Sven shows us blue steel.

He has a lot of modeling experience.

A rare photo of everyone at work.

(Staged, of course)

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Working Hard In The Teachers’ Office!

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Bye Sven!

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Cup of Cha‘s post called Goodbye Foreign Visitors describes my feelings on the new visa regulations, only more eloquently than I’d put it. This week involved saying goodbye to expat friends, Sven from Tennessee and Christina both left on Saturday.

Any foreigner living in China now will tell you that something weird is going on. Our fellow foreigners are disappearing in great numbers. It as if wild animals are picking them off on their smoggy bike rides to work. Increasingly we feel like Mexicans just inside the American border: looked upon suspiciously, regardless of the legitimacy of our legal status. Perhaps that overstating things, but a lot of people are moving away.

Visas are not being renewed for perpetual tourist and business folks. Some of these de-facto expulsions are legitimate, like people who hang out in China, teaching in a semi-legal status. Others, like business people who are frequent visitors to China, are wrong-headed. The most peculiar trend, and a prominent one at that, is it appears anyone born 1984 or later gets an automatic rejection on new work visas.

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Stick and I are both over the age-25 cutoff, and we both think we’re working for reputable schools who can look after our paperwork… but there are mysterious rumors about the inability to renew working visas a second time, or get an L visa for over 30 days, or switch from one kind to another. From everything I’ve heard, shady visa agents are making money hand over fist, while smaller schools and businesses are losing their foreign employees. Seems like a sad situation if expats who love China are forced to head home while under the table “visa services” make more cash.

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Goodbye Foreigners!

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Yesterday, we went up to Wudaokou to visit Sven. Wudaokou is a cool college-town area in northwest of the city, Propaganda is down the street, and a Pizza Hut, and an English bookstore. Our favorite Indian restaurant, Ganges, is just down the street. As soon as we got off the subway, I started to feel a bit jealous of Sven. Where we live, in Fengtai, is where you end up if you’re going someplace interesting and accidentally get on the bus going the wrong way.

We wanted to check out a coffeeshop and library near the Old Summer Palace. The library’s called One Way Street (not to be confused with my Yantai haunt, the One Way Ticket), and it’s separated from Beijing traffic by a garden of the Old Summer Palace, and shaded by trees. Not newly-transplanted saplings in a row, these were big shady climbing trees, with hammock-style camping chairs underneath. We got some coffee and tea from nearby Mima coffeeshop and played with the bookstore cats. I understand the summer palace much better now that I’ve used its old grounds as a peaceful escape from frantic Beijing.

I had a fantastic afternoon talking with Sven and Stick, so good that I had Harry Potter open on my lap the whole time and didn’t read it.

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One-Way Street

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Thanks to Sven (who does not foster age-inappropriate crushes) for the title.

I asked one of my classes to write about their Chinese names. What’s your Chinese name? Who choose your name? What does it mean? Are you named after someone? Do you like it? Is it common?

This assignment was suggested to me at LCC as a non-threatening way to let American immigrant students share a bit about their cultural and personal backgrounds. It was pretty successful, as people shared their baby nicknames and laughed about the way Americans mispronounce their names. (No topic is ever completely safe, and one of my students wrote that her name was chosen by the nuns who found her.)

It’s an even better assignment in China, because the students all write out the lovely characters in their names. It’s always interesting to hear the stories behind Chinese names, I know a girl called “Only Treasure”, because of the one-child policy, and Stick works with a girl called “Rebeautify” since she was born right after a massive storm. My students wrote about how their parents consulted an astrologer, gave them the five elements in their name, one character from an illustrious ancient scholar or poet, plus a homophone for beloved, intelligent and successful.

Now I’ve now got a leg to stand on when they want to change their English names to MooMoo or Watermelon.

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My English Name Is Voldemort

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Sven: I’m off to class to have mad fun with our apathetic teenagers!

Sven: What?

Carol: Wow, your tones are almost as bad as Sven’s.

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Office Adventures

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My specs had a tragic accident today. After Sven helped me out at school with a superglue temporary fix, I went to the specs store to get new ones. We get Stick’s contact lens solution at a little glasses shop by our apartment, so I knew where to go, but I hadn’t really looked at potential frames. The prices ran from 98RMB up to over 3000, and the appearance went from hilariously awful to fashion model good, without much correllation between price and appearance.

There were no other customers on a Thursday afternoon, so the staff had a lot of time to help deal with my not-so-great Mandarin. I’m amazed by my Chinese skills, I successfully used the words for eyeglasses and break, with my new friend the past tense le, but mostly I’m guilty of excessive use of you, mei you and jige.

The best part was when the, uh, lens grinding guy (what do you call that job?) came over and asked me if I can see without my glasses. I told him I can’t see anything at all, and he told me that must be why the frames I picked are so big and ugly and I should try these ones instead! Oh, Chinese honesty. I told him I didn’t like the ones he picked either, since they were so loud, they’d clash with my face, and we argued for a while before agreeing on a third set of frames.

My new frames and new lenses came to just under $40, and they really could do it in under an hour, which is something LensCrafters has never managed to do for me. I have a strong prescription, and this is the first time I’ve gotten same-day glasses since I was a kid. This is also the first time the optician hasn’t commented that I have really bad sight for someone so young. Then again, maybe he did and I just didn’t understand him.

I had to call Stick to come down and bring me some cash though, because I’d forgotten to bring any. Fortunately the store is about a block down from our house, so he was there before my glasses were finished.

I guess I forgot to bring money because on the way down, I was a little fixated on remembering my Chinese vocab and worrying about my broken glasses. And, I was bit focused on the fact that the word for glasses and the word for cheap beer are disturbingly similiar. Yanjing means both eyeglasses and a local brewery that produces a beer that’s literally cheaper than water.

I wonder if there’s a separate word for beer goggles.

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Yanjing

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I work with two other Americans, Sven From Tennessee and David The Teen Idol (the students love him). We were in the teachers’ office today, enjoying the pleasures of full-speed English, when David The Teen Idol mentioned he was on his way to his other job, where he teaches conversational English to adults…

…at the Office For The Protection Of Intellectual Property.

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The real reason for YouTube’s inaccessibility doesn’t have anything to do with that place with the mountains, it’s actually due to this video of my new co-teacher Sven impersonating a monkey.

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Sven The Monkey

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