I arrived in Beijing after a 12-hour flight from San Francisco. Wasn't too bad except for the fact that I got stuck with a middle seat. I sat down on the plane and all of a sudden thought to myself. WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING?!!! Why am I leaving so many great friends and the family that I love so much? I looked around at all the foreign faces and thought I don't belong here! The sound of screaming babies was deafening. A baby screaming in Chinese sounds pretty much like a baby screaming in English. LOUD! So I did what any red blooded American would do in a situation like that. I put on my iPod listened to some of my favorite tunes and got out a book and sunk into my own private Idaho. After a while I was able to fall asleep. When I woke up I noticed something strange. I saw three fathers standing in the isles holding their babies. That struck me as funny for some reason. The father sitting a couple of rows ahead of me was being extremely attentive to his kids. He had a friendly smile and joked with them and listened while one of his kids who seemed around 4 or 5 talked non-stop about something he was very excited about. Seeing this was somehow comforting to me. I felt relaxed and at ease all of a sudden. If I am heading to a nation where this is the norm it can't be all-bad.
After several hours of not talking to the two people seated on either side of me, the young man sitting in the window seat said in very good English, "excuse me" as he had to go to the bathroom. So all this time he spoke English? When he returned, I asked him if he lived in Beijing. He answered that he wasn't Chinese he was from Mongolia. His name was Tilu and he had been studying road construction in Washington DC and San Francisco and was going home for a friends wedding. He was tired as he had flown from DC to San Francisco then had the 12 hour flight to Beijing, a 15 hour layover and then two hours to his home in the capital city. All of a sudden my flight didn't seem so bad.
I am reading a book called lost in planet China, which is a very funny and supposedly a spot on look at China from a westerners view. It didn't make me feel better about going to China though as he talked at length about the horrible air quality and pretty repulsive habits he encountered. (read you have to watch your step when walking because of the variety of bodily fluids, solids and otherwise material that form land mines to be avoided.) His description of drivers in Beijing was terrifying from a pedestrian’s point of view. Looks like I am in for a huge adventure I thought to myself.
Sherry met me at the airport. Some people give you American names probably so you can have an easier time with it. She is from Human Resources. She and a driver took me to my temporary apartment. My company has a complex with two apartment buildings. One is for foreigners and one for Chinese who come to work in Beijing from other parts of China. The one for westerners is nicer and the rooms are larger. The Chinese live two to an apartment. So my temporary digs consists of a very small kitchen. (When I say small I mean really small) There is an even smaller room with a chair a tiny table and a tiny fridge. The bathroom doorway is just a little shorter than I am tall which means I have to duck to enter. The toilet is (western style) which means you don't have to squat over a hole. Thank God I thought. The bed is rock hard but after the flight I had, I was happy to lie down and quickly fell asleep.
My friend Bill woke me up with a loud knock on the door. I jumped up like you do when you wake up from a deep sleep and opened the door. We greeted each other and he started to give me the scoop. As he talked I knew that I was in for a real challenge. I will be assistant director of photography in a photo department where none of the photographers speak English. Neither does my boss the DOP. Apparently there are a couple of photo editors who speak some English.
I will be trying to learn Mandarin, which is spoken in this part of China. Even if I manage to learn enough of that language to get around it would do me no good in Hong Kong where Cantonese is spoken or in many other parts of China where many different dialects are the norm. Ok so how bout those Chinese characters. There are by one dictionary 60,000 characters. To read a newspaper and get around you need to know 3,000. The average Chinese knows 4-5,000. To be scholarly, you need to know 12,000. So I know two so far. I know the symbol for net which will indicate where they have wi-fi but it can also mean they make nets or they have a tennis court with a net. I also know the one for male only because it looks like a little man with a square head. I know two words so far Ni hao _hello and shay shay- thank you. So far that has gotten me though getting a few items at 7-11 across from my apartment and exchanging money at the bank this morning. Not knowing the language here makes you feel like an infant. I can almost feel people looking at me and thinking WHO LET THAT LARGE TWO YEAR OLD OUT BY HIMSELF? HE COULD GET KILLED OUT THERE!!! Challenging!
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