I went to China and came back.
It happened suddenly, and was actually quite a bit easier than I
expected. I went with the Harvard dragon boat club, which was
invited again this year to compete in the Tianjin international
university dragon boat festival. The trip went left on
September 29 and returned on October 9, and I had not planned to go
because of serious conflicts with my lab work. About one week
before departure, though, my lab equipment suffered another in a string
of malfunctions, which would not be fixed for two weeks at least. One
exhausting afternoon was what it took to get all the official
preparations made. A week later we were off.
I went with 17 other travelers. This was actually pretty novel for most
of us. My recent travels have been either by myself or with a close
friend. On this one, my companions were people I didn't know very well,
and there were a lot of them, and we all had to stick to the same
schedule for much of the time. I recalled my trip to western Europe
with People to People when I was about 15. A big difference at that
time was that the plans were all made in advance by chaperones
traveling with us. Our plans, such as they were, were made either by
the Tianjin dragon boat association, who frequently neglected to tell us about the plans until
we were in the midst of them, or else made by the group itself.
I didn't know much about my companions when we began our journey, and
that seems almost unimaginable now. 10 consecutive days of close
contact will do that. Perhaps I should introduce them briefly before
starting
in earnest. Here's who's who:
Bill: a lab tech at HMS, not far out of college. He was one of the
principal organizers of the trip. Bill has Irish red hair and is
generally peppy and amiable.
Max: a lab tech at HMS, he works with Bill. Another principal organizer,
he had been to China last year with his family. Max is
Chinese-American.
Laura (short): a biology graduate student. Despite being of Italian
descent, she hates tomatoes. She has dark hair and big eyes.
Laura (tall): a city employee, and not really affiliated with Harvard
at all. She knew someone else on the team, who didn't come to China with us. Laura's blond and Midwestern.
Heather: a lab tech at HMS, I think in short Laura's lab. She turned
out to be an expert bargainer. Canadian and fair with brown hair.
Erica: a bio grad student. Also a fountain of weirdness: she knows how
to say "hippopotamus" in about 12 languages. She makes sure everyone
knows her family is Italian.
Mark (other): a bio grad student. Big into running. He's tall and thin and Germanic-looking.
Vitaly: a CS grad student. A huge shutterbug. He's Ukranian, though
he's lived other places longer by now.
April: a lab tech at HMS. April was the only one of us who went on the
China trip last year. She's blond and has braces, which make her look
really young.
Sarah: a grad student in ethnomusicology and dance. Indian kathak seems
to be her favorite. She's tall and has red hair and some freckles.
Neal-dra: a community development worker, and a friend of Sarah's, not
actually affiliated with Harvard. She has three sons even though she
still looks much too young for it. Neal-dra is African-American.
Sasha: an undergrad at Brown studying dance and religious anthropology.
She's done so many unusual things that many people think she must be a
compulsive liar. Tall and attention-grabbing with her platinum-blond
dreadlocks.
Lydia: a grad student in middle-eastern studies. She likes the crossword. Mid-height with long blond hair.
Rob: Lydia's cousin. He likes extreme sports. Tall and well-built with buzzed brown hair.
Jenny: Rob's girlfriend. She works on a yacht. Sporty and blond.
Morgan: Rob's childhood friend. He loves the ocean and he loves beer. Big, blond and mischievous.
Kevin: Rob's friend. He's a rock musician and rides a motorcycle. He has
buzzed black hair and hipster glasses.
That's everyone except for me, whom I presume the reader knows
something about. Less than half of us are actualy Harvard students,
though the majority are Harvard somethings. Several people never did
dragon boat before this trip, and many are only one season in. We never
managed to get everyone together in the same boat before Tianjin.
In the States, we often try to be circumspect about matters of race and
appearance. It's what a person does that counts, not what they look
like, right? So why did I make an effort to describe everyone's looks?
Well, in China, your looks can get you more attention than anything
else. Especially in Tianjin, which is much less heavily touristed
than Beijing, foreigners draw small crowds of curious onlookers and
picture-takers wherever they go, and the crowds are bigger the less
Chinese you look. It's not considered overly rude to stare. So in
detailing their
appearance, I've also given clues as to which people got the most
attention. Neal-dra got the most by far, and Max got none at all
(except when he spoke, and then people thought he must be an idiot
because he didn't speak Chinese very well). Redheads and blondes were
more popular than brunettes, but I think just about everyone was asked
for at least one picture with a local.
-------
SEP 29-30
Travel day. We assembled at Boston's Logan airport early in the
morning, and flew to Newark at about 9:30. From there we left at noon
for Beijing. This is just another illustration of how inscrutible the
airline industry is: our route took us almost directly over the north
pole, so how come we had to go south first for the cheapest fares?
Moreover, how come the team from Toronto flew first to Boston, and from
there direct to Beijing?
The flight was 12 hours long, but mostly uneventful. I talked mostly
with Heather and Sasha. We had some fun looking out the windows at the
snowy wastes of northern Canada and the Arctic circle as the sun set,
and then at Siberia and Mongolia as the sun rose again on our way
south. On
the decent toward Bejing, we got spectacular views of terraced
mountainsides with the Great Wall snaking through, followed by vast
agricultural fields and then cityscapes.
We arrived in Beijing almost exactly the same time we left Newark,
except a day later,
thanks to a 12 hour time zone difference. We were a bit ahead of
schedule, which gave Bill time to go to the Starbuck's in the baggage
hall (when he asked for coffee, the
clerk said "What is coffee?"). In short order we were met by the
translator assigned to us by the festival, a student of English who
introduced himself as Romeo. This because his Chinese name was deemed
"too hard" for Americans, and because Romeo is "funny and easy to
remember", as he immediately had to explain about five times in a
row. His fellow translator, who called himself Andy, had no such
trouble.
We were all pretty wiped out on the bus ride, but with new
seat-partners many of us started another round of
getting-to-know-you. I spoke to Neal-dra and Sarah as we drove into
Beijing. We also chatted with Romeo, and Max received his first round
of Chinese heckling. Romeo wanted to know what kind of Chinese Max
spoke, and when he said Shanghainese and tried to demonstrate, Romeo
whispered to me, "Max says he speaks Chinese, but I don't think he
does."
In Beijing we picked up the California team, who'd arrived the
day before and had a night's sleep and were very spunky. They also
had a TON of baggage. We filled up the bus's trunk and then had to
layer bags in the aisle. Then most of the Californians engaged in a
three hour giggling match. I tried to introduce myself to my
neighbors twice, but they just went back to giggling each time.
Perhaps you can understand why, when we finally reached Tianjin, many
of the Harvard people were kind of cranky.
After check-in, we went downstairs to the hotel restaurant where there
was a buffet laid out for the foreign dragon boaters. It was
generally praised as being really tasty food (especially compared to
the airplane fare we'd had for about the last 16 hours) and most of us
enjoyed it very much. There were Chinese foods prepared in the local
fashion: steamed buns are the staple starch in the Tianjin-Beijing
northeast corner of the country, along with rice of course, and the
rest of the meal consisted largely of stir-fried or stewed meats with
vegetables. Much of it would have been perfectly at home in an
American Chinese restaurant. There were also a large number of
dumplings, pastries, and other bread products filled with red bean
paste, a wonderful innovation that has a toehold in the States but
deserves better. A number of soups, much thinner than we make them and
intended for the end of a meal, rounded out the local offerings.
Finally, there were the attempts at western comfort
food. We didn't really know what to make of a lot of it. Some items
were recognizable standards, just presented in an unexpected way, such
as the platter of white bread with large serving bowls full of jelly,
but no spoon or knife. There was a western-style raw salad that few
people ate: Americans who might have done so were reminded that fresh
vegetables in China are likely to be washed with tap water, and are
thus to be avoided in the name of intestinal health, while visiting
teams from elsewhere in the east
probably just thought it was unappealing. (I am told that Chinese
cuisine generally includes only hot vegetables that have been cooked
in some way.) And then there was a pile of stuff that looked like
nothing so much as good old marshmallow salad from back home, though I
seriously doubt that's what the chefs had in mind.
That evening was not terribly eventful afterwards. A few of us walked
around the block to see what the neighborhood was like. I still don't
really understand how Tianjin works. Our hotel seemed to be at the
intersection of a highway and a commercial avenue, with fewer and
fewer streetlights the further you got from either. It had the
sprawling nature of a suburb combined with a city center's high
population (well, high to me anyway) density and a lot of night
traffic, by car, bike, and foot. The avenue had a number of food
markets, indoor and outdoor restaurants, car service shops, bank
branches, a few internet cafes, and an enormous building we finally
identified on our last day as a bowling alley/archery range. (Why
don't we have archery ranges in the states? It seems so much cooler
than bowling. Maybe because it seems more dangerous....) We picked
up some bottled water, glazed sesame seed snacks, and ludicrously
cheap bottles of Tsingtao beer (3 yuan/500 ml, which is about 38 cents
for a big bottle), and went back to the hotel to be mystified by
Chinese television. We finally settled on C-MTV.
I roomed with Morgan during the trip. I don't mean to disparage him,
but there is no getting around the fact that he was drunk a lot of the
time. He would tell you the same if you asked, I'm sure. We chatted
a little bit as we were settling in in the early evening; by the time
we had both returned to the hotel that night, he was visibly swaying
as he leapt onto the bed. He slept with his shoes on. For Morgan,
that was just a teaser.
---------
I later learned (from less giggly team members) that the California
delegation were all people who had gone to the same high school in San
Fransisco. I presume it's largely or all Chinese-American, because
all of the paddlers were and many spoke Chinese to varying degrees.
Since then they haves spread all over, but are largely students in the
University of California system (hence the name "California team").
Many of them were really young, in the 17 to 19 range, but had been
paddling for several years. (We, on the other hand, had only three
people who had begun paddling before late May. Did I mention that?)
The friendliest people -- at least, to us grad students -- were the
older
ones, in particular the coach Brian (late 40's?), the drummer Jadene
(who later proved invaluable to us in the races), and the oldest
actual paddler Phil (22, shutterbug, a Chinese yo-yo talent). They
had been to the Tianjin festival the previous year, and were kind
enough to share a lot of experience and advice with us.
I'll put in a few words about some of the other teams here. I'm sorry
to admit that the Chinese teams all just sort of blended together.
When you can't read any of their jerseys they're hard to tell apart.
Eastern hemisphere visiting teams included a women's team from
Singapore, a men's team from Pakistan and one from Nepal, a mixed team
from South Korea, a Russian boys' team from Vladivostok (from the
"Eastern Russia Watersports University"), and a
beleaguered crew of just 10 paddlers from Australia. The Russians
also had a mixed team from western Russia (rumors abounded that they
were also the Russian national team, affiliated with a university just
for show; they had won the previous year), and there were teams from
Toronto and from Venice, plus our two American teams.
The North American delegation was overseen and headed up by the
mysterious Dr. Chen. He's a dentist who lives in California, and
really the only mystery surrounding him was before we had met him.
Our team organizers found him to be pretty vague about most things,
didn't really know what he did in real life, and theorized wildly
about where he got the money he later reimbursed us with. Once we
spoke with him he turned out to be a very nice man. Nonetheless, he
did produce 50,000 yuan in freshly printed 100 yuan banknotes from an
attache case once....
-------
OCT 1
This was our practice day. We got up mercifully late for a dragon
boat festival -- which is to say 8:00 or something -- not that it was
difficult to wake up with so much jet lag hitting us. I heard more
than one story about what people were doing at 3:30 a.m. Breakfast
was a weird affair, laid out buffet-style again. There were steamed
buns, some filled and some not, rice and noodle dishes, red bean soup
and rice porridge (I found it surprisingly tasty), and a sketchy
looking brown "tea egg". At least, that's what we called it, because
we believe it had been hard-boiled in tea. That is, extremely salty
tea. I tried it and it was hard to eat. I now suspect it may have
been a cousin of the infamous
thousand-year egg.
And, of course, the
western style breakfast: French toast and fried eggs (amazingly
accurate), a platter of cold cuts (standard morning fare in parts of
Europe, at least), and hot Gatorade (weird anywhere).
The practice was held at the race site, using all the race equipment.
It was pretty different from what we use in Boston, so it was really
helpful to do. We put down an absurd deposit for a bundle of life
jackets and boarded our extremely long and wide boat. At this point
we realized we had a problem: no steerer. This was not really
unexpected. We had come short-handed, with only 18 paddlers instead
of the 20 paddlers, one steerer and one drummer that constitute a full
team. Our plan was to borrow personnel from teams who weren't
competing with us, but the only teams we knew at this point were the
other North Americans, who were practicing at the same time. So: no
steerer. Morgan convinced Romeo to
do it for us, which would have been a disaster. Instead, Romeo
paddled (for some reason I still don't really understand, though it
later turned out to be a good idea) and I steered. I felt the difference
immediately: as soon as I tried to bring us about, the steering oar
jumped and nearly launched me into the water. We went up and down the
channel, did a practice 500 meter run, and a few starts. Spectators
on a docked cruise ship cheered us as we went past. Only about 30
minutes later, we called it a day. The air was extremely polluted --
Tianjin is a fast-growing industrial port city -- and everyone got
tired really quickly. Max called it a "slap in the face". I didn't
feel it until the next day, during the first race. We went back in to
the marina, and I nearly crashed into two other boats and gently rammed
the
dock. We ate a boxed lunch of rice, some kind of meat/vegetable
stew, and what seemed like cucumbers cooked with squid, although it
was sometimes hard to tell. We all practiced our chopstick skills,
lacking other options.
Even the day before the races began, there was a notable festival
atmosphere. The race site is in an area of Tianjin called Tanggu,
which is the port area and sits next to an upscale pedestrian shopping
district. There's a kind of esplanade, running along a long
rectangular inlet from the ocean that is normally used for shipping,
that looks more or less like the pretty waterfront found in every
port city. On this occasion, is was packed with vacationers and
locals: the festival is scheduled to coincide with the Chinese
national holiday "Golden Week", and in fact October 1 is Chinese
revolution day.
So there were plenty of onlookers who watched with interest, and we got
our
first "fan clubs" of Chinese who'd follow us for a little while, take
it all in, and sometimes ask for a picture. There were also some
professional journalists who had come with the teams from their
countries, toting video cameras everywhere but not talking to anyone.
The Russian guy was the nosiest. He showed up several times, whenever
we were doing anything remotely interesting. He recorded Sarah and
Neal-dra doing some kathak dancing until they noticed they were
drawing more attention than they liked, taped us warming up and
playing hackey-sack, and was generally a pest. And of course, there
were huge numbers of racers milling around, shouting and jumping to
psyche themselves up (this practice seems to be the same worldwide).
After we had returned to the hotel and showered off, we went on a
"city tour" which turned out just to be a trip to another pedestrian
mall. It was kind of a tourist trap, but that meant mostly Chinese
tourists. All sorts of things were for sale, and we were told it
would have been more but for the fact that Golden Week had many more
people traveling to Beijing than to Tianjin. I was still too tired to
buy anything, which requires haggling in China (more on this
later). Other teammates bought everything from dresses to musical
instruments, or just random tchotchkes.
As I mentioned, I still don't really understand how Tianjin
works. The race site at Tanggu was about an hour's drive from our
hotel, and the "city tour" destination was an hour's drive from
either, but they were all in the city of Tianjin. We went by a
combination of highways and local roads and I found it impossible to
keep my sense of direction. Perhaps the closest comparison I can make
is to New York, except a New York in which all five boroughs are
merged together on the same land mass. The city just goes on and on
and on, and there's sort of a center, but everything else just
sprawls. I have a vague recollection that L.A. is something like this.
Following our "city tour" (and a 20 minute delay because someone just
had to
get postcards and stamps _that minute_), we returned to the hotel for
more buffet semi-Chinese dinner. It was much the same as the previous
night. We had a minor scare after dinner, when Romeo asked, "So where
are your flags?" We goggled. It turned out that each team was
supposed to have a national flag and a university flag, but no one had
mentioned this to us. We talked seriously about trying to make a
flag, starting about 8:30 in the evening. California had brought two
USA flags, and no university flag; they kindly let us borrow one of
theirs, and so we were at least not obviously unprepared.
About 10 of us went out later for beer. Romeo guided us to a
coffeehouse, where they put on American music the instant we all sat
down (we were the only customers). I heard differing reports on this,
but apparently in China the bar is not the main venue for alcohol
consumption. Instead, it is more done with meals at a restaurant.
We had a guidebook that said exactly the opposite. Whatever the
truth may be, there didn't seem to be too many booze-only
establishments: they tend to be dance clubs, or karaoke parlors, or
restaurants or bowling alleys or some such thing, in addition to
serving beer. Of course, there aren't too many coffeehouses in China
either, so I can't really fill in all the blanks on this one.
Our evening was pleasantly spent with Tsingtao (Chinese beer of
choice, mainly because it is actually known in the USA) and shooting the
breeze. We told Romeo innumerable lies about American culture, or
rather Erica did and we all laughed about it. Also vulgar American
slang. (It's what everyone does with foreigners, right? Later on the
Russian youth team told me lies and tried to get me to say dirty words
in Russian.) We stayed out unnecessarily and unwisely late -- 10:30
p.m. -- in stubborn denial about our 5:30 wakeup the next day.
---------------
I pause here for a note on how business is conducted in China. With
the exceptions of supermarkets and the most strictly high-priced,
foreigner-targeted department stores, the prices everywhere are
theoretically negotiable. Haggling is a national pastime in China. I
don't know how they have time for it. It's rude to insult the quality
of merchandise or call a seller on an obvious lie, so pretty much the
only bargaining tools you have are a generic "it's too expensive", the
walk-away, the lowball offer, and the volume discount. I never came
up with a better tactic than to iterate these four until I reached a
price I liked, or despaired of the seller ever seeing reason.
The seller, on the other hand, has the following advantages: they can
tell lies that are not disprovable (It's handmade! It's pure silk!
It's antique!), they know that Americans don't value their money the
same as they do (the exchange rate is very favorable for most
Westerners), and, most significantly in touristy areas, if they can't
get a good deal out of you, they can wait two minutes for any of the
other thousand suckers on the street to walk by. And, most
importantly of all, they are usually better at bargaining than
foreigners, because Chinese sellers bargain for their living. I frequently bought things
for one sixth to one eighth of the initial price, and I'm sure that
was still not a good deal for me. But it's yuan, so it's no big deal
to me (seller advantage #2). Other foreigners are probably better or
worse equipped for this, and for every skinflint who haggles the price
down to just above cost, there are probably two who pay a 2000%
markup.
In Beijing, there are a number of things that look like malls. What
they have on the inside might really be a mall or a department store,
but it might also just be an endless succession of kiosks and stalls,
each staffed by an independent vendor selling the same stuff as the
guy twenty feet down. When you walk down the hall in such a place,
you are trailed by a chorus of "Hello! Come look!", "Sir! Do you want
ties!", etc. I found that you get less of this if you don't commit to
speaking English. If you respond to "Hello!" with the Chinese "Ni
hao!" in an obviously foreign accent, people don't know how to follow
up and just watch you quietly.
Outside, there are an infinite number of street vendors. They cluster
around tourist areas, where they sell the kitschiest things like Mao
watches and Great Wall playing cards, but elsewhere you can still buy
street food and little toys. In between in scale are any number of
hole-in-the-wall businesses of all kinds. My suspicion is that these
holes-in-walls are where you get the best stuff for reasonable prices,
as is so often the case in so much of the world. This is pretty
directly because only knowledgable locals shop in such places. Hence,
one of the lessons I have arrived at regarding travel: expect to be
ripped off. I have had friendly and cheerful locals rip me off
everywhere from Boston to Bucharest to Beijing. In this regard, at
least, people everywhere seem to be very much the same.