Having Fun All The Time

Surprise! They have Walmart in China, too. Although I've only seen this one, in Xiamen, which is one of the wealthier cities in the country. (It looks pretty much like a Walmart inside, too.)

(This is part 3 of a 5-part series.)

Sanming: A journey back home, this time with people from home-home in tow

It had been raining in southern China for about a month, and as we headed towards the Guilin airport it started to rain again. Our flight was delayed again, as had the flight from Shenzhen to Guilin, but took off after only an hour or so delay, and we landed in Xiamen, where I had planned for us to go directly to the train station and catch a sleeper train to Sanming, which would put us in my town around 6 a.m. the next morning (I had first done this with my friend, Natasha, when she visited me from Guangzhou in the spring).

But those plans were ruined when we got to the station and the ticketseller informed me that due to flooding, the train was closed and would not open again for at least a week.

This left me standing in the middle of a train station in China, with four of my family members, and no other English speakers in sight or really friends to speak of in the city, wondering how the hell we were going to get to Sanming with the trains out and wondering where we were going to sleep, exactly.

The issue was not totally easy to resolve, but after about 30 minutes we were at a hotel, we had rooms, and we were planning to go to the bus station in the morning to take a bus to Sanming. There was a bit of a mixup in the middle there – the only hotel address I had in Xiamen turned out to be an unregistered hotel and the cab driver refused to take us there, so I asked him to take us to a different hotel – but it went fairly smoothly and the only bad thing about it was that now we would only have at most several hours in Sanming and we had to sleep on rock-hard beds in Xiamen for a night.

The sun-drenched city of Xiamen from the hotel window (I don't remember the rain stopping during this part of the trip, but it must have temporarily.)

The next morning, the earliest bus we could get was 12:30 p.m., so my uncle and cousin and I cut out of the bus station for an hour or so in search of coffee, food, Internet access, and a bank to exchange money. Along the way we stopped at the famous peanut soup shop on Zhongshan Rd in Xiamen that every Chinese person I have been with in Xiamen has taken me to. The place is interesting – it kind of dirty and is always super crowded and loud and exhausting; it’s not really the kind of place that appeals to me at first. But after you’ve been there a couple of times you notice that it appears to be one of those magical food establishments – a sort of nexus between different classes and breeds of human beings that attracts all types regardless of their status or background. Among the churning masses that shove and squirm to get the sugary-sweet and piping hot peanut soup you find cops, old ladies, young punky Chinese kids, families, women in high heels, fat middle aged guys, everybody. And the place has a kind of ruthless soup-Nazi feel to it; you take a coupon at the register for whatever you want and then give the soup/snack counter your coupon and they give you your volcanically hot food. And then you struggle to find a bench to sit down on among the teeming masses. The place is a headache and a nightmare in a way, but it’s definitely an experience and the people watching is better than maybe anywhere else I’ve seen in Fujian.

Eventually we returned to the bus station and hopped on the bus back to Sanming. When we all first got on the bus it was like an oven inside – literally, it was probably 130 degrees Fahrenheit or more. It had been sitting with the engine off in the scorching southern China sunshine for hours and they had allowed us to board without starting the air conditioning. So immediately everybody dumped off the bus and let it cool off inside, and then we reboarded again.

The Fujian landscape as viewed from the bus on the way to Sanming

Chinese buses are actually fairly comfortable and I think my whole group was pleasantly surprised at first. The long distance buses, as far as I have encountered, are not the hard-backed bench seating arrangements you’re likely to see in a movie about China. They’re basically Greyhounds, except maybe a tad dirtier and smellier and with A/C that may not function as well. So the 4.5 hour trip from Xiamen to Sanming was uneventful and, around 5:30, we pulled into our hotel in Sanming.

The hotel itself was unfortunately quite bad (a friend helped me book it and I made the mistake of trusting him completely without checking out the hotel for myself – I have seen way nicer hotels in Sanming), but the dean of my department at the college had booked a dining room for us in the hotel, and prepared the most elaborate, expensive and delicious Chinese meal I have ever seen or eaten. Pretty much all the teachers from our department attended, which meant that there were about 15 of us including my family at table. The meal was fish, expensive snails that I had never seen before, jellyfish, several pork and beef dishes, several vegetable dishes, a few soups, crab, prawns, and several other traditional Chinese dishes that I have since forgotten. It was amazing, and I have no idea how much it cost, but it must have been at least 1200 RMB (somewhere around $200). Which is like spending over $1,000 on a meal in the U.S. – it’s a serious all-out eating fest. And, of course, there was lots of drinking, and for some reason the dean especially took a liking to my uncle, who explained a bit about California and San Francisco and some other things about the U.S.

After dinner it was time for the event that later my uncle said was the most meaningful part of the trip for him, to which everyone seemed to agree – that was meeting my students. It was after 9 p.m. when we finally made it to my teaching building, and I knew that the students had been waiting for around an hour at least, and I and my family members were still a little intoxicated from the drinking at dinner. But when we arrived in the classroom we got the usual explosive, more-or-less screams-of-delight greeting from the group of 50 students and then my dad and mom and uncle and cousin mingled with the students for about an hour. At the beginning I just introduced my family members to the class and explained that I hoped the students practiced their English; and they could say anything they wanted except “My English is very poor”. So they mingled and talked and I think my family was just as amazed, if not more so, by the experience.

The thing is, and really I’m just parroting my uncle here, that the students come across as so enthusiastic here in this part of the country (especially in a place as rural as this, where the students perhaps didn’t even expect to get to go to college, much less have experiences learning from/with foreigners) that it is impossible not to compare them in your mind to the cynical, bored, uninterested students in wealthy cities in the U.S. – or even relatively wealthy cities in China, for that matter. My friend Natasha had the same reaction when she came to Sanming from Guangzhou – her students were all spoiled city kids and she spent most of her time trying to keep them from misbehaving, whereas with my students I don’t even have a shadow of a problem like that. The students are so well behaved and so hard working it is a little scary. And they are so enthusiastic about everything I bring to the classroom that it is hard for me not to become completely spoiled by them.

The exhausted family arrives in Sanming -- but barely gets to see it in the daylight

So my family met the students, and after about an hour I finally decided that it was time to head back to the hotel when I noticed that my father, soaked in sweat, had begun distributing hugs to very happy students. I’m sure the students were happy to get hugs, but we were all tired and extremely hot, white family and Chinese students alike – the students were just as soaked in sweat as the rest of us – and it was time to go.

As we left I realized that I had left the keys to my apartment back at the hotel, which was a 40 minute cab ride away, and that I still had to get our World Expo tickets and some fresh clothes out of my apartment. So we went back to town, I left my family in the hotel and then headed back out to return to the school. I made the cab ride back and opened my apartment door and again it looked a bit unfamiliar after just six days away – that feeling of having left this somewhat shabby world and gone into a much cleaner, brighter one temporarily – and then I grabbed my things and left.

A typical Chinese town as viewed from the van on the way to Fuzhou.

This morning was cooking western food day in my classes; it was the last full-class meeting for both of my 50-student classes, so earlier this week I went to the second-biggest city in the province, Xiamen, to buy some taco shells and hot sauce and cheese and to do some sightseeing, and then I came back two nights ago with a long list of things to do (prepare for family to arrive in China, finish final exams, rehearse for yet another singing performance, find students for the English class I want to teach this summer, and make tacos with 100 students).

Yesterday I ran around all day doing these various tasks, and as I was about to go out shopping for tomatoes and chicken for the tacos one of my students reminded me that she had invited me to go out to a big fish dinner that night with some of the other teachers from our department.

So I wrote out a list for some other students to go shopping and gave them some cash and went out with the teachers to a big meal of steaming bowls of fish soup and lots of beer.

I could tell right away, as soon as we started eating, that the students were planning on getting me unconscionably drunk. The restaurant was one of the small classic gritty ones with peeling gold paisly-textured wallpaper and a cigarette-smoke-stained ceiling, chairs that wobbled when you moved and a big round table with a sort-of lazy Susan glass platform in the center. Immediately one of the tougher female students (these were the students from my adult training class, all about 28-40 years old) started toasting me and making me down shots of beer. In the first 20 minutes I probably drank the equivalent of four beers. Needless to say, by the time midnight rolled around and we called a cab to return back to school, I could hardly keep my eyes open and my Chinese had become completely incomprehensible.

I came back to the school with three other students, seated in the cab with 20 pounds of chicken, 30 pounds of tomatoes, a hot plate-like cooker and pots and pans and stuff in bags and boxes on our laps. All of us pretty much drunk (I must say that I do not particularly enjoy these overdrinking experiences, but they seem for the most part harmless and certainly make the dining experiences lively). Our class started at 8 a.m. the next morning, and I still wasn’t clear how we were going to cook the chicken and prepare everything.

Of course, when I woke up in the morning at 6 o’clock, none of those things had become more clear. Also it was dumping down rain outside, and my apartment is a 10 minute walk from the teaching building. And I had to carry a big cardboard box of food and a big electric cooker to the classroom.

So I showered and carried the box of stuff there, and then waited for the first few students to arrive. They brought the chicken and explained that they could chop it up into small pieces, ala the classes Chinese dish gong bao ji ding (cubed deep-fried chicken), and then fry it with the chili powder I had brought. That sounded like a good idea, so I told them they could start and then headed back for my cooker.

But, in my still-dazed state, I forgot my keys when I left the classroom, so I walked all the way back to my apartment in the rain, hiding under my umbrella but still getting soaked in the downpour, and then when I got to my apartment realized I had no keys and decided that the only option was to kick in my door, Jean Claude Van Dame-style.

At first this idea seemed stupid, but after a couple of hard kicks I realized it was fun, and on my third kick I had it. I kicked the hell out of the door and the lock broke off the door frame and the door flew open. I grabbed the cooker and dashed back out into the rain, then dropped the cooker in the rain as I tried to open my umbrella, then got it all organized finally and got to class.

So by now I am completely soaked, hungover, tired, and still have to figure out how to make some kind of sort-of western food with my classes.

But here is where my fawning ode the the efficiency and organizational skills of my students comes in. By the time I got back to my classroom they had organized the desks into little work stations and were dicing tomatoes and pre-boiling chicken in the first cooker. In about 30 minutes with a bit of instruction the students had prepared a huge bowl of fresh salsa (tomatoes, green chili peppers, diced onion, sugar, lemon juice), and deep fried/stir fried the chicken in little cubes with onion and peppers and chili powder. We cut up some cheese and olives I had bought in Xiamen and I showed them how to put the tacos together.

The students were pretty consistently refering to the salsa as “salad” in Chinese so at this point I basically explained that they should put the deep-fried chicken on the bottom, and the salad on top, and then chow down. I told them they could try some cheese if they wanted, but when they ate the cheese most of them exclaimed “bu hao chi!”, which basically means “tastes bad!” even though it was real cheddar and mozzarella from the U.S. and tasted good to me. So we just ate tacos with Chinese deep-fried chicken and salsa on top, and to me it was decent, if not good (the taco shells were meant to be heated up in an oven, so they were kind of bland and too chewy).

The thing I forgot to consider was that tacos are inevitably messy, and become messier when you are eating stir/deep-fried chicken that is dripping with grease, and become still messier when you have no plates or napkins. So instantly the floor of the small classroom, with 50 students all eating grease-bomb tacos, was coated in oil and tomato and fried chicken.

I should add here that in the couple of weeks leading up to this little cooking event, my students pretty regularly asked me when we were going to cook pizza/hamburgers. They asked me this even after I explained that we were eating neither pizza nor hamburgers, but something called tacos which is a kind of Mexican food. The students, after hearing this explanation, inevitably continued to call our upcoming food either pizza or hamburgers, having no frame of reference to imagine what this taco thing might be. Last night, though, on the way to dinner, I did overhear one student saying to someone else on the phone that it wasn’t pizza, or hamburgers, but something like that.

Up until today I used to find that a little annoying — peoples’ inability to imagine that American food consists of anything other than pizza or hamburgers or fast food. But this morning before class I guess I just understood it a bit better. There is just no way for them to get that it’s not either of those things. It’s like snails: in English we have one word for snails, and that is “snails”. But in Chinese cuisine there are a ton of different kinds of snails, and none of them are called the word “snail”. The word “snail” exists in Chinese, but nobody eats “snails”. Snails live outside and you find them on the ground. The things you eat are not snails. If you say, I ate “snails” (wo1niu2) for lunch today, a Chinese person will look at you with shock and explain that that is impossible, even if you ate snails with them. This is so complicated and abstruse that even I barely understand it. It would be ridiculous to expect that an average American who had never gone to China would know anything about this — likewise with Chinese perceptions of American food.

OK, so we made the tacos, the students were amazing, they cooked and diced and boiled and fried, and I was amazed to find that, even though I heard plenty of “it tastes really bad!” throughout, at the end of both my classes everything was eaten up. In the second class, in particular, probably because it was closer to lunchtime, the students ate all 6-7 pounds of chicken and 6-7 pounds of tomato in less than 10 minutes. And they ate most of the cheese, too.

At noontime when the classes were over it had stopped raining and four of my students helped me carry everything back to my apartment, and on the way one of the training students asked a student from my younger class if she liked the food. My student’s response was, in Chinese, “it was so-so…it’s just that we’re not used to eating it”. This was great — the kind of response I was hoping for. It means not necessarily that the food was bad but that it was different enough from their past experience to actually kind of be Western food. The tacos weren’t good, and the chicken was kind-of Chinese (even though there was no soy sauce in it), but they were Western.

And, as a bonus, when we were near my building, the same student told me, in English, and out-of-the-blue, without my asking anything about the class: “I like the Western style of teaching. I feel that in the Chinese education system our classes are too boring. But in the Western system the teachers do more interesting things, and then the students can learn more outside of class.”

I laughed and asked her if that meant she liked my class.

“Yes, of course,” she said. And then she added: “It’s not like our other classes. In our other classes, we are always preparing for tests. We have too many tests.”

This reminded me of the CET-6, which I blogged about last semester and which she then told me the students would all be taking again tomorrow afternoon. This particular student had failed the CET-6 last semester (along with virtually all the others in the class) and was no doubt facing pressures from all directions to pass it this time.

The students handed my stuff to me when we got to my place, gawking at the smashed door lock and peeking curiously into my place, and then I wished them luck in tomorrow’s tests and they headed off to lunch.

Finally I got a chance to rest a little after last night’s excitement, and actually I opted to write this post. In ten minutes I’m off to give a few spoken English exams and then in the afternoon I’m headed to the city to hand out flyers for this summer’s class and buy World Expo tickets for my family.

I realized that with every month that passes in China I become slightly more poor; my $600 per month salary is just about $100-200 too small to sustain my student loans back home and my perhaps slightly too spendy lifestyle here. So I am taking little bites out of the I saved in Portland before I came out here. So wish me luck with finding students for that summer private English class.

Or some kind of magical falling-from-the-sky kind of luck with fiction writing. My latest and I thought best yet story that I submitted to about 10 journals earlier this year has been rejected from all but 3.  : )   But there are still those 3.

Before I left to go on my visa run to Hong Kong, I really tried to find a site on the web that would explain everything to me. But I couldn’t find one. So I want to create a quick guide here to going to Hong Kong to change your visa status.

The whole thing is actually pretty easy, and once you get to Hong Kong there are so many English speakers that you really have nothing to worry about.

Here’s what you need to do: If you have a tourist visa and you want to switch it to a Z visa, there is no way to do that in mainland China. You have to leave mainland China to go to the embassy for your country (or, if you’re like me and hate waiting in lines, you can pay a travel agent in HK to go to the embassy for you). A great place to go is Hong Kong, because it’s close to the mainland and easily accessible and you don’t need a visa to enter Hong Kong if you’re U.S./British citizen.

What you need: You need a Foreign Expert’s License from the provincial capital of whatever province you intend to work in. This is a pink-colored piece of paper that says you are a foreign expert. You also need a letter from the Provincial Capital directing you to apply for a Z visa at the Hong Kong Embassy for your country.

NOTE: The letter MUST say Hong Kong. If it says “apply forthwith at the nearest embassy in your home country”, you will have to send it back to the provincial capital to be changed, which could be a delay of another week or so.

You also need a passport-sized photo for the application.

When you actually get to Hong Kong and apply for your Z-visa, the embassy or travel agency (whichever you use to get your Z visa — I used Shoestring Travel in Kowloon and they were quick and decently helpful and relatively cheap) will take the original documents away from you and just give you back a passport with the Z-visa in it. The Z visa will have a “duration of stay” of 000 (zero) days on it. But really this means that you and your employer have 30 days from your date of entry to mainland China to get a temporary residence permit so that you can stay in China. The residence permit can be valid for up to 12 months and allows you to travel in and out of China freely.

How to get to Hong Kong: If you’re relatively new to China as you’re thinking about going to China to apply for a residence permit, your Chinese skills might not be so good and you might be worried about expensive Hong Kong. I would say the first one, traveling with weak Chinese skills, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and the second one, HK being expensive, you can’t do anything about.

But you should be able to get to HK pretty cheaply, especially if you’re in sourthern China.

Here’s how: Go to Shenzhen and take the subway from there to Hong Kong Go to this web site and look up the train schedule from your city to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is in mainland China, right next to Hong Kong. If you take a train to Shenzhen, you can get off the train and inside the Shenzhen train station you can go through mainland China customs and cross over to official Hong Kong, and then take the Hong Kong subway to HK. (Once you get off the train in Shenzhen this will all be easy, because there are signs throughout the train station that say, in English, “HONG KONG”. You just need to follow these signs through the train station [most people will go that way] and you will find customs and the subway). The web site linked to above will give you pricing and time schedules for the trains going to Shenzhen. In my experience the site has always been accurate.

You have to actually go to the train station to buy train tickets in China. So go to your local train station and figure out how to buy the tickets you need. Basic Chinese should be able to accomplish this. You can say “dao4 Shen1 zhen4″, they will ask you what day, you say the day, whether you want a soft sleeper or hard sleeper (ruan3wo4 soft sleeper/ying4wo4 hard sleeper) and presto, you’ve got your ticket. (From what I understand, you can’t buy a train ticket more than 10 days in advance in mainland.)

If you’re traveling a really long ways and have money to spare, soft sleepers aren’t bad. There’s less cigarette smoke and it’s theoretically more secure because you get a small cabin with only 3 other people, so there’s less risk of someone poking around in your stuff. The beds are about the same in terms of comfort. The difference between the two is just that hard sleeper you share a whole train car with maybe 80 other people in 3-stack bunks, whereas soft sleeper you get a more secluded (and quieter) cabin with 4 bunks, 2-stacked.

Overall I think both are pretty safe. If you are traveling with a lot of stuff and are seriously worried about someone stealing your stuff, go with the soft sleeper, but if you’ve just got a bag of clothes and a camera, keep your money and passport on your body and sleep with your camera by your feet or head, and put your bag of clothes wherever. Nobody wants to steal a bag of clothes anyway.

When you get on the train and find your bunk, just relax. Someone will come and take your ticket from you. They will give you a plastic card. Keep this card. When you are close to arriving at your destination, they will come back and get your card from you, which will of course wake you up if you’re sleeping. If they’re taking your card, it means you’re almost there so you can get your stuff together. If you want to ask someone when you’re going to arrive, you can say “wo3men shen2me shi2hou4 dao4 Shen1zhen4″ (I’m not good at Chinese so the grammar here is probably wrong, but it gets the message across).

In Shenzhen, it’s easy to find the border. Cross the border and take the subway to Hong Kong. The HK subway is labeled in English and now that you’re in HK it will be super easy to get around because at least half of the people around you are fluent in English.

Once you’re in Hong Kong: If you have your papers with you when you arrive in Hong Kong, it will only take two to three business days (maximum) to get your visa. You might be able to do it in less than 24 hours.

If you’re like me and had to go to Hong Kong to wait for your papers to come in the mail, you might have to hang out for a while. If this is the case and you’re trying to reduce expenses, I would recommend staying on Lamma Island. It’s way cheaper than anywhere in HK and it’s easy to get to by a 20-minute ferry ride and much more relaxing. If you’re staying in HK for a while and want to keep costs low or just not stay in the busy city, just go to Lamma. But, if you want to stay in the city and money isn’t really a problem, SoHo is nice. If you want to stay in the city and you want to save money, the ChungKing Mansions in Kowloon (hostels) are definitely the cheapest place to stay in the city. I stayed in the New Peking Guest House (actually called the Peking Guest House once you arrive there) and it was satisfactory, about 180 HKD per night for a tiny private room.

I think that should cover most everything for someone who has to go to HK to change visas. Once you get your Z visa, of course, you have to return to mainland and still get your residence permit, which requires that you have a foreign expert’s card, which is like a second passport, kind of. So that’s potentially another hassle if your employer is as unhelpful as mine was. But this little guide should get you through the trip to HK and back without costing you too much money.

If any travelers in this situation actually stumble across this and have any questions, I’m happy to answer.

And remember to have fun while you’re in Hong Kong. : )

This week a friend of a friend, whom I had never met (the friend of the friend), came to visit me from a huge city (Guangzhou) several hundred miles west of here where she also teaches English.

The trip was a little slapdash. She had a few days off and took the sleeper bus here from Guangzhou, arriving on Monday morning, and had about two and a half days to stay here and see Fujian.

The idea, before she arrived, was to travel down to Xiamen, about five hours away by bus, to spend some time there and see the sights. But when I realized she wouldn’t get here until 6 a.m. Monday morning I backed off that plan a little, thinking it would be too rushed to cram in a trip to another city in Fujian if she wanted to see any of my base city.

It turned out that we managed to get to Xiamen and see my city at the same time, a feat which involved hiking around here for one day and taking a cruise around on the backs of some motorcycle taxis, and then the next day rising fairly early and deciding to go to Xiamen anyway, even though we couldn’t stay in a hotel there because neither of us had our passports with us.

It was fun, if tiring. Monday was tomb-sweeping day in China, a holiday for honoring the dead by visiting their tombs  in the mountains and lighting small fires by them and burning incense with family. So we swung out of town and started up a country road that my professor, when he was still here last month, had shown me, and walked a few miles into the country. We saw lots of tombs untouched, and then a few with families milling around, burning incense and I think eating. We climbed up a hill and saw a tomb up close and, next to it, another under construction.

The tombs are sort of scattered around the evergreen-and-bamboo forested mountains of Fujian, oval shaped, made of gray and red stone and brick, resembling a female oraface or a bisected papaya. The mountains in Fujian are pretty and misty and lush-looking, resembling in shape and size the Green Mountains in Vermont where I lived for five years in college. They look prime for skiing to my native Northerner’s eye, but as far as I know snow falls here only once a decade or less. Once you put the city behind you walking on those roads, it would be easy to forget about the large, clogged city you left behind if not for the smog that still lingers in the air even miles away.

We came back to town after an afternoon in the hills, walking on the way back past the enormous steel mill in this city that has essentially swallowed whatever town was there before. There are small residential streets where people still make a life as the ten-foot-wide blue dump trucks from the steel mill rumble by all day, leaving behind trails of exhaust and dust, and whatever industry churns inside the blue steel walls of the factory that stands above the small houses.

Then we ate and considered watching a movie and then went home instead. We were both tired from the walk and planned to go to Golden Lake the next day. But when I woke up rain was dumping down and I realized that anything we did would have to be indoors. There being nothing to do indoors in my city, I proposed that we catch a bus to Xiamen and see what we could in an afternoon. If we had to be sitting around inside all day, at least we would be moving.

This made me feel better after waking up and seeing the rain. We went downtown and bought tickets for a bus leaving ten minutes later and hopped on board. That was at 11 a.m., and I figured that at least we would be there by four and would be able to see some of the city, no matter how early we had to come back. I was exicted. I’ve lived close to Xiamen for more than five months now and haven’t really seen any of it except the bus station, and I knew I would be satisfied to get just a taste of it.

I felt that way for the first three hours of the trip, buzzed because of hopping on a bus with no set plan for return, and then I started looking out the window. Long stretches of tumbling, slanting mountains drifted by at first, interrupted only by 30-second stretches of darkness as we passed under mountains. Then the mountains began to flatten and the air thickened. It looked almost like twilight, even though it was only two o’clock. The air was thick with smog and occasional rain, and we began to see factories, but not just factories — huge industrial compounds of factories, whole towns made into factories or factories made into towns. Many seemed to be oriented towards stone mining or refining and furniture manufacture. It was one of those moments when you don’t willingly step back, but feel shoved back to marvel at the vastness of production that our world requires, and the system that allows it to exist thusly — the size of those factories that produce towels, desks, chairs, stone steps, whatever, that no doubt find themselves post-production scattered all across the world, used by every kind of person, all manufactured in this little vein of mountainous land between here and there.

Once, around three in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a town going by — smoke rising from the factories, the factories seeming to be all there was of the town, the air thick and twilightish, a long row of maybe 1,000 middle-school students walking along the side of the main road in front of a factory in their nylon school uniforms, returning home, probably, from school, in the middle of all this.

Then it started to rain harder and the traffic on the highway stopped for maybe an hour. Just stopped, no explanation, no idea of what was ahead of us. People got off the bus to socialize and smoke cigarettes on the road. Somebody lit one on the bus. It seemed to be getting later more quickly. I wondered if going all this way had been a good idea, and thought about my classes the next morning.

Eventually the traffic cleared up and we passed by the scene of the accident. Most of the debris and all of the victims appeared to have been cleared away. What was left were five or six cars piled together inside a tunnel and pushed to the side of the road to let traffic through. The bus picked up speed and a half hour later we were inside Xiamen and it was raining hard and 5:30 p.m. We hailed a cab to the bus station and got train tickets back for 10:30. This gave us about four hours to explore, and we went to Gulangyu (a small island just across from the city that was British-settled a century-or-so ago) and walked around for a while, ate, bought a souvenir, and went back to the train station.

We had hard sleepers, which turned out to be comfortable enough, but for some reason I couldn’t sleep. My visitor-traveling companion spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend and I put on my headphones and turned the music all the way up. I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, feeling lonely and worried about being awake to get off the train when it arrived back home. An old man, who I had been a little rude to when we got on the train (he had told us we had the wrong bunks and I had insisted he was wrong, until, of course, I realized he was right — I still can’t really read Chinese) had told me that we would arrive around 6 a.m. but I didn’t know how we would know.

It turned out to be not a problem. The train steward woke us up at six and swapped out our tickets and fifteen minutes later, as I stood on the smoker train looking out the window, I saw the first signs of my home town out the window; I knew we’d be there in about five minutes.

I felt fine after we got off the train. That had been my first real trip in China where my Chinese skills had been sufficient enough to handle all the stuff involved with booking tickets, finding sightseeing stuff, buying food and other necessities, talking to cab drivers. But it wasn’t just that. The morning had one of those feelings that you get when you have been moving for a while, when you’re dead tired but not ready to sleep. There were a few people riding by on bicycles this early, dressed in ponchos and boots for the rain, but still not many people on the street. We hailed a cab and went home and I showered and spent a couple hours preparing for class and then slept for ten minutes.

For my afternoon class my friend came and actually taught the class a tongue twister, and they were amazed to meet another foreigner and, as always, incredibly warm and excited and eager to learn. It was really fun, and it was really nice to see someone else’s teaching stlye, to get some new ideas and to get some tips and constructive critiques of my teaching. I got off class and my friend packed her bags and got ready to go. We caught the bus to the bus station, grabbed some Lanzhou noodles to go and I saw her off on the train platform.

Before she left, we sat in the waiting room and watched Chinese Informercials for skin whitening creams and laughed and made fun of the T.V. It was fun, and I learned a lot just in three days about what it is like to be a foreigner in a major city (Guangzhou, where she teaches, is huge, and there are a ton of foreigners there — it was interesting to hear about her experience and how different it has been from mine; she makes more than twice the money, for instance, is not nearly such a spectacle to the locals and has a lot of foreigner friends and, as previously mentioned, a foreigner beau), but as we waited for the train I didn’t really feel like eating and I couldn’t stop feeling surprised at how much I felt I was going to miss this person who I hadn’t even known three days before.

This was a repeat of the experience I had a month previously, when a professor  and friend from my undergrad college stayed here for a month and I spent some time with him almost every day. Seeing this place through both of their eyes definitely changed it for me, and also made me realize that in the day-to-day, when I am here, even if I am not actively missing home or the people I know and love back there, there is a lot I am missing.

So, I walked out of the train station after she left and headed back outside. It was getting darker again and the rain was settling down now; the streets were wet but it was barely drizzling on my neck. I sat on a bench for a while and thought about it, about what it means to go somewhere and then come back, to do things that you do just because you want to, not because you know how they will end up or what they will mean.

Then I got on the bus and came back home, one foot after the other, happy and surprised like always, but also sad again to see someone go.

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.

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.

: )

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.