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photo tour of my neighborhood

Sunday, September 28, 2008

This probably isn’t going to be very interesting for anyone but family, but Chris and I went for a walk and took some pictures of our neighborhood. I was waving my camera around and indiscriminantly clicking, so some of them are a little blurry, but here are the highlights.

Here’s our building. I guess it doesn’t look like much on the outside (ok, ok, it looks like a slum), but unfortunately, China seems to place a higher priority on function rather than form, except for the parks, which are freaking gorgeous:

Also, most buildings in China have cages on the windows on the lower floors to protect against theft, which I’m not sure is as big of an issue as the bars and occasional rigged lines covered in jagged broken glass might indicate. Inside is really modern and clean, swear.

Next door, a new complex has just come up, and people have only recently started moving in. It’s fancy, with walls and guards and a security gate. We have a really nice view of our rich neighbors out of our balcony windows, and we’ve been watching the construction and cleanup going on as a substitute for tv.

If you walk a little further into the residential neighborhood, you’ll come to this palacial-looking public toilet:

And this completely incomprehensible business sign for a ritzy-looking establishment that does snacks, massage, and aroma therapy:

When the weather’s nice, people come outside. The roundabout near our street has been packed with senior citizens visiting and enjoying the gorgeous fall weather we’ve been having. People sit around, play cards or chess, talk, play with their dogs, or munch on street food. When I was in the US this summer, I kept feeling vaguely uneasy at how deserted all the sidewalks seemed to be. I kept wondering where everybody was.

I really wish that picture had turned out, because it would have been a really good one. Near our house, there’s a row of playground equipment that I assumed was for kids, but gets more use from the elderly. Older Chinese people take care of themselves - you’ll see them out in open areas doing tai chi, playing on see saws and swing sets, or walking around backwards to target one muscle or another (it looks FREAKY, incidentally).

Here are some other housing pictures:

And here’s some stuff from Ninghai Lu/Hankou Xi Lu, which are very near to our school, and where most of our needs get met.

Here’s one of the DVD shops, which mysteriously disappeared for a couple of weeks. We found out from a Chinese friend this weekend that there’s been some kind of “politeness contest” going on in China (or maybe just Jiangsu?), which involved cleaning up DVD shops and street food vendors. I couldn’t find any references to this online, but thankfully the DVD shops are open again.

Very near here, there’s the Exotic Foods store, which in the bizarro world I live in, means things like pasta, whiskey, canned beans, chocolate, olive oil, and cereal.

We’ve bought a lot of whiskey from this store, and for just a little extra, you can get these ridiculous gift sets that come with fancy bags that people dig out of the trash to take home, souvenir glasses which are overrunning our kitchen cupboard, and upscale packaging:

This is just down the street from the market, where we get veggies and meat:

There are also soooo many little food stalls, clothing shops, and tiny little hodgepodge places that sell stuff like shoelaces and power strips scattered around:

Anyway, that’s pretty much what my daily life looks like. We’re enjoying a week off for National Day, planning to go to Shanghai tomorrow to finally do something in Shanghai that doesn’t involve rushing to the airport. Most of our friends are out of town, so we’re getting into some highly anticipated time in.

The full flickr set is here, if you’re interested.

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bei tian min ren

Friday, September 12, 2008

Our apartment building just got a shiny new silver gate. Gates were the bane of our existence while we lived on campus - if memory serves me correctly, there were at least eighteen that had to be hopped, several eyeless, soulless ferrymen who had to be paid off with special silver coins emblazoned with the insignia of hell, a bloodthirsty hound that could only be avoided by throwing a cloth sack filled with the intestines of a virgin pig before its feet, and all of this usually had to be accomplished while being riproaringly drunk. So we were more than wary when the gate first appeared, but after a few days of seeing it always unlocked, we stopped worrying about it.

Today is Friday, and we’ve got a three-day weekend due to Mid-Autumn Festival. Chris and I finished classes at about three-thirty, and BOLTED from the school, determined to escape work for a glorious seventy-two hours as quickly as possible. We’d been at home for about thirty minutes, during which time we’d mostly jumped around screaming about how great it was to have such a slight taste of freedom, when the doorbell rang. I think we were irrationally afraid that it was going to be something involving school, and so we didn’t answer it (stupid).

Later, Chris went out to buy water (we haven’t set up a water delivery service yet, and so we have to run around the corner every day or two to buy some), and found out that the gate was locked. Chris can jump it - a combination of being tall to begin with and having spent the last several months working out like some kind of sustained but none-the-less-intense-for-the-duration Rocky montage - so it’s not so much a problem for him. I, however, am now for all practical purposes under house arrest. The doorbell had been the building manager trying to give us a key. Chris found some friendly people who told him where to get a key - the trouble was that it was too late in the evening, and the building manager had already gone home for the day. Chris’s conversational Chinese is pretty damn good, and he understood that the friendly neighbor was telling him to try again “ming tian”, which means “tomorrow” or “bei tian.” Chris didn’t know “bei tian”, so we looked it up on the internet, figuring it was some other word for one day of the week or other.

All the internet knew about the phrase “bei tian” was the Chinese idiom “bei tian min ren,” which translates to “bemoan the state of the universe and pity the fate of mankind,” which I hope is exactly what our friendly neighbor was advising Chris to do.

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From My Gmail Drafts Folder

Saturday, September 6, 2008

1. These were the blurbs on the backs of books I was processing at the library. I really apologize for not being able to cite authors, but I didn’t include it in the draft I wrote for myself to treasure them forever (and I’m too lazy to hunt them up online, although it should be easy to do if you’re curious).

a. What werewolf Elizabeth Young craves is a normal life, with a husband, kids, and less shaving. Unfortunately the vaccine she’s researched isn’t working yet. Worse, she’s in heat - and soon every dangerous wolf pack for miles around will be at her door. To buy time, she needs to have sex, and often, with the first human male she can find…
b. …Jayd just wants to chill, still hoping Junior year can carry on, drama free. And with Misty and her ex KJ reportedly “hanging,” Jayd is ready to move on. But the brother won’t stop blowing up Jayd’s cellie, and the text-messages keep coming; and the message is clear: KJ wants Jayd back bad. Buy Jayd couldn’t care less. She’s got a new man to kick-it with now - a half-Jewish white boy from Palos Verdes whose parents are loaded with a capital “L.” And Jeremy Weiner’s no ordinary white boy - he listens to East Coast rap, he’s got a sweet ride, and he’s got it bad for Jayd Jackson. But no one at South Bay High will just let a sistah be happy. Misty’s back to her usual foolishness, KJ’s all over her jock, and the notoriously anti-black teacher Mrs. Bennett is tripping. Jeremy’s got her totally sprung, but she’s going to have to rely on her brains–and some of Mama’s magic, of course–if she’s going to survive another week at Drama High.

c. Strong-willed Ashley Baxter is trying to forget. She has locked up her heart, convinced that no one - including God - could love her. Four unlikely people - Alzheimer’s patients - find the cracks in Ashley’s heart and slowly help her remember. Then comes the nightmare of September 11, which forever changes the lives of the Baxter family, causing them to remember what is important and leading them to make decisions that are both heart-breaking and hopefilled. Landon Blake, who has loved Ashley since she was a teenager, tries to dull the pain of her rejection by immersing himself in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero.
2. A short passage written shortly after the death of Steve Irwin and apparently during a particularly emo period of my life:
I think Steve would want us to look at his death and learn what we could from it, and there really is a nice little parable in there. The guy wrestled some of the most dangerous animals in the planet, and did some of the most outrageously dumb things ever filmed, and in the end, a fuzzy, relatively innocuous beastie that tourists swim with regularly was the one that took him down. So the lesson here is: watch out for the things you think you can trust.
And that’s exactly why people read these horribly trashy books. Because life sucks, and the hero never means half the tripe he spouts, and people get old and ugly and die. Unless you happen to be in a romance novel.
[I wish I knew who in the world I was planning to send that little angsty gem to]
3. I think this was the start of a blog post I probably wisely abandoned, due to its graphic and personal nature:

UGH. Ok, I realize that whining about my period is about as cliched and uncool as it gets, but I haven’t had one of these in FIVE YEARS. I mean, what’s going on with me right now is pretty close to what would happen if a boy started menstruating, right down to me absolutely flipping out and convincing myself and everyone around me that my kidneys were failing after a drunk trip to the bathroom that resulted in a gory surprise.

Oh, you’re still here. Excellent. Anyway, I’m getting off my Psycho Freak Out Barn Burning Birth Control (Depo Provera) after spending a good three years longer on it than you’re really supposed to, and I’m admittedly a little freaked out about having to be a regular girl again. See, I liked Depo. Yes, it made me grouchy for a while, and sure, there may have been thirty pounds or so that kind of showed up without an invitation, but so what? I DIDN’T BLEED. I realize that ladies reading this have no idea why I’m so disgruntled by this completely normal thing, and so I appeal to my male audience for sympathy: every month for the next thirty or forty years?! Come on!!

I hate to start talking about this, because it always makes me feel like a traitor to my gender and like the kind of girl that all intelligent feminists hate, but I WISH I WAS A BOY. I find the female reproductive system to be at least as good an example of poor design as a twenty-one year old pothead neo-Taoist survey-crazed drop out with a band’s myspace page. [note: this is not to say that twenty-one year olds, potheads, neo-Taoists, drop outs, and rocknrollers aren't capable of producing tasteful, user friendly myspace pages. It's just that when you put it all together you wind up with something that crashes your machine every time you accidentally click on it, and leaves permanent scars on your retinas from all the flashing and glitter. You know, just like a vagina.]. There’s this weird bloody mess every month, plus the frequent UTIs, and don’t even get me started on what happened to me right before I moved to China, pelvic exams, statistically smaller body mass and lesser strength, not to mention various societal pressures and prejudices. Where exactly is the silver lining? And if you tell me anything about the miracle of childbirth, I will answer in the words of my no-nonsense ninth grade health teacher: “it feels exactly like trying to poop a basketball.”

4. Did I post this?

Overheard recently:

“Damn, if my wife was as beautiful as you, I wouldn’t go out to work on the project tonight. I’d just stay home… just kissin’.”

“Just kissing?”

“Yeah, baby, just kissin’. I wouldn’t try to make love or nothin’.”

5. I know I posted this on my old blog, but it made me kind of laugh to remember that this is an actual, honest-to-god, true story that I solemnly swear I am not exaggerating, so here it is again.

Um, I had the weirdest haircut ever yesterday. I’m not going to mention the name of the place, because I’ve always had good experiences there. The people who work there are always really nice and friendly, and in spite of the fact that i hate salon banter, they do a nice job and are extremely pleasant.
But yesterday was something else. I arrived about ten minutes early, and the woman glared at me from behind the counter. “It’s 12:20,” she snapped. “You’re not supposed to be here until 12:30.”
“Oh,” I said, flustered. “I can… come back?”
“No, it’s fine. Can you wait outside while I run grab a coffee?”
“Um, ok-”
“I’m going to leave door unlocked, so don’t let anyone come in.”
I followed her outside and set up shop to play some tetris until she returned, and then she said, “Ok, look, do you have any adderol or know where I could get some?”
“No, man, I’m sorry,” I said, when what I meant to say was, “stay the hell away from my hair!” I did offer to reschedule so that she could have a full lunch - my plan being to leave and go somewhere else. But she told me to just sit down, she’d be right back. So I sat on Dickson Street, protecting the salon, and harboring fantasies of defending it against a Mafia-esque hair product crime ring, with the trusty though unfortunately narcoleptic dog that’s always sprawled out in front of the nearby shoe store by my side.
She came back, and barked an order for me to go inside and directed me to the shampooing station. I noticed a half empty bottle of wine, not tucked away beneath a desk, but just sitting there on a styling table. I got a really rough shampoo with scalding hot water, but I was far too frightened to complain. I got situated in the chair, biting my lip against the pain of my now-damaged neck, and she asked me what I wanted her to do. I muttered something vague - my usual tactic being to allow them to ask the right questions until we figure out what I’m actually asking for, since I have no idea how to describe a haircut- and she practically yelled, “what do you want me to do?” I yelped that I wanted to keep as much length as possible, I just needed a trim. She then grabbed a seemingly random section of my hair, and abruptly snipped it. “Is that ok?” she asked.
“Um, yeah,” I whimpered, fairly sure that it was not ok, but completely blind since I didn’t have my glasses on. She then proceeded to attack, with no recognizable system, and I just sat there impotently, watching huge chunks of my hair fall to the floor. She then launched into the salon chit chat routine, but spoke each question in such a way that it felt like an interrogation: “Where are you from.” “How old are you.” “Are you married,” etc, all the while grabbing pieces of my hair (about which I’m a little more vain than I usually care to admit) and viciously mutilating them. I wanted to blurt out, “I JUST WANT TO GO HOME!” but fear kept me rooted in the seat.
A few other people cycled through, all of whom were greeted with, “got any adderol?” and she kept getting distracted, walking away to answer her cell phone, eat a bite of her sandwich, or, at one point, after trying to adjust herself in a display that I can only describe as pornographic, vanishing into the bathroom to change clothes. FINALLY, after about an hour and a half, the ordeal was over, and I put on my glasses and tried not to scream. She’d mentioned that she was going to undercharge me, since she’d been late and I’d watched her freaking store for her. Of course she didn’t. Forty-five dollars of my life, gone, forever, just like half of my hair.
6. I guess this was intended for family, and I never finished it, but it was the start of a description of a day in my life, back when I lived on campus (shudders).

At 7:15, my alarm clock goes off. It’s my cell phone alarm, and it’s a British lady yelling “IT’S TIME TO GET UP. THE TIME IS [beat] 7:15″ over and over again. The night before, I’d had a talk with myself about how much easier my mornings would go if I’d just wake up when my alarm goes off, maybe drink some coffee, check my email, and get my head fully functional before class starts. However, my resolve goes straight out the window, and I set my alarm for 7:30. Then 7:45.

Then there’s a frantic scrambling for clothes, toothbrush, deodorant, and my elevator card (using the ‘vator is a 150 yuan privilege), and within ten minutes I’m swaying exhaustedly behind the podium of my first class of the day, yelling at myself for not giving myself enough time to look over my lesson plans before the start of class.

The bell rings, and the last few stragglers come trailing in, giving me wary looks to see whether or not today’s the day I’ll start cracking down on tardiness. I take roll and ask the class, “how are you?” and get the sleepy, dishonest response, “fine.” I make sure everyone’s awake, give them a page number, and we’re off.

Most of my classes are two hours long with ten minute breaks. Which, incidentally, is a very long time to be up in front of fifteen Chinese teenagers if you don’t know what you’re doing (and let’s face it, sometimes it’s hell even with the most carefully planned lesson). Sometimes it’s all smiles and jokes and they get really into it, but sometimes you spend hours the night before trying to come up with a fun, informative class and it immediately goes down in flames.

Anyway, I teach my first class, and then my second from ten to noon, and then it’s lunch time. Lunch options include fried noodles from the guys in the alley just outside the school (cheap), Wu’s Fried Meat Buns, which are these juicy little bombs of greasy goodness, located a little further down Ninghai Lu, Skyways, the tasty German bakery, on Hankou Xi Lu, across the street from the market and the DVD shops, or the nearby McDonald’s.

7. Some environmental notes:

Over lunch, I watched a couple of national geographic specials that left me with an OH MY GOD WE ARE WRECKING THE PLANET sort of feeling… Don’t worry, this isn’t about to become a buzz-word laden lecture on environmentalism - I know I’m the last person who can throw that particular stone (I don’t recycle, and one of my favorite pasttimes in the states was driving around for no real reason - I know I’m no friend of the earth). But holy god. First of all, I saw a program on elephant rage. There are all kinds of problems surrounding elephants. In jungles, elephants are needed as gardeners - their tendency to trample out patches provides a vital ecosystem . Of course, force elephants into too small of a jungle habitat and EVERYTHING gets trampled, which wrecks the ecosystem. Thin out the elephant population too much, though, and those stomp patches start to disappear, which damages the entire jungle. So there’s issue number one.

Issue number two: human/elephant conflict. Apparently, grieving elephants occasionally do not take their losses lightly - they strike back, trampling villages and killing people. Of course, villages also get smashed by elephants looking for food, forced into contact with human beings by their shrinking habitat. Then there’s the fact that elephants could very well suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, which causes violent lash-outs. And how about the roving gangs of orphaned bull elephants with out-of-control hormones and no older elephants to provide limits and education? These bands of thugs run around killing *anything* that gets in their way - people, rhinos, whatever. And uncontrolled aggression in the largest land animal is a considerable problem.

Where are these problems coming from? Well, when elephant population becomes too dense, it becomes a huge burden on natural resources. Naturally, elephant population becomes too dense when people take over its existing range. In an effort to correct the situation, people cull the elephant herds. Elephants, however, are deeply emotional and social creatures, and a baby calf watching its mother gunned down out of no where could very well grow up to be the kind of elephant that gores people for fun. The show I watched showed a lot of different methods people were trying out - chili powder, for example (elephants’ noses are too sensitive to tolerate it), but all anyone was doing was treating the symptoms, not the problem - there just aren’t enough resources left to support an elephant population without interspecies conflict. Now, I don’t know how to solve that one.

Then I saw a show about the crazy spike in jellyfish numbers in the ocean. Predictably, this one’s a global warming issue. And that’s a huge problem because if jellyfish take over the ocean, well…. I mean, come on, they’re creatures out of a sci-fi nightmare. I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to the television, but I did catch this: there’s one species of jellyfish that at the moment of death releases all of its eggs/sperm into the  ocean, resulting in a TON more jellyfish. This was discovered after someone attempted to cull the species. Woops.

So, um, apparently culling isn’t the way to go, if it leads to sociopathic, violent pachyderms running amok and horrible, unstoppable, brainless jelly monsters eating the entire ocean.

8. And here’s a sentence I’d really like a context for - no subject, no address, or anything. It sounds juicy, and I HAVE NO IDEA who or what I was talking about in November 2006:

We’re doing all of this too late; there was a time for it, but we let it pass, and there’s something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we’re thinking and planning.

It’s late and I’m bored…

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mooncakes

Thursday, September 4, 2008

It’s almost time for Mid-Autumn Festival (I think it’s officially on the 14th of September). As far as I can tell, Mid-Autumn Festival is the Thanksgiving to Spring Festival’s Christmas - it’s centered around a big family dinner, and people don’t go insane over it, they just have a good time. It’s low key and easy, and unlike the idiot holiday planners in the West, the Chinese had the sense to spread things out a little bit more, so there’s none of the stress involved with having to pull off two major holidays with only one month in between.

Instead of a turkey, Mid-Autumn Festival features the consumption of mooncakes. I freaking love mooncakes. My students all roll their eyes at me when I bring this up, and I think they’ve got the same association with mooncakes as I do with fruit cake, but I’ve already eaten four today and I’ve only been awake about an hour (I’m home sick with the sniffles, currently). I’ve been looking forward to mooncake season ever since I moved to China - when I visited about a year ago, I ate a ton of them, and I’ve got a really strong taste association between that and deciding to uproot my entire life and charge across a really big ocean. Hence, Mid-Autumn Festival is not only a time for me to munch on tasty Chinese pastries and contemplate the beauty of the full moon, it also commemorates the first time in my post-collegiate career when I finally overcompensated for the massive self-respect points deficit I’d been running by actually Doing Something I Was Proud Of. Really, when I think about Anne one year ago, I still get revved up about it and think to myself, “oh rock on, Gresham.”

Mid-Autumn Festival dates back to the Zhou Dynasty some 3,000 years ago (this is all according to Wikipedia), and occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. This is the day that the moon is supposed to be at its fullest and most beautiful, and the whole idea behind the festival is that your family gets together and celebrates the harvest and enjoys a brightly lit autumn night. I think autumn is a superior season, and I’m one hundred percent down with harvest festivals. I think it’s absolutely lovely to set aside an entire legal holiday for kicking back and appreciating the moon.

There’s a legend associated with the festival, of course, and like most Chinese stories there are approximately eighteen million versions. They all seem to start out with the earth having ten suns a long long long time ago. This was problematic, since farmers couldn’t grow anything and it was wretchedly hot all the time. Finally, a talented young archer named Houyi came along, and shot down nine of the ten suns. As a reward, the emperor gave him a pill that granted immortality. Of course, it was an Asian folklore gift, so it came with a warning that it should never be swallowed. In one version, Chang’e (his wife) swallowed the pill of her own free will, and in another, Houyi gave it to her for safe keeping while he went away on business. One of their servants tried to steal it, and Chang’e panicked and took it herself, not knowing what else to do to protect it. Both of these versions end with Chang’e floating up off the ground and all the way to the moon. She managed to stop her flight when she reached the Moon Palace, and hacked up a part of the pill. There was an immortal rabbit who lived in the moon, and Chang’e ordered it to figure out how to reproduce the pill so that she could get back to the earth to see her husband. The rabbit is purportedly still up there pounding away trying to get the pill right while Chang’e waits. Houyi went on to build his own palace in the sun, and he sees Chang’e once a year on Mid-Autumn festival - hence, the moon looks its best on that night. Another version casts Houyi as a tyrannical jerk, who shot down the suns and was rewarded by becoming the Emperor. He commanded his advisors to concoct the immortality pill so that he could be emperor forever. Chang’e realized that this would be absolutely terrible, so she took the pill herself to spare China an eternity of horrible leadership. She started floating off the ground, and had the wherewithal to grab a rabbit for company. There’s no man in the moon in China - it’s a lady and a rabbit, and you can see their shadow as they make mooncakes together in the Moon Palace. There’s another version of the story here.

The other big mythological presence for Mid-Autumn Festival is Yue Lao (literally “Old Moon”), a god in charge of marriage, but that’s not as much fun as archery, immortality, flying ladies, and anthropomorphic rabbits.

Back to mooncakes. Mooncakes are roundish pastries with a design on top (characters or pictures of Chang’e floating off into outer space). The sort I’ve been chowing down on are incredibly dense, and all the recipes I’ve looked at use an alarming amount of lard. I just found out that you’re supposed to eat them in little wedges and wash them down with tea, as opposed to shoving them into your mouth whole like a blonde western piglet. Traditionally, they’re filled with lotus or red bean paste and maybe some salted duck eggs (eggs=moon, symbolically speaking), but today you can find variations that involve ice cream, yoghurt, jelly, oreos, etc. Here’s one with egg yolks inside:

Mooncakes figure into mid-autumn festival thusly: Remember the Mongols? Around 1271, Kublai Khan rode in and founded the Yuan Dynasty, which lasted until 1368. Toward the end of the dynasty, civil unrest was erupting all over the place, in spite of strict laws against public assembly, free speech, and the like (and yes, I’m tempted to make an obvious analogy). According to legend, the rebel force spread a rumor of a nasty plague that could only be prevented by eating moon cakes. The Chinese population flocked to buy them (which is completely plausible if you’ve ever heard anything about traditional Chinese medicine - apologies for sounding snarky). The rebels had inserted little pieces of paper with a message - “KILL THE MONGOLS ON SUCH AND SUCH DATE,” or something to that effect. This is in no way historically substantiated, but it’s part of the reason for the national mooncake consumption on Mid-Autumn Festival.

AND: Pieces of paper inside baked desserts? Sound familiar? I read that story and immediately thought of fortune cookies. There are no fortune cookies in China, and most people have never heard of them:

The internet tells me that fortune cookies were based on a Japanese cookie, and they have no real historical connection to China whatsoever (Wikipedia insinuates that the whole Mongol story was dreamed up in order to give some Chinese legitimacy to the fortune cookie), but I prefer to ignorantly believe that there is a remote path of lineage in there somewhere. I’ll ask my students about it if my nose will stop running long enough for me to teach a class.

For those of you not faced with mooncake options every time you leave your house, here are some do-it-yourself recipes:

Azuki Bean Flaky Crust Mooncake

Azuki Bean Mooncake WITHOUT 3/4 cups of lard

Lotus Paste Mooncake

Lotus Seed and Black Sesame Mooncake

A Bunch of Step-by-Step Recipes, Including Nutella Filling - plus, a pretty awesome blog. She’s involved with Heifer Project in Arkansas, no less. Which means we probably know some of the same people, which is a weird result to get out of a random google search for mooncake recipes.

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Do you not fear the duck blood?

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Last night, we went out to dinner with a high school student we’d been joint-tutoring over the last month, his father, and his cousin. He’d decided to discontinue the lessons, because he needed to take a ton of IELTS classes in the hopes of getting his score up to a 6.5, but apparently etiquette demands a lavish dinner be bestowed upon anyone offering a service, no matter how brief.

Sam and his family picked us up at school, and we drove over to the Confucius Temple area for dinner. We ate at a dim sum-ish place (anybody: how do you say dim sum in Mandarin?), where they brought out tiny plate after tiny plate of odd dishes. It was actually pretty good - we got to try about fifteen soups, a whole bunch of different kinds of dumplings, duck, fish, crawfish, etc. Sam’s cousin is a student at Nanjing University, and we both *really* enjoyed talking to her. She studied in Paris for a year, and focuses in urban planning - beautiful public spaces, sustainable building practices, etc. - things that China needs DESPERATELY and pretty much mean that she is a ton more intelligent than I am. She admitted to us later that before dinner, she’d declared, “my only responsibility will be to eat,” because she was nervous about her English. Her English was really damned good, incidentally (and she also speaks French) - she was really well-spoken, friendly, and minus the Chinese flash that tends to rear its head during formal dining situations. She was also a little more in synch with what China looks like through foreign eyes. At one point, bowls of soup with little dark brown chunks in them came out, and she asked Chris and I, “do you not fear the duck blood soup?” Hells no, I drained mine. I might have been a little more hesitant about it if I’d known beforehand that the duck blood wasn’t part of the broth, but was named for the little brown chunks that were actually congealed duck blood, but it really tasted pretty good.

Duck blood soup is one of Nanjing’s specialty dishes. Others include cold salted duck (which I LOVE if it’s boneless), some other ducky things, stinky tofu (which is claimed as a specialty by most Chinese cities, since there are so many variations on it), and five fragrance eggs. I just read about five fragrance eggs this morning, and I wish I tried the one we were served last night. When the plate came out with a black egg shaped thing on it, I immediately thought it was one of these and managed to avoid even trying it. Sam described it as a “five taste egg” though, which sounds absolutely DELICIOUS:

A nutritious snack, five fragrance egg is an egg boiled in a broth composed of anise, cinnamon, ginger, other herbs and sometimes tea leaves.  It is left to simmer in the broth for hours.

From here, which also has some other descriptions of Nanjing dishes.

Chris also thought it was a nasty rotten egg, and he got us out of eating it by saying, “Um, we had so many eggs for lunch…” which was a completely acceptable excuse, apparently. I don’t know if it made sense according to Chinese logic, or if they were just willing to accept whatever weirdo hangups the foreigners had.

I’ll definitely take any visiting friends or family to that restaurant (*aHEM). There were performances going on, and a nice view of crazy neon Confucius Temple. One lady played a guzheng jawdroppingly well, and I’d go back just to see that again. I really, really, really want to learn how to play that thing. I’ve always thought it would be kind of cool to learn the harp, but now that’s been replaced with the guzheng all the way.

I have a really weird relationship with Chinese food. I hardly ever want to eat it during the course of my day. Chris is far more acclimated than I am, and he’s perfectly happy to eat fried noodles for lunch, whereas after a morning of teaching, I always feel like I need “real” food and get disappointed with noodles or fried rice. It doesn’t taste bad, at all, I just never get full and it always seems a little boring. On the other hand, the handfuls of times I’ve gone out for a proper Chinese dinner, I get really into it. Like last night, I felt full and happy and wanting to repeat the experience. Last night I had so many tiny bowls of flavors I can’t even describe that my mouth waters upon remembering. But why can’t I manage to get excited about the more basic fare? The problem isn’t that I have no sense of adventure - I’ll eat some strange stuff without complaining (except previously discussed lines drawn at rotten eggs and feet). I really need to work on it, I guess, because I’m in the middle of arguably the most exciting and bizarre culinary tradition in the known universe, and four days out of five, I’d rather have a ham sandwich.

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How to NOT Teach

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Number One Teaching No-No: Students do not equal friends. I’ve learned this over the last year, and now I’ve taught a few new classes where I maintained enough distance between me and my students to be able to do my job and stay in control of the classroom. This was not the case for my first six months or so in China.

When I first came to this school, I was hired with reservations - I only have a bachelor’s degree in English lit and absolutely no training in ESL or anything vaguely related to education. I was lucky to have a connection to get me hired in the first place, and my boss explained that I’d be teaching lower level students as a way to get my feet wet.

I started out teaching two classes. One of them was a class full of kittens, as far as I was concerned. I made Number One Teaching No-No really quickly in that class. You shouldn’t make friends with your students. It will cause all kinds of classroom management issues and heartbreak further down the line, as we shall see. In my defense, though, I spent the first few months in China feeling freaked out, wildly intimidated by my coworkers, homesick, and a little lonely. Besides Chris, my students were pretty much the only people I felt really comfortable talking to. And I think they picked up on some of that, because this was the class that threw me a birthday party, showed me their pet snake after school, brought me candy, and occasionally greeted me with applause when I walked into the room. They were the ones who helped me get a grip on China - they answered my questions, taught me Chinese words, and gave me a better sense of modern Chinese attitudes than I was getting in my first furtive, stressful trips to the supermarket. So I owe them. I taught them every academic term since I’ve been here except for one, and now I’m teaching them again with a few changes in the attendance roster, which I’ll explain later.

Then there was the other class. This was the lowest level class in the school, consisting of fifteen boys. Their classroom smelled like a gym sock in hell, and the only English they could use with any kind of confidence was obscene. I’d been in there maybe five minutes before deciding that this was NOT a job for the rookie, but rather for the educational equivalent of a green beret. It didn’t help that some of them were over six feet tall, and every time they’d stand up I’d suddenly feel extremely small. They slept in class, refused to do their work, talked loudly in Chinese over me, once memorably showed up to class completely sloshed after a liquid lunch, or appeared with casts on their arms and black eyes from fistfights over girls.

The first term that I taught them was absolutely awful. I left the class feeling like I’d been wrestling bears for two or three hours, limping away to lick my wounds and have mini nervous breakdowns. Finally, one day I lost it on them, and chewed them out like nobody’s business. I’m not a screamy person, and the shock factor worked. Perfectly. Then the tentative conversations after class started happening - they couldn’t understand directions because the language was too difficult or I spoke too fast, they couldn’t make sense of the grammar rules and got so frustrated with it that they stopped trying, they had the feeling that they were attempting something impossible, etc. It got better after that (although there were a few repercussions of my righteous fury). I switched my tactics - instead of getting flustered by the wildly inappropriate comments, I started shooting back (which earned me some street cred), I explained parts of speech using the multifunctional f-bomb, I redesigned the textbook content to revolve around things they cared about (hip hop, World of Warcraft, basketball, etc.), Chris and I went to KTV (karaoke) with them, and I started really priding myself of being capable of teaching them. I thought I’d figured out a way to make things stick in their heads. I started thinking of them as my Lost Boys, I knew their personal problems, I figured out how to read them and see the difference between laziness and frustration, and I was dumping HUGE amounts of personal time into supplementing lessons with extra stuff to be sure they understood. By the end of last school year, I would have jumped off a cliff for those guys if I had to, and I think they would have followed me if I asked them to.

Then almost all of them failed their final exam. They got the opportunity to resit it, and some of them made it through, some of them didn’t. I was bummed out by this, and when I got back from my short summer vacation, I got called in to the boss’s office to discuss their future. They wound up taking a three week summer class and then retaking that level’s exam. I spent that three weeks wracking my brains for new ways to present the material and giving motivational speeches that would have made generals proud. And this, the most problematic class in the school behaviorally and academically, worked HARD for it. They were taking notes, asking questions, and acting like a completely different class. Finally, they took the exam, and all but two of them passed it. Whew. It was a better outcome than I was braced for.

We had a week off for orientation, and I was totally psyched about coming back to class and giving high fives and starting Level Four with them. Seven of them had moved up to a higher class, leaving eight with me. But there was another aspect of their program that I had no idea was lurking out there to trip them up. These students are studying in a foundation program. They passed the level exam for that program, but there was more to it. They also need a mark of five on their IELTS score (American friends: like the TOEFL) or higher to get their visa. If they don’t have the IELTS score to get a visa, the foundation program won’t do them any good. And they just took their IELTS tests, and their scores were too low.

The school decided that the class shouldn’t move on to Level Four. I understood the reasons for this - they’d barely passed their exams, and in a practical sense, the lower IELTS score meant more than the ok exam score. The school wanted to give them the best shot possible for getting into a foreign university, which meant a hardcore focus on IELTS and English. So they got taken out of their program, and put into intensive language training - no more foundation program, no more subjects, strictly classes in IELTS and English. I found out about this on Tuesday, the day before classes started.

They were NOT happy when I went to class on Wednesday afternoon. They’d found out the news that morning, and were moping around the corners of the classroom when I came in. I’d spent hours the night before putting together a curriculum of sorts, which I’m pretty proud of, to replace the level four textbook they wouldn’t be using, and several other hours freaking out on Chris over the matter, and I had this complicated vocabulary/writing exercise/role playing thing all photocopied and planned out. The class trudged to their seats, and I asked them sympathetically how they were. The universal answer was, “bad.” One of them told me that they were all planning to leave the school, because they couldn’t see much of a point in staying.

Now, I rationally know that these students had massive problems with study skills, motivation, and what have you, and they’d been floundering in all of their other subjects. But I defy you to learn that a class you’ve been teaching English for one year hasn’t improved their ENGLISH at all, in one year, and not do the math and come up with a highly plausible common denominator.I felt like I’d let them down (and of course key players have told me that’s not true already) and misled them.

I meant to go into class and be as optimistic and motivational as I could, but one look at their faces and I immediately forgot everything I was supposed to do, and started with “I’m so sorry, I feel like I haven’t done my job well,” and started bawling. NOT professional, at all. And now I know that if you ever want to seriously freak thuggish Chinese youth, just start crying. So they spent a few minutes making me feel better, and then we pretty much just had love fest for the rest of the class. One of them made the comment that they’d bombed the IELTS because “we are all VERY bad men.” “No, no, you are good men!” And all eight of them grinned and said, “NO! BAD!” So we spent a little time giving everyone gangster identities - I had a hitman, a mob boss, an arsonist, a cat burglar, a sociopath, a jewel thief, a ruffian, and a drug dealer by the end of it. We wound up talking about a surprising variety of stuff (art, women’s rights in China, high school, the Olympics, stuff like that). At some point they started addressing me as Anne Jie (Big Sister Anne), which almost set off the waterworks again.

Most of them have left the school by now (and for the record, I have actually done things in class with them since last Wednesday - it was only one day of horsing around). Last term I’d write little stories about them for reading on Fridays (I gave them all superpowers in one, stuck them into western fairy tales in another, stuff like that - it got them to read and get a little bit of new vocabulary in, I guess). I started working on one called Very Bad Men that I’ll never get to give them. So this turned out not to be a touching family comedy about a ragtag group of champions after all, no matter how much I was looking forward to cheering for them at the graduation they didn’t make it to. I don’t really know where they’re headed - I think they want to take cheaper IELTS classes with people who speak Chinese. If they don’t get that IELTS score, there goes the “study abroad” dream crashing to the ground, which depresses me to think about. Some of them wanted to go abroad because their Chinese entrance exams weren’t good enough, and I have no idea what they’re going to do. It’s just been a bad week for me. The good news, I guess, is that by next term I’ll have mostly fresh classes that I will not make the mistake of getting so personally wrapped up in, thereby avoiding massively depressing situations like this.

I got a text message from one of my guys that said, “Anne. I will miss you. You are not my teacher now, you’re my friend.” Damn straight, and that’s probably a better arrangement for everyone.

I got really sad over this.

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a fervent apology

Friday, August 8, 2008

A while back, three students came running into my class five or six minutes late. Technically, they’re not allowed in the classroom after the bell rings, but these three had never been late before, always did their homework, and generally never made me angry. Plus, we were reviewing for an exam, and five minutes didn’t seem worth costing them a full hour over. However, their classmaster was in the hall and had seen them come in late, so I had to take some action. I assigned a paragraph explaining why they were late, just to keep myself covered. Two of them tossed out a basic “sorry, overslept, won’t happen again” thing, but here was the third:

Dear Anne,

Today, I’m late. About five minutes later. For this behavior, I have nothing to say. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t sleep like a person who has no responsibility. William predict the time at 7 o’clock, but his clock lost an hour. He made a mistake, but the daylife teacher in the dormitory call us, we didn’t wake up. So I have most of the fault. I think the matter will not happen like this terrible day will not appear again.

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first Chinese banquet

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

When I came home to visit, the number one question I got asked was, “what’s the food like?”, which made me feel incredibly guilty. The truth is, I don’t eat that much Chinese food, and when I do, it’s not especially exciting. My favorite dish is scrambled eggs and tomatoes. There are a few beef and chicken dishes I can get into, but for the most part, I really haven’t gone for gold in a country with arguably the most exciting/fear factorish culinary tradition on the planet.

My awesome friend Wells came to see us last week, and we took him to the restaurant around the corner that Chris and I had tried a few nights ago. We had some really good veggie dishes, and thought that the place would be a solid addition to our dietary canon. Of course, when we took Wells there, we wound up ordering a plate of feet on accident, which caused me to totally lose my appetite.

I felt bad about that - I don’t want to be the white girl in China who gets squeamish about exotic food (even though that’s exactly who I am). Fortunately, last night I had the chance to make up lost points when I went along with Chris to dinner with the family of a student he’d been privately tutoring.

One of the upsides/downsides of working for a school with a really large foreign staff is that you’re spared a lot of the culturaly stuff most foreign teachers get, including formal banquets. I’d never been to a serious Chinese banquet before. The weddings and staff events I’d attended previously were buffet situations. I was terrified when we went. 1) I didn’t want to embarass Chris with my bumbling laowai ways, 2) I was really worried that something would be put in front of me that manners demanded I choke down, even if it resulted in me blowing chunks all over the table, 3) I don’t speak enough Chinese to be anything other than a goofy monkey masquerading as a person.

It wound up being a lot of fun. It was in a really ritzy hotel, and we had a private dining room. We went with the boss and his wife, as well as the student and his family, and some of their family friends. This included another high school student, who I’m pretty sure got dragged along in order to converse with American teachers. She sat by me and bore her cross bravely, spending more time helping me eat than gleaning valuable information about American university systems.

We sat at a big circular table, and when we first walked in, we all had a big showy fuss about who would sit in the seat of honor. I don’t even remember how it worked itself out, but it took a long time. I just stood there until someone showed me which seat I was supposed to be in. In front of me was a plate with some shrimp and cold meats, one of which was duck, the others - I have no idea. It was tasty, though! We managed to avoid baijiu, and performed the required toasting with orange juice (which, incidentally, was damned good juice - way better than any I’ve been able to find in a store). A server snatched the plates as soon as we were done, and plunked down new courses as fast as we could eat them. There was an AMAZING chicken (?) soup that the high school kids told us was featured in Kung Fu Panda, which I haven’t seen, a dumpling course (holy god, good dumplings), a weird custard thing that was tasty, “western” style beef (which was the only thing I had to eat that made me wince on the inside - it was nasty meat wrapped around a huge honking chunk of bone), a rice dish, vegetables, and more. Early on, we got some kind of sweet stuff served with milk and honey in a hollowed out dragon fruit. I don’t know if the actual stuff was dragon fruit meat or if it was just extremely elegant presentation, but it was GOOD. I mean, the food just kept coming, plate after plate after plate. Eventually, the server began passing out what looked an awful lot like an extremely unhealthy piece of human feces with weird little quasi tentacles coming out of it. It was a sea slug. I saw it, and inwardly I felt a huge rush of relief when I realized that I was, in fact, going to be able to do it. And by god, I really liked it. It had a squishy, gelatinuous texture - basically exactly what you’d imagine a sea slug would feel like - but the second I stopped thinking SLUG and started thinking tasty sauce, I scarfed the whole thing down and really enjoyed it. I think I finished my slug before anyone else at the table. I was in serious danger of bursting at the seams when the final round of fruit appeared to signal the end of the meal.

Throughout the whole thing, people periodically got up and walked around the table, toasting everyone. It seemed to be a pretty simple process - stand up, say xie xie, smile a lot, take a tiny sip of orange juice, and move on. Chris and I made a round too, and most everyone said thank you, or cheers, in English, and smiled at us. We also got presents from our hostess - I scored a necklace, and Chris has a handsomely crafted shark with a diamond for an eye that doubles as a keychain and a bottle opener. I was really worried going into it that I was going to breach some sort of etiquette unknowingly, but it was totally ok. My high school neighbor finally just told me, “eat as you want, do not be worried about table manners here!” After a good round of guffaws over my inept chopsticking abilities (there were advanced chopstick challenges here, mind you), I gave it up and used the fork and knife thoughtfully provided.

I feel really silly posting about this, since this is extremely old news to anyone else who’s spent any time in China. It’s also eyebrow raising that I’ve been here nine months and haven’t gone out to a nice  dinner with a Chinese family yet. I sort of feel like anyone I know who’s also in China is going to jump on this post with the “well, actually…” comments that I definitely deserve (once again, the usual disclaimer: I haven’t been here long enough to know much about anything, and I’m the least expert source on anything Chinese you’re likely to find). But it was cool and I really liked it and wanted to tell the internet about it. Also, I really *like* a lot of Chinese manners. I guess it seems like the dominant social principle here is one of hardcore passive aggression (I fit right in!), but there’s other stuff, like the ritual toasting, that’s just awfully nice and respectful. Or like making sure your table has knives and forks and your menu includes “western” beef for your foreign guests. Or putting away the ridiculously expensive baijiu you brought in favor of nonalcoholic orange juice after seeing looks of horror on your foreign friends’ faces. I think people get a little carried away with the Chinese notion of guest/host relationship (witness: the 2008 Olympic Games), but I like the idea that respect and courtesy are the most important characteristics of social interaction, you know?

Anyway, main points:

  • Chinese banquets = fun, not stressful.
  • I like it when people are nice.
  • I ate a sea slug.
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Really, really, really unfortunate.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

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my bookcase

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Ok, if you’re wondering how the China/America jetlag works, here’s my experience: go to America, and be unable to stay awake for five or six days. Come to China, and be unable to go to sleep for the same amount of time. It’s two in the morning, and I absolutely cannot sleep. So, here’s a tour of the bookcase in my bedroom.

The primary bookcase that shows off our dazzlingly varied interests and astonishing levels of literacy is located in the living room (incidentally, when we moved over here and I was ecstatic over winning the rights to organize by subject and alphabetize by author, I realized that sooner or later I’m destined for library science and should just stop fighting it), but we have a second one in the bedroom, with glass doors on the front. The top shelf holds the collection of single issue comics that a couple of wonderful boys in Arkansas took pains to get for me and either send to China or send with me on a plane in one of the most meaningful gestures of transpacific friendship extended to me thus far. There are also some magazines (Vice and a few cooking magazines), Chris’s headphones, and the case of Michael Hearst’s Music For Ice Cream Trucks with a mix CD inside that I’ve been meaning to rip and keep forgetting. Two things to mention: Music For Ice Cream Trucks is the best music in the world to listen to if you’re sad and trying to fall asleep, and that mix CD is one of the best that’s ever been made for me, which is a perennial source of guilt. Its maker got in my way at exactly the wrong time for a well-meaning guy to cross paths with me at my most emotional bulldozer-ness. I have absolutely no idea what happened to him, only that I hurt his feelings pretty badly and the music is awesome. If he ever reads this, dear god, I’m so sorry - try to stay clear of 23 year olds fresh out of their first misguided three and a half year relationship, because heaven knows you didn’t deserve THAT.

The second shelf is where the pictures and souvenirs are. There are two of me and Daniel (from New Years and Halloween) and one of the entire Gresham clan at the beach, containing rare photographic evidence of my ill-fated black hair dye stint. I ADORED the way it looked, but Mom really, really, really didn’t, and after a couple of months I wound up feeling so guilty that I wound up paying an absurd price to get my hair stripped, which was an awful lot harder on the pelt than the dye and has become one of those things that the family jokes about and everyone laughs, but there’s still a sore spot. There are also two pictures from Chris’s sister’s wedding, who I got to meet last week and who was really, really cool - none of the suspicious, undermining, disdainful, all but overtly threatening treatment that I’d be wholeheartedly throwing at my siblings’ significant others. There are also a couple of pieces of coral, a jar of sand, and sea shells from the Philippines, a rock with a lot of fossils Amy and I found in a drainage ditch in Harrison, a weird Chinese sculpture paperweight looking thing that has a purpose I keep forgetting to ask Chris to tell me, and the souvenir “traditional” baijiu cup from the Maotai gift set Chris got for his birthday. Maotai is swanky baijiu, and I think almost everyone reading this now knows exactly what baijiu is after my trip home. I swear the nice stuff tasted worse than the fifteen RMB stuff from Suguo (the name of our local convenience store chain) that I brought home.

The third shelf is along the same lines - a picture of Scout in a frame, the group photos taken of all the teachers and students at the beginning of the year (I’m not in them - I didn’t get here until October), and a jar with some nasty water and the now dead white flowers our landlord brought us as a housewarming present that smelled really good at the time. I tried to fit in the little embroidered panels that one of my students brought me from Suzhou, but they wouldn’t fit, and they’re still in their box until I get around to finding a catproof place for them.

The last two shelves are a little bit junkier. The fourth has all of my Chinese stuff stacked up on it - flashcards, CDs, the scripts for the CDS, a grammar/vocab workbook, the two character workbooks, character grid pads, and the dozen or so notebooks that I’ve accumulated over the last year. I also temporarily stuffed in the bags of Mardi Gras beads I bought for my students in New Orleans as a cheap souvenir that leads into an easy lesson (about Mardi Gras and New Orleans culture, not exposing oneself to get shiny things). The bottom shelf is really junky - it’s the storage spot for Stuff We Use Often (my ipod, cameras, various chargers, cables, stuff like that).

That’s it, really.

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