I’ll add a picture of the Crocs ad when I get one.

In the last entry, I explained my voyage into the world of getting paid for letting people take my picture. This odyssey continued last Friday and Saturday, and became more and more strange, as everyone decided that I knew how to speak perfect Chinese. While this was a great opportunity to practice, at most times it resembled the photography scene from Lost in Translation, an inevitable comparison that was playing through my head all the while. I was photographed with a hip-hop dancer from Shanghai, a 19-year-old Crocs salesman, the beautiful trophy wife of an English businessman, and a Canadian dude-bro who couldn’t stop hitting on the hip-hop dancer.

The Canadian was interesting. He had spent four summers in China interning at various offices and is now studying Mandarin and looking for work, trying to break into the circle of foreigners that work in the Beijing offices of various foreign companies. His Chinese was alright, but not good enough to get anywhere with the hip-hop dancer. When he wasn’t ogling her, he was either nonchalantly telling me about his hilariously dull experiences in the Beijing club circuit or doing a strange dance that I have come to recognize as the foreigner networking jig. The jig has a few basic steps, which include ostentatious displays of ritzy cell phones, loud discussions of future job prospects, and taking down numbers. Beyond the basic steps, there are more advanced ones, such as taking pictures of your contacts in order to remember them or explaining how you first got a job in Beijing (perhaps the best story I have heard was, “I called them and told them I spoke some Chinese and had buying. . . I mean purchasing experience,” Which I think means that this person took some Chinese in college and had seen their future employer’s product on the shelf.) I had thought that this sort of social networking was a real-life version of the friend-collection that is currently taking place on myspace.com and facebook.com, but then I asked my boss to explain. Apparently, the foreigner labor market in China, though much more stable than ten years ago, is still very unpredictable, and a stray contact on your cell phone could land a job, as Western-trained minds are still a hot commodity despite the growing savvy of less expensive Chinese labor.

I'm done with school here in two weeks. My plans after that are still to be determined, but now it looks like I'm going to go to India for three weeks and then Malaysia for two weeks after that. I'll then return to China and tour around until the 1st of July. I want to be in the Twin Cities on the 4th.

I recently was afforded another break, which I had to spend in Beijing in order to arrange my visa to India. The first two days of break were spent waiting in front of the Indian Embassy, watching professional tour guides skip the long line in order to process the visas of twenty Chinese citizens who plan to run amuck in New Delhi while toting $4000 SLR cameras and wearing identical fluorescent hats. A strange thing about the Chinese tourism business is that there is still the image of the “bushwhacker” anthropologist wearing all khaki and documenting his findings for the world. In most ads concerning tourism in China or abroad, this image persists, contrasting sharply with the reality I see at every mildly-touristy spot- 30 Chinese people all wearing the same thing, following around a flag-bearing tour guide while snapping close-up pictures of fake flowers.

However, my break was not without its benefits. Because I was here, I was available to model for Crocs, an American shoe company specializing in ugly foam shoes. One of my classmates works for this company and needed to find an Asian-looking boy to model these shoes. So, I was invited to go out to eat at a ritzy Chinese restaurant. (I think the greatest part of my study abroad has been mingling with all classes of people, a freedom I don’t exercise in the US.) They decided I “looked healthy enough” and told me to go to their office the next day so we could go to the Great Wall to take pictures.

The next day, my classmate and I went to their office, and we took an extremely expensive cab ride to “The Commune”, a hotel complex overlooking the Badalang portion of the Great Wall. When the hotel was first constructed, it won international praise for its modernist architecture. While I was there, it was clear that this praise was well-deserved, as each of the two-dozen structures on the compound were unique and complex. However, the buildings, made of bamboo, rusting metal, and huge panes of glass, weren’t suited for housing the event that was taking place that day – an Easter celebration catering to rich Chinese families. Children played among priceless works of art crafted by masters of the contemporary Beijing scene, finding painted eggs among the meticulously planted shrubbery. Among all of this commotion, the fathers of the children were recording their child’s every move with the aforementioned $4000 cameras. Most of the servants, who greatly outnumbered the patrons, wore the same thing – black pants and a matching black shirt with a single red star on the chest. Some servants, however, were forced to wear different clothes, forced to dress as clowns and enormous bunny rabbits in order to entertain the children. Perhaps the least strange sight was me - amidst all of this, I was wearing horrendously ugly shoes while getting photographed atop and inside the award-winning modernist architecture.

Poorly written, but I have homework:

In China, there are two kinds of tourist spots – those that westerners visit and those that westerners do not visit. Tai Shan is one that westerners do not visit. Because it is relatively remote and not especially Chinese, most Western tour companies rarely bother with it. As a result, ticket prices are cheaper and accommodations are a little bit shabbier. Also, Chinese from the neighboring small cities are more likely to take short train rides there for a jaunt rather than going all the way to Beijing. These middle-class workers and college students rarely have the opportunity to see westerners. While Beijingers see white faces every day, the average Chinese person perhaps sees one a year. And when they are sightseeing, a white face is just another part of the spectacle. While I can occasionally blend in, and often do when walking in Beijing with my Asian-descendent classmates, it’s impossible with my friend Anna, who was gawked at by most of our fellow hikers. Often people would awkwardly utter a “Hello” and occasionally people would ask for pictures. Inevitably, our Chinese was better than their English.