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.