Chinese Guy Bitten by Panda, Again

Yet again, someone decided to jump a fence and enter a panda's enclosure here in the PRC, and yet again, said fool has been mauled. This time it wasn't a drunk, and it wasn't a dopey teenager. This time it wan't GuGu, twice-headlining panda in Beijing news stories.


This time, panda YangYang took a bite out of the crime of stupidity, and an uncounted number of bites out of a college student surnamed Liu. (Though a few articles have tried to categorize the twenty-year-old Liu as a "teen," such whitewashing isn't saving anyone any face.) Whatever Liu's major might be, it surely isn't logic, or press relations: asked for explanation (as to just what sort of person thinks jumping into a pen with a bear is a good idea), Liu said, "YangYang was so cute, and I just wanted to cuddle him."


Asked for comment, YangYang informed reporters that the attack should be considered as "a sort of commentary on the failings of a college system whose requirements are simply too lenient." He went on to lament the "apparent inability of some of the nation's top graduates to generalize experiences."


Liu's blunder comes at a particularly embarrassing time for wildlife officials, whose recent ad campaigns--aimed at giving pandas a harder edge--have apparently failed.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice (Like Salt and Margarine)

I've been getting exposure to quite a few strange tastes in the past few weeks, some of them pleasant surprises, some of them familiar shocks that I'd almost been able to forget from last year.

Returning from his summer trip to Malaysia and other parts, Nersey brought me back a tin of Malaysian-style coffee, with the warning that the first cup might take some getting used to. The tin lists the ingredients as "Coffee (70%) Salt, sugar, and margarine (30%)," and I'll leave it up to coffee experts to explain just what they do with the last three ingredients. (Wiki has this to say about it.) Strange as margarine and salt coffee sounds, the result of brewing (I used my regular perculator instead of a sock) is ... well, the first few cups take some getting used to. The coffee turns out thick and black, and there is a strange aftertaste, which (maybe suggested by the ingredient list on the tin) I'd describe as buttery. By my third pot, I'd cut back on the amount of grounds I used for each pot, and really, the coffee is pretty good. I don't think I'll ever convert from, say, Sumatra Mandheling to this Malaysian variation, but I won't turn down the offer of another cup. (In fact, I'm considering a trip to Malacca during my upcoming vacation time.)

中秋天节 (Zhong qiutian jie, Mid-Autumn festival) was Sunday. This is a traditional Chinese holiday, among the country's most important, during which people take a day of work to spend time with family, eat and gaze at the moon. (Nowadays, moon-gazing has been largely replaced by staring at the television set, as with 春节--Chun jie, Spring Festival.) The moon plays a big part in the 中秋天节 festivities in the form of 月饼 (yue bing, moon cakes). These saccharine, moist and sticky little cakes come with a number of surprise fillings (traditionally, lotus paste, bean paste, jujube paste, yam--of the purple potato-tasting variety--and hard-boiled egg yolk). Most of the fillings have chalky textures, apparently chosen to offset the jelly-like texture of the surrounding, and tastes chosen to offset the sickeningly sweet exteriors. So what you wind up getting inside the mooncake wrapper is the long-lasting and low-tech equivalent of an ipecac-filled chocolate.

What you also get for 中秋天节, if you're unfortunate enough to be a teacher, is a whole lot of moon cakes, usually from children with very fragile egos. This year I got two big, big boxes of moon cakes, one from the grandfather of a serious trouble student (It is my assumption that this gift box was a poorly thought-out apology) and another from the parents of a teenaged student who has been a VIP on and off for the past year. The boxes are flashy, gold and red affairs, ornately decorated and weighing in at about ten to fifteen pounds apiece, while only holding a few moon cakes each. (They're also expensive as all get out, adding a large helping of guilt to the honor of the gift.) I also got single moon cakes from quite a few students who, not content with my most heart-felt thanks, insisted I have a try, so I downed four of the gross little things on Saturday, trying my best to smile. In another week, the experts tell me, I may have finished digesting them. Anyone who thinks my assessment of this traditional food may be a bit harsh should check out an oldie from the blog scene: Noboby Likes Moon Cakes.

In other news, I have discovered Hunan and 客家 Kejia food, both of which now join Sichuan, Xian and Xinjiang food, on my list of 好吃. From Hunan, 红烧肉 (hong shao rou), thick hunks of pork and some small vegetables in a rich red sauce and 农家炒肉 (nongjia chao rou, Farmer's home fried meat), little strips of pork cooked in a heaping helping of edible spicy peppers have become part of my regular routine. I've had a certain kind of tofu a number of times while in China--a yellow, eggy tofu rectangle with a small piece of sausage in the center; it turns out this is 客家豆腐, Kejia or Hakka tofu. The dish tastes a bit like the egg and sausage casserole my family makes for 圣诞节 (Shendanjie, Christmas), and has made for a nice brunch-time treat on my days off. If the self-styled Guangdong/Hakka women I met on Sunday is right, and Hakka should be counted as Guangdong people, then I guess there is such a thing as good Guangdong food.

Trust Us. We Know What We're Doing.

Checking out of my old apartment turned out to be more of a pain in the neck than finding a new one. Because my former landlord was apparently a busy man, he'd long ago turned all the actual rent issues over to a real estate company, with whom I'd had at least one prior problem.

This meant that my deposit--a whopping two months' rent--was in the hands of the real estate company, rather than those of my landlord. Before you get your deposit money back, any outstanding bills have to be resolved, and an inventory of the apartment has to be done (in my case, to be sure that a cagey 外国人 doesn't make off with some poor sap's TV). After two hours of looking over the place, the real estate agents conceded that I hadn't stolen or damaged anything, and the landlord had not only agreed but also pointed out that I'd actually fixed a few things up, putting the place into better order than it had been when I moved in.

I asked whether we should go to the real estate office then to take care of my deposit. "在这里我们没有钱。 我们的福田办公室有钱。 你请给我们你的合同和你的发票，还有我们的福田(什么）五天后(什么) 你钱." (Zai zheli women meiyou qian. Womende Futian bangongshi you qian. Ni qing gei women nide hetong he nide fa piao, haiyou womende Futian (shenme) wu tian hou (shenme) ni qian.--We don't have money here. Our office in Futian has money. Please give us your contract and your receipts, and in five days our Futian (something) will (something) you money.

I responded, “你们先给我钱，就我给你我的发票." (Nimen xian gei wo qian, jiu wo gei ni wode fapiao.--Give me then money first, then I'll give you my receipt.) Then the agent did the one thing that always tells me I'm about to be screwed over by someone; he said, in English, "Trust us. We know what we're doing. This is process, always process." I told him I didn't much care about the process, pointing out that once I handed over all my receipts and my contract I had nothing left to indicate his company owed me money. Even my landlord said I shouldn't hand over my contract or receipts until after I'd been paid. "This is not a confident matter. We just want to help." I told him he could help me by writing down the address of their Futian office and letting them know that I'd be coming to collect my money at my earliest convenience, so they'd better get ready.

The next day, I got a message from the company, asking for my fax number. I sent them the school's number, and they faxed me an invoice detailing what they thought I was owed as a return of my deposit. Unfortunately, they'd listed one month's rent as unpaid (which was bunk), bringing my refund down significantly to about nothing. One of my coworkers called and cussed them out over the phone, and then they sent another fax, this one indicating that I was owed more money. They then began calling the school, asking me to sign and date the invoice and fax it back to them so that they could prepare my money.

I asked a coworker whether the invoice clearly stated I was owed money or whether my signing might indicate I'd been paid money. The invoice stated neither. Again, my coworker called and cussed the company out.

The next week, at my earliest convenience, I made a trip to Futian and visited the company's main office. When they asked what I wanted I showed them the invoice, and they immediately said, "你需要去那个南山办公室." (Ni xuyao qu nage Nanshan bangongshi.--You have to go to that Nanshan office.) I told them that, since the Nanshan office had told me to come to the Futian office, I was there, and I planned on getting my money.

“如果我需要再去南山，就我先要去给公安说话." (Ruguo wo xuyao zai qu Nanshan, jiu wo xian yao qu gei gongan shuo hua.--If I have to go to Nanshan again, then I'll go to the police to talk first.)

Then the woman quickly went back to get my money.

Back Online in a New Place

It's been a good while since I put up a post, mostly because I've been busy. (It's a funny thing how when interesting things are happening, it's harder to find time to write them down, while when nothing's happening, I've all the spare time I could use.)

In recent weeks, I've changed apartments, which has eaten up most of my free time. Just looking for an apartment in Shenzhen is one of the worst experiences anyone can live through, and it's getting more expensive. (Oddly, while the real estate market is consistently going down in Guangdong, the asking prices for rent are rising. The explanation I've been given is that if fewer people are buying homes, then it must be because they're waiting for prices to go down even lower, and if they're not buying, they must be renting; therefore, raise the rent.)

On the bright side, the real estate agents in town seem to be getting a little better about showing people to apartments. The first agent I contacted actually showed me more than ten places on our first day of hunting, and she called back the next day, eager to show me more places. Perhaps the closing of many real estate offices has led to an increase in customer service and competitiveness: See last year's apartment shopping stories below. At the end of the first day, though, she did tell me, "我们今天看了那么多房子。 如果你不买一家，就我会哭!" (Women jintian kanle name duo fangzi. Ruguo ni bu mai yi jia, jiu wo hui ku! "We've seen so many apartments today. If you don't buy one, I'll cry!")

Overall, the apartment shopping was almost fun at first. I got to practice my Chinese a lot, and I got some good exercise. After a few hours, though, the whole process started to wear thin. Bathrooms in most places were too small, or had squatters. We saw at least a dozen huge apartments with no furniture. Many of the apartment owners didn't even bother to clean the places before trying to find new tenants (in two cases, families totalling more than ten people were still in residence), so bonuses like air conditioners or refrigerators were unseen behind piles of of clothes, knick-knacks or packing boxes.

In the end, I finally found a decent place where the landlord seems to understand investing a little bit of money into an apartment raises the value. The place I have now has a smaller living room, bathroom and kitchen than my previous apartment did, but these are all large enough to be comfortable. (And, really, I never got much use out of the massive sofa I had in my former apartment.) The bedroom is larger, so I'll probably end up putting in a desk for my computer--I may even get an Internet connection...maybe. My rent is about 200 元 per month cheaper, and I can walk to school, which doesn't save that much money but does cut down on the number of smelly, dirty, loud, or otherwise offensive people I have to sit next to in a day.

Probably the biggest improvement is my balcony: large enough for a patio table (metal and glass, with an umbrella) and four chairs. Since my living room is smaller now, I may not be able to host as many people at one time, but with the patio set-up, I'll probably be able to do a lot more barbequing a lot more comfortably than I used to. The balcony's cooler at my new place, too, and more private (meaning I'm looking out over rooftops instead of at a wall of other apartments), so I've been spending a lot more time there.

It took me about three days to move all my things, and about four trips in cabs. Then I got to go through the process of closing out my contract for the old apartment, a pain I'd been warned about before, which ended up being worse than I expected. (No matter how much the service may improve when it comes to getting you into an apartment, there's been no decrease in the size of the hassles you face when you leave.) Next post I'll be sure to write something about the little scam artists in my old real estate agency.

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Six Days in Nanshan: Day Two
Originally posted: 07:33, 2007-08-27

After a slow breakfast and some reading, I left the Hai Tao and got a cab to the Hai Wan hotel, where it turned out no rooms were available. I wound up at another hotel whose name I couldn't discern, unless it was actually "The Vienna Group," which is under the same management as the Hai Wan.

Where the Hai Tao had been well above my price range for the long term, this second hotel closer to the cost for renting. Besides, this hotel room provided me with much better motivation to get out and find an apartment. A bit darker and older, this room was a nice enough place to sleep and shower, but not the kind of place you'd want to kill time in.

I met with Nersey and his mother-in-law to go apartment hunting and ran smack dab into the Shenzhen business model for real estate. Set up an appointment to see places with a company, and you find out they only begin looking through listings (mostly above your price range) after you've arrived. Ask to see one of the places in your price range taped to the agency's window, and you're told it's too far away or that a much pricier one is more "beautiful." Beauty >Space+Cost is apparently the basic formula in determining desirability in housing here. After hours with the first agency, we got to see two apartments: in one the bathroom was simply too small; in the other the bathroom would have been large enough had it not also been the laundry (with a washing machine plunked right in its center). I learned the phrase "Ce suo tai xiao le" quite quickly and had a good deal of fun sitting on the washing machine, pantomiming scrubbing my feet and back.

We parted ways with the real estate folk and had lunch at Hasio, then rested a while. Later Nersey and I went out walking, collecting mingpien, and trying to get to see apartments. We managed to get a look at a little loft-style place that was really quite nice (or would have been, were it not for the garden gnome-sized bathroom), and later met with an English-speaking agent called "Apple," who almost took us to see the same loft we'd already seen. After a visit back to her office, she was able to show us an unfurnished apartment in one of the Time buildings; the owner raised the rent by 300 kuai per month as soon as we entered, and it just wasn't worth it without the furnishings.

I had dinner with Nersey and his family, and his wife made a few phone calls to agents that night, asking them not to bother calling unless they had a few apartments to show instead of just one. I wasn't waiting with bated breath while I returned to the hotel.

****On a side note, in real time I have had my first corporate class tonight. For now, I'm teaching English training at a big computer company on Monday and Tuesday nights. The class went quite well from my point of view. The students are talkative, have good senses of humor when it comes to success or mistakes in English, and seem to be very much invested in improving their English. Even better, their English is already quite good, so it's largely a matter of lowering their inhibitions about speaking. In true Chinese fashion, I'll probably have to wait a week or so to see if the class went well for them, but tomorrow I have the chance to talk less (since I don't have to do the whole spiel about my credentials) and lean on the curriculum now that I know how far they've gotten in it. Hopefully, things will continue going well, and I won't wind up with the same fate as their last teacher, who apparently forgot to let them speak now and then.

Six Days in Nanshan: Day Three
Originally posted: 08:22, 2007-08-29

For the second day in a row, I had a breakfast pass, though this meal turned out more disappointing than the previous day's: no good meat, no fruit, just a thoroughly Chinese breakfast--various steamed bread objects and congee. The only things I recognized as baozi were stuffed with zhu (pig) something, and that something wasn't rou (meat), whatever part of the pig it was. In the end I got a tray of jidan (egg) buns that were light and moist to look at, but dry and chewy to eat. Coffee, it turned out, wasn't part of the breakfast pass, so the disappointment cost me 50 RMB; live and learn, no such thing as another free meal.

Nersey and I started apartment hunting again, this time with an agent who, while not seeming to get the point of looking at many apartments, was at least willing to try. Such people help you appreciate China's sense of service, even after others have robbed you of hope. After seeing two lackluster places in the immediate area, we took a longer walk out toward the local Walmart to the NewEra building. There I got to see the first apartment in my price range that I could imagine living in. Though small, it used space very economically, allowing a good amount of space in the kitchen and bathroom. Alongside the mainroom was a sheltered balcony-cum-laundry, and the main room itself was built on a sort of open concept design; a half-wall of silhouette shelves divided the main space mentally into a sitting room and bedroom, with a curtain hung on the bed side to create actual privacy. It was a cozy little place, well furnished and decorated in a style John Waters would have loved--nice '60s and '70s colors and a sofa whose camp value alone justified a good part of the rent.

For some reason the owner felt it very important that a Chinese lantern be hung from the curtain rod while we were there looking. Since I couldn't follow the Chinese being spoken, I'm not sure whether she was just taking advantage of having people taller than herself in the apartment or whether she thought the lantern really filled out the whole overall style of the place. I put the apartment in the category of "very strong maybe" and said I'd contact the agent if I was still interested after seeing a few more places.

Nersey and I went back to his place to have lunch and a rest. Since his knee was giving him a lot of pain, his mother-in-law gave him a Chinese medical treatment; this is a massage that looks quite painful--consisting largely of loud beating and vigorous stretching of the leg--but I'm told it's actually very relaxing.

Later we saw a few more places, all disappointing. The worst was over the Eastern Athens Hotel, a cramped little space with a bathroom so Lilliputian that, were I able to sit on the training-sized toilet, my knees would jut out into the entryway and showers would have to be taken in just such a posture. The NewEra apartment was looking better and better. I got back to the hotel figuring I had at least one good option if the next day turned out to be a bust.

Six Days in Nanshan: Day Four
Originally posted: 07:53, 2007-08-30

I skipped breakfast at the hotel, opting instead for a walk around the area and some vegetable baozi with a canned coffee; all told, this ran me just five kuai. Nersey begged out of the apartment hunting, as his knee was still acting up, so I set out with two agents and a little English to one of the Time buildings and saw two apartments.

The first was a spacious room with a large kitchen, large bathroom and good-sized bedroom set off of it. It had lots of storage space, one large balcony and a second balcony for the washing machine and complete furnishings, all new or in good shape. (This is actually the apartment I wound up renting.) Next I saw a place in the same building, offered by the same owners, for the same price; this second place was smaller, on a lower floor (which Chinese apparently like less) had no washing machine or refrigerator and only one air conditioner set in the place of the least possible usefulness. "Yi yang, danshi meiyou, meiyou, meiyou . . . wo bu dong," I said to the real estate agent: "The same (price, I hoped, was understood), but doesn't have, doesn't have, doesn't have . . . I don't understand." He shrugged, nodded, smiled; I think maybe he got the joke.

I managed to get across that I really liked the first place, but that I'd need to wait for my Zhongguo pengyou (Chinese friend) before I could settle anything. While I was waiting for Nersey's wife to get home, I went out with another agent from another agency. She was able to show me a once-nice apartment whose current resident looked like he was preparing for the lead role in a cinematic version of Kafka's The Hunger Artist and who had done a good job of starting the apartment's decline into utter squalor; all that was missing was a boarded over window and maybe a graffitoed RIP for someone named Tiny or Boo. Then she showed me an absolutely beautiful room in the same building (with enough furnishings and details--such as a forty-two inch plasma TV--to make up about a year's salary for me) that just exceeded my price range by, oh, half of my monthly salary or so.

After Nersey's wife came home, we had dinner, and then a storm broke out, during which Nersey's mother-in-law taught me shandian (lightning), leisheng (thunder), and that you shouldn't touch a shu (tree) during a thunderstorm, though I think tree is actually shumu. We decided against going to look at more apartments, and I settled myself on the apartment I'd seen that morning.

We walked down to the agency, but it was closed for a business function; she phoned the agent, and he and his partner came rushing back to the office just to explain to us that the landlord was currently out of town, so the apartment couldn't be rented yet. After a bunch of talk (among the Chinese) and some confusion (on my part), we managed to set up a meeting for the next morning, but only after I'd paid a deposit--not the apartment deposit, but an agency deposit; I'm not sure why. (Perhaps arranging to sign for an apartment and then not showing up is the Chinese equivalent of knocking on someone's door and running away.)

好吃:Hao Chi

Since I've been asked recently about what foods from home I miss the most here in China, I figured I'd mention a bit about the dining and snacking situation in China.

I eat out for nearly every meal here: restaurants are so cheap that it costs about the same for me to cook at home as it does to eat out, and the Chinese food I can buy in a restaurant is much better than Chinese food I could cook myself. Though I'm actually pretty good at cooking Western dishes, it's impossible, unusual, or ridiculously expensive to get many of the ingredients I need. The things that are 找不到 (zhao bu dao, not to be found) in Shenzhen are herbs, spices, and some fruits and vegetables--there's no fresh basil or thyme here, though there's coriander aplenty, and things like cloves or allspice are only available in the foreign import shops, sometimes; artichokes and raspberries are as common as unicorns. A lot of the other common ingredients I'd use at home--things like canned tomato paste or corn, soup mixes, wheat pasta, BBQ sauce, 等等--sell at steep prices here (One can of tomato paste goes for about 8 元; that doesn't sound like much until you consider I can buy a large bowl of egg-and-tomato fried noodles for about the same price). So I end up eating out every night, unless Nersey and his family invite me to dinner or I cook to celebrate some holiday.

The good news about this is that the Chinese food I can get at restaurants is also much better than that I could get back home in the States. Sichuan, Xinjiang and Xian dishes are all spicy--really spicy; back home I'd tried dishes like Kung Pao chicken (here, gong bao ji ding) and been disappointed, but most of the Sichuan places that cook it here manage to make it both spicy and tasty, a skill that eludes most of the stateside cooks. Sichuan cuisine also has a lot of ma la dishes, made with little peppers so spicy your mouth goes numb while you're eating, that are high on my list. The Xinjiang restaurants make a lot of lamb dishes, a lot of noodle dishes, and some of the best barbeque I've ever had: at least once a week, I just eat food on a stick (lamb on a stick, chicken wing on a stick, sliced potato on a stick, mushrooms on a stick, 等等) all grilled with hot pepper and cumin. At the local Xian restaurant I've discovered a dish called 回锅冬瓜 (hui guo dong gua) that's some kind of spicy battered and fried squash; even though it's no longer on the menu, the cooks will still make it for me when the supermarket next door has 冬瓜 on sale.

I do miss some food from time to time, like meatball parmigiana subs, good steaks or gravy, but I rarely get long-term cravings for specific things. Probably the thing that's easiest to miss from home isn't the kind of food as much as convenience: for some extra money and a lot of time, I can eat, say, pasta salad here, but one thing I can't do is go to the supermarket and buy a pint container of pre-made pasta salad. I can buy a decent sandwich at Andes cafe or hunt around for thinly sliced meat at restaurants, shop for bread that isn't sickeningly sweet, take out a loan for some cheese and put together a decent sandwich on my own, but I can't just order an Italian cold cut sub for take-out. In fact, I can't get cold cuts: they just don't have them here. And cheese here is so expensive that I rarely even eat it with crackers, let alone cut it up and put it on a sandwich where I'll hardly taste it.

One thing I don't miss that much anymore is pizza, especially not now. Granted, living above a Pizza Hut makes it hard to miss pizza much, but a few months ago I was getting cravings for good pizza. (The stuff at Pizza Hut just isn't that good--not since the Arabian Nights pizza left the menu--and I'd been getting tired of it.) Ah, but 意想不到, a wonderful thing has happened here in Nanshan! Just as Pizza Hut rolled out its new Olympics themed menu (including the "World Conqueror Pizza")--Jia gave me a brochure for a new pizza place: Champion Pizza, whose incredibly perplexing website apparently hypnotizes people to make them want more pizza. Since trying it, I've developed an out-and-out addiction for it--an addiction largely fueled by the VIP cardholders' deal they offer: two ten-inch pizzas for 57 元. Compared to 78元 for a nine-incher at Pizza Hut, that's almost like getting free food.

So at the moment, the food situation here is pretty good. If anything I think more about the food from here I'll miss when I go back to the States. For example, there are a lot of good eggplant and tofu dishes here (yes, good eggplant, good tofu) that I know I can't get at home.

放假: Taking a Vacation

在夏天, 老师们几乎都放假,大概放两个月. (Zai xia tian, lao shi men ji hu dou fang jia, da gai fang liang ge yue.) In the summer, almost all teachers get to take a vacation for about two months. I'm not that lucky; since I work at a training center, my school winds up being just as busy as usual (if not busier) during the summer.

Nonetheless, I've scored something like a vacation, because I have a fixed class on Saturday afternoons, one that can't be cancelled, which means that I can't work a set Monday through Friday schedule. I've enjoyed that fixed class since it started, and it's been my favorite class for a while. Now, I think I'll never like another class as much again.

Why? Because, since I have to work Saturday, it means my schedule is the least suited to the new summer camp classes that began today--the summer kids' classes. This means that I won't have to teach anyone under the age of eighteen or so until (probably) early in September. So my schedule for the foreseeable future includes just two fixed classes (one a corporate gig) and a bunch of flexible adults' classes. Sometimes a change really is as good as a break.

Independence Day may have officially been last Friday (which a few foreign teachers--three of us actually American--and I celebrated at my place with burgers, chips, pasta and potato salad), but today I feel a much greater sense of freedom than I did three days ago.

...And a Sight of Beijing, Hold the Mao

A former 同事 (tong shi, co-worker) returned to Shenzhen for a week after having spent about a month or so traipsing around China. The traveling opportunity would almost be enough to make me jealous--after all, it's a chance to really see something of China, instead of just Shenzhen--but seems to involve a lot more walking, sweating, and running into other strange back-packers than I really have the desire for. (Among the strangest on-the-road tales was the one about a 40-something guy who's apparently traveling with a stuffed koala bear--a stuffed koala bear with definite opinions about weather, tourist sites, 等等, that only he can hear.)

The most interesting bit of information, though, came from Beijing. It seems Mao's tomb is closed, and Beijing's Underground City is also unavailable for viewing. In fact, it sounded like nearly all Beijing's tourist sites were "closed for renovations" while she and her beau were there--renovations apparently expected to last until after the Olympics. If the PRC really has shut down all the tourist sites in Beijing (except for the Wall and the ugly buildings constructed for the Olympics), it must mean someone didn't get the memo about basic marketing.

Add this to the recent visa restrictions over security concerns and all the areas where travel is currently restricted due to one disaster or another, and you wonder whether 2008 won't actually become a benchmark low for China's tourist industry.

Quick Notes: Da Bao, Di Li, Deluge

So the PRC has made a bold and positive move to protect the environment, and I'm already seeing the effects close to home. In a city where I rarely see blue skies and only see green or black water, I'm at least starting to see fewer plastic bags, thanks to a new policy requiring stores to use heavier strength bags and charge customers for them. Of course, a Google search on "china plastic bags" shows at least one US environmentalist criticism of the move, but the change is a great one as far as I'm concerned. Now when I go to buy juice or water at the 7-11 that's right next to my building's entrance, I no longer have to watch the shop attendants wrap a tiny plastic bottle in two or three plastics while fruitlessly arguing, "不需要包。真的，我家离这儿不远." (Bu xu yao bao. Zhen de, wo jia li zhe'r bu yuan. I don't need a bag. Really, my house isn't far from here.) The only downside of the ban is that I've always used the endless supply of bags the stores give me to line my garbage can at home, but I guess the brighter side even of that is that I can now buy a heavy-duty garbage bag for just 2 毛 (2/10ths of an RMB)--one that won't break the minute I dump out my coffee grounds.

Now the government just needs to find a way to get rid of the old flimsy bags at restaurants, where I'm still getting the same treatment every time I 打包 (da bao, carry-out) food.

Every month, the school calls a handful of each teacher's students to find out whether they're happy with classes. Every month, there are either students who are unhappy (usually because the teacher is 无聊--wu liao, boring) or students who are happy for very peculiar reasons: "The teacher is responsible" is one of the most common comments. This month, I got one of my strangest comments yet: "老师教学很好，地理知识也很好." (Lao shi jiao xue hen hao, di li zhi shi ye hen hao. The teacher teaches well, and his geographical knowledge is also very good.) For someone from a country where most students can't find Iraq on a map, this came as a big surprise at first, until I remembered that I live in a country where most of my students can only name five countries (in their native language, at that) and constantly confuse Australia for Japan when looking at a map.

Nersey and I have been discussing plans for construction of an ark. The rainy season (which was in May last year) has hit Shenzhen. In the past week or so, we've had three days of straight rain, three days of sunny weather accompanied by nighttime downpours, and a few days of mixed drizzly, cloudy and all around depressing weather. The rain has been heavy enough that I've had to stop using my living room air conditioner most day, since the drainage system is no longer working properly. Fortunately, all of the weather has thus far been accompanied by relatively steady winds, so I've been able to open the balcony doors and find relief.

Creepy Enough Yet?

在生命中的每一年，在一年的每个日子， 在一天的每个小时，在一小时的每一分钟， 在一分钟的每秒钟，我都在想你，念你，恋你，等你。
Zai sheng ming zhong de mei yi nian, zai yi nian de mei ge ri zi, zai yi tian de mei ge xiao shi, zai yi xiao shi de mei yi fen zhong, zai yi fen zhong de mei miao zhong, wo dou zai xiang ni, nian ni, lian ni, deng ni.

More and more I'm getting messages like the one above, now at the rate of one per day, mostly from one woman I met about four or five weeks ago. I'd played a game of Chinese chess with some of her co-workers at a restaurant, and we'd talked for a brief bit in a mix of Chinese and English.

The next week, I got a message on my phone: "Tonight look for you. You no come same place?"

Not taking much time to think my response through, I sent back "I was there earlier. I must have just missed you."

Minutes later, the reply came back: "Miss you too!" (Look up "miss" in a Chinese dictionary and you get 想--xiang--and it doesn't really have the meaning of "fail to meet due to timing.")

So now I'm getting regular messages like the one at top, the sort of sappy fodder that bounces around on instant messengers back home and on cell phones here in China--canned romantic sayings: "In a lifetime, every year; in every year, every day; every day, every hour; every hour, every minute; every minute, every second, I miss you, [love]*, [love]* you, wait for you." And this from a woman I talked to for about ten minutes. 很可怕的！(Hen ke pa de, really frightening!)

On the bright side, such messages make for great Chinese practice, as they're generally written for the nearly illiterate--a category I fit into pretty safely here.

*Both 念 and 恋 give me a bit of trouble for translating; both can mean "love," but the dictionary shows a whole slew of other meanings, ranging from "understand" to "feel drawn to."

On Shaky Ground

Following on the heels of the Sichuan earthquake* that struck last week come the aftershocks of suspicion, superstition, and blind nationalism. For the most part, my students have been in somber moods, having gone into mourning in their own personal ways, and of course the whole nation officially went into mourning earlier this week, with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday being national days of mourning including work halts and observed moments of silence. (Interestingly, the Chinese way of observing three minutes of silence while en route apparently requires drivers to blare their horns, making for the loudest minutes of silence I've ever heard--deafening silence made real.)

For these people--and this is the vast majority--the Sichuan earthquake is to them what 9-11 was to most Americans. I've had students cry in class and talk about how helpless they feel; the whole nation seems glued to television sets, watching the news coverage of the crisis, so that the streets near my apartment are more than usually crowded with pedestrians clustered around the little television kiosks.

For some, though, this is a chance to show their true colors as conspiracy theorists, isolationists, racial supremacists, or worse. The rumors that have cropped up around the event range from the superstitious--clouds foretelling the earthquake or unlucky numbers or unlucky 福娃 (fuwa) like JingJing and YingYing causing disasters in China this year--to the usual beleaguered Han laments: the earthquake was caused by Xinjiang separatists, by the Dalai Lama, by Taiwan; [insert your country's name here] isn't doing enough to help because they hate Chinese; 2,000 years ago, Han Chinese invented an earthquake-prediction machine** which would have saved everyone in Sichuan had cultural imperialists not imposed Western seismographs on their country.

A few people, both Chinese and 外国的, have told me the earthquake was surely caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Who knows what category of confusion about geology to put that in?

Probably the nastiest little bone of contention I've heard debated endlessly by a few people in the last week is the size of Yao Ming's donation. In classes, a few students--usually rich, usually unwilling to talk about how much they donated--have gone out of their way to heap scorn on Ming, calling him a 香蕉 (xiangjiao, banana) and race traitor. Such loudmouths have gone out of their way to pester me about how much I've donated and, when I've refused to answer, verbally abused me for being an American capitalist who came to China to steal their money and women. Granted, I'm 一个人 (yi ge ren, single) and will make less money in five years than one of these men recently lost playing the stock market, but to such small-minded bigots, I'm American and, therefore, rich--rich and greedy.

So it's been a mixed week, showing me once again some of the best parts of living in China, and some of the worst parts of living in China. Now when people ask me how I feel in the aftermath of the earthquakes, I can usually only reply that my feelings are muddled.

*And, yes, suddenly I can access Wikipedia without using a proxy--and read "Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident"; maybe the earthquake took out the PRC's central censorship bureau. Oops, nope, the blocks are still in place for the 1989 riots.

**In reality, a Chinese inventor, Chang Heng, did invent the above 候风地动仪 (houfeng didong yi), which just showed what direction tremors came from after an earthquake had already happened.

The Olympic Torch Delay Hits Shenzhen

The Olympic flame came to Shenzhen today, more or less as had been planned. The intended route seemed a relatively convenient one for me, though not convenient enough for me to view it from my balcony.

The running route for the torch was set to go to the 海王 (hai wang, or Sea King) building which is just a few minutes walk from my place, and it was supposed to do so relatively early in the morning. Just before I went to look at the crowd and see whether I might be able to squeeze in close enough to see, I ran across the announcement that the relay would be starting a bit late, so I waited until around one o'clock to head there.

By the time I arrived there, the crowds were massive: probably fifteeen to twenty thousand people packed into a single block and swarming onto the streets. For some reason, rather than adding to the permanent fences built alongside the road to stop pedestrians, the powers that be had decided to use little movable barriers to control the crowds. Little to no police presence attended the event and people were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted: mostly clambering onto the roofs of bus stations, scaling light posts or trees in order to get a better view; a number of banners had been ripped down by these climbing attempts, and branches were ripped off trees in a few places. Most of the rest of the crowd's energy was devoted to trying to push through to find a better place, pounding drums, and chanting: "加油，中国，高兴" and what sounded like "一三" ("jia you, zhongguo, gaoxing" "yi san"--"Add gas (Go!), China, Happy" "One, three"); it seemed anytime someone decided to yell out a two-syllable phrase, the crowd just picked it up and screamed it for a few minutes.

Early on, I got caught up in one group's decision to push through the crowd, and I wound up opposite Children's World--a store about halfway between the 海王 building and the Haiya Baihuo overpass. I managed to get near the permanent fencing on the side of the road and, thus, stay out of the pushing contests.

Around three-thirty, there was a bit of a louder roar well off in the distance: people got excited for a few minutes, but then the cheering and chattering faded back away. Twenty minutes or so later the torch finally arrived ... sort of. Since the crowds had pushed the movable barriers on both sides of the streets to nearly touching, the officials apparently deemed it unsafe for the runner to continue. So instead of watching the torch run past, I got to watch a bus and a van pass, preceded by a handful of men in uniforms marching. Ahead of the bus ran a bunch of people shouting at the onlookers and shoving back the barriers. I did get to see, presumably, the runner, sitting and looking tired and discouraged in the van as it drove past, and then the whole thing was over, the crowds pushing and shoving to get home.

May Day: Save Our Sense

I may have to make a trip out to 家乐福 (Carrefour) and pick up a fan just so all the shit flying around will have something to hit. I'll have to go within the next week, though, or else risk being labeled an "anti-China" reactionary protestor. The anti-protest protests have begun, targeting KFC, Carrefour, and the Body Shop--and probably a lot of others I haven't heard about yet.

I first heard about the Carrefour boycott about a week and a half ago, and at that time the stated reason for the boycott was a simple one: France allowed the Olympic Torch protests to happen, so boycotting a prominent French company would send a strong message. Unfortunately, there must not have been enough people joining in the boycotts, so late last week SMS messages started circulating: Carrefour gave money to the Dalai Lama (who, of course, is the leader of a "terrorist" organization).


Now May 1st is set for the beginning of an extended boycott against Carrefour. And the mob mentality may have set in. Shanghaiist.com just ran an article about a 22-year-old American who was atacked by a mob of protestors after coming out of a Carrefour in Hunan province (or "Fulan" as the locals would call it). I have some misgivings about the article, such as the atrocious English written by "an Ivy League university volunteer programme" who would presumably be here teaching English. More in keeping with the sort of attitudes I've been encountering every day as of late are some of the sentiments expressed in the comments section, such as "he should have known that he was taking risk to do the whole thing at this time and place."


The comment that probably drives me the craziest is "When news or rumors pop out like this, the first knee-jerk reaction of you guys is blasting evil China and Chinese." Fair enough, some of the 老外 commenting on the story are knuckle-heads, but so are some of the 中国人. But lately, in every class, I've had to listen to the woe-is-us diatribe of how the PRC is a developing country that everyone steps on and takes advantage of and doesn't respect, while at the same time having to listen to lecture after lecture on how the Han are superior to other people, due in part to their 5,000 year old history. The whole country seems to be suffering from a sort of collective Napoleon syndrome, and it just gets sadder and sadder with each new update. Hopefully, the whole thing will start to disappear after the May 1st holiday, when everyone has to work the weekend to make up for the luxury of two days off.
And, now, KFC has made the list of places to boycott: "Worth mentioning that a few days ago and compared to boycott French goods, the famous American restaurant chains KFC has also been included in the boycott list, the 'charges' is 'the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution to boycott Chinese Olympic.'" (That last link's a bit diffuicult to read, but at least attempting to be fair.) As an American, though, I'm looking forward to the boycotts for two very important reasons: 1) I can make a 不吃肯塔基 sign and parade the streets--"Don't eat Kentucky," which looks a lot like "Don't eat KFC"; and 2) I can finally start selling some 我是巴哈马人 T-shirts to other foreigners (What have folks from the Bahamas ever done to China, after all?).

Just Nod Your Head and Smile

I tried to discuss the Olympic torch relay in class last night. My goal was to try to get students to focus on the meaning of the Olympic flame itself and some of the motivations 外国人 (waiguoren) might have for taking part in such protests. I pointed out that it had been a foreigner responsible for one instance of the torch's being extinguished.

"No, there were no foreigners--Tibetan's children," they insisted. I said that many of the protestors (such as those who hung the handcuff Olympic rings, those who chained themselves to the Eiffel Tower, and some of those who caused the torch to be extinguished) were foreigners, not Tibetans. "Children of the outside countries, not Tibet's children," I clarified.

My students then showed me the one picture published in the newspaper, saying, "See, Chinese woman want save flame, Tibetan terrorize flame, Chinese, Tibetan, China, Tibet," pointing back and forth between the two figures. "What about other pictures?" I asked. "You're saying this picture isn't real?" they accused me. "No, just that there are other pictures," explained; this one incident isn't everything. They didn't believe me. So, for the record (on a blog that can't be accessed in China without a proxy), the guy below is whiter than I am.

And this guy's pretty pale too.
And I don't think I need to point out that there aren't many Chinese as dark-skinned as the guy in the middle of this picture.

Again, though, my students can't easily get ahold of such pictures. I had to go to the New York Times and BBC to get them, and Chinese searches just don't route that way. And of course my students wouldn't think to do an English search on the issue; after all, the Western media always lies. (As an interesting side-note, yes, Chinese police do dress as indicated the one page in the youtube clip, but the 保安--bao'an, or security/paramilitary guards that monitor my neighborhood certainly do dress in camouflage and boots; who knows which are actually being shown in that clip.)

So, I'm done raising such issues in class. It's too much to hope for that people will be able to put aside the People's Daily and Xinhua official lines long enough to even complete a sentence.

Virtual Black-Out

So the riots in Lhasa have set off a string of other riots, and speculation about all of them is running rampant. One thing is absolutely clear as far as any of my Han students are concerned: this is all the fault of the Tenzin Gyatso--whom my students tend to view in the same light as most Americans view Osama bin Laden. According to them, the Tibetans are well-armed and well-funded terrorists, who take their orders directly from the Dalai Lama ... yep, Nobel Peace Prize winner (1989) and terrorist king-pin. Seems he's got quite the resume.

The purpose of this terrorism sweeping through the Middle Kingdom, as my students deduce, is to ensure that China doesn't host the Olympics (and never mind that once a host country has been selected, the games don't move). The simple solution to all of this, a few say, is "to get someone to him quiet and kill him." Nothing would ensure peace during the Games like wiping out a man honored throughout the world for his efforts to create peace.

Of course, my adult students are all highly educated individuals, show a good bit of reasoning skills, and are really among the top products of their nation's education system. It would almost be worth asking how they could be so (and so alone in being) out of touch with the rest of the world's perspective, except that the answer is written (or not written) on the front of every newspaper. We've entered an essential media blackout here in Shenzhen--one which runs from the papers to the Internet more than I've yet seen. The only real sources available in print or online are government organs like the People's Daily--only of help in finding out what the government wants us to know.

It's a strange thing: whenever people back home had asked about the government censorship they're sure I run into in China, I've always worked to defend China. Really, until a short while back, censorship has played a very small role in my day-to-day life; I've always been able to get loads of information on international politics, even when the North Korean nuclear snafu was going on, and if anything has been blocked, it's just been a few blogging sites, Wikipedia, and occassionally Youtube. Now, nearly anything of value is inaccessible without a proxy, and even with a proxy a large number of sites still won't load. Apparently, the minute news starts to affect China policy directly, this is when the Orwellian tactics kick in.

And it's sort of a sad thing as well. The steps the government is taking in response to the riots seem about the surest route to ruining the Olympic Games for China. Already we've begun to hear the chatter about boycotts by prominent leaders, and the disruptions to the torch relay are at least common knowledge here (though my students can't seem to differentiate between Western pro-Tibet protestors and the "Dalai clique" terrorists closer to home). Maybe the events will smooth over a bit before Opening Ceremonies, but the Games have picked up a few stains because of this that won't rub away. Nor does it seem likely China can look forward to kind receptions among media once the games begin: after breaking their guarantee of greater press freedoms in 2008, then lambasting most Western news outlets, it seems they'll be lucky to get honest treatment by the presses and far more likely now to get resentful treatment. Since nearly every Chinese person I know is emotionally invested in the Games' success and the "good face" it could bring China (the product of eight years of hype), I can't imagine anything less than a perfect Olympics leaving anyone happy.

I'm predicting a somber September in Shenzhen and parts further afield.

Missing Books, Left and Right

Last week, my textbook 老外在中国 (Laowai zai Zhongguo--Foreigner in China) disappeared. I'd had it with me when I went into a restaurant to play Chinese chess--my new distraction--with some local cabbies. The games were interesting enough that I forgot to take my book with me when I headed home.

Last year, this wouldn't have been a problem, since forgotten personal possessions were generally treated with more than their due respect out in the untamed boondocks of Bao'an. I once left a copy of "Zorba the Greek" at a restaurant, only to return the next day and find it set upon its own little table, perfectly centered on the table cloth. Here in civilized Nanshan, though, it's a different story. I returned to the restaurant the next day and inquired after the book. Though the waiter seemed unable to understand my question, one of the cooks spoke up quickly, "老外在中国!" I affirmed this, and the waiter went off to find the manager while the cook babbled the title over and over again.

The manager showed up just to tell me, "没有; 没见 (meiyou, meijian--don't have, didn't see)," with a shifty sort of look in his eyes. I suspect he just decided to take it home, since he has been making some half-hearted attempt to learn English. Now that Jia has managed to order the same book online and the loss doesn't irritate quite as much, I can finally find hilarity in the situation; that someone out there is probably using my Chinese textbook to learn English--and learn miserably bad English at that, since the book's author is no whiz in the language, forming conversations like the following (set in a doctor's office):
D: What's wrong with you?
P: I feel uncomfortable.
D: Where do you feel not good?
P: My body has the ache.
D: It should be caused by the cold.

Elsewhere, more books have disappeared. Having met "a nice girl, I thought" at a party, Baolou later invited her over to his apartment, from which she promptly lifted his teaching materials. At least this second person (however not nice she may be) is pretty sharp and will be studying well-constructed English in the future.

Just a Little Favor

One of our adult students recently wrangled me into an uncomfortable corner. After complimenting me on the way I ran classes ("Best in the school!") and telling me he'd be honored if he could take me out to dinner sometime (I accepted, but pointed out that I rarely to never speak English outside of school), he asked me whether I could do him "just a little favor"--review his resume. He said he'd send both the English and Chinese writing so that I could check whether the grammar in his translations were right. Though I'm not too fond of the endless exchanges of favors that run most of life here in China, I figured looking over a resume couldn't be that much work.

Yesterday, he sent me his full resume: all four pages of it, including descriptions of companies and long lists of poorly proofread gobbledygook. He hadn't even bothered running spell-check on the document. I worked through a bit of it, just identifying which portions were suitable for a resume and which parts would need to be condensed. I printed off a sample resume for him and a list with a few resume-writing pointers, then said I'd be happy to look at his resume again once he'd taken some time to condense his four pages of information into a standard format of one page. I figured this was a fair enough effort.

"But how about you correct it first, and then I'll make it smaller, okay?" he asked once I'd given my advice. I pointed out that what he'd given me was a lot of information to go through at one time. "But I just need you to show me my mistakes." I pointed out that in many places I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. "I give you the Chinese." I pointed out that the Chinese I was studying was on a bit simpler level than that (leaving out that almost none of my hanzi have much to do with the corporate world)--things like asking for and giving directions, talking to service staff, 等等. "Then it can be good practice for you."

"Well," I finally said, tired of the needling, "I reckon this will take me about a month, maybe a month and a half to proofread as it is now. I'll have to look up a lot of phrases and words, and I'm going to have to enlist a lot of people for help. On the other hand, if you can make it smaller, just a page or so, then I can go through it in maybe a day and just ask you questions for things I don't understand." I didn't point out that I have absolutely no intention of learning a bunch of corporate terminology, at least not until I'm well done reading a children's comic book.

He finally said he saw what I meant, or at least he didn't try to hand the print-off back to me again. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. As for the sort of high-brow material I actually am studying, I'll give some of the little mantras I've been working on below:

大头，大头，下雨不愁。人家有伞。我有大头。
Da tou, da tou, xia yu bu chou. Ren jia you san. Wo you da tou.
Big head, big head, when it rains, I don't worry. Other people have umbrellas. I've got my big head.

谁高？我高。满地都是草包。
Shei gao? Wo gao. Man di dou shi cao bao.
Very loosely, this translates, "Who's tall? I'm tall. Everyone else around is useless." More literally, the last sentence is something like, "The full ground, all are grass bags."

电灯泡。砸核桃。谁放屁？我知道。不是他，就是他。
Dian deng pao. Za he tao. Shei fang pi? Wo zhi dao. Bu shi ta, jiu shi ta.
"Light bulb bubbles. Smash walnuts. Who farted? I know. If not him, it must be him." [This is sort of an eeny-meeny-miny-moe chant, one whose English translation I've begun using in classes to pick students.]

These are little nursery rhymes Jia has taught me (and which I'm sure she'll correct if I've messed up any of the hanzi). For some reason these seem to stick better in my head than more useful expressions, and since they have really simple sentences, I usually only have to hunt for one or two hanzi to finish them.

Li Yang Reconsidered

I'm no big fan of Li Yang's "Crazy English," and I don't go out of my way to keep this dislike a secret. Generally, the only effect I see from Yang's teaching in my class is loud shouting during class activities and a heightened tendency to repeat (usually poorly) one or two nearly meaningless phrases.

Recently, I've run into a few adult enthusiasts of Li's in classes, and have adjusted my original opinion of his message slightly. (My overall opinion of him, that he's just a motivational speaker who's making money with a ridiculous gimmick, hasn't changed at all.) Li's central message, which sadly gets drowned out by all the shouting, is that in order to learn English, you have to be "crazy"--have to pursue something with all your heart. I realized recently, talking with Whitetooth about some of his experiences, that we've both gone through periods of studying so intently that others might think we were losing our minds: both of us have caught ourselves tracing hanzi on the bathroom wall while taking showers just to keep awake, and my morning routine of making forty sentences from the flashcards taped all over my apartment before letting myself use the bathroom in the morning might look at least masochistic if not perfectly insane.

A few of my adult students seem to have gotten this part of the message: that learning means work, and that you have to be inwardly motivated to keep up that work. Unfortunately, the distractions in Li's message make the central idea muddy for them. One student says he spends all his time outside of work and class studying: "Li Yang said he had to listen to the 'I Have a Dream' speech a hundred times before he understood. Last night, I listened to it fifty times, and I still don't understand. Tonight I'll have to listen to it another 50 times." (This student has since missed a week of classes at the school.) Another student has expressed unhappiness with the classes, because she's expected to think of her own sentences to speak during class sessions, which should be the instructors' jobs; she thought she'd be fluent by now, because she quit her job in order to attend classes all day, every day at the school.

So they've got the act like a crazy person part of the equation down; they just can't seem to make the connection that the craziness ought to be born out of the fatigue and frustration that studying according to a normal and sensible schedule creates. And they still can't tell the difference between realistic goals and "crazy" promises. Maybe after they see the absolute failure of "Crazy Chinese," which promises to teach children 1,000 more hanzi in half an hour's studying per day than they currently learn in six years of schooling--maybe after that they'll be able to see that a silver tongue is often attached to a big bag of grass. (大草包 or big grass bag is a common slang term for someone worthless.)

Shenzhen Goes Crazy
Originally Posted--06:14, 2007-11-05

And in the upcoming weeks it's likely to try and drive me that way as well. The reason? "Crazy English" has hit Shenzhen. "Crazy English" is already popular with a few of my more annoying students, who insist on listening and REPEATING everything I say as loudly as possible, and even my Chinese manager has apparently told Whitetooth that "it's good because you speak English loudly." Despite Li Yang's claims that there's more to "Crazy English" than just screaming English at the top of your lungs, none of his adherents seem to have gained anymore from him than shouting every English phrase they know.

I like Li's attempt to explain the "crazy" element of his program by saying that it's not to be questionably lunatic but "to dive into the thing one sets out to do." He's translating the Chinese term gongzuokuang, which we would translate as workaholic, and neglecting to note that the "crazy" part of the phrase just means crazy (as in kuangre--fanatic; kuangwang--deluded).

The cleaned up Answers.com article has this to say, and whoever wrote it made a good decision by not going to far into Li's biography (such as, for instance, mentioning that he almost flunked college). Of course, no one seems to notice (or admit) that Li is just a pep-talk performer, not a teacher. In the States, most would probably immediately think of Christopher Farley's motivational speaker from SNL. ("You're gonna end up living in a van down by the river!")

Though there are a few character-assasination sites on the web, Li doesn't really deserve them; he's not a cult leader, just a motivational speaker, which is exactly why he chooses to perform in front of crowds of 30,000 people. He hasn't done anything innovative, just capitalized on the Chinese ability to mimic sounds like automatons. (It's not getting students to repeat anything I say that's a problem; it's getting them to know what they're saying or to actually say it correctly--not say "shpeak," for example--or to use English in sentences on their own that's the rub.) He isn't shaking Chinese tradition in the least, just capitalized on the Chinese desire to do things as groups; every morning, Chinese work to do calisthenics in synchronicity, most of their performances devote at least half the time to choreographed dance, classes (English and otherwise) are conducted through endless repetition or rote phrases, and really the only new thing Li has brought to the table is yelling. (If you think yelling goes against Chinese tradition, sit at the next table over when a waitress delivers the wrong dish to a group of Chinese, when shouting is necessary to indicate displeasure.) And, of course, when folks shout in any language, pronunciation suffers.*

No, there's really nothing wrong with what Li is doing, unless you happen to be a waiguoren living in China. The enthusiasm at Shenzhen University (which has a bus stop on my way home) must already be spreading like wildfire, for I've already had my first college student step up to me and scream, "HELLO," inches away from my ear. My first response was to say nothing, after which the student shouted again, louder and closer. I slowly and loudly replied, "Wo ting bu dong," ("I hear but don't understand.") and honestly I can't understand--can't understand why he'd think I'd take the time to talk to him after such a rude greeting.

*I wonder if any native speaker can understand what he's saying at the end of the clip, say, about 3:34 on. The one part almost sounds like "Elvis Presley" to me; it's worth noting that his English is apparently quite good when he's just talking.

祝我生日快乐: Happy Birthday to Me (Sort of)

Well, my birthday is right around the corner, which turns out to be sort of a weird thing. I hadn't expected it to seem that important a day, really, so I was a bit surprised this afternoon to find myself suddenly meditative about the whole aging process. I guess in part this is because I effectively skipped turning thirty last year: since many Chinese add at least one year to their age*, it was easy to get into the idea that, though I was by stateside standards hitting the big three-oh, I'd already passed it on the mainland, so nothing was really changing--a peculiar little bit of reasoning that kept me from experiencing any major crisis.

This year is only a little different: Since I'm now already thirty-two by Chinese standards, turning thirty-one tomorrow doesn't seem like such a huge deal, but the encroaching birthday, no matter how far away (in geographic if not temporal terms) it may feel right now, provides an explanation for the way I've been feeling the last week. Over the past two or three weeks, my ability to pick up new hanzi has been slowing down a lot, to the point where I'm only able to remember one or two new hanzi per day, and in the last week I've been obsessing over the idea that I'm not getting anywhere with my studying. Part of me knows, of course, that plateaus are a natural part of learning anything, and another part of me knows that I was due for one--you can only make big improvements for so long before the slow-down sets in for a while. But in the last week or so, this little plateau has seemed a bigger deal than it should.

Today it hit me suddenly that this temporary slow-down in my progress seems like a bigger deal than it actually is just because of when it's happening; another year is passing on my internal calender, and since I got a pass last year on the "round number" milestone, this year seems a little bigger than it should. Realizing this, I drew the conclusion that I've been a silly ass for the past week and that it's about time I moved on from there. So today, I spent a good chunk of time cleaning, then I reviewed my hanzi lists from a few chapters in my textbook (reminding myself that I've learned over 600 new hanzi since December--not too shabby a number), then I made a single resolution for the new year (after all, it's really Spring now, and I'm living in a country where the first day of Spring marks the beginning of a new year): "Try not to be too much of a silly ass." It's probably the best resolution I've made in my life.

As for birthday plans, tomorrow I'll likely be having dinner with Nersey and Jia, since Nersey has an oven and has started making pizzas with nan from the Xinjiang restaurant. Then I'll probably go to bed early, since I have to work early the next morning. Since my birthday gives me occasion to mention it, below is the ridiculously simple Chinese "Happy Birthday" song (sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday" to you, though often as not sung for many reasons besides a birthday**).

祝你生日快乐。祝你生日快乐。祝你生日，祝你生日，祝你生日快乐。
Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri kua le.
(Literal English translation: Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday, wish you birthday, wish you birthday happy.)

*The reasons for these extra years have been explained to me in two ways: Either a child is considered one-year-old at birth, thus adding a year to the overall age, or age is tracked according to the lunar rather than solar calendar, leading to the extremely inflated ages you hear about for seniors in China. If you want to feel older, visit this calculator site and find out your Chinese age.

**Last year at Lao Chongqing (my favorite Sichuanese restaurant in the neighborhood), I sat outside during a particularly riotous celebration. About eighty women from one of the nearby factories had the night off and, crammed into the relatively small restaurant, went through a good amount of food, beer and baijiu. When they weren't busy dancing without music or running in and out of the front door, they spent most of their time singing 祝你生日快乐. The next day, I mentioned the party to a friend, and he asked the head waiter whose birthday party it had been. The head waiter's response (as it was translated for me) was "It was no one's birthday. They were just happy with drinking, so they sang some. People like to sing that song when they're drinking, because everyone knows the words."

Walls, Walls, Walls

China still thinks in walls. You'd think maybe a country that went ahead and built the world's largest wall to (unsuccessfully) keep out intruders would have sort of gotten tired of the whole idea of walls, but the idea of the wall is alive and well in China.

This realization first came to me last year on my second day, after I got locked in--yes, locked in--my own neighborhood. From my apartment last year, I had to pass through one (usually) locked gate to get into the space between my buildings and the other buildings in my area of the neighborhood; all the buildings on the perimeter of this area are linked by fences, turning them essentially into part of one great wall. The gated community is the basic community of China, neighborhood after neighborhood surrounded by walls, and the walls seem more important than anything else; streets often meander aimlessly, dodging around one community after another. To walk to school along the main road--in a straight line along restaurants and shops--takes me about half an hour. To walk home along a separate road, this one winding between neighborhoods, takes me well over an hour.

But divisions seem too to run deeper here than simple stonework. India may have its caste system, but China has something just as clearly divisive--the idea of outsiders. Many of the adult students at our school, having seen a few of the foreign teachers talking to each other in Chinese or about Chinese, have decided they need to find people to study with. In one of my classes, all six students talked about this desire to find a study partner. I pointed out that all six of them were studying English, that they all knew each other, and that it should be easy enough for them to make plans to meet and study. No, that wouldn't work: two of the men live in different districts, one in the Nantou area of Nanshan and the other in Bao'an, near the Nantou checkpoint (ten minutes apart by bus); the woman who lives in the Nantou area--this is no good because this would be "blended company" (a man and a woman); two students live across the street from one another, but in different neighborhoods, so this is also no good. Ideally, they all want to find someone who works at their company to study with. "Are there any people in your company also studying English?" I asked them. No, no there aren't. "Then maybe trying to find someone from outside your company would be a good idea?" No, not really; eventually someone in the company will maybe study English.

The word "danwei" (government office work units) doesn't get used much around here, and any time I use it just to mean a clique of co-workers, I'm almost immediately corrected. ("Danwei" seems to be a relic of earlier days--a word from before Opening and Reform.) But the feelings behind the danwei is alive and well. If I look at my Chinese friends, I realize I'm nearly their only friend who isn't a co-worker, and they're generally reluctant to talk to other groups of Chinese. I rarely hear my Chinese co-workers talk about meeting their friends, but they do go out together quite a lot (this despite a rapid turnover rate). It seems a desperately lonely way to live; I wonder, since they're always out with co-workers when they're out at all, whether they ever get a chance to blow off steam about work. (In the US, loose lips sink ships, but here they more likely get you fired.)

So our school now has a "social committee"--another co-worker and I--who are responsible for arranging social events for our adult students. We're looking into bowling and maybe some salsa dancing lessons nearby, trying to find something we can take people out to do at least once a month. It's a curious job to find myself now responsible for helping adults have a night out.

Kibitzing

I had perhaps my most interesting class yet last night. At school they've begun a new sort of course offering--adults classes that meet at least twice every day and for which students can more or less show up whenever they want to. Different teachers handle the classes on different days or at different times, which means that continuity breaks down a bit, and most of the time (to judge by the class notes most teachers leave) teachers do whatever they want, sticking only loosely to the course curriculum. It means that I'm freed up to do just about anything I think is interesting (and that students are prepared for this), which makes it a bit more interesting to teach.

After Monday and Tuesday's class both got hijacked by questions like "Is it true that most people in the US don't marry or have children?," "As an American, do you think you're better than black people, or is that an inappropriate question?," "How do you say, ' [insert food name for which there is no Western equivalent],' in English?" I decided I couldn't take another class without extra materials. Since students are always asking me about food in America (which they assume is all hamburgers and hot dogs), I started hunting for some American menus and soon ran into the menu from Chicago's Eleven City Diner. I figured this would be a good way to show what food in America is like and maybe break down the idea of a McDonald's and KFC nation.

I knew the menu would be a hard read; Nersey had mentioned that Jia struggled to read menus while stateside, and her English is better by several degrees than most of the students in the level I'm teaching. I also knew it would be worthwhile if the students would only put the effort into it. I put together a glossary of about forty or so words I knew wouldn't show up in the Chinese-English dictionaries--things like "shmear" and "mayo" and "side car." I also geared myself up for the class to be an absolute flop. Despite my concerns, the class went over extremely well.

In total, I had four students show up, and all of them seemed to think that this was an incredibly valuable lesson, even if it was miserably difficult. We only managed to get through the first page of the menu and into a few of the words from the glossary. It didn't occur to me while looking at it, but Rubin's short dedication uses a good number of abstract expressions; it took a long while to explain how a restaurant can be a "cornerstone" when a cornerstone is part of a building or how you could "rekindle" feelings without understanding the idea of feeling being like a fire inside a person's chest. With the exception of "diner" and "delicatessen,"* my students knew nearly all the words they were reading; they just didn't understand what it said or why there'd be such a thing in a menu. It took about an hour and a half to get through Rubin's writing, but once we'd worked our way through it, two students concluded that it was "beautiful," like "poetry." My students may be light-years away from remarking, "Oy, this mentsh is a real dikhter," but somehow they manage to get a lot more emotion out of two short paragraphs than most people back home probably would. I imagine getting a chance to peek into part of another culture (and especially into part of it that is maybe just behind the surface and not often seen) and understand it makes such a little thing a larger experience than it could ever be for a native.

* These two new words led to a good bit of pilpl. One student's dictionary defined "diner" as "a restaurant that serves exotic, foreign foods" and "delicatessen" as "meat from foreign countries." It wasn't easy to convince them that diners mostly serve familiar homestyle food and that most delicatessens are neighborhood shops that serve a lot of local foods. I think it's a fair bet those definitions were written by Chinese rather than waiguoren; after all, what's more exotic a foreign food to the average Chinese than a double-decker pastrami sandwich?

Odd Man In

Nersey and Jia recently found a good Xinjiang restaurant within walking distance of our apartments, and we've been a couple of times just for the random lamb kebab or tudou pian (grilled potato slices). Late Monday night, hungry from having had nothing more than a bowl of oatmeal all day, I went in for an entire dinner, adding nan (flatbread), grilled sausages, qiezi (eggplant), some vegetable skewers, and a plate of fried noodles to my normal order. The food was great; I filled up to bursting for under twenty kuai, and this morning I didn't have any of the digestive problems that normally accompanies eating too much at a Chinese restaurant.

Xinjiang food has become my favorite in China, since it's the closest to Western food you can find while still eating Chinese (and cheap). Nan is more or less the same as pita bread; Xinjiang-style kebabs are similar to Greek- or Turkish-style foods--loaded with cumin and pepper; tudou pian are like potato chips, only better; even their fried noodles have a distinctly Mediterranean flavor to them (quite odd, since most of Xinjiang is basically desert). Perhaps more importantly, the Xinjiang restaurants are usually Muslim, therefore safer, and the food seems healthier, cooked with less oil and cooked more thoroughly as well.

The greater attraction of Xinjiang restaurants, though, is that 意想不到, I often feel an odd sense of identity with the workers. Because many Xinjiangren are both ethnic minorities and Muslim, they don't seem to fit in as well with Han Chinese. The ethnic majority (i.e., Han) customers tend to talk down to them and be even ruder than they usually are. (Keep in mind that shouting, "服务员"--“Waitress"--at the top of your voice, snapping your fingers, arguing loudly, etc., are all normal manners in most restaurants.)

Monday, I got to listen to a table of four young Chinese men--all equipped with bad haircuts, "Western" clothes, and big leather money bags--alternatively mock one of the waiters and me. Their comments on him mostly consisted of lines like, "You are stupid; we didn't order this" and "Little wonder--he's a Xinjiang person," such quips followed by loud laughter. The item they chose to mock me about was that I was practicing my hanzi while eating; they all were of the opinion that I must 看不懂 (kan bu dong--not understand) what I was writing. I didn't bother responding, because I've learned it just isn't worth the effort. There are stupid people, and there are stupid people.

During the night, I got sympathetic smiles and nods from the staff throughout the night, and the waiter receiving the most abuse from the Chinese talked to me for a bit, mostly to compliment my writing. Together we got to enjoy the spectacle of watching the brain trust at the next table attempt to decipher the "English" sign on the wall: most of their attention was focused on the top of the poster (which advertising an electronic Quran/camera/MP4 player), where the writing is in Arabic. They proudly concluded that the capitals USB meant 美国 (meiguo--America). Little wonder, then, I don't feel bad about feeling like an outcast sometimes in China, or about identifying more with the minority than with the majority.

We've Got Your Cultural Sensitivity Right Here

I dropped into 比胜客 (Pizza Hut) last night and tried one of their special promotion pizzas. Apparently following the New Year's World Celebration theme that ran from mid-January to early February, The 比胜客 executives decided to capitalize on the romantic vibes of our Valentine's Day with a new promotional roll-out: Arabian Nights. (Stay to watch the video; it's worth it.) Included on the specialty menu for the month are roasted lamb chops, "Magic Apple Tea," a plate of chopped lamb and hummus with something like pita bread, a curiously named dessert--the "Harem Sweeties"--that look like cookies, and the "Arabian Nights Pizza."

Last night I tried the lamb and hummus, and it was good enough (and close enough to Middle Eastern cuisine) that I decided to give the specialty pizza a go. I normally pass on any of the specialty pizzas, because shrimp (which sends me into anaphylactic shock) is a key ingredient in most of them, and Chinese cooks tend not to be great withholding one ingredient while making a dish. I carefully interrogated the waitress (her mouth coyly covered by a gauzy orange veil a la "I Dream of Jeannie") about what exactly was on the pizza, and once I'd determined that the pizza did not, would not, and wasn't supposed to ever contain any shellfish of any kind, I ordered a small. It turned out to be the best pizza I've ever had a 比胜客, in China or at home. Unfortunately, the recipe for the pizza isn't bound to help international relations that much.

The "Arabian Nights Pizza" is made with a special, savory sauce (which is what makes it so good), corn, garbanzo beans, red and green peppers, beef sausage and--here's the kicker--pork sausage: not exactly halal. I don't expect too many Middle-Easterners to be popping in to the restaurant to admire the waitresses' 可爱 little face-coverings and chow down on some pig intestines, though hopefully the little faux pas will be smoothed over somewhat by the very "Open" idea of honoring another culture's pre-hamburger history.

Bu Dui and Context-Blindness
Originally posted: 06:23, 2007-10-06

I've heard a lot of speculation about how China will one day take over the global market, crushing America's economic system, and I have to say I'm not particularly concerned. Yes, manufacturing and much unskilled labor are easily exported to China, and even some skilled labor (as in computer work) is coming here as well. I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon, though, and as long as America can keep up on the innovation curve, I'm sure it's future is safer than we expect.

The reason I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon is that there just isn't much creativity in China. Innovation requires a certain ability to see the larger pictures, and contextualization just doesn't seem to be a Chinese trait. For example, I go to a restaurant and am asked, "Ni yao he shenme?" ("What do you want to drink?") I respond, "Wo yao he xuebi." ("I want to drink Sprite") The immediate response is "Meiyou," despite there being cans of Sprite visible in the refrigerator. The problem is that my pronunciation of xue is slightly off, so it sounds as though I'm ordering "shuibi," which doesn't mean anything in a restaurant. Once I get up and point to a can of Sprite (this after trying to correct my pronunciation a few times to no success), the waitress will nod and say, "A xuebi." The waitress doesn't take the time to think, "Let's see this foreigner speaks bad Chinese. I asked him what he wanted to drink, and he said he wanted to drink something I didn't quite understand. What do we have to drink that sounds like 'shuibi?' Tea? No. Beer? No. Oh, xuebi! He must want that."

Granted, when it's all written out, it sounds like thinking through such things is a lot of work, but most Westerners make such adjustments all the time. If an Aussie visits an American bar and orders a be-ah, he can more or less rely on not being told, "Sorry, we don't serve bears."
The inflexibility goes a bit further than this though, even into the writing of clearly intelligible hanzi. I recently tried writing out the phrase "Qing man man shuo" ("Please speak slowly") while trying to hold a bilingual conversation with a man. Unfortunately, I switched the writing order of strokes five and six in the character qing. The result was that the entire phrase became meaningless. I rewrote the phrase, creating an identical version of it, only this time writing those two strokes in the correct order, and suddenly my chicken-scratch meant, "Please speak slowly."

Another illustration of this is the phrase 青井工牛, which I took a picture of in a public bathroom. This translates into something like "green well work cow" and is meaningless. I showed the picture to a number of Chinese people, and each time they laughed and said it meant nothing. I would ask why someone would write this in a bathroom, and nearly every time they would say something like "No one would write this. It doesn't mean anything." One person told me that it was probably an example of someone using characters that sounded like the proper characters in order to be cute, and that there was a huge movement to stamp out this sort of abuse of the language. "It's probably just someone's idea of a clever name," she said. Why would someone put this in a bathroom of all places? "Oh, sometimes people might think it's clever to put a clever name in a bathroom." Jia was the only person (after twenty) who took the context into account. It turns out the phrase just had a few missing pieces: 请讲卫生 , roughly, "Please be clean." It seems exactly the sort of thing you'd put in a bathroom, but only Jia took the time to consider the context.

This inflexibility extends to written English as well. Once the guy I was talking to proved incapable of reading Chinese written out of order, I tried writing from right to left "t-u-o-b-a," which shows on the page as "about." This, though, was also meaningless, simply because it was written in the wrong order. And while trying to get students to stop saying, "Oran-gee," I wrote "oran-zh" on the board, figuring the pinyin "zh" sound might help get the final across. "No, teacher," they cried, "Gee-ee, not zed aitch-a. Gee-ee." Everything is either dui or bu dui, right or wrong. Either everything is perfect and in keeping with normal practices, or it's just plain wrong.

But it doesn't stop there. If I want to eat sweet and sour chicken, I might try asking whether the cook can make tong su li ji with chicken instead of the usual pork. No, this is "impossible." If I ask whether the cook can cook chicken in the same sauce he uses for the tong su li ji, this is also "impossible"; there's no item like that on the menu. How could you possibly cook that?
It goes as far as a denial of basic reality in some cases. Recently, all the teachers from the school went out to eat. Unfortunately for me, the fried rice at the restaurant was cooked with shrimp, to which I'm allergic. One of the Chinese teachers was kind enough to order another fried rice without shrimp for me, and when the dish came out, of course, it had shrimp. (After all, that dish is made with shrimp. How could it not be made with shrimp?) Still, we had to work to convince the Chinese teacher that the dish had shrimp in it. "It's impossible. I said we wanted no shrimp." What were these shrimp-like things in the rice then? "That's ham." Why does this ham have a curly tail and pink and white stripes like a shrimp? "Oh, those are shrimp!"

So rest easy, America. Be sure that if anyone does actually manage to build a better mousetrap in Beijing, he will be sure to toss it out after repeatedly hearing, "That's not a mousetrap. Everyone knows what mousetraps look like, and this doesn't look like a mousetrap. Bu dui."

Quick Notes: Sacked, Sacked, and Smiling

Well, the problem of my disastrous corporate class has been solved; they've requested a new teacher. The students' account of my first class session was that I told them Chinese English teachers spoke bad English and taught incorrectly. One student said that "as a patriot" she "could not continue to take classes with that teacher [me]," since I clearly didn't like China. Apparently she deemed the class to have "a learning atmosphere unconducive to improvement." (Both of those quotes are, of course, from Whitetooth's translation; none of the students would be capable of such speech at this point.) I told Whitetooth he should have responded, "I'm sure the teacher couldn't agree more."

Fortunately, Baolou (the teacher formerly responsible just for the Business English course at the same company will be taking over the General English course, and I'll be able to pick up some evening courses to replace it, so the only major change for me is that I can now sleep in once again on Tuesdays. There don't seem to be any other repercussions looming, so 没问题 (mei wenti--"No problems").

In keeping with the yin/yang nature of life in China, the same day I got this news (Sunday) was also the day I had my two worst children's classes yet. Sunday morning, four students showed up to sit in on my first class of the day and "have a try." Since the class is already nearly full and meets in a small classroom, this meant that two of the fourteen students total sat on the windowsill, there weren't enough books to go around, and the whole class turned into painful chaos. Since the salesgirl who had brought the students into class promptly disappeared to do something else, the chaos didn't even have any apparent benefits. But it was after lunch that things went downhill.

In one of my little-little friends classes (In Chinese, 小朋友 xiao pengyou means "child" or "children," and I often say xiaode xiao pengyou to indicate very young children) two boys have been coming to class for a while despite my protestations. The two boys have been placed in a higher level than this class and (at twelve or thirteen years old) are much older than the rest of the class (which ranges from six to ten years of age). Earlier, I'd asked them to be moved to a more appropriate class, since they tended to be disruptive and oftentimes violent. Yet Sunday they returned and, during class, refused to do anything other than hit one another in the crotch; Chinese boys think this is incredibly funny and often continue to play this "joke" well into adulthood.

So having picked up on the idea that this was an amusing pastime, one of my seven year old girls, with a big grin and a cheery "Bye-bye teacher," threw a punch at me on her way out of the class. Fortunately she's extremely short, so the punch, though well aimed, fell just a millimeter or two short of serious damage. She was promptly disciplined, her mother called, and I had to have a sit-down with the girl's mother. I explained that this was not appropriate in class, and the girl's mother agreed that this was "impolite." I said that I thought her daughter's action stemmed from her watching the bad behavior of other students in the class, and I assured her that I was doing my part to get the "bad influences" removed from the class and placed somewhere more appropriate. Hopefully the mother took the time to say something to the staff before leaving.

Aside from all that, though, things are actually going quite well as of now. As the weather slowly improves, my mood has been getting better and better, and I've been going out during the day more often just to walk or to hunt for interesting shops. I spent yesterday morning knitting on my balcony and went walking in a nearby park with a co-worker this afternoon. I've had a few impromptu conversations in Chinese in the past week--one with a person I met at Andes, another with the student's mother mentioned above--and managed not to struggle very seriously with them. 意想不到, then, things are looking up.

Struggle Sessions (i.e., Corporate Class)

Yesterday went poorly. Just before break I began another corporate class, again at a high-tech firm, and the classes hadn't been going all that well in the first few weeks.

After a three week break, I returned bright and early to the company for another class. (Class meets at eight in the morning, meaning that I have to get up before the sun to make it on time.) But I felt sure that, since everyone had gotten almost a month's break and since so many things had happened during that break (snowstorms, bad traffic, Spring Festival), that the students would be a bit more lively. In all of my other adults classes, any preparation I'd done was largely wasted, since everyone just wanted to talk about their vacations.

Just ten minutes before class, I got my first bad omen, a text-message from Whitetooth: "Before [the class] I should tell you some of the [company] students seem to think you don't like China, so maybe try to avoid any Mao jokes." Fifteen minutes after the start of class, when the second through ninth students finally showed up for the class, I got my second bad omen. Since the first student to arrive and I had been discussing our vacations, I opened the same topic up to the rest of the class: "Did anyone do anything interesting over the holidays? ... How about you, Apple? ... How about you, Girl-with-boy's-name? ... How about you, Racial-slur?"

Since this series of questions yielded nothing but downcast eyes and a lot of chatter in Chinese, I turned to the textbook, attempting to get them to read parts in a conversation aloud. This went a little better, but I was met with strong resistance whenever I attempted to correct pronunciation. Since the unit in the book was about illness and advice, I tried to set them up in pairs to complain about an illness and offer advice, but this went over poorly. We slowly, oh so slowly, worked our way through the tedious grammar section of the unit, then I had them work again in pairs, this time on a cloze exercise, in which one student was meant to play a doctor while the other played a patient.

After two minutes of simply reciting the exercise instructions aloud, they lapsed into speaking Chinese again. I tried near the end of class to open up a general discussion again, and met with failure on five different conversation topics. Thankfully, time had run out, so I took the time to pull Racial-slur aside and explain the problem with his name to him. He seemed grateful, but who knows. After I'd finished speaking with him, another student approached to tell me, "We think you should give us more chances to talk and reading." I said I'd do my best to do so during the next class, leaving it unsaid that I'd given all of them numerous chances to speak and to read, chances they'd chosen not to take.

This is an all too common phenomenon in adults classes here: the solid block of awkward silence, followed by a request to "let" students talk more. Somehow, they expect the teacher to make them talk, and there's nothing they really seem to want to say. I managed to hold back from any criticism, but was sorely tempted to say at the end of class, "China I like. It's classes like this I don't like--classes where people don't even have the common decency to show up on time, then don't make any effort to do any work in class." So between now and next week, I'm going to try and figure out something to do during class--something exciting and entertaining (and probably useless for learning)--just so that I don't start bleeding from biting my tongue too hard.