The Longest Day

Looking back on my 10-day bike trip through Sichuan province, there is one day in particular which stands out.  After biking 150km in two days, and hiking up 10,000+ stairs, my legs were just two jelly tubes hanging off my torso.  Our first day after the hike to the summit of Emei mountain, we only biked about 10k and decided to rest for the night in a nice hotel… we deserved it.

And then there was the 5^th day…

It all began nicely, we had a good breakfast and plotted our route for the day.  We figured if we left at around 10, then we could ride the 100km of relatively flat road to Ya’an before dinner.  Everything was on track until it started to rain.  I had planned for this and strapped my plastic 99 cent poncho over my backpack.  I figured I’d rather get wet with rain than with sweat, so I didn’t wear any raingear myself.  Momentary delay and I was back on the road.  After the first 50k, things were right on schedule for us to arrive by 4:30 – 5:00.  I was a little hungry at this point, but I figured if I just continued strong, then I’d be able to feast early with some Peace Corps friends working in Ya’an. The girl I was traveling with, fellow volunteer named Brianne, was not at all hungry, so we kept on truckin’.  Our French and Chinese counterparts had fallen well behind and called us with news that they’d hitchhiked into a nearby town and will just take a bus to Ya’an where they’d meet up with us. Brianne and I high-fived to celebrate Americans winning out over the French and Chinese, but we had no idea how our victory would be severely tarnished by the end of the day.

Then… everything went downhill… figuratively speaking of course, because literally speaking, things went uphill.  We rode up some hills as more and more road construction made our paved country road into a slop of mud and rocks which cars weren’t even allowed to drive on.  We keep biking, intermittently asking for directions and confirming that this “road” would lead us to the right place.  Knowing that each pedal brought me closer and closer to my destination and a warm bed, I kept hammering away despite thirst, fatigue, and hunger I haven’t known since high-school wrestling tournaments.  My drive waned drastically when the townspeople’s estimates became more and more arbitrary.  “20km to go” would become “27” and then “15” and back up to “22.”  The one thing I knew for sure was that we were making progress, so I kept on going.

BOOM! Flat tire. The shining moment of luck in a day of misery, Brianne happened to pop her tire in the only good place we would pass the whole day. We were directly next to a bike tire repair man, who put on two patches for less than a dollar, and we were back on our way in 20 minutes.  To add to our luck, the rain stopped and I felt a short bump of energy.  Then our muddy strip of road ended in a full-on roadblock. We could’ve picked up our bikes and walked around, but a helpful man told us he’d lead us to a detour. We acquiesced and I thought, “Gee, how nice… a detour!” IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN THAT the detour was an extra 30km up one of the steepest hills I’ve ever ridden a bike on. Trudging became walking became strapping our bikes to the back of a moped and riding to the top.  It was during this clownish accent to the top that my body gave up on me. Well it would have if it wasn’t for the lollipop that Brianne offered me as my eyes were rolling back into my head and my twitching legs gradually stopped moving all together. We made it to the top only to find out that our benevolent aid wanted payment for his “assistance” in driving us 30km out of our way. I would have gladly given his some gas money and even a little extra for the trouble, but the form of the request was entirely out of line.  He stopped on the side of the road and said, “before we continue, give me money.” I proposed that we’d give him a quarter of what he was extorting, but he countered with the ever so comforting truth, “You don’t know where you are or how to get where you’re going. Without me you won’t get there.” My brain had the neuronal attendance of an un-aired senate filibuster on kitten-puppy relations… or in other words, I was so out of it that I couldn’t even make up a good analogy to describe my exhaustion. I managed to persuade him to accept our 25% offer, and after we reached the top, I realized that during our ride up the mountain, my rear bike tire got bent.  Giving no $h!+ at all that my 18 dollar bike was halved in re-sale value, we rode our bikes UP the mountain following the road indicated by our new guide.

Once again, riding became walking became standing still and staring down at my lifeless legs. To the surprise of only those who don’t know her, Brianne saved the day again. Pears and peanut butter!!!... But no knife! I devoured the pear in Viking fashion, and with juice running down my chin I began thinking of some acceptable way of getting the peanut butter out of the jar and into my tummy. Fingers? No. Too filthy, even for me. Stick? Cleaner, but there might be some bark coming off into the PB. Turn a plastic grocery bag inside out and us it as a finger condom as I scoop out the PB like a starving badger? OK. I got my energy back up and began the 30 minute countdown to my next crash. 

Finally, some downhill! And the bystander estimates are regularly in the teens! And it’s only… oh… sunset. We continue in the dark as our mud road becomes paved again. Well, partially paved… and therein lies the problem. Turns out that though she’s a superstar at many things, Brianne’s nightvision is less than stellar. A large hole claims her front tire, and we roll into the next village as a raggedy bunch of failures. I ask a policeman how far to Ya’an, and the estimate is back up over 20. Apparently southern Sichuan has a network of wormholes which not even Stephen Hawking could navigate efficiently.  All the bike shops are closed, and we decide to just try and hitch a ride to the city.

A really nice couple picked us up and we made it to Ya’an at 9 o’clock, when I stuffed my face with food and passed out on the floor. A half-decent close to the longest eleven hour bike ride of my life.

One-Year Anniversary

           I just started my second and final year of teaching in China, and there are a lot of things going through my mind.  The main thing I noticed stepping back into a classroom was that my students were speaking English. After a year of constantly reminding them that they shouldn’t speak Chinese in class, a summer off seemed to make all the difference. I’m teaching the same classes that I taught last year, and I actually have the same groups of students as well. It’s remarkable how different a first day can be after you already know your students and they know you. Last year I felt like I was teaching in a Charlie Brown comic, mumbling, “Waah waa whaah wah,” as students stared wondering why I kept making them raising their hands. This year it was all business from the first minute with active participation and enthusiasm. I hope this keeps up.

           My relationship with China has also changed dramatically. I have weathered storms of frustration, fatigue, and absolute bewilderment. I’m very glad that I made the choice to come live and work here, but it would be difficult to say that I love it here. As I feel more and more integrated with the language, culture and people of western China, I am just as “foreign” as I was the first day I arrived. Things are different at school, where students and teachers know me, but on the street I’m perpetually a stranger to all, emphasis on STRANGE. I can’t see myself living here mainly because the other 400,000 people in my city can’t see me living here. You know how beavers will slap their tails against the water when they catch sight of an outsider approaching their dam… well I feel like I’m living in a city of beavers every time I go outside and people feel that it’s necessary to alert the other citizens of my presence. It’s nice to blend in because then you can choose to stand out. Unfortunately, when you stand out you can’t just choose to blend in. Towards the end of the school year, I became frustrated with western China as a whole, but I’ve recently directed my aggravation to the lack of education here. Even those students who go to school don’t have a “full” view of what they’ve studied, especially in liberal arts. Everything is studied as if it was times tables, and that leaves subjects, which should be colorful and expressive, as flat production-based instruction. This also stems from the whole system being test-oriented from the 6^th grade onward.

It’s been pretty much impossible to empathize with the people who have had such a remarkably different education than me. The difference is just so big, and I guess that’s also why many of them also have trouble empathizing with me. Even growing up in America has taught me things that I can’t seem to teach here: organization, efficiency, competition, racial diversity, and even economics. Not high-level economics, but just the things we take for granted living in a capitalist society. The main thing I can’t understand here is how buying in bulk is ever more expensive than buying individual sizes… yes, not the same price… MORE expensive. I’ve explained this to shop owners and they just think I’m trying to bargain, not explain an economic principle to create buyer’s incentive.

Lastly, I’ve started looking into what I might do next year. At this point film school is on the top of my list. I’ve continued drafting some screenplays since I’ve been here, and it’s made me happy to have a creative outlet for my thoughts. Writing again was like loosening your belt after a huge meal.  You didn’t realize how tight your pants were, but now you’ve never felt better. Other options for the future could involve work in either EASTERN China or Europe. For now, I’m going to do my best to teach English and make the most of my second year.

Summer Vacation

            This summer was a pretty big spread of experiences.  First, I went to Guilin for two-weeks to study Chinese. It was such a great atmosphere for studying and just living in China.  The most remarkable thing about Guilin was that I could clearly understand and communicate with others in Chinese. The most unremarkable thing was the food.

After coming back to Kaili, I realized how “rural” my site actually was. Guilin is in the neighboring province, but the level of development is totally different. It was a shock that definitely left an impression on me. Fortunately, I was only shocked for about 14 hours before going to teach in Rongjiang.

In Rongjiang, a nearby town, two other volunteers and I taught English teachers how to better teach English. After arriving, I scratched out 85% of my lesson plans based on the realization that these teachers needed more instruction on WHAT English was rather than HOW to teach it. This is a problem we share in America, but to a lesser degree. Teachers are becoming less and less a career for talented people. In the elementary and middle school levels, many teachers are those who have failed at everything else and have resigned to living of a low-salary teaching job. Teaching well can make all the difference, and the bar needs to be raised worldwide. How can you teach what you don’t know? I have no answer to this question, but apparently Guizhou province does, because many of its teachers don’t know what they are supposed to be teaching, but they’ve been doing so for 10-15 years already.

After Rongjiang, I went to an organic farm outside Chengdu to lead and English Environmental camp. There were 6 volunteers there with 30 students, and we spent 4 days together working, cooking, cleaning, studying, having seminars, and organizing local projects to help the environment. It was great to spend this time with such interest(ED/ING) students. I even met one who influenced the next two weeks of my summer.

This student, Wanda, had been planning a bike trip through Sichuan province and invited a fellow volunteer and me to go with her. Also on this trip was a French study abroad student who did most of the planning for the trip. Our adventure took us from Chengdu to Emeishan to Ya’an, a total of about 200km. We bought bikes, tents, and sleeping bags in Chengdu ($60 per person total) and then rode, hiked, and camped our way to Ya’an.  After that, I just came back to Kaili and started teaching again feeling refreshed and ready to go.

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.