Part 2

Alright so, as promised, this is the followup of my last post. This past Sunday I met my Chinese family. My family consists of me, a fellow HBA classmate (now my older brother), and a chinese mother and father. Our teachers introduced us to our family and then we were on our own. They also gave us a photo album, which they apparently expect us to fill up with family memories. My "parents" were genuinely thrilled to meet us, and they told us that while we were in Beijing, their home was also our home. They are incredibly sweet. My "ma ma" is a teacher and my "ba ba" is a chemist. Before coming to Beijing, I had purchased an "I love New York" t-shirt and hat, which I gave to them as gifts. It was a big success. We exchanged phone numbers, and then I had to return to my dorm room to do my homework.

One of the main points that the teachers stress to the parents is that we have a lot of work and not a lot of free time, so they should be understanding if we are unable to spend a lot of time with them. However my parents, the following day, gave me a phone call, inviting me to a very special evening. My Chinese was not good enough to make a convincing excuse, so at 5:00 I found myself in my ma ma's car, talking in Chinese, and explaining that I really had to be home by 8:00 to do my work. If I didn't tell them this, I don't know what time I would have gotten home. It sounded like they had some real big plans for that evening.

Anyway we drove through Beijing for about half an hour, until we arrived at their apartment building. Along the way they pointed out the Olympic stadium and the CCTV building and other landmarks. They are incredibly proud of their city and their country. In the apartment were my ba ba's parents, cooking dinner, dressed in what can only be described as matching daytime pajamas. I apparently now had Chinese grandparents. My ye ye (grandpa) instantly demanded that we sit down and relax and gave us an enormous amount of tea. Their apartment was very small, only four or five rooms, and all four of them live there. My ma ma explained to me that she and my ba ba recently purchased an apartment that they had not yet moved into, so that they could finally live alone.

For dinner I had no idea what to expect. When the plates were brought out, it wasn't very reassuring: a lot of stew-ish dishes and fish and strange unidentifiable brown items (there were also eggs from an unidentified animal). Of course, to be polite, I had to try everything. Nothing was terrible. A few things were actually very good, even though I have no idea what they were. The whole time my Chinese grandparents talked to me in totally incomprehensible Chinese. It turns out that it's not my fault that I didn't understand them, since apparently the Chinese that older Beijing people speak is totally different from modern Chinese. My parents translated all meal. The general topic of conversation was "in what ways is Chinese better than America".

One little surprise I had was that apparently in China burping and slurping and chewing with your mouth open is totally appropriate. Or at least at this dinner. My nai nai (grandma) was really into the burping.

Once I was full, I was forced to eat a ton more food. Once this was done, and it was time to go, my grandparents offered their home to me, and we said good bye. My parents drove me home, and it was back to work.

MS

Internet Again

Apologies for the hiatus. The cafe where I steal my internet from has been having technical difficulties. After my first real weekend in Beijing I have much to tell, and not much time to write, so this will be part 1 of a 2 part miniseries.

For those of you wondering where our class went last weekend instead of the Great Wall, I will say now that the class went to a Chinese Opera, and I did not attend. I've heard mixed revues. Instead, I was playing soccer with some local Chinese students on our school's soccer field. I did not know this, but apparently soccer is a pretty big deal here, and they were all unfortunately very good. The experience was as fun as embarrassing. They had a nick name for me and, while I don't know what it meant, I don't think it was complimentary.

After 10 days in Beijing, I still have not completely adjusted to the time change. I wake up before my alarm every day and want to go to sleep around 9. It's really hard to adjust. Also the weather here is crazy and there were two days last week where it was completely dark by 4pm due to clouds which was unhelpful. I also don't have a lot of time at night to sleep so I have to sleep during the day after class which also throws off my body clock.

Talking to the locals is a really fun way to practice my Chinese and to test what I know, but many of them only want to talk to me to practice their English. It leads to an interesting dynamic, usually with them talking to me in English and me replying in Chinese. No one looks good, and no one understands anything. One Beijing local asked me for my email address, so that I could teach him English over the internet (I withheld my personal information). One thing that I'm noticing is that our teachers can understand us and can hold conversations with us but our Chinese is really difficult for locals to understand. It makes me appreciate my teachers all the more.

Anyway this weekend I went out Friday and Saturday night to two completely different parts of Beijing. On Friday I went to a giant rave in an old factory (converted to an art studio). The whole thing was pretty poorly put together and there was fog from the fog machines everywhere but it was a lot of fun. There were a lot of my Yale classmates there, both from my program and from other programs in Beijing. Also a ton of of locals.

On Saturday I returned to Sanlitur (I had been there the week before), and I went to a club called Vic's. Lots of my friends who have been to Beijing recommended this place to me and it was absolutely awesome. They play a lot of American music and pack a ton of people into a not so big space. There was a live performance of the Chinese hip hop type that was definitely something new.

I also took the Beijing subway for the first time. It is new and clean and air conditioned and has LCD TVs in all the cars. It really puts New York's subway system to shame. It's so new that even Beijing locals need to look at the maps on the cars in order to get around.

The big news of the weekend is a bit of a coming of age story. I bought a bike. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a big deal in Beijing. Everyone has a bike, and if you don't have one, you can't go far. I had to walk long and far to find my sweet ride. I ended up at a small shack in an alleyway, and paid 180 kuai (maybe $25). I had to negotiate the price down from the original 240 kuai. The fact that when they first put the bike together and I rode it out of the store it fell apart helped out. Even my Chinese teachers are impressed that I found a bike for so cheap. Like all bikes in Beijing, it has a "seat" on the back (a flat weave of wires) for a lucky passenger. It also has only 1 gear and minimally effective brakes. It's my pride and joy. Going to the market has never been faster.

Anyway that's it for part 1. The menu for part 2 includes meeting my host family and a very special meal they prepared for me. Stay tuned.

MS

End of Week One

Today I had my first test, thus ending my first week of classes. Tests are divided into two parts: a written exam and an oral exam. The written exam is 2 hours long and consists of translations, multiple choice, and reading comprehension questions. For the oral exam, we need to recite a short essay we wrote and memorized earlier in the week. The whole affair is pretty stressful. Since every night we have so much work, we don't really have time to review previous lessons. The week's lessons add up to a couple hundred characters and several dozen sentence structures, that we have to cram in in addition to our regular homework. As a result, I don't think anyone got much sleep last night. The test itself is not terribly difficult, just enormously frustrating when there is one character out of hundreds you studied that you can't remember. The oral exam was much easier than I thought it would be. After speaking only Chinese for the past week, memorizing 2 paragraphs of Chinese that I wrote took only 20 minutes. I'll soon know if it was as simple as I thought.

After the exam, we had a Chinese Class lunch. Every Tuesday and Friday, the teachers take their classes out to lunch. It is a good opportunity to practice Chinese with the teachers in an informal setting. The teachers also know what to order so lunch is much better than when we order on our own. Everyone is in good spirits because the week is over. It's a win-win. After lunch, everyone is exhausted and passes out in their room.

Even though we've only been here for a week, already everyone walks around the campus and surrounding area like they own the place, recommending restaurants to teachers and strangers and talking loudly in mediocre Chinese. We get some bemused looks, but in general the people on the campus are now accustomed to our presence. Our Chinese has gotten much more fluid, not necessarily much better grammatically, but we can definitely communicate our ideas and thoughts a lot faster, at least to each other. We still have to sidestep around words or sentence structures we don't know, but in general we can carry a conversation.

Talking with the teachers is definitely an ego check, since they correct every mistake we make. However I try to talk to the teachers as much as possible, because it's the only way my Chinese will improve in its accuracy. Every school night the teachers have office hours in our dorm building for several hours. I try to go every night because it not only improves my Chinese but it also increases my homework scores. It can get frustrating talking to the teachers for long periods of time, but every night it becomes easier to understand what they are saying the first time they say it.

Tomorrow we were supposed to go to the Great Wall, but because of recent bad weather, we are rescheduling. Apparently there is a backup activity planned, but for now it is a secret. I hope you're as excited as I am.

MS

More

Since my last post I've had two 1 on 1 sessions with two different Chinese teachers. We have these sessions every day and they last for 50 minutes. These are really intense. There is no where to hide and no way to pass a question on to another student. Every time the teacher asks you a question, you have to figure out what it means and respond. That means a lot of the time the teacher repeats or rephrases the same question sometimes three or four times. It can be embarrassing to ask the teacher what he is saying but the teachers are, as usual, very nice about it, as it is expected that we are going to have trouble, especially at the beginning. Compared to the teachers, I feel like I am talking at a painfully slow rate. Often I have to stop mid-sentence, collect myself, and start over. But even looking back at my session today compared with my session yesterday I can notice improvement. My ears are slowly becoming accustomed to hearing Chinese all the time, so I can pick up on phrases or words that I know much faster. With just two days of school, my vocabulary has grown tremendously. These 1 on 1 sessions really pressure me to engage completely in Chinese for a full 50 minutes. They may be the most valuable part of the curriculum.

Today I ate my first of what I expect to be many weird things on this trip. My friends and I went to a small restaurant in Wudaokou that serves each person a bowl of broth and noodles with an assortment of things to put in the soup and to eat on the side. This assortment consisted of many strips of meat that I can not identify, but it also included a plate of fried honeybees. I know they were bees and not some other insect because they had their wings and stripes and everything else that a bee has. They were also about an inch long each, and fully intact. They are very crunchy and mostly tasteless, but the worst is that you have to chew them for longer than you wish you did, and after you swallow you still have honeybee in your teeth. One of my friends really took a liking to them, but I was content with just one. I give eating honeybees 2 dumplings (out of 5 obviously).

MS

It begins

Yesterday everyone took the language pledge. At first it was really funny and everyone was laughing and shouting simple chinese phrases at each other but it quickly turned into a problem. The basic deal of the language pledge is no english. Ever. Don't speak english in class, don't speak english out of class, don't speak english in the dorms, don't speak english on the phone, don't read english books, don't listen to english music, and definitely don't watch english movies (youtube is banned here so it's easy to deal with that). Conversations are painfully dull and ineffective. Instead of joking and constant chatting with classmates we only have very simple, bizarrely profound sentences ("This book is big.") that often never make it to the end. Walking to class and from place to place is frustrating and often quiet. Ordering at restaurants has devolved into pointing at things other people are eating. That said, it's not as bad as it sounds. It is funny talking to people and struggling to convey simple ideas. Everyone has a good attitude about it. We know how important it is, and already we have shown dramatic improvement in the necessary vocabulary. It can only get easier.

We also had homework last night. We had to memorize the characters for about 130 words. A few we had seen before, but most we had not. It takes a while. After dinner everyone locked themselves in their rooms and memorized until they fell asleep. This seems to be the way things are going to be around here during the week.

Today was our first day of class, which is a lot of Chinese at once starting at 8am. We have 75 minutes of "lecture", which is basically where we learn all the lessons for the day. This class is only about 10 people, and there is a lot of participation and being put on the spot. The class starts with a dictation, which is one sentence that the teacher reads that the students need to write in characters. After that is "read aloud". The class of 10 people splits up into two sections of 5 and, with a new teacher, practice reading and speaking Chinese from the homework the night before. Then a 20 minute break, and then drills, where we practice what we learned in lecture. Classes end at 12. All classes are in only Chinese. It's nothing like Chinese class at Yale. It's intense and tiring but it was actually a lot of fun and the teachers are all incredibly understanding and helpful. I have a homework assignment tonight similar to the one from last night, except tonight, in addition to the memorization, we have exercises that drill us on what we learned today.

Soon I have my daily 50 minute 1 on 1 tutor session, with yet another teacher. There are 37 2nd year students and 18 teachers for us. We switch teachers every week. Lot's of names to learn.

MS

In China!

I landed yesterday afternoon in Beijing after a 12.5 hour flight. We flew over polar ice for most of the trip. It was really weird because we basically followed the sun, so it was always sunny outside. Longest day ever.

Our dorm rooms are small but very nice. I have a television, refrigerator, air conditioning, and my own bathroom. The bathrooms are by far the strangest part of our accommodations. There is no structural divide between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. This means that when you take a shower, the water does not stay in the shower area, but instead floods the bathroom. The floor does not funnel it into a drain; the water just sits there. After my shower, I tried kicking the water towards the drain but this was minimally effective. As it turns out, many bathrooms in Beijing are like this, including those of all my fellow HBAers. The solution, as I found out at 7:15 this morning, is a cleaning crew that comes in for the purpose of drying the bathroom floor everyday. This might have been an inconvenience if I wasn't already awake to take my daily temperature. Yeah, we have to get our temperature taken by 7:30 every morning. They are really serious about Swine Flu here.

Anyway last night I went out with a few friends and had a great first night in Beijing. We were all exhausted from our trips that day, but we knew that we would probably have a lot of work soon and we might not have so many opportunities to hit the town without worrying about homework. We went to San Li Tun, an area of Beijing with a lot of bars and clubs. We wanted to mix it up so we tried a bar with mostly Chinese people in it, a bar with mostly foreigners, and a bar that was Beijing's attempt at an 80's themed dance club. Going out in Beijing is dirt cheap compared to going out in American cities. Drinks are usually 10-20 kuai, or $1.70-$3.00. Cabs across the city are under 50 kuai, which is less than $8.00 (the subway closes at 10pm which is inconvenient). Dinner was 15 kuai per person. You can really have a good time and see the city on a student's budget.

I've spent most of today exploring the surrounding area and getting myself set up for the next 9 weeks. I bought a cell-phone and SIM card and calling card for around 300 kuai. I had to shop around because most places try to sell you the same package for around 500 kuai. I went to the grocery store to stock up, which is also incredibly cheap. Everything is cheap. I can't stress that enough.

Anyway tomorrow is the placement exam and orientation and the beginning of the language pledge. Being able to speak english to other kids on the program for just these first few days has been incredibly helpful getting around. I'm not sure how it will all work when we can't consult each other to work out sentences in Chinese. One of the most frustrating things so far is not that we can't speak to people or understand them (it is sometimes difficult but for the most part it works out fine), but rather that we can't read anything. I only recognize a few characters and only understand them in specific contexts. When I see a menu that is only in Chinese, I may know one or two ingredients but I have no idea what I am ordering. Signs on stores mean very little to me. Even my cell phone is difficult to use because I can't read the Chinese it displays. I hope that a few weeks here will cure that.

MS

Welcome!

Hello! My name is Matt Slotkin and I am a rising junior at Yale University. Thanks to Yale's wonderful Light Fellowship program, I will be spending the majority of my summer in Beijing, China, learning Mandarin and living in a city I've never been to before. This blog will document my adventures and experiences. I will not have a roommate in my dorm in Beijing, so it is my hope that you, the reader, through the magic of the internet, will be a companion on my travels. My plane leaves later today, so I will write again when I land on Friday, hopefully from my dormroom.

MS