Dear Mr. Fly...

Things have been heating up here in China.  We are approaching the end of the semester, my sitemate is working through his final paperwork before leaving me as 外教1, (the number 1 foreign teacher), and summer has definitely arrived.  When cooking one day, I made the mistake of opening a window without a screen, and a fly managed to sneak in.  In honor of this home invasion, I’ve decided to write a poem to my new roommate.

Mr. Fly,

Try to remember, you’re not an invited guest,

You snuck into my house as an unwanted pest,

I’d like you to leave, please don’t stay and rest,

Go back the way you came, I think that would be best.

Why are you staying, don’t you miss your home?

You’re the only fly here, why aren’t you alone?

I’ll leave the window open so that you can roam,

And just this once consider please throwing me a bone.

Where do you get off!?! Inviting friends to stay!

Now there’s 3 of you, if we vote you’d get your way.

But this isn’t a democracy, we’re in China today.

The government says that my way IS the highway.

Stop tapping the glass, I know you want to leave

I’ll help you if you’ll listen, I need you to believe

I want the same thing you do, we can both be relieved

UGH! You’re not a pet, you’re just a peeve.

If only we could talk, I’d tell you what I know.

I’d give you the directions and tell you where to go

I’d tell you glass is solid, even though it doesn’t show

Your friend starved to death yesterday, and soon you’ll follow.

Things have changed now, my broom was once your friend

Guiding you to the window, it is now your final end

I was nice for a while, now it’s your turn to bend

Let’s see if you break, when all your organs blend!

This is really not my style, I promise I’m not mean

It’s just that abuse of hospitality is not at all my scene

You’ve taught me a lot too, and from all that I’ve seen

I know that next time, I’ll be sure to use the screen.

Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous is one of my favorite words.  Also included in no particular order are the words ironic, toboggan, polliwog, ephemeral, preposterous, quotidian, nebulous, and charlatan.  Ironically, moments when you can use "ubiquitous" correctly are few and far between.  In China, however, ubiquity is a reoccurring feature of my quotidian life.  At first, the unanimity of my students' beliefs and actions seemed preposterous.  I regularly chalked it up to a mistranslation.  I would think to myself, I'm sure she doesn't mean to say, "ALL northern people in China take cold showers."  I would assume the abhorrent generalization was purely meant to simplify her phrase lexically, but as I met people from the north of China defending and exemplifying such statements, I slowly came to accept that maybe these wide-sweeping generalizations are actually somewhat true.  Moreover, I began to hear people making the same kind of claims in Chinese.  It's no wonder then, that my students fail to comprehend the intellectual and personal diversity of countries, like America, which don't subsume the individual into a nebulous collective.  Although statements that begin, "All Chinese people…" sometimes prove to be accurate, statements beginning, "All American people…" are almost always flat-out wrong.  When I tell them that not all American people own a gun, my students look at me as if I was a charlatan sent here to sell them toboggans in summer.

As an extremely individualistic person, it grates me to encounter so many ubiquitous opinions.  To make myself feel better this semester, I am secretly using my students' similarities against them.  In their communal experience, the collective of their teachers all taught them the exact same set of mistakes, which have now been carved deeply into the Broca's area of their brains by years of rote Chinglish memorization.  I now start each class with a mistake of the week in order to snipe out each mistake one by one.  I wish I could have gotten rid of these pests while they were still just polliwogs, but it's just as effective to kill the fully formed frogs, as long as I do it before they plant their eggs in the next generation.  It was rough returning to the basics of asking, "What does ephemeral mean?" instead of always just spitting out the ever so popular, "What means ephemeral?" but it had to be done.  I hope their Chinglish proves to be ephemeral.

One GIANT Project

If you ever come visit Southwest China, you'll probably go into sensory overload for a few days because of the tsunami of noise flooding into every public space, the neon lights that light up skyscrapers like Christmas trees, and the chili pepper that is dumped onto everything you eat.  As you adjust to such levels of hyper-stimulation, everything becomes less overwhelming and you find the time to establish certain bubbles in which time moves more slowly, people don't talk as loudly, and the food is spiced more conservatively.  Luckily enough, one of my personal bubbles in China has been the basketball court.  I say, "Luckily enough," because you can't go a quarter mile in the province of Guizhou without walking past a public basketball court with a game of 4-on-4 in progress.  As a friend here once said quite accurately, "Guizhou is basically one giant project.  And just like in all other projects, basketball is the most popular sport.  You just need a ball, a hoop, and some people who want to play."  At least where I play, you don't even need to have athletic shoes, shorts, or even experience with basketball.  In fact, the most common basketball player is probably a 30 year old man who takes smoking breaks between games played in a pair of loosely-tied dress shoes, some blue jeans, and a sweater with the sleeves rolled up.  I'm the weird one for wearing basketball shoes, shorts, and a t-shirt… as if I didn't stand out already. 

The other day, another Peace Corps Volunteer in my city named Sandor invited me to come visit a nearby town with some of his students.  As many 'planned' excursions go in China, there was no plan at all, and after about an hour and a half of switching buses, walking down dirt roads, and climbing up some mountains, we turned the corner to a wide-open valley with nothing more than some rice paddies, a tiny village of 50+ wooden homes, a circle pavilion for local festivals, and, you guessed it, a basketball court. However, this was no ordinary basketball court.  This particular court was bordered on one side by a creek, on the next side by a Miao festival featuring dance and song, on the third side by a steeply terraced rice paddy, and on the last side by a bull roaming for food in the mud next to the creek.  You may have seen a similar setting before while playing Mortal Kombat, except instead of two ninja's duking it out in 1-on-1 combat, this arena was hosting an open entry 5-on-5 tournament.  So Sandor and I rounded up 3 willing locals to join our international squad registered under the teamname "美中友好"(Americhina Friendship).  While waiting for our game to start, we decided to check out the song and dance party taking place only a hop and skip away (jump and you're in the creek).  Naturally, being that we were probably the only white people to ever stumble upon this village (which no Chinese person I talked to even knew the name of) we were invited/forced to drink 3 lucky bowls of rice wine to celebrate the occasion.  After getting a solid buzz going and taking the obligatory peacesign photos, we were called over to begin our game.  Long story medium, I dropped 14 of my team's 31 points with Sandor scoring 9 of the other 17.  Unfortunately, the team we played against had more than only two athletes, and they ended up winning 42-31.

By the time we finished playing, the sun had set, the crowds had dispersed, and the bull had wandered away from his post at the Eastern sideline.  In some misguided ploy to give me free dinner and drink, the locals assured me that the bus I took to the village was some phenomanomaly (phenomenal anomaly), and the only way to get back home involved eating dinner at their house and then flagging down random motorists heading to Kaili.  Much to my surprise, the no-plan-plan worked out yet again, and I made it to home with enough time to get a good night's sleep before my 8 a.m. class the next day.

You might still be in China if...

…a crotch in your pants is a privilege, not a right.  You earn it once you’re potty-trained.

…every “No Smoking” sign is coupled with a  “No Spitting” sign.

…couples dress alike.

…’perched’ is a common neutral position.

…your olive oil freezes in your poorly heated apartment.

…repairmen leave bigger messes than they fix.

…Jackie Chan is the frontman for every toiletry in your house.

…the majority of your students’ glasses are just thick frames with no lenses in them.

…you need to use both hands to count the number of electric fires in your house.

…you spend more money on dessert than on breakfast, lunch, and dinner combined.

…there is literally no inappropriate time to pick up your phone.*

…despite freezing temperatures, nobody ever wears hats…except babies.

…despite blinding brightness, nobody ever wears sunglasses…except foreign teachers. 

…50 students hand in their homework, and no two pieces of paper have the same dimensions.

*So far the best examples of this are a friend picking up his phone MID-point in a tennis match, a student picking up his phone while singing a song during an audition for K-VOX, and a man stopping to read a text in the middle of giving a speech.

Back at Home

"Nous passons le temps de la journée à oublier combine le temps passe."

(We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.)

-Hipolito…Amélie

 

            I've been back at Kaili now for about a month.  When I first arrived back, I was expecting to have to clean up the mess I'd left behind in my apartment.  The night before vacation, I had an electrical fire and got to fulfill my lifelong dream of pulling the pin on a fire extinguisher.  Unfortunately, covering half of my home in anti-fire powder was not part of my fantasy.  To my surprise, none of the mess I had left was there when I got back.  Instead, it was somebody else's mess that welcomed me home.  Apparently, the apartment above me had also had some sort of fire, but they decided to put it out the old-fashioned way – gallons and gallons of water.  The water came through my ceiling and soaked my apartment thoroughly until the apartment below me noticed the leak in their ceiling.  By this time, my floorboards had warped, my bed was ruined, and the paint on my walls had peeled off almost entirely.  Luckily, my school had some cleaners come by and fix what they could.  I guess the workers felt like they weren't adequately paid however, because they also swiped my leather gloves, a 2012 calendar, and a bottle of rice wine on their way out.  All in all, I'm glad they cleaned the bulk of the mess, and I only had to sweep up the newly fallen paint chips, replace my broken water heater, and put new blankets on my bed.

            After dealing with the initial problems, I just got to relax for 3 weeks while waiting for school to start again.  It was so great to spend time watching movies, studying Chinese, reading books, playing basketball, and waiting to get hungry enough to eat my next meal.  Since coming to China, I'd been spending almost all of my time trying to 'make the most' of every minute.  It was nice to simply sit around and watch time pass for a change.  Naturally, problems arose that I had to deal with: hunger, tiredness, or my kitchen being so cold that my olive oil freezes in the jar.  I dealt with these problems in stride and just continued with the next movie on my movie list.  Life has enough little quirks without your neighbor needing to flood your house with water.  I'm glad I got to clear my plate before classes started again, I'm rested and refreshed for my second semester.

Rhymetime!

When I got back to China from vacation, I first spent two weeks in Chengu for IST (In Service Training) before coming home.  The training was largely uneventful, as it was composed of language classes, teacher training, and various cultural activities.  One night, however, we had a "No-Talent Talent Show" where I shared the following spoken word poem about my time thus far in China.  There are several inside jokes, so if you don't understand anything, please do me the favor of just assuming it's something totally hilarious.

I pulled up to the hotel

In a taxi all alone.

I left my family back in Atlanta

With my friends and student loans

No need to go to the front desk

There was a sign on the front door

Saying Peace Corps China check-in

Was on the second floor

I got to my room early

And had some time to kill

Then when I least expected it

In walked my new roommate, Phil

We had Chicago deep dish for dinner

We had good times and were merry

Little did I know

It was the last time I'd eat dairy

After a long delay in Beijing

We still got here on time

Well actually only most of us did

There were 10 left behind

PST kept us pretty busy

Helping us with integration

We had language, culture, and host families

But mainly reiteration

We had interviews and rumors spread

As admin made their selection

And when China sometimes scared us

Zhou Xiang was there for protection

Site visits were both good and bad

We had our highs and we had our lows

And not all of us were lucky enough

To be placed in Guizhou

For those who couldn't say goodbye to hotpot

They're in Chongqing and Sechuan now

Regularly answering questions like:

"Ni ke bu keyi chi lajiao?"

And for all of us it can be stressful

But if you're in Gansu, beware

Relax and do some yoga

Or you'll be pulling out your hair

Teaching in a Chinese school can be difficult

For fear of being lame

But with a PCV as a teacher

Students always play "activities"

Dealing with plagiarism can be difficult

It left me somewhat unraveled

But when two roads diverged in a wood, I –

I took the one less traveled

When stereotyping westerners

Our students do more than dabble

They don't really understand our ways

Merry Christmas… here's an apple

So come meet your friends at IST

Where no one feels lonely

But if you take a train remember

It's standing room only

It's the year of the Dragon now

And we're all living the dream

What better place than China

Who better than a China 17

Sharpening Pencils

"A dream of cake is a dream, not a cake, but a dream of a journey is itself a kind of journey"

                                         -Marek Halter

 

I just got back from a 4-week vacation through Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Thailand.  I don't wish to write much about what I consider to be the 'boring' details of vacation: What did I do? What did I see? What was my favorite part? Roses and thorns…? Etc.  To summarize, highlights included rock climbing on ocean bluffs off the shore of Thailand, eating loads of Indian food, Chinese New Year festivities, and taking a Thai cooking class.  What I mostly did during my vacation however, was just feel downright uncomfortable.  For me at least, the best way to describe something uncomfortable is to use an analogy.  So here we go…

 

            I think people are like pencils.  We have something in our core that allows us to leave our mark on the world around us.  Sometimes we leave a beautiful mark, and sometimes we make mistakes.  We have the ability to fix our own mistakes, but only for so long.  If we make too many mistakes, we end up just smearing our problems around and making them all worse.  Also like pencils, we regularly need to be re-sharpened in order to leave the best impression possible and avoid mistakes.  When I went on vacation this winter, I left my pencil sharpener in Kaili. (Not literally [Well literally, yes, I did.] But for the purposes of this post, I left both my physical pencil sharpener and my metaphysical pencil sharpener in Kaili. OK…?)  So, when I'm close to my (metaphysical) pencil sharpener, there is nothing to fear.  I am always at my best, I feel comfortable, and if I need a quick refreshing, my familiar sharpener's right there.  On vacation, as I felt myself getting duller and duller, leaving a nasty, flat smear in my wake, I found no way to sharpen myself.  I just kept grinding down my lead in frustration and using improper sharpening techniques (like chewing the wood away with my teeth) just to get through each day.  In the moment, it seemed to be working out pretty well, but now that I'm back in China and can see how rough a trace I really left.  I realize that it didn't work well at all, and I need some serious re-sharpening.

 

            To clarify a few things, I don't speak Malay or Thai, nor do I know my way around any part of Southeast Asia that's not China.  For vacation, I pretty much threw myself to the wolves and just hoped for their mercy.  In this case, the majority of the wolves were conniving racists who saw anything white as a wallet with legs.  Unable to use my silver tongue or golden pipes* to prove myself to be otherwise, I constantly found myself in a role I wholeheartedly detest… tourist.                                                                                                                                                       *(See previous post entitled "Just to be Frank)

            Getting back to China was like cleaning out your ears and suddenly realizing how much the sound had actually been muddled before.  I finally had the confidence to approach people, express myself, and ask for/receive help.  I guess my vacation gave me some perspective in exchange for 4 weeks of my mental well-being, and for that I'm somewhat grateful.  I still think I got ripped off, but, hey, I'm used to it after traveling through Thailand.

Finals... FINALLY!

Fittingly, and with the painful sting of irony, I'll start this post with a properly cited quote.

            "But there is one thing that Free-thought can never be by any possibility – Free-thought can never be progressive.  It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction.  All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone the farthest."

-G. K. Chesterton… The Ball and the Cross

 

One of my students plagiarized his final.  Well actually, 5 of my students did.  Fortunately, my 250 freshmen students all had 1-on-1 interviews, so excepting the possibility that an identical twin showed up to take his/her twin's exam, all my freshmen honestly passed their finals.  I gave my sophomores more freedom in the completion of their final exams, and as we all know, with great freedom comes great abuse of the rules. 

 

*Before continuing, it's necessary to give some cultural background here.  China is a country of teamwork and community.  In America, the community is often subsumed by the individual, whereas in China, the individual is commonly subsumed by the community.  No task, however small is ever really undertaken alone.  This is why, in the school system, plagiarism and cheating are not understood in the same way as in the west.  Where Turnbull takes "free-thought" to the extreme in The Ball and the Cross and uses nothing from others, Chinese students regularly choose the other extreme, effectively eradicating any possibility of doing that which has not already been done.

 

With this in mind, I designed my final so that the assignment could not be successfully completed while plagiarizing.  For their final, each student was supposed to choose one core belief that they held and isolate one experience from their own past which either inspired that belief or evidenced it.  I was surprised to find some of my worst students turning in well-written accounts of what they learned during the opium wars, their personal struggle with Asperger syndrome, and their opinion of the asceticism exemplified by modern Chinese architecture.  Needless to say (not really), it was pretty to easy to distinguish whether or not a final was plagiarized. 

I only gave one of these students a second chance.  In fact, the student who took Chinese asceticism too close to heart and didn't indulge himself in the process of doing his own work had not fully plagiarized his paper.  He had only misled another teacher into proofreading his paper which he failed to mention was a final for another class.  Shockingly, and I mean shockingly, he turned in a FULLY plagiarized paper one week later!  After quickly pulling up his life's story on the internet and complimenting him on being a published author, I wrote a zero on his paper and showed him to the door while I gathered my thoughts.  I gave my student a second chance, and he still didn't do his own work.  In fact he did even LESS of his own work the second time.  As other students filed in to present their finals, I transferred the zero to my grade book, and together, the five lonely 0's stood out from all the other grades like bull's eyes denoting those students who I thought would never understand what self-reliance really meant.  (Even if they did understand 'ascetic')

            Six hours later, after all my other students had finished presenting their final essays to each other, my spirit was lifted by the stories of students whose mistakes were grammatical and not fundamental.  Just before leaving for the day, in walks the ascetic himself, out of breath and clutching what seemed to be a third draft of his final.  Preparing to hear a well-rehearsed plea for a third chance, I preemptively told this student that I would not change his grade.  Shockingly, and I mean shockingly, he did not protest, but instead said only that he understood my decision.  He only wanted me to read his final final and give him my corrections. 

Though he didn't use the word 'self-reliance' in his final final, I actually believe that he came to understand what it really meant.  The belief that he identified for his final was that one should rely on oneself, and the experience he isolated to justify this belief was the experience with this final exam.  He used what simple English he possessed to describe why using the work of others impedes one's own development.  I hope that the other four students can learn in the next two years what their classmate did on his journey from ascetic to aesthete in just one day.

I Prefer Milk and Cookies

            Christmas provides us all a time to relax after a long year of work or study.  The cold weather pressures us inside, close to our loved ones, where we pass the evening before the soothing crackle of a fire.  As expected, that's not the case in China.  One of our early cultural sessions began with the advice that whatever we think naturally as Americans, the opposite is true in China.  I naturally thought that this was hyperbole… and with just this first thought, I proved my teacher's advice to be true.  Everything is indeed totally counterintuitive here, from drinking hot drinks in summer to the basics of righty-loosey and lefty-tighty.  You can imagine then, how a relaxing holiday such as Christmas quickly becomes a time for egging strangers in the streets, sillystringing passing cars, and giving out apples which have been completely engulfed in plastic wrapping.  It was explained to me that the apples come from similarity of the Chinese name for Christmas Eve (Ping an jie) and the Chinese word for "apple" (Ping guo), but as for the eggs and sillystring… feel free to hypothesize.  My best guess is that MaoZeDong watched The Nightmare Before Christmas one year, and took the story a little too literally.  When a young gun sprayed one of my friends with silly string, Adam, a fellow volunteer, and I ended up joining in the festivities of Hallowistmas, and covered his face with what had to be toxic shaving cream.  Nothing screams Christmas like retaliation and escalation. 

The party that we had that night was also a mish-mash of both Jewish and Christian traditions.  Our Cranukkah celebration began with the lighting of the menorah, and concluded with a white elephant gift exchange.  After the dust had settled over Zunyi and several games of risk had been played till completion, I left with a box of Hungry Jack pancake mix and a bag of Hershey's Chocolate Chips.  Despite China's attempts to the contrary, I still got my Christmas cookies.

Thanksgiving

            好久不見 - Long time no see.  There’s no need (irony) to write about how busy I’ve been since my last post.  Strangely enough, that’s what NOT writing indicates.  Anyway, now that I have ample free time, I can catch up on all the things I’ve neglected, such as giving thanks.

            I am part of Peace Corps China’s 17^th batch of volunteers, and that means that I fall into a long line of traditions passed down through the years.  In my province, there is a designated place to celebrate every major western holiday except for Thanksgiving.  As the story goes, thanks was originally given in Kaili.  This was back when there was a fewer number of volunteers, and everyone could stay in just two apartments.  Now, there are 40 volunteers in Guizhou, and it is too difficult to host everybody in a small town like Kaili.  This year, however, there are four apartments to split in Kaili, and I decided to try to return to old traditions and, with the help of my citymates, we successfully hosted a wonderful Kaili Thanksgiving. Thanks to a generous friend of mine here in Kaili, we had access to a large dining room at a local hotel and set up a big buffet style dinner with what can only be describes as a “unique” Thanksgiving spread.  We had pepper chicken and dumplings instead of turkey and stuffing, but there was still pumpkin soup, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potato casserole, and even some homemade apple pie.  Lastly, to honor the original Thanksgiving traditions practiced by the pilgrims, we concluded the evening with a rousing game of musical chairs.