So you want to study Chinese in Beijing

Posted on October 2, 2004 by Will Moss

The pros and cons of Worldlink Education

Last spring, for selfish personal reasons, I quit my perfectly good job in Singapore and abandoned my wife for three months to come to Beijing and study Mandarin. I am now living and working in Beijing, along with my wife, so I guess the whole crazy stunt can be considered a success.

Before I came to Beijing I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how I was going to study here. I had two years of Mandarin instruction in Singapore, so I wasn’t starting from scratch, but my skills were elementary. I had no idea which language programs or schools in Beijing were reputable or what would be a fair price to pay. I spent a lot of time on the web and wrote to acquaintances living in Beijing.

I got a lot of different opinions. Some people told me to come to Beijing, hire a tutor and work one-on-one. Some people told me to attend classes. I heard BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture University) was great. I heard BLCU sucked. It didn’t add up to a really coherent picture. One problem was a shortage of useful information on the web. It was easy to find websites for Wordlink Education, BLCU, the Taipei Language Institute and other programs with registration information, classes, fees and so forth. What I couldn’t find was third-party reviews, real testimonials from students or critiques by people who had been through the programs.

Ultimately I chose Worldlink Education’s Beijing language program, and instruction at their in-house school, the Beijing Chinese Language Academy. Worldlink seemed reputable and well organized and their office in Australia, through which I did registration, was responsive and quick. I chose their in-house classes rather than BLCU instruction (which they also offer) because of the smaller class sizes.

On the whole, the experience was pretty good, but not perfect. I posted this article so that people who are considering Worldlink for study in Beijing know exactly what they will and won’t get from the program, and what kind of an experience they can expect.

I am also including a little bit about Beijing itself. I am not going to write about the city in detail. Others have done that, including me in my China Diary blog (www.imagethief.com/china). Also, I am not an old China hand by any stretch. My total time in Beijing is now a year. But I’ve been in Asia for nearly ten years, so I have some perspective.

All of this is based on my own experiences. Other people will have different opinions, and your mileage may vary. Shop around, and don’t make your decision based just on what I have to say. I invite other Worldlink Beijing alums to add their own comments, good or bad, using the form at the bottom of this page.

Beijing
“Motherfuckers,” muttered the American in line behind me, “I fucking hate the Chinese.” I was in Bangkok, boarding my most recent flight to Beijing on a transit from Singapore. The passengers were mostly Chinese and the queue to board the airplane was random disorganized at best. The angry American was coming to China on business for what I am sure were six long, miserable weeks. Clearly not all of this guy’s baggage was suitcases, if you know what I mean, but I think he was a pretty good example of how you can end up if you don’t learn to roll with the cultural punches.

If you haven’t spent time in Asia, be prepared. Very little English is spoken away from the central business district. Although it’s modernizing fast, Beijing still has a lot of third-world grime, dust and odors. Much of the food is shockingly oily. Public transportation is crowded and, often, uncomfortable. Queuing (lining up for things) is an inexact science. People might seem rude and brusque at first glance. Service may sometimes seem appalling (although it can be surprisingly good at times). You’re a foreigner, so sometimes you’ll pay more for stuff.

Relax. Things just don’t work the same here, and you have to have patience, tolerance and open-mindedness. Chinese social idiosyncrasies are as valid as American ones. Treat discovery of those idiosyncrasies as a cross-cultural adventure and you’ll have a good time. If you expect things to work like they do at home or are quick to get frustrated or angry, you’ll end up culture-shocked and miserable like my fellow traveler in Bangkok. Beijing is fascinating, generally inexpensive and great fun. Western comforts are easy to find once you know where to look. It is much more accessible and easy to get around than I thought it would be. In general I have found Chinese people to be friendly, enthusiastic about speaking Mandarin, and engaging and curious about me and my country.

Some of this stuff seems obvious, but my own Wordlink roommate wrestled with a lot of these issues while he was in China. He was a great guy with good Mandarin skills from university, but this was his first time outside the US and I think a lot what he experienced here took him by surprise. There is no real way to know if you’ll like it or not before you arrive. Buy a good guidebook and read it thoroughly before you get on the plane. Track down people who have spent time in China and talk to them.

Classes
This is what you are coming for, so I’ll spend the most time on it.

Worldlink classes consist of three sessions: Speaking, comprehension and listening. Normally these are taught by different instructors, and each session uses a different BLCU text provided by Worldlink. You have two of the three sessions each day, varying over the week. Speaking and comprehension provide the backbone of vocabulary and grammar while the listening course uses cassettes to get you used to hearing and understanding native speakers. I strongly advise going to the BLCU bookstore, near Worldlink, and buying your own set of the cassettes for your listening session. The entire set for one textbook costs about 80 yuan (US$10). If you take the “intensive” course there is an additional afternoon session which is mostly extra reading and vocabulary.

The professors are mostly retired BLCU instructors and the instruction is Asian in style, which means a lot of working through the book by rote and not too much creativity. Homework consists of book exercises and memorizing vocabulary and characters. Different instructors encourage different amounts of discussion in class, but, generally, there is a serious lack of useful conversation time.

You are expected to use language exchange partners or tuition for conversation, but there was a chronic shortage of tutors at Worldlink while I was there. Language exchange partners are local students who swap their Mandarin coaching for your English. If you’re lucky, as I was, you can get a great one who will become a good local friend. If you are unlucky, you’ll get someone who was roped in by being invited to a party where “there will be foreigners” and who has no real idea what he or she is getting into. Several of my friends’ language partners were recruited in this way. There is no shortage of energetic local students advertising to be tutors and language exchange partners, so if Worldlink isn’t providing what you need, don’t be afraid to swallow the modest cost and strike out on your own. If you want to progress, there is no substitute for speaking Chinese to locals.

If you already have some Mandarin, Worldlink will give you a placement test when you arrive. It’s one-page, and no one actually speaks to you. One page is no basis for assessing someone’s language skills. If you’re having a bad day with your characters, or if there is some key vocabulary in the reading passage that trips you up, you get downgraded. If you’ve encountered the parable in the reading passage before and can explain it, you get placed high. To Worldlink’s credit, you can shift classes. They say you can do this during the first week, but they are fairly flexible about it throughout. If you feel uncomfortable with the level of the class you are in at any time, don’t be afraid to ask to change up or down.

Worldlink does not offer all course levels all the time, and they shoehorn a lot of students into the next-best class level. A good friend of mine was not willing to settle for next-best, and browbeat Worldlink into opening a new class at his level. That was fortunate for me since I ended up joining him after spending one weeks in a course that was too easy and then another week in one that was too hard.

But we learned another lesson: Worldlink’s quality of instructors varies wildly. Some are truly fantastic. Some are complete no-hopers. One friend of mine had his Mandarin skills ridiculed in class by his teacher. Not a constructive approach to instruction. Our new instructor was friendly and well meaning, but he had a complete inability to explain vocabulary and grammar in Mandarin, which some of the instructors are very good at. He also had not been trained for the listening class and had apparently never operated a cassette player before. There were some tragicomic moments as my friend and I used our bad Mandarin skills to explain to him how he was supposed to teach us.

Again to Worldlink’s credit, they eventually replaced him with a significantly better instructor with whom I enjoyed studying. But it took a second round of furious lobbying and threats by my energetic classmate. All in, the first three weeks of my twelve week program were something of a write-off. Bear this in mind if you are coming for a month-long program.

Students come to Worldlink for varying lengths of time, and the people in a class can change with time. In the nine weeks after I finalized my class our group ranged from two students to nine. I spent the final three weeks as the sole student in the class, which was at once useful and trying. Four to six people is very comfortable. Much above six and no one person gets to participate much in class. If there are more than ten people in your class at Beijing Chinese Language Academy, complain loud and hard. You are paying extra to avoid BLCU’s large classes.

Often the students have substantially different skill levels. That is not necessarily bad, but it can be frustrating for everyone involved at times. More frustrating, motivation levels can vary dramatically from people who are driven to learn to complete tourists who cut most of their classes and only manage to slow class down at the odd times they show up. We had a one student who was in our class for one month during which he attended six times and contributed nothing but carbon dioxide and surplus body heat.

I spoke to a lot of my friends and classmates about their experiences in Worldlink classes. Opinions ranged from those who felt it was tremendous experience to those who felt it was a total waste of time. On average my friends thought their classes were OK, but were disappointed because they felt that the classes could be significantly better. Better instructors, more conversation and less rote book-work were what many of them wanted.

There is no doubt that you can learn from the Beijing Chinese Language Academy classes taught at Worldlink. I did. But use the classes a springboard to get vocabulary and grammar. You’ll gain much more actual speaking and listening ability from talking to locals, whether they are language exchange partners, tutors, taxi drivers or shopkeepers, than you will from the classes.

Accommodation
My experience was great. I had asked for a three-person apartment, but demand was high with the rush of students returning to Beijing after SARS and I was “upgraded” to a two person apartment. The apartment complex, Huaqing Jiayuan (Leisure Garden), was in a neighborhood called Wudaokou. At first I was alarmed by how far the apartment was from the school, nearly four kilometers. But I rapidly got over that.

The apartment was clean, modern and spacious, if not overly stylish. Despite a very odd smell from the drains in the shower, it was a long way from the roach-infested pit I had mentally prepared myself for. Wudaokou was a great neighborhood to live in, with dozens of bars, restaurants, outdoor beer gardens, coffee houses and shops. A subway station right across from the apartment provided easy access to downtown. School was a ten minute bus ride away, but for most of the summer I walked the forty minutes to and from school. It was hot and dusty, but not unpleasant.

There were a few issues in the apartment that you should prepare for. Although there was a fine fridge and microwave, total cookware consisted of a frying pan, a cleaver and a cutting board. Dishes were four bowls and eight chopsticks. Fortunately, the supermarket downstairs had a fine assortment of ridiculously cheap kitchenware. Also, in Beijing you often prepay for your power, which I didn’t know at the time. Although that was supposed to be taken care of for us, our power went out a couple of times, requiring frantic calls to the landlady, Worldlink etc.

Worldlink’s website also made a few unsupported claims about the apartments. For instance, it says that “all apartments have Internet access”. It would better read, “Internet access can be arranged in all apartments.” It’s not hard to do, but you do have to pay for it yourself (80 yuan a month for broadband). Also, the website says that all rooms have desks and chairs. Well, I got to the apartment first, so I claimed the master bedroom, which did have a desk and a chair. My roommate was in the microscopic second bedroom, which fate he accepted with good cheer. But he had no desk or chair. The apartment also didn’t include the promised DVD player, but my roommate wasted no time prying one out of Worldlink. Ultimately, I was very comfortable there.

Some of my friends who had opted for the dormitories were not so lucky. The dorms are rudimentary but serviceable, but they were also full. The overflow was placed in the Chengfu Hotel, right off of Beijing’s fourth ring road, about two kilometers from campus. The Chengfu was, not to put too fine a point on it, popular with the local whores. It was an adventure for male and female students alike. It didn’t have either the convenience of the dormitories or the charm of Wudaokou.

Some students opt to stay at the Xijiao Hotel, also in Wudaokou. I put my father up there when he was visiting Beijing, and I have nothing bad to report.

Home stays with Chinese families are another option, and I can’t really comment on them much since I didn’t do one myself. I will tell you that my friends who did home stays had mixed experiences. Some thought it was great, some thought it was weird and uncomfortable. Based on what I have heard, I will tell you this: The language benefits of a home stay are real (see “Immersion” below). But be prepared to gamble a bit on the quality of your family, and be ready to surrender some privacy and independence regardless. If your situation is uncomfortable, ask Worldlink to move you.

Fellow Students
My fellow students were the best part of my Worldlink experience. In three months in the program there I made many very good friends, some of whom I hope to stay in touch with. The ready-made social group is hard to beat when you come to a new city, especially one where there can be difficult to make local friends quickly. People were friendly, supportive and fun.

They were, on average, younger than me. I was the rare mid-career professional, at the creaky age of 36. Many of my classmates were college students or grad students, with the occasional 30 something and one or two older people. But we were all strangers in Beijing, and I found it very natural to form friendships with people.

Having a group made it that much easier to navigate restaurants, explore the city, be tourists, share experiences, and generally survive three months in a strange place without feeling stranded. Having moved back to Beijing to work just two weeks ago, I miss that ready-made group of friends, and I feel much more isolated.

Immersion
The trade-off of the social group is that Worldlink is not “immersion” in Chinese. I was constantly surrounded by English speakers, and hung out with English speakers in my spare time. For a while, I worried about this. “Don’t take anyone to Beijing who will speak English with you,” said my tutor in Singapore (who is from Beijing). Well, I didn’t need to take anyone with me. I found them all there. But I think the trade off of immersion for the support and fun of great was worth it.

You can immerse yourself a bit more with a home stay, if you like. But unless you are relentlessly dedicated to speaking Mandarin all the time, you’ll end up speaking English to your classmates anyway, especially if you want any kind of social life.

There are some non-Worldlink programs that pledge students to speaking nothing but Mandarin. Whatever works for you. Immersion is great, but there is plenty you can accomplish by simply making the most of opportunities to speak the language. My fellow-students and I had a series of “speak Mandarin” dinners where we spoke in Chinese to each other. But it seems a shame to limit all of your discourse to the lowest, linguistic common denominator for three months. If you want to immerse yourself, go backpacking on your own for a month through rural China or get yourself an English teaching job in the sticks for six months (not hard). Worldlink won’t do it.

Extras
Worldlink promotes a few bells and whistles to flesh out their package, including the weekend excursions and social outings, elective classes and the student-lounge with Internet access. As with everything else about Worldlink, it’s a grab-bag of good and bad.

I never did any of the weekend trips, although they were very popular. They seemed quite expensive to me for what they were (often 1500 yuan or more for two days by train to Xian or Inner Mongolia, which is deceptively close to Beijing). Often fifty, sixty or more students went on the trips, and they were basically package tourism. Here is your schedule. On the bus, off the bus, eat here, sleep there. If you don’t mind that, go for it. A lot of people had good fun.

For places like the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace I suggest skipping the Worldlink trips and doing it on your own, or with a small group of friends. It’s easy to hire a driver and get to those places and more fun to chart your own course when you’re there.

I only did one elective, a course on Chinese character writing. It covered stroke order and radicals. It was OK. I think the electives are very hit-and-miss, and I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing anything by only taking up one of my allotted four.

As for the student lounge, the computers are full of spyware and tend to run badly, but they do generally work. Think twice before accessing your Internet banking. Demand is very high at peak hours (right before class and right after). If you have a laptop, it’s a better bet to bring it and plug it into the Worldlink network. The lounge is often a disaster area of pizza boxes and beer bottles. It’s not so good for lounging, but reasonably tolerable for checking your webmail and meeting your friends before lunch.

Management and Organization
Worldlink is bang-up at processing your application and getting you enrolled in the program. They will meet you at the airport, just like they say they will. They will have someplace tolerable for you to stay. The fundamentals work fine.

The devil is in the details, however. As an academic program, Worldlink seems fairly haphazard. It all comes together in the end, but with rough edges. As we learned, if you don’t end up with the right class or the right instructor, you need to be prepared to make things happen. (Or, if you’re like me, find a friend who is prepared to make things happe). Things like tests and attendance are all fairly random, and depend a great deal on the individual instructor.

Be prepared to be taken by surprise here and there, and to have to ask to office to help you with things that you might feel they ought to automatically take care of, like buying electricity for your apartment. The upside is that the staff were generally very helpful when I did have to ask for them to take care of things.

Was it worth it?
Unquestionably. If you want to come to study Chinese in Beijing, Worldlink makes it easy. The courses, the accommodation, the visa paperwork and the ready-made gang of friends are all taken care of. It’s the easiest way to get there, and it takes the burden of organization out of your hands.

But you can expect some compromises in the classes and the quality of service. That’s the deal you make. I had a good experience, but I worked hard to speak Mandarin with regular Chinese people on a daily basis, and I had a head-start on the language. I also knew exactly what I wanted to get out of being in Beijing for three months, and I achieved that. Even though that didn’t all have to do with Worldlink, they served the purpose I needed and so I feel good about the experience. Not everyone felt the same. My roommate thought the whole thing was a poor second to his Duke University language program of the year before.

It would be easy to come to Worldlink and piss the time away and not learn much, or to be scandalized by a poor experience and give up on it (which some people do). You’re paying a lot considering the local costs, so be willing to go to the mat with Worldlink to get your money’s worth if you feel jerked around. Be clear about what you want to get out of the experience and do what you need to in order to achieve that. Come into it with your eyes open and can be worth your while.

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The standard issue chairman mao

Posted on August 6, 2004 by Will Moss

I had never before lived in a country where there was a real cult of personality. China has fixed that.

Oh, Americans give it their best shot. God bless them if they don’t want Reagan on everything these days: Ships, money, Mount Rushmore, text books, dog licenses. But as a nation, they seem to have a fair aversion to elevating deceased leaders to godhood.

This is a good thing. I am not in favor of cults of personality or the deification of human beings, living or dead. I am in favor of a scrappy press and an angry body politic that delight in jerking the rug out from underneath the people that run the country.

I am not, however, opposed to enshrining the memory of leaders who have had a significant impact on the history of the nation. Even I misted up at the Lincoln Memorial as I read the Gettysburg Address, one of history’s great orations, from the text etched on the wall in the shadow of the great man’s statue.

But what keeps America great, even in one of its darker periods, is that someone so inclined (perhaps a southerner with a Civil War chip) can stand on the steps of that very same monument and loudly declare, “Lincoln was an asshole!” without fear of state retribution or persecution.

Just try that on the steps of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, smack bang in the center of Tiananmen Square, and see how long it takes the state to dish out some retribution.

China knows cult of personality, and Mao is the beneficiary. I realize that “cult of personality” is often used with regards to a living person, but I suspect that, in the Chinese national consciousness, Mao is not entirely dead. One of the interesting things about being in China now is that the country still seems to be building the Mao mythology, even as it modernizes at a breakneck pace and wrestles with itself about Mao’s legacy.

Before I share any further observations, I need to make a disclosure. I am not a China expert, nor a China historian. As with all the other entries in this journal, I write as a layperson awash in China for the first time. If you want to take scholarly issue with any of my observations, the comment form is at the bottom of the page. Among all the articles I have posted on this blog, this is the one for which I would most like to see some input from other people living in China.

The thing that got me thinking about Mao’s place in the Chinese national consciousness was a small photograph that my father bought at a curio store when he was here for a recent visit. Prior to that, I had noted the giant painting on the Forbidden City, the Mausoleum, and Mao’s portrait on all the new currency in a kind of offhand way. The photograph was nothing special. A relic from the 1960s, it shows three students in, naturally, Mao jackets posing at the feet of a Mao statue in front of what appears to be a university or government building.

The statue of Mao is large and imposing, perhaps near ten meters tall. He stands resolutely, gazing forward at the horizon/future/building across the street. He appears to be facing a moderate headwind, as the bottom of his greatcoat is swept back in the imaginary breeze.

I was walking home from class by a back road a couple of days after my father bought the photograph when I passed one of the nearly one-hundred universities in the Haidian district. I can’t remember which university this was; the University of Panel Beating, or the University of Flocculent Textile Sciences or some such. What was important was that it had the Mao statue and what appeared to be the same building in the background! Oh my god, I thought, that’s the goddamn statue! This is the place in the photo! What a coincidence!

I whipped out the digital camera and took a couple of furtive shots, and strolled on past the Starbucks, the Subway, and the other franchise businesses that were, cunningly, located down the street, just outside of Mao’s still resolutely communist gaze.

Well, of course it was not the same statue or the same building. This became completely obvious when I spotted first one, then two, then three other identical Mao statues in front of the indistinguishably drab institutional buildings that still represent the cutting edge of Chinese academic architecture. This was, it turned out, the standard issue Mao statue, planted in front of what appeared to be all public facilities that existed during the 1960s or 70s. On Xueyuan Lu, not far from where I live and study, two of the statues gaze resolutely at each other from opposite sides of the street, in a breathtaking tableau of entombed narcissism.

This experience got me thinking about the rest of the Mao iconography in Beijing, and about how Chinese people today actually perceive Mao. There is no doubt that the Chairman is omnipresent. If the statues on the university campuses aren’t enough, in many Beijing restaurants, a bust of Mao occupies the same spot of honor that, in Singapore, would have a small Buddhist or ancestral altar. Many taxi and van drivers have a Mao medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. On one side will be Mao, and on the other will be either Zhou Enlai or Kuan Yin. (I am not sure why the option.) At this moment the Chinese government is in the midst of introducing new currency in which all the bills feature the Chairman’s likeness.

Tiananmen Square is, of course, the centre of the Mao cult in China. The Chairman’s immense portrait hangs on the front of the Forbidden City, gazing across the square at the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, beyond that, his own tomb, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The portrait is a mandatory stop for the legions of Chinese tourists who make pilgrimages to Beijing to stand at the heart of the empire. Everyone has their photo taken in front of the Mao portrait. The tomb itself is a monumental attraction, and as the focal point of the average Chinese tourist’s Beijing pilgrimage, plays as a central and formalized a role as the Kabaa does in the Hajj.

But despite the cult of personality, the mythmaking and the iconography, it seems that the Chinese don’t really agree on Mao’s legacy. During my father’s recent visit to Beijing, we were invited to the house of three academics whom, for obvious reasons, I won’t identify. In the midst of a lovely meal of home cooked dumplings, vegetables, and surprisingly palatable Chinese brandy, the topic of Mao came up. Two of the academics were in their fifties and had come from prosperous families. During the Cultural Revolution, as teenagers, they were both shipped to a northern province to till the earth for eight years. They were blunt in their assessment of the Chairman. “We hate him,” said one, leaving little room for argument.

Also at the table was a younger academic, in her forties, who was the head of the institute where one of the other two worked. She was not a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and she had a different opinion. She saw Mao as the founder of modern China, and a figure to be revered. I don’t know much of this sentiment was sincere and how much was a political necessity of her position. I was, however, impressed with the fact that the three of them were willing to share their differing opinions with us, and able to be colleagues and friends despite their fundamentally different outlooks on the most charged figure in modern Chinese history.

Originally, I thought the younger academic’s sentiment might be representative of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese in general. It seemed likely that, if you had not personally had to endure those miserable years, you might be more receptive to the modern mythmaking and reformation of Mao. But a read through the transcript of a Taiwan discussion forum on the Beijing University Website, provided by my friend Dave Hull, made me re-think that. Amidst the lively and somewhat worrying debate about whether China should invade Taiwan were several references to Mao. Clearly, as a group, educated Chinese youth aren’t really sure of Mao’s legacy either. Some admired his charisma and vision. One, screened by the anonymity of his posting, pointedly referred to him as “that madman”.

Meanwhile, here in Beijing, the official iconography of Mao, while still powerful, is slowly being diluted by the transformation of Cultural Revolution imagery, including Mao imagery, into tourist kitsch. On any stroll through Tiananmen Square you will be besieged by hawkers touting Mao watches (the second hand is his waving arm, moving back and forth) and little red books of Mao Tse Dong thought, helpfully translated into English. Go to the Hongqiao Market, near the temple of heaven, and you will find dozens of curio stores selling reproduction Cultural Revolution posters featuring socialist-realist and revolutionary-romanticist renderings of the great figures of the Chinese revolution. Shops in Qianmen sell T-shirts with portraits of Lei Feng, the idealized communist soldier.

The Chinese clearly recognize all of these things as kitsch, and no one seems to mind. Of course the Chinese History Museum, on Tiananmen Square, displays waxworks of the great figures of Chinese history, with a strong emphasis on revolutionary figures. This is done without any visible irony whatsoever, so who really knows how the Chinese view a Mao watch. They don’t wear them.

With all of these conflicting signals, there was only one thing to do. I had to visit the heart of cult, and make the pilgrimage to Mao’s tomb. Technically the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, this is an enormous, square, Stalinist edifice on the southern end of Tiananmen Square, near Qianmen. It is a huge attraction for the thousands of Chinese tourists who come to the capital.

An artificial scarcity is maintained by only opening the tomb for two or three hours a day, five days a week. The result is a queue that can stretch well over a kilometer, enhancing the Chairman’s mystique. After all, it wouldn’t be so flattering if the Chairman was open round the clock, like a Seven-Eleven, and you could just wander in any time. (Notice: Cashier does not have the keys to the crypt.) No, the government has clearly taken a calculated step to enhance the sense that all the world has come to see Mao.

If you are ever in Beijing, I highly recommend going to see the Chairman. The joy of it is not in actually seeing the body; it’s in witnessing one of the world’s last remaining bits of great, communist theater. Dave Hull and I spent an hour in the immense queue that wound, in crisp right angles, across half of Tiananmen Square. We baked in the brutal, Beijing summer with the salt of the Chinese earth; ordinary people who had come from across the country to see the big city sights. The crowd was a mix of families, old aunties and uncles, and colossal Chinese tour groups in matching caps, dutifully following young women with colored flags and megaphones. Foreigners were rare. People from the countryside, where, I am told, the cult of Mao still holds strong sway, were common. Kites flapped overhead, and water and ice cream hawkers roamed the line, flogging temporary relief and trailing a cloud of beggars who competed with each other for the empty plastic bottles.

We moved quickly, under the constant bombardment of a public address system that explained, in Chinese and English, the decorum that should be observed in the queue and in the mausoleum. Every twenty yards or so, an attendant with a megaphone kept an eye open for queue jumpers and forbidden bags and parcels.

After an hour of switchbacks we approached the entrance to the Memorial Hall. As we moved toward the front stairs, we passed the flower concession. Here you could spend two kuai on a bouquet of artificial flowers wrapped in official “Chairman Mao Memorial Hall” cellophane. Many people were buying the flowers. As we ascended the stairs we had a chance to buy the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall Official Pamphlet for one kuai. “Chairman Mao will always live in our hearts”, it proclaimed on the front, above a photograph of a still living Mao giving a speech. I bought one.

Moments later we were at the grand entrance to the Memorial Hall. After an hour of flirting with heatstroke I was suddenly, gloriously, bathed in the air-conditioned breeze. Inside the doors the queue split into two, flowing to either side of a large statue of a seated Mao, arms in lap, legs casually crossed, gazing benevolently over the masses come to visit his corpse. In front of the statue were two enormous metal bins on wheels into which people duly threw the bouquets of artificial flowers they had purchased moments before. Some genuflected briefly, as they would with incense before a Buddhist shrine, before tossing their flowers into the bins. Obviously, when the bins were full, they would be wheeled back out to the flower stall and replaced with empty ones. Someone is doing well on that racket.

Clouds of starched attendants manhandled the bifurcated queue into neat two-abreast rows and we were rudely prodded into the next room. There was some pressure to keep the visitor throughput up. An auntie and uncle in front of me attempted several times to walk single file so both could be on the inside to get a better glimpse of Chairman, only to be rudely wrenched back into line-abreast by the attendants. Anyone who slowed down or, heaven forbid, stopped was immediately upbraided and poked back into motion.

Two doglegs later and we were in the Hall of Last Respects. There was the Great Helmsman, tucked under a Chinese flag with only his head and upper shoulders showing, as if napping in a refrigerated, glass coffin were simply the way to pass a hot afternoon. An honor guard of four soldiers kept watch. Of course, who knows if that really was him in the crypt. It could have been a bad waxwork. He did, after all, look puffy and, well, dead. Rumors float around Beijing that the real body is swapped with a wax one on alternate days. It is also said that, when not on display, the corpse is lowered on a hydraulic lift into the chamber below where the mausoleum ghouls perform their grisly maintenance tasks. One friend of mine thought that this meant the Chairman was raised into a standing position when on display, perhaps something like the “Evening with Mr. Lincoln” animatronic at Disneyland. I had to disappoint him, but I do think there is potential in the animatronic idea.

In the Hall of Last Respects everyone craned their necks for the best look as we swept past. We all had line of sight on the body for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. And then we went around the back wall and emerged into the gift shop.

If ever an ironic shock could cause respiratory arrest and death, this was it. Fifteen feet behind the corpse of the literal embodiment of Chinese communism, the gift shop was flogging Mao paintings, Mao medallions, Mao figurines, Mao picture books, and Mao tributes of every other conceivable shape and form. If the gift shop didn’t have what you wanted, behind the mausoleum, stretching towards Qianmen, was a hundred yards of stalls selling even more Mao paraphernalia.

And that was the Temple of Mao. Admission was free.

My father, an Englishman by training, is convinced that the enshrinement of the corpse is a Chinese expression of the Arthurian myth. By not returning the body to the elements, Mao is kept alive in the public consciousness and the implicit suggestion is made that, perhaps, in China’s darkest hour, the Great Helmsman will rise again and steer China through its troubles. Then again, many people here believe that China’s darkest hour already came as a result of Mao’s stewardship.

So Mao continues to loom over China, occupying an uneasy, conflicted spot in the national consciousness, half tyrant, half beloved founder of the modern state. Both views are correct. But the conflict doesn’t seem to be causing the nation any visible agonies. Even those who disparage Mao feel an obvious pride in Chinas current success. Perhaps, one of these days, the Chinese will reconcile their feelings about Mao’s role in their history. Meanwhile, the Chinese might not be sure of Mao’s place in the modern world, but they seem increasingly sure of their own.

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My career in Chinese showbiz is launched

Posted on July 25, 2004 by Will Moss

As a white, suburban American, I enjoy being someplace where I am considered a novelty. Although Beijing has plenty of foreigners, especially in the university district of Haidian, white people are still sometimes greeted with the same shocked amazement also reserved for bearded ladies, elephant men, and other freaks of nature. This is especially true in neighborhoods off the beaten path, and with children, bless their ignorant, rude little hearts.

Being freaky looking creates odd opportunities. That’s why, this week, I was excited to launch a new career as an actor in Chinese television commercials. It is clearly only a matter of time before I am paired with babe-alicious Karen Mok in the next Hong Kong blockbuster.

But first, the details on my big break.

Alright, not that big a break. In payback for all the Chinese people working miserably around the world as nuclear reactor fuel rod polishers, Foreign students in Beijing are often dragooned as cheap labor. China has an entire seedy underworld of young, low-priced English teachers working for meager communist Shekels, kitchen scraps and free lodging in swampy, mosquito ridden apartments. Unusual looks also make foreigners prime targets for recruitment as models and actors, regardless of talent or looks.

A few days ago, on the way to my gym, I was waylaid by a hyperactive, young Chinese man named Andy who explained to me that he was looking for foreigners to appear in a television commercial for “medical equipment”. He staked out the gym on purpose and had approached me because I was “strong looking”. Now, if this come-on doesn’t ring your alarm bells, you need to check your defense mechanisms and send me your credit cards. Being a sucker for new experiences, I told Andy I was interested. He duly took a snapshot of me and scampered off with a promise to call if I was selected.

Well, I say modestly, of course I was selected. Everyone was selected. They were hard up for lao wais. For four hours of filming I would receive three hundred yuan (about S$60). Well, of course, normally I don’t get out of bed for less than $30,000 per day, but I had nothing else planned. Still, I was annoyed that the producers rejected my demands for a forty foot trailer, a private all-female massage team, and a nonstop supply of red M&Ms candies imprinted with Mao Zedong’s likeness on one side and the Chinese flag on the other. Nevertheless, I would have the exquisite pleasure of knowing that millions of Beijing residents would be exposed to my inglorious kisser during their late-night television viewing.

At 7:30AM Saturday morning I arrived at the rendezvous where met my fellow exotics, Stuart (English), Andreas (German), Tony (American), and a Tunisian woman whose name I never got. We were bundled into a van and whisked into the suburban sticks.

Candidly, my fellow thespians and I were a bit nervous on the drive. We had no idea where we were going or what we were supposed to be pitching, and our van was being driven by a beefy, bullet-headed Chinese man who could easily have been sent from central casting to fill the role of Triad Enforcer no. 4. He also sounded exactly like Wolfman Jack would have if he had spoken Mandarin. I kept waiting for him to introduce the Supremes.

Two hours of nasty traffic later, we arrived in the suburb of Huairou, at the Joyful Birth Garden Conference Center. I pulled the name from a posted slogan that translated, “The Joyful Birth Garden faces society and all walks of life earnestly”. An alternate translation replaces “earnestly” with “with sobriety”. Take that as you will.

If you were a recovering alcoholic, prone to DTs, the Joyful Birth Garden would be an unnerving place to spend your time. The main building is a futuristic, angular, concrete megalith with a spooky absence of windows on the second floor. Werner Erhardt would like it. The entrance to the building is reached by a causeway across an artificial lake. The architecture looks crossbred from Logan’s Run, Robocop, and the Road to Wellville.

Across the lake from the main building are guest residences that are even more surreal. Each set of residential buildings followed a different architectural theme. These were, in order: American Suburban Tract House; Pseudo Gothic Cathedral; Ancient Roman Forum; and Midwestern Industrial White Ghetto. The disturbing atmosphere was amplified by near complete desertion, creating an eerie, last-men-on-earth feel.

If we were a bit anxious on the drive, the Joyful Birth Garden had us all but planning escape contingencies. We were escorted into the complex by our Chinese companions, one of whom was ominously cradling an aluminum softball bat. But our anxiety was short-lived. It turned out there was an entire film crew already on site, ready to go. There was a camera, lights, boom mix, sound guy, makeup, the works. We were not, after all, going to be rolled, or turned into cult zombies.

We were, however, going to flog…Hotpop™.

It took us a while to figure out what Hotpop was. What was immediately clear from the props was that it was not medical equipment, but medicine. At first we were convinced it was a Viagra-like virility pill. After interrogating the crew we then concluded that it was either a muscle-growth promoter or a stimulant of some kind. I have little doubt that its sale would be prohibited or at least heavily regulated in most developed countries. But it’s over-the-counter in China.

Our attempts to divine the nature of Hotpop were complicated by the bizarre, out of context lines that we had to deliver. Like the translators working on Monty Python’s “funniest joke in history”, each of us had only a piece of the puzzle. We even received our lines on separate little strips of paper.

I can think of no better way to capture the strangeness of what we were filming than to walk you through the vignettes and lines. (See the photos in the Hotpop! Gallery.) First, Tony and the nameless Tunisian girl, who had vanished for an hour to be put through hair and makeup, pretend to be a married couple. They push an empty baby stroller (the frame will be cropped) down a shaded path. Tony gazes down at Ms. Tunisia adoringly and says,

“18 Hotpop a day and my performance has never been better, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

She gazes up at him serenely and nods knowingly. You can see where the Viagra theory came from. It took a few takes to get this one right.

I’m next. Wardrobe dresses me in the ghastliest Hawaiian shirt imaginable and makes me wear my sunglasses on my forehead. If Magnum P.I. had a pimp cousin named Lyle, he would have looked just like I did. I am seated at a table with a coffee cup, and I say to the camera, as I positively radiate avuncular, yet pimplike sincerity,

“Now, almost no Americans don’t know hotpop!”

When I explained to the director that this sentence was ungrammatical in English, he dismissed my concerns, explaining (I think) that it would all be dubbed into Mandarin anyway.

Later, I embellish my original line by holding up a Hotpop box and proclaiming to the camera, “Hotpop is great!” (Thrusts box at camera.) “I love Hotpop!” I still have no fucking idea what Hotpop is. But I am sure Lyle Magnum would love it.

Stuart is next. His wardrobe consists of a fantastically nerdy “Lee Jeans” baseball cap and the softball bat. All of China will soon think that “Lee Jeans” is a Major League team, and start looking for Stuart’s rookie card. Stuart, bat menacingly on shoulder, delivers a vaguely psychotic, “Wow, Hotpop!” for the camera, looking like a high school nerd who has finally been pushed too far.

The final performer in our group was Andreas. His priceless line, delivered with a deadpan, German lilt, is,

“Hotpop is great. I can’t live without Hoptpop!”

Throughout our performances we were patiently coached and cajoled by the director. However, in a true Lost in Translation Moment, all direction was in Mandarin, so we spent a lot of time using our psychic powers to discern exactly how he wanted us to nuance our shillery. At one point, as they attempted to coach the desired incandesce out of Stuart, we were treated to the spectacle of several Chinese crew members delivering an emphatic chorus of, “Wow, Hotpop!” I’ll never need to take drugs again.

Eventually, it was all in the can. A second crew of foreign actors had shown up to do the afternoon filming of athletic vignettes, and we lounged on the lawn while they worked. I will forever be grateful that I was not tapped for one of the shirtless segments, or the dreaded Speedo appearance. If there is one thing Beijing doesn’t need, it is a broadcast of me, all hairy paleness, dressed in nothing but a postage-stamp sized swimsuit and a bathing cap. Hotpop this, baby!

At the end of the day the four hour shoot had turned into a twelve-hour full day. I didn’t mind. I was 300 yuan richer; a good payday in a town where a draft Beijing Beer is only 3 yuan. Plus I had been treated to one of the most pricelessly bizarre experiences of my life.

And, of course, I launched my career in Chinese showbiz. I don’t know when the Hotpop ad will hit the airwaves, but I am already looking forward to my imminent Ringo Starr moment, when I sprint down Sanlitun pursued by legions of lust-maddened Chinese women all dying to sample my staglike, Hotpop-enhanced powers.

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