Yes, China let me out

I’m back in the land of shorts and sandals, which no adult Chinese male, at least in Yangzhou, would be caught dead wearing. I’m groggy, but none the worse for wear, though it’s definitely the traveling part of traveling I hate most. Sadly, grace under pressure doesn’t belong on my modest list of strong suits.

Jianghai College arranged to have a driver pick me up at 9 a.m. Friday for the three- to four-hour drive to Shanghai Pudong airport, where I was to catch a 4:10 p.m. flight to Chicago. We were graciously accompanied by a teaching colleague, Fan Chun Xia. Xue Cai Ming, Lu Wen Juan and several other students with whom I’d grown close showed up at my dormitory to see me off.

The last few days had brought a whirlwind of late shopping and final farewells, which grew increasingly emotional until the thought of leaving had become difficult. I kept telling myself this was a good thing — better to have mixed feelings, to have met so many good people, to miss them, than to have been desperate to get out, thinking I had wasted a year.

I can’t see not going back at some point.

Anyway, a late start didn’t worry me. We had plenty of time. But I hadn’t built in the stop for a meal. I don’t care what you’re doing or where you’re going or why. In China, people stop at noon and 6, just about to the minute, for lunch and dinner. If you get injured seriously enough to require an ambulance there, I would suggest not doing so around noon or 6.

My mind started racing with worries about the early arrival time advised for international travelers, then worst-case scenarios. My old friend Panic stopped by. Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, contemplation, meditation, I needed them all.

After some rushing required to solve a problem paying for extra bags, I cut it a little close but made it. The rest was just waiting and losing sleep.

There’s so much I haven’t written about my experiences but still would like to write, so for the time being, the Rog-ect isn’t going anywhere.

Let me start this new chapter by recommending a couple of resources that have done a far better job than I of explaining and describing China. One is Middle Kingdom Life, a great guide to teaching in China and related topics, specifically geared toward expats. The other is “Serve The People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China,” by Jen Lin-Liu, which I just started reading. In the first several pages, I found more accurate insights about Chinese cuisine and classrooms than I had expressed in a year of blogging, i.e., students taking cell-phone calls during class, Chinese chefs not measuring any incredients. Plus, it’s got recipes, including Yangzhou fried rice.

I’m diving into the recipes as soon as I do some grocery shopping. And get a wok and a new knife. And a stove, preferably gas. And a new home for the stove. And … well, all in good time.

The farewell tour grows complicated

As the clock winds down — I’m to be picked up Friday morning — it’s getting increasingly difficult to extricate myself. Without further ado …

Small gifts, please. Small. As in not large.

I can’t make them stop. I’ve tried, believe me. My Jianghai College predecessor, Brian Cross, warned me about the parting gifts a month before I left for China. While here, I’ve bought a few things for myself, mostly clothes, and done plenty of shopping for folks back home. I’m bringing back a tad more than I left with.

Then the steady progression began: a decorative lacquer scene of Slender West Lake in Yangzhou, a 10-piece coffee-pot-and-mug-set, a smaller teapot and cup, a larger teacup, an even larger piggy bank in the shape of a rabbit. (Guess that would make it a bunny bank, right? It is, after all, the Year of the Rabbit.)

It finally got to the point that, worried about how to get all this stuff home, I told one of my students before a little class party Monday: Please, no gifts. “OK, sir.” That evening, he pulled out a big, wrapped box containing, well, a big, metal trophy in the form of an eagle, with wings spread. Naturally.

Oscar, an amiable student from another class, visited yesterday following several aborted attempts. Truth be told, I was dreading it. He arrived carrying what looked like a violin case.

“What’s in the case?” I asked suspiciously.

A violin. For me. Of course.

I know, I know. There’s an obvious solution: Send it all to the States. Which brings me to …

The China Rog-ect awards a scholarship

Like so many of life’s stories, this one seemed potentially and deceptively simple at the start, only to turn into a saga.

The idea was to help a student named 薛彩明 — Xue Cài Míng — an oasis in the arid zone known as English and Trade 1001, a class of 32 freshmen who were about as easy to teach as getting turtles to pole dance. Not only was she one of the best English speakers, she busted her ass in class, worked part time at a nearby restaurant to pick up extra money, studied at all hours outside the classroom, all of which are extremely unusual for students here, and somehow managed to find the time to give me occasional Chinese lessons.

A couple of months ago, she’d told me excitedly that she might get a 1,500 RMB scholarship from Jianghai College, and that was the last I’d heard of it. When I asked her about it, she told me not to worry. From what she had told me about her upbringing, I knew the money would have meant a lot.

So, without knowing with any certainty what had happened, I decided to find a way to give her the money. The financial office at the college had no idea what I was getting at, and Han Lily, who is expecting, has been on bed rest. Instead, I turned to another friend and colleague, Fan Chun Xia, to find out how I could put 2,000 RMB in Xue Cài Míng’s college account toward her tuition.

I made clear I didn’t want to make a big deal about it, because gift-giving here can be complicated, and I doubted Xue Cài Míng would accept such a gift from me personally.

Naturally, Fan Chun Xia got back to me and informed me that everyone from the foreign languages dean to the college president was touched by my generosity, that a farewell party would be held in my honor and that a wad of cash in an envelope would be handed to a sure-to-be-mortified Xue Cài Míng.

Which is what happened. The dean had a chance to remind everyone there, including 60 freshmen, that he had pleaded with me unsuccessfully to stay another year (more on that to come). I even got to say a few words in Chinese, after which Fan Chun Xia translated my Chinese back into Chinese.

Indeed, Xue Cài Míng at first refused the first annual China Rog-ect Award For Currying Favor with the Foreign English Teacher, several times in fact, to the point that it got awkward. A couple of other teachers and the dean began to shift nervously in their seats, as if this might be some kind of potential loss-of-face moment that would require them to turn over the deed to Jianghai College to me. (Keep it!)

It all ended well (I think, I hope) after Xue Cài Míng cried during her speech, tried again to return the money, and finally relented after I repeatedly assured her how much it would mean to me to end my stay this way and that I just might give her a duck’s egg on the final exam if she persisted in rejecting this great China Rog-ect prize.*

Crisis averted, but there’s still time. Nine days left.

*Over the past several days, she seems to have come to terms with it, now referring to me as her American father, though she also seems determined to plough through the money by bringing me daily food and treats. I’ve now got enough to feed a family of four for a week with what I’m supposed to polish off in two days.

An argument for forks

They’re ubiquitous, those half-size kuàizi, whenever and wherever you order anything to go here, so it stands to reason that a lot of wood is being used. A “Strange But True” item in the March issue of The World of Chinese reports that China uses 45 billion pairs of disposable, wooden chopsticks each year, accounting for 16 million to 25 million trees being felled.

The Statistical Yearbook of China’s Forestry reported different numbers — 23 billion pairs used in 2009, 1,520,000 trees felled — but you get the point. In December, to raise awareness, Greenpeace and Beijing artist Xu Yinhai created a “disposable forest” made of chopsticks (scroll down for the photo).

The environmental organization recommends choosing a restaurant that uses sterilized kuàizi or bringing your own.

The World of Chinese is a good resource for a foreigner, or lăowài (老外), teaching English in China to learn more about the culture while picking up language tips and class discussion ideas.

Likes and dislikes, extended edition

LIKE: Personally mixed salads at the Chinese supermarket. They’re not so much salads as cold dishes or appetizers. You grab a metal bowl or basket lined with a plastic bag, and throw in whatever you want — spicy cucumbers, marinated tofu, bean curd (it may not sound appetizing, but trust me — yum) and a lot of other things I can’t recognize.

You can use multiple bowls if you want to keep your choices separate or mix them all together. Then you take it to a preparer who dumps it all into a larger bowl, tosses in various spices and sauces, as much or as little as you like, mixes it and pours it back into that original plastic liner. It’s weighed; a price is stuck on it; and the preparer places it in a second bag. Done. Incredibly convenient and good. It took me only eight months to discover this.

A crowded supermarket gives one a good sense of how seriously Chinese shoppers take food, especially fresh goods. You might be struck first by huge tanks of live fish, as well as the varieties of seafood — cuttlefish, squid, eel, shredded jellyfish. The selection of eggs seems limitless here: fresh, vacuum-packed, big, small, speckled, spiced, salty duck eggs, partridge eggs, quail eggs, maybe dinosaur eggs if you ask.

One look around reveals long counters of meat, poultry, pork, mutton, sausages hanging all over the place, duck necks, all kinds of marinated and barbecued cuts, large vats of rice or, if you prefer lugging one out, huge bags piled like sandbags at a flood.

Oh, wait. I see a jar of Skippy’s over there …

The personal size.

LIKE: Watermelons in the handy personal size. Because otherwise you’re buying this humongous beast and watching most of it rot in your fridge. Maybe these smaller ones are sold in the States, and I never noticed. Anyway, back at the ranch, I cut into one, and surprise: it’s yellow on the inside. Not sure what to make of that, but it tasted like one fine watermelon to me.

DISLIKE: The sound of 57 in any language. In Mandarin, it’s 五十七, or wŭshí qī. As the Chinese proverb goes, “age and time do not wait for people.” Appropos of nothing, they also say, “donkey’s lips do not fit onto a horse’s mouth,” which sounds both useful and more amusing to me.

LIKE: The sound of “Happy Birthday” sung in Mandarin. The tune, first sung rousingly in English by one of my freshman classes, came with a cake and a gift (a plasma light, cool). The cake, like many I’ve seen and tasted in China, was filled and covered with a scrumptious, light, whipped-cream frosting, topped by an ornate display of sliced fruits and, inexplicably, half a cherry tomato.

At my request, the freshmen sang “Happy Birthday” again, a bit raggedly, in Mandarin:

happy bday to me

DISLIKE: Chinese cake forks. They’re like a cross between a plastic stir stick and a tiny tuning fork — suitable perhaps for pinning butterflies’ wings in a collection or spearing a cocktail wiener, nothing more.

LIKE: The fixing of things. It just seems to me that the Chinese are generally better at it, more meticulous, maybe because they’ve had to be. They don’t throw things away like we do. One night I came out of class to discover that the rear tire on my bike was flat. The next morning, I took it to a man with a small shop right on campus. My first thought: How much is he going to charge for a new tire?

First, he set the bike on its side and carefully extracted the inner tube. Then he partially re-inflated it and, squatting next to a large basin filled with water, submerged the tube section by section to find the leak. Once that was done, he deflated it again, dried and cleaned it, and applied a patch. Oh. Yeah.

The job took at least a half-hour. Two yuan. Less than 15 cents.

DISLIKE: College students asking my permission in class to use the toilet. I mean, really? The habit reveals something of how regimented their lives are. At Jianghai Polytechnic College, students with the same major and at the same grade level are put into one class, and they do everything together — take the same courses at the same times, go together to the same study periods. This explains the mass migrations of students from the “living campus” — the dormitories — to the “teaching campus” every day like clockwork at 8 and 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. No wonder so many chafe at their daily routine.

DISLIKE: Honking. At least in Yangzhou, a bus driver, taxi driver, truck driver — hell, any driver — leans on the horn until anything slowing him gets out of the way. If a pedestrian was lying dead in the street, a bus driver would simply keep honking until the dead man got up, staggered to the side of the road, then resumed being dead.

The hot pot trifecta

I hit the trifecta, as usual, a couple of nights ago:

1. Overate.

2. Burned my tongue.

3. Left with an oil stain on a nice shirt.

Hot pot, or huŏguo (火锅), is like Chinese fondue, and very popular here in Yangzhou. You get a pot of soup into which a seemingly endless  supply of ingredients can be boiled: beef (thinly sliced), lamb, pork, chicken, fish, crab, various meatballs and seafood balls, shrimp, tofu, noodles, cabbage, bean sprouts and on and on. Dipping sauces can be served on the side.

A larger pot might come with a divider separating a mild broth and a spicier soup like yin and yang, and tables at a hot pot restaurant have either built-in hot plates or flame heat. No matter how hot it gets outside, these places are routinely packed inside. The untrained brow sweats while the nose runs.

It gets messy. (See: No. 3 of the trifecta.) But the steady process of cooking and eating right there at the table suits the Chinese devotion of a meal as much to social and spiritual sustenance as to nourishment.

A neat trick, taught to me awhile back by one of my classes, involves one dining companion delicately holding a ladle on the bubbling surface while another cracks an egg into it. Once the egg is poached, one punctures the yolk with a small straw and sucks it clean.

Not exactly my thing, but hey.

The egg trick

I suck.

It’s another Rog-cast

It’s spring; it’s warm; and the courts on campus are packed again every day. Good time for Jianghai College freshman 张天齐 (Zhang Tian Qí), also known as Allen, to talk NBA basketball.

The China Rog-ect is on the air

For those of you who simply cannot do without the sweet sound of my voice, I’m going to give podcasting a try. Or at least I hope this is a podcast. It’s a ‘cast of some kind, anyway.

Rog-ect podcast 1

The 15-minute tutor

Holes could easily be poked, I suspect, in any rationale for canceling classes for two or three weeks to meet with students individually for … 15 minutes each.

Even to me, at times, the idea didn’t seem to make much sense.

It was born out of a desire to try something different, a more intimate way of reaching all those blank faces. I could fill in the rationalizations later. In the end, they proved somewhat sound, if not entirely above skepticism.

Not much time, 15 minutes, so I had to move quickly. (Why 15? Seemed like a good number. Remember: I’m talking classes of 25 to 30 students. A normal two-hour class period allows enough time for eight individual sessions — any longer, and we’d never have finished. As it was, I had to use plenty of time outside of normal hours to get everyone in, and I did not have the time/patience/initiative to do all of the tutoring outside class hours.)

A spring day at Slender West Lake

That’s Slender West Lake in Yangzhou, not to be confused with West Lake in Hangzhou. There will be a quiz.

Blossoms everywhere today, a painting in every direction. The juxtaposition of present and past, the stories told from ancient dynasties, the attention paid to the visual world around them, one is constantly reminded of the deep significance to the Chinese of such fundamental elements of who they are.

Here’s a slideshow.* Drag the cursor over a photograph for whatever words I can provide.

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*A few more have been added to the mix.