the china chronicles 5 -- chengdu day 1

so when we landed in chengdu i knew wouldn't like the city very much. the airport was the indicator. it was not too impressive. dusty-ish, claustrophobic, a lot of people, old, dated. i turned out not liking the city very much at all, surprise surprise.

we did all the usual things one does after getting off a plane, except that our friend lauren got lost around the baggage claim. so me, my roommate and our other pal all yelled HEY LAUREN! across the baggage claim. EVERYONE except lauren turned around and there was when i realized that less people here speaking english and that an english-speaking chinese in chengdu would be weirder than in, say, shanghai or beijing. consider it noted for future exploitation. we found her eventually.

we loaded our baggage up into a taxi and headed off towards the hotel. my dad, in the spirit of casual conversation, asked the taxi driver if the hotel we were staying at was a good one. the response was a no. it's not.

well, damn.

the hotel, as i found out, wasn't the worst one i'd ever stayed in, but it definitely ranked on the 1 to 10 sketchfactor scale as a 6. sketchier than normal. the carpets were first. they were an indiscriminately dirty gray and we couldn't tell if they were supposed to be that color or they were just filthy. we decided on filthy and played the floor is lava and avoided touching it at all costs. we even walked on tiptoes in slippers.

the second thing that was bothersome was that the room smelled like cigarette smoke and the a/c, when turned on, smelled like old a/c. the third bothersome thing was that our window led out onto SOMEONE ELSE'S DECK. i kid you not, their houseplants were outside our window. if they wanted to open our window and rob us in the middle of the night we couldn't do a thing.

we left the door out to air the room and my roommate was on her bed, threatening to eat me because she was hungry. i told her i wasn't food. then, to test the skills of room cleaning, since i doubted room cleaning did a good job in this hotel, i drew a picture with the pencil and paper provided by the hotel. it was a dude screaming I'M AN AMERICAN BASTARD in chinese which would look like this:

我是一个美国混蛋！

[to clarify, that wasn't i'm an american comma bastard. it was i'm an american bastard.] and then in english, DON'T SCREW WITH ME, B-TCH, THAT'S RIGHT, YOU'D BETTER RUN. now whoever picked up the paper could enjoy the benefits of two languages and in case they couldn't understand either, also a cartoon figure.

well the whole point of the exercise was to test if room service thoroughly cleaned the room or not. again, i had my doubts. so i folded it up and stashed it under the cover of a magazine that was in a drawer and drew a smiley face on the cover to cleverly deceive whoever found it into thinking it was nice. if the cleaners found it it would be removed. if not then we know who's not earning their wages properly.

by the way. i left the dash in "b-tch" to self-censor because i didn't want anyone who picked up the paper to think that all english-speaking chinese were bastards like me.

throughout this whole time, my roommate was lying on her bed threatening to eat anything that came near. it was a relief not to be devoured by a starving fourteen-year-old when her mom finally showed up to announce the epic quest for lunch.

we found it at a restaurant nearby and nothing was remarkable until it came time to pay the bill. then it took two women, four waitresses, and a waiter about forty-five minutes to split the bill evenly, calculator included. the kids? well we were just happy we had wifi in this dump of a restaurant, in a far away city.

the usual. it's a hazard of traveling.

afterwards we went to a temple BUT NOT BEFORE we stopped at a travel agency to book tomorrow's trip. thinking ahead, that's us.

the temple was unremarkable, made remarkable by my dad's insistence that we pay attention to a topic the kids honestly cared nothing about. it was a horrible day for walking around. the humidity was high and so was the temperature, and we seemed to be there for the benefit of my dad only, who was the only one interested in whatever dose of ancient history this place had to offer.

again, a hazard of traveling. all those temples and sanctuaries and monasteries all seem the same after awhile. just old-dead-history that we were supposed to appreciate because it was our heritage and no better reason than that. and for a bunch of kids who would have rather seen the city and maybe get to love it a little more, well. we weren't getting out easy.

there was deathmetal screaming, failed suicide pacts, wait-you-told-me-those-weren't-peach-trees-but-they're-growing-peaches, starbucks as the first sign of civilization, stone xylophones playing simple gifts due to marching band, and asians wasting money involved. long story, ask me sometime.

we went back to the hotel BUT NOT BEFORE we stopped at the travel agency again. we then got some shopping done and since my dad my brother and i couldn't find a taxi like the rest of those lucky sons of guns, we walked fifteen minutes back to our supersketch hotel. then i took a shower, didn't eat dinner, and started drawing another picture completely unrelated to cartoon figures screaming in american and chinese.

before my roommate took a shower i turned on the tv and starting watching a cheesy drama which i laughed about watching. but by the time my roommate stepped OUT of the shower i realized that it was actually a good drama and we started watching it. and watching it. and watching it.

there were gay joker-like campy antagonists with harems, emo-starving-wait-he's-actually-kinda-attractive-whoa-artists, amish chinese hitmen with john lennon sunglasses, twisted family histories between a rich family disowning a girl into a poor family, cartoon sound effects, beating of old men, and pretentiously asshole-ish but later turned good random guy for plot advancement or else the drama would have made no sense.

but once i thought on it, EVERYTHING here made no sense. what happens in chengdu, stays in chengdu.

chengdu day 1 END.

the china chronicles 4 -- shanghai

so remember the bug drama and how my roommate promised she would scream if a bug landed on her face while she slept? it turns out that she makes noises in her sleep and that i might or might not have misinterpreted that as screaming at 5:08 am. but unlike a good friend, i just lay in bed for awhile, wondering if that was seriously a cry for help and why she wasn't flailing around the room because i knew she hated bugs. so i looked over, discovered that she was just stretching or something and still sleeping and NOT covered in bugs, and went back to sleep.

we woke up early and ate at the hotel buffet. i love hotel buffets. they are so neat and clean and organized. don't get me wrong, i like the cultural food too and the experience of eating legit regional food but hey. i also love breakfast on white plates with placemats and five different kinds of fruit juice and bacon and danishes.

[the hangzhou hotel buffet was much more impressive, but heyy. you took what you got.]

then we were off for our main objective in shanghai, which was the world expo. we subwayed there, which was practical for maybe more practical for one or two people but not a group of 11 with a small kid and four confused adults.

but we got there and i found that we had to walk a mile or so before we even got IN the place. this was intense. obviously walking around was the theme and my shoes were already half-dead. so it was like china walking vs. my shoes and we would see who came out victorious.

the expo for those who don't know are a bunch of buildings with exhibits inside depending on who set them up. they're called pavillions. there were country pavillions, company pavillions, and miscellaneous ones like the ones about city planning and stuff.

we went into at least like thirty that day... i can't even remember them all. we only went into the ones that didn't have a huge line, so that meant some of the smaller ones like belarus, slovenia, bosnia/herzegovina, you know the ones that most people are like HUH THAT'S ON A MAP. the largest ones we went in were indonesia and australia, which involved somewhat of a line but it was worth it. it would take entirely too much time to explain them all but let me tell you it was AH-MAY-ZING. all right. i'm being overenthusiastic. but it was SUPER COOL.

we were planning to stay in the expo until late so we could see the lights. so we did. we got there at 8 something in the morning and didn't leave until 10 that night. it was awesome.

we ate lunch at the cafeteria in the expo, where i had really good baozi and some weirdass soup that was like seaweed in water. we had a break for ice cream after the australia pavillion [vanilla for me, i keep it simple]. we bought dinner at one of the fast-food places and ate it on some benches outside, like hobos except everyone was doing it. pizza hut and kfc for the win.

then afterwards we went into more small pavillions. my legs hurt from all the walking but it was so much fun that we just kept going in more and more.

interestingly enough, the country name for belarus in chinese translates into "white russia" so i wondered out loud if belarus was like russia, but more racist. i got laughed at. there were stamp stations in most of the pavillions where you could "stamp" a "passport" and collect the stamps so we ran around doing that as well.

then we went home, which was an epic quest in and of itself being that we couldn't find the subway, and when we did it was completely PACKED with people. and when we finally got in bed that night, we were ordered to go right to sleep because we would have to do the same thing tomorrow. but my roommate and i watched V again instead of sleeping. teenage rebels. that's what we were.

the next day was essentially a repeat of the first day. more walking, except with more of the larger exhibits. we got this thing on a red lanyard that let us skip the lines into 5 exhibits and they were i think: india, nepal, morocco, lebanon [i think?] and the GM theater where we were supposed to see a 4D show.

so off we were waving our red lanyards in the faces of the workers and skipping the lines. morocco's pavillion was SUPERNICE. i think i will live in morocco when i grow up.

while waiting for the GM show we went into the north korea pavilion and then the iran one, which were right next to each other. it seems like a bad idea, right. nkorea's was really super happy fun time, which we were like yeah right. us four american kids went in and my roommate and i really wanted to buy a north korean flag to wave in the face of airport security on the way back. but we didn't.

then we ate dinner omnomnom. i had chicken rice that was way overpriced. but what can you do, eh? everyone's trying to make a living.

then we went to the GM show which involved people saying that in twenty years we would have personal cars that could steer and park themselves, avoid accidents, plan out routes to stop traffic congestion, and be 100 percent environmentally friendly. also the cities of the world by that time would have all turned into a loving places full of huge glass buildings, futuristic-looking highways, beautiful people and sunshine and peacenotwar and happy endings.

i'm sorry to tell you, GM. some dreams don't come true in 20 years. some don't come true in ever.

we went home that day on the subway, ready to head out again tomorrow.

the third day, we went to the america pavillion. we had heard from the military police who were patrolling that we could show them our passports and they would let us in since we had the sacred navy books. turns out it wasn't true but by waving our navy books in the face of the workers there and schmoozed our way in.

we [meaning me my dad and my brother] left the expo early that day, leaving our friends there. we had a date with the guy that picked us up from the train station [remember, gray BMW and converse?]. he said he would bring us around the city and so he did. we rode in high style, VIP. we saw a cute little shopping street full of stuff, the temple of the city god, and some street sights of the city.

let me tell you that i am in <3 with shanghai. if there is one place i want to go back to, it's that place. like maybe to live, even. it's great.

unfortunately as soon as a place starts growing on me we have to leave and that's what we did the very next morning. we had to fly out to chengdu, way out in sichuan province. so we did. the flight was not long. a small girl received a puzzle from an airline attendant. the small girl kept staring at me. i demanded a puzzle from the airline attendant. they were fresh out. so i complained in english, got stared at some more, and read song of the dodo halfway through again.

the usual. traveling gets so traveling after awhile. and then we touched down in chengdu international airport and then the fun began again.

shanghai END.

the china chronicles 3 -- hangzhou to shanghai, day 1

we checked into the hyatt hotel, with my dad claiming that the company booked a room for us. but apparently they spelled his name wrong, or at least his last name. not like we're not used to this. so we went through about thirteen different permutations of our last names and finally the one that was right was one that only my art teacher about 9 years ago. super. cool.

before going to sleep that night we went to see a show on the west lake which was one big lake in the middle of the city and the main tourist landmark of the place. i can't say much about the show except that it was a generic sort of chinese show that involved singing, dancing, and pseudo-cultural references to some mythical love story.

it turned out that the next morning i did have a minor cold since the a/c wouldn't stop blaring on me the whole day. but by then we had to start on a long chain of sightseeing different temples and buildings. now it is really hot in hangzhou and we did a lot of walking so i think i did my best to block that out of my memory.

the next day we shipped out to shanghai by train, which involved a crowded train station, the threat of being pickpocketed, and walking all the way from the back of the train to the front where our seats were. the train was one of those high-tech WHOOSHWHOOSH a hundred kilometers an hour because they don't speak miles in china.

the train tracks went RIGHT THROUGH some people's backyards and they watched us go by. there was especially one house with a dirt front yard and two women were doing the washing outside in a bucket. even at 120 km/hour i could see them stop their work to watch us pass. they looked really depressed -- like oh, there goes the train out of this dump of a place and i'm NOT ON IT, WHICH IS THE PROBLEM. it would be easier to care if these people weren't everywhere in china.

the train was so fast that i didn't even have time to finish the temple level in Phantom Hourglass before we got to shanghai, where my dad's friend [purple shirt, jeans, black converse, which makes him super cool, okay] proceeded to pick us up in his gray BMW with a chauffeur. i told my dad to get some poor friends.

we were staying at hotel called the swissotel grand and here was where i met the rest of the party. by party, i mean my friends who were all hanging around a pillar in the lobby. so i met up with them, said hey what's up. they had just flown down to shanghai from chinacamp, which i did not go to.

we got room assignments. one of my friends and i were roommates. like, w/out the parents. [both girls, okay, nothing scandalous here.] the hotel room was nice except that the wall between the bathroom and bedroom was clear and even when the curtain was put down, it was still a little see-through. awkward. so we just decided to not look in the bathroom when someone was showering. logical choice there.

then we looked out the window expecting some beautiful view. not. there were six large fans and a pathetic little garden about five stories below us, and a huge yellow building across from us. but that was all that was bad. the beds were comfy and it was clean and all 5-star-hotel-y. and the toilet sang [or played audio from whatever channel was on tv] which made my friend very happy.

we then went out in hunt of lunch and happened on this restaurant. we [parents] decided to let's go right on in. we ate. it was decent. our parents caused trouble for the waitstaff. the bathroom was mad weird. you know, the usual. end of story.

we were supposed to take a cruise on the shanghai harbor that night and so we set out in the afternoon to get on the ship. so we did. and so we took a cruise. i have an obsession with city skylines, and it was like YES. MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CITY SKYLINE. the boat was mad loud but it went around and around and ooh, look at the pretty lights. i didn't even get seasick. or harbor-sick, which would have been extremely pansy of me.

we couldn't find a ride back to our hotel. a guy with an unmarked white van by the side of the road offered to drive us back... for a price, of course. SKETCH. CITY. but since we had 11 people [including 1 grown man and 3 grown women, 2 teenager guys at least one of which who could take out a sketchy taxi driver, 3 girls who could also probably take out a sketchy taxi driver together, and 2 little kids who could alert the cops with their screams of dying], we decided it was safe. the taxi driver couldn't possibly rob 11 of us at once.

it was still really sketchy. i'm glad the police in china are completely incompetent at their jobs.

we got back to the hotel un-robbed and then it was sleepy time. but not before one more drama.

my roommate was out taking a shower in her mother's room while i showered in our room. i finished first and she still wasn't back so i turned on the tv and got out my sketchbook [the usual]. but then this giant bug falls from the ceiling onto the headboard of my bed.

HOLY. FORKING. MOTHEROFJESUS.

it was this ---------------------------- big, i kid you not, and from across the room it looked like a cockroach. so what do i do? i call room service. in chinese, of course, even though both my language skills seem to have deserted me at that point.

hello, good evening, room service, how may i help you?
good evening, uh, there is a, uh...
yes?
THERE IS A COCKROACH IN MY ROOM HOLY JESUS SEND SOMEONE UP NOW OHMYGOD.
oh, that -- WHAT?

so they assured me someone would come "immediately."

ten minutes later, they came. the whole time i watched the bug like a forkin' hawk on steroids so i didn't look like an idiot when room service came and i had to say OH OOPS IT CRAWLED AWAY. there was a lady in the maid uniform and a manager in his dapper suit and phone, ready to call pest control. then the lady looked once at the bug which was hanging on the wall and was like

oh yeah. that's not a cockroach. that's a [chinese name here that i don't remember] and it's related to the firefly.

i was like you mean the terrorist cousin of the firefly just invaded my room. the lady sprung into action, grabbing my roommate's shoe and attacking the bug viciously. like, she pounced on that bug and i wouldn't have expected it out of a 4 foot 5, 50 year old lady but she KILLED that thing like a BUG ASSASSIN. the guy looked relieved at not having a cockroach infestation and a really upset customer and offered to change my sheets so i could sleep knowing there were no bug-germs on my bed. coolthanks man, it means a lot to me. i stopped flipping out by now. i generally don't stay flipped out for long. i even doodled the bug onto one of the pages of my sketchbook.

after the bug was dead and the lady was in the middle of changing the sheets, my friend came in all happy from her shower and was like WHUT. so [in english] i told her the story, had a little freak-out session again, and then settled down. the manager looked considerably startled at discovering that i could not only have hysterics in chinese, i could do it in english too. yeahbilingual.

so all the drama was done with and we finally got into bed and watched V [which is like MTV but in chinese and much, much better. they actually did play american artists but they were only really famous ones].


my roommate promised she would scream if another bug landed on her face in the middle of the night and with that reassuring promise we went to sleep.

hangzhou to shanghai, day 1 END.

the china chronicles 2 -- beijing to hangzhou

so the first day i woke up in beijing was at 5:38 am, which is a lot better than i do with jetlag normally. my brother tends not to deal with jetlag so well and he must have been up since 4 at least, just fidgeting around some but not enough to wake me. i actually woke because i was cold for reasons previously explained. freezing to death in the middle of a beijing summer is the biggest paradox ever.


i already forgot what we did for the first two days because we just stayed home bumming out. my aunt offered to take us places but we instead watched chinese national geographic dvds. my dad was out on a business trip so we had no choice.

when he came back he took us out to see the forbidden city, the tiananmen square building, the laoshe teahouse, peking duck etc. we got sidetracked into a quite fascinating tour through the hutong of beijing by this one taxi driver who knew the place and knew the tourists.

already i was getting weird stares when i spoke english so i switched languages except at home with my cousin. her dad [my uncle] told me to speak more english to her so she could practice. my dad [her uncle] told me to speak more chinese to her so i could practice. obviously i listened to my uncle 'cause he's cooler.

my uncle and i talked a lot about different things. he's really interested in america and the differences between american kids and chinese kids, but that conversation quickly turned into a political discussion on taiwan and china cross-strait relations and the threat of political action and military intervention, etc. i always end up talking to my uncle about these kinds of things, i don't know why. but i get the feeling he likes talking in english about complicated topics with his weird american niece.

he sounds faintly british too, which was a plus. i never understood why and he's never noticed it but then again he says i talk really fast. i never understood that either and i've never noticed either.

then he wished me luck with the thing where i played the thing on the field. he meant marimba in the marching band, at which point i whipped out my camera and showed him the pictures of my marimba and the video of me playing it so i could clear up once and for all what i did in america. [which by the way was what i took those pictures for anyway. they didn't have marching bands or marimbas in china so there we go. their lives were just enriched.]

the last day we went to visit my grandpa which sounds sweet enough until you realize he's a pile of ashes living in a cemetery and i was expected to find his little box among all the other flower-covered boxes living there. i found him. he was number six hundred something? we gave him flowers. i wish i could talk to him but i guess that will just have to pass on that one. not all dreams come true, kids.

we left for hangzhou from nanyang airport, which was the OTHER airport beside the capital airport. it is officially the smallest, skeeziest airport i have ever been in but it was an airport which meant that of course i loved it. and here there were less international travelers so waving around our navy books got us even more stares.

they had us walk out to our plane on the runway. not even like a shuttle bus, they're like GET WALKING. i took a secret picture on the way. and then on the plane i got the emergency row seat, next to some guy who thought he was all hip but his face looked like a pufferfish.

but anyway. the plane landed in hangzhou where we hitched a ride to the hyatt on a really nice company car driven by a nice young man with a polo, straight jeans, leather shoes, and a leather bag which, by the way, was how all the dudes dressed here in hangzhou. we drove for a long time because it's a rule of city planning to make airports the least accessible places ever.

the driver had a car where you could answer the phone directly by talking indiscriminately to the steering wheel. some guy called him from the company saying WHARRGARBLWHARRGARBL and please pick up some toilet paper on your way back which made me think that nice as he was, he must have been a company bitch working at below minimum wage to live a living. sad fact, sad fact.

my dad laughed and asked me if i understood a single thing he had said. i didn't get the wharrgarbl part but obviously i heard enough to draw my conclusions about drivers who drive people around and buy toilet paper to wipe the asses of their bosses for three yuan an hour. i only told him the part about needing more toilet paper, which proceeded to make my dad amazed that i could understand the hangzhou dialect and the driver all amazed that i could speak the mother tongue at all.

we went through the usual routine of

i thought you were american?
yes i am
but you speak chinese.
yes i do
this is quite impressive!
yes it is
wo gao su ni, ah, ni de nu er hai zhen xing, ah.
thanks man. i always thought i was supercool, myself.

right so if that EXACT CONVERSATION didn't happen like 9001 times during this whole trip i don't know what i'm going to do with myself.


so anyway. hangzhou was the first southern city i had been to IN MY LIFE and it was cleaner and more western than beijing, which was interesting. it was also supposedly richer from the trade with the west. there were a lot of trees and it was about 98 degrees at 100% humidity.

the first day we ate at pizza hut for lunch. the hotel was nice and gave us free pears which i ate but didn't like, and i had to sleep on the rolling bed since there weren't enough beds, and i knew i was going to have a very minor cold the next day.

beijing to hangzhou END.

the china chronicles 1 -- JFK to PEK

so i felt like typing out my adventures in the LAND OF MY PEOPLE just so i could read it. so here we go.

i left my house with an episode of Garfield the Cartoon half-finished, and i sort of wanted to know what happened in the end except my dad insisted we would miss our plane if we arrived at the airport anything but 4 hours early. okay fine. 4 hours it is, you win and i can't watch Garfield. so we left the house. it's my dad's way or the highway and coincidentally even though my dad got his way we were on the highway headed for JFK anyway.

[actually, first before leaving i took pictures of my marimba from multiple angles and my dad took a video of me playing it. the why will be explained later.]

i have a strange obsession with airports and was kind of excited that it was JFK airport instead of Newark, since JFK is so much prettier and larger. i just love airports. they're so open and clean and orderly and ever since that dumb book in fifth grade called Fly Away Home or something i've wanted to try living in an airport except without the overt symbolism we were expected to search for.

the thing is, i hate airplanes. but airplane was my life for the next 13 hours.

i think for once the plane was tolerable. they played Planet 51 [which was cute but forgettable] and The Lovely Bones [which was creepy and forgettable]. i read ten essays in The Writer's Presence, which was the original summer assignment, then got pissed off and read the whole book through just so i could say i did. THEN i started reading the AP Bio assignment which was more interesting but of course my dad told me to CUT IT OUT AND GO TO SLEEP. his way or the highway, remember, and there were no highways in the sky. or so i thought. that shall be explained later.

so then i fell asleep listening to Explosions in the Sky [which, now that i think about it, is ironic on a plane, okay]. but they're good sleeping music. probably the first time i had managed to go to sleep for more than 3 hours on a plane. ironic name, good music, see?

so we landed at PEK [aka Beijing Capital Airport], Terminal 3 [aka the new terminal] and waved our navy books in the face of the immigration officers. all those chinese nationals with their maroon books and no entry cards, and we had NAVY BOOKS and YELLOW ENTRY CARDS. we got a few side glances but this would become a theme.

my aunt picked us up and we arrived at her apartment. i smelled like airplane and felt like jetlag and overall it was gross until i took a shower. showers are the general cure-all for feeling crappy. afterwards i felt super awesome and i jumped around the apartment while my aunt uncle and cousin watched their weird american relative air-guitaring the part to... i think it was a  Streetlight Manifesto song, actually.

then my dad told me to EXCUSE ME CUT IT OUT AND SLEEP so i shotgunned the bottom bunk of the guest room bunkbed [the top was smaller] and turned the AC on and nearly froze to death because i didn't know 20 degrees Celsius was like 68 degrees Fahrenheit. so i was in china and i didn't know metric.

SUPERCOOL.

JFK-PEK end.