long overdue

I miss China. I know that's the last thing most of you expect of me, but I do, and I knew I would. This semester was really unbelievable, and mostly because of the people I met. I got to know my twelve other classmates down to the grossest, most intimate detail, and I love them. I miss them all, especially the venerable Courtney Morse, the girl with an eerily similar name and my sister from another mister. I miss Tenzin, my Tibetan host father, and Sophie, my three-year-old sister from Kunming. I miss the pigs from my home in Shaxi, and, more than anything, I miss the mountains at the edge of the world.

In China, I ate chicken eggs, quail eggs, and hundred-year-old eggs. I drank goat's milk, yak's milk, cow's milk, and warm milk. I traveled to the tropical rainforest, tea plantations, the Great Wall, and the himalayas. I lived with the Hui, the Dai, the Bai, the Mosuo, and the Tibetans. I shouted at waiters to blend into my surroundings. I pet nearly every dog I met. I went bowling. I witnessed a Tibetan bar brawl. I climbed mountains. I experienced what my classmates and I dubbed "China rage."

besides my whole, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" mantra, I am thankful that China pushed and prodded me in all these ways. Life in the countryside was hard at times, but nothing like it is for many of its citizens. Most of China continues to be rural, though the cities get most of the press. But if I didn't tell you what a fucked-up, backward, self-obsessed country China is, I wouldn't be doing my job. I don't think it would be a service to anyone except the Chinese government if I came back and didn't share the frustrations I felt, because China has a millennium to go if it is going to bring liberty and progress to all its people. I hope that everyone who reads this will keep in mind that the same country lauded for the most dramatic poverty reduction in history saw little reason not to throw thousands of democracy supporters in jail right before the Olympics.

Before I went to China, I believed the hype. I believed that the Communist Party might soon fall out of power, and that wealth was reaching everybody, and that the the consolidation of power might actually be doing some good. Now the idea seems ludicrous to me that China could ever change. Even its desire to "save face" abroad does not trump its Machiavellian obsession with greatness.

My experience in China was so meaningful because it helped me to understand that. A lot of things I saw enraged me. They made me appreciate more than ever to come from a country like the United States, which often deservingly receives a bad reputation, but which fosters discussion and diversity inside its borders.

Beijing is a nice city. I would have loved to have more time to explore it, in the way that I would like to explore New York or Hong Kong. But for all you potential China travelers out there, it would be a crime to leave China without seeing the mountains. Go to Tibet. And don't you dare let the Chinese government off the hook for anything.

From having little interest in the outside world to an obsession with being number one to a feigned concern for its own minorities' protection, China has a lot of the qualities negatively attributed to the US. In the past three and a half months, China often left me completely frustrated, as I struggled to understand so many things about its culture. From the six-fold leap in decibel level to the staged "minority shows" to strangers on trains telling me I would catch cold to the baffling continuation of Mao-worshiping, I felt like a martian who had disembarked a spaceship in a parallel universe. While Beijing may be an area of comparatively free political expression, my experience is that it in no way reflects the countryside and smaller cities, which might as well be another planet.

What really drove me nuts was that not only did China have very little idea about the outside world, but it pretended that it did, and would claim influence in a realm of areas in which it had very little business. I'm not being facetious; a country that prided itself on isolation for centuries is still very obviously dealing with the consequences.

On one of my last days in Beijing, I was riding a taxi and picked up a copy of Taxi Magazine, available for passengers' reading pleasures. There was a feature on a festival called "Christmas," which was suggested to be a spinoff of China's Spring Festival.

Not only was the introduction unapologetically uniformed ("Americans celebrate christmas for 7 days while Europeans celebrate it for 14"--really, how difficult is it to google the 12 days of Christmas?), but sexist: "even the stingiest Danish housewife will make sure her family has enough goose live paste to celebrate the holidays." Everything was stretched very thin to allude back to Chinese history, as the article proceeded to literally make shit up about each country, claiming that Mexicans ate only fruit on Christmas and that Swiss fondue was inspired by Chinese hotpot. This greatly offended my Swiss friend, to say the least. I went home and searched the web for anything to back up this connection; there has not been so much as a facebook note crediting the Chinese with fondue. The Chinese also claim that Italian pasta is not actually Italian at all, but brought from China by Marco Polo when it was in fact introduced by Arab traders in the 8th century. And for a piece on one of the most celebrated Christian holiday in the world, there was not a single mention of Jesus Christ.

I have a lot of good things to say about China, because I really did have an extraordinary and eye-opening experience, one of the most rewarding of my life. But I cannot with a clean conscience go on to tell any of that without first getting something off my chest.

China, get over yourself.

I had culture shock coming to Beijing. Compared to the rest of China, it was almost like an American city. The only thing I thought when I was looking out the bus window on the way from the airport to the hotel was, "money." Everything was sleek and clean and new, and when I went to the drugstore, it sold things like deodorant (which is simply not available in Yunnan) and people formed lines to get to the cash register. Buildings are made out of glass windows instead of smudged concrete and Beijingren are polite and apparently have political opinions. It was weird to walk down the streets and not be blocked by tricycle carts and linked-arm girls, and not to see fruit vendors and people shouting at shopkeepers.

at lunch at a nice restaurant yesterday, Kelly and I were raving about the food and the ambience when all of a sudden the huge heating vent fell from the ceiling and cut her as it came down. The waiters and Lu Laoshi hurried over to put medication on her side, and she was just sitting there awkwardly trying to eat as they were lifting up her shirt.

today we had a snowball fight on the Great Wall. Driving through the countryside, the branches of trees were covered in ice, and Ashley and I sang christmas carols. I bought a panda backpack.

I prefer Beijing to Kunming, but I don't think anything's better than northwest Yunnan. I miss the mountains already.

I sent my clothes to a washing woman in Shangri-La and they came out smelling like barbecued yak. I don't mind, because at least my clothes are clean and not filled with Tibet-dust, but I wish I didn't smell like a meat locker.

in the past few weeks, I left Shangri-La, stopping over in Kunming to stock up on snacks from Wal-Mart for the train to Guilin. I was on the third bunk for the 18-hour ride; below me were some very yappy Chinese ladies with tragic taste in fashion. I accidentally dropped the foil seal from my jar of peanut butter on their beds, and that sent them yapping off their rockers in unintelligible haranguing. I was happy to get off the train.

Yangshuo was pretty cool, a city outside of Guilin where all the karst is. Karst is limestone that has been chemically eroded to produce steep, jaw-dropping peaks covered in green, and it's really famous in southern China. I thought maybe the karst would be in this one little park cordoned off by the government, filled with boisterous Chinese tourists, and demanding a 70 kuai entrance fee to view from a crammed platform. Wrong. The bus ride from Guilin was spectacular, construction workers and pomelo vendors and rice paddies still brimming with water surround the towering, vertical karst peaks. Yangshuo seems to have squashed itself into the most beautiful piece of land of all, mossy cliffs everywhere in the backdrop. It was hard to get over. The company wasn't bad either.

we rode bikes through the karst valleys at sunset, and took a bamboo raft along the Li river.

Now I am in Kunming, which is cold and gray, trying to finish my paper in an internet cafe. I had my presentation this morning, thank god that is over. The only thing good about this city is the Indian food.

Things That Describe China:

yelling

spitting

shoving

staring

slurping

interrupting

rubbernecking

smoking on buses

driving like madmen

wasting no part of an animal

toilet stalls without doors

KTV for hours at a time

screaming into cell phones

cute fat furry puppies (not all things on this list are negative)

wearing slippers indoors

wife-seeking white men

not drinking water during meals

no indoor heating

couples who wear matching outfits

the asian squat

wearing surgical masks outdoors

using umbrellas when it's sunny

getting geared up in proper hiking atire but then not actually doing anything

taking a million pictures of your girlfriend holding a cappuccino

yelling at waitresses

long pinky nails

pouting (if you're a girl)

eating pickled eggs and chicken feet as snacks at movie theaters

men pulling their shirts up to their nipples at bars

telling tourists not to eat at your restaurant because you don't feel like cooking right now

wearing the same outfit three days in a row

putting sugar on tomatoes

bureaucrats getting off on making your visa extension miserable

yelling at white girls wearing shorts

corn-flavored popsicles

telling foreign exchange students from the Upstate New York that they will catch cold (we're at the Tropic of Cancer)

children not having to do chores

weird acid-wash jeans

Kung-Fu movies on buses

card games at bars

not knowing that the Olympics are over

my semester in China is winding down. I have had a fantastic time on my ISP, and really enjoyed getting to meet all the people I did. I'm in Guangxi province right now, but will return to Kunming to see my classmates for the first time in a month. I will miss the people and the experiences, but China, I'm sorry, there's just no love lost between us.

you should go to Tibet though.

also, the Obama cabinet is really cleaning out prominent Democrats.  The administration is taking three of the best and most visible Democratic senators, two great governors, and the 4th-ranking Democrat in the House.  What will the Democratic caucus be like without Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden?   At least he left us with Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer.

It's been said before, but I have to say it again.

John McCain: classic white-haired West Coast republican, experienced in foreign policy but sometimes doubted by the conservatives of his party

Arnold Vinick: classic white-haired West Coast republican, experienced in foreign policy but sometimes doubted by the conservatives of his party

Barack Obama: young, energetic, handsome, idealistic black candidate from Chicago who gives a good speech but who lacks foreign policy experience and who many believe can't win the election

Matt Santos: young, energetic, handsome, idealistic Hispanic candidate from Houston who gives a good speech but who lacks foreign policy experience and who many believe can't win the election

Rahm Emanuel: young, energetic, handsome, Jewish political mastermind who used to be a ballerina when he was a child and is fond of practical jokes.  Driving force in recruiting candidates for Democratic party and in behind-the-scenes congressional politics.  Highly partisan; Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama

Josh Lyman: young, energetic, handsome, Jewish political mastermind whose character is based upon Rahm Emanuel.  Driving force in recruiting candidates for Democratic party and in behind-the-scences congressional politics.  Highly partisan; Chief of Staff for President-elect Santos

Hillary Clinton: original frontrunner and star of Democratic party.  Seen as safer bet; more centrist and a "political insider."  Current Senator; First Lady for former Democratic administration.  Ugly, drawn-out Democratic primary leads to upset in which the dark horse candidate wins

Bob Russell: original frontrunner and star of Democratic party.  Seen as safer bet; more centrist and a "political insider."  Former Senator; Vice-President for current Democratic administration.  Ugly, drawn-out Democratic primary leads to upset in which the dark horse candidate wins

Joe Biden: older, politically-astute Washington insider with foreign policy credentials, picked for Vice-President due to experience and to add confidence to ticket instead of to pick up a swing state

Leo McGarry: older, politically-astute Washington insider with foreign policy credentials, picked for Vice-President due to experience and to add confidence to ticket instead of to pick up a swing state

Sarah Palin: ridiculous, out-of-touch Governor from an irrelevent red state (Alaska) who is picked as Vice-Presidential candidate to appeal to the conservative wing of the party

Ray Sullivan: ridiculous, out-of-touch Governor from an irrelevent red state (West Virginia) who is picked as Vice-Presidential candidate to appeal to the conservative wing of the party

Secretary of State:  once elected, Santos puts aside past differences and offers post of Secretary of State to former rival Arnold Vinick, whom most people originally thought would be the next president of the United States.  Obama offer post to former primary challenger Hillary Clinton, whom most people originally thought would be the next president of the United States.

the only difference is that Joe Biden's not dead.

I love this town. I love this place. I could never set foot in Kunming or any other Chinese city again and be fantastic. The cobblestone streets are hilly and filled with yaks and dogs, and gossip travels fast. The last I saw of Dakpa, I was walking with Tenzin and his family and we see two men outside of Arro Khampa, rummaging through a big cardboard box. Dakpa turns around, a bottle of french wine in each hand, and bellows, "Hello! Come and have a drink!"

Tenzin is a good man and a good host father. He, along with Dakpa, knows and is known by everybody. I even learned about him in the book I was reading, on the Tea Horse Caravan that linked Yunnan to Llasa. He had a nomad wife who died soon after they married, and has a peculiar passion for Nescafe, which I witnessed the first morning when he handed me two mugs, one filled with coffee and one with butter tea.

Whenever the family isn't looking, I give my butter tea to the dogs. I spilled some on my shoes, and they followed me around the house, trying to lick it up.

Yesterday I left the house at the lethargic hour of three in the afternoon, and the sky was gray and angry and a thin dusting of snow covered the path. I have a ritual meeting with Sam and Ashley every afternoon, where we sit in the Raven, warm from the stove, and drink tall mugs of hot chocolate.

Last night Tenzin invited Sam and Ashley over for dinner. I wish I could remember our conversation over Tibetan stew forever. I love how Tenzin laughs, he cracks up at his own jokes and starts hyperventilating. He had two other friends over as well, fellow Tibetans who had also spent time as monks in India. It was almost like a yuppie dinner conversation in the Northeast; Tibet, Buddhism, travel, and laughter.

I've made a lot of empy promises to people I've met here return. I've lied and said that I love China. But Tibet is different. Tibetans are tall and proud, and their country is beautiful. How could I not come back?

I made the mistake of opening an urn-type thing on the kitchen table. There were some strange white slabs inside. 'What's this?" I asked. "Dried yak cheese," Tenzin replied. "For the tea. This morning, I think your tea was not so good. Tomorrow you can put the yak cheese in it, and it will be delicious."

I think my host family is trying to set me up with their nephew Tsultrim. He came over last night for dinner and made momos, Tibetan dumplings filled with potato (or yak meat). "He's a very good cook," my host mother said encouragingly. "And handsome."

It was hard to follow the rest of the dinner conversation though, because it was in Tibetan. So far I know two words, "foreign girl" and "yak."

I've moved in with my Tibetan homestay family. I'm back in Shangri-La for the third time (I just can't stay away!). Tenzin, my host father, is one of the most successful men in town, I'm discovering. A few weeks ago I haggled a bit more aggressively than I should have for a scarf, only to find out that it was my host father's store and I would be eating breakfast every day with the girl I had tried to take down. Tenzin also co-owns my favorite restaurant in town, has a travel agency, and is working with an American client to have Citigroup invest in a hotel project in Deqin. He grew up as a nomad in the Tibetan part of Sichuan province, lived in India, and speaks Tibetan, Chinese, English, Hindi, and Nepali. I even googled him.

This is all very different since my last homestay father was a bean farmer.

His house is absolutely beautiful, a traditional Tibetan lodge with textiles and dark wood, with a huge living room where everyone hangs out. Last night we watched a Tibetan documentary in which a man drowned in quicksand. The best part is Tenzin's little white Tibetan puppy Dunba, who likes to lie on his back and wave his little paws at me.

I had yak butter tea for breakfast, per Tibetan tradition. I love yaks, but I wish they would stay out of my morning beverage.

Last night I met up with Sam and Ashley, who have been living at the Tanka Center for the past few weeks. They have to teach English every night to the Tibetan students at the center. I watched Sam with his white board, drawing pictures of every fruit he could think of while his student achingly repeated, "honeydew...lemon?" Ashley was very cute in her Tibetan uniform, frolicking with her new friends. She apparently spends six hours a day learning to draw from the head monk of the center.

last night we went to the "disco" in the town square, where all the villagers get together every night and dance to Tibetan music in a big circle. I tried to follow the moves of a man in a mustache and fedora.

Yaks are kind of funny. They just stand in one place for hours, and they don't even blink. Today I was trying to get to the bathroom but a yak stood dumbfounded at the entrance, blocking the way. You'll be walking around and see a yak standing outside a house, and when you make your way back forty-five minutes later, the farthest the yak has gone is a few steps to the left. They wear Tibetan bells around their necks, and at night the fields sound like Christmas.

I am completely fixated by yaks.

I also can't remember the last time I've seen a flush toilet. Or stall doors. Most Chinese bathrooms are little huts built over a stream-type thing, with a couple of little partitions (in the best of situations) so that three people can go at once. Pulling my pants down in front of other people hardly phases me anymore. I've seen so many Chinese butts. I hate it when they come into the stall with you though, and wait for you to finish peeing. Chinese people are so impatient.

This is what the trek was like: we hiked down from Feilaisi, a town on the ridge, and found our way through the yaks and desert shrubbery to the Mekong river canyon, where the only way down was a path along a crumbling ledge. We crossed the river via footbridge and asked farmer after farmer where the town of Xidang was, where we spent the night. The next day was a grueling hike up a mountain and down the other side into the perfectly secluded village of Yubeng. I've never seen anything like it. These wooden Tibetan houses are clustered around terraces, surrounded on all sides by snow-capped mountains. The only way to get there is on foot or by mule. It almost looks like somewhere the Trapp family would live, only with Tibetans instead of Austrians (or Vermonters).

Nature! Naaaaaature!

I was never really into Tibet at home, even though everybody talked about it. I was never really into hiking or the outdoors either. But being here has changed my life. I'm definitely investing in a good pair of hiking boots. What is it about Tibet that draws so many people in?

I'm in Deqin in November, exactly what my professor told us not to do.  But I've got some altitute meds and some mittens, and tomorrow set out to hike to Kawagebo, one of the holiest mountains in Tibetan Buddhism.  It has never been summitted, just like the rest of the Beautiful Snow Mountains, which form an intimidating ridge against the Tibetan Plateau .

It's beautiful here.

the road from Lijiang to Shangri-La takes you up into the mountainous highlands, where the cows turn into yaks and the landscape goes from cute to terrifying as your bus makes death-defying passes on roads clinging perilously to the rock face.  But that's nothing compared with the road from Shangri-La to Deqin.  When you're not stopping for a yak crossing or for one of the million photo/bathroom breaks demanded by Chinese tourists, you're wondering how it is that you've reached the edge of the world.  It's desolate.  The cliffs are a straight drop.  The earth is brown and red and purple, until there is only rock and snow.

one man picked himself a snack of a twig with some berries that he brought onto the bus.  I glanced back at him a few hours later to see him filling a surgical mask with the peel of his orange, which he strapped to his face.  I will never understand Chinese people.

I've been on Lugu Lake for the past however many days.  I've lost track of everything to do with the real world.  Can it be that I have found the last unspoiled piece of China?   The only boats on the lake are the long wooden canoes of the Mosuo people.  I asked a woman today where her husband was.  "On the Sichuan side," she said, pointing across the lake.  "He has his own family and I have mine."

I came here to study and to write my research paper, but I can't speak Mosuo and my computer currently has a broken hard drive.  Instead I play with puppies and kitties in this animal kingdom where pigs, ducks, and ponies roam the streets, and turkeys wander in and out of restaurants.

since China is 13 hours ahead of the East Coast, the polls didn't close until 10 am on November 5th. Last night we all went to bed excited after attending a Naxi music concert conducted by an eccentric Chinese millionaire, who had given us a lecture that morning at his home. When he was talking about some incomprehensible aspect of modern Chinese culture, he mentioned "gaibian," the Chinese word for "change." He paused, as if he wasn't sure if we quite understood, then said, ""Obama?" punching his fist into the air. Then he pointed to Justin and said, "like you!" Justin never gets a break from being the only black man in China. Chinese people really have no concept of race. The conductor said, "my mother was Tibetan and my father was a Turk, so I was better than the stupid Naxi." We laughed uncomfortably and looked at our watches.

We asked for lecture today to be postponed so we could all watch election results. In the morning we went to some temple to get blessed by another living Buddha, then booked it to a cafe to sit anxiously with our laptops and repeatedly refresh MSNBC. At about 11:30 am Pennsylvania and Ohio were called for Obama, and after that it was just madness. I'm so happy for Jack Murtha, Eric Massa, Dan Maffei. North Carolina, Jesus Christ. Right now we're in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lijiang, filled with Chinese tourists who barely even know about the election, and who would favor McCain if they did. Everyone in the cafe was bewildered, but we kept yelling results to each other at the different tables and hugging each other and trying to stream McCain's concession speech. One Australian turned to his friend and remarked, "Obama has won the election...so I hear."

There are thirteen kids on this trip, including one Bermudean and one Swiss. Not a single person voted for McCain. I literally feel like singing the star-spangled banner right now. I wonder what the madness is like in the States; I spent the last presidential election waving signs on a rainy street corner in Pittsford Plaza, watching the results in county headquarters in wet socks with my dad, everyone ready to cry into their champagne. Now I'm in China, wishing I were storming the quad with the rest of the students at Tufts. If people are half as excited as they were about the World Series, that is.

after this weekend, I don't think anything else in China is worth mentioning. Shangri-La is amazing. I want to live there, and I'm the last person on earth who should live in China.

we drove up into the foothills of the Himalayas, to the border of Tibet where that beautiful place exists. It's beautifully desolate, cold and the color of dead grass. Yaks graze everywhere and big racks for drying wheat surround traditional Tibetan wooden houses.

our point person in Shangri-La, or Zhongdian in Mandarin, was a gregarious Tibetan man named Dakpa. He used to be a monk when he was younger and exiled to India, and runs a Tibetan culture NGO (and a really good Indian restaurant... he's pretty much Mr. Zhongdian) and knows everybody and everything worth knowing. He also looks like a Tibetan Viggo Mortensen, case in point that Tibetans are pretty much the most attractive race on this planet.

Tibet is also an extremely musical culture, as it turns out. Beside Dakpa's songs of welcome, we spent our first dinner in Zhongdian exchanging songs with the table next to us, a boisterous group of Tibetan reporters. Then Dakpa took us to a bar and we sang traditional Tibetan songs until we were invited by another Tibetan man to celebrate at his restaurant with more songs and dance. Alison and I sang a very shoddy rendition of Hava Nagila. The night ended with a drunk, belligerent Tibetan man, who believed he had been promised the next song, climbing onstage and ripping the microphone out of Joe's hand, then throwing a full bottle of Dali at Dakpa's head.

we had been warned that when Tibetans get mad, they don't like to use their words.

the next when Courtney and I found ourselves in an African drum circle with Japanese hippies and a Belgian innkeeper. The night after that, by chance we ended up with the same hippies at a different cafe, drinking yak butter tea and dancing with Tibetan locals. Everyone here is so friendly and warm. It's hard to even bargain with a shopkeeper without ending up with an invitation to dinner that night with their family.

we visited a lamasery and received blessings from the living Buddha. We visited an orphanage and played duck duck goose with Tibetan children (one child was confused and instead played goose goose duck). We went to a tiny temple in the countryside, where our companions were a friendly goat and some roosters. We went to a mountain and bathed in hot springs in our underwear.

I was never really into Tibet at home, but now I'm enthralled. I'm thinking of coming back here in a couple of weeks, Dakpa has already introduced me to a family I could live with. Hiking in the daytime, Tibetan music at night.

My host mother is obsessed with my socks. She keeps taking mine, including my Pizza Days socks, and giving me new ones while she washes them. And when I don’t wear her socks, she goes down to the village meeting house and complains to my professor.

“She’s so confused,” Xiao Zhou said to me. “She gave you socks, why won’t you wear them?”

I also don’t understand why Chinese people think they can make any situation better by giving you a pomegranate.

Our last night in Shaxi we went to the village meeting house to see a performance of traditional Bai song and dance. My host mother sat in front of me, and kept looking back every two minutes to make sure I was okay. When I got up to talk to Xiao Zhou at the other side of the room, Justin told me that she asked everyone in her general vicinity if they knew where I was and when I would be back. Then she told me I should dress warmer or I would catch cold. I’m sorry, I’m from upstate New York. At home you can ice skate on my birthday, but here I can catch cold by wearing flip flops in sixty-degree weather?

Bathing was so awkward.

I got home from lecture Sunday night and my host mother seized me by the hand and showed me a pair of plastic basins, into which she poured hot water from a thermos. I hadn’t seen a sink anywhere in the house yet and had been wondering how to shower/wash clothes, but didn’t expect to arrive at this crossroads so soon. My host mother handed me a bar of laundry detergent. “For my clothes?” I asked. “No. For your face,” she replied. We were right in the middle of the open-air “hallway” between the “kitchen” and “living room;” she and her brother were both looking at me. I sat down and started to rinse my face with only the water, but the brother unwrapped the detergent and put it in my hand. So, with them examining me closely, I washed my face with laundry detergent.

When my host mother went into the other room for a minute, I hurried and got a dab of shampoo from my room and started to wash the roots of my hair. She came back and tried to take the basin away from me, saying the weather was too cold, and I was trying to explain to her that I had shampoo in my hair, and then her brother came back out and tried to take the basin away too, and took a towel and started drying my hair as I was washing it. I managed to get all the shampoo out of my hair as I was wrestling with them, and slunk away to read the National Geographics I had found in the village meeting house.

If I thought my Kunming grandmother was overprotective, she has nothing on my Shaxi mother.

Since my ISP has been predetermined by Zhong Laoshi of the Tufts Chinese department to be on the Mosuo people of Lugu Lake, I wanted to spend my time in Shaxi learning about what I’m really interested in: farmers. My Shaxi mother and uncle are both farmers, but since they can barely speak Mandarin we are reduced to the communication equivalent of body language.

Yesterday morning my host mother took me on a walk along the river on the outskirts of the village. It was just about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Even in Yunnan, at its tropical latitude, you can feel autumn. The patchwork fields were out of a storybook, with far-off villages dotting the mountain foothills. Everything had a dreary tint to it, perhaps because of the rain that hasn’t let up in four days, but that just made it even more majestic.

She dropped me off at the village school, where I met a few of the teachers. One teacher, whose English name was Victor, took me to his dormitory and cooked me lunch. Now I know my mother might be worried reading this post, but as I told Jess Bidgood, white women in China have about the appeal of Eleanor Roosevelt. He played me traditional Bai music, and found one of the gym teachers, who used to be a farmer, to talk with me about agriculture. I stayed there for hours, drinking cup after cup of tea. The gym teacher invited both of us to eat dinner with his family that evening. Victor also invited me to sit in on his classes that afternoon, but I told him I had better check in with my host mother to tell her where I was. Which I felt was very big of me, considering the opportunity I was passing up.

I ran into my host mother while I was walking home, and asked her if I could eat dinner with the gym teacher, expecting her to say alright. “Bu xing, bu xing,” she repeated. “Not okay, not okay.” “Weishenme?” I pleaded, why not? Because I had already eaten lunch with them. That should be enough. I didn’t need to eat dinner with them.

Xiao Zhou told me that my host mother had only said that per routine, and I should disregard her and eat with them anyway. But as I was on my way to buy them cigarettes as a thank-you present, I ran into my host mother again. “Bu xing, bu xing.” I was almost in tears as I brought her back to Xiao Zhou, who, after an epic discussion on my character flaws and attributes, convinced her that since the family who would cook me dinner was not the same as the family who had cooked me lunch, I would not be too much of a burden.

Sometimes I hate traditional Chinese culture.

But thank god I ended up eating dinner with them, because it was the best experience I have had in China to date. I felt so welcome in the gym teacher’s home. He would speak Bai, and Victor would translate into Mandarin, and we spent three hours eating and chatting that way. All my malevolence towards China went right out the window, as I felt how rewarding it was to speak with them in earnest. The gym teacher invited me back to hear him play traditional Chinese instruments, and I regretted my time in Shaxi was so short.

I received a call from Xiao Zhou half an hour before I had said I would come home. My host mother was beside herself with worry. It was 7:30 at night, where on earth was I? Victor and the gym teacher walked me home, and halfway there we ran into my host uncle, who was out searching for me with a flashlight. He wordlessly brought me to my host mother, who made me call Xiao Zhou right away to tell her I was safe. She followed me into my room and made me change socks in front of her, because my old ones would “make me catch cold.” Then I sat on the bed as she personally rolled up my pants legs. She scolded me for my secret stash of crackers, and took all of my clothes to put in the wash.

It’s not the living conditions I mind here in Shaxi. I couldn’t care less that there’s no running water, or that the bathroom doesn’t have a door. It’s the lack of personal choice. I wish I could be allowed to hear that gym teacher play the erhu for me, without my host mother thinking I was too much of a burden. I wish I could communicate with her, because living in the countryside makes my two and a half years of Chinese feel like nothing.

In a small moment of freedom before bedtime, I shined my flashlight in on the pigs. The three of them were asleep, fat, and snuggling side by side.

I thought my frightening incidents with animals in China were over when I got off that mule. Then I was attacked by a monkey.

We hiked down from Jizu Shan and went to Dali, the center of the Bai people. It’s a touristy village on a lake, and also attracts a few westerners. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much of Dali because I was too busy voting for Obama. The day we left Kunming my absentee ballot still hadn’t come, and I was heartbroken at the thought of sitting out my first presidential election until Alison suggested we just print out the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, which ended up taking the entire afternoon. If I had to miss cormorant fishing on Lake Erhai with a bunch of Chinese tourists, at least it was so the world would be in better hands.

A small temple in some misty mountains was our next stop, and we hiked up there to spend the night. It’s also where there are lots of wild monkeys, and my professor brought a bag of peanuts hoping to attract them. I offered to carry the peanuts, and was minding my own business when we heard the stampede of about thirty monkeys coming our way through the woods. I can still hear the monkeys’ footsteps. One ran straight for me, leapt around my waist, and grabbed my bag of peanuts as I shrieked my head off. They all swarmed around the peanuts on the ground as I was ushered to safety by my friends.

The temple was so beautiful, though. There were grottoes and waterfalls, and we all slept in one room of this old inn. The next day we got to the next temple, one of the most important in Yunnan, that a local governor had saved during the Cultural Revolution. It was rainy and cold, and the mist turned into thick, impenetrable fog which we hiked through to get down to the Bai village of Shaxi. It was a surreal experience. We hiked silently in a line, wearing brightly-colored rain jackets and pushing past pine trees along a ridge high above the valley. Parts of the trail were collapsed by landslides, and we were all soaking by the time we got to the bottom.

In Shaxi we met the group of families with whom we are going to live for the next five days. My host mother snatched my bag as soon as we met and led me down an old cobblestone path past low-slung houses and muddy trenches until we got to her home on the edge of the village. It’s different in every way from my homestay in Kunming. In Shaxi, everyone is a poor farmer. My bed is next to the chicken coop, a plank cushioned with straw and an animal hide. The whole thing isn’t so much a house as a series of rooms accessible from a muddy courtyard, with bales of hay piled everywhere and ears of Yunnan corn drying on string from the eaves.

I’m still not sure who exactly is in my family. There wasn’t a formal introduction like in Kunming. I ate alone with my host mother, except for when the nainai, or paternal grandmother, shuffled in and wheezingly served herself some soup. The only other person I have seen is the didi, or mother’s younger brother, who is a farmer like she is.

There’s a constant sound of trickling rain and everything is damp and dark. My host mother is nice, she tells me to wear more clothing and eat and drink more. It’s hard to understand her. Everyone else in her house speaks Bai, and she’s the only one who knows a little Mandarin, but speaks in a heavy local accent. My shoes are wet from the rain, and I have no others to wear while they dry out. I huddle around my computer for warmth.

the further out of the Kunming valley we get, the more extreme the terrain is. Half the time it looks like desert, half the time the Himalayas. Finally, we arrived at the temple where we spent our first night. We ate dinner with the monks, in bowls we washed ourselves. There was a rule that no food should be wasted, so it was really unfortunate that I had served myself some fermented tofu.

We prayed with the monks before dinner. Prayer isn’t exactly my strong suit, but there’s something fascinating about Buddhist monks, and how they chant expressionless for hours at a time. The monks suddenly lined up and circled the inside of the temple in a procession, the back of which we joined. It was funny, a bunch of confused white people following chanting monks walking circle after circle around the temple, having no idea when it would end.

We took mules up to the top of a mountain to reach the monastery where we spent the next night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I mounted my mule that memories of my childhood horseback riding accident came back. Every time he slipped on the steep path through the woods, all I could remember was my horse getting spooked and charging off through the trees with me clinging on for dear life until I got thrown off by a fence. I thought I had finally regained my composure by the end of the hour and a half ride, until I got off the mule and promptly burst into tears.

I can't describe enough how beautiful that monastery was. It was on top of a towering mountain, and beyond the mountain were other mountains, and on the other side were other mountains, and they were all rugged and misty and blue. It was freezing cold, and Tibetan prayer flags whipped around in the wind. The temple was built right onto the cliff, and a few of us woke up early to catch the sunrise. The local villagers were already out, reciting their morning prayers. I love it I love it I love it.

Saturday afternoon my family took me to KTV, or karaoke. Having heard various friends’ horror stories about their own experiences at KTV that lasted four, five, six hours at a time, I was a little apprehensive. Upon arriving at the complex, which was adjacent to the bus station, I was ushered into a private room with my Chinese mother, grandmother, three-year-old-sister, and her pet turtles. As in, two live turtles she had bought at the market that morning and was swinging around in a little plastic cage. My grandmother told me that since I was the guest, I had the honor of singing the first song. And the second and third and fourth songs, as it turned out. I alternated between Elton John and assorted Christmas favorites.

When I told my Chinese grandmother on Sunday I was going to meet friends to study, she wouldn’t let me leave the house without an entire picnic of items from the kitchen. We argued back and forth until I finally managed to leave the house with only a loaf of bread and a pomegranate.

I survived riding my bicycle in Kunming. I am one with Chinese traffic. To imagine that this summer I was too afraid of cars to even ride my bike in Medford…I don’t think I will ever think Boston drivers are crazy after having lived in China. I am fearless. Okay, so I have been walking the past few days since my back tire blew. But there are only five bike-repair stands between my apartment and school, and I’ve already been to all of them.

I genuinely love Sophie. I usually compare small children to kittens—they’re cute and small, but the novelty wears off very fast. But Sophie is like a miniature real person. I like everything about her, how she asks me every day if her outfit looks beautiful and how she comes to get her grandfather during the scary parts of Sleeping Beauty. Living with a family let me transcend my habit of treading water on the sidelines, and I’m so thankful that they helped me to understand more of Chinese culture. I will miss them. I will also miss the kid who practices piano every night somewhere in this apartment complex. It reminds me of my brother after dinner when we were in high school.

My grandmother asked me if we had the Barbie movies in the United States. I said I thought so, but I personally had never watched them. She nodded. “You don’t have time,” she said sympathetically. I didn’t have the heart to set her straight about my relationship with Barbie.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the countryside, where I'll be for the next month and a half. Chinese cities are great (well, no, they're not), but this is what I've really been waiting for.

Vocabulary I have Learned in Chinese This Semester:

(sound made by oil when cooking)
To conduct oneself in society
To raise children to assure one’s security in old age
Family happiness
Struggle
Conflict
Filial piety
A tendency to avoid problems and live a happy life
To forget all moral principles at the sight of profits
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
To help each other when both are in humble circumstances
College entrance exam
To poison
To smuggle
To shoulder heavy responsibilities over a long period ahead
To leave a mistake uncorrected and make the best of it
To be good friends despite great difference in age
Philistinism
To be too fond of drink
To not go back to one’s home for the whole night
Love and respect for one’s elder brother
Moral crossroads
Sparkplug
Self-cultivation
To lose face
“To tell the truth, I am rather disappointed with the nature of man.”

Sometimes when I eat, Sophie brings over all her toys and tells me they are for lunch. I must try each one with my chopsticks and give her feedback on her cooking. So far I have enjoyed the playdough more than the stuffed dolphin, but I think that’s just because I am a vegetarian.

It’s funny how whenever my family thinks I don’t like something, they ask me if I want sugar on it. I don’t know where they got this idea that Americans put sugar on all their food, but I certainly don’t like it on tomatoes and fried goat cheese.

My Chinese grandmother is kind of controlling. I love her, but it’s true. I think she likes to change tiny details of my plans just to show that she can. If I say I’ll be home at 6:30, she’ll say 6. If I want to sleep in until 8, we’ll haggle until I get her down to 7:30. If I want to read, she’ll trick me into going shopping (“we’re just going for a little walk”). My Chinese mother and grandfather are much more loose. So far I’m just amused by my grandmother’s antics, but if I were living here for longer I wonder if she would drive me crazy. Is she testing my American-ness? I like to test her too. I intentionally shock her with things like, “My parents are divorced.” “My mother likes to order takeout.” “I plan to put my career before a man.” “In America we do not think that wearing a t-shirt is the reason someone catches a cold.”

I came home fifteen minutes early from class yesterday, and the kitchen was filled with women. They were my Chinese grandmother’s friends. It was like having fifteen Chinese grandmothers at once. They kept urging me to sit down and eat even though no one else was ready, because in China you don’t wait for everyone to be seated, so I awkwardly picked up a jiaozi, and they kept coming over every thirty seconds to tell me to eat more and to try replace my chopsticks with a fork. There is nothing more offensive to a foreign exchange student in China than being offered a fork.

My grandmother got out the photo album I had given her and pointed to a picture of the Tufts econ department. “This is her house!” she said, and her old lady friends gasped. Then they started speaking in Kunminghua. The only thing I could understand, other than “she doesn’t understand Kunminghua,” was, “you let her ride her bicycle by herself?” I just moped by the fruit. Thank god pomegranates take so long to eat, and my grandmother was making me eat the entire thing. Otherwise it would have been me, a bunch of old ladies staring at me, and nothing to do but meet their eyesight.

Instead of lecture we went to a Wa village to get some more of that indispensable cultural immersion. I don’t really know what exactly the point was, but it started with a Wa man pointing to Justin, the only black guy on the trip, saying that since they both had dark skin they must share the same ancestry, and ended with Justin up onstage with a gong tied around his waist. Then we all had to chant one by one into a microphone and perform some kind of borderline sexual dance that involved a lot of hair-swishing and bending over, as Chinese schoolchildren looked on in boredom. One twelve-year-old even plugged his ears.

I had a China-tastic weekend. We all piled into my host grandfather’s Mitsubishi to take Sophie to the suburbs where she played "constructively," in English of course, with the six little girls of an American missionary family.

Me: Are you going to celebrate Halloween now that you live in China?
Girl: My mommy says Halloween is Satan’s birthday.

We took two of the girls to go bowling, because that’s apparently what you do in China at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. On the way, there was some sort of detour, for a reason that escapes me, to what can only be described as a talent show for the elderly. I shrank back along the sidelines until I was seized by a 65-year-old man with a crumpled sheet of paper bearing what I later determined to be a shoddy English translation of some weird Christian hymn.

Man: I am overseas Chinese. I live Burma. I am doctor. You know? You know?
Me: Yes. I know.
Man: Do you know the river of no return?
Me: Um. No.
Man: OK. You sing with me onstage.

My host grandmother finally, after a million years, noticed that an old man was trying to drag me onstage and came to my rescue. Then we went bowling.

No matter what I do, I can’t eat my food at anything but lightning speed. It’s an American thing. My grandmother is always telling me, “man man chi,” eat slowly, but in a matter of minutes my meal is gone, while the others haven’t even served themselves rice. When they try to spoon more greens into my bowl, I protest, “wo zhende chi bao le.” They all put their chopsticks down, pause a minute, and direct me to the fruit bowl, where I am supposed to eat one tangerine after another until the rest of the family has finished.

My grandmother likes to feed me fruit. I don’t mind, because I happen to be a big believer in fruit, but it’s kind of funny how she sits there, watches me eat a banana, then tries to give me another one. I have gotten used to evening conversation over a pomegranate. Every morning, my grandmother tries to stuff my schoolbag with apples, until I explain to her that the added mass actually makes riding my bicycle even more miserable.

I am really at wit’s end with this whole bike-riding thing. I have to keep looking for new bicycle-repair stands so the shopkeepers don’t think I’m a complete asshole who keeps breaking her bike. Instead of marching into confrontation with the school rental place, Xiao Zhou and I decided it would be better if I just rode her bike, which she never uses. Which was great, until halfway home when the chain fell off. Then a policeman yelled at me for riding in the crosswalk while I was in the middle of a busy intersection. Honestly, aren't there bigger fish to fry in the realm of Chinese traffic law than a hapless foreign exchange student on a bicycle?

China is one big puppy parade. Puppies scamper down the mossy steps of old temples and chase each other between the legs of octopus-tentacle vendors. I don’t know why they never seem to grow old, but they must send the elderly dogs into a doggie nursing home (my vegetarian euphemism for hot pot...). Puppies in China look like they had sprung alive from the pages of a Chinese comic book: small, fat, ridiculously furry, and with a certain googly-eyed stupor. I love to watch the old ladies who walk in the park in the morning, practicing taiji exercises as they stroll surrounded by puppies.

There is an old German Shepard named Xiao Hu, or Little Tiger, who belongs to the guard of our apartment building. She likes to eat sweets. My grandmother gave me a handful of coconut candies to feed her.

One thing that kind of bugs me about China is how everything is staged. Everything is one big spectacle. Come see our Elephant Reserve and roam with wild pachyderms! Come see our Minority People! Chinese culture show! Taijiquan! Natural Wonder! Village that can only be reached by cave but has an enormous lot in which to park your SUV! I say this with all due respect, but Chinese people are a little obsessed with their own culture. These shows aren’t even for Western tourists, as I had originally presumed. No, it’s simply what Chinese people like to do in their free time. They like to file into a room with stadium seating, be served tea by people dressed in cheap, brightly-colored costumes, and be entertained by a hyper emcee who practically yells into the microphone. Even the decorations for Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese New Year have cute little cartoon characters—it’s hard to take them seriously. The building across from our apartment is a wedding complex. You can look into the window and see Chinese families eating food while a stupid-looking performer swathed in tacky red cloth and sequins reenacts some long-lost tale of heroism.

I love China, but sometimes I think it wants me to appreciate its culture so much that it drives me away.

And then there are times like yesterday, when we drove for hours to reach a forgotten temple in the woods, surrounded by Hui villages and fishing ponds, and even though it was sunny in Kunming, a misty rain started to fall as we entered.

My bicycle has been causing me to lose face. When the pedal fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. When the chain fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. But when the brake came off in my hand as I was trying to stop, I decided it was the last straw. Tomorrow I am going to march into the bike rental shop of my university and give them a piece of my mind (or more likely just cower behind Xiao Zhou).

Riding through traffic in Chinese rush hour is a nightmare. Really, I think I would rather someone just chop me up and feed me to the poor. Chinese drivers are mad in the most original sense of the word. If a police car pulls up to check out a crime scene (well, that’s an exaggeration of what Chinese policemen actually do), drivers will just honk at it to move out of the way. The bike lane is useless because taxis pull up out of nowhere and nearly throw you over your handlebars. And Chinese pedestrians just flop into the road like dead fish. Literally. I was once almost killed by a man who absentmindedly put a bucket of fish in the road as I was trying to pass.

Thank god we’re leaving for the countryside soon, because if I were in Kunming much longer I’d have to go into a home for frustrated bicyclers.

Beside my emerging issues with road rage, I really like my homestay. My family is very gracious and I feel bad that I can't do more to reciprocate their kind gestures. I've been so used to living on my own that my basic routine is wake, go to school, come home for lunch, go back to school, come home for dinner, work, sleep. But we have had a lot of chances to talk. If you had told me when I was a high school senior sitting through AP Spanish that I would soon find myself living with a Chinese family in an isolated province speaking their language, I never would have believed you.

the father in my house is gone because of the One Child Policy. He left shortly after Sophie was born, disappointed that she was a girl. Sophie is the smartest three-year-old I have ever met. How could that be a disappointment? But now it's as if her whole life is now a mission to prove her father wrong. The amount of resources Chinese parents pour into their only children is incredible. There are no cousin, uncles, or siblings anymore, just the relationship between the generations, which is fiercely tight. Sophie is lucky to have grandparents that take such good care of her while her mother works, taking her to English Corner every thursday night and buying all the educational toys and computer programs they can find, in hopes that she can carry on the family torch.

my grandfather is such a good cook. He's a Hui, a Chinese muslim, and he doesn't quite look Han. He seems to be mid-sixties, and you can still see that he was handsome. I admire how much energy he has. Today he cooked the eggplant dish I love so much, with tofu this time. It tastes like ginger and garlic. I want him to show me how to make it, but I'm afraid I won't remember.

I went to a Chinese zoo today. It made me want to cry. Everyone was in a pretty somber mood. Lions and tigers are stuck in cages and look like they have no more will to move.

I’ve moved in with my host family. I am with a young, single mother who lives with her parents and her three-year-old daughter in an apartment in downtown Kunming. My host grandmother likes to keep me at arms’ length, putting a blanket around my chair when I’m doing homework because “I might catch cold.” The grandfather does the cooking and plays with the three-year-old girl, Sophie, who happens to speak perfect English. No one else in the family can say a word, but of course the toddler strolls right into my room an hour after I move in and announces, “my name is Sophie, what’s yours?”

It’s kind of bizarre living with a family that speaks only Chinese and a toddler that only wants to speak English. But Sophie seems to have made an executive decision to help my Chinese by flatly refusing to translate anything her family asks her to. Of course, she addresses me nonstop in my native tongue—“where are your slippers? Why are you in bare feet? You’re eating too much pomegranate,” but when her grandmother is trying to explain to me where to lock my bicycle, Sophie glares up with arms crossed, and shakes her head.

That’s right, I’ve decided to grab the bull by the horns and ride my bicycle in Kunming, a sort of carpe diem moment for me. Also, my host family lives a forty-five minute walk from my university. Within the first twenty feet of riding, one of my pedals fell off. I just looked at it in disdain. At least the Chinese drivers did not make roadkill of me today. Perhaps tomorrow.

Home-cooked Chinese food is infinitely better than restaurant food. They don't feel the need to drench everything in oil. My host grandfather cooked me eggplant with cloves of garlic that I simply could not get enough of, and I don’t even like eggplant. There was boiled spinach, familiar enough. And thin tofu strips with slices of red pepper. They mercifully kept the hot pepper on the side so I did not have to choke on everything I ate. I was so confused. Why was it so good? I didn’t even have to supplement my meal with hidden crackers after everyone had finished.

The first morning, I woke up (to Sophie pounding on the door, “wake up, wake up!” It made me miss Shay) to find breakfast already laid out on the table for me. Sophie and my grandmother sat across from my plate, watching expectantly. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they had painstakingly arranged the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a serving of potato chips, and a red apple. My grandmother looked very pleased with herself.

My bed here is a lot more comfortable than my hard dorm bed, with a big squishy comforter, though bus station lighting seems to be a general trend in China. Also, I have discovered that my family stored their bootleg B-movie DVDs in my closet. Surviving Christmas with Ben Affleck last night, Lord of War with Nicholas Cage tomorrow?

But bootleg movies aside, since I was pretty nervous coming into my homestay, I am truly thankful about the family I am with. They are all very wonderful to me, if a little overprotective--I think I can deal with a 6 p.m. curfew for the time being. My Chinese has already improved drastically. There really is no substitute for living with a real Chinese family. I’ve talked to my host mother so much that sometimes I don’t even notice I’m talking in Chinese. Until Sophie comes along and tries to feed me dried prunes or whatnot and I jump at how strange English sounds to my ears.

I hope my host mother doesn’t mind putting up with my kindergarten-level comparisons. That’s all they make you do in Chinese class, dumb comparisons about Zhongguo versus Meiguo. “Oh, Chinese broccoli is spicier than American broccoli, how interesting!”

Last night was my host grandmother’s birthday so we went out to one of those hospital-sized restaurants that are so common in China, where families can rent their own private rooms. I ate peanuts, fried goat cheese, a slightly greasy tofu dish, and pumpkin fritters. Being a vegetarian is very convenient because not only is Chinese meat sketch-tastic, but not eating it reduces the number of dishes which people can randomly spoon into my bowl. Which they do, quite frequently. Also, whenever people turned their heads, Sophie would grope my food. My grandmother would catch her, than transfer whatever she had fondled onto her own plate and give me an even more generous serving of the tainted item. And then she would scold me for not eating more, and other people would join in the fun of heaping food into my bowl, or just shout words of encouragement from the sidelines. The whole thing was very complicated.

On the way there, we all piled into the Volkswagen of who I am 99% sure is my host mother’s younger brother’s fiancé. They insisted that I sit in the front passenger seat. Not only did they insist that I sit there, but Sophie insisted on sitting on my lap. Not only did she insist on sitting in my lap, but she turned around and stared at me the whole drive there. It baffles me that my host mother won’t let me go outside without a million layers of fleece, but she lets her three-year old daughter roam around in the front seat of a moving vehicle in a Chinese city on the lap of a foreigner. Obviously I have a lot to learn.

Xishuangbanna is less a part of China and more an extension of Southeast Asia, and I wanted to quit school and stay there. The streets of Jinghong could not possibly have fit any more palm trees, and the local Dai language was above every Mandarin sign. Burmese men in sarongs hawked jade and fruit. Instead of noodles, the vendors sold steamed bamboo, and there were practically seconds between when ripe mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and bananas were plucked and when they were sold right on the street. Courtney and I found a little alleyway that led to creaking huts, squashed around a damp courtyard hidden by banana trees, where we spent most of our nights.


I don't know what was better, being practically in Burma or meeting the other people who were just as awe-struck as us. We met an American motorcycler who had been detained for a few hours that afternoon for taking a picture of the border, and ran into the same pairs of Spanish, Israeli, Dutch, French, and Belgian backpackers in the cafes that dotted our section of town, getting to know all of them.

Courtney and I had taken the overnight bus from Kunming, settling down a 16-25 hour drive that we in fact made in fewer than 9 (causing us to wonder, at 4 in the morning, where on earth we were and what we had gotten ourselves into...cue nap on bus station bench). We decided to first check out one of the backpacker cafes we had heard about (after waiting until a more reasonable hour) and see what this town had. The Forest Cafe was a hole in the wall that served us muesli with fresh fruit; Sara, the famed owner, was a petite Han Chinese woman with cropped hair and a loose sweater over a peasant skirt. She offered to take us on a trek later that week, and tried not to laugh as she gave us directions to the elephant reserve (which was completely worthless) (which had no elephants) (which led me to follow the elephants' cue and thereby after swear off any place visited by Chinese tourists).

so Courtney and I rented bikes and spent a day riding around--Jinghong quickly turned into a series of huts and squatter farms lining pathetic roads. We swerved down a dirt path and found the Mekong River. I suddenly had visions of Martin Sheen and armored rafts, but quickly regained my composer as we rode along the banks. SO BEAUTIFUL.




The whole time I couldn't shut up, going on about how I loved Asia, was ridiculously happy, planned on purchasing a bike as soon as I returned to Boston, wanted to open a pineapple plantation, blah blah blah. I'm sure Courtney wanted to shoot me.

The next few days we explored the rest of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture (as it is called), staying as far away from Chinese tourists as we possibly could--which consequently led us to be dropped off by a bus in a town the middle of nowhere, with naught to do but explore shanty farms until we were chased away by a farmer's dog (and his son, incidentally, who also barked).

every night Courtney and I went cafe-hopping, ordering smoothies, dinner, and deserts and the different backpacker havens. It was like living in a small, happy town--waving at our backpacker friends across the street, meeting up and deciding to all go to the next cafe, sharing stories about what to do and not to do. Trying different combinations of juice--orange and lemon turned out to be simple, yet the most refreshing.

In between activities we would often sit on the porch of our little hut, welcoming other pairs of backpackers as they moved in and out. There was a really nice sense of solidarity. One time at a cafe while I was using the computer, the waitress came over and handed me a potato.



The last few days we spent on our trek, which started out along the Mekong and swerved up into the (green, lush, misty, just kill yourself) beautiful mountains where we passed Dai, Ake, and Aini villages. We spent the night on the floor of a Dai family's hut, in a village perched somewhere really high up, wherever it was. It was us, Sara, and four other European backpacker pairs. We saw so much--all I can do is gush. The view was incredible. We followed the Mekong until we swerved onto the other side of the mountain peaks, where we saw rice paddies, tea terraces, and rolling mountains forever. As I was crossing a pineapple farm, I fell on my face in front of a Dai woman.


Anyway, the whole experience made me think. I'm studying abroad in China more to make the most out of a Chinese requirement than because this is necessarily the place I've been dreaming of. Chinese cities are hard to love. They are invariably gray and damp and filled with car exhaust, and there are no Westerners and quaint old buildings have been torn down in favor of drab apartment complexes. But no matter how sarcastic the tone of my blog is, I don't want anyone thinking I don't like it here in China! Because it's not the cities I ever really love when I travel abroad. Spending that week in the tropical countryside, seeing old buildings, old people, so many ethnic groups, was a transformation of how I feel about China. I can't wait to travel more.

Even though every developing country claims its drivers are the most deranged, I think the trophy must really go to the Chinese. Never in my life have I seen one city bus cut off another with such hateful vigor. Or been in a bus that did a complete U-turn on a four-lane highway. The bike lane isn’t much better, motorcycles are much harder to spot until they zoom up behind you and nearly knock you down in your path. I would love to bike here more often, if only I weren't completely terrified of any combination of a Chinese person and a set of wheels.

Also, taking note of the bus bombings this summer in Kunming, it suddenly unclear which is more dangerous, being in the bus’ path, or actually onboard. Kunming buses do, however, play soothing videos of grasshoppers frolicking on dewy, green leaves.

It’s funny how fast it took everyone to know what there is to know about me. People here have already picked up on my quirks, the ones that I'm only even aware of from other people’s observations. How I swear really loudly from my desk when I’m frustrated and think about foods I hate just to gross myself out. I’m known as the girl who likes Indian food, puppies, war movies, and the “Latin America” section of msnbc.com. I guess no matter where I go, I can’t escape my compulsions. I just like things how I like them.

It’s discouraging how mediocre I am at Chinese. Granted, I’m a white girl, but all this effort seems like it needs to start showing. I left Spanish when I was really good at it, to slave away at an elusive language unwilling to be tamed, for mediocrity in the tongue of a country I don’t even plan on spending time in after I’m done with the Tufts language requirements. The only times I am actually good at Chinese are when I’m supposed to be responding in a different language. A few nights ago Sam asked me a question in Spanish, and the only words that popped into my head were Chinese proverbs.

At least I know how to scold parents for spoiling their children. And discuss horticulture.

Today Tal and Aly didn't come to class so I was all alone with Zhang Laoshi. She made me act out a skit with her in which I was a taxi driver and she was a passenger who had lost a cell phone, for which she offered me a 1000 RMB reward. My goal was to use our vocabulary to politely say I didn't want the money but "begrudingly accept" after an annoyingly long period of beating around the bush. It reminded me of the Iranian taarof custom. Why do other cultures bother so much with politeness when it comes to things like cups of tea and lost cell phones, but have absolutely no respect for anyone who wishes to walk in your general vicinity?

I’ve been making mad trips to the fruit vendor to stock up on vitamin C for combating my cold, buying about a pound every evening right outside my door. My favorites are the little tangerines the size of ping pong balls, and enormous tangelos that take about an hour to peel. Fruit stands were such a good idea. Whose idea were they? There's nothing like a Chinese tangerine, they're small and firm and just sour enough and start to spray juice as soon as you crack open the peel.

We had a lecture from an guy from an environmental NGO the other day. He said that ecotourism in China is actually more detrimental than tourism in general because Chinese people’s idea of ecotourism is driving a Volkswagen into the deep forest to take a million pictures of themselves on a horse. And then they get off the horse. And shout a lot, as it turns out. Noise pollution, as well as pollution of the air, water, and general dignity of the earth.

The bottled water stand around the corner from me has a little boy who always plays on the dirty cement expanse of the sidewalk. All his toys are lined up neatly next to the ice cream freezer, which sells slightly icier versions of Magnum and Good Humor. Walking past tonight, I saw the cot behind the counter of the little stand. The man was tucking his worried-looking wife into bed beneath the worn plaid blanket. The boy was still playing on the sidewalk.

Chinese is so dumb. Even if you recognize the character, and know the pinyin, and know the tone, and know the meaning of that individual word, you may still have no idea what anything says. For instance, who knew that “car water horse dragon” means “heavy traffic”?

It does feel good when you get it right, though.

today we visited a drug clinic, the biggest rehab facility in China. Not only does Yunnan have the most poor people, but also the most heroin addicts and the highest incidence of AIDS, all in province!!! What a deal. The clinic was exactly what the government wants you to see. Cheerful inmates in matching tracksuits perfectly arranged four-to-a-table in the library. Smiling smack addicts performing a cheesy Chinese culture revue, led by an emcee who probably thought he was on a game show. All around was propaganda about "6.26," the Chinese-invented "miracle drug" that was supposedly an herbal cure for heroin addiction, with a 98% success rate and no side-effects. Ok. It was like the Olympics, "6.26" on posters on the walls and flashing from every page of the patient-run magazine, Kaishi. "6.26 is a cultural miracle! Unlike the deadly chemicals spawned from German labs! We praise China's enduring kindness and cunning scientific wit!"

it dawns on me that some of you just want to hear about a typical day here, one unmarred by forced basketball games with heroin addicts. Not that heroin addicts are bad people, I'm just not really into basketball. Every morning I wake up around 7, take a shower and review some homework before heading to class. I usually eat a mantou, which is basically boiled Wonder Bread, or sometimes a scallion pancake or mushroom dumpling. Unless I am getting Indian food that evening, that is the best-tasting food I will have all day, which, let's face it, is pretty sad.

(for lunch at the rehab clinic, the only thing that wasn't battered and deep fried--really, China?--was defrosted cherry tomatoes. Which tasted like they had been repeatedly put in and pulled out of the freezer over a period of weeks by someone who couldn't quite make up his mind on whom to burden his sad fruit).

We have Chinese class from 8 to 12 every day, with a little break in between where we do taiji with an old Chinese guy whose only English is, on repeat, "the legs..." I can't wait to tell my chiropractor.

after Chinese I get lunch, from the noodle vendors in the alley or from the Muslim cafeteria. Then I try to fit in some more chinese homework (but usually end up sleeping) before afternoon lecture on Chinese history and culture. Thank god we finished the unit with the terrifying videos on the Cultural Revolution. I was starting to lose my faith in the human race.

there isn't much time to do things between classes and the library, but we often go exploring around the little shops and parks nearby, and almost always end up on Western street. Since Kunming doesn't have any tourists, all the foreign people are expats and college students, which can be pretty interesting. All the white men throw themselves at Asian girls, must find wife. You start to run into the same people everywhere you go, since it's such a small community, especially at Salvador's, the coffee shop where we all go do work and dabble in the smoothie menu.

every night in the library here, there seems to be some sort of cult that meets across the hall, droning on and on in a chant that could be a membership prerequisite to some sort of secret society. Our professor later informed us they were learning Vietnamese.

This is what it sounds like:

Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.
Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.
Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.

besides the omnipresent pug, Chinese people are very fond of huskies and samoyeds. The front baskets of bicycles are often filled with fat, curious puppies, and it's not uncommon to see a large man walk down the street cradling a little white ball of fur.

we have four more straight days of class, on Saturday and Sunday, before they have to get rid of us for a week due to the holiday. V. excited for Xishuangbanna!

sirens went off for 13 straight minutes this morning. At first I thought it was just regarding the sort of car accident you might expect from Chinese drivers. But later I found out it was because today is the day Japan invaded China.

I haven't done any reading for my Chinese culture class because of the amounts of homework my indefatigable Chinese professors assign. Every night I have to memorize new characters for the tingxie, write an essay to read aloud before the teacher, figure out complicated grammar exercises, and translate texts. To add insult to injury, the lighting in my dorm room is about what you would expect in a low-security prison. There is no light at my desk so I hunch over by my suitcase. My body keeps flinching as if it wants to get up and turn on the light, only to remember that the pathetic blueish glow illuminating the corner closest to the door is the climax of our room's brightness.

I find this stressful.

in other news, I finally discovered a Chinese dish that I didn't find completely awful. Yunnan is famous for its water-fried cheese. It's the only province in China where you can even find cheese, unless you want the carrot-flavored stuff found in select grocery stores. It tastes like thin crispy slices of mild goat cheese, and is probably also the most unhealthy food in China. Oh wait, except for everything else. Today I think I actually improved the nutritional content of my lunch by adding a diet coke and a Snicker's bar. I am dying to eat something not slathered in chilis and drenched in oil. Indian again tonight.

People who say Chinese food is good are lying.

Some very exciting activities are on the horizon. This weekend we are going to the Stone Forest, one of the coolest places in China and coincidentally only a few hours' bus ride from Kunming. During National Week, where Chinese people go on a free-for-all, a few of us are going trekking in Xishuangbanna, the southern part of Yunnan and the only part of China located in a tropical rainforest. It's supposed to be interesting because of its Dai people and its elephants, and I look forward to exploring some villages.

The groups we learn about in lecture are right outside, waiting to sell you noodles, or right in the hallways, attending classes. There's the Dai, the Bai, the Yi, the Miao, the Naxi. I can't keep track of all of them but it's very cool. In November I am going to be spending a month on Lugu Lake studying the Mosuo people, in a place rumored to be more Tibetan than Tibet. Looking forward to some yak butter tea (...) (...) (no). But the rest of it should be awesome!

I can't believe I spent this much time on my blog instead of doing homework.

come now, aren’t classes in study abroad supposed to be fake? I was preparing to indulge myself in the joke, enough to please Tufts to allow me transfer of credit, while really being a tourist in disguise and spending my days exploring the city. But I barely even have time to see the mingsheng guji of Kunming because I must always instead go to the library to learn vocab and translate Cinderella and The Departed into Mandarin and struggle with grammar structures quite above where I left off in Chinese 4. I am very shaky at speaking, and my nerves are made worse by the bell (Chinese universities have bells?) that goes off every twenty minutes like an oven timer (always when I am mid-sentence). The commuter rail in the backyard is mind-boggling loud, and there is some sort of construction either in the room next to, above, or below us, though I have never actually seen anyone with a hammer or nail. Two nights ago my roommate and I were awoken by a man shouting hysterical obscenities at the door of the woman who lives across the hall.

Every day when I walk to class I am stared at. It’s like some warped version of high school. Chinese girls hold hands and Chinese boys perpetually have their arms around each other, and their heads follow me when I walk by. There is nothing as frustrating as being trapped in a mob of Chinese students, who walk haphazardly and at a snail’s pace. I race and duck, trying to discern a logical pattern to their movement as I rush up the seven flights of stairs to my class. If anyone is capable of blocking an entire stairwell with naught but her own tiny frame, it is a Chinese student heading to class. One time I was caught behind a group of people eating corn on the cob.

Every morning we take a break between Chinese classes to do taijiquan in the courtyard with a spry old taiji master. You’d think we were the Olympics by the crowd of Chinese students we attract. They gawk and even take pictures, standing there for the entirety of our stretches and jabs. I’ve never been so aware of my whiteness.

My point not to suggest that I'm having a hard time, but to emphasize that studying abroad is no rocks for jocks. At least not here. It’s really hard to integrate into Chinese culture. We don’t like to eat what they eat, and we don’t wear the things they wear, and we constantly astound each other with our own cultural norms. I said “sorry” too much when I lived in the United States; here, I once said “duibuqi” after narrowly avoiding a collision on a hiking trail, and was met with astonishment at the fact that I had even thought to apologize. Crossing the road the other day, I started screaming when the line of buses and motorcycles suddenly broke free of the red light and came charging at me. The accents here sometimes make me feel like I’d never left Boston, hearing pronunciations like “idea-er” and “empher-size.”

Thursday we heard from a remarkable guy, a 90-year old man who was imprisoned under Mao for twenty years. He had sad old man eyes and responded “much obliged” whenever someone brought him some tea. We’ve been studying the Mao era this week, and I never got how messed up China was until I got here. I asked the old man how people still respected Mao here, never disputing his tyranny yet at the same time paying homage to his tomb and praising his contribution to Chinese history. How is that possible? It’s a walking contradiction, but people don’t bat an eye. I don’t think I can ever understand.