That said, far and away most of my idle internet cycles have been ploughed into Quora lately (my profile being here).

Most people in the office seem to be rooting for the Lakers. Kobe is pretty famous here in China and I wonder if they are largely just rooting for him?

I also learned today that in the many encounters the Celtics and the Lakers have had in the NBA finals, something like 11 times, the Celtics have won 9 of them. I didn’t realize that head to head the numbers were so lopsided. Both teams have racked up an impressive number of championships though.

Luckily so far the only 2:30 games I’ve been really anxious to see have fallen on days where I didn’t have work the next day, and so, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a really entertaining experience to be in a bar at 3 in the morning surrounded by equally enthused people chanting USA. It’s even more fun, I think, when the other half of the bar is English and has much more creative cheers only to get drowned out by an even louder round of U!S!A! Thankfully, the experience was a pretty fun feel rather than one of unveiled hostility or contempt. I was standing next to this Brit and he had the good humor to answer some of my rooted-in-ignorance questions (mostly about the lineups of both teams since I really don’t know anything).

I’ve started reading The Goal Post since I can’t be bothered to go out and find commentary myself, I’m relying on their “Best of AM/PM” digests to keep me somewhat informed. So far so good, I guess.

GOOO USA! (ps thx Green)

I’ve been going back and forth with him on emails and some of the questions he’s asked me I feel like I want to think about a little more so I’ve tried to use them as a basis for this post.

I think I’m in a fairly lucky position of having a bunch of pretty good friends who I can visit that are concentrated in a handful of cities in the US. It makes any visit to those cities into a good trip and if ever I do manage to move back to the US it’ll leave me in a position to hopefully avoid the awkward situation of starting out with absolutely no social network to speak of, as was the case when I moved to China.

There are certainly things I miss about the US while I am in China and things I miss about China while i am in the US. I think one of the big things I appreciate about being in China, and only realize that I have come to take it for granted when I go back to the US, is the cheapness and convenience of a lot of things. Food in particular comes to mind – it’s a really fantastic that I can basically go downstairs and across the street are 4 different hole-in-the-wall restaurants any one of which I can go to and get a delicious dinner for no more than a couple bucks, USD.

It’s a little weird to go back to the US and feel like I’m a visitor there now. I mean, every day in Beijing I am faced with this very obvious sense of being not like everybody here, but it’s a new thing to have that happen in the US, I guess. Sure, in somewhere like NY a great many people are not from there but at the same time it was an experience I am not used to and am unsure if I will ever get used to.

That all said, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable I guess. Daily routine things have not shifted in some dramatic way for me. Some people when they come to China lament the coffee options and eventually upon discovering where to buy better coffee then lament how it’s relatively expensive compared to other options. I imagine this’ll change as people in China drink more and more Coffee but we’ll see. I’m not a coffee drinker so this particular experience never really came up for me. My breakfast routine was always basic stuff like yogurt, or eggs, or oatmeal, all of which are no trouble at all.

I liked how friendly people seemed when I first moved here though now it feels a little superficial. People aren’t screaming “HELLO!” for much of any other reason as to point me out as a foreigner and demonstrate that they can. Maybe I’m being too harsh, I don’t know. I do like that in the US I can readily engage in a deeper conversation with most people simply because we have a shared language. My Chinese proficiency still really isn’t good enough for me to get into seriously meaty conversations. At the rate it’s improving I wonder if it ever will be unless I really drop everything and seriously resume studying for a while.

I don’t know, we’ll see. I’m still having a pretty good time, and still when people ask “how long will [I] be here?” I answer “as long as it stays fun and interesting.”

Anyway… What is it like to be a hapa in an Asian country?

One thing for me has occasionally been the expectation of language skills. I learned no Chinese growing up and occasionally this is seen as a failure on my mother’s part. This however I suspect is not unique to being a hapa in China as I know this happens for many Asian Americans in Asia as well.

There seems to be this assumption that 混血兒 (mixed blood) people are smarter and better looking. I can’t really tell if this is just something that people say as flattery or if this is a widely held belief, though I am coming to suspect the latter.

My experience has mainly been one of a (white) foreigner in an Asian country and less so a hapa in an Asian country though. I guess unlike an actual white foreigner though, I do occasionally get mistaken for minority Chinese until I screw up in conversation and say something only a foreigner would say.

On second thought, being a hapa I find I get a lot of passes where somebody who was either fully Asian or fully something else would not. For every time I’m told the Chinese half of my family has failed to instill me with Chinese language and culture, I’ve no doubt there are many instances of it simply being chalked up to my non-Chinese half/upbringing.

In basically any situation I can choose to emphasize one half over the other as it suits me, which affords me a nice degree of flexibility and eases dodging any sort of ethnicity based assumptions that would work against me.

Edited after Owen’s answer: The above refers pretty much entirely to my experience in China. Elsewhere in Asia (India, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam) I am pretty much 100% white guy foreigner, probably in no small part as a consequence of spending my time in those countries as an obvious tourist.

Note June 8: updated here because I updated it there too.

More recently, I find myself coming to find the trend of movies in 3D to be a little tiresome. Roger Ebert who is no fan has said as much about 3D in a variety of places. I think he’s got a lot of pretty good points.

The first movie I’ve seen so far that I think really did a great job of using 3D was Avatar. That’s the only one though. I had a great time seeing it, it looked great, it was fun and bright and vibrant and generally a good time. I admit, I haven’t seen it in 2D and so can’t really compare but, still. Actually that’s true for all of the movies I’ve seen in 3D with the single exception of Up! which I feel didn’t really benefit from it very much, either.

Yesterday, I went and saw Alice in Wonderland and it was to me a pretty big disappointment. Not just the 3D-ness of it, which was pretty bleh, but in general the sort of discombobulated sense of confusion I had through much of it. I guess a lot of people say they enjoy the fanciful sense of whimsy something something Alice something blah blah but I just got annoyed and bored by turns while watching it.

Update: I saw How to Train your Dragon and actually that wasn’t that bad either. We’ll see, maybe when Toy Story 3 comes out here it’ll be improved for having 3D too.

Through hosting these movies, I’ve come to meet a whole bunch of new people in Beijing. It’s generally nice to meet new people in Beijing because over time I’ve come to notice that I lose friends pretty fast in this town. There’s no underlying drama or anything like that, only that it seems most people who I meet here are not long for Beijing, arriving and departing within the space of a year. If I’m lucky I’ll meet them early in that period and overlap with most of it. Mostly though I catch people in the middle and occasionally the end of their stays, their visits, their semesters, their job search.

So with the constant turn over in people there is a constant weakening if not breaking of those weak ties which I seem to have amassed so many of.

I wonder who I’ve known the longest here in Beijing. I guess there are a few people who I met very early on in my stay here, some even before I had even moved here, but who I don’t actually keep in touch with at all (for example, Ed I met at a dinner my parents hosted before I lived in Beijing. We never really spent much time hanging out or anything and at this point we’ll say hi when we run into one another but I feel like that’s happened less and less often as our mutual friends have drifted out of Beijing as well). But who is there who I actually keep up with regularly that I met here? I can think of maybe one or two people at most. Everybody else got here a lot later or already left.

I guess in a lot of ways that’s reflected in the notion that nearly three years is a long time to have been here to most people who hear it. There are of course the old timers, the old China hands who have been bouncing around Beijing for the better part of the last decade (my parents for example) but I don’t have all that much exposure to them. Mostly they seem to be a bit older than me, too, which has slowed my falling in with them socially.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll cut myself short here and think on this some more.

When I go and do social things, a lot of the time I will end up meeting somebody and we’ll be talking and at some point they will suggest that we exchange phone numbers or something. Generally in such a case I will offer my number and shortly thereafter they will call it. I will save the number and a few weeks later I will go through my phone and delete all the names I can’t recognize – chiefly the people who I got one call from when they got my number and then never heard from again.

So why is it that all of these number exchanges are ultimately so fruitless? Am I just remembering this incorrectly, and in fact I have called a lot more of these people back than I am admitting here and to myself? I don’t think so, but I guess I’m not really sure.

If somebody asks for my number I’m not about to lie or give some excuse for why I can’t or won’t give it out. I can’t very well suggest “if you need to get in touch with me we obviously have mutual friends, ask them for my number” because that would send a very clear “please only consider getting in touch with me if you really really want to” which they of course will not because we’ve only just met.

I should clarify that all of this idle thought is gender neutral because in cases where I am actively soliciting girls’ numbers I am inevitably faced with the decision to call or not call and that is a decision I am usually comfortable making.

But returning to the general case of numbers of people I am not interested in sleeping with (eg met at a poker game or talked to at some gallery or a friend of a friend while out) – why is there never, or so rarely, a call later?

Of course I must consider for myself, why do I never call them? Presumably whatever reasons I have for not calling are the same as theirs… but maybe not because I am not usually the one initiating number exchanges?

Perhaps it is because it is nice to have the numbers of people if I should come up with a good reason to call later, and it is less troublesome than having to ask a mutual friend how to get in touch later. And there might not even be a mutual friend, I guess.

I don’t know. I don’t take it personally but have no real insight on this, so, I unceremoniously delete another handful of numbers from my phone. Alternatively, I could get a phone that is not older than my duration in China and doesn’t have such a tediously low limit (feels like approximately 4) on how many numbers it can store. On second thought, it’s kind of like people I meet once, add as a friend on facebook, send one message and promptly forget about.

The flight I took was on Ethiopian Airlines which runs a route from Beijing to Addis Abeba with a stop in Delhi. On the way back, I was seated next to a group of Chinese dudes from Tangshan.

When I first boarded the plane, I was pretty tired and fell asleep pretty much right away, as I am wont to do during air travel. Later though, when I was awake and eating some chewy chicken thing, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation.

In the past I’ve been really unreceptive to striking up random conversations with people because in Beijing the only people I ever encounter who try to strike up random conversation are people trying to sell me something, but during my visit to India I met a lot of people who were really just friendly and wanted to chat.

So anyway, I’m chatting with this guy and he’s trying to figure out what my deal is since I got on in Delhi, am flying to Beijing, and don’t really look that Chinese or Indian. I noticed that on this flight, in contrast with my flight out of China, it’s mostly Chinese (the flight out was much more Indians and Africans) and I asked what they were all doing in Addis Abeba.

He wasn’t sure about most of the people on the plane (and I’m not sure why I assumed he would have any idea) but him and his 3 buddies were all coming back to China from Zambia. Apparently they’d been traveling for something like 17 hours when I got on the plane in Delhi and were closing out 24 hours of continuous travel (final stop was Beijing where they all lived now).

I knew basically nothing about Tangshan and Zambia both (couldn’t locate either on a map either) so I asked these guys about what they were doing and where. First I got that Tangshan was in Hebei, so from this I guessed (correctly) that these guys were working in some heavy industry or mining or something and had been sent out to Zambia since China seems to have invested a lot in lots of African nations lately. That was exactly it, as they all had backgrounds in coal mining and had been sent to Zambia to investigate digging for something else (coal? oil? this got lost in translation a bit). They were coming back at that time because their Visas were up.

It was around this time that our conversation was getting to be too much for our mutual lack of each other’s language, so the guy next to me asked his buddy to switch seats him because the buddy’s English was better. I found out that this was their first ever trip out of China, and that Americans speaking English are much easier to understand than Africans and British and pretty much anybody else. It’s because all the TV and movies that these guys use to practice are American!

He lamented a bit how he wants to get better at English but he has nobody to practice with and not enough time outside of work to do so either. I sympathized though really for him it’s a lot more legitimate considering that I am a foreigner in China learning Chinese while he is not a Chinese dude in America learning English.

About this time the conversation turned as my conversations so often do to basketball. The buddy likes Garnett a lot, and the first guy said he likes the bulls, but also Kobe. The Bulls fan was apparently the best of the four of them, and wanted to know if I was very good at basketball because I am American (so obviously I play basketball all the time!). Compelled by my duty to truth I explained that I am not in fact much of a basketball player.

That’s pretty much all there was to it as by this time we were landing and we exchanged cards and pleasantries out at the luggage carousel and then I headed off.