Having Fun All The Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are few things more humbling than looking at a Chinese college English exam.

Thursday night I spent two hours with some students, helping them prepare for the CET-6 English exam, which they took on Saturday. The CET-6 is a test that (apparently) almost all college students here take to measure their proficiency in English.

The test is extremely advanced for a second language test and yet contains quite a lot of grammatical errors and yet is U.S./Euro-centric and is the kind of thing that would make anyone who espoused progressive education in the United States scream bloody murder. The exam tests English reading, writing and listening by using fill-in-the-blank excercises/multiple choice and standard reading comprehension tests like you’d find on the SAT or GRE.

The thing is, though, that the test is almost unimaginably difficult for any non-native speaker. To pass, the students have to get something like 60 percent of the answers correct; but most of them don’t know I would say probably 30 percent of the vocabulary (I read somewhere that a reading passage is technically “illegible” to a reader if he/she doesn’t know 20 percent of the words).

An example of a test question (from memory):

One of the fill-in-the-blank excercises is a long passage about Germany’s response to the success of the U.S. economy in the 90’s. Random words are blanked out and the students answer by multiple-choice. One of the early sentences says something like

“Germany’s response came about after seeing the U.S. economy _______ in the 90’s.”

A.) Soar B.) Amplify C.)       Hover D.) Extend

I think, maybe, without a dictionary, some of my more advanced students might know the meaning of “Soar” and “Extend”. Amplify and hover I think they wouldn’t know. Maybe they would have seen them before. But, nonetheless, they are expected to know these words, and to somehow understand why “soar” is preferable to “expand” in this context. Although, without living in a Western culture or having some idea of what happened in the U.S. economy in the 90’s, I don’t know why they would be expected to know the answer at all.

The reading level is, I think, somewhere around the reading level on the pre-SAT you take in junior high-school. So around the level where native speakers are at the age of 16. Except the subject matter is all about Western culture. So they’re being tested on the use of the language in the context of Western culture, when most of the students have met less than a handful of foreigners. Most of them have not traveled far from home. I don’t think any of them have left the country. It’s not like they have English-language newspapers in the library, either. Considering all that, they know an amazing amount about the West. But they don’t know things like what the U.S. economy did in the 90’s, and they certainly don’t know the word “amplify”.

The only analogue I can imagine would be if you took a 14-year-old in the U.S. and expected him to be able to score a 1200 on the GRE. Even if the kid had studied every day since he was six years old, only the occasionally lucky or brilliant student would pass. Most of my students won’t pass the CET-6. That would be incredible. Of about 200-some students who I know, three of them have passed it already. And those three, I think, worked incredibly hard. And they also, I suspect, got incredibly lucky on the day they took the test.

That is what most of these students will be relying on Saturday when they take the test–luck. The tests are timed and there is not enough time even for a native speaker (read: me) to comfortably read the material and answer the questions with total confidence. I am sure that if everyone in the U.S. had to take the test, a good portion of the population would fail. I can’t really guess at the number, but I bet it would be in the teens at least. So my students will basically go into the test room, read frantically, guess on most of the answers, and if they are lucky (stats say that someone always passes by guessing) a few of them will pass.

The rest will go on thinking that they are no good at English, even though they are. And who knows how not passing the CET-6 will affect their chances at getting a job (some say that they won’t be able to get a teaching job without passing it).

So Thurday night, after two hours of trying to explain to the students things like the difference between “soar” and “extend”, and why we typically use “soar” and “crash” when we talk about the economy in English, I threw up my hands and told them that the test was unfair, that it was criminally difficult for them and that it also included a bunch of grammatical errors, typos, unclear questions/answers and some multiple-choice questions with no single logically correct answer. I told them that I knew that they had all worked incredibly hard, and that whatever happened on Saturday, they should feel good about how hard they had worked and how much they had learned.

And I walked home thinking: sometimes you can be frustrated at the students’ limitations, and then sometimes you can be frustrated at your own.

Some pictures from recent trips to some towns / cities near Sanming. I need to make some changes to the blog, I think, before I can post these a bit bigger.

Taken from the side of XianJing Mountain in Datian.

About picture #1: We took a walk up the road along XianJing Mountain on my first afternoon in Datian — it took us about 30 minutes to drive there from Datian and we saw few cars or people once we arrived. There were old-style Chinese houses on the way to the top and a lot of rice fields. Near the top you could look down and see the laddered rice fields on the sides of a lot of mountains. These things look just like topo maps and you see them a lot driving through the countryside. They are really pretty. Note that on this mountain we were high enough so that a lot of the smog/pollution was below us, hence the rarely glimpsed blue sky.

Taken in Shaxian at a small hike / tourist attraction. A couple of different people told me this is China's largest "lying Buddha".

A not-so-old Buddhist temple in Shaxian, again mostly for tourists. It was pretty, though.

We took a meandering boat ride on QiXing (Seven Stars) Lake in HuMei (Beautiful Lake) near Datian. I learned (a little) how to play MahJong.

The city of Shaxian from afar.

An iron bridge near Datian. Getting there in a car involved asking multiple people to move motorcycles, piles of woods, driving over piles of dirt, etc. Clearly a car hadn't been through that way in a while.

Self-portrait in Shaxian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace out for now.

: )

Howdy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s something.

: )

Sanming City, Fujian Province, China from the top of Qilinshan

Behold, the city of Sanming! This picture was taken from the pagoda on top of Qilinshan, or “Unicorn” Mountain (although it’s not really a unicorn….it’s a Chinese creature that doesn’t really resemble the western unicorn).

Note the vast amounts of smoke rising from the center-right and floating downwind through the valley. That smoke is headed toward the direction of the university where I am staying, and is the reason why it is almost never not cloudy here. Yeah. Constant “fog”. It also gets “dusty” (to the point that wiping your hand across the table renders a blackened palm) in about three days, which means I am constantly trying to clean surfaces.

It is pretty, though.

When I flew to China, the first Chinese person that I actually spoke to was, of course, in America. He was waiting with me in the check-in line, in the JFK Airport.

The flight from New York to Shanghai was, understandably, populated mostly by Chinese people (there were a few Westerners, but I could count them on one hand). This guy was standing in line in front of me with his wife. I heard him say, “He has a nice backpack; that’s a very special backpack,” and realized he was talking about me (I was wearing a big North Face overnight pack that was not particularly special but was out of place among the travel gear of everybody else).

So, I said hello and we talked for a minute. I told him that I was going to Fujian Province.

“Oh, they speak a lot of crazy dialects there,” he said. “I do not understand those people.”

In my bags, I had two books on Chinese and three audiobooks on learning Chinese (Mandarin). One of the things I wanted to do while in China was/is learn Chinese. So that was not terrific news for me.

Since then, I have come to realize that he was right, but not totally (it is possible to understand people here in Fujian, because they do speak Mandarin, if with a very heavy southern accent), and also in more ways than he intended (it’s not just that people in Fujian don’t speak standard Mandarin, but that a good chunk of Chinese people in general do not seem to speak standard Mandarin).

Which all leads to the title of this post, which is, there is no Chinese.

Officially, I guess, that statement is incorrect. Mandarin is the official language of China and is what is primarily spoken in Beijing, apparently. So people from the northern/Beijing area tend to speak fairly standard Mandarin. But go elsewhere in the country and you could come across any number of dialects, heavy accents (like way more prohibitive than just a southern v. northeastern accent in the U.S.), and sometimes just flat out different languages, which is what some of the dialects are (different languages).

Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are two major dialects/languages in China. Mandarin is the standard language spoken here in the university. So classes are taught in Mandarin (or the case of my classes, English). But all of the students speak their own local dialects.

Some students explained this to me over lunch a week ago. There were about five of them eating with me, and they told me that among them they spoke two different local dialects. One was called Min Nan Yu (Fujian Southern Language) and the other one I didn’t catch the name of. These were just two dialects of Fujian. There are others. The students speak these languages among each other in their dorms, and often can’t understand the students from two doors down, because they have a different local dialect. These students are all from Fujian. Fujian is just one relatively small province in a much, much bigger country. See the image below — Fujian is the red blotch in the SEern section of China.

Fujian, China - Thanks to Wikipedia

Yeah. So if there are multiple dialects spoken in that small red spot, how many languages do you think are spoken throughout China? Lots. I haven’t found an exact number in any reliable source, but apparently there are about 7-ish dialect groups in China, including Mandarin and Cantonese, and any number of permutations of those dialects.

Which means that even if a person knew Mandarin and Cantonese, there is a good chance that in parts of China he/she still wouldn’t be able to communicate with people.

Thankfully, most of my students primarily speak Mandarin and English around me, so I can communicate with them now in English, and there is a distant, snowball-in-hell chance that one day I will be able to understand what they are saying in Mandarin.

But, the catch is, I can’t really learn Mandarin from them. Because…they all have heavy southern accents, and their Mandarin is influenced by their local dialects. Which means that they all say words differently, some correctly, some incorrectly.

The word “water” is a good example. In Mandarin, water is shuǐ (pronounced like “shway”). But some students pronounce it like “sway”, which is incorrect (accented), but which they would correct me on if I tried to learn “water” from them and pronounced it “shway” (which is correct). I ran into this problem over and over again my first two weeks here, before I started taking lessons. I would learn a word one way, and the next day, a different group of students would teach me the same word, pronounced differently.

And that is only one tiny pronounciation difference…the students, because of their accents/dialects, also pronounce their r’s as zh’s and l’s differently, and there are other differences…

On top of all that (all the speaking differences), it turned out that the Chinese writing book that I brought with me to Chinese is also useless. Mainland China now uses a simplified form of Chinese characters for writing, while Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Chinatowns in America, use an older and more complex version of Chinese writing. So, I might as well line hamster cages with the writing book I got in the U.S.

All of this is to say that I am really glad I am taking Chinese lessons now, because learning Chinese from random students in Fujian, it turns out, is close to impossible.

I have them for 4 hours a week, and each lesson is a small disaster, because I really can’t pronounce the words, but I think I might be learning something. That’s good enough for now.

Naptime. Peace out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is, by the way:

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

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

Xiang (meaning fly, pronounced like “shyang”)

Praise, ambition, fly. Ya heard.

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

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

Addendum to the rat posting, next day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you need that for? They asked.

For drinking, I said.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading HFATT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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