Having Fun All The Time

This article in the New York Times helped confirm something that I have been casually observing in the past 14 months in China: that prices for consumer goods, from eggs to jeans to cars, are totally chaotic and in some cases are either way too high or way too low, with no apparent explanation for the insane prices.

This article specifically quotes milk prices as an example of how inflation in China has begun to carry the prices of common goods way beyond the reach of the ordinary person:

“The money supply is too large,” said Andy Xie, an economist based in Shanghai who formerly worked at Morgan Stanley. “They increased the money supply to stimulate the economy. Now land prices have jumped 20 times in some places, 100 times in others. Inflation is broad-based. Go into a supermarket. Milk is more expensive in China than it is in the U.S.”

In Shanghai, where the average monthly wage is about $350, a gallon of milk now costs about $5.50.

I see this kind of thing everyday, and it wouldn’t be so crazy if there weren’t also products that were incredibly cheap, and also if there weren’t consumers so consistently making choices that to my eye seem absurd.

A little anecdote: I recently went “guang4jie1″ (sort of like window shopping) with a female Chinese friend of mine, who has maybe a bit of a problem with spending money. Although her monthly salary is lower than mine (my salary is about 4,000 yuan, or around $600), she compulsively buys things, mostly clothes but also other stuff like expensive meals and spa treatments, that I would never even dream of buying on a salary like hers.

A couple of weeks ago when I met up with her she casually bought a pair of 1,000 yuan boots and a 500 yuan dress in preparation for a holiday trip she was about to go on.

There’s a double-mystery here. The first part of the mystery is: whose money is she spending? Is it her parents’? Is it really hers and she spends no money most of the time and splurges on big things? Or is she just now, at the tender age of 24, beginning to burrow into a hole of debt that will one day haunt her like debt is haunting so many Americans now? I have no idea. I’ve never asked her where she gets her money from; although I have mentioned that it seems like she spends a lot of money.

The second part of the mystery becomes clear when you take a look at the 1,000 yuan boots she bought. We were in a department store in the middle of town and the boots were these kind of rhinestone-studded suede numbers that would sell for $40 in the U.S., I think. But she paid almost $150 for them.

As she was shoe-shopping I found a pair of classically ugly, cheap men’s  pleather shoes in the men’s footwear section. I don’t have a picture at the moment…I’ll try to go back and take one later, but these shoes were clearly pleather (fake leather), had cheap white soles with barely any traction, and were labeled with the brand name “FASHION” (this is a common brand name in China). The price tag was over 500 yuan, more than $80.

This makes no sense. You can buy a pair of Adidas just down the road for the same price, and the quality is far better, the shoes are made of much more durable and attractive material, and everyone knows that the shoes are expensive and nice. (Yeah, Adidas is considered “nice” here, and Puma is like super nice.)

On top of that, you can find these same shoes on the Internet for less than 100 yuan. Or in a seedier store in a crappier part of town. The reason for the high price seemed to be the location. You’re in department store, so some of the items will be double what they are elsewhere.

I have no idea how the retailers get away with this. It seems similar to the fruit phenomenon, which is that an apple costs 1 yuan when bought in the village next to the university, but 5 yuan when bought at a convenience store in the city.

Or the fact that a towel can cost 150 yuan in the city’s biggest mall, but 20 yuan at a smaller store outside the city center.

Crazier still is the fact that foreign-produced brand-name goods are often far more expensive than in the U.S. Levi’s jeans are the first thing that comes to mind. At home you can usually get a pair of Levi’s at Sears or some department store for around $30 or $40. But I’ve never seen a pair of Levi’s here for less than 400 yuan, about $60, and prices can go as high as 600 yuan, $90.

The higher you go, the more expensive stuff gets. There’s a Lacoste outlet store in this town (most of whose goods appear to be knockoffs) where the jeans cost a couple thousand yuan.

Cars are also often more expensive, and there’s a slightly hilarious and insane theory that a few Chinese people have told me that foreign car companies intentionally sell their cars for a higher price here because they think that Chinese people find prestige in more expensive things. Who knows where this theory comes from, but the only logical explanation I can see would be shipping costs and import taxes. The idea that a car company would raise its prices to attract customers, especially in a market like China where everybody just buys the nicest car they can afford, is ridiculous.

But with all that said, there is still one thing that seems to hold this world together like glue: you can still buy noodles and eggs for lunch for about 4 yuan, which is around 60 cents. If you live economically, which most people do, you can eat for only about 20 yuan per day ($3), which is almost exactly what my daily food budget is. That doesn’t include the yogurt I occasionally eat in the morning (5 yuan peanut noodles and hun dun dumpling soup is better anyway, just not as convenient), the Starbucks instant coffee I buy online, or my occasional pizza dinner, but it’s pretty consistent. In a good week I probably spend less than $50 on meals, and I always eat out.

Of course, if food prices caught up with the price of almost everything else here excluding rent (which they could do in the coming years — the CPI for food in China rose over 9 percent over the last 12 months as of October) even my life would be completely impossible here, even though my salary is higher than the average by about 2,000 yuan (around $300).

The reason: the rent for my tiny apartment is 1,300 yuan per month ($191), my student loans are still about 800 yuan per month ($112), and the various expenses of life invariably quickly eat up the remaining $300-odd of that $600-ish-a-month salary.

Luckily I have been able to find private students over the past six months or so to increase that income so that I don’t have to spend my savings to stay here, but it comes at the price of losing most of my days off in order to teach privately.

The whole money problem, however, is basically due to the fact that I can’t lower my living standards to that of most of the people here. In order to survive with prices like this and income like that, there’s certain food you have to eat every day, certain places you have to live, certain clothes you have to buy. Last year living at the college I more or less lived in those conditions and ate that food. But I don’t think I would want to do it again.

Anyway, I still have enough time to study and to write, and teaching English here is for the most part enjoyable and rewarding. But sometimes it’s a shock to think about the income gap between here and the U.S., and then see how much stuff still costs here.

I think I’m making progress on the front of being not so sensitive to questions and comments that make huge generalizations about Americans, foreigners, white people on a regular basis here, especially from people who don’t have any experience with foreigners.

But it can be a challenge. In a recent Chinesepod lesson, John Pasden, the foreigner host of the show (it’s a daily podcast for learning Chinese) mentioned that China is a post-industrial, pre-PC culture — meaning that, for example, in China it’s still OK to call someone fat if they’re fat, if they’re deaf-mute to call them dumb, or, to distinguish blind from seeing people by call seeing people “normal”.

This spills over into a million different things. I can’t profess to really get it. I think to some extent, to deal with non-PC-ness you just have to be a very easy-going person with an unshakable sense of humor. Which I have the capacity for, but sometimes am not really good at.

For example, yesterday, one of my Chinese teachers asked me if foreigners are all fat, if foreign women all look 60 when they’re 30; an acquaintance of mine recently used the derogatory word for black people at the dinner table (in Chinese and then, when I questioned him on it, in English); and pretty much every time I eat something that resembles junk food (which I do on occasion) some Chinese person in my vicinity turns to whomever is standing next to them and explains to them, in Chinese, that the only thing we foreigners eat is McDonald’s and KFC, so that’s why I’m eating that.

People also occasionally ask me why the United States is performing military drills in the Yellow Sea, up by Korea and Northern China, and then tell me, with barely masked emotion, that Chinese people are worried about it and think it is very dangerous. As if the white person before them can easily represent the views of basically the entire democratized world.

This stuff is stupid to get worked up over. Virtually all of these people have no contact with the outside world except through the government-run education system, the government-run media, and Hollywood movies.

(At the same time, however, they all learn English in school and learn about Western culture as part of their language study — which, I am coming to think, makes the majority of people rather confused about what exactly the outside world is, and makes it tougher for them to learn the language because half of learning a language is cultural.)

The result is a confusing mix of ideas that basically seem offensive to me whenever I run into them. But then I think about how foreigners and minorities deal with the myriad offensive conceptions that mainstream culture has of them in America (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, Hispanics, hell, even people from Texas), and then I think about how different people from those groups deal with those misconceptions. Some of them choose to spend their lives being offended and pissed off, and some of them choose to find humor in how stupid it is. I’m trying to fall into the latter category in my life here.

And to be a little self-aware. After all, I’ve only met one or two people from Texas in my life, but I know that I have, on many occasions, uttered the words “I never met a Texan I liked.” (That was pre-Jamie’s girlfriend, if you read this, Jamie.)

Most of that is George Bush’s fault, and stereotypes, and of course I have long since let go of that idea (which I sort of just thought was funny). But I know that I had it at the time because it seemed entertaining, and I naively thought that as long as I never met any Texans, there was no way that my little bias against Texans could affect them.

Turns out I was probably wrong.

Before I thought about coming to China seriously I think that I was faintly aware that Chinese is a “tonal language”, but I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant.

It took me a solid couple of months to figure out the precise meaning, another three or four months to be able to reliably produce the tones with considerable forethought, and just up until the last couple of months (I’ve been studying Chinese for about 13 months now) to be able to carry a Chinese conversation with reasonable confidence that most of the tones I am uttering are correct.

But what is a tone? And why does it take more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears to be able to use them correctly in speech?

The answer to the first question is simple (of course, there are a thousand complications hiding behind the simplicity, but I’m going to avoid those here). Chinese is made up of five tones (or four, depending on how you count) which combine with the movements within the mouth that make up most English speech, which two components together comprise the bulk of how meaning is conveyed in spoken Chinese.

Take, for example, the Chinese word zhi (pronounced a lot like “jur” in juror). Zhi has dozens of different meanings, depending on the tone and the written character that is used to represent the spoken word.

So depending on the tone with which it is said, zhi has different meanings.

But what the hell is a tone?

We actually have and use pretty close approximations of each of the four main tones of Chinese in English; we just don’t happen to be aware of their use because the tones are not necessarily integral to the meaning of the word.

This is similar to how most native speakers are generally not aware of how important stress is in every English word. For example, do you know which are the stressed syllables in the words economy, economics, economist, and economical? Are you aware of how important it is to stress the correct syllable in each of these words every time you say them? Moreover, are you aware of the rules that govern why the stress syllable is indeed stressed in each of these words?

Of course you’re not familiar with the rules, but you know how to correctly pronounce each of these words. Economy is eCONomy, economics is ecoNOmics, economist is eCONomist and economical is ecoNOmical.

Non-native speakers, of course, don’t know any of this off the bat. And so they have to study the rules and practice. Which is, of course, incredibly difficult. About as difficult as it is for us English speakers to wrap our heads around and master the Chinese tones.

Let me explain the four main tones of Chinese. My explanation will focus on our varying pronunciation of the English word “Yeah”.

Of course, we say “yeah” all the time and, although we are unaware of it, the tone of our voice often indicates the meaning of the word.

For instance, when we are responding to someone and want to express polite disagreement or reserved agreement, we will often say the word “yeah” in what I consider to be a flat tone, as in: “Yeeaah, I guess sooo, but…”

This is the Chinese first tone. The voice is high, flat, inflectionless, like a musical note. “Yeah”. We say it without our voice dropping or rising, as it does sometimes in questions and commands. “Yeah, I guess so, but….” That is the Chinese first tone, also known as the flat tone, the high tone or the singing tone.

The second tone is the rising tone and it is embodied in the English question yeah. As in “yeah, so what?” The voice rises when we say it in English in a way very similar to how it rises in Chinese.

The third tone is the low tone or the dipping tone. The voice goes lower and dips just a little bit, like a downward-dipping parabola. We have a rough approximation of this tone when we say a doubtful, skeptical, almost condescending yeah, as in “yeah, but I don’t think you really understand what I’m saying”. This sound is low and longer in duration than the other tones.

The fourth tone is the falling tone. This is what I think of as the agreement tone in English. It’s friendly, happy, giddy. We use it when we use yeah to express definite agreement, as in, “yeah, I think so too!”

So those are the Chinese tones. And my point in writing this point was originally not actually to explain the tones but to say what I think about the statement “don’t worry about the tones”, which something I have heard from foreigners pretty consistently in China.

Not surprisingly, most of the people who said this to me were not very good at speaking Chinese and were painful to listen to and to understand. And I’m sure that it would be even worse for a Chinese person to listen to. And I draw a parallel between them and many of the English learners out there who we native English speakers won’t even give the time of day to. Because their pronunciation just sounds wrong.

Learning pronunciation in Chinese is mostly about learning tones. Foreigners let themselves off the hook with this “don’t worry about it” statement too often, and I know from experience that it leads to pronunciation problems down the road. And it makes those foreigners more isolated in China, unable to actually talk to Chinese people, only able to practice Chinese with other foreigners, which is not why they started learning Chinese in the first place (I don’t think).

So, if you’re learning Chinese and another foreigner throws this comforting statement your way, don’t grab onto it, don’t buy it. It will be tempting, believe me, because the tones will keep you up at night they’re so damn hard to learn. You will see yourself in your dreams opening your mouth, the tones perfectly clear in your head, but coming out in a disastrous mess as soon as your vocal chords start humming.

But don’t believe what they tell you about the tones. You’ve got to worry about them. Or they’ll never stop being your enemy.

There are certain things that, as an American, you take for granted. And I have been realizing lately that when I was still in America there were some things I had never really thought about before — things that I have now, after living in China for 14 months, had more reason to consider.

The first one and one of the most important is that there are things we get as Americans that a lot of other people don’t get automatically; it just comes with the territory of living in an “undeveloped” country.

Like what? What could be so great about life in America that you can’t get someplace else?

Well, at first, nothing. You don’t really notice the stuff until you’ve been outside for a while. Then it all starts to stick out at you.

Take traffic, for example. At first, I just found the traffic here insane and thought no more of it. But now I think a little further, and think that the people here have no other choice. It’s their reality to almost get killed every other day crossing the street.

OK, that one’s easy. How about building codes. Does anybody inspect the buildings here to make sure they’re safe and nothing is going to fall on you and kill you? Apparently not. Exhibit A is the building that fell down in Shanghai last year complete, just fell over in one big piece. Fire escapes are rare and precarious-looking structures are ubiquitous.

This building fell over in one big piece in Shanghai last year

Moving on. The next one is hospitals. One of the few foreigners I know in this town had to get his appendix removed in the local hospital, and somehow during the surgery they didn’t quite put everything back in the right place when they sewed him up. So some of his stomach muscles don’t work anymore.

Peter Hessler, in his book “River Town”, also points out that a few of his acquaintances died in his two years in a Sichuan river city, due mostly to a less safe healthcare system.

The next one is mental health. I was explaining to my Chinese teacher (who is a psychology professor) recently some of the services my sister receives as a disabled person. One of the things I mentioned was that there are social workers who come to hang out with her and take her shopping and stuff like that.

Her response was: We don’t have those kind of people in China.

I also have some personal experience with a kid with a disability who’s family is afraid of telling the public school system about the kid’s disability for fear that teachers will ignore the kid and people will ridicule him, because disabled people have no real enforceable legal rights in the education system here.

Compare that to the system in America where kids may be teased for having disabilities, but where they are also entitled to a whole host of rights and resources and modified forms of education (at least a great deal of the time), which entitlements are enforceable by suing the state.

Then, of course, there’s health care for the old, which I don’t know much about here but seems to be more or less nonexistent. I have had a couple of students whose elders have been dying or have passed away due to cancer of various varieties; the families didn’t have the money to pay for surgery so the old people just died, and this has happened occasionally with young people, too.

It’s hard to explain better than that, and probably none of this sounds particularly new or interesting. But it changes things to live here and know that if I were these people this would be my only reality — the world in which I would have to live and survive forever — and I think if that were the case for me my life would be a whole lot more oriented towards making money and finding security than it is now. Because the people here who manage to become wealthy-ish are able to have many of the securities and comforts that we’re afforded in wealthier western countries.

Many, but of course, not all.

Even more cause for a belated moment of gratitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video’s here: YouTube

Or here: Youku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Have you eaten?

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

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

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

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

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

As anybody who has taught English in China for a while knows, there’s a special kind of English spoken here, which has garnered its own term in Chinese and in English. That is Chinglish, or, in Chinese, Zhong1Shi4Ying1Yu3.

What that essentially means is that because students in China largely learn English in a “vacuum”, i.e. without interacting with foreigners, there are certain funny, weird, incorrect or only partly incorrect phrases that pop up a lot.

One of the first ones you hear on coming to China is, of course, “My English is not very well”, which is usually accompanied by a second of squinting and intense thought as the speaker tries to decide if she should say “well” or “good”.

There are others, and I have learned over time that it’s pretty useful in classes to directly explain the Chinese phrase I’m correcting, and then explain how to say it in English. The reality is that most students, when they speak English, will be directly translating from Chinese to English in their heads as they do so; they will not use the most natural or high-frequency English phrase. So it’s more effective teaching to “back in” to teaching oral English here sometimes — that is, start with the extremely common Chinese phrase you know they will one day translate incorrectly in conversation, and explain how to say it right.

For example, the Chinese phrase wo3you3shi4. I have something to do. That is how most students translate wo3you3shi4 (which literally means “I have an event”, but is the Chinese equivalent of “I have a previous commitment” or “something came up that I’ve got to take care of”. Students often say, “sorry, I can’t come to class because I have something to do.” Isn’t my class “something to do?” I have occasionally replied in jest. Confusion. Nobody gets the joke. It’s best just to teach the language and avoid subtle mockery.

Is it delicious? This is the question students ask when they want to know if something (you’re eating) is good or not. Someone, at some point, decided that it would be a good idea to translate the Chinese phrase “hao3chi1″, meaning, literally, “good eat”, into the word “delicious”, when in fact in spoken English we just say “good”, or “tasty”, as in, “how’s your food?” –”it’s good”

I want to play with you. This has been uttered to me by more than one student, and when I first heard it I thought I had somehow stumbled into some kind of twisted seventies softcore skin movie. You want to play with me? What? Unfortunately Chinese students never learn the correct translation of the word “wan2″, which actually means “hang out” or “do something together” but is tragically translated in English textbooks as “play”. So Chinese college students are always “playing” together in English, when they should be hanging out.

It is very fashion. This statement is the result of the words fashion and fashionable being one and the same in Chinese. And since clothes is a topic often mentioned in textbooks and lessons, the mistake pops up with annoying frequency. Yet another weird Chinglish phrase that is hard to kill.

Can you borrow me your book? Again, the result of the words lend and borrow being the same in Chinese, hence the common error.

Of course, just as there are crappy ways of translating Chinese into English, there are awkward and ugly ways of translating English into Chinese, and I utter them every day. So this isn’t a mockery or a critique of Chinese learners of English, just a short list of things that their teachers should correct them on. I’ve devoted a lesson to these four phrases for all of my classes, and the result is always nice. Just learning how to say these five things correctly goes a long way in making their English sound more authentic.

Teaching them how to correctly use the slang word “sucks” really helps, too. As in, I suck at basketball, my shoes are sucky, he is a sucky guy. Telling the students that suck means, po4, jiu4, mei2yi4si5, bu4hao3, lan4, wu2,liao2, all in one word tends to help them grasp it, I find.

Because having authentic English speakers in the classroom makes your ears feel better, and makes your students a little more fun to be around.

Sit down at the piano. Notice the keys spread out before you, black and interstices of white. If you don’t know how to play piano, you see a meaning that is hidden by foreignness. Your eyes discern nothing among the keys; but your hands long to reach out to them, to coax some melody from the percussive depths of the instrument before you as easily as you hear it in your mind. You long infinitely for that talent, for that mysterious ability which you know will in all likelihood forever remain hidden from you.

And that gap between you and the person who can sit down, who you see sit down before the piano and place her hands on it, depress one key and then another, open a river of metered sounds, harmonic, rhythmic layers of fifths and half-steps without any evident thought or effort or hesitation, you wonder privately what is the difference between that person and you.

Now you are the piano player. Someone you know sits down at your piano and reaches out tentatively to the keys that are so familiar to you. She presses one key timidly, and then another, and familiar sounds rise to you, and you hear the song that you once played, the one with no chorus, no tempo, no tune at all; the lost song of the hands that long to play but cannot, the hands that are strange to the piano. This person is close to you, knows you, but in this way she does not. And in this way the person in you who knows her does not know the person in you who can sit before the piano and play beautiful music. They are not the same. They cannot be the same. They cannot even know each other.

Why did you sit at the piano all those hours, practicing? What did you want to learn? What did you want to see or experience that you could not experience any other way, except to do this, to become a stranger, in some way, to yourself? Why else would you have sat there for so long, bent in sweet labor over the worn keys, sometimes playing sweet music and yet sometimes only practicing, producing sounds so that your hands would know, so that your hands and some deep part of your mind would understand where to go, so that they would forget that person who was a stranger to the keys, so that person would in fact disappear, so that even if you never played the piano again after this day you would always look at the keys and know, that part of you would always remain.

Why else did you bend over the keys and play alone for all those days and years, except to lose yourself, to become unknown, to change and become a stranger to your former life, so that life could be clearer, could be more easily understood, could be new, in some way? And who is that person who sits down before the piano and looks strangely at it, and produces the music of someone who doesn’t understand, who is only groping in the dark for a song that she can hear in her mind but never bring into the world? What does she see and what does she feel when she looks at the keys before her?

After I had resided in this small Chinese city for about eight months, someone kindly informed me that Sanming residents have a cute little saying about themselves. That is that they all consume, on average, about one brick a year.

This is a reference to the sun-blotting-out pollution that is the signature not just of large Chinese cities but of everywhere in China, with almost no exceptions that I have seen so far — big cities, pretty mountainscapes, small villages that may be located near enormous coal mines, etc. Pollution here is a constant of life, like sunshine and rain.

In Sanming, my city, it most prominently noticeable in the whitish haze that invariably reduces visibility not in any very obtrusive way, but just enough so that when you go hiking you can never really see much of the horizon, and when you go to the mountains with friends you never (or seldom) see a truly blue sky. It’s usually more that grayish overcast color that I associate with the depth of a New England winter, sometimes with a dome of bluish-gray at the ceiling of the sky.

Then also sometimes there is the stink, especially the further west you go in the city. The west side of town is officially the pollution side — that’s where the brownish striations of coal dust and carbon decorate the buildings most noticably, the place where many buildings’ residents seem to have given up on trying to keep the windows clean, and just let the dust and ash collect and collect until everything has this sort of choked, blackened mask.

It’s sort of a strange kind of beauty, if you have the right eye for it or are in a mood to overlook it. If you don’t or you’re not, it just looks dirty, or maybe more accurately just polluted, since dirt is everywhere but pollution is something that we can more easily quantify and identify.

And then it’s in the streets some days, in the coal smell that descends over the city, the sooty cloud that billows its way from the smokestacks at the steel mill (the biggest in the province!) or the burning trash heaps or any of the other numerous pollution sources here.

At first these details, the dirt, the pollution, were overwhelmingly depressing for me, but over time I have gotten used to them, grown accustomed to the sight of coal-streaked buildings (almost all of them look this way, which is why when I first arrived in Sanming I pointed to a cluster of buildings on the horizon and asked my liaison, Are those buildings burned?), and the loud, chaotic, playfully and rambunctiously and unpredictably polluted streets.

It’s part of life here and I can’t say I like it or hate it. It just is, as I wrote somewhere else in some failed fiction no one will ever read, like the high of one’s ears or the length of one’s nose or the color of one’s skin.

The clock just passed midnight which means as of today I’ve consumed a complete Sanming brick. Happy China birthday.

I went to Fuzhou this weekend and wanted to share an interesting experience I had going to Starbucks.

We don’t have a Starbucks in my city, and there are few in this province, so whenever I get a chance to go to one I take it. It’s like fucking Christmas every time I go. Suddenly I step from the loud chaotic uncomfortable unfamiliar world of China into an environment that totally sates every base craving I could have as an American: the corporate decor and smooth featureless music and padded overpriced comfort that is Starbucks.

The interesting thing about this trip was that my companion, a Japanese girl who teaches Japanese history in Fuzhou and whose name is Mami, does not speak English and so would have to order in Chinese. And of course I speak English and Chinese but not Japanese. And the tellers at Starbucks usually speak pretty good English and of course Chinese. And whenever I go to Starbucks I order in English because I don’t know the words for “grande black coffee, no room, with a ham and cheese panini” in Chinese (well, I don’t know grande or panini). So I took the lead and tried to order for Mami.

The problem is that when I’m with Mami it confuses everyone, because nobody knows until she starts speaking that she isn’t in fact Chinese. So Chinese people always look at me, scan over my face, and then start speaking in rapid-fire Chinese to Mami.

The only problem is, Mami’s Chinese isn’t as good as mine. So she often doesn’t understand and just nods her head, and then I have to step in and actually answer their question. But I’ve found that people usually still persist in trying to talk to Mami, not me…I’m not sure why; I think they realize pretty fast that she’s not Chinese. Maybe they figure that if this Asian-looking foreigner doesn’t understand them, there’s no way in hell the white guy standing next to her does.

Anyway, on this particular occasion I was in line with Mami and tried to order in English, but the Starbucks girl didn’t understand, so I ordered in Chinese, but there was still confusion. The place was packed. She couldn’t understand what Mami wanted. But she had my order, so I ducked out and ran to the pick-up line. Then Mami stayed there at the order line for like 10 minutes, but I had no idea what she was doing.

It turned out the Starbucks girl spoke Japanese and had lived in Japan for two years, so Mami was chatting with her in Japanese. Finally Mami came back and I started to say in Chinese to her that it seemed like everywhere we went together we confused the hell out of Chinese people, but I couldn’t remember the Chinese word for confused, but Mami happened to know the English word confused, so we stood there wondering out loud what the Chinese word for confused was.

Then a Chinese woman leaned over and told me it was wu4jie3, which actually means something like misunderstand. By this time I had checked my dictionary and found five different words for “confused”. Apparently confusion is an important concept in Chinese since it gets so many different words.

The Chinese woman spoke great English, and after a moment she started talking to Mami in English, asking her a few questions to which Mami responded by nodding and saying yes in English. Of course, Mami didn’t understand what the woman was saying, so when she asked Mami, “are you here in Fuzhou traveling?” and Mami again nodded yes, I said, in Chinese, no, we’re both teachers.

Naturally, the woman never imagined, and I’m not sure she even understood after that point, that Mami and I would be communicating exclusively in Chinese, which is actually true. Why would she? Why the hell would a white guy and a Japanese girl, both of whom have maybe only intermediate Chinese skills, be getting Starbucks together in China and using Chinese to communicate?

The whole thing makes no sense at all, but that’s China. And I surprised myself by actually being surprised when the Starbucks people told me they had run out of covers for their to-go cups. Almost as much as it surprised me the time the people at McDonald’s in Sanming told me they had run out of beef.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense in this country.