Busy Day Tomorrow

I'm going to bed kind of early tonight since I have to wake up at 6:30 tomorrow for a super busy day.

7:00 - Rehearse for next Saturday's performance of Romeo and Juliet. I landed the role of Romeo! And by "landed" I mean I volunteered. And it's actually just a 10 minute skit. But it'll still be fun to perform, especially because it'll be in Chinese. Plus, theater at Yale is intense and competitive, so this is an opportunity to satisfy my "biaoyanyu" - desire to perform haha. The skit is part of next Saturday's "Beijing Night," a sort of talent show that HBA has every year.

11:00 - Meet up with some Yalies who were in my Chinese class last semester. It'll be cool to compare what our Chinese is like now, since we're all doing different programs (HBA, Duke-in-China, and Princeton in Beijing). We're going shopping at the Silk Market where I'll be able to practice my haggling skills and hopefully buy some cheap clothes.

3:00 - Get back to campus to practice for my second Beijing Night act, an a capella rendition of a traditional Chinese song. I wasn't planning to do this but my friend really needed boys in her group since she had already written the sheet music. I haven't sung since high school but it's just a background part so it shouldn't be too hard to remember, and it should be fun.

5:00 - Practice for my third Beijing Night act: the kungfu routines that we learned at Shaolin. There are two, but on the day we learned the second one I didn't feel too well, so I didn't learn all of it. I still have to perfect it. Hopefully I have enough time this week to not only attend class and do all of my homework and prepare for my weekly test, but also memorize a martial arts routine, a Chinese song, and a Chinese skit.

6:00 - Eat dinner.

Afterwards - Do my homework. It's a three-pages-of-vocab night. Those are the worst. Luckily since it's the weekend we don't have written homework.

Good night!

My Language Progress

For the past few weeks I've been vacillating between 1. regret over choosing to come to Beijing for so long, 2. happiness over choosing to come to Beijing for so long, and 3. regret over choosing to come to Beijing for so little time.

I'm really having a great time in China, and my Chinese has gotten a lot better. But it makes me sad to think that I chose to give up an entire semester at Yale. I'm really going to miss my friends, and my extracurriculars, and having a variety of classes, and going out on the weekends, and meeting people, and going to lectures and Master's Teas by distinguished guests, and just being at Yale! I love it and I can't believe I'm halfway done. On top of that, I won't get to see my family until Christmas. Luckily, I've been able to keep in touch with them pretty frequently thanks to e-mail and Skype, but it's not the same.

On the other hand, nine weeks is simply not enough time to master a language. Sure, HBA has a language pledge, but while we adhered to it strictly at the beginning, we now speak Chinglish outside of class and English on the weekends. My classroom Chinese has gotten very good. Just a few weeks ago I took a listen to a recording I made back in December, and I am shocked to see how much I improved. I was almost embarrassed to hear how slow I used to speak, and how much trouble I used to have distinguishing different sounds and tones. My reading has also gotten a lot better. But I am nowhere close to fluent. When I interact with someone other than my classmates and teachers (who are familiar with our lessons and can therefore limit what they say to what we can comprehend), I still have a tough time. Plus, while it's easy to recall a word you just learned or grammar points you just drilled, it's hard to recall vocab and grammar from five weeks ago. Everyone has their strengths. One girl in my class can recall vocab from our very first lessons, even words that teachers brought up in class but that we were never actually assigned. Another second-year girl speaks so fluidly that when I met her I thought she was L5. I'm not having as easy a time retaining all I learn, so I'm glad I'm staying for longer than just the summer.

Even so, will six months be long enough? Should I have opted for the whole year? That way, I would have taken a year off completely and would still have four semesters at Yale instead of just three.

I guess we'll see!

I'm also learning a lot about Chinese customs, but again, I have a long way to go. Given that our campus's cafeteria has closed for the summer, HBA students have to find other places to eat. I usually just go to a restaurant called Beijing Beef Noodle, since it's close by and the food is good. I ate there three times this week. Each time, I ordered beef lo mein, and on the third day, the waitress brought me not only my lo mein but also a plate of black fungus. I had seen the dish before at the weekly meals with our teachers, but I usually avoid it. This time, however, I felt bad not eating it, because I thought the dish was "on the house," a gift for eating at the restaurant so frequently. So I tried some. If I didn't know it were fungus, I would have just thought it were sea weed. It wasn't bad tasting, but not anything I'd have ordered myself.

A few minutes later, my waitress came back and told me she had made a mistake. The fungus wasn't supposed to have come to me at all. When she saw that I had ate some she asked me to pay 12 kuai, but when I said I didn't even want it, she asked me why I had been eating it. Oh, China.

Shaolin Temple, Part 2

I didn't do sports when I was a kid.

As a result, I've always been skinny, and although skinny, I've never been lean. My body is all flab and no muscle. So kungfu last week was tough, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The soreness accumulated with each day until I thought I couldn't take it anymore.

And that's when my group went to Songshan Mountain to attempt the four and a half hour ascent!


(One of the many, many, many flights of steps.)


No worries, though, I made it all the way to the top, and it was one of my proudest moments.



For a brief moment I was the highest thing in Henan Province, China! Actually, I'm not sure if that's true. That's what my friend said when were both standing on the peak, and I liked the way it sounded.

You'll notice in the pictures above that there are steps at Songshan, so we weren't actually hiking in the wilderness or anything. Even so, the steps were very steep and not in the best condition. Climbing up was exhausting, and I was one of the last people to make it to the top (some people didn't make it to the top, though.) The view was just beautiful.

There were also cool statues and monuments along the way. Apparantely, Shaolin holds significance not just for Buddhism, but for Taoism and Confucianism as well. I did not learn as much as I wanted to about East Asian religion during my stay, because the monks we spoke to were hard to understand, and one of our interview sessions was cancelled completely. So while we HBA students were mainly there as tourists, I still had a great time getting to see some of "real" China (even though Westernism and commercialism have reached these places, too.)

A few days later, we visited the Longmen Grottoes. To be honest, I'm not really sure what the history of this place is, but it was really cool.



I'm super glad I chose the Shaolin Temple as my social study program. Beijing is great, but I want to see as much of China as I can. I'm already excited for my trip to Shanghai in August, where I'll be staying with my of the first friends I made at Yale, Liz Cui (one of Yale's 50 most Beautiful People 2010 fyi).

Another upside of my trip was that it gave me new inspiration to work out. So, I went to the gym every day this week and hope to continue this trend.

For those of you with Facebook, check out my latest photo album to see all of my pictures from Shaolin. For those of you without, here are a few more:

One of the Buddhist (or Confucianist or Taoist) temples we visited lit up when you put money in the donation bin. Very high-tech for such an ancient place.



Lastly, here are some videos from the Kungfu Competition we went to. Enjoy!

Shaolin Temple, Part 1

Last Friday I and about 20 other HBA students took an overnight train to the Henan Province of China to spend a week studying Kung Fu at the Tagou Martial Arts School near the famous Shaolin Temple. My first impression of the city near our hotel was that this part of the country was a lot more "China." Unlike at Beiyu, the university where I attend class, there were very few foreigners, and it was a definite step-down in terms of our comfort level. Especially up in the mountains, where we were staying, it was easy to see that China is a developing country.



We woke up the first morning (and every other morning) at 5:30 for our daily exercises. After a breakfast of carrots, cabbage, and other pickled vegetables, gross pasty bread, eggs, and coffee (yes, I became a coffee drinker last week), we met with a teacher for a few hours of kung fu lessons. I've always considered myself a flexible person. When I was a little kid I even used to be able to put both of my ankles behind my neck, and in elementary school I could do a split with ease thanks to a few years of Taekwando. But I don't know where that all went. I already felt sore after our morning stretches, and after hours of various kicks and punches (all while rapidly switching between squatting really low and standing up and squatting even lower) I was ready to call it quits. But wait! After a vegetarian lunch of carrots, cabbage, pickled vegetables, pasty bread, eggs, soup, and Sprite, we had a small break and then it was back to fung fu for the afternoon!

Actually, it wasn't bad. The first day of kung fu was exciting and fun. We learned a routine that we're going to perform in a few weeks at HBA's talent show.

I felt it in the morning. I couldn't bend down as low during the next few mornings' exercises, but the excitement of being in such an ancient place, different from anywhere else I've ever been, kept up my spirits. We only had one other full day of kung fu (although I felt kind of sick the second day and sat out on the afternoon session). The other days, we visited nearby temples and touristy sites, like the Longmen Grottoes. We also climbed Song Shan. I'll write about both experiences in my next post.

One of the cool things about being at Shaolin was that you constantly see large groups of uniformed children just marching and chanting in unison. These kids enroll at Tagou at the age of 4. Watching them perform was awesome! One night we went to one of their competitions. At Shaolin, you don't have to worry about your kung fu not being as good as someone else's, at least during competition time, because the students here cheer in unison and show the same level of enthusiasm for every single student. Actually it was a little weird. Someone would go up to the front of the crowd and do their routine for the judges, all while the audience cheering "Jia you!", stopping and starting at the same time as if on cue.


We went to Shaolin to write social study reports, but one thing I was disappointed about was that we weren't given as much time for interviews as we were told we would. I chose to write about minority students at the Tagou school: girls and international students. Girls were admitted in 1985, and we saw very few of them while at Shaolin. We saw some American students, too, including the number one kungfu student in our country, at least according to his annoying father. Another American couple we met, who now live in Beijing, had enrolled their three young sons in the school for the summer. They have lived all over the world, and their kids can now speak perfect English, Spanish, and Chinese, and they're not even 12 yet.

On a different note, our hotel was better than I imagined, but was still lacking. One flaw were the centipedes all over the floor. Another was that the room was always either freezing or suffocatingly hot. Also, the bathroom's walls were made of clear glass, giving us no privacy from our roommates. The cafeteria we ate at was also dirty and unattractive. We ate the same food almost everyday, and I think it was the fast pace and rigour of our exercises and the lack of variation (and protein) in our meals that left me feeling less-than-perfect at the end of the week.

We did eat out once in a while though. At one restaurant, we were given metal trays and directed toward a central table. At first I thought it was just a buffet, so I was a little creeped out to see raw meat and seafood among the bland vegetables and weird noodle-cake things. But it turns out that those things were just ingredients, and when we got back to our seats we could put the ingredients we had chosen into our personal pots of boiling broth. The meat cooked very quickly. Our vegetables and noodles also absorbed the flavor of the broth, and it was all very, very good. The only downside was that the waitress made a mistake and gave me spicy broth (things in China are usually spicy unless you request them not to be.) No worries though, our teachers at HBA are always telling us to 入乡随俗 (rùxiāngsuísú), which is the Chinese equivalent of "When in Rome, do as the Romans Do." My classmates and I use that phrase pretty often, actually, including when my roommate had to use the handle of a hotel toothbrush to spread peanut butter because we had forgotten to buy knives at the supermarket. Except in that case I don't think the phrase was entirely appropriate :)

Leaving Beijing for a Week

One of HBA's "一大特色"s, or distinctive qualities, is that at midterm every student sets off for various parts of China (or chooses to stay in Beijing) for a week to write a research paper on the topic of his or her choice. There were some really great destinations to choose from, including Shanghai, Qingdao, Inner Mongolia, and the Chinese countryside, and we could also choose to stay in Beijing to study architecture, art, or business. I chose to go to the Shaolin Temple, arguably the most famous Buddhist temple in the world and a fount for ancient Chinese martial arts. So, for the next week I'll be waking up at 5:30 a.m. and learning Kung Fu with Buddhist monks, kind of like the karate kid!




It might have been a mistake to choose Shaolin because I'm already lacking sleep as it is, but how could I pass up a chance like this? Besides, after HBA is over I'll have two and a half weeks before ACC, my fall program, starts, and during that time I'm going to be travelling to Shanghai and other places (still haven't made up my mind...)

We took midterm exams this morning. I can't believe HBA is already halfway done, and that we've studied a semester's worth of Chinese. I realized while I was studying that I've forgotten a bunch, but I think my growing ability to communicate with my Chinese teachers, tutors, host family, and even random people I come across shows how effective HBA is.

The other day I was taking the metro to Sanlitun, a really famous street in Beijing known for its bars, clubs, restaurants, etc. I knew the pinyin for the stop I needed to get off (pinyin is a romanization system for written Chinese, which doesn't have a phonetic alphabet. For example, the word 中国 means "China," but a non-Chinese speaker wouldn't know how to pronounce those characters. So, using pinyin the word is written "zhōngguó." The accent marks indicate how you should raise and dip your intonation).

Anyway, I knew the pinyin for the metro stop that I wanted but couldn't read the characters on the subway map. So I asked a girl to help me find the stop, and she answered me (in English) that she was going to the same stop. I continued talking to her in Chinese and she followed suit, and we had a nice conversation on the train. However, I found out at the end of the ride that she isn't even from China! She's from Indonesia. Being a foreigner, I couldn't even tell she had an accent.

She was really nice, (I already forgot her name...) and she told me that she actually is friends with some Yale graduates who studied in Beijing a few years ago. She also told me about a Christian group that she's a part of and she invited me to attend. I think I might want to take a look at it after HBA ends. But the reason I bring it up is because in our follow-up e-mail, she censored the word "church" as "ch--ch" and "ministry" as "m-n-stry." Was she worried that the Internet Police were looking for these words in online communication? I thought it was kind of strange. This week, the head professor of HBA, Feng Laoshi, gave a presentation on religion in China. I attended it but fell asleep...

Oh well, I'm sure I'll learn all about religion here while I'm kung-fu'ing it up with monks at Shaolin this week!

Some random pictures:

We had a picnic at Beihai park!

Pepsi makes underwear!


Delicious Texas Barbecue-style dinner for the Fourth of July!

I'll have tons of Shaolin pictures and information in a week. Zaijian!

Reflection

Last week I discovered the song "Good Life" by OneRepublic, and I've been playing it on repeat for the past four days because I think it's great.



The first time I heard the second verse, I was shocked at how well it described me.

I mean, people probably say that about a lot of songs that deal with love and friends and hardship and other lame things like that. But this verse literally has specific details about my life. Namely:

"To my friends in New York, I say hello.
My friends in LA, they don't know
where I've been for the past few years or so,
from Paris to China to Colorado."

Anyway, besides this coincidence, I also love this song because of its optimistic and appreciative tone. The other day I was riding in a cab back from Beihai Park while looking out my window and just taking in the sights of Beijing. The buildings weren't particularly beautiful nor the weather particularly nice, but at that moment I was overwhelmed with excitement at being in such a different world. Every few days it dawns on me anew that I'm actually in China right now and that, while a few weeks ago I was only able to say few things in Chinese, I am now able to have full conversations with my teachers and friends in the language. It's surreal. And I'm not even done with my first of six month.

Really, I am so thankful to the Light Fellowship for sponsoring my stay in Beijing.

In three days I will have been on this Earth for a total of 20 years. I can't believe how fast time flies. I still remember my dad bringing me to the park to learn how to ride a bike, and how he and my mom would urge me to yell a warning to the pedestrians in front of me when I was unable to stop. But I thought it was embarrassing to yell and chose to just just run my bike into the people on the sidewalk. When I was young I also believed that if you got cut with a piece of glass you died. And now I've already finished two years of college.

I feel old. But old 是 old, I am the luckiest guy in the world.

Bei'ing our Kewen

As part of the grueling exam we have every Friday morning, we also have to memorize and present a small speech to the students in our 小班可, small class. Since everyone is busy on Thursday preparing for the written part of the test, these speeches are usually memorized in the 10-20 minutes before we have to present them. During this time it isn't unusual to look at the balcony and see dozens of HBA students pacing back and forth by themselves talking under their breath.