English Translations

Here's something a little more positive...some English signs I've seen in Harbin that I thought were pretty funny. I'm sure American signs in Chinese are just as bad.

"Chinestern" Culture, or A Lack Thereof

This Saturday, our CET excursion was to the old synagogue in Harbin and St. Sophia's Cathedral. This cathedral is now a history and architecture museum but remains one of the greatest examples of Russian architecture in Harbin. In fact, when I told my one-on-one professor that I was going there this weekend, he said he was planning on taking me there himself, as my one-on-one study topic is the architecture of Harbin and how it reflects the city's history and culture (in case I didn't mention that in an earlier post).

I'm sure many people would call St. Sophia's the most interesting thing in Harbin, but what we did after visiting Harbin's historic places of worship was actually more interesting to me because it gave me a true insight into Chinese present day culture. Cortne, Laura, Dane, and I went back to Zhongyang Dajie where we had gone on our scavenger hunt to check out the Europlaza mall that we had read about in the small Harbin guidebook CET had given us. I have to say I think it was nicer than most malls I've seen in the United States. It seemed so out of place in this city.

While it was really surprising to see Versace and Burberry in Harbin, what was even more strange were the Chinese high-end brands (I used to think that was an oxymoron). "Prich" seems to be the Chinese version of Ralph Lauren, and it's seriously not a knock-off.  The clothes are in the same price range, and they appear to be of the same quality. Unfortunately for the Chinese though, they don't have the same international recognition as American and European designers. Chinese Lacoste is called "Crocodile," once again the same prices; a polo was 800RMB (about $115USD). On the second floor, I thought I was walking into a Holister until I saw the sign "Who.a.u," but the clothes in the store could easily have been in an American store.

This was such a cool find not because I needed new clothes (I discovered soon after arriving in Harbin that I had already brought too many) but because of the way the Chinese were so eager to embrace Western fashion. At first, it was really quite funny to see brands like Crocodile, Prich, and Who.a.u, but as I really thought about it, it wasn't funny at all. It's actually kind of sad. These are Chinese brands, but they have English names. In fact, there weren't hardly any Chinese signs in Europlaza, and the few that were there all had an English translation. Even more evident than the language difference, was that all of the models on the walls were white. I didn't see one Asian model.

The Chinese are so infatuated with the West that they are rejecting their own identity and culture, a product of thousands of years of Chinese history. What's kind of ironic is that they don't really fully understand Western culture. They see Western clothes and buildings and attempt to mimic them, but they don't understand the values of the many cultures that make up the Western world or the fundamentals upon which "our" society is built. This isn't for a lack of mental capacity; it's simply because if you don't grow up in a given society or culture, you can very rarely ever come to fully understand it. I fear that Chinese society is becoming more and more superficial, not only as it becomes more materialistic (because Americans are about as materialistic as people get) but also as the Chinese lose a huge part of their heritage and replace it with the little more than the shiny exterior of the West.

H一N一

Aside from the heat sensors as we walked through in the airport and the occasional mask wearing Chinese person, I haven't come in contact with the seemingly over publicized swine flu situation in China until this week. Last weekend two cases of swine flu (H一N一) were discovered at Heilongjiang University not far from HIT, and the last I heard they had spread to 48 cases (numbers stated in Chinese statistics). Harbin is now considered a high-risk city for the H1N1 virus. The woman who cleans our dorm came around with a thermometer for every student with the instructions to take our temperatures twice a day, and at any sign of a fever to go straight to the hospital. She looked at me rather strangely when I asked what normal human body temperature was in degrees Celcius. Anyway, I assumed this was similar to the sign in our dorm lobby that says we must show ID every time we enter but IDs are never checked. I think I was wrong.

The police have closed off our campus to all people other than students, faculty, and staff. Students must show a student ID card, and faculty have been issued documents (compete with the university's red stamp) allowing them to enter the campus. Similar to our staying in a hotel before moving into Dorm No. 6, this policy doesn't seem to really prevent the H1N1 virus from spreading.

China received quite a bit of criticism for it's failure to properly deal with the SARS virus in 2003 (I believe it was 2003; SARS on wikipedia is blocked), so it seems like they aren't messing around this time. The difference is that SARS is actually a serious disease. The H1N1 virus is the flu. The flu as in "I didn't come to work yesterday because I had the flu," or "summer is over, it's almost flu season." HIT is considering canceling students' fall break, prohibiting them from going home to celebrate the 60th aniversary of the PRC's founding. I'm not sure whether or not that would affect our break, as it does not start until October 17th, but I can say that if the Chinese government's overreaction to a disease that amounts to little more than a cold stops me from visiting Dalian or another Chinese city (still in the planning stages), we will miss out on a big part of this study abroad experience.

Personally I'm not at all worried about the flu, and no one reading this should be. That's not why I'm writing it; I just think that the Chinese reaction to the situation helps fill out an image of China, as compete an image as can be created without sitting on a plane for 13 hours.

Chinese College Students

I've had quite a few conversations with Chinese college students in the last few weeks, mainly with He Wei and some with Cortne's roommate Song Yang. I can't say that I have a full image of the way Chinese youth think or how they have been educated in the Chinese system, but I can say that some of the things I've seen are very interesting.

In many ways, their lives are exactly like those of American college students. They come from all over the country, live and eat on campus, go home for holidays, study late into the night...sometimes, prepare for the GREs to go to graduate school in the United States, and even access the same websites as American students (no comment). In fact, they are probably more like I am as a student in the United States than I am as a student in China. Here I eat at restaurants much more often due to the difference in food prices, and I study quite a bit more because you can't get away with not doing the reading when your class is one on one with a professor and the reading is in Chinese! HIT students seem to study even less than I do at Georgetown. I think they must really cram for tests a few days before because it seems like they go for weeks without studying and then one night stay in the library all night (okay, maybe it's not the library). Anyway, in many ways this university isn't very different from most American universities.

However, there are definitely differences between American 20 year-olds and Chinese 20 year-olds aside from the obvious food they eat, language they speak, and clothes they wear. First of all, you can pretty much assume that every student you see walking around campus is an only child. In fact, almost all Han Chinese born after 1979 when the One Child Policy was instated are only children. I personally don't believe that this policy will be around for another 30 or 40 years, but if it were, it's really strange to think that the Chinese would not only not have siblings but wouldn't have closely related aunts, uncles, or cousins either.

While the effects of the One Child Policy are rather concrete and easy to see, there are far more implicit influences on young Chinese that I think greatly shape their view of the world. For example, about a week ago I was eating lunch with He Wei, and he mentioned how it was interesting that we would be in China for the 60th aniversary of the founding of the PRC (October 1, 1949). I responded that it was also exciting that it was the 20th aniversary of the Tian'anmen Square protest. He was rather surprised that I knew about that because he said most Chinese people our age don't know about it. It's really crazy to think that people in this country don't know about an event that was so publicized all over the world. It occurred to me that if there were another protest in Tian'anmen on October 1st, 2009, I might not know about it because I would be in the country where it happened. Shoot me an email if Beijing goes up in flames, will you?

I know I shouldn't be surprised at the altered form of history that is taught in Chinese schools, but when you actually come in contact with the results of it, it really makes you realize that this isn't the same as America. I even see it in the classrooms of the international students building. Each classroom has a world map and a map of China. The world map has China in the middle (China is the Middle Kingdom afterall), and the Atlantic Ocean is called the "Big Western Ocean," but the map of China is especially interesting. Taiwan is shown as a province of China, no different from any other province, and the body of water east of China is labeled as the Japanese Sea. Japanese Sea is crossed out and Eastern Sea is written over it in pen. This is the case with every map in every classroom. I mean, is that really worth the effort? You can still see that it says Japanese Sea under the pen marks.

I suppose it takes time for things to change, and things in China definitely are changing, but if Chinese children and even college students aren't taught about their own history and the world around them, it will be a long time coming. For now, I just find myself saying, "真的吗中国，真的吗？" ("Really China, really?")

Laundry

Last Monday I wore the last clean shirt that I had brought with me to China, which posed a serious problem. I would either have to re-wear clothes for the rest of the semester or dare to attempt doing laundry in Dorm No. 6. The fact that I'm writing this post on Friday may give you an idea of how long it has taken me to make this decision.

When we first moved into the dorm, there was a large red bucket under the sink in the bathroom. At first I thought it was where the water from the sink drain went (that should tell you something about the state of the bathroom in general - for a great description of our bathrooms, check out Cortne Edmonds' blog "Of Applesauce and Broken Mirrors," also on blogspot). When I found out that the bucket was for washing our clothes, I only hoped that they had a lot of tide-to-go pens in the chaoshi because I have no idea what goes on inside a washing machine, and I definitely was not capable of doing it myself. Unfortunately, instead of tide-to-go pens, you can buy washing boards at HIT's chaoshi, washing boards like the ones you see in museums or old movies. I remembered how I've been told that when asked what the most important invention of the twentieth century was, great-grandma Castle said the washing machine.

Fortunately, it turns out that the floor we live on does have a washing machine (one washing machine and not one that could be easily identified as such but still an electric appliance that supposedly washes clothes). Dryers, on the other hand, are basically nonexistant in China, but it was a huge relief to know that I would only be using the red bucket under the sink to carry my clothes to and from the laundry room. It appeared that the laundry machine ran on coins, but no RMB denominations seemed to work. I then remembered that we had been told to buy tokens at the front desk in order to use the machine. When I went downstairs, the guard said the tokens were 两块五一个, but I heard 两块五个. Thinking that I could do five loads of laundry for 2 RMB, I was shocked at how cheap it was. Then I realized that it was 2.5 RMB for one load, still a seventh of the cost at Georgetown (although that does include drying). Anyway, I gave him a 10 and got four tokens.

After using the washing machine and carrying the clothes back to my room the problem of drying them arose. He Wei had dried his clothes on the shower rod in the bathroom, but since it was the morning, I wasn't sure who else wanted to take a shower, so that didn't seem that the best idea. Plus, I didn't have nearly enough hangers to hang up my wet shirts and undershirts from the first load (let alone the other two that I would do), so I had no choice but to lay them out flat around the room. My clothes covered my bed, desk, chair, and part of the floor, but I finally have clean clothes again! They are definitely a little stretched out though. It will be nice to get back to the United States and put them in a dryer. I clearly need to do laundry more often in the future though, but I doubt that will actually happen given my schedule.

Scavenger Hunt

Saturday was the first of our CET organized weekend activities. All of the CET students participated in a scavenger hunt around the city. We divided into 6 teams of four to see which team could answer the most questions in three hours. My team included Cortne, Andrew, and Laura (Cortne's suitemate who goes to Northwestern). We were more excited about seeing new parts of Harbin than searching for specific items on the scavenger hunt list, so we set out for Zhongyang Dajie in the Daoli district. This pedestrian street is the center of the remaining original Russian architecture of Harbin. Today, it is the main upper class shopping street in Harbin where you can find almost any Western brand. Of course that means that it is also the site of Harbin's only McDonald's location. We just had to stop for some ice cream cones. I never thought I would call McDonald's expensive, but since the prices are standardized around the world, food at McDonald's is quite a bit more expensive than food you can get elsewhere in Harbin, especially for its quality.

Anyway, we walked the length of the street to the Songhua River bank at the end (pictures above) and then decided to take a taxi back because it was about a 40 minute walk there, and for part of it we were walking over this bridge that should not have had a pedestrian sidewalk on it because it was literally an expressway, so we didn't really want to go back on foot. Hailing a cab wasn't too much of a problem; getting the driver to take us back to HIT was. As soon as we said where we wanted to go, the taxi would drive away, so finally we decided to get into the cab before we told the driver where to go. That way he couldn't get rid of us. It worked, and thankfully the second time we went over that treacherous bridge was in a car.

In other news, I would like to comment on some interesting observations I've made in the past week or so. I have found that the Chinese are very welcoming towards foreigners, most of all the middle aged women. When I first moved into the dorm, I wanted to get a key chain for my keys (there's an inner and an outer door to my room), so I went to the chaoshi on campus. It's like any supermarket in America with pretty much anything I would want to buy, except a key chain. I showed a store employee my two keys and attempted to ask for a key chain. She took hers out of her pocket and asked if that was what I wanted. She said they didn't have any in the store, but she took the two keys she had off hers and gave it to me. I was kind of embarrassed because I didn't want to take this woman's key chain, but she insisted so there was nothing I could do. Now almost every time I go into the store (which is more often than you would think), she comes up to me and tries to help me find what I need. She even puts things in my shopping basket that she thinks I might like. I have to discretely take them out before I check out so as not to hurt her feelings.

There's another woman about her age that works at one of the cafeterias on campus. She makes the actual version of what Americans call fried rice. I like to go to her because she makes it right in front of you, so it's hot and you know it hasn't been sitting out for hours. She definitely recognizes me by now. Today, I went to the cafeteria around 10:00. On Mondays, I have an 8:00 class and then I have a break until 2:00. I don't really have time for breakfast, but after going to class I feel like eating lunch food even though it's only 10:00. I heard someone in front of me in line ask for chicken chaofan, and she said that at that time of day she was only making egg chaofan. I figured it was worth a try to ask for spicy beef chaofan myself. I expected her to say no, but she made it for me without any problem. She put it in a plastic bag (no box or anything - at least it cuts down on unnecessary waste!) as they seem to always do here, and I took it back to my dorm to eat and write this blog post.

Harbin Pictures

On Fridays I only have two classes, and they don't start until 2:30pm, so I actually have some time to post. I have been working constantly this past week. Through homework, attending class, and simply keeping my language pledge of only speaking Chinese, I'm completely exhausted.

Last Friday and Saturday we took placement tests, and I think I was placed too high. They decided I should be in the highest level class with students who have had up to five years of Chinese and have lived in China. The workload is one thing, but what's worse is I can't even understand the professor when she gives us an assignment, and I can't ask a classmate in English because of our language pledge. Also, the vocabulary lists in our textbooks don't have English translations. There are only definitions of the words in Chinese. I guess there's not much I can do except wait for my Chinese to improve through being here. They say after the first two weeks, we won't have too many problems, but this is only the fifth day of the language pledge. I feel like I understand what my roommate says to me more and more everyday, which is really cool.

Aside from classes, things are going really well. My roommate He Wei has moved in. He's a big help with little things like getting a meal card, setting up the internet in our room, and fixing the toilet, which constantly overflows unless you turn off the water supply to the bathroom. When you turn on the water to take a shower, you have to flush the toilet every 15 seconds to keep it from overflowing, but they say they're going to fix it today. It seems like things in Dorm No. 6 are starting to settle in for the semester.

Above are some pictures of everyday life in Harbin. From top to bottom (I hope they show up in this order): me and my suitemate Dane in front of Dorm No. 6; Corner Coffee (jiejiao kafei); downtown Harbin; a street vendor selling corn.

I'm keeping a running list of future blog post topics, so bear with me.

Won't be Starvin' in Harbin

Note: This post was written on August 29th, but I just now have internet access to post it.

First of all, I should inform you that if you comment/have commented on my blog posts, I won't be able to read the comments because I cannot access the blogger website from China. I do have access to my email, however, so feel free to contact me at jhg45@georgetown.edu or jarrett.gross@gmail.com.

As many of you know, one of the most important things to me in my everyday life is eating good food, hence my problem with Leo's. Fortunately, from my experience in Harbin so far, the food is wonderful…well most of it at least. In the thousands of years of Chinese history, they don't seem to have figured out breakfast yet. I can't say what I ate this morning at our hotel, but I can say that I didn't eat very much of it. It was a buffet of steamed cabbage, some type of cold noodles, and an extremely dense type of cold bread.

Aside from the breakfast at our hotel, however, the food has been quite good here. My best experiences have been at the small hole in the wall restaurants that I've tried with the other CET students in our first days here. As I mentioned earlier, the noodle place we went to on our first day here was great. The dish I ordered was really spicy; I knew that the last two characters in its name meant "spicy noodles," but I just found out today that the full name was "numbingly spicy noodles." The name was definitely fitting!

Today I discovered a coffee shop about two blocks from our hotel and Dorm 6 with free wireless internet. The coffee and espresso drinks are priced at American prices, but it's such a quaint little place that I see myself spending a lot of time there this year. I'm debating about not even getting internet access in my room and just using it there because the process involved in getting an internet connection in the dorm is incredibly complicated. Anyway, after the coffee shop, I had lunch with a few new friends at a bao place across from our hotel. The mushroom and pork baozi that I had were delicious. I never thought I would say this, but I think it's better than Wow Bao…no escalators with jumping water though.

For dinner today we went to a little restaurant that we had seen yesterday called "California Beef Noodle King" (spelled "Caifornia beef aoodle hing" or something like that under the Chinese characters). I wasn't too hungry, but once again the food was good, especially this dish with eggplant, potatoes, and peppers over rice. The one thing about the food here is that it is all rather similar. I'm hoping I don't get sick of it or it will be a long year.

My classes started yesterday, but I don't have time to write about them right now...I'll keep you posted.