i experienced china. on the streets. with the people. in the muck and the rain and the squalid conditions. last night, i went to beijing and met up with stacey (who is working here for a year, teaching english) at her place in the northeast of the city. she¡¯s been out here since early february and she and her co-workers have explored the night life a little bit. stacey didn¡¯t know any chinese at all when se got here and i must say that i was quite impressed with the vocabulary she¡¯d been able to pick up in two short months. her apartment was also much much nicer than expected and it was decorated with ikea rugs and furniture. (yes, there is an ikea in china.) at first, seeing her in the middle of beijing was quite trippy but then eventually, as the night wore on, it was just the surroundings that seemed weird and out of place. seeing someone i associated with home made everything seem that much more exotic.



aniwaise, we went out to bar street with a few of her co-workers and hit up a spot called tony¡¯s (the owner there speaks good english and his name is tony so i¡¯m not sure what the bar is actually called). everyone at the bar was foreign and it was more diverse than most of the bars i¡¯ve been to in the states. her co-workers and friends were from seattle, canada, australia, germany and various other far away places. hoards of young foreign kids came in and out, presumably stuck in china due to their parent¡¯s occupations. the beer was cheap, the music was hip hop (tony gets donated CDs from customers), and the conversations were conducted entirely in english. i felt like i was in pb.



standing on the shitty little sidewalks people watching was a complete trip and a reality check. little street urchins assaulted the foreigners, begging for money. one little kid was delightfully cute and ran to each new taxi pulling up, holding out his hands and pleading with his big eyes and strategically placed dirt paint. his mother sat on the sidewalk breast-feeding another son. most of the foreigners paid the children no mind and sometimes the kids got bold enough to grab onto pant legs and hang on in hopes of payoffs. all the while, these tiny little kids were running back and forth across the street, performing death defying feats of frogger action in search of the next victim. one guy smacked the crap out of the little kid and he lay there on the street crying while his mom screamed at him to stand up. three minutes later, the kid was back up on his feet, chasing new pairs of legs down the street. a combination of pain, fear, compassion, and anger for the human condition struck me as i stood there watching all these foreigners walking by, getting drunk on the cheap, with little urchins running between their legs. as we left, one little kid stole stacey¡¯s friend¡¯s bottle of beer, which was momentarily unguarded. the grin on his face was akin to that of a child who had just scored the biggest christmas present of all.



the foreigners are gods here. they are catered to and excused for every action. some of the people i talked to said they loved it here because they could do anything and everything. they could be as loud and as rowdy as they wanted to be. as rude and as polite as they wished. i was quite taken aback at the utter lack of disregard for other people¡¯s countries that these foreigners exhibited. maybe it was because they were drunk, maybe it was because they took off their social shackles. whatever the reason, i didn¡¯t like it. it was amusing at first but then as the night wore on, i couldn¡¯t help thinking that china was just a big playground for foreigners to come into and do their worst. it was difficult to realize that in most ways, i was just as foreign as the foreigners were. but i felt like these chinese people were my people and that this rotting, pungent, backwards country was my country. and ¡°they¡± were pissing and spitting all over it. but then again, everyone does that here. i couldn¡¯t quite figure out if i was proud to be american, or ashamed to be chinese. or the other way around. or both.