Eric's Beijing Diary

I hardly ever watch movies. I always used to say the last great movie Hollywood produced was Fiddler on the Roof. I have seen some interesting movies since then, but none that came up to that level. They just don't make them like that anymore. But I usually see a movie or two when I travel, because in the years since I have been in China, The airlines have put little video players on the back of each seat. The first time I experienced that was when I flew to Urumqi in the summer of 2005. That flight was long enough for a movie. When I fly to Tokyo, I can usually finish a movie if it is not too long. And I usually watch one movie going over the ocean. On my flight from Beijing to Portland, I saw a movie called "A Beautiful Mind." It's a novel, actually. Embellished for a movie saturated audience. But it is roughly based on the life of a real person. The gist of the story is that the professor was delusional, but was somehow able to come to terms with that fact, so he was able to choose not to believe his delusions. In the movie, they show him coming to this realization because the little daughter of his imaginary friend never gets older. I don't know if that little vignette is actual, or a Hollywood creation. But at least it's the case that he somehow was able to realize that his delusions were delusions, and choose not to follow them.

While I was in Arizona, Mel took me to see Victor Hugo's classic, which I have already mentioned. I saw a third movie on my flight from Seattle to Beijing that was also quite interesting, but for the life of me, I can't remember it right now. Must not have been that important.

Oh, China! Sometimes you can be so inconvenient!

I went to the Bank of China today. I have a Great Wall credit card. It's a U.S. dollar credit card. My bill has my Chinese name at the top, but it gives me the amount in U.S. dollars. If I hand carry the bill to the bank, I can pay with RMB. Actually, I have to carry the bill to the bank, because there's no other way to pay it. There are no checking accounts in China so I can't write a check, and even if I could, I would be hesitant to do so because of the unreliability of the mail system in China. But there's another reason. Most of the time they don't send me a bill. Maybe two or three times a year I will get a bill in the mail. The rest of the time, I have to have them fax the bill to me. Sometimes I will get the bill very late after I have already paid it. Most of the time I never see it. What I usually do is to go to the bank and call them from there and then have them fax it to the bank's fax machine. It's a cumbersome process, but really the only option I have since post mail is so unreliable in China. Occasionally, they have told me they can't fax it to me, but I tell them there is no other option, since the mail system clearly does not work. So they always comply. It's a cumbersome, annoying system, but I have managed to live with it. Except this time. They told me they absolutely could not fax me the bill, but told they they had an "automatic" system. Their "automatic" system turned out to be a nightmare. It just didn't work. And the people trying to tell me how do use it didn't know anymore about it than I did. I went through it so many times with them, that in the end I was correcting them when they missed a step. This is not a complaint about poor training. I am talking about non-existent training. It was obvious that none of the head office staff in Shanghai that I talked to had ever once tried the procedure they were carelessly rattling off to me.

Fortunately, the lady at the Haidian branch was very helpful. She called the head office and actually worked through the automatic process with them. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. If she hadn't gone to bat for me, I am not sure what I would have done, but she stuck with the problem until she got my bill for me. What she finally ended up doing was to go upstairs and have them print one for me. I don't know why I can't just do that every time.

Several years ago, there was much talk about international banks being able to compete locally in China. But the day came and went without much fanfare. It may be technically legal now for foreign banks to compete, but there are still many obstacles. In one sense, there would have to be. There's just no way a non-citizen would put up with the exasperating inconvenience of a Chinese bank if there were any other option. It's strange too, because the local people at the bank I go to are always very helpful. They don't speak English, but that part doesn't bother me. This is China. If you need English, you need to go to the branch over by Tsinghua University where they have English speaking staff. I used to do that, but I hated it. Such an insufferably long wait. The Haidian Branch is much more efficient. And the language part is my responsibility, not theirs. Interestingly, when I call the head office in Shanghai to ask for my bill, they always ask me to wait for an English speaker. So language is not the issue at all. It's just that they don't like to be troubled with having to fax my bill to me. But what can I do? Is there anything more contradictory than a bank that insists that you pay your bill, but refuses to give it to you? It seems to me that they need to completely remodel their online banking system (which is essentially nonfunctional--I have never been able to get it to work) or clean up the postal system. Or get rid of the bosses in the head office who don't want to be bothered with the needs of customers. The contrast between them and the staff at the local bank couldn't be more extreme. I'm not sure why. My theory is that the local staff ore ordinary Chinese people hired from the public, because they're really nice, and the big shots in the central office are relatives of Party members. I don't know if that's true or not, but it sure seems like it.

Every year there is a unit in the book for the non-English Majors called, Marriage across Nations. It's that time of the year again, so I was talking this morning with my students about the difference in culture. I gave the example of an American I had overheard complaining about having to go meet his Chinese girlfriend's family. At the time, I figured this relationship probably wasn't going to work out, and I wasn't surprised when it didn't. During our conversation, I asked one young lady what she would do if a foreigner wanted to marry her and take her to a country far away. She said, "If I really love him I will go anywhere with him." Call that dreamy-eyed, but she was absolutely serious. I don't ridicule such commitment. I applaud it. There is something noble about a young lady who is determined to marry for love. She wasn't saying what she thought someone else wanted to hear. She was speaking from the heart. Then she added. "But I will take my parents with us." Well, said. This is China.

Today on the bus, a young lady sat down by me and started talking. She had just come in from the countryside to take a test. She is trying to get into the art school at People's University. Not sure why she is coming here now, because the senior students usually take the National Entrance Exam in the spring, but it's possible that they have some sort of special program for students who did not do well on that test. Not sure. At one point in our conversation, she looked at me and said, "As a old man, you are handsome." So there you have it, folks. Not bad looking for an old man. Take those compliments when you can get them.

Brother Liu caught me checking something in my little electronic dictionary. I started this study on my own several years ago. I was using an old Japanese Bible of Dad's, and Jack Helpern's Kanji dictionary. Helpern is a German Jew who has lived in Japan most of his adult life. I was referred to his dictionary by a colleague when I was teaching at UAT in Arizona. I put it aside for several years, because I was busy learning Chinese, and I couldn't see how it could be anything but a distraction at the time. But a few years ago, I decided to do a comparative study of Japanese and Chinese characters using the Bible. I found it to be very helpful. Sally from church, who studied Japanese as her second language was very helpful if I had a question once in awhile. She became interested in my study and suggested we try to find time on Sunday to meet, because she was studying for her Japanese proficiency test. We finally settled on Sunday morning before church. Sally has moved to the other side of Beijing now (after passing her proficiency test), but I've picked up another couple partners along the way. Brother Liu worked in Japan for a couple years and speaks quite well, and Jenny lived in Okinawa for 15 years, and actually became a Japanese citizen. Franz is a Chinese student studying Japanese. We all have different objectives. Jenny is more interested in learning English. But our interests intersect at the Japanese language. I am not really interested in the meaning of every word, just the ones that have kanji associated with them. The others are more interested in the other words, so I help them check those words using my little Besta dictionary, and they help me understand the relationship between Chinese and Japanese characters. I go to www.romaji.org, set the toggle to hiragana instead of romaji and paste in a chapter from my Chinese Bible in e-sword. Then I create a parallel text with English, Japanese with kanji, Japanese without kanji, and Chinese.

The kit I started with went the way of history when my computer bag was stolen a couple years ago, but I now have a little electronic dictionary that has several Chinese-English dictionaries, but also a couple really excellent hiragana dictionaries. Japanese characters were imported from Japan during the Tang Dynasty, so they're really quite old. My interest is mainly in trying to develop a multi-dimensional understanding of Chinese characters. Comparing what various characters mean in Japanese and Chinese is very helpful, especially for characters depicting words I know both from Chinese and Japanese. It is a slow, tedious study, but useful, as it adds one more dimension to understanding the relationship between characters and their original root meanings.

Caught the morning sun as I was walking home from the village Bible study this morning. House churches throughout China have a custom of meeting for prayer and Bible study every morning at 5 am. It varies from place to place a little, I guess, but it is a pretty widespread practice. So when you are praying and studying the Bible with village believers at five in the morning, you can know that right that moment, thousands of other believers throughout China are about the same business. This practice is a good foundation for what needs to happen next, which is many, many Chinese young people going to the corners of the world. These meetings are not always that structured. They do tend to follow some kind of Bible reading schedule, though. We did a chapter from the Old Testament, a chapter from the New Testament, and then read a Psalm together.

Pure cane juice. This guy feeds the cane in from his end, and the crushed cane comes out the front, with the juice being collected in a container below. It's pretty good, actually. Not fancy, like the soft drinks modern young people have gotten so used to. but pure natural sugar in a natural base that is not overly sweet. It's nice once in awhile to taste sweetness that is actually good for you. No preservatives. No garbage. No artificial flavor. No artificial anything. Just pure cane juice. Not sophisticated; the taste is a little bland, actually. But I really like it. So much better for you than garbage soft drinks. And for 5 kuai, well, you just can't pass it up.

New Year's Day. One passenger on the bus. This town is pretty dead on New Year's Day. Every town in China is pretty dead on New Year's Day. The whole country shuts down. It's much more profound in the countryside, but you couldn't help but notice it no matter where you are in China. The ticket guy was obviously up pretty late loast night. New Year's eve in China does not end early. World War III starts just before midnight, with little kids handling fireworks that only the fire department would be allowed to detonate in the US. My landlady took us to the same restaurant again. Really nice meal. But it's hard not to have a really nice meal when you eat out in China. Chinese restaurants aren't that good for a single person eating alone. The whole culture is designed with groups in mind. If you are by yourself, it's better to go to a coffee bar or something. But if you are with a group, you can't beat a Chinese restaurant.

Rough couple of days. I boarded the plane Thursday evening in Seattle. There was a delay getting off the ground, because the pilot insisted on using the runway that would put him into the wind on takeoff, and the tower was not cooperating. They wanted him to use the runway he was originally scheduled on. I can appreciate their irritation, but I believe the pilot was right to be stubborn about it. We had a fully loaded plane. A plane that size with every seat occupied and lots and lots of luggage and then enough fuel to cross the ocean is really heavy. Flying into the wind makes all the difference in the world. When we finally did get cleared for the runway our pilot insisted on using, I noticed that it took us a long time to get airborne. I don't like to think about what it might have been like if we hadn't had the wind coming at us. Once you get off the ground, you can breathe easily (assuming you don't have to make an emergency landing) because you will burn up a lot of fuel in twelve hours. Fuel is very heavy. Anyway, our late departure meant that we didn't get into Beijing until after midnight. So I left on Thursday evening and got to Beijing early Saturday morning. I had no Friday.

After I got to Beijing, I was trying to decide what to do, because I knew I could never get to Fragrant Hills before morning.. I went over to where the shuttle buses were, and the shuttle to Zhongguancun was closed. But for some reason, there was a shuttle going to Three Dollar Bridge (San Yuan Qiao). There was another guy who said he was heading toward Zhongguancun also, so I decide to take that shuttle. He was a really nice guy--let me share a taxi with him and dropped me off in Wudaokou. He just told me to give him 20 kuai, which was more than fair.

Because of the New Year's holiday, the Bridge Cafe was closed, and much to my disappointment, when I got to Lush, they told me they were closing at 2:30. So I would have to find another place to finish off the night before I could head out to Fragrant Hills on the first bus in the morning. I met a couple Russians at Lush. Actually, they were members of a Russian minority. One of them looked Chinese to me. I thought perhaps he was Chinese Russian, or something. But he told me that he had no relation at all to China. After Lush closed, I headed over to KFC to wait for the morning bus. I met a Muslim from India, who was quite talkative. I started asking him about his religion. He told me that he was a Musilm, but that he did like wine. When he started talking about his religion, I told him he must not be very serious about it if he still drank wine. He said, "Yes, but I always say, 'Oh, my Lord, I'm sorry.'"

"But you're not sorry. You like your wine, and you intend to keep drinking it."

I don't know--I guess I was just tired. But for some reason I felt inclined to point out to him the hypocrisy of his situation. He was nice guy anyway.

By the time I finally got out here to the Hills, I was exhausted, but not sleepy at all, because the sun was coming up. I just didn't feel like going to bed, so I headed up to the park and did some hiking. I guess I just wanted to be sure the mountain was still there.

Soooo....New Year's Eve, but all I want to do now is sleep.

Last night Mel and I took Dad to see Les Misérables, the film adaptation of the Victor Hugo classic. More correctly, it's a film adaptation of the Broadway musical, which is based on the Book. Hard to believe I'm 58 years old and I've still never read it. You know how you have a list of books in the back of your mind that you know you should read? Like Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or (need I mention it) War and Peace. The only problem with this film adaptation is that Jean Valjean is too young. I guess in the book he is really old. In the movie, they show the scene where he is dying, and it doesn't make sense. The way the story has been going, you kinda have the impression that he should just be getting ready to start living. But otherwise I really did like the movie. Probably a lot more light-hearted than the book, but quite artistic and absorbing. You should see it.

   Click to enlarge. Today, Mel took me to the airport. Dad came with us and we stopped at Monti's for lunch. Monti's is housed in an old adobe mansion, built in the early days of the Arizona territory. It is the oldest continuously occupied building in the Phoenix metropolitan area. I wouldn't call it cheap--it's not McDonald's. But they do have pretty good burgers, and the adobe environment is nice. Naturally air conditioned. it's the type of home you really should have in a desert climate. Except it's not a home anymore. I think it's been a restaurant now for many more years than it was family mansion.

My plane was late out of Phoenix, but I still got to Seattle in plenty of time to make my flight to Beijing. I have always been struck by how much easier it is to leave the United States than it is to leave China. I suppose that's partly because I am a US citizen, but no official ever checks your passport when you leave the country. The airline does, I guess to make sure you have a visa for the country you are entering, but there is no stamp on my passport to say that I left the US. Not so with China. You need permission to enter, and you need permission to leave.

We got together this evening to talk with Melissa, who is teaching English in Northern Japan. John is holding his daughter on his lap, except that she is one the other side of the world. It is certainly a changing world. When I was a kid, calling the United States was a very big event. I don't ever remember talking to someone from the US while I was in Japan. We used to go to the Post Office and buy blue air letter forms. That's basically how we communicated. The other way was by sending reel-to-reel tapes back and forth. But even that, although it was a lot cheaper than calling, was not a frequent event. We did it only two or three times, I think, in all the years I was growing up in Japan. Now, it is so simple. Sometimes I think it's too simple. Something of the simplicity of life is lost in all the cacophony of social networking and email.

Made my pilgrimige to Powell's with Heather today. I hadn't even planned on going to Powell's this time around. I guess I just figured I wouldn't have time to squeeze it in. But Heather had the day off today, and we had to wait for Melissa anyway before we could drive down to Christine's place.

So Heather and I were able to spend a few hours at Powell's. Powell's is probably the largest used book store in the world. Usually I am inclined to think of used book stores as small places without a lot of variety. So when people really get serious about buying books, then tend to go to a place that sells new books. But a store this big beats those other fancy places all to pieces. So many books of every possible variety. I didn't have that much space for taking books back to China, so I really tried to limit myself, but I did find three good books.

The one I was most interested in was a book on Afghanistan. The author was George Bush Senior's ambassador to the Mujahideen during the years following the Soviet invasion. It looks like a real treasure in terms of helping to provide the historical context for the current situation.

On the left is a book called, Standard Seamanship for the Merchant Service, a book I just happened to notice on one of the shelves as I was walking by. This book was originally published in 1926, but the version I bought was revised in 1936. A little newer, but still old enough to be written in the days when there were still a few sailing ships plying waters of the seven seas. I was never a sailor, but my uncle was a merchant mariner until he was injured in Panama, and Dad worked as a shipfitter in the shipyards in California during World War II.

The book on the right is a cultural history of the city where I was born starting from the Edo kingdom during the time of the Tokugawa shoguns, to the end of the Showa (reign of Hirohito) period in 1989, when the man who had been emperor throughout World War II and my childhood passed away. I have never read a book that focuses specifically on Tokyo, so this should be interesting. And as a cultural history, it covers stuff that you don't usually read about, and it is written by someone who was a respected translator of Japanese literature. Solomon said, "Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh (Ecclesiastes 12:12)." So choose your books wisely. Life is short. You can't read every good book.

 

I haven't been on snowshoes since I was a Boy Scout in Minnesota. They are a little clumsy, but they really make deep snow a lot easier to deal with. Snowshoes have changed a little over the years. The ones we wore today were smaller than the traditional Michigan snowshoes I used as a Boy Scout, but easier to walk in. Jason took us to a park in Washington State just north of Portland. Actually, most of the trail we navigated had been traveled. We probably could have done it with just a good pair of boots. But it's really nice to have snowshoes, because if you step of the trail or something, you stay on top. I wish I would have had a pair of these when I was a kid growing up in the snow country of Northern Japan. So many times I would walk through deep snow and sink all the way to my hips. The reason, of course, is because soft snow is mostly air. We had skis when I was a kid, so we did a lot of cross country stuff, but skis are not always the best solution for that, especially if you come to some steep downhill areas through the woods. As we were coming back down the trail this afternoon, we met a guy on cross coutry skis who had a pair of snowshoes on his back. That's the way to go. Maybe. Skiing with snowshoes on your back would not be that much of a burden. But snowshoeing with skiis on your back might be a bit awkward. I'm pretty sure there are lots of guys like him around these parts, though, because when we rented the snowshoes, there seemed to be lots of that kind of gear being rented.

Went to a small fellowship with Heather and Jason this evening. Some of these modern churches employ a very casual approach to worship. They announced that this was going to be a praise night with no sermon. I generally think church should have a message, but in fact, they did. They showed a video clip of Nick Vujicic, the Australian who was born without arms and legs. It was quite uplifting.

The communion service was pretty casal too. It was very pleasant, although I do think churches should give some sort of exhortation as to the seriousness of the Lord's Supper. Otherwise you could have someone come in off the street and take communion who really shouldn't. Communion is not for everyone. It is for believers. The Bible has sober words for those who take communion outside the covenant of faith. I guess this is sort of taken for granted in America, which has a Christian heritage. It's not like China, where people think they're handing out free grape juice.

But it was a very nice time with some really nice people. Just one more reminder that Jesus meets us where we are. He does not expect us to come up to some sort of high religious form in order to be good enough for Him. Services like this remind me why I am so glad to be

Portland. Where young people go to retire.

I saved 1700 RMB on my ticket price by taking the early morning flight out of Beijing. But to do that, I had to get a motel near the airport. The airport is on the opposite end of the city from Fragrant Hills, where I live. The motel room cost me 268, so that means I saved 1400 and some. I flew out of Beijing early this morning and got here early this morning. The International Date Line. It does weird things to your body. But Eason picked me up at the airport, and I was able to take a good nap at Rachel and Eason's place before this evening.

   Click to enlarge.

We went to a really nice pizza place with a lot of local brews. After I posted some pictures on We Chat, a friend in China messaged me, "I searched that Portland is a beer city, is that right?" Yes, it is. According to Jason, Portland is the micro-brew capital of the world. Lots and lots of small local beers and ciders. And really, really good pizza. Better not eat that too often.