Eff Lanterns… Let’s Get Horns!

So this week is the first full week of classes. When I woke up on Monday morning, I was still kind of tired, so I guess the jet lag is finally wearing off. The weather is beautiful here. It’s been between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit for the past few days, so you don’t even need a jacket when you go outside. Most of my professors say that it shouldn’t get too much colder. I am really excited about this!

At 9:00 AM I had Chinese class. We moved even faster than last time. In just two classes we already have over 100 vocabulary words so I already know a lot of the practical things I need to say to order food, go shopping, etc. I really like Chinese. The hardest part about learning the language is definitely the tones. I can remember the spellings, meanings, and pronunciations, but sometimes it is really hard to remember the tone marks. We do our homework for Chinese together for each class, so we definitely have some major studying to do tonight in order to prepare for class tomorrow.

After class, we were finally able to get our meal cards on campus. Some of the restaurants on campus are starting to open again now that Chinese New Year is over, however all of the cafeterias and eateries will not be open until next week. The Chinese students at Beida start class next Monday. It will be nice when campus is really busy because for the past week and a half we have been the only ones on this huge campus. I think once there are more students around, Beida will really have a big campus feel. Using our meal cards, we went to the jiaozi (dumpling) house on campus. It was really good and really cheap! Two scoops of jiaozi, or about a dozen dumplings cost me 3 kuai, which is about 50 cents in US dollars.

After lunch I met with Dr. Wu, my professor for my independent study on Chinese Women’s Studies in the lounge of the history department. We walked around campus and then we walked to her office so she could give me my textbooks. Dr. Wu is really cool. She is pretty young. She received her master’s degree from Penn State and just returned to Beida from the University of Maryland where she received her PhD in August. She is a professor in the sociology department. We had a really good discussion about different feminisms and the translation of the word feminism into the Chinese language. At first, the word “feminism” was translated into the Chinese characters for women’s rights. However, a lot of Chinese women, aside from my professor who is a really cool hardcore feminist, felt that this translation was too strong and rebellious. The current translation of the word “feminism” in China is “femininity,” which both my professor and I feel is too weak of a translation, but is generally more accepted in Chinese society. I feel like it’s going to be really easy to have one-on-one discussions with Dr. Wu. The first book she assigned me is actually a novel about the lives of three generations of Chinese women, which will be followed by a more academic book on these topics. I’m really looking forward to reading the novel, called Wild Swans. I will probably start it tonight.

Monday was the last day of Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year traditionally ends with the Lantern Festival. Some of the program advisors recommended that we go to the festival, but we didn’t really know what to expect or exactly how to get there. We got out our maps, planned our trip and left campus around 4:45. We rode the Beijing subway for about an hour and a half and got off by the Pearl Market. We kept trying to ask the people around us for directions to the festival and we walked for about two hours without really knowing where we were. After about two hours, we decided that we had probably missed the lantern festival anyway and to save the night, we would take cabs to Tiananmen Square, have dinner, and celebrate the year of the ox.

When we arrived, Tiananmen Square looked beautiful. We saw the Mao Mausoleum and all of the other buildings around the square lit up. There were huge fireworks going off in every direction and tons of crowds. The funniest thing was that all of the Asians were wearing light up horns on their heads. They looked like devil horns and it took a second for me to realize that they were ox horns for the year of the ox. After dinner, we went on a mission to buy ox horns, which we did, but only after buying ice cream at KFC (which is actually really good). We also found other mei guo ren (Americans) who took a group photo of us wearing our horns in Tiananmen Square across from the Mao Mausoleum. The Chinese people thought we were pretty silly, but loved us, kept shouting hello, and wanted to take pictures with us. Some of them even shook our hands, gave us hugs, and kisses on the cheek.

We left Tiananmen Square and headed back to Beida in cabs. We got dropped off right outside of campus because we wanted to light off fireworks. At midnight on Monday, fireworks became illegal in China again and they don’t sell them on the street anymore. We bought some really big fireworks and went to the big lake on campus to set them off.

Although our night didn’t end up the way we planned, it actually ended up being one of the most fun nights in Beijing so far. I absolutely love the group of friends I am making here. Most of my friends here actually go to AU and we can’t believe we have never met before. We are actually already talking about reunions once we are back in DC. We didn’t get back to the dorms until after midnight, but Marie and I were pretty awake and pumped up from such a fun night. We wore our ox horns and danced around to Billy Joel, did some homework, and went to sleep… only in China haha!