Random Collection of Pictures

Inside a shopping mall that's halfway demolished, halfway in operation

If the smog levels rise above 200 pm2.5, the air becomes very hazy

Beijing's main CBD with the new supertall skyscraper "Zun" and
the famous CCTV building

A hike on an unrestored part of the Great Wall

How’s life?

I can’t believe it’s nearly two months since I arrived in Beijing. But if you have a routine, time passes quickly. From the first days here, most of my time here has been spent at university classes, studying or attending mandatory events, which I actually appreciate. Starting a new life with no fixed schedule is way more difficult. This way, I had an easy time getting to know people at classes, courses and events. Two months into Beijing, I feel pretty much settled (which is certainly not the same as feeling at home). So is live really that different here?

I feel like there’s no simple answer to that question. First, I’m certainly biased since I already know a good deal of Chinese. Coming here without any knowledge of the language, China is an immense challenge and a culture shock. Whereas in France or Spain, even if you don’t know the language, you’re still be able to 1. read/translate and 2. find people who will be able to help you if you talk English, here you’d be virtually illiterate and deaf-mute.

Language-barrier aside, there a plenty of new things you have to get used to, but then again you’re wondering how fast that process is actually happening. These things include:

1. Smartphone for everything

Still thinking Europe is developed and China is a developing country? Welcome to reality, where I reserve a table, call a taxi to the restaurant, select dishes, send my order and pay without anything but my smartphone and a single app. I can also wash my clothes with an app. I can ride dirt-cheap bicycles at every street corner with an app. I send money to all my friends with an app. I pay my metro ride with an app. I exchange business contacts with an app. Basically, China – or at least its developed coastal cities – are very close to the point where your smartphone replaces every single item you’re carrying in your purse right now. Sure, you’re gonna argue data privacy and police state, and this is indeed a problem in a country where everything is controlled by a single ruling party, but then again, to me these arguments often sound like a lame excuse of rich countries who became too comfortable and lazy to try out new things.

2. Taxi for anywhere

I actually try to avoid this – it often feels decadent and unnecessary to me (and I don’t wanna get the reverse culture shock when forking out 30€ for a 15-minute taxi ride in Berlin). But the truth is, Beijing is so big that despite its relatively good public transport network, it often just takes too long to get somewhere. Furthermore, everything stops running at around 11pm. At the same time, 1km in a taxi costs around 0,28€, making it really hard to opt for other options. Even for Chinese people, this is a good deal – way better than for us in Germany. It also gives you the chance to talk to and not understand Beijing locals mumbling about things.

3. College Life

This is of course rather specific for my situation, you probably wouldn’t live in a student dorm if you came here to work. I’ve been through this before, and even though I like the German model with most students having their own (shared) flats throughout the city more, dormitories have some appeal to them. From a practical perspective, there’s nothing like leaving your room and entering the classroom 5 minutes later. It’s also a lot easier to meet up with university friends spontaneously. And since we’re being spoiled with single rooms, privacy is not a big issue either (my last dorm experience was sharing a small room with a co-student in Taiwan, something I don’t really have to repeat).

4. FOOD

A very positive change indeed. As an ardent worshipper of Asian cuisine, this is heaven. Authentic Chinese food comes in an unimaginable variety (we’re talking about a huge country with over 1 billion inhabitants after all) at ridiculous prices. For that reason, and because cooking in a common area without your own pots and pans is annoying, I don’t do any food or drinks myself here (except coffee, because the Chinese notion of that usually includes too much sugar and too little espresso). The social importance of food and eating in China is a lot higher in general, with having dinner together being everyone’s favorite pastime. If you’ve never experienced real Chinese food (definitely not the one you’re getting at a “All-you-can-eat” buffet), try googling “Hot Pot” and see if there are places nearby serving it.

There are two things that I find a bit unnerving, and these will probably stay with me during my time here. One is Beijing as a city. It certainly has its interesting aspects – history, politics, the small Hutong alleys in its center – but for the most part, Beijing is a gigantic pancake with congested roads. It’s as pedestrian friendly as a formula 1 racetrack and getting somewhere not your neighborhood is a big mental effort. The concept of public space is quite new in China, more so in its ever paranoid political center Beijing, where the city planning up into the 20^th century was deliberately carried out so that there would be no places where people could gather (and possibly scheme or revolt). While other Chinese cities slowly try out things such as public green areas or pedestrian areas (that usually resemble open-air malls), Beijing seems to remain true to its modern-era roots, which are big streets and enclosures. While the latter luckily is a rare sight in Europe, Beijingers love to enclose just about everything. Gated communities obviously, but why not enclosing the university? Hell, why not enclosing the PUBLIC park? I’d really like to know the reason, contemporary China is a fairly safe place, so security is not a major concern. Maybe it’s just reminiscing the Great Wall? Anyways, it gives the city the look and feel of a very efficient but dead place where public space is merely the necessary vehicle to take you from your office job to the shopping mall.

The second thing has to do with the people here and again, I was prepared for it so I’m not too surprised. Good things first, I like the people here and haven’t had problems with locals at all, many of them are in fact super nice. That being said, making friends (in the sense of building a meaningful relationship) with Chinese proves to be extremely difficult, and not just because of the language barrier. I can say that because I know foreign born Chinese people who speak the language perfectly and still struggled to connect with people when they were staying in their parents homecountry. I’m sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking, foreigners hang out with foreigners or with Chinese that have had strong western influence in their lives, e.g. studying or living abroad for a while. This is quite sad but probably unpreventable given the vast cultural gap. Through language and deliberate isolation, most Chinese live in a huge, fluffy bubble, full of cheesy pop ballads, food and TV dramas and mostly devoid of things that we would call mature or earnest, like political debate, complex movies or art in general. I know I’m walking a thin line, especially in big cities like Beijing all this is available even without having to circumvent state censorship, and in the West there are also tons of people who don’t care about the latter things. Proportionately however, I’d say there are huge differences. Generally speaking, the Chinese perspective on the world is pragmatic and materialistic. Why wasting your time pondering politics when you can’t change them anyways? What matters is personal success – traditionally defined as getting a well-paid job, a befitting partner and the best education for your kids. I assume that this will change, as it did in other countries who were becoming wealthy, but that is a matter not of years but generations. In the meantime, we can consider ourselves lucky that many German brands count as status symbols for which Chinese are willing to pay crazy amounts of money just to show that they can afford them.

What is this language?

 This language – Mandarin – is a tonal language belonging to the family of Sino-Tibeton languages, which might or might not have had a common ancestor with our Indo-European languages some 15 000 years ago (one of the reasons it’s so strange to us). It’s the mother tongue to an estimated 1 billion speakers, more than twice the number of the second most common one in the world, Spanish. It is also the major reason I came to China. I’m not a linguist or sinologist, so this is not going to be a scientific introduction, but rather a report of my personal experience enriched with a few facts.

We all heard that Chinese is a difficult language to learn. Think of those weird characters and the words that all sound the same to foreigners! For everybody keen on the Chinese culture and language I would love to deemphasize its difficulty, but I really can’t. It’s just a fact that Chinese is nothing like Spanish, French or any other European language you might have studied at school. Any self-titled multilinguist telling you how to learn to speak Mandarin in just 3 months (or 6 months, or a year) is probably just trying to sell you their shit. After more than two years of studying, I drew two conclusions that I think apply universally (unless you’re a language genius or come from a language that’s similar, like Japanese):

1. Chinese, especially its written form, takes a shitload of dedication

2. to speak fluently, there’s just no other way than living in China/Taiwan, I’d say for at least a year

Before I extend on those points, let me make my point clear. I dare say I have a modest talent for learning languages, but I’m far from a wunderkind. I don’t think that Chinese requires an exceptional amount of talent or intelligence anyways. What you’ll need is dedication and diligence. Which brings me to reasons for which it is not a good idea to start learning Chinese:

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         Your career:

This is probably one of the most common and equally wrong motives for a multitude of reasons. First of all, your career has not really a direct connection with China or Chinese, since the intrinsic motivation is not learning the language, but getting a good job / a lot of cash / power / whatever. If you’re down this path, you’re probably good at making cost-benefit analyses. In the same time you need to get your Chinese on a level that has any relevance in a vocational context, you could do an MBA at a prestigious university and work 3 gruelling years as a drone in some office tower to repay your student debt. That MBA also has the advantage of providing you with a great network and signaling all employers that you want to make it to the top. Chinese on the contrary is much less of a qualification for top jobs than most people think. First, despite the overall low proficiency in China, the international businesspeople there usually speak English, most likely better than your Chinese will ever become. Second, if you’re working on the Chinese market in an international company, you’ll always have Chinese colleagues whose English/German is most likely better than your Chinese will ever become. If you’re climbing up the career ladder, you’re getting your own assistant/translator, whose English/German is definitely better than your Chinese will ever become. If your goal is to work at a Chinese company, you might want to reconsider (In the words of our Business Chinese teacher: “Working culture at Chinese tech companies? [Laughing] Overtime, overtime! That’s the working culture.” There’s also the so called 6/12 or 6/14 rule at those companies, dictating working 12 or 14 hours a day for 6 days a week.) Ultimately, Chinese is not an important asset because in situations that are crucial for your company/institution like negotiations or meetings, there’ll always be people whose whole job is to translate. Is that an argument against learning Chinese for work? Totally not, your Chinese colleagues will like you a lot if you’re able to chat with them in their native tongue and if you’re happen to work in China, not knowing Chinese guarantees that you’ll stay an alien in the expat bubble forever. Just don’t start learning under the assumption that it’s going to be a career booster.

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               Kind of a general interest in languages / giving it a shot / finding Chinese culture somewhat                 fascinating

That’s the stuff that you often hear from exchange students, who happened to pick a Chinese or Taiwanese university and are now wondering if they should take the language classes offered. It depends on the goal: If it’s getting a glimpse of a language that’s fundamentally different from your own just out of curiosity, it makes sense. If it’s learning Chinese, you better have more than a bit of interest, because the one semester is but the kick-off to years of studying. After I stayed in Taiwan for half a year, taking the additional language classes offered, I could finally ask for a bus and not understand what people replied, that’s how far I got.

The best reason to learn Chinese is because you really want to learn Chinese, that’s what I’m convinced of and that’s what it’s like for me. I can’t even lay out exactly why I want to do it, there are many reasons plus some sense of purpose in the process. I want to understand China better, after all it’s becoming a global power. I am deeply intrigued by how different Chinese works from the languages I knew before. I have many Chinese-speaking friends who brought me closer to the culture. I want to be able to speak the language that 1 billion people are speaking, most of whom don’t know any other. There are many other small reasons that combined outdo the more frustrating aspects of learning Chinese. There are many.

The most obvious is the pace of progress. After more than two years, at least one of which I studied a lot, I still can’t have a normal conversation. Neither can I read texts that aren’t dumbed down for students. The same effort put into Spanish or French would’ve gotten me to C1 level, in Chinese I’m somewhere between A2 und B1. When you’re hanging out with Chinese, you’re inevitably feeling stupid at some point, because you’re always losing track of conversations, no matter how hard you’re trying to focus. Another factor is that just learning characters isn’t enough and it’s not even the greatest challenge (it’s actually far easier than I imagined in the beginning). The biggest obstacle is the overarching vagueness of Chinese. Characters are vague, sentence structures are vague and even content can be vague. Take the common character 才 (cái). It means talent or ability, but also describes a person that has talent or skill, serving for gifted persons as well as a suffix for a few professions. It furthermore is used as “just” in certain sentence structures, sometimes also as “only” or “actually”. This vagueness doesn’t seem to be a problem if you learn it from early on. Anecdotal evidence shows that bilingual kids often prefer Chinese over grammar-heavy, structured languages like German. If however you happen to grow up in this frame of reference, the seeming arbitrariness of Chinese can drive you crazy. It means that often, despite being able to recognize every single character, I don’t know what the f*ck I’m reading. A little comfort: It was even worse in ancient times. Modern Chinese is less dense, often using two syllables with similar meanings to create a word that is less ambiguous. For example, 树 and 木 both have „tree“ as a meaning, so if you put them together to 树木, “tree” becomes the only possible meaning. Normal Chinese people are in fact not able to understand ancient Chinese either, when I recently asked a woman to translate an inscription of Lao-Tze’s life on a statue, she couldn’t help me.

The other big challenge is listening comprehension and correct pronunciation. Compared to English or German, the Chinese language offers little creative leeway for vocal expression. Despite there being 75 000 characters (of which even an academic however won’t use more than 10 000, less than half that for the normally educated), there are only 413 possible syllables for pronouncing them. This number goes up to 1522 if you account for the 4 (+1) tones – and this is where the fun starts. If you’ve never learnt a tonal language in your life, to grasp the concept of syllables meaning different things according to how you pronounce them takes at least half a year. It takes a lot longer until you’re actually pronouncing words the way you should, unless you’re in steady contact with native speakers. A little mind-boggling example: The two syllables qizi can mean, depending on their pronunciation: Wife, wife and children, adopted son, flag, piece in a game of chess or bottle opener. Of course, often context allows to make the correct guess. But even then, Chinese people are not very forgiving when it comes to pronouncing words. It makes sense to pay close attention to the tones when you can – by nature – use them correctly. So quite often you find yourself in situations, where you as a foreigner - knowing their struggles - can actually understand what another foreigner is trying to say in Chinese, but the Chinese cannot, because it’s mispronounced. Another feature of the very limited amount of syllables is that having just an idea of how a word should sound like is not enough to understand something, because hundreds of words will kind of sound like that. The last annoying thing I need to mention (there are so many more, but these are the major ones I think – if you’re reading this and learning Chinese, feel free to tell me about others) is that there’s no such thing as standard Mandarin (I just realized I used Chinese and Mandarin synonymous, please excuse this culturally insensitive mistake, I’m too lazy to skip through the whole thing again), every place has its own accents. In Taiwan for example, people don’t really care if they’re supposed to pronounce a sh-, ch- or zh-, it all sounds like s. In Beijing, people love to add heavy Texas-like r’s to the end of some syllables in patterns I will probably never be able to understand.

After reading the last paragraph, you might be wondering why the hell any Westerner would want to learn Chinese when the world is full of joy and beautiful things to do. Well, in my case, I think part of the reason actually is that it’s so damn hard. It sometimes really feels like learning to speak again. Minor achievements like being able to read a menu and order in Chinese at a restaurant feel epic. The realization that you’re actually able to write a simple letter consisting of nothing but characters that 2 years ago were completely enigmatic to you is fantastic. It really is more than another language, because by learning it, you’re learning another culture and another way of thinking alongside.

Not quite like back in the days

When I was done with high school and started this blog, my desire first and foremost was to see some countries that were

1. different from mine

2. affordable with my strictly limited budget.

The second point explains the pettiness with which I used to detail my daily expenses, bargaining successes and expensive setbacks. Though my financial circumstances have somewhat improved and I don’t have to count every penny anymore, the frugal, offbeat type of backpacking still appeals to me. So when I first heard that there’s going to be a whole week of holidays around China’s National day (1^st of October), I was eager to find some destination that wouldn’t be flooded by domestic tourists - I was halfway successful. 

China has two weeks of National holidays each year, one around the Spring festival (equivalent to our Christmas) and one around its National day. These are the times of the year where you might see bird’s eye view pictures of massive 12-lane streets covered entirely by lines of cars in your news show’s foreign segment. And who could blame the Chinese for wanting a nice time out when average paid-leave entitlement ranges between 5 and 10 days a year? Having said that, you don’t want to be around major touristic sights when 1 billion people are vacationing at the same time.

After my Chinese language tandem partner told me how much she misses her former university’s city Weihai (威海) and I could find no information about sights and neither an article in the Lonely Planet, I decided on going there. Located around 700km southwest of Bejing in Shandong Province, it is a mere 6-hour train ride to get there. While it has no specific attractions, its location along the shore and the mild climate made Weihai a favorite vacation home investment place for rich Chinese, a fact made visible by an endless amount of apartment skyscrapers with no lights on at night. It’s permanent population of less than 3 million is however tiny by Chinese standards. 

Weihai - A mere village

I spent two days in a youth hostel that didn’t have any other foreign guest but lots of young Chinese who equally hoped to avoid the National holiday crowds. Despite limited conversational capabilities, most of my time there was spent with that group and I doubt that my listening comprehension ever advanced at such a pace before. Since there wasn’t really that much to do, the focus was on the important things – food and 玩, which literally means playing but has a meaning so broad it can actually be used for pretty much anything that’s (supposedly) fun to do.

Playing "Werewolfes" in Chinese - I had no clue what was going on

The second part of my 5-day trip then was a bit less exhausting (having a conversation in Chinese at my level requires as much focus as dealing with a mathematical problem) and more traditionally vacation-like, though I felt some regret for my decision to continue to Qingdao as I fought my way through the crowd covering its seaside promenade. Built by the Germans and famous for its beer (also German), Qingdao is frequently cited as one of Asia’s most livable cities and looks much like Europe in its very center. 

Interestingly, there’s no ire here against the former colonial power, the German roots are instead proudly displayed. For one thing, it certainly helps that Germany didn’t take Qingdao by force, but leased the land to establish a trading post. Additionally, the Tsingtao brewery established by Germans for their own consumption and now Asia’s second most successful brand of beer as well as the sewerage systems installed are widely seen as benign gifts. Ultimately, I think the Chinese view of power politics and even their own partial colonialization is a lot more pragmatic and forward-looking than those of many other countries, with little condemnation for the fact that stronger countries subject weaker ones (it’s a very different thing if other countries committed cruelties like Japan did – their relationship is still overshadowed by the atrocities it perpetrated in the first half of the 20^th century).

Qingdao's skyline is literally lit

Chinese find Europe and its architecture very romantic and consequently like to marry in
front of it (this has usually nothing to do with religion).

Apart from getting flattering comments for our country of origin and fighting our way through crowds beleaguering tourist attractions (forgot to mention, I was now with two German co-students), we made use of the extensive availability of Tsingtao beer. On one of these occasions, I got to know a Chinese German studies student whose dedication to and focus on getting drunk baffled me. Within a single night he managed to pass out, regain power (to drink more) and pass out again three times. At times I felt he was born into the wrong society and how acceptable his drinking behavior would be had he grown up in rural Bavaria.

Looks like a chemical experiment, but is just Tsingtao IPA - at least
according to the shopowner

As you can tell from this loose connection of story threads, there were no major events during those five days and I was actually hoping for the trip to be like that. I made tons of acquaintances, saw some places that seem just nice to live in, experienced some bits of China that are not super international Beijing or Shanghai and probably learnt more Chinese than in one week in class. Of course, this short trip was nothing in comparison to the nine month epic thing I did five years ago (and, as time passes, sometimes struggle to believe I actually did), but then again, I don’t even think that I could enjoy such a long time of meandering and rambling at the moment. Ask me again after the upcoming four uninterrupted months of classes.