The Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010

Day 2: Wednesday, November 11. As the plane descends, I can see a definite yellow-brown smog cloud, and I recall all the media stories about Beijing’s air pollution during the Olympics. The Englishman sitting to my right asks if it is our first trip to China, informs me that Beijing has an excellent metro system, and warns me about the cold weather. Somehow, coming from darkest Scotland, I am not worried.

Beijing Airport is quite a sight. The ceiling curves and soars fifty feet above our heads, held up by massive pillars. Abundant skylights and plate-glass walls let in so much sunlight that artificial lighting hardly seems necessary. Everything appears very new. At passport control, the line moves slowly but Owen is apparently a Fastpass; an official riding a Segway pulls us out of line and directs us to a station marked “business permits only,” where there is no waiting. Score one for travel with a two-year-old. When we reach the pre-security section of the airport, with the shops and restaurants (including a Kenny Rogers Roasters), I notice something that Eric observed some time ago: seeing and hearing Chinese everywhere actually feels rather homey, much less foreign than, say, French or Italian. This is what comes of living in San Francisco for four years. It helps that almost everything in the airport is also signed in English.

We have two parties waiting for us at the airport. The first is the brother of one of Eric’s colleagues in Dundee, with his extremely pregnant wife in tow. We have brought them a suitcase full of baby goods. (It later occurs to me that I never actually looked in the suitcase to confirm that it was not, say, guns and crack. Eric assures me that he checked, and that it was mostly infant formula, which Stacie W. may think is worse than guns and crack if she reads this, but at least would not get us arrested.) After leaving them with the suitcase, I idly ask Eric whether he knows if it is their first child; about an hour after that it occurs to me that that is a really effing stupid question to ask IN CHINA. I blame the jet lag.

The other person waiting for us is a graduate student named Yao, whom our host Jun has sent to meet us. He takes us to the car, where a Chinese version of Davey is waiting to drive us to Tianjin, about 90 minutes away. We had been hoping to ride the 350 kph bullet train (that’s about 215 mph, if you’ve forgotten your metric conversions), which makes the trip in half an hour, but apparently the Beijing traffic is so bad that it takes an hour to get from the airport to the train station, thus negating the advantage of the train.

Things I notice during the drive:

1. The traffic is scary.

2. We are driving on the right, and the array of cars looks much more American (sedans and SUVs) than British (hatchbacks). Audi seems to be particularly popular.

3. The traffic is really scary.

4. The license plates only have one Chinese character; the rest of the letters are in the Roman alphabet. Yao says this is because our alphabet is easier to remember; the Chinese character is the province.

5. Did I mention the traffic is really freaking scary?

After an initial terrifying half hour or so of impossibly tight merges on the overcrowded highways (our driver blares his horn continually in lieu of ever yielding to another vehicle), the vast semi-industrial sprawl of the Beijing outskirts gives way to farmland and a slightly less frightening ride. The countryside is extremely flat and not very impressive. Visibility is poor due to the yellow haze of smog; when the driver rolls down the window at a toll station, it smells like a wildfire. We know we are finally approaching Tianjin when endless clumps of high-rises begin to dot the landscape. Tianjin is the third largest city in China, with a population of 10 million or so, notwithstanding the fact that I had never heard of it before we started planning this trip.

We have no idea where we are staying. The car finally turns onto the campus of Nankai University and pulls up at a hotel whose sign reads “Foreign Guest House.” Our host Jun is waiting. He was one of Eric’s classmates in graduate school at Emory; we have not seen him in quite a while. His career has been impressive so far – he finished his Ph.D. in only three years and is already a department chair. Jun checks us in to the hotel, which turns out to house mainly long-term visiting professors. He is perturbed to learn that there is no elevator, as we are on the fourth floor. I assure him it will be fine – I’m not so far along that I can’t handle a few stairs.

Our room turns out to be a whole suite that includes a kitchen and washing machine (useful, considering Owen’s morning), with high ceilings and a balcony. It’s a bit careworn, with scuff marks on the walls and a shortage of grout in the bathroom, but quite comfortable. Within five minutes, Owen is running from room to room exclaiming, “I love my new home!” Poor kid, twenty hours was well more than enough travel time for him. He is also asking if he can see “lion dancers, maybe” about every two minutes, but Jun confirms that this is highly unlikely since it is not a festival time. (Odds that he will get to meet the Monkey King, whom he learned about from the good old 1980s special “Big Bird in China”: even less. Youtube giveth, Youtube taketh away.)

Jun leads us down to the hotel restaurant for a lunch of egg soup, dumplings, salad, and fruit. In a sign of things to come, Owen will only eat orange slices. Eric and Jun run through a predictable bout of Emory talk, and then Jun turns to the topic of the advantages of being a scientist in China: the cost of living is very low, the government throws piles of money at you, top-quality graduate students are a dime a dozen, etc. The second time he mentions that it would also be very easy for me to get work teaching English to undergraduates, I realize that this all seems to be a bit more than idle chatter. Is he seriously trying to recruit Eric?

After lunch, Eric heads to the lab with Jun for more science talk, while Owen and I go back to our room for a desperately-needed nap. We are collected for dinner at 7. Jun has brought his wife Minh and their two children, ages 5 and 6, who call themselves Sophie and Rob and are eager to practice their English on us. (The children are really called Li-fan and Li-tun. English nicknames seem to be very common in China; I suppose it keeps us from butchering the pronunciation of their real names.) From the fact that there are two of them, I feel better about my earlier brain fart. Apparently academics flout the one-child policy with some frequency.

They take us to a different restaurant on the campus, where we get a private room (as we will for almost every lunch and dinner during the trip – they seem to be part of every restaurant). Jun orders about 15 dishes. The food is excellent and not too different from what one might get at a good Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. Owen won’t eat anything except some cookies and, weirdly, a tiny whole roasted fish, but he has a blast playing with Jun’s kids. Eric and I give up trying to enforce good behavior when it becomes clear that the older kids are under no such orders. Eventually the three of them are running laps around the table, shrieking at each other in both Chinese and English, and playing hide and seek behind the curtains. There are broken dishes involved (Owen proves that he has not mastered the magician’s trick of removing a tablecloth without upsetting the table), and eventually tears when a game of playing at being roaring tigers gets too intense. I am pretty sure the waiters are happy to see the end of us when we leave.