Stuff

I had just navigated 100 pounds of ill-matched luggage through LAX when, awaiting a hotel shuttle, I was suddenly engulfed by a 747-bellyful of Chinese adolescents. I was overwhelmed not by anything Chinese, but by the magnitude of sniffling, giggling adolescence all around me—and the coincidence of all this on the eve of meeting up with seventy-some Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) bound for China.

That was two months ago in Los Angeles. A few days ago in Chengdu, some mature Chinese adults stepped from the platform onto train number 17 bound for Chongqing, only to be engulfed by Americans, many in their twenties, with an obscene amount of stuff. Each PCV, having just ended training and being sworn in, was accompanied by a Chinese teacher from the destination university. My good colleague, Kairong, happened to be sick and was rapidly getting sicker. All of us PCVs had in tow not only the (approximately) 100 pounds of luggage we’d barely managed to carry through US airports, but also another three or four big items we’d acquired from Peace Corps: water distillers, dehumidifiers, medical kits, TEFL books and more.

Kairong deftly swooped my water distiller (in a box the size of a medium suitcase) behind the last seat on the car and stuffed my huge duffel bag behind the last seat on the other side. I straddled one of my suitcases, with my knee-caps courting my ear lobes, while another few items barely stayed anchored in the overhead bins.

Unlike the bus to Beibei (taken a few weeks ago for a site visit), this train was clean, spacious, and ultra-modern, but it still couldn’t quite accommodate all our stuff. More PCVs stumbled along, trying to find a few more cubic inches for something. Chinese passengers stared ahead stoically in silent amazement.

Conversations—some in bad Chinese, some in simplified English—burbled along as the train sped us through lush Sichuan countryside and then into the municipality (think state or province) of Chongqing and then into the city of Chongqing (the mountain city of six or seven million at the junction of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers). At last our train pulled into the massive Chongqing station where—we had to disembark! With all of our stuff! In a hurry! No simple feat.

Because travel with excess baggage is uncommon, wheeled carts are equally uncommon—but Kairong and other Chinese teachers scouted around and came back with a few tiny men with tiny carts, which were soon heaped full with eight or nine suitcases apiece. The bungie cords could never quite hold all of the gear and inevitably one cartful of stuff would explode and have to be reassembled. When we got to the turn-styles where uniformed officials asked for papers and passports, the carts of stuff again had to be disassembled and reassembled just to get through the turn-styles.

Given that the most expert bargaining still couldn’t bring the porters’ fees down much below the price of the train tickets, I offered to carry the bulk of my stuff. Kairong was not one to stand on ceremony and, in other situations let me lug a hundred plus pounds (he had his own gear), but the first problem was stairs. There were simply too many. Even elevators couldn’t do their magic when they could be found. The bulging carts didn’t fit through the narrow elevator doors, and, again, carts were disassembled and reassembled. We eventually dispersed, going off in different directions, me to Beibei, a fabulous university “town” at the foot of JinYun Mountain on the Jialing. 

(For anyone who read the last few posts, this may be confusing: Beibei is a satellite city outside downtown Chongqing, both of which are in the larger municipality of Chongqing. I had visited Beibei a week or two ago, but just for a few days to meet my Chinese counterparts. I returned to Chengdu for the tail end of training, swearing in, and all that. This trip to Beibei is the real move--I'm on my own now. Tomorrow morning, Saturday, the School of Foreign Languages will host its first faculty meeting, and several other foreigners and I will be introduced to the 200 teachers in the School. The school has an excellent reputation for its work in linguistics, applied linguistics, pedagogy, literature, and, of course, foreign languages.)

The Jialing meets the Yangtze

The city of Chengdu (Sichuan) has inhaled and exhaled us several times in the last few weeks. We were blown out to our various teaching sites, some of us 33 hours away by train, sucked back to Chengdu for one last intensive week of language training and testing, and we're about to be spit back out to our teaching sites. But, before we leave Chengdu, we will re-congregate in a hotel on the campus of Sichuan Daxue for three days of meetings and a graduation of sorts--graduation from "Pre-Service Trainee" to "Peace Corps Volunteer." Joining us for our swearing in as "PCVs" will be our new waibans and university teaching counterparts, who will then make the long trek back with us to wherever we are going. Chengdu will continue to breathe us in and out--we have not seen the last of Peace Corps headquarters or the land of Pandas.

Chongqing, not unlike St. Louis, is at the intersection of two mighty rivers. Here you can see the green Jialing River hitting the muddy brown Yangtze (known here as the Chang Jiang) with downtown Chongqing cityscape all around--behind me and on both sides of both rivers. (Chongqing is a big city within the larger state-like municipality of Chongqing.)

Don't let the skyline fool you: Chongqing, a city of mountains, has plenty of pockets of natural beauty tucked away, and Chongqing the larger municipality is green and lush. Forty-five minutes north by bus, following along the Jialing, is my college town of a half-million, Beibei, and Jin Yun Mountain (among many other mountains).

 Our merry little party made it to the top of Jin Yun Shan, and, in the picture below, you might be able to make out the Beibei skyscrapers far beneath the mountain. (You can see them in the original photo.)

In the picture above, nestled in the trees to the left, is an ancient Buddhist monastery, which you can see much better in the photo below.

Before closing, I want to send belated birthday wishes to my dear, dear Benji and to a cluster of good friends--Ann, Miriam, Marilyn, Wendy, Arax, Jim, and my PCV friend Martha! Zhu ni shengri kuaile! And I have a Chinese question for friend Robert: Knee how? Hope surgery went well.

That way

Long before the Chinese man summoned me, waving vigorously for me to follow him to the bus on the other side of the fence, I'd been fed an extra-early breakfast, had bumped my bulging suitcase down six flights of stairs, and had wobbled across a quarter-mile of unevenly tiled lanes to the taxi-stand with hopes of beating rush-hour traffic. There I caught my breath for a minute. Then, spliced between hair-raising games of taxi chicken through Chengdu traffic were teeth-gnashing periods of paralysis. The worried taxi driver understood my answers to questions about my bus ticket but not much else, so we sweltered on in silence.

Once at the downtown station, she pulled over to let me out, while dozens of truck and bus drivers behind us leaned on their horns. Immediately, a half dozen bystanders clustered around me, shouting at me and each other. Wary of their intentions, I waved them off and wobbled into the station, where "security" meant standing in line and dumping a hundred pounds of gear onto a conveyer that nobody was monitoring and walking through the portal with my real goods still strapped around my waist. I spotted gate 24, and a very pretty uniformed woman walked me halfway into a fenced compound with numbered spots for big dirty buses, including the one bound for Beibei.

I was one of the only passengers standing there when a man in a gray polyester shirt asked to see my ticket and pointed to a bus on the other side of the fence, where another man waved vigorously from the stairwell of the bus. Not about to be kidnapped by faux-long-distance-bus-drivers, I ignored him. People seated on nearby benches paid scant attention. The man returned and I dismissed him, saying I needed bus 693 to Beibei. He shook his head and pointed, taking my suitcase, weaving through a maze of other buses outside the fence to the one with the exercised driver. He pitched my luggage into the belly of the bus and made an old man forfeit his front seat for me. I was about to call Peace Corps when I spotted on a tray before me the other passengers' tickets, all like mine, 24-693, bound for Beibei.  We headed for the same exit that all the other buses did and were checked out by a uniformed official who jumped onto the bus, asked for papers, counted heads, and hopped off again.

It seemed to be the right bus, an ancient, grimy coach with windows too dirty to capture much of the scenery as the skyscrapers of Chengdu melted into a string of poor shops and then mushroomed into thickly vegetated mountains. When it was apparent that the four-hour bus ride was going to take five or more, I called the person who was waiting at the station to fetch me. That man, "Frank," asked in English to speak to my seatmate so he could determine more exactly where we were. A dozen passengers who had been watching me burst into commotion when I turned to see who might talk to "Frank." One man took the opportunity to point his long telephoto lens my way while his seatmate took the phone and jabbered away for a few minutes.

I got off in Beibei, although the turnstyles I saw through the dark station window turned out to be plumbing equipment in a hardware store. I was re-directed around the corner, where the station was not so cavernous that every eye couldn't still be fastened upon the white-haired giant who had just wobbled into the station.  "Frank" had stepped out for a moment, but reappeared shortly, and it wasn't long before he, my waiban; Li Ling, my host for a week (not to be confused with Li Ying, my host in Chengdu), and "Eric," the professor who serves as the coordinator for foreign teachers were laughing and conversing (mostly in English) over hotpot at a local restaurant, our individual pots gurgling on the electric burners next to each place setting.

"Frank" was decked out in cut-offs and had been listening to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujuah" in the car, and I was infinitely relieved to be spared an elaborate banquet with baijiu and toasting rituals. After our very late luncheon, we bought my return ticket on the train, checked out my future apartment, tried out the key for my university office (shared with "Eric" and several foreign teachers from Minnesota), and surveyed the beautiful gardens of Southwest University.

It was the next morning when I had to check in with the police, as you do upon entering any new city. My passport was strange enough that I was ushered upstairs, not to the side of the hall that said "Crime Crackdown" but to the side that said "Prevention" and had doorways marked "Foreign Police Glimpses" and "Safety Shield."

No matter how mundane my getting settled routines might have been (checking the water heater in the apartment, seeing if the windows latched, etc.), the time sped by. My delightful new host, her husband, and exceptionally talented daughter are so easy to be with--I look forward to being able to spend a lot of time together throughout the next two years. I confess, we spoke in English mostly, partly because the daughter is an award-winning English speaker, but they're all game to help me with Mandarin (which is not the only spoken dialect in this "small town" of half a million, a satellite town outside Chongqing).

I have yet to see what teaching will be like (and I have another ten days to spend with the whole Peace Corps group back in Chengdu) but I'm just delighted with what I've seen of Beibei. JinYun mountain towers over the Jialing River, where mahjong players seek relief from the heat, setting up tables under umbrellas in the shallows of the river. The "small town" of Beibei, like other Chinese "small towns" is crammed full of skyscrapers, but there's still a college town feel to the bustling neighborhood where I'll live.

Below is a picture of Li Ling, her daughter, and me posed about a block away from Xi Nan Daxue Teaching Building Number 5, where I will live for much of the next two years.

From Chengdu to Chongqing

Today our language skills were tested in four different classrooms: In one we made pretend phone calls to the shifu to come repair our leaky water heaters, in another we haggled with the ticket taker for a seat on a train to Lanzhou, in still another we fended off robbers and molesters, and in still another we had to make peace with passengers who had different ideas about an open window.

Monday all this will cease to be academic: I will make my first solo trip--by taxi to the north station in Chengdu, then by "long distance" bus to Chongqing, four hours away. Will I remember to tell the taxi cab driver to turn on the meter and will he understand me? Once in Chongqing, will I be able to avoid the ritual toasts to honored guests--Ganbei! Bottoms up!--without insulting my university chair and waiban? Will the banker understand me when I try to open a bank account? Will I be assigned writing classes enrolling 90 students each? What will I think of the Yangtze and the Three Gorges?
Or Chongqing? If you don't want to wait for whatever I have to report next week, check out  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing for more about Chongqing. My university is in the Beibei district, a forty minute bus ride from downtown Chongqing.

Chinese Chicken

Having just finished two weeks of "Model School" (teaching local Chinese kids English), I can attest to the passion, intelligence, and discipline many Chinese kids bring to learning. My kids were awesome.

I can't quite say the same thing about Chinese drivers. They're utterly insane! Maybe it's precisely because the culture at large is so disciplined and conscious of the greater good--and maybe we can be disciplined for only so long. And what more potent symbol of freedom and autonomy is there than the key to the car? That symbol is potent in the US: Sixteen-year-olds crave it, and seniors don't want to lose it. So why wouldn't the same symbol have potency in China, where millions and millions of drivers JUST got the key to the car (which happens to be a little space of pure agency, at least in the imaginations of said millions of drivers)?  There are red lights? Who cares! Cement truck drivers go barreling through them. Florists on bicycles, grannies on motor scooters, bike-riding trash collectors with plastic-wrapped cargo ten feet high and five feet wide, and shop girls with fru fru dresses and umbrellas all vie for the same public space with the color-blind cement truck drivers. Pedestrians have dubious rights, even on sidewalks--that is, if one car decides to pass another via the sidewalk.

But, while I can observe the road through the bus window, I really don't have to deal with it since I won't be allowed to drive for the two years I live in China. Instead, I have to deal with the sidewalk. There the nominal rules of the road (occasionally sticking to the right) vanish. At first, I was simply put out by the madness on the sidewalks. Masses of people would move toward me every day on any given sidewalk, and it seemed like there was no deferential yielding to anybody, let alone to white-haired ladies.

But people don't crash into each other. (If anyone crashes into things, it is the white-haired lady with sized 9 1/2 feet.) What invisible laws of physics are at work? While I am wary of finding out the mortality rates for the road, I seriously doubt that the mortality rates for the sidewalk are all that bad. For a long time, I simply couldn't explain why.

And then slowly I began to understand a few things about the great game of Chinese Chicken. It's played on a nano-scale, even though I still don't understand the physics. If played artfully, it seems to work and you can't quite tell who's giving way or by how much. But the key seems to be not to hesitate and to let blind intention move you and protect you.

How that applies to things with wheels, I've already suggested, and how it applies to standing in line, I'll save for another day. But the thing is, on the sidewalk, Chinese Chicken seems to work.

That said, I need to make several things clear:  When I say "Chinese Chicken," I'm referring to the US notion of chicken; I'm decidedly not calling any Chinese person a chicken, which is a particular kind of insult. And, whenever I am overwhelmed by games of chicken or rules of the road (or lack thereof), I don't have to look far to find practices, some thousands of years old, highlighting Chinese intelligence and ingenuity. And my host is both very kind and fiercely protective, which I think is not uncommon among good Chinese mothers. And, for all I know, she's a gold-medal driver, but, after all, we just walk and take the bus.

[I usually write on Fridays, but my laptop was out of commission for most of last week, so this post is late.]