Having Fun All The Time

Starting at the end of June, I left Sanming for Beijing to meet my cousin, Jess. Our plan was to spend a little under a month traveling around China, starting in Beijing and then heading west to Xi’an, and then proceeding southwest to Sichuan and Yunnan, and finally ending up in Shanghai, where we would say goodbye.

Before I left, I took some last photos of the building in Sanming where I taught for the last two years -- and where I won't be teaching anymore, as I'm moving onto the bigger, more developed city of Xiamen in southern Fujian

As happened last year when I was getting ready to go, I had too much to do in Sanming before my departure date, or anyway it seemed that way. I also suffered from the inevitable  Trip anxiety about everything going well on the trip. It always goes this way for me, whether I’m leaving for a weekend or a month. Before I go, I get anxious. This anxiety is all-consuming and results in me sleeping poorly, thinking constantly about the trip, and spending hours on the computer making inconsequential decisions, like whether to buy a train ticket directly from one city to the next or a bus ticket from the big city to a smaller city midway in order to avoid flooding in the area. These sessions online searching for tickets also inevitably end in me making a random decision, since perfect knowledge is impossible from home. When you travel, sometimes you just have to go for it.

I realize that this whole stress experience is something a lot of people don’t have when they’re planning a trip – they just go for and make the plunge and their upcoming trip is a huge thing to look forward to. Perhaps it’s a testament to how cushy my life is in China that a big trip becomes a bigger source of anxiety than anything else going on in my life. I find, however, that usually within about 12 hours of leaving home my stress basically disappears. This is an incredibly weird phenomenon: I feel stressed out, very stressed out, about traveling, right up until the moment I actually leave. And then once I am out the door and have put a fair distance between me and home, the stress is completely gone. Yeah, completely gone. Not just lingering or dissipating, but disappeared. Like a nightmare that you vanquish simply by waking up.

The stress was gone for me, on this trip, right around the time my train from Fujian Province was within an hour of Shanghai. I had spent the evening on the train relaxing and reading and chatting with a young college student on the train. He was going to school at Tongji University. He was friendly and seemed perfectly happy to chat with me in Chinese until his head turned blue, which is one of the best things about riding on the train in China, if you’re studying Chinese. We chatted most of the morning and then I started to notice the marshy outlands of Shanghai out the train window late in the morning. We were going to arrive in Shanghai a bit before noontime, and around ten was when I noticed that we were passing through what looked like an endless swamp. Small agricultural villages floated by, and it seemed that every house we passed was flanked by a water border of some kind. Mostly it was rivers or creeks, with frequent fields of rice flooding across the flat land. Buildings were small and concrete, with gabled roofs. I saw almost no one in the fields and the sun barely burned through the thick smog that clouded the air.

This is a photo of the 2008 class's classroom. They took all there classes here. Above the blackboard in the back of the room it says "Where there is a will there is a way." Get it? Will? That was great for my ego in my moments of teacher's desperation.

When we were about an hour from Shanghai I wrapped up my talk with the college kid, and he asked if we could exchange phone numbers. This is something that happens with almost every random Chinese person I talk to and never results in any further contact between us, but I gave him my number anyway and he gave me his. He told me to call him if I wanted to go see Tongji University; he would be happy to show me around.

When we arrived in the Shanghai train station I briefly felt a little bit of the panic and stress I had felt back home when I had been planning the trip, as I realized that I hadn’t planned how to get to my hostel from the train station. Then I remembered that I had Google maps on my phone, which allowed me to simply check the bus route to my destination, from wherever I happened to be. Oh yeah, that was why I hadn’t planned how to get there. It was also one of the huge advantages of traveling in China as a resident. I met so many foreigners on the trip who had no phone, no map, spoke no Chinese, had no easy way of getting around; but I had been in China for two years, which meant that none of these things were problems. I had a phone I had spent 450 U.S. dollars on so I wouldn’t have to wonder how the hell to get where I wanted to go; I had taken all the addresses and phone numbers with me so that I would never have to look for a hotel on this trip; I had studied Chinese for two years in China, so speaking wasn’t a problem; and, the best part of all, I had booked all my train tickets in advance through a Chinese travel agent called China Connection Tours.

When I had been planning the trip back home, I had been unsure of the importance of booking train tickets in advance. We would be staying in many destinations for four or five days, and I had to pay a 5 to 20 dollar surcharge for every ticket the agency booked for me, so it seemed like maybe it was planning overkill. This had been another great thing for me to stress out over while I was planning the trip. Was I planning too much? Was I locking us into an itinerary that we wouldn’t enjoy? Was I just a spaz who was doing way too much in advance and wasting money on train tickets that wouldn’t be used?

This is the same classroom from the other end -- viewing the front of the classroom, the place where I stood for 5 hours a week for two years, trying to help 50 people make some progress learning English.

Turns out, it was not a waste at all. Throughout our trip, I can’t remember running into a single other foreigner who didn’t have some horror story about something that had happened to him/her two or three days prior wherein he or she had to sit in a hard seat on a Chinese train for 12 to 30 hours. We met so many people who had done this. For some reason, this summer in China, the entire country had decided to go out traveling, and it was virtually impossible to get a sleeper train ticket anywere. The only things for sale were hard seats. We met people who had totally changed their travel plans in order to avoid nightmare rides like this, and then we met people who had done days on trains in hard seats. We met a few people who had even done overnight rides with standing-room-only tickets. They had literally stood on the train for whole nights, surrounded by rowdy Chinese tourists or regular folks heading out to dagong, hit work…in other words heading out of their hometowns to do some kind of manual or unskilled labor.

The worst case of travel unpreparedness I saw on our trip was a young guy we ran into in Sichuan. He was American, maybe 25, with long brown hair and a beard, dressed in earthy colors and dark green carpenter pants. I ran into him in the morning, when we were checking out of our hostel to head south to Yunnan. This poor guy was also checking out, but he was headed to Shanghai. He had booked a flight to the city without booking a hotel room, and for some reason (which I couldn’t fathom) he had waited until this moment, when he was about to leave for the airport, to try to resolve the issue.

He was freaking out. He couldn’t speak Chinese, so he had enlisted one of the poor front-desk girls at the hostel to help him get a hostel bed or a hotel room. But every call she was making was turning out to be a dead end. I stood at the counter behind him, waiting to check out, while he cursed in front of me.

The main street in the center of Sanming University.

“How could there be no fucking rooms left anywhere in that goddamn city?!” he asked (not at her, but himself – he was obviously not trying to be rude to the front-desk girl but his stress was getting the better of him).

“Sorry, they say they have no room,” the Chinese girl said patiently.

“Can you try that number—try that one you had before,” he said, leaning over the counter and pointing to something on her computer screen. She was helping him find hotels online. I wondered if this task—pseudo travel-agent—really counted as the responsibility of the girl at the front desk at the hostel, where beds were about 45 yuan, or $6.50, per night.

While I waited the girl called four different hotels or hostels (I wasn’t sure which she was calling) and came up with nothing. The guy was completely frozen.

“Shit,” he said. “I really have to get to the airport. I’m really late already. Fuck! How am I supposed to just go to Shanghai with no hotel? Fuck. I’m probably going to have to get some fucking expensive hotel and it’s going to be more than my plane ticket. I may as well just not go. Shit!”

He was talking to nobody, because the girl behind the counter clearly only understood that he was very upset (she undoubtedly understood the word “fuck”, also), but I wanted to interject because I had been in his shoes several times.

“Dude,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Just go get on your plane. You’ll find something when you get there. When you arrive, just get in a cab and tell the driver ‘hotel’, and he’ll take you someplace fine.”

This didn’t really calm the dude that much, but perhaps it helped, because a couple of minutes later he pulled the move that sometimes you just have to pull when you’re traveling. He said “Fuck it,” grabbed his bag, and headed for the airport.

Remarkably, my cousin and I got to the curb before him and were working on hailing a cab when he arrived in the street. Even more remarkably, when we successfully hailed a cab and I offered it to him, he refused. “No, no, you guys were here first. You take it, it’s your cab,” he said.

Obviously this American had not been in China for long. I was astonished that he had even considered refusing an open car from someone who was offering it to him; any other Chinese in the entire country would have stolen the cab from me without even blinking if I had bent down to tie my shoes. If I actually offered a cab to a Chinese in a hurry, I am 100 percent certain that it would never be turned down.

Nonetheless, I told him to get in the cab and catch his flight. Which, after a slight hesitation (he looked like he was willing to accept whatever fate was going to throw at him at this point, including an inability to get to the airport in time), he did. Jess and I continued to try to get a cab for a few minutes, and got to the train station in plenty of time.

We basically always had plenty of time, even when I was stressed out about time. Maybe because I was often stressed out about time? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Anyway, we didn’t miss any trains or planes the whole trip. We had only one small mishap on the trip, which was that Jess’s day-bag got stolen. Other than that, everything went fine. And I started to realize that everything was going to go fine as I walked along the street in Shanghai, headed to the subway so I could go to my hostel, already halfway to Beijing a full three days before my cousin would even arrive there.

I guess, my point is that I kind of overthink travel a bit when I’m sitting in my comfortable Fujian home, half-dreaming, half-worrying.

After arriving in Shanghai I found the hostel without any trouble. It’s called the Rock&Wood International Youth Hostel, a well-located and clean and modern hostel with decent prices for Shanghai (60 yuan, about $9.50 per night for bunks). The only strange thing about the hostel was that there were literally no Chinese staying there. This was the only time I had seen a youth hostel in China with no Chinese, and I never saw a native Chinese in the several nights I stayed there (this was also where Jess and I ended our trip). By the time my head hit the pillow that night I wasn’t worried about anything. In my first night in Shanghai I went shopping for some essentials that I hadn’t been able to buy in Fujian, and chatted with a couple of Australians who had traveled the world, skateboarding everywhere, and had come to Shanghai and discovered a Russian community of skaters in the city, just by going out and skating in the streets. They told me that Shanghai has the largest skate park in the world, and that they had gone there, and that they had seen less than a dozen people there all day. That most of the place was grown over with weeds. This was about as unsurprising to me as the fact that Shanghai had the largest skateboard park in the world was surprising. These two were the first skaters I had seen in China.

They also had impressions of China that were profoundly weird to me. Their impressions were roughly thus:

• Beers and going out clubbing are super cheap
• The Russian skaters throw great parties
• It’s, like, an international city, you know?

Anyway, they were cool guys. And by the time I met them I had had a few of the hostel’s 10 yuan beers. So eventually I commandeered the conversation and started telling them stories about what I had learned in Fujian, about the Chinese government, modern Chinese history. I told them about a student of mine whose mother had died because the family couldn’t afford the surgery needed for the form of cancer she had (I never learned, because of the language barrier—at the time I learned the story I couldn’t speak Chinese—what kind of cancer she had).

I talked more than I usually do, and I remember a distinct silence after the story about the cancer.

“Woah, man, that’s intense,” one of the Aussies said.

Then they went to bed. I realized that I would have to tone down my China obsession and try to assimilate a bit more back into the expat mindset if I was going to live in hostels for the next month, and if I was going to serve as any kind of enjoyable guide for my cousin. Hard truths about politics and daily life in China probably don’t go well with fun summer travel. Anyway, I felt like the skaters needed a dose of reality.

I, too, finished my beer, and went back to my room. The next day I had a flight to catch to Beijing.

Beijing

I had an expat buddy in Beijing. Two, actually, and I was planning to stay with them my first night in Beijing and then move to a hostel, so as not to put them out too much, and meet my cuz the day after next at the Beijing airport.

After arriving in Beijing I went straight to the subway to head to their place, and was immediately confronted with the most immediate and brutal fact of Beijing for anyone who has to ride the subway there: There are a lot of fucking people.

After taking the express rail from the airport into the city (about 30 minutes), I entered the actual subway. Folks were “lining up” at the entrances to the subway cars, and as the actual train arrived a subway employee, probably noting my large rolling suitcase, waved me to another line that she presumably thought would be les of a shoving match to enter through, and I ignored her. Ignoring Chinese people is, unfortunately, a kind of habit of mine, as I usually find public officials, waiters, and transport people to be kind of pushy and unhelpful and unconcerned with the people they’re actually supposed to be helping. If they want you to do something, it often has nothing to do with what is actually right for you—you’re standing someplace that you’re technically not allowed to stand, for instance, and even though there are 20 other Chinese standing there the official singles you out as the foreigner and asks you alone to move to a different spot, for “safety”. Something like that. But it turns out in this instance I should have listened, because when the train arrived it was completely packed, literally packed with people, and the only way I could get on was to basically use force. Which I did. Which resulted in a couple of yelps from people whose shins met the blunt edge of my suitcase. I felt bad, and apologized, but I didn’t even know whom I was apologizing to. The subway car consisted of a mass of bodies crushed in together, and it’s not like anybody was going to call me out on being rude. The rule in situations like this in China is: do what you have to do. In this case, that means that everybody was pushing, and it’s not like I was going to go against the grain here.

I made it to Natasha and Nick’s place (my expat friends, one British, one American) and dropped my stuff in their comfy, upscale apartment. Natasha had a knack for living in nice places in China. (The rent on this place, I later found out, was more than 60 percent of my monthly salary in Fujian.) Natasha and I chatted and caught up. She would be moving to Chicago soon to go to grad school, and Nick would be moving with her. This would definitely be our last chance to hang out for a long time, and we had met in China – she and I had moved here at the same time, and knew a mutual friend from back home who introduced us over Facebook. Our friendship was kind of a rare one for me: the chance to talk to someone from the same place, who had come to China for the same reasons, and yet experienced a very different China from me, was totally refreshing for me. Natasha had stories about “real” expat life in China—meeting foreigners who had married Chinese, who had lived here for years, who were married to other foreigners themselves, who had long-term careers here. I had basically spent the last two years in the presence of Chinese, and that was it. The world of foreigners in China was foreign to me. And it was always comforting to hear that I wasn’t the only one.

In the evening we went out for dinner and trivia night at an Irish pub. This was weird for two reasons: first, the Western food was good; second, the Italian restaurant we had dinner at happened to be hosting a symposium for foreigners in Beijing involved in the energy industry. And it was packed with about 50 other foreigners. And there was a keynote speakers whose topic was solid waste disposal. The host of the symposium introduced her by explaining, with a little embarrassment, that solid waste did not mean what we might think it meant. It meant, like, cans and bottles and paper and stuff like that. Not, you know, that solid waste. So the four of us sat through our dinners of pasta and pizza, unable to really talk at any length because of the talk that was going on, listening to fascinating details about how garbage is dealt with in China. Also, the power went out. And there was a leak in the ceiling that was pretty distracting.

We did trivia later, and the other foreigners were weird. This is another inevitable thing about China, and a reason I’m usually not unhappy that I chose to go to a city with almost no foreigners in it. The foreigners in China, in general, tend to be at least slightly weirder than the people who actually inhabit English-speaking countries. No one seems to know why this is. There’s a general theory that it’s because life in China is easy, so it tends to attract people who couldn’t handle a more challenging existence back home. Of course, that’s a half-baked theory. The truth is that China contains a lot of lame foreigners, and, naturally, a good percentage of really amazing people. Nick and Natasha were examples of the really amazing contingent. But they did mention that it could be hard to find decent foreigner friends in Beijing.

One of the women we did trivia night with, in particular, showed her stripes when she said some pretty tactless things to Natasha, one of which went something like, “Oh, you were thinking, Natasha? That’s new.” (Prompted by Natasha saying she was thinking about something. Aside from the fact that this joke is not funny, it makes no sense, because Natasha is one of the smartest women I’ve met. And that lady was definitely not.)

Lu Xun, looking like a player in his Cosby sweater, I must say.

That evening I slept on the air mattress they so graciously provided me, and then moved on to my hostel, where I would spend another night. The next morning I would go to meet Jess at the airport. I spent a while getting oriented, and then went to the Beijing Lu Xun museum, which was right near the place we stayed (Bejing Templeside Guest House, an amazing place located in a Beijing hutong, which sadly will be closed at the end of this season because the owner wants to renovate the property, so I won’t write much more about it here except to say that Emma, the young girl who manages the place, is a wonderful and helpful lady and that I hope she finds a great job after the hostel closes). Lu Xun is pretty much The Big Guy in Chinese literature, and it was interesting to see photos of the places he used to live and to read quotes from some of his books, and get a general feel for his life story (he was obviously brilliant). But, because most of the displays in the museum were 100 percent Chinese, I can’t say much more than that. I could get the general drift of the meaning of the displays, but can’t say that I absorbed a lot about Lu Xun from the museum, due to the lack of English (which is fair; I can’t see a lot of foreigners spending time in the museum).

I will say that I found one quote, centrally displayed over a black-and-white background of pretty austere looking grass in a field, pretty wonderful:

The Lu Xun quote in his museum.

“什么是路？就是从没路的地方践踏出来的，从只有荆棘的地方开辟出来的。”

“What is a road? It’s something that was trampled underfoot in a place where there was no road. It’s something that—in a place where before there were only thistles and thorns—was started.”

I didn’t do much else that first day. I found some really good street food vendors, and pigged out on lamb’s meat sandwiches in the hot Beijing summer sun. But that was about it. I was fully intent on relaxing, and I was very glad that the anxiety I had felt in Sanming had pretty much stayed there with all my crap when I left. I still had small worries, especially because Jess hadn’t really arrived yet, but I was happy, and felt the refreshed, renewed feeling you really only get when you travel. In the evening I chatted with the girls who ran the hostel and drank beers and read, and went to bed early so I’d be ready to pick up Jess in the morning.

Next post: Cuz arrives in Beijing and the trip begins in earnest.

Surprise! They have Walmart in China, too. Although I've only seen this one, in Xiamen, which is one of the wealthier cities in the country. (It looks pretty much like a Walmart inside, too.)

(This is part 3 of a 5-part series.)

Sanming: A journey back home, this time with people from home-home in tow

It had been raining in southern China for about a month, and as we headed towards the Guilin airport it started to rain again. Our flight was delayed again, as had the flight from Shenzhen to Guilin, but took off after only an hour or so delay, and we landed in Xiamen, where I had planned for us to go directly to the train station and catch a sleeper train to Sanming, which would put us in my town around 6 a.m. the next morning (I had first done this with my friend, Natasha, when she visited me from Guangzhou in the spring).

But those plans were ruined when we got to the station and the ticketseller informed me that due to flooding, the train was closed and would not open again for at least a week.

This left me standing in the middle of a train station in China, with four of my family members, and no other English speakers in sight or really friends to speak of in the city, wondering how the hell we were going to get to Sanming with the trains out and wondering where we were going to sleep, exactly.

The issue was not totally easy to resolve, but after about 30 minutes we were at a hotel, we had rooms, and we were planning to go to the bus station in the morning to take a bus to Sanming. There was a bit of a mixup in the middle there – the only hotel address I had in Xiamen turned out to be an unregistered hotel and the cab driver refused to take us there, so I asked him to take us to a different hotel – but it went fairly smoothly and the only bad thing about it was that now we would only have at most several hours in Sanming and we had to sleep on rock-hard beds in Xiamen for a night.

The sun-drenched city of Xiamen from the hotel window (I don't remember the rain stopping during this part of the trip, but it must have temporarily.)

The next morning, the earliest bus we could get was 12:30 p.m., so my uncle and cousin and I cut out of the bus station for an hour or so in search of coffee, food, Internet access, and a bank to exchange money. Along the way we stopped at the famous peanut soup shop on Zhongshan Rd in Xiamen that every Chinese person I have been with in Xiamen has taken me to. The place is interesting – it kind of dirty and is always super crowded and loud and exhausting; it’s not really the kind of place that appeals to me at first. But after you’ve been there a couple of times you notice that it appears to be one of those magical food establishments – a sort of nexus between different classes and breeds of human beings that attracts all types regardless of their status or background. Among the churning masses that shove and squirm to get the sugary-sweet and piping hot peanut soup you find cops, old ladies, young punky Chinese kids, families, women in high heels, fat middle aged guys, everybody. And the place has a kind of ruthless soup-Nazi feel to it; you take a coupon at the register for whatever you want and then give the soup/snack counter your coupon and they give you your volcanically hot food. And then you struggle to find a bench to sit down on among the teeming masses. The place is a headache and a nightmare in a way, but it’s definitely an experience and the people watching is better than maybe anywhere else I’ve seen in Fujian.

Eventually we returned to the bus station and hopped on the bus back to Sanming. When we all first got on the bus it was like an oven inside – literally, it was probably 130 degrees Fahrenheit or more. It had been sitting with the engine off in the scorching southern China sunshine for hours and they had allowed us to board without starting the air conditioning. So immediately everybody dumped off the bus and let it cool off inside, and then we reboarded again.

The Fujian landscape as viewed from the bus on the way to Sanming

Chinese buses are actually fairly comfortable and I think my whole group was pleasantly surprised at first. The long distance buses, as far as I have encountered, are not the hard-backed bench seating arrangements you’re likely to see in a movie about China. They’re basically Greyhounds, except maybe a tad dirtier and smellier and with A/C that may not function as well. So the 4.5 hour trip from Xiamen to Sanming was uneventful and, around 5:30, we pulled into our hotel in Sanming.

The hotel itself was unfortunately quite bad (a friend helped me book it and I made the mistake of trusting him completely without checking out the hotel for myself – I have seen way nicer hotels in Sanming), but the dean of my department at the college had booked a dining room for us in the hotel, and prepared the most elaborate, expensive and delicious Chinese meal I have ever seen or eaten. Pretty much all the teachers from our department attended, which meant that there were about 15 of us including my family at table. The meal was fish, expensive snails that I had never seen before, jellyfish, several pork and beef dishes, several vegetable dishes, a few soups, crab, prawns, and several other traditional Chinese dishes that I have since forgotten. It was amazing, and I have no idea how much it cost, but it must have been at least 1200 RMB (somewhere around $200). Which is like spending over $1,000 on a meal in the U.S. – it’s a serious all-out eating fest. And, of course, there was lots of drinking, and for some reason the dean especially took a liking to my uncle, who explained a bit about California and San Francisco and some other things about the U.S.

After dinner it was time for the event that later my uncle said was the most meaningful part of the trip for him, to which everyone seemed to agree – that was meeting my students. It was after 9 p.m. when we finally made it to my teaching building, and I knew that the students had been waiting for around an hour at least, and I and my family members were still a little intoxicated from the drinking at dinner. But when we arrived in the classroom we got the usual explosive, more-or-less screams-of-delight greeting from the group of 50 students and then my dad and mom and uncle and cousin mingled with the students for about an hour. At the beginning I just introduced my family members to the class and explained that I hoped the students practiced their English; and they could say anything they wanted except “My English is very poor”. So they mingled and talked and I think my family was just as amazed, if not more so, by the experience.

The thing is, and really I’m just parroting my uncle here, that the students come across as so enthusiastic here in this part of the country (especially in a place as rural as this, where the students perhaps didn’t even expect to get to go to college, much less have experiences learning from/with foreigners) that it is impossible not to compare them in your mind to the cynical, bored, uninterested students in wealthy cities in the U.S. – or even relatively wealthy cities in China, for that matter. My friend Natasha had the same reaction when she came to Sanming from Guangzhou – her students were all spoiled city kids and she spent most of her time trying to keep them from misbehaving, whereas with my students I don’t even have a shadow of a problem like that. The students are so well behaved and so hard working it is a little scary. And they are so enthusiastic about everything I bring to the classroom that it is hard for me not to become completely spoiled by them.

The exhausted family arrives in Sanming -- but barely gets to see it in the daylight

So my family met the students, and after about an hour I finally decided that it was time to head back to the hotel when I noticed that my father, soaked in sweat, had begun distributing hugs to very happy students. I’m sure the students were happy to get hugs, but we were all tired and extremely hot, white family and Chinese students alike – the students were just as soaked in sweat as the rest of us – and it was time to go.

As we left I realized that I had left the keys to my apartment back at the hotel, which was a 40 minute cab ride away, and that I still had to get our World Expo tickets and some fresh clothes out of my apartment. So we went back to town, I left my family in the hotel and then headed back out to return to the school. I made the cab ride back and opened my apartment door and again it looked a bit unfamiliar after just six days away – that feeling of having left this somewhat shabby world and gone into a much cleaner, brighter one temporarily – and then I grabbed my things and left.

A typical Chinese town as viewed from the van on the way to Fuzhou.

The family arrives in Hong Kong

(This is part 1 of a 5-part series)

Hong Kong: A delay, a rainstorm and a night ride through the mountains

The journey all across eastern China has just ended, so before posting pictures I’m going to try to recall everything I can about the 14 day trip here.

Leaving Sanming

My family’s visit to China took place at the beginning of summer, just a day after I wrapped up the last bits of my teaching work for the semester. My mother and father would be flying to Hong Kong from Boston, and my uncle and cousin (mother’s side) both flew in from San Francisco. I was pretty much flat-out busy for two weeks before they came, booking tickets and hotels at the last minute and administering final exams and giving grades. So when the time finally came to take a train to Hong Kong to meet my parents, I was exhausted and had developed a bit of a cold, but I was ready to go. I had been living in a small city in southeastern China (Sanming, Fujian Province, right across from Taiwan) for several months without leaving for more than a couple of days, and I hadn’t left Fujian since February, so I was ready to get out of the area for a little while and see what the rest of China had to offer.

Hong Kong

The first destination was Hong Kong. I left Sanming on the 23rd of June to go meet my parents, submitting final grades that morning and then buying a sleeper bus ticket to take me the 14 hours to Shenzhen, which is a major industrial city in the Chinese mainland just a few miles away from Hong Kong Island. From Shenzhen I could literally cross the border from mainland to Hong Kong by subway. I had originally planned to go by sleeper train, which is much more comfortable and in this case faster, but all across southeastern China over the past month it had rained, and floods and landslides had shut down the train route. So I boarded the bus in the afternoon and we set out west.

The only notable thing from the bus trip was that the bus’s dinner stop was several hours away from Sanming, at a broken-down-looking roadside restaurant where they served bad chicken soup and fried vegetables and rice and charged an outrageous 15 yuan for the meal (about $2 USD; normally this kind of meal would cost 7 or 8 yuan). But the place was obviously in the middle of nowhere and supported at least a few families, who appeared to be living in total poverty. Connected to the dining hall I could see their living quarters, which consisted basically of half a dozen beds crowded together and shrouded in mosquito nets. The place is hard to describe; it was just the kind of place that you know at a glance is inhabited by people who make no money and have very little, so it was easier not to feel cheated as I forked over my money. It was a bit of a racket; I took my food and they told me to pay later, and after I started eating they asked for the money; that was how I got tricked. But there was nothing to do about it; I had already started eating so I couldn’t barter. I paid my money and reboarded the bus.

As the sun was coming up I arrived in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a huge manufacturing city that is full of modern, brand-new buildings, and it would look like a modern, well-developed city except that everything in it appears to be under construction, recently under construction or about to go under construction. There are piles of dirt, brick, metal, and other building materials everywhere — in parking lots, on sidewalks, in roads — and everything gives a feeling of being sort of haphazardly placed — as though the entire city were a sort of giant sandbox or playpen for designers and builders toying with the idea of a city. Buildings seem to not really line up in neat blocks; parking lots are incomplete; restaurants sit awkwardly next to factories and warehouses crop up next to shopping malls. The whole place seemed surreal as the bus drove through it, periodically stopping to drop off passengers, one at a time, until the bus was almost empty when we finally arrived at the station.

When I walked out of the Shenzhen station there were about 20 cabbies surrounding the exit, trying to usher me to their cabs. I didn’t think quickly and let one of the cabbies take me to his cab before I started to barter with him for a ride to the Shenzhen train station; I should have haggled cab fares when I was surrounded by 20 cabbies, but wasn’t sharp enough in the dazed blue dawn. So the 20 minute ride cost me more than it should have; about 70 yuan. The city started to redden as the sun came up and my cab approached the train station. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the main Shenzhen rail station and the cabbie told me that the subway would open in about 30 minutes, at 6:30 a.m.

As I was nearly arriving at the Hong Kong border crossing, where my cell phone would stop working (for some reason mainland China cell phones don’t work in Hong Kong), my mom called me up and told me that their plane had been delayed for reasons unknown, and that they would arrived at least 12 hours late; they were stuck in their connecting city, Detroit. This was fine because we had 36 hours in Hong Kong before we would fly to Guilin, to begin our travel in mainland, but it was a bit of a downer. She also told me that immediately before leaving San Francisco, my uncle had had to take his daughter (who was also coming to China) to the hospital because she had been complaining of strange stomach cramps, but that the hospital had cleared her to fly and they had successfully taken off. So I should still go to HK to connect with them. I wished my mom luck and said that I would try to find a calling card in HK so that I could get in touch with her and confirm her new arrival time later.

Arriving again

Arriving in Hong Kong was less dramatic than it was the first time I traveled from mainland China to HK, probably because this time I knew what to expect. I knew that I would suddenly find myself in a much wealthier, cleaner, more orderly, more familiar in a way and yet also unfamiliar environment. I knew that I would suddenly become more aware of my own body odor and clothing and that everyone would suddenly be better dressed and wealthier and just generally moving at a different pace (faster pace) than I had become accustomed to. So it wasn’t that much of a shock, and it felt really good to be back on the streets of Hong Kong (I spent 10 days there in the spring waiting for a new visa), cruising around on their super clean and efficient subway system and walking down the streets, digging the Western city vibe.

I only had the morning and part of the afternoon to get organized before I had to go to the airport to meet my uncle and cousin, so I immediately found an internet bar to search for the address of our hotel so I could check in and figure out how to get a calling card.

I settled on a calling card in one of the 711s that are all over Hong Kong (this is one of the major differences between HK and mainland; mainland really hasn’t figured out the magic of convenience stores, and it really does make life less convenient) and figured out how to check into our hotel, which was the plush and comfortable City Garden Hotel a few subway stops east of Central HK. I took a shower in the hotel’s bathroom and sat in the hotel room for 10 minutes and suddenly felt cleaner than I had felt in months. There is just something about being in HK that is that way — it’s the subtle noxious smell of mainland hotel bathrooms, or the dirty smell of the water, or the fact that laundry drying machines are not allowed in southern mainland — there is some indefinable way that life in mainland is dirtier than life elsewhere, inevitably dirtier, and once you are accustomed to it you don’t really feel it or sense it again until you leave mainland completely. And that is what I did in the hotel — just sat there and felt cleaner and fresher than I had felt in a long time, and then put on a fresh shirt and headed off to the airport.

Visiting the Night Market. It was so hot and sweaty and crowded, and we were exhausted, so we ducked out quickly after arriving

At the airport I met up with my cousin and uncle and then we headed back to the hotel pretty much immediately, and after about 20 minutes of walking around we ate at the best restaurant I have tried in Hong Kong yet: called Little Chili. It was a small Sichuan-style restaurant only a few blocks away from the City Garden Hotel specializing in (as the name implies) spicy Sichuan dishes including hot pot, shui3 zhu3 (I don’t know what that dish is called in English) and spicy fried meat dishes. We ordered Sichuan-style spicy fried chicken, fried Chinese greens, fried Chinese boiled dumplings and an eggplant dish and everything was ridiculously good, and way cheaper than you’d expect in Hong Kong. The 20-oz Qingdao beers were only 10 HKD! In the 10 days I spent in Hong Kong in the spring, I scoured the island for good food deals and I never found anything like this place. If you’re looking for good, cheap food in Hong Kong, Little Chili is definitely the place to go.

Unfortunately I screwed up ordering food and mistakenly ordered two orders of the spicy chicken dish, even just one of which would have been too big for the three of us. This was because I pretended to understand the waitress when I really didn’t understand the last question she asked me. After the confusion and the slight botching of what otherwise would have been an excellent introduction for my cousin and uncle to Chinese cuisine, I realized I would have to be stubborn and persistent in getting Chinese speakers to help me understand them through the duration of the trip, which would eventually result in me really getting much better at sticking to a conversation in Chinese, even when things got bungled or were difficult to understand. Which is of course essential for really making progress in the language.

The next morning, my parents came. It had been about nine months since I had seen them, which is one of the longest if not the longest period I’ve gone without seeing them. It was really joyful and almost tearful. In a way, I was almost nervous to see them again because it had been so long and I had missed them — I was nervous about the emotional ups and downs of seeing them for a good period of time and then having to say goodbye again. But seeing them again in person overwhelmed those worries and after a few minutes we got headed on our way to getting a taxi back to the hotel.

Connecting away from home

The next day, in Hong Kong, it rained, and it continued to rain throughout most of our time in the South. Our one day in Hong Kong we spent walking around — we went to the Man Mo Temple, and shopped for the necessities we would need for the rest of our trip, and did some antique-shop browsing. My cousin and uncle went to the old nunnery in Hong Kong and gave it great reviews, although I’ve never been myself. And for dinner we found an excellent and fairly cheap Chinese restaurant in SoHo, a little bit away from the escalator where all the overpriced food is. But it was quickly time to leave the expensive hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong — we only had about a day there, and then we took the bus across to the Shenzhen airport. I was a bit nervous to cross the border with my family — I knew everything would be fine, but I was anxious anyway — and then border crossing by bus was not as clean or easy as it is when you go from HK to Shenzhen by subway. But we all passed through mainland customs without a hitch, and after a delay of a few hours in the Shenzhen airport because of heavy rain, we took off for Guilin, our first destination in mainland China.

In the shuttle bus from HK to the Guilin airport, right after the border crossing, I encountered something of a major coincidence. There was another young guy on the bus, sitting next to my father and I, who I started talking to soon after we boarded after the crossing — a German guy a couple of years older than me who was also setting out with his mom to go traveling around China. The coincidences were this, in the order that I realized them:

1: He had also been teaching English in China, only he had been at it for two years and in Xi’an, and he had also been teaching German

2: He was also just starting out on a tour of mainland China with his mother

3: His mother had arrived in Hong Kong on the same day as my parents, and she would be leaving Beijing on the same day my parents would be leaving Beijing

4: They were also planning to travel to Guilin at the same time as us, and in fact had the same flight

5: They had been staying in the same hotel as us and the German guy, whose name was Jan (pronounced like “Yen” in English), had noticed us in the hotel

6: Jan was planning on traveling south through China after his mother left, just as I had planned to do, stopping in Xi’an and then continuing toward Taiwan

7: Jan and his mother’s seats on the airplane were actually directly behind my and my parents’ seats

There the coincidences (perhaps mercifully) stopped. Needless to say I ended up talking to Jan for about four hours straight and learned that he had spent about 3 years living in India studying Buddhism, that he studied sociology in university in Germany, that he was more or less sick of China and wanted to leave, and that he wanted to move to Taiwan to continue his study of Chinese, and that he was planning to go to Massachusetts in the fall to practice silent meditation for three solid months. He was a vegetarian and a non-smoker and I was able to identify with almost all of his views, except that he seemed to have been traveling and studying and meditating long enough to be far more calm and understanding of certain situations than me. And he was able to provide a lot of insight on life in China, particularly with respect to friendships, relationships and women — something I talked about with almost all the foreigners I met along our trip throuhgout the country (the foreigners who were living or had lived in China, anyway) since as I plan to sign for another year teaching English in mainland the reality of establishing and maintaining real relationships here becomes more of a necessity/reality.

Eventually, though, it got late, and I was exhausted, and I passed out in my airplane seat as Jan turned to his mom for conversation in German. My parents were already fast asleep on the plane; because of the delay, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small mountain town in the famous karst peaks in south-central China, until at least 2 in the morning.

Arriving in Yangshuo

I had booked a van to take us the hour and a half from the Guilin airport to our Yangshuo hotel, and when the lights of Guilin finally slipped behind us after the van reached the highway, we couldn’t see much out of the windows, except the occasional karst mountain floating by in the hazy dark like a phantom cloud. The karst mountains are plane mountains — they rise in great multitude from what appears to have once been a flat plane, not very tall or massive but sharp and jutting, like the image of a sound wave suddenly interrupted by a shout. They are so famous and beautiful that they are featured on the back of the Chinese 20-dollar bill. Everyone I spoke to who had seen them said they were one of the most beautiful places in China. But in the night they were just vague dark shapes moving slowly in the distance.

From our balconies in the hotel in Yangshuo we could see the nearby mountains and the river

We arrived in Yangshuo and checked into our hotel, and just as we were settling down to go to sleep someone set of fireworks in the park across the street from our hotel, and I saw the chrysanthemum-like explosions of fireworks outside at 3 in the morning. The next morning we woke up and stepped onto the balcony and looked directly out to the LiJiang river outside our balcony (we stayed at the Riverview Hotel, cheap, comfortable, with great service) and huge karst peaks to either side, towering over the little town and carpeted with green.

This week a friend of a friend, whom I had never met (the friend of the friend), came to visit me from a huge city (Guangzhou) several hundred miles west of here where she also teaches English.

The trip was a little slapdash. She had a few days off and took the sleeper bus here from Guangzhou, arriving on Monday morning, and had about two and a half days to stay here and see Fujian.

The idea, before she arrived, was to travel down to Xiamen, about five hours away by bus, to spend some time there and see the sights. But when I realized she wouldn’t get here until 6 a.m. Monday morning I backed off that plan a little, thinking it would be too rushed to cram in a trip to another city in Fujian if she wanted to see any of my base city.

It turned out that we managed to get to Xiamen and see my city at the same time, a feat which involved hiking around here for one day and taking a cruise around on the backs of some motorcycle taxis, and then the next day rising fairly early and deciding to go to Xiamen anyway, even though we couldn’t stay in a hotel there because neither of us had our passports with us.

It was fun, if tiring. Monday was tomb-sweeping day in China, a holiday for honoring the dead by visiting their tombs  in the mountains and lighting small fires by them and burning incense with family. So we swung out of town and started up a country road that my professor, when he was still here last month, had shown me, and walked a few miles into the country. We saw lots of tombs untouched, and then a few with families milling around, burning incense and I think eating. We climbed up a hill and saw a tomb up close and, next to it, another under construction.

The tombs are sort of scattered around the evergreen-and-bamboo forested mountains of Fujian, oval shaped, made of gray and red stone and brick, resembling a female oraface or a bisected papaya. The mountains in Fujian are pretty and misty and lush-looking, resembling in shape and size the Green Mountains in Vermont where I lived for five years in college. They look prime for skiing to my native Northerner’s eye, but as far as I know snow falls here only once a decade or less. Once you put the city behind you walking on those roads, it would be easy to forget about the large, clogged city you left behind if not for the smog that still lingers in the air even miles away.

We came back to town after an afternoon in the hills, walking on the way back past the enormous steel mill in this city that has essentially swallowed whatever town was there before. There are small residential streets where people still make a life as the ten-foot-wide blue dump trucks from the steel mill rumble by all day, leaving behind trails of exhaust and dust, and whatever industry churns inside the blue steel walls of the factory that stands above the small houses.

Then we ate and considered watching a movie and then went home instead. We were both tired from the walk and planned to go to Golden Lake the next day. But when I woke up rain was dumping down and I realized that anything we did would have to be indoors. There being nothing to do indoors in my city, I proposed that we catch a bus to Xiamen and see what we could in an afternoon. If we had to be sitting around inside all day, at least we would be moving.

This made me feel better after waking up and seeing the rain. We went downtown and bought tickets for a bus leaving ten minutes later and hopped on board. That was at 11 a.m., and I figured that at least we would be there by four and would be able to see some of the city, no matter how early we had to come back. I was exicted. I’ve lived close to Xiamen for more than five months now and haven’t really seen any of it except the bus station, and I knew I would be satisfied to get just a taste of it.

I felt that way for the first three hours of the trip, buzzed because of hopping on a bus with no set plan for return, and then I started looking out the window. Long stretches of tumbling, slanting mountains drifted by at first, interrupted only by 30-second stretches of darkness as we passed under mountains. Then the mountains began to flatten and the air thickened. It looked almost like twilight, even though it was only two o’clock. The air was thick with smog and occasional rain, and we began to see factories, but not just factories — huge industrial compounds of factories, whole towns made into factories or factories made into towns. Many seemed to be oriented towards stone mining or refining and furniture manufacture. It was one of those moments when you don’t willingly step back, but feel shoved back to marvel at the vastness of production that our world requires, and the system that allows it to exist thusly — the size of those factories that produce towels, desks, chairs, stone steps, whatever, that no doubt find themselves post-production scattered all across the world, used by every kind of person, all manufactured in this little vein of mountainous land between here and there.

Once, around three in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a town going by — smoke rising from the factories, the factories seeming to be all there was of the town, the air thick and twilightish, a long row of maybe 1,000 middle-school students walking along the side of the main road in front of a factory in their nylon school uniforms, returning home, probably, from school, in the middle of all this.

Then it started to rain harder and the traffic on the highway stopped for maybe an hour. Just stopped, no explanation, no idea of what was ahead of us. People got off the bus to socialize and smoke cigarettes on the road. Somebody lit one on the bus. It seemed to be getting later more quickly. I wondered if going all this way had been a good idea, and thought about my classes the next morning.

Eventually the traffic cleared up and we passed by the scene of the accident. Most of the debris and all of the victims appeared to have been cleared away. What was left were five or six cars piled together inside a tunnel and pushed to the side of the road to let traffic through. The bus picked up speed and a half hour later we were inside Xiamen and it was raining hard and 5:30 p.m. We hailed a cab to the bus station and got train tickets back for 10:30. This gave us about four hours to explore, and we went to Gulangyu (a small island just across from the city that was British-settled a century-or-so ago) and walked around for a while, ate, bought a souvenir, and went back to the train station.

We had hard sleepers, which turned out to be comfortable enough, but for some reason I couldn’t sleep. My visitor-traveling companion spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend and I put on my headphones and turned the music all the way up. I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, feeling lonely and worried about being awake to get off the train when it arrived back home. An old man, who I had been a little rude to when we got on the train (he had told us we had the wrong bunks and I had insisted he was wrong, until, of course, I realized he was right — I still can’t really read Chinese) had told me that we would arrive around 6 a.m. but I didn’t know how we would know.

It turned out to be not a problem. The train steward woke us up at six and swapped out our tickets and fifteen minutes later, as I stood on the smoker train looking out the window, I saw the first signs of my home town out the window; I knew we’d be there in about five minutes.

I felt fine after we got off the train. That had been my first real trip in China where my Chinese skills had been sufficient enough to handle all the stuff involved with booking tickets, finding sightseeing stuff, buying food and other necessities, talking to cab drivers. But it wasn’t just that. The morning had one of those feelings that you get when you have been moving for a while, when you’re dead tired but not ready to sleep. There were a few people riding by on bicycles this early, dressed in ponchos and boots for the rain, but still not many people on the street. We hailed a cab and went home and I showered and spent a couple hours preparing for class and then slept for ten minutes.

For my afternoon class my friend came and actually taught the class a tongue twister, and they were amazed to meet another foreigner and, as always, incredibly warm and excited and eager to learn. It was really fun, and it was really nice to see someone else’s teaching stlye, to get some new ideas and to get some tips and constructive critiques of my teaching. I got off class and my friend packed her bags and got ready to go. We caught the bus to the bus station, grabbed some Lanzhou noodles to go and I saw her off on the train platform.

Before she left, we sat in the waiting room and watched Chinese Informercials for skin whitening creams and laughed and made fun of the T.V. It was fun, and I learned a lot just in three days about what it is like to be a foreigner in a major city (Guangzhou, where she teaches, is huge, and there are a ton of foreigners there — it was interesting to hear about her experience and how different it has been from mine; she makes more than twice the money, for instance, is not nearly such a spectacle to the locals and has a lot of foreigner friends and, as previously mentioned, a foreigner beau), but as we waited for the train I didn’t really feel like eating and I couldn’t stop feeling surprised at how much I felt I was going to miss this person who I hadn’t even known three days before.

This was a repeat of the experience I had a month previously, when a professor  and friend from my undergrad college stayed here for a month and I spent some time with him almost every day. Seeing this place through both of their eyes definitely changed it for me, and also made me realize that in the day-to-day, when I am here, even if I am not actively missing home or the people I know and love back there, there is a lot I am missing.

So, I walked out of the train station after she left and headed back outside. It was getting darker again and the rain was settling down now; the streets were wet but it was barely drizzling on my neck. I sat on a bench for a while and thought about it, about what it means to go somewhere and then come back, to do things that you do just because you want to, not because you know how they will end up or what they will mean.

Then I got on the bus and came back home, one foot after the other, happy and surprised like always, but also sad again to see someone go.

Before coming to Hong Kong, I naturally booked the cheapest hostel I could find. It’s called the New Peking Guest House, located on Kowloon (the peninsula north of Hong Kong Island, considered part of HK but not the island), which has turned out to be the epicenter of tourist traps in HK. 

That’s a bit of an exagerration. The area is not too bad…it’s very city-ish, lots of foot traffic and plenty of large financial buildings around. Certainly not everyone here is a tourist. But it turns out that just about every young person who comes to HK on a budget stays in the Chungking mansions, which is the large building of hostels where my guest house is located, and so a small unregulated market of guys that appear to generally be Indian and African have cropped up in the area, most of whom are relentlessly hawking watches, rooms in cheaper hostels, and a variety of other “goods”, both lascivious and pharmacological. Once you walk a little ways down the street this stuff quickly dissipates, and the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon is just a relatively expensive downtown-y area full of clothing stores, malls and restaurants. So that’s the first thing I saw when I came to HK.

I got to the hostel in the evening, though, and pretty quickly went to bed. Before I went to bed, however, I tried to contact someone on CouchSurfing.com, which turned out to be an incredibly wise move. 

Before I had even fallen asleep the person, a girl whose CouchSurfing page said she was into books and would be happy to show anyone around HK, had written me back, and the next day I wrote her back, and finally we set a time to meet that evening. This was great. I had only been in HK one day and already I was gonna get to make a friend. 

That day, which was Thursday, I took the subway across the harbor to HK Island with the idea of taking the tram to the peak of Victoria Peak. But when I got there I decided it was too foggy to even bother. So I sat and had a cup of coffee. An older couple, maybe in their fifties, came and sat down in the cafe across from me. So I asked them where they were from. The man, in good English with a German accent, told me that they were from Germany. He had a cousin living in Idaho. A son living in South America. They were on a two week vacation and had started four days ago in Frankfort (sp?). Next they were going to Macau, and then Australia. They had also come to take the tram and then decided not to. I told them that I had read that you could go to the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, which was right next to us, and check out the observation deck they had there for free. So, we all decided to go. 

The deck was kind of lame, but not entirely pointless. Only one corner of the building is open to the public, so you basically just get a view of the harbor. But it was a pretty nice view, with a view of the enormous 2 International Finance Center building.

2 International Finance Center, 2IFC, is the tallest building in HK and apparently the 7th tallest office building in the world. See it? It's that pointy one. I didn't take this picture, obviously.

I asked the German dude his name, it was Axel, which is perhaps the coolest name ever. He was originally from Homberg (sp?) and was interested in my experience in China so I happily filled him in. Then I said goodbye to them and went back to the hostel to drop some stuff before meeting my new CouchSurfing friend. 

The CouchSurfing friend experience was awesome. Her name was Tif and she was friendly from the get-go. She had clearly shown people from CS around HK before, because she immediately was in tour-guide mode and didn’t totally drop the tour-guide thing the whole time. Which I didn’t mind at all, because she was telling me interesting stuff about HK. She pointed me to the light show on the harbor that happens every night, that I will post pictures of when I return to Sanming and can upload pictures from my camera. She told me about SoHo and how to get there, which I explored two days later and turned out to be the coolest part of HK I have seen so far, she took me on the ferry, which crosses the harbor from Kowloon to Central and is about a million times more fun than taking the subway, and after we wandered around the night market, which I will also post pictures of later, she took me to HK Island to go to a hookah bar, which, who wouldn’t love to go to a hookah bar in Hong Kong. Seriously. 

I also recited poetry with another person for the first time ever. She was talking about how she really likes Saul Williams, and apparently I had had enough beer to recite some Hart Crane and Robert Frost at her. So then I was glad that she responded in kind with some Saul Williams, because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized that it is actually pretty awesome to listen to someone recite poetry, and would have felt foolish for actually reciting poetry at a hookah bar. It’s a really entertaining form of conversation. It just takes a willingness to shelve one’s self-consciousness momentarily. 

So, then, after haggling with some taxi drivers, I went home and slept pretty well until the next morning. Since then I have walked about 20 miles throughout Hong Kong, exploring a ton of it on foot, but of course none of it is as fun when you do it by yourself. It’s interesting, sure, and you get to see some cool things, but always as someone who is totally foreign to everything around him. Always with no sense of belonging to any of the stuff you’re witnessing (which is a feeling you get to have when you walk around with a local, who knows it and lives it every day). 

Today it started raining cats and dogs, so I have even given up on walking around. I went to the movies and watched the film about Confucius, and had dinner. Apparently I’m staying here for another five days-ish, at which point I’ll be able to head back to the mainland, which is a very good thing because eating in HK is way, way too expensive for me. And the 3000 RMB the school promised to reimburse me for this trip has already come and gone like it was nothing (which really, HK costs as much as the U.S., and 3000 RMB is about $400; imagine traveling as a tourist to any U.S. city; how long would $400 last you?).

Peace out till next time. 

: )

Tonight I found something that I wrote last October while I was still in Vermont, before I came to Fujian. Not sure why I never posted it but now seems as good a time as any. I had forgotten what my professor, Mark, had told me before I left. His words have turned out to be totally accurate and true; it’s a pity that I managed to more or less forget them. I suppose that’s the reason for writing in the first place…

How I ended up going to China by saying “OK”

On a summer afternoon this year I was sitting at a desk, in a cubicle, on the eleventh floor of an office building in downtown Portland, Oregeon. A lot of things were gray in that office. The linoleum covering the desk was a kind of granite color, with little chips of darker colored gray to give it a little less sterile look; the cubicle walls were covered in that gray nylon fabric that all cubicle walls are covered with. I had all kinds of charts and phone directories and printouts of information that I had affixed to the wall with gray staples. I had stapled the sheets of paper to the wall long before that day, and had since memorized most of what was on the sheets by sheer repetition of use, which meant that the sheets of paper on my cubicle walls had become invisible to me and therefore meaningless. I had gray pens, and gray file organizers, and a gray computer tower. I even had gray pants. The dust that accumulated on the cuffs of my shirt was gray, and the highway that was visible out the nearest window was gray, and the carpeting that stretched out all around me and throughout the small hive of cubes was gray. Everything was gray, gray, gray. Gray was everywhere. I checked into work at about 8 a.m. and checked out at 5:30 p.m., with a 20-minute lunch break somewhere in the middle. Which meant that for a good portion of my day, nearly every day, I spent a considerable amount of time contemplating, absorbing, ignoring and reviling gray.

As you might expect, the gray in my work life, after a time, began to make things outside of work begin to seem pretty gray, too. Not gray in the literal sense, exactly. More gray in an all-encompassing, world-view-orienting type of way. I think I began to see gray in everything. I began to be gray. I began to think in tones of gray. Not in any kind of well-balanced, yin-yang, seek-the-middle-ground way, but in a dull, impassive, grim, unhappy way. Things were gray and I was not enthused about them, the color or the overall outlook.

But that’s just to set the tone for you. On that day, that summer day, I was feeling very gray, but I was working. I was busily doing whatever it is that office workers do on their computers all day long. I was probably working in Excel. I was probably concentrating hard, on whatever I was working on. Then, for a momentary reprieve from the drudgery of coding, or looking at data, or tweaking some presentation or graph in Excel, I pulled up gmail. There was an email from a friend of mine. It was a brief, informal email, a quick bite that looked like it had been copy and pasted from a newsletter or something that had come through his inbox. The email said that a former professor of mine, from the college where I got my B.A. (the college is a tiny liberal arts school in Vermont), was looking for someone, preferably an alum, to fill a position teaching English in China. The subject line was probably in all caps, and probably said something like “AMAZING OPPORTUNTIY TO TEACH ENGLISH IN CHINA”. I am certain that it contained the word opportunity, because that is where all the trouble started. Or, maybe I should say, that is where all the fun started. However you look at it, I think it was the word “opportunity” that drew me in.

I tend to think that our society, meaning the United States society, and presumably other nations, although I’m not sure which, are generally obsessed with the idea of opportunity. The idea of the American Dream is very much built on the concept of opportunity. Capitalism, at least in my lay mind, is generally synonymous with opportunism, so maybe that is why it seems to me that America is generally preoccupied with the idea of opportunity. The maxim of American opportunism is generally thus: You only get a limited number of opportunities in life, and you have to jump on them when they come along. Stand around long enough, and you’ll get a chance to sit down. You only live once. So on and so on.

The general idea of these idioms seems to be that life is like a waterslide at a summer water park. You wait in line, and wait in line, and wait in line, and eventually you get your chance to jump into some dark, downward-slanting chute through which a ceaseless current of chlorinated water courses. You go whooping and hollering your way down the pipes, toward some unknown wave pool full of screaming, sweaty children. You hope that if someone becomes your landing pad, it will be a chubby kid. You don’t really know where the pipe goes or how long the slide is, because they all wind in and out of each others’ paths confusingly, but you generally expect that the ride will be fun, and that you will get wet, and that you will not get hurt. So you leap willingly into a dark chasm which, to an untrained eye, could easily be an entryway to drowning or suffocation. Occasionally, a kid chickens out and walks the 10-year-old version of the walk of shame, back down the long poolwater-soaked stairways, elbows his or her way through the lines of kids snaking up said stairways and through the cloisters of excited children on each transom, to the sympathetic (we hope) arms of his or her mom. Most kids gawk at these chicken shit children as they walk back down the stairs. Everybody knows they chickened out. Everybody knows that they did not leap into the waterslide whooping and hollering. They got scared.

Maybe people really don’t think of life that way, but sometimes I get the suspicion that nobody ever really leaves the waterpark. There is a little bit of the excitable water-slide goer in all of us, hawkishly looking out for the next scaredy-cat kid to come walking down those urine and chlorine slicked steps.

There are certain key things that certain individuals said to me that helped me make the decision to go. Tonight, sitting in a friend’s living room with the college professor who helped me get the job in China, a friend of mine asked him what the most important piece of advice he could give me was. “I would say just be patient,” he said. “There are all kinds of ways that your patience will be tested, and it’s generally not OK in China to express a lot of impatience, which can be maddening.” He explained that people tend to be less inclined to question orders handed down from on high. That people are generally not good at questioning the whys of what they do, but just accept it as necessary.

One friend who had taught in China told me to bring lots of gifts.

Milton Leathers, a soft-spoken southern gentleman from Athens, Georgia, told me that there was no way I could ever regret going to China if I did it. His words were “Even if something bad happens – and I really don’t think there’s any chance that anything bad will happen – you still will never regret it. I meant think of all the things that you will learn just by being there.”

He also said, “You’re 25, which is about the age that you are starting to realize that the years are going by a bit faster than they did when you were 14 or 15; soon you’ll be working some type of regular job, with a focus on your career, and there won’t be any time to get away to do something like this; and if you do, there will be someone right behind you to replace you in your work.”

The general consensus of everyone I know is that I had to go, which, in a way, means that I did have to go. There was no way that I could have made any other choice, given that. When everyone in your world gives you one version of reality, or potential reality, you have no choice but to accept it. To do otherwise would be nihilistic. Of course, in a way, they never understand the full context, which is why one must question it and make sure they understand the full picture. But there is a difference between showing the whole picture and insisting on one’s unwillingness to do something. I think people saw enough of the picture.

I talked to quite a few people about China, some of whom had been there to teach. One of those people is the uncle of my significant other. He is a writer with graying hair that tends to stand up on his head (his hair), giving him a bit of a shocked look. I talked with him in his living room for an afternoon, about a week ago. Almost the entire time I sat on the couch silently, nodding and smiling as he held forth about everything he could remember about his experience in China.

He talked about the language, his past studies of Chinese, where he was located and the lifestyle he had had there. He told me about some of the friends he had made, and the fact that many of his students had visited him in New York since he had come back home. He talked about some of the other teachers he befriended, one of whom was the dean of his department, whom he taught English during his time there. He showed me books, gave me reading suggestions, burned some CDs of Chinese dictionaries.

One of the things he said was striking, for some reason. He was looking across the coffee table at me, with his wide-eyed, slightly awed look. He crossed one knee over the other. Behind him was a stack of books that reached to the ceiling. Daylight slanted in through the old wood-paned windows of their tiny apartment in the Upper West Side of New York. He mentioned that it had been easy to meet people, that the majority of people were kind, and gentle, and generous. “I loved them,” he added.

A thought: The key to my door is really weird. It’s not like a normal key, where you have a flat object with two edges that are all curvy and bumpy. The bumpy, key-blade part of it has another plane that intersects the main key-blade at a perpendicular angle (so that if you point the key at your face you see a plus sign). It’s extra difficult to fit into the door and for the longest time it took me several minutes to get the door opened in the dark. I wondered if I would ever learn to open the door smoothly without a struggle and a full minute of cursing under my breath. I noticed today that I open it smoothly now, with a minimum of jabbing at the door.

This weekend I went to town on the bus to run some errands, and on the way back it was getting dark out and it was raining and the people on the bus, even though we were packed together closely, were more or less quiet. I was listening to music on my headphones and looked around at all their faces and realized that I was unimaginably far from home and still alive, and I got a little rush of joy but also dull, quiet sadness because, also, I could see how unimaginably separate and different I was from the people on the bus.

Another thought: What would happen if there were technology that could translate one spoken language into another orally, on the spot, so that you could have a conversation with someone without a translator present, without knowing any of their language or they of yours?

Another thought: What is the point of travel? Why does it feel so intrinsically interesting to some of us, and not to others? Why do I feel, now, so ambivalent about travel for travel’s sake, as I have for as long as I can remember, and yet then also why am I now so far away from home?

The bus stops. A woman I watched get on carrying a thick bamboo stick over which were slung two large plastic bags filled with blankets and vegetables straightens up and lifts her stick of bamboo and struggles to get the bags back onto the two ends of it, and as she does this the bus begins to lurch forward. But all the passengers around me shout at the bus driver to stop, and he does, and the lady slowly gathers her things and lurches, herself, towards the exit. We all shuffle aside and press against each other to give her way. Everybody pays the same, 1 yuan, about 15 cents, to ride the bus, even these people who bring on large loads of clothes, food, machinery, I assume in most cases to sell somewhere, with them.

The bus rolls forward again and the driver turns out the cab lights. The drivers do this whenever we are on the road and won’t be stopping for a while, and when they do, everyone on the bus seems to get sleepier and quieter. There is a young girl sitting on a cardboard box on the floor of the bus, next to an older woman who is standing next to a few similar boxes. I’m not sure what’s in the boxes, but I look at the girl. She is staring straight ahead, with no expression that I can discern on her face.  I feel like I recognize this girl, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t appear to be sleeping, just absorbed in some kind of thought. Or maybe no thought at all. I keep glancing down at her face, to see if it will reveal something to me about what she is doing or thinking. I keep expecting her to turn to the woman next to her, since I think they are together, and say something. She just sits there, staring off at nothing. She sits there for ten minutes like that.

Finally we come to my stop, and I get off with a bunch of other students who are all going back to the school too. I open my umbrella and walk in front of the bus and look both ways to see what cars are coming. It is clear, except in the distance, in the lane opposite the bus, a silver car is gliding fast through the rain and shows no sign of slowing down for me or the people around me. We walk across the rainy street and about 100 meters away the car starts laying on its horn. By the time it reaches our stop we are all on the other side of the street, and I hear the ragged sound of its horn bend as it passes behind us.

I walk slowly in the rain. I have very little to do with the rest of my day, and I feel tired. I walk up the hill on the rain-soaked dirt road that leads back to campus. There are little pockets of students all walking the same way, and I walk by some of them and some of them walk by me. There are palm trees on both sides of the road and run-down houses and an old brick factory where plastic is burned and recycled. The walls and the window frames of the building are black with soot and a thick smell of urine and trash seeps up from the stream that flows along the road.

I feel old all of a sudden, but very new, in a way, too, because somehow I know that I was never really supposed to be here or to see any of this. It is all a choice you make, to go somewhere far away like this, and I think about how I made that decision some five-odd months ago. It feels like I didn’t really decide so much as let reality decide for me, while I sat by and weighed the reasons for going or not going as if they had perfectly equal weight. They still do, as far as I can tell, even now that I have put the decision behind me. It made itself, or anyway I don’t feel like I had anything real to do with it.

Robert Frost’s old famous poem says, “And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”. These lines are so haunting because they hit at precisely what it is to look at a life–your life–and have decisions before you that are so obviously serious and important that it’s impossible not to feel just a little bit outmatched by them. Like it’s unfair that anyone could have that much power over his/her own life in her hands.

It is also about the recursive nature of time; how you can regret things that you did or didn’t do in the past, but you can also regret things you are not doing now; hell, you can regret things you know you’re not going to do in the future.

But that has nothing to do with whether they actually happen. That has more to do with chance, with how you feel on a particular day, with how important you decide it is to think about the road you’re taking. And with how far ahead and how long you stare down that road.

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

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.