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.