Ping pong politics.

Ping pong politics.


Beijing so far is not about the architecture, the politics, the Olympic games being over, or the communism or the Great Firewall. Our experience of the city is about the people that cook for us, the people that teach us, the people we buy from and the people we live with. This is about an exchange.


We CET language students live on a converted Danwei, literally meaning Work Unit. It’s a communist-era set of buildings designed to provide everything a set number of people, men, women and children, could need. It has a cafeteria, housing, classrooms and recreation areas, all preserved from the Cultural Revolution. We mostly use the open plaza in the center of the buildings to play sports.


One day, after the lunch we always eat together in the campus’ cafeteria, we hung around outside playing soccer in the too-rare, too dusty sun. Not long after, a few of the cooks from the cafeteria came up and asked us if we wanted to play basketball. Of course, we replied in broken Chinese.


It was a normal game. One guy had a basketball uniform on, the others straight off their shifts. The same kind of thing was probably happening in a thousand different places at that instant. But despite how average it felt, living here as an average person requires a certain amount of compromise.


As students, we’re still learning to compromise what we know with what we’re discovering. We learned where some of the bars are, we learned where you can get a rather large bottle of beer for $.50 USD, we learned what normal food is. We have also learned that our Chinese roommates are used to sleeping 8 to a dorm room, that abortion is taboo as is promiscuity, and to never assume you know what’s inside a dumpling. You give up some space, you give up English, you give up some capacity to express yourself. It takes an effort to be normal after that.

It’s a back and forth, like ping pong.


Our Chinese roommates and our teachers are the other side of the exchange. What we give to them I’m not really sure yet, but what we get is real access to what it’s like to grow and live in the biggest city in China and one of the biggest on Earth. We share some habits, we don’t share others, but what comes out of living together is that at least we understand something at a basic level about each other and about two countries that are literally a world apart. More than language, it’s about collective giving and taking, being part of the push and pull that feels much farther away in America than it does in Beijing.