Tag: Life in China (Page 1 of 3)

The Real China: Handsome Foreign Spies and Open Secrets

April 21, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

Posters across Beijing are warning Chinese women to beware of handsome foreign men who might be romancing state secrets out of them. You can see the full comic-style poster and read about it here and here.

As the consensus most shuai guh (handsome guy) among the students and teachers at my university, I should state now that the only secrets I blazed abroad were the open secrets: that China is a rotten, awful country deserving of universal censure, a place of proverbial lawlessness and pollution, with foul-mouthed pushy masses of people fouling the earth with their trash, spit, and excrement, and the cars, buses, and bikes on the streets destroying any peace with their recklessness and blaring horns, and all the selfish, crowded ugliness happening under the sagging smog of the dishwater-colored sky.

But back to the story of the comic, one thing I’ve never understood is how so-called handsome foreign men are even persuading local Chinese women to date them. All my small talk fizzled out before it ever got flirtatious.

Me: So, what do you like to do?

Aggressively Introverted Chinese girl: I LIKE… WATCH TV.

Me, smiling solicitously: Okay. Do you like anything else?

Her: JUST WATCH TV.

Me, giggling nervously: Okay, that’s good. Do you like TV dramas? Prison Break?

Her: …

Me, after a deflating pause: Do you like sleeping?

Her: YES. I LIKE.

[END CONVERSATION AS BOTH LOOK AROUND FOR SOMETHING TO DISTRACT THEMSELVES WITH.]

I learned to assume that everyone in China counted sleeping or dreaming as a hobby. One girl took being a cold fish to an extreme though and told me she had no interests, nothing, even despite me pressing her if she liked the staples of sleep and TV. In a way, that’s a lot more interesting than saying “JUST WATCH TV.”

So, I have no idea how the few foreign guys I saw in China with Chinese girlfriends got that way. I assume they wore it on their sleeve that they were looking for a Chinese girlfriend and they found their inverse half in a worldly metropolis like Beijing.

And- hold everything- since when was it that foreigners were spying on China and not the other way around? Is there a single piece of military equipment, a single automobile, computer, clothing line, or Chinese toy that was not blatantly cheated and copied from foreign sources? A friend of mine works as an engineer for a car company and he’s told me how his management has issued real warnings- not simple cartoons that are getting laughed at in China and abroad- about sharing too much data with Chinese clients because of the now obvious business wisdom that China steals and spies out whatever intellectual property it can.

But this is communist tyranny. Everything corrupts from the inside, from the top down, with the stiff-browed leaders perpetually making highhanded, doublespeak excuses and laughably see-through shows of triumphal patriotism and Big Brother brainwashing. What an awful country.

In fact, at one dinner a few talented English students of mine confessed to me that they all three wanted foreign boyfriends because they found them much more handsome and appealing than Chinese men. Now, I met a lot of decent, likable guys in China, but I could see the ladies’ point. The Chinese husbands I witnessed too often showed off domineering, drinking, dismissive, pouty, entitled behavior, not caring who was watching and seeming to have no appreciation for how much more attractive and shapely their wives were compared to them.

As I’ve said before, the greatest threat from foreign guests in China, handsome or not, is when they see China for what it really is.

The Real China: Conclusion

March 17, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 2 Comments

The ultimate travel fantasy is not to any place, but to the foreign country of the past, to see the people who lived in one’s home country and culture in their shockingly ancient yet familiar form. The language could be understood and the traditions recognized, but the words used and the way people were would be the most fascinating difference.

My desire to see China was not a longing to live in another hemisphere where the people’s faces looked different and they lived in more exotic architecture. I wanted to see China because I wanted to see what it was like to be human without being a modern American. I wanted life without the restraints of American assumptions. All of our culture and language has a precedent, and I wanted to be in a society that had grown from different roots.

Would the people’s facial expressions and voices be the same as I was used to- in general- only substituting strange-sounding words? Would I feel a natural connection with people and make friends across cultural barriers? Would I feel at home away from home? Would I find my niche? How would things feel differently from the way I had always assumed the world was?

Going to China was not just time spent abroad, a résumé highlight or adventurous gap year. It was life lived among people with completely different hearts, minds, and habits. Things overlapped, as human customs everywhere will, but in colloquial terms these people had no interest in football tailgates, processed foods, hip-hop music, or the American dream. (Well, if you want to be difficult, many Chinese families do dream of sending a child to America for college, and it seems as if as many Chinese as possibly can do emigrate out of China into whatever clean and wealthy country they can get into, with America traditionally at the top of that dream list, but that is not to say that the typical person in urban or semi-urban China conceives of life in American terms.)

In many ways, it was a relief to be there, and I savored the luxuries of Chinese life. By that I mean it was a luxury to find reprieve from the cultural nuisances I lived with in America. In China, the people might have had loud phone conversations in small, public spaces (e.g. the elevator or taxi cab) but my brain had no idea what they were saying. I did not have to involuntarily eavesdrop the way I do with all the rude, sometimes scandalous private conversations I overhear in America.

Another great thing, I only had a guest spot in Chinese society, so it did not stress me to hear people boast about their status. I had no idea, again, what it meant when they advertised the name of their university or the corporation they worked for. “Good for you,” I would tell them without envy. No one I met in China really had what I wanted, so proclamations of personal success rolled off me like water off a…Peking duck before it was killed and roasted- when it had water-wicking feathers, that is.

My acquaintances were not pursuing the American dream- a big house in the suburbs with a big yard, big cars, big salary, and big retirement fund- they were after the Chinese dream- moving to a big, crowded city with job opportunities at mostly depressing jobs, living in a dingy apartment, having one male child, having a foreign car that was inconvenient to park and dangerous to drive, and either getting rich from a non-stop work schedule or from Communist Party funds. I did not want what the Chinese were after, so it made it easy for me to shrug off the competition.

I also savored being around young people who tried to dress in a youthful way rather than an older, sexier way, whose appearance was modest in that they wore simple clothes that covered rather than showed off their bodies, modest in that their attitudes and actions were carefree and without worldly cynicism. The people did not often assert themselves and their identity. In China, when an authority figure or respected leader admonished the people, they listened. They may not have followed, and too often the things they did follow were the irrational words of a demagogue meant to cow the people, but as a people they felt oneness with each other and tried to band together.

That seems like ugly naivety to say that, I know, like I have come around after all my criticism to apologize for China’s brutal authoritarian state, but my meaning is the sense of place felt by the common man. Everyone in China seemed like a part of a whole, or at least the people I met uniformly expressed a strong connection to their Chinese identity. The phrase “We Chinese…” was used to begin many declarative sentences, and it was never a question if the individual saying it could speak on behalf of “we, the Chinese people.” Coming from a land of individualism, alienation, and identity politics, that seemed amazing.

And from the schools and students I saw, there were no obvious cliques of outcasts, rebels, or sharply defined popular kids. Making friends seemed so easy when every student spent their day with the same 30-50 classmates and they all saw school not as a social gaming table but as a serious work with coveted rewards of choice schools and jobs.

I was relieved not to be around the darkness and apathy of American individualism, where not one thing can be said, not one value can be preached, without the strife of vulgar internet message boards and self-justifying arguments. In a fractured society, every piece has sharp edges; they cannot be put together with incompatible pieces. I could better tune out the hostile words in China because I could not understand more than a small fraction of what was spoken. It was up to me to search out the English language materials of my choice. I was free from the bombardment of slang terms that grow like bacteria off of the internet, pop music, and television. No one in China ever told me, out loud, “LOL,” “awesome sauce,” “that rocks my face off,” or insulted my ignorance of the newest shorthand terms for drugs and sex acts. No one, except for people in Shanghai and Hong Kong- possibly– ever judged me for my clothes, for not wearing cool jeans and shoes, or for wearing my shirt tucked into my pants “like an old man.”

China, a land or loud crowds and pollution, was in many ways my place of solitude. I escaped the tyranny of American culture that had left me a pariah in my own hometown. I knew I would not be excluded or shunned the same way in China because the people did not know how to judge me.

My essays on China were not written for personal judgment, but for comment and critique of culture. I write not so much about China as about why people do what they do, how they live, and what are the observable consequences in a people’s culture. The perspective I gained in China I apply to my view of every culture, including my own. China happened to be the place where I lived, the place I commented on, but if you have been reading closely, you will have noticed that this commentary critiqued America sharply, too, and the broader cultural forces that are universal to all societies.

Back to the dream of traveling to the past. I would like to do this for the same reasons I went to China. All the documents and artifacts and the way the scholars, historians, journalists, filmmakers, and writers have described the past- is it true? Or more exactly, how close is it to the truth? What would the people really be like? Live like? Talk like? If they used English, how well would I understand them? Our dictionaries overlap, but from the way the people of earlier times wrote, I can tell they think, believe, and speak in fundamentally different ways than the people I live with today. I do not wish to escape to the past, but I would like to see it, be immersed in it, and let my observations and intuition shape my perspective. That is what I have done with China.

The real result is that there was much to be offended with in the country that I looked to with such airy anticipation. But if a man expects to live in any society, he either has to believe in it and be a part of it, or he has to make peace with his unhappy conscience and abide in a small niche of a corrupted whole. I could not accept the corruption of China. I could not smile and say the good outweighed the bad. I think I have long desired to depart the United States for much of the same reasons.

I am convinced that, if Americans from before our grandparents’ generation could see their homeland today, their strongest impression would not come from our computers, our convenient home appliances, or our city infrastructure. They would not be most surprised by a child using a smart phone or families traversing interstates in a hybrid car. Instead, they would be shocked by the way children talked to their parents and the way parents talked to their children. They would be taken aback by how all the easy technology had isolated people and made their minds dependent, how it had changed basic attitudes and behavior. I am sure they would question the widespread example of parents who were modeling a conformist, materialistic lifestyle for their children. Personal music devices and DVD players would not be as amazing as the language and content of the material being played. The amazement of smart phones would sour when it was seen how much they spoiled dinners and conversations.

Americans from the past might fall prey to the quick and facile lifestyle of microwaved meals and instant entertainment- human nature dictates they would- but I imagine that the first impressions of many would mirror my observations in China. I was not so surprised at the different vehicles being driven on Chinese city streets, but in the willingness of the drivers to run me over. People mattered most, not technology.

I was not confused by the sound of the Chinese people’s words, but by the volume and aggression they were regularly spoken with. I expected to see poverty, but what most alarmed me was how a brand new hospital building could be overwhelmed with loitering families who filled the just-opened lobbies with dirty blankets and careless trash. Foreign technology and television had made its way into China, and the ingestion of electronic media was very familiar to me. The car had made its way even to the smallest towns I visited (I was told by my two Australian friends that only about five years before our town had one traffic light and no cars). Technology in China and the outward forms of buildings and cities- while often very different- were familiar to me in their basics and not surprising at all. What shocked me about Chinese streets was not the way they looked different, but the way people spat and urinated on them. An American-born Chinese person (“ABC” in both Chinese and Chinese-American slang) can instantly be told apart from her Chinese-born peers not by her iPhone and Nike clothes, which can be bought in China, too, but by the way she wears her clothes and the way her face looks.

The point of observing culture- the point of this whole effort- is not to be found in a bloodless survey of outward modes of living. The point is to see the outworking of human thought and human hearts. My Aunt Fong would always tell me “China need time,” a strange apology from a civilization always boasting about its most ancient character, but no, I thought, China need reform- foundational reform that comes from the reform of people’s hearts

Since leaving, I have vacillated between foreswearing China forever and making a return someday to see Aunt Fong and try and find a better way of living there. I love Aunt Fong like my mother, and I talk to her every week over the computer. I also long to see all the friends and students I met in China again. I imagine being able to start new relationships with them, having my heart refined by experience and renewed hope. But I also keep in mind that China is still much the same place as I left it. I might be admired by the people there, but most of them can only giggle and gawk at me, perhaps asking me about my favorite NBA team and whether I can use chopsticks.

I do plan on seeing Aunt Fong again- how could I not? My dilemma now is how long to stay in China and what to travel there for. A one or two-week vacation is not worth the expense or time of a twenty hour flight in my opinion. A stay longer than a month would require a visa sponsorship; I would need to have work in China. I hesitate to do that because of the misery I already experienced standing in front of a Chinese classroom. As much as I respected my elementary school music teachers and participated in their classes, that is how much my Chinese students responded to me. To my former teachers: I have done my penance. I see what I was like. I am sorry.

I was always hoping to see more of the church in China. I have asked Aunt Fong to help me find a way to observe the house churches and meet with them. She has helped me get peaks inside a few churches in what turned out to be frustrated visits. Perhaps, God willing, that hope will fully come to fruition.

For now, I am where I am. I daily dream about finding a new culture to live in and observe, or I think through how best I should get to work from my home base in Iowa writing about my experiences already. Eventually, I hope to find a place where I can be at peace and believe in what I am doing, not so much because I have found the right location, but because I have been refined and found people that I want to join together with as one culture.

Thank you for reading and commenting.

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.

The World’s Best, Worst, Most, Least, -est, -iest, and -un’s*

January 1, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

This is a popular time of year for lists of all kinds, and while mine isn’t confined to the year 2015 alone, I thought it might be a fitting time to share. It’s a survey of the superlative places, or better put, the places most notable for each superlative category in the whole world*. (*that I’ve been to**.) (**not just in 2015, but in my lifetime.) While my list isn’t as timely as other common year-end lists, it more than compensates for this in originality of categories. Let’s begin with something fairly typical and move on from there. The…

Best Food: Japan
Runner-up: Thailand
Honorable Mention: New York City

Japan’s famous dishes: sushi, noodles, yakitori (barbecue), teppanyaki (the showy iron hibachi grill food) is all great, but in all my time in Japan, every single thing I tried except for the donuts and desserts was excellent. Japanese tastes are usually right on, in my book, except when it comes to sweet foods. They’d probably find a saltine cracker “too sweet. Oh, no, too sweet.” I have no idea how those seaweed-eaters stay so skinny with all that good food around. Maybe because it’s all incredibly expensive?

Thailand is the country with my second-favorite food. Its people and restaurants are close to my heart. Unlike Japan, almost every place you eat at in Thailand is inexpensive and unpretentious. And there are street food vendors galore, so you never run out of new things to try.

New York is probably the place with the best food I’ve tried in my own country, with the very large caveat that it’s all way overpriced, as if the whole city were inside an airport terminal, and way too classy for a simple Iowan like me to navigate and feel welcome in. A longtime resident there asked me my favorite food in the city, and to get out of her glaring spotlight, I replied generically, “Uh, I like the pizza.” But that wasn’t enough to get me off the hook. “Like what, you mean a pie? Or by the slice? What kind of pizza?” She grilled me so bad I wished I had told her I only ate peanut butter sandwiches, but then she probably would have interrogated me on what kind of peanut butter and bread I used and then humiliated me for using mass market name brands.

Best Meal Experience: China
Runner-up: Korea

I’ve written about how fun (and wild) Chinese dinners could be here and here. In short, Chinese dinners, in celebration with family and friends, are hours-long events with many rounds of food, drinking, toasts, and merrymaking. While the average meal was pretty dismal in China, a big dinner was filled with dozens and dozens of different dishes to choose from, and the fun atmosphere of the event filled a whole evening. The dinners really were the highlight of my time in China.

I’m not crazy about Korean food, (unlike Koreans, whom I believe are in a sense really deranged about their own food, with anecdotes of Korean airline travelers telling security guards that they need to bring their kimchi on board because Koreans can’t eat the food in other countries- look it up), but Korea is a great place to eat out with friends. For one, Korea is jam-packed with independently-owned restaurants, most of which are furnished with long tables meant for very large groups. And the up-all-night culture means there is always a place you can find to take a group of one or two dozen people at any time for barbecue or a crowd-pleaser like chicken and beer or spicy chicken stew (jjimdak). While I disagreed with all the sour pickles being served at every Korean meal, I could never turn down barbecue, a fool-proof and plentiful option in the busy streets of Korea.

Jjimdak, from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/FOD/FO_EN_6_4_4.jsp?cid=586927

Worst Meal Experience: USA
Runner-up: China

In America, the places available to eat at where I live mostly expect you to sit down, order, eat, pay, and go quickly, with a waitress (cue the authoritarian Millennial: “That’s SERVER.”) constantly coming up and asking you, “How’s everything for ya?” or “How’s that tastin’ for ya?” or anything else “for ya?” Then, after turning down dessert “for ya” by asking for “just the check,” you chat a little, then leave and go home and scroll through your phone. Boring. Any place in America that doesn’t follow this model, in my experience, has been a neat independent place, or more likely, an elite dining experience far out of my price range and cultural comfort zone.

Runner-up is China, because although the special dinners there were great fun, they always brought stomach pain in their wake, and the average meal there was something lousy that you would expect to find as a sight gag in a dreary scene of a movie. Limp, oil-soaked vegetables, hardly any protein, unrecognizable bland, soft-textured, gelatinous foods, stinky foods like smelly tofu, and all of it prepared below acceptable hygienic standards. Okay, maybe not ALL of it, all of it, was prepared with poor hygiene, but enough must have been that I had stomach pain on a weekly basis and spent three days in the hospital at the end of my year-long stay.

Worst Food Instincts: Korea
Runner-up: USA

I think, long ago in the time dominated by robed, funny hat-wearing Confucian scholars, the isolated peninsula of Korea considered its mountainous terrain, cold winters, and limited fruit and vegetable production potential, and began philosophically analyzing everything edible with the question, “But what if we pickle it?” As in, “These green beans would taste great if freshly picked and then boiled or grilled, but what if we pickle them?” Americans think they have a taste for the exotic when they express a fondness for kimchi, but little do they realize that Koreans eat kimchi at literally every meal. Kimchi is not just the cabbage stuff either, there are several kinds of kimchi, with the most common being the cabbage and radish kinds, and there are all kinds of pickled foods eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Being helpless to find a healthy meal anywhere in Korea of lean meats and fresh vegetables, or fresh fruits, without breaking the bank, was an aggravating experience that made me want to toss my sanity to the wind and lash out to a Korean audience, “I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU PEOPLE GOT SO BIG! ALL YOU EAT IS CARBS AND PICKLES! AND YOU TAKE THE ELEVATOR AND ESCALATOR EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF WALKING. BUT YOU’RE THE THICKEST, HEALTHIEST-LOOKING PEOPLE IN THE ORIENT! WHAT GIVES?!” (Cue the authoritarian Millennial again: “It’s called EAST ASIA. Oriental is a rug.” Cue everyone born in East Asia who has learned English and wasn’t educated overseas: “But we say Orient.”)

America gets the shame of being runner-up in this category because of our obvious, out-of-control instincts to manufacture food with high sugar content, and to load comfort foods with craving-inducing things like bacon and melted cheese and so on. Absurd Frankenstein sandwiches like KFC’s Double Down, made out of two “buns” of fried chicken with cheese and bacon in between are a successful parody of America’s eat-whatever-looks-tasty mentality, and could possibly be a surprisingly healthy alternative, like the Double Down is, to even fattier sugar and carb-loaded cousins. (Compare the classic Burger King Whopper and the Double and Triple Whopper.) It’s a shame to have to talk about and try to explain the American diet to acquaintances overseas, and I think a very sad and shameful reality for us Americans to live with. Why do we continue to eat this way?

The Double Down sandwich, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-double-down-sandwich-smart-marketing-and-not-as-gross-as-youd-think/

Smelliest Place: Busan, Korea
Runner-up: China
Dishonorable Mentions: Key West, Florida and New York City

When I first came to Busan, an exceptionally glib Korean man introduced himself to me and asked where I was from. When I said Iowa, he responded by telling me, garnished with an unctuous ear-to-ear grin, how he had driven through Iowa once and been bombarded by the wafting stench of manure. Yes, I replied through politely gritted teeth, there are quite a lot of farms in Iowa. I knew it was undignified at the time, but I only had a faint idea how outrageous it was for a Busan resident to be having a laugh at the unpleasant smells of any other place.

Iowa is the US’s leading producer of corn and pork, and there are many other farms producing other crops and livestock, so the farm stink settling over its lonesome highways is an unfortunate byproduct of agricultural necessity. Iowans prefer to endure it with a good-humored perspective by repeating the tongue-in-cheek line “That’s the smell of money.” But Busan’s smell? It’s not a necessary byproduct of anything. It is, as far as I could tell, the smell of incompetent plumbing and infrastructure. Every open creek winding through this otherwise picturesque city reeks like an open sewer, as do most of its busy shopping centers if the competing smells of frying oil and grilling meat aren’t enough to mask it. I’ve lived in Iowa most of my life, yet I only smell bad smells on those occasional trips through the country, and even then it’s not a guaranteed fact of every long drive. In Busan, I smelled the sewer every day. It didn’t matter how I tried to mind my own business, that sewer stink found me. No matter how posh-looking or exciting the lights, sounds, and crowds are in any district in Busan, the fumes of human waste will sneak their way in and bring everyone’s haughty upturned nose back down to ugly reality. When I took walks or runs along Busan’s riverside recreational paths, which was quite a lot since the only other place to take a long walk was up a mountain, I sometimes tried holding my breath or masking my face around open drains. The intense, vomit-inducing odor was the most powerful urban stink I had been overcome with outside of China.

China, in my nickname borrowed after Thailand’s “Land of Smiles,” was the Land of Smells. It could have been shoddy plumbing like Korea, which it partially was, but it was also plant and animal waste left after street markets, restaurant refuse rotting outside, human and animal droppings on the sidewalks and streets, and the world’s worst air pollution. I went on an unwisely long run once on a blazing hot summer day in China, traversing along a riverside road from one city to another, and on my way back, passing alongside a farmer with his small herd of cows, I doubled over from the heat, dehydration, and the burning, sulfurous smell of an adjacent glass factory. I thought I would either retch or faint, and if I fainted, I figured my unconscious body would lie baking in the blazing sun until some concerned passerby called for help. Which could have been a long time, since passersby in China aren’t often concerned (see “the Little Yue Yue event”). I soldiered on, but the rest of my stay in China was never sweet-smelling. Pretty much all of China stinks, or if not, it probably means that you’ve been there long enough to have gotten used to the smell.

Dishonorable mentions of Key West, Florida, for the smell of decomposing seaweed and sargassum around its many island beaches which smells nearly like diarrhea and can be smelled for miles around, and New York City, for the smell of ammonia in every dank corner that I assume comes from human urine.

Safest Place: South Korea
Runner-up: Iowa and Middle America

I begrudgingly award this honor to South Korea because they love bragging about themselves, and Korea’s public safety is one of their most vaunted features. Yes, to answer the question asked of every foreign guest in South Korea, I did feel safe there. I much appreciated the public trust there that made it a casual, thoughtless thing to leave one’s bag and phone unattended at a coffee shop while going to the restroom. I was at times shocked when I saw school-aged girls walking alone through unlit parks and back roads to go home after their late night tutoring and study sessions. In big city America, that would be known as “looking for trouble.” But as far as I know, these girls were rarely if ever harassed. Also, the young men in Korea seldom adopt a tough, confrontational attitude as far as I saw, and I never felt the animosity of aggressive men jockeying for social rank and strong appearance like I have in America. Mostly, people minded their own business, and accidents and slip-ups could usually be smoothed over with a meek apology. There is one glaring inconsistency in Korea’s public safety record: drivers, especially scooter and motorcycle drivers, are reckless and boorish, driving over sidewalks or driving through red lights as they please, racking up an alarming number of pedestrian injuries and deaths every year. So, to rain on Koreans’ pride parade, I would point out that I never feared for my life so much as a pedestrian or car passenger in my hometown.

Speaking of, public safety often never crosses my mind where I live. To avoid the element of danger, I just stay away from bars and crowded nightlife areas. Contrary to the world’s fears about Americans’ private gun ownership, the real danger from guns is from inner-city gangs, drug and alcohol-related crime, robberies, and suicides. If you live in Middle America, like I do, these terrible facts of life can mostly be avoided. I’ve never bought into the hysteria that the average American gun owner has a loose hand cannon just waiting to go off. I should mention though, that like Korea, I worry about traffic accidents and injuries. I’ve thought to myself many times that if I died violently, it would probably be from being crashed into by a teenager texting while driving. Big roads and cars dominate American life, and there’s no way to avoid them.

Most Dangerous: China
Runner-up: Manila, Philippines

If I had to pick a “Most Dangerous” place, I would say China because I almost died there and because many times I thought a wild taxi driver or purposeful truck driver callous to the human life of pedestrians would plow into me without a care. I thought I could have been crushed by panic spreading through one of the many crowds I was inevitably caught in, or from getting sick through poor hygienic conditions, pollution, and exposure to the cold (Chinese buildings aren’t allowed to have central heating unless they’re above the geographical mid-line set by the government, or unless they’re a big public or commercial space like a train station or mall).

I also feared for my life in the mean streets of Manila, where I was eyed as prey by nearly every onlooker, and where relatively safe transportation is hard to procure unless you tip a police officer to flag down a taxi whose driver is likewise eager to extort extra money out of you. Plus, every shopping center and public transportation hub has armed police and metal detectors, and pistol and shotgun-wielding police were a common sight outside of shops and banks. There was a worry of attacks by political groups, but even more so I was afraid that a lax officer’s casual grip on his shotgun handle would send an accidental spray into the street. Manila is also the only place I’ve been pick-pocketed, so that infamy earns it high marks of distinction on the dangerous list.

More ranks of honor and dishonor to come.

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: Hospitals

December 11, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Patients in the front lobby waiting for their number their number to be called.

Imagine taking your children here or seeking urgent help for yourself in this chaos. This was in Shanghai, a first-tier city, so keep in mind that these are much better-than-average facilities. I visited hospitals in third-tier cities that looked like they had been abandoned until recently; hallways were dark, floors were dirty, beds were messes of blankets and floor mats, and in one instance, the urinal emptied onto the floor.

Here, I squeezed into a packed elevator and rode it up to the 15th floor, with people pushing out and shoving in, hearing the weight alarm beep, and shuffling out again, for several stops on the ride up. In another stuffed elevator, a woman at the control panel screamed violently at a passenger whose bag was blocking the door. In Chinese, there are no polite words and phrases like “Please move.” In the 15th floor lobby, people with tumors and other obvious maladies were waiting shoulder to shoulder, or making room so that a physician could take pictures of a screaming little girl’s deformed hand as her parents stretched her wrist out against the wall. There was no privacy, no order, no expectation to be seen in a timely or sympathetic fashion. China, to any civilized visitor, is a nightmare experience of constant crowds, filth, noise, and stress.

Waiting in line and pushing through the masses in a modern Chinese hospital.

My Hospital Experiences in Semi-Urban China

The first time I entered a Chinese hospital, I was tagging along with Aunt Fong as she visited her sister, a nurse. I wanted out.

Once we were in the exam room- a bare, concrete floor with peeling plaster walls, filled with only a clunky wooden table, and a metal cabinet with glass cupboard doors, illuminated by the dim fluorescent bulb overhead and the street lights filtered in through the barred windows- I thought this must be a place where Chinese police take suspects to confess. To get out of that hospital, I probably would have signed whatever bogus papers they put in front of me, detailing my alleged crimes against their People’s Republic.

I seriously was giving thanks to God that I did not presently need the services of the hospital. This was at night, after hours, when there were no patients in the lobby or quiet hallways, so I was spared from seeing anyone suffering. About two months later, I did need the services of the larger city hospital, badly.

At Sanda (kickboxing) practice, my instructor would always pair me up with his nephew, who was easily many levels above the rest of the class, and who never pulled his punches when it came time to pummel me. It happened that he and I were sparring in front of the older students in the class (a lot of elementary and junior high-aged students also came to practice after school, but they were usually occupied with horseplay at the other end of the gym). Whenever there is an audience, the act increases in intensity and commitment. I never set out to hurt anyone while sparring, but the goal of landing blows means pain is never completely avoidable, and the natural rhythm of two sparring partners will go back and forth and often escalate. My instructor’s nephew and I often had sustained battles that were basically real fights, only lacking a referee and a bell to separate us. I had to bring more intensity than I naturally preferred; the beatings would not soften on my account.

That night in October, when my sparring partner and I were the center of attention, he was landing shots and getting the best of me as usual. I became frustrated, but I didn’t try and rush at him in anger. Without much thought, I quickly snapped my left leg up and let a kick fly against his face. The timing for a head kick is difficult to make, but this strike landed solid. There was an audible thud, I saw my opponent’s pupils rattle, and I stepped back in shock.

I started pleading how sorry I was; my instructor applauded me and told me good job, not to worry, there would be no hard feelings. I still feared a reprisal from a young man who was very capable of dishing one out. As he went into the bathroom to wash out the blood in his mouth and check for injuries, I meekly retreated to the edge of the mat to check my foot. Meanwhile, all the older students were in an uproar, telling me enthusiastically how great the kick was and encouraging me to knock him out, pumping their fists and cheering “K.O.!” I suspected they also had received punishment from my sparring partner’s fists and shins.

On my foot, there was a small cut, right on the top of the base of my second toe, the small joint where the metatarsal meets the phalange. I wanted to wash it off and put a bandage on it, but everyone forbid me. Aunt Fong even put a plastic bag around my foot before I took a shower. The locals were more terrified of their water supply than I was. They might have been right to be so cautious, but over the next few days, things went from bad to worse. Their methods- rubbing the gash with alcohol swabs and taping a square of gauze over it- did me no good either.

The day after the incident, I was walking with a limp and feeling shameful that such a small wound would force me out of practice. I couldn’t understand why my foot was so stiff and painful from one gash. It was no matter, I consoled myself, I had no school the next week because of the National Day holiday, and I could relax and recover on my vacation in Shanghai.

Aunt Fong and I had planned the trip, but business prevented her from joining us at the last moment, so I went with Uncle Jiang by train and met his sister and her daughter in China’s largest city. They were on holiday, too, and our group met up with Uncle Jiang’s son, who lived and worked in the city, for a few days of sightseeing.

Limping my way through the Shanghai crowds.

The first day, I soldiered on, hobbling through the shoulder-to-shoulder and chest-to-back street crowds. Back at the hotel, we examined my foot and saw it had bled through both the gauze and my sock. The yellow, orange, and pink discharge look awful, and my foot was swollen and painful to the touch. Removing or slipping on my shoe caused me to wince sharply in pain. I tried to convince myself that my wound would heal in a few days and I could tough out the pain, but Uncle Jiang saw things otherwise. After checking my foot and replacing the gauze, he said no more outings (no discussion), so our group spent most of the next two days in the hotel room. I did get to walk outside on occasion to get something to eat.

I at least got in one day of sightseeing in upscale Pudong, Shanghai.

For the remaining time on our Shanghai holiday, my foot swelled more and more, and when I took off my shoe in the crowded train station as we waited for our homebound train, the wound was so infected that it oozed out pus when I touched it with an alcohol swab. It was disgusting, painful, and scary all at once. I was afraid for my foot.

After a breezy ride back from Shanghai on the G Train, Uncled Jiang and I took a taxi straight to a hotel restaurant to meet Aunt Fong some of their old medical college colleagues. After eating, she whisked me off to the medical college hospital for what would turn out to be a traumatic afternoon.

The street in front of the hospital was closed to traffic, so knickknack and toy vendors rolled out tarps to hawk their wares, and patients and their family members poured out to the lobby’s many open doors like ants out of a mound. Since Aunt Fong worked for the medical college affiliated with the hospital, she led me around as she pleased, trying to find a doctor she knew personally. We never stopped at a desk to check-in or pause at any time to sit and fill out paperwork and wait. Aunt Fong rushed through the place, with me limping behind, the scenery pouring over me and stupefying my thoughts. Aunt Fong cut through the crowd without turning her head; I oscillated left and right between patients with bandaged heads and open wounds and the huddles of country farmers on the chairs and on the floor. The atmosphere was not unlike the bedlam of the nearby street markets. Any area was fair game for sitting or lying down, the sound of people loudly talking rang through the halls, patients crowded around doctors as they filled out prescriptions one-by-one for the scattered line-up of people in the exam room, and the building interior looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in the past 30 years.

Looking at the walls with thin paint and the floors worn smooth, the old white window casings and wire grating, I was aghast how doctors could practice medicine here and how patients could convalesce while lying in a mess of blankets, for example, in a bed in the hallway. American hospitals try and remove the unpleasantness and make the painful, uncomfortable experience as tolerable as possible. Their freshly painted walls, bright lighting, area carpeting, padded chairs, wall art, informative posters, private waiting rooms, and well-ordered interchange between departments all project sterility and a soothing sense of expertise. While the fear of procedures and bad news prevents patients from relaxing, the hospitals have been designed and built to reduce as much anxiety as can be.

I don’t know what to compare the Chinese hospital environment to, except the many other dilapidated public buildings in China in need of a good janitor and maintenance team, or better yet, a wrecking crew. I will say this: whenever I’ve seen pictures of America from around the turn of the 20th century, I have always gotten a feeling that the buildings were unclean and full of cracked glass and dirty residue that gathered in the corners. I would question: is this the poor photographic quality, or was the world really so dingy back then? The people themselves looked desperate and skeletal, having grim, hollow expressions and wearing clothes that appeared tattered and dirty, as if they had been collecting dust in an attic. If the people were dressed nicely, as many were, I marvel at how dignified they looked in contrast to the casual gym shirts, sweat pants, yoga pants, jeans, and sandals of Americans today.

Skeletal, grim, tattered, dirty, dingy, cracked- that is how the Chinese hospital looked to me. It was as if I were wearing X-ray specs from an old comic book, only instead of see-through, the filter placed over my eyes made everything dirty, dim, and faded. Every square foot of building and every haggard figure combined to form a visual masterwork on the themes of urban despair and the horrors of poverty. It would be futile to try and tally all the character traits of the twelve-story building and its hundreds of inhabitants, their dusty cotton jackets and dirt-stained hands. All I can intimate about the hospital in writing (it deserved an oil treatment from a Realist painter) is the feel of my pallid complexion and stiff throat as I tried to calm myself and will my shaky body to walk smoothly through the halls of grime, injury, and disease. I was filled with disquiet and I brindled like a leashed animal being dragged forward after it smelled medicine and fear, although I had to play the part of a steady man of reserve.

Please don’t misunderstand my narrative on the hospital and its patients. I do not look down on the poor or disparage them (I’m poor by American standards, but that is a very relative standard). My terror was in the confines of a chaotic facility where poverty and pestilence joined forces to put on a show of suffering. A local friend I met, who had spent two years studying in America, told me that the government had opened up the city’s hospitals to all the surrounding country towns, so the facilities had become overrun with mobs of travelers seeking help. Relatives of the ill often did not have the money to afford a simple hotel room, so they would lay out cardboard and blankets and sleep in the elevator lobbies. In the wild mix of humanity, filling every exam room and waiting area, could be found the local city residents, in casual clothes, and the rural poor- no romantic country swains of pastoral imagery, but more like the crowds who mocked and scoffed at Don Quixote, wearing thick, all-weather coats and pants.

The different types of people were so many, and so intermixed, that I could not separate who was who or what office each area performed. I was overwhelmed. People walked into exam rooms as they pleased and watched the physician over his shoulder as he wrote a prescription for someone else. The talking never stopped. But as rude and unruly as the masses were, I could not help but feel great sorrow and pity when I saw painfully sick men on a hospital bed in the hallway (there was not enough space for every patient in the rooms) surrounded by family members who were weary from standing around all day. I felt helpless, not having a way to heal or comfort these people.

After Aunt Fong found a couple different doctors to ask for information (she never paused to greet anyone, she would immediately start speaking at someone and they would answer right back) we got on an overcrowded elevator (the only kind of elevator in a Chinese public building), headed for the 11th floor. She walked straight past the Nurses’ Station counter and into the small doctors’ and nurses’ office. One of Aunt Fong’s friends from the luncheon, herself a medical doctor, was along with us, and she and my aunt hurriedly made conversation with the staff in the office until they found the doctor they were looking for. A faceless man wearing the uniform white lab coat and face mask sat me down on a chair and set my injured foot up on a stool. After examining the infected wound and making some remarks to Aunt Fong and her friend, he went to the cabinet and pulled out a large pair of tweezers, cotton alcohol swabs, and a metal pan.

Aunt Fong’s friend looked at me with pity and gripped my shoulder. Aunt Fong grabbed my hand and told me, “Close yo’w eyes.” I focused, trying to recite familiar psalms in my head as the doctor went to work. The acute pain of the tweezers inside my skin caused me to grit my teeth and breathe hard out my nostrils. I thought it was terrible but I could suffer through it. The doctor’s work took time, and the waves of pain soon made me start to sweat. Before long, I began to feel flushed with intense heat.

I opened my eyes just enough to see the doctor finishing. I weakly tried to wave him away. My neck could no longer keep my head erect and I knew I was about to pass out. Aunt Fong and her friend urged me to sit up, but I remained slumped over with my head between my knees. They lifted me under their shoulders, and with one Chinese woman under each of my long arms, they walked me past the Nurses’ Station and into an exam room. The sight of a six-foot tall (nearly two meters to them) limp, foreign body stumbling forward with assistance was quite a sight for them and I inspired a lot of giggles when I returned the next week for a check-up.

I stood out in China.

After lying down for a while and regaining the color in my face, we were back on the elevator, going down and turning away surplus doctors and patients who tried boarding on the floors between the eleventh and the ground.
There was still the matter of the bones in my rigid foot. Aunt Fong led me down another hallway and grabbed a radiologist who was having a smoke in the hallway, outside the X-Ray room. He held his lit cigarette with one hand as he adjusted the camera above my foot with his free hand. I quietly laughed at the scene, unthinkable now in America, and let the comic relief soothe my earlier experience.

My foot healed, slowly, and after several more doctor visits (with alcohol swabs and metal pans, but no tweezers) and a few months’ time, I was able to curl my toes again and walk without limping. I never saw a bill for any of those visits. I assumed that in China it was all about who you know (which it is) and Aunt Fong had called on her relationships to help me out. Really, I just followed her, received care, and didn’t ask questions.

At the university, I did pay once for antibiotics when I came down with bad, flu-like symptoms. Two students escorted me from room to room and helped translate for me so the doctor could write me a prescription. I learned from the students that their mandatory student health insurance cost 100 yuan per year, which is around 17 American dollars.

Yet, there was one incident that did threaten to leave me with an onerous medical bill, which brings me back to the Monday after the awful weekend bus trip. After two days sitting in pain for hours at the sales office and declining food, I lay about Aunt Fong’s apartment, reading books and not even stirring to eat. I got up several times throughout the day to use the toilet, but other than that I did not have the strength to do anything other than lie in pain. Rightfully worried, Aunt Fong took me to the hospital that night.

By luck, I was able to go to the newly built city hospital on its first day open to the public. It already had people sleeping in the elevator lobbies and lounging on the steps outside, but the equipment inside was clean and unused. Before this hospital was available, the closest “Western” hospital was a short train ride away in Nanjing. Sue, the Australian, made her husband, Grant, promise to immediately take her there if anything serious ever happened to her.

A nurse inserted an IV into my arm, and she let two bags of fluid drain into my dehydrated body. An hour later, I stood up to go back to Aunt Fong’s. Or so I thought.

I made it into the elevator with her, but as the doors started to close, I felt my body slumping to the ground. For a moment, I lost consciousness, then I struggled to blink open my eyes and watch as the elevator’s button panel tilted to an oblique angle before me. Aunt Fong was making panicked noises as she tugged on my arm and pulled me out of the elevator. The sounds were murky, but I could hear her crying out for help and running down the hall. The clamor of footsteps came rushing back to me, and I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough to see the doctors or nurses, but I felt two of them pick me up and sit me in a wheelchair.

“Fong bian,” I breathed out softly. I needed to use the bathroom, I told them, immediately. It must have been the IV fluids; I needed to clear out my system. They wheeled me to the bathroom quickly, then two aides cautiously watched me over the squatting toilet, and in a dire moment like that there was no thought of shame. I sat back on the wheelchair for a short ride, then they transferred me to a bed and rushed me down the hallways as fast as they could push me.

The fluorescent lights overhead blurred past my vision like dashed freeway lines. I struggled to blink my eyes open, afraid that if I closed them I would slip away and fall asleep in the biblical sense. I could hear the doctors’ urgent voices and Aunt Fong asking panicked questions as she ran alongside them. Repeating the refrain of familiar psalms in my head, I willed myself not to lose consciousness.

I was taken to the top floor and wheeled to an open stall in the Intensive Care Unit. Sometime during the rush, a nurse squeezed two tubes of glucose into my mouth as another gave me two or three injections- I’m not clear on how many I actually received. I remembered that a friend of mine who trained in emergency medicine told me that the glucose was a disgusting, gelatinous blob, but going down it tasted sweet and smooth to me. If the FDA allowed it, I’m sure companies could market it as a new snack for sugar-happy American children; many of the yogurts and puddings on store shelves are not far off.

Aunt Fong told me that she stayed with another nurse by my bedside that night. After I was started on a new IV drip she watched me drift to sleep and then worried over my heart rate on the monitor. In the morning, a doctor who spoke English told me that they were concerned about my heart rate because it was so slow. “In fact,” he said, “last night it stopped two times.” I learned that the hospital wanted me to stay for two more days as they built up my dehydrated body with IV fluids and monitored my heart.

Most of that first morning I spent alone, then Uncle Jiang and Aunt Fong came by to visit me. Aunt Fong brought me a bowl of noodles to eat, and for the first time in a few days I was hungry. Uncle Jiang kept me company for a while when Aunt Fong had to go to her office or attend department meetings at her medical college. He and I didn’t talk much to each other. I just read from my e-book and he would look up English words in his pocket electronic translator or frequently instruct me, “Rest. Rest. You must… have a rest.” He would motion toward me as if pushing my forehead back to recline.

When it was only Aunt Fong and me, I told her, “I thought I was going to die last night. I thought I might die here in China.” She told me she feared the same thing and said that if I had died, she would die, too.
Over the next couple days, my boredom was greatly relieved when a few friends I met through Aunt Fong came and visited me, her nephew brought me some movies to watch, and the university’s Director of Foreign Affairs, Mr. “Oliver” Zhang, stopped by to give me some chocolates and offer condolences.

By the second day, I felt decent enough to really walk out of the hospital (I was tired of having a nurse follow me into the bathroom and hold up the heart monitor attached to my body by round stickers), but the doctors still wanted to perform one more test. A man I assumed to be a senior doctor at the hospital, due to the squad of nurses and interns following him around, filled a syringe full of silver liquid and plunged it into my IV tube. My heart rate, which had recently settled into the 50’s after surging up and down the first day, zoomed up to 130 beats per minute, then plateaued and gradually slowed down. The head doctor gave me a thumbs-up, smiled, and exclaimed, “Very good!” My heart rate while asleep was below 40 beats per minute, which alarmed them, but the test proved my heart was in good condition and pumping at a healthy pace.

The silver test fluid also blurred my vision for the rest of the evening, but that was the last I had to endure. The nurses monitored me overnight again, and in the morning I was free to go. Walking out, I observed the loungers lying on the floor of the elevator lobby and the overflowing trash bins. I pointed out to Aunt Fong how disordered and slovenly things were, especially remarkable since this was the first week this hospital has been open. As I had tried pointing out to her many times before, China does not “need time.” The problem of China is not modernization, infrastructure, or money. As a trashed, brand new hospital shows, the problem is the culture of the people. They feel clean in their conscience when acting dirty. This is not to pick on poor farmers who had no change of clothing or clean beds to sleep in. Poverty doesn’t force people to throw their trash on hospital floors.

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

Naturally, I was relieved to put the whole experience behind me. I thought it would all be over after I walked out the doors, just the same as my other escorted hospital visits. Then, I watched Aunt Fong on the phone in her dining room, pacing the wooden floor,nearly in hysterics with the person on the other end. After she hung up, she hugged me, in tears. I owed the hospital a couple thousand dollars for my stay. Aunt Fong wasn’t speaking on the phone to the hospital, though. She related to me that she was speaking to the heads of my university, and she had become so emotional because of what had happened to me. She expected my school to take responsibility, and they ended up covering my bill.

I don’t understand how it all worked out, I was simply full of thanks that I was treated and it was paid for. As part of my university teaching contract, I didn’t have health insurance, only a very small stipend for healthcare expenses. I asked about this before I signed on the dotted line, and the university said that China’s healthcare was “different.” No fuller explanation was ever given, I think mostly because the Chinese themselves don’t understand their systems.

I inferred from the way banking and other institutions were run in China that healthcare treatment (appointments, procedures, and payment) must be based on relationships and the discretion of the business. What I mean is, a person cannot go to a Chinese bank and expect the same treatment for the same services every time. The bank isn’t governed strictly by a system of policies. If the bank teller tells you she cannot make a money transfer without certain documents and several mangers’ approval, as an example, you cannot tell her that the teller you spoke with last week did it all by himself without needing any extra documents. If she says it cannot be done, then arguing about written rules or past experience is moot. Chinese culture does not place a great amount of value or authority in written policies and standards. Business relationships are extensions of personal relationships. How your individual case is handled, in law and business, is largely up to the mood of the authority figure.

A friendly mediator in this environment is likely to tell you to jump through hoops or wait until another time. Have patience, because “that’s China.” Now, I was never directly held up by this type of runaround, but I was aware of the way the system worked. At any moment, the baton of responsibility and social power might be passed. In the Chinese mentality, people did not expect to get anywhere or receive the treatment they desired unless they had personal connections to someone with power, who could pull the right levers, in which case no paperwork was needed and all problems were solved. Perhaps the Chinese are mostly right about how the world works, and they have only made an implicit social phenomenon explicit.

So those were my hospital experiences in China. There were other times I visited hospitals- I visited a major hospital in Shanghai, I briefly walked through a hallway and bathroom of a city hospital in semi-rural China, I went to a patient room in a small hospital near my university by walking up unlit stone steps in a dark alley, I visited a new mother and her infant daughter lying in a narrow room with a row of five beds and other women and their families pressed close together, and I saw a young man with a broken arm wrapped up in the sorriest looking cast and sling I have ever seen- but I mention these major episodes in the spirit of my other stories written here. I do not offer, I could not offer, a survey on the Chinese healthcare system. What I can share is my individual experience, which another foreign traveler would share much of if he ventured into the heart of China (except the 3-day stay, hopefully), and I can share my perspective on particular Chinese customs and culture.

If you ever set foot in the real China, you very likely might see things differently; I’ve met people who are both much more enthused and much more jaded on China than I am. One thing, though, you could not disagree over with me: visiting a Chinese hospital will make you count your blessings in having lived in the West.

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 Basics of the Chinese Language

December 1, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

(Continued from “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese”)
(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

For comparison between the two languages, English and Chinese, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this post and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

“Good” is a simple word, easily spelled in English, and to write it one merely has to use the letters he has long been master of: g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the equivalent word is written “好.” This is likewise a simple word in the Chinese writing system, which grades written characters according to their complexity (that is, the number of strokes needed to write a word). In Chinese, a complex character can have upward of twenty strokes. For purposes of reader comprehension only, consider the printed English alphabet, wherein all the letters are written with one or two strokes of the pen, unless one is writing for calligraphic purposes and uses three separate marks to make a letter like “k” or “m.”

The relatively simple Chinese word “好” has six strokes. It is made of two symbols set side by side. “女” (three strokes) which means “woman” and is a pictogram, or pictorial symbol, of a woman grown large with child, and “子” (also three strokes) which means “child” and is a pictogram of a baby wrapped tightly in nursing clothes. Don’t ask how these symbols are supposed to resemble a woman and a baby (I think the “woman” symbol looks like a passable stick figure drawing). It is like the rule of constellations: someone discovers a pattern, he gets the right to name it, it catches on with people, and soon everyone points to the sky and says, “Look, a bear!” when everyone knows full well that the stars look nothing like a bear, major or minor.

Chinese writing today developed out of primitive symbols (not necessarily inferior, just primitive) inscribed onto a hard surface (i.e. bamboo, inscribed with a reed pen, and before that the preserved written artifacts came on bones or tortoise shells). Brush and ink were found to be a better writing method, much quicker, and so the characters began to take on their elegant abstract shapes. With words like “好” we get a glimpse into the Chinese mind. A woman with child is a good thing. Hence the characters for “woman” and “child” form an ideogram (a symbol not of the visual world but the conceptual) for the quintessential representation of good. Not surprising then that China is the most populous country on earth and Han Chinese the largest people group. The character for “home” (家) is a symbol of a roof with an abstract pig underneath, so in ancient China, it was a pig that made a house a home.

Not every written word in Chinese can be broken down to find these charming insights. Not by a long shot. And not many words are simple pictographic symbols, like “木” for tree, “林” for woods, and “森” for forest. The majority are a combination of two or three simple characters: a root to give a hint about the sound or meaning of the word, and an accompanying symbol to distinguish the individual word and perhaps further suggest meaning. As an example, the character for bird is “鸟.” Most every type of bird: chicken, turkey, hawk, pigeon, and so forth, has this character embedded somewhere in its Chinese symbol. In the most basic arrangement, “鸟” is paired side by side with a second, distinguishing symbol to give a hint about the word’s pronunciation or specific meaning. “Chicken,” for example, is written “鸡,” and “duck” is written “鸭.” “Bird” is on the right, indicating the category or type of word (birds), and the distinguishing symbol is on the left. These side by side examples are only one basic form though. The root characters might also be stacked above or below others and contained within other symbols, and very commonly it looks more complex and confusing than the clear side by side examples. Their present-day forms have progressed through stages that have seen the words modified and added to considerably. It takes a lot of deciphering to get at the root of the words and understand their etymology.

So, the memorizing of Chinese characters is aided by mnemonics, but still there is the Herculean task of memorizing the symbols for thousands of individual words if one aspires to achieve an educated level of literacy. Word by word must be written stroke by stroke, over and over again until the stroke order and writing motions are lodged in the brain. If the rote practice of writing characters is abandoned, then how to write them is soon forgotten. The eye still recognizes words when reading them, and the mind has a vague memory of the written symbol, but it is indistinct. Attempting to write the word is useless because Chinese characters must be exactly and intricately drawn. Imagine if writing the word “it” was not a matter of remembering “i” followed by “t,” but memorizing “dot, down stroke, horizontal stroke, downward stroke” in that order. Then imagine memorizing stroke by stroke, first through last, in order, for words with one or two dozen strokes, multiplied by the thousands of words needed to build an educated Chinese written vocabulary.

The popularity of computer keyboards and text messaging has given rise to the modern Chinese observation: “take pen, forget character.” Even Chinese students, who have studied written characters their whole life, struggle to recall how to write certain words, especially when they have ceased writing practice in favor of the keyboard. Our resourceful yet stupid American youths can simply make up their spelling based on text messaging: “r u gone 2 tha gym?” Forgetful Chinese cannot ignorantly staple strokes together because the characters need to be written exactly, or pretty near, standard.

And the students in China strive harder than the pupils in any other language to achieve basic literacy and to acquire a working written vocabulary. Even though the Chinese language has only several thousand written characters in common usage, it takes years to master them all. Each of these characters has to be practiced dozens of times in a writing book before it can be used freely. At the height of my personal studies, I estimated that I could write close to three hundred words off the top of my head, and I recognized at least five hundred by sight- which is not enough to be very helpful in real conversation. I rapidly lost the ability to write mostly all of these words after ceasing regular use. Note: while the written language uses a relatively small number of written characters, these characters are regularly combined in Chinese to form new compound words (example: “How much?” is a two-word combination that is literally “Many-few?”), so the number of words used by a speaker or writer of Chinese, like any language, is practically unquantifiable. It all depends.

But how about typing these symbols on a computer? And how do foreign speakers learn the sounds of the written words if Chinese symbols have no phonics? The answer is a writing system called pinyin, which I mentioned earlier. Pinyin (pronounced in Chinese like “peen-yeen,” spoken through the nose with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth and the open lips fixed in place) uses Roman letters to imitate the sounds of spoken Chinese, only the letters have been loosely adapted and assigned new sounds. For example, “qi” in pinyin Chinese sounds like “chee” spoken quickly through a pinched mouth. “Xi” sounds like “shee,” also spoken with a quick, hissing sound.

Additionally, pinyin uses tonal marks over the vowels in a word to indicate which of the four tones to use. The tones are critical in Chinese for meaning and comprehension. Saying “ma” with a high-pitched even tone could mean “mother” or “to wipe,” whereas saying “ma” with a rising, low to high-pitched tone means “horse.” The simple consonant and vowel pairing “ma” can make seven different, common words, using four tones and one neutral tone (no inflection or stress in the voice). Even with four differentiating tones, words still overlap on the same sound, like “mother” and “to wipe.” All the possible syllables in Chinese have these tonal variations which can change the meaning of the word completely. In English, clearly, saying the same word with a different tone does not change the essential meaning, only the emotional tone or context.

Every syllable in Chinese must have a tone, and every word in Chinese is a one-syllable word, a compound of two one-syllable words, or possibly a phrase of several one-syllable words. Also, syllables must be a consonant followed by a vowel, sometimes ending in the open consonant sounds “-n” and “-ng.” Therefore, fa, fan, and fang, are possible sounds for Chinese words, but a consonant-vowel-consonant combination like fal or fat is not.

To understand how this works out, let’s go back to “好,” the Chinese word for “good.” In pinyin, its sound is written “hǎo.” That is one syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel sound, with a tone mark over the “a” to indicate a rising tone. This pinyin script teaches someone familiar with Chinese pronunciation how to pronounce “好” (it sounds like the question word “how” spoken with a low, rising voice from the back of the mouth). Now, if using a computer or sending a text message, pinyin can be used to input “好” or any of the thousands of other idiosyncratic Chinese characters that would never fit on a keyboard. The user would type “h-a-o,” then the computer program would display a list of the common words that are written “hao” in pinyin. “好” is a very common word, so it would probably be in the first slot in the program’s list, so the user would press “1” and “好” would be entered onscreen. There are other Chinese writing computer programs that go by stroke input, but I found pinyin input to be the easiest method and much more user-friendly; it didn’t require a working knowledge of the written characters’ stroke order.

Typing “nihao” (for “hello”) into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, “hello.” To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

The list of options for every syllable input might have had you wondering why such a thing was necessary. Again, it is because every possible consonant and vowel combination is differentiated by the four tones, and the words sometimes overlap, having the exact same sound and tone. “Ma” and “hao” can make many different Chinese words. The pinyin letters are the same, but nonetheless the words are written with a different Chinese character. Chinese is very limited in its possible consonant-vowel combinations. Certain consonants can only be paired with certain vowels. Imagine in English if “she” was possible but “show” was not, and you will have a simple abstraction of what Chinese is like. Looking at the pinyin section of a Chinese dictionary, it becomes readily apparent that the Chinese language is a moderate collection of permutations. Nearly all the words are limited, single consonant and single vowel combinations. English allows for most any pronounceable consonant cluster, and consonants and vowels can form whatever syllables are practically demanded. A word like “strict,” for example, starts with “str-,” a three-consonant cluster inconceivable in Chinese, and it also ends in a hard-stop consonant cluster: “-ct.” Chinese words, written in pinyin, cannot do that. They must end in short, open vowels or in an open consonant sound: “-n” or “-ng.”

Having short, one-syllable words and limited combinations of consonants and vowels necessitates that Chinese has far fewer written words (characters) than English. Chinese uses compound words to create new words from its basic building blocks: one-syllable words, so it is not lacking when the people need a new word to express a new concept. It is only that the new words are all compounds of the existing, simple words. A funny example from the modern age: “computer” in Chinese is a compound word combing their words for “electric” and “brain.” Very simple, perhaps charmingly so, from an English speaker’s perspective. But it must be considered that English accepts all comers in its world word buffet, so long as the word works and has a nice feel or pronunciation. So the English language has an unmatchable amount of words by way of its borrowing from other languages. Regardless, the words and sounds of Chinese are nonetheless quite limited. The sounds are very often similar, indistinguishable to the untrained ear, or even actually identical, indistinguishable no matter whose ears you use.

One other thing, besides pinyin, which was implemented as part of the latest stage of the development of the Chinese language, that being Chairman Mao’s cultural reforms and the intent to make the written language easier to use: simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese is basically making shortcuts in the complex, intricate, and numerous strokes of many Chinese words. Taking the pen to write “龍” (“dragon”) requires 16 brush or (commonly) pen strokes in traditional Chinese. Making it simpler, but still somehow recognizable, simplified Chinese writes the same word/symbol as “龙” and only uses 5 strokes. An economical alternative trying to make a written language which is by nature cumbersome a little less so.

One word which could use the simplified treatment, which relates back to one of my original questions on the Chinese language, is the character for “I”: 我. The most common pronoun and most common word in speech is pronounced simply (it sounds like “wuh”), but it is written with seven marks of the pen. These seven marks, while written rapidly, are astonishingly too numerous- at least four or five too many- for such a common word.
I know this passage has been tedious, an informal information dump, but I believe it is relevant and necessary to include in my discussion on the topic.

For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. I will forgive you for not skipping over this section as I asked you to. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Continued in Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

December 1, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

Anyone teaching English as a foreign language, anyone living in a foreign country, in my opinion, ought to make the effort to learn a new language.

Per teaching English, it is crucial that the teacher understands how to think through language, how to deconstruct sentences and convey meaning to people who have never lived in the context of the language’s home culture, whose ears do not hear the difference between a syllable’s sounds or a word’s feelings. If a man intends to teach, he should be humble enough to learn. Doing the work of thinking through a new language enlightens the teacher to the obstacles before the language student and, I should think, teaches him empathy for those who are learning.

For those living in a new country, the benefits of learning the native tongue should be obvious to anyone. Consider buying medicine from a row of bottles labeled only with foreign script, calling a phone directory to ask for assistance, scheduling an appointment, asking for directions or any kind of help; imagine the need for holding a conversation, interacting with a fellow human being in a meaningful way, or ever participating in the native culture and society. At the very least, learning the natives’ language shows them you are serious and respectful about your stay in their country, and it clears you from charges of hypocrisy should you ever lose patience with an overseas customer service call center and tell the representative on the other end to learn English.

These reasons are enough to induce any serious English-as-a-second-language teacher (there are a few reported to be in existence) to give learning a new language a noble effort. The mountain is a tall, steep climb though, so the new language learner will need a high level of constant motivation (and that from within, not necessarily without) to steel his discipline. He has to want to learn the language. I had, as mentioned, a fascination with East Asian cultures, and a curiosity- shared by most, I suppose- for the artful brushwork of Chinese handwriting. Plus, the dissimilarity and difficulty of Chinese did not intimidate me, it intrigued me. I can look at a food label in Spanish and work out what “sal” and “azúcar” mean by comparing them with English, but when looking at the Chinese symbols on the same food label, I have no idea which of the little dots and dashes to start with. The intricate characters are impressive, but equally abstruse. There is no way for a foreign speaker to sound them out or even begin to guess their meaning. So I wanted to learn the key to unlocking Chinese symbolism. I wanted to satisfy the many questions I had about a language I could not fathom yet which functioned as the communicative and cultural medium for well over a billion people.

For instance, what do the pronouns “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and “we” sound like in a language with no connection to Latin? And how are they written? Is there simplicity and significance in their sound and appearance? In English, “I” is written and spoken as simply as is possible, and the rationale for this is axiomatic- in spoken language no other word is used so frequently. The word I use to refer to myself, “I,” ought to be able to be spoken rapidly; there should be no effort in saying it or writing it. I wondered, does Chinese follow this same self-evident logic?

Could I distinguish words by their sound, by onomatopoeia? “Onomatopoeia” comes from the Greek term for the “making of words,” so how did the Chinese make words? In English, the words “fast” and “quick” sound fast and quick, and “slow” and “languid” sound slow and languid. Could I extract the meaning of Chinese words from their established sounds? That is, would the Chinese word for “love” sound soft and expansive? Would harsh verbs like “kick” and “cut” sound as, well, as they were supposed to? Or would they be indistinguishable and (completely) arbitrary as the sounds for plain adjectives like “tame”? And with China’s writing system, famed for its exotic beauty, what would the special words look like? I mean, they could write the word for “sign” however they wanted, but the words for “tiger” and “dragon” and all that Chinese glamour, and big words like “love” are supposed to look… um, I will draw on my juvenile vocabulary here: cool.

So let it be known that I entered into my Chinese studies with a deep well of enthusiasm and interest. I had the self-motivation necessary to begin a new discipline and overcome the obstacles and setbacks inevitable along the way. There are so many languages and cultures that I could not summon the effort to spend an honest hour of study on (and I wager my readers who examine themselves will admit the same). Chinese was a language and culture I had a thirst to know more about.

Aunt Fong and I, ready to take on all things China.

My Studies

I mentioned that my first Chinese friends, Caili Ma and Aunt Fong, were my first Chinese teachers. Caili had experience teaching Chinese as a foreign language, so she would work with me in practically the same way that I learned to teach English, which was focusing on one piece of language and drilling it until I became comfortable with it. Caili would take turns asking me questions and having me ask her questions, always on one language focus or one sentence structure. An example, translated from Chinese: “Who is he?” “He is a man. He is my brother. He is 24 years old.” “Who is she?” “She is a girl. She is a child.” And so on.

My other teacher, Aunt Fong, had never taught language before, and her English skills were sorely lacking, hampering even basic communication with someone who did not intuitively understand her expressions and body language. Aunt Fong and I did intuitively understand each other, so we could get along and palaver our points with patience. I thought of our pairing like Han Solo speaking to Chewbacca, where we had an emotional bond and mutual understanding despite our exclusive languages. In this analogy, I was the tall spectacle in China, more than six inches taller than the average Chinese man, and differing in skin and hair, and Aunt Fong was the charming one with social ease that allowed her to approach anyone and start a conversation, once even getting us invited into a stranger’s KTV room for food, drinks, and singing, so I suppose that makes her the Han Solo and me the Chewbacca.

Aunt Fong’s ebullient personality affected our study time together; we would jump from topic to topic, never settling on one piece of language or ever establishing a plan. She would print off Chinese language study sheets online and give them to me, and after a haphazard four-hour session, I might pick up some new vocabulary through exposure. Exposure is helpful to get used to the sounds and rhythms of a language, but I was certainly unprepared for asking or answering questions when I arrived in China months later.

Once there, I began a much stricter study regimen with Aunt Fong’s husband, Uncle Jiang, a Chinese language professor. He had never tried to teach an adult to speak Chinese, but he was well-learned in Chinese language and literature and had studied English to an advanced beginner level, so he had the knowhow, ostensibly, to teach me. We began meeting two nights a week for two to four-hour study sessions.

Because China is a strongly patriarchal society where the teacher or the father of the family holds court, dictating or occasionally throwing a tantrum as everyone sits passively in uncomfortable silence, and because I am too meek and polite to ever voice an objection, our study sessions lasted for as long as Uncle Jiang wanted them to. This meant I would be sitting at his wooden table as he paced around the apartment, chewing sunflower seeds, spitting out their shells, and commanding me “Again!” whenever I paused long enough from my recitations to swallow and clear my throat, reading and re-reading lesson stories about friends going to a bookstore until Uncle Jiang was likewise exhausted and dismissed me around ten o’clock.

The first lesson, he grilled me and grimly shook his head after I tried to pronounce the four basic tones of Chinese for him (I will explain the four tones momentarily). “No,” he grumbled in a low voice without inflection. When I had practiced with Caili Ma, I was able to mimic her tones, but there was a gap of half a year between then and when I demonstrated for Uncle Jiang, so the mental impression I had of Chinese had rusted and warped in the meantime. He would have me repeat the four basic tones and the consonant sounds of Chinese over and over, telling me without gentle euphemism, “No… No. You…are wrong.”

I once sat with him for ten straight minutes, staring at his mouth as he had commanded me and repeating the Chinese sound for “c” without pauses. Ten minutes isn’t such a long time, but those minutes passed “c” by dreadful “c,” Jiang modeling and me repeating hundreds of times. I thought I knew how “c” was supposed to sound in Chinese, but Uncle Jiang got frustrated with me right away and insisted we drill it and drill it. Eventually, my brain turned to mush and I stopped thinking, only reacting and- I swear a tape recorder would back me up on this- exactly emulating the sounds emitting from Uncle Jiang’s mouth. He finally gave up on correcting me and shook his head. A day later, the university’s Foreign Affairs Officer, Amy Hu, whose English is excellent, told me that “c” in Chinese pinyin script (I will also explain pinyin in a moment) sounds like “-ts” in the words “lights.” That’s what I thought in the first place. I kept that in mind and from then on my supposed “c” problem was solved.

For my homework from Uncle Jiang, I would repeat the sample sentences from my workbook a set number of times until I could speak them at a fairly rapid pace. With his exacting pronunciation critiques and my repetitive drilling, I attained a decent beginner’s level of Chinese. Certain phrases were imprinted on my brain that will stay in my memory, ready to be called up for near-fluent use until the day that I die.

There was something that I quickly forgot and will forever lose unless I pick up my workbook again: the written Chinese characters. Chinese has no alphabet and no phonics. Chinese words are not built up out of parts, they come whole, so every word must be memorized individually. (Technically, it must be said that the written characters are built up out of parts because the simplest symbols and shapes are combined to form new symbols, and all characters draw from the same pool of standardized stroke movements. This means that Chinese characters have similarities and roots- it would be impossible for them not to- however the root symbols are usually not reliable for pronunciation or even meaning, and memorizing word by word is still very difficult and time-consuming.) To memorize a written word in Chinese, a student has to learn the proper stroke order (i.e. pen or brush stroke), which essentially leads the hand to draw the character. In English, young students need only learn how to write the 26 characters A-Z. After struggling with the difference between “b” and “d” and likewise making sure to face the loop of the “p” on the right side, any moderately bright kindergarten student is ready to write any letter at will in only a few weeks of training. Then, using phonics and familiarity, any word can be spelled.

For comparison between the two languages, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this next section and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

Continued in “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”