I am Totally Famous

Apparently, this blog was referenced in a national Indian newspaper.

And I quote, "And for Indians, who have been saved by Abhinav Bindra from getting a crushing inferiority complex, there is more cheer in all those Western reports and in CNN’s stories about some Chinese ways that are very Indian. Spitting and baby pooping, as reported in the blog called The Rice Wine Diaries, and in a CNN story on the booklets the government was distributing telling its people how to behave for the duration of the Olympics." See http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/08/17/stories/2008081750130300.htm

Here I was thinking no one read this thing. And now, my dream has come true. I am finally the international voice on Chinese spitting and baby pooping.

Chinese Buses

As a foreigner who had a minimal grasp of the language, to me, China was often a country of surfaces.

It was difficult to penetrate past the surface, whether it was with people or places. Unless I had the secondary medium of English, I mostly dealt with surfaces. I was disabled in China. I couldn’t understand. I dealt with surfaces.

But sometimes, the surfaces were so beautiful.

One of my favorite activities was to ride the buses. On a Saturday or Sunday, with a friend or alone, I would pick a random bus and ride till the end of the line.

Boarding the bus, I would clank my coins into the slot. One or two Yuan would usually do it. After some initial stares from the rest of the riders, I would sink into anonymity.

The bus would muscle down the street, blaring its angry horn at unsuspecting drivers and pedestrians. At stop lights it would turn off its engine to save on gas.

The bus is a place where you usually interact on surfaces, no matter where it is. Rarely will people strike up a conversation. In this way, riding the bus made me feel at home. I was just another person on his way to somewhere.

Sometimes, I would interact with children. I remember one particular little girl, sitting across from me. Her mother looked ahead but the girl stared up at me with huge oval eyes. She looked for a long time and then she looked at her mother, as if asking for cues on how to handle this new thing.

She wore an orange puffy-coat and matching orange mittens. Her hair was in black strands of pig tails, her nose slightly snotted. When she glanced back, I stuck out my tongue and her head snapped forward.

But then I saw the pink flesh of her tongue flash and she looked straight again. I had about 20 more years of face-making experience, so the girl was clearly outmatched.

I made my best scrunched face but the girl countered with bottom teeth exposure. I inside-outed my bottom lip and rolled my eyes but the girl countered with a classic display of tongue out and hand-antlers. At this point, the girl’s mother looked down and lightly smacked her on the head. I made my best “nothing” face.

When they rose and walked down the aisle for their stop, the little girl turned and flashed her tongue one last time in a Parthian shot.

I must have taken the bus dozens of times. My aim was to get outside the city, to see a neighborhood without Western advertising or Western money; that was more old China than new.

From my vantage back in America, the rides blend together in a series of pictures. Tall buildings gave way to dingy shops and little caves of industry. The road became narrower. Among the rows of white-tiled apartments, I saw the occasional house, with its old-timey black- tiled Chinese roof, the top in a slightly curved crescent moon.

The bus stopped at a traffic light near one of Shaoxing’s many canals. I looked down onto its coffee-colored water. Off to the side, women dressed in pink puffy-coats scrubbed their clothes, mashing them against concrete slabs in the water.

Downstream, I saw similar slabs with similar women scrubbing on each side, about 30 feet apart. Each woman knelt over her her rock, emanating ripple after ripple in the water. Each rippled wave reached out across the canal to meet another, the women’s energies coming together and overlapping in the middle, like a synchronized water show performed for no one and everyone.

As the bus drove farther from the city, smoke spewed from little factories, their thin pipes cutting whisps in the grey sky, like flag poles with ephemeral cloth. Among the grey factories, farms and green patches suddenly appeared, like puzzle pieces from two different pictures jammed into one another’s edges.

We passed residential neighborhoods, with their old grey houses and huddled shops. One house opened up into a pond with hundreds of downy baby ducks swimming in the murky water. Others had lilly-padded ponds with algae blooms and buoys; a network of nets for raising fish.

Sometimes, I could see the mountains. They seemed positioned against the city’s neon lights, like sound barriers against car horns on a highway. They were spectacularly green compared with everything else, the elevated terrain unusable for quilt-patch farms and slap-dash factories.

When I would ride, perhaps three or four in the afternoon, my fellow riders were usually young teens returning from schools in the city. Boys in the back would flick each others’ ears, their hair purposefully messy, as if they had waged war with weed-wackers; their hair the only casualty. Or they’d be middle-aged men and women returning from work, haggard with huge plastic rucksacks sitting beside them.

And then there were the old. In China, old people seemed particularly jolly, keeping active with Mah-jongg, Tai Chi and grandchildren. Sometimes I’d hear a hacking cough and an old man would rise to hawk loogies out the window. No heads would turn.

I remember one old lady. Her hands were cracked from winter or washing, like clay baked too long. She had a paper bag with red apples sitting at her feet. She wore a Mao suit, woolen and drab-blue. She had big brown eyes, calm and serene. She sat so still, like she was part of the seat. She looked to be about 80.

Sometimes, watching people on the bus was like viewing part of a movie without context. I would look at someone’s surface and in my negative space, I would try to infer their story. For this woman, in those at-least-80-years, she had 10 years of civil war in the 40’s, a couple years of starvation in the 50’s, mass madness in the 60’s and 70’s, opening in the 80’s and 90’s and textile factories in the aughts. That was the rough outline of her country’s history, events that were sure to affect her life.

Then, there were the all the smaller events that effect every life. Childhood. Marriage. Children. A husband? Rough hands for a good farm? What did the world do to her?

I wanted to know what she thought when the bus hugged the road’s edge for a passing BMW; what she thought when she boarded a bus for home and found a foreigner. I wanted to know how she kept streaks of black in her grey pigtails.

When the bus slowed to a stop, the old woman rose. She smiled and muttered something, shaking her head, before waddling off the bus. I had the impossible urge to talk to her, to know her story.

But we both dealt in surfaces. We didn’t have the language to penetrate past our skin, our clothes and expressions.

Like the washerwomen’s ripples, we could only touch the surface. Never down beyond the surface, into water who knew how deep.

Sometimes I’d get out and walk around. But other times, I’d stay on until the bus turned around. With my usual late start, the bus would soon stop running. The bus would turn around in a gas station, the driver getting out to sign a sheet of paper.
On the way back, from my new position, I would sometimes see something I missed.

Once, it was a small hill with little mounds rising up equal distances apart, packed earth supported by marble slabs and steels. Some had huge neon pink, yellow and green reefs beside them, on reef blown down to a ditch.

They were graves.

The hill looked ancient and I wondered how many generations were piled atop one another. On the hilltop, a tree arched upwards in every direction, it’s leaves so loose upon its sprawling branches that they seemed to vibrate. The tree seemed to hum, its long roots reaching deep down, deeper down, on my way back to the city; back to the lights.

American Music

In my Oral English class, I gave a lesson on American music.

Many of my 400 students requested such a lesson and I was happy to oblige. Part history lesson, part musical tasting, the lesson started with Southern field songs and then moved on to blues, jazz, country, bluegrass, R and B, rock, punk and rap. It was the best music my fair country had to offer.

However, my country's musical stylings were not well received. They looked confused during the field song.

Leadbelly “sound like dying.”

Miles Davis was “crazy man.”

Hank Williams was plain "terrible," they said. “He is a too sad man.”

Foggy Mountain Breakdown was a little better, but still terrible.

They dug Curtis Mayfield but plugged their ears to Jimi Hendrix.

Bad Religion was “so terrible.”

The only group they almost unanimously liked was Outkast. As I finished my lesson, a student would usually ask me why I hadn’t played Backstreet Boys, which apparently, was good American music.

In China, most of the music didn’t appeal to me. I disliked Beijing Opera and the local variant, Shoaxing Opera. To me, it "sound like dying" and "so terrible."

On the radio, they most often played an imitation of trashy European techno. When I would ride the buses and watch the beloved Karaoke videos that incessantly played on the journeys, it seemed as if China was stuck in the early 90s. Shaoxing wasn't exactly the cultural vanguard of China but maybe our two country’s musical standards don’t translate too well.

Also, it could have been the quality of pop music in general. Now that I’m back in America, turning on the average radio station is almost equally distasteful, almost worse, especially now that I understand the words. At least in China, I could pretend they were singing something deep and beautiful.

Although my students failed to appreciate my country’s music, it wasn’t a total failure. At least they now knew what it sounded like.

And usually, among the scrunched up faces and condescending smirks, I would see one person in the back, bobbing a head back and forth, to the beat.

Bad Habits

I loved my Great Uncle Harold.

He died about four years ago but I remember him fondly, as an affable bigot. I loved his delusional worship of all things Republican and the dirty ditties he would sing at holiday dinner tables.

What made him a bigot was that he raged against almost every minority. What made him affable was that he raged against every minority except the one he was secretly a part of.

My Great Uncle Harold was most likely a homosexual, gleaned from the fact that he lived with his “roommate” for over 40 years and from that one Christmas card with the pink sweaters and that poodle. Spending the majority of his life in San Francisco (another piece of evidence), one of his favorite minority targets was the Chinese.

Uncle Harold would get on his third glass of wine and he would start. “They are just little, awful people. You wouldn’t believe it. When you get on a trolley, they push right past you and go under your arms when you’re waitin’ in line. And they sit there and scream at one another like there isn’t anyone else in the world. Uhh.”

For a long time, I thought my Uncle Harold was just being a bigot, but in this case, his description sounds just about right. But from the Chinese point of view, they weren’t acting rude in the trolley; they were just acting like that trolley was in China.

As a Westerner in China, local habits often felt like an assault on my senses. However, during the year I lived there, I came to tolerate and even embrace some of those habits. But others I never got used to.

Let me first say that the Chinese in general are not a rude people. They just delegate their politeness to the private sector. For the most part, they are extremely courteous in private but publicly atrocious. Manners become more civilized the more metropolitan you get, but are still very relaxed.

In their defense, when you have so many people in a tiny space, there is not much private space to pick your nose. But still, their behavior tends to shock foreigners.

To help you experience their offenses, I’ve organized each offense by sense assaulted. Enjoy.

Sight
Picture this: A gorgeous Chinese woman walking down the street in a stunning red dress. She’s wearing stiletto heels and she’s strutting. She knows she’s got it. She’s basking in her own beauty and so is everyone else. But as she steps down to the curb, you hear a Hhhqwwwwaaak. She turns her delicate little head and from her dainty mouth, she lets fly a mess of regurgitated snot.

Probably the most conspicuous rude behavior in China is the spitting. It isn’t just a subtle drop of spittle to cement. Rather, it’s a throat-rattling hawk followed by a flying projectile of flem. In China, the violent crime rate is very low. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

In one year, I was almost spat upon more times that I can count on all available fingers and toes. I saw students spit on the classroom floor and mash it into the ground. If I was the last person off the bus, I would see puddles of spit on the floor under several seats. Even walking behind elderly men and women was dangerous, because, in addition to their spitting habit, they have the habit of not seeing where they were spitting.

Although the government says it’s trying to stamp it out of cities, in most of China, spitting isn’t a big deal. That would bother most people, and I admit that spitting probably isn’t the best way to avoid germs and communicable diseases (especially SARS), but came to embrace spitting.

I have always been a clandestine spitter, harried by the disgust of my fellow Americans for too long. In China, I had few human rights, but I could spit in peace. I embraced this social habit.

But there were some habits that I refuse to embrace. For instance, I was afraid of Chinese babies.

Here’s why: You are walking around China and you see a cute baby, with chubby cheeks and big eyes staring at you. Then, its mother turns to go and you see another pair of chubby cheeks. I’m talking about the constantly exposed baby-ass.

It doesn’t seem logical. It would be more logical for adults to have exposed asses because we have control over our bodily functions. But the baby does not possess this control and therefore, an exposed baby ass is highly volatile and could blow at any time.

I saw the devastation: about to sit down at a table outside Starbucks and what’s waiting for me on the chair: baby poop. At the checkout line in the grocery store and why isn’t anyone using cashier 14? Baby poop. Walking on the sidewalk and what’s that on my shoe? Baby poop. BABY POOP.

And once the Chinese baby gains control over their faculties, the fun isn’t over. If you are a Chinese child, you have a carte blanche to relieve yourself wherever and whenever you please. I saw children drop trow at busy sidewalks, their streams arching upward onto the blacktop, as cars and pedestrians pass by and their parents proudly look on. I saw children peeing besides bus stops not 3 feet away from a businessman’s pant leg.

And once, walking around an imitation Wal-mart, I saw a father not a one-minute-walk away from the bathroom plop down his little girl in the seafood section and goad her to let it flow onto some rubber mats. There was no drain. The pee was trapped in the pockets of the mat until some poor soul had to clean it up. What appalled me most was that I was the only one to stop and stare. Pissing on the floor of a grocery store was no big deal in Shaoxing, China.

I don’t know when the cut off age is, but I know it isn't before 12. And this freedom seems to return when you get old. I’ve walked in many an old man’s pee puddle as he relieved himself near a pedestrian walkway. Old people and babies are so respected in China, that they have complete freedom in bodily expulsion.

Hearing
I was once talking to a student about her dream to travel abroad.

“Where do you want to go,” I asked.
She listed off the Native English-speaking world. “England, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.” There was one country missing.
“You don’t want to go to the USA?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It is too noisy.”

I lost it. I cracked up for a full minute. If the Chinese people have tolerance for one thing, it is for noise. A Chinese city is the noisiest place I can imagine. The most constant noise is the beeping of horns.

After a year, I became accustomed to the din but when I first got here, they blasted into my skull.

In America, our traffic etiquette is based on trust. We assume that most people are paying attention and only use our horns as a “fuck you” or a “what the fuck?”

But in China, their traffic etiquette is based on mistrust. One would think that the actual car was powered by the horn. In a 5-minute taxi ride, the driver will typically beep the horn 15 times.

He’ll beep to let the bicyclist know he’s nearby, beep at other cars so they see him or beep at pedestrians walking across the street without looking or with looking. He’ll beep at on-coming traffic when he decides to improvise a lane on the other side of the road, beep at traffic lights that are red when he wants them to be green and if he hasn’t beeped in a while, he’ll beep.

I don’t know if it’s because he’s testing the horn to see if it still beeps or if it’s just his chosen form of expression but yeah, there is a lot of beeping.

A large portion of the other noise comes from mind-obliterating, brain-thumping, spinal-cord rattling, pull-my-hair-out-someone-turn-it-off techno music. I have no idea why storeowners feel the need to blare electric squiggles and bass thumps from massive speakers outside their stores. Perhaps they think it will get their store noticed.

Techno music is so annoying, you can’t really ignore it. But don’t tell them that. One day, my friends and I were eating dumplings at our favorite dumpling restaurant. I noticed a new noodle restaurant opened next door. The way I noticed was that our table started to quake against the vibrations of the techno beat. A young Chinese man bobbed his head to the scourge of sound and suddenly our haven wasn’t so haven-y.

The nice couple that ran the dumpling restaurant didn’t seem to be too happy. But still, they didn’t say a word. They tolerated it. I was so fed up that I decided to try out by burgeoning Chinese.

I turned to the noodle shop owner and said, “Duibuqi, ni de yinyue rang wo exin,” which means “Excuse me, your music makes me want to puke.”

He stared at me for a moment and then said a torrent of words I didn’t understand, except the last one, which was either “die” or “kill.” I decided to tolerate the music too, which was a good move, because he turned it up.

As much as I hate to say this, another thing you have to get used to is the Chinese manner of speaking. Chinese can be beautiful if you go closer to the north, featuring the Beijing dialect that is profuse with rrrs and shhs. But unfortunately, the north was defiantly not where I lived.

I lived in Zhejiang province, which is notorious for its awful sounding dialects. Imagine that someone from the hills of Kentucky had a love child with someone from a hole in Texas. Imagine that love child talking and then translate that level of ridiculousness into Mandarin.

When I first got there, I thought the people in Shaoxing were an argumentative people, always screaming at each other. And while that is partly true, most of the time, they were just talking normally. Sometimes I passed a person talking and I’d think they were making fun of themselves, or perhaps, quacking. But they weren’t.

The cacophony of the language became most apparent when listening to it screamed into cell phones. Sometimes I’d be sitting on a bus and hear what I thought was a frantic cry. Perhaps someone had a gun somewhere or maybe a fire broke out. When I actually looked, however, I would see a cell phone attached to the person’s head.

Many Chinese people, for some reason, see no rudeness is screaming into the phone. And why should they? No one is going to tell them it’s annoying.

But in America, my Uncle Harold would have had no qualms about it. Except he’s dead.

Taste
The Chinese do have the best cuisine in the world, but like USA’s “best” baseball player, they also use performance-enhancing drugs.

MSG, a flavor enhancer, is another habit of the Chinese that Westerners frown upon. The Chinese sell it by the bag here. In almost everything you eat, you will find MSG.

But walking past a Chinese restaurant in America, you might find “No MSG” written in the window. That is because Chinese people love MSG, while Americans think it causes headaches and cancer. Recent studies show that MSG isn’t all that bad for you. But it isn’t necessarily good.

I do notice the good taste, but I don’t notice the headaches. I just have utterly insane dreams.

A brief survey: I had a dream that I was lovelorn bachelor’s imaginary friend in the style of a really bad romantic comedy.

I had a dream that I somehow went back in time and prevented racism but my mother still grounded me for not telling her where I was going.

I had a dream in which I saw my ex-girlfriend in a San Francisco restaurant and her friend had a “perception problem,” which required me to throw “perception glitter” on my face and get in a “perception bear mascot suit,” just so she could see me.

When you wake up from dreams like that in America, you say, “What the fuck?”

But in China, you say, “What did I eat last night?” And usually, when you eat at Chinese restaurants, the answer is “something delicious.”

Whenever I started hating China, my taste buds would tell me otherwise. I think it is safe to say that China has the best food in the world.

Most of it is made of the typical stuff: rice and noodles, vegetables, beef, been curd, pork, chicken and fish. But occasionally, some people will eat things most westerners outside of mental institutions would not consider food.

In the south, they have a saying, “If the backbone faces the sky, they eat it.” That would appear to include everything except for bipedal animals (humans). But from what I’ve heard, even that is not entirely true.

As was repeated to me in awful joke after awful joke before I came to China, yes it is true: Many Chinese eat dog. But most people don’t eat dog very often.

I could sense a generational rift. The younger generation seemed to view canines more for petting than digesting. At our local Starbucks, I even saw a group of Chinese yuppies in sweaters with their Chinese dogs, in sweaters. But if I walked down the street, I could find a small restaurant that serves dog and nothing but dog, 18-hours a day.

Men sat around tables outside and gnawed on a plate of steaming puppy paws, waiting for their basket of roasted dog or bowls of doggy stew. And right next to the diners sat a large bucket of blood-tinged water with little raw paws poking out, where the cook would skin the next day’s delicacies.

Almost every time I passed by this restaurant, I cringed and remembered my own beloved dog who passed away last spring.

But I write “almost” because once, I ate dog. Exactly why I chose to eat dog escapes me. Perhaps it was the sheer want of a new experience that convinced me to put that first chopstick-pinch of meat in my mouth, or maybe it was the beautiful looks of horror I expected when, back in America, someone would make the same lame joke of “did you eat dog? Har Har Har” and I could say, in a hollow Hannibal Lecture voice, “Actually, yes.”

And perhaps, I was because my own dog died a couple of months before and I wanted to remind myself that he was just an animal after all. And maybe, it was because a friend “double-dog dared” me.

Perhaps it was all of those reasons that made me open up the menu and point to “Spicy Dog Salad.” When they brought the plate out, the most surprising thing was that it looked like any other plate of meat. There were a few peppers but mostly it was cold, spiced meat strips. The closest meat I can compare it to is bear meat, which doesn’t help the general readership.

The meat was tough and stringy and I stopped eating after a few bites. I haven’t eaten dog since but I would recommend it to anybody. It puts the pampered, sweatered, gourmet-food-fed dog off its pedestal and where it belongs: as an animal that I could eat, but would rather make friends with. And no, I didn’t get a doggy bag.

In addition to dog, I ate less cuddly creatures, including snake, turtle, eel, frog, camel, snail, chicken foot and once, fried scorpion. For the most part, I would dread the initial bite but then would realize why the Chinese ate it: it doesn’t taste that bad. Snake is particularly delicious when barbequed.

Generally speaking, I became accustomed to the odder parts of the Chinese cuisine. But on one occasion, some of my students told me something I never got accustomed to.

One day, I came to help Natalie with one of her group discussions. Unlike me, Natalie taught at a private school. Most of her students were adults and had a high level of English. We got on the topic of alternative medicine.

“Yes,” said one of her brightest and kindest students. “We often eat fetus.”

I thought I misheard her. “You eat what?”

“Fetus,” she said. “It is very good for the skin. It can make your skin clear… have no, how d’you say…” She pointed to a dot on her face.

“Pimples?”

“Yes! In my village, we often eat fetus.”

The woman next to her nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said, “fetus is very good for health.”

“Where do you get it?” I asked.

“The hospital.”

“Oh.” What surprised me most was not that the people across from me had eaten human baby but that I smiled and nodded. Some people would jump up and scream “cannibals” and catch the next flight out of Shanghai.

But Natalie and I didn’t do that. We politely sat across from the baby eaters, and let them go on about the benefits of eating baby. Was I that culturally sensitive?

Later, the misunderstanding was revealed. They didn’t eat fetus but rather, the placenta, which is actually used in a lot of products in the West, like shampoos and perfumes.

We laughed and laughed and laughed until one woman said, “Actually, one man in my village, he is very sick. He has eaten the small baby.”

“The fetus?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Many people don’t like his action but he think it good for the health. Very expensive.” Asking other close Chinese friends, I know that eating fetus happens rarely, but still happens.

Intellectually, I try to understand it as using the same moral calculus that Westerners use for justifying using embryos for stem cell research. But in the end, it was the worst thing I heard while living in China.

Touch
Perhaps after occasionally eating babies for medicinal purposes,the next most offensive thing to a foreigner’s senses would be butting-in-line.

Traveling last summer, I would often wait in line to buy a train ticket, sometimes for an hour in the sweltering heat. During this hour, I would sometimes turn away for a moment. And on more than one occasion, during that moment, I would feel something move in front of me. Then I would turn back to see that in the space where before, there was nothing, there was now a Chinese body.

In America, we hold our personal space dear. The space in front of us while in a line is some of the most sacred personal space. Anyone who attempts to violate this space gets throttled.

But in China, this violation is moderately tolerated. It’s not that most people butt. It’s just the people who do, tend to get away with it. Most people just ignore it.

Now, I say most people because in my year in China, I saw about three fights go down in the train station over butting. But as often as it happens, I should have seen a lot more.

Chinese also invade each other’s personal space in another way, but this invasion is often welcome. To express same-sex friendship, many Chinese tend to be physically affectionate. If I saw two men holding hands in America, I would think they were gay (which is perfectly fine).

But in China, I often saw two men hold hands. Young men are particularly affectionate. They often have their arms around each other in camaraderie, hands on each other’s knees or even interlocking each other’s legs on the train. Sometimes I heard that lovely frat boy voice inside my head saying, “What are ye, a gay? (which again, is perfectly fine) but I know it is just a cultural difference.

Chinese society is not exactly open to homosexuality, although the government did take it off their list of mental illnesses in 2001. But on the bright side, with all the touching that goes on, it’s easier for gay people to hide.

Smell
Chinese people are a mysteriously unsmelly people. I arrived in China during the winter season and on my first trip to the grocery store, I was horrified by the dearth of deodorants. I cringed as the weather grew hotter, expecting human stench to spring from my students’ deodorant-less bodies.

But the awful smells never came. Except for that one kid, they were odorless.

However, China more than makes up for the unstinkiness of its people.

First, the air quality is one of the worst in the world. The World Bank estimates that China has China has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. While that makes for beautiful sunsets, that sunset is also complimented with a burning sensation in your throat.

Then, the sewer system isn’t so great so there are sidewalks that you know will reek of shit. This smell is competing with many delicious smells coming out of apartments and houses so your nose is constantly in misery and elation, sometimes in a single moment.

“What’s the lady in that house cooking?” Sniff. Sniff. “Sweet and sour chicken with rice cooked in…diarrhea.” And then there’s the many street vendors who cook smelly tofu. The name speaks for itself.

Well, I think that about does it. That’s a lot of bad habits. Some may say that I’m picking on the Chinese but even the Communist Government publicly acknowledges their problems.

A recent report in China’s own Asian Times said that Chinese traveler’s poor manners were “affecting China’s international image” with common complaints of graffiti on historical sights, spitting, talking loudly, littering, bargaining at stores that don’t bargain, screaming into cell phones and publicly clearing one’s throat (Asian Times, Oct. 2006).

Chinese tour groups have even been banned from several French hotels. How could the citizens of the most “cultured” country in the world appear so crass? The Communist Government has always been comfortable with contradictions but they are not comfortable with that one.

They are quickly trying to change it. Efforts include a “no spitting” campaign in Beijing, a horn ban in the city of Chongqing and a stand-in-line day every Monday. With the Olympics coming in one year, they don’t have much time.

Still, old habits are hard to break, especially when they belong to a large chunk of 3.6 billion people.

To be fair, now that I’m home, I can see many American habits that would horrify your average Chinese citizen. They can take their pick: The compulsive overeating of our people, the incessant violence in our communities, the dry-humping on our dance floors, the material waste in our households, the isolation of our elderly, the blah blah blah of our blah blah blah.

Still, they are my culture’s bad habits and it’s good to be home.

I Just Like

As classes progressed, I became more critical of my employer.

Yuexiu Foreign Language College was a special type of school. It was a money-making institution, designed mostly for rich kids who did poorly on their college entrance exam.

Its classes appeared impressive. “Marketing,” “System Operations” but just like building bricks, many of the classes weren’t real. They were meant to look good.

They had one foreigner teaching gym when he could have helped so much more teaching another class, like half of my English students. But he was there so the administration could tell prospective students: “We have so many foreign teachers, we have one teaching gym.” The students, and their parents who were paying for it, were being cheated out of a quality education.

However, despite its capitalistic gouging, the school did offer the students a way out. The school was known for its study abroad program. For exorbitant amounts of money, Yuexiu students could travel to partnership schools in England, Germany, France, Australia and Singapore. In the business school, my students had their hearts set on Singapore, an island south of China with a large ethnic Chinese population. If they studied for three years at Yuexiu, and their parents paid enough money, they could be accepted into an unscrupulous Singapore business college.

Their three years at Yuexiu would shrink and count as one year, leaving them with two years to go. But if they graduated, they would have the coveted Foreign University Diploma. That piece of paper would put them above most other mainland graduates. It was a rip-off, but it offered a better alternative than just settling for less.

To be fair, my experience at the college was probably not an average one. My oral English classes were the shortest of any teacher, with the Business students who could probably care the least of any major.

Other foreign teachers taught newspaper reading, culture and writing, or simply how to pass the state tests. A good many were perfectly happy with their classes and would renew their contracts the following year. I was not one of those.

But I tried to make it work. In my Marketing Class, I decided to assign their first paper. They were to get into groups and write two paragraphs on one of China’s “marketing environments.”

While that sounds a bit advanced, it boiled down to three people writing three sentences each on technology, China’s culture, politics or people. While broad, the essay was to be in their own words. There were no questions. No one came to me for help.

When they turned in the papers, 75 percent of the class had plagiarized. To mix it up, I decided to take them on field trips. The great thing about marketing is, if the place sells something, you’re money. Because the marketing book featured a case-study on McDonalds that they couldn’t understand, I decided to pay our local chapter a visit. McDonalds is all over China. Shaoxing had three.

In the particular store we visited, I saw those glorious arches from my homeland. I would often go there when I was feeling homesick for quick and fatty fare.

However, before you even go in the store, you can tell it has a Chinese tint. Outside, what appeared to be Ronald McDonald sat molded to a bench. But it wasn’t Ronald McDonald. It was Uncle McDonald. The differences are subtle, but in essence, it means that Uncle has a smaller body and even smaller head, with extra-squinty eyes.

The speaker outside usually played the melodic McDonalds advertisement. “Ba-ba-ba-baba.” But instead of saying “I’m loving it,” the sweet-voiced singer sang “Wo jiu xihuan,” meaning “I just like.” I thought this was a great semantic improvement from American culture’s many abuses of the word “love.”

Inside, the McDonald’s staples were basically the same. Differences included putting sweet red beans on ice cream and offering fried chicken, because hey, it’s American. They also offered group family meals; family being the preferred style of eating.

Advertisements featured sensuous body parts: full lips, a neck, a Caucasian man’s peaked bicep, with a tasty burger beneath. I lectured my students on the genius of Ray Kroc, globalization and standardization for 15 minutes.

I opened the floor for discussion. We discussed buying ice cream and spent the rest class time eating sundaes.

It was 10 in the morning. During that semester, we went on several other field trips. One to Starbucks, where I had my morning coffee; one to Trust-Mart, Taiwan’s version of Wal-Mart, where I did my weekly grocery shopping; and one to the main street, where I got my morning exercise.

Each field trip contained a corresponding lesson and activity for the students, and a corresponding errand for me. I liked this way of teaching better.

The Bullets Are Very Expensive

In my Oral English classes, I kept it light.

I gave a lesson on descriptions. I took pictures of my friends getting incredibly drunk and brought them in for my students to describe. Another lesson covered pronunciation, using a Bingo game.

I was tired of being frivolous, so I decided to have a lesson about something serious. How much more serious can you get than war? I printed out vocabulary sheets, pictures and discussion questions so we could handle the big stuff: Why do people have war? Would you be willing to kill another human being?

I conducted a survey and it usually went like this:
“What if Hu Jintao called you up and said, ‘Would you please fight in a war?’ Would you go?”
A resounding “No!”
“What if the war was to defend China. For example, if USA bombed China, would you fight me?”
“Yes!” they yelled.
“What if Hu Jintao called you and said, ‘China isn’t big enough. We need more land.’ Would you fight for more land?”
“No!”
“What if that land was Japan?”
“YES!!! I hate Japan!”

From then on, whenever I wanted to spice up a class, I could push the Japan button.

I asked them about 9/11. As I mentioned before, I heard that in China there was dancing in the streets. But in no way did I mean that everyone was dancing in the streets, or even most, but that the anti-American sentiment is common among the Chinese population.

However, most of my students said how terrible it was, how awful for the loss of life and how sorry they felt that day. When talking about 9/11, that was the attitude I most often encountered.

But not always. One male student said, “The terrorists do well.” He wasn’t a very good student, so I thought he might have mispronounced. He didn’t.

“So 9/11 was a good thing?” I asked.
“Yes. The USA is too powerful.”

I controlled myself and tried to appreciate his use of terrorist (a word I just taught him) in a correct sentence.

Whenever I was confronted with Anti-Americanism, I tried to imagine why they might hate us. For that, you must think about the propaganda their government tells them as well as the legitimate reasons they might have.

America is too powerful. With that, comes the ability to be benevolent, as well as the ability to be a bully. And hell, whenever I watch E! Entertainment News or Oprah, I hate us too.

There were others who agreed with him, albeit with more tact and intelligence. These students gave the kind of answers a teacher dreams about: both articulate and contentious.

One girl talked about the “hegemony” of the United States, that the loss of life was unfortunate but the US policy is unjust. Another girl said that “governments are naturally violent. They use violence to control the people.”

Even though she was attacking my country, I appreciated the girl’s universal answer. Governments were violent in general, not just in the U.S., which implied that the Chinese Communist Party also used violence. I could live with that.

I never expected one of my students to publicly say something that hinted disrespect to the government. It was as if they came out of the wall, had an intelligent conversation and disappeared once again into the mass of Chinese faces.

The students made me promise to give a “happier” lesson next time. As they were leaving, I fell into conversation with a student who had a question about guns.

Guns are banned in China, but this student seemed to have a particular interest in firearms. He was a good student with a buzz haircut and a penchant for dressing in army uniforms.

He said that in China, you can get any gun you want. “The smuggler,” he said. You want an AK-47? 3000 yuan, or about $400 dollars. A Hunting rifle? 6o yuan or about 10 dollars.

“My neighbor had a machine gun,” he said. “But the bullets are very expensive.”

My next lesson was lighter, a lesson on emotions. I started the lesson with describing the foreigner’s experience in China as an emotional roller coaster.

I start my day on a high point. Then, my shower doesn’t work (drop). Next, I have a really good class where students participate (go up) followed by a dead-faced bad one (go down). I walk outside and eat in a cheap and delicious restaurant (go up). But on my way home people harass me with hellos and laugh and point and call me “old other person” (plummet down). Then I see two men holding hands (roller coaster loop, signifying confusion). The last one always got a big laugh.

I started out with the nice emotions, like joy and calm but the fun didn’t start until I got to heartbreak. This was where my improv acting skills came in handy. I picked a girl out from the audience and said, “I love you.”

She was, of course, mortified, her face flushed with embarrassment. Then I said, “You say, ‘Go away.’”

I mimed ripping out my heart, breaking it and stomping on it, which they thought was hilarious. After that, I wrote “furious” on the board and screamed, “Why don’t you love me!” which was followed by a definition of “bold.” I then mimed a gun and shot her. That was followed by a quick definition of “remorse,” at which point I started sobbing. Finally, I defined “despair,” before taking my own life.

I separated the class into groups and instructed them to write a small play depicting an emotion for next class. I spent the next week watching imitations of Chinese soap operas.