Alright, enough.

Enough with the shitting on China already, I can't help but self-admonish. 

My tone has been wildly negative for the last little while because I've had to examine the state of things here as closely as my laser-focus obsessive brain possibly can.  Why?

The decision whether to come back here next year came up recently, so I needed to weigh some pros/cons.  It's kind of a big call, as I don't see myself as the type to take off partway into a contract - unlike certain Ontarians...  if I decide to sign on again, I'm committing to another full year of annoyances to go with the good stuff.  Let's get mathy!

Cons:
1.  It's easy to get annoyed by wildly illogical things that happen here all the time.  I don't look at it as an issue of cultural difference as much as an insatiable desire to cut every corner possible at all times.  Just remember, every product you get that was made in China is 'EXPORT QUALITY', and every odd thing you see a Chinese person do outside of China is 'MAGNIFIED BY 1.4 BILLION' here.

2.  This place can't be good for your health.  The water is hard as hell, you're randomly assailed by sewer gas anywhere/anytime, and the air can be incredibly chewy from time to time.  It takes extra effort to eat well, and to resist the urge to anger-drink on occasion.  People still smoke everywhere here, including (but not limited to) restaurants, on bikes, banks, enclosed train/bus stations, and in front of you wherever you are unfortunate enough to have to walk... it's all part of how...

3.  The country is arrested in a culture of semi-permanent adolescence.  Teenagers can be selfish, destructive to themselves/the environment, really into vomiting in public from drinking, and obsessed with keeping up with the Wangs when it comes to material goods use/consumption.  A guy who has lived in town for 7 years once told me that given the choice between a knockoff Gucci bag and an indestructibly well-constructed handmade italian leather attache, the Chinese would take the 'Gucci' bag 100% of the time.  I thought "generalization!", but have subsequently seen nothing to contradict this.

Pros:
1.  Loot.  It's pretty unlikely I would be walking into a full-time job at home, let alone one that pays all my accomodation/bills/etc.  I get free dinners with all the beer one could possibly need on a regular basis too, which doesn't hurt.  I still owe a shitload to Canada student loans too.. good times.

2.  I've 'figured out' virtually everything I'm going to need to know to survive here another year.  I know how to get all the various foods/drinks I want (alas for milk, which I will enjoy before leaving YVR at the end of June - and then probably go into stomach convulsions from drinking something healthful), I've scoped out a few restaurants that are easy to eat at (and am making inroads to tricky ones by getting menus translated etc.), I now know exactly what level of entertainment to expect on a weekend, and I know a cadre of expat townies I can see when I want to speak some English.  Long sentences!

3.  Travel opportunities.  I'm going to Japan for the second time already this year at the end of April (flight= about $450 return), which is fantastic.  Thailand was hot and delicious.  I've seen some provincial highlights and am going to go visit friends in Bejing from my ed program sometime soon.  Imagine what I could do with another year...  Korea? India? Tibet? Australia? Who knows.

4.  Stuff.  I have improved this apartment (added u-bends to sinks, got an oven, grew plants, etc.) significantly since I got here, and could come back from Canada with any products/light foods/etc that I feel like I'm missing (shoes!) after having left bulk stuff here for future use.

It looks like a 4-3 margin, and without even factoring in the career advancing experience I can garner with another year it wasn't that hard of a choice.

I'm in.

I'm in for another year of wishing I lived in a country of people forced into competence by the fact that they could possibly lose their jobs.  I'm in for another year of delayed gratification, if I define gratification as being composed of getting to do the vast majority of my hobbies - like breathing clear air and mainlining Mexican food.  I'm in because despite all of the annoying things that China has to offer, I can almost completely control the level of their involvement in my life.

I'm meeting interesting people, stockpiling 'WTF' stories for when I reconnoiter with whatever friends remember me when I return (I'm thinking single digits), and enjoying the satisfaction of living an 'adult' existence for the first time in my life. 

I owe it all to Chinese people being spectacularly lazy and bad at English...so maybe I should stop bitching about it.  I mean, I won't, but I could.  From time to time.

See you at the end of June, trees/nature/air.  Who wants to go salmon fishing with me when I return?

What's that, you say?

                I’ve been settling back in in a fashion roughly approximating ‘nicely’ since my nearly month-long exodus from the PRC.  After an initial comedown period of disappointment and disillusionment I’ve re-established a connection with the reason I’m here after all (LOOT), and found my way back into my old routine of attempting to eat well/stay hydrated to combat the worst effects of The China.

                This isn’t to say that things really get that much easier here.  At the core of every outing to the grocery store/restaurant/mall/etc lies the same issue: I will have to attempt to make myself understood, and understand in kind.  The fact that I have collected some elemental mandarin since I’ve come here helps less than you would think, though, because it puts you in decided danger of thinking you might be understood when you speak.  Explanation!

                Mandarin is a language that dearly holds on to its multiple-intonation format.  They literally can’t get enough of it; it’s the reason you can’t even pretend to speak mandarin without feeling like some kind of closet racist.  If you don’t do all the crazy ups, downs, recovered dips, and high level tones *just so* you will be looked at like a dog that is trying out its speaking legs for the first time… and not even some kind of adorable Hanna-Barbera creation, either.

                Part of the issue is the antiquated (yet quizzically still clung to) language, but a larger part is the near complete lack of multiculturalism here.  Now, you might say, “what do you mean, look at all the white people on the billboards?” – a semi-valid point, in a way.  I don’t hold the fact that the entire world seems to want to get ‘a bit closer’ to white people as valid multiculturalism, though: Orlando Bloom and an endless succession of anonymous blondes aren’t bastions of cross-cultural exchange – they’re just sexy as all getup.

                It’s hard to even come to visit somebody in China.  They need to send a letter of invitation dictating their address, job, and own visa status before you can even be considered for a visitor permit – after which you can stay in the country for no more than 30 consecutive days on a typical tourist visa.  You think you can come live in China? You better have a post-secondary degree in a field that the Chinese literally CAN’T do to even think about applying.

                Plus you have to remember that as a result of decades of unbridled (by reason, empathy, or environmentalism) development, much of the country is barely habitable by comfortable western standards; those with any lung, allergy, stomach, or immune issues have no business doing more than crossing the airspace.  What’s that, you’re a vegan/vegetarian? Get out of here you wuss, before you are forced to eat the boniest possible fish (which is the selection process for fish served across the country…jesus I miss halibut).

                Thus people of the Caucasian persuasion are actively discouraged from coming to live in China.  You’ve got to be a particularly hardy brand of weirdo to make it more than one day (the length of time a teacher recently lasted at our school… ah, Ontario, you make good people) in this country, and even then it’s only despite the best efforts of the Chinese service industry. 

                I’m not trying to say that helpful people don’t exist, I’m trying to say that the vast majority of people have no idea what to do with someone that doesn’t speak the wacky language like their neighbour.  This is why ‘po-tone-hwa’, or however you want to spell it, even exists: making effort to divine what someone who can’t exactly intone your way(even if they’re just from a different part of China) is seen as too much work for any day ending in ‘day’.

                In Canada it is common to encounter somebody with a thick accent (or no English at all) who wants something.  You think about the situation, use simple/slow language, point at things with your hands, and usually sort things out in a remarkably short/easy period of time.  In my experience here, the preferred way of dealing with such situations is to keep your hands at your side and speak mandarin increasing in speed by the moment.  This leaves the hapless foreigner again using their skills, but to help themselves through a situation – which is a situation that doesn’t have to be! 

                It’s not the peoples’ faults at all: clearly they’re not the leading intellectual lights (products of Chinese school system, currently working at KFC etc.) and they are completely unused to helping anyone who isn’t part of the clan.  Aggressive mono-culturalism (hello, ‘southern Chinese’ mountain people) has hobbled peoples’ ability to relate, and the breath of relief when people finally see us turn away is as palpable as it is audible.

                It’s just the way things are here.  If I ask my class about why such things are never addressed, or encouraged to change, the more glib amongst them announce “this is CHINA!” (or more commonly ‘the China’ after hearing about me/Hoochador’s go-to explanation for anything odd here).  If you can’t get used to constant disappointment over the little things – that don’t have to be that way, but damned if they are going to change – you don’t have a lot of business here. 

Thankfully I can laugh most such inconveniences off – if only a few hours after the fact.

A stark contrast

 It has been a little difficult to collect my thoughts about China in the last while; part of this can be chalked up to the general busy-ness that accompanies the job, but the greater part really falls into the lethargy/depression camp.  I wouldn’t say that I’ve become actually personally or professionally depressed – it’s just that the ‘what the hell!’ moments that still occur on a near daily basis have led to more sighs than tapping keys.  Allow me to explain.

 I went to Japan for the greater part of my spring holiday period, and it turns out that I both love and hate that country.  Allow me to explain, with the help of some visual aides:

 This is a picture of the gates that organise admission to subway cars in Tokyo.  When the train comes it stops exactly in front of the doors, which then open to allow people out.  Meanwhile, people have been standing in straight lines in front of these doors waiting to get in… once the people leave, they file on.  The whole thing is remarkably efficient.

 It was fun to watch before I realised that it was throwing China into a bleak relief.  In a similar situation in China everyone would be clustered around the gates, which would be stuck open (or operated by a dirty piece of rope) and covered in spit marks.  Once the train stopped 9 inches off the target the fight would begin, and with it the concurrent seagull-like screaming of Chinese people moving inordinate amounts of baggage behind them on the quality of dolly that you see only in fish market back rooms in the real world.  The whole thing would take 3 times as long, and given that it is public transit you would be bathed in halitosis the entire time.

 This is a picture of the canopy along the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Meiji Jingu park, Tokyo.  What you see are wonderful old trees and blue sky over an expansive walking area as well-constructed as it is meticulously clean.  What you can’t hear is the serene atmosphere, quiet but for the hushed speech of friends walking and the birds of the forest.  It’s one of the biggest tourist draws in Tokyo, and always busy.

 This would be different in China, or I’ll eat my Yomiuri Giants hat.  The path would be crumbling due to the constant passing of motor scooters and the ‘chinese mini-vans’ (three wheel motorbikes that have been encased to protect the rider from the elements, rather like a very dirty popemobile), and the trees would be a quarter the size – and leafless.  Every 20 yards or so there would be a stall selling plastic garbage or some kind or other, or some kind of food stand with a mechanized voice stridently proclaiming the same 8 words over and over on a 6 second loop.  Garbage would be everywhere it collected from the wind that the denuded trees couldn’t block, and toddlers would be running around in ass-less pants urinating and screaming about how great they are (one assumes).

 This view of Tokyo – I believe facing south east towards the rainbow bridge – was remarkable in that visibility (in this city of 13-14 million) stopped just short of the curvature of the earth.  The cars are kept under strict emission guidelines, the power for the city isn’t generated by burning coal, and the industries are kept in line by crazy things like environmental laws – rather than abject individualistic profit.

 Nijo-jo castle in Kyoto, the former residence of the Shogun.  This is an austere wooden building with some minimal gilding, and for some reason completely without hundreds of people smoking or inflatable red fake gates run by never-off air compression units you’d expect to see on an illegal Phillipino pearl diveboat.  Note, also, the blue skies.

 This river in Arashiyama, a western section of Kyoto, does not have homemade motorboats running up and down it at all times… nor is it full of never-decaying plastic bags or discount-brand beer cans.  There were many types of waterfowl, and a variety of fish living without the benefits of pens and nets – to keep people out, mind you, rather than fish in.

 Ah, a glimpse of bad English writing on a product… nothing better than an unnecessary use of ‘The’…though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese to just be trying to be ironic.  Irony here is how you describe the sky, not a mode of address.  Also, hooray for DIP HOP.

 It was so great being in Japan (I’m currently considering a return in early May, as evidence of this), that it left me a bit dumbstruck on my return.  So many of the issues with everyday life in China could be ameliorated if anyone took a bit of pride in the products they make or the systems they devise for organisation/transport/etc… but everyone is too busy trying to make money and get places/RMB before others do to notice.

 The depression I felt upon returning from a country designed by – and for the easy use of – grown-ups to an embarrassing free-for-all was palpable, but receded with work and time.  I think I know what astronauts returning to the space station after a relaxing/luxurious recess back on earth might feel like now.  The first week you’d really be wanting that Caesar salad with the brick oven-baked focaccia bread, but eventually you’d settle back into your synthetic chow and do what must be done.

 Thus, I returned to The China.

Hands-free relief!!

Damnit.

I’ve been reading other ex-pat blogs of late, and clearly I need to pick up my game a little.  I tend to wait for inspiration to strike – then write accordingly – but when the extraordinary becomes banal, the volume of outrage-related writing tends to taper off.  I could say I was too busy to write, and anybody else teaching in town who covets my position might expect that, but it’s not really the case.  Call it a lack of inspiration, perspiration, or personal variation: the end result is still the same.

It’s not like I don’t see things on a near-everyday basis that make me shake my head, either…. Two days ago I saw an approximately 60 year-old man blowing a snot rocket in public.  This isn’t pleasant, but it’s not the most outrageous thing I’ve seen on its own merits.  Usually it wouldn’t even earn a second thought: this is, after all, the land where toddlers run around in ass-less chaps so they can pee wherever they see fit.

No, the reason it stuck in my visual craw is that he was riding an escalator at the time.  Why is that weird?  I don’t know - it just is.  I didn’t know there was some kind of unwritten social compact we have in the rest of the world about blowing your nose all over escalators, but apparently we do: this is what living in ‘The China’ helps you discover.

Some people would say that the lesson is to appreciate the things you had, so as to greater love them upon your (inevitable, I’d say) return.  They’re not wrong, but they’re missing the point a bit.

I’ve often said that studying Latin helped me learn a little about Latin, and a lot about the English language.  This experience is rapidly becoming roughly analogous to what you come to learn when you live in comparatively exotic lands: how exactly your own society works, and why.

Does the old man emptying his sinuses all over the treads of the escalator change your day in any way?  I’d argue not, because I hardly ever go home and clean the bottom of my shoes with my tongue; rather, it’s just another one in a series of ‘wait, what?’ moments that define existence in a wildly crowded developing nation.  China likes to talk a good game about being a modern nation, but is still largely populated by an ‘old-world’ approach to life.  Traditionalism is a nice pastime, I suppose, but there are places traditional activities might be curtailed…

Escalators, for instance.

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?