Big City, Small World

Again, much has happened in the time since I wrote my last post. I’ll use the same structure for recapping the last few days as my previous post, for lack of a better method.

Sunday:

I met up with my PiB friend, Kevin, and one of his friends currently working in Beijing. We walked around Wudaokou for a bit, and then wandered over to PKU, which was nice because I had never seen the campus before. Since both Kevin and his friend are Stanford graduates, we snuck into the Stanford center’s lounge in one of the buildings. I would have perhaps been tempted to pay a visit to the Yale-PKU center, except I had no idea where it was located. Overall, it was a refreshing way to spend my last day of absolute freedom before the start of IUP.

Monday:

The first day of IUP! I was a little nervous about finding everything, meeting people, and generally not having any disasters. Fortunately everything went smoothly. In the morning we had a welcome speech and ceremony, where we signed our language pledge. Unlike PiB, this pledge applies only to IUP-related activities. I’m quite relieved about this because all-out language pledges can be quite socially frustrating. For a year-long program, I think being able to speak some English outside of class won’t be as detrimental to my Chinese as it would have been at a summer program, especially because my two flatmates are native Chinese speakers, anyway. After we signed the pledge, we split up into little groups to tour the important (or most relevant) places on campus. My group’s tour leader was Liao Laoshi, who I had met previously at Yale. (She conducted my IUP interview and met with me once to talk about IUP when I was choosing programs.) It was nice to see someone familiar among all the new faces.

I spent the rest of the day meeting other new IUP students and, when inside the IUP building, sharing awkward (and somewhat trite) introductory conversations in our rusty Chinese. In spite of our disparate interests and backgrounds, I like all of the people I’ve met so far, and am looking forward to getting to know them all much better.

Even having completed fourth year Chinese at Yale, I still feel like quite a novice here. The majority of people at IUP have spent at least a semester studying Chinese in China, or lived for many years in China. I feel like my two months pale in comparison. Generally speaking, though, I’d much rather be at a program that challenges me, than one that is too easy. I have no fears about IUP in this regard.

Tuesday:

Placement exams were held on Tuesday and Wednesday. I was lucky, and got mine over with on Tuesday. Placement exams shouldn’t be stressful. After all, their purpose is only to gauge your level, not grade you on any specific course work. Yet I still found myself stressing over this test. Seeing all that vocabulary I still don’t know, listening to all those recordings I still don’t understand, all the chengyu, and all the classical Chinese I hadn’t a prayer of understanding just made me feel 很失望 (hopeless). I’ve heard IUP likes to place people conservatively, so if I get placed into fourth year again, I guess I’m OK with that. On the bright side, seeing all that remains to be learned is providing excellent motivation for this year. I’m genuinely looking forward to the start of classes next week.

After the placement test, I went with Karen (a fellow Davenporter in IUP) and her two apartment-mates to the IKEA in Beijing. (Who knew, right?) After working our way through the entire store (which, apart from the Chinese signs and product labels, is identical to any other IKEA in the world), we hopped in a cab and headed back to Wudaokou. A several hour adventure ensued, including dragging tons of IKEA furniture across four lane highway (occupied by typical Beijing traffic), getting locked out of an apartment, and, finally, eating baozi and jianbing in the hallway outside the apartment sitting on newly purchased IKEA chairs, while waiting for the key to arrive. Next time, we’ll know to use the home delivery service.

Wednesday:

Wednesday was completely free of IUP obligations for me, since I had completed my placement exam on Tuesday. I decided it was a good time to buy a bicycle, so I wandered over to the bicycle stand at the south gate of Tsinghua. After testing out a few different bikes, I settled on an old and plain black bicycle for 220 RMB. I didn’t even try to haggle because the man who I was buying from had been especially helpful. I know I could have gotten a shiny new bicycle probably of similar quality for the same price, but I’m happier knowing my bike is less likely to get stolen. In the words of the shopkeeper, this bike “丢不了.” ("Cannot be lost.")

After purchasing the bike, I rode around Tsinghua for a bit. For the first time, I had a visceral understanding of why the bicycle is a symbol of freedom in China. (Now if only I had a working wristwatch and sewing machine, I’d be in business.) The Tsinghua campus is huge, and having a bicycle allowed me to explore places on campus that, given the current weather, are just a tad too far out to be worth walking to.

When considering the different ways I could get to IUP everyday, the thought of taking a cab never crossed my mind. A few days ago, I realized that, in a logical sense, it wasn’t the cost that made the idea anathema to me. After all, the cost would be no more than the public bus in most US cities. What made the idea so distasteful? Maybe the immediate thing stopping me from commuting by cab is the potential embarrassment of appearing lazy. But I’m not embarrassed to drive or take cabs in the US. Why should it be any different here? I think, on a deeper level, what would bother me about this method of transportation is that it is so antithetical to the idea of adapting to a Chinese lifestyle. If millions of Beijingers commute by bicycle every day – distances much further than my three kilometers – I should be able to do so, too. Perhaps part of what excites me about having a bicycle here is that it is part of my adaptation to an urban Chinese lifestyle.

Later Wednesday evening, I met up with Marta, a PiB friend currently doing an internship in Beijing, and her cousin to get dinner. (We went to a Korean barbecue place near the Wudaokou station that had delicious food, but terrible service.) In an incredible coincidence, I had run into Marta on the street at Tsinghua on Monday – neither of us knew the other was in China – and we decided to meet up later on in the week. It’s hard to gauge how much of a coincidence our run-in was. We both know each other in a Beijing context, so it’s not terribly surprising we’d both be back in Beijing at the same time a year later. And Tsinghua is a university with many foreigners. But given the size (both area- and popoluation-wise) of Tsinghua, and Beijing in general, the odds still seem fairly low.

Which brings me to a final observation. IUP is not a large program at all. The number of current students is well under 100. Most of us live in apartments or homestays spread out over the Tsinghua/Wudaokou area. And yet I am constantly running into IUPers on the street. There are hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people living in the few kilometer radius that IUP students occupy, but it still feels like we somehow have a presence (at least to ourselves). It’s a nice feeling.

P.S. Picture post to come soon, hopefully.
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