Time to start doing this thing!

Two things I wanna say to preface this. First, I think I am gonna try and write a blog every week for the summer. Afterall, I have the free time now. That is my goal, secondly my sister finally got a facebook, and I had this nice long message written out to her about my life here in Beijing. I was just editing out some mistakes, so I hit 'backspace'... and lo and behold I returned to the previous page. Of course, when I forwarded to the message writing page, all my hard work was gone. :( Here is the revised and updated general info about my life which I had intended to send to my sister, here for her, my parents, and the entire world to see.

I suppose I will start with my new place. Well, my room doesn't have much floorspace, but the bed is really big. I can roll around as much as I want, comfortably sprawl out to read, watch movies on my computer, and lay almost completely sideways without my feet sticking out. Sheets here seems to lack the elastic billowing section at the corner that allows them to conveniently grip a mattress, so I just have them tucked in on the sides, but as much as I tend to wiggle around trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in they usually get tugged undone a bit. The kitchen is really small, but I imagine I won't be using it for much other than putting the meat/veggie/sauce combination that you get when you order gaifan(盖饭) on top of the rice, and then washing my chopsticks after I am done eating my takeout. If I make plenty of money and I decide to get really fancy maybe I will purchase a rice cooker, but I don't really see that happening. The bathroom is similar size to the kitchen, but it has all the necessities and then some: in addition to the toilet, sink, and shower trinity of bathroom needs, it also has a washing machine. That is DAMN nice, because I do NOT want to have to walk to the local laundromat every time I get tired of re-wearing my clothes for the 4th time. The living room is nothing special. In order to liven the room up a bit, it could really use a red, blue, or similarly strong-colored rug to warm it up a bit, as well as some more stuff hanging on the walls (Lili put up a painting I got in Xi'an, but it is kind of gray-blue colored, and positioned on a wall that I don't see very often). In retrospect, I think I shouldn't have given Veronica the big bedroom so readily, or I should at least have requested that she pay a bit more of the rent, since she has a bit more of the floorspace. I think maybe I will talk to her about that when she gets back from her vacation in Yunnan. The location of my apartment is fantastic too! Less than a 10 minute walk (or a 3 minute bus ride) from the subway, not to mention the bus routes that go by here can get me all over the city. The neighborhood has lots of little shops, although less cheap restaurants than I would like. I have yet to do a thorough exploring of the shops, but I want to find somewhere to buy a yoga mat, and a guy told me that there is a magic shop around here too! There are several music shops, and if I had the disposable income for it I would waltz right in and sign up for lessons on some Chinese instrument, but I don't want to make any more financial commitments until I get some more work, preferably at least 1500 RMB per week.

My apartment costs 4000 in rent per month, so I pay 2000 per month. The acrobatic school I am planning on going to for August will cost about 4000-5000 RMB. Add on a bit of guesswork for food and miscellaneous necessities, and I came up with the goal of earning 12,000 RMB before August. With eight weeks, that breaks down to 1500 per week. My first week's earnings (not counting freelance work): 440 RMB. ...Hmmm. A bit of a gap there, eh? Yeah, I need some more students. The way my English teaching works is that I go through a company. Students go to the company to request one-on-one tutoring, and the company then introduces the student to a teacher. However, I have no students at the moment. I have let my company know for quite a while now that I want more students, but I am still sitting at zero. I am gonna get in touch with another English teaching company (the one my flatmate, Veronica, works with) this week, and try to work with them too. Outside of the English teaching companies, I have two steady students that have negotiated pay and classes with me personally, two high school students. We meet twice a week in a coffee shop in the trendy, international part of town, and I usually bring an article from an American newspaper, something I found on Simple English Wikipedia... something with an interesting topic that will teach them more than just language, but also about culture and life in America. It is always fun to teach them, because all three of us meet together (cheaper for them, and more money for me too), so we can have small discussions rather than just two way dialogues. I am trying to introduce a lot of ideas, but there are some things that they are not comfortable talking about or don't have much to say about (gay marriage) and some things that simply don't interest them at all (the US's international relations), so there is a lot communal decision making about what we should study each class. I like that a lot, because this way I don't feel like a totalitarian ruler, arbitrarily imposing my plan, but more like a little commune, deciding what we want to do as a group. Outside of teaching English, last week was my first time working as a voice recorder. Reading simple texts for three and a half hours was boring as hell, but at 200 RMB an hour (about $30/hour) it felt really nice to walk out of there with that wad of hundreds in my wallet. It is a freelance thing, so if they want me again the will call me. It is nice money, but since it isn't regular it isn't the kind of thing I want to rely on. There is also a place that calls me to teach English to a group of elementary school kids for several hours on some weekends for a few hundred RMB, but again: it's freelance work, so it not steady and I don't want to rely on it for my necessary income. Ideally, I want to get four or five more English students, so that my steady, reliable income will increase to 1500 per week, with occasional freelance work here and there. Not counting the freelance (which shouldn't be more than 600 or so each time), that would have me working about 12 or 14 hours each week, a significant increase from the three hours each week I am working now, just teaching the high school students.

I haven't just been hanging around though. Three things have been taking up my time recently: looking for more work, reading, and Meng Lili. Lili really like my new apartment. It is A LOT more comfortable than her dorm room, so she is hanging out here a lot. I am sure that her liking me has something to do with it, but the couch and the big screen TV probably help draw her here too. I am cool with her hanging out here though, not only 'cause I like her back, but also because she helped me out BIG TIME. Ya see, there are lots of English language books at the national library in Beijing, but foreigners aren't allowed to rent them. With my money put on the card as a deposit, Lili successfully got a library card, and is kindly letting me rent books off of it. I have my own library card for the national library as well, but I can only enter to read the books there. I am not allowed to take them out of the library using my own card. As far as the reading itself goes, I just finished my first book of the summer, one which has been on my reading list for a while, ever since seeing it recommended by my favorite anarcho-punk group: Cunt. To be honest, a lot of the book I didn't like. Her talk about how powerful women are, how playing chess prepares you for self-defense, and buying products only produced by fully women owned enterprises seemed a bit silly to me. (not to say that women are weak, but power is measured in relative terms. If you claim that women are powerful, the only people to contrast that with is men, who are just as numerous and just as powerful. In other words, stating that women are powerful implies that men are weak, and, tearing away all the socio-economic stuff and muscle mass, I fail to see a power difference between women and men as individuals in terms of will-power, passion, desire, etc.) However, it did have what seemed to me like some good recommendations in other sections of the book, so I would advise all of my female friends to read it, both as a to reawaken awareness to some of the constant dangers toward women in our society, and just as a way of being more aware of their own bodies. I agree with the author in the respect that I am surprised at how some of my female friends are so ignorant of what is actually happening in their body every month. Other books on my reading list for this summer include Wolf Totem, a story about a man who was sent to Inner Mongolia during the cultural revolution and his experience with the nature and culture there, Opening Up, a sociological work about sex and youth culture in Shanghai, The End of Poverty, concerning global wealth distribution, and several writings about various aspects of China, globalization, and minority cultures here. I can't spend my whole time here just reading books I find interesting though. I have to do some reading about potential SIP topics as well. I hope that some of the books I read about China and globalization can help give me some direction, and there are papers I can download from Jstor to supplement the books I read too. My current plan write now is to read a lot about ethic minorities in China and have that be my SIP, but we'll see how I feel about that subject come autumn. I have found another interesting work though, entitled Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, written by Kató Lomb, a Hungarian who ended up being able to use about twenty different languages to communicate, also being mostly self-taught. I have had vague plans to pick up French and Spanish after I leave China, and this has really helped me realize this vague idea into a real goal. Afterall, I am only 21! I have decades left, and if I spend the same amount of time and energy on French of Spanish for three years, I will be much more proficient in those languages than I am now with Chinese!

My job hunt has had some success, which is almost surprising considering how lazily I have been looking. I have been accepted as a secretary with a hiking group, Dandelion hiking. It is a really small business, and my pay will be appropriately small, but so will my working hours. I will mostly be doing fairly simple tasks which make use of my having English as a mother tongue: responding to emails which are written in English, and some minor translating. As a benefit, I get to go and climb the great wall or a nearby mountain every weekend! I went with the group just yesterday to a new part of the great wall, the most run down and un-restored section I have been to yet! It was raining, which actually made the hike not much fun, but It was nice to see some good sights. That was not the only time I got out of Beijing recently though! Last week at Juggling Club, Fede introduced me to Li Zhengkai, who was planning a two month performance tour from Beijing to Sichuan province. Fede felt I was one of the only Juggling Club regulars that had the confidence and skill to perform, so I signed my name right then and there. Zhengkai called me on Thursday afternoon to ask me if I could leave Beijing with him and his friends that evening, and I said yes as I started to pack my bags. A few hours later there with five of us in a car and Nirvana on the radio (these guys were musicians, and one of the retirements of being a modern musician in China is to be well-acquainted with whatever is popular in the West), it really felt like the beginning of a road trip. It was for them, but not me. Due to the fact that I had to go to the great wall on Saturday I wasn't able to stay with them for long, but during the two days we hung out in Hebei province I did my first real street performance. On a public square in a little city in Hebei, I span my fire staff, make jokes with the crowd, breathed fire, and earned 20 RMB in doing so. I was not the only member of the group to perform though. I was most impressed by Xifi, a crippled man with almost no use of his arms who does calligraphy, uses chopsticks, and does just about everything else with his feet, including performance art.

One thing I have not been doing at all? Studying Chinese. I could use the excuse that I am still arranging my life (what work I will do, what community organizations I will partake in, etc), but the thought of studying Chinese hasn't even crossed my mind... until tonight. I went into a resturant, looked at the menu on the wall, and I was amazed by how many characters I still didn't know. I think I will take a photograph of that wall, and then learn those characters. Then I will be able to order ANYTHING in the restaurant!

As a side note, June 4th just passed, anniversary of you-know-what back in '89. The Chinese
government is going crazy with their internet security, and Hotmail, Blogger, Youtube, and Twitter are all blocked. (I use a proxy server) I went to the square twice that day, once in the morning with Lili and her friend (an ethnic Tibetan who gave me the pleasure of hearing my first ever Tibetan rap), and again in the evening with Li Zhengkai before we left the city. There were more police officers than there were regular people in the square, and most of the security was in plain clothes. The need some acting classes though, and a better plan, because it was pretty damn easy to tell who was a cop and who was a tourist. The fact that stoic looking guys in t-shirts and polos (and Olympic volunteer shirts! What would the IOC think of that?) would hold umbrellas for other stoic looking guys in t-shirts and polos who were talking on a walkie-talkie, or would hang out and chat with uniformed guards helped to give it away a bit. Also, the fact that they tended to move in pairs of small groups, all have the same plaid umbrella (it was really bright that morning), and never lose their disciplined walk make it plain as day. When I was there in the evening, one Chinese guy even asked one of the guards “walking around here all day like that, do you get tired?”, and a pair of young Chinese guys mockingly waved Chinese flags and shouted “yeah!” to some security forces. It was nice to see these little expressions of joy on such a somber day. The night before I actually spent some time showing Lili youtube videos (accessed ia proxy server, of course. Youtube has been blocked for months) about what had happened twenty years ago.