Occasional Dispatches of a Laowei in China

We’ve got another typhoon today in Zhejiang province, the second in three weeks.  It’s gotten cold and it’s windy as a well digger’s ass, the river outside is on the verge of flooding, the trash dump is ankle deep in water (and I know this because the old man searching through it for plastic bottles to recycle for change is up to his ankles in water), none of the food vendors who set up right next to the trash dump and sell stinky tofu and fish and snails and fruit and vegetables and flatbread and squid kebabs are out.  The chicken-man with his live chickens which he grabs by the feet and unceremoniously drops squawking into boiling water just before he gives it to you, with a smile—he’s not out.  Today on the bus, as we were driving through a little flash flooding, the driver hit the brakes and brown water started rushing under the doors onto the bus until it was up to my ankles.  The driver had to hit the brakes only because another bus driver floored it and cut him off, forcing him to slam the brakes and swerve left, almost running a car into the median wall, all while we were driving through a foot of water.  The internet is down, the wind is getting in the cracks in my windows, the rain is hitting my balcony door even though there’s a four foot overhang and I’m holed up in the apartment with no beer.  Even if I was to step outside into the horizontal rain to the only store within walking distance, I would only be able to purchase 2% Snow Beer.  I think they call it Snow Beer because it tastes like it’s made by filling the bottle halfway with beer and the rest with yellow snow.  I could continue, but I haven’t decided if I’m gonna disparage 2% beer in every post, or save it all for one monster Snow Beer rant.

Just got back from a week in southern China’s Guangdong province with some of my friends from the teaching program in Beijing.  Fergus, a British guy teaching in Beijing, came down on Friday the 29^th and met up with Daniel from Mexico.  On Saturday we took a 25 hour train from Shanghai to Guangzhou (what used to be called Canton), and from there an hour train got us to Shenzhen.  On train to Guangzhou we shared our cabin with a computer programmer from Shanghai named Zhang, who asked us to give him a common name.  John was too common.  Craig was not common enough.  We settled on Mark, making him the fifth or sixth person I've named Mark.  Any time I have to give a student an English name, I write down all the names of my family and friends and let them choose.  That's why there are five Marks, two Alex's, an Abby, two Marys, a Neal, a Gavin, a Jerome, a Rick, a Zak, a Reena, and even a Sam, who I insist on calling Sammy J. (Sorry Florencia, I'm not going to give a Chinese person a name with an 'l' and an 'r' that close together, that's just mean.)

Here’s a great example of how communism and capitalism in China sometimes intersect awkwardly:  the government has mandated that the Golden Week is a national holiday.  As such this is the only time, beyond the New Year in early February, that people get a chance to travel, to see distant relatives or to visit tourist spots such as Hangzhou.  Taking off work other times of the year is essentially unheard of for regular people.  So that’s all well and communist.  But, the prices for everything travel related operate under standard capitalistic principles.  Our train tickets were a full 200 yuan higher than they were the week before.  Hotels and restaurants and tourist attractions charge more.  Food vendors jack up their prices.  It’s no different than the hell of flying the day before Thanksgiving. . .  Mao must be doing triple lutzes in his grave.

Two of our friends are teaching English down in Shenzhen, which is just north of Hong Kong and about an hour by fast train (100 mph) from Guangzhou.  I’ve been saying for a while that China makes a person immune to absurd statistics, and Shenzhen is a big reason why.  Today Shenzhen is the focal point of trade in Guangdong province—a province with a population of around 90 million that might have a larger manufacturing workforce than the entire United States.  Shenzhen has quickly become the world’s manufacturing center, and 30 years ago it barely existed.

The city has a rootless and unmannered feel, very different from Shanghai or Beijing.  Almost no one here is from Shenzhen.  Most are from the interior provinces, here to make money to send home, or to save enough to return home and start a family.  Whereas in Hangzhou most foreigners are studying or teaching, most of the foreigners are here with their company’s logo on their golf shirts. 

I imagine Neptune’s horses aren’t aligned to maximize the feng shui of his building. 

“No no no, yes, but I haven’t been here before.”

Sometimes he would say, “What bus should we get?” or “Which way should we turn?” or my favorite, “Where are we?”  This happened literally every time we had to go anywhere.  I kept thinking he was going to stop asking us where we should go, that maybe this was all an elaborate joke, but even on the last day in Shenzhen he asked us how we should get to Hong Kong about 15 minutes before we were supposed to leave.

Early in the day, when asked about clubbing, he said, “No, no, yes yes.  We can go clubbing.”  We asked if there was a street with lots of bars and clubs.  “Yes yes, yes, no,” he said.  Around seven p.m. he decided to tell us that he didn’t know where a club was that we could go to. 
 

“No, I don’t know any bar streets.  There are many bar streets.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

Around eight he said, “I don’t think it is a very good idea to go to a club.  It can be dangerous for westerners.  There are many people who will try to screw you.”  This made the International Superstar very upset and caused Fergus, Polish Guy and me to laugh very, very hard.  I think he meant financially. 

“That’s because it’s a brothel, Fabian.”

“Yes.  Because it’s a brothel.”

“No, not maybe.  It is.”

“Right, because they are trying to get you to pay for sex.”

He had been saying things like this all week, but this night confirmed it:  Fabian really, really loves just talking with whores.

Fabian’s tour guiding reached its most ridiculous point the day we went to the beach.  For various reasons, we didn’t get on the right bus until around three in the afternoon.  We were going with one of Fabian’s fellow teachers, a 21 year-old from Sichuan province named Cary.  She asked me if Cary was a boy’s name.  I thought about some of my students--Dolphin, Money, Alby, Polia, Brain, Johnson, Harry Potter, Jenny Depp, Star, Sun, Snow, Monkey, Angenes, James Fish, Duck, Berry--and told her not to worry about it too much.

Cary must have taught Fabian everything he knows about Shenzhen, because she also had no idea what was going on.  After about an hour on the bus, we asked Cary how far away we were. 

Four or five “20 minutes” later, we found ourselves stuck in standstill traffic.  We asked Cary how far away we were if we got out and walked.  

So we got out and started walking.  The sky was sfmoggy and we were walking along the harbor where the big 20 foot storage containers are shipped all over the world, one per second, 24 hours a day.  They were stacked about a hundred feet high to our right, red and blue and yellow and orange, stretching endlessly through the sfmog.  Soon it became clear that there were thousands of people walking with us alongside the traffic.  No one had considered that, this being the national holiday, there might be literally half a million people trying to get down this two-lane road to the beach, and that when we got there we might not see the sand but for the people.

Walking past a few miles of shipping containers made me think something not altogether original:  China does it big or not at all.  If they are going to build a dam, it’s going to be the biggest damn dam ever.  If they’re gonna build a city from scratch it’s going to have 10 million people.  If there’s going to be a canal it’s going to be the world’s longest.  If it’s going to be propaganda it’s going to be as bombastic as humanly possible.  If it’s going to be a wall it’s going to be a great one.  And if there’s going to be an Olympics, they’re gonna go all out. 

For those who might not know, 'My Super Sweet-Sixteen' is an MTV show where obscenely spoiled American princesses whine and bitch while their parents degrade themselves by buying 10,000 dollar dresses, letting their children throw shoes at them, and apologizing for not getting the right color Mercedes.  At first I was appalled that this is the mindless shit we export to other countries, and then I realized he was right.  Being in China right now, in some ways, is like watching the middle ten minutes of My Super-Sweet Sixteen…all the plans are made, preparations are under way, dissenters are being squashed, anticipation is building, and China is getting impatient to just get the party started, so it will be all about her and she can put on the crown and have everyone look at her and take pictures with her friends and dance on tables and publicly humiliate that girl she hates and jump up and down when she gets the Mercedes. 

(Maybe you have to be inundated with Olympic hype to appreciate it, but look up some pictures of the Olympic Stadium, the "Bird's Nest," if you haven't seen it, or read about how big the Olympic village is going to be, or think about the fact that 1.5 million people are being displaced for the games and you might get an idea of what I'm talking about.  But that's still just the beginning.  This isn't an Olympics, it's a century-claiming coming out party.  It's China's 'My Super-Sweet Sixteen.')

We reached a small town at the end of the harbor, where Cary guessed we were about 20 minutes away from the big beach, da mei sha.  Predictably, we came to a sign:  da mei sha 4 km, pointing up a road that led up into the mountains.  This is when the International Superstar and the Dane got upset and started storming angrily up the mountain, because I think they had had visions of wearing fancy pants and drinking cocktails all night.  About an hour later it was almost seven and there was no beach in sight.  The sun was dropping over the South China Sea.  The people were packed going up the side of the road, as cars blew by us on the left, honking for no apparent reason.  One of the ubiquitous blue utility pick-up trucks drove by.

First, there was now no traffic, and we were going a good thirty miles an hour. 

“We’ll jump.”  Oh.  Yeah, we’ll just jump.

“We’ll jump.”

They didn’t, and we didn’t have to jump.  Eventually the truck caught a little traffic, and we passed the International Superstar and the Dane.  So we hopped off, trying to smile off the looks from some confused bystanders.  It was dark by the time we got to the beach, which was packed as expected.  Everywhere people were yelling, splashing, chasing, and having enough fun to make up for a 2 hour walk.  A few in our group were furious that it had taken so long to get here, and the Dane was cursing Fabian’s friend Cary out of earshot, whose crime seemed to be offering wait until three pm on her day off to take some foreigners to the beach.  Oh yeah, and being unable to predict that a lane would close and traffic would be a disaster.  NO CLUBBING!!  Oh, the horror!  The horror!  (Aside:  This kind of pretentious, affected, entitled, self-centered attitude is part of what I wanted to get away from when I came to China.  You don’t have a pre-ordained right to have everything go as planned, you don’t have a right to hate on people with good intentions when they mess up.)  I might be being a little too harsh, but I didn’t see a single Chinese person look put-out in the slightest that they had spent the first day of their holiday (which for most people was half the length of ours) walking to the beach, or that there was so much traffic, or that the beach was crowded, or that the sun was already down.  They were with the people they loved, and having fun. 

Then I saw it—a jellyfish.  Right there in front of me, a big jellyfish, red and clear.  Oh shit, I thought, another one floating right there.  I looked around and realized they were all over.  I turned around…they were behind me.  The slimy fuckers had me surrounded.  I can’t believe it, I thought, my mom was right.  The ocean is an incredibly dangerous place. I should have stayed on the truck.  Then one touched me.  And another.  It didn’t sting.  Then another rubbed against my leg.  It didn’t feel like a jellyfish.  I looked closer.  I grabbed it, and saw a familiar face looking back at me.  The Colonel.  That smug Kentuckian.  KFC bag.  I looked at another.  Die Hard 4 DVD case.  DVD case for a movie that doesn’t come out until November.  Pizza Hut.  Water bottle.  DVD wrapper, Chinese movie.  Kung Fu Chinese fast-food wrapper.  Another KFC.  Suddenly it was quiet, like the sea was taking a deep breath.  I then heard the collective gasp that comes before a big wave, swelling into a full-out holy-shit “Ahhhhhhhh!”—the anticipation of a few hundred people swelling with the wave.  I threw the Colonel back in the water and looked up, because a massive breaker was about to land on my head and I had to decide whether to dive through or go with it.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2182896&l=9882c&id=5701138

I left Beijing on August 29^th by overnight train and got to Hangzhou early the next morning, turning 23 somewhere along the way.  There were seven of us from the program on the train, and our tickets for the soft seat cabins had us split into three in one car, three in another, and one.  I took the one by itself and ended up in a cabin with a Chinese family.  I spent most of the trip hanging out with the three kids in the family who called me “Mr. Ben.”  They laughed when I first told them my name, because “ben,” when spoken in a tone that starts high then falls in pitch, means “idiot.”  When said in another tone, one that starts high and then drops before rising again, like Scooby-Doo saying “whaaaaat,” it means “book.”  So every time I say the transliteration of my name, which is Ben Ji Ming, if I’m not careful, I’ll say “Hey nice to meet you, my name’s Idiot Bright.”  See? Chinese is easy!  As you can see, there is no room for confusion.

Immediately across from the White House is the Washington Monument, our most phallic of monuments.  It’s smaller than the real Washington Monument, and I was a little disappointed Paul didn’t provide me with any scale information.  Standing next to it and its miniature reflecting pool made me feel about 30 feet tall.  But it’s not the size that matters, it’s the sentiment.

Paul finished summarizing the plaque and waited for me to say something.

Huamei School operates differently from traditional Chinese schools.  It’s a boarding school for some of the wealthiest, most westernized students in Zhejiang province.  We have Chinese students who live in Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Canada, Portugal, and America.  The school prides itself on its western teaching methods and its holistic education.  It has a great slogan to that effect:  “Huamei School:  Education focus on the whole child.”  The whole school is covered floor to ceiling with English phrases and sayings.  The floors and steps have words and short sayings like, “Are you OK?” while there are banners hanging in the hallways with wise sayings, some of which even make sense.  For example, I really like, “A man without spirit cannot enjoy happiness even if he possess a great deal of property.”  But then there are some, usually word for word translations of Chinese proverbs that make my day better every time I see them, like, “Bring along the tough and tensile strek of hope pick up the firm packsack of patience.”  I asked a teacher what a strek was.  Still no word.

Huamei’s even invented its own week, called the “Huamei week.”  The Huamei week is ten days in a row of classes followed by a four days weekend.  This is good because it gives me longer breaks to visit nearby cities.  I have Huamei week Wednesday off, which means days three and eight are free.  I just found out that they call the normal Sunday-Saturday week the social week.  This is incredibly misleading because the Huamei week means I teach on some weekends, and thus prevents me from socializing.  The Huamei week also means I have no idea what day it is. 

I was repeatedly warned by teachers that I would have discipline problems with my students—that they were rich, spoiled, and lazy with no respect for authority.  Compared to other Chinese students this may be true, I haven’t had many problems with discipline.  There is one class that I’ve had some trouble with, and while I’ll admit that there are times I would like to drop class 8A off the Mount Rushmore Condominium Complex, I know it’s not their fault.  Unlike the rest of their grade, most of the students in 8A are new to the school and have little English training.  The boys throw paper and smack each other around, and the few girls that are good at English are so bored that they talk all the time.  They’re just kids who don’t understand what I’m saying and want to be running around having fun, so I’m cutting them some slack.  Otherwise, my students are respectful and eager learners.  A few of my 10^th grade classes can joke around in English, and those classes are always hilarious.  And I will always have a hard time calling students who live four or more to a room, take classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and clean their own classrooms lazy or spoiled.

In the afternoons between classes I like to hang out in Ray’s office.  Ray is the head of the international affairs office, meaning he is in charge of student trips abroad, managing the foreign teachers, and running the Korean student exchange.  There is a Korean teacher who works in the office named Hong Yeon Seok (English name: James Bond) who is in charge of the 40 Korean students studying at Huamei, and he and I have become friends.  His English isn’t great, but he gets his point across enough to crack me up, and he loves baseball.  He and his wife live next door to my apartment, and once they invited the other two English teachers, Meg and Amy, and me over for a “beer party.”  They gave us a delicious dinner and then we drank 2% beer and played drinking games until late into the night.  I could write a thousand words on the pointlessness of 2% beer, like how moving your arm up and down is enough exercise to sober you up while you drink it.  But as with so much else about China, like men doing construction in suits, or businesswomen hocking loogies near your feet, or street cleaning trucks blaring Christmas music, or old women decking you to get on the bus first, it’s better to just accept it and move on.

Which brings me to this afternoon in Ray’s office with Joseph and his buddies.  They come in and, while one’s trying to tell me he’s from Japan and the other one’s telling me he’s the principal’s son, Joseph goes to me, “I’m you nickaw.” 

“You nickaw.  I’m your nickaw.  Nickaw.”  He never does say it right, but finally I realize what he’s getting at.  “Like Snoop Dogg.  I’m you nickaw!”

The kid whose father is not the principal of the school seems to understand the socio-cultural undertones of “nickaw” a little better than Joseph and says to him, “You shut the fuck up your mouth!  Shut the fuck up your mouth!”  Hong laughs loudly.

You know, I get choked up just thinking about it.  Sometimes it’s moments like these…moments when you can feel and hear the positive impact you are making on young people’s lives, when you can see in their young faces the joy and hope that learning can bring, when you know that you’ve made just one life better…its moments like these that make me feel like I’m actually making a difference.  It’s the little things, really.

You can see a good part of our district from up here.  At whatever hour of the early morning it is, the hammering construction still kicks up dust, ringing clear over the honking taxis, squeaking buses and the shouting people.  A few of the innumerable cranes still swing over the hazy pink horizon.  By the estimates of one European organization, as cited in the New York Times, 1.5 million peoples’ homes will be raised in preparation for the Olympics to make way for new stadiums, roads, hotels, subway lines, or marathon route beautification projects.  That’s the one and a half Cincinnatis being picked up and moved somewhere else in the span of a couple years. 

Being in Beijing is like watching a living thing molt before your eyes—change colors, reshape, reconstitute itself into a new and improved beast.  Nearly every description of modern Beijing mentions the byproduct of this molting; the dust, the construction, the noise, the re-education of the populace, the insanely rapid change, so I’m not adding anything new here.  But up in the construction site on top of our apartment, cranes visible above the skyline in every direction, we get a pretty good view of it.

It’s the capital of a communist government that’s unsure of what about itself, exactly, is communist.  Unemployment is up and the Iron Rice Bowl, which used to guarantee everyone a livable wage, is disappearing.  To get ahead in the economy you often have to be connected to the party, or know someone who is.  Dissent and unrest are on the rise.  The government is frantically preparing for an Olympics where international attention and pressure is going to want some answers besides “are there enough hotels?”  Every Olympics has a political undercurrent, but China’s record with regard to journalistic freedom, human rights, working conditions, product quality, food safety, political expression, Tibet, Taiwan , as well as a host of other issues, ensures that the government will be held closely under the microscope.  Some predict a repeat of Seoul 1988, when those Olympics created a wave of international pressure which eventually toppled the dictatorial regime in South Korea and ushered in democracy.  I’m skeptical.  That kind of change is a long way off.

The last week in Beijing blew past.  After teaching practice week, our teaching classes became more and more of a joke, as we settled into grammar, testing, etc., and most people got anxious to just get to their school or continue teaching practice.  Anything to not sit in lessons for six hours a day.  Me and Alex the British guy I sat next to spent a good amount of time having fun with the Germans in our class.  At one point a German girl looks at the blackboard and says, "It is not structured!  It must be oorganized!  Into rows!  There must be structure!"  That gave us enough material for the next few days.  Few days later our teacher had us play hangman.  A different German girl went up to the board, and we guessed that her word was "hangman" in about three guesses.  Ahh, the German wit.

“I’m not going to cry,” said Jakub to a few of us, in his Polish Borat accent, on the second-to-last day. 

“I know.  But I’m not going to.”

We’re there one night drinking beers and a dish comes out.  We try it and Wilson laughs and goes, “Damn that’s good, niu bi.”

“You don’t know niu bi?”

“Well niu bi’s an important one.  Cow’s vagina.”

“No, just cow’s vagina.  It’s like an exclamation.  If something good happens, you say, niu bi.”

“No, niu is third tone.  Bi is fourth tone.  You just said something else’s vagina.  I can’t remember what, but you probably don’t want to say it.”

“The ‘water boil cow meat?’  Niu bi!”

I stood up when she was done and tried to stay away from shabby.  But I had to say it a few times for my activity.  I kept waiting for the class to start cracking up, but I didn’t get the same reaction, which I attributed to the fact that they had gotten used to whatever was so damn funny.  But when I pointed out the difference between Ruby and I’s pronunciation of the word, they lost it again as I said it with Ruby’s softer “Shah-bee” sound.  My obnoxiously grating Midwestern “aa” didn’t make them flinch.

I asked Wilson later that day what the hell happened.  He burst out laughing right away. 

“Oh man.  She just had the whole class repeating over and over “stupid c---.  It’s probably the worst thing you can say to someone in China .”

“Nothing.  They don’t have that sound.”

“Yeah.  You sound like an idiot, man.”

Every few days I try to wake up early and go to the university's track right near my apartment.  Ostensibly I am there to run, but I hate running.  Its just that moving my legs in a repetitive motion lets me gawk at as many people as possible. 

At six in the morning there are hundreds of people out.  Every piece of equipment in the weightlifting area is taken, and there are people hanging around, talking with those lifting or stretching or just aimlessly standing around.  The equipment itself is a combination between workout equipment and jungle gym, as its all made of brightly colored metal piping.

The first day, I walk onto the track and feel the eyes on me.  Here, at the International University of Economics, the sight of a westerner is nothing new, but still, I have never been stared at like this.  So I perform some self-conscious stretches and take off.  It feels good, and today is clear for Beijing, which means that you can see sky.  The sun pulls itself hazy and orange over the buildings, and as I round the track I pass middle aged women in loafers and dress pants, chubby young men wearing too-tight shorts and fake Nike t-shirts and foggy glasses, old husband and wife couples walking deliberately around the outside lanes.  As the sun gets higher and it gets hotter, some of the men pull up their shirts, roll them up under their armpits and rest them on their significant bellies.  Almost all the working men do this—it's one of those Chinese habits, along with spitting, that the authorities are trying to re-educate out of the people in time for the Olympics.  After lunch time groups of construction workers sit in the shade, dirty shirts pulled up, slightly fat bellies stuck out.  The street-vendors, couriers, taxi drivers, they all do it.  It's common enough that there could be a few hundred thousand people in Beijing walking down the street with their gut out at any one time, so the re-education seems a losing battle.  Apparently The Man is worried that the bellies will offend westerners just trying to catch some speedwalking or maybe some ballroom dancing.  As long as the loogies keep missing my person its all good with me.

There is one man who predates the revolution who I have seen all over campus.  He is here every morning at 5:30.  He is no more than five feet tall, and his skin under the few irregular tufts of hair is spotty, dark and leathery.  I know this because it is what I usually see of him, as he and walks with his head bowed.  His stride is about 4 inches, one foot placed just in front of the other, all the way around the track.  I run three miles around the track, he makes it one lap.  There are plenty of young Chinese in much better shape than me, and they will sometimes run a mile before he makes it around the curve.  But still, he has determination and the knowledge that he will get there when he gets there, and he stays in lane two as everyone else blows by him.  To walk in lane two takes balls.

I run down the backstretch and pass the basketball courts.  I've stopped to watch a few times, and it becomes immediately clear that not only is basketball the most popular sport of the younger generation, but that the older generation has no idea what's going on.  The young guys have some game.  They know how to dribble with both hands and their heads up, they get down on defense, they make the right pass and generally seem comfortable on the court.  One of them plays a lot like John Stockton, and I like to watch him flick bounce passes between two defenders to a cutter on the baseline, or abruptly pull up on a breakaway for a smooth ten-footer. 

Some of the young guys have clearly been watching Yao Ming's games.  You can spot them easy—the no looks, between the leg dribbles, complete lack of defense.  Even down to the longer shorts its clear they watch a lot of the NBA.  It seems that most of the flashier players, having realized that they don't exactly have the height to be Yao, have resigned themselves to simply being Tracey McGrady.  Lots of 3 pointers on the break.

But the older guys suck.  There is one guy who plays often.  Must be around 50 or so.  Every time he gets the ball he jacks up a shot.  It's a pathetic shot—both hands on the outside of the ball, ball behind his head, flicked off in a jerky spastic kind of motion.  He apparently thinks he has Reggie Miller range.  Everyone knows by now the guy can’t shoot, so they lay off and dare him.  He takes the dare every time.  He’s good at getting it to hit the rim, but the ball is usually still headed up when it gets there.  This makes it hard to make shots.  His five other teammates always look a little pissed off that he keeps shooting, but they keep passing him the ball.  They must not be watching enough Kobe.  He wouldn’t pass his mom the salt if he thought he had a better look at her plate.

In case you missed it, I did just say his five other teammates.  As you may have heard, this is a crowded country, and if 12 want to play, then 12 play.  Or 13, or 14.  At the rate of population growth, by 2020 basketball will be played 100 to a court, and you'll be only be able to pass by handing your teammates the ball.

Today there are 11 playing on the near court, but I don’t stop to watch.  I finish my run and sit on the surface just off the track to stretch.  I notice a young Chinese man a bit away who keeps looking toward me.  Finally he comes over and starts talking to me in English.  I find out he’s a boxer named Iga.  “My thing's on?”  I think he asks.

“Your thigh's on what?”

“Mike thigh's on.”

Who's Mike?

“Mike Tyson.”

“Mike Tyson?”

“Yes!”  He mimes some jabs.  “I like him.”

I think about Mike Tyson threatening to eat another boxer’s children before a fight.  “Me too,” I say.

We talk for a little bit longer about boxing.  He likes the De La Hoya/Merriweather fight of last May, has never heard of Sugar Ray Leonard, and doesn’t think the fact that Mike Tyson bit of a piece of another man’s ear is a big deal.  Then he asks, “You like Jesus?”

“Jesus?”

“Yes, Jesus.”  He lifts the cross that hangs from his neck.  “I like Jesus.”  He points in the direction of the church he goes to.  “I’m here every morning, except on Sunday.  On Sunday I go there, to church.  Do you like Jesus?”

I think about how to answer this.  How do you say, “I wasn't there or anything, but seems that Jesus was a revolutionary human being whose message of tolerance and compassion for all other human beings has been twisted and abused for more than two millennia by people more interested in riches, power and control than spiritual salvation, and that the same people who brought Jesus to fine countries like yours were usually followed by armies and diseases and conquest, and that inquisitions, witch-hunts, and boy fondling come to mind” in Mandarin again?

Then I look at Iga’s face, waiting patiently for my answer, fingers still lingering on the cross, and then I think about his choice of ideology in the land of Mao.  For some reason I think about a Doobie Brother's song I haven't heard for years.

“Jesus is just alright with me.”   

I put a picture album up. . . Try it and let me know if you can see the pictures because I can't at the moment. . . another update to come in the next day or so.

Since it took so long to get the blog up and running, here are some of the blog posts I had planned from the last week. . .

 7.29.2007 

Wake up early, scarf breakfast, chug coffee, hugs, kisses, crying, lines, security, some more lines, get on the plane, find seat, think about leaving family and friends for six months alone in a new country, think about it some more, let the anticipation build, get a cookie for the road, feel excited and nervous and anxious to get there and all the other natural emotions, crush knees into seat, seatbelts on and tray tables up and then—

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the captain.  We will be de-boarding the airplane.  Those who are planning to make connections in Chicago should go to the ticket desk for alternate plans.”

Ready, set, wait!

My first post is not from China but from an exceptionally comfortable couch in the business class lounge of the Northern Kentucky Airport.  Judging by a look around the lounge, there apparently has been some kind of trophy-wife convention in Cincinnati this weekend.  It’s 4:10 in the afternoon and I should be somewhere over the Pacific right now, but after enduring some mechanical failures, mediating bickering between United and Delta, and schlepping back and forth across terminals during what apparently is a trophy-wife convention this weekend, I have ended up with business class seats to Paris, and from there, to Beijing by Tuesday morning.  I’ll be heading the opposite way around the world and showing up a day late, but as I enjoy the fresh fruit and free beverages and contemplate the massage chair, I have to say it’s all worked out just fine.

7.30.2007

I write this from De Gaulle airport, outside Paris.  I am sitting on some ridiculously comfortable futuristic-yet-non-bourgeois chairs and waiting for the next plane.  I feel very well rested.

In a turn of events which “Sugar” Sam “Sexmachine” Johnson would definitely term as “fortuitous,” my flights to Paris and Beijing were upgraded to business elite, or something snooty like that.  Instead of the cramped suffering of the plebes, I would be enjoying my trip with fully reclinable seats and free booze.  The toilets had soap of lemongrass and wasabi, and the Thai soup tasted like spicy Froot Loops.  Luckily, I really like Froot Loops.  Upon entering the plane, you are greeted with a glass of champagne, presented with some fresh socks, assorted creams and lotions, a hot towel, and the menu for the flight.  The menu includes items such as “Herb-crusted lamb with blah blah blah. . . “ Not that it mattered, it still came out of a microwave.  At least I had my Thai Froot Loop Juice.

I reclined all the way, stretched my legs, took some champagne and watched the sun set over Lake Superior.  The trophy wives were whining and the businessmen were ignoring them, pretending to sleep or read business things.  We were about 20,000 feet up and the sky was clear, and I could see about a quarter of the lake as we flew just south of it.  I watched as the horizon turned pink, then orange, then red as it waned to the color of a fire dying out, and the little wispy pink clouds just below me turned pink then purple then black. 

Just then the whole trip seemed immediate, real for the first time.  Up to that point it had never really seemed I was leaving everyone that's important to me.  It was a strange time for a moment of realization—I have no personal feelings for Lake Superior, we’ve never had dinner together or high-fived—but something about it pulling over the horizon made the surreal goodbye's of the last week tangible for the first time.  Sometimes we just need the sight of an arbitrary body of water to make it click. 

When it got dark I pulled the shades, reclined the chair to an obscenely comfortable position, put on my courtesy noise cancelling headphones, and went to sleep very excited.

8.5.07

Ming Tombs, Great Wall, and the Wisdom of the Cultural Revolution

Almost slept through the Great wall trip.  Woke up 15 minutes before bus left.  Tour guide took us to Jade shop and pottery shop before we went to the wall.  She talked in the mike as we rode past the new Olympic stadiums.  Bizarrely, she started talking about the Cultural Revolution.  I wasn’t expecting anyone to bring it up.  At first she seemed like she thought negatively of it, but she quickly jumped back to the standard line.  This is more or less what she said about it:

“In the 1960’s our great leader Mao Zedong said, ‘everyone should get a chance to be the worker, the worker is the strength and glory of the country, so everyone should have the glory of the worker.’  So people who weren’t the worker, who were students and scholars went to all the corners of the country for some years, to learn how to be the worker.”

Well. . . that’s one way of putting it.  From the little I’ve read and heard from Chinese people, this seems to be a common thought process concerning the Cultural Revolution.  They recognize that it was bad, that maybe it shouldn’t have happened, that perhaps it was damaging to China, but the next logical thought—condemnation of the leaders who instigated it—never happens. 

 Sometime after Reform and Opening began in the late 70's, the standard line on Mao Zedong and his often disasterous policies became that he was right 70% of the time, and wrong 30% of the time.  Wilson, who lived in Beijing for a year with a host family, told me that some people have recently begun switching the percentages, saying he was wrong 70% and right 30% of the time.  But its always 70 and 30, never anything else.

Right afterward we were dragged to a Jade factory, which was a tourist trap with all kinds of ridiculously overpriced jade.  Very socialist.  We spent more time there than at the Ming Tombs, which were incredibly touristy and whose sites were limited.

Lunch was at another tourist trap, some kind of pottery factory.  But more importantly, we had French fries!  There was much rejoicing.

It takes a few hours to get to the Great Wall as traffic is horrendous.  Jakub the Polish guy keeps us entertained with stories of fork-lift races and exam-cheating and getting a lightbulb stuck in his mouth, taking a taxi to get the lightbulb out, returning, finding a dormmate with a lightbulb in his mouth, and walking with him to the hospital only to find the cab driver with a light bulb in his mouth.  Apparently the Poles love a challenge.

We head to the most touristy section of the wall, as it is the closest to Beijing.  The city fog blends with the mountain fog so badly that visibility is horrible.  We name the mist sfmog.  It just sounds right.

I didn’t think people would be hawking so much crap on the actual wall.  I expected more sanctity, I guess.  As soon as you get off the bus there are very persistent people hounding you, to sell postcards and t-shirts and goofy hats and communist shirts, and once we got on the wall there were painters and other artists, food vendors, goshery tables, and a woman who sold little pissing Buddhas.   The wall is crowded but I climbed as much as I can, and there are still awe-inspiring moments, considering the human and natural elements conspiring otherwise. 

An Arrest

After dinner we head Beijing’s night market.  Nicoli, a Dane, has been drinking rice wine since before 9, and is utterly pissed, and some of the Brits like to say.  He's wearing a communist hat and dancing around like a buffoon on a crowded street corner, much to the delight of most of the Chinese watching.   They're laughing hysterically.  One of Nicoli's friends reels him in, and as we cross the street, a raving wild-eyed old Chinese man stands above everyone and starts ranting in Chinese.  From the grumbles and eye-rolls of the audience I can tell that no one is very interested in listening.  He's crazy, but not as crazy as the drunk laowei, and he's definitly not as funny.  He gestures wildly with papers in his hands, and his open shirt flaps around, and it seems like he’s pointing towards some from our group, but really he’s pointing everywhere.  It would be speculation to say that he was reacting to Nicoli and the perhaps disrespectful hat he was wearing.  He seems to be an equal opportunity rabble-rouser, because soon he starts screaming at the people gathered around. 

In any case, the cops roll up and rather politely try to take the raving old man into custody.  He refuses vehemently, yelling on tiptoes at the crowd over the cops’ shoulders.  The police stop being polite.  After several failed attempts at coercing him into their car, the police surround him and take him to the ground efficiently, dragging him to the car.  He doesn't go quietly.  I ask one of the Chinese assistants in our program what happened, and he looks back across the street to the scene and shrugs, “Something political.”

Night Market

Next we walk down the street to a night market, where booth after booth sizzles with the bizarre food of all kinds.  A crush of people is pressed against the booths, and the strange smells comingle and waft up over their heads as they haggle, point, shout and laugh.  The men behind the booth are animated and their eyes and hands do most of the negotiating.  Friends dare each other to try things, everywhere there are these little negotiations going on...what to try next, who has to eat the last one, who is a girly-man for not swallowing or trying.  On the tables sit rows and rows of cow stomach, hearts, testicles, whole squid on a stick, worms, snakes, starfish, scaly fish staring skyward, numerous fried insects, and all kinds of unidentifiable creatures on sticks.  It was only right to try as much as we could.  You might be saying to yourself, "It all sounds so good, how should I know what to get the next time I have the opportunity to eat strange animals?"  Well, kind reader, I've taken the guesswork out of nightmarket eating.  This little guide will help you the next time you are in such a situation.  Here’s the verdict:

Snake:  C +

Tender and sort-of fishy.  They rip out the spine and clean it (hopefully), skewer it and grill it and roll it in spices.  The raw ones slide slowly down their inclined spot at the booth but always stop short of falling on the ground.  Jakub from Poland eats the head first, then realizes he has to spit out the skull bone.  It bounces on the ground and rolls down a gutterdrain... I would eat it again, but downing a whole snake would be a challenge.  There's a bigger snake that just has a stick rammed down his throat, and that one gets an F.

Silkworm:  F - - -

Couldn’t swallow it.  It’s like a plastic ball filled with rotten cheese sauce.  Tastes worse than it sounds.  There are four or five skewered on a stick, and only three of us give them a try.  Our reactions were enough to dissuade anyone else from coming near the nasty little things.  Seriously, don’t do it.  There’s being adventurous and then there’s being a jackass to your body.

Heart:  A

Not sure who or what’s heart.  Maybe chicken.  Pretty tasty.  I’d eat it anytime, really.

Scorpion:  A -

There was small and large scorpion.  The small ones were about 2 inches long, small and crunchy.  The large were 4 or so with long tails.  I had the little one.  Tasted like a bit of fried chicken skin.  Highly recommend.  I didn’t try the bigger ones but they looked pretty mean.

 Testicle:  C

It wasn't clear who or what's testicle we were eating, which inevitably led to "Now we know how they enforce the one-child policy" jokes.  I can't in good concience give an unidentified nut a higher grade than a C, but it really wasnt bad.  Tasted like a bland sausage.  There were all kinds of penises available too, but I passed.

Grasshopper:  B +

Big damn grasshopper.  3 inches long at least.  Salty and crunchy, again tasting like something deepfried.  No big deal, except that they require a lot of chewing or else the legs get stuck in your throat or teeth…mmmmm.

Starfish:  D +

It's bad, but not silkworm-bad.  The outside is spongy and tastes vaguely like seafood, and the inside has this green goo that oozes out.  It was just fun eating a starfish though.

So there you have it, the quick guide to nightmarket eating.  A synopsis:  Scorpion good, silkworm bad, and testicle useful for population control.

(Note on this post:  I tried to go on Wikipedia and look up some facts about the Cultural Revolution, but the page was blocked.  I don't see why they need to block a page about a few million people learning about the glory of the worker. . . )

For the next six months I will be an English teacher (lao shi) in a school in Hangzhou, one of these medium-sized Chinese cities of about 4 million people.  The only English language TV station in China runs a commercial calling Hangzhou "The most beautiful city in China." 

I am painfully aware that, especially due to my lack of Mandarin, I will never come close to understanding the mystery of this place.  Probably I'll write things here that I will later learn are just flat out wrong.  In that way this blog will better serve as a log of the adventures, mistakes, misunderstandings, and euphoria of a foreigner (laowei) adjusting to a new country rather than a journalistic picture of China.  Of course, I'll try to report the facts--but there is no place in the world where the way things are becomes the way things were as quickly as in China.

So I'll keep my eyes open and we'll see what happens. . .