David Bowie, Damien Rice, and Dave Matthews Band in a mixed whirl: Dongwangzhuang 东王庄

"你好. Please show us your student ID," says the service attendant.

"I'm just going to my room," I reply.

"We still need to see your ID."

"I don't have mine on me."

"It's for your safety."

"Against what?"

After a few more seconds of haggling with the attendants, I climb the three flights and tread the hallway down to my dorm room. The aftersmell of an overused mop lingers. As I take off my shoes, a droplet of water from the ceiling soaks into my shoulder. The air conditioner is still not fixed. The ceiling panel is darkening with spots of black and green. After a swig of Pocari Sweat (a popular beverage in Asia, also known as Monkey Sweat), I lay down on my hard bed. It is moist.

On the fifth floor whiteboard, someone has put up an advertisement - "2BR Apt in 东王庄, 3000approx./month, if interested call Wiley!" During my hour break, I call Wiley. Immediately we set up a meeting to look at the apartment and meet the landlords. The landlords are an old couple who live in the vicinity. The wife, Ai-yi, reminds me of my grandmother - the way she wields her fan threatens her timid husband, who doesn't collect money until Ai-yi spreads her fan.

Outside, I hear the hooting of pigeons and chirps of sparrows on the first floor balcony and overworked air conditioners groaning. The elderly yell at each other - the accent is too strong for me at this point. With the smack of a playing card on a makeshift wooden desk, a man showing off his round Buddha stomach yells "Wo Cao!" (Profanity) Around the wastebins, ladies squabble over the ownership of a few plastic water bottles.

As soon as I sign my lease agreement with the landlords, I bike back to my dorm and scramble to pack everything before the Foreign Student Affairs Office closes for the night. After an hour, everything is squeezed in two pieces of luggage, two bookbags and two boxes. Unfortunately, no taxis are around. A white unmarked car drives up.

"Where are you going?" he asks.

"Dongwangzhuang. I need to move a few stuff as well. Will your car handle the weight?"

"No worries."

The man looks like he was part of some Chinese gang with his huge tattoo on his deltoid enlarging every time he flexes. We quickly stuff all of my clothes and books into his trunk and are on the road. If all unmarked cab drivers are like this man, then I don't know why I'm still riding state-regulated taxis. He gives me recommendations on the best restaurants, best markets to buy household goods, and best places to meet Chinese girls. "My neighborhood has too many of them. Come by, we'll have some baijiu (vodka, but not really) and I'll introduce you to a few." We exchange phone numbers. He promises to call.

The first few days in the apartment I furiously organize my library, clean the kitchen, dust my bedroom, mop the floor and pay the internet bill. I have announced that I will hold a "happy hour" at my place for IUP students to mingle and bond over wine and snacks. Fortunately, I am sponsored by IUP with an allowance of 500RMB. After running around the Lotus Center and only finding disappointing Great Wall red wine (a soury excuse for vinegar), Jason and I head to the Carrefour store in Zhongguancun. The Carrefour store in Beijing is the size of Costco, but nothing is sold in wholesale. That doesn't seem to stop the locals from taking advantage of the lower than average prices and the wide selection of imported goods. Fortunately, in the evening lots of IUPers come to warm up the apartment. I'll admit it - the happy hour was a good cover for my housewarming party. Over Alcantra and Merlot, we pass the night identifying Chinese emperors and government officials on playing cards. I was hoping for a rowdy game of Kings.

As with any new environment, time is necessary to adapt. My daily commute to IUP has doubled. I actually have to learn to cook, force myself to go the market and buy cheap packaged noodles, or drag myself to the restaurants in the area - the cafeteria is no longer fifty meters away. Over Skype, I've asked my mother for a few recipes. Apparentely, to make a good stew, all I need is some vegetables, ground meat, cooking oil, spices and water. I've also been pestering the teachers to teach me some Chinese plates. In any case, would anyone like to be my foodtaster?

While at one of Beijing's best jazz clubs called the OT Lounge at Jianguomen, Carol told me of a doctor who learns another language to see life from another perspective and wrote a book about her reflections. I suppose I am attempting the same thing - to approach life from a younger perspective, to force myself in a strange environment that changes as fast my vocabulary and thoughts change. This past Friday, IUP held its Speech Day. I related my years working as a waiter in San Francisco. I expected the speech to be difficult because I was using Chinese, but because I was speaking about bundles of experiences and emotions buried in my mind and heart, the speech wrote itself on the podium. I am surprised how much clear my thoughts are when I speak Chinese now - perhaps its all due to more subtle adjectives and verbs that are now in my vocabulary, but I do not feel the need to memorize anymore. I speak from the gut.

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An Off-Broadway Show: A Place to Live.

April 7th : Ms. Jia, the housing assistant at IUP, sent a short email with a long attachment. With Tsinghua University Foreign Student Affairs Office’s lack of immediate response on the availability of dorms for IUP students, Ms. Jia urged all students to find off-campus housing as soon as possible. The attachment, The Renter’s Handbook, reads like Moses’ commandments - “When negotiating with the landlord, thou shall demand accompaniment to the police office to file for the residency permit” - “Thou shall demand the landlord to operate all appliances to ensure proper usage.” While I was still at school, I didn’t have time to find an apartment, so as soon as I got home I went through one housing site after another, my Chinese electronic dictionary in one hand, the mouse in the other, searching for an affordable place. The Olympics hype cranked up rent rates up to twice the usual rates at most places.

I found an apartment in the Huaqing Jiayuan complex, not ten minutes from my university campus. Fully furnished, safe, close to the market and school - for twice the price of the university dorm (6500RMB per month). Considering that it was the lowest price tag I had found within such close proximity to my Chinese program, I sent an email to the landlord, agreeing that I will live in her apartment for a year and requesting wire transfer information as well as the lease agreement, on which I would send her a scanned copy of my signature. I informed the Light Fellowship Director and asked for a increase on my summer housing budget.

May 20th: Ms. Jia sends another email: “DORMITORIES AVAILABLE! Reserve quickly!”

Frustration.

The next few emails I exchanged with the landlord to cancel the lease, at least the ones she sent me, weren’t pretty. A Chinese neighbor told me that the first affirmative email I sent was as good as the lease agreement or any red Chinese print seal. I was lucky, the neighbor said, to not have been demanded some fee for canceling everything that I had negotiated.

As much as I enjoyed exchanging letters with the landlord in Chinese, the days of this pleasant-culturally-ignorant-and-naïve-American-student-studying-Chinese personality ended. I feel as though the landlord let me go not just out of her kindness but because I didn’t know the subtle formalities in Chinese business.
Chinese business lesson #1: Know the customs.

On a brighter note, my visa just came today. The visa company even gave me a plastic cover for my passport.

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