My rampant consumerism is a constant no matter where I go.

I just spent a very long car ride singing along to Lady Gaga with my cousin Siran (alias Christina), who will leave for a study abroad program in Washington, D.C. four days after I depart for Austin. Things other than "Bad Romance" to rise in Chinese popularity: OPI nail lacquer and the Twilight saga. According to Siran, one look at Robert Pattinson's pearl-dusted jaw and Kristen Stewart's insomniatic eyes will cause the high schoolers of Beijing to start frantically tan lian ai. That's the Chinese idiom for dating, which I guess transliterates to something like "discussing romantic love". I find little quirks of speech like that charming (condescending of me?), picture powdered belles and dandies draped in rococo silks, sipping coffee out of crystals and talking eros a la salon. I just wish I knew some more.

I went shopping with my aunt, Jingxue, my father's youngest sister. First we made the obligatory trip to Hongqiao, the ostensible "Pearl Market" glutted with all manner of Maoist kitsch, knockoff Burberrys, and Guanyin pendants in addition to the titular pearls. It's a kind of soft landing into Chinese culture-- the place is always full of foreigners, negotiating the matrix of temptations in English whatever their native tongues. (How lucky I feel to speak commerce's lingua franca.) All the shopkeepers are savvy to that, shouting out words like "price" and "low" (not in that order) they probably plucked from some phrasebook. Next we went to Wangjing, where my aunt lives. I'm not sure whether it bears to Beijing the same relation Cedar Park does to Austin or Manhattan does to New York, whether exurb or borough. I do know it has a high Korean population-- we wandered around a commercial center in one of the Koreatowns looking at hairclips too gaudy and slips too narrow for me to wear.

My aunt commented that, even when I spoke no English, the shopkeepers could sense that I wasn't quite Chinese. Maybe I should set a formal goal of working on that or something. I don't want to get ripped off for the weird treacherous foreignness clinging to my face (or whatever), even if I figure getting hoodwinked in a Beijing flea market has gotta be more cost-effective than bargain-hunting in Texas.

I've got two more days in Beijing, one of which I'll spend at the Qianmen Hotel with the CET group. I'm ready to go. I've spent the past week being treated like a not-quite-person, with all my relatives' kindest intentions. I love my extended family (or something; not knowing them too well, it's the kind of abstract love distilled out of obligation and respect for tradition, only slightly more felt than my love for the US Constitution). And I'm not saying I'm totally ready to navigate China without anyone holding my hand (metaphorically, except at busy intersections.) But all the attention, the well-intentioned advice, the warnings repeated again and again by different concatenations of concerned voices-- it's getting oppressive.