Having Fun All The Time

Before coming to Hong Kong, I naturally booked the cheapest hostel I could find. It’s called the New Peking Guest House, located on Kowloon (the peninsula north of Hong Kong Island, considered part of HK but not the island), which has turned out to be the epicenter of tourist traps in HK. 

That’s a bit of an exagerration. The area is not too bad…it’s very city-ish, lots of foot traffic and plenty of large financial buildings around. Certainly not everyone here is a tourist. But it turns out that just about every young person who comes to HK on a budget stays in the Chungking mansions, which is the large building of hostels where my guest house is located, and so a small unregulated market of guys that appear to generally be Indian and African have cropped up in the area, most of whom are relentlessly hawking watches, rooms in cheaper hostels, and a variety of other “goods”, both lascivious and pharmacological. Once you walk a little ways down the street this stuff quickly dissipates, and the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon is just a relatively expensive downtown-y area full of clothing stores, malls and restaurants. So that’s the first thing I saw when I came to HK.

I got to the hostel in the evening, though, and pretty quickly went to bed. Before I went to bed, however, I tried to contact someone on CouchSurfing.com, which turned out to be an incredibly wise move. 

Before I had even fallen asleep the person, a girl whose CouchSurfing page said she was into books and would be happy to show anyone around HK, had written me back, and the next day I wrote her back, and finally we set a time to meet that evening. This was great. I had only been in HK one day and already I was gonna get to make a friend. 

That day, which was Thursday, I took the subway across the harbor to HK Island with the idea of taking the tram to the peak of Victoria Peak. But when I got there I decided it was too foggy to even bother. So I sat and had a cup of coffee. An older couple, maybe in their fifties, came and sat down in the cafe across from me. So I asked them where they were from. The man, in good English with a German accent, told me that they were from Germany. He had a cousin living in Idaho. A son living in South America. They were on a two week vacation and had started four days ago in Frankfort (sp?). Next they were going to Macau, and then Australia. They had also come to take the tram and then decided not to. I told them that I had read that you could go to the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, which was right next to us, and check out the observation deck they had there for free. So, we all decided to go. 

The deck was kind of lame, but not entirely pointless. Only one corner of the building is open to the public, so you basically just get a view of the harbor. But it was a pretty nice view, with a view of the enormous 2 International Finance Center building.

2 International Finance Center, 2IFC, is the tallest building in HK and apparently the 7th tallest office building in the world. See it? It's that pointy one. I didn't take this picture, obviously.

I asked the German dude his name, it was Axel, which is perhaps the coolest name ever. He was originally from Homberg (sp?) and was interested in my experience in China so I happily filled him in. Then I said goodbye to them and went back to the hostel to drop some stuff before meeting my new CouchSurfing friend. 

The CouchSurfing friend experience was awesome. Her name was Tif and she was friendly from the get-go. She had clearly shown people from CS around HK before, because she immediately was in tour-guide mode and didn’t totally drop the tour-guide thing the whole time. Which I didn’t mind at all, because she was telling me interesting stuff about HK. She pointed me to the light show on the harbor that happens every night, that I will post pictures of when I return to Sanming and can upload pictures from my camera. She told me about SoHo and how to get there, which I explored two days later and turned out to be the coolest part of HK I have seen so far, she took me on the ferry, which crosses the harbor from Kowloon to Central and is about a million times more fun than taking the subway, and after we wandered around the night market, which I will also post pictures of later, she took me to HK Island to go to a hookah bar, which, who wouldn’t love to go to a hookah bar in Hong Kong. Seriously. 

I also recited poetry with another person for the first time ever. She was talking about how she really likes Saul Williams, and apparently I had had enough beer to recite some Hart Crane and Robert Frost at her. So then I was glad that she responded in kind with some Saul Williams, because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized that it is actually pretty awesome to listen to someone recite poetry, and would have felt foolish for actually reciting poetry at a hookah bar. It’s a really entertaining form of conversation. It just takes a willingness to shelve one’s self-consciousness momentarily. 

So, then, after haggling with some taxi drivers, I went home and slept pretty well until the next morning. Since then I have walked about 20 miles throughout Hong Kong, exploring a ton of it on foot, but of course none of it is as fun when you do it by yourself. It’s interesting, sure, and you get to see some cool things, but always as someone who is totally foreign to everything around him. Always with no sense of belonging to any of the stuff you’re witnessing (which is a feeling you get to have when you walk around with a local, who knows it and lives it every day). 

Today it started raining cats and dogs, so I have even given up on walking around. I went to the movies and watched the film about Confucius, and had dinner. Apparently I’m staying here for another five days-ish, at which point I’ll be able to head back to the mainland, which is a very good thing because eating in HK is way, way too expensive for me. And the 3000 RMB the school promised to reimburse me for this trip has already come and gone like it was nothing (which really, HK costs as much as the U.S., and 3000 RMB is about $400; imagine traveling as a tourist to any U.S. city; how long would $400 last you?).

Peace out till next time. 

: )

Tonight I found something that I wrote last October while I was still in Vermont, before I came to Fujian. Not sure why I never posted it but now seems as good a time as any. I had forgotten what my professor, Mark, had told me before I left. His words have turned out to be totally accurate and true; it’s a pity that I managed to more or less forget them. I suppose that’s the reason for writing in the first place…

How I ended up going to China by saying “OK”

On a summer afternoon this year I was sitting at a desk, in a cubicle, on the eleventh floor of an office building in downtown Portland, Oregeon. A lot of things were gray in that office. The linoleum covering the desk was a kind of granite color, with little chips of darker colored gray to give it a little less sterile look; the cubicle walls were covered in that gray nylon fabric that all cubicle walls are covered with. I had all kinds of charts and phone directories and printouts of information that I had affixed to the wall with gray staples. I had stapled the sheets of paper to the wall long before that day, and had since memorized most of what was on the sheets by sheer repetition of use, which meant that the sheets of paper on my cubicle walls had become invisible to me and therefore meaningless. I had gray pens, and gray file organizers, and a gray computer tower. I even had gray pants. The dust that accumulated on the cuffs of my shirt was gray, and the highway that was visible out the nearest window was gray, and the carpeting that stretched out all around me and throughout the small hive of cubes was gray. Everything was gray, gray, gray. Gray was everywhere. I checked into work at about 8 a.m. and checked out at 5:30 p.m., with a 20-minute lunch break somewhere in the middle. Which meant that for a good portion of my day, nearly every day, I spent a considerable amount of time contemplating, absorbing, ignoring and reviling gray.

As you might expect, the gray in my work life, after a time, began to make things outside of work begin to seem pretty gray, too. Not gray in the literal sense, exactly. More gray in an all-encompassing, world-view-orienting type of way. I think I began to see gray in everything. I began to be gray. I began to think in tones of gray. Not in any kind of well-balanced, yin-yang, seek-the-middle-ground way, but in a dull, impassive, grim, unhappy way. Things were gray and I was not enthused about them, the color or the overall outlook.

But that’s just to set the tone for you. On that day, that summer day, I was feeling very gray, but I was working. I was busily doing whatever it is that office workers do on their computers all day long. I was probably working in Excel. I was probably concentrating hard, on whatever I was working on. Then, for a momentary reprieve from the drudgery of coding, or looking at data, or tweaking some presentation or graph in Excel, I pulled up gmail. There was an email from a friend of mine. It was a brief, informal email, a quick bite that looked like it had been copy and pasted from a newsletter or something that had come through his inbox. The email said that a former professor of mine, from the college where I got my B.A. (the college is a tiny liberal arts school in Vermont), was looking for someone, preferably an alum, to fill a position teaching English in China. The subject line was probably in all caps, and probably said something like “AMAZING OPPORTUNTIY TO TEACH ENGLISH IN CHINA”. I am certain that it contained the word opportunity, because that is where all the trouble started. Or, maybe I should say, that is where all the fun started. However you look at it, I think it was the word “opportunity” that drew me in.

I tend to think that our society, meaning the United States society, and presumably other nations, although I’m not sure which, are generally obsessed with the idea of opportunity. The idea of the American Dream is very much built on the concept of opportunity. Capitalism, at least in my lay mind, is generally synonymous with opportunism, so maybe that is why it seems to me that America is generally preoccupied with the idea of opportunity. The maxim of American opportunism is generally thus: You only get a limited number of opportunities in life, and you have to jump on them when they come along. Stand around long enough, and you’ll get a chance to sit down. You only live once. So on and so on.

The general idea of these idioms seems to be that life is like a waterslide at a summer water park. You wait in line, and wait in line, and wait in line, and eventually you get your chance to jump into some dark, downward-slanting chute through which a ceaseless current of chlorinated water courses. You go whooping and hollering your way down the pipes, toward some unknown wave pool full of screaming, sweaty children. You hope that if someone becomes your landing pad, it will be a chubby kid. You don’t really know where the pipe goes or how long the slide is, because they all wind in and out of each others’ paths confusingly, but you generally expect that the ride will be fun, and that you will get wet, and that you will not get hurt. So you leap willingly into a dark chasm which, to an untrained eye, could easily be an entryway to drowning or suffocation. Occasionally, a kid chickens out and walks the 10-year-old version of the walk of shame, back down the long poolwater-soaked stairways, elbows his or her way through the lines of kids snaking up said stairways and through the cloisters of excited children on each transom, to the sympathetic (we hope) arms of his or her mom. Most kids gawk at these chicken shit children as they walk back down the stairs. Everybody knows they chickened out. Everybody knows that they did not leap into the waterslide whooping and hollering. They got scared.

Maybe people really don’t think of life that way, but sometimes I get the suspicion that nobody ever really leaves the waterpark. There is a little bit of the excitable water-slide goer in all of us, hawkishly looking out for the next scaredy-cat kid to come walking down those urine and chlorine slicked steps.

There are certain key things that certain individuals said to me that helped me make the decision to go. Tonight, sitting in a friend’s living room with the college professor who helped me get the job in China, a friend of mine asked him what the most important piece of advice he could give me was. “I would say just be patient,” he said. “There are all kinds of ways that your patience will be tested, and it’s generally not OK in China to express a lot of impatience, which can be maddening.” He explained that people tend to be less inclined to question orders handed down from on high. That people are generally not good at questioning the whys of what they do, but just accept it as necessary.

One friend who had taught in China told me to bring lots of gifts.

Milton Leathers, a soft-spoken southern gentleman from Athens, Georgia, told me that there was no way I could ever regret going to China if I did it. His words were “Even if something bad happens – and I really don’t think there’s any chance that anything bad will happen – you still will never regret it. I meant think of all the things that you will learn just by being there.”

He also said, “You’re 25, which is about the age that you are starting to realize that the years are going by a bit faster than they did when you were 14 or 15; soon you’ll be working some type of regular job, with a focus on your career, and there won’t be any time to get away to do something like this; and if you do, there will be someone right behind you to replace you in your work.”

The general consensus of everyone I know is that I had to go, which, in a way, means that I did have to go. There was no way that I could have made any other choice, given that. When everyone in your world gives you one version of reality, or potential reality, you have no choice but to accept it. To do otherwise would be nihilistic. Of course, in a way, they never understand the full context, which is why one must question it and make sure they understand the full picture. But there is a difference between showing the whole picture and insisting on one’s unwillingness to do something. I think people saw enough of the picture.

I talked to quite a few people about China, some of whom had been there to teach. One of those people is the uncle of my significant other. He is a writer with graying hair that tends to stand up on his head (his hair), giving him a bit of a shocked look. I talked with him in his living room for an afternoon, about a week ago. Almost the entire time I sat on the couch silently, nodding and smiling as he held forth about everything he could remember about his experience in China.

He talked about the language, his past studies of Chinese, where he was located and the lifestyle he had had there. He told me about some of the friends he had made, and the fact that many of his students had visited him in New York since he had come back home. He talked about some of the other teachers he befriended, one of whom was the dean of his department, whom he taught English during his time there. He showed me books, gave me reading suggestions, burned some CDs of Chinese dictionaries.

One of the things he said was striking, for some reason. He was looking across the coffee table at me, with his wide-eyed, slightly awed look. He crossed one knee over the other. Behind him was a stack of books that reached to the ceiling. Daylight slanted in through the old wood-paned windows of their tiny apartment in the Upper West Side of New York. He mentioned that it had been easy to meet people, that the majority of people were kind, and gentle, and generous. “I loved them,” he added.

I first learned that I would have to leave the mainland on my last day of classes for the semester, about three weeks ago. My liaison in the Foreign Affairs Office at the college, who was supposed to be taking care of all the visa issues, called to tell me that two packages had arrived, and after giving me the packages she said, “Also, there is something very important that I have to tell you about.” 

She took out a piece of paper that she had showed me about two weeks prior, the working license that allowed me to legally work at the university (and which she said was the last thing we needed before I could get a working visa to stay at the college). She pointed to just below the header, where the letter directed the holder of the working license to report to the nearest Chinese embassy in the United States to get a working visa. 

The last time she had showed me the license, I had not noticed that crucial detail. And after months of nail-biting, hair-pulling, ad politely trying to not be a nuisance but also still persistently question her about when I would finally be legal in the country…I was tired of thinking about it. I just wanted the school to take care of it. I did not understand one crucial thing about the situation I had found myself in, which was that they had told me what I had wanted to hear regarding the visa situation before I came to China, and I had let myself believe them. Everything that happened after that was white noise. For three months I had pestered the Foreign Affairs Office people about my visa, and for three months they had essentially avoided telling me what they knew all along — I would have to leave the country, on my own, to get the visa I would eventually need, and, as an added bonus, I would be expected to pay for that trip. 

This revelation, on the last day of classes, deflated me and almost squashed me. I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt used, I felt stupid. But I quickly realized (after yelling about it to myself and discussing it over the phone with a couple of key people) that there was nothing I could do about the trip out of the country. I would have to do that, either way. The only thing I could really do anything about was determining who would pay for the trip. 

So I spent a day negotiating with the college and eventually, with the help of a key person at the school, got an extra few hundred U.S. dollars out of them. They agreed that they would refund me for my actual travel ticket, that they would throw in a little extra money for accommodations, and I would go. That was the best I could get without outright threatening to leave the college, which, if I were a more stubborn or hard-nosed person, I would have done. 

I booked a train ticket to Shenzhen. There is a train that passes through Sanming, Fujian and goes all the way to Shenzhen, which is almost directly north of Hong Kong and adjacent to it. I would take the train to Shenzhen the day before my tourist visa would run out, then I would cross customs in LuoHu, which is part of Shenzhen and actually in the same train terminal where I would be arriving, and then, if all went well, I would simply get on the Hong Kong MTA system and head into HK. 

So, I waited. There were about two or three weeks between when I learned that I would be going to HK and when I actually left. Waiting was not the easiest thing I have ever done, because the entire time I was thinking about the fact that there was no guarantee at all that I would be able to return to the mainland. I was heading out of the country just as my tourist visa was expiring on the hope that I would be able to return on a working visa, finally, after being in the country for almost four months. I finished grades for all my students, begrudgingly since I felt that the school was seriously not doing its job in supporting me as a foreign teacher and therefore why should I do my job until they started doing theirs. But I did the grades anyway, submitted them to the college’s intranet and waited some more. Some teachers came by for a party at my place. We ate rat. It was actually a ton of fun. I felt less bad about the whole situation and the people involved. We all went out for karaoke. It was, again, a ton of fun. I felt a little less bad again. The dean in my department and others invited me to spend the Spring Festival with them in their hometowns when I returned from HK. I felt less bad again, and as the time for my leaving arrived I finally decided that whatever happened, whatever the reason was for why I was leaving with no guarantee that I would return, to wait in HK for some indeterminate amount of time for the Foreign Affairs Office to swap my paperwork so I could get the visa in HK — whatever happened, I was totally confident that there were people who really wanted me there, teaching, at the university. They did appreciate my presence, even if a behemoth bureaucratic system, and various slip-ups and textbook cases of miscommunication had seriously gotten in the way. I at least felt welcome, still, as I was leaving. Which helped. 

So with classes and grades and everything else done I packed up almost all of my stuff, or at least everything that I could carry, into two huge backpacks and a messenger bag and set out at 1:30 a.m. to catch the train that would take me to Shenzhen. One of the teachers picked me up and he very kindly waited with me at the train station and helped me find the train car when it arrived. Which was very lucky for me, because there was a lot of running and shouting involved. Apparently the trains tend to only stop for a couple of minutes at each station. So if you have over 100 pounds of gear on you it is not so easy to navigate, read the signs of trains, and try to process train stewardesses speaking Chinese. 

But it worked out. I got on the train, found my car, got into bed, and slept. I woke up at around 7 a.m. and looked out the window. The air outside was smoggy and the sun was up and the countryside looked almost as it had the day before, only a little flatter. We were moving away from the endless egg-crate-like mountains of Fujian, southwest, into Guangdong. There was still only one other passenger in the four-bed soft-sleeper room with me, a young woman, maybe about 23 or 24, with a pale, overwhelmed looking face and a soft voice. I had listened to her talk on the phone in a plaintive, almost whiney Chinese the night before. The only thing I had understood was “Wo hen kun, wo hen kun” — I’m very sleepy. I had been on the top bunk on the front end of the room, listening to Chinese lessons on my iPod as I fell asleep, while she was on the bottom bunk on the other side of the tiny room. I had also been able to smell the shampoo-scent of her hair, for some reason, whenever she moved. Probably because I already smelled like sweat and nerves. I don’t know why I was so worried about the whole thing, now, in retrospect. As I fell asleep, I was less worried than I had been at 11 p.m. earlier that night, waiting to get on the train.

After waking up at 7 a.m., I quickly fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until 11 a.m. After an hour or so of reading I got up and moved around a bit, ate, read some more, and then finally decided to try to talk to the girl in the cab with me. Using Chinese, I managed to find out that we would be arriving at about 3:30 p.m., that she was also headed to Hong Kong via Shenzhen, that her parents lived in Hong Kong so she often went there, and that she was, amazingly, a secretary at the very college where I am a teacher. And that she had seen me around campus before. It occurred to me later, after she helped me find my way to customs and the subway to HK, that I never asked her for her name. But I’m hoping that next semester I will be able to find her and thank her. It was not easy for her, I’m sure, to communicate those very basic things to me in Chinese. And the last thing she told me, that once we got to the train station I would be able to tell where to go by the signs inside the station, I didn’t understand until after we actually got off the train and she pointed to a sign that said Hong Kong and she repeated the word — “biao1 zhi4″ that she had used so many times back in the train cabin, while I sat searching through my dictionary, befuddled — which word means “sign” (or as my dictionary defined it, to my confusion, “logo”), as in “YOU CAN JUST READ THE SIGNS”.

As a language teacher, I can totally and exhaustively sympathize with the frustration she must have felt trying to speak to me in Chinese, as I feel that frustration trying to speak to my students in English. But I also know from experience that speaking with someone of a different language takes practice, patience, and the ability to closely monitor your own words and simplify your sentences. Practice, that is, that you maybe only get if you’re a language learner or teacher. 

So, the train got to Shenzhen, I got off, I followed the girl through the train station, and finally we had to split at customs, where Hong Kongers and Chinese people split with foreigners. We waved and I said thank you, and I went to the foreigners customs area. 

The line for Hong Kongers and Chinese looked brutally long, but it took me about five minutes to pass through the foreigners line, and I walked straight down, again following the signs that said “Hong Kong”, to the LuoHu MTA station, used the ATM to get some HK Dollars, bought a subway ticket, and got on. This was when I finally started to get the surreal and exhilirating and confusing feeling that I was going back into something, essentially a kind of world that I had known before, for most of my life, but that I had been living very far away from, without realizing it, for quite some time. 

That description of what I felt sucks. It’s hard to describe. First there’s the fact that I hadn’t seen, looked in the eyes of, shaken the hand of, a native English speaker in four months…it feels strange to mention it, but honestly I also hadn’t seen a caucasian person in four months, which had been a quiet point of interest in my mind. It doesn’t matter at all, but it has relevance purely because of the undeniable role that my caucasian-ness had played in my life in Fujian. As in, people staring, people shouting hello, people continuously turning and saying to their friends, “Ni kan, laowai” — “Look, a foreigner” — wherever I went, all the time. And because of the fact that I had begun to wear my own skin differently, but had not had time or opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that, to step outside the situation, to see it all how I would have seen it if it were someone else experiencing it, not me. 

That’s what I started to think, standing on the subway, a few short miles from Hong Kong Island. I was suddenly very happy, for no one reason that I could pinpoint. I was smiling to myself, even as I realized that compared to all the clean, well-dressed, sophisticated Hong Kongers around me I looked decidedly shabby, my shoes were extremely dirty, and I did not exactly smell like something off a page of “Vanity Fair”. I was stinky, I had a huge load of bags with me on the subway, I was not sure exactly where my hostel was located and I was, despite the excessive sleep on the train, tired. But I was happy to be in Hong Kong. 

I was glad I had made it. 

: )

A contest….guess what I ate for dinner tonight…

You get three hints:

Hint #1: Here's the fully prepared dish, bottom left. It tasted a bit like jerky, due to the seasoning.

Yeah, so hint #1 is impenetrable, I know. But wait, there’s more…

Hint #2: Season, dried, and about to be quartered. Viewing this beheading was a kind of twisted revenge for me, having lived with the suckers for some 3-odd months.

If that doesn’t do it for you, I think hint number three will…

Hint #3: Yep, that is the hintquarters of a mouse being lopped off. I ate with relish. These mice were raised to be eaten, so don't get freaked out and think I am in China eating sewer rats, here...

On a mostly unrealted note, we also captured the bat that has been living in my air conditioner since I moved in. I have some pretty gruesome pics of the bat being offed as well, but so as not to provoke the PETA gods, I will forebear to post those tonight…

To pre-empt any possible rat/mouse strikes this evening, I have re-set my rat traps in the bathroom (I found some little rat poop in there today, the first rat evidence I have found in about two months), the kind that kill on impact, so as far as my means go they are as humane as possible, and I (regretfully) am hoping to find some more cold, dead rat corpses in my apartment in the morn.

T-minus 12 days until the solo trip to Hong Kong. Wish me luck.

Hope you all are well.

: )

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the wedding reception of one of my older students.

The happy couple bowing to assembled friends and family.

The wedding reception was rather like a wedding reception back home. There were 100+ family mambers and friends in attendance, and the bride and groom spent most of the evening strolling from table to table, toasting people and thanking people for coming.

A table all ready for some tasty dishes. Note the round glass plate that conveniently spins, allowing all at table to enjoy the many dishes that comprise each meal. And the watermelon seeds. One weird thing about the dinner -- there was an unexplained Bandaid on the soy sauce bottle. Ew.

We ate, and then after dinner went to the newlyweds’ new condo to have some tea and play some traditional Chinese wedding games, which were a little risqué.

The games included the following:

• The bride lighting cigarettes for all the men in the room, while everyone around her tried to blow out the lighter.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to snatch, using only their mouths, a piece of candy dangled down to them on a string by a friend standing on a chair.
• The bride and groom simultanously trying to lift, using only their tongues, a chopstick from a big beer bottle.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to convince me to eat some puffed rice that had been strewn all over their bed, telling me in broken English that it had something to do with good luck and with their likelihood of having a son, and then me eating said puffed rice to widespread applause.

I have some photos of those games, too, but am not sure about the privacy boundaries regarding post-wedding risqué games, and so will have to let you use your imagination.

All in all the wedding was fun, and I was glad I went, and as a bonus I learned a couple of new Chinese blessings:

Zao sheng gui zi — Meaning something like, I hope you have a boy and therefore implicitly not a girl (that was the translation I was given, anyhow)

Bai tou xie lao — Meaning something like, I hope you grow old together happily

I also got some action photos from the same class…

Teaching outside on a sunny day...students sometimes say I look very serious when I teach, which I guess I can see from this photo.

And number 2…

Teaching outside, same class, Cosby sweater.

And number 3…

If I had known that one day English language-learners would have to read my handwriting on a blackboard, I would have worked harder at my penmanship. Apologies for my creepy lack of a face in this picture.

And finally, KTV (karaoke) on Christmas Eve. Oy, there was a lot of drinking, and I nearly ruined my phone by dropping it on the hard tile floor, and I nearly got blown up when somebody threw a large bundle of lit fireworks on the sidewalk in front of me, and I had to literally run away from my students so that they would let me go to sleep that night, but it was fun…and we had a totally premium karaoke suite.

Those glowing blue windows are the TV's on which the song lyrics are displayed. I sang "My Heart Will Go On" (very popular English song here, I think because of the Chinese-style flute intro), "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, and "Desperado". And a children's song in Chinese, Two Tigers (which goes to the tune of Frere Jacques).

I taught my last class today, and learned that the whole visa situation could turn out to be critically not as easy as I had been led to believe it would be. So today has actually been consumed with anxiety about that, but I’ll write about that some other time if the anxiety turns out to be validated.

I’ve been here three months now, and the six-week Spring Festival vacation is about to begin. Let’s hope I can stay here after that’s over.

Peace out for now. Much love to you all.

: )

A thought: The key to my door is really weird. It’s not like a normal key, where you have a flat object with two edges that are all curvy and bumpy. The bumpy, key-blade part of it has another plane that intersects the main key-blade at a perpendicular angle (so that if you point the key at your face you see a plus sign). It’s extra difficult to fit into the door and for the longest time it took me several minutes to get the door opened in the dark. I wondered if I would ever learn to open the door smoothly without a struggle and a full minute of cursing under my breath. I noticed today that I open it smoothly now, with a minimum of jabbing at the door.

This weekend I went to town on the bus to run some errands, and on the way back it was getting dark out and it was raining and the people on the bus, even though we were packed together closely, were more or less quiet. I was listening to music on my headphones and looked around at all their faces and realized that I was unimaginably far from home and still alive, and I got a little rush of joy but also dull, quiet sadness because, also, I could see how unimaginably separate and different I was from the people on the bus.

Another thought: What would happen if there were technology that could translate one spoken language into another orally, on the spot, so that you could have a conversation with someone without a translator present, without knowing any of their language or they of yours?

Another thought: What is the point of travel? Why does it feel so intrinsically interesting to some of us, and not to others? Why do I feel, now, so ambivalent about travel for travel’s sake, as I have for as long as I can remember, and yet then also why am I now so far away from home?

The bus stops. A woman I watched get on carrying a thick bamboo stick over which were slung two large plastic bags filled with blankets and vegetables straightens up and lifts her stick of bamboo and struggles to get the bags back onto the two ends of it, and as she does this the bus begins to lurch forward. But all the passengers around me shout at the bus driver to stop, and he does, and the lady slowly gathers her things and lurches, herself, towards the exit. We all shuffle aside and press against each other to give her way. Everybody pays the same, 1 yuan, about 15 cents, to ride the bus, even these people who bring on large loads of clothes, food, machinery, I assume in most cases to sell somewhere, with them.

The bus rolls forward again and the driver turns out the cab lights. The drivers do this whenever we are on the road and won’t be stopping for a while, and when they do, everyone on the bus seems to get sleepier and quieter. There is a young girl sitting on a cardboard box on the floor of the bus, next to an older woman who is standing next to a few similar boxes. I’m not sure what’s in the boxes, but I look at the girl. She is staring straight ahead, with no expression that I can discern on her face.  I feel like I recognize this girl, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t appear to be sleeping, just absorbed in some kind of thought. Or maybe no thought at all. I keep glancing down at her face, to see if it will reveal something to me about what she is doing or thinking. I keep expecting her to turn to the woman next to her, since I think they are together, and say something. She just sits there, staring off at nothing. She sits there for ten minutes like that.

Finally we come to my stop, and I get off with a bunch of other students who are all going back to the school too. I open my umbrella and walk in front of the bus and look both ways to see what cars are coming. It is clear, except in the distance, in the lane opposite the bus, a silver car is gliding fast through the rain and shows no sign of slowing down for me or the people around me. We walk across the rainy street and about 100 meters away the car starts laying on its horn. By the time it reaches our stop we are all on the other side of the street, and I hear the ragged sound of its horn bend as it passes behind us.

I walk slowly in the rain. I have very little to do with the rest of my day, and I feel tired. I walk up the hill on the rain-soaked dirt road that leads back to campus. There are little pockets of students all walking the same way, and I walk by some of them and some of them walk by me. There are palm trees on both sides of the road and run-down houses and an old brick factory where plastic is burned and recycled. The walls and the window frames of the building are black with soot and a thick smell of urine and trash seeps up from the stream that flows along the road.

I feel old all of a sudden, but very new, in a way, too, because somehow I know that I was never really supposed to be here or to see any of this. It is all a choice you make, to go somewhere far away like this, and I think about how I made that decision some five-odd months ago. It feels like I didn’t really decide so much as let reality decide for me, while I sat by and weighed the reasons for going or not going as if they had perfectly equal weight. They still do, as far as I can tell, even now that I have put the decision behind me. It made itself, or anyway I don’t feel like I had anything real to do with it.

Robert Frost’s old famous poem says, “And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”. These lines are so haunting because they hit at precisely what it is to look at a life–your life–and have decisions before you that are so obviously serious and important that it’s impossible not to feel just a little bit outmatched by them. Like it’s unfair that anyone could have that much power over his/her own life in her hands.

It is also about the recursive nature of time; how you can regret things that you did or didn’t do in the past, but you can also regret things you are not doing now; hell, you can regret things you know you’re not going to do in the future.

But that has nothing to do with whether they actually happen. That has more to do with chance, with how you feel on a particular day, with how important you decide it is to think about the road you’re taking. And with how far ahead and how long you stare down that road.

One of the pros of the past three months in China has been the stabilizing effect it has had on my eating and sleeping habits.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that a very common greeting in this area (and, as I understand it, throughout a lot of China) is, “have you eaten?”

I get asked this question like 5+ times a day, and not just when it is around lunchtime. Students often ask me this at 10:30 in the morning, when it is not clear whether we are closer to breakfast or lunchtime. I usually see my students in front of the main dining halls in the middle of campus. When they see me, an expression usually forms on their face that is something like a confused, dazed, interested smile. The expression is utterly unique and fascinating and is reproduced almost every time I see a student who knows me.

They then say, quietly, “Hello, Mr. Will. Have you eaten yet?”

I think the funny, friendly, gentle look they give me is a mixture of panic (at having to compose an English sentence on the spot to greet me), warmth (at seeing a teacher), and concern (foreigner = lost white man).

The question they ultimately pose to me (after groping around in their minds for the right English words and sentence structure) is usually funny in two ways: first, because what meal is never specified; and second, because it has no actual connection to any possibility of our eating together. The answer — “yes, I have eaten,” or “no, I haven’t eaten” — is as inconsquential as the “good” we English speakers give when asked “How are you?” (which question, by the way, Chinese students know very well, because they shout it at me all the time as I walk across campus — more as a blunt statement than a question).

The second big reason “have you eaten?” is so funny is because of the ruthless order that students seem to impose opon their day here. When I first arrived in China, I often ate lunch at 12:30 or 1 p.m., and dinner at 5:30 or 6 p.m. That kind of a dining schedule is almost unimaginable to some students, I think. About 80 to 90 percent of them, as far as I can observe, start eating lunch somewhere between 11:45 and 12, no earlier or later. The dining hall is all but deserted at 1:05, and it is impossible to get anything that isn’t cold and slimy after 1:25.

All of which is to say that if a student sees me at 12:45 p.m. and asks me if I have eaten, and I haven’t, they usually say, “Oh, why so late?”

So, after struggling to answer this question repeatedly in my first few weeks here, I started just eating lunch at 11:45, and dinner at 5 or 5:30, and leaving my former, just-wing-it, unscheduled eating pattern to the dogs.

Which is actually a lot easier than avoiding eating until late in the day and then wandering around, starved and wild-eyed, desperate for something to eat (which is how I always used to do it).

Another hilarious thing that I will add as a poscript is that students love to give me fruit. I’ll be walking along somewhere, maybe having just finished lunch, and I’ll see a student I know, and he or she will be carrying some fruit, and without fail he or she will offer me a piece of fruit from the bag, if not the whole bag. Students will look exactly as if they have just gone shopping for some fruit for themselves, be coming directly out of the fruit store, see me, and then hand me the bag of fruit and say, “this is for you” and then walk away as if they had planned to give me the fruit all along. It is profoundly weird and funny and sweet.

Probably the weirdest eating experience I’ve had since coming to China was in late November, when I was visiting some students in a nearby town (about 2 hours away) and they took me out to eat what they said was their town’s specialty, “pork bone”.

Everyplace in China seems to have a specialty of some kind (I have heard a million times, for instance, that nearby Shaxian is famous for its snacks, Quanzhou is famous for its seafood, and Fuzhou is famous for its lazy women), and it is usually food related. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary that my students’ town, which is called Datian, would have something “famous”—in this case pork bone.

Some students came over and prepared this dinner, which included beef, pork, crab, duck, a few differnt kinds of vegtables, and soup. As you can see, we still managed to deal the meal a crippling blow.

Neither did it seem out of the ordinary when, later, we sat down at table and a large platter of what indeed appeared to be pork bones was placed on the table, and when a student then put a large, pinkish, meaty bone on a platter in front of me.

I picked up the shank of animal and immediately took to gnawing on the most readily gnawable part of it. The meat was delicious—sweeter and more tender than I expected and a little salty. My mouth watered and I immediately exclaimed “hao chi”—delicious—with real enthusiasm, not the faked kind I sometimes utter when someone puts something weird like red chicken or any variety of intestines or snails in front of me. It was really good and I immediately dug in.

But, it turned out, there was a small but important detail that I missed when the bone was placed in front of me.

It was a face.

Yeah. After my first round of gnawing on the large, greasy, drippy bone in my hands, I put it down on my plate to grab my beer glass. Someone was already toasting me, or the whole table, or maybe just everyone in my vicinity, so I was obliged to half-stand and give a little nod of acknowledgement and drink (you never drink on your own here; the glasses are tiny and every time you take a sip someone else butts in and toasts with you, and then you often have to drink the whole thing—that’s just how it works). So I nodded, drank, wiped my hands a little, gave a glance around the table to show I was at least marginally engaged in the conversation around me, and then looked back down.

There was an eyeball, big, maybe the size of a pool ball, on my bone. And a nostril. And teeth. And the ridges you can feel with your tongue on the roof of your mouth. And there was some grayish matter clinging to my left hand that appeared to be brain. It was.

I immediately acknowledged that I was going to have to make a very deliberate effort not to make any sounds of horror, not to visibly move away from the bone, not to make any expression of any kind. I slowly put my hands back onto the bone and raised it upward. It appeared that I had been gnawing somewhere behind the eye, like maybe on the cheek part, or somewhere around where the ear might have been. I could not believe that in a brief moment I had gone from delighting in this particular bone to suddenly feeling about three shades whiter because of it.

After my initial shock, which was I think fleeting, I kept eating. After I realized that my bone was half a skull, and accepting that fact, I simmered down. The eye was still weird, but I tried not to pay attention to it. I’m not sure if the people around me knew what was going on, but I have a feeling that giving me the head was a mild joke they were playing on me. The bone/face was damn good tasting, I’m guessing they gave it to me because the meat tasted so good, but also, I caught a few looks of amusement at my dismay and confusion over, say, what the hell to do with the brains. One of my students’ husbands was sitting to my left, and he pointed out the brains to me and somebody told me what they were, and that they were the “best part”. So, I ate them. They were not the best part.

The best part was, indeed, the face, which I ate most of. When most of the facial meat was gone and I wasn’t sure what to do about the eyeball (I knew I wasn’t going to eat it), I asked a student if she wanted to eat it. She said no, which I felt gave me the green light to consider the bone picked. And I moved on. Despite the fact that I enjoyed the flavor, I did not accept another pork bone after that.

The rest of the meal was, as far as I remember, totally normal, at least for China. Chinese meals usually consist of lots and lots of different dishes, and anytime you go out to eat in any kind of celebratory or official fashion, there seems to be an unwritten law decreeing that there must be at least 10 dishes served. So the other dishes were probably veggies (often spinach and cabbage fried with a heavy serving of oil and salt and sometimes garlic), fish (usually one or two fish dishes, always still with all the bones included, so you have to eat really slowly to make sure you don’t choke on nasty prickly fish bones—the fish is usually broiled/parbroiled in a delicious cream or wine/soysauce mixture and is almost always ridiculously good, despite the onerous task of eating around the bones), chicken (often there are a couple chicken dishes, sometimes fried like the sesame seed chicken you can get at Chinese restaurants all around the States, sometimes chicken pieces cooked up in soup, sometimes just regular old chicken feet, which I still can’t figure out how or why anybody bothers with them, because they’re feet, for one, but also because there’s hardly any meat on them and they are slippery and gross), fried beef/pork, clams/oysters, and or whatever other variety of animal parts you can imagine.

One of the dishes at our dinner was this crab dish, which was cooked with soy sauce, vinagar, salt, and the most amazing red-rice wine I have ever whiffed. Oy, bad picture quality.

At this point, I have eaten so many weird things that I have completely lost track of it all and I no longer consider most of it weird. The small sized whole-body (eyes and tail and everything) fish that you can get for 2 yuan (30 cents) at most barbecue stands, for instance, no longer phase me at all and are a treat I look forward to. The snails and various iterations of beef/pork intestines that I used to recoil from I now enjoyÉand just generally the different style in which all Chinese dishes are cooked is something that I have, pretty much, started to like.

Things I still do not particularly enjoy, but are widespread:

Duck’s blood.  The title describes it perfectly. It is nothing but duck’s blood, but it pops up in all kinds of dishes unexpectedly, most commonly, it seems, in malatang, which is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure style of noodle shop. Apparently when they kill the ducks they let the blood drain out before butchering them, congeal the blood somehow so it’s solid, boil it, and then chop it into little pieces. The resulting product is something that looks and tastes somewhat like liver but is somehow even more gross.

Pig’s feet. These are everywhere! They are not at all the pickled pig’s feet that are somewhat common in the U.S., which, as I understand it, usually occupy the spot in the bar behind the jar of pickled eggs, which I once heard is used as a measure to see if someone is truly drunk or not (if you can eat it, you must be drunk—but that might just be something I made up, I don’t know). The pig’s feet here are served as a legitimate, to-be-savored dishÉthere is not much special to them and you wouldn’t know they were feet if you saw them on a platter. They look like really fatty, big chunks of pork. But beware, that ribbed-looking hunk of fat was once an appendage that spent at least a year or two tramping around in a thousand other pigs’ excrement. I just can’t shake that idea when it comes time to eat ‘em.

Tiny bits of pork or beef with hardly no meat on them. That’s kind of a long title, and there’s probably a real name for the dish, but I don’t know it. I just don’t understand these dishes. They are the most unsatisfying thing to eat ever, because the little bits of bone look like meat, they taste a little like meat when you suck on them, but at the end of eating this dish, you have taken like 40 bites of the food but none of it has turned out to be edible, and I always have a big pile of bones next to my bowl that did me no good (in China, lots of stuff has bones, so it’s OK to constantly be spitting stuff out of your mouth onto the table next to your bowl).

Little crabs. These bastards are so hard to crack open/dissect, and, as with the tiny bits of pork or beef, there is hardly anything edible to them, so there is usually almost no payoff (although the 2 miligrams of crab that you get from one of the little suckers is always delicious).

There are a ton of other weird things about eating here (it’s OK to burp at table, apparently; toasting is a complex and socially dominating activity; deciding who is going to pay sometimes involves shouting matches, shoving, and pulling—meaning you have to be willing to literally strong-arm someone’s money back into their pocket if you want them to let you treat; and on and on). But I think, on the whole, the food scene is awesome. Food is by far the cheapest thing in China, it is often really good, and there is usually a ton of it. And, although I do occasionally get bored with my meal rotation when I eat too frequently in the dining halls, it is always really easy to find something totally weird, and interesting, to eat.

There are few things more humbling than looking at a Chinese college English exam.

Thursday night I spent two hours with some students, helping them prepare for the CET-6 English exam, which they took on Saturday. The CET-6 is a test that (apparently) almost all college students here take to measure their proficiency in English.

The test is extremely advanced for a second language test and yet contains quite a lot of grammatical errors and yet is U.S./Euro-centric and is the kind of thing that would make anyone who espoused progressive education in the United States scream bloody murder. The exam tests English reading, writing and listening by using fill-in-the-blank excercises/multiple choice and standard reading comprehension tests like you’d find on the SAT or GRE.

The thing is, though, that the test is almost unimaginably difficult for any non-native speaker. To pass, the students have to get something like 60 percent of the answers correct; but most of them don’t know I would say probably 30 percent of the vocabulary (I read somewhere that a reading passage is technically “illegible” to a reader if he/she doesn’t know 20 percent of the words).

An example of a test question (from memory):

One of the fill-in-the-blank excercises is a long passage about Germany’s response to the success of the U.S. economy in the 90’s. Random words are blanked out and the students answer by multiple-choice. One of the early sentences says something like

“Germany’s response came about after seeing the U.S. economy _______ in the 90’s.”

A.) Soar B.) Amplify C.)       Hover D.) Extend

I think, maybe, without a dictionary, some of my more advanced students might know the meaning of “Soar” and “Extend”. Amplify and hover I think they wouldn’t know. Maybe they would have seen them before. But, nonetheless, they are expected to know these words, and to somehow understand why “soar” is preferable to “expand” in this context. Although, without living in a Western culture or having some idea of what happened in the U.S. economy in the 90’s, I don’t know why they would be expected to know the answer at all.

The reading level is, I think, somewhere around the reading level on the pre-SAT you take in junior high-school. So around the level where native speakers are at the age of 16. Except the subject matter is all about Western culture. So they’re being tested on the use of the language in the context of Western culture, when most of the students have met less than a handful of foreigners. Most of them have not traveled far from home. I don’t think any of them have left the country. It’s not like they have English-language newspapers in the library, either. Considering all that, they know an amazing amount about the West. But they don’t know things like what the U.S. economy did in the 90’s, and they certainly don’t know the word “amplify”.

The only analogue I can imagine would be if you took a 14-year-old in the U.S. and expected him to be able to score a 1200 on the GRE. Even if the kid had studied every day since he was six years old, only the occasionally lucky or brilliant student would pass. Most of my students won’t pass the CET-6. That would be incredible. Of about 200-some students who I know, three of them have passed it already. And those three, I think, worked incredibly hard. And they also, I suspect, got incredibly lucky on the day they took the test.

That is what most of these students will be relying on Saturday when they take the test–luck. The tests are timed and there is not enough time even for a native speaker (read: me) to comfortably read the material and answer the questions with total confidence. I am sure that if everyone in the U.S. had to take the test, a good portion of the population would fail. I can’t really guess at the number, but I bet it would be in the teens at least. So my students will basically go into the test room, read frantically, guess on most of the answers, and if they are lucky (stats say that someone always passes by guessing) a few of them will pass.

The rest will go on thinking that they are no good at English, even though they are. And who knows how not passing the CET-6 will affect their chances at getting a job (some say that they won’t be able to get a teaching job without passing it).

So Thurday night, after two hours of trying to explain to the students things like the difference between “soar” and “extend”, and why we typically use “soar” and “crash” when we talk about the economy in English, I threw up my hands and told them that the test was unfair, that it was criminally difficult for them and that it also included a bunch of grammatical errors, typos, unclear questions/answers and some multiple-choice questions with no single logically correct answer. I told them that I knew that they had all worked incredibly hard, and that whatever happened on Saturday, they should feel good about how hard they had worked and how much they had learned.

And I walked home thinking: sometimes you can be frustrated at the students’ limitations, and then sometimes you can be frustrated at your own.

Some pictures from recent trips to some towns / cities near Sanming. I need to make some changes to the blog, I think, before I can post these a bit bigger.

Taken from the side of XianJing Mountain in Datian.

About picture #1: We took a walk up the road along XianJing Mountain on my first afternoon in Datian — it took us about 30 minutes to drive there from Datian and we saw few cars or people once we arrived. There were old-style Chinese houses on the way to the top and a lot of rice fields. Near the top you could look down and see the laddered rice fields on the sides of a lot of mountains. These things look just like topo maps and you see them a lot driving through the countryside. They are really pretty. Note that on this mountain we were high enough so that a lot of the smog/pollution was below us, hence the rarely glimpsed blue sky.

Taken in Shaxian at a small hike / tourist attraction. A couple of different people told me this is China's largest "lying Buddha".

A not-so-old Buddhist temple in Shaxian, again mostly for tourists. It was pretty, though.

We took a meandering boat ride on QiXing (Seven Stars) Lake in HuMei (Beautiful Lake) near Datian. I learned (a little) how to play MahJong.

The city of Shaxian from afar.

An iron bridge near Datian. Getting there in a car involved asking multiple people to move motorcycles, piles of woods, driving over piles of dirt, etc. Clearly a car hadn't been through that way in a while.

Self-portrait of my scrubby mug in Shaxian. Note that I am wearing the sh*t-eating grin I referenced in my last post.