State-Journal.com - Jamie's fortune: You will travel far

Jamie visits a portion of The Great Wall of China, which spans thousands of miles.

One of Jamie’s favorite meals is shuijiao (boiled dumplings).

Jamie Sturm

I have an unusually strong fondness for fortune cookies. Classmates look at me strangely when I sit down with a pile of seven or eight fortune cookies next to my plate in the cafeteria. It’s just the combination of sweet, crunchy taste with humorously outlandish Chinese sayings that always leaves me wanting more.

Sadly, I found no such cookies in China during my 2008-2009 study abroad (apparently they were invented in the United States). I did, however, accumulate a fortune of rich and bizarre experiences that have changed how I view the world and definitely how I relate to anyone from Asia.

In this and two follow-up articles that will appear in The State Journal’s Travel section, it’s my goal to recount these experiences and paint a picture of one of the most complex and rapidly developing countries in the modern world.

How it all began

A Frankfort native, my desire to see the world arose partly from having grown up in a small town. Though I love being with my family and relish the great Kentucky tradition of Wildcat sports, my interactions with foreign exchange students during high school left me with a desire to explore beyond the reaches of Pikeville and Paducah.

The other aspect of my travel bug arose from an acute interest in foreign language. And not just the language itself, an equal portion was the people who spoke that language; that if I could simply verbalize the pulsations of my brain in a different way, I was instantly able to relate to millions of more people than before.

I studied Spanish at Franklin County High School under two excellent teachers, Terry Johnson and Barbara Geoghegan. I even made a few short trips to Latin America in the first years of college. But when I left for college, something my father said made me reconsider the Spanish major I intended to pursue. He challenged me to branch out and try something completely different.

I accepted the challenge.

I enrolled in my first Chinese class at Kalamazoo College, and I remember being skeptical about my chances of sticking with it. Aside from Asian buffets and the occasional game of pingpong, I had no interest in Chinese-related things. That would all change, because I quickly fell in love with the language and set my sights on a year-long study abroad in China, which I returned from in June.

I spent six months studying in Beijing, three months in Harbin, and the final month traveling everywhere from Shanghai to Tibet. So without further adieu, I give you...Beijing.

The real Chinese food

For those of you still pondering the fortune cookie mystery, fear not—there are plenty of other tasty options in Beijing.

My two favorite meals were heijiao niuliu (black pepper beef) and shuijiao (boiled dumplings).

The pepper beef, like almost any Chinese dish, is served on its own plate and meant to be eaten with white sticky rice. I loved this dish because it reminded me of the carne asada served at most Mexican restaurants. And like everything else in China, it was cheap – around $2.

The dumplings, which I ate everyday at lunch for a modest 50 cents, consist of meat and vegetables mashed into a sphere the size of a quarter, then boiled inside a thin noodle-like shell. A popular, cheap meal, they can be found in all parts of China.

Meals are served family style. This means when ordering, the group decides collectively what dishes they will share. The waiters put the dishes in the middle of the table and give each person a small bowl – roughly 4 inches in diameter – full of white, sticky rice. Then, with chopsticks, each person reaches to the middle of the table and grabs a piece of food to put in their rice bowl. They eat by mixing the rice and food together as they go.

As a foreigner accustomed to individual-style dining, this took some getting used to. In fact, my friends and I never quite adapted to the pervasive Chinese notion of collectivism. So, when it came time to pay the bill, our Chinese observers gawked in disbelief as we divided it up between us. According to Chinese custom, friends take turns paying the entire bill, rotating based on the occasion. They assume everyone pays roughly the same amount in the end.

Most meals cost no more than $5 per person, if that. More often I ate dinner for $2. I did this multiple times per week because it was so cheap, but this was the equivalent of Applebee’s to a Chinese person.

Another popular type of Chinese cuisine is street food, i.e. food sold by individual vendors on the sidewalk. Extremely common throughout Beijing, these vendors target people looking for a light meal or a quick snack. Entrees include lamb kabobs, bowls of noodles, dumplings, and occasionally the equivalent of a Chinese breakfast burrito.

My classmates and I often ate street food as a number of vendors camped outside our university’s gates. I personally took advantage of the lamb kabob deal: two for 15 cents. You can’t beat that!

My favorite place to shop for street food in Beijing was called Wangfujing Xiaochijie (Wangfujing Snack Street). It’s about as close as China gets to indigenous fast food.

Snack Street looks much like a county fair – about 30 red booths are lined up, each with a vendor. But it differs because instead of funnel cake or candy apples, vendors sell lamb testicles, starfish, rice-filled pineapple, mice, and more, all cooked and served on kabob sticks. Sound appetizing?

Most booths purposefully overprice their foods, knowing buyers will haggle for better prices. Still, most kabobs range from between $1-2, pricey to the Chinese customer.

Aside from street food, most fast food in Beijing has foreign roots. Kentuckians will be proud to know that KFC is wildly popular in China, more so than McDonald’s is in the United States.

Other foreign fast food options include McDonald’s, Subway and Dairy Queen, among others. McDonald’s is fairly common but many other foreign fast food restaurants are just beginning to make headway in China, and locals are very open to Western cuisine.

According to many Chinese with whom I spoke, KFC owes its success to adapting its menu to local tastes. Many desserts, sides and drinks sold at KFC in Beijing are available only in China and thus draw in a heavy local clientele.

Shopping takes a little haggling

Bargain shopping in China requires a different set of skills than in the United States.

It’s common knowledge that China manufactures cheap products. The cost of labor in China is exponentially less than in the United States, so producing basic goods costs next to nothing. For effective bargain shopping, then, the key is recognizing products for their production cost and offering a proportionate price.

Chinese vendors are accustomed to haggling with customers over prices, sometimes for more than 15 minutes for valuable items. Chinese customers have developed a set of techniques to buy at the optimal price, and I learned a few of them along the way.

One approach is to make vendors compete amongst themselves. Often, vendors selling the same items will set up booths in close proximity to each other. There might be five or six different vendors selling the exact same thing in a given area.

Once, I encountered this situation at a technology superstore (think Comp USA, only five stories tall). I was looking for a digital voice recorder, but felt completely overwhelmed by so many vendors all selling voice recorders. So I spotted a burly Chinese man browsing around for the same item, and I teamed up with him.

Together, we devised a plan of attack: split up and find out the asking-price of each vendor, then meet and re-evaluate. After learning the prices, he would send me to haggle with a certain vendor. If the price was too high, I would shake my head as a signal and then he would call to me from afar, saying, “Jamie, come over here. This vendor says he can go for 20 yuan less.” It worked like a charm.

Another technique is to offer a low price to begin with, and when the vendor asks his price, meet somewhere in the middle. The danger here is to make sure and not offer a price that’s too low, because it insults the vendor. I tended to err on the cheap side, so a few vendors just sent me away with a look of disgust and a brisk hand motion.

Perhaps the highest percentage technique is the famous walk-away. Most American youths are unknowingly familiar with this technique as it’s often used in boy-girl relationships. For instance, if the girl wants a certain guy’s attention, she will show a flash of interest in him, only to then ignore him or feign apathy. Then the boy is hooked, and he plays the game.

It’s the same with bargaining in China. After showing interest in an item, I would make excuses as to why I couldn’t afford it: “Sorry, sir, I’m a student – no cash,” or “I already spent all my money on my girlfriend,” or the most direct approach, “I just don’t think it’s worth the price you’re asking.” Then I would walk away and hear the vendor calling out lower prices with each step I took.

A friend of mine once bought a used trumpet with this method in a Shanghai antique market. The process took 15 or 20 minutes, but when it was over my friend had saved much money and was already learning to play the Jurassic Park theme song on his new toy.

Christmas not the big holiday

Beijing proved to be a festive city even during the Christmas holiday season.

Despite its communist mindset, the People’s Republic of China has weathered considerable Western influence. One manifestation of this is the celebration of Christmas.

In recent years, the Chinese government has built a handful of Christian churches in Beijing for local worshippers. Subject to government supervision, these churches still manage to preach the Christian message to the masses and provide a safe haven for spiritually-minded Chinese citizens.

In December 2008, I was spending much time with a local Chinese family I had met through a connection in Lexington, Ky. This family practically adopted me as their son, and when it came time for Christmas, they were eager to spend it with me.

Together, we attended a church service on the night of the 25th and I attempted to explain, in my limited Chinese, what the Christmas message was. They, like many Chinese, had heard of Christmas but were only vaguely familiar with the story of Jesus.

Although a modest number of Beijingers attended Christmas services, the level of interest was similar to that of Valentine’s Day in the United States. The real winter holiday for Chinese people is called Spring Festival.

Spring Festival, which marks the beginning of the year according to the Chinese lunar calendar, begins usually in later January or early February, and the celebration lasts for days.

I also spent Spring Festival with my host family. Like every other Beijinger, we ate a large meal together, played majong, watched the Spring Gala on TV (think Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, only in the form of a variety show), and finally took to the streets to set off fireworks.

Setting off fireworks in the streets of Beijing at 12:30 a.m. was among the most dangerous things I did in China. No kidding.

I could hardly hear myself think, because out of Beijing’s population of 15 million, presumably half of them were all setting off fireworks at the same time, with little awareness for people or cars passing by. That being said, it was a thrilling and unforgettable experience.

Up close & personal

One would think, living in such a large city would make it easy to pass unnoticed. But I found living in Beijing to be an up close and personal experience with Chinese culture, one that has marked me in numerous ways.

Now back in the states, I attach more importance to collective dining with my close friends – we’ve even selected a particular weeknight to spend sharing a meal. Now, I find myself haggling hopelessly with United Airlines over inflated flight tickets. And now, when I hear overseas Chinese speak of “the year of the cow,” I no longer think of those Chick-fil-A commercials, but rather of the intense new year celebration that is as important to China as Christmas is to the United States.

I’ve been changed by China, and I’m thankful for it.

Jamie Sturm is a senior at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich. For questions or comments, e-mail him at James.Sturm3@gmail.com, and for video footage of China, visit his Youtube channel at www.youtube.com/JLSKZOO10.>