toastykitten

I'm going to New York in a few hours. For one blissful week of vacation. I'm so excited!!!

I like Philly so far, all three hours I've seen of the outside. Our room is small, and the toiletries suck, but there is free wireless and we're right in the middle of downtown. And this city is immensely walkable, unlike, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles, which I love.

Hangzhou was our last stop before the end of the tour. It was also one of my favorite places because it was so beautiful and CLEAN. For the past ten days my snot had been coming out black, but it was actually starting to clear up a little here. We were given a terrible tour guide, who kept punctuating every sentence with "Ah"! Granted, the other tour guides whose Cantonese was not their first dialect did it, too, but they didn't do it as much as this one. "Ah! We are at the tomb of YuFei. Ah! He was a war hero. Ah!"

We were told by Leslie that the reason Hangzhou was so beautiful was because of Nixon's historic visit to China. Hangzhou was one of his stops, and he made an offhand comment about how it was beautiful, but kind of old-looking. So then the Hangzhou government decided to clean it up and make it into a really beautiful place. It is actually pretty crazy - if you compare it to the crowdedness and smog-filled cities like Shanghai and Beijing. You can actually breathe in Hangzhou, and have some semblance of a private space.

We walked around SaiWu, or West Lake, and also took a short boat ride that was pretty awesome. I loved all the landscapes, and we passed by several people who had rented their own boats for the afternoon. A Mongolian tour group passed us and started singing loudly in their own language - they were wearing their own country's clothes - furs and all - and all of them had very red, sunburnt faces.

After the boat ride was a visit to the temple and tomb of YuFei, who as far as I could tell was a war hero in some far off dynasty. We were informed that most of the original tomb had been ransacked and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (at least I think that's what she said) and that many of the items we saw, such as statues, and paintings, were pieced together afterwards.

Hangzhou is famous for their tea leaves, supposedly some of the best in the world. So of course our government sponsored tour stop for the day is a tea house where they sell us tea leaves at fucking outrageous prices. And I mean prices that would be outrageous even in America. Our salesman talked a lot about the antioxidant benefits of green tea, which I was with him on until he told us that some dude had been injecting the AIDS virus into watermelons and that you could actually get AIDS that way. The implication being that drinking green tea would purify the AIDS virus out of you. "Don't worry, he has been caught." I shot my sister a look and could hardly hold my laughter in.

Oh, and this may be a betrayal of my heritage but I thought the Chinese green tea was way too bitter. I prefer the Japanese kind.

God, Chinese medicine.

Our next stop was actually for Chinese medicine. This won raves all over the bus, as many of the tour participants were old immigrants and had various aches and pains, and believed that the stankier something was, the better it was for you. My sister and I joined my mom in a room where the salesman gave us some handouts. My sister and I were given the English translation, which was full of grammatical errors and almost seemed to hail from a different universe. What is "wind-phlegm"? I still have the paper somewhere.

My sister and I had to leave the room, though, when the salesperson started rubbing free samples of ointments all over people. You would have thought he was giving out gold or something, the way people were like, "Hey, over here! My back hurts!" Have you ever smelled Tiger Balm? It's a god-awful smelling herbal ointment that people (even Mark's mom uses it) use to rub on places that hurt. Picture an enclosed space with thirty people clamoring to be rubbed with something even more foul-smelling than that.

Ugh. Yeah, so we had to leave the room. The front had a display of various Chinese alternative medicines with probably mislabelled English - many of them said "Semen _____". There was one of dried human placenta. You can probably see the rest on my Flickr page.

After dinner we saw an acrobat show that was supposed to showcase all of Chinese history, I think. I think one of the dancers was Indian - she didn't look very Chinese to me. It was pretty cool and my parents both loved it. I couldn't get any good pictures on my camera though.

Afterwards Leslie mentioned that he competed in a singing competition once and had even been offered a record contract. He turned it down because he was in school at the time. Anyway, he serenaded us with a few songs - the first one, from Leslie Cheung's archive, the second one, Andy Lau's "mong ching sui" and the third, Teresa Teng's famous song whose title escapes me.

At the hotel, I was relieved to find out that our beds were soft.

The next day, Guangzhou!

So every tour guide told us how to cat-call in the Suzhou dialect, and told us that Suzhou was known for both being a "land of pretty girls" and a really romantic city in general. Many go to Suzhou to get their wedding pictures taken because it's so scenic. We did not get a pretty girl for our tour bus, but the other tour bus did. Our tour guide was a baby faced guy with glasses named Ah Jun, who had an equally babyish voice. It was a bit disconcerting.

During our long tour bus ride, Leslie opened up a little about the harsh realities of Chinese life. Leslie just about fell over when he learned that Americans don't pay for public school education at all. He mentioned that he knew one of his friends who got pregnant and decided to abort the baby, even though it would have been a boy, because she couldn't figure out a plan to pay for the child's education. Every year costs about $10k renmenbai. The average, lucky person with a steady job makes about $2k renmenbai a month.

He also told us that if a person needed surgery in China, the family would save to give a $5k renmenbai red envelope to the doctor. He was careful to say that you didn't have to do it, but you'd just feel a lot better if you did. Of course, he horrorified the majority of us with this small detail, because we were so used to having our doctors just follow the law and not take bribes or things that would seem to be a conflict of interest. He then changed the subject, saying something like, "well there are lots of things to like and dislike about China, just as there are in America", and the topic changed to stars that Chinese people love and hated.

Chinese people LOVE Andy Lau, Anita Mui, Roman Tam, etc. He named a number of people that were already dead and I think Andy Lau was the only person who was alive on that list.

Chinese people really hate Zhang Ziyi because they think she's so arrogant. And she has the nerve to go and ACT in ENGLISH movies when her English is so TERRIBLE!

I'm sorry - the Chinese hate for Zhang Ziyi amuses me a lot.

My notes for the first day in Nanjing is really short. I know we got introduced to Leslie, a tour guide and native of Nanjing who would accompany us throughout the tour. He looked like this Taiwanese singer/actor that I used to think was cute. He was fairly young - only a year older than me, actually, and he talked a lot about how much he loved his mom. It got my parents clapping, as he went on and on about filial piety, and made me and my sisters roll our eyes.

In Nanjing we visited Sun Yat-Sen's mausoleum. You had to climb something like three hundred steps to get to it. Did I mention how many tripping hazards China has? There's no such thing as "wheelchair accessible". I tripped over everything - in restaurants, random rooms would be slightly raised a few inches over the actual floor, for no reason I could discern - it wasn't for aesthetics, that's for sure. It drove me crazy.

Sun Yat-Sen's body is actually up there in the mausoleum.  There are also a couple of pots that were shot at by the Japanese. The holes were never mended, to remind us of what the Japanese did. Here, we were informed that any Japanese person visiting Nanjing is required by the government to visit all the memorial sites. Hence, no Japanese ever visit Nanjing.

I know we went to a jade place. That was boring. And expensive. I note in my journal that the funny thing about all the government-sponsored tourist shops is that they all seem to be staffed by young women. Shortage of females in China? Not in these shops - they outnumber male staff 10 to 1. And they are so, so pushy. They will not physically let go of you until you purchase something. I had to do a lot of ducking to avoid being caught in their clutches.

We also went to visit the Yangtze, I think, which is actually called something else in Cantonese. I don't remember what it's called. The weather was starting to get cold, so our pictures didn't come out that well. In the building where we stopped, we met a government-paid artist who painted stuff inside crystal balls. It's a lot prettier than I'm making it sound. My parents bought a few.

Next day is WuXi, where we'll go to Taihu, a great lake.

Welcome to day 2 of my China trip. I forgot to mention that I'm making these notes based on a journal I kept while in China, but they're not very consistent or anything, so I'm elaborating on things as I go along. I make no guarantees for the facts that our tour guides imparted on us. I know these entries are really long, but I really need a way to remember as much as possible, and the only way I can do that is to write as much of it out as I can.  Otherwise I'm going to be looking at my notes and thinking, "What the hell did I mean by Super8-Hotel Breakfast - bleh?"

I am back! It feels so good to be home in the Bay Area, despite the rain and the cold. I missed home so much.

Some things I have learned while in China:

1. Chinese people really, really loathe Zhang Ziyi. On a level that just goes beyond reason. Ok, I don't think she's that hot, either, but I don't have enough energy to hate her. Seriously, one of the reasons the tour guide listed for hating her was that "She tries to speak in English, and it isn't even that good."
2. Chinese people really, really like Andy Lau. I'm with them on that.
3. My sisters are the pickiest people on the planet. The pickiest one? She literally starved herself the entire time because she couldn't stand the food. She snacked on stuff she brought from the US instead. And it wasn't because the food was really, really bad - it was just mediocre. I offered her a bite of my jook (rice porridge), which is bland and has zero flavor. She tasted it and made a face. "What?" I asked. "There's no flavor to it." Her response was, and I kid you not, "It has too much of a rice taste."
4. Guangdong people are known for loving to eat. It was in Guangzhou and Hong Kong that we got the best food. (Those weren't part of the tour, though.)
5. Cool Guangzhou kids live in the eighties, and are slowly edging towards the grunge stage.
6. My dad did a lot of things in China that I didn't know about. Many of his students came up to him and still recognized him. I should mention that this is only his second time back in thirty years.
7. The villages my parents grew up in are dying out.
8. My grandpa on my mom's side had three wives. One of them ran away. We used to think that was my mom's birth mom, but then we visited her grave to pay our respects.
9. Peeing in the squatting position is very hard if you're not used to it, and requires some strategy if you don't want to pee on your pants or miss the toilet. I did not have to pee in front of anybody, thank god.
10. Our tour guide almost fell over after learning that American primary, middle and high school education were free.
11. United Airlines sucks.
12. Tour guides like to tell you how to catcall in the Suzhou dialect. If the girl's pretty, you say to her, "Ai-yoh", drawing out the "o" sound at the end. If she's really pretty, you say "Ai-yoh-yoh". If she's not pretty, you would say, "Ai-yah." Really ugly: "Ai-yah-yah!" Suzhou is known for its pretty girls, although I couldn't tell the difference.
13. I saw more black people in Beijing than I do in a day in San Francisco. (The China-Africa forum was going on at the same time we were there.)
14. Chinese people like to sleep on hard beds.
15. There is a phone and a scale in every hotel bathroom in China. I have no idea why.
16. My cousin Nina, who lives in Guangzhou, was unable to come to the US for college. Why? Because US Immigration knew that she had an aunt and a sister living in the US on green cards already, and said that she would probably try to stay if she came to the US.
17. Chinese people - at least our relatives, anyway - can't hear the word "No". It gets very irritating. "Do you want something more to eat?" "No, thank you. I'm full." "Here, have a pear." "No, thank you." "How about an apple? You should have an apple." "No, thank you." "How about some sugar cane?" "No, thank you." It got so bad my parents had to basically tell them that they should not bother asking us again after we've said no. Do people just eventually give in after saying no a million times?
18. Families really know how to push all your buttons, even when they aren't trying.
19. The place to buy fake purses is Ladies Street in Hong Kong. Just point at the Marc Jacobs or Prada knockoff you want and someone will get it for you. Don't pay more than $30.
20. Chinese people are shocked to learn that I don't understand Mandarin, or Putonghua, as they call it. Salespeople would just keep talking to me as if I understood what they were saying, and I just smiled and nodded. Also, the salespeople here are really fucking pushy. They will grab you by the hand and put stuff on you and all the while you're squirming to make a polite getaway.
21. The Chinese government must make millions off all the tour buses that show up at all these national sites and buy their government-sponsored trinkets.

That's about it for now. For the next couple of weeks I might write up the stuff I saw. I really regret not bringing a sketchbook with me, although there wasn't much time to sketch. I wish I wasn't one of those people who get carsick or airsick, but I am, and it just bugs me that all that time I could be drawing or reading I had to stare out the window or sleep. I tried listening to the histories that the tour guides told us, but my Cantonese wasn't good enough to follow, and eventually I would just fall asleep. Anyway, the most interesting stories that the tour guides weren't the histories, but rather stories about themselves, and when they veered off-track from their scripts. I felt a bit bad for the tour guides - a number of them had college degrees or were working towards them, and they were stuck with us, people who were lucky enough to have made it to America and able and willing to spend more money in two weeks than they made in two months.

I didn't feel like I reached some sort of new conclusion about my Chinese identity, which I thought might happen. I think it's part of growing up in the Bay - if I wanted to surround myself with Chinese people and talk about Chinese stuff, I had that option already. I did, however, learn exactly how much of a spoiled American brat I am, and it's not a pleasant realization to have. The trip just made a lot of things in my head make more sense - sometimes if you don't see a thing, no matter how much you know it's true, it just isn't there. My parents used to tell us all the time about how hard it was to farm land and how they had to pick up cow poop for manure and how small our house in the village was - and my sisters and I rolled our eyes and would say, "But we are living in America now. We don't have to do those things, so why bring it up?" And then I saw the village, and it was tiny - just a row of houses stacked close to each other - most not having more than two rooms. My sister, who was old enough to remember living there, said that our house was better now that it had walls. My parents pointed out where they used to carry water from the well, the mountains they had to climb to get firewood, and how they had to take the vegetables to the market, and something in my head just clicked - I had a better idea of what my parents used to have to do, and it's really nothing compared to the life they lived in America. Life in America was hard for my parents (I don't kid myself that it was hard for me), but compared to the farm life, it's not really hard at all. We had a roof over our heads, we had (some) support from relatives, if my dad lost a job he could get another one. We had days off, and we ate better than anything we would have had in China.

I'd like to go back, after the 2008 Olympics are over. It's fascinating to me how much things have changed, and in such a rapid time-span, too. I wasn't able to look at the BBC on the Internet, but every hotel had the BBC International Channel on, which I found hilarious. Our tour guides would often pepper their conversations with "Mao Zhe-dong said..." It made me think that it was the new "Confucius say..." which one of my English teachers used to do, until somebody pointedly said, "Confucius says."

I head to China tomorrow. I am so excited, and yet kind of nervous. I've never been on a plane this long before, never flown overseas, and can't really imagine what China is actually like even though I've seen pictures and spent most of my life around Chinese people. I also don't know if I will survive my family for the next few weeks. We'll see.

Anyway, we'll see. The first stop is Beijing, then Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangdong, Hong Kong.

See you in a few weeks.

Tomorrow we're flying to Seattle, to meet up with some friends for our New Year's Eve celebration. Since Mark and I hardly ever spend any holidays together, it's definitely a treat for me. Apparently the plan is to go to some "good underground hip hop" concert. I have not heard the words "underground", "good", and "hip hop" all in the same sentence lately, so I have my hopes up. I don't have a name. Will probably write about them once I see them.

The next day we're driving up with Mark's friends to Vancouver. I am the queen of packing. I packed all our stuff, including umbrella, beanies, gloves, undies, heavy sweaters and towels all in our luggage, and we still had room for Mark's laptop. We're bringing his laptop because we got a hotel with wireless. Geeks need their Internet. In Vancouver, we plan on eating dim sum, possibly taking a walking tour of Gastown, going to the aquarium because they have beluga whales, and checking out the underground historical drama of Vancouver. There may be more.

We're going to have to remind ourselves to take lots of pictures. We always bring the camera and forget about it. It's such a waste of my money. ^_^

Project Runway has podcasts! Tim Gunn explains what goes on behind the scenes, what the cameras didn't show, etc. Zod's meltdown went on for about ninety minutes, Diana's clothes looked nothing like what she pitched to Heidi, and Heidi surprises everyone by having a brain.

I hate Zod. I don't even think he's that talented - he just keeps adding ruffles and thinks that makes up for his lack of understanding about a woman's body. There's no one I really root for right now like I did in Season 1. This season, they're either mean, or boring, and they seem unwilling to listen. I mean, did any of them even watch Season 1? So far I think Nick has the most potential, Chloe is talented but boring, Diana totally disappointed with this last challenge and is so inarticulate I wanted to smack her, Emmett is a cute boring robot overcompensating his menswear background with pink frills, Marla can't sew, Zod is evil incarnate, Daniel V who? I can't remember anyone else.

Must. Sleep.

We went to Hearst Castle today, on the way back from visiting my oldest sister and her family. This is the short version: Rich people craaaazy.