Coffee and Tea and Language Without Me

When you have to boil a pot of water (“put the kettle on”) to make coffee, you stop and pause, grab that half-forgotten bag of premium wulong cha (black dragon tea), and (if you’re me and you feel oddly uneasy at six thirty in the evening), you end up making both. So I’m sitting here at my desk, a tall mug of black Nescafe cooling alongside a tiny glass and accompanying teapot. I’m drinking them in tandem. Maybe it’s me, maybe I think I am turning Chinese, or maybe the instant coffee is just awful, but I am finding my taste leaning heavily in favor of the tea.


Sink full of dishes, a tiny cup of tea orbited by an empty glass, a tiny teapot (the dragon changes color when the tea is ready!), a big mug of Nescafe instant coffee (mixed with a lone chopstick), and a tiny "mixing" glass for the tea (more useful than it sounds, stop by and have a cup and I'll show you).

It seems like it’s been a while since I got a good blog in, and I mean that in both the noun and the verb “way.” Pay attention folks, I am unraveling the language before your very eyes. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Blogger. Someone smack me, I am too pretentious for my own good.

I had a decidedly Dedalus moment the other day, as I (surprise, surprise) wandered the streets of Zhanjiang. (I don’t do as much wandering as I would like, but that’s mostly my fault, and not for lack of time.)


Wandering.


More wandering.


And yet more wandering.

I was reviewing some basic Chinese words in my head, when it hit me: the superfluous egocentricity of language (notice the I at the beginning of this sentence). Always in English, you’re referring to yourself, be it to describe action, state a preference, or what have you. Shouldn’t the subject [I] be understood by the very fact that you say it? I imagine that clarification may be necessary when writing (again with the I), but it’s much more simple in Chinese. You can ask, do you have dumplings? You mei you jiaozi? And if dumplings are not to be had, you will hear in response, I/we do not have them; or, in Chinese, mei you, which, simply, is “not have.” It strikes me as a much more inclusive statement, never separating the speaker from the collective. There’s an unspoken yet understood group that does not have dumplings; likewise, you rarely need to add the “I” in Chinese. I like dumplings; formally, “wo xihuan jiaozi,” but a simple “xihuan jiaozi” will do.

It’s simple, and I like it. Grammar, at least, shouldn’t be a problem. I look forward to eating these words as I learn more Chinese, of course, but for now, it’s an interesting observation on the language.

Along an Unseen Path

It’s been overcast and blustery here in Zhanjiang these past few days, and even though the rain has stopped, the ground is wet, the sky is a vague gray, and I just don’t feel like going outside too much, despite the cool air.


I told you it's been rainy.

I’m beginning to get used to the fact that my novelty in this city will never wear off. Every day, I wade through torrents of new faces, on campus and off, and even if people begin to recognize me, they remain wide-eyed as I move through their life, always pausing and stealing secret glances, snapping “subtle” photos with their camera phones. No matter how long I am here, I know I will never become ordinary or routine for the people of Zhanjiang. That used to annoy me, even scare me, but now, I can’t help but laugh and smile. They stare and I smile; the more I smile, the more they stare. I spend most of my time walking around with a big toothy grin, and I’m OK with that.

I should have updated the entry I began on my birthday, but I didn’t. Here, briefly, is the rest of the story.

All of the foreign teachers, along with some of my local faculty friends, all gathered outside my apartment on Tuesday; we were going out to celebrate the birth of yours truly. We went to a fantastic Sichuan restaurant, with some of the spiciest food I’ve had yet in China (my Uncle Mike would love it here). All told, there were thirteen of us gathered to celebrate what I like to call “Christmas in September.”


Starting with me, and going clockwise: Jude, Anne (hidden behind Brenda’s hair), Kevin (in the green shirt), Lynn, May, Liam, Brenda, Nicki, Steve, Fr. Bobby, Dragon, and Sheng.


There are more chilies in this food than there is actual food.


You get a bowl of long "life" noodles on your birthday. The long noodles are meant to give you a long life!


The Rookies.


A meal well done.

As I was writing this, I received a call from Michelle, informing me that the school has set up a bank account for me and deposited my first paycheck. Cool beans! I walked over to the Administrative Building, picked up my bank book (I’ll have to remember to have a student come with me to get an ATM card … I’m told any Chinese bank is more or less good anywhere in China), and headed back to my apartment. But then I decided to explore, and found something wonderful.

The park is huge, accessible from campus only through a tiny, almost invisible footpath that runs in front of two small, unassuming, and out-of-the-way shops. Walking to class every morning, I never would have imagined this barely-discernable trail that runs between the retaining wall that forms the sidewalk and roadway would open up into such a massive and extraordinary park. It roughly borders a large lake that every now and then decides to be a river, and I connected the mental dots in my head to form a far more complete picture of the city with the park to fill in the black edges of my inner map. It was beautifully quiet in the park today, and I was able to leisurely stroll up and down both banks of the lake. There are fantastic little bits of distinctly Chinese architecture everywhere, from the gentle arches of massive stone bridges to the distinctly round, orange-tiled roofs of simple pagodas. Everywhere there were benches, magnificent scenery, impossible trees, and rarely-used footpaths, daring you to venture further. I was able to view only a small portion of the park before it got dark, but I think I’ll be spending a lot of time there. It’s a very quiet and relaxing area, and I could grade papers, write, or read virtually anywhere.

Well, that’s another week done. My comfort level here has grown alarmingly fast; I never thought I would feel this comfortable here, that this place would begin to feel like some kind of home; and I certainly didn’t expect this place to feel so familiar so quickly. But thankfully, it has. I can’t wait to begin my Chinese lessons next week, and I can’t wait to discover more of this city.

Birfday and Class (I can't believe I have to go to class on my birthday!)

Sunday was Teacher’s Day, a national holiday here in China. It says something about a culture, and the importance they place on education and the respect conferred upon teachers, when there’s an entire day set out to honor you. But, as my friend Father Michael said, “the other 364 days belong to the students.” Oh, how right you are.

I was feeling rather ill on Saturday, but by Sunday morning I was feeling much better. I was awake early (well, for a Sunday, at least), was able to clean my apartment, and just sat down in time to be visited by a small group of students, four senior girls from my thesis writing class. They stopped by to spend some time with me (I guess they didn’t hear how boring I am ... Lawler, I need a link to that!), and they gave me a really nice, elaborate tea set.



A few more students stopped by, swelling the ranks to ten. I received a very sweet card, and a dolphin wind chime, from this group, along with a huge bundle of fruit (which I really do need to eat more of). The whind chime is outside, on my balcony, and provides some soft music as I hang my laundry to dry. In explaining how I used to work at a store (Home and Garden Culture) that sold very large wind chimes, the girls blurted out, “but that was the biggest one they had!” So somehow I managed to sound ungrateful … way to go, Teacher Matt.







My students wanted to take me out to lunch, but I knew that wasn’t fair: I had just received an 800 kuai (about $100US) bonus from the school during Friday’s teachers banquet (the banquet that made me feel awful), and I knew that the students were on very tight budgets. So I treated them to lunch.

And now today is my birthday. The big two-two. My early morning class knew it was my birthday, and I walked in to a blackboard covered in a giant colorful “Happy Birthday!” adorned with flowers and hearts. Before I peel my eyes away, the whole class was singing happy birthday and clapping. They really are the best. Of course, I didn’t bring my camera (after promising myself I would bring it everywhere), so I have no pictures to show; the class monitor erased the board (before I could stop her), so that I could use it during class. I had a big bag full of candy that I passed out, and the kids were thrilled to be able to eat the candy—gasp!—during class!

That bag of candy was supposed to last both classes, but it was empty by the time I left the first. Oh well; I just stopped by the corner shop on my way to my next class and bought a ton of cookies. This class didn’t know it was my birthday, and I started by telling them that today was the MOST IMPORTANT day in all of literature; did anyone know what it was? I was hoping someone would yell out Bloomsday (no one did), so I told them: today was my birthday. The clapped and laughed, wanted to sing, but I told them that first, they had very important class work that could cause them to fail if they didn’t finish it: eat some cookies! … right? Guys? The mock severity must have gone over their heads: they thought I was really about to give them a grade-breaking bit of class work. “OK, that was a joke, you guys,” I laughed, “you’re not going to fail if you don’t eat the cookies.” They got it, I guess, and started laughing the nervous laugh of Chinese students. They sang “happy birthday,” loud and with pride; I’m sure I was “interrupting” one of the other foreign teachers classes. Oh well. Good kids.

Kids. Ha! I told them I turned twenty two today, and they exploded in laughter. They were all mostly twenty three, some of the “young’ins” were twenty two, some were already twenty four. And I’m calling them “kids.”

Two odd things happened in class today. We were finishing The Canterbury Tales, and in a very male-dominated text (we focused mostly on the Knight), I decided to tell my classes about one of the poem’s strong female characters, the Wife of Bath. Now, I’m lucky to have three or four guys in a class of forty; my students are virtually all young women. And it was a revelation for them to be told that Chaucer, nearly seven hundred years ago, wrote of a strong, intelligent, and independent woman. As soon as I mentioned her, faces that had been slouching in boredom immediately pricked up and began to pay attention. She was an older woman (the girls shake their heads in disapproval), yet still very beautiful (nodding in agreement); she had four or five husbands (strong looks of shock and disgust, even a few hushed calls of “bad woman!”), and yet she was well traveled and wealthy (some begrudging admiration); but above all, the Wife of Bath was able to earn independence and in some respects equality with men (huge, wide-eyed agreement). To see them connect so well with a character really makes me wish for a better text book; the Wife of Bath wasn’t even mentioned in ours. And after mentioning her, it was difficult to go back to the boring old chivalric boy scout that is the Knight.

The second interesting thing happened during an activity, where I let the students break into groups, small groups of three to six; I told them we were going to write our own (brief) Canterbury Tale about spring. In the first class, it was totally unstructured. I wanted to go for at least some rhyming, but any attempt to control their energy was moot. The class constructed a pretty straightforward poem, but man, they loved it! They couldn’t stop laughing and, I guess, it was really enjoyable to voice their opinions and frustrations in class. The two poems are below.

From my 8:00 class:

The flower is smiling and the bird is singing,
I sleep on the bed and listen to the melody of the birds,
The breezing wind makes my face comfortable and suddenly my mother wakes
me up.
Although I’m tired, it is a good day to have a picnic.
I want to have a picnic, but my mother said, “Today is the start of the new
term, go to school!”
In this new term, I met my Mr. Right,
I find he’s handsome and I try to talk to him.
At that moment, I asked for his telephone number.
Because I want to have a day out with him, he refused!
So I called and said, “The most romantic thing I can imagine is holding a
small umbrella with him in a rain shower.”
Finally, we listened to the rhythm of the falling rain together.

For my 9:00 class, I “tweaked” the formula a bit: I gave each team one word that they had to use in their sentence. This dictated their topic, and cut out some of their own creativity, so this one wasn’t quite as successful:

We all like ice cream very much,
And ice cream is melting in the sunshine.
The ice cream dropped on my mobile phone!
And my boyfriend hates the mobile phone,
And he loves playing basketball.
When we play basketball, we wear sunglasses, because they are cool.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think they’re fantastic! They have never used that many adjectives, or even alliteration, in their in-class writing. This experiment was truly as success.

So that’s a pretty good birthday so far: two successful literature classes, and some much-undeserved praise from my students. And later tonight, a big group of foreign teachers and faculty will take me out for dinner.

Yeah. Twenty two is starting out just right.

My Apartment in Zhanjiang

Here's a little video tour of my apartment in Zhanjiang. Yes, the doorways are very low, and yes, I'm up on the fifth floor, but there's a lot of room and it's quite comfortable.

Hong Kong Leftovers

Yeah, so, I documented one very fun night out on the town in Hong Kong, and only now realized that I never posted the video. So here it is!


See! The delicious Taj Mahal Indian restaurant, tucked away somewhere in some strange industrial buidling! Enjoy! The beautiful sights of the Hong Kong skyline as seen from the ferry between Kowloon and central Hong Kong! Laugh! As your humble narrator buys beer in a Hong Kong 7-11 and the Maryknoll bunch dance and sing at a karaoke bar! Hear! The sounds of the busy city and the night life of Lan Kwai Fong! Listen! As I stumble over adjectives and sound like a pretentious ass as I attempt to describe the architecture and sights of the night!

And yes, and one more:


Despite me calling this place "The Smuggeler's Den" throughout the video (and ignoring confirmations to the contrary), it is indeed named "The Smuggler's Inn." A great little watering hole-in-the-wall, and only $30HK for a pint of Tsing Tao. Not bad!

As the green trees dance in the rain

I feel awful.

Last night, I attended a dinner with our waiban (the head of the foreign teachers office), some other university higher-ups, and the other foreign teachers. Our waiban, Mr Deng, introduced himself, we made some toasts, and enjoyed a pleasant meal. They gave us some Dove chocolates and 800 kuai (about $100) as a bonus for the upcoming Teacher’s Day on Sunday. It was all very nice and pleasant, good to meet the people that hired me and whatnot, but something from dinner didn’t sit right, and this morning I feel like utter garbage, like I ate nothing but razor blades.

It hurts to move, and I make all-too-frequent trips to the bathroom. I was laying in bed at 9:30 this morning, whishing anything could make this horrible stomach-churning pain go away, when one of my students stopped by. Without even realize what was going on, "Mike" was in my apartment, in my room, at my computer, installing some garbage, asking me to help them.

What the … ?

I couldn’t protest, I couldn’t tell him to get the hell out of my apartment. That’s just not done; it’s not polite, it’s not the Chinese way, and it’s certainly no way for a teacher to treat a student. So I sat and watched, grimacing and making my pain evident, as “Mike” helped install some music and movies he thought I would like. He dropped a few files from his MP3 player/USB drive on to my computer: Growing Pains Episode 109 (Carol’s Crush), some Ace of Base, and Groove Coverage’s (?) “Far Away from Home.”

Thanks, “Mike.”

I walked into the main room, hoping some movement and air would make me feel better. Muzak thundered in through the windows, and as I looked out into the overcast sky, a swell of voices from the street overwhelmed me. What the hell was going on? Why were there so many people?

“The new students, they are moving in,” "Mike" informed me. I looked from my kitchen window onto on of the athletic fields, and saw that it was choked with cars. I looked again at the brooding gray sky: wel, are you going to rain, or are you going to rain? Do it, you coward!

Nicki called, came upstairs; she brought her medpack, and gave me some anti-diarrheal pills, and thankfully, “Mike” left. Some more students stopped by, to hand me their graduation thesis outlines; I took them gratefully, but made sure I didn’t open my door wide enough for them to take it as an invitation to come in. They left, along with Nicki, and now I’ve been in my room, slowly feeling better but still feeling quite ill.

It’s almost the fifth anniversary of September 11. I spent some time this morning reading through a thread over at Evil Avatar, about what you were doing the day of. It’s strange and unsettling that I remember the emotions of that day so strongly. Just staring at the television, hearing the reporters mention that people were jumping from the rooftops … what unimaginable horror and pain was there, where jumping was the better alternative? And honestly, I remember thinking (and still feeling): what madness drove these people to do this? They were young men, not much older than I am now. Shouldn’t they be at home, raising a family, doing something good with their lives, living for happiness and love rather than dedicating themselves so strongly to death and violence? Their deaths are all the more sad, because they died so willingly, and for nothing.

I continued to feel awful. I wasted some time on the net, and was reminded of a very interesting game being developed by the good folks at Valve (they made a game you may have heard of, Half-Life) called Portal. The game was originally designed by students at DigiPen, a game design school in Washington state. They demoed the game for Valve, and were immediately hired. That’s a great story and all, but what’s interesting is the concept: one of the most unique game mechanics I’ve ever seen, one with limitless potential. If you haven’t already, click those links and check it out.

It’s raining now, and the thunder is echoing deep from within the city. It’s one of those tropical rains, that manage to be very wet and very long and yet not refreshing in the least. It will stop raining in a few hours, maybe a day or two, and when it’s clear, everything will be hot and wet, just as it was before.

The First Pizza Entry

Wrote this when a great song played randomly on the evening of September 05.

The things you remember. I'm sitting at my desk in China, enjoying the struggle through Ulysses yet again (up to Lystregonians), when “Wrong Place Right Time / I Can Hear the Grass Grow” by The Fall randomly plays in iTunes (a rip, as it turns out, from the Complete Peels Sessions boxed set that Rob and Juice got me for my birthday last year). And I’m immediately transported back to October 2005 – Jesus, almost a year ago now, isn’t it? – and I played nothing but The Fall on my trip up to Rhode Island, to visit Eric at Brown. I parked, met up with Rick and Marilyn, and we had a great weekend together. I remember that we got a lot of solid work done on The Hopeless Movements that week – a memory flashes of us talking about golf for the Decompression Chamber Golf sketch – and once, we went for a drive, and I played them a few “sneak peak” tracks from the (at the time) upcoming Fall album, Fall Heads Roll. I think we toured the campus a bit, got lost on and off the highway, and then went for some late night pizza.

That was a good memory. That was a good time with good friends.

I never thought I’d be one to suffer from appetite loss as a result of stress, but I haven’t eaten much at all in the past few days. One actual meal, maybe, in the last three days: the rest has been odds and ends, peanut butter spread over foully-sweet bread or a bag of M&Ms.

I want to be back in Rhode Island eating pizza with my friends.