Today marks our 1 year anniversary of living in China. Last September 10th, Chelsey and I boarded a flight from Boston Logan airport to Beijing Capital airport. In celebration, of our year here, I’m sharing a short story about how I spent my Chinaversary day with Chelsey and her visiting aunt Patti. Hope you enjoy!
Guardians at the gate
I wake up and check my email on my iPhone. Chelsey has already gone to the Great Wall, and I vaguely recollect offering her my fisheye lens–it makes for great Great Wall photos–but she was in a rush to meet the driver, Mr. Liang. An email from a Nobel Prize Winning astrophysicist asks me to call him in the morning while it’s still Friday on the West Coast. I futz around with VPN for a few minutes and add his contact on Skype. I get up to make coffee, but he’s calling me. We talk about astronomy jobs and data science for 41 minutes and 42 seconds. I make Rickshaw Roasters coffee with the French press we brought from Austin that’s now badly cracked but we’re too ambivalent to replace. We’re leaving in a few weeks anyways, and technically it performs better than the replacement we tried.
I call my mom and dad briefly, but they seem tired- it’s already 10 PM in Boston. It’s always good to hear their voices, even if for 10 minutes and 42 seconds. My dad’s use of the word whatnot sticks out in my head. The Rickshaw Roasters is too strong, and the new almond cereal is super good– I get seconds on both.
Chelsey texts me from the Wall to run her laundry in preparation for her trip tomorrow. Chelsey’s aunt Patti is visiting us in Beijing for 2 days before they leave to Tokyo together, hence the Wall visit. You can come to Beijing without a visa, but only for up to 72-hours, and only if you have an ongoing flight to a different destination booked. The hot-headed gate agent in Atlanta didn’t know that, and forced Patti off the plane. I don’t know whether to include the 010 in front of the digits when I call the Delta Lost Baggage Chinese phone number from my mobile, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. The Delta employee says they’ll deliver the bag to my house in the afternoon, but they said the same thing yesterday. I put the laundry in.
My internal monologue shifts to whether to bring Dataclysm or the Southeast Asia travel guidebook with me to the bank. I text Chelsey to ask how much Yen she and Patti will need, but my cracked, hypersensitive iPhone screen auto-completes chore for more and cry for get. Maybe the iPhone AI is better than I thought. I bring the Southeast Asia guidebook, knowing that I’ll probably play around with my phone anyways. I stuff 8000 Yuan in an envelope I saved from Caitlin and Natalie’s Brooklyn wedding invitation from last Fall.
The 10 people seated ahead of me at ICBC means about 50 minutes of me playing around with the XE app. I admire the phrase mid-market rate, and wonder why I haven’t made a spreadsheet for currency exchange yet. I have one for everything else, so why not a quantitative analysis of our delivered exchange rates to confirm our intuition that the Chinese banks offer the best exchange rates at the expense of long lobby wait times, and a 500 USD limit per bank per day. Chelsey recommends 800 USD equivalent, which XE informs me is 82,154.4 JPY Yen, or 5,347.84 CNY Yuan. The hypersensitive screen accidentally likes a picture on Instagram, but it was a good picture anyways, I probably would have heart-ed it. My broken iPhone sucks.
Ticket number W004 is called, and I debate whether or not to get merely the 50,000 JPY Yen maximum, or whether to try to request the 80,000 JPY all in one go. I have tax documents that enable me to withdraw more than the anonymous foreigner limit, but these documents usually baffle the uninitiated. The teller greets me in English so I give it a shot and instantly regret it. Three workers are consumed for 10 minutes before a manager’s iPhone is slid under the glass corral: Proof of income in Baidu Translate confirms my intuition to stick with the bigger branches for that kind of advanced foreigner stuff. I request 50,000 Yen and the teller smiles. Defeated, I don’t even bother with the envelope of eighty 100-yuan bills, my recently-lost-and-subsequently-replaced ICBC bank card yields 5 crisp 10,000 Yen notes.
I decide there’s enough time before lunch, so I walk south to Jiadoukou to Bank of China to see if I can get that extra 30,000 Yen– I know that 50,000 isn’t enough for two people in Tokyo for 6 days, and we got a shitty exchange rate in Kyoto last time. The six people queued ahead of me are enough for me to get through reading about Ho Chi Minh City, but unfortunately also long enough to not get my 30,000 JPY before I have to leave for lunch. Mr. Liang, Chelsey, and Patti are driving up Dongzhimen right now. Chelsey and I are still confused about when Dongzhimen ends and when Jiadoukou begins. I jump in the front seat, Mr. Liang has more facial hair than the last few times we went to the Wall. I get excited about our favorite restaurant, only a block ahead where schizophrenic Jiadoukou turns into Gulou Dong Da Jie.
The owner of Dali Renjia welcomes us at the doorway to his treehouse-like Yunnan restaurant. I encourage Patti to look at the pictures of Dali while we ascend the steps to the serene loft-like second floor. Chelsey and I gasp when we see that an additional stairwell is unfurled from the ceiling, and the owner leads us up steep rungs to the rooftop patio. We emerge from a sky-blue A-frame portal onto the awesome overlook of Baochao Hutong. We’re jazzed. I get a kele. Chelsey asks me how to say “iced”– bingda, but I’m never sure if there’s a g so I just say it fast. There’s no iced tea anyways, so they get liangbei sodashui. The owner serves us a cola and two glasses of soda water with lime. We order the same incredible mushroom dish we always get, the salty Yunnan cheese, first skin of tofu mint salad, ginseng scrambled egg, and mint shrimp.
It’s about 2pm and Patti and Chelsey are going straight to the Forbidden City Palace Musuem to get there before close at 4 pm. Chelsey and I think the Palace Museum is over-rated, but it’s still a top destination, and only a short cab ride away. I ask Chelsey if she knows how to give directions to the cabbie for the north entrance of the Forbidden City. I debate whether or not to join them, weighing the tradeoff of sharing time with Chelsey and Patti, and being at home to accept the baggage from the Delta Lost Baggage delivery man. Chelsey and Patti encourage me to come– “the delivery man can just leave the bag with the guard at the gate to our apartment complex.” The blue sky overhead tips the scales, and we start our cab search.
The unsuccessful cab search raises Chelsey’s blood pressure. I flag down a rickshaw and ask do-qi-cha-ma?, not lingering on any syllable too long since I don’t actually know what they are. He holds up his pinky through middle fingers: san-shi. I admire that the price is not-too-high: more than a cab, but also faster than a cab since we can zip through bike lanes. Besides, the cab search has been a disaster and Patti’s gonna love this rickshaw experience. I snap what might become the cover photo of Patti’s visit- Patti and Chelsey framed by the red velvet canopy with gold tassels, with the Gulou drum tower backdrop, and a typical scooter delivery man peeking out between their noggins. Their smiles are huge.
It looks like there is no north entrance to the Palace museum and I begin to realize I’ve fucked up. Our suspicions are confirmed when an umbrella-bearing local speaking great English informs us that, indeed, the north gate serves only as an exit:
Chelsey: So there’s no way to enter through the north gate?
Umbrella lady: No, it is only for exiting, you will have to go the south gate.
Chelsey: Ah that’s so annoying! How do we get to the south gate.
Umbrella lady: Well for example, you could take a rickshaw.
Chelsey: [exasperated] Damnit.
Umbrella lady: You need a rickshaw?
Chelsey: Well yeah, now.
[The umbrella lady pulls her silk scarf out from her left arm, revealing an advertisement for a rickshaw service]
Umbrella lady: Well in fact, I am a rickshaw driver!
Chelsey and I erupt in laughter, Chelsey admiring the cunning, and I replaying the super-hero-like great reveal. I brace myself for the rickshaw price tag, and balk at the hyperbole– 80 kuai per person, gimme a break! She correctly judged us as misguided Americans, but misjudged us as mere tourists. We turn our backs to the offer, and hear the familiar invitation to barter: cheaper, cheaper. I respond with er-sher and we both acknowledge that there will be no compromise today.
We’re in another taxi desert, too far from the Tiananmen Square entrance to walk and still make it to the palace musuem in time. I look towards the line of old-timey looking buses, and I approach the ticket-takers. Qianmen ma? The young lady responds “QiAnnnmen Doy”. I wave Chelsey and Patti over. Fifteen kuai each makes my 20 kuai rickshaw offer seem lowball, and I question whether this trolley is more for sight-seeing or people-moving. The ticket-takers reconfirm doy in unison to my second appeal of whether they stop at Tiananmen square. I’m still unconvinced when I hear the name of my University over the loudspeaker as the trolley starts rolling, but it’s the Medical Center, not the distant PKU campus. Google Maps reconfirms we’re on the right path– and we thank the VPN gods. Someone must have sacrificed a digital goat on the virtual altar.
At that moment I look down to my ringing phone, and know that the luggage is at our house.
Me: ahhh Nihao
Caller: 你好你的行李在这里你的家
Me: ummm Nihao ahhh luggage
Caller: 是你好，我在这里与你的行李在你的房子，在GuanShuyuan
Me: Ahh doy doy doy, yes, the luggage is at GuanShuyuan, can you leave it at the Guard Gate?
Caller: Wo ting budao.
Me: Can you leave it at the Guard Gate?
Caller: Wo ting budao.
That one I recognize: I don’t understand. Fuck. Communication problem to the max. I should have just stayed home, what a screw up. I look around at all the Chinese families and consider handing them my phone, but it feels like shattering glass in a cafe. The call ends and Chelsey has a Google Translate of “leave it in with the Gaurd at the gate” on her phone. I do the same and copy and paste the string into a text message that I’m not sure will ever get through.
We are near enough to Tiananmen square, so we hop out the back exit of the trolley. Patti asks me to call the original Delta Lost Baggage phone number that is in my phone. No answer. We are all anxious about the bag. Patti and Chelsey will fly to Japan at 10 am, and without her bag Patti will have no clothes for the rest of her journey on to Spain. We need a translator. I look around for someone who “looks like they speak English”. What the hell does that even mean? There are people everywhere on the streets, but who will be unlucky enough to have 3 Americans hand a phone to them and ask them for free translation service?
We search for our prey, still walking towards Tiananmen Square.
From behind us a young lady approaches. We will later find out from business card that her name is Feng.
Feng: Hello, have you all been to the Great Wall of China yet?
[All of our eyes light up and we look at each other]
Me: Hey! These two just went this morning!!
Feng: Oh really?
Me: I mean, well, like we’re interested in going. It’s just so great, I’d like to go very soon.
[I turn my shoulders towards Chelsey and retrieve my iPhone from my pocket, hitting redial on the most recent call]
Chelsey: Yeah, so yeah, the Great Wall! Yeah, it’s so… great, ya know the Wall. Can you tell us…
Feng: Oh yes, well we offer a car service to MuTianYu…
Me: I’m sorry, can. I. just…
[I hand the phone towards Feng]
Feng: Hwaay Nihao
Feng: 这是什么
Feng: 嘿，这是谁
Feng: 好了，你在GuanShuYuan ，还好
Feng: 好的
[Turning towards us]
Feng: The delivery man says he has your bag and he can leave it in the lobby of your hotel.
Patti & Chelsey: Ask him if he can leave it with the guard at the gate.
Feng: 你好，你可以离开与门口守卫的包吗？
Feng: He says the guard will not accept the bag at the gate.
Patti & Chelsey: Really why not? Ask again.
Feng: 你确定?
Feng: The delivery man says he is sure that he cannot leave it at the gate, the guard will not accept the bags.
[My internal monologue: Fuck, I should have stayed home.]
Me: Tell him I’ll be there in 30 minutes.
Feng: 他将在那里在30分钟内
The phone call lasts 4 minutes, after which Feng hands us her business card:
China International Travel Service
Feng
Interpreter
Feng writes down the license plate of the delivery man– “a black van, like that one.”, pointing to a white van, “But black”.
Feng tells us about the services she offers and I explain that I am going to the Great Wall in 2 weeks and would be happy to use her service. We thank her numerous times, and all laugh about how unlikely it was for an interpreter to approach us in the nadir of our desperation.
I hug Chelsey and Patti and say I have to run to get to the bag in 30 minutes. I am wondering how long it will take to get a cab, when a rickshaw approaches. It’s a bit too far to take a rickshaw and I refuse multiple times, even though he says Andingmen is fine (through my minimal Chinese, his minimal English, and reading of his body language). I return to the street corner wondering if I’ll ever get a cab. I flag at one, but there are two people in it. Remarkably, it slows down, and I open the rear door. Why is there a second man in the passenger seat? He turns to me in perfect English and asks if I speak a little Chinese. “EE-dee-arr” (a little), I say, followed by “Andingmen”, and then Andingmennei” for good measure. The man hands over 20 kuai to the driver and wishes me good luck– oh, he was just the previous passenger who serendipitously was getting out where I was waiting.
The driver repeatedly yells into his Baidu Maps app “ANDINGMENNEI DA JIE”. Not a good sign– a typical cab driver would consider this an easy fare. Maybe this is the luck the previous passenger was alluding to. I bring up the Google Maps app, which is still kicking it strong because of the VPN goat sacrifice. The suggested route confirms my intuition: just go straight, with a brief jog at Dong Si Shitiao. I show the driver my map and muster several of the few permutations of 20 Chinese words I know, which remarkably seem to answer all of his questions, and make him think I know more Chinese than I actually do. He realizes this illusion when he strays from the discussions on directions, and I have to admit wo bu jerdou. He laughs: ni bu jerdou la!
I check my email in the cab, there’s a nice message from Natalie Gosnell checking in from her new assistant professor job in Colorado. Instagram shows a bunch of photos from Bali, a daily reminder of how excited I am for my trip there in 3 weeks. Chelsey and I are thinking of getting tattoos when we get there to mark our 1 year in China, but we still don’t know what of yet. Not something overtly Chinese– probably a blue lobster fighting an untethered astronaut in space, or something sick like that. Chelsey’s spirit animal is a mantis shrimp. We’re so excited about scuba diving.
I look up and we’ve missed the right lane for the jog on Dong Si. No!! Yojuan! Yojuan! I say to the cabbie, but it’s too late– the conspicuous no right turn sign might have been violated by other drivers, but not this seemingly risk averse one. Shit. My map updates and the revised route is horrible– Gulou at this hour of the day is so trafficky. At that moment my phone rings– it’s the baggage delivery man. The 30 minutes have expired, and I’m hosed. I hand the phone to the driver and witness a spectacle. Two Beijingers conversing about when this laowai is going to pick up the suitcase. I imagine what they’re saying, and gather that it’s along the lines of “We’re close. We’ll be there soon. What bag. Andingmen, I know. YongKang Hutong, where’s that. We’ll be there soon, dude, chill out!”
We turn onto Gulou and again, my intuition is confirmed… Gulou is a parking lot. The driver initiates a 3 point turn, and I get cold feet– I could get out now and make a run for it through the hutongs, which might get me there faster than him doubling back and taking the Second Ring Road. I yell “dowla” to signal that I’ve arrived, and hand over 25 kuai, but he refuses to accept. Wo jerdou, wo jerdou!! Remarkably I have faith in him, and relent on my offer. He zips north past Dianmenwai, and we’re at the second ring road in a few minutes. But the clock has marched on and my iPhone buzzes with the familiar 185- phone number. I hit the speaker phone, and hand the phone over to the driver and after 15 seconds of screaming dialog, I recall that the microphone doesn’t work in speaker phone mode on my shit iPhone, so the cabbie’s futile yelling is falling on deaf ears.
The stakes seem so high as I retrieve my busted-ass blue iPhone 5C to toggle off the speaker phone mode. But the hypersensitive cracked screen resists my sweaty fingers, so I have to wipe the screen on my jorts. Still, I cannot toggle off the speaker, so the delivery man can be heard yelling unintelligible, muffled, Chinese to which the driver is responding to both him and me. I feel like I am in a Die Hard with a Vengence scene, and the fate of the bag is at my fingertips, but the hope is slipping away. I imagine the delivery man, exasperated, yelling that it’s been almost an hour, he has other bags to deliver, and he can’t be waiting around all day for this bullshit, where the hell are we?
I have to turn off the phone screen to refresh the digitizer, and call the delivery man back. I hand the phone back to the cabbie, who sounds dejected… Has the deliver man left??
We pull up to the line of cars at Yong Kang Hutong’s stop light, and I hop out of the car, handing over 34 kuai instead of the 31.2 the meter says. The puzzled driver hands back the 3 extra, and we laugh and I say xie-xie numerous times.
I dash towards Yongkang and look twice before running across the street on a no-walk sign. I see the delivery man standing aside a huge pink hardshell suitcase in front of a black van. He smirks, and I’m not sure out of relief, or being pissed off. I sign the form and take the bag. I double check that it has Patti’s full name on the tags. It does. All of this was because of that hot-head in Georgia who didn’t believe Patti that you can come to China without a visa, albeit only for 72 hours. It’s been about 44 hours so far.
On my walk up Yongkang Hutong I reflect on the day, and our 1 year in China– I should probably write a blog post about this.
I empty my backpack full of 8000 CNY Yuan in the wedding invite envelope, 50,000 JPY Yen in the bank envelope, and my Southeast Asia travel guidebook. Chelsey and Patti had also stuffed their T-Shirts from the Great Wall in there. One says “I climbed the Great Wall”. The other says “I have climbed the Great Wall”. I close my eyes on the bed and wake up to a call from Chelsey– she and Patti are coming home in a cab, but she doesn’t have any money to pay the cab driver because they used it all to pay for Palace Museum tickets. Chelsey doesn’t have a bank account here, and I don’t think cabs accept cards anyways. WeChat Wallet maybe, but not cards. I grab 1000 kuai from the wedding envelope and proceed back down Yongkang Hutong to meet them near that tiny foreigner bar we walk by but have never gone into. We embrace and laugh and decide to go into Ron Mexico.
We get two Old Fashioned’s and Patti gets a glass of white as I recall the Die Hard-like retrieval of the luggage. Patti sort of agreed with us that the Palace Museum is crowded, huge, and had similar structures to Confucius Temple, just bigger. The two young bartenders, one Swede and one Mexican American, chat us up and within minutes humble brag that they haven’t slept all night. Patti asks if it was partying or work, and they giggle and say a little bit of both. They seem to be functioning fine despite not having slept, and Patti asks them why they moved here. We double down on drinks.
We decide to cook dinner at home rather than go out again. We pick up a bunch of veggies on the walk home for 4% of what we just paid for drinks.
Chelsey and I make breakfast tacos and guacamole, and I put on first Ella Fitzgerald, then a samba playlist from Spotify, which I still pay for.
Dinner is served with a chilled red wine, and I ask Patti about moving to Atlanta from Miami: “Did you see Miami change since growing up there?” Patti explains that she felt discriminated against as a minority in a now predominantly Hispanic culture in South Florida. Chelsey and Patti begin an argument that I can see has increasingly less middle ground, so I sit back and listen, wondering if I can find a common ground. One example could be that Chelsey and I don’t speak Chinese and have lived here for a year without really bothering to learn the language. Today we had benefited from the kindness of strangers who were willing to speak a foreign language to communicate with foreigners in their own country. We wish we had learned more Chinese, but at some point we just didn’t bother because we knew we were leaving, and besides, our community is mostly English speakers at work and elsewhere. Chinese sure would have made our lives easier. Patti points out that we are only visitors, not permanent residents.
The argument mimicked a miniature version of dialogs going on around the world in the last year- the UK Brexit, the US presidential election, and even to some extent China’s Great Firewall that blocks foreign content. A moment of accord is reached when Chelsey and I acknowledge that there are aspects of the culture and behaviors here that cause us grief: cars accelerating at you in crosswalks, folks overtly cutting you in line, and train passengers rushing onto the train before passengers exit. All of these things have familiar analogs back home, but their ubiquity here really does point to underlying cultural differences that we still find hard to swallow. I think of all the great cultural experiences that we’ve had here, and think that surely the good outweighs the bad. The common ground is short-lived, and the flames are eventually extinguished as we agree to disagree.
Before bed, Chelsey and I reflect on our year here. We’re glad we came, and we’re also glad to be going back home to friends and family. But not until we explore Southeast Asia. The guidebook says Saigon has cool nightlife.