(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.