Seth’s blog

In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character, a Russian defector, goes into a New York supermarket and faints: So many brands of breakfast cereal! Whereas my head merely spun when I shopped for headphones and encountered hundreds of choices in a building near me. It’s an electronics mall, full of office-sized booths each with a different owner and product line. Maybe eight  specialize in headphones. In Berkeley I live miles from a Circuit City where I might find four or five headphones I’d consider. Radio Shack is closer; they might have two or three possibilities. In Beijing several of these electronic malls are near me.

During my Chinese lesson with the girl who sold me my cell phone I told her that after the lesson I was going to shop for headphones — the electronics mall is across the street. How much do you want to spend? she asked. About $40, I said. Because you are a foreigner, they may cheat you, she said. Her boss went away and came back with two choices. One was $40, the other about $60. After the lesson I went to the mall. I found the $40 headphones. Price: $9. Before bargaining. I went back to my teacher and told her what had happened. She spoke to her boss. She came back and said: Maybe it wasn’t the real product. As if someone would counterfeit a brand (Somic) you’ve never heard of. It was exactly the same item.

“One bed two dreams” is a Chinese proverb. Here the two dreams were $9 and $40. In One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes, “The Chinese will ask you for anything because you just may be stupid enough to agree to it.” It has nothing to do with being a foreigner. “In China business, the expectation is to be cheated,” says McGregor. A friend of mine graduated from Beijing University, one of the top two schools in the country, with a finance major. She got a real estate job in Shanghai, her home town. When she got there her salary was half of what she had been promised.

I’ve been here a month. I’d been here before — not just to Beijing but this exact area. I taught a month at Beijing University, right next to Tsinghua, met lots of PKU students, who are similar to Tsinghua students. So many aspects of life here don’t surprise me. But here are four things that have surprised me.

1. The beauty of the Tsinghua campus. It’s huge, more like a village than a campus, and it has an unusual Jane-Jacobsian beauty. Lots of new building, lots of old buildings, vast diversity of uses (elementary school, high school, big natatorium, little corner shops that repair bikes, barbers, tailors), lots of paths of different sizes through lots of greenery. Few cars, lots of bikes. It isn’t pedestrian friendly because things are so far apart but it is very bike-friendly. Basically quiet.
2. How much time I spend bike riding. Perhaps an hour in a typical day. It is still a little scary to ride outside campus but I have seen a vast amount of bike riding and no accidents. There are big bike lanes — very different from Japan.
3. How slowly I am learning Chinese. I thought I would learn in some conventional way — hire a tutor, go through a textbook — but the one tutor I tried was boring and the conversational textbooks teach stuff people never say (just as my Chinese friends reply to “thank you” with “not at all”). But I do have a burning desire to learn, it is connecting that desire with the right knowledge that is the problem. Ideally I would have someone with me all the time and when I wanted to say something or understand something I would be told the answer.
4. How rarely I leave my neighborhood. I’ve gone downtown once. I went somewhere else once. Just getting internet access has taken a significant amount of time.

Basically I’ve been turned into a child. Learning the language, bike riding, not going far from home. Fortunately without school to attend.

Today I went to a special building, only a 10-minute drive from my office, to get a physical exam needed for a special visa. The administrative assistant of the Psychology Department accompanied me. We set off about 8 am. He mentioned a vision exam so I went back to my apartment to get another contact lens. (I wear just one, so that I have good vision both near and far.) Then we tried to get a taxi. We found one but, stuck in traffic, it went nowhere. After 10 minutes or so, we got out. We decided to go in the administrative assistant’s car (he prefered to take a taxi because he didn’t know where the building was.) It’s now 9:10 am. We set off. We reach the building around 9:20. Oops — I forgot my passport. We get a taxi to take us back to campus so I can get it. The driver tries to cheat us by taking a long route. On the way back — on a reasonable route — we get stuck in traffic again. We get out of the taxi. We’d like to go back to the exam building, pick up the administrative assistant’s car, and take a different route back, but that would require crossing six lanes of busy highway to get a taxi going in the right direction. That’s too scary so eventually we get a taxi that goes back to campus via another route. Now it’s too late to do the exam. We’ll try again early tomorrow. For some reason — exhaust fumes? too much sitting in a car? — my head hurts.

More What a difference a day makes. I went back the next morning and there were no problems at all. We found a taxi easily, the trip was fast and smooth, the exam didn’t take long, and the trip back was fast and smooth. We passed a man trying to start his car in the middle of a big street.

This morning (Sunday), two friends and I wanted to go see the leaves change on some maple trees in a famous place. We went to the bus stop. The first three buses were utterly, totally packed — I have never seen buses so packed.

So we decided to take a taxi. The taxi couldn’t go there — congestion was so bad that only buses, using special lanes, could get through.

We went back to the buses. Three or four more buses were utterly totally packed. We decided to go another time.

In the time we spent waiting for the buses we could have almost walked there; it’s only about 5 miles away. Maybe next time we will bike there.

This recently happened in a class at the Beijing Language and Culture University:

TEACHER Your milk is safe if you buy it at a supermarket.

STUDENT What do you mean, “supermarket”? Where else could you buy it?

TEACHER That’s a good question, I don’t know the answer. They told us to say that.

When analyzing their data, a vast number of scientists more or less blindly do what a statistics book told them to do, just as this teacher said what she’d been told to say. Even worse, a vast number of statistics textbook writers simply copy other textbooks (not word for word, just the ideas and recommendations). The scientists and the textbook writers take refuge in false certainty. They fail to grasp that although the recommendations are black and white, the world is not — just as it isn’t black and white what milk is safe. Unlike this particular classroom, no one questions this.

Thanks to Sally McGregor.