BLOG BEIJING

One interesting thing is Beijing is the classifieds section at http://thatsbj.com , where you can find a job, buy or sell something, or do the typical personals thing.  Today I saw this ad:

White boy looving [sic] for punky girl with dragon tattoo. Want to sit around playing Xbox and listen to heavy metal music with me?

I can never figure out if these ads are entirely serious.  This one sounds real, but also very weird and way too specific:

Hey we are 4 Chinese girls enjoying our life in the city, but sometimes we get bored. So we are thinking of making new friends. Here is the idea: we set up a dinner party with four guys, drinking a little bit, eating nice food, talking (no politics please), and if we have a good time, we go dancing…There might be other stories after that, you never know…It sounds like a good idea but now we need these four guys. So any cute guy in the town interested in this please write back with a picture (and you will get ours). We are looking forward to hearing from you

Most of the ads sound something like this:

Hi, this is Jessie, a young lady in BJ.
I’d like to make friends with foreigners from English speaking country. I’m interested in learning English, your culture and literature. Of course, I’m glad to help you with Chinese.
If you are interested, please write back or send emails to jessieyang7476 at hotmail dot com(also MSN account).
Looking forward to hearing from you.

Or this:

I am invited to an Embassy Ball at the Kempinski around the end of November. I will share a nice table with some officials from the embassy - but I have no beautiful woman on my side.
What is a handsome man, without a beautiful person on his side anyway?
I am a tall, fit european guy, and I would like to take a beautiful and charming nice girl/woman with me. Age around 25 to 35, preferrably beautiful, charming and a bit tall; and you should not be afraid of some local european food - some of these things, I haven’t even tried… It will be a little bit formal, but be informed, that I am a terrible dancer. I am not ugly and i can certainly entertain you for the evening. And of course, you will be invited. If you have a pic, I will send mine in return.

Or strangely worded requests (but with obvious consequences), like this:

I am looking for an intelligent, attractive Chinese girl to help me with some translation and interpretation and to accompany me to some social events, possibly to travel with me to the provinces for business meetings. A curious mind and sweet disposition are important - I want to enjoy your company. Please help me learn more about your country. Email replies welcome at xxxx@xxxx.com.

Or the more direct approach:

Good-looking, fit (work out regularly), in his early’s, Caucasian, well-educated, secure, ambidextrous man looking for open minded couples/groups for adult encounters

And:

Hi we are two straight handsome western guys in mid to early twenties.
We are looking for any open minded chinese girls to hang out with and have fun with at the same time.

And, finally, the truly bizarre, and, I suppose, the one I’m most hopeful for.  This man has travelled from India to China to teach the right Chinese girl the Spanish guitar (apparently an extremely heavy one), and I hope he finds her:

Hello and namaste, I am an Indian male, currently working in Beijing. I am interested in teaching a chinese girl (19 - 25 years of age) english / hindi (the native language of India), finance or the spanish guitar, in return for some Chinese. I am living in the Sihui Dong area. So if you live in the Sihui / Sihui Dong / Gaobeidian areas, it would be extremely convenient. However, if you want to learn the guitar, you will have to come to my apartment, as it will not be possible for me to carry my guitar. Don’t miss this opprtunity Do get in touch soon.

An American Ex-Pat Living in Beijing by Tony Watkins

Beijing is either a wonderful city or a polluted mess, depending on where you live and where you go. When I first arrived here, I lived in a dorm building with Korean students and Korean food and Korean groceries available 24 hours a day. I quickly moved to a three bedroom walkup in an old communist style apartment building, where I lived with a Chinese girl and a Thai guy, both students with me at the Beijing Language and Culture University. We lived near the Wudaokou subway station, way out in the Northwest of Beijing, far away from the hustle and bustle of the center, but full of clubs and bars for all the foreigners.

Coming from Korea (where I lived for two years), Beijing didn’t seem crowded and didn’t seem polluted; being a New Yorker, Beijing didn’t feel noisy and it didn’t feel busy. The one thing that struck me most was the bikes. I’d bike to school every day with a pack of Chinese people in our own bike road, not lane. We’d stop at lights and follow the traffic cops directions. Stay to the right except to pass, and usually bike at a sane speed, not at top speed like we New Yorkers usually do.

BLCU was full of foreigners. I was in the Westerners class; they divide up the classes based on your passport, so we had a few Asian faces, but no Asian passports. The teachers and the students spoke English and I was annoyed. I wanted to learn Chinese! So I transferred out to the Asian class and studied with the Koreans and Filipinos and Indonesians. Why the school thought Filipinos and Americans shouldn’t study together never made any sense to me.

After my four month Chinese program was up I stopped working part-time and started working full-time teaching English. It’s the typical ex-pat job, one I’m used to and pretty good at. I moved out of the communist walk up and into a 200 year old house in the hutong, in one of the nice courtyard style layouts. My house is renovated, and the courtyard has obviously fallen from it’s former glory somewhat but it’s cool as hell for a guy who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In the mornings I open the door and chat with the old lady who lives next to me. She had a stroke and has trouble walking, and I see her pause and deal with headaches or something from time to time, but she’s one of my best Chinese teachers. We sit outside, or in my house or hers, and chat, drink tea, and I try to understand. She can’t speak a word of English, like almost everyone in the hutong.

Across from me is a little girl and her family. Sometimes they invite me over to eat hot pot outside and drink beer and baijiu (58% alcohol) and smoke cigarettes for lunch. I decline on the baijiu and cigarettes, but I have to drink the beer. Getting to work becomes difficult on those days…

The people here are all friendly in a crazy way. Most people don’t seem to work to much – if at all. We play cards and mahjhong and you can see beer being consumed at almost any time. The main restaurant here is the best I’ve found in China, and almost the cheapest. Kung Pao chicken is about one dollar, and of course theres no tax and no tipping. Hutong people have a long history of being lazy and enjoying life, so this is the best place to live. Rich Chinese and most working foreigners live in high rise apartment buildings with doormen and pay much more rent than me. I think they’re out of their minds.

But at night, it’s a different story …

The Hutong at Night

Young prostitutes walking back to their little massage parlor in the hutong carrying one piece of corn in a bag. It’s six in the morning and I’m not sure if they’ve been up all night or are just getting started. Actually, I’m not sure what their job is, exactly. I think they do massage and actually cut hair in addition to “the other”. I mean, I’m sure they do “the other”. Some of them might actually cut hair, too. They work in fully functioning hair salons or obvious fronts. Walking home each night from work, I pass through a gauntlet of these "hair salons" with spinning barber poles and girls inside. Sometimes they call out to me, but usually they just sit there looking bored. In one, they’ve got a couch and a TV and a back room, and only one hair cutting chair in the front for show. The girls lounge on the couch hugging stuffed animals, watching TV and waiting for customers. They seem cute and child-like, just young girls having a slumber party or something like that.

Being in Asia for several years, this kind of stuff isn’t alarming any more. It was almost the same in Korea, maybe just a little less open, but still easy to find. China is all out - in every hotel I’ve ever stayed in in china I’ve been propositioned. Usually just a phone call asking about massage a few hours after you check into your room - but the message is clear.

I remember being a little kid in the seventies and eighties growing up in New York City and driving on 10th avenue and 11th avenue and the West Side Highway going to school and seeing the hookers out and about in the early morning. I remember a fat one who was topless right there on the sidewalk. All the kids on the bus pointed and giggled, and I remember understanding the whole deal, understanding about sex and prostitution from a purely intellectual standpoint. I remember the disgustingly huge black breasts, and thinking it was funny and ridiculous and not at all appealing. I couldn’t understand what was interesting or tantalizing about any of those 11th avenue whores, other than being comical.

I remember being a young man and visiting Amsterdam and seeing the red light district. We walked down a small dead end street that had black hookers on it, and i remember seeing families and children strolling and looking and thinking it was very weird. Some tourists were making monkey noises and black jokes, but the hookers on the other side couldn’t hear. I suppose those tourists were horrible racists, but maybe they wouldn’t have acted like that, or made those comments, about regular people - just about prostitutes.

I know all about the gangs and the mafias, the kidnappings and the rapes, the drugs and disease and all of the awful things associated with prostitution, especially in Asia. But the ones I see here in the hutong, the ones I’ve seen in Bangkok and everywhere else in Thailand, the ones in Amsterdam, the ones I remember from my childhood in New York, and the girls handing out small bottles of energy drinks in Korea trying to get men to come to “room salons” mostly seem in a good mood. At least, they’re always laughing!

Keep on Keepin’ On

So I keep on keeping on in Beijing. My life here is much more ordinary and boring than it ever was in New York. I go to work and go home, usually eat in the same restaurant, watch DVDs and write my blog, try to study a little and spend most of my time alone or with my girlfriend. There’s no bars, no raves, no clubs and parties, no friends and activities all day and all night. But, I’m happy . . .