Archives for April 2009
You’re in Squatter Country Now
Collectively, I’ve been in China for 16 months. That’s spread across five years, mind you. And in all my travels (and staying-putles), I’ve only gotten food poisoning once. But that doesn’t mean everything I’ve eaten has settled well. Many long nights were spent sipping on a bottle of Pepto Bismol. Getting struck by… uh… we’ll call it lightening… isn’t so serious when you’re in the comfort of your own home, however. It’s when you’ve gone downtown that it becomes a matter of life and death.
Foreigners like to hold out (or hold it in) for a Western toilet, because there’s no way in hell we’re going to squat to do our business, but you’re not always going to find yourself next to a hotel with a clean lobby restroom when nature comes kicking down your door. And even hotel lobbies can’t always guarantee a Western toilet. So you get used to the squatter very early on, because it’s either that or poop your pants and smell like everybody else in China.
Oh, come on. I’m joking!
I’m to the point now where I prefer using a squatter. I’ve been there for a while, actually. Uh… that last sentence could go either way. Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with being a fan of squatting and everything to do with avoiding the alternative when it looks like this:
The truly sad part about this picture is the handicap sign above the toilet. A wheelchair-bound person’s only option is this disgusting seat out in the open (and right next to the urinal trough) for everyone to see? Really? I know stall doors are a novelty in a lot of public bathrooms, but I would think anyone who has to use that toilet would be completely humiliated.
Then again, Chinese people find public urination/defecation much less embarrassing than we do. On any given day, I can walk down the street and pass two or three guys casually peeing in the bushes. They’re not trying to hide it (and they’re not trying to hide it, either). In fact, yesterday, I was riding the escalator down to the underground walkway/shopping area when I saw a mother letting her son pee at the bottom. It was a huge puddle, too! And I seemed to be the only one who noticed. I also seemed to be the only one who cared not to step in it.
Sit for Suzhou
What little faith still existed in my heart for China’s train system has just been destroyed. I previously wrote that the trains, despite being crowded and difficult to get tickets for, always left on time. Ha! That’s not really true anymore. A friend and I went to Suzhou for the day and were only able to get standing tickets for the ride there. Our car was so crammed with people, the attendants struggled to get the doors open and closed at every stop. I suspect the ticket offices don’t even keep track of how many standing tickets they sell.
But I’ve come to expect these kind of setbacks. The truly annoying, faith-shattering part was that, once everyone was on, and the doors were shut, the train just sat there. No explanation or apology as to why we had to wait 30 minutes before we started moving. It was hot, there was no space to move, and several guys couldn’t wait to get off the train to smoke a cigarette. Ugh. The only reassurance I had to keep me from blowing up was that the odds of this happening again were very slim.
Yeah. Right.
Whatever the odds are, we got ‘em. The same thing happened on the way back to Changzhou! The train stopped, and the attendant yelled, “Changzhou dao le!” All of the Changzhou passengers stood and gathered around the door, but it wouldn’t open. The attendant passed through the crowd several times but never opened the door, just kept telling everyone to wait a minute, wait a minute. Thirty minutes later, the train started moving again. In another five minutes, it stopped at the real Changzhou station and let us off.
Anyway… Suzhou was nice. It’s a city famous for its historical gardens. We hit up three of them before braving the train back to Changzhou. At least we were able to sit on the way home.
Don’t Be Shy
Songs are the perfect time-filler for class. I can spend ten minutes introducing a new song and practicing it several times. My last lesson was to review the songs the students already know and learn one new one. By the time we get to “Five Little Monkeys,” it’s already time to wrap up. But all this singing comes with major repercussions: my voice is shot. I would rather the kids sing without my help, anyway, but if I’m not there to lead the group, they start droning, “Five little blah blah blah… blah blah blah blah monkeys blah blah.”
I’m sure that’s what I sound like to them every day. And that’s what everyone who speaks Chinese sounds like to me. It’s complete nonsense until I hear a word I’ve studied before, then I perk up, “Huh? What? Did someone just say ‘niunai?’ Who’s talking about milk?” I don’t even fully understand a lot of the questions I get asked (typical questions like “Where are you from?” or “What is your job?”), I just hear a key phrase like “na guo,” know they are saying something about “which country,” and am able to answer accordingly. Then the other person assumes I am a whiz at Chinese and starts asking harder questions, “How long have you been in Changzhou? What can Obama do for China? What’s the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?”
Taxi drivers are an inquisitive bunch. I’m always reluctant to be in a taxi alone with them, because I know they’re going to start drilling me, and I’m still too uncomfortable and shy concerning the Chinese language. When I’m in line to buy a train or bus ticket, my heart starts pounding, dreading the moment I have to say, “I want two tickets for Suzhou at 9:30,” only for the attendant to reply, “Sorry, we don’t have blah blah blah blah blah.” Time to take out the blank face and retreat.
Those of you who knew me before probably didn’t see me as very outgoing. Definitely not the kind of person who could sit next to a stranger on the bus and talk to them in Chinese, let alone in English. Well… I’m still not. But in the time I’ve been here, I’ve realized I really am a social person. I think every expat has this moment of self-discovery: we need other people to be completely happy. After a few months of living in China, you find that you can get along with almost anyone. Maybe some of that is just desperation, but you actually do have something in common with other expats, maybe more in common than the people you went to school with who turned down your offer to travel abroad. You were all crazy enough to come to a foreign country to work.
Star Experimental School
Now that the weather is nicer, the grass is greener, the sky is bluer, the clothes are skimpier, and the boys are happier, it seems like a good time to finally post pictures of what my campus looks like. Yes, it’s huge. There are over 3,000 students in this primary/middle school, and most of them stay here during the week. I’m not a fan of its English name, though. To me, “experimental” brings to mind imagery of insane asylums that had to be closed down due to unethical practices. Maybe I should be more mindful of the cameras in my classrooms…
You Will Learn Something Today
The Grade 4 lesson books are already jumping into some pretty heavy English, and I’m left wondering how I can possibly get these kids to understand past, present, and future tenses when we only meet once a week. Past tenses are particularly confusing for them, even without all the irregular verbs. Then the book keeps adding “didn’t” in there, which throws them off even more. Alas, the best most of the students can do is, “I didn’t reading a book,” when they’re really trying to say, “I read a book.”
I decided to give past tense a break (or rather, I gave it a break; clever, huh) in order to focus on “What will you do?” and “What are you doing?” One of the ways we practiced this was to have a student stand at the front of the room. I would ask the other students, “What will she do?” and they would reply, “She will dance! She will sing! She will play guitar!” And she has to do it. Because I’m the teacher! Bwahahahaha!
Hey, I dance plenty of times in front of my classes. I think it’s only fair for the students to do the same.
Another activity that gets some giggles out of them is passing around two pictures of phones. The students pretend like they are calling their friend and asking, “What are you doing?” When I hand the phones to a boy and a girl, though, the entire class whistles, “Ooooooooh!” I’ll finally take the last call but hold the phone upside down and repeatedly say, “Hello? Are you there? Hello?” The student who’s trying to ask me the question gets increasingly flustered, while the rest of the class screams at me to turn the phone around.
I normally don’t care for the activities suggested by the teacher’s manual, but this last one ended up being rather entertaining… when the kids understood what was going on. Most of the time, they didn’t. The point, though, is to keep proposing new things to do, because something is keeping you from doing the last one. Some of the classes really nailed the concept:
Let’s play football.
But it’s raining. Let’s watch TV.
But there’s no TV. Let’s go to sleep.
But it’s morning! Let’s make a cake.
But I don’t like cake. Let’s play basketball.
But I am very tired…
I was pretty excited that they were “getting it,” and I started clapping and saying, “Yes! Right! Exactly! Good job!” The students were a little surprised by this enthusiasm. They looked at each other and shrugged, as if to say, “What’s his problem?” My problem… is that we’re actually learning something.
The Great Chinese Caption Contest
There’s something about sticking a cartoon speech bubble next to a Chinese person that instantly spells hilarity. In a cheap effort to encourage lurking readers to finally post a comment, I thought it would be fun to do a caption contest with actual prizes. Or just one prize. I will send a Changzhou comb to the person who writes the funniest caption for any of these pictures. Really! The contest will stay open for two weeks, and you can submit as many entries as you want. Sorry, no bonus points for entries written in Chinese.
I Dream of China
I don’t have nightmares. I can only recall one dream (and this was almost twenty years ago) that scared me. I still remember it, too. I was being chased by a monster and woke up right when it finally caught me. I used to have a really bizarre recurring dream about oscillating shapes that made me very uneasy, but I don’t think that can count as a nightmare. Yesterday, though, I had a dream that disturbed me so much, I woke up in the middle of the night scared out of my mind that somebody with a knife was hiding in my apartment.
Now you’re really interested, aren’t you?
Things started out on a pretty uncomfortable note when my emergency team and I walked into a gymnasium where a massacre had just taken place. Hundreds of people had been hacked to bits. Severed body parts adorned the blood-splattered floor. We started sewing the body parts back onto any survivors we could find. I remember picking up a piece of a leg and thinking, “I need to get this on ice until I can find its owner…”
After I had done all the sewing my stomach could handle, I sought out the guy responsible for the killings. Apparently a bunch of civilians found him first. I was told they beat him to death and left his body in the room of an office building. My team and I went to investigate. As promised, his body was crushed into a disgusting pile, except for his creepy, large head, which was fully intact and staring blankly forward. I wanted to throw up when I saw him and kept saying to myself, “Oh my God…” He had to be dead, but as I started walking around the room, I noticed his eyes were following me.
Yikes. I’m creeped out all over again just thinking about it. I hope tonight is something safer, maybe another dream about my uncle building in China. I don’t know why this has turned into such a prominent theme lately, but he’s come three times now to build a temple, a skyscraper, and a residential area. Next time, he better build a fence around my apartment to keep the guy with the knife away.
Prostitutes and DVDs
As I was walking back to the bus stop after visiting a local park, I couldn’t help but notice several doorways along the side of the street emanating a dark pink glow. Sitting directly behind every glass door was a mostly-naked woman watching TV. Something like that is pretty hard to ignore. Something like that is also pretty easy to figure out. Brothel. On previous bus rides, I’ve seen plenty of shady shops that couldn’t possibly be anything else, but this was the first time I saw the pink light that screams, “Hey! We’re open for business!”
(Interesting cultural side note: in Chinese, they refer to hookers as “chickens.” This has caused some unnecessary embarrassment and confusion with Chinese friends and students since, in America culture, we use the word “chicken” when we want to call someone a coward. It doesn’t have quite the some effect, and they, completely shocked, exclaim, “Why would you say that to me?!”)
It was my understanding that prostitution was illegal in China. But then… it was my understanding that DVD piracy was also illegal in China. A few months ago, there was a police check, and all of the DVD stores hid their English DVDs so their merchandise would look nice and legitimate. But without the English DVDs, the shelves were hilariously barren. Five Chinese DVDs spread across a huge bookshelf? Come on! The police aren’t stupid! They know these stores sell bootlegs. They could bust them any time they wanted, and not just on a police check that was somehow tipped off to the store owners. I’m guessing the brothels get a similar treatment.
“Oh, no, police officer, I’m not doing anything wrong, just watching TV in my own house with no clothes on like all my neighbors do.”
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