Chapter 1

Off to China again.

Brigitte and I flew to San Antonio to daughter Gaby's on November 2. I stayed until November 5th when I flew off to Beijing where I will be until November 21. I have gone alone to Beijing 3 years in a row for a couple of weeks to immerse myself in Mandarin which I have been learning now for over 4 years. I opted to stay at a small hostel each time as there are few if any foreigners and the staff do not speak English   I have found that lots of people study English in China (in fact more Chinese people study English than there are English speaking people!)  but they never get a chance to use so after a few phrases one can revert to Mandarin and they are quite pleased.  Each year I have written a travel report like this as a means to fix in my memory the events of the trip.  I share it with those who may be interested.

On November 4th,  I had a lovely meeting in San Antonio with my first Chinese teach, Shuqiong. She used to live in Montreal and I spent 3 weeks several years ago there working with her. Since two years, her husband has been transferred to Dallas Texas and the family moved there. When Shuqiong heard I was coming to San Antonio, she decided it would be a good time to show her parents in law the city so she came up with her husband, two children and the parents,.  We met at her Hilton hotel.  The rest of the group went of for a boat ride around the river walk and Shuqiong and I caught up for a couple of hours. She has now landed a job with the second Baptist Church school which has asked her to manage a new Mandarin program.  She is a happy camper as that is what she was doing in Montreal.  The school is near her husband's office so they go in together and leave the baby with the parents in law who have come back from China to help.  It is a great arrangement and it was fun to see how Shu Qiong has managed the change.

On November 5, I flew from San Antonio to San Francisco and connected to a flight on United to Beijing. The Beijing leg was almost 12 hours and it doesn't get any shorter year-by-year. Maybe I should splurge one year and go business class. I did buy myself an upgrade in to economy plus which gave me a seat in the exit row. This, of course, has lots of legroom the risk is that one of the toilets decides to go out of business on a 12 hour flight which can make things wrong or uncomfortable. Going through Chinese customs and immigration was very smooth. Compared to leave 1 to 2 hours it takes in Dulles Airport the Beijing airport was much more efficient mainly because most of the immigration desks were manned by people.  At Dulles airport, there must be 50 booths for immigration but I have never seen more than 20 to 25 immigration officers and  the back ups can last two hours. There's nothing worse after a 8 to 12 hour flight than having to stand in a line for hours.

I picked up my bag and walked out to the main terminal and found the hotel manager Bing  standing there waiting for me. He was accompanied by his nephew who now works with him. We loaded the car and headed into town. 

The weather was typical of Beijing, cloudy and a lot of smog. The traffic between the airport and town was not that heavy going into town.

I have stayed with Bing for the last two years and each year he has had a different hostel in which he is managing. The current hostel has 50 rooms compared to 10 in last years hostel and eight in the year before. Bing is a real entrepreneur and has managed some sort of hostel for the last eight years. He is married and has a five-year-old son. The son, whom I named a few years ago is Mikey and the mother no longer live in Beijing but have moved back to his hometown of Chongqing in the South. His wife does not like the climate in Beijing. Bing and I are scheduled to visit Chongqing later next week. Bing insisted that I spend a week with him in his home town.  The problem is that Chongqing is 1200 miles south of Beijing and they speak a Chongqing dialect.  As the reason for coming to practice my Mandarin, we compromised and I will spend 3 days there next week.

Bing proudly showed me his newest hostel which is located near the Lama Temple in downtown Beijing.  It has two stories although the upstairs is now being reconstructed. I was given that the biggest room in the hotel which is really only 10 x 10 but it has its own bathroom. I found the same furniture which being had bought for me and his first hotel which consist of a long desk chair the lamp and a cupboard for my clothes. None of the other rooms have these amenities and they are mostly very very small rooms. On the upstairs there's construction going on to build a fairly large bar as well as a small suite for Bing to live in and a fairly large room which I will use on my next visit to the hotel. The new location is not as quaint as in the past as it is not near a hutong  which are the old Beijing type of neighborhoods with most of the stores. So far I have not discovered a hutong we had in the past years. This location is more central end is near one of the major attractions of Beijing namely the Lama temple. More on this later.

Bing Announced that he had arranged for a dinner for me with a few of his friends as a welcome. An Hour after arriving at the hotel we met up with his friends and off we went for a dinner. Of course I was a little tired. At least this year there not  15 people there as he had done last year. After dinner, we got back to the hotel and I was able to settle in and finally got to bed. 

I woke the next morning feeling terrible with a head cold and a stuffy nose. Luckily I had brought with me all sorts of magic pills and I spent the day today sorry for myself and resting after a long trip. After resting most of the day, Bing announced that he had organized an other dinner with a few more friends.  He seems to have an endless supply of friends, both male and female.  This time, 2 ladies showed up with 2 small trunks which were carried to the restaurant where 3 male friends showed up, one Chinese, one Australian and an other Swedish.  They all live here in Beijing.  We got to a rather dismal looking restaurant with about 10 tables, each with a hole in the middle measuring 12 by 18 inches.  The little trunks were opened and out came 5 bottles of very expensive French red wine while the other trunk held 8 glasses and a wine decanter.  One of the girls is the owner of a wine importing company and this was her treat.  Interestingly, neither I nor she drank a drop.  The next surprise was the arrival of a fire box with glowing coals which was put into the holes in the table along with a leg of lamb on a spit.  We had two such buckets. One is provided with a set of long knives and forks and one cuts oneself pieces of lamb to eat. Various vegetables were also placed on the table such a cut cucumbers, boiled cold cabbage and a few others I had never seen. It was good and I had a great meal.  The meal was lively and all in Mandarin as both the Australian and the Swede live in Beijing and were fluent in Mandarin having studied the language and lived here for several years.  There are still not a huge number of foreigners who speak Mandarin.  So the conversations  got livelier as the evening got longer.  I was able to participate but I tired after a while.  Masses of wine were taken by some of the party. From the labels and the years (2003) I have to assume that these were excellent and expensive wines.  As the restaurant was not far from the hostel, I walked back.  Some of the others continued on to a bar for nightcaps which I really did not need.

The next day, I had my Mandarin lesson by Skype with my teacher who is in Beijing. This is what we do on most days I am at home.  With the 12 hour difference in time, she gives me a lesson when it is morning in Beijing and evening in Virginia. Hao Jie is her name and I have worked for 4 years with her.  I then went out a walked the neighborhood for over 4 hours.  This is how I create situations where I need to use my Mandarin. I walk into stores, I ask questions and sometimes buy small things after going through price negotiations which can last several minutes.  The Chinese are always surprised to see a foreigner who can speak their language and it endears on to them immediately. They are very forgiving and can understand even if one does not get the tones right. I purchased a light weight and cheap backpack to put in my various small items and headed back to the hostel.  I did not want another dinner so I told Bing I would not be going out that night.

The next day, after lessons, my teacher said she was coming over to the hotel to pick up the stuff I had brought for her (thermos, back pack and other items purchased in the US, made in China but which cost half as much as if they were bought in China.  Talk about dumping, that is going on in huge style, but it does keep prices in North America down and inflation in control. She said she would go with me to show me the Lama Temple.  So, off we went to have a bite to eat for lunch and then headed to the Temple.  It is in fact a royal palace which later was given over to become a Buddhist complex.  It is huge extending for about a kilometer in length with some 30 buildings.  It is a quiet island in the middle of bustling and noisy Beijing and operates as a working praying area with monks, smoke candles and people bowing and kneeling in front of huge statues of the various variations of Buddha.  At one point, there were 7 teen age girls all looking very Chinese but speaking English to one an other.  We stopped and asked them where they were  from and found they were from Singapore and were fluent in Mandarin also.  Singapore adopted the teaching of Mandarin to all school children which is a wise move.  The same goes on in Taiwan where Mandarin is also taught to the children.  Given the importance of China to these countries, having the population able to speak Mandarin positions them very well.  These girls were on an exchange visit and were have a ball. 

The temple is a political statement the Chinese government makes to establish the legitimacy of Tibet being part of the Chinese republic based on the historical connection between the country.  As one knows from the news, if one is outside China, there are on going protests by Tibetans against the Chinese presence which often take the form of people setting themselves on fire. It is so bad, that now when the national assembly is meeting in Beijing to do a generational change, the security forces on Tienanmen square the assembly meets, include pairs of firemen with extinguishers standing ready to douse anyone who tries to do a set fire to him or herself...

The 18th party conference is now going on in Beijing a security measures are extreme.  Taxis have been instructed to remove the hand cranks of the passenger windows if coming near any official meeting buildings and security forces are visible everywhere.  But that is all the population knows as no information is provided about what is going on among party members.  Everyone knows who the next president and prime minister will be as these are all determined well in advance of  the meetings. There are some 2000 delegates representing the 82 million party members (out of a population of 1.5 billion, not a large percentage) and they seem to sit around and approve whatever the party leaders put in front of them. It is in fact, a largely ceremonial meeting and a bit of a farce but they go through the sham every 5 years for the appearances of deliberating.  The pictures one sees are masses of dark suits with bad hair jobs.  They all seem bored to extremes and one knows why. But the system seems to continue.  The question is whether the party will evolve fast enough to satisfy the population which is furious about the corruption and graft which is rampant.  There are more millionaires among the government members than in any other country save Saudi Arabia, perhaps.  China's history is a series of putsches installing new rulers when the people decide the current lot are not delivering their security and well being.  The leitmotif of this and any previous dynasty before the current Communist party one is to strive for a harmonious society.  The last thing this or any government can withstand is any of these huge populations getting irritated to the point of taking to the streets.  When these populations of China start that kind of protest, there is little any government can do to put them down.  

On the other hand, I believe that if the current lot were not in charge with an iron fist, this country would probably not withstand a break up into several smaller, more manageable and perhaps more cohesive units.  But more on that later.