Kite Store: 老北京风筝店

For my independent project, I selected the topic of "kites" and "kite making" in China (yesterday, I actually changed the topic to environmental NGOs, but I am nevertheless going to continue my investigation of the kite scene). Kites are such a important part of Chinese history and culture. Not only were some of the earliest kites invented in China, but they have contributed to military strategies, favorite pass time activities, and traditional Chinese folk art. In addition to their cultural significance, kites are also very valuable to me for personal reasons. When I was young, my dad used to make me swallow shaped kites out of bamboo. Of course being young, I would play with them without much thought and recklessly rip the thin paper material within a few days.

Nowadays, I have more appreciation for kites, and today, I visited another kite store in Beijing. The ride was about an hour long, and the store was very different from the last kite store I visited. The store owner was quite loquacious and I learned a lot--some good, some bad, some kind of sketchy. He introduced himself as from Weifang, which is recognized as the birthplace of kites, and every year Weifang hosts an international kite festival that draws tens of thousands of people, which I plan on ditching (or rather rescheduling) finals for. Life is good!





The couple who owns the store

Temple of Heaven con amigas nuevas!

I thought that I hadn't been here, but as I was walking around the park, I realized that I have!

Nueva amigas Lily and Mary Ann


So breathtaking

798

798: 现代艺术区 （Beijing Modern Art District）.

It's cool to see "modern art" in Beijing, but it made me a bit uneasy when I was there. Many people don't like modern art, but I like it as long as the the theory is sound and the execution is creative. However, to me modern art is only modern if it is unconventional and avant garde. Since modern art and even post modern art with its austere shapes and random splashes have already been done and over with in the West, to repeat these trends in a different location just isn't "modern art" anymore. I can't help but think of an idiom that I learned today in class that goes something like “第一个吃蟹子的是英雄”. The literal translation is "the first to eat a crab is a hero" but a more meaningful translation means that while the first to do something is courageous, or avant garde, the second guy, the third guy, and the rest that follow are just hungry guys who decide to eat crabs cause they saw another guy eating it the other day. Similarly, while Marcel Duchamp's ready-found urinal piece was bold and revolutionary, the next guy who decides to buy a urinal from across the street and put it into his art exhibit is just plain lazy.

When I was in 798, I had the distinct feeling that the modern art district was geared not towards the Chinese/Beijing audience, but rather towards Westerns who have already developed a penchant for modern art. After all, who was I with but a herd of international students from the States? The district focused heavily on themes from the Chinese Revolution and even reflected some corrupt societal realities through nude photography, however, Cultural Revolution slogans, nudity, and abstract art are so typically "modern" art in the Western sense that to see it in a Chinese context was like seeing some kind of frame work awkwardly filled with a new subject matter. The fusion was sometimes disorienting and unnatural, like a painting of modern sky scrapers in Van Gough's expressionism style. In some ways, pop art, propaganda slogans, etc can be visually powerful, but nevertheless highly superficial (on second thought, superficial representation is what iconic art is all about). By focusing all of modern art on the Cultural Revolution, I felt like I was given bite-size history that completely eluded the rest of Chinese culture. Of course, I'm generalizing here. I did see a few great exhibits, though I guess in the end, I was left wanting. I also appreciated the giant sculptures in 798, which most of my pictures are of.
Anyhoo, another theory of mine for why the Chinese Revolution/Cultural/Mao was such a prominent theme is because it directly affected artists in China. And who doesn't like to reflect on the history of their own craft?


Optimus Prime! at least 3 story tall...


Man shouting at the sky


Huge sculptures


This exhibit was pretty cool. It is essentially an exhibition of the physical building itself. I loved the folding windows and truly the design was much cooler than any actual "modern" design I've seen. It reminded me of a gothic cathedral, sturdy but airy and light. It used to be a factory, and you can still see the slogans written all across the top. This one in particular says "long live Chairman Mao"


More shouting figures

A little bit in love with Beijing...

Winter in Beijing hasn't been very good to me lately. Although I have recovered from my early cold, Beijing is still a fairly cold place. The 200+ new words I have to learn as an L5 student also keeps me pretty contained within the Minzu University campus. Classes are a lot harder than I expected and I began to spend my entire afternoon and night studying for Chinese. For my first day of class, I prepared from 4pm-1am with a dinner break in between. By Wednesday, however, I learned that even if I prepare significantly less, I can still do fairly well in my class the next day...I still see the value of being very focused on my studying, but I've also decided that it wasn't worth it to spend all my time in Beijing studying in my room...a conclusion that I think many students in the program come to realize.

Anyhow, enough said about Chinese studies, this is a post about why I'm a little bit in love with Beijing.
Beijing is AWESOME. I've been here before with my parents when I was younger, but all we did was sight see. But actually Beijing's diversity of things is really 层出不穷(read: is ridiculously diverse) and keep on blowing my mind. Today, my neighbor Hozhimin (Jamie--he's really awesome and I can already tell that we're going to be really good friends) and I went to Houhai Park (后海公园）and had a blast! The lake in Houhai was completely frozen over and Beijingers have created all kinds of informal recreational sports on top of the ice. We saw people skating, playing ice hockey, riding skating chairs, flying kites, and even just riding their bikes! Hozhimin and I like to do this motion of imitating our mind's being blown whenever we see something cool (such as Beijing's subway commercials. OK, random tangent, Beijing subway commercials....HOLY CRAP. Along the walls on the subway route there are like flat screen monitors that play running commercials. OK, that's pretty upscale compared to New York, but get this, in Beijing, as you ride the subway, there are commercials that are TIMED to follow the subway as it passes. So when you're looking out of a moving subway, there is a TV screen that plays commercials! I'm not a very big fan of commercials, but even I couldn't help but be impressed by commercial screens that run at the speed of a subway).
While walking around Hohai Park, Hozhimin and I also stopped into a bar that was performing live music. Hozhimin plays a lot of guitar and we decided to try our luck (or rather, his luck) and went into the bar to speak with the bar owner in regards to getting Hozhimin a gig in their bar. They really like him (partially because he's awesome, partially because he is awesome, and I suspect partially because he's a very tall white guy who speak fluent Chinese). Anyhow, tomorrow he gets a live audition and if it works out then he gets to play every night during Chinese New Years! We've already decided that if he because super famous, I can be his PR agent. Yesss, new career path!
Lastly, I'm finally getting to know the people on the fifth floor better. Tonight we had a jam session. My co-sib for my Chinese host family is really into composing and playing music and today he showed me how to play a Ukulele. I know I get really into stuff really fast and sometimes come across as 半途而废, but nevertheless, right now, I'm pretty sure I want to get my own ukulele and get my co-sib to teach me how to play. My co-sib is pretty serious and even brought over a fancy piano keyboard among other recording instruments. I will post more thoughtful and less touristy things perhaps tomorrow. But today, so much of getting MIND BLOWN.


Frozen over




Kite flying


Ice skating


Bicycling! What a BAMF (for my international readers and parentals, BAMF means bad ass motherfuckers. It's a compliment for being really hardcore/厉害/cool)


The most adorable kid ever! Kind of like every other kid you see in Beijing.


Meet my friend Jamie!

Mornings

6:30, when I wake up


7:50, when I leave for class

Dormitory- a walk in perspective

Meet my roomie Shazeda! Our room is very neat, mainly because our dormitory is inside a hotel and the hotel staff makes my bed every day.





The view outside my window

The pictures are about my dormitory, but today, my adventure of the day was my search for a 中药店 (Chinese herbal medicine store). I've come down with a cold on my first day of classes (how unfortunate!) and decided to take my teacher's suggestion to brew some herbal medicine drinks. I went searching for 胖大海 which is said to treat sore throat, but I'm not sure if all the walking in the cold in search of medicine made me even sicker. :/ This afternoon, I sure did feel a lot worse than I did this morning, before I went searching for meds. BUT, I am still enjoying my time here in Beijing, so all is still good despite a slight decline in health. :)

Beijing

First post- mainly because everything's been constantly changing and I haven't yet been able to form concrete impressions for longer than a day.
I still haven't yet, but I figured that I would at least post a few pictures for my subscribers's sake (that's you!). These pictures are not a very good representation of what I've been doing these last few days because they are from a field trip we took this morning. But they'll have to do until I figured out what to say.


Forbidden City from the top of a park outside of the Forbidden City walls


Mandatory picture in front of Tiananmen. Oh yeah, I got a haircut! I got bangs, but they keep on falling in my eyes so I've resigned to bobby pins for as long as I need to.

Chicago Airport

I'm very particular about my airports, and Chicago O'Hare Airport has just made it onto my list of favorite airports. It has a cool jazzy vibe and whatever is the equivalent of the New Urbanist feel for airports. There were dinosaur fossil structures(or replicas of dinosaur fossil structures) near security gates, children's art exhibits in connecting passageways, and this super cool musical tunnel with coordinated changing lights that reminded me of a Trans-Siberian Orchestra performance!


Cool musical tunnel

春卷

For my last day home, my mom made me my favorite dish ever--春卷 (Chun Juan)！ It's like a Chinese burrito that's our family's spin of the traditional egg rolls, except it's bigger and the wrap is more like a scallion pancake as oppose to fried and crunchy.


Wrapped inside are slices of cucumber, stir-fried bean sprouts, scrambled eggs, scallions, and sometimes sweet and sour sauce. Delicious!

Starting a New Blog for the Light Fellowship

The Light Fellowship that is providing me with full funding to study Chinese in Beijing requires me to keep a blog...
So I present you, Joy in Beijing
I'll probably end up cross posting many things from Joy in Beijing onto this blog, but I'm keeping that one separate so that this blog remains unscrutinized by the Light Fellowship community and Light applicants eager to learn more about ACC...

南瓜豆沙并 for breakfast!

aka pumpkin bing stuffed with sweetened red bean paste


My mom is a great cook! She made the red bean paste and the pumpkin flour for the pumpkin bing! Also, note the beautiful golden color--is it the pumpkin or is it the beautiful morning sunshine? :)

Dumplings

Mom with the dumplings!




Up close

Eating Animals

"Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense?"

I am continuously surprised by how much we sacrificed for money. Even though all of us have above average standards of living (by the simple fact that we live in America) and have more than surpassed our basic needs for sustenance, we continue to strive for more wealth even though it means unnecessarily sacrificing our youth, energy, and time. Often, I get caught up in it too because wealth is often equated with success and respect, and who doesn't want to be successful and respected? I've also found that sometimes being at Yale makes me forget how lucky I am because everyone is so smart and hard-working that it takes a lot of effort to simply not be a slacker (relatively).

Through reading Eating Animals, I have learned about something else that we've sacrificed for money--our responsibility to the animals we eat which we've grown to treat like parts of a machine instead of living creatures. We don't have to treat the animals that we eat like our pets (even though Foer makes the argument that the animals that we eat, ie pigs, are every bit as smart and charismatic as the animals that we take for pets, ie dogs), but treat them as we should treat creatures that can feel suffering and pain.

I have to admit that I do have a soft spot for social responsibility arguments, but I don't think that it takes any exceptional sense of social responsibility to want to end the exceptional suffering of millions of animals, especially if the only cost is eating less meat or paying higher meat prices that accurate reflect the cost of humanely raising an animal. Today, the animals that we eat live unnatural and mutated lives because of our increasing demand for cheap meat. To meet our consumer demand, animals have been genetically engineered so that they grow faster and bigger than ever before, all the while eating less food, which any pea pod of common sense will tell you is impossible without compromising other aspects of their wellbeing. Instead of blaming the animal agricultural industry or the farmers, it has been our consumer demand for cheap meat that has driven them to this practice.

In the meantime, here's to being a better vegetarian. Oh yeah, Nattie, I hope that you don't mind that I'm reading your birthday present...

A good excerpt from Eating Animals: I am the last Poultry Farmer

Flo Riding with real Floridians

In these past few days, I went on a road trip with some Florida folks from the Jonathan Edward's class of 2012. We covered a lot of ground (which unfortunately meant a lot of driving...). Among the highlights were a board walk in Fort Myers, ocean kayaking in Merritt Island (the dolphins came pretty close to our kayak!!!! AND THE OCEAN WAS warmer than California in the summer!), and Harry Potter land at Universal Studios in Orlando! It was also really cool to have gone home with some Yale friends because now I can finally see where they came from!


Boardwalk


Cypress trunks


Group reflection


Group photo!


Beach shot post ocean kayaking! We were staying with Ashley's uncle, who has a house on the beach! It was so convenient to play in the ocean!


Ashley and her new dog Honey who she adopted from the shelter. Ashley reminds me a lot of Amber because she is also crazy adventurous, a big hippie, once cut her hair super short and had a faux hawk, likes to sing in public, and is very chill and funny!


This is my friend Chelsea who also came to Fort Myers to bring me along for the cross Florida road trip. She's also an Environmental Studies major. :D I like this photo of Chelsea because she looks very mysterious!

New Year Resolutions

1) Stop losing/misplacing things! Not only is it annoying (and costly when I have to pay others to find it for me), but when I have to purchase new stuff to replace lost things, I'm not being very good about minimizing consumption and practicing the 3Rs

2) Spend more time learning about my family history. Ever since my Grandma passed away this summer, I've deeply regretted not spending more time with her when I had the chance. She always had the greatest stories to tell me about our family, what my now middle-aged uncles were like when they were rambunctious teens, what my cousins and me were like when we were toddlers. Now, that she's gone, the task of unraveling our family history might be tougher, but I'm on a mission to learn about my family and my ancestors. It doesn't have to be glorious, it doesn't even have to be unique, it just has to be our family history.

3) Don't buy more clothes! I tried to do this last year, but i still bought 17 items (that I can think of) may it be dresses, pants, or shirts. It always starts pretty well...until I find myself at a really good sale or in outlet-land Florida, where perpetually on sale malls call like sirens and tempt the "money saver" in me. In order to not cut myself completely from shopping (because I have a sinking feeling that I'll fail) I've given my self exceptions that I don't consider part of the crazy consumerism culture that I'm protesting.
EXCEPTIONS!
- if its made by a person with a face--haha, yes of course everything is made by a person with a face, but specifically a person who isn't just a interchangable part of the mass-production consumerism machine. I hope that the steep prices will keep me from buying it!
- if it is second hand (so garage sales, thrift stores, Eli Exchange, and mom's closet are still OK!).
- if it is made with in good social/sustainable consciousness. My friend Didem from Turkey who keeps a blog about sustainability has met all sorts of cool green entrepreneurs, including sustainable fashion designers who reuse materials for their products.

4) Stretch three times a week; play Pingpong often! :)

5) Eat lots of cake and ice cream, but be sure to not get cavities!

Lost resolution post from 2011

I found this lost post in my draft folder. It was set to be posted at around this time last year and was originally titled "New Years Resolutions 2011". It has been a good reminder of what I thought was, and what I still think is, important enough to be my only New Years Resolution for 2011.
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After spending the majority of my first day of the new year working on internship applications for consulting firms and Google, I chatted the rest of the night away with my mom on my Queen-size magnolia bed. After dinner, I asked my mom to tell me a story, and she decided to tell me the story about how my grandparents got married, what they were like as people, and the trials that they had endured in the political turmoil that marked China during the mid 1900s. Ever since my Grandma died this past summer, I've regretted not spending more time with her when I had the chance, getting to know her better (rather than having her lavish attention on me all the time), and being able to share with the next generation stories about her. My resolution for 2011 is to learn more about my own family history.

Tonight, I learned about my family from my mom's, which is a side that I'm less familiar with. Given the political chaos that defined China for most of the 1900s, the period that my grandparents lived through was a trying time entirely different from the one that I know. Life got progressively better for each successive generation. For my grandfather who was an orphan, illiterate, and poor for all of his life, he once expressed his greatest wish in life to be the ability to always be full from eating Wotou, a hard and coarse cornbread that my dad says tastes like cardboard.
When my mom was growing into an adult during her college years, economic reforms were just beginning to lift China out of poverty, and at one point she thought that her life would be perfect if she could just afford to eat fruits whenever she desired. It wasn't until she was 28 and pregnant with me that she finally had the luxury of doing so.
Now, as I have spent most of my day slaving over applications, worrying about whether or not McKinsey & Company will like my application and how in the world I can get through the interview process, I can't help but compare my current preoccupations and desires to the greatest wishes expressed by my grandfather and my mother once upon a time.

I can't help but think now that I have all the material comforts I need in the world, why am I still striving to work for these highly stressful and highly competitive industries that promise high monetary returns? For my grandfather, he would be wealthy to his heart's content if he could just be full after every meal. For my mom, wealth and success was the ability to afford all types of food. But what will define wealth and success for us? Without even trying, I now live with conditions that were once my grandpa and my mom's greatest dream in life. What will my dream be?

A New Year!

A New Year is complete with a new bedroom!

I helped to paint the walls and doors, install the ceiling fan and light, and install the carpet!

A new hair cut!

Psych! It's actually a wig!

New friends (age 9-20, with me begin the oldest of course)!

At one of my mom's friend's New Year party.

New Year at Fort Myer's Beach!