EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final installment of a four-part series on the author’s trip to China. Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon
Ah, the joys of returning home after a lengthy trip away from home: the cats don’t remember you, the bill collectors do, and the inside of your fridge smells like Salinas in August.
I’m back on the Island now with the final part in this four-part series along with some final thoughts.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final installment of a four-part series on the author’s trip to China. Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon
Ah, the joys of returning home after a lengthy trip away from home: the cats don’t remember you, the bill collectors do, and the inside of your fridge smells like Salinas in August.
I’m back on the Island now with the final part in this four-part series along with some final thoughts.
One of my favorite things to do when I visit an exotic locale is to reserve some time for simply walking and wandering around, stopping here and there for a bite to eat or a puff on a cigar and generally observing the world around me. These adventures usually wind up lasting longer than I originally anticipate because I nearly always get lost at some point and spend an hour or two trying to get found again. This is exactly what I did last week, first visiting the Temple of Heaven south of Tiananmen Square and its massive surrounding park and then exploring the neighborhoods around it. Subway stations are never where they’re supposed to be (and the first two that I did find were both closed for renovation work), but it nevertheless gave me a chance to explore the Xicheng (West City) district of Beijing.
Here, I caught glimpses of the mysterious hutongs, or ancient neighborhoods comprised of labyrinths of narrow alleys. The residents of these hutongs have lived for generations in these little enclaves. One of the things that strikes you in observing the daily lives of the Chinese is that everyone, everywhere is always doing something. They are unpacking boxes or transporting mountains of empty plastic bottles on rickety bicycles. They are raking leaves on a traffic island or stuffing dead branches into plastic bags. They are sweeping sidewalks with homemade brooms or making those homemade brooms. They are shoveling sand into wheelbarrows or tending trash fires or piling junk in a corner or any one of a million other tasks.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Tuesday morning or Saturday night, they are working for themselves or for their families or for The Man. Exceedingly rare is the person of any age—from toddler to ancient, weathered elder—who is doing nothing, or who is drunk or begging. Everyone seems to have a job or something to do and they are doing it jinjinyouwei: they are doing it with a will.
The Language
It occurs to me that I haven’t spent a whole lot of time in this series on the reason I made this trip, chiefly to study the Chinese language at the superb Beijing International Chinese College in the Chaoyang district.
On my first day of classes, I was given a placement test of sorts. They put two books in front of me: a beginning Chinese reader and an intermediate Chinese reader. I read a few sentences from both and they took away the beginner’s book and told me I was in the intermediate class. Just like that.
For the next month, I was up every morning well before sunrise and on the superb Beijing subway system from the Dawanglu station to Hujialou where my school was located. One of the things I wasn’t quite expecting was that the classes were taught entirely in Chinese. No English spoken here. When the teacher asked us to define a word or a sentence or for that matter an entire passage, she didn’t mean for us to translate it into English. She meant we had to describe its meaning using only Chinese.
Every day I was given about four hours worth of homework, which consisted chiefly of writing Chinese characters over and over and over again. If you didn’t do your homework, you got to stand in front of the class at the chalkboard the next day looking like a fool. This happened to me the first two days until I figured it out the system. It never happened again after that.
A great testament to the school is the fact that many of the embassies in the area send their staff to this school for language lessons and at least two or three days a week the halls were filled with mighty important looking people from the Colombian embassy, Nigerian embassy and a host of others. Although Chinese may sound incomprehensible to speakers of Indo-European languages, it’s actually one of the most logical, most simply constructed languages on earth. The difficulty in learning the language for a gringo such as myself lies in the fact that it is so different from languages like English, French and Spanish.
In fact, if someone gave me six months to invent a foreign language, I would adopt a lot of the principles behind Chinese. There are no plurals, no words like “the” or “an,” verbs don’t conjugate like they do in French and Spanish and to make a statement past tense you simply add either the suffix “de” or the suffix “le” at the end of the sentence or the verb. No messy verb changes or the like. I flew out of Shanghai last Sunday for the trip home. This time I had a window seat and I watched as the lights of China slowly faded away into the mists of the East China Sea. The Chinese are a people who have been slammed over the centuries; first by themselves, then by outsiders, then by themselves again. Now their country is in the driver’s seat and they’re having the times of their lives.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was in a country where the people are actually looking forward to their future, not dreading it or trying to avoid it. They nearly universally love Americans there and our lifestyle, or at least what they perceive to be our lifestyle. (There was more Christmas spirit in Beijing than I’ve seen in any American city in years, maybe decades). I never got any mistreatment or evil looks and when I paid for a steamed dumpling or a taxi ride, I paid what the locals paid. I know this for a fact and that’s not something I can say for most countries I have visited in this world.
Much has been said about the terrible smog problem in Chinese cities, but I must have hit it at a good time because I only saw about two days of smoggy weather in Beijing. As far as I’m concerned, L.A. was a lot worse back in the ’70s than China is now.
I read recently that the People’s Republic of China just became the world’s largest economy. The future will be interesting indeed.
