Category: Beijing

The Museum of Tap Water (part 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

As I noted earlier, Beijing has a museum devoted to tap water — apparently the only one in the world. Another translation of its name is the Beijing Water Supply Museum. It was incredibly hard to find. None of a dozen people in the neighborhood knew where it was. It is on the grounds of the government company that supplies tap water. While I was there, there was only one other visitor, an American. Like me, he’d noticed it on Google Maps.

I loved it. One of the exhibits was called “10-Day Imperial Approval”. Permission to start the water company (around 1910) was requested from the Emperor. Approval came in a lightning-fast ten days from the Emperor’s mother on yellow paper. Only the Emperor, his father, and his mother were allowed to use yellow in decorative ways. The penalty for breaking this rule was death. In the early days of the water company, slips of paper gave you permission to collect your water in a bucket. A photo of an early president of the company (thin, young, shaved head, high-collar traditional shirt) made him look more like a dashing criminal than a captain of industry.

For anti-terrorist reasons, there was nothing about how the water was processed.

Museums are usually devoted to the rare, beautiful, and intricate, which why a museum of tap water sounds like a joke. When Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker‘s architecture critic, devotes his best-buildings-of-the-year list to nine show-off buildings and an art exhibit — none of them advancing the art of making the houses and workplaces where we spend most of our lives — I am glad to see agreement that something is missing.

The other visitor was in Beijing to visit his sister, a high school exchange student, living with a family that speaks no English, who had checked the wrong box on her visa application and was unable to come home for Christmas. She was having a great time and now wanted to apply to a college with a Flagship Program — you go to the American school for two years and then a Chinese school for the last two years. What a sea change! Americans treat another country as equal. Americans grasp that someone else might have something to teach us. At Berkeley a few years ago, the psychology department had a day-long get-together to discuss various issues. About a meeting about one of them, I suggested that we look at how other departments had handled it; maybe we could learn from them. Bad idea, I was told, they’re supposed to copy us.

Chinese Takeout Beijing Style

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In the elevator in my apartment building I realized the student holding hot food had just had it delivered. She gave me the menu. The restaurant, I learned, is called Kyoto. it serves mainly Korean and Japanese food. Free delivery. The surprising part: There’s no address. And it never closes, even on holidays.

An example of the general truth that there are many more kinds of restaurants (food-serving businesses) in Beijing than in America. Today I bought sugar-coated banana on a stick from a street vendor.

The Last Days of Old Beijing

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I’m enjoying The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer, one of a few fun books I brought to China. (The others are Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt and The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu.) It’s about living in a downtown hutong. What pleases me most is how good his Chinese must be (I want reassurance I can learn it) but I also like strange stuff like this:

[Watching TV in a friend’s apartment, Spring Festival 2006.] The annual variety show paused from its singing and acrobatic performances to announce that China would send a pair of pandas to Taiwan as a measure of friendship. The program’s five hundred million viewers could pick the animals’ names by choosing from a list and sending a text message via cell phone.

“Who says we can’t vote?” [his friend] laughed. . .

We ate and watched television until Unity and Wholeness were announced as winners of the name-the-panda election. (Taiwan’s government would initially refuse the animals.)

What were the other candidate names, I wonder.

Bike Culture in Beijing

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The Tsinghua campus is really big so everyone has a bike but bikes are very prevalent elsewhere as well. In several ways the surroundings have been shaped by this:

  • Bike mechanics scattered around campus. There are about seven of them. Fix your bike instantly. Also sell spare parts — locks, seats, baskets, and so on.
  • Huge bike lanes. On the road from the subway to where I live, the three lane road is divided into one shoulder lane, one lane for bikes, and one lane for cars. The appearance is that the bike lane is twice as wide as the car lane. The effect of these huge bike lanes isn’t trivial: I feel safe.
  • Bikes parked everywhere. At big stores, parking attendants charge 5 cents/bike. Payable when you leave.
  • Discarded bikes. Near the subway station is a pile of 20-odd bikes. About once a year discarded bikes are removed from the Tsinghua campus.

Making a Living in China

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Several buildings are being built on the Tsinghua campus. At least one woman makes a living as a prostitute among the construction workers. She is known as Qikuaiban, which means seven and half yuan (about $1). The name came about when she offered her services to a worker, he said, “All I have is seven and a half yuan,” and she accepted that payment.

Happiness in China: Who wants to be a construction worker?

Assorted Links (China edition)

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  1. Chinesepod.com. Podcasts for learning Chinese.
  2. Popup Chinese. More podcasts
  3. Pinyin.info. “Most of what most people think they know about Chinese — especially when it comes to Chinese characters — is wrong.”
  4. Laowai Chinese. “I’ve been busy not losing my job (teaching) and not ignoring my publisher. What I mean is: I’ve been working on the editing and layout of my book Chinese 24/7. I’m glad to announce there are now over ten people outside my family who have expressed interest in my book.”
  5. Sinosplice. “There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. Rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu…. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be gleefully playing “name that odor” with your Chinese friends!”
  6. Imagethief. “Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in “Memoirs of Geisha”, alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.”
  7. Beijing Sounds. A linguist blogs. “The final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your [Chinese] spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.”
  8. Danwei “Today’s New Culture View reports that the People’s Supreme Court approved the death sentence of Yang Jia, the man who murdered six policemen and wounded three others and a security guard on July 1 this year.”
  9. Scientific and academic fraud in China. One popular post printed a letter from a Yale professor teaching at Beijing University upset about plagiarism among his Chinese students: “When plagiarism is detected in America, it can end the career of the person doing it,” he writes. Such as Harvard professors Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, and Alan Dershowitz?

Happy Thanksgiving! A Chinese friend texted me this. I replied I was surprised she was aware of it. “The majority of Chinese know this day,” she replied, “and say thanks to their friends and families.”

The Four Abundances

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Someday, if I am lucky, I would like to write a book called The Four Abundances. It would be about how four incredibly important things that were once impossibly scarce, became or will become, to everyone’s surprise, abundant:

  1. Water. Free and everywhere. So cheap my Berkeley landlady pays my water bill. This has been true for a long time.
  2. Knowledge. I mean general knowledge. Via the Web, reference book knowledge and news is instantly accessible for free. A recent development, although books and newspapers were a big step in this direction.
  3. Health. A future abundance. Health is far from abundant right now. On the other hand, health has improved dramatically during the last 200 years, as Robert Kugel has documented. It is clearly approaching abundance.
  4. Happiness. Another future abundance. I suppose it seems impossibly far off — but abundant water once seemed impossibly far off. Here it’s hard to find signs of improvement, much less approaching abundance. Depression has become more common, not less, during my lifetime.

My self-experimentation has convinced me that health and happiness depend on things that were common in Stone-Age life, just as there was enough water and knowledge during that time. (Now we have more than enough water and knowledge, which is fine.) We need to figure out what those elements are. Self-experimentation provides a way of doing so.

In my little corner of Beijing, transportation is becoming a fifth (or third) abundance. Mostly I ride a bike — my bike was free, costs pennies to maintain, doesn’t pollute, provides exercise, easy to park. For longer trips I take the subway (30 cents/ride) or a cab (a few dollars a ride). Many people take the bus (a few cents/ride). I might get an electric bike for a few hundred dollars. Doesn’t pollute, very cheap per mile, easy to park, little congestion.

I’ve thought about this for months; what made me finally decide to post this was noticing that two little tools I use every day — a penlight and a brush to clean my keyboard — were free, giveaways at trade shows.

Beijing Shopping

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character, a Russian defector, goes into a New York supermarket and faints: So many brands of breakfast cereal! Whereas my head merely spun when I shopped for headphones and encountered hundreds of choices in a building near me. It’s an electronics mall, full of office-sized booths each with a different owner and product line. Maybe eight specialize in headphones. In Berkeley I live miles from a Circuit City where I might find four or five headphones I’d consider. Radio Shack is closer; they might have two or three possibilities. In Beijing several of these electronic malls are near me.

During my Chinese lesson with the girl who sold me my cell phone I told her that after the lesson I was going to shop for headphones — the electronics mall is across the street. How much do you want to spend? she asked. About $40, I said. Because you are a foreigner, they may cheat you, she said. Her boss went away and came back with two choices. One was $40, the other about $60. After the lesson I went to the mall. I found the $40 headphones. Price: $9. Before bargaining. I went back to my teacher and told her what had happened. She spoke to her boss. She came back and said: Maybe it wasn’t the real product. As if someone would counterfeit a brand (Somic) you’ve never heard of. It was exactly the same item.

“One bed two dreams” is a Chinese proverb. Here the two dreams were $9 and $40. In One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes, “The Chinese will ask you for anything because you just may be stupid enough to agree to it.” It has nothing to do with being a foreigner. “In China business, the expectation is to be cheated,” says McGregor. A friend of mine graduated from Beijing University, one of the top two schools in the country, with a finance major. She got a real estate job in Shanghai, her home town. When she got there her salary was half of what she had been promised.

My Beijing Life: The Surprises

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I’ve been here a month. I’d been here before — not just to Beijing but this exact area. I taught a month at Beijing University, right next to Tsinghua, met lots of PKU students, who are similar to Tsinghua students. So many aspects of life here don’t surprise me. But here are four things that have surprised me.

  1. The beauty of the Tsinghua campus. It’s huge, more like a village than a campus, and it has an unusual Jane-Jacobsian beauty. Lots of new building, lots of old buildings, vast diversity of uses (elementary school, high school, big natatorium, little corner shops that repair bikes, barbers, tailors), lots of paths of different sizes through lots of greenery. Few cars, lots of bikes. It isn’t pedestrian friendly because things are so far apart but it is very bike-friendly. Basically quiet.
  2. How much time I spend bike riding. Perhaps an hour in a typical day. It is still a little scary to ride outside campus but I have seen a vast amount of bike riding and no accidents. There are big bike lanes — very different from Japan.
  3. How slowly I am learning Chinese. I thought I would learn in some conventional way — hire a tutor, go through a textbook — but the one tutor I tried was boring and the conversational textbooks teach stuff people never say (just as my Chinese friends reply to “thank you” with “not at all”). But I do have a burning desire to learn, it is connecting that desire with the right knowledge that is the problem. Ideally I would have someone with me all the time and when I wanted to say something or understand something I would be told the answer.
  4. How rarely I leave my neighborhood. I’ve gone downtown once. I went somewhere else once. Just getting internet access has taken a significant amount of time.

Basically I’ve been turned into a child. Learning the language, bike riding, not going far from home. Fortunately without school to attend.