Far away so near

If I've been remiss about keeping up with the posts on this blog, it's in part because communication, even from China, is now so easy and multifaceted -- email, Facebook, Skype, cell phone, etc. -- that the only true impediment to it is the government's arbitrary (and easily circumvented) censorship, rather than cost or distance, and the blog is just an outlet among several. As long as I'm at Starbucks or any number of other wifi locations off campus, or as long as I use my TA Joe's Netpas (yes, one "s") login, the world is at my fingertips and I can Skype from my iPhone to a landline, update my Twitter account, or exchange any amount of data with anyone (I typically download Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC in the background on iTunes while I'm slurping my overpriced iced mocha.) Setting up the blog, I admit I was still entertaining a romantic notion of China as the quintessence of remoteness, a notion that harkens back to Marco Polo's day, but in reality it's very much part of the connected globe, and so the idea of writing a blog with dispatches from far away, as if it were as tentative and fragile as a message in a bottle, has been washed up by a data tsunami on a digital shore littered with such bottles.
I'm not sure that the metaphor quite holds (water), but anyway...The other reason I've let time elapse is because we've settled into a kind of routine of teaching, rehearsing, shopping, scrounging for food, etc. Even doing a play in Beijing becomes remarkably normal after a while. Until Joe Graves returned yesterday (more about that later), David and I had been effectively orphaned and made in many small and large ways to fend for ourselves. Our presumptive contact and minder Sebastian has been nowhere in evidence, and so getting anything done, from figuring out banking, shopping, and procuring cell phone cards, to obtaining a faculty ID (which identifies us as "foreign experts"), necessary to get past the guards at the campus gates, has been dependent on our own resourcefulness or the kindness of strangers.
Especially going to restaurants is still something of an adventure. Don't ask what our favorite dishes are; to our knowledge we haven't ever ordered the same thing twice (mostly because we can't recall what we ordered before). We usually have to order by pointing at some picture or other and hoping that what looks appetizing in the photo isn't fried bees, snake soup, or old turtle stew (I'm not making these up; we've actually encountered these, though not ordered them). The staff is often a bit impatient with our evident inability to speak even simple Chinese, and in fact seems puzzled that there could be such a thing as a non-Chinese-speaking person.
In one restaurant, to which we've gone several times, they smile indulgently at us when we come in, which we are willing to endure because the dishes are good and cheap (8-10 yuan). It's better than being spoken to at high volume in rapid Chinese, as if we were simply hard of hearing, and we'd understand if whatever was being said were repeated often enough with no change of inflection and no attempt to add an explanatory gesture. Who knows what we've actually ordered and eaten these last two weeks. Sometimes you just have to eat a spoonful of peanut butter or a yoghurt to reset your stomach. There are certain things we haven't been able to find. I am nonplussed that there seems no cinnamon anywhere (to put on my oatmeal). David is on a futile quest for limes for his gin and tonic. The last time he bought limes, they turned out to be mandarins with green skin.
The traffic is absolutely stark raving mad, and they'll just as soon run you over as look at you. We marvel at how such a thoroughly collectivized society, with its professed ideals of social equality and mutual respect turns so utterly Darwinian when loosed on the streets. Traffic signals mean nothing, and pedestrians are at the bottom of a food chain that starts with busses at the top. The simple rule is: get out of the way of anything larger than you. Our assumption is that the street is a kind of primal scene in which the Chinese compensate for all of the other psychic pressures in their life.
These are minor irritations, of course. (Well, ok, I guess if I were flattened by a bus, that would be a major irritation.) The students, by contrast, are very much aware of the world outside, and seem very conscious of their place as the elite in a rapidly transforming society. They strike a balancing act -- we have interesting discussions about this in class -- between pride in China and loyalty to its post-Maoist principles, and their sense of being players on a global stage, the values of which they have to understand, if not embrace.
In the next post, I'll write about rehearsals and Joe's return.