Chinatown Is Not Actually China

Chinatown is not Actually China



I have never been to China, but I have been to Chinatown.

I must have made my first visit when I was five or so, visiting California from Florida with my family. My memories of San Francisco are disembodied and somewhat bizarre chunks: the seals on the rock, the occasional hotel room. I don't remember anything about Chinatown.

The next Chinatown I visited was in Washington D.C, when I was eight. This was fascinating - the huge yellow and gold gate that failed utterly to jibe with its surroundings, the tremendous escalator I rode up somewhere within its confines - and the restaurant. We ate at a big dark restaurant there, and although I barely recall the food, I do recall a black marble cat that represented a live cat that had passed there sometime in the restaurant's former life. It represented China to me, somehow - a big heavy sculpture treated, fondly, as if it were alive. Whenever I thought of China I thought of the green and gold gate and the cat.

I have a favorite Chinatown now. I live an hour and a half from San Francisco and am there often, and the first place I go to, the place I always gravitate to, is Chinatown. It's dirty, crowded, packed with overweight tourists and spitting geriatrics, but I love it anyway. That combination of star anise, frying garlic, stale urine and tobacco smoke that hangs over the area in a doleful cloud is addictive. I would bottle it and sell it to myself.



In any case, I was there this Wednesday to pick up our Chinese visas at the consulate, which is, rather ironically, positioned right next door to Japantown. After passing the silent Falun Gong protesters positioned outside (and accepting a brochure chock full of gory photos,) I went inside and was astonished to find that the pickup line was both short and fairly effective. I had been expecting some Communist bureaucratic nightmare, but instead I simply found a mid-sized line, at the end of which a lady yelled at me in Chinese. She switched to English when she realized I was stupid, and we picked up the visas.

And so I wandered over to Japantown. Japantown was built as a sort of all-contained Japanese shopping center, and it certainly succeeds in that, although the Koreans are making considerable inroads. I wanted lunch but it was still a little early, and as I wandered the clean, sanitary, and orderly halls of the shopping mall, I found myself yearning for some spit and live game birds. I had planned on getting some ramen for lunch from one of the various noodle vendors in the neighborhood, but my heart wasn't in it. I needed to eat something funkier.

So I walked all the way down Geary in my very un-practical high heeled shoes, stopping off at a decrepit Thai place, which happened to have my favorite food in the Whole World: papaya salad with salty crab. Which you can see here.



But I always gravitate towards Chinatown magnetically, wherever I am in San Francisco, and I found myself walking under the gate once again, amused by the sudden transition from Starbucks and kitsch stores to The Wok Shop and mechanical singing crickets. I walked up the street for a bit, overhearing tourists (One smug man saying, "I don't THINK sushi is CHINESE!") punk ass local kids, and various shop keepers yelling at each other in Cantonese.




There is one thing you should know when you visit San Francisco Chinatown: get off the "main" tourist street (Grant) as soon as possible, and walk up to the street directly above it, Waverley. The tourists thin out almost magically and you will be alone in a sea of Chinese people buying weird looking fruit, live pheasants, and steam table dim sum. You may also encounter incredibly awesome cakes.

Learning Chinese: Oh Help Me God

A tattoo reading, indeed, "Fuck, everyone!" courtesy of Hanzi Smatter.com and BMEink.


It is often said that Chinese is a difficult language.

This is a vast understatement. Chinese seems to be contrived by some malignant force to screw with Westerner's heads. You go through life happily learning about grammar, past tense, dangling participles and all those other exciting aspects of the English language, and then you begin Chinese and, pysche, none of that applies anymore. You had better get really really good at memorizing all the various and exotic uses of "le", pal. Tones become of infinite importance, turning how you say something into a direct reflection of what you're saying. It's oft-repeated, but in Chinese, you really can accidentally call someone's mother a horse. (How awkward!) Mandarin, the official language of China, gives you four tones to contend with. Cantonese, the dialect common in the south and in Hong Kong, features six or seven. But of course, that's not all. A dizzying array of local dialects spread across the vast landmass of China, and that's not even taking into account the accents that can make two speakers of good ol' Mandarin mutually intelligible. One might feel compelled to give up.

I was stupid and, despite knowing all this, decided I would learn Mandarin.

Mandarin had romantic appeal to me. My mom majored in East Asian studies and speaks it, and since I wanted to go into international journalism, learning to speak a language a good billion people use seemed like an obvious choice. Sure, I knew it was difficult. I also knew that I had a profoundly lousy track record with learning other languages, exemplified by nine years of Spanish giving me the ability to haltingly ask for a beer and the location of the bathroom. I also am completely incapable of properly pronouncing words in English, yet alone in Mandarin - my mangled, horrific pronunciation is the source of much family amusement. If anyone shouldn't have bothered, it would be me.

Yet I was hopeful. Perhaps Mandarin would be different.

It wasn't. Mandarin was just as hard as I'd heard it was and probably more so, hastened by the fact that my college, true to its egg head routes, offers no "leisurely pace" language courses. No, everything was accelerated, which meant daily quizzes, drilling, and endless sheets of characters to memorize every night, regardless of parties, fatigue, or simple profound frustration.

It sucked. It sucked hard. I began to hate the mere sight of those crisp little flash-cards I would make for myself every single night, began to loathe the poorly drawn cartoon characters that narrated my text book. I would stay up late at night and plot Li You the foreign exchange students gory death at the claws of a rampaging panda bear. I came to the deep and startling conclusion that the Chinese ancients were actually, specifically, out to get me, a conviction that only deepened as my test scores got grimmer and grimmer. It seemed like all the work I put into Chinese seemed to retroactively worsen my grade. My smarter friends and classmates experienced momentary frustration but still breezed past the quizzes, picking up characters in five easy minutes. It took me two hours and I would still forget the little twisty thing at the top of the character for "student." Confucius say: Give it up, roundeye!

But I couldn't give it up. I needed a language class to get my Associate's Degree, and I had to see this thing through to the bitter end. Anyway, I was fully aware I was going to be spending the summer in China, and I'd be damned if I couldn't order a beer and find the bathroom in that language too. So I stuck it out, watching grimly as my eyes crossed over on themselves in yet another late night attempt to remember the character for "soy sauce glazed beef." (Who the hell cares?) If I got an F, it would at least have an apologetic panda sticker, for "You sure tried, dipshit!"

And things did get easier. I'd heard from my teacher that Chinese took him a while too. He had to rewire his brain from his English sensibilities and turn it over to those used in Chinese, had to get to a point where he could quickly process characters, associate the shape with the meaning. But after about half a year, something clicked, and characters and words came more easily. Everything stopped seeming so willfully, nastily, perverse.

He was right. Lo and behold, a few weeks into the second semester, something clicked. I could learn characters, even stupid ones, and actually remember them. I could slash and burn my way through oral exercises with a minimum level of competency. I could even speak Li You's parts on our spoken dialouges without choking on my own angry, angry bile. I was never going to be The Interpreter but yeah, I would probably be able to order a beer and find a place to pee in Beijing. Improvement had occurred.

Will being in China proper improve my Mandarin? I imagine it will. A language gains a lot more importance in one's psyche when it involves basic survival (or at least getting fed.) Being able to recognize essential characters will doubtless matter more when it means the difference between the men's and the women's bathrooms, or the difference between the ginger fish and the ginger fish testicles. I will grow as a person, grow as a learner of the world's most ancient, and perhaps most prestigious, language.

Or at least I will learn as many Chinese cuss words as humanly possible.

Examples of the many dangers of poorly used characters found here: Hanzi Smatter


THE Mandarin.

I Don't Know Anything About China

I don’t know anything about China.

A country with a six millennia old history doesn’t lend itself to cursory study. For a lily white American like me to comprehend it fully, I would have to perfect my Mandarin, learn a dialect or two, read the major works of Confuciusm, Taoism, and Legalism, look into a wide variety of Marxist texts, and learn how to differentiate between many similar looking earthen ware pots. I will not have the time to do this before I actually go to China, since I am writing this in June and I will be leaving in early July.

So I will have to resign myself to knowing nothing.

That means my visit to China will doubtless be a long succession of me being stupid, hopefully with more hilarious results then dangerous, injurious, or expensive ones. I know enough words of Mandarin to indicate that I like eating duck and I don’t like eating cats, and I can ask where the bathroom is if I don’t mutilate the tones. I probably don’t have to worry about being sold as a bride to a country farmer, and I don’t have any particular urge to practice Falun Gong. I’m not dumb enough to wander into any opium dens or Hong Kong transvestite sex parlors. I should be okay.

A lot of people are surprised when I say I am staying alone in China. I don’t see anything dangerous about it. I’m nearly 19 years old, I’m only moderately stupid, and I’ll be staying in a modern city. China’s crime rate is low – extremely low. China is one of the safest places I can think of for a foreigner to be. I’d be in more danger in Manhattan. I’d probably be in more danger in Tacoma. But it’s true: China is foreign, China has a language I am not comfortable with, China has people who think and act and look differently then I do. I think I’m okay with this. I hope I’m good enough to be okay with this.

I am going to Hong Kong where my mom grew up in the seventies, where we will probably have tea at the Peninsula, eat funky sea animal parts, and buy many pairs of knockoff sunglasses. Then we are going to Xi’an, where we will ogle terra cotta warriors, try the dumpling banquet, and look at the old bell tower in the center of town. Then it’s off to Xinjiang province, where we will visit Urumqi and Turfan, and probably evaporate into puffs of feckless condensation in the 112 degree desert heat. I will also see the lost city of Gaochang, eat pulled noodles, and make some totally inappropriate but hilarious Borat jokes due tot he proximity of the Kazakhstan border. And then I will go to to Beijing, where I will be all on my lonesome for four weeks of attempting to tease my Mandarin into a vaguely recognizable form. I will hopefully drink pijiu, visit the Ming Tombs, and shake my booty to some Mandarin punk rock – if all goes well.

I have one other distinguishing characteristic: I love food, and I especially love Chinese food. Due to my mother’s connection with Hong Kong, I was lucky enough to be raised eating the real and the good stuff on a regular basis, certainly more then most foreign devils get to. Thus, I am looking forward deeply to eating every single funky thing I can possibly find in China, sanitation be damned. If you notice a curious obsession with food coming through here, you’ are completely and totally right. Wo xihuan chi fan.

So this blog will be about China and how it was for me, and possibly about what I ate every day too. I can’t guarantee it will be interesting or well written, but it will definitely be my own, so help me God.

(Am I allowed to say that?)