Having Fun All The Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later. Off to buy taco stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

Today I taught 140 ten-year-olds English at the same time. I was asked to do this about 4 weeks ago by a superintendant of a local primary school while I was deeply inebriated at 6:30 in the evening (heavy drinking is par for the course when dining on a professional basis here; my liaison and I were doing some partying on the company, so drinking vast quantities of beer was mandatory). But even then, when he asked me, I didn’t say yes. What I said was: “I will definitely consider it.”

It turns out, as I learned weeks later, that this phrase in Chinese actually means “yes, no problem”.

So last night at about 5:30 p.m. I started planning for my first primary school class.

Based on my university class teaching experience, I knew approximately nothing about teaching primary school. So I went with safe, easy stuff. I decided to try to just play “Simon Says” with them and then teach the words from the chapter in the book via Powerpoint-slideshow, and then to teach them to sing a song (knowing how to play guitar is incredibly valuable in situations like this, because you can just pull out the guitar and everybody is happy; you’re not just some English-speaking stroke at the front of a classroom who wants everybody to sing some off-tune song with limited vocabulary). I finished my Powerpoint at about 10 p.m. and then turned out the lights and went to bed.

The next morning a teacher from the school picked me up at 8:30 and told me that the class I would teach would be about 150 students, which is 100 more than I expected.

We went to the school and did the normal Chinese introductions, sitting in an office and drinking tea and smoking cigarettes (which, interestingly, I learned that smoking indoors will be banned nationwide as of Jan. 1 next year…which to me seems like going to New Orleans and telling everyone that drinking is not allowed anymore after next week) and then I went to class. And there they were, all 140 of them.

The room was about the size of an ordinary classroom, with a big counter at the front of the room and a chalkboard and a computer with digital projector. The students were lined up in front with mini-chairs, 12 to a row, packed together in a way that would make a fire-code inspector shudder. I realized that playing Simon Says with all 140 of them would lead to inevitable injury and possible trampling, so I just asked the first three rows to play.

Explaining the game was a little tricky and I got hung up on explaining that when I didn’t say Simon Says they were supposed to not move at all, and just say “You didn’t say Simon Says”…after about 10 minutes of trying the game we got to the point where they did both (clapped their hands and said “You didn’t say Simon Says”). Luckily one of the Chinese teachers understood my meaning and chimed in to help me explain the game, but they still didn’t quite get it. So I played it for another five minutes with them and then moved on.

After that I taught for another 30-ish minutes with I think at least the bare minimum of efficacy. Using basic Chinese phrases like “read after me” and stuff like that was enough to manage the class, pretty much. We practiced the words and made some sentences, and then sang “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes”. By the second verse they were pretty fidgety, and I was totally sure that the school’s teachers had warned them to be super well behaved for my class, so I decided that was all I had for them and let them go.

The funny thing was, after class was over the students decided they wanted my autograph and I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of cute 10-year-olds thrusting little cartoon-decorated pads of paper and pens at me. Which, even though it was completely ridiculous, you can’t say no when kids ask for your autograph, so I scribbled my English name in maybe 50 notebooks and then one of the teachers dragged me out of the room.

We hung out for a while longer and then, as is the custom when getting together with folks on a professional basis here, went out for a big elaborate meal and some midday drinking.

I definitely felt relieved that the class was over (I had been pretty nervous about it when planning the prior evening), but then I also know that primary school teachers here face the pressure of teaching and managing huge classes of occasionally unruly children nonstop here.

Classes are rarely smaller than 50 students, can be as big as 60 or 70 even in primary school, and the children are (as all children are everywhere) loud and occasionally misbehaved and difficult to control (although they are much more obedient than American children; I commented to one of the teachers that if you crammed 140 U.S. kids in a classroom for one hour, the school would quickly be reduced to cinders).

Primary school teachers simply do not have it easy, and the material they have to teach is not simple. Even in the fourth-grade English book I was teaching from, the students were already past just conjugating verbs and into making complete sentences, learning intermediate vocabulary like “dragon kite” & etc. After 6 months of Chinese study there were still some sentences that I could not translate from English to Chinese without a dictionary.

So at lunch I looked around at the other primary school teachers sitting with us and when they complimented me and said “You are so hard working — you must be tired” I definitely had to answer….no way. (Although, honestly, they would have said this to me even if I had showed up to the class in my pajamas and just read aloud from an English newspaper to the students*.)

After lunch I went to a colleague’s home for tea before returning to the college in the afternoon, and we got to talking about the education system in China, which is something that everybody seems interested in here, especially vis a vis the U.S. education system.

I think most people in the U.S. are aware of how hard the Chinese education system drives its students. The stereotype is that Chinese kids are wizards at math and science and study approximately 90 hours a day. But it’s tough to get a real feel for how hard the kids are really working. We also know that a lot of U.S. students are totally overloaded with extracurriculars and exhausted all the time in America in the race to get into top universities.

But, I think, here, the pressure is definitely greater. From grade 1, students’ whole existences are basically centered around the Gaokao, which is the college entrance examination in China that determines whether and where students go to college. At present, I still know little about the actual content of the Gaokao, but I do know that it is super hard and that it is singularly important in determining a student’s chances for college admission. From what everyone says, it is basically the only thing that matters. Which means that from a very young age Chinese students are basically bred to be test-taking machines, containers for information, 10-hour-a-day studying animals.

To someone with a progressive educational background from the U.S. it is totally obvious that that kind of educational system and college admissions process is fraught with all kinds of terrible dangers and inadequacies, mostly having to do with the inadequacy of testing in determining students’ potential for success in life and the dearth of critical thinking skills that a rote-learning curriculum results in. But those are platitudes. And the Chinese people in my university, including the students and especially the young teachers, all are very aware of the issue and aware that the students are overworked and aren’t getting what they need. But as far as fixing the problem goes, there seem to be few answers and a lot of people who are afraid of letting go of the old rules/old system.

As little as I know about the subject now, I think it will become more and more important as time goes on. People here, especially because of the limited number of offspring they’re allowed to have, care a LOT about their kids’ educations and futures. And as they understand more and more (as we’re still struggling to understand and accept in the U.S.) that testing does almost nothing in terms of guaging a student’s chances of success, stuff has gotta change around here. Or at least, based on the number of people who keep asking me what the education system in the U.S. is like (this is the #1 question I get asked by students and teachers), I think it will.

A couple of other interesting notes from conversations/reading:

The only “private schools” in China are actually schools for people who are not registered to go to public schools; so, whereas in the U.S. we generally take pride in going to private school and pay a lot of money to do so and expect a better education from them, here the private schools are considered the shoddier option across-the-board.

Plagiarism is much more common (or has been in the recent past) in school systems at every level here, from middle school through university. In the lower-level grades (that I have taught, i.e. in my experience) it seems to be a symptom of the rote-learning atmosphere — it’s not the process of discovering knowledge that’s important, but the acquisition of the correct answer, so what’s the harm of looking up the best answer and copying it word-for-word? — whereas in the higher echelons of academia it can be simply a matter of finding research published in another language and translating it and putting one’s name on it…which, again, could be a symptom of the rote-learning environment.

That said, the level of material that is covered in Chinese classroom simply annihilates the material covered in U.S. schools. I don’t know the statistics and specifics, but I can say that these kids are learning math, science, and language concepts at a very young age that we wouldn’t even dream of teaching the same-aged kids in the U.S. It’s very advanced and very hard, and it leaves no doubt that some very smart people come out of the education system here.

That’s all for today.

: )

*I have actually tested the penchant of people for complimenting me even when there is no logical basis for doing so…case in point: in the afternoons I usually go running on the college’s track. Usually I run a decent amount, and look extremely sweaty and exhausted at the end of my run. Often students ask me how many laps I ran, and after I tell them 6, or 8, or whatever it is, they invariably say “Wow, you are very strong”; but on some occasions I have lied and said 1 or 2, and their reply remains exactly the same.

I traveled to Xiamen last weekend and stayed there for a few days. I left my base city by myself on Saturday evening and arrived in Xiamen in the morning, spent three days there and then came back.

Xiamen is a pretty city of about 2 million on the ocean.

I figured that for this trip, rather than inundating the blog with words, I would just post some pictures and some audio of walking through Xiamen.

So here goes.

Waiting in the train station, midnight.

The smoking room in the train station.

The sleeper cabin I had to myself, morning.

A Xiamen back alley, midday.

A Xiamen side-street.

A church on the same street.

Some wriggling prawns.

A shark moments after its head was cut off.

The packed ferry.

The ocean, afternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I realized something today while watching a video on the New York Times web site called “The Continental Picture Show Series”.

The video is mostly silent, with written narration inserted in frames ala old-time-stilent movies.

It’s about birds, and visiting the oldest woman in America, or something like that.

It reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s novels, where he splices his stories with random photographs that seem to have no explanation, or only connect tangentially to the story.

The video, however, should have some connection to reality. But it has a surreal mood. Things definitely don’t connect to each other logically but obviously relate visually, emotionally, symbolically.

This is very much the case with Sebald’s books. And Kafka’s. And what I think that does is it makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction less important. Kafka’s and Sebald’s books were fiction but there was a great deal of the author visible in each work. Just not literally — only symbolically, emotionally, intellectually. Everything connected but nothing connected.

This is extremely hard to do, I think. It’s much easier to write a story that has nothing real in it (surral needs real in order to be surreal, I guess, because it turns real on its head) and is pure fiction, or to write a story that is essentially autobiographical. Sebald and Kafka, and the creator of this video, I think, did both. They seem to inquire into reality deeply enough as to make the question of what is reality their real inquiry. In a way that you almost can’t detect or touch or rationalize.

I think this is important because we must accept that life is not simply a mediated form…everything we do is both fact and fiction; life is both a construct of our wills, an active narrative that we construct in the moment and in retrospect and looking forward; and it is also a series of random events with no meaning, no future intent or history or significance; it is both of those things at the same time. It is useful, I think, to inquire into that divide sufficiently enough to understand the ways that reality stands on its head.

It isn’t strictly surreal…I think “surrealism” is a much broader category. It’s just so inquisitive that we can understand it without understanding it. Like Kafka narrating, in the Castle, how time speeds up and slows down like an elastic plane; or like Sebald in the Emigrants narrating as a young man describing his uncle standing on the seashore and explaining that it is the edge of the darkness, with an underexposed black-and-white picture of a man standing on the seashore on the opposite page.

Or it’s like theses weird birds in this video flying across the road in Iowa.

After being in china for only six months, one of the things I have noticed is that everybody is starting or has started a business of his/her own, and if a person hasn’t started a business, he or she probably has an eye on starting one sometime, whatever it might be.

Sometimes these are small businesses that don’t go much further than supporting the person’s family or providing extra income outside his/her primary job. Sometimes, if the person has a fair amount of sense and is good at navigating the hoops of maintaining an enterprise in this country (keeping customers and bureaucrats happy) the business becomes more successful, and he or she can have a very comfortable life, even by Western standards, or even more than that.

I only really have a few examples, but just those examples are enough to convince me that in China there is a serious spirit of entrepreneurship and business-starting. I’m going to wait till the end of the post to give you my examples because first I want to point out that the reason this stands out so much for me is because back in the U.S. I don’t really know anyone my age or even significantly older than me who has seriously put work into starting a business, let alone gone the whole way and really started a business on his/her own.

That seems totally unthinkable to me – that someone I know in the U.S. would have started a business and had it take off and managed to support himself/herself on the proceeds. I mean, think about it. Who do you know who has done that? The vast majority of my friends and relations in the U.S. are not thinking about starting something up to work for themselves. They are, at best, working a steady job for a corporation, nonprofit, or the state, or they are going to school, or working for a school; at worst they have no job at all and they are applying to Starbucks or Borders or some other huge retail/service chain, basically resigned to the idea that they are going to have to punch a clock to shovel shit for a wage or if they’re lucky a salary…and at the end of the day whatever profit is seen will fall into the pocket of a few guys in suits in a boardroom somewhere.

Maybe it’s just the company I keep back home that gives me this view…maybe in the U.S. I only hung out with types who weren’t likely to get charged up about the economics of life to try to start a business, but I really think there’s more to it than that. The few people I’ve met who have openly speculated to me about the prospects of starting a business in the U.S. were people who had been bred to do so because they grew up in a wealthy family, and had no real need to think about the possibility of having to work an ordinary job. Everybody else, the middle-class people I know from home, basically planned to work for a larger organization of some kind. The idea of starting a school, or a restaurant, or a bakery, or a car service, or a web site…it didn’t occur to them. Why is that? Doesn’t that sound backwards? That people in the Land of Opportunity wouldn’t really have that much interest in starting up businesses? Does that strike anyone else as marginally true (i.e. that most of the people they know don’t seem to talk/think about starting a business)?

The reasons for that may be too many to even fathom. Maybe it’s because in America there actually is a lot of security in a day-job, whereas in China most day-job workers don’t make enough money to have a comfortable life (the teachers at my university certainly don’t) and often don’t get the nice benefits that many Americans get in their day-jobs. Maybe it’s because many of the day-jobs in China aren’t nearly as nice as the day-jobs in America (i.e., nice corporate offices, nice desks and computers, windows next to desk, designer furniture, plenty of meetings to sleep through, etc. – versus the options in China: factory, construction worker, low-paid overworked teacher, etc.)

I will tell you one thing I have noticed a lot more since coming to China. I hear it when I read U.S. news or, honestly, when I watch the Daily Show and they show me what political figures in the U.S. are saying these days re: financial industry reform. “Don’t tax the rich, they’re the ones creating the jobs.” Those ten condescending words, which I’m sure every American has heard (over and over) over the past 10 years (if not more….10 years is really the full amount of time I’ve been at all politically aware) seem so contrary to every economic ideal America is supposed to be about it makes my head spin. And sitting here in China, where everybody knows that if you really want a job you’ve got to make it for yourself, it makes absolutely no sense and just sounds absurd. Which of course it is.

But where does it come from? Who says it? I must add the caveat here that I used to ask the same questions whenever I would hear American pop music back home. Who listens to this shit? Who churns it out and who consumes it? I know I don’t and no one I know does. So why is it so ubiquitous, so cloying, so pleasantly easy-to-swallow and yet obviously specious and wrong? Why is this shit everywhere? It’s like when you go swimming at the nearest Howard Johnson’s indoor pool and you go to use the bathroom and somebody has shit all over the floor and somehow it’s on the walls and the mirror too. Who the fuck went into the bathroom and shit everywhere? And why? What were they trying to achieve, except to make everybody else’s life just slightly wretched?

It would be easy to spin a conspiracy theory of some kind here about how corporate interests have blanketed the American television media with messages that benefit the priveleged few. And I’m not at all opposed to that explanation. But I think there’s got to be something more to it than that. In my eye America seems to have this history of innovation and brilliance and the will of the individual to innovate, adapt, change and build. A guy in America’s supposed to be able to come up with a good idea and start a business and run it the way he wants to run it, and have a good life because of his hard work. But why does that seem like a few-and-far-between kind of thing in America now? And why are so many people I know consigned to lives beneath fluorescent lights in the U.S., in shitty offices with shitty cubicles doing stuff they don’t care about. Basically sitting for eight hours a day in a HoJo’s bathroom that has been hand-painted with human shit?

I don’t get it. I think my idea here is a little underformed and I don’t really have any empirical evidence to back up what I’m saying, just anecdotal evidence. But here are the examples of people I know here who are running businesses of their own.

An English teacher who runs and owns his own bar

An English teacher who runs his own school on the weekends and makes enough money to afford two apartments and a car (things that are way out of reach for most Chinese)

A young 30-year-old guy who is starting his own English school

A young 22-year-old girl who is starting up a photo shop with a photographer friend

A young economics teacher who does work consulting teaching management to local companies

A guy who opened a half-million-dollar (USD) exclusive tea-shop-club next to the steel mill in this town to serve steel mill executives

I don’t know very many teachers here…most of them are on this list. The majority of my friends here are students, and they’re the only ones who aren’t trying to start businesses, for obvious reasons. Everybody else…seems to be trying to start one. I’m sure I’ll keep meeting more people like that. And I think it’s safe to say that most foreigners who have spent some time in China over the last several years have noticed that there are a lot of people trying to start businesses.

It just seems right, in China, to start a business. And maybe that’s why China is developing and changing and growing so quickly – because a lot of people are chasing their proverbial piece of the pie, and that creates a lot of competition and productivity and economic pressure. I dunno. This is stuff I probably should not even bother thinking about. But it’s there. It’s been there ever since I graduated college and really had to think about my own economic survival. Because I don’t want to work for anybody, either. I don’t want to work for Starbucks or Borders, ever. I don’t want to wear an apron or a robe identical to that worn by 500,000 other baristas all across the Land of Opportunity. And I know too many smart and talented people who are doing or have had to do just that. And it seems backwards to me. Especially when I know how much money the guys at the top make for sitting in office chairs and holding their pencils.

Anyway, I think that’s all I have for today. Anybody who cares to chime in on this topic is more than welcome.

Thanks for reading HFATT.

<: 0 )

I realized today when I got a phone call from a Chinese person and took it without really any major communication problems that my Chinese has gotten a lot better in the past two months.

The thing that made me realize it was that the first successful phone conversation I had with a non-English-speaking Chinese person was only two months ago, and at the time, I was totally thrilled.

Obviously, the first conversation was sub-preschool level language use. The converstaion went something like this:

Me: Hello. Is XiaoLu there?

Other person: No. This is his mother.

Me: Oh, his mother. Hello.

Other person: XiaoLu will come back in something something. He went to something something.

Me: Where?

Other person: Something something. Are you that foreigner?

Me: Oh, yeah. I am.

Other person: Something something phone call.

Me: Oh. Can you have him call me later please?

Other person: Yes. Something.

Me: Thank you. Goodbye.

Other person: Bye-bye.

So maybe the word “sucessful” is too strong. But at the time, I thought it was cool that the basic function of a phone call had taken place. I didn’t just have to say “sorry, I don’t understand” and then hang up.

But the conversation today was much better. A guy from the online store where I buy clothes called because I hadn’t put my name on my order. So I gave him my name, and everything was fine. And I realized that I had basically understood everything he had said.

Maybe the reason this stuff is so interesting to me is because even though I studied French for five years before and during high school, I never really got good at it or had the chance to practice it in real-life situations. If you just memorize vocabulary and grammar when you’re learning a language, as a lot of students in the U.S. do (at least in New Hampshire when I was growing up — in cities and in places with more Spanish speakers I guess you could put the language to use) you never get the chance to stand on your feet in the language. You never know that with the sliver of vocabulary you have learned, it is possible to convey meaning.

Also, if you live in an single-language environment like I always did, even if you’re studying another language you’re probably not very likely to be able to speak it easily in the real language environment. For instance, when I studied French in high school we did go to Quebec on a field trip once. But the minute people opened their mouths, the language spilled out so fast and was pronounced so differently from how I pronounced it (meaning badly) that I didn’t really understand anything. Except hello.

Also, there is a lot of work to be done in between saying hello in a language and then actually speaking it. When I went to France in college for a week my pronounciation of “bonjour” was good enough at times to make people on the street think I actually spoke French. Which I didn’t really.

My point is basically that learning another language is totally interesting in itself, especially when you can walk out the door and talk to people who couldn’t speak English even if you wanted them to. And also that semi-off-the-beaten-path China has got to be the best place anywhere for learning another language, because even if you don’t feel like talking to strangers, strangers definitely want to talk to you.

Talking to cab drivers is another great way for me to measure my progress in learning the language. It’s about a 35-minute cab ride from downtown to my door, and cab drivers love to ask questions and talk (last week, one cab driver who I had apparently ridden with before actually offered me a cigarette and we both smoked as we headed back to the college). Of course, when I first got here, small talk with cab drivers was impossible. I felt lucky just to be able to make my destination clear to them verbally. But that has slowly changed.  First I was able to chat with them for 30 seconds, then a few minutes, then more like 10 minutes, and now, if I am reasonably creative, I can go almost 20 minutes without the conversation breaking down and the driver just chatting away with me no longer understanding. Basically, as long as I don’t get lost in the skein as words, they will keep conversing with me (it’s kind of like a mini-Chinese lesson that I get as a free bonus for riding in a taxi).

The other good thing about talking to taxi drivers is the repetition. The conversation basically always starts the same way. Here’s what the driver almost always says/asks, in order:

Where are you from?

Are you a student or a teacher?

Oh, you’re Chinese is great. Very standard. (This after me saying the words “America” and “teacher”; people here are very nice.)

Why did you come to China — for work or to learn Chinese?

I have a cousin/brother/friend who lives in Canada/the U.S./Hong Kong. He speaks English very well.

How much money do you make?

Oh, that’s pretty good. But it’s not much in America, right?

How much money does a cab driver make in America?

From here the conversation could go anywhere, and as the time grows longer it becomes less and less likely that I will understand what he is saying. But it’s becoming easier as I get better at knowing and recognizing the structure of words and sentences, the basic vocabulary, which then allows me to recognize and isolate the words I don’t know from everything else. Which in turn lets me think about the words I don’t know and either try to put together their meaning or infer their meaning from the context. That’s a big shift from where I was at a couple of months ago — basically grasping for straws and recognizing a word or phrase here or there, but everything else being a big mush pit where I didn’t know what was going on.

This all tells me that the initial hump of learning Chinese might be receding a bit. There’s a good post by John Pasden at Sinosplice.com that looks at the difficulty level of learning Chinese versus other languages (namely Japanese), and basically he points out that people tend to think Chinese is super hard to learn…but it’s actually just hard to learn how to learn – meaning that there’s a huge hump of stuff you’ve got to learn in the beginning, and then it gets easier from there. Basically, to first start learning Chinese, you’ve got to bend your brain around this concept that the meaning of words is totally dependant on the tone of their prononciation — which for an English speaker is really pretty damn far out — and then you’ve got to actually learn what those tones are, how to say them and then how to parse them in rapid-fire speech.

Those things are now becoming less difficult for me (I don’t want to jinx myself by saying anything more pronounced than that. It’s still all pretty damn difficult.) I think that basically started to happen (the decrease in difficulty) when I started obsessively listening to Chinesepod.com lessons and practicing pronouncing sentences in bed and in the shower (I think now my listening has gotten better than my speaking…because my vocabulary still sucks but listening to Chinesepod has made me more comfortable hearing normal-speed speech and exposed me to the sounds of lots of words). I still have a long way to go…and I am hoping and praying that things will continue to go smoothly (enough) here so that I can stay and learn more.

Especially now that forming the sentence “Can you please bring me a glass of water” is no longer a small miracle.

Other language landmarks…

Learning how to say the names of all the delicious stuff at my favorite restaurant

Teaching someone how to play poker in Chinese

Actually understanding what my Chinese teacher is saying some of the time

Translating an English word for some confused students into Chinese during class (note: extreme aberration)

Traveling to another city (for snacks…yeah, weird) with someone who speaks no English  and then back again and having fun

Learning how to lift weights in Chinese (fairly extensive use of pantomime)

Understanding an Upper-Intermediate lesson on Chinesepod.com

That’s all for today.

: )