Having Fun All The Time

There are certain comments/observations that I always took literally when I first came to China because I wasn’t used to hearing them and I didn’t know why the person was asking me them. For example:

• Are you tired? Do you want to have a rest?

My response to this question last year was always, “No, I don’t think so…why? Do I look tired? I don’t feel tired. Well, maybe I’m a little tired. I wonder if I’m talking too slowly or something…everyone’s always asking me if I want to have a rest….BUT I’M NOT TIRED SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME!!?”

After about six months in-country, though, I stopped having this internal monologue whenever somebody asked me this question, because I realized they asked it because:

1. People actually take 1-hour naps after lunch here, way, way more commonly than in the U.S., especially at college campuses…classes stop for a few hours so that the teachers and students can ALL go to their rooms and sleep
2. Students are nervous to talk to me and don’t know what the hell else to say

A year ago, I wondered what was wrong with me whenever somebody asked me if I wanted to have a rest. No I just decide if I’m tired or not and say “yes” or “no”. Way easier.

• You don’t like to eat very much. You’ve eaten so little.

This one also used to confuse the shit out of me. Usually at lunch/dinner I eat way more than everybody else. I take like three vegetable servings and two meat servings and an egg or a chicken leg and a bowl of rice and soup and pig out, and everybody else takes like one fucking piece of cucumber and a bowl of soup and two pounds of rice. So I used to always think…wait a minute, I just ate a ton of meat and veggies, and this person ate like nothing but rice, why are they telling me I only ate a little, WTF?

And then I realized, again, somewhere after month six-ish, that Chinese people look at eating completely differently from (warning: a few sweeping generalizations are to follow) us foreigners. Essentially, and I don’t think this is an exaggeration, Chinese people, at least here in my area, look at a tray of food and measure the amount of rice on it. And that’s the quantity of food eaten. Foreigners people (I guess meaning westerners in general but maybe just Americans), of course, look at veggies and meats as the food consumed. So when Chinese people look at my tray and see that I at like a normal westerner-person portion of rice, they don’t even see all the veggies and meats I ate. It doesn’t register. So they think I am a starving child, and I look at their meal which basically consisted of white rice and think they are a starving child, and everybody ends up saying, “What is wrong with you? You only ate a little (rice/meat), you are going to die on that diet YOU NEED TO EAT MORE WTF”

• My life is not very interesting. I’m not very good at English.

This one is just about the necessity of modesty. Even if a student or person is super interesting or really good at English, he/she is unlikely to admit it, even after intense questioning. At this point if someone is really modest about something after I’ve given them a compliment, I just let it go and know that they heard the compliment, even if they can never verbally agree.

• Have you eaten?

This one is basic Chinese stuff. If someone asks this, they’re not asking you to eat with them. They’re just being polite. Just like the meaningless English greeting, “how are you?” to which we all reply “good”.

The moral of this story, for me, has been in realizing that a lot of the time, especially here but also in normal life back home, there’s a lot of information I don’t know, a lot of reasons for the stuff that happens on a day to day basis. So there’s no point getting worked up about stuff that may or may not have meaning. No use interpreting things internally unless you’re sure they’re really an issue.

For example, when I ride the bus here, if someone’s sitting next to me, and then a free seat opens somewhere else, they will frequently go sit there. A year ago this made me feel terrible, and I internally assumed it was because they didn’t want to sit next to the laowai. But after a while I realized that it is far more likely that they just see that I am super tall and can’t fit in any seat on the bus and need extra space. I don’t know why/how I realized that, but I did, and for some reason I’m pretty sure it’s true (mostly because I don’t think people really mind sitting next to me…just as many times people have been super happy to sit next to me here).

Likewise, I used to be really bothered by people shouting “hello!” at me all over the place. I used to find it annoying and slightly mocking. But now I’ve actually talked to some of those people, and realized that they just really want to interact but are way too shy to just come up and talk to me. One group of kids who shouted at me like that are now my private students — paying me to teach them English. I just had to break through that barrier of shyness and realized that there was a lot of curiousity and desire to learn about my culture/language behind that somewhat intimidating, shouted greeting.

So there are definitely good things about life in China year 2. Mainly that everything gets easier and makes a hell of a lot more sense (however note the post from a couple weeks ago where I explained that nothing makes sense in China).

As anybody who has taught English in China for a while knows, there’s a special kind of English spoken here, which has garnered its own term in Chinese and in English. That is Chinglish, or, in Chinese, Zhong1Shi4Ying1Yu3.

What that essentially means is that because students in China largely learn English in a “vacuum”, i.e. without interacting with foreigners, there are certain funny, weird, incorrect or only partly incorrect phrases that pop up a lot.

One of the first ones you hear on coming to China is, of course, “My English is not very well”, which is usually accompanied by a second of squinting and intense thought as the speaker tries to decide if she should say “well” or “good”.

There are others, and I have learned over time that it’s pretty useful in classes to directly explain the Chinese phrase I’m correcting, and then explain how to say it in English. The reality is that most students, when they speak English, will be directly translating from Chinese to English in their heads as they do so; they will not use the most natural or high-frequency English phrase. So it’s more effective teaching to “back in” to teaching oral English here sometimes — that is, start with the extremely common Chinese phrase you know they will one day translate incorrectly in conversation, and explain how to say it right.

For example, the Chinese phrase wo3you3shi4. I have something to do. That is how most students translate wo3you3shi4 (which literally means “I have an event”, but is the Chinese equivalent of “I have a previous commitment” or “something came up that I’ve got to take care of”. Students often say, “sorry, I can’t come to class because I have something to do.” Isn’t my class “something to do?” I have occasionally replied in jest. Confusion. Nobody gets the joke. It’s best just to teach the language and avoid subtle mockery.

Is it delicious? This is the question students ask when they want to know if something (you’re eating) is good or not. Someone, at some point, decided that it would be a good idea to translate the Chinese phrase “hao3chi1″, meaning, literally, “good eat”, into the word “delicious”, when in fact in spoken English we just say “good”, or “tasty”, as in, “how’s your food?” –”it’s good”

I want to play with you. This has been uttered to me by more than one student, and when I first heard it I thought I had somehow stumbled into some kind of twisted seventies softcore skin movie. You want to play with me? What? Unfortunately Chinese students never learn the correct translation of the word “wan2″, which actually means “hang out” or “do something together” but is tragically translated in English textbooks as “play”. So Chinese college students are always “playing” together in English, when they should be hanging out.

It is very fashion. This statement is the result of the words fashion and fashionable being one and the same in Chinese. And since clothes is a topic often mentioned in textbooks and lessons, the mistake pops up with annoying frequency. Yet another weird Chinglish phrase that is hard to kill.

Can you borrow me your book? Again, the result of the words lend and borrow being the same in Chinese, hence the common error.

Of course, just as there are crappy ways of translating Chinese into English, there are awkward and ugly ways of translating English into Chinese, and I utter them every day. So this isn’t a mockery or a critique of Chinese learners of English, just a short list of things that their teachers should correct them on. I’ve devoted a lesson to these four phrases for all of my classes, and the result is always nice. Just learning how to say these five things correctly goes a long way in making their English sound more authentic.

Teaching them how to correctly use the slang word “sucks” really helps, too. As in, I suck at basketball, my shoes are sucky, he is a sucky guy. Telling the students that suck means, po4, jiu4, mei2yi4si5, bu4hao3, lan4, wu2,liao2, all in one word tends to help them grasp it, I find.

Because having authentic English speakers in the classroom makes your ears feel better, and makes your students a little more fun to be around.

Sit down at the piano. Notice the keys spread out before you, black and interstices of white. If you don’t know how to play piano, you see a meaning that is hidden by foreignness. Your eyes discern nothing among the keys; but your hands long to reach out to them, to coax some melody from the percussive depths of the instrument before you as easily as you hear it in your mind. You long infinitely for that talent, for that mysterious ability which you know will in all likelihood forever remain hidden from you.

And that gap between you and the person who can sit down, who you see sit down before the piano and place her hands on it, depress one key and then another, open a river of metered sounds, harmonic, rhythmic layers of fifths and half-steps without any evident thought or effort or hesitation, you wonder privately what is the difference between that person and you.

Now you are the piano player. Someone you know sits down at your piano and reaches out tentatively to the keys that are so familiar to you. She presses one key timidly, and then another, and familiar sounds rise to you, and you hear the song that you once played, the one with no chorus, no tempo, no tune at all; the lost song of the hands that long to play but cannot, the hands that are strange to the piano. This person is close to you, knows you, but in this way she does not. And in this way the person in you who knows her does not know the person in you who can sit before the piano and play beautiful music. They are not the same. They cannot be the same. They cannot even know each other.

Why did you sit at the piano all those hours, practicing? What did you want to learn? What did you want to see or experience that you could not experience any other way, except to do this, to become a stranger, in some way, to yourself? Why else would you have sat there for so long, bent in sweet labor over the worn keys, sometimes playing sweet music and yet sometimes only practicing, producing sounds so that your hands would know, so that your hands and some deep part of your mind would understand where to go, so that they would forget that person who was a stranger to the keys, so that person would in fact disappear, so that even if you never played the piano again after this day you would always look at the keys and know, that part of you would always remain.

Why else did you bend over the keys and play alone for all those days and years, except to lose yourself, to become unknown, to change and become a stranger to your former life, so that life could be clearer, could be more easily understood, could be new, in some way? And who is that person who sits down before the piano and looks strangely at it, and produces the music of someone who doesn’t understand, who is only groping in the dark for a song that she can hear in her mind but never bring into the world? What does she see and what does she feel when she looks at the keys before her?

After I had resided in this small Chinese city for about eight months, someone kindly informed me that Sanming residents have a cute little saying about themselves. That is that they all consume, on average, about one brick a year.

This is a reference to the sun-blotting-out pollution that is the signature not just of large Chinese cities but of everywhere in China, with almost no exceptions that I have seen so far — big cities, pretty mountainscapes, small villages that may be located near enormous coal mines, etc. Pollution here is a constant of life, like sunshine and rain.

In Sanming, my city, it most prominently noticeable in the whitish haze that invariably reduces visibility not in any very obtrusive way, but just enough so that when you go hiking you can never really see much of the horizon, and when you go to the mountains with friends you never (or seldom) see a truly blue sky. It’s usually more that grayish overcast color that I associate with the depth of a New England winter, sometimes with a dome of bluish-gray at the ceiling of the sky.

Then also sometimes there is the stink, especially the further west you go in the city. The west side of town is officially the pollution side — that’s where the brownish striations of coal dust and carbon decorate the buildings most noticably, the place where many buildings’ residents seem to have given up on trying to keep the windows clean, and just let the dust and ash collect and collect until everything has this sort of choked, blackened mask.

It’s sort of a strange kind of beauty, if you have the right eye for it or are in a mood to overlook it. If you don’t or you’re not, it just looks dirty, or maybe more accurately just polluted, since dirt is everywhere but pollution is something that we can more easily quantify and identify.

And then it’s in the streets some days, in the coal smell that descends over the city, the sooty cloud that billows its way from the smokestacks at the steel mill (the biggest in the province!) or the burning trash heaps or any of the other numerous pollution sources here.

At first these details, the dirt, the pollution, were overwhelmingly depressing for me, but over time I have gotten used to them, grown accustomed to the sight of coal-streaked buildings (almost all of them look this way, which is why when I first arrived in Sanming I pointed to a cluster of buildings on the horizon and asked my liaison, Are those buildings burned?), and the loud, chaotic, playfully and rambunctiously and unpredictably polluted streets.

It’s part of life here and I can’t say I like it or hate it. It just is, as I wrote somewhere else in some failed fiction no one will ever read, like the high of one’s ears or the length of one’s nose or the color of one’s skin.

The clock just passed midnight which means as of today I’ve consumed a complete Sanming brick. Happy China birthday.

I went to Fuzhou this weekend and wanted to share an interesting experience I had going to Starbucks.

We don’t have a Starbucks in my city, and there are few in this province, so whenever I get a chance to go to one I take it. It’s like fucking Christmas every time I go. Suddenly I step from the loud chaotic uncomfortable unfamiliar world of China into an environment that totally sates every base craving I could have as an American: the corporate decor and smooth featureless music and padded overpriced comfort that is Starbucks.

The interesting thing about this trip was that my companion, a Japanese girl who teaches Japanese history in Fuzhou and whose name is Mami, does not speak English and so would have to order in Chinese. And of course I speak English and Chinese but not Japanese. And the tellers at Starbucks usually speak pretty good English and of course Chinese. And whenever I go to Starbucks I order in English because I don’t know the words for “grande black coffee, no room, with a ham and cheese panini” in Chinese (well, I don’t know grande or panini). So I took the lead and tried to order for Mami.

The problem is that when I’m with Mami it confuses everyone, because nobody knows until she starts speaking that she isn’t in fact Chinese. So Chinese people always look at me, scan over my face, and then start speaking in rapid-fire Chinese to Mami.

The only problem is, Mami’s Chinese isn’t as good as mine. So she often doesn’t understand and just nods her head, and then I have to step in and actually answer their question. But I’ve found that people usually still persist in trying to talk to Mami, not me…I’m not sure why; I think they realize pretty fast that she’s not Chinese. Maybe they figure that if this Asian-looking foreigner doesn’t understand them, there’s no way in hell the white guy standing next to her does.

Anyway, on this particular occasion I was in line with Mami and tried to order in English, but the Starbucks girl didn’t understand, so I ordered in Chinese, but there was still confusion. The place was packed. She couldn’t understand what Mami wanted. But she had my order, so I ducked out and ran to the pick-up line. Then Mami stayed there at the order line for like 10 minutes, but I had no idea what she was doing.

It turned out the Starbucks girl spoke Japanese and had lived in Japan for two years, so Mami was chatting with her in Japanese. Finally Mami came back and I started to say in Chinese to her that it seemed like everywhere we went together we confused the hell out of Chinese people, but I couldn’t remember the Chinese word for confused, but Mami happened to know the English word confused, so we stood there wondering out loud what the Chinese word for confused was.

Then a Chinese woman leaned over and told me it was wu4jie3, which actually means something like misunderstand. By this time I had checked my dictionary and found five different words for “confused”. Apparently confusion is an important concept in Chinese since it gets so many different words.

The Chinese woman spoke great English, and after a moment she started talking to Mami in English, asking her a few questions to which Mami responded by nodding and saying yes in English. Of course, Mami didn’t understand what the woman was saying, so when she asked Mami, “are you here in Fuzhou traveling?” and Mami again nodded yes, I said, in Chinese, no, we’re both teachers.

Naturally, the woman never imagined, and I’m not sure she even understood after that point, that Mami and I would be communicating exclusively in Chinese, which is actually true. Why would she? Why the hell would a white guy and a Japanese girl, both of whom have maybe only intermediate Chinese skills, be getting Starbucks together in China and using Chinese to communicate?

The whole thing makes no sense at all, but that’s China. And I surprised myself by actually being surprised when the Starbucks people told me they had run out of covers for their to-go cups. Almost as much as it surprised me the time the people at McDonald’s in Sanming told me they had run out of beef.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense in this country.

I didn’t post much this summer, so here’s a little photo overview of my summer.

I lived in this building for most of the summer in downtown Sanming.

This is the street market where I often bought breakfast...it closed around 8:30 so I often missed breakfast and was hungry in the morning.

I bought a mountain bike and spent a lot of time biking in the mountains around the city. One day I met a high school kid and he led me on an extra long tour around the area

I taught English to a bunch of primary school kids throughout the summer. They turned out to be ingrates and dropped my class as soon as the soon year started. Teaching primary school students turned out to be basically a failed experiment

I went to visit my friend Natasha in Guangzhou, China, about 12 hours away by bus. She's funny funny and great, also teaching English. This is her with a Chinese man in the Catonese Opera restaurant she took me to. The Chinese guy sang some opera song (hence the makeup) and then an old woman said a bunch of stuff to us in some dialect and then gave us 100 RMB and a piece of paper with what turned out to be her name and phone number written on it. Weird.

Guangzhou was a huge, modern city where the cops hassled me for no reason. It had lots of Western stuff including real hot dogs, though, which was nice.

Guangzhou also had a military school that I checked out and that was really boring and hot, and the kids in fatigues creeped me out, until they noticed the only foreigner on the whole island and I waved at them and remembered that they were just kids.

Guangzhou also had some pretty neat back alleyways.

The city is so huge, Natasha and I wandered into one of those alleyways and it was a city unto itself; it seemed to go on forever

Some mailboxes in the alleyway near the opera house.

Near the middle of the summer I developed a big burn-like thing on my arm that I thought was a spider bite. It turned out it was an acid burn from some kind of bug that contains acid in its body...if you kill it on your skin, it slowly burns you. It hurt like a bastard

Toward the end of the summer, some friends and I went on a daytrip to have a barbecue cookout in the mountains nearby

This was a supplement to the steady, perhaps excessive, diet of Chinese barbecue and beer throughout the summer. I don't know why the colors are so washed out in these photos...

Of course, MahJong (or in Chinese...majiang)...is a standard social outlet at all similar outings...but I can never participate because I haven't put in the time to learn yet and I am always a little too drunk to follow the rules by the time people start playing this at picnics and such...oy

The summer ended with a trip to the Fujian coast with a bunch of other foreign teachers working in Fujian. I made some new friends, and we visited a university in the area and met some students who cheered when we came in the room but were, of course, too shy to really actually talk to us

And we took a tour of a nearby river...most of the tour was spent on the bus, though, which sucked

The summer ended with yet another (!!!!) performance of TongNian (childhood), the song I have become slightly famous for knowing how to sing. I got a bit tired of being "informed" that I would sing the song at various events (rather than being asked) and a bit rudely told them that this time would definitely be my last time and asked them to confirm that. But I was fed up and a little rudeness was in order to get my point across

A picture with some of the students from the final performance