Having Fun All The Time

It’s no secret that foreigners get stared at in China. Especially if you have very white or black skin, are especially tall or have non-black hair. You will get stared at a lot. You will have to become comfortable with your appearance, and if you’re not, you’ll have to change it. I’ve done a bit of both in the past two years — changing and getting comfortable with being looked at, and while there are times when it gets overwhelming and I just want to not be noticed by anyone for one minute, just to see what it would be like again, for the most part, I’m OK with it.

There’s another interesting aspect to it, though, aside from my own comfort level with being stared at. That is that other people in my company sometimes get weirded out by the sudden attention they’re getting from all directions.

For example, two weekends ago I was having lunch with a couple of my students. I teach a handful of high school students on Sundays, and usually we have lunch together after class in the food court in the mall downtown. Last weekend we happened to sit next to a whole family, like three generations sitting together, who had come to the clean and modern food court to have their lunch. Naturally, the two old ladies in the family, upon finding themselves seated next to me, could not stop talking about me, my skin, the way I ate, the way I spoke Chinese, the way other foreigners they had seen on the street or on television looked and spoke and ate and etc.

Note that they weren’t talking to me but about me, while sitting to my immediate right. It should have been clear to them that I understood everything they were saying, because I was talking with my students in Chinese. But this fact, that I probably understood, had no affect on them.

It drove my students nuts, however. They couldn’t focus on the conversation at all, and repeatedly went blank-faced when I asked them questions. I didn’t realize that it was because of the conversation going on to my right until the family got up and left and all the students gave sighs of relief, and one of them said, in English, “Finally they go!”

This is not new, however. Early on I learned that my Chinese friend Mike hated walking down the street with me, because all the staring eyes freaked him out. He would often walk behind me until I told him that if he didn’t stop pretended not to know me I was going to ditch him. The people it doesn’t seem to freak out is very pretty women. I was once walking with a very attractive female friend and asked her if all the people staring at us bothered her. “People stare at me all the time,” she said.

I did notice one other thing recently: When I’m walking down a crowded street, the people in front of me (i.e. the ones I’m walking behind) will often turn around to see what is behind them because so many people are staring at the space behind them that they know something is there, they just don’t know what. This is often creepy for me to witness, because it’s like they have eyes in the back of their heads and just intuitively know that a laowai is there. It took me awhile to notice that phenomenon, and now that I have I kind of get a kick out of it.

Which brings me to my last, and funniest thing about being such a spectacle for being white: I learned last year that if I go to McDonald’s and sit on the bench and put my arm around the statue of Ronald McDonald and sit perfectly still, people have no idea if I’m real or not and so slow way down and stare at me until I crack up. Which takes about .005 seconds. I guess it’s immature but it’s probably also the most fun thing I have ever done.

Since it basically feels like summer again, and warm and sunny and nice, I have started jogging again over the past month.

Unfortunately, however, the track and soccer field in the middle of town has been torn down for a new housing development, leaving no public space for working out in the entire city, and no soccer field except two that are inaccessible to the public because they’re at schools.

There have been upset people in town and annoyed people, and there appears even to have been a store that protestied the demolition of the arena by refusing to move their stuff out of the store (their store is built into part of the stadium walls, so they’ve got to go). But mostly people have just dealt with it and started doing ridiculous things, like running in circles in the big apartment park that I live in, or braving the walkway by the river, which constantly has motorcycles zipping along it (even though it’s for pedestrians). I’m in the latter category.

Yesterday when I was coming home from my run it was a beautiful, hot, sunny afternoon. After a few days of rain, people seemed to be celebrating by doing laundry. The faces of the buildings were collages of pinks and greens and blues, sheets and shirts hung out to dry.

Apparently the small scuzzy restaurant on the corner nearest my building had decided to air out their kitchen, too, because as I was walking home I heard a crash from inside the doors, and out came two rats, squeaking madly, with a couple short young cooks in white, but grimy, chef’s coats in pursuit. A girl came out after them, smiling happily at the entertainment. Another rat came running out. I noted that their refrigerator unit appeared to have been pulled away from the wall.

The rats appeared stunned by the sudden sunlight. They ran towards the street, and then ran back towards the shop, but the cooks were chasing them around, and there was nowhere to go but the street or the restaurant. This went on for about 40 seconds, I’d say.

The two Chinese guys were wearing the blue flip-floppy things that I wear in the shower and occasionally when I’m hanging out at home, and that you sometimes see on poor guys from the villages who have come to town to beg, on old ladies out for evening walks, or on extremely casual cooks with questionable personal hygiene. My suspicions of their poor hygiene were confirmed when the shorter guy, with long orange hair reminiscent of a hedgehog, managed to stomp on the head of one of the rats, leaving a smear of blood on the step of the restaurant.

It was a good hit. Even though he was wearing soft rubber flip flops, I got the impression that he had hit some kind of nerve or perhaps given the rat a concussion. It sort of flopped around helplessly for a sec before the other short guy in the grimy white smock gave it a good stomper, crushing it with much more authority, which was easier, now that it was immobile. A little more blood sort of splattered out, and one of the cooks sort of kicked it onto the sidewalk. No time to dally; there were two other rats to deal with. This is all while they’re wearing these flimsy little fucking flip-flops, mind you, which if you were going to ask me to stomp a rat to death I’m not even sure I would do it in combat boots, for fear some globule of rat gore would fly up and hit me in the eye, or something.

The next rat had been pretty much cornered next to the entrance to the restaurant, but it was evading death by flip-flop by virtue of a motorcycle and a few crates of garbage that it was running behind. There was a crack in the wall that would have been amply big enough for the rat to run into and perhaps even re-enter the restaurant, but for some reason it didn’t seem to see the escape route and instead just kept running back and forth madly, trying to escape the blows that rained down around it. The cook had now picked up a crude wooden stool and was attempting to smash the rat with the seating area, and eventually succeeded, crushing some part of the rat’s hindquarters, thereby stunning it, thereby allowing the death blow to be dealt with said crude wooden stool with relative ease by the cook in the grimy whitish-gray smock with the hedgehog hair and the blue rubber flip-flops and the questionable personal hygiene.

Which left rat three. I should note that at no time during this ordeal has any of the onlookers, besides perhaps me, reacted to this scene with anything other than complete absorption and apparent delight. The two stocky young pasty-faced cooks are laughing and grinning and moving about with great enthusiasm, and the very pretty young girl who works as a waitress and is wearing a one-piece blue-and-white uniform advertising some kind of Chinese beer on the apron, and a couple of other onlookers, have seemed pretty much totally happy to be witness to this brutal rat massacre, and I have to admit that even though I find rats repulsive, and in this case I was especially repulsed because I had on many occasions enjoyed the fish and snail dishes at this rather overpriced “cheap restaurant” (so the window claims), I too enjoyed the show, and couldn’t help smiling every time the rat again evaded the pudgy little cook guy. There was something really funny, and gross, about the little rat managing to escape him because of a pile of trash and a motorcycle. But the others seemed to more think just funny.

The glee of the audience is important here because at this point a motorcycle driver, who had just been parked on this corner waiting for fares, decided that he wanted to have a go, and joined the fray. This proved the rat’s undoing, because with the pudgy hedgehog-haired cook guy on the outside of the garbage and the motorcycle cabbie wearing a white helmet on the inside, they were able to do a pincer motion, thereby, through pure strategy and superior cognitive ability, eliminate the rat’s chances of escape.

It was the moto-cabbie who did it. He sort of poked at the rat with his toe, leaning his body back and stretching his foot forward in a jabbing motion because he couldn’t quite reach past the trash and the motorcycle with his full flat foot, and something about that quick sharp poke totally wrecked the rat’s game, and that was it, it was stunned, and the moto-cabbie sort of dragged the rat out by clamping down on its rear end with his toe and clawing backward with his sneaker, the way you might try to trap a dropped roll of toilet paper with your foot if you didn’t want or couldn’t get up from the toilet seat, and then he, and it wasn’t so gross to me, somehow to see a person actually wearing shoes to do this, stomped the rat sharply, obviously killing it.

Everybody seemed pretty proud and celebratory, and I did notice one woman who had stopped to watch the hunt immediately continue on her walk after the death of the third rat, looking somewhat perplexed and troubled, and I too decided to move on, sort of trying to forget about it but also feeling that this kind of made me less afraid of rats, in a way, and more confident that the next time I encounter a rat in my home (if there’s a next time) I’ll know how to kill it, as in the past I’ve always been afraid to try the stomping method with rats, out of a fear, mostly, that blood would splatter everywhere the way it does when you stomp a fat and juicy bug.

I’ve also been thinking about studying Buddhism lately and thinking a bit more about what it has to say about treatment of life forms and thinking more critically about my consumption of animals and how I still have no way to really justify it that is in any way ethical, but I’m not all the way there yet.

I also decided promptly after witnessing the rat killing never to eat at that overpriced restaurant ever again. And also not to talk to those pudgy little hedgehog cooks any more. I always thought they smiled a little psychotically whenever I went into their restaurant, and the service was terrible.

_____

In a completely unrelated note, I have learned how to play a Taylor Swift song on the guitar and how to sing it, after one of my students shared his almost total obsession with the American country-pop singer a couple weeks ago. (Many students have told me they really like her songs and I try to teach stuff they like, and they like nothing more than learning songs.) This is, needless to say, a serious blow to my sense of manhood and my trust in my own musical taste, but even worse is the fact that after I learned the song I actually kind of liked it, which is very confusing for me.

———

I also recently learned that the reason so many old Chinese men have hideously long hairs growing out of moles on their faces is because Chinese medicine teaches (supposedly) that plucking or removing those hairs can make the mole cancerous. I had previously, and erroneously, it turns out, been told (by a foreigner — the recent correction came from a Chinese) that it was because they thought those disgusting long hairs were good luck. This is typical: it’s amazing how many things I’ve had to re-learn multiple times about Chinese and Chinese culture, because of poor translations, miscommunications, or just bad information. It’s funny, because if I had stayed here for just like three months and then gone home I could have talked like nonstop about China and it probably would have all been garbage. It’s entirely possible that that’s still the case, although I hope not.

_______

All for today. End of trans.

Last year at about this time, I was moving into a friend’s apartment to stay for the month of June while he went back to his home country (Camaroon) to see his family. My friend was another foreign teacher at the college, and he had long paid for his own apartment in the city center, even though the college also provided housing on campus for us foreign teachers.

The place was pretty spartan. He had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small bathroom with no hot water and a dining room slash living room. He had furnished the apartment with a folding aluminum table in the kitchen, about five blue plastic stools, a more than 10-year-old bed in the bedroom, a typewriter stand with a computer on it next to the bed, a TV on a TV stand in the corner of the bedroom, and a bamboo mat on the floor of the second bedroom. There was a poster of a young Chinese pop-star-looking model half torn off the wall of the second bedroom (left by the previous resident) and a laminated picture of a Chinese woman that a student of his had cut from red paper. Aside from a refrigerator that stood in the kitchen with a bowl sitting on top of it, and built-in closets full of clothes, that was all that he had in the apartment. He had lived there for more than a year.

Despite the black hole of charm that this apartment represented, however, it was an improvement from my previous living situation. The apartment I had on the college campus was old and unclean, and located too far from the city. So I was glad to move into my friend’s apartment in the city.

His apartment quickly proved to be not to my liking, though, mostly due to a serious roach problem. I remember one night in particular that I was spending with my girlfriend at the time, after we entered the apartment I turned on the light, and then quickly turned it off again. “Are you afraid of cockroaches?” I asked her in Chinese.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait outside for a minute,” I said. She stepped outside, I went back in, turned on the light, killed as many Cheeto-sized roaches as I could before they all scattered out of sight (about three or four), and then poked my head out the door. “OK, you can come in now,” I said.

After that, I simply decided to move into the newest building I could find in the city. This is an urge I have never had before in any place. I’ve always gravitated towards old places, places that I thought had more of an austere look and seemed a bit weathered. But that changed after I dealt for a while with dirt, roaches, rats and bats. I became a lover of new things, and in this way came to understand, to some degree, not to romanticize poverty or to intuitively reject development as an idea.

This is all a rambling way to introduce the place where I now live, which is called “Sunny City”. Before I moved in here the place looked ridiculous to me: about 20 brand-new apartment buildings in a huge cluster, built on top of an underground shopping mall. The buildings are all around 20-stories, which by my reckoning means there are around 2,000 or more apartment units, which is pretty vast. The grounds are all nicely landscaped and well tended. There is at-your-door garbage pickup. There are security cameras. Like most Chinese construction, the buildings are already showing signs of wear and deficient building — there’s a crack in the wall of my bedroom, and for some reason for months all the kitchen fans on this side of the building seemed to blow backwards directly into my apartment through my kitchen fan. So that was awesome. But other than that, it’s mostly OK. I haven’t killed any roaches or wild animals in my home for a year, which has been very nice.

But there is one thing that is maddening about the place — one thing that I realized recently would never be accepted in the U.S.: the noise.

The thing about Sunny City is that the buildings were considered complete before any of the apartments’ interiors had been designed or built. Half of the apartments in the park haven’t been sold or lived in yet. That means that even though there are already a ton of people living here, every time an apartment is sold it must be built on the inside. They are selling these fuckers a la carte. And building an apartment’s interior is, it turns out, very loud.

Last weekend they were resurfacing a wall in a unit just below mine, which mean that there was a guy with a hammer and chisel taking the tiles and the concrete binding agent off the wall, and it took him four days. He started at 7:45 every morning. I know this because the noise sounded like it was right next to my head, and it was impossible to sit in my apartment without feeling like I was going nuts when the chiseling was going on. It lasted about six hours each day. No writing happened on those days. At one point I resorted to picking up a corner of my very heavy bed and slamming it on the floor, in the hope that it might make him stop (yes, clearly illogical).

At one point, I remembered with nostalgia the nice notes the landlady used to put up in the elevator in my apartment in Portland, Ore. when the water was going to be off for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 10:30, when no one was going to be home anyway. Even then the notes seemed absurd. Just turn off the water, lady — do you really think we’re gonna complain? I used to think. Now the elevator note seems like an exotic and incredible fairy tale. Nobody else in this building seemed particularly disturbed by the hammering last week. It just happened, and people accepted it. And this happens all the time. People are much more willing to accept rude and abrupt intrusions into their personal space and nice quiet bubble, to an extent that Americans’ finickiness and insistence that others’ respect their personal space and right to peace and quiet and safety seems completely absurd.

The best example I can think of is that the last time I went home, I was shocked to learn that you’re not allowed to use cell phone on long-range buses in the U.S. I had forgotten this in my time in China. The idea that someone was telling me not to make phone calls to respect others’ who might want to rest seemed laughable when I heard it, but it was great when I wanted to take a nap. You never find that here. It seems a long range bus ride is a license for the loudest imaginable person to start shouting into his cell phone here.

This idea extends to so many things in life, including accepting the decisions of authority. I have been astonished to see the gentle, almost blithe acceptance by people here of decisions from above — decisions that make me bridle as though someone had taken away one of my basic rights, or denied me food, or something. In my first couple of months of teaching there was a sports meet at the university for which all classes would be canceled for a couple days, and I didn’t find out about it two days before. How could they not tell me? I said to myself. Don’t they know that if they had told me a head of time I could have planned some travel, or something? Now I’m just going to sit at home with nothing to do. I was sincerely, unashamedly pissed off. Then the next day, when, because of rain, the sports meet was canceled and class was back on the following day, I was even more pissed. What if I had made plans to travel somewhere?! I chafed.

But people around me just accepted it, as I’ve seen them do time after time here over the past two years. An order comes down from above, and everybody follows it. There is no use complaining. Complaining only makes people upset and angry. You’re better off just going along with it.

The cultural difference was hammered home last week when I was describing to my Chinese teacher an ordeal involving an alum from my college in the U.S., who I had helped the university invite to China to teach. They had strung him along for a month, saying that the position, and then at the last minute, in a mysterious, completely unexplained twist of events, they had changed their minds and said they had enough foreign teachers. He had put off job searching for a month and several people had spent a lot of time communicating to prepare for his trip out, not to mention the Chinese books he bought to get ready, and the kind of mental preparations you have to make for a trip like that. But the word came down from above, and the people who informed him and me of the change passed on the information nonchalantly, as if they couldn’t imagine a world in which another option aside from indifferent acceptance was possible.

When I told my teacher about this, I used the word “disappointment”, cuozhe, and her reaction was confusion.

“No, I think that word is too strong,” she said. “You should use a lighter word.” Her eyes looked straight ahead as she searched for a word, as if the story didn’t even warrant a negative label — really, as if this was actually how things should have gone. Then she came up with a word. “This is just a small trouble,” she said, using xiao (meaning small) and mafan, which is the kind of word you use when you don’t want to put ketchup on your fries because opening the little foil ketchup packet is too mafan. “You can just call it a small trouble.”

By now I could almost expect this reaction, and I felt a weird mix of guilt but also frustration. Guilt because I knew for a fact that she, my teacher, had experienced much worse in her life than I could ever imagine, and therefore really did see the problem as just a small trouble; and frustration, of course, because I am an American, and some part of me — I would even say some slightly spoiled, self-righteous part (characteristics that aren’t necessarily always bad) — wanted to insist. No, this is not just a small trouble, he wanted to say. This is a tragedy!

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who is famous for lots of reasons, one of which his work “Sunflower Seeds” which is now at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

AiWW's work "Sunflower Seeds" consists of 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds on the floor of the gallery, which visitors could walk on and pick up and play with (until last month when they closed the exhibit to visitors because they were worried about dust from the seeds)

At the moment it seems he is famous for a party that he is holding at his studio in Shanghai this Sunday. He’s inviting (from what I hear) anybody who wants to come to his studio to feast on river crab (10,000 of them).

The Chinese word for river crab (he2xie4) sounds similar to the word “harmonize” or “harmonious” (he2xie2), which is the govt slang term for what happens to things on the Internet here that daddy don’t likey.

Another work of Ai Weiwei's from a series called "finger". He was also profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year

Which is, in turn, what is happening to AiWW’s art studio in Shanghai, which apparently he spent about 7 million yuan on (or $1 m ). The government has ordered that the studio be destroyed for reasons that to my layman’s eye appear to be the bureaucratic disguise of a politically motivated act (but you can read the actual story here or here).

The reason I know about this is only because a friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in going to the party in Shanghai, which is being held this weekend, but I declined because I’m just too busy for the next two weeks to do anything but work.

But it sounds interesting. I can’t really tell how many people are planning to go but it seems like a pretty cool, quiet kind of implicit but acquiescent disagreement. The plan, from what I’ve heard/read, is just to eat crab and commemorate the destruction of the place.

My friend also mentioned that the organizers are offering to reimburse a share of some peoples’ travel expenses, but I don’t see that in any of the news stories about the party. And he said that they’re giving everybody two ceramic sunflower seeds.

There’s also a great movie about the making of the 100 million sunflower seeds that I really like because it goes to the little Chinese town where they manufactured them and there are little clips of Chinese women working that are so perfectly real. Like pretty Chinese girls in high heels sitting in an old shabby run-of-the-mill building and painting probably thousands of those seeds a day. At one point AiWW asks a woman how much money she’s made and she says about 2 or 3 thousand yuan (if my Chinese serves).

The video’s here: YouTube

Or here: Youku

AiWW also helped design the famous Bird’s Nest, aka the Beijing National Stadium, which was the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and which is really important to a lot of people here. Especially last year people often mentioned the bird’s nest to me with a little glow of pride, and when I was in Beijing with my family this summer several people suggested that we check it out. It is pretty impressive. (Although AiWW later denounced it, classic rockstar move almost bordering on cliche but whatever.)

The Bird's Nest in Beijing, the architectural centerpiece for the Olympics in 2008

Oh yeah, I guess he also got a bit of a doffing by the police as a result of an art project of his in 2008…which ultimately resulted in him having to get brain surgery. I don’t want to find my site harmonized as well (I don’t have a fancy VPN anymore) so I guess I’ll just leave it at that, since I don’t have anything original to say on the subject anyway.

Except that there will be no exciting trip to Shanghai for me…too much stuff to do, I’m afraid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Have you eaten?

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the pros of the past three months in China has been the stabilizing effect it has had on my eating and sleeping habits.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that a very common greeting in this area (and, as I understand it, throughout a lot of China) is, “have you eaten?”

I get asked this question like 5+ times a day, and not just when it is around lunchtime. Students often ask me this at 10:30 in the morning, when it is not clear whether we are closer to breakfast or lunchtime. I usually see my students in front of the main dining halls in the middle of campus. When they see me, an expression usually forms on their face that is something like a confused, dazed, interested smile. The expression is utterly unique and fascinating and is reproduced almost every time I see a student who knows me.

They then say, quietly, “Hello, Mr. Will. Have you eaten yet?”

I think the funny, friendly, gentle look they give me is a mixture of panic (at having to compose an English sentence on the spot to greet me), warmth (at seeing a teacher), and concern (foreigner = lost white man).

The question they ultimately pose to me (after groping around in their minds for the right English words and sentence structure) is usually funny in two ways: first, because what meal is never specified; and second, because it has no actual connection to any possibility of our eating together. The answer — “yes, I have eaten,” or “no, I haven’t eaten” — is as inconsquential as the “good” we English speakers give when asked “How are you?” (which question, by the way, Chinese students know very well, because they shout it at me all the time as I walk across campus — more as a blunt statement than a question).

The second big reason “have you eaten?” is so funny is because of the ruthless order that students seem to impose opon their day here. When I first arrived in China, I often ate lunch at 12:30 or 1 p.m., and dinner at 5:30 or 6 p.m. That kind of a dining schedule is almost unimaginable to some students, I think. About 80 to 90 percent of them, as far as I can observe, start eating lunch somewhere between 11:45 and 12, no earlier or later. The dining hall is all but deserted at 1:05, and it is impossible to get anything that isn’t cold and slimy after 1:25.

All of which is to say that if a student sees me at 12:45 p.m. and asks me if I have eaten, and I haven’t, they usually say, “Oh, why so late?”

So, after struggling to answer this question repeatedly in my first few weeks here, I started just eating lunch at 11:45, and dinner at 5 or 5:30, and leaving my former, just-wing-it, unscheduled eating pattern to the dogs.

Which is actually a lot easier than avoiding eating until late in the day and then wandering around, starved and wild-eyed, desperate for something to eat (which is how I always used to do it).

Another hilarious thing that I will add as a poscript is that students love to give me fruit. I’ll be walking along somewhere, maybe having just finished lunch, and I’ll see a student I know, and he or she will be carrying some fruit, and without fail he or she will offer me a piece of fruit from the bag, if not the whole bag. Students will look exactly as if they have just gone shopping for some fruit for themselves, be coming directly out of the fruit store, see me, and then hand me the bag of fruit and say, “this is for you” and then walk away as if they had planned to give me the fruit all along. It is profoundly weird and funny and sweet.

I think it is the trademark of any neurotic person to constantly be in a state of anxiety and worry over things that he or she has done in the past that were idiotic.

I am, I think it is fair to say, one such person. I have, in the past, spent a lot of time worrying, fretting and hair-pulling over past infractions and offenses I committed, both real and imagined. The habit might have some practical purpose, but to all appearances it is just a way of burning up excess mental energy, or something. It seems to go everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and to generally do me no good in the process.

I hope, in this post, to illustrate for you some of the ways in which China is obliterating that self-conscious, neurotic part of me.

Or at least suspending it. I’ve only been here a week, so maybe that trait of mine is just on vacay while I get my head screwed back on.

The best example I can give you of how sheer circumstance destroyed all possibility of my being self-conscious by sheer self-consciousness overload was in the fact that, upon arriving here, I somehow caused the entire water system of the south end of campus to cease functioning for two days. All water flow stopped. That included showers, sinks, washing machines….everything but toilets. Southern campus includes my building, where I and one other foreign teacher live, some campus nurses offices, and two large apartment/dorm buildings where on-campus faculty live—I would guess that there are several hundred of them in those two buildings, judging by the size.

So within a day of getting here, I knock out the water for virtually all residential faculty at the university. And, I don’t even know it. All that I knew at the time was that I had flown halfway around the world to China, that I had been moving for around 35-40 hours straight, and that I desperately wanted a shower, and that I couldn’t have one for my first three days here. Which wasn’t a big deal – I was able to sponge bathe with some cold water in a bucket – but I was worried about whether the water situation would get fixed, or if I was experiencing a new and unprecedented status quo. I was persistently reminding my liaison that the water wasn’t working, and hoping that eventually he would prove correct when he said, “It will work tonight”.

So, eventually, the water got fixed. And only then did I find out that it had been out for the two faculty buildings, as well. That, let me make clear, was not my fault. Apparently a pipe in my building was broken, which meant no water to my place;so then, when the school’s workers attempted to fix that pipe, the whole water system went down. So the teachers’ water was only out a day. But, still, the water going out coincided with my arrival. Great.

This kind of thing—committing some real or imagined offense, unintentionally or by no fault of my own—seems to happen at least a few and perhaps several times a day here, in little microcosms of the whole experience of making a mistake, realizing the mistake, and then feeling like an idiot. Except I think that at this stage in my China life, I am so unaware of all the mistakes that I am probably making, all the weird little cultural faux pas that I may or may not be committing every time I open my mouth or leave my apartment, that I can only think that at some later stage, some more experienced, wiser version of myself will do that old thing – look back on me and think: what an idiot.

The good thing about making mistake after mistake after mistake, however, is that it generally doesn’t matter, and it actually becomes fun for me to be willing to make mistakes and to make a fool out of myself, a lot of the time. It is actually quite liberating. More when it comes to the small stuff, though – it’s not liberating to ruin the showering prospects of hundreds of people.

For instance, today, when I was trying to order lunch, for some reason, a student left a 5 yuan bill on the tray counter for me, in order (presumably) to pay for my lunch. I was oblivious to the 5 yuan that was lying on the counter next to me, but after I ordered, the students around me pointed to it and told me to take it. Of course, I paid for my own lunch and left the bill there, not understanding that someone had left it for me. So some students actually followed me as I walked to the tables and gave me the money. I muttered thank you in Chinese to them, and then scanned the room, trying to find the likely suspect (the one who had bought me lunch). I spotted a table of three students who were eyeing me with curiosity, and, assuming that it was they who had dropped the 5-spot, I went to their table and sat down and crashed their lunch. It turned out none of them really spoke English, so for the 20 minutes I sat there trying to converse using what little basic Chinese I know and shouting (basically) at them in very slow English. They also hadn’t bought my lunch.

It was, in a way, a complete disaster, socially speaking. But it was also a hell of a lot more fun than sitting by myself eating lunch.

There are like a million other examples. One involves what happened tonight, when I went to the convenience store with three other students and bought an 18 pack of bottled water.

They all looked at me quizzically when I put the heavy cube of water bottles on the counter.

What do you need that for? They asked.

For drinking, I said.

I bought the severely overpriced water before realizing that I had pulled the case of water from a stack of packed bottled waters that the store actually breaks open to sell individually. The students didn’t even have to explain to me that I should be bottling and refrigerating boiled water, not buying bottled water for 20 yuan a case. I could tell by the aghast expressions on their faces. But it took me a few minutes of reflection to figure all that out.

But then, after I realized what their shocked expressions were all about, I carried the 15-ish pounds of water home feeling all right. It was heavy, it was overpriced, it was a waste of plastic, but at least I figured something new out. I learned something. Even if I had to make an ass out of myself to do it.

There will be many, many more lessons to learn here. In the meantime, I will have to keep making a total buffoon out of myself every day. But at least I’m not sitting around wondering when I’m going to make an ass out of myself next. And I have water.

I guess I should also mention that I have no idea how to order food in China, really. I have learned how to say the names of a few dishes, so I am good to order pig heart noodles, or dumplings in broth with a side of peanut noodles, or mussel and beef broth noodles, but if I want anything new or different I basically have to go to the dining hall and stand in front of the kitchen and gesture madly and talk in very slow and deliberate English with whatever student happens to be nearby, asking him or her to help me order anything, anything, as long as he or she teaches me how to say the dish’s name in Chinese.

So, things are fun. I am learning and managing to stay fed and alive. I would like to write a post about teaching at some point, since that seems to take up the majority of my time and anxiety so far (since I have never really taught before), but it also seems the most mundane of all the subjects I have to choose from. But, nonetheless, I’ll reflect on teaching soon.

Thanks for reading HFATT.

This post is my first dispatch from China. It’s a little bit of a departure from the previous few posts on Having Fun All The Time, but not really, in a way. After all, the reason I came to China is that I thought it would allow me to come a little closer to the eponymous goal of HFATT. And I am here to say, after two months of packing, form-filling-out-ing, moving across the country and then compressing all my belongings into two big bags, tearful goodbyes, one very long flight and then another shorter flight, etc, etc – I am here to say that maybe the eponymous goal has come closer to being achieved. Because China has naptime.

Let me back up a notch, for a sec. I really love naptime. Really love it. And two months ago, while I was still in America (Portland, Ore. to be specific), there was nothing I reviled more about my life than the fact that I was denied the god-given right to nap. And there were some things that I really didn’t like. Like the fact that I stared at a computer screen, zombie-like, for nine hours a day. Or the fact that most of my very close friends were very far away. And then the main thing I didn’t like, which was working so much for corporate interests that I eschew. (Which, by the way, if you’ve seen Michael Moore’s latest movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, he really hit home with me when he talked about how when young people in America become buried in student loans they often have to go work for big banks and financial institutions just to get by and pay their student loans….I think the quote from the movie was, “every day, just by existing, they make the world worse”.) Yeah, I think that’s a natural reaction for someone with any kind of conscientious worldview who ends up working for a financial institution.

That was a serious digression. What I meant to say was that I believe that all people should be allowed to have naps, and in the town in China where I now live, the town I arrived at only few days ago (Monday, October 12), many, and perhaps even most of the people, nap.

Classes here start at around 8 a.m., or a little earlier. The students sing songs, and move from class to class in their respective departments for most of the morning. And then, around 11:30 or noon, just about everything shuts down. The students and teachers go get lunch, they chat over food, then they file back to their dorms, offices, homes. They go chill. They go nap, and stuff.

Almost each day I’ve been here until today, I have had lunch with students for one reason or another, and they have invariably asked me, a little after noontime, if I felt tired, if I wanted to go have a rest. Initially, I was a little surprised by this, and thought that maybe the asked me if I was sleepy because they thought I would be worn out, or something, by the immersion in an unfamiliar environment. But now I think it might have been just because they were sleepy.

Today, I got out of class at about 10:45 a.m. and walked back to my apartment without stopping for food. It seemed a little early for food and I wasn’t hungry, and I was a little eager to get back home to change. So, I came home and changed, and then watched an episode of the Wire (as I think is becoming my custom), and read a little, and answered some students’ questions online, and did some laundry, etc, and then by the time I headed out for food it was around 2:30. I circled around the campus and found that, having served lunch to students and teachers, the noodle shop cooks and proprietors had shut down their kitchens and turned off the lights, leaving the doors open but the stoves off. No one was eating in any of the restaurants on campus. I walked out the back gates of campus and discovered that, again, no one was eating or cooking. I spotted the occasional shop keeper, seated at a table in a small dining room, on the little neon-colored plastic stools they keep at the tables, most of them slumped over, their heads on their arms, in states of total rest.

Finally I turned around to head back to campus, thinking that I would rather wait till dinner to eat than spoil someone else’s naptime (my respect for naptime is great), when the security guard for the college hollered at me from the back gate, and jogged toward me. Pointing at the noodle shop I was headed away from, he shouted that I should eat there, which roused the 25-ish-year-old cook, who had been seated in a wide-backed chair with his feet up on another chair, facing away from the door and out a window that looked down on gabled roofs and further mountains, the lights out, drowsing.

I gave in to the security guard and followed him inside, and asked for noodles. The security guard asked me if I wanted an egg. Dan. Yow. After a minute, the cook brought me a big bowl of steaming noodles with radish leaves (I think) and a fried egg on top. He sleepily sauntered over to the television and turned it on, and returned to his chair. The TV sound came on, but the screen was a snowy blue. He seemed unperturbed, but there was no question I had ruined his nap.

But I got lunch, and sleepily walked back to my apartment. I am still, physically, in the Eastern Standard Time Zone of the US, so my clock might be a little off. I have only been here four-ish days. But I like the fact that I can nap if I want to, and I probably will later. I realize that the hour and a half class I taught this morning was really the only thing I had to do today. Everything else is optional. A couple of months ago, that would have terrified me – well, it’s an hour and a half, I would have thought, but it’s still teaching English in China to people who have challenges speaking English when you have never really even taught before. Yes, yes, I would tell myself if I could talk to that former self—but there’s naptime.

The lush, green hills around the university are usually shrouded in a haze that is part humidity, part smog. The air is heavy with water and dust. It is warm. The sounds of campus tend to echo around between buildings and among the mountains around us. It is afternoon. It is time to nap.