Hard seat to Xinjiang

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So next week is National Week, a fall country-wide holiday where China's rural-urban migration is reversed and students, migrants and sojourners make the trek home (travel costs being what they are, however, few among the migrant-worker population can afford the trip).

I'm foolishly taking a train from Shanghai to Urumqi (Wulumuqi in Mandarin), the capital of Xinjiang. This is the "wild west" of China, with the country's hottest and coldest spots, a whack of oil underground and the majority of China's Uyghur population.

That's about all I know. And I sure as hell can't speak Uyghur. But I do know this train is supposed to take about 42 hours, which is triple the amount of time I've spent in a vehicle of any kind. I'm taking a "hard seat," which costs about $60 each way. Should be interesting.

Here's hoping I nab a window seat.

Laoshi hao

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge of 54 Chinese seven-year-olds is nuts. Well-intentioned, but nuts.

I spent a while just now trying to think of a comparably farcical and incompetent pedagogical exercise, but can't.

I totally had a lesson plan, I swear. It just didn't make much sense when I was faced with a gaggle of squirming kids whose language I couldn't speak, as I tried to explain the finer points of English conversation (we got as far as "Hello! How are you?" "My name is..." and, inscrutably, "Good afternoon!" but things started to fall apart at "I'm very good."). The young'uns were tickled pink to have a foolish foreigner in their midst, and liked repeating things in unison, but weren't too into the whole dialogue thing.

In my (feeble) defence, when we arrived at the school we spent a couple of hours of hashing out our roles for the next couple of months and were then told we would just be introducing ourselves to the students. So as we stood in front of a sea of smirking faces and my partner turned to me and told me we had half an hour left and should maybe teach them something, I cried a little inside.

It could have been worse, I think. No one ran from the room crying when they discovered they were being taught by a cretin. And my partner, who, um, did a lot of translating, knows the Mandarin equivalent of, "Shut up and sit still, for the love of all things holy" much better than I. But somehow I don't think we kindled a lasting love of the English language in the adorable rapscallions' hearts.

Maybe it will be better next time. They're very excited at the prospect of getting Yingwen names, blissfully ignorant as they are of the language's colonial baggage.

In the meantime, I'm going to go buy valium in bulk.

wet.

When it isn't stickily, drippingly, mind-meltingly humid (which is about 90 per cent of the time), chances are it's pissing rain--torrential, sheet-like, enormous raindrop-laden storms.

Shanghainese don clingy, plastic rain capes they drape over bicycles to keep themselves and their basket-bound belongings dry. Some bike with an umbrella in one hand, which amazes me.


The first time I was caught in one of these out-of-the-blue downpours, I was in an off-putting, touristy part of downtown. I wandered until I looked and felt like drowned rat, then ducked into the first convenience store I could find.

I didn't even need to awkwardly attempt to pronounce "yusan" through the wet hair that was plastered to my face. The woman at the counter took one look at me and wordlessly handed over an umbrella.

Milking lax product-safety laws--and tainting consumer confidence in the 'world's factory'

The milk powder isn't safe. Neither is liquid milk, yogurt or even cream-based candy with a creepy white rabbit on the label (they're apparently hugely popular).

Upwards of 53,000 children have become sick from melamine-tainted milk products made by China's dairy giants, and at least four have died so far. The Chinese government has been in full-scale damage-control mode since Shijiazhuang-based Sanlu recalled 8,875 tonnes of milk powder on Sept, 11, announcing the products had been tainted with melamine.

The purges started almost immediately: First to go was Sanlu chairwoman and general manager Tian Wenhua, who was fired from both her job at Sanlu and her Party position, and then detained by police. Then six other officials were sacked, including Shijiazhuang's Party chief Wu Xianguo, and the city's mayor and vice-mayor. About 20 people have been arrested, and several more "detained." Today, China's chief quality watchdog, Li Changjiang, stepped down. Recalls of further milk products have continued apace, as China and the countries to whom a widening range of products are exported--including Singapore, Yemen and Canada--are yanked off the shelves as a precautionary measure.

The Chinese government has been doing its best to contain the negative fallout from the scandal, or at least to get across the message that it's dealing as best it can with the escalating crisis. Premier Wen Jiabao has been visiting crammed-to-bursting children's hospitals for photo ops and to reassure panicked parents; the government has vowed to cover the medical treatment for infants sickened by the contaminated milk. Last week Beijing went as far as announcing an end to exemptions from food-quality inspection--exemptions that Sanlu and several of the other 22 dairy companies implicated in the melamine contamination all had: Some of these companies hadn't been subject to government inspection since 2005.

But that doesn't really help parents of sick kids, or consumers afraid to buy dairy products that, ironically, the Chinese government has been pushing, big time, in an effort to boost calcium intake. The companies involved weren't two-bit players--Megniu, Yili and Sanlu were among the biggest in the country's $18-billion industry--and commenters on blogs and news websites are demonstrably incensed: . This isn't China's first melamine contamination scare--dog and cat owners the world over went into panic mode when pet food was recalled in the summer of 2007 after it was found to be poisoned with melamine--but it's one of the country's biggest food-safety crises in years. It's causing locals to question the safety of products they depend on daily, and shining an unflattering global spotlight once again on the country that has become famous (and infamous) as the "world's factory."

Worse than shoddy checkups is the nature of the offending chemical: Melamine is used to make plastics and is high in nitrogen. Small amounts shouldn't cause serious damage, but enough of it can cause kidney stones, kidney failure and even death. The chemical boosts the protein reading of milk, and could have been used to disguise watered-down milk and bump up company profits--not exactly an "oops" kind of thing.

It's also clear the cover-up in this case was pretty huge: Even the official news service Xinhua is reporting there were multiple cases brought to the authorities' attention months before the September recall. According to articles on popular Chinese websites Tianya and QQ, at least one father tried to bring attention to his daughter's illness and was bought off.

Although few Chinese I've seen or spoken with will actually question the government's actions, they're angry and scared and sure as hell aren't buying any milk products if they can help it. The fear factor has already started to hurt China's dairy farmers, many of whom are forced daily to dump tonnes of milk they can't sell. The government has started exhorting Chinese people to buy milk and keep the previously burgeoning industry alive, but somehow I doubt that's going to have much of an effect. It will be interesting to see what kind of political or persuasive clout (if any) public opinion holds as this continues. The people hit hardest by the poisoned milk are China's nascent middle class--mothers who would rather (or are pressured to) return to work right after giving birth, and are wealthy enough to afford the status symbol offered by infant formula, or dairy products in general.

It still isn't clear what effect this will have in the long term--not only on a growing domestic dairy industry, but on China's role as a universal and cheap supplier. If the government's serious about cracking down on unscrupulous producers, it's going to become more expensive to do business here, driving away foreign investment; if it isn't, this will continue to happen until people are afraid to buy anything with a "Made in China" stamp on it.

Not-so-still life with mother, child and scooter

OK, I don't really know the relationship between these two people and am imposing my own preconceptions on them by positing they're a mom and her kid. But this scooter-riding woman and the little dude in the T-shirt caught my eye a couple of weeks ago in the French Concession.


They were stopped at a red light and she pulled out a tissue and started cleaning the little boy's face and fixing her makeup as cars and bikes zoomed around her.


This kid was not impressed.

Waiguoren's day out

I was surrounded by hordes of squirming, grimacing, guffawing children; half a dozen burly, unsmiling nurses; piles of syringes and rack upon rack of tiny vials of blood.

No, this wasn't a second round of cautionary Tory anti-drug ads. This was a day-long medical check-up for the students at a migrant elementary school in the far north of Pudong.

We arrived first thing in the morning after about two and a half hours in transit via subway and taxi, up past bizarre "free trade zones" and into the thick of an out-of-place residential laneway in the middle of an uber-industrial area. The place was a zoo of small children spending recess running around an open, paved yard and playing ping pong. They gaped, giggled and pointed at the foreigner--"Waiguoren! Waiguoren!"--which was awkwardly hilarious.

Our task was to oversee the children lining up to have their blood samples taken by a row of nurses parked at tiny, retro-looking metal-and-plywood school desks. The classroom itself wouldn't have been out of place in a 1950s Communist China PSA: the walls were whitewashed concrete (or something like concrete, but less dense-seeming); the metal hinges and fixtures on the windows were rusty; the miniature desks and chairs were an off-blue colour and deceptively heavy given their size; there were posters on the wall exhorting rules such as "Love life, love the Party."

The nurses were clad in long white coats and blue tissue caps; they were strong and unsmiling as they knotted taupe-coloured elastic tubes around the students' tiny arms and poked and prodded in search of a vein.

But the best part was the kids themselves: Dozens of students crowded in waves into the small room, clutching medical forms that invariably became crumpled and ripped almost in two by the time they were out. All the kids were handed glass vials with their student number the nurses used to put their blood sample--not the best idea, in my opinion, as the rascals spent the time waiting using the little tubes as pan pipes, mimed telescopes or fake swords. Given the number of times those things were dropped on the floor, I certainly can't attest to their sterility when the blood samples finally got put in them. But whatever.

For tiny children being poked with sharp needles and having their blood syringed out before their eyes, these kids were pretty brave. The little kids didn't seem to know what was going on, so they fidgeted in line, played with their vials and gaped at the weiguoren, whose words of comfort were limited to "Bu yao pa" ("Don't be scared") and who spent most of the day herding kids and handing the post-shot peeps candy to boost their blood sugar and staunch their tears (medical professional right here, everyone). The oldest children, who were around 10, jostled to see what was happening at the front of the line, and shoved each other dangerously close to the syringes.

This was one of the lucky migrant schools to have achieved the status of "ming ban," which means it's considered a privately run official school and gets government funding. But the teaching resources still aren't as good, and of course the kids don't get any medical care at all; these blood samples and eyesight tests could be their only contact with the medical system for years. The depressing part is, if the blood tests reveal something important about their health (one of the doctors testing the samples as they went along remarked she had already found several incidents of gastrointestinal issues, likely the result of poor hygeine and unsafe food), chances are the kids' parents won't be able to afford treatment, anyway.

These kids didn't give a shit about that, though: They were too busy scampering around, cheeks stuffed with candy, proudly displaying their now-illegible medical forms and cotton ball-bandaged inner elbows.

For short-term planning ahead

There are condom dispensers like these affixed to walls, fences and gates around our neighbourhood, although they're notably absent from trendier, touristy areas downtown, around Xintiandi and in the French Concession. To be honest I'm impressed they're there at all, in a country where HIV was for almost 20 years considered solely the domain of foreigners (and men who have sex with men, which at the time was also thought an "abnormal" Western import) and where HIV was called aizibing--the "loving capitalism disease." A lot has changed since then, and China finally seems to be tackling HIV/AIDS in a concerted manner--the government went as far as promoting prevention among sex workers, which Party members previously feared would further encourage the country's burgeoning sex trade. That said, migrant workers remain an unaddressed risk factor given their statistically higher chances of contracting HIV and their lack of access to health care. Crap. 

What I'd really like to know, though, given their prominent streetside placement, is what these little boxes' pickup rate is.

In the land of the xiao zi

"Little capitalists."

That's the literal translation of a term describing people Westerners might call materialists. The "xiao zi" are the front-line generation in the Middle Kingdom's emerging affluent middle class: While their grandparents went through re-education and Mao's decade-long cultural revolution and their parents endured the brunt of post-1978 economic reforms and the 35 million layoffs they brought with them, people born in the past couple of decades have grown up in a China that's relatively wealthy, and with much more freedoms and access to global information than their parents and grandparents had.

In urban areas, and in Shanghai--the "head" of the economically reformed Chinese dragon--especially, these xiao zi seem to be increasingly prevalent. They see less of a need to conform to the conservative and often austere lifestyles of previous generations; mammon is supreme, but more important than that are the trappings that come with it: Starbucks becomes a status symbol of an emerging middle class that favours clothes and accessories emblazoned with eye-catching, sparkly brand names. They're hip and trendy and are both driving and benefitting hugely from China's superlative development (for now, at least).

The term can be an invective--one former Fudan student said it's used as fodder in an ongoing Beijing-Shanghai rivalry: Beijingers fling it dismissively at Shanghainese they see as too hedonistic, shallow or just economically oriented for their more politically focused sensibilities. But the xiao zi are emerging as an increasingly vocal group. Like most Chinese I've encountered, they won't protest or complain about the government openly until something it does (or fails to do) affects their lives directly. But this middle class has something to lose and feels entitled to stability, predictability and freedom to enjoy the wealth it has accumulated. The xiao zi may not be in the streets calling for an end to Party corruption and the right to vote for their government representatives, but they will protest a new high-tech rapid transit line running through their neighbourhood, just like disgruntled middle-class Canadians. And they aren't too pleased when it turns out the biggest powdered-milk producer in China has been selling melamine-tainted infant formula powder, leading to a massive recall allegedly covered up for months as two kids died and thousands got sick from the stuff.

But anyway.

I'm not sure if these xiao zi exist outside of China's urban centres; my guess is they do, but in smaller numbers and very different forms. But as China's economy grows there will be more of them, and they'll be making more demands on the government for things to which they feel entitled. And if the the Red Dragon's overheated economic growth loses some of its flame power and falters, you can bet the CCP will hear from the little capitalists riding its plumes.

This is Shanghai--part two

The city's smaller streets, especially in the downtown area, are a maze of lilongs--row houses with storefronts on the ground floor, a single entrance leading onto an outdoor alleyway and the building's multiple units. They're criss-crossed with laundry lines and power lines; people, bicycles, garbage and miscellany. In some, the gutters double as miniature open sewers. Grimy, but they're also the most organic, community-oriented streetscapes I've seen so far.

During the day, these mini-neighbourhoods are hives of small-scale commercial activity. I'm not sure if the people living here own the stores, which sell everything from bean cakes to bicycle equipment, but I think they live above them. At night, they gather to watch TV in the stores, or sit outside and gamble (I'm trying to figure out what the games are but am failing--some play mah jong, but the most popular is a weird one with round tiles and what looks like a checkerboard). There are water spigots on the sidewalk people use to wash dishes or to bathe; I'm not sure if there's running water inside.

As far as I can tell, these neighbourhoods are endangered species in this city: They get rezoned, bulldozed and replaced by towering skyscrapers to feed the urban development craze; their inhabitants get unilaterally relocated, lately to the outskirts of Pudong near the airport.

This is Shanghai--part one

The crazy financial Lujiazui district of Pudong, as seen from the Bund (or Waitan) on the other side of Huangpu River. The enormous bulbuous space station/phallic object is the Oriental Pearl Tower--Dongfang Mingzhu. Pudong materialized out of swamp land in the past 15 years. This is the iconic skyline the city's planners are going for in attracting tourists to clog the Bund and foreign investors to fill those office towers.

The white thing is the honkin' Radisson hotel near People's Square (Renmin Guang Chang). It has nice bathrooms.

And I totally got this wrong before, because I'm an idiot: Just behind it is the extremely architecturally out-of-place Jinmen Dajuidan Hotel, not the art museum. The hotel, built in 1926 by the Brits as the China United Assurance Company, has an old-school clock face and is apparently supposed to look Italian. It has been refurbished and, like a lot of the old-school colonial buildings in the city, is now a heritage building.

The Shanghai Art Museum is just behind the camera, to the left. It was built by the British in the 1930s as part of a race club (honestly, you can't get much more colonial than that. Way to go, chaps). Last week it hosted the opening of the Shanghai Biennale, which is pretty cool: There were gigantic, iridescent metallic bugs crawling up and down the building.






Crazy-trippy neon signs on the ultra-touristy, pedestrianized Nanjing Dong Lu.

I fucking hate that street.

This can only end badly

So as part of this program I'm in, we all do volunteer placements with organizations around Shanghai. The one I'm working with, Shanghai Lequn Social Work Service, is one of the first "professional" (read: government-approved) social work organizations in China (well, technically the first in "mainland China," because Taiwan is also part of Zhongguo, don'cha know). It works with migrant worker children. These kids get the shaft: Because their parents come to Shanghai from other provinces looking for work and to fuel this city's madcap development, they don't have Shanghai hukou. This hukou is an outdated municipal citizenship-type thing and it wouldn't have much contemporary bearing except it determines how you access all government-funded social services, such as education and medical care. Because migrant workers don't have Shanghai hukou they can't access those services in Shanghai, and they could work here for years without being able to transfer it. Organizations like Shanghai Lequn try to provide privately funded schools and physical checkups for these kids, which is of course hugely problematic. Anyway--bad scene, but this group seems to be doing incredible shit in an attempt to fill a gap the government can't or won't address. Would like to find out more about where this money comes from--is it from corporations who benefit from these kids' parents' underpaid labour?--but the result of it seems excellent and judging from its modest, understaffed office, Lequn certainly isn't swimming in cash.

Where I come in, apparently, is working in these migrant children's schools. I'm going to teach English and help run an after-school broadcast and print journalism kind of program, where the kids put together a mini-magazine and have a classroom "radio" news show. The idea is to help give them a better sense of perspective, or agency, or something. I'm also helping with medical check-ups.

Sounds great, right?

Except there's one problem: I can't speak Mandarin. Or read/write Chinese. At all. Functionally illiterate doesn't even begin to cover it.

I can count and string together some basic sentences and queries, and I can recognize a handful of characters. But for fuck's sake: The very idea of trying to edit a newspaper I can't read or comprehend is laughable. I can't imagine how I'll teach English to Chinese-speakers when I can't translate that shit to save my life. I may be able to help with medical check-ups if accompanied by a medical professional issuing directions, and if I use muddled hand gestures. But seriously--to whom does this seem like a wise idea?

I actually asked the supervisor, as she was explaining the program through a translator, whether she knew I didn't speak Chinese and whether that would be okay. She laughed.

"Mei guanxi, mei guanxi!" ("Forget it, forget it.")

Um, okay. Whatever you say.

I have to be honest: This is a very cool-seeming program that will no doubt teach me a lot, and about which I'm really excited in a really selfish way: It'll be interesting and enlightening to see how these schools work and just how circus-fucked what appears to be a massive urban underclass is.

But I can't imagine my trying to help out will end in anything but tragedy; I would hate to be one of those annoying, saccharine volunteers that parachutes into a foreign country expecting to save the world. Here's hoping I can just get by with dumb but well-meaning and harmless foreigner.

Bad fucking news.

Zixingche culture

Projections for car purchases in China are sky-high: About 20 million households own cars, country-wide, and although the growth in sales has slowed in the past few months, there are still hundreds of thousands of people buying automobiles every year.

Gone, then, are the days when the streets here were clogged solely with the two-wheeled forms of transport.

But that isn't to say they're ceding supremacy, or that bikes are anything less than ever-present here in Shanghai. I definitely haven't seen any city--including Amsterdam, almost as famed for its bikes as it is for its hallucinogenic pursuits--with nearly as many bikes.

Most roads have designated bike lanes that are crowded with swarms of bicycles, and cyclists tend to take over other lanes, as well. Row upon dense row of bikes, with kickstands down and rear wheels locked to frames, line Fudan University campus, and numerous streets across the city.

Virtually everyone here seems to have a bike, and bikes seem to be the primary way people get around in their immediate vicinity. I would venture to guess they're still the major mode of transportation after public transit. But they seem almost exclusively utilitarian and commuter-oriented; I've seen the odd mountain bike kicking around, but have yet to witness anyone using a bike for exercise. Whereas in many North American cities bicycle commuting seems to be the exception, rather than the rule (especially with bike theft being so damn prevalent), here the opposite is true.

And forget panniers--the shit people pull with their bikes here is beyond impressive: Many of the street stalls selling everything from books to fruit to cheap DVDs are actually enormous, rectangular fold-out crates attached to bike trailers; almost all bikes I've seen are equipped with a basket or a rack or both, and they're usually loaded down with miscellany. Plenty of cyclists, particularly on campus, tool around with people perched side-saddle on their bike racks. In addition to the old-school tinkling bells, some bikes have loudspeakers--I'm regularly woken up around 6:30 a.m. by tinny broadcast voices from bikes passing the nearby intersection.

I'm sure bicycle prevalence is far smaller now than it was when the CCP championed the two-wheeled wonders a few decades ago, but cyclist commuter culture seems well-enough entrenched to last at least a little longer. This is, I think, due in part to their practicality in a country where pragmatism is paramount and there just isn't enough physical space for everyong to have a car and due in part to their affordability. But bikes also figure pretty prominently in the collective psyche, I think. With the possible exception of popularizing that stylin' suit, pushing bikes on the masses might've been the best thing Mao did.

Random acts of helping the dumbass foreigner

My guardian angel wore artfully faded knockoff jeans, a Chinglish-emblazoned T-shirt and had her hair in a henna-dyed bob.

"Do you need help?" she asked--in English, because at that point I wouldn't have been able to comprehend even a phrase as simple as that in Mandarin.

I was bent over a sorry excuse for a bicycle, hands covered in grease, face covered in that grimy sheen the city's polluted humidity brings out in wimpy Westerners. I have a feeling those factors, plus the glassy look in my eyes, made it pretty evident I either needed a hand or a dose of valium and a Tsing Tao. Maybe two.

"Um, yeah."

She put down her handbag, flipped the bike over, quickly assessed the damage--a derailed chain and wonky sprocket, apropos of absolutely nothing I had done to the infernal machine, I swear--pulled out a tissue to protect her fingers and ever-so-daintily straightened the sprocket, slipped the chain back on, rotated the pedals a few times and flipped the bike back upright.

I gawked. She handed me a tissue for my fingers. Smiled.

"OK?"

"Um. Yeah. Thanks so much--xie xie."

She picked up her purse and sauntered off, high heels clicking.

The one good thing about having been completely ripped off purchasing a two-bit bicycle whose chain snapped in two literally 15 minutes after I pedalled away is that it has made patently clear just how nice a lot of people are. Twice since the chain snapped and I got it replaced at one of the ubiquitous ad hoc bike-repair stands that appear magically each morning on every other street corner, this piece of mechanical crap has fallen apart. Twice in that time, passersby have seen my helpless flailing and helped me put the thing back together.

Encroyable. I figure I've banked enough of a karmic debt so far, if I ever get back to Canada I'll have to help every tourist and immigrant I can find. I feel a bit better today after I gave directions to a foreign student even more hapless than myself, but my smug, savvy sentiments were short-lived: I was wandering in circles again five minutes later.

I chalk up part of this kindness to what appears to be a sense of obligation towards foreigners as guests--part of this crazy guanxi/renqing system of social networking and social obligation I actually plan on writing more about when I have time and understand it better. Part of it, though, is that when they aren't trying to run me over, people are just nice. Almost embarrassingly so.

I have, however, made a mental note to look less deshevelled and helpless. That can't be doing much good in the cultural ambassador department.

Traffic

Shanghai traffic is like a massive game of chicken.

Or a high-stakes round of Risk.

Either way, it isn't for the faint of heart.

Naive, overly polite Canadian that I am, I spent my first couple of days here assuming that when the little pedestrian was green, it meant I should cross at the indicated white-striped crosswalk. I assumed, even more idiotically, that oncoming traffic would stop for pedestrians, even when said pedestrian was in the way.

I spent my first couple of days here in the path of oncoming vehicles.

Then, after my sixth or seventh near-flattening, I figured out that the point in most intersections here is not, in fact, to just obey the traffic signals. Sure, you can take a cursory glance at them and presumably the colour of the light in front of you may factor into your decision-making. But blindly obeying traffic signals here is for chumps. If you can make it across any other way, or if you think you can make it across somehow, then away you go, and damn the trucks/pedestrians/junk-laden bicycles.

When people approach an intersection here, be they on foot, bike, moped or car-bound, there seems to be a sophisticated strategizing that goes on between them and the others approaching--a kind of risk calculation that combines guesswork, luck, manouevering skill and some unknown quality I can't fathom, let alone attempt to master. But nobody stops if they don't have to. They may slow, veer, speed up or just honk really loudly as they plow through the intersection, making hairpin turns and swerving dangerously close to anyone in their path. It's incredible there aren't piles of carcasses at every intersection.

I should note, of course, that this is an oversimplification. I have not seen anywhere near every single intersection in this city, and at the really enormous ones there seems to be more of an imperative to stop at the light. But the best example of the aforementioned is at the intersection outside my dorm room, with which I'm obsessed because I'm obsessed (and just a little tetanus-phobic) with the tiny, rusty balcony off said dorm. This intersection is a perpetual collision course: hordes of bikes and mopeds will charge through the intersection as a big, unwieldy bus heading in the opposite direction makes a perilously wide turn, barely missing them; at the same time, oncoming traffic swerves through the middle of the intersection and a tiny man on a rickety bicycle towing a food stand/barrel of garbage/kitchen door makes a slow left turn, appearing motionless in the morass of honking and screeching.

Crazy shit.

I am, of course, nowhere near co-ordinated enough to negotiate a traffic ballet that intricate and intuitive.

So I do a hesitant little dance around the corner, stride confidently into the intersection when it looks like there's a smidge of an opening, and scamper to the other side when I realize I'm being blindsided by an enormous truck. Good times.

Dui bu qi; wo bu huisho zhongwen

"I'm sorry; I don't speak Chinese."

I've been saying that with alarming frequency lately, and it's getting to be a tiresome mantra.

I'm a pretty communicative (read: annoyingly loud and verbose) person. This makes living in a place whose language(s) I can't speak at all, never mind with anything near passable proficiency, an exercise in excruciating frustration. I knew this going in, but there's something about spending your life in a fog of almost unadulterated incomprehension that drives you around the fucking bend.

I’m a firm believer in “fake it ’til you make it” linguistics: I like to launch into a new language and force myself to learn it through awkward, misunderstanding-laden situations. But with Mandarin, this doesn’t work—I can’t piece together meanings to unfamiliar words, or sound them out while reading them; I certainly can’t guess at the word I’m looking for by bastardizing the English version, which works well in Eurocentric languages (biciclette! abandono! Zehr gut!). But spoken Mandarin and written Chinese don’t conform to Western norms of language, which is refreshing but also shitty if you’re me, and sick of being the jackass who points at things, mutters something unintelligible and then just resorts to speaking English really slowly, as though that will make it any less foreign to people who—quite reasonably—expect you to speak Chinese when you’re in China, dammit.

In some ways, Mandarin is relatively simple: It doesn’t have many (any?) articles, and best of all you don’t need to conjugate verbs when you change tenses. But there are special designators you’re supposed to use when referring to amounts (like a gaggle of geese or a flock of pigeons, but for ALL nouns), and there are five differentiated tones, so you can say the same syllable and have it mean five different things.

I just can’t wait until I confuse the “ma” that means “mother” with the “ma” that means “horse.” That’ll make me some friends.

Written Chinese is a whole other world of pain: it’s ideographic rather than phonetic, which is cool but makes it impossible to read anything by sounding it out. Hello, character memorization.

The sum of all this is, I become the North American tourist caricature I despise: I know a few words but can patch together few full phrases; I use hand signals a lot; I point; I resort to English and get frustrated when I can’t get my point across. It’s crap.

On one level, the helpless, alienated-foreigner feeling is probably a good way to get a sense of what it’s like to be in a completely strange place with no way to communicate. But I know Canadians are far less understanding of visitors who can’t speak English than most people here have been with me. Ergh.

I’m still hopeful I’ll pick up enough Mandarin to haggle, understand directions and maybe even have a conversation about the CCP. But until then, I sit on the subway on a little island of incomprehension in a sea of word I don’t understand—totally incommunicado.