Back from China

Last Friday, I returned from a two week trip in China.  I had the opportunity to do some sightseeing and visit my wife’s grandparents.  We traveled through Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, and my wife’s hometown of Yangzhou.  I’ve just finally finished sorting out my photos.  They’re up on Flickr now, in case you’re interested.  Considering how the maybe two or three people that check this blog regularly are friends or family members, I figured it might be nice to link to the photoset here.

Now, I can ramble on about the tourist sites we saw and the history behind them, but everyone knows it’s the minutiae that really make a trip memorable.  Read my wife’s blog if you want some commentary on the bigger picture.  As for me, I love recalling the trivialities.  I’ve compiled a comprehensive journal of the most interesting things I experienced on that trip that I won’t be quick to forget.

Don’t Eat The Peppers

Beijing isn’t supposed to be known for its spicy food, but on our first night there, my wife and I walked into a random restaurant near our hotel and ordered some.  Of course, we didn’t know it at first.  After all, the menu only showed one or two little chili pepper icons out of a possible four.  So as soon as our dishes arrived, I employed my l33t kuaizi skeellz to quickly scoop up some short ribs and green onions and deposit them into my unsuspecting mouth.  “You’re not supposed to eat the peppers,” my wife mentioned all too late.  Apparently, those weren’t green onions.  Let me put her words into proper perspective: my wife is the type of person who will rush headlong into spicy food.  She has no problem with the thought of signing a waiver before accepting some restaurant’s challenge to survive a bowl of their spiciest ramen.  So when she told me, “I don’t eat the peppers,” I worried for my life.  But the food was good.  And I was hungry (and, not to mention, proud).  So I sucked on those short ribs until my mouth was numb.  And I had four sores in my mouth for the next week-and-a-half.

The Forbidden City’s Geriatric Mosh Pits

I’m technically referring to the masses crowded around the viewing entrances to each and every one of the buildings that held any slight historical significance, all clamoring to take an inevitably blurry picture of generally vacuous interiors with their phones and their point-and-shoots.  The bodies were so dense, I had to literally pry myself into them so I could swim like a salmon going upstream against a shove-induced current.  But when I came to realize that the chaos was actually the natural order of things, it got to be sorta fun throwing my body against random people without reprimand.  Besides… I can attest to the fact that those old Asians aren’t nearly as frail as they look.  “I can see how people died when oil was on sale,” my wife later concluded.  And now I know what it feels like to be a paparazzo outside of a rehab clinic.

Peking Duck At QuanJuDe

Apparently, the Western tourists tend to be dragged around to the Western-style, xican restaurants for their tour food.  Needless to say, it wasn’t very good – generally worse than American Chinese food.  It was an imitation of an imitation.  So I appreciated every opportunity to seek out the real stuff with my wife.  Last time she toured Beijing, her tour guide made mention of the city’s most popular Peking (i.e. Beijing) duck franchise.  So after flagging a taxi, we found the nearest QuanJuDe and devoured what was probably the most delectable food I ate throughout the entire trip.  We ordered a half-duck and a plate of duck hearts, with some coconut juice to wash it down.  It turns out that we spent about half of what it would have cost us to take an optional leg of the tour with our guide to what was probably the exact same restaurant.

Scoping Out The Wangba’s

It’s hard to tell from a tourist’s perspective, but gaming is indeed alive and well in China.  While walking off the Peking duck, my wife and I happened upon a netbar half a block down the street from the restaurant.  We needed to check our email to make sure there wasn’t any lingering paperwork left to sign for our recent house acquisition.   And I wanted to update my Facebook status.  (Shame!)  After climbing down a short flight of stairs, the space opened up into a vast, multi-sectioned room that was far larger than I had expected.  Through a thin cloud of cigarette smoke, my eyes beheld the comforting, ever-familiar dance of lights cast by hundreds of monitors aglow with a myriad of computer games.  There, I glimpsed Counterstrike, Battlefield 2, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, that Korean kart racing game, and lots of Chinese MMO’s.  A perusal of the game list at our computer revealed at least a hundred games to choose from, including a lot of Western titles.  I regret that I didn’t have my camera with me.  I also regret that the computer we ultimately ended up using had a sticky mouse button – otherwise, I would’ve tested out China’s FPS mettle.  We also ended up going into a netbar in Yangzhou, about a week later.  This time, the sticky keyboard prevented me from engaging in a quick round of gaming (which, in hindsight, is probably why no one was using that particular machine).  But would you believe that we paid something like 40 cents for an hour’s worth of computer usage?  And to think that people spend a dollar to play for maybe five minutes at an American arcade.

Thieves And Psycho Killers

We took an overnight train from Beijing to Xi’an.  Shortly before leaving, our tour guide repeatedly stressed the importance of two things: 1) keeping a constant eye on our luggage at the train station, and 2) locking our cabin door.  At the time, it sounded like your typical overzealous, “just in case” nagging.  But as we sat around a lounge waiting for our train to board, a particularly seedy kid was circling our tour group, his eyes intently focused on our luggage.  Everyone made sure to keep their eyes on their stuff, but the kid just kept circling, pausing at regular intervals and even sitting among us, his eyes never leaving our baggage.  Finally, one of the more charismatic women of our group got it in her mind to take a picture of the guy, tourist-style.  “Say cheese!” she exclaimed, as a couple of our other tourists played along, posing next to him.  We didn’t see him again.

When we finally boarded our train a couple of hours later, we were all ready to settle down and get some rest.  The tour company secured a separate cabin for each couple in the group (whereas each cabin would normally hold four people) – Westerners need their privacy, you know.  We were all located in the first two cars of the train, so after the social banter died down in the hallways, my wife and I decided to get some shuteye.  Around midnight, nature called, so I sat up and asked my wife if she needed to go to the bathroom, too.  She got up and headed for the restroom, while I stood watch at our door.  In the meantime, a pudgy, red-headed man meandered into our car from a neighboring one, taking swigs from a glass bottle.  He saw our open door and stumbled over to it.  He then leaned across the hallway and stared at me for a solid minute with his drowsy, vacant eyes.  I gave him a couple of nods and some nervous hellos.  He finally stumbled off in the direction of the bathroom, ducking into a washroom adjacent to it.  As my wife exited the bathroom and made her way toward our cabin, he leaned out of the washroom to block her path.  My entire body tensed.  If he does anything, I’m gonna run over there and kick his ass. My mind was straining to recall the kempo I learned a few years back when I heard my wife squeak out an “Excuse me,” after which he let her pass.  She walked back into our cabin and went right back to sleep.  What a trooper.  Me, on the other hand – I wasn’t about to leave our room with someone like that wandering the hallway.  So I closed the door and waited, listening.  I had hoped that the man would leave as quickly as he came, but instead, he paced our hallway for hours.  I tried to sleep, but I kept hearing things at our door – knocking, pulling – the man was trying to open it.  He repeated the noisy ritual on a good number of doors in our car.  After a number of these attempts, he again came to our door and began banging loudly on it with his fists.  Then I heard a muffled thud – he tried to ram himself against the door.  The door slides open, by the way.  At this point, I started mashing the “Call Attendant” button in our cabin, to no avail.  I really had to pee.

Anyway, I fell asleep after an extended period of paranoia, waking up at around 4 AM to the sound of silence.  I carefully unlocked the door and peered down the hallway in both directions.  The crazy guy had finally left.  I gave my wife instructions to lock the door and listen for my secret knock (”Shave and a Haircut”) to before opening it.  I darted to the bathroom and unloaded.  The next morning, our tour group was abuzz with their own tales of the crazy guy – how he actually got into one couple’s cabin, how someone’s husband threatened to sock him, how he pissed all over the washroom floor.  It turns out that the next cars down housed a French tour group.  My wife and I thought the exact same thing: Psycho killer.  Qu’est-ce que c’est?

The Forbidden Fruit

Fresh mangosteen is apparently almost impossible to get in the States.  My wife talked up a storm about how she was enamored by the stuff the last time she came to China.  So when she came across some of them in a Wangfujing grocery store, I couldn’t resist purchasing a couple.  Expensive by Chinese standards, we still got them for much cheaper than we would find them (if we could find them) in the States.  The dark-red rind is extremely difficult to penetrate without a knife.  When we finally clawed our way through it, I was surprised to find the meat a little slimy.  Pieces are arranged like orange slices – although they looked and felt more like leech slices.  I forced my wife to eat a piece first (I’m such a great husband).  After several minutes passed without any undesired side effects, I put one in my mouth.  Each slice had a large, pit-like seed in the center, so it wasn’t nearly as convenient to eat as your typical orange.  The mangosteen didn’t taste as amazing as my wife hyped it up to be.  Turns out she exaggerates a lot of things.

Kung Fu Extravaganza

Shortly after we arrived at our hotel in Xi’an (the city with the Terracotta Army), I flipped on the television and began channel surfing.  I discovered this amazing Chinese televised kung fu competition that airs regularly on CCTV5.  From what I could tell, it pitted a group of young contestants in a single-elimination tournament, complete with cheering crowd, colorful stage, and energized commentary.  I didn’t need to know Chinese to understand the language of fighting.  Even better was that in between matches, they’d bring some shifu up to demonstrate a useful move or technique.  Then there was a moment as I sat there, flipping through the rest of the channels, that I realized all of the channels (aside from a couple of dedicated news ones) were showing kung fu.

Eating Myself Sick

My wife’s grandparents didn’t have the opportunity (nor did they have the resources or physical energy) to attend our wedding in the States.  So when we arrived in Yangzhou, they had an entire itinerary for the week already prepared, beginning with a couple of small banquets to be attended by family and several of my father-in-law’s acquaintances.  Traditional Chinese weddings lack a lot of the Western customs – the various dances, the bouquet toss, the cake-cutting.  Instead, they fill that missing time with food – plate upon plate upon plate of food.  And so it was at these lunch banquets.  Our table was overflowing with food, familiar and exotic.  And they toasted – a lot.  They would lift their glasses at random moments, mutter some Yangzhouese, and take a swig of their preferred beverage.  My glass was filled (and refilled) with Tsingtao, which they insisted I drink along with the rest of the men.   In addition, my wife’s grandparents insisted on feeding us three meals a day, during which they would repeatedly put food on our plates – another scoop of pea sprouts here, another bowl of porridge there.  Add another baozi or four, and by my second day in Yangzhou, I was stuffed to the rafters.  I was eating and I wasn’t hungry.  Family and friends were there.  I couldn’t turn down their food.

The second lunch banquet came around.  I snuck in a glass of orange juice before my father-in-law’s friend caught me and handed me a large can of Tsingtao.  And you remember how I ate that Peking duck with the duck hearts, right?  This second banquet decided I needed to finish the rest of the duck.  I asked my wife what those foil-wrapped things in the middle of the table were.  “Duck heads.”  Someone at the table set one of them on my plate.  It was half of a head, to be precise, sawed down its length.  No thank you.  I continued to eat the other food at the table, but the head stared at me.  I didn’t get sawed in half just so you can throw me away.  I flipped the thing over and its halved tongue flopped out of its open side.  I glanced over at my wife’s plate – her duck head had been mostly dismantled, its tongue nowhere to be seen.  By this time, she was picking at its brains.  She always tells me it’s her favorite part.  “When in Rome…,” I thought to myself as I boldly scooped out a chunk of that half-brain, closed my eyes, and devoured it, all the while thinking happy thoughts.  I bit a snippet off of the tongue and concluded that I liked cow’s tongue much better.  But my duck head still looked mostly untouched – nothing like the massacred remains piled on my wife’s plate.  So I flipped the head over once more and proceeded to gnaw the duck’s face off.  Suffice it to say I didn’t eat dinner that night.  I was sick to my stomach.  “Bu yao” and “Chi bao le” quickly became an integral part of my linguistic arsenal, spoken without hesitation from that day forward.

Crazy Nene

The Chinese word for a grandmother on the father’s side is nainai, but in Yangzhouese, it sounds more like nene.  My wife’s nene is a bit crazy.  I was warned of this ahead of time.   See, she primarily speaks some other dialect that no one else around her can entirely understand.  And she likes to talk.  To compensate for her inability to communicate verbally, my wife’s nene developed a habit of making frequent, rapid gestures to get her point across.  My wife was particularly entertained by her poignant demonstration of the word “miscarriage.”  However, more than once, I found myself sitting next to my wife as she appeared to be having an extremely stimulating, extremely hilarious conversation with her grandmother.  My wife was shrill with bouts of laughter as she stared intently at her nene rambling on and on about something that was undoubtedly comedic gold.  This continued for several minutes as I looked on.  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.  “What’s she saying?” I whispered over to my wife.  My wife’s eyes quickly darted in my direction, a gaping smile still her face.  “I have no idea,” she replied, punctuating this with another round of laughter.

These Guys

This picture takes a bit of explanation.  After Yangzhou, we took a bus back to Shanghai for one last night there before departing from the Shanghai Pudong airport.  We walked for a couple of miles down Nanjinglu until we reached the Bund – one of the popular tourist attractions.  It’s basically a stretch of land along the Huangpu RIver that was conceded to Western powers after the Opium Wars.  You can glimpse all sorts of classic European architecture.  The first time we visited Shanghai during our guided tour, the weather in Shanghai was extremely hazy.  One could hardly see across the river.  When we returned toward the end of our trip, the weather was lot more hospitable, so we decided to pay another visit for some better pictures.  My wife’s cousin also wanted to meet us somewhere across the river for dinner.  So there we were, walking along the Bund and taking in the scenery when we glimpsed a peculiar Caucasian man facing the river, his eyes closed and arms outstretched.  He was waving his arms gently, as if he was conducting an imaginary orchestra.  It was a lot like watching, as I had dozens of times in China, someone performing tai ji.  Except this was cheap taii ji with a tenth of the artistry, none of the exercise, and a dash of insanity.  It was… awkward.  Even more awkward was a Chinese stranger, behind and about ten feet away from the “conductor,” mimicking the man’s every movement with an indescribable fervor and intensity.  Where the conductor dipped and bobbed, his Asian lackey squatted and swooped.  Where the conductor heard gentle strings, his lackey clearly heard thundering horns.  And as the moments passed with me and my wife still watching the spectacle, the lackey crept closer and closer, until he was just an arm’s length away from his master, probably thinking he was preparing to learn some taboo martial art yet unseen in the Eastern world.

We Warned You

My wife and I had a blast hanging out with her (three days older) cousin in Shanghai for our last night in China.  He was accompanied by his “pengyou” – a girlfriend about whom he refused to tell his parents.  We had fun staying out late and all, but they offended us.  No, it wasn’t the fact that they failed to find a lot of things to do so late at night.  They refused to let us pay for anything. We were supposed to treat them to dinner, but my wife’s gambit didn’t work out.  She essentially blackmailed them – they had to let us pay for dinner, or we would tell his parents about his clandestine relationship.  He didn’t submit to our demands.  So now we are forced to reveal the identity of this elusive woman to the world.

There you go, biaoge.  Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

God Bless America

The trip to China was great.  It was especially nice to have the “cool” wife in our tour group, translating things when the tour guide wasn’t available and elaborating on the cultural peculiarities and history of her homeland.  But I’m definitely glad to be back on American soil, where I can breathe the air in deeply without choking on it a little.  I can actually drive my car and listen to music instead of fearing for my life in the backseat of a cab, facing oncoming cars, gutsy pedestrians, and hundreds of cyclists amidst a cacophony of blaring horns.  I can go to the bathroom without having people cut in front of me to use a urinal.  A urinal!  Seriously, even if you wait just a foot behind a guy at a urinal in China, someone behind you will still manage to cut in front of you.  I can finally eat multicultural dishes.  Chinese is great and all – until it’s all you’ve had for two straight weeks in a row.  And most importantly, I’m glad to hear some English again from someone other than my wife.  Besides… she makes a poor translator.