366 days in Beijing

Oh, young Dusty. The money and time you wasted on Vegas.

Oh, everybody who’s ever gone to Hawaii. The money and time you wasted on Hawaii.

I feel like an incredibly large number of people failed me in my 20s. Maybe I didn’t meet any of those people, yet they still failed me by failing to somehow make the world aware that Thailand is the perfect detestation for anyone who wants to go have fun when they’re young (or, if you want to really fight dirty and point out I’m 35, old).

Here’s what you’re looking for when you’re on a trip in your 20s: Weather. Women. Liquor. Food. Clearly not in that order, but in all cases, the cheaper, the better. 

You can find all four in Las Vegas, of course. Also, of course, they will cost nearly a year’s salary.

Here’s what you’re looking for when you go to Hawaii: Weather. Beaches. Food.

You can see where I’m going with this.

We spend a fair amount of time traveling, reading about traveling and talking about traveling with people who like traveling. As it turns out, there’s a reason Thailand is at or near the top of everybody’s list.

As you’ve likely guessed by now, we went.

We broke our trip up into three chunks: Four days in Bangkok, six on an island called Koh Samed (or Koh Samet - they can’t seem to figure it out among themselves), and two in SIem Reap, Cambodia.

Make plans to go to Thailand. Right now. If you’ve got some tentative travel plans, take a second to cross them out before you read on.

I mean, here’s what a $60 hotel gets you in Bangkok.

You’ve seen the Hollywood version of Vegas and, if you’re like me, you’ve seen that there’s more truth to it than you’d imagine. I can’t begin to write honestly about either Vegas or Bangkok without this next bit.

If you go in with the right attitude, some legitimately crazy things are going to happen. I won’t be writing about any of them, but I can think of at least five things that I’ve lived through in Vegas that I will barely talk about to my closest friends, much less write about on a blog.

Bangkok is in the same vein. Only, it’s much cheaper, and much seedier.  I mean … it just is. Once again, I’ll feint around the seedy details, but suffice to say, your imagination is not going to live up to the reality. No “unless” needed. It’s just not.

I’ll just say this - there is a really fun way to use ping-pong balls in Bangkok, but the way you’ve heard about isn’t it.

That aside, everything else is damn-near perfect too, assuming you like amazing food for three bucks, genuinely friendly people, perfect weather, $50 hotels and $10 massages.

I guess I should’ve started out with all that - if you don’t like that stuff, there’s no reaching you.

You know they call it “The Land of Smiles,” right?

So, we spent our days in Bangkok. We went to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, we took the boat trip down the river (twice), we made friends with an old woman from Oklahoma who’s a professor and owns a ranch. 

Before we move on to island life, one more word on Bangkok (and Thailand in general).

You know how, as the saying more or less goes, Eskimos have about 1,000 words for snow? Well, Thais must have about zero words for exploitation,  because they’re clearly not familiar with it as a general concept.

There’s a street called Soi Cowboy - if you’ve had the misfortune of seeing the sequel to The Hangover, google it and you’ll be familiar - that was right near our hotel and is a great place to grab a beer and people watch. A perfect place, even, depending on your disposition.

One night, we were sitting enjoying our beers, and saw three things in very quick succession (by very quick, I’ll say within in an hour).

First, a little kid of about 10 sits on a moped next to our table and half-assedly tries to talk me into buying Kelsie some flowers. It was so half-assed, in fact, that it made me suspicious. We’re two white people who are obviously drunk and in love, who happened to sit down a foot away from him, and Kelsie’s being nice to him. We’re perfect marks, in the little-kid-flower-selling market.

But he’ll barely talk to us, or look at us - moreover, we’re clearly an annoyance.

You can see where this is going. The kid ducks seemlessly off into the crowd, not to return that night. Later, we see him, also sitting disinterestedly at a table at the other end of the street. The next night, he’s back on the same moped, same time.

The kid’s so cute, he can run the same damn pickpocket scheme every night, and get away with it.

Same street, same night. Two human pyramids form, flash-mob style. At the top, three-people high - little kids, maybe five years old.

Same street, same night. Twice. Women breast-feeding their newborns - one on the side of the road, one on a stairwell. Both begging for money. This, we saw several more times, but to see all of that in under an hour made us feel like shit. Which, of course it did, but what more do you say? Needless to say, no pictures of that. 

Anyway, Part 2 on the island of Koh Samed coming soon, followed by Part 3 on Cambodia. By the way, the days on this thing are all screwed up now. It was bound to happen. As I publish this, we’re on day 639 - i”m going with the dates we were actually in the places listed.

When I left Seattle on Saturday, it was a beautiful blue Northwest day.

Meanwhile, in Beijing on Saturday, one of the most polluted cities in the world had its smoggiest day ever - on a scale of 1-500, it hit over 700. (Check this out.)

The email from HR:

Dear Colleagues,

Recently it is very cold in Beijing and the air is “suffocating”. Many of our editors and reporters are not in very good health, with quite frequent cases of fever and cold.

We suggest that you don’t stay outside for a long time and drink more hot water. If you have to go outdoors we hope that you will wear thicker clothes and have your masks on, and do not remain where there are too many people. Eating more fruits and vegetables will also help you to maintain a good health in winter.

If anyone does not feel well, please go to the hospital immediately for a check. Should there be any difficulty, call us and we will try our best to help.

We wish you all a good health,

International Staff Office

The central conceit of this blog was, obviously, that we were going to move to Beijing for one leap year. Ride out the contract, climb the Great Wall, learn how to use chopsticks. Etc.

If you didn’t go to South Kitsap High, your math has probably led you to the conclusion that things haven’t gone quite according to Hoyle. 

I don’t mind explaining the reasons. I’ve already explained them too many times to many people. What I do mind is people reacting as though there’s been a secret plan afoot from Day negative-20 to turn this blog into 1830 Days in Beijing. (And yeah, I just referred to myself in the third-person-blog form.)

Let’s start with why we’re staying. Put simply, our lives here are good and our lives at home would quite possibly be not good if we went home now.

A lot of this is going to be about my job situation. I really hope it doesn’t come off as though I’m a jerk who doesn’t care about his wife’s career, because I absolutely do. The fact of the matter is, she’s going to finish off the last of her college and be more successful than I am once we get home. That’s not me paying lip-service as a husband, it’s just the truth. The reason so much of this is going to be about my job situation is that it’s my job that brought us here, and it’s my job that’s in an industry that is ceasing to exist as fast as it possibly can.  

So.

Here, I have a job I really enjoy. I get to travel all over the world. I get to write. My boss is great. It’s lucrative. The doomy feeling of a U.S. paper is absent. I walk out my door, and four minutes later I’m at my desk. 

Kelsie, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily love her job. Then again, I don’t know anybody who would - she’s teaching bratty little kids a foreign language. But she’s awesome at it, and she makes more money per hour than I will probably ever make in my life. That means she doesn’t have to work a whole lot of hours. THAT means that we get to spend an incredible amount of time together. Almost all our time is spent together. You might recall we got married about five minutes after we met - time together is a good thing.

So, that’s how things have turned out. We get to hang out together almost all day every day, put a bunch of money in the bank, experience an incredibly interesting city and travel as much as we want. We’ve met really great people, had really great meals and lived lives we’re both proud of.  I can promise you that moving to China hasn’t been easy, at all, but I’m intensely proud of the fact we’ve done it and nailed it. We’re both much better people than the people who left the U.S. (who were already much better than most people). 

And yet, every single day for the last 200 or so, I’ve checked the job ads back home. I mean, every single day, usually about the third thing after I wake up. A lot of them. Thousands and thousands of job ads. 

At first, I was pretty much applying for everything that rang even the slightest of bells. Almost immediately, I got an interview for a job that was an A+ in just about every category, but I whiffed the interview (not to make excuses, but doing an interview at 6 a.m. over a terrible Skype connection isn’t easy - I promise).

Having gotten that close with such a great job, I narrowed my focus. Part of it was that it became emotionally draining to put in 5-10 hours of work for every opening, getting my resume and cover letter just right, talk myself into why this job in this location was a good fit, spend an hour on craigslist with Kelsie checking out real estate in the area, Google imaging the city, etc. Call me whatever you will, but you try it. Try talking yourself into a few dozen lives that don’t pan out. I’m not taking it personally - there are thousands of really talented people in this industry looking for jobs right now. Still, it makes you feel groundless.

That turned out to be good though, because we both came to realize that no, we probably don’t want to leave in West Palm Beach or Reno or Dallas. We don’t want me to take a big pay cut, or Kelsie to have to go to a crappy school to major in something that doesn’t interest her. Once you’ve really envisioned a future apart from where you want to be, you get a better sense of where you actually do want to be. 

Another thing is that I’m perfectly confident the right fit is going to come along, so there’s no sense trying to round peg/square hole it at this point. I know this is pure hubris, but I’ve been extremely fortunate in life, thanks in large part to not forcing decisions. You might call it indecision - I call it waiting until there’s a good decision to be made. Delayed gratification and all that. I’ve had offers for jobs that weren’t a great fit for whatever reason. We came very close to going for it. I mean, AGONIZING days and weeks in which we tried to decide things like: What is this going to mean for our future? How will this affect the relationships we care about? How will this affect our future kids? How will it affect our retirement? How will this affect our health and our marriage and our cat?

We asked ourselves all those same questions late in the pre-367 era (and, in fact, for quite some time after that - you might remember we planned to stay for a couple months extra, then move home for good). 

The answer, again, is: Our lives here are good and our lives at home would quite possibly be not good if we went home now. We want to wait until they will be.

We headed over to a place called Kro’s Nest earlier this week for some pizza and trivia.

Earlier in the day, I’d heard somebody complaining about an inability to roll the windows down in their taxi. I mostly dismissed it, because who cares?

So, we’re on our way to trivia and notice that the window cranks are missing in our cab. We did some speculating that maybe it was some convoluted anti-pollution idea designed to keep people from rolling their windows down all winter, wasting heat and maybe gas in the process. Sounded dumb, but lots of things here do.

Nope. What’s actually going on is much, much dumber. Much.

The 18th Party Congress is coming soon to a city near us, during which there will be a once-every-10-years leadership transition. As part of a laundry list of security measures, nobody can roll their windows down. Something about people throwing leaflets out the window. Oh yeah, no pencil sharpeners, remote-control planes or knives for the time being, either. There’s something about ping-pong balls too, but that was too much for me to get my mind around so I didn’t even try.

(In case you were wondering, trivia went pretty badly.)

My boss’ name isn’t really Kevin.

The guy who sits next to me, his name isn’t really Aaron. And our friend Angela’s name isn’t really Angela. 

Their real names are Yu Yulei, Sun Xiaochen and Cai Muyuan, but try saying those three times fast, or at all. (My favorite is a girl in my department we call Helen, whose name is pronounced like a quick, soft Z. Say that out loud to yourself - it’s pretty funny. Because I have the name I do, I get to make jokes about other people’s.)

One of the harder things to get used to is that pretty much every English-speaking Chinese person has an English name that we’re supposed to call them by. At my work in particular, they’re pretty firm about it.

The reason is obvious - Mandarin is incredibly hard to pick up, so giving people familiar names makes them seem more accessible. I think it would be pretty common to just avoid talking to somebody altogether if you felt like an idiot trying to pronounce their name.

Still, you can’t help but feel arrogant and coddled when you’re calling Sun Xiaochen “Aaron.” I know his real name, he knows I know it, but Aaron it is. I asked him once if I should start going with his real name, and he told me to just stick to Aaron. (I think it’s company policy to strongly encourage foreign staff to use the English names, in an effort to keep us from feeling obliged to do otherwise).

It seems especially strange because the Chinese are generally pretty nationalistic. Every once in a while, they’ll adopt a Western idea or person, but it’s usually for reasons that are well beyond me. Why is Kobe a huge deal here, but LeBron isn’t? Beats me. Why is there a new KFC opening every five minutes, but no Taco Bell within 2,000 miles? No clue. You’d think adopting a Western name would be an absolute non-starter, but no.

I have a Chinese name, but it’s only for business cards and bank accounts and such. The characters are pronounced Da Si Di, which sounds something like Dusty if you say it fast. It means, roughly, to mentally inspire, or to reach mental inspiration. Aaron, coincidentally, picked it out. (When I found out I was getting a Chinese name, I immediately wanted to go with Yao Ming, but that got shot down faster than you can say Yao Ming.)

I’ve come around to the idea that it isn’t nearly as strange for them as it is for us. The Chinese don’t link their names as closely to their identities as we do, and, beyond that, “identity” isn’t quite as crucial a concept as it is for us. Nicknames are exceedingly common, and it’s not unheard of to change your name if you get a new job or get married or even go to grad school. Plus, I think my Chinese name is kind of cool, so it’s fair to say that works both ways.

As an English teacher, Kelsie gets to play god because most people get their names early in their English lessons. Usually she teaches people who’ve been at it for awhile, but occasionally she gets to name somebody.

Let’s just say there are a few more Kristas running around China than there were a year ago.

It says a lot for Beijing that the two times I’ve felt unsafe here, I was: 1. Laying in bed and 2: Taking a walk to buy a toaster oven on a sunny afternoon.

This probably sounds grandiose, but I feel safer in Beijing than in any other place I’ve lived.

You walk down the street, at any time of night, and never worry about getting stabbed or robbed or beaten up or asked to sign a petition to raise or lower the capital gains tax.

I think it’s partly the fact there’s no meth to speak of, and partly the fact it’s just not the way Chinese people are wired (for the most part). Of course, I did live in Tacoma for a long time, so maybe my basis for comparison is a little off.

The point is, with the obvious exception of taxis, I’ve only felt unsafe here those two times. I’ll easily take any security concerns I have now over the chance of getting skulled with an Evan Williams bottle by a meth-head while I’m digging my keys out of my pocket in Tacoma. 

Those two times here are going to require some half-assed history lessons to explain.

The first was late last spring. There was a blind activist named Chen Guangcheng who had more or less become the center of the world for a week or so. He wound up in the American embassy a few miles from where we live, and then in a hospital that’s about as close. His story is riveting, but I need to make a very long story short.

I was in bed one night and read this, in which Chen said that, that very day, the government had called and threatened to beat his wife to death if he didn’t leave that hospital and turn himself in.

Now, Chen Guangcheng and I obviously live wildly different lives, but when your own wife is sleeping next to you and you read that about a guy who says that and is basically in your neighborhood - it’s pretty damn unnerving. I promise. I didn’t sleep much that night, and I was ready to head to the airport the next morning

The second time was two weeks ago. I have no grasp of whether the story about a disputed group of islands in the East China Sea has made much of an impact in the U.S. (I’m guessing not), but it’s really interesting, so I’ll give you some incredibly simplistic background.

The dispute islands lie here ..

The Diaoyu Islands - known as the Senkaku Islands to the Japanese - have been  under Japanese control since 1895. Before that, they were China’s since, roughly, time immemorial or so.

Japan’s strongest claims to the islands are that they were legally awarded them after WWII, China spent decades not caring, and that (most importantly) Go To Hell, China. A Japanese buddy of mine put it this way (over the course of a few emails):

Moochers. It’s strange that they seem to find a chance to claim the islands in the first place. We are “civilized mad.” We are pissed, but trying to show the world that democracy and freedom are not the same as controlled anarchy, or Chinese democracy. 

China’s claim is that it’s held the islands since forever, that the islands were taken by illegitimate force, that there was a linguistic mistake in 1945 that led to Japan’s continuing ownership, and that (most importantly) Go To Hell, Japan.

It’s much, much more complicated, of course, but that’s the gist of it. My own read is that Japan probably has a better claim. I’m accustomed to the idea that possession is nine-tenths, and I’m not the kind of person who usually whips myself up into a nationalistic fervor. But then again, my read isn’t very informed.

(I suppose if, say, Canada started claiming Hawaii, I might get mad, but who’s to say? I bet Canawaii, or Hawaiiada, would grow the world’s best weed. Canawaii would probably make the most sense from a branding perspective in that scenario.)

A month or so ago, Japan’s government purchased the islands from their private (Japanese) owners, and everybody got really mad, really fast. 

I’m usually pretty ignorant, so, before we moved here, I had no idea the Chinese hated the Japanese on a visceral level. But, Good Mao, they do. 

Again, I’m going to gloss over this, but most of it stems from the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 40s. Japan invaded China in a such an awful manner, even by invasion standards, that it’s somewhat commonly known as the Asian Holocaust. Most of those involved have died off, but their offspring know the stories. It’s not the kind of thing you just forget about in a few decades.

What you’re left with is the Japanese viewing the Chinese as stupid barbarians, and the Chinese viewing the Japanese as savage devils - that might sound like nit-picking, but it’s not.

Some riots and protests broke out. They were no joke. One afternoon, we were in a cab on our way to a local park, and it took an extra 45 minutes to get there because there were some riots/protests blocking traffic. (There are truthful-sounding rumors that the protesters were bused in by the government to divert attention from the extremely problematic once-every-10-years regime change that’s eminent and a fiasco.)  Former Washington Governor Gary Locke is the U.S. ambassador - his car was blocked in for a few minutes by a mob. A guy in Xi’an - a few hours from here - was beaten nearly to death for driving a Japanese car. 

Back to the toaster oven.

The two places we do our shopping here are, by chance, Japanese owned. They were both shut down for a couple days. They even took the trouble to cover every bit of corporate signage on the storefront with pro-Chinese slogans. It was especially annoying because one of them is the 7-11 on our block that Kelsie and I stop by a combined five times a day, I would guess. (Just take one second to pretend all the 7-11’s in the U.S. were Japanese owned, and that your closest 7-11 did this for these reasons.) 

On the day in question, my boss - an exceptionally sober, level-headed guy - started off a meeting with “Diaoyu Islands are China’s!!!” and an awkward fist-pump. He was kidding, but in that truth-said-in-jest kind of way. When he was done, he strongly warned me to stay away from anything even mildly related to Japan for the next week. Again, he’s not an alarmist. But China hates the Japanese; the U.S. is a Japanese ally; good enough.

Warning: this next part is anti-climactic.

As it happened, I had been fired up to get a toaster oven for about a month, and that was my day to do it. The place I planned to go to was the other of the two Japanese-owned businesses in our world, a large department store about a 20-minute walk from home called Ito Yokado.

So, mostly out of pure thick-headedness, partly out of a pretty intense lingering desire to make the apartment smell like chocolate-chip cookies, I decided to go anyway.

Now, before you judge me too harshly, take a look at the reality. Really.

On that 20-minute walk, I flinched probably 10 times. A lot of that was because it was almost like a montage of paranoia: there was a guy casually carrying a big metal cane and smacking it against his palm, a group of guys brandishing rebar as they unloaded a car full of it, and a group of teenagers yelling aggressively as they walked down the street. Not the kind of stuff you see every day, but also not the kind of thing you’d notice if you hadn’t been specifically warned that you were likely to be a target of random violence and seen a bunch of footage of it happening to other people.

It was right in that sweet spot where you know you’re being paranoid, but get to feel a little bit justified for it. I made it to the store with few, if any, injuries. (Zero injuries.)

I don’t feel ridiculous for being freaked out, but I also still feel completely safe here. Every place in the world is going to have things to fear. In Beijing, it’s taxis, nationalism and unsafe food, air and water.

OK, that’s a lot of things. But still. 

“In this country, supermarkets are cathedrals.”

Serge, “The Wire”

I realize that starting off with a quote is only very slightly less hacky than starting off with “Webster’s defines supermarkets as… “

But I think about that quote about once a week.

Here’s the food I miss most: All the food. 

ALL THE FOOD.

For starters, a taco supreme, and a grand slam with eggs over-easy, and a Deli Club (yeah, that one gets capitalized here - I gave that sandwich a shout-out in a newspaper with a circulation of almost a million people, so I’m allowed to relegate every other food on this blog to lowercase) with funyuns and a chocolate milk.

And an Oregon burrito from Muchas Gracias.

I’m not saying I might hurt somebody to consume one of those items.

I’m saying I would hurt somebody to consume one of those items if I was bigger than that somebody and there were no further consequences. 

The point is, if you go into a store here, the food is mostly awful.

It’s super low-quality, it stinks, there’s nothing close to a guarantee on the safety - death penalty threats aside - and there are people with megaphones yelling at you, constantly, to buy soap, which, incidentally, is nearly as likely to give you a horrible rash as get your clothes clean.

You know your average butcher section, where steaks are wrapped up in packages and put in those refrigerated bins?

Here,they put big mounds of raw meat in those, unpackaged and out in the open.

Super hot day? Big bin of meat sitting there. Super cold day, with the heater cranked all the way up? Same.

I’m well aware of the food-safety issues at home. I’ve spent five bucks on organic milk, for example, an annoying number of times. 

But that’s just nothing. I’m telling you, we’ve spent dozens of hours (I hope it’s only dozens anyway) talking about Safeway.

Americans absolutely grasp the rarity of things like freedom of speech and democracy and all that.

They - we, until now - don’t grasp the rarity of supermarkets.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but … if you put on some pants and head to the door, within 10 minutes you’ll be somewhere where you can buy just about any food anybody could ever want.

If you want a not-quite-perfectly marbled family-sized carton of rib-eyes, GAME ON. If you want a delicious jug of Odwalla superfood? If you want some organic asparagus? If you want any one of the 15 varieties of Ritz (I just looked), or 12 varieties of Cheese-It (ibid), or some fresh spinach, or frozen tater-tots, or phyllo dough, or coffee creamer or good coffee … 

I’m not kidding about this one. I bet you hate your supermarket. I know I did.

I just can’t remember why.

What would you have them do differently? You can get relatively high-quality food of just about any type you can imagine without even thinking about it, at any time, within a short distance of your home. If you need to get exotic with it, you can go to Trader Joe’s, or Chinatown. Or if you want to get healthy about it, you can get a CSA (that’s not job No. 1 when we get home, but it’s job somewhere-in-the-top-50).

The point is, there are lots of crappy things here that fall under the umbrella of So Big It’s Easy To Forget.

The ability to drive up to N. 21st and Proctor and buy the ingredients for a bacon-cheese burger and fries? Never forgotten. 

Note: Actual work email. Context here.

Dear colleagues,

The summer is coming, bringing high temperature and unusual heavy rains these days.

   

In such a hot weather especially in outdoors, you should be attentive to keeping fit away from the heat and should not eat too much cold food. And according to our General Office, all the staff should pay attention to our office dress code – business causal.   Casual dress such as sleeveless clothes, shorts or slippers are not allowed in the office.

 

Thank you very much for your co-operation and take care.

 

Foreign Affairs & Communications Dept.

As the 366 days in Beijing are coming to a close I feel compelled to write an essay of my thoughts on the past 344 days, specifically the holidays and celebrations. The first couple months were really difficult. It was incredibly hard trying to juggle a new culture, new people, a new time zone, new everything, while trying to stay connected to people at home. I think that we’ve done a pretty good job at staying in contact with our close friends. During the first few months we obviously talked to everyone more often than we do now. I was homesick and overwhelmed. For so much of the first 8-12 weeks of being here I was so wrapped up in my life back home that I didn’t really make an effort to move forward with the new life we’d chosen. Then we made friends.

We’ve celebrated every major holiday here consistently bigger than any time I can remember doing so back home.

For Halloween, we went with some friends to a party in the art district of Beijing. On Thanksgiving, 20 or more of us gathered in our hall and had a pot luck with people from countries all over the world.

On Christmas, 20 or so of us went to a classy Champagne Brunch in the business district.

On NYE, we all had a nice Chinese dinner before going out for the night.

During Chinese New Year, those of us who stayed behind in Beijing (only about 5 of us did) hung out every day of the festival going to temple fairs,partying, having a big taco night toward the end when more people had made their way back to Beijing, but of course the highlight was on CNYE when we all went to a hutong bar, drank, and then spent the next 3 hours just dancing around while fireworks were going off nonstop.

I celebrated Australia day because I now have really cool Australian friends.

Dusty’s birthday fell during the week and we were still able to gather around 20 people for a small bar crawl that ended up with everyone involved in another one of our now-famous slapping fights.

On St. Patrick’s Day, we went to one of our favorite bars, which happens to be called the Irish Volunteer and danced in the rainstorm until it was time to go home.

My birthday fell on a Wednesday, yet still 20 people came over for beer-pong/pizza/catch phrase extravaganza.

And, most recently, on the Fourth of July, 10 of us went to a, you guessed it, bar and played American trivia (we came in 3rd out of 20 teams and won a bucket of beers). The music round of trivia was a live music round in which two of our friends were playing the live music. After trivia, they went on to play a long set of pretty classic American songs, including Proud to be an American, during which at least 100 people were singing along loudly and swaying and hugging (we’re really patriotic now).

This was all just a really long way of saying that they days you expect to be homesick never end up being the ones that you are. The days I’m homesick always just happen on a random day of the week when it’s smoggy and I haven’t heard from anyone back home a few days. 

Do I miss everyone and everything back home? YES YES YES YES. I would go as far as to say that if none of our friends had existed during our time here, we would’ve left a while ago. We have a good life here. This year has been a roller coaster. It’s been challenging, fun, eye-opening, enlightening, and rewarding. I know the million dollar question is what are we doing next? Will there be another 365 days in Beijing? As soon as I know the answer, I’ll fill you in. 

There’s this a doorway I go through on my way to work.

It used to always be open.

Now it’s always closed. So is another one of the four sets of doors I go through every day.

I don’t know why, or at least not for sure. I think I can make an educated guess. 

I would imagine that, one day, a meeting was convened. (That’s not part of the educated guess - meetings here are convened with the passion and unavoidable regularity of church.)

Prior to this theoretical meeting, everybody was charged with concocting an idea to solve … say … heating overruns? Break-ins that had yet to happen? People tripping down the stairs? Nuclear fallout?

Somebody came to that meeting and brought up a drafty day/loiterer/clumsy girl/movie from the 70s they’d seen or imagined, with sufficient urgency to get somebody just above their level of seniority to buy in.

Thus was born my theoretical Subcommittee to Evaluate Every Single Door in the Building.

That’s the way things work here - constantly shifting laser focus. I think if you’re Chinese, you just get a sense for when you need to pay strict attention to something, and when it’s suddenly become a waste of time.

The classic example: Spitting here is a bit of a national pass-time. So, in the buildup to the Olympics, somebody formed a Committee to Stop All the Spitting. Public service announcements were created, signs were posted. They went so far as to hand out bags for people to spit in, and for what I’m sure were a few glorious months, the streets of Beijing did not run white with spittle. 

You can guess how that’s panned out in the long term, but that’s just how it goes here.

One day, you’ll be going along writing, say “the U.S. basketball team selected its roster.”

The next, somebody will decide it’s US (no periods). The next two weeks, every single person in the building will dedicate themselves in full to rooting out every single instance in which the periods were left in. Criticisms are leveled, fines (yes, fines, for entire departments) are handed out, careers are at stake.

The next week, nobody much cares whether it’s US or U.S., just so long as the doorways adjacent to the stairs are shut.

I’m to the point now that I can sense it happening.

The past couple weeks, I noticed a few of our taxi drivers standing on their brakes at yellow lights.

That’s a marked difference to the nine previous months when I just assumed taxi drivers were somehow stoplight-blind, or something.

But then, I noticed it yet again. So once I started writing this, I googled it. And I was right. The propaganda machine is in motion. Here and here and here. 

If I had to bet where things will stand by November, I would say the doors will be open, the periods gone, and the taxi drivers stoplight-blind.

And, of course, spit everywhere.