Though the looking glass, snarkily

So it's been a while since I checked in last with the blog, primarily because I'm a little lazy but also because work has piled up (the reason I'm ostensibly in China) and that Bonnie has arrived for an eleven day visit. We spent the first couple of days visiting the usual stuff in Beijing...Tiananmen, the Summer Palace, Chaoyang. Here are some of the pictures...
The Chairman...

After Beijing, we headed out to Beijing West Rail Station, this absolutely massive, badger-like structure on the southwest edge of the 4th Ring Road for our over night train to Xi'an, the prominent tourist city best known for the terracotta warriors.

Here are a photo from a VERY hot day in Xi'an (96 F, 110 F effective temp) walking around in the center of the city.

Tomorrow, the warriors!

People have probably heard me tell this little factoid before but it bears retelling, not just to emphasize just how unbelievably hot the summer in Beijing is but also to show that, as difficult as it may be to believe for Westerners, the structure of truth is actually different in China than what is accepted in Los Angeles or Kiel.

In Mao's little red book, there is a rule that supposedly states that when the temperature exceeds 40 degrees C (~ 104 F) that all workers get the day off. (I say supposedly because while I have a copy of the little red book, I haven't been able to actually find this quote. Which is pretty understandable since Mao's discourse on the structure of capital, socialism and the revolution is so filled with poorly written (translated?) cliches that it is virtually catatonia inducing.) One might think that since it often gets to 40 degrees in Beijing and more commonly in the south that this rule would be less than fully applied, maybe only when the temperature gets to 42 or so. But in fact the way it works here is that the temperature is just never reported as more than 39 degrees. On the news, in the papers, China has a magically maximum temperature, which hasn't been exceeded in 57 years.

Before I came to China I spent a fair amount of time working on Mandarin. Mandarin, for those unaware, is the common language of modern China, comparable to Hamburg German or Oslo Norwegian. As a state mission to unify China under one linguistic rubrick, for a long time Mandarin never really worked. Sure it was taught in schools but no one outside of Beijing really spoke it. But since the advent of television, (or, more accurately, the economic reforms that led to most eastern Chinese being able to afford televsions) it has swept over the country. Now everyone speaks it.

For an English speaker, there is almost no toe-hold into the language: no common cognates, no phonetic writing, and a grammar so far removed from Indo-European as to appear to lack one. That said, I still put my time in, memorizing characters and phrases, studying up on grammatical constructions. I thought, while in LA, that I was making pretty good progress. Now that I'm here, I feel indescribably lost in a see of indistinguishable tones, gluttal g's and aspirated s's. I'm barely able to order a meal, much less make myself understood. No matter how carefully I articulate my tones, they never come out well enough to satisfy my listener.

What's worse is that in this sea of w's, g's and s's, I can't seem to rememeber anything. If I get the word right, I forget the tone. If I get the tone right, I forget the sounds. I'm reintroducted to people several times and still can't get their names quite right. Foods I eat every day still come out wrong. It's like swimming in an Asian Lethe, linguistically treading water.

Many of these difficulties occur in every language, even ones much closer to one's mother tongue: the indistinguisable stream of syllables, the inability to articulate key sounds, the sensation of memorylessness. The obscurity of Mandarin is more or less incidental, a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. And so I understand its just a sensation, this wandering in the field, and that with practice things will indeed progress. It's just hard to remember when the woman behind the counter corrects your pronunciation of 'coffee' every single morning.

So it's taken me a little while to end up here, writing. It's about 8:00 PM on July the 5th, which means I've been in BJ for about 40 hours. You'd think I'd have had the time to sit down and bang out a couple of sentences for the folks back home but that hasn't been the case.

After getting in at 6:00 AM on the 4th, I took a taxi into the city, finding it pretty much as I left it: enormous, growing, covered in a thick, yellowish fog. I was surprised to find that some part of me had missed it, even the fog.

Having made my way to the university, I wandered around different labs that Prof. She works in until someone found me that had some idea of who I was, or at least who She was. In the course of this wandering, I accidentally bumbled (with two large suitcases and two satchels) into the nuclear engineering lab, from which I was whisked - politely but by no fewer than three guards - back to the street. As my wait stretched on, I reflected that had a corresponding incident occurred with a Chinese graduate student at an equivalent American lab (e.g. Los Alamos), I don't think the word 'polite' would be used in the description. After another half hour I was discovered by a graduate student in the turbulence lab, who brought me back to his office to wait.

I spent the remainder of the morning finding an apartment, or, more accurately, following and watching Chinese people negotiate for me, and occassionally attempting response to some softball questions (e.g. "Do you like China?"). Finally, having found a place that was acceptable and negotiated the unbelievably Byzantine taxation system, I got settled: I wondered around WuDaoKou, found some food, bought some groceries, had a beer, and went to sleep.

Also, here is a photo I took on my walk to work this morning. Notice the actually blue sky. Those pollution controls for the Games have really done their work...