Everyone's Staring

Red Cross Ready, a note

2010-09-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

“Dear Witeny, I know you will back to America. So I send you a small gift made by myself a week ago. I remember one day, when I take 28 bus go out of school, I saw you take 10 bus to school, your face seemed sad, blank, and complicated. I hope you can be happy when you back to America. I love your smile :-). Also home is the most warm place for everyone. You must be happiness in the future.”

The first time I saw the note that would become my Red Cross cubicle’s first decoration, I put it away quickly and tried not to cry. But I kept pulling it out again and again, amazed that one of my youngest and least advanced students was able to articulate a few basic observations so succinctly. I was pretty sure I knew the sad, blank, complicated face she referenced. I agreed with her suggestion that I should be happy when I [went] back to America, but facing the prospect of a new city and another start from scratch, I wasn’t sure I could follow her command. “You must be happiness in the future.”

Turns out it’s difficult to avoid being happiness when your friends make you laugh until you cry on a regular basis, your job is fun, and an 11-month-old beams and shares his first word with you when you come home at night: “Hiiii!” Plus, I get to drive a Swagger Wagon pretty frequently, and that should make anyone happy. I’ve had the chance to enjoy live music, including my current favorite band, go to free museums and my first (pre-season) pro football game, and start a book club with some of the coolest ladies in Seattle.

The note is folded in half in a picture frame on my desk, reminding me to enjoy every moment.

When I grow up, I want to be a grown-up.

2010-08-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, I went to the bank with my mother, the goal being that I would never again have to go to the bank with my mother. We went intending to remove her name from my checking and savings accounts. Without saying so directly, the teller implied that unless I was getting married, there was no reason to mess with things. I don’t have a man to will my money to, so I might as well leave it to my parents in the event of some tragedy.

Her point was valid. After all, I don’t want the $8 in my checking account to get all tied up in red tape, right? Still, I left the bank feeling a bit stuck in the middle. I’m certainly not a child, but the bank teller (of all people) wouldn’t extend the “independent adult” moniker just yet.

Currently, the most-emailed story on The New York Times is titled, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” The story mentions our society’s “scattershot approach” to marking adulthood. We’re old enough to choose our leaders and give our lives at 18, but not responsible enough to decide what we ingest until 21. There’s a full 10-year gap between the moment I could legally drive a vehicle alone and the day (not yet here) when I can rent a car as an “adult.”

The story focuses on the research of Psychologist Jeffery Jensen Arnett, who suggests that the 20s be re-branded as their own distinct developmental stage, “emerging adulthood,” because we clearly don’t have our shit together like all those grown-ups with houses and jobs and whatnot. The story is really thought-provoking, even if I don’t agree with many of the primary assumptions being made. If you’re in your 20s (ahem, most of you) I’m really curious about your thoughts on this.

For example, the author lists several activities such as traveling, competing for low-paying community service opportunities, staying single, and continuing education, then suggests that these amount to “forestalling the beginning of adult life.” This is based on the traditional sociological definition of adulthood, which according to this article is marked by five “milestones”: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.

The steady pursuit of these milestones is far less uniform than it was a generation ago, the author concedes. “It implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity.” So far, so good. But then, this: “They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.” Later, it is suggested that 20-somethings haven’t “braced themselves” for “the trappings of adulthood.”

I don’t know what it looks like, but I am not “forestalling the beginning of adult life” by traveling, serving in AmeriCorps, or pursuing higher education. I am not slouching toward my adult life. This is my adult life, and all of the choices I have made were not made because I am running away from the inevitable reality of a mortgage payment.

I think Arnett’s study of adults in their 20s has a lot to offer society, but I have to disagree with the idea of rebranding our 20s as some kind of pseudo-adulthood. Perhaps it is adulthood that needs to be redefined to reflect modern realities.

The tone of the story suggests that adulthood comes when you’ve made all the important choices that will ever be made, and you’ve reached that blissful moment where you just get to live with them. If “adulthood” means the day you wake up and there are no choices to be made, only motions to go through, I hope I never get there.

Growing

2010-07-10T09:35:00.000-07:00

My first thought was that not much has changed. My friend’s dad responded to this observation with, “Well, we’re all ten months older,” which seemed to be about it. But I’m starting to notice a few things. Pop’s gone so country that Jaron of Evan & Jaron is praying for tragedy to strike his ex-girlfriend. Country’s gone so pop, Reba is covering Beyonce. I saw Toy Story 3 in 3D, which blew my mind. Also, I get to drive past Des Moines Golf and Country Club every day, and for the first summer in three years I’m not serving drinks there. Yeah, unemployment makes me feel so grown up.

I’m daily amazed by how flat and open my home state is, how the blue sky goes on for miles and the stars are all visible at night. A while ago, Jason and I used Google street view to show Des Moines to a Chinese student. Wide-eyed as we showed him our former houses and favorite parks around the city, he said, “Wow, America must be like one big garden!” Drawing the distinction between “America” and “Iowa” for the millionth time, I conceded that there is a lot of green space in Iowa. Seeing it now, in contrast to “gardens” built on top of cement in my Chengde neighborhood, I understand why what he saw was so fascinating. Des Moines just has so much grass growing everywhere, shrubs and flowers wherever they’ll fit.

Of course, how and where things grew was my dad’s primary concern—well, secondary concern, after navigating chopsticks. My parents spent ten days with me in China before we flew home last week. I packed the schedule with as much must-see China Stuff as possible, from Shanghai to Xi’an to Beijing to Chengde. Me taking charge was an interesting role reversal for all three of us. I planned, I booked hostels, I mapped bus routes… I stressed.

And in the same way that a parent is really proud of a nice gift, and the child is more interested in the huge cardboard box it came in, they derived the most pleasure from things I hadn’t counted on, like our bus driver’s road rage battle with an eighteen-wheeler (wahoo, China!) and, would you believe, the fact that the Chinese grow corn in the mountains. It’s true, folks. All these years Iowans thought we had a monopoly on putting corn everywhere. But in dry, mountainous Hebei province, corn is growing out of cliffs and valleys at every turn, water and constant sunshine be damned.

And, er, speaking of sunshine be damned (forgive me for compressing three blogs into one), I have formally accepted a position working for the Seattle Red Cross, beginning at the end of August. My official title is “Capacity Building Grant Coordinator.” I’ll be doing a combination of research, grant requesting, and conducting interviews with people the Red Cross has helped so I can write those heart-wrenching stories that make people want to donate money. The position is through Americorps, so I can continue my streak of being moderately impoverished but satisfied with my job. Thankfully, I have the awesome opportunity to live with my brother and sister-in-law and their two little boys, just a couple miles from work! Rumor has it I’m paying rent in dishwashing.

Going

2010-06-16T02:13:00.001-07:00

Until a mishap stopped me in my muddy bike tracks yesterday, I hadn't stopped moving since I woke up last Thursday. My student's mom and her sister taught Jason and me how to make dumplings and a couple of other dishes. After lunch, I set to cleaning my apartment slowly and steadily, with Rosie's help/moral support. Including breaks for mixing cocktails, it was an all-day event.

Friday, Mr. Lei took us to Sledge Hammer Hill, a prominent feature of Chengde's surrounding landscape that looks more than a little phallic. Appropriately, touching it is supposed to add years to your life. Army crawling through the cave in nearby Frog Crag, which we did, is supposed to make your immune to disease. So, I will live forever and never get sick.

After a farewell feast with Mr. Lei, I gave my last batch of finals. Highlight: Two girls worked a dialogue about how much they love me and my beautiful smile into their final presentation (suck-ups, I know! But it was sweet.) Low Point: In my final act as a teacher, I had to tell a boy he's lucky I'm not failing him--only because I'm not allowed to--because he slacked off all year and then failed to prepare a final presentation.

I hunted down Chengde's foreign liquor supply, a shop curiously connected to an elementary school on a leafy side street, to buy Cuervo for my farewell fiesta. I went home to email information to the Seattle Red Cross (my future employer!), organized my apartment, packed a bag and headed to la fiesta. I even slept in a hurry, and left Chengde at 5:45 a.m. I spent the afternoon in Beijing with Daisy, and took off on the overnight train to Guilin at 4 p.m., plummeting forward as I read Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which suited my pace, and convinced me that moving is the only thing to do, really. I plowed forward even as I slept.

Within an hour of arriving in Guilin, I hopped a bus to Longsheng, where I missed a connection by five minutes, crashed in an ugly hotel reluctantly recommended by Lonely Planet at a last resort if you end up overnighting in this "decidedly ugly" town. The showerhead was positioned directly over the squat toilet, the whole place precariously perched above a coursing, muddy river. It's always raining down here, strange to see rivers with water after a year in the dust-stormy north.

Up early, I caught a bus away from decidedly ugly into arguably the most fascinating manipulation of landscape humans have ever pulled off, the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces in Longji. There I spent some of the best few hours of hiking, through soggy mountains of muddy, shimmering pools, little waterfalls pouring into the pools below all the way to the bottom, the water and me in constant motion.

Busses. Back to Longsheng, to Guilin, to Yangshuo. I walked 90 minutes in the twilight to my current dwelling at Yangshuo Outside Inn, past several tiny villages, amid perhaps the most interesting landscape on earth. Towering limestone peaks covered with greenery, grown up from shifts in land otherwise as flat as Nebraska. So I walked and walked and walked, slept, and leapt out of bed to rent a bike and traverse the countryside. Thursday to Tuesday, I barely stopped to eat and sleep.

It started sprinking as I left the hostel on my brand new Giant mountain bike, the Crayola color of burnt sienna, accented with deep maroon. A beautiful bike. Soon it was pouring. I hate to turn around, and I hadn't stopped yet, so I plowed on--almost Chinese as I futilely held my umbrella with one hand, navigating puddles and sharp rocks with the other.

I biked all day, stopping only for lunch under a tent restaurant during a hard downpour. The proprietor's child was curious about me. She also had a huge glob of thick green snot under one nostril, and while her mother smacked her hands and arms repeatedly for unseen offenses, she never wiped her nose. The little girl seemed as unphased by the beatings as her mother was by the snot globule. I sat until I could sit no more, and rode to visit a cave.

Foolishly, I assumed two things. 1: Caves are natural wonders. 2: It doesn't rain in caves. China sometimes has a way of taking naturally beautiful places and exploiting them in the tackiest possible way. So this cave's stalag-tites and -mites are lit up like a Saturday night disco, and photography teams take portraits and show them on computer screens--inside the cave--like it's Adventureland or something. Also, I had to pull out my umbrella a few times to dodge the dripping roof.

I tried to loop back to the hostel, but some conman (or maybe he was legit, but it was a scam regardless) wanted to charge me to bike through his "historic village" situated conveniently on the main path. I hated the idea of just going back the way I came (why? why?) so I turned and took a side road from the village, going going going as the path tapered into more of a stream, until I was walking my bike on a narrow stretch that wasn't actually a path at all. I wouldn't turn around, because I was at the river and knew my hostel was just across the water, if only I could find a bridge. And I wasn't about to stop moving now.

But I looked back and realized my umbrella was gone. I'd rigged it over my basket to cover my camera bag. My heart sank--the umbrella was given to me by a sweet couple from California on Easter Sunday at the Vatican in 2008, when they noticed me next to them, umbrella-less and soaked to the bone. Since receiving that umbrella, I've never forgotten it on rainy days. So, finally, I turned around even knowing there was no chance it hadn't been claimed by the next passerby.

Here I am, frantically peddling up muddy, rocky slopes in the most beautiful place in China (did I mention this? It's beautiful. No, really.) going and going because I don't want to stop going. At once, it starts to sprinkle again, and I hear a dooming metal-on-rock sound. scrape-scrape.

The back tire on my brand new, burnt sienna Giant mountain bike is completely flat. And of course it starts to rain harder. This bike is really heavy, so I can carry it about seven steps before dropping it in a puddle. Going the long way around, the only way I know how to get back to the hostel, I figure it will take me approximately the rest of the week. I wanted to cry. Or maybe I did. In the rain, who can tell?

Two guys passed on their motorcycles before a skinny little man in an army surplus jacket took pity on me. He surveyed the situation, shook his head slowly and chuckled a little, and finally made a phone call to a bike repairman. I tried to communicate that I'd like to call the hostel, but eventually just plopped down on a rock to wait. If there's one thing I have learned this year, it's that things just happen in China, at a pace and through a method that I haven't yet managed to grasp. Usually, the thing to do is be still and wait anywhere from 60 minutes to 60 days longer than I imagine a thing should take. And so I did. Finally stopped after five days of going, I surrendered to the situation.

My rescuer was kind, but couldn't hide his amusement at my situation. I took off my shoes to ring out my muddy socks. He grinned and shook his head some more. Don't you have an umbrella? Mei you. He shook his head. Slowly, to rub it in. Then he pointed to the bike and shook his head grimly some more. The repairman was an hour arriving.

He found no fewer than five holes in the tube (how?) and I finally did call the hostel manager to negotiate the price of a new tube. (He found the holes or he made them?" she sighed in typical ex-pat fashion.) After a few more calls, the mechanic left, came back with the tire, and had it fixed up in three minutes. He also donated his old poncho to me for the ride back.

My savior squatted under a nearby roof, shaking his head still at the turn his afternoon had taken. And, again, I went.

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"The World Spins Madly On"

2010-05-29T23:49:00.001-07:00

I recently finished reading an edition of The Best American Travel Writing, an annual collection of noteworthy travel pieces from American magazines. In one story republished from Gourmet magazine, William Least Heat-Moon recalls playing copilot for his father as a child, and something his father often said on trips. "From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel, one returns changed by challenge."

Beginning today, I can count down to my homecoming in days rather than months. It must be time to reflect on those challenges that have shaped me this year. Although some days it feels like it's just beginning, it also feels like it might be simpler to list the experiences and emotions I haven't had since August.

My passport was lost in the mail until the day before I left. I celebrated my 23^rd birthday on the Great Wall. I saw the Dalai Lama, and the sunrise at the Taj Mahal. I learned how to say, "I am cold!" in Chinese, and celebrated Christmas at a nightclub. I wrote a 50,101-word novel, and ate holy food off the floor while recovering from food poisoning. I rescued a puppy, and a monk who thinks we should love pigs as much as we love dogs taught me about anger. I taught, and learned, and taught some more. I really loved that part.

Some of my experiences were rather mundane. My toilet overflowed. I cried a lot. I went to the gym. I cooked.

Last night, my friend Cate and I climbed into the mountains above Chengde just before sunset. A network of trails crisscrosses away from the city's neon lights (lights that make it look much more glamorous than it actually is), and we've been saying for weeks that we wanted to spend the night out in the open, above the noise. We camped under a pagoda, watching the sun sink behind the western mountains on its way to rise over my friends and family, as the gleaming full moon ascended from the east.

We talked the night away, and got a few amateur photos of the brilliant moon, before the sun lightened the horizon again around 3:00 a.m. Watching the sky's rotation like that, it's impossible not to comprehend just how fast the world is spinning. As Cate said, "Look at this sky moving. How could anyone ever have thought the world was flat?" (I told her about Iowa.)

It's difficult to quantify what I'll miss when thirty more of those spins land me in the U.S. The food, my students, my friends, my own space. Will I miss the thrill of being on a bus careening toward a bicyclist and swerving at the last minute? Or seeing children relieve themselves by the sidewalk? The deep, guttural sound of a man cleaning mucus out of his lungs to launch it into the street? Perhaps.

Simon Winchester, author of "Welcome to Nowhere" in The Best American Travel Writing, quoted his tailor's comment to him upon his return from an incredible journey. "You know, you are a very, very lucky man indeed. Lucky to be in such a place. Lucky to see such things. And luckiest of all to meet such very kind people. I envy you. Everyone must envy you. Wherever would you be—have you ever wondered—without all their kindness and without all this luck?"

There may not be ubiquitous envy for my experiences or living conditions, but I do consider myself indescribably lucky to be in such a place, to have met such kind people, to see the sky turn pink and orange with the moon still high in the sky over Chengde.

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"Life Would Be Perfect...": Want Less, Have More.

2010-05-19T04:13:00.001-07:00

The past nine months have afforded me more free time than I've had in years (and far more than I hope to have again prior to, or even in, retirement). It was a time to develop hobbies. While I wish I could say I learned to juggle, or took up the offer for belly dancing lessons from the teacher at my gym, the truth is… I developed an obsession with National Public Radio. Which is how I stumbled upon a recent interview with author Meghan Daum, whose book, "Life Would be Perfect if I Lived in That House," chronicles her hobby—obsessively hunting for the perfect living space.

The interviewer, Rebecca Roberts, said in her lead, "It's a uniquely American phenomenon, this house lust, this fantasy of the perfect life in the perfect environment." I glanced at my surroundings and mused at what these uniquely house-lusty Americans would think. My kitchen has two food preparation surfaces: the top of a 4-foot-tall refrigerator, and the (broken) lid of a (functioning) washing machine. I cook on a hot plate that sits on top of my microwave, and I wash my dishes in a sink conveniently angled to elevate the drain. I don't lust for a house, but most days I do lust for an oven.

With Daum's interview in the background, I landed on this Foreign Policy story about China's housing bubble. Its author debunked Roberts' claim in the first paragraph. "Last fall 80 percent of respondents to a China Youth Daily online poll said that home ownership was a prerequisite for happiness." In the unlikely event that Americans ever were the only people in the world who associated happiness with square footage, it certainly isn't true anymore.

The article reports that China's successful young generation, beneficiaries of the spoil-inducing (and its less desirable cousin, unreasonably high expectation-inducing) one child policy are struggling to attain homeownership, the last rung of the success ladder they're told they deserve to ascend uninhibited. On the flip side, wealthy Chinese with a lack of places to invest excess cash are holding multiple, empty apartments now poised to crash in value.

About compulsively changing houses, Daum said, "I really felt that where I lived was a direct reflection of who I was. My house was really a mirror of my soul. And until I found sort of the right mirror, I just wasn't going to be settled." Young Chinese women seem to agree. They're unlikely to pursue a man whose virtuous soul isn't reflected in his walls and his wallet.

Scanning the rooms of my charmingly filthy, disintegrating hovel, with its perpetually broken furniture and a variegated wooden bathroom door shedding soggy splinters in my entryway, I'm inclined to disagree with the notion that where you live is in some way a direct reflection of who you are. Then again, I signed up for this dwelling. More unbelievably, perhaps because it's the first place I've lived on my own (or because I have impossibly low standards… or because I can listen to npr for hours without annoying anyone), I know my busted toilet seat and blown outlets will always hold a revered place in my storied housing history.

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Spring, Storms, & Sequins

2010-05-09T19:10:00.001-07:00

Spring lasted about two hours in Chengde. I think I was asleep. Bundled up in my turtleneck and winter coat until the last bitter days of April, I glared at the stick-trees, beseeching them to grow some damn flowers already. When I returned from Qingdao last Tuesday, it was nearly 90 degrees, and blossoms were blowing off the trees in a fierce wind as though they had been there all along, and were now tired of announcing spring. Grandmas and grandpas play mahjong around tiny street-side tables well into the evening, barbeque joints stay open all night long, and Friday night beers can be enjoyed to excess by the banks of the river. It's like it wasn't 20 below a mere two months ago.

Dust storms are one of the more interesting experiences that accompany Chengde's spring/summer. Saturday afternoon while reading at a table by the river—shortly after some guys cracked open foaming beers which the wind splashed straight against my back and hair—the sky began to turn a hazy yellow. As I walked to the grocery store and then home, to change out of my beer-scented garb, the Saturday afternoon crowd continued to go about its business in the increasingly yellow/orange air. Severe drought and deforestation caused an increase in storms this year, so small clouds like this one don't merit much reaction—they happen all the time, and are sometimes almost indistinguishable from regular industrial haze. A more severe storm can look like this—Chengde had one of these back in March. Around 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, wind rattling my windows woke me to another storm. Street sweepers were out with their straw brooms, trying to make the dust disappear even as it swirled and settled on top of them.

Decidedly less of a global calamity, The springtime fashion sweeping Chengde's sidewalks also keeps me guessing, and wondering if I should just stay inside. It's a tragic fact that I cannot wear my flip-flops ("slippers," as they're known here) outside the apartment. They're considered house shoes, and honestly bare feet after an afternoon on the town are too filthy to describe. This rule I understand, but others are more difficult to decipher.

It seems your legs should always be covered, in some fallacious show of modesty. Evidence suggests it would be perceived as scandalous if I wore shorts around town with my bare white legs showing, yet women can wear shimmery dresses that barely cover their (small, flat) butts, with sheer black tights and high heels. I see them wearing dresses cut similarly to halters or strapless dresses that I own, but I know I couldn't wear the same dresses without repercussion.

As a woman who didn't develop beyond knees and elbows until I was nearly 17 years old, I finally feel some empathy for those "early bloomers" trying desperately to cover their extra, curvy flesh in front of their girlish peers. Except I'm trying to feign modesty in front of 30-year-old women who can wear sheer tights and sequins and look more like a 5-year-old in a dance recital than a soliciting trollop. Exasperated, I default to jeans and old Houghton softball shirts, pretending I, too, can still pull off the sweetly pre-pubescent look.

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Window Clings

2010-05-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

For the past five years, my mother has kept me in window clings. Every college dorm or old apartment window donned pumpkins at Halloween, Santa and snowmen at Christmas, and turkeys in between. Currently, chickens and bunnies on my kitchen window proclaim spring. It seems small, but my mom's window clings and the boxes they come in—full of local newspaper clips and American snacks—make me the grudging object of envy among fellow vagabonds. "Your mom is so cute," they always say. I know what they mean. My mom is the best.

She worries about me, but in a practical, hands-off way, shaking her head and saying prayers (and sending provisions) while I traipse around the world. She did contact a family friend who occasionally does business in China to ask him to check up on me when he's "in the neighborhood" of a country with 400 million people. Against all odds, she's convinced my father—whose words around this time last year were, "CHINA? Why on earth would anyone want to go to China?"—to spend ten days here with me before I go home next month.

I think my mom would be impressed with the women I've encountered this year: A Tibetan nun in India, who called me "teacher" but treated me like a daughter, pumping me full of rice, vegetables and cookies, insisting that I borrow her gloves for my eternally frigid hands, and grinding up my food poisoning medicine with concerned, motherly diligence; My student's mother, who keeps her cell-phone dictionary on hand solely to translate the names of the food she's sending me home with, who forecasts the weather for me and admonishes me to wear more clothes when it's chilly, who gave me a bottle of cough medicine and the classic Chinese prescription to "have a good rest" when I was sick.

In addition to my mother's care stretching across the Pacific, and all the willing proxies I've encountered abroad, so many women have filled a maternal role this year. My aunts sent me prayer-filled Christmas cards (and one pesky glitter-filled card, whose remnants are still being swept up) and the right words at just the right time. My sisters provided books, pictures and even a Christmas tree. My bosses are wide-eyed at the amount of mail I receive from someone as "distant" as my brother-in-law's grandmother.

No matter how independent we are, we always appreciate being taken care of. Window clings from America and flimsy black gloves from India remind me that good mothers are everywhere, and it's a good thing.

Happy Mother's Day!

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Qingdao

2010-05-05T19:57:00.001-07:00

On the slowest trains in China, there are no trash receptacles, the squat toilet usually has a lifetime of stains, disguised only by the fresh ones on top of them, and, like pre-smoking-ban bars, there's no way to emerge from them without smelling like an ashtray. The next class of trains uses washable seat covers and offers a tin plate for accumulated trash. Finally, the luxurious new fast trains are more comfortable than airplanes, with adjustable seats, a free bottle of water, and music that, mercifully, isn't the annoying, easily downloadable tune that everyone uses as their cell phone ring-back.

Traveling to Qingdao and back last weekend, I experienced all three carriers, and was amused to note that the passengers don't really differ—they just behave differently depending on the setting. On slow trains, they spit sunflower seed shells on the table or the floor. Disgusting, maybe. But someone has decided riders on the slow train aren't civilized enough to use receptacles. The same seed devourers on the fast trains gingerly place their seeds in their own personal trash bag, supplied on the train.

Of course, in all three settings no one feels compelled to stand in a line when entering or departing. Crushed in the huddle for the train back to Beijing, I mused about my earliest lessons in "waiting your turn." I remembered my line buddy in kindergarten, a kid named Jeffery who picked his nose and was obsessed with singing "Take me out to the Ballgame." Fortunately, he moved away. But while he remained, I was trained to stand still next to him come hell or high water. I've seen the kids lined up in neat little rows at the primary school near my apartment, but as bodies swirled around me, pulling my backpack one way and my camera bag the other, leaving me stranded in the middle, I had to wonder if behind closed doors they don't give their kids lessons in throwing elbows as well as waiting patiently. There are some things I won't miss.

Chinese people have an uncanny ability to fall asleep instantly, almost anywhere. I admire and slightly resent them for this trait. I always notice babies and toddlers being lugged around in the most uncomfortable positions, bundled and resting on their mothers' arms, being jostled about through busses and train stations, or even hiking mountains. As I tried to contort myself a million different ways to sleep sitting up on the train home, I observed fellow passengers hunched over luggage in the aisle, or sitting on a stool with their head in a fellow traveler's lap, that traveler draped on top of the unconscious torso of their companion. I wondered sleepily about the benefits of sprawling out in car seats and strollers as a baby. Perhaps I was robbed of this basic instinct to become unconscious at will, regardless of spatial realities.

Our hostel in Qingdao was built in China's first observatory, an interesting, narrow building with a rooftop terrace and a huge telescope next to the bar (I shudder to think about the demoralizing things that telescope has suffered at the hands of intoxicated expats.) I traveled with Daisy, my student from last fall. Now, hostels are a scary concept for many people who haven't stayed in them—those of us who frequent them know they can be a blast, even if you do room with the occasional weirdo or the jerk who insists upon turning on the lights when they stumble in at two a.m., or stumble out at six. But for Chinese girls like Daisy, the fact that a foreign man slept in the bed next to her is almost too much to stomach. Even though he slept with his shirt off, she somehow hadn't noticed it was a guy until I told her later. A 28-year-old woman who took a day trip with us to Mount Laoshan was so shocked that she was sharing a room with some foreign men, she was thinking about staying at a different hotel.

The 2008 Olympic sailing competition was held in Qingdao, and it is rated one of the best places to live in China. While it doesn't escape the smoggy plague of most large cities (The Haier electronics factory is—proudly—stationed here) it is overall a pleasant city. Laoshan and the parks and streets within the city itself where covered with the pink and white blossoms of late spring. Dozens of couples taking wedding photos (formal photo shoots that happen with many matching costumes and cheesy poses, long before the wedding takes place) filled the parks and beaches. Germans occupied the city for a time, introducing beer and German architecture. The structures around the sea thus have a unique heritage, and one of the most popular beers in China is still brewed here.

The people were unbelievably friendly, which Daisy could not get over. She would ask someone for directions, and if they said our destination was five blocks down on the left, she would walk two blocks and check with someone else just to make sure we were still going the right direction. When we arrived at the turn, she would again ask, just to be sure, that we should turn left. Every time she spoke to someone, she would return to me wide-eyed and smiling. "These people are so nice!" She shook her head every time. I don't know if she ever needed directions—it was more of a social experiment, to see if 100% of the sampled population truly would answer her questions. After talking to an especially handsome man in a nice suit, she skipped over to me and remarked, "Ah! I am going to marry a man from this province!"

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Even the melons were good.

2010-04-18T21:52:00.001-07:00

"Ah, America! Bruce Lee! Wo ai meiguo. I love America!" This shirtless Chinese guy greeted me at the hostel front desk, where he had been doing his best to impress the cute receptionist with goofy antics and a mediocre body clad in moose-patterned boxer shorts. I acknowledged my undeniably close relationship with the great Bruce Lee, and fell into my bed dreaming of the beach.

A few freezing nights after the heat was turned off in my apartment weeks ago, I sat at my computer under layers of cotton in various forms—clothes, robe, blanket—and pointed my mouse at Sanya, China's southernmost city on its only tropical island. Last week, while my students participated in an intramural track meet at the university, I landed in Sanya for three days of sun, seafood, oogling fat Russian tourists, and Chinese women going to great lengths to keep the sun from darkening their precious skin while they enjoyed the beach view.

Dadonghai Beach must be the most tactfully developed place I've visited in China. Curvy boardwalks and stone passageways, outdoor barbeque restaurants and classy bars ringed the bay, offering an endless supply of seafood, fresh-squeezed juice, and cold beer on tap. (Cold beer! On tap! It does exist!) Adorable couples in matching Hawaiian-patterned shorts and shirts, clinging to each other under umbrellas to deflect the sun, did add a charmingly tacky twist that reminded me I hadn't left the country. (And then, of course, moose-boxer boy, who wore said boxers and a fanny-pack-inspired man purse when a few of us went out for a drink Thursday night.)

Perhaps it was because I traveled alone, but this was by far the most social experience I've had in a hostel. The crew assembled for a Friday night out included a couple of Indian-English guys spending nine months traveling in Asia, two Swedes and three Americans studying with different programs in Shanghai, another English teacher from Holland, and one of my Chinese roommates. I hate to generalize about entire nations… but they're small, so I don't feel too bad about it: Swedes and the Dutch are my favorite people to meet while traveling. They're impossibly nice and genuine, and always up for a good time.

For good or for bad, the chain-smoking hostel cook acted as our bar guide. "I'll take you to a place where the floor bounces," was the pitch he made to us after we'd downed a bottle of 100rmb Absolut playing drinking games at the hostel. The club, which did indeed have some sort of spring-loaded floor, was pretty normal—with Chinese characteristics. A remix of the "McDonalds, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut" round was worked in with a techno "Glory, Glory Halleluiah," followed by "Take me Home, Country Road." And then a slender, tan, scantily clad transvestite danced to Michael Jackson.

And then I ate a watermelon, and liked it. It's true what they say, I just hadn't had a good one yet.

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Making memorable the phrase "aspirate on vomit": All in a day's work

2010-03-24T04:32:00.001-07:00

Our friend and colleague Mr. Lei is acutely aware of the fact that foreign teachers are a goldmine of the English language (if I do say so myself.) In addition to making chapter recordings and reading vocabulary for his classes in the Overseas Nursing department, Jason and I have been writing dialogues so his students can practice talking medically in casual conversation.

The instructions are to work the textbook symptoms and procedures into short, memorable dialogues. Want to learn about bacterial meningitis? Read about how "Friend 1" almost died when he was a kid!

Unit 44: Bacterial Meningitis

A conversation in which one friend tells another about the time he almost died from meningitis.

Friend 1: Hey, want to hear a crazy story? When I was younger, I almost died!

Friend 2: Really, how?

Friend 1: I had bacterial meningitis. It's a potentially fatal disease that can rapidly lead to death. First, I just had a cold. Then, suddenly, I had a really severe headache, drowsiness, delirium, irritability, restlessness, vomiting, and fever.

Friend 2: Oh, that sounds awful!

Friend 1: Yeah, that's not even the worst part. My parents knew something was really wrong when I resisted flexion of my neck, and I started to have convulsions. That's when they took me to the hospital.

Friend 2: You had convulsions? I don't believe you. You're making this up!

Friend 1: No, it's true! I received antibiotics intravenously for rapid effect. Nurses had to work really hard to save me. They kept the room as quiet as possible, put padded side rails on my bed so I didn't hurt myself during convulsions, and helped move my body around so I didn't aspirate on vomit or catch pneumonia.

Friend 2: Wow. I'm really glad you survived.

Friend 1: No kidding. For a while I was monitored for a slow pulse rate, irregular respirations, and increased blood pressure. But I recovered eventually.

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Eating like a grown-up

2010-03-22T20:02:00.001-07:00

So, it's true that frozen dumplings make up at least 14% of my weekly meal count (yes, I used my GRE-refreshed elementary math skills to figure that out.) Instant oatmeal accounts for a full third of my intake—with various fruits or honey to shake it up each morning. But what do I put into my body the other half of the time?

Last week, my mother informed me, her 23-year-old baby, that all of her "adult children" made corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's Day. I have to take the exclusion with a grain of salt, because an uncle in his mid-thirties is still considered the baby in my dad's family, despite being by far the largest of ten siblings. His girth is cited whenever I'm indignant about the fact that my parents should, at some point, have to concede that I'm an adult now. Then again, they still file my taxes, answer my mail and pay for my health insurance. What is adulthood, anyway?

Still, this exclusion from the mythical adult-land where people cook real meals daily, combined with a desire to stop eating at restaurants so frequently (thanks in no small part to this story—more details and pictures—about recycling cooking oil from sewers being a common practice), has sparked an interest in cooking more of my own adult-grade meals.

One of the biggest issues I've encountered trying to cook for one is that it's almost never practical for me to have adequate ingredients on hand. If I buy vegetables without a specific recipe in mind for them, they're likely to sit neglected in my refrigerator while I make pb&j or boil a handful of dumplings. Thankfully, it's finally looking like spring up here—if spring is a snow storm followed by a gigantic dust storm followed by wind and rain—so fresh veggies are again on the street mere steps away.

I'm trying to build a repertoire of recipes I can file under "easy" in my mind, so I'm more likely to turn to them than a street vendor when hunger calls. Not surprisingly, the first winner involves a hearty scoop of peanut butter:

Peanut butter noodles – This was so delicious, and because it's an Asian dish, I didn't have to improvise on ingredients I can't find here. Peanut butter, honey, soy sauce, and hot chili paste!

A second dish that went well, and made more than enough to replace restaurant forays this week, is actually a version of a really common dish we ate in India, Aloo Gobi Masala. Fun fact, I learned the Chinese for "cumin" in assembling these ingredients. They call it "little fennel."

My student in India taught me how to make naan, or Indian bread. It was so easy when I cooked with her, but something went terribly wrong when I tried to make it myself yesterday. I ended up wasting most of my flour, making a doughy mess of my kitchen, and cooking something more along the lines of a bland pancake. Another hurdle for me is that mishaps like this make me want to swear off any interaction with a cutting board/rolling pin for a few days. Thankfully, I'll be working through Aloo Gobi leftovers for at least that long.

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Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

2010-03-12T17:32:00.001-08:00

Charles Dickens became one of my favorite authors sometime after I read A Tale of Two Cities in high school—this despite the fact that he couldn't create a plausible heroine for anything. I took my amour far enough to read David Copperfield, nearly 1000 pages of impoverished Victorian English glory. I have a new tutoring student whose English name is David. When my most recent tutoring acquisition, an audacious 14-year-old boy, asked me for a unique English name, I drafted a short list of movie and literary character names, and he chose Oliver. This adds a Dickensian twist (pun?) to my days, and makes me smile. Speaking of names, Oliver also has a huge pet mouse named "xiao jing," or "little king." I think it's adorable.

My former student Daisy, who first appeared in my stories as a meek character who seemed to be at the whims of the men in her life, has proven to be an especially strong woman (the anti-implausible Dickensian female!) determined to do something different with her life even as all of her friends and family pressure her to settle. She recently moved to Beijing to find a better job and continue to improve her English. It has improved greatly, but still has a touch of China that makes it musical to read.

Regarding her desire to leave China and pursue anything somewhere else, she sent me this line in an email: "I think it more like a dream than an aim. Life will become boring and hopeless if dream is considered as a luxury. For me, the aim or dreams like a kind of support. I just try my best to let them come true." I think she could have a career as a greeting card writer once she cleans up that grammar.

Lately her friends, like mine, have started to get married, and she's feeling the expectant stares and parental toungue-clicking. Her response to my suggestion that when she moves to America we can go out and find husbands together: "I smiled when you told me we can find our husband in America together, because that moment I felt life can be colorful." Life can be colorful. Write that down.

A friend and fellow Drake journalism grad, Alexa, is currently teaching English through a Fulbright Grant in Indonesia. She recently wrote an incredibly honest blog about the stress of planning the next step after an experience like this—essentially, you think you go abroad to find your calling, to "take a year off" and get it all figured out, but most of our species only end up more confused and with less direction by the end. I've been thinking of saying something really similar, and I invite you to check out what she has to say.

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Lhasang Tsering, Dissenter

2010-03-10T21:29:00.001-08:00

This is the other piece I wrote for Contact Magazine while in India. It is a short profile of one of the most interesting men I've ever met. This man turned down an opportunity in his youth to study medicine in the U.S., instead choosing to join meager guerilla efforts to force the Chinese army out of Tibet. While the Dalai Lama, and thus the majority of Tibetans who follow him, champions a "Middle Way" policy in which Tibet remains part of China but is a fully functional autonomous region (free to elect their own representatives for deciding on local issues), Lhasang Tsering insists that the world is suffering as long as Tibet is occupied by China:

Lhasang Tsering runs one of the most successful bookshops in Mcleod Ganj. Yet, when he speaks, he keeps one eye trained in the direction of Tibet. An outspoken critic of the Tibetan government-in-exile's Middle Way policy, Tsering uses poetry to express the pain he feels for his homeland and its people, and his unwavering belief that Tibet must be a free, independent nation.

"What you call poems, I call my pain in words," he says. Those words reflect the pain of a lost home, a thwarted freedom struggle, and a feeling that no one is doing enough. On the wall behind his desk at The Bookworm is a plaque declaring, "The world without Tibet is not complete."

Another poster behind him reads, "I have something to live for. I have freedom to fight for." No, Tsering doesn't participate in demonstrations, marches, or hunger strikes. But he sits ready to fight if he is asked. "When freedom was a goal, I led the demonstrations. Now, I'm not interested in taking part in rituals," he says.

Tsering, the former president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, left government service because he disagreed with official policies. He sold his watch, a nice pair of shoes he received as a gift, and most of his clothing in order to purchase books for his first small store. "Books were the only things I knew and loved," he explains. Well-versed in what it takes to run a successful business, he says a business-oriented attitude is one of the flaws in the current negotiations with China.

"The matter of independence for Tibet is not like a game, or a business. Unlike this bookshop, which is a business where I try to make money, and I change something if I'm not, the Tibet issue should not be about winning and losing. In my humble view, winning and losing are important, but they are second to right and wrong. Always."

As he speaks he keeps his eyes on Tibet. It may be on the other side of the mountain, but he knows exactly which way home is.

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Tibetan National Uprising Day

2010-03-09T16:46:00.001-08:00

In the exiled Tibetan community, where I spent most of my winter vacation, March 10th is National Uprising Day - a day when Tibetans execute hunger strikes, protests, and rallies to keep the cause of equality in Tibet alive. I wrote the following story for a local publication in Dharamsala before we left.

Because the piece was written for Tibetans, it doesn't delve into a lot of the history necessary to fully understand the day. You may remember (although, to be honest, I certainly didn't) that there were massive uprisings in Tibet in 2008, when many Tibetans were killed or imprisoned. If you were alive in 1959, you might remember the scandal surrounding the teen-aged Dalai Lama's covert escape from Tibet into India in March of that month.

As long as the Chinese government continues to oppress traditional Tibetan culture, which is fundamentally different from Han Chinese culture, the Tibetan community will observe March 10 as a day of mourning the oppression and impending loss of their culture. This is the little bit that I learned about the day from being in Dharamsala (Originally published in Contact Magazine, March 2010 Issue):

For the exiled Tibetan community, National Uprising Day isn't about going hungry, picketing the Chinese embassy, or shouting slogans in the streets of Dharamsala. While all of these things will happen on 10 March, the day remains truly focused on the plight of the majority of Tibetans who remain in Tibet.

"Our brothers and sisters have suffered for speaking their minds and exercising their basic human rights. They have to pay a high price for basic freedoms," says Tashi Choephel, a researcher at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy. This year marks the two-year anniversary of the March 2008 uprising in Tibet, which was the largest and most widespread since the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959.

For those in exile, the events of March 2008 sent a powerful message that Tibetans continue to believe in and to fight for their rights in the region. "The sense of identity for exiled Tibetans became stronger [after the uprising]. There was unity among the exiled community like never before," Choephel says. He finds the continued resistance encouraging, and believes the issue will be solved in time. "I would tell Tibetans inside Tibet not to give up hope, because there is a light at the end of the tunnel. They're an example to Tibetan people outside Tibet to continue to fight for the cause."

According to TCHRD's 2009 Annual Report on the Human Rights Situation in Tibet, fast track courts in 2009 issued the death penalty to five Tibetans for their participation in the spring 2008 protests. The governmental organization states that torture is endemic in Chinese-administered prisons and detention centers. Several cases of torture and inhuman treatment have been reported since the protests, when the TCHRD estimates that around 6,500 Tibetans were arrested.

China refuses to admit international regulatory bodies to inspect its prisons. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was denied access to Tibet after March 2008, and the International committee of the Red Cross, which is mandated to visit detention facilities and check on the wellbeing of prisoners worldwide, isn't allowed in, either. A joint statement by six United Nations Special Procedures mandate holders calling for an increased flow of information in and out of Tibet continues to be ignored.

Although the Chinese authorities deny the use of extreme force upon Tibetan demonstrators, the reality is that they continue to oppress both the religious and lay communities who protest peacefully. "Earlier, activists and political prisoners were mostly monks and nuns, but in 2008 a large number of civilians were arrested, sentenced, even given the death sentence for peaceful protests," says Choephel.

Always focused on the reality of the situation inside Tibet, those in exile will use 10 March as a day to advance the Tibetan cause and to send a message to their countrymen who remain oppressed. "As Tibetans outside Tibet, we have a moral responsibility to speak out, because we have the facilities to reach the world with our message. We need to let the Tibetans inside Tibet know that we still have a desire to go back," says Sonam Dorjee, Dharamsala regional president of the Tibetan Youth Congress.

The 40-year-old TYC, the largest and most active exiled Tibetan NGO, will facilitate protests in March not as a ritual of habit, but as a promise to their fellow Tibetans who continue to resist. "The issue is still alive because of the Tibetans inside Tibet. The Chinese failed to invade the hearts of the Tibetan people. Even though they know they're in danger, they speak out," Dorjee says.

Dorjee, who hasn't missed a 10 March protest since he was 10 years old, when he sneaked onto a bus with his father to attend a march, experienced the most memorable moment of his life when the Dalai Lama greeted him during a 10 March hunger strike in Mcleod Ganj. Although these experiences are personally gratifying, he reiterates the importance for exiles of remembering those inside Tibet when they protest. His father is missing half of a thumb, shot off by a Chinese border guard when he fled to Tibet. "To me, this has always been a reminder that we have a responsibility to the people inside Tibet to remember their struggles," Dorjee says.

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The Taj Mahal

2010-03-07T16:54:00.001-08:00

It was no accident that we went straight to Mcleod Ganj and stayed put for five weeks. Transportation in India is more terrifying by far than its Chinese counterpart. And that's saying something. The day we traveled to Agra, we received a crash course in all the things we'd missed out on thus far. The inside of our sleeper car on the train looked a lot like my dad's old grey van—it even had huge, dusty fans attached to the ceiling, maybe 6 inches from our bunks, so I was able to share with Jason the story of how my sisters and I always got our hair caught in the van's rotating fans on long road trips. Throughout the 6-hour trip, children hopped on to try to sell things, or to sing songs for money.

In Agra, we had to negotiate with rickshaw after rickshaw to get to the bus station. Then, successfully not getting ripped off too badly, realizing we weren't at the correct station, we had to negotiate all over again. Some guy tried to push an offer to drive us there in his private car for nearly $80, to which I finally responded, exasperated, "Look, I know you see our white skin and think we're rich, but I honestly do not even have that much money in my wallet right now." We arrived at a bug-infested hotel near the Taj Mahal around 11 p.m., crashed until 5, and then rose to see the Taj before the crowds.

Like the Golden Temple, the Taj Mahal is so picturesque as to be cliché. What can I tell you about it that you haven't seen in elementary school history books? It's big, it's beautiful, and when you think about the fact that the whole thing is one great big tombstone, it really puts cremation in perspective. The space inside is really austere, just marble floor to ceiling, and a wall around the two tombs—one slightly higher than the other—ornately decorated with carvings and intricately painted flowers. In an empty side chamber, I broke the no camera rule to capture a bat sleeping peacefully in a corner.

There are gardens to walk through all around the main mausoleum, but I hated to turn my back on the shining mass of marble in the perfect, post-thunderstorm morning light. As the sky turned from purple to crisp, clear blue, I wanted to walk backward away from it to lock it in my memory. I worry that my brain will file this perfect image as something it saw in a book, and the memory of really standing there in awe of the whole thing will fade.

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The Golden Temple

2010-03-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

Lately, I'm quadruple-tasking, studying for the GRE with one hand, scrolling through job listings (dismal) with the other, thinking with one part of my brain about India, while the other portion focuses on July, when, as of now, my life is slated to drop off into the unknown.

When we left Mcleod Ganj—yes, two whole weeks ago, how's this for punctual? Don't tell my potential employers—we hadn't used any form of machinated transportation in nearly five weeks. The seven-hour bus ride was mostly uneventful. We only hit one government truck full of school children.

In Amritsar, a large, dusty city near the Pakistani border, we spent two nights in pilgrims' quarters beside the Golden Temple, the Mecca or Vatican of the Sikh religion. Just about every day since we left I've been trying to think of a way to articulate that experience accurately.

Entering the clamoring temple grounds, the overwhelming din of metal on metal to my right sounded like an exuberant rendition of Stomp. After choosing our "bed," or raised board with one pillow which we were to share in the overcrowded foreigners' section of the free hostel, we took off our shoes (not allowed on the temple's sacred marble walkways), covered our heads (a mandatory sign of respect), and ventured across to find out what the tin clamoring was really all about.

Sikhism is an astoundingly generous faith, born partially out of a movement to do away with Hinduism's caste system. Just as everyone of any station can sleep in the free hostel, everyone who visits the temple is invited to dine in the massive, sacred dining hall that precedes the temple. Rolling up our jeans to keep them out of the sacred mush of dal and curry constantly being mopped off the marble floor, we walked in, washed our hands, received huge metal plates, a spoon, and a bowl for water. Up a set of stairs, the steady but orderly flow of people take seats on the floor in line after line after line.

Volunteers come by one by one: First, chapatti (Indian bread), then ladles full of dal, rice pudding, and some sort of aloo (potato dish) or paneer (cheese curd dish). The food splatters in every direction, especially if you aren't holding your spoon when it gets dumped on. After the initial adjustment to eating food thrown at you from above while you sit bewildered on the floor, I have to say that this is one of the coolest cultural experiences I've had. I say that even though one night the clean-up crew sent food-scrap-spray from the mop over what remained of my food, and an Indian friend we'd met saw me cringe and feign fullness. "It's holy food," he told me with a straight face, "you have to eat it all." And I did.

After cleansing their bare feet, pilgrims walk into the temple. The temple itself is actually rather small, with marble walls and magnificently maintained gold plaiting that reflects in a large mote surrounding it. Visitors walk around the holy pond, pausing at certain sacred monuments, washing themselves in the water and generally being clamorous—a Sikh we met in Mcleod Ganj told us Sikhs are some of the loudest people in the world, and she's right. Over loudspeakers, setting the mood and giving the din an unmistakable air of worship, live Sikh hymns are played from inside the temple.

There are so many small things going on inside the temple grounds. First, people were staring at us. A lot. As usual. More than once, mothers pushed their children in front of me and told them to say "hello" and shake my hand. One guy asked us to take pictures with him… then asked us to email the pictures, ostensibly so he could use them to pretend he knew some Americans when he tried to immigrate, which he then asked us how to do. "I was born in America, sir, I really don't know the process…"

The most fascinating part for me, again aware of the chaste Catholic boxes I put things into, was a portion of the water designated for nearly naked bathing (for men only, of course) in the holy water. All the hair they've ever grown (Sikhs don't cut their hair, shave, or shape their eyebrows. They believe all of your hair was given to you by God and is therefore a gift you should not mess with) remains wrapped up in a turban, while they strip down, hand their clothes to compliant wives or children, and go for a dip with their friends. I found myself wide-eyed during our first walk past. Thereafter, I tried to keep my eyes glued to my bare feet on the marble, afraid of seeing a towel slip as they changed in the open back into dry clothes.

I made friends with three young Sikh girls visiting the temple on their weekend holiday. They befriended me because I sat down, exhausted after all of our traveling followed by trying to sleep on half of a board with half of a pillow—Sikhs must not sleep, because the noise doesn't diminish at all, 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. share the same decibel. Anyway, the girls approached me because I sat in the universal position of misery, knees pulled to chest and my head resting on them. "Are you sad?" was their introduction.

The three cousins were really eager to tell me about the customs that affect their life. The oldest was a little bit younger than me, in her second year studying electronics at university. The younger two were still in high school. They were amazed that I was alone, that my parents weren't worried about me—I tried to explain that they probably were, but there's not much they can do. This conversation quickly landed on the topic of arranged marriages, which all three will probably have, even though the oldest has a boyfriend she isn't telling her parents about.

"It's very frustrating, but our parents just worry about us, and want to make sure we end up with someone who will take care of us," the oldest explained to me. "Well, maybe when you have daughters you can give them more freedom," I suggested hopefully (or dumbly?) "No, we'll probably be worried then, too!" At this comment the youngest shook her head vigorously. Not her. She looks with disdain at her strikingly orange sari when I express how jealous I am of their beautiful clothing. This 14-year-old, like her counterparts all over the world, doesn't like wearing what her parents want her to wear. The spark in her eye says she'd give anything for a pair of tight jeans and a "love marriage," as they qualify them.

(I had serious sari-envy at the temple. It may have been the fact that I was—still—wearing my jeans with increasingly large holes in the side, and a 2006 Drake Relays hoodie that saw its better days… in 2006.)

I haven't had the opportunity to post photos, but you can find Jason's shots of the temple, along with other events of the trip, here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pastelnino/TripToDharamsalaDelhiMumbaiMcLeodGanjAndIndiaAtLarge02

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Leaving India

2010-02-19T02:49:00.001-08:00

A series of days have been happening to me for a few weeks now, and I find that today is the last of those in Mcleod Ganj. Whether this emotion has any place in the constitution of a worthy international journalist (probably not), a few weeks of immersion rendered me momentarily unable to process everything going on around me. Struck with the realization that I'll soon be back in the land of the Great Firewall, it seems prudent that I lay down some reflections.

Beggars make me sad about myself, because they make me think about myself at all when clearly they are the ones without hands, or feet, or enough money to buy milk for their babies. Looking at a person who clearly doesn't have the resources to work on her own—who in India wants to hire the old woman with nubs at the end of her arms?—my first instinct is to try to assuage my guilt. Why doesn't the government help her? Why doesn't that guy who looks richer than me help her? Etc, etc. Obviously, the problem of poverty and inadequate resources for the handicapped in developing countries runs deeper than my self-involved blogging, so I won't attempt to dissect it here. It just sucks. I should do something about it. You should do something about it.

On a related note, I made a concerted effort to give my money to businesses run by those who looked just a few days away from asking for the cash without anything to offer in return. I know you've seen the commercials, but the equivalent of $60 in the hands of a displaced man struggling to sell jewelry off of a table constructed over a sewer really can render him speechless. then again, as Jason reminds me, I don't know where/how those jewels were mined. Everyone's life would be so much easier if everyone was so much kinder.

The Tibetan situation is frustrating, as any Tibetan will readily explain to you. Jason & I both scored private audiences with members of the Tibetan government-in-exile as part of our research for stories we wrote for Lha's monthly magazine. They're running a legit establishment up here in India's Himalayan foothills. They're keeping a close eye (as close as possible) on the fate of their countrymen and women in Tibet. Yet they're working 9-5, as one dissenter and fabulously bearded man told me, on what is, for many Tibetans, a life or death issue. The Dalai Lama will die, and this government with no bargaining chips on the global playing field (except this one: "Hey guys, torture hurts. Like, a lot. Especially electrocution. Please help.") will have its hands full trying to harness the pain of millions of Tibetans, to remind them that nonviolence is golden.

"Don't worry about it too much," Tashi told me in one of our conversation classes. The other day as we climbed a couple hours past the mountain snowline, he reiterated his first lesson to me, the day after we arrived here. Our enemy is our own anger. Your body is a guesthouse, a convenient vessel for you to do as much good as you can while you're here, not for you to use worrying about material things, including illusory homelands. Still, it's difficult to return to China, where admittedly my biggest physical hurdle will be finding a functional proxy to access Facebook, knowing seventy percent of imprisoned Tibetans are monks and nuns put in jail for protesting peacefully and requesting basic rights.

I acquired food poisoning pretty early on, but I've been eating right through it. It became kind-of a game, really, to see if I could eat enough to make input greater than output through sheer volume. Last week I broke down and went to a Tibetan doctor, who prescribed herbal pills that taste like dirt, which I have to chew (chew! three dirt pills!) at every meal. Not knowing exactly what made me sick, I wouldn't take back a single potentially infested meal. Indian food is magical. The presence of properly cooked western food, also magical.

February 14 marked the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year (coincidentally the same day as China's this year, though not always). Jason's student invited us to spend the holiday with his family—wife, brother, and three kids sleeping and eating in one room, with an attached kitchen and bathroom—an experience that involved basically sitting still and stuffing our faces with biscuits, candy, fruit, momos (Tibetan dumplings) and more tea than one should consume in a year, for about six hours straight. Felt just like an American holiday. As a thank-you, his student wrote us each a card (this guy just learned the ABC's four weeks ago) and his son drew me a picture of the entire family, which beats any photograph. I had to send the card, along with many other Tibetan gifts and souvenirs, home to my parents, because I can't bring any of it back into China.

We've met a pile of the most outgoing, kindhearted people one could hope to meet in the world. People from every corner (often from multiple corners at once), here to concentrate on their own work, meditate, help the refugee community or the local community, find themselves, nurture discarded puppies, practice yoga, learn about organic, small-scale farming, be of knowledge and be of use. I hope our paths chance to cross again, but often that's not the case. We all just take our cultural enrichment and run, better for the conversation, gallons of chai, and unexpected company.

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Oh, The People You'll See

2010-02-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

As I’ve mentioned, there is a wide array of Westerners living in or visiting Dharamsala, drawn by altruism, pilgrimage, tourism, or the pursuit of some downright wholesome hash. Some of them are strikingly normal. Like Courtney, an Australian girl we met at lunch yesterday who accompanied us to a nearby waterfall (watertrickle.) and regaled us with stories of her solo travels throughout India. Or Milton, a retired English teacher from Arkansas who Jason assists with the advanced English class at Lha.

Others are a bit quirky or, at the very least, fun to look at. They’ve assimilated bits of Indian and Tibetan dress into their daily ensemble in the most curious of ways—dhotti pants, furry moccasins, “Free Tibet” scarf and a blanket/shawl wrapped around them expertly. My favorite one of these was a whole family of tourists, Mom, Dad, Daughter #1 and Daughter #2. Mom and both Daughters seemed to acquire a new, matching article each day, so that they were wearing Jamaican-inspired, Indian-made red, yellow and green jackets the first day we saw them, covering them with elaborately embroidered yak-leather vests the next day, and finally, after the Long Life Puja at the temple last weekend, ceremonial white scarves draped over it all.

After seeing these ensembles parading around for more than two weeks now, I didn’t think anything would surprise me. Then I saw The Most Beautiful Woman I Have Ever Seen (Really, Ever. In My Entire Life.)

An English woman, in her late sixties, perhaps, with brown and grey dreadlocks not much younger than her. Not just any dreadlocks, but dreads tied together on the top of her head, Pebbles-style, with a huge, floppy pink bow. Select dreads were wound with that really silky fabric that sometimes covers the cuddliest of stuffed animals, in a variety of colors. Her jacket incorporated green, purple, blue, and orange (heavy on the orange) in an 80’s-type design with those bizarre z’s and paint speckles all over it. The orange parts specifically had an amateurish sponge-painted look to them. Underneath, a fuchsia sweater, jeans, and pink Crocs that almost matched the sweater. She tied it together with an oversized wristwatch and a pile of hemp and beaded bracelets. I managed to note this much through sideways glances at a restaurant, and when I chanced one full-on stare I noticed there also seemed to be pieces of tinsel—the Christmas tree kind—wound into a few of her dreads, as well.

People are so beautiful.

Tashi

2010-02-01T22:34:00.000-08:00

So this former HP consultant turned nun from Minnesota put this little, adorable black puppy into my lap, then led us down the street to purchase shampoo, milk, and bowls before we even knew what happened. Only when little Tashi was unleashed in our guestroom and promptly peed under the bed did I realize what we had done.

“I feel like a teenager who wanted a baby because they’re cute,” I remarked as he began to gnaw on Jason’s shoestring (which he later politely regurgitated at Jason’s feet). Parenting 101 became even more real when Jason began to bathe him and ended up so drenched and soapy that he might as well have bathed himself in the process. Tashi is a common Tibetan first name, and also part of their everyday greeting. Yes, this is a little bit like naming your child “Hello,” except Tashi means “good luck” or “auspiciousness,” and they love all things auspicious. So, our little guy was lucky to be in from the cold and the fat, greedy street dogs, and was named accordingly.

Tashi fit comfortably in my arms, and there were very few places I couldn’t take him—his primary activity in public was sleeping on my lap, charming everyone with his grunts and wiggles. At the guesthouse, though, the world was his playground. He made sincere efforts to remove Jason’s digits, ears, and nose with his sharp little teeth, and was equally determined to poop in the most inaccessible places under the bed. We often took him up on the roof to play, play here meaning to eat every piece of fuzz, dirt, or paint chip he could sniff out. He took quickly to me as his mother, and the instant he became tired he would seek out my lap and collapse into it, unconscious before his head hit the thigh.

Although we were in love with him from the moment the stranger deposited him in my lap, it was evident that we could not accommodate him in our one tiny room—let alone afford the $150 per flight, plus veterinary bills, to bring our wayward pet home with us. He charmed his way into the hearts of all of our ex-pat friends over the course of the next few days. Everyone “Would love to take him but…” and “Don’t get rid of him just yet, I might know someone who…” Westerners are infamous in these parts for our soft spot for dogs, and I knew that, despite everyone’s best efforts, they were unlikely to find locals who wanted to take care of a needy, 6- or 8-week-old puppy.

After three days of newspaper covered floors and 60-minute sleeping cycles all night long, we made the difficult decision to just take him to the only animal charity in town, which nurses puppies until they look big enough to compete with the other dogs and then releases them into the streets. I consoled myself with the idea that we could at least visit him there and maybe help take care of the other dogs. On our way, we stopped for lunch at a rooftop Indian restaurant, where Tashi got his own plate of fried eggs, what I thought might be his last substantial meal.

Somehow, his ravenous gobbling tugged at the heartstrings of the restaurant’s well-dressed owner, who said he had been looking for a nice male puppy—he could only find females, and he didn’t want to deal with more pups down the line. The fact that Tashi comfortably peed right next to our table and then went and pooped in the corner didn’t dissuade him at all, and as we paid our bill Tashi gleefully followed him behind the counter and began sniffing out his new digs.

Sunday night’s clueless new parent emotions gave way Wednesday night to pangs of empty nest syndrome, as Jason and I sat on the bed missing his whine to join us and chew our fingers/hair/clothes/blankets to shreds. Our human friend Tashi, a monk with a soft spot for all animals who can’t understand why Westerners don’t take home pigs and cows so readily, questioned our actions but hinted that perhaps we racked up some good karma for finding the puppy a safe home.

Long Life Puja

2010-01-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

The young monks scurried silently around the open-air temple, passing out disposable cups and then filling them with butter tea. Unfortunately for all arteries involved, butter tea, a Tibetan staple, is exactly what it sounds like—hot tea seasoned with a large dollop of yak butter. The crowd, piled on the ground upon endless rows of cushions, was attentive to the tea distribution, but many also continued humming the mantras led by the Dalai Lama, who was seated with other important monks inside the regally adorned inner temple.

The three-hour ceremony, called a long life puja, is a centuries-old ritual meant to strengthen and purify the bond between a guru (teacher) and his students. The tea, followed by small plates of rice and, finally, a myriad of biscuits, bread, chips, and fruit, symbolizes an offering to the Dalai Lama, the most important guru for many Tibetan Buddhists. While the edible offerings are shared ceremoniously with the crowd, a queue of worshipers and government officials snaked out of the inner temple, waiting to present their fantastically wrapped offerings while the chants continued unabated (save the occasional microphone-enhanced cough and wheeze from an aging Dalai Lama.)

The Long Life Puja Fund explains that this ritual “purifies the relationship between teacher and disciple, and creates the merit for the teacher to remain among us. Since all realization depends on the blessing and guidance of the teacher, this ritual offering practice is extraordinarily precious.” Precious, but sweetly baffling to an American Catholic accustomed to unleavened bread—which I have to get off my cushion to receive!

At times overwhelmed by the proceedings, I noted in my journal that it felt like the only thoroughly foreign ritual I’ve experienced in all of my traveling. Somehow, the genuine students didn’t seem to mind my presence. During one prayer, a nun seated nearby showed a group of Brazilians and me how to contort our fingers together before having them filled with uncooked rice, which we tossed in the air for good luck when the mantra changed.

If I was out of place at all, others were there to deflect attention. The token psychotropic-drug-using hippie with graying, greasy locks walked in endless circles around the inner temple, his eyes nearly rolled back in his head as he clutched gaudy, psychedelic statues of gods in either hand. Truthfully, no one seemed that bothered by him, either. They were there to experience communion with their spiritual leader.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, the famously smiling Dalai Lama emerged from the inner temple, flanked by a colorful security force, dressed alternatively in ceremonial robes, three-piece suits, Indian military uniforms, or plainclothes. He managed to lean his hands out in blessing a few times as he walked down the aisle, and an interaction with some children to my right made everyone laugh. Because his likeness smiles down from every guesthouse, restaurant, and café in town, it seemed so natural to see him standing there, perma-laughter in his eyes despite his age. I confess I was moved only by the obvious spiritual tug felt by the community around me.

Footnote: In conversation class on Monday, I tried to find out what the specific chants meant, but the monks surprised me with smiles and abashed shrugs. “There are thousands of mantras in Buddhism, you can’t expect us to know exactly what they all mean!”

Do nuns have fur? And other English adventures in Mcleod Ganj.

2010-01-23T03:50:00.000-08:00

Gyatsen Choesang and Gyatsen Chodon share one small, blue-walled room just down the mountain from Mcleod Ganj. A gas stove surrounded by mismatched kitchen utensils and simple food sits on one end. Across the room, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama smiles down from a bookshelf crowded with holy texts, Tibetan flags, and elementary English books. Seven small bowls are filled with water as a prayer offering, and a Pringles can full of incense sits on a small table, also surrounded by Tibetan regalia.

We’re sitting on Choesang’s bed, pronouncing our way through an animated children’s dictionary syllable by syllable. “Fur. Animals have fur. This dog has soft fur.” The nuns repeat the sentence slowly, and then look at me quizzically—what is this, fur? Illustrating that “fur” is the hair on animals, I touch some of my own hair. The nuns touch their neatly buzzed heads and laugh mirthfully. “Ours is much less fur,” they giggle. After about 20 new words, they offer me hot water and a basket full of butter cookies. We switch to reading a Tibetan children’s story, “Snowlion.”

Depending on how I phrase the question, Choesang fled Tibet when she was 16 or 25. She is in her thirties now, learning English so she can communicate with Dharamsala’s constantly replenished foreign community, and also so she can read Western philosophy to expand her studies. But first, we concentrate on the story of Tenzin, a poor firewood gatherer who receives a modest amount of gold from a magical stone snowlion, and his friend Tashi, who greedily tried to get too much gold, causing it all to disappear. The old legend feels familiar. It seems even possession-denouncing Buddhists can appreciate a good rags-to-riches-and-the-greedy-man-falls story.

I leave just before lunch and begin the trek back up to town from their room, a journey I hope to someday complete without wheezing audibly. The narrow path meanders past cows, goats, the occasional young Indian hoodlum who almost hits me with a firecracker (we both giggle when I jump), a tattoo shop that I’m sure doesn’t charge extra for the hepatitis, and a handful of locals I didn’t know six days ago, who now greet me with a cheerful, “Hello/Namaste/Tashi Delek/Where are you going?” Near the top of the path, a shop sign reads, "Daily Need's Shop," and the English nerd in me chuckles anew every day at the thought that the shop belongs to a Mr. Daily Need.

At the afternoon conversation hour, I hear Jason’s stentorian voice covering topics as varied as the American banking system, atheism, and thermodynamics with monks and high school students (he swears they asked.) I’m witnessing the strangest debate I’ve ever heard, between a middle-aged monk who thinks the world would be a better, more peaceful place without religion, and a teenaged lay Buddhist who insists that we need religion because it makes people feel good in their hearts and minds. The teenager is brave for taking on his elder, and his impassioned speech slips into Tibetan when he can’t find the words he needs to express religious ideas. Yesterday, I taught the word “intangible” to a group of monks trying to explain to me where the soul is located in the body.

Jason and I are tasting our way through the town, alternating between Indian, Tibetan, and pleasantly accurate, if not authentic, Italian food. With it’s delightfully earth-toned buckets of aloo splattered on roti, Jason commented that Indian food “looks like something they just found on the ground and made delicious,” which is probably a pretty accurate description of what happened. Tibetan food reflects the simplicity of ingredients available on the Tibetan plateau—you can even drink tea flavored with yak butter, for a truly authentic experience. A full meal for both of us, including chai, costs around three dollars.

My enemy is my own anger.

2010-01-19T02:19:00.001-08:00

“I know all that’s true, but…”

“But meat is so tasty!” The young monk finished my sentence, breaking into a wide smile that accentuated his sharp cheekbones. His eyes shone with genuine amusement, instantly relived of the gravity they held as we discussed the case for vegetarianism. Although he was a teenager when he made his dangerous Himalayan trek to escape Tibet and enter a monastery, he didn’t give up meat until recently. “Once I fully understand that my body can be nourished without harming that other body, if I know I will stay alive without killing, it is bad for my karma to keep doing,” he explains in near-perfect English.

We met at Lha Social Work’s daily English conversation hour, where Tibetans, Australians, Canadians, one traveler from Finland, and we Americans sat in small circles and shared our thoughts on hobbies, politics, and lifestyle choices.

“You live in China? What is it like there? Have you been to Tibet?” A 29-year-old woman, also a refugee since her teen years, breathes this last bit excitedly, her eyes twinkling with envy, until I explain that I live very far from there, and foreigners are only allowed to go with a special permit as part of a tour group, which is very expensive. Still, the fact remains—I can go to her homeland legally, if with some effort, while she risks imprisonment or execution if she tries to return.

She and the monk are surprised to hear that many of my Chinese friends disagree with their government and don’t hesitate to dissent, at least in conversations with foreigners. They’re also interested to know that I couldn’t read anything about Tibet or Dharamsala without using a proxy to avoid government censors. As I explain my work in China and my motivation for going, I’m a little anxious. I knew this would come up, but I hadn’t envisioned the reality of looking into the deep eyes of two refugees on my third full day in India, explaining my relationship to their oppressor. Do they think I’m an ally to their enemy? Am I?

The monk seems to sense my discomfort. Without prompting, he offers his own beliefs about enemies, not arrived at without some effort. “My enemy is my own anger,” he says. “The Chinese have done bad things in Tibet, but the Chinese people are not my enemies. My only true enemy, keeping me from happiness, is my own anger.”

Less of a pilgrim than many of the dreadlocked, prayer-bead clasping Westerners in Dharamsala, I really just came here to be useful. So while it shouldn’t, jumping so quickly from politics to inner peace throws me. Really, he just takes out invasion and occupation on himself? Again sensing my unease, the wise smile returns, the big laugh as he clarifies, “Of course, it isn’t ever easy.” This student of Buddha confesses that sometimes, even though he knows violence will never beget peace, he is hopeful when he hears of Palestinian action against Israel (Local sentiment seems to stress solidarity between the situations in the two nations.)

As the hour ends, I concede that I have a lot to learn. Not least of all, some yoga basics would help me sit cross-legged for an hour like my partners without my toes falling asleep and my hips throbbing. Inner peace may follow.

An Afternoon in Majnu Ka Tilla

2010-01-15T22:22:00.000-08:00

The minute we emerged from the Delhi airport, I was grasping. Overwhelming traffic, like Beijing. On the left side of the road, like Belfast. Crowded, dusty, dizzying, like San Salvador or Managua. Resembling cities I’ve seen before, yet cumulatively, I realized in an instant, like nothing I’ve yet experienced. Roads are shared by cars, rickshaws—auto and bike-drawn, students in burgundy uniforms, women in multi-colored saris, city busses with passengers hopping on and off at will, regardless of motion, and the occasional zebu (think ox, but bigger, and with a camel-like hump behind the head.)

Dust seems to be the pervading material characteristic of the city, so our guestroom’s pervading characteristic, dampness, was unexpected. A coating of dawn-when-camping moisture sits on our sheets, pillow, and towel. My only other experience with Lonely Planet-reviewed accommodation was in Europe, where “reasonably clean rooms” meant there might be dust bunnies in the corners. Jason reveals to me with a giggle and a tug of the curtain that “reasonably clean rooms” in Majnu Ka Tilla, Delhi, means you’re lucky the Mamma Pigeon built her nest and filled it with eggs on the outside of the window screen, rather than above your head. So the window stays open.

We need a ride to the ATM at Delhi University. A man, noticeably shorter and thinner than myself, offers to take us on his rickshaw. It’s a bike-drawn bench just wide enough for the two of us, with bars on the side and a tin covering over our heads. So we emerge into the aforementioned traffic, and I observe his childishly thin legs as he lurches forward. Pulling 280+ lbs uphill requires him to snap his whole 100 lb body forward, leaning all of his weight, standing, onto each peddle. This is his job, but I can’t help taking stock of Jason’s stature and thinking maybe he should get on the bike. But the truth is, I doubt either of us could’ve done it. Our driver dismounts and runs to make a quick right turn through four lanes of traffic. When we arrive, he’s whistling, not even winded.

We ordered thukpa and thenthuk, two popular Tibetan soups. The first was a delicious vegetable soup with long, thin noodles, full of a wave of various vegetable and spice flavors. The other had hand-pulled homemade noodle squares in a spicy vegetable broth, perfect for the chilly evening and my famished stomach that’d been subsisting on airport or airplane food for two days. Some of the foreigners we met during our airplane adventures recommended going vegetarian in India, to increase our chances of avoiding what the expats call “Delhi Belly.” If these soups are any indication, I doubt we’ll miss the meat.

It’s still my first day, so I feel somewhat entitled to be a jaw-gaping tourist, though I do my best to suppress it. At dinner, I’m enraptured by a beautiful Buddhist nun at the table next to us. Her crimson robe and shaved head seem a bold declaration that she’s made a serious commitment to the rest of her days, and she wears it comfortably, humbly. I’m wearing sweats and a winter coat I can’t convince myself to part with even though it’s fifty degrees outside. Travel-greasy hair, which I twisted into a million anxious, fascinated knots on the drive here, hangs unimpressively in my eyes. I’ve made no such commitments. I just woke up in India and decided to try the food.

Also, I posted this myself for the first time since September. Hooray for the absence of censorship!

Your Estimated Time of Arrival Is.

2010-01-15T22:20:00.000-08:00

I generally make an effort not to dwell on transportation mishaps, as the best travel writers seldom bore their readers with the ins and outs of navigating a bus schedule (half of our time in Harbin was spent walking nowhere and riding the bus the wrong way to the outer extremities of a humongous city. Wanna hear about it? No?) However, I’ve decided it’s worth noting that our red-eye flight from Shanghai, forecasted to land in Delhi at 2:45 a.m., unceremoniously flew past and landed in Mumbai, it’s second destination, instead. My worst traveling fear, of falling asleep in transit and waking up in the wrong city, was realized.

Our company made the indefinite delay tolerable. We met Ramon, a button and zipper salesman (more exotic than it sounds) from Netherlands, a collection of Indian students who just finished medical school in Shanghai, and a lovely Chinese businesswoman who let me use her cell phone to inform our driver that we’d be indefinitely late. He took the eleven-hour delay as an opportunity to do absolutely nothing at the airport and then charge us for eleven hours of parking. When we finally arrived in Delhi, we heard an almost-thorough announcement that another flight would arrive late. At the end of the message, the announcer said, “The estimated time of arrival is.” Is. Is we have no idea so we’re not going to say anything. The Indians in line were stoic, unphased, while travel-weary and delirious Westerners doubled over laughing.

The Here and Now is Coming Round

2010-01-10T13:59:00.001-08:00

When the year turned in China, I was sitting in my narrow living room with Jason, Becky and Sara, attempting to pop a huge bottle of champagne that essentially tastes like a drop of fruit juice mixed with bai jiu (Chinese liquor, or, the grossest thing ever deemed consumable.)

The four of us trolled through Billboard’s best of the decade lists, musing at the fact that this is the first turn of a decade we’ve been functionally conscious for, remembering who we were crushing on when “You Got it Bad” was big, considering the raunchy lyrics of R. Kelly’s “Remix to Ignition” that provided the background for some of high school’s greatest moments, applauding Justin Timberlake’s ability to stay afloat, nay improve, post N’Sync, and recalling which frat basement we were dancing in to “Gold Digger” this time four years ago. Also, noting that we haven’t even heard of some of the artists in the week’s top 40—we really have been gone awhile.

True, our New Year’s celebration was exceptionally tame. Our rowdy crew has dwindled in the past month, aided by an English buddy insinuating that some girls at a KTV were prostitutes and instigating a fight that landed a Chinese friend and a couple waiguoren at the police station, veritably guaranteeing that the rest of us won’t be permitted to remain in Chengde one second past the end of our teaching contract. We’re trying to keep a low profile.

In my first significant act of the decade, I went as close to Siberia as I ever hope to be. Sara, Becky and I ventured up to Harbin, where the current low is -23 F, and tomorrow’s forecasted low is -32 F, for their Ice and Snow Festival. I invested in some warm and amusing knock-off apparel for the occasion—I am the proud owner of a “Lumbia” coat, complete with the Columbia snowflake logo, and also a pair of rather legit-looking Ugg boots, which I really wish said “Gugg” like the ones I saw in Chengde last week.

The city of Harbin remains in a deep freeze until March, which entitles them to build an entire ice amusement park on an island, complete with a several-stories-tall bottle of Harbin beer, the local brew. In addition to ice buildings, snow sculptors create scaled replicas of monuments like the Egyptian Sphinx. I thought I was just going to freeze my tail off and get a few cool pictures, but the festival was more interactive than that—every other sculpture featured steps up and often-enormous ice slides to the bottom. The Hollywood Hill was sculpted in snow, and a line of children and adults waited to sled down it.

Harbin is unique in China because it has a history of Russian involvement, which is visible in some of its downtown architecture and restaurants. At a Russian café decorated like your grandmother’s living room—or a curious antiques museum, if your grandmother isn’t the type to pile old photos on the wall and keep curio cabinets full of old cameras or a cabinet devoted to delicious vodkas—I had borscht that I would almost accuse of being authentic, and some tiny Russian cookies that followed it perfectly. I assume the actual Russians dining there were paid for adding to the legitimacy of the place.

The park in the city center has a themed extension of the island festival. This year it was Disney themed—the On Ice variety, of course. All the princesses, and a row of villains, were sculpted in snow. When I get to India next week and am finally able to post pictures, I will throw up some Disney trivia, because I have a picture of a snow villain that I swear I’ve never seen before. Free postcard if you can tell me who it is. I have a picture in front of Ariel’s frozen ocean palace, which is enough for me to concede that it was worth wearing two layers of tights under my jeans for a couple days. I also experienced the pleasure of a sleeper train back from Harbin, which was tolerable except that I woke up in an absolute panic, thinking that I actually was heading to my freezing death in Siberia.

Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but at the beginning of November I thought to myself, “These next two months are going to be the hardest.” The daylight dwindled, and as the temperatures hung out below zero I spent as little time as possible outside the apartment. We all did our best to create ample holiday cheer while not thinking too hard about it being the holidays. Those months survived, I am incredibly excited for the next segment of my journey, which begins Thursday when Jason and I leave for six weeks in India. I’m excited about the whole trip but, notably for you, I’ll finally be able to post to my own blog and put up pictures from the last 5 months.

Happy New Year!

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and all Through the Club…

2009-12-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

The power’s out, so our private room is lit by a collection of tall candles, held in place by the beer bottles we’ve already emptied. The feast isn’t traditional Christmas Eve fare, but it’s certainly one of the best meals we’ve had in awhile. Fish, deer, noodles of questionable origin—“It’s made from a plant,” my friend Daisy translates imprecisely—vegetables, cold and hot.

A small Christmas miracle, our set menu includes shrimp and some meat supposedly gleaned from a cow—delicacies that stand in for my mom’s “surf and turf” Christmas Eve spread. A bigger Christmas miracle, there’s a downpour of snow blanketing the streets, which is beautiful for the ten minutes before it gets covered in perpetual pollution dust. Perhaps not miraculous, but simply amazing: Some guy is moonwalking in the street when we rush to the window to watch the snow fall.

Sara, another teacher from Drake, celebrates her birthday on December 24, and her university’s kitchen made her a fantastically huge cake to share with eleven people. As we ate, I played Christmas carols from my cell phone. The students we invited were wide-eyed with entertainment (or fear?) as we bounded cheerfully through “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!” and turned momentarily somber when “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” came on.

I thought by now I’d seen all of Chengde’s seedy corners—there aren’t many corners at all, and few of them are exceptionally seedy—but Sara’s desire to dance lead us to the “KoKo Love,” Chengde’s only dance club. The building looks like an old bank or something similarly stately. I fell walking up the fake-marble staircase. Twice. Once when we unknowingly tried to go up without a ticket, and again after we purchased them. So, let that stand in for the inevitable slipping on the icy ramp that would have happened at St. John’s in Houghton on Christmas Eve. That’s probably the last parallel I can make between this experience and the other twenty-two Christmas Eves in my life.

The marquis behind the DJ flashed “Merry Christmas!” every few moments, as slightly chubby Chinese men threw their weight back and forth on the dance floor. A floor which, like many things around here, felt like it was about to snap and drop us into a sweaty, dusty pile on the first floor. Thankfully the men were less forward than American guys at a bar—no groping, grinding, etc—they just stood nearby and rocked their chubby bodies while smiling creepily at us. “These Chinese guys, they’re really just too much sometimes. Really, honestly, Too Much,” was Richard’s expert analysis of the situation. He, as the only foreign guy with four foreign ladies, may have made this comment after some gangster tried to buy the four of us from him. But I can’t be sure.

Sometime shortly before midnight, I covertly stole a basket of popcorn from a nearby table where a couple was making out. Cate promptly spilled the basket all over the floor, and Becky followed it up by accidentally dashing her half-full bottle of beer on top of it. Yes, at the stroke of midnight Christmas day, I was dancing in a pile of soggy popcorn, beer and broken glass while Lady Gaga was remixed China-style in a smoky club. Happy Birthday, Jesus.

"Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. -Liz Gilbert"

2009-12-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

A month's worth of novel-ing left me less committed to verbatim honesty and more interested in entertaining myself with my writing. Early feedback on my most recent post suggests that a disclaimer is necessary.

While I did my best to elaborate upon my understanding of economics for Mr. Lei, I did so with humility and assured him that I am by no means qualified to break down a nation’s economic policies. He’s an incredibly smart individual and I know I’m not his primary source for information.

Although it would have entertained me greatly, I did not tell Mr. Zhang that all republicans think humans had pet dinosaurs back in the day. And I certainly didn’t bring up sexuality. But I could have.

When my students ask me, “What’s good?” I do tell them what I think is good, or, if I’ve gotten to know them well, I can better consider what they might think is good. While an entertainment critic could be inclined to disagree, I feel there’s nothing more subjective than one’s choice of media diversion. My students are bright. I think they get this.

My intention in the post was to convey the absurdity I feel when constantly responding to inquiries as though I’m a lifetime Gallup employee. Although I often feel like it is expected of me, I don’t presume to represent 304,059,724 Americans with my every whimsical statement.

The Perks of Being a Foreign Expert

2009-12-14T08:45:00.001-08:00

“America is a very powerful nation. It seems to me, you are very strong and wealthy. So, can you tell me why the economic collapse?”

“Well, um, there were many reasons…”

“Yes, but I don’t know any. Please explain it to me.”

Mr. Lei summarizes the American conundrum in three almost-grammatically-correct sentences. You’re very powerful. You’re strong, and you’re wealthy. How could you let things go to shit like this? I’m not an economist. And the degree I hold didn’t automatically make me a journalist, so I can’t even claim that. I’m just an English teacher, but here I go.

“Well, there’s this thing called predatory lending… and there were all these bad mortgages that led to foreclosed homes…why don’t we have jobs? Well, sir, they’re all here… Yes, did you know we owe you, with your charade of being a poor, underdeveloped nation, billions of dollars?”

It took several days and one invasive, uncomfortable medical examination, but shortly after arriving in China I was presented with a miniature passport, sealed by the P.R.C.’s State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. I am, by government decree, an expert on all things foreign. Mr. Lei is only one of the university professors who expects me to spell out America’s problems in black and white, to defend with clarity the confusing mess that is my homeland.

“I think democracy is great, don’t you? Our situation sucks, we are not allowed to represent ourselves, only one party, one group to make decisions… power corrupts. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. So we are very corrupt, and can’t do anything about it.”

Mr. Zhang, an English teacher his students have dubbed “Mr. Right” because he is so opinionated, is expressing all of this to me on a crowded city bus. Curious about how much China has changed since the age of Mao? Mr. Zhang is the perfect caricature of a newer, more outspoken minority, though certainly not representative of the unwaveringly patriotic majority. Jason was so uncomfortable, he alternately answered questions and then pretended to have fallen asleep—on a 15-minute bus ride—to avoid going too deeply into the topic of democracy in public.

“If you are in a political party, which do you choose?”

“Democratic.”

“So you support Obama? Why?... How can you be so sure?... What is wrong with the other party?”

“The other party represents some views that I agree with, but I believe it’s been co-opted by religious fanatics who think humans had pet dinosaurs 4,000 years ago, and that religious figures who have spent their entire lives suppressing their sexuality are authorized to tell me what to do with mine…”

As you can see, there is ample room for me to indoctrinate on my own terms, and I simply can’t help it. When you’re asked these questions around the clock, giving P.C. answers becomes exhausting. Foreign expert-dom allows me to pass off all sorts of personal beliefs as legitimately, quintessentially American, and therefore trendy and desirable.

Among the students, I abuse the privilege by recommending my favorite movies and musicians when they ask for suggestions about what’s popular with American college students. I honestly have no idea, and rarely had any idea when I was in college. You want action movies? Watch the Borne trilogy. You want a musical? Try Across the Universe. Two of my sophomores are three seasons deep in Grey’s Anatomy. Because it helps them learn medical vocabulary, of course.

This week Jason & I taught Christmas carols. I’m sure the students would prefer the N’Sync Christmas album, but we’re going all classic—heavy on the Gene Autry, a touch of Judy Garland, and Nat King Cole. Some classes just look confused—this isn’t what pop music sounds like on the Internet—but a few choice students look like they might understand what it means to rock around the Christmas tree with Brenda Lee.

Farewell, November!

2009-11-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

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.

National Novel Writing Month

2009-10-28T07:10:00.000-07:00

Sometime last summer, I turned to Jason and said, “I wonder what you would look like with a beard.” “Terrible,” He promised. Somehow this conversation led to the decision that both of us would take part in that timeless college tradition, No Shave November. My participation was mostly for solidarity reasons—I’m lazy enough to know what my legs look like when I don’t shave for a while.

November ended tragically, with Jason assuming the role his scruffy red beard suggested, drinking beer in bed in a worn-out undershirt. Pictures are on Facebook, if you’re brave enough to find them.

Last year’s curiosity satiated, I stumbled upon a new challenge for us to undertake this November. It’s a little less passive, and a bigger challenge than kissing an extremely itchy face (gross.)

Between November 1st and 30th, we’re each going to attempt to write a 50,000-word novel as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a tradition in its eleventh year that I just stumbled upon last week in an email newsletter.

It works like this: You spend your days and nights writing, and at the end of the month you upload your work to the NaNoWriMo website. If you’ve reached 50,000 words, you can download a PDF certificate stating that you “won.” The novels don’t go anywhere, and aren’t necessarily read by anyone, although some projects started during this month have been published—one was a #1 New York Times bestseller.

At this point I can’t tell you much about either novel, except that Jason’s writing satire and my novel is set entirely in a kitchen. This may be all I’ll ever tell you, so use your imagination!

If it seems crazy to you, you’re probably right. But we’re significantly under-employed and we love to write. As the NaNoWriMo folks declare on their FAQ page, “Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.”

This Morning

2009-10-22T08:56:00.001-07:00

The weight of my blankets pressures me to stay in bed. I know the tiled floor is frigid, so I drop my hand to scoop up socks before moving another muscle. The steam from my water boiler fogs up the kitchen windows, trying to escape to the deceptively warm-looking sun.

My cell phone reveals the millionth message from David, our persistent, needy high school friend. “Hi Whitney. Weather is turning colder and colder. You must take care.” Maybe it’s all the Hollywood movies, but the Chinese refuse to believe that I’ve experienced cold before. I’m met with looks of pitying disbelief when I tell people that my home in Iowa is, in fact, colder than here. At least it was. Now it’s warmer. Tomorrow it will probably be colder again. Chengde’s weather is on some sort of steady axis I’ve never experienced. Once a warm temperature drops away, it won’t be reached again. If anything, it’s easier to deal with.

After breakfast I layer on the sweats and venture outside. The path inside the apartment wall is lined with the vegetable of the day, harvested from some hidden garden—last week it was leeks, this week it’s arugula. The wall, the windows, the stairs—everywhere, arugula.

I’ve never lived in a city that I didn’t prefer in the morning. I walk past the school, where parents and grandparents mill outside the gate, watching their kids meet up with friends or form rigid, green-uniformed lines to listen to the morning’s announcements. I laugh out loud at a small dog strolling by in a leopard-print suit with rhinestones.

On the corner of a busy intersection, men have an impromptu birds-and-cards gathering. They come out early in the morning carrying two wooden birdcages, connected by a board slung over their shoulders. Six or eight birds are lined up in their cages by the street, while the men play mahjong, chess or cards on a cardboard box. I don’t know why this is the meeting spot. Maybe it used to be something else—everything here was something else just a few short years ago—maybe the busy intersection was a park, and old men don’t care for change. When I walk past in an hour, they’ll be gone. The noise of the high-rise going up behind their post replaces the birds.

I’m pretty great at crossing the street now. The trick is, as I’ve suspected all along, to understand that your life is not as important as getting to your destination quickly. I step into traffic, preferably sandwiching myself between old people or small children, because drivers really don’t want to hit them. I shrug at horns and sing aloud whatever my iPod releases into my ears.

Across the street, fortunetellers on small stools line the sidewalk, the yin-yang that was emblematic of friendship necklaces in my childhood printed carefully on the posters in front of them, holding untold secrets. I don’t know if there’s a reason they congregate in front of the city hospital, but from my ear-plugged and ignorant American viewpoint, it sure does look like preying on the vulnerable. Occasionally I see them working, an elderly man squatting in front of a stool and extending a wrinkled palm to be deciphered.

If I brought 10 kuai with me, I could easily spend it on this 10-minute walk. Without splurging for an unintelligible palm reading, I could buy a whole, steamed-on-the-spot sweet potato or ear or corn, fruits both recognizable and exotic, toys dancing their way out of green plastic bags, socks, slippers and nail clippers laid out on strips of fabric. There are tiny caramel apples lined up on a stick, a fall delicacy, next to newspapers, magazines, and the omnipresent, vehement beggars—the same three every day.

No one else uses the gym in the morning. The gym is hilarious, and I love it. Every wall is adorned with cheap posters of (American) body builders, even though the only other patrons I’ve encountered are middle-aged women. When I walk down the stairs, a black man with bulging muscles grimaces at me. Upstairs, it’s Baywatch girls on steroids. Lots of steroids.

I run by natural light and the glow of the treadmill, pondering the billboard that hangs inside the retail building just across the alley. A grossly anglicized Chinese couple stands in sailing attire, ala Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger, and raises their eyes to the front of their yacht. Near the billboard, a Chinese flag whips in the wind. Above it all, some other community’s arugula is laid out on the roof.

More Ups Than Downs

2009-10-15T07:46:00.001-07:00

Some families claim closeness via metaphorical bodily references. “You’re in my heart,” “It runs in our blood,” or, “It’s in our bones.” A beautiful gift from our mother, my sisters* and I have something better, something tangible. It’s this lump in the back of our throats. You might have one too, although it’s unlikely that you’re as in touch with yours as we are. It takes practice. It takes a lot of crying. About everything, from the mildly frustrating to the truly elating, wherever it hits you—work, the grocery store, or, in the luckiest of situations, your own living room. Almost always unsuccessfully resisted, the lump wells up and burns in our throats, constricting and threatening to explode. One thing makes it burst every time: acknowledgement.

After a particularly challenging week, I should have seen it coming in my sister’s email. “Forgive me for noticing, but I could tell you were a bit... down.” Once acknowledged, it bursts, flooding the eyes and nose—often the saline just streams out of the pores at the eyebrows, the ducts too overwhelmed by the flood to direct everything properly. Of course she noticed. For those of you not connected to the express line to my emotions, I suppose full discloser is only fair: Sometimes, this is hard. Sometimes, I am down. Often, even when I am happiest, there is a lump in the back of my throat, daring challenge to present itself.

But so many things are not hard, and maybe I don’t give them enough attention. Everyone we meet, and even some we don’t meet, couldn’t be more excited to help us out. This week, Jason forgot his bag on the bus. The person who found it opened it, found a phone number for Jason’s student, and brought the bag to her at our campus the next morning so she could give it back to him. I know some places where this might have happened in America, but I’m also aware of many places where the story would’ve ended with Jason buying a new bag, not even bothering to hope for a kind stranger.

Genuine friendships are born daily, as we share lunch with students or as we walk into the street to get lunch (The street food vendors really want to talk to us now, and honestly I’m more motivated to learn the language because of this.) A student approached me in the hallway weeks ago to ask if I would help her practice English, and now we share meals almost daily. Her favorite exclamation, “Of course!” punctuates our Chinglish (heavy on the –glish) conversations.

The other foreigners in town know what it’s like to be parachuted into The Land That Keeps You On Your Toes. “I just feel like every day presents some simple task that I can’t accomplish,” I whined to an American friend who’s been here for years. I called her because I couldn’t find curry or oatmeal at the grocery store. “I still feel like that,” she replied honestly. It’s ok to feel like that. The day before, I enlisted her help filling out my gym membership forms because I couldn’t read them.

Every evening we finish teaching at 5:40 pm, just as the sun is setting behind the mountains that surround our campus. Darkness settles as the bus nears the city, and Chengde’s buildings glow with sporadically affixed neon lights that chase, blink, and sparkle—a display that is arguably a bit flashy for a town this small, but is at least aesthetically interesting. The building project under the river has progressed, and most nights there’s enough water in the formerly parched riverbed to reflect a neon glow from the bedazzled bridges.

My toilet works, my electricity is usually on, and even on the hardest days I couldn’t be happier.

*I don’t mean to exclude my brother from this profession of sibling camaraderie. He just has the good fortune of having inherited less estrogen.

Am I in the Wrong Classroom?

2009-10-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

I’m getting better at this. Some days, I even know which classroom to go to and which students will be there when I arrive. On the best of days, I walk away feeling like we all learned something.

Other days, professors approach me and try to remember their college English—which they haven’t used in years—while their students harass them from the hallway.
“Speak English, teacher!”
The professor stammers until I offer, “Am I in the wrong classroom?”
“Yes!”
So I leave, because he seems older and wiser than I am. His students file in, while mine begin to gather around me in the hallway, and we all stare in expectantly.
“Is there a problem?” the professor asks, finally.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure this is actually our classroom.”
“Oh, we’ll go somewhere else, then.”
He files out as his classroom full of boys snickers and trails behind.

It seems this one was on me. I should have asked someone, “Some of my classes haven’t met yet. Do you suppose someone else has been using our classroom in the interim?”

Still other days are like hide and seek, or lost and found. My students aren’t in classroom 4, because some kids are “having a meeting.” So I look first in 5, where we sometimes meet, and then in 2, where we met once. I find them in 3, where I’ve never been.

Someone could have mentioned that nothing is static; that your students will be in the general area of the fourth floor, wherever they can find space. Someone also could have mentioned that Friday is a special class, a blend of students from earlier classes who come for extra practice—a reality that involves planning a second lesson, or quick improv. Yes, someone could have mentioned it. But, more importantly, I should have asked.

I should have asked more questions from the very beginning. The questions are basic, and I can’t believe I’ve just caught on.
Number one: “How will my day be different than the schedule claimed it would be?”
Number two: “How will today be different from yesterday?”
Number three, if anyone can think this far ahead: “How will tomorrow be different from today?”

As the culture shock begins to fade away, the burden of personal accountability is increasingly clear. When I am walking down the street and I hear the ominous collecting of throat mucus behind me, it is not that guy’s responsibility to avoid spitting on me. It is my responsibility to stay out of his way if I don’t want to get spit on today. When I am walking toward a parent steadying her toddler so he can pee by the sidewalk, that parent has her hands full. It is up to me and only me to walk around the stream if I don’t want to get peed on today.

I expected—and still expect—to learn an enormous amount by living in a foreign environment. Somehow, I didn’t expect China to be a nation that would teach me so much about independence and personal accountability. The most exciting thing about residing in a different culture is anticipating the myriad of things I’ll eventually be wrong about.

Iowa Photography

2009-10-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

While the government ‘round here continues to be utterly indifferent to my communication needs (like they have billions of people to govern or something), I would like to give due credit to a wonderful friend who is channeling my writing to you. The lovely Nicole Jobst, fellow Drake journalism grad and therefore sympathetic to the cause of uncensored communication, has offered to be my personal proxy.

In addition to being a superb friend and empathetic journalist, Niki is also an outstanding photographer. She recently opened a shop on etsy.com, iowaphotography.etsy.com, where nature- and Iowa-lovers can find one-of-a-kind shots of the home state I dearly miss. As a side note, I didn’t know about etsy.com at all until she opened this shop, and it’s a really great site for finding handcrafted goods from around the world. And maybe if you consider yourself crafty, there’s a business venture in it for you, too. Definitely worth a look.

Take-home message: Niki is pretty great for helping me out, and in turn I would like you to help her out by checking out her photo shop and sharing it with anyone you think might be interested in an attractive slice of Iowa’s backyard.

On the photography note, I’ve established a flickr account to share some of my photos. I can’t post too many because they are huge and there are monthly upload limits. I’ll try to establish some sort of rotation. For now, my ID is whitneyd2009. You can check out photos of Shijiazhuang, Chengde and my apartment.

Also, while I can’t sign in to blogger or facebook to respond to your comments, please keep posting them if you have them, and hopefully I will re-enter virtual society sometime soon.

Thanks for reading!

The Great Wall

2009-10-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

There is an athletic complex across the street from my apartment. The reasons why I did not know it was there until just a few days ago are complicated. China is complicated.

Today I found the hidden passageway that leads to its fence, only to realize there was no easily discernable way in. My Chinese sucks, so I approached a boy on the coveted inner portion of the barrier, pointed to a clearly locked gate, looked pleadingly at him and said, “Nar?” Where? “Wo pao ma?” Can I run? Or maybe it’s “Do I run?” Or even, “Where’s the nearest grocery store?” Like I said, my Chinese sucks.

He conveyed the obvious, “Not here,” then pointed to an inaccessible building across the track. I could draw the next hour into an excruciatingly long anecdote about me circling the entire Chengde city block and finding no way to access the building, inquiring after a million security guards in the interim—in increasingly whiney Chinese—Naaarrrr!? Wo pao maaaa??—but the important lesson for folks at home is that some days are exceedingly ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I’m at the whims of China’s unique blend of perpetually changing fate. And sometimes I’m fairly certain I’m just an idiot.

October 2nd, for example. I passed my twenty-third birthday with wonderful friends who made me—and China!—delicious cakes, sang Karaoke past midnight, and then went to the bar until an hour embarrassingly and inconveniently close to the hour we were to depart for a day at the Great Wall with eleven freshmen (yeah.) and the school’s foreign affairs directors.

Now, around 4 a.m., when I for the second time began to suggest, “Guys, I have to climb the Great Wall in five hours, perhaps I should go home and aspire to be sober by 7,” I allowed an Englishman named Richard to tell me, “It’s only ten steps! You sit in the bus for an hour, walk up ten steps, and Bam! You’re on the great wall. Now have another beer!”

I appreciate citizens of the United Kingdom for this reason: You can get into the liveliest debates and, as long as no one’s mother is insulted, still be good friends in the morning. So I would like the record to reflect that when Richard sent a text message at 4 p.m. that read, “Just woke up, thanks for a great night guys! Good shit.”—after I had spent many breathtakingly beautiful but deliriously exhausted hours hiking on slippery stairs that at their most difficult require the climber to scramble on hands and knees—I was not angry. Not at all.

We visited the Jin Shan Ling portion of the wall. It’s not the wide, majestic corridor you see in pictures—that part is near Beijing, recently renovated and chronically teeming with tourists. Jin Shan Ling is less than an hour away from Chengde, and only the entrance is restored. The rest is full of the narrowest passageways and crumbling watchtowers.

The crowds thin out and then nearly fade away the further you walk from the entrance. Bright colors look so out of place against the majestic stone wall that I, in my old purple t-ball jersey with “Houghton” scrawled in bright pink across the chest, look photo-shopped into all of my pictures, an altogether unlikely addition.

The peak for me, despite the exhaustion (which, to be honest, was for most of the day overrun by the adrenaline rush that accompanies interacting with such an omnipresent historical icon), was in the moments before we turned around to hike back to the gate. I climbed up an especially lofty, steep incline to one final watchtower, then noticed one more set of stairs, piled inconspicuously behind a wall. Up those stairs, I found myself completely alone on a square roof, wall stretching endlessly to the east and west with mountains on every side.

Some days I think I could write a novel about China’s challenges, and others I’m certain I’m just a fool with no grasp on anything. But every now and then I’m lying on my own stretch of the Great Wall of China, and I realize I’m so fleeting here that it hardly matters one way or another.

It’s My Party and I’ll Be Tyrannical If I Want To.

2009-09-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

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.

On Time and Toilets

2009-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

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.”

Friends

2009-09-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

“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.

Beat It.

2009-09-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Chengde, Week 1

2009-09-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

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.

I Wonder if Mao Peed Here

2009-08-28T18:10:00.000-07:00

As part of our language and cultural training in Shijiajuang, we took a field trip to nearby Xibaipo, where China’s modern government was drafted. The site is essentially a (dirty, dare I say boring) shrine to Chairman Mao. A guided tour consists of repeated “Mao sat here, Mao ate here, Mao wrote something down here,” and even a “Naked Mao was wrapped in a blanket and thrown into an air-raid shelter here” (pictures to come.)

Now, all props to Mao for Liberating the People and whatnot, but two days later as I stood in line after line after line (didn’t someone say they don’t queue in China?) for my foreign expert health exam, I wished the Great Chairman Mao had done a touch more to liberate goodwill ambassadors.

Line 1, which lasted a mere 45 minutes, culminated in me being called into a room to verify that I arrived on UA flight 501 from Chicago and to sign my name confirming the made-up body temperature that the doctor had surmised, presumably by noticing I looked cold.

Next, I slouched in a line for 10 minutes, only to be informed that the forms I was holding were not completely filled out, and I needed to get out of the line to do so. Unfortunately, five days of oral language training didn’t make me an expert character artist, so my waiban (foreign affairs officer from Chengde) had to fill it out for me anyway.

Line 3: Bloodletting. The scene: A hallway, two nurses sit behind what looks like a ticket booth, accepting veins through an opening in the glass. I watch two strangers get stabbed, then offer my arm (clean needles, no worries). I don’t get a bandage when it’s over, only a cotton ball I’m instructed to hold in place for five minutes.

Which proves impossible, because the next station involves hugging an x-ray machine for a chest x-ray. My open wound lines up conveniently with the spot where everyone in front of me has hugged the same un-sanitized machine post-bloodletting.

Although they do this exam under the pretense of scanning for infectious diseases, the next stations I suffer through are 1) an ultrasound. You know, in case I’m carrying the contagious disease called pregnancy. And 2) An EKG, which involved being topless in a doorless room. A man actually came to the doorway while the nurse was hooking me up to the machine, which was straight out of 1960, so there was literally a curtain between half-naked, electrocution-prepped me and some strange man. I hope the nurse was saying, “Get out of here, perv, this isn’t a free show.”

So I’ve had a pretty serious cough since a few days before I arrived in China, and the filthy city of Shijiajuang did nothing to alleviate my symptoms. I went through half my store of Robitussin and Sudafed in my first week. Naturally, I was dreading my visit to the “EENT” office, where I felt sure they would look in my throat and notice the most-definitely contagious, infected lump in the back of my throat. Lucky for me (unlucky for China) they dropped the “ENT” portion of the test and only checked my eyes (you know, contagious glaucoma and whatnot.) This test consisted of the doctor asking me to take my glasses off, then laughing at me when I finally successfully conveyed that, “No, really, I cannot see anything on the opposite wall.”

Finally, the most dreaded portion of all physical exams, I had to pee in a cup. As I squatted over a hole in the floor, attempting to hold a teacup-sized receptacle under me without urinating on my hand or falling over, I recalled Jason’s glib comment as we departed Xibaipo. I wonder if Mao peed here.

Beware the Dangerous!

2009-08-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

The first of many interestingly translated signs I saw when I arrived in Beijing was displayed blocking a broken moving walkway. It read, “BEWARE THE DANGEROUS!” I foolishly thought the sign actually referred to the broken walkway. As soon as we loaded the bus and departed for Shiziajuang, I realized it foreshadowed a myriad of Dangerous to Beware of.

There are some things a traveler can prepare for pre-departure. Adequate clothing, comfortable shoes, a stockpile of medicine. Other things, while expected, cannot be fathomed until experienced. I understand that China is an extremely large nation, and therefore will not generalize based on my experiences in one province. As day ten draws to a close, I would like to share what I have surmised are the key themes of the Hebei Provincial Driver’s Manual:

1. DO NOT, under any circumstance, come to a complete stop.

2. Use your horn, use your horn, use your horn. There is no motor vehicle situation that cannot be resolved favorably by engaging the horn. A short honk is appropriate for announcing your intention to switch lanes in heavy traffic. A slightly longer honk may be necessary for announcing a left turn across several lanes. Finally, when passing large trucks on mountainous roads, do not release the horn, as it is of the utmost importance that you have only one functional hand on the wheel when another large truck comes careening in your direction.

3. Use your turn signal sporadically, preferably when it makes the least sense.

4. It is of utmost importance that you arrive at your destination as quickly as possible. Neither your life, nor the lives of your passengers, is worth the loss of face you will suffer if you follow cars at a reasonable distance, slow for pedestrians or cyclists, or choose not to drive into oncoming traffic whenever convenient. Do not embarrass yourself, and bring shame to your family name, for the sake of passenger safety and sanity.

5. Despite the numerous interstate signs commanding you to “buckle up,” seat belts are actually illegal. All vehicle owners are required to purchase seat covers which make seat belts inaccessible to passengers. Those who purchase seat covers with mistranslated English themes on them will receive reimbursement from the government. If you drive a taxi, wrap all seatbelts around headrests repeatedly until taut, so passengers understand that your ability to drive safely is unprecedented.

6. Where they happen to exist, lane markings are barely a suggestion. The expected behavior is to straddle them and engage your horn as specified above in order to announce your intention to move left, right, forward or back as is suitable.

7. In the event that you feel too important to stop at a red light, please press horn appropriately and accelerate into the cross-traffic. If you have installed flashing red and blue lights in your vehicle for personal use, this is an appropriate time to engage them.

8. Should you find yourself in the far right lane heading a direction you suddenly do not wish to go, begin U-turn by inching into opposing lanes and pressing the horn as prescribed for mountainside driving. DO NOT, under any circumstance, come to a complete stop.

9. Upon arrival at your destination, or if you feel compelled to drive on the pedestrian walkway for increased efficiency, you will need to cut through the bicycle/motor bike lane, usually 5-10 riders thick. Expect to be ignored, as bikers are busy text messaging with both hands, lighting or smoking cigarettes, balancing children and infants between their legs, etc., in addition pedaling. Simply engage the horn and proceed slowly. DO NOT, even for a family of four riding on one bike, come to a complete stop.

10. Simulation exercise: A bus meets a semi truck on a curve ascending a mountain. A car is passing the truck and there is no shoulder. No matter which driver you are, DO NOT slow down. Lay on your horn and increase your speed. If you are driving the bus or the semi, wish for good luck to save you from falling down the mountain as the car squeezes between you. If you are in the car, repeat this passing technique as frequently as necessary until you reach your destination.

The Pain of Unrequited Love

2009-08-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've always been infatuated with the United States Postal Service. Long before the interwebs brought widespread friends and family a click away, the USPS carried cards, pictures, and the occasional (and now nearly extinct) letter with respectable grammar. Not surprisingly, I've marveled at how they manage to keep paper so smooth on cross-country journeys. I do love a nice, flat piece of paper.

People have a tendency to distrust my long-time lover, the USPS, insisting upon things like package insurance and delivery confirmation. My post office never misplaced so much as a post card. I balked whenever someone suggested such outlandish acts of treachery. Insure a package? Nonsense. Love really is blind.

I recently entrusted my dear United States Postal Service with another inanimate, government-owned object I'm quite fond of, my United States Passport, which needed to travel to the Chinese embassy in Chicago to be adorned with an employment visa. I loved my passport just enough to do something I've never done - certify my mail. You know what they say, put a lover on a leash and he's bound to run away.

Instantly, my true and faithful servant fell off the loyal service train (or interstate). Ten days after I left my well-traveled passport at the Forest Ave PO in Des Moines, it still had not arrived at its destination. Like any neglected girl would do, I started making phone calls, complete with hopeless pleas and angry tyraids delivered to automated devices that had no capacity to respond appropriately. Like a typical dishonest partner, the USPS returned with vague messages like, "Your case is open, but I can't tell you more than that until the end of the day," and "Your package is at the post office." As opposed to what, the damn zoo? The automated answering service for the track and confirm branch of the postal service actually has a statement when you ask to speak to a real person that says something along the lines of, "Just so you know, the person you are about to talk to likely does not know a damn thing. Do you still want to talk to them?"

I poked and prodded for a full two days before receiving confirmation--via the online tracking system--that my item had been delivered. There is speculation as to whether it sat in the DSM or Chicago post office undetected all those days. Jerk didn't even have the balls to call and apologize.

Things, Odds, & Ends

2009-08-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote this note the night I got home from Des Moines, after enjoying my friend Liz's wedding and the ever-thrilling West Point bar scene. Suffice it to say, I was not sober. I apparently did not succeed in publishing it after I wrote it, which is probably good because waking to find that I wrote and published an entire blog that I didn't remember creating might have embarassed me. But I just read it and decided it might be important to publish. If you require proof of my inebriation, I would like you to know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my parents' space bar. Read on:
-----------------------------------------

It is approximately 2 a.m., I've had a crazy 72-ish hours, and the best way I could serve the general populus is by rendering myself unconscious. Unlucky for you, I'm just crazy enough to feel like writing. Even though my parents apparently have a janky, barely functioning space bar.

First things first, Things:

Yesterday, I moved out of my lovely apartment on Des Moines' finest street, Brattleboro Ave. 2920. It was a lovely place to spend year 4 at Drake, and I enjoyed 67% of my time there. My landlord was pretty chill, as far as slum lords go. Unfortunately yesterday I proved myself less than chill, as far as tenants go. But that's a story for the "Odds" chapter.

As far as Things go, I would like to let everyone know that:

a) The YWCA (7th and Grand) has a "Dress for Success" closet. I donated a box of travel-sized shaving cream, which now resides in said closet. If you are of the professional variety and have apparel to dispose of, I suggest taking it there, where ladies who really need jobs will be able to utilize your threads to score a respectable job.

b) The Animal Rescue League takes couch cushions. If you've given up on your pile of dust, covers, and dirty hand-me-down pillows, take them to the ARL. The animals love you.

Awkwardly, Odds:

I lied to our landlord about the couch on the dumpster belonging to us. I will claim that the devil made me do it. Although, actually, it was my mother. I guess I was worried that he would make me take it out or pay a bunch of money or something, but I doubt that would have happened (apparently it only costs $5 to have furniture picked up from the curb). I was uncomfortable enough, though, to call him in the morning and tell him the truth. He thought it was honorable.

And, finally, Ends:

I really grew to think of Des Moines as my second home over the past 4 years, and it was impossibly difficult to leave the city and all of my friends who remain. As I bawled and told Nicole I didn't actually want to go to China anymore, she said, "Whitney, you will rock China. I wouldn't ordinarily tell a person that they would rock something as large as China, but it's you, and you will." While I don't know how true this is, I do appreciate the sentiment.

The Nadas wrote this song about their beloved DSM. I offer it to you all as a farewell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj3W7rBOq10

Too Wild for Comfort

2009-07-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Every spectator in Yellowstone hopes for comfortably close encounters with wildlife. Three bears, a fox, a heard of buffalo, some deer and countless chipmunks graced us with their presence during our day in the gorgeously preserved park. The fox was too quick for a photo op. and the grizzly bear was so far away that in pictures he looks remarkably similar to a ball of fluff masquerading as a bear. The deer would’ve remained unfazed if I stuck my lens in their ears. Maybe they’re not so wild, after all. The following morning I drove back into the park, intending to see more wildlife and to enjoy a long run through the wild backcountry (and to avoid the wailing that accompanies dressing a toddler each morning).

I chose a trail surrounded by gorgeous mountains on either side, which supposedly ran along a sparkling stream in a five-mile loop. I should’ve learned two days prior to be wary of supposed five-mile loops. I jogged jauntily down the side of the hill, barely aware of how far I was going, the Prius becoming invisible as I descended. The dew was still clinging to the grass, a mist not yet burned off the stream as I approached. Momentarily forgetting Yellowstone’s complimentary pamphlets about how wild animals are—duh—rather dangerous, and hikers hike at their own risk, my imagination ran wild. How cool would it be if I saw a bear or a buffalo down here?

Then I almost tripped. Over a pile of bones. I tried to convince myself that they probably washed up from the river, but they were pretty far up. Then I looked up and realized I couldn’t see outside the valley. I also swear I saw a coyote standing on a rock shelf 100 yards away, licking his lips and thanking his lucky stars that two meals stumbled upon his lair this morning. But maybe it was just a rock.

A long run had sounded so wonderful, I just couldn’t give it up. I jogged a few more paces into knee-high grass beside the water. Then Chris Farley’s voice came to me from a classic SNL skit, and I decided to turn around. No one’s going to care how many miles you ran when you’re a pile of BONES down by the RIVER.*

*If you’re too young, too old, or too boring to get this joke, watch the video here.

Is That Digital?

2009-07-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

My body temperature hovers somewhere below ninety-eight degrees, at least a half-degree below the average human’s. My friends are used to it. My boyfriend dutifully, if grudgingly, holds my hands when they’re especially frigid. I’m cold, in the same way that I am 5’6” and Caucasian. It’s my natural state. Yet every time I go out, without fail, a man will saunter up to me and deliver his smoothest line from what I assume is an infinite reservoir of clever come-ons. “You look cold.” Thank you, I am cold. You look stupid.

On the boardwalk across from Old Faithful last week, I learned that technology is the key to averting this stating-the-obvious flirtation. Set a camera up on a tripod, look like you know what you’re doing, and men on either side of you, even the ones with 7-year-old daughters vying for their attention, want to talk about your camera. What kind of camera is that? How’s the image quality? Yes, honey, I know the geyser is erupting but I’m trying to talk to this girl about her Canon XSi. Don’t interrupt.

Two lessons to take away from this: Gold-digging ladies, get yourself a nice camera. Guys who inevitably will have nothing clever to say to the next interesting girl you see, “Is that digital?” trumps “You look cold.”

In the Rodeo Capital of the World, Stupid Decisions are Contagious

2009-07-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

Most people who know my brother and I would, I hope, describe us as generally responsible people. As we walked up a mountain at dusk with nothing but a Labrador, a camera, and Wall Drug’s finest walking stick, I had to concede that most people would be wrong. In our defense, our hotel’s front desk clerk said the trail was five miles up and back. He also gave us bad directions to the trail entrance, which should have been our first clue that, friendly as he was, he probably didn’t know much of anything.

In addition to a late start and poor preparation, my brother glanced at a steep portion of mountain near the top and declared, “I think I’ll climb this part and meet you at the top.” Jazz thought it was a terrible idea, as evidenced by her unwillingness to follow me on the road while her owner risked his life on a hill, which was presumably fenced in for no trivial reason. When he emerged again on the road he described his climb something like this: “That was cool, but probably not the best decision I’ve ever made.” Apparently it involved sticking his hands into caves while plotting how he would use the WallStick to fend off any wild cats that emerged. I’m not sure if this makes Wall Drug’s merchandise more or less ridiculous. Neither is Jazz.

What happens next, Matt will call luck. I’d go with unfortunately convenient. We made it to the almost-top, where a couple had (conveniently) driven up to watch the sunset. We could hear the cats calling, it was after 10 p.m., and Matt was worried about losing his dog or his sister to the creatures of the night. He interrupted their romantic moment to inquire if we could perhaps hitch a ride—down a mountain, on steep, windy gravel—in the back of their truck. Not backseat. Back. With the spare tire. The man stuttered a, “Uh, well, it’s kinda bumpy but uh…” and we jumped in.

For the first 36 seconds I stared down at the spare tire and counted, reminding myself that it was only 5 miles (which is, I must point out, twice as much as 2.5. If you’re reading this, deceitful receptionist.) I did eventually look up, because riding backward and looking down are two sure causes of motion sickness for me. If I’m ever commissioned to write a travel book for Cody, Wyoming (The Rodeo Capital of the World!), I’ll certainly recommend watching the rodeo from the back of a pick-up on a mountain two miles away. You know, just to say you did it.

Later, as we’re cruising into town in the safety of a 5-star safety-rated Toyota mini van on a dangerously flat, 35 mph speed-limited, paved road, my brother says (quite seriously, lest you think he intended this to be funny), “Oh! I better buckle up!”

On Monuments

2009-07-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ever driven within 300 miles of Wall, SD on I-90 has seen a sign for Wall Drug. Free Ice Water. America’s Favorite Roadside Attraction. Animated Life Sized T-Rex. This-Sign-Is-A-Not-So-Subliminal-Message-Ordering-You-To-Stop-At-Wall-Drug-If-You-Call-Yourself-An-American. It’s nuts. And it honestly wasn’t even on our route at the beginning of the day. But somewhere between Matt setting my camera up on a tripod in the middle of the highway beside the entrance sign to the Badlands, and our wonderfully panoramic hikes within, mystical forces conspired to land us, starving and thirsty, in the shadeless town of Wall right at lunchtime.

Interestingly, every tourist at Wall Drug looked like they had suffered a similar fate. Every face—especially those of the women in line for the two-stall bathroom—read, “The signs told me to come, but I’m honestly not sure what I’m doing here, surrounded by South Dakota key chains and generic native art, trying to enjoy a buffalo burger before taking numerous photos of my child next to the large dinosaur and the six-foot-tall bunny out back. I guess I just wanted some free ice water.” (According to Wall Drug lore, the initial success of the place was due to a “free ice water” sign put up late in the Depression era, when tourists were beginning to accumulate on their way to see Yellowstone or the recently completed Mount Rushmore.)

Looking around at the mayhem, which our toddler certainly contributed to, I dubbed Wall Drug a “Monument to Ridiculousness.” Which is nice, I guess. Ridiculousness is one of the pillars of American civilization (reality TV, anyone?) and thus just as deserving of an adequate monument as anything or anyone else (veterans, presidents, natural beauty, long-suffering Native Americans, et cetera). Kelly almost modified my classification to “Monument to White Ridiculousness.” But just as we walked out the door, a lone, formally dressed black man came in. Somehow his attire made the whole scene even more ridiculous. But we did get a nice walking stick.

Our second monument of the day, Mt. Rushmore, was the site of a Greenpeace protest just hours after we left. The most exciting things that occurred during our visit:

1) We met another Coast Guard officer who was moving from Seattle to Virginia. This confirmed my growing suspicion that the U.S. Military’s policy of moving its employees every few years is actually an elaborate scheme established in conjunction with the U.S. Tourism Industry to ensure that the inherently patriotic must hit the road every summer.

2) One of the original drillers of the sculpture was in the gift shop signing books.

3) Matt squished George Washington’s head.

Where I've Been

2009-07-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

On July 6, I set off with my brother Matt, his wife, Kelly, and their 17-month-old son, Jimmy, along with a lick-addicted Labrador and a skittish Italian Greyhound, on a six-day, seven-state drive from Des Moines to Seattle. As we cruised out of Iowa into the Black Hills of South Dakota Matt asked, “Does this landscape remind you a little bit of Ireland?” It did, somewhat, but that wasn’t the remarkable part of his inquiry. What’s remarkable, I mused, is that I’ve spent more of my days in places like Ireland and Germany than I have in states so closely bordering my own. I decided this trip was the perfect opportunity to experience more of my own country before I depart for another international tour. I present for you a short series on the things I learned along the way. If you’ve no time for anecdotal entertainment, here’s the summary: America is a beautiful, terrifying, ridiculous nation.

Perspective, or Things That Are More Important Than Iced Tea

2009-06-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is only loosely related to China, in that some of my days at the country club make me very excited that said days are numbered.

Tuesday, 6:45 a.m.: Ladies are set to show up for breakfast before a morning of golf. I made coffee, juice, and several other all-important breakfast buffet elements, and was just finishing up when—“Where’s the TEA?! Girls, I need that tea in fifteen minutes! What the hell have you been doing up here?!”

A word about brewing our particular brand of industrial kitchen tea: It takes five minutes. I did not major in math, but if elementary school taught me one thing, it’s that five is one-third of fifteen. That gives me time to finish brewing tea and pick my nose before these proper ladies show up.

My manager’s unwarranted panic, which he feeds off of to get through most of his shifts governing the all-important functioning of our Club For The Uncomfortably Wealthy, got me thinking about perspective. You know, that bygone concept of measuring seemingly challenging things against actually challenging things to assure yourself that the apocalypse will (likely) not be caused by the timing of tea production?

Sunday, 8:00 a.m.: A second incident solidifies my belief that something must be said. I’m working in the golf course concession stand, pouring too-strong bloody marys for guys who, doubtless, should be at home helping their wives get the family ready for church. This guy saunters up with two friends, shouts his order over their heads—I don’t hear it, an important detail—and then disappears to the bathroom. He reappears minutes later, looking annoyed. Where is his drink? He ordered a drink? I didn’t know. Thanks to this misunderstanding, I present for your enjoyment:

How To Have a Vodka-Water-Lemonade Made Without Telling the Server What She’s Doing, as told by Some Jerk

1) “Now, put some ice in a glass.”

2) “Good, ok, now get the Absolut out.”

3) “Now pour a shot.”

4) “That’s not enough. Pour a bigger shot.”

5) “Charge me for a goddamn quadruple shot if you have to, just put more vodka in there.”

6) “Now pour some water in there. No, like this.” (Forcibly remove water from server’s hands.)

7) “Aaand get out the lemonade.” (While server is retrieving lemonade from cooler, still baffled by why, exactly, this is happening, lay hands on bottle of Absolut and indiscriminately pour the amount of vodka you really wanted in that drink).

8) “Now pour the lemonade. Good. That’s how you make a vodka-water-lemonade. What’s your name? How long have you been working here? Did you have a late night? Yeah, I can tell you have no idea what you’re doing out here, Whitney.”

9) Disappear into a burning inferno. No one will miss you.

I was confused about what would make anyone behave this way, until my friend Erika cleared it up for me: “His penis is too small, he’s cheating on his wife, and he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it.” A-ha!

One can only assume, from their complete absorption in the drink-related details of their lives, that my manager and this friendly club member haven’t watched or read the news—golf scores don’t count—in the past week. Had they, they’d know that people are facing some rather formidable odds in places like North Korea, Iran, and Somalia (And elsewhere in Des Moines, for that matter.) They would understand why how drunk they get this morning is not my primary concern, and shouldn’t be theirs, either.

But I know we all do it. We all get caught up in the minute details of our own lives, and forget that expensive gas is a light burden to bear, being ten minutes late won’t end the world, and it actually doesn’t matter what the neighbors think of your infrequently-mowed yard. So, the next time you’re stressed about iced tea, or your professional or personal equivalent, be thankful you are not:

1) A journalist sentenced to twelve years of hard labor for attempting to expose human rights abuses: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8103006.stm

2) Living in a theocratic nation where a Supreme Leader trumps any charade of democracy:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8102406.stm

3) Attempting to operate a navy in an area where most income comes from criminal activity and there hasn’t been a functioning government for nearly 20 years:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8096137.stm

4) This guy: http://www.facepalm.org/images/03.jpg

Airplanes, and other Thoughts on Space

2009-06-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

According to the plane ticket I purchased last Monday—with half of my life savings, if you must know—I have exactly 67 days to accomplish all the things I planned to do before undertaking my Chinese adventure: Learn to operate chopsticks with grace, train my vocal apparatus to navigate Mandarin tones (also, with grace, or something that sounds like it.) And, in my most extravagant scheme, replenish my grossly-severed savings account.

So far, I’ve learned to count to ten and utter incredibly useful phrases such as, “I am not a man” and “That woman is fat.” (Presumably, I could construe my meager linguistic feats to also form sentences such as, “That woman is not a fat man.” China, here I come.)

In addition to the standard responses detailed in my first post, other sentiments expressed about my move to China include “You’re so brave!” and “Aren’t you worried about culture shock?” My pocket answer to these was, previously, “No, I do not think I’m incredibly brave, just terribly curious about the world. And I appreciate cultures for what they are, not how they compare to mine.” That was until one night not too long ago—and no, whether or not I was slightly inebriated is not a vital detail in this anecdote—I took to wondering what’s in a traditional Chinese breakfast dish. Google delivered me here. Brief, terrifying summary of ingredients:

3 tablespoons short or medium grain rice

1 litre/2 pints/4 cups water

Oh, and if you’re feeling especially ravenous, it’s common to stir in some white fish. Now, I’ve once or twice enjoyed salmon and cream cheese on a bagel for breakfast, but as a general rule I relegate seafood to after-breakfast pursuits. The other option my search yielded was just your basic, artery-clogging, morning ball of dough and grease. With a side of rice gruel, I presume.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to find a corner of the earth where the basic cereal/milk combo can’t be acquired. I’m sure I won’t be plugging my nose and drinking my breakfast (heh.) throughout the year. But I do think it’s important to immerse yourself in local traditions rather than scoping out the omnipresent American comforts abroad.

Speaking of comforts:

I’m out for a run today, and a man has a bucket and his garden hose camped out on the sidewalk. He sees me coming, drags his hose a good 3 feet away from the sidewalk, still looks up apologetically and offers a “Sorry!” as I jog by. This charming old man expressed remorse because his garden hose came within three feet of my personal space. Midwesterners enjoy approximately 100 feet of personal space each*, and, I’ve noticed, are incredibly apologetic if we invade this space without express permission (rock concerts, crowded bars, and the occasional food-related festival excluded.) I offered the man a smile and a, “You’re fine!”—although in running mode, it may have come off as a grimace and a “FINE.” But I meant well.

The incident reminded me of our first exercise during our week of teacher training. Twenty-six of us crammed into one of Drake’s cozier men’s restrooms (the first time, I assure you, that a urinal and its accompanying scents so severely violated my personal space). Starting with the poor soul in the back of the pack, we had to push our way through the unmoving crowd as they maintained eye contact with us but refused to move out of our path. The lesson: Men’s bathrooms are gross. Oh, and China is a crowded place where the “100 feet of personal space” rule does not apply.

This is not to say I’m conceding defeat and admitting fears of culture shock. Merely an observation that I may be hurdling quite a few Chinese garden hoses, and gardeners, unapologetically blocking my path.

*could be gross over- or under-estimation. What do you think I am, a journalist?

Everyone's Staring

2009-05-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

I have it on good authority (Wikipedia) that Americans are scarce in Chengde. It’s small by Chinese standards (3-400,000) and known primarily as a mountain resort for emperors in eras past. Quaint, not well known or inundated with tourists who look like me. Our program coordinator has been upfront: You will be an oddity. People will stare.

In addition to this, anecdotal evidence suggests that my Midwestern relatives and friends are, by and large, quite uneasy about me spending a year in China. This is a topic for another post, but to foreshadow a bit, I’ve been “warned” about facing such tribulations as squatting to use the toilet, eating nothing but rice, acquiring slanty eyes (I wish I was kidding) and being nuked by North Korea. My loved ones are staring—cheering me on, or at the very least hoping I manage to survive the trials and tribulations of, to quote a very well meaning old woman, “That bad place.”

Finally, I always listen to this song (pardon the TMNT) when faced with new situations. The refrain goes something like this: “Paloma you wonder if you’ll miss the thunder and everyone’s staring but no one is caring for you now.” I first heard the song as a freshman at Drake, when “no one is caring for you now” seemed an especially apt description of my newfound adult freedoms. While I was studying in Ireland, I listened to it over and over again while fretting about “missing the thunder” of Drake happenings while I was away.

Now, as I anticipate living in a “small” (hailing from a town of 90-some people, I choke every time I’m forced to describe a city of hundreds of thousands as “small”) Chinese city where eyes are literally on me every minute, and knowing that everyone back home is watching just as intently from afar, the “everyone’s staring” line couldn’t be more accurate.

So, that’s that. Everyone’s staring. I hope everyone’s reading!