Meefers/THE CHINA

It’s been a while now since I’ve written anything about being bewildered by ‘The China’ – as we call it when something disappointing/confusing happens to smite you – but that doesn’t mean that ridiculous things don’t happen all the time: it just means that I’ve become inured to their effects.  Every once in a while I’m still left shaking my head while something odd takes place, but now it’s less of a hallucinogenic freakout and more of a ‘ha, China, when will you get your shit together’ kind of shoulder shrug. 

For example, the other day I was wondering why the bus was going so incredibly slowly towards the shopping area… it turned out that there had been a literal ‘fender bender’ (both cars not damaged beyond cosmetic value) car accident, and that the crash team was laughing and having cigarettes in the middle of the road while they block 2 of 3 lanes, rather than getting their cars to the side.  Why were they waiting? I don’t know!  Probably waiting for someone to show up with some pickled chickens’ feet, or somesuch.

This kind of speaks to the ‘meefer’ (catchphrase for when me or Hoochador see somebody pulling a ‘ME FIRST’ kind of move) philosophy of life that seems to hold sway in this crowded country; it appears everybody is convinced that they are a unique and beautiful snowflake, and that they need to be accommodated for at all times.

It seems a bit odd for a communist country, but it’s true, and largely what is holding this country in an ‘almost first world’ kiddie pool stage; the ‘me first’ philosophy that leads to people self-entitled-ly sticking their cars at perpendiculars into traffic is what really holds china back. 

For a communist country where the ‘greater good’ should be something that is worked towards, China is the most ruthlessly individual country I’ve ever lived in: basically if you’re not part of an individual’s family, you can go indirectly (and in a slow, second-hand smoke wreathed fashion) to hell.

  This is what you see with the massively inefficient lines forming at attractions, where you have to dry-hump a complete stranger so another complete stranger won’t wedge themselves in in front of you.  This lesson should have been learned at my first grocery shop when old ladies would (figuratively) come sprinting from across the store to slam their veggies onto the scale in front of my tentative north American approach….and thus get their food weighed first.  This all used to actually bother me, but you just change your behaviour and get on with your own menial existence.

If you are a large person who is not afraid of being assertive (or ‘being a bit of a jerk’ within the western moral system), you will have no trouble getting around/getting your veggies weighed.  There is, however, one thing you will not escape.

When you go skiing, it is your responsibility to keep your eyes on what is happening downslope in order to avoid running into anyone who might have crashed or stopped for some reason.  If you keep your head on a swivel, you can get to the bottom without running over a toddler and feel good about yourself. 

Moving around in public in China has the same feel to me: nobody pays attention to anything that is happening around/behind them because they are so special, and thus people move very inefficiently whether in cars or on foot because they are always in each other’s way.  This is less of a problem if you move around at the same speed as the malformed hunchbacks (and by this I mean actual hunchbacks because, you know, eastern medicine is a winner) and their brethren that you see every time you go to the market… but if you are 40-50% taller than they are, it makes using the sidewalk a bit of an exercise in saving oblivious idiots from themselves.

I’ve yet to decide what exactly is the best way to deal with this problem, but my current practice of allowing tuned-out people – who I detect aren’t paying attention to their surroundings by about the time they come within a metre of me or so – to walk directly into my shoulder (rather than doing an avoidance dance to save them from themselves) allows for a little satisfaction.  I usually just look at them and raise a questioning eyebrow, before they realise my relative giant stature and scurry off with feet that barely ever leave the ground.  It’s neat.  It’s ‘The China’ in action.

Sino-Ponzi letter to Chiron

In an effort to avoid the dreaded 'dead-blog' effect that crippled the creative ramblings of so many of my compatriots of (refugees from?) the PDP program last year that went abroad, I've decided to post an e-missive I recently sent to an old teacher/mentor of mine.  Without further ado, my letter to Chiron (classical references: the most exclusive of all references!)

...

It's kind of tough to say exactly how things are.  School-wise I move between wondering why weeks are going by so (relatively) easily, and feeling wildly out of my depth.  Logic tells me that must be some 'first-year' sentiment, but it doesn't make the fact that I am teaching Comm11 first thing tomorrow any less galling.

In that class, for example, I need to do some kind of teaching on the topic of formal vs. informal language.  Slightly less than half that class is basically at this school to 'country-club' it, and isn't really up to learning much; the other half is actually pretty good, invariably female, and has just cottoned onto how to use the normal garden-variety swearwords...but not that they shouldn't really be used in written assignments.

My socials class is blessed with 5-6 good students out of 19, the others having coasted up to the top level without the requisite English skills in some kind of crazed sino-ponzi scheme.  I just marked two provincial exams taken by members of this ss11 class (Eng 10 exams btw), and there is no way in hell they will pass those.  Logically this means they will re-take English 10 etc etc... thus graduating - if that happens - about the same age I received my B.A. in a pair of ill-advised skate shoes and a hemp necklace.

Really, it's a good example of what happens when a magnificent degree of staff turnover meets students coming from rich families.  There's not a whole lot of grit in the bunch (with notable exceptions), and I'm going to have to fail a lot of them.... that is I'm going to give them realistic class marks and if they choke on the provincials it's game over/game reset time for them in those classes: there was a hilarious discrepancy between class marks and exam marks last year, so I'm trying to mark as realistically as I can.

The thing that stops me from immediately finding the exit is that the current group of grade tens is good: they are unblemished by the hilarious hijinks of yesteryear. After a recent reading comprehension test we gave to all levels, it has become apparent that the top third of the grade tens are clearly superior to the bottom half of the grade 12's.

Well, there's that, and the fact that I have student loans to pay…and probably a good deal more teaching to do to charge up my teaching resume to the point where my best-case scenario isn't teaching 1.5 days a week in Atlin. Beer's cheap too, I might mention.

...

All that being said there's not much to kvetch about...on the broad assumption the students continue to faux-bribe us with trips to family restaurants, cultural attractions, and, most recently, and small mountain of sesame (Zhoucun) pancakes and supposedly medicinal papayas.  Good times.

On stereotypes

It’s tough, when you come to a new country, to fully divorce yourself from your pre-assembled ideas about it.  Obviously this is something that the more worldly among us can do without issue, but newly-minted expats like myself have a little more trouble doing this.  That, or I’m trying to excuse my inabilities.

            Everyone has pre-conceived notions of China and the Chinese people, largely because they have met the far-travelling all photo-capturing masses on their international sojourns – though if truth must be told it’s only the teen girls from our school that seem interested in being in endless pictures with us foreign devils.  Perhaps it would be useful to re-examine some of the preconceptions I had before coming to the PRC.

1.     The Chinese are terrible drivers.

This is a bit of a misleading supposition, because it is fueled by seeing the Chinese outside of their natural environment: China.  When you see them pull some kind of improbable stunt-driving move that results in a minor fender-bender while driving in Canada/the US/etc. it is easy to just suppose that the Chinese can’t operate a motor vehicle with the same panache as your standard Euro/Canadian/Yank/etc.

What you don’t realise it that if they were driving in China, what they did would make perfect sense.  Traffic flows in a much more legally-relaxed way here.  Stuck behind a line of cars? Jump your car into the oncoming lane to perform a breathtaking sextuple pass that just dekes back into a traveling lane in time to avoid death.  The road got you down?  The sidewalk is right there, those people aren’t cars and, as such, will definitely move.

The Chinese are in no way terrible drivers: they are just used to driving in a situation without traffic laws that need to be obeyed.  When you port that into a law-abiding society their crazy moves become inherently dangerous, because nobody is expecting them, is all.

2.     The Chinese are always ‘this close’ to breaking into unison street dances.

This is something everyone mentions when you say you are going to China… and something that is demonstrably true.  In the sweltering evenings right after I arrived it was very normal to see anywhere between 6 and 60 middle aged/old Chinese people doing unison street dances.  Why has always been a bit unclear…but the obvious answer of wholesome exercise you don’t have to pay for is likely the solution.

The students, when I asked about this, were quite sure that I could just join in if I felt the urge and could suss out the moves, but I’ve yet to join the terpsichorean fray.  I think I’d rather stand out in a group of a couple dozen 60-70 year old Chinese women, actually.

3.     China is LOUD.

If you’ve been in a restaurant frequented by any reasonable number of Chinese people, you will have noticed the general tenor being something along the lines of a fortissimo.  It is due in part to the delicate tonal qualities needing to be quite apparent in order to make sense, and also to the general conviviality of such a situation, but still always struck me as being a bit excessive.  Would visiting China itself rob me of my idea that the Chinese were simply loud as hell?

No, no it would not.  China is a land of loud noises, from the 5:30AM fireworks barrages to the mechanised voices screaming at you about how somebody nearby is selling corn on the street.  My students assured me that it was fully possible to communicate at a whisper level in mandarin…but were only able to keep it up for about a minute.  The only assumption I can make is that the entire country is suffering from at least mild hearing loss due to the general din, and thus feels compelled to be heard above it.  Keep in mind that I spent some years in a rock band/going to loud concerts for fun…and I am still constantly cringing away from shrilly yelling students/vendors/bus brakes/etc.

            More generalizations to come some other time; I’ve got to go do some cooking next to my thundering exhaust hood on the hotplate that emits an eerily painful high-pitched keening sound.  Huh? Did somebody say something?

Ex-pat blues

‘Oh I woke up this morning, next to my Chinese wife,

‘I just can’t wait until it’s late and I can lament my life… I got the…’

            I was staying at one of the local 5-star hotels to get away from my admittedly joyless apartment, but the plan from a few days earlier was still in place: to meet up with Mr. Hoochador, to absorb as much food and free beer as possible at the hotel restaurant, and thence to the locally infamous ‘Yes Pub’ to meet up with the non-locals.

            It’s a bit of a cliché to be found drinking with the other dozen or so local expats, but the opportunity to speak English to more than the three people on staff at my school (plus the helper maidens, though they’re not much for repartee) inexorably drew us in shortly after our arrival in town.  That two of them (with rumours of an antisocial third one somewhere) were attractive women only added to the scene, and so off we went for the 3^rd consecutive weekend.

            On arrival I felt my spirits take their weekly fall (walking into a smoky dive of a bar playing terrible tunes will do that to a man), augmented by the added disappointment of there being nobody who both spoke English and lacked a Y-chromosome.  Mr. H. and I bellied up to the lawhai table – a misleading term as we were the only fit ones there – and started to chat while we took in some more local brew.  It was all very depressing until…

            Actually, nothing happened to keep the mood light: that was an unnecessary tease.  We were left with only a group of predominantly northern Englishmen, who seemed to delight equally in regaling with tales of people who had left town previous to our arrival and in advising us to stay away from Chinese women.  It was pretty easy to see what angle they were coming from, though, as they were all married to local women and thus pretty effectively tied down.  One remarkable guy had been in town for eleven (11) years, despite having a vociferous lack of love for the area, the people, and the act of flossing.

            The evening took on the tone I imagine one would feel attending a lodge meeting with your grandfather, but without the fun hats.  It was smoky enough – largely because of the dearth of the usual crowds to absorb the second-hand smoke before it drifted my way – to render my clothes odious in a faster time than normal… thankfully I had long stopped caring about my sleek exterior appearance by this time in the night.  The girls were wisely absent, and so it was with Hooch and I; we changed our interior for exterior pollution and hopped a cab home in mild defeat.

Mt. Tai (sad slide whistle)

(Slide whistle sound)

(Yet more slide whistle sounds)

(Sound of me muttering “I’m going to kill that (expletive deleted)er when I get back down this”)

                It would have absolutely sickened the English, this much I know; the vaguely organised lines swept almost imperceptibly towards the ticket gates (not all of which were open, naturally) as people kept their groins as close to the leaders’ backsides as possible.  It would have been arousing if it wasn’t so maddeningly unnecessary.  It was the most popular multi-religion pilgrimage spot, Mt. Tai, in the middle of the National Day holidays.

                The accumulation of irk began some days earlier when the leader of the Helper Maidens came purposefully into the staff room to inform us that there was probably an issue with the trains they had booked on our behest… it seems that part of my return journey was now to be a 57-minute standing journey instead of a breezy 17-minute sit (all after climbing and descending a 5000+ foot mountain, mind you).  This was not, however, my main concern when it came to that day’s navigation.

                After an admittedly vague request for an early train to TaiShan I had been cheerily presented with a ticket for the 4:49AM train going south.  After balking like a pitcher with Parkinson’s disease, however, I took this in stride… sure, it meant running around at 4:05 in the morning trying to flag a taxi down off the remarkably sparse main road, but it would mean beating the hordes – which in China is always a goal.  For all the grace with which they almost kill each other dozens of times a day on the road, the Chinese are simply terrible at walking around on foot.

                If that seems like a generalization it’s because it is one, but it’s one that you will notice before you leave your airport of arrival.  My best guess is that due to the sheer number of people in any one place the Chinese, as a group, are unbothered by bumping into one another, reasoning that they will hit someone else before they make it all the way to the ground; in this way each individual concussion spreads a wave not unlike the decreasing ‘ripples on a pond’, and everybody can buy groceries without paying any attention to their surroundings.

                Where the Chinese really fail is in mass attendance events.  Part of the western picture of China is of a highly-organised culture that works like some kind of nearsighted machine, polluting the world and bullying Tibetans with all the style of a robotic synchronised swimming team.  What we don’t tend to picture, or encounter, in the west is the physical, ‘on the ground’ reality: being in a group of thousands of Chinese people is a bit like going to an amazing concert’s mosh-pit fringes, but without our attendant social mores regarding personal space or due courtesy.

                All of this makes me sound bitter, but in reality the opposite is where the truth lies.  Oh, I was certainly taken aback when I first entered the throngs climbing the mountain after the ticket fiasco… but when it became apparent that it was essentially a mobile climbing free-for-all I actually fared quite well.

                Chinese people, it turns out, tend to exist at 3 heights relative to my modest frame: knee, elbow, and shoulder.  Naturally I laid off kneeing children as much as possible, but the time came when I stopped contorting myself like some kind of fey pretzel in order to avoid collisions with the oblivious masses…. If they weren’t interested in avoiding contact with any of my major joints, I certainly wasn’t going to leave them unimpressed.  In this way, I came to know the Tao of crowd movement: if there is space then you would be crazy not to occupy it, because some less crazy (though no less crazed) person will take it in about a second.

                While I’m engaging in wild generalizations, it might be useful to examine the general state of Chinese physical fitness.  It is very possible (as evinced by the muscle-bound specimens at my gym) for Chinese people – just like real people! – to become very, very fit.  As a group they simply choose not to which, when coupled with an interesting desire to stop and rest at the top/bottom/midpoint of any group of stairs, makes for proverbial ‘tough sledding’ when trying to climb a narrow stone staircase with about 200,000 of them.  The religious aspect of the mountain also made for both the very old and the very young making slow appearances, often helped on both arms by stronger folk but doggedly walking up nonetheless; these groups tend to stop in rather sudden, monolithic fashion…which leads to incredible pedestrian traffic jams perched across remarkably steep stone stairs slanted back in the direction you’ve just come.

                None of this is to take away from the impressive mountaintop vistas and thousand year-old (or more) temples to be seen, but rather to ‘heads-up’ anyone looking to do anything popular on a Chinese national holiday.  The trip was very long but a nice one, leaving me merely shaking my head at the piercing slide whistle-merchants as I made my descent.  They can live…for now.

Wake up!

“Whoa, whoa….why were you taking a bath with Billy?”

(Gales of innuendo-fueled laughter)
“No no no, we were taking a bath downtown, with wheels”

                “Oh, a bus!” was my exclamation, as the veil of second-language interpretation lifted incrementally.  At least it let me make male/male bath jokes for the rest of the class, which work even better in a culture not accustomed to mixed-company needling.  I had been given the highest-ability English class, you see.

(Falling asleep, glasses riding up the forehead like a compass pointing northwest)

“Gregory! Wake up, kid!”

(Stands up instantly, hands at his sides and chin held high; glasses still pleasingly askew)

“Hahaha!” (mimics the snap-to attention, boy scout salute cracks up to my right brow)

                You’ve got to keep them awake should they drift, and broad physical clowning is the only way to quickly convince them that they’re not in any serious trouble.  They were, after all, undergoing military training in the exercise yard this time two weeks ago, so it is a slow battle convincing them I do not require them to jump to attention in order to answer “how are you today?”.  I had, in fact, also been given the lowest-level English class possible.

                Settling in was a slow process unaided by a solid week of crippling omni-flu which left me perilously close to wit’s end, but eventually it happened despite my pathogens’ best efforts.  The school had 4 teachers (including myself) with which to deliver the comprehensive curriculum required by the ministry of education.  Through a breathtaking display of staffing I found myself the only Humanities teacher in a school whose entire purpose is to teach people English, and therefore in line for a self-styled promotion.

                My broad claim to be head of Humanities (H.O.D. English and Social Studies, if you prefer) was as ridiculous as it was irrefutable; the other three men being math/engineering-centric had no objections to my humourless assessment of the situation, as they were quite busy at the time.  There was, however, help at hand for us in a roundabout kind of way.

                Known variously as the ‘office ladies’, the ‘helper maidens’, or the ‘feckless five’, there were also a quintet of women at work with us on a daily basis.  I say at work, though, in a rather broad sense, because short of the brief period of very visible travails accompanying our arrival, they were very hard to fully understand.  They spoke, on average, passable English, and were largely responsible for the extracurricular ESL classes (all taught in perfect Mandarin), for helping the older students fill out English-language forms (often right after they walked out of English class), and for counselling the students should they encounter some emotional difficulty – though by their own admission the students were unaware of this capacity.

                One day the ‘hot-shot’ English speaker of the bunch was in our staff room discussing our upcoming vacation plans (a week off was in the offing) when she started teasing us about something or other; this was an astonishing development to say the least, because we were unaware that teasing was even on the table in this workplace dynamic.  This inexorably led to the following:

“So Ms. X and Ms. Y are responsible for A and B, Mrs. Z is responsible for keeping our passports for some strange reason, and you basically do all the hard office work?”

                “Yes…”

“So our school has 4 teachers to deliver the entire curriculum, and 5 people to supervise self-study, help kids fill out forms, and make them feel nice?”

                “Aha! Ha! Yes…”

                I realised almost immediately that I had gone a bit far by logically cornering somebody in their second language, and spent the afternoon considering an apology to keep things copacetic.  It was with some trepidation, then, that my hoochador compatriot and I edged into the office some hours later to ask if they could translate ‘can we see his form from the gym the other day so this other guy can copy how it was filled in?’ into the zany pictographs of the Chinese language so we could give it to a no-doubt gobsmacked gym attendant.

                It was with a trace of vindication that I received a copy of the form from the other day: bilingual and filled out to exhaustion by one of the helper maidens while my compatriot stood nearby paying for his membership.  We gave our thanks, and left with heads just high enough to avoid the lintel on the way out.

Hangover mountain

“What? Oh, goddamnit, why? Nooo…”

                … I internally bemoned as the bus rolled to a stop, and the sound of the children playing some kind of sword-clashing PSP game seemed to rise up like an illegally pirated wave.  Why the bus wasn’t moving wasn’t immediately clear, it seemed, to anyone lucky enough to be riding it out to the southern mountains that glaringly sunny Saturday.

                It wouldn’t have been nearly as big an issue if my colleague hadn’t seen the face (or parts thereof) of Chinese traffic death the day before, and expressed an ardent desire to numb that image with a series of Tsingtaos and a liberal sprinkling of hoochador.  Perhaps some explanation is in order, actually; this seems like a classic case of ‘in media res’ abuse.

                It is a fine thing indeed to be gainfully employed in both the field and place of your choosing, and another entirely when you lack the specificity/nepotism necessary – as clearly had become my case.  Touching down in Beijing airport beggared my vocabulary’s file on ‘surreal’ synonyms, really; it seemed more like an overdone movie set than actual useable air, and made for good fooling with my colleague-to-be – as had been clarified on the transpacific flight itself – while we stumbled our way around the terminal.  I couldn’t shake just how amazing it would be to load up my backpack with requisite equipment and become a mobile ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ laser show, no matter where I went.  On bad air days it still occurs to me, occasionally.

                A couple days later I was in the dipsomaniacal depths of school ‘meet and greet’ staff dinners, crushing jet-lag like so many bottles of BaiJu (approximately 70 proof rice wine) as the seasoned Chinese-school principal circumnavigated the table for individual toasting time.  I found myself looking deeply into the big man’s eyes as I requested he fill up for GumBei time…seconds later we mutually toast (I surmise) by pointing the bottoms of our empty wine glasses at each other, and I’ve proved I’m not some ‘little man’ to be scoffed at – at least when it comes to blatant disregard of my well-being in the name of respect.

                At least I could say I felt compelled in that particular case.  The trouble with getting saucy with my colleague, despite it being a nice bonding experience, is that it served no real purpose for me: I didn’t have to distance myself from the thought of accidentally seeing some poor woman’s corpus callosum astride a lane marker.  I merely got into the jollility of it all, which of course leads to subsequent problems the next day; in retrospect, not the best of my many choices regarding timing of ‘party time’.

                It was probably the ‘hoochador’ – named by us for the interesting Chinese opera mask adorning the bottle that distinctly resembles a lucha libré wrestling getup – that did the most debilitation that night, and on into the next day.  There are times when it doesn’t matter how much water you drink after, or snacks you have during… you simply have to live with the fact that you selected potable spirits on the basis of price and novelty bottle.  My colleague had, perhaps, steered us wrong on this one, but I could draw some comfort from his proximity on the seat behind me (that much closer to the sword-clashing children).

                I often found myself on school-related trips during those first 3 weeks of teaching at No. 11 Canada Zibo Secondary School, invariably without any real idea as to where we were going but full of the promise that it would allow me to be photographed many hundreds of times by people I will, in all probable likelihood, never see again.

“Is this a…drinking kind of lunch?”

“Ah…no, not really”

                Conversations like the above lead to a series of 7-8 people who speak nothing but the finest Chinese reverently saying that it’s time to acquaint yourself with the bottom of your PiJyou (beer) glass, often in remarkably-spaced intervals for all those but the most hardened alcoholics.  Then it’s back onto a bus to wavily watch 16 year-old girls punch the boys they like, accompanied by choppy (yet voluminous) commentary in a seemingly un-whisperable language.  A short mountain climb/cave tour later you’re back down to concrete vision and the familiar world of your iPod, and not a moment too soon: this is the Tao of field trips to other schools.

                At some point the bus rides/lunches/dinners are over, and you breathe the visible air while climbing the 110 stairs to your apartment.  There’s an inevitable wealth of informative winge to be disseminated on the domicile’s behalf, of course; I simply prefer to end, as I began, abruptly.