Anne Ciccarelli • China
One of the things my mother warned me about were the animals in China. As someone who got queasy watching a dehydrated raven get decapitated by a car last year, she had a right to – you need to desensitize yourself to things when you go to a new country. Cultures are different, and that’s normal.
I’ve been okay for the most part. Stray dogs and cats don’t bother me and I am used to seeing all of my food. Maybe I just have a thing for birds, though, because they were what got to me.
I’m assuming it was for Spring Festival – our professor said that releasing a bird from a cage could give you good karma. The shop keeper would let you pay money, pick a bird, then release it. Apparently he would trap the birds specifically for this ritual.
The birds were crammed in the cages, many of them fighting each other and the cage to get out. The ravens had it the worst – they were large, but in a small cage. I didn’t see anyone buy them. The sparrows were also crammed into a small cage, but the magpies at least had a little room.
One of the sparrows was already dead. In the fight against the cage, one of the ravens lay at the bottom, not moving. A magpie fell to the ground before it regained consciousness and flew away.
Our professor summed it up pretty well: “I kind of want to buy a bird, but I don’t know if I should support this industry.” I think it was fair – we were tourists. We had the right to not participate, but nothing more.
My friend and I stood by the bird-freedom-seller’s cart for a long time, watching and not speaking. The birds screamed and thrashed.
We snapped some pictures, then left.
Over the weekend, my class took an overnight trip to the neighboring municipality of Tianjin. Tianjin is kind of like the baby brother of Shanghai that hangs out with Beijing – the buildings in downtown are a mix of old Western concessions, Soviet-style blocky buildings, and towering futuristic high rises. However, the things that it seems to have more than anything of are building cranes.
One of my classmates looked out the window on the train ride to Tianjin and said that he’d heard a rumor that half of the world’s supply of cranes were in China’s growing cities. The number of cranes I’ve seen so far in both Beijing and (especially) Tianjin does not make me doubt that.
Tianjin is like a lot of Chinese cities in that it could be called “up and coming”. While there was a lot to do there, most of the buildings weren’t really finished yet. This seems to be a general trend in Chinese cities – there is a lot of construction, and if you came back in five years, the city would probably look completely different. Everywhere, Chinese cities are growing and morphing.
One example is the city of Chongqing, that used to just be a city in the Sichuan province. Now, if you look at a map of China, Chongqing is its own municipality, just like Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai – it is no longer part of a larger province, but an area with borders in its own right.
Therefore, the architecture was probably the most interesting thing in Tianjin. We spent most of our time walking around the various Western concessions, looking at buildings filled with European architecture and city planning. Now these buildings have been given different purposes, with many of them now housing major banks. The former Italian concession, on the other hand, has been turned into a tourist trap of Western restaurants and wine bars, sort of like a Little Italy in the States.
But that didn’t mean that there were foreigners there. In fact, I didn’t see a single Westerner outside of our group when we were in Tianjin. Tianjin has had a complicated past with the West, and for good reason. The concessions represent many painful memories for the Chinese. One building in particular, a Catholic church now covered in scaffolding, was the site of a violent protest against the French presence in Tianjin.
Today, most foreigners in Tianjin live outside the downtown area. The concessions are now part of the city, embraced by the Chinese. It is interesting to see that most of the European buildings are being kept, while the traditional Chinese courtyard-style buildings are being replaced.
Maybe this is a step in the direction of international diplomacy or forgiving the West. Maybe it isn’t. In any case, it makes Tianjin an interesting place to walk around for anyone remotely interested in architecture.
At the end of the day, the most striking thing about the temple fair was how it American it felt. Other than the fact that all of the signs were in Chinese, I probably could have found a county fair somewhere in California that would have been a near-perfect substitute for the New Years activity.
Let me back up a moment. Starting on Sunday, Beijing has been inundated with New Years celebrations. Monday was the first day of Chunjie 春节, literally “spring festival”, or more well known in the US as Chinese New Year. Everything about Chunjie makes your average American New Year celebration look like a group of Northwestern students the night before a midterm. Fireworks and firecrackers literally go off nonstop for days, people have abandoned Beijing to see their family elsewhere, stores are closed, feasts are consumed, and most importantly, the sky is weirdly blue.
In order to get in on some of the cultural activities, our class went to the Ditan Temple Fair a couple days after the start of the year of the dragon. It seemed like everyone was there – you could barely walk down the aisles without pushing against someone. There were decorations, games, concessions, and souvenirs, all commemorating the new year.
But really, outside of the connection to the most important national holiday, it felt so…American. The only thing there seemed to be to really do at Ditan was spend money – and very large amounts. The carnival games were hard to win, the food wasn’t great, none of the souvenirs seemed to have any purpose, and there were so many people. It reminded me of your average day at a theme park, minus the rides and with the added bonus of winter.
In a sense, though, that seems to be a theme here – China and the United States are freakishly similar. Americans are so quick to paint China as the “other” in any given situation or criticize the country based on very little actual knowledge, so it is nice to add the temple fair to the list of things I can point out to Americans and say: “they’re the same.”
Yesterday was the first day of classes, meaning that I am officially done with orientation. Orientation is always a funny thing – it is both wonderful, in that you don’t have any actual homework and get to do fun things, and horrible, since you have no idea who anyone is or where to find anything.
This wasn’t completely true for me, since there are four other Northwestern students here at IES with me. That made some things a lot easier, but still. Beijing is a little tricky to navigate, and some of the mandatory orientation lectures get old regardless of what program they are for.
However, orientation also had some insanely awesome things for us to do. At Northwestern we mostly just had our little Essential NU programs where we would be told not to binge drink, have sex safely, be aware of diversity, and something else that I have long since forgotten.
Here at IES we had Mystery Beijing and Mystery Haidian, and I am proud to say that my partner for Mystery Beijing and I successfully finished our task, and even prouder to say that my group for Mystery Haidian owned the competition.
Mysteries Beijing and Haidian are the scavenger hunt activities that the IES staff puts on for its students during the last two days of orientation. The first round is Mystery Beijing, where you and a partner are given five hours to find a place in Beijing that they give to you in Chinese, whereas Mystery Haidian involves a larger group, four hours, and a list of many things with various points all around the Haidian district, where Beijing Foreign Studies University is.
The whole point of the activity was that you had to ask Chinese people for directions and had to use public transportation at least once.
Being forced to go to places such as the Yonghegong Lama Temple in Beijing, roughly an hour away once we figured out where a subway stop was, and into random locations such as a Chinese traditional medicine clinic and a massage parlor in Haidian helped me and the rest of my group members get over our fear of using our broken Chinese with the people in Beijing. Once you get over the first person staring at you because you said, “oops, I forgot my cat,” instead of “oops, I forgot my hat,” makes the next person’s stares not seem quite as bad.
Plus, since my group totally beasted the Mystery Haidian competition, we are getting a free fancy dinner out of it, which makes the hour we spent getting Peking duck and a demonstration of how to eat it totally worth it.
There really isn’t much to say about packing. You stress a lot about what items to throw in a single suitcase, eventually decide arbitrarily on what goes in and what stays out, and then suddenly your bag is zipped up…
And it’s 2 am and there’s a broken bottle of purple nail polish on your bathroom floor.
These things always happen to me. I seem to be physically incapable of preparing for a big trip in the way that you should – a normal person would have been packed hours ago and sound asleep right now. But not me. Not only do I manage to put off everything until the last minute, but I also have some serious struggles in the epic battle against keeping my white bathroom tile clean.
But really, that’s kind of how any big trip is. You spill glass and purple lacquer everywhere, panic for awhile, laugh about how it’s a good thing the stain is your favorite color and your school color, and then realize that not only is nail polish remover a thing, but that you have a giant bottle of it right in front of you.
Then you clean it up, and everything is okay.
That’s how Beijing will to be, I assume. I’m going to spill purple nail polish everywhere, escape with maybe a little scratch, and get most of it off the floor with the help of a product made just for that purpose.
Except in this case, the purple nail polish is a metaphor for something that I will probably only understand in hindsight. I just hope this new city doesn’t include any metaphorical shards of glass.
Anne Ciccarelli is a junior at Northwestern University with a major in Asian Languages and Civilizations and minors in Linguistics and Asian-American Studies. She is from Palo Alto, California, and does not like Chicago winters. However, she gets through them by participating in the Northwestern University Marching Band, Chi Omega, and Dance Marathon in addition to spending quality time cramming for midterms. She has never been to China, but has been to Japan and Canada, and all over the United States. While in Beijing, she hopes to become more fluent in Chinese and impress her friends with insider knowledge of Chinese culture, politics, and food.
