Lighting a candle for St. Christopher

What can you do, what kind of reaction can you have, when suddenly faced with the very real prospect of being in a foreign country where you don't speak the language with no official documentation for being there, or any money? Everything's all right, now. But for a while there tonight, I stared that possibility in the face, and it was not pretty.

I came home from work planning to pack for my May Holiday trip - I am to leave for Shanghai Sunday night, tomorrow, after finishing work. My train ticket and my travel money were in my wallet, as well as my passport. As I was having a cup of tea with my roommates, our house phone rang. I answered, and was greeted with Chinese speech. "I don't speak Chinese," I said. The man on the phone laughed, and asked for me by my full name (in very good English). He said he was calling from the police station, and someone had found my wallet, which was in my bag the last time I had checked, before getting on a crowded bus. I am not sure if I was pickpocketed, or if I was just in a hurry getting out the bus change and didn't put the wallet back in securely enough.

They ended up bringing the wallet to my apartment. Everything was there except for the money, a hefty sum by local standards, but not even a tiny fraction as valuable as my American passport, my California drivers license, and my bank cards, both Chinese and American -- which were all thankfully there. I am so, so grateful right now. I honestly didn't expect the cash to be returned. Cash has no name. But the other things... Well, in lieu of a general go-to deity, I'll just thank St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. And the Jinan city police, and whoever it was that turned in my wallet with everything really important intact.

But, wow, wow, wow. That was the most frightening experience I've had so far in China. And now I am awake and still not packed when I should be long-packed and asleep, still shaking from the experience and fretting over my plans to travel long distances across this alien land alone. Someone keep a candle lit for me somewhere, won't you?

Wo xi huan Zhongguo fan

See that gibberish-looking post title up there? It means, "I like Chinese food." But I can't possibly explain how to say it properly, because Pinyin, the method of writing Chinese speech in English letters, has almost no connection to the way English letters actually sound in English. It's sort of like learning a whole different language in order to learn yet another language, which you still can't properly learn because no one in China actually uses PinYin, they use their ridiculous pictograms, and Pinyin is just for foreigners.



But the fact remains that I really like Chinese food. Most other things in this place are a big annoying Communist quagmire, but at least the food rocks. Some days, it's the only consolation.

I think what I like most about the food culture here is the communality of it. (Not to be confused with Communism.) For the most part, unless the food in question is a bowl of noodles, dishes are shared. Individual diners rarely even get their own plates any bigger than dipping bowls. All food is places in the middle of the table. When you order, you order for everyone, and then you eat everything on the table.

I've always been a fan of sharing food, mostly because I want to try all sorts of different things, not just the one dish I've ordered. Western food culture is such a selfish one. We get our own dish, and huddle over it until we've had our fill, then maybe go to the kitchen for seconds. Whole dinners can pass like that with us never meeting the eyes of our dining companions, can't they? But here, it's impossible to not keep conversation going when respective chopsticks continually meet over the dwindling shared bowl of Di San Xian. It is not a good culture for germophobes. But then, a true germophobe's head would probably explode promptly upon arrival in China, before even getting to a restaurant.



This is Hot Pot, in the picture above. I love Hot Pot. It's sort of like fondue, except, you know, not. There's a burner on the table, and you get a big pot of spicy, flavorful, delicious broth, and a selection of meats and veggies that you throw into the steaming pot to cook. Then everyone at the table sticks their chopsticks in there to fish out the boiling bits of deliciousness. It's the epitome of the shared food culture, and it's wonderful.

I am bracing myself for the day when I return back to America and find myself at a restaurant with people who do not share my love of communal food. I just know I will reach across the table and take someone else's food, and they will think I am some sort of disgusting barbarian, and then I will have to explain that I have been living in China, which will sound as weird as my saying that I was raised by wolves.

Mystery train, expressway to your skull

If I had moved to Beijing instead of Jinan, I would have probably spent the last six-odd weeks gushing about how much I like China. But judjing China by a Beijing still basking in a post-Olympic afterglow is like judging the United States by a Manhattan at the height of prosperity. Wonderful as it may seem, it's not an honest picture. In a way, knowing this made me enjoy Beijing more than I might have without the context of a more realistic China.

The past three days in the capital have probably been my favorite three days so far in this country. A big part of it was that I was so very hungry for a taste of the west, for someone outside of my coworkers to speak English to me, for real cheese, for a place that was so anonymously international it could have been anywhere in the world.

Six other teachers and I took a train up early on Monday morning. The hostel we had booked was one of the nicest hostels I've ever stayed in. We checked in and then went out exploring, headed towards the obvious initial destination of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. It was too late in the day to gain entrance into the latter, but we loitered about the square for a while and contemplated history. Just as we were about to leave, a dust storm gathered above us. April in Beijing is known for these - it's the Gobi desert exacting its revenge on humanity, strong winds blowing dust and sand into the city. I spent the duration of the storm walking the massive length of the square and haggling with a Chinese man for a cheaper price on a copy of Mao's little red book.

The second day was the Great Wall, which is a couple hours outside the city. We opted to go to a minimally-visited part of the wall, planning to do a 10-km hike. There was lots of haggling with taxi drivers, and by the time we got to the start of the hike we had less time than we'd hoped to cover some very steep and partly ruined terrain. One of my colleages, mindful of a past knee injury, decided not to do the whole hike, and I decided to stay with her, mostly because I didn't want to rush myself through the experience.

The Great Wall of China was one of the most magnificent things I have ever seen. There are no words to describe it. It took my breath away. The wall stretched as far as the eye could see across the highest peaks of inhospitable mountains, snaking into the hazy horizon. So many times, I picked up my camera to take a picture and then just put it back down, knowing I could never capture it. Standing up there, knowing the hundreds and hundreds of years of history of the rough stones under my feet, was incredibly humbling. Even though I didn't do the whole hike, it was worth it to skip the more touristy sections of the wall, because we were basically the only people up there: just us and the hard-blowing desert wind.

We had been planning on leaving Beijing on Thursday morning, but kept forgetting to book out tickets. By the time we got around to it, on Wednesday morning, all the good tickets for the nice fast trains were gone. We ended up having to take the cheapest seats on a slow overnight train on Wednesday night. With this in mind, we all split up to wander about the city and make the most of our last day in Beijing, and all ended up going shopping and spending entirely too much money. I am learning how to effectively haggle, which is essential here. Bought lots of lovely things, mostly presents.



Of course, when it was time to meet back up and go catch the train, we ended up going to the wrong station, rushing across town with no time to spare, and grabbing our train seats at the last minute. The next six hours constituted the hottest and most uncomfortable train ride of my life, yet one of the most memorable. Every inch of the train was occupied. There were people sleeping huddled up in the aisles and in the small spaces between train cars. The windows were wet from so many people trying to breathe the same air. We played absurd word games and talked books and politics as long as we could to keep ourselves awake. I drifted off around 4am, and woke up shortly afterwards to find one of my colleagues using his very limited Chinese to talk to the large group of amused passengers who had gathered around to sneak a peak at the sleeping laowais. We got off the train shortly after 5am, about 72 hours after we'd left. After a few hours' sleep and a shower, I'm ready to hop on the next train (hopefully not the same one) and head back to Beijing.

I've been stuck so firmly in my own head for the past few weeks, looking at everything but the world around me. Travel, as it always does, gave me a much-needed kick in the head, reminding me that I am here to see and experience as much as I can. The small frustrations of daily life will always be there, but I will not always live in China, so it's really in my best interests to get the hell out of my own head and enjoy this whole wild experience. Probably for the first time since I left America, I am truly glad to be in China. We have a national holiday coming up that will leave me free of work responsibilities for about a week and a half, and I believe I will be traveling to Shanghai and Nanjing. Although in all honesty, I would be very happy to scrap all other travel plans and go bum around Beijing for 10 more days.

Don't look down

I've climbed two mountains in the past week. My legs haven't hurt this much since I played roller derby. It's good. The weather has warmed up alarmingly fast, with the smog blanket driving up the temperature well into the 80s and reminding me that the summer will be downright unbearable, but the past few days have been just gorgeous, even with the dust and smog. Some days, even the saddest of the sad bastards have to smile at the warm breezes and the sunshine.



Last Saturday I climbed the mountain that I can see from my house, thanks to a rare weekend day off brought on by a national holiday whose name I don't know. Something about tomb-sweeping? This was the easier of the climbs. All the mountains around here (and all around China, from what I gather) have steps built into them for climbing up. Easier, but less nature-y. The steps continued almost all the way up to the top, but the last little stretch was all rock-scrambling. (Actually, there were stairs all the way to the top, but I didn't see them until I was up there.)



I nearly cracked my head open against a boulder while falling down a mountain when I was 17, in Italy. It's a long story. Since then, I've been terrified of natural heights. Man-made heights, like the roofs of tall buildings, are no problem, but give me a mountain to scramble up and I start shaking and my eyes start stinging. But I scrambled. And I got to the top. It took me longer than it may take someone three times my age, but I did it.



Somewhere up there, balanced on a rock and looking for the next step, I realized that I've spent the past decade of my life learning the same lesson over and over. Don't look down. That's the lesson. Because when I concentrate my gaze on the next rock, and the rock after that, and look for a tree to hold on to, I can get to the top just fine. It's when I look down at the distance crossed that all my thoughts get tangled in fear. In more general terms, dwelling on past mistakes only impedes me from living my life today, and from taking the opportunities in front of me. Don't look down. Will someone please remind me of that next time I go into a self-doubting depressive funk?



On Wednesday I tagged along with five other teachers to climb Thousand Buddha Mountain, one of the biggest attractions of Jinan. The climb was longer, and the scrambling-up part was more treacherous, but the view from the top was worth it.



Things are looking up for me here, overall. And not just because of the nice weather. I finally get paid tomorrow, and next week a bunch of us are going to Beijing. There are two possible new developments in the works. If both of them pan out, they will make the rest of my stay in China downright awesome. Cross your fingers for me.

Wind of change

I've been turning this over in my head since I came to China, this reason why I seem to have a knee-jerk dislike of so many things here. It's not the dirt and it's not the foreignness, though both of those are not exactly my favorite things. It's the fact that China reminds me so much of Russia, the way Russia was when I was a kid, 20 years ago.

I was born in Moscow and lived there until I was 10 years old, when my family immigrated to America. My memories of it are the hazy recollections of a child -- I remember my house and my grandmother's house, my school and taking the subway, small things about everyday life. I can't describe the political tension and the mood of the country as the Soviet regime crumbled into nothingness and the borders opened. I can, however, remember finding out about Moscow's first McDonald's opening up, and wanting desperately to go there, because of the inherent appeal of the forbidden Western fruit. This is why it's been so hard for me to describe the similarities between here and there -- I lack the language of adult analysis for the Russian side, and lack the language more literally for the current Chinese experience.

The most tangible similarity has to do with housing. I grew up in a huge, crumbling, industrial-looking apartment block with poor infrastructure. I hadn't seen any buildings like that since I came to America. In China, everyone lives in them, the faceless Communist stone boxes divided into identical little apartments, too many people crammed into each one with insufficient plumbing.

Many of my fellow teachers and other foreign expats who come to love this country say it is because they have never seen anything as exciting. The lack of infrastructure is part of the excitement. When the power or water go out, all you can do is laugh about it. If I had grown up in a cradle of Western comfort and stability, I would be more inclined to take it in stride, shrug and chalk up one more point for "local color." But I didn't, so I can't. It hits too close to home. I grew up like that, with the inconsistent power and water, in a nation that imposed poverty on its population as one of the side effects of Communist power-grabbing. I have never had any desire to return to Russia, and living in China now feels too close for comfort. I remember too well how hard-won my American comfort and stability have been.

There are other factors and reminders, of course. The xenophobia that comes with a closed society. The way all foreign and Western things are simultaneously feared and coveted. The amount of bureaucratic red tape required for travel. Something about the mood of people, the atmosphere. These are insufficient words. As I said before, I lack the language to fully describe this.

If YouTube were not currently blocked by the Great Firewall, I would end this with "Winds of Change" by The Scorpions, written in the early 90s about the children of Moscow faced with such a rapidly changing world. It's a song about me, about my generation. I was a child in Moscow when the song was written. I can hear it now in the streets of China, a soft whisper through the veil of smog and exhaustion.

Let's never come here again because it will never be as much fun

You've all seen Lost in Translation, right? Yeah, it's like that. It's all like that. The strangeness, the complete alienation. The way everything floats by in a haze of foreignness. The way I live squarely in a world of concreteness rather than abstraction -- I can make myself somewhat understood in shops and restaurants, but not much beyond that. The way the bubble of concreteness makes me feel so one-dimensional. The way my foreignness is always on display, even when I feel like crap and just want to walk down to the store to get some food, everyone will inevitably turn their head and stare and laugh. Most of the time, I don't mind. But sometimes, it makes me not even willing to leave my apartment for entire days on end.

Here's the thing: I came to China, and to this city specifically, because of my friend, who told me I would live in the big dorm-like building with 20-odd other foreign teachers. Instead, I live on the other side of town, surrounded by Chinese people. I'm not blaming my friend, who genuinely had no control over this, but I am blaming the school for misleading me. If I had known the level of immersion I would be in, I would not have come here. I would have done this the right way instead of the easy way, done my full research and gone to South America, where I speak the language and the culture interests me, instead of just coming here because someone else was willing to take care of the particulars for me.

I was hoping that living here would increase my interest in China and its culture to something beyond a surface-level tourism. This has not been the case. The problem here may be Jinan, which is neither old, historic, nor pretty. It's a polluted, sprawling dirt pile of a city. I sincerely hope my interest in this country increases after I get paid and can start traveling in my days off, but right now it's all very grim.

I feel very guilty for thinking all these things. Here I am, in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, complaining. And I'm trying, I really am. It may be a matter of adjustment, of waiting. But right now, I am thoroughly not happy.

The teaching, however, is going wonderfully. Last weekend, my teenager class watched Mulan and then had a lively discussion about gender roles in modern China. The teaching, and that class specifically, may be the only thing that will keep me here for the length of my 6-month contract. It reminds me quite a bit of the year I spent in rural North Carolina, actually -- I was there paying my dues to my chosen profession, trying to get newspaper experience, but I was so lonely and miserable, and always felt so foreign. I didn't expect this here, though it makes sense.

Today marks a month of my being here.

Refreshing the world

The company I work for is a private language school, which means our students attend English classes in the evenings and weekends, so my work schedule is the opposite of a regular school schedule. I work Friday nights, then 11-hour days on Saturdays, then slightly shorter days on Sundays. After two exhausting weekends of work, I finally feel like I can start drawing conclusions about how I feel in regards to teaching.

First of all, I don't like teaching small children. At all. I never thought I would like it, and it was never something I had any interest in doing, and this confirms it. My youngest classes are full of 6- and 7-year-olds, and my oldest classes are teenagers. It's a good range that really allows a beginning teacher see all her options, but in my case it only cements my belief that I never again want to teach any students who haven't hit puberty yet. I don't have the enthusiasm and patience that such work requires.

But the teenagers? Oh, the teenagers. I love teaching teenagers. My oldest class is filled with 14- and 15-year-olds. They are brilliant. They make me realize that I was right, that I do want to teach ESL when I get back to the US. And this makes me very happy, because I've run out of ideas for new career options.

There are only six of them in the class. (Most of my other classes have about 20 students.) The first day, I made them put their desks in a circle and we had some great roundtable discussions about the roles of language in a culture, and their personal goals in learning English. The all agreed that they already know a good deal of grammar and vocabulary, but their weak spot is listening. The book they are supposed to be working from is completely useless anyway, so I'll be heavily supplementing it with various English language audio and video stuff. Actually, I taught them to say, "This book sucks."

This past weekend, the book said they should talk about advertising. So I downloaded a bunch of stuff off YouTube (which passes through the firewall, thankfully) and brought my laptop to class and made them watch the weird American phenomenon of Superbowl commercials. Most of the clips went too fast for them, but in the end they understood and laughed and learned new words and expressions. But the highlight of the class, and of my entire time in China so far, was this Pepsi commercial:



Nevermind that it's a commercial trying to sell massive amounts of high fructose corn syrup. That's not really the point. The point is that I got a class of Chinese teenagers to listen to Bob Dylan. And they UNDERSTOOD. And they agreed that every generation does in fact refresh the world. And I walked out of that class knowing that I will show that commercial many more times in many more classes, and they will watch and listen and understand.

Where I'm calling from, continued

There's a mountain outside my house. I live in a huge, industrial apartment block. I access my apartment through an alley. But across the closest main road, there is a mountain with pagodas on top. I can see it when I walk out of the front door. It's lovely.

Most teachers in this city live in Li Xie Da Sha, an apartment building the school rents in its entirety. It has a big banner over the entrance that says, "Foreign teachers apartments." I don't live there, for reasons of space and because I applied too late and because the school I work in (there are three in the city) is really far from Li Xie Da Sha. So I live with two lovely British girls in a big building full of Chinese people.

There are good and bad things about this arrangement. The good things include a much higher immersion factor, distance from the incestuous dorm-like lifestyle, and a mountain outside my house. The bad thing is that when I want to go out, I have to make phone calls and plans and take taxis, instead of just walking out in the hall and tagging along with whoever's going out.



I've been exploring Jinan. It's difficult to do because the pollution drapes over the city like a thick blanket. I'm not particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, but I feel the dust in my lungs after a few minutes of walking. It will be better once the rains come and tease the green out of the dead brown trees.

Where I'm calling from

There are people everywhere, more people than I ever thought could fit into any place, be it a bus or a sidewalk. They come at you like waves on the streets, bikes and motorbikes, buses and taxis, people and more people. There is no personal space here. Traffic lights don't matter, nor do traffic lanes. I'm more used to it now, the constant vigilance required just to get around this city that feels so vast and tall and endless despite not even being one of China's biggest.

Everything feels so much more strange and exotic when you don't speak the language around you. For the past couple of days, my roommates and I thought there must be some kind of religious services happening nearby because we kept hearing a man's voice chanting something strange and relentless. This morning, I found the man. He was wheeling a wheelbarrow through the alley, collecting plastic bottles for recycling.

The school gave us all little cards to show taxi drivers with our address on them. My apartment happens to be on a little-known sidestreet, the mouth of which is marked by a woman selling bananas. Taxi drivers have trouble finding it. Monday night, my roommates and I were trying to get home and instead got lost somewhere in Jinan. The driver was yelling at us, unable to find the place, so we paid him and got out, walked down ghostly empty streets flanked by closed shops. We hailed another taxi and somehow made it home.

The next night, my roommate Emma stayed at the bar longer than Jan and I wanted to stay, so Jan and I went home. We got to the door to find out that my key didn't work, and had to call Emma. Her taxi got lost on the way home. In the meantime, Jan and I sat in the cement stairway, three flights up at one in the morning in the middle of winter in a country where neither of us spoke the language, and laughed hysterically. The hall lights are on a sound sensor, so they turn on at the sound of footsteps or doors slamming. At first, we would clap our hands to keep the light on, then gave up and sat in the dark, laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the moment. I still have the key. I will keep it forever as a reminder that sometimes you have to just open your arms and your heart to the randomness and craziness of the world around you.

I start teaching on Friday evening, and teach 20 hours of classes through the weekend. I am excited and terrified.

Internet is wonky at home, hence the radio silence. Should be back online for real by next week.

Dragons and hamburgers

Went out to explore the city today and ended up in a beautiful park. Jinan is known for its natural springs, and I saw several of them today. Signs around them tell visitors that it's a poor idea to take the murky, muddy water from the spring pools and put it in bottles to take home, since that's apparently a thing people do.

The park is right downtown, surrounded by tall, nondescript city buildings, but inside the park is all traditional architecture, low pagodas festooned with stone dragons. Amanda (Ben's wife, who is Chinese) ran her hand along the painted decorations and said, "I wish I lived in a time when it was all like this." In her own lifetime, she has seen so much of old China razed and replaced with modern Western building, and it saddens her. "In a hundred years, no one will know what makes China special," she said.

In Beijing a couple days ago, the airport terminal I flew into and a good chunk of the highway from the airport to the city were all brand new. Neither the terminal nor the strips of hotels and apartment high rises were there before the Olympics. They sprung up nearly overnight, a cookie cutter facade to a crumbling national edifice. In Jinan, half the city has been torn down in the past few months in preparation for some other big sports event happening in August. By the end of the summer, the endless blocks of rubble and turned earth will turn into shiny new buildings, which will in turn crumble and peel until they are replaced with something else.

I look forward to revisiting that park as its vegetation wakes up with the spring. It will be a nice place to sit and write.



On a different note, we passed many street food vendors today, and I kept asking Amanda what they were selling. One stand had some weird looking sandwiches with bread that looked like cream puffs and filling that looked like fried chicken. I asked what they were, and she started laughing at me. "They're hamburgers! Aren't you American?"