Friday March 28,
Hope and Lily pack up and return to the ol’ USofA. I am jealous. When I last wrote, let me see, we had no lights one day, no electricity in the outlets the next, no hot water for two days, and was told by “Horace”, no internet, but apparently that still works. So Friday comes along, Hope and Lily take off and I go to do a load of laundry and take a shower. NO water! No hot, no cold, nada. Joy of Joys! It is raining in Beijing for the first time in six weeks, and ironically TODAY there is no water. I pick up the apartment, move the furniture, rummage through collected debris, and about two hours later, the water is running, brown at first, but then clear, so I do the laundry and take my shower. The heat has been off for a few weeks, everywhere in Beijing, but today is so damp the laundry is taking forever to dry. Katie comes home from school and we hang around here, have some of our glorious Annie’s mac and cheese for dinner. She plays computer games while I watch the movie “Michael Clayton” that Celine gave me on the other computer. It is the first day since I have been here that I did not leave the apartment. I needed a down day.
Saturday March 29
Wake up and first thing I do is use the toilet and attempt to flush, but it overflows. I am plunging like a maniac, but no dice. The lovely contents are spilling over. I clean up as much as possible, get dressed and call Mercy. I’ve had enough. This place is a disaster. Like a little exclamation point, the curtain rod that holds up the shower curtain crashed on Katie’s head during her shower this morning. I tell Mercy to get a plumber over here asap. She says she’ll come over herself, but I say that won’t do. I am taking Katie to a friend’s and I will be out until it is fixed.
I take Katie all the way across town to Exilia’s and we have the opportunity to stumble upon the pool, spa, gym, and playground in Exila’s apartment complex. She is steps from a grocery store. She is on the subway line….not that she needs it, she has a car. Not everyone in Beijng is living like we are, and for the first time in my life I am insanely jealous of someone else’s material goods. I am the ugly American. I want that pool in MY building. I want an elevator that is well lit and does not smell of sewage. And yes, I know, it is one of the Ten Commandments to not covet your neighbor’s goods…..but, sorry Mom, I am COVETING my neighbor’s toilet!!
I spend the day on the subway, popping up at various stops to see the sites, find an English language book store, and later a Daoist temple with the most bizzaro statues where humans turn into animals or demons in one of the 18 levels of hell. Funny, weird and scary all at once. I get back to Exilia’s at
The three of them go into the bathroom and I go into the study to cry. It is also about 30 degrees outside now, at
Sunday
Quiet Day hanging around the house. Celine calls mid afternoon and says her parents want to take us to dinner. They pick us up at 5 and we head to a restaurant that serves food from
Monday
I head out to Chinese language class and the classroom has HEAT! Someone has managed to get the AC unit to generate heat. Too much for most students but I am sitting right under the heater and it is blasting me and I am happy, happy, happy. When the students complain that it is too hot, the teacher, in very Chinese fashion, says she does not control it, and moves on. Well, someone controls it, someone got it to work this morning, someone must know how to turn it off or down. Not her. “I do not control it.”
I am not learning much Chinese, but at least I am warm!
My office is colder than the apartment so I opt to stay home and work under a blanket. I attempt to get our air conditioner to turn into a heater. I find the remote for the AC unit and turn it on, but all I get is cold air. Of course, the remote is all labeled in Chinese, so I don’t know what buttons to push. I am preparing three lectures, one on the First Amendment, one on McCarthy and Murrow, and one on New Media that I will present in Shanghai next week. A very productive day, and the laptop generates enough heat that I keep it on my lap like a little kitten to keep me warm.
Tuesday
Go into my freezer of an office for office hours and get a lot of work done. No visitors. Because it is April Fool’s Day, I am going into class pretending to be Hillary Clinton and the students are going to have a mock press conference with Hillary. It is a big hit. They were very well prepared, and caught “Hillary” in a few gaffes (what is her position on
Wednesday
Katie has no school because it is conference day (and she hasn’t been here long enough for the teacher to want a conference with us yet) so Celine is supposed to be here at 10 to babysit. At 10, the cleaning people arrive and I decide Katie and I should go to my office and wait for Celine. My student Eve arrives and meets Katie. She asks if she is Chinese and I reply yes, from
Off I go to class and bore the students to death with First Amendment Law. Instead of inspiring them, this topic seems so remote from their reality, they are more glazed over than usual. At the end of class we talk about press reform and whether there are any efforts to try to change the system here, to open a dialogue between journalists and the government propaganda office, but only one student seems engaged and optimistic, the rest seem so resigned “this is China”, “that’s just the way it is”, “we are used to it”. It is sad but painfully realistic. Rocking the boat here is a very bad idea. Most of these students were too young to remember Tiananmen 1989, and none learned about it at school; all they have known is
Intellectually I knew that the Chinese had immense control over individual’s lives here, but in reality it is even more pervasive than I could ever imagine. Obviously on the big issues, family planning or free speech, there is total control. But on even the littlest things, the government dictates your life. Take the heat, for example. The city of
I head home and Katie is still out with Celine. Around
Katie and Celine arrive and Katie is too enamored with Celine to be sufficiently grateful to Eve, but I insist we oooooh and ahhhh over the Yiyang food: dried fish snacks, bean powder, noodles, and sesame cookies. (The cookies were not bad). I ask Katie if she wants to ask Eve anything about Yiyang or would like to return to Yiyang with Eve. Katie has no questions and does not care if we go to Yiyang. She is clearly not into this self-exploration. Eve leaves and Celine (who we are now calling the Saline Solution) plays with the AC remote and gets the HEAT to come out of the AC!!!! I am jumping up and down with joy. The heat is only in two of the four rooms but I find a fan and try to draw it down to my bedroom and the living room. Amazing what a little warmth can do for one’s disposition. All in all, a really good day.
Thursday.
I was supposed to go into NBC News today to talk about staying through the Olympics but my contact there was sick and cancelled. We’ll try again in a few weeks. I am not terribly optimistic and not completely sure I want to be here that long.
I spend the morning tackling the power point presentation for the four lectures on new media that I’ll give in
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