I'm sitting aboard an eleven hour train bound towards Guangzhou (广州) from Changsha (长沙). Conditions are a bit tight, as I'm in a hard seat coach. The hard sleepers (a significant step up from the hard seats) were sold out and, besides, this is not an overnight train. It does arrive at 2 am, though. In cases like this, you take what you can get. I'm reminded of the anecdote described in one of my thesis interviews in India two years ago, describing an American woman who threw a temper tantrum on a bus, shouting "I need a big space!". By the time I got to my seat, all the suitcase storage space up above was taken, so I had to shove my overpacked suitcase where my feet would normally, contorting my legs at a less than comfortable angle. There's not an inch of space in the aisle as its full of passengers without seat-specific tickets (at least I have one of those). That definitely wouldn't meet fire code in the U.S. So, in short, right now a bigger space would be nice, but I'm trying not to complain.
In contrast, my train trip two days ago was a breeze. I traveled overnight from Shanghai to Changsha in a hard sleeper, which really isn't that "hard" (but is cheaper than the "soft sleepers" which are akin to first class). Those beds come with clean sheets and pillows, and plenty of space in which to unwind, spread out, and socialize. I did some language work, which attracted the attention of my neighbors, who struck up a conversation.
Even though I'm not in formal classes right now (they start in March), there's lots I can do to improve my Mandarin on my own. I have a small binder which is divided into the major parts of speech, and then further divided into thematic categories. Every time I learn a new word, I add it to this book. Actually, when I'm out and about, I use a cheap notepad to jot down the new words (or have whoever I happen to be learning them from write them for me) and then later transfer them to my more formal book . When I don't have a Chinese friend at hand to help me, I consult my palm pilot, on which I installed a Chinese-English dictionary. Thus far, it's proved to be indispensable. I carry it wherever I go. I can input in any of the three mediums (English, Pinyin, or characters) and easily switch between them. To input Chinese characters, I draw them with the stylus, and the palm automatically recognizes it digitally (or gives me a string of choices which best approximate it). In this way, when I'm out and see any character I don't know I can find out exactly what it is, without lugging around a heavy paper dictionary. It also means that I can order dishes from restaurants by name and not just point to them like an ignorant tourist.
I work on my Chinese every day, constantly adding new words to my book. I just think of what I would say if I were speaking English, determine which words I don't yet know, then look them up (obviously trying to keep things as simple as possible). So far I think it's worked pretty well. I've been able to converse with a number of Chinese people to varying degrees of success. So far, however, usually they have an easier time understanding me than I do them. In other words, my diction, grammar, and pronunciation seem to be quite good, but my ability to decipher other peoples' spoken Chinese has much room for improvement. It's best when I meet someone with a lot of patience who is willing to speak slowly for me and repeat things multiple times. Luckily for me, it seems to be pretty easy to find people willing to do this, so happy are they that I am at least making the effort to speak their language. Of course, most of the people I talk to do speak some English, which makes communication easier. But there have been people I've talked to who don't. Sometimes it's out of necessity, such as asking directions or buying things. But I've also had Chinese girls sit down next to me and start talking who don't speak a word.
I've got a lot of catching up to do on this blog. I actually drafted an entry several days ago, soon after I moved from my initial location at Adam's spare Zhongshan Park apartment to my friend Mike's place in Xuhui, but I never published it. Now I'm glad I didn't because in retrospect I think it was a little too negative. As nice as Adam's apartment was, I didn't want to overstay my welcome, and Mike and I go way back to Harvard and Hasty Pudding, so I was eager to spend some time with him. Mike has lived in Shanghai for one year and works as a teacher (both English and psychology, his own area of expertise) at Shanghai International Middle School, where many of the students are children of expats from Korea and Japan. He lives in a spacious, three room apartment provided free of charge by the school in a building with the other fifty or so foreign teachers. In China, "Middle School" corresponds to what Americans call "High School". The names of the three levels of schools in China (primary school, high school, and college) translate as "Small School" (小学), "Middle School" (中学), and "Big School" (大学).
What I wrote about in that unpublished blog entry was some initial despondency I was feeling after spending some time with Mike's teaching colleagues. Here's what I wrote:
"While all the teachers I've met are nice people, I get the impression that this is more of an American-dominated enclavic environment than I'm looking for. They teach English all day, their social circle mostly consists of other Americans, and few of them seem to be serious about learning Chinese. If learning Chinese is a serious goal of mine, I worry that working in an environment like this would, at best, retard my progress in learning Chinese, or, at worst, actually undermine it. Several of the male teachers here have Chinese girlfriends, but it seems that they mostly speak to them in English. If I were dating a Chinese girl I would want to use that as an opportunity to practice Chinese as much as possible."
I spent more time with some of those teachers after I wrote that, and, to be fair, I think I unfairly judged some of them. Some indeed have studied Chinese and have become quite fluent. Some do speak Chinese with their girlfriends. And I don't think it's fair to say that their social circles revolve entirely around other Americans. That said, I still feel that it is probably more of an enclavic environment than I would want personally. But it would be foolish and self-important to pretend that I would be happy associating with no one but Chinese people and speak nothing but Chinese. As eager as I am to learn the language, my ability to communicate will always be restricted by my limited vocabulary. I don't think I could go too long without speaking in depth about complicated topics with other intellectual people, and the fact of the matter is that it's going to be a long time before I could ever do that in Chinese. So of course my social circle in China will include Americans and other English speakers.
That said, hanging out in expat environments is definitely not always on the top of my list. I wrote that unpublished blog entry after an evening at a British pub with Mike's friends. The bar perfectly resembled a British pub, right down to the rowdy British lager louts, and the blonde haired women (even the waitresses were Filipino, not Chinese). The pub charged the equivalent of $9 for a pint of beer, so Mike and I got our beers at a nearby convenience store for $0.50 instead. The reason we went to the pub that night was for its weekly trivia contest. Expecting something fun and intellectual (like the trivia night I used to do with my roommates in State College), instead it turned out to be boring round after round of inane 80s pop culture, with questions about Care Bears, hair metal, and hamburgers.
On another evening, Mike and I got together with another former classmate and Hasty Pudding alum. He runs a business in Shanghai and does quite well by himself, to the point that he invited us to dine in a private dining room at his favorite restaurant, a fully western-style steakhouse and cigar lounge. The meal the three of us ate rang up a tab of several hundred dollars (yes, dollars, not yuan).
*A brief aside: Our train just passed a forest fire, and it really aroused the attention of the passengers, who all gathered around the window pointing, some snapping photos. It's been unseasonably warm and dry this winter, which may explain why there have been so many fires lately (another, much bigger one destroyed several buildings in Beijing yesterday)
Back to the story. You can better believe I would not be eating meals like this if I were paying for them myself. By the time you reach a level of luxury such as this, there doesn't seem to be much discount between what you pay in China and what you pay in the West. And that seems true of a lot of the expat-oriented commerce in Shanghai, even the stuff that's not as luxurious as this steakhouse. As already noted, nearly all the bars and coffeeshops charge just as much, or more, than their Western counterparts. And I guess that's because a lot of expats have a lot of money to throw around. There's definitely a bit of a divide between the expats who are businesspeople and those who are teachers. The teachers still do very well by Chinese standards, but they can't afford to go to go to expat watering holes too often. Of course, not all expensive things in Shanghai are the provenance of expats. Mike showed me a newly opened commercial development called Xintiandi which resembles several similar developments in the U.S. but is fairly unique in China. Normally new developments are erected from scratch on sites where the previous dwellings were demolished, but Xintiandi has painstakingly preserved a historic shopping district, retaining its old feel while updating it into a haven for well-heeled Shanghai yuppies.
Most expat housing is also expensive, certainly beyond what I was hoping to spend for an apartment. I contracted the services of a real estate agent named 王志云 (Wáng Zhì Yún) who works with Adam's landlord. Normally she deals with more expensive expat property, but she went out of her way to help me out in procuring a cheaper apartment. I think she also became a friend, went out to lunch with me twice, and taught me some Chinese words. After looking at several places ranging from run-down and dirty (at 1900 RMB/month) to considerably more, I settled for something extremely close to Adam's place, and literally right next to Zhongshan Park. It's on the sixth floor of older apartment building with no elevator, but the inside is clean and modern with new furniture and appliances. I thought the 3000 RMB/month price (about $470) was pretty good, especially considering that I'm renting it for only three months. Zhi Yun also served as translator with the landlords, and explained the lease agreement to me. I paid the entire three month's rent upfront, which meant I had to take a huge wad of cash out of the bank. But now my biggest expense while in China is out of the way, and I have an apartment (starting in March).
But I didn't settle on the apartment until after first considering a homestay offer from the Xi family. The Xis live in Songjiang District, a suburb west of Shanghai, and were referred to me through a friend of a friend. I went out there on Sunday afternoon to see the house and meet the family, which consists of mother (divorced), daughter (in final year of high school), German shepherd, housekeeper, and grandparents. They're quite cosmopolitan, having lived in Japan several years on business, and thus are quite more internationally minded than the average Chinese family probably has the opportunity to be. The offer was generous, and would have provided me with my own room free of charge and home-cooked meals every night, as well as a friendly and interesting family to learn from. The house was in a gated community with plenty of picturesque water features and landscaping. But I decided in the end that as nice as a homestay might have been, I really wanted to be living in the city, close to the heart of things, and with the freedom and flexibility to determine my own schedule without worrying about disturbing a sleeping family. That, and the commute to my school in time for 8 am classes seemed a bit daunting. With my chosen location in Zhongshan Park, I am only a fifteen minute bike ride or so away.
With the question of housing for the spring settled, I resolved to spend the rest of February traveling and visiting friends in the south of China. My first destination was Shenzhen, where I would meet my friend Sophie (whom I first met in Beijing three years ago and have been pen pals with ever since), as well as my father's friend Michael. But I decided, in typical fashion, to make the trip a little more interesting, and so I chose a destination halfway in between as my first stop. That turned out to be Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, an interior province in the Yangtze River Basin that is considerably less affluent than Shanghai.
I'm glad I came to Changsha.It satisfied my desire for a dose of something quite different than Shanghai. Changsha resembles Shanghai only along its central boulevard, which is lined with skyscrapers and upscale shopping malls. To the credit of Changsha shopping malls, they play much more interesting music than American shopping malls. One of the ones I visited was playing some rocking Beatles tunes (and not musak Beatles covers, like the trains in China do). Just off this boulevard is an older city that hasn't changed nearly as much in recent years. The urban fabric is denser and better scaled for humans, with narrow lanes and lots of small shopfront and street vendors. On my first day there, I crossed the river (very low because of the severe drought facing China this year) on a long bridge and wandered into a little restaurant. It was there that I met 贺圆 (Hè Yuán), who took it upon herself to be my tourguide for the rest of the day. A recent college graduate with a bubbly personality, she speaks fluent English but we actually spent a lot of our time together speaking Chinese. She taught me many new words and phrases, such as 这风吹起来很束缚 (zhè fěng chuī qǐlái hěn shūfú, or "the wind blowing on my skin feels so comfortable) We climbed to the top of Yulueshan mountain on what ended up being a beautiful summery day in Changsha in the middle of February. At the top of the mountain we rode an elevator to the top of a rotating observation tower for a 360 degree view of the city. She stayed with me until evening and I treated her to dinner to thank her for her friendship. She said she doesn't have many opportunities to practice her English, and seemed very impressed by the efforts I'm making to learn Chinese. We saw each other again today, but then I had to leave for Shenzhen on a train ticket I'd already booked. We made enough of an impression on each other, however, that I promised to visit her again on my way back from Shenzhen later this month.
It's now some 10-11 hours after I wrote what's above. I'm now aboard a train from Guangzhou (广州) to Shenzhen (深圳). This one's only 70 minutes long, but it costs 75元, just 12元 less than the much longer train I just got off. It's 3 in the morning. I must say they do this transfer thing pretty efficiently. Cross-country trains from across China converge in Guangzhou, which is the most central location in the Pearl River Delta, and then shorter, frequent trains shuttle people to Shenzhen, which is where the most jobs are, I guess. I thought Spring Festival ended a few days ago, but I guess I'm part of the tail end of it. That is, I just participated in the greatest seasonal migration of people on the planet, and in precisely the direction of the heaviest flow: the return of migrant workers from their homes in the provinces (in this case, Hunan) to the factories in the rich coastal cities, of which Shenzhen is probably the best example. I have to admit that wasn't on my mind when I planned this excursion. During this seasonal rush period, they run a slate of extra trains all through the night, which explains my current situation, having just waded through a terribly crowded train station with thousands of people in the middle of the night. I saw people carrying some interesting things: bags of rice, buckets of condiments, appliances, boxes that looked (from the look on the face of the man carrying it) like they contained concrete.
