PUPPY LOVE
I am madly in love and he is amazing. He adores me, he thinks I’m brilliant and he lights up like nothing I’ve ever seen every time he lays eyes on me. When I’m walking around the compound and he sees me, he sneaks up behind me and surprises me. He defends me when people give me a hard time and he lavishes me with praise. He’s hysterically funny, thinks I’m hysterically funny and I’ve never met a kinder man.
Our conversations are wonderful and he’s so curious about the US. He loves to share his comparable Chinese experiences. He’s always open and he seeks me out for my company. He hollers up to my apartment to say hello whenever he knows I’m home. The sound of his voice echoing up through the canyon between our two apartment buildings makes me smile and he stops everything whenever he sees me.
Oh, and he is my student and he is 16.
I so very much adore him because he is the warm, silly, gentle benevolence of men that makes life worth living. Yes, I have tons of students who adore me and tell me that they love me but they really want to do their own thing and not have to learn. There’s no real critical thinking going on for them. As wonderful and adoring and sweet as the rest of my students are, they adore the benevolent exotic maternal figure that I am. I am their door to the West and they blindly accept all that I have to offer because I am not mean. However, my favorite student is desperate to learn and shows his appreciation by questioning and challenging me. There’s really no other way to put it short of, “He just gets it.”
His demeanor around me is so open, sweet and loving that I just want to take care of him. I am torn between wanting to show him everything the world has to offer and encasing him in steel to spare him the pain of knowledge. Granted, considering the ferocity with which he defends me when I’m trying to teach and his fellow classmates are being disrespectful, he’s far better equipped to handle himself than the open vulnerability he shows me lets on. Nonetheless, I wish there was some way I could show him all I have seen in the world and keep him safe.
I came to realize this deep and abiding love for my student when I was informed today that I needed to teach an extra day of classes tomorrow (Saturday the 30th). I immediately thought, “Oh crap. That sucks.” As I was wallowing in my “I can’t sleep in? NOOOOOOO” misery, it suddenly dawned on me that I would be seeing my favorite student and my first urge was to rush home and figure out a class that would be fun for him.
Mind you, before the Mrs. Robinson and pedophile emails start rolling in, I have absolutely no lust for my young student… though I do understand how, if your sexuality wasn’t screwed on tightly, it could get mixed up in adoration for a student. However, for me, I am in love with my student entirely platonically. Case in point: I was leaning over to hear something he said and I realized I was flashing a bit of cleavage (I realized this primarily from his inability to look me in the eye, dropped jaw and general deer in headlights look). My gut response was, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry I defiled your youth!” and then I switched to, “But thanks for noticing.”
Accidental flashing and sexuality aside, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for this kid. He’s so lovely and his ferocious curiosity coupled with his open vulnerability is so appealing. He is the reason this job is the best I’ve ever had. I only hope that someday I have a son so lovely.
Friday, September 29, 2006
HOW DO YOU TEACH ENGLISH?
I originally had no intention of touching “How do you teach English” as I am absolutely no expert and at most generous estimations only have about 3 years of experience but people keep asking me said question and I thought I’d address it to the best of my abilities… which is to say, you should probably get a book on said issue.
Generally, teaching English is pretty straightforward. Your boss gives you a curriculum and the books, explains how many pages you are to cover a day and you plan a lesson around that. Before you enter class, you put on your EFL voice, which is over-articulating and then pausing as though each word in your sentence was followed by a period as well as never using anything short of literal English. (It’s actually harder than you think. If you slow yourself down and ask yourself “Does this make literal sense?” about everything that comes out of your mouth, you end up having a hard time knowing if it does.) You give a mini lesson, the kids ignore you or tell you how boring this is, you lay out what they are to do, the kids ignore you or tell you how overly easy it is, you tell them “Okay, now it’s your turn,” then they accuse you of not preparing them or the lesson being too hard, you choose a volunteer or claim a sacrifice to show that it can be done by someone other than you and you proceed until the bell rings.
However, at my school, things are a little different. I not only have no textbook to teach from, I have no curriculum and no active peer to ask for suggestions. My predecessor took the job so lightly that he describes it as “Eh, babysitting.” He blew off every responsibility he had to the school and often suggests I do the same. Granted, he’s the perfect counterpoint to my over-thinking, perfectionist and worrywart of a brain but if he’s what has blazed the trail for English teachers before me, they cannot think all that highly of us English speakers. It is true that if the school truly cared about the English classes I teach, they’d give me a curriculum but I’ve been hired to do a job and my self-respect is more important to me than getting away with the minimal amount I can. After all, I teach students who are striving to be international businessmen and women, ambassadors and international liaisons. They need real, functioning English if they want to be truly competitive.
In lieu of a curriculum, I have been informed that my “curriculum” will simply be my books of lesson plans.: my curriculum is to be set by me. Granted, when I heard that, all I could think of was the Sisters of Mercy song called “Ribbons” and the line “I tried to tell her ‘bout Marx and Engels, God and Angels, I don’t really know what for.” “Ribbons” is a song about the lunacy (and eventual destruction) that results from being stuck in a relationship where you express yourself through overly thinky means and the other person does not get it. Eldritch was trapped by love. I am trapped by contract. My education has me greatly versed in all the things a classical education would provide an indulged, ferociously curious, erudite Western and I am to teach students who are only on occasion interested in listening to me. Make no mistake, “Education is the lone commodity from which the consumer wants less, not more.”
All things considered, I decided to offer the students the opportunity to have a positive experience with English… the best of my abilities. I want my students to feel smart and empowered in English. How does one do that with students somewhat ambivalent about learning? Redundancy.
They have Chinese teachers teaching them the nuts and bolts of English. In their other classes, they learn about nouns, verbs, gerunds etc. In my class, they use it. In my class they not only hear the way English sounds but I offer them a view into how things are actually used, not just what is grammatically correct.
Depending on what the curriculum of the other English classes is, I base my class around that. If the other classes are learning about vacations or travel, I base my class around talking about vacations or travel. I have taught them that when they ask a Western “How far” is something, the Westerner will, most likely, not tell them “X kilometers” but a unit of time. When classes are learning about introducing themselves and others, they actually have to do it in my class. In their other English classes, they are given their options and must fill in the blank correctly. Any mathematically inclined chimp can do that and still know nothing about speaking English. So, in my class it’s a bit more complicated. I tell them what the book will tell them and then I explain the ways that varies from real English (ie. “How far” usually gets you a unit of time, not distance). I can’t teach politics and I certainly can’t teach that rigid dogma the Chinese are so fond of gets you nowhere with the English language but I can teach the kids who aren’t getting straight A’s that they might actually be good at real English. Case in point: the boy who is first in his class with English came in third out of four in the game I had them play. His hubris at being number one made him feel as though he could play Uno while I was teaching the lesson and still win the game took a bit of a beating. Ultimately, that boy has nothing to learn from me because he fills out forms well and that has killed his desire to learn from me but his classmates that beat him learned that, even for a brief moment, they could excel too. The underdog winning is not overtly political but it is distinctly American.
I find the major problem is when you get stuck in a class that just isn’t interested. Not every class is always disinterested and each one has its own specific flavor (I’ve got 24 different classes; I know this firsthand) but there are days when even the best, most attentive classes just do not care. Granted, there are days when you’re off the mark and there are days when they don’t understand but then there are days when they’re just not having it and there’s nothing you can do about that. The way you discern the times of when they’re bored from when you’re doing something wrong is to ask them. If, before you ask them, they offer up that they’re bored, chances are they’re simply not going to be paying attention for class. And, while you need to be somewhat entertaining, it is, ultimately, up to you to figure out how much of a dancing monkey you’re willing to be.
Basically, my classes are spoken English classes, which means they must get accustom to hearing me speak and they must learn to enunciate properly. Having taken my subject matter from the other teacher’s curriculum, my plan generally is shaped around an intro of casual conversation (ie. “How was your weekend?”) and then I explain how today’s topic is relevant to my life. For introducing other people, I introduced some of my friends and family. Then I lay out which few pieces of information I want from them about said topic (usually three to four pieces of information), I write out relevant sentences on the board for them to modify for their own expression and then I have each person try their hand at the paragraph. If the class seems particularly uninspired, I break them in to four teams and have them compete for the largest amount of people to speak the paragraph properly.
In a nutshell, it’s not rocket science and you have to be willing to regularly make an ass out of yourself but it can be really good when it’s good and not too crappy when it sucks.
I originally had no intention of touching “How do you teach English” as I am absolutely no expert and at most generous estimations only have about 3 years of experience but people keep asking me said question and I thought I’d address it to the best of my abilities… which is to say, you should probably get a book on said issue.
Generally, teaching English is pretty straightforward. Your boss gives you a curriculum and the books, explains how many pages you are to cover a day and you plan a lesson around that. Before you enter class, you put on your EFL voice, which is over-articulating and then pausing as though each word in your sentence was followed by a period as well as never using anything short of literal English. (It’s actually harder than you think. If you slow yourself down and ask yourself “Does this make literal sense?” about everything that comes out of your mouth, you end up having a hard time knowing if it does.) You give a mini lesson, the kids ignore you or tell you how boring this is, you lay out what they are to do, the kids ignore you or tell you how overly easy it is, you tell them “Okay, now it’s your turn,” then they accuse you of not preparing them or the lesson being too hard, you choose a volunteer or claim a sacrifice to show that it can be done by someone other than you and you proceed until the bell rings.
However, at my school, things are a little different. I not only have no textbook to teach from, I have no curriculum and no active peer to ask for suggestions. My predecessor took the job so lightly that he describes it as “Eh, babysitting.” He blew off every responsibility he had to the school and often suggests I do the same. Granted, he’s the perfect counterpoint to my over-thinking, perfectionist and worrywart of a brain but if he’s what has blazed the trail for English teachers before me, they cannot think all that highly of us English speakers. It is true that if the school truly cared about the English classes I teach, they’d give me a curriculum but I’ve been hired to do a job and my self-respect is more important to me than getting away with the minimal amount I can. After all, I teach students who are striving to be international businessmen and women, ambassadors and international liaisons. They need real, functioning English if they want to be truly competitive.
In lieu of a curriculum, I have been informed that my “curriculum” will simply be my books of lesson plans.: my curriculum is to be set by me. Granted, when I heard that, all I could think of was the Sisters of Mercy song called “Ribbons” and the line “I tried to tell her ‘bout Marx and Engels, God and Angels, I don’t really know what for.” “Ribbons” is a song about the lunacy (and eventual destruction) that results from being stuck in a relationship where you express yourself through overly thinky means and the other person does not get it. Eldritch was trapped by love. I am trapped by contract. My education has me greatly versed in all the things a classical education would provide an indulged, ferociously curious, erudite Western and I am to teach students who are only on occasion interested in listening to me. Make no mistake, “Education is the lone commodity from which the consumer wants less, not more.”
All things considered, I decided to offer the students the opportunity to have a positive experience with English… the best of my abilities. I want my students to feel smart and empowered in English. How does one do that with students somewhat ambivalent about learning? Redundancy.
They have Chinese teachers teaching them the nuts and bolts of English. In their other classes, they learn about nouns, verbs, gerunds etc. In my class, they use it. In my class they not only hear the way English sounds but I offer them a view into how things are actually used, not just what is grammatically correct.
Depending on what the curriculum of the other English classes is, I base my class around that. If the other classes are learning about vacations or travel, I base my class around talking about vacations or travel. I have taught them that when they ask a Western “How far” is something, the Westerner will, most likely, not tell them “X kilometers” but a unit of time. When classes are learning about introducing themselves and others, they actually have to do it in my class. In their other English classes, they are given their options and must fill in the blank correctly. Any mathematically inclined chimp can do that and still know nothing about speaking English. So, in my class it’s a bit more complicated. I tell them what the book will tell them and then I explain the ways that varies from real English (ie. “How far” usually gets you a unit of time, not distance). I can’t teach politics and I certainly can’t teach that rigid dogma the Chinese are so fond of gets you nowhere with the English language but I can teach the kids who aren’t getting straight A’s that they might actually be good at real English. Case in point: the boy who is first in his class with English came in third out of four in the game I had them play. His hubris at being number one made him feel as though he could play Uno while I was teaching the lesson and still win the game took a bit of a beating. Ultimately, that boy has nothing to learn from me because he fills out forms well and that has killed his desire to learn from me but his classmates that beat him learned that, even for a brief moment, they could excel too. The underdog winning is not overtly political but it is distinctly American.
I find the major problem is when you get stuck in a class that just isn’t interested. Not every class is always disinterested and each one has its own specific flavor (I’ve got 24 different classes; I know this firsthand) but there are days when even the best, most attentive classes just do not care. Granted, there are days when you’re off the mark and there are days when they don’t understand but then there are days when they’re just not having it and there’s nothing you can do about that. The way you discern the times of when they’re bored from when you’re doing something wrong is to ask them. If, before you ask them, they offer up that they’re bored, chances are they’re simply not going to be paying attention for class. And, while you need to be somewhat entertaining, it is, ultimately, up to you to figure out how much of a dancing monkey you’re willing to be.
Basically, my classes are spoken English classes, which means they must get accustom to hearing me speak and they must learn to enunciate properly. Having taken my subject matter from the other teacher’s curriculum, my plan generally is shaped around an intro of casual conversation (ie. “How was your weekend?”) and then I explain how today’s topic is relevant to my life. For introducing other people, I introduced some of my friends and family. Then I lay out which few pieces of information I want from them about said topic (usually three to four pieces of information), I write out relevant sentences on the board for them to modify for their own expression and then I have each person try their hand at the paragraph. If the class seems particularly uninspired, I break them in to four teams and have them compete for the largest amount of people to speak the paragraph properly.
In a nutshell, it’s not rocket science and you have to be willing to regularly make an ass out of yourself but it can be really good when it’s good and not too crappy when it sucks.
Monday, September 25, 2006
AMERICAN IDLE
It would appear my lazy ass may be getting on television. For singing.
My horrid rendition of Auld Lang Syne caught the attention of one of my fellow teachers and she thought instantly, “Cash Cow.”
Apparently, there’s a national, televised competition for foreigners who can sing in Mandarin. I have been given a famous song to learn and the lyrics to go with it so I can sing to millions of home viewers.
What?
There are so many things beyond wrong with this notion that I’ve simply got to give it a go.
It would appear my lazy ass may be getting on television. For singing.
My horrid rendition of Auld Lang Syne caught the attention of one of my fellow teachers and she thought instantly, “Cash Cow.”
Apparently, there’s a national, televised competition for foreigners who can sing in Mandarin. I have been given a famous song to learn and the lyrics to go with it so I can sing to millions of home viewers.
What?
There are so many things beyond wrong with this notion that I’ve simply got to give it a go.
WHEN IN ROME
If I ever hear those three words again, I’m going to go postal. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love “The Promise” and all things 80’s pop. It has nothing to do with such lovely melodies. What my rage has to do with is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Now, anyone who has ever worked with me is familiar with my disdain of the phrase “Take one for the team.” You see, “Take one for the team” is a popular phrase amongst male New York film PA’s when they don’t feel like doing something and want the chick they’re working with to carry extra weight. Make no mistake about it; film is the most misogynistic workplace I have ever been in and the thing about true misogyny is not that the men are angry (that’s the women) but that the men are beyond lazy. A dude will tell a girl “Come on, take one for the team.” If she says agrees, she’s bled dry. If she tells him to suck it up and carry his own weight, she’s labeled a bitch. As it was a lose-lose situation, I always opted for “bitch” because boys on film sets whine too much and there’s something to being the only gal I know who has told another male PA to “suck it.” You see, “Suck it” has become my reflexive response to anything even remotely resembling “Take one for the team.”
Apparently China has its own version of “Take one for the team.” They have co-opted, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Everyone consistently says, (when I am told to do something I have no interest in doing) “Do you know there is a phrase called ‘When in Rome’? Well, be like in Rome.”
Now, I am doing everything I can to be agreeable and up for anything. As cranky and stubborn as I can be, I can be equally accommodating. However, upon the (literally) 19th declaration of the AFTERNOON that I should, “Be like in Rome. When in Rome” it becomes a feat of mammoth proportions not to scream “SUCK IT!” It’s really hard to remind myself that what is, in reality, the umpteenth ‘little’ infringement on my day, voice, sense of humor, body or smiling photo face, is to them the first and only of the day. They will never be “foreign” so there is no drive for them to even remotely understand what that mantel might mean to someone in said context. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t all think that “When in Rome” was not only cute and get-out-of-jail infringement card but appropriate as well.
I almost explained what “When in Rome” means to my boss today as he informed me that I needed to “Be like in Rome.” I have always taken “When in Rome” to be a comment on embracing the debauched nature of a place where you don’t fully belong… the operative element of all of this being the “debauched nature of Rome” in her full bacchanalian, anything-goes orgy and vomitorium glory. PRC communists who have outlawed pornography and lumped anything more revealing than a ball gown in with it, are telling me, essentially, I need to embrace the debauched customs of their land. I may have never said it before because it seems like stating the obvious but “I WILL NOT MAKE OUT WITH ANYONE IN POSSESSION OF BLACK TEETH.” Beyond that, there’s not much debauchery to be had.
So, when my boss blew me off today because the fact that I ran out of drinking water on Saturday (it’s now Monday night and I was booked solid with classes all day) is less important than his leaving his office right at 5pm on the dot and the only response he offered was “Be like in Rome. When in Rome” I actually hung up on him. Frankly, pretending we got cutoff due to bad cell reception was safer than the things that flew out of my mouth a moment after I hung up.
He called back and informed me that I needed to come to his office in the morning to discuss my new schedule. (Keep in mind, every week and occasionally every 15 minutes I am given the new “permanent” schedule.) Now, normally I would be free Tuesday morning but he decided to add on to my work load another few hours of teaching in the Kindergarten, some of which take up all my free time on Tuesday mornings.
I reminded him of my schedule and he said, “Oh, okay. Come in tomorrow morning.”
“But I teach in the Kindergarten.”
“Then come this afternoon.”
“I did, you weren’t there. That’s why we’re talking on your cell.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.”
*Click*
And, as my boss hung up on me, one of the wonderfully kind neighbor girls just informed me that the building’s power will be out tomorrow.
Fantastic
If I ever hear those three words again, I’m going to go postal. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love “The Promise” and all things 80’s pop. It has nothing to do with such lovely melodies. What my rage has to do with is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Now, anyone who has ever worked with me is familiar with my disdain of the phrase “Take one for the team.” You see, “Take one for the team” is a popular phrase amongst male New York film PA’s when they don’t feel like doing something and want the chick they’re working with to carry extra weight. Make no mistake about it; film is the most misogynistic workplace I have ever been in and the thing about true misogyny is not that the men are angry (that’s the women) but that the men are beyond lazy. A dude will tell a girl “Come on, take one for the team.” If she says agrees, she’s bled dry. If she tells him to suck it up and carry his own weight, she’s labeled a bitch. As it was a lose-lose situation, I always opted for “bitch” because boys on film sets whine too much and there’s something to being the only gal I know who has told another male PA to “suck it.” You see, “Suck it” has become my reflexive response to anything even remotely resembling “Take one for the team.”
Apparently China has its own version of “Take one for the team.” They have co-opted, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Everyone consistently says, (when I am told to do something I have no interest in doing) “Do you know there is a phrase called ‘When in Rome’? Well, be like in Rome.”
Now, I am doing everything I can to be agreeable and up for anything. As cranky and stubborn as I can be, I can be equally accommodating. However, upon the (literally) 19th declaration of the AFTERNOON that I should, “Be like in Rome. When in Rome” it becomes a feat of mammoth proportions not to scream “SUCK IT!” It’s really hard to remind myself that what is, in reality, the umpteenth ‘little’ infringement on my day, voice, sense of humor, body or smiling photo face, is to them the first and only of the day. They will never be “foreign” so there is no drive for them to even remotely understand what that mantel might mean to someone in said context. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t all think that “When in Rome” was not only cute and get-out-of-jail infringement card but appropriate as well.
I almost explained what “When in Rome” means to my boss today as he informed me that I needed to “Be like in Rome.” I have always taken “When in Rome” to be a comment on embracing the debauched nature of a place where you don’t fully belong… the operative element of all of this being the “debauched nature of Rome” in her full bacchanalian, anything-goes orgy and vomitorium glory. PRC communists who have outlawed pornography and lumped anything more revealing than a ball gown in with it, are telling me, essentially, I need to embrace the debauched customs of their land. I may have never said it before because it seems like stating the obvious but “I WILL NOT MAKE OUT WITH ANYONE IN POSSESSION OF BLACK TEETH.” Beyond that, there’s not much debauchery to be had.
So, when my boss blew me off today because the fact that I ran out of drinking water on Saturday (it’s now Monday night and I was booked solid with classes all day) is less important than his leaving his office right at 5pm on the dot and the only response he offered was “Be like in Rome. When in Rome” I actually hung up on him. Frankly, pretending we got cutoff due to bad cell reception was safer than the things that flew out of my mouth a moment after I hung up.
He called back and informed me that I needed to come to his office in the morning to discuss my new schedule. (Keep in mind, every week and occasionally every 15 minutes I am given the new “permanent” schedule.) Now, normally I would be free Tuesday morning but he decided to add on to my work load another few hours of teaching in the Kindergarten, some of which take up all my free time on Tuesday mornings.
I reminded him of my schedule and he said, “Oh, okay. Come in tomorrow morning.”
“But I teach in the Kindergarten.”
“Then come this afternoon.”
“I did, you weren’t there. That’s why we’re talking on your cell.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.”
*Click*
And, as my boss hung up on me, one of the wonderfully kind neighbor girls just informed me that the building’s power will be out tomorrow.
Fantastic
Saturday, September 23, 2006
SIMPLE PLEASURES
As I write this, I must confess that I am indulging in one of the most exquisite things I have had in quite some time; bread and salted butter. May I suggest you do the same? Get yourself a delicious, handmade loaf of good bread, tear off a hunk, put some salted butter on it and indulge as you read this. None of that wonder bread stuff; we’re talking grown-up time Italian or French yummy bread. For an extra sinful twist, put a little honey on it. Or, even toast it up. God, there is some thing so primal about bread and the smell of toast must be in my DNA or something.
Anyway, back to my story…
My predecessor from last year now teaches almost exclusively at a local college. My predecessor is a “unique” individual who’s looking for an Asian Mena Suvari to his Kevin Spacey. Nevertheless, as I am neither “too young” nor notably “subservient” we have a polite, asexual, professional relationship. He has given me many tips on how to cope with some of the more difficult aspects of this job (ie. Am I really just an overpaid babysitter for the kindergarteners? Yes and no.) and ways to keep the younger kids’ attention for more than 10 of the 45 minutes of class time. While he has been giving me tips on how to manage my job, I’ve been giving him tips on how to manage his. Ironically, I am much better suited for his job and he for mine. He has absolutely no interest in culture or history or art or politics or anything even remotely nuanced; ie all the things a college student is interested in. I have absolutely no (long term; I can handle a year) interest in being anyone’s dancing, exotic foreign monkey; ie. all the things younger students are interested in. Consequently, when my predecessor has (in his opinion) an eye-roll-worthy student who is far too “precocious,” he passes the student off to me because, frankly, I love talkative, “precocious” students. There are so many students in the area desperate to articulate their thoughts fully in English and I suspect my predecessor cuts them off mid-thought. There is nothing more discouraging that being on the precipice of new thought and being met with bored, condescending professors who have (not) seen and heard it all and couldn’t give a crap about your passion. I know: I was an art history major at Reed College.
Saturday (9/23), I spent most of my day with a curious and gentle 18 year old young man. My predecessor had declared the young man “tedious” because the young man loved to talk about film and the Chinese culture “as if it’s the best thing the world” [insert eye roll]. Nothing warms my heart more than actively ignorant, Western-cultural elitists taking positions as, essentially, cultural ambassadors to areas that have minimal contact with the Western world. Between our foreign policy and foreign presence, it’s no wonder the world is less than keen on us. Regardless, what I saw was an arrogant teacher interested in phoning it in and who is resentful of any student who challenges (even inadvertently) him. Recognizing more than a little of myself in this neglected young man, I spoke up. I immediately insisted that my predecessor pass along my contact info so that I may meet with this young cinephile.
When we first met, he thought we might be the same age. He was quite surprised to find out I was 10 years his senior. Our beginning conversation was a bit awkward as he is clearly in the midst of his angst-riddled teenage years, to say nothing of the fact that he’s been in school with one Western professor who is clearly not interested in anything of interested, so why on earth should he trust another Westerner with his passions? We made stilted conversation for a little while, he asking the occasional question and me answering to the best of my abilities.
Quickly, we found our way from the Post Office by the Bell Tower (a perfect meeting place, by the way) to Geming Park (just hop on the number 11 bus on the East [North flowing] side of the Bei Dajie; the Bei Dajie is the main avenue that runs North/South from the Bell tower and bisects the old city; you can’t miss the Bei Dajie). Geming Park is actually a memorial park for the 40,000 residents of Xi’An (1/3rd of Xi’An’s population at the time) who were killed in the revolution. However, as with all parks in Xi’An, along with the somber memorials, there are many amusement park rides, water games and badmitton courts for entertainment. Unlike many parks in Xi’An, Geming Park is free to enter (though the amusement park rides cost a fee).
After a brief tour of the park in which my companion explained many of the memorials and the Chinese characters, we picked out a spot at the picnic table and sat down to watch the busy commotion on the bridge over the lake. Over the lake was a long, winding Chinese bridge made out of concrete. In the center of the bridge (and lake) was a Chinese pagoda where many musicians in formal (think “black tie” not “traditional”) clothes were playing classical music. Some singers, equally formally dressed and with sheet music, joined the musicians as the music wore on. As they singers ended up singing for hours and hours, I asked my companion of they were singing opera. After a brief scolding that I shouldn’t presume that because in one place in China something is popular that it is popular everywhere, I quickly explained that, coming from New York, whenever anyone formally sings in a park for hours at a time, it’s usually opera (or a musical; but to explain “opera” vs. “musical” was to dive into semantics). Fortunately, I think that issue was cleared up and we continued talking.
It was nice to be around a curious, if not somber, 18 year old. He liked that I was so open (granted, compared to my predecessor, how could I not be?) and had many questions about student life in the United States. I explained as best I could and conversation, on occasion, turned, as it always does, to sex. Because the whole metropolitan area seems to be aware of the “fact” that I have “a boyfriend” he wanted to know about long distance relationships. Primarily, he wanted to know if there was “place in [my] heart for only one.” I told him that when I was younger I thought so but now that I am getting older, I don’t know how true that is. I said for me that there is only room for one at a time and some loves are greater than others but I don’t know if there is room for just one love.
He explained that he had left a girl behind in his hometown that he loved greatly but that he no longer knew how to feel about it all. I told him I thought that love is what it is; that you can’t make it be something else and the hardest thing about getting older is growing apart from the things you loved so passionately when you were young.
He then asked me about sex. He started with what sex education was like in the United States and when we first learn about sex. He was amazed that sex education was taught in schools and he wanted to know how young we started learning about sex.
I explained that my first sex education class was when I was 9 or 10. I also explained that your science teacher or gym teacher teaches it and it is not very exciting. I explained that you were taught simply what a doctor would teach you if you asked him/her about sex. Generally, we learned the anatomical names for everything, exactly how babies are made and how STD’s are spread. I also explained that I grew up in a very free and open household where I could and had asked most any question about sex whenever the curiosity struck me.
He then told me about a mountain in his hometown that had been carved into the shape of a sleeping woman in memorial of an empress who had been buried in his hometown. We talked of film and culture and art. We talked about writers and their personal histories. He always seemed a bit surprised by his own knowledge of homosexual artists and I eventually told him I felt it was perfectly normal for people to be homosexual and that I have many wonderful friends who are homosexual.
And then he asked me about my thoughts on sex. I told him I thought it was perfectly natural and healthy. He said something rather cryptic, “People like you do think that.” Normally, that sort of statement would have insulted me but we had long and consistently established that “people like [me]” were “open” and “nice” and people he liked “very much.” He had been saying “people like [me]” a lot, so I often asked him what he meant by that and he always said, “open, nice.” I asked if he thought that, “open, nice” was good or bad and he said, “Good, I like people like you very much.”
Non-insults aside, I also told him that sexuality was very difficult for every teen I ever knew. I asked him his thoughts on sex and he said, “I think most 18 year old boys want to try it.”
“I think you’re right.” I concurred. “I think many 18 year old girls are afraid of sex because they see it as just about giving the man pleasure. But, as women get older, they start to understand that sex might be nice for them too.”
We continued talking about Wong Kar Wai movies and eventually left. We separated at the bus and he left, awkwardly, not saying goodbye and as I watched him go, consumed in his own thoughts, I felt relieved that yet again, I have no desire to be a teenager. It sucked the first time, why would anyone want to go back? As an adult (I won’t say “full-grown” because I’m far from it) I get to dictate so much more of my life. I can keep the small-minded morons to a dull roar unlike when I was in school. I can decide when and where I want to go (within obvious limitations) and the Technicolor of everything being new has begun to wear off into the comfort of beginning how to learn to do things well.
As I went shopping at Carrefour that night, I realized that if I want two kinds of similar cereal, I may have two kinds of similar cereal and not have to depend on the Jude to have to get it for me. I had forgotten how much I actively like being a grown up. Granted, the blows are harder but the independence is sweeter and it doesn’t need to be taken.
As I write this, I must confess that I am indulging in one of the most exquisite things I have had in quite some time; bread and salted butter. May I suggest you do the same? Get yourself a delicious, handmade loaf of good bread, tear off a hunk, put some salted butter on it and indulge as you read this. None of that wonder bread stuff; we’re talking grown-up time Italian or French yummy bread. For an extra sinful twist, put a little honey on it. Or, even toast it up. God, there is some thing so primal about bread and the smell of toast must be in my DNA or something.
Anyway, back to my story…
My predecessor from last year now teaches almost exclusively at a local college. My predecessor is a “unique” individual who’s looking for an Asian Mena Suvari to his Kevin Spacey. Nevertheless, as I am neither “too young” nor notably “subservient” we have a polite, asexual, professional relationship. He has given me many tips on how to cope with some of the more difficult aspects of this job (ie. Am I really just an overpaid babysitter for the kindergarteners? Yes and no.) and ways to keep the younger kids’ attention for more than 10 of the 45 minutes of class time. While he has been giving me tips on how to manage my job, I’ve been giving him tips on how to manage his. Ironically, I am much better suited for his job and he for mine. He has absolutely no interest in culture or history or art or politics or anything even remotely nuanced; ie all the things a college student is interested in. I have absolutely no (long term; I can handle a year) interest in being anyone’s dancing, exotic foreign monkey; ie. all the things younger students are interested in. Consequently, when my predecessor has (in his opinion) an eye-roll-worthy student who is far too “precocious,” he passes the student off to me because, frankly, I love talkative, “precocious” students. There are so many students in the area desperate to articulate their thoughts fully in English and I suspect my predecessor cuts them off mid-thought. There is nothing more discouraging that being on the precipice of new thought and being met with bored, condescending professors who have (not) seen and heard it all and couldn’t give a crap about your passion. I know: I was an art history major at Reed College.
Saturday (9/23), I spent most of my day with a curious and gentle 18 year old young man. My predecessor had declared the young man “tedious” because the young man loved to talk about film and the Chinese culture “as if it’s the best thing the world” [insert eye roll]. Nothing warms my heart more than actively ignorant, Western-cultural elitists taking positions as, essentially, cultural ambassadors to areas that have minimal contact with the Western world. Between our foreign policy and foreign presence, it’s no wonder the world is less than keen on us. Regardless, what I saw was an arrogant teacher interested in phoning it in and who is resentful of any student who challenges (even inadvertently) him. Recognizing more than a little of myself in this neglected young man, I spoke up. I immediately insisted that my predecessor pass along my contact info so that I may meet with this young cinephile.
When we first met, he thought we might be the same age. He was quite surprised to find out I was 10 years his senior. Our beginning conversation was a bit awkward as he is clearly in the midst of his angst-riddled teenage years, to say nothing of the fact that he’s been in school with one Western professor who is clearly not interested in anything of interested, so why on earth should he trust another Westerner with his passions? We made stilted conversation for a little while, he asking the occasional question and me answering to the best of my abilities.
Quickly, we found our way from the Post Office by the Bell Tower (a perfect meeting place, by the way) to Geming Park (just hop on the number 11 bus on the East [North flowing] side of the Bei Dajie; the Bei Dajie is the main avenue that runs North/South from the Bell tower and bisects the old city; you can’t miss the Bei Dajie). Geming Park is actually a memorial park for the 40,000 residents of Xi’An (1/3rd of Xi’An’s population at the time) who were killed in the revolution. However, as with all parks in Xi’An, along with the somber memorials, there are many amusement park rides, water games and badmitton courts for entertainment. Unlike many parks in Xi’An, Geming Park is free to enter (though the amusement park rides cost a fee).
After a brief tour of the park in which my companion explained many of the memorials and the Chinese characters, we picked out a spot at the picnic table and sat down to watch the busy commotion on the bridge over the lake. Over the lake was a long, winding Chinese bridge made out of concrete. In the center of the bridge (and lake) was a Chinese pagoda where many musicians in formal (think “black tie” not “traditional”) clothes were playing classical music. Some singers, equally formally dressed and with sheet music, joined the musicians as the music wore on. As they singers ended up singing for hours and hours, I asked my companion of they were singing opera. After a brief scolding that I shouldn’t presume that because in one place in China something is popular that it is popular everywhere, I quickly explained that, coming from New York, whenever anyone formally sings in a park for hours at a time, it’s usually opera (or a musical; but to explain “opera” vs. “musical” was to dive into semantics). Fortunately, I think that issue was cleared up and we continued talking.
It was nice to be around a curious, if not somber, 18 year old. He liked that I was so open (granted, compared to my predecessor, how could I not be?) and had many questions about student life in the United States. I explained as best I could and conversation, on occasion, turned, as it always does, to sex. Because the whole metropolitan area seems to be aware of the “fact” that I have “a boyfriend” he wanted to know about long distance relationships. Primarily, he wanted to know if there was “place in [my] heart for only one.” I told him that when I was younger I thought so but now that I am getting older, I don’t know how true that is. I said for me that there is only room for one at a time and some loves are greater than others but I don’t know if there is room for just one love.
He explained that he had left a girl behind in his hometown that he loved greatly but that he no longer knew how to feel about it all. I told him I thought that love is what it is; that you can’t make it be something else and the hardest thing about getting older is growing apart from the things you loved so passionately when you were young.
He then asked me about sex. He started with what sex education was like in the United States and when we first learn about sex. He was amazed that sex education was taught in schools and he wanted to know how young we started learning about sex.
I explained that my first sex education class was when I was 9 or 10. I also explained that your science teacher or gym teacher teaches it and it is not very exciting. I explained that you were taught simply what a doctor would teach you if you asked him/her about sex. Generally, we learned the anatomical names for everything, exactly how babies are made and how STD’s are spread. I also explained that I grew up in a very free and open household where I could and had asked most any question about sex whenever the curiosity struck me.
He then told me about a mountain in his hometown that had been carved into the shape of a sleeping woman in memorial of an empress who had been buried in his hometown. We talked of film and culture and art. We talked about writers and their personal histories. He always seemed a bit surprised by his own knowledge of homosexual artists and I eventually told him I felt it was perfectly normal for people to be homosexual and that I have many wonderful friends who are homosexual.
And then he asked me about my thoughts on sex. I told him I thought it was perfectly natural and healthy. He said something rather cryptic, “People like you do think that.” Normally, that sort of statement would have insulted me but we had long and consistently established that “people like [me]” were “open” and “nice” and people he liked “very much.” He had been saying “people like [me]” a lot, so I often asked him what he meant by that and he always said, “open, nice.” I asked if he thought that, “open, nice” was good or bad and he said, “Good, I like people like you very much.”
Non-insults aside, I also told him that sexuality was very difficult for every teen I ever knew. I asked him his thoughts on sex and he said, “I think most 18 year old boys want to try it.”
“I think you’re right.” I concurred. “I think many 18 year old girls are afraid of sex because they see it as just about giving the man pleasure. But, as women get older, they start to understand that sex might be nice for them too.”
We continued talking about Wong Kar Wai movies and eventually left. We separated at the bus and he left, awkwardly, not saying goodbye and as I watched him go, consumed in his own thoughts, I felt relieved that yet again, I have no desire to be a teenager. It sucked the first time, why would anyone want to go back? As an adult (I won’t say “full-grown” because I’m far from it) I get to dictate so much more of my life. I can keep the small-minded morons to a dull roar unlike when I was in school. I can decide when and where I want to go (within obvious limitations) and the Technicolor of everything being new has begun to wear off into the comfort of beginning how to learn to do things well.
As I went shopping at Carrefour that night, I realized that if I want two kinds of similar cereal, I may have two kinds of similar cereal and not have to depend on the Jude to have to get it for me. I had forgotten how much I actively like being a grown up. Granted, the blows are harder but the independence is sweeter and it doesn’t need to be taken.
Friday, September 22, 2006
RUMINATING
So, I’ve been here almost a month and I’ve been stewing on a few things: general stuff and small tidbits that contrast sharply with home.
1. Glitter. Everyone here wears jeans, all the time. The thing about the jeans is that they’re all glittery. Even the shirts are glittery. Even the hairpieces and shoes are glittery. Studs, glued glitter and silver threads, everything always glitter. There are no words.
2. Butterflies. BUTTerflies. Atop the glittery jeans are BUTTerflies. The body of the butterfly lies at the butt crack of the jeans and then the wings of the butterflies spread out over each butt cheek. Even fewer words.
3. Rotty Rotty teeth. I long for the days of good Austin Powers dental hygiene. No joke, most people’s teeth here are black. Not yellow. Not white. Not gray. Black. In lieu of plaque build up at the bottom of their teeth, they have black… whatever. And atop the black build up, their teeth have slashes of black across their teeth. Even the children have black teeth. It looks like the whole city has been chewing on tar gum.
4. Skin color. A woman from Africa came for a job in my school and one of my “advantages” over her (ie. reason I should not feel threatened) is my Portland Pallor. I’m pasty and she’s not, therefore I’m more qualified to teach English?
5. OJ. Yeah, um, they sell “orange juice” but it’s actually orange “drink.” You know, Tang? Yeah, it’s Tang with pureed pulp floating in it. They label the plain old Tang, “Orange Drink” but they label Tang with pureed pulp “Orange Juice.”
6. Translation Dictionaries. I was flipping though my translation dictionary and found an entry that made no sense to me… in English. I truly have no idea what a “Blue Movie” is in English. To me, that statement makes no sense. So, I asked one of my Chinese colleagues if she could translate the Chinese into something less opaque in English. I asked this in the office of all the Chinese English teachers. The woman I asked gasped, giggled and blushed as she announced to the whole office what I just asked. Everyone tried to hide their giggling as they looked at me. One woman, between giggling tried to translate. “Adult. Adult movie.” It all clicked and suddenly I realized that I had just asked half of my colleagues to translate “porno flick.” Keep in mind, in my office there are Born Again Christians and in China, sex is a general no-no.
7. Noises. General noises we make in English mean things in Chinese. “Hey-yo!” hollered to get people’s attention sounds a lot like “I don’t have” in Chinese.
8. Sex. It’s repressed here, so it comes out in ways I’m not accustom to; like 6 year olds trying to cop a feel.
9. Discipline. They’re not joking around about it here. I now teach kindergarten students twice a week for an hour each time. The kindergarteners are told to sit properly in their chairs and not get up. Any loud outbursts or rambunctious behavior is sternly punished. If I want to have interaction with the (very normal) children, I must approach them and not let them out of their chairs.
10. “Fresh.” In Chinese, “fresh” must be one of the most beautiful words to describe a woman. However, in English, “We love you because you’re so fresh” does not quite carry the same implications. I am consistently told how wonderfully “fresh” I am by both suitors and employers.
11. Children. Despite their harsh discipline and the occasional bad apple, the kids are so loving. We had a rocky start but really like each other now. They are generally so happy to see me that even the craziest kids literally leap up onto me to full-body hug me hello and good-bye. They love to hold my hand, hug me and kiss my cheek.
12. Ceremony. So I’m making friends and being treated about as much an equal as one could hope for in a society that has never had full-time exposure to a Western woman. We joke with each other. The young women are comfortable bossing me around, the way young women who know it all do. The older women are comfortable bossing me around the way that women who wish they had done it differently do. Generally, the women (and the occasional man willing to brave the language barrier) are comfortable around me. We talk about life, travel, sleeping and health tips. My friendships are profound in the equality we’ve been able to find; primarily, the sisterhood knows few cultural boundaries. However, the moment we’re all in a formal setting, I become distinctly aware of our difference. In all formal settings, I become the movie star that everyone clamors to get a photo with and I become “famous” in the “communal piece of property” sense. Levels of discipline and decorum are fiercely respected and it is unthinkable that I would be just one of the gang. The strangest part, to me, is that there is generally no one new around when this shift happens. It’s just us and the pretext of the ceremony.
13. Maintenance. There is dust everywhere and it is there constantly because of the air pollution. I have to sweep and wash every flat surface at least twice a week. I must do all my laundry by hand. I must shop for food at least five times a week (most people here shop at least twice a day and eat out at least once). The thing about food shopping is that one must have at least four different places one must go to get groceries and for whatever reason, they are rarely all in the same place. Being one’s own housewife is seriously time consuming. No wonder no one ever goes anywhere. There’s no time.
So, I’ve been here almost a month and I’ve been stewing on a few things: general stuff and small tidbits that contrast sharply with home.
1. Glitter. Everyone here wears jeans, all the time. The thing about the jeans is that they’re all glittery. Even the shirts are glittery. Even the hairpieces and shoes are glittery. Studs, glued glitter and silver threads, everything always glitter. There are no words.
2. Butterflies. BUTTerflies. Atop the glittery jeans are BUTTerflies. The body of the butterfly lies at the butt crack of the jeans and then the wings of the butterflies spread out over each butt cheek. Even fewer words.
3. Rotty Rotty teeth. I long for the days of good Austin Powers dental hygiene. No joke, most people’s teeth here are black. Not yellow. Not white. Not gray. Black. In lieu of plaque build up at the bottom of their teeth, they have black… whatever. And atop the black build up, their teeth have slashes of black across their teeth. Even the children have black teeth. It looks like the whole city has been chewing on tar gum.
4. Skin color. A woman from Africa came for a job in my school and one of my “advantages” over her (ie. reason I should not feel threatened) is my Portland Pallor. I’m pasty and she’s not, therefore I’m more qualified to teach English?
5. OJ. Yeah, um, they sell “orange juice” but it’s actually orange “drink.” You know, Tang? Yeah, it’s Tang with pureed pulp floating in it. They label the plain old Tang, “Orange Drink” but they label Tang with pureed pulp “Orange Juice.”
6. Translation Dictionaries. I was flipping though my translation dictionary and found an entry that made no sense to me… in English. I truly have no idea what a “Blue Movie” is in English. To me, that statement makes no sense. So, I asked one of my Chinese colleagues if she could translate the Chinese into something less opaque in English. I asked this in the office of all the Chinese English teachers. The woman I asked gasped, giggled and blushed as she announced to the whole office what I just asked. Everyone tried to hide their giggling as they looked at me. One woman, between giggling tried to translate. “Adult. Adult movie.” It all clicked and suddenly I realized that I had just asked half of my colleagues to translate “porno flick.” Keep in mind, in my office there are Born Again Christians and in China, sex is a general no-no.
7. Noises. General noises we make in English mean things in Chinese. “Hey-yo!” hollered to get people’s attention sounds a lot like “I don’t have” in Chinese.
8. Sex. It’s repressed here, so it comes out in ways I’m not accustom to; like 6 year olds trying to cop a feel.
9. Discipline. They’re not joking around about it here. I now teach kindergarten students twice a week for an hour each time. The kindergarteners are told to sit properly in their chairs and not get up. Any loud outbursts or rambunctious behavior is sternly punished. If I want to have interaction with the (very normal) children, I must approach them and not let them out of their chairs.
10. “Fresh.” In Chinese, “fresh” must be one of the most beautiful words to describe a woman. However, in English, “We love you because you’re so fresh” does not quite carry the same implications. I am consistently told how wonderfully “fresh” I am by both suitors and employers.
11. Children. Despite their harsh discipline and the occasional bad apple, the kids are so loving. We had a rocky start but really like each other now. They are generally so happy to see me that even the craziest kids literally leap up onto me to full-body hug me hello and good-bye. They love to hold my hand, hug me and kiss my cheek.
12. Ceremony. So I’m making friends and being treated about as much an equal as one could hope for in a society that has never had full-time exposure to a Western woman. We joke with each other. The young women are comfortable bossing me around, the way young women who know it all do. The older women are comfortable bossing me around the way that women who wish they had done it differently do. Generally, the women (and the occasional man willing to brave the language barrier) are comfortable around me. We talk about life, travel, sleeping and health tips. My friendships are profound in the equality we’ve been able to find; primarily, the sisterhood knows few cultural boundaries. However, the moment we’re all in a formal setting, I become distinctly aware of our difference. In all formal settings, I become the movie star that everyone clamors to get a photo with and I become “famous” in the “communal piece of property” sense. Levels of discipline and decorum are fiercely respected and it is unthinkable that I would be just one of the gang. The strangest part, to me, is that there is generally no one new around when this shift happens. It’s just us and the pretext of the ceremony.
13. Maintenance. There is dust everywhere and it is there constantly because of the air pollution. I have to sweep and wash every flat surface at least twice a week. I must do all my laundry by hand. I must shop for food at least five times a week (most people here shop at least twice a day and eat out at least once). The thing about food shopping is that one must have at least four different places one must go to get groceries and for whatever reason, they are rarely all in the same place. Being one’s own housewife is seriously time consuming. No wonder no one ever goes anywhere. There’s no time.
Monday, September 18, 2006
A FULL SPECTRUM KIND SPECIES
Like I said before, we’re a full spectrum kind of species. We are capable of just as much good as we are bad. We run the gamut.
Saturday September 16th, I made plans to spend time in the Muslim Quarter with a new Chinese friend, his wife and lovely daughter. I was asked if after the Muslim Quarter, I would like to go for a massage with him as his wife and daughter needed to get back home for his daughter’s schooling. I glanced briefly at the wife, as the sisterhood is more trustworthy than the brotherhood for a woman here, and she assured me he goes every month and that I should go too. So, I agreed.
The whole family took me on a tour of the Muslim Quarter not found in any guidebook. We walked around and watched the tourists. At each stall, we stopped to watch the, I find, surprisingly vulgar Westerners haggle with the native Chinese. It’s not that the merchants won’t take you for every cent they can, it’s just not personal with them. For them, it’s business. They will make a profit off you, the question is just how much of a profit. With the tourists, it’s personal; as if a good price is your visa-given right and if you don’t get it, you’re taking your money to somewhere where you’re appreciated. I found myself shockingly disappointed every time I watched a Western storm away, snooty nose in the air hand flailing in a gesture of dismissal as if their presence was what would make or break the single stall in an alley so crowded in the off hours of the day that you can barely breathe. No wonder much of China views the West as imperialist bastards. Between our foreign policy and our foreign presence, there’s really very little other conclusion to come to.
Between my Chinese guides and my tendency not to make a grand scene wherever I go, I was left alone, free to observe the tourists fighting with the vendors. I explained which countries each group of tourists was from and how I could tell; either by the language they conversed in with each other or by the accent their English held. I explained to my hosts the difference between the British accent that holds the letter “a” deep in the throat while Americans place it high in the nasal cavity. I explained the rolling rhythm of Italian and the lisp of Castilian Spanish.
We continued on a bit until my new Chinese friend spied a beautiful building behind one of the stalls. (The stalls are built out from the houses the merchants live in, like a garage placed directly in front of the façade of a house.) He pushed through, said something to the young man manning the stall in front and we were allowed access back to see the front of the house.
Hanging on the wall of the house was a plaque from UNESCO’s Asia Pacific Heritage awarded to 125 Huajue Alley (run a web search for it and on UNESCO’s site, you will find photos of the place). 125 Huajue is, apparently, the only restoration project in China to receive the award for excellent restoration. Only 13 awards have been given out in Asia total and 125 Huajue is the one that China received for.
Technical awards aside, the front of the home is beautiful. The façade is beautifully carved stone with a small moat or drain running along the front doorway. Every inch is covered in some sort of carving. Flanking the large keystone with the family name are intricately carved, lifesize writing implements of brush, ink and tablet. Incredibly realistic stone foliage adorns the various still-lifes. The solid stone rods that support the roof shingles are all tipped with a gargoyle-like face and no two are the same.
While we were studying the façade, an old man came out to speak with us. He spoke with my Chinese friend and my friend translated that the old man was “a teacher, like [me].” We nodded hello and it was explained that I was an English teacher from America, New York. As my hometown always affords me, I got a respectful nod. The old man gestured for us to enter his home and he said he would give us a tour.
You must step on the stone island in the moat to reach the door and as you pass through, you’re greeted with traditional Qing dynasty architecture. Specifically, a large, minimalist, rectangular pond serves as the courtyard with narrow walkways on either side to walk towards the house. As you approach the front entrance to the house on the far end of the long rectangle, rooms only accessible within the home flanking the rectangular pond, the front courtyard flares out like a capital “T” with the smaller ponds on either side of the entrance adorned with wooden hand cranks to pump water into the pond. The front door to the house proper is a long, woven shade and you pull the shade back and enter through the side of the flap.
Once inside the house, one is amazed at the serenity. Not fifty feet away (granted, on the other side of large, thick stone walls) is a throng of tourists so thick you feel as if you’re drowning but inside the house is silence. The thick wooden beams supporting the house are painted black and each room is framed at the entrance with an ornate almost picture-like frame. As we entered, I saw the illuminated Koran pages on the wall and greeted the old teacher in Arabic as my Muslim friends growing up taught me to do. He reciprocated and I was offered a high seat in the sitting room off the right of the entrance.
As I sat with my friend in the two high chairs and the old teacher and my friend’s wife sat in the low chairs, I felt the handles of my chair. Being an art history major with a fetish for all art Asian, I immediately pegged my chair as period appropriate for the Qing dynasty. Considering how sturdy it was under my massive self, I nailed it as a reproduction. I guessed that the artist was going for early Qing dynasty, making it several centuries “old.” I marveled at the craftsmanship and thought how amazing that current artists have kept such a tradition alive. I was finally able to pull my eyes from the chair to look around and see how many pieces really fit the period. Not to mention, the stunning “4 Seasons” scrolls (the four seasons are a very popular theme in Chinese scrolls) on the wall behind me and the calligraphy scrolls to my right, the window overlooking courtyard being to my left.
Suddenly, the old teacher and my friend erupted into excited chatter. My friend, a passionate interior decorator and calligraphy enthusiast, had recognized the scrolls to my right. It turns out that the beautiful calligraphy scrolls on the walls were the old teacher’s and he was a teacher of calligraphy. Not just that but apparently, he is one of the most famous calligraphers alive. Granted, I was never given his name nor would I have retained if I had been but considering the passion the Chinese have for calligraphy, it was not unlike suddenly discovering I was sitting in Picasso’s sitting room.
By the window to my right, there was a large basket of scrolls and work the old teacher had been working on and we were invited to take a look. One by one, we unfurled the scrolls, some flecked with gold, some on brown paper, some on brilliantly white paper, some with sketches and some completed masterpieces. It was all stunning and, once again, I find myself incredibly frustrated at my inability to comprehend Chinese.
After many photos were taken, both of the scrolls and us, we were given a tour of the house. Directly across from the sitting room and to the left of the front entrance, is a bedroom. The frame around the bedroom was larger, therefore leaving less space for heat to get escape and I studied the inserts adorned with vignettes as my friend, his wife and daughter and the old teacher all looked at the furniture in the bedroom. I was told to come into the bedroom and inspect one of the armoires. I immediately pegged the clean lines, simple clasp and overwhelming brute size of the armoire as late Qing dynasty (a little over a century old). “Good repro” I thought again.
I was then informed that the armoire was “over a hundred years old.” It occurred to me that this was no repro and I looked at my hand touching the silken, lacquered wood as my stomach dropped. Then I realized that there were no museum security guards to wrestle me to the ground and scold me. I had, in fact, been invited to touch this gem. Since I was old enough to walk, I have wanted more than anything to touch history, to break through the fourth wall of museums and breathe life into those lonely objects so derived from their original purpose. I’ve always thought of museum pieces as incarcerated from their real life; that they must sit there, night after night, wishing for the good old days when they had stolen moments with their owners who were willing to treat them as their maker had intended and not some idolized, precious object to be adored in some strange guided cage. I see museums as filled with lost pets left to wonder where their owners are and why they are no longer loved but merely studied behind glass. I go to museums to say “hello” to these pieces of the past the way many people visit pet stores to pet the lonely puppies.
And there I was, touching the previously forbidden. I found myself smiling at the thought of this piece of history having such a good home and my smile became infectious. Soon everyone was smiling and the old teacher was dating everything in the house for us.
It turns out that my repro chair that was so sturdy, was in fact, as I had dated the “forger’s” intended date; early Qing dynasty. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t know that sitting down or I never would have been able to relax at the thought of a several-hundred-year-old chair supporting my fat ass.
We left the old teacher’s home high on life and wandered into the streets of the Muslim Quarter. We quickly traversed a maze of streets and wandered into a residential street where I was clearly the only Westerner to be there in quite some time. I noticed there was no pretense of Imperial Chinese beauty, simply the light brown of the dirt and dust and mud of my alley back home. We walked along this street as people stared at me and then we came upon a doorway with several older folks sitting, eating soupy rice out of their bowls, just watching the world go by. My friend entered the doorway quickly and we followed a long, winding hallway back past open fire pits, nut grinders and sweating workers to a baker’s shop.
Inside the shop were large, wheel-able crates of every baked good they make in China. Moon cakes (to celebrate the upcoming Moon Festival on October 6th; it’s the harvest festival) of every variety (they are phyllo dough little buns stamped with red; they have dense centers ranging from the sweet kind with a paste of walnuts, raisins, dates and brown sugar to savory with meat and spices) as well as peanut butter cookies, fried pieces of dough that taste sweet like a hard doughnut or salty like a wonton and a wide variety of things I could not place.
The smell was a fantastic mix of baking starch, sugar and meats. As we left, my friend bought me a package of sweet moon cakes and I was quite excited as I really like them.
We then stumbled about the local streets buying various things for lunch. My friend and his wife bought raw beef, a solid rice pudding with unsweetened stewed prunes, berry flat buns (berry starch with a berry jam center fried up hot and soft) and then we found a noodle place for lunch. I was given a large bowl of sesame noodles (while in America, the noodles are usually cold and spaghetti like, here they are broad, hot and al dente) spiced up very hot, a bowl of rice, a large communal bowl of some sort of cooked meat with a gelatin-like soup and a communal red soup with couscous –like grains at the bottom.
Eating beef raw is something to behold. It was fresh and delicious as was the rest of the food… except for the cooked meat stew with gelatin soup. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get thoughts of haggis out of my mind, and so it was an active effort not to gag as I ate it the gelatinous muck. Of course, I took some of everything I was offered and wished my stomach was larger so I could eat more. Unfortunately, the cooked meat stew seemed to be the true delicacy so they kept heaping it on to my rice and I had to eat until I was bursting at the seams.
We finished lunch and my friend’s wife and daughter found their way back so the daughter could attend her schooling. My friend and I found our way to his friend’s spa.
When we got off the bus, my friend took my hand and would not let it go. Now, I do not come from a handholding culture. I don’t know where the lines between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” handholding lie. Frankly, no one has held my hand in public since college and while I have no problem taking someone’s arm, handholding just seems too intimate for me.
Nevertheless, there I was being led, by the hand, up the street by this giddy, middle-aged man who is friends with the head of my school. His wife had suggested I go with him to the spa, so I took her comfort at face value but I knew I was in over my head. Harmless or not, this was definitely something I had no compass for.
We went up the stairs to the spa, holding hands and into the massage room together holding hands. I took a seat in the lounger chair and as we watched tv, waiting for the masseurs to show up, he lay on his side, watching me with child-like interest and invading my “dance space” as they say in Dirty Dancing. “This is my dance space. This is your dance space. Got it?”
We chatted and then the masseurs arrived to rub us down. I had to take off my shoes and roll up my pants. Actually, those things were done for me and I realized, Toto, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. First of all, my legs weren’t shaved because A) they don’t sell razors in Xi’An except for at Carrefour and there it’s for 50 yuan (like spending 50 bucks on a razor) while the spare heads cost 20 yuan a pop and B) I hadn’t expected to be showing my legs. Considering the cost of blades, I’ve been rather lax about the whole leg hair thing as they’re covered by long pants every day and I’ve got no one seeing my legs. Nevertheless, my friend was unphased by my hairy legs and he started waxing poetic about my beautiful hands and my beautiful feet.
He declared them to be the most beautiful in the world. He then took my hand again to study it and caress it.
Now, I’m from the United States of America; we don’t do sensual if it doesn’t lead to sex. In a country where men walk hand-in-hand, I can’t tell where the sexual line and the sensual line is drawn. I just can’t. I’m not calibrated like that and having to sort that out in crunch time is hard.
However, the rational part of me understood that his masseur was touching him far more intimately than a little hand holding AND his wife suggested I be here, so the argument could be made that I was being alarmist at being so ridiculously uncomfortable.
Freaking out aside, the massage was incredible. I got rubbed and pulled and bent and flexed and crawled upon so deeply and thoroughly, I’m still relaxed… though I do have bruises all over me from the acupressure. Ironically, the masseur explained to my friend that I was so fresh and delicate that she was afraid to massage me as hard as she normally does for fear of bruising me. She did but I loved every second of it.
Once the massages were over and it was just the two of us in the room alone, things got a little weird again as he curled up next to me and wanted to hear me speak of the US. Of course, conversation eventually turned to my “boyfriend” as my friend knows lots of people at the school I work at and all I had to do was mention to one person that I “have” a boyfriend and instantly everyone knows.
So, the single American girl is sitting there on the lounging chairs with the married Chinese man who is extolling her great beauty and caressing every inch of her hand as he starts asking if I’ve ever been away from my boyfriend before. Not wanting to sound like some wide-eyed innocent, I said, “Yes, we’ve been apart many times before.” The next question was if I ever cheated on him or he on me. Now, I wanted to leave no wiggle room for argument as to why he should be able to partake in my body so I said, “No.”
“Never? Not once?”
“No, never. Not once.” I stood my ground.
“How many boyfriends did you have before?”
Again, I wanted NO wiggle room for him to make the argument for sex with him. “None.”
“Only one boyfriend?” He asked, amazed. Granted, I was amazed too considering I have more in common with Samantha from Sex and the City than Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice. “Most American women have many boyfriend. They do not care how many.”
I must admit, there’s nothing more heartwarming than being told what my culture does and does not do by a person who not only has never experienced it but I am their first contact with it. All I could do was shrug.
“I think you are like traditional Chinese girl.” He said, his tone and body language subtly changing. I was immediately given much more personal space and his air changed from suitor to father.
All because I just lied to appear as a “good” girl.
The rest of the afternoon was a lovely haze of napping while waiting for friends. As soon as his flock of buddies showed up, I was shuffled off into a taxi and sent home. The moment I closed my door behind me, I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Like I said before, we’re a full spectrum kind of species. We are capable of just as much good as we are bad. We run the gamut.
Saturday September 16th, I made plans to spend time in the Muslim Quarter with a new Chinese friend, his wife and lovely daughter. I was asked if after the Muslim Quarter, I would like to go for a massage with him as his wife and daughter needed to get back home for his daughter’s schooling. I glanced briefly at the wife, as the sisterhood is more trustworthy than the brotherhood for a woman here, and she assured me he goes every month and that I should go too. So, I agreed.
The whole family took me on a tour of the Muslim Quarter not found in any guidebook. We walked around and watched the tourists. At each stall, we stopped to watch the, I find, surprisingly vulgar Westerners haggle with the native Chinese. It’s not that the merchants won’t take you for every cent they can, it’s just not personal with them. For them, it’s business. They will make a profit off you, the question is just how much of a profit. With the tourists, it’s personal; as if a good price is your visa-given right and if you don’t get it, you’re taking your money to somewhere where you’re appreciated. I found myself shockingly disappointed every time I watched a Western storm away, snooty nose in the air hand flailing in a gesture of dismissal as if their presence was what would make or break the single stall in an alley so crowded in the off hours of the day that you can barely breathe. No wonder much of China views the West as imperialist bastards. Between our foreign policy and our foreign presence, there’s really very little other conclusion to come to.
Between my Chinese guides and my tendency not to make a grand scene wherever I go, I was left alone, free to observe the tourists fighting with the vendors. I explained which countries each group of tourists was from and how I could tell; either by the language they conversed in with each other or by the accent their English held. I explained to my hosts the difference between the British accent that holds the letter “a” deep in the throat while Americans place it high in the nasal cavity. I explained the rolling rhythm of Italian and the lisp of Castilian Spanish.
We continued on a bit until my new Chinese friend spied a beautiful building behind one of the stalls. (The stalls are built out from the houses the merchants live in, like a garage placed directly in front of the façade of a house.) He pushed through, said something to the young man manning the stall in front and we were allowed access back to see the front of the house.
Hanging on the wall of the house was a plaque from UNESCO’s Asia Pacific Heritage awarded to 125 Huajue Alley (run a web search for it and on UNESCO’s site, you will find photos of the place). 125 Huajue is, apparently, the only restoration project in China to receive the award for excellent restoration. Only 13 awards have been given out in Asia total and 125 Huajue is the one that China received for.
Technical awards aside, the front of the home is beautiful. The façade is beautifully carved stone with a small moat or drain running along the front doorway. Every inch is covered in some sort of carving. Flanking the large keystone with the family name are intricately carved, lifesize writing implements of brush, ink and tablet. Incredibly realistic stone foliage adorns the various still-lifes. The solid stone rods that support the roof shingles are all tipped with a gargoyle-like face and no two are the same.
While we were studying the façade, an old man came out to speak with us. He spoke with my Chinese friend and my friend translated that the old man was “a teacher, like [me].” We nodded hello and it was explained that I was an English teacher from America, New York. As my hometown always affords me, I got a respectful nod. The old man gestured for us to enter his home and he said he would give us a tour.
You must step on the stone island in the moat to reach the door and as you pass through, you’re greeted with traditional Qing dynasty architecture. Specifically, a large, minimalist, rectangular pond serves as the courtyard with narrow walkways on either side to walk towards the house. As you approach the front entrance to the house on the far end of the long rectangle, rooms only accessible within the home flanking the rectangular pond, the front courtyard flares out like a capital “T” with the smaller ponds on either side of the entrance adorned with wooden hand cranks to pump water into the pond. The front door to the house proper is a long, woven shade and you pull the shade back and enter through the side of the flap.
Once inside the house, one is amazed at the serenity. Not fifty feet away (granted, on the other side of large, thick stone walls) is a throng of tourists so thick you feel as if you’re drowning but inside the house is silence. The thick wooden beams supporting the house are painted black and each room is framed at the entrance with an ornate almost picture-like frame. As we entered, I saw the illuminated Koran pages on the wall and greeted the old teacher in Arabic as my Muslim friends growing up taught me to do. He reciprocated and I was offered a high seat in the sitting room off the right of the entrance.
As I sat with my friend in the two high chairs and the old teacher and my friend’s wife sat in the low chairs, I felt the handles of my chair. Being an art history major with a fetish for all art Asian, I immediately pegged my chair as period appropriate for the Qing dynasty. Considering how sturdy it was under my massive self, I nailed it as a reproduction. I guessed that the artist was going for early Qing dynasty, making it several centuries “old.” I marveled at the craftsmanship and thought how amazing that current artists have kept such a tradition alive. I was finally able to pull my eyes from the chair to look around and see how many pieces really fit the period. Not to mention, the stunning “4 Seasons” scrolls (the four seasons are a very popular theme in Chinese scrolls) on the wall behind me and the calligraphy scrolls to my right, the window overlooking courtyard being to my left.
Suddenly, the old teacher and my friend erupted into excited chatter. My friend, a passionate interior decorator and calligraphy enthusiast, had recognized the scrolls to my right. It turns out that the beautiful calligraphy scrolls on the walls were the old teacher’s and he was a teacher of calligraphy. Not just that but apparently, he is one of the most famous calligraphers alive. Granted, I was never given his name nor would I have retained if I had been but considering the passion the Chinese have for calligraphy, it was not unlike suddenly discovering I was sitting in Picasso’s sitting room.
By the window to my right, there was a large basket of scrolls and work the old teacher had been working on and we were invited to take a look. One by one, we unfurled the scrolls, some flecked with gold, some on brown paper, some on brilliantly white paper, some with sketches and some completed masterpieces. It was all stunning and, once again, I find myself incredibly frustrated at my inability to comprehend Chinese.
After many photos were taken, both of the scrolls and us, we were given a tour of the house. Directly across from the sitting room and to the left of the front entrance, is a bedroom. The frame around the bedroom was larger, therefore leaving less space for heat to get escape and I studied the inserts adorned with vignettes as my friend, his wife and daughter and the old teacher all looked at the furniture in the bedroom. I was told to come into the bedroom and inspect one of the armoires. I immediately pegged the clean lines, simple clasp and overwhelming brute size of the armoire as late Qing dynasty (a little over a century old). “Good repro” I thought again.
I was then informed that the armoire was “over a hundred years old.” It occurred to me that this was no repro and I looked at my hand touching the silken, lacquered wood as my stomach dropped. Then I realized that there were no museum security guards to wrestle me to the ground and scold me. I had, in fact, been invited to touch this gem. Since I was old enough to walk, I have wanted more than anything to touch history, to break through the fourth wall of museums and breathe life into those lonely objects so derived from their original purpose. I’ve always thought of museum pieces as incarcerated from their real life; that they must sit there, night after night, wishing for the good old days when they had stolen moments with their owners who were willing to treat them as their maker had intended and not some idolized, precious object to be adored in some strange guided cage. I see museums as filled with lost pets left to wonder where their owners are and why they are no longer loved but merely studied behind glass. I go to museums to say “hello” to these pieces of the past the way many people visit pet stores to pet the lonely puppies.
And there I was, touching the previously forbidden. I found myself smiling at the thought of this piece of history having such a good home and my smile became infectious. Soon everyone was smiling and the old teacher was dating everything in the house for us.
It turns out that my repro chair that was so sturdy, was in fact, as I had dated the “forger’s” intended date; early Qing dynasty. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t know that sitting down or I never would have been able to relax at the thought of a several-hundred-year-old chair supporting my fat ass.
We left the old teacher’s home high on life and wandered into the streets of the Muslim Quarter. We quickly traversed a maze of streets and wandered into a residential street where I was clearly the only Westerner to be there in quite some time. I noticed there was no pretense of Imperial Chinese beauty, simply the light brown of the dirt and dust and mud of my alley back home. We walked along this street as people stared at me and then we came upon a doorway with several older folks sitting, eating soupy rice out of their bowls, just watching the world go by. My friend entered the doorway quickly and we followed a long, winding hallway back past open fire pits, nut grinders and sweating workers to a baker’s shop.
Inside the shop were large, wheel-able crates of every baked good they make in China. Moon cakes (to celebrate the upcoming Moon Festival on October 6th; it’s the harvest festival) of every variety (they are phyllo dough little buns stamped with red; they have dense centers ranging from the sweet kind with a paste of walnuts, raisins, dates and brown sugar to savory with meat and spices) as well as peanut butter cookies, fried pieces of dough that taste sweet like a hard doughnut or salty like a wonton and a wide variety of things I could not place.
The smell was a fantastic mix of baking starch, sugar and meats. As we left, my friend bought me a package of sweet moon cakes and I was quite excited as I really like them.
We then stumbled about the local streets buying various things for lunch. My friend and his wife bought raw beef, a solid rice pudding with unsweetened stewed prunes, berry flat buns (berry starch with a berry jam center fried up hot and soft) and then we found a noodle place for lunch. I was given a large bowl of sesame noodles (while in America, the noodles are usually cold and spaghetti like, here they are broad, hot and al dente) spiced up very hot, a bowl of rice, a large communal bowl of some sort of cooked meat with a gelatin-like soup and a communal red soup with couscous –like grains at the bottom.
Eating beef raw is something to behold. It was fresh and delicious as was the rest of the food… except for the cooked meat stew with gelatin soup. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get thoughts of haggis out of my mind, and so it was an active effort not to gag as I ate it the gelatinous muck. Of course, I took some of everything I was offered and wished my stomach was larger so I could eat more. Unfortunately, the cooked meat stew seemed to be the true delicacy so they kept heaping it on to my rice and I had to eat until I was bursting at the seams.
We finished lunch and my friend’s wife and daughter found their way back so the daughter could attend her schooling. My friend and I found our way to his friend’s spa.
When we got off the bus, my friend took my hand and would not let it go. Now, I do not come from a handholding culture. I don’t know where the lines between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” handholding lie. Frankly, no one has held my hand in public since college and while I have no problem taking someone’s arm, handholding just seems too intimate for me.
Nevertheless, there I was being led, by the hand, up the street by this giddy, middle-aged man who is friends with the head of my school. His wife had suggested I go with him to the spa, so I took her comfort at face value but I knew I was in over my head. Harmless or not, this was definitely something I had no compass for.
We went up the stairs to the spa, holding hands and into the massage room together holding hands. I took a seat in the lounger chair and as we watched tv, waiting for the masseurs to show up, he lay on his side, watching me with child-like interest and invading my “dance space” as they say in Dirty Dancing. “This is my dance space. This is your dance space. Got it?”
We chatted and then the masseurs arrived to rub us down. I had to take off my shoes and roll up my pants. Actually, those things were done for me and I realized, Toto, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. First of all, my legs weren’t shaved because A) they don’t sell razors in Xi’An except for at Carrefour and there it’s for 50 yuan (like spending 50 bucks on a razor) while the spare heads cost 20 yuan a pop and B) I hadn’t expected to be showing my legs. Considering the cost of blades, I’ve been rather lax about the whole leg hair thing as they’re covered by long pants every day and I’ve got no one seeing my legs. Nevertheless, my friend was unphased by my hairy legs and he started waxing poetic about my beautiful hands and my beautiful feet.
He declared them to be the most beautiful in the world. He then took my hand again to study it and caress it.
Now, I’m from the United States of America; we don’t do sensual if it doesn’t lead to sex. In a country where men walk hand-in-hand, I can’t tell where the sexual line and the sensual line is drawn. I just can’t. I’m not calibrated like that and having to sort that out in crunch time is hard.
However, the rational part of me understood that his masseur was touching him far more intimately than a little hand holding AND his wife suggested I be here, so the argument could be made that I was being alarmist at being so ridiculously uncomfortable.
Freaking out aside, the massage was incredible. I got rubbed and pulled and bent and flexed and crawled upon so deeply and thoroughly, I’m still relaxed… though I do have bruises all over me from the acupressure. Ironically, the masseur explained to my friend that I was so fresh and delicate that she was afraid to massage me as hard as she normally does for fear of bruising me. She did but I loved every second of it.
Once the massages were over and it was just the two of us in the room alone, things got a little weird again as he curled up next to me and wanted to hear me speak of the US. Of course, conversation eventually turned to my “boyfriend” as my friend knows lots of people at the school I work at and all I had to do was mention to one person that I “have” a boyfriend and instantly everyone knows.
So, the single American girl is sitting there on the lounging chairs with the married Chinese man who is extolling her great beauty and caressing every inch of her hand as he starts asking if I’ve ever been away from my boyfriend before. Not wanting to sound like some wide-eyed innocent, I said, “Yes, we’ve been apart many times before.” The next question was if I ever cheated on him or he on me. Now, I wanted to leave no wiggle room for argument as to why he should be able to partake in my body so I said, “No.”
“Never? Not once?”
“No, never. Not once.” I stood my ground.
“How many boyfriends did you have before?”
Again, I wanted NO wiggle room for him to make the argument for sex with him. “None.”
“Only one boyfriend?” He asked, amazed. Granted, I was amazed too considering I have more in common with Samantha from Sex and the City than Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice. “Most American women have many boyfriend. They do not care how many.”
I must admit, there’s nothing more heartwarming than being told what my culture does and does not do by a person who not only has never experienced it but I am their first contact with it. All I could do was shrug.
“I think you are like traditional Chinese girl.” He said, his tone and body language subtly changing. I was immediately given much more personal space and his air changed from suitor to father.
All because I just lied to appear as a “good” girl.
The rest of the afternoon was a lovely haze of napping while waiting for friends. As soon as his flock of buddies showed up, I was shuffled off into a taxi and sent home. The moment I closed my door behind me, I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
JEWISH GRANDMOTHERS
I have had to, for several reasons, articulate that I have a boyfriend back home that I have no intentions of cheating on. Now, as this is a communist country where everyone knows everyone else’s business, the moment one person knew about it, fifty people knew that “lao-she m’guaren” (American Teacher) was claimed. For them, it’s not so much gossip as simply new information with which to understand the Western female. For me, it is an effective deterrent to the males interested in a trophy mistress (they would NEVER consider a relationship with me seriously but their need to experience my super white, soft skin is more than a little evident; I’ve even been compared to “fresh, delicate like ripe fruit”). As it is unfathomable that a man would take a larger woman as his girlfriend, whomever my boyfriend is, he must be at least my size, if not bigger. Granted, there is no talk of whether or not a woman wants a man who is larger than she.
Creepy old men aside, everyone here wants to know if my boyfriend will marry me, if he has a good job and if we are a “good match.” It’s nonstop. Everyone who knows me has turned into my Jewish grandma. Teachers I have barely met want to know if I’m getting married forthwith, why I’m not already married and why I’ve waited “too long” to have children.
And I think it has to do with the idea that American women are known to be utterly independent. I get the sense that everyone is fascinated by the idea that given the multitude of options, we all eventually choose the more traditional route of a stable life partner. America has the reputation of a place where any and everything goes. American women may take female lovers, multiple lovers and never get married. Our free will choices (in theory) does not effect the way the government treats us, our family and our friends. (In other words, as bad as we have it in America, if we are openly gay or “loose”, the government [thus far] will not come in, take our job, our home, our parents’ jobs, our parents homes and heavily tax us.) And, while I admit that in your teens and early twenties, those “unlimited” options are nice, don’t most of us settle down eventually? Why is the notion that one would want off the Ferris Wheel and start a life so surprising? Granted, I’m a romantic and I’m not saying the minivan lifestyle is for everyone but even George Clooney lives with a woman from time to time.
I have had to, for several reasons, articulate that I have a boyfriend back home that I have no intentions of cheating on. Now, as this is a communist country where everyone knows everyone else’s business, the moment one person knew about it, fifty people knew that “lao-she m’guaren” (American Teacher) was claimed. For them, it’s not so much gossip as simply new information with which to understand the Western female. For me, it is an effective deterrent to the males interested in a trophy mistress (they would NEVER consider a relationship with me seriously but their need to experience my super white, soft skin is more than a little evident; I’ve even been compared to “fresh, delicate like ripe fruit”). As it is unfathomable that a man would take a larger woman as his girlfriend, whomever my boyfriend is, he must be at least my size, if not bigger. Granted, there is no talk of whether or not a woman wants a man who is larger than she.
Creepy old men aside, everyone here wants to know if my boyfriend will marry me, if he has a good job and if we are a “good match.” It’s nonstop. Everyone who knows me has turned into my Jewish grandma. Teachers I have barely met want to know if I’m getting married forthwith, why I’m not already married and why I’ve waited “too long” to have children.
And I think it has to do with the idea that American women are known to be utterly independent. I get the sense that everyone is fascinated by the idea that given the multitude of options, we all eventually choose the more traditional route of a stable life partner. America has the reputation of a place where any and everything goes. American women may take female lovers, multiple lovers and never get married. Our free will choices (in theory) does not effect the way the government treats us, our family and our friends. (In other words, as bad as we have it in America, if we are openly gay or “loose”, the government [thus far] will not come in, take our job, our home, our parents’ jobs, our parents homes and heavily tax us.) And, while I admit that in your teens and early twenties, those “unlimited” options are nice, don’t most of us settle down eventually? Why is the notion that one would want off the Ferris Wheel and start a life so surprising? Granted, I’m a romantic and I’m not saying the minivan lifestyle is for everyone but even George Clooney lives with a woman from time to time.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
I’M A CROSS CULTURAL MESS
Yup, that’s about it. I’m a cross cultural mess. I am an American who has come to China to teach Korean children English. I have made good friends with a Brazilian who is married to a Frenchman and my daily life is a mélange of English, French, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish.
It is no surprise then that Tuesday night (9/12) that I went out with my Brazilian Angel again to meet up with a Parisian friend to visit the Muslim Quarter in the old city for the night market. If you are ever in Xi’An, you must visit the Muslim Quarter. We met up with the Frenchman at 7 as night was falling and the lights blazed to life. In Xi’An, the outlines of buildings are lined with small lights but there is only just enough light at the ground to see where you are going and where the buildings are. It is very romantic.
In my New York arrogance, I thought I had seen it all or at least would not be caught off guard by any sort of lifestyle. Freaky to conservative, I have friends who run the gamut. (Case in point; one friend is attempting to become a priest while another is a stripper) People are people and I say live and let live, just don’t bore me or you’re out.
However, it had never occurred to me that there would be Han (“Han” is what most people think of as “Chinese”; anyone born in China or in possession of a Chinese passport is in fact “Chinese” but “Han” is the race typified by the almond eyes and about 150 other points of soft tissue description) Muslims and I was turned into a gaping moron at the first sight of a Han woman wearing a hajib. Through my tourist stupidity, I happened to notice that all the hajib were not opaque fabric like I’ve seen in America and abroad but made out of translucent white fabrics or tiny knit laces. So as my Brazilian Angel and her Parisian friend strolled and spoke in French (that I could follow easily and occasionally participated in) I turned into the staring dork tourist.
Despite my dork-level gaping, it was comforting to have the French gentleman around. He was in his mid thirties and on his way to Tibet. He was taller than me, blond and blue eyed, tatted up and wearing a football (soccer) jersey (Brasil) and shorts. He has a fierce passion for travel and has been to pretty much every country you can think of. It was sort of like being with my younger brother Tom. The Frenchman was warm, polite, casual and friendly and very open in the Western way. It was a nice to have familiar rules of conduct between the genders around. He thought nothing of the fact that touched his shoulder when we met as we leaned in for the bisous. Physical contact with a male without tense undertones was comforting as can be.
Together we all explored the Muslim Quarter. My Brazilian Angel gave us the tour of the night market with her arm around mine and our French escort warmly participating in the banter. As we passed the stalls filled with puppets make from donkey skins painted brightly, I thought of all my creative friends who would love the puppets. As we passed by terracotta warrior figurines, I thought of my girl Sandra who knew more about Xi’An than I did because she knows all about those warriors and the famous leader who commissioned them. We strolled about the tented night market looking at all the art, dried fruits, puppets, figurines, mirrors and all other objets d’art. Our French-speaking presence was followed by “Hello! Good price! Frenchy?”
We left the tented area and strolled down the street filled with hajib wearing Han women selling all sorts of beautiful objects. Soon we came upon the Chinese-Muslim version of barbeque restaurants. Kebabs with three bite-sized pieces of meat were dunked into large vats of open, dry spices and then roasted on the open fires just outside the bustling restaurants. As we were getting lost in the amazing smell, one of the merchants recognized my Brazilian Angel as she had purchased something from the merchant earlier and offered to give my Brazilian Angel a tour of the private scroll room on the second floor of one of the buildings. As my Brazilian Angel began debating with the merchant in Chinglish (I swear, that is not my word; it is what the Chinese call the Chinese/English hybrid) it fell on me to translate to the Frenchman. Apparently, I did a decent job and he was excited to see the room.
We followed the merchant up and discovered some of the most beautiful scrolls I have ever seen. There was a series of four that depicted the four seasons in the most brilliant colors I have ever seen. There were a series of scrolls influenced by cubism. I was overwhelmed by the imagery and I wanted to purchase everything there. My Brazilian Angel promised we’d be back and we left to find some food.
Back on the street, we continued to wander, looking for a place to eat. We eventually found the one restaurant that my Brazilian Angel was familiar with and went in for dinner.
Dinner in Xi’An consists of a starch, a lot of veggies and some protein. (And for those of you not accustom to spice and chopsticks, you should get used to them before you come here.) Usually the starch is either noodles or rice. So, when we sat down for dinner, my Brazilian Angel started asking the Frenchman what he wanted in French (which I was perfectly able to follow and respond in) spoke to me in English and our waiter in Chinese. She managed to do all this in the span of ten second spurts per language with merely a blink between languages.
We all agreed on two types of kebab; beef and lamb and to try the local starch. We all thought the local starch was potatoes sliced up and softened with a savory, spicy coating and bean sprouts. It turns out the starch was not cubed potatoes but rather a tofu like substance made out of fermented rice. It was neutrally strange. The meat came in straight from the grills on the street and it was beyond delicious. The beef was in a cumin based dry spice and I have no idea what the lamb was in but it was a more mellow spice. My Brazilian Angel then ordered fried rice as Xi’An is apparently where fried rice comes from.
Let me tell you, fried rice has been lost in translation. The original fried rice is very spicy, sautéed up with a few sliced vegetables like bell peppers and cabbage, no egg and these special tiny beans that are dried and very salty.
We left with our mouths on fire and then had these wonderful lollipop cakes. At one of the local stands, there was a soft, gummy rice cake dipped in sesame seed and stewed, spiced fruit. Two pieces of balsa wood was tacked together to make a handle/set of tongs and we got to eat our cakes like lollipops.
As we finished our cakes, we needed to leave the Frenchman to make it back in time. We said our goodbyes and left high on the beauty of Xi’An at night.
Yup, that’s about it. I’m a cross cultural mess. I am an American who has come to China to teach Korean children English. I have made good friends with a Brazilian who is married to a Frenchman and my daily life is a mélange of English, French, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish.
It is no surprise then that Tuesday night (9/12) that I went out with my Brazilian Angel again to meet up with a Parisian friend to visit the Muslim Quarter in the old city for the night market. If you are ever in Xi’An, you must visit the Muslim Quarter. We met up with the Frenchman at 7 as night was falling and the lights blazed to life. In Xi’An, the outlines of buildings are lined with small lights but there is only just enough light at the ground to see where you are going and where the buildings are. It is very romantic.
In my New York arrogance, I thought I had seen it all or at least would not be caught off guard by any sort of lifestyle. Freaky to conservative, I have friends who run the gamut. (Case in point; one friend is attempting to become a priest while another is a stripper) People are people and I say live and let live, just don’t bore me or you’re out.
However, it had never occurred to me that there would be Han (“Han” is what most people think of as “Chinese”; anyone born in China or in possession of a Chinese passport is in fact “Chinese” but “Han” is the race typified by the almond eyes and about 150 other points of soft tissue description) Muslims and I was turned into a gaping moron at the first sight of a Han woman wearing a hajib. Through my tourist stupidity, I happened to notice that all the hajib were not opaque fabric like I’ve seen in America and abroad but made out of translucent white fabrics or tiny knit laces. So as my Brazilian Angel and her Parisian friend strolled and spoke in French (that I could follow easily and occasionally participated in) I turned into the staring dork tourist.
Despite my dork-level gaping, it was comforting to have the French gentleman around. He was in his mid thirties and on his way to Tibet. He was taller than me, blond and blue eyed, tatted up and wearing a football (soccer) jersey (Brasil) and shorts. He has a fierce passion for travel and has been to pretty much every country you can think of. It was sort of like being with my younger brother Tom. The Frenchman was warm, polite, casual and friendly and very open in the Western way. It was a nice to have familiar rules of conduct between the genders around. He thought nothing of the fact that touched his shoulder when we met as we leaned in for the bisous. Physical contact with a male without tense undertones was comforting as can be.
Together we all explored the Muslim Quarter. My Brazilian Angel gave us the tour of the night market with her arm around mine and our French escort warmly participating in the banter. As we passed the stalls filled with puppets make from donkey skins painted brightly, I thought of all my creative friends who would love the puppets. As we passed by terracotta warrior figurines, I thought of my girl Sandra who knew more about Xi’An than I did because she knows all about those warriors and the famous leader who commissioned them. We strolled about the tented night market looking at all the art, dried fruits, puppets, figurines, mirrors and all other objets d’art. Our French-speaking presence was followed by “Hello! Good price! Frenchy?”
We left the tented area and strolled down the street filled with hajib wearing Han women selling all sorts of beautiful objects. Soon we came upon the Chinese-Muslim version of barbeque restaurants. Kebabs with three bite-sized pieces of meat were dunked into large vats of open, dry spices and then roasted on the open fires just outside the bustling restaurants. As we were getting lost in the amazing smell, one of the merchants recognized my Brazilian Angel as she had purchased something from the merchant earlier and offered to give my Brazilian Angel a tour of the private scroll room on the second floor of one of the buildings. As my Brazilian Angel began debating with the merchant in Chinglish (I swear, that is not my word; it is what the Chinese call the Chinese/English hybrid) it fell on me to translate to the Frenchman. Apparently, I did a decent job and he was excited to see the room.
We followed the merchant up and discovered some of the most beautiful scrolls I have ever seen. There was a series of four that depicted the four seasons in the most brilliant colors I have ever seen. There were a series of scrolls influenced by cubism. I was overwhelmed by the imagery and I wanted to purchase everything there. My Brazilian Angel promised we’d be back and we left to find some food.
Back on the street, we continued to wander, looking for a place to eat. We eventually found the one restaurant that my Brazilian Angel was familiar with and went in for dinner.
Dinner in Xi’An consists of a starch, a lot of veggies and some protein. (And for those of you not accustom to spice and chopsticks, you should get used to them before you come here.) Usually the starch is either noodles or rice. So, when we sat down for dinner, my Brazilian Angel started asking the Frenchman what he wanted in French (which I was perfectly able to follow and respond in) spoke to me in English and our waiter in Chinese. She managed to do all this in the span of ten second spurts per language with merely a blink between languages.
We all agreed on two types of kebab; beef and lamb and to try the local starch. We all thought the local starch was potatoes sliced up and softened with a savory, spicy coating and bean sprouts. It turns out the starch was not cubed potatoes but rather a tofu like substance made out of fermented rice. It was neutrally strange. The meat came in straight from the grills on the street and it was beyond delicious. The beef was in a cumin based dry spice and I have no idea what the lamb was in but it was a more mellow spice. My Brazilian Angel then ordered fried rice as Xi’An is apparently where fried rice comes from.
Let me tell you, fried rice has been lost in translation. The original fried rice is very spicy, sautéed up with a few sliced vegetables like bell peppers and cabbage, no egg and these special tiny beans that are dried and very salty.
We left with our mouths on fire and then had these wonderful lollipop cakes. At one of the local stands, there was a soft, gummy rice cake dipped in sesame seed and stewed, spiced fruit. Two pieces of balsa wood was tacked together to make a handle/set of tongs and we got to eat our cakes like lollipops.
As we finished our cakes, we needed to leave the Frenchman to make it back in time. We said our goodbyes and left high on the beauty of Xi’An at night.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2006
So, I suspect that most dealt with the fifth anniversary rather somberly. I simply could not. I decided to embrace life and place an embargo on all the suspiciously-well-timed “newly discovered footage” and memorials by diving into the culture in which I currently live. I’ve had enough rubbernecking for one life.
Consequently, I made plans with my Brazilian Angel (the one on roller blades married to the Frenchman) for lunch. We had lunch at her place and I told her all about Teacher’s Day the day before. I told her about my run in with the toasting and she said I should be happy I’m not in Korea. (My Brazilian Angel and her Frenchman lived in South Korea for several years before they moved to China.) There, apparently, once you down the drink, you must turn the glass over above your head to prove you’ve drunk it all down. Frankly, my head would have been soaked with all the liquor my hand wrapped around the glass was able to cover.
After lunch, I had to return to classes but we made plans to go downtown for a visit when school was out, as I had yet to figure out where the 36 stopped. As we walked to the (embarrassingly obvious) bus stop, it was revealed that we both have the same green and orange pashmina. It was a funny coincidence and left me feeling even better about the universe.
We got on the bus and rode it down through the Old Wall. There is nothing quite like the old wall of Xi’An. It is so beautiful that you are willing to risk the imposing nature to get a better look. I was reminded of the first time my mother told this shy child to speak to a stranger to get some information; my nervousness was only exceeded by my excitement at discovering something new.
Quickly, we rode through the wall and I was sad to see it go but even more excited to see the old city arrive. When my Brazilian Angel and I got off the bus, I was amazed at the spaciousness of the old city. Most old cities in Europe are cramped and claustrophobic but the efficient grid system allows for massive boulevards like Park Avenue and huge roundabouts like the one the Arc de Triomphe is in. Everywhere is a mix of Westerners and Asians. The old city is a bustling metropolis of tourism, good food, high fashion and good bargains.
My Brazilian Angel and I went strolling about looking for a good gift for her mother-in-law, to no avail. She kept apologizing and checking to see if I was tired but I was so elated at being in a real city that there was no way I was cutting our trip short. We had a pretty good meal at a nice cafeteria-style restaurant (where you’re not supposed to bus your own table; the thought on that being if you bus your own table, there’s no need for the table cleaners to have a job) and then went to Carrefour.
For those of you unfamiliar with Carrefour, it is a godsend. It is a French “hypermarche.” (Grocery stores in France coming in several sizes from tiny stalls, to “supermarche” the French equivalent of “supermarket” to “hypermarche” where one must imagine Macy at 39th Street married with two more floors of supermarket) There is a Carrefour in the old city. On the first floor is a bakery with many French pastries and a McDonald’s as well as some toyshops, bookstores and jewelry kiosks. On the second floor begins the official Carrefour with any Western goods you could ask for from office supplies and sports equipment to Western bedding and it’s all at comparable-to-local-prices. On the third floor is the food. They have anything you could ask for from Cadbury chocolates to local dietary staples. Granted, the foods imported from the Western world are more expensive if you consider that (in terms of buying power) the yuan is close to the euro or the dollar in their respective countries but when you consider the rate of the yuan against the euro or the dollar, you’re actually spending the same or less on the product that you would at home. (Case in point; imported jiffy peanut butter is 15 yuan which is ridiculously expensive especially when you consider you can get local honey, butter or jam for 2 or 3 yuan but when you consider that 15 yuan is less than 2 bucks, you’re not doing so bad.)
Most importantly, they have yogurt! Real yogurt! A lot of the “yogurt” here is a drink for children that tastes of liquid SweetTarts, so I’m not much of a fan. But, at Carrefour, they’ve got real yogurt! Yay! They’ve also got lots of cheeses and whole wheat bread! Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Chinese food. It is one of my favorite foods but it’s also nice to have some of my own dietary staples.
One of the best parts about being in China is that even the ramen is the absolute best. So, I got a few cups of ramen for nights when I’m in no mood to go out but would like some noodles.
My Brazilian Angel and I checked out and made it home by 9:45. Oops, hehehe. Forgot about that curfew. Ah well, I had a good harmless time.
So, I suspect that most dealt with the fifth anniversary rather somberly. I simply could not. I decided to embrace life and place an embargo on all the suspiciously-well-timed “newly discovered footage” and memorials by diving into the culture in which I currently live. I’ve had enough rubbernecking for one life.
Consequently, I made plans with my Brazilian Angel (the one on roller blades married to the Frenchman) for lunch. We had lunch at her place and I told her all about Teacher’s Day the day before. I told her about my run in with the toasting and she said I should be happy I’m not in Korea. (My Brazilian Angel and her Frenchman lived in South Korea for several years before they moved to China.) There, apparently, once you down the drink, you must turn the glass over above your head to prove you’ve drunk it all down. Frankly, my head would have been soaked with all the liquor my hand wrapped around the glass was able to cover.
After lunch, I had to return to classes but we made plans to go downtown for a visit when school was out, as I had yet to figure out where the 36 stopped. As we walked to the (embarrassingly obvious) bus stop, it was revealed that we both have the same green and orange pashmina. It was a funny coincidence and left me feeling even better about the universe.
We got on the bus and rode it down through the Old Wall. There is nothing quite like the old wall of Xi’An. It is so beautiful that you are willing to risk the imposing nature to get a better look. I was reminded of the first time my mother told this shy child to speak to a stranger to get some information; my nervousness was only exceeded by my excitement at discovering something new.
Quickly, we rode through the wall and I was sad to see it go but even more excited to see the old city arrive. When my Brazilian Angel and I got off the bus, I was amazed at the spaciousness of the old city. Most old cities in Europe are cramped and claustrophobic but the efficient grid system allows for massive boulevards like Park Avenue and huge roundabouts like the one the Arc de Triomphe is in. Everywhere is a mix of Westerners and Asians. The old city is a bustling metropolis of tourism, good food, high fashion and good bargains.
My Brazilian Angel and I went strolling about looking for a good gift for her mother-in-law, to no avail. She kept apologizing and checking to see if I was tired but I was so elated at being in a real city that there was no way I was cutting our trip short. We had a pretty good meal at a nice cafeteria-style restaurant (where you’re not supposed to bus your own table; the thought on that being if you bus your own table, there’s no need for the table cleaners to have a job) and then went to Carrefour.
For those of you unfamiliar with Carrefour, it is a godsend. It is a French “hypermarche.” (Grocery stores in France coming in several sizes from tiny stalls, to “supermarche” the French equivalent of “supermarket” to “hypermarche” where one must imagine Macy at 39th Street married with two more floors of supermarket) There is a Carrefour in the old city. On the first floor is a bakery with many French pastries and a McDonald’s as well as some toyshops, bookstores and jewelry kiosks. On the second floor begins the official Carrefour with any Western goods you could ask for from office supplies and sports equipment to Western bedding and it’s all at comparable-to-local-prices. On the third floor is the food. They have anything you could ask for from Cadbury chocolates to local dietary staples. Granted, the foods imported from the Western world are more expensive if you consider that (in terms of buying power) the yuan is close to the euro or the dollar in their respective countries but when you consider the rate of the yuan against the euro or the dollar, you’re actually spending the same or less on the product that you would at home. (Case in point; imported jiffy peanut butter is 15 yuan which is ridiculously expensive especially when you consider you can get local honey, butter or jam for 2 or 3 yuan but when you consider that 15 yuan is less than 2 bucks, you’re not doing so bad.)
Most importantly, they have yogurt! Real yogurt! A lot of the “yogurt” here is a drink for children that tastes of liquid SweetTarts, so I’m not much of a fan. But, at Carrefour, they’ve got real yogurt! Yay! They’ve also got lots of cheeses and whole wheat bread! Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Chinese food. It is one of my favorite foods but it’s also nice to have some of my own dietary staples.
One of the best parts about being in China is that even the ramen is the absolute best. So, I got a few cups of ramen for nights when I’m in no mood to go out but would like some noodles.
My Brazilian Angel and I checked out and made it home by 9:45. Oops, hehehe. Forgot about that curfew. Ah well, I had a good harmless time.
POSEIDON
Did you know that the trident is an eating implement in Xi’An? In lieu of a fork, they give you a small (about four inches long; quarter of an inch wide and about a centimeter thick) white plastic trident with long tongs (two inches of tong, two inches of handle) to eat cakes and mouses. It’s wild. Oh, and cherry tomatoes and corn are considered fruits, not vegetables. So, with the fruit platter (the starter and the end of a meal) come melons and cherry tomatoes.
Atop cakes (which are angel food/ sponge cake so as not to break said plastic trident) that are covered with whipped (but not sweetened) fresh cream sit cream animals (usually a teddy bear) as well as peaches and cherry tomatoes. I guess I can sort of buy it, considering that cherry tomatoes are pretty sweet and are often sweeter than strawberries.
Hardest for me to buy, though, is the corn thing. Corn is treated like a fruit. There’s corn is a yogurt (and “yogurt” is universally spelled as “yoghurt”) as well as a corn candy that tastes just like corn, but in sucker form.
Did you know that the trident is an eating implement in Xi’An? In lieu of a fork, they give you a small (about four inches long; quarter of an inch wide and about a centimeter thick) white plastic trident with long tongs (two inches of tong, two inches of handle) to eat cakes and mouses. It’s wild. Oh, and cherry tomatoes and corn are considered fruits, not vegetables. So, with the fruit platter (the starter and the end of a meal) come melons and cherry tomatoes.
Atop cakes (which are angel food/ sponge cake so as not to break said plastic trident) that are covered with whipped (but not sweetened) fresh cream sit cream animals (usually a teddy bear) as well as peaches and cherry tomatoes. I guess I can sort of buy it, considering that cherry tomatoes are pretty sweet and are often sweeter than strawberries.
Hardest for me to buy, though, is the corn thing. Corn is treated like a fruit. There’s corn is a yogurt (and “yogurt” is universally spelled as “yoghurt”) as well as a corn candy that tastes just like corn, but in sucker form.
ALL THE RIGHT NOTES
Last week’s Thursday (9/7) was a bit rough. I had to spend the morning getting my physical done in order to prove that I’m not carrying anything problematic (ie. HIV, worms, TB, and, I kid you not, “mental confusion”) for the general population. It involved a lung X-ray, a core/trunk sonogram, blood work, height/weight measurement, blood pressure and an EKG. What I did not know what that it involved getting many levels of undressed in front of a room full of other (many male) patients. Patient privacy doesn’t really exist here in China, so as they pulled my shirt up to take the EKG, the other male patients helped themselves to an eyeful of my (apparently) large breasts and made no secret of looking. It actually was like a Vaudeville skit watching the men pile on top of each other to peer around the half wall offering me a smidgeon of privacy. (Though, if you go with a male, they avert their eyes.)
And then the final meeting piece of the exam was a brief meeting with a doctor where he takes your blood pressure. Now, I’m a fainter around needles but I managed to stay conscious as my blood was taken. I’m not ashamed of my body but I’m certainly no exhibitionist. And, unfortunately, I don’t speak Chinese. It’s safe to say that I was stressed. So, my first blood pressure reading was 140/90 while normally it’s something like 120/60. The doctor who was taking my blood pressure looked at my chart and said, “No, no, my diagnosis is that you too fat. Too fat.” He looked up at my blood pressure reading and shook his head in disgust. “You must calm down,” he snipped at me. “Push button again. My diagnosis, too fat.”
I pushed the button again and discovered my conundrum. How does one relax enough lower their blood pressure to “reasonable” levels while being yelled at, ogled and medically examined in the few seconds it takes for the blood pressure cuff to retest you? All I could do was resort to my yoga training. I took a deep breath, went to a serene place and tried to imagine all the tension melting out of my body. The second reading was 130/70 which was apparently low enough to let me go, however the doctor kept repeating his “diagnosis” was that I am “too fat.”
Now, I come from a medical family. For a long time, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I have heard many a discussion of “diagnoses” and “too fat” was never one of them. “Morbidly obese,” “over fat” and “weight problem” are all terms I have heard in conjunction with or as diagnoses but “too fat” is not what I might categorize as a “medical term” much less a “diagnosis.” So, I smiled, nodded and left. My body is what it is, I work out, I watch what I eat and I’m in a country where the normal body type is Kate-Moss. I am a broad shouldered, well-muscled, well-rounded tall woman. My body type does not exist here.
And then a colleague was nice enough to take me out to dinner and we discussed working out. I told her I enjoy yoga and she happened to have a card for 10 free lessons at the yoga studio in my building. After dinner, we went to the yoga studio and immediately I was informed that I was “too fat” and that I “must” attend the gym with a trainer three times a week, “at least.” “Please, you are too fat. You must, MUST come at least, AT LEAST three times a week to the gym.” The personal trainer was brought to meet me and everyone started gasping and chatting about my “fat” body and how it definitely needed to be fixed immediately. The colleague who was kind enough to offer me the ticket simply rolled her eyes and we left rather quickly as I promised to go for Saturday and Tuesday yoga classes.
The overwhelming nature of Thursday left me vaguely aware of the fact that on Wednesday, there had been talk of “Teacher’s Day” performances. There was something about singing or dancing and me being involved but I was too wrapped up in the chaos to remember clearly.
However, Friday morning I was handed the lyrics to Auld Lange Syne when I got in to work at 8am and told to start studying it. Turns out, I had been volunteered to sing a solo at this “Teacher’s Day” thing on Sunday. I had no idea what “Teacher’s Day” was and the last time I sung in front of people, I was in the 3rd grade, sick and auditioning for a singing group in front of my whole grade. My voice cracked but I sung as hard as I could. All the students auditioning were then sent back into the 3rd grade chorus. One by one, our teacher asked everyone who auditioned to come back up to the front. He called everyone but me and then said, “Is there anyone else I missed?”
I raised my hand and said, “Me!”
The teacher looked straight at me, started laughing and said, “YOU? You’re not getting in!” and kept laughing. The entire grade turned around, looked at me and laughed.
It’s safe to say my urge to become the next rockstar died then and there and I never looked back.
Nevertheless, I was volunteered for this singing and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I took the lyrics and started studying. The fact that I’ve never known the lyrics and certainly never attempted to sing Auld Lange Syne sober was not lost on me. In other words, I could not read the lyrics to Auld Lange Syne and not get the “church giggles” (you know, the really inappropriately timed laughter that only gets worse as people stare in shock at your inappropriate behavior) as I thought about all the scandalous and dirty things that are initiated during Auld Lange Syne. Frankly, I couldn’t stop giggling at the thought of all the drunken asses in Times Square singing, “May auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to..hmmm… da da da da da dum…”
“There’s no way this is really going to happen.” I thought.
“Do you want to come with us?” One of the teachers asked me kindly.
“To where?” I asked.
“For some exercise.”
I shrugged and followed. Exercise class wasn’t then so I figured that perhaps there was a special teacher’s exercise class.
I followed her to the dance studio on the second floor and as I approach the room, I see several of the female teachers doing deep bends at the barre in their jeans (always glittery, by the way) and heels (like country where everyone has Carrie’s shoe closet from Sex and the City). It looked like a full on dance class.
Now, I’m a team sports girl. You hand me a basketball, a volleyball or a bat and I’m your lady. I’m not a dancer. I used to dance and it’s just not for me anymore. There’s too much focus on form and not enough organic decision-making. I get bored with repetition very quickly and so I’m usually sick of the routine before I’m anywhere near good at it.
I tried to beg off but they wouldn’t let me. So, I decided to be a good sport about it and I went into the dance studio to try and learn their routine.
Which is when I discovered that I live in a country of boy-band backup dancers. The leader (and only male) called out “One, two, three, four” in Chinese and the hands were flashing, the butts were shaking, the legs were flying and every once and a while they would clap in unison to a rhythm I was having trouble following. It was like cheerleading on crack.
And not a one of them was anything short of “really good.”
I spent an hour trying to get any good at the dance and just could not. I felt like I had wandered into the advanced dance class in Fame when all I wanted was water ballet. Frankly, I couldn’t understand what the guy leading the class was saying or the tips he was giving, so I had no guide other than (poorly) mimicking his movements.
And then the dance turned in to something entirely more serious as they spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what formation to leap from and dance into as they twirled around on the hypothetical stage.
Which is when I wished them well and left to mentally prepare for class and was left to wonder why (in my home country of boring, angry women phys ed teachers and gross older male phys ed teachers) my education in the “Hot Gym Teacher” class was so lacking. There is not an unattractive phys ed teacher amongst ‘em here. There’s four phys ed teachers in the grade and middle schools and they are all fierce, take-me-home-and-do-as-you-must hot men with a great passion for all things physical.
Nonetheless, on Fridays I spend five hours trying to get the attention of students, which means a lot of loud talking. It also means that starting at 8 am, I am working on the whole school’s English (not just my students’). It is very taxing on the voice. And, I was coming down with a cold.
By 5pm, my voice was tired, my throat was raw (from the speaking and the cold) and I had to return to practice Auld Lange Syne. We practiced for two hours and worked out a routine that revolved around me coming out and singing the opening solo.
Good times.
We practice for two hours, the whole time I was fighting the church giggles and being prodded to sing louder as my voice (which I know should be coming from my diaphragm and was; thank god for the voice training I’ve had as it’s the only reason I’m able to teach English and be this hard on my voice) was beginning to really give out. At the end of two hours, I was just about to say, “That’s it ladies, my voice is gone and I’m exhausted. I gotta go,” when the principal’s secretary came in and said he’d be meeting us for the audition in twenty minutes.
Apparently, we had to audition our routine in the gym momentarily. Mind you, I now sound like Barry White with a cold no matter how hard I exhale to make a sound. So, I chugged tea like it was going out of style in an attempt to soothe my overworked vocal cords and refused to speak until we were singing. I watched the backup dancers do their routine for the principal and we all applauded. Then it was my turn.
I sang my part and simply could not get much sound out as my vocal cords were busy going “Hey! We’ve had ENOUGH for one day!” Ultimately, I sounded so quiet it sounded like I was singing to myself. But, I got through it and tried to keep a smile on my face as best I could.
We then wrapped, much was discussed with the principal about routines and then I was given my “notes” as it were. I was told I was too quiet and too shy and I must look proud and happy to be a part of the school. I tried to explain that I was proud to be a part of the school but by that point I had laryngitis and decided to call it a day.
I went home, had lots of hot tea and went to bed.
I spent Saturday morning on voice rest and took a long, hot shower in order to soothe my chords. I use the free time to work on my lesson plans and surf the net. In the afternoon, I tried to find my way downtown but went to the wrong bus depot and ended up not finding the right bus (the number 36). After an hour of not seeing the right bus, I just went shopping locally for fruit and decided to hole up in my apartment for the remainder of the day. After all, Sunday looked like it was going to be a big day.
Sunday morning, I had to be at the bus on the other side of the compound in “jeans and a white t-shirt” by 8am. So I was.
I show up and everyone is very nicely dressed and has many bags of changes of clothes. The men are in ties and the women are in skirts. And there I am in my jeans and a white t-shirt while my formal/nice collared white shirts are resting comfortably in my closet at home. One of the other English teachers (a Chinese woman who speaks a little English) from the grade school was kind enough to come and sit by me to explain what was going on. She told me that we were going to a hotel by a nice park where we would spend the day in the hotel celebrating “Teacher’s Day” and then we would go walk in the park in the afternoon and into the evening.
We were driven to the hotel in a very nice bus. I was told how much the bus costs (I think something like 600,000 yuan but I’m not sure; everyone here knows how much everything costs and has no problem divulging that to you at a moment’s notice) and I was told how the constant army/pop music videos that were playing were truly inspirational. It is interesting to be in a country where the order and discipline of the army is pervasive. My guide spoke to me about how she became a Christian and I found myself being curious as to how communism would inspire religion.
After a half hour, we reached our hotel and we were taken into a third floor conference room. We practiced our routines (their dancing and my singing) and were applauded upon each performance by any stragglers who happened to be about. Then we took photos in the beautifully landscaped garden. It was just as you would imagine a Chinese garden to be; pagoda-esque gazebo, winding path, weeping trees, ducks, lake and random little muses. Everyone flocked to get their photo taken with me and I must have had thirty some-odd photos taken of myself with other teachers. The more photos that were taken of me, the more teachers that showed up to have their photo taken.
Eventually the photo portion of the morning ended and we returned to the third floor conference room for the morning lectures to begin. Though scheduled to begin at 10, it did not begin until 11 because, as I was told, it is the Chinese custom is to start all meetings late. We began with introductions and of course I was applauded upon introduction because, apparently, speaking English without an accent is a great feat. To be honest, I feel utterly ridiculous being exalted for simply having existed until now when the other people be applauded are the heads of the province’s educational departments and the founder of the university system. Nonetheless, they find equal value in me and the least I can do is offer my partnership, so I stand and gratefully accept the applause with a bow.
We had tea while awards for excellence were handed out, then the officials spoke and then we broke for lunch. Lunch was a wild experience.
The Chinese do not drink with meals. At most they sip tea. However, the caveat to that is when it is a banquet. Everyone is given a glass, a teacup and a small fluted shot glass that holds about a fourth the amount of an American shot. The glass is filled to the top with beer and the shot glass is filled with hard liquor. The food is placed on the lazy Susan before you and the food is selected by turning the lazy Susan clockwise until you reach the dish you want.
While I was going to take a seat with my friends at their table, it was insisted upon that (in a room full of close to three hundred people) I sit with the officials at the most important table of about 10 people. And that is when I learned about the toasting.
You must stand next to the individual you wish to toast, say your toast and if it is a toast of great importance, you must finish everything in your glass. When you clink your glasses, the subordinate clinks their rim lower on the glass; it’s apparently the equivalent of bowing. The more important the toast, the harder the alcohol. So, being considered one of the most important people in the banquet, I was toasted repeatedly with the hard liquor. I literally drank close to twenty of those shots. (Think 5 shots of grain alcohol.) Now, I’m not a drinker to begin with and I’ve dropped a fair amount of weight, so after each shot, I would immediately eat the closest, fattiest food on the lazy Susan I could reach. (Starch doesn’t actually do much to help sobriety. In fact, I’ve been told by doctors starch actually aids with the absorption rate. Fatty foods do the most efficient job of keeping your head clear by slowing the absorption rate.) And, this is not even considering all the beer toasts we had.
At one point, I was given my “Teacher’s Day” bonus of 500 yuan. Not too shabby when you consider that the buying power of one yuan in China is equivalent to (if not a little stronger than) the buying power of a dollar in New York City, even though there is about 8 yuan in a dollar. However, if you were to ask me when, things were a little too fuzzy to say for sure.
Toasting aside, I somehow managed to stay relatively sober (I certainly would not have driven but I could walk a straight line) and we had to return to the third floor conference room for the entertainment portion of the afternoon. I watched the traditional Chinese dance with sleeves (the name of which I cannot remember; watch the dance scene at the beginning of House of Flying Daggers to see what I mean) and it was breathtaking. The women entered the stage wearing sky blue dresses trimmed with gold and had white sleeves that dropped to the floor. In various formations, they whipped themselves around the stage and used their sleeves to articulate their gesture. I think that is one dance I could definitely enjoy studying.
And then, as Xi’An was the last stop on the Silk Route, there was a modified belly-dancing troupe dressed in bright gold with puffy genie pants (forgive my lack of PC terms but I don’t know the real name for those pants). It was very sweet to watch such a modest belly dance troupe. As I used to belly dance a bit in college, I’ve seen some truly “gesture” filled dancing but this was the most modest hip shaking I’ve ever seen. It was truly sweet. Then there was some opera singing (the talent of the “hobby” singers is staggering here) and some choral singing.
And then it was my group’s turn to dance. They got up and did their amazingly well-synched dance and the adult in me was amazed that their talent while the 14 year old in me couldn’t stop giggling at the fact that the (really hot) phys ed teacher was wearing black stretch pants, a black headband and wristbands, a bright red clingy top and a slash of red lipstick across his cheekbone. It was a little too 80’s-meets-West-Side-Story. The church giggles hit and I had to bite my lip hard (enough that it started bleeding) to not lose it.
And for the grand finale was me, singing Auld Lange Syne. Another moment for church giggles. Everyone in the group was really supportive and raised fists in solidarity. I went out, sang my solo (poorly but I did it) and was quickly joined by my backup singers. We sang our piece and then Auld Lange Syne was repeated for all the performers to join us on stage and sing along. It was very nice.
****
After our performances, we crossed the road to one of the most famous lakes in Xi’An (and of course I’ve forgotten the name) for a walk in the lake’s park. Once the fee to enter the park was paid, we were all free to roam. Around the lake is a bit of an amusement park, complete with bumper cars, roller skating rink, bungee jumping over the lake and archery. We strolled around the lake for the rest of the afternoon and watched the men try their hand at a variety of macho sports. It was truly lovely to stroll and chat with my colleagues outside of work and under such mellow conditions. They helped me with my Chinese and I helped them with their English.
It occurred to me while I was strolling with the women, watching the men try their hand at macho sports that I’ve never been comfortable with the sisterhood of my peers before. In America, women don’t need each other quite the way they do here in China and so they can afford to be more fickle and duplicitous. In China, a woman is still directly linked to her family’s honor in a way that she can really only wound it but never add to it, so with other women comes the preservation of her good name and therefore her family’s honor. That’s not to say there isn’t duplicitous or fickle behavior, it’s just to say that movie “Mean Girls” or “Heathers” has no real place here because women can’t afford it. Case in point, when the women were putting on their makeup, they offered to do mine for me and had a good time each providing something new to my look. It was earnest sisterhood. Also, it was revealed to me that one of the earlier male English teachers had “taken” a woman from the area “away” from her family. Women in America are empowered enough that that decision would be seen as her own choice and nothing particularly interesting, whereas in China that sort of behavior is seen as something HE inflicted on her FAMILY. Sisterhood is the only thing that can protect against such maligning if it ever came down to her word against his.
Last week’s Thursday (9/7) was a bit rough. I had to spend the morning getting my physical done in order to prove that I’m not carrying anything problematic (ie. HIV, worms, TB, and, I kid you not, “mental confusion”) for the general population. It involved a lung X-ray, a core/trunk sonogram, blood work, height/weight measurement, blood pressure and an EKG. What I did not know what that it involved getting many levels of undressed in front of a room full of other (many male) patients. Patient privacy doesn’t really exist here in China, so as they pulled my shirt up to take the EKG, the other male patients helped themselves to an eyeful of my (apparently) large breasts and made no secret of looking. It actually was like a Vaudeville skit watching the men pile on top of each other to peer around the half wall offering me a smidgeon of privacy. (Though, if you go with a male, they avert their eyes.)
And then the final meeting piece of the exam was a brief meeting with a doctor where he takes your blood pressure. Now, I’m a fainter around needles but I managed to stay conscious as my blood was taken. I’m not ashamed of my body but I’m certainly no exhibitionist. And, unfortunately, I don’t speak Chinese. It’s safe to say that I was stressed. So, my first blood pressure reading was 140/90 while normally it’s something like 120/60. The doctor who was taking my blood pressure looked at my chart and said, “No, no, my diagnosis is that you too fat. Too fat.” He looked up at my blood pressure reading and shook his head in disgust. “You must calm down,” he snipped at me. “Push button again. My diagnosis, too fat.”
I pushed the button again and discovered my conundrum. How does one relax enough lower their blood pressure to “reasonable” levels while being yelled at, ogled and medically examined in the few seconds it takes for the blood pressure cuff to retest you? All I could do was resort to my yoga training. I took a deep breath, went to a serene place and tried to imagine all the tension melting out of my body. The second reading was 130/70 which was apparently low enough to let me go, however the doctor kept repeating his “diagnosis” was that I am “too fat.”
Now, I come from a medical family. For a long time, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I have heard many a discussion of “diagnoses” and “too fat” was never one of them. “Morbidly obese,” “over fat” and “weight problem” are all terms I have heard in conjunction with or as diagnoses but “too fat” is not what I might categorize as a “medical term” much less a “diagnosis.” So, I smiled, nodded and left. My body is what it is, I work out, I watch what I eat and I’m in a country where the normal body type is Kate-Moss. I am a broad shouldered, well-muscled, well-rounded tall woman. My body type does not exist here.
And then a colleague was nice enough to take me out to dinner and we discussed working out. I told her I enjoy yoga and she happened to have a card for 10 free lessons at the yoga studio in my building. After dinner, we went to the yoga studio and immediately I was informed that I was “too fat” and that I “must” attend the gym with a trainer three times a week, “at least.” “Please, you are too fat. You must, MUST come at least, AT LEAST three times a week to the gym.” The personal trainer was brought to meet me and everyone started gasping and chatting about my “fat” body and how it definitely needed to be fixed immediately. The colleague who was kind enough to offer me the ticket simply rolled her eyes and we left rather quickly as I promised to go for Saturday and Tuesday yoga classes.
The overwhelming nature of Thursday left me vaguely aware of the fact that on Wednesday, there had been talk of “Teacher’s Day” performances. There was something about singing or dancing and me being involved but I was too wrapped up in the chaos to remember clearly.
However, Friday morning I was handed the lyrics to Auld Lange Syne when I got in to work at 8am and told to start studying it. Turns out, I had been volunteered to sing a solo at this “Teacher’s Day” thing on Sunday. I had no idea what “Teacher’s Day” was and the last time I sung in front of people, I was in the 3rd grade, sick and auditioning for a singing group in front of my whole grade. My voice cracked but I sung as hard as I could. All the students auditioning were then sent back into the 3rd grade chorus. One by one, our teacher asked everyone who auditioned to come back up to the front. He called everyone but me and then said, “Is there anyone else I missed?”
I raised my hand and said, “Me!”
The teacher looked straight at me, started laughing and said, “YOU? You’re not getting in!” and kept laughing. The entire grade turned around, looked at me and laughed.
It’s safe to say my urge to become the next rockstar died then and there and I never looked back.
Nevertheless, I was volunteered for this singing and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I took the lyrics and started studying. The fact that I’ve never known the lyrics and certainly never attempted to sing Auld Lange Syne sober was not lost on me. In other words, I could not read the lyrics to Auld Lange Syne and not get the “church giggles” (you know, the really inappropriately timed laughter that only gets worse as people stare in shock at your inappropriate behavior) as I thought about all the scandalous and dirty things that are initiated during Auld Lange Syne. Frankly, I couldn’t stop giggling at the thought of all the drunken asses in Times Square singing, “May auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to..hmmm… da da da da da dum…”
“There’s no way this is really going to happen.” I thought.
“Do you want to come with us?” One of the teachers asked me kindly.
“To where?” I asked.
“For some exercise.”
I shrugged and followed. Exercise class wasn’t then so I figured that perhaps there was a special teacher’s exercise class.
I followed her to the dance studio on the second floor and as I approach the room, I see several of the female teachers doing deep bends at the barre in their jeans (always glittery, by the way) and heels (like country where everyone has Carrie’s shoe closet from Sex and the City). It looked like a full on dance class.
Now, I’m a team sports girl. You hand me a basketball, a volleyball or a bat and I’m your lady. I’m not a dancer. I used to dance and it’s just not for me anymore. There’s too much focus on form and not enough organic decision-making. I get bored with repetition very quickly and so I’m usually sick of the routine before I’m anywhere near good at it.
I tried to beg off but they wouldn’t let me. So, I decided to be a good sport about it and I went into the dance studio to try and learn their routine.
Which is when I discovered that I live in a country of boy-band backup dancers. The leader (and only male) called out “One, two, three, four” in Chinese and the hands were flashing, the butts were shaking, the legs were flying and every once and a while they would clap in unison to a rhythm I was having trouble following. It was like cheerleading on crack.
And not a one of them was anything short of “really good.”
I spent an hour trying to get any good at the dance and just could not. I felt like I had wandered into the advanced dance class in Fame when all I wanted was water ballet. Frankly, I couldn’t understand what the guy leading the class was saying or the tips he was giving, so I had no guide other than (poorly) mimicking his movements.
And then the dance turned in to something entirely more serious as they spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what formation to leap from and dance into as they twirled around on the hypothetical stage.
Which is when I wished them well and left to mentally prepare for class and was left to wonder why (in my home country of boring, angry women phys ed teachers and gross older male phys ed teachers) my education in the “Hot Gym Teacher” class was so lacking. There is not an unattractive phys ed teacher amongst ‘em here. There’s four phys ed teachers in the grade and middle schools and they are all fierce, take-me-home-and-do-as-you-must hot men with a great passion for all things physical.
Nonetheless, on Fridays I spend five hours trying to get the attention of students, which means a lot of loud talking. It also means that starting at 8 am, I am working on the whole school’s English (not just my students’). It is very taxing on the voice. And, I was coming down with a cold.
By 5pm, my voice was tired, my throat was raw (from the speaking and the cold) and I had to return to practice Auld Lange Syne. We practiced for two hours and worked out a routine that revolved around me coming out and singing the opening solo.
Good times.
We practice for two hours, the whole time I was fighting the church giggles and being prodded to sing louder as my voice (which I know should be coming from my diaphragm and was; thank god for the voice training I’ve had as it’s the only reason I’m able to teach English and be this hard on my voice) was beginning to really give out. At the end of two hours, I was just about to say, “That’s it ladies, my voice is gone and I’m exhausted. I gotta go,” when the principal’s secretary came in and said he’d be meeting us for the audition in twenty minutes.
Apparently, we had to audition our routine in the gym momentarily. Mind you, I now sound like Barry White with a cold no matter how hard I exhale to make a sound. So, I chugged tea like it was going out of style in an attempt to soothe my overworked vocal cords and refused to speak until we were singing. I watched the backup dancers do their routine for the principal and we all applauded. Then it was my turn.
I sang my part and simply could not get much sound out as my vocal cords were busy going “Hey! We’ve had ENOUGH for one day!” Ultimately, I sounded so quiet it sounded like I was singing to myself. But, I got through it and tried to keep a smile on my face as best I could.
We then wrapped, much was discussed with the principal about routines and then I was given my “notes” as it were. I was told I was too quiet and too shy and I must look proud and happy to be a part of the school. I tried to explain that I was proud to be a part of the school but by that point I had laryngitis and decided to call it a day.
I went home, had lots of hot tea and went to bed.
I spent Saturday morning on voice rest and took a long, hot shower in order to soothe my chords. I use the free time to work on my lesson plans and surf the net. In the afternoon, I tried to find my way downtown but went to the wrong bus depot and ended up not finding the right bus (the number 36). After an hour of not seeing the right bus, I just went shopping locally for fruit and decided to hole up in my apartment for the remainder of the day. After all, Sunday looked like it was going to be a big day.
Sunday morning, I had to be at the bus on the other side of the compound in “jeans and a white t-shirt” by 8am. So I was.
I show up and everyone is very nicely dressed and has many bags of changes of clothes. The men are in ties and the women are in skirts. And there I am in my jeans and a white t-shirt while my formal/nice collared white shirts are resting comfortably in my closet at home. One of the other English teachers (a Chinese woman who speaks a little English) from the grade school was kind enough to come and sit by me to explain what was going on. She told me that we were going to a hotel by a nice park where we would spend the day in the hotel celebrating “Teacher’s Day” and then we would go walk in the park in the afternoon and into the evening.
We were driven to the hotel in a very nice bus. I was told how much the bus costs (I think something like 600,000 yuan but I’m not sure; everyone here knows how much everything costs and has no problem divulging that to you at a moment’s notice) and I was told how the constant army/pop music videos that were playing were truly inspirational. It is interesting to be in a country where the order and discipline of the army is pervasive. My guide spoke to me about how she became a Christian and I found myself being curious as to how communism would inspire religion.
After a half hour, we reached our hotel and we were taken into a third floor conference room. We practiced our routines (their dancing and my singing) and were applauded upon each performance by any stragglers who happened to be about. Then we took photos in the beautifully landscaped garden. It was just as you would imagine a Chinese garden to be; pagoda-esque gazebo, winding path, weeping trees, ducks, lake and random little muses. Everyone flocked to get their photo taken with me and I must have had thirty some-odd photos taken of myself with other teachers. The more photos that were taken of me, the more teachers that showed up to have their photo taken.
Eventually the photo portion of the morning ended and we returned to the third floor conference room for the morning lectures to begin. Though scheduled to begin at 10, it did not begin until 11 because, as I was told, it is the Chinese custom is to start all meetings late. We began with introductions and of course I was applauded upon introduction because, apparently, speaking English without an accent is a great feat. To be honest, I feel utterly ridiculous being exalted for simply having existed until now when the other people be applauded are the heads of the province’s educational departments and the founder of the university system. Nonetheless, they find equal value in me and the least I can do is offer my partnership, so I stand and gratefully accept the applause with a bow.
We had tea while awards for excellence were handed out, then the officials spoke and then we broke for lunch. Lunch was a wild experience.
The Chinese do not drink with meals. At most they sip tea. However, the caveat to that is when it is a banquet. Everyone is given a glass, a teacup and a small fluted shot glass that holds about a fourth the amount of an American shot. The glass is filled to the top with beer and the shot glass is filled with hard liquor. The food is placed on the lazy Susan before you and the food is selected by turning the lazy Susan clockwise until you reach the dish you want.
While I was going to take a seat with my friends at their table, it was insisted upon that (in a room full of close to three hundred people) I sit with the officials at the most important table of about 10 people. And that is when I learned about the toasting.
You must stand next to the individual you wish to toast, say your toast and if it is a toast of great importance, you must finish everything in your glass. When you clink your glasses, the subordinate clinks their rim lower on the glass; it’s apparently the equivalent of bowing. The more important the toast, the harder the alcohol. So, being considered one of the most important people in the banquet, I was toasted repeatedly with the hard liquor. I literally drank close to twenty of those shots. (Think 5 shots of grain alcohol.) Now, I’m not a drinker to begin with and I’ve dropped a fair amount of weight, so after each shot, I would immediately eat the closest, fattiest food on the lazy Susan I could reach. (Starch doesn’t actually do much to help sobriety. In fact, I’ve been told by doctors starch actually aids with the absorption rate. Fatty foods do the most efficient job of keeping your head clear by slowing the absorption rate.) And, this is not even considering all the beer toasts we had.
At one point, I was given my “Teacher’s Day” bonus of 500 yuan. Not too shabby when you consider that the buying power of one yuan in China is equivalent to (if not a little stronger than) the buying power of a dollar in New York City, even though there is about 8 yuan in a dollar. However, if you were to ask me when, things were a little too fuzzy to say for sure.
Toasting aside, I somehow managed to stay relatively sober (I certainly would not have driven but I could walk a straight line) and we had to return to the third floor conference room for the entertainment portion of the afternoon. I watched the traditional Chinese dance with sleeves (the name of which I cannot remember; watch the dance scene at the beginning of House of Flying Daggers to see what I mean) and it was breathtaking. The women entered the stage wearing sky blue dresses trimmed with gold and had white sleeves that dropped to the floor. In various formations, they whipped themselves around the stage and used their sleeves to articulate their gesture. I think that is one dance I could definitely enjoy studying.
And then, as Xi’An was the last stop on the Silk Route, there was a modified belly-dancing troupe dressed in bright gold with puffy genie pants (forgive my lack of PC terms but I don’t know the real name for those pants). It was very sweet to watch such a modest belly dance troupe. As I used to belly dance a bit in college, I’ve seen some truly “gesture” filled dancing but this was the most modest hip shaking I’ve ever seen. It was truly sweet. Then there was some opera singing (the talent of the “hobby” singers is staggering here) and some choral singing.
And then it was my group’s turn to dance. They got up and did their amazingly well-synched dance and the adult in me was amazed that their talent while the 14 year old in me couldn’t stop giggling at the fact that the (really hot) phys ed teacher was wearing black stretch pants, a black headband and wristbands, a bright red clingy top and a slash of red lipstick across his cheekbone. It was a little too 80’s-meets-West-Side-Story. The church giggles hit and I had to bite my lip hard (enough that it started bleeding) to not lose it.
And for the grand finale was me, singing Auld Lange Syne. Another moment for church giggles. Everyone in the group was really supportive and raised fists in solidarity. I went out, sang my solo (poorly but I did it) and was quickly joined by my backup singers. We sang our piece and then Auld Lange Syne was repeated for all the performers to join us on stage and sing along. It was very nice.
****
After our performances, we crossed the road to one of the most famous lakes in Xi’An (and of course I’ve forgotten the name) for a walk in the lake’s park. Once the fee to enter the park was paid, we were all free to roam. Around the lake is a bit of an amusement park, complete with bumper cars, roller skating rink, bungee jumping over the lake and archery. We strolled around the lake for the rest of the afternoon and watched the men try their hand at a variety of macho sports. It was truly lovely to stroll and chat with my colleagues outside of work and under such mellow conditions. They helped me with my Chinese and I helped them with their English.
It occurred to me while I was strolling with the women, watching the men try their hand at macho sports that I’ve never been comfortable with the sisterhood of my peers before. In America, women don’t need each other quite the way they do here in China and so they can afford to be more fickle and duplicitous. In China, a woman is still directly linked to her family’s honor in a way that she can really only wound it but never add to it, so with other women comes the preservation of her good name and therefore her family’s honor. That’s not to say there isn’t duplicitous or fickle behavior, it’s just to say that movie “Mean Girls” or “Heathers” has no real place here because women can’t afford it. Case in point, when the women were putting on their makeup, they offered to do mine for me and had a good time each providing something new to my look. It was earnest sisterhood. Also, it was revealed to me that one of the earlier male English teachers had “taken” a woman from the area “away” from her family. Women in America are empowered enough that that decision would be seen as her own choice and nothing particularly interesting, whereas in China that sort of behavior is seen as something HE inflicted on her FAMILY. Sisterhood is the only thing that can protect against such maligning if it ever came down to her word against his.
Friday, September 08, 2006
(Written 9/5)
CYBIL
I’m a woman. I’m allowed to have my psychotic mood swings. It’s not that I “feel things more than other people” (I once heard a woman explain herself like that and, dear god, she needed a fork through her forehead; Christ, who hasn’t almost died from a broken heart?) but rather that I think I’m less well equipped to avoid my feelings. I feel what I feel when I feel it and I feel the broad spectrum. I feel it, I compartmentalize it and then I let it go. It’s part of my “charm,” you know, one of those quirks that people at first find charming but then just find irritating? I’m not proud of it but it is what is and there is little I can do about it. However, my mother and I were talking about said mood swings and she called them my “resilience. You have no support system, are being treated like a native teacher and still you’re managing.” Normally, I think of it as my schizophrenic personality but when a woman like the Jude (who fully believes it is a mother’s duty to give her child her honest and critical perspective on her child’s flaws) describes you as “resilient” it might be time to rethink the harsher label.
Schizophrenia or resiliency aside, I’m now happy as a clam at the potential in my world.
All my kvetching about my needs not being met aside, today (Tuesday September 5, 2006) is literally the first day in which I have seen blue sky. In other words, today is gorgeous and glorious. I wish the culture shock would hurry up and be over so I could fully enjoy the beauty sooner.
This week, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I don’t have classes so I was indulgent and lollygagged around the apartment in my pajamas in the morning. I watched the sunrise over the mountains from my balcony and sat on my window bench, being languid in the sun and watching Sex and the City (which, it occured to me, is probably pornographic contraband here in PRC, so I kept the volume low… and it also occurs to me that I would give up the opportunity to violate Hugh Jackman for that complete series set they have as I’ve only got the first three seasons). It’s amazing how that show has evolved in my head as I’ve grown. Having known a few people who worked on the show, I know the stories behind many of the plotlines and I’m impressed by how they spun the universal truths into such a fluid and organic narrative that feels totally authentic. It is really nice to have such a keepsake of home in such a beautiful but foreign locale.
For the first time, I can see the mountains surrounding the city and damn, they are high. I’ve literally never seen mountains rise so high. I have no idea their elevation but in comparison with my 5th floor elevation, they’re wicked high. There must be a fierce fault line running around near here. Off the left side of my balcony and over the tops of the nearby buildings are the mountains and now the sun is setting to the far right, lighting up the sky and the compound in brilliant pinks and oranges. The blue and pink contrast of sunrise and sunset is so dear to me that I had the colors permanently etched into my skin within my first tattoo. The waning moon is big and bright and rising in full view of my balcony. The moon is the constant reminder of the permanence of cycles and so to see it now is a wonderful blessing. It is yet one more opportunity for me to believe the universe is conspiring to get me through the rough patches. Spirituality aside, according to my natural guides, my balcony faces South, putting me on the Northeast corner of the compound. I think I can handle that.
On my way to classes this afternoon, I spied a woman rollerblading around one of the beautiful oriental parks in this compound. (The compound is littered with muses, promenades and patios to hang out in.) The poor thing looked rather wobbly on them but she seemed to be having a good, determined time. I didn’t get a chance to look at her face but as I’m the only friggin' Westerner in the compound, it didn't occur to me to check. Though, in retrospect, I should have consciously recognized the determination instead of merely felling its kinship. (The determination of an individual for the goals that serve the individual, especially for females, is unheard of here. In that sense, I am the epitome of a Westerner.) I passed her by thinking, "Be careful sweetheart, don't break your butt." I smiled at the thought of her determination to do someting new so publicly and wished her well.
"Hello! Um, hello?" a Western voice rang out from behind me. It took me a minute to place the sound, though her voice did tug at me like a long-forgotten lullaby. Curious at the inquisitive sound and no response, I turned to see if it was for me. I hasn't been so far but you never know, right?
The woman on rollerblades had a Western face and was looking directly at me. I nearly lept out of my skin for the excitement. "Please don't be a tourist" I begged silently.
"You speak English, right?" I nearly wept at the sound of her using "right?" in lieu of "yes?"
"Yes! Hello!" I was tempted to deeply kiss the wobbly woman.
"Do you live in the compound?"
"Yes, yes I do."
"Yes, you're the English teacher, right? Wendy told me about you. I live here too."
We spoke for a little while. Her husband is French while she is Brazilian and she lives here in the compound, two buildings down from me. We made a date for me to go to her house on Thursday morning and she's going to introduce me to a Chinese tutor. She was so warm and kind and I left wanting to desperately hug her goodbye but I resisted for fear of being a bit of a needy freak. After all, she is not currently employed and her husband is not Chinese, which means he must be employed. They must be tapped into the international scene here and the last thing I need to do is scare away my first solid connection to my Western world here.
Hallelujah! Here is where, if I had some, I would crack open a bottle of champagne and toast to my day of gifts from the universe.
CYBIL
I’m a woman. I’m allowed to have my psychotic mood swings. It’s not that I “feel things more than other people” (I once heard a woman explain herself like that and, dear god, she needed a fork through her forehead; Christ, who hasn’t almost died from a broken heart?) but rather that I think I’m less well equipped to avoid my feelings. I feel what I feel when I feel it and I feel the broad spectrum. I feel it, I compartmentalize it and then I let it go. It’s part of my “charm,” you know, one of those quirks that people at first find charming but then just find irritating? I’m not proud of it but it is what is and there is little I can do about it. However, my mother and I were talking about said mood swings and she called them my “resilience. You have no support system, are being treated like a native teacher and still you’re managing.” Normally, I think of it as my schizophrenic personality but when a woman like the Jude (who fully believes it is a mother’s duty to give her child her honest and critical perspective on her child’s flaws) describes you as “resilient” it might be time to rethink the harsher label.
Schizophrenia or resiliency aside, I’m now happy as a clam at the potential in my world.
All my kvetching about my needs not being met aside, today (Tuesday September 5, 2006) is literally the first day in which I have seen blue sky. In other words, today is gorgeous and glorious. I wish the culture shock would hurry up and be over so I could fully enjoy the beauty sooner.
This week, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I don’t have classes so I was indulgent and lollygagged around the apartment in my pajamas in the morning. I watched the sunrise over the mountains from my balcony and sat on my window bench, being languid in the sun and watching Sex and the City (which, it occured to me, is probably pornographic contraband here in PRC, so I kept the volume low… and it also occurs to me that I would give up the opportunity to violate Hugh Jackman for that complete series set they have as I’ve only got the first three seasons). It’s amazing how that show has evolved in my head as I’ve grown. Having known a few people who worked on the show, I know the stories behind many of the plotlines and I’m impressed by how they spun the universal truths into such a fluid and organic narrative that feels totally authentic. It is really nice to have such a keepsake of home in such a beautiful but foreign locale.
For the first time, I can see the mountains surrounding the city and damn, they are high. I’ve literally never seen mountains rise so high. I have no idea their elevation but in comparison with my 5th floor elevation, they’re wicked high. There must be a fierce fault line running around near here. Off the left side of my balcony and over the tops of the nearby buildings are the mountains and now the sun is setting to the far right, lighting up the sky and the compound in brilliant pinks and oranges. The blue and pink contrast of sunrise and sunset is so dear to me that I had the colors permanently etched into my skin within my first tattoo. The waning moon is big and bright and rising in full view of my balcony. The moon is the constant reminder of the permanence of cycles and so to see it now is a wonderful blessing. It is yet one more opportunity for me to believe the universe is conspiring to get me through the rough patches. Spirituality aside, according to my natural guides, my balcony faces South, putting me on the Northeast corner of the compound. I think I can handle that.
On my way to classes this afternoon, I spied a woman rollerblading around one of the beautiful oriental parks in this compound. (The compound is littered with muses, promenades and patios to hang out in.) The poor thing looked rather wobbly on them but she seemed to be having a good, determined time. I didn’t get a chance to look at her face but as I’m the only friggin' Westerner in the compound, it didn't occur to me to check. Though, in retrospect, I should have consciously recognized the determination instead of merely felling its kinship. (The determination of an individual for the goals that serve the individual, especially for females, is unheard of here. In that sense, I am the epitome of a Westerner.) I passed her by thinking, "Be careful sweetheart, don't break your butt." I smiled at the thought of her determination to do someting new so publicly and wished her well.
"Hello! Um, hello?" a Western voice rang out from behind me. It took me a minute to place the sound, though her voice did tug at me like a long-forgotten lullaby. Curious at the inquisitive sound and no response, I turned to see if it was for me. I hasn't been so far but you never know, right?
The woman on rollerblades had a Western face and was looking directly at me. I nearly lept out of my skin for the excitement. "Please don't be a tourist" I begged silently.
"You speak English, right?" I nearly wept at the sound of her using "right?" in lieu of "yes?"
"Yes! Hello!" I was tempted to deeply kiss the wobbly woman.
"Do you live in the compound?"
"Yes, yes I do."
"Yes, you're the English teacher, right? Wendy told me about you. I live here too."
We spoke for a little while. Her husband is French while she is Brazilian and she lives here in the compound, two buildings down from me. We made a date for me to go to her house on Thursday morning and she's going to introduce me to a Chinese tutor. She was so warm and kind and I left wanting to desperately hug her goodbye but I resisted for fear of being a bit of a needy freak. After all, she is not currently employed and her husband is not Chinese, which means he must be employed. They must be tapped into the international scene here and the last thing I need to do is scare away my first solid connection to my Western world here.
Hallelujah! Here is where, if I had some, I would crack open a bottle of champagne and toast to my day of gifts from the universe.
(Written 9/5)
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Okay, so the thing about being the “foreign” in a country that needs to import its foreign is that no one has any point of reference for you. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Just like everyone else, I have some basic needs beyond the whole “food/water/air” thing. They are emotional needs and, while I may be a princess about them, I’m clear on what they are, I’m not much of a puzzle and I don’t demand beyond them. The first need is my solitude. It doesn’t matter where or when but I need to be assured that I will have time every day in a physical space with music of my choosing that will not be penetrated by anyone. I need it to be myself. I need it to talk to myself and to sort things out. The second thing I need is constant contact with the people I love. I don’t need to talk on the phone constantly or have standing dates for drinks but I do need to at least have constant email contact. My third need is that I need to feel connected to my cultural world via news, gossip and cultural excursions.
Essentially, at home, my mornings look like this: I get up, check my email and news while I have breakfast, check my horoscope and gossip blogs while I have coffee, a shower and then I’m off to start the day. I speak to no one but my dogs and it centers me. Emma and I have a good snuggle and she relaxes over my left shoulder as I breathe in her Shi Tzu perfume. It doesn’t matter if the routine happens while I’m working a night shoot or just a usual day job; my routine tells me it’s morning and that’s that. I know it’s petty and small but it anchors me. It gives shape to my days and helps me feel as thought, regardless of what shit happens during the day, I will have contact with people I love every morning as well as be tapped in to the zeitgeist. Frankly, the only thing more entertaining than the petty minutia of the zeitgeist is the conversations I have with my beloveds.
However, I live in Xi’An China at the moment. While my first need is being met, and ferociously (gotta love culture shock and the isolation it creates), the second two are not. I am in the middle of China; the Denver of China, if you will. The sum total of my culture’s presence here consists of Coke popularity and Oil of Olay ads. If I look past my toes to the center of the Earth and then out the other side, I would find myself looking at the bottoms of the feet of the people I love. The students I work with are rich and spoiled and incredibly rude and vulgar. I’ve had students get up and scream swear words in Chinese at me in the middle of class. I’ve had students tell me that I’m “fat” and then make obscene hand gestures about my (apparently) large breasts (I’m a 38 C on a six one and change frame; my boobs are “athletic” at best). Some classes are so disinterested in learning they go to sleep or start drawing on the stage while I’m trying to engage them. Most of the teachers here have microphones with small speakers attached to their hips to be heard over the screaming and yelling. I not only don’t speak Chinese, I don’t have a megaphone and will not resort to being “louder” as a solution. To top it off, as an American, they don’t want me using the textbooks; they want me to come up with a curriculum off the top of my head. I am very alone here, so I really, really need to have my support system somewhere. I need to be reminded that I am human, feminine, smart, sexy and still me.
It is now Tuesday September 5, 2006 and I have yet to get internet access. (I got here on Saturday, August 26, 2006.) With web access, my second two needs are met to an extent that I can live with for a year but without it, my days lose order and I feel completely isolated. (And then there’s the little fact that I have to generate all these lesson plans without any help, much less internet research.) I use an Apple laptop G4 (Steve Jobs, I love you by the way… I feel a kinship, almost having dropped out of Reed but at the time I lacked the balls to fully commit to dropping out) but everyone on the compound here runs on Hewlett Packard PC’s. I have an Ethernet connection and am fully capable of plugging myself in, however, my system administrator needs to provide me a few numbers to access things and, well, how does one translate “IP address” into Chinese? Nonetheless, I tried to do so and over the weekend, I had the tech support guys come to my apartment to try and provide the numbers. The moment they saw I run on a Mac, they practically leapt up from their seats and were muttering about, “Oh no. No work.” They then called my boss to explain the situation (as my boss speaks English) and he informed me that I would get a computer on Monday. I agreed, as there was nothing else I could do and told myself, “Okay, I’m crawling the walls and want to curl into a weeping ball but I can live another few days. Suck it up.”
So, I did. However, Monday was a nightmare of day with the children and I was unable to meet with my boss about my computer. I called him this morning to make a meeting to talk about my computer and several other things at 12:30. I met him on the way to his office at 12:30 and he told me that he couldn’t meet then but I should come back after classes at 5pm. I returned to his office at 5 and he was already late for a meeting, so he had no time to help me then. “Call me tomorrow,” he told me once again. He allowed me to use his computer, however the internet explorer wasn’t working (reason 1.73 billion I heart macs) so yet again I just have to wait.
I hate this.
The worst part is that I am fully aware that there is an American community somewhere in Xi’An (and dear god, I may violate the first Western male who manages to speak to me in complete sentences without tripping up over his “r”s) but I am unaware of how to get there. I have been trying to ask but the welcome wagon here has utterly vanished. I’ve been trying to get the city map but I don’t know where to find one or even where I am on said map, much less how to get from wherever “here” is to wherever it is that I want to go. I’m like that ass who drowns in half an inch of water because she got knocked over the head and can’t turn her face to get out of the puddle.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Okay, so the thing about being the “foreign” in a country that needs to import its foreign is that no one has any point of reference for you. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Just like everyone else, I have some basic needs beyond the whole “food/water/air” thing. They are emotional needs and, while I may be a princess about them, I’m clear on what they are, I’m not much of a puzzle and I don’t demand beyond them. The first need is my solitude. It doesn’t matter where or when but I need to be assured that I will have time every day in a physical space with music of my choosing that will not be penetrated by anyone. I need it to be myself. I need it to talk to myself and to sort things out. The second thing I need is constant contact with the people I love. I don’t need to talk on the phone constantly or have standing dates for drinks but I do need to at least have constant email contact. My third need is that I need to feel connected to my cultural world via news, gossip and cultural excursions.
Essentially, at home, my mornings look like this: I get up, check my email and news while I have breakfast, check my horoscope and gossip blogs while I have coffee, a shower and then I’m off to start the day. I speak to no one but my dogs and it centers me. Emma and I have a good snuggle and she relaxes over my left shoulder as I breathe in her Shi Tzu perfume. It doesn’t matter if the routine happens while I’m working a night shoot or just a usual day job; my routine tells me it’s morning and that’s that. I know it’s petty and small but it anchors me. It gives shape to my days and helps me feel as thought, regardless of what shit happens during the day, I will have contact with people I love every morning as well as be tapped in to the zeitgeist. Frankly, the only thing more entertaining than the petty minutia of the zeitgeist is the conversations I have with my beloveds.
However, I live in Xi’An China at the moment. While my first need is being met, and ferociously (gotta love culture shock and the isolation it creates), the second two are not. I am in the middle of China; the Denver of China, if you will. The sum total of my culture’s presence here consists of Coke popularity and Oil of Olay ads. If I look past my toes to the center of the Earth and then out the other side, I would find myself looking at the bottoms of the feet of the people I love. The students I work with are rich and spoiled and incredibly rude and vulgar. I’ve had students get up and scream swear words in Chinese at me in the middle of class. I’ve had students tell me that I’m “fat” and then make obscene hand gestures about my (apparently) large breasts (I’m a 38 C on a six one and change frame; my boobs are “athletic” at best). Some classes are so disinterested in learning they go to sleep or start drawing on the stage while I’m trying to engage them. Most of the teachers here have microphones with small speakers attached to their hips to be heard over the screaming and yelling. I not only don’t speak Chinese, I don’t have a megaphone and will not resort to being “louder” as a solution. To top it off, as an American, they don’t want me using the textbooks; they want me to come up with a curriculum off the top of my head. I am very alone here, so I really, really need to have my support system somewhere. I need to be reminded that I am human, feminine, smart, sexy and still me.
It is now Tuesday September 5, 2006 and I have yet to get internet access. (I got here on Saturday, August 26, 2006.) With web access, my second two needs are met to an extent that I can live with for a year but without it, my days lose order and I feel completely isolated. (And then there’s the little fact that I have to generate all these lesson plans without any help, much less internet research.) I use an Apple laptop G4 (Steve Jobs, I love you by the way… I feel a kinship, almost having dropped out of Reed but at the time I lacked the balls to fully commit to dropping out) but everyone on the compound here runs on Hewlett Packard PC’s. I have an Ethernet connection and am fully capable of plugging myself in, however, my system administrator needs to provide me a few numbers to access things and, well, how does one translate “IP address” into Chinese? Nonetheless, I tried to do so and over the weekend, I had the tech support guys come to my apartment to try and provide the numbers. The moment they saw I run on a Mac, they practically leapt up from their seats and were muttering about, “Oh no. No work.” They then called my boss to explain the situation (as my boss speaks English) and he informed me that I would get a computer on Monday. I agreed, as there was nothing else I could do and told myself, “Okay, I’m crawling the walls and want to curl into a weeping ball but I can live another few days. Suck it up.”
So, I did. However, Monday was a nightmare of day with the children and I was unable to meet with my boss about my computer. I called him this morning to make a meeting to talk about my computer and several other things at 12:30. I met him on the way to his office at 12:30 and he told me that he couldn’t meet then but I should come back after classes at 5pm. I returned to his office at 5 and he was already late for a meeting, so he had no time to help me then. “Call me tomorrow,” he told me once again. He allowed me to use his computer, however the internet explorer wasn’t working (reason 1.73 billion I heart macs) so yet again I just have to wait.
I hate this.
The worst part is that I am fully aware that there is an American community somewhere in Xi’An (and dear god, I may violate the first Western male who manages to speak to me in complete sentences without tripping up over his “r”s) but I am unaware of how to get there. I have been trying to ask but the welcome wagon here has utterly vanished. I’ve been trying to get the city map but I don’t know where to find one or even where I am on said map, much less how to get from wherever “here” is to wherever it is that I want to go. I’m like that ass who drowns in half an inch of water because she got knocked over the head and can’t turn her face to get out of the puddle.
(Written 9/3)
AND THE RESURRECTION
So Friday (last entry and September 1, 2006) sucked. (Today is Sunday, September 3, 2006.) It was the crash before the reset. I was pushed to my edge and lost my mind, though I am left to remember that a coworker has her computer desktop set to give her a daily English expression and the one she happened to have on at that point was “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” I like to think of it as a brief sign from the universe that I needed to get through that moment without going home.
For me, giving in to the bleak darkness is the only way to get past the culture shock. I can avoid, I can dismiss but it eventually catches up with me and so the only way for me to fully begin to move past the stalling out and general haze of fear caused by culture shock is to submit to it. It’s not pretty and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but the best way for me to handle the situation is to lance the boil and submit to the sinking feeling of awfulness shadowing me.
Fortunately for me, but perhaps not for her, my mother finally was able to reach me on Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on whether or not you think 1am counts as Friday or Saturday). The Jude works at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (or New York Presbyterian or whatever they’ve renamed it for this year) on the Northern tip of Manhattan and it is a veritable United Nations for all the various nationalities working there. When her daughter is living in another country, this serves as an invaluable resource and on Friday, it most certainly did.
Apparently, while everyone thinks the country code for China is 29, it is really 26. So, the Jude had been trying to call me for the better part of a week and couldn’t get through. We had had sporadic contact via email but when school started for everyone else and I still didn’t have internet in my home, I was ostensibly cut off. She was freaked out because I wasn’t contacting her and I was growing increasingly culture shocked in my isolation. She spoke to one of the doctors she works with who explained the country code was wrong and then the doctor called my apartment from her cell phone (dear god I love technology). I was out having noodles at the dinner my beloved colleague set up for me but the call finally went through.
Then, at midnight/1 am, the Jude called me from New York. I heard the phone ring in the living room and it pulled me from my fevered sleep. I knew instantly it was the Jude and, half asleep, I flew down the hall to get the phone. I picked up and it was the comforting sound of mom on the other end. I started crying immediately and, though she claims we spoke for an hour, it felt like a brief moment. I completely unloaded on her couldn’t stop crying about what a mistake this was.
The kind woman told me that whatever I decided, she would stand by me completely. She said if I needed to come home we would do whatever it took to get that done. She told me that she would go to the Chinese consulate at home if they gave me a hard time here. I told her it was just the stress talking but more than anything I just wanted to come home. I told her that I couldn’t stop dreaming that my old paramour was next to me and I don’t understand what’s going on with my head.
She listened to it all and was very supportive. She told me how much she loved me and that she supported any decision I wanted to make. I blathered on a bit more, about what, I have no idea. We finally got off the phone and I went back to sleep, feeling so much better.
The next morning, Saturday, I got up and got ready. I decided to play my least favorite but most crucial “Worst Case Scenario” game. Usually, it involves “being fired” which is something I fear because I’ve never really been fired. Granted, I’ve been in positions where I would have been fired had I stayed but I generally know when to bail. On rare occasion, I’ve set out to be fired but always ended up getting promoted in some weird, “Office Space” turn of events.
The closest I ever came to being fired was being pushed out of a production company I was in the midst of founding with two other people. The girlfriend of my female production partner met me on a Friday, my female production partner not only didn’t get back to me all weekend (we had been speaking daily up until that point), she blew off a meeting we were to have on Monday and then Tuesday she called me up to let me know she didn’t think I fit in the direction “we” were planning on going. Our third partner was there in a completely “equipment and technological knowledge” capacity; he had no interest in direction. Consequently, the only “we” I could deduce was my partner and her girlfriend (who, though highly opinionated about all things and very been-to-the-mountain had never worked a day in film and had no idea what a film business model looks like). I reasoned that if I was being pushed out of a company I was helping to found because of a jealous, divisive (whenever my partner left the room, the woman would recant stories of my partner’s “ridiculous fantasies” of continuing her work in entertainment and then roll her eyes; to my partner’s credit, she has a long list of impressive entertainment accomplishments, she’s no teenager with a dream) girlfriend, it was best I know before things got too permanent.
So, this episode of “Worst Case Scenario: China” went a little like this: I asked myself, “Self, if you’re horrible and they hate you, what’s the worst that would happen?”
“Well, they would fire me, pay me my wages and the penalty and send me home… which would send me home anyway.”
“So, the absolute, worst case scenario is that you will be sent home, right?”
“Right.”
“What do you have to be afraid of?”
“Ultimately, nothing.”
“Exactly.”
“So why not give it a go? You can go home having done little more than kick around a (bug free, thank you) swank apartment in China for a week or you can go home after having spent a year working in China. Either option ends with you going home but the year offers you a lot more stories.”
“Self, you’re right. I think I’ll stay.”
And then I thought about the tearful conversation I had with my mother over the phone. I instantly felt like a heel because the only thing that sucks worse than having the culture shock is being the person on the other end of the line listening to their child have the culture shock meltdown and feeling completely helpless. I reasoned that the breakdown I had was my equivalent of cold feet at the altar. As I’m not really comfortable with the notion of a big wedding with lots of witnesses (and in fact am only comfortable with the notion of matrimony as a way to translate “We’re two grown adults allowed to play house” abroad) I doubt there will come a time when the music begins to play, the double doors open, I find myself in a corseted gown with the horrific sensation of “Institution” bearing down on my sex life as I gasp for air and become the deer watching the lights grow closer as the horn begins to blow, unable to move. I’ve always seen marriage as something you do only if you can’t not. How it is that you could be so desperate to marry someone right now that you have time to reasonably, rationally plot and plan a massive theatrical production seems a bit counterintuitive to me. (And by “to me” I mean to me. To each their own and if that works for you, more power to you. Considering the popularity of the wedding day as “her special day,” I am more than aware I am in the minority.)
As I was snickering to myself about the moment being a bit like preparation for my (non) wedding day, my mom called again. I apologized for my doomsday perspective the night before and she told me not to be silly. I then joked that it was preparation for my cold feet on my wedding day.
She laughed and told me, “True, but all I would have to say to you then is, ‘RUN’. I think you should give this a try. I think it will be a very rich experience for you.”
“I agree. I think if I wrote a thesis at Reed, I can get through this.”
“If you can write a thesis at Reed, I know you can get through anything.”
“Remind me of that in the delivery room.”
We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and how, currently, in America, simply living together results in many of the same divorce-esque responsibilities if you split up. We then talked about the fact that one of the few advantages to being married is that you’re the defacto healthcare proxy, to say nothing of the fact that, abroad, you’re not always guaranteed rights to your partner unless you’re married. When then talked about the minutia of contacting each other, the wrestling puppies (the Emma-nator and Billy-boy), and life in general.
It felt good to be back in my own skin.
One of the many things that working in film has taught me is that movies take a lot of effort. It takes at least six months of work and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to turn out two hours of product. Consequently, those moments where the hero comes back to herself are always punctuated with crescendo music and edited within an inch of its life. What rarely makes it on to the screen is that the hero always needs some down time once a resolution has been reached. So, I gave myself Saturday. I decided to exempt myself from expectation for Saturday.
I did my laundry (with the Takeshi Kaneshiro-free washboard) and hung it to dry on my clotheslines above my balcony. I took a stroll in the nearby alley where the fresh food vendors, “hole in the wall” local eateries and reasonably priced grocery stores are.
It’s a fascinating place to wander. The streets are narrow, perhaps ten or twelve feet across and a winding few feet across at that. Men and women with their fruits, vegetables, fish and nuts park their bikes and carts on either side of the alleyway. This is a place where adults regularly sleep and live three to a five hundred foot studio apartment and so personal space does not really exist. They measure the food with everything from a hook, a weight and a stick to an electronic scale. The man from whom I buy my grapes places the grapes in a small plastic bag, attaches the bag to a hook and picks up his single weight. About five pounds of grapes costs me less than two Yuan (1 Yuan being about 11 cents currently) and they are the best globe grapes I’ve ever had. They have the depth of flavor of a dark concord grape but the dilution of the Italian globe grape. Depending on where the merchant must put the weight to counterbalance the grapes on the hook tells him how much to charge me. The woman from whom I buy my apples has a small electric scale to do the same. Ten apples costs me less than three Yaun and the apples are the lightest thing I have ever tasted.
The sound of the alley is the lilting song of the colloquial accent that utterly eludes my quasi Taiwanese-Mandarin trained ear but it does not echo as the alley is dense with people and the doors are long, heavy-duty plastic strips. The ground is always wet and made of a combination of cement and very pale brown dirt/mud. There are huge puddles where the cement has broken away and the constant flow of water to keep shop steps clean has pooled. My Western face is quite the novelty and all the old peddlers call out “Erza” which means “Girl” to catch my attention so I will look at them.
Though the ground is a light, muddy brown, the walls are alive with bright color. Each stall sells a combination of things, be it bread and cigarettes or wash pans and pillows, but everything is beautifully colored with dark reds, pinks, deep purples, brilliant oranges, blacks, light blues and hearty greens. Given the color palate in the area, it is no wonder that my ancestors risked life, limb and immortal soul to come here.
And though the alleyway is always busy and I am constantly stared at with a sea of “Erza” following me, I am remarkably peaceful there. It is not unlike an out of body experience, the likes of which listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” creates. It is a combination of complete comfort and complete exoticism laced with profundity in the hazy mist around you.
So, at the end of my first week and the beginning of my second, my pendulum has drifted back into the “ready for this” space.
****
Having just gone for a stroll deeper into the local area than I’ve ever been before, I must admit that being “foreign” is exhausting. I would like to comment on how weird it is to have people staring at my crotch constantly but to be totally honest, I come from New York and I’d be lying if I said it was entirely out of the ordinary. The difference is that here, when I look up and some woman or man is clearly checking out my crotch, I can’t respond with something to the effect of, “Can I fucking help you?” Here, I have to pretend not to see it. I am already self-conscious enough about the fact that, in a city filled with Kate-Moss-Framed women, I am all breasts, hips and thighs; I don’t need to be consistently reminded of my blatantly obvious sexuality. One boyfriend once commented that I had a body that was built to, “you know, take a good slamming. I don’t have to be nervous that I might seriously injure you in the heat of the moment” and I hear his voice now as the Asian gaze run over my body and pools at my crotch.
Regardless, I walked around for merely a half hour and now I am ready for a nap. It’s difficult to maintain that neutral balance of polite cheer. I don’t want to seem snobby and therefore imperialist and I don’t want to seem too friendly and therefore touristy or slutty. I try to carry myself as if I belong, simply taking in the sights and nodding to anyone not-dating-appropriate (much older men, children and women) who stares at me extensively. Teenage women see me and are giddy with excitement to try out their English, which usually consists of “Hello, nice to meet you.” I try to return their excitement with a pleased, “Hello, nice to meet you.” Whenever the rising sensation of “oh lord, not another ‘hello, nice to meet you’ conversation” hits me, I remind myself of what my friend Annie (she’s from China and now lives in New York City; she’s my fairy godmother/angel) once told me when I laughed at how exotic she told me I would be. “You’re very exotic. You travel the world. Most of these people, they do their job, they have their family and that’s it. They can’t go anywhere. They are tied to their job and will never see the world.” Annie then told me this story of a woman who worked at a hotel where Annie was staying while she was back home visiting. The woman bent over backwards to take care of Annie and as they were chatting, Annie discovered that the woman lived on the 3rd floor of the hotel and that was it. She never went anywhere outside the city except to see her family and she would live her whole life in that job. “You’re the closest thing most of them will ever see to the outside world,” she told me.
I know I live a life of great indulgence and the least I can do is humor people when they try to use their English but good lord, the whole package is surprisingly tiring.
AND THE RESURRECTION
So Friday (last entry and September 1, 2006) sucked. (Today is Sunday, September 3, 2006.) It was the crash before the reset. I was pushed to my edge and lost my mind, though I am left to remember that a coworker has her computer desktop set to give her a daily English expression and the one she happened to have on at that point was “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” I like to think of it as a brief sign from the universe that I needed to get through that moment without going home.
For me, giving in to the bleak darkness is the only way to get past the culture shock. I can avoid, I can dismiss but it eventually catches up with me and so the only way for me to fully begin to move past the stalling out and general haze of fear caused by culture shock is to submit to it. It’s not pretty and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but the best way for me to handle the situation is to lance the boil and submit to the sinking feeling of awfulness shadowing me.
Fortunately for me, but perhaps not for her, my mother finally was able to reach me on Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on whether or not you think 1am counts as Friday or Saturday). The Jude works at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (or New York Presbyterian or whatever they’ve renamed it for this year) on the Northern tip of Manhattan and it is a veritable United Nations for all the various nationalities working there. When her daughter is living in another country, this serves as an invaluable resource and on Friday, it most certainly did.
Apparently, while everyone thinks the country code for China is 29, it is really 26. So, the Jude had been trying to call me for the better part of a week and couldn’t get through. We had had sporadic contact via email but when school started for everyone else and I still didn’t have internet in my home, I was ostensibly cut off. She was freaked out because I wasn’t contacting her and I was growing increasingly culture shocked in my isolation. She spoke to one of the doctors she works with who explained the country code was wrong and then the doctor called my apartment from her cell phone (dear god I love technology). I was out having noodles at the dinner my beloved colleague set up for me but the call finally went through.
Then, at midnight/1 am, the Jude called me from New York. I heard the phone ring in the living room and it pulled me from my fevered sleep. I knew instantly it was the Jude and, half asleep, I flew down the hall to get the phone. I picked up and it was the comforting sound of mom on the other end. I started crying immediately and, though she claims we spoke for an hour, it felt like a brief moment. I completely unloaded on her couldn’t stop crying about what a mistake this was.
The kind woman told me that whatever I decided, she would stand by me completely. She said if I needed to come home we would do whatever it took to get that done. She told me that she would go to the Chinese consulate at home if they gave me a hard time here. I told her it was just the stress talking but more than anything I just wanted to come home. I told her that I couldn’t stop dreaming that my old paramour was next to me and I don’t understand what’s going on with my head.
She listened to it all and was very supportive. She told me how much she loved me and that she supported any decision I wanted to make. I blathered on a bit more, about what, I have no idea. We finally got off the phone and I went back to sleep, feeling so much better.
The next morning, Saturday, I got up and got ready. I decided to play my least favorite but most crucial “Worst Case Scenario” game. Usually, it involves “being fired” which is something I fear because I’ve never really been fired. Granted, I’ve been in positions where I would have been fired had I stayed but I generally know when to bail. On rare occasion, I’ve set out to be fired but always ended up getting promoted in some weird, “Office Space” turn of events.
The closest I ever came to being fired was being pushed out of a production company I was in the midst of founding with two other people. The girlfriend of my female production partner met me on a Friday, my female production partner not only didn’t get back to me all weekend (we had been speaking daily up until that point), she blew off a meeting we were to have on Monday and then Tuesday she called me up to let me know she didn’t think I fit in the direction “we” were planning on going. Our third partner was there in a completely “equipment and technological knowledge” capacity; he had no interest in direction. Consequently, the only “we” I could deduce was my partner and her girlfriend (who, though highly opinionated about all things and very been-to-the-mountain had never worked a day in film and had no idea what a film business model looks like). I reasoned that if I was being pushed out of a company I was helping to found because of a jealous, divisive (whenever my partner left the room, the woman would recant stories of my partner’s “ridiculous fantasies” of continuing her work in entertainment and then roll her eyes; to my partner’s credit, she has a long list of impressive entertainment accomplishments, she’s no teenager with a dream) girlfriend, it was best I know before things got too permanent.
So, this episode of “Worst Case Scenario: China” went a little like this: I asked myself, “Self, if you’re horrible and they hate you, what’s the worst that would happen?”
“Well, they would fire me, pay me my wages and the penalty and send me home… which would send me home anyway.”
“So, the absolute, worst case scenario is that you will be sent home, right?”
“Right.”
“What do you have to be afraid of?”
“Ultimately, nothing.”
“Exactly.”
“So why not give it a go? You can go home having done little more than kick around a (bug free, thank you) swank apartment in China for a week or you can go home after having spent a year working in China. Either option ends with you going home but the year offers you a lot more stories.”
“Self, you’re right. I think I’ll stay.”
And then I thought about the tearful conversation I had with my mother over the phone. I instantly felt like a heel because the only thing that sucks worse than having the culture shock is being the person on the other end of the line listening to their child have the culture shock meltdown and feeling completely helpless. I reasoned that the breakdown I had was my equivalent of cold feet at the altar. As I’m not really comfortable with the notion of a big wedding with lots of witnesses (and in fact am only comfortable with the notion of matrimony as a way to translate “We’re two grown adults allowed to play house” abroad) I doubt there will come a time when the music begins to play, the double doors open, I find myself in a corseted gown with the horrific sensation of “Institution” bearing down on my sex life as I gasp for air and become the deer watching the lights grow closer as the horn begins to blow, unable to move. I’ve always seen marriage as something you do only if you can’t not. How it is that you could be so desperate to marry someone right now that you have time to reasonably, rationally plot and plan a massive theatrical production seems a bit counterintuitive to me. (And by “to me” I mean to me. To each their own and if that works for you, more power to you. Considering the popularity of the wedding day as “her special day,” I am more than aware I am in the minority.)
As I was snickering to myself about the moment being a bit like preparation for my (non) wedding day, my mom called again. I apologized for my doomsday perspective the night before and she told me not to be silly. I then joked that it was preparation for my cold feet on my wedding day.
She laughed and told me, “True, but all I would have to say to you then is, ‘RUN’. I think you should give this a try. I think it will be a very rich experience for you.”
“I agree. I think if I wrote a thesis at Reed, I can get through this.”
“If you can write a thesis at Reed, I know you can get through anything.”
“Remind me of that in the delivery room.”
We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and how, currently, in America, simply living together results in many of the same divorce-esque responsibilities if you split up. We then talked about the fact that one of the few advantages to being married is that you’re the defacto healthcare proxy, to say nothing of the fact that, abroad, you’re not always guaranteed rights to your partner unless you’re married. When then talked about the minutia of contacting each other, the wrestling puppies (the Emma-nator and Billy-boy), and life in general.
It felt good to be back in my own skin.
One of the many things that working in film has taught me is that movies take a lot of effort. It takes at least six months of work and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to turn out two hours of product. Consequently, those moments where the hero comes back to herself are always punctuated with crescendo music and edited within an inch of its life. What rarely makes it on to the screen is that the hero always needs some down time once a resolution has been reached. So, I gave myself Saturday. I decided to exempt myself from expectation for Saturday.
I did my laundry (with the Takeshi Kaneshiro-free washboard) and hung it to dry on my clotheslines above my balcony. I took a stroll in the nearby alley where the fresh food vendors, “hole in the wall” local eateries and reasonably priced grocery stores are.
It’s a fascinating place to wander. The streets are narrow, perhaps ten or twelve feet across and a winding few feet across at that. Men and women with their fruits, vegetables, fish and nuts park their bikes and carts on either side of the alleyway. This is a place where adults regularly sleep and live three to a five hundred foot studio apartment and so personal space does not really exist. They measure the food with everything from a hook, a weight and a stick to an electronic scale. The man from whom I buy my grapes places the grapes in a small plastic bag, attaches the bag to a hook and picks up his single weight. About five pounds of grapes costs me less than two Yuan (1 Yuan being about 11 cents currently) and they are the best globe grapes I’ve ever had. They have the depth of flavor of a dark concord grape but the dilution of the Italian globe grape. Depending on where the merchant must put the weight to counterbalance the grapes on the hook tells him how much to charge me. The woman from whom I buy my apples has a small electric scale to do the same. Ten apples costs me less than three Yaun and the apples are the lightest thing I have ever tasted.
The sound of the alley is the lilting song of the colloquial accent that utterly eludes my quasi Taiwanese-Mandarin trained ear but it does not echo as the alley is dense with people and the doors are long, heavy-duty plastic strips. The ground is always wet and made of a combination of cement and very pale brown dirt/mud. There are huge puddles where the cement has broken away and the constant flow of water to keep shop steps clean has pooled. My Western face is quite the novelty and all the old peddlers call out “Erza” which means “Girl” to catch my attention so I will look at them.
Though the ground is a light, muddy brown, the walls are alive with bright color. Each stall sells a combination of things, be it bread and cigarettes or wash pans and pillows, but everything is beautifully colored with dark reds, pinks, deep purples, brilliant oranges, blacks, light blues and hearty greens. Given the color palate in the area, it is no wonder that my ancestors risked life, limb and immortal soul to come here.
And though the alleyway is always busy and I am constantly stared at with a sea of “Erza” following me, I am remarkably peaceful there. It is not unlike an out of body experience, the likes of which listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” creates. It is a combination of complete comfort and complete exoticism laced with profundity in the hazy mist around you.
So, at the end of my first week and the beginning of my second, my pendulum has drifted back into the “ready for this” space.
****
Having just gone for a stroll deeper into the local area than I’ve ever been before, I must admit that being “foreign” is exhausting. I would like to comment on how weird it is to have people staring at my crotch constantly but to be totally honest, I come from New York and I’d be lying if I said it was entirely out of the ordinary. The difference is that here, when I look up and some woman or man is clearly checking out my crotch, I can’t respond with something to the effect of, “Can I fucking help you?” Here, I have to pretend not to see it. I am already self-conscious enough about the fact that, in a city filled with Kate-Moss-Framed women, I am all breasts, hips and thighs; I don’t need to be consistently reminded of my blatantly obvious sexuality. One boyfriend once commented that I had a body that was built to, “you know, take a good slamming. I don’t have to be nervous that I might seriously injure you in the heat of the moment” and I hear his voice now as the Asian gaze run over my body and pools at my crotch.
Regardless, I walked around for merely a half hour and now I am ready for a nap. It’s difficult to maintain that neutral balance of polite cheer. I don’t want to seem snobby and therefore imperialist and I don’t want to seem too friendly and therefore touristy or slutty. I try to carry myself as if I belong, simply taking in the sights and nodding to anyone not-dating-appropriate (much older men, children and women) who stares at me extensively. Teenage women see me and are giddy with excitement to try out their English, which usually consists of “Hello, nice to meet you.” I try to return their excitement with a pleased, “Hello, nice to meet you.” Whenever the rising sensation of “oh lord, not another ‘hello, nice to meet you’ conversation” hits me, I remind myself of what my friend Annie (she’s from China and now lives in New York City; she’s my fairy godmother/angel) once told me when I laughed at how exotic she told me I would be. “You’re very exotic. You travel the world. Most of these people, they do their job, they have their family and that’s it. They can’t go anywhere. They are tied to their job and will never see the world.” Annie then told me this story of a woman who worked at a hotel where Annie was staying while she was back home visiting. The woman bent over backwards to take care of Annie and as they were chatting, Annie discovered that the woman lived on the 3rd floor of the hotel and that was it. She never went anywhere outside the city except to see her family and she would live her whole life in that job. “You’re the closest thing most of them will ever see to the outside world,” she told me.
I know I live a life of great indulgence and the least I can do is humor people when they try to use their English but good lord, the whole package is surprisingly tiring.
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