now I check my electrical meter like every three days

I dunno WHAT the hell happened this morning. I got to the subway station at the usual time and there was literally 10 times as many people as usual. It’s always crowded, but this was just ridiculous. Like, must wait in a line to go down the stairs to the platform ridiculous. I don’t always get on the first train because I don’t like being shoved into the train by the people behind me, but I accept that sometimes it’s not possible to avoid it. Usually it’s no problem: move forward with the crowd and find a spot on the far wall of the car. Once the doors have shut everyone relaxes, and if you’re planning to wait for a train that’s not crowded you’ll be waiting for an hour, so I just suck it up like everyone else. Most mornings the crowds are small enough that the people who should have gotten up ten minutes earlier or whatever are not so anxious and nobody pushes anybody. Today it was MADNESS. Hard to keep track of my purse madness, get squashed against the outside of the train and then shoved in and had to elbow someone pretty hard to get my arm in the train with me madness. Had trouble finding a place to stand with both feet on the floor* madness. Scary madness.

I thought, maybe because it’s so cold today? (It was a toasty 25° when I left my apartment.) But it’s not this crowded when it’s pouring rain, and actually the sky was clear** this morning.

Anyway, the steady rain of Weird Shit continues, although I have been so busy at work recently that I haven’t posted anything. Don’t take that to mean I have Totally Mastered China. I did manage to get both my water and electricity cut off overnight (not on the same night, because apparently I don’t learn very fast). See, in China utilities are pay-as-you-go. For the water, gas, and electricity, I have plastic cards with microchips in them; they look like French credit cards. You stick the card in the meter and look at what you’ve got left. Evidently (no one told me this) you are supposed to check weekly to make sure you’re not going to run out, because when the meter gets to zero you get NADA. When I moved in and the landlady gave me the cards and the keys and so on, I asked her how you refill them. She said, “Bring me the card and the money.” Okay, no problem. Well.

So the electricity went out around 11 pm. I worried about the stuff in the refrigerator, but you know, my laptop has a pretty long battery life and I can just open the curtains for the 45 minutes I’m home and awake in the morning. I took the electricity card and the money and went downstairs to the landlady’s office (actually they’re a company that owns all the apartments in my building and several others, excluding those that have been sold as condos) whereupon, seeing their locked door and dark office, I remembered that I have NO IDEA what time they come in in the morning, but it is surely not before I have to be at work. I debated waiting around until they opened but since I know they’re open until fairly late in the evening (at least until 8 pm) there’s really no reason to think they open promptly at 9am, you know? Maybe they don’t come in until 10. Or 10:30. Or noon. I asked another resident on his way out the door and he suggested I just come back after work. So I fretted a little more about my refrigerator (okay, a lot more) and then I went to work. I came back in the evening and, lo and behold, there’s nobody there. The lights are on, but the door’s locked. I knocked really loud and jiggled the handle as hard as I thought I could without risking breaking it, and then I said a bunch of bad words and went away for half an hour. It was just after 6:30, so I figured they’d gone out for dinner*** came back, hoping they’d have the sense to get their damn food to go and come back promptly.

No dice. I went away again and got myself a snack and came back. Forty-five goddamn minutes later the one dude FINALLY showed up. I gave him the money and the electricity card and told him his colleague had told me to come to the office when I needed the card refilled. He gave me that dumb-cow look Chinese people give you when they can’t figure out what you want. “You want me to handle this?” he said. I said Yes. He said, “But the bank is closed. You have to go to the bank. Do you know where it is?” He named a specific bank for me and I said, “No, I don’t know where it is.” Then we got into one of those conversations in which the Chinese person slurs out something I not only don’t understand but can barely hear the separate syllables and I say I don’t understand talk slower and he repeats himself at the same speed and no more clearly than the first time and I tell him I don’t know those words pelase speak clearly and he repeats himself at the same speed and no more clearly than the first time and I get fed up and tell him I have no electricity what can I do? And he smiles at me and says, “I’m the only one here. I can’t leave the office.”

I did not smack him as he deserved or even swear at him in any language, for which I think I should get a gold star or something for that, at minimum. I did not even ask him where the hell he’d been for the previous 45 minutes. Instead I bought some candles and went to Starbucks to charge my devices and look at their excruciatingly slow internet for a while. Fortunately the next day was Saturday so I wrote off the unhelpful asshole in the office and went and asked around until I found the right bank.

The vegetables and leftovers in my fridge survived, and surprisingly so did the milk. The fish and the chicken did not. Well, I mean they were dead animals already but they were no longer edible after 48 hours without refrigeration.

So then like a week later, because I am retarded, the same thing happened with the water. Except this was in the morning: I took my shower and made tea and then I turned on the faucet to brush my teeth and it went: drip. drip. nothing. Whoops. But! This time I was smarter. I took the card and went to work and at lunchtime I went to the bank. The BANK people gave me the dumb-cow look. Oh, we don’t fill these cards here, you have to go to (other bank). Sigh. So I went to the other bank and waited in line again, only to get the goddamn dumb-cow look AGAIN. We don’t fill these? I told them that the other bank told me to come to them and they kind of shrugged. So I went back to the office and called my landlady and she said, bring it to the office. I said NO. I told her she needs to tell me how to do it myself and eventually she gave me directions. The water card, evidently, can be filled at the complex utility office which is open quite late. I went home and found it and it was no problem except that I hate everyone involved in this whole scenario except the nice lady in the utility office.

*Bonus: Jackass who actually had a seat complained at me that I was stepping on his feet. What am I supposed to do, dude? Do you see me being jostled from all sides? Be glad I haven’t landed in your lap yet.

**Beijing clear, meaning only moderately disgusting.

***Instead of having it delivered, which every restaurant in China will do, including McDonalds.

Socialism With Chinese Characteristics

I am about to edumacate you because it seems like a lot of people are confused about what kind of political/economic system they’re actually running over here. Which is not really a surprise given the news coverage of China available to Americans, triply so if you get most of your international news from television.

The Chinese have had three or four eras, in which the country adopted different politico-economic systems. According to the Chinese, they have had three: the ancient dynastic feudal system of emperors and landlords and peasants; the chaotic capitalist interlude between 1911 and 1949 which was officially democratic but actually the Nationalist government had no interest in power-sharing; and the modern Communist era.

This view is repeated by the media and creates the false impression. The communist era is OVER. It’s finished. No more communism. Stop thinking of them as Communists. They’re not.

The Cultural Revolution ended in 1979 with Mao’s death and his wife’s execution. In 1980 the new premier, Deng Xiaoping (say “dung shao ping”) announced a new policy which has been ongoing since then. This policy was really an entirely new political economic system. It was the end of totalitarianism and the end of communism. The policy is called “Reform and Opening” and it is ongoing. It has two sides, the economic side and the political side.

The economic side is easy to explain, and to see: no more communism! It wasn’t working, they abandoned it. This was done openly and in fact explicitly, over a period of about two decades. China has embraced capitalism approximately like the way the abominable snowman embraced Bugs Bunny although they have not named it George. Instead they named it “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” even though it has only a historical relationship with socialism. Seriously every free space in this entire country is covered with advertising. Subway stations exit into malls. I don’t think any of the people who read this blog read cyberpunk novels but you’ve seen Blade Runner, right? Demolition Man? Idiocracy? Any of those movies in which corporations have taken over and literally everything contains advertising including breakfast cereal and the inside of your fridge. China isn’t quite that bad. But it is modern capitalism, totally unencumbered by regulations.**

It’s no mystery why people still think of China as communist. After all, big-C Communism is both an economic AND a political system, and they have not changed governments. The Communist Party is still in control, and the country’s official name is still The Chinese People’s Socialist Republic. What happened is sort of what happened with the two big political parties in the US during the 1960s and 70s. The Democratic Party USED to be the party of Jim Crow and Southern white reactionaries, and then they switched sides and the Republicans started talking about State’s Rights and “welfare queens.” The CCP’s policies have changed completely and now really don’t include any communism at all. They just haven’t changed their name.

In fact, economic policy aside (all economic policies here have the word “development” somewhere in the name), they haven’t changed their rhetoric at all either. When the CCP talks about “socialism with Chinese characteristics” they mean exactly what China has got right now, which is really in no way socialist. It’s capitalism in which challenges to the political dominance of the CCP are not tolerated.

The last time I took a poli-sci class was never, so I’m going with the layperson’s definition of totalitarianism vs dictatorship: under a dictatorship, an individual has personal freedoms but not political ones. Under totalitarianism one has neither. Under Mao, China really was totalitarian. You were required to support the CCP and the revolution in thought, word, and deed, and if you failed to, or were suspected of failing to, or accused of failing to by someone who didn’t like you, your life and the lives of your family members was ended, or at least ruined. College graduates (and indeed for a while all adults) were assigned jobs and job locations and domiciles and if you didn’t like it, tough shit. If your parents had been the wrong sort of people you could look forward to being sent off to the countryside to get reeducated via laboring alongside the peasants. Everyone had a “work unit” which you could transfer out of only with the permission of the one you were in and the one you wanted to transfer into; likewise if you wanted to get married you needed permission from your boss and your fiance’s boss.

This too, ended in stages beginning in 1980. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 listed a large number of the remnants of these Maoist policies (like the permission to marry requirements) among their grievances. Nowadays you can do damn near anything you want in China, with the following two exceptions: civilians may not own firearms (although this is ignored for people in the countryside who own hunting rifles, and if your ancestor brought his/her own rifle when they fought in the Chinese civil war/resisted the Japanese invasion those tend to be grandfathered in); and there are no First Amendment rights.

This last is the part that allows the CCP to maintain their total control of the country. The vast, vast majority of Chinese people do not find themselves in any kind of trouble regardless of how frequently, vociferously, or publicly they complain about the government. You can bitch about the CCP all you want, in any forum you want, although if you do it on the internet it will be “harmonized” i.e., deleted by the censors, in a matter of moments. You can even go to protests once in a while without taking any significant personal risks. But if you ORGANIZE any kind of meeting or protest or group or whatever, online or in real life, then you’re going to be in big trouble in a hurry. You will have frequent, unpleasant contact with the Security Police*** which according to various dissidents usually starts with intimidation and totally non-subtle surveillance (like, it makes a noise when they put your cell phone conversation on speaker so they can record it) and escalates to late-night visits from big scary dudes who may or may not beat the shit out of you. The intimidation and surveillance and occasional property damage or confiscation may extend to your family members (that’s probably more intimidation, not necessarily a relic of Maoism). The last step is jail time, and if you wind up in prison for political crimes more than a few times, your family will eventually be informed that you have tragically died in prison due to a heart attack or something, sorry the body is not available it has already been buried.

Anyway, that’s China’s modern economic and political system, ridiculously oversimplified: you can do anything you want as long as it presents no plausible threat to the CCP’s political control.

PS, American tv news is not a valid source of information about foreign countries.

PS#2: There is totally an actual animal called a Bone Eating Snot Flower. The tragedy of my day is that I have not yet found a way to work this phrase into a conversation.

*Don’t go looking around tvtropes.com unless you’ve got a couple of hours to lose. It’s one of the world’s most effective time travel devices, capable of launching you several hours into the future if you’re not paying attention. Alas, it does not work backwards.

**Fun Fact: This is what Libertarians and anti-regulation Republicans want. Okay, it’s not what they WANT, what they WANT is some bullshit Randian Galt’s Gulch happy valley of virtuous capitalists, but this is what you actually get when you do that in a modern economy. It has its benefits, but there’s also that whole “let’s flavor the baby formula with melamine because it’s cheaper and then we’ll just lie about it” issue. China’s environment is in such a sad state because there is no practical way to effectively regulate any pollution-producing industry or entity.

***The security police are NOT the neighborhood cops you see wandering around discouraging crime and arresting pickpockets and what have you. The regular cops are as apolitical as the rest of Chinese society. They live in the neighborhoods they serve, and they don’t want to beat up their neighbors for resenting corrupt officials or whatever. If you get arrested by the regular cops, your neighbors will stand around shaking their heads at what a degenerate you are. If you get arrested by the security police they’ll have arguments about whether you’re a born troublemaker and possibly a traitor or a tragic hero fighting the corrupt system, and some of them will shun your family and some of them will bring dumplings.

this week in Weird China: no one is cold but me

I took a Tai Chi class over the weekend, which was icy, icy cold, but also fun. Tai Chi is almost always done outside unless the weather is really truly miserable, and apparently damp 45° weather does not count as miserable for the young lady who taught the class. And no wonder, since when (after standing around outside for an hour and a half) she touched my hands to correct my posture her fingers were toasty warm. She told me I need to do some shoulder exercises to free up the chi in my shoulders and improve the bloodflow to my fingertips. I know that scientifically this is BS but man her warm fingertips and total immunity to the weather were pretty convincing. I dunno what the hell she was wearing under her hoodie and yoga pants (I was wearing my long undies, in preparation for spending the morning standing outside: not helpful, or not enough) but now I’m wondering if those little Chinese girls I complained about last year, wearing their cute little skirts and unzipped spring coats in mid-November, really just plain do not feel cold. ??? So I’m still confused.

This week in Cooking Adventures: I took apart a whole fish without making a mess! This was a fish that had been frozen overnight and then defrosted, so no danger of Zombie Fish sequelae. Also: sharper knife, better cutting surfaces, less fear. I didn’t cut the head off, which turned out to be the right decision, as it made the whole thing easier to handle. Then I made a big ol’ pot of soup out of it, which turned out rather well although I will probably add a whole lot of lemon to the leftovers.

Also I made Rice Cooker Banana Bread which also turned out rather well. And I put Nutella on top of it which made everything wonderful. I’m not sure there are any desert products that are not made more wonderful by the addition of Nutella.

On Friday, the school that called me last week to cancel the Chinese class called me back to un-cancel it, so I’m starting again tomorrow! I hope. This is going to be a real small class, with only two students so far. I think that’s why they cancelled it last time; the other student must have told them he or she couldn’t make it. Anyway, I’m looking forward to this. Since I’m exposed almost exclusively to regular-speed casual spoken Chinese these days (i.e., Real Chinese rather than Classroom Chinese) it’s hard to tell if my oral comprehension is improving. People use too many words that I just don’t know, and I can’t interrupt people four times in every sentence to ask for definitions. On the other hand, I am having less trouble with routine conversations, in which I already have a good idea of what people are going to say. I don’t think I’m really improving my vocabulary on my own though, so I really do need a class, or at least some kind of structured learning environment.

This school is not BLCU. It’s a private language school aimed at teaching foreign business people Chinese. They have classes in about 3 locations, one of them two train stops from my home/office (it’s kinda in the middle between them, super convenient) and hold classes at hours employed people can come to. This one is going to be twice a week after work. I will just have time to eat a quick dinner at the local noodle shop of my choice between work and class.

Fun fact: there is a noodle shop chain here called American California Beef Noodles. No one associated with this restaurant has ever even been to California, but people keep asking me if we have them in California and if it’s famous there.

Notice: Format Change

As of like three weeks ago when I stopped updating. Basically when I get home from work I’m too tired to write a big long essay on how my life is going and assorted weird shit that happens here. My life is going pretty well, actually: work is interesting, co-workers are friendly and speak a range of No English to Nearly Fluent so I get a lot of oral practice communicating with them, pay is good, apartment is nice, weather is giving ominous signs of the approaching winter. But after a long workday and commuting (a short commute, actually, about 30 minutes including walking to and from the train stations) and making dinner and etc I’m damn tired and it’s practically bedtime already.

So: posts will be shorter and involve many fewer photos. I’ll try to remember to upload photos to Flickr or Picassa or something.

It is possible (now that I’ve figured out how to post by email) that posts will be more frequent, but no promises. Today I’m not that busy.

Current Frustrations:

(1) I signed up to take a twice-a-week Chinese class after work that was supposed to start today. At 11am this morning the school sent me an email saying it was cancelled. I’m not sure if my reaction is more GRRR or RESIGNED SIGH. I wanted a group class because it’s more fun and you can, you know, meet people, and is about 60% cheaper than a private tutor. But now I suspect that’s not going to happen and I’ll have to pony up the funds. It’s not a strain on my budget, but it’s annoying.

(2) Much more importantly, my tourist visa will expire in about 10 days, so I emailed the HR people here to see how my work visa was coming along. The answer turned out to be: no progress has been made. Literally the lady in charge of visas has done nothing. WTF? Glad I asked, shit. So I’m going with her on Friday to get a 30-day extension* to the tourist visa, which I’ll have to do again next month because it takes about 2 months to get all the paperwork together for a work visa. On Monday I have to get up at oh-dark-thirty and take the trains (plural) to a hospital on the opposite side of town which is apparently the one and only place in Beijing authorized to perform the required health check for foreigners. THEN, I have to leave China and present all my paperwork at a Chinese embassy or consulate and apply for a work visa. None of these things, and I mean NONE of them, are free. Not to mention I have to keep going down to the damn police office to re-register for the stupid residence permit.

The only upside to this pile of inconvenient bureaucratic bullshit is that I will definitely be home for Christmas , probably for about 2 weeks. As I am a foreigner, I’m entitled to 4 weeks of annual leave which do not include the two weeks of paid leave everyone gets (one week each for Chinese National Day and for Comintern/Socialist Worker’s/Labor DaySpring Festival/Chinese New Year, sheesh what’s wrong with me?).

Also, my sympathy for immigrants to America, legal and otherwise, has increased about 300%. Chinese rules for immigrants are stupid, arbitrary and inconvenient, and they’re meant to be. I cannot imagine that the laws in the US are any more sensible, consume any less time or money, or are any less of an intentional pain in the ass.

*BONUS WTF: This requires a note from the bank. I have no idea what the note says but it must be goddamn gold plated because they require a $3000 deposit for 30 days. I found this out today, we’re going to the bank to get it tomorrow. NO, I don’t have a spare $3K sitting around. I could get it, but not in 24 hours. I mean, what is wrong with this woman? Is it typical in China to spring major expenses on people like this? That’s more than I get paid in a month! [Apparently, this was not a shock to her, as when I said "twenty thousand yuan? thousand?" in the voice that means you don't have it she promptly told me that the company will cover it as long as I do not somehow abscond with the money which in context probably means "screw up so badly that they fire me and thus don't get the deposit back." But still.]

I wrote this two weeks ago; just posting it now because my connectivity problems are solved

The people from the third interview last Wednesday called me back and offered me a job, which starts tomorrow, Tuesday. It actually pays nearly the same as the other place out in the middle of nowhere, but this place is right in the middle of town, two blocks from a subway station. So it’s a pretty ideal situation.

I was ridiculously, shiveringly happy about this for about an hour. I don’t know, I’m more relieved than anything else. The last time I had a real job was 2009. So I am still capable of being a self-supporting adult. Probably. I mean, we’ll find out in a few weeks when they start paying me. AAARGH I have so many insecurities they have to elbow each other out of the way to get my attention. Or just yell louder, that works too.

Anyway this is an editing job, which is what I wanted. The company is a mining consulting company, which means they send geologists and what have you to inspect a mine or mine site and write due diligence reports for investors or potential investors. Their scientists are all Chinese, so they write the reports in Chinese. These reports are then translated to English by a Chinese translator, and then it’s my job to edit their translations into proper English.

So I went looking for apartments all the rest of the week, starting Tuesday. I looked through a few hundred ads and came up with maybe a dozen that I liked, based on price, location, and photos.

Apartment hunting in China turns out to be a lot like apartment hunting in the US, with the added bonus of not knowing what people are saying about 40% of the time, and a much deeper suspicion that I’m getting scammed somehow because there’s no way to do it without going through a real estate agent and these guys practically have I AM RIPPING YOU OFF tattooed on their foreheads.

I don’t look at apartments if the agent doesn’t include a photo. My StarTrek™ Brand Personal Transporter And Teleportation Device has unaccountably not be delivered yet, and I don’t feel like traipsing all over town to look at this place you can’t be bothered to take a picture of.

You know how a lot of real estate photos are carefully staged to hide some kind of glaring flaw? Like that the whole place is tiny and cramped, or the bathroom is some kind of horror designed by HR Geiger, or the kitchen hasn’t been cleaned since 1995 or whatever? One person managed to put up a photo in a way that fails the photo requirement in a manner I’ve never seen before:

This apartment contains a wall! And a kitchen counter, with things on it that are no doubt the property of the current resident. Not that it matters, of course, since if you respond to this ad you won’t be taken to this apartment.

…actually it looks like a nice kitchen: it’s right next to what I suspect is the front door, for one thing. Kitchens in all but the newest, most expensive Chinese apartment buildings have this bizarre quality of looking like an afterthought. Like the architect said, “Okay, I’ve got bedrooms, bathrooms, living room, balcony, closets, AC, radiators, lighting … what am I going to do with this little leftover space here?” And then later someone actually moved in and installed a gas line as cheaply as possible and dropped a two-burner Coleman stovetop on one of the counters. I’m serious. Half the time the fridge doesn’t even fit in the kitchen. It’s totally inexplicable.

Anyway, this brings me back to my original topic: real estate agents and their many failures to impress me.

In China it turns out to not really matter, because the apartment in the ad, with it’s clean kitchen and tastefully decorated bathroom, is never, ever available. Never. Ever. When you make an appointment with a Chinese apartment agent, you are not going to see a particular room that has been advertised at a particular price. You are going to see a bunch of rooms whose quality has been suggested by the ad (though they never actually attain the quality of the room pictured), and whose price is approximately in the range of the one noted in the ad.

Except! Friday I actually did get to see a room that was the exact one pictured in the ad. It is beautiful. It is exactly as described, exactly as shown. Except it cost 30% more than the ad said it did, putting it several hundred US dollars out of the price range I’m willing to pay. Very frustrating. I was walking around this place going SOLD!! in my head, and the landlord says, oh yeah, I want UA$1000 a month. Really dude? Because that’s not what the ad says. Don’t you have truth in advertising laws in this country?*

Anyway I looked at nine places in three days and one of them was the right one. I moved in on Sunday and now it’s Monday and I wasted half the day looking for an Ikea that Google Maps is convinced exists. Reality  is being a little stubborn on that point. It’s a nice apartment! It’s all mine and the kitchen is clean and the bathroom is the size of a real bathroom and the bed is nice and soft and the shower has lovely high water pressure. And it is literally right across the street from the train station. I’m very happy.

The past week has not been all that happy though. I was in such a hurry to find an apartment largely because of the hotel I was in.

The hotel, oh the hotel. It was not the same charming little place I stayed in last week and ooo they just sent me an email requesting a review for the website on which I found it. Oh man this hotel. Now that I don’t have to actually sleep there it’s starting to be funny but before that it was just a headache. Compared to the cute little courtyard hotel, hotel #2 was … well. The actual room was only a little bit smaller and a little bit cheaper and the bed was actually noticeably softer, and the place is in an extremely convenient location. It is so depressingly soulless it has negative charm. If you were making some kind of dark farce set in a businessman’s motel so staggeringly unattractive on all levels that it beggars belief, you could film it here and you wouldn’t have to change a thing, not the staff or the towels or the pathetic fake flowers (I think they’re supposed to be violets) next to the doors.

Oh yeah, and last weekend I went to Hefei. I’m not sure what to say about that. Um. It was nice? The city is 100% multistory apartment/office towers, of varying quality and vintage, none of them interesting in any way. I did write a whole bunch of stuff about it but it was Bad so I deleted it. In the interests of brevity I shall summarize: My hosts were good and kind people and they were very generous and friendly and I would never say this to them: I did not have a good time and I won’t be going back. Not that it was bad, just that it was wasted time when I was already stressed out about the whole job/housing issue and also there’s some other stuff about Chinese socio-economic issues and being a foreigner and Joanne Personal Weirdness** and so on but it would take hours to explain all that and I’m not up to it this week or possibly ever.

*They do, yes. They also have traffic laws.

**Also I might have had PMS, but that would be additional to, not instead of, Joanne Personal Weirdness, which is a constant and does not take breaks just because there’s also this useless reproductive cycle hormonal bullshit going on.

It’s just like Return of the Jedi!

Uh. if Luke didn’t have any Jedi powers, and also didn’t speak the same language as everybody else, and could only sort of read very slowly while moving his lips* like a second grader, and also there are no spaceships or laser swords or guns that shoot light beams which are somehow projectiles that don’t move any faster than an arrow, and also everybody is an alien except Luke.

Other than that, it’s exactly like Return of the Jedi.

Yeah, I’m back in China. Below are questions everybody has asked me at least twice; the short answer to all of them is NO.

Are you going to school for another year?

No. I’m getting a job. I plan to take classes in the evening, and that plus just the realities of living in China and talking to my friends will give me enough practice that my language skills will continue to increase.

Do you have a job yet?

No. I arrived with a bunch of job interviews set up, three here in Beijing, and one in Hefei. I don’t want the one in Hefei, but I was willing to take it if the other three said no. Currently I’ve had one and a half job interviews, about which more later.

So are you living in the same apartment as before?

No, because (for entirely stupid and widely resented political reasons left over from the totalitarian Mao era) it’s hard to extend your lease when you don’t have legal permission to live in the country, and my student visa expired July 31. Also, there was, in July, no guarantee that any job I got would be within a reasonable commuting distance from that apartment. Now this turns out to have been true: none of the job interviews/job sites are within commuting distance of Wudaokou, where I lived last year. I am staying in a hotel.

What is a Hefei? And why wouldn’t you want a job there?

Hefei (pronounced huh-fay) a smallish city in southern China, about 3 hours’ drive west of Shanghai. I don’t want this particular job there because it’s a part-time English teaching job and I want a full-time job and I’d rather be an editor. I don’t want to live there because it’s a small city and I do want the minimal “international city”** comforts I’ve been availing myself of in Wudaokou: coffee shops, dairy products, not being the only Westerner for miles (being stared at does get tedious after a while), food that is not Chinese once in a while. These things will be available in vastly more limited supply in Anhui province, which is southern and rural and much less developed.

Additionally, natives of Anhui speak (a) southern-accented Mandarin, which is slightly more difficult for me to understand than the accents more common in the north, and/or (b) southern dialects of Mandarin, which will be really, really, really difficult for me to understand, and (c) a significant minority speaks one of several Chinese languages that aren’t Mandarin at all, in the exact same way that Portuguese is neither Castilian Spanish nor Mexican Spanish but something else entirely.

One and a half job interviews?

This has been a frustrating two days so far.

The first job interview was really a job offer. Good money, everyone was friendly, I was about thisfar from saying Yes right there. Then the interviewer tells me that the office I was interviewing at is not the job site. The job site is TWENTY KILOMETERS OUT OF TOWN. Seriously? How the hell am I even supposed to get there? Oh, right, you take the train to the end of the line and then sit on a bus for 45 minutes. Fabulous. I’ve had a job with an hour and a half commute before, and it sucked. Okay, there were a lot of problems with that job that had nothing to do with the commute, but at least there I had the option of moving closer. Here it’s not really practical.

For one thing, land is cheaper out there in the suburban wasteland, so people tend to actually buy houses and live in them; there are orders of magnitude fewer rental properties. And none of them are the kind I want, which are either shared multi-bedroom apartments or single-bedroom apartments; they’re all four-bedroom deals intended for Mom, Dad, Baby, Parents, guestroom. For two, like all suburbs it’s geared towards people with cars, so transit access is poor. If I want to visit my friends that’s either a twenty-minute walk to a train station or a bus ride to a train station. And I’d still have to take two trains to get anywhere I know anyone. And three, it really is suburban wasteland. Since it’s so out in the middle of nowhere, it lacks all the good things about Beijing,** like historical sites and city parks, not to mention all the amenities aimed at foreigners, students, and other people who don’t have cars, like coffee houses and sidewalk sellers and places with free wi-fi and chain stores, even Chinese ones. It basically defeats the whole purpose of living in Beijing at all, which is to live in (a) a city (b) a historic city (c) a historic city where I already have friends.

My choice would be: Make going into Beijing to do anything—have dinner with a friend, drink a cappuccino, see a movie, eat fast food (Chinese or otherwise),eat anything that isn’t Chinese, not get stared at for being non-Chinese, see something historically/culturally interesting, participate in career advancement/networking opportunities—anything— basically a day-trip, or have an exhaustingly long commute.

But the money is really, really good. Really good. If the other two say no I’ll take it and suck up the shitty commute. I told the interviewer I had some other interviews to go to and I would definitely think about his very generous offer. They’re emailing me a contract.

So that was Monday. Today, Tuesday, I went to the second interview, at which they were much less organized and I spent, I think, a total of about 45 minutes sitting around waiting, of the 2 1/2 hours I was there. This was probably because the person who invited me for the interview was out sick and didn’t send me a note to ask me to come back some other day. So some co-workers were covering for her, and I can’t fault them for making me wait around periodically while they figured out what she meant for them to do with me; they clearly had enough of their own work to do. What I was supposed to do (I knew this already) is take an editing test, and then have an interview with whoever hires editors. I waited around for a very long time, took the test, waited around for another very long time, checked in with Covering Co-worker #1 and informed him that I had finished the test 2o minutes ago although I did not say the last part, waited around for another very  long time, and was told by Covering Co-worker #2 that the person who was supposed to interview me was in a meeting and they would email me to set up a phone interview.

Aaaargh. Chinese people are usually pretty up-front about things. If they don’t want you they say so right out, and in any case Co-workers 1 and 2 both speak about as much English as I do Chinese, so it’s not like they’d looked at the test and decided I failed it. No one looked at the test before they sent me home. So I’m just in limbo waiting for them to get back to me, whenever they get back to me.

This job is in a much better part of town. Less than 1 block from a subway stop in a neighborhood with lots of good restaurants, near a huge number of attractive (in the sense of convenient, affordable, and appropriately sited, as well as in the sense of good-looking) apartments. It’s diagonally across town from the Good Job With Terrible Location, so picking a temporary place to stay in between them is a ridiculously impractical idea, although I did spend a solid hour online trying to make it happen.

At this point, my dad is sitting there banging his head against the computer screen and saying, “What is wrong with you? Take the job that was offered! Don’t sit around waiting for a maybe!” To which I say, go re-read all those paragraphs where I was talking about livable neighborhoods or lack of same. Nobody moves to New York City to get a job in New Jersey.

Tomorrow: Joanne Gets a Job in Beijing, Take 3! Please say yes, Wednesday people.

Wednesday evening I have to call the dude in Anhui and tell him when I’m coming down there, and buy myself a train ticket. And decided how long I’m staying down there, and whether I want to bring my big suitcase (answer: NO) and if not, where will I keep it? and also, where am I going to sleep when I come back to Beijing? Because my room in this hotel will expire on Saturday.

There are a bunch of other hotels nearby, though, and I’m starting to like this area more and more. I may just walk down the street and ask how much they’d charge for a week or so, starting Monday.

ALSO: I’ve been here for 4 days and have already found some Seriously Weird Shit. Voila! This (and its buddy, which I did not photograph) was in a department store, next to the manicure girls and just in front of the elevator:

Yep. it’s a real, stuffed polar bear. What? Why? Why is it in the mall? Why is it next to the manicure girls and the escalator, across from discount dresses?

For once, I am not sure this would strike me as less weird if I was a native-born Chinese citizen. The dude showing it to his baby as I went up the escalator certainly seemed as puzzled as I by its existence and/or location. Stuffed mounted polar bears are not a usual thing to have in a mall here, as far as I am aware.

*Not a joke, I have caught myself doing that more than once.

**Beijing is an international city in the same way Fresno is.

***It does, of course, have all the bad things about Beijing: poor air quality, horrible traffic, Chinese Plumbing, inconsistent trash pickup, etc.

good for pregnant and children daily edible

Oh Chinglish, how you make me giggle:

And indeed they were multicolor. Although since it’s been 90 goddamn degrees every day for the past several weeks, and Chinese don’t refrigerate their eggs (why? why?) only three of the six turned out to be edible.

Alas, both blue ones were bad. Or at least seriously suspicious. If they dyed those eggs to make them blue, that could possibly be why the egg whites inside looked kinda greenish. Maybe. But since the way to find out is to eat them and see if you spend the next week curled up on the floor next to the toilet wishing you’d never been born, I decided not to try them.

The weather here has been Awful, with brief interludes of Awesome. Most days it’s well over 90° by noon, and the humidity starts at Unpleasant and gradually rises until it hits Unbearable. Then it stays there for hours and finally rains.

I really do like the rain though. And it turns out that Beijing is one of those cities that has summer thunderstorms, which are high up on my list of Things That Are Awesome. A couple of nights ago we had a really, ah, enthusiastic entry in the genre, starting at midnight and running until around 1:30. I think. I mean, that’s when the flashing and banging stopped long enough for me to fall asleep, anyway. The thunderous pouring rain went on a while longer, I think.

You know that thing where you try to guess how far away the lightning is by counting the seconds between the flash and the crash? Yeah, it doesn’t work so well when there’s a lightning flash every two or three seconds for minutes at a time.

So I’ve been hiding from the humidity in the lovely air-conditioned mall, where I noticed this store for the first time. I dunno if it’s new or I’ve just never looked in that corner before:

OMG it’s the Suzie Store! Okay, so it’s not spelled right. But close enough, right?

Anyway it being summer and all, the supermarket and sidewalk sellers are just dripping with gorgeous exotic fruit. The sidewalk sellers sell pineapple quarters on sticks for 3 yuan, which is not quite 50¢ so I have one almost every day. They’ve got lychees and cherries in piles and you buy by the kilogram (well, half-kilo for me) plus some other thing that I keep forgetting to take a picture of. They looks like a lychee except they’re bright red.

The supermarket has my most favorite and least favorite fruits from Thailand, durians and mangosteens. You can buy durian in the US; it’s allowed into California and travels well.* If you’ve never seen one before, here they are in all their spiky glory not glory, some word that is the opposite of glory. They’re roughly basketball-sized, and hard as a rock.

The ones I like are mangosteens, which are banned in California due to a fruitfly problem. Also, I think they just plain don’t travel well, in spite of their hard shells. This is the fruit from the outside:

Looks like a plum, kinda. Then you cut it open with a pocket knife and eat the white stuff inside.

And lastly: the watermelon crisis has been averted.

Four people, one watermelon, twenty minutes. It was so juicy we had to wipe up the floor afterwards. MMMMM. I’m thinking of buying another one and squashing it for juice.

Well, second-to-lastly. No, third. Second to lastly: OMG we have a real donut shop!! Okay, I hate it when people who use multiple exclamation points but seriously? This is the only place in Wudaokou that produces real, decent donuts. With sprinkles. You have no idea how happy this made me.

Lastly lastly: we have some sort of semi-serious plumbing issue, which caused minor flooding in the kitchen and caused our landlady to come over with her husband and rip out part of the wall to get at the pipe. Um, yeah, so in China the building owners don’t deal with your plumbing issues. You do it yourself. This made a huge mess, and although the fridge s still plugged in, we can’t really use the kitchen until they finish messing with the plumbing and there’s running water in there again. The bathrooms still work, we buy our drinking water in 5-gallon jugs, and it’s really too hot to cook, but, well. It’s still a big inconvenient mess.

*I guess. I’m not sure how you’d figure out that something that smells so awful has gone bad. Fresh, ripe ones smell like something rotting. My supermarket puts their produce by the front door, so when you first walk it in smells like somebody dropped something behind the chicken counter and hasn’t cleaned it up in a few weeks. That is not an exaggeration.