It’s not that I don’t like being a vegetarian. It’s just that like most limp-wristed liberals, when I’m watching Pride and Prejudice, sometimes I get one of those midnight cravings for a steaming plate of endangered animal genitalia (number 6 FTW!), and I just wish my stomach was still bubbling with the enzymes capable of processing animal proteins. I could could be enjoying a rubbery mouthful of seal penis right now, I often think to myself, doubting the validity of my life choices.

In search of the perfect Saturday night dinner party venue at which to kickoff the Labor Day weekend, I would have booked one of the members-only tables at Guolizhuang Penis Hot Pot anyway, but some of my male friends are a little squeamish about Jane Austen, so the Beijing Drunken Masters Supper Club ended up instead at Heroic Mountain, a GuiJie restaurant themed on wuxia martial arts fiction.

Because no dinner’s complete without… wait, is that a testicle?

I gather from my ten minutes on Google Images that wuxia fiction involves a lot of martial arts masters trying to quietly raise families in rustic country villages before they’re forced by honor or violence to go on a journey in which they kung-fu the world’s face. There’s also a lot of insulting of tavern chefs and overturning tables. It seems to me that Heroic Mountain did a good job of live action genre fandom along those lines, though I’ll admit to some disappointment that none of the staff did a flying bodyslam into the middle of our plates.

Other Lessons learned
Heroes of wuxia drink beer out of tiny bowls.

Heroes of wuxia are constantly surrounded with pots so huge, they’re only legal in California. We defied all rational expectation by failing to break this one spectacularly with a pair of Shaolin hammers.

Heroes of wuxia look outstanding in yellow cardigans.

Heroes of wuxia don’t order food off a menu. They approve or reject an array of awesome dishes that come pouring out of the kitchen.

“I think we’re supposed to turn down a few of these,” Bekka said, clearing a space for the crispy lotus root. No one ever did, and eventually, the food stopped coming.

See also: heroes of wuxia talk about gross things at dinner.

Now if some kindly, enterprising soul would just open up a Redwall-themed eatery (Turnip ‘n’ Tater ‘n’ Beetroot Pie!), I think I could pretty much die happy.

Also this week:

As seen on the hand towels dispenser in the women’s bathrooms at China Central Place, Da Wang Lu. I loaded up on as much bumf as I could carry, because my bitch friends always borrow all my bumf and then I don’t have any.

Nova Heart Show

Nova Heart – Good Ideas by Nova Heart

Checked out Helen Feng’s new band Nova Heart at Yigong YuShan, which ended up being infinitely better than DJ Spooky at Migas.

Javi and I got medicinal foot massages from the prostitutes at the bargain brothel down the street from my house. I first noticed the brothel on a walk one day; the sign outside says “24 hour foot massage”, and there’s a dumpling restaurant in the basement. Man, I thought, massage and dumplings at 3:00a.m.! Beijing has everything.

We went in around 5:00 in the afternoon with toesies aching from a morning trip to the Great Wall, expecting to be handed a pair of flip-flops and greeted by the smell of Chinese herbs. I looked at the couch piled full of bored, heavily made-up young women watching a soap opera and doing each other’s nails. Some guy wandered out of a curtained doorway zipping up his pants. Epiphany: there’s no such thing as a 24-hour foot massage parlor.

We were lead through a labyrinth of pitch-black hallways and ended up in what I can only surmise is affectionately called the “People Who Have Trouble Reading Between the Lines Pavillion”, with four hard massage chairs under flickering flourescents. The madam handed me a bawdy laminated ordering form covered in pictures of condom boxes and Russian models making sultry faces. “Do you want any of these?” Nothing on the menu appeared to involve feet, but I did note that most of the sexual favors cost a whopping $12.00 USD. A hand job and a plate of carrot dumplings for less than fifteen bucks: welcome to China, may I take your order? “You just want the five dollar foot massage from the sign outside, don’t you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Our massage girls were sweet as pie and very curious about us. I wondered if they were happy to take a break from getting people off, or if it sucked because they weren’t making as much money, but I didn’t bring it up. They get a reasonable number of foreign customers, they said, but most of them can’t speak any Chinese and they can’t communicate. I spent a moment contemplating the consequences of randomly pointing to something on the menu in this place.

“So what’s your name?” I asked. The girls looked at each other uneasily. “We don’t have names here, we have numbers. I’m Number Six, and that’s Number Nine.” Number Nine was quiet and pregnant. Number Six was chatty and pleasant, but I surmised she hadn’t had it very easy. Most Chinese people in Beijing have made exactly one major move in their lives: from their hometown to the big city. And once a year, during Spring Festival, they go back to see their family. If they’re terribly lucky, a couple times in their life they might travel somewhere unique, but that’s a rare event. A little depressing, yes, but that standard story speaks to a kind of familial stability. Not so for Number Six, who had moved to Beijing from Haerbin Province by herself when she was 15, and had been to several provinces along the way. We talked about travel. “Have you ever been to Mongolia?” she asked. “No, have you?” She had.

As our hour wound to a close – and the foot massage was pretty kickass, actually – I asked the ladies if the dumplings were any good. “Definitely try the green bean paste and the mushroom dumplings, they’re alright,” said Number Nine. But we home hungry, on happy feet.

Hong Kong is a never-ending commercial paradise of pristine luxury goods, tiny cakes, delicate food and refined, respectful manners. No one shoves their way onto a packed subway car, smokes in enclosed spaces, spits gobules of phlegm in your general direction, breathes in your face, bothers you while you’re reading, screams in restaurants, or pokes you just to see what will happen.

“This city is lame,” I said to Charlie, as yet another person politely waited their turn for the escalator.

Walking anywhere on Hong Kong island is like wandering through a Skymall ad, and the city reeks of frenetic overspending. There are fine art galleries, upmarket gift shops and custom shoemakers in the scrubbed subway stations. I counted seven Ferraris on the ten-minute walk from the MTR to the restaurant. The streets teem with immaculately-dressed bankers sizing up your accessories and and a whole lot of women who clearly do nothing but smell good for living.

And for future reference, don’t acrobatically jump over a car while riding an ATV without a permit. It’s illegal:

“Where are all the poor people?” Javi asked, as we exited an indoor mall and ended up in an outdoor mall. Surely, I thought, there’s a seedy underbelly around here somewhere. But I never did find a place to catch a sweaty show and a cheap drink.

What we did find was a few amazing evenings with friends, some stunning vistas, a neighborhood temple:

A Magic: the Gathering shop in a labyrinthine office building (“Yup, Friday Night Magic, every week at seven.” – bless them), definitive proof that the Chinese have found a way into the Super Mario Bros. universe and are smuggling back backpacks made of endangered Koopa pelts:

Indications that the Hong Kong music scene may be having, um, issues:

And a comfortable seat on the third floor of the Hong Kong Central Library, the sign on the door of which reads, “This door handle is sanitized six times a day.”

Jesus, Hong Kong government, take it easy, have a Jello shot or something. Sometimes people need a few germs in their lives.

The staff of Seven Treasures Pond, our local Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, greeted us with such enthusiasm us that Kyle was sure they were secretly cannibals. “No one’s that happy to see you unless they plan to cook and eat your bubbling flesh,” he insisted, sniffing the appetizers. They fattened us up on a ginormous, boiled-at-the-table bowl of watercress, fake meatball, jujube and five spice soup. If this is Buddhism, I thought with a face full of lotus root, then namo-freakin-amituofo.

In the foyer of the restaurant, which is unromantically situated on the ground floor of a highrise next to a hairdresser and a laundry, sits a table covered in candles, a shrine to Buddha, and jars upon jars of what appear to be pickled scorpions but what are actually fruit pieces fermenting in Shaoxing wine. “I grow everything myself,” said the proprietress, offering us what turned out to be a very delicious plate of plum seeds.

I’ve been back there about 10 times now, the food is so incredible.

I heard a rumor the other day that Panda Express, in move so meta it makes life feel like a fractal, is planning on opening its first Chinese location in Beijing. Ten years too late, you cheeky buggers, ten years too late and five kuai short. What I wouldn’t have given for a Panda Express in 2002.

My first year in the world of Chinese cuisine was not the endless frolic in fields of chao mein that I imagined. It involved a whole lot of dry heaving in the duck offal and tofu aisles of the open air market. As a friend recently pointed out to me, southern-style ‘stinky tofu’ produces its own impenetrable great wall of smell through which it takes inhuman willpower to pass, a smell that, in my experience, is rivaled only by forty years of unattended bat guano piling up in the towers of Wat Si Sanphet. “Disgusting” I’d think to myself, enjoying my solidified cow tit juice sandwich.

So yeah, the beginning is rough. You get off the plane, you eat corn with gingko seeds for three weeks, and when you find the one restaurant that doesn’t flavor the appetizers with jellied duck blood you pitch a tent on one of the tables and refuse to be moved.

“Culture shock, huh?” asked my friends back in America, but I’m not sure that quite covers the feeling of a smile crystallizing on your face as you, hogtied by diplomatic propriety and frozen under the gaze of thirty expectantly staring colleagues, listen to the banquet host explain that the special foreign guest gets to eat the fish eyeball. Which tastes, for the record, like biting into a tiny condom filled with soybean oil.

But a few years later, after you’ve passed certain not-doing-that-at-a-restaurant-again milestones, when you’ve realized that tuber-based dishes are almost always safe and you should probably just bleat “potato” at the waitress until she brings you some, when you’ve learned what “mountain bear paw” looks like in Chinese and never to point to it on a menu, and when you’ve figured out that while “seven treasures” may be okay, ordering anything with the phrase “eight treasures” in the name is just asking for trouble, a whole new world begins to open up.

A magical, twinkling, alternate reality world in which I’ve somehow developed an appreciation for the rank taste of jiucai. A world inhabited by fresh mangosteen, hot almond milk, mung beans, homestyle tofu, malatang, sticky buns, and a happy host of strange vegetables. A world in which I no longer feel the need to cower in my apartment trying to make a pizza out of Uyghur flatbread and tomatoes.

“Actually,” explained Mr. Jiao from the property management office, “the Chinese invented pizza. Marco Polo was unable to fold a steamed dumpling into a ball like a civilized person, so he just plopped the filling on top the bread.” Nice job with your clumsy foreign hamhock fingers, Marco Polo, you big asshole. Nice. job.

This is my fourth lunar new years in China, and I really did try not to get so swept up in the revelry that photos fall by the wayside. I did manage a few pictures and some video, but along the way what I’ve found is that our camera is woefully inadequate to capture the Bladerunner dystopia that Beijing becomes during New Years week. Some choice selections:

Saturday

Appetizers at HuaJia YiYuan

What’s odd about this deer penis wine is not really that it exists at all, but rather that some of it’s missing from the bottle.

Charlie and Bekka at GuiJie (Ghost street)

The bowling alley at GongTi

The rabble

Picking songs at Coolth KTV (karaoke)

What happened after that last picture has been stricken from the record, but suffice to say it involved a very loud group chorus of House of the Rising Sun, and at least one song by the Spice Girls.

Sunday – New Years’ Eve

Off the subway – headed for the temple fair at Ditan park

Sign on the public bathroom at Ditan park. Glad we’re all finally getting honest with ourselves about the dangers of entering a public pisser here.

Bekka and I at Ditan park gate

The long slog into the park

Kyle pretended to pose for this so I could snap a shot of the true face of socialism: giddy officers carrying a giant teddy bear.

Crispety, crunchety and blessed by actual priests

Chinese temple fairs: exactly like the American fair in that the food looks scrumptious until four seconds after you eat it, at which point it becomes a solid ball of indigestible remorse

Look, culture.

I almost photoshopped in a bunch of cherry blossoms.

The cracking fireworks, going off intermittently for days now, start in earnest after nightfall. The air fills with the smell of cordite.

From the window at a house party:

Beijing becomes an industrial mass of surreal explosions

We run outside and join the fray

From ground level:

Every street is ankle-deep in red firework paper

During the last three days of 2011, my sole purpose in life was to wait for my furniture to arrive, while intermittently darting downstairs to buy basketfuls of vegetables and jian bing (chewy flatbread).

Yes, I was wildly excited about defeating the TaoBao ordering process by actually buying something, but it turns out that checkout is only half the fun. Now that I’ve got the hang of it, ordering is easy. Delivery, on the other hand, can apparently only happen when you’re at least two blocks away, slathered in massage oil, with two young spa attendants waving aromatic orange peels in your face, and it involves twelve successive phone calls from the freight driver, four calls from the property management office, two red stamps, three signatures, six lords a’leaping, and the personal heavenly blessing of the Jade Emperor himself.

After that exciting debacle, I figured that until my work desk was resting peacefully in the home office, the only safe excursion was to the local grocery, where I could sprint back home, carrots flying, in time to meet the delivery guy.

Chinese refrigerators are quite small, and kitchen cabinet space is at a premium. I recently learned this is because, up until a few decades ago, the traditional Chinese kitchen consisted of only a wok, a curved spoon, a giant cleaver and, depending on how traditional your kitchen was exactly, an old lady who thoroughly disapproves of your nutritional choices and wishes you’d eat more rhinoceros horn. Practically speaking, this makes the American dream of lurching through a grocery store once a week and returning home with a Mount Everest of noms (I call it Nom Everest) impractical, so Chinese tend to buy a bunch of spices and snacks, and then go to the store once daily for fresh vegetables, noodles and tofu.

Yes, the thought of buying your daily food supply in basket-sized batches sounds quaint, provincial and vaguely organic, but in practice, it’s an ever-present reminder that the human body is a disgusting sac of ravenous biomatter requiring constant sacrificial fuel.

The tedium of the endless trips is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I’ve always loved grocery stores. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because as long as I’m still shopping, there still exists the possibility that I might end up with ice cream. Or maybe because, during any trip to a Chinese grocer’s, I can actually hear David Attenborough’s voice when I stand next to the deli case. In any event, I find the whole process vaguely comforting. Or rather, I did. The happy complacency was shattered shortly after I saw this:

LOL, I thought, Spicy Duck Tablets. I whipped out my phone to take a picture. Click.

Within less than 10 seconds of the shutter snap, a bald man in his mid 30′s with a huge, dripping splatter of what appeared to be blue hair dye drying on his scalp materialized next to me, and an audible hush settled over the aisle. “You can’t take pictures in here,” he said. I froze, my synapses firing hysterically while my brain Googled “it’s cool, you’ve seen this before”. No search results returned. Why would a bald man dye his non-hair? I thought, paralyzed by weirdness. And once he started dying it, why would he not distribute said dye evenly across his scalp? Did he come to work like that, or did he do that here? Is he a grocery store enforcer?  Had he been watching me from some kind of surveillance room? Why can’t I take pictures of food packaging? Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, autopilot engaged.  “Oh, okay,” I mumbled, and wandered off towards the frozen dumplings in a daze.

I spent the rest of the day trying to construct a plausible sequence of events that led up to that moment.  The best I could do was that maybe he was cleaning up an exploded package of dye in the storeroom when his apprentice enforcer burst in and breathlessly reported, “there’s a foreigner taking pictures of the duck tablets – gogogo!”, at which time he used his standard issue teleporter to deconstruct himself at the cellular level and reassemble in the snack aisle next to me. Guess I’ll never know. What I do know is that, after the incident, I was too paranoid to take a picture of the large snack bag reading simply “PASTE”.

Aaaanyway, everyone here is gearing up for Chinese New Years (Jan 23rd), and my friends and I have made plans to shoot off fireworks on the ice at HouHai between bouts of Magic: the Gathering. I’ve tried on several occasions to explain the pandemonium that is Chinese New Years, but I think the best I’ve ever managed is, “Dude, you don’t even know”. Gregg comes to my rescue here by reminding me that fireworks stands sell child-sized backpacks full of sparklers and rockets so that, come New Year eve, every toddler turns into a sugared-up kamikaze armed with explosives.

Here’s hoping for a fire-breathing Year of the Dragon.

My political platform typically consists of the word “Meh”. I like to pat myself on the back for being too pessimistic to believe in anything except individual human responsibility. Governments shall rise and fall, shit shall happen, life shall go on. But the more I hear about SOPA and the Protect IP act, the more I sense my withered inner activist shaking off the coils of eternal slumber.

If you’ve never heard of SOPA or Protect IP, here’s the skinny:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Sad thing is, I think it’s only a matter of time before a bill like SOPA or Protect IP is passed. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll happen when some unfortunate event occurs that opportunistic legislators can use to make everyone who opposes the bill look bad. The comments section of a website will spark a celebrity suicide, or some kid will download a pirated slasher movie and kill his parents or whatever. Name your tragedy. “We have to do something,” legislators will bluster, and they’ll set about happily paving the road to hell. What’s really kind of amazing is that it hasn’t happened sooner.

So yeah, I think it’s inevitable. But I’m not willing to see it pass without at a hefty dose of public ire.

What is happening in the U.S. right now is vastly egregious. A body of people who can’t answer the question “what is DNS?” are toying with the idea of making fundamental changes to the core operating basis of the net, changes that would effect everyone, every day, in ways that, if you’re a nerd, should certainly scare the crap out of you. If you’re not a nerd, try this on for size: the people responsible for building and approving the IRS website want the power to decide what should and shouldn’t be available online.

And now a quick break for this message by your congresspeople:

Look, legislators, nobody is blaming you guys for not reading the whole bill or doing your research. A) the internet is complicated, b) the Appalachian Trail is really lovely this time of year and c) most bills are thicker than the Wheel of Time series, and God knows when I got to page 5000 of that, it was like, “Call me when Rand picks a girlfriend and let me know how the final battle goes, mmkay?” But here’s the summary: This one is over your head, let it go.

Truth is, Washington, I’m tempted not to give two fucks what you do. Beijing has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into a similar scheme, they have a rumored staff of 50,000 working round-the-clock to stamp out and track down any offenders, and yet it took me 45 minutes to set up a permanent path around the blockade. Most people know how to, as it’s called here, “climb the wall”.

So good luck with that. It will take your 10-year-olds approximately seven seconds to figure out how to create or log onto a distributed darknet and download or share whatever pirated media they want. You will still be paying $1000 a ticket to attend conferences about the exciting new world of social networking. By the time you hear about said darknets – or whatever alternative work-around everyone’s using – and whip the tut-tutting mothers of America into a tizzy of terror about them, everyone I care about will be communicating through telepathic bio implants. In the meantime, you’ll continue to flail around in increasing frustration as you throw untold amounts of money at turning site administrators into criminals, and making technology that much more of a pain in the asshole to use for only those Americans who don’t understand it – including yourselves.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

So, on one hand, your little regulatory commissions are kind of sad. But this isn’t about my ability to figure out how to ignore you. This is about my clients, who want to build their businesses by using their own websites as platforms for open communication, without being afraid of some lawsuit-hungry psycho with an internet connection. And this is about you taking all those good intentions and sinking them into a solution that doesn’t do more harm than good, instead of kissing special interest RIAA butt.

The internet, in its current lightly regulated state, is preciousssss to me. It’s the only wonder of the world that anyone can take a chisel to, participate in, and make their own. Yes, it comes with risks, copyright infringement, and really gross porn. But if you take the one, you take the other. Sorry – that’s how the First Amendment works.

Scarily, the right course of action here is the one thing that makes legislators feel powerless and grumpy, which is to do nothing. The solution is to do nothing. Quietly and without ruckus check the “veto” box, and then refuse to entertain even the suggestion of altering the fundamental ways we share information. Tell the RIAA to stop whining for government intervention and change their business model to fit the modern world like everyone else. Do not create a consolation-prize type bill that says basically the same thing as SOPA, but is called something else. Do not become politically skittish in the face of some horrible accident. Just do what a good government is supposed to do, which is facilitate smooth trade, increase the quality of life for your citizens, and foster innovation and peace.

But if you must legislate about something tech-related, why don’t you talk about allocating some funds for state governments to conduct and implement usability studies on their DMV websites. That’s something Americans could get behind.

Everyone else, if you’d care to tell your representatives to back off, you can do it here: http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

I spent the better part of Christmas Eve morning sitting in an empty concession stand outside of Solana shopping center waiting for the two very confused young ladies behind the counter to figure out how to bake a pizza slice.

“Why does this oven have so many knobs?” whispered one to the other, loudly.

“How should I know? No, turn it that way. The OTHER way. Why do foreigners use these things? Hey, maybe the customer knows.”

“Ask her.”

“YOU ask her.”

At long last, my garden slice was shoved across the counter, topped with – oh joy – crunchy cucumber and partially-frozen corn.

The pizza stand shared the space with what I can only infer is a coffee shop called “Yikes! The Spot.”, not to be confused with more famous establishments “Crap! A blemish.” and “Uh oh! My period.” I considered ordering a coffee or a “Mike tea with yam currant cereal” but taking into account the speed at which the pizza was produced, I figured the next twelve years of my young life would be better spent elsewhere.

Had I been in any kind of a hurry, I might have been frustrated at the wait, but after yesterday’s mega death match with TaoBao, China’s hottest online shopping portal, and its standing army of Chinese online payment interfaces, staring off into space is about all the heavy mental lifting I can handle today.

Yesterday started out rather pleasantly. I stuck my head into a local bookstore. Bought a set of speakers for some Christmas movie magic. And I girded my girly loins for a long sit-in at Industrial Commercial Bank of China.

Despite the invariable multi-hour wait to speak to a teller, I like ICBC. You can pay your water, electrical and gas bill in one go (just bring in the receipt that the billing people tape to your door), their checking accounts are totally free, and you can’t toss a crab apple without hitting a branch office. So, daydreaming about never having to haul a single piece of furniture home from IKEA ever again, I figured I’d do the rest of my apartment shopping on TaoBao.com. For that, I needed a Chinese bank account.

The tellers were patient. I filled out forms. I filled out the same forms again. I nodded a lot and said “yup” a lot and a lot of people fussed over my foreign ID.  It all seemed rather straightforward, really. And just as things were wrapping up smoothly, the bank teller handed me this:

“Don’t let anyone else use it,” she said. If she had been wearing glasses, she would have looked at me balefully over the top of them.

“What is it?”

“You plug it into the computer. Com-PU-ter.”

“Yeah, the USB gave that away, but…”

“NEXT!”

So home I went to give the Mysterious Device a whirl. I plugged it in, and a big “ICBC” logo flashed on my monitor. And then nothing happened. I pushed some buttons. Poked it. Still nothing. “Meh,” I thought, pitching it off the side of the couch, and promptly forgot it existed. To the TaoBao mobile!

Okay, so I’d never navigated Chinese ecommerce.  But how hard could it be, really? Find something rad, add to cart, enter bank card information, rejoice. A few hours of poking around, and I found a pretty awesome coffee table. Added to cart, confirmed order, and prepared to pay online.

Pay online. Such small words for such a far-flung circle of hell.

What happened over the next seven hours can only be described as “doing battle”, and at this moment I’m not 100% certain whether I ordered a coffee table or authorized the Chinese mafia to launder money through my bank account. At hour two, I began to hallucinate new browser windows.  At hour four, I started to wonder if the Chinese had actualized an alternative system of economics under which people exchange pure liquid rage for goods and services. At hour four point three, I cried. And at hour seven, emotionally depleted and twitching a little, I gave up.

I had registered for online banking. I had set up some kind of IE-only browser-based-but-you-have-to-download-and-install-it application called “Banking @ Home”. I installed “security drivers”, whatever those are. I made passwords for AliPay, China’s Paypal equivalent. I made passwords for TaoBao. I tried direct bank transfer, but couldn’t figure out what info they wanted from me. I tried putting in my card number, but the form validator wouldn’t accept my foreign passport as a valid ID.  I gave half the Chinese internet my bank card number. I stared at, and gave up on, a screen called “Pay by pre-paid voucher”. I made up secret security questions and secret answers. At one point I had five programs open, and they all seemed to be telling each other juicy secrets, but none of them seemed to be helping me pay for my coffee table. I pushed next. Next. Next. Next. But nothing worked. The big red X is truly universal.

And suddenly, just as a disembodied fatherly voice told me to fall into the white light, I sat bolt upright, scrounged around under the couch, and dug out the Mysterious Device. I stared at it. It stared back at me. I plugged it in again. I tried to check out one more time. “Enter password for your USB key.” I tried one. It worked. “Click OK twice on your USB key to finalize your order.” I pushed “OK” twice on the Mysterious Device. And magically, miraculously: “Payment succeeded! Congratulations.”

Immediately, I received a private message from the coffee table manufacturer. “Thank you for your perseverance.”

“How do you know I was ‘persevering‘?” I wanted to scream. “I could have been taking a very relaxing bath.”

Despite the traumatic checkout process, the TaoBao “finding and buying stuff” experience is actually totally amazing, and uniquely Chinese. Like eBay, anything and everything you could ever want you can buy cheaply. But like any good Chinese shop, no price you see online is the final sale price. You put your desired item in your cart, you confirm your commitment to buying it, and then the seller usually contacts you right away (or you can contact them) and you can haggle over chat, after which they modify the price in your basket before you finalize your purchase. Thanks to this “promise to buy it and then hash out the details” method, you can also get all kinds of crazy custom items factory-direct. I just bought a ginormous custom-cut living room rug from a carpet manufacturer in TianJin for about $150.00 – shipping included.

Successful transactions in capitalism: the true meaning of Christmas. Angels are singing.

Happy Holidays to all.

In my final days in South Carolina, faced with an empty house and no internet, I actually bought a jigsaw puzzle. The analog kind, with actual pieces you can actually lose. And on our very last night, myself and a nameless collective of miscreants wrote a note about the origins of Blue Stalin on a paper plate  – the last plant-based writing surface we hadn’t packed yet – stuffed it inside his hollow, hollow head, and left him in a bed of leaves in an undisclosed location.

I had forgotten how much of travel is waiting. The good traveler knows how to make waiting bearable. Waiting for the dryer to finish the last load of laundry so you can finish packing. For the shuttle to come. For the plane to take off, and immediately thereafter, for the plane to land. For the jetlag to wear off, for it to be early enough to fall asleep or late enough to get out of bed. But the waiting’s over. We’re in Beijing, finally, finally.

On our second morning here, Kyle and I stumbled out of our hotel into the dry, crackling cold and found a sticky-bun restaurant that smelled like pee, chestnuts and bland corn porridge, 50 cents for three buns. I ordered the ones with vegetarian filling. “WE. DON’T. HAVE. ANY. OF. THOSE.” the shop owner bellowed at the dumb foreigner, waving her hands dramatically. Four waitresses clustered behind the counter, staring inscrutably. I almost cried with joy: I’m home.

This has no bearing whatsoever on my move, but when I see someone who knows and loves their craft well, it’s like they’ve reached some kind of nirvana and they become mesmerizing to watch. The dumpling baker was only about twenty with a smooth impish face, and he probably makes a few dollars a day. But he sang village songs with twinkling eyes, a huge smile and a ready voice, and his singing filled the whole kitchen as his flying hands transferred baozi from rack to oven three at a time in perfect rows. He stopped just long enough to fix me with a blazing grin and shake my hand below the serving window. What’s his secret, I wonder?

My secret is a smartphone. Considering that nothing in this country – nothing at all – can happen without a mobile device, that was my first order of business. Even website registration for services like WeiBo (China’s answer to Twitter) or TaoBao (China’s answer to eBay) is often verified by text messasge. The iPhone sales lady in Apple’s SanLiTun location smiled at me pleasantly. “Sure, you can buy one. You have to go online after 10:00p.m., go to a special url, and try to make a reservation. If you manage to do so successfully [erm...?], you might be able to come back tomorrow and pick it up.” Not sure if that “path of most resistance” sales procedure is a response to in-store theft or some kind of inventory management technique, but I went next door and bought a Droid. Just outside the glass doors of the Apple store, a dozen or so men brazenly stand around offering boxes of pirated iPhone 4s to passersby. Mall security loiters a few meters away, disinterested.

The last few frantic days have mostly consisted of procedural t-crossing and i-dotting. Apartment hunting was a blur of staring at real estate agents’ backs as we walked over and over and over the same two square miles. “Hah,” they all said, “You might have found a place for that price a few years ago, but now? No way.” We ended up with a nice, but slightly smaller and vastly more expensive than we wanted, two-bedroom near SiHui subway, on the eastern edge of the city. The bathrooms are lovely. The floors are heated from beneath. Our neighborhood is pretty great. That’s all I wanted, really.

Even in such a short time, it’s clear that things have changed here. The Beijing I remember – where gaggles of pudgy, shirtless old men playing mahjong dominated the residential districts and women walked their dogs in pajamas – is being crowded out by frenetic modernization. No one seems to be hawking and spitting as often or as loudly as they used to. Housing prices have doubled. Traffic is twice as bad, if such a thing is conceivable, and taxis are twice as hard to come by. By government decree, there are now ‘no smoking’ signs in every restaurant, which seems to mean that people are free to go on gleefully smoking inside as usual, but now chuck their cigarette butts on the floor for lack of an ashtray. The dive bar where I met Kyle has been gutted, just one more empty husk of industrial rubble in a soon-to-be decimated alley squeezed between the flagship Adidas store and a new luxury mall.

But still, I keep stumbling on bright flashes of that more familiar Beijing in the little corners that development passed over. The beverage aisle in the local grocery carries a mysterious brand of soft drink, which they courteously translated into English as “XJPT SPMQG DPFFF.” Fruit sellers and steamed dumpling vendors gather around the subway entrances. From our sixteenth floor window, we can see the coal trains passing by on the tracks beside our building.

And then there are the things that have always been and will always be part of China. The winters here are so dry your lips harden and start to crack within hours of arrival, and no amount of water or chapstick will save you. Taxi drivers are as ornery as they’ve always been. And cultivating good guanxi in your apartment complex is a matter of necessity.

Apartment life here is like accepting a new family.  If you insist on privacy, if you expect professionalism or perfection rather than warmth and good spirit, if you demand that the kid who installs the cable makes an appointment before showing up, or if you make a stink about punctuality, customer service, or plumbing problems, you will quickly become irrevocably and universally hated. Workplaces here are like brotherhoods, and gossip travels with otherworldly speed: when you make an enemy of one cleaning lady, you can be certain that the electricians four complexes over have heard all about the rude foreigner in building #3. And when your Chinese property management team doesn’t like you, all the tiny, invisible moving parts that propel your life smoothly forward immediately begin to break down. It’s like instant and observable karma. Mysterious fees appear on your bills.  The guards won’t let your friends into the building without you coming down to fetch them (they tell you it’s “policy”). You can’t get blown fuses fixed. You’re always last on every waiting list. Your questions are answered in monosyllables. I’ve been down that road, it’s exhausting and unrewarding and littered with my undelivered mail.

All it really takes to get anything done here is to skip the getting-to-know you part of human relationships and treat everyone on staff like a long-lost brother. Bring cookies and American cigarettes. Accept happily that no one will do what they said they would when they said they would (it’s not personal), understand that whatever can go wrong will, and welcome any visitor from the building staff warmly at any hour, and suddenly there are a hundred people who will bend heaven and earth to make your life a little easier. This is the Chinese concept of guanxi in action, the almost formulaic creation of personal connections and favor-trading that, much more so than money, make the Chinese world go ’round.

I used to hate guanxi. To an American, it feels like vastly unfair favoritism and blatant bribery. In our culture, we expect to be treated like valued customers in every dealing with service and industry, regardless of our behavior or personality. An American sees and feels a distinct line between personal and professional relationships, personal and professional behavior. In China, these lines are indistinct. But I’m coming to understand guanxi as a form of community building. It makes vast sense that a newcomer should quickly show their colors and the community should quickly fold them in, particularly in a place like China, where the collective supports and protects the individual, especially when bureaucracy and government can and do so often fail in that regard.

And similarly deep-rooted Chinese attitudes seem to remain intact.

On our way to the mandated health examination (where we saw a contraption mysteriously labeled ‘reverse vending machine’. I can only assume that you give it soda and it gives you money.), our taxi driver informed me with strong undertones of disapproval that Obama has yet to issue formal condolences to North Korea on the death of Kim Jong Il. He also seemed to consider it a shame China hadn’t been involved in a major war in a while. “We’re out of practice,” he said, shaking is head, and then, “Oh well, leave government things to the government. We ‘old hundred names’ can only mind our own problems.”

This old-hundred-name can agree with that last bit, at least.

I thought about that comment far longer than I’m sure Rusty intended. I examined everything I own with a new eye, wondering “Being a minimalist and all, do I really need this?”.  But when, during the early stages of packing up the house for my upcoming move, I found my plastic silver cat amputee ashtray with inbuilt fan (more on that exciting development below), I decided that, no, minimalism is probably not an ism I have any claim to.

I do, however, structure my existence around moving a lot, making regular clutter enemas a necessity. My moving-to-a-new-country methodology tends to involve throwing everything I own on the side of the road and then ignoring that anything unusual is happening until a mean lady with immaculate hair makes me turn off my electronic devices. Conversely, Kyle lovingly removes each item from its place,  pets it, tell stories about it, showers with it, writes it a sonnet, and then refuses to leave without it – an approach that brings me face to face with, well… Behold, artifacts of my minimalist lifestyle:

Exhibit A: Silver mechanical plastic ashtray lucky amputee cat

I never really sorted out if the red knobby thing was supposed to be a bloody arm stump, or if he is holding a strip of his own living skin in his other paw, but yes, it came like that. The best part is that when you open the stomach to stub out your cig, an internal “air-clearing” fan is activated, emitting a whirring sound from deep within the cat’s bowels. Whrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Exhibit B: Shaolin Dodecahedron Banhammer

To gaze upon the banhammer with mortal eyes is to know Mjölnir for the flimsy puff of sissypants weakness it is. Eat it, Thor. And also forum trolls. Actually, this is an old Shaolin training hammer that got incorporated into a Dungeon Master costume last Halloween (no, really). Mystery solved.

Exhibit C: Astrolabe

I know sextants are the new thing, but I really can’t sext my way out of a paper bag.

Exhibit D: Chinese Teacher’s Day ‘Thank You’ card

No, little Suzie. Thank you.

Exhibit E: Chinese Fighter Pilot Helmet

I don’t know what kind of girl chooses diamonds over a dual-panel faceguard, but whoever she is, she’s not sexually active.

Exhibit F: Zombie Survival Kit + Holy Oil and a vial of hallowed ground from Jerusalem

Insurance shimsurance. All the major eventualities are covered: zombie outbreak, vampire attack, and finding out I’m an immortal and need a portable place to hide from a sword fight with the Kurgan (there can be only 0ne).

Exhibit G: Blue Stalin

Because fact is stranger than fiction: One spring day about four years ago, Kyle and I ended up on the nearly-abandoned campus of a small Beijing art college. Thirsty and cranky, we poked around for, and finally found, a snack shop. Just next door, behind a slatted plastic curtain, we found the student supply store. And because we were feeling whimsical, we bought a white plaster bust of Stalin – which we were told was not actually Stalin, but whatever – and some paint. Blue Stalin was the best tie rack ever, and when it came time to leave Beijing, we couldn’t bear to part with him. He spent 8 months in the cargo hold of a transatlantic ship, and was finally delivered here, to my door, in South Carolina. And here he will stay. Look for Blue Stalin in a public park near you.