䷌ 同人 Seeking harmony among people. Prosperous and smooth. Favorable to cross great rivers. Favorable for the superior person to be steadfast and upright.

After the first weeks

After a few weeks I was settled in with a friend group, the “Sum Dinner Folks.” We had lunch together almost every day, we had our wechat group chat, and we would frequently get dinner and go out together. It was great to have a core group of people, and we could all rely on each other for anything. We’d go out to visit landmarks, eat together, party together, study together, hang out at each others dorms/apartments, and just enjoy China.

Same in our classes: The entire class got along, and we would have fun breaks where we would try to teach each of our language’s profanity to each other. My go-to word was “cuck” since it was embedded in the 2016 election and everyone else already heard of the other bad words. For lunchtime, if plans with the Dinner Folks fell through, we could always go with classmates to the cafeteria or nearby restaurants.

Living with a Chinese Grandma

My living situation was such that I had my own room close to campus and activity for 1500元/mo. This is a good price for the area for a first-time foreigner. The only problem is that I wasn’t alone – There was a grandma, a grandpa, a delivery driver, and a Korean student there, and on top of that the grandma/grandpa’s daughter and the daughter’s daughter would be there a lot, so it was a noisy place and I studied away from it at any opportunity. For example, I had to record a 30 minute presentation about Chinese hip-hop for my undergraduate thesis. 15 minutes into the recording, the entire family got into a shouting match and I had to cancel the recording and redo it later.

Originally when I leased the house I asked if I could use the kitchen. They said yes. But when I moved in and started cooking, the grandma said I could not and that I should instead eat at the cafeteria. I tried explaining my situation, that I wanted to learn Chinese cooking, but it ended in a compromise that I could boil water at the most.

This came to be a problem when I was boiling water for tea on the stove while getting my running clothes on. I forgot all about it, went out for a run, and while on the track suddenly realized that the water was still boiling and made a mad dash back to the apartment. Luckily the water just finished boiling, so all that was hurt was the pot which was discolored. From that point on they didn’t let me in the kitchen.

Alcohol and Party Life

I’ve never been a “party guy” myself, but since a lot of the foreigners really enjoyed this side of life and I was always jumping at opportunities to socialize, this was something I did a lot.

Northwest of the old Republic capital (A bit less than 100 years ago this was the capital of China!) is the premier bar/club district of Nanjing, “1912 Bar District.” Since there’s really no official drinking age beyond “don’t look like a child,” it’s overrun with drunk irresponsible 16-21 year olds and is a great place to see the kind of debauchery you wouldn’t normally see in China. This is where we ended up every couple of weekends.

There were a few concerns and things I felt guilty about: I would be speaking only English and not learning Chinese, it would be hard getting up the next day due to staying out late or a hangover, the alcohol would hurt my body and liver, it would be expensive, etc. But all those were mostly alleviated: I never drank too much so it didn’t hurt my health. I would talk to Chinese people there and my confidence improved with a few beers. Foreigners had a different status, so it was easy enough to go to nearby convenience stores and buy alcohol to smuggle into dance clubs, or clubs would have free drinks for foreigners. The only part that I had trouble with was staying productive the next day, since I would be tired from dancing, walking, and drinking and sometimes miss out on activities on Saturdays and Sundays.

There were some exciting times and stories with friends, like breaking into a closed movie theatre with Dani, random pictures outside clubs, seeing plenty of fights, watching the world cup in Blue Marlin… There was a time that I was walking home at 8pm after studying ready to sleep after buying some snacks. Some Americans from John Hopkins saw me and told me that there was a bar opening up nearby called “Clockwork” and some friends were playing there. We went there, saw the band, and went to an Ellens afterward. There was an African DJ playing there who gave us some free drink tickets. I chatted with him afterward when he was done playing and we ended up taking a taxi with his friend to 1912 and went to the Ellens there. There we met some more DJs and danced until the daylight. These kinds of nights were memorable, and it was always fun meeting the people that made the party happen.

But even though it was a great time at first, it eventually got old and I haven’t stepped back in that district at night for many months. The music was always the same, the free alcohol was fake, the strangers were usually boring, the rooms way too smokey, and people would always want to go to the same places. I would be out there in a club and be wishing I was writing something or coding or practicing Chinese or sleeping. It wasn’t expensive, but was more expensive than staying in. I eventually found some people that felt the same way, so going out didn’t always mean going to these places.

Later Living Arrangements

Later I ended up living with an English teacher very close to class. He was from Chicago and had his visa, house, and expenses sponsored by an English teaching company, and he liked board games like me. It was chance meeting on a wechat housing group and he said initially that I didn’t have to pay (but had me pay 1000元 later) and I moved in a day after meeting him. It was a two bedroom apartment with a cat, and I could use the kitchen! Although it was on the 5th floor, it wasn’t too bad of a climb.

My roommate didn’t speak and English, so it was a tricky situation for him to live in China. People were always trying to scam him, something I didn’t see too often. I would try to let him figure this out on his own, but would help him a bit. An example of this is when he hired an “Ayi” to clean his house. He miscommunicated and instead had a pair of “sanitation workers” come over who cleaned all the grime from the bathroom and kitchen, but didn’t do his laundry, tidy, and clean his sheets like he’d expect from an ayi. So he complained to the woman who set this all up, but in the end had me translate, and she explained this situation.

After all this transpired, the woman approached him on wechat (which has a translate function) and told him the cat scratched him and she needed 1000元+ for medical expenses. This was obviously a lie since the cat was literally locked in a separate room this entire time. She was in the room to introduce the two workers and come to hear the roommate’s complaint, but never knew about the cat beyond me telling her “don’t open this door there’s a cat in there.”

In the end my roommate settled for 100元 or so, and his Chinese friend got rid of the cat.

Misc Experiences During this Time

It’s easy enough to go back through my journals and photos to see what I all did during this time, but some are more interesting than others and it’s hard to sort by quality with so much quantity. So I’ll just bullet some stuff that happened but doesn’t warrant an entire section.

• Climbing Purple Mountain: Through the AIC organization I ended up formally joining later, we had a trip to climb Purple Mountain. “Mountain climbing” is the Chinese term for these activities, but in reality it’s typically hiking up a mountain which usually involves a lot of stairs.
• On March 30th we had a chance to go to Zhenjiang to see two sites: Cishou Pagoda and the Jiaoshan Scenic Area.
• Exploring Xianlin Campus: The Xianlin campus is the newer Nanjing University campus that they’re steadily migrating most classes to, especially for undergraduates. It’s basically a newly-constructed small city for undergraduates, so there’s a strong university culture. The library was well designed and has robots that shelve books. Unlike American college campuses which have typically grown over many decades, this was made specifically for the purpose and is laid out in an efficient and beautiful way.
• Talking: There’s a bar less than a minute from the door of our class building called “Talking,” and lots of students would be there for the 10元 pints of Tiger beer (no tip!). This became a common hang-out spot for friends, a place to meet new people, a way to get to know the classmates, or get together with new acquaintances.
• Nannar Cafe: There’s a cafe on the westernmost end of Hankou Road above a print shop, which might be closed now. It was pretty expensive for 20元 for an Americano, but there was a group of people I hung out with there and studied with that took up a big table so I could blend in and get away with paying maybe only a third of the time. The group was diverse, with some Chinese, Koreans, English, Americans, Germans, Lithuanians, and some others that would show up there almost every weekday. There were some great memories made here, and it got me studying more than I normally would. There was a particularly memorable moment when I cooked everyone a dinner at one of their apartments. I still chat with some of them to this day!
• Buzz Cut: Since buzzcuts make me “look like a nazi” according to friends in the US, getting one in China was the only time I would be able to rock the hair cut. Especially during the hot Nanjing summer, it was nice to feel the breeze on my head.

Retrospective & Lessons Learned

The world is a huge place with lots of different people. Especially after meeting people between Europe and China that didn’t speak English but were learning Mandarin (Russia, Middle East, and Western Asia specifically) I realized how different people fundamentally can be in terms of personality and lifestyle. China is like this too, but I was used to it from my first time in China. This is really hard to explain, but just trying to find common ground to communicate with somebody that you can only communicate with in Chinese as both of your second languages is really fascinating.

Being in as many wechat groups as possible leads to lots of opportunities.

The first months in China were fantastic and full of opportunity. Going into March and April, it still felt like there was a full year of being in the country ahead, so there was a sense the future was endless. Anything we didn’t do today could be done tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Our Chinese improved so quickly, and we really felt like China experts.

One hard problem for me to deal with at this time was relationships with Chinese people, the duration from stranger to friend. I’m a white guy that matches most of the characteristics of the average “foreigner” archetype they might see on TV (tall short blonde-ish hair blue eyes), so there’s a lot of people that really want to be friends with me because of this. They don’t know my personality, they don’t know if I can speak Chinese… They just see a guy that they want to be seen with. This happened a lot: I would meet some girl or guy and plan to hang out, then they would invite all their friends to look at me, take pictures with me, etc. They would ask the same questions and tell me the same things about their country (I’d eventually call it ‘China-splaining’). The most common occurrence would be where I would meet someone, we would meet again and they would insist on treating me to something, and then I would find that it was hard talking to them and finding common interests. This happens with foreigners and people back in the US, but there isn’t that same level of tying ourselves together by spending money on each other or the persistence of the other person trying to make a foreign friend. “Owing someone” is a powerful thing.