GADLING’S TAKE FIVE: Week of June 10

by Adrienne Wilson on

Here’s a handful from the week that you may have looked over some how and for one reason or another they deserve all your attention. Take five, 15 or 50 minutes exploring these posts from this week.

5. Urban Camping: Tents in the Big City?:
Like camping or sleeping in your car? Here’s a lovely gear idea to get you doing both right out on your urban neighborhood street or avenue or boulevard.

4. Internet Everywhere with AutoNet Mobile:
This one is for real internet junkies or professionals who actually need the net on the GO. See how you can get broadband internet service for your car.

3. America’s Most Miserable Airports:
A trip through the airport can be a trip in itself. Find out which airports you should try avoiding this summer when making plans that may include a layover or flying through them all together.

2. Eating Your Way Through the Ethnic Neighborhoods of Los Angeles:
Looking for something different to feast on in the city of Angels tonight? The options are endless as Neil points out in this spotlight on some of the ethnic neighborhoods serving up exotic plates. Oh, and they’re delicious too…

1. A Canadian in Beijing: Shannon’s Wings:
Ember pays homage to a close friend who committed suicide and walks us through the details of an accidental bird sanctuary visit. The piece is touching, beautiful and thought-provoking. Hands down one of the best for the week…

A Canadian in Beijing: Laoshe Cha Guan (Laoshe Teahouse)

by Ember Swift on

Tea is important in China. It has been part of China’s cultural legacy for centuries. Even the word “tea” originally comes from the word “te” in Fuzhou Hua (the Chinese dialect in Fuzhou Province). In Mandarin, the word for tea is “cha” ??? (same character) and many other languages also use this pronunciation.

Tea has so much significance here and is used for so much, not just to fill a cup so that one can sip warm liquid. For example, various teas are used in Chinese medicine, tea is used in cooking to flavour foods, tea is used in washing and bathing, tea is used to help with skin abrasions or to help your puffy eyes when you’re underslept or hungover, i.e. steeped green tea leaves pressed onto the black circles under your eyes and then wait awhile. Dried used tea leaves have also traditionally been used to fill children’s pillows and is believed to be good for their developing minds. This is only some of what I learned about tea this week. (Yes, school can be helpful!)

So, it was perfect timing for an invitation from my new friend Rain to go out for a cup of tea together (??????????????????? “Do you want to go out for tea?” is more regularly asked here than “Do you want to have a coffee?”). I figured we were going to a local (random) café and I was simply looking forward to getting to know a new friend and scanning the menu for the various kinds of tea that I learned about in my lessons.

What I didn’t realize was that she had tickets to the most famous and historically significant teahouse in Beijing: Lao She Cha Guan ???????????.

Lao She was a famous Chinese author who was born in Beijing (then called Peking). He wrote many plays and novels throughout the course of his life, one of which was called “Teahouse” or “Chaguan 茶馆” in 1956. It was about the ups and downs of the people’s lives in China throughout the turbulent changes between 1898 and 1945 and has been dramatized many times by the Beijing People’s Theatre.

What truly interests me about Lao She is his political affiliation. He was a radical, it seems, and wrote work that was critical of decadence and political corruption and championed national resistance. At the time of Communist control, he was safely stowed in the United States but was forced to return in 1949.

I learned that between 1949 and 1966, Lao She wrote several plays and was “put to use” by the hierarchy but that his work during this period was never critically acclaimed. He “gave every indication of being a loyal support of the Peking government, but his egregious form of flattery, so exaggerated in its denunciation of the state’s enemies, may have been a form of oblique satire.” (source)

(Well, of course it was.)

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, people like Lao She – public figures with loud, politically critical and/or influential voices with any history of dissent – were doomed.

He committed suicide in September of 1966.

(Hello again, Shannon.)

So, when I walked up to this building and saw all the connections to my life, I had to pause a moment to take it all in once again. There are simply no coincidences are there? No, I don’t think so.

The place was packed and Rain had already reserved tickets for the tearoom which included a full performance in traditional Chinese style. As she was negotiating for a table and settling the tickets, I watched tourist after tourist pose beside the bust of Lao She for a photo. We were then ushered into the tearoom and seated at a large table that was already occupied by two other women. Historically, teahouses were the places that people would come and sip their various teas, make new friends and take in the arts.

This current building, while newly constructed as the first teahouse in Beijing after the reform period (I believe it was built in 1989), has a full performance room with large round tables at which people sit with strangers eating sweet “xiao chi” (snacks) and sipping bottomless cups of traditional Chinese tea.

The stage is at one end and the performances were fantastic. The show began with a tribute to the upcoming Olympics and how the five Olympic Ring colours can be equated to the five traditional kinds of tea in China. Furthermore, there was a short Chinese opera (Beijing style), a magician, the traditional “xiang sheng” performance which is a Chinese comedic conversational exchange also known as “cross-talk comedy” (Da Shan is a famous Canadian performer here in China as his Chinese is impeccable and he is an expert in this performance style), some martial arts dances by various energetic young boys, etc. I can’t identify all of the traditional performance styles but it was all very enjoyable.

My favourite performance was called kouji 口技. It was a performance that featured two elderly men who used their mouths to make sound effects. The main part of their show was a full conversation in bird calls filled with emphatic gesturing and miming. The audience loved it. They finished their performance doing impressions of various forms of transportation like airplanes, trains and automobiles. They were a brilliant team.

(Hey, quick aside: what was that American movie from the 80’s called that was all about cops – maybe Police Academy? — where there was an actor who could make all of these amazing sounds with his mouth and he would often just speak in sounds rather than words? This is what that performance made me think of.)

I laughed and applauded even when I didn’t fully understand the meaning of these performances. The facial expressions on the faces of the performers were enough to make me laugh. This style and variety of performance is totally conducive to having no Chinese language skills. Many of the performances were wordless and easily entertained the many non-Chinese speakers in attendance.

After the concert, we took a stroll through the reconstructed traditional Chinese tea house which has been built inside the building – sort of like a building within a building. There was a false courtyard and a woman playing the guzheng and several little nooks and crannies in which to sip tea and take it all in as if we were back in time by a hundred years. I was not permitted to take photos inside this teahouse replica, however, and so I cannot show you what it looked like. All I can tell you is that it was peaceful and lovely and felt a bit like a living museum.

When we left, we zigzagged around the vendors outside wanting us to buy souvenirs and/or ride in their rickshaws and emerged quietly onto the sidewalk into the cool summer air. It had been raining slightly while we were inside and the damp freshness in the city cooled the skin my face and inspired me to breathe deeply.

This has been a reflective week filled with fortuitous timing and fated experiences.

Everything happens for a reason.

In Chinese, there is a beautiful word that sums up my recent time here: yuanfen 缘分. This compound (as it consists of two characters) means “destiny, fate, purpose, predestined lot” all rolled into two lyrical syllables.

Yes, China, I believe in yuanfen 缘分.

You make it impossible not to!

A Canadian in Beijing: The Wild Wall Will Not Be Tamed

by Ember Swift on

When I went to the Great Wall on that first weekend I arrived in China, I simultaneously learned about the “rest of the wall.” By this, I mean the “wild wall” that isn’t a tourist attraction but lies along the spines of mountains across China, crumbling and often forgotten.

National Geographic Adventure Magazine ran an article called “Astride the Dragon’s Back” (written by Matthew Power). My friend here loaned it to me after we returned from seeing that tourist section of the Great Wall. I read it twice. I was fascinated.

This weekend, a friend of mine took mercy on my country girl self and took me to the outskirts of Beijing so that I could breathe some fresh air. Our plans were simply to see green mountains, fresh water and breathe deeply. On Saturday morning, we were climbing the mountain roads just one hour north of Beijing on his motorbike and I finally felt the city fall away from my skin. The air was fresh and the view was breathtaking. I was laughing and singing out loud into the wind when even my laughter was replaced by a gasp at what I saw.

There, on the mountain, was the Great Wall of China, climbing like a stony vine up the ridge, sporadically spiked with watchtowers and jagged in its uneven state of deterioration.

I yelled into the wind and my friend’s ear, “Look! It’s the Great Wall!” He yelled back, “No, Ember, that’s just the wild wall. The Great Wall is over there!” and he pointed to where “Mu Tian Yu,” the tourist site that I visited two months ago is located a few miles away. I yelled back , “but that’s still the Great Wall and it’s even more gorgeous! No McDonald’s and postcard vendors!” and he laughed.

And then, suddenly, he slowed down, turned off the road and parked the bike. It turns out that walking up to the wild wall is very easy. You just park your vehicle, find a path and walk up the mountain! Some paths are more worn in than others. We found this out the hard way and had to descend once before finding a more worn way that didn’t require crawling through weeds and overgrown spiked bushes!

Fifteen minutes later in the 38 degree heat, sweating and winded from the climb, I was standing on the Great Wall of China… speechless. There it was, just stretching before me like an open palm of history and I was on its back, atop piles of stone that had long fallen in on itself and formed more of a rounded ridge than a defensive squared-off one.

It was solid, though, and felt safe to stand on. It had been trekked before. There was evidence of footsteps and rubbish by other curious hikers, which was the only sad fact to what was otherwise a glorious moment of discovery for me. The rubbish, I mean. Happily, though, the trash was just on the flatter sections that had obviously been used as picnic sites. When we walked along, it was just stone and greenery for “gongli” after “gongli” (kilometre after kilometre.)

The article I read two months ago spoke about the first non-Chinese person to trek the Great Wall, British ex-pat William Lindsay, and his non-profit organization called “International Friends of the Great Wall,” an organization that he set up to promote both the exploration and the preservation of the “vast, unreconstructed, overgrown sections that are free of tourist kitsch, trash, vendors, graffiti, and all the encroachments of modernity.”

The article explained that some of the really remote sections are under threat. Apparently, one section of the wall located northwest of Beijing was dismantled stone by stone to pave a local highway. It was a thousand yards in length. Furthermore, the tourist areas “have been rebuilt and paved over, essentially, with little concern for historical accuracy or respect for the wall’s landscape.”

When I read about these situations, I really craved the wild wall and what it would feel like under my feet or against the palm of my hand. I really wondered if I had felt the history fully at the tourist site. I even wondered if the stones under my feet had truly been ancient stones or if they had all been replaced to accommodate the excessive traffic at those sites. For example, I have heard that Badaling, the most popular location of the Great Wall, gets over 10,000 visitors a day.

So on Saturday when I stood there on that wild section of the Great Wall, I felt huge and miniscule at once; I felt vividly alive and simultaneously conscious of the dead under my feet in a more raw way than I had before. The dust and dirt between the stones was grey and brown and black and white and I couldn’t help but wonder if those white flecks were ancient bones. I knelt down and took a handful of dirt into my right palm and circled the colours with my left fingers. I still couldn’t speak. I just heard the wind. I just breathed time into my lungs through the scent of the nearby lilacs mixed with my own sweat.

Time is all we have.

After awhile, we decided to climb up to the closest watchtower. It took another fifteen minutes to get there, but we made it. Peering out those old windows into the foothills and valley below, I felt a solemnity with time. These old stone buildings were still standing and still telling their stories. They’re not going anywhere fast. I was reminded that the earliest fortifications were built in the 7th century BC. While I have no idea when these specific sections were built, they are still ancient to this Canadian! And, there’s fierceness in how solid the rock sits against the mountain. Resolute. Determined. Stubborn.

I felt myself flood with respect.

I also wanted to clean up the rubbish and wished I had brought an extra plastic bag or twelve. The place was littered with plastic bottles and garbage and cigarette butts, not to mention covered in graffiti.

The article explained that recent economic growth in the past twenty years has meant the advent of the first “Chinese hiker,” or city people (once having emptied the countryside for the city in hopes of finding urban work) now exploring the countryside again, this time as wealthy tourists. One of my favourite quotes from the article is this one: “It seems ironic that the city the Great Wall was built to protect is now, in a sense, its greatest threat.”

Environmentalism is not exactly thriving here, but Lindsay’s organization is trying to promote a sense of mutual ownership, conservation and stewardship of this huge piece of ancient history. And, really, in terms of the municipality of Beijing (which is about the size of New Jersey) we’re talking about four hundred miles of The Great Wall that line its northern mountains, of which only a few have been reconstructed for tourism. Constant preservation is impossible, but instilling a sense of respect and honour for such an important piece of history is not.

My friend, who is Chinese, had never seen the wild wall before. He stood there as amazed as I was. He, too, was silent. He told me it would not be his last visit to see the wall in its natural state, crumbling back into the chaos of nature where it began.

William Lindsay is quoted as saying, “The Great Wall is an entire landscape, not just the wall itself. Its greatness is in its wholeness, and every alteration, every tourist trap makes it less.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

A Canadian in Beijing: Dancing the Bargaining Dance

by Ember Swift on

I have tried my best not to spend too much time at the markets here in Beijing. It’s easy to do. They’re addictive. I think it’s the action combined with the colours and the diversity of people you can see there. Not to mention the fact that “things” are so cheap here (by Canadian standards) that it’s hard not to get excited when you find a gift for a friend that costs a fraction of what it would back home.

And let’s not forget the bargaining.

One of my friends on campus, Daisy, is an expert bargainer. She is from France and she is just starting to learn Chinese. After only two months here studying the language, she has mastered most of the bargaining lingo and she chats easily with the shopkeepers in a dance that I find highly entertaining. Watching Daisy bargain is like watching a stage show by an expert choreographer. It’s not just her words but also her facial expressions – the disdain, the disgust, the surprise – and then her exaggerated body language that communicates a complete and utter disregard for the item in question no matter how much she would like to purchase it.

It’s awesome.The first time I went shopping with Daisy, I felt as though I should apprentice with her when it comes to bargaining; she is the master and I am the student and I watched her technique closely for subtlety and style. She has a gift.

Here in Beijing, there are several kinds of large shopping complexes. So far, I have experienced the “Yaxiu” markets down near Sanlitun area (very geared towards tourists) as well as the Wudaokou Fuzhuan markets which are here near my school. Both markets were vast and carry stall upon stall of stuff, stuff, stuff. Both feature overpriced clothing to start with that can be bargained down to a reasonable compromise after engaging in the dance. Both are exhausting, in that enjoyable kind of way.

Yaxiu markets is a huge building with several floors. Each floor has its own character. There are floors that feature only accessories like belts and purses, another for children’s wear, another for adult clothing, another for silks and materials, etc. We only spent time on three different floors before we left again, but I managed to bargain myself into two new t-shirts and a pair of jeans – with pant legs mercifully long enough for my tall self.

We noticed the presence of lots of foreigners at Ya Xiu and the obvious mark-up on the clothing as a result. As soon as a shopkeeper saw us, I felt sure that the price doubled thanks to our appearance. Clothing that I’d seen in the Wudaokou markets for just fifty or sixty kuai was suddenly being quoted at two-hundred kuai here. A standard response of ours was “tai gui!” (too expensive!) which was always responded to with “wo gei ni pianyi yidiar” (I’ll give it to you cheaper!)

Well, of course they will – otherwise, where’s the dance?

Daisy came away with several bags worth of skirts, shirts and shoes. I asked her how she was going to be able to send all these clothes back to France with her and she said that she probably wouldn’t send them home. “They wear out too quickly anyway,” she said, “They’ll probably break before I need to go home!”

And herein lies the problem:

When I first arrived and was asking about markets, my friend Traci said this to me: “The great thing about China is that the clothing is cheap.” Then she paused for a moment and followed that up with, “But the bad thing about China is that the clothing is cheap.” I laughed at these double meanings, but it’s so true. These clothes aren’t made to last, to be sure, and Daisy’s approach is one of many.

For me, I have been trying to avoid these markets because I can easily get sucked into the incredible discounts and the fun clothes. I don’t want to contribute to all this consumerism, but I’m as susceptible as the next person. What I know to be true is that the more I buy here, the more will be made and the more this cycle (and production) of disposable goods will be fuelled. I have already had to sew a tank top I bought a few weeks ago because the stitching came undone at the seams. I’m working on a moderation theory. I’ll let you know how it goes!

The Wudaokou markets are more casual than Yaxiu. Fewer tourists and lower prices to start with, narrower passageways, and just as much stuff. There are also food stalls, manicure booths, stationary stalls and I even saw a whole stall devoted to custom sticker making. Outside, there are merchants selling goods out of the backs of their cars. It’s a circus and I love it. I stand in the midst of the chaos and smile.

Then, I turn and see Daisy in the midst of another choreographed bargaining scene and I take a look at what she’s after. She’s handing a pair of shoes back to the shopkeeper gruffly and she’s at the point where she is not only poised to leave but actually walking away, flippant and irritated. This is the “piece de resistance” because it generally gets her the price she wants. The shopkeeper will fear losing the sale and concede to her final offer by calling her back as though this amount is her name. Today was no exception. Money was exchanged, the shoes went into a bag and the bag went into her hand.

I saw a smile flash in her eyes but she kept her cool and showed no reaction in front of the merchant.

She’s my new shopping hero.

Pictured from left to right are David (Canada), Daisy (the shopping hero from France!), Daniel (South Africa) and Tobias (Switzerland). These are some of my dorm friends here at Beijing Language and Culture University.

A Canadian in Beijing: Capital Museum A Total Snooze

by Ember Swift on

I suppose if I weren’t so tired today our class trip to the Beijing Central Museum (or, ????????????: Shoudu Bowuguan) would be more interesting to me. As it stands, we’ve been here for two hours and I’m bored out of my mind. I’ve even returned to the bus early (the eventual meeting place) because I couldn’t stand the sterility of the experience any longer. My legs were so tired from the endless walking that I’m even sitting on the ground out here and, as you know, that’s not something I advocate in Beijing!

I’m just not into it. What does this say about me?

I’m actually really interested in history and I find stories of the past fascinating. I love to learn about the places I visit and how they have come to develop into what they are under my feet and before my eyes. Where a place has come from and how it has journeyed and why — I love that stuff. So, why couldn’t I get into this museum, I wonder?

The museum is a beautiful modern building made of glass and marble and full of architectural wonder. It has only been open in this current location since December 19, 2006. It is 60,000 square metres in size, five floors with escalators and elevators between each and it can accommodate up to 2,000 visitors per day. It’s majestic, really, and the photos really don’t do it justice.

It’s gorgeous. Every display is well-placed and “just so.” In fact, I think that’s the problem. I have this overwhelming feeling that this place has been over thought, and now the information being communicated about China’s history also seems over thought, as though a huge committee sat around a giant table both approving and vetoing what I should or should not be told as a visitor. Or perhaps it’s more like what I could or could not be told. I became more and more agitated by the descriptions of history with every room that I eventually just found a bench inside and watched people instead.

But, what do I know? My learning is as limited as the next person’s – it’s through my Canadian cultural lens, education, reading material, etc. – and so I can’t claim to know what “really happened.” Still, I know well enough that the rise of the republic in China was not all glory and accomplishment. There was no mention of what the people went through throughout this transition (i.e. “The Cultural Revolution”) or even what they faced throughout the “Great Leap Forward” campaign just following the end of Feudalism in China. I saw no mention of the destruction of historical artifacts, literature, cultural relics; no mention of deaths by starvation or long-term incarceration; no mention of the dislocation of people and families throughout both movements. At least, no mention that I could see in English.

The signs in English were not as complete as the signs in Chinese, either. I know enough of this language to know that, but my ability to read all of the history-related characters was pretty limited and so I had to rely on these English translations which were, of course, full of written errors. I was really shocked to see such mistakes in such an official building. This is the Capital Museum of Beijing! I’m shocked that these errors made it through and I do hope that correcting these is on the “to do” list before the Olympics. I’m sure they’ll have lots of visitors through this museum at that time who will require the English as much (or more) than I did.


[I wished I had some sort of guide, but the computer kiosks offering more detail were entirely in Chinese and I didn’t learn until later that I could have rented an English headset (like I did at the Summer Palace) to accompany my walk. Oh well, I suppose I was meant to experience it as I was and these are my honest impressions.]

Last night, I went out again with my musician friends and checked out live music at Mao Live House (and played a couple of songs too) and so I really didn’t get much sleep. After awhile, my fatigue and my irritation with these language errors (not to mention what seemed to me to be an incomplete reflection of historical events) combined to make me stop reading these annoying signs altogether. Instead, I wandered slowly and aimlessly, looking at displays and snapping pictures until even this lackadaisical passivity got boring.

What’s more, (if you’ll permit me to complain just once more about this museum!), the displays were hardly interactive at all. There were lots of paintings, wood/clay models to peer at as well as plenty of items behind glass, but there was very little for the museum goer to do besides wander and snap pictures. I’ve perhaps become spoiled by places like The Science Centre in Toronto, but I’d have to say that my one trip to the Beijing Capital Museum is plenty for me. I don’t need to go back.

Time to board the bus that will take me “home” to my quiet dorm room so that I can take a nap.

May as well continue this snooze fest!