I love birthdays. I shamelessly responded to many who asked why I was going to China: “Because my birthday is a national holiday there.” I share a birthday with the People’s Republic of China. Which is kind-of cool. Except for this.
I intend to spend my birthday celebrating with friends, going out to dinner and karaoke.
China intends to spend its birthday parading its threatening military through the streets of Beijing, with unfathomably heightened security—security so intense, residents who live along the parade route have been warned by authorities that if they step onto their balconies they risk being shot. Peasants have historically traveled to Beijing to petition the government for a redress of grievances, but this year they (and me, for that matter) are forbidden from the capital city. Security forces on October 1st in Beijing will not rival but will instead far surpass those deployed for the 2008 Olympics. (See Michael Sheridan’s Times article for these facts & more.)
Additionally, the government is cracking down on online services used to reach oft-banned sites like Facebook and Blogspot—homesickness-staving resources I’ve relied on—in order to create a “favorable online environment” for this week’s festivities (Owen Fletcher, PCWorld). Also, the website www.momswhothink.com, which I tried to visit in my quest for a list of baby names my students could choose English names from, is currently banned—presumably not to protect the “favorable online environment,” but because the censors have extended their reign to include any IP address even closely related to banned ones. The Thinking Mothers are one of many benign casualties.
Dubbed The Great Firewall by many who experience it, China’s expansive censorship effort has much in common with today’s Great Wall. Both are incomprehensibly massive, sprawling in scope and vision, presumed visible from space*, and eternally useless at achieving their intended task. Although Facebook and Blogspot are blocked, this post will reach you if I have to email it to a friend in America first. Getting around the Great Firewall is at most an inconvenience. As James Fallows reports in The Atlantic, “What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.”
As our birthdays align this Thursday, my lifespan represents a mere 38% of the PRC’s 60 years. Subtract the years I wasn’t thinking about anything outside of Iowa, let alone the United States, and my international consciousness vs. the PR’s existence drops to an infinitesimal percentage. I have my own beliefs about what a human right looks like, but I cannot presume to offer advice to, or criticism of, the government of the most populous nation in the world. Perhaps they know what they’re doing—media reports like Fallows’ certainly suggest that residents don’t mind all that much—and who knows, maybe if I had my own sweet new fighter jets and futuristic ammunition I, too, would parade them in the streets on my birthday.
*Debunked by NASA itself.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
On Time and Toilets
Part 1: Do you have class today?
I showed up in the foreign affairs office at 9:30 this morning. Had I not angrily removed the top of my constantly-running toilet mere hours earlier, so violently lifting the mechanism that’s supposed to float that this time I finally just ripped it out, leaving me with a more rapidly running, overflowing-out-of-the-bowl-and-the-back toilet, I would not have visited the foreign affairs office at all.
“Do you have class today?” Maggie asked as I walked in the door. Yes, Mags, remember when you told me, last Thursday night, that I had to come back early from Beijing because the freshmen were starting class on Monday? (An arrangement I’m certain the university decided upon no earlier than Thursday afternoon.)
Maggie’s mouth twitched the way it always does when she is scanning for English words. Step one, she repeats a key word from my speech. “Freshmen?” The corners turn down as she runs through the Chinese version of her response in her head, then turn up a bit in a near smile as she prepares to form the English words, if she can.
“Oh.”
Oh?
“I’ll make sure your students know.”
I grab my book and settle in, knowing this will be a production. A few weeks ago, the sophomores were informed via text message that class was starting, as I walked toward the classroom to teach my first class. Maggie glides to the fax machine phone, the only phone is this three-person office, calls someone and has an impossibly long conversation that I imagine centers on the whereabouts of 40-some wayward freshmen who are just killing time until someone tells them it’s time to go to class NOW. Without a word to me, she hangs up and goes back to her desk.
A few minutes later, a man walks in and sits down next to Ms. Wang, Maggie’s slightly more fluent counterpart. “Whitney, do you have your schedule with you?” No. It’s in my head. Teach at 10:20 in Classroom 2. That’s it. Ms. Wang pulls up a document with my schedule on it. They discus it in detail, he points at some of the times and laughs, shaking his head. I’ve never seen him before. But I do know this schedule was completed about four weeks ago, and he could have pointed and laughed at it then if he felt so inclined. Now, I just need to know if I’m teaching in 20 minutes, in a building a million staircases away from here.
The man leaves. Maggie and Ms. Wang go back to their work. I wait a few minutes, out of politeness. “So, um, should I go?” Maggie twitches. “Just now, we inform the teacher they’re in class with now. When they are finished this class, he will send them to yours.” Maggie always says “just now” instead of conjugating verbs into the past tense. A pretty functional language trick, actually.
"Oh, by the way, my toilet is broken, do you think someone could come look at it today?"
Part 2: Do you understand “chair”?
There are a few students in the classroom when I get there. They look startled. More students gather around the doorway. I wonder if they’re my students, just nervous about coming in. They’re surveying the classroom. Suddenly, they swoop in, grab one chair each and march back out. The students who were in the room leave too, with their chairs. I watch it happen, knowing it will end in disaster for me in the near future, but powerless to stop it. After all, what if I manage to convey that I need those chairs, only to have none of my students show?
My students do show up, all 40 of them. We have 15 chairs. “You guys will have to check the other classrooms for chairs,” I say. They stare at me as though this is English 101 for them, even though I know they’ve been studying for six years minimum. “Chairs.” I point. This is a problem every class period. There simply aren’t enough chairs in this building, so whoever shows up on the floor first gets the chairs.
As my students are running wildly all over the building looking for something to sit on, the director of the English department strolls by, clad as always in a matching sweat-suit with high heels (exercise clothes are very expensive here, and therefore a status symbol rather than gym apparel. I can get behind this.) “Miss Yi, do you know where we can get more chairs?” She looks into the faces of the ring of freshmen surrounding me. She speaks directly to them. “Whitney is a very good teacher. You listen to her. You are young, you can stand. Go back to the classroom.” So that’s that.
She turns to me and, in classic Chengde manner, states, “I will call the Person in Charge of Chairs. She will bring some chairs, probably around noon.” 20 minutes after my class ends. I love that there is a Person in Charge of Chairs. There is a Person in Charge of Just About Everything, but somehow Nothing ever seems to be done. What does the Person in Charge of Chairs do with the rest of her day?
Part 3: No photos, please.
My students are in awe of my sheer American-ness. While I’m walking around listening to them present an exercise I assigned, I notice a cell phone pointed at my face. “Please, put your cell phone away.” I realize that in Chinese this command translates roughly into, “Each of you is only allowed 100 photos each.” I manage to ignore them and continue with the lesson, but occasionally a student trying to get a good angle will actually tap the shoulder of the person speaking directly to me, and ask her to move to the right so they can see my face. I think next week I’ll have a box for them to leave their cell phones in at the beginning of class.
Part 4: By the way, my toilet’s been overflowing this whole time.
The repairman came into our lives pretty early on, because Jason’s washing machine didn’t work when we arrived. Then, the repairman tinkered for hours, only to report (in Chinese and confusing hand motions) that the part we knew wasn’t working was, in fact, not working.
The toilet is a pretty simple machine, I think, and probably would have been easier to fix had I not completely beheaded it in my morning rage. Mr. Repairman showed up dressed in clothes not suitable for fixing toilets, like he had just come from his office job where he engineers toilets behind a huge mahogany desk. He walked in and flushed the toilet, solely to experience the wonderment of water gushing freely all over the damn place. Grasping the gravity of the situation, he left and reappeared in clothes more suitable for manual labor, with a bag of tools.
At one point he asked me if I had any wire. First I thought he was asking for a screwdriver. He altered his hand motion and I assumed he wanted string. I pulled out my sewing kit (what is he going to do with sewing string inside my toilet?) Finally, he held up another random wire—where did it come from?—and I shook my head. By then it was nearing 6 p.m., and I think he had finally realized that the part I broke was, in fact, broken.
He terminated his visit by walking me into the kitchen, and instructing me to turn over the (dirty) pot in my sink. He turned the water supply back on, gestured to encourage me to fill the pot with water, and then turned the supply off. “Don’t turn this back on. Use that water until tomorrow.” Amusingly, he included gestures for just about everything I might need to do with that water before tomorrow. Cook, bathe, brush my teeth… “But if you need to use the bathroom before tomorrow, you’ll just have to hold it.”
I showed up in the foreign affairs office at 9:30 this morning. Had I not angrily removed the top of my constantly-running toilet mere hours earlier, so violently lifting the mechanism that’s supposed to float that this time I finally just ripped it out, leaving me with a more rapidly running, overflowing-out-of-the-bowl-and-the-back toilet, I would not have visited the foreign affairs office at all.
“Do you have class today?” Maggie asked as I walked in the door. Yes, Mags, remember when you told me, last Thursday night, that I had to come back early from Beijing because the freshmen were starting class on Monday? (An arrangement I’m certain the university decided upon no earlier than Thursday afternoon.)
Maggie’s mouth twitched the way it always does when she is scanning for English words. Step one, she repeats a key word from my speech. “Freshmen?” The corners turn down as she runs through the Chinese version of her response in her head, then turn up a bit in a near smile as she prepares to form the English words, if she can.
“Oh.”
Oh?
“I’ll make sure your students know.”
I grab my book and settle in, knowing this will be a production. A few weeks ago, the sophomores were informed via text message that class was starting, as I walked toward the classroom to teach my first class. Maggie glides to the fax machine phone, the only phone is this three-person office, calls someone and has an impossibly long conversation that I imagine centers on the whereabouts of 40-some wayward freshmen who are just killing time until someone tells them it’s time to go to class NOW. Without a word to me, she hangs up and goes back to her desk.
A few minutes later, a man walks in and sits down next to Ms. Wang, Maggie’s slightly more fluent counterpart. “Whitney, do you have your schedule with you?” No. It’s in my head. Teach at 10:20 in Classroom 2. That’s it. Ms. Wang pulls up a document with my schedule on it. They discus it in detail, he points at some of the times and laughs, shaking his head. I’ve never seen him before. But I do know this schedule was completed about four weeks ago, and he could have pointed and laughed at it then if he felt so inclined. Now, I just need to know if I’m teaching in 20 minutes, in a building a million staircases away from here.
The man leaves. Maggie and Ms. Wang go back to their work. I wait a few minutes, out of politeness. “So, um, should I go?” Maggie twitches. “Just now, we inform the teacher they’re in class with now. When they are finished this class, he will send them to yours.” Maggie always says “just now” instead of conjugating verbs into the past tense. A pretty functional language trick, actually.
"Oh, by the way, my toilet is broken, do you think someone could come look at it today?"
Part 2: Do you understand “chair”?
There are a few students in the classroom when I get there. They look startled. More students gather around the doorway. I wonder if they’re my students, just nervous about coming in. They’re surveying the classroom. Suddenly, they swoop in, grab one chair each and march back out. The students who were in the room leave too, with their chairs. I watch it happen, knowing it will end in disaster for me in the near future, but powerless to stop it. After all, what if I manage to convey that I need those chairs, only to have none of my students show?
My students do show up, all 40 of them. We have 15 chairs. “You guys will have to check the other classrooms for chairs,” I say. They stare at me as though this is English 101 for them, even though I know they’ve been studying for six years minimum. “Chairs.” I point. This is a problem every class period. There simply aren’t enough chairs in this building, so whoever shows up on the floor first gets the chairs.
As my students are running wildly all over the building looking for something to sit on, the director of the English department strolls by, clad as always in a matching sweat-suit with high heels (exercise clothes are very expensive here, and therefore a status symbol rather than gym apparel. I can get behind this.) “Miss Yi, do you know where we can get more chairs?” She looks into the faces of the ring of freshmen surrounding me. She speaks directly to them. “Whitney is a very good teacher. You listen to her. You are young, you can stand. Go back to the classroom.” So that’s that.
She turns to me and, in classic Chengde manner, states, “I will call the Person in Charge of Chairs. She will bring some chairs, probably around noon.” 20 minutes after my class ends. I love that there is a Person in Charge of Chairs. There is a Person in Charge of Just About Everything, but somehow Nothing ever seems to be done. What does the Person in Charge of Chairs do with the rest of her day?
Part 3: No photos, please.
My students are in awe of my sheer American-ness. While I’m walking around listening to them present an exercise I assigned, I notice a cell phone pointed at my face. “Please, put your cell phone away.” I realize that in Chinese this command translates roughly into, “Each of you is only allowed 100 photos each.” I manage to ignore them and continue with the lesson, but occasionally a student trying to get a good angle will actually tap the shoulder of the person speaking directly to me, and ask her to move to the right so they can see my face. I think next week I’ll have a box for them to leave their cell phones in at the beginning of class.
Part 4: By the way, my toilet’s been overflowing this whole time.
The repairman came into our lives pretty early on, because Jason’s washing machine didn’t work when we arrived. Then, the repairman tinkered for hours, only to report (in Chinese and confusing hand motions) that the part we knew wasn’t working was, in fact, not working.
The toilet is a pretty simple machine, I think, and probably would have been easier to fix had I not completely beheaded it in my morning rage. Mr. Repairman showed up dressed in clothes not suitable for fixing toilets, like he had just come from his office job where he engineers toilets behind a huge mahogany desk. He walked in and flushed the toilet, solely to experience the wonderment of water gushing freely all over the damn place. Grasping the gravity of the situation, he left and reappeared in clothes more suitable for manual labor, with a bag of tools.
At one point he asked me if I had any wire. First I thought he was asking for a screwdriver. He altered his hand motion and I assumed he wanted string. I pulled out my sewing kit (what is he going to do with sewing string inside my toilet?) Finally, he held up another random wire—where did it come from?—and I shook my head. By then it was nearing 6 p.m., and I think he had finally realized that the part I broke was, in fact, broken.
He terminated his visit by walking me into the kitchen, and instructing me to turn over the (dirty) pot in my sink. He turned the water supply back on, gestured to encourage me to fill the pot with water, and then turned the supply off. “Don’t turn this back on. Use that water until tomorrow.” Amusingly, he included gestures for just about everything I might need to do with that water before tomorrow. Cook, bathe, brush my teeth… “But if you need to use the bathroom before tomorrow, you’ll just have to hold it.”
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Friends
“Waan…Twooo… Tree! Ah-ah-ah-ah.”
This guy reminds me of The Count from Sesame Street. With a Chinese accent.
“Ni meiguoren?”
Yeah, I’m American. I nod.
He works himself up again, and poises his finger to draw on the shop counter. “Yooo… Esss… Aaay! Ah-ah-ah.”
Our Friend on The Corner, so named because his narrow booth is carved into a building on the corner of our street—and because we haven’t employed our burgeoning language skills to discover his real name—sells us juice for three kuai, beer for two, and ice cream bars for one. The cultural and linguistic exchange is free.
When he isn’t practicing his numbers in English (only up to 3, because nothing in his shop exceeds that amount) he and his wife perch on crates of warm beer and watch the small TV mounted in the corner above the Coca-Cola.
Our Friend on The Corner was my first street friend, but in a blatant snub of the United States Center for Disease Control, I’ve also stumbled upon street friends dealing in the culinary industry.
The Chinese use spices—cilantro, garlic, chives, green onion—the way I would use something more benign, like iceberg lettuce. My theory is that this habit evolved during hungrier times, when milder veggies didn’t thrive the way hearty seasonings did. But I could be way off. Maybe they’ve always enjoyed chewing up whole cloves of garlic.
Cilantro Sandwich Lady caters to this local palate. She camps in front of Our Friend on The Corner’s corner shop, expertly chopping equal parts cilantro, chicken, and chicken fat into pieces and tucking it into The Best Bread in China. I’ve embraced the omnipresence of cilantro. If I close my eyes and imagine the cheese and salsa, it almost resembles Mexican. Almost.
While the food and drink entrepreneurs of Chengde become our friends, the children continue to express their appreciation of our presence in different ways. Most impressively, a little girl stood in the aisle of the bus today, a mere 10 inches from Jason’s face, her mouth gaping at the sight of a clueless white boy listening to his ipod with his nose buried in Steven King. Doesn’t he know how funny he looks? her expression begged. She jabbed her friend in the seat in front of him. The friend turned around and peered curiously at him through the hole in the headrest.
Yesterday, a university student actually exclaimed “Bai!” (“White!”) when my dashing boyfriend walked by. I think they like him.
Finally, my absolute favorite Chinese friend thus far: Last Friday I wandered around the city with my incredibly conspicuous Canon XTi, taking photos of folks while they napped or played Mahjong in the midday heat. A man waved me over to join their table, and asked me the most wonderful series of questions, which I here translate:
"Do you speak Chinese?"
-"A little."
"I see that you're taking pictures. That's pretty cool."
- Whitney shrugs and smiles awkwardly.
-"You take pictures, are you writing a story? Do you write words?"
That's right, folks. I'm officially an internationally recognized journalist. Thank you, impressive-looking camera.
This guy reminds me of The Count from Sesame Street. With a Chinese accent.
“Ni meiguoren?”
Yeah, I’m American. I nod.
He works himself up again, and poises his finger to draw on the shop counter. “Yooo… Esss… Aaay! Ah-ah-ah.”
Our Friend on The Corner, so named because his narrow booth is carved into a building on the corner of our street—and because we haven’t employed our burgeoning language skills to discover his real name—sells us juice for three kuai, beer for two, and ice cream bars for one. The cultural and linguistic exchange is free.
When he isn’t practicing his numbers in English (only up to 3, because nothing in his shop exceeds that amount) he and his wife perch on crates of warm beer and watch the small TV mounted in the corner above the Coca-Cola.
Our Friend on The Corner was my first street friend, but in a blatant snub of the United States Center for Disease Control, I’ve also stumbled upon street friends dealing in the culinary industry.
The Chinese use spices—cilantro, garlic, chives, green onion—the way I would use something more benign, like iceberg lettuce. My theory is that this habit evolved during hungrier times, when milder veggies didn’t thrive the way hearty seasonings did. But I could be way off. Maybe they’ve always enjoyed chewing up whole cloves of garlic.
Cilantro Sandwich Lady caters to this local palate. She camps in front of Our Friend on The Corner’s corner shop, expertly chopping equal parts cilantro, chicken, and chicken fat into pieces and tucking it into The Best Bread in China. I’ve embraced the omnipresence of cilantro. If I close my eyes and imagine the cheese and salsa, it almost resembles Mexican. Almost.
While the food and drink entrepreneurs of Chengde become our friends, the children continue to express their appreciation of our presence in different ways. Most impressively, a little girl stood in the aisle of the bus today, a mere 10 inches from Jason’s face, her mouth gaping at the sight of a clueless white boy listening to his ipod with his nose buried in Steven King. Doesn’t he know how funny he looks? her expression begged. She jabbed her friend in the seat in front of him. The friend turned around and peered curiously at him through the hole in the headrest.
Yesterday, a university student actually exclaimed “Bai!” (“White!”) when my dashing boyfriend walked by. I think they like him.
Finally, my absolute favorite Chinese friend thus far: Last Friday I wandered around the city with my incredibly conspicuous Canon XTi, taking photos of folks while they napped or played Mahjong in the midday heat. A man waved me over to join their table, and asked me the most wonderful series of questions, which I here translate:
"Do you speak Chinese?"
-"A little."
"I see that you're taking pictures. That's pretty cool."
- Whitney shrugs and smiles awkwardly.
-"You take pictures, are you writing a story? Do you write words?"
That's right, folks. I'm officially an internationally recognized journalist. Thank you, impressive-looking camera.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Beat It.
Outside my apartment window, there are currently 50 middle-aged Chinese women line dancing to Michael Jackson's Beat It.
This fact deserves its own blog post.
This fact deserves its own blog post.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Chengde, Week 1
Dogs start barking at 6 a.m., but it’s only a minor nuisance. I’ve been up for an hour anyway, ever since some jerk laid on the horn for a full sixty seconds at 5 a.m. Why? Still, I stay in bed until 7. Cereal is the primary reason I get out of bed on any given day, and I don’t have any here. “Milk” comes in bags or juice boxes that aren’t refrigerated. What?
Outside, a girl sprints out of her family’s apartment, pops a squat, pulls up her pants and runs away. Moments later, a neighbor jogs out to retrieve his mail. In his haste, he drops a piece in the fresh urine. “It’s just ions,” Jason tells me, repeatedly, every time I see someone pee in the street. It’s just ions. Thankfully, the man doesn’t go back to pick up his ion-drenched mail.
We catch the number 10 to campus, and settle in for 30-50 minutes of bliss. There’s only one road to the university, and right now it isn’t a road. My anthropological/sociological education begs me to be culturally sensitive. But I know the American term for this road. “Mess.” I have a student whose chosen English name is Messy. I wonder if she knows.
I don’t know that China is developing as well as it could, but I can say it’s developing as fast as it can, with mixed results. Huge piles of rubble lay at the base of towering, blocky apartment buildings—eyesore status symbols where crowded brick huts festered last week. Progress.
Some Chinese cling to tradition in the face of all this change. During my home stay with a wonderfully hospitable family in Shijiajuang, the girls were continually pointing. “This is a traditional Chinese sofa.” “This is a traditional Chinese tea table.” Traditional is chic, attainable only because they already have mounted flat screens in spacious apartments. Add to that their flawless English, they’ve got nothing to prove re. their ability to Westernize. They’re allowed to be Chinese.
So, the road. Some days it’s available, others not. What was once one lane is becoming four, but China doesn’t do detours. We jump the asphalt onto whatever length was completed yesterday, jump off into a jumbled mess of four lane traffic on a Chinese noodle’s-width of dirt road when the blacktop ends. This isn’t the termination of blacktop Keith Urban croons about, I’m sure.
Teaching is respite, a reminder that I’m not here to ponder the logistics of loogie-haulking or stupid-fast national development that’s led to the tragic drying up of every riverbed I’ve seen. My students are almost all girls, small-voiced but funny. They want to learn English to land a good job. They want to visit France because it’s the country of romance. One boy, Antonio, writes me a private note asking if he can visit me in my office. “If you have time, I would like to hear you talk.” Oh, Yeah. I don’t have an office, he’ll have to settle for class time. At least I know he’ll show up.
My class claps for me when I answer their request about my Chinese proficiency with, “Yi dianr”—un poco, a little. In Chinese class, I receive less praise. The other foreigners—5 girls, 2 boys from Pakistan, 1 girl, 2 boys from Nigeria, 1 girl from U.A.E.—are ahead by five weeks, already reading simple character paragraphs. I’m like a kindergartener again, except I showed up the day after everyone learned the alphabet. I recognize random articles and a word or two, so I see “__ __ the __ __ of __ __ American __ __ river.” What?
My classmates are great. They write paragraphs in pinyin so we can actually follow along, and show us where to get lunch. And, critically, which hand gestures translate into the desired action on the part of the server. Zhe ge, zhe ge, zhe ge…
Every evening the local women gather to dance in the square just below my apartment. Jason and I boil dumplings—a step up from instant noodles, anyway—and watch their perfectly choreographed, expressionless moves. The men line up on the benches, smoking, nodding approvingly, spitting unceasingly.
Outside, a girl sprints out of her family’s apartment, pops a squat, pulls up her pants and runs away. Moments later, a neighbor jogs out to retrieve his mail. In his haste, he drops a piece in the fresh urine. “It’s just ions,” Jason tells me, repeatedly, every time I see someone pee in the street. It’s just ions. Thankfully, the man doesn’t go back to pick up his ion-drenched mail.
We catch the number 10 to campus, and settle in for 30-50 minutes of bliss. There’s only one road to the university, and right now it isn’t a road. My anthropological/sociological education begs me to be culturally sensitive. But I know the American term for this road. “Mess.” I have a student whose chosen English name is Messy. I wonder if she knows.
I don’t know that China is developing as well as it could, but I can say it’s developing as fast as it can, with mixed results. Huge piles of rubble lay at the base of towering, blocky apartment buildings—eyesore status symbols where crowded brick huts festered last week. Progress.
Some Chinese cling to tradition in the face of all this change. During my home stay with a wonderfully hospitable family in Shijiajuang, the girls were continually pointing. “This is a traditional Chinese sofa.” “This is a traditional Chinese tea table.” Traditional is chic, attainable only because they already have mounted flat screens in spacious apartments. Add to that their flawless English, they’ve got nothing to prove re. their ability to Westernize. They’re allowed to be Chinese.
So, the road. Some days it’s available, others not. What was once one lane is becoming four, but China doesn’t do detours. We jump the asphalt onto whatever length was completed yesterday, jump off into a jumbled mess of four lane traffic on a Chinese noodle’s-width of dirt road when the blacktop ends. This isn’t the termination of blacktop Keith Urban croons about, I’m sure.
Teaching is respite, a reminder that I’m not here to ponder the logistics of loogie-haulking or stupid-fast national development that’s led to the tragic drying up of every riverbed I’ve seen. My students are almost all girls, small-voiced but funny. They want to learn English to land a good job. They want to visit France because it’s the country of romance. One boy, Antonio, writes me a private note asking if he can visit me in my office. “If you have time, I would like to hear you talk.” Oh, Yeah. I don’t have an office, he’ll have to settle for class time. At least I know he’ll show up.
My class claps for me when I answer their request about my Chinese proficiency with, “Yi dianr”—un poco, a little. In Chinese class, I receive less praise. The other foreigners—5 girls, 2 boys from Pakistan, 1 girl, 2 boys from Nigeria, 1 girl from U.A.E.—are ahead by five weeks, already reading simple character paragraphs. I’m like a kindergartener again, except I showed up the day after everyone learned the alphabet. I recognize random articles and a word or two, so I see “__ __ the __ __ of __ __ American __ __ river.” What?
My classmates are great. They write paragraphs in pinyin so we can actually follow along, and show us where to get lunch. And, critically, which hand gestures translate into the desired action on the part of the server. Zhe ge, zhe ge, zhe ge…
Every evening the local women gather to dance in the square just below my apartment. Jason and I boil dumplings—a step up from instant noodles, anyway—and watch their perfectly choreographed, expressionless moves. The men line up on the benches, smoking, nodding approvingly, spitting unceasingly.
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