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The above are a few of the literal and homonymal versions of the many Chinese expletives that sprang from my tongue on several occasions yesterday. There were also quite a few English expletives thrown in the mix as well, which I said directly to the face of the offender in question. Had the ignorant jinu understood what I was saying, a physical attack would probably have been inevitable, which of course I would have gladly welcomed for the opportunity to mace her in the face, but alas, I did not want to be inconvenienced by police involvement, which always takes a lot of time, and it was about to rain and I didn’t have an umbrella, so I heroically kept my insults and curses in English, and physical confrontation was avoided.

What would cause such a violent and angry reaction from yours truly you may ask. In a nutshell, lack of transparency regarding rules and regulations, lack of reason, lack of common sense, a crazy landlord, lies, cheating, more lies, and more cheating.

There is a lengthy back story regarding the crazy and unreasonable nature of my boss’ new landlord, but to get to the point, after not having the new apartment ready by the tenth, as stipulated in the contract, we finally get the okay to move my boss’ stuff from his friend’s apartment to the new apartment yesterday. We were told the landlord had a meeting in the afternoon, so we needed to be there by 1 pm. The moving company could only come at 12, so we hoped that an hour would be enough time to pack up the stuff.

However, due to an unknown rule that we need approval to move anything out of the apartment complex where my boss’ stuff was stored, there was a huge disaster and the moving truck wasn’t even allowed to leave. We waited three hours to finally get approval just to leave the gated community to get to the new place. The movers even threatened to dump all the stuff and leave because of the 3 hour wait.

It is 3:3o by the time was can even begin to travel to the new place. The new landlord is irate that we didn’t get there before one, and as I’m in the moving truck, bluntly tells me, “I’m not at home” “There is no way you can move in now” “Come back tomorrow.” There is absolutely no way I can tell the movers to take the stuff back to the friend’s apartment, so I desperately call the real estate agent. The real estate agent says she will try to solve the problem, but it will take her half an hour to get there. Fretting outside behind the new house, I go inside the complex, to find the door wide open, and the landlady at home! She blatantly lied to me telling me she wasn’t there, and that there “was no way you can move in now.”

It gets worse, even though she is there, she won’t let the movers move in. She wants us to say that we will start the contract on the tenth, when the house wasn’t even finished and we only had just moved in on the 17th. Basically she would be getting 2,500 more kuai if we started on the 10th. I refused, and we got in a big fight. It makes NO sense that we would start on the 10th when the renovations weren’t even finished, which is why we were moving in on the 17! It was crazy beyond all belief. And then it started to rain. The movers were already threatening to dump my boss’ stuff and leave. I couldn’t leave his stuff lying on the sidewalk in the rain, and the landlord wouldn’t let us move in unless I agreed that the contract started on the 10th, so I was coerced to sign for the 10th. The Jinu landlady wouldn’t even let the movers begin to move the stuff until I had signed all the contracts legally ensuring that I had agreed to the 10th.

It was a nightmare, it was awful, she cheated my boss, but I got his stuff into the apartment, and I thought it was over, until…

This morning I come back to the office, and tell my coworker the crazy story of what happened, and how idiotic and unreasonable and downright cheating the landlord was. He insists on calling the landlord because it was evident that we were being ripped off. I tell him it’s not a good idea, because the landlord is “not even human,” a huge insult because it implies that the person is a beast or an animal. I was forced to sign a contract, and now there is nothing we can do. He says it doesn’t matter, calls up the landlord, and starts with “why are you cheating the foreigners?” This of course starts a huge fight, and it culminated with the landlord threatening to beat up my coworker. My coworker hangs up on him, and the landlord then proceeds to call our office phone 10 times. I finally pick up, and the landlord demands to know who called him. I play dumb, and tell him no one is at the office but me (He doesn’t recognize my voice). He demands to know our company’s address and insists that he is coming over himself to find my coworker and inflict bodily harm on him. In a panic, I say he has the wrong number and hang up .

The threats of violence would have been laughable had it not been serious. Essentially my boss picked the craziest landlord in the world, and I wish him well when he does actually move in. I have vowed to never deal with the landlord again, and had it put into the contract that if there are any problems with the house, the agency will be the middleman and deal with everything. I have always laughed at the fact that my coworkers are “classist,” and early on one of my coworkers described the landlord as one of the “poor class” indicating that he was uneducated, uncouth, uncivilized, and pretty much a beast. I thought it was appalling that she would categorize a person like that, but now I believe her. I won’t buy into the fact that it is because he is of a “lower class,” but this landlord was probably the beastliest human being, if I can even call her a human being, that I have ever met in my life.

I have been losing a lot of friends recently -especially girl friends, which are the worst to lose in a country with with such a skewed gender ratio. It’s not the result of anything personal, but rather the work of a government who is trying to boot all the “bad elements” out of Beijing. These “bad elements” tend to be the young foreigners, that despite having lived, studied and worked in China for several years are not the filthy rich laowai who will flood Beijing and fling money at the Chinese economy in one short frenzy of Olympic fervor, and thus to whom the government refuses to reissue visas. I have had to say goodbye to a few friends for good who had their visas denied and don’t find it worth it to come back. I’ve also bid farewell to those who will go home for the summer and hope to come back after the Olympic madness has died down in October, and I am still praying for some going home that they will actually be able to get a visa to come back in a few weeks.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my company figured out my visa situation and I am good till November, and that Andy is also saved from the madness until September. However, it is still sad and frustrating to lose so many friends to the policies of a capitalist, communist, cash hungry, over-the-top, face-saving, ridiculously paranoid government.

I was going to write about this a month ago when it happened, just never got around to it. I’m going to make an effort to write more blogs, even if they are short, poorly written and done on my lunch break. So here it goes:

The weather is getting warmer, and the government is doing something right, because Beijing has had an unprecedented beautiful spring. In the past there has been one week of nice weather, and then it just gets hot, stinky and muggy as summer descends on the city, prompting tubby middle age men to walk around with their shirts up to show off their summer figure… a nice round potbelly.

This year however, has been wonderful. Today is a balmy 70 degrees with crisp breeze and blue, blue sky. It’s amazing. Well, a month ago on one of these amazing days, my friend Pete had a BBQ at his place. He lives on the first floor, and has a little balcony attached to his bedroom, outside of which is a little fenced in patch of green. The public generally can’t access this patch of green, but since Pete’s balcony looks out over it, and we are on the first floor, it is perfectly easy to get over the balcony railing and just be outside on the grass. We figure this is the perfect place to have an outdoor grill.

The grill, two grills actually, were placed outside, literally two feet away from his balcony, and the grill masters get to work lighting it. Everything is going smoothly, we have it lit, and are just waiting for the flames to die down before we begin cooking the massive amounts of meat we prepared (I made a special tandoori chicken marinade). Then, all of a sudden, a guard notices us. There are guards manning every entrance to every housing complex. They are poor, uneducated people with a boring, useless job, so the chance to disrupt a foreigner’s party was a pretty welcome break from the doldrum of their normal purposeless occupation. The guard gets into the green space, and tells us that we can’t BBQ here. We ask where we can BBQ. The guard gets on his walkie talkie and asks someone. Another guard appears. Second guard says, I don’t know, you just can’t barbecue here. At this point, one of our Chinese friends comes to save the day, but she kind of makes the situation worse. She says, “why can’t we BBQ?” The answer is “it’s not allowed.” She asks “Why?” they say, it’s just not allowed. “Why?” It isn’t safe. “Why?” Because of the big flames. We look at the BBQ and it is just smoldering charcoal. There isn’t a flame. “So it’s not safe, that’s why we can’t BBQ?” The answer “Yes, it is not safe, so it isn’t allowed.” She replies “Well, where can we BBQ then?” The guard then says, if you put the grill on your balcony, then it will be okay, you just can’t BBQ here on this little green patch.” Reply: “but..if we put it on our balcony, won’t that be more dangerous, because it is closer to the building, and you are asking us to lift up two hot grills over a balcony railing. Isn’t that definitely more dangerous? Silence from the guards, and then “It just isn’t allowed to BBQ here. But you can BBQ on your balcony.”

Hence, going against all rationality, reason and safety, we moved two burning hot grills up over a 3 foot railing and onto the tiny little balcony to grill from there. Two feet from where we were previously, and probably much less safe. China.

For those who remember my crusty Shenzhen apartment, with puckered linoleum floors, bare white walls, rusty pipes, the occasional cockroach and no shower stall, where I am living now seems like a five-star hotel in comparison. I live smack dab in the Central Business District (CBD), right next to a modern art gallery (Today’s Art, Project #1); surrounded by little cafes, coffee joints, and soon to be bars; and within walking distance of an organic food store and a French supermarket. A twenty-five minute walk north from my apartment finds you in the heart of the business district, dominated by the China World Hotel, Kerry Center, Fortune Plaza, etc.

The CBD is an incredibly nice place, with gleaming buildings, upscale restaurants, cool architecture and fancy gelatto places. However, China is China, and no matter how hard architects and urban planners try to recreate a modern business area that rivals those of developed countries, there will still always be something that gives it away. In this instance, it is corn.

Now with millions of pedestrians on the street everyday, I sometimes complain that planners waste sidewalk space by planting trees on the sidewalk, essentially leaving only two feet of clear walking space on the sidewalk. However, I guess that if they didn’t plant trees on the sidewalk, there would be nowhere else to plant them and the city would be an ugly, nature-less maze of concrete. Yet in the CBD, on a street right next to the Kerry Center, planted in the little squares of dirt on the sidewalk were not trees, but corn! It was unmistakable and undeniable, corn taller than me was sticking out of the packed dirt, with fully developed ears, ripe for picking.

I am not sure that the corn was there on purpose, but Andy and I made jokes that the government had declared that there must be corn planted in the CBD to remind all the millionaire businessmen of their agrarian roots and that the peasant “is the backbone of the revolution.” Or, that the scarcity of arable land in China had finally hit such a crisis point that they needed to plant in the CBD to provide enough food for the population.

Whatever reason for the corn, the sheer contrast between the luxury of the adjacent Kerry Center and the green/gold stalks struggling to grow in its two-feet wide patch of dirt was quite surprising and even comical. It’s China.

On Saturday, Andy’s coworker had a moving sale (moving to Belgium after five years in Beijing), and we went to nab stuff for the apartment. In addition to getting important things like plate and cup sets, linens and kitchen utensils, we grabbed a few miscellaneous items that she was trying to get rid of, including a few books and movies.

A previous random conversation between Andy and I about the weirdness of certain aspects of Japanese culture had led to the mention of a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, a movie about a group of Japanese youngsters put on an island for a “scientific survival project,” in which they have to kill each other or their heads explode. Sure enough, it was among the DVDs being given away, and so we picked it up for the sheer coincidence.

Now, the description on the back of the DVD case is just a quintessential example of glaring inattention to detail. Although this DVD may be pirated (just a disclaimer, I didn’t buy it, I got it free), it is still funny that such glaring mistakes occur, a problem that unfortunately plagues more products in China then could-be-fake-DVDs.

Here is part of the movie description on the back. Remember, this film is a violent Japanese horror flick with that Japanese girl in Kill Bill that Uma kills with a mace to the head, or whatever that spiky ball on a chain is called, just to put it in perspective:

“Authorization-in the cellphones that it had manufactured, they allege that their “stroke input” was utilized in the character input system…They claim this would fall under the copyright protection range of the two Hu’s invention. Traditional Chinese culture has always been, uh, rather traditional about love and sex. Premarital sex is frowned upon, one night stands are unthinkable and divorces are rare. Chinese have been generally perceived as conservative, if not awkward, when approaching fundamental questions about relations between men and women.”

Glad I’m not watching a movie based on that description! Although I think awkward cell phone lovers might find it interesting.

Passport? Money? Prescription Medication? Underwear?

All very good items to remember, but if you are a woman, especially a woman of color, especially a woman of color moving to an Asian country, especially a woman of color moving to an Asian country who actually likes their tan, sun-kissed skin, then it is of vital importance to remember your make-up bag.

Getting dressed for my interview this morning (which went well, although they currently don’t have a position to offer me) I had a severe panic attack when I couldn’t find the bag that contained my make-up. It had my favorite brands of creams, powders and glosses that took me 8 make-up wearing years of trial and error to find.

Bereft of my favorite brands was not the only problem. China has a thriving cosmetics industry, but beauty means one thing: white. The phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” does not seem to have relevance here. In a country where you have to put your photo on resumes, and job eligibility requirements frequently demand that the applicant be of a certain appearance, beauty in China is evaluated on a very strict, unmoving, and unfortunately, Western-based, set of criteria. I’m Western, but apparently I don’t fit in. No beauty store sells foundation for my skin color (and really, I’m not even that dark), although every single sales lady always tries to sell me a whitening cream. Maybe so that I would eventually be able to come back and buy a foundation? It would essentially be impossible to replace my make-up here in Asia.

Fortunately, the make-up crisis was averted when I finally found the bag under the clothes I wore yesterday which I had unceremoniously dumped in the closet. Still, in those few minutes of panic, I realized just how wonderful it really is to find a shade that fits. Your shade, catered to your skin color, rather than having to alter your skin color to cater to a shade.

I hate those commercials that shows a woman frowning at being eggshell white, then giddy with joy when, after using [Enter Bleaching Agent Here], her skin is the color of death.

For National Holiday, October 2007, I went on a two-day camping adventure on the Great Wall.

Pre-Expedition

There were five of us all together, and it took about half a day before-hand to prepare: I had brought a sleeping bag, but we also needed mats (we weren’t sure if we would be sleeping in a guard tower, or if we would try to get off the wall and try to find a relatively flat clearing on the mountain side, but either way, mats were essential. We also bought a cooking stove, and a ton of not- good-for-you snacks filled with carbs and calories for energy, and some good snacks, like banana chips and peanuts. We also da baoed (boxed) some relatively unspoilable Chinese food, like noodles, froze them, and carried them with us. Unfortunately one of the dishes we got had meat in it, which we forgot about, and had to throw away (because no one wanted to get sick off of spoiled meat in the middle of nowhere). Our biggest concern was bringing enough water, and being able to carry it (carrying water on your back can get pretty heavy, and climbing the great wall is already difficult and treacherous without 60 pounds on your back). So we decided on ten bottles each, with the hope of not getting lost and dying of thirst, or falling off a cliff because our bag slipped). Andy was very concerned about the water situation, by the way.

The Natural Gate

The Plan

You may be wondering how we possibly could get lost if we were simply walking on the Great Wall. Doesn’t the wall go in one direction (or two, depending on if you are going East to West or West to East)? The answer is no, the Wall has areas where it forks in different directions. Also, most of the wall is broken, resulting in a lot of the Wall being nothing but ruins, covered in brush and overgrowth, so much that you can lose the wall completely (which is what happened to us).

The decision makers (Andy and Pete) decided to start from a non-touristy wall entrance, huanghua cheng, and then hike thirty kilometers to Mutianyu, a more touristy section of the Wall. We got contradictory statements whether it was actually possible to hike from one part to the other, some said you could, some said it was impossible. We decided to take the chance and go for it. All that we were told by the people who said it was possible was that if we come to a fork in the wall, stay right. Otherwise, we would be in the middle of nowhere, which would be a very bad thing if we ran out of water. So, we hired a mianbao che (a little minibus) to take the five of us to the wall. It took 2.5 hours to arrive.

Mao Watches

The Explorers set out

We arrive, and the first thing we decide to do was stock-pile on some energy, a.k.a eat lunch. Normally I do not eat rice with meals (useless starchy carbs with nearly no nutritional value in the long run) but we all ate a bowl of rice, and some vegetables and meat of course. While we were there, we met some Canadians who were eating lunch at the next table. One had been living here for 9 and a half years (and forty pounds, his words, not mine). He saw our huge backpacks (I did not have a camping backpack, so poor Andy had to carry both his and my sleeping bags and mats, resulting in him having the biggest and heaviest bag). And we told him our plan. He of course thought it was ludicrous (himself being extremely unfit) and said that we would only be able to make it to the fourth guard tower! However, he gave us the card of the owner of the restaurant, in case we got in trouble or needed some friendly guanxi for whatever reason. After lunch we  set out for the actual wall. Being an unrenovated section, we actually had to use a ladder to get onto the wall (normally there are steps). It was a rickety wooden ladder, and extremely difficult to climb, more so with heavy sacks on our backs. So that was the first obstacle. After that, the entire Wall was ours, and with the one exception of spotting some foreigners briefly at one section of the wall that was close to a village (which was a godsend on the way back, since we didn’t know it was “near” civilization until then), we didn’t see another soul.

Repaired Wall

Sometimes you get the Wall, sometimes the Wall gets you

We set off on the Wall at about noonish, which meant we had roughly 7 hours of hiking time before it would get dark and we would be forced to stop. Climbing is hard. The Wall has very steep inclines and descents, and as we were on an especially perilous section, entire chunks of the wall would be missing or nothing but a heap of rubble. We got pretty lucky with alternative path finding. We were able to bypass a whole mountain peak by finding a path that curved downwards across the mountain side to another part of the wall.

One time we didn’t get so lucky. On a particularly tricky climb over rocks and through brush, our group decided to split up. Andy and Pete wanted to attempt to rock climb, while Ally and I (and Jon, since the boys oh so chivalrously decided that one boy needed to stay with the women (right)) decided to follow a path that we thought would lead us up the mountain and back on the wall. We had a beautiful hike through wilderness, (not entirely wilderness, because there were small terraced plots of corn and squash, but still no soul to be seen), However, there was no way to get back on the wall! We soon discovered that we were on the Mongol side of the wall, and experienced first hand why the Wall was built, to keep the Mongols out. Being the Mongols kind of sucked, because it meant the three of us had to backtrack back to the point where we first split up and climb up the way Andy and Pete did.

Explorer Devi Framed by the Wall

The Climb of Terror

During the course of the hike there was a lot of tiptoeing past perilous drops where the Wall’s walls were non-existent, and there was a significant amount of rock climbing, but nothing compared to one section of the wall that we had to get past (twice as it will turn out) which I shall refer to as the Climb of Terror. Okay, so maybe the others might refer to is as the Climb of Relative Scariness, but as I am scared of heights, I was pretty afraid. I’m not exactly sure how far the drop was, but if you fell, the least that would happen would be broken limbs and internal bleeding, and the worst, well thank God the worst did not happen.

What made it particularly scary in the psychological sense was that if one of us had fallen, we were absolutely in the middle of nowhere, with no one around. It was hard enough to carry our own bodies this far, and would have been close to impossible to carry someone back had it been necessary. I should say here and now (especially if Grandma reads this) that we are all fine, and the only injuries I have are incredibly sore muscles and lots of tiny lacerations on my arms and legs from hiking through brush. Ally had the worst injuries, which were still nothing but cuts and bruises after she fell and rolled down a particularly steep section of the wall as we were descending. Luckily she had her pack on, which protected her back and kept her from rolling further.

Anyway, back to the climb of terror, think of going mountain climbing up a nearly vertical precipice. Then think of trying to scramble onto a crumbling wall with scary drops on either side, and being well aware that the wall could crumble beneath you at any time. Then think of trying to get incredibly heavy bags up with you at the same time. And then think of the girl who’s scared of heights trying not to hyperventilate while holding on for dear life while others have to hoist bags up the cliff while she’s uselessly clinging to a rock face. I don’t remember much of the ascent besides being scared, but I think people pulled and shoved me to get me up there. Anyway, at least I made it .

What do we do about that?

The Campsite

After that adventure, dusk was quickly settling in, which meant that we had to hurry up and find a campsite before it got too dark to see. We walked for about another 15 minutes with absolutely nothing suitable in sight, no guard tower, no flat part of the wall, nothing. I think at one point Ally randomly looked over the wall, and lucky she did, because she found the only relatively cleared, flat piece of space available probably within a huge distance. The area was very small, maybe 12 square feet, but it was enough space for us to lay out sleeping bags and have a small fire against the bricks of the wall.

We made our own firepit using rocks, and there was plenty of dry firewood, and about 10 feet of brush between our camping space and a mountain cliff drop (at night, we all thought that the huge space of fog and mist looked like a lake, but no, it was simply a lot of sky in between the mountains ) We cooked our food using the stove we bought, and roasted my stolen corn in the fire. All in all, it was a pretty cozy campsite, the weather was perfect, the ground was dry, but lumpy. We heard animal noises that sounded like a cat, and we tried to remember if there were bobcats in the Chinese mountains. Our cell phones still worked (gotta love China on that one) so we texted friends, but got two contradictory reports. However, no bobcats were sighted that night.

Lost

We woke up in the morning around 7 o’clock. We originally planned to wake up at five (which is not so early since we went to bed at 8), but that didn’t happen. We packed up our things and started out close to 8. After a while we got to an almost fork in the road, or should I say, fork in the woods, for at that point we were walking on soil with trees everywhere with a few stones here and there to remind us that we were maybe on a Wall. Having been told to stay right, we go right. However, after walking for a while, the path just stops. There was no where else to go, and no wall to be seen. Befuddled, we back tracked, and this time decided to go left at the fork. After walking down that way for quite some time, the path also stopped. We were lost.

Overgrown Wall

Turn Around

At this point, we had to start making decisions. We were low on water, had no idea how far we had walked, nor how far we had left until Mutianyu. So, even though we said that there was no turning back, nor did we want to endure the Climb of Terror (CoT) again, it was clear that turning back was our only choice. Going down the CoT turned out to be easier than going up. Pete had brought a rope, so we decided to lower our bags first by rope. Andy climbed down first, than Jon went down to the midpoint, I went down and found a safe spot somewhere in the middle, and Pete and Ally both staggered themselves at the top, and thus we began the process of lowering bags. It was quite efficient actually, and we all made it safely.

We kept on hiking, and out of luck encountered a German couple on the wall. They had on sandals, so we asked how they had got here (they couldn’t have hiked all the way in sandals) and they said they had followed a path that was about thirty minutes from a main road and restaurants. I was so happy! Only thirty minutes to civilization? If we hadn’t met them, we would have walked another 1-2 hours back to where we started from. This was much easier. When our bedraggled group finally made it to the restaurant, it was so nice just to wash our hands and get the dirt out from under our fingernails. For some odd reason I had dirt smeared across my face which the whole group neglected to tell me about until after we had finished lunch. Thanks guys.

Where we came from

The Aftermath

As I said, we all survived with barest of injuries. However, it was so hard to walk afterward; my muscles hadn’t been worked like that in a long time and were really sore for days (they still kind of hurt a bit). Anyway, the whole trip was such an adventure, and ranks up there as one of my coolest life experiences. Pete video recorded it; I will have to get a copy to show you guys sometime.

The expedition group

This week I have been teaching my kids about Earth Day (April 22cd). With China’s particularly objectionable social acceptance of littering, spitting and smoking anywhere and everywhere, and moreover its wide-scale environmental problems, I’ve had no small degree of sadistic pleasure making my kids repeat “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” a hundred times over.

Teaching the subject of environmental protection has made me realize how lacking, if not near non-existent, environmental education is in Chinese (primary) schools. I remember in elementary school, Earth Day was huge. We went outside and planted trees, we had “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” stickers, we had lectures, we sang songs, we had entire weeks devoted to the study of the environment.

Not so much here in China. The kids barely knew anything, and couldn’t really answer me when I said, “what causes pollution?”(Of course translated into Chinese for them). They at least said factories, but every other answer was a little off topic, like “poaching animals!” At least I can see some connection as it relates to the environment…

After explaining pollution, its causes, and a brief outline of what we could do to help save the earth, I asked my kids if they had any other ideas how they could help protect the environment. The answers:

1) Don’t take showers (… to save water)
2) Shut down the city’s power (… to save electricity)
3) Don’t go anywhere (…to avoid driving cars which cause pollution)

And… my favorite…

4) Commit Suicide (…because humans cause pollution, cut down forests, and kill animals)

I was a bit shocked at this answer, especially since it came from the mouth of a second grader. What can you expect from kids who know next to nothing about the environment? Next week we will see how well my third graders do…

Aiya!!