MY GAY

There were Americans in Xi’An today (10/23). They were delegates from Michigan (primarily the North-of-Detroit area) and they were quite lovely but clearly on a whirlwind tour of the China; 4 cities in 10 days with countless schools in each city. While I hit it off with them and wish I had more time to speak with them, I felt neither homesick nor notably comforted by their presence. For me, they simply were and my primary goal with them was help articulate the depth, breadth and brilliance of my school.

There was a pretty friggin’ cool writer who interviewed me briefly for the Detroit Free Press and may have something about me on her TV show for CBS. There was the head of the group who has great passion for all things China and he was a remarkably friendly fellow with the clear understanding that not every American comprehends the value and importance of being abroad. Several of the teachers were in charge of groundbreaking international exchange programs. Americans aware of their global responsibility are few and far between; those of us who are aware of the responsibility share a certain kinship. And, once the question, “Why would you come all the way out into the middle of China to teach English?” was asked and I responded with (in my opinion) the only appropriate answer of, “Why not?” we were clearly all on the same kinship page. But the thing that rocked the most was seeing my babies in action.

We had a meeting with the 20 or so American delegates, the heads of the schools, 8 of my babies (14-16 years old) and me. Part of my job was to look like the expensive trinket that I am. I wore one of my ridiculously expensive suits (ironically purchased in the USA but made in China), put my hair up in what Americans consider a “serious hairstyle” and made sure my makeup was decently fixed. The other part of my job was to be the entertaining English-to-English translator. Native Chinese speakers have a specific, mathematic lexicon fully predicated on identical cultural touchstones and consequently the surface simplicity does not always fully articulate the idea within the free-flowing, heterogeneous language of English. Conversely, the flowery lexicon of native English speakers full of its clauses and clarifications is too loose structurally speaking and too verbose for Chinese speakers who have not had much exposure to English in its native environment. Westerners are not only used to other cultures, they’re used to other cultures that are used to other cultures. People in Xi’An are fully sophisticated and lead day-to-day lives almost identical to their Western counterparts, however they lack the capacity to relate to “foreign” as they have yet to have the breadth of experience with “foreign” that the West has had. Consequently, for there to be full understanding between Xi’An and the West, there generally needs to be a second filter of an English speaker at least vaguely aware of where the Chinese are coming from. I served that purpose because, in the 2 months with no language capacity, I have clearly become the authority on all things Chinese.

Nonetheless, what I lack in Mandarin capacity, I make up for in Mandarin-speaker-English-lexicon capacity. I’m able to flesh out many seemingly curt notions coming from the Chinese as much as I’m able to reduce the English into manageable bites. Consequently, once my babies were done introducing themselves and there was a Q&A session from the Americans, it fell on me to translate the verbose, multi-clause English sentences into direct sentences that maintained the integrity of the idea. The first time my specific skill set was needed, my “Puppy Love” crush was up speaking and someone asked him something about “whether or not [he] want[ed] to speak to American students with whom [he has] similar interests and [were] within a similar age range via the internet.” Normal Chinese, simply put, is not that complicated a language. The Chinese are direct because their language is mathematically direct. They have a staggeringly homogeneous society and so they don’t need to use all the explanations we do. Also, it is simply a given in their culture that everyone “matched up” will find things to discuss and all persons will absolutely be within a culturally acceptable, appropriate age range. (Hell, in a language where “Monday” directly translates to “Day 1”, “Tuesday” is “Day 2” and so on and so forth, you can be damned sure the clauses are worked out LONG before complicated conversations begin.) You can’t run off on tangential qualifiers like that in daily Chinese (or maybe you could, but no one does). Such abstract placement of (for them, redundant) qualifiers and the division of a concrete idea is truly advanced (if not utterly distracting) and even my Chinese-American friends who are bilingual (having grown up in a Mandarin-speaking household in America but speaking English in school) have trouble with it. The things English speakers do to be polite and accommodating actually just end up confusing native Chinese speakers. Americans try to show their friendliness by being amenable and fluid while the Chinese prefer working around concrete fact. America’s given is the individual and China’s given is the group; Americans consequently are free to fight for the group and the Chinese can fight for the individual. It doesn’t matter how you come; the Chinese just want to know what they’re dealing with. Granted, their unwritten expectation is that you recognize that you are part of a group and so you’ll accept that your needs might not all be met but they want to know up front what they’re dealing with so they can factor it in to their judgment. They won’t apologize for not meeting your needs just like they won’t expect you to apologize for demanding your needs; that brusque bartering of needs is a given in their culture but is considered staggeringly vulgar, if not utterly rude in mine.

Silence fell over the room as more Western eyes than my baby has ever seen looked at him in anticipation. My poor baby glanced around the room at all the other (Chinese) English teachers who had been struck still. Their static faces and steady blinking indicated they were clearly not able to help him at the moment. (Westerners shoot their eyebrows into their hairline and their eyes go wide or they furrow their brow and say “hmm” when they are challenged. The Chinese get very still and cease to respond outwardly as the inner gears grind to overtime.) Then his gaze fell to me, the look of desperation at how deep the rabbit hole got shining his trembling eyes. “What” he exhaled in almost a whisper, vaguely reminiscent of Brando’s “the horror” in Apocalypse Now. I looked him straight in the eye, smiled calmly, letting him know he was about to make us all very proud and said, “Do you want to speak to American students on the internet?” (My students know I’ll lob it over the plate for them as many times as they need that but I will never swing away for them. They have come to understand that I will neither steal their thunder nor grow tired of their struggle.) He finally exhaled, a broad smile crossed his face as he answered, “Yes, I want to talk with American students. I would like to email them. That would be great.”

Not only was his victory snatched from the jaws of utter humiliation but he also discovered he was being offered what every student in my school wants; an American pen pal. The Americans, for their part, understood how difficult it was for him to chat off the cuff and they exploded in applause, smiling and nodding. My baby was utterly glowing and I couldn’t have been happier.

I suspect the American visitors have not had someone like me in their meetings before and they seemed relieved to have my extra level of translation. Westerners tend to see the Chinese as docile and opaque. That has not been my experience. When the Chinese don’t understand something, they hang back until it gets sorted out (Fools rush in where angels dare to tread) preferring to give no answer than offend or lose face with the wrong one. They retreat “behind the mask” (as I think of it) of a static face so as not to indicate an improper or misleading emotion. They will even stare at you silently while they think behind the mask to let you know that their thoughts are with you; a habit I found unnerving at first but now I am accustomed to it. It is the visual equivalent of raising your pointer finger and saying, “Lemme think about that a second,” and then dropping off into your own world of thought. So, when the Chinese become what the West interprets as “guarded” or “offended” they are merely taking their time to figure things out. Time is not a “luxury” in China; it is a birthright. In the West, we embrace first and reject second because we don’t want to waste time. We welcome you in and then toss you out if you don’t measure up. In China, “toss you out” is not really an option. So, they will wait until they have all the information before deciding how to respond. Consequently, if you offer up lots of complicated, circuitous sentences and notions, you’re going to be waiting a very long time. And, if you fill the silence they create by responding with more explanation (as is the standard operating procedure in the West because we fear lulls in conversation) it will simply take more time. If the Chinese ultimately decide that they do not understand you, they will end the silence with, “What?” Only then should you clarify or simplify. (I suggest going with simplifying; use the silence to figure out a more simple way to express the thrust of your idea.) Also, I have found, in fact, that the Chinese are better at casual conversation than most Americans and so if you give them the time and the space to translate their chatting into English, they have no problem leading the conversation. It’s really hard at first as Americans see all the waiting as a waste of time but, ultimately, it’s a really cool way to learn lots of interesting stuff about a culture totally different from your own. The Chinese know a lot about their own history and love to clue foreigners in on it.

In that I get the Chinese culture more than my American brethren did and have a full understanding of my own, I was able to bridge the gap. The Americans all wanted my business card and gave me theirs in order to set up email exchange programs with their students. I got lots of attention from the Americans who seemed quite thrilled with the opportunity I provide but best of all, my babies were able to use the tools I helped them hone in order to interact with more Westerners than they’ve ever seen before. There really was nothing like seeing them light up at being able to interact with full-grown American adults. They were given irrefutable proof of their talent in English and an opportunity rarely had by even the wealthiest, most powerful of adults around here.

But, once the students were done with their piece and it was clear we were merely one stop on a whirlwind tour, I just wanted to get back to class. The Americans were clearly interested most in me and I was the one they wanted to interview and photograph as I felt the Robert-from-“Company” syndrome rear its ugly head. As lunch ended, all the Americans came up to tell me how each student told them how “kind” all my students professed me to be and how much they adore me. It was nice to hear the weariness of my brethren melting away at the warmth of my students and the loving relationship we have. We have a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong in America but the one thing that China can do that America can’t is wash away the weariness of loneliness. America, in many ways, has crested; our innocence is gone and our “sophistication” still too unwieldy to be executed properly. I don’t recognize America anymore. She’s drowning in paranoia, human rights violations and corruption covered by finger pointing and declarations of “DIVINE RIGHT!” America’s Third Great Awakening frightens me. There is no more pride in being an American, merely xenophobia, dogma and the terrifyingly real notion that we’re wasting the lives of our brave men and women of the armed forces in a meat-grinder-for-oil fiasco on the whim of very old, very sheltered, very rich, very arrogant men. My home has been hijacked and Bin Laden has nothing to do with it. My home used to protect and fight for good but she is now so mired in shit that she’s even lost the ability to assist the UN when genocide is declared.

China is a land filling with hope and bright-eyed optimism; the ugliness of the revolution lost to the new generation and the fear of human rights violations is vanishing into the mist. The world the Chinese-American immigrants fled is vanishing and a new dream is being realized. Her birth was bloody and awful and it killed the mother but China is growing up now. No, she’s not fully realized yet and there’s still a long way to go but she’s coming along. As with all youth, now is the time she is opening to discussion and reveling in her curiosity. I am incredibly blessed to be here and a part of that blossoming.

I suspect many of the Americans saw what I have with my students as the reason they got into teaching and they were rejuvenated to see it was still possible to have. My students are free to touch me and be touched by me without fear of “sexual impropriety” or “abuse” charges. I am free to dote on them and they are free to be dependent on me. They trust that I understand things beyond their comprehension and will make judgment calls according to their best interest thus freeing them up to be children. They have been raised to understand that I am a surrogate parent, a position of authority to be fiercely respected, not a predator who slipped between the cracks or a payday for the litigious. I am free to punish them as I see fit but rarely must do so and so they are freer to be more informal around me than my Chinese counterparts. So, the focus for the Americans became about me because my position is the fantasy of fantasies in terms of a teaching job. However, why anyone would come thousands of miles to the middle of China to talk to a New Yorker to the exclusion of the Chinese is, at best, incongruous to me. I walked them back to the Kindergarten as the interviews continued and then headed home to swap out my morning stuff for my afternoon classes.

I started off my afternoon classes with a bang. I always close my 7th grade classes with a game where the students must complete four sentences with their preferences of things. In one of my 7th grade classes, there is a boy who has a stutter. He has never spoken before but under the pressure of his teammates, he finally stood to speak. Some of the boys around him did the “M-m-m-m-m-my fa-fa-fa-fa-favor-r-r-r-r-ite” mocking thing and I shut them up fast with a brief “In or Out.” (I have given them 2 choices, “In or Out.” If they want to stay in the class, they choose “In” and must behave to stay in the class. If they want to misbehave and wait outside for the class to finish and consequently get handled by the Chinese teachers for being thrown out of the Westerner’s class, they choose “Out.” I now merely say, “In or Out” and the whole class shuts up. I know how to say, “Be quiet” in Chinese but the threat of having to be confronted by my corporal punishment peers is far more intimidating than me having an aneurism yelling, “Be quiet!”) So, my student with the stutter was able to fully articulate all four sentences complete with his own off-the-cuff opinion and it rocked. In fact, his enunciation was better than most of his peers. Something about his extra effort to speak got him to open his mouth and enunciate. He got his team a point as well as a little braver in English. I love that my students have the courage to do that.

And then I discovered my gay. I have found my gay in China.

I adore him and he adores me, as is the norm (or perhaps “requirement”) for one of my divine gays. I can’t explain how I know as most of the boys here would ping on the West’s gaydar, despite the fact that they’re undeniably hetero. Today I was dressed up in my finest Western threads but I put my hair up in a French twist with a hair-stick adorned by a peacock feather to hold it in place. To the Chinese I would look decidedly American and to the Americans, I would look decidedly adult with a little flair of China. As both sides would want me to look like a heightened version of “exotic yet approachable” it seemed an appropriate compromise.
All the students had been telling me how beautiful I look and been complimenting the beauty of my feather. It’s truly staggering how many girl students gasped and leapt up and down clapping with glee at my great beauty and how many boys stopped dead in their tracks, jaw dropped and then immediately pronounced, “Teacher! You are most beautiful!” However, there was something about the earnestness with which this young man complimented me and then engulfed himself in watching me be “beautiful” that was not about a desire for me but to be me. My talent, not me, hypnotized him. For whatever reason, I had the school enraptured and the young man was clearly amazed with my capacity for such drama. He was fascinated to watch me wield attention, use it to my advantage and maintain heightened interest. There was no tint of jealousy and there was no coloring of lust; it was merely a tutorial for a ravenous student. During class, I gave him a little more attention than I should have but what can I say? I’m so happy I’ve finally found my gay.

And he is divine, with a “V.”