Life on Mars

Return to Normalcy (or Escape from Beijing!)

2006-12-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

December 15, 2006

“You can turn the city upside down/
like an umbrella/
but it won’t keep you dry.”
- DNTEL

Three weeks ago I walked into Shi’s office to discuss my departure. He’d heard it through my trusted grapevine that I had decided to leave Rong Cheng to move to Beijing and he invited me up to talk. There was an orchid placed in the corner of the room and he mentioned that it only blooms for three months out of the year. I can’t say for sure whether or not he was alluding to my four-month stint there on the edge of rural China, but I enjoyed the performance regardless. He made generous offers to procure employment for me at the local school of television and Weihai University, but he was also frank that these did not compare to Beijing. I told him I’d think about it, and I did, but the things I’m looking for presently are not there.

Over the next few days I sent out e-mails that were not replied to and made phone calls to non-existent numbers. The facts slowly dawned on me. In order to stay in Beijing, I would have to locate a job, renew my passport (7-10 days), obtain a visa (with letter of employment), secure an apartment (6 months rent upfront), and commit to a six-month stint in China—all in under 20 days. This isn’t impossible, but it would certainly be unpleasant.

My next to last week in Rong Cheng I taught my students who are going to America. After our second class we went to the Leisure Café. We talked about America and what they should expect when they go there. Fat people. The great abundance of stuff at the gas station. Dirty talk. They asked me if I had a gun. I told them that not everybody has guns, but most people are allowed to.

I missed my homeland. I missed the crazy people there, my family and friends, chocolate, good ice cream, milkshakes, and sitting on the couch watching television. It became clear to me that I was homesick.

I’ve never been homesick before, never in all the times that I was somewhere else. I’ve missed home, but I’ve never been overcome by it the way I was when I decided to leave China.

My leave-taking was subject to all of the accoutrements of Chinese culture. I was invited for lunch and dinner and given strong drink, my friend’s grandmother sewed me 2 pairs of colorfully stitched soles for my shoes, and then another friend’s grandmother sewed me about 6 more pairs, and I became leery of any more “grandmothers” out there sewing brightly colored shoe soles. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, the ritual is light, but the cordiality is heavy. If the shoe soles came heavy like the dumplings, I would have to begin turning them away, and I worried that this might somehow affect my fortune.

By virtue of leaving though, I did have the perfect excuse to throw an American party. I printed flyers and handed them out. This seemed to confuse people. The serve-yourself fixings bar also threw people off. The chicken wings were a big hit, as were the dance and air guitar instruction and my impromptu rendition of the White Stripes’ “Elephant,” although people did begin to leave shortly after…

I gave away all the things I had accumulated in China and I still couldn’t close my bags. When I left I had a huge overweight suitcase, a fully-packed hiking rucksack, an overstuffed computer bag, and a loaded backpack. Unfortunately I had to leave behind the large gold-framed Jesus stitching that Yuan had given me.

In appreciation of my stay, the school administration gave me four medium-sized glass representations of a cabbage, three pigs, a pig holding a cabbage, and a fish in the shape of a vase where you put the flowers in its mouth. These I added to my menagerie of personal belongings. I was then ceremoniously deposited at the airport to begin the long journey home.

Upon arrival in Beijing I spoke to airport employees at the information desk who assisted me in purchasing a ticket to New York. I would have two nights in Beijing before my departure to sort myself out for the return home. There is no leaving that does not carry with it some emotional toll.

I braved Beijing’s rush hour traffic by bus, a long, tedious rite of passage back into the immense sprawl of metropolitan life. I disembarked at the Beijing Railway Station and hauled my various apparatus to the curb and hailed a taxi. By taxi we dove back into the city’s glow-in-the-dark circulatory system, through its spaghetti-laced network of veins and conduits, navigating the complex hive of apartments in Beijing’s second ring.

Alone and exhausted in the back of the taxi I felt somewhat disconnected from the world around me. I had no idea where I was really, aside from in a taxicab somewhere in Beijing. Everything looked the same. I was in no danger. If I were to be let off here I would simply hop another in the infinite supply of taxis. I had money to buy food, clothes to spare, and the address of my destination, but I had no bearings and only a rudimentary grasp of the native language. I looked forward to arriving somewhere.

My good friend and sometime travel agent Mona Bei had made reservations for me at a hotel in Beijing. At check–in it came to the desk clerk’s attention that, not only was there no reservation in my name, but my visa had expired. I tried phoning Mona with no success and then tried to convince the desk attendant that my passport didn’t expire until Jan. 5, a full two weeks hence. He showed me the stamp that stated that I had arrived on August 8, and the fine print on my visa that stipulated that it was valid for the duration of 60 days after entry. I tried in vain to explain to him that it was a multiple-entry visa and that I wasn’t required to leave the country, but he was relentless. The Chinese government does not allow foreigners without valid stamps to rent rooms in Beijing.

I started to wonder. What happens to foreigners, like myself, who accidentally end up in a country illegally? I tried my luck at two other nearby hotels. One of the desk clerks made a surreptitious phone call to the district police station, only informing me afterward that she had reached an answering machine. I quietly slipped out of the lobby through the revolving doors.

Dragging all of my luggage and glass pigs and cabbages down a street in Beijing in the bitter cold, I thought that I was making a good decision to leave the country at this juncture. If I could last two nights without getting arrested or robbed, it would probably be wise to return home and regroup.

I reconnoitered the area and found a sympathetic front desk clerk that believed me when I lied and told her that my passport was still valid, despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe she just wanted to practice her English.

The room was clean and cheap and it looked as if all of the furniture had been purchased at IKEA. I was getting closer to home. The shower sprayed all over the bathroom but it was a small price to pay for a safe hideout. I ditched my baggage and asked if there was anyplace to buy a hamburger in the area. She said that there was, just down the street, a little place called McDonald’s. I laughed and tried to explain the subtle differences between hamburgers. She stared at me blankly. Still queasy from my food poisoning weeks earlier, I opted for the safety and comfort of the golden arches.

Mona called me while I was there and we had a four-minute phone call that I later found out cost 17 dollars. We said our goodbyes and I dove back into the crisp Beijing night. I walked with the crowds for a while and observed the people ballroom dancing in lines on the sidewalk, the nightly ritual in much of China. I stopped and chatted with some street vendors who were amused by my meager Chinese and bought trinkets for the folks back home, then I found a café with free Internet access that proved too difficult to access and instead ate corn chowder and drank a thin milkshake. I stopped for an overpriced back massage on the walk home and finally crashed some time after midnight.

I awoke Saturday morning with the unique feeling that I had been hit by a moving train. I was groggy, sore, thirsty, hungry, and still tired, but this was my next to last day in China and I wanted to make the most of it, so I rallied for my cold shower and charted my course on the map the lobby attendant had given me the night before. I would take a taxi to Grandma’s diner, eat apple pancakes and drink coffee and thick milkshakes while catching up on my e-mail, then I would walk to Silk Street and spend what would amount to hundreds of dollars on clothes and DVDs to add to my already bloated suitcases.

I had a ball at Silk Street bargaining and just plain arguing with vendors young and old. At one point a young girl held me hostage until I had tried on every pair of Adidas in the catalogue, then yelled at me when I didn’t want anything, attracting the attention of one cop patrolling the aisles. I made promises I didn’t intend to keep in order to escape. With my booty in tow I went to my favorite teahouse to plot out my evening. The hostess remembered me and we looked at all the junk I bought and talked about Beijing restaurants and Chinese medicinal substitutes for Valium. She didn’t charge me anything and I hopped a taxi to find a restaurant we had picked out.

The taxi driver had no idea where we were going and we drove in circles until I couldn’t bear it anymore and told him to drop me off on Gold Street. I went to the pharmacy to find the pills the girl from the teahouse had recommended for sleeping on flights. They had two kinds, one that, if I understood correctly, would render me unconscious, and another which would induce relaxation. I opted for the latter, then went across the street to eat another McBurger.

It was late when I returned to my room, around 10 p.m., and I still had to find a way to cram all of my new junk into my grotesquely overweight suitcases. I had a theory that if I rolled every single thing inside of each suitcase, it would all fit. By the time Borat had ended, I had new bags. I had converted every single bag I could find into luggage. Plastic bags, paper bags, the bag they gave me at the store. I even had to call front desk the next day for more bags, bigger bags, because these weren’t working. They had bags that were just big enough to make things interesting, but far too small to pass for comfortable. This is how I will always remember China. I went to sleep in a sweat.

The alarm came far too early. My plans of eating a hardy breakfast and lounging in Starbucks washed down the drain, and sprayed all over the toilet, sink, and the clothes I had brought into the bathroom with me. I did my final repacking and hustled out of the room with my various bags. I caught a taxi to the bus station easily enough and was on my way to buying a bus ticket when the bus attendant wearing a blue vest told me that the bus would not leave for a half-hour and would take an hour to reach the airport. I still had to deal with check-in and customs and thought it would take too long. It was at this juncture a man approached me and offered to take me in his vehicle. He escorted me to his parked car, a white Volkswagen Jetta, and hustled to pack the trunk. We would most likely arrive at the airport within 45 minutes. I sat back wearily and took in the monstrous Beijing skyline one last time, then closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.

I had partially fallen asleep when I realized we were at the airport. I got out of the taxi and stood there as the driver unloaded my equipment. I actually shook his hand I was so excited to finally be at the moment of departure. And with that he drove off and I turned and pushed my cart into the main terminal.

I went to the ticket counter where I’d bought my ticket two days before and they informed me that they didn’t accept credit cards. My heart skipped one or two beats before I walked over to the ATM to investigate my financial status. After taking out all of the money I had in my various accounts in two banks, I was left with enough money to buy a Starbucks.

I filled out my international flight forms and maneuvered through the crowd into the check-in area. During check-in, it was determined that my bags were indeed overweight and that I would have to pay an extra fee to bring them onboard. I walked over to the overweight baggage line and waited my turn. I was informed that the fee would be the equivalent of US$200 unless I could reduce the weight. I opened one of my mammoth suitcases and actually unloaded a bag from inside another bag to come in under the weight limit. Then I returned to the check-in line with my children in tow and waited for the attendant.

It was at this time that I had a revelation. I had an undeniable certainty that I was being protected by something greater than me and now it was bringing me home safely. Immediately following this feeling of immense security, I realized that I was missing one of my bags.

I looked for it among the other bags and it wasn’t there. It was very clearly missing. I thought about what was in the bag. I made a mental checklist: laptop, video camera, all of the video footage I shot in China, and my iPod. The strangest thing is that I never panicked. I stood very still and thought about what my options were. I could sacrifice the bag. Though this was a choice I clearly wasn’t thrilled about, I was fully aware that it was the most likely outcome of the situation. Regardless, I wanted my stuff back and I wasn’t going to let it go without a fight. I decided to enlist the help of the ticket counter people.

I told them my story. Woman with a blue vest, man with a white Volkswagen Jetta. That’s all I had for them. They said a bunch of stuff in Chinese and I understood some of it. They were going to try to get in touch with the bus station, and they were going to wait for the bus that I had intended to take to arrive to ask about the guy with the Jetta.

I stood there watching them abuzz and thought about my backpack. This is a backpack I’ve had since at least college, maybe longer, filled with the digital detritus of my four months alone in China. All of my memory files and the first 20 pages of a movie script were in it. I felt as though in the pit of my stomach there was the end of a rope that stretched out into the city somewhere with my stuff at the other end and I tried to will it to come back.

I made deals with myself. I told myself that I could live without all of my stuff. I’d have to start over. Things would be slow, but everything would ramp back up. I could write the movie script from scratch if I had to, it would just be a pain in the ass. Then I promised myself that if it came back, I would finish the script.

I calmly stated that in my country when there is a robbery in progress we usually inform the cops, and would they be interested in doing that? The woman making the decisions agreed and we walked into a branch of the Beijing Airport Police Station.

The redirected us to the headquarters in the upper level parking lot. I had left my bags with the attendants and was free to follow my stomach-rope into the police station. There, sitting in the center of a large white counter, was the Beijing Airport Chief of Police. He stood and we looked each other in the eye and I listened again as my girl told the chief what we had. He looked indignant and nodded to me and motioned for the woman to take me away.

We went back to the counter and I was informed that my flight had been delayed and I would get a free meal at the gate when I arrived. I looked forward to this free meal as it was now past 11 a.m. and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. The counter people told me to go ahead and check my stuff in and to come back afterwards. I went back to the ticket counter and checked everything in, and when I returned, the counter people told me to go with the girl to the police station again.

I wanted to feel hopeful, but it seemed pointless. Whether or not it was there, I had to remain calm the whole time or else I would upset the balance of whatever the hell was going on. When we opened the door to the police station I saw my bag sitting on a chair next to the counter. I felt so relieved. The police chief was smiling and I shook his hand and they told me that they found the guy, everyone at the bus station knows him, the guy with the white Jetta, and they told him that he could do one of two things. If he brought the bag back, there would be no questions asked, but if he didn’t, I was only told that there would be trouble, and I took that to mean something about the weight of the Chinese Police being brought to bear against some lowly cab driver.

It called into question some ideas I had two days before when nobody would let me rent a room. The bureaucracy that prevented me from speaking directly to anyone to secure a hotel room was the same one that put the fear into my bag thief. Maybe we had something in common.

I thanked my erstwhile companions and entered the check-in hall once again. Once I scanned my carry-ons, the five of them, I took my place in The Longest Customs Line Ever. I moved incrementally forward, grabbing all of my bags, picking them up and moving them forward a few feet at a time. I tall man with a beard in front of me talked to his ex-wife on the telephone about their delinquent child. When I finally reached the customs officer, he informed me that I did not have the proper boarding pass and would have to return to check-in to retrieve it. Even though my bag had returned, I couldn’t deny the Kafkaesque proportions to which my reality had swelled. I didn’t know if my nerves could handle it.

I returned to the check-in counter where they had misplaced my proper boarding pass and got back in The Line.

Then I reached The Promised Land. There were hordes of people surrounding the pile of food trays. I pushed my bags into them and showed my ticket, good for a tray of noodles and a coke. I bought my Starbucks, looked at airport souvenirs, and sat and waited for my plane to depart.

When I boarded the plane I felt giddy with fatigue. Every few minutes I would say to myself, I can’t believe it. How did this happen?

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully explain what China meant for me. What was I doing there in glamorous and harmonious Rong Cheng, city of the future? I wish I had written a blog about the sheer magnitude of contraptions I saw in China chugging along and blowing out steam, and that I had pictures of them. I wish I could tell you about the time my landlady set me up to eat in some kind of lamb dive-bar on my first night in my apartment, and how I was too weary to change course so I ate all of the soup even though it tasted and smelled like funk. These were interesting times.

Ba Da Guan

2006-12-11T04:23:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2, 3 2006

Qing Dao: Days 2, 3, 4

I wake up, take a cold shower and go find the Red and Black Cafe, a place I spotted during the previous evening's excursion. It is a posh three floors of polished wood, leather chairs and big soft couches. I am momentarily transported. The coffee comes in a nice grande-sized serving, the tiramisu is flat (the tomoatoes were an interesting touch though). I liberate a city walking map from the book rack.

Back at the hotel I grill the staff about net bars, buses, and what there is to do in Qing Dao. We make notes on my map and write things on post-its. I feel eager and excited about being in a new place.

I walk around a few streets close to the hotel, getting the lay of the land, then hop a bus to Qing Dao University where I find a net bar, post to the blog, and download reams of information on Qing Dao. I read about a place called Ba Da Guan that was occupied by the German army before the first wolrd war and still houses some classic European architecture. Somewhere around this time the weather drops severely.

I hop a cab to Ba Da Guan and stumble around in the cold for a few hours. Despite the now bitter cold there is massive wedding photography going on, women in strapless, sleeveless gowns fearlessly posing for posterity.

I take a taxi to another part of town and search for a travel guide. After sufficient confusion I find a bookstore that has only the barest selection of English books. Conversely I did find a DVD store that had an incredible selection of American film classics. I loaded up on films I've always been meaning to see.

After that I walked to the Tsing Tao brewery and picked out a restaurant on bar street to eat dinner and sample their fine brew. I feast on fish, shrimp and beef and am unable to finish a large pitcher of beer.

Back at the hotel, Hu informs me that he is going to Yentai for the evening but leaves me in his friend Li's charge. Li and I take a taxi to the Paulaner Bar to see some unspecified musical performance.

The Paulaner is top shelf, leopard print furniture, lava lamps, continuous techno party looping on the flat screens. A Filipino cover band takes the stage and tears through searing renditions of Say You, Say Me, I Just Called to Say I Love You, and With or Without You. I fall in love with the beautiful Russian bartender who stands behind the bar making little hearts out of clay.

Li tricks me into thinking we are going to another bar. Instead we go back to the hotel. I go to sleep and wake up two hours later with food poisoning. I will spare you the gory details, but let's just say that both sides suffered heavy casualties. I spend the next day alternately writhing in bed and watching such cinema classics as Double Indemnity and Casablanca. I make brief harrowing forays into the freezing cold for medicine, pizza and Coca-Cola. I boil water in my electric water heater and soak my feet in the sink to warm myself. One of the medicines has the unexpected side-effect of making me bloated.

I don't sleep for the first 24-hour period. The second night is make or break. It is obvious to me that if I don't sleep I won't kick the sickness, and if I don't shake it off by the next day, the bus ride back to Rong Cheng could be particularly traumatic. I wake feeling warm and only slightly ill.

I pack my things and surf the hotel office internet and find a cafe on the ocean that serves Western cuisine. Upon arriving I find that the Western menu they advertised was really a Western menu item, a steak. I bail and go to the Crown Plaza where I shell out for pastries and a seriously bungled eggs benedict. I attempt to buy Christmas presents in the town market and forfeit relatively early, realizing the impracticality of the situation. I catch a taxi to the bus station and manage the bloated 4-hour ride back to Rong Cheng.

Qing Dao

2006-11-30T21:34:00.002-08:00

November 30, 2006

This is how I get around China. I show people these post-its and they take me places. It is not a foolproof. I have accepted it though as a viable means of transport. I seem to have forsaken the all-knowing guidebook and legitimate research in favor of random possibility. I land and scramble for information. Today it worked, mostly.

It all started out wrong. A friend of mine backed out on me at the last minute, no reason stated. After class I boarded a bus full of students and then had to fight my way through the young pubescent hordes yelling for the bus driver to let me out after he took an alternate route, bypassing my stop. The fascinating thing was that I was asking students all around me to tell the bus driver to stop, to help me, yet they all just stared at me quietly. There is a chance that they didn’t understand me, but surely the sight of a man flailing and shouting near the back of the bus must have resonated with someone.

At the bus station I boarded a junker, a heap for sure. Blackened on the inside from the smoke of a thousand cigarettes, I could clearly see that I was in for a long ride. I had heard that the ride would take about four hours. It took five and felt like three days. I grew fingernails and a beard. The oldest man I have seen in China rode with us. He aged as well.

People boarded at all manner of strange location, at on ramps, under overpasses, by gas stations. There seemed to be an elaborate system of phone calls and shouting out the window that allowed people to board with their various sacks. I have never seen such an assortment of paraphernalia as I have on the buses in China.

The driver drove with his window partially open the entire trip. I was cold but offered no complaint as it lessened the amount of smoke that pooled overhead. I saw some of the bleakest, greyest landscape I have ever seen in my entire life between Rong Cheng and Qing Dao. Miles and miles of tree branches and the outlines of mountains through overcast skies, harvested cornfields, piles of pasty earth, mostly colorless, except for the occasional green field of baby wheat or pink brickyard. Sporadically we came across power plants spewing clouds of smoke into the air and the early stages of cities around them. The miracle of industrialization. I saw vehicles hauling cardboard, fiberglass automobile shells, hay, pine, people, cornstalks, people lying on cornstalks, pigs.

At one point an empty bottle that had occupied a seat up until that time fell onto the floor and started rolling around. The driver told a woman to throw it out the window. I looked outside and noticed a small seating area up ahead with benches and foliage. She seemed to wait until we arrived there and threw it at the little park so that it shattered around where people would walk. The driver noted the strangeness of her shot selection as well and told her he meant for her to throw it into the bushes. She responded that she heard him, but didn’t understand him. I am not alone in this, apparently.

Upon arriving in Qing Dao I inquired what the name of the place was so that I might catch a taxi back when I return. The driver said, “Qing Dao.” I had to specify, the name of the bus station.

I caught a taxi to the hotel that Mrs. Yu had set up for me, upon my request, through old friends of hers from school. It’s still too early to say, but it seems my request contained a fatal error. I had read once in a guidebook, which I subsequently forgot to take notes from or bring, that one of the hotels near city center had rooms with balconies overlooking the sea. I thought this was great and asked Mrs. Yu if she could arrange a room like that. She unfortunately did get me a room overlooking the sea ("Perfect Life Between Sea and Mountain"), only not in city center. Qing Dao is on a peninsula. I am somewhere on the outskirts of the city, on a desolate strand of beach, from the looks of it, and it is not summertime.

There is an upside to this. While trying to coordinate the Internet in my room with the hotel staff, I befriended them and have plans for all types of unspecified fun over the next two days. Seeing the Internet not working and time slowly slipping away, I told them not to worry about it, that it was more important for me to go and eat and have fun as soon as possible, and where exactly would that be…? They told me of a place down the street (surely there must have been something lost in the translation) that was alternately beautiful, bamboo, and animals. I was drilling the boys for deeper meaning when one of them offered to take me out to at least fulfill the eating portion of my request.

We hopped in the hotel minibus and drove off into the night. I found out that my host’s name was Hu and that he had been in Qing Dao for 2 years and thought highly of the place, and though he was on the clock, it was somehow permissible for him to take his new American friend out for dinner, on me of course. I gathered that he was on sporting terms with hotel management. We drove through an upscale Qing Dao neighborhood and stopped for gas before arriving at the restaurant. In China, I find that it is quite common to pick your food out from a selection of fish tanks and plates of uncooked meat. I am always confused by this as I’m never sure what’s what. I attempted to make selections based on what Hu seemed excited about.

The food, truthfully, was excellent. We feasted on a plate of spicy fried lamb, legs of pork, some kind of fish I had seen him handle a few minutes earlier, and raw oysters dipped in wasabi and soy sauce, accompanied by a couple of Tsing Tao beers. We made suitable conversation, I think I may have a ride to the brewery tomorrow and definitely some sort of outing planned for tomorrow night, perhaps including hot pot and maybe dancing (?), and, more importantly, I felt like I had pierced the usually opaque veil separating me from China.

Beijing Diaries VI

2006-11-28T05:46:00.000-08:00

October 23, 2006

Last day in Beijing. I wake up early to pack my things and make the key exchange with Alison. She suspiciously looks the place over. The TV/VCR/Speaker complex doesn’t turn on and she looks at me despairingly. I had unplugged it to charge my laptop. She returns my deposit. The last I saw of her she was on the floor frantically shoving loose papers into a makeshift garbage bag. I took this as my cue to leave.

I had epically overpacked for Beijing and paid dearly for it this morning. I made the prerequisite rounds, Starbucks, the bookstore, the sidewalk eatery, the tea house, all the while hauling two gigantic bags around and causing untold damage to my neck. I tried on pants with my two huge bags. I walked around carefully trying not to knock people down. I was like some awkward lumbering alien with huge unsightly growths. I felt like that terrible monstrosity, the tourist, and was embarrassed for myself.

I managed to board the metro and purchase a bus ticket to the airport. I sussed out the schedule and saw that I was early, a rare occurrence for me, and made my way around the block to the lush cafe where I had coffee earlier in the week.

Airport check-in was fairly painless. I wandered into all of the clothing, book, and souvenir shops and found a reclining chair to curl up in until take off. The in-flight corned beef sandwich was unexpected. Upon arrival in Weihai I located my luggage and walked out of the airport alone into the cool night. I felt momentarily liberated, independent, as if I had truly arrived and could finally maneuver through this strange land unattended. This was short-lived. My official re-entry into provincial life began when the taxi driver didn't understand a single lick of my efforts at Chinese. I did understand that he wanted to take me somewhere I didn't need to go. We settled on the Jiaotong, even though I wanted to go to the school. We would at least be in the right city.

I urged the driver on at the Jiaotong and eventually up the long dirt road to the dorm. Though the meter read 50RMB, the driver tried to charge me 100. We yelled at each other for a solid 5 minuted before I grew weary and gave him 80RMB. I could live with a $4 loss. Thus began my life in the dorms...

Beijing Diaries V

2006-11-23T04:37:00.000-08:00

October 22, 2006

Mona had arranged a pedicab ride through one of the last remaining Hutong areas of Beijing. I was also staying in a Hutong area but was informed, to my dismay, that it wasn’t one of the originals and had only been reconstructed to look like an original. Upon arriving, I was again reassured after seeing how small and uncomfortable the originals are.

We rode through the narrow alleyways built during the Mongol occupation to house the city’s teeming residents. The alleyways eventually opened up onto a lake surrounded by bars, shops and restaurants. After dismounting, we met a guide who led us through some shop-lined alleyways back onto the streets of Beijing and through the gates and up the steep stairs of the Drum Tower.

Back in the day (I’d make a terrible tour guide), they would beat on the drums at certain intervals to tell time. There was also an elaborate water clock on display, one, I presumed, that had not been widely produced. While perusing the Hutong shop area I had been hurried along after stopping to buy an old advertisement for “Oh Dear” cigarettes in order to catch the drumming spectacular at noon.

After leaving the Drum Tower we had our brief encounter with the Olympic Torch entourage.

The guide led us back into the Hutong and we visited a family that still lived there, and evidently made a reasonable living showing people they still lived there. We sat in the courtyard sipping tea for a few moments before the tour masses showed up. The man of the Hutong told us that a couple from Yale had spent their honeymoon in one the rooms off the courtyard and the family had left it decorated to show people. I made a mental note to cross the Hutong off my list of honeymoon destinations.

After the tour Mona humored me while I looked at old Chinese junk and ate more Thai. I made her drink a mojito and we sat in one of the cafes off the lake and chatted over tea and coffee with rum as the evening chill set in.

Cha Shan

2006-11-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

30

2006-11-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2006

Against apathy

2006-11-15T02:40:00.000-08:00

November 15, 2006

For the past 10 days my students and I have been doing classes on Batman Begins. It started off highly promising. Their interest was roused, they were excited and participated in class, then it devolved into nobody wanting to do anything except watch the movie. More than once I threatened to pull the movie if no one made any effort to speak English and started a minor crusade against the students who don't do anything, ever.

After one particularly exhausting tirade I asked if any of them ever wanted to get married. After sufficient embarrassment, one of them said that everyone wanted to. Then I asked them if they ever wanted to have kids. This was even more embarrassing, but they admitted that, yes, they did want to have chidren. I then asked them what they would do if their child, in the middle of class, wasn't paying attention like he was supposed to, but instead was vigorously shaking a bottle of water on his desk for no apparent reason. I pulled the bottle out of the guilty party's desk and re-enacted the scene. This brought barrels of laughter and widespread approval. I told them that's how I feel, like they're my kids screwing up and it frustrates me. They understood. I asked them why they don't make any effort in class. After rounds of silence one student spoke up and said that no teachers ever cared about them. It was all suddenly very after-school special. I told them I cared about them and consistently made efforts to involve them and they still didn't do anything in class and I asked them what I should do? What do they want me to do? They told me not to do anything.

Truthfully, in 31 days they leave for the factory and will probably never speak another word of English in their lives. I had them for approximately 50 days, and, if anything, showed them a good time. I'm pretty sure that was enough.

Chinese Men

2006-11-15T01:12:00.000-08:00

Marlboro would like to use this in their next ad campaign.

The Crawling Shrimp of Rong Cheng

2006-11-15T01:09:00.000-08:00

It tastes like crab.

While at the Jiaotong I decided to veer, momentarily, from the relative safety of the roast pork. Rong Cheng, situated near the seaside, is home to a wide variety of shell fish and crustaceans, my favorite of which is pa xia. To eat pa xia, the crawling shrimp, one must remove the spiny shell from the elongated tail portion and bite off the exposed flesh. The head covering can be removed as well, and whatever nerve bundle exists there sucked, but that's optional. I prefer not to.

Windy mountaintop

2006-11-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

November 15, 2006

Two Mondays ago, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say I was evacuated from the dorms. I was sitting in bed editing at the time when I received a call on my cell from Ms. Chu telling me that she and Chief Jiang were waiting outside. I asked, for what? She told me that it was too cold and that I would spend the night at the Jiaotong Hotel.

A note on the Wei Hai Engineering Technology College, it is built on the top of a mountain next to the sea and is still under construction. "Windy mountaintop" doesn't do it justice.

Part of the mountain was leveled, I hear, much to the dismay of the local villagers, to make room for the new facilities, designed by an architect, they tell me, from the warmer southern region of China. The dorms currently house over 1000 young men, women and teachers.

I think the villagers had less say than the people on the other side of the fence.

I won’t lie, I was frankly thrilled at the prospect of spending a few more nights at the Jiaotong and avoiding the daily wrath of Wang, our cranky steward. I walked outside where one of the Chief Jiangs sat in the driver seat of his car with the window down imploring me to hurry, hurry (“Kuai, kuai!”). I’m not easily rushed in any culture, the result of years of intense comfort and relaxation, and I’ve learned to ask all of my questions in China before going anywhere. I stood my ground to find out where I'd be going exactly and for how long, and then told them that I would be back in a moment, after I packed my bag. This elicited a flurry of refusal, no, get in the car, what would you possibly need a bag for? I told him that I was going to get my toothbrush and a change of clothes. He told me that the Jiaotong had toothbrushes. Clearly, he hadn’t spent any amount of time there.

I got a phone call about 5 minutes into packing my bag, inquiring what could possibly be taking me so long. I looked out the window, and, not seeing the sky falling, only snow, and thinking I probably had at least a few more minutes before everything was frozen solid and we'd be trapped at the school until spring, I finished packing my bag.

My dorm room in disarray during the time it was too cold to sleep there (the lights in the room are blue):

View from the school at night:

I was warmly received by the Jiaotong staff who seemed to remember only the good times we miscommunicated and not the bad. Shortly thereafter, surprisingly, I was told to hurry, hurry and drop my bags off and then come back downstairs so they could take me to dinner, at the Jiaotong. The Jiaotong is quite the hot spot for meals, weddings, office parties, and late night drinking, incidentally. In the two-and-a-half months that I spent there they also managed to build and entire addition that now houses one of the newest and most popular hot pot restaurants in town. The sound of construction mingling with cars parking in the morning was as much a part of my daily routine as their lovely corn meal porridge.

Chief Jiang opted for a private room in the old Jiaotong and lit up myself and Mr. Joon, who had accompanied us, with a bottle of wheat liquor. It was suddenly much warmer.

I had one of my infamous restless Jiaotong nights and the next morning, hangover in tow, made my students watch 45 minutes of Waking Life, a dialogue heavy philosophical cartoon, in complete silence, as revenge for their behavior the previous day.

Beijing Diaries IV

2006-11-07T22:05:00.000-08:00

October 21, 2006

No plans today. I set out on a mission to find a current issue of Time Out Beijing. I check Starbucks, the bookstore, every newsstand I pass, no luck. A man stops me on the street and inquires, in English, about my business in Beijing. I tell him I’m looking for a magazine right now, would he be interested in lending a hand? He leads me across the street into the lobby of a posh hotel where they have free English language local events magazines for their guests. I help myself. He tells me that he is a teacher and invites me to come to an art exhibit. I tell him sure, why not, I’ll have a look, and we cross the street and walk into a building, up the stairs, to a small room on the second floor wallpapered with traditional Chinese prints for sale. I see they have also hornswogggled a South American and are holding him captive. I inspect a few of the prints and make my escape.

It is cool and damp outside but I decide to walk around more. Two hours later I am lost on one of my long stupid walks. The laptop in my backpack started to feel heavy after the first hour and it is now getting dark and beginning to drizzle. I think, worst case, I can catch a taxi, but that seems extravagant and I keep telling myself that it may be around the next corner. It eventually is and I stumble onto familiar grounds from a new direction, though not the one I intended. I find refuge in my neighborhood teahouse and start mapping out a plan for the evening.

As night falls, I make my way to the Outback Steakhouse. Sad to say, but after two months of Chinese cuisine, I wanted a proper steak. Outback looked the same, tacky, faux-Australian, but felt unfamiliar. It lacked the happy chatter of the wait staff.

Afterwards I boarded a taxi for an evening of aural weirdness. Some Norweigian duo was playing their laptops in the art district and I opted for that over Chinese death metal and national rock. The music consisted of long droning over synth-washes, much what I expected from the brief description. People sat in their seats with their eyes closed. I drank a beer and chatted up some Americans who had also come for the show. We exchanged war stories and I gathered that I was in a far stranger situation.

Dorm Life

2006-11-07T02:38:00.000-08:00

November 7, 2006

This is a picture from the time my window fell two stories down to where the men smoke cigarettes. Luckily, no one was smoking at the time. As you can see from the picture below, the window was of significant size and could have caused severe damage to a man smoking a cigarette.

At the time, I was engaged in a furious foot chase around my dorm room, trying to coerce various flies toward the window, which I would open when they were close enough and shoo them out. This was my plan of attack. You can imagine my surprise when the window left the premises.

This is the room where the students eat meals.

This is the room where I eat meals. Sometimes I eat out.

This is a meal. Most meals are variations on one another. Usually there is bread, noodles, or rice, sometimes all three. Other recurring menu selections inlude either pork fat, chicken parts, cod fish and squid mixed with either celery or red and green peppers. Occasionally, the tomato. Today we asked for more food because we were hungry and they gave us a plate of boiled cabbage.

This is the codfish and the celery.

This is hard-boiled sparrow's eggs and celery.

This is one of the places in my room where cold air comes in. Notice the daylight. I shoved a sock in it.

I thought this might be a fire hazard.

Beijing Diaries III

2006-11-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

October 20, 2006

Mona texts early to postpone our daytrip until the afternoon. I take the opportunity to drink caramel macchiato at Starbucks. I miss the little things. I sit on a couch and blog while caffeinating and eating a pastry and fruit bowl. Outside a student approaches and asks if he can practice his English with me. I tell him, in English, that I’m looking for an English bookstore and maybe he can help me. He leads me across the street to a four-story bookstore and we peruse the lit section. I purchase Newsweek and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Student wants to spend the day drinking coffee with me and practicing English but I politely ditch him to eat fried duck and meet up with Mona.

I underestimate the distance to the metro and to my destination and arrive late. On the metro I read Newsweek and feel like I’m in New York and it takes forever to get anywhere. Mona is waiting with more pastries and we sit and talk while waiting for the bus. The bus trip is long and I nap briefly before arriving at Fragrant Hills.

We walk up a slight incline toward the mountain along a street lined with food and junk vendors and crowded with people who have come to see the leaves change colors. We buy doughy Korean pastries with sweet goop inside from these people:

Walking up the mountain, Mona tells me stories about when she was 13 and she had to wake up at 3 in the morning to come here with her grandparents to fetch clean water before the long lines formed. I picture her grandparents as kindly old Chinese with buckets and eternal grins. The air is cold and clean. The leaves, unfortunately, have not changed colors.

Mona’s aunt picks us up in a car and we drive to Mona’s grandfather’s house for dumplings. I meet her mother and grandfather and he tells me to keep my jacket on in the house because it gets cold. He stays in the living room eating dumplings and watching the news while we sit in the kitchen and I practice my Chinese and amuse my hosts. Mona had previously offered to take me to a big Beijing nightclub but I find out that this isn’t her scene and she is just doing it to be kind. We opt instead to sit around the living room and talk to each other without shouting. She tells me that the neighbor feeds over 20 stray cats on a daily basis. I mention, in case they have not already figured it out, that the cats will keep coming back. She says that they believe that cats have lives too and should be cared for as all living things.

I take the metro back and watch DVDs I bought the day before at a steakhouse I was led to by a stranger on the street.

Beijing Diaries II

2006-10-31T03:23:00.000-08:00

October 19, 2006

I wake up to birds chirping. Birds. Chirping. Not knocking at the door, vacuuming, cars parking, garbage trucks—birds. In the heart of Beijing no less. Very strange. The courtyard house is unnaturally quiet. I lie in bed with my ears ringing. Last night was the first night I’ve slept without a fan in over a month. I wonder if I have tinitis.

I go to a café and drink coffee, eat pastries, then meet Mona and Zach for sightseeing. We go to a trendy art district called 798 (yesss) full of converted factories, warehouses, art spaces, studios, cafes and restaurants. Mona and Zach appear as if they could go all day without eating. I succumb quite easily to coffee and Thai curry.

There are white people with cool haircuts crawling all over the place, English businessmen, high-society ladies. It reminds me of Brooklyn.

We leave 798 and take a taxi to the antiques district. We stroll and window-shop. I handle old a few old things before finding out what they are worth and then refrain from handling them further.

Afterward we stop for Muslim Chinese food that is painfully spicy. Bean curd, spicy chicken, green and red peppers, noodles, lamb kebobs, bok choy, coca cola. Full and sleepy they roll me next door into a Gong-Fu spectacular at the Red Theater.

I get dropped off at the village gates, grab my laptop, and go to the teahouse around the block. The cute waitress flirts with me during the presentation of my ginseng oolong tea and Chinese pudding, which looks like black tire rubber floating in milk and tastes of licorice. I flip through a Beijing Time Out and talk to my Mom through the computer.

October Surprise

2006-10-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

Olympic torch sighting in Beijing.

(isn't it a little early for this?)

Beijing Diaries I

2006-10-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2006

The morning is hectic. I wake up at 7:00 after four and a half hours sleep. The tank is not full. The phone rings shortly after. It’s Mrs. Yu from school. She’s in the lobby with the driver waiting to take me and my things to campus. I tell her I’m not finished packing, I need to shower, can she give me fifteen minutes. She repeatedly says that Chief Jiang says I will move to the school today. I tell her I understand this but nobody told me and I’m not ready yet. This will take fifteen minutes. She acquiesces. Minutes later she and the driver are knocking on my door. With the shower running I reiterate my position, regardless of Chief Jiang’s wishes. She yields. I get my fifteen minutes.

On the way to the school we stop at JiaJiaYue and I purchase sweet breads, the kind I had only wrapped in plastic until now. They live up to expectations.

In class I show the students my passport and plane ticket, items many of them will never again see in their lifetimes. They comment that I was thicker in my passport photo. I play Sufjian Stevens and we watch slideshows of my trip to Maine.

After class Chief Jiang, Mrs. Yu, Mr. Fang, and Chief Chien take me out to lunch and ply me full of alcohol. I consider telling them that attempting to board a plane drunk in my country is grounds for not boarding the plane, but opt not to. They frequently toast my trip to Beijing.

We leave late and race to the airport, stopping briefly for gas. I step out of the vehicle to videotape a man selling a pile of corn.

Chief Chien assists me with check-in and takes his leave at the security checkpoint. I listen to Harmony in Ultraviolet through boarding and while sleeping the length of the flight to Beijing.

I wake up on the descent with a massive headache. Mona Bei greets me at the airport with a big hug and we board a shuttle bus to city center. We talk and I slowly fill her in on two months of personal drama. She kindly listens and proffers Confucian insight into my predicament.

We go to a lush café for coffee and then to Tiannemen Square to meet Alison who holds the keys to the courtyard house I found on Craigslist.

Alison makes me write and sign a contract that says something to the effect of my deposit will be returned to me if nothing is broken. She mysteriously tells me that if the landlord asks, I am good friends with Jason. Everyone leaves.

Jason, it turns out, is not prepared for houseguests. I venture out into the Beijing night in search of a towel, soap, and bottled water. A nice family overcharges me for something that is not quite a towel. Their little girl’s voice cracks when she talks and she gives me a corn stick.

I eat dinner at a little table on the sidewalk. People walk by and nobody stares at me. I find it comforting to be anonymous again.

Chinese Marketing

2006-10-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2006

I stayed up late Tuesday night cutting a Tae-Kwon-Do DVD that I promised my friend Liang and that I put off until the last minute. He may use it for television advertising and I could use a foot in that door. I also had to pack up my hotel room at the Jiaotong. Sometime while I am in Beijing the school will arrange to haul my belongings to campus. I am constantly amazed by the sheer amount of useless items I brought with me to China.

Autumn Festival

2006-10-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

October 14, 2007

Last Saturday was the Autumn Festival. I had mentioned to my Tae-Kwon-Do instructor Liang that I wanted to party for the festival but I had no one to party with so he said he’d party with me. Liang and his wife Liang took me out for lunch. They picked me up at the Jiaotong in a taxi and we rode out to the mall. There was a moment where I thought they were trying to decide whether or not to bring me to the sit-down restaurant on one side of the street or the mall food court on the other.

At the mall food court surrounded by the usual assortment of fried pork, clams, and beer, I was once again a source of curiosity for the local volk who had turned out in force for holiday shopping.

After lunch, we too shopped ‘til we dropped, or until I dropped. I ate some kind of sugar-glazed fruit on a stick. I doled out approval and disapproval regarding fashion selections. The Liangs bought me mooncakes, the official food of the Chinese holiday. Mooncakes aren’t actually cake, but a chewy concoction of sugar and dough, sometimes containing gummy nuggets.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of working in a mooncake factory. On a shopping outing not too long ago, my friend Yuan received a call from her boss asking her to come eat cake or make cake or something, I didn’t quite understand, and I was subsequently invited to come observe the proceedings first-hand. Naively, I consented and spent the next three-hours meting out dough, folding boxes, and hand-wrapping the finest assortment of baked breads I’ve laid eyes upon in these two long months. To compound matters, I hadn’t eaten lunch and was sleepy because my body ached all night after sitting though the three-hour outdoor student talent show, which merits its own entry, in the freezing cold the night before. Never have I wanted to eat something sitting in front of me so badly. After an adequate pause in the endless parade of baked goods preceding the National Holiday, I made a break for it.

The Liangs invited me to their home for holiday dinner that evening, not wanting me, I assume, to spend it all alone at the hotel. I arrived and we dined on what I can only describe as a stairwell landing lit by a single thin fluorescent light stapled to the wall. Dinner culminated in a modified version of rock, paper, scissors (hands up or down) where the odd man out had to drink the soup. Not having lost a hand, I pondered what could possibly be wrong with the soup? I thought there must be strong liquor in it. I’m sure there were nuances lost in the conversation, comments on the soup's mustiness or lack of flavor, sarcastic praise for the male cook. When I asked, as one might, why are we doing this, they answered (why of course) for fun! This, somehow, made it easier to join in the revelry.

Recipe for Disaster

2006-10-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Seaside

2006-10-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2006

On Thursday I learned what sounds to make to get the taxi driver to take me to the sea. It's beautifully quiet there.

They've built a park alongside the beach with surprisingly tasteful sculptures, quite popular in the region, and a shady grove of pines.

I lay in the grass for the first time in two months and relaxed my eyes and ears, just listening to the ocean and the wind through the trees. Sprawled throughout the grove were laborers, I assume, from the nearby arena in development.

Upon closer inspection I observed that the arena is being built across the street from a vast upscale housing development. The gates to the community were open and unmanned so I wandered through the Disneyesque assortment of enormous houses and endless rows of apartments (these pics don't do it justice). The eerie thing is that the whole development was completely empty.

I believe nobody is living here because nobody can afford to. I wonder where they expect all of their moneyed tenants to come from and when they will arrive. If, indeed, this many people do come, I'm convinced that they will lay waste to the beachfront in no time at all.

Screen Test

2006-10-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Uncle goes to the zoo...

2006-10-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

October 2, 2006

The doorbell rang Monday around 10 a.m. in the midde of my morning coffee. My 14-year-old niece, whose name I don't remember (it's not uncommon for me to spend whole days, even weeks, with people whose names I don't know), was standing there asking if uncle wanted to go out and play. I didn't understand where we were going, but I'll go anywhere quite frankly. I ended up here didn't I?

Her father is a policeman who works in the hotel lobby at night (one of the affectionately titled "lobby people" with whom I drink tea and beer on occasion) and we rode to our mysterious destination, eating assorted breads, in a police mini-bus. By this point I had found out that we were going to the zoo. The zoo, incidentally, is in Rong Cheng, which is much larger than I thought, stretching at least an hour to the northwest. There was an alarming moment when we turned the corner into a medium-sized amusement park. I was actually disappointed at the thought of hoofing it through an amusement park all day. I had myself all geared up for the zoo. Luckily, our police escorts waved us through and we drove up to the top of the mountain where the zoo is located.

It's an impressive facility built right into the mountain overlooking the sea. I think non-police persons park at the bottom and walk up the mountain then down the mountain. Fortunately for us, my niece's father didn't enter the park and met us at the bottom of the mountain with the bus.

On the way home we stopped to eat at a restaurant. My policeman friend wanted me to drink beer, I think, because he was driving and this prohibited him from doing so. I should mention that this is a man who likes to drink beer. I declined, thinking I was being clever when I said I didn't want to drink alone. To solve the problem, he had my 14- and 16-year-old nieces join me.

National Day

2006-09-30T04:24:00.000-07:00

October 1, 2006

Happy Chinese National Day. Welcome to my world.

For others it was business as usual.

Interview

2006-09-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

This is the most advanced group of students I've worked with. Some of them have aspirations to study in America. These are a few choice moments from our mock interview sessions.

Songbird

2006-09-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

Your moment of zen...

Yes, he is playing Kenny G.

September 18, 2006

I asked my students to come in Monday prepared to talk about their desired majors. It turns out I have a future civil engineer, a machinery automator, a horticulturist, an athletics director, a 3-D animation specialist, a cartoonist, an architect, a few capitalists, various computer aficionados, and one musician in my class. I searched out websites, CDs, and DVDs for each area of intetrest but only a few students took an interest, including one girl who was very eager to absorb a significant portion of my music library into her iPod. I introduced the musician to Kind of Blue.

Sunday School

2006-09-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

September 17, 2006

I arrived at class Sunday morning at 10 a.m., a little worse for wear from toasting to new friends and whatever the night before. Despite my weakened state, I taught two and a half hours, talking at length, sometimes, only to myself. The students here don't always know what I'm saying but think it's impolite, maybe, to ask questions. I go through this in all my classes. I have a speech about how I can't read minds and if they don't understand something to ask questions and that I'd rather communicate in poor English than not at all and that it's okay to make mistakes. Then I make fun of them when I catch them not doing these things. They love it.

Some of the students are leaving for university in Sacramento in October. I'm excited and terrifed for them to go to America. I found out that I am the first American many of them have ever met. There was a Canadian teacher here briefly, and an African, but no Americans that they knew of. They mostly get Koreans and Japanese, some Russians. There are no westerners here because it's a county, not a city, and foreigners don't come to counties. Nobody told me.

They are quite possibly the most naive group of twenty-year-olds I have ever met. I want to fly over with them and make them sandwiches, buy them sweaters, take them to a ball game or something. I tell all my students that I hope one day we can eat hamburgers together in America.

They will be overwhelmed by it. Some may be eaten alive. Others will fit in. They already look and act California. I just wish I had more time to prepare them.

After class the head mistress and her cohorts took me out to lunch, the first all-women crowd I've dined with. They too wanted to drink me under the table. They seemed disappointed when I told them I didn't want beer after the previous evening's follies, just a Coke.

Sabado Gigante

2006-09-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

September 16, 2006

Saturday marked the start of the unfortunately named "20 Day Economic Forum of the Developed Counties of China" in Rong Cheng. More importantly, it also marked the first of my five days of vacation. I texted my karate instructor's sister who speaks a little English and invited her to meet me for lunch. After a series of very confusing missives about whether or not I was scheduled to teach her class that afternoon (I told her I had no prior knowledge of it, but that didn't necessarily mean it wasn't me), she agreed and we met at the Jiaotong. She made me drive her on the back of my bike to a restaurant a few blocks down.

At the restaurant she ordered sweet poridge, fried dough, pork skewers, mushrooms and bok choy, a humongous vat of seafood soup, and corn on the cob, affter which she mentioned that it was all for me and that we had to leave in less than a half-hour to go to her English class that she thought I was supposed to teach. This is my life in China. A lot of food, not enough time to eat.

She made me drive her to her English class and then told me that I should get more exercise. I thought, but didn't say, that maybe she should get her own bike. I returned to the Jiaotong and got a call from her asking me to come back to school to negotiate teaching the class with the school's principals. Why we couldn't have done this while I was there, I don't know. I returned and made a deal to teach two hours a day for the following six days, throughout my vacation.

During the negotiations my cell phone rang. It was Mrs. Xiao calling to tell me that she was at the hotel waiting to take me to dinner with her husband, where was I? I told her that I was talking to some people and that I would meet her there in a half-hour.

I rode back to the Jiaotong where she was pacing the lobby anxiously awaiting my arrival. She was clearly excited to introduce me to her husband and high school sweetheart who runs a peanut oil factory near the school. I changed and hopped into their mammoth SUV. At the restaurant we were joined by the couple who had taught Xiao English 23 years ago. They had been teaching English for 28 years in Rong Cheng and had instructed practically everyone I know who speaks English in the area. This generational intimacy is something I don't see much back home. I also move every two years.

Ten of us sat around the table, me, Xiao, her husband, their daughter and her friend, the driver and his daughter, the English teacher couple, and their son, who left shortly after we arrived to go meet up with his boys or something. The meal was intense, as usual. We drank beer and ate a selection of sea creatures unmatched during my stay here. The newest and strangest entry by far was the centipede-like crustacean that tasted like crab.

After dinner we drove out to the opening night festivites and walked around the blockades that had been erected to keep out non-ticket holders. The Economic Forum is an important event for Rong Cheng and a sign of its growing significance as a city of trade. I groan a lot, but for once, it appears, I am actually in the right place at the right time.

I found out that next year 1,500 students will be coming from Harbin University. That number might be off, my informants have been known to inflate, but any students from Harbin, which is a well-known university, is a big deal. The campus remains unfinished, but you can see how much they intend to build. Once I move, it should be more like I'm on a university campus, kids everywhere, other teachers. I tell myself I'll finally learn Chinese. In any event, I am close enough to the bottom to hopefully begin laying some groundwork.

TGIF

2006-09-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

September 15, 2006

Check out my new digs. Nice, huh? Very Chinese prison cell. I always said I wanted to get in on the ground floor of something. To their credit, my hosts did tell me that it wasn't ready yet. I muscled my way in on the last day of classes despite their delicate protests. There was a team of Chinese laborers inside cleaning wet cement off of the tiling which looks like it will effectively conduct cold thorugh the floors this winter. I found out that the school was designed by an architect from southern China where the weather is warmer. I can't wait to see what they do with the place.

In class I requested the presence of the A/V guy to unlock the secret room so that we could watch cartoons. The A/V guy did eventually show up. He showed up and took the DVD player out of the room. I pushed my way past him into the secret room and made noise about the other DVD player in the back. He told me that it was broken and that he was the technician. I told him that I was a technician too, and that could he at least hook up the speakers to my computer. Everyone, to my dismay, completely ignored my pleas and left with all of the equipment.

In lieu of the projector, we watched the cartoons on my laptop with hardly any volume. If my students wanted to watch cartoons, we were going to watch cartoons. Interestingly enough, they didn't want to watch cartoons. They wanted cinema. My associate teachers had told me that the students wanted to watch cartoons. Fortunately, I do have a couple of long rambling dialogue movies that I brought with lessons in mind. Maybe I'll have my conversations, listening sessions, and movie screenings after all. We watched cartoons anyway. The students surprisingly preferred vintage Bugs and Popeye to the sleek modern fare. They have good taste at least.

We followed with an exceptionally vigorous game of Hangman. If anyone remembers any more games like this or others that you used to play in grade school, please let me know. They come in handy here.

Friday night after Tae-Kwon-Do, Xiao and the other three beginners took me out for beer and meats. They put lemon popsicles inside of the beer and ate chicken heads. I was just happy to be out.

My new pad

Return of the Meiguoren

2006-09-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2006

On Thursday I made my triumphant return to Tae-Kwon-Do. Liang and Liang (you call everyone by their last names, and the Liangs are married) were happy to see me and I felt elated to be with people who are willing to sit and listen to my tentative experiments with their language. They are all the more important to me at this juncture because they do not understand a lick of English yet still choose to spend some of their time with me.

Dong-Dong showed up and he, Xiao, and I sat around for a while hashing out some Chinese. Xiao said she wanted to be my friend and asked for my number and e-mail. If someone asks for you number or e-mail then you're in. They may never call or e-mail, but they'll deal with you when they see you if you are a strange foreginer with no one to talk to.

Thursday night I stayed up late burning cartoons to DVD. I wasn't anywhere near as sore as usual.

Green Salad

2006-09-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

Septemer 13, 2006

You can't possibly understand how much this means to me. I have not seen much of this in China, the elusive green salad. I see raw vegetables, of course, on street corners, at JiaJia, but never in restaurants, at lunches, during dinners, on my plate. The people of Rong Cheng cook most of their vegetables into a moist stew. I was discouraged from purchasing such simple amenities by my current living situation and lack of kitchen, but I'm past all that now.

The street vendor mistook my request for two tomatoes for two kilos or something, but I didn't want to fight her over it after she started yelling at me about how much I owed and the policeman walked up. She was yelling because, I think, she thought I might understand better, and the policeman just happened to be in the vicinity, and you know, you can never have too many tomatoes, so I just forked over a few bills and scampered off. Back at the Jiaotong, I washed the greens and ate them folded, dripping water over the sink.

I also visited the Chinese pharmacy in search of an herbal sleep aid. I'm glad I made a point at the last second to distinguish between a mild calming effect and a heavy sedative. My short but informative experience in China has taught me to ask for less. Always ask for less. The pharmacist recommended a whole box of Zhi Bao San Bian Wan. My internet search has furnished me with this equally perplexing translation: Priceless Treasure Three Whip Pill. According to my contacts in the homeopathic heallth community, I have purchased pills for impotence. The confusion persists.

I set out on a mission recently to demand that the school provide me with Chinese lessons. After a month of trying to figure things out on my own, I have figured out that I need help. I think I've pinpointed my exact problem with the language. It's that I can't understand what anyone's saying. More specifically, I'm having trouble singling out individual sounds from the normal flow of conversation.

Some of my colleagues here at the Wei Hai Engineering Technology College have a way of, how shall we say, avoiding the issue. Allow me to explain. I have two main contacts at the school, Mrs. Tiao and Ms. Chu. They're English teachers and now serve as my in class translators, as well as my reluctant liaisons with the administration. Upon arriving at school, earlier than usual I might add, I asked Mrs. Tiao if she knew if Dean Jiang was in. She asked why and I told her that I needed him to arrange for scheduled English lessons. She responded by telling me that they were going to put a table in her office for me. I admired her attempt at a brush off but told her that wasn't enough. She made motions toward the telephone, then she deliberated with the other teachers in the office about the request (there are three, sometimes four), then she dodged the situation altogether when the "class is starting" music began (I'll have to tape this for you) and we walked to class. Everything here must be done with kid gloves.

During break I made efforts to pry information from my hesitant colleagues, including the poli-sci teacher who sometimes attends my lectures, regarding the country's limited success with environmental law. I read about it in the Times recently. The poli-sci teacher remained eerily silent (I think her English is not so good) while Abbott and Costello stumbled over each other trying to put a positive spin on a negative situation. I wasn't swayed by their argument.

After class I brought up the lesson request again when Dean Jiang showed up to drive me back to the hotel. I kept talking English at everybody until Xiao feebly translated my request. Jiang responded that I could start when we return from vacation on the 20th, a week from yesterday. Did I mention I have five days off starting after class on Friday?

And so I have a compromise, and a week more to stumble unaccompanied through my own personal bewilderment.

Within no more than 10 minutes of returning to the Jiaotong that afternoon I received a phone call on the hotel line requesting that I come to the front desk. There, one of the many school teachers who doubles as driver waited to take me back to school. I asked him why, I just came from school. He explained, and, not really understanding, I assumed that they had taken my plea into consideration and were going to begin my Chinese classes sooner rather than later.

Wishful thinking on my part. Instead I met with President Shi who was excited to give me a copy of the school's publication of The American Community College Student Experience, a book he co-published with my father's college. We talked and I pitched my lesson request and he seemed sympathetic to my plight. He told me that I would be moving out of the Jiaotong and into a two floor apartment currently under construction at the school in 10 days. I nodded, curiously, wondering what this really means for me, and what strange, new challenges this will bring.

Shi then took me, Jiang, and some of the school's professors, including Mr. Joon, who I haven't seen in weeks since he traveled back to Korea for mysterious reasons, out for beer and dumplings. They are forever amused by whether or not I find food delicious. I was fairly exhausted and not very amused at this point after staying up late shuffling files and burning DVDs to make room for cartoons I was downloading for the last day of classes before vacation.

The festivities ended and I returned to the Jiaotong, again.

A whole lot of lathing going on...

2006-09-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

September 12, 2006

Yesterday I was granted a tour of the school's engineering facilities, discovering, to my chagrin, that English is not my students' main focus. For those of you as unfamiliar with lathing as I was, I have supplied a definition below.

lathe (NOUN):

A machine for shaping a piece of material, such as wood or metal, by rotating it rapidly along its axis while pressing against a fixed cutting or abrading tool.

I also got my hands on some Chinese tunes.

Teacher's Day

2006-09-09T20:23:00.000-07:00

September 10, 2006

When I walked into class today my students stood up and, in unison, wished me a Happy Teacher's Day. I asked them if they got me anything. They didn't. In commemoration of the Day of the Teacher I was notified that I would teach two more days this week, bringing the grand total up to twelve days in a row, the remaining five days beginning at 6 a.m. How thoughtful.

On the ride home I notified Jiang, the driver, that I had a caught a Chinese cold. We made a pit stop at a local pharmacy where Jiang and the doctor evidently have a pretty cordial relationship. We walked out without paying, and, I'm not sure what Jiang said to the person at the counter, but I'm almost positive it was the equivalent of "It's on him."

Teacher's Day was in full effect at the Jiaotong, replete with karaoke and a live band in the lobby. I vacated the premises for a few hours to work on my Chinese.

Recovery

2006-09-08T02:32:00.000-07:00

Views from my hotel room

September 8, 2006

I slept like a dream last night. The simple truth about my life in China is that my outlook correlates directly with how well I sleep. In class today I mentioned that I had a DVD to show the students of some of the taping I did. They called in the school's A/V speciaist who showed up and unlocked the secret room behind the chalkboard that held the video equipment. I followed him into the room, trying to scope out their set up, but he told me to go back outside and continue with class. Difficult to do during the lowering of the projector screen, which seemed to last an eternity. I began to notify everyone that the piece was extremely short, but it was too late. Curtains were pulled, lights were dimmed, and close to 90 people sat in silent anticipation. What took close to 15 minutes to set up, during which all expectations soared wildly out of control, was over in approxiamtely 49 seconds. I have never seen anyone more disappointed in my life. They looked shattered. Everyone. Teachers, students, the A/V guy. It was heart breaking. I tried to recover, telling them that we could do more in the future, but I had already lost their trust. Nevertheless, I forged ahead in the awkward silence, only my voice ringing out in the eerily quiet auditorium. The pain eventually subsided and together we conjugated.

I spent the afternoon and evening at the Jiaotong, alternately sleeping, lounging, consolidating my notes, rearranging my room, and catching up on correspondence. I ordered lunch and then had to put the smackdown on the hotel staff for not serving what I ordered. They were surprisingly sympathetic.

One Month

2006-09-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

September 7, 2006

Yesterday was another two karate class day. I've never had this happen before, but I had trouble sleeping last night because I hurt too much. I couldn't find a way to lay where my body didn't ache. I have knots in my chest and left tricept. I woke up at 6 a.m. to my one month anniversary in China.

We moved out of nouns and pronouns and into verbs in class today. I anticipate a long arduous road to sentences.

After class I went back to my hotel room and crashed until my next karate class. I had planned to struggle through one session today and tomorow and take the weekend off. I opted to take the bus instead of riding my bike becasuse my legs were killing me. This being my first solo bus ride in China, I wasn't expecting the strangeness that ensued. A chubby Chinese man saw me board and called in English, "Please sit here," in a seat next to him. Naively, I did. He asked my name and I told him, harmless enough, then he asked if I had a mobile phone. I lied and told him no, not wanting to make any new friends today. He asked me to write my name in his book, which I did, somewhat unwillingly, not seeing a polite way out of the situation. I was hoping my stop would come before things got uncomfortable, which they did.

He asked me if I smoke, which I'm beginning to think is the kiss of death in China, and then if I drink. He told me that we would go hang out together. I told him no, thanks, I've got my own things to do. All the while he is looking me up and down and practically salivating. I try to ignore him. He asks if he can take a look at my hair. I say, "You're looking at it," then I see him lift his hand to touch it. I back away and put my hands up in self-defense saying, "No, no, no, no," feeling violated at this point. It was during this interlude, I believe, that I missed my stop. I go to the front of the bus to try to get off and the ticket lady starts playing dumb. "Ting bu dong," she says ("hear no understand," the official motto of Rong Cheng). I start making getting off the bus motions when I hear chubby in the back calling my name softly, "Adrian, Adrian," and pointing at the seat. Thorougly creeped out at this point, I disembark at the park I was previously kicked out of, a significant distance from the gym.

I backtrack and arrive a little late, not clearly explaining why, not really wanting to either. During the warm-up and stretching routine they get a look at the bottoms of my feet which are swollen and blistered and call off the lesson, telling me to take a few days off. I will gladly comply. I look forward to taking about 400 mgs of ibuprofen (which I forgot I had last night) and painlessly drifting off for a few hours.

Makoto

2006-09-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

September 6, 2006

"The focus of makoto varies in different periods of history, but its common denominator has always been a purity of motive, which derives from man’s longing for an absolute meaning out of time and from a realization that the social, political world is essentially a place of corruption whose materiality is incompatible with the demands of pure spirit and truth.

Rejecting this grossly material world in which he finds himself, the man of makoto proceeds not by logical argument, pragmatic compromise, or a common sense effort to attune himself to the 'movement of the times,' but by the force of his own true feelings. Instead of depending on careful, rational plans and adjustments, he is propelled by unquestioning spontaneity…'Sincerity' in the words of a modern Western observer 'spells readiness to discard everything that might hinder a man from acting wholeheartedly on the pure and unpredictable impulses that spring from the secret centre of his being.'

Selfless dedication, or in more accurate psychological terms, belief in one’s own selflessness, is a further mark of the sincere man…The sincere man has freed himself from the besetting sins of 'egoism' and worldly ambition and is undaunted by the danger of personal risk and sacrifice. The purity of his intentions is revealed in action, usually of a dangerous nature; talk, unless reflected in deeds, is always a mark of insincerity and hypocrisy.

Sincerity precedes not only the realistic demands of established authority but also conventional rectitude; for its ultimate criterion is not the objective righteousness of a cause but the honesty with which the hero espouses it…

In his struggle against corrupt political power the hero’s main weapon is sincerity of resolve. Though at first he may achieve impressive (even miraculous) results, his noble renunciation of everything temporal and impure disposes him to defeat…"

- Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure

Payoff

2006-09-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

September 5, 2006

I found out I changed someone's life today. My good friend Dong-Dong told me tonight in not so many English words that he quit his illustrious job at the Jiaotong and is going back to school to study English, with Mrs. Soon no less. I feel deeply moved, to say the least. I'm not sure what role I played, but my being completely helpless in China may have been an influence on someone.

I'm sad to see all my friends go, but it seems that I've been adopted by my Tae-Kwon-Do instructor and his clan. After my 7:50 a.m. class at school this morning I was deep into trying not to move too much when my gym called to tell me that I had a lesson. I tried to bargain for the 6:30 p.m lesson but they were adamant that I go to the 2 p.m., for which I was already one half-hour late. My karate garb was in the hotel wash and I practically had to fight them to get it back. When I arrived, my three instructors, the lead instructor's wife, sister, and gym woman were all sitting at the gym's full-service bar waiting for me. I tried to explain my confusion regarding scheduling and in the process found out that I do indeed have two classes a day and should just come anyway to pracitce Chinese with them and hang out. That's where I was until about 9 p.m. tonight when Dong-Dong rolled in to tell me the news.

Luckily I was able to skip the second class after we went out to eat and I gorged myself at the behest of my instructor. Near the end of the first class I tried to explain to them that my legs didn't function properly anymore, to which they responded that this was good and that I just needed to take a hot shower, sorely underestimating the situation.

The Bludgeoning Continues...

2006-09-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

September 4, 2006

I don't have any word to describe it except brutalize. They brutalized me today. The pummeling actually began yesterday. I went to the gym thinking I might get a little workout, a bit of a warm up for my Tae-Kwon-Do class which started today. Things, unfortunately, spiraled out of control, as they have a way of doing in China. There is no half-way.

The Chinese have a way of sizing me up by looking at me, like I am a prize horse. They look me up and down, they talk about me to their friends while I'm standing right there, what I know, what I don't know. I really don't know much which makes it worse. The gym woman, as I like to think of her, gets up from her chair where she's talking to her friend and comes over to assist me while I take off my shoes to don flip-flops, as is gym policy. She sets me up, mostly against my will, with a large man named Xian-Ba-Wen (or that's how it sounded to me, anyway. There tends to be a huge gap between how words sound to me and what they actually are). Xian-Ba-Wen proceeded to slowly wear down every major and some minor muscle groups in my immediate possession while gym women and her friend examined and talked about me. I left fairly exhausted and fearful of how I would feel the next day.

I woke up early to prepare for my first ever Tae-Kwon-Do class in China. I have come to find out that Tae-Kwon-Do is a Korean style of self-defense, and now have the distinct pleasure of being yelled at in two languages, neither of which I understand. By the end of the stretching and warm up sessions I was reasonably tired and sweating profusely. The follwing 45 minutes of punching and kicking the air in front of me while trying to figure out what my instructors were saying capped it off. The head instructor, his wife and 7-year-old child (who, incidentally, makes me look like some kind of abomination on the mat) took me out to lunch afterwards and bombarded me with the names of things in Chinese, making me repeat them and recite them from memory, and taught me how to properly use chopsticks. The instruction, I gathered, doesn't end in the classroom. They told me to come back that evening at 6:30, presumably so that I could catch up with the other students.

Following lunch, I went to the Dean's office and found out that I will be teaching more classes. They asked politely and I accepted. That is mainly why I am here. I'll be teaching four classes on some days and I'll also be teaching the school's administration, which should be interesting. I've developed a first lesson routine and have gotten relatively good at simultaneously entertaining and teaching. Regrettably, today also marked the day I lost my translator, the wonderful Mrs. Soon. Two of school's English teachers have stepped up to the plate and seem to be getting the hang of things.

I returned this evening for my second karate lesson. There was a class of beginners who had the agility of wood and made me look especially good during warm-ups. It's amazing to me how rapidly the body adapts. Though I hadn't practiced at all in the invtervening 7 hours, I had soemhow improved. The muscles remember. Things were going well until the head instructor showed up. He zeroed in on me and pushed me to my limit for the night. My upper thigh was screaming in agony at one point as he had me practice a kick over and over again until I at least understood what I was supposed to be doing. When I actually had to hold my leg up we swtiched to the other one. When class ended everyone circled around me and spoke Chinese at me. Eventually they tired of that, realizing that's it's not that much fun when the foreigner doesn't know what you're saying. After sufficient humiliation the party broke up and I was allowed to return to my hotel room.

The Weekend Cometh

2006-09-02T06:20:00.001-07:00

September 2, 2006

After only 21 days of assorted work I have arrived at my first full two-day weekend where I have no scheduled engagements other than those of my choosing. Nobody has infringed on my time, called me, showed up at my door, or otherwise barged in unannounced on my life. I've crossed the first threshold.

After I bungled my first ever Chinese date I walked into a class full of restless 18-year-olds about to begin the first weekend of the school year. They didn't remember any of the previous lessons and it's quite possible, we found out, that many of them can't read the English alphabet. I told everyone about my date during break and showed them video of Beijing, a place that, strangely, I have visited and many of them haven't. The Chinese-English teacher was upset with me regarding my use of the words meats and breads and Mrs. Soon followed everything I said by saying, "The English say..." I positively couldn't wait for class to end.

I returned to my room and lay down. I had a half-hour before Dong-Dong and I were supposed to go to the park. My eyes were tired but I was too keyed up from the day's events to rest. Part of me wanted Dong-Dong to be late, but Dong-Dong is always right on time. My bell rang at exactly the right time and I invited him in and told him the story. We laughed and it came as a relief to me to have a regular friend in China.

On the way to the park we passed Hao Di Fang while the staff was having its pre-dinner warm-up on the street. I waved to Yuan and she waved back. She looked miserable. When we arrived at the park I asked Dong-Dong what we were supposed to do there. He asked me what I do when I come to the park. I told him I read. It turns out he thought I always go the park because there's something going on, and I thought he was taking me to the park to show me something. Really there wasn't anything going on at the park. We sat and practiced Chinese and he told me that we were going to party with the hotel girls that night. This, I thought, sounded like fun after a truly dreadful day. We also made arrangements for him to set me up with Tae-Kwon-Do lessons.

We met up with Jin Juan, her boyfriend Ping, and Xiao Wei that night at the hotel. On the walk they discussed where we should go and suggested Hao Di Fang. I told them that this was a terrible idea and that this girl did not want to see me any more that day. They discussed other places but Hao Di Fang, I gathered, is the spot in Rong Cheng. They said who cares, and I said yeah, who cares, whatever, and we went to Hao Di Fang.

There was a terse exchange at the entrance, she was still clearly upset about lunch, but we walked on by and I finally made it to the upstairs tables. I knew they existed, but up until this point I had never actually seen them. We sat in a booth and they asked me if I like China and I told them that China is difficult but I find it interesting. They asked what I meant and I told them that everyone stops and stares at me in the streets and that every day China likes to punch me in the stomach a few times. They enjoyed this. The waitress arrived with a pot of tea, on the house, courtesy of Yuan. A peace offering I guess.

A waiter came and informed us that our karaoke room was ready. I sang Stand by Me. I don't know what they sang, but it was fun. On the way back to the hotel Dong-Dong agreed to take me to the gym on Saturday. At the hotel we went up the back stairs into the office where Ping works and ate fruit that Hao Di Fang gave us. They cut open a melon that turned out to be a little bitter and everyone spit it out and they took all the rinds and the remaining half of the melon and threw them out the window, presumably into a garbage below. Despite the bitterness, it was no-holds-barred the sweetest melon I've ever had.

I slept in the next day and laid around catching up on my blogging until Dong-Dong showed up at ten on the dot. We rode a bus out to the gym which is on the way to the park I got thrown out of. There was some over the phone haggling between Dong-Dong and the Tae-Kwon-Do instructor that eventually brought the price down. The instructor's wife ran the counter and commented on my belly.

Later on in the afternoon Dong-Dong showed up with a white karate jumpsuit. I felt strange and elated that somehow, by whatever grace and good fortune, I have befriended this person who gets things done. He also had two apples, which I have added to my collection of apples that people bring me in the afternoon.

A Tale of Two Sisters

2006-09-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2006

I only hope I do this tale justice. It all began on my first visit to the Leisure House. There was one stand out performance, a young woman with a winning smile, exactly the person you'd like to see over a cup of coffee. She wore a little blue dress and gave the impression that she ran the place. She waved to me when I left, and to let you in on a little secret, when everybody stares at you but nobody waves, it can get a little lonely. It was a nice gesture.

A few days later I visited a different cafe, Hao Di Fang (A Good Place), alone for the first time, and, on the way to my seat, I could swear I saw the same exact girl wearing the same exact dress. There are curtains separating individual nooks at Hao Di Fang and the workers kept walking by and lifting my curtain to look at me like I was some kind of circus animal, but I never got a good look at anyone. On the way out I saw her behind the counter but she didn't recognize me. I asked her in English if she worked at the other cafe too and pointed in that general directon. She got very excited and pointed and said, "Sister, sister!" One of her co-workers chimed in, "Twins." "Wow," I said, "Twins."

This short series of events launched a two-week-long exercise in futility. I frequented both coffee shops, truthfully, in order to get out of my hotel room, but, I won't lie, I wasn't exactly displeased either when I saw the twins. I ususally spent epic amounts of time at either location deeply engrossed in work. Except for this one time...

This was the one time I wanted to get in and out of the coffee shop in a rush. I purposely didn't bring a book for that specific reason. I just wanted one cup of coffee, a little afternoon pick me up before going back to the hotel. I ordered and I waited. And I waited. Normally they are quick with the coffee, they have it right out, but this particular time they were taking forever. I was in the throes of boredom when she walked past my booth and turned around. I almost didn't recognize her at first in street clothes. I waved and she waved back, extra excited I thought. All of a sudden I wasn't so bored. Then, out of nowhere, she comes over to my table and, leaning on it, she starts talking to me in her best broken English. I'm about as thrilled as you can be. I ask her name and she tells me it's Dong Yuan and that she works at the other coffee shop. Her sister's name is Dong Fang. Just when we're getting somewhere she tells me that she "go work" at the other cafe, and that while she work, I should go by and "play." I tell her okay, sure, that's a great idea, I'm there and all.

She leaves and I'm thinking about going right over in a little while when I get a call from Mrs. Soon. One thing led to another and that night I ended up having dinner with the school's administrators. The next day I'm a little hung over and tired and it's my first day teaching and I'm feeling a little disheartened by the student's lack of English prowess and decide against going to the coffee shop. That night I practiced Chinese with Dong-Dong for three hours.

The next afternoon I visited the coffee shop. I see her, she's on the phone, she waves, I wave, I go to my secluded area. I order coffee and, apparently, popcorn from the waitress. She leaves and Yuan soon returns with my order. We make sounds at each other, I'm sitting, she's standing, and she keeps brushing my knee with hers. She pours my sugar in my coffee, she reaches over me and opens my bag of popcorn...I'm not Chinese, but I'm not stupid either. I show her the business card of the school where I'm working and she grabs it and holds it tight and asks if she can keep it. I tell her it's not mine, it's Jiang's, but I write down my name and number on a piece of paper and give it to her and mention that I live at the Jiaotong Hotel. She says, "Oh, Jiaotong," and nods her head like she knows where it is. She tells me her English isn't good and I say that's okay, my Chinese isn't so good either, and it sort of winds down after that. I didn't see her again that afternoon.

I wait about three days before returning. The meal pictured was served to me that afternoon. I mistakenly ordered about 20 meat skewers and a plate of fruit from the waitress. Again, Yuan came in with my order and said that she had tried calling me but that it was the wrong number. I show her the card with my number on it and it turns out that, the way I write, my fours look like Chinese nines. This time she gives me her number. We chat some more and I show her all of my Chinese vocabulary that I'm working on and we experiment a little with the dictionary, but then she "go work" and that was that.

That night I tell Dong-Dong the story, no small feat in itself mind you. Dong-Dong and I have had some marathon sessions in order to get a single point across. The truth is that I fight tooth and nail for even a shred of understanding. It is a constant struggle to simply communicate, a wholly ironic situation not entirely lost on me. I explain to Dong-Dong that he needs to tell me what to say on the phone the next day...

Class isn't until two that afternoon and I'm slow getting up. I put off the phone call for as long as I can, nervous, of course, about saying anything in Chinese that could potentially get lost or misinterpreted over the telephone. She picks up and I go blank staring at my sad little sheet of notes. I stutter through it and she says a number of things which are completely over my head. I say in Chinese, "Uhm, can you come to the Jiaotong Hotel," to which she responds in a flurry of semi-irate Chinese even more things that I don't understand. I reply, "Hao or bu hao." ("good or no good," with the "or" delivered in impeccable English) She responds, "Bu hao! Bu Hao!" I'm reeling in the face of this onslaught when she essentially says to meet her at Hao Di Fang for lunch. I struggle with the time but we eventually agree upon 11:00. Or 11:30. A.M. or P.M.

I show up at Hao Di Fang with my best don't care attitude at 11 a.m. and then convince myself that what we actually said was 11:30 (it was 11) and walk around the shopping district for 15 minutes. I return and sit on the stairs next door to Hao Di Fang. An older Chinese gentleman on the sidewalk starts calling to me in Enlgish, "So nice to see you." I stand up and greet him and we talk momentarily, he used to be an English teacher, before another English teacher friend of mine, Patrick, walks up and enters the fray. We deliberate over the time issue and Patrick agrees to talk to Yuan on the phone for me. I'm half-expecting her to bail when he hangs up and tells me, "She will come immediately."

She shows up with four guys and waves to me, then motions that she is going to put her bag inside. The guys and I are staring at each other uncomfortably so I walk up and introduce myself. They tell me to please wait. They gesture for us to go inside and we stand around awkwardly before they are seated and then Yuan leads me to a table above where I usually sit. She asks what I'd like to eat and I tell her that I can't read the menu, it's in Chinese, and that maybe she should order since she works there, all of which I don't think she understood, so I start saying, "Haochi! Haochi," which literally means "good eat," but is translated as delicious, so, like some sort of buffoon, I'm sitting there saying "Delicious! Delicious!"

She orders and we go back to trying to talk to one another. She's visibly excited to see me, but somewhere between flipping through the dictionary and notebook, the serving of various random foods (hot chicken foot, squid and noodles, fried rice, and ice cream, simultaneously, and all for me, I discover), and my catastrophic mispronunciations, she began to get flustered. Early on I had explained that I had to leave for class at 1:30, which she (somehow) mistook for 12:30. We had also taked about singinig karaoke, which I thought we were supposed to do after lunch. After so many mouthfuls and witnessing the date's extrordinary plunge to unfathomable depths, I decided it was time to move on to the karaoke part. We stood up and she ushered me to the door of the restaurant and said, "Bye!" I tried to stop her, telling her that I still had another hour. All of her friends and co-workers stood around us curiously observing this nuclear meltdown. We stepped outside at her request and I was able to diagram my hours of operation for the afternoon.

She led me back inside to the table, giving the "what did I get myself into?" eyes to all of her friends, breathing rapidly, and patting her hand on her heart. It seems that no one had mentioned to her that I am a walking disaster. At the table I made one last ditch effort to salvage everything by dropping the karaoke bomb. She seemed so upset at this point. I later learned that we don't do karaoke in the afternoon.

Upstairs in one of the karaoke suites I offer to sing her a song and she flips through the song book briefly before throwing it down on the table and saying that there are no English songs. The karaoke assistant turns the televison on and nearly blows us out of the room. After turning down the volume he steps out and she throws her back against the couch in submission. I tell her, "Come on, let's get out of here."

Yes, it keeps going. Outside things are momentarily better. It's a gorgeous day and I say so and tell her that we should have gone somewhere else besides her place of work to eat. She doesn't understand. She takes me to the bakery where her friend works and tells her friend the story. I peruse the baked goods. Her friend tries her broken English out on me and it occurs to me that not everyone is well-suited to teach or listen to beginners. We leave and I try to explain to her that, though I like her, it is difficult, almost painful actually, to continue this particular conversation any longer. I illustrate the last point by performing air harakiri at a Chinese intersection. She is not amused. I'm struck with the realization that my ambitions far outweigh my abilites and I wonder for how much longer this will be the case. The date officially ends one half-hour early.

Space to Roam

2006-08-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2006

"All current technologies reduce expanse to nothing. They produce shorter and shorter distances, a shrinking fabric. Now, a territory without temporality is not a territory, but only the illusion of a territory. It is urgent that we become aware of the political repercussions of such a handling of space-time, for they are fearsome. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals. If the parceling out of territory, of territories of time, is envisioned like that, according to strict regulation and not a chrono-political understanding, there will be nothing left but absolute control, an immediacy which will be the worst kind of concentration."

- Paul Virilio, Pure War

I received a call late last night from Mrs. Soon telling me that our class today would be at 7:50 a.m. and not 2:20 p.m., as previously noted. This put an immediate end to my staying up late and sleeping in party and severely hampered any possiblity of a good night's sleep. When the A/C cut out in the middle of the night, I believe my fate was sealed. I turned the fan to the preternaturally loud "High" setting and tossed and turned through another night at the Jiaotong Hotel (also known in certain hotel literature as the Rong Cheng Communications Mansion).

That morning we arrived at school, climbed the stairs from the parking lot, and crossed the empty marble plaza near the entrance. The sun beat down on the reflective surface making it feel hotter than it actually was. I wondered what these dead stone plazas say about our values.

We walked to the auditorium where my classes are held only to find it literally padlocked shut. While Mrs. Soon made phone calls, I looked out to the area where the road ended. The school and surrounding vicinity are still under construction and I remarked to Mrs. Soon that I'm drawn to these raw areas. Soon everything will be paved over, demarcated, quantified. I used to wonder what the obsession was with paving everything until it dawned on me that pavement has greatly increased my ability to visit some of these strange regions. It's curious that the same process that enables me to explore new territory also generates a wistfulness for untouched geography.

Our colleagues arrived to tell us that there would be no class today, the students had something else to do. Feeling slightly demoralized, I returned to the hotel and tried to sleep. Lunch arrived at the cusp of sleep with a knock at the door. I roused myself to let the bellhop in and was further disheartened to see the tentacles of my arch-nemesis, the dreaded you yu (squid), dismembered on my plate. I was beside myself.

On my way to the Signing Ceremony last week we passed a park that dwarfed all the previous parks I've seen on my Rong Cheng bicycle tours. It was a significant distance from the hotel, but I decided that I would trek out by bike one day. This was that day. I looked around the room unable to sleep, unable to eat, unwilling, even, to blog. I resolved to bike out to the park and spend the afternoon reading.

The ride, though lengthy, wasn't exhausting. I tried to avoid the endless staring around me and focus straight ahead. At the park they had benches with backs, a rarity in Rong Cheng. I picked one out overlooking the entirely empty park and opened my book. Within minutes, three generations of a Chinese family encircled me and began asking questions and pointing at my book. I intimated that I was from America and that no, the book was not in Chinese. They walked away and the youngest daughter, a girl about 7 years of age, turned and smiled at me. I felt better.

Not even ten minutes later a man pulled up to a bench 50 yards away on his scooter. I noticed out of the corner of my eye but paid him no mind. Five minutes passed and he rode through the path where my bike stood. I looked up momentarily and nodded, noticing for the first time that he was a cop. He motored around my bike and rode off down the path. I continued reading but could feel the upcoming interruption like a knot in my stomach.

The policeman returned and parked his scooter next to my bike. I stood and moved my bicycle off the pathway and he waved me off, insinuating that it was okay where it was. He stood and took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered me one. I declined, shaking my head and motioning that I don't smoke. He looked at me curiously and took one cigarette for himself. He asked where I was from and what I was doing here in China and how had I come to China without knowing any Chinese. I explained in shattered Mandarin that I am an American English teacher at the engineering school and that I had come here to learn Chinese. He kept looking at me and smirking and then looking around the empty park. I took my wallet out of my backpack to show him the hotel's business card and mistakenly left the wallet exposed on my bag. He promptly took the card and put it in his other shirt pocket. He pointed at his shirt sleeve which, among the Chinese characters, clearly said "Police" in English. I nodded innocently, trying not to betray my unease at the tension in the air.

I reached over to my backpack and put my exposed wallet back in its pocket while simultaneously pulling out my notebook of vocabulary. I searched for a pen to write down the word for police but couldn't find one. He looked around the park some more and smirked at me some more and I sat back and waited for him to leave. I was under the impression that I could outlast him by boring him with my lack of ability to speak Chinese. He looked at my book and I offered to show it to him but he was uninterested. He lowered himself, resting on his haunches, and asked me how much money I had. I feigned ignorance. He took out a wad of bills and asked again how much money I had. I paged through my notebook and, surprise, I couldn't find anything useful. He squatted and I sat in silence, both looking around the park. I said in Chinese that it was beautiful. He asked if I'd been drinking. I played dumb and he pretended to drink. I said, "Drink what?" He said, "Wine." I pretended to not understand the word for wine. I honestly wasn't sure if he was asking me if I drink wine or was I drinking wine, but I didn't want to drink wine with him, if that's where this line of interrogation was going, and I certainly hadn't been drinking. I'd have been in a much better mood.

Frustrated, bored, and possibly insulted by my lack of knowledge, he told me to leave the park. I motioned, I should leave? He nodded sternly and I left, making no sudden moves and avoiding eye contact, truly surprised by the turn of events.

On the bike ride back I was livid. I had just been kicked out of the park for reading, or more likely, for one small man's lack of creativity and imaginaton. Title. Money. Power. That's all he seemed to understand. How dull and colorless. Is this what the world has come to? I had a real moment of despair. I looked around at the hundreds of Chinese on their bikes, on the sidewalk, my heart pounding, heat rising in my chest cavity. Is this what they have to deal with? Buses and people on scooters kept passing me and breaking in front of me, cutting me off, forcing me to slow down and work to get back up to speed. I burned most of the anger off by the time I reached one of the town's smaller plazas. I sat down and read for a few minutes before the sand fleas biting my ankles became too much to bear and then returned to the hotel.

Now all the truth is out
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Wheron mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone
Be secret and exult
Because of all things known
That is the most difficult

- William Butler Yeats, To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing

Things are accelerating.

2006-08-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

August 29, 2006

Monday was my first day, again. I experieced the same sick feelings in the pit of my stomach all over again as I sat in the office of the Dean of Academic Affairs waiting for some word on the class I was supposed to teach. The smoking ban has not yet reached China and he sat behind his desk chain-smoking and saying Chinese things into the telephone. I sat with Mrs. Soon who had accompanied me and whom they stipulated would only assist with translations for one week before leaving me to my own devices.

In the classroom sat 43 young men around the age of 18. During the school year they live in dorms on campus. I went around the room testing their level of English and quickly realized that they were remedial at best. Out the window went my fantasies of conversation and dialogue, listening sessions and movie screenings. I strolled around the class harassing sleeping students while Mrs. Soon went over simple phonetics. Inside I was experiencing a quiet deconstruction of my perspective on the next six months of my life.

I resumed control of the class and gave out my first assignment, to bring an English name next lesson.

Monday night I spent close to three hours practicing Chinese with Dong-Dong. Practicing entailed me typing someting into the online dictionary, the two of us searching through the myriad meanings for any particular word (e.g. with: dog with short shinbone, rice with nothing to go with it, to whip with bamboo strips, etc.) and then stringing the various words together to see if that meant anything in Chinese. We made significant progress, surprisingly. Enough that I missed dinner, which I took to mean that I would rather learn Chinese than eat. After Dong-Dong left I sat in the lobby with the lobby people and and drank tea and practiced English with a fourteen-year-old who called me Uncle.

Tuesday I didn't start class until 2 p.m. This came as a breath of fresh air in the swarm of 6 a.m. mornings that I've had, this one almost qualifying itself as a weekend, the likes of which I haven't seen in 18 days now. I went to the Leisure House and devised simple lesson plans revolving around introductory grammar.

That afternoon I felt welcome. At the end of last class I had opened up the floor to questions, always popular, and the students expressed worry that I would leave right away. I told them that I had come all this way to meet them, why would I leave so soon? This seemed to break the ice and they invited me to play basketball with them that afternoon. I declined promising them a complete demonstration of my lack of skill at a later date.

I spent another two hours or so studying with Dong-Dong and actually have enough words in my little pocket notebook to say whole sentences without searching online. Simple meaning still eludes me, but that, I think, will always be the case.

Buddha Spectacular

2006-08-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

Please excuse this bit of self-indulgence. I was duly inspired by the rotating Buddha.

Entrance to exhibit of traditional ancient Chinese lifestyle and culture

Buddhas, meditating presumably

Little golden buddhas (all shapes and sizes!)

Today

2006-08-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

August 27, 2006

You ever have a day where you felt that you couldn't have done anything better, or anything worse, or anything other than what you did?

A list of the days activities, in this order:

- Last middleschool class (a boy who found my angry American impression particularly hysterical wept to his father after class because he thought he would never see me again. A phone call was made to the school and he was placated with my e-mail address.)
- Healthy lunch (ordered by yours truly)
- Chinese girl at coffee shop talked to me.
- Rong Cheng commercial zone shopping tour and extravaganza, led by Mrs. Soon.
- First Chinese haricut. Unexpected eradication of sideburns by overzealous barber.
- Dinner with Mrs. Soon, Mr. Yan, the three Jiangs (my new school's driver, managing director, and dean of academic affairs), and Mr. Fang (head of student life).
- Outmaneuvered Chinese in drinking games.

Is not is...

2006-08-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

August 26, 2006

Until further notice I will no longer be able to post new pictures or video, which is a complete shame because we were able to make it the Buddha today and I did get some new pictures and video. Instead you get this old picture of me and Yan, who took me to see the Buddha with Won, and then took me out for dumplings, fried pork and beer afterward.

It appears I am in need of a cleaning cassette that I probably won't be able to obtain until tomorrow or Monday at the latest, provided they have them. I ventured out this afternoon near closing time and stumbled into one electronics dealership that had cassettes, but not cleaning cassettes. This provoked a certain amount of confusion since I couldn't say anything useful in Chinese, and they couldn't understand anything I said in English, but we settled on the construction "is not is" ("it is but it isn't"), and that seemed to appease everybody.

mmm...

2006-08-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

(can't a guy get a salad around here?)

Night of the Wen Zi

2006-08-25T02:33:00.000-07:00

Stairway to the breakfast buffet

August 25, 2006

I was surprised to see my old friend President Shi at breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning. I was in the midst of saying, "Excuse me, please may I ask...coffee?" when I heard a "Hi!" come at me from across the breakfast buffet table. I was happy about the timing and glad that he caught me in the middle of actually saying something, however mangled, in Chinese. I was tired from a long night of fighting off the wen zi (mosquitoes) that had invaded my peaceful slumbers. He recommended that I light a coil but I didn't know how to explain to him my long sordid history with mosquito coils and my reluctance to loose all that dark smoke in my room. It turns out he was there early to meet with Joon and we sat and talked briefly before I headed to class.

Class, it turns out, will continue though Sunday, until further notice. Barring rain, rumor has it that I will visit the largest Buddha image in Asia tomorrow.

Conversation 101

2006-08-24T03:11:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2006

Today was my next to last day with my current class of middleschoolers, if the original arrangement for 14 days is still in effect. (Disclosure: I did not attend school the day of the Signing Ceremony, so my teaching streak ended at Day 10.) Nobody has mentioned anything, but we had class pictures a few days ago and they gave me the files today. My hosts are rather vague on a variety of topics.

I truly feel that I made headway with the students. The first day of class they were very quiet and shy, whereas today they were teaching me the Chinese words for things and drawing pictures of me wearing women's clothing on the blackboard.

This afternoon I made progress with my new plan to befriend the hotel staff and saddle them with my tremendous capacity for the mispronunciation of their ancient language. I may or may not have a promise from Chang Dong (Dong-Dong) to massacre his mother language more, at some point in the not too distant future.

Geological Processes

2006-08-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

August 23, 2006

"Summer days will come, happiness will be mine."
- Beck

This morning in the elevator a girl boarded and literally froze in panic at the sight of me. It took her a few moments to compose herself, after which she asked me in Chinese if I was Amercian. I told her, in my best Mandarin, that yes, I am American. She gasped and reached out her hand. We shook hands and exited at the first floor, then she ran back into the elevator, having realized she missed her floor in all the excitement. Fans.

On my two-hour walk this afternoon it dawned on me that, like plate tectonics, sedimentation, and erosion, maybe my eventual comprehension of the Chinese language would be a geological process. Mountainous. Vast. Slow.

But one day...

Signing Ceremony

2006-08-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

August 22, 2006

I didn't understand what they were saying either.

To my Chinese audience, I apologize for butchering the proceedings.

Correction (8/21/06 Post)

2006-08-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

I'm relieved to find out that many Chinese do indeed have weekends. I will immediately put an end to my disinformation campaign.

(it appears my informant is suspect..)

We are many

2006-08-21T04:22:00.000-07:00

August 21, 2006

It's official. In my exhaustive explorations of the city of Rong Cheng in the Shang Dong province of China, and after rigorous application of the scientific method, I can declare with complete confidence that there are loads of places to get your hair cut. There are a lot of heads here, I guess. I, personally, will not be getting my haircut any time soon, and certainly not by myself. Too many variables right now. I'm supposed to attend a signing ceremony tomorrow for the college where I'll begin teaching in a week or so. I imagine it will be my first time meeting many of the college's faculty, and I would prefer not to show up as the walking freakshow. At least not any more than I already am.

This afternoon I was reading my hotel room communication manual ("Communication Hotel") and it said that there is a gym on the 6th floor. This was news to me so I decided to check it out. To my dismay, the 6th floor contained nothing of the sort, but it did have a better view than the 4th floor. I encountered some maids and, through a variety of different methods, up to but not including drawing, asked if there was any way to get onto the roof. They all looked around nervously so I abandoned this line of questioning. Things are different here in China. I found out today that many Chinese don't have weekends. They work. Every. Single. Day. Except for two extended holidays each year. I was floored by this. No weekend. My mind reeled. I couldn't process this, no weekend.

The TV just said, "You remember that cold front from Mongolia two days ago..." Words I never thought I'd hear.

I proceeded to move out of their line of sight and walk up the next few flights of stairs to the roof. There were floors that the elevator didn't go to with fancy conference rooms behind locked doors. The door to the top floor was padlocked shut. No weekends, I thought. When do they not do anything? I opened a window and peered out at the rows of apartment buildings, filled with people not sleeping in.

No wonder they're not interested in my rooftop tomfoolery. They probably just want to get home at a decent hour.

In other China news, my fridge now works. I plugged it into a different outlet. That one only took me a week. And tonight I actually ordered food in Chinese and they brought me what I ordered. Exactly what I ordered. Beef and rice. I need to learn the words for vegetables.

Sunday morning cartoons

2006-08-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

August 20, 2006

Last night, Joon and I went out to dinner. I found out that our Chinese hosts were adamant that he stay in country because there was a certain American who was coming to teach and Joon thinks they were sweating the language barrier. He had me in stitches describing how they would tell him he had to wait until some unspecified time in the future when this American would show. Obviously I'm the American. He found it absolutely hilarious that I'm having all of the same experiences that he did with the food, sleep, and overwhelming hospitality. As a matter of fact, I think he may have been relieved to hear that he's not alone. I know I am.

Today was Day 9 of my 14-day teach-a-thon. For class the students had requested that I show them and American cartoon. I was able to procure an episode of Spongebob Squarepants to their delight.

By the way, they are never this quiet.

Saturday afternoon scrapbook

2006-08-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

August 19, 2006

Yesterday I walked North. Today I decided to walk East.

Boy with bike

Bicycles everywhere

Boy wearing pink karate garb

Man under bridge

New apartments under construction

House being torn down

Men at work

All of this rubble was cleared by the next day

Man watching daughter at play

Where cement apartment buildings give way to orange roofed houses

Man burning wood on the sidewalk

Martian lamp post

Down sidestreet

Corner store

Man praying on moped

Boys catching crabs

Working Street

2006-08-18T02:43:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2006

Today after class I decided to take a long walk through Rong Cheng. It's something I've always liked to do in new places, walk. Just wander aimlessly. I walked down streets filled with bicycles on the sidewalks, streets filled with men playing dominoes on the sidewalk. On one street there were women painting white lines around trees. I walked around to the back of the power plant and saw all of the bicycles in that parking lot. I walked up to the border bewtween the paved and unpaved sectons of town, where cement apartment buildings give way to orange roofed houses lined up in identical rows. I walked down a street that looked like it only had furniture shops and smelled like dung, where whole families sat out on the sidewalk, shop after shop, talking and staring at me as I passed by. I walked into the shopping district where there were even more bicycles, standing four rows deep on the sidewalk, and school kids said hello to me in English.

It seems that there is an enormous reclamation project going on, where the very poor houses are being torn down and replaced with cement apartment buildings, and the old apartment buildings are being convereted into newer apartment buildings. And there are people, endless people, working, digging, sweating, tearing up sidewalks and replacing them with newer sidewalks. I don't feel comfortable taping them yet. Maybe later. The shopping district is a whole different story. I found my way back to Working Street for the first time. It's not as far from the hotel as I thought.

JiaJiaYue

2006-08-17T04:04:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2006

I went to the supermarket by myself for the first time today to forage for some minor items, a wash cloth, snacks, fruits, yogurt, and anything else that might supplement my strange diet. I'm not completely sure, but I think the supermarket's name means House House Happy. I encountered the usual surprised stares, double-takes, and outright gawking as I perused the aisles. I'm the only Westerner I've seen in 10 days, so I can't even imagine how often they see us.

There was an interesting assortment of fruits and vegetables, not all things I was familiar with. I picked up some peaches and what I thought were white pears but turned out to be some kind of apple-like substance with passion fruit-like seeds and goop inside. I already have a loaf of bread in my fridge that has the consistency of cardboard and thought I could find some condiments to make it more palatable. I found some honey but opted out of the peanut butter because I wasn't sure which jar contained jelly, but I knew for certain that some of the jars in the vicinity contained hot pepper sauce because they had "Hot Pepper Sauce" written on the label. I was not, as you may have all hoped, actually able to read any Chinese. I picked up what I thought might be yogurt due to the container stye and the large strawberry on the side, and I opted for the Jieshen Bathing Towel, which is a glove that you put your hand in.

To give you an idea of how much things cost in China, 3 fake pears, 4 peaches, 8 yogurt drinks, a container of honey, and a hand glove towel cost 22 RMB, or just under US$3. This is what the supermarket sounds like on the inside as well (see below).

Weihai

2006-08-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

August 14, 2006

After a less than stellar night's sleep, I looked forward to the end of class and returning to the Traffic Hotel to crash. At school that day, Mrs. Soon had taught me how to return missed calls on my cell phone. I still can't retrieve messages, which the blinking envelope assures me exist, but I can now return missed phone calls.

Yan dropped me off in the hotel back lot and I took the elevator up to the fourth floor. My phone started beeping in the hallway. Missed call. I called back and it was Patrick telling me that President Shi was taking us out to dinner in Weihai and that we would leave in a few hours. I had time enough to finish my next day's lessons before we left.

Weihai is home to one of China's national economic and technical development zones and was one of the earliest ports to open to foreign trade. Over 5 billion dollars pass through the city yearly and it shows. They're building everywhere. I've never see anything like it. You really get a feel for how quickly China is expanding. We stopped at a seaside park for a walk before dinner and I tried to explain to Patrick and Joon how large and new the city felt compared with American cities. They translated for the driver and kept walking.

President Shi was waiting for us outside of the restaurant where the wait staff was having its pre-dinner briefing.

Shi's wife and daughter were there as well and were unbelievably kind in welcoming Joon and myself to China. I'm often impressed by how attentive the Chinese are. Shi offered me the menu and told me to order some coffee. My little support network must have mentioned something.

I think word had gotten out that I wasn't thrilled with the hotel's food prep. I was a little slow on the uptake and didn't realize that this was a Western-style restaurant until the pizza, steaks and Bud came. Shi studied in the US for a year and said that he would drink beer and eat pizza with his host family. It never occurred to me how American that is until I was doing it in China.

Nice to meet you

2006-08-15T02:59:00.000-07:00

No rest for the weary

2006-08-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

August 14, 2006

The Traffic Hotel is busy these days. I put my weary head down on the pillow last night at 10 p.m. in search of elusive sleep, only to be awoken by the following, in this order:

- Phone call for massagee
- Mysterious beeping
- Anonymous banging on door
- Last minute packing nightmare
- Dawn

Yellow Sea

2006-08-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

August 13, 2006

This is the view from outside my classroom. I am currently teaching in the port town of Shidao located on the Yellow Sea. Highlights from today's lessons include:

- The three forms of "what is up?" (what's up, what up, whassup)
- How you doin' vs. how's it goin'
- What time is it? You know what time it is, it's time to eat.
- The high 5

The high 5 was particularly popular amongst the students and very well may be a keeper. Tomorrow I might introduce fish out of water, feed the birds, and it's raining, it's raining.

I learned today that an hour and a half is also a long time for the students. As I was prying one last sentence out of this delirious Chinese boy it occured to me that maybe the kids were tired. I made him say something anyway. One has to maintain standards.

Following class, Mrs. Soon, the headmistress, and her gigantic husband Yan took some of us out to lunch at a Korean restaurant. For one brief moment, my feeble grasp of the Chinese language threatened to make the evoutionary leap from unawareness to dim perception before collapsing under the sheer weight of inebriaton. To be quite honest though, when Yan drinks, we drink.

After lunch, we toured Shidao briefly. We drove through the port and stopped at a few sceneic overlooks.

Then we went swimming in a huge saltwater swimming pool at the Shidao Bay Tourism and Vacation Resort.

First Day

2006-08-12T00:59:00.000-07:00

August 12, 2006

As we neared the school I thought to myself that this would be one of my life’s defining moments. I was nervous, certainly. I had actually come all this way to teach, and there I was, riding in the back seat of the jeep on my way to the part where I would teach, or where I would suck at teaching. I imagined my whole life culminating in this one moment of colossal failure. Dead silence while I fumbled through my meager notes and ESL books looking for the next exercise. All those years and dollars spent on university a complete waste. I looked around for some solace, a distraction, anything to take my mind off this impending doom. The sea on the left side of the vehicle was completely shrouded in fog, but in the mountains to the right, a large Buddha emerged.

I was rushed into the classroom where about 20 young students awaited. It was as I had feared, awkward, silent, disorienting. I started yelling good morning at them. Everyone looked around uncomfortably. I directed everybody to arrange their desks into a circle to buy myself some time. Then I dove in with a few drills. I was treading water at this point and asked if they had a CD player where I could play a song. I had brought Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World and had a lesson planned around it. This set off a massive search for equipment that eventually led the 20 or so of us into the next room. I inserted the disk and observed the pained looks on their round young faces. I started to write the words to the song on the board, incorrectly. I wrote “I see trees of green, clouds of white,” and then it clicked for me.

I had to make a few minor adjustments but my head was in the right place and I wasn’t going to end up in the flaming wreckage as I had feared. It still went on forever and I finally had to ask the head mistress when it would end. She answered that it was time and that I had taught for an hour and a half, which, unfortunately, she now expects me to teach for the remainder of my classes there. She also expects me, if I understood correctly, to teach for the next 14 days straight, which I’m not so thrilled about, but I’m in China and not so sure either where I stand yet.

Leisure House

2006-08-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2006

At approximately 3 a.m. this morning my air conditioner ground to a complete halt. I lay there hoping it would come roaring back to life as the humid air bore down upon me. By 4 a.m. I had given up on trying to sleep and began roaming around the room, passing the time until the 8 a.m. breakfast buffet.

I sat with Joon at breakfast and we talked more about our amorphous travel plans, maybe to South Korea this time. We commiserated momentarily on being foreigners in China, not knowing Chinese, and how I thought the coffee was weak.

Soon after I realized that I’d been living in the past. I found out today that it is Friday and not Thursday. I was exactly one day behind. This would normally be irrelevant except that my first day of class is now tomorrow instead of in two days and I didn’t know exactly at what time or what level of English the students spoke or anything else that might be extremely important.

In the initial throes of this crucial moment I decided to visit the Leisure House. I had discovered Leisure Houses, which are actually far less dirty than they sound, yesterday. This particular one had wicker swings and fake ivy and brewed ground coffee.

I spent 2 solid hours studying Chinese and enjoying caramel macchiatos. Unfortunately at this rate it will cost me close to two dollars an hour to hang out in China, which isn’t bad at all in retrospect.

I got wheels.

2006-08-10T06:58:00.000-07:00

August 10, 2006

Patrick met me for breakfast at 8 a.m. We sat in front of a large window overlooking the power plant. Joon, a South Korean teacher in residence and another English speaker joined us soon after. We made vague plans to travel somewhere, sometime.

Following breakfast, Patrick and I retrieved my bike from the small room where it resides and we rode to the supermarket.

Riding in traffic alongside trucks and buses and dodging Chinese felt strangely unreal. After all these months of planning and thinking about it I was actually riding a bike in China with Chinese people. Patrick offered to take me to another supermarket but I told him I was okay on supermarkets and we went to the middle school where he teaches instead. A company of camouflaged middleschoolers stood on an athletics field in marching formation. Patrick mentioned that it is becoming more difficult to discipline students and that perhaps American students might benefit from such a regimen. I asked if he had ever undergone this type of training. He said he hadn't.

I should mention that the middle school was enormous by any standards. We retired to the break room for the English dept. and I spoke with one of the teachers at length about teaching in China. The prevailing theory seems to be that I should just talk to the students about American things and that’ll be fine. Whatever that means.

I returned to the hotel and waited for lunch to be served.

Through process of elimination I have deduced that I will be fed via room service. When no lunch arrived, I visited the front desk and wrote down the time and said the Chinese word for eat (chi). The girl at the front desk said the word for meal (fan) and then she left and came back and said other things and I agreed to what she said and left feeling fairly sure that the lunch situation had been resolved.

In a previous conversation, Patrick and a hotel manager type had asked me what I like to eat. I told them that I was interested in vegetables and healthy eating. They asked me if I like beef and pork and hot and I said yes, but maybe I’d be more interested in fish. The culminating result was fried fish with hot peppers which I considered to be a minor victory.

Following lunch I tried to teach myself Chinese then crashed, still suffering from jet lag. I woke up and “brewed” the hotel insta-coffee, wondering to myself if Starbucks has reached Rong Cheng.

I was under the impression that the school was within bike riding distance from the hotel and by extension the beach and decided to ride out. They are not close at all and I made it as far as some sort of residential district in development before turning back.

To different time zones.

2006-08-09T16:23:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2006

I met Shi and Wei for breakfast at 5:30 a.m. as promised. I was severely dehydrated and not sure whether or not I could drink the tap water. I expected there to be water at breakfast, but instead was greeted with a fried egg and a bag of milk. There was also a hunk of bread and a pork dumpling. I ate grudgingly, still bloated from the previous night.

Wei dropped us off at the airport and we made our way through the terminal. I was desperately seeking a wi-fi connection and a cash machine, the combination of which would allow me to secure a password, withdraw Chinese money, and buy water. I didn’t want to pester Shi who had already been generous beyond reason.

After a protracted and unsuccessful effort, we boarded the plane. I secured for myself a small paper cup of warm water then gave up and went to sleep.

We arrived in Wei Hai and were greeted by the school’s driver, Nguyen. He drove us to a hotel in Rong Cheng where I’ll be living for the next few months. A small collection of the city’s English teachers had been assembled to have lunch with us.

The reindeer games began early as I was expected to drink beer with everybody and toast such things as the difference in time zones. The teachers spoke in halting English and understood me only when I spoke at half-speed. I attempted to ask questions about my role over the next few weeks. It appears that I will begin teaching 2 classes a day at a private language school in a different town beginning August 12th, and that may or may not continue when my primary assignment begins on August 28th.

The fatigue, jet lag, alcohol, and continuous gorging were beginning to take their toll when I was led away in a semi-trance state as the lunch ended. Nguyen and one of the English teachers, Patrick, offered to take me shopping. Wanting to get a lay of the land, I accepted and we drove off to the main shopping area in Rong Cheng, which they referred to as “Working Street.” The dozens of retailers seemed pleased with my foreigness.

We visited a western-style eatery, apparently so that they could show me off to the proprietor, then we drove up to Shi’s school and then to the beach. I was in seriously rough shape at this point when they decided to pull over to try to figure out the address book on my new Chinese cell phone. I was slightly discouraged when they too couldn’t figure out the keypad, which is in Chinese.

Upon returning to the hotel I was presented with a large Pee-Wee Herman-style bicycle for use in further explorations of the city.

I crashed for the next 4 hours, waking up partially rejuvenated. My contacts had arranged for a meal of chopped up chicken and mushrooms and steamed bread to be delivered to my room. Women have called and are knocking on my door and ringing my doorbell as I write this. I don’t answer, as instructed.

Peking

2006-08-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

August 8, 2006

The evening started innocuously enough. President Shi and his military friend Wei picked me up at the airport. We had awkward conversation in the car on the way to the hotel. I was able to sort out that the hotel was 20 minutes from the airport and that we were leaving at 9:30 a.m. the next morning. Other than that I was fairly confused. At the hotel, Shi told me that I should wash up and that he’d be back in 10 minutes.

One of Wei’s friends had shown up in the meantime in his dress greens and we drove out to a restaurant ten minutes away. The restaurant specialized in the boiling-of-the-food-at-your-table-style for which I don’t yet have a name. I witnessed the arrival of a bottle of wheat wine of whose properties I was already fairly aware. I looked around unassumingly as Wei poured us all a shot. They encouraged me to sample the various fruits and nuts set on the table and were impressed with my chopsticking abilities.

Several plates of raw meats arrived and I was instructed to toss them into the boiling water in front of me. I ate to pass the time while Shi told me the Chinese words for things. Then the shots began. It was light and not as fierce as my previous trip to Peking. Conversation was mild yet lively despite the complete lack of Chinese on my part. I ate huge quantities of red meat to slow the onset of absolute drunkenness. Shi kept an eye out for me and I made it through intact. He mentioned to me on the way back to the hotel that women might call me or knock at the door but not to answer. Only he would call at 5:30 a.m. to go to breakfast after which we would depart for the airport.