Right now, I’m changing my job, my apartment and um, everything! Everyone I’ve spoken with who’s made China their home says that China pushes your limits. In China what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Or it makes you throw up for a few days, I forget.
Thursday
Ji: Hey, there’s a college in Weihai that needs a teacher.
Meg: I’m sorry, no. My contract is for Yantai and I don’t want to move.
Ji: *long Chinese sob story regarding the horrific death of the previous teacher’s mother and the childhood friendship between my current boss and the college’s headmaster*
Meg: No, look at my contract.
Saturday
Secretary: Have a good time in Weihai, Meg!
Meg: I’m not moving to Weihai.
Secretary: Yes.
Sunday
Ji: You will move to Weihai at 9am tomorrow.
Meg: No. Contract. Yantai.
Ji: But there isn’t time to find a new teacher! They need someone starting tomorrow! *long story regarding the previous teachers’ flexibility as compared to my inherent laziness*
Meg: No. Contract. Signature. Yours. No.
Ji: Excuse me while I get my husband to leave his job in a company across town and yell at you in Chinese.
Ji’s husband: *Loud Chinese accompanied by pounding the table with his fists*
Ji: He says that you are irresponsible and you are ruining our school.
Meg: No. Contract. No.
Ji: *long story involving imminent ruin of the school due to my American incompentance and character failings*
Meg: No. Contact. No… Screw this, I’m taking my Magic cards and my Harry Potter books and I’m quitting!
I went to Jackie’s the other night with Will and Jennifer. (haha I have to make up new names now because someone in Yantai reads my blog haha). Jackie’s, the proud home of Loud Food and Spicy Music, is has awesome Western food and fun English-speaking staff and they’ll even make cocktails. Plus Will and Jennifer are really interesting, and the combination of good margaritas and good conversation is one of my favorite things.
But evening was a little off for me by the gut-wretching agony that is first person plural. Simple phrases like “We liked that movie…” “we’re going to…” and “…then we went home” really make me sad. I felt the same way sometimes in Beijing with Jeff and Fresca, although I know they went out of their way not to make me feel like a third wheel. Even indirect references to a shared life are a bit depressing.
Almost every day I find something else to love in Yantai, but a part of me can’t wait to get home and start saying “we.”
I’m sure they wanted a picture of the foreign teacher actually teaching, but instead this is me playing WoW with Stick.
Yantai is famous for cherries, and I think I’ve received at least my body mass in bags full of cherries from students. At one point I had three bags in my fridge and another one on the kitchen table. They’re quite nice but they’re really nothing special, and I honestly can’t imagine liking ANYTHING enough that I would want to eat my weight’s worth.
This is me almost every day: “Thank you! Yes, I’ve eaten cherries before. Yes, I like cherries. Yes, we have cherries in America. Yes, they are this big.”
I don’t add that the only difference between famous Yantai cherries and Stop&Shop cherries is that in the US, we don’t spit out the pits all over the floor.
My school often hires secretaries who don’t speak English. I understand that I’m in China and I understand that the vast majority of people I meet will not speak English. But it seems to me that speaking English would be a requirement to be a secretary in a language school. Especially if that secretary shares an office with the American teacher. Especially if that secretary’s job involves dealing with the foreign teacher everyday.
Sometimes Ji’s around, but sometimes she isn’t.
Meg: Do we have any crayons?
Secretary: Yes.
Meg: You know what I mean by “crayons”, right?
Secretary: Yes.
Meg: Do you know where they are?
Secretary: Yes.
Meg: Where are the crayons?
Secretary: Yes.
Meg: Are my superpowers way cooler than Spiderman’s?
Secretary: Yes.
Some days, I really love China.
Today when I was coming in to work, the postman stopped me in the hallway and shoved a box at me. (It had to be mine because it was addressed in English!) I just stood there for a moment, looking at the return address label for a while, thinking it had to be some kind of collossal, intercontinental mistake.
I opened it in the office, and it was a box of books! Not just any books, although any English texts would have been amazing, but a dozen children’s classics. Including some of my personal favorites, like The Lost World and Around The World in Eighty Days. Sturdy hardcover editions, unabridged but with annotations for unusual phrases, the best editions for a school library.
“Who’s that from?” the two office secretaries asked me as I opened the box.
“Um, my ex-boyfriend,” I said.
“Does your boyfriend know that your ex-boyfriend sends you long letters and books?”
I decide not to get into an explanation of the difference between know and worry about, and I say “No, the letters are from my friend Eric. This is from someone else.”
“Is it the one who send you the poems that made you cry?”
“No, that’s Marcus.”
There’s a brief conversation which I’m sure involved the Chinese for “what a slut” and “crazy American girl”.
“It’s from someone else. I may not have mentioned him… we don’t really get along very well.”
“The ex-boyfriend you’re not friends with sent you this box?”
“Yes.”
They confer again in Chinese before saying “I don’t understand Americans.”
Part 1 of 10,000
What’s the first thing you learn in a new language? That’s right, numbers. Beijing-bound flights usually have at least one Westerner practicing yi, er, san, si, and so forth. We usually also working on the accompanying handsigns, which, as Copperpoint has said, go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Dude!, Kermit, gun, redrum, Fight the man!
Anyway, we soon learn that a basic concept like “two” isn’t a basic concept. 2 can either be “liang” or “er”, actually. When you want 2 dumplings you use “liang ge” but you receive 2 RMB change as “er kwai”. “Liang” for 2 rooms, or staying 2 nights, but “er” for second floor or room #2. “One country, two systems”, the Chinese euphemism for the Mainland-Taiwan situation is called “y? guó li?ng zhì”.
I’m utterly baffled by 2. How am I going to master “wife of my father’s older-but-not-oldest brother”?
I got World of Warcraft loaded on one of the computers in the lab downstairs from my office and I logged on for a couple hours of bandit-slaying and emote flirting with Stick. I’ve already said how much I love WoW, and it was so nice to be back on a MMORPG! And, of course, to play with Stick. We made it through a bunch of quests in the dwarven/gnome lands, and because it had been a while since I played WoW or played in that area, I got to enjoy the graphics and the dialogue all over again.
The crowded servers were really choppy, and even on a less populated one, the cities were still laggy. (Yeah, I know. It takes weeks for a letter to make it to China and I’m complaining because my dwarf froze when she tried to loot. This is the disturbing life of a computer geek.)
The only thing I’d change about WoW is creating an adults-only server. No, not that kind of AO, I just mean a new realm where the over-eighteen crowd can quest without constant chatspam about the speaker’s super-cool 60th level on another server. I mean, I don’t need kids around when I’m playing pretend heroes!
