Tag: Life in China (Page 2 of 3)

Normal in China: Kung Fu in the Park

November 26, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Militant Chinese Communists cowered whenever I mentioned the word “gun,” but they gave no thought to the daily sight of men carrying two-handed long swords over their shoulders on the way to go swing and twirl around in the park, or the groups armed with tai chi swords (called jian) carving the air in unison, or the student clubs of young men swinging metal nunchucks around the soccer field and tennis courts in the twilight dark.

Getting some pointers from a friendly spear-wielding stranger in the park.

It remained conspicuous to me, even though I brought a sparse knowledge of Chinese martial arts and exercise with me on my foreign stay. I knew there would be tai chi morning exercise groups, of course- what surprised me was just how numerous and common these groups were, being at every mid-sized park I went to in China, and how diverse and popular the practice was. There were tai chi groups with swords, with folding fans, and the various forms of empty hand and breath control tai chi, and there were individuals who brought out their imposing spears and pole weapons for solo practice, and there were dancing groups for uptempo line dancing and partner ballroom-style dancing, and various and sundry different styles of kung fu.

Aunt Fong’s father-in-law leads me through his daily tai chi routine.

Anyone familiar with Chinese language and culture might note that kung fu is a broad word that does not designate martial arts only. Kung fu (or “gong fu” in Chinese pinyin, which is 功夫), as I understand it roughly, refers to both skill and practice. A musician could refer to her piano playing as her piano kung fu, her years of piano practice likewise as kung fu.

Aunt Fong encouraged me to study “Chinese tea kung fu.” I couldn’t resist deliberately misinterpreting “kung fu” and sent her this doodle of “Kung Fu Fong.”

So, all the acrobatics and dancing and weightlifting and running and stretching and martial arts forms and competition that I saw could be summed up as kung fu. The stout old man in the riverside park that I nicknamed “Master Splinter,” who twirled two bo staffs at a time and juggled them by launching one into the air as he transferred the other from his left to right hand, and bellowing a high-pitched wail deep from his belly as he did so, was practicing kung fu. He was also doing kung fu when he led a small group of young students through handstands,flips, cartwheels, and splits.

Learning to spin the bo staff.

Aunt Fong was always telling me “China gong fu, very good!” I was practicing sanda, or Chinese kickboxing, already, which would count as a form of Chinese kung fu, but I think she wanted me to do something more traditional. In China, the more ancient it is, the better. And even though I remember telling her “Okay, I’ll try it” dozens of times, she seemed to sense my growing skepticism that “China gong fu” was “very good!”

I practiced two different styles of kung fu in the park. The first was with my aunt’s friend, Wei. Because he was such a big man, we called him by the Chinese word for big, da, and so he was either Da Wei or Master Da Wei.

Da Wei showed me a kung fu form that consisted of choreographed moves going forward and back in a straight line. Each week, we’d review the routine so far and then he’d add another line of moves onto it. By the end, I was going back and forth 6 lengths, kicking and clawing and elbowing and blocking. It seemed not at all practical from the perspective of martial arts as a means of self defense from real, stronger foes, but as a training method for body movement it helped me flow in a way I hadn’t done before. And while I was thankful to learn one-on-one from a teacher who was generous with his time, I have to say it seemed very dull to be doing such basic moves over and over, not the amazing flips, spins, and crisp, snapping techniques of Shaolin monks.

Going through the kung fu form with Da Wei.

The other kung fu style I got to try is translated into English as “push hands.” In push hands, two people stand arm’s length from each other and do as the name says: push each other until one loses balance. It might sound dimwitted, like an excuse for boys to play rough in the schoolyard, but in practice the skilled push hands players moved so smoothly in reaction to my attempts at shoving them that several times I lost my footing and had to step forward, off balance, because I had over-committed my forward motion. The look and feel of it was like Neo’s bullet-time back-bend fall in The Matrix. Any time I pushed their chest, they rolled their shoulder back, gripped my pushing arm, and pulled me forward. Try as I might, I couldn’t move them out of position without resorting to wrestling-style overhooks and underhooks (encircling and gripping my arm around their arm).

A few times, my opponent got aggressive and pushed into me with all he had, sending us both to the ground, me first. The goal of push hands was only to get someone to step out of their standing position, not take them down to the ground. I was more than used to being wrestled to the ground from my experience in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, so while the exceptional falls were unexpected, they did not catch me unprepared. I immediately latched onto my opponent’s exposed neck and, without squeezing, held them in a choke hold for a couple seconds to prove a point: while they may have won the push hands battle, I had won the war. In a live situation, me squeezing for a few seconds would have cut off blood flow to his brain and made him black out. And, while their kung fu was spent mastering how to push and react to pushes from a straight-on, standing position, my kung fu back in America was spent on martial arts- martial arts as a real method of combat and self defense.

Gathering an audience as I press in with my overhook grip. My back is dirty from getting pushed down earlier.

Another extremely aggressive opponent in the push hands group would look for opportunities to latch onto my fingers and bend them backwards. Bending fingers is so dirty that even early no holds barred/mixed-martial arts events banned it, along with other notorious moves like eye pokes, fish hooks, bites, and groin strikes. I was afraid for my safety, having this stranger in a strange land quickly go for this injury-causing move, and in that desperate moment, having no safe word or mutual unspoken ground rules to rely on, I had to hook my leg around his in a reaping motion to trip him backwards and release my fingers. Shockingly, his onlooking buddies in the push hands group made a commotion then, not at him for hurting an unsuspecting beginner, but at me for using a judo throw in a pushing game.

Even more surprising, when my malicious sparring partner righted himself back up, he again went for a grip on my fingers as soon as he was able. Looking back, I should have told everyone “Bu yao” (“No/ I don’t want”) waved it off and walked away. Practicing with an untrustworthy partner like that is a stupid way to get hurt or let bad feelings build into a real fight. But I pressed on for a few more rounds with him.

Getting arm-dragged in Communist China.

In a way, I felt like I had to prove myself. Aunt Fong had introduced me to this group on several occasions, and each time, instead of them coaching me through drills and new techniques, they all waited to take turns against me in a battle of China vs. foreigner. I really wanted to compete against them and better my skills. So, against my adversary, I had to be constantly on edge, yanking my hands away as if from a hot stove whenever I felt his grip begin to squeeze. To this day, I remember his hollow eyes and predatory smile the way crime victims in stories recollect their attackers even all the way back from childhood.

On the taxi ride back from the park, Aunt Fong could read it on my face but I told her anyway. I didn’t want to do Chinese kung fu any more. “China gong fu” was not “very good,” but fallen in my eyes.

The Real China: Trains and Travel

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

Throughout life, I have managed to silently keep my peace and meekly abide through many and various insults and indignities, my teeth often gritted, but my turned cheek being slapped without protest. Without this experience and temperament, I wouldn’t have been able to endure a full year in China. Its transportation rituals, however, had me at my breaking point. All of the buses and subways I used in local mass transit systems were fine and about as good as one could expect for each respective city in China. What I mean to discuss are my trying journeys: the train rides and my travels into major tourist areas.

A typical scene at a smaller train station.

China has built up its railway network so that most every city on the east coast is linked with all the others, and residents of one can conveniently buy a ticket to most anywhere at their local terminal. Not many people have cars, so the railway system functions as the alternative to the American interstate system. Major lines, like those travelling due east to Shanghai, also offer a high-speed rail service. China isn’t on par with the Japanese rail network (will any country ever be?) but it is investing heavily to make its own infrastructure faster and better connected.

I did make a few trips by car and bus on the toll-ways, which were not so unlike their American equivalent, minus the build-up of roads, businesses along the exits, and traffic jams (not that traffic jams don’t happen in China, just not on the toll-ways I traveled. In fact, China has made world news several times from its days’ long traffic jams). Buses are the number one method for long distance holiday travel in China, though I found that statistic hard to believe when comparing my bus trips to my experience in the very crowded train stations. There were times when I was in a ticket line or train car and I began counting the heads of people: “1, 2, 3…” then thought that there were so many people it would be faster to count down from China’s total population to find out the number of people in my train: “one billion, two hundred and ninety-nine million, nine-hundred and ninety-nine; one billion, two hundred and ninety-nine million, nine-hundred and ninety-eight…”

Like many mundane tasks in China, I always had an escort with me, a friend to buy my ticket for me. After waiting in line and showing my passport to the cashier, my translator would make the purchase- same as anywhere, except the business being done in Chinese made it especially boring, unknowable, and fickle. Buying a ticket for one trip might only take ten minutes and my friend would take care of the whole process while I waited near the building entrance. Other times, I’d have to dutifully follow someone back and forth between the self-service computer terminal and cashier line, watching them in their shared confusion and frustration, having nothing to do with myself except remember the times as a child that I had to trail behind my parents in a store without toys.

The train travel itself was where the real frustration began, far more hectic than the tranquil-by-comparison ticket office. Outside of the terminals, there was typically a plaza surrounded by retail businesses and dozens of food vendors (if you ever find yourself in China and you’re brave enough to try them, I recommend the hard-boiled eggs sitting in the pan of near-black sauce). The terminals- train and bus- were major gathering spaces in the world’s most populous country.

A great mess of humanity streamed in and out of the main doors, but to get in (sometimes out) required passing through narrow metal gates. The barriers were set up to direct the crowd through the ticket and security checks; being China, this meant the crowd would push and jostle their way into the single-file opening. In any country, waiting in lines to pass through security and gate checks is a ritual that ranks around a trip to the dentist’s office in terms of pleasantness, but as a consolation, at least the people in most other countries are waiting in line. Experience quickly taught me that the metal barriers were a necessity in a land without manners or respect for unwritten rules like waiting one’s turn.

In China, men with duffel bags slung over their shoulders barged past me without regard; petite female ticket-takers seemed to seek me out and palm-strike me in my kidneys as they cut through the crowd. However mellow I imagined my demeanor, funneling through the gates was a miserable enough experience to make me ball my fists and look for the next pusher to make an example out of him- or her- for all the rest.

Wading through those bottlenecks, sometimes over 20 rows of people deep (God help the fleeing crowds if there were ever a fire emergency), seemed like the worst thing, but it was only the first major hassle of a Chinese train trip. Inside the waiting lobby, all those swarms of people sprawled out in the many rows of seats, letting their outer coats, bags, seed shells, plastic food wrappers, drink bottles, and (it can be assumed) spit fall to the floor. A dowdy cleaning woman would shuffle around the people standing throughout the floor space, thick as insects, and use a straw broom to sweep up the refuse in a futile, never-ending cycle.

Outside a train station. Small shops and restaurants abound on the lower levels.

A large convenience store was usually located in the waiting lobby; the major terminals had small restaurants and shops like a modestly-sized airport. Browsing through the cramped shelves of food and buying a bowl of instant noodles was my only respite when the train was delayed, which it was by several hours on one occasion; I also had a bus trip that was delayed by over an hour, though it should be noted that those were single events and I don’t have any figures on the percentage of delayed trains and buses in China. That one evening when my train was delayed, the instant noodles had to suffice for dinner as the delay was indefinite, without an announcement about the estimated arrival time or cause of the problem. My friends and I waited outside the departure gate altogether for four hours until the proverbial watched pot- our midnight train- boiled.

China proved too much for this boy, so he left with his student friends on a midnight train to Hefei.

Inside the Chinese train cabins, the ride varied considerably depending on the class of ticket and destination, but it was always crowded to full capacity at least. The nicest ride, the high-speed G trains, were fitted with new, reclining individual seats, and they could cut the travel time by more than half. This expensive service was exclusive to major city routes, which in my area meant I could take a G train to Nanjing or Shanghai. But keep in mind, it was still China, so the high-speed ride, while smooth, was far from leisurely. Passengers talked, chewed, littered, had phone conversations, watched portable DVD players, and played music through speakers- not headphones- all at full volume. Yes, believe it or not, somehow the littering was at full volume too, but to be fair the noisome litter did not remain on the floor throughout the whole trip. A cleaning woman would come by to collect trash and bark at you to lift your feet so she could sweep. Plus, in addition to the noise of the passengers and their devices, the overhead television screens would be flashing commercials, programs, and movies at a soft volume that was loud enough to be distracting but impossible to make out over the clamor of the car. A tease if you were interested in the program, a bother if you were trying to enjoy quiet while you read or napped.

The typical train carriage, not the elite G train car, was crowded too, but beyond crowded were its straight-back benches and well-worn cushioned seats, overflowing with people so much so that extra passengers- those with a seat-less ticket- gathered in the connecting space between cars or sat in between their friends’ seats, if possible. Shoeless souls set up buckets between the rows of seats or slumped over on top of coats and bags to try and sleep in an unsightly pile. Not since riding in a mud and trash-covered bus on my way to detassel corn fields in Iowa had I seen people so indiscriminate about the conditions they slept in.

Waiting to board the G Train.

One convenient alternative to the lousy rest on these basic cars were the sleeper cars. Traveling to Beijing, which is located far up in the northeast near Inner Mongolia, I had booked an overnight trip on a sleeper car (that is, I had the trip booked for me). Shortly after midnight, I boarded the train and tottered through the narrow walking space of the cabins and found my bunk inside the darkened interior. My room had four bunks, two on each side wall, one above and one below. I was up top, and I was lucky that none of the other passengers had used my bunk for storage space, so I was able to hoist myself up and lay myself out without having to try and negotiate with inconsiderate passengers to move their bags in a language I didn’t really speak. Even though I was well over the average height the train bunks were designed for, I managed to find a sleeping position and slip away from consciousness until around seven o’clock, when daylight filled the cabin and passengers and porters started making a commotion to disembark. I managed to get a fair night’s sleep and get a long trip out of the way at the same time- not bad.

The flip-side of the sleeper car coin was what I experienced when traveling to Shanghai, not half the distance to Beijing from where I was staying. My escort for that trip, Uncle Jiang, insisted on the sleeper train either to save money or because he illogically thought it would be a sensible trip to make overnight. I don’t know. Again, I was an illiterate, childlike observer when the tickets were being purchased. Sometime after one in the a.m., we boarded the train and made our way to our bunks. Less than five hours later, we were woken by the porter. I followed my escort as he tried to navigate the pre-dawn streets and bus terminals of Shanghai, feeling doubly grumpy from poor sleep and having to wait on my guide for unendurable amounts of time as he studied the wall map in desolate, not yet open bus stations. I suppose Uncle Jiang’s brain was just as foggy as mine was after our tease of a sleep.

But that sour experience was nothing compared to the worst long-distance travel I suffered not only in China, but so far in my short life. I have to preface this by saying I realize persecuted people around the world have been rounded up for train trips to prison camps and death camps, far worse than what I endured, so take my complaint for its relative worth. My description is vivid, not hyperbolic, and it was a truly awful experience, though not comparable to the worst trips ever suffered by human beings, as I admit. What makes this awful trip of mine noteworthy was how very typical it seemed to the Chinese people crammed into that train car with me, and how it wasn’t a cause of anger and outrage.

The pace and conditions of this car ride reminded me of news reports about jet planes grounded on the tarmac for hours on end with no food service or air conditioning, or cruise ships that lost engine power and became stranded at sea. Yet those instances are exceptions to otherwise fair to decent service. This fateful train trip of mine was routine, repeated by thousands every week as the only means of access to a famous tourist town in China. As passengers, we were jammed in like swine, but the rail company was transporting us for profit, under a pretense of customer service. None of it was forced; the passengers weren’t on that train as punishment. A business, generously subsidized by government funds, offered this terrible service, and the passengers took it because it was the only option they had or because they were so beaten down, made powerless by life in China, that they accepted it as an unchangeable inconvenience of life. I become so angry just thinking about this trip that I have to calm down and compel myself to write so that you, dear reader, might hear the full story.

For months, Chinese students and friends had been asking me if I had seen Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), “the most famous mountain in China.” I had never heard of it before coming to China, but every time someone queried me about what I had seen in China, they always asked about and recommended Yellow Mountain. “China has five famous mountains. But we say, ‘If you see Yellow Mountain, you do not need to see any other mountains.'”

A famous “waving tree” greeting visitors at Yellow Mountain.

Strangely, many of its advocates had never themselves been to Yellow Mountain, and I even spoke to several young residents of the town of Yellow Mountain (Huangshan City) who had never ventured to the nearby mountain range. I say strangely, but after living in China for a year it was the type of answer I came to expect.

“Have you seen Huangshan Yellow Mountain?”

“No. Have you?”

“No. I have no seen it.”

“But you live in Huangshan City.”

(Grinning silence)

Yellow Mountain, although a big regional draw, was connected to the rest of the Chinese railway system by a single rail line that ran only the slowest trains. I heard that Yellow Mountain was beautiful and scenic all year round; I chose to go in June, right after the spring semester had ended. Two eager students of mine arranged everything and accompanied me on the long weekend trip.

Boarding the train, I wasn’t clear how long the ride was supposed to last. I walked on and shimmied past all the people lounging in the entryway and by the bathroom (a hole in the floor, or more accurately a hole in a metal basin that emptied directly onto the tracks below. It was against the rules to use it while the train was stopped in a station, and I think it was one of the few rules obeyed by all). My student friends told me we had seats on our tickets (not everyone was so lucky), so we budged through the thick tangle of people standing in the aisles and took our very cramped seats on the bench seating. We were arm to arm and hip to hip in steamy summer weather. I battled the urge to panic. I was trapped with a table top pressing against the top of my lap, sitting tightly between two bodies, with no way out. I couldn’t move an inch in any direction.

Every time a new person sat down in the window seat, they tried in vain to push the window up higher. It had a catch so that it could only be opened a maximum of four inches. The train, I would estimate, moved at a top speed of 30-35 miles per hour and made twenty-minute stops at the many stations along the way, so the breeze filtering in from outside was hardly a relief.

One of the only ways to pass the time was watching the passing scenery. Here, a very common sight in China: multiple cranes at a high-rise apartment building project.

Whenever we made one of our frequent stops, vintage fans of wire and metal would oscillate overhead, failing to counteract in the slightest the combined summer humidity and body heat. It was a vain show of providing desperately desired relief. As passengers boarded and disembarked, luggage was hoisted and dragged through the compact network of bodies that irksomely flowed around the moving passengers, then those riding on settled back into their standing positions.

On the way to Yellow Mountain, we began with an over-full load of passengers that slowly dwindled away at each station until we had a reasonable amount of space right before we reached the end of the line. To reach Yellow Mountain City took all day- we started before lunch and arrived after dark- and so we searched for a taxi to our hotel in the dark, pouring rain.

The mountain and surrounding areas were lovely and scenic as everyone intimated, though I wouldn’t agree with the boastful Chinese proverb that once a man had seen Yellow Mountain, he need not see any other mountain in China. The trip was filled with rainstorms, views of waterfalls, steep stone-stepped inclines that brought the legs to a halt, tea sales pitches, and winding bus rides.

A view of a stream running down a mount of Yellow Mountain. A scene from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was filmed here, so I had to repress thoughts of the badness of that movie to fully enjoy the scenic beauty.

Huangshan in the rain. I really wanted to buy one of these extra wide farm hats, but the thought of shipping or hauling something that size prevented me.

The tea sales presentation proved too much for my friend, Maxwell, to sit through.

Exhausted from climbing in wet shoes, sitting in wet shorts, and walking through shopping streets, my student friends and I made it back to the train station for our return trip, same as the first, but a whole lot hotter and a whole lot worse.

This time, my students hadn’t been able to procure seats. The train, being the only train out of Yellow Mountain, was too much in demand. But the cashiers don’t turn any buyers away, so we were one of many surplus passengers who would sit in a seat until the car became too full and a seat holder came to evict us from his spot. Then, we stood up, pressed together, holding our bags in hand, and leaned against the sides of the bench seats to balance ourselves. I had purchased a folding fan as a souvenir from Yellow Mountain (Huangshan) City’s shopping street; I used it to try and supplement the faint, scant breeze from the rotating overhead fans. I couldn’t stop waving the fan, the heat was so intense and there was no relief from the steamy summer heat by way of fresh air movement or the opening up of free standing room space.

Eventually, I realized my fanning was futile, and besides the sweat from my hand and the strain of the vigorous fanning were wearing out the fabric until it was close to tearing, so I gave up the battle and holstered my puny folding fan. Sweat streamed down my face and my shirt became plastered to my body. I was too hot and crowded to feel embarrassed, and it was clear that everyone else was suffering in that summer heat trap, too. It was like being in a sauna on a low heat setting and having the door handle break off when you wanted to exit. The only thing on everyone’s mind was the suffering. There was no comfort. We were reduced to our basest elements, physical bodies cooped up like animals. It would have been a dream to do as they do in India and ride on top of the train to feel the rush of the wind outside.

Or was the suffering on everyone’s mind? Throughout the trip, I noticed others chatting away, watching TV, or looking passive like a typical passenger.

I spent that trip as restless as an infant with an earache, unable to take my mind off the misery. I brought my e-reader along on the trip, so that was one small relief over the daylong journey. In my irritation, I struggled to keep my eyes on my reading, and for a half hour I distracted myself by watching an episode of “Friends” on my friend’s laptop (old “Friends” episodes were fashionable and popular in China, at least while I was there). Eventually, thankfully, that trip did end. It would be the worst of several terrible travel experiences in China.

Like I said, people have suffered far worse travels, so the only thing I consider especially remarkable about the overly-crowded, slow-moving hot boxes is that the people in China expected it. To them, it was normal.

“Maxwell, let’s never ride that train again.”

The Real China: My Pet Chicken

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

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

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

“Yes,” she would laugh, “chicken.”

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

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

Chickens for sale on a commercial street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s my chicken?” I asked.

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

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

Chickens with red, plastic strings around their ankles.

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

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

The Real China: The Chinese Classroom

November 13, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

As a foreign teacher in China, I was only expected to teach oral English. Grammar and reading were the domain of the Chinese English teachers. My expertise, coming from an English-speaking country, was speaking and teaching Chinese students how to speak. My native English ability made me valuable to the university- enough that they would pay for a good portion of my flight costs and provide me an apartment for the 11-month term of my contract- because I could not only model proper pronunciation, but take this language that students had been studying in grammar books and speak it. Yes, grammar and language knowledge (and especially knowing how to teach) are important for teaching English as a Second Language, but if you can form new sentences in English, at will (this is the test for language fluency), then you are an expert. Growing up in English-speaking culture and speaking this language from childhood will alert you, naturally, when a Chinese student asks, “Where are you come from?” and grant you the authority to correct him, “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” No grammar credentials needed.

But I had studied English in college and taken an English language teaching course, so I had some ideas about how best to get students to work through the language. The zeal of naivety is a powerful substitute for real experience.

I had a real problem though that every language must face: no one can learn to speak by watching a native; they must be guided to attempt speaking for themselves.

I had gathered from Chinese students and from their English teachers, both foreign and Chinese, that the oral English classes followed a regular pattern where the teacher would give a topic at the end of one class (e.g. “Where would you like to live in the future?”), and during the next class the students would speak (i.e. read or recite) what they had prepared. I could see the benefit in that: the Chinese classroom is all about following precedent, and speaking extemporaneously terrified most pupils with the dread of embarrassment in front of their peers. I might not know what word to use and then I’ll be standing in front of everyone like a fool, without anything to say!

Also, if the right topic were chosen, the students would be eager to share (in my experiences, an eager class response did occur a few times, but it was rare. The dead look on students’ faces usually said, “You expect me to talk about what?”). So if I chose to follow this method, the students wouldn’t balk at something new, a good portion of the class could pretend that they were really speaking English, and a few bold adventurers might actually wade into new conversational waters.

I decided not to do that though. Speaking is its own language skill, and real speech and conversations follow conventions and patterns that occur in real time. Speech has many forms, and even though public speaking on prepared topics is one of those forms, I wanted my students to practice speaking spontaneously in real life scenarios. So, for my lesson structure, I would introduce and explain the speaking topic of the day (e.g. “Asking for Information”), then demonstrate an exercise for the first scenario (“You are trying to find the school library, so you ask a professor for directions.”). After that, I would tell the students to role-play this with a partner, and after about five minutes- more or less- I would call for everyone’s attention and have a couple sets of partners repeat their role-play conversation for everyone so that we could review the exercise as a class. A sensible plan, perhaps, but there were some inherent problems of the Chinese classroom I could not overcome.

I mentioned that Chinese students follow precedent and avoid speaking up to prevent loss of face. This is not just a natural temperament shared by many. It is a near-universal disposition, a product of the culture that has been built in by all the small things that shape the students’ everyday experience. In contrast, American students are expected to speak up and they are rewarded for it. When I was a high school student I dreaded having to raise my hand to earn my “Participation” grade. Shyness and reserve are either mildly disdained or avoided. Many American classrooms today are shaped by expectations for open discussions. The theory is that student and teacher interaction is best facilitated through a circular or U-shaped seating arrangement where everyone can see each other’s face and the teacher is about equidistant from every desk (lecture halls are different, of course, and not every classroom is set up this way).

In China, every classroom I taught in was a large, long room with a chalkboard and podium in the front, facing rows of long, narrow desks and benches- bolted to each other and bolted into the floor. I saw no exceptions to this. Some classrooms had better furnishings- that is, they had a computer and a projector or a better chalkboard or a podium that was sturdy and didn’t fall apart when you set your bag on it.

A typical classroom at my university. The back chalkboard was always painted on with writing and pictures, usually some kind of slogan. In this case, the large characters say “Teacher’s Day,” which is celebrated on September 10th in China.

From my teacher’s vantage point, it looked like Venetian blinds laid out, with 30 to 50 students crammed in between the slats. The desks were only a bench top with (maybe) some cubbyhole space beneath to hold pens and a couple books. And the seating was very narrow and uncomfortable; there wasn’t enough room to stretch out, so most students would hunch forward and lean into the desks with their chests. Try sitting side-by-side with someone on a constricting bench and carrying on a conversation with them. This, and being asleep, is why people don’t speak up in church. And it is why Chinese students, having spent their young lives this way, will not speak in class. Goad or coax them as I would, they would not. They would not speak up in my class, they would not speak up for a pass, they would not speak up here or there, they would not speak up anywhere.

Add to the seating arrangement the Chinese reverence for the teacher, who usually lectures, and phones and other various distractions, and you have the ingredients that prevent interaction. Seating might seem like a small, surmountable thing, able to be overcome by planning and will, but its dominant effect is subtle and psychological, shaping the teachers’ and students’ ideas on classroom learning. It physically inhibits social interaction between students sitting in the desks by directing their eyes forward, and without an environment conducive to social interaction there is no conversation. Students believe the teacher doesn’t notice them individually, they disappear into the block of seats. No one wants to speak up and break the anonymous silence. That would put everyone’s eyes on them.

This is the Chinese classroom, and sitting in this environment for the large majority of their day, for most of their life, has shaped those students to the degree that I could ask them if 600 RMB ($100 U.S.) was the typical monthly rent for an apartment and repeat myself, rephrase the question, ask loudly, “Yes? No?” and still not get an answer from anyone. It was infuriating. Over and over I experienced that you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. When lesson planning, if I came to a part where the students had to give their input, I would ask myself, “Can they be creative? Can I trust them to participate and move the flow of the lesson?” Having learned quickly from classroom experience, I knew whenever I asked myself this question that the answer was no. I would either start my lesson plan over or work out an alternative for when the students would sit in stupefied silence.

I met four students who lived in this UNFINISHED off-campus apartment.

This is their kitchen. I hope they weren’t paying $100 a month for this.

Really, the way things worked out, I learned that during the role-play time a small number of students would do the exercise I asked them to do, most might mumble to whoever was sitting next to them and kept an eye out for me, keeping their voices so low that I couldn’t hear them no matter what they were saying in whichever language they were saying it in, and a good number made little effort to conceal themselves doing math homework, reading for another class, taking my picture on their cell phone, sleeping, or text messaging. I had to accept the bad and work with it. Discipline is tough to maintain period; across languages and cultures a novice like myself stood no chance.

In my teacher training prior to China, I was taught to walk around, listen in, and offer correction or answer questions as needed. But when the students are huddled together in a block of long, narrow desks, I could only look on from the outside (that’s not a bad metaphor for China: a mass of humanity crowded together, indecipherable and impenetrable from the outside). So I would pace up the aisles and shimmy sideways, banging my knees, as I passed through the last row of desks, making a pretense of listening in and observing the students’ faces and behaviors.

I noticed all the little details that they had in common. How they would twirl their pens compulsively, each one fluidly repeating their favorite motion and passing the pen around their fingers. As a student, I was a compulsive doodler, but I never noticed any artists in China, only dexterous pen acrobats. And when they wrote, they all used their right hand- no exceptions. I asked a Chinese teacher if I observed that correctly, and she said yes, all students are taught to write with their right hand. I had to infer that this was because of the complexity of the Chinese writing system, where each word has a precise way to be written and the stroke order must be memorized.

When I watch Americans write, I sometimes notice people who invert or reverse the stroke orders I learned in school. That is, they might write the letter “e” starting clockwise from the tail and spiraling in, opposite the way that I do. But handwriting is sloppy in America. It’s very common and trite to hear people joke that they can’t even read their own writing. I always questioned what the purpose of handwriting was if it was illegible, even to the hand that scribbled it. Why not scratch whatever symbols come to mind if the writing doesn’t even look like English script? But that’s America, where anything goes, and being casual and nonjudgmental are unimpeachable virtues.

Not so in China, where students are still expected to meet a standard other than being diverse or tolerant. With Chinese characters, if a writer painted with the ink brush in the left hand, it would look slightly different; every stroke would be off because the hand would have to push the brush instead of pull. Plus, every Chinese word must be memorized. There are no phonics to make learning new words easier, the mnemonics are not at all intuitive, and everyone is expected to learn to write the characters the same way. Repetition is the only way. When each word must be memorized, and universal literacy is on the line, that demands that everyone studies hard, using the same method.

Strangely related to my classroom handwriting observations, I recoiled at the sight of the long fingernails that some of the girls and a lot of the young men grew out on their little finger. I never learned the real reason for this style. One friend told me it was convenient to have one long nail to scratch things and handle things and whatnot. Perhaps. As an observer, I can say that it was effective in raising the hair on the back of my neck in mild disgust.

Not the best picture, but it’s the only one I have where you can see the long pinky nail. Look closely at my stylist’s right hand.

I would scan the students’ shirts and smirk in confusion if I saw English words misspelled or words arranged randomly. If the clothing companies wanted to use English, I thought, why don’t they just copy and paste text they find online? These companies copy everything else. Occasionally, one student might have had on an American college sweatshirt or a sweater that read “Nebraska.” I would always ask those students, “Have you been to Nebraska? Do you know what that means?” Of course, they had no idea, and I usually had to point at their shirt and tug at mine to indicate to them that I was asking about their shirt.

I became used to seeing variations of the same five basic hairstyles for girls (four of which had bangs that stopped even with the brow line) and the same three styles for boys (buzzed short, combed across, and the popular “poof”- a tangled mess of hair that stuck up as if they woke up and never combed it). When I saw a male university student with long strands down to his shoulder blades, it shocked me. I’m sure it was the same reaction middle America had to the first longhairs of the 60’s. So, bored by the interchangeable bobs, I differentiated the students by character traits and fashion choices; things like brightly colored eyeglass frames, over-sized frames on some girls, or even frames worn without lenses. I thought that it was foolish, if not pretentious to wear frames without needing vision correction, but those who wore them defended the fashionable practice for its “cool” style.

Most of my female students’ hairstyles conformed to this.

Every so often I would see some sort of English reading material on a student’s desk space. I would ask her if she was reading the book for class or pleasure, and maybe try and milk some questions out of it if I thought the student was friendly and able to handle a bit of small talk. Some students, though, I knew to just walk by. Either they would clam up with embarrassment and fail to respond audibly, or I had learned from past experience that there was no way they were going to put together a complete English sentence. One student, when I asked her a question related to the class exercise, looked me right in the eye and quietly but coldly told me, “Please, leave me alone.” And that I did, for the rest of the year.

In the middle school I taught at, more so than at the university, I noticed a lot of calligraphy practice books and pens with special writing nibs. Throughout China, I observed brushwork and fanciful writing fonts far more often than images and icons. The Chinese writing system is what the people grew up learning, what they practiced, and hence, what they loved. It is always on the Chinese mind. I even acquired the Chinese habit of breaking down the characters I saw into brush strokes and practicing their stroke order with my finger on my palm or thigh.

And speaking of writing, I have to note the absence of pencils and erasers. The Chinese didn’t write with them (not that, in America, pencils are preferred over pens for writing purposes, but they are more common in my observation). So whenever the students made a mistake, they would pull out a thin wheel of tape, run it over the section they wanted to remove, and peel away a thin layer of paper from their sheet. This mandatory school supply could be spotted on most desks, and during a written test the tape wheels would be passed back and forth as students nervously tore away at their paper.

These weren’t for white correction tape. They had clear tape meant to pull off the top layers of ink and paper.

One unsightly thing I could not help but notice was the soft black hairs on a few girls’ upper lip, and my occasional glimpses of coarse leg hairs and underarm hair. I hesitate to mention it, I don’t mean to shame any of the young women, but body hair was a not uncommon part of real life in China. Most of the Chinese I saw grew hardly any body hair, but when it did sprout up, it was obvious against their light skin. I don’t know how the Chinese view it, but it always startled me whenever I saw girls with leg and armpit hair. Please note, this was not the norm I saw, and on average I would say that most had fair features and smooth skin.

But the truly disgusting thing I observed among my students, the feature that both sickened and infuriated me, was the sight of red, purplish, puffy hands. I’m sensitive to the shape of hands, and by that I mean that I notice the look and character of individuals’ hands, which probably began from my love of drawing, so when I first saw a girl with fat, square fingers instead of slender curves, I passed it off as a physical anomaly that I would not want to hold hands with. But then I saw it again, and then again on another girl: the skin was past red and now had the deep purple color of a contusion. What was wrong with these girls’ hands? I had never seen this before. Skinny girls with fat, square hands.

The question had an obvious answer. Just as my face was sore and red from constant exposure to the cold, these girls had chilblains on their hands from sitting in unheated classrooms throughout the winter, taking notes with un-gloved hands. Yes, because we were south of the Huaihe River (the geographic dividing line), the Chinese government did not allow central heating in buildings, except for department stores and some hotels and restaurants. Because we were right on the southern edge of the Huaihe River, that meant our city was as far north as one could get in China and still not have central heating. So, all winter long, from dormitory to dining hall (or “canteen”), from the classroom to the library or anywhere else, everyone had to wear layers of winter clothing, but either finding it superfluous or an unnecessary expense, most students went without hats and gloves. Perhaps the circumstances could not be helped, but seeing how inflamed those girls hands became, and seeing how normal they thought it, how overlooked it was, how assumed it was, was a small detail that swelled my indignation.

We’re wearing coats because there was no heat in our classroom. Side note: my student, John, in the purple coat in the upper left, wore glasses just for show. They either had no lenses or non-corrective lenses

The Real China: Pretend Culture

November 4, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

Walking through a country, as opposed to skimming over it in a textbook or magazine, will reveal the little things- the things you had always assumed and never noticed in your home culture. The magazine version is great for a broad overview listing the distinctive parts that make China China, but the man-on-the-street view shows you the real points that locals would never give notice to in print, and even points that they are not even able to notice themselves.

Some things are just too embarrassing, or taken too much for granted.

The boasted value of China, the one they paraded before the world in Beijing’s international debut at its 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, is harmony. This is supposed to be the cement that holds the Confucian society together, and the highest ideal that people everywhere were supposed to maintain and strive for.

“Harmony” at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But how observable is harmony? Could a foreign guest, like me, detect it? Would Chinese people typically show more politeness or deference to others than I would normally expect elsewhere? Would public order amaze me in China as it so often amazes outside visitors to Japan? Would the famous collectivist mindset wordlessly cue everyone in on how to fit into Confucius’ hierarchy and give their attention to the group welfare? When they sang in that howling cat voice along with their one-stringed guitar, would it be multi-part or just one melody?

Would China, chief among all preachers of harmony, stand out to me as the epitome of harmony?

In my experience, just the opposite.

Public order in China is about the worst I have ever seen. Even contrasting the grimiest places within American shores- say, a smelly, trash-lined New York City subway station- with an equivalent in China- a stop on the Shanghai metro, which looks so much whiter and more modern in its architecture- China comes out the obvious loser in the chaos contest. (Or would that be the dishonorable champion of the chaos contest?)

As wild as the crowds are on a given New York subway train, everyone is still expected to follow the flow of unwritten rules. When it is time to board, people stand to the side as the people exiting the train shuffle off first. And, crowded as it can be, riders are still expected to keep their own personal space as much as possible- no fully-opened newspapers, for example- and conspicuous things like cooked food and music speakers were frowned upon, though of course anyone with experience publicly commuting through New York knows how loudly, madly, and sometimes entertainingly these mores are violated. But, in the middle of all the madness, blocking the way or bumbling over the local manners would bring down a quick scolding in that bossy New Yawk! accent.

In Shanghai, while the modern fire doors prevent passengers from contemptuously throwing their garbage onto rat-infested tracks Big Apple style, I once shared a car with a man who had taken a giant bag of garbage onto the train itself. I reflexively pulled away in my posture to give him all the space he needed around the center pole in front of the car’s double doors. He was wearing drab-colored pants and a jacket, typical for all kinds of Chinese factory workers or laborers, only his outfit was blotted with dark stains, and his hands were covered from fingernail to wrist in brownish grease. With one hand he held onto the neck of his sagging plastic bag, and with the other he held onto the circular pole overhead. I leaned into a corner of the car and pitied anyone who would hang onto that pole next- they would retract their hand and find it covered in smelly garbage grease- but then again from the look of the dirty film-covered floors and surroundings, and from the sparse cleaning crews I had encountered in China, with their soggy, old, denim-colored mops that they would listlessly drag over the pitted concrete-colored flooring, anyone holding onto the rails in a crowded Chinese subway car should be pitied.

And, I think that this is not news to anyone familiar with scenes from a slum country, but when the subway car’s doors open, the people inside and out immediately stream into each other like two opposing fire hoses. The same goes for elevators in China. Every time I tried to get off an in-demand elevator, some old woman with flat, curly hair and a dusty cotton jacket would walk straight into my chest, without flinching, unless I circled around her like a slippery matador. Now, I don’t think it was the same bossy woman walking into me every time, but this is hard to confirm because I never got a good look at her face. She always had a downcast brow and avoided eye contact as if she were a dim-eyed beetle furiously crossing the sidewalk. Plus, I stand over six feet tall and the elevator raider barely cleared five feet, and as soon as the doors opened she was palm-first into my sternum, so the angle did not allow for a good view of her face.

Even though in every subway station there are helpful floor stickers reminding people to stand to the side to clear the lane so passengers getting off the train can file through quickly first, which opens up the space for incoming passengers, and even though in it is in a land dominated by iconography when you consider Chinese written symbols, no one cares about the obvious floor signs.

What we in the West call “arrows” is Chinese for “EVERYONE AT ONCE.”

In the passenger trains, where long-riding passengers had a chance to take their shoes off and kick their feet up, they did so. They would sprawl out on each other’s laps, across rows of seats, on the bags and buckets and blankets they brought in, and if the train was crowded enough then people would spend the ride standing or squatting in the space connecting the cars, in between the bathrooms and luggage racks. Consistently, from the cheapest, slowest, most crowded train I rode in China all the way up to the high-speed G Train, people would dump their trash and spit their seeds and leftover food out all over the floor- leaving a poor, wearied cleaning lady to walk through and collect the piles as she lagged behind the accumulating mess. Alternatively, a berserk woman would stomp through and screech at people to hand over their plastic wrappers and paper bins.

Also, more obnoxious than the trash on the train, it was universal for people to play their portable TVs, radios, computers, DVD players, and speakers at full volume. Few saw the necessity of using headphones when there was no concept of keeping one’s music to oneself. Or one’s voice- loud talking and boisterous behavior pervaded the moving cavern on rails, just as it did in every other public gathering place in China.

Which brings me to my point: harmony is not a real Chinese value. It is an imagined ideal. The real values that stood out in my eyes are those that scoffed at manners like keeping quiet in public, keeping one’s hands to oneself, and all the other things supposedly learned in kindergarten. While harmony is not observable, or only obliquely so, the constant boisterousness is definitely apparent.

Cute motivational posters, while possibly made in China, are not sold there.

Boisterousness is a value of the real China, as are the (actually expressed) saying “To get rich is glorious,” and the idea that self and self’s inner circle are all that matter. The true ethic underlying all the little things in China is “every man for himself and push the strangers out of the way.”

I started to see it everywhere, in details as small as the little tissue packets everyone carried with them.

In America, practically every restaurant has napkins on the table, either in a holder or wrapped around the silverware, and public bathrooms have toilet paper and an electronic hand dryer or paper towels, so living my whole life with these conveniences made me notice the glaring absence of napkins and even toilet paper. In China, you bring your own.

In restaurants and cafeterias, the tabletops were bare. Only in the nicest restaurants- those connected to a hotel- were there napkin holders. Even then, the napkins were thin squares folded up into a triangle, and the table is so large that diners have to wait for the napkins to make their way around the lazy Susan every few minutes. Thankfully, these hotel restaurants would provide a plastic-wrapped wet cloth napkin that was thick enough to last throughout a whole dinner. Having that made me feel like I was living in luxury compared to other napkin-free homes and businesses.

If you were lucky, a small café selling noodles or dumplings might have a roll of paper streamer sitting on the table (the kind of party streamers that are used to decorate a high school gym) for you to wipe your fingers with. Other restaurants might occasionally have napkins, too- it wasn’t forbidden- but customers were generally expected to bring their own.

It took me quite a while to catch on and plan for this; many of my meals were eaten with greasy hands. Often, I was spared from learning my lesson the hard way (that is, going without tissues). Friendly students would do the polite thing and offer me one of their own.

Eventually, I tired of being offered tissues or having to ask someone for assistance every time I had messy hands or a runny nose, so I went into the store on campus and picked up my own pack of tissues. A big pack held a dozen small pouches- the convenient size that are kept in purses or pockets. I would have liked to have set an example and defied their cultural norms if I could have found a large cardboard box of tissues to bring into the classroom, but no store had them for sale. The small pouches were all that was available for personal napkin and tissue needs; they were stocked in every department store and convenience shop.

These bulk-size packs go fast when you consider that they are your sole napkin, tissue, and toilet paper supply away from home.

People wanted the small tissue pouches because they knew they needed them. If they were stuck out and about and they had to use a public restroom, the communal paper dispenser at the bathroom entrance would likely be empty, and it would be left to them to provide their own tissues to use in the stall.

Bringing one’s own tissues to every situation, needing it daily like a billfold, phone, and keys, was, I believe, a small indicator of the cultural mindset. I heard Chinese people lament how selfish everyone was, how people in China only wanted to make money for themselves and didn’t care about the condition of anyone outside their family, and while bringing one’s own tissues was not a direct reflection of epidemic selfishness of callous proportions, it was a result of a culture where every individual was left to fend for himself.

In the land of the free and independent-minded, by contrast, Americans have a big reputation for generosity. Americans will give freely to relief efforts half a world away, and that is in addition to their charitable giving to local churches, clubs, and benefits. There is still much thought for the self, obviously, and America is just as famous for being a land of competition and pursuit of wealth. Like any country, those on the outskirts of society have a very difficult time finding employment and sustenance for themselves, and more than ever, this generation of Americans fear for their jobs and worry how they will provide for their families.

Still, before the growth of the American welfare state, before the widespread breakdown in society and public morality, the Protestant American ethic, while expecting everyone to pull their own weight, had very generous and charitable habits. There were and are, in a far-fetched sense, napkins on the table. Public bathrooms were, and are, expected to have toilet paper, hand soap, and hand towels, and there is a reasonable expectation that a fair number will be fairly clean, depending on the location (gas stations not included). When they are not clean it is accepted as a common fact of life, but not as an unchangeable rule of life, as it seemed in my experience in China.

America is a real country, with real problems, and I do not argue that it is a model of virtue or a utopia. No, while seeing Chinese society has predictably made me more thankful for the blessings of American life, it has more so made me perceptive to the problems of my home country. It is well known in America that public trust and consciousness can be pretty dismal depending on what part of the country you live in. Living in dog-eat-dog New York City for a short time was a shock to my easygoing Midwestern sensibilities. My point though is that the prevailing beliefs and practices in America are still very empathetic toward neighbors and strangers. I would argue this is because many in today’s generation have been trained by cultural precedent and the familiar words “Do unto others” and “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

These exemplary American attitudes I speak of were starkly different from the popular thinking I encountered in China. The Chinese believe in receiving good fortune and luck, and working with indefatigable diligence to earn a high salary for your family. Their precedent was: if you don’t work for it, if you don’t cultivate the rice crop, your family will starve. The fears and selfish drive for survival have carried over from the generations living under famine. Chinese people of the past didn’t expect others to feed them or provide for them. They didn’t expect public charity to provide for their food or housing (what charity is there when everyone is starving in communes?), and they didn’t and still don’t expect access to timely, quality medical treatment and government services unless they know the right people.

The positive side of China’s harrowing history is that an industrious, self-achieving work ethic has become practically universal. People take individual responsibility because they have to. Every area of life depends on personal diligence. They scrupulously watch their health, meaning they scrutinize their diet and get daily exercise. Every food ingredient is chosen for its health benefits (if you trust the folk wisdom). Many rely on diet, daily tai chi, and Traditional Chinese Medicine shops as their health care plan. They know they can’t fall back on the government’s system.

Trying out Traditional Chinese Medicine. I seriously recommend cupping for muscle aches.

Aunt Fong’s father-in-law leads me through his daily tai chi routine.

The great downside of China’s universal work ethic is that managers, companies, and institutions often expect employees and underlings to live, eat, and even sleep on the job site, going all week without a day off. Also, the part that most often disgusted me about China’s selfish, starved-animal mindset: unruly crowds and near-sighted drivers and pedestrians. Whenever they encountered another person or a group, everyone had to be first. They had tunnel vision, and as a matter of course they would run into people and push them if they got in their way. No looking over the shoulder, no checking one’s blind spot. No yielding way, no stepping around. No “sorry’s” or “excuse me’s.” If this sounds like a trivial thing to live with, I challenge the reader to swap the manners of home for the law of the street in China.

In Communist China, right of way drives YOU!

Other examples of the selfish culture would be the bartering merchants who attempted to cheat people as their business model (not that this is rare among marketers elsewhere), and also the widespread littering. Roadside ditches and creek beds became reservoirs for stray trash, and any vacant or run-down property became a de facto dumping ground. The unspoken shrug was “Why worry about it? Trash is someone else’s problem, so drop your wrapper and let ‘someone’ clean it up.”

The culture of B.Y.O.N. (Bring Your Own Napkins)- and culture-wide ugly behavior are admittedly only tenuously connected. After experiencing life in China though, I started to connect the two, like a small twig connected to a branch of the selfishness tree. The twig itself is not significant, only a distant extension of the root, and if examined in isolation it would not attract special attention. However, if the root and trunk are known, then a trained eye can recognize any twig and identify its genus and species.

The question I am asking then: why do some countries provide public conveniences that are unavailable in other countries or which must be provided by the individual? I believe it is more than a case of developed versus developing countries. France is developed, but I was surprised to run into pay toilets there, and I heard of snippy store clerks getting snippy and telling foreign visitors that providing bathrooms is not their responsibility. Japan is developed, but their restaurants don’t give away the freebies of American restaurants like soda fountains and ketchup pumps (expect only one ketchup packet at a Tokyo McDonald’s).

My takeaway lesson from life in China: unlike the Confucian cultural value on everyone’s mind- harmony- B.Y.O.N. and “every man for himself” were real, actual cultural practices. Confucian harmony- the smooth, peaceful interworking of society- was an unrealized, imaginary ideal. Each individual person was on his own, and public behavior was anything but harmonious. Likewise, Mao and the communists of the 20th century said their revolutionary state was for the people, yet they could not teach the people to look out for each other, to love their neighbors as themselves.

How many other ideals, in China and elsewhere, are merely imagined? What real practices, like B.Y.O.N., are taken for granted and largely ignored? The ignored practice, and not the imagined, is what is most indicative of a culture.

The Real China: Traffic

October 28, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

Traffic in China does not follow the laws, conventions, or assumptions of American roadways, as might be expected. Remember, China is a collectivist society, which means that drivers from opposing traffic will share your lane with you.

Driving and walking are dangerous prospects in China (not that driving is especially safe anyplace else). Sidewalk and street blend into one here, and cars split the street with whatever wanders into it: bicycles, dogs, buses, motorcycles, electric scooters, livestock, domestic fowl, and plenty of pedestrians. I often wondered why so many people walked in the street, without seeming to care for their safety, when there were always sidewalks or walkways nearby. I always set out to use the sidewalk myself, but after weaving through too many food carts, tables, chicken cages, broken concrete slabs, construction leftovers, parked bicycles, trash, dung, and motorbikes, I ended up taking to the street myself.

American cities might be crowded and busy like China, but at least there is a division of space: sidewalk and street are not the same, nor do they serve the same functions. In China, if you could drive or park there, it was fair game. The same lawless rule applied to walking: if people wanted to trot along the highway with their wheelbarrow behind them, then they did so.

In China, as in most developing countries, the drivers honked non-stop. This, along with many other experiences, made me question whether “developing” was just a euphemism for the opposite of decency. Honking served a theoretical purpose- alerting other motorists and pedestrians of one’s approach- but the people in China were so jaded and dulled to the sound that they would not step aside unless they had to, and then only at the last possible moment. Drivers honked whenever they backed up, whenever they started going forward, whenever they entered a gate or narrow street, whenever they rounded a blind corner, whenever they changed lanes (although I never saw anyone check their blind spots or mirrors), whenever someone was in front of them traveling at a slower speed, whenever they were overtaking another vehicle or weaving in between opposing traffic, or for pretty much any other contingency.

Honking was constant, and it often came in the from of three-round bursts from angry truck and bus drivers. Drivers in China refuse to yield, even when turning left through opposing traffic, so they simply honk and wind their way through other vehicles like a herd of confused cows.

One of my honking taxi drivers almost ran down a university student, but I can’t really fault the driver in that case, because he had his headlights on, was driving under 5 miles per hour, and had honked steadily at the young man several times before he finally flinched and stepped aside. Chinese pedestrians, too, could be shockingly passive.

One November morning, my “Uncle” Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) and I were driving back from his hometown to our university, which normally took 30 minutes; we each had class at 8:00. The fog that morning was intense- you would have tripped over your toes if you didn’t know your heels were behind them. Almost as thick as the fog outside was the tension inside the car. I watched wordlessly as my honorary uncle slowly traversed the maze of the once-familiar city streets and grunted and sighed while trying to determine which streets we were on. Then, insanely, and I do not use those italics lightly, pedestrians would appear- on the highway, not on the city streets- would appear in front of us, walking the wrong way, into oncoming traffic, when a perfectly usable pathway (flat, smooth, and clear) lay on the other side of a separating barrier. We would honk and swerve around them, and after surviving our 80-minute odyssey of missed turns and drowsy detours, we eventually arrived at our campus gates.

I often muttered to myself about Chinese drivers’ lack of courtesy and safety in relation to other drivers and especially to pedestrians, but those people walking on the highway, in the fog, were out of their minds in any culture.

Back to the taxi drivers. Of course, they showed the same temerity as taxi drivers the world over. But in China, no one showed respect to the dashes and lines indicating whose lane was whose. So, when passing, the taxi drivers would honk several times and go left or right- whichever was most convenient, not necessarily a legal or safe driving space- to overtake whatever was in front of them.

Once, on a four-lane road, I was a passenger in a taxi and we were in the left lane of northbound traffic (note: China, like America, drives on the right- theoretically). We were blocked in front by a charter bus and on the right by a semi. So, in his impatience, my driver passed the bus in front by going left. We were driving north in a southbound lane.

Driving the wrong way was fairly common for taxi drivers though. So common, in fact, that there was another taxi in front of us, also in the midst of passing the bus by driving into opposing traffic. Apparently, this fellow scofflaw was too slow for my taxi driver, so he went left around him– we were driving in the far lane of opposite-direction traffic. I do not remember how long it took to pass the car and then the bus, or by how little we missed a head-on collision, but if I counted it in breaths, it would have been zero.

Chinese motorists pile them in, too, at least on the motorbikes. Every morning, I could count on seeing husband and wife, or daughter and child, doubled-up on a motorbike, and if it was raining, wearing a parka made to drape over the handlebars. If it was cold, they used mittens that were fastened to the handlebars. Motorcycles were not a fair weather pleasure vehicle in China. Such a thing did not really exist outside the very few rich young men in large cities driving sport bikes as playthings. Two-wheeled vehicles were used year round; they were often a person’s primary transportation. I saw, more times than I could count, father driving the motorbike, mother holding on in the back, a son or daughter standing in the foot rest, and maybe a small child in mother’s arms. I saw them carrying dogs and chickens on the back, or so many cases of beer that I do not think I could have fit them in the passenger side of my car.

A local Chinese tractor loaded up with cardboard.

The funniest, most outrageous, motorbike scene I ever saw was a woman on a scooter trailing a motorbike-truck (motorcycle front with a truck bed attached- Uncle Jiang asked me what the American word was for this and I had no word to tell him other than jalopy), and with her extended right leg she was pressing against a stack of plywood on the motorbike-truck, preventing the sheets from sliding during travel. I will repeat that: loose plywood on a truck bed was being held in place by a woman’s extended foot as she followed the truck on her scooter.

I also saw- twice, so it seemed like a regular thing- a mattress on back of a motorbike-truck, and like the plywood pile, it was loose and held down by a person instead of a rope. A man was lying down on the mattress to weigh it down, and holding onto the front of the truck bed as his friend drove. I guess that rope and bungee cord are Western luxuries.

Chinese labor has saturated the supply side so much that bungee cord is more expensive in comparison.

It was scary and sadly funny, but too often tragic. You have probably read in the news about children being carelessly crushed by oblivious drivers, like the two-year-old, Yue Yue, who was struck and left in the street for hours as passersby took no notice of her unconscious body. Or the story of the over-packed van filled with elementary school students that was in a head-on crash. There have been multiple stories like that one, with many fatalities and serious injuries, so you may have read about these incidents more than once. I first heard about the school van crash from my mother, on a computer call from America, and I told her that awful as it was, I was not surprised. It was sadly sobering to say something like that.

On foot, a person had to expect drivers to ignore them or spitefully zoom past them. Possibly, you could even become knocked down and then run over several more times by the same car until the driver was sure that you were splattered and your family could not extract lifelong healthcare support for your dead body. When crossing the street, it was usually necessary to join up with a bold mob that was big enough to force traffic to yield. The streets were scene to daily, cavalier contempt for human life. In the Real China, that is the way of life.

A crippled man pushed himself on a wheeled cart into the middle of a major four-way intersection, cars careening past, as I craned my neck to watch from the back of a bus window. Almost as alarming as the dangerous sight on the street was noticing that no one else in my bus seemed to regard it. When my aunt noticed me staring in surprise, she laughed at it and basically communicated to me, again: “That’s China.”

The Real China: Like a Child

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

Living in China, and I am sure expatriates of all stripes would say the same, often made me feel like a child. Predominantly, this was because of my low language ability. Riding in the back of a taxi cab, watching the city streets scroll past the passenger window, unintelligible signs and store fronts would wash over me. In groups of people, I often had to sit without stirring and wait for the indecipherable conversation’s indeterminate end. Out shopping by myself, I could either point at what I wanted or go without it; good Samaritans did step in when the lady behind the counter became confused orstartled by me.

But not only my ignorance of the language sidelined me to watch the adults go about their business, every facet of life- social customs, city layouts, building aesthetics, manners of speaking, who was married to whom, everything– fit into a foreign grammar that I could not parse at first glance.

Understand- or actually, don’t understand- cousins would call each other “my brother” or “my sister,” friends might do the same, and any time I tried to ask questions to peel away the layers of whatever Chinese riddle was going on, I was met with an embarrassed giggle, or confused look, and maybe a jumbled answer about how Mei Mei was or wasn’t really Sho Sho’s brother, or they just called each other that, and no further explanation. With the question of who was married to whom, I suppose it was not always completely necessary to determine this, but Chinese married couples shared no common jewelry or beauty mark, and then I would see a svelte lady hanging around a sloppy-looking man and wonder why that would be, or see a pretty young lady and wonder if she could be single, so how could my curiosity not grow? I would be sitting among the same groups as certain pairs always seemed to be there together, so I kept a keen eye out to track which male and female pairs consistently came or went together. It really was not very transparent to tell.

I had to be shrewd to gather what clues I could. Wives in China keep their family name after marrying, so my aunt for instance, married to Uncle Jiang, was still Aunt Fong and not Jiang. During group chats, the couples almost never spoke my language and so they rarely introduced themselves to me directly. Sometimes they would arrive separately or sit apart according to the social rank of the whole mixed gathering. I merely absorbed the social scene from a silent distance.

The men and women there did not follow American modes of conspicuous “couplehood” like holding hands, sitting close together, or making inside jokes to try and look cute while grating on everyone else’s patience. People there had a habit of acting reserved, yet still jolly, in public and in private, which I did appreciate, but this clouded my social perception considerably. Eventually, it would dawn on me that a certain man and woman had been standing around each other in three different gatherings, and therefore there was no other explanation but that they had to be married.

The smoking gun that my friend, Ma Cao, was married to this cute lady: their mutual baby.

Another example of the foreign cultural grammar I had to interpret: the basic arrangement of shopping spaces. To contrast, first consider America, the land of wide open space, where each commercial business often has its own rectangular building and parking lot. If combined, stores will form a mini-mall, still rectangular and with a much larger parking lot, and of course many stores can join up under the roof of a classic symbol of America, the very large, boxy shopping mall, with an encompassing parking lot or garage. Also do not forget the downtown districts, with specialty boutiques situated in a row of gentrified, old connected storefronts, separated by interior walls, with parking space on the streets.

In China, there are variations on these basic models, “with Chinese characteristics.” Commercial store giants like Carrefour and Wal-Mart often formed the core of the Chinese equivalent to a medium-sized mall (there were furniture malls and other grand shopping centers throughout the larger cities, too). They have an attached parking garage for the minority of customers who arrived by car, usually above or below the store, but most take public transportation or ride their electric scooters, so the most common parking is a long, cluttered line of scooters, with some charging up via extension cords and exterior building outlets. Inside the building, dozens of smaller shops line the way to the main store. The tactic is the same one your local supermarket uses in placing the milk and eggs in the back corner, past produce and aisles of impulse buys, only the Chinese line their corridors with so many clothing and gift shops that it was difficult to find the main interior entrance, usually requiring walking around corners, through corridors, and up or down escalator ramps- once I was unable to find the Carrefour altogether. I became frustrated and stranded like a gambler desperate to escape an ingeniously looping casino. And, like a cunning supermarket, immediately after the Wal-Mart check-outs are the tea and medicine shops, candy counters, cheap plastic trinkets, and arcade games. This much was easily understandable from an outsider’s view.

What I could not navigate were the shopping streets. In a big city, the shopping streets were major attractions with chain stores, popular food vendors, neon signs, and more people per square foot than I had seen in even Times Square or almost any other American equivalent.

Nanjing’s Confucius Market, where filial piety and sales tax are included on every item.

In streets like these, the super chains like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and the Nike and Adidas stores were easy to identify. But where I mostly stayed, in the real China (as opposed to the mega-cities which have every kind of commercial layout), shops were housed in rows of decaying architecture built centuries ago that stretched over several long city blocks. Each shop was recessed in the structure, as if cut out of a concrete cave, and there was no signage to signal what were the contents inside. Sure, there were names painted above the square openings, but always in a typical, sloppy or mechanical font of Chinese calligraphy. This was of no help to me or anyone accustomed to the marketing power of inviting icons. The hardware store did not post a picture of a wrench out front. The clothing stores did not have an icon of a fashion model or a simple graphic of a shirt, but if they were a big enough franchise then at least they had abundant sale posters hung up and a wide window view to the clothing racks inside. The fake Apple store, however, did use the trademarked white apple logo to try and fool the masses into buying a knock-off i-product. Or, maybe it was a real Apple store after all, but who was I, a foreigner, to tell?

The cumulative effect of these businesses in the row house style of an American downtown (note that Chinese cities do not have downtowns but urban centers with sprawling streets and cavernous back alleys) was an eyesore and a headache. The natives, who had spent their life getting acquainted with the language and the cityscape, could pick out the distinct business types by familiarity or by reading the writing scrawled above the doorway. Meanwhile, I was left scratching my head. I wondered what each shop contained, and I had to walk directly front and center to peek inside, like an audacious toddler, and scan with wide eyes all that the shop contained.

One city’s not-so-inviting commercial street. The garage-door like openings were a dark mystery to me, but the chickens spoke, er, clucked for themselves.

A very Chinese feature of the multitude of small businesses was the overlap among neighboring shops with the same product line or service. Three hardware stores in a row might have slices of the same pie: one selling chain, cords, parts, and pieces of things; another, power appliances and generators; and the third, paint and bathroom fixtures. Or, there could be a whole street of nothing but small clothing shops, each selling a variation of the same shirts, purses, coats, scarves, and accessories. I walked down the streets of a small city where I saw four different bakeries in addition to the street snack vendors, each low in quality, not a threat to its competitors and not being threatened with lack of business. The Chinese economy, very unlike the American, makes tolerant allowance for small business owners to set up shop next to a near-duplicate line of competitors, sell little, and pay less in rent.

Go to any tourist area, any area that is could even conceivably attract a tourist in China, and you will soon be able to predict with great accuracy what booths and what gaudy junk will line the way to the attraction. Walkways led the way to every accessible part of the Great Wall- filled with tiny shops for folding fans, t-shirts, cheap jade amulets, and cheaper plastic toys- and it was the same at every other location. Permanent stores and booths might not be set up, but at the top of a mountain trail or outside the mouth of a cave an old woman might be waiting to show off wooden toy swords and bottled tea and fruit drinks to the only group of travelers she might see all day. How far had these vendors walked to set up shop, and how long were they sitting along this pathway? I always wondered. It seemed that, despite the saturation of identical souvenirs, the number of businesses in Chinese tourist sites and cities did not drive up the level of competition. I cannot imagine any greedy slumlords evicting tenants when I often stumbled upon shops in dark alleys after getting lost after several turns through rambling lanes, and to my surprise, saw an employee or owner lounging at the counter, watching TV. I peeked in my head for a moment out of sheer astonishment. Who would ever shop at this place? Who could even find it?

A typical line-up at a busy tourist attraction.

There were many times in China where, like a boy wandering away from his mother to explore the variety of aisles in a large store, I set off on my own to walk the streets of the city and chance to find new sights and adventures. This was my favorite thing to do when I visited the major cities. I would follow my street map and take a pedestrian tour through parts of Beijing, for instance, letting the streets take me where they would, stopping whenever I was hungry or something caught my eye. I spent the time mute, a stranger not only to the city-dwellers but to their language, culture, and society as well. Again, sights and sounds poured over me, like an infant hearing words for the first time, and to acquire an understanding of my surroundings I had to passively accept it.

In any new city or experience in China, having a friend to translate for me proved invaluable. On my own, I could gain a sense of my surroundings, but I often needed someone to confirm or correct my surmises. Occasionally, I would be blessed to meet a young man who had studied in America and, in addition to understanding the general differences between our cultures, spoke fluent English. Other times, some of my bolder female students would be willing to approach me, and eventually our conversation would turn to explanations of the Chinese way.

Mostly though, I was on my own in a country where a tall, white man is a strange novelty. When I bought vegetables or food at the campus food store, the check-out ladies would mostly refuse eye-contact, but sometimes they would laugh and I can only assume that they were exchanging in-jokes to each other like, “Hey! Here’s that big foreigner, and he’s buying peanuts again! Foreigners must love peanuts!”

And even though I knew how to count and speak a scant amount of phrases in Chinese, they would always hold up their fingers or their calculator display to show me how much I owed, which I recognize was a courtesy to me as a foreigner, even if it could feel a little patronizing. I shocked the cashier a few times by repeating the total in Chinese, or saying, “I know, four fifty” when they seemed skeptical that I could comprehend. Those rare times I spoke up, they would have a good-natured laugh. I was a surprise to them- precocious, even.

Walking the streets, children would see me and call out to everyone, “Laowai!” Foreigner! After living for months in a city as the only non-Chinese face, I too sat up in attention when I saw a bulbous, white body through a train or bus window- another foreign traveler or teacher. We were a special class, an odd and entertaining spectacle.

I will say that many people seemed delighted to have me in their country. In city life, strangers ignore each other as they walk past, and this happened to me for the most part, but there were still quite a few occasions where I perceived that the people in front of me were whispering about me or the group standing to my side was examining me as I walked by.

Thankfully, Aunt Fong or another volunteer would often accompany me into the city center or help me when I needed to do something important like go to the bank or doctor. This ensured that I got to where I wanted to go, my needs were communicated to the clerk, banker, or wait staff, and no sly vendors could cheat me out of my American dollars. After a while though, having someone escort me everywhere, order my food, and speak to store employees for me aggravated my American sense of independence. It ignited an urge to go see places and try things on my own, hence my solo excursions around Beijing and elsewhere. Still, I could not escape my dilemma. I either relied on an intermediary to help me and do most things for me, or I wandered on the outside of society, aloof to what was taking place before me.

Aunt Fong, literally taking me by the hand.

It was not a very difficult burden to live with, but it was definitely humbling. The worst part about being a foreign guest was when people assumed I was stupid, or when they bossed me around like an ignorant beast. I held no ill feelings toward those who phrased things delicately or spoke to me simply, as if to a child. I knew from teaching English classes that expressing one’s meaning to speakers of other languages often required baby steps. The point wasn’t to demean but to convey. To do so subtly requires acute empathy of your listener’s perspective.

But not everyone took pains to explain things delicately to me. Oftentimes, with Uncle Jiang, I received rough orders that were his transliterations of Chinese grammar. “Look. Follow me.” Or: “Listen to me.” He would speak these commands with a stiff, stern face, and his tone and cadence were deep and slow, almost like Darth Vader, but without the booming sense of doom or space helmet.

This routine of listening to blunt statements got old quick, but I always reminded myself that Uncle Jiang was good enough to try and teach me Chinese and let me stay over at his and Aunt Fong’s apartment most weekends. I had to respond to his grace with patience. He and Aunt Fong also took me along on several weekend trips, which I have to credit him for, even if he tried to rush me through lines by pushing me in the back or tugging my wrist and chiding me “Quickly, quickly.”

My position in China was such that I could not change my treatment. In America, the fantasy of teenagers is to own a car and move away from their parents to drink and do whatever they want- right away at 18, if possible. In China, I was reverted to the childhood stage, unable to fend for myself. My travels and most of my commerce depended on someone else, not necessarily older, but culturally literate. I was relieved of certain responsibilities, cared for by others, often treated as the helpless outsider. I could not argue I was otherwise.

The Real China: Questions I Could Not Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the riverside park with Aunt Fong and Uncle Jiang.

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

I breathed easier and smiled. “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real China: Frequently Asked Questions

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

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

Keep this in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“DOYOULIKE… CHI-NESE FOOD?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handsome in China

September 18, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

First day of class at the local middle school, walking up the stairwell past hundreds of young Chinese pupils, and a young voice bellows out at its breaking point: “HANDSOME! YOU ARE HANDSOME!” I swiveled my head to search the stairwell for the red-faced boy who had screamed it out. SCUH-REAMED screamed. He yelled like only a middle school boy could. Of the surprising amount of admiration I was already adding up, his unrestrained shouting stood out.

Almost anyone who goes to Asia to teach English is guaranteed to hear, over and over, by one and all, how good-looking they are. In fact, if an American teacher didn’t hear a generous amount of personal compliments, I would be worried that they had a tumorous growth on their face or a horrendous skin disease. Then again- no joke- while overseas I did meet an American guy with some skin condition that turned him grayish-purple. Other than that he looked healthy, and he had a young Korean wife and a baby, so maybe there are no disqualifications. Readers, take note: if you spend enough time with the locals in China and they don’t tell you how handsome or beautiful you are, demand why not.

Even so, while I learned to laugh off these compliments as a general cultural phenomenon, something sweet that needed to be taken with a grain of salt, it still seemed as if people were going out of their way to praise me in particular. I decided to test it. I shared some pictures of my friend Andrew with one of my college classes. Physically fit with a strong, smooth jawline, and clear eyes- I thought if my students didn’t think he was an attractive American specimen then they didn’t know what handsome was. When I displayed some pictures from our vacation together in Thailand, immediately I heard from my students how handsome I looked. Yeah, yeah, as expected, but thank you all the same. As jaded and knowing as I wanted to pretend I was, “handsome” compliments never lost their charm. “But what about Andrew? Do you think he’s handsome?” I asked. “En,” came the muted reply. One girl flat out told me “no.”

Blurry or not, Andrew is a good-looking guy, despite what my students might tell you.

Stunned, I struggled as how I should interpret their reaction. My English class wasn’t seen as being nearly as important as other university classes, so I could rule out personal flattery to get a better grade out of me. Perhaps they just preferred lighter hair colors and blue eyes? I ran the experiment again, this time with small portrait pictures of every member of my father’s side of the family. My younger brother is a lot blonder than I am, with blue eyes and a pleasing smile, so surely my students would be impressed by him, I thought. I asked what they thought of my brother, then what they thought of my cousin’s strawberry blonde husband. “Don’t you think they’re handsome?” I baited.

“No,” said one of my male students, “Only you are handsome.” I laugh at it now, but he was completely serious.

As with most every American, when I met people in China, it was better than an even chance they would tell me I was handsome. And, as in the example above, even the men said so.

Once, while out chatting with the curious English-speaking students at our university campus along with my fellow foreign English teachers, Grant and Sue, a young man approached me and, sure enough, after asking where I came from, blurted out how handsome he thought I was. Sue and I shared a humorous glance with each other- it was a running joke at that point- and she remarked to me about the gap between Western culture, where the men are not supposed to say such things. Then she told my admirer, “In our countries, we don’t do that. Men aren’t supposed to tell other men they’re handsome! It’s just not done.”

The student looked at her blankly, and plainly stated, “But it’s true!” Sue didn’t know what to say after that.

Even if someone contradicted my alleged handsomeness, he and his like-minded countrymen would have none of it.

When they told me so, I told them thanks, they were very kind. That was what I worked out as my polite response after an awkward phase of smiling and not knowing what to say. I worried that it might make me sound conceited in a culture where it was standard to deflect and deny compliments by saying, “No, not at all.” But as the student above proved, I would not have been successful in negating what they said. For awhile, I thought it might seem more humble to reciprocate the kind words, so I would say, “Thanks! I think you’re handsome, too.” But that just seemed to make the situation tenser, and they might look at me askance and ask why I thought that.

If it was a group of girls giggling about me, I sometimes blushed. To my American sensibilities, it was out of the ordinary, even off-putting, to hear people comment on my appearance, especially when they were pouring on the praise. I was amazed to hear them say they thought I was handsome, or the Chinese word for “cool young man.” My experience and upbringing had not prepared me for this.

At English Corner in the campus park, girls like these to come gawk and get a picture.

At English Corner in the campus park, foreign teachers could expect girls like these to come gawk and get a picture.

Even most adults and the college professors said so when they met me. One English professor told me, while we were waiting in an English office for our student-interview meeting to begin, “Oh, Dustin, you are so handsome. All the girls like you.” He meant it. It took all my power not to burst out laughing. I thanked him awkwardly, yet kindly, for that special compliment.

And every Joe Average from America will hear from his Chinese inspectors how much he resembles Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks or some other Hollywood superstar. On my campus, there were quite a few students who watched the American TV show Prison Break who told me that I looked like the main character, Michael Scofield (played by Wentworth Miller). I cannot vouch for that, but at that same English meeting I mentioned, with student scholarship applicants sitting one at a time before a long table of English language professors, one girl sat down and immediately began by saying how attractive she thought I was and how closely I resembled Michael Scofield. She had to fit that in as part of her self-introduction; didn’t even let anyone ask her any questions first. Then she smiled in nervous embarrassment, as did I.

My celebrity comparison in China: the very handsome American actor, Wentworth Miller.

I don’t see the resemblance.

A couple times, when I passed by a group of girls, they called out after me. What a turn of the tables compared to my American life! Usually, when my onlookers wanted to get a kick out of me, they would holler a high-pitched “Hello!” as soon as my back was turned to them, but on a few occasions some giggly students waited until I was past and blurted out, “I think you are handsome!”

After a while, it almost became easy to believe. Really, I knew coming in that people would notice my tall figure in a crowd and many Americans had already seen their stock rise after coming to Asia. I would have been more surprised to not receive praise. For most of my Chinese admirers, I was the only foreigner they had ever met in person. In an area of a couple million people, I was one of only a handful of white faces. (How’s that for a pleasant literary image? A handful of faces.) The only other white people I saw around my town were the Australian couple, Grant and Sue, who lived across from me in my campus apartment building, and on a few rare occasions some foreign English teachers in the nearby mid-sized city.

And even if the Chinese said I was handsome, it was more like I was a curiosity- something to look at. A novelty who was good for a picture, not an interview. Or, if there was interaction through words, it was the same three questions (“Where are you come from?” (sic) “How old are you?” “Do you like Chinese food?”) or English as a stunt. At the middle school, the students liked to shout “Hello!” to me as a game of daring, or for their own entertainment they could call out my Chinese name “Li Da-Sen!” At the university, the students would sometimes do a double-take, and if they were with a group of friends, I could expect a jocular, “Hello!”

Everything I did was conspicuous, so occasionally I would hear from one of my students when and where so-and-so or so-and-so’s friend sighted me on campus or around town. I behaved myself every time I went out for a bowl of beef noodles or for a trip to the market, because I knew that eyes were always on me and I would eventually hear reports about what I did earlier in the week from someone who watched me do it. I even found out from a few girls that my celebrity picture (students would stealthily use their camera phone to take my picture while I lectured in class- some students would even sit in on my class just to watch me and take my picture) had made the rounds on Chinese internet sites and reached their friends in cities many provinces removed from ours.

And where celebrity goes, gossip is sure to follow. Once, a student I met on campus told me, “I heard someone say that Dustin has two kids.” That was the only rumor I ever heard. I can only hope I was spared from other wild fables.

With a baby. Not my baby.

Being called handsome in China taught me an important lesson. I had to travel halfway around the globe to do it, but once I was there, I had changed my world. My status in society and my esteem in other’s eyes were completely different than my place in America. In my home country, I had been ignored and excluded so much that I thought it was a law of the universe. Gravity pulls objects toward objects of greater mass just as surely as women and attention are only attracted to the rich, powerful, and showy, I thought. I never expected to receive compliments on my appearance until that imaginary day when my face was on a magazine cover. I thought I would have to settle for my female relatives’ familial pride whenever I dressed up for holidays.

China taught me otherwise. Who I was changed with where I lived. I was a nobody in America, or next to it, but I was handsome in China. I had an outsider’s place in society, or a lack of place in society, but coming from America, being young, and being perceived as handsome meant my position was one of minor celebrity.

I have to say that I preferred it to no celebrity, or no attention at all. Conversations were much easier to start, and I could talk to anyone with the expectation that they would “give me the time of day.” I no longer had to mumble timidly and lower my gaze around people who did not seem comfortable with me. The first time I walked into a classroom in China, the students erupted into gleeful applause. No exaggeration, that happened multiple times. (Of course, that wore off after they became bored with my class as it was inevitable they would be. All I could do was talk at them- in incomprehensible English!)

Still, I could not shake off my shyness. My meek character had been formed by years of being a silent man of little importance in the Midwest. Even when my Chinese students and friends looked at me expectantly, mouths open in wide smiles- even when I wanted to dazzle them- I struggled to find the words and enthusiasm. I would watch in admiration as Grant and Sue, the Australians, would tell breathless tales about life on the Gold Coast, driving on the beach, hunting for mud crabs, spotting snakes and wild birds around their house, while all of their young onlookers (myself included) were bound to them in smiling silence. I did my best, I raised my voice and tried to make simple jokes, I tried to be like Grant and Sue, but I struggled to build any social momentum with my listeners. (And it was “listeners” mostly, as Chinese students go mute by default and will almost never speak unless called upon by name.) I was Sisyphus struggling up a steep of stone dispositions, always sinking back to the unsure feeling of a failed comedian.

What I faced on a daily basis. Note the girl on the right-hand side who is taking my picture with her phone.

Walking into a room, I would immediately arrest the attention of everyone, but I could not hold it. I was as shy and introverted as the quiet Chinese students as I was trying to model speech to. It was beautiful, and humbling, irony that I was teaching Chinese students the basics of English conversation. I often looked over the text’s rudimentary reminders (e.g. “English speakers often precede personal questions by using a hesitant statement such as ‘I hope you don’t mind, but…’”) and I would think to myself how sensible and helpful the advice was. Wow! I could use that! I needed to be taught basic social skills and conversation, too.

But I was the teacher, so I had to be an example for my students. I had a strong sense of English conversation, if not real comfort and mastery of it; I was at least able to discuss it with my students. I was not a typical American, but I could relate to them how Americans typically behaved. Often, I found myself, a definite non-fan of spectator sports, telling my Chinese charges about American football and American sports culture, among other topics I had detached insight into. I was not interested in American sports personally, but I did find it a fascinating subject to talk about and a convenient topic to teach. I was an atypical American teaching, if not exactly modelling, what Americans were like.

Like a circular knot, I could not tell where my position and personality started and where it met with the representative, handsome American teacher in my students’ imagination. My identity was intertwined with strands of my old self- conditioned by my lowly rank in America- and the new handsome man I was in Chinese society. My heart never truly accepted my celebrity. Though I was grateful to finally feel what it was like to be admired and noticed by the masses. It was flattering and it made it easy to win friends, but it also taught me that popularity is, like most everything, a meaningless pursuit. Even with the affection of a classroom of girls’ eyes, my loneliness remained. I still carried hidden burdens on my heart. My face enjoyed a wonderful reception in China; I could not say the same for my soul.

When I later lived In Korea, I was still handsome, but I was runner-up to my school’s Number 1 Most Handsome Teacher, the P.E. teacher. This honor was bestowed by the 5th grade girls.