Chinese Tables

Princeton in Beijing is over and gone with it is my excuse to not write in the blog. The last week has brought with it great joy and great angst. Every time I do something now, I can't help but think of it as the last time I will be doing it in China. This is the last time I will buy some fruit from a Chinese guy. This is the last time I will brush my teeth with bottled water. This is the last time I will visit the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. But considering that today was also my first time visiting the Forbidden Palace and the Temple of Heaven, this particular thought didn't make me too nostalgic.

Actually a year ago, when I came here with my dad, we visited these places and enjoyed them greatly. Going back was good, though I am completely exhausted and today was Celebrate the Sun Day in China, which is celebrated by making the weather 100 degrees. Unfortunately Celebrate the Sun Day coincided, this year, with Unbearable Humidity day.

The Fobidden City/Palace Museum is where the emperors used to live. The further you walk into the palace, the holier it used to be considered to be. In the old days, there was maybe 1,000 people that were ever allowed to even go inside, which is ridiculous considering that when I visited today there at least 5,000 tourists packed in. Also, I was considering what the emperors of yore would say if they saw the status their palace was currently in. Fat Americans and sweaty Europeans shuffle around its hallowed ground. At the holiest center of the palace, where only the emperor was allowed to go, there was a trash can full of water bottles and a naked baby. If I get a time machine, I know what I'm gonna do.

The Temple of Heaven, our second destination of the day, is where the emperor's used to go to pray for good crops and even more extravagant palaces, presumably. It is a pretty cool place, the highlight being the two accoustic marvels located in the back of this massive park. The first is a "center stone". This is a stone on the roof of a building designed so that if you yell then your voice is "particularly resonant and sonorous". I don't think the Chinese people understood though. They would just stand on it, get a picture and step off. Realizing that this behavior certainly failed to honor the spirit of the ancient engineer who took the trouble to perfectly design the accoustic properties of a giant stone building, I took to the stone and shouted at the top of my lungs. This seemed to catch a couple of the Chinese people off guard. Another thing at the Temple of Heaven, which I have called possibly my favorite thing in China is the echo wall. An ancient and perfectly round structure, the echo wall gets in name, because it is a wall on a building. That it lets your voice echo around its massive diameter seems to be a mere coincidence. I stood on one side of the echo wall, and Phil stood on the other side. I shouted "wasssup".

Our taxi cab driver on the way home today was amazing...by far my favorite in China. His taxi cab was immaculate and when I told him that I'd never seen such a nice taxi in China, he looked very proud. He told me that there were a million taxi drivers in China, and he won an award that put him in the top 100. They announced his name on the radio and gave him a plaque which he showed us. It was gold and had some Chinese characters that I didn't understand. Let's just assume that it said: "Bless this Mess" and move on.

In China, there are a number of people who make their living by collecting used plastic bottles and trading them in for whatever nominal amount of money the government uses to encourage recycling. You may think that this is an unfortunate situation and I agree, but for different reasons than you might expect. You see that people have chosen this occupation will not take no for an answer when they want your bottle. More than once, including today, I've been forced to chug a liter or two of iced tea, just so they could trade in my bottle for a couple of cents.

There are also countless people whose job is to sell stuff on the streets or the sidewalks. In general these guys sell about one of four things: DVD's, Chinese trinkets, watches, or clothing. I think there just must be some central warehouse in China where poor quality rip off goods are created at an impossibly cheap cost and distributed to various salesman. Otherwise, I just can't understand what kind of distribution mechanism is allowing for the current in situation. How is a sketchy looking guy at the great wall selling the exact same poor quality rip-off Rolex, as the sketchy looking guy in Shanghai? It's almost as if these rip-off brands have become brands in themselves: they're bad indeed, but at least they're consistent.

One of the favorite places for the salesman to hang out is in bridges and underground passages. They lay out a blanket and then lay their wares out on them. Apparently this is illegal, because whenever a policeman is spotted, a lookout guy starts shouting and everyone grabs their blankets and starts to run away. This tends to cause a veritable stampede of Chinese merchants, though the method seems to work--I have yet to see one get caught. I'm still not certain why the policeman aren't able to spot the merchants from the non-merchants. An open letter to the Chinese police force:

The ones carrying massive blankets that look like their full of rip off watches and running away from you are almost certainly the ones breaking the law.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen.

We've had three Chinese tables in the last week. The first was for all of the second year students. I had been sick for the days before it, but I was able to eat some of the food they brought for us off a surprisingly well-considered fixed menu. After dinner we were supposed to practice for the upcoming talent show, at which every second year student was going to perform some Chinese songs. Though the dinner was enjoyable, two and a half hours into it, and one plus hours into practicing Chinese songs, when one of the teachers proposed to begin with the kareoke, I decided it was time to begin the walking back to my dorm.

The Talent Show suffered from the similar problem. Clocking in at nearly four hours, I think that, although the untalented student's courage was admirable, we did not need to humor every one of them with a spot on the program. Maybe if we could have put them all up there at once and just let them go for five minutes everyone would be a winner. One of the truly enjoyable skits of the night was written and performed by the teachers, and provided us an insight into their mind that no conversation could have. Basically the sketch was an impression of us students. The rage was palpable and the mockery enjoyable. I'm not too sure it was even intended to be funny, it played more like a polemic, but I laughed long and hard.

I enjoyed the second Chinese Table with a couple of teachers and students at an excellent restaurant. But when it's not a set menu, ordering food with Chinese people is always an ordeal. First of all, everyone always says one thing that they don't like, and the teachers fail to understand that just because one person doesn't like something, this doesn't mean that the rest of the table won't eat it. A typical ordering session might go something like this:

"Joe, what do you like to eat."
"Well, I like everything except for pork."
"Ok, no pork. Steve, what about you?"
"Well actually I really like pork, but I don't care for beef."
"Sorry Joe doesn't like pork, we can't order it."
"But there's 10 other people here, they all like pork. John probably wouldn't mind if we got one pork dish."
"You have offended my family's honor."

In order to not add to the confusion, I tend to keep my mouth shut during the ordering process, but once I let it slip that I don't like fish. Quickly all the teachers learned of this situation. Now every Chinese table begins with the proclamation that Tom Knight doesn't like fish. The teachers nod their head, an air of dissaproval in the air, and do their best not to order fish.

Another obstacle on the road to ever getting any food at Chinese table is what I have come to call "the spicy food problem". I am convinced that every Chinese person has had some sort of traumatic experience with spicy food in their life, because whenever you try to order anything spicy, they intervene and urge you to think carefully before you make that commitment. An attempt to order something spicy in the presence of a teacher might go something like this:

"I'll have the Kung Pao Chicken."
"Hmm. Interesting choice. That dish is awfully spicy you know."
"Yeah, I like spicy food. No problem."
"This one is actually really spicy, I think you might want to try something else."
"Ok, fine...How about this one: Mild Chicken Dish."
"Again, very spicy. Less spicy than the Kung Pao, yes, but still quite spicy."
"Well then, I'll just have a glass of water and some rice please."
"Ok, but just be careful."

We graduated from the program on Friday, and after the ceremony we had our final Chinese table. Every teacher and student from the program was there. It was truly a great time, and thanks to the massive amounts of photos taken (I contend that it was one of the most well documented in the history of mankind) I don't think anyone will be forgetting it anytime soon. Did I mention that we could speak English? Conversing with our teachers in a language that confused them as much as Chinese confused us was the ultimate revenge. I tried to explain to a teacher what this felt like, "It's like in a movie when the good guy gets his gun taken away and the bad guy is torturing him, but then the good guy somehow gets his gun back and then he looks at the bad guy, and the bad guy knows something is wrong. Then the good guy, he just flashes the bad guy a little grin for a couple seconds and then, BANG!" The teacher, fortunately, didn't understand, but the rest of my table had a good laugh.

This was one of the few Princeton in Beijing events that I wish could have lasted longer. As I left the restaurant bound for my dorm, and soon America, I mourned the end of my last Chinese table.