As continued from my former post, Part 1: An Ode to China.
4. Bicycling- Beijing is a city of bicycles. Life in Beijing is substantially worse without a bike or motorbike, as nearly everything is too far to walk and to short to drive. Hence, the bicycle is usually the most efficient way to travel. Bicycle riding is far from relaxing, but it does imbue one with a sense of camaraderie as you and the 10,000 other bicyclists at the intersection work together to cross the road, frustrating the gridlocked, rage-stricken car drivers. Furthermore, since all of the drivers are used to bicyclers, they are unusually adept at not hitting them.
5. Costumes- What do you want to wear today to work? A skull-patterned MC Hammer pantsuit?
A 1830s-era frontier dress, a la Little House on the Prairie? Or maybe you'd just like to keep it causal, and wear your Strawberry Shortcake outfit. In China, anything goes in terms of dress code. I blame this on the fact that throughout their schooling, Chinese children wear only their Mao sweatsuits, and thus, the finer points of dress code are often lost; at an opera in the Beijing Egg, not a single person, other than us, the only foreigners, dressed up.
Some might find this lack of clothing awareness a problem, but I'm not one of them. Why?
A) The children in their uniforms look very comfortable, and allow children to not have to worry about dressing in the morning, which makes the otherwise very put-upon students of China happy.
B) It gives people a lot more creativity in their clothes. For halloween one year, I dressed as a cowgirl: gingham shirt, cut off jean shorts, high pigtails, with brown eyeliner dotted on my face to give me freckles. My students weren't even aware my outfit was a costume, and seemed indignant I hadn't dressed up for their halloween party. When questioned further, they explained that my outfit was the current trend in Japan.
C) My favorite, however, are the little girls. Ornate Qing dynasty headgear, tutus, darling pink qipaos and Disney princess accessories all create a glorious mish-mash confection of adorableness.
Truly, anything goes, and one learns to appreciate the casualness once one returns to the US, where casual fridays consist of a regular business suit, sans jacket and heels.
6. Patience- Sometimes, things get lost in translation, words are forgotten, sentence structures are misused and tones are incorrect. What is amazing is how kind the Chinese people are about mistakes. They'll smile and wait for you to say it again, and if you continually get it wrong, they'll start playing a guessing game with you by repeating the words in all four tones.
7. Hutongs- My love affair with hutongs started the morning after I arrived in Beijing, waking up in a hotel next to Qianmen at 4 am due to jetlag. Lying in my dismal, stifling, 1970s era hotel era, I had my doubts as to whether I made the correct choice returning to Beijing. To clear my head, I decided to go for a quick morning run.
Running through the hutong in the morning is an otherworldly experience for the runner, but especially for the people living in the hutongs. As the morning twilight merged into early light, I would squeeze between biycles and rickshaws with bewildered older Chinese drivers, jump over the bricks inexplicably piled in the middle of the lane and smile at Chinese babies that often thought I was an alien. And, for all intents and purposes, a white, foreign girl in shorts, running for unclear reasons, as no dog or person was pursuing me, early in the morning, is as much an alien in the hutong environment as an actual martian.
On that day, as I ran through the one-story, gray stone hutong alleys, watching Beijing wake up, eventually arriving at the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in time for the daily flag raising ceremony, I gradually reconfirmed my reasons why I wanted to be in Beijing.
So, what makes hutongs so magical, you ask?
A. Walking through a piece of living history, where one can examine the precise, artistry of Qing-era stone masons next to the slipshod renovations made in the past 50 years to accomodate the population boom?
B. Witnessing the life of the hutong-dwellers: daily marathon mahjong games, drag races between children and their tricycles, eating chuar outside, no matter the temperature?
C. Making one wrong turn results into a hutong turning into an unguidable maze that keeps you captive and wandering, until you emerge, either close to where you started, or in a part of town that you weren't even aware existed.
Or D., all of the above?
Clearly D. is the answer I'm going for.
In recent years, a number of hutongs have been renovated and hipster-ized. Now cupcake shops, mixology bars and foreign-food restaurants sit next to traditional tea houses and chuar stands in some hutongs. Still, just one or two turns down the less-beaten track brings you to the the normal Chinese hutong, where one witnesses a lifestyle from a different world
4. Bicycling- Beijing is a city of bicycles. Life in Beijing is substantially worse without a bike or motorbike, as nearly everything is too far to walk and to short to drive. Hence, the bicycle is usually the most efficient way to travel. Bicycle riding is far from relaxing, but it does imbue one with a sense of camaraderie as you and the 10,000 other bicyclists at the intersection work together to cross the road, frustrating the gridlocked, rage-stricken car drivers. Furthermore, since all of the drivers are used to bicyclers, they are unusually adept at not hitting them.
5. Costumes- What do you want to wear today to work? A skull-patterned MC Hammer pantsuit?
 |
| Just a normal day on the metro. |
Some might find this lack of clothing awareness a problem, but I'm not one of them. Why?
A) The children in their uniforms look very comfortable, and allow children to not have to worry about dressing in the morning, which makes the otherwise very put-upon students of China happy.
 |
| The Daily Marching Exercise with the first-graders. |
B) It gives people a lot more creativity in their clothes. For halloween one year, I dressed as a cowgirl: gingham shirt, cut off jean shorts, high pigtails, with brown eyeliner dotted on my face to give me freckles. My students weren't even aware my outfit was a costume, and seemed indignant I hadn't dressed up for their halloween party. When questioned further, they explained that my outfit was the current trend in Japan.
C) My favorite, however, are the little girls. Ornate Qing dynasty headgear, tutus, darling pink qipaos and Disney princess accessories all create a glorious mish-mash confection of adorableness.
 |
| Drive slow, homie |
 |
| Off to school. |
Truly, anything goes, and one learns to appreciate the casualness once one returns to the US, where casual fridays consist of a regular business suit, sans jacket and heels.
 |
| I saw this bag everywhere, except in stores, so I couldn't buy one. It is a loss I must live with. |
6. Patience- Sometimes, things get lost in translation, words are forgotten, sentence structures are misused and tones are incorrect. What is amazing is how kind the Chinese people are about mistakes. They'll smile and wait for you to say it again, and if you continually get it wrong, they'll start playing a guessing game with you by repeating the words in all four tones.
7. Hutongs- My love affair with hutongs started the morning after I arrived in Beijing, waking up in a hotel next to Qianmen at 4 am due to jetlag. Lying in my dismal, stifling, 1970s era hotel era, I had my doubts as to whether I made the correct choice returning to Beijing. To clear my head, I decided to go for a quick morning run.
Running through the hutong in the morning is an otherworldly experience for the runner, but especially for the people living in the hutongs. As the morning twilight merged into early light, I would squeeze between biycles and rickshaws with bewildered older Chinese drivers, jump over the bricks inexplicably piled in the middle of the lane and smile at Chinese babies that often thought I was an alien. And, for all intents and purposes, a white, foreign girl in shorts, running for unclear reasons, as no dog or person was pursuing me, early in the morning, is as much an alien in the hutong environment as an actual martian.
On that day, as I ran through the one-story, gray stone hutong alleys, watching Beijing wake up, eventually arriving at the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in time for the daily flag raising ceremony, I gradually reconfirmed my reasons why I wanted to be in Beijing.
So, what makes hutongs so magical, you ask?
A. Walking through a piece of living history, where one can examine the precise, artistry of Qing-era stone masons next to the slipshod renovations made in the past 50 years to accomodate the population boom?
B. Witnessing the life of the hutong-dwellers: daily marathon mahjong games, drag races between children and their tricycles, eating chuar outside, no matter the temperature?
C. Making one wrong turn results into a hutong turning into an unguidable maze that keeps you captive and wandering, until you emerge, either close to where you started, or in a part of town that you weren't even aware existed.
Or D., all of the above?
 |
| Entrance to a hutong- the two orange wooden posts notate that this belonged to a family of medium wealth- a successful merchant/doctor etc- when it was originally built |
 |
| Bicycling around Hutongs: the best way to spend a lazy Saturday. Hopefully with adventurous people. |
Clearly D. is the answer I'm going for.
In recent years, a number of hutongs have been renovated and hipster-ized. Now cupcake shops, mixology bars and foreign-food restaurants sit next to traditional tea houses and chuar stands in some hutongs. Still, just one or two turns down the less-beaten track brings you to the the normal Chinese hutong, where one witnesses a lifestyle from a different world
