“I think we take this one three stops to Line Squiggle Squiggle Curve Dot.”
This is a typical dinner for Stick and me… vinegar peanuts, cold garlic cucumbers, spicy peanut chicken (gung pao ji dian — all foreigners very like), and fried egg and scallion rice. No dinner is complete without a couple bottles of Yanjing beer!
It’s not quite Andiamo’s, but it’s pretty tasty.
I ran into our school’s headmaster last night while I was putting up my Halloween bulletin board. He was on Sunday-night duty, which means waiting for the kids to come back to school after their weekend at home, so he had some time on his hands. We were chatting and I mentioned how difficult it was to get the colored paper and staples for my board.
I didn’t tell him this, but there’s some kind of ban on English teachers and school supplies. For the last month, when I’ve asked my TAs for something like blank paper, they’ve looked at me like I wanted a virgin sacrifice. If I harass them long enough, they’ll come up with the back of a Xerox for the kids to write on.
But the headmaster led me down to the Logistics Room, It’s an Aladdin’s cave of school supplies, a Prismacolor rainbow of printer paper, giant sheets of colored paper, origami paper, markers, rolls of tape, glue, scissors, all the things that a primary school teacher could want. And he told me to feel free to take whatever I wanted, and come back whenever I felt like it to take more. It was like one of those old Nickelodeon shows where the kid wins all the toys he can grab.
If I had a CD player to play the CD that came with our textbook, then I could — but I don’t really expect that.
I got a Chinese baby book a few days ago, a glossy board book with simple characters and pin yin and English. (We’ll ignore the premise that the intended readership is someone who can read all three, but is still liable to chew on the book)
It’s been pretty helpful with my character recognition, until I got to this:
Do we really need 7 strokes to say “triangle”? Can’t we do it in three?
The worst thing about living with Stick… well, actually it’s the second worst thing. The very worst is all that compromising garbage that I’m meant to be doing. But the second worst thing is what to call him.
I feel very high-school talking about my boyfriend.
I tried the Amherst lingo “partner”, which does sound a little more mature than boyfriend. But there was a problem with that, too. Using a non-gender-specific term in the happy valley seems to mean something else.
People here just assume we are married, what with the moving to China together and all, which is fine except then someone will ask where my husband is and I’m all “Husband? Husband who?”
Yesterday we were at a business lunch when Stick refered to me as his “lady friend,” to the amusement of everyone around us.
But then my dilemma was solved by a native Chinese speaker at the table. Chinese, for all it’s inability to express “2” consistantly, has a perfect way to describe a significant other. My that person.
It says “Can you guess these nationalities from their costumes?”
I threw a kid out of class yesterday. He was really asking for it, he had already earned frowns for his team, and then got himself a corner, and then I told him to get out of my classroom.
Whenever I say something like that, I secretly laugh because it just sounds so weird coming out of my mouth. My little brat doesn’t know it’s been, like, ten minutes since I was on the other side of the desk, and he was pretty intimidated. Plus, then his Chinese teacher saw him standing in the hall and yelled at him.
One unexpected side effect is that now when I point at the door in that class, I get dead silence in the classroom.
