Further life and times of *liltayinchina*

Just thought I'd share the proof that I'm COMING HOME! This ticket was hard enough to procure and so, it deserves some attention.

I took a bus from Wuchang to Hankou just to get in the right quadrant of the city. Then I took a taxi to get to the building where the ticketing agency resides. I took an elevator to the 33rd floor, ears popping and plenty of time to analyze my pores in the mirrored walls. On the 33rd floor, I walked past empty or under-construction suites and walked into the Across China - International Ticketing office where Rita, who had been avoiding my emails the previous week, grudgingly met me and processed the ticket. I gave her a wad of bills - seventy 100 yuan bills to be exact. She issued the ticket and I left. I got in another taxi and got dropped off near the bus stop. I walked among a throng of Saturday strollers to the stop and squeezed my sweaty self onto a bus bound for Wuchang. By the time the bus was stop-and-going across the main bridge over the Yangtze River, my phone started vibrating crazily.

It was Rita. She was calling to ask me to return to the 33rd floor because she'd entered the ticket incorrectly in her system and she was going to get into trouble if she didn't destroy the ticket and re-issue it. I said no way. I suggested that she send a courier like she was originally going to before she dropped off the face of the internet...hesitantly, she agreed.

I received two emails and three text messages between that Saturday afternoon and Monday morning along the lines of, "Maybe you will come to the office and bring the ticket" or "Maybe you will meet my courier in Hankou" and my favorite, "Maybe you do not understand that this is very troubling for me. It was complicated the day you came in and I was not prepared to present the ticket to you" - even though I called her Saturday morning, asking if I could come that afternoon and she replied that I could.

Long story short (and as you can see from the photo) - I got my ticket. Monday morning, the courier was late and had to wait for me for ten minutes while I was teaching. When I came to the office, a man eyed me suspiciously through a cloud of cigarette smoke. When I pulled out the original ticket that Rita had printed for me, he snatched it and stared at it, an inch from his face, to confirm that the tickets were identical, save the mysterious labeling that would make one kosher in Rita's system and the other not. After a few minutes of staring at one spot on the original ticket, Mr. Smokey thrust the new ticket into my hands and shuffled off.

I'm coming home!!! 

Posted by liltayinchina at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday evening, the power was off. The temperature reached a 100-degree high yesterday afternoon - I believe it was actually 101 degrees - and yet, my apartment wasn't all that bad when I returned home at 6pm. But, the power was indeed still out.

In the fading light of day, I read Vanity Fair’s green issue, brought to me by Bianca along with a copy of Vogue and some Cheez-its.

Once it got too dark to read, I fired up the iPod and listened to a This American Life podcast about Habeas Corpus and our interrogation prisons in Guantanamo. I dug out my LED headlamp and stood in the dark in my kitchen, cutting up tomatoes by the light of the lamp with headphones in, listening to brilliant story-telling journalism.

When I finished my tomatoes, I turned the lamp off and lay in bed, limbs outstretched, caught up in a “be here now” reverie, laughing in the dark at the humor of Ira Glass and his contributing editors.

It was the calmest I’ve been in weeks. Usually, I arrive home dog tired and look around thinking, “There are a million and three things I could be doing but all I want to do is lie down or watch a poorly copied DVD with Chinese subtitles obscuring half the screen” (sometimes I use this fact to convince myself that I’m trying to trick my subconscious into learning to read without a bit of traditional study).

But I had very few options upon returning home last night. I could do exactly what I always try not to do: lie down and pass out. And so, the simplicity of my evening struck me as delightful and completely refreshing. I suppose to become the ascetic that Jack Kerouac was during his days spent in the Cascades as a fire lookout, I’d have to trade my iPod for a CB radio and my headlamp for a box of matches. I think my 21st century version isn’t all that bad.

In fact, the moment couldn’t have been more apropos: I had just finished reading an article about the privatization of water in China (the government simply cannot handle the magnitude of the polluted water problem, which in many ways they have created in the first place and so cities are beginning to sell the problems and -soon to be – profits to a couple of French companies who specialize in water cleanup and management) and the impasse this shift is causing for poverty-stricken citizens and was delving into an article on the devastation of vast tracts of Amazonian rain forest caused by the extraction, treatment and overland transportation of oil by Texaco, now Chevron. And it struck me as incredibly convenient that as I was reading these articles, I wasn’t using the obvious evil of coal-powered electricity to read my magazine or to cool my mildly muggy room. At the same time, my iPod had been charged by an outlet the previous evening and my magazine was, most likely, not printed on 100% recyclable paper and the batteries in my headlamp are not reusable and my tomatoes were most likely grown with the help of a variety of chemicals and enhancers, but, as they say, it begins with understanding.

Oh that the power would go out more often around here. (Don’t tell any of my housemates that I said that. I’ve heard they spent quite different evenings last night.)

Posted by liltayinchina at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Almost three weeks ago now, a fifth-grade girl at my school fainted in her Chinese teacher’s office early in the morning and was taken to the nearby hospital. After only minutes in the hospital she was pronounced dead – a combination of a fatal heart attack and damage to her brain when she struck her head upon falling. The girl had suffered from a rare heart illness, which she inherited from her mother, her whole life but no one knew about it until her death two Thursdays ago.

I was walking through the school gates a little late Thursday morning, having walked to a nearby dumpling stand for breakfast. Upon entering the gates, I noticed a commotion and a large crowd surrounding a small group of devastated young girls. The girls were walking with a teacher and a man pushed his way through first to allow the girls to pass quickly under the curious stares of strangers. As I walked slowly along one avenue towards the school buildings, the girls continued in their huddle along the parallel avenue, sobbing and moaning loud enough to send chills down my spine.

I mentioned this scene to several of my English co-teachers and no one heard a thing until the following morning. As Julia and I were making our way to first period Friday morning, Jade, a Chinese English teacher for grade six, seized Julia’s arm and unloaded her terrible news. The little girl was dead. She had been one of the brightest pupils in the fifth grade. She had been Mustafa’s student, not Lisa’s. She was dead.

For the rest of the day, I walked around in an irritable haze. At ten o’clock, as usual, the students marched to the field and were prepped for the fanfare that would welcome an envoy of students and teachers from Singapore the following Monday. I watched incredulously as the music went on and the students did their daily calisthenics to one of my favorite songs, “Tonari no Totoro”, which happens to be a Japanese song and comes from a Japanese cartoon, but in the song that was blaring across the field, a Chinese woman sang the song using Chinese words and changing the idea to suit Chinese children’s imaginations. I became furious.

This little girl had died, tragically, unexpectedly and students throughout the school were being forced to pretend nothing happened. I realized that we, the teachers, were grownups and were required to have a certain level of programmed personal risk management, but death isn’t something easily understood by children; it brings some adults to tears everyday. I needed something to be opened up. I needed the opposite of the school’s suppression. I was suffocating. And yet, the days went by, have continued to go by, and nothing. I think about the fact that a little girl died so suddenly and my mind sort of dances around the fact as if it is a roadblock threatening to cut off an otherwise enjoyable haze.

All this has really shown me is that I am not well suited to dealing with tragedy. Eileen admitted to me that she felt very distant from the fact, even though she and Winnie taught a class next door to the little girl’s own class the following morning. Eileen and Winnie heard the collective sobs of the little girl’s classmates for the duration of their forty-minute class. Maybe I take things too personally. Maybe I can’t let things go as I should. But do me a favor, think of how this tragedy could be your own and tell me that you’d wish for those around you to “just let it go” or to suppress the potential hysterics of children coming to terms with death for the first time at the age of seven or eight or ten.

The worst part of all is that I find I’m daily growing resentment for the way the school is run. And I’d be alarmed that maybe a future working relationship with all things Chinese isn’t such a great idea except that in talking with those Chinese whom I trust and love, they seem to be just as disillusioned with the school as me, which is a greater tragedy since these good, dear friends and colleagues of mine cannot leave.

The imbalance of how the foreign teachers are recruited and then paid compared to the years of work and study and preparation that the Chinese English teachers go through to get paid one fourth of our own salary is enough to make me daydream of setting up monthly lotteries to distribute half of my income to much more deserving teachers.

I’ve only got 34 days left in China and it seems a damn shame. I feel I’ve done plenty of good things and traveled enough; I know this is where I want to aim my future, but I feel I’m leaving China on bad terms. And that, to me, is the shame. So, now that I’ve spent a good three weeks feeling disconcerted and saddened, I think I’ll spend the rest of the time making up with China. When I think about it, I’ve only had two previous major growing pains during this year away from home: there came a point in Shanghai when I was angry with everyone and everything and I contend that the sweat made me go crazy, and then there was a lowness around the western New Year when I had to say goodbye to my mother and return to my insane co-habitants of this moldy mansion I call home. This third growing pain has been a strange mixing of frustration with the “Chinese way” and with the school and how it is run, and I’ll be honest, since this isn’t my “real life” – the teaching and the frustration with the school, that is – my tendency has been to shrug off each disappointment and frustration and to focus more on the daily subterfuges and to LOSE SIGHT of the 180 reasons why I am here: my 1st and 2nd graders, and more dubiously, my Kindergarteners. So from now on, I’ll revel in the chaos that is this school’s administration and I’ll look more carefully at my students each day, for as morbid as it is to say this, I could lose one any day and never have the chance to say goodbye.

Posted by liltayinchina at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s the middle of May and I’m finishing up my ten-month contract with the school. As of June 30th, I will no longer be a teacher on the payroll. Originally, I was going to travel for a little while after my contract was finished but plans have realigned and I’ll be heading back to America come July 2nd.

In preparation for my return, I’ve started packing. I’ve been thinking about this post for several days now and need to amend the original path it was going to take. Friday evening, Eileen and I were guests at Winnie’s parents’ apartment. The apartment, though not “new” in the sense of being recently built, is new to Winnie and her parents. They used to live in Hankou, which is across the Yangtze. They moved to the new apartment in Hanyan so that Winnie’s daily commute to the school wouldn’t be so long. When her parents first suggested the move to Winnie, she protested, fearing that Hanyan was too “country” and wouldn’t have enough social entertainments for when she wasn’t at work. Hankou has been her playground and Hanyan is mostly a residential segment of the greater Wuhan.

So her father suggested a trip to Hanyan to see just exactly what the neighborhood had to offer. Winnie told us Friday night that after she found a cinema, a game center, a Pizza Hut and a couple of decent malls, she was sold on the shorter commute. Her parents began the search for an empty apartment and they moved in just after the Spring Festival Holiday.

The apartment is very small. But don’t get me wrong; it is delightfully comfortable, inviting and warm. The kitchen is the size of most bathrooms in America, with the bathroom about the same size. There is an open dining room off of the living-room/entry way, and two small bedrooms, each of which has a bed, a desk, a nightstand and a bureau.

When I first walked into Winnie’s room, I couldn’t get one thought out of my head, “I have too much stuff. Too many belongings.” I was shocked to see my vibrant and animated friend’s earthly possessions. My photo albums and books alone wouldn’t fit along a whole wall of her room. This isn’t a shocking revelation. I’ve always had too many belongings. When I think back to the delightful jumble and chaotic miniature world of knick-knacks that was my room growing up, I’m amazed that just being in the room didn’t give my mother panic attacks. In every corner or cubby or purse or box or tin or basket, there were other containers and in those containers were bits of ribbon, coins, crayons, erasers shaped like animals and food, rubber and plastic finger puppets with googlie eyes and moving arms, puzzle pieces from boards long gone, scraps of paper with writing and drawing and on and on and on.

In Seattle, I managed to move my belongings around eight different times in as many years. And of course, I’ve not pared down my stuff, but I continue to add to it. I’ve left belongings behind in Birmingham, clogging my mother’s home and now in Seattle and will end up leaving things behind in China that I just can’t take with me.
I don’t want to suggest that there is a better way being described here. For me, personally, it was a revelation, but I’m certainly not going to swear off books and pens and art and candles and fingernail clippers and great shoes to become an ascetic – too drastic for me!

And since I’m not leaving it all behind, I’ve got to get it home which leads me to the original reason for this post: International Mail, or as Winnie put it last Wednesday while she was helping me, Internet Mail.

I schlepped five small boxes to school for shipment to the US last Wednesday. I had asked a former co-worker if I could designate him as the recipient of all of this stuff - mostly winter clothes and books - and he agreed.

Winnie walked with me to the post office on our lunch break. We talked about life and school and everything else that friends usually talk about and we were happy and content. I was planning on buying her lunch after our “quick” errand was through.

In the past, I’ve mailed boxes home from this exact post office. I’ve sent boxes to different States at different times and every time, the object that I intend to send is already wrapped up in a sturdy box. No matter. The postal workers always send me to the packing counter where the box is either placed in another box or placed in a tear-proof plastic bag with slight padding. I’ve never understood the reason given, and have just chalked it up to a general nervous energy consuming the postal worker that suggests that I might not have really known what I was doing with the scissors and tape when I sealed the box in my home. Wednesday was no exception.

Only this time, it was made absolutely clear to me through Winnie that Internet mail MUST BE SENT IN ONE BOX. I took a box and dropped it on the ground three times to show that the box was solid and that I was completely comfortable with whatever might happen to it in transit. Winnie became frantic and said that it didn’t matter how well the boxes were taped – INTERNET MAIL must go in one box! I looked up at a sign that was just above our heads and read, in English, “International Mail” – which solved the first mystery. Winnie giggled at her mistake and we chatted, still in high spirits, about the differences between the two words for a few minutes. In the meantime, the postal worker wandered off to stare at some papers and to scratch her head and rub her shoulder. She was lost to us for good.

The other postal worker manning the packing station brought out a box the size of a cubical, but half the height and started assembling my five boxes inside. Watching her puzzle around with the boxes made me think, for a fleeting moment, that her job might be kind of fun. I lost that feeling almost immediately when she started hollering at Winnie that she was going to open my boxes and dump the contents into the big box.

At this point, attempting casual nonchalance, I started the age-old country comparison that lets off a tiny bit of steam but doesn’t do anyone any good: “In America, you can bring ANY KIND of box and as many of them as you want to the post office and they’ll send them anywhere as long as you have an address and can pay the postage.” In retrospect, I realize now that the Chinese workers, in their way, are more concerned with the end result than the American workers. I’ve yet to have a postal worker in the States say, “Is this packed well? Will it survive the trip? Maybe you should put a bubble envelope around it. In fact, I demand that you put a bubble envelope around it!”

So I told Winnie that the next time I planned on making a shipment, everything would arrive at the post office in plastic bags, but that for now, I was really going to fight this unpacking and repacking of my five boxes. She related my frustration to the postal worker who grudgingly brought out the “leviathan” – my new name for the human body-sized mailbag available for shipping five boxes TOGETHER. Seriously. I could have gotten into this bag. Give me two months supply of food and water and some air holes and I could return to America for 360 kuai or $45 USD!!

So the worker brings out this indestructible bag and starts shoving the five boxes into it. I’m not exactly sure why she pushed the bigger box so hard when she knew the leviathan was a ready alternative, but so it goes. All five boxes in, she folded down the opening and snapped huge black plastic clips into pre-made holes along the edges of the fold. It took her maybe two minutes to get it all done and thirty minutes to argue with us beforehand.

My “package” felt like the trunk of a beheaded sea fish as I hoisted it from the packing counter, to the floor, and dragged it to the addressing station. The postal worker warned Winnie that I should use ballpoint pen to write the address on the body of my giant package. Because the material is indestructible, there is a rough and woven texture to the surface of the bag that reminded me of the hardy skin of some deep-sea creature.

Address written, it was now time to queue up and mail the thing.

Queue.

This is a new word for me, in that I have always known its meaning but have never really considered the act of lining up and all the weight that such an act carries in meaning. And the term “lining up” just isn’t grand enough for the act itself. Besides, I’ve been teaching British English for nine months now and some things were bound to slip in.

Queuing isn’t something that is held in high regard in China. I’ll leave it at that. Winnie and I walked up to the counter and along the counter, standing shoulder to shoulder, stood about fifteen people. As soon as the one standing directly in front of the one person on duty would step away, the two people on either side made a push to get to the space left by the retreating body. Winnie and I commented on the absence of a line or of any order. I flumped the leviathan onto the ground, stacking the five boxes in its belly so that it stood at attention in the space where a line SHOULD have been. The leviathan came to my waist in height and Winnie kept unconsciously trying to sit on it to rest. We watched in fascination as people pushed and thrashed to be next “in line” for the one worker on duty. Winnie is Chinese. But she say she doesn’t feel Chinese. I know that she was more concerned about what we were witnessing because I am a foreigner and she was embarrassed by how the situation “looked” to an outsider, but she also seemed genuinely disgusted by the difference in culture. I made few comments, not wanting to hurt her feelings or embarrass HER, and yet, she couldn’t leave it alone. She groaned and made other non-verbal reprimands all to no avail. I suggested that people who don’t think a line is necessary probably don’t think offending a young girl is so horrible either.

I started getting heated under the collar only when a man came up, analyzed the situation and then pushed past us to stand DIRECTLY in front of me, in between the current customer and the leviathan. I laughed out loud, incredulously. He turned around, gave me a cold stare and then resumed his stance.

Winnie handed me the customs sheet and told me that I had to be Chinese and push my way through. I told her I couldn’t. Not because I’m some noble angel, but because I’m just not accustomed to doing it and it is unnerving to push en masse to get to a position that twenty others are also vying for. She shook her head and told me there was no other way. She didn’t want to do it – and I didn’t think she should have to do my dirty work for me – and she thought that people would be more forgiving of a foreigner because I “wouldn’t know any better” – but that’s exactly what made me uncomfortable. What IS the correct way to get service? I feel like many every day errands become a Darwinian test to constantly eek out the fittest in every situation. It’s just creepy.

But my breaking point came when an older couple came over and tried to move the backpack hanging over the leviathan’s back in order to see how I had addressed my leviathan. Apparently, they were sending something to Australia and had never addressed anything in English before. It was as if my leviathan was an example, sitting calmly in the center of where a line SHOULD be so that people could address their packages correctly at the last moment before pushing through to the counter. I said, “That’s it” and used the one or two inches I had on most of the people in line and elbowed my way in. I got stuck. People pushed and I pushed back. The whole mass of bodies swayed with the tension of those pushing from the outside of the throng.

I reached far over the head of the man who had smushed himself into a space that was large enough for my expelled breath only and handed the customs sheet to the attendant who was trying to explain to another woman that she couldn’t ship her vial of suspicious looking bio-hazardous material from the current location. She almost looked relieved to see me. Winnie shouted from the perimeter of the throng that she was with me and would translate. I shoved my way back out to Winnie and hoisted the leviathan again and slammed it down on the scale – curious to see how big my fish really was. Turns out, small fry.

The postal worker took her time, seeming to know the exact moment of the impending hysteria if she didn’t move on to another customer. It got especially bad when the two shipping to Australia made their way in and started pulling at the leviathan to get a better look at the address. The attendant stood up and snapped that the people needed to form one line. Winnie walked up when the counter suddenly became free and scolded the worker for not suggesting the queue thirty minutes earlier. I paid the tiny fee for shipping this huge animal, took my receipt and we exited the post office, both of us brooding. Winnie was furious and embarrassed. I was exhausted.

We walked next door to China Mobile to recharge the money on my cell phone. We walked in, pressed the button on the machine at the door for a number, sat down, waited thirty seconds, the number was announced, we walked to the counter, I handed over 30 kuai and typed my cell number into a keypad and the attendant handed me a receipt. Finito.

In my attempts to be positive, I told Winnie, “See, we ended on a good note!” and she replied dejectedly that the post office could learn something from China Mobile. She went off on a diatribe about government workers and I ushered her to the restaurant to fill her with food and to try and erase the post office experience.

My receipt says that the leviathan will cross the ocean – on its surface instead of deep below – and arrive in Seattle sometime in August. I wonder, if I can live without those things for three months, do I really need them at all???

Posted by liltayinchina at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

According to Mao, you're not a real man until you've climbed the Great Wall of China. I'm now a real man. Woo hoo! I just returned from a week with my friend Bianca in Beijing. IT WAS AWESOME! More to come, but for now, I'm in search of my toothbrush and then my pillow. 

Posted by liltayinchina at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)