You can’t say I didn’t try. I dropped in on two provincial libraries this week. Just dropping in is not the way to go. While just seeing the facilities and a bit of their cities was very informative, I can’t say that it will provide me with a large amount of evidence. However, the two libraries were so contrasting that I am almost hesitant to write about them. One was crumbling, the other brand new.
Because my language skills are still embarassingly basic, I cannot really carry on a conversation in these places. It takes a Chinese person with the patience of Job to understand me, and many adults are not up to the task. I find that middle-schoolers are most likely to try to have a conversation with me. They have a big enough (and fresh enough) English vocabulary to make a go of it.
The staff at the two libraries did try. One even sat me down, made me a cup of tea, and had me wait while they fetched their foreign language cataloger. Still, I could not get across what I wanted to talk about other than to ask to have a look around. That is a request easily granted. Even the first library was able to understand that.
There are questions I think I could have gotten across at both of them. For example, I think that the first library just may be building a new building for itself. If it hadn’t have been my very first one, I probably would have pressed the issue. But, I’m afraid my bashfulness go the better of me in that instance.
I think that the next steps for this trip is to concentrate on making the connections ahead of time and preparing a short text that explains what I am after. Both of these seem like very plausible goals.
I am currently in Shijiazhuang, the capitol of Hebei province. Being here reinforces the idea that all the bi-lingual signage in Beijing makes one lazy. It is much more difficult to navigate here with my limited language skills. It makes me realize that being at BeiDa is not really an immersion experience.
Shijiazhuang is described by the Lonely Planet guide as a ‘bustling and sprawling’ provincial capitol, and from what I have seen this is true. Except that some of the new development is empty. In the downtown core there are a number of commercial buildings that look brand new but abandoned. And still, there are construction cranes everywhere.
My purpose in coming here was to see if I could just drop in at a provincial library and find someone to talk to. Apparently I can’t do that here. The staff was small, no one spoke English, and my broken Chinese was only good enough to let me look around a bit. There must have been a bigger back-office space that I didn’t wander in to, because the two reading rooms do not reflect the library’s description online. If the three people working in the ‘non-book’ section developed the library’s web presence, I am very impressed. Additionally, the corridor that had the ‘vice-chief’ and ‘chief’ offices was fairly abandoned, and I don’t think that’s just because it was lunch time. I’m betting the administrative offices have been removed to some other location. There is also a very conspicuous construction site right behind the building. So I think that Hebei is about to get a shiny new library. Although I would have thought that the reference librarians would have gone to the window and pointed at it a bit.
The gap between rich and poor is even more abrupt here. New office buildings are right next to old alley dwellings. The small shops appear even less organized than their Beijing counterparts. I would also guess that the overall level of Internet development is lower, because the net cafe is much more visible that it has been in the parts of Beijing that I have visited. I have seen no less than 5 in the 24 hours that I have been here, and I haven’t been to that many parts of the city. I can only point to 2 in Beijing, and I’ve been there for almost 4 weeks. Additionally, I was not able to find anyplace here with wi-fi, but in Beijing I know of 4 places with free access (granted, that’s including the Starbucks).
I’m very happy that I stopped by the office of Wang Bo last week. He has posted a lengthy account of our meeting.
In his post, he laments his poor spoken English, although he is very gentle in describing my language ability. He asks for his reader’s help with my project and even talks at length about my Chinese name. My name, apparently, has sparked a little bit of debate in the comment section of Wang’s blog.
I will be visiting two libraries rather unannounced next week. It’s a trial run to see if just walking in is even a possibility after I complete my language training in 5 more weeks. If it’s a complete flop, I suppose I can just limit myself to where I have contacts and make it a bit more of a tourist trip.
Many thanks to Wang Bo for soliciting his colleague’s assistance!
I have written quite a bit about my initial impressions of Beijing over at my personal blog. I think it’s time to write a bit more formally about that.
I keep getting the impression that Beijing is somewhat like the Chicago of the 1970’s, except that instead of being a city on the decline (perhaps even hitting rock bottom before the vast period of urban renewal that continues today), Beijing is a city on the rise. Physically, they compare well. Both have a strong grid pattern and a CBD. Chicago’s lake shore gives it a hard edge, whereas Beijing grows in all directions. Still, I think the comparison is valid.
Near where I am staying is an international district known as 五道口. I have been told that it was a strongly Korean neighborhood in the 1950s, and continues to be an international neighborhood, being at the crossroads of three large universities and being a hub of foreign student life. Korean, Japanese, and Anglo travelers mix each night in a a dozen clubs and thirty or fourty restaurants. Many are internationally themed (a French bakery, American coffee shop, and English pub), but there is a strong Korean presence in the restaurants.
At night large numbers of street vendors open up shop, selling puppies, books, clothes, jewelry, and knickknacks of all sorts. Food carts are present as well. The market combined with the night life make it seem some sort of bastard child of Maxwell and Rush Streets of the 70s. (Or perhaps North Clark of today?)
There is an edge to it all. My first night here I came across a Korean guy bleeding from a split lip, his head being cradled on a friend’s lap. 5 policemen stood by, not doing much. I’m not sure if he walked into a street sign or was in a fight, but no one seemed too concerned. Perhaps the traffic makes people immune to sights of random injury, but it seems more like people are simply used to spectacle: of drunken students, loutish expats, aggressive vendors.
I wish I knew the geography literature a bit better so that I could say whether or not geographers are talking about this sort of scene more. Has it been done already? It’s definitely a qualitative project in the making.
In addition to Chicago, I also can’t get the image of Blade Runner and William Gibson out of my head. Now I understand a lot more about what is going on in cyberpunk novels. I wonder if those novels would appear in GeoBase? That’s definitely on the to do list.
