I HAVE A DATE
I have a date.
Really, what more do I need to add to that?
Today is Wednesday December, 06 and I have a date for Saturday to go to the museum with, you guessed it, Alpha Hottie (who will be known as "Z" here on out). My lunch mate figured out how to do it. At the West Egg party, we got free tickets to an art exhibition at one of the more famous museums in Xi’An. I took two tickets, thinking I would invite my Chinese Angel to come with me, as we usually do things on Saturdays.
However, Sunday, it struck me that I love going to museums with boys. I love going with boys who like museums because I love people who want to be there more than me. And, I love going with boys who don’t like museums because I like to see just how much tedium a boy is willing to suffer for me. It’s really a win/win.
So, I spent much of Sunday and all of Monday morning fantasizing I was the kind of girl who had the ovaries to ask out Z. I mean, I wish I was the kind of woman who could just walk right up to the hottest, sweetest guy I’ve interacted with in a while and say, "You, me, Saturday. Be there or be ." To be fair, I usually am that girl; I see what I want and I take it. However, I’m in China and, as you may have noticed, I’m a bit in over my head when it comes to boys, so it would appear I am no longer that girl; I see what I want and I flee.
I jokingly mentioned my predicament to my lunch mate as a comment on the absurdity of who I am in the States versus who I am in China.
"You should not ask him directly. He will know you like him and you thought he might have a girlfriend." She told me.
"I know that. I’m not going to ask at all. I accept defeat very easily." I explained.
"I wish there was some way you could talk to him about the art and if he likes it, then ask him." She said dropping off into thought.
"No, it’s fine. I’m not going to ask him." I insisted, knowing this would go the route of the Motor Scooter Incident if she thought about it for too long.
"Let me think about it." She said conspiratorially.
"Okay." I said, hoping desperately that she would forget it. Granted, I should know better by now but a girl can hope nonetheless.
This afternoon at lunch, my lunch mate arrived, giddy in that conspiratorial way. I had truly forgotten about asking Z to the museum so I was utterly perplexed when she sat down and gave me that smile of hers.
"I figured it out."
"Figured what out?" I asked, confused.
"I will ask HIM for you."
And the "Oh. Fuck." alarm bells started going off in my head again. Just as there is only one "THE pill," there is only one "HIM" when she and I speak. "Ask him what?"
"I will tell him that you asked me but that I do not have the time to take you. I will ask him to take you instead." She explained as I felt like I was in some sort of "Parent Trap" sequel.
"Right, and you’re worried I’ll get lost so he has to look out for me." I jokingly follow her plot through to the part where hijinks and hilarity ensue.
"Perfect!" She squealed.
"No, I was kidding." She looked at me, blinking as I backpedaled hard. "No, please don’t ask him."
"Really?" She asked.
I cringed, "Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just… what if he’s got a girlfriend?" What if he doesn’t like me blah blah blah as I rediscovered my inner 13 year old.
"I will do it." She said definitively.
I half smiled, half cringed; the most honest and naked expression I could make in that state.
After lunch, we headed to the classroom that Z’s been babysitting this week (the teachers must rotate every week, the responsibility to watch over various classes at lunch) and my lunch mate panicked. We walked up to the classroom, she turned around and grabbed me and said, "I am so nervous" as she then mimed her heart beating fast in her chest.
"We don’t have to do this." I said.
"No, I’m going to do it," she answered resolutely as she turned back around and headed into the classroom.
Just as she headed into the classroom and hollered out "Lao she", a little girl, not quite 6 walked up to me and stared at me, transfixed. In dire need of a distraction anyway, I squatted down to her level and she just stared into my eyes, mesmerized.
The little girl was so nakedly fascinated by studying my face, that I briefly forgot the middle school drama going on between my lunch mate and Z. She stared deeply into my eyes and placed her palms on either of my cheeks. She just held my face for several moments. She then slowly stroked my face, smiled, took her hands back and walked away.
I love that. I love little kids and the mystery inside their little heads. I love how fascinated they are about the most random things and I love how completely they give themselves over to the moment once they are captured. I figured she was my little guru for the moment and I decided to drop the nerves.
As she walked away, my lunch mate came back to me and asked for the ticket. I handed it to her and Z showed me his phone, for what reason, I had no idea. As I took his phone, I noticed he had a picture of himself as the background (like everyone here in China does; it’s either their significant other or, barring a significant other, it’s themselves). As there was no picture of a girl, I took it as a good sign. Then, I realized that this man is not only beautiful in person but the camera is in love with him as well.
They have some back and forth while I’m looking at his phone and wondering what the hell I’m supposed to be doing with it. The two of them sort it out and then turn back to me. She and I teased him about how there was too much chin in his picture and then it was revealed to me that I was getting his number so I could call him before I left for our date.
We tried to do the they-tell-me-the-number thing but that wasn’t working, so I just had him write his number down. Underneath his number, he signed his name in Chinese characters. I took one look at the characters and said, "Can bu dong." (Roughly, "I can’t read that.") "Pinyin ma?" (I asked him if he could write it in pinyin, the Romanized version of Chinese characters.)
He looked at me, nodded and wrote out his name. Finally, at last, I can not only fully understand his name, I can say it as well.
I thanked him and my lunch mate and I scurried out.
"Thank you thank you thank you" I whispered as we tried to stroll casually away.
"He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He likes you."
And just like that, I’ve got a date.
Maybe sometimes life just is that easy.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
TONIGHT
Tonight (12/5) I love China like no other. The heating in my apartment, as in all the rooms and buildings in my complex is WAY too hot. Consequently, we have all turned our heat down and opened our windows, despite the teeny tiny digits of the desert air on a December night.
This evening, my Brazilian Angel made me dinner. I think she had a turning point this weekend after spending time at the impoverished school we donated all the money to. She saw our West Egg friends amongst the impoverished Chinese children. She saw the company wives clad in Louis Vuitton and the company men vulgarly plastered in their companies’ logos contrasted with the children who came from families barely able to afford the yarn to make mittens. She seems to have drawn a line in the sand between those of us here, oblivious of anything outside our ghetto and those of us here to embrace the challenges (slight though they may be) that help us grow. We talked of the fun of frivolity and indulgence and the importance of recognizing it as such. She even spoke of her alienation and disillusionment in some of the members of West Egg and her fear of returning to the life she lived in the small town in China.
We talked about her moment of clarity and our relationship seems to have returned to what it once was. I’m beyond the moon at such a lovely resurrection.
And now I sit, the winter air blowing in as my feet roast on the heated marble floors and the strains of an ancient Chinese string instrument playing its melancholy tune echoing throughout the canyons of my compound. Often at night, I hear the instrument being played and have, on occasion, tried to locate the source of the music, to no avail. After a while, I decided to think of the instrument as my "Chinese Ghost."
A friend once told me about the "Ghost Stories" in Chinese fairytales. By and large, the ghosts of Chinese stories are perfect women. They are the women that the writer concocts as the ideal woman. She is a mere apparition and only through the love of her creator’s alter ego can she be made whole. It is a romantic notion, in the pre-feminist sense, and I think of my string instrument as such. I love the sound of "melancholy" in China because everyone is so publicly about the pursuit of "happy" that melancholy feels distinctly mine, even though I know better. I love the sound of an anonymous string instrument at night almost as much as I love the steady sound of a lover’s breath as he sleeps.
The sound of a solitary string instrument harkens me back to my freshman year of college. In the middle of the night, I was often awakened by one of my dorm mates playing his cello on the deck outside my dorm room. The sound echoed off the canyon beyond the dorm where we lived and the world had fallen quiet. There was a palpable sense of potential as we had yet to see how short we would fall and how only a fraction of us would be left by graduation. In those moments, we were still golden children filled with hope. Every day was a new discovery of the breadth of talent surrounding you and every night was an in depth discussion of the talent you were studying. It was chronically Christmas Eve.
The precision of his playing indicated a recently abandoned passion in the pursuit of higher education. Many of us at Reed had forfeit a god-given gift in the pursuit of a classical education. My dorm mate had given up being a concert cellist and I had given up being a career athlete.
However, in that sound, in that moment, the cost and sacrifice of our forfeiting had yet to settle in. No doors had closed yet and while others were flying open before us. I had yet to know what it felt like to ever be faced with a physical feat I could not conquer effortlessly and his fingers had yet to falter for notes. The great potential we so casually discarded had yet to leave, not yet fully understanding our shunning.
And I revisit that notion now with the echoing sound of my Chinese ghost. I have not yet had to face the cost of what I have forfeit in my pursuit of China. I have not yet fully realized the wonder of the life I will gain from having made a firm decision. I have been here a matter of months; I could not possibly see it all fully. The dream of someday conquering Mandarin and marrying my two worlds is still alive and bright. I don’t know all the ways in which I will compromise to make a small piece of what I dream a reality.
All I do know is that in this moment, I am cozy, content and arrogant in my full belly. I love China like no other.
Tonight (12/5) I love China like no other. The heating in my apartment, as in all the rooms and buildings in my complex is WAY too hot. Consequently, we have all turned our heat down and opened our windows, despite the teeny tiny digits of the desert air on a December night.
This evening, my Brazilian Angel made me dinner. I think she had a turning point this weekend after spending time at the impoverished school we donated all the money to. She saw our West Egg friends amongst the impoverished Chinese children. She saw the company wives clad in Louis Vuitton and the company men vulgarly plastered in their companies’ logos contrasted with the children who came from families barely able to afford the yarn to make mittens. She seems to have drawn a line in the sand between those of us here, oblivious of anything outside our ghetto and those of us here to embrace the challenges (slight though they may be) that help us grow. We talked of the fun of frivolity and indulgence and the importance of recognizing it as such. She even spoke of her alienation and disillusionment in some of the members of West Egg and her fear of returning to the life she lived in the small town in China.
We talked about her moment of clarity and our relationship seems to have returned to what it once was. I’m beyond the moon at such a lovely resurrection.
And now I sit, the winter air blowing in as my feet roast on the heated marble floors and the strains of an ancient Chinese string instrument playing its melancholy tune echoing throughout the canyons of my compound. Often at night, I hear the instrument being played and have, on occasion, tried to locate the source of the music, to no avail. After a while, I decided to think of the instrument as my "Chinese Ghost."
A friend once told me about the "Ghost Stories" in Chinese fairytales. By and large, the ghosts of Chinese stories are perfect women. They are the women that the writer concocts as the ideal woman. She is a mere apparition and only through the love of her creator’s alter ego can she be made whole. It is a romantic notion, in the pre-feminist sense, and I think of my string instrument as such. I love the sound of "melancholy" in China because everyone is so publicly about the pursuit of "happy" that melancholy feels distinctly mine, even though I know better. I love the sound of an anonymous string instrument at night almost as much as I love the steady sound of a lover’s breath as he sleeps.
The sound of a solitary string instrument harkens me back to my freshman year of college. In the middle of the night, I was often awakened by one of my dorm mates playing his cello on the deck outside my dorm room. The sound echoed off the canyon beyond the dorm where we lived and the world had fallen quiet. There was a palpable sense of potential as we had yet to see how short we would fall and how only a fraction of us would be left by graduation. In those moments, we were still golden children filled with hope. Every day was a new discovery of the breadth of talent surrounding you and every night was an in depth discussion of the talent you were studying. It was chronically Christmas Eve.
The precision of his playing indicated a recently abandoned passion in the pursuit of higher education. Many of us at Reed had forfeit a god-given gift in the pursuit of a classical education. My dorm mate had given up being a concert cellist and I had given up being a career athlete.
However, in that sound, in that moment, the cost and sacrifice of our forfeiting had yet to settle in. No doors had closed yet and while others were flying open before us. I had yet to know what it felt like to ever be faced with a physical feat I could not conquer effortlessly and his fingers had yet to falter for notes. The great potential we so casually discarded had yet to leave, not yet fully understanding our shunning.
And I revisit that notion now with the echoing sound of my Chinese ghost. I have not yet had to face the cost of what I have forfeit in my pursuit of China. I have not yet fully realized the wonder of the life I will gain from having made a firm decision. I have been here a matter of months; I could not possibly see it all fully. The dream of someday conquering Mandarin and marrying my two worlds is still alive and bright. I don’t know all the ways in which I will compromise to make a small piece of what I dream a reality.
All I do know is that in this moment, I am cozy, content and arrogant in my full belly. I love China like no other.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
SPLINTERS
When things in my life become irrevocably damaged, I hear the sound of splintering glass. I hear that incredibly slow moment as the first cracks begin to appear and you can do nothing but watch the opaque lines race back and forth across the solid air as tiny, deadly clouds of broken glass are emitted into the air. The sound of splintering glass is not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard, only more precise. When I hear that sound, I know it is merely a matter of time before things come cascading down in brittle piles of crystalline, razor-sharp savagery.
Of late, my Brazilian Angel has been emitting that noise when she speaks. At first I tried to ignore it but it’s becoming louder and louder and I don’t know that it’s safe to ignore it anymore.
She first began emitting it when she told me how excited she was to be possibly returning to the small town in China where she and le Francais were living before. She eagerly told me of the minutia of living in the small town where everything was right at her fingertips and how she never needed to leave home to get anything. Every morning begins with massage sessions at either her house or the house of one of her (it goes without saying "Western") friends. They have their morning gossip and massages in the house’s spa as they try to figure out what to have the cook make for dinner that night and where to shop after the menu issues have been sorted out.
It’s not that she lives that kind of life in the other city, it’s the excitement with which she can barely contain herself at the thought of shrugging off the difficulty of the hard living here to return to true civility. She talks constantly about all the friends she’s going to see again and all the wonderful shops she’s going to visit. She talks about how rough it is to work live here and how she can’t wait to escape it all. I suspect it’s overcompensation at the thought of returning to a serious(ly gilded) cage but as I’m not her therapist, I’m certainly not interested in working with her to unpack that.
Nonetheless, it’s a side of her I’ve never seen before and it’s rubbing me in all the wrong ways. I try to be supportive and listen to her but the lifestyle makes me want to gag and I genuinely have nothing to add to a world where the greatest flaw of a woman is baring her tube-sock-like breasts during her daily massage party in a country where the only drinkable water must be shipped in. Frankly, I remember when we first met, she begged me to help her find work as a teacher so she could have an identity of her own and now she can’t degrade her work fast or hard enough.
To top it off, she’s now taken to telling me how I must conduct myself. She explains how I must behave around other people and I’m left to wonder how it is that she would understand how I must conduct myself around my friends better than I would. I have introduced her to my Chinese Angel, who was put off by her loud, sexually based conversation.
"Chris, you really must speak slower around your friends. They don’t understand a word that comes out of your mouth. Your friend at dinner last night was positively stunned at how fast you spoke. Did you see the look on her face? She had no idea what you were saying."
Actually, I had seen all the numerous looks on her face and they had nothing to do with my behavior. However, as there was nowhere to go with that question but a fight that would resolve nothing, I nodded and smiled tightly.
And then last night (12/2), West Egg had it annual Christmas Dinner at the Sheraton in South of Xi’An. I made the conscious decision to let bygones be bygones and have a good time. Isn’t that what the Holiday Season is about in the beginning?
We got to the extravagant Sheraton and were immediately served mulled wine and escorted into the packed front hall. Spectators had collected to watch the caroling. There was a small Chinese gentleman dressed as Santa, countless waitress dressed as Mrs. Claus and lots of small children dressed as a Christmas choir. I mingled with a few of the business people and was introduced to many more new people. I rubbed elbows with Chinese people just off the street as well as captains of industry.
I was finally introduced to one Australian man. Well, actually, not "introduced to" so much as "accosted by." Clearly having had his fill of the mulled spirits, he launched his meaty hand towards me, "And you would be?"
I took his hand and shook it firmly, not wanting to appear demure or "wilting flower" at all. "Hello. Christina."
"Oh, you’re Australian." He stated proudly at the top of his lungs.
Everyone else around us already knew me and as I’m known as "Christina, the New Yorker," we were all bewildered.
"Why is she Australian?" My fellow American asked.
"Because all the attractive people come from Australia."
I smiled politely. "Thank you but I’m from New York."
"Bah!" He dismissed it.
"And what do you do?" He pushed on.
"I’m a teacher." I answered and watched his face fall. You could actually feel the group grow tense and suddenly their circle of tension seemed to tighten around my neck. I wanted to turn to everyone and say, "It’s Christmas. Lighten the fuck up."
The drunk Australian captain of industry looked me up and down, sighed, rolled his eyes and said, "I could have guessed that." And I heard the entire circle of formerly jovial people mentally gasp. "I used to be an English teacher too but then I got truly educated and now I’m in manufacturing."
"And now you drink yourself silly while your wife’s away so you can work up the nerve to hit on strange young women at Christmas parties. In other words fuck you too." I thought. However, hearing the uncomfortable shifting and coughing of our fellow partygoers, I knew I needed to take the high road. I smiled genuinely and spoke the most innocent, backhanded compliment I could come up with, "And that seems to have worked out wonderfully for you so congratulations"
Crestfallen, he nodded and then left our group.
While I am happy with my ability to have managed a very civil, "Go fuck yourself you rickety old bastard" such a confrontation put me in a foul mood. Essentially, he named the elephant in the room that seems to follow me around West Egg. I neither want nor need anyone’s pity but as my company is apparently more entertaining than my unfortunate employment is damaging, I am allowed entrance to the exclusive enclave of an "Open to the Public Caroling Session."
I went outside for a breather, desperate for company that would just be with me. Alas there was none to be had, so I went back in and found the people I knew.
We then went up to dinner. As my Brazilian Angel was heading up the stairs with me and we were all conversing in French (there were for French present in our group than not, so we went with French) I was asked by several of the unknown Frenchies where I was from. "Obviously, I’m an American English teacher." I answered in French as everyone nodded confused.
"Why ‘obviously’?" My Brazilian Angel asked.
"Look at me." I said and my Brazilian Angel.
"I don’t understand."
"I don’t know either but there was a gentleman earlier who only looked at me and then said he could have guessed I was an American English teacher." I said.
"Oh, well, yes. Obviously it’s the glasses." My Brazilian Angel explained with the last answer I wanted to hear.
I’ve got the rectangular glasses every New York pseudo-intellectual wears as a badge of honor that screams; I know nothing of Versace but I know everything Marc Jacobs and Goethe have ever produced. They are the very same glasses that say, "I speak French, own an Apple computer and understand the difference between a ‘misto’ and an ‘espresso’." in New York.
However, in Xi’An, they symbolize the "English Teacher." There are three types of Western women here: 1. The Company Wife (my company for the evening), 2. The English Teacher (me) and 3. The Student (Company Wives in training last night).
I didn’t want to make any more drama. I just wanted to have a nice dinner and now I realize I’ve got the scarlet "E.T." slapped on my face. Just as my stomach begins to sink at the thought of a whole night sticking out, the lovely English gentleman who wrote me the less-than-lovely email finds me, calls me out by name and makes the extra effort to say hello. In summation, I stick out, I insight drunken men to start fights and now I am to be patronized.
I sat down at my table and started to drink. I did not drink heavily, but enough to take the edge off my volleyball injuries and the discomfort of being the social reject. The lovely French gentleman sitting to my right (my Brazilian Angel to my left) and I had a long conversation about art and work and life. It was truly lovely and he was charming; without an ounce of patronage. His girlfriend, a Chinese woman eager to work on her English talked with me too.
As the event was to be a formal occasion, all the wait staff was dressed in tuxedoes and white gloves. They all spoke English with absolutely no expectation Chinese would ever come up. I’m not unsettled by the idea that I would have been in over my head and need the kindness of strangers to help me sort out what I need with my minimal Chinese in CHINA. What I am unsettled by is the notion that in CHINA it would ever be acceptable for me to get upset with a CHINESE person for not speaking ENGLISH fluently. How lazy must Westerners be if they come to another country and not only make no effort to speak the language or no apology for not but that it is EXPECTED for the native people to meet the visitors on their terms?
One of the wait staff assigned to our table came around asking what we all wanted to drink aside from the red wine. As he asked me, I answered with the Mandarin word for water. (It sounds like "Sway" but with an "Sh" at the start, not just an "S"; "Shway")
He looked at me, confused. His face registered the same blankness of my students when I say a word in Chinese and they try to figure it out in English.
"Water" I said, smiling, knowing that he was trying figure out what English word was "Shway."
He looked at me, blinked, understood what just happened and laughed. Smiling, he hurried to get me water.
He poured me water and I thanked him in Chinese.
For the rest of the night, I had my own personal wait staff.
I must say, at the stage of my life, I am always a little amazed at the people who have no idea how to handle wait staff properly. I never understand how it is that people either fully ignore the human being handling them/ become belligerent or completely overcompensate by turning the wait staff into their new best friend. In other words, some dude or dudette whose just trying to do their job must deal with your crap by feeling ignored/ shit on or compromised into being your buddy. Frankly, if they want to hang out with you, they’ll deal with it after the soiree.
Ignoring/ being belligerent to wait staff is bad but I think trying to turn them into your buddy is worse. They’re being paid to be around you. They can’t reject you. Their job depends on making you happy. And, you’re ignoring the glaring fact that you’re not one of them. I don’t care how much guilt you carry about your money, you will never belong with them in that setting. Nevertheless, my Brazilian Angel insisted upon pulling each wait staff person down to our table to chat with her, trade phone numbers and generally socialize even though several of them tried to beg off politely claim they had work to do.
Eventually dinner let up and the entertainment portion of the evening began. The whole night we had had two Philippino women and a man singing Christmas carols to the standard party pop song renditions. However, they soon began to play samba music and several people got up to dance.
I would have danced but my legs are in such pain from the four hours of volleyball I played that there was no way that was going to happen. So I hung back and watched, thoroughly entertained by the lovely ladies and the middle aged white guys shaking a tail feather. It was the best part of my evening.
Later there was a raffle to see how much money could be raised to help an impoverished school here in China. The goal was to raise 1,000 Yuan. In a room full of wealthy businessmen, the goal was less than a fifth of my monthly salary. It was ridiculous. Disappointingly enough, they had a hard time raising the 1,000 Yuan and it wasn’t until a table of five twenty-something single men pooled their resources and came up with the cash together that the 1,000 Yuan was raised. Frankly, if you can’t spare some of your extravagant wealth for impoverished children in China at Christmas, where the fuck is your heart?
So, they raised the 1,000 and then tried to raise more. As they were trying to raise more, they started to raffle of songs. You would be serenaded by the staff and the lovely English gentleman for 100 Yuan. No one paid them any mind and just kept drinking and socializing.
Pissed off, I opened my wallet. I happened to have over 1,000 Yuan on me last night and so I decided to show them all up. As the guy going table to table came to my table, I fanned out my grand said, "1,000." Everyone at my table saw me pitch in my money and they all opened their wallets and pitched in a few hundred a piece. If the pathetic "English Teacher" can spare a grand, the captains of industry can at least spare 100.
My 1,000 bought me a rendition of "You are so beautiful" sung by the Englishman, some of his colleagues and the staff of the hotel. I had been hoping for something silly, like Rod Stewart’s "Do you think I’m sexy" but my gesture seemed to inspire a certain amount of earnestness.
After the singing portion of the evening, my Brazilian Angel then set about insisting that she get a job at the hotel. She told all her friends (who were waiting on us) that she didn’t care if it was just one hour a week but that she wanted to work in the hotel. She was just as desperate for work in the hotel as she had been when she begged me for a job at a school.
As I sat there, tuning out her pleading I noticed one of the twenty-something guys at the table to have collected the first 1,000 was making no secret of watching me. Under normal circumstances, I would have been flattered to the point of embarrassment to have such a good looking man watching me but considering my treatment that evening by people who couldn’t be bothered to share their wealth, I was left to think, "Oh honey, don’t even bother." I am so very much not a part of the world he is and the notion that he would want to save me, as seems to be the general theme of the relationships in that room (his money saved her from a life of completion and her company saved him from a life of isolation), was beyond unappealing. Apart my intermittent crankiness, I am content with my life. I don’t belong with that world of "Lost in Translation" forced relationships in lieu of cultural immersion. I don’t want to be someone’s distraction. I want to be their passion.
We wrapped up dinner and headed to the car; le Francais, my Brazilian Angel and I. As we drove home, I mentioned my sore legs from my four hours of volleyball.
"You played volleyball and didn’t invite me?" My Brazilian Angel asked, clearly upset.
"I wasn’t invited until ten minutes before we played. And then I didn’t know we were going to play again until we were about to play." I explained.
"But Chris, you know how I love volleyball. You could have called me." My Brazilian Angel declared, truly upset.
"I know you love volleyball but I don’t have a cell phone and I didn’t even know we were going to play until we were playing."
"You should have invited me." My Brazilian Angel sulked.
"Next time I will." I promised, not really wanting to.
"Yes, you should have invited me." She repeated herself.
A few minutes later we were home and I was left bewildered about my place in the world.
When things in my life become irrevocably damaged, I hear the sound of splintering glass. I hear that incredibly slow moment as the first cracks begin to appear and you can do nothing but watch the opaque lines race back and forth across the solid air as tiny, deadly clouds of broken glass are emitted into the air. The sound of splintering glass is not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard, only more precise. When I hear that sound, I know it is merely a matter of time before things come cascading down in brittle piles of crystalline, razor-sharp savagery.
Of late, my Brazilian Angel has been emitting that noise when she speaks. At first I tried to ignore it but it’s becoming louder and louder and I don’t know that it’s safe to ignore it anymore.
She first began emitting it when she told me how excited she was to be possibly returning to the small town in China where she and le Francais were living before. She eagerly told me of the minutia of living in the small town where everything was right at her fingertips and how she never needed to leave home to get anything. Every morning begins with massage sessions at either her house or the house of one of her (it goes without saying "Western") friends. They have their morning gossip and massages in the house’s spa as they try to figure out what to have the cook make for dinner that night and where to shop after the menu issues have been sorted out.
It’s not that she lives that kind of life in the other city, it’s the excitement with which she can barely contain herself at the thought of shrugging off the difficulty of the hard living here to return to true civility. She talks constantly about all the friends she’s going to see again and all the wonderful shops she’s going to visit. She talks about how rough it is to work live here and how she can’t wait to escape it all. I suspect it’s overcompensation at the thought of returning to a serious(ly gilded) cage but as I’m not her therapist, I’m certainly not interested in working with her to unpack that.
Nonetheless, it’s a side of her I’ve never seen before and it’s rubbing me in all the wrong ways. I try to be supportive and listen to her but the lifestyle makes me want to gag and I genuinely have nothing to add to a world where the greatest flaw of a woman is baring her tube-sock-like breasts during her daily massage party in a country where the only drinkable water must be shipped in. Frankly, I remember when we first met, she begged me to help her find work as a teacher so she could have an identity of her own and now she can’t degrade her work fast or hard enough.
To top it off, she’s now taken to telling me how I must conduct myself. She explains how I must behave around other people and I’m left to wonder how it is that she would understand how I must conduct myself around my friends better than I would. I have introduced her to my Chinese Angel, who was put off by her loud, sexually based conversation.
"Chris, you really must speak slower around your friends. They don’t understand a word that comes out of your mouth. Your friend at dinner last night was positively stunned at how fast you spoke. Did you see the look on her face? She had no idea what you were saying."
Actually, I had seen all the numerous looks on her face and they had nothing to do with my behavior. However, as there was nowhere to go with that question but a fight that would resolve nothing, I nodded and smiled tightly.
And then last night (12/2), West Egg had it annual Christmas Dinner at the Sheraton in South of Xi’An. I made the conscious decision to let bygones be bygones and have a good time. Isn’t that what the Holiday Season is about in the beginning?
We got to the extravagant Sheraton and were immediately served mulled wine and escorted into the packed front hall. Spectators had collected to watch the caroling. There was a small Chinese gentleman dressed as Santa, countless waitress dressed as Mrs. Claus and lots of small children dressed as a Christmas choir. I mingled with a few of the business people and was introduced to many more new people. I rubbed elbows with Chinese people just off the street as well as captains of industry.
I was finally introduced to one Australian man. Well, actually, not "introduced to" so much as "accosted by." Clearly having had his fill of the mulled spirits, he launched his meaty hand towards me, "And you would be?"
I took his hand and shook it firmly, not wanting to appear demure or "wilting flower" at all. "Hello. Christina."
"Oh, you’re Australian." He stated proudly at the top of his lungs.
Everyone else around us already knew me and as I’m known as "Christina, the New Yorker," we were all bewildered.
"Why is she Australian?" My fellow American asked.
"Because all the attractive people come from Australia."
I smiled politely. "Thank you but I’m from New York."
"Bah!" He dismissed it.
"And what do you do?" He pushed on.
"I’m a teacher." I answered and watched his face fall. You could actually feel the group grow tense and suddenly their circle of tension seemed to tighten around my neck. I wanted to turn to everyone and say, "It’s Christmas. Lighten the fuck up."
The drunk Australian captain of industry looked me up and down, sighed, rolled his eyes and said, "I could have guessed that." And I heard the entire circle of formerly jovial people mentally gasp. "I used to be an English teacher too but then I got truly educated and now I’m in manufacturing."
"And now you drink yourself silly while your wife’s away so you can work up the nerve to hit on strange young women at Christmas parties. In other words fuck you too." I thought. However, hearing the uncomfortable shifting and coughing of our fellow partygoers, I knew I needed to take the high road. I smiled genuinely and spoke the most innocent, backhanded compliment I could come up with, "And that seems to have worked out wonderfully for you so congratulations"
Crestfallen, he nodded and then left our group.
While I am happy with my ability to have managed a very civil, "Go fuck yourself you rickety old bastard" such a confrontation put me in a foul mood. Essentially, he named the elephant in the room that seems to follow me around West Egg. I neither want nor need anyone’s pity but as my company is apparently more entertaining than my unfortunate employment is damaging, I am allowed entrance to the exclusive enclave of an "Open to the Public Caroling Session."
I went outside for a breather, desperate for company that would just be with me. Alas there was none to be had, so I went back in and found the people I knew.
We then went up to dinner. As my Brazilian Angel was heading up the stairs with me and we were all conversing in French (there were for French present in our group than not, so we went with French) I was asked by several of the unknown Frenchies where I was from. "Obviously, I’m an American English teacher." I answered in French as everyone nodded confused.
"Why ‘obviously’?" My Brazilian Angel asked.
"Look at me." I said and my Brazilian Angel.
"I don’t understand."
"I don’t know either but there was a gentleman earlier who only looked at me and then said he could have guessed I was an American English teacher." I said.
"Oh, well, yes. Obviously it’s the glasses." My Brazilian Angel explained with the last answer I wanted to hear.
I’ve got the rectangular glasses every New York pseudo-intellectual wears as a badge of honor that screams; I know nothing of Versace but I know everything Marc Jacobs and Goethe have ever produced. They are the very same glasses that say, "I speak French, own an Apple computer and understand the difference between a ‘misto’ and an ‘espresso’." in New York.
However, in Xi’An, they symbolize the "English Teacher." There are three types of Western women here: 1. The Company Wife (my company for the evening), 2. The English Teacher (me) and 3. The Student (Company Wives in training last night).
I didn’t want to make any more drama. I just wanted to have a nice dinner and now I realize I’ve got the scarlet "E.T." slapped on my face. Just as my stomach begins to sink at the thought of a whole night sticking out, the lovely English gentleman who wrote me the less-than-lovely email finds me, calls me out by name and makes the extra effort to say hello. In summation, I stick out, I insight drunken men to start fights and now I am to be patronized.
I sat down at my table and started to drink. I did not drink heavily, but enough to take the edge off my volleyball injuries and the discomfort of being the social reject. The lovely French gentleman sitting to my right (my Brazilian Angel to my left) and I had a long conversation about art and work and life. It was truly lovely and he was charming; without an ounce of patronage. His girlfriend, a Chinese woman eager to work on her English talked with me too.
As the event was to be a formal occasion, all the wait staff was dressed in tuxedoes and white gloves. They all spoke English with absolutely no expectation Chinese would ever come up. I’m not unsettled by the idea that I would have been in over my head and need the kindness of strangers to help me sort out what I need with my minimal Chinese in CHINA. What I am unsettled by is the notion that in CHINA it would ever be acceptable for me to get upset with a CHINESE person for not speaking ENGLISH fluently. How lazy must Westerners be if they come to another country and not only make no effort to speak the language or no apology for not but that it is EXPECTED for the native people to meet the visitors on their terms?
One of the wait staff assigned to our table came around asking what we all wanted to drink aside from the red wine. As he asked me, I answered with the Mandarin word for water. (It sounds like "Sway" but with an "Sh" at the start, not just an "S"; "Shway")
He looked at me, confused. His face registered the same blankness of my students when I say a word in Chinese and they try to figure it out in English.
"Water" I said, smiling, knowing that he was trying figure out what English word was "Shway."
He looked at me, blinked, understood what just happened and laughed. Smiling, he hurried to get me water.
He poured me water and I thanked him in Chinese.
For the rest of the night, I had my own personal wait staff.
I must say, at the stage of my life, I am always a little amazed at the people who have no idea how to handle wait staff properly. I never understand how it is that people either fully ignore the human being handling them/ become belligerent or completely overcompensate by turning the wait staff into their new best friend. In other words, some dude or dudette whose just trying to do their job must deal with your crap by feeling ignored/ shit on or compromised into being your buddy. Frankly, if they want to hang out with you, they’ll deal with it after the soiree.
Ignoring/ being belligerent to wait staff is bad but I think trying to turn them into your buddy is worse. They’re being paid to be around you. They can’t reject you. Their job depends on making you happy. And, you’re ignoring the glaring fact that you’re not one of them. I don’t care how much guilt you carry about your money, you will never belong with them in that setting. Nevertheless, my Brazilian Angel insisted upon pulling each wait staff person down to our table to chat with her, trade phone numbers and generally socialize even though several of them tried to beg off politely claim they had work to do.
Eventually dinner let up and the entertainment portion of the evening began. The whole night we had had two Philippino women and a man singing Christmas carols to the standard party pop song renditions. However, they soon began to play samba music and several people got up to dance.
I would have danced but my legs are in such pain from the four hours of volleyball I played that there was no way that was going to happen. So I hung back and watched, thoroughly entertained by the lovely ladies and the middle aged white guys shaking a tail feather. It was the best part of my evening.
Later there was a raffle to see how much money could be raised to help an impoverished school here in China. The goal was to raise 1,000 Yuan. In a room full of wealthy businessmen, the goal was less than a fifth of my monthly salary. It was ridiculous. Disappointingly enough, they had a hard time raising the 1,000 Yuan and it wasn’t until a table of five twenty-something single men pooled their resources and came up with the cash together that the 1,000 Yuan was raised. Frankly, if you can’t spare some of your extravagant wealth for impoverished children in China at Christmas, where the fuck is your heart?
So, they raised the 1,000 and then tried to raise more. As they were trying to raise more, they started to raffle of songs. You would be serenaded by the staff and the lovely English gentleman for 100 Yuan. No one paid them any mind and just kept drinking and socializing.
Pissed off, I opened my wallet. I happened to have over 1,000 Yuan on me last night and so I decided to show them all up. As the guy going table to table came to my table, I fanned out my grand said, "1,000." Everyone at my table saw me pitch in my money and they all opened their wallets and pitched in a few hundred a piece. If the pathetic "English Teacher" can spare a grand, the captains of industry can at least spare 100.
My 1,000 bought me a rendition of "You are so beautiful" sung by the Englishman, some of his colleagues and the staff of the hotel. I had been hoping for something silly, like Rod Stewart’s "Do you think I’m sexy" but my gesture seemed to inspire a certain amount of earnestness.
After the singing portion of the evening, my Brazilian Angel then set about insisting that she get a job at the hotel. She told all her friends (who were waiting on us) that she didn’t care if it was just one hour a week but that she wanted to work in the hotel. She was just as desperate for work in the hotel as she had been when she begged me for a job at a school.
As I sat there, tuning out her pleading I noticed one of the twenty-something guys at the table to have collected the first 1,000 was making no secret of watching me. Under normal circumstances, I would have been flattered to the point of embarrassment to have such a good looking man watching me but considering my treatment that evening by people who couldn’t be bothered to share their wealth, I was left to think, "Oh honey, don’t even bother." I am so very much not a part of the world he is and the notion that he would want to save me, as seems to be the general theme of the relationships in that room (his money saved her from a life of completion and her company saved him from a life of isolation), was beyond unappealing. Apart my intermittent crankiness, I am content with my life. I don’t belong with that world of "Lost in Translation" forced relationships in lieu of cultural immersion. I don’t want to be someone’s distraction. I want to be their passion.
We wrapped up dinner and headed to the car; le Francais, my Brazilian Angel and I. As we drove home, I mentioned my sore legs from my four hours of volleyball.
"You played volleyball and didn’t invite me?" My Brazilian Angel asked, clearly upset.
"I wasn’t invited until ten minutes before we played. And then I didn’t know we were going to play again until we were about to play." I explained.
"But Chris, you know how I love volleyball. You could have called me." My Brazilian Angel declared, truly upset.
"I know you love volleyball but I don’t have a cell phone and I didn’t even know we were going to play until we were playing."
"You should have invited me." My Brazilian Angel sulked.
"Next time I will." I promised, not really wanting to.
"Yes, you should have invited me." She repeated herself.
A few minutes later we were home and I was left bewildered about my place in the world.
Friday, December 01, 2006
OW
Um, ow. And tomorrow (Today being December 1st, tomorrow being the 2nd) it’s gonna be SUPER OW.
I just spent four hours hot and sweaty with Alpha Hottie. I grunted like a Williams sister at Wimbledon and he called my name repeatedly.
Yeah, I wish it was about that too but this is me and this is real life. There are two rules to remember: 1. I NEVER get laid. Don’t know why that is, I certainly never signed up for said embargo, but it stands nonetheless. 2. Real life is never that easy.
So, I just spent four hours playing volleyball with the primary and middle school teachers. I am bruised, I am dirty and I am, apparently, a conquering hero. The middle school teachers played the primary school teachers in a winner-takes-all battle royal. I was auditioned from noon to 2 for the primary school teachers.
At lunch (11:45) my lunch mate was asked if I played volleyball. She asked me if I played and I said, "Yes, but I haven’t played in a long time. I’m not very good." I haven’t played since I was in high school… as a student. I’m rusty, to say the least to say nothing of the fact that I have just stuffed myself to the gills with food.
So, I finished up lunch and headed out to meet the players. At first, I thought it was just going to be a few of us; my primary school boss (one of the friendliest, warmest, most reflective men I know) and a few teachers. When I saw Alpha Hottie come around the corner, I thought, "Oh shit."
I get the sense he’s not interested. I know he really wants to be friends but I think that’s where it ends. Granted, I have no real reason to think that but I think it nonetheless. So, to sum up, I now have to play a game I haven’t played in over a decade in front of the man who "likes" me but isn’t "in like" with me in a country where all the sports they enjoy are nothing I’ve ever liked (they like track and field and synchronized dancing) so I have a reputation as not be all that athletic. Frankly, I’m competitive as hell and quite the jock but none of the sports they like have enough savagery behind them for my liking. If I’m competing with others but there isn’t the risk of a massive collision resulting in compound fractures, I’m not interested. Sad but true. High stakes are the only incentive to pull my inner whiner from myself and simply respond to the stimulus. The only reason I like Yoga is that it makes no bones about being brutal on the body, the only competition is with yourself and it aggravates my inner whiner to the point of being catatonic.
So, there I stand, my competitive inner bitch going, "Yup, one more thing about to be lost in translation. Enjoy eating what’s left of your pride."
"You play…?" Insert volleyball gesture by the hottest man on the planet. He seemed truly perplexed.
"Volleyball…" I fill his blank and prepare to answer.
"Volleyball." He repeats like a willing student instead of letting it go like my proud male colleagues.
I lift my hand in a gesture of "a little." "A little." I say, wishing I hadn’t agreed to this.
He nodded opaquely and my inner competitive jock bitch was rolling on the floor laughing at my impending doom.
We warmed up with a round of bumping the ball back and forth and I was surprised at how easily it came back to me. "Maybe I’ll be able to slide by." I thought.
Once the warm up was done, we wandered across the field to one of the soccer goal posts (sans net) that we were going to use as our makeshift net. We split up into teams of two. Fortunately I was on Alpha Hottie’s team, so he’d get the front row seats to my mortification.
We started playing and quickly I got up to serve. I could never serve with I was in school. I thought, "Oh god, here it comes. I hope I don’t hurt anyone."
Much to my surprise I made proper connection and our team got a point. Quickly, our team won as I nailed serve after serve. Suddenly, I went from "Random Special Teacher Invited By Propriety" to "Team Hero." Everyone was talking quite fervently with "Tina" peppering their conversation. Everyone started giving me thumbs up.
Then Alpha Hottie hollered something in Mandarin from behind me. "Beautiful girl!" followed. (Boys say that to all girls all the time here in China; it’s strange in that it rarely means anything romantic... in fact, it's most often said by brothers) I turned, confused by his outburst and saw that everyone on my team was looking past me to the track and field entrance.
A lovely, petite woman joined our team, clearly very friendly with Alpha Hottie. Considering the diamond ring on her left ring finger, she’s either his serious girlfriend (which I suspect) or his seriously platonic friend. They were very friendly at first but then after a few minutes, they stopped speaking to each other and then didn’t really interact anymore. (Frankly, you’d have to pry me off him with a crowbar.) Normally, I can tell in two gestures whether or not people are sleeping together. Hell, in two conversations, I can tell if they will sleep together even if they haven’t met yet. I have amazing accuracy; I’ve never been wrong. But, in China it’s just a different physical language. I can’t tell at all.
She joined our team and we continued to kick ass and take names. Alpha Hottie kept applauding me and trying to say supportive things to me in English. I kept applauding him and flashing him the "V" for victory with my fingers whenever he did something good. At the bottom of it, we’re both jocks and there’s a kinship with jocks, regardless of language barriers.
After a while, I started to notice that after each serve, I grunted like a Williams sister. At first I was utterly mortified but then I decided it was better to grunt and get the serve than to not grunt and fuck up the game. Pretty quickly, I was cultivating my grunt and after each one, I had a flash of boys talking about how much they like to watch women’s tennis for the noises.
We continued to play as students filed back into school and surrounded our playing to watch. I was cheered by my students and they all came up to me to say, "Teacher, you are cool."
I then had to leave to teach my afternoon classes. My primary school boss pulled me aside as I was leaving and he said, "4 o’clock. You find I."
"Okay." I nodded and headed off, worried about why he would want to see me.
My classes finished at 3:30 and I flopped into the office to hang out for another half hour. At about 3:45, the lovely young woman who may or may not be Alpha Hottie’s lady, came to the office, smiled so euphorically and unleashed a, "Tina!!!!" as she gestured for me to follow.
Awaiting me outside the office were all the women who had been playing volleyball and as soon as they saw me, the bounced up and down excited and flashing the "V" sign. Each one tried her hand at telling me "You are very, very…" and then she would give me the thumbs up sign with a broad smile.
I demurred as pride cometh before a fall. The women then all explained that their English was "very, very bad."
"My Chinese is very, very, very bad." I said and they seemed to like that. After all, it’s only fair. I’m in their country, I should speak their language and yet, they are clearly upset they cannot meet me in English.
We walked to the middle school and there was another volleyball court with my primary school boss hanging out. It would appear that my boss didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted me to play volleyball for the primary school against the middle school.
I agreed (not that I could turn them down) and I was put in the first rotation.
We lost the first game (we played to 25) and then during the second game, I caught my stride and we went from 0-17 to 25-17 for the win. I was on a good streak as I served. Everyone was cheering me on and I was utterly flabbergasted as to how that happened.
As we started our third game, I realized I was the only girl playing. All the other women had yet to get in the game and seemed quite contented to cheer from the sidelines. I offered one of the women my place and everyone shook their head "NO!"
"Tina!" "Tina!" I kept being called out by Alpha Hottie and my boss. They kept grabbing my arm and shaking their heads when I would walk towards the sideline.
We continued playing another two games but didn’t win again. Upon my fourth hour of volleyball, my precision wasn’t quite what it had been and so my serve sucked, hence no more cleanup rounds of serving from me.
Nevertheless, we played well, dug down deep and gave it a good try.
And now I hurt.
I hurt like the hurt to end all hurts.
I can’t wait for tomorrow.
Um, ow. And tomorrow (Today being December 1st, tomorrow being the 2nd) it’s gonna be SUPER OW.
I just spent four hours hot and sweaty with Alpha Hottie. I grunted like a Williams sister at Wimbledon and he called my name repeatedly.
Yeah, I wish it was about that too but this is me and this is real life. There are two rules to remember: 1. I NEVER get laid. Don’t know why that is, I certainly never signed up for said embargo, but it stands nonetheless. 2. Real life is never that easy.
So, I just spent four hours playing volleyball with the primary and middle school teachers. I am bruised, I am dirty and I am, apparently, a conquering hero. The middle school teachers played the primary school teachers in a winner-takes-all battle royal. I was auditioned from noon to 2 for the primary school teachers.
At lunch (11:45) my lunch mate was asked if I played volleyball. She asked me if I played and I said, "Yes, but I haven’t played in a long time. I’m not very good." I haven’t played since I was in high school… as a student. I’m rusty, to say the least to say nothing of the fact that I have just stuffed myself to the gills with food.
So, I finished up lunch and headed out to meet the players. At first, I thought it was just going to be a few of us; my primary school boss (one of the friendliest, warmest, most reflective men I know) and a few teachers. When I saw Alpha Hottie come around the corner, I thought, "Oh shit."
I get the sense he’s not interested. I know he really wants to be friends but I think that’s where it ends. Granted, I have no real reason to think that but I think it nonetheless. So, to sum up, I now have to play a game I haven’t played in over a decade in front of the man who "likes" me but isn’t "in like" with me in a country where all the sports they enjoy are nothing I’ve ever liked (they like track and field and synchronized dancing) so I have a reputation as not be all that athletic. Frankly, I’m competitive as hell and quite the jock but none of the sports they like have enough savagery behind them for my liking. If I’m competing with others but there isn’t the risk of a massive collision resulting in compound fractures, I’m not interested. Sad but true. High stakes are the only incentive to pull my inner whiner from myself and simply respond to the stimulus. The only reason I like Yoga is that it makes no bones about being brutal on the body, the only competition is with yourself and it aggravates my inner whiner to the point of being catatonic.
So, there I stand, my competitive inner bitch going, "Yup, one more thing about to be lost in translation. Enjoy eating what’s left of your pride."
"You play…?" Insert volleyball gesture by the hottest man on the planet. He seemed truly perplexed.
"Volleyball…" I fill his blank and prepare to answer.
"Volleyball." He repeats like a willing student instead of letting it go like my proud male colleagues.
I lift my hand in a gesture of "a little." "A little." I say, wishing I hadn’t agreed to this.
He nodded opaquely and my inner competitive jock bitch was rolling on the floor laughing at my impending doom.
We warmed up with a round of bumping the ball back and forth and I was surprised at how easily it came back to me. "Maybe I’ll be able to slide by." I thought.
Once the warm up was done, we wandered across the field to one of the soccer goal posts (sans net) that we were going to use as our makeshift net. We split up into teams of two. Fortunately I was on Alpha Hottie’s team, so he’d get the front row seats to my mortification.
We started playing and quickly I got up to serve. I could never serve with I was in school. I thought, "Oh god, here it comes. I hope I don’t hurt anyone."
Much to my surprise I made proper connection and our team got a point. Quickly, our team won as I nailed serve after serve. Suddenly, I went from "Random Special Teacher Invited By Propriety" to "Team Hero." Everyone was talking quite fervently with "Tina" peppering their conversation. Everyone started giving me thumbs up.
Then Alpha Hottie hollered something in Mandarin from behind me. "Beautiful girl!" followed. (Boys say that to all girls all the time here in China; it’s strange in that it rarely means anything romantic... in fact, it's most often said by brothers) I turned, confused by his outburst and saw that everyone on my team was looking past me to the track and field entrance.
A lovely, petite woman joined our team, clearly very friendly with Alpha Hottie. Considering the diamond ring on her left ring finger, she’s either his serious girlfriend (which I suspect) or his seriously platonic friend. They were very friendly at first but then after a few minutes, they stopped speaking to each other and then didn’t really interact anymore. (Frankly, you’d have to pry me off him with a crowbar.) Normally, I can tell in two gestures whether or not people are sleeping together. Hell, in two conversations, I can tell if they will sleep together even if they haven’t met yet. I have amazing accuracy; I’ve never been wrong. But, in China it’s just a different physical language. I can’t tell at all.
She joined our team and we continued to kick ass and take names. Alpha Hottie kept applauding me and trying to say supportive things to me in English. I kept applauding him and flashing him the "V" for victory with my fingers whenever he did something good. At the bottom of it, we’re both jocks and there’s a kinship with jocks, regardless of language barriers.
After a while, I started to notice that after each serve, I grunted like a Williams sister. At first I was utterly mortified but then I decided it was better to grunt and get the serve than to not grunt and fuck up the game. Pretty quickly, I was cultivating my grunt and after each one, I had a flash of boys talking about how much they like to watch women’s tennis for the noises.
We continued to play as students filed back into school and surrounded our playing to watch. I was cheered by my students and they all came up to me to say, "Teacher, you are cool."
I then had to leave to teach my afternoon classes. My primary school boss pulled me aside as I was leaving and he said, "4 o’clock. You find I."
"Okay." I nodded and headed off, worried about why he would want to see me.
My classes finished at 3:30 and I flopped into the office to hang out for another half hour. At about 3:45, the lovely young woman who may or may not be Alpha Hottie’s lady, came to the office, smiled so euphorically and unleashed a, "Tina!!!!" as she gestured for me to follow.
Awaiting me outside the office were all the women who had been playing volleyball and as soon as they saw me, the bounced up and down excited and flashing the "V" sign. Each one tried her hand at telling me "You are very, very…" and then she would give me the thumbs up sign with a broad smile.
I demurred as pride cometh before a fall. The women then all explained that their English was "very, very bad."
"My Chinese is very, very, very bad." I said and they seemed to like that. After all, it’s only fair. I’m in their country, I should speak their language and yet, they are clearly upset they cannot meet me in English.
We walked to the middle school and there was another volleyball court with my primary school boss hanging out. It would appear that my boss didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted me to play volleyball for the primary school against the middle school.
I agreed (not that I could turn them down) and I was put in the first rotation.
We lost the first game (we played to 25) and then during the second game, I caught my stride and we went from 0-17 to 25-17 for the win. I was on a good streak as I served. Everyone was cheering me on and I was utterly flabbergasted as to how that happened.
As we started our third game, I realized I was the only girl playing. All the other women had yet to get in the game and seemed quite contented to cheer from the sidelines. I offered one of the women my place and everyone shook their head "NO!"
"Tina!" "Tina!" I kept being called out by Alpha Hottie and my boss. They kept grabbing my arm and shaking their heads when I would walk towards the sideline.
We continued playing another two games but didn’t win again. Upon my fourth hour of volleyball, my precision wasn’t quite what it had been and so my serve sucked, hence no more cleanup rounds of serving from me.
Nevertheless, we played well, dug down deep and gave it a good try.
And now I hurt.
I hurt like the hurt to end all hurts.
I can’t wait for tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
LOST IN TRANSLATION
You know it was only a matter of time before I used that title for one of my entries, right? It’s not what you think though. I assure, at no point have I faux-hooked up with Bill Murray or become married to Spike Jonze’s doppelganger.
Instead, I was out with my Chinese Angel this evening for a fantastic dinner of soups. On Monday (11/27), my homesick-crankiness continued from Sunday evening, though it was lessened by the presence of my babies who tried really hard. Today was Tuesday and as my mother tells me, "There is a reason every job you will ever have will pay you." Tuesdays are the reason I get paid to be here. Tuesdays by and large suck ass. Fortunately, Tuesdays are very short. I have one hour of classes first thing in the morning with the Kindergarteners starting at 9-ish and then I have two classes in the middle school starting at 2:55pm.
When classes were over and my interest in teaching completely obliterated, I went to find my Chinese Angel. She too is having a bitch of her time with her job and we support each other in very realistic and maternalistic ways. We have similar interests and we teach each other our languages. She also is in possession of the urge to roll her eyes just a little too much for convention’s liking, loathes being in photos, has no problem maintaining her sense of self and loves to travel. So, we eat together quite regularly and it’s always a pleasure for me to be with her.
Tonight (11/28) we went to one of the restaurants nearby school for soups because I wanted soup desperately. Cold, blustery, overcast days demand soup and so that’s what we did. I had a sour soup with noodles, chives and sesame seeds. She had my favorite soup of tomato, egg and leek soup with noodles. We both shared, as a starter, the thick corn soup (consistency of egg-drop soup) with egg. (They like egg here, by the way. It’s in everything.)
The food was delicious. As I gobbled it all up, I am once again amazed at how much I can eat here and not just not put on weight, but lose it as well.
Once we left the restaurant, my Chinese Angel brought up my weight loss and, as she’s one of the few who possesses the subtlety to talk about it without declaring in the loudest voice possible how FAT I used to be and how SLIM I am, we talked about it. She asked how I did it and I told her I have no idea.
"I actually eat more in China than I do in the States but I just lose weight here."
"I guess you can say the Chinese diet is good for keeping fit."
"Yes, I think so. Or, maybe it was just lost in translation."
Once I explained to her what "lost in translation" means, she doubled over laughing.
As we were laughing there on the street, I heard a familiar, masculine, "Hello." Before I knew the voice rationally, I knew it in my knees. The sound made me want to peel off my glasses, wrap my arms protectively about the source of the voice, nuzzle my cold nose into the fabric-softner-scented body and lose myself in every sensation but sight. Everything about that sound begs to be snuggled.
I looked up and there was Alpha Hottie, smiling his broad smile and hand pulled out of his puffy parka to wave at me though he was not five feet from us. Alpha Hottie’s always rushing from place to place but he stopped dead in his tracks to say hello to me.
In my insomniatic crankiness on Monday, I hadn’t really looked for the opportunity to say hello to my boy and so we sort of missed each other. I had been feeling uber cranky Monday and figured the reason he’s not been more forward with me were all the reasons a Western boy would not be forward (primarily, "Thanks, but no thanks"). Frankly, that sort of thinking only feeds on itself, so in the inside of my head was confident he was not interested.
However, as he stood there smiling, my Chinese Angel studied him. The moment he saw her looking at him, he slipped behind the mask, nodded politely at her and continued on his way. She watched him scurry away, said, "So that’s him" and nodded. She then shot me an approving look and we continued on our stroll.
I guess some things are never lost in translation.
You know it was only a matter of time before I used that title for one of my entries, right? It’s not what you think though. I assure, at no point have I faux-hooked up with Bill Murray or become married to Spike Jonze’s doppelganger.
Instead, I was out with my Chinese Angel this evening for a fantastic dinner of soups. On Monday (11/27), my homesick-crankiness continued from Sunday evening, though it was lessened by the presence of my babies who tried really hard. Today was Tuesday and as my mother tells me, "There is a reason every job you will ever have will pay you." Tuesdays are the reason I get paid to be here. Tuesdays by and large suck ass. Fortunately, Tuesdays are very short. I have one hour of classes first thing in the morning with the Kindergarteners starting at 9-ish and then I have two classes in the middle school starting at 2:55pm.
When classes were over and my interest in teaching completely obliterated, I went to find my Chinese Angel. She too is having a bitch of her time with her job and we support each other in very realistic and maternalistic ways. We have similar interests and we teach each other our languages. She also is in possession of the urge to roll her eyes just a little too much for convention’s liking, loathes being in photos, has no problem maintaining her sense of self and loves to travel. So, we eat together quite regularly and it’s always a pleasure for me to be with her.
Tonight (11/28) we went to one of the restaurants nearby school for soups because I wanted soup desperately. Cold, blustery, overcast days demand soup and so that’s what we did. I had a sour soup with noodles, chives and sesame seeds. She had my favorite soup of tomato, egg and leek soup with noodles. We both shared, as a starter, the thick corn soup (consistency of egg-drop soup) with egg. (They like egg here, by the way. It’s in everything.)
The food was delicious. As I gobbled it all up, I am once again amazed at how much I can eat here and not just not put on weight, but lose it as well.
Once we left the restaurant, my Chinese Angel brought up my weight loss and, as she’s one of the few who possesses the subtlety to talk about it without declaring in the loudest voice possible how FAT I used to be and how SLIM I am, we talked about it. She asked how I did it and I told her I have no idea.
"I actually eat more in China than I do in the States but I just lose weight here."
"I guess you can say the Chinese diet is good for keeping fit."
"Yes, I think so. Or, maybe it was just lost in translation."
Once I explained to her what "lost in translation" means, she doubled over laughing.
As we were laughing there on the street, I heard a familiar, masculine, "Hello." Before I knew the voice rationally, I knew it in my knees. The sound made me want to peel off my glasses, wrap my arms protectively about the source of the voice, nuzzle my cold nose into the fabric-softner-scented body and lose myself in every sensation but sight. Everything about that sound begs to be snuggled.
I looked up and there was Alpha Hottie, smiling his broad smile and hand pulled out of his puffy parka to wave at me though he was not five feet from us. Alpha Hottie’s always rushing from place to place but he stopped dead in his tracks to say hello to me.
In my insomniatic crankiness on Monday, I hadn’t really looked for the opportunity to say hello to my boy and so we sort of missed each other. I had been feeling uber cranky Monday and figured the reason he’s not been more forward with me were all the reasons a Western boy would not be forward (primarily, "Thanks, but no thanks"). Frankly, that sort of thinking only feeds on itself, so in the inside of my head was confident he was not interested.
However, as he stood there smiling, my Chinese Angel studied him. The moment he saw her looking at him, he slipped behind the mask, nodded politely at her and continued on his way. She watched him scurry away, said, "So that’s him" and nodded. She then shot me an approving look and we continued on our stroll.
I guess some things are never lost in translation.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
HOMESICK
I think it is the plight of every 20-something to get pangs of homesickness around the holiday season. It’s not so much that you want to go home but that you’re still sorting out what your home is. Granted, 20-something or not, I doubt "home" ever feels as stable as it did when you were a toddler and the magic of holidays were imprinted upon you. However, the weather has finally turned cold enough for me to viscerally recognize the season as winter and I’ve seen enough blondes wrapped in velvet to trigger my rhythms into recognizing now (late November) as the holiday season.
I have this image of my "home" as the last Christmas my parents were together. It wasn’t a particularly happy time in our household; my mother was overextended (as always from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day) with the holidays and my father’s downward spiral and self-imposed alienation from our family was reaching epic proportions. All the crap aside, we had family in our house and we were all doing our best to be with each other. I remember flopping backwards over the arm of our couch in the living room and lying down to feel the heat of the glowing embers in the fireplace warm the right side of my cheek. The scent of citrus, spices, baking, roasting, cooking, expensive and spicy perfumes like Shalimar, fabric softener and fireplaces hung in the air. It was dusk and my mind was thick with afternoon sleepiness. The sound of Medieval music came through the stereo (always the sound of the holidays to me) and I swirled my dangling toe in time with the music. In the distance, I could hear all our relatives arguing about the finer points of musical theater in the dining room, my father’s keyboard clicking away and I remember thinking, "This is home."
And I miss home. I miss the smell of it. I miss the twinkle lights and the anxiety of preparation. I miss wood burning fireplaces. I miss the dysfunction of family. I miss cider and hot chocolate. I miss the frozen streets of New York as wind comes racing off the river, blows through the street and nearly knocks you into the avenue as you cross. I miss cold so strong it burns. I miss the sound of Jonathan Schwartz’s voice saying, "This is Sunday afternoon, 12 o’clock in the East and 9 o’clock in the West" as he then proceeds to give sports stats in a voice that lulls you to comfort. I miss trying not to slip on the ice in Chelsea as my friends and I stumble through to get to City Bakery for their obscene hot chocolate and marshmallow. I miss putting a bottle of whole cloves through the skin of an orange and then having that to sniff for days on end. I miss the random days off in order to get ready. I miss shopping with my friends for the perfect present for other friends. I really miss looking at the price tag and just paying what the price tag says.
I think most specifically, I miss being around boys I want to hug who want to hug me back. I am physical because I need physical. I really need physical now. I need boys who want to hug me. I love and miss my girls more than anything but I’m getting my regular fill of female contact and there is something about the scent of a man, being engulfed in that smell, those arms and knowing that he wants you there that just sets my mind at ease. It’s not really a sexual thing. When my dad used to hug me, it put me at ease. When my brothers hug me, it puts me at ease. When my gay boys hug me, it puts me at ease. No, it’s not a sexual thing. It’s a comfort thing. Hugs from boys make me safe and protected. Hugs from boys who want to hug me are all the more wonderful. They make my world okay.
My Eastern men would never dare to disrespect me with something so intimate as a hug. My Western men here are all of the European ilk and therefore go the sophisticated bisous route, in lieu of my preferred hug. A world without hugs from boys feels entirely too adult in all the wrong ways. It’s a constant reminder that I cannot have post-pubescent male contact without it being explicitly sexual. It feels worlds away from anything I understand as home.
So here I sit, 8 o’clock at night, classes tomorrow, work not done just feeling blue as the sound of WNYC’s Sunday Baroque echoes in my big, empty marble apartment. (I really should get a rug or something.) For the first time since my first week here, I find myself crying. I’m not bawling or gut-wrenching weeping, just crying at the thought of so many more months without a hug from a boy or any other traces of home.
I just want another moment where I can lay back and think, "This is home."
I think it is the plight of every 20-something to get pangs of homesickness around the holiday season. It’s not so much that you want to go home but that you’re still sorting out what your home is. Granted, 20-something or not, I doubt "home" ever feels as stable as it did when you were a toddler and the magic of holidays were imprinted upon you. However, the weather has finally turned cold enough for me to viscerally recognize the season as winter and I’ve seen enough blondes wrapped in velvet to trigger my rhythms into recognizing now (late November) as the holiday season.
I have this image of my "home" as the last Christmas my parents were together. It wasn’t a particularly happy time in our household; my mother was overextended (as always from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day) with the holidays and my father’s downward spiral and self-imposed alienation from our family was reaching epic proportions. All the crap aside, we had family in our house and we were all doing our best to be with each other. I remember flopping backwards over the arm of our couch in the living room and lying down to feel the heat of the glowing embers in the fireplace warm the right side of my cheek. The scent of citrus, spices, baking, roasting, cooking, expensive and spicy perfumes like Shalimar, fabric softener and fireplaces hung in the air. It was dusk and my mind was thick with afternoon sleepiness. The sound of Medieval music came through the stereo (always the sound of the holidays to me) and I swirled my dangling toe in time with the music. In the distance, I could hear all our relatives arguing about the finer points of musical theater in the dining room, my father’s keyboard clicking away and I remember thinking, "This is home."
And I miss home. I miss the smell of it. I miss the twinkle lights and the anxiety of preparation. I miss wood burning fireplaces. I miss the dysfunction of family. I miss cider and hot chocolate. I miss the frozen streets of New York as wind comes racing off the river, blows through the street and nearly knocks you into the avenue as you cross. I miss cold so strong it burns. I miss the sound of Jonathan Schwartz’s voice saying, "This is Sunday afternoon, 12 o’clock in the East and 9 o’clock in the West" as he then proceeds to give sports stats in a voice that lulls you to comfort. I miss trying not to slip on the ice in Chelsea as my friends and I stumble through to get to City Bakery for their obscene hot chocolate and marshmallow. I miss putting a bottle of whole cloves through the skin of an orange and then having that to sniff for days on end. I miss the random days off in order to get ready. I miss shopping with my friends for the perfect present for other friends. I really miss looking at the price tag and just paying what the price tag says.
I think most specifically, I miss being around boys I want to hug who want to hug me back. I am physical because I need physical. I really need physical now. I need boys who want to hug me. I love and miss my girls more than anything but I’m getting my regular fill of female contact and there is something about the scent of a man, being engulfed in that smell, those arms and knowing that he wants you there that just sets my mind at ease. It’s not really a sexual thing. When my dad used to hug me, it put me at ease. When my brothers hug me, it puts me at ease. When my gay boys hug me, it puts me at ease. No, it’s not a sexual thing. It’s a comfort thing. Hugs from boys make me safe and protected. Hugs from boys who want to hug me are all the more wonderful. They make my world okay.
My Eastern men would never dare to disrespect me with something so intimate as a hug. My Western men here are all of the European ilk and therefore go the sophisticated bisous route, in lieu of my preferred hug. A world without hugs from boys feels entirely too adult in all the wrong ways. It’s a constant reminder that I cannot have post-pubescent male contact without it being explicitly sexual. It feels worlds away from anything I understand as home.
So here I sit, 8 o’clock at night, classes tomorrow, work not done just feeling blue as the sound of WNYC’s Sunday Baroque echoes in my big, empty marble apartment. (I really should get a rug or something.) For the first time since my first week here, I find myself crying. I’m not bawling or gut-wrenching weeping, just crying at the thought of so many more months without a hug from a boy or any other traces of home.
I just want another moment where I can lay back and think, "This is home."
Saturday, November 25, 2006
WEST EGG
To be totally fair, I wouldn’t want to hang out with the vast majority of the foreign teachers in Xi’An. Just like the foreign students, they seem to come with a certain kind of opportunistic baggage in regards to the people here. Granted, the West Egg community is opportunistic as well but that is in regards to the resources here; the people are almost superfluous to their task at hand. Neither is ideal, but the West Egg community makes no bones about what they are whereas my peers do. We teachers seem to try to fool ourselves into thinking we’re saving the community from itself.
Regardless, West Egg has requested me back. Mere hours after the rather rude rejection email, I was called to go to Saturday brunch yesterday (11/25) with the West Egg community. I explained that I had received an email that requested I not attended functions as it would compromise the "integrity of the community" and I no longer felt welcome. A few phone calls were made and then I was called back explaining that it was not understood who I was and that there are "teachers and then there are teachers." Feeling nervous about it all but knowing there was no real way out of brunch without being rude, I accepted.
I went to the brunch with my Brazilian Angel and met up with the American/German couple in the lobby of a Shangri-la Hotel. Soon a lovely Englishman and his Taiwanese wife appeared. We wandered to the restaurant where the red carpet was rolled out and immediately we were swarmed by the chef, maitre-d’, hotel manager and countless other important hotel people eager to take care of our every whim. While we were busy being swarmed with complimentary this-that-and-the-other, the lovely Englishman pulled me aside and said, "I think it was you that I sent the rather rude email to."
"Yes, I think so," clear that the email I received was rude but aware that there has been more than one rude email on the planet and it was entirely possible he was speaking of another rude email.
"Yes, I’m sorry about that. You see, I receive many emails from all sorts of foreigners and the group had decided only to be businessmen in Xi’An." Yes, we were speaking of the same email. "If I had known it was you, if I had realized, well, you’re a special case. You’re not really… You’re already one of us." He businessman-sheepishly explained. And there it was again, the notion that has plagued/saved me my whole life; "the answer would be ‘NO!’ but you’re you." For whatever reason, I am always the exception to the rule. I don’t know why that is but it is. Most of the time, it is as fantastic as it might seem and on the whole I am infinitely grateful for it.
I shook my head and said, "Don’t worry about it." Frankly, if "you compromise our integrity" written by a completely anonymous stranger was even remotely close to the rudest thing ever been said to me, I’d be a lot thinner-skinned than I am.
The Englishman and I ended up sitting next to each other and having quite a good chat, though I should have asked him more questions about himself. We talked shop for a bit (he has a friend in film production and knows a staggering amount about the film industry in Xi'An) and then we talked about movies he’d seen recently. I then turned to talking with the women and he with the men and, at long last, we talked about all sorts of things besides shopping. Once we got off the topics where racism and colonialism could be injected, the ladies were a pleasure to speak with. They soon began to resemble the familiar, doting matriarchy I tend to socialize with in the US
We talked about art and life and politics and language. The women have all lived here longer than I and consequently are a wealth of information regarding access to things.
It was soon declared that I was the artist of the group and I gave the women taking painting classes the right to blow off the tedious "perspective" piece. I felt a bit like the "artist and her patrons" but that wasn’t a bad thing in this setting and I can most certainly pay my own way. We spoke in a multitude of languages and the men joked that I should work for the CIA with all the languages I can function in. I joked that, "Perhaps I already do."
We settled up the bill and headed out; me having turned a corner and starting to really like my foreigner friends.
Friday, November 24, 2006
GET STUFFED
Happy Thanksgiving!
This year, I am overcome with gratitude about my life. I have always felt lucky, always been grateful for my life and this year is no different.
I spent my Thanksgiving straddling my two worlds. My day was spent immersed in the hectic schedule of my classes and the evening was spent in the four-star Sheraton of Xi’An in the company of my brethren expatriates. My kids were ungodly unruly and my brethren were ungodly disassociated.
My kids were, well, my kids. Even though it was a holiday for me, it was just another day for them. They had varying levels of interest in what I was doing but at the end of the day, I had to stay an extra hour to listen to their newly installed oral exam for one of my classes. I quite liked it and my kids were very excited to have me there. When I walked into the massive room (the one I used with the same class for my open class in the middle school) all the kids swarmed me to say hello. Several of my kids told me how nervous they were and they all had questions about the exam. As I talked with the kids who approached me, other kids sitting on the far side of the room waved to me. I flashed them a "V" with my right hand to indicate I knew they were going to be victorious. It made them smile and they nodded back.
The oral exam was quick and just like the classes that I teach; they are given a topic, a little time to prepare and then asked to speak. Most of my babies did phenomenally well and I can’t wait to tell them how proud I am of them next week.
Once the exam was over, I raced home to get changed and await my Brazilian Angel’s phone call to go for the Thanksgiving party at the Sheraton in the South of Xi’An. She called just as I finished getting ready and we were off.
We got to the Sheraton just as our fellow expatriates were finishing the first course of their buffet dinner. The food was good, I think, but as it’s been several months since I’ve sat down for an honest to god Western meal, it’s hard to say for sure. I proceeded to stuff myself silly and drown myself in the company of "people like me."
There were three couples (my Brazilian Angel and le Francais, an Australian and his Spanish wife and the American and German team who hosted me for dinner previously), two single women (a woman from the Netherlands and myself), two men without wives present (the man from Bern and a fellow New Yorker who may or may not be married) and a Canadian woman whose husband was away. I’ve never seen so many glum, forcibly gay people in my life.
The conversation amongst the women boiled down to where to purchase the best things, the pitfalls of doing said purchasing and the best spas. I was one of two women with a full time job and neither my Dutch counterpart nor I said much during the dinner. My Brazilian Angel made mention of her part time job in passing but she immediately dismissed it as too bothersome, too banal with no pay and only for the "psychological relief." No one spoke of children or passion (outside of haggling over prices) or anything that gave back to the community. Whenever the conversation died down, the women all retreated into their space of sulking until the next conversation of purchasing name brand labels at wholesale prices came up. It was rather sad to me to see how proud the women were to elucidate just how much a mere adjunct to their husbands they are. The only deviation the conversation took from the minutia of a life I can’t relate to was to discuss how (with rolling eyes) the wives need to bribe their husbands to do things with sex.
And I was left to wonder, as I felt a bit like Nick Carraway surrounded by all this excess and frippery, how I would ever marry my two lives. Ultimately, I am Western and the party is what Xi’An knows of Westerners despite the fact that I am not the miserable counterparts who sulked there before me. I don't know how to rectify my two worlds without ostracizing one of them.
However, as I write this entry, it would appear my answer has materialized. The man in charge of organizing the email list replied to my contact (I was told to contact him to get on the list of updates) by telling me that "in order to maintain the integrity of the group" I am not welcome with in the e-list. My suspicions confirmed and my graceful exit offered; I shall no longer visit West Egg!
Happy Thanksgiving!
This year, I am overcome with gratitude about my life. I have always felt lucky, always been grateful for my life and this year is no different.
I spent my Thanksgiving straddling my two worlds. My day was spent immersed in the hectic schedule of my classes and the evening was spent in the four-star Sheraton of Xi’An in the company of my brethren expatriates. My kids were ungodly unruly and my brethren were ungodly disassociated.
My kids were, well, my kids. Even though it was a holiday for me, it was just another day for them. They had varying levels of interest in what I was doing but at the end of the day, I had to stay an extra hour to listen to their newly installed oral exam for one of my classes. I quite liked it and my kids were very excited to have me there. When I walked into the massive room (the one I used with the same class for my open class in the middle school) all the kids swarmed me to say hello. Several of my kids told me how nervous they were and they all had questions about the exam. As I talked with the kids who approached me, other kids sitting on the far side of the room waved to me. I flashed them a "V" with my right hand to indicate I knew they were going to be victorious. It made them smile and they nodded back.
The oral exam was quick and just like the classes that I teach; they are given a topic, a little time to prepare and then asked to speak. Most of my babies did phenomenally well and I can’t wait to tell them how proud I am of them next week.
Once the exam was over, I raced home to get changed and await my Brazilian Angel’s phone call to go for the Thanksgiving party at the Sheraton in the South of Xi’An. She called just as I finished getting ready and we were off.
We got to the Sheraton just as our fellow expatriates were finishing the first course of their buffet dinner. The food was good, I think, but as it’s been several months since I’ve sat down for an honest to god Western meal, it’s hard to say for sure. I proceeded to stuff myself silly and drown myself in the company of "people like me."
There were three couples (my Brazilian Angel and le Francais, an Australian and his Spanish wife and the American and German team who hosted me for dinner previously), two single women (a woman from the Netherlands and myself), two men without wives present (the man from Bern and a fellow New Yorker who may or may not be married) and a Canadian woman whose husband was away. I’ve never seen so many glum, forcibly gay people in my life.
The conversation amongst the women boiled down to where to purchase the best things, the pitfalls of doing said purchasing and the best spas. I was one of two women with a full time job and neither my Dutch counterpart nor I said much during the dinner. My Brazilian Angel made mention of her part time job in passing but she immediately dismissed it as too bothersome, too banal with no pay and only for the "psychological relief." No one spoke of children or passion (outside of haggling over prices) or anything that gave back to the community. Whenever the conversation died down, the women all retreated into their space of sulking until the next conversation of purchasing name brand labels at wholesale prices came up. It was rather sad to me to see how proud the women were to elucidate just how much a mere adjunct to their husbands they are. The only deviation the conversation took from the minutia of a life I can’t relate to was to discuss how (with rolling eyes) the wives need to bribe their husbands to do things with sex.
And I was left to wonder, as I felt a bit like Nick Carraway surrounded by all this excess and frippery, how I would ever marry my two lives. Ultimately, I am Western and the party is what Xi’An knows of Westerners despite the fact that I am not the miserable counterparts who sulked there before me. I don't know how to rectify my two worlds without ostracizing one of them.
However, as I write this entry, it would appear my answer has materialized. The man in charge of organizing the email list replied to my contact (I was told to contact him to get on the list of updates) by telling me that "in order to maintain the integrity of the group" I am not welcome with in the e-list. My suspicions confirmed and my graceful exit offered; I shall no longer visit West Egg!
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
PRECISION
I’m unclear exactly what it is that makes our vision precise. I’m not talking about 20/20 vision but seeing things we had not before. Considering the infinite quantity of visual information our cortex gets, what is it that filters some things out but not other things? And what is it that makes us filter the same image differently? For me, it has something to do with moods; I literally see the world differently depending on my mood. However, I don’t know what it is exactly; I just know what shifts it.
Alpha Hottie and I went for a stroll today (11/22) and he just looked different. It wasn’t just that he’s grown a little stubble on his chin but he looked decidedly different. Well, not different but more precise. In fact, he looked so precise, I found myself wondering who I had been looking at before.
Bless his heart, he’s more than willing to make the effort to speak to me in English because, "Wo meiyo poutugnhua" (I have no Mandarin). So, as we strolled, it became evident to me just how different he is.
Thus far, I’ve only really known married men and single men too nervous to treat me like a human being. Everyone has leapt at making me comfortable and/or treating me like a precious, fragile specimen. Alpha Hottie just is with me. It’s really nice.
He was clearly nervous about his English as he hasn’t really used it in a long time (dear god, were that I in possession of that man’s recall) but he wasn’t nervous about me. He was simply happy to see me and when we first bumped into each other, he asked if I would walk with him. After some serious arm-twisting on his part, I relented.
Today has been a lovely, gray, Pacific Northwest sort of drizzly day. It’s the sort of day that makes me comfy in my skin and talking with Alpha Hottie just added to the loveliness. Without the external distractions of others, we really had a chance to introduce ourselves and I like him even more than I did before.
His face has taken on such specificity that I am embarrassed by the brevity with which I must have been looking before. As he talked and said the occasional word in Chinese, I watched his mouth (helps me comprehend) and his chin seemed to have completely altered itself beneath his new scruff. His lips seem a darker shade of red. His eyes lit differently when speaking to me in English and his skin, dark from a job that keeps him outside most of the day, seemed to have more a cinnamon hue than a honey one. More than the beautiful creature I (and a lot of female primary school teachers) had been watching, he took on the distinct and full features of a man. At one point, I was almost overcome with the urge to kiss his cheek for his specific beauty.
While we talked about our backgrounds, I got to watch him and noticed that there was no time spent behind the mask that I could see. Whenever he couldn’t think of a word, his face would reflect either frustration or confusion. It was such a comfort to be with someone who is not only lovely enough to meet me in my language (which he has no practical need of in his life) in his country but who trusted me enough to let down his guard fully. By the end of our chat, he was even offering up personal information of his own volition. I quite liked it and am utterly smitten with his easy charm.
I’m unclear exactly what it is that makes our vision precise. I’m not talking about 20/20 vision but seeing things we had not before. Considering the infinite quantity of visual information our cortex gets, what is it that filters some things out but not other things? And what is it that makes us filter the same image differently? For me, it has something to do with moods; I literally see the world differently depending on my mood. However, I don’t know what it is exactly; I just know what shifts it.
Alpha Hottie and I went for a stroll today (11/22) and he just looked different. It wasn’t just that he’s grown a little stubble on his chin but he looked decidedly different. Well, not different but more precise. In fact, he looked so precise, I found myself wondering who I had been looking at before.
Bless his heart, he’s more than willing to make the effort to speak to me in English because, "Wo meiyo poutugnhua" (I have no Mandarin). So, as we strolled, it became evident to me just how different he is.
Thus far, I’ve only really known married men and single men too nervous to treat me like a human being. Everyone has leapt at making me comfortable and/or treating me like a precious, fragile specimen. Alpha Hottie just is with me. It’s really nice.
He was clearly nervous about his English as he hasn’t really used it in a long time (dear god, were that I in possession of that man’s recall) but he wasn’t nervous about me. He was simply happy to see me and when we first bumped into each other, he asked if I would walk with him. After some serious arm-twisting on his part, I relented.
Today has been a lovely, gray, Pacific Northwest sort of drizzly day. It’s the sort of day that makes me comfy in my skin and talking with Alpha Hottie just added to the loveliness. Without the external distractions of others, we really had a chance to introduce ourselves and I like him even more than I did before.
His face has taken on such specificity that I am embarrassed by the brevity with which I must have been looking before. As he talked and said the occasional word in Chinese, I watched his mouth (helps me comprehend) and his chin seemed to have completely altered itself beneath his new scruff. His lips seem a darker shade of red. His eyes lit differently when speaking to me in English and his skin, dark from a job that keeps him outside most of the day, seemed to have more a cinnamon hue than a honey one. More than the beautiful creature I (and a lot of female primary school teachers) had been watching, he took on the distinct and full features of a man. At one point, I was almost overcome with the urge to kiss his cheek for his specific beauty.
While we talked about our backgrounds, I got to watch him and noticed that there was no time spent behind the mask that I could see. Whenever he couldn’t think of a word, his face would reflect either frustration or confusion. It was such a comfort to be with someone who is not only lovely enough to meet me in my language (which he has no practical need of in his life) in his country but who trusted me enough to let down his guard fully. By the end of our chat, he was even offering up personal information of his own volition. I quite liked it and am utterly smitten with his easy charm.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
GLUTTONS FOR PUNISHMENT
I decided to test the waters of corporal punishment. Frankly, it’s what my students understand in terms of discipline and to be a truly independent teacher here, one needs to embrace it or forfeit their position as head of the classroom. I’ve been watching my coworkers closely when they punish the students and I’m feeling more comfortable with the lines. Granted, I have no intentions of pushing any lines or boundaries but it’s becoming clear to me with my naughty students I need more than just "Get out!" Remembering the story of the little duck Ping on the Yang Tse River from my childhood, I was inspired to try light swatting.
Having had my sorted past, I’m quite adept at hitting someone and make a loud noise without causing much pain (and vice versa). I decided on Friday (11/17) to start bringing a folded up map to class to swat the naughty students with. Folded up maps make a lot of noise for what little they hurt when you hit someone.
So, for the past few days (it’s Tuesday 11/21 evening) I’ve been swatting at the naughty students. It makes a loud noise, everyone gets jolted for a second and then the class laughs. I don’t do it out of rage or anger and I don’t yell at them about what bad students they are (like my coworkers do; I’m not comfortable with that AND I’ve been told that our school is quite "progressive" in terms of not hitting students) when I do it. I simply yell them to "Stop," "Be quiet," "Behave," or "Wake up!" I’m not worried about hurting them as they hit each other full-on for the ten minute break between each class and I pat my friends’ backs harder when I hug them hello.
They love it. I don’t get it but they love it. They stand up immediately after being swatted and give it their all. It’s fired them up.
Quiet students who used to nap during my class and insisted that they can’t speak English have been giddy and leap to say, "Hello!" as I pass in the hallway. The giddy bad boys who sit in the back of class who used to make eyes at me now line up and breathlessly say, "Hello teacher [insert the title of the last class’s lesson]" whenever I pass. And it’s really inspired them to try harder and pay attention in their class. Again, I don’t get it but it works and they love it.
I spoke to my Brazilian Angel about it and she said, "Of course it works. It’s quite sexy."
I think it’s fair to say I don’t get other people’s libidos.
I decided to test the waters of corporal punishment. Frankly, it’s what my students understand in terms of discipline and to be a truly independent teacher here, one needs to embrace it or forfeit their position as head of the classroom. I’ve been watching my coworkers closely when they punish the students and I’m feeling more comfortable with the lines. Granted, I have no intentions of pushing any lines or boundaries but it’s becoming clear to me with my naughty students I need more than just "Get out!" Remembering the story of the little duck Ping on the Yang Tse River from my childhood, I was inspired to try light swatting.
Having had my sorted past, I’m quite adept at hitting someone and make a loud noise without causing much pain (and vice versa). I decided on Friday (11/17) to start bringing a folded up map to class to swat the naughty students with. Folded up maps make a lot of noise for what little they hurt when you hit someone.
So, for the past few days (it’s Tuesday 11/21 evening) I’ve been swatting at the naughty students. It makes a loud noise, everyone gets jolted for a second and then the class laughs. I don’t do it out of rage or anger and I don’t yell at them about what bad students they are (like my coworkers do; I’m not comfortable with that AND I’ve been told that our school is quite "progressive" in terms of not hitting students) when I do it. I simply yell them to "Stop," "Be quiet," "Behave," or "Wake up!" I’m not worried about hurting them as they hit each other full-on for the ten minute break between each class and I pat my friends’ backs harder when I hug them hello.
They love it. I don’t get it but they love it. They stand up immediately after being swatted and give it their all. It’s fired them up.
Quiet students who used to nap during my class and insisted that they can’t speak English have been giddy and leap to say, "Hello!" as I pass in the hallway. The giddy bad boys who sit in the back of class who used to make eyes at me now line up and breathlessly say, "Hello teacher [insert the title of the last class’s lesson]" whenever I pass. And it’s really inspired them to try harder and pay attention in their class. Again, I don’t get it but it works and they love it.
I spoke to my Brazilian Angel about it and she said, "Of course it works. It’s quite sexy."
I think it’s fair to say I don’t get other people’s libidos.
Monday, November 20, 2006
THIS AND THAT
I think I’m supposed to talk about the wedding I went to on Saturday November 18th but it was a wedding. It was pretty standard as beautiful weddings go. I don’t really feel there’s much I can add to “The Bride was the most beautiful bride ever” and “The Groom looked like the luckiest man on the planet that he was.”
Granted, there were a few differences between a Western wedding and a Chinese wedding, none of which I saw but was told about. The first of which is that the groom pays for the wedding. The next is the ceremony itself. It begins in the morning when the groom pulls together a caravan of his friends and family to haul over the feast they’ve cooked for the bride’s family. While the groom is collecting his friends, family and food, the bride’s house is abuzz with activity too. Her home (her parent’s home; unmarried/divorced children live with their parents, regardless of age unless their careers take them away from their hometown) is filled with family, friends and children who prepare the home for the groom’s arrival. The children run about, hide the shoes the bride is to wear for the civil ceremony and then barricade the front door. When the groom’s caravan arrives, the groom must bribe the children to let his caravan into the house. He has the money tucked into a red envelope and gives it to the child who gets the door open.
Then, the caravan arrives, food in hand, and the groom and his men set about finding the bride’s shoes. If ever there were an appropriate metaphor for the kind of marriage I think I would have, it is “She’s lost her stuff again and he’s got to get it found.” Once the shoes are found (and the groomsmen properly paid for rendered services) the couple heads off in their caravan to the municipal building to get hitched. After the municipal stuff, the caravan arrives at the location of their reception where hundreds of guests await their arrival and the entertainment portion begins.
I was invited to the reception and it was lovely. In a room full of several hundred Chinese, I was the only foreigner there. I did not know the groom but the bride was my beautiful colleague. Consequently, everyone knew who I was by virtue of the fact that by simply making a New Yorker appear, she was infinitely more sophisticated. I knew I was in trouble when the groom’s father, happily sauced from all the toasting, stumbled by my table, took one look at me, got wide eyed and hollered, “Meigua ren!” Normally, the word used for a Westerner sounds like “”Lo-why.” In fact, once most people know that I’m American, they still call me “Lo-why.” To identify me by country is seen as a slightly more intimate and familiar; the first step to welcoming me into the fold. (After identifying me by country, the levels of intimacy following are “Miss Teacher” [in English] and then “Teacher” [in English] and finally some permutation of “Christina.” Ultimately, the most intimate is "Chris" and touching me. The men who are close with me are allowed to touch me when in private and the women are allowed to touch me in public.)
Within 20 minutes of my arrival, I had been singled out, hugged by everyone in the wedding party, toasted five times and pointed out to everyone. It was very sweet and very well intentioned but, as you may have noticed, I loathe being the center of attention especially when what’s going on has nothing to do with me. I was very happy sitting with my Chinese Angel, our colleagues and just hanging out, admiring how beautiful my beautiful colleague was in each of her multitude of costume changes. (The first dress she wears is her wedding dress. The next is a traditional Chinese gown; hers was snow-white with poppy flowers printed on it and a faux white fur wrap. The rest are a variety of party dresses.)
After we had been at the wedding for an hour, and I was in danger of being very drunk, my Chinese Angel had the good sense to pour me out of the building. We said our goodbyes, a few more “Meigua ren!”s were shouted and we were off.
From there, (the reception was held near the Bell Tower) my Chinese Angel walked me about to get some air until my head cleared and then we headed to the Big Goose Pagoda.
Frankly, I love the Big Goose Pagoda. It is tranquil and beautiful and everything you would hope a Buddhist sanctuary would be. Incense filled the air. Ancient chant was projected by one of the buildings in the compound.
And then there was an announcement in Chinese over the loudspeaker.
Around back from the pagoda (the front entrance to the pagoda faces South) is a massive (the largest in Asia) water fountain display (on the North side). They play music (a half hour’s worth of traditional Chinese music to Russian marches to Viennese waltzes) as the jets of water dance in time to the music. It is beautiful and apparently, even more so at night as they’ve got lights to go along with it too.
After the dancing water, we got dinner of pulled pork in thick flatbread and a huge bowl of dumpling soup. It was delicious and very spicy. Satiated and tired, my Chinese Angel poured me into a taxi and I headed home madly in love with my new country and my new Angel.
The next day, Sunday, is my usual day to tutor my handsome, nervous young student. My Brazilian Angel happened to be about (her computer is on the fritz and the least I can do is help her) checking her email. To my great pleasure, he managed to have an extended conversation with her even though he was clearly nervous. When we first met, he was unable to look me in the eye for being so nervous about his “lack of’ English. Now he’s having conversations with my friends.
With her presence, my student was definitely nervous and formal but once she left, it was really, really nice the way he loosened up. Nothing makes me happier than to know that my students who are raised with all these societal notions of who “I” am, who “they” are in respect to what “I” represent and the intimidating ideas said interaction implies are actually comfortable enough with me to let down their guard. As my student and I finished our lesson with an intense discussion about Islam, Muslim and the Muslim Quarter (he was having a hard time understanding that “Islam” is the religion and “Muslim” are the people though not “all people” are Muslim… to say nothing of the fact that all Muslims must speak Arabic to study the Koran. He has a Muslim friend and he had no idea his friend might speak Arabic.) we were both finished giddy.
Once he was gone, I met up with my Brazilian Angel and we both talked about how gorgeous my student is. It’s not just that he’s handsome as all get out and well dressed but that he has an honesty and earnestness that registers clearly on his face, making him all the more luminously beautiful. His eyes tell you more than his mouth ever could, Mandarin or English. She is unfazed by the age difference whereas I find it a pity that he’s too young and that I am too provincial to find the age difference a problem. Nevertheless, god never closes a door without opening a window, right?
My window appeared at long last, on Monday when Alpha Hottie made his reappearance at lunch. It had been a week since I had seen him at lunch. I tried to say hello to him but I couldn’t catch his eye (he was sitting at the table next to mine, facing me) which means either he’s got a serious case of the “shy” or he’s avoiding me. After about 5 minutes of glancing in his direction, I gave up on making eye contact to say “Hello” and I was promptly swarmed with emphatic students and my lunch mate.
I, being me, figured he had been avoiding me because, well, that’s what boys do with me. When my lunch mate asked what was going on with the two of us, I told her this. Bless her heart, she shook her head and said, “No.” My lunch mate then informed me that while I was with him on the motor scooter, he blushed while talking about me and that she thinks he going to be shy around me. “Simple words in English he might understand from me he might not understand from you because he is nervous.” She then glanced at him. “He is not shy but I think he is shy around you.”
Score one for the honkey! It looks like it’s time to break out my very worst Mandarin to help someone feel more comfortable.
I think I’m supposed to talk about the wedding I went to on Saturday November 18th but it was a wedding. It was pretty standard as beautiful weddings go. I don’t really feel there’s much I can add to “The Bride was the most beautiful bride ever” and “The Groom looked like the luckiest man on the planet that he was.”
Granted, there were a few differences between a Western wedding and a Chinese wedding, none of which I saw but was told about. The first of which is that the groom pays for the wedding. The next is the ceremony itself. It begins in the morning when the groom pulls together a caravan of his friends and family to haul over the feast they’ve cooked for the bride’s family. While the groom is collecting his friends, family and food, the bride’s house is abuzz with activity too. Her home (her parent’s home; unmarried/divorced children live with their parents, regardless of age unless their careers take them away from their hometown) is filled with family, friends and children who prepare the home for the groom’s arrival. The children run about, hide the shoes the bride is to wear for the civil ceremony and then barricade the front door. When the groom’s caravan arrives, the groom must bribe the children to let his caravan into the house. He has the money tucked into a red envelope and gives it to the child who gets the door open.
Then, the caravan arrives, food in hand, and the groom and his men set about finding the bride’s shoes. If ever there were an appropriate metaphor for the kind of marriage I think I would have, it is “She’s lost her stuff again and he’s got to get it found.” Once the shoes are found (and the groomsmen properly paid for rendered services) the couple heads off in their caravan to the municipal building to get hitched. After the municipal stuff, the caravan arrives at the location of their reception where hundreds of guests await their arrival and the entertainment portion begins.
I was invited to the reception and it was lovely. In a room full of several hundred Chinese, I was the only foreigner there. I did not know the groom but the bride was my beautiful colleague. Consequently, everyone knew who I was by virtue of the fact that by simply making a New Yorker appear, she was infinitely more sophisticated. I knew I was in trouble when the groom’s father, happily sauced from all the toasting, stumbled by my table, took one look at me, got wide eyed and hollered, “Meigua ren!” Normally, the word used for a Westerner sounds like “”Lo-why.” In fact, once most people know that I’m American, they still call me “Lo-why.” To identify me by country is seen as a slightly more intimate and familiar; the first step to welcoming me into the fold. (After identifying me by country, the levels of intimacy following are “Miss Teacher” [in English] and then “Teacher” [in English] and finally some permutation of “Christina.” Ultimately, the most intimate is "Chris" and touching me. The men who are close with me are allowed to touch me when in private and the women are allowed to touch me in public.)
Within 20 minutes of my arrival, I had been singled out, hugged by everyone in the wedding party, toasted five times and pointed out to everyone. It was very sweet and very well intentioned but, as you may have noticed, I loathe being the center of attention especially when what’s going on has nothing to do with me. I was very happy sitting with my Chinese Angel, our colleagues and just hanging out, admiring how beautiful my beautiful colleague was in each of her multitude of costume changes. (The first dress she wears is her wedding dress. The next is a traditional Chinese gown; hers was snow-white with poppy flowers printed on it and a faux white fur wrap. The rest are a variety of party dresses.)
After we had been at the wedding for an hour, and I was in danger of being very drunk, my Chinese Angel had the good sense to pour me out of the building. We said our goodbyes, a few more “Meigua ren!”s were shouted and we were off.
From there, (the reception was held near the Bell Tower) my Chinese Angel walked me about to get some air until my head cleared and then we headed to the Big Goose Pagoda.
Frankly, I love the Big Goose Pagoda. It is tranquil and beautiful and everything you would hope a Buddhist sanctuary would be. Incense filled the air. Ancient chant was projected by one of the buildings in the compound.
And then there was an announcement in Chinese over the loudspeaker.
Around back from the pagoda (the front entrance to the pagoda faces South) is a massive (the largest in Asia) water fountain display (on the North side). They play music (a half hour’s worth of traditional Chinese music to Russian marches to Viennese waltzes) as the jets of water dance in time to the music. It is beautiful and apparently, even more so at night as they’ve got lights to go along with it too.
After the dancing water, we got dinner of pulled pork in thick flatbread and a huge bowl of dumpling soup. It was delicious and very spicy. Satiated and tired, my Chinese Angel poured me into a taxi and I headed home madly in love with my new country and my new Angel.
The next day, Sunday, is my usual day to tutor my handsome, nervous young student. My Brazilian Angel happened to be about (her computer is on the fritz and the least I can do is help her) checking her email. To my great pleasure, he managed to have an extended conversation with her even though he was clearly nervous. When we first met, he was unable to look me in the eye for being so nervous about his “lack of’ English. Now he’s having conversations with my friends.
With her presence, my student was definitely nervous and formal but once she left, it was really, really nice the way he loosened up. Nothing makes me happier than to know that my students who are raised with all these societal notions of who “I” am, who “they” are in respect to what “I” represent and the intimidating ideas said interaction implies are actually comfortable enough with me to let down their guard. As my student and I finished our lesson with an intense discussion about Islam, Muslim and the Muslim Quarter (he was having a hard time understanding that “Islam” is the religion and “Muslim” are the people though not “all people” are Muslim… to say nothing of the fact that all Muslims must speak Arabic to study the Koran. He has a Muslim friend and he had no idea his friend might speak Arabic.) we were both finished giddy.
Once he was gone, I met up with my Brazilian Angel and we both talked about how gorgeous my student is. It’s not just that he’s handsome as all get out and well dressed but that he has an honesty and earnestness that registers clearly on his face, making him all the more luminously beautiful. His eyes tell you more than his mouth ever could, Mandarin or English. She is unfazed by the age difference whereas I find it a pity that he’s too young and that I am too provincial to find the age difference a problem. Nevertheless, god never closes a door without opening a window, right?
My window appeared at long last, on Monday when Alpha Hottie made his reappearance at lunch. It had been a week since I had seen him at lunch. I tried to say hello to him but I couldn’t catch his eye (he was sitting at the table next to mine, facing me) which means either he’s got a serious case of the “shy” or he’s avoiding me. After about 5 minutes of glancing in his direction, I gave up on making eye contact to say “Hello” and I was promptly swarmed with emphatic students and my lunch mate.
I, being me, figured he had been avoiding me because, well, that’s what boys do with me. When my lunch mate asked what was going on with the two of us, I told her this. Bless her heart, she shook her head and said, “No.” My lunch mate then informed me that while I was with him on the motor scooter, he blushed while talking about me and that she thinks he going to be shy around me. “Simple words in English he might understand from me he might not understand from you because he is nervous.” She then glanced at him. “He is not shy but I think he is shy around you.”
Score one for the honkey! It looks like it’s time to break out my very worst Mandarin to help someone feel more comfortable.
Friday, November 17, 2006
I HEAR THERE’S TROUBLE IN SHANGRI-LA
My wealthy compound is in the North East and is built to attract wealthy Asian businessmen from around the globe. The sanitized South has a reciprocal compound being built to attract wealthy Western businessmen.
Both compounds are wealthy beyond reason but mine is distinctly Chinese with its garishly extravagant (and I find ugly) Bauhaus architecture and surrounding authentic Chinese venues while the Southern one is distinctly New Money European with its columns, classical statue reproductions and surrounding Disney-fied tourist attractions. There is no question by anyone living in either of these compounds that they are fortunate beyond compare… well, perhaps except the errant angst riddled teen.
I was invited for dinner at a lovely couple’s home last night (11/14). My Brazilian Angel has made friends with the American wife of the couple and another European gentleman from my father’s family’s hometown of Bern, who happens to currently live in my compound.
The lovely couple (she is American and he is European) was truly lovely. Their home is lovely (a house with several, beautiful, spacious stories) and adorned with things from their travels all over the world. His job has moved them to every country on the “Must See” list of international travel. Her job is teaching English and she knows how to find all the best resources money can buy. Their relationship has the ease, comfort and familiarity of a decade of loving compromise, hard work and being each other’s touchstone. Their beautiful dogs are well-trained, loving and large breeds (in China, if families have a pet dog, it’s never larger than a teacup breed of any sort). The lovely couple has the kind of relationship and life I used to envy and it wasn’t until last night that I realized that I no longer recognize that part of myself. It was very strange and I’m still mourning the loss of that piece of myself but I don’t know that, in the end, I’ll miss it.
In my choice to have as authentic an experience afforded a six-foot-plus white girl in China, I found a real community with real friends, real politics and, well, reality. For all its idiosyncrasies and real-life-issues, it is a home for me. There is a specificity for me here. I find comfort in my Chinese friends who protect me as best as they know how, I have found clumsy steps towards romance with two of the men and I find respite in the two men charged with caring for me. I am surrounded by a community of people who do their best to understand me with what they’ve got, do everything in their power to provide me what I need and act with the best of intentions; you cannot ask for more than that in this world. The Chinese, for my newfound Western friends, are simply job titles and career roadblocks. The Chinese women boil down to “Maid” and “High Powered Official.” The Chinese men boil down to “Driver” and opaque moneygrubbers or “China Businessmen.” China is literally nothing but a European ghetto sprinkled with some good tourist sites and shopping. I find it very strange and am left to wonder why one would come to China to, at best, avoid it.
Our drive South on the Xi’An beltway to the other compound took over an extra hour (it normally takes 20 minutes) because, well, frankly, don’t try getting ANYWHERE in Xi’An between 6 and 7. It won’t happen. We left at 6 just as the rush to go out to dinner begins in Xi’An. (In Xi’An, everyone eats out at the very least 3 times a week, the bus system is over-crowded and there is no subway system consequently everyone drives to their destination.) So, in the car it was my Brazilian Angel, the gentleman from Bern, the Chinese driver and myself.
Practically speaking, it simply makes sense to hire a driver if you must drive regularly when you live abroad. In some countries, all drivers in car accidents are placed in jail until the months-long process of settling the “People’s” case against the drivers is concluded. In other countries, drivers simply disappear. In other countries, there are the routes to keep you alive, the routes that will put you in the hands of people looking for something to ransom and it helps to have someone who can discern the difference. When the whatever hits the whatever, you want someone who knows the geography, the language and the politics intimately. The Bern gentleman told me stories of the practicalities of living with Chauchesko and surviving revolutions in the developing nations in which he lived only to return a few months later in an attempt to salvage the unsalvageable. Essentially, as a high profile businessman representing an even higher profile company, it is only safe to have an extra, in-the-know presence when out in public. In fact, China is one of the few places where he has worked in the numerous decades he’s been abroad where he felt he didn’t need full-time security.
All this drama aside, the in-the-know presence is still a human being and I was mortified by my fellow Westerner’s constant discussion of his harsh and myopic knowledge of “the Chinese.” At full volume, he discussed how “disgusting,” “crude” and “vulgar” they can be. He then commented that, perhaps, “in a few generations,” the Chinese might be more “civilized.” While I admit I was thinking the same words and evolutionary thoughts, the Chinese had nothing to do with said words and thoughts. Being a precious, fiscal resource to a company does not a learned diplomat make. Needless to say, I had a hard time making conversation in the car, as, under the guise of “polite conversation,” I have nothing to add to, “The Chinese are a disgusting and dirty people.” All I could think was of the Chinese guy who was silently driving us having to drive this loud, myopic man everyday. No job is worth that bullshit.
When we finally arrived at the house in the compound in the South, we got stuck at the gate because, apparently, the guard was not prepared for us. While that sort of thing is a pain in the ass, it is not an issue specific to China; try getting into the Dakota to just poke around. The driver was attempting to sort it out when the man from Bern leans over and starts shouting in English, “Go, make a call. Go! Make a call! Go!” I must admit, the dismissive waving of the hand was an extra lovely touch.
The English yelling, of course, made the Chinese guard stop and look at the yeller from behind the mask to see if he could sort out any of the words. Sitting behind the driver I could see that the driver didn’t even miss a beat as he continued to talk at the guard in Chinese. The only thing that mortified me more than the scene we were making was the fact that the driver was accustomed to said types of scenes.
Finally, the gates were opened and a line of guards led the car to the lovely house. In that moment, I think I finally understood viscerally why it is that developing nations envy Western money. Western money gives the power of unparalleled physical comfort with the ability to be dismissive and blasÈ about it. It simply appears to be a birthright. I always knew that but this was the first moment in which I understood it. For the first time, I saw my world from the outside and I got it.
We pulled up to the house and as I reached to get the flowers resting on the floor of the very clean van, the driver leapt out and rushed to open my door. I thanked him and wished him a good night in Chinese. For the first time, the stone-faced man broke into a warm smile and reciprocated my sentiments. I then said a little prayer that he was unable to understand the bulk of what his boss says, despite the fact that I think that prayer was in vain. Nothing unsettles me more than thinking that my babies at school have careers full of such vulgarity and racism ahead of them. My babies did nothing wrong. In fact, they are helpful, kind and generous to a fault and it upsets me to no end that someday, they will understand the brutalities of the world. In moments like those, I realize why “knowledge” is the true fall from grace.
And there I was, standing with my Brazilian Angel and the man from Bern. The Nouveau-Renaissance influenced house complete with mosaic water fountain (in a desert city) and glass walled house (in a city crunched for power) stood before me in a stunning display of Baroque, disposable income akin to a storage room full of Thomas Kinkade paintings. I had a brief flash of learning in Middle School that the Robber Barons lit their cigars with hundred dollar bills.
I must admit, a childhood spent amongst the wealthiest of the wealthy, an education from the top economic and academic spheres and a professional career that has afforded me access to some of the most exclusive places with the most exclusive people has rendered me somewhat weary of such nouveau shows of money. I am cautious of anything that tries too hard to prove itself rich (because it never stops once my pedigree is revealed) and I had the sinking feeling we were entering the realm of new money.
While it was somewhat true that we were entering the realm of new money, my hosts for the evening quite lacked the stench of it. They were incredibly gracious and unbelievably kind. I very much enjoyed their company but I knew that inside that house there would be no mention of my China. All night I kept glancing at and fidgeting with the steel ring with the small piece of violet glass that one of my babies gave me and only fits on my left ring finger as a reminder that my China was still out there, somewhere, awaiting my return.
I must admit, I was perplexed by the party’s apparent distaste for China. While in China, they only frequent French or American eateries and shop for groceries only in European markets. Now, I’m the first to admit that I need a few staples from the West (hello bread and salted butter!) but the bulk of my life in China is (highly privileged) Chinese. I slowly began to realize that the incredible warmth extended to me was not “to me” but to what I represent; ironically the exact opposite of my current situation with my Chinese friends. As a professional (read: not student here on daddy’s money) “foreigner” in China, the presumption was that I was experiencing the same difficulties, trials and tribulations that they were with the uncouth Chinese. As a “New Yorker” in China with my pedigree (that always proceeds me), it was presumed that I would be the truly erudite commentator on said suffering. “Foreigners” in China really stick together in a way they don’t in the West. Try speaking English in Paris and spitting on you is too good. Speak English to a Parisian here and they’ll hug you. The Swiss Germans find me to be a philistine with my Swiss German heritage. In China, mention your father’s family is from Bern and suddenly you’re long lost cousins.
Amongst the foreign community, English is embraced as the language of the civilized and even fellow countrymen not of Anglo countries speak English to each other. Parisian French is embraced as the language of the sophisticated civilized and spoken amongst those who have proven themselves capable of English as a way to discuss the romantic elements of life. Having attended classes at the Sorbonne, I am one of the few trusted with the subtleties of translating the notions of French-speakers’ with limited English into English. Everyone is jealous of those who speak Parisian French and their inherent, cultured backgrounds. Regardless of where we have lived, we have all been members of an Alliance Francaise at one time or another. For some of us, it stuck, for others it did not. Canadian and Swiss French are merely joked about as bastard children of Parisian French and if anyone speaks either Canadian or Swiss, they do not admit to it. German is the language of business and spoken amongst the men, despite the reprimands of their wives. German is considered practical but too crude for dinner parties. Spanish is considered an extra talent; like being able to split a check and sort out tip. Portuguese is considered a thing of superfluous beauty; like a Fabrige Egg. My rudimentary Welsh, Hungarian and Arabic simply reinforce the concept laid by my capacity for French. Chinese is merely mentioned from time to time as a strange language that has taken Western language noises and turned them into the most “silly” of words or phrases. I guess we shall let them eat cake, non? (And yes, I know she probably did not say, “Let them eat cake.”)
My American hostess clearly has the same issues as I do with America and subsequent baffling foreign policy but I was unable to figure out exactly what country she’d prefer. I am unable to make peace with America for what she has inflicted upon people I love, not because it’s hip to hate the establishment. I am willing to accept alternatives and am fascinated by exploring other options. However, I was unable to sense any real openness on her part towards other options. Most perplexing of all was how much she felt like a belated echo; you recognize it as your own but it was something you never thought you’d see again. It was truly bizarre but I couldn’t quite figure out why I was so unsettled by her.
And then I put my finger on it.
Though many years my senior, she was precisely where I had been in college. If I had coupled with the hypothetical guy I concocted in my head in college, I would have remained in the place where she is. Frankly, it was the most unsettling feeling I had felt in a while. It upset me so much that I got no sleep last night. I saw her there with her comfort and her money and her dogs and her husband and it was all lovely but it is all clearly a bubble. She studies art and life and beauty but never engages the countries she lives in beyond the good shopping. Hell, she’s never even taken a bus much less lived without a driver for most of her adult life. I immediately recognized her ability to host a party and maintain the light banter just a little too well as a former forte of mine.
And I don’t begrudge her those things, I am just entirely unsettled by what a near miss that was for me. I love my “uncivilized” little babies and my maid-free messy home. I love my friends who speak this funny language and expand my world in ways and with a kindness I never thought possible. For whatever monies I lack, there is passion, affection, love and life in my world. I am engaged in my community. I am not plagued by loneliness. I feel like, as much as I may lack and as short as I may fall, I still was able to move to the other side of the planet because passion drove me to it and find a home. I gave it all up back home and was still able to find a little piece of the world where I can just be me… nothing imported.
What I fear is that my voice is not the voice of the “Foreign” experience in China. Theirs is.
My wealthy compound is in the North East and is built to attract wealthy Asian businessmen from around the globe. The sanitized South has a reciprocal compound being built to attract wealthy Western businessmen.
Both compounds are wealthy beyond reason but mine is distinctly Chinese with its garishly extravagant (and I find ugly) Bauhaus architecture and surrounding authentic Chinese venues while the Southern one is distinctly New Money European with its columns, classical statue reproductions and surrounding Disney-fied tourist attractions. There is no question by anyone living in either of these compounds that they are fortunate beyond compare… well, perhaps except the errant angst riddled teen.
I was invited for dinner at a lovely couple’s home last night (11/14). My Brazilian Angel has made friends with the American wife of the couple and another European gentleman from my father’s family’s hometown of Bern, who happens to currently live in my compound.
The lovely couple (she is American and he is European) was truly lovely. Their home is lovely (a house with several, beautiful, spacious stories) and adorned with things from their travels all over the world. His job has moved them to every country on the “Must See” list of international travel. Her job is teaching English and she knows how to find all the best resources money can buy. Their relationship has the ease, comfort and familiarity of a decade of loving compromise, hard work and being each other’s touchstone. Their beautiful dogs are well-trained, loving and large breeds (in China, if families have a pet dog, it’s never larger than a teacup breed of any sort). The lovely couple has the kind of relationship and life I used to envy and it wasn’t until last night that I realized that I no longer recognize that part of myself. It was very strange and I’m still mourning the loss of that piece of myself but I don’t know that, in the end, I’ll miss it.
In my choice to have as authentic an experience afforded a six-foot-plus white girl in China, I found a real community with real friends, real politics and, well, reality. For all its idiosyncrasies and real-life-issues, it is a home for me. There is a specificity for me here. I find comfort in my Chinese friends who protect me as best as they know how, I have found clumsy steps towards romance with two of the men and I find respite in the two men charged with caring for me. I am surrounded by a community of people who do their best to understand me with what they’ve got, do everything in their power to provide me what I need and act with the best of intentions; you cannot ask for more than that in this world. The Chinese, for my newfound Western friends, are simply job titles and career roadblocks. The Chinese women boil down to “Maid” and “High Powered Official.” The Chinese men boil down to “Driver” and opaque moneygrubbers or “China Businessmen.” China is literally nothing but a European ghetto sprinkled with some good tourist sites and shopping. I find it very strange and am left to wonder why one would come to China to, at best, avoid it.
Our drive South on the Xi’An beltway to the other compound took over an extra hour (it normally takes 20 minutes) because, well, frankly, don’t try getting ANYWHERE in Xi’An between 6 and 7. It won’t happen. We left at 6 just as the rush to go out to dinner begins in Xi’An. (In Xi’An, everyone eats out at the very least 3 times a week, the bus system is over-crowded and there is no subway system consequently everyone drives to their destination.) So, in the car it was my Brazilian Angel, the gentleman from Bern, the Chinese driver and myself.
Practically speaking, it simply makes sense to hire a driver if you must drive regularly when you live abroad. In some countries, all drivers in car accidents are placed in jail until the months-long process of settling the “People’s” case against the drivers is concluded. In other countries, drivers simply disappear. In other countries, there are the routes to keep you alive, the routes that will put you in the hands of people looking for something to ransom and it helps to have someone who can discern the difference. When the whatever hits the whatever, you want someone who knows the geography, the language and the politics intimately. The Bern gentleman told me stories of the practicalities of living with Chauchesko and surviving revolutions in the developing nations in which he lived only to return a few months later in an attempt to salvage the unsalvageable. Essentially, as a high profile businessman representing an even higher profile company, it is only safe to have an extra, in-the-know presence when out in public. In fact, China is one of the few places where he has worked in the numerous decades he’s been abroad where he felt he didn’t need full-time security.
All this drama aside, the in-the-know presence is still a human being and I was mortified by my fellow Westerner’s constant discussion of his harsh and myopic knowledge of “the Chinese.” At full volume, he discussed how “disgusting,” “crude” and “vulgar” they can be. He then commented that, perhaps, “in a few generations,” the Chinese might be more “civilized.” While I admit I was thinking the same words and evolutionary thoughts, the Chinese had nothing to do with said words and thoughts. Being a precious, fiscal resource to a company does not a learned diplomat make. Needless to say, I had a hard time making conversation in the car, as, under the guise of “polite conversation,” I have nothing to add to, “The Chinese are a disgusting and dirty people.” All I could think was of the Chinese guy who was silently driving us having to drive this loud, myopic man everyday. No job is worth that bullshit.
When we finally arrived at the house in the compound in the South, we got stuck at the gate because, apparently, the guard was not prepared for us. While that sort of thing is a pain in the ass, it is not an issue specific to China; try getting into the Dakota to just poke around. The driver was attempting to sort it out when the man from Bern leans over and starts shouting in English, “Go, make a call. Go! Make a call! Go!” I must admit, the dismissive waving of the hand was an extra lovely touch.
The English yelling, of course, made the Chinese guard stop and look at the yeller from behind the mask to see if he could sort out any of the words. Sitting behind the driver I could see that the driver didn’t even miss a beat as he continued to talk at the guard in Chinese. The only thing that mortified me more than the scene we were making was the fact that the driver was accustomed to said types of scenes.
Finally, the gates were opened and a line of guards led the car to the lovely house. In that moment, I think I finally understood viscerally why it is that developing nations envy Western money. Western money gives the power of unparalleled physical comfort with the ability to be dismissive and blasÈ about it. It simply appears to be a birthright. I always knew that but this was the first moment in which I understood it. For the first time, I saw my world from the outside and I got it.
We pulled up to the house and as I reached to get the flowers resting on the floor of the very clean van, the driver leapt out and rushed to open my door. I thanked him and wished him a good night in Chinese. For the first time, the stone-faced man broke into a warm smile and reciprocated my sentiments. I then said a little prayer that he was unable to understand the bulk of what his boss says, despite the fact that I think that prayer was in vain. Nothing unsettles me more than thinking that my babies at school have careers full of such vulgarity and racism ahead of them. My babies did nothing wrong. In fact, they are helpful, kind and generous to a fault and it upsets me to no end that someday, they will understand the brutalities of the world. In moments like those, I realize why “knowledge” is the true fall from grace.
And there I was, standing with my Brazilian Angel and the man from Bern. The Nouveau-Renaissance influenced house complete with mosaic water fountain (in a desert city) and glass walled house (in a city crunched for power) stood before me in a stunning display of Baroque, disposable income akin to a storage room full of Thomas Kinkade paintings. I had a brief flash of learning in Middle School that the Robber Barons lit their cigars with hundred dollar bills.
I must admit, a childhood spent amongst the wealthiest of the wealthy, an education from the top economic and academic spheres and a professional career that has afforded me access to some of the most exclusive places with the most exclusive people has rendered me somewhat weary of such nouveau shows of money. I am cautious of anything that tries too hard to prove itself rich (because it never stops once my pedigree is revealed) and I had the sinking feeling we were entering the realm of new money.
While it was somewhat true that we were entering the realm of new money, my hosts for the evening quite lacked the stench of it. They were incredibly gracious and unbelievably kind. I very much enjoyed their company but I knew that inside that house there would be no mention of my China. All night I kept glancing at and fidgeting with the steel ring with the small piece of violet glass that one of my babies gave me and only fits on my left ring finger as a reminder that my China was still out there, somewhere, awaiting my return.
I must admit, I was perplexed by the party’s apparent distaste for China. While in China, they only frequent French or American eateries and shop for groceries only in European markets. Now, I’m the first to admit that I need a few staples from the West (hello bread and salted butter!) but the bulk of my life in China is (highly privileged) Chinese. I slowly began to realize that the incredible warmth extended to me was not “to me” but to what I represent; ironically the exact opposite of my current situation with my Chinese friends. As a professional (read: not student here on daddy’s money) “foreigner” in China, the presumption was that I was experiencing the same difficulties, trials and tribulations that they were with the uncouth Chinese. As a “New Yorker” in China with my pedigree (that always proceeds me), it was presumed that I would be the truly erudite commentator on said suffering. “Foreigners” in China really stick together in a way they don’t in the West. Try speaking English in Paris and spitting on you is too good. Speak English to a Parisian here and they’ll hug you. The Swiss Germans find me to be a philistine with my Swiss German heritage. In China, mention your father’s family is from Bern and suddenly you’re long lost cousins.
Amongst the foreign community, English is embraced as the language of the civilized and even fellow countrymen not of Anglo countries speak English to each other. Parisian French is embraced as the language of the sophisticated civilized and spoken amongst those who have proven themselves capable of English as a way to discuss the romantic elements of life. Having attended classes at the Sorbonne, I am one of the few trusted with the subtleties of translating the notions of French-speakers’ with limited English into English. Everyone is jealous of those who speak Parisian French and their inherent, cultured backgrounds. Regardless of where we have lived, we have all been members of an Alliance Francaise at one time or another. For some of us, it stuck, for others it did not. Canadian and Swiss French are merely joked about as bastard children of Parisian French and if anyone speaks either Canadian or Swiss, they do not admit to it. German is the language of business and spoken amongst the men, despite the reprimands of their wives. German is considered practical but too crude for dinner parties. Spanish is considered an extra talent; like being able to split a check and sort out tip. Portuguese is considered a thing of superfluous beauty; like a Fabrige Egg. My rudimentary Welsh, Hungarian and Arabic simply reinforce the concept laid by my capacity for French. Chinese is merely mentioned from time to time as a strange language that has taken Western language noises and turned them into the most “silly” of words or phrases. I guess we shall let them eat cake, non? (And yes, I know she probably did not say, “Let them eat cake.”)
My American hostess clearly has the same issues as I do with America and subsequent baffling foreign policy but I was unable to figure out exactly what country she’d prefer. I am unable to make peace with America for what she has inflicted upon people I love, not because it’s hip to hate the establishment. I am willing to accept alternatives and am fascinated by exploring other options. However, I was unable to sense any real openness on her part towards other options. Most perplexing of all was how much she felt like a belated echo; you recognize it as your own but it was something you never thought you’d see again. It was truly bizarre but I couldn’t quite figure out why I was so unsettled by her.
And then I put my finger on it.
Though many years my senior, she was precisely where I had been in college. If I had coupled with the hypothetical guy I concocted in my head in college, I would have remained in the place where she is. Frankly, it was the most unsettling feeling I had felt in a while. It upset me so much that I got no sleep last night. I saw her there with her comfort and her money and her dogs and her husband and it was all lovely but it is all clearly a bubble. She studies art and life and beauty but never engages the countries she lives in beyond the good shopping. Hell, she’s never even taken a bus much less lived without a driver for most of her adult life. I immediately recognized her ability to host a party and maintain the light banter just a little too well as a former forte of mine.
And I don’t begrudge her those things, I am just entirely unsettled by what a near miss that was for me. I love my “uncivilized” little babies and my maid-free messy home. I love my friends who speak this funny language and expand my world in ways and with a kindness I never thought possible. For whatever monies I lack, there is passion, affection, love and life in my world. I am engaged in my community. I am not plagued by loneliness. I feel like, as much as I may lack and as short as I may fall, I still was able to move to the other side of the planet because passion drove me to it and find a home. I gave it all up back home and was still able to find a little piece of the world where I can just be me… nothing imported.
What I fear is that my voice is not the voice of the “Foreign” experience in China. Theirs is.
TEE HEE
My lunch mate realized that I was interested not in the gym teacher she was thinking of but, in fact, the hottie we all know and love as Alpha Hottie. Even Ms. Formerly Of The He’s-not-my-cup-of-tea said, “Oh, him. I think he’s handsome. I thought you meant another teacher.” The man is universally hot. That’s all I’m saying.
Consequently, she took it upon herself to convince him to give me a ride on the back of his motor scooter in lieu of our (lunch mate and I) regular stroll from the primary to the middle school after lunch today (11/13).
Normally, I wait at the front of the school while my lunch mate fetches her bike but today, Alpha Hottie happened to be leaving at the same time we were. My lunch mate and Alpha Hottie disappeared behind the school to where they keep the bikes and scooters and then she reappeared, giddy about something. My “Oh. Fuck.” meter went off instantly.
“Just wait a moment,” she said, giggling in her conspiracy.
“Oh god. Oh no. Really, it’s fine.” I beg, knowing the approximate route this situation is about to take. The last thing I need is my dating life to be sorted out for me in a language I don’t understand. Rejection sucks. Rejection via translator who also works with me (read: public stage) is horrifying. The Chinese have no problem telling you exactly what’s wrong with you, as far as they’re concerned, in a public setting and the last thing I need is to hear about my shortcomings as a reason to romantically reject me while everyone listening nods knowingly. I’m insecure enough and the regular monologues several teachers have at me about how fat I was and how slim I am and how “all the teachers” talk about how much better I look and that I should keep losing weight does nothing to quell my insecurity. They all want me to be a model if I’m not “very fat, like when you first here.” Yes, it’s all meant with the best of intention but it doesn’t upset me any less. I certainly don’t want to have to deal the critical monologues that will result when the hot man rejects me. I can hear them now, “Well, of course. We all thought…” as nerve after nerve is pounded. Suddenly, I’m back in middle (or primary, as it were) school, where everyone is watching as someone else sorts out my love life. The only difference this time around is that we fit in our clothes better, have larger paychecks and have some vague notion of the things we’re “supposed” to be doing in proper society.
Alpha Hottie reappears with his motor scooter and the control freak goddess that is me is left to watch helpless, as the chain of events I set off takes on a life of its own. My lunch mate talked with Alpha Hottie and they argued about something. “Great, he’s already not happy and she’s going to bludgeon him into dating me. Please god, kill me now. Just please, let me stroke out and die right here. Please,” was the sum total of my inner dialogue. The arguing died down and my lunch mate said something else.
Alpha Hottie walked his scooter out the front gate and my lunch mate said something else. Instantly, Alpha Hottie sat up straight, slid forward on the scooter seat and turned to look right at me, expectantly. I now have proof that god does not exist because had their been a god, it would have struck me dead to shut up the mental shriek I unleashed as I realized I was supposed to be getting on the scooter with him. All I have asked for is sitting there awaiting me but it comes with a fucking live, studio audience. I have suddenly realized there is no way I’m going to survive this without making a complete ass of myself and I for the first time in a long time, really care about that.
My lunch mate explained that she was going to ride her bike along side the two of us on his motor scooter. Fortunately, I have NO experience with motor scooters and so my “motor scooter etiquette” is nonexistent. Thank god I was extra unprepared for today’s mortifying experience because pure blindsiding and utter usurping of control isn’t enough; I must be fully ignorant as well. I decided, as I was not comfortable with the whole “sidesaddle” thing they seem to prefer here, I’d just go for the whole “spread eagle” enchilada. If you’re going to cross a line, really fucking cross it, right?
As I tossed one leg over the scooter and slid down to the seat, I was slapped in the face with his amazing smell. I realized that it’s not the poppies that emit opium in China; it’s the boys. My mind went clear and I took a deep breath. I could stay in that smell forever.
Once my ass was on the scooter and my mind became my own again, I decided to let my legs dangle and not put my feet up on the foot part as I really wasn’t able to deal with the notion of actively squeezing him between my thighs. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I could do it and not make an inappropriate noise.
So, there I am, dangling a bit off the back and he half turns to me and then speaks to my lunch mate.
“Put your feet up on the platform.” My lunch mate tells me.
To recap, I’m living in a country where I’m not allowed to touch men, much less hug my guy friends, but suddenly it’s totally okay, nay, I’m being URGED to wrap my thighs around a relative stranger in public while other people negotiate our dating potential. Yeah, my ability to comprehend has rather vanished.
I lean back a little to see the platform. “When in Rome,” right? I pop my feet up on the platform and there I am, with my legs wrapped fully around him and face the color and temperature of freshly steamed lobster.
I then mentally debate putting my arms around his waist. I figure the only thing more mortifying than offending him with my forward contact is eating pavement. Fully expecting him to at least flinch or, more likely, turn around in that “What the fuck are you doing” sort of way, I wrapped one arm about his waist. Nothing. He was totally blasÈ.
“Okay, if he’s fine with that, I’m putting my other hand on his waist to counterbalance myself because I will be damned if I’m going to crack my skull on the pavement to get a date” I thought.
And then I did it.
And he remained blasÈ.
And realized just how solid he is.
And we were off.
He made a little “Oof,” teasing sound at first realizing my weight. I immediately thought, “Enough. I’m walking. Bye-bye. I’m out. I’m done,” as I discovered that my flight reflex is firmly intact. As I pulled back, took my arm from his waist and started to lift my legs, he said something to my lunch mate.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s had two women on the back of his bike. You’re fine.’” My lunch mate explained quickly.
“What’s he doing with two women on the back of his bike?” I joked, trying to be silly and relax a bit.
My lunch mate’s eyes went wide with horror, “No, no, they were just friends, I’m sure.” She nodded nervously. “Only friends.” Horrified silence hung in the air as she glanced nervously at me and then at him.
Right. Well. That misfire cleared two things up for me; one, this is definitely about dating and two, my mouth is only going to get me in trouble. I clarified, “I was just teasing.”
My lunch mate nodded with relief.
I did my best to settle back down again but all I could do was cringe. Normally, I’m a pretty good sport but I don’t do well when stripped of all control, knowledge and resourcefulness. While I had a general idea of what we were doing, I wasn’t really clear on why I needed to be there as it was clearly a negotiation between the two of them, I had NO idea what they were saying and I was even less sure of how the hell it was fully acceptable to for me to be pressing my breasts against his back considering the fact that I was about to be riding with him between my thighs.
Oh. My. God. My breasts are against his back. Fuck. I hadn’t noticed, much less planned that. FUCK.
I freaked out, unsure if that much forwardness is rude or uncouth or what. I hadn’t meant it to be forward, it just happened. Granted, there’s absolutely no way I could have held on to him and not have leaned the cousins against him but I hadn’t realized what holding him meant. Frankly, the cousins, while not huge, are most certainly present and so they often require a little strategic planning. To top it off, by the time I realized exactly what I was doing, it was too late to casually readjust away.
I have to admit that it was beyond surreal to have the fact that we’re both interested in spending time together negotiated by a third party while my thighs are wrapped around his hips, my arms are around his waist, my breasts are pressed against his solid frame and we’re in broad daylight, in public, in China with a friend looking on approvingly. Frankly, the last man to be that close to me is (and was) happily married… to a man. It’s been a loooong time since said contact has meant anything and even longer since it wasn’t contact I’ve since come to regret. I’ve gone months without (post-pubescent) male contact and suddenly, I’m straddling the hottest man (who’s infinitely casual between my thighs) on the planet while a number of us are casually discussing his and my mutual interest in one another, the wonderful and practical fact that he excelled in English in high school, that he would very much like to “work on his English” with me and all I can think is how good he smells.
I’m fairly good with crash courses. In fact, if I have a forte, I’m pretty sure “crash course” is it. However, this was a bit much. I had to recalibrate my “China” sensitivity gauge while the fact that he smells like warm, fresh laundry that needs to be nuzzled kept wrenching me away from lucid thought. We rode down the street and I couldn’t stop thinking about how lovely it felt to be wrapped around him and how I desperately wanted to curl up into him and go to sleep. Suddenly, and for the first time in China, I genuinely didn’t want to cross a line that would make me lose face. Hello vanity!
As we made it to our destination, I thanked him for the ride, he shook his head indicating it was nothing and then was off. Then my lunch mate turned to me and said, “Good, now you’ve been introduced, you can sit with him at his table at lunch.” Um, I can’t even begin to unpack the notion that hanging out with a dude riding between your thighs is merely, “Introduction” in a country where I’m not really allowed to shake a dude’s hand. To say nothing of the fact that, at almost 30, I’m literally discussing school lunchroom table politics as highly relevant to my dating life. What?
Because I’m a lucky bitch beyond compare, I bumped into my Brazilian Angel right after said ride and I immediately told her what happened. I escorted her to lunch across from the compound while we talked.
She leveled her gaze at me and spoke. “Did you push your breasts against him?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I was holding onto him and so yeah. No stomach or anything, because it wasn’t tight, just boobs. Wait, what?”
“Good. The women here have none so he’s going to be thinking about that.”
“I don’t know. He seemed very comfortable. Nothing really fazed him.”
“Excellent. That means he liked it.” Or it meant nothing to him. I’m just sayin’.
“What? I was dying.”
“Chris, you really must lighten up.”
As my Catholic friend is reprimanding me for being too hard on myself and not blasÈ enough with my sexual finesse, Alpha Hottie happens to ride by us on the street. He turns around to look at us as he drives by and I holler, “Hello” after him.
I look at my Brazilian Angel and point to him.
“Was that him?”
“Yeah.”
“Chris, he’s really handsome” was blurted out in surprise from the woman who, until that moment, thought there were no good looking Asian men.
“I know,” I say, truly comprehending I am most certainly flirting with a hottie way out of my league.
“Perfect. You’ve got a boyfriend.”
“What?”
“Well, actually, the only problem is if he doesn’t want you.”
“Duh. Hello. He’s way out of my league in the looks department and the virtues of my intellect aren’t exactly going to make it through the language barrier.”
“Chris, don’t be so hard on yourself. Look at yourself. You’re lovely. You have beautiful eyes.”
“But…”
“I won’t hear anymore of this shit. Enough.”
“But…”
“No, really. No more. I don’t where you get these ideas that you’re not pretty. You are. Enough. Do you really think these things about yourself? It’s shit.” And my Brazilian Angel continued to reprimand me for my lack of self-confidence for the better part of a half hour.
Later today, after classes, I returned to my apartment to drop off some books before I went out to buy some water. (I have a water heater but, frankly, if I had to wait for the school to replace the bottles of water I’d have died of dehydration long ago.) As I’m replaying Mr. Not-So-Much-A-Toad’s Wild Ride, I walk out of my apartment sans keys. 50 Yuan and some unexpected visitations later, a locksmith came and wrenched my door open.
Fucking boys.
My lunch mate realized that I was interested not in the gym teacher she was thinking of but, in fact, the hottie we all know and love as Alpha Hottie. Even Ms. Formerly Of The He’s-not-my-cup-of-tea said, “Oh, him. I think he’s handsome. I thought you meant another teacher.” The man is universally hot. That’s all I’m saying.
Consequently, she took it upon herself to convince him to give me a ride on the back of his motor scooter in lieu of our (lunch mate and I) regular stroll from the primary to the middle school after lunch today (11/13).
Normally, I wait at the front of the school while my lunch mate fetches her bike but today, Alpha Hottie happened to be leaving at the same time we were. My lunch mate and Alpha Hottie disappeared behind the school to where they keep the bikes and scooters and then she reappeared, giddy about something. My “Oh. Fuck.” meter went off instantly.
“Just wait a moment,” she said, giggling in her conspiracy.
“Oh god. Oh no. Really, it’s fine.” I beg, knowing the approximate route this situation is about to take. The last thing I need is my dating life to be sorted out for me in a language I don’t understand. Rejection sucks. Rejection via translator who also works with me (read: public stage) is horrifying. The Chinese have no problem telling you exactly what’s wrong with you, as far as they’re concerned, in a public setting and the last thing I need is to hear about my shortcomings as a reason to romantically reject me while everyone listening nods knowingly. I’m insecure enough and the regular monologues several teachers have at me about how fat I was and how slim I am and how “all the teachers” talk about how much better I look and that I should keep losing weight does nothing to quell my insecurity. They all want me to be a model if I’m not “very fat, like when you first here.” Yes, it’s all meant with the best of intention but it doesn’t upset me any less. I certainly don’t want to have to deal the critical monologues that will result when the hot man rejects me. I can hear them now, “Well, of course. We all thought…” as nerve after nerve is pounded. Suddenly, I’m back in middle (or primary, as it were) school, where everyone is watching as someone else sorts out my love life. The only difference this time around is that we fit in our clothes better, have larger paychecks and have some vague notion of the things we’re “supposed” to be doing in proper society.
Alpha Hottie reappears with his motor scooter and the control freak goddess that is me is left to watch helpless, as the chain of events I set off takes on a life of its own. My lunch mate talked with Alpha Hottie and they argued about something. “Great, he’s already not happy and she’s going to bludgeon him into dating me. Please god, kill me now. Just please, let me stroke out and die right here. Please,” was the sum total of my inner dialogue. The arguing died down and my lunch mate said something else.
Alpha Hottie walked his scooter out the front gate and my lunch mate said something else. Instantly, Alpha Hottie sat up straight, slid forward on the scooter seat and turned to look right at me, expectantly. I now have proof that god does not exist because had their been a god, it would have struck me dead to shut up the mental shriek I unleashed as I realized I was supposed to be getting on the scooter with him. All I have asked for is sitting there awaiting me but it comes with a fucking live, studio audience. I have suddenly realized there is no way I’m going to survive this without making a complete ass of myself and I for the first time in a long time, really care about that.
My lunch mate explained that she was going to ride her bike along side the two of us on his motor scooter. Fortunately, I have NO experience with motor scooters and so my “motor scooter etiquette” is nonexistent. Thank god I was extra unprepared for today’s mortifying experience because pure blindsiding and utter usurping of control isn’t enough; I must be fully ignorant as well. I decided, as I was not comfortable with the whole “sidesaddle” thing they seem to prefer here, I’d just go for the whole “spread eagle” enchilada. If you’re going to cross a line, really fucking cross it, right?
As I tossed one leg over the scooter and slid down to the seat, I was slapped in the face with his amazing smell. I realized that it’s not the poppies that emit opium in China; it’s the boys. My mind went clear and I took a deep breath. I could stay in that smell forever.
Once my ass was on the scooter and my mind became my own again, I decided to let my legs dangle and not put my feet up on the foot part as I really wasn’t able to deal with the notion of actively squeezing him between my thighs. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I could do it and not make an inappropriate noise.
So, there I am, dangling a bit off the back and he half turns to me and then speaks to my lunch mate.
“Put your feet up on the platform.” My lunch mate tells me.
To recap, I’m living in a country where I’m not allowed to touch men, much less hug my guy friends, but suddenly it’s totally okay, nay, I’m being URGED to wrap my thighs around a relative stranger in public while other people negotiate our dating potential. Yeah, my ability to comprehend has rather vanished.
I lean back a little to see the platform. “When in Rome,” right? I pop my feet up on the platform and there I am, with my legs wrapped fully around him and face the color and temperature of freshly steamed lobster.
I then mentally debate putting my arms around his waist. I figure the only thing more mortifying than offending him with my forward contact is eating pavement. Fully expecting him to at least flinch or, more likely, turn around in that “What the fuck are you doing” sort of way, I wrapped one arm about his waist. Nothing. He was totally blasÈ.
“Okay, if he’s fine with that, I’m putting my other hand on his waist to counterbalance myself because I will be damned if I’m going to crack my skull on the pavement to get a date” I thought.
And then I did it.
And he remained blasÈ.
And realized just how solid he is.
And we were off.
He made a little “Oof,” teasing sound at first realizing my weight. I immediately thought, “Enough. I’m walking. Bye-bye. I’m out. I’m done,” as I discovered that my flight reflex is firmly intact. As I pulled back, took my arm from his waist and started to lift my legs, he said something to my lunch mate.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s had two women on the back of his bike. You’re fine.’” My lunch mate explained quickly.
“What’s he doing with two women on the back of his bike?” I joked, trying to be silly and relax a bit.
My lunch mate’s eyes went wide with horror, “No, no, they were just friends, I’m sure.” She nodded nervously. “Only friends.” Horrified silence hung in the air as she glanced nervously at me and then at him.
Right. Well. That misfire cleared two things up for me; one, this is definitely about dating and two, my mouth is only going to get me in trouble. I clarified, “I was just teasing.”
My lunch mate nodded with relief.
I did my best to settle back down again but all I could do was cringe. Normally, I’m a pretty good sport but I don’t do well when stripped of all control, knowledge and resourcefulness. While I had a general idea of what we were doing, I wasn’t really clear on why I needed to be there as it was clearly a negotiation between the two of them, I had NO idea what they were saying and I was even less sure of how the hell it was fully acceptable to for me to be pressing my breasts against his back considering the fact that I was about to be riding with him between my thighs.
Oh. My. God. My breasts are against his back. Fuck. I hadn’t noticed, much less planned that. FUCK.
I freaked out, unsure if that much forwardness is rude or uncouth or what. I hadn’t meant it to be forward, it just happened. Granted, there’s absolutely no way I could have held on to him and not have leaned the cousins against him but I hadn’t realized what holding him meant. Frankly, the cousins, while not huge, are most certainly present and so they often require a little strategic planning. To top it off, by the time I realized exactly what I was doing, it was too late to casually readjust away.
I have to admit that it was beyond surreal to have the fact that we’re both interested in spending time together negotiated by a third party while my thighs are wrapped around his hips, my arms are around his waist, my breasts are pressed against his solid frame and we’re in broad daylight, in public, in China with a friend looking on approvingly. Frankly, the last man to be that close to me is (and was) happily married… to a man. It’s been a loooong time since said contact has meant anything and even longer since it wasn’t contact I’ve since come to regret. I’ve gone months without (post-pubescent) male contact and suddenly, I’m straddling the hottest man (who’s infinitely casual between my thighs) on the planet while a number of us are casually discussing his and my mutual interest in one another, the wonderful and practical fact that he excelled in English in high school, that he would very much like to “work on his English” with me and all I can think is how good he smells.
I’m fairly good with crash courses. In fact, if I have a forte, I’m pretty sure “crash course” is it. However, this was a bit much. I had to recalibrate my “China” sensitivity gauge while the fact that he smells like warm, fresh laundry that needs to be nuzzled kept wrenching me away from lucid thought. We rode down the street and I couldn’t stop thinking about how lovely it felt to be wrapped around him and how I desperately wanted to curl up into him and go to sleep. Suddenly, and for the first time in China, I genuinely didn’t want to cross a line that would make me lose face. Hello vanity!
As we made it to our destination, I thanked him for the ride, he shook his head indicating it was nothing and then was off. Then my lunch mate turned to me and said, “Good, now you’ve been introduced, you can sit with him at his table at lunch.” Um, I can’t even begin to unpack the notion that hanging out with a dude riding between your thighs is merely, “Introduction” in a country where I’m not really allowed to shake a dude’s hand. To say nothing of the fact that, at almost 30, I’m literally discussing school lunchroom table politics as highly relevant to my dating life. What?
Because I’m a lucky bitch beyond compare, I bumped into my Brazilian Angel right after said ride and I immediately told her what happened. I escorted her to lunch across from the compound while we talked.
She leveled her gaze at me and spoke. “Did you push your breasts against him?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I was holding onto him and so yeah. No stomach or anything, because it wasn’t tight, just boobs. Wait, what?”
“Good. The women here have none so he’s going to be thinking about that.”
“I don’t know. He seemed very comfortable. Nothing really fazed him.”
“Excellent. That means he liked it.” Or it meant nothing to him. I’m just sayin’.
“What? I was dying.”
“Chris, you really must lighten up.”
As my Catholic friend is reprimanding me for being too hard on myself and not blasÈ enough with my sexual finesse, Alpha Hottie happens to ride by us on the street. He turns around to look at us as he drives by and I holler, “Hello” after him.
I look at my Brazilian Angel and point to him.
“Was that him?”
“Yeah.”
“Chris, he’s really handsome” was blurted out in surprise from the woman who, until that moment, thought there were no good looking Asian men.
“I know,” I say, truly comprehending I am most certainly flirting with a hottie way out of my league.
“Perfect. You’ve got a boyfriend.”
“What?”
“Well, actually, the only problem is if he doesn’t want you.”
“Duh. Hello. He’s way out of my league in the looks department and the virtues of my intellect aren’t exactly going to make it through the language barrier.”
“Chris, don’t be so hard on yourself. Look at yourself. You’re lovely. You have beautiful eyes.”
“But…”
“I won’t hear anymore of this shit. Enough.”
“But…”
“No, really. No more. I don’t where you get these ideas that you’re not pretty. You are. Enough. Do you really think these things about yourself? It’s shit.” And my Brazilian Angel continued to reprimand me for my lack of self-confidence for the better part of a half hour.
Later today, after classes, I returned to my apartment to drop off some books before I went out to buy some water. (I have a water heater but, frankly, if I had to wait for the school to replace the bottles of water I’d have died of dehydration long ago.) As I’m replaying Mr. Not-So-Much-A-Toad’s Wild Ride, I walk out of my apartment sans keys. 50 Yuan and some unexpected visitations later, a locksmith came and wrenched my door open.
Fucking boys.
SOCIALITE
My Chinese friends and I are growing even closer and it is lovely. My beloved colleague has clearly been talking me up to the department and everyone is now making a serious effort to get to know me. The hot “math” teacher must be the “main” teacher because he teaches English and is in my department. (Each class is divvied up into what their particular test strength is. So, class 1 of each grade tests well in English, class two is math and so on and so forth. Consequently, their homeroom teacher is from the department that they test best in.)
I’ve been hanging out in the middle school teacher’s room as much as possible and so they’ve been making an effort to talk to me. As it has been midterms week this past week (11/6-11/10) all the teachers in the department have been under enormous stress and have been leaning on each other for support. I’ve been around and doing my best to support them. After all, my job and salary don’t depend on the results of the students’ work while theirs do and the least I can do is show them that someone is pulling for them… even if the students are too overworked to give a damn. They have seen my support and have consequently tapped me for help with some of the exams, some planning and some emotional support.
It’s been nice to have the hot main teacher about too. We have a nice flirtation and there’s something about a man who makes his living speaking English who has yet to muster up the whatever to say a single word of English to me. The sum total of our entire relationship is comprised of our glances, gestures and my occasional, brief English monologue. Frankly, as I don’t know him personally, I am only able to observe the very general and the very specific about him. I must say, there’s something about him that is the essence of what I like about the masculine half of Chinese culture. Case in point: the English department had a meeting regarding the implementation of an oral exam. As the hot main teacher was talking (in Chinese) with great severity at length and depth about something about permission to create the exam (my Chinese is still rather weak so I only got the general idea), he was sitting at the desk of another (female) colleague; the desk next to my beloved colleague. On the desk was a yellow pen made up with the bobble head of a curly haired blonde girl and feet with a suction cup on the bottom. The whole time he was orating with gravitas, he was playing with the head of the pen and watching the curly blonde hair bounce. Not surprisingly, I was the only one who got the giggles.
As I stifled my laughter and the room erupted into conversation, he glanced at me. I looked at the doll and then at him and he smiled too, put the suction cup feet down and fluffed her hair. He shot me another look and made her head bounce again, making me laugh as the rest of the room continued with their fevered and serious conversation.
Then, the next time I saw him, I was sitting at the desk he had been sitting at. He took another seat to have a serious conversation with my beloved colleague. As they spoke, I saw the pen. I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye and, mid conversation, he shifted his gaze to me. I let him finish his end of the conversation and then offered him the bobble head pen. He smiled at my flirting and had to ask my beloved colleague to repeat himself.
Then on Thursday (11/9) I was alone in the office with an older female colleague with whom I’ve never really spoken, one-on-one. She opened up a conversation about the frustrations of having to work with and, ultimately, be dependent on students who are so overworked that they are rendered ambivalent about test taking. I did my best to offer her support. And then we talked about some ideas for new approaches.
My beloved colleague then showed up, spoke with her briefly in Chinese and somehow they brought up the strange idea that people who aren’t lovers or related hug in the West. It seemed a strange opener but I was more than willing to discuss the topic. I explained that in the US, I hug everyone I know socially and that it’s very strange for me to not be able to hug people here. My beloved colleague laughed and told me that I should never hug him because his wife would be utterly shocked and upset. He did the funniest pantomime of his wife’s shock at seeing me hug him. He opened his eyes wide, dropped his jaw and lurched forward, gasping and saying, “Oh no!” He had me on the floor, I was laughing so hard.
Once I collected myself, I also explained that when I’m living in Europe or with my European friends, I kiss them too. At this, he became a bit more serious and said that in China, “Kiss means love.” I thought it was a very sweet notion and so I didn’t bother to further explain.
We went to lunch and then I met up again with my beloved colleague, his darling daughter in tow, as I was heading back to my apartment (he and his daughter recently moved into a building near mine in the compound). He and his daughter escorted me back to my building and we talked some more about cultural differences. As we approached my building, he told me how much he admired me. He explained that he felt it was very brave of me to leave everything and everyone I knew to come to such a foreign place. I explained that China is not so foreign as it might seem and that the essence of youth is to do foolish, reckless things. Sometimes youth gets away with recklessness and sometimes does not but I feel that this time I had gotten away with it. He smiled at that and I suspect he dipped into the memory of a few of his own youthful follies.
I then told him how much I admired him for raising such a lovely girl. My own paternal drama makes me entirely over-sensitive to men who are good to young women so I felt it appropriate to tell him how I admire him for raising such a lovely daughter. He translated what I had said to his daughter and then he told her to thank me.
“Thank you,” she said in English just as I had taught her to do in class a few weeks back.
I smiled and said, “Don’t thank me. Thank your father.”
She demurred, smiled and shook her head.
We then parted ways as I went to have my siesta in the window seat in my bedroom. (Rough life, right? Well, someone’s gotta live it.)
The next day, I got to see my lunch mate. When I eat in the primary school, I usually eat with a lovely young woman of 22. She is another English teacher and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we usually have lunch together. However, she’s been getting to the cafeteria late and the students who are the children of the staff and administration (they are allowed to eat in our smaller cafeteria) have taken to sitting with me if I’m free. Fortunately on Friday, my table started to clear quickly as the kids wolfed down their food. So, by the time my lunch mate showed up, there was plenty of space for her to sit. We talked for a bit and she teased me about the fact that Alpha Hottie wasn’t at lunch. (Something that made me rather sad.)
As my singledom has been spread far and wide, everyone’s been on my case about finding a new boyfriend. What type of boy do I like? Who do I think is handsome as a beautiful woman like me needs a handsome man? (I’ve learned to stay far away from any generalized “looks” discussion as the Eastern and Western notions of “good looking” can be VERY different.) How many times a week do I see Western men? Are there potentials? Most of the people seem amazed that I might even consider a Chinese man and they all think that my parents would faint dead away if I brought home a Han. I’ve tried to explain that, ultimately, his race doesn’t matter to my mother, just so long as it’s a good match. No one seems to believe me. Then again, no one seems to believe me when I talk about the fact that Chinatown in New York is huge; I think that their perspective of China’s lack of power as a global player and presence is a bit skewed.
Nevertheless, my lunch mate is the only teacher who knows explicitly of my crush on Alpha Hottie and knows him as well. (My Chinese Angel has probably guessed but she doesn’t know him at all and had never seen him before I pointed him out.) She’s done a little reconnaissance for me (“I will help you!” “He’s shy”), declared herself a neutral party (“He’s not my cup of tea”) and has even offered to bridge the gap (“I will translate for you. I think his English is little. I will teach you some Chinese words so you can talk alone.”). I thanked her but told her I was very shy and certainly wouldn’t know how to approach him… which means a standstill.
In terms of dating, I unfortunately come from New York; the male to female numbers are ridiculously in favor of men (to say nothing of the percentage of the population the gay men take up) leaving the remaining single men a mixed bag of emotional landmines, narcissism and petty bullshit who have little talent for genuine company. (Not that I can throw stones but still, I’m the girl. I’m supposed to be the psychotic one.) Men in New York can discard women like tissues because there’s always eight more women lined up to take her place. I’m insecure to begin with and regularly going out on dates with men who can’t be bothered to pull their gaze from everyone else’s short skirt does nothing for the confidence. You can practically read the ticker on New York men’s foreheads “What else is out there?” And New York men never open the door for you. Wanting to be treated like a lady and while not being supermodel-hot in New York is a fantasy akin to wanting that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Not being one willing to work so hard for a situation that felt like settling, I gave up active dating by the time I was 25. A single conversation with a coworker who is a stunningly beautiful young woman from Philadelphia Mainline money and always has a boyfriend managed to kill what was left of my waning desire to date. I was complaining that the dating world felt like such a haze of smokey bars, massive tabs and the same tedious games via the same tedious conversation over the same deafening music when all I wanted was connection with a friend. She explained to me her mathematical approach to dating. She told me how many dates I needed to have in a week, how many different men I needed to be dating when I wasn’t interested in anyone versus how many men I needed to be dating when I was interested in someone (astronomically more, by the way), how many times he needed to call me before I called him and how, if either of us ever moves, I must simply cut all ties with him. I immediately gave up on dating as I realized I could either be single, miserable and in possession of some self-respect or single, miserable and in possession of no self-respect. All my relationships post that period were coincidental and primarily of his pursuit.
Forfeiting my dating life was a survival mechanism; I love New York more than anything but the only thing that rivals the brutality of the dating world in NYC is the real estate world of NYC. Consequently, it has left my talent for dating utterly atrophied and my nerves fried. To have to dive back into the nightmare of dating in front of my lunch mate while she translates for us is a notion beyond horrible. Granted, most of my dating hang-ups of, “What happens when he decides that I’m too.. whatever, tries to find the cowardly way to ditch me and then avoids me like the plague when I don’t get it” aren’t, per say, culturally relevant here but they cripple me nonetheless. Hell, rationally speaking, the numbers are all in my favor and his culture couldn’t be more accommodating or loving towards me but in my gut, I am assured that it’s going to be just like New York. Hence, “standstill” if the boy doesn’t know how to make a move.
Alas, Alpha Hottie did not show up in the lunchroom at all on Friday but that did leave my lunch mate and I free to talk about men. My Brazilian Angel had clued me in to the fact that Chinese women are always on the pull (for those of you not familiar with the British slang term “pull” it means to be on the active hunt for a wo/man; if you’re “pulling,” you’re doing the flirt dance that leads to hooking up) however, I was not viscerally abreast of this situation until I spoke with my lunch mate.
My lunch mate has a boyfriend she loves very much but her parents want her to find someone with a better job. Consequently, she’s looking for a more suitable boyfriend. She figures, if she finds a guy she likes more than her current boyfriend and he makes more money with a more stable job, she’ll try dating him for a while before jumping ship with the other guy. My lunch mate is sweet and kind and in the West, not the “type” of woman who would ever actively look to cheat on a boyfriend she loves. Considering the relative comfort with which she looks for a new boyfriend, I can only image what the less scrupulous women about are up to. Frankly, it seems remarkably old world to me. Granted, I’ve never understood the whole, “Either marry for love or marry for money” debate as “money” and “love” don’t seem mutually exclusive or inclusive to me and I don’t really see what one has to do with the other. Then again, maybe that’s why I’m single without a prospect in sight.
Nevertheless, being single and without prospect has not hurt my (platonic) social life. Today, (11/11) I spent in the company of my Chinese Angel. She is a lovely woman in her late thirties, perhaps early forties. We’re good friends and her English is so superb that I am often caught off guard when she speaks Chinese. I tend to forget that her native tongue is not English.
We spent the day wandering around my new favorite part of the old city; a rebuilt market area nestled in the Southeast corner inside the old city wall. The buildings, instead of the newfangled monstrosities of the center of the old city, are rebuilt to look like an old city. It’s beautiful and quiet as the streets are blockaded off and no one is allowed to drive down them. Granted, it’s a bit of the Disney version of China with its disingenuous recreation-for-money faÁade but is the Chinese-Disney version of Disney; cleansed of anything remotely unpleasant to Westerners and yet very subdued.
I took it upon myself to wrap my arm around her arm as Chinese female friends do when they walk about and so we spent most of the day arm in arm. I really like her and I want her to know that our friendship is truly precious to me. I figured the best way to do that was to treat her the way that the Chinese treat good friends. It was truly quite lovely and amongst the Chinese, it was presumed that we spoke Chinese first and English second. As we walked along the stalls lined up in the middle of the vehicle-free street, we perused the wares. Puppets carved out of thin sheets of velum hung in window store shops, cut paper silhouettes lined the stalls and every peddler there sold jade trinkets. I managed to find several birthday presents and a special something for my new niece Isabella. My Chinese Angel managed to negotiate the prices down enough that we all felt comfortable with the purchase.
While we were strolling about, we came upon one of thousands of peddlers peddling sweets on a stick. Essentially, several pieces of fruit (all approximately the size of globe grapes) are kebobed onto very sharp wooden skewers and then glazed with caramelized sugar. While it’s almost like caramelized apples, the sugar coating isn’t chewy but rather very brittle and it shatters very easily. My Chinese Angel pushed me to try one of the sticks with globe grapes (my favorite fruit ever) and I obliged. It was very strange to have warm globe grapes that were very sweet and yet still more bitter than the other item I was eating. Usually, I have the sweet of the grape to cut the savory flavor of the other item I’m eating, so it was a brief and pleasant trip to opposite world.
We then strolled up to the Muslim quarter to poke around. We had some dinner at one of the fantastic kebab places. Frankly, I could live on the kebab meat, it is so damned good.
Satiated from dinner and one of the best leisurely afternoons I’ve had here, my Chinese Angel insisted upon walking me back to my bus and on the way back to the bus, I discovered truly what a whore I am.
Starbucks is coming to Xi’An. I just about wet myself I was so excited. I jumped up and down, clapped and squealed a little “Yay!” My Chinese Angel, bless her, was elated for my pleasure and made a point to remember the name of “Starbucks.”
Truly, there is a god, her name is “Starbuck” and she likes me.
My Chinese friends and I are growing even closer and it is lovely. My beloved colleague has clearly been talking me up to the department and everyone is now making a serious effort to get to know me. The hot “math” teacher must be the “main” teacher because he teaches English and is in my department. (Each class is divvied up into what their particular test strength is. So, class 1 of each grade tests well in English, class two is math and so on and so forth. Consequently, their homeroom teacher is from the department that they test best in.)
I’ve been hanging out in the middle school teacher’s room as much as possible and so they’ve been making an effort to talk to me. As it has been midterms week this past week (11/6-11/10) all the teachers in the department have been under enormous stress and have been leaning on each other for support. I’ve been around and doing my best to support them. After all, my job and salary don’t depend on the results of the students’ work while theirs do and the least I can do is show them that someone is pulling for them… even if the students are too overworked to give a damn. They have seen my support and have consequently tapped me for help with some of the exams, some planning and some emotional support.
It’s been nice to have the hot main teacher about too. We have a nice flirtation and there’s something about a man who makes his living speaking English who has yet to muster up the whatever to say a single word of English to me. The sum total of our entire relationship is comprised of our glances, gestures and my occasional, brief English monologue. Frankly, as I don’t know him personally, I am only able to observe the very general and the very specific about him. I must say, there’s something about him that is the essence of what I like about the masculine half of Chinese culture. Case in point: the English department had a meeting regarding the implementation of an oral exam. As the hot main teacher was talking (in Chinese) with great severity at length and depth about something about permission to create the exam (my Chinese is still rather weak so I only got the general idea), he was sitting at the desk of another (female) colleague; the desk next to my beloved colleague. On the desk was a yellow pen made up with the bobble head of a curly haired blonde girl and feet with a suction cup on the bottom. The whole time he was orating with gravitas, he was playing with the head of the pen and watching the curly blonde hair bounce. Not surprisingly, I was the only one who got the giggles.
As I stifled my laughter and the room erupted into conversation, he glanced at me. I looked at the doll and then at him and he smiled too, put the suction cup feet down and fluffed her hair. He shot me another look and made her head bounce again, making me laugh as the rest of the room continued with their fevered and serious conversation.
Then, the next time I saw him, I was sitting at the desk he had been sitting at. He took another seat to have a serious conversation with my beloved colleague. As they spoke, I saw the pen. I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye and, mid conversation, he shifted his gaze to me. I let him finish his end of the conversation and then offered him the bobble head pen. He smiled at my flirting and had to ask my beloved colleague to repeat himself.
Then on Thursday (11/9) I was alone in the office with an older female colleague with whom I’ve never really spoken, one-on-one. She opened up a conversation about the frustrations of having to work with and, ultimately, be dependent on students who are so overworked that they are rendered ambivalent about test taking. I did my best to offer her support. And then we talked about some ideas for new approaches.
My beloved colleague then showed up, spoke with her briefly in Chinese and somehow they brought up the strange idea that people who aren’t lovers or related hug in the West. It seemed a strange opener but I was more than willing to discuss the topic. I explained that in the US, I hug everyone I know socially and that it’s very strange for me to not be able to hug people here. My beloved colleague laughed and told me that I should never hug him because his wife would be utterly shocked and upset. He did the funniest pantomime of his wife’s shock at seeing me hug him. He opened his eyes wide, dropped his jaw and lurched forward, gasping and saying, “Oh no!” He had me on the floor, I was laughing so hard.
Once I collected myself, I also explained that when I’m living in Europe or with my European friends, I kiss them too. At this, he became a bit more serious and said that in China, “Kiss means love.” I thought it was a very sweet notion and so I didn’t bother to further explain.
We went to lunch and then I met up again with my beloved colleague, his darling daughter in tow, as I was heading back to my apartment (he and his daughter recently moved into a building near mine in the compound). He and his daughter escorted me back to my building and we talked some more about cultural differences. As we approached my building, he told me how much he admired me. He explained that he felt it was very brave of me to leave everything and everyone I knew to come to such a foreign place. I explained that China is not so foreign as it might seem and that the essence of youth is to do foolish, reckless things. Sometimes youth gets away with recklessness and sometimes does not but I feel that this time I had gotten away with it. He smiled at that and I suspect he dipped into the memory of a few of his own youthful follies.
I then told him how much I admired him for raising such a lovely girl. My own paternal drama makes me entirely over-sensitive to men who are good to young women so I felt it appropriate to tell him how I admire him for raising such a lovely daughter. He translated what I had said to his daughter and then he told her to thank me.
“Thank you,” she said in English just as I had taught her to do in class a few weeks back.
I smiled and said, “Don’t thank me. Thank your father.”
She demurred, smiled and shook her head.
We then parted ways as I went to have my siesta in the window seat in my bedroom. (Rough life, right? Well, someone’s gotta live it.)
The next day, I got to see my lunch mate. When I eat in the primary school, I usually eat with a lovely young woman of 22. She is another English teacher and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we usually have lunch together. However, she’s been getting to the cafeteria late and the students who are the children of the staff and administration (they are allowed to eat in our smaller cafeteria) have taken to sitting with me if I’m free. Fortunately on Friday, my table started to clear quickly as the kids wolfed down their food. So, by the time my lunch mate showed up, there was plenty of space for her to sit. We talked for a bit and she teased me about the fact that Alpha Hottie wasn’t at lunch. (Something that made me rather sad.)
As my singledom has been spread far and wide, everyone’s been on my case about finding a new boyfriend. What type of boy do I like? Who do I think is handsome as a beautiful woman like me needs a handsome man? (I’ve learned to stay far away from any generalized “looks” discussion as the Eastern and Western notions of “good looking” can be VERY different.) How many times a week do I see Western men? Are there potentials? Most of the people seem amazed that I might even consider a Chinese man and they all think that my parents would faint dead away if I brought home a Han. I’ve tried to explain that, ultimately, his race doesn’t matter to my mother, just so long as it’s a good match. No one seems to believe me. Then again, no one seems to believe me when I talk about the fact that Chinatown in New York is huge; I think that their perspective of China’s lack of power as a global player and presence is a bit skewed.
Nevertheless, my lunch mate is the only teacher who knows explicitly of my crush on Alpha Hottie and knows him as well. (My Chinese Angel has probably guessed but she doesn’t know him at all and had never seen him before I pointed him out.) She’s done a little reconnaissance for me (“I will help you!” “He’s shy”), declared herself a neutral party (“He’s not my cup of tea”) and has even offered to bridge the gap (“I will translate for you. I think his English is little. I will teach you some Chinese words so you can talk alone.”). I thanked her but told her I was very shy and certainly wouldn’t know how to approach him… which means a standstill.
In terms of dating, I unfortunately come from New York; the male to female numbers are ridiculously in favor of men (to say nothing of the percentage of the population the gay men take up) leaving the remaining single men a mixed bag of emotional landmines, narcissism and petty bullshit who have little talent for genuine company. (Not that I can throw stones but still, I’m the girl. I’m supposed to be the psychotic one.) Men in New York can discard women like tissues because there’s always eight more women lined up to take her place. I’m insecure to begin with and regularly going out on dates with men who can’t be bothered to pull their gaze from everyone else’s short skirt does nothing for the confidence. You can practically read the ticker on New York men’s foreheads “What else is out there?” And New York men never open the door for you. Wanting to be treated like a lady and while not being supermodel-hot in New York is a fantasy akin to wanting that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Not being one willing to work so hard for a situation that felt like settling, I gave up active dating by the time I was 25. A single conversation with a coworker who is a stunningly beautiful young woman from Philadelphia Mainline money and always has a boyfriend managed to kill what was left of my waning desire to date. I was complaining that the dating world felt like such a haze of smokey bars, massive tabs and the same tedious games via the same tedious conversation over the same deafening music when all I wanted was connection with a friend. She explained to me her mathematical approach to dating. She told me how many dates I needed to have in a week, how many different men I needed to be dating when I wasn’t interested in anyone versus how many men I needed to be dating when I was interested in someone (astronomically more, by the way), how many times he needed to call me before I called him and how, if either of us ever moves, I must simply cut all ties with him. I immediately gave up on dating as I realized I could either be single, miserable and in possession of some self-respect or single, miserable and in possession of no self-respect. All my relationships post that period were coincidental and primarily of his pursuit.
Forfeiting my dating life was a survival mechanism; I love New York more than anything but the only thing that rivals the brutality of the dating world in NYC is the real estate world of NYC. Consequently, it has left my talent for dating utterly atrophied and my nerves fried. To have to dive back into the nightmare of dating in front of my lunch mate while she translates for us is a notion beyond horrible. Granted, most of my dating hang-ups of, “What happens when he decides that I’m too.. whatever, tries to find the cowardly way to ditch me and then avoids me like the plague when I don’t get it” aren’t, per say, culturally relevant here but they cripple me nonetheless. Hell, rationally speaking, the numbers are all in my favor and his culture couldn’t be more accommodating or loving towards me but in my gut, I am assured that it’s going to be just like New York. Hence, “standstill” if the boy doesn’t know how to make a move.
Alas, Alpha Hottie did not show up in the lunchroom at all on Friday but that did leave my lunch mate and I free to talk about men. My Brazilian Angel had clued me in to the fact that Chinese women are always on the pull (for those of you not familiar with the British slang term “pull” it means to be on the active hunt for a wo/man; if you’re “pulling,” you’re doing the flirt dance that leads to hooking up) however, I was not viscerally abreast of this situation until I spoke with my lunch mate.
My lunch mate has a boyfriend she loves very much but her parents want her to find someone with a better job. Consequently, she’s looking for a more suitable boyfriend. She figures, if she finds a guy she likes more than her current boyfriend and he makes more money with a more stable job, she’ll try dating him for a while before jumping ship with the other guy. My lunch mate is sweet and kind and in the West, not the “type” of woman who would ever actively look to cheat on a boyfriend she loves. Considering the relative comfort with which she looks for a new boyfriend, I can only image what the less scrupulous women about are up to. Frankly, it seems remarkably old world to me. Granted, I’ve never understood the whole, “Either marry for love or marry for money” debate as “money” and “love” don’t seem mutually exclusive or inclusive to me and I don’t really see what one has to do with the other. Then again, maybe that’s why I’m single without a prospect in sight.
Nevertheless, being single and without prospect has not hurt my (platonic) social life. Today, (11/11) I spent in the company of my Chinese Angel. She is a lovely woman in her late thirties, perhaps early forties. We’re good friends and her English is so superb that I am often caught off guard when she speaks Chinese. I tend to forget that her native tongue is not English.
We spent the day wandering around my new favorite part of the old city; a rebuilt market area nestled in the Southeast corner inside the old city wall. The buildings, instead of the newfangled monstrosities of the center of the old city, are rebuilt to look like an old city. It’s beautiful and quiet as the streets are blockaded off and no one is allowed to drive down them. Granted, it’s a bit of the Disney version of China with its disingenuous recreation-for-money faÁade but is the Chinese-Disney version of Disney; cleansed of anything remotely unpleasant to Westerners and yet very subdued.
I took it upon myself to wrap my arm around her arm as Chinese female friends do when they walk about and so we spent most of the day arm in arm. I really like her and I want her to know that our friendship is truly precious to me. I figured the best way to do that was to treat her the way that the Chinese treat good friends. It was truly quite lovely and amongst the Chinese, it was presumed that we spoke Chinese first and English second. As we walked along the stalls lined up in the middle of the vehicle-free street, we perused the wares. Puppets carved out of thin sheets of velum hung in window store shops, cut paper silhouettes lined the stalls and every peddler there sold jade trinkets. I managed to find several birthday presents and a special something for my new niece Isabella. My Chinese Angel managed to negotiate the prices down enough that we all felt comfortable with the purchase.
While we were strolling about, we came upon one of thousands of peddlers peddling sweets on a stick. Essentially, several pieces of fruit (all approximately the size of globe grapes) are kebobed onto very sharp wooden skewers and then glazed with caramelized sugar. While it’s almost like caramelized apples, the sugar coating isn’t chewy but rather very brittle and it shatters very easily. My Chinese Angel pushed me to try one of the sticks with globe grapes (my favorite fruit ever) and I obliged. It was very strange to have warm globe grapes that were very sweet and yet still more bitter than the other item I was eating. Usually, I have the sweet of the grape to cut the savory flavor of the other item I’m eating, so it was a brief and pleasant trip to opposite world.
We then strolled up to the Muslim quarter to poke around. We had some dinner at one of the fantastic kebab places. Frankly, I could live on the kebab meat, it is so damned good.
Satiated from dinner and one of the best leisurely afternoons I’ve had here, my Chinese Angel insisted upon walking me back to my bus and on the way back to the bus, I discovered truly what a whore I am.
Starbucks is coming to Xi’An. I just about wet myself I was so excited. I jumped up and down, clapped and squealed a little “Yay!” My Chinese Angel, bless her, was elated for my pleasure and made a point to remember the name of “Starbucks.”
Truly, there is a god, her name is “Starbuck” and she likes me.
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