Hiccups

This is the mental summary of an unfortunate night out. I guess you could call it a poem of sorts.

That was a good dinner. I’ve eaten my fill of good food, had some good conversations, and now I can just go home and watch a movie. Huh, I wonder what they’re talking about. How much would I understand if they were speaking Mandarin instead of their local dialect?

Wait! That last bit sounded comprehensible, “走把。上车吧”

Yes, finally, something I understand… “Let’s go. Get in the car.”  But where…? Ok. I’ll just ask, “我们去哪里？”

Ok. They are just going to repeat that I should get in the car, they won’t say where we’re going. That’s strange. Maybe it’s because they know that I wouldn’t want to go. I probably don’t want to go, but how can I say no if I don’t know where I’m going. That’s there game isn’t it… ‘don’t tell him where we’re going and that way he can’t say no!’ Or maybe it was culturally inappropriate for me to ask where we’re going. Chinese people never ask these kinds of questions anyway. Now that I think of it, they don’t even have the arrival time printed on their train tickets, and nobody seems to care. Well nobody but me at least. Whatever, I’ll just get in. Why refuse an invitation from friends?

Are we going to my apartment? Oh good. They took me home. That was nice of them. Wait, no! They were just picking up another teacher… ugh. So close to being home, yet so unbelievably far… ugh. Where are we going now? It’s not even worth it to ask. The answer won’t change anything. I’m along for this ride regardless.

What! We are going to eat some food. This is absurd, we literally just finished eating dinner. This isn’t even dessert food, it’s just a second dinner. Wait, why are they all eating, they left food uneaten at dinner and now there ordering extra dishes… oh no! And they are ordering beer… by the case. It’s gonna be a long night.

Maybe I can make up a lie so I don’t have to drink any beer tonight. I’m taking medicine. There’s no way they can disprove that. Yeah, that’s a good one. The man to my right just said he’s allergic to alcohol.  That’s another good one, but it takes more commitment. Wait, now they’re arguing. Oh, god. They are going to make him drink some beer anyway.  Who makes someone drink something they are allergic to? Well I guess we are all allergic to alcohol in some sense, so it's not an outright lie.

Ok. My turn on stage. “I can’t drink tonight, I’m taking medicine.” They aren’t listening, “No. Really. I…” They are opening a bottle, “I can’t. It’s…” Oh great. One bottle. “Ok. Only ONE bottle.” I doubt he’ll remember that verbal contract. It’s never only one bottle.

And now the toasting game begins. Why can’t I just drink my beer slowly, why is the smallest sip always a full double shot that you have to chug when toasting somebody else? Why can’t I drink my own beer, that I don’t even want, at my own pace? This is a charade. I thought I graduated college last year.

Hiccup!

Haha. This is like a cartoon. Three bottles of beer and I start hiccupping. That guy to my right has al.. hiccup… also drunk three bottles.  So much for his aller… hiccup… allergy. Way to go with the commitment to your lie, buddy.

Hiccup!

I got in trouble once in high school for hiccupping. I came home from a party, and my mom heard me hiccup. She assumed I was… hiccup… had been drinking, but I hadn’t. I never drink beer. I hate beer. Ugh. Hiccup!

Wow. Almost three hours and I haven’t understood a single thing they’ve said. If you invite someone to come to… hiccup… dinner with you, you should at least speak a language they understand. Why am I even here? They aren’t speaking any language I… hiccup… understand, I already ate dinner, and I hate… hiccup… hate drinking beer. Next time I need to refuse the invit… hiccup… invitat… hiccup… invitation. I guess it’s just just by politesse that they… hiccup... I have to go to the… hiccup… bathroom.

Jumping in the Deep End

Where I live, the Chinese people can’t swim. A few of them will tell you otherwise, but they have actually just misrepresented themselves. What they mean when they say, “I can swim,” is that they can stop themselves from drowning in waist high water. The inability to swim is largely due to people never genuinely trying to learn. There is a river near here, but as I said, the water is at most a meter deep. Nevertheless, the slowly moving current creates riptides that are apparently vicious enough to claim a handful of lives each year. There are a few public pools here, but the “swimmers” who frequent these pools just spend all day clinging to the lane ropes like a flock of crows on a telephone wire. After a quick flail and gasp, they might flap over to another lane rope, but that’s the extent of the swimming that takes place.

A Chinese kid asked me to teach him how to swim. He was trying to learn in the river, which by his “logic” was the right place to start. “The pool is too deep. If I can’t swim than I will drown… In the river, if I can’t swim then I can just stand on the rocks.” Oddly enough, the same survival mechanism that causes him to stay alive is the same one that has prevented him from learning how to swim. While flailing about on the surface, his feet instinctively shoot downward to look for something solid. When practicing swimming in the river, your feet will always find the rocks before your body finds its own buoyancy.

I told the boy that the solution to his problem is strangely enough to just jump into the deep end of a pool. With a lifeguard taking care to avoid a worst-case scenario, this boy will either learn how to swim or receive help and try again. When the ground is there to stop you from drowning, you will never learn how to stay afloat by yourself. This is often the solution to our problems, you need to throw yourself into the deep end, where you must learn in order to survive.

What’s green when you see it, red when you eat it, and black when you throw it away?

 I’ve never really ENJOYED watermelon, I always just saw it as something to just pick around in a fruit salad or an excuse to scare children into thinking a tree would grow in their belly. When I first came to China however, my deep ambivalence to this favorite summer snack quickly became pure hatred. At every hour of the day, as a crisp morning get-me-up, as a midday snack, as an after dinner sweet, watermelon was forced on me like cheek pinches on a newborn baby. Being a non-confrontational pansy, I would accept thirds and fourths with my seconds. For a taste that I didn’t even like, I had to get my face and hands sticky, work hard separating seeds in my mouth, and impolitely spit out the black pellets which always make me think of bloated ticks who just enjoyed a blood feast (have fun imagining that next time you eat some watermelon). The cons of eating watermelon grossly outweighed the pros, almost as much as watermelon’s water content grossly outweighs its melon content. The watermelon that was forced on me was also always in comically large amounts. One watermelon, the smallest divisible serving size, is an appropriate amount of fruit for about 12-15 people. Unsurprisingly, when you offer a basketball-sized fruit to share among 3 people, there are a few slices left over. Oops. Did I say left over? I meant to say, there are a few slices that everyone feels obliged to eat after they have already stuffed themselves with the rice, beer, and initial watermelon that was forced on them earlier. This lifestyle continued until one day when the watermelon season ended.

I lived in peace for months until my visit to Rongjiang last week for teacher training. I stayed there for two weeks giving local English teachers lessons about creative teaching methods, and during my stay I ate more watermelon that I ever had before. Rongjiang, a small, dirty village in southwest China is actually quite famous for its watermelon. This is why, at first, I wasn’t too upset to be eating watermelon again. I’d had a long and cold winter to recover my watermelon tolerance, and for once the pros of eating watermelon outweighed the cons. This watermelon was sweet, flavorful, and full of nutrients.

WAIT! Full of nutrients!? Really? But I thought watermelon was just all water! For a long time, I did too. It turns out that I had prematurely judged my waterlogged enemy. It turns out that I was wrong in thinking that something so watery could not also have meaningful substance as well.

It is after my experience in Rongjiang that watermelon has gone from being my enemy to being, once again, a fruit to which I prescribe a great deal of indifference.