Week 6: Mahjong, rain, Oxford, and the Enlightenment

It's kind of hard to get my head around that I'm going home in a little over two weeks. Except maybe I have been comprehending it subconsciously: I've been more homesick lately, and more likely to eat Western food--though having a cafe in the dorm helps with that, since in means I don't have to walk twenty minutes to get to the cafeterias on campus.
On the other hand, yesterday I had the most Chinese-y experience I've yet had here, and will probably ever have in this program: my tutor and I and a couple of my classmates spent most of the afternoon at a teahouse. The building was probably a hundred years old. The rituals of steeping and serving the tea (jasmine, by the way, and very good) may not have changed for centuries. The mahjong table was new--the electronic dice and built-in tile shuffler make it maybe thirty years old--but mahjong is mahjong, and all together it gave me a feeling I hadn't yet experienced. I've been to Tian'anmen, and to the Great Wall...but tea and mahjong are the real soul of China.
And the weather held for our excursion. There's been a lot of rain in Beijing lately. Last Saturday floods killed nearly forty people, and it's only supposed to rain more this weekend. Ah well, I guess it's a nice break from hot and humid. If it ever actually rains.
And speaking of last Saturday, that was the evening I finally watched Anonymous. It's a lovely movie; the only people I know of who don't like it are the ones who can't be buggered to put aside their pet theory about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. That the movie supports the Earl of Oxford theory only matters insofar as Edward deVere (said Earl) is a well-constructed and beautifully-acted character. (Not to mention attractive--he's played by Rhys Ifans, whom most people know from Notting Hill, and Jamie Campbell Bower, whom everyone will soon know from The Mortal Instruments.) The point of the story is that no matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, they're still wonderful works of art, and powerful cultural icons, and a picture of the human condition at a particular point in history that still resonates with modern readers/viewers. All that good stuff.
And so it annoys me that people get bogged down in petty details, and stick to their biases to the point that they can no longer understand why anyone else sees the world differently. Which brings me to this week's episode of Crashcourse, in which John Green tells conflicting stories about the death of Captain Cook and asks whether, since transcending our own biases is so difficult, it's actually worth doing.
My answer: of course it is! As they keep quoting in Up the Down Staircase, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" The fact that something is difficult makes it even more important that we try to do it. Colonizing the Americas was difficult; so were uniting the United States and landing a man on the moon; so too will be curing AIDS and sending manned missions to Mars. Humans do things because they're difficult.
And learning to see things from someone else's perspective shouldn't be all that difficult. To return to the Enlightenment, which I mentioned a couple of months ago and which John Green seems to enjoy talking about: the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries believed it was possible for man to see the world from God's perspective. I'm prepared to argue that we've accomplished that. Now that we can see what a god sees, why do we refuse to see what other human beings see?

Lessons from Abroad: middle of week 4

Almost halfway already. That's a good feeling, oddly enough. The charm of being somewhere exotic and foreign didn't last long...Beida is already just a place to live in. Beyond that, here are some of the things I've learned this week:

• Food from Sichuan province might be hot, but Korean food is as spicy as it gets. One evening last week, I ate at a Korean restaurant on campus. The beef dish I got turned out to be right about at my limit for spicy things; I couldn't eat more than a bite or two at a time. And apparently they make it even hotter in Korea. So I have decided to set a new scale for measuring spiciness, measured in bibimbites (bbb); one bbb is how much my tongue and the roof of my mouth hurt after one bite of that dish (which was not in fact bibimbap, but I needed a cool name). The next day, I ate Sichuan-style liver (it may even have been beef), which was about 3 bbb--that is, it took three bites for my mouth to hurt as much as I remember one bite of the Korean beef taking.
• I'm a lot less picky about food than I thought I would be. I'm still avoiding pork and shellfish where I can, but where I can't I'll eat pork. Various kinds of tofu are also getting less weird for me...and there's some spicy things I find I can eat, because I paid for them and don't want to waste money.
• Thought 1 from homestay: Elderly Chinese people are a lot like elderly Jewish people. I had dinner this evening with my homestay family, an older couple, and the wife was very bubbe-like, urging me to keep eating, making most of the conversation, and occasionally repeating something I'd said to the husband, who wasn't really paying attention. It felt familiar, and was therefore nice. The food was good too--kind of a mild beef chili-soup-thing over beef noodles.
• Thought 2 from homestay: Personal comfort doesn't really seem to be a factor in ordinary Chinese people's lives. My evidence: the beds. Living in the dorm, I thought my bed was uncomfortably hard. Then I moved into the homestay, and discovered how much less comfortable beds could be. The dorm beds now seem nice and soft, and I imagine my bed at home will be heaven. If it's not already too soft.
• The Chinese seem to have a mostly positive stereotype of Jews: they think we're especially smart, and I hope I've met my hosts' expectations in this regard.

Before I go, here's a picture of a Lucky Bird. They're as common on the Beida campus as feral cats, or (for comparison) slightly less common than pigeons in Pittsburgh. And they're prettier than pigeons.

Lessons from Abroad

I've been in China for two weeks already, for an eight-week intensive language-learning program at Peking University, and I'm already getting a decent picture of how urban Chinese society works. I've been so busy lately I almost didn't write this, but here are some lessons I've already learned:

• Americans are neat freaks. In China, there's no assiduous cleaning of restaurant tables and bathroom stalls; certain places will always smell terrible to the average American nose; and if you hand-wash your clothes, it's hard to get the stains out. This is okay. Except that I plan on buying more shirts when I come home to the American standard of cleanliness, because I'm never going to get those beef broth stains out of my light-colored shirts. (Noodles in beef broth behave like spaghetti in tomato sauce; and you'll always be wearing a light-colored shirt when you eat either.)
• Food is fun, when it doesn't get all over you. For one thing, Chinese politeness standards are not American; it's perfectly acceptable to slurp noodles, which I can't seem to do neatly, hence the stains. Still usually fun. For another, chopsticks are awesome things. Third, there's so many exciting dishes, from baozi (the big round dumplings) to chicken soup with the meat still on the bones, to Peking duck in little rice pancakes. (That was an awesome day.)
• You don't need to understand everything that's being said to you to get what's going on. However, when someone is talking directly to you, you'll always wish you could remember all your vocabulary.
• Sunny days are to be appreciated...of course, as with everything else, there are exceptions. We've been lucky enough to have four blue-sky days in a row, but that makes it hotter. Best way to get around that: carry an umbrella. They were invented for the sun, you know.
• Get as much sleep as you can; the teachers will run you ragged.

And with that, I'm gradually off to bed.