Tag: Chinese food (Page 1 of 2)

The Real China: “A Handsome American Guy Studies Kung Fu”

March 8, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Television is a fun gauge of a nation’s psyche. A look into how a people entertain themselves speaks volumes about who the people are. In America, football, zombies, gritty cop dramas, and sophomoric, snarky sitcoms reign supreme. Chinese TV is dominated by historical fantasies of slaughtering Japan’s invading soldiers, romantic melodramas, singing showcases, dry news reports, and sports (basketball, volleyball, and ping pong- what else).

I didn’t watch much television in China. While it was an entertaining spectacle to flip through when I was home alone and bored, which was quite often, I instead spent most of my free time on the slow-as-molasses and “Great Firewall” blocked internet, or out exercising and exploring around my college campus. When I did watch TV, I would spend a minute on the (mostly) ping-pong and volleyball channel, then click up through several song and dance channels, some serials, and one movie channel that would occasionally play something spoken in English or subtitled. I was at times so desperate for an English-language movie that I’d stay up late to watch whatever forgotten American garbage was airing, like Cheaper by the Dozen 2 until I couldn’t take it any more and went to bed.

Mostly I turned on the television to watch the English language news channel and try to feel somewhat connected to the outside world from my surreal hinterland outpost. The news channels were state-controlled, like all the rest, so it was interesting to note the edge in Chinese reporters’ voices when discussing an issue related to U.S. actions and Chinese sovereignty (not so ironically, each channel is called “CCTV” followed by a number, which stands for China Central Television instead of closed-circuit television). On the surprising bright side, a typical newscast was a plain rundown of international headlines and summits, so the number of biased statements and gimmicks per minute was surprisingly fewer than a typical American broadcast.

Chinese newspapers were completely impenetrable by my illiterate eyes, so I never bothered with one. In my observation, daily newspaper reading was not all that common of a habit in the small (by Chinese standards) cities where I spent the majority of my time. I didn’t see anyone carrying them in hand while commuting through the subways and crowded streets of the Tier 1 cities, either. While I cannot comment on daily readership numbers, I can say from my perspective that I did not notice anyone carrying a newspaper with them, reading it over breakfast, or collecting piles of old papers in their living room or office. The first time I noticed the local newspaper was when I penetrated its sports page as a story. And as long as I am going to do a little boasting, I should add that this was after I was featured on the local television news channel.

So first: how I got on television. It began when Aunt Fong took me around to try and find a martial arts school.

Martial arts training can be very informal in China, and by that I mean I regularly saw tai chi and kung fu groups meeting in the park- perhaps as few as two or three friends practicing their techniques together, or one man sweeping a two-handed sword or pole-arm through the air. Aunt Fong introduced me to a colleague or friend of hers (someone connected to her gwan-shee network) who practiced his routines every morning in a riverside park, so I did get a taste of this do-it-yourself kung fu. About once a week during the spring, Aunt Fong would nag me to wake up extra early and take a taxi to meet “Big” Wei, or Da Wei, as we called him in Chinese, before he finished his 6 a.m. practice and headed back home. While I was thankful to Aunt Fong and Da Wei for the time he spent teaching me a lengthy kung fu routine, and I was open to learn and integrate kung fu techniques into my martial arts knowledge, my heart was just not into performing choreographed, fossilized routines. I wanted to continue the martial arts I had pursued in the United States and develop my skills to a competitive level.

There were no schools nearby for me to practice any wrestling or grappling like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu I studied back in America (those schools exist only in China’s major cities- it is still a nation obsessed with its ancient traditions over contemporary fascinations like mixed martial arts and BJJ), but Aunt Fong had a friend who practiced Sanda, or what might generically be called “kickboxing” in America. She knew I wanted to practice at a serious gym, so she took me there to meet the coach. Master Wei, not Big Wei, was a trim, middle-aged man with an army crew cut and a block-shaped head. His physique did not immediately tip me off that he was a former champion and coach, but when I felt the power of his right hook and watched as he used breath control to take my best punch to his stomach again and again without flinching, I sensed serious power in his modest size. Also, he amazing abilities like the way he could sit cross-legged and use his only his two pointer fingers and thumbs to elevate himself off the floor.

Master Wei’s school was on the second level of a small retail space, indistinct from all the other dingy, white-walled retail spaces lining the downtown city blocks. The gym upstairs was filled with weight-lifting machines, heavy punching bags, and floor mats. During class nights, young kids would come after school and horse around until Master Wei or his nephew would step in, blow the whistle, and start class. Then, all the kids and some adults would run in circles or perform the same leg-swinging exercises for what seemed like forever. Thirty minutes is a very brief time respective to most things, but it is an unendurably long time to repeat the same floor exercise or run in tight ovals without a break. Master Wei would just shout, “Come on!” or blast his whistle as we struggled. He was a strict taskmaster who had never been influenced by the American idea to keep all of the students engaged or entertained.

Sometimes, he would pair students up for sparring or a partner exercise, tell us to begin, then go downstairs to take a half-hour phone call, leaving us to continue the exercise indefinitely. Other times, he would sit and watch his nephew and I fight each other, chiming in “Very good!” if I did something right, or pulling his nephew to the side to scold and slap him with his whistle cord when he did something wrong. Not that I was the one getting the best of his nephew- more often it was just the opposite, but Master Wei wasn’t related to me so that meant I was spared these whistle cord whips.

Those punishment breaks were the only pause in the action. Normally, Master Wei’s nephew and I would fight each other until I saw parents arriving after dark to pick their children up from the gym. Then, I knew my reprieve was mercifully near. Aunt Fong would walk me home as I hobbled on ankles and shin bones that felt like crushed glass. (Here, I tell how a minor injury from fighting at the gym turned into a serious problem that made necessary my first hospital visit.)

My very minor television appearance occurred one afternoon after I finished my classes and took a taxi to meet Aunt Fong at her university before heading off to my normally scheduled Sanda practice. At her campus, I was surprised by a small group of her colleagues and student friends who were expecting me as my taxi arrived. One of her excited students told me that a television crew was coming to film me for the news. I wasn’t sure I could believe her; I did not see why they would be interested in filming me or how the local TV station would even know about me.

But in small city China, word of a young, tall foreigner gets around. Students in my English classes would tell me how their friends had seen me eating at the cafeteria, or shopping downtown- sometimes they would show me unnerving pictures that their friends had taken of me unaware in the middle of class or from across campus. Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) once forbid me to run outside the university campus after the school security guards (I assumed) told him or a link of the social grape vine that they saw me running along the street outside the school’s gate. So I was skeptical that I was newsworthy, but not completely surprised when I came to Aunt Fong’s office building and saw a camera crew waiting outside.

They filmed me walking around the campus, playing ping-pong with a ping-pong professor (they really have those in China) and play-fighting with another young man in front of a crowd of students. Then, the camera crew followed me to the Sanda gym and filmed me training on punching mitts with Master Wei. After the workout, one of Aunt Fong’s friends served as a translator so I could be interviewed. She relayed questions to me about my training and competition experience in America. I tried to explain to her that I had only fought a few fights, as an amateur, and my competition awards were not championships but awards for having finished two of my fights with the “Submission of the Night”. Good luck explaining what “Submission of the Night” meant to a provincial Chinese audience. I was afraid I was being set up as the great white hope of my college town, and as a foreign novelty I would be matched to fight some Chinese giant with bad intentions.

“No, no, I said I killed seven FLIES with one blow!”

I never did get to see my segment on the news. It aired during a holiday week, while I was away in Shanghai, and Aunt Fong said she couldn’t record it.

Master Wei thought that I was good enough to audition, along with his nephew, for a spot on the national broadcast of kickboxing fights: Wu Lin Feng. The prospect of fighting professionally and being able to earn an income from martial arts became my incentive to return to the gym for my regular session of Thursday through Sunday beatings by the hands and feet of Master Wei’s nephew. I was always relieved when Master Wei told us to practice boxing- no knees or kicks- because it was less painful to be hit primarily in the head versus the legs and body, and I could use my long arms to outbox Master Wei’s much shorter nephew.

My newspaper appearance came a couple months later, also due to my training at Master Wei’s gym, and also reported by the same journalist who produced my TV story. In a Chinese martial arts school, students are accepted by their teacher in a formal ceremony where the student pays obeisance to the teacher, is accepted by him, and then they dine together with friends. The night of my ceremony, I knew something formal was about to take place, but I had only a foggy idea of what it was all about and could not fathom how formal and well-attended it would be.

I met two other students, also being officially accepted by Master Wei as students, in the lobby of a nice restaurant near the gym: Ma Cao, a colleague of Aunt Fong’s who taught exercise science and possessed the largest calves proportional to body mass I have ever seen on a human being, and a very skinny college student who I suspected was mostly into training Sanda so he could boast about it to girls. Ma Cao was wearing a mandarin suit; I only had on the khaki pants I wore to my classes that day and a black, wool jacket over my sweater. I felt shamefully underdressed in my normal teaching clothes and I began to get the sense that this ceremonial dinner was of much bigger import than I had assumed. I thought we would probably bow, shake hands, and sign a certificate before training at the gym, but the event at the restaurant was shaping up to become an all-night affair.

Ma Cao showing off his giant calves.

Before most of the guests arrived, we three students took out our billfolds and divided our “lucky money” into three red envelopes so we could present them as gifts to Master Wei. If you want to be someone’s student in China, you had better have a red envelope full of lucky money with their name on it. We had to count out the luckiest of numbers- 888 Chinese yuan- which had me smirking because this number in Chinese is said, “ba bai ba shi ba.” For a moment, as our small group counted and repeated the sum, we sounded like a small chorus of sheep. Then, minutes later, Master Wei, his family, and all of his old kung fu friends arrived. The journalist came with camera in hand to take pictures of our ceremony.

One after another, we three students stood in front of Master Wei and his wife, who were seated on a small couch in the dining room. Then, we poured them each a cup of tea, and bowed. My two friends did a full kowtow on a floor cushion, but Aunt Fong told me to do just a formal standing bow, hands held together. The newspaper reporter captured this scene and it ran under the headline “A Handsome American Guy/ Studies Kung Fu.” I am not making that up. The sub-heading read how I strived to conquer the competition arena “Wu Lin Feng” within one year. This translation was made for me by a Chinese friend with an English degree and excellent English skills, so skeptical, bilingual readers can check the translation for themselves. The original Chinese headlines are 美国帅小伙/ 珠城学功夫 and 力争一年内“武林风”擂台扬威.)

I’m featured in the story on the right, not the one above the women’s curling team.

After the bow, Master Wei, his kung fu colleagues, and I signed a red certificate that said something about how he would teach me and I would be a good student. I was afraid Master Wei would resent it if I ever trained at a different school and possibly track me down to challenge me to mortal combat, like in the movies, but Aunt Fong assured me our teacher-student agreement was not exclusive. I am still alive to this day, so it turns out she was right.

With the contracts signed, the kung fu teachers and students went out into the lobby to take commemorative pictures for a full hour. I stood in with every possible permutation of people involved with the ceremony. After eight o’clock, the picture-taking died down and I was able to join all the people in the dining room who had already been eating while I was in the lobby. It was typical in China to eat foods that had been sitting on the table for half an hour or longer, so coming in to find stacks of room-temperature food didn’t bother me. Master Wei’s new students footed the bill that night, so all the platters and excess amounts of rice liquor were partially funded on my honor. (More about Chinese dining and drinking customs in “Bottoms Up!”)

The wannabe heart throb on the left (I never learned his name), Master Wei sitting in front of me, and Ma Cao on the right.

Joining the students of honor in this picture are Aunt Fong and, I think, a kung fu teacher or university professor in the red jacket.

Master Wei’s very tough nephew on the left.

So how did my training with Master Wei turn out? Did I realize my dream of competing as a professional martial artist? After my foot injury in the fall, I trained regularly at the (unheated) gym over the winter and got toughened up quite a bit by Master Wei’s Spartan practices. But, concurrently, China as a whole was dragging down my health and emotions. By the time the spring semester had wrapped up and I had open days to devote to training in the now sweltering gym, I felt so forlorn that I lost nearly all spirit to fight. It didn’t feel good to train anymore. Master Wei could tell that my emotions were poor and my heart was fading. He proposed that if I wanted to compete on the televised show, I would need to train full-time for two months and try out in August. I would need my visa extended for that, but I thought it might be worth it. Realizing a martial arts dream seemed worth it to try with all my might, even if that meant staying in China for another two months or a year.

Alas, I could not deny my flagging spirits and health, and at the end of June/early July I became so ill that I had to stay in the hospital for three days.
Training became unthinkable.

Looking out at the brownish-gray sky from my hospital bed, I only wanted to leave China for a clean country where I could convalesce in soul and body. At the end of July, I departed from the Hefei airport with a souvenir newspaper in my luggage.

My view from my top floor hospital window. The window pane itself was clean, it was the outside which was so dirty.

Christmas in China

December 23, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

December isn’t the Christmas Season in China. Well, it is in some ways, surprisingly, but the people aren’t taken with the Christmas Spirit as Americans were once upon a time.

Walking through the shopping streets in the early dark of winter, I began to notice more and more window decoupage displays of white paper snowflakes over red and green backgrounds. Next to the fashion mannequins, there might have been stacks of presents wrapped in shiny paper, and the whole scene would be advertised with text that read “Ho! Ho! Ho!” or misspelled, gibberish renderings of “Merry Christmas” and other holiday greetings. If a store had a Santa dummy (the Chinese called him Christmas Man), he would usually be dressed in gold or red, maybe silver, and he was always playing the saxophone. I asked one of my students why Santa was always playing the sax, and I received the only answer one can give to such a question: “I don’t know.”

CUH-RIS-A-MERS MAN!

“M-R-R-E everyone!”

The surprising part of Christmas in China, to me, came when I devoted lessons to Christmas, asking students what they knew about it and how people celebrated. My classes knew the melody of “Jingle Bells” and a few other classics, which seemed natural enough, and they also shared the new Chinese tradition of giving apples stamped with a Christmas pattern to their friends- stencils of a reindeer or “Christmas Man” surrounded by the Chinese characters for “Merry Christmas.” I found one of these apples in the spring, after losing it in between my refrigerator and kitchen cupboards, and it still had the same color and firmness as the day I received it. I shudder to think what they sprayed or injected their produce with; the bananas were also uniformly yellow.

All the chemicals in Chinese food made my stomach shake like a bowl full of jelly.

What truly surprised me was when I asked my students as a class, “What do you do for Christmas?” and several of them replied without shyness, “Go to church.” China was still convalescing from Mao and his brand of communism, I thought, and I assumed that like the university professors and public officials who professed the faith, students in school would be hush-hush about church.

Assembling for worship in China, of course, isn’t taken for granted as it is in America, where buildings for every Christian denomination- and then some- can be found within walking distance of every residential area. The public church buildings in China (Three Self Patriotic Movement churches) were registered with the state, and people could openly attend, but state controls hamstrung evangelical efforts and what ministers could preach and teach. It is “the church” with bureaucrats of the Communist Party as head.

Those birds un-caged by state controls, the house churches, were many and various in China, and these were all treated with secrecy for fear of government action (i.e. arrest and imprisonment). So, when I had students freely tell me they were going to attend church with their grandmothers on Christmas, I was taken aback. I was stunned for a moment, and I knew to not ask them what type of church they attended in front of their classmates. Perhaps they went to one of the public churches, and they could share so without reprisal, or maybe it was that they were part of a house church, and attitudes had relaxed to the point that young students thought nothing of discussing it openly. I was left to assume the former, not able to dig into the issue in front of a class of peers, only slowly having my questions about the church in China answered in small increments as time went by. Those small peaks I did get inside church life in China were densely filtered by screens of language and culture.

When I asked my two classes of university students what they were doing on Sunday, the 25th, I heard a groan in reply: “Tests.”

“Tests on Christmas!” I exclaimed, like a claymation character from a Rankin/Bass movie, “That’s terrible.” They concurred.

Earlier that week, I spoke to a Chinese English teacher who told me that one of her fondest school memories was when her foreign English teacher threw a Christmas Party for his students. So, I decided to brighten my students’ day. After they finished their tests, they could come over to my apartment that Sunday for a Christmas Party.

Now, between my two college classes (I had 18 other classes of middle school students), I probably had 45 students, but I did the invitation math I had learned in America and expected 15 people to come, 20 tops, and then only an hour after the official start time. I figured that it would be safe to host the event in my apartment with such a modest crowd, and besides, I had no idea how to reserve a room on campus.

Six o’clock sharp came, official party time, and I had candy and a Christmas cake on the table (cake in China is just like cake in America, only it tastes bad. Imagine the quality of cake you might find in a tawdry convenience store, and that is what cake in China tastes like). I had yet to button up my shirt, but I heard a knock at my door and my phone was beeping with text messages asking me to clarify directions to my apartment. I let the first batch of students in, and from that point on there was a continual stream of new guests. I learned a valuable lesson about Chinese culture that night: if you invite people to a party, they will show up.

Maybe five to seven of my especially anti-social university students didn’t come that night, but the rest of the 45 did come, and some even brought friends. A student who never came to my class (because 10 o’clock was too early in the morning for him) even showed up. At one point, I had over thirty people in my living room. I opened every window to let in the winter wind and try and alleviate the collection of body heat. We could hardly move or hear each other speak, but everyone was in high spirits, with students taking turns to sing solos, and candy and cake being obliterated on and around the table.

A ring of people lined my living room and poured into the kitchen and study.

Another thing about cake in China- it’s often double-layered with a thin spread of cream or jelly filling in between, and there is a light, fluffy frosting on the outside. Not unusual for a cake, but the tall and triangular slices, I want to note, carried messy potential inside and out. It would be tricky to eat such a big, sloppy slice as it was, but in China, people do not keep forks or dinner plates in their kitchen. And cake is one food that will cause the Chinese to relent and admit it cannot be eaten sensibly in a bowl with chopsticks, so Chinese bakeries supply cake buyers with a stack of thin, four-inch paper plates and tiny plastic forks that would be better used to spear cheese cubes.

Also, in China, people devour all of your treats. They don’t pretend they’re uninterested and walk away from leftovers as in American culture.

Big, sloppy cake did not combine neatly with tiny plates and forks. Twenty different mouths slicing cake on my coffee table and struggling to cut it into bites with underpowered forks against handheld, flimsy plates turned my living room into a mess quicker than Old St. Nick could ascend a chimney. I didn’t mind so much, I was too busy trying to accept gifts and play the host by saying hello to the unmanageable mob of people. It was a fantastically big end to the holiday weekend.

The night before, Christmas Eve, I was with Aunt Fong in her hometown, a much larger city than my university town. She took me to a hotel, where a church group had rented a ballroom to put on a Christmas program. People lined the long rows of folding tables, watching the front as new groups came out to sing or speakers shared a teaching or narration. Of course, Aunt Fong had to show me off, so she brought me up front, stuck a microphone in my hand, and had me sing a Christmas song for everyone. Speaking as a man who hates approaching people and feels uncomfortable talking to cashiers at the store, I can say honestly that I was an exceptionally good sport about singing for a ballroom-full of Chinese strangers.

Aunt Fong showing me off. The hat was not my choice.

I’m the tall blurry one in the back. Aunt Fong is on my right.

After the Christmas program ended, Aunt Fong and I headed toward the shopping district. Meanwhile, my phone received “Merry Christmas!” text messages without ceasing. We were out after ten o’clock at night, but the streets and stores were filled with people, probably more crowded than I had ever seen them in that city. That is a noteworthy event. But no one was caroling or wishing passersby “Merry Christmas!” Instead, it seemed like a tame version of a Mardi Gras festival. Children were buying balloons shaped into spirals and other creative shapes, people were wearing carnival masks, and food vendors were on every street corner. I had a hard time getting my bearings in the midst of the colors, crowd, and confusion, and it felt dreamlike as Aunt Fong pulled me through the streets and shopping malls.

The next morning, I returned to my university apartment. Grant and Sue, my Australian neighbors on the fourth floor, had invited me over for Christmas dinner. Also, there was Lee Ahram, the Korean teacher, and Theresa, a Chinese student who had studied in Brisbane- Grant and Sue’s hometown. Sue, savvy shopper that she was, had managed to find a countertop toaster oven, probably the only one in the whole city, so she was able to prepare roasted chicken and potatoes for our meal. China, like many countries in Asia, only has gas burners in its residential kitchens; because the only ways people prepare food at home are by boiling or stir-frying (less commonly, foods could also be steamed over a burner, or stewed or braised).

Grant, Theresa, Sue, and Ahram.

Western meals were difficult to prepare in China. Besides the difference in produce, it was hard to come by certain ingredients and spices, and there were no ovens to bake anything. People were stuck with bad store-bought cake.

So, Sue’s Christmas dinner was a special meal for a special time for our group of assorted foreigners. We were far from our families at home, which was a daily heartache around the holidays, but we had a bond as strangers in a strange land who pined for a Christmas celebration with some solemnity and familial warmth.

At the end of the meal, Sue brought out plates of Christmas pudding, which I was as eager to see as I was to taste. Being an American, the only pudding I had ever seen was Jell-O pudding, and on rare occasion, bread pudding. I had heard talk about pudding in British media, and I had always assumed it was some formless dessert that only the English could love, and that America should probably send a delegation to tell them to start building some structure into their dishes.

Well, the Christmas pudding was formless, but it was a custard not far off from American pudding. Sue had spooned it over a slice of, I think, fruit cake. I can say for sure it was custard and a slice of dense cake. I thought it was pretty good, but Sue lamented that it didn’t turn out quite right; she had to use a can of not very good custard mix, the only kind she could find.

It was all well and good by me. My time in China was often a lonely and isolated experience; having that mid-year holiday celebration was a reviving oasis.

One of my favorite and Aunt Fong’s least favorite photos. The girl on the left was a student of mine named Tiffany.

The Real China: A Timeshare Adventure (Pt. 2/2)

December 10, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Continued from Part 1

The trap was sprung. Aunt Fong and I were stranded at a makeshift timeshare sales office in the back corner of an isolated construction lot, in an out-of-the-way part of a city I didn’t even know the name of.

Once inside, we briefly wandered through the sales office, looking over the enlarged map on the wall and the model display of the future, finished apartment complex. China, currently undergoing a construction boom, has sales offices throughout its cities with large display models like those. They always inspired me with childish daydreams of filling the streets with army men and tanks, playing out big battles or defending civilians against a rogue, mutated lizard. Out back of the sales office was a lawn area with two rectangular fountain pools, some shade trees, and three different demo buildings to show all the tourist/prospects what their timeshare purchase would be like. (I refer to the apartments as timeshare units, but I do not know for sure that the Chinese used the infamous timeshare system prevalent in American vacation spots. However it was, they were trying to stick us poor saps with vacation property.)

I wonder if this grandmother daydreamed like me about marauding through this model of the Forbidden City (at a theme park in Southern China).

Our walkthrough lasted 30 minutes at most, and most of those minutes were spent flattening up against a wall or shuffling through a crowded hallway to get a look at a bed or shower stall with all the other trapped souls loitering their time away. Reluctantly, my aunt led me back into the sales office to find a seat. I have no idea what Aunt Fong told our inescapable sales rep as he pulled his white plastic chair up next to ours, but the mood was one of tension and futility. I could not feel sorry for him; anyone caught in the sales game (as I shamefully once was) ought to relieve themselves of the dirty business.

It must have been plain, even to the men on that sales mission who were primarily focused on scoring money, that Aunt Fong and I were an unfortunate woman and her foreign “son” who had been duped into this scam, and no amount of salesmanship would have turned us into buyers. Salesmen, unscrupulous curs by nature, have no shame and they believe that every objection can be overcome, so they will hound a prospect until he gives up his money or, in a fit of anger or frankness, spits out the real objection (or curse words) and walks away. For Aunt Fong and me, there was no exit, but the young sales rep could see there was no use harrying us- doting middle-aged women and their foreign honorary sons do not buy vacation property.

It did not matter that our assigned sales rep was content to coast through this misery with us by offering refills for our water cups and bothering us only occasionally; his teammates rotated with him in a system that ensured the tourists were always talking to someone and had new, fresh personalities constantly entering and working them over. In China, I had seen how the morning shift employees would line up outside the store’s front doors and either be berated by the boss or receive a pep talk and have a group cheer (even the security guards at my university’s gates would do this before they went to loafing in the guard booth for the day), so I could only imagine how awful the strategy meetings were for these college-aged kids who were selling timeshares to unsuspecting tourists in this weekend getaway racket. Every time a new sales rep or manager came over to us, I knew it was because they had a sales manager or president breathing down the back of their neck, and if they didn’t perform, he would call them out in front of everyone at the sales meeting.

I considered that all these sales reps were just kids trying to pay for college, or without the grades to get into a good college program, and now the cult-like company environment had them believing they had to pressure innocents in order to make money. (Money! That most sacred of words to a salesman’s ears, surely containing more pleasures than paradise.) But I knew better than to pity the youths; sales companies quickly filter out those with any qualms about the ethics of scamming, cheating, charming, and cozening (hence the high turnover of the fainthearted), so anyone still working for this timeshare company was either nearly out the door or, just as likely, a performer who had refined his craft to make regular sales and, more importantly, someone covetous of filthy lucre. Feeling sorry for the hopeless squad of salesman would be like feeling sorry for a hungry snake coming upon a bird’s nest only to find it empty. Let it starve. The world does not need more timeshares.

I was so innocent before at the beach, not knowing what sales agony lie in store.

During the first hour, I slowly lost hope. My stomach felt worse than terrible, the constant presence of the sales rep made everything awkward and without a moment’s privacy, and the mass of people crowded throughout the confines, combined with the dance music, drumming, and shrill announcements over the PA system, made it impossible to focus on a single, clear thought. When the man behind the main counter began whacking away at the drum for the third time, and the thin girl once again rose into a fever pitch of exclamation, Aunt Fong asked me if I knew what she was hollering into the microphone about. Yes, I nodded, they had gotten some wearied soul to sign on the dotted line. Those “lucky” buyers then became the envy of everyone else when they were allowed to take their families into a small, private room shut off from the main sales office.

I reasoned after the fourth or fifth announcement, when an hour had gone by and things seemed to relatively slow down (there were no new busloads of people and no new sales celebrations), that surely, everyone had been subjected to the sales pitch and had time enough to make a final decision. Our business was done here; let us go. I was neglecting to factor in the callous, unrelenting hearts of the managers behind this sales tactic. They were going to hold us there as long as they wanted and squeeze us until more signed contracts came out. Like juicing a lemon, the effort and time put into the final drops- just to make sure all the juice that could be gotten out was gotten out- was far more than the first effort of squeezing the fresh fruit.

During the second hour, after I had made a trip to the bathroom, seeking some stomach relief in vain, and come back to sit next to Aunt Fong, she told me to close my eyes and rest. She would do this all the time in China’s various and sundry crowded, chaotic scenes. I protested about the futility of trying to ignore bedlam this way, but she would always insist I follow her relaxation technique. So, absurdly, as the dance music thumped on and people walked and talked around us, I followed her lead and lay back in my chair to try and relax.

Our assigned sales rep at least had the sense not to try selling us at that point, but that didn’t stop his sales buddy from tagging in and loudly speaking at us. He was barking away like a man possessed towards two people who would not even open their eyes to look at him. He tried selling us by starting a conversation with me, a foreigner who could not understand a word he said. I finally opened my eyes and stared at him, mystified that he was going on at length when I clearly comprehended none of it, and I tried telling him a couple times, in Chinese, that I didn’t understand. “Ting bu dong. Ting bu dong.” It was no matter. He chattered on until Aunt Fong bitterly scolded him and told him to get lost. He retreated, but still we could get no peace. Inevitably, other salesmen came in to take his place. They were on a tag team system, sent out by an overbearing sales manager, and would not leave prospects alone. The large stereo speakers, not twenty feet away, continued pounding out a dance beat.

So, Aunt Fong and I retreated to the back lawn and pulled some chairs underneath a shade tree. As the din of the sales routine reverberated and repeated around us- tourists never really changing places as new faces came in to badger them- I began contemplating if I could sneak off into one of the demo apartments and stretch out on the bed for a nap. My pain showed no signs of subsiding and I was growing weaker by the minute. After another half hour, Aunt Fong went out to the bus and convinced someone to open it so she could get her bag. Then, at least we had some bread and snacks to give us energy and occupy our time. Plus, I had my notebook, so I did my best to focus on writing over hours three and four.

Writing in relative luxury- I had one of the only chairs on the lawn with a back and arm rests, most everyone else sat on stools for hours.

Yes, hours three and four. I spent them wilting in the oppression of the summer heat and sales bleed. When my eyes drifted from my notebook, I entertained myself watching two little boys, one wearing only sandals and the other nearly naked, as they ran around the lawn and splashed in the fountains. They skipped about, having the time of their lives, blissfully unaware of everyone else’s misery. Their hilarity, I thought, was a picture of the incurable optimist who believes attitude creates every situation, rather than believe that being stranded at a sales company office creates the situation. Those bare-bottomed little boys may well have found the only way to be happy during that sales pitch. Like most optimists, they ought to have been embarrassed by their naked idiocy, but they were only thinking of the glee they had running without clothes. I smiled, not at their pluck, but because I was the only one who seemed to notice two naked boys running around. Back at the university, a student once summed up Chinese opinion on public child nudity by remarking, “What? It’s natural.”

Someone needs to sell that baby a sense of shame.

Then, in my plastic lawn chair, my head drooping in defeat, I noticed a bright green praying mantis balancing on the blades of grass. I tried to pick him up, but he always hopped out of range of my fingers, so I switched to taking pictures of him as he crawled around. Eventually, he walked over to a tree trunk and started climbing. I was captivated and watched him until he was so high that he disappeared in the sunlight. Then I was left with only my notebook for entertainment and at least another hour waiting in that chair.

Mantis vs. Tree

Finally, well beyond four hours after we were stranded in that cursed sales office, people started standing up, the sales reps quickly stacked the chairs, and we were back on the bus. Our captivity stretched well into dinnertime, so they had to relent. I was expecting a mutiny at any point during that unendurable afternoon. I imagined that there would surely be impatient individuals who would cause a major fuss if this were an American group. I couldn’t fathom how a Chinese crowd, known for their lack of manners, had failed to cause an uproar.

The bus driver took us right back to the restaurant we had eaten lunch at, which both dampened any enthusiasm I might have had for dinner and clued me in that the sales company and restaurant owner had a business arrangement with each other. The sight of food didn’t move my appetite and my stomach gripes had grown more turbulent, so I didn’t try eating any food. Not even when the man sitting next to me, another tourist (with a bald head, side tufts of hair, and glasses that made him look like an ostrich), dug a fish head out of the soup and plopped it into my bowl as a show of friendly hospitality to a foreigner. I listlessly stared at it, and he blurted out some choppy sentences in Chinese through a foamy mouth full of food. Aunt Fong insisted he was being very friendly. I spent the rest of the dinner declining food offers and waiting for the evening to end.

After eating, they took us straight back to the hotel. We had spent so long at the sales office that there was no time for any after-dinner activities, which was fine by me. I took some medicine from Aunt Fong and went straight to bed.

On Sunday morning, the sales reps came around again, banging on our door and hauling our luggage out to the bus. They drove us out to another dopey Buddha statue on the beach, so I walked along the shoreline and looked out at the sea for twenty minutes. Then, it was back on the bus, where I hung my head and wished that we would turn onto the highway and just start the long trip back to Bengbu. But I was awoken out of my gloom by a bump! bump! and the awful, terribly familiar shaking of the bus. Oh, please, they can’t be serious. This isn’t happening.

We were headed back to the sales office.

This baby was probably the only one excited to go back. I think even the sales reps and managers hated themselves for putting us through that grind.

In the words of Karl Childers from Sling Blade, “I seen red.” I didn’t have the strength or the language faculties to say anything, but why weren’t the other passengers on the bus protesting? Americans, I had a feeling, would rise up and demand that bus be turned around. I reflected on tense situations I had witnessed in the past, growing up in the States, and usually there were one or two fiery individuals who would raise a ruckus and give voice to the complaints of the silent majority. In those instances, I could hold my tongue and quietly observe the battle unfold. Perhaps, I surmised, now I was in the middle of China’s group-minded culture, where no one wanted to be the one to speak up, draw attention to themselves, and risk losing face. Or perhaps everyone’s psyche was crushed from the day before and we all believed we had no option but to helplessly sit through the sales pitch again. Every sales pitch has its psychology plotted out, so the timeshare company probably expected, reasonably, that a second dose of the sales office would leave all the tourists so exhausted that they had no sales resistance.

I began reasoning with myself again. Maybe they only needed to check over some documents from yesterday. One of the sales reps will run in while we wait here on the bus.

We came to a stop and the sales reps immediately stood up; everyone else followed. No! No! Come on, people! Let’s kick out the windows or do whatever we have to- we are not going back into that office! Do not go gentle!

I was in a feverish sweat. Sitting in the back row, watching the backs of the others as they filed out, I resolved not to leave my seat. I was terribly sick, I had no energy, this sales treatment was an outrage, and all I wanted was to lie down and rest. By the time everyone except Aunt Fong, me, and a couple sales reps had left the bus, I recognized that my protest was futile. I would be shut inside a hot bus with hardly any ventilation. Aunt Fong, recognizing my current infirmity, looked at me sorrowfully and helped me to my feet. “Don’t angry. Don’t angry,” she said.

Off the bus, I grimaced in pain and searched for the nearest place I could lie down and escape the sun. Aunt Fong and I didn’t even start down the walkway into the sales office, lined with yesterday’s haggard, colorful streamers that were pathetically flitting in the wind. I hobbled across the dirt roadway and sat down under a tree where the bullfrog-shaped bus driver and his wife had already claimed the only decent seating. Sitting on a wooden post, supporting myself with my hands on my knees and barely having the strength to stay erect, I watched a scene on the dirt roadway.

Outside the bus, Aunt Fong was quarreling with some of the sales managers. She was furiously shrieking at them, and one, maybe the head manager, was posturing and shouting right back at her in between drags of his cigarette. Aunt Fong was inconsolable; I was enraged. My downcast face and posture didn’t show it, but I was filled with wrath beyond the point that polite people care to admit they are capable of. I wanted to commit violence. I imagined myself marching into the sales office and overturning the tables and driving all the sales reps out, kicking over the speakers, and tossing that big drum into the model table. I wanted to yell at someone or run off and take the bus out of that miserable resort.

I was incapacitated by illness, so I wasn’t capable of any of those actions, but as I watched Aunt Fong and the sales manager continue to fight with raised voices, I swore to myself that if that manager went from aggressive, dismissive gesturing with outstretched arms to placing his hands on Aunt Fong or so much as poking her in the chest with his finger, I was going to be up and off my seat. It would have required everything I had and my body would be completely spent, but I was ready and willing to pay the price. I was going to lay hands on this Chinese ruffian and take him down to Brazilian jiu-jitsu town. I didn’t care if he had learned Tai Chi in the park from Kung-Fucious himself, I had spent enough time grappling to take him down, sit on his chest, and make him sorry he ever considered selling us timeshare. I would probably double over in pain afterwards and vomit what little was left in my stomach, but I believed I could will myself to efficiently tackle that scoundrel and serve him his comeuppance.

I watched intently for a moment of contact between him and Aunt Fong, but it didn’t happen. After telling them off, she broke away from the small huddle and hurried over to me, still slumped on the wooden post in a sullen pose. She took my hand in hers, knelt down in the dirt so she could look up into my downcast eyes, and with tears streaming out of hers, she pleaded with me, saying, “Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry.” I reached my hand out and tried to comfort her with my languid arm. Tears were running down my face, too.

“No, no, mei gwanshee. Mei-yo wuntee.” Never mind. No problem, I told her.

After a moment together, we went back under the shade trees out behind the sales office to find a better seat. This time, I did not even have the energy to eat or entertain myself. I read and struggled to sleep, tormented by the discomfort of the cheap lawn chair and the unceasing noise around me. It was Sunday, and trapped as I was I still tried to have a rest and read through passages of my Bible. I know, that must seem like a great contrast between my feelings of wrathful violence a few moments earlier. I suppose my spirit has passes from Psalm 83 to 84. A great thirst for God’s vengeance, to a desire for peace in His presence.

Trying, and failing, to sleep on a long, sick Sunday afternoon.

About three hours later, we were allowed back on the bus.

Lunch was at the same restaurant as before. This time, I didn’t even pick up my chopsticks. The smell and sight of food, and the stuffy, enclosed space of the dining room had me feeling even worse than before, so I spent the duration of the meal seeking fresh air out on the street curb, next to the smokers. They asked me where I was from and if I played basketball. They laughed at themselves for teasing a six-foot tall American with such a novel question.

In time, we were back on the bus and on the highway. I spent the trip alternating my posture as I reclined on the back row of seats, failing to ever fall into a deep sleep. So, I passed the time straining my eyes to try and read the subtitles of the movie on the overhead televisions. Stopping mid-way at a rest area, I sought a moment of solitude by walking around the back of the bathrooms and shops. My assigned sales rep was at my heels in a moment; he couldn’t let me be, even then. As I solemnly circled the parking lot and ambled back onto the bus, I refused to respond to his pleasantries or the looks of anyone else involved with the company. They disgusted me and I never wanted to see any of them ever again.

After an exhausting, seemingly interminable ride, we were back from whence we came, in Aunt Fong’s city, at a time when people were in bed and the streetlights were the only thing filling the lonely streets. The bus pulled up to the corner where this whole regretful experience began. People poured out of that bus as fast as they could, desperately hailing down taxis, no one saying the least word to each other or even making eye contact to acknowledge another and tacitly bid them good bye. I thrust through the sparse line of people on the sidewalk and pulled my luggage out from the cargo space below the bus, not content to allow our sales rep to show me the courtesy, stepping past him to grab hold of it myself.

Aunt Fong and I looked left and right for a cab. As she walked down the sidewalk, I paused, noticing the attractive sales rep standing by herself on that forlorn street corner. I had felt this dilemma approaching in my stomach as we neared the end of our trip. I could have easily walked up to this young woman, one of the most attractive I had seen in China, and asked her for her phone number. Two nights ago she had outright told me she was interested in me. But she was part of this ugly, devious sales company, earning her wages by beguiling the unsuspecting. I hated that company and I wanted to be rid of even the memory of it.

I wasn’t going to be like Lot’s wife. In that instant I turned away from her and looked over my other shoulder to see that Aunt Fong had found a free cab. I strode forward without ever looking back. She and I were back at her apartment in a moment; then I was in my bed on the floor of the guest bedroom. I wanted to put this awful weekend behind me. Compared to it, all the other bad weekends in China were only runners-up.

I say bad “weekends” and not “times” because, while I managed to make it through the weekend without collapsing and being taken to the hospital, I could not maintain throughout the week. My three-day hospital stay would begin starting Monday night.

The Real China: A Timeshare Adventure (Pt. 1/2)

December 8, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Grading my final tests in China.

It was July. I had just finished grading my semester tests; my time in China was coming to an end. This meant that my time with Aunt Fong was coming to an end.

My university had been good enough to give me until the end of the month on my work visa, so I had four weeks of time to do what I willed in their country. Being a Chinese socialist state, “doing as I willed” did not include viewing YouTube, blogs, Facebook, or other social media online, but likewise being a dilapidated society in the midst of industrial revolution, I probably could have demo-rigged an old concrete farmhouse with fireworks and been let off with a stern talking to. Realistically, in China I was free to set off fireworks at will, start fires on the sidewalk, and use the street as a human waste receptacle with intersections.

By the end of my journey, I was so sapped of energy and enthusiasm that I barely had the spirit to go on. Had I not had the strong desire in my heart to stay with my Chinese aunt, I would have gladly booked a flight the week after classes ended and bid China a hasty “88” (that’s a texting abbreviation for “bye, bye”; eight, in Mandarin Chinese, is pronounced “ba”). I had spent part of every week with stomach cramps or diarrhea, I had come to my wits’ end with classes who would not speak freely no matter how easy the atmosphere or how soft I made myself (if a rare student did have the audacity to ask a question to the foreign teacher, they struggled to say something worthwhile), and, as if I have not made it plain already, I was completely disgusted with the Chinese lifestyle and living within Chinese society in a Chinese city.

Before you think to lecture me on having the open-mindedness to accept a different culture, or chastise me for my bitter attitude, I think it should be noted that my treatment of China, her people and culture, has been nicer than necessary. Too generous, even. China is a country where, if you fell down dead (or unconscious) on the subway, the other passengers would leave your body to lie there as they scrambled out of the car like it was on fire, justifying it later with pathetic excuses about liability risk and fear of disease. If your small child wandered away from you and got run over by a van, don’t expect the people nearby to notice her or do anything about it. Don’t even expect those neighbors of yours to recognize you or your child when the police and newspapers come questioning. That’s community life for many in this collectivist society.

Sure, those two events might be notorious and not normative, but they result from a norm of cold indifference to strangers- with “strangers” being a much broader category in Chinese thought versus Western assumptions. I saw appalling things all the time there, even if they weren’t great enough to attract the same media attention. As I observed in the real China, periled strangers are someone else’s problem (as are safety standards, cleanliness, basic resources, etc.). Even family are viewed in terms of cruel economic survival. Getting wealthy for one’s own is the spirit of the times; living life for softer reasons would seem extravagantly foolish.

And let me advise the reader that, before I ever came to China, I spent five weeks in out-of-the-way, Thailand, sleeping under a mosquito net, using a bucket and a barrel for showering and washing my waste down a hole in the bathroom, and being chased by feral dog packs when I ran past the neighboring farm houses- and I loved it. Poor conditions don’t scare me. What bothers me are filthy, crowded cities run by a society shaped by communist groupthink, irrationality, and intense pride in inane, centuries-old cultural tidbits.

My bathroom in Thailand. I didn’t love THIS part; I learned to live with it though.

At least, in the midst of the squalor, I could find comic relief in the chickens trotting around wherever they pleased.

Being in that situation for so long, practically alone except for an occasional group outing with other English teachers who could venture into deeper conversational waters than “Do you like NBA?”, not being able to speak my thoughts and feelings- at length and in depth- was probably the burden that weighed on me most in China. Many times, I would find myself wanting to cry out to someone, “Can you believe these people?” only to look around and see everyone else either involved in said situation or blissfully unaware of what had me in shock. They were these people. Silently, I would cry out, “None of you notice that girl using the sidewalk as a bathroom? That 9-year old girl, squatting right there? You do notice, but you don’t care!?” My perspective would neither be understood nor welcomed, so my moments of exasperation had to be swallowed and left to fester as unanswered objections and misery.

Throughout all of these “Can you believe this?” experiences, Aunt Fong would plead with me, “Don’t angry China.” She would even beg me to blame her for my disappointment, the one person in China and in my life who was with me whenever she could be and always looked out for me. She made sure I had meals, checked on me at my university, took me to the Sanda (kickboxing) gym and introduced me to the instructor, took me along on various dinners and social outings with her friends, and planned weekend and holiday trips so I could see and potentially enjoy China. Far from being blameworthy, Aunt Fong was my constant companion in China and the only reason I stayed longer than my teaching duties required.

Near the last of my evil days in China, my evil countenance said it all. Aunt Fong, at left, was still keeping a sunny demeanor.

Well, it so happened that while in my summertime blues, feeling diseased, dejected, and disgusted, Aunt Fong felt inspired for us to take a weekend bus trip to the coast and tour a resort town. It wasn’t her first plan (that trip fell through), but as we returned to her apartment complex one afternoon, she stopped to pick up a flyer and listen to the pitch of a sales representative (a young lady who looked like she might be a college sophomore) standing at a marketing table outside her apartment gates. At the time, I had no idea what the trip was all about; I didn’t even recognize the section of map enlarged in the brochure.

All I knew was that Aunt Fong was initially excited about it and thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see a beautiful seaside area. In her mind, she still thought she could win me over on China and get me to stick around another year. Of course, as soon as Uncle Jiang learned of the trip, he chided me, while chewing sunflower seeds and pacing the living room floor, “No! ….no! Tell her, ‘No….’” He was very convincing, groaning out syllables in a gruff tone and setting his face in an inflexible frown.

It only put me in an uncomfortable spot. There was no way I was going to dash Aunt Fong’s hopes and tell her no, and I could likewise neither tell Uncle Jiang to his face, “It ain’t happenin’.”

The next afternoon, when a different sales rep, a young man in his early 20’s, came over to my aunt’s apartment to sign us up and collect the trip fee, she looked at me tentatively and checked if I really wanted to go. “How much is it?” I asked. Cheap, she said, and she was paying.

“How long is the bus ride?” I asked her through Chinese, English, and the mutual understanding we had developed through our time together. It would take about 10 hours to drive to our vacation spot, which would be spent riding Friday night through early, early Saturday morning. Then, on Sunday afternoon we would have to load up and make the return trip home. I wasn’t excited about spending 20 hours plus of the weekend in transit, trying unsuccessfully to sleep on a Chinese bus, so the reason I asked this question was to convey to Aunt Fong that I did not think this trip was worth the travel. I had heard that the Chinese were practitioners of the indirect response; so was I.

There was a moment where she waited on me, looking sympathetic and unsure of my answer, and I sighed and shifted uncomfortably as I begrudgingly told her okay. The sales rep knew enough English to tell me that when I was at the beach, pictured in the brochure, my heart would feel amazing. That wasn’t the point. My aunt thought it would be a good trip and we could have fun seeing a new place. She wanted to make me happy, and I wanted to make her happy, so I consented.

I was miserable, but if being happy would make her happy, I was willing to give it a try.

On Friday evening we loaded our bags and took a taxi to the travel company’s office. I refer to them as a travel company, not because I fully understood their business, but because as a naïve outsider I had to make inferences and plug along despite my gaps in comprehending the situation.

We waited an exceptionally long time in a building lobby that could have served as a set for a Jackie Chan movie where he beats up the thugs in their derelict, dumpy hideout. Then, we chanced fate and squeezed into a typically trashy Chinese elevator and rode up with ten other people. It was not the first time I was in a precariously slow elevator and my group tripped the weight limit buzzer or had to turn people away.

Upstairs, we walked into a room clearly separated into plain-clothed travelers and business-dressed sales reps. Most of them were young men with white dress shirts and black slacks, and there were a couple young ladies in sexy black mini-skirts. There was always something a little off about Chinese dress clothes, which were almost always in the typical Western style. They were cheap-looking with frilly style accents like a fanciful extra button or a diagonal seam running across a pant leg. I surveyed the scene of that waiting room in an instant and groaned about what I feared was coming. Not a sales pitch, it’s Friday night, let’s just get on the road. I had sat through a sales pitch a few weeks before, when on a tour group through the famous Yellow Mountain, but that was only for tea, so the ladies walked around with samples (some of them quite good) and I and the two students who accompanied me just slumped in our seats and drifted to sleep until the 30-minute meeting was over.

Sleeping, the unanswerable objection to any sales pitch.

At the travel office, they didn’t pitch anything to us. Not yet. They led us down the hall to another room for some reason I wasn’t privy to, then a minute later we were back into the elevator that looked like it had been stripped for parts, then onto the bus. All the young people in business dress accompanied us tourists on board, a ratio of one company rep to two tourists. It hadn’t yet dawned on me why we would possibly need so many hired hands to accompany us on a weekend getaway. Cheap Chinese labor costs, I guessed.

Our group, 30 to 40 large, piled into our seats and snacked as we gabbed and watched a movie on the overhead screens. (One thing about China: no business or public transportation system attempted to forbid outside food or drink. People chewed seeds and spit the shells out, noisily tore through plastic to get to eggs, noodles, or pickled meats, and they littered on the ground whenever they didn’t have a waste bag convenient, which was often in the lacking infrastructure of China. In China, trash is what you make it.) To my relief, Aunt Fong suggested we move out of our restricting seats so I could stretch out my long legs in the back row. Once there, the young company employees seated in the back area turned around out of curiosity and struck up an excited conversation with this charming middle-aged woman and her foreign friend. The young men asked me the usual questions, but their English was decent enough, plus the excitement of the trip spurned them on, so they tried more than I used to to have a good back-and-forth talk with me.

Then, unprovoked by anyone, one of the two young ladies working for the company, sitting near the back row, turned around in her seat and blurted in Chinese that she thought I was handsome and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. This girl was very easy on the eyes, and for a moment I thought my luck in China might have changed. I had no idea how I would functionally communicate with her, but during that bus ride she conveyed that there was a water park back in Aunt Fong’s home city that we could go to together. I was left to think over her advances as I uncomfortably shifted on the back row of seats, letting my feet hang down in the aisle until it bothered my back, then lying flat across the seats until it hurt my neck. Through the quiet hours of the night, I phased in and out of semi-consciousness until our bus slowed to a lurch and released its air brakes outside the hotel.

The time was right before sunrise on Saturday morning, and we had a couple hours until the company reps would come knock on our door to make way to our first destination. Aunt Fong was exhausted, but I was restless after the poor sleep, so I left her to snooze in our hotel room while I went out for a run. Our hotel was situated at the top of a steep hill, overlooking a shabby amusement park, garden area, and groups of hotels lining the valley along the river. As I explored, I observed how unusually clean and empty the streets were, how new the buildings looked, how planned and color-coordinated they seemed, and how many trees were planted along the broad sidewalks. Every other Chinese city I had been to was clamoring with people, scooters, cars, and animals by sun-up. This place was practically deserted by those standards, and judging by appearances it resembled a seaside American vacation spot- the skies were even (mostly) blue!

I came back to the hotel room, had to rouse poor Aunt Fong awake from her brief snooze, and set out with her and a company rep closely at our heels, who hurriedly insisted that he carry our bags for us. After driving through the town for a half-hour and listening to the other female representative clamor into a microphone (“SHA-SHA-SHEY-BAR-BAH-SHEE-BAH-BAI-SHA-SHEE-SHOO-SHOW-JI-KWAI-BAI-BAR-SHU-SHA-SHA-SHOW!”), presumably to build everyone’s excitement for the trip (and that must be one of the most awful sounds I have ever been subjected to– shrill Chinese barked over a scratchy speaker system), the bus pulled over and our group was ushered off to see our first site.

An overwhelming crowd of tourists, each shadowed by a young company rep, milled around at the gate below a mountain whereon was nestled a very large, seated Buddha statue. The company escort assigned to my aunt and me (the same man who came to her apartment and signed us up), started to become obnoxious, walking step by step beside us and forwardly offering to take our picture at the gate. It still hadn’t dawned on me why there were so many travel company employees accompanying the tourists on the trip, why there could possibly be a need for one rep for every two tourists. I figured we could take our own pictures. Chinese crowds might be exceptionally callous, but there were always a few friendly volunteers to help hold a camera. Like most things I didn’t understand about China, I chalked this nonsense up to the way people there did things.

I wasn’t the least bit interested or impressed with the mountain’s idol, so after observing it momentarily I went back to milling about aimlessly, like all the other tourists, for the next 30 minutes. 30 minutes of pacing around a blank plaza and parking lot. Okay, there were a couple gates with some frilly ornamental carving and Chinese characters on them, like there are gates in front of every other place in China, but other than that there was nothing to do there. Eventually, everyone made it back to the bus and we continued on through the town. That was a letdown, I thought, this beach had better be impressive.

It wasn’t. It was populated with swimmers and loungers- some in tight one-piece swimsuits, some in bizarre, bright orange, Chinese beachwear- but my group was only there to walk along the broad concrete barrier that served as a lookout point. It was also a station for another dopey statue, this one a crescent moon with a face. The company rep took our picture again (what a burn that is to yield to a courtesy you don’t wish for), then Aunt Fong and I walked down to spend a moment on the beach. I was less than overjoyed at that point. One, the setting didn’t seem all that great- spending a half-hour each at a simple beach and the base of a small mountain was nowhere near worth a 10-hour bus ride. And two, the vigor I felt earlier during my morning jog had fast dissipated. I struggled to put on a happy face and pose on the beach as Aunt Fong took my picture, and as we marched back to the bus I felt my familiar stomach pain returning.

Note the breathing mask, parasol, and bright orange purse and shoes, de rigueur for the young Chinese lady at that time.

China’s version of McDonald’s Mac Tonight “Moon Man” character from the ’80’s?

They took us to a restaurant, where we filed through the kitchen and up two flights of very narrow stairs, then into a dining room that struggled to contain four large, round tables and enough chairs to fit most everyone on the bus. (Walking through the kitchen, or inside then outside then inside, or past a utility room or a small bedroom, or even walking past the pens of the sheep you were about to eat, was not uncommon in small, family-owned restaurants.) I grimaced at the sight of the food set before us. Except for the mantou (steamed buns), most everything had the familiar reddish-orange tint of overly spiced, oily food.

At that point, my stomach pain and appetite were about even, so I tentatively choked down some food, which seemed foolish because the unsavory food was the primary culprit causing my recurring stomach pain in China. Consider though, I had no alternative food source than what was set in front of me. China does not have prevalent convenience stores in most areas, and the snack shops they do have are not very accommodating to Western palettes (more spiced meats and tofu, and instant ramen noodles). So, to feed my natural hunger and try and maintain strength, I would usually stick with the safest options, like noodles and soup, and avoid irritating dishes containing chili peppers.

My eating strategy was no help. Back on the bus I lay down and shut my eyes, resting the back of my hand across my face for relief. I didn’t care where our tour group went to next; I only wanted a long bus ride so I could take a nap. But then- !

The bus began sloshing one way then another, slowly bouncing up and down as it crawled forward. What is this? I sat up, angered and annoyed, and looked out the window. We were at a construction site. The bus driver was navigating over potholes on a dirt service road. I thought for sure he was either lost or incompetent, having chosen a stupid place to make a U-turn, but after five minutes of abuse by shocks, winding past hollow concrete structures, the driver parked in a row behind two or three other buses and the company reps made a commotion to hustle us off right away.

Hollow apartment buildings outside and the tension of a hot bus inside, the darkness descends.

In a daze of sleep and sickness, I asked myself what the rush was, why we needed to see the end of this construction lot, and again “What was wrong with these people?” Then, out in the bright summer light, I surveyed the apartment buildings under construction and heard the blare of loud dance music, drums, and a girl’s voice screaming over the large PA system inside the ranch-style building in front of us. Then, I watched as the bus driver locked the door and walked off with his wife to find a napping spot. I swallowed hard.

They had stranded us for a timeshare pitch.

The multi-colored streamers, loud sounds, and legions of sales reps were intended to excite us, but I could not have felt more dread. Facts of life, transferred from American to Chinese terms, usually turned out louder, smellier, dirtier, much more populated, and just plain miserable. We faced the nefarious timeshare pitch, but not in comparatively tame America- in China. What horrors did our captors have planned for us?

As I drug my feet down the salesmen-lined walkway leading into the building, I glowered at their broad, crocodilian smiles and glib welcome cheers. Aunt Fong was tugging at my arm, pleading, “Don’t angry. Don’t angry.” I was too far out of my senses to know what to do other than resent having to spend part of my afternoon inside their sales office. If I had my health, I would have followed my plan of exploring the construction site and the surrounding town on foot. I strongly considered this option later on, as our annoying sales rep followed me out to the open lot where they liked to show their marks the site of the next proposed apartment building. Sadly, I could feel I didn’t have the strength to walk off. My body was quivering and I thought I might need to use the sales office’s nearby toilets, however filthy, at any moment.

Could I just walk off and explore?

Reasoning with myself (the desperate recourse of a man stuck in a hopeless situation), I suspected that my aunt and I would be held for an hour and then, after our repeated refusals, they would have to let us go. After an hour, all the tourists will have said yes or several times said no, so that will be all, right? I was underestimating the depth of indecency within the timeshare salesmen of what must surely be the country with the greatest impropriety in the Orient, if not the whole of Asia.

Continued in Part 2.

The Real China: My Pet Chicken

November 17, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Every time I saw a chicken in China, which was about as often as days ended in “Y” (or, in Chinese, when they began with shinchee), I would take a moment to observe it with bemused glee. With Aunt Fong, I would point out the bird and tell her, “Look at that! That chicken is strutting around the parking lot like he owns it!”

Or I’d ask, “What’s that chicken doing in the street?” She never understood much of my words, but she definitely grasped my bewilderment at seeing live chickens walking around parks and sidewalks, or tied by the foot to a cage on the street.

“Yes,” she would laugh, “chicken.”

Well, knowing that I had a fascination with all the filthy street fowls in her country, Aunt Fong called up a friend of hers and arranged us a visit to her chicken farm. So, one Saturday in November, a couple Chinese men came by in a pick-up truck and drove us through the criss-crossed residential streets of the city, then onto the high-speed roads and into an industrial zone at the very outskirts of town. Either we were going to be kidnapped in a factory warehouse, I thought, or escorted to a small farm property that was dumped next to the warehouse. Luckily, we made it to the latter. I could never be sure in China. In a foreign culture and language, my only option in new, strange situations was to wait and see.

My mental vision of a chicken farm had been formed by images of American farms with long, white-roofed buildings housing thousands of overstuffed hens in small cages. That idea was nothing like this Chinese chicken farm. This was a chicken paradise. On the steep, gravel ascent up to the farmhouse, in the ravines sloping down from the road, on the cinder blocks and assorted debris filling the valley, in the open spaces around the farmhouse, on top of the farmhouse itself, in, on, and around the chicken coops, and throughout the woods behind the property: chickens, chickens, chickens. This place was to chickens as China was to people. A variety of tawny, dapple-gray, white, and rust-colored birds swarmed over the landscape, with roosters issuing calls in a never-ending chain. I have no idea how those chicken farmers ever got a full-night’s sleep. Or, how they ever went into town without filling up every interior space they entered with foul chicken stench.

Chickens for sale on a commercial street.

We had some time before lunch (in China, going to someone’s house is a big invitation, and a meal is expected), so I explored the grounds of the chicken farm and curiously examined all the nooks and crannies these birds had staked out for roosting. I don’t know what those chickens did with themselves besides gawk about all day from one place to another. But I saw the way they timidly gave way to me, and I knew what I was going to do with myself.

At first, I walked confidently forward, thinking a straggler would fall behind the crowd and fail to notice me. But chickens had to earn the reputation of being chicken, and as soon as I made way for a group they lived up to their name, clucking in panic and flapping away as fast as their dumpy bodies could carry them. I picked up speed and changed strategies. I would make for the flock but furtively keep my eyes on one lollygagger off to the side. Then I would break hard left or right, stoop low, and pump my legs in pursuit of my quarry. I tried this tactic out several times, working up a light sweat in the cold, fall air. It was no use though. The birds’ caution and quickness outdid my cunning and foot speed.

One time, I backed a few chickens into some netting. Most shot right back out as fast as they had pressed into it, but one stumbled and struggled to get back to its feet. Pinned underneath the netting, it panicked, trying to flap itself upright, and it clucked such a racket that I felt sorry for it. In my brief moment of hesitation, the chicken was up again, and it doubled back out and around the net, evading my grasp. Although I aimed on catching one of them, I had to fearfully compel myself forward because I had no idea if chickens would bite at me or scratch me when I tried to pick them up. My grandmother used to tell me that chickens were mean and they sometimes pecked at her when she gathered eggs as a child. But I didn’t gather any chickens that morning, and after many fruitless pursuits, it was time for lunch.

Country cookin’ in China (at a different farmhouse than the chicken farm).

I got to enjoy lunch at a couple different farmhouses in China, and the experience was about the same at each. The house itself was a simple, rectangular structure made of concrete blocks. The inside was partitioned into rooms that were separated by lengthwise walls, meaning people couldn’t walk between rooms inside- doors had to be entered from outside. Furnishings were at a bare minimum. They had beds and a large dinner table with stools, and a desk and a cabinet, maybe, but nothing on the walls or on the floor to soften the cold look of concrete. Maybe a Chinese calendar or a red paper symbol for “blessing” on the front door.

The farm houses I visited reminded me of my Boy Scout days, camping in a meagerly equipped shelter or cabin. Outside blended in with inside and the tools and accommodations inside were for function, not comfort. Dinner itself was like most of the other home-cooked meals I had in China. Cold meat dishes with bone in every chopped-up bite, and plates of limp vegetables swimming in oil. After the customary nap after lunch (the farm family offered me one of their beds to sleep on), Aunt Fong roused me awake to head back home.

But before we left, I watched as two workers fed the chickens with scoops of seed from a big barrel. The chickens were no longer shy, and when a few of the more audacious birds hopped up near the mouth of the barrel, the workers grabbed them around their ankles and tossed them aside, flapping to the ground. The one worker knew I wanted to hold one of the chickens, so after he seized one by the wings, he called me over and handed it off to me. Then, a moment later, he was clutching another, and so he transferred that one to my other hand. With one pinched by the wings and one by the feet, I held onto the chickens firmly as they flapped and struggled, and when they settled down for a moment Aunt Fong took my picture. Their behavior when I held them was like what I saw from the chickens and ducks in the street markets. Whether they were bound by the ankles or being carried upside-down, they would occasionally jerk to try and right themselves or get free, but mostly they just held still, resigned to being held in an awkward position as they looked around at everyone from an inverted angle.

I’m looking very drowsy after just having woken up from my post-lunch nap.

As a special treat, the farm owner gave us a live chicken, packed in a box, to take home.

Back at Aunt Fong’s apartment, on the ninth floor of her building, she took some red, plastic string and tied one end to the chicken’s leg and one end to the handrail in the stairwell. I had a Sanda (kickboxing) workout that evening, so I got my gym bag ready, amusingly watched my new pet chicken roosting on the stairs, then took the elevator down and ran to practice. Aunt Fong picked me up around 8:00, and when we made it back to her apartment building, I stepped out on the ninth floor and expected to find my chicken. It was gone and so was the red string.

“Where’s my chicken?” I asked.

Aunt Fong conveyed that her husband didn’t abide with having a chicken in the stairway. Anything goes in China, but people still have their personal preferences. Aunt Fong laughed and told me to, “Ask Uncle Jiang:
‘Where’s my chicken?’”

I never did learn what happened to my pet chicken. I don’t think we ate it. I assumed Uncle Jiang either gave it to someone or let it loose to roam outside with the other feral chickens in the apartment complex. Yes, wandering chickens were a not uncommon sight in the apartment complexes of China, as well as the other spaces of the towns and small cities. Live, vagrant chickens were just a fact of life that none of the natives seemed to care about. The only thing they seemed to take notice of was the delight I had in spotting chickens in strange places. To them, it was nothing. Those places weren’t strange. Why did this foreigner care so much about chickens?

Chickens with red, plastic strings around their ankles.

From then on, every time I saw a chicken with a red, plastic string knotted around its ankle, I would point it out to Aunt Fong and say, “Maybe that’s my chicken!”

She would laugh and tell me again, “Ask Uncle Jiang: ‘Where’s my chicken?’”

The Real China: “No! This is not a potato!”

November 10, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Either to make conversation or as a language quiz, Uncle Jiang would often ask me, “Dustin, what is this?” He was not the only one.

Usually, he asked it when we sat down for dinner. He would pick something up with his chopsticks and ask for its English name. I didn’t know who was supposed to be “the grasshopper” and who the old sage in this situation. Many times, my answer was simple. “Porridge. This is porridge.” In America, we would probably call it Chinese porridge or just use the Chinese name, as we do for Kung Bao chicken and all the other mainstays on a Chinese menu, but the basic vocabulary word Uncle Jiang was looking for was porridge.

Other times, I was surprised when he asked me for an English word and then disagreed (!) with my answer. I held a piece of sweet potato in my chopsticks once, and Uncle Jiang asked me, pointing at the purple tuber, “Dustin, what are you eating?”

“This is a sweet potato,” I replied without thinking twice.

“No!” he said, “This is not a potato!”

He looked indignant, even shocked. I had no idea what to tell him. Maybe appease him by calling it a yam? I stumbled, trying to explain in simple English that a potato is a potato and a sweet potato is a sweet potato, two different things. I supposed he thought I meant it was a sweet-tasting (normal) potato, and I had to infer that the two vegetables do not have similar names in Chinese or occupy similar categories in Chinese thought. Well, why not? I cannot imagine any object more similar to a potato than a sweet potato.

The source of the controversy. I don’t know what else to call it besides “purple sweet potato.”

When I brought one of the boiled purple sweet potatoes to have as my breakfast before class, it was the same routine. My students were surprised by my breakfast, a vegetable grown in their own soil, and asked me, “What is that?”

“A sweet potato,” I told them.

“No! It is not a potato!” they argued, as adamant as Uncle Jiang.

Then why did you ask me? I wanted to counter. Or Fine. You tell me what it is. It’s your vegetable. I have never seen a purple sweet potato like that in my neighborhood of the US.

I was befuddled that they could disagree with me on a term from my native language. How was that possible? I was considered the expert, so they would ask me questions about English vocabulary and acceptable grammar, but they wouldn’t accept my answer if it conflicted with their understanding of what a “sweet potato” should be in Chinese terms.

At the dining hall (or “canteen”, as the students called it) I had a plate of silver noodles once. Or so I thought they were called from reading labels at Chinese buffets. Once again, my students asked me for the name of the mystery item I was eating.

I took a breath. “These are noodles.”

“No! It is not noodles!”

This time I vigorously tried explaining myself. I told them that anything that fits the shape- long, stringy, and noodle-like – is a noodle. If it looks like a noodle, if it tastes like a noodle, it is a noodle. I think they disagreed because this noodle was made from a different flour than the noodles they knew as “noodles.”

Even the rainbow-colored Funnoodle is a member of the noodle family. (Sorry, no silver.)

“It may be a rice noodle,” I bargained, “But this is a carbohydrate in a long, thin shape. IT IS a noodle.” I don’t think I had them convinced. Really, the English language did not have appropriately nuanced food categories to satisfy them.

Besides noodles, Chinese cuisine is big on dumplings, each type with its own name, and so they were crestfallen when, one after one, I would answer my questioners, “Dumpling. Dumpling. That is also a dumpling. Yes, this is a dumpling, too.”

Their furrowed brow seemed to say, “But this one is sweet and is made by rolling a ball of rice flour! That one is pork inside a boiled wrapper. This one has shrimp and is fried in oil. They are different!”

One time, Uncle Jiang changed the game on me. He wasn’t going to wait for me to give him a none-too-specific vocabulary word, he would supply it himself. Over breakfast, he called the golden sweetener “bee honey.” I gave him a doubtful look. He held out for a second, then asked, “Bee honey, or honey?” As I told him it was the latter, I wondered what kind of honey these Chinese had been keeping secret from the outside world that they would need to specify “bee” honey. Surely, Marco Polo would have reported on a non-bee creature also capable of producing honey. And, if this mystical being could do it without regurgitating nectar, it would outsell the “bee honey” tenfold.

I guessed that the Chinese word for honey was a typical Chinese compound word, probably combining “bee” plus a word to indicate the fluid product of honey. (Yes, the Chinese word for honey is a compound word that translates literally “bee honey.”) China did have a multitude of honey varieties (hardly any peanut butter on their shelves but ample honey sections in every grocery store), and canvas roadside tents where a vendor would hang out all day napping and apparently selling jars of honey he had supposedly harvested himself, from bees.

(Here’s an interesting link from a beekeeper with insight into Chinese honey and an encounter with a street beekeeper… er, a beekeeper selling honey on the streets.)

The most egregious battle over appellation came after dinner at my friend Ma Chao’s house. (Ma Chao’s family name means “horse.” I would like to meet an American named Tom Horse or Tom Yellow, two common Chinese surnames, instead of Tom Butler or Tom Cooper.) At the dinner were Ma Chao, Aunt Fong, a kung fu teacher, an English-speaking Director of Foreign Relations at a local university who went by Mike for his English name, one of Aunt Fong’s friends, and me. We made it through dinner without arguing over potatoes, dumplings, or noodles. Then, after dinner, when everyone was all liquored up (as Chinese dinner guests are wont to be), Ma Chao brought out his weapons (as a few of my Chinese friends were wont to do).

Like many kung fu enthusiasts, Ma Chao was a collector of swords and polearms. Ma Chao, Mike, and Aunt Fong’s friend, Lily all wanted to handle them and pose for pictures. I thought that the inebriated swinging blades at each other was a stupid idea, but as the saying goes, when in Rome, disregard personal safety. At their urging, I came over to the living room to take some pictures with them.

Ma Chao and me, handling his weapons.

Ma Chao handed me his sword, and Mike, as my translator, informed me, “That is a knife.The Chinese name is dao.”

The sword I held required both hands on the hilt, and the blade was around three feet long.

“No,” I told him flatly, “this is a sword.”

“No!” Mike riposted, “It is a knife.” He pointed to the cutting edge and said, “See? It is only sharp on one side.”

I explained, “It doesn’t matter if the other side is dull, that only means it is a single-edged sword. But it is a sword!” In my flustered state, I rushed my words, not caring if I lost my listeners over technical details.

“No,” Mike insisted, “sword is for a different word. This is a dao, it is a knife.”

“A knife?” I exclaimed, “Look how long it is!”

That sword could have severed limbs in one stroke. “If it uses two hands and the blade is longer than my forearm, it is a sword!”

I wanted to ask him how he would classify a pointed rapier without a cutting edge. Or, hand him a dictionary and have him look up broadsword. I’m sure it would have been of no use.

Lily pretends to behead me with a Chinese “knife.”

His stance, like that of all my vocabulary quiz masters, was fixed and intractable. I had experienced the same stubborn reaction by enough people that I could tell it was a phenomenon of culture and language, not a personal idiosyncrasy. Somehow, a people that had been raised in rigid classrooms, taught to copy and repeat everything they heard, became skeptical and as combative as a wild donkey when my foreign authority told them what was what in English.

I was left to question what kind of argument would persuade them of a vocabulary word’s legitimacy. What I wouldn’t give to see Uncle Jiang and Mike on a Webster’s usage panel. “No! It is not a transitive verb! It is a noun.”

Mike’s opinion would carry a lot of weight at Webster’s so long as he was carrying this Chinese pole weapon (guandao) with him.

Believe it or not, the comb is the tastiest part of the whole chicken.

The Real China: Bottoms Up! (Part 2)

October 9, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

And here’s the most incredible thing: over the course of a two-hour dinner, bai jiu (a clear distilled spirit of 40-60% alcohol) would be the only beverage. No water; you had to wash everything down with hard liquor. And more: if you wanted to quench your thirst, you needed to be part of a toast. As Sue explained in her mother hen voice, “Don’t you dahyr bring that glass to your lips unless you’ve given somebody cheers! That’s why I always sit next to someone I know, so I can go, ‘Ahram, cheers!’ when I need a drink.”

Yes, that was the truth. The entire table would refrain from touching their glasses until the top social-tier had begun toasting each other, then everyone would join in and take turns raising their glasses to each other or walking over to an honoree and standing to have a drink with him while he remained seated. Standing up to show deference was an added honor when making a toast, as were lowering one’s glass below the honoree’s when clinking them, and downing the glass completely and tipping it upside down to show it was empty. To signal this impressive feat (basically it was taking a tall shot of sake, vodka, or a similar clear alcohol), the toaster would call out “Gan bei!” which meant “Bottoms up!”

Everyone loved Grant and Sue, they were usually the life of the party, so they would each receive a lot of toasts, and Sue would always decline the gan bei in a funny way. Standing with an excitable (i.e. Chinese) man toasting her, Sue would say in a booming, Australian voice, “You gan bei. Me meiyou gan bei!” All the Chinese speakers would smile because meiyou (pronounced “mayo”) meant “there is no” or “not have” and Sue was using it to try and say “no” or “will not.” So, in effect she was saying “There is no bottoms up!”

The way the toasting would work out, the men in the most prestigious seats would generally remain seated and let people come to them as the toasts worked their way like social order dominoes around the table. Dinner guests spaced their drinks out over the course of the meal by taking many turns raising their glasses or standing to drink with each of their friends at the table. Toasting served as a way for people to introduce themselves to the host and his friends- who had significant gwan-shee, and it also broke the ice between strangers of equal social standing. And, obviously it was a happy way for old friends to show affection to each other.

Although it was necessary to wait for the toasts to refresh oneself, once the toasting began there was a chain reaction of opportunities to have a drink. It was actually quite awkward as I made and attempted a succession of toasts because I had to either try and repetitively slide my stubborn chair backward or stand straight up and try to avoid buckling with the seat cushion pressing into the back of my knees. All the standing for toasts, in a way, nullified the need for the extra-long chopsticks. As long as we were up to drink we could have reached out to scoop some food into our bowls.

The most movement was for the highest honor-giving: making a pass around the table to make a toast with every seat. This did not happen often, but there were a couple times I went out for a dinner with a new group of people and Aunt Fong had me stand up to pay tribute to my hosts. She led me around to initiate the standing toasts and introduce myself to each guest; I was equipped with my tall glass in one hand and a bottle of bai jiu in the other, so I could refill my glass after each bottoms up. I knew the bai jiu was volatile, mind you, I refused to drink it unless strongly socially obligated, and I was sneaky about refilling my glass with very conservative pours (I held my fingers tightly together and gripped the bottom half of the glass in a sleight-of-hand attempt at blocking my hosts’ vision of my drink level), but their eyes were watching me and they made sure I emptied my glass with every drink.

Circling the table, I thought after my first drink Wow. That was a little much. I need to sit for a mome… after the second That’s enough. This was a bad i… After the third drink my mouth was numb to the burning sensation of the alcohol, after the fourth I forgot whether I was going clockwise or counterclockwise around the table, the fifth How many people are at this dinner? And who are they? Whatever number was after fifth What’s going on? Is this- is this China? I’m sitting down.

All right, I’ve embellished, but there were a few times when I had to sit down and turn away from the table to steady myself after drinking too tall a glass of bai jiu. I missed American culture, where I could choose my own beverage or, if out with friends, call it quits after a drink or two. The peer pressure in a Chinese business dinner was not very unlike the atmosphere in a college fraternity house party. I hated being socially forced to drink, especially when it was the sweet, vengeful bai jiu. One time, I saw Ahram successfully wave it off and I assumed she got away with having tea either because she was a lady or there was something forceful about the way she chuckled and said, “Actuarry, I don’t want dat.” (Not mocking, that’s how she actually spoke.) Whenever it was offered to me, I gladly accepted light beer as a compromise.

Something you may already know about the Chinese is that it is very common for their face to become flushed whenever they drink alcohol. I don’t understand the genetic reason for this, nor do I much care, but I find it a peculiar trait, like the way they have dry, crumbly earwax as opposed to the waxy, liquid substance in the ears of every white person (go ahead, look it up). Anyway, it was not uncommon to see a group of men walking in dress shirts and black slacks, two or three with rose pink or puce faces, one perhaps stumbling, at one in the afternoon.

I remember, one spring afternoon, seeing some young college students helping their friend who was dragging the tops of his feet against the sidewalk as he struggled to keep pace with his designated hoisters, carrying him with his arms spread across their shoulders. It was still the lunch hour, so I stood perplexed, thinking Did he get into a car crash or something? He was wailing and tears were streaming down his red face- maybe he got into a fight over a girl? Noticing my stare, my Chinese friends told me he was just having a hard time handling his alcohol, best to ignore him.

Ever naïve, it dawned on me that the culture of drinking is nearly universal, it only changes forms between societies. American binge drinking is an atrocious menace responsible for thousands of traffic fatalities and yearly freshmen deaths at university campuses, but of course ours is not the only nation with a drinking problem. The Chinese, while seemingly very cautious not to mix alcohol and cars, loved to get carried away with friends and colleagues as a standard practice. In my observation, drivers declined to have any drinks and no one would goad them “Just one…” I don’t have the drunken driving numbers on the national level to corroborate this; it was always plain who the driver was and his teetotal status was strictly kept.

One young man I met told me he was thinking about going back to school to change careers because he couldn’t abide all the drinking required of him as a businessman, where every deal was sealed over dinner by a show of alcohol tolerance. It crossed my mind that without the regular opportunity to get loaded at dinners and expel emotions in the KTV (karaoke) clubs, the overworked Chinese would reflect on their lives, trapped in a gray, decrepit communist state, and become either crack-brained or suicidal. Problem drinking there, as often here, was society’s pleasurable stress-relief valve.

That night, eating with Grant and Sue, the Korean teacher Ahram, and the collection of officials from the university, I was thankfully given a large bottle of beer to drink from as I sampled new foods during our dinner’s many rounds. I mentioned before that the food in China was strange, usually lying in a pool of oil and prepared either boiled or stir-fried. When the serving girl brought out vegetables, they were either limp greens on an oily platter (no one eats salad in China) or crispy or steamed vegetables like lotus root and corn on the cob. The lotus root was a new favorite of mine, but the flavorless corn was well below par for the tastes of a native Iowan. With the many meat dishes, there were a large variety of kinds and spices, but a sameness connected them all. Nearly every meat dish was served chopped up, bones and all, and served spiced, oily, and often served barely above room temperature.

A meal of steamed corn, bean soup, various and mysterious limp vegetables, some kind of oily meats, and sliced melon.

Being an American, I have never been that interested in the path the animal takes from farmyard to table, nor have I ever been subjected to witness the work of the butcher. Looking at beef and chicken cuts, shrink-wrapped in plastic white trays in the grocer’s refrigerated, brightly lit display, I have had convenience in choosing my meat and ease of mind in divorcing it from any breathing, bleeding creature. However, it has seemed to me that the conventional cuts of meat must be fairly obvious to a trained butcher. For example, in every bucket of fried chicken are the main parts of the bird: breast, wings, thighs, and legs. The Chinese would also eat the feet and head (not the beak or skull, mind you), but the rest of the bird would be chopped into unrecognizable bits. Considering that Chinese consumers can choose to pick out their bird live, as we do with lobster, and watch it killed and maybe cleaned in front of them (as we don’t), I expected that they would all be expert in cleanly dividing the meat into its standard portions. But no, they took that naked hen and chopped it up, I imagined with two cleavers like the Muppets’ Swedish chef or a drummer on a snare solo. The meat was truly that messy. Every bite, and I mean that- no exaggeration, had bone and tendon in it.

The Chinese prized the nutrition in the bones, and so I learned to chew around the big bones and grind up and swallow the little ones. My aunt Fong would offer me a straw when we had beef bone soup so that I could follow her lead and suck out the marrow. Me: “What? Shen me? (‘shun-muh’)” Aunt Fong: “Mm! Very good!” Sluuuuurp.

On my aunt’s adamant insistence, I tried sucking out some beef marrow for myself. I rate it two thumbs down.

Speaking of soup, I cannot get through a discussion of the cockamamie cooking methods of Chinese cuisine without mentioning one unbelievable dish, one meat that I could manage to eat without bones in every bite. At a home-cooked meal, the main course we once had was chicken soup. That is, a whole cleaned chicken sitting in a weak, yellow broth. The broth we sipped with our spoons had less flavor than a single bouillon cube. I have never tasted thinner soup. I think it was only water and oil. And the chicken itself we comically tried to peel apart with our chopsticks. No one brought out a knife to slice cuts off for each guest; we twisted the flesh from the bone and often partnered to hold the meat and strip off strands like pigeons struggling with a large bread loaf. Besides the impractical hassle, it tasted bad, too. I thought I had traveled around the earth to visit another world, where the people didn’t have the sense to know how to prepare and eat chicken, or even realize that the way they were doing it lacked sense altogether. It was as if the natives had never prepared or eaten a chicken before, but I knew they were far more acquainted with the tasty creature than I was. Some of them had chicks in their house and pet roosters that would stalk the sidewalks. Small city residents saw live chickens every day.

Chickens strutting outside someone’s house.

This is not to say that China was without tasty meat dishes- or protein dishes. China was a tofu lover’s paradise with bean curd in every shape, texture, flavor, and smell. Grant and Sue’s favorite meat dish at the restaurant, and an internationally famous dish, was the roast duck. This was a meat that was at least shaved thin by a cook and served mostly free of bone. We ate it wrapped in a thin pancake with scallions and dipped it in a sweet bean sauce. Quickly assembling a wrap and dipping it while the automatic lazy Susan rotated by was a test of timing and chopstick dexterity.

My favorite dish was the braised pork (hong shao rou/ 红烧肉), served hot in a round, black stew pot. China has not only different varieties of pork than America, but they also serve it in a way contrary to American expectations. Meat, fat, and skin were served in one three-layered, bite-sized piece. Stewing the meat this way made the pork succulent, sweet, and tender. I have complained about a lot of things in China, but without reservation I will say that their pork was far better than American pork, and I come from America’s largest pork-producing state.

Do yourself a favor and find a Chinese restaurant than can prepare this. Tell them you want “hoang shao ro.”

I fully realize that eating skin, fat, bones, feet, and chicken heads (cheeks, eyes, and brains) is repulsive, a near abomination, to Americans raised on diets of white meat chicken, ground beef, and thick steaks; really, raised on a diet of processed foods- foods processed far from view or thought. Well, tastes are individual, and I am a man with a big appetite and an adventurous palate, so take my word on this for its relative worth when I say the comb was the tastiest part of the chicken, the feet and knees were the best parts of the pig, and pickled chicken feet were not that bad. I eventually grew to like them. I avoided the blood sausage completely and I am fairly confident I avoided dog, but like I said, most meat dishes were chopped up into unrecognizable bits, so it is possible that the “beef” wasn’t always beef. I will move on so readers with weak stomachs won’t get sick.

After many rounds of new dishes and over an hour’s worth of toasting, as bellies swelled to capacity, the tempo slowed down and the feeling became very relaxed. Diners leaned back in their chairs, some might smoke (smoking was common in China, but not as much as I expected, though I once caught a little farm girl with a cigarette in her mouth), then the serving girl would clear away the empty platters and combine dwindling remainders together, and guests could even sip their drinks at will.

The last round was signaled by a dessert platter: watermelon, orange slices, dragon fruit, and sometimes a mildly sweet pastry. I think I ate a record amount of watermelon in China, or at least a personal best. Once springtime arrived, local farmers would drive trucks full of the round fruits (not oblong) into town every day, and a crowd of shoppers (not a queue- remember, this was China) would bring one home as a daily staple. After the meal, the group would polish off the thin slices of watermelon and lethargically pick at the dragon fruit, pausing to let the large meal settle and finish off the last remaining bits of the evening’s conversations.

Then, when the pause lasted for too long a moment, the group implicitly shared the understanding that the long affair was over. Grant or Sue said, “Well, all right then” and the whole table heaved themselves to their feet, using the chair backs and table top for support. Any contents remaining in the bottles were poured into glasses, and we all held our glasses high in the air and gave one final “Gan bei!”

After that, the real entertainment began. If it wasn’t clear who was footing the bill, if payment had not already been arranged and settled beforehand, then dinner guests would fight (push and shove, but not punch) for the check. It was at the same time alarming and charming to see them insist, “No! No! No!” and reach over their friend’s shoulder to snatch the check away. They each had honed techniques to get the winning end of this aggressive ritual and earn the prestige of paying for the meal. In American, I was used to “going Dutch” with friends, or seeing little scenes that might go back and forth for a few verbal rounds, each person saying, “No, you paid for it last time” or offering other pleas before the eventual payer holds his ground with something firm and the others graciously say, “If you insist.”

In China, they do not acquiesce. Whoever has the bill might hold it above his head or at an arm’s length away from his opponent, like a playground game of keep-away. Or, if trying to thrust cash on his friend, he would jam it into his friend’s pants’ pockets, or if his friend were playing defense with his hands already in his pockets, then the money would be dropped in the shirt or jacket pocket.

I once witnessed a great battle between Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) and his sister. Family honor was on the line. They knew each other’s tricks. From the dining room to the hallway, riding down the elevator, and out of the lobby and into the parking lot, she thrust cash at Uncle Jiang and he blocked or riposted every advance, opening her hand and stuffing the bills right back in. They chattered at each other like two squirrels fighting on a tree trunk, and I watched silently from the sidelines. Uncle Jiang’s sister made a brilliant strategic choice and gave the money to me, the stunned third party. Uncle Jiang wasn’t having it, so he snatched it right out of my frozen palms and stuck the money in his sister’s purse as she tried to walk away. As persistent as the widow in Jesus’ parable, she clung to the door of the taxi cab as Uncle Jiang and I tried to make our departure. I was sitting in the front passenger’s seat, and the window was open a crack. She made the winning move, dropping the wad of cash into my lap as the driver took off. There was nothing Uncle Jiang could do. He would have to wait to repay his sister another time.

Two odds and ends related to meals and restaurants: like the two English teachers in New York had suggested, I tried to find a local restaurant on the food streets which I knew and trusted. This seemingly simple task was made difficult by the unintelligible signs and haphazard set-ups of Chinese shops and street-side restaurants. If you were not literate in the written language and culture, you were not going to be able to approach a restaurant counter and sound out “taco” the way you might to a Spanish speaker at a Mexican restaurant (which, unlike the average unmarked restaurant in China, would have traditional Mexican architecture or a Mexican flag to help distinguish it to passersby). The dishes in China were many, strange, and puzzling, and even if you knew the name of a favorite, the locals probably wouldn’t grasp your pronunciation attempts. So what I did was scan the open-door restaurants and street vendors, looking for anything familiar I could recognize and use as a stepping stone to boldly request an order from a stranger in a foreign language. Relying on my very limited vocabulary, I spotted the characters for “beef noodles,” stopped into the four table small restaurant, and said the name of the dish in a very plain sentence with a voice that was quiet but nonetheless clear in pronunciation. They brought me out a big bowl of beef noodles (mostly noodles with a couple tidbits of beef) that cost only one American dollar, and I ended up returning to this same restaurant for the same meal several times.

Some places advertised “California” beef noodles. Most of the beef noodle shops I visited were run by Hui people, a Muslim minority, not the majority Han Chinese.

The other thing: the Chinese, like healthy eating advocates in America, were always stressing the importance of breakfast. As a typical morning greeting, they would ask, “Have you had your breakfast?” Growing up and going through school in America, I heard classmates say countless times that they never ate breakfast. It was a common thing to skip, and people seemed to take pride in nonchalantly boasting that they never ate breakfast. In China, the attitude was the opposite; casually forgetting breakfast would have been a shock. They made sure to be up early to fill up on noodles, fried pastry sticks, potato and egg pancakes, hard-boiled eggs, soup, steamed buns, and congee (rice porridge).

My school’s P.E. teacher once got me breakfast when I told him I hadn’t eaten. An English teacher, Miss Liu, heard about it and said, “Small Black bought you breakfast!? Small Black is our leader.”

Lunch was likewise a big meal. The lunch “hour” was around two hours long, so people could enjoy a big meal with family or colleagues and take a mid-day nap. Dinner could be big, but it didn’t have to be. It was usually only a large affair if friends were gathering together at a restaurant or entertaining guests at home.

Perhaps it was all the strange food in China- its unsanitary preparation from farm to street market to kitchen to table- that caused me weekly stomach sickness. I made sure to always boil my water or drink from a water cooler, so I didn’t suspect that. Of course, the ever-present crowds of people and filthy environmental conditions could have been the main culprits or contributors. All the large meals, doused in oil and red chili sauce, and the unwanted glasses of alcohol certainly never allowed my stomach a moment’s peace. The dinners were at times tasty and fun, but no moment in China was ever pure bliss. Every intriguing bite concealed the potential for pain.

The answer to why I got sick so much in China: I never saw any health department grades in any restaurant windows, but I did see places thawing out their squid in a side alley.

The Real China: Bottoms Up! (Part 1)

October 8, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

As unappetizing as the food was in China, as dreary and dilapidated was the landscape, I have to say that my spirits were brightened whenever there was a big group dinner. I’ve never had such fun at an American dinner party.

If all the extraneous, all the vanity, is removed from life, the simple pleasure of enjoying a good meal with friends is the only sure form of happiness a man has. (Don’t believe me? Look it up in Ecclesiastes.) China, and much of life, hadn’t turned out to satisfy my expectations. English classes, city life, and new friendships were not playing out according to fantasy. My time was going to pass in China as quickly as it ever had; I was going to feel dejected and trapped in a foul country. That was my lot. But the dinners were something I could depend on to lift up my mood and remind me to be thankful for all the good I did have. They were the best occasions for sociability, and without them I probably would have lost 10 or 15 pounds like the two English teachers in New York had predicted.

Most of my dinners out were hosted by the university or it’s Department of Foreign Affairs. Any holiday or any event (e.g. the foreign teachers’ arrival on campus, the end of the semester), the school would host the other foreign teachers and me for dinner. Besides me, there were Grant and Sue, the retired Australian couple spending their third year in China, and Lee Ahram, the Korean teacher from Seoul. We were all brought in as language specialists of a sort, native speakers who could demonstrate to the pupils how the language they learned rote from chalkboard and textbook was supposed to be spoken by live people.

On our first dinner out together, at the hotel restaurant on campus (hotel restaurants were the best in China, and they are where I had most of my big, round table group dinners), Grant and Sue explained that I should not sit down before anyone else. It was best to follow the hosts’ lead in everything, and in the case of the seating arrangement, each seat was assigned certain prominence and would be allocated by the senior members in the group’s hierarchy.

So I followed behind our Chinese hosts as we walked through the lobby with its cold fish, meats, and vegetables on display in the glass-faced cooler, past the small group of undersized ladies dressed in matching fuchsia uniforms who wished us welcome in unison, up the worn, carpet steps to the second floor, turned right to walk down the narrow corridor, past the pungent odor emitting from the bathrooms- several yards away- and waited for the servants in the hallway to direct us into our room.

Me, in the red, at another dinner with teachers from a different school. Typical of a dinner out in a private dining room.

Each dining room was private, accessed by a single door from the hallway just like a typical large hotel’s floor plan. The dining rooms had enough space for a dozen or more people, and usually they were furnished with one very large, heavy round table on the far side, and cushioned chairs, couches, a coffee table (should that be called a tea table?), a tall air conditioner unit, a coat hook, and a card table on the near side. It was a large, private space where a party of extended family, friends, or business contacts could camp out for hours and smoke, sip tea, and eat and drink to their stomach’s content. Once the door was shut, a silent serving girl would be the only outside disturbance into the room, and there was often a small window that would slide open to reveal new dishes for her to serve so that she did not need to constantly interrupt the atmosphere by walking in and out.

Compared to America, I preferred the dining service in China. The serving girls never introduced themselves, they didn’t ask me how my first few bites were and how my meal was (“How’s that tastin’ for ya’?” “Can I get those plates attayer way?”), they stood by and waited for the group’s order, served it in silence or maybe announced the name of the dish, then stood aside to let people eat and converse. The only bad part was that in a Chinese restaurant without private rooms, with an open floor plan, or even in a private room if the serving girl were absent, diners who needed something would call out at the top of their voice, “Fuwuyuan!” (“Server!” This word looks like a mess of vowels on paper, like a bad Scrabble tray, and its pronunciation sounded just as sloppy.) The diners shouted like hungry infants, but their voices were the hoarse, throaty calls of men who had been smoking and drinking for decades. There was hardly a moment’s peace in China; a call for service, a merchant’s shout, a grandmother’s shrill minding, the buzz of talking from crowds, roosters’ crowing, car horns, and those terrible large truck and bus air horns that still haunt my memory- but nearly never the chattering of a squirrel, the melody of a song bird, or even the caw of a crow- would interrupt and invade the tranquility of the mind.

Something else to be thankful for in all service industries in China, not only in restaurants: no tipping. I left a couple small bills behind at a sandwich and coffee shop once, and the busboy chased me down outside the door, as I was zipping up my coat, and surprised me by speaking in intelligible English, “You forgot this” and handed me back my tip money. The price on the menu was assumed to include all expenses, including service labor. A tip, even given in generous appreciation for exceptional service, could not be received except at the breach of honor, and could even be taken as an insult that basically said, “Here, you need a little help to improve your business.”

Another time, I went in for my first haircut in China and wordlessly followed along as I was given a head and shoulders massage, a shampoo, and another massage before my haircut (pre-haircut massages were obligatory). Then my haircut. Then there was a final shampoo after the haircut. At least 60 minutes of service split between two hairdressers. Total charge: around six dollars U.S. I tried to insist on a tip. I couldn’t conceive how a business could stay afloat by charging so little, but the head hairdresser (I don’t know if that’s a pun, but I apologize if so) stiffly thrust out his palm and shook his head in adamant refusal. It would have been a serious violation of their code, their honor to dutifully serve, to accept a tip.

My aunt liked taking pictures of me all the time, even while I was getting this haircut.

Back to the restaurants, I have to mention the numbers on the private room doors. They weren’t numbered according to floor level or distance left or right from the main stairs (well, they followed these conventions a little). The main determiner for door numbers was luck. I’ll spare a full discussion on Chinese lucky numbers and superstitions, which can be found in bland detail elsewhere, but I will say that the Chinese prefer even numbers, except for four, which is pronounced very similarly to “death” in their language. I read that tall buildings would skip floors four and fourteen in China, which I never actually encountered there, though I thought the rationale would have made a lot more sense than the way most American buildings omit the thirteenth floor. Any Chinese person could tell you, “We don’t like four and fourteen because they sound like ‘to die,’” but it would take an internet search by the common man to figure out the foggy details of why thriteen is unlucky in Western culture, or a Ph.D. in something like folklore or obscure history could explain offhand why that is so. And is it even that unlucky? It’s certainly not offensive like four is in China. If someone gave me thirteen of something, I wouldn’t mind (hey, a baker’s dozen!), but giving a gift of four items in China was considered a serious taboo, tacitly wishing for someone’s death.

Anyway, the room numbers were usually, needlessly, three or four digits long (there were probably never more than twenty or so rooms in a single restaurant), and the deluxe room was always “888” or “8888,” even if the rooms before it were “242” and “240.” This was because everyone loved eight because it meant something like “fortune” in Chinese, or at least it rhymed with a phrase that meant “to make a fortune.” (Note: “eight” in Chinese rhymes with the “to make” part of the phrase, not even the “fortune” part of “to make a fortune.”) I can’t quite explain it, it has something to do with the quality of auspiciousness too, but I know the Chinese mind equated being blessed with having obscene amounts of money and so they loved eight. I never actually got to eat in the 888 room, but it was always full of a lively crowed when I got a peek inside; probably it was always reserved for big occasions.

On the evening of my first big dinner in China, with Grant and Sue, Ahram, the two officials from the university’s Foreign Affairs Office: Miss “Amy” Hu and Mr. “Oliver” Zhang, and some assorted vice presidents from the university, I didn’t even know to check for the door number. My mind was being overwhelmed by all the subtle differences in the foreign surroundings and the shockingly strong bathroom odor wafting down the relatively nice, yet nonetheless dingy hallway. I kept my bearings by following Grant and Sue and listening to their commentary as we waited in the cushioned chairs around the coffee- no, tea- table. The serving girls spent about ten minutes filling the dining table up with about a half-dozen dishes when the senior members of the group, the vice presidents, decided it was time to begin. Sometimes the meats and vegetables would sit for twenty minutes before the meal began; lukewarm and cold meat dishes were common. As the group dined, the serving girls would bring more and more dishes until plates had to be removed, combined, or stacked on top of each other.

This restaurant was unique. A wood-burning stove underneath the table heated the soup in the center. We’re all wearing coats because this restaurant, like most buildings, was unheated.

Grant and Sue explained that the most prestigious seat was the one furthest away, facing the door. Grant inferred this was because the kings and officials from years past would be able to scan all approaching guests and look out for danger that way. Maybe he was onto something. Anyway, it always seemed like the most important-looking seat if I had to pick one. So the vice presidents on the second tier of the hierarchy insisted that the man with the highest status, the most guanxi (easier if I just write it “gwan-shee,” which means basically face/ social status/ reputation), sit there first. After that, the second-tier group members would fuss and jostle each other over seating arrangements, with guests energetically declining and then reluctantly accepting the honor (sometimes when being shoved into the seat by two of their lower-tiered friends) until the seats were filled up all the way around; the more important or higher status people sitting closer to the prestigious seat at the far side of the table.

I was seated next to Grant, a little past midway on the counterclockwise side of the descending hierarchy. I noticed that this table had an automatic lazy Susan (How classy! How convenient!) with a digital number displayed in front of every seat. I asked Amy Hu, who spoke flawless, refined English in a mixture of educated British and American accents that made her sound dignified and lovely, if not like a movie character from a period piece, why our seats were numbered. She said she thought the numbers corresponded to the seats’ position around the table, which was obvious enough, so I had to deduce my own answer that the numbers served no practical purpose. The serving girls would never call into their headset, “I need another bottle of beer for Seat 6!” They would either hand the person another drink directly, or if they were serving a new dish, they would make space for the platter on the lazy Susan wherever they could find it and let it slowly rotate around for every seat to grab a piece. The seat numbers, like those on the door, I figured, were just another arbitrary status marker to let people know how auspicious there seat was.

So as people remained in their seats and the large variety of dishes slowly made their laps around the table’s circumference, we reached out with our chopsticks to eat a bite directly from the communal dish or gathered a small portion into our small bowls. Almost no one in China had large dinner plates; only small bowls and small plates. Meals were eaten family style and diners gathered a little at a time with their chopsticks. Only in some soups was there a serving spoon, otherwise (prepare yourselves, germ-conscious Americans) people would take food from platters with the chopstick that had just touched their mouths. I read that the proper etiquette was to pass food from the communal plate with the blunt, untouched end of the chopsticks, but I never saw this rule followed. It never bothered me to eat from shared dishes. In fact, it was a relief to be in a culture where people weren’t watching for me to slip up so they could be the one to sound the social alarm and call out, “Double dipper!”

I knew from eating at Japanese, Korean, and Chinese restaurants that each culture used a different style of chopsticks. The Japanese use what I consider the standard: slender, square, or circular sticks of medium length made of wood or ceramic. They feel balanced and proportional in one’s hand. Koreans use thin, flat metal chopsticks that easily slipped and turned sideways in my hand so that I had to frequently reset my grip. They also set the table with a long-handled metal spoon (that I would call an ice cream spoon) instead of the short, deep spoon used by Chinese diners (the white, plastic spoon served with egg drop or miso soup in American Chinese restaurants). Chinese chopsticks were the longest and most difficult for me to wield. Cut three or four inches off the end and you would have the standard Japanese chopsticks. This aside information is redundant to anyone familiar with these cultures, but the difference and the extra length of the Chinese chopsticks puzzled me until I sat down to my first big dinner in China.

From l to r: standard-sized Japanese chopsticks, Korean chopsticks and spoon set, souvenir chopsticks of the larger Chinese size, barbecue tongs.

As the dishes rotated around for everyone to select a sample, your choice dish might be an arm’s length away. Keep in mind that these round tables had a large circumference that could fit ten or more people around them, and the lazy Susan would be filling up with rows of plates as the meal went on. To get that chicken leg without standing up and leaning over the table and the dishes in between, you would need an extra-long pair of chopsticks. Hence, Chinese chopsticks. It was like having extremely long, delicate fingers to take pinches of food, one small bowl full at a time.

And those plates would stack up. Because the meal was served family style, ten different mouths might try a little of every dish; a large group could easily finish off more than two dozen plates of food. I was at a wedding where the serving girls filled up the table as everyone watched the ceremony, so by the time my table started eating, the plates had piled up into a mound that was three deep in the middle, with turtle soup, shell and all, on top. The craziest example was when I went with Aunt Fong to meet one of her friends at a restaurant that served coffee and international foods. To the Chinese, Western food is KFC and McDonald’s, so I was used to people telling me no when I asked them if they liked Western food, or saying, “I love Kun-duh-ji” (“Kentucky” or KFC in Chinese). So I was skeptical about the international menu at this restaurant, but I had been griping for months about wanting pizza and Aunt Fong had promised me this place had it.

Sitting on the long couches in our private dining room, with the menu laid out on the long, rectangular tabletop (another Western touch of this café), I watched as Aunt Fong flipped back and forth through the menu’s twenty or so pages (Chinese menus are thick). She said “pizza” at one point and then she was looking at bowls of soup, so I said, “Okay.” A pizza and some soup seemed like enough to feed our party of three. But she continued browsing through the menu, looking at different entrees; I assumed she had changed her mind about the soup and pizza.

After our waitress brought out two large bowls of soup for Aunt Fong and me, followed by two other main dishes, I realized that what I thought were her audible suggestions were actually her selections. She had tabulated a huge order of food, uneatable even with my voracious appetite. I was already full and plates already covered the table when the medium-sized pizza was served. I didn’t have the stomach for it at that point, but I ate a sympathy piece just because Aunt Fong had ordered it just for me and I would have felt bad if a whole pizza went uneaten. The pizza itself was decent for a Chinese restaurant that didn’t specialize in pizza. Even after it was on the table, a few more dishes were brought out. I counted so I would be able to report it to my American friends, and at one point there were eleven dishes on the table, balanced on top of each other and nestled together. For three people. All were main dishes, like a Thai curry chicken and rice; it was not eleven side dishes holding dinner rolls or a small iceberg lettuce salad.

The copious spread for my birthday dinner.

That was not atypical. I don’t know if it was a matter of the host’s prestige or a desire to make sure everyone got fed well, but the amount of food on the table was beyond abundant. Sometimes there were left-overs to take home, but usually the guests brought their appetites and would eat up most everything.

Each restaurant varied what Chinese staple foods it served, though every big restaurant had a menu over a hundred items deep. A small restaurant on a shopping street might specialize in a certain kind of dumpling or noodles, but a hotel restaurant had virtually whatever its guests could think off; they made all kinds of meats and regional favorites.

The drinks, though, were fairly standard. Each restaurant would set the table with a large bottle of Sprite and a Minute Maid orange drink that they don’t sell in the States. Then, for everyone who wasn’t a kid, a student, a person far younger than the median age of the group, or a lady who insisted on tea, there was light beer- possibly– and a clear rice liquor called bai jiu (“by jee-oh”) that translates to “white wine/liquor.” I would usually protest and ask for tea and only tea. By no means had China turned me into a tea connoisseur, but I dreaded having to drink the foul bai jiu and I was desperate for an alternative. Bottled water was not an option and there was no water cooler available to fill up a glass. Being a man, I was expected to have some kind of alcohol, so my only alternative was light beer, which I had only occasionally when the restaurant had bottles in stock and my hosts were passively content to let me drink it. I hated the bai jiu, I thought it should have been taken off the dinner tables and relegated to garages as a solvent to clean lawnmowers with. Then again, Chinese people don’t have private garages, and I didn’t hear or see a single lawnmower throughout China- no one had a yard.

But the men hosting the dinner always insisted I be given a glass of their hard liquor, and they outnumbered me, had way more gwan-shee than me, had the mandate of Chinese society, behaved a lot like boys who were used to bossing people around and getting their way, and they were the ones paying for dinner after all, so they lined up my glass next to all the others, smashed the top of the bai jiu bottle (no openers necessary) and drained a bottle or two, glug-glug-glug, among the row of glasses. Some of the men could drink a bottle or more by themselves in one sitting (maybe that should read, “in one sitting, one passing out, and one falling”). I would try to pull my glass away from the downpour, but they would always insist, “A little!” and continue the stream till my glass was filled far past my comfort zone.

Continued tomorrow in Part 2.

Cheers! with my friend Ma Cao.

The Real China: Questions I Could Not Answer

September 24, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Being an American in China (or just being a white-faced foreigner from an English-speaking country), attracted a lot of attention from the locals. I was one of a very small sample of non-Chinese people in an area of around 3 million people, and after months of living as the only white man in a small university town (small in Chinese terms, as the official count of the county was over 600,000 people), I too became shocked whenever I saw another laowai– foreigner. Most Chinese were too shy to approach me or come out and speak directly to me, but that didn’t prevent them from blurting out “Laowai!” as I walked past or surreptitiously peeking over their shoulder when I was near. I could always tell, while walking on campus, when one girl in a pair had spotted me walking behind them. Their voices would get suspiciously low, and a couple seconds later, her friend would slyly look back at me, and then they’d both giggle.

Occasionally, a few students would find me walking through the campus and ask to take a picture with me (most would just try to sneak a shot with their camera phone), and I would always oblige them with a pose. Other brave souls would walk straight up to me, in the middle of whatever I was doing- shopping, eating, jogging, exercising- and start firing off the frequently asked questions (e.g. “Can you speak Chinese?” “Are you America?”).

Because America has the most dominant popular culture and everyone knew about my homeland from movies and the news, I held a lot of appeal to most of the people I met. Countless times I heard from someone how they had always dreamed of going to America but couldn’t because of the expense. Many young people would stare at me awestruck with an open smile, not saying anything, their imaginations soaring with images of the fabled life they had seen on screen. It was tempting to assume their wonder was due to my presence, but really any foreigner would receive the same reaction as a representative of a far-off land the natives had previously only imagined. A young white man, in China, would have to have a horn growing out of his forehead not to be admired and called handsome. So, the Chinese, especially the younger generation, carried impressions of foreigners that would excite them to speak to me.

On the other hand, there were quite a few tense car rides and dull, uncomfortable moments at the dinner table where I sat in silence with a middle-aged man who either had no interest in American topics or lacked the English to step out and meet me in the middle ground between our cultures. Not to say that I expected my hosts to cater to me. As a guest in their country I did respect that Chinese was the language of the land. Mostly, I tagged along as a silent observer and conversation piece in social situations; getting to speak with a young Chinese man fluent in English, or a female student with exceptional English skills, was a rare treat.

But in most situations, I was not comfortable enough to ask conversational questions in Chinese, and the English questions my hosts felt socially obligated to ask would only underline the awkward gap between us. At a restaurant, it was only polite for my hosts to ask me what I wanted to eat, but I only knew the name of a handful of Chinese dishes. “What would you like to eat?” they would ask, expecting me to select a restaurant, or, if we were at the restaurant, a list of items (typically, a party at a restaurant will select enough items to cover the table with plates, not one entrée per person as is the norm in the US). This question was practically impossible for me to answer since the only restaurant names I knew were KFC and hot pot (not the name of a restaurant but a type of restaurant where meats, vegetables, and noodles are dipped into a broiling pot of spicy soup on your table). For dishes, I would select a certain kind of black mushroom (mu-er or 木耳/ “wood ear”) or I would try and get off the hook by saying, “Uh… chicken?”

I had no idea what was written on any of the menus, so the only way I could choose anything was by pointing at the pictures (if the menu had them) or by walking up front to the display coolers in the restaurant lobby and letting my pointer finger get to work. Living in a foreign country with abstruse written symbols meant almost always having adults choose my food for me when eating out, an experience that humbled me back to childhood.

It could also be frustrating, having to answer “What would you like to eat?” and thinking How should I know? This is your country’s food. You choose.

At the riverside park with Aunt Fong and Uncle Jiang.

The dinner question I hated most was one of (Aunt Fong’s husband and therefore) “Uncle” Jiang’s favorites. I would reach out with my chopsticks to sample one of the many lukewarm meats from the pile of plates on the table (having so many dishes at one meal meant things often sat around while waiting for the rest to get cooked; I suppose that people had eventually gotten used to and preferred lukewarm platters- but they always drank hot water), and once I put the strange meat in my mouth Mr. Jiang would ask, “Dustin… what is that?”

I stopped chewing. “Beef?” I would venture, desperately hoping I was right. I knew it wasn’t chicken, or at least it looked nothing like chicken as I had seen it before.

“No,” Uncle Jiang spouted with a breathy Chinese accent.

It’s not beef, and it can’t be chicken- oh no- this had better be pork because it sure isn’t fish. “Is it pork?” I asked, stifling my voice from cracking.

“No.”

Oh no, it’s dog. I’m eating dog. That is the only other dark meat.

My throat stiffened. Maybe Uncle Jiang had misunderstood me or confused his vocabulary.

“No, I am wrong,” he said, “It is beef.”

I breathed easier and smiled. “Okay.”

Uncle Jiang played this mystery meat game with me on several occasions, usually following the same routine. I would begrudgingly guess wrong a couple times and then wait to hear from him that he was wrong and it was beef after all. He had no idea how nervous this made me. I never ate dog in China, as far as I know, but I did see it as butchered meat on a few occasions (as a skull with cheek meat or a whole red carcass), and the sight of a hanging, skinless dog was more difficult to see than I was prepared for.

Not very different from the “What restaurant do you like?” question was “What is your favorite tea?” As a tea culture, the Chinese can tell the subtle difference between red, white, green, and black teas and all their subtle varieties. When Americans say they prefer green over oo-long tea at a restaurant or coffee shop, I am skeptical they are faking it. To me, tea comes in two flavors: bitter and sugar-added. Asking someone their favorite kind of tea is a cultural assumption; it seemed a polite inquiry to my hosts but sounded baffling to me. They would bring their tea mugs and thermoses everywhere, and if there was tea in the mug it would be made obvious by the mass of loose green leaves soaking in the water. Tea bags weren’t used in China; the leaves were preserved whole for better appearance, smell, and flavor. The people scrupulously prized the different varieties, reserving the finest- those purchased at any of the abundant specialty tea shops- for gift-giving.

A cup of loose leaf tea. Better to use some kind of filter or leave the leaves in the tea pot, otherwise you have to constantly spit them out when you drink.

A cup of loose leaf tea. Better to use some kind of filter or leave the leaves in the tea pot, otherwise you have to constantly spit the leaves out when you drink.

One student gave me a bag of leaves (not from a tea plant) from her father’s garden that would sweeten a mug, so I added one of these leaves in with a few chrysanthemum blossoms for my morning beverage and started telling people “chrysanthemum” as my default “favorite tea” answer, which confused most of them because they had never heard the English word for, nor could they pronounce, chrysanthemum. This social defense worked for me until a Chinese English professor and tea connoisseur informed me that chrysanthemum is not actually a tea. I was thwarted. To move past this challenge, I would tell all future tea interrogators, “Um, green” and let that sink in with them as I thought to myself: Just give me some hot water. I don’t know anything about tea. Then my host, if I were a house guest, might counter with, “There is only red or black to drink.” Foiled again. Let it not be said that the Chinese are unschooled in the art of verbal ju-jitsu.

There were other categories of questions I struggled to politely dismiss. As the sole, exclusive American in the city, I was looked to as an expert or reservoir of knowledge on my home country. Students interested in graduate school abroad would ask me which schools had the best programs for music education, economics, language learning, or whatever it was they wanted to study. I had to think up ways to softly say, “I have no idea.” More than a few times someone asked me what the name of an American movie was by giving me the Chinese name and an unhelpful description of one detail they remembered about it. Conversely, many times I frustrated the Chinese and my interlocutor would grunt and complain, “Why don’t you know the Chinese name?”

I was expected to be familiar with any American city or state mentioned, which was fine because most Chinese only knew the major cities and tourist sites. The struggle came when they asked me about a specific university. The Ivy League schools are incredibly famous and revered in Chinese schools, and besides these, many students had looked into schools I had never heard of. They asked me how to get into Harvard or wherever it was they had their hopes set on, as if I had any idea or access.

More times than I cared to, I had to answer questions about my favorite NBA team or player, or what NBA team played in my hometown. I had no interest in basketball, which was a shock to them, so I flatly told them I never watched the NBA. Their reply: “But you’re so tall!” It would be like a child meeting an elf from the North Pole, getting a chance to excitedly ask it questions about Christmas, and hearing from the elf that it didn’t work for Santa and its family didn’t even celebrate Christmas. The NBA was the greatest thing in the world to them, and I came from the land of basketball, yet I didn’t share their love. “How could this be?” I’m sure they were thinking, if they ever thought in English. I explained to my Chinese friends that I did love to play basketball as a boy, ironically the only time in my life when I was not above average height.

The long defunct Waterloo Hawks, an NBA team from the city neighboring my hometown.

At the middle school where I taught, the boys loved asking me about computer games. Note that what were called “TV Games” (Nintendo, Playstation, and X-Box) were considered too expensive in China, and almost no one owned them or played them. The students loved playing online games which were either cheap, free, or pirated. Their questions about computer games became so expected that I tried leading them on a few times. “Yes, I love CrossFire. Do you play CrossFire?” Before I told them I wasn’t serious, they were thrilled.

The most popular game among my male students, “CrossFire.”

One line of questioning I found humorous and also embarrassing was when a student would introduce himself and say, “I am from such and such a town. It is famous for pears. Do you know it?” Of course I never knew it, and the idea that foreigners would know of a Chinese town famous for pears made me smile on the inside. Related to this, the question would come up in conversations if I knew of some famous historical figure or Chinese emperor, and I had to plead ignorance. I imagined it must have felt like meeting someone who had never heard the name Thomas Jefferson or only faintly recognized George Washington. In a land where I had to struggle to explain to people who Elvis and the The Beatles were, I was often reminded that my own cultural knowledge or ignorance could be equally strange.

The Real China: Frequently Asked Questions

September 22, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Think: when you last met a foreign exchange student or a recent immigrant, what did you ask him or her? “Where are you from?” “What city are you from?” “Do you like America?” Then, after the obvious, was there anything left to say? Sometimes, yes, in my experience there has been a spark of interest and it is fascinating to talk to someone with a foreign perspective. But, perhaps more commonly, the conversation dies there. Any chemistry is dampened by the discomforting cultural gap, the language gap, and having nothing in common to comment on other than, “So, how many people live in your country? …Oh, you don’t know?”

Keep this in mind.

My first semester in China, I was one of three foreign English teachers. The other two were Grant and Sue, a long-married Australian couple with adult children, a few grandchildren, and two and a half years of Chinese life experience under their belts. Grant and Sue were just about the liveliest and friendliest people I could have asked to meet in China. It was my good luck to have them there at the university so I could learn from them, meet local friends of theirs, and take in all their stories of world travel and adventure in Australia.

Sue was usually forthcoming with her opinion (she wasn’t rude- a lovely lady, with a bounty of energy and experience, and a lot of fun), and one thing she sounded off on was a weekly obligation of us foreign teachers: English Corner. Contractually, we were expected to spend a couple hours on Friday afternoon at “English Corner,” a meeting at a park on campus, where any student at the university could come meet us and practice their conversation skills. I was curious about what kind of characters we might see down there, and a little flattered that we would be the center of attention. According to Sue, I had my hopes set too high.

At my first English Corner, I won the “Who’s Tallest?” contest. Also, curious students came to get their picture taken with me.

“Oh, it’s awful!” she began, “You finish your last class for the week, and you just want to be done, but then you have to go out there and talk to these students, and there’s only so many time you can answer, ‘Do you like Chinese food?’” Her speech was filled with big gestures and a swelling Australian voice (trust me, it was very amusing in person; I’d give you my comedic impression of it if I could, or better yet, book yourself a flight to Brisbane and ask Sue about English Corner in person). For a moment I wondered if she were just being a spoilsport about it, but she went on, “I’m sorry, but I’ve answered, ‘Yes, I can use chopsticks’ too many times.”

I maintained a cheery attitude nevertheless, and having Grant and Sue around to entertain the Chinese students and coax them out of their shells certainly helped matters, but before long my attitude soured from answering the same questions that Sue had lamented.

Young Chinese students are not only hamstrung by very limited English speaking skills, they are also crippled by weak social skills. Day to day, as far as I could tell, they spent much of their free time in quiet or solitary activities. When not in class or studying, which was not all that often, most students spent their time on the computer, surfing the net, or playing computer games- although I did see packed ping-pong tables and volleyball, basketball, and badminton courts daily. Most were unwilling to speak to someone outside their circle, and for those who were daring enough to try, they lacked the know-how to make small talk.

And while American students generally like to go out on weekends and like heavy doses of partying or drinking, I never heard of Chinese students going to bars Friday after class or getting a group together to go bar-hopping. There was no such thing as Chinese house parties or fraternities. I heard of students going out to KTV (karaoke) and going out to eat sometimes, sure, but their orbit strongly gravitated around the campus. And within that sphere, their orbit was confined to their classmates, since Chinese university classes are a consistent group of students that attends every subject and lecture together instead of mixing up the students for each subject/class like in the U.S. Outgoing individuals could make friends beyond their roommates or classmates through attending extracurricular clubs. For the most part, their social interactions, like people the world over, centered on the same groups who went to the same activities, only more so; a highly insular pattern.

So, as a teacher, the social behavior I observed in class was the carefree in-joking of friendly pairs who had spent so much time together they had created their own world of excited chatter mixed with horseplay. Boys would play-wrestle and hit each other. The girls loved giggling. The immovably introverted would twirl their pens in silence, practice calligraphy, study their history books, or do their math homework. The quiet ones seemed very studious, but the net effect was surprisingly childish. Remember that the average Chinese student is a couple inches shorter than the average American, much skinnier, and most likely wearing clothes that Americans would associate with pre-teens or children. Girls with uniform bangs and pig-tails wore outfits decorated with cartoon characters or bright designs of stars and alleged “English” writing. In maturity, outlook, and attitude, there is a world of difference between an American college student and a Chinese.

The ingrained inward nature of my young students, their unfailing passivity and inevitable “I’m shy” or “I have nussing to say” responses, and the inherent difficulty of our disparate languages and customs made it so that, in conversation, I could not get the ball rolling no matter how friendly I was, no matter how adroit I was at wording new questions.

An exception to the rule was “Emily,” a delightful high school student who enjoyed telling me about her English studies and her family, and even enjoyed singing songs for me.

As I came to know, along with Sue, meeting young people in China followed variations on the same pattern of a skinny, pipe-armed boy asking, “Do you like… Chinese food?” and smiling with glee that he had asked me, this foreign curiosity, a real question in English. I became so worn down by these same, simple social interactions that I became too fatigued to care anymore. I could not bring myself to smile after awhile, and I responded to all the predictable questions with muted, rote answers. I went into China adventurous and eager, and my intent was to be a good sport in every situation, so it did take a large number of dreary experiences to drip down and erode my resolve, but those trying times added up quickly. A man can only answer the same question so many times before his heart takes a bow and his mumbling mouth takes over.

I, like many foreigners in China before and after me I’m sure, thought it would have been easier to hand strangers a bi-lingual card of frequently asked questions and save us each the hassle of going through the pointless routine. Then, the truly interested would have to come up with their own questions and we could both move into more interesting territory.

So here is a write-up of my hypothetical FAQ card. The questions below reflect the actual wording of my Chinese interviewers.

Q: “Are you America/ Are you American/ Where are you come from?”
A: Yes, I’m from America. I live in Iowa; it’s close to Chicago and the Mississippi River. (“Oh, Mi-shu-shee-pee.” Hearing students say, “Where are you come from?” drove me up a wall. And China provided plenty both of ungrammatical questions and walls with which I could climb up. I could tolerate other grammar slip-ups, but this one had me giving my answer through gritted teeth. It was one of the few cases where I would blurt out grammar correction.)

Q: “Do you like Chinese food?”
A: Some of it is fine. (This is my polite answer. It is a true answer, but I spare them any criticism for their country’s unsanitary food preparation and rudimentary recipes that basically went: “Step 1: Chop it up. Step 2: Stir-fry it in an inch-deep pool of oils or boil it in soup. Apply Step 1 and Step 2 to whatever it is you are planning on eating.”)

“DOYOULIKE… CHI-NESE FOOD?”

Q: “How long are you in China/ How long will you come to China?”
A: The length of my stay is two semesters: September to July.

Q: “Can you use chopsticks?”
A: Yes. (What a non-starter this question was. What kind of a follow-up question can you transition into? The answer is either yes or no, and it felt a little insulting to think that I had been in China for months and still hadn’t figured it out. This question was probably the most egregious example of “Hey everybody, it’s a foreigner! Let’s all come gawk! I wonder if it has met Obama or Kobe.” To test myself, and out of spite for this question, I started to practice eating with my left hand. I thought that it would allow me to taunt, “I can use chopsticks with either hand, so that makes me better than you at chopsticks.” But the only person I actually teased with this was my gracious Aunt Fong.)

“You want to know if I can use chopsticks? I’ve got the photographic proof right here.”

Q: “Do you/ Are you like China?”
A: Sure. (Spoken dryly.)

Q: “Can you speak Chinese?”
A: A little. (I would almost always refuse to demonstrate this for a few good reasons:
1. Language is a conversation, not a demonstration, and it is very off-putting to be prompted, “Say something Chinese.” It is a natural question for people to ask, but it is usually a rude request. In my high school in Iowa, a classmate with immigrant parents from Taiwan was occasionally pestered to either “Say something in Chinese” or asked, “How do you say this in Chinese?” He would always flatly reply, “No” and shake his head. At first, I was taken aback by his standard reaction, but once I thought about it, and especially after I experienced it myself, I understood why he did this. I basically did the same. Imagine, reader, if someone prompted you in a cloying voice to “Say something in English!” Maybe you’d have a quote at the ready, but my guess is that, like me, you would be stuck for words, save the thought, “I wish you hadn’t put me on the spot.”

2. Chinese, as a language, sounds terrible, and the sounds it does make are nearly indistinguishable (more on that later). I wasn’t about to doubly humiliate myself by speaking their language impromptu, only to have them say, “What!” or have them assume the teacherly role and correct me that I was using the wrong tone (if you aren’t familiar with Chinese, every word has a tone- there are four standard tones- and if you say something with a high tone instead of a low tone, for example, then your listeners will be confused and probably won’t understand what you are trying to say).

3. I was bored with this question and I no longer wanted to endure their fulsome surprise when I spoke a sample sentence correctly.)

Q: “Do you have a girlfriend?”
A: No. (I became tired of this one, too- it never led anywhere. Only giggles from onlookers who were too shy to ask a second question. So, I followed my Aunt Fong’s advice and I started telling people, “It’s a secret.” They would usually persist, even if I told them “it is a secret” in Chinese. Okay, so I would use Chinese with strangers when I had to.)

Q: “Do you want a Chinese girlfriend?”
A: As long as I don’t have to live in China. (I was tempted, but I never actually said that. I usually just blushed.)

Q: “How old are you?”
(Reluctantly, I would give this answer out. I tried avoiding a direct answer by telling them I was in my 20’s, or “it’s a secret.” Of course, a fool and his question are not soon parted, so they would just repeat themselves more forwardly until I gave them what they wanted. Because of my young face, most people were eager to know. One taxi driver guessed that I was 16.)

Q: “What is your QQ number?”
A: I don’t know. I have one, but I don’t know it. (Gasps of shock. “You don’t know your QQ number?!”

What is QQ? The Chinese government has an office that electronically patrols their Great Firewall, blocking controversial search terms and social websites like Facebook and Twitter. The most popular social software in China, among children and adults, is QQ, a chat program with add-ons like personal profile pages. Chinese students exchange phone numbers to text each other, but equally important is one’s QQ number. Me telling them, “I don’t know it” sounded as absurd to their ears as saying, “Yeah, I’ve got a phone, but I’m not sure what the number is.” More shocking to them was when I told them that no one in America uses QQ and no one has ever heard of it. “But how do you chat?” they would cry. My reply: “People just use Facebook and Twitter.” Or Snapchat, Instagram, whatever.)

The things I was asked were the obvious, immediate things a Chinese person would ask a foreigner, and of course that is why I heard them so frequently. This was wearying, but the real problem was that these questions were usually the entire conversation. They didn’t lead anywhere. Conversations didn’t build depth of meaning or relationship. After a student asked one question, they were usually done. Confidence and English language reserves spent. I would have to put in the work and follow up “Do you like Chinese food?” and other questions by asking them in return, “How about you? Do you like foreign food? Pizza? Pasta?” Usually, they would tell me no, they only liked Chinese food. And that was it. End of conversation tree. My time in China was a lonely experience not because no one tried to speak English to me- just the opposite, I had strangers enough who would try that- but because the questions and conversations had nothing to say.

One of many strangers who asked to take his picture with me. In this case, while I was touring the Great Wall.