This morning as I was drinking coffee and watching Travel In Chinese on CCTV9, a sleepy Jeff came into the living room.
“I’m up, I’m up.” He said. “You don’t have to set off fireworks to wake me.”
I turned away from Mark Roswell long enough to say something clever and witty like “Huh?”
“The fireworks in the courtyard. Just now. Didn’t you hear them?”
“No,” I said. “I really didn’t.”
9,998 to go.
This is Jeff and me having a calm, rational discussion about the definitive pronounciation of xie xie.
In anticipation of Fresca and Jeff’s visit, my students gave me KFC and McDonald’s coupons. (They didn’t want me to pay a ludicrous $2 for a “western” meal!) I thanked them, but I giggled because I can’t think of 2 people in my life less likely to eat in a KFC. Protest outside with pictures of mutated birds, ok, I can see that, but not actually eat fast food. “Foreigners don’t lke Chinese food, so you can take your friends to KFC everyday!” my student told me, proud of his multi-cultural knowledge.
I wondered, angrily, why I was offered (in China, this is all but force-feeding) second helpings of blood tofu and sea cucumber. I asked why I was not classed with the foreigners who might be so uncultured as to prefer french fries to chicken hearts. My students exchanged a look of surprise that made a verbal answer totally unneccessary.
Step 1 of my Chinese assimilation is complete!
9,999 left.
The other day in class, one of my middle-school boys tripped, knocked over some desks and got a bloody nose. I figure since it wasn’t actually inflicted by another student, I’m still a good teacher, right? When he got hurt, I didn’t know what to do for a moment, I mean, do I look after the hurt child, Daniel, and leave the other 29 unattended? In a room full of furniture that clearly dislikes students? My school has no policy on this kind of thing, because China has no guidelines for anything that hasn’t happened yet, and this was my first classroom injury.
In China, you can’t just take the kid to bathroom to clean up, because Chinese bathrooms are BYOTP. (I carry tissue packages in my backpack, but since I was teaching class and not, you know, backpacking, I didn’t have my bag with me.) So I sent another student, Andy, to get paper towels, which is more difficult than is sounds. Our school keeps paper towels in the main office, but they’re locked up with other controlled substances like ink refills and printer paper. I literally had a student dripping blood on my hands while the office assistant comes in to ask if I really gave permission to Andy to use the school paper towels? (Because he might have made up a story, and by the time the authorities find out there really is no bleeding classmate, Andy’ll be halfway to Mexico with his contraband Bounty!) And if I did give permission, then do I know where the key to the supply cabinet is?
I had my coat with me in class, because the school’s heat isn’t working properly, and I started fishing through the pockets looking for emergency supplies. Poor Daniel was seconds away from having a maxipad on his nose when the office twit came back with the paper towels.
Oh, the title? I bet you thought my new superpower would be something lame like “staying calm in a crisis” or “coping under pressure”. No way! My new superpower is the ability to make someone known as Maxi Pad Boy for the rest of his school career! Thankfully, the office twit brought the paper towels in time, and Daniel is still known thoughout the school as Dumpling Head.
With great power comes great responsibility.
My school just acquired two more books for our English library. One is a second copy of Harry Potter 6. Even assuming that whoever bought these books doesn’t read English and only picked the book based on color, what are the odds that he would pick one of the four books we already own?
The second is part four of seven in a certain pre-teen fantasy series. I’m not going to name the author, because Eric likes her writing, and I promised I’d stop bashing that series Dragonsocks or Dragonpiano or whatever it was called. (I didn’t know that Eric knew what “trite” and “derivative” meant! But he got annoyed and Eric never gets annoyed, so I shut up) Our new book isn’t about dragons, it’s actually about the intergalactic war between the psychic unicorn girl and the flesh-eating-bug aliens.
The unicorns win.
Today is China and my two-month anniversary!
Last night, I got a phone call from Cora, another foreign teacher at a nearby school. When I was in England and I met other Americans, we’d laugh about how many potatoes and how much warm beer our British classmates could consume. In China, it’s exciting to run into someone from any country where they don’t blow their nose on the sidewalk.
After comparing the lies our headmistresses tell us and each other, we got down to business. I told her which nightmarket has a stall with deoderent, and she told me how to get to a downtown cafe that does a sideline in imported cheese. We have become junkies for Western products, and we tell each other how to get the next much-needed fix befor exchanging last names, ages or hometowns.
“What’s in Minnesota besides the Vikings?” I asked Cora, trying not to imagine her above-average Chinese middle-schoolers learning to say “Whatever” and “That’s different,”
“You follow the Vikings?”
“No, but my boyfriend has couch-coached them for almost 30 years. Unfortunately for me, by the time I got him undressed and saw his tattoo, it was too late. I liked him too much and I couldn’t escape.” (Living alone in a city where no one speaks English has been detrimental to my social skills)
“We also have the Mall Of America,” Cora told me. “It’s the biggest mall in the country! We’re the mall state!”
“This is exactly why statistics need context. There should be a malls:population ratio, or we should look at the relationship between square feet of shopping space to square miles of state.”
“Did you say you were from Massachussetts?”
“I’ve lived there for 6 years, but I was born in New Jersey. Oh, can you tell?”
“You bet,”
When I was preparing to come to China, I tried to learn important phrases in Chinese, like “Thank you”, “How much?” and “Where is the bathroom?” I did not learn “And now your foreign teacher is going to sing Edelweiss,” which would have given me a split-second advantage this morning.
I tried to explain that I was brought here under false pretenses, I thought I was on my way to a meet-and-greet with a dozen prospective middle-school students, not putting on an impromptu lounge act. (I decided not to quibble with the dozen becoming a gross, after all, this is China and exponential population growth is to be expected)
Then I tried to explain that I don’t actually know Edelweiss. I have a vague impression of white flowers and the Von Trapp Family escaping the Nazis, but no lyrics or tune.
“It’s an English song,” the headmistress explained, clearly as baffled by my refusal to burst into song as I was by her request. “and you are American,”
I wanted to tell her that she had the wrong sister — it’s actually Bethie who’s musically talented. I wanted my dad’s church choir to carry me through. I wanted alcohol, Stick and a kareoke version of the Human League, which is the way I usually sing in public. But I wasn’t going to get any of this.
I wish this were a photo of me singing You Are My Sunshine, but it’s actually me lecturing in the same room.
The children then reciprocated by singing to me. Hey, Dad, in your extensive knowledge of Christian music through the ages, is there a verison of Jingle Bells about bats?
The Great Chinese Scallop Shell Stockpile:
The Final Resting Place Of Scuffy The Tugboat:
I’m not sure if identifying the words rain water on a gutter really count as literacy.
Today is Grave-Sweeping Day in Yantai. I can’t possibly express how pleased I am to find out Chinese holiday that doesn’t involve lighting any late-night fireworks under my window. On Grave-Sweeping Day, residents of Yantai don’t actually sweep graves. They honor their ancestors by burning paper money at crossroads, which the ancestors receive in the afterlife. I’m not really sure how 4he netherworldly economic works, but since every intersection in Yantai has a few of these incendiary offerings, I’d be more concerned about afterlife inflation.
