Substandard

I asked my teaching assistant a Chinese-language question this morning, and she managed to suppress her laughter long enough to answer me. My Chinese is pretty bad, the tones trip me up, and also I learned to speak in Yantai, and Yantai-hua is annoyingly different from standard Mandarin.

Great, I know just a few words, and when I say them, I sound like a hick.

“Sometimes, in the rural areas, the Chinese is not very good,” my TA said. “It’s…” she paused to think of the word. “Substandard.”

I would have gone with “nonstandard,” but substandard works. Yes, that’s exactly how one would describe my Chinese.

Street Shopping

My coworker asked me yesterday why I would walk past the supermarket to get fruit at a street stand. I think I said something about it being more Chinese, but I didn’t really have an answer.

Yes, the fruit carts are a little less expensive, and the prices becomes cheaper and cheaper as the laowai prices come down, but I don’t know if that’s the reason to walk the extra block. The fruit is a little fresher… again, it’s not really a big difference.

Ihe main reason is that my Chinese is terrible. The guy who’s sitting outside all day with his bikecart full of grapes has a lot more time to deal with my bad pronunciation than the hourly supermarket cashier. (Sometimes they like to use this free time to bargain, which is kind of like a test of how fast I can count backwards in Chinese.) The cashier doesn’t care if she makes the sale or not. But the bikecart guy, or popcorn girl, or any other street vendor, has an interest in selling the product, so they really will go out of their way to try to understand the disjointed phrases that I call Chinese.

Beijing Hotpot

Tonight, we celebrated Moon-Viewing Night by trying out a street hotpot place. It’s a hole-in-the-wall during the day, but at night, they set up portable tables with propane burners and vats of boiling soup

So we get a table, and a menu, and I THOUGHT I was ordering a chicken broth. The waiter said something about chicken in the soup and I was all “Yeah, ok, fine,” because he seemed to be repeating “chicken” and “soup pot”.

Then the soup came, and there was a headless, plucked chicken sitting in the pan! Oh, THAT’S what he was saying! I felt a bit stupid because the waiter had so clearly tried to tell me what was up! If only Chinese had an article, so that I could tell “chicken in your soup” from “a chicken in your soup”. Although I probably wouldn’t understand anyway, my Chinese is survival-only, not fancy.

Apparently Beijing hotpot comes with a little dish of seasoning to drop into your broth for flavor. The waiter, who was probably hating his job more and more as the evening went on, said something about cilantro. It’s xiangcai in Chinese, but I thought he said xiangcao, which is vanilla, and for a horrible moment I thought I’d ordered a giant bowl of vanilla-headless chicken soup

When he came back with the dish of cilantro and scallions, I caught on. Then I ordered other food for the soup, based on what I saw other people eating. It took forever to come, I’m not sure if the’re always slow or if the waiter was in the kitchen psyching himself up to deal with my bad Chinese. (Just kidding.) (I hope.)

The food was delicious. Hotpot is essentially make-your-own-soup, which means you can put exactly what you want it in. No mystery meat! Only the vegetables you want! And if you don’t order Chicken Carcass Soup, all the meat is boneless, too.

Vegetarian And Tea Restaurant

Vegetarian And Tea Restaurant
103 West Dianmen St. (DiAnMenXi DaJie)
XiCheng District (In the second ring road, just outside the north entrance to Beihai park)

The outside is nothing special, just a light-up sign saying “vegetarian restaurant”, but the inside is a wonderful haven away from the crowds of Beijing.

The dishes are simple glazed pottery or color glass, and the waitstaff are fast and thoughtful. But after a day of Tiananmen vendors and shoulder-to-shoulder bus riders, the restaurant is relaxing and peaceful.

Meat eaters needn’t worry, this is no rabbit food. Even dedicated carnivores will feel full after the meatless versions of traditional dishes (Beijing roast tofu, anyone?), or some of the tasty dumplings and fried rice dishes. Careful, though, when they say a dish is spicy, they’re not kidding! The menu is in English, and the staff makes a huge effort to understand my limited Chinese and make sure we have everything we could need.

Try any of their amazing teas. Although the Chinglish descriptions of their health benefits can be laughable, the teas are tasty and the thoughtful staff keeps replenishing the pot.

To get here, take bus 13, 107, 111, 118, 204, 810, 823 or 850 to Dianmen, or walk west out of Beihai park’s north gate.

Vegetarian And Tea Restaurant

Vegetarian And Tea Restaurant
103 West Dianmen St. (DiAnMenXi DaJie)
XiCheng District (In the second ring road, just outside the north entrance to Beihai park)

The outside is nothing special, just a light-up sign saying “vegetarian restaurant”, but the inside is a wonderful haven away from the crowds of Beijing.

The dishes are simple glazed pottery or color glass, and the waitstaff are fast and thoughtful. But after a day of Tiananmen vendors and shoulder-to-shoulder bus riders, the restaurant is relaxing and peaceful.

Meat eaters needn’t worry, this is no rabbit food. Even dedicated carnivores will feel full after the meatless versions of traditional dishes (Beijing roast tofu, anyone?), or some of the tasty dumplings and fried rice dishes. Careful, though, when they say a dish is spicy, they’re not kidding! The menu is in English, and the staff makes a huge effort to understand my limited Chinese and make sure we have everything we could need.

Try any of their amazing teas. Although the Chinglish descriptions of their health benefits can be laughable, the teas are tasty and the thoughtful staff keeps replenishing the pot.

To get here, take bus 13, 107, 111, 118, 204, 810, 823 or 850 to Dianmen, or walk west out of Beihai park’s north gate.

Beef Noodle Shop

Last night we went to a little restaurant a few blocks from the school. From the Arabic on the sign, and the lack of pork on the menu, it’s probably a Muslim place. (This is always reassuring to me because they tend to have really clean kitchens, something that is not always part of the local-noodle-shop experience.)

Stick and I passed it during the day, and we brought Christina back there for dinner. At night, they set up those white plastic tables and chairs, and they have a keg. Yeah, a keg of cold beer. In China. Did I mention it was cold? We ordered three random styles of noodles. Mine was pretty good but as we sat there, we saw waiters bringing out other things that looked even better: other noodles, and fried rice, and peanuts, and some kind of kebabs. We’ll probably be back tonight or tomorrow — I’d say it’s to try some of the other dishes, but it’s really for the beer.

Immersion Chinese

We may have a new Juice Aunt in Beijing. Juice Aunt is the woman who sold bottled drinks outside my apartment in Yantai. She and various members of her family would be outside my house with their cart, all day, every day, which left Juice Aunt with lots of time to help me with my Chinese. It was a slow process, since she doesn’t speak any English, but she was very patient with my “What do you call this? And this? And this?”

Her first claim to fame is yelling at me for spending too much money on water. I would buy a few bottles of water from Juice Aunt every night as I came home. Tap water isn’t drinkable, so I’d get a bottle to drink and a bottle to make the morning’s coffee. One day, Juice Aunt scolded me for spending so much money on little bottles when I could go to the supermarket and get one of those giant Poland Spring jugs!

The second time Juice Aunt scolded me was when Stick came to visit. She saw him leaving my apartment with me in the morning, and I got such an earful! I could only understand one word per sentence, but she made it pretty clear she did NOT approve of men spending the night! I told her he was my husband visiting from America, and she stopped scolding me.

Anyway, we found a little street market just outside the complex. I think our living situation is ideal. Our complex is really clean (I swear I am going to post pictures soon). Our neighbors are a little higher-class, a little more educated, so there’s no staring like we’re zoo animals and no bellowing “HULLOR!” as we walk to school or to the little market inside the neighborhood. Also, did I mention the clean? Can’t overestimate the importance of clean.

Outside the super-clean neighborhood is real China. There’s a street market, with one of those noodles-on-a-folding-table restaurants, a strange little toy store, the popcorn stand, all kinds of fruit vendors, sometimes a wandering pancake man, and a woman selling DVDs from a suitcase. She’s got a good selection of English TV shows and she’s extremely patient with my bad Chinese. The other night, she taught us some new words, and enlightened me a little on the great mystery of when to use le. (Completed actions, right? And, um, random other times?)

The English-language TV shows are great for making the apartment into a little American haven, and when we finish the first season of Heroes, it’ll be time to learn some new Chinese words.

Tienanmen Square

Yesterday, we decided to catch the bus into central Beijing and do a little exploring. It was touch-and-go whether we’d get out at the right bus stop, it seems that in Beijing, all the streets in the neighborhood are variations on the same name. We found ourselves at what seems to be the intersection of Fuxingmennan Dajie, Fuxingmennei Dajie, and Fuxingmenwei Dajie, but fortunately there’s a giant rainbow bridge at the intersection. I recognized that bridge from the last time I was in Beijing, but that doesn’t mean I knew where we were. It just means I can get back to the hostel where I stayed with my sister when she visited. Not exactly a major attraction.

We were told to take the subway but we decided to walk to Tienanmen from there. It’s a bit of a hike, but we discovered the giant Beijing Bookstore and learned some new landmarks for our next adventure.

The flower displays for National Day were being built in Tienanmen. I saw them last year in their completed state, and they looked amazing. When you see the giant completed project, with all the flowers, and pools of water, it’s hard to believe it’s just a temporary installation. It’s even more impressive to see the amount of work that goes into the flower displays. Great Wall flower frame:

Working on the flowers:

Illiterate In Beijing

Most of the time, I can get around on my Chinese. I can read simple signs, I can ask basic questions, and I can recognize both foods I like and foods I won’t touch on a menu. But sometimes, everyday things remind me that I’m really living in a non-English world.

A sign appeared next to our building’s elevator the other day. I looked it over. I didn’t see the “is forbidden” characters from a non-smoking sign, or the word for electricity, or the words for up and down, so I figured it was probably safe to get in. Probably. I mean, “elevator is broken,” has to have some of those characters, right?

Housekeeping, or certain death. Until my Chinese improves, we may never know.

Mandarin

Beijing still feels like Wonkaland, but I kind of love being in Wonkaland. I’m having huge issues with the language, though.

Since this summer, I’ve been doing ChinesePod lessons, which I would totally recommend to anyone trying to learn Mandarin. They’re much shorter than typical language tapes like Pimsleur, so I don’t feel like I’m devoting an hour of my life to fighting the unforgiving tones. Also it’s easy to find a lesson by topic, so if you just want to work on ordering food, you don’t have to sit through a whole “Hello, I am an American. What’s your name?” dialogue.

I’m also doing a basic radicals writing book. I like it because the author gives some background on each character so they don’t seem like random squiggles (I know, I know, foreigners like me should just go home), and there’s a little story to help remember the character. It’s difficult though because the simplest characters to draw are not necessarily the most common or the most useful.

So I can speak survival-level Chinese and recognize simple characters, but I can’t usually say and write the same character. It makes shopping and traveling an adventure.

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