Having Fun All The Time

This post is about to go all over the place.

When I came back from Hong Kong, I got to spend a few days in the hometown of a very generous colleague of mine, hanging out with his extended family members as they celebrated the Chinese New Year (“CNY”).

Chinese New Year is by far the biggest holiday in China. It’s evquivalent to Christmas in the U.S., except maybe even bigger, because hundreds of millions of Chinese all over the country tend to go back to their hometowns for at least a week or two to be with family. (I think in the U.S. we treat Christmas as a big deal, but most of us don’t necessarily always go back to our hometowns.)

One of the things I enjoyed the most about spending CNY with a big Chinese family was just hanging out with lots of people in their homes, while they talked and laughed with each other, ate food, encouraged each other to drink a lot of wine, and played games with the kids in the family and otherwise let everybody lounge around and spend time together. My Chinese isn’t good enough to really converse with people yet, so I spent a lot of the time smiling and nodding and not saying much; but it was still refreshing to feel a little bit of that family “vibe”.

One of the characteristic things about the winter here is that people tend not to use indoor heating in southern China, even though the temperature can drop low enough so that it can feel really cold inside (like around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). So people tend to spend time at home in fuzzy slippers, with long underwear and robes and sweatshirts on. Basically the most casual of casual attire. And they dress thusly even when they are having the whole family over for the afternoon/evening to celebrate, so as I was hanging out with people for CNY, folks were often in big comfy robes and hoodies and fuzzy slippers and etc. Which meant that I could dress however I wanted (those of you who know me well know this means mismatched flannel shirts + hideous Cosby sweaters + a hideous cardigan of some kind). Almost as if I were hanging out in my own slovenly apartment, except I wore jeans to their house and not pajama bottoms.

I mean, I did go to an environmental liberal arts college in Vermont where wearing pajama bottoms to class was the norm, but there are some standards of dress that I could never let go of (I always found it slightly repellant when other people wore pajamas to class in college, especially when those people were comfortable scratching, rubbing, leaving the crack exposed or any other combination of activities that should be limited strictly to private quarters).

Anyway, for some reason the winter dress style in China doesn’t bother me like it did in Vermont. Probably because although people do occasionally wear long underwear-type pajamas in public, they A.) generally put pants over their long underwear when they go outside, and B.) actually don’t use wasteful indoor heating when it is 50 degrees outside and when just wearing more layers would suffice, which I think probably saves a lot of money for them and a lot of fossil fuels for the rest of the world. I still actually haven’t found a pair of long underwear that fit me, and now the weather has gotten warm enough again where I won’t need them, but here in China, it all makes sense.

And I recently learned the Chinese word for long/thermal underwear. The literal translation is, apparently, “autumn clothes”, which seems appropriate. We don’t really have such a set word for this style in American English, as far as I know, but apparently the Aussies have a great combo of set phrases to describe someone who is dressed all pajama-y and thermal-grungy in public.

The term Australians use for those ugly, underwear-like pants is: “tracky dacks”. This word comes from the word “track pants” but appears to be sufficient to refer to any kind of hideous, not-for-public-eyes lower-body wear.

And another word Australians apparently can use for someone who looks like they have totally let themselves go and is just wearing tracky dacks in public, or in private, appears to be: “daggy”.

As in, I’ve just been at home all weekend hanging out in daggy tracky dacks and I haven’t shaved or taken a shower and I’ve been drinking milk from the carton and eating Flav-R-Ice and Ramen and watching episode after episode of the Wire.

Also, check out the Urban Dictionary’s explanation of “daggy”:

Australia (and New Zealand) are sheep-farming countries and our populations are familiar with many of the aspects of farming livestock. a “dag” or “dags” is the colloquial term for the dung which collects and mats into the fleece immediately surrounding a sheep’s anus; it hangs in dried-out dangling clumps which make a sound when the sheep runs, hence the phrase “rattle your dags”.

There’s a great example of various uses of these words at this blog, too: http://gailkav.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/daggy-tracky-dacks/

Ricky, at center, is the king of Track Pants

I have thought track pants were a worthy form of ironic attire since I first saw the show “Trailer Park Boys”, in which one of the main characters is always decked out in track pants, an ugly houndstooth shirt and a gold chain. He is definitely one of the most stupid characters I’ve ever seen depicted onscreen and I think that’s why I like him so much. Lots of people hate “Trailer Park Boys” because the comedy strikes them as obvious and transparent, but I always enjoyed it.

I told you this post was going to go all over the place. Since I got back to Sanming I have been sitting at home reading, writing, and studying Chinese. This lifestyle may lead to somewhat fragmentary thinking. But, classes begin again in less than a week so I will probably have more interesting things to write about then.

: )

Hong Kong is a very Western city dropped in the middle of Asia: When I arrived there by subway I had the reverse sensation from what someone coming directly from the West might feel: it seemed totally familiar to me, way more like home than mainland China.

I just returned from 10 days in Hong Kong. I initially went there because my tourist visa ran out and it wasn’t possible for me to remain in China without going to Hong Kong (“HK”) to switch to a working visa. But, my employer (a university in Fujian Province) hadn’t finished securing a proper working license for me. So off I went to Hong Kong, to wait for an indeterminate amount of time for the school to finish securing the working license and then mail it to me. I left mainland China on Feb. 3 and returned to my home on the 17th, so in all the trip was about two weeks long.

The view from the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, next to the tram that goes to the top of Victoria Peak. The tall building at center is called IFC2.

One of the first sights I saw was this one. The Bank of China building lets you go to the 43rd floor viewing deck for free, which is not spectacular but I would say worth it, especially if it’s foggy and you’re not sure there will be much of a view from Victoria Peak (which was the case for me), which is the mountain next to HK that you can take a fairly expensive tram up to see the whole city.

I met some cool German folks and went to the Bank of China building with them. This is them.

And onto the next thing…

A gracious CouchSurfing host took me on a walk through the Night Market.

And then…

I'm not sure she wanted me to take her picture, but I took this one anyway. : ) I would highly recommend CouchSurfing to anyone even considering traveling, because it's awesome.

And then…

We crossed the harbor from Kowloon (the touristy peninsula north of HK that is still part of HK) to Hong Kong Island on the Star Ferry. The Ferry is quick, cheap, and nicer than the subway.

To have a beer and some tobacco…

On a pedestrian bridge on the way to the bar we saw a lot of these "No Hawking" signs, which were an amusing rebuke to the habits of mainlanders. As my host informed me, Hong Kongers take pride in being "different" from mainlanders. These signs were amusing evidence of that.

And to the hookah bar…

This tiny bar with outdoor seating was located right next to Lan Kwai Fong, in Central on Hong Kong Island, right down the road from a little Japanese barbecue shop. Highly recommended.

Hanging out, drinking beers and smoking hookah was one of the big highlights of the trip. That is something I could never do in Fujian Province. The tobacco was 150 HKD, which is roughly 140 RMB (Chinese money) or about $22 US, which, if you’re on a mainland China budget, is a lot of money (especially with $50HKD beers added in). In all, including travel expenses, visa costs, eating and hotel, I spent about 8000 RMB on my two-week foray to Hong Kong, or a bit over $1000 U.S. dollars. Considering that I make 4000 RMB per month in the mainland, somewhere around $500, every time I opened my wallet in Hong Kong, I cringed.

Hong Kong features what is apprently the "world's largest permanent light show", called the Symphony of Light, which shows right next to the ferry stop on the Kowloon side of the harbor every night at 8 p.m. Pretty, even if the music is weak.

Another reason to do CouchSurfing: the natives can tell you what to do in the area. My first host suggested this light show, which was a fun free thing to do that I checked out the next day after we hung out.

An alley just north of the "SoHo" (south of Hollywood Rd) area

The hostel I stayed in for my 9 nights in Hong Kong, in Kowloon (in the ChungKing mansions) was definitely, without doubt, the cheapest in HK (I had a private single room for 180 HKD, or about $25 USD, per night), but food in the area was no good, it was loud and Kowloon is generally not a fun place to hang out. So I spent a lot of time on Hong Kong Island around the “SoHo” area, which has a lot more charm and more eating options.

These guys were using a badminton-shuttlecock-like object to play hackey sack, and they almost never dropped it. I thought it was cool so I just snapped some photos.

Another…

Closest-up of the object as I could get

And then…

There's a temple in Central Hong Kong Island called the Man Mo Temple.

Incense…

These large burning incense coils filled the air with smoke such that it quickly became difficult to breathe or see. So I soon left, coughing and wiping my eyes.

And then…

Back to Kowloon each evening to go to bed. The hostel where I was staying, the ChungKing Mansions, featured a loud and chaotic Indian market on the ground floor, with lots of guys hawking all kinds of goods. Coming home late in the evening was a little sketchy only because the goods they were hawking became increasingly illicit as the hour got later.

Note the cool red Hong Kong taxis in the previous photo…

A shot from the Star Ferry Terminal, Kowloon side I think. The Star Ferry is great, cheap, and makes the outlying islands really easily accessible. And it runs frequently.

And then…

On my second-to-last day in Hong Kong I took the ferry to Lamma Island, which is a small, more relaxed and much cheaper island right next to Hong Kong Island.

The ferry was easy and cheap and took about 40 minutes to Lamma Island. And as soon as I arrived there I realized I should have gone much earlier in my Hong Kong trip (considering how long I was there and how I spent a lot of time just relaxing and trying to minimize expenses)…

Lamma was relaxed, comfortable, friendly, and cheap. And on the day I went it finally became sunny and warm in Hong Kong, which was a good feeling.

After getting off the ferry I met a guy from Switzerland who had just got his bachelor’s degree in medicine and was taking a year off to travel before going to medical school. He had been to Japan, Korea and Thailand, and was spending a few more days in HK before going to mainland China. He helped me find the beach and then we parted ways, I think both feeling a little awkward because we were both traveling solo and not totally accustomed to talking a lot. I kept meeting people like that in Hong Kong, travelers anyway, many of whom had been all over Asia or were starting out to go all over Asia.

A beach in Lamma. I didn't swim, but the water was nice enough to.

After sitting on the beach and reading the latest New Yorker (another commodity I’m not afforded in the mainland) I decided I had enough time to walk the mile or so across Lamma Island to the small mainland-style town on the other end of the island (the town was Sok Kwu Wan, and was nowhere near as cool as the town I landed in, to the north, Yung Shue Wan)…

...and I snapped this picture on the hike, which was fun and worth it...the town in the background is Sok Kwu Wan.

And that was my trip to Hong Kong. There were other things I saw that I photographed with my disposable film camera, such as the Big Buddha (cool, but if you go, take the tram; the rattly, nauseating bus ride is rough) and the tram to the top of Victoria Peak (it was too foggy to see anything). And there was the night on the town I spent with some Italian friends I met on CouchSurfing.com; that night and meeting up with the other person from CouchSurfing were the best parts of the whole trip. There’s nothing like meeting people from a foreign land. But after my day in Lamma, I picked up my visa from the travel agency and was good to go back to the mainland. So I said so-long to ample Starbucks everywhere, Western food choices and ubiquitous English speakers, and took the Hong Kong MTA back up to Lo Wu, where you can simply walk through Chinese customs within the Shenzhen train terminal (which is attached to the Lu Wo MTA station).

Of course, the day I returned to mainland China to travel back to Fujian was the eve of the Chinese New Year, which is the most hellacious time possible to be traveling in China. So all train tickets for days were totally sold out. Instead, I had to settled for a late-night sleeper bus back to a major city in Fujian, from where I would have to figure out another way to get the rest of the way to my home city, Sanming (this ultimately involved lots of waiting in the rain, waiting in the 24-hour McDonald’s, waiting in the hotel, riding another bus to another city that was not Sanming, and then getting picked up by a very gracious colleage from the college).

To get to the sleeper bus, I had to endure a very sketchy 15-minute ride in the back of a van, scrunched up in the trunk area with the luggage, not sure where we were heading because I had only understood a little of the Chinese the driver said to me. But we made it to the bus, and there was indeed a sleeper bed there for me.

The tiny bunk beds on the bus to Fujian from Shenzhen...back in the mainland. : )

And, last, the grainy shot of me in my sleeper bunk. The bus was definitely tolerable and fine for the 10-hour trip back to Fujian…I think I slept for a few hours.

Grainy shot, sleeper bus, around 9 p.m. Cost of trip from Shenzhen to Xiamen, Fujian: 305 RMB, or about $45 US Dollars. Good night and good luck.

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. 

: )