Having Fun All The Time

Howdy.

I am getting the feeling that I am in an in between places at the moment.

I have been in Chinese lessons for about a month now. I am still waiting for certain paperwork to pass here so that I can be fully legit to teach. I have met a lot of students here, got to know them a bit, and have even made a couple of friends off campus.

I am getting the feeling that I am now putting some of the initial troubles of life in China behind me, like figuring out how to order food, how to communicate about basic things like the bathroom and money, how to answer some yes or no quesetions. How to sleep at night. How to balance my own time with the time demands of others. How to accept things as they come.

But still I am growing an awareness of how little I really know–about the people, about the language, about the country, about the food, about everything. I’m starting to think the smidge of security I have attained is really just blithe ignorance of what this place is really about, and that understanding a little of that will be the next big challenge.

But it is actually a challenge I am OK with. They say that the initial phase of coming to a place like China is the “honeymoon phase”, where you love everything and everyone. After that wears off, you start to get an idea of what you will really think of the place.

With that wearing away of the honeymoon phase, I am starting to wonder what the hell comes next, life-wise, after a thing like this. What does anybody do with themselves. But then I think of this person that I knew several years back who was living with cystic fibrosis, a girl my age who was really beautiful and great but who knew that her chances of living to 30 were slim to nonexistent. She didn’t waste any time doing anything that she didn’t love or didn’t have an interest in. From what I understand she worked her ass off to try to get a master’s degree back in her home (somewhere in England) and she died about a month ago.

We are all going to die eventually, and that isn’t necessarily the greatest foundation to draw life-governing axioms on but it’s a start. She wasn’t wasting her time, and I’m trying not to waste my time too. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I leave China, or decide to start some other career, or whatever. But I don’t feel like a day here is a waste of anything.

That’s something.

: )

Just saw this article, also, about gossip, and had to post it…maybe it was a follow-up to the article from last week; I dunno…..:

At my last job, gossip was rampant. So many people had negative attitudes. Workers would become frustrated if one person was slacking off, so they’d vent about it.

I, for one, was afraid to say anything because I didn’t know who might repeat something I said, change it around or use it against me. People would even gossip about what others did on the weekend, like what bar they went to. It was every man for himself, and it was uncomfortable.

There’s a greater sense of being part of a team here than in other jobs I’ve had. If employees do violate the company policy, a manager speaks to them, and if they don’t stop, they’re let go. It has happened.

There was an article in the NYTimes the other day about workplace gossip. Considering that office/school/whatever gossip is something that everybody deals with almost all the time in life, it’s funny how little anybody knows about gossip or how to fight it.

I spent about two years working in a place where office gossip compacted my soul just about every day, made me want to scream in my gray cubicle, made me want to wander the streets muttering to myself and drooling; and just about everybody I know over 30 has had a similar experience at least sometime in their lives.

Ralph Steadman drawings tend to flash through my head whenever I hear office gossip, even when it is coming out of my mouth. I think he understands me.

But nobody knows how to deal with gossip, or at least I never do, beyond a.) going along with it and secretly hating yourself, b.) laughing uncomfortably and saying nothing, or c.) saying something about how annoying you think gossip is, and then looking like a loser and risking becoming the target of the apmorphous and cancer-like gossip.

Gossip tends to be pretty toxic and is half the reason I don’t ever want to work in a drab office again. The other half is that I find most offices drab. But if somebody could figure out why gossip happens, how to stop gossip, and what exactly people are trying to accomplish by backbiting and spewing awful shit about each other day in, day out, I would give that person a high five.

So, here’s the article. The only really meaningful suggestion it makes for anti-gossipers is letter (C.) from above. But, still, it’s always good to know that maybe it might make a difference if you’re going to stick your neck out and look like a chode:

The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.

I should add that I think it is not really the meanness of gossip that is the really sucky thing about it, but the feeling of powerlessness you experience when you are around someone who is gossipy. Even if you agree with them, or like them, it can be sucky to feel like there is literally nothing you can do to stem the flow of their negativity. And it is usually only a small minority in a group that are the real gossip instigators. Everybody else tends to go along for the ride, I think, because they don’t know how else to deal with it.

Anyway, I’ve had my soapbox moment for the day, I feel better.

: )

A friend of mine sent me an email today wishing me a happy birthday, and telling me that she hoped I was keeping a daily record of my early experiences in China, because when she first moved to America, she quickly started forgetting things she’d experienced.

“Those things fade away much quicker than you expect,” she wrote. “You will even forget what you didn’t know. (Your case could be different, but this was true for me.)”

This seems totally true already. I’ve been here for a month already, but it still feels as though I’ve just landed. Even so, all of the things that struck me as profoundly different and strange when I landed in Fuzhou are already, I think, blending in with what I am coming to understand as reality.

Part of that is natural, I think: in a place as new and different as this part of China, there is a constant flow of unfamiliar information forcing its way through my brain. The vast majority of that (words, names, foods, smells, sounds, emotions, memories from home, etc, etc) are immediately lost. Some little bit remains, whatever I manage to hold onto, and that starts to become the basis for my understanding of things.

I think that’s even true of language…I’m not sure what being here is doing to my English skills, if it’s making them better or worse, but I’m certainly hearing less and less English nowadays than ever before. What English I do hear is, essentially, Chinese English…a language with different syntax, grammar and pronounciation than American English, but that is often pretty consistent in those differences.

So, I want to try to capture the first few days here, if I can.

I came in on a plane, flying through Shanghai and landing in Fuzhou. The plan was that I would get picked up at the Fuzhou airport. After leaving New York, nobody really spoke English. I realized I was on my own, pretty much. I used one Chinese word in my 30-ish odd hours of travel to China, and that was shuai, or water. I had to keep looking up how to say it. I realized I was fucked, speaking-Chinese-wise.

The food on the plane to Shanghai was really weird. I could hardly eat any of it, and I was hungry…so I started to worry about food. I realized I didn’t really know what kind of food they had in China, the real China. I wondered, with trepidation, if I would be able to eat enough to stay moderately healthy. I drank more water and ate as much of the food as I could (I don’t remember what it was, but I haven’t seen food like that since I got to China).

When I landed in Shanghai, I wandered around in the airport for a while. It was strange and exhilirating to be walking around on the ground in China. I was only in the airport, but I felt a little like I was in a dream. I stepped outside and looked out at the land, but it was very foggy…or maybe it was smoggy. I couldn’t see anything. There were some young Chinese people at the entrance to the airport and they seemed to be aware of me more than I was used to, but I wasn’t really sure.

That was after I went through customs. Before going through customs, getting through customs was mostly what I was worried about. Not for any particular reason — just because it was going through customs, and that made me nervous. I didn’t know anything about Chinese customs (no pun intended). So there was that.

It turned out that going through customs was easy. A man looked at my declarations form and papers and stamped the passport. I walked on through. I didn’t know where to get my bags, so I just followed the crowd through the airport to the baggage claim area. The airport seemed empty and unused, for some reason. Maybe because it was the middle of the night. We passed a lot of police as we walked through the airport.

I had been told in JFK that I would need to transfer my bags myself in Shanghai. I didn’t know what that entailed, or how I would find my bags, or where I would bring them, so that had been another thing to worry about on the flight to Shanghai. It turned out that following the crowd worked. I got my bags, as Chinese people bustled around me, speaking a language I did not understand, and then I noticed a woman yelling what sounded like “Fuzhou”. So I went up to her. She pointed in the direction of a sign that said “Transfer Flights”, or something like that, so I went that way. I waited around for a while (figured out that my cell phone didn’t work and so called my family to tell them I had arrived using a calling card on a payphone) and, eventually, someone took my bags and pointed me toward another door. I went through it. I was at the entrance to the airport. That was when I walked through the main entrance to check out the Shanghai fog.

The flight to Fuzhou was short, and I stayed awake for most of it. By the time the plane took off from Shanghai it was full daylight again, and I realized that I had cleared customs with no problems and I was reasonably sure that my bags were on the plane with me. Everything was fine, and everything would be. We landed in Fuzhou and I again followed the crowd to the baggage claim. I spotted a man holding a sign with my name on it, and he waved when he saw me. I had not sent any pictures of me, so he wouldn’t have known what I looked like, but I was obviously the one. The only other white people on the plane, as far as I could tell, were much older than me. I waved at him and I also smiled, very enthusiastically (as I had begun to worry, on top of everything else, that maybe I should have called him before I left New York to confirm that he would be there). Both of my bags drifted by on the baggage claim conveyer belt and I walked out of the airport to meet him.

He had come in a rented Audi with a driver. He had water for me and we chatted. He tried to teach me some Chinese words and I tried to listen. We talked about disparate things. (This is a nice car, right? Yes, it’s very nice. Naptime in China. Other foreigners and their first perceptions of China. Landowners and other people he knew.)

I reeked from traveling. I felt dirty and tired and overwhelmed. The fact that I had made it had not nearly sunk in yet. After talking for a couple of hours with him I tried to relax and put my head back. I had traveled for almost two days straight and I was completely bushed, and I was just realizing how different things were going to be (even the looking out the window at the buildings confused me for reasons I will get into another time). I think that was the beginning — the first day, then the next few days, then the first week, I kept feeling like the differences were piling up and getting more serious — and then things started to dissipate and become more real and more manageable, I think (or I became better at managing them).

So, that was the beginning of day one in China. There were actually a lot more things that happened. (We got lunch and ate fish stomach and a number of other things I could not really identify and I worried more about food. We got dinner later and I met people and struggled to remember their names, and failed, because Chinese names are so different from Anglo names, we came and looked at my apartment and I discovered that the water was out [see previous post] and on and on — I also tried to call family back home again and that was kinda tough to do, too, etc.) And by the time the day was over I think I would have slept anywhere, on anything, so I was not worried about how my mattress smelled, or how I smelled, or anything. I just went to sleep, and was extremely grateful to have made it to a home, to have a key to that home, and I decided that I would have to stop worrying pronto if I was going to sleep at all. So I did. And I slept.

The next day was just as long as the first, and the third just as long as the second, but I think each one was pretty much a little bit better than the last. That trend seems to hold true as things continue. And I think now I have realized that I have (more or less) made it.

Stay tuned for day 2 (or maybe week 1, or something) and thanks for the birthday wishes, y’all.

: )

Sanming City, Fujian Province, China from the top of Qilinshan

Behold, the city of Sanming! This picture was taken from the pagoda on top of Qilinshan, or “Unicorn” Mountain (although it’s not really a unicorn….it’s a Chinese creature that doesn’t really resemble the western unicorn).

Note the vast amounts of smoke rising from the center-right and floating downwind through the valley. That smoke is headed toward the direction of the university where I am staying, and is the reason why it is almost never not cloudy here. Yeah. Constant “fog”. It also gets “dusty” (to the point that wiping your hand across the table renders a blackened palm) in about three days, which means I am constantly trying to clean surfaces.

It is pretty, though.

When I flew to China, the first Chinese person that I actually spoke to was, of course, in America. He was waiting with me in the check-in line, in the JFK Airport.

The flight from New York to Shanghai was, understandably, populated mostly by Chinese people (there were a few Westerners, but I could count them on one hand). This guy was standing in line in front of me with his wife. I heard him say, “He has a nice backpack; that’s a very special backpack,” and realized he was talking about me (I was wearing a big North Face overnight pack that was not particularly special but was out of place among the travel gear of everybody else).

So, I said hello and we talked for a minute. I told him that I was going to Fujian Province.

“Oh, they speak a lot of crazy dialects there,” he said. “I do not understand those people.”

In my bags, I had two books on Chinese and three audiobooks on learning Chinese (Mandarin). One of the things I wanted to do while in China was/is learn Chinese. So that was not terrific news for me.

Since then, I have come to realize that he was right, but not totally (it is possible to understand people here in Fujian, because they do speak Mandarin, if with a very heavy southern accent), and also in more ways than he intended (it’s not just that people in Fujian don’t speak standard Mandarin, but that a good chunk of Chinese people in general do not seem to speak standard Mandarin).

Which all leads to the title of this post, which is, there is no Chinese.

Officially, I guess, that statement is incorrect. Mandarin is the official language of China and is what is primarily spoken in Beijing, apparently. So people from the northern/Beijing area tend to speak fairly standard Mandarin. But go elsewhere in the country and you could come across any number of dialects, heavy accents (like way more prohibitive than just a southern v. northeastern accent in the U.S.), and sometimes just flat out different languages, which is what some of the dialects are (different languages).

Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are two major dialects/languages in China. Mandarin is the standard language spoken here in the university. So classes are taught in Mandarin (or the case of my classes, English). But all of the students speak their own local dialects.

Some students explained this to me over lunch a week ago. There were about five of them eating with me, and they told me that among them they spoke two different local dialects. One was called Min Nan Yu (Fujian Southern Language) and the other one I didn’t catch the name of. These were just two dialects of Fujian. There are others. The students speak these languages among each other in their dorms, and often can’t understand the students from two doors down, because they have a different local dialect. These students are all from Fujian. Fujian is just one relatively small province in a much, much bigger country. See the image below — Fujian is the red blotch in the SEern section of China.

Fujian, China - Thanks to Wikipedia

Yeah. So if there are multiple dialects spoken in that small red spot, how many languages do you think are spoken throughout China? Lots. I haven’t found an exact number in any reliable source, but apparently there are about 7-ish dialect groups in China, including Mandarin and Cantonese, and any number of permutations of those dialects.

Which means that even if a person knew Mandarin and Cantonese, there is a good chance that in parts of China he/she still wouldn’t be able to communicate with people.

Thankfully, most of my students primarily speak Mandarin and English around me, so I can communicate with them now in English, and there is a distant, snowball-in-hell chance that one day I will be able to understand what they are saying in Mandarin.

But, the catch is, I can’t really learn Mandarin from them. Because…they all have heavy southern accents, and their Mandarin is influenced by their local dialects. Which means that they all say words differently, some correctly, some incorrectly.

The word “water” is a good example. In Mandarin, water is shuǐ (pronounced like “shway”). But some students pronounce it like “sway”, which is incorrect (accented), but which they would correct me on if I tried to learn “water” from them and pronounced it “shway” (which is correct). I ran into this problem over and over again my first two weeks here, before I started taking lessons. I would learn a word one way, and the next day, a different group of students would teach me the same word, pronounced differently.

And that is only one tiny pronounciation difference…the students, because of their accents/dialects, also pronounce their r’s as zh’s and l’s differently, and there are other differences…

On top of all that (all the speaking differences), it turned out that the Chinese writing book that I brought with me to Chinese is also useless. Mainland China now uses a simplified form of Chinese characters for writing, while Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Chinatowns in America, use an older and more complex version of Chinese writing. So, I might as well line hamster cages with the writing book I got in the U.S.

All of this is to say that I am really glad I am taking Chinese lessons now, because learning Chinese from random students in Fujian, it turns out, is close to impossible.

I have them for 4 hours a week, and each lesson is a small disaster, because I really can’t pronounce the words, but I think I might be learning something. That’s good enough for now.

Naptime. Peace out.