziba subway stop, and exhausted, we decided to just sit down for a while. We sat at some benches facing the Jialing River, and the Jiangbei District across from us. After travelling together 24/7 for a week and a half by then, we had nothing to say to each other. We just sat, looked across the river and took in the buildings around us. The best cities can captivate you. The best cities can make some stupid moment like this into a special one. I’m going back to Chongqing this May with my sister, and I am incredibly excited for it. Hopefully we have plenty of stupid moments for the city to change for us.

36: Americanisms

It’s just hit me that I’ve been here for more than 6 months. I haven’t seen any of my family members in that long, I haven’t been in America in that long, and I feel so used to it all. I’ve stopped having those moments where I pause in the streets and immediately think, “Holy shit, I’m in China!” Being here for this long means that I’ve picked up some habits that I’m sure would make my mother shudder.

For one, I have no qualms about picking my nose in public. This is actually one of my favorite things, because I’ve always seen picking my nose as something absolutely natural. EVERYONE does it, so why not as well make it public? I can imagine people reading this with a disgusted expression on their face, so I will add this: picking your nose is not the worst thing. Chinese people believe that snot is meant to be removed from your body by any means, so it is extremely common to see people shooting snot rockets onto the ground. I’ve had plenty of close calls, with people hitting an inch next to my shoe.

Back home, I can jay walk pretty well. I just wait for a traffic bubble and then just walk quickly across the street. A policeman has stopped me after crossing Broadway in San Diego (a 6 lane street!), and he let me off after I told him I was from DC and used to jaywalking. In China, jaywalking is common, but the way they do it is much more fearless than in America. People will walk a few lanes, then stand precariously as buses and cars go around them, honking their horn or flashing their lights. It’s quite hilarious to see, but I’ve started joining the ranks of daredevils who blaze forward in the name of saving time. It’s hilarious to hear people say, “That laowai can cross streets like a Chinese person!”

“EH?!?!?!” This is the worst habit I’ve developed here. My mom always taught me to be as quiet as possible, for lack of a better way to tell me if I’m being loud. She just flat out told me that I shouldn’t make noises when I chew, nor should I grunt in reply to anyone. So I was never very vocal other than talking. However, after I started working in China, I quickly picked this up. It’s not uncommon to hear people shout out “EH??” to someone trying to get their attention. People will hear their phone ringing and then answer “WEI?!” anywhere in Beijing. The bathroom, the bus, or out in the street, you are pretty much guaranteed to hear someone say this. Unfortunately, I am now one of those people. Someone calls out to me, and I turn around and go “HUH?????” It’s incredibly convenient to do this, but also incredibly rude in America. I can only hope I can drop this habit pretty quickly!

At the beginning of last semester, I walked into a public bathroom and recoiled in horror. There was absolutely no walls separating any of the squat toilets, and I couldn’t help but think that I would never use a bathroom like that. Winter break rolled around, and I went on my program trip. I quickly realized that there would be 12-hour stretches where I would have no access to western toilets and quickly got over my American privacy quirk. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved a few times of “别看我！” or “Don’t look at me!” Before I came to China, I adhered to the unspoken rules of the men’s bathroom. Go in, do your business, and leave. Do not make eye contact with anyone else. Do not talk. But now I’m used to the anything goes situation in Chinese bathrooms.

Despite these habits I’ve picked up, I’ve also kept some very strong Americanisms. No matter how hard I try, I can’t shake the thoughts that pop into my head.

Whenever I’m walking down the street, and I want to cross, I still look behind me. If you see Chinese people cross the street, they just do it in a flow, without ever looking back. If a car comes up behind them, they just assume the car will honk. I, on the other hand, can’t shake the years of my parents lecturing me to look before I cross.

The customer is not god anymore. Growing up in a consumerist society, you get used to getting what you want. A messed up order in a restaurant is not grounds to send it back. You get what you get, and you pay for what you get. My dorm recently converted their washing machines from card-operated to coin-operated. I asked the front desk if they could convert my 5 kuai bill into coins so I could use the coins for the machine. The man said “Well of course we don’t have 1 kuai coins!” as if I had asked him to kill someone for me. He told me to go and try the convenience store. I went, bought some items, and then asked the cashier if she could convert the bill for me. She said no, and refused to explain more. I persisted and she finally snapped, yelling at me to leave her alone. I left with no explanation. It felt weird to be in that situation, after years of having people sweetly explain to me why they couldn’t do it, or even gladly changing my bill.

Of course, there’s the amazingly clichéd saying, “you can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tiger,” which I think is pretty true. My friend last semester turned to me and said, “You’re pretty Chinese. You could fit right in if you weren’t so American and white.” This is pretty much my predicament. I’ll never get rid of the American in me. In a way, I don’t really care. I like being certain of my identity. I know I’ll keep trying, but it’s like the response I always get wherever I go: “You could fit in, if you weren’t so tall… and so white…”

35: 中文

One of the things that most Chinese people say to me is “Your Chinese is very good!” Unfortunately, I know deep in my heart that that is just a lie. To them, a laowai speaking any sort of Chinese is good, simply because they have at one point in their life attempted to penetrate this language fortress that is known as Chinese. Anyway, now that I’ve started my new Chinese class and my teacher is stricter on tones than any teacher I’ve ever had, I thought it’d be a good time to air out my grievances and, to be fair, talk about the things I like about Chinese.

Tones. Tones, tones, tones. Anyone will tell you that tones are pretty much the bane of any westerner studying Chinese. My classmates frequently ask me how I handle tones as a deaf person. I tell them pretty much the same thing I say when confronted with anything Chinese culture: “I don’t know.” Basically, in Mandarin, there are 4 tones, a flat one, a rising one, a dipping one, and then a dropping one. What tone you use in a syllable can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One of the biggest issues is 哪儿 and 那儿. They both have the exact same sound, except the first one, where, has a dipping tone, and the second one, there, has a dropping tone. So you can say “你在哪儿？Where are you?” and “你在那儿！You’re over there!” and they will sound virtually indistinguishable to a non-Chinese person. There are much more complicated mistakes. For example, we recently covered a unit about pandas. The word for panda is xiongmao, with a rising tone and then a flat tone. However, if you switch the two tones, you end up saying ‘furry boob’. Tones are incredibly important, but for some reason they haven’t really been stressed in my classes until I got to China. I would carry on whole conversations with Chinese people, and at the end they would tell me that they were pretty much guessing what I was talking about, just because I didn’t get the tones right. Now that tones are stressed in my class, I find myself being understood within the first few tries, rather than on my fifth or sixth try. I’m getting there, hopefully.

Characters. I actually got the concept of characters pinned down rather quickly. Some people struggled to understand why a whole culture would just use characters to represent EVERY SINGLE word when they could just use an alphabet and place those letters together to form another word. I already understood, because my first language was pretty much the same. In ASL, almost everything has a sign for it. People would ask me why I didn’t just fingerspell anything, and I would look at them as if they were crazy. Fingerspell everything? Are you crazy? Why not just create a name for each object and then just go from there? Of course, knowing ASL doesn’t help me with my memorization at all, but it does help when I don’t have to muck through some strange new concept while trying to learn a whole new set of words.

Culture. I think that every language that I’ve studied has its own culture behind this. I know this is an incredibly obvious thing to say, but it really is intriguing how a language that may be more ‘cultural’ than others can hinder or help your experience with studying that language. For example, when I studied Spanish, there was really no culture involved. You just learn the new words and new grammar, and for the most part, you can get the language down, at least for the first 2 or 3 levels. Once you hit higher levels, you have to start studying more cultural knowledge in order to understand idioms or expressions that are commonly said in that culture. When you study Japanese, however, you are instantly plunged into the culture. You see, the Japanese culture is very, very indirect. You must internalize this thought, so when you write or speak Japanese, you can say “I like” instead of “I like that”. This culture is so pervasive in the language that when you get your first test back, the teacher is already saying things like “You’re being too direct!!! Remove ‘I’ from this sentence and you’ll have a good start” (This is a real criticism I got. I had to remove ‘I’, because to the Japanese listener, it’s obvious that I’m already the one talking). Chinese is a nice middle ground in this spectrum. When I started studying Chinese, it was easy enough to pick up the language without any prior cultural knowledge. When I got to the higher levels, it required some cultural knowledge, but not too much. For the most part, it helped a lot if you knew the culture, but it wouldn’t hinder you too much if you didn’t. A good example is what they call basic stuff: the word for cellphone is directly translated as ‘hand machine’, and the word for patient is translated as ‘(to) bear troubles’. When people reach advanced Chinese, they have to start studying idioms, of which are based on thousands and thousands of years of history. Imagine it as a popular joke amongst teenagers about some Charlemagne. Chinese teenagers will quote something from Confucious and manage to work it into a conversation. How bizarre is this? If I make a historical joke, even my closest friends will give me blank stares. Anyway, when it comes down to it, I consider myself good at picking up other cultures, and Chinese has that nice balance of culture in it that I can follow along and still be interested in it.

Grammar. Again, this is another topic that my ASL experience has helped me with. For the most part, Chinese grammar is very similar to ASL grammar. There is no real conjugation of verbs in both languages. You just have to use clues to pick up whether it took place in the past or will happen. Time words are placed differently than in English, but same for both ASL and Chinese. Even if the grammar patterns are not the same, my experience being bilingual has helped me be able to transcend confusion that comes from studying a new grammar pattern.

Culture Pt. 2. One of the things that annoy me about English speakers in America is that people are expected to follow one specific conversation at any table, no matter the number of people. Oftentimes I’ve followed a conversation only to realize that it’s not relevant to me at all, so I start a new conversation with someone else. Halfway through my second sentence, I realize that people are staring at me, thinking I’m rude as shit for ignoring them, when I just had no vested interest in the original conversation. As far as I know, in Deaf culture, we frequently break away from other conversations to start our own and the whole thing is very fluid, much like the language of ASL itself. Chinese is somewhat similar. Instead of multiple conversations at one table, like ASL, or one conversation by one person at one table, it really is everyone having the same conversation at the same time. I went out with my close friends, Mandy and Ben. Ben is from America, but Mandy is from China. We were discussing what to eat, and Mandy ordered in Chinese for us. The conversation suddenly erupted into Mandy plus three other waitresses, all talking over each other, for a good five minutes. Ben and I couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation. When Mandy was done talking, and we had finished ordering, I asked her what they were talking about. She simply replied “Oh, just what we were ordering” as if it were no big deal. This is a common occurrence in China, and it does satiate my desire for an environment similar to Deaf culture, which I have been missing for a while.

Chinese truly is a complicated language. I know this is such a cliché to say, but to a person like me, who wants to constantly learn and constantly be stimulated, it’s a perfect language to study and immerse myself in. I can only hope that someday I can reach that level where I can get into a 5 minute conversation with three other people all talking at once, but for now, I have to stick to studying tones.

34: CBD

Yesterday, Laurence and I made a trip to the Central Business District. I was excited to go see all the architecture that Beijing has been heavily promoting since the Olympics. I was excited to feel like I was back in the hustle and bustle of New York, which is what I associated the CBD with in my head. And of course, I was excited to see Rem Koolhaas’ famous CCTV Tower, which led him to denounce the evils of democratic bureaucracy in favor of absolute authoritarianism (more on this later).
When we got off the station at Guomao, we saw a sign for the China World Trade Center. Of course, we followed it. It took us through fancy malls with upscale stores selling perfumes or western style dresses. There were three enormous zones of just store after store after store, and we walked from Zone 1 to Zone 3. When we finally arrived at Zone 3, we found an elevator and decided to ‘sneak’ into the rooftop garden on the 6th floor right next to the World Trade tower. I was, of course, freaking out about being right next to a gorgeous building that was so heavily promoted during the Olympics. However, when I turned around and looked at the environment, I was a little… disappointed. The ubiquitous Beijing sprawl still reigned supreme, and New York’s narrow streets were not as prevalent there as it was in my mind. From the garden, I could not see the other two iconic buildings, the Park Hyatt, and the CCTV Tower. The other buildings were either large socialist modernism designs, or still under construction. We left the World Trade Center to seek out the CCTV Tower. We passed a huge empty lot with migrant apartments on the edge. We walked past a few more lots until the CCTV Tower came into full view. It loomed in the thick smog, and only a few of the lights were on. The intersection was dead, except for cars zooming by. When we got there, I realized that they had just shut down the building entirely, and fenced it up with the blue construction fence that you see all over China. It was… disappointing.
Nonetheless, it was still exciting to see the CCTV Tower building. For those of you who don’t know what it is, you should look up some pictures on Google, because it really is a pretty and unique building. However, two aspects of the building reveal much about Chinese society. First, Rem Koolhaas has praised the Chinese government for making this building possible for him. His argument is that in the future, authoritarian governments are what will pave the way for fantastic new buildings, as they are the ones that can ignore zoning laws and approve whatever could contradict public opinion. Take, for example, Azerbaijan’s new planned building. It is a kilometer tall building built on artificial islands over the Caspian Sea. Could you imagine America, or any other western country taking on a project like this? It would be subject to the bureaucracy that has developed in these countries, and subject to public opinion that would change interests in the building over time. Koolhaas has found in China a place where he can plop down exactly what he had visualized on paper, not subject to changes by zoning laws or public outrage.
This leads me to my second point: the CCTV Tower building is a great example of how the Chinese people have resisted western influence of their globalization. People have mocked the CCTV Tower, calling it by its now famous nickname, 大裤衩, or ‘big boxer shorts’! It’s not that they want globalization nor that they are a 2nd world country, but it’s that they want globalization on their own terms. Zhongguancun, the electronics district that my university is just north of, is incredibly packed all the time, with computers and malls, and some really pretty architecture. The contrast between the busy Zhongguancun and the CBD says a lot about the development of China. They’re still not at the level that America is at. They’ll get there someday, I have no doubt about that, but right now the Beijing government is trying to force development that really is way out of their reach.
Additionally, I think that Beijing should give up on their dream of being an international, Western (I’d rather use the term globalized here, but that’s a whole other debate) city. Coming from Washington DC, and seeing how the city there has merely embraced its position as a government city, I want Beijing to do the same. People have this obsession that money equals power, and yes, that is true, but if you think about the population of China, Beijing is amazingly powerful in that they have control over 1.3 billion people. I would love to see how the city could transform if Beijing embraced this attitude, rather than worrying about if Shanghai and Hong Kong is overshadowing it. I know it could be so much more amazing.

33: 过剩的人

The thing about living in a megapolis is that with it comes a surplus of everything. In my small town, I can only think of one or two food stores (or rather, places to buy food/groceries). In downtown San Diego, around the Horton Plaza area, I can think of maybe 4 or 5 areas. Here at my university, I can easily think of 7 or 8 alone, not including the areas just outside all the gates on campus. On the walk to Wudaokou, a good 20-minute walk, there are many more places to buy fruit and other foodstuffs. The same is true for restaurants: in the two hutong I lived next to over winter break, there are about as many places to eat as my hometown of Solana Beach. The food street next to my university also has much more, not to mention even more restaurants in the neighboring areas of Wudaokou and Zhongguancun. I am pretty much guaranteed to pass three or four restaurants (again, I use this word lightly. It’s not as much a restaurant as it is a place where you sit down and tell the waiter to get you this and that dish) in any hutong that I walk through in Beijing. I can easily recall 10 hair dressing places on that walk to Wudaokou, where there are only two or three places in my hometown.

On top of that, since China has no minimum wage (well, it does, but it’s not very enforced), there is also an abundance of workers in any given place. Restaurants usually have very quick service, but a different person serves each dish. It’s not unusual for someone to take your order, someone else to take your money, someone else gives you back your change, someone else serves your food, and then someone else cleans your table. Shops look busy, but only because a tiny little shop will have 7 or 8 employees. Hairdressing shops always have 10 employees, but only two or three customers at a time. It’s absolutely ridiculous to an American like me, after being raised on the joys of capitalism and proper distribution of resources.

As a matter of fact, due to China’s One Child Policy, there is a shortage of labor, and in the upcoming few years, the highest paying jobs available in China will not be white collar jobs for college graduates, but rather, labor jobs, simply due to the low supply of people in China. This has many implications for China. For example, China has been hoping to move away from a reputation as a labor factory for the rest of the world and into a white-collar investment zone, but this disparity in labor demand and supply ensures that they will be a labor source for a while longer. Additionally, families traditionally bring themselves out of poverty by having many children to support them in their old age. Once the family reaches a comfortable level, they start having less and less children. This pattern is quite universal, except for the places where a limited number of people were encouraged, like modern day China, or Soviet Russia. It will be interesting to see how the new urban population of China reacts after the government lifts their One Child Policy to combat the labor deficit.

Seeing this in China has guaranteed one thing for me: I will never complain about a lack of jobs after college. At least I won’t be working in an overcrowded shop with a lack of minimum wage!

32: 昆明，云南 / Kunming, Yunnan

Before we came on our trip, Laurence and I were invited to dinner by her teacher, Zhang Laoshi (Teacher Zhang), to celebrate winter solstice. Over jiaozi, Zhang Laoshi told us that it was a bad idea to go to South China because we would get sucked into the laziness of it. She told us people didn’t get up until 11 and didn’t eat breakfast until noon. At first, I was skeptical, and I wondered aloud to Laurence if Zhang Laoshi was exaggerating or not.

However, once we arrived in Kunming, we realized she was true. Of course, she was exaggerating. Since we arrived by sleeper bus at 5 in the morning, we decided to sleep a bit before getting out to explore. We overslept a bit and didn’t leave our hostel until 10, but we quickly realized that it was no problem, because the rest of Kunming seemed to be doing the same. Morning rush hour was just starting (compared to a 8AM morning rush in Beijing!), people were crowding the bus stops, waiting to get on their buses, and breakfast places were still open and busy. I quite loved it – after many summers (and a glorious semester of classes at 11) of getting up at 10, here was a city full of my fellow late-starters.

A city full of lazy people was not without its flaws. After eating breakfast, we set out to find the Kunming City Museum, only to find it had been closed for repairs… for 2 years. The neighboring urban planning museum was completed, but just never opened. The day was not killed, though. We headed to the Yunnan Provincial Museum, which was open. That was the last stop of our planned day, and it wasn’t even lunch. So after exploring the museum (did you know that Chinese museums have no qualms about putting ancient dildos on display?), we ate lunch and decided we would let the laze of Yunnan come over us.

We spent the rest of the day wandering. I was hot (65 degrees!), so we stopped for some ice cream. A sweet old lady in front of me in line saw me and said “新年过好！”, or “Happy New Year!” We headed north to Green Lake Park, where a Sunday combined with warm weather drew huge crowds. Since many westerners skip Kunming in favor of the rice paddies and rural villages of Yunnan, we were a rare sight for Kunming citizens. Many pictures were taken of us by them, and of their city by us. On a whim, we decided to explore Yunnan University. It was obvious that this South China laze affected everyone. While Peking University kids were hunkering down for finals, students at Yunnan University were practicing their biking, taking pictures, or just resting on the grass. I was amazed by it. With two more awkward hours to kill for dinner, Laurence and I sat outdoors, enjoying the warm weather and laughing the day away.

The next day, with no commitments and facing higher temperatures than the day before, we headed out to a famous temple in the northern suburbs of Kunming. It was built on a mountain, so we wandered around the mountain, taking in the sun and warm weather. Afterward, we visited the biggest Buddhist temple in Kunming, and caught the last half-hour of a Buddhist service.

That night, we caught a sleeper bus to Anshun. After the cold and high-strung environment of Beijing, I definitely enjoyed the relaxing, warm environment of Kunming. I especially appreciated the laziness. I actually would consider living here, but the truth is, Zhang Laoshi was right when she said we would get sucked in. I know if I lived in Kunming, my 10’o clock mornings would slowly turn into 1’o clock mornings. It was an amazing and adorable city, but I’ll save it for visits.