Archive for August, 2009

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International Food: Italian

August 8th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Food

Chris, who likes to say he’s half-Italian (because I guess he is), started craving fettuccine alfredo one day, which made me start to crave some pasta. I love pasta. It’s a good thing northern Chinese cuisine favors noodles.

So one day after work, we decided to venture out across town to the nearest Annie’s, a popular local chain with five or six locations spread around eastern Beijing. It took a while to find the one in Beijing High Life, but it was a cute little restaurant–very clean, professional and Western. It was like walking into a small-town Italian joint, and that was what the food was like, too.

Annie’s tries to put a little class into the dining experience, but it’s not good enough to be a nice dinner. We got free bread to munch on while we waited for our food, which never happens in China. The food was nicely presented. I got the potato gnocchi, and it was yummy but not delicious. There just wasn’t anything especially remarkable about it. If this post sounds boring, it’s because I can’t make Annie’s sound exciting.

To its credit, Annie’s is a nice change from the loud, old and used Chinese restaurants without having to break the bank for it. There was enough of my gnocchi to make another meal of it, which makes it a great deal. Chinese food portions are always large, but Western food portions, especially in China, never are.

Datong: Really is all the same

August 8th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Reflections

Just back from Datong. I need to go meet a friend, though, but here are a few thoughts:

Datong, briefly: It’s nasty and dirty. China is, in general, but Datong is nasty and dirty in a different way. Shanxi is infamous for its coal mines, and the dust from the coal supposedly blankets the whole province. I don’t know if the dust in Datong was coal, though, it was mostly just very fine dirt. I suspect it was everywhere because Datong seemed to be tearing up all of its roads. Everywhere we went, we would drive at least on two really really bumpy dirt roads that looked to be once paved. Our hotel room had a bunch of bugs, including roaches. There also is no ice cream in Datong, which I will elaborate on later.

China, generally: My mini-holidays are over, and the next time I travel somewhere, it will be to go home. Getting out of Beijing has made me realize how spoiled this city has made me, though. Which is interesting to think because of how living in Beijing has made me realize how spoiled the States has made me. Beijing has culture; I mean, it has different people from different backgrounds, and they all clash with each other. At the same time, Beijing is still Beijing, still China, and it is so without losing its identity and history. It is surely changing rapidly, but getting lost in its hutongs will still transport you back in time. Datong was uninspiring, everywhere the same. In Beijing, vendors at markets vary very little, and the whole city of Datong was like that. Every store on a street by our hotel was a little convenience shop (more on this later). Another street was all mian guan (restaurants selling noodles). Of course, Datong is not a big city like Beijing. Perhaps it’s a good sign of progress that China has cities like Beijing, which was so different just 30 years ago. But, though cities are always ahead of the wave, they are not necessarily harbingers of the future.

Qingdao ahoy!

August 8th, 2009 by Johanna | 1 Comment | Filed in China, Shenanigans, Stories

Actually, there isn’t anything ! about Qingdao. Wait, no, there is one thing, and here it is:

The one good thing about Qingdao: I found an ice cream place that serves ice cream on a waffle cone—three delicious scoops for only six kuai! And on our last night, I tried to get some for dessert, but the place had already closed. Devastated, I loitered around for a few moments. The really sweet guy who worked there noticed me, and perhaps even remembered me from a couple of days before, and said he can still get me some ice cream on a waffle cone if I wanted it. He was all smiley and happy to serve me, too. It was the cutest thing ever, and it made my night.

Besides that, Qingdao was full of potential greatness, but we were let down repeatedly. Perhaps it was because we had absolutely no idea where Qingdao was, what it looked like or what to do there, no plans and no time to think about any of these things. But I was still expecting something exciting.

The road to Qingdao: It started with the bullet train. After the 14-hour ride back from Dandong on a hard seat, Chris and I were looking forward to the clean, modern and sleek bullet train. And it delivered: the backs of the seats reclined a good bit and even the seats themselves could be adjusted forward. We settled down in comfort until we realized how many people kept walking back and forth, rustling in the aisle, talking loudly and generally doing annoying things. And then the kids! Some stupid little girl kept running up and down the aisle all the way to Qingdao. It was a miserable six hours. I just wanted to sleep!

The hotel search: Then, we arrived in Qingdao, ready to find us a hotel. We had no idea where in Qingdao we were, nor where a good hotel might be. The nice hotels close to the beach front were pricey ($120 or more a night). We started looking for hotels farther away from the shore; they seemed a little dicey. This guy started hassling us, trying to get us to look at hotels. We could not shake him off! It didn’t help that a lot of the more reasonably priced places wouldn’t take foreigners (not exactly because of local racism, but because a place needs to get government permission to house foreigners). A lot of times they would see Chris and say, No rooms available. After looking at four or five places, someone flagged us down on the road and told us her hotel had rooms available for 220 kuai a night. We thought it was worth a shot and went to look at the room.

The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel: Our room was tiny. The beds were wooden. The bathroom was the size of a large shower and doubled as one. There were no slippers. Our air condition broke our last night. The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel is no Crowne Plaza.

The bathing beaches of Qingdao: So we put on our bathing suits and headed down to the beach. Bathing Beach No. 1 was so crowded that crowded seems inadequate to describe it. There were no free spaces available on the sand. There was no free space in the water. The water was dirty with litter and seaweed. People didn’t lay out on towels; they just buried themselves and each other in the sand. I did not see a single bikini on a girl, but I saw men in tight shorts or Speedos and naked babies everywhere. Bathing Beach No. 2, which was a ways down the shoreline, was an exact replica.

Qingdao redeems itself: Qingdao is actually a cute little city that reminded me somewhat of San Francisco because it has a lot of one-way streets and hills. The German influence did not seem German, but the architecture was not Chinese, either. It is definitely one of the Chinese cities being revolutionized by the Chinese economic miracle. Run-down apartment buildings are being demolished so modern high rises can take their place. On the other hand, decent-looking facades line the sidewalks, but breaks in the walls reveal dismal living conditions on the other side.

Friends-turned-extortionists: Chris and I got lost wandering around the city, and just when we were about to hail a taxi back to our hotel, a guy sitting outside a small corner restaurant shouted at us: “Hello! Welcome!” He was waving us over. It was 5 in the afternoon, so Chris and I decided what the hell and joined him. He seemed to be friends with the restaurant owner, who brought us some cold bottles of Tsingtao and peanuts. This guy knew about 10 words in English and had no idea how to form English sentences, so there was a lot of pointing and gesturing. “You! Mah firrriend-a! Look-a look-a! Ship-a! Tomorrow! OK!!!!” “You! Tsingtao beer! OK!!! Me, Laoshan beer.” Somehow, I gathered from him that there was a shipyard in the direction behind the restaurant, and this guy was saying he and the restaurant owner had the pass to enter it so they could take us to go look around. A couple of beers later, the restaurant owner pulls up his SUV, and we are on our merry way to what turned out to be the Port of Qingdao. It was the coolest tour ever. There were billboards with these Communist slogans everywhere. There was a “butterfly garden,” which had statues of butterflies, giraffes and zebras. The restaurant owner drove us around the port and then back to town, straight to the heart of the tourist area. Finally, we were back at a familiar place. Chris and I say thanks and hop out of the car, but restaurant owner and mah fiiirrriend-a guy starts saying something about 200 yuan. I look at them quizzically, and it sounded like they said something about how other people would charge us 500 kuai.

“Wait, you want us to pay you 200 kuai?” I asked, not sure if I was understanding them through their Shandong dialect. And with perfectly serious faces, they were like, Yes!

I told them we had no money, and of course, they didn’t believe me. After this back-and-forth a few times, they popped the door open and told us to get back in the car because they will take us to an ATM. I was like, No, we’ve already caused you so much inconvenience, and Chris and I walked away. We watched our shadows just in case they were to hop out of their car and chase after us. I’ve never been so glad to be near a crowded Chinese tourist area.

The Americans: Chris and I walked along the tourist walks and then went to McDonald’s to recover over some fries and soft serve ice cream. On our way out, we ran into a couple of white guys, one of whom had been drinking a lot since that morning. They turned out to be part of some program at OSU and were studying at Qingdao University for the summer. We decided to get a beer, and I tried really hard to like the drunkard, but he was too pushy and borderline violent. He started an argument about Afghanistan and the Iraq War when Chris said he had been in the army. Then he kept trying to get us to go to a disco club called Feelings, which even his friend didn’t want to go to. His friend went home, and he kept saying how it would be awkward to end the night without going somewhere. Chris and I said we could have one more beer, but we didn’t want to go anywhere. He ended up wandering away randomly, and I couldn’t have been more relieved.

In a way, Chris and I have come full circle. We got into trouble the first weekend we were in China, so it figures we would get ourselves into trouble again on our last weekend together in China. Miraculously, we managed to stay out of it the whole time in between.

International Food: Mexican

August 5th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Food

Mexican Wave

A couple of weekends ago (man, that was a long time ago), Chris and I took Pang Li out to eat Mexican after he helped us try to get train tickets to Dandong. I was really craving a burrito that day. Ironically, I ended up getting two tacos once we made our way out to the Silk Street Market area, where Mexican Wave is anchored, beckoning Americans who looking for something familiar.

According to its menu, Mexican Wave is the oldest Mexican establishment still in business in Beijing. If the restaurant can serve as an indicator, Mexican food in China is the complete opposite of Mexican food in America: expensive small servings instead of cheap large portions.

It tasted like standard Mexican fare, though, but it didn’t satisfy my Mexican craving. Had I known the tacos came in a hard tortilla shell, I wouldn’t have ordered two. But the carne asada and pollo asada were delicious. It seemed a little cleaner than Mexican food back home, too, which is unusual because—when is anything cleaner in China?

If you’re bored, here’s something new

August 5th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in Web Site Updates

I’ve added stuff to the Web site after ignoring it the whole summer (I told you I’ve been busy!).

Kinks still need to be ironed out, but I thought I might as well put it up.

Check it out!

Heading for the home stretch

August 5th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Reflections, Shenanigans, Work

It’s hard to believe that my summer in Beijing is nearing the end. I leave a week from tomorrow. It’s already August, but I have had no concept of time here. It doesn’t feel like I will be going home soon–probably because I can’t fathom that I’ve already been here for 10 weeks. These weeks have flown, and it seems like I just arrived. And yet, it feels like I’ve been here for forever.

I don’t want to dwell on this too much because it’s making me really sad.

I have been super-uber busy these past couple of weeks. I caught a minor cold a few weeks back and have been recovering since. Chris and I took a long weekend to Dandong, and I just found out yesterday that my uncle has been staying there for the past month or so. We came back, did our last burger story, wrapped up the internship with an evaluation-presentation, celebrated our last day with some coworkers (including a new one, with whom Chris is infatuated), then took off for Qingdao for another long weekend. (More on Qingdao later.) Chris and I returned yesterday evening for his final dinner (hotpot) in China, celebrated in the company of our closest work friends, and then a few rounds of beer. Now he’s gone, and it hasn’t quite hit me.

Tonight, Pang Li and I will try to get tickets to see Up, which just came out here.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Datong with Catherine, the last remaining intern. We plan to come back Saturday.

Catherine heads back to the States on Monday.

Meanwhile, I still have one more hamburger story to write for work and perhaps some stuff on Dandong or Qingdao. I have many, many pictures I need to post.

State media taboos

August 5th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Reflections, Work

I’ve been censored!

I almost made it two whole months!

But finally, it’s happened!

Something I wrote did not fly with the powers-that-be who mine articles for personal opinions at China.org.cn. Unbeknownst to me, I had inserted “personal opinion” into an article I wrote on two Swiss photographers, Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer. Personal opinion is a huge no-no in traditional journalism. I was pretty embarrassed.

Here is the disputed original. See if you can spot the opinion.

Braschler and Fischer could not dodge the bureaucratic red tape so easily at other times. In Shaanxi Province’s Yan’an to shoot at the only retirement home for revolutionaries of the Chinese civil war, the institution’s director insisted on having official permission to take pictures. Despite the new press freedoms, Braschler and Fischer were forced to seek authorization from the media department of the local government, where they were bounced around from official to official because no one wanted to take the responsibility.

They also were arrested three times. “For no reason—that would not happen in other countries,” Fischer said.

“We’ve never been arrested before, so that was quite a surprise,” Braschler said. “Particularly for us, it [photography] was just the most natural thing we did.”

[Here, I describe the situations that led to their arrests.]

This is what appears in the final version (emphasis added for your convenience):

The photographers faced many other challenges on the road. They battled a respiratory infection, a gastrointestinal infection and three cases of food poisoning. They took countless gambles on where to find hotels or places to stay. In the Taklimakan Desert, near a military nuclear test site, they were allowed to stay at a hotel only after negotiations and on the condition that no one saw them. Foreigners were not allowed in the region without proper paperwork.

Braschler and Fischer could not dodge the bureaucratic red tape so easily at other times. In Shaanxi Province’s Yan’an to shoot at the only retirement home for revolutionaries of the Chinese civil war, the institution’s director insisted on having official permission to take pictures. Despite the new press freedoms, Braschler and Fischer were forced to seek authorization from the media department of the local government, where they were bounced around from official to official because no one wanted to take the responsibility. They also were questioned at the local police station three times by authorities.

In China, it is not exactly an arrest if police show up, take you in their car to the police station and question you for hours before releasing you. That, I will admit, was a mistaken assumption on my part. I offered to change it to something that more accurately reflected their situations. Here were some of the unapproved suggestions I made:

They were detained by local authorities…

They were taken to the police station by local authorities who were uneasy about what Braschler and Fischer might show the world.

They were taken to the police station and questioned for hours, twice after taking portraits and once after talking to protestors involved in a property dispute.

It seems that Braschler and Fischer, who were there and all, may have misunderstood exactly what was happening when the police took them down to the station and grilled them for hours about photos they had taken (twice) and their conversation with some local protestors. It was irresponsible of me to write something so blatantly biased about Chinese police without even consulting them about what happened. (I did try enlisting my editor/supervisor to help me contact the police, but she said she was too busy.)

Anyway, here is how Braschler viewed what happened to him and Fischer concerning the three arrest-like situations they found themselves in:

We’ve never been arrested before, so when we got arrested, that was quite a surprise. Particularly for us, it [photography] was just the most natural thing we did. We took a portrait of the mechanic, and the Communist leaders of a town in Liaoning took offense at us for photographing someone who wasn’t wearing proper clothes. And that was quite a shock because we didn’t expect to be arrested for something like that…

In the west if a mechanic is dirty in the evening, it means you’ve worked hard all day, and that’s OK. If you wear proper clothes, it means you’re lazy.

In Xinjiang, there, it was not such a big surprise. We photographed a railway security guy. In a way we knew it was sensitive: it’s Xinjiang, there are the problems with the Uighurs—it can happen. We kind of thought, OK, we take the risk, get arrested, and sure enough…

The really shocking one was the third one that was like a land dispute in Wuhan [in Hubei Province]. We didn’t even take out any cameras, nothing–we just talked to people. It was an area where they already have the modern high rises…and people were insisting they [residents] move out of their houses. These people saw us, they came to us, realizing this was their chance to make their call public, but in five minutes we were arrested.

It was pure intimidation. And it worked, obviously. I mean, what can you do? If they arrest you, what do you do?

I so wish I can get the police’s side of this story. It didn’t help that my supervisor took this issue up with me 30 minutes before the end of the workweek, which also happened to be my last day of this internship.

But really, all of my stories here have been biased and reflect the views of only one person or side. It’s tough to find people to interview and is a huge inconvenience to need to go through so many other people just to schedule an interview and then have it translated. Sigh. I am learning…

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