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.