Met up with Geng Xiubo. I should have taken my camera, but I decided against it at the last minute. The two of us, and another friend of hers, went out to the Botanical Gardens near Xiangshen. Xiubo’s advisor was having a party for the lab out there today.
Meeting up with Xiubo was a bit of an adventure. The night before we IM, and she tells me to take a cab out to her apartment. No problem. She tells me to show this to the driver:
到青年公寓，在中关村东路上的海淀交通支队附近
过了海淀交通支队向北几百米，看到天桥停车就行
It means something about taking me to a specific pedestrian bridge near the Chinese Academy of Science. She says she’ll meet me there, but I should call her when I arrive. I tell her my phone doesn’t work, so she tells me to show the driver this:
他想借用一下你的手机，给我打电话，让我来告诉你他要去的地方
So go outside, hail a cab and show the driver the first card. No problem. I see the pedestrian bridge, and he (apparently) says something to the effect of “That’s the bridge.” He pulls over at a taxi stand, and I pay him. Then I show him the second card. He just stares at it.
Uh-oh. The cabbie shows it to two male university students that want the cab. They just stare at it as well and hand it back to me. Oh shit. It’s not working.
I get out. I look around and don’t see Xiubo, which I knew wouldn’t be there. I have to stop someone at random on the street and borrow their cell phone. I stand on the bridge for a several minutes trying to figure out a way to avoid this predicament, and to gather up the nerve to borrow a phone from a total stranger on the street. This would be embarrassing enough in an English speaking country, let alone one where I don’t speak the language.
Jackpot! I see another white guy on the street. He’s bearded, balding, and in his mid 40s or early 50s. I go up to him and say in English, “Hey. I can I ask a favor. I’m supposed to me meet my friend here, but she’s not here, and she ask me to call her, and gave me this card so I could borrow someone’s phone since mine doesn’t work here, and it didn’t work when I tried before. Do you have a phone I could borrow? It would only take a second.”
To which he responds in a French accent, “I’m sorry, but I do not have a phone.”
Damn. Eventually, I chose some college guy that was walking alone back from shopping. I try to ask him in what little Mandarin I know, but he just stares at me befuddled. I give up, and show him the card.
Amazingly it worked! He gives me his phone! I have never felt so relieved in my life.
Shit! Pressing the buttons don’t work, and I can’t read the screen! He takes the phone back and dials the number for me. Xiubo answers “Wei?” and after an initial moment of confusion on her part, and a code-switch to English, her and a friend meet me on the bridge. Success!
The three of us grab some warm soy milk and some breakfast jiaozi from a street vendor and then we catch another cab out to the botanical gardens. We spend the day walking around, look at of all things, irises, hostas, zinnias, marigolds, and tulips. Nothing like traveling halfway around the globe, and seeing the exact same plants you grew up with.
In the afternoon we met up with her lab. Technically, I believe it’s the lab that she’s starting in, not the lab that she already was in. Their get-together was in the words of Andrew Leung, “very asian.” A picnic, followed by a game of essentially duck-duck-goose, card games, and some penalty kick soccer. Only a few people spoke to me. Xiubo said it was because most of them were embarrassed to try their English. The ones that tried spoke fine, so I don’t know.
That evening, Xiubo, her friend, her friend’s boyfriend Tianchen, and I go out to a Chinese barbeque joint in the university district. It’s good, but completely different of course. Chicken wings are cooked on bamboo skewers over a flame grill, and rolled in pepper seeds for spice. Xiubo tells me that she’s got an internship at MSR-Redmond at about the same time I do. Awesome. The dinner ends, but of course no one lets me pay, so I tell Xiubo that I’ll buy her dinner when she comes to Seattle, and she agrees.
Xiubo and her friend are tired and head back to their apartments, but Tianchen agrees to show me around. We walk down to Tsinghua and Peiking Universities. He’s an interesting guy. He asks about the US and how we view China. How the China compares to the US, and other things. It was a really good conversation.
Occasionally, you can tell that he grew up in a monoculture. For instance, he believed that all black people spoke poor english and committed crimes, because of what I can only assume is watching their very skewed portrayal in American popular culture. He also made comments about how poor Chinese people are poor because their lazy. The irony of such a social Darwinist idea flourishing, if only superficially, in a socialist country, wasn’t lost on me. Strange. If I got back to Beijing, I’ll definitely have to look him up.