An American in China

I lie. I tell unabashed-blatant-through-my-teeth lies. Yes, I was taught not to lie by both of my parents. I was taught not to lie by my teachers. Lying is bad; I get it. In fact, I am normally pretty straightforward. If I don’t like something, I will politely say that no, I am sorry, but I don’t. If I am hungry I eat, if I am not hungry I don’t. But here, here it is different. When I am trying to buy something and a vendor asks where I am from I tell them I am from anywhere but America. When my waiban’s wife sees me with food and tells me I don’t have enough for a good lunch I tell her not to worry, I have more food in my apartment, even though I don’t. When I was tutoring and I couldn’t/didn’t want to stay for lunch, I told Mama Chen I had friends waiting for me, and then I would run out and catch the bus home. No friends. I thank the host of a banquet or dinner for giving me more food even though I actually would rather throw up on them because I am already too full. When I am on the bus and someone offers me a seat I tell them no, no thanks, no really I don’t want it, even though I might be aching to sit and be comfortable. Sure, I could tell the truth, but in reality, or at least in my mind, lying just makes life a little bit easier. If I am asked “Are you cold?” and I answer, “Yes, I am.” They will gladly give me whatever sweater or jacket they are wearing, while lecturing me on wearing more clothes. This isn’t because I am a teacher, or a foreigner. It’s just the way they are. Giving. However, if I were to take such gifts, and reply with merely a “thank you” it would be so horribly inadequate. And it would only serve as a reminder of how little I have to offer them back.

I think it will be nice to stop lying.

So, I teach. That’s why I am here. I am teaching at Chengde Teacher’s College in Hebei Province. Chengde is a little town about 255 km north of Beijing. I have classified my students into two groups. One type is farm kids. These guys are pretty smart, they like English and have worked really hard. The other type is rich slackers. These kids are smart too, but they don’t really care about school, and more than likely they were told by their parents that they would major in English whether they liked it or not. I have a little over 500 students. I love my students. And, I dislike my students. In most respects they are just like every other student, sometimes they are lazy, sometimes they don’t listen, but sometimes everything clicks. I love them because they are incredibly endearing. And freakin’ hilarious.

On one of my first days of teaching I needed to write something down, so I reached into my bag and pulled out a writing utensil.

“Excuse me, Teacher? How do you know when it is right to use a pen and when it is right to use a pencil?”

What. I was terribly confused. I looked down and, sure enough, I had a pencil in my hand. I assured my student that in this case it didn’t matter which one I used, and that rarely did it matter. I started to write.

“TEACHER!!!” She exclaimed (same student).

“What?!” I said back.

“You are writing with your right hand!”

“Yes.” I replied, lost again.

“But all foreigners write with their left hands!”

Here is an interesting cultural difference. In Chinese culture it is (as far as I know) frowned upon to be left-handed. When a child appears to be left handed, the parents train them to use their right instead. So, I could see where a culture who never uses their left hands looks at a culture who doesn’t care about using left hands, it would seem as though everyone was, indeed, left-handed. I shook my head no and explained that in America it didn’t matter, so not everyone is left-handed, just more people are left handed. She nodded her head slowly, pondering this new information.

That first month I got a lot of interesting questions (wait, who am I kidding, I still get questions like these):

“How do you make your skin so white?”

“What do you think of our China?”

“What does your husband think of you being here?”

“Do you want to find a Chinese husband?”

“Can you tell our money apart?”

“What do you think of Chinese boys?”

“Do Americans like Chinese hair?”

“Can you speak Chinese?”

“Does the light of God smile upon your face?”

STOP! Ok, so that last one was asked by Anne. Anne is part of the rich slacker group. She is from a suburb of Beijing, called Lang Fang. But she loves English. Her favorite TV show is The Big Bang Theory. She asked this question because at some point one of her high school English teachers told her the best way to learn English was to read the Bible. READ. THE. BIBLE. And she actually did it. On the one hand, Chinese people love it when stories have “a point”, a lesson learned, so who knows maybe she likes a good thought-provoking parable. On the other hand, how many people do you know who have read the Bible cover to cover? It’s a wonder she still has any interest at all in the language. But she does, and I can talk faster and use all sorts of slang and she just trucks along, understanding most of what I say.

And then she will skip class for weeks at a time.

7 a.m. Ugh. I hate mornings. I roll over and listen to the screeching tires of the number 29 bus as it makes its stop outside the walls of the campus. First bus of the morning. The engine roars as the bus moves again, almost as if resisting the effort to accelerate. As I get out of bed the bull horn starts. Oh that bull horn. A year ago I found it annoying, its indecipherable message just another thing I didn’t understand. Today the message is still undecipherable but the consistent pattern of the barking and clicking has started to become a source of comfort.

8 a.m., on my way to work. Food sizzles as it is thrown into a pan. The kitchen in the little restaurant on the first floor of the apartment building is already busy. Knives hit the cutting board, spoons and spatulas scrap pans as food is stirred and served. Past the kitchen, dogs bark, a puppy whines. The dogs are always barking. There are lots of strays on campus, and they are hungry. As I get closer to the school the sounds of people get louder. “Hello!” Girls squeal as they chase each other in front of the cafeteria. Others yell at their friends to wait. The boys pick on each other as they run to class, the couples cling to each other and whisper sweet secrets.

Noon. As I wait for the bus, a dump truck careens around the corner, throwing dirt from the back as it speeds to its destination. A woman on a bike, wearing high heels and a sequined sweater rolls past, her brakes squealing as she rounds the corner. Next comes a 3 wheeled construction truck, its bed full of workers, “Hellooooo!” Finally, the bus. The brakes scream and the hydraulics hiss as the door opens and shuts again. “Hello!”

In the city the horns honk, the bikes screech. Some of the vendors shout their wares. The buses chug and puff out black smoke. “Helloooooo!” People talk loudly on their cell phones, quietly to each other. Grandparents yell at their grandchildren, school kids run around, yelling and laughing while eating their lunch and heading back to lessons (only 10 hours left in their day!). “Heeeeellloooo!”. A taxi honks, whoops, I wasn’t paying attention. The traffic lights tick, the faster the ticking the less time the green light has left, better hurry. Hurry, hurry, hurry! Yes, cut me off then stop dead in your tracks.

6 p.m., dinner time back on campus. Sounds echo in the cafeteria. The trash ladies bang the food trays against the garbage, cleaning off as much left over bits as possible. Big ventilator fans in the back kitchens whirr noisily, students shout at each other and at the workers.”Hello!” On my way back, the babies and their moms are playing near the apartments. The kids giggle and the moms talk in baby talk, and occasionally scold. First lessons in sharing and being nice never come easy. Dogs and puppies bark happily as they try to get some attention.

As night falls back in the city , the entertainment comes out. Bands made up of old men playing recorders and the “erhu” (the two string Chinese Fiddle) dot the riverfront. In between bands unfamiliar music blares as the ladies do their exercising; coordinated dances complete with scarves to twirl. “Helloooo!” These noises get quieter as I head to the river bar, only to be replaced by pounding techno and drunk Chinese men shouting at each other to drink more. “Heeeelloooooo! Heeeeeellooooooo! Helloooooooo!” As I sit with some friends, enjoying the company and a cold one, the sounds of laughter and the hissing of food, both on a grill and frying in a wok surrounds me.

Back at home, in bed for the night, the growl of more dump trucks and cement trucks occasionally intrudes the quietness of my apartment. The construction never stops here. As the noise from the trucks disappears, a different sound replaces it. The distant rhythmic hammering of huge machines that dig what can only be the deepest holes in China drift in my window. Ah, this, this I can fall asleep to.

Ok, so, I really like food. I like to eat it. I like to cook it. I just like food. No, no, I love food. My adventures in eating here in China have actually been pretty tame, in my own opinion. The food is a little bit spicier than I am used to, and it also helped that I couldn’t read the symbols for what I was eating for most of my experience. I think the most interesting thing is that the food tastes different sometimes simply because the combinations of meat and veggies is different than I am used to.

The first realization that I have come to is this: I LOVE TOFU. The Chinese have this tofu thing DOWN. Let me rewind. Tofu made in America is (in my opinion) really gross. I don’t know what they do to it, but it’s gross. Tofu in China is usually homemade, and is delicious. They have also mastered the ways to use it. They put it in soups, they fry it (as in deep fried), they mix it with veggies. They cut it into large chunks and put some sort of delicious sauce on it, they pan fry it with chilies. All of these ways are delicious. Can I say delicious one more time? Delicious.

In China, everyday is a farmers market. You can buy fruits and vegetables off the side of the road. You can buy homemade tofu off the side of the road. You can buy homemade snacks off the side of the road (my favorite being the sweet potato chips). It is one of the things about China that I am really, really going to miss.

While the food in China is (usually) delicious no matter where you get it, nothing, and I mean nothing, beats a home-cooked meal. I tutored a high school girl for about 10 weeks last winter and my lessons happened to end right around lunchtime. So, her mom always insisted I stay for lunch. It was always delicious. A couple of times it was dumplings, as she was determined I would be able to make them on my own by the time she was done with me. Another time it was hot pot. Once it was a classic combination of tons of dishes, my favorite being cold noodles with cucumber, my least favorite being the chicken necks. They were just too darn boney. I think the best argument for home-cooked food though is; whether it is Momma Chen’s dumplings or the vegetable egg drop soup my host mom made (back in Shijiazhuan), it not only fills up your tummy, but it also makes you feel just a little bit more at home.

Admittedly, I will leave China in mere weeks having eaten a couple of “evil” things. I have probably eaten more, but, like I said, it was only recently that I was able to read the symbols for what I was eating. What can I say, ignorance is bliss. When I first got here, back in September, I along with a couple of friends went out to eat. The menus at Chinese restaurants are awesome. They are enormous and heavy, much like a coffee table book, and usually have pictures to go along with every dish. It is quite convenient when you can’t read the language. However, there are pitfalls. Something may look good in the picture, but taste awful. Also, what you ordered could arrive looking nothing like what it does in the picture. On this particular occasion it was the latter of the two problems, we ordered some spicy chicken. We ended up getting a whole chicken:

Another occasion happened on my friend Sara’s birthday. Her birthday falls on Christmas Eve. So a bunch of us foreigners plus some of her Chinese friends went out to eat to celebrate. When we sat down we were told by the waitress that if we wanted to order our own food it would take 2 hours, so we should just get the set menu. This was probably just a ruse to get us to order the expensive stuff, but we were in no position to argue. It was kind of fun, I had never even seen a lot of the food that was placed before me, and despite Richard saying “That’s probably penis” about everything, I tried quite a bit of it. There was one dish that was served, it looked like cold cuts, actually it looked like uncooked pancetta, and Richard exclaimed “Now, I know for a fact THAT is penis.” Now, sometimes Richard has the maturity/sense of humor equivalent to a 9-year-old so I just rolled my eyes and tried a piece. It was actually pretty good. It wasn’t until my third piece that I started to realize he was probably right.

So, I ate horse penis. And liked it. Whatcha gonna do.

Why hello everyone. Long time, no see, eh? A mixture of being “slightly” overwhelmed, lazy and having a volatile (at best) internet connection has left this poor little blog quite overlooked. So for my last two and a half months in China I will do my best to give you a look into my life here.

As someone who has done no traveling outside of the U.S. (I am not counting Niagara Falls, nor a 2 hour walk through New Gales, Mexico) I thought I was at a severe disadvantage. I was wrong. Sure, it may have helped to get that being adventurous thing down a little bit quicker, but I must say, I think I’ve done all right. The one thing I simply can’t get my mind around is being labeled a “foreigner”. My friend Rosie brought this up one night at a (fantastic, Thai) dinner at her house. Someone asked her where she was from (while she was traveling outside China) and she had to give a complicated answer of being an American and living in China with her Chinese husband. “I can’t say that I am Chinese. I will never be able to say I am Chinese” She said. “But what do I say?”

Anyone who is in China and is not Chinese is a foreigner. They aren’t tourists, they aren’t “teaching English”, they aren’t Americans, or English, or Irish, or Filipino. They are foreigners. An illustration of this from my students goes something like this:

Student: “I met some foreigners at the Summer Mountain Resort this weekend! They were American. Do you know them?!”

Me: “Oh, you met some Americans? No, I probably don’t know them. What were their names?”

Student: “I don’t know. We took pictures with/of them and asked if we could be good friends.”

We don’t belong. Never have, never will. I find this a little bit alienating. I do give the good people of Chengde a break, I am 1 of about 20 non-Chinese people living in a city of 5 million (this is the city plus outlying areas). When I try to speak Chinese I get laughed at or, once, I got yelled at (…ok, my Chinese is quite laughable, but I try!) It doesn't matter how many people I befriend or how much Chinese I learn, I will always be a foreigner. Do I have suggestions for how to change this? No. It’s just the way it is. It doesn't mean I have to like it, it just means I have to deal with it. (By the by, one of my Chinese friends recently asked me how I felt about people staring at me all the time. "They still do that?" I asked. "Oh yes." She replied. I honestly hadn't noticed anymore. For me, the perpetual wallflower, this is quite an achievement.)

Now, I can't say this is ALWAYS a disadvantage. Because you are a foreigner you can get by with doing all sorts of "crazy" things and people will just chalk it up to you being a foreigner. I can't think of any concrete examples at the moment, mostly because I don't think what I do is ever particularly crazy.

As a slight sidetrack, when shopping in China, I have found that it is paramount NOT to tell the sellers that I am American. The price is doubled automatically if I am American. I can actually see little "kuai" symbols in their eyes. I have learned how to tell people I am everything from Dutch to Mexican (yep). Once I told a woman “Wo shi zhong guo ren” (I am Chinese) in a matter of fact voice, as in “duh, can’t you tell?” She started to nod her head in understanding, and then (I could see the light bulb turn on) she looked at me and laughed and said “Ni bushi zhong guo ren!” (You are not Chinese!).

I told her I was German.