Flying a Long-Distance Relationship
A few days before I left China, my girlfriend and I went to the park to fly kites. We had two, one for her and one for me. When the wind picked up, I got a little too excited and let all of the string on my kite unravel. The end of the string wasn’t tied to the handle, though, so the kite flew away, crashed into the lake, and disappeared forever. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
But I didn’t leave China with the intent to disappear forever. We are still together and are willing to brave a long-distance relationship. My friends and family have been supportive of this decision and have usually just said, “That’s cool.” The support on my girlfriend’s end, however, has been much more sinister. If people don’t bluntly say, “So what can you do,” they offer negative advice like, “Long-distance relationships are too hard. They never work out. Why don’t you just find a Chinese boyfriend? You don’t want to go to the US. You won’t like it there.”
Sometimes, I wish I was still in China so I could tell these people to shut the hell up.
Last Train to Nanjing
Tomb Sweeping Day is a festival where people honor their dead ancestors by going shopping and visiting nearby attractions. I had a three-day weekend due to this celebration, but I’ve reached a point where the things I still want to see are too far away to do (or at least do comfortably) in just three days. Plus, since my Harbin trip, I’ve had no enthusiasm for traveling alone.
Fortunately, I know this girl (who you could call my girlfriend) who makes for a great travel buddy. Unfortunately, she runs a busy schedule down at the sweatshop training school and doesn’t have a lot of free time. I guess that’s the biggest problem with foreigner teachers trying to have local friends and local friends with benefits. Foreign teachers have so much time to kill while their Chinese friends work nine hours six days a week.
I wasn’t going to spend my three days watching TV, despite how much you guys love the TV roundups, so Sarah and I headed to Nanjing on Sunday. I should have realized trying to do Nanjing in one day was a bad idea, considering my ILP group tried the very same thing in 2005, and all we were able to see was this obstacle course with hilariously dangerous safety nets. Warning, old photo:
It took me half the day to realize we had gone to the same mountainous scenic area I was at four years ago. Everything about my ILP experience is such a haze now. But rather than attempt the obstacle course in a body four years older, we checked out Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum and the Linggu pagoda:
And then it was already time to go. We took a different bus back into the city, knowing it didn’t go to the train station but thinking it would, at the very least, take us to a good transfer point. It didn’t. We hopped in a taxi at 6:25 and told the driver to go to the train station. He asked when our train left. 6:58. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it was clear he was dumbfounded that we were so far away yet expected to get there in 30 minutes. In fact, he didn’t even take us. He said we’d have better luck with the subway. We didn’t.
I’d like to think we would have made it had we not gotten stuck at the subway’s exit gate. Their stupid token system picked the worst possible time to start rejecting random people. The guard wouldn’t let us duck under the gate, either. We had to go wait in the line of shame and be let through manually. By the time we got to our train’s terminal, it was 7:01. Of course, the only thing you can count on in China just happens to be that the trains always leave on time. Damn it, damn it, damn it! We had to pocket a 40-yuan train ticket and wait five hours so we could take the next available train back to Changzhou at 12:30 at night.
Man, you get tired of standing in these lines:
I didn’t arrive at my school until 3:00 in the morning. There’s supposed to be a guard stationed at the front at all times, but it was so late, he had already called it a day, turned off the lights in the guard house, and built a little bed on the floor. The sound of a taxi pulling up and the door slamming wasn’t enough to wake him. I decided to let him be and found a nice, dark, quiet place where I could climb over the fence. It was so easy for me to get in, it makes me wonder how secure these places really are.
This little “adventure” has also brought to light how much I hate traveling at the whim of public transportation. I am getting particularly annoyed with the train system in China. When I was preparing to go to Harbin, I went to the train station seven days ahead of time to buy my ticket. They said I could only buy tickets five days in advance. I came back two days later, and the train I wanted was sold out.
The five-day rule is enormously inconvenient, as is being required to buy your tickets in person. For those who want to leave a city the same day they arrive, there’s a good chance the only option left is a standing ticket, which is also very, very inconvenient. But there are so many people all trying to ride the train at the same time, allowing people to reserve seats in advance, over the phone or online, would probably mean you won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
A Date with a Chinese Gay
I recently read on a friend’s blog her story of a Chinese man following her to work and relentlessly asking permission to be her friend despite how many times she said no. Situations like this happen a lot. It’s happened to me on several occasions. I’ve even been accosted by a couple of gay Chinese men who wanted to be [more than just] friends and who used the same “I won’t take no for an answer” approach.
The last time this occurred, I initially passed the guy in the supermarket and never expected to see him again. He must have been quite enamored with me, because he waited for me at the exit so we could talk. The first question he asked was, “Do you speak Chinese?” I said I knew a little, so he then asked, “Ni shi gay ma?” This threw me off, because he was mixing Chinese and English in order to ask if I was gay. Oh, that in itself threw me off, too, but I still managed to say, “No, I’m not.”
Now the first rule of dating is that, if the two of you have established you don’t share the same sexual orientation, you stop hitting on each other. The possibility of a relationship is over, and the most you can hope to be is friends. Right? This is common sense, right? But then this guy asked, “Ni keyi ma?” as in, “Could you be gay just this once?” I told him I didn’t think so. Rather than give up, he started telling me he liked me, in Chinese and English, “Wo xihuan ni. I like you. Wo xihuan ni.” Then he said, “I love you.”
And there, he just broke Rule #2: Don’t say, “I love you,” to someone you just met! Again, I told him no. He still wasn’t convinced and started pointing at my crotch, saying, “Money,” like, “What if I paid you…” At this point, I’d had enough, as he was now following me outside the store, so I firmly yelled, “You have got to leave me alone!” He did.
I’m aware that Chinese culture is much more direct, but I was also under the impression that homosexuality is still very taboo in China. So it surprises me that 1) people will admit to strangers they are gay and 2) will try to solicit sex from said strangers. I think some of these guys have a fantasy of making love to a foreigner and, when they see one, don’t want the opportunity to slip by. It’s unfortunate, because incidents like this just make it harder for China’s gay population to garner any respect.
The Five Things I Don’t Like Hearing
When I posted the article Mr. Negative, I should have clarified that it didn’t mark the end of my complaining. Come on, guys, isn’t it as therapeutic for you as it is for me to make a public list of the obnoxious things I have to hear on a regular basis? Maybe we can learn a little something along the way. It’ll be fun! Starting with my favorite:
1. Hello
Of course this one’s going to top of the list. What foreigner doesn’t grow to hate the hello? While there’s nothing wrong with a warm greeting between two passersby, many people have gotten into the habit of heckling foreigners with this one and not letting up until they get some kind of reaction. I’m not talking about a wave or a smile or a return hello, either. That usually doesn’t satiate them, which means I’m still not sure what it is they hope to accomplish.
2. Laowai / Waiguoren
I’ve addressed the issue of being called Laowai instead of Mr. Nielsen enough, but there’s more to the picture than that. I feel like all of China has signed up for a game of I Spy, and when anyone sees a foreigner, they must drop everything they’re doing and blurt out, “Waiguoren!” Seriously, people will stop mid-sentence to make this observation. It’s not so much addressing you, either, as it is just letting those around them know that a foreigner is in the area.
3. May I come in?
You might question why something so polite would be on this list, but it seems that, no matter how many times I ask my students to drop this one, they just won’t let it go. I’m guessing “May I come in?” is a formality their previous EFL teachers introduced, and it drives me crazy. Any student coming into class late stops at the door and bellows, “May I come in?!” even if I’m in the middle of explaining something important. It’s a constant reminder I’m not getting through to these kids as quickly as I had hoped.
4. When will you get married?
I thought I had dodged this question once I left Utah, where your business is everybody’s business, but apparently it’s okay to pressure acquaintances you don’t know very well into marriage here, too. What gets to me, though, is that the people who ask if/when I will marry the girlfriend I’ve only been dating for four months have been dating their significant others for two or three years! Why don’t you get married, huh? Why don’t you get married!
5. Your nose is big.
Nobody is more aware of my big nose than I am, and nobody likes being reminded of it as much as I do. Or, uh… don’t? Since pointing out the obvious seems to be such a celebrated pastime, everyone can join in on the fun of bringing attention to the parts of our bodies we’re most self-conscious about! Fortunately, the only thing they’ve got on me is a big nose. Other people, both foreign and Chinese, aren’t so lucky.
Chutes and Ladders
I envy the countenance some of the Chinese teachers have. As soon as they walk into the room, you can see the wave of fear sweeping across the students. They quiet down, straighten up, and remove all evidence that, just a few minutes prior, they were completely ignoring the foreign teacher’s demands. That’s me, by the way.
Part of why the Chinese teachers’ presence is so effective is because they speak Chinese. Who would’ve thought, right? But they’re also a bit rough with the kids, physically throwing them out of class or smacking them in the back of the head with a book. And this is just for offenses like doodling or working on other homework in class. To me, those are great alternatives over talking and making airplanes. I’m not picky.
Admittedly, it’s hard to resist the temptation to fall back on traditional discipline, but it’s clear some level of sternness is required if anything is going to get done. And in one class, the little hell raiser who’s always loved pushing my buttons finally got to me. I was going around the class, prompting students to ask, “Can I have a piece of paper?” when I caught him tearing up a paper he had nabbed from the teacher’s desk. I calmly took his book away, went over to the window, tossed it out, then continued with the lesson without missing a beat. The kid was mortified into submission, and the rest of the class, while not making a scene of it, was surprised enough to behave for the next 20 minutes. A new record!
After class, I tried to tell this student I would help him get his book back, but he didn’t want anything to do with me. And that’s when I realized I am in a very, very difficult position as a foreign teacher. These kids don’t interact with foreigners on a regular basis. So what they see in me they infer in all white people. I don’t want Chinese kids to think foreigners are rude and mean-spirited, but I’m also trying to eliminate the mindset that foreigners are goofy and can be walked all over. I’m sick of having to wash out the footprints in my jacket.
This issue really comes to light when dealing in closer relationships. I guess now is a good time to mention that I am dating a Chinese girl, and while we get along great, she, unfortunately, has heard stories of other foreigners cheating on their girlfriends and, since I’m a foreigner, fears there is a possibility I will do the same. Comma overload. The sad thing is, there really are a lot of foreigners who come to China and treat it like their own personal playground, enjoying the monkey bars one day and claiming the merry-go-round the next. Then they go home with a bunch of stories to tell, but all they’ve really done is made it harder for the rest of us to establish the rapport we took for granted back in our motherlands.
Can Foreigners be Themselves?
So I live in China by myself, and I don’t have to adhere to any rules this time. I can date if I want, but… is it really wise to get into that? I find it difficult just being friends with people, because we’re always misunderstanding each other. I probably have a long list of cultural no-no’s I’ve unknowingly committed. It gives you the impression everyone’s got the wrong idea about you when you’re not even sure what you’ve done!
In a way, these misunderstandings are part of the fun of being here, but it also gets tiring having to suppress the real you. Most people get hopelessly confused when I start to talk fast or make jokes or use slang, yet that’s an integral part of who I am! And if I feel like I can’t be entirely myself, what must they be going through? I often wonder what my friends and students are like when they don’t have to think about what they say, when they aren’t hindered by a small vocabulary.
Would you want to date someone you can’t talk freely with? Some foreigners, of course, aren’t too concerned about the who, they just like the what. And everyone says it is easy for a foreigner to find a girlfriend. I think, though, that much of this is based on our being a novelty. I don’t want to date someone if their only interest in me is that I’m white, and I speak English. I like to think there’s more to me than that, even if there’s not. It’s still nice to pretend.
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