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.

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.