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.”