Farewell, November!

I have officially completed my largest single document thus far! I hesitate to call it a novel, because it becomes rather tangential in spots, droops into personal musings more than often than not, and because variations of, “How in the heck am I going to get this dooone!?” account for at least 100-200 words in the final product. One night last week, I was pouring through www.quotegarden.com, trying to see if anyone has ever said anything inspiring about writing that might inspire me to write 10,000 more words. I came across this gem:

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” So, essentially, I’ve just had an enlightening month-long conversation with myself. I would like to think I’m better because of it, although honestly the exercise has left me feeling a bit schizophrenic. Lesson: Don’t model characters after yourself unless you really want to see what you would say—to yourself—in a variety of situations. You might be confused or appalled at your own audacity. At least pretend to model characters after someone else, so when they say really stupid things you can pretend it wasn’t you. That said, occasionally I found myself to be rather witty.

The quote belongs to a French guy, Jules Renard, who wrote many things and whose Wikipedia page tells me we would have gotten along great, had he not perished in 1910. Some other quotes I like:

“The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.”
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” (Hooray!)
“I am never bored anywhere; being bored is an insult to oneself.”
“If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more.”

Seems like a cool guy.

What have I been doing other than typing frantically for the past 30 days? In addition to teaching at the university, I now have two tutoring jobs, which keep my both busy and entertained. First, Ms. Chen: Ms. Chen, I’m told, is one of the wealthiest women in Chengde. Her plush apartment with such amenities as dark hardwood floors, a piano, and a bathtub (!) supports this hypothesis. Ms. Chen wants to learn English because she hopes to send her adolescent son to an American boarding school sometime soon. My understanding is that she wants to go to the States with him and potentially work in business. She’s in her forties and has not studied English since college, which means her conversational English is for all practical purposes nonexistent. Often, we stare at each other and try to communicate telepathically until one of us cracks. Thankfully, we have textbooks to aide our conversations.

I am also tutoring a girl my own age who is preparing to take the international English examination next month. She goes by Daisy, and while I love spending time with her, I feel a bit uneasy about my own role in her life. Daisy’s story is not unlike most modern Chinese students’. She took a standardized state test before she went to college, and that test decided that she should study psychology. She also managed to study Chinese, a subject she seems to love dearly. However, as any English major in the United States would understand, her passion for Chinese does not lend itself to career trajectories her lawyer-father considers practical. As an English major in the United States might not understand, this essentially means she is not allowed to pursue her passion.

Although she found psychology both difficult and boring, she is now studying to earn a higher score on the IELTS so she can move to a foreign country and earn a master’s degree in the subject. Specifically, my job is to help her increase her speaking fluency and her English writing skills, because she scored too low on these portions of the test the first time she took it. I’ve also taken it upon myself to scour the worldwide web and introduce her to psychology programs that might genuinely spark her interest. I’m operating within this system of subjugation that she faces, helping her do what a group of superior men decided she should do, “for her own good,” but I’m trying to assuage my guilt by helping her find something to be genuinely passionate about within her circumstances. I wonder what my feminist professors would say.

Daisy said something that broke my heart the first time we met. We were talking about what we studied in college, and in response to my journalism degree she sighed and said, “I thought about studying journalism a long time ago. But then I thought, if I’m not allowed to tell the truth, what’s the point?”

Halloween in China

Walking across campus toward CDMU’s massive lecture hall, I hear Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way” booming from a glowing classroom three floors up. I cringe, I smile, I know that must be the room I’m headed for, where the university’s English Club meets. Ask any student what their favorite kind of music is, they’ll respond, “gentle.” Jason and I gave a riveting performance about the joys of Halloween in the United States. Perhaps the only thing that stuck was trick-or-treating, but that’s the most important part, anyway.

After nearly two weeks of Halloween-oriented lesson plans and side gigs like our Backstreet Boys-infused night with the English Club, I have this to say about Americans who celebrate Halloween. What the heck is wrong with you? Seriously. Try explaining a holiday that glorifies gory murder, or why we scare children by telling them the bogeyman is hiding under their bed, or in their closet, or whatever. Explain to someone why you craft fake spider webs out of cotton balls to decorate your front porch. Define the words “slime,” “corpse,” “monster,” “vampire,” and “skull.” Do this upwards of ten times with a group of students who prefer the gentle croon of Nick Carter over any other musician ever, and you will start to feel like Satan himself, will begin to wonder how your culture became so twisted. I’m just happy we showed them The Nightmare Before Christmas instead of a more age-appropriate Halloween flick, like Saw or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They squealed and averted their eyes when the animated bogeyman died.

Halloween night, we found a KTV (karaoke bar) that was actually decorated for Halloween—the workers had great costumes and kept coming into our room to take pictures with us. I dressed as Mother Nature. Easily assembled with a flower-print dress and some leaves from the streets, it was neither the best nor the worst costume I’ve produced. It did become the most ironic costume I’ve worn, because on Halloween night the Chinese Weather Manipulation Gods created a massive snowstorm that dumped 16 million tons of snow on Beijing. A few flurries from the snow massacre drifted this way. Mother Nature was not involved, unless her weeping added to the poundage.

On an unrelated note, just in case you’re worried that I might be morphing into some sort of responsible adult now that I’ve been a college graduate for six months, take heart: This week I was locked out of my apartment for 24 hours due to a series of events that involved my own irresponsibility, Jason’s keys mysteriously disappearing days before, and our foreign affairs officer handing me a pile of six keys on an interesting mix of key chains that ranged from a shoestring to “I Love Minnesota,” none of which ended up being for my apartment. The saga culminated with someone making a run to campus, 30 minutes outside the city, around 10:00 p.m., and finally giving the correct spare key to a teacher who lives in my building.

My novel is up to 10,342 rambling words.