It only takes a few weeks of being back in your hometown to feel like everything you’ve done prior—all that time spent fighting for the attention of hungry Chinese students—never happened. Or it did happen, but everything you thought you learned from the experience… well… never happened. Or it did happen, but… nah, I think I’m done with that joke.

Your time as a teacher is easily justified as wasted, especially during those final evaluations when only one or two of the students can repeat a concept you spent the whole semester drilling. But most teaching positions in China are very impersonal, anyway, and your job isn’t so much about teaching a specified amount of content as it is just giving the kids a chance to have a teacher who isn’t Chinese. In a way, foreign teachers are there to break cultural boundaries, not necessarily teach, but if a little English is learned along the way, more power to you!

Some of my students still stay in touch with me, though, so I didn’t walk away with nothing. And as a young fish out of water standing in front of a class of 50 restless Chinese kids four times a day, your comfort zone naturally grows. Maybe you find you’ve only become comfortable addressing non-native English speakers, but progress is progress! When you tell people you taught in China, they’re just impressed by the word “teach,” if they’re impressed at all, but to you, it’s not that. To you, it was a lesson in confidence and endurance and resisting the urge to crap your pants and run home crying when things go bad.

Things go bad a lot.

As much as I liked my ILP classes (the first teaching I ever did in China), those kids were awful. Class time with the foreigners was “release hours of pent up energy that our Chinese teachers would beat us for” time. They would fight each other. They would pull their pants down. They would yell and throw things at the teacher. They would literally tear the desks apart. But through all that, I finally learned to just be patient and focus on creating a better lesson instead of trying to create better students. That comes later, and it’s pretty much an uphill battle, anyway.

If there’s one thing you learn as an English teacher in China, it’s patience. There’s patience, because the kids’ English is bad, and there’s patience, because their behavior is bad. It was different, though, trying to be patient with my primary classes of 50 students as opposed to the ILP classes of eight. I’ll admit, I lost my temper sometimes. Things were said. Books were thrown out the window. Nonetheless, I’m a much better person now than I was five years ago, and China has played a big part in making me that way.

Dream Pinball 3D (DS)
Remember when I said good pinball was hard to find? That rings particularly true for the DS, because there is no ultimate pinball game on the platform. Dream Pinball comes close for being a straight-up pinball simulator with none of the gimmicks a la Metroid Pinball or Flipper Critters. The developers made one fatal mistake, however. They screwed up the camera. All seven of the camera options follow the ball too closely, making it hard to gauge when it’s going to fall to the bottom. This also prevents you from being able to read the little signs that say “hit this for the jackpot.” Activating multiball complicates things even more, because the camera can’t decide which one to follow and just does a little jig at the bottom. The ball physics aren’t always accurate, either, but at least the tables are well-made and have multiple flippers to control. If you absolutely must have pinball on your DS, Dream Pinball is the best you’re going to find, but it’s far from perfect.

Tomena Sanner (WiiWare)
If you like your wackiness Japanese style, then you’ll probably love Tomena Sanner. Your character is in a hurry to get to a dance party and must overcome all sorts of crazy obstacles in his way, from dinosaurs to giant robots to men in drag. The game is played with only one button, though, so it’s not quite a platformer like it sounds. Your character runs automatically, and each obstacle he meets has a range in which you can interact with it. Push the button too soon or too late, and you’ll get a “miss” and lose time. But whether you miss or score a good or great, something hilarious is bound to happen. Tomena Sanner is more about making you laugh than it is about being a game, though the online leaderboards show there is definitely room to improve. Plus, there’s local split-screen support, which, like the rest of the game, is fun in short bursts. At the very least, Tomena Sanner is one of the few WiiWare games that’s only 500 points. If you have leftover points and nothing to spend them on, here you go.

Assault Heroes (Xbox Live Arcade)
The Xbox Live Arcade has no shortage of twin stick shooters, a gameplay mechanic I’m not exactly a fan of. But Assault Heroes feels like such an homage to classic NES shooters, including co-op support, that all is forgiven. I like how, even though you start in a vehicle, you aren’t confined to it. Many times, you’ll have to go on foot to pick up hard-to-reach power-ups or traverse underground bunkers. Or your car may blow up, leaving you mostly helpless until it reappears. This is a great way to handle “dying,” because it gives you a second chance to survive. You even rack up extra points for any enemies you kill while outside your vehicle. Assault Heroes isn’t terribly difficult, though. On the medium difficulty, I only had to restart in two or three places. Regardless, the action ramps up at a nice pace and throws a lot of big robotic bosses your way. The campaign is relatively short, but the action is pretty easy to come back to and play multiple times. You could do a lot worse for $5.

All was well until one of the girl ghosts told us the infection also attracted zombies. There was a big group of zombies headed our way right now and would be here in 24 hours to kill us. The only way we could escape them was to remove the infection, and the only way we could remove the infection was to kill ourselves. Wow. That has win-win written all over it!

It wasn’t entirely hopeless. There was an arcade game in the mall that had a big, plastic axe attached to it. The ghost said if we killed ourselves with the axe, we would still come back to life, and the infection would be gone. My roommate and I decided to try it. On the way to the mall, we passed by another girl ghost who was posing for a picture for the boy ghost. The girl waved at us. The boy scowled. Typical.

In the arcade, my roommate took the axe, slit his throat, and bled all over the place as he died. Uh… I was beginning to have second thoughts about this plan. The other customers weren’t too thrilled, either, and started screaming and running around. My roommate did get back up, though, so it worked. But before I could use the axe, the panicked crowd pushed us out of the mall.

I kept yelling, “I need to go back in there! I need to use the axe!” but it was no use. The police soon arrived and taped off all the entrances. They would not let me back in, and I only had a few hours left before the zombies would arrive. But once again, I’ll never know the outcome, because I woke up before they got there.

Okay… that’s swell and all, but how do you remember which one is first and which one is fourth? It’s easy to get them mixed up and makes reading typed-out pinyin a pain (wo3 yao4 gen1 ni3 shuo1 hua4).

Then one day, I wrote the tone markings side by side: – / V \ . Revelation time! They looked like a minus M, or -M. The M can even stand for Mandarin. The minus stands for… look, I’m not going to do all the work. Now, whenever I forget if the falling tone is second or fourth, I just have to think of it as it fits into the -M formula.

Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)
My opinion of this first-person shooter would probably change drastically if I had an Xbox Live account, since the developers locked half the game’s content for paid subscribers only. Jerks. What’s left is a very short offline campaign that, fortunately, does support two-player splitscreen. You absolutely have to play this game with at least one other person, otherwise your AI teammates will drive you crazy. They always want to be a hero and won’t retreat to the safe house. I could see this being really fun with four human players, though. Even with just two humans, there were some great moments where we were holed up in the bathroom of a farmhouse, too afraid to go out and face the big monster zombie downstairs. If you thought you knew what zombies were like in games… you don’t. Unlike the slow, staggering zombies of Resident Evil fame, the zombies in Left 4 Dead are fast, crazy, and travel in huge numbers. Watching a crowd of them pile over a fence is pretty intense, four players or not.

Army of Two (Xbox 360)
At a glance, Army of Two seems like it’s just trying to rip off Gears of War. But then you play it for a few hours and start to understand what separates the two games. For starters, Army of Two is a lot clunkier. The characters, especially when interacting with objects or each other, are sluggish, and the button layout is unnecessarily convoluted. But that lovable “duck and cover” gameplay is back in full force, and it’s harder and more brutal here than in Gears. Even on the easiest difficulty, the AI’s aim is spot-on. It’s frustrating at first, until you learn how to work with your teammate (AI or human, but please choose human). It gets intense when the two of you are on opposite sides of a room filled with bad guys, taking turns getting their attention so the other can sneak up from behind. And because the AI is so good, each terrorist you kill makes a huge difference and feels that much more rewarding. Gears is still better, but I do like killing terrorists.

Jetpac Refuelled (Xbox Live Arcade)
All you need to do is spend two minutes with the original Jetpac to realize it wasn’t a good game. So why did it even garner such a polished remake? Refuelled looks really good, sounds really good, and plays really good. It’s a really good game… at first. You start out flying around a small 2D level, collecting parts to make a spaceship, then collecting fuel so you can blast off that wretched planet called Level 1. But then Level 2 comes around, and all you do is collect more fuel. Then Level 128 comes around, and you’re still collecting fuel! So… yeah, it tends to be a bit repetitive. The changes in the gameplay come from the enemies that swap out every level. It’s really great for the first 20 levels, because you are constantly seeing new types of enemies. But the developers quickly ran out of ideas and just started throwing more of the same at you. Onwards and upwards to Level 128! It’s still fun in short bursts, though, and has a nice two-player mode, which makes it worth the $5 asking price.

Dokapon Kingdom (Wii)
It’s about time somebody figured out how to do the party board game genre right. Dokapon Kingdom is one part RPG, though, making it a little harder for the whole family to jump right in. But the mechanics are easy to figure out, and, like Mario Party, much of the game is based on luck, anyway. It’s all about rolling the right numbers and being able to spot the best route to take. The battle system is just rock, paper, scissors, too, which, against the computer, is a matter of blind guessing. When you add in other players, though, Dokapon suddenly becomes really engaging and fun. There are so many opportunities to sabotage each other, whether it’s poisoning them with a spell, stealing ownership of one of their towns, or killing them in battle and changing their screen name to “ButtWipe.” What’s not to love?! Well, it is just a board game, so there’s a lot of waiting between turns. You definitely need to play with a group of people you get along with and who have a natural patience for RPGs.

While there, we walked around the city’s lake and came across a small amusement park. This particular ride made me laugh, and I had to get a video of it:

It’s a little hard to tell from the video, but the ride is playing the song “It’s a Small World,” and the people in the carts are shooting animals and dinosaurs with laser guns.

… and I’m ready to go back. Nah, just kidding. There are certainly things I miss about China (my girlfriend being first and foremost), but I really wasn’t getting much enjoyment out of teaching, and there are so many things about China that drive me crazy and would have continued to do so had I stayed. For the sake of my sanity, it was important to leave.

But being back in the US has been rather stressful. A lot of chores pile up while you’re away, and the job market ended up being considerably bleaker than I imagined. That’s a rude awakening. But there are some good things about being back, too. It’s nice to be around my family again, and it’s nice to have Mexican food and legitimate copies of video games readily available!

On the other hand, it’s hard to go from being a foreign teacher and being treated like a celebrity (for better or worse) to being just a plain, old US citizen again. I don’t stand out at all, and few people even bat an eye when they hear that I’ve been living overseas for 18 months. If that time has done anything for me, it’s just put me way out of the loop.

Part of the problem is that I’m from a small town in Utah. The population here has yet to break 10,000. Changzhou had a population of 3.5 million and enough shops and restaurants and fun things to do to support that many people. In a city that big and crazy (this is China, after all), every day was an adventure (again, for better or worse). Believe me, I’m hoping I can move soon, but for the time being, I really feel like I’m just treading water.