Monday, March 23, 2009

A New Semester

Now that many of you who are students back in the U.S. are already
enjoying or at least anticipating Spring Break, I have finally started
my spring semester classes. It has been a very good first two weeks,
but an incredibly busy two weeks as well. You see, I've run into a
problem. I spent the whole winter here in Shenyang, with nothing to do
per se. So I started up lots of various activities, got more involved
in certain areas, etc. Now that school has started again, I have no
desire to stop doing all those things I started during the winter, but
I also have to attend 20 hours of Chinese class a week (and
theoretically study outside, too!). So I've been a little overwhelmed
with activities… And the real problem is that I enjoy all of them, so
I really don't want to stop anything. Hm. Such dilemmas. :)

As far as my classes go, this semester is looking quite promising.
With the semester change, I moved up to the next level class. The
benefit of that move is that the higher level class has much more
interesting courses. I now get to take courses on reading newspapers,
writing essays, understanding Chinese culture, and – get this –
watching movies! The watching movies class is definitely an enjoyable
one, especially since it's the last class on Friday. What a great way
to start the weekend! Of course, I still have the more traditional
grammar and speaking classes, which are going just fine.

The composition of the class is quite different from my class last
semester. In general, the foreign student population at my university
last semester was probably around 50% Korean (we're pretty close to
Korea here…), and in the higher level Chinese classes, that percentage
increased exponentially. (I.e. in my class, I ended up with a Czech
classmate. And there was me. And Koreans.) However, apparently the
world financial crisis is hitting the Korean currency quite hard, so
many of the Koreans are finding it difficult to afford the tuition and
living expenses in China these days. A huge number of them just went
home. So in my class of 15-20ish, there are only 5 Koreans now, which
is a huge change.

Of course, I have nothing against Koreans. In fact, some of my best
friends in Shenyang are Korean. But it's really fun for me to look
around my classroom this semester and see so many different countries
represented. It really looks something like the U.N.! Korea, Japan,
Mongolia, Germany, Slovenia, Russia… even Belarus! (Ok, I'll be
honest, I didn't really know how to spell that country's name. But I
do know how to write the name in Chinese!) The Belarusian happened to
sit right next to me the first day of class, so we started talking.
When we each heard the other's country, it was really interesting.
"Oh, we don't have very good relations with the U.S." she said. So
true. But don't worry, I'm doing the best I can to alleviate the
tensions between our countries, by befriending this girl here. So far
so good. :)

The reality of starting the spring semester is that the winter
vacation must come to an end. For me, the two semesters and the winter
break just all seem to run together, since I've just been around
Shenyang for the whole time anyway. But many of my friends left for
the winter, traveling off to various places literally around the
world. The last of my friends returned last week, so everyone is
pretty much back now. (The exceptions, of course, are the few people
who were only here through last fall, so have now left for good.) Of
course, it's been fun to catch up with all my friends and hear about
their experiences. It sometimes makes me a little jealous, admittedly,
to hear of all their adventures, but I've had my own here. And it's
all good anyway, because I now have souvenirs from literally all over
the world! For some reason most of them are edible, so they won't be
making it back to the U.S. with me… but for now, I'm certainly
enjoying such things as Belgian chocolate, brought straight from
Belgium; Ghanaian chocolate, which is also amazingly delicious; and
famous Kenyan tea. Just think, all I had to do was move to China to
get all this! Haha!

Friday, March 6, 2009

oh, China

Living in China can do strange things to a person. Really. When I meet Americans living here in China, I can usually get a sense of how long they’ve lived here just by the way they carry themselves, by the way they act, by how much they have become un-Americanized.  So I was thinking about that the other day, and decided to try looking at myself. How un-Americanized, or rather, how Chinified, have I become since living here these six months? Here are just a few of my reflections.

 

For the first time in my life, I have started craving rice. Yeah, strange. I’m not as bad as most Asians about this yet, meaning I can still enjoy a few meals once in a while that don’t include rice (especially breakfast), but once I go two or three days I start missing it. Right now I’m on day four and I’m about to go crazy. I was thinking about just making up some rice for a snack. Weird.

 

(Okay, okay, I know that comment above about “most Asians” was totally un-PC. Sorry, didn’t mean to offend anyone.)

 

I was also astonished to realize that I have only worn two outfits in the past five days. Please don’t get too grossed out by this or think I have terrible personal hygiene. It’s just the custom here. Actually, I am fairly unusual in that I don’t usually wear the same thing two days in a row – I at least alternate two outfits back and forth. But let me tell you, when you have to do all your laundry by hand and nobody really cares if you wear the same thing every day, it’s really tempting to wear things multiple times (even many multiples of times) before calling them “dirty.” It’s also tempting to wear the same pants today that I got dirty yesterday in the slush outside, since that same slush is just going to get them dirtier.  Really, before you judge me too harshly on this one, try hand-washing all your jeans and then letting them hang dry, hoping against hope that they’ll dry before they freeze. It’s not a particularly fun experience.

 

Recently I was struck by the fact that I no longer notice the terrible fashion (or rather, lack of fashion) here. In fact, I was quite surprised a few days ago to actually see a girl wearing a really stylish, sophisticated, well put-together outfit. She looked like she could have been on the streets of DC or NYC, not on the slush-covered roads at Liaoning University. That very well may have been the first classy outfit I’ve seen here, besides traditional suits. While not noticing the bad fashion is convenient for me now, I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about when I go back to DC! Haha!

 

Another interesting phenomenon in China is that people develop a skill of being oblivious to noise. There is so much noise in this country, largely because there are so many people, that if a person pays attention to everything, they could probably literally go insane. A car horn in China is simply a way to let others know that you exist and are there, talking on a cell phone is perfectly allowable in just about any situation, music blasting out the door of a store is apparently an invitation to come in and shop, and there is always a construction sight within earshot to just add to the background noise. Silence is unheard of, no pun intended. At least, that’s the way it is in the cities, and despite most of you never hearing about Shenyang before I moved here, it does happen to be a city of more than 7 million people. So what am I getting at? I have apparently developed that skill. Not that I’m upset to be Chinified in this way, because it’s certainly a useful skill to have (especially living in China!). But apparently some of my foreign friends have not been so blessed… they’re constantly overwhelmed by the noise around them.

 

One more thing. In Chinese, there seems to be no such thing as a run-on sentence. As long as you throw in a comma, you can just keep going. (Obviously, that’s a bit overstated, but not by much.) I don’t know how many run-ons are actually making it to the final postings on my blog, but I know when I’m writing I’m sure struggling to find the end of sentences! I never used to have that problem…

 

So, it seems I’m becoming Chinified. But only to an extent. I still find certain things strange and bizarre in this place, like seeing the laoban (boss) of my dorm rollerblading through the hallways on a fairly regular occasion.  Or seeing some workers try to create a make-shift drainage system to get the melting water from the roof of a store to flow down into a manhole, when there were already inches of slush covering the ground anyway. Yeah. Strange.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Kimchi fried rice & chocolate chip cookies... Am I still in China?

Sunday marked six months of my being in China, which means I’m also over halfway through my time here! Wow! So I started reflecting on the past six months, how much I have enjoyed being here, and how much I like China.

 

Then I thought about how non-Chinese my experience has actually been. Sometimes I feel more like I’m studying in the U.N. than in China!

 

Take, for example, just the past week. One week ago, I hosted a big lunch for some of my friends. I cooked what can more-or-less be considered “American” food (chili and gumbo), and all the guests were from Africa.

 

Thursday, I got together with my American friend to bake cookies. Yes, that’s right, I baked cookies! First time in six months! It was marvelous. But let me tell you, there’s nothing Chinese at all about baking chocolate chip cookies.

 

And yesterday I was getting ready to make something for dinner, so I opened my fridge. True enough, the rice inside is fairly Chinese. But the kimchi that I fried that rice up with was certainly not! (It was, however, homemade kimchi. Not by me, of course, but by one of my Korean friends. And for those of you who don’t know, kimchi is that famed pickled cabbage that Koreans eat with everything. Unlike many Americans, I actually love it.)

 

So, like I said, the U.N.

 

One of the most entertaining conversations I’ve had this week was with my Chinese friend about chocolate chip cookies. I had been with him in the morning before going to bake the cookies, so I was telling him that I was excited to go bake. He had absolutely no idea what (non-Chips Ahoy) chocolate chip cookies actually are, nor how on earth to bake them. In talking, he said that he always thought “cookies” were just “big crackers.” Only in China can cookies and crackers be considered as one thing! He was terribly surprised when I told him that American cookies are usually soft, not crunchy or crackery. In the end, he decided American cookies must be like a cross between crackers and cake… Not that I would have ever said it that way myself, but I suppose given what he has to compare them to, it’s not a bad analysis!

 

Of course, I gave him some cookies after we baked them, so he could experience a true American cookie.  He said they looked just like he’s seen on TV. Haha!

 

On the one hand, baking cookies with my American friend felt just like being back in the U.S. for a few hours. However, we still knew we were in China as we were mixing up the dough… Butter, for example, comes in sticks here that are a different size than those in the U.S., and they are only measured in grams. The recipe, of course, didn’t give the gram measurement for how much we needed.  Then there was the lack of chocolate chips that ails China. We just bought chocolate bars and broke them into pieces. In the process, though, we managed to buy one chocolate bar that was clearly made in China… nasty! (We discarded that one.) And perhaps the most entertaining was trying to decide how much brown sugar (or “red” sugar, as it is called in China) to use. Of course, the recipe called for a certain amount of brown and a certain amount of white. But brown sugar in China is about six times darker than brown sugar in the U.S. Even with replacing half a cup of the brown sugar with white, our cookies tasted a bit molassesy. We also had to decide what kind of white sugar to use, since even white sugar in China is different than in the U.S. They have two kinds here: wet sugar and sugar crystals. (We went with the wet sugar.) And then there was the problem of the flour…

 

I could continue, but I’m sure you get the idea. It was the most entertaining cookie-baking experience of my life! But somehow – miraculously! – those cookies turned out, and they were also the most delicious cookies I’ve eaten in a very very long time. Mmm.

 

Actually, the kimchi fried rice was possibly the tastiest fried rice I’ve had in a while, too.  I’ve been on a fried rice kick recently, making a different sort of fried rice every day. (Rice is cheap, but I can’t eat the full pot when I cook it. The best way to use leftover rice is fried.) So far the kimchi wins.