She must sit down first, as is proper

As I have explained in Chinese to various people:

[I have a roommate (from Guangdong); my roommate has a (older male) cousin; this cousin has a (older female) sister; this sister lives in Beijing and is very rich.]

Thus, so it goes, I found myself last Monday in a VIP room in one of the most expensive restaurants in Beijing. We were driven, my roommate, his friend, and I, by that type of Chinese servant-driver who is entitled to eat with everyone at the main table, but not to join conversation. He may chat in the car, if conversation is struck up, but he likely won’t speak much otherwise. He is always around, opening doors for you, unsmiling, commenting (if asked) on which might be the fastest route, or the most expensive plot of real estate.

He picked us up, already carrying Joe, my roommate’s cousin (that is his English name). We drove to Joe’s sister’s apartment, located in the Beijing equivalent of the Upper West Side, where we had tea. At the restaurant, we were met by two uniformed valets for each of the six us, and ushered inside my a maitre d’ who knew Joe’s sister. Our room had the largest windows. It had a flat-screen television, a private bathroom, a sitting area with leather couches and a cloistered stock of beer and wine. Western wine is extremely expensive in China.

The central room of this restaurant was a cavern filled with sequestered pools of water, and lines of refrigerated shelves tucked into nooks made to look like they were carved from rock.  In this room could be seen every animal and every plant that the restaurant might use to make food.  The pools were filled with hundreds of living lobsters, crabs, clams, salt water fish, freshwater fish, bottom dwellers, snails, sea urchins, shrimp, prawns, octopi, turtles, and eels.  The shelves were filled with carcasses of land animals, their children, their limbs, their organs; and plates of completed dishes extending all the way down past the island of tall green foliage and into the dark rear of the cave.  Somewhere back there were regular tables, with people eating at them in the low light.

We could not sit at the table until she sat first, because she was the host, and in our little Confucian hierarchy, the highest.  We waited while she used the private bathroom, standing and talking.  “At these kind of places,” Joe said, “we have to follow these rules.

The chicken feet I liked, though the pig’s feet yielded only scraps of cartilege in my mouth.  The giant crabs were difficult to eat, because I’m not used to eating them, and the bamboo was hairy, and like a squash.  There weren’t any dishes that I recognized, save the pile of dead crab.  The TV was on through dinner, but not so that you could hear it.  Towards the end of the meal, a man came in and performed a dance while twirling dough. We laughed and clapped like royalty. I thought we were going to eat the dough, but we didn’t.  I don’t know what they did with it.

As we drove home, we passed Tian’anmen Square.  That is still the only time I have seen it.

I wonder what the evening will look like

Today is what Beijing is like when they turn off all the factories.  Some days, I hear, they just shut everything down, and the smog slides down the buildings and through the roads and away, and the sky is blue, or cloudy, or even carries a white moon below the sun (though I’ve never seen that).  They order people out of their cars, too, and they run their instruments and watch the air and ask the athletes how it goes.  These days are tests for the Olympics, which by all accounts is the end of this city.  I remember when I road from the airport into the city for the first time, watching the sun set like a Technicolor red balloon.  The light in Beijing is almost all red, to be seen through the mist.  Hatches of red character floating in dark fog.  Today there is no fog, because it is like one of those non-days, when the city has clear blue sky, and long paved swathes of sun, and you can see the dirt most clearly on the glass of the window.  Today, though, they didn’t turn off anything, such as I know.  It rained for the last three days, and stopped just before the light this morning.  Tomorrow we’re a port city again, like when the Olympics end.

I have prepared a “fall of the Ming” metaphor for my internet access situation

So getting access to the internet from my computer took me all this past week. Then getting access to this blog took another two days. It’s a long convoluted process that involves me learning how to say things like “my ethernet port is broken” and “no, I still can’t get on the internet.” I am very sorry I haven’t emailed or facebooked this information to people, I know you’re curious etc. but I just haven’t had very much time to spend at the internet café, and even now that I have my own access, I won’t have a ton of time. I’m going to try Still: I am in China! It is crazy. And so on.

Right now I’m sitting in my one room double in Xinsonggongyu, at Beijing Normal University. My roommate is having a (I have dubbed it “sick”) birthday party in Sanlitun tonight, at this place called Vics, and I’m going to be leaving soon. I’ve already been to Vics once before and based on my time in Japan and here I can in good faith describe it as ‘one of those foreigner clubs in Asia,’ though it is not a bad one.

I will endeavor now to paint a very brief picture of my first week (or so), with broad strokes:

• Today I went to the Great Wall, at Jinshanling (金山岭长城). Pictures are forthcoming, either here or on facebook.

• On I think it was Tuesday, my roommate’s cousin gave us a box of dog meat, and another box of beer.

• I have eaten: duck tongue, duck feet, pigs feet, octopus, prawns, bamboo, and this one thing that somebody told me was cow vagina, but they were joking.

Quick aside: I have just spoken with Max, whose name I will use later if he doesn’t mind. He is a friend who graduated last year, and who I will be going out to the party with. He has informed me that he has some Beijing nightlife secrets to reveal, or something. 成功as it were.

• I’ve bought a cell phone (which was an interesting affair to conduct all in Chinese) but the best way to reach me and talk is by Skype or iChat.

Now my room is a preparty, so I’m going to have to go.

I am a pompous Churchill quote

Today is my last day in America. Periodic updates as we move towards an open beta.

And so it begins:

Welcome, all, to my new Chinablog. I will try and post as regularly as I can for the duration of my time in the Far East, though there will be periods while I’m travelling when I won’t have internet access, and (I imagine) times when I’m quite busy with work. Still, my goal is to never let a week go by without at least one post. In the beginning, I want to try for one per day, but that pace might become a bit grueling. Good word, that. A thick, sloppy paste-adjective. Like chewed paper pulp, or oatmeal that’s made, set out for a week, frozen, defrosted, and microwaved.

I want to start off with a bit about why I’m going, what my expectations are; a general explanation. But that can wait for tomorrow, as it’s a quarter after two in the morning. Night!