Although I have been taking classes for a few weeks now, I have only recently settled into the feel of each course and the style in which the professor conducts it.  Knowing that I would be attending the reputed “Best University in all of China,” I was sufficiently worried about the course load.  I also figured that, being an international student, I would be in a program unto itself, hopefully not as sadistic.  After all, I wanted to learn as much as possible but I didn’t want to be stuck in a library in China; the experience was as much about traveling, living, and working in China as it was about the classes.

Without having attended PKU as an in-country Chinese student, it’s hard to compare, although the work load is definitely more intense here in China than most abroad programs my friends are in.  They also have a different cultural standard here, which was apparent in the very structure of our classes.  To start off, the classes are three hours long.  That in and of itself is a struggle; there is also an ample amount of work, not to mention the 9 hours of Chinese per week.

Wang Laoshi (Teacher Wang) teaches Chinese, and is a young PKU grad student.  We have a quiz every class and frequently have to write short one-page essays in Chinese.  A regular class consists of three hours of oral exercises and practicing grammatical structures, and the bi-weekly tests can run a bit lengthy at over 8 pages.

Ma Hua teaches Marketing and Business in China and is an interesting guy.  He too is a young guy (early 30’s) who has had 8 years of experience in the technology/web software industry here in China, and has recently decided to teach this class on the side.  We read interesting articles and case studies and discuss the cultural differences of China and how they require different approaches than dictated by western business fundamentals.

Professor Yuan Jian teaches Rural Economics which focuses on the urbanization of modern China and all its economic implications.  She is an emphatic, well-spoken, small woman who seems to be passionate about what she teaches.  We talk about the economic drivers of both parts of China—the rural and urban—by studying the history of the transformation and the recent economic phenomena.  We will also be taking an overnight trip as a class to a rural village to learn, hands-on, the effect the modernization of China has (or does not have) on rural villages.

Professor Mike Chapman teaches Beijing: Its Urban History and Culture, and recently got his PhD in History at Boston College.  He is an upbeat, interesting guy, a scholarly type, currently working on a few theses/books and seems to have a lot of interesting stories.  Most notably he organizes walking tours around Beijing every Sunday enabling a more personal approach to what we’re studying.  He also arranges a social every Friday night when you go out to dinner, and a bar or two with your classmates.

Here, on our first tour, he is explaining how these traditional Chinese homes were built; we walked around the hutongs—narrow streets or alleys lined with traditional courtyard residences typical of old Beijing—and looked at a new development which manifests a growing revival movement away from monotonous high-rises to more traditional Chinese architecture, now with the incorporation of modern materials and technologies.  We also stopped for Peking duck at a delicious, traditional restaurant, and visited the Llama Temple (a.k.a. Yonghe Temple) which one of the largest and most important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in the world—combining Han Chinese and Tibetan styles.  For a Friday night social we ate dinner in a small, hutong neighborhood where locals service a restaurant or food stand at the front of their homes, which was a great experience.

On an organized trip one Saturday, we went to the Summer Palace or Yihe Yuan in Chinese, which means “Gardens of Nurtured Harmony.”  Not to be confused with the original Summer Palace, destroyed in the Second Opium War in 1860, the current Summer Palace started out as an expansive garden complex and later became the Summer Palace for the Empress Dowager Cixi.

It is an expansive 2.9 square kilometers, three quarters of which is water.  The main palace overlooks a large lake filled with paddle boats for rent and large dragon boats ferrying tourists from place to place.  Monica, Lihau, Will, and I (along with Monica’s language partner—a Beida student) all rented a paddle boat to explore the vast area.  We went around an island in the middle of the lake (attached to land by a formidable stone bridge); along the inlets and interspersed pagodas, we discovered another bridge, excessively arched in a distinctly oriental style.

We also saw the Marble Boat, an ornate 36 meter wooden boat (made to resemble marble) on which the emperor could enjoy the finest luxuries.

To answer your question, general security is not much of an issue in Beijing.  The general populace, as well as tourists, are can get to pretty much any notable place without much hassle, including the Puning Temple.  So long as you pay the price of admission, you won’t have any problems and there are plenty of tourism pamphlets, articles, and other resources that will help you to map out the best way in which to get to, or experience a place.  That being said, the only real region of China I know has accessibility issues is Tibet.  In order to go, you must get special admission through a tour group, and must adhere to a number of certain protocol (one of which being you cannot leave with pictures that go unchecked by authorities… so I have heard).  But besides that, you really shouldn’t have any problems.  Without a doubt the biggest issue you will face in terms of travel is the language barrier, and even walking around Peking University, you seldom have the luxury of falling back on English in order to get your point across.  As for cultural differences, there are countless.  I plan to write up a post just on that so be sure to check back and I will detail some of the most notable I have encountered.

Through the program I was paired up with a language partner, who contacted me in the second week of September.  Her name is Zoe, and after speaking on the phone briefly, we arranged to meet up.  We met outside of Shaoyuan (the dorms for international students) and we walked around campus ending up at a local café for coffee and some food which I frequented early in the semester when we still did not have internet.  She speaks English very well and I tried my best to use Chinese, although it was hard in anything more involved than simple conversation.

She is a junior at Beida, and is majoring in English literature and is also learning French.  As we got to know one another, I instinctively asked how many siblings she has, not realizing the obvious answer.  That ubiquitous question never has to be asked or answered here in China.  She was really interested in the fact that I had three sisters and such a wide spread in ages (13, 24, and 27).  Zoe was born in Shandong province and explained to me the rigorous path one must take in order to end up at one of the best universities in all of China.  There is a central enrollment system—China’s Ministry of Education oversees all college applications in the entire country.  During the Chinese equivalent of high school, a nation-wide exam is administered and students opt to either take the exam in one of two categories: humanities or science/engineering.  Based on these results, students are all distributed throughout the various tiers of schools, from the most renowned, to vocational schools.  The system is also based on a quota-system pertaining to respective provinces.  Since Beida is in Beijing, it may be much easier to get admitted having grown up in Beijing, rather than be the top 2% of a more rural province.  Zoe was one of those lucky few, scoring in the top percentile of her province and getting selected to attend Peking University.  We talked for awhile about what we wanted to do upon graduation, and she is still deciding upon whether to get a job or go to grad school as she is interested in teaching.  She is an extremely smart, fun-loving girl and we stayed at the coffee shop, talking about cultural nuisances and personal experiences for awhile.

We more recently went to a museum to see the Qin-Han and Roman Civilizations exhibit where we saw various Roman statues and even some soldiers taken from the Xi’an burial site of China’s first emperor.

She is pictured above in the exhibit, helping me to understand what we were looking at.

In an effort to make my room feel homier, I decided I would print out some pictures of the trip thus far, and set out in search of a printing facility on campus.  After some searching, I found this tiny store in which there were three computers on a desk and a man photocopying books in the corner.  Another man came up to me and took a USB stick on which I had loaded up some pictures, and started to print them out on a rackety old printer, on top of a 5 foot stack of various types of paper.  I printed out about 30 pages in full color, so the process was tedious.  As I stood awkwardly in the 15 by 7 foot room, people came and went, exchanging some words with the man briefly and leaving a book or two on a nearby desk.  A young kid was continuously photocopying each and every page of various books with a fluidity and rhythm that only comes from much practice.  He would flip a page and slap the copy button without hesitation and work his way, page by page, through texts that were hundreds of pages long.  It took a total of 75 minutes for my project to finally eek its way out of the printer, but not knowing how long it would take, and out of sheer curiosity, I was content in waiting in the room.

There were two other men besides the one photocopying, and it seemed they must take turns because the other two started to play a movie (illegally online—there are little to no protection laws in China and you can find and download just about anything online) on a computer.  I watched it despite not grasping anything besides a word here or there, but it was comedic to see the special effects and cinematography.

It was set in ancient China, and one scene depicted the emperor and either his empress of mistress riding along a beach upon horses.  The “love scene” consisted of them lying on the beach and him kissing her cheek, and then it was implied that house passed.  Real scandalous.  Another noticeable difference was in a scene after an epic battle had taken place.  Instead of the fallen soldiers resting in puddles of realistic blood, they instead were merely laying on red sheets.  The effect was far from believable, and perhaps this movie was an exception, although it was still an interesting contrast from the movies I am used to seeing.

Before long, the man had finished photocopying the heavy volume, and after shouting some Chinese at his co-workers, they sprang into action; one gathered the photocopies as the other laid out some materials at an adjacent work station.  Within minutes they measured, fit, cut, and bound the photocopies into a completed recreation.  The newly created book looked surprisingly professional, and had every page as well as the full title of the original in a clean, academic looking bound book.  I was amazed at how well-finished it looked; after the man flipped through it one last time to check for imperfections, he put it in a piled of completed copies.  I could not figure out whether or not they make more than one copy of a given book, although by the looks of it, they copied on a case by case basis.  (A standard book costs 20 Yuan to copy—a little less than $3).  It was fascinating to witness the efficient and methodical way in which they all worked, and to get an up close and personal look at yet another industry created and made possible because of the overwhelming supply of labor.

This is my room; as you enter from the hallway, there is a bathroom immediately on your left which thankfully contains a western-style toilet, and a shower. (A Chinese-style toilet basically consists of a glorified hole in the floor made out of porcelain, and often not so glorified). Straight ahead is a single, Jacob’s room, and to the right is the room Pete and I live in.  My side of the our room is what is pictured above.  You cannot drink the water, but can bathe in it.  The hot water is also shut off at 11:00 p.m. each night until the morning.  The conditions have been pretty good although one morning, as you can see here, mud came out of the shower and sink instead of water.

One of the first things I noticed upon entering the room was how dirty the walls seem to be.  Like most anywhere in China, you can smoke in doors—including the dorm hallways and in the bedrooms.  In my office building in which I work and some malls, smoking is usually confined to the bathrooms and fire escapes… but as a general rule of thumb there is no such thing as an environment in which smoking is not allowed.  We luckily have air conditioning as well as a refrigerator.  Our dorms are hotel-style, and we are spoiled with a maid coming in every morning replacing toilet paper, cleaning the bathroom, and sometimes even making our beds.  I soon found out that we, as international students, are extremely privileged when compared to the actual students here at Beida.  Most of the students don’t have a shower, refrigerator, or air conditioning and share a common bathroom between floors.  They therefore have to walk to designated showers on campus which could be at least 10 minutes away, so you can often see people in pajamas carrying a shower bag walking through the streets of Beida.  Zoe, like most students, is one of four in her room, which only has enough space for two bunk beds, some clothes lines, and no desks.  Therefore their rooms serve as solely a place to sleep.  Living here in China may be a drastically different experience, but even at Beida, we are undoubtedly privileged.

In the morning we visited the Puning Temple, in the same compound as our hotel. The main attraction was in a large, Buddhist temple overlooking the compound. When you enter this building, you immediately realize why it is a popular tourist spot, as all you can see is the big toe of the world’s largest wooden Buddha, weighing in at 110 tons and reaching 68.4 feet high. The entirety of the Buddha is encased within this ornate 5 tier temple-building, is made of 5 types of wood, and is incredibly impressive.

Shortly thereafter we got on the buses and headed back towards Beijing. We got back in the late afternoon, and someone…somewhere, said “pizza.” Tony and I overheard the word and couldn’t get it out of our heads, after a solid week of nothing but Chinese food, pizza was what we wanted…what we needed. So, we set out in search of a pizza place. A friend told us that he had heard there was one just outside the east gate, and so to the east gate we went. We walked awhile in both directions with no luck. Tony had a bike and went ahead to scout out the area, calling me 20 minutes later. He had searched down the main road for awhile and finally found a pizza place; he ordered and paid for the pizza—90 yuan. It would be another 25 minutes until it was ready, and so he came back because we had to pick up our Chinese language books from the program director. After 20 minutes had passed, we were back on campus, had gotten our books, and were ready to go get the pizza.

We were starving, and the situation was growing ever-more complicated; Tony had a bike, and his apartment was very close to the pizza place. I had to find a taxi to get there, which would otherwise be a 30 minute walk. Another 20 minutes go by—no taxi. I started resorting to looking for old, left-to-rot bikes but to my surprise, out of the thousands lying around, all of them had locks—even the ones that had roots growing in them! It seemed that all the bikes that appeared to be forgotten indeed all had owners. We were getting desperate now; no taxis were anywhere on campus and it was an hour after we had ordered the pizza… we were starving.

With morale at an all time low, and seemingly no options to speak of, I decided in the moment to go over to a man who was in the process of locking up his bike, and ask if I could borrow it. I got his attention, and asked him in severely broken, circuitous Chinese if I could use his bike, holding up money as an incentive. After a few floundering moments which involved more pointing and full-body acting than a game of charades, he understood what I was asking for. It was clear that he didn’t speak English, although he mustered a broken reply to the extent of, “I don’t want your money.” And what’s even more astonishing is that he agreed to it! This random guy that I walked up to on the street was actually agreeing to let me borrow his bike, and we really couldn’t communicate to each other outside of hand signals! I was blown away as he started to unlock his bike and started un-linking the keys to his locks off his keychain! I gave him my Peking University student ID, to let him know I would be coming back but I don’t think he fully understood at first. With limited Chinese, I gave him my phone number, and he told me that he would call me after work.

Stunned and stammering “xie xie’s,” I watched the twenty-five or so year old walk into an adjacent building. I turned to Tony and he just shook his head in disbelief at what had just transpired. Still unsure of what I had just agreed to and whether or not he understood, we hopped on our bikes and rode off into Beijing.

We flowed in harmony with the hundreds of bikes, swarming through intersections and roads amid the droves of people; it was seemingly chaotic yet everyone is so used to it that the sea of people and vehicles never seem to be at odds. After a harrowing commute, we arrived at the blessed pizza place, leaving our bikes among the jumbled heap of scooters and bicycles found on every street corner. We ran in for our long-anticipated Western-fix. Hand sanitizer had been properly applied (as before any meal) and we were prepared for our feast. The waitress came over and put a 8 inch pizza between us. On the street, you can have a decently sized meal for up to 10 Yuan, and 90 Yuan at a pizza place couldn’t even come close to filling us up. Considering all that we did in order to reach our pizza, it was somewhat disappointing, although at that point any food was worth celebrating.

Me and “my” bike

After finishing our meal—3 minutes later—I had decided I needed to show my new bicycle-lending friend my gratitude. After some discussion, I decided giving him money would skew his benevolent deed, as was probably his reasoning earlier. I instead wanted to give him something more thoughtful than money in return for his generosity, towards a foreigner no less. I had realized during our journey to the pizza place, while dodging passers-by, that I had no bell. The efficacy of having one is debatable; there is a continuous cacophony of bells and horns from the bustling traffic over which, I would imagine, my own would not be audible most of the time…but nonetheless I decided it was the perfect gift.

As we plucked our bikes from the cluster, a woman came running over us demanding money. Initially we thought she was a beggar asking for loose change but we soon realized she was actually an official collecting dues for parking our bikes. Here we were, among hundreds of bikes and carts left on the sidewalk in disarray, and yet there was in fact a system behind this apparent chaos. We had to pay one Jiao (a 10th of a Yuan) per bike.

(As an aside, $1 USD is worth approximately 6.8 Yuan and therefore 100 Yuan (China’s largest bill) is about $14.5 USD; Kuai is another way to refer to money and is equivalent with Yuan.) Tony and I rode around the streets of Beijing, periodically stopping to ask a stranger for directions to the nearest bicycle shop (in the best Chinese we could muster).

We rode around without finding a shop and eventually stopped to ask this old man for directions; he was sitting under a make-shift lean-to, next to a row of bicycles he had for rent. We pointed to the bells on his bikes to demonstrate what we were looking for and we exchanged some simple phrases with him about finding a bike store until he stood up and, with a huge smile on his face, started yelling “Beawl!” “Beawl!” We didn’t know what the word was in Chinese, and just kind of watched as he walked away. He motioned for us to follow, and he brought us over to his bikes and asked me to pick out one—he had been saying “bell,” apparently the only English word he knew. I pointed to the shiniest one in the line-up, and he got out a tool and took it off his bike, then and there, and mounted it on mine. I handed him a few Yuan and he smiled and gestured his thanks with a bob of his head. I said thank you in return, and with a shared wave, we headed off.

Tony went back to his apartment and I headed back to campus, still trying to grasp the unbelievable situation I found myself in. I got back to my room, and polished the bell till it looked good as new and gave it a few brrings to check that it worked. I couldn’t wait to see the look on this man’s face when I handed him back the bike. A few hours later, he called me on the phone and I headed back to where we had met. As I pulled up, there he was, standing on the sidewalk with his briefcase in hand, waiting. I got off and handed him his locks and keys, and showed him the bell I had bought for his bike. He almost looked confused for a moment, and upon realizing what I had done, he bowed his head and said “xie xie” in rapid fire. I in turn thanked him for his generosity and found out his name—Jiangwuxing. We parted ways and I started walking back through the streets toward my dorm, thankful and stupefied that I had had such an experience.

Later that night I received a text in Chinese from Jiangwuxing saying that anytime I wanted to use a bike, to call him, and that he was happy to have met a new friend.

I was too.

That night we were determined to find something other than a KTV bar, and took to the streets in a large group.  After walking around with no luck, one of the better Chinese speakers in the group decided to ask a young couple nearby for an idea of where any bars might be.  It turns out that the guy had a friend who owned a bar.  Being a Tuesday, it wasn’t open, but he called up his friend and had him open just for us—he didn’t want to pass up the business of 25 sober Americans.  We followed them to their friends bar, which was in actuality his home-turned bar, with a second floor (about 10 ft. above the second) with various booths and posters of Audrey Hepburn and Madonna.  It was actually pretty cozy and was just enough room for all of us, spread out between a back room and various booths.  We all had a great time and some friends and I ordered Baijiu, a kind of Chinese hard-alcohol (rice-wine) that we have been hearing much about.  It has a reputation for tasting horrible, but was in actuality not too bad.  It came in a clay (real-clay) bottle that required us to break off the clay top in order to drink it.  It was…weird tasting to say the least, but not as bad or perhaps just as bad as the cheap stuff we are used to in college.  We all had a really fun time and were thankful we managed to find a bar rather than a KTV for our last night in Chengde.

The Mountain Resort is in the city of Chengde, in Hebei Province, and was where the emperors of the Qing Dynasty came in the summer to avoid the Beijing heat (the resort is known to be at least 3 degrees Celsius cooler than the city of Chengde itself).  It is the world’s largest existing imperial garden, and took 89 years to complete.  It is 5.6 km², a vast complex of palaces, administrative and ceremonial buildings (including a 70m tall stone pagoda built in 1751), gardens, lakes, pasturelands, and forests.  The palace zone, which is how we entered the Mountain Resort, was built to resemble the Forbidden City and was where the emperor would receive his guests.  From there, we entered the vast fields and forests scattered with ponds and various pagodas.  After walking around for just 10 minutes, we spotted our first deer.  We got pictures in anticipation of it running away but to everyone’s surprise it came up to us, unflinching.  We started to offer it some snacks we had with us and it ate right out of our hands!  Soon enough a whole family came out of the woods and everyone was feeding the deer.  After awhile, me and 6 other people started hiking up one of the many mountains.  We walked along a stone walkway on which buses would periodically race by, ferrying people to various peaks.  After an arduous 45 minute hike, we reached the peak, and could see over the whole of Chengde.  We walked back down to an enormous lake, encircled with beds of giant lily pads.  There was much activity along the walkways and surrounding forests; people were practicing under the different types of wushu with swords, and I encountered three different sets of brides and grooms having their pictures taken with the scenic backdrop.

Along the shore we walked up to this small table on which were various scrolls of calligraphy.  Behind the table sat an old man in traditional dress, looking out over the lake.  I pointed at a scroll and asked how much, to which I got not a number but some phrase which I couldn’t understand.  Luckily I was with a friend, Paige, who can speak fluent mandarin, and he translated for me: the man said that it isn’t for sale, he was just an artist.  After a few brief moments of looking over his work, I tried asking him again, what price would he sell one for.  To this, he had an extended reply which was apparently a very interesting one based on Paige’s reaction.  The man said: “I am not here to be a vendor, although, if someone wants to buy a piece, I would say it’s 100 yuan; if they don’t have 100 I would say 50 yuan.  If they don’t have 50 I would say 10 yuan, and well, if they don’t have 10 yuan I would just tell them to have it.”

We were obviously confused because we were so used to people ripping us off in every way possible, and yet this old man said I could give him whatever amount I had, or was willing to give him.  It was obvious I wanted one by the way I was scanning his portfolio, and suddenly, he crept down and rustled around in a chest he had by his feet.  He put these two wooden blocks out on the table and slowly unraveled a brand new paper scroll.  It was already backed with an ornate setting, and you could tell he made and prepared his own scrolls.  He asked me for my Chinese name, and I showed him the correct writing of it on my iPod touch (which I’m sure he was really confused as to what the device was).  After he looked at it, he nodded and went back to his table.

He grabbed one of the dozens of brushes laying around and began dipping it in this bowl of china, periodically adding ink.  Long moments passed as he stroked the brush back and forth with his right hand, lathering up the 毛笔 (calligraphy brush).  A crowd started to gather- mostly of local Chinese- and before he began there must have been 20 or so people standing around, watching.  After he had sufficiently soaked his brush, he closed his eyes, spread out his hands over the scroll, pausing for only a moment…and then methodically swayed his left hand over the scroll continuously from end to end, barely an inch above the paper.  His hand slowed to a stop, and he gently let it settle onto the scroll.  Without hesitation he brought his brush to the paper, and in one fluid motion, made the first character come to life.  Within minutes he had made four large characters in the middle of the scroll from right to left, stopping only briefly to retouch his brush with ink.  He then proceeded to make two vertical rows of characters on both the right and left sides of the scrolls, and finished his piece by pressing down, with the entire weight of his body, on his signature chop.

I am not quite sure what it says, but I think the four main characters say something to the extent of “the great and honorable Mr. Wu Wei Hao” (my Chinese name).  As for the sides, I’m not quite sure although I’ll have to find out.  After he was done, the silence was broken and he seemed pretty happy.  He promptly got out this small ratty book and plopped it on the table, motioning for me to sign.  He explained how everyone, to whom he had ever given his art, had signed the book; I signed my signature next to where I was from and he wrote my traditional Chinese name next to it for me.  I decided to give him 100 yuan ($16 USD) because it was well worth the experience—I got a video of the whole thing which is pretty amazing.  He was very appreciative, and I asked to take a picture with him.  He then went on about how we can’t think about how he is Chinese, and we are American, but that we are all people.  After an exchange of smiles, thank you’s, and some other Chinese I couldn’t understand, we made our way back to meet up with the group and head back to Chengde; I was feeling pretty good about the experience and my first ever personal calligraphy scroll, and great souvenir.