Having Fun All The Time

I just finished reading Factory Girls, the new book about female migrant workers in a major manufacturing city in southern China, written by the Chinese American journalist Leslie Chang.

Chang is married to Peter Hessler, who is the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which was the book that I read immediately before coming to China and which served as my bible on everything Chinese in my first months here.

Factory Girls by Leslie Chang

River Town was Hessler’s account of the two years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English at a university in Sichuan (central China, hot and mountainous and jungly, known for its super spicy food). Hessler had basically no background in China — he learned Chinese in his two years in country, and educated himself on the history and culture after he arrived — whereas his wife, Chang, learned Mandarin from her parents as a kid and got a home-grown education in Chinese history from her mom and dad.

The perspectives these two people provide on China are enlightening and based on years of serious study and journalistic work that is always patient and compassionate and sometimes verges on being heroic.

The two people are also very different. Hessler essentially comes across as very intelligent and diligent, and good at describing peoples’ political views and histories, but he is weak when it comes to showing people as people. In his most recent book, Country Driving, which presents three stories — one in which he makes a solo road trip across China, one in which he lives in a small village outside Beijing for several years, and one in which he spends a few years tracking the development of a Zhejiang boom town — some of his most central characters never become much more than two-dimensional.

He tells us, for instance, that Jiawei, the youngster who is his neighbor in the village for a few years and who almost dies in a mad-dash trip to the hospital in Beijing, calls him “uncle monster”, but we never really find out if the kid is scared of Hessler, if he likes Hessler, or if he’s indifferent.

Chang’s book, on the other hand, presents migrant workers as stunning, headstrong individuals who make major life decisions as frequently as they change hairstyles, and who have real life crises and actually have emotional reactions to the things that happen to them. People express feeling to Chang and she’s able to write about them in a convincing way.

Part of the key to this, I think, is that somehow she gets close enough to these women so that she gets not only their story but also their ideas about themselves, their dreams for the future, however unlikely. She records not only their emotions but also their crazy and actually kind of pretty ideas and expectations for their own lives.

To sketch it out for you real quick, throughout the book Chang basically tells the story of two young Chinese women, Min and Chunming. Both grew up poor in the Chinese countryside and decided to emigrate to the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, near Guangzhou, the third-biggest city in China. Both rose from the factory floor to higher-paying positions. But Chang makes the smart move of not dwelling too much on the hardships they overcame as to focus on their lives, their ideas, their more uplifting thoughts and moments — the very things that the women themselves probably tend to focus on that make their lives better.

At different points the two women pause in conversation to reflect on their lives. At one point Chunming says: “Someday if I have the means, I would like to write…I would write only about the simplest, most ordinary things.”

At another point, Min reflects on the good parts of life in the Chinese countryside: “The life in the countryside was pleasant, but you could go from one end of the year to the other and almost never see money.”

At another point in the book that I can’t find at the moment, one of the girls reflects on the hard life she lived when she first arrived in Dongguan as a factory worker. The factory workers generally worked 12-plus hours a day, lived a dozen or so to a dorm room and got less than U.S. $100 per month in salary (this was just in the past five to ten years). Reflecting on that life, Chunming said (paraphrasing): If I had to go back to living the way I did then, I don’t think I would have the courage to do it.

These are revelations that Hessler never experiences, and they put Factory Girls on a level above Hessler’s work..the distance between them might not be great, but Chang’s ability to see the Chinese people as people and sense their feelings from tone of voice and the expressions on their faces, her ability to wait for the right moment to ask a personal question or to remain silent when she knows someone is about to speak, all these things make the people in her book real and the book very powerful, especially for me, now, living here.

I must say, however, that I had the same experience with Hessler’s book as I had with this one: once I started reading them, I barely stopped except to eat until I was done.

This is a muddled account of these books, and I guess I’m writing about them because each one has been so valuable to me in understanding the world around me here, and also has done so much to expose to me how much I still don’t know and will never know, and to explain to me why the Chinese culture is so hard to understand and why it has always been so hard to understand for outsiders.

A perfect example of this is in Chang’s book. Chang grew up speaking Chinese and learned a great deal about Chinese from her parents, and spent around five years in China before she began work researching the book. And still throughout the book we see how her identity as an American creates unbridgeable gaps between her and the Chinese people she’s trying to understand. Once, when she’s dining with a distant relative to learn about her family history, the relative quotes Confucius and when Chang doesn’t know the saying, the relative’s wife remarks, “A person learns the culture of the place where she has grown up.”

In so many ways, this is somber and depressing, but I guess it reflects the kind of culture that China tends to be — a place where tradition often overwhelms personalities so that tall ideas like nation, culture, history, status all overwhelm whatever it is that actually make a person unique, until the individual doesn’t matter anymore.

That kind of thing is changing quickly, or that’s what everybody says. In fact that precisely what Chang’s book is about — migrant workers like her two main characters move from the countryside to the city and learn individuality quickly, naturally, and remake their entire lives at a relentless clip, over and over and over again, until the idea of tradition seems like a slightly entertaining, and also a little sad, joke.

But then also there are so many ways that tradition is still an overwhelming force here. I’m using “tradition” really loosely here, but I guess I sense it when a student tells me that her mother told her to quit playing the drums so that she could study harder, or an acquaintance confides that he doesn’t love his girlfriend but plans to marry her anyway out of a sense of responsibility, or I spend an hour sitting in a meeting with a flock of people, most with heads passively erect, all listening to someone in some official position drone on and on to no purpose except because that person is an official, and so therefore everybody is just supposed to listen to him for some reason.

I have reservations, for some reason, about the idea of going to a place like China with the goal of understanding it, just to write about it in English and send missives back home. I have this image in my mind of these messages going back, through this long darkness, and then coming across strangely scrambled and mismatched, with only a little bit of the story being told and so much being misunderstood, misinterpreted. I guess I feel that way because I remember the stuff that I imagined and expected before I came here, and I realize now that so much of it was wrong, only a half-truth, a fear or paranoia that turned out to be untrue, or only true half the time, or only true for some people; and sometimes I don’t really know how to cope here except to get rid of all my expectations and try to just let my perspective go completely. Which at times feels like letting go of my morals, in a way, or at least most of them.

For instance when I see a woman beating a small boy with a stick on the sidewalk and shouting at him, or a peasant man beating his wife in the street, and some part of me wants to do something, but then a bigger part of me knows that my morals do not apply here, and the only thing to do is to keep walking.

And this applies to conversations, too, bigger issues. One of them begins with a T and is a big island not far from my city. Another one also begins with a T and is a big, very culturally significant region very far from here. When people talk at me about these issues, what do I do? What do I say? What do I even think? The only thing I can think, now, is that this is not my home, I know already that I will never understand it, and many of the morals I once had are now somewhat distant from me, in a way. I don’t question that they’re still there but I just can’t use them, sometimes, in some situations.

And sometimes that affects me in personal ways, too. Because I am not just an outsider here. I am not just a tourist, visiting here. I live here and all of my friends now (since Tsi, the other foreign teacher, left without saying goodbye and has not returned) are Chinese.

I am also someone who hates very much to have a bone-dry romantic life, and although for the first six or seven months here that is exactly what I had it has not been that way since then. And whatever romantic life I have had has been a strange one, and this is the area where I have most had to let go of whatever expectations I had before coming here. In order to have romantic relationships here I have learned that I have to let go of all of the rules, completely, including expectations that partners will be monogamous, that they will not lie, that they will not try to cheat me out of money, that they will not one day claim to love me and then the next day avoid speaking with me in private.

All of these things are huge adjustments and it helps to have guides like Hessler and Chang in dealing with them. And particularly Chang, because she is more apt when it comes to understanding how the culture affects the individual in a place like this. For example, in her book, after a long section on corruption in Dongguan, she connects the dealings of businesspeople with the private lives of her subjects in a short, sweet paragraph:

Married men who pretended not to be were the number-one dating hazard of Dongguan. Fu Gui, Chunming’s business partner, had been involved with one such man; Liu Huachun, the friend who had recently bought the Buick, had been tricked twice. In a place where people lied reflexively for work, deception naturally seeped into personal relationships. Lying was often the pragmatic choice because it got you what you wanted. Eventually your lies might catch up with you, but few people thought that far ahead.

Hessler, on the other hand, never saw that deeply into anyone’s personal life. In his first book, River Town, he met a few young men who complained to him about the complexity of their romantic relationships, but Hessler seemed too busy being appalled at their terrible decision-making abilities to be able to see why they might be making the mistakes they were making. And when it came to Hessler’s own engagement with the Chinese people, he never seemed to struggle much with defining his role in the community. In River Town, he has one encounter with a young woman who pursues him, who he suspects is a prostitute, and he mentions that he tells her to stay away from him and then ignores the love letters she subsequently sends him; in the second half of the book he writes that none of the male Peace Corps volunteers in his group had a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman.

All of that is maybe because Hessler is a born journalist, and was able to see himself as separate from the people he wrote about and was able to look at Chinese society from a bird’s-eye view, somehow (or at least as seeing individuals’ personal experiences as having little relevance to his own beliefs and views). And Chang also seems to have that ability. Towards the end of her book, Chunming, her main subject, is considering leaving her pursuit of success in her career behind to join a nunnery-like English school of seriously dubious merit, but Chang seems excited and gently encourages Chunming to do it. In the notes in the back of the book Chang writes that she was excited when Chunming talked about studying English because she thought it would make a good ending to her book (Chunming doesn’t join the school).

But while reading Chang’s book, I wanted her to stop Chunming from joining the school. It was obvious that the school was terrible and that she would never learn English there. But Chang wanted her to join. I had a similar feeling reading Hessler’s book. I wanted him to talk to the girl who claimed she loved him. I wanted him to let himself be part of the story, because he already was part of the story. The whole thing felt disingenuous — to read about these Americans’ observations of Chinese peoples’ lives and yet to get so little of the Americans’ actual roles in the story. To learn so little about what they felt, and thought, and why they said what they said.

These are all selfish impulses because they are about me. They are about my desire to learn about what I should do when something completely strange happens here. Like, to give an example, when I fall like a rock for a woman over the course of a month, and then she tells me she is moving away and asks me to go with her, and I have to decide, like, right there, what to do, and give her my answer in a language that I am still struggling to speak.

But then again the books are also grounding because they provide me with an example of what I should do when it seems like the whole goddamn world is falling apart around me here, and I try to think of what these two writers would do, and I know that in most cases it is just to stand still, and not say anything, and not do anything sudden or rash, and wait until the dust settles and go home and think about it. And then maybe write.

My mother took this picture, and I think it is the best one from the whole trip. The "BJ" stands for Beijing, of course. I have no idea why these people look so serious.

Beijing: An unwelcome welcome, the storied wall and a big goodbye

Immediately upon arriving in Beijing, we got in a car accident. It was around eight in the morning and we had rented two cabs at the train station to take us to our hotel; I called the hotel and asked them if it was all right if we came and checked in early, and they said yes. I had booked us in a small hotel called the “Templeside Guest House”; which actually turned out to be a tiny hostel in one of Beijing’s thousands of tiny residential alleyways known as Hutongs.

The hutong where our hostel was located. A bit misleading, but the inside was nice.

The Hutongs in Beijing are a relatively famous attraction of the city; many of them are hundreds of years old and are packed with tiny apartments and convenience stores; really like little towns to themselves tucked away from the chaos of Beijing traffic. Really, I have seen these kinds of alleyway systems in Xiamen, too; they seem to exist in any city that is reasonably old and interesting. But Beijing has a lot of them, and I was interested in the Templeside hotel because it was located in a 600-year-old Beijing hutong (supposedly 600 years old).

Regardless of the age, it turned out that the hotel was definitely located in an obscure hutong, and so true in fact that when we arrived at the hutong, it really looked from the outside like nothing more than an alleyway, and it was hard to believe that we were supposed to go in there to find our hotel. On top of that, our cabs had stopped on the opposite side of the street and expected me and my family to unload our luggage and walk across four lanes of Beijing rush hour traffic to get there. So I told them we couldn’t stop there and to take us to the other side of the street. Which they dutifully did, and which went fine, until I heard a loud crash and the cab in front of mine – the one that held my mom, uncle and cousin – was hit in the passenger-side door by a bus.

We were trying to keep track of what day it was by counting on our fingers when we took photos. But after day 10 it didn't make sense anymore.

It was a low-speed collision and luckily everyone was fine (except for the cab’s door and front right fender, and probably the driver’s day, which were all ruined), but it was the first car accident I had been even incidentally involved in in China (aside from my drunken shouting at the road rage incident in Shanghai); and right after the accident a girl from the Templeside hostel came running out of the hutong shouting “Oh my god!” in unison with me, except I was adding more English expletives. Everything was OK, though; we grabbed our things from the cabs, my mom actually paid the driver who was now engaged in a heated argument with the bus driver, and we followed Emma, the young Chinese girl from the hostel, into the hutong to go to our new Beijing home.

I’ll spare words on the Templeside hostel except to say that it was awesome. I think it shocked my family at first to see that I had booked them in a hostel (even though it was an honest mistake on my part), but we all had our own rooms and bathrooms and the place had a great courtyard with a garden in the center, and we met more interesting people just lounging around in the courtyard than we did during all the rest of our trip in China. Which is how it always works with hostels. On top of that, the service was excellent and everything was a fraction the cost of what it would have been at more mainstream, more plush and probably physically more comfortable hotel. We got essentially free tour guide service from the four girls who ran the hostel, we got travel tips from other people at the hostel, and after three and half days of stay and a lot of meals eaten at the hostel our bill for three rooms was only around $500 USD (including two dozen beers, three breakfasts for the group of five, one dinner and a lot of coffees).

This is the base of the Mutianyu area where we took the tram to the top of the wall. The base was completely flooded with bloodthirsty vendors, but once we got to the wall it was mercifully quiet and surprisingly pretty empty of other people.

Beijing was hot from day one. After settling in the hostel that morning we went out and checked out the Forbidden City, which was beautiful but incredibly hot and crowded and in some sense just a dizzyingly large and rather beautiful place with a more-or-less boring history, at least as far as the history the tour guides know goes. It’s a lot of hooh hah about how many concubines the emperors of China had and where the concubines lived and where the emperor lived and you get little substantial stuff about the political significance of the place and the way the country was governed. Not that I know much about those things in relation to the Forbidden City anyway, but it would have been nice to learn more. Instead I learned stuff I already knew: the City is old, it’s big, the emperor lived there, he had sex with lots of women, the place was inhabited by eunuchs, it was forbidden to any guests for hundreds of years, etc. That’s about all there was to the story. We got a guide for 150 RMB because I was too hot to seriously barter, but I think it should have been 100 or less. Then, late in the afternoon, when we had all pretty much reached our limits of sweatiness and crankiness, my uncle and cousin disappeared into the crowd somehow, and I stood with my parents for 10 minutes scanning faces in the crowd before we decided to just give up and go back to the hotel, which we did.

The two things the Forbidden City has going for it are that it is huge, and that it is symmetrical. There's a lot of history, but on the scorching hot day when we went, I just felt like getting out of there. I had had all the scorching hot hugeness and symmetry that I could take.

When we got to the hotel we immediately started drinking, and this didn’t stop until about 6 hours later after we had finished an enormous Brazillian steakhouse meal in Beijing and returned to the hotel, and I realized that I was completely exhausted, drunk, and had pretty much been completely sapped of optimism and energy. We had really not stopped moving for over 40 hours, since the night previous we had slept on the train, and everybody seemed to be on everybody else’s nerves in the group after a difficult day. Eventually I slept, but it wasn’t restful, and I realized I was beginning to get worn out from the constant motion – it had been over a month since I had really had any time to relax and do nothing, which is a long time of constant activity for me.

A quick group shot on basically the final destination of our epic tour, the idiosyncratic, at time successful and at times useless Great Wall of China.

The next day was better, because we went to the Great Wall. As I learned from Peter Hessler’s book, Country Driving, the Great Wall is actually not one wall but many, many different walls that sort of amble along northern China, from Beijing to Mongolia. But anyway the wall we went to was definitely the Great Wall – the one you see in pictures that is big and stone and stretches on to both horizons. We went to Mutianyu Great Wall by way of a rented taxi van driver whose number my uncle had got from the woman who cuts his hair in San Francisco.

The mighty explorers

It took us about two hours to get there, the taxi for the whole day was 600 RMB (the driver, Mr. Li, couldn’t really speak English, or just barely, so it was pretty much all Chinese with him), and Mutianyu was ridiculously beautiful and the tourists were beautifully few. We walked along the wall for a couple of hours, looking at the rocky peaks in the distance and the endless rope-like coil along the ridge’s edge, and fell into the spell. It was a lot like seeing the Grand Canyon – description doesn’t really prepare you for it, photos can’t really ruin it for you; you just have to go there, and when you see it you’ll definitely feel something.

Mutianyu Great Wall. Note the lovely relative lack of people

After the Great Wall we went to the Summer Palace, which was another loud hot crowded tourist attraction and beautiful, but I think we were all too hot and had lost the patience for it. We walked around a bit and then went home.

The Summer Palace. A ton of buildings and gates. Very pretty, but beyond that I didn't get it. We did see an old lady take an astonishing nose-dive into the side of a hawker's stand, though (sorry, no picture of that)

In the evening we ordered in and ate dinner at the tables in the hostel garden and watched World Cup soccer, and for me that was my favorite night of the whole trip – relaxing with other hostel people and chatting and eating in the garden, like an actual relaxing vacation and not a maddened race across China. We didn’t have enough nights like that over the trip but that was because there was so much to fit in – and that’s just how the trip had to be. There are so many things to see and do in China, it’s such a huge place. It’s got as much to see and do and experience as the U.S., maybe – it’s not like a smaller European country where you can get a feel for it in a week or so. It is a big, big, mother of a beast of a country that takes serious travel and serious patience and a serious willingness to push your boundaries. And I began to realize that the trip was almost over and we had done all those things and we had actually managed to see a huge swath of the country, and that we had made it to Beijing, pretty much to the end.

That day was my father’s birthday, July 5, and I borrowed one of the hostel’s bikes and went out in search of a place to get him a cake. I cruised up the road outside our hutong for about 10 minutes and found a bakery and ordered a cake for 75 yuan, and a half hour later I picked it up. I hadn’t had time to do more than that for his birthday, but I was happy that he was in China. It was definitely one of those things that you could never predict in life – a year ago, I would have never imagined that I would celebrate my dad’s birthday on the Great Wall of China. But that’s how it happened.

Tiananmen Sqare. I didn't even notice the cluster of umbrellas -- gotta credit my mom with a good eye for a good photo

The next day was our last day. Together, we went to Tiananmen Square and stood in the middle of it, and I had to ask a Chinese person if we were in Tiananmen Square to confirm that we were actually there. It basically looks like a giant, giant parking lot where no cars are allowed. It’s a bit more impressive than that, but that’s the gist of it. Then I went shopping with my mom, in the evening we went to a totally amazing acrobat show (which was also slightly disturbing to me because the performers appeared to have been performing the stunts since the age of 3, and I have seen street acrobat performers, children, performing in China and they can be a pretty depressing sight – often extremely poor, performing stunts that have twisted their bodies in unnatural ways, 5 year old children working all day doing stunts to try to feed their families, etc.), we ate Beijing roast duck for dinner, and then we all went to bed. I would get up in the morning at 3:45 to accompany my parents to the airport.

I got up in the morning and we found a cab right away outside the hutong even though it was 4 a.m. and pitch dark. The ride to the airport was 100 RMB and took about a half hour, and we made it on time. I was extremely anxious, really unaccountably so, and just figured I was feeling that way because I still had to bring my uncle and cousin to the airport and then later I would also be flying back to Fujian late in the evening. I also hadn’t yet found a hotel for when I landed in Fuzhou. But really it was because I was saying goodbye. I had gotten used to having my family with me, and what I had known would happen was happening – I had become happy and comfortable to be with them and then we were all shoving off again and going our separate ways, and it felt a little bit like falling back into a vacuum. Due to so many factors – language barriers, cultural differences, my newness to the place, economic differences, personality differences – there is still really no one in my city who I feel close to, who I really deep down trust and feel trusted by. Which is also how I felt a lot of the time in Oregon after college. So saying goodbye to people who I hold dear initially wasn’t easy, and I knew it would take a while again to adjust back to my normal life.

This is just a photo of a poster of the acrobat performance, because we couldn't take photos in the show, but they did this trick at the end of the show. 14 girls together mounted a moving bicycle. It was crazy and the girl driving the bike was wearing a weight-lifting belt

But later that evening, around 10 p.m., I too was taking off from Beijing and headed south again. When I finally arrived in Fuzhou I encountered some very nice people who, at 3 in the morning, helped me find a hotel near the bus station for the night (as I expected might happen – Chinese people in strange cities, I find, are always totally willing to help a strange foreigner in need, maybe partly to practice their English but really just because of basic kindness); and in the evening on the eighth my bus arrived back in Sanming, the old familiar and yet unfamiliar place that I still call home. I was tired and had developed my second cold since the trip started, but I was back. I saw a familiar face soon after arriving, which helped soothe me, and then I went home and slept, and the journey was really, definitely over.

In the airport, waiting for my flight back South. I made the mistake of spending most of the last day in Beijing in the airport, waiting for my flight and writing this epic summary of our epic tour, after which point I pretty much passed out of exhaustion in the airport for the afternoon. Thus the genesis of this 10,000 word summary. Thanks for reading

The British Pavilion at the World Expo. The pavilions for almost every country (except the crappy U.S.A. pavilion, which looked like a Honda dealership) were interesting and kind of amazing -- even though the lines were so long we couldn't get inside any of them

(This is part 4 of a 5-part series.)

Shanghai: Mexican food, a rainy World Expo and a ride on the bullet train straight north

We took a van from Sanming to the Fuzhou airport, and paid 1,500 RMB for the privilege, which is about 1,000 RMB (or $140) more than we should have paid, but we were running late and I was exhausted and not in a position to argue, since I had not planned the van in advance and had to rely on a friend to book it for me.

The sun was finally out full and it was hot, but we stayed cool in the van and arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. We arrived in Shanghai in the late afternoon and checked into our hotel, which was the luxurious and very western Aston Hotel, or, in Chinese, the Pu3 Jiang1 Fan4 Dian4. The Aston claims to be the first westerner-run hotel in Shanghai, and it seems to fit the part. The building is old European-style architecture and looks like something from England or France (sorry, my architectural knowledge and therefore language is pretty tepid here). It’s European-y. And comfortable. And has a good western breakfast. The only problem is that most of the people who stay there are not Chinese, so it’s kind of like a foreigner’s hiding spot in Shanghai. If you visited China and you only stayed at the Aston, you wouldn’t really have visited China.

The ritzy restaurant in the lobby of the Aston Hotel. The hotel was great and comfy -- but the waters in the lobby were 25 RMB (you can walk out the front door of the lobby, go a block to the left, and buy the same water for 1 RMB)

As a consequence, we ate western food for dinner both nights in Shanghai. Which was actually great. The first night in Shanghai we went out for Mexican, after I had complained our whole trip that there was no real Mexican food in China. It turns out, I was wrong. There is one real Mexican food restaurant in China, and it is called the Cantina Agave, and it’s located somewhere in Shanghai not far from the French Concession. We ate nachos and burritos and tacos and taco salad, and everybody’s meal was good, and my uncle and I had a couple of shots of tequila. As always is the case when eating western food in China, the bill was a king’s ransom compared to what it would have been for a Chinese meal, and probably almost as big as the bill for the unbelievable meal we had in Sanming. But it was good Mexican, and I think the whole group was craving something other than Chinese food for the evening.

Cantina Agave! Delicious Mexican food in China (perhaps the only delicious Mexican food in China)

We only stayed in Shanghai for 48 hours, which was not long enough to see a whole lot of the city. It was just long enough to see that the pollution is pretty bad (about a half-mile visibility on the day we arrived) the tradmark Oriental Pearl Tower building is really just a dirty cement monstrosity, the cab drivers are maniacs, and the foreigner/food scene is awesome. We also saw a road rage incident in which a Chinese guy driving a car rammed an unmanned motor scooter and proceeded to plow the scooter with the bumper of his car all the way to the sidewalk. (The driver of the scooter cut him off, and when the car honked at the scooter, the scooter parked in front of the car, got out, and walked to the driver’s window to confront him, so really he had it coming – but still this was after I had had two shots of tequila and a couple beers, so I responded by snapping a lot of pictures and shouting mocking obscenities at the driver of the car.)

I think the thing that set me off about this driver (of the car) was his reckless disregard for all the people standing around in the street. No one got hurt, but someone could have...even if it is hilarious that he put that jerk motor-scooter driver in his place in the most direct possible way

Our last day in Shanghai we went to the World Expo. But we didn’t get there until late in the afternoon because most of our group was by now suffering from diarrhea, including me. And by the time we arrived, the place was packed and the lines for all the interesting countries’ pavilions were all over three hours long. So we walked around, saw the interesting buildings and the huge, huge Expo campus, my mom bought a T-shirt, I bought a cap, it rained on us, and then we left. It’s hard to say that the Expo was a letdown, because I knew the lines would be long and I knew we didn’t have enough time to really do anything, but still – it’s a long way to go and a lot of expense to see a bunch of fancy buildings that are just going to be destroyed in a few months’ time. Even if we could have gone inside, I have a feeling I would have felt the same way. But maybe not. A follow-up trip to Shanghai might be in order to confirm.

A snapshot at the Shanghai World Expo!

The highlight for me in Shanghai, however, was the fabric market (mian4 liao4 shi4 chang3). On our first full day in Shanghai my mom and pops and I went there to look for gifts and cheap tailor-made clothes, and it did not disappoint. I had heard on ChinesePod.com that you can get custom-tailored men’s shirts there for 80 RMB, or about $12, and I wanted to check it out because it’s hard for me to find shirts that fit my fairly thin, tall frame.

It was awesome. The fabric market is just a huge marketplace where individual tailors stand and shout at people passing by and try to get them to stop and order a suit or jacket or shirt. You basically just go in and find a tailor and negotiate a price (you want to do that first – they will try to draw you into making decisions about your clothes before you name a price, because that gives them a huge advantage in the negotiations, i.e. you’ve already made all your decisions with them and you don’t want to go to someone else and do it all over again), they take your measurements and the following day you can pick up your custom-made piece.

I got a lot. I got a beautiful brown wool overcoat that fits me perfectly for 350 RMB, a little over $50. I got a 3-piece blue suit with thin lapels that looks pretty modern and cool and fits me perfectly for 650 RMB, or almost $100. I got two dress shirts, one black, one blue-and-white-striped, for 80 RMB each (about $12 each) and a casual blazer for 300 RMB (around $40). And an extra suitcase to carry it all for 200 RMB (around $30). The only adjustment that needed to be made when I picked up the clothes was the sleeves of the suit, and it took about 20 minutes. Everything else was nearly perfect. The pants of the suit, especially, fit me better than any pants I’ve ever owned. In total I spent around $250 for the clothes, which is a laughably small amount considering what I’ve been willing to pay for awkwardly fitting, relatively ugly clothes back home when I couldn’t find anything better. So, in summary, the Shanghai fabric market has officially replaced all other clothing stores in the world in my mind. (The address is: 399 Lujiabang Rd; see the link above  for more info.)

The Shanghai skyline. That big pointy building is the Oriental Pearl Tower. And yes, it's not that far away, but it looks like it is, because of the smog, and the smog seemed to be at least that thick for the duration of the trip

We picked up the clothes on our way to the Shanghai northern train station, to board our bullet train which would take us to Beijing overnight. The bullet train goes 124 mph (200 km/h) and travels the 800 miles (1300 km) from Shanghai to Beijing in about 10 hours. It wasn’t cheap – the tickets ran about $130 USD to buy in advance, about the same as what plane tickets would have cost – but it was interesting and I slept incredibly well. There’s something about sleeping on trains that I love, and the bullet train was the best. It’s the white noise, partly, and also the rocking motion that the train makes – it all combined to create excellent sleeping conditions. So after boarding I immediately fell asleep and woke the next day with the train almost in Beijing and my pillow covered in drool. (Note: when you board the bullet train, you take all your bags on you, as with normal trains in China; you don’t check them, you just stow them under the sleeping car berths.)

The bullet train (D train) rocketing north toward Beijing

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.

Arriving in the beautiful town of Yangshuo

(This is part 2 of a 5-part series.)

Yangshuo: Luck with tourguides, quitting smoking and a culinary experience

My uncle and I were the first to wake up the next day and we set off to find breakfast. My parents were still exhausted from their 48-hour journey from the U.S. and we wanted to let them sleep, and my younger cousin (14 years old) also just wanted to sleep, so we let her be. We walked down the main street of Yangshuo, which is extremely wertern and touristy, and found a place with a decent western breakfast and ate for a couple of hours. The rain had temporarily stopped and the peaks started to appear from the mist around us, and it reminded me of being in a ski town in Colorado or Alaska — you can’t really believe that the mountains around you could be so dramatic or beautiful; there’s just no getting used to it.

Quickly, though, it started raining again, and when my parents woke up after noon it was too rainy to do much. We settled on a raft ride up the LiJiang river (Jiang means river I think so maybe it’s just the Li River) and found a 2 hour ride on a rickety bamboo raft for about 120 RMB. The driver couldn’t speak English, but my Chinese was good enough to find out that the river is 6 meters deep and has an old, creepy sugarcane plant along it, which we passed.

The raft ride along the Li River

Yangshuo is in southern China just a few hundred miles north of Hong Kong, and the landscape there is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere. The town itself is fairly small. It consists of a street that runs along the main river (the LiJiang) where our hotel was located, and then several streets that spur off of that into town that generally consist of restaurants and tourist shops. It’s a great place for touring, especially if you’re new to China or don’t have a lot of time to see a lot of the country, because there are a ton of places to buy gifts where bartering is not only allowed but totally necessary, there are a million things to do and its very easy to find places to get western food and to rent motorbikes or bicycles to get out and explore.

After the boat ride we cleaned up and got ready for the Yangshuo night show that was designed by the guy who also designed the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies. We bought the tickets in the morning; the tickets were about 150 RMB. There was an option to buy 250 and 350 RMB tickets too, but somebody told us that we didn’t need those, which turned out to be more or less true (would have been true if it hadn’t rained, but it did rain, and the only part of the stage that’s covered is the 350 RMB seats – but probably not worth the extra 200 to not get rained on anyway). The show consisted of about 300 performers singing, running around a huge stage that actually was the river’s surface – they used boats to move around on the water and crazy big moving platforms – and even though the story was impossible to follow I still thought the performance was beautiful and the music was good. The others in my group varied in their opinions – my uncle wished there was an English translation and my mom found the whiney singing a little annoying, and other people seemed to think it was just a little boring.

The night show in Yanshuo rocked my world, but others weren't quite as crazy about it -- although we all thought it was good. Those red things are people performing on a huge stage that is just water.

On the way to the show we were seated in a van with four of possibly the weirdest people I have ever encountered, and one very sweet and nice English girl. The English girl was of Chinese descent and teaching English in a nearby province, and she had run into the other four in Yangshuo. The four weird people were also all foreigners teaching ESL in China, two couples. One couple was American and one was English. The Americans guy was super mumbly and I couldn’t understand anything he said, and everytime I spoke to him directly he looked away; the American girl was super intense and seemed like she was burning a hole in my head when she looked at me; the English guy had huge bulbous eyes the color of pale green apples and spoke very slowly; and the English girl, after we had all got soaked at the performance, kept grabbing her breasts with both her hands, like full on titty-grabbing herself for no reason, and complaining about how her “knickers” were soaked.

I was, however, fascinated by the sweet English girl, and actually when I first spoke to her I thought she was Chinese so I spoke in a slow English. Then she started talking and right as I was about to compliment her on her excellent accent I realized that she was in fact British. She said she was staying in Yangshuo for three weeks studying Chinese before returning back to England to go to grad school, and I wanted to talk to her some more but there was no time; the show was over and it was time to head off to the next thing.

After the show we went out for dinner. We found a Chinese-style steakhouse and watched the World Cup game between Germany and England, and watched Germany kick England’s ass. Later that night I walk back with my parents as my mom did some last-minute shopping. We got a little lost in the winding streets of the little town after I stepped into a smoky open-air Chinese stall restaurant to buy some beers for us to take back to the hotel. The place stank of Chinese cigarettes and was loud and chaotic and dirty. It felt a little like being back in my home city and I felt more in my element there than I had felt in our expensive hotel in Hong Kong, in a way. I’ve never been able to afford nice hotels for myself and am still not sure if I ever will. I let a cigarette while the waitress wrapped up my beers, which I bought for 4 Chinese Yuan per can, or around 60 cents, which was 10 percent of the price we had paid for the same beer at dinner. Then I left the restaurant to meet my parents and together we headed back to our hotel.

On the way to the hotel we stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom, and in the men’s bathroom, there was a completely drunk English guy who could barely stand, slowly and deliberately washing his hands, muttering, “fucking Germans”.

Thinking about not smoking

That night my parents asked me if I wanted to sit with them on the balcony looking out over the LiJiang river and have a beer or two, and I did. At first we just chatted and my dad and I smoked and we drank beers, and then my dad went to bed. Then my mom asked me about my smoking and I admitted that I was still smoking regularly, always at least several cigarettes a day. But that I wanted to quit, and that I had tried a few times but that I had always been foiled by basically nothing but a lack of resolve.

A view from the Yangshuo countryside

Then she mentioned in passing the story of how she quit, which she said I must have heard before, and when I said I hadn’t she told me about it. I guess that she decided to quit smoking after she got pregnant with me. She had tried several times before, especially after my sister was born, but had never been able to fully get there. She had been a smoker since she was 14, so anything – taking a drag at a party, getting into a car accident – could send her back into full-on two-packs-a-day smokerdom. So she finally managed to quit, while pregnant with me, by taking a full week off from work and deciding to do nothing but stay at home and focus on not smoking cigarettes. She asked my dad to smoke outside and put his cigarettes in his truck and she fully committed to not smoking. She cleaned the house constantly without taking breaks so that she would not get a chance to have a cigarette, and just basically wanted to smoke all the time until the week was over, and at the end of the week she wasn’t a smoker.

This story made me realize several things, but most of all it made me realize that being a smoker is more than just a habit or a feature of a person, not like liking chocolate or not liking broccoli. Being a smoker is totally something that shapes your persona and your routine and what your life is in so many ways. Once you have been a smoker for several years, your personality becomes the personality of a smoker, whatever that is. It may be only subtly different from the life and personality of a non-smoker, but it is different, and I realized that after smoking since the age of about 21, about five years, I could no longer remember what it was like to have the life and personality of a non-smoker. And I told my mom as much – that I couldn’t even imagine my life without cigarettes – and realizing that (after saying it, of course) was one of the bigger, kind of sadder things I’ve realized in a long, long time. I’m not sure why – I just realized that being a smoker and smoking is not just a matter of stinking and having ugly teeth and skin and etc, it’s also a huge conglomeration of things that pile up over the years and decades that you can never, ever measure or conceive of in one sentence or in one idea in your head. At least I can’t. It’s one of those cumulative things that you never fully realize that you don’t ever know you don’t ever know the full extent of. And after I really realized that, I realized that I have to quit smoking cigarettes, really. And the next day I didn’t want any. I did take a drag of my dad’s cigar halfway through the day, but I didn’t even know why, and after that I didn’t want any, and sometime after that I decided that I was going to focus on becoming a non-smoker, on overcoming my cravings and focusing on the long-term and giving it up. And that is what I did for the rest of the vacation – it was hard as hell at times, but that is what I did.

Also, at the end of the conversation I thanked my mom for deciding to quit smoking soon after she became pregnant with me.

A motorcycle trip through the mountains

The next day in Guilin we all woke up rather late, because we had all been up late the night before, and again we went off to a western breakfast. After that, my mother booked a cooking class to learn how to cook some Chinese dishes for the next morning, and I noticed that all the dishes the school was planning to teach were very weird, non-Chinese dishes that you don’t even find in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The school’s facilities looked cool but they were obviously teaching how to cook some weird forms of non-Chinese food that sort of approximated Chinese food – in other words, they were realizing that a lot of foreigners are not comfortable with true Chinese food and trying to accommodate accordingly, but they were doing it badly. So instead, I suggested that my mom just asked them to teach her how to cook fried rice, fried noodles, and gong bao ji ding, three super common and usually delicious authentic Chinese dishes, and that’s what she did, and the next day I think it turned out pretty well.

We stopped to take picture on the motorscooter ride. To left is Nancy, our amazing tour guide.

After we left the school we realized that the rain had actually stopped for the first time in days and we immediately decided to rent motor scooters to go on a tour of the Yangshuo karst peaks. There were hawkers promoting tours on almost every corner in Yangshuo, literally, so we just asked the first one we passed. The first question I asked the vendor was if she had helmets, and she said yes. This was a good sign, as the vendor we had questioned the day before had laughed when I asked this question and explained that helmets were not really necessary at all, as though it were obvious. But this vendor had them, and she actually offered a reasonable price off the bat – 100 RMB for a motorized scooter for the whole day. She said she could add a tour guide for 150. I asked if we could get a discount on the bikes since we were renting 4, and she said yes, and I suggested 80, and she said OK. We agreed to the tour and said we would go rally the troops and return in an hour.

It sounded great – around 550 RMB (less than $100) for 5 people to scooter around the beautiful landscape for a full day, and it was great. It was ridiculously, ridiculously great. We completely lucked out on the tour guide. Her name was Nancy, and she was clearly a sweet, decent woman and was one of the few people in Yangshuo, besides the people in the cooking school, who did not appear to want to rip us off in the slightest bit. She smiled a lot and let us take as long as we wanted all day and led us on an amazing six-hour tour of the Yangshuo countryside, through obscure villages, over muddy obscure mountain paths, through back woods and into huge rice fields in valleys, and answered all our questions and even told us about her family and that they all grew up in farming families but were now working in the tourism industry in Yangshuo. About herself, she said early on that she was just a farmer, with a smile that flickered with an understanding of the negative connotations that word carries in China but also the fact that she had risen above that status by way of her use of English in the tourism industry.

I probably annoyed my family by speaking Chinese with Nancy, even though her English was much better than my Chinese, but she was accommodating with me and seemed to appreciate that I could speak the language. She told me that she had learned her English by taking a months-long (I forget how many months, I think 6) training course in English. She also said that often in China the children of a family take the man’s name (females in marriages in China don’t typically take the man’s name after marriage), but that her son had taken her name. “Because I am the most important person in my family,” she added, again smiling slightly.

This is the little dirt path where Nancy showed us the rice -- it was in the middle of nowhere and totally quiet, a nice contrast from the touristy busy-ness of Yanshuo

The motorcycle ride was a bit difficult for my mother, because she had only ridden a motorcycle once before and some of the trails we went on were very thin and very muddy, but for me it was very fun and reminded me of my days riding a dirt bike in the woods in New Hampshire when I was a teenager. About halfway through the trip one of the bikes broke down, and Nancy made a phone call to a person who must have been her dealer, and the dealer agreed to bring another bike out and take care of the broken-down one. It was about that time that I realized that Nancy didn’t own or hold any stake in the motorcycles we were riding, and I realized I could ride the hell out of mine and really have fun, so I started playing in the mud on the bike more and opening it up all the way when we hit open stretches. I was able to get it up to about 40 MPH on a paved road, which was as fast as I wanted to go anyway on a small motorcycle in China. Also while driving through the mountains in Yangshuo there was little reason to go fast – the slower you went, the more chance you had to look at the incredible mountains and valleys and streams and hollows. The place was amazing.

At one point Nancy stopped and showed us the rice growing in the fields. The rice was green and lush and stood about knee high or higher, and she explained how at harvest time the farmers would cut the clumps of rice blades with a knife and use a small threshing machine (the word “threshing” is my guess and not her descriptor) to actually get the rice out of it’s green pod-like container. She also knelt over a stream and showed me some snails and I recognized them as the kind that is so often fried up with a bunch of numbing hot sauce in restaurants in Fujian – the kind you can suck out of the shell in one slurping kiss – and when I asked her if she wanted the snail she said no, but if there were more she might gather them.

The tour went on and on and on, and by the end I was exhausted and everyone seemed to be hungry and the sun was red and hanging low. Finally I asked Nancy to bring us back and we skipped the final couple of stops she had scheduled, but she was still ready to bring us on another hour or two of touring. The woman was working hard and making sure that we all had a good experience – I noticed that she went out of her way to talk with each member of the group every once in a while, not focusing on any one person but trying to switch between people and make sure everyone heard something interesting – and she earned every damn bit of that 150 RMB, which is a good day’s work in China (even for me). As we pulled into the garage and put the bikes away I thanked Nancy and said the day had been perfect and we were all happy. “I am happy too,” she said, “because today I got a group of five. It’s a good day for me.”

(I got her card at the end of the trip – her phone number is 138-7837-4059 and her email is nancyzhang09@126.com)

Tasty meals in Yanshuo

We all wrote enthusiastic comments in her recommendation book and went to a big Chinese dinner nearby, which I enjoyed thoroughly but which everyone else only enjoyed a bit – they were still not used to how to use Chinese sevingware, the rules of table (in China you eat out of a bowl and never off a plate, for instance, and of course you use chopsticks and not a fork), and the completely different palette of tastes that comprises Chinese cuisine.

One of the last things we did in Yangshuo was a cooking class, which was a little expensive at 150 RMB ($20 per person), but was four hours long and included a tour of the local food market, instruction on cooking and a final meal, all with a translator, so I think it was well worth it. I missed it because I slept in.

I realized over the trip that Chinese things – the food, the compulsion to drink hot water and not cold water, the flavors and smells and sights and habits – they are all part of a very big painter’s palette that is just different, just fundamentally different, from the palette of the culture from whence I came. It’s not that the people are weird or that it’s impossible to get accustomed to Chinese life; it’s just that you have to come to understand the colors that underlie everything here, become familiar with the palette, and then things begin to fall in place. But you can’t mix the colors. Just as you can’t take a palette of earthy greens and browns and yellows and splash hot pink on top of it, you can’t really take an American diet and mix it in harmoniously with a Chinese diet. The flavors, the ingredients, the philosophies, start from different places and go in different directions. You have to choose one and stick with it for a while. You can’t sit down expecting a burger and fries and end up with fried snails and curdled duck’s blood. It doesn’t work that way. So, I think my family had a bit of a turbulent time, food- and stomach-wise, throughout the trip, and it was a bit tough for them to eat and appreciate the Chinese food. But I think that’s OK. You can’t get used to it and start to appreciate it in just two weeks; it took me a lot longer than that; it’s just too weird and different at first. But I did realize, a bit, how much I had changed since coming here. There are so many things I like now that I thought were freaky at first – drinking boiled water, for one; eating everything out of a bowl; spitting at table; eating snails; sharing all dishes with the whole table; eating cold chicken legs at the beginning of meal; weird-looking, generally unidentifiable meats; jellyfish; etc. The list goes on and on. But it’s just because I’ve had enough positive experiences with all those foods to understand what good is when it comes to those foods. If you don’t even know what good or bad jellyfish is, how can you know that the slimy thing you’re putting into your mouth is not poison?

As part of their cooking course, my mom, uncle and cousin went to the Yangshuo food market, where they got a glipse of the very different, definitely dirtier and more gruesome Chinese food-shopping process. The only substantiative comment I got from them on the experience was: "It was definitely real."

After dinner we all went home and cleaned up and passed out. The next day was the cooking class and then we would leave Yangshuo to go to my base city in Fujian. The cooking class was located near the end of town, near the food market in a building with the most amazing view of Yangshuo that we saw on our entire trip. For 150 RMB per person, the school provided a translator, a chef and a guide; they met at 9 a.m. and went to the food market in Yangshuo (the only thing I heard from my uncle about the market was that it was “real; it was definitely, definitely real”) and then went back and cooked. Everybody had their own wok and utensils and salt and spices, and around noontime my father and I joined them to eat.

As part of their cooking experience they also tried some Chinese tea with the traditional tea set...this method of brewing tea is extremely common, but usually with slightly smaller cups, which means that every two or three sips the tea server has to refill your cup for you

We sat on a deck on the sixth floor of the hotel the school was located and looked out over Yangshuo and enjoyed the food and a few beers, and then it was time to go. We went back to the hotel and packed up in the van and headed back through the karst peaks, this time in the daylight, to return to the airport and turn our path toward the little city in Fujian where I had lived for nine months, Sanming.

The family arrives in Hong Kong

(This is part 1 of a 5-part series)

Hong Kong: A delay, a rainstorm and a night ride through the mountains

The journey all across eastern China has just ended, so before posting pictures I’m going to try to recall everything I can about the 14 day trip here.

Leaving Sanming

My family’s visit to China took place at the beginning of summer, just a day after I wrapped up the last bits of my teaching work for the semester. My mother and father would be flying to Hong Kong from Boston, and my uncle and cousin (mother’s side) both flew in from San Francisco. I was pretty much flat-out busy for two weeks before they came, booking tickets and hotels at the last minute and administering final exams and giving grades. So when the time finally came to take a train to Hong Kong to meet my parents, I was exhausted and had developed a bit of a cold, but I was ready to go. I had been living in a small city in southeastern China (Sanming, Fujian Province, right across from Taiwan) for several months without leaving for more than a couple of days, and I hadn’t left Fujian since February, so I was ready to get out of the area for a little while and see what the rest of China had to offer.

Hong Kong

The first destination was Hong Kong. I left Sanming on the 23rd of June to go meet my parents, submitting final grades that morning and then buying a sleeper bus ticket to take me the 14 hours to Shenzhen, which is a major industrial city in the Chinese mainland just a few miles away from Hong Kong Island. From Shenzhen I could literally cross the border from mainland to Hong Kong by subway. I had originally planned to go by sleeper train, which is much more comfortable and in this case faster, but all across southeastern China over the past month it had rained, and floods and landslides had shut down the train route. So I boarded the bus in the afternoon and we set out west.

The only notable thing from the bus trip was that the bus’s dinner stop was several hours away from Sanming, at a broken-down-looking roadside restaurant where they served bad chicken soup and fried vegetables and rice and charged an outrageous 15 yuan for the meal (about $2 USD; normally this kind of meal would cost 7 or 8 yuan). But the place was obviously in the middle of nowhere and supported at least a few families, who appeared to be living in total poverty. Connected to the dining hall I could see their living quarters, which consisted basically of half a dozen beds crowded together and shrouded in mosquito nets. The place is hard to describe; it was just the kind of place that you know at a glance is inhabited by people who make no money and have very little, so it was easier not to feel cheated as I forked over my money. It was a bit of a racket; I took my food and they told me to pay later, and after I started eating they asked for the money; that was how I got tricked. But there was nothing to do about it; I had already started eating so I couldn’t barter. I paid my money and reboarded the bus.

As the sun was coming up I arrived in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a huge manufacturing city that is full of modern, brand-new buildings, and it would look like a modern, well-developed city except that everything in it appears to be under construction, recently under construction or about to go under construction. There are piles of dirt, brick, metal, and other building materials everywhere — in parking lots, on sidewalks, in roads — and everything gives a feeling of being sort of haphazardly placed — as though the entire city were a sort of giant sandbox or playpen for designers and builders toying with the idea of a city. Buildings seem to not really line up in neat blocks; parking lots are incomplete; restaurants sit awkwardly next to factories and warehouses crop up next to shopping malls. The whole place seemed surreal as the bus drove through it, periodically stopping to drop off passengers, one at a time, until the bus was almost empty when we finally arrived at the station.

When I walked out of the Shenzhen station there were about 20 cabbies surrounding the exit, trying to usher me to their cabs. I didn’t think quickly and let one of the cabbies take me to his cab before I started to barter with him for a ride to the Shenzhen train station; I should have haggled cab fares when I was surrounded by 20 cabbies, but wasn’t sharp enough in the dazed blue dawn. So the 20 minute ride cost me more than it should have; about 70 yuan. The city started to redden as the sun came up and my cab approached the train station. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the main Shenzhen rail station and the cabbie told me that the subway would open in about 30 minutes, at 6:30 a.m.

As I was nearly arriving at the Hong Kong border crossing, where my cell phone would stop working (for some reason mainland China cell phones don’t work in Hong Kong), my mom called me up and told me that their plane had been delayed for reasons unknown, and that they would arrived at least 12 hours late; they were stuck in their connecting city, Detroit. This was fine because we had 36 hours in Hong Kong before we would fly to Guilin, to begin our travel in mainland, but it was a bit of a downer. She also told me that immediately before leaving San Francisco, my uncle had had to take his daughter (who was also coming to China) to the hospital because she had been complaining of strange stomach cramps, but that the hospital had cleared her to fly and they had successfully taken off. So I should still go to HK to connect with them. I wished my mom luck and said that I would try to find a calling card in HK so that I could get in touch with her and confirm her new arrival time later.

Arriving again

Arriving in Hong Kong was less dramatic than it was the first time I traveled from mainland China to HK, probably because this time I knew what to expect. I knew that I would suddenly find myself in a much wealthier, cleaner, more orderly, more familiar in a way and yet also unfamiliar environment. I knew that I would suddenly become more aware of my own body odor and clothing and that everyone would suddenly be better dressed and wealthier and just generally moving at a different pace (faster pace) than I had become accustomed to. So it wasn’t that much of a shock, and it felt really good to be back on the streets of Hong Kong (I spent 10 days there in the spring waiting for a new visa), cruising around on their super clean and efficient subway system and walking down the streets, digging the Western city vibe.

I only had the morning and part of the afternoon to get organized before I had to go to the airport to meet my uncle and cousin, so I immediately found an internet bar to search for the address of our hotel so I could check in and figure out how to get a calling card.

I settled on a calling card in one of the 711s that are all over Hong Kong (this is one of the major differences between HK and mainland; mainland really hasn’t figured out the magic of convenience stores, and it really does make life less convenient) and figured out how to check into our hotel, which was the plush and comfortable City Garden Hotel a few subway stops east of Central HK. I took a shower in the hotel’s bathroom and sat in the hotel room for 10 minutes and suddenly felt cleaner than I had felt in months. There is just something about being in HK that is that way — it’s the subtle noxious smell of mainland hotel bathrooms, or the dirty smell of the water, or the fact that laundry drying machines are not allowed in southern mainland — there is some indefinable way that life in mainland is dirtier than life elsewhere, inevitably dirtier, and once you are accustomed to it you don’t really feel it or sense it again until you leave mainland completely. And that is what I did in the hotel — just sat there and felt cleaner and fresher than I had felt in a long time, and then put on a fresh shirt and headed off to the airport.

Visiting the Night Market. It was so hot and sweaty and crowded, and we were exhausted, so we ducked out quickly after arriving

At the airport I met up with my cousin and uncle and then we headed back to the hotel pretty much immediately, and after about 20 minutes of walking around we ate at the best restaurant I have tried in Hong Kong yet: called Little Chili. It was a small Sichuan-style restaurant only a few blocks away from the City Garden Hotel specializing in (as the name implies) spicy Sichuan dishes including hot pot, shui3 zhu3 (I don’t know what that dish is called in English) and spicy fried meat dishes. We ordered Sichuan-style spicy fried chicken, fried Chinese greens, fried Chinese boiled dumplings and an eggplant dish and everything was ridiculously good, and way cheaper than you’d expect in Hong Kong. The 20-oz Qingdao beers were only 10 HKD! In the 10 days I spent in Hong Kong in the spring, I scoured the island for good food deals and I never found anything like this place. If you’re looking for good, cheap food in Hong Kong, Little Chili is definitely the place to go.

Unfortunately I screwed up ordering food and mistakenly ordered two orders of the spicy chicken dish, even just one of which would have been too big for the three of us. This was because I pretended to understand the waitress when I really didn’t understand the last question she asked me. After the confusion and the slight botching of what otherwise would have been an excellent introduction for my cousin and uncle to Chinese cuisine, I realized I would have to be stubborn and persistent in getting Chinese speakers to help me understand them through the duration of the trip, which would eventually result in me really getting much better at sticking to a conversation in Chinese, even when things got bungled or were difficult to understand. Which is of course essential for really making progress in the language.

The next morning, my parents came. It had been about nine months since I had seen them, which is one of the longest if not the longest period I’ve gone without seeing them. It was really joyful and almost tearful. In a way, I was almost nervous to see them again because it had been so long and I had missed them — I was nervous about the emotional ups and downs of seeing them for a good period of time and then having to say goodbye again. But seeing them again in person overwhelmed those worries and after a few minutes we got headed on our way to getting a taxi back to the hotel.

Connecting away from home

The next day, in Hong Kong, it rained, and it continued to rain throughout most of our time in the South. Our one day in Hong Kong we spent walking around — we went to the Man Mo Temple, and shopped for the necessities we would need for the rest of our trip, and did some antique-shop browsing. My cousin and uncle went to the old nunnery in Hong Kong and gave it great reviews, although I’ve never been myself. And for dinner we found an excellent and fairly cheap Chinese restaurant in SoHo, a little bit away from the escalator where all the overpriced food is. But it was quickly time to leave the expensive hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong — we only had about a day there, and then we took the bus across to the Shenzhen airport. I was a bit nervous to cross the border with my family — I knew everything would be fine, but I was anxious anyway — and then border crossing by bus was not as clean or easy as it is when you go from HK to Shenzhen by subway. But we all passed through mainland customs without a hitch, and after a delay of a few hours in the Shenzhen airport because of heavy rain, we took off for Guilin, our first destination in mainland China.

In the shuttle bus from HK to the Guilin airport, right after the border crossing, I encountered something of a major coincidence. There was another young guy on the bus, sitting next to my father and I, who I started talking to soon after we boarded after the crossing — a German guy a couple of years older than me who was also setting out with his mom to go traveling around China. The coincidences were this, in the order that I realized them:

1: He had also been teaching English in China, only he had been at it for two years and in Xi’an, and he had also been teaching German

2: He was also just starting out on a tour of mainland China with his mother

3: His mother had arrived in Hong Kong on the same day as my parents, and she would be leaving Beijing on the same day my parents would be leaving Beijing

4: They were also planning to travel to Guilin at the same time as us, and in fact had the same flight

5: They had been staying in the same hotel as us and the German guy, whose name was Jan (pronounced like “Yen” in English), had noticed us in the hotel

6: Jan was planning on traveling south through China after his mother left, just as I had planned to do, stopping in Xi’an and then continuing toward Taiwan

7: Jan and his mother’s seats on the airplane were actually directly behind my and my parents’ seats

There the coincidences (perhaps mercifully) stopped. Needless to say I ended up talking to Jan for about four hours straight and learned that he had spent about 3 years living in India studying Buddhism, that he studied sociology in university in Germany, that he was more or less sick of China and wanted to leave, and that he wanted to move to Taiwan to continue his study of Chinese, and that he was planning to go to Massachusetts in the fall to practice silent meditation for three solid months. He was a vegetarian and a non-smoker and I was able to identify with almost all of his views, except that he seemed to have been traveling and studying and meditating long enough to be far more calm and understanding of certain situations than me. And he was able to provide a lot of insight on life in China, particularly with respect to friendships, relationships and women — something I talked about with almost all the foreigners I met along our trip throuhgout the country (the foreigners who were living or had lived in China, anyway) since as I plan to sign for another year teaching English in mainland the reality of establishing and maintaining real relationships here becomes more of a necessity/reality.

Eventually, though, it got late, and I was exhausted, and I passed out in my airplane seat as Jan turned to his mom for conversation in German. My parents were already fast asleep on the plane; because of the delay, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small mountain town in the famous karst peaks in south-central China, until at least 2 in the morning.

Arriving in Yangshuo

I had booked a van to take us the hour and a half from the Guilin airport to our Yangshuo hotel, and when the lights of Guilin finally slipped behind us after the van reached the highway, we couldn’t see much out of the windows, except the occasional karst mountain floating by in the hazy dark like a phantom cloud. The karst mountains are plane mountains — they rise in great multitude from what appears to have once been a flat plane, not very tall or massive but sharp and jutting, like the image of a sound wave suddenly interrupted by a shout. They are so famous and beautiful that they are featured on the back of the Chinese 20-dollar bill. Everyone I spoke to who had seen them said they were one of the most beautiful places in China. But in the night they were just vague dark shapes moving slowly in the distance.

From our balconies in the hotel in Yangshuo we could see the nearby mountains and the river

We arrived in Yangshuo and checked into our hotel, and just as we were settling down to go to sleep someone set of fireworks in the park across the street from our hotel, and I saw the chrysanthemum-like explosions of fireworks outside at 3 in the morning. The next morning we woke up and stepped onto the balcony and looked directly out to the LiJiang river outside our balcony (we stayed at the Riverview Hotel, cheap, comfortable, with great service) and huge karst peaks to either side, towering over the little town and carpeted with green.

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.

I am trying to think of how to begin describing the evening I just had, and nothing is really coming to me.

I think I have to start by saying that in this town in China I have become something of a celebrity. And I’ll just spare you the details about my ambiguous thoughts and opinions of that fact and say that it seems to be irrevocably true, and that I did nothing to earn it except be foreign, tall, of average attractiveness and the capacity for saying “yes” to even perhaps daunting propositions.

Tonight’s proposition was made to me about three months ago, when I went to one of the administrative leaders of this school to ask for reimbursement for my visa trip to Hong Kong, which after visa, transport and hotel costs totaled just under $1,000 USD. He quickly granted the reimbursement and then added, at the end of our meeting, that he would like me to perform the Chinese song “Childhood” (”童年”) on “Teacher’s Day” later this year. I had already once performed the song at a small performance my students had given the previous semester (although I suffered horrible stage fright, forgot half of the lyrics and treated the audience to an earful of microphone feedback), so I quickly agreed without asking for details. The man had just agreed to pay back 1 large that I had more or less kissed goodbye forever, so I was apt to agree to about anything.

By now, if you’ve followed my blog at all, you know that I was in for a lot of surprises when I finally did learn those minor details. It turns out that I was signing up to sing the song in front of an audience of teachers from all around our county who will be gathering in our capitol city performance hall in September. I would also be the only performance representing our college of approx 10,000 students, some of who are very gifted singers (at the first singing competition I attended here, I was moved to tears — there are seriously beautiful singers in the art department here).

So…that’s in September. Tonight was the warm-up, a performance at the college’s end-of-the-year bash when some of the best student singers and dancers perform in the college’s auditorium…again, seriously talented, devoted singers and dancers, troupes of 20 students doing really advanced dance and opera-style Chinese singing…and me.

Luckily, there were 15 dancers on stage to distract the audience from me. But I still had to learn a 4-minute Chinese song, not forget the words, and learn how to dance/do hand movements and stage walking and stuff along with the dancing students…all this while focusing on not choking and getting warbly-voiced and stone-faced in front of the school audience…which was at least 500…I don’t really know how many in all.

The good thing about this performance was that I had professional help. Since I was singing to a choreographed dance this time, the dance teacher instructed me on how to stand on stage (not hunched), how to walk on stage (big steps, not measly nervous ones), and how to accompany my singing with gestures that go along with the meaning of the words…and stuff.

At first these suggestions were exasperating, because it’s hard enough to remember the words to a real Chinese song, let alone doing choreographed steps and motions and stuff like that. It’s just not something I’m used to. And there is/was also my cynicism about the whole affair that Ihad to get over. I had to come to grips with the fact that Ihad agreed to do this, and that I could not go at it half-heartedly and make an embarrassment of myself again in front of hundreds of people. When the teacher/coach said stand up straight, I had to do it, when she reminded me that I wasn’t smiling and my eyes had no emotion, I had to fix it, when she asked me to wag my finger and shake my head, I had to do that, too.

These things, in any normal context of my life, I find/would have found impossible to do, but then I realized that all the other performers (all students, which makes me kind of weirdly the only non student on stage at the end of the show) are giving it their all and having a good time and actually putting on a damn good show, and I had to do it. So I worked with the dancers and the teacher, we practiced the song maybe 20 times, and then finally like an hour before the performance we had it, and I felt good with it.

I realized while standing backstage waiting to go on that the only way not to go insane with stage fright was to jump up and down and do jumping jacks and do the most ridiculous movements possible. This actually really helped me get the energy to have fun with the performance, and then a second later I heard the announcers shouting my Chinese name and I marched on stage and stared straight into the blinding stage lights and shouted “Hello everybody!” in Chinese into the microphone.

This time it went much better. I tripped over the lyrics a little once but quickly recovered and other than that it was smooth. I did not collide with the students as I had done in rehearsals, I’m pretty sure I remembered to smile most of the time, and I was helped greatly by getting a chance to really practice and getting good feedback and seeing myself performing in the mirrors in the practice room and stuff like that. And after the show, when people congratulated me on the performance, they really seemed to mean it (they congratulated me last time, but it was obvious that they were just being nice).

And then afterward my liaison told me that that was actually just a rehearsal for the big show in September, which I sort of knew already. So yet again in September, I will be doing something that would be completely unimaginable at home. And even though I am making a resolution to severely cut back on agreeing to appear in public performances here, I at least think I am going to enjoy my next slice of completely unearned stardom.

It is so hot in Fujian right now you could fry an egg on my sunburned back.

It is hot enough to melt the flip flops to your feet.

Then again, it is June, which is officially a summer month, I guess. It’s hard to believe I have been here for just a few days shy of seven months, but anyway.

I am shortly about to venture out to town with a couple of students to try and find some “Western” ingredients so that we can make tacos in class next week. Which I am excited about. The students always ask me what I used to eat in America, and I invariably have to answer Mexican food, because that was the staple of my diet (after mac and cheese, which they would hate anyway because of the cheese part).

I went to the supermarket by myself last weekend to scope out the food options and found some diced beef and “cheese” that tasted like cream cheese mixed with butter mixed with flavorless gelatin. So cheese is out. But I’m hoping that with luck we’ll be able to find the necessary ingredients for taco shells and salsa, and then we can fry up some chicken or beef and make approximations of tacos.

Things have progressed pretty well the last month or so, despite the lack of posts. I got my residence permit and reimbursement for the Hong Kong trip and an offer to stay indefinitely. Which is cool. I tried to get a new apartment on campus but found that all the other apartments are about in the same shape that mine is in, and when I asked if the newest building we looked at also had rats, I received the reply that every building has rats, with a chuckle. Luckily I have gotten used to them, and they haven’t been in my apartment nearly as much the last few months (mainly because I stopped leaving the screened window open at night, which somehow they were coming in through, although I’ve no idea how).

Next week I’m giving final exams and then family is arriving for a two-week tour of the country. We’re going to get out and explore Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Yangshuo, which is supposed to be one of the nicest and most fun tourist destinations in China.

And I think I am gradually fumbling my way towards being marginally conversational in Chinese. There is still a ton of work to do, but that part of life is always interesting and exciting as it progresses.

This summer a friend and I are gonna try to teach private English classes and that will hopefully bring in enough bread to at least cover my student loan costs for the next year, if it goes really well. If it doesn’t go well, I’m thinking that it will at least be a good experiment in trying to work independently here.

And I met an American who’s been living in this town for three years, volunteering at an orphanage that is somehow linked to his church back home. He’s my age and certainly seems to be doing good work here, so next week I’m going to go to the village where he works and hang out with some kids.

More later. Off to buy taco stuff.

A Chinese friend sent me a link to a video of this guy, Joe Wong, a Chinese-born American stand-up comic performing at the “Annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner” in 2010. At first I got this dinner confused with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which Stephen Colbert spoke at in I think 2006, but it’s a different, lower-profile event (although Joe Biden, as you can see in this video, attended the Joe Wong performance).

I found it pretty damn funny, especially the darker jokes ala life is like pissing in the snow in the middle of the night. I’ll let you watch it and see the punchline. It’s good, and Joe Wong proves that even though there are (from what everybody says) huge differences in the Chinese/American senses of humor, the gap is by no means unbridgable (which is something I’ve found in my time here with English speaking Chinese people too).

I guess as an aside I could mention that the other foreign teacher I met who visited me from Guangzhou told me that it’s nearly impossible to explain knock-knock jokes to her students, and also she said it’s hard to explain sarcasm. Which I believe.

But my response to that is basically that A. knock-knock jokes aren’t funny anyway, so who cares; and B. The people I’ve interacted often seem to get sarcasm — it’s just it’s hard to pick up on tone of voice when you’re a language learner, so the situation has to be fairly obvious. In my classes I seem able to elicit the biggest laughs by combining facial expressions with snyde comments, or by making fun of myself or making myself appear pitiful. Which is basically the only way I know how to be funny anyway, so it works.

There are two interesting posts on the Sinosplice author’s experience with making jokes in Chinese: Post 1; Post 2