Our trip to the 798 Beijing Art District was definitely one of the highlights of my three weeks in Beijing. The Beijing art is an area of the city reserved solely for Chinese artists and craftsmen to display and sell their work, as well as sell Chinese souvenirs and an assortment of different foods. Not only is it fantastic that a city has a hub for artists like the 798—something all cities should have—but it gave us foreigners a glimpse at traditional, as well as modern Chinese art, culture, and thought. It was definitely a unique opportunity to experience that much culture and creativity in a single district of the city, and it is a place I would definitely return to. 

Examples of artwork seen at the art district:

Another interesting day trip was to the Beijing Silk Market—a shopping center selling a huge assortment of different clothing, jewelry, artwork, traditional Chinese souvenirs, and different foods. While the contents of the mall are almost all name-brand and high-end, they’re also almost all fake. Because of this, going to the market was the perfect place to practice our Chinese language and bargaining skills—using all the words we know to try to get the price down as low as possible. Because the Silk Market is usually visited solely by foreigners—whose Chinese skills aren’t great—the shops are designed to trick and overcharge who don’t know the difference. While the items sold by the shops were many of the same things we would see at a shopping center in the states, it was an experience vastly different than any we could ever have in the U.S.

Overall, it was a a great weekend! 

Halfway through my third week living in Beijing, I finally feel like I am beginning to acclimate.  The cultural shock and immediate novelty of my surroundings has given way to a deeper interaction.  For instance, ordering breakfast on the way to class from the small cafe, a once daunting task, has become routine.  Speaking the Chinese language has also become more natural.  Why practicing at school, I was limited to just an hour of class time, so it was easy to forget about speaking for the next 23 hours.  Here, I am constantly thinking in terms of the language.  In conversations, I find myself responding more and more readily.  Third year Chinese is helping me quickly learn how to voice opinions in Chinese, which has led to more stimulating conversation outside of the classroom.  While I am still not “comfortable”, I have embraced my surroundings and the challenge they present. 

Two weekends ago, we visited the Forbidden Palace.  On one of the hottest days in Beijing so far, my classmates and I made our way through a seemingly endless array of ornate buildings and beautiful gardens.  The architecture was truly spectacular.  I enjoyed learning about the history and culture that surrounded the palace.  Perhaps even more interesting was observing the sense of pride Chinese felt in visiting the Palace.  It really provided a view into the historical relevance of the place.  It was truly humbling to be part of their experience looking at the Emperor’s throne room, and hiking up the hill to see the giant golden Buddha statue. 

I believe that my ability to speak Chinese is progressing at a rate at which I did expect when planning to spend my summer in Beijing.  Although I am in intensive classes for much of my time here, I believe my true progress is made outside of the classroom.  Last weekend, I took a cab home from a restaurant I had visited, and found myself holding a conversation about the European Soccer Championships.  While I had never actually read in a book how to criticize the German National soccer team, I was quickly able to learn, and maintain the conversation.  While I no doubt stumbled and made a fool of myself at some points, the driver would just laugh and correct me.  Experiences like these account for much of my learning in Beijing, and are definitely the most fun I have learning the language. 

I am very excited for the next four and a half weeks in for of me.  This week our class is planning to travel to Xi’an.  It will be great to be able to see another city outside of Beijing, and I cannot wait for the opportunities it affords me. 

吃了吗？
(As I recently learned, asking if a friend recently ate serves as a substitute for saying hello, an appropriate segue way into…)

In a sort of coincidence (that I’m going to chose to interpret as divine intervention for the sake of a dramatic blog), the very topic I fussed over as the most glaring shortcoming in my ability to express my daily needs, all required for ordering food, was the central focus covered in the past week. While this laid the foundation for understanding a dish’s components, I am nowhere near being able to boast that I could translate any item from any menu in any restaurant, especially given the sheer enormity of variety in Chinese cuisine. In fact, our daily lesson included an adage on the eclectic melange in every kitchen: “带翅膀的除了飞机什么都能吃，四条腿的除了桌椅什么都可以吃,” — besides those of an airplane, you can eat any wing; besides the four under a table or chair, you can eat any leg. Hardly the musings of Confucius, but equally as pithy and equally as observant. Now three and a half weeks into the program, I cannot think of any saying more adequate.

Except maybe a joke told by our program’s Professor Zhu. In response to a few remarks regarding the 很奇怪 meats with which we were not acquainted as we gathered around the ubiquitous Lazy-Susan style dining table, Zhu Laoshi told us about a Chinese man that once went on a safari in the African savannah. While exploring the man was bitten by the world’s most venomous snake. Instead of keeling over dead, the man stood and watched as the snake keeled over from ingesting the digested foods in his own system, potent enough to kill even the beast. Though said in warning of the imminent food poisoning we may expect, which I thankfully have yet to experience, I think the humor holds a definitive truth to it.

Apart from the dining room, I am pleasantly surprised the degree to which I learn from exploring the jungle that is Beijing. I am endlessly thankful the subway systems and most street signs also include the pinyin pronunciation of the characters it displays, so I can practice the reading and speaking aspects of the language wherever I go. I have found that many formal names are compounded words of simpler building blocks, which with repeated exposure I have begun to recognize and piece together. For example: Tian’anmen Square’s name comes from 天 安 门  tiān (sky, heaven) ān (peace) mén (gate, door) meaning the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Elsewhere, Wudaokou, the name of a nearby neighborhood means the Opening of Five Pathways. With components like these, I’ve been able to decipher the names of other places around Beijing, typically including place words like bridge, alley, gate, pathway, etc.

The Summer Palace was especially interesting to apply this pattern. Retaining many of its original heavenly and or naturally derived names and the context of the feature allows me to circumvent the English translation and anticipate the meaning of the unknown vocabulary. Accordingly, I’ve learned words I would otherwise not think to look up for usage, like “arch” from 十七孔桥, the Seventeen Arch Bridge, pictured below. Besides the strictly academic benefits of visiting the Summer Palace on a lazy, hazy Sunday afternoon, the proximity to campus and the traditional buildings surrounding the scenery of the Kunming Lake made the site easily one of my favorites in Beijing.

The more I explore, the more I fully realize the total dichotomy of this country. On Saturday afternoon, the program visited 798, Beijing’s modern arts district, situated at the foot of steel high-rises in repurposed brick factory buildings from the nascency of the communist industrial booms in the 1950s. But on Sunday afternoon, I climbed the stone paths to survey the Sea of Wisdom Temple and Hall of Buddhist Incense from nearly half a century ago. All within the same country. All within the same half of the same city. But lest I forget a half of this modernized ancient country, a pagoda will ornament the mountain ranges beyond the sky-scraping Central Business District or the steely skyline will assert itself through the view of a modest temple.

It’s hard to believe it’s already been two weeks, time has seemed to pass so quickly. It doesn’t seek like all that long ago since I landed in Beijing. The flight itself, however, seemed like it would never end. Fortunately, I was lucky to share a row with two kind Chinese people who every so often would start a conversation with me, which I think made the time pass a bit quicker. One of them even helped me read a page of a book she was reading. The conversations were mixed Chinese and English, so it was also good practice before I got on the ground in Beijing. After settling into the dorms, I and the other students had our first authentic Chinese dinner. That next morning I woke up at 4:00 AM, and continued to wake up early until I recovered from jet lag, which took a few days.

That first weekend we were given a tour of the campus and were introduced to our language partners, who all seemed friendly. Campus is beautiful (the northern half of campus could easily be mistaken for a park), complete with a lake (未名湖 lit. “nameless lake”), trails, and traditional Chinese architecture. The other half of campus is replete with school buildings, supermarkets, dining halls, and other shops. The dorm rooms are very good; they are larger than I expected, plenty of outlets that are compatible with American electronics, strong air conditioning (which is excellent because this city can get incredibly hot sometimes), and hot water. You share a common room and a bathroom with at least one other person, which for most of us was another Notre Dame student. These are both pictures of campus:

The first days of classes weren’t so bad, but it didn’t take long to get up to speed. There are four hours of classes in the morning, as well as a half-hour long one-on-one session with one of the teachers in the afternoon. Every school night also has a two-hour long study session in the classroom for which attendance is optional, but most people tend to go as you are awarded extra credit for going to a certain number of there. At these you have time to do much of the homework and ask questions if you need to. It’s also a good time to preview the next lesson, which is necessary as every class starts with a quiz. The speed of the class is very quick, but not unbearable as long as you put in the time every night.

My first impressions of the dining halls are good. They can be rather chaotic, and the foods available are only posted in Chinese, so we end up more or less pointing to get what we want, but the food is good and very cheap, usually less than 10 RMB a meal. There are several dining halls nearby, and they all work a little differently and offer different dishes. The restaurants we’ve gone to so far have been very good. The food here is very different but I’m getting used to it. Meals in restaurants are served family style, and chopsticks are always used, both in restaurants and in dining halls. Also, beverages are seldom served chilled; Chinese prefer most drinks either hot or lukewarm.

Our first program-sponsored weekend trip was to the Great Wall, which we went to on Saturday. And I can honestly say the Great Wall is the most, if not second most incredible thing I’ve seen in my life. This far from Beijing there is no smog to obscure the skies, and you can clearly see the mountains that lie all around Beijing. The hardest and most exhausting part was simply the climb up to the Great Wall. After climbing flights and flights of stairs, and then a few flights more, we managed to actually stand atop the great wall. The view from the wall is truly magnificent. Standing, surrounded by forests and mountains, seeing the Great Wall extend in both directions, meandering through the peaks. We walked along the length of the wall for a while before turning back. Here are a few pictures I took there.

That Sunday a few classmates and I went to the Pearl Market, a large market in Beijing. They sell tons of things: cheap electronics, clothing, bags, chopsticks, fans, shoe, you name it. No items have price tags and you have to haggle with the vendors to reach a price. If you come to Beijing, you should go to at least one of these such markets. To get there, we rode the subway for the first time, and my first impression of the subway was very good. It’s cheap and fairly quick, and there are stations all over the city. Classes resumed the next day, much like like the week before.

When someone asks me what I’m studying at Notre Dame, I respond by saying, “Finance, Spanish, and Chinese” as I watch their expression shift from mildly interested to very confused. After asking me to repeat myself at least once, they almost always respond with, “Chinese?! Really?! Isn’t it hard?! Have you ever been to China?!” I smile politely and answer their questions with “Yes, yes, it is, and no but I would love to go someday!” Little did I know that, when the time finally came for me to take the 13.5 hour flight over the ocean and finally get to experience authentic Chinese culture, being in China would be one of the hardest and one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced.

Generally speaking, Chinese class in China is about the same as in America. We have homework, oral reports, essays, tests, daily quizzes, and wonderful teachers. However, every single day we have four hours of class followed by forty minutes of one on one conversation with a teacher. Learning Chinese makes one ridiculously tired, whether its from painstakingly trying to learn 250 new words a week that all sound and look about the same or from struggling to understand difficult grammar concepts that only exist in Chinese but not English. Because I signed a language pledge that I would only speak Chinese for eight weeks, I’ve been trying my hardest to learn as much of the language as quickly as I can in order to communicate as clearly as possible. Furthermore, speaking English in China practically has no use because it is seldom to come across anyone who can understand English.

Although becoming fluent in Chinese often feels like an impossible task, little breakthroughs and simple triumphs throughout my time here have pushed me to keep going. When I successfully obtained a card from the lady at the subway desk and navigated my way from my home at Peking University 2 lines and 17 subway stops away to a restaurant for dinner where I was able to successfully order food in Chinese, it felt like I could actually become accustomed to living in China. 8 weeks in a foreign country with foreign customs and a foreign language? I can do that! …can’t I?!

My first weekend in Beijing was spent getting situated in my dorm, learning about the program during orientation, and meeting my Chinese language partner, a Chinese Peking University student named Lily who has already taught me a few popular slang phrases in Chinese. On Sunday, June 19th, I also got to celebrate my birthday! The Notre Dame coordinator and Chinese teacher, Ye Laoshi, truly cares about the well-being of his students, and he bought two cakes to help me celebrate turning 20 in Beijing! Ye Laoshi calls himself our yeye- ye in Chinese can also mean grandfather, and Ye Laoshi’s caring nature has definitely turned him into our Chinese grandfather, even though he’s a young teacher. It was definitely a unique birthday, especially considering the two cakes were made of vegetables, as Chinese people traditionally do not enjoy sweet treats.

The second weekend in Beijing, Notre Dame took us on a trip to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China. After taking an almost two hour bus ride out of the city of Beijing on Saturday morning at 8 AM, we finally arrived at the entrance to the wall. In order to reach the wall, we climbed about 80 flights of stairs up to the sixth guard post of the wall. We quickly realized that the Chinese version of hiking was really climbing stairs instead of walking up inclines. It was one of the most physically tiring things I’ve ever done, especially considering it was over 100 degrees outside in the sun. Once we reached the wall, we were rewarded with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and greenery. We “hiked” from the 6th guard post up to the top of the 12th guard post, taking in the breathtaking scenery and coming across a few Notre Dame alums along the way, just proving how ridiculously widespread the Notre Dame network truly is. After finally getting to the top of the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, we hiked back down to the 4th guard post where we were able to take a slide down the side of the mountain. It was one of the more dangerous and most fun things I’ve ever done. I was so fortunate to visit one of the wonders of the world, and I’m so thankful for such a great opportunity! On the way back from the Great Wall, we stopped at an art gallery opening and were able to meet the owners and artists. It was so interesting to discuss the art work with its creators in Chinese, and it was cool to see how even though people may come from different cultures, they all experience the same feelings of hope, sadness, and confusion that can be expressed through their art.

On Sunday, we were on our own to explore the city as we pleased. We decided to take the subway to the Hongqiao Pearl Market, one of the largest counterfeit markets in the city. All though none of the items in the 7 floor building were real, they were all so realistic looking some tourists were getting fooled into paying prices one would pay for the real thing! It was so fun to barter with the shopkeepers, and negotiating a good price is definitely an acquired skill that takes a bit of practice. The different shopkeepers have bartering with foreigners down to a science, using flattering English phrases and huge calculators to negotiate fair prices. Being American and being able to speak Chinese was definitely a huge advantage, as most of the shopkeepers immediately took a liking to us and wanted to know how and why we had undertaken the challenge of learning one of the most difficult languages. After getting ripped off a few times and finally figuring out the best way to get the lowest price possible, I walked out of the market with basketball jerseys for my brother, two purses for myself,  two touristy shirts with funny sayings, and a traditional Chinese shirt. It was overall a very fun and light-hearted day. However, I couldn’t relax for too long as I had to go to office hours to prepare a 700 word essay and study for my quiz the next day!

Even though I’m in third year Chinese and am learning how to engage in discussions about complicated topics such as the no-longer-existent One-Child policy and the governmental restrictions on NGO’s, I am definitely realizing how long and winding the road is to even come close to speaking fluent Chinese. For right now, I’m just trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of everything going on around me as I struggle to put together bits and pieces of what I’ve learned in class and apply them to the situations that I engage in around me. For right now, I’m still chasing China.