the Sam Jackson College Experience

My dedicated readers will no doubt already be aware, but for those who missed a beat: I am currently writing a biweekly column for the Yale Herald about reflections from my return from studying in China last semester. The last column was about the way institutional controls on electricity and dorms affect the lives of students. This week we continue that theme by addressing mealtimes in PKU, though only briefly. Unfortunately, this is not the comprehensive account of all the gustatory delights China has to offer – that’s a post for another time.

Follow all the posts in this series by looking for the tag “a semester returned.”

A modified version of this piece originally appeared in the Yale Herald, February 26, 2010, titled “So much food, but so little community.”

If you want to learn about a place, watch its people eat. At Yale, the magical camaraderie said to characterize the residential college system is manifest best in the college dining halls. At Peking University, mealtimes are no less illustrative of the often quite different dynamic which underlies student life for China’s most elite students.

Consider a ‘day in the life’ of an average student at PKU, compared with Yale. Here, we’ll consider breakfast: At Yale, you roll out of bed and are able to eat breakfast as you please, with only a slight hiccup in the half-hour between breakfast and lunch; your experience is one of groggy leisure marked by free copies of New York Times and Cross Campus.

In China? You must bravely arise early decide what you want to try to eat (and quickly). Your options are many: unlike those hapless students in New Haven, you have hot breakfasts to choose from without needing to go to Commons! Unfortunately, also unlike Yale, you have to be sure to get up early to try to get this food, because many of the dining halls close around 830am and don’t reopen until lunchtime.

Worse, this foreshortened time means that you have to fight swarming crowds of other students for the privilege of ordering food: after opening at 6am, the tastiest breakfast treats are usually gone by 730 at the dining hall nearest our dorm, for example. But, don’t get discouraged just yet. You have so much to choose from! You can have red-bean filled buns, soups, noodles, whatever your heart desires, as long as it’s Chinese and still available, and as long as you don’t need to try to find two seats next to each other to breakfast with a friend!

Not interested in the shi tang chaos? Try one of the abundant carts on the streets or a smaller shop. Here you can get a tasty Taiwanese-style breakfast pancake fried to perfection, or fresh-steamed baozi filled with cabbage or meats. Mission accomplished.

Good work. You’ve made it through breakfast, and all for about 75 cents – if you weren’t too stressed by the ordeal, you’re certainly looking smug compared with that Yalie and his 10 dollar swipe for a bagel and tea, even if he does have relative peace and tranquility. You go to class, where – lucky you! – you decide to stop at one of the snackeries conveniented located in your classroom building and buy some bread and candy to make it through lecture. You then fill up your tea-bottle from one of the hot water dispensers outside the classroom.

The abundance of choices may dull your mind to the dangers of this system. Busy though we are at Yale, we take for granted that our academic schedules allot almost all an hour or more to eat. In China, if one had time at all between classes, it’s generally under 30 minutes.

Asked how to deal with this inconvenient conflict, Chinese students I polled suggested most frequently ‘not eating’ as their solution.

Because students are forced to keep such eccentric schedules,  because the dining halls are so painfully unaccommodating to so many, and because labor is so extremely cheap, there are a fantastic variety of wonderful options that would make zero economic sense to offer in New Haven! You can get spicy-boiled-vegetables and noodles on a stick up till about 11pm on campus; from 6-12, you can get spicy grill-fried meats, tofu, and other delights, or go to the fruit stand and buy all oranges, melons, and tomatoes; after those on-campus shops close, you can head outside the gates to get delicious chuan’r, kebabs fresh cooked for you. The 24 hour McDonalds will deliver to the dorm for about a dollar.

What does this story say about the institutional objectives and mores at Beida? As Yalies, our biggest point of confusion was why no one complained more. With tables bolted to the floor and unable to seat more than 4 people around them, mealtimes often feel like a return to middle school, without the recess.  People do, in fact, complain – in small doses and almost always in mediated, monitored contexts. And even if the uncaring policies of the school created hassles for students, people still try to eat together, cramming several miniature hot-pots onto their tables and catching up.

At Yale in Chinese 140 right now we’re taught how important family meal time is in Chinese culture.  University dining differs greatly from home habits anywhere, but the sheer number of people eating alone in a rush offered a vivid demonstration of the ways Beida – intentionally or otherwise – isolated its students within a built world of schoolwork and other time obligations. Beida is a source of great scholarship, but where student life is concerned, it remains rigorously managed and controlled just like grade school. Mealtimes manifest a philosophy wherein individual student needs are rendered subordinate to the greater group.

Thanks for reading, and please join in by posting any questions you have here in the comments, or anything you’d really like to hear about for future columns / posts. I’m open to suggestions!

My dedicated readers will no doubt already be aware, but for those who missed a beat: I am currently writing a biweekly column for the Yale Herald about reflections from my return from studying in China last semester. The last column was about cats and other cute animals, and the dearth thereof here at Yale. This week we begin to turn towards more serious matters.

Follow all the posts by looking for the tag “a semester returned.”

Original Publication: February 12, 2010, in the Yale Herald.

Having electricity in your room after midnight is a luxury most Yalies take for granted. But at Peking University (PKU), your lights go out at midnight and don’t turn on again until sometime between 6 and 6:30 a.m.. As a perk of the Yale-PKU program, our special floors in an otherwise ordinary dorm were equipped with two common rooms that, even after hours, maintained copious current­.

Other Chinese students were not so lucky, and late night strolls through the meandering paths were lit only by street lights, with nary a window aglow. (The next most prominent perk was showers on our floor, as opposed to the “norm,” which entailed a five to 10-minute walk to a separate building—another story.)

The obvious conclusion—to be drawn at first glance from this unusual situation—is that Chinese students are not only very hardworking but have also adopted a sort of institutionalized early-rising disposition. Thankfully for my faith in the laws of (student) nature, this latter part was not entirely true. If the agents of the Chinese Communist Party, via PKU, were universally able to turn teenage students into morning people, I’d have known for sure that America was doomed.

How, then, did we overcome the dearth of electricity? When we first arrived on campus, class hadn’t officially started yet, so the lights were available 24/7. Internet access (such as it was) was not affected at any point in time. I was therefore confused—and jetlagged to the tune of 12 hours, Beijing to Boston time—when I saw a veritable IKEA’s worth of dorm supplies for sale, overflowing on the sidewalks outside the student dorms.

One rule I discovered is that, in China, you have to pay for things that you normally think ought to come included. Broadly speaking, this includes such items as napkins in restaurants, potable water anywhere you go, and access to websites located outside China. In the case of dorm rooms, this means many things, including illumination after hours.

The top sellers in these street-side bazaars were small, goosenecked lamps, with a cord to charge and a battery to work after the juice cut out. Environmentalists, take note: They were usually equipped with either fluorescent or LED bulbs, presumably the better to last long into studying. Equipped with one of these lamps and a powerful laptop battery, no student could go wrong in their sly subversion…or so the thinking went. But in truth, for those at PKU not in our program, a bigger problem arose when trying to work late at night: roommates.

Our own rooms were reasonably sized, and we were each privileged to have a wonderful Chinese roommate who wanted to be in the Yale-PKU program with us. The average PKU student, however, shared the same space with three other students.

I asked people how they managed this system, and got a variety of replies. Long story made short—lamp or no lamp—late night studying is discouraged when some people need to sleep, and the likelihood of collisions increases with more roommates, two to a bunk.

When I first came to understand this system of electricity denial, I struggled to find a reasonable explanation. Surely there must be a good reason, I told myself—the government is truly committed to thwarting dangerous climate change, and is taking aggressive action to reduce coal burning! No, probably not.

It is true that the government seeks to enforce a certain “ideal” or image of behavior as part of a schema like this one. The better question is what this behavior is meant to achieve in the laptop age. One hypothesis we formed: An early-to-bed, early-to-rise undergraduate population, burdened with endless classes and no common space to congregate, has neither the space nor energy to gather to dissent or conspire.

I was somewhat used to this loss of technical convenience. I went to a boarding school where, in the tenth grade, we were required to be back in our dorms by 8 p.m. and have our lights out (and ourselves in bed) by 11 p.m. Staying up later was largely frustrating regardless, however, because even as upperclassmen, our collective Internet shut off promptly at 11 p.m., excepting those days when it cruelly teased us until 11:02 or—once!—11:15.

Elaborate circumvention schemes for this system are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say we tried everything we could to scale our own version of “the wall.” By no means is this to say that I accepted happily the changes in China. But we had a common room, and it served a happy purpose of forcing us together to gather and become closer friends as I baked brownies for us all, safe in our refuge from the encroaching dark.

Yale-PKU remains the only program at that university—otherwise host to more than 4,000 international students—that affords its enrollees the opportunity to live with Chinese students. Other foreigners are housed in hotel-style dorms complete with a steady supply of electricity.

But what’s the draw of having working lights if you don’t have a conversation partner? My countless bedtime discussions in the dark with my roommate were, in their own right, some of the most illuminating experiences of my time abroad, and that made it all worthwhile.

Thanks for reading, and please join in by posting any questions you have here in the comments, or anything you’d really like to hear about for future columns / posts.

I decided to try to write a column for the Yale Herald this spring semester about my time in China, since it didn’t end up working out that I would write one while there. It’s been a strange experience readjusting to Yale, and I’ve come to appreciate many things about it that I once took for granted. At the same time, there are certainly lessons learned from China that are worth applying here, and there is plenty worth missing about Beida. This first article falls more into the latter camp, and is reposted below.

Original Publication: January 29, 2010, in the Yale Herald.

Time spent abroad reveals volumes about the world left behind. I had the pleasure and privilege to study in the Peking University-Yale Joint Program last semester, and my experience both defied expectations and eludes easy explanation. In this column, I will share some of those reflections formed abroad and narrate the everyday rediscoveries in a life newly reunited with Yale.

I’d like to talk about one of the first unique features I noticed at Beida, the school I attended in China. It’s a feature that Yale lacks in a very quantifiable way: animal camaraderie. Yale is lacking in the four-legged friends department, while China’s flagship university has a surfeit of semi-domesticated animals that roam its grounds. Never have I met so many different cats in so little time: big cats, small cats, feral cats, and more recombination still. Outside of campus, I would meet felines in temples, restaurants, and alleys; on campus, they roamed the grounds, as fearlessly and assuredly as any of the students. One cat liked to sit by the window and listen to East Asian demography lectures; another occupied special turf next to a noodle shop. I learned to recognize these different cats by their territory and their habits­—the same was true for dogs, though they were fewer in number.

At Yale, however, our visible animal life appears to center around rodents. During my freshman year, devious squirrels plotted a grand invasion of several Bingham rooms and managed several reconnaissance forays before students rebuffed their advances. Though obnoxious, these Old Campus squirrels are key contributors to the inter-species dialogue here at Yale, and we welcome their presence as a check to impressions of overwhelming urban sterility. Recently passed New Haven ordinances now allow enterprising residents to raise chickens, but I have yet to see any campus examples thus far.

While I was in China, there was one cat in particular that, through charm and good looks, stole the hearts of all who met her. She was called Xiao Huang （小黄）meaning “little yellow,” and she proudly wore her golden-orange coat every day as she and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Xiao Bai, （小白） “little white,” lazed about their turf outside our Chinese class every day. While some of the semi-homeless animals at Beida suffered and begged for the attentions of motivated bystanders, Xiao Huang knew how to work the system to her advantage. The little minx and her beau were fed every day by staff at the building they frequented, and in return they offered their adorable services—usually in the form of purring—as a pick-me-up to anyone who had just bombed a Chinese test. I was a frequent patron.

But there were also the animal-welfare situations that left me at a loss for action. One such recurring experience would pass at night on busy streets: As I walked, I’d spot a small crowd forming, bottlenecking the sidewalk with interested bystanders. Getting closer, the crowd would thin and reveal a man or men in nondescript parkas, vending merchandise from a cardboard box at their feet. Only when it’s too late to escape without heartbreak does the occasion’s interest become clear: puppies for sale. Of course, in Shanghai one could buy live ducks a block outside our downtown hotel. I was discouraged from doing so, perhaps, by the startling variety of other animals—alive or otherwise—available for purchase there. But its being commonplace didn’t erase its impact.

Xiao Huang’s sad story came together in bits and pieces as I learned more about her. She lived outside one of the foreign student’s dorm, and she had originally been rescued by a foreigner, but left behind when that woman’s stay in China was up. Those strays outside Beida appear to manage with their feline wits, but for every Xiao Huang being taken care of, there are a dozen more that struggle. The more helpful comparison between Yale and Beida comes when considering the relevance these cats have for Chinese students. One official club devotes its time creating shelters for—and feeding—the hungry cats on campus: Plenty of people want to help. What do we have at Yale?

I wish there were fewer cats lounging in Beida’s bamboo groves. As Beijing’s winter took a bite, I saw so many suffering—kittens shivering and groups of cats huddled together for warmth. Like so many ephemeral observations about China, closer analysis revealed a more complex problem. I bought catnip and lamb kebabs for my feline friends, but I learned that just because they speak Chinese doesn’t mean Chinese cats like spicy food. I also recognized that it was human feeding of these cats which allowed so many to survive on campus.

What does it mean to surround ourselves with animals? It’s important because it helps to ground us. I appreciated the increased presence of animals not just for the daily dose of adorable cat behaviors, but simply because nature in this active embodiment captures the attention and reminds passersby that no matter what color the sky is, how much homework you have, or what personal struggle you face, nature still exists all around. When you watch animals play, the exigencies of student life fade away like magic.

I couldn’t take Xiao Huang back to Yale, so how can that wonderful appearance of the wild be recaptured? The answer starts with you, readers: If your Master or Dean doesn’t have a pet, start a petition to insist on real-life college mascots. If professors at Harvard can graze cows, why not a real life Trum-bull?）

So, I’ve felt pretty awful the last week, and the ‘weather’ — or, more accurately, the pollution — has been part of the problem. Twitter’s @BeijingAir has been a constantly depressing reminder, nearly always showing “Hazardous” or at best, “Unhealthy” in the last week.

Why has it been so bad? Well, because of a specific weather pattern that has trapped pollution, one that is especially perilous in the winter when people start to burn coal to stay warm.

A picture’s worth a thousand words here, thanks to NASA:

This photo represents most of Eastern China – Beijing is in the middle-northern part of the smog cloud. Here’s an explanation from NASA’s team on why this smog may have built up so thick:

Thick haze and fog settled over much of China on October 28, 2009. In this photo-like image captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the thickest of the gray-brown haze conforms to the low-lying contours of the Yellow River Valley and the western half of the North China Plain near the Luliang Mountains.

A temperature inversion may be responsible for the build up of pollution over eastern China. Normally, air cools with altitude, but occasionally, a layer of cool air will be trapped beneath a layer of warm air. Since the cool air is more dense than the air above it, the two layers don’t mix and pollutants build up in the cool air near Earth’s surface.

Temperature inversions develop most often during the winter, when long, cool nights chill the ground. The cold land cools the air nearest the ground, leaving the air at higher altitudes warmer. The two layers of air do not easily mix, and the temperature inversion can last for days if winds are calm.

Today the sky has finally shifted to actual clouds, instead of smog, and it’s started to rain and let down some gross wet snow. Maybe that will help to clear things up…

By the way, using tools like NASA’s WorldWind, which I have long been a fan of, you can track weather patterns like this in near-real time, and make your own animations using MODIS. Very cool stuff.

The issue of pollution in China is a very great one, and not a matter than can easily be summed up in one blog post, no matter how exhaustive. However, after several rain and then snowstorms over the weekend, the air quality today is so nice, and the scenery so beautiful as a result, that I just had to stop delaying and start writing a little bit about it.

Today the air quality in Beijing, as measured by the US State Department monitoring station at the US Embassy, is at one of its best levels I have ever noticed in my following the reported figures. In fact, at this very moment, the current rating is “Good,” the highest possible rating. This is extremely unusual, and really lovely for my lungs today. I noticed how clear the sky was, and how nice the air was to breathe, and this morning I had class on the 5th floor of a classroom building. Here’s the view that I have, reminding me of the beautiful scenery that you can ever-so-rarely see just outside the city…

Indeed, 风景很漂亮！ (The scenery,’fengjing,’ is ‘hen piaoliang,’ very beautiful). Apologies for photo quality, it’s just a borrowed iPhone shot, as I always forget to bring a camera to track the Monday morning classroom view.

It’s extremely difficult to describe what Beijing is like on its bad air days — which are many, even in the Fall, when the air is light-years better than the Summer air, apparently — to those who have never experienced it. This is true of a lot of things about China, of course, but in the case of pollution it is especially striking. I went to L.A. this summer for the 4th of July, and that was certainly a striking comparison to the San Francisco air I was used to all the rest of the summer. However, the comparison between San Francisco and L.A. can’t even begin to describe the difference between Beijing and say, New York.

Whenever I learn a new “comparison phrase” in Chinese class, my first instinct is to look out the window and talk about pollution (污染, wuran) or the air (空气， kongqi). Something like, “Although Beijing is very pretty, the air is not so good” (一方面北京很漂亮，另一方面北京的空气不太好). Although some say that they start to forget what blue skies look like, I thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) haven’t come to that stage just yet. Every day a large part of the equation that determines my happiness is determined by the color of the sky and the quality of the air.

Here is a photo, captured at a particularly bad moment, at the Summer Palace. This day was not cloudy, this photo was not retouched, and there was nothing wrong with my camera. On a day like this – which are especially bad, but not especially infrequent – you can stare directly at the sun without any real harm or pain, it seems, because it is so obscured through the smog. The photo was taken at a slightly ‘darker’ setting so as to bring out more detail, but the lack of contrast is real.

Not so great, right? That’s the seventeen-arch bridge at the Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Beijing. Here’s a photo of another part of the lake, reflecting the summer palace, on a notably better day. This photo from someone nice (neverecho) on Flickr.

You can see a big difference, I hope. Now, the air is usually not as bad as in photo #1, though usually not as good as in photo #2, at least as measured by the “how much does it ruin sightseeing” factor. Every day I have Chinese class on the 5th floor of a building that looks out at the mountains in another direction, and my teacher told me two months ago that if I looked out a certain window, I could see the summer palace. I thought I didn’t understand her – that I had lost something in the translation – because every day, no matter how hard I looked, I saw no evidence of the place… until today, when I saw the top of the Buddhist Incense Tower (the same tower pictured above) beautifully framed by the mountains behind it, from about 2.5 miles away. (Sorry, forgot to take the camera after remembering how I should have brought it to my first class… am sick today!)

Here’s a photo (again) of me at the Forbidden City, on what was a really uniquely great air-quality day. They’re not impossible, just relatively rare. Blue skies, hooray! We hear that things have been especially good recently, which is at once comforting and scary. Comforting to know that things are improving, scary to know that they used to be worse, given what they’re like today.

I think that this demonstrates some of the variety that you see here in Beijing alone. In the first week we were here, the air was more like in the unfortunate Summer Palace #1 example, and you literally couldn’t very well see more than a few hundred feet down the street very clearly. It was some time before I even knew that the mountains in the first photo existed, since you certainly couldn’t see them rising out of the North China Plains just on the horizon. I want to go revisit places that I went in early September just so that I can now actually see them, since as time has gone on things have generally improved with the seasons.

The New York Times reported about two weeks ago on air quality in Beijing and China. From that article, I see that there were apparently 221 “blue-sky days” for 2009 through September, according to Beijing city officials, a city record since their blue-sky index began in 1998. While this sounds great, not all 221 of those blue-sky days were as blue as the one you see above, and they most certainly did not register as “healthy” or even “moderate” on the air quality indicator metrics that would be used in the United States or Europe. As the article explains, the Chinese official air-quality indicators are quite misleading and skew data in a way which looks more favorable for China; the US Embassy monitor is more thorough and realistic in terms of what it measures and how it does so, even if it is not located in as many monitoring sites.

The positive notes in the article include massive reductions in per-car emissions, huge shifts to newer pollution control regimes in Beijing factories, better boilers and furnaces in power plants and homes, cash-for-clunkers programs to eliminate old cars from the roads, etc, etc, etc. Interesting to note is the ease with which Chinese administrators and authorities can act – if they choose to do so – given the generally feeble powers of businesses or other private groups to oppose the government — when this works well, it works!

Last weekend I took a walk around some hutongs around 20 minutes from Tiananmen, and you can still see people there burning the coal briquettes described in the article as being so terribly harmful to the environment. With the cold winter ahead, I can only imagine how many people would go through. The photo below shows them highlighted through the doorway into someone’s home. (Note that some parts of these hutongs were nicer, and some were worse; some had more rubble, while some looked like nice neighborhoods, and most of them were at least a little bit paved, unlike the one here)

Beijing, however, isn’t all of China, though the same characteristics that manifest here in Beijing are present elsewhere to varying degrees. Nearby Shanxi province is reputedly the most polluted in all of China, in both air and water, with little of the political will to clean up and much less international face to lose for not doing so.  On a positive note, when we left Beijing after that first, polluted week, we were amazed and happy to arrive in Yunnan Province to a pure-seeming environment with perfect blue skies every day.

Yunnan lives up to its name: "south of the clouds," with lots of big sky.

Meanwhile, on our visit to Shanghai, we were blessed with very good weather and air, and most of the days were substantially better than Beijing; the worst may have been worse than what you would find in the U.S., but there was perhaps just one day out of our visit that had distractingly bad air quality, a much better ratio than what we normally experience in Beijing. Indeed, just as the Olympics helped to shape Beijing, so this upcoming 2010 World Expo is leading Shanghai to create a huge push for its own increase in blue-sky days (above and beyond what Beijing hopes to accomplish) among other big changes. Below is a photo of Shanghai’s Pudong skyline on a typical day when we were there, more or less, with this one erring on the side of “less” – obviously not perfectly haze-free, but better than what we were used to back in Beijing.

Air quality is what is most noticeable about the environment (环境) here, but obviously other things are important. Arguably, while air quality is currently estimated to be responsible for upwards of 700,000 deaths in China, water is an even more important factor in the human-environmental equation. In fact, water quality and water security in the US are too-little talked about as well. This past weekend, we had a lot of rain and snow – I mentioned this at the start as the cause of today’s wonderfully clear day. What I didn’t mention is that the reason we had so much snow here in Beijing is because authorities fired huge amounts of silver iodide into the clouds in order to seed them and cause more precipitation, in order to try to alleviate more drought here in Beijing.

Weather modification like this seems to escape the notice of many of our Chinese roommates: for example, on the 60th anniversary, several people I spoke with were just “amazed!” that the weather coincidentally happened to be so great on that auspicious occasion… not quite suspecting that it could have been artificially concocted. In any event, these frequent efforts at weather control from the central government only underscore the importance of water here in China. I don’t know very much about the water available – what’s wrong with it, how unsafe it might be, or exactly how prevalent counterfeit bottled water is in places that I go. I do know that I love street food, and that I love bubble tea smoothies made with ice of dubious origins…

I’m only here for a single semester, and I don’t think I can accumulate too much long term trouble, be it from air or water, no matter how hard I try to taste all that Beijing has to offer. My immune and digestive systems are strong, and despite a few slips here and there, I’ve been fine. I’m mostly just worried about the 1.3 billion people who live here full time.

Then, of course, there’s the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere, and the other pollutants that make their way across the ocean only to come back to visit me in the United States. But I try not to think too much about all that.