zai beijing vanr

The End

2008-06-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

What a melodramatic title. Anyways, yes, we are at the end of our stay in Beijing.

The last few days have been rather low-key. Despite our grand plans to make the most of the remainder of our time here, we have lapsed into much laziness, assisted by the apocalyptic weather conditions. (Yesterday Rozi and Helen and I literally waded through water that was up to six inches deep, just to get to the convenience store that is right by our dorms.) We've watched an extraordinary number of movies and not done much else. It's great.

Now I'm packing and I am not having much difficulty with luggage space limitations, because I've thrown out a good amount of clothing that has been ruined thanks to being washed in China water. I might have to throw out my Cal hat too, even though it has served me faithfully in China, because it got destroyed by Inner Mongolian duststorms and Beijing acid rain. The clothes I'm not that sad about because that means I get to do lots of shopping when I get back, and the hat, well, I am kind of sad but I think my Stanford friends will be happy to see it go. Hm - maybe it is salvageable? I'll try to wash it when I get back...

We're supposed to move out of our dorms today, but our flight isn't until tomorrow morning, so we'll be having a sleepover in the lounge. Shen Laoshi was kind enough to give us the key to the bathroom upstairs too (we normally have to go back to our rooms to use the bathroom.. very inconvenient) so the accommodations will be good. Hooray for a sleepover and more movies and not sleeping much and preemptively correcting jetlag!

Chinese Tutorial: DONE

2008-06-10T00:48:00.000-07:00

I just finished my Chinese final and am feeling a little giddy. It was pretty catastrophic, so much that I didn't even want to look my teacher in the eye when I turned it in. Don't think I could have expected much better, though, given that I barely studied - gave up early last night, wasted time all morning (I took two naps! and read about 20 articles on the new iPhone, thanks Google Reader; and also Gtalked per usual)...

2 units, pass/fail (no letter grade option), nobody else in the class - so little motivation to do well! Taking the test felt like taking a test in high school. It was kind of awesome. Stress levels abroad are quite low :)

gasoline

2008-06-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

The average price of gasoline in the U.S. hit $4 a gallon for the first time Sunday.

Wow. $4/gallon average. I know in Austin it's still around $3.80 and in California it's into $4.30 or something. But that's so high. What happened to the good old $0.99/gallon days....

Countdown...

2008-06-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'm already making note of all the things I'm going to miss when I leave in a week.

Cabs everywhere, and really cheap, to take you anywhere - Beida Ximer, xiexie :) Nightlife that doesn't require you to be 21. Amazing food at restaurants like Salt and Alameda and Hatsune and Dadong. Fuwa being cute all over the city. The baozi canteen. The little convenience store that accepts fan ka so we can buy jasmine tea and ice cream and in Helen's case Ritz crackers with peanut butter. The gym, with lots of Asian people who don't really work out. Karaoke. Chilling in the Stanford lounge pretending to work while other people watch movies.

Mostly, though, I think I'll miss the people on the program. Here's to an awesome last week :) cheers.

some notes on 内蒙古

2008-06-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

The entire Stanford program minus one (22 people total) road-tripped up to Chengde and Inner Mongolia this past weekend.

The most interesting things to note from the trip -

Some beautiful temples in Chengde, including the Buddhist Puning temple, built in 1755, and the Tibetan-style "Little Potala Palace," built in 1767.

Puning temple complex

Puning temple

Tibetan prayer flags outside Little Potala

Not the great wall, but a pretty good wall nonetheless

A truly inedible vegetarian Buddhist dinner in Chengde, which consisted of about 10 types of fake meats - fake fish, fake chicken, fake shrimp, fake duck, fake eel, fake squid, fake pork with fake pork fat, and other creations of varying degrees of rubberyness and tastelessness.

Looks eeriely like real fish, huh?

To make up for it, a delicious lamb dinner in Inner Mongolia, where we ate an entire lamb roasted on a spit, and where Pokey, Barry, and Rozi devoured the lamb legs like true carnivores.

Horseback riding on the Inner Mongolian highlands through a duststorm.

My horse, about to ride into the duststorm

Protecting ourselves best as we could (aka with hoodies)

A little bit worse for the wear post-duststorm

Nearly freezing in the 30/40-degree night in an unheated yurt in Inner Mongolia - we ended up piling 15 people into one yurt (meant to sleep two) to huddle on the two pushed-together beds and play card games late into the night. It worked; we certainly stayed warm while we were there. Leaving that yurt, on the other hand....

Tracy is clearly too tall for the door in our yurt
I am cold

Anyway, it was wonderful spending two days under pollution-free skies, and we are now back in Beijing. Finals coming up soon. Then home.

back from inner mongolia

2008-06-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

...where I had the most delicious pecans ever. There were also horses that we rode, and a sandstorm that we rode through. And yurts. And coldness.

I am clean and showered. There are many stories. More to come.

Press!

2008-05-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

We are on the news!

School news:
Stanford Daily

China news:
Sina
Sohu
Tencent QQ
Netease
IT.com.cn
HC360

Of KTV and Missed Trains

2008-05-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

Wang Ning is here in China! How exciting to have friends visit :) He arrived Saturday but unfortunately Helen and I were frantically busy with conference preparations; most of Sunday we were busy with the conference, and then being extremely tired and lazy in bed recovering from it all.

However, I was finally free yesterday and Wang Ning and I made an awesome day trip out to Tianjin. We caught a late morning train and arrived in time to try Tianjin's famous goubuli ("dog ignores") baozi (steamed buns) for lunch, as well as some other Tianjin specialties.

Unfortunately, food only amused us for about an hour before we realized that Tianjin is a rather boring place. Solution? KTV for 3.5 hours! Amazingly, all the small rooms were taken - I guess Tianjin people were bored enough to be all karaokeing on a Monday afternoon too - so we had a medium sized room all to ourselves, to sing our favorite Mandarin pop songs.

Then we had dinner...

And then we missed our train.

So we got to spend another very warm and sticky hour and a half in the Tianjin train station listening to loud and obnoxious announcements over the PA system. Train ride back to Beijing, cab ride back to PKU, and thus concluded the day trip. Tiring but enjoyable :)

a carefree life once more!

2008-05-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Very happy to report that our conference went off completely successfully -- the room was full, the students were attentive and interested, the speakers were much more thumbs up than not, and there was plenty of congratulations afterward on a job well done. Can't ask for much more than that. Everyone was amazed that we'd pulled it off from idea to actual event in the time span of a month, but what can we say...when you're studying abroad in Beijing, you have a lot of free time.

Now we can once again return to normal, college-student-carefree lives. Well...not exactly, but closer, anyhow.

On Saturday we went on a tour of some hutongs (alleyways), which Beijing is famous for. There used to be over 6000 hutongs in Beijing that, if connected, would reach from Seattle to Washington DC. But now with modernization only about 2000 are left. We did the touristy thing and took rickshaws through some hutongs near Houhai, and then wandered around near the lake for a while. I'd never been during the day before, so it was pretty interesting -- there were lots of Chinese people hanging out by the lake, some swimming, some fishing, blatantly ignoring the "No swimming or fishing" signs behind them.

Riding the rickshaws

Walking along the edge as they pave a hutong road

We also saw the Drum and Bell towers in the middle of the city:

Drum Tower

Bell Tower

Walking centipede-like down the extremely steep stairs in the Drum Tower

sandstorm

2008-05-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a sandstorm and the sky was yellow.

2:30 pm

Google's Sichuan People Search

2008-05-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

About a day and a half after the earthquake, Google launched a custom search engine allowing people to search for information about their relatives and friends in Sichuan. It crawls different websites and forums so people can find out if those they care about are safe, or otherwise. Within 10 days it had already connected at least 1000 people with their relatives and friends in Sichuan.

Working at Google last summer made me quite the fangirl, so I decided to share the Google love with my Stanford classmates by organizing a trip to the Beijing office. We were missing a few people who decided on the spur of the moment to fly out to Xinjiang, but about 15 of us taxied over to Google on Friday and had a nice little company visit. They told us about Google's business in China and some of their projects, including the aforementioned people search for the Sichuan earthquake.

CHINICT

2008-05-25T04:05:00.000-07:00

I attended this conference called CHINICT on Thursday. It's a very big tech conference, apparently, with big companies, "rising stars" i.e. hot start-ups, and all manner of other semi-related participants, like venture capitalists and angel investors, and media people. The tickets are supposed to be very expensive but I hear that most people get invited as VIP guests and get in for free. A Tsinghua professor who is a Stanford alum invited me and Helen (though Helen didn't come because of Chinese class); the forwarded invitation letter said:

> You can invite people of your choice to register
> free of charge (VIP pass) to CHINICT 2008. Typical
> profiles of interesting people to invite include key
> executives at large companies, officials,
> entrepreneurs, influencers and media.

Yes, that's us.

The presentations were so-so but it was a good networking opportunity. I saw a few of my entrepreneurially-minded friends who show up at all these events. I guess if you hang around Beijing long enough, you get to know this circle of people pretty well.

entrepreneurship conference: the fruits of our labors

2008-05-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

What Tracy and I have been working on for the past month.

beijing zoo

2008-05-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

I went to the zoo a few days ago. I think I've grown to like zoos and aquariums more as I've gotten older....so many cool animals!

Golden pheasant

Golden eagle

Some zebras

Meanwhile, something to look forward to tomorrow:

INDO Mansion

2008-05-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

As part of our conference marketing efforts, we are partnering with Docin.com, a startup in the area headed by a Stanford alum. The company is like Youtube for documents, and one of their verticals is focused on students (think note sharing), so they helped us design a flyer and are advertising on the site. Look!

Yesterday morning Helen and I made the first trip to their office, located in INDO Mansion (which houses many other tech companies, as we discovered when we encountered Bjorn, another Stanford person, waiting at the elevator). Initial discussions were promising, and I ended up making another trip in the afternoon.

They gave me a desk space in between other company employees, and an Ethernet cable; I had my Macbook Pro with me, and conference publicity work began in earnest: poster + website + other advertising materials. In between that work Jon, the CEO, also invited me to sit in on some company discussions about site UI and I got to contribute my probably-very-unhelpful American viewpoint. It was a pretty neat experience.

On the way out I stopped by Bjorn's office which was a few stories down. It was almost midnight but he was just chilling in the HiPiHi office and reading blogs or something. Nice. We chatted for a while, and he also gave me and Jon a demo of their product, a Second Life-like virtual world. Their logo is a little ridiculously cute.

3 Days of Mourning

2008-05-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was day one of three days of mourning for victims of the Sichuan earthquake. In the afternoon at 2:28, exactly one week after the earthquake hit, there were three minutes of silence... marked by loud sirens and horns from the city's millions of cars. Actually I didn't know of this until afterwards, because I was at the gym, which is in a basement and well isolated from sound. Anyways...

Websites are all in black and white, too.

Internet and Pollution

2008-05-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

In my opinion, two critical metrics of the American college student experience in China are Internet speed and pollution levels.

Unfortunately, the Internet has been extremely, painfully slow in the last few days, with Gmail regularly disconnecting; and intense smog has not only been making my eyes very uncomfortable but also everything fuzzy around the edges.

Le sigh.

earthquake in sichuan

2008-05-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

'Thousands dead' in Chinese quake

Between 3,000 and 5,000 people may have been killed by an earthquake measuring 7.8 in just one county of south-western China's Sichuan province, reports say.

Some 10,000 people are also feared to have been injured in Beichuan county.

Desperate efforts are under way to find survivors. One school that collapsed has buried an estimated 900 students.

President Hu Jintao has urged "all-out" efforts to rescue victims of the quake, which hit 92km (57 miles) from Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital.

Dozens of aftershocks have been reported since the quake, which was the strongest to hit Sichuan province in more than 30 years, Xinhua reports.

State television said the quake had not caused major damage to Chengdu, which has a population of more than 10 million people, or to the nearby Three Gorges Dam.

The BBC's Quentin Somerville says the Chinese army has a good record of mobilising and getting people to safety.

He also says news is coming through very fast from the affected area - it is one of the most open and speedy responses to an emergency he has ever seen from Chinese state media.

The quake was felt as far away as Beijing, he says, meaning millions of people will feel connected to the disaster and will be watching TV screens closely to see how the government responds.

We're safe in Beijing, far from the earthquake's epicenter. Four Stanford students were in Chengdu at the time of the earthquake (at the airport on the way back from a weekend trip to Sichuan), and are safe but temporarily stranded there...

Salt and Pepper

2008-05-12T02:18:00.001-07:00

Time for a pictures post!

I finally went through my pictures from the last couple of weeks and sorted them into albums. I came up with Salt (a restaurant), Pepper (a bar), and Hatsune (a restaurant). However the Pepper album is not that exciting so I am only posting Salt and Hatsune pictures. Too bad "Salt and Hatsune" doesn't have quite the same ring as "Salt and Pepper"...

My parents' college friend is located in Beijing now and he has very generously been treating me and Helen to Beijing's most delicious food, at least according to the "That's Beijing" 2008 Awards. Not shabby at all :) Actually these few meals have probably been the best I've ever had in my life. It's kind of amazing how good food can be for such reasonable prices.

Salt: voted best for contemporary cuisine
First Western food I had since arriving in China. AMAZING. I had forgotten how wonderful Western food can be... especially salad.

Hatsune: voted best for Japanese cuisine
Best sushi I've ever had. Delicious and pretty!

fine arts in beijing

2008-05-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

A good weekend for fine arts in Beijing --

Katharine, a sophomore Physics/Dance double major, has been dancing with a professional dance group in Beijing for the past few weeks. So we went to see her perform on Saturday! It was quite interesting; the choreographer is Chinese-American, so the dances combined modern dance and hip-hop with wushu and taichi. Although I've only gone to very few wushu classes before, I could definitely see its influence. Katharine was splendid, of course, and afterwards there was free food so it was good all around.

Then we went to a performance by the Big John Blues Band in a newly-opened venue in the 798 Art District here. The band is new, formed in 2007, but the members were all hand-picked by the frontman, and many of them have long and fruitful histories in the Chinese music scene. We chatted with the drummer afterwards (he lived in NYC for a year, so he and Franci immediately hit it off), and then went to Lush, where we end 2/3 of our nights.

I will now leave off with some pictures taken on some night of lounging, probably around 3 am. There is no reason for these pictures. I just think we look rather representatively sleepy and lazy:

Lazy Day

2008-05-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

Between the two of us, Helen and I might have moved a total of 1000 feet today. Most of my total comes from going up the three flights of stairs to do laundry, and Helen's from going to a canteen (dining hall) for dinner.

Today's accomplishments are
- much progress on entrepreneurship conference planning
- demolishing half a box of milk biscuits
- watching 4 hours of Korean drama
- laundry

Entrepreneurship Conference
As mentioned in previous posts, we are planning a conference at the end of May, stated purpose to introduce and inspire local university students to entrepreneurship as a realistic career choice, Silicon Valley-style, perhaps? We initially conceived of the idea about two weeks ago, and at the end of last week we started contacting people. Amazingly it's all coming together. We've confirmed some pretty noteworthy entrepreneurs, VCs, and consultants; booked a nice conference room at Tsinghua University; and secured some sponsorship. I am very excited.

Milk Biscuits
Rozi discovered that the convenience store Wumei sells large boxes of "milk biscuits" that are very satisfying to snack on. Of course, Helen and I followed suit and bought our own box, which was finished extremely quickly... Yesterday night Helen retrieved a half-full box of Anuraag's biscuits and that box is also now empty. Oh dear.

Kdrama
Well, we watched episodes 9-12 of Samsoon. There are 16 episodes total, so I guess we can be proud of finishing 25% of the drama today.

Laundry
Part of my excuse for not going to the gym today is that my laundry situation was dire - but I successfully did two loads of laundry! Unfortunately I have no drying rack and also not enough hangers so my clothes are dispersed all across my room and the common room and the air is very damp.

chopsticks and massages

2008-05-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

It has been very long (read: 5 days) since I have last blogged, and there are reasons I could give -- the planning of our entrepreneurship conference, which began in earnest last week and is scheduled for the way-too-soon date of May 24; the watching of aforementioned drama; the hours spent on Skype every day; the CS103B midterm which just ended an hour ago...but the real reason was probably just laziness. So I apologize.

Tracy and I had dinner at her language partner's house (he's a freshman Econ major at Beida) over the May 1 holiday weekend. As soon as we entered his house, his mom began berating him about how long his hair was (apparently it looked like the hair of a Taiwanese pop star instead of a Beida student, terrible). Then his parents showered me and Tracy with fruit, candy, tea, wine, massive amounts of food, Chinese paper cuttings, and Olympics phone charms. They were also amazed that we could use chopsticks. Why is everyone surprised at our ability to use chopsticks??

In completely unrelated news, Tracy, Kristine, Franci, Tayvin, Che and I got full-body massages at a spa this weekend. I think we should make massages a weekly tradition.

Fluff

2008-05-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

One of Beijing's less pleasant surprises is its fluff. Here is a picture of a kid running happily through fluff:

Most of us are less happy when we are assailed by the fluff, which is actually flying pollen produced by poplar and willow trees in the springtime. In fact, Beijing has instituted a policy of sex changes for the poplar and willow trees to stop fluff production. Oh, Beijing.

In the meantime, I have discovered a good way to relieve my displeasure with fluff - burn it! It is highly flammable and burns quite satisfyingly when much of it has accumulated in drifts... I would write more about my adventures burning fluff but I am not sure I should document such activities.

My Name is Kim Samsoon

2008-05-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

We have begun to watch this Korean drama to improve our Chinese. It is rather effective... and so interesting!

Edit by Helen: So interesting, in fact, that we are really tempted to stay up to keep watching despite its being 2:30 am. But we will be strong-willed students and resist. Must resist.

PKU 110

2008-05-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

So it turns out the dementors were roaming around yesterday because President Hu Jintao was on campus. Something to do with PKU's 110th anniversary.

I also have my suspicions that the Chinese government seeded the clouds yesterday to make it rain and wash out the air before the celebrations today. Today the skies were blue (bluest in the morning, gradually graying as the day went on...) and visibility was high, unobscured by the usual smog. There was the matter of poplar fluff still, but overall the campus was quite pleasant for the visit of many thousands of visitors, including foreign university presidents and chancellors being transported in black Audis.

I attended some celebrations on Friday to commemorate the 110th anniversary. They were very much like the New Year's celebrations broadcast every year on CCTV. A good amount of singing, dancing, and recitation.

One act/skit was dedicated to Deng Xiaoping. I was informed that Chinese people like him because he got Hong Kong back for China. I was also informed that the next leader who can get Taiwan back for China will be very much liked. Dot dot dot.

Another act/skit celebrated the Lifeline Express, and the PKU graduates who work with the Lifeline Express to offer eyecare to Tibetans. There was a whole elaborate dance, highlighting a Tibetan woman's everlasting gratitude to the Lifeline Express for giving her eyesight.

Pictures and video to come :)

Night's Predominance, or the Day's Shame

2008-05-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

By th' clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
(Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 4)

At 9:30 this morning it was impressively dark outside. I actually did a double-take and checked my clock again, then checked my cell phone because I still couldn't believe the time. It was also thundering and pouring rain. It looked like it could have 3 am.

At 10:00 the sky had lightened but had also turned green. Frank suggests that it was the smog having a chemical reaction with positive ions.

Perfect conditions for zombies or other creepy supernatural things to take over the world. In fact, I did see a number of security guards dressed eerily like dementors...

i <3 beijing

2008-05-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Not necessarily the city itself, mind you, because the city is kind of smoggy and big and smoggy. But the Stanford program here and the people and the experience have been amazing so far. I'm really having fun :) just wanted to put that out there. It's 4:41 am here so I'm way too tired to write a real blog post but I just got back from watching six hours of Asian dramas and American movies, singing along to Barry's 3 am guitar serenades, and a delicious slice of chocolate cake. Life is good.

Potato Chip Experiment

2008-05-01T06:27:00.001-07:00

A scrap of recently-acquired semi-useful knowledge:

If you leave a potato chip out on a shelf during a Beijing summer, it will become crispier. This is because the air is so dry that moisture is sucked out of the chip.

However, it is also exceedingly dusty here, so your potato chip might end up covered in a layer of dust and ickiness.

SH v BJ, 6-4-2

2008-04-29T03:30:00.000-07:00

Lest any readers of this blog come to the hasty decision that Beijing is more awesome than Shanghai because of its more awesome mascots, here is a more comprehensive comparison of the two cities.

cute mascots: BJ
Okay, well... see post on Shanghai World Expo.

clean air: SH
"Clean" is very relative, but the sky in Shanghai was recognizably blue! Currently in Beijing the air looks extremely gray and foggy, with the slightest, almost imperceptible tinge of blue. And the fog is, of course, smog.

cool buildings: SH
Shanghai has very funky architecture. The most famous is the Oriental Pearl Tower, but there is also the Jinmao Tower, and a can opener shaped building currently under construction of which I have forgotten the name - right to left order:

paper/coin currency: BJ
I am in favor of Shanghai abandoning coin currency. In Beijing people use bills even for one kuai (approximately 14 cents) and five jiao (approximately 7 cents). Everything is coins in Shanghai :( a mi wallet no le gusta.

shopping: SH
My judgment on the quality of shopping - and by shopping I mean bargain shopping - is based on very few data points and so is not very accurate, I'm sure. In any case, I have been rather disappointed by shopping in Beijing so far, but we went to Taobao City in Shanghai and that was enjoyable.

A bit of trivia: Taobao is China's equivalent of eBay and it trounces eBay here. Taobao City is a 3-story mall that was opened a few years ago, with 300 stores representing existing sellers on the site. Neat business idea, bridging e-commerce with real life retail.
Another sidenote: Shopping with Stanford people who are not Asian is always quite interesting. One seller tried to tell Pokey that the rhinestones on the cap he was examining/bargaining for were actual diamonds, and thus he should pay more - but even she couldn't keep a straight face.

style: SH
As we pulled into the Shanghai Train Station I received an SMS welcoming me to the 時尚之都, or Fashion Capital. Shanghai is definitely far more fashionable than Beijing. I actually felt semi-inspired to upgrade my usual outfit of Aeropostale polo and jeans, although I did not act upon this semi-inspiration.

ease of transportation: draw
My primary mode of transportation in both cities is taxi, because I don't know the bus and metro routes and I am scared of so many people squishing in public transportation. Taxis are cheap but they are also immensely difficult to flag down! Not much difference between the two cities.

food: draw
All very tasty. 小籠湯包, xiaolongtangbao:

clubs and lounges: SH
I am entirely not qualified to speak on this subject but I vote Shanghai. Perhaps Helen will substantiate this decision in another blog post, or refute it.

wifi: BJ
Being the EECS nerd that I am, I carried my Macbook Pro around with me in Shanghai in my extremely large handbag, searching for wifi. I failed. This despite repeatedly SMSing a Shanghai entrepreneur I met last week, requesting wifi hotspot locations. Oops. Beijing wins because I have internet access here and have successfully located two (! plural!) wifi cafes, which students use to study when their electricity has been turned out at 11 pm.

Master Kong jasmine tea: BJ
Master Kong jasmine tea is my favorite type of bottled tea, easily available from convenience stores in Beijing (or at least those that I frequent). Not so easily available in Shanghai (or at least where I looked). This tea is actually extremely important to my personal happiness, so big plus points for Beijing. See my collection of Master Kong tea bottles:

waterfront: SH
Beijing has Houhai, but Shanghai has the Bund. One side of the river has European-looking buildings lit up in warm yellow and orange tones at night; the other side has neon rainbow-colored alien-looking buildings like the Oriental Pearl Tower.

cooking class! dumplings edition

2008-04-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, we had our first of four cooking classes--set up by the Stanford in Beijing program, probably because they realized we like to eat and will do anything related to food.

At 6 pm, Tracy, Christian and I walked to the home of a Chinese grandmother who lives near Beida. She spoke no English at all, but was extremely cute, and I think all three of us took an immediate liking to her. We walked up four flights of stairs to her apartment, and she showed us to her kitchen table. She'd already mixed out a little bowl of pork dumpling filling and a little bowl of dough. As she explained what ingredients went into each bowl, we learned out to stretch the dough, snap! it off in pieces, roll it, and wrap the dumplings. All three of us tried all the steps and very quickly learned that we were better at some things than others -- my snapped pieces were all too big or too small; Tracy's rolled dumpling skins looked like amoeba instead of circles; Christian's dumplings were floppy and didn't stand up like they were supposed to. But eventually we found our niches and got a nice little assembly line going, and proceed to pump out slightly deformed dumplings at a good rate.

Eventually we used up all the filling in our little bowl and brought them proudly to the kitchen to be cooked. Our grandmother looked at our misshapen creations and told us, while clearly attempting not to laugh, that they were "not bad." She also informed us that she had actually made some dumplings before we came so we wouldn't eat at 9 pm, and when we went into the kitchen, we found about 100 dumplings beautifully folded. It put our combined 25 dumplings between three people to shame, but we cooked beautiful and deformed dumplings all together, and they were delicious.

Then she fed us apples + pineapples for dessert, hawberry fruit skins for dessert #2, jasmine tea, and chocolate candies to top it off. She chattered while we were eating about how ginger should be added at the beginning of dish preparation since it took a long time for the flavor to be released, and onions should be added at the end, and hawberries are good for digestion, and computer games are addictive, and how she liked to do 24-form taichi.

She was so cute! Next Monday we will be back to make Beijing noodles. Looking forward to it :D

大牛 - not a real post

2008-04-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

My father has informed me that "大牛" would be better translated as "big ox" or "big bull" than "big cow." I thus stand corrected.

Shanghai World Expo 2010

2008-04-27T19:48:00.000-07:00

In Beijing, everybody is crazy about the 2008 Olympics and the Fuwa (formerly known as Friendlies, but no longer, because the word might be mistaken for "Friendless" or "Friend Lies").

In Shanghai, everybody is still crazy about the Olympics, but also about the 2010 World Expo that will be in Shanghai. Unfortunately, the mascot for the World Expo is not very cute. I think his name is 海寶, hai bao, "treasure of the sea". He looks a little bit like toothpaste.

in shanghai

2008-04-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

So both Internet and time are scarce. We'll be back Monday morning (our time) so expect updates in a few!

houhai, and the art of bargaining

2008-04-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, Che, Pokey, Tracy and I made the trek out to Houhai:

Houhai (Simplified Chinese: 后海, English: Back Lake) is a lake in Beijing, part of the Shichahai lake area. In recent years it has become famous for nightlife because it is home to several popular restaurants, bars, and cafes.

It was a cold, rainy Sunday night, and Houhai is well-liked because of its outdoorsy feel -- bars and restaurants around a lake, rooftop terraces, etc -- so it was pretty empty. We ducked into the first not-too-sketchy bar we saw to get out of the rain, and it turned out to be a pretty cozy place with comfy sofas, a synchronized swimming competition playing on CCTV, and a lone guitarist lip synching to American songs.

A very eager waiter (服务员 fuwuyuan) handed us a drinks menu and must've seen the faces we made at the relatively high price of 35 kuai/shot, because we hadn't looked at the menu for ten seconds before he gave us a sideways glance and said, "I can reduce each shot by 5 kuai, if you want..."

Our combined immediate reaction was a, "....what? we're allowed to barter for set drink prices at bars??" But he'd handed us the option, so we happily accepted and ran with it. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Us: 5 kuai off? That's nothing. How about this, we want to buy in bulk. Give us 8 shots for 150 kuai.
Waiter: 150! That's impossible, way too low. 240.
Us (to each other, while shaking our heads and making faces): There are so many bars around here, we can always go somewhere else, nothing's keeping us here. Nothing special about this place.
Waiter: No other bars will give you discounts! Believe me. No one else! I'm being so generous already [you ungrateful foreigners]. I won't do 150 kuai, but I can pour a little bit more in each cup.
Us: A little bit more? Hmm...all right, how about this. 200 kuai for 8 shots, with a little bit extra poured into each.
Waiter: 200 kuai? [goes over to consult with his fellow fuwuyuan] Okay...200 kuai.
Us: Deal, then! And how about you throw in a free plate of peanuts?

Sometimes it's pretty awesome, this bargaining thing.

Healthy Beautiful Happy Gym

2008-04-23T03:19:00.000-07:00

The gym here is called 康美樂, which literally translates to "Healthy Beautiful Happy". I can only aspire to be so awesome at naming gyms.

Anyways, Helen and I have been trying to go every day, since life is less busy here than at Stanford. We succeeded Monday through Thursday last week, failed Friday through Sunday, and have been succeeding this week so far :)

It's interesting to see the set up. There are maybe twenty treadmills, but only four ellipticals, two of which are broken. Not much love for the ellipticals here, I guess. The machines are all lined up against a mirror wall, and on the opposite side there are dance studios where classes such as belly dancing are conducted. My treadmill today was in the perfect location for me to watch the belly dancing class in the mirror. The instructor is male, he likes wearing training-bra-like tops, and he is very exuberant. Take a look:

A less exciting part of my 6km (! crazy! that's the most I've ever run in my life) treadmill run today was the less-than-fragrant guy on the treadmill next to me. He smelled bad as soon as stepped onto the treadmill, before he even started exercising :( When he came I had a very vigorous debate with myself about whether or not I should leave, but my desire to get into shape won out over my poor nose's discomfort, so I got to observe him a little while longer. He was wearing a collared shirt with a pocket in which he put his mp3 player, and khaki shorts, not quite normal gym attire. He ran for about two minutes, then straddled the track as it kept going, and did random squat stretches; stopped the machine, started it again, slowly, and picked up a little bit of speed; then started snapping his fingers and pointing at an invisible crowd and throwing out his arms like a wannabe pop star. It was glorious. He must have been having an excellent make-believe concert.

I <3 Skype

2008-04-22T22:06:00.001-07:00

I have discovered that Skype is kind of amazing.

Prior to this discovery, all communication was conducted via IM or email, which really isn't so bad. However, especially now that I am in the midst of RCC interviews (I need housing next year oh noes) Skype is just awesome.

I Skyped with my mom yesterday, and it was our first voice conversation since I arrived in China a month ago. Oops. Apparently my accent in Chinese is becoming more mainland Chinese and less Taiwanese. Dammit China, I want my Taiwanese accent back!!

Oh yes, Skype in the news (although this is unrelated to my recent discovery of its general awesomeness as a service):

Luxembourg, 21st April, 2008 – Skype announced unlimited* calling today to over a third of the world’s population with the launch of its new calling subscriptions. The new subscriptions signal the first time Skype has offered a single, monthly flat rate for international calling to landline numbers in 34 countries.

surprise! a haircut

2008-04-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

After a long day of shopping last Saturday, Tracy and I packed our bags and headed down six flights of escalators in the Xidan shopping center to catch at taxi back to Beida. We were on the first floor and almost out the front door--so close!--when Tracy was grabbed forcibly on the arm by a male person and dragged down the plaza. She turned around and gave me a sort of, "What the hell is going on?!?" look and I ran after her and her abductor.

Of all places, we ended up in a hair salon, and abductor guy (who, admittedly, had pretty stylish hair) was joined by his abductor friends and they sat both me and Tracy down in salon chairs and started spraying water and shampoo into our hair and massaging it and washing it. We still had no idea what was going on, but they didn't seem to care much about our protests and just assured us that they just "wanted to show us what our hair could look like" and it was a special promotion and completely free service.

After a few minutes, it came out that the "showing" was free but any cutting would cost us 30 RMB. Ok, 30 RMB, around $5 USD, that was a decent price for a haircut. We both agreed, especially since it was kind of pleasant getting our heads thoroughly massaged, and since they'd sort of already started cutting our hair by this time. Ten minutes later, I looked over at Tracy, and she had little foil things all over her head....umm...did haircuts usually require the use of foil?!

Aha. Here was their trick, then....they had told us our hair would "look good if it were lifted" and tried to perm our hair without explicitly telling us they would. They were just hoping we'd obliviously go along with it and then accept their 300-500 RMB bill afterwards, and they almost succeeded before Tracy realized that she was going to be charged for the silver foil things in her hair and demanded they remove them.

Long story short, we ended up with unexpected (but cheap and pretty decent) haircuts. But it was such a strange experience. What a marketing technique.

So strange.

entrepreneurship in china

2008-04-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

Re: Tracy's post on the Stanford Alumni Reception - I suggested we go up to Bravman and tell him he was a 大牛, but we weren't sure how he would feel about being called a "big cow," no matter how complimentary a phrase it is in Chinese...

As has been alluded to in past posts, Tracy and I have spent many of our free hours in China meeting up with various people connected with tech, business, and entrepreneurship here. We're interested in potentially working in a field in/related to China, so we're trying to find out as much as possible while we're here.

We've so far spoken at length to a consulting company that helps multinationals enter the China market; the United States Information Technology Office; Stanford alumni working at start-ups in virtual world technology and the Internet space; local Beijingers working at a start-up on mobile local search; and yesterday, many interesting people at the Stanford Alumni Reception, including a member of the Stanford Alumni Association Board of Directors, a professor at Tsinghua University, a venture capitalist in China, and a president at a consulting company who might be able to hook us up with SOEs so we could get a better sense of how they operate.

All pretty exciting :) Understandably, this has kept us pretty busy in between our classes at Beida, our classes we're taking online at Stanford, attempting to go to the gym every day, and still leaving time to hang out with other people in the program.

So much to blog about from the past week! 4 hours of KTV, a surprise haircut, going out last night and learning to play the dice game....

well, another time.

President Hennessy at PKU

2008-04-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

President Hennessy spoke at PKU just now: "Stepping Up: How Universities Must Change to Meet the Needs of Society in the 21st Century".

I think I was the only Stanford student that went. I guess some people were in class, others couldn't wake up, and the others who wanted to go probably didn't know the location. I happened to go up to the lounge really early, so I ran into Professor Shen who is the Stanford at Beijing program director, and a couple other Stanford faculty, a few minutes before they left. I got to sit in VIP seating with the Stanford delegation, behind Vice Provost Bravman and Dean Plummer. Pretty sweet.

Hennessy mentioned a lot of history and numbers in his talk. There have been 500+ Stanford students that studied at PKU since 1994, the first Stanford students went to China in 1979, that sort of thing. He discussed three trends that he sees as relevant to universities in the 21st century:
1. increasing complexities that society faces, like the environmental challenges that come with overpopulation and economic development
2. globalization, as local problems like terrorism and infectious diseases become global problems, and how the rise of Asia is an important subtext to globalization
3. the speed of technological development, so that universities are key in discovering new knowledge and educating their students to use this knowledge.
And, very pertinent to his actually being at PKU, he talked about how universities need to collaborate more and prepare students to collaborate more.

Hennessy's remarks probably lasted half an hour, and then it opened up to questions. The first girl said that Hennessy was too idealistic and the reality is that the Chinese government suppresses many of their dreams; someone else also commented on the political tension right now. One person asked how PKU students can go to Stanford, in reference to the Stanford at Beijing program; Hennessy said, "You can come if you apply and get in!" rather sidestepping the question. I asked the last question - just a generic question on behalf of the Stanford students here, what we should do to make the most of our time, not particularly brilliant but I felt I should at least represent the Stanford students. Hennessy somewhat remembers me from our long conversation yesterday, I think! How exciting. His answer wasn't too specific though, just 1. spend more time with locals, but more pointedly, 2. get fluent in Chinese.

On a slightly related note, one of the PKU administrators working on this program saw me after the event concluded, and asked me if I was the one that did the opening remarks for the program on the first day, which were in Chinese (I did). Then he complimented me on my English, saying it was very fluent, and asked if I had prepared my question for Hennessy beforehand (I did not), and that it was very well asked. I suppose the PKU students wrote out their questions ahead of time, but I'd hope my English is good enough to wing a casual question...

Stanford Alumni Reception

2008-04-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

There was a Stanford Alumni Reception in Beijing, Shangri-La Hotel, yesterday. I learned that alumni receptions essentially consist of many hors d'oeuvres and talking to random people.

Okay maybe not that random: people including John Hennessy, President of Stanford; John Bravman, Vice Provost of Stanford; Jim Plummer, Dean of the School of Engineering; two other deans, composing the delegation to Asia; a number of professors; and some very impressive alumni. A few of us chatted with Hennessy for 20 or 30 minutes about China, Tibet and the Olympics, censorship, and all sorts of interesting intellectual things. Actually, Che and I intro'ed ourselves with: "Hi, we used your textbook last quarter, we love EE108B!" and it somehow segued nicely into less nerdy conversation. At one point Hennessy said, "China's trying to paint the Dalai Lama as some sort of monster.. that's obviously not going to work. I've met the guy, he's such a nice person" and proceeded very casually with the rest of the conversation. I wonder what it's like to be name-dropping on the order of the Dalai Lama. We also chatted with Bravman for a while, about the weather and such (a little bit less intellectually stimulating). One of the most notable alumni I talked to was Nick Yang, who began with, "My company is publicly traded on NASDAQ. Oh, by the way, this is my second company. We sold the first one for $30 million." And then, "But I'm not the most successful in my class, the Google guys were at Stanford the same time as me."

Chinese people have a term for really cool/baller: 牛, niu2, literal meaning "cow". All of the people I mentioned above would be considered 大牛, da4 niu2, literal meaning "big cow".

I had the foresight to make business cards last week when Helen and I visited the Central Business District to see someone at USITO. That was pretty clutch. I'm not even looking for a job, although I was basically offered one by virtue of the fact that I'm EE - but it was really cool to meet people and distribute my business card! and hopefully I will be motivated enough to stay in contact with these 大牛. All of whom, by the way, are engineers, interestingly, and predominantly EECS. I love it. Actually, Stanford EECS is pretty much all I have on my business card.. but it's so key! One alumnus yesterday saw that my nametag had MS'09 on it (I don't know who registered me, but they put BS and MS'09), and he said, "Wait, let me guess. You must be econ undergrad and MS&E coterm." When I responded with "EE undergrad, CS coterm", he seemed much more impressed. That's right ;-)

[Haha, this intellectual elitism needs to stop. EEs are a little too proud of being EE, I think.]

Studying with PKU Students

2008-04-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

To Stanford students, I think the most unfathomable part of the PKU student experience is having dorm electricity shut off at 11 pm (luckily, as international students staying in the Shaoyuan Guesthouses we are exempt from such atrocity). How is it even possible to be a student without all nighters and intense study sessions?

I learned from a PKU student who is a math major that because math is a more difficult major (苦, ku3, literal meaning "bitter"), math majors have access to classrooms in which they can study 24/7. As we are starting to feel the pileup of work from three weeks of play, Helen and I joined him for a study session last night, and it was actually very productive for our CS103B pset. Studying here is very different from studying in the US. We "work together" in study lounges but we also chat once in a while, listen to music, take late nite breaks, etc. At PKU, people study in classrooms, so they're sitting in rows, each studying his/her own material very seriously, and NO talking. Dead silence. Helen and I were the only ones with laptops, and our typing was a little disruptive, I think. Also, late nite is more along the lines of going out the South Gate and buying "small eats". And people usually pack up by midnight - I guess 24/7 access doesn't actually translate into 24/7 studying.

washington roulette

2008-04-16T22:43:00.001-07:00

Tibet, from China's POV

(check out page 3 especially)
(taken from Che's posted items on Facebook)

After Chinese class some Beijing guy came up to me + Pokey + Barry and asked us if we could please help him out, he was trying to get tickets to an event, but you had to have a Beida student ID to get tickets and he wasn't a student. We looked at the flier for the ticket he wanted, and lo and behold, it was for President Hennessy's talk on Monday here at Beida (he's the president of Stanford). Pokey and Barry decided to help him :P

I don't think the guy had any idea we were Stanford students--students from any other school would probably have no idea who Hennessy was and wouldn't be too eager to help a random guy get tickets to a random event--but he got lucky I suppose.

Criminal Justice Law Class

2008-04-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm in class right now, one of the BOSP Beijing content classes. Our classes are all Stanford classes, catered to Stanford students, and taught in English. The teacher for this criminal justice class is a professor from the Peking University Law School. He studied in Germany at some point in his career, so he likes saying "JA" as a filler, which I slightly prefer to the Beijing "ERR" sound, but after a while it's also not so novel.

Three-hour-long fuzzy lectures are killer. I'm not used to mandatory attendance! I'm a big fan of techie classes where doing well on psets and exams is sufficient. Class is entirely optional, and sleeping in class is quite normal, or bringing laptops and Gtalking all the time. Well, I guess I do have my laptop now and I do spend most of the three hours Gtalking, but I do mildly resent having to be in class from 9 am to 12 pm.

I am looking forward to lunch! and purchasing train tickets to Shanghai for next weekend :D

china, tsinghua, usito

2008-04-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

Similar to the Facebook status changes I noted last time in my Tibet post: support for China on MSN

It's really quite difficult to post these things, because Blogger is blocked, Techcrunch is blocked, I have to go through proxies to view most vaguely blog-like objects on the Internet...

The past few days have been super busy. Had dinner at Tsinghua University (MIT of China) with an old friend - the campus there is quite beautiful. Will post pictures sometime.

Tracy and I visited USITO (United States Information Technology Office) today, an NGO that acts sort of as a lobbyist to help American tech companies gain permission/contracts to enter the Chinese market. It has something like 50 US member companies, including eBay, Cisco, Microsoft, Freescale, etc. We learned a ton of interesting things about governmental regulations on technology in China and how difficult it is for foreign companies to work here.

This post lacks actual content, but now I must go shower. Just got back from the gym, and dinner + pub quiz in half an hour :P Leave a comment/email us if you are actually interested in learning more about either the tech market in China, or in getting a basic sense of what the government's views are regarding technology.

after the lights went out

2008-04-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

Waiting for 11 pm yesterday night was likened by some to waiting for Y2K eight years ago -- by 10:55 pm, those of us in the Stanford lounge were all sitting in anticipation, scrambling to get homework done, awaiting the darkness of electricity-less-ness. The lights turned off a few minutes late, so for a while we were afraid it was going to be just as anticlimactic as Y2K turned out to be. But luckily we were wrong :D

I played my first ever game of Chinese Chess last night at around 11:30 pm, by the light of one flashlight in the lounge. It was like a (really high-tech) middle school camp after lights out - watching a scary movie on a laptop, playing games by flashlight, and navigating around our rooms by the light of our cell phones. I want to play more xiang qi!

Obligatory Food Post

2008-04-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

- in chronological order, coincidentally also in increasing order of amazingness by location (i.e. skip to Part III for the fancy stuff)
- apologies for low resolution, my 10MB camera takes pictures that are far too large to upload in the original

Part I: Little Cafe in the Central Business District (CBD)
Total cost: 13 RMB/two people (~$1 pp)

dumplings

揚州炒飯 Yangzhou fried rice

Part II: International Student Cafe at Renmin University
Total cost: 90 RMB / 5 people, 9 dishes (~ $2.57 pp)

Kristine and 小籠包 xiaolongbao

拉皮

Japanese style tofu

seaweed

sweet batter fried corn

京醬肉絲 (tofu skins and pork with sweet sauce)

spicy Sichuan veggies

土豆絲 shredded potato

疙瘩湯 (soup with clumps of flour.. I didn't translate that right)

Part III: 大董烤鴨店 & 鼎泰豐 - Da Dong Peking Duck & Din Tai Fung
Total cost: 805RMB / 4 people, 7 dishes + drinks + 4 desserts (~$28.73 pp)

Helen and I with the menu (essentially a big studio picture book of food)

春筍 bamboo shoots

宫保蝦球 kungpao shrimp

jellyfish

unknown veggie

cod buried in salt bonsai garden

cod excavated from salt bonsai garden but now wrapped in leaves

tofu soup

condiments for Peking duck

wrapper for Peking duck

cutting up the Peking duck

Peking duck, in pieces

this is how to wrap Peking duck

Peking duck wrapped and finally ready for consumption

杏仁露 almond dessert

fruit atop smoking dry ice

Wrigley's gum served on a plate

almond tofu shaved ice

combination shaved ice

we are blocked :(

2008-04-12T05:46:00.000-07:00

Dashboard is still up so we can make posts, but all Blogspot sites are (temporarily?) blocked so we can't actually view our page or any of the comments.

Also, I have been trying to upload a video to Facebook for about 2 hours and the upload speed has ranged from a high of 8KB/sec to a low of 0.5KB/sec. It's currently going at 2KB and I have uploaded 1.3/63MB. This is no good.

Also, our electricity is being turned off from 11 pm - 6 am tomorrow night for....not sure. Energy testing of some sort?

Also, Tracy and I are both dying - we're both kind of sick and the cold weather and pollution aren't helping much.

So sad :(

love at renmin

2008-04-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

After getting back from clubbing at 4 am yesterday (see post below :D), I happily slept in today and woke up at noon. My day was consumed by 4 hours of KTV of entirely Chinese songs -- exactly one of which I could actually sing. But it was fun trying to follow along and read the (traditional!!) Chinese characters fast enough to keep up with whoever was singing. And now I might go learn a few songs for next time :D

We visited Renmin University, another fairly good college in Beijing, with a friend of a friend who goes there. Over dinner, we learned all about love and dating at Renmin.

You know how we joke about sketchy grad students at undergrad parties? At Renmin they take that to a whole new level - they have scheduled parties on Wednesday and Saturday, the sole purpose of which is for PhD students to find girlfriends. Male PhD's pay a minimal fee to enter the party, girls of any age go in for free, and everyone's happy. Right?

(Tracy and I politely declined an offer to go to the next one.)
If a guy likes or is dating a girl, it's tradition for him to make a heart out of candles in front of her door on her birthday. A heart of lighted candles...aww..how cute.
If a guy wants to tell a girl he loves her, he takes her out to this grassy field on campus at midnight (when no one was around, it was explained) to tell her. Apparently it's a popular place to declare love.

At Beida, there's the pretty Weiming Lake in the middle of campus that serves the same purpose. We tried to think of an equivalent place at Stanford, failed, and concluded that maybe no one ever told anyone else they loved them at Stanford :( how sad.

I don't think we really have any traditions at Stanford regarding dating, in fact, unless you count Full Moon on the Quad, which I don't. I wonder if it's cultural, or because it's Stanford. On the other hand, maybe I'm just ignorant, so do enlighten us if you know of any such traditions at our lovely school.

Nightlife in Beijing

2008-04-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first night rolling out to a bar and club with the Stanford kids. We went to Lan and Mix in the Chaoyang District downtown. Overall, very fun, despite my extreme tiredness :)

Lan 蘭
http://www.lanbeijing.com/
According to the Insider's Guide to Beijing, Lan was voted 'Best Decor' in that's Beijing's 2007 Reader Bar and Club Awards and Restaurant Awards. I believe it. Lan takes up the entire fourth floor of a shopping mall and it definitely qualifies as a luxury venue. To take the bathrooms as an example, each toilet is in its own decorated room - mirrors for walls, tinted red, an island in the middle with the sink, the faucet of which is the mouth of a dramatic swan sculpture. The prices of drinks match the opulence; Christian treated us to a round of drinks and he paid the equivalent of US$115 for a handle of vodka. The NYC prices were probably why the place was very empty on a Thursday night and the few people there were middle-aged foreigners who couldn't dance very well. It wasn't exactly the most happening place, which is why we headed over to Mix shortly afterwards...

Mix
http://www.clubzone.com/c/Beijing/Lounge_Bar/MIX.html
Mix is a pretty legit club. Good dance music, despite the sleepy looking DJs, and enough people to make it fun but not so many that it was uncomfortable, although there seemed to be more guys than girls. Ordering drinks was also a ridiculously complicated procedure thanks to the extremely loud music and the usual language difficulties. Anyways, it was a lot of fun dancing with the Stanford people, and we managed to avoid the sketchies pretty well. Hooray, good times.

contentious issues

2008-04-09T23:16:00.000-07:00

Tracy, Katharine and I had lunch with Billy, a Beida student, today. Billy is a third-year Psychology/Econ double-major here. He's from southern China, and is in my Corporate Governance class (which means, among other things, that he went through three rounds of interviews and written English tests to be selected as one of 11 Beida students allowed to take Stanford classes).

We went to this sort of Western restaurant on campus where they served us salad with silverware and "egg budding" that was actually flan. Over lunch, conversation wandered over to current events, as it often does. Billy was telling us about how angry he is at Europeans in general (and protesters in Paris in particular) for being so close-minded regarding China. Paraphrasing:

They protest the Olympics and protest Tibet without really knowing anything about the issues, only reading biased Western news; a lot of them don't even know where Tibet was or what any of the history between Tibet and China has been, but are simply jumping on the bandwagon and denouncing China because everyone else is doing it. My Chinese friends in Europe say there is a generally unfriendly atmosphere there towards China.

Not to mention, Europeans think all Chinese people are brainwashed by the central government, when in fact a majority of college students dislike the CCP and the way it runs the country. They put up with it because they believe that "China's transformation" and rise upwards should be accomplished by a united country, and not a fractured one (aka not a repeat of the Warring States period of Chinese history). Now is not the time to cause dissonance. The students all have ways of getting around the Chinese firewall (proxies, tunnels, etc), and often read Western news as well as CCP news to try to get all the facts. We're all fluent in English as well as Chinese.

The interesting part of this, for me, was that unlike most times in the past, when he and his friends have just shrugged off outside criticism of China, the Tibet/Olympics issue -- and the "biased Western media accounts" of the story -- has angered a large portion of the college crowd at once. People are actually gathering together online in support of China and against the unfair accusations towards the Chinese government. They're angry at CNN in particular for biased reporting -- one example he gave was a CNN photo that was cropped to show only Chinese soldiers with guns in Tibet, without showing the Tibetans throwing rocks at the soldiers. Billy, who a week ago thought the concept of the Olympics was stupid, now wholly supports the Olympics to show his support for China.

Not to say that the government has acted well. Clearly, they are suppressing free speech, and they are limiting the Tibetans' freedom of religion. The point is that even students who by and large don't support the CCP think portrayal of the Tibet issue has been unfair enough that they're willing to stand up for the central government.

This is true of Chinese (international) students in the U.S. too. Amongst my facebook friends list -

It was the first time I've really talked to any of the Beida students about Tibet, so it was interesting. Tracy's Taiwanese friends would give you an entirely different story.

Fuwa 2: Jingjing, the violent one

2008-04-09T20:10:00.001-07:00

Fuwa

2008-04-09T05:58:00.000-07:00

The most adorable Olympic mascots ever. They're everywhere in Beijing (China?), bringing joy to all in the form of excessive cuteness.

Advanced C++ Class

2008-04-09T04:46:00.000-07:00

I sat in on a Peking University CS class today. Advanced C++ for freshmen, I think?

It was amazing, but not in a good way :( There were about 30 or 40 students in the class (3 or 4 girls, and many many guys with glasses) so my presence was rather conspicuous, especially as I came in just on time and had to sit in the front row. As far as I could tell from the two hours of class time today, the primary mode of teaching is putting code on the projector screen and asking students to go up, explain, and write the output on the chalkboard. And then the next slide in the ppt is the answer key.. I was asked to go up twice and both times I declined as politely as I could, saying that I'm not actually a Beida student, but the substitute teacher clearly thought I was just trying to get out of the classroom exercises. (This might have been a good time to have a distinctively non-native accent in Chinese; my Taiwanese accent apparently doesn't mark me as very foreign.)

For those who are CS-y: The entire class was on C++ STL classes!! One hour on set and multiset, another hour on map and multimap. There's a reason for cppreference and dinkumware and Google! It's quite unnecessary to walk through exactly what every function does :( All I could think of during this lecture was how much better Julie Zelenski and Jerry Cain are at teaching CS than this teacher was.

If this were a Stanford class, all the students would have peaced after half an hour of the first lecture, and probably would not have shown up again except for the midterm and final. Or if some did show up, they would have brought laptops and been doing other things all through class - not a single person had a laptop today! Maybe it's against school policy, or something. Chinese students are very respectful of their teachers. They even applauded at the end of lecture! and it was just a random, not-very-good lecture in the middle of the quarter.

I think the excessive number of exclamation points in this post is a good indication of my amazement today.

how to squish college students

2008-04-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

1. Have a tiny campus. Pretty, but tiny.

2. Put students 4 - 8 to a small room (2 - 4 bunk beds per room). Leave no room to hang clothes up and make students hang them in the halls. Don't allow students to pick roommates. Force them to stay in the same room all four years.

3. Turn off electricity in all dorms at 11 pm every night. Close the library at 10:30 pm. Force students to go to off-campus cafes if they want to study past 1 am or so (after their computers run out of battery).

-1. However, the food is amazingly cheap. Any given meal at one of the campus canteens -- a serving of jiaozi (dumplings) with rice porridge, five baozi (meat/veggie filled buns), a stir-fried dish and rice, a steamer of xiaolongbao -- usually costs less than $1USD. I eat so much.

-2. The Beida students are really nice!! One of the best things about being here is getting to meet them, eat long meals with them while attempting to communicate in Chinese, party with them...

I'm quite enjoying being at Beida. I'm just glad I'm an international student, with the privilege of a room to myself and 24-hour electricity.

And despite being at the top university in their country--and having studied like crazy to get here--the students here almost universally dream of going to the United States to study.

We went to see some Peking Opera. It was interesting.

observation 1

2008-04-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

if china were to lose its autonomous regions (yellow), it would look exactly like a squirrel:

it exists!!

2008-04-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

Yeah, we gave up on being creative. Maybe we are just not creative people.

Soon-to-come: adventures, interesting observations, and photos! Stay posted!

ps. sorry if looking at this page hurts your eyes. it is rather pink.

Hello from Beijing! (2 weeks after arrival)

2008-04-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

After many failed attempts at a creative name for our travel blog, Helen and I have settled on tracyandhelen.blogspot.com to document our adventures in China during our quarter at Peking University.

Hooray!