14 assorted impressions from Beijing
After a semester living and studying there. Not to be taken too seriously. In no particular order.
1.
I became a much better cyclist in Beijing once I started thinking of myself as a driver in one of those formation driving teams that criss-cross past each other with teensy margins. If, while cycling on a Beijing road, you look ahead and see that following your planned trajectory will almost lead to a crash… that’s perfect! Keep going just as you are, and you’ll only almost crash.
2.
In other countries I’ve lived in (Australia, Germany, US), street addresses are generally designed to be a one-to-one function — any given address refers to only one location, and any given location can be described by only one address. You could also imagine addresses as a one-to-many function (with one address pointing to multiple different locations) or as a many-to-one function (with many different addresses describing the same location).
Beijing addresses are a many-to-many function.
3.
Right before I left the US for China, a friend wore a t-shirt made by the brand Boy London to an event I was at. Someone there pointed out to her that the brand’s logo — which features prominently on their clothes — is a gigantic Reichsadler, a major symbol of Nazi Germany. My friend, shocked, immediately covered the shirt with a hoodie for the rest of the event, and never wore it again.
In China, this brand is really popular! Intellectually, I get why the same taboos don’t apply as in the US and Europe; emotionally, I still find it jarring every time I walk past the Reichsadler plastered across a shirt.
4.
I had never considered the concept of “personal audio space” before, but once I got to China I sure realized fast how much I missed it.
What’s personal audio space, you ask? It’s my (sheltered, Western) expectation that other people will not wantonly impose sounds on me without good reason.
In China, on the contrary:
- People on the subway often listen to audio from their phones without headphones, with the sound blaring from their phone speaker at full volume. This includes the dialogue of TV shows, WeChat voice messages, and even the (completely pointless! extremely annoying!) sound effects in children’s video games.
- Stores often have loud, pre-recorded, repetitive marketing messages blaring from low-quality speakers at their entrances. Econ 101 tells me that if these stores continue to exist, there must exist people for whom this is not a complete dealbreaker..?
- Hallway lights in shared apartment buildings are often, you guessed it, sound-activated. In my building, the sensor is not very sensitive, so you have to stamp as hard as you can in a particular part of the entranceway if you want light. Conveniently, the door to my apartment is designed using some clever magnet-based system so that it only locks if you really slam it, meaning that when you leave in the morning you’re spared the hassle of creating extra din to turn on the hallway light.
5.
TV screens on trains are ubiquitous. My very favorite thing I’ve seen on one so far was a cooking show about how to make a sandwich, complete with this shot of the first step:
6.
Here’s a question from our final listening comprehension exam, after we heard a short paragraph about the internet:
Based on the text you just heard, which of the following is false?
- A) We need to prevent the broadcasting of harmful information on the internet
- B) Harmful information includes information that is bad for the health of body and mind
- C) Harmful information includes that which has a bad influence on society and public opinion
- D) Any kind of information should be able to be posted on the internet
Can you guess which was “false”? So nonchalant.
7.
One cool thing about doing a language program is that in the course of covering all your reading, listening, speaking and writing materials, you get a whirlwind tour of different takes on a range of social, political, cultural, and economic issues.
While this obviously can’t compare to actually living in a place for many years and coming to understand it deeply, I do feel like it was a more useful way to get a gestalt sense of life in China than if I had been studying one specific subject area. Certain topics and themes recurred so often throughout our three different textbooks that it’s hard to believe they’re not a salient part of Chinese life.
The clearest example I can put my finger on is an underlying sense of the importance and praiseworthiness of 努力 (“hard/diligently” in the sense of “studying hard” or “working hard”). It’s everywhere: in an article we read that blithely proclaimed that bad academic results are usually the result of laziness or bad attitude on the part of the pupil (with no mention of teacher quality, let alone socioeconomic context); in the continued existence of the Gaokao (the gigantic centralized university entrance exams, which in theory act as a fair playing field where students from all backgrounds compete on even footing, but in practice have subsumed almost literally every waking hour of almost literally every Chinese child in preparation); in our teacher asking us to name types of addiction, and being amused and bemused when someone suggested “work addiction”; in the Chinese tech industry’s pride in its “9/9/6” work ethic (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week).
8.
Several Chinese acquaintances have told me proudly that “political correctness” is not a thing in China. Other political sensitivities notwithstanding, it’s true that identity politics seems to be largely absent in China, which in some ways is a pleasant change.
But it was also sometimes grating, even for me as a very privileged person. Two instances come to mind:
- In one story we read, “maybe she has a mental illness!” was given as an amusing potential explanation for a character’s strange behavior. When my teacher reached the words “mental illness” while reading it aloud, she chuckled merrily.
- A different story we read involved a husband who found out he had late-stage cancer. He explained that his wife was “only 40kg” (~90lb), so naturally he was reluctant to tell her the bad news — the implication being that she obviously wouldn’t be able to deal with the mental stress. When I pointed out to the teacher that this didn’t seem like a very informative way to describe the wife in this context, he freely admitted that Chinese people tend connect physical appearance with mental faculties. “But don’t worry!”, he hastened to reassure me, “If I were just looking at you, I would judge you to be strong!”
9.
I think Japan is supposed to be the home of wacky vending machines, but I haven’t been there, so Beijing was exciting by my standards. My favorites were machines for coffee and freshly-squeezed orange juice in our class building, and the package machine outside my apartment where you could enter a code you received via text to unlock a cubby containing your package if you weren’t home when it was delivered.
10.
I wasn’t expecting traditional beliefs about Chinese medicine to have any effect on my life, but they did. Notable instances include struggling to find a cold drink on a hot day — with even supermarket fridges set to lukewarm — because drinking cold things is bad for your stomach; a well-meaning yoga teacher declaring that cool air on sweaty skin can make you sick, as she shut the windows to prevent the lovely cool breeze from flowing into our hot, humid studio; and a Chinese friend (studying for an MS in Computer Science) asking that we choose a restaurant with non-spicy food, since her “fire” had “risen” recently (上火了) — she could tell because she was having a breakout.
Of course, I was raised by a thoroughly secular and scientifically literate mother who still knocks on wood, so maybe this shouldn’t have been that surprising.
11.
After living in the US, land of simultaneously grumbling about high taxes and low-quality local amenities, one nice thing about Beijing was the clear feeling that the city was alive and being cared for.
12.
Didi (Chinese Uber) aggressively notifies me about the importance of safety every time I use its service. And yet, more than half of the Didis I get into have decorative seat covers that make the seatbelts unusable. I do not appreciate this approach to safety.
13.
So many fences! Fences around campus (don’t try to enter through what looks like a road on the map — it will be fenced off, and you will be late for your placement test), around parks (though in this case more often large, solid walls than fences), and all along every street (I think to prevent jaywalking?).
After landing in Denver I went more or less straight to a large, unfenced, grassy park. Can recommend.
14.
During the part of yoga class where the teacher talks you through a body-scan relaxation exercise (“relax your fingers… relax the palms of your hands… relax your wrists…”), more than one yoga teacher would regularly include “relax your teeth”.
