Having Fun All The Time

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.

I first learned that I would have to leave the mainland on my last day of classes for the semester, about three weeks ago. My liaison in the Foreign Affairs Office at the college, who was supposed to be taking care of all the visa issues, called to tell me that two packages had arrived, and after giving me the packages she said, “Also, there is something very important that I have to tell you about.” 

She took out a piece of paper that she had showed me about two weeks prior, the working license that allowed me to legally work at the university (and which she said was the last thing we needed before I could get a working visa to stay at the college). She pointed to just below the header, where the letter directed the holder of the working license to report to the nearest Chinese embassy in the United States to get a working visa. 

The last time she had showed me the license, I had not noticed that crucial detail. And after months of nail-biting, hair-pulling, ad politely trying to not be a nuisance but also still persistently question her about when I would finally be legal in the country…I was tired of thinking about it. I just wanted the school to take care of it. I did not understand one crucial thing about the situation I had found myself in, which was that they had told me what I had wanted to hear regarding the visa situation before I came to China, and I had let myself believe them. Everything that happened after that was white noise. For three months I had pestered the Foreign Affairs Office people about my visa, and for three months they had essentially avoided telling me what they knew all along — I would have to leave the country, on my own, to get the visa I would eventually need, and, as an added bonus, I would be expected to pay for that trip. 

This revelation, on the last day of classes, deflated me and almost squashed me. I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt used, I felt stupid. But I quickly realized (after yelling about it to myself and discussing it over the phone with a couple of key people) that there was nothing I could do about the trip out of the country. I would have to do that, either way. The only thing I could really do anything about was determining who would pay for the trip. 

So I spent a day negotiating with the college and eventually, with the help of a key person at the school, got an extra few hundred U.S. dollars out of them. They agreed that they would refund me for my actual travel ticket, that they would throw in a little extra money for accommodations, and I would go. That was the best I could get without outright threatening to leave the college, which, if I were a more stubborn or hard-nosed person, I would have done. 

I booked a train ticket to Shenzhen. There is a train that passes through Sanming, Fujian and goes all the way to Shenzhen, which is almost directly north of Hong Kong and adjacent to it. I would take the train to Shenzhen the day before my tourist visa would run out, then I would cross customs in LuoHu, which is part of Shenzhen and actually in the same train terminal where I would be arriving, and then, if all went well, I would simply get on the Hong Kong MTA system and head into HK. 

So, I waited. There were about two or three weeks between when I learned that I would be going to HK and when I actually left. Waiting was not the easiest thing I have ever done, because the entire time I was thinking about the fact that there was no guarantee at all that I would be able to return to the mainland. I was heading out of the country just as my tourist visa was expiring on the hope that I would be able to return on a working visa, finally, after being in the country for almost four months. I finished grades for all my students, begrudgingly since I felt that the school was seriously not doing its job in supporting me as a foreign teacher and therefore why should I do my job until they started doing theirs. But I did the grades anyway, submitted them to the college’s intranet and waited some more. Some teachers came by for a party at my place. We ate rat. It was actually a ton of fun. I felt less bad about the whole situation and the people involved. We all went out for karaoke. It was, again, a ton of fun. I felt a little less bad again. The dean in my department and others invited me to spend the Spring Festival with them in their hometowns when I returned from HK. I felt less bad again, and as the time for my leaving arrived I finally decided that whatever happened, whatever the reason was for why I was leaving with no guarantee that I would return, to wait in HK for some indeterminate amount of time for the Foreign Affairs Office to swap my paperwork so I could get the visa in HK — whatever happened, I was totally confident that there were people who really wanted me there, teaching, at the university. They did appreciate my presence, even if a behemoth bureaucratic system, and various slip-ups and textbook cases of miscommunication had seriously gotten in the way. I at least felt welcome, still, as I was leaving. Which helped. 

So with classes and grades and everything else done I packed up almost all of my stuff, or at least everything that I could carry, into two huge backpacks and a messenger bag and set out at 1:30 a.m. to catch the train that would take me to Shenzhen. One of the teachers picked me up and he very kindly waited with me at the train station and helped me find the train car when it arrived. Which was very lucky for me, because there was a lot of running and shouting involved. Apparently the trains tend to only stop for a couple of minutes at each station. So if you have over 100 pounds of gear on you it is not so easy to navigate, read the signs of trains, and try to process train stewardesses speaking Chinese. 

But it worked out. I got on the train, found my car, got into bed, and slept. I woke up at around 7 a.m. and looked out the window. The air outside was smoggy and the sun was up and the countryside looked almost as it had the day before, only a little flatter. We were moving away from the endless egg-crate-like mountains of Fujian, southwest, into Guangdong. There was still only one other passenger in the four-bed soft-sleeper room with me, a young woman, maybe about 23 or 24, with a pale, overwhelmed looking face and a soft voice. I had listened to her talk on the phone in a plaintive, almost whiney Chinese the night before. The only thing I had understood was “Wo hen kun, wo hen kun” — I’m very sleepy. I had been on the top bunk on the front end of the room, listening to Chinese lessons on my iPod as I fell asleep, while she was on the bottom bunk on the other side of the tiny room. I had also been able to smell the shampoo-scent of her hair, for some reason, whenever she moved. Probably because I already smelled like sweat and nerves. I don’t know why I was so worried about the whole thing, now, in retrospect. As I fell asleep, I was less worried than I had been at 11 p.m. earlier that night, waiting to get on the train.

After waking up at 7 a.m., I quickly fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until 11 a.m. After an hour or so of reading I got up and moved around a bit, ate, read some more, and then finally decided to try to talk to the girl in the cab with me. Using Chinese, I managed to find out that we would be arriving at about 3:30 p.m., that she was also headed to Hong Kong via Shenzhen, that her parents lived in Hong Kong so she often went there, and that she was, amazingly, a secretary at the very college where I am a teacher. And that she had seen me around campus before. It occurred to me later, after she helped me find my way to customs and the subway to HK, that I never asked her for her name. But I’m hoping that next semester I will be able to find her and thank her. It was not easy for her, I’m sure, to communicate those very basic things to me in Chinese. And the last thing she told me, that once we got to the train station I would be able to tell where to go by the signs inside the station, I didn’t understand until after we actually got off the train and she pointed to a sign that said Hong Kong and she repeated the word — “biao1 zhi4″ that she had used so many times back in the train cabin, while I sat searching through my dictionary, befuddled — which word means “sign” (or as my dictionary defined it, to my confusion, “logo”), as in “YOU CAN JUST READ THE SIGNS”.

As a language teacher, I can totally and exhaustively sympathize with the frustration she must have felt trying to speak to me in Chinese, as I feel that frustration trying to speak to my students in English. But I also know from experience that speaking with someone of a different language takes practice, patience, and the ability to closely monitor your own words and simplify your sentences. Practice, that is, that you maybe only get if you’re a language learner or teacher. 

So, the train got to Shenzhen, I got off, I followed the girl through the train station, and finally we had to split at customs, where Hong Kongers and Chinese people split with foreigners. We waved and I said thank you, and I went to the foreigners customs area. 

The line for Hong Kongers and Chinese looked brutally long, but it took me about five minutes to pass through the foreigners line, and I walked straight down, again following the signs that said “Hong Kong”, to the LuoHu MTA station, used the ATM to get some HK Dollars, bought a subway ticket, and got on. This was when I finally started to get the surreal and exhilirating and confusing feeling that I was going back into something, essentially a kind of world that I had known before, for most of my life, but that I had been living very far away from, without realizing it, for quite some time. 

That description of what I felt sucks. It’s hard to describe. First there’s the fact that I hadn’t seen, looked in the eyes of, shaken the hand of, a native English speaker in four months…it feels strange to mention it, but honestly I also hadn’t seen a caucasian person in four months, which had been a quiet point of interest in my mind. It doesn’t matter at all, but it has relevance purely because of the undeniable role that my caucasian-ness had played in my life in Fujian. As in, people staring, people shouting hello, people continuously turning and saying to their friends, “Ni kan, laowai” — “Look, a foreigner” — wherever I went, all the time. And because of the fact that I had begun to wear my own skin differently, but had not had time or opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that, to step outside the situation, to see it all how I would have seen it if it were someone else experiencing it, not me. 

That’s what I started to think, standing on the subway, a few short miles from Hong Kong Island. I was suddenly very happy, for no one reason that I could pinpoint. I was smiling to myself, even as I realized that compared to all the clean, well-dressed, sophisticated Hong Kongers around me I looked decidedly shabby, my shoes were extremely dirty, and I did not exactly smell like something off a page of “Vanity Fair”. I was stinky, I had a huge load of bags with me on the subway, I was not sure exactly where my hostel was located and I was, despite the excessive sleep on the train, tired. But I was happy to be in Hong Kong. 

I was glad I had made it. 

: )

A contest….guess what I ate for dinner tonight…

You get three hints:

Hint #1: Here's the fully prepared dish, bottom left. It tasted a bit like jerky, due to the seasoning.

Yeah, so hint #1 is impenetrable, I know. But wait, there’s more…

Hint #2: Season, dried, and about to be quartered. Viewing this beheading was a kind of twisted revenge for me, having lived with the suckers for some 3-odd months.

If that doesn’t do it for you, I think hint number three will…

Hint #3: Yep, that is the hintquarters of a mouse being lopped off. I ate with relish. These mice were raised to be eaten, so don't get freaked out and think I am in China eating sewer rats, here...

On a mostly unrealted note, we also captured the bat that has been living in my air conditioner since I moved in. I have some pretty gruesome pics of the bat being offed as well, but so as not to provoke the PETA gods, I will forebear to post those tonight…

To pre-empt any possible rat/mouse strikes this evening, I have re-set my rat traps in the bathroom (I found some little rat poop in there today, the first rat evidence I have found in about two months), the kind that kill on impact, so as far as my means go they are as humane as possible, and I (regretfully) am hoping to find some more cold, dead rat corpses in my apartment in the morn.

T-minus 12 days until the solo trip to Hong Kong. Wish me luck.

Hope you all are well.

: )

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the wedding reception of one of my older students.

The happy couple bowing to assembled friends and family.

The wedding reception was rather like a wedding reception back home. There were 100+ family mambers and friends in attendance, and the bride and groom spent most of the evening strolling from table to table, toasting people and thanking people for coming.

A table all ready for some tasty dishes. Note the round glass plate that conveniently spins, allowing all at table to enjoy the many dishes that comprise each meal. And the watermelon seeds. One weird thing about the dinner -- there was an unexplained Bandaid on the soy sauce bottle. Ew.

We ate, and then after dinner went to the newlyweds’ new condo to have some tea and play some traditional Chinese wedding games, which were a little risqué.

The games included the following:

• The bride lighting cigarettes for all the men in the room, while everyone around her tried to blow out the lighter.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to snatch, using only their mouths, a piece of candy dangled down to them on a string by a friend standing on a chair.
• The bride and groom simultanously trying to lift, using only their tongues, a chopstick from a big beer bottle.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to convince me to eat some puffed rice that had been strewn all over their bed, telling me in broken English that it had something to do with good luck and with their likelihood of having a son, and then me eating said puffed rice to widespread applause.

I have some photos of those games, too, but am not sure about the privacy boundaries regarding post-wedding risqué games, and so will have to let you use your imagination.

All in all the wedding was fun, and I was glad I went, and as a bonus I learned a couple of new Chinese blessings:

Zao sheng gui zi — Meaning something like, I hope you have a boy and therefore implicitly not a girl (that was the translation I was given, anyhow)

Bai tou xie lao — Meaning something like, I hope you grow old together happily

I also got some action photos from the same class…

Teaching outside on a sunny day...students sometimes say I look very serious when I teach, which I guess I can see from this photo.

And number 2…

Teaching outside, same class, Cosby sweater.

And number 3…

If I had known that one day English language-learners would have to read my handwriting on a blackboard, I would have worked harder at my penmanship. Apologies for my creepy lack of a face in this picture.

And finally, KTV (karaoke) on Christmas Eve. Oy, there was a lot of drinking, and I nearly ruined my phone by dropping it on the hard tile floor, and I nearly got blown up when somebody threw a large bundle of lit fireworks on the sidewalk in front of me, and I had to literally run away from my students so that they would let me go to sleep that night, but it was fun…and we had a totally premium karaoke suite.

Those glowing blue windows are the TV's on which the song lyrics are displayed. I sang "My Heart Will Go On" (very popular English song here, I think because of the Chinese-style flute intro), "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, and "Desperado". And a children's song in Chinese, Two Tigers (which goes to the tune of Frere Jacques).

I taught my last class today, and learned that the whole visa situation could turn out to be critically not as easy as I had been led to believe it would be. So today has actually been consumed with anxiety about that, but I’ll write about that some other time if the anxiety turns out to be validated.

I’ve been here three months now, and the six-week Spring Festival vacation is about to begin. Let’s hope I can stay here after that’s over.

Peace out for now. Much love to you all.

: )

Probably the weirdest eating experience I’ve had since coming to China was in late November, when I was visiting some students in a nearby town (about 2 hours away) and they took me out to eat what they said was their town’s specialty, “pork bone”.

Everyplace in China seems to have a specialty of some kind (I have heard a million times, for instance, that nearby Shaxian is famous for its snacks, Quanzhou is famous for its seafood, and Fuzhou is famous for its lazy women), and it is usually food related. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary that my students’ town, which is called Datian, would have something “famous”—in this case pork bone.

Some students came over and prepared this dinner, which included beef, pork, crab, duck, a few differnt kinds of vegtables, and soup. As you can see, we still managed to deal the meal a crippling blow.

Neither did it seem out of the ordinary when, later, we sat down at table and a large platter of what indeed appeared to be pork bones was placed on the table, and when a student then put a large, pinkish, meaty bone on a platter in front of me.

I picked up the shank of animal and immediately took to gnawing on the most readily gnawable part of it. The meat was delicious—sweeter and more tender than I expected and a little salty. My mouth watered and I immediately exclaimed “hao chi”—delicious—with real enthusiasm, not the faked kind I sometimes utter when someone puts something weird like red chicken or any variety of intestines or snails in front of me. It was really good and I immediately dug in.

But, it turned out, there was a small but important detail that I missed when the bone was placed in front of me.

It was a face.

Yeah. After my first round of gnawing on the large, greasy, drippy bone in my hands, I put it down on my plate to grab my beer glass. Someone was already toasting me, or the whole table, or maybe just everyone in my vicinity, so I was obliged to half-stand and give a little nod of acknowledgement and drink (you never drink on your own here; the glasses are tiny and every time you take a sip someone else butts in and toasts with you, and then you often have to drink the whole thing—that’s just how it works). So I nodded, drank, wiped my hands a little, gave a glance around the table to show I was at least marginally engaged in the conversation around me, and then looked back down.

There was an eyeball, big, maybe the size of a pool ball, on my bone. And a nostril. And teeth. And the ridges you can feel with your tongue on the roof of your mouth. And there was some grayish matter clinging to my left hand that appeared to be brain. It was.

I immediately acknowledged that I was going to have to make a very deliberate effort not to make any sounds of horror, not to visibly move away from the bone, not to make any expression of any kind. I slowly put my hands back onto the bone and raised it upward. It appeared that I had been gnawing somewhere behind the eye, like maybe on the cheek part, or somewhere around where the ear might have been. I could not believe that in a brief moment I had gone from delighting in this particular bone to suddenly feeling about three shades whiter because of it.

After my initial shock, which was I think fleeting, I kept eating. After I realized that my bone was half a skull, and accepting that fact, I simmered down. The eye was still weird, but I tried not to pay attention to it. I’m not sure if the people around me knew what was going on, but I have a feeling that giving me the head was a mild joke they were playing on me. The bone/face was damn good tasting, I’m guessing they gave it to me because the meat tasted so good, but also, I caught a few looks of amusement at my dismay and confusion over, say, what the hell to do with the brains. One of my students’ husbands was sitting to my left, and he pointed out the brains to me and somebody told me what they were, and that they were the “best part”. So, I ate them. They were not the best part.

The best part was, indeed, the face, which I ate most of. When most of the facial meat was gone and I wasn’t sure what to do about the eyeball (I knew I wasn’t going to eat it), I asked a student if she wanted to eat it. She said no, which I felt gave me the green light to consider the bone picked. And I moved on. Despite the fact that I enjoyed the flavor, I did not accept another pork bone after that.

The rest of the meal was, as far as I remember, totally normal, at least for China. Chinese meals usually consist of lots and lots of different dishes, and anytime you go out to eat in any kind of celebratory or official fashion, there seems to be an unwritten law decreeing that there must be at least 10 dishes served. So the other dishes were probably veggies (often spinach and cabbage fried with a heavy serving of oil and salt and sometimes garlic), fish (usually one or two fish dishes, always still with all the bones included, so you have to eat really slowly to make sure you don’t choke on nasty prickly fish bones—the fish is usually broiled/parbroiled in a delicious cream or wine/soysauce mixture and is almost always ridiculously good, despite the onerous task of eating around the bones), chicken (often there are a couple chicken dishes, sometimes fried like the sesame seed chicken you can get at Chinese restaurants all around the States, sometimes chicken pieces cooked up in soup, sometimes just regular old chicken feet, which I still can’t figure out how or why anybody bothers with them, because they’re feet, for one, but also because there’s hardly any meat on them and they are slippery and gross), fried beef/pork, clams/oysters, and or whatever other variety of animal parts you can imagine.

One of the dishes at our dinner was this crab dish, which was cooked with soy sauce, vinagar, salt, and the most amazing red-rice wine I have ever whiffed. Oy, bad picture quality.

At this point, I have eaten so many weird things that I have completely lost track of it all and I no longer consider most of it weird. The small sized whole-body (eyes and tail and everything) fish that you can get for 2 yuan (30 cents) at most barbecue stands, for instance, no longer phase me at all and are a treat I look forward to. The snails and various iterations of beef/pork intestines that I used to recoil from I now enjoyÉand just generally the different style in which all Chinese dishes are cooked is something that I have, pretty much, started to like.

Things I still do not particularly enjoy, but are widespread:

Duck’s blood.  The title describes it perfectly. It is nothing but duck’s blood, but it pops up in all kinds of dishes unexpectedly, most commonly, it seems, in malatang, which is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure style of noodle shop. Apparently when they kill the ducks they let the blood drain out before butchering them, congeal the blood somehow so it’s solid, boil it, and then chop it into little pieces. The resulting product is something that looks and tastes somewhat like liver but is somehow even more gross.

Pig’s feet. These are everywhere! They are not at all the pickled pig’s feet that are somewhat common in the U.S., which, as I understand it, usually occupy the spot in the bar behind the jar of pickled eggs, which I once heard is used as a measure to see if someone is truly drunk or not (if you can eat it, you must be drunk—but that might just be something I made up, I don’t know). The pig’s feet here are served as a legitimate, to-be-savored dishÉthere is not much special to them and you wouldn’t know they were feet if you saw them on a platter. They look like really fatty, big chunks of pork. But beware, that ribbed-looking hunk of fat was once an appendage that spent at least a year or two tramping around in a thousand other pigs’ excrement. I just can’t shake that idea when it comes time to eat ‘em.

Tiny bits of pork or beef with hardly no meat on them. That’s kind of a long title, and there’s probably a real name for the dish, but I don’t know it. I just don’t understand these dishes. They are the most unsatisfying thing to eat ever, because the little bits of bone look like meat, they taste a little like meat when you suck on them, but at the end of eating this dish, you have taken like 40 bites of the food but none of it has turned out to be edible, and I always have a big pile of bones next to my bowl that did me no good (in China, lots of stuff has bones, so it’s OK to constantly be spitting stuff out of your mouth onto the table next to your bowl).

Little crabs. These bastards are so hard to crack open/dissect, and, as with the tiny bits of pork or beef, there is hardly anything edible to them, so there is usually almost no payoff (although the 2 miligrams of crab that you get from one of the little suckers is always delicious).

There are a ton of other weird things about eating here (it’s OK to burp at table, apparently; toasting is a complex and socially dominating activity; deciding who is going to pay sometimes involves shouting matches, shoving, and pulling—meaning you have to be willing to literally strong-arm someone’s money back into their pocket if you want them to let you treat; and on and on). But I think, on the whole, the food scene is awesome. Food is by far the cheapest thing in China, it is often really good, and there is usually a ton of it. And, although I do occasionally get bored with my meal rotation when I eat too frequently in the dining halls, it is always really easy to find something totally weird, and interesting, to eat.

There is an aspect of my present life that I am already familiar with, and that is the mild episodes of paranoia that accompany living in a place where your actions are scrutinized more than usual and people in the community are generally aware of who you are and what you are doing on a daily basis more than you could ever guess.

In some ways, living in a tiny town in Vermont (where I went to college) for five years was like this. Even though I was just a college student, I knew the names and faces of most of the people in my college and a lot of the people outside the college. There weren’t a lot of distractions in Vermont (the town where I went to school had 3,500 people and the college 700), so people chatted, mostly, about each other.

That was, in almost every way, right up my alley; for most of my time I immensely enjoyed living in a place where I saw familiar faces every time I walked outside and where the term “tight-knit community” was more a mantra than a slogan. When I moved away to Portland, Oregon after college, the pointed disinterest with which most non-acquaintances regarded me and my overall insignificance in the social mix of a mid-sized city took me off guard. I had forgotten how different life in small-town Vermont is from the norm.

But now that I am living in a relatively small (by Chinese standards) city in China, I am realizing again what it means to have my actions scrutinized (maybe that’s too strong a word; looked upon with intense curiousity might be more precise) and to have my general reputation and public image be something that can and will change based on almost all my actions. (What I say in public, my politeness while interacting with people, my skills as an English guide and language learner, my shoe size, what I did for work prior to coming to China, how much money I make….every detail about me, it seems, could become something that is used as a detail to describe me to someone who doesn’t know me..) Everything I do / say / write is in a sense potentially public knowledge, and that adds something of a burden to the daily acts of life.

A case in point: A few weeks ago when I was meeting with some students on a particularly cold day, I took off my sweater in from of them because I was feeling warm. I had a button-down shirt on underneath it, of course, so it wasn’t like I was doing anything out of the ordinary (at least, according to my social norms). But everyone in the room gasped and emitted the “Waaaaaaaaah” that is the Chinese version of our “Woah”. Based on their response, you’d think I had just vomited in front of a roomful of students (which, please note, I have never done, despite what some people might say). I often here this “Waaaah” when I walk past little groups of students on campus and it usually makes me flash my trademark “shit-eating grin”. For some reason it is always hilarious to me the amazement I cause in students who don’t know me just by existing. Either that or I have a giant brown stain on my back when this happens; sometimes I wonder.

It turns out (at least as far as I was able to deduce from aggressively questioning students) that they all said “Waaaaah” because they were all freezing, sitting at their desks, and they thought I must be “Very strong” to be able to take off my sweater in such cold weather.

In retrospect (and I have only realized this upon writing about it) they must have been blowing smoke up my ass, because they know I am not that strong (I have always been, and still am, a slender, willowy bastard) and that is just too abstruse a reason for them to have all “Waaaaahhhd” simultaneously upon seeing me taking off my sweater. I’m guessing it just had something to do with the cultural appropriateness of taking off clothes in front of people. Maybe they thought it was weird. I think that is probably it. So, starting that day, I started taking off my sweater in the hallway before going into any classrooms. That seems to do the trick in quelling “waaahs”.

But, that’s not actually the end or the point of the story. The point is that just yesterday, weeks after I took my sweater off in front of the students, another student told me that she had heard, second-hand, about me taking off my sweater in front of the class. I believe her exact words were: “The students think you are very interesting. They said that you took off your sweater in front of the class. That’s very interesting, I thnk.”

My impulse was to ask, again, aggressively, “What on earth does INTERESTING mean?!” But I did not. Instead I smiled, nodded, and said I’m glad that the students find me interesting.

What happened in the classroom that day, what exactly caused them to “Waahhh” at me, perhaps I will never know (note that the students in question who “Waaahd” were all older than me, some by 10 or 20 years, and about evenly divided by gender). But, I am long past worrying about it. More noteworthy, I think, is the kind of general paranoia inspired by a vague awareness that anything I do could become a story that is passed from person to person as somehow emblematic of me. I mean, it’s not like the student I spoke to yesterday heard anything about my progress in Chinese, or my patience or professionalism, or anything (not that I care that she didn’t) – she heard about how I took my sweater off.

All this, however, I understand and am actually pretty comfortable with, I think. After living in a tiny town in Vermont for five years I know that talk is often just talk, and people are usually happy to have something to talk about. It (usually) has little or nothing to do with the subject of the conversation. And I feel OK about my ambassadorial performance so far (despite one experience with a bit of excessive drinking, but that has more to do with the Chinese penchant for forcing beer down one’s throat whenever possible and was not my fault, and I will get to that in another post….) And, as the title of this post suggests, paranoia is, in my opinion, an unavoidable facet of modern life – in America, in China, wherever. If people have the means and the leisure (and now, the technology) to gossip and chit-chat, share judgements and observations within a shared worldview / framework (which the Chinese seem to have in spades), you will have paranoia. Especially if you are a foot taller than everybody else, have different colored skin and hair, and they turn and say “Waaaaaah” when you walk by.

These are just some of the pros and cons. You get much love and affection, and along with it, plenty of attention.

Peace out for now.

: )

Howdy.

I am getting the feeling that I am in an in between places at the moment.

I have been in Chinese lessons for about a month now. I am still waiting for certain paperwork to pass here so that I can be fully legit to teach. I have met a lot of students here, got to know them a bit, and have even made a couple of friends off campus.

I am getting the feeling that I am now putting some of the initial troubles of life in China behind me, like figuring out how to order food, how to communicate about basic things like the bathroom and money, how to answer some yes or no quesetions. How to sleep at night. How to balance my own time with the time demands of others. How to accept things as they come.

But still I am growing an awareness of how little I really know–about the people, about the language, about the country, about the food, about everything. I’m starting to think the smidge of security I have attained is really just blithe ignorance of what this place is really about, and that understanding a little of that will be the next big challenge.

But it is actually a challenge I am OK with. They say that the initial phase of coming to a place like China is the “honeymoon phase”, where you love everything and everyone. After that wears off, you start to get an idea of what you will really think of the place.

With that wearing away of the honeymoon phase, I am starting to wonder what the hell comes next, life-wise, after a thing like this. What does anybody do with themselves. But then I think of this person that I knew several years back who was living with cystic fibrosis, a girl my age who was really beautiful and great but who knew that her chances of living to 30 were slim to nonexistent. She didn’t waste any time doing anything that she didn’t love or didn’t have an interest in. From what I understand she worked her ass off to try to get a master’s degree back in her home (somewhere in England) and she died about a month ago.

We are all going to die eventually, and that isn’t necessarily the greatest foundation to draw life-governing axioms on but it’s a start. She wasn’t wasting her time, and I’m trying not to waste my time too. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I leave China, or decide to start some other career, or whatever. But I don’t feel like a day here is a waste of anything.

That’s something.

: )

So…the inevitable has happened. Last night I had my first encounter with the rat with whom I am, apparently, in cohabitation.

It was very simple. I came home from dinner (after dark) and flipped on the light, only to witness a dark shadow dash across the floor and behind the couch. With a groan, I steeled myself for battle and kicked aside the old coffee table and the grimy old leather couch in the corner of my living room.

Kicking aside the couch actually occurred in pieces. The couch is one of those piece-together jobs from I would say the 70’s. It’s comprised of five sections that fit neatly against each other, and it is L-shaped, to fit in the corner. Until last night I had not really touched it or sat on it much, because, well, it looks like something rats live in. Which, it turns out, it is. After I kicked aside a couple sections of couch, my new best friend the Big Hairy Rat came scurrying out and ran into my bedroom. Great. Exactly what I wanted.

Let’s call him the BHR for purposes of this blog. So, upon witnessing a one Mr. BHR flee into my bedroom and then around the corner into the bathroom, I quickly suit up with a small plastic trash can as a shield and a Puma sneaker as let’s say lightsaber, and head on into the bathroom, ready to do gruesome battle if necessary. And, lo, the BHR is nowhere to be seen. I search for obvious hiding spots and discover none, and determine the only possible escape route to be under the bathtub, which locale I can’t really see into or access in any way.

I should mention that before I entered the bathroom, duly armed, I first turned on the light and flung a flip-flop in there, the idea being to “flush him out”, which idea didn’t seem to do anything.

So, once in the bathroom, I decide to start whaling on the tub in an effort to coerce/scare the bejesus out of the BHR and get him, I hope, to flee the bathroom, my bedroom, and the whole premisis entirely, to be honest. I whale and whale. But no BHR. Apparently he has an escape hatch behind that tub, somewhere, because I stay in the bathroom and listen, and bang on different parts of the tub, and then just stand there and try to be really really quiet, hoping he’ll come out, but nothing. No BHR. No rat. So I resign myself, and give up. I go into the kitchen and inspect the situation. Of course, it turns out that I forgot to change the trash before I left for dinner, so he had been attracted to a banana peel from that morning. Which banana peel he had pulled out of the trash and nibbled on, I assume fruitlessly.

That was not his first taste of banana. Last week I had left two bananas, an apple, and a tasty little cream-puff-like treat out on the counter in the kitchen overnight, only to discover the next morning that the cream-puff had completely vanished, the bananas had both been eaten a little and even the apple had been chewed.

So the BHR loves variety. And he likes his fruits, not just his sweets.

Honestly, at first the rat thing completely freaked me out. I mean, fucking rats. I hate rats. And I haven’t even had to deal with them before, really. And then after I inspected the couch a little more I discovered the place where he has dragged a good number of things, like dead cockroaches and the like, to nibble on. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do to the couch. But I guess I’ll probably just put it back into the corner. There’s nothing I can do, really, about the rat, or the couch. So I’m just going to have to deal with it. Which isn’t really that hard. It just means emptying the trash before nighttime, so there’s nothing for the rat to nibble on. Which is easy, because the trash bags in China are tiny.

There are other creepy-crawlies, too. Like cockroaches. And these big beetle things that fly in here sometimes. And there are a ton of bats on campus. I assume there are giant spiders and snakes roaming the forests around here, since it’s like 70 degrees or hotter year round and 90 percent humidity all the time. And I hear there are a lot of monkeys in the woods, too. Not that monkeys are creepy; they are just, well, far out.

I just hope I do not get bit by any superpoisonous snakes or frogs, and that no mutant breeds of man-sized spiders invade while I am living in tropical China. (If spiders were man-sized, by the way, I once heard that they would be able to run at 300 mph.) But I have other things to think about, really. Today I found a website called “Skritter” that helps you learn to read Chinese, and I spent a few hours on it. And learned how to write my name in Chinese.

Which is, by the way:

Xu (meaning to allow or praise, pronounced like “shoe” in my last name)

Zhi (meaning ambition, or, “will”, pronounced like “ji” in Jim)

Xiang (meaning fly, pronounced like “shyang”)

Praise, ambition, fly. Ya heard.

Maybe next I will try to learn the Chinese word for rat.

Maybe then the BHR will leave me and my bananas alone. Effing rats.

Addendum to the rat posting, next day:

It turns out I was correct about the giant spiders thing. Today I went on a hike with some students and we saw, in a giant scary spiderweb, a huge, malignant looking spider. It looked exactly like a black widow, except with a reddish hourglass figure on its back, instead of its belly, and it was approximately the length of my thumb. I tried to take a picture but dared not move close enough.

Also, after witnessing the rat again in the bathroom last night, I decided to blockade the entrance underneath the tub. So I think the rat is trapped under there now, maybe, unless I spotted a totally different rat last night. I also brought up the subject of rats with my students on our hike today, and they suggested that I try to flush the rat out with water and strike him/squash him with a shoe. Yeah…I dunno about that. The students also suggested that the rat likely “has many friends”. Yeah, I guess I am still in denial about that.