Off the Wall in Beijing

Pregnant "Barbie"

2010-06-29T04:15:00.001-07:00

So I was strolling along the Silk Market minding my mental shopping list when lo and behold, there she was in her hot pink polyester dress, barefoot no less, with a noticeable belly bump. I breathlessly asked the seller lady (who must have thought me a retard), "Is that doll really pregnant?" (Yes, I said those exact words.)

The seller lady, sensing a freshly minted sucker, humored me by placing the Happily Family box into my hands. She pointed to the picture on the bottom corner--the one where Fake Barbie's belly was popped open and a proportionally giant spawn could be seen nestling in the crevice! "It's a girl," the seller lady helpfully pointed out. LIKE IT MATTERED. Ignoring the twitches of my decade-plus-old C-section scars, I nodded and grinned like Fake Ken must have done when he planted his seed into the fake hole, and bargained down to a price that wouldn't leave me thoroughly wanting to kill myself for doing this in the first place. And off I went with my Happily Family box.

So here are the pictures. Of course I googled "pregnant Barbie" to see if the real one ever did get knocked up. Those fucking cowards at Mattel. Yes, they did release a pregnant doll but noooo, it wasn't Barbie herself but her slightly less attractive friend Midge (Midge!), who at times could be bought in a single pack--without being a Happily Family item! What, Ken didn't have a slightly less attractive friend to be the baby daddy? The funnest part was reading the outraged reviews of some grown women on Amazon (whine, whine, whine, why couldn't pregnant Midge have come with a wedding ring?).

It was such a good day. I was happily.

giggle, giggle, tee hee!

When I get utterly bored, I make the baby breech. Yeah, I'm bitchy like that.

Foot Play and the N-Bomb

2010-06-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

The World Cup is a big deal here in Beijing, as it is in every other world capital, I'm sure. But in Asia, the Chinese take this obsession to a funny length at times. You can see all sorts of exhibits and signs and odes to this competition, accompanied by copious photographing of people next to such exhibits and signs and odes.

I remember watching the 2006 World Cup. I was just a month away from beginning a new life south of the hemisphere, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to be exact. So I was caught up in the fever, wisely preparing myself for the worship that would surround me in my new home.

In China, the games are of course narrated in Mandarin, which can be interesting if you know anything at all about the language. There is a word here, nega (sometimes it's spelled nigga), which means "this one" or "that one" (I forget) but sounds very much like the unmentionable N-word that no one in their right mind would say these days. The thing with the nega word is that I've never heard it used all by its lonesome (I'm not sure why since in English we don't typically say, "that, that, that") but rather multiplied like cells gone awry.* Anyhow, it's rather jarring to hear the N-bomb cast about wily nilly while watching the men of Ghana play, for example. More disturbing than the vuvuzelas? You betcha.

* Ahh, mystery solved. According to the interweb, nega can be used to stall in speech when you are searching for something to say. Bet you're glad you learned this Mandarin lesson, eh? You nega nega nega whatever you.

Even Google is confused!

Slack

2010-06-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

My motivation to blog becomes smaller and smaller. I'm not sure why; maybe the novelty of living overseas and being a stranger has worn off. Or maybe it's because I'm surrounded daily by things I could blog about--Chinglish, pregnant Barbies, funky foods--that it anesthetizes me a bit. Or, there could be the very practical explanation of having to work full-on at a demanding school. Whatever. I'm not sweating it.

I think I will take it easy on my expectations for blogging and just post random pictures I take in the city. So a picture a day (give or take a few weeks) until I am inspired to quip some more.

Enjoy your first Chinglish sign. Many more to come.

Hotpot in the City

2010-02-05T18:23:00.001-08:00

Running Wild and Looking Pretty

Yesterday, I took my mom downtown to the Shin Kong Plaza, where my favorite hotpot joint, aptly called Hotpot Paradise, sits on the 6th floor next to the world-famous Din Tai Fung, soon to be another post.

I love the hotpot life! It is seriously such a gastronomic routine in China, or at least Beijing, that the word is compounded--i.e., we say hotpot, not hot pot. (Not Hot Pot should be the name of every other restaurant!)

Hotpot Paradise gets my repeat business because each customer gets her own bubbling cauldron. (After all, sharing is for chumps.) You have a choice of broth--mushroom, pork tea, Thai hot and sour, etc. And what you toss inside said broth is found on the pages of a hardcover menu: every meat imaginable (ranging wildly in prices), exotic veggies, tofu, etc. The sine qua non is the dipping sauce, a pungent, thick sesame paste into which you add scallions or chili oil depending on your pleasure. Mom tweaked it with lemon juice, ignoring the bemused looks of waiters everywhere.

Hard to get wrong, easy to make right. When I asked my young student Howard earlier this year why hotpots were his favorite thing to eat, he eloquently answered: Well, you just boil everything and then put it in your mouth.

Amen

I Yam What I Yam

2009-12-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

Despite the most cliched post title, I've to say there is nothing trite about the winter yam carts that have been popping up all over town. These things are just so dang sweet (literally and figuratively), and if you happen to have a pat of butter on you (hey--it happened to me once!), then heaven awaits. Cheap and salt-of-the-earth goodness.

Loogie Is So Popular

2009-10-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've a confession to make. I secretly like all the spitting and hack-a-loogieing that the Chinese do around here. To be fair, it's mostly older folks who do it, and students and bus takers and street walkers and, oh let's face it: Everyone hacks a loogie. It's the national pastime next to eating.

Anyway, whenever I'm out and about, I listen for the thunderous roar of the throat clearing that builds into the ejaculation of a spit. It's a comforting daily soundtrack and alerts me that, "There is a here." But the fun part? As soon as I catch wind of the phlemg song, I yell out "Expectorate!" in my best Hermione Granger voice and award myself 1 point for being an earwitness to this charming event. A 10-point day is indeed a good day, for it means I combed the streets of the Jing in pursuit of adventure.

So wave your wand and say it with me, Expectorate Now!

It's Your Birthday

2009-10-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, September 30, was Hawkens' 15th birthday. Sometimes I feel the need to type it out in black & white, unconvinced as I am that it's been that long since he was born. The parenting journey is fraught with self-doubt and sighs of relief, and mine may have had more than its share of the former. Sometimes I think it takes sheer cockiness to decide to have a child, to think you have enough of a clue to raise another human being to a healthy state of mind and body.

Looking back I see it was indeed cockiness dabbled with cluelessless on my part, but tossed with a healthy pinch of intuition, a dollop of faith or wishful thinking, a barrel of luck, and a giant heart ready to bleed out love (gag). Trial and error, maybe that's all it's ever been throughout the history of mankind.

So here's our young hero today: enamored of Alice in Chains (proclaims it to be the greatest band, despite my telling him he's wrong); plays his bass guitar at all hours of the night; putting off doing theatre until the second semester in order to cope with new academic challenges ("do you know what Asian Fail is? anything below an A-!"); taking Honors Geometry and has a posse of Korean kids to eat lunch with; admonished me today for not raising him with a clearer idea of what it means to be a Democrat vs. Republican (I assigned him some internet research out of this); discovering athesism and annoying me with quotes. (I sure hope his grandparents aren't reading this post.)

Happy Birthday, Hawkens.

Caught in the Rain

2009-08-30T21:00:00.001-07:00

Today was not Sunday-productive at all. No naps were taken, no lazying about in PJs, my restfulness-o-meter pinged below a 5. I did manage to sneak in another 90-min massage from "John" though (why does it seem so wrong that these Chinese masseurs/masseuses are randomly assigned foreign names?). Anyway, John has to wear a face mask when massaging me, and his English is limited to: "pease turn over" (when the frontside gets a turn), "wait a meenit pease" (when he has to leave the room to wash the oil off his hands in order to begin the face/head portion), and "gween tea?" (for post-coital). Just kidding, sheesh!

John is such a sweetheart that I can't bear to ask for a new masseur, even though I want to sample them all. This spa caters exclusively to expats, and the staff is so goddamn servile that I sometimes can't take it, so guilty I feel for spending fistfuls of kwai that would support their families for months. The spa will also deliver any treatment you want to your home without additional charges. Because pollution is the white elephant in the treatment room (or any room in China), there's even a massage devoted to getting rid of it, the so-called lymphatic drainage. Being a fan of good plumbing in any capacity, I'm thinking I'll go for that next week, though I'm dubious it'll detoxify. I'll just consider it my placebo.

So this evening I took a cab to Auchan, and as usual it's a comedy of errors getting there. For one thing, I can never find Auchan's Chinese name written anywhere to show the cab drivers. For second, every Chinese person pronounces the name differently so getting a driver who understands what I'm saying is a game of chance. But as luck would have it, an English-speaking Chinese man walking his dog managed to bail me out. I was so grateful to him that I kept grinning like an idiot when he was giving the driver directions.

Auchan is like a Carrefour or Walmart. The first floor has a tea stand that makes the most killer oolong milk tea with red bean and mango pudding. And if you don't think that sounds divine, you suck. There's also a dumpling house nearby that is dirt cheap. The second floor has your typical household stuff, the clothes being low quality walmart style. The third floor, however, is a caucophany of strange sights and sounds, with a huge bakery and a deli carrying everything imaginable. I saw trays of fresh-baked mooncakes but was too intimidated by the throngs of pushy old ladies that I just drooled from afar.

When I left Auchan, it was totally pouring giving me a chance to whip out my just-purchased Engrish umbrella. I managed to find what they called a "black taxi," or a remise in Argentina, or a regular car operating as a cab. The young driver was pleased when he figured out I couldn't speak Mandarin and began to show off his 3 words of English. At a well-lit intersection, I noticed that his lapels had patches of lady outlines--you know, the kind that truckers carry in the States--except this Romeo had two lady silhouettes facing each other, forming a symmetric W, coincidentally my first initial and our ex-Prez's middle. After being stuck in traffic for what seemed like hours, the driver jammed his cell phone into the charger, showing off yet another single lady silhouette that began to softly shimmer in the dark cabin, displaying the time. It was 8:02. Then with a heavy sigh, the kind that accompanies slow, arduous commutes in heavy downpour, my young friend pulled out a cig and cocked his head around to offer me one. I was tempted, but thought about how plugged up my lymph system would be next week with pollutants and nicotine. I couldn't do that to John. No, xie xie.

More soon. Food delivery is here. Tonight is Indian.

Home Is Where the Hawk Is

2009-08-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

We've created a home, Hawk and I. Or rather, we each retreat to our unspoken spoken-for places and leave each other alone. He is a teen, after all (and I am a recluse). The townhouse is quite nice. It's three floors, but I'm so unused to climbing for every frickin' thing that my knees are now protesting. Or maybe that's just oldish age. Anyway, it must be true that the Chinese have small, teensy feet (and the corollary--oh, let's not go there) because the stairs are so narrow even my size 6 have to turn sideways to ascend and descend.

But the wood floors, they are a thing of beauty.

I hired an ayi (a housekeeper) a week ago. My ayi, she is a thing of beauty, in her housekeeping talents, that is. Some teachers at work warned me that it's just the honeymoon stage, and she will slack. What rubbish! After coming from Argentina where my maid actually left a dead cockroach under a glass...well, this ayi love affair will last forever, I know it! My eyes almost watered the first time I opened a drawer and saw all my undies painstakingly rolled and tucked and facing the same direction in tidy rows and columns, alphabetized by brands (ok, I made that last part up). OCDness so has its place! (Weda + ayi sitting on a tree...)

Lest you think I'm a total unfeeling bourgeois first-world jerk, I acknowledge the moral implications of having a maid. But I also know I am helping to put food on her table, so it's a gray area I'll continue to live with.

It's a tenant's market right now, so landlords in all expat compounds have been bending backwards to accommodate. What has this meant for us when we moved in? A brand new LCD TV, a brand new fridge, and a custom-built dresser and bookshelf for Hawk.

Never one to sit at home when there are shiny malls to be discovered, I've been taking the shuttles from the compound and exploring various areas of the first and second ring road. (Beijing is laid out in rings. The center is the first; the burbs where I live/work is beyond the fifth.) One evening on a return shuttle, as luck would have it, I happened to meet a lovely Chinese woman who lives coincidentally around the corner from me. Sensing a fellow shopaholic, she walked me through all the must-see places at each shuttle stop, and even passed on the number of her artist mentor/teacher, whom I will be taking painting classes from. She wanted us to do an English/Mandarin conversational exchange, but alas...I am serious about learning Chinese and would rather have a real teacher in a real school. So she and I will simply have to be shopping buds.

More soon. Hawk and I want to blow this pop stand and look for a hot pot joint. Wish you were here to slurp some broth with us.

A Month and Counting...

2009-08-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

So much has happened since we got off that plane on August 1 that I feel I oughta start tracking for posterity's sake. Presently, Hawk and I are at Cafe Zarah, a hip little German place on Gulou in the Dongcheng district. From the look of it, patrons are mostly Caucasian foreign correspondent types, although there's a table of graphic designers near the window. I want to write more, but am distracted in a pleasing way by the young woman behind me who's speaking in flawless (to my untrained ears) Mandarin. How many years to get to that point? I am still working on ni hao.

Gulou street reminds me of Haight-Ashbury in San Fran. It is true that places, just like people, will often have a doppelganger. I feel comfortable here on Gulou among the vintage stores and mangas and anime knick-knacks, interspersed with alleyways that god's forsaken. There's a goose right now being fed a bowl of white noodles. His cries blend well with the jazzy soundtrack. And Hawk, as he is wont to do, has just abandoned me for manga browsing.

Things at school are quite good. After the kid-in-a-candy-store effect of the first few days, I feel I'm starting to get my grounding, or at least not turn down the wrong corridor. The school, you see, is humongous, and my metres-to-miles conversion has it pegged at about a mile around the outside hallway once. If you were to wander down the 4 inner hallways, then god bless you. You've achieved your workout for the day. No further exercise is needed. I jest, for it is true that the stress and busyness level is fairly high here, and one is served well by exercising as much as one can. For that reason, many teachers join a swimming club before school or do yoga, pilates, tai chi, or some kind of geeky aerobics class after. The wellness program for teachers is a big deal here. I prefer to just bike to the delectable Comptoirs French bakery, where the phallic eclairs come in chocolate and coffee.

Here are some of the delights I've encountered at the new school:

* The cafeteria is akin to an international food court. There are two kitchens each with 4 or 5 hot entree choices, a sushi bar (some days), a sandwich/panini bar, a salad bar, and a cafe. Before school, breakfast is usually served consisting of a couple egg dishes, bacon/ham, hash browns, some chinese items (baos, potstickers, etc.), oatmeal, and assorted danishes. Food is no longer free as it was at my last gig, but it is quite cheap--a complete meal will run 2 - 3 bucks. I am so pleased as punch by the variety of choices that I can't even complain about the lack of free lunch. Also, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

* I've a TA, in the third grade! Need I say more?

* I have so many classroom books, and the elementary school has a literacy room with booksets of every important title you could possibly want for your students.

* The technology is stellar. I'm so spoiled now from using the voice amplification system that should I leave this school, I will have to purchase mine very own to take to the next gig. It also feels dangerously close to karaoking and I've sung a few lines of Madonna to my kids already, so inspired by the stereo quality of my own voice lecturing and posturing. They are an astute bunch, those third graders. Two told me the first week: You are weird, Ms. Bory (to which I replied: I know you are, but what am I?).

* The professional development lending library is well resourced! And most titles with a buzz are there.

* The learning21 approach of the whole school is progressive and exciting. It's what I always imagined teaching should be. I feel like for the first time, I will actually be growing outside my own initiation.

There's more but yeah, yeah, yeah. how boring. I know what you really want to hear about--the eye candy.

Stay tuned.