I'll Show You

There are some things I don't like. I didn't particularly like it last night when the cook's assistant snickered and stared at me the whole time I ate three mantou (little steamed buns), a fried dough stick, and a fried egg, the unfortunate result of my attempt to order a vegetable dish from a cook who speaks only Chongqinghua. Mind you, what unifies "Chinese" for a billion plus people is Hanzi, the single system of written characters, not Putongua, king of the many spoken dialects. I can't read menus written in Hanzi, I can't speak Chongqinghua, and my Putonghua (Mandarin, the language of government and business) is still poor. I'm not alone. Even some of my students at the very selective Xi Nan Daxue fret that they might fail their exams in Putonghua--that is, if they grew up speaking any of a dozen other dialects.  Sometimes a husband and a wife speak to each other in Putonghua, rather than the dialects of their native provinces because their dialects are mutually unintelligible. But I ramble. The cook's assistant really didn't have to laugh at me because I cannot read Hanzi or understand Chongqinghua.

I didn't like it today when the crowd in the train station pressed so hard on all sides of me that I would have been carried forward without losing my place if I had found a way to lift my feet off the ground.

I don't like standing in line. There is no sense of turn-taking whatsover, not in that train station, not in Yong Hui, not in any of the other grocery stores where I have to wait in line to have my vegetables, tofu, and peanuts weighed. I might wait patiently, but if I actually appear to be patient, arms will be thrust ahead of me and the shop girl will accept whatever the most aggressive housewife thrusts under her nose. There is no standard of fair play when standing in line.

But lest you think Chinese people are unfriendly, think again. It's true that you're more likely to be greeted by blank stares than smiles on the street. The public can seem distant, unfriendly. But what does a smile from a stranger mean? If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it will be expressed with more than a smile.

Just today--just in the last twenty-four hours--I encountered over a half dozen people who went out of their way to help me. There was the student on Bus 558, the doctor in the cavernous waiting room of the train station, the eighteen-year old who admittedly opened his conversation by asking how old I was, the translator who joined me at a little table for jiaozi (dumplings) and the graduate student who offered her library card who was sitting at the next table, the girls at the north gate who went looking for a wifi cafe on my behalf, and girls by the east gate who actually found one--and then thundered down the street to get me when they thought they had given me the wrong directions. These are just today's encounters, but I've had scores of others. For instance, within the past week I stopped in front of the optician at the local market and handed him not one, but two pair of glasses, one with a broken bow, the other with wobbly bows needing tightening. He told me he'd need ten minutes but, when I returned to pick up and pay for my glasses, he refused even the most nominal payment. Instead, he just wanted to hear about Meiguo and to wish me well.

Although I'm not ignorant of "guanxi"--networking and working the old boys' club for mutual benefit--I'm stunned by the degree to which people go out of their way for me, sometimes leaving no trace of who they are and no way for me to reciprocate if I want to and no way for them to seek favors, even if that had been their hidden motive.  All of these encounters occurred today, but I encounter similar acts of kindness regularly.  If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it seems to me,  it will be expressed with much more than a smile.

Big-Something-Oh

(Apologies for missing my Friday post--have had computer problems.)

The virtue of being condemned to a seven-year old's vocabulary is that big-something-oh birthdays are a laugh--seem somehow anachronistic, surreal, nothing to take too seriously. And so I didn't. Between my language lessons (where I'm the student studying Putonghua) and more language lessons (where I'm the teacher teaching Yingyu), I enjoyed hanging out with both friends and students. Fellow foreigners (waiguoren) Olga, Inge, and Clay treated me to Sichuan cai, chocolate, and red wine (they know my weak spots). 

The landlady, Mrs. Niu, brought me a cake, still boxed (above) on my back-porch kitchen counter. Looking the other direction in my very narrow kitchen, you can see not only the cake, but also my fifteen foot high walls and windows.

And here are some photos (below) snatched from a Powerpoint my students made me after a  four-person lunch exploded into a twenty-some-person awesome feast.  Meanwhile, thanks to Chris, Ben, Nick and other well-wishers form other points on the planet!

Jiggling My Foot on Election Day

I could have been seven years old, plotting a sneak preview of my Christmas stocking, so excited was I when I threw off my quilt around five am on Wednesday. Were the first election results in yet? The adult in me whispered that the polls weren’t even closed yet in California, but the child in me impatiently jiggled my foot while my laptop growled into action—a show of bravado for a machine so ridiculously slow that I can usually take naps while waiting for pages to load.

Around me thousands of people seemed to be dead to the world—in a world still dark except for the wet leaves reflecting some light far below.  Most of these thousands of neighbors slept, as I had, with balcony and kitchen windows still flung open, even though temperatures were dropping down to single digits Celsius.  South of the Yellow River, there’s little central heat, but people in Sichuan and Chongqing tend to like the cold fresh air. This sometimes creates tension in the dormitories, where students from the north want to close the windows and “turn up the heat” (whatever that might be), and roommates from the south are invigorated by chilly temps. In my case, the window latches don’t really work and I have plenty of long underwear from my hiking days. But the little wheels were still spinning on the computer, slowly loading something.

No matter what the results would be, I was grateful for the help I had had on both sides of the Pacific getting my absentee ballot safely delivered to the Boone County clerk. Although my waiban and his assistant had helped me with some computer glitches, my biggest help came from the shorter of two graduate students rummaging through a pile of burlap bags and packages that had been dumped in a corner of the post office. While the taller one kept trying to find her bag, the shorter one realized that I needed to know if my letter would be delivered by November 6^th.  Even though it was still early October at the time, there was no stamp I could buy that would guarantee delivery by election day. The sympathetic graduate student thought my best option would be to mail it via a private delivery, ZTO. She would take me there. Meanwhile, the taller student found not one, but two colossal bags, each of which weighed nearly fifty pounds. I offered to carry one bag, and the graduate students carried the other bag between them. The shorter student and I loaded the taller student and her bags onto the first campus shuttle we passed, and then the two of us proceeded to wend our way through a maze of sky-scraper like dormitories to a complex that had a fed-express-like ZTO. She “mei guanxi’d” me though all my protests and stayed with me to inquire about costs and to negotiate in Chinese with the clerk who was about to close the shop, and she waited to translate the Boone County clerk’s address into Hanzi (Chinese characters), which were required for the ZTO forms but not for the Chinese postal service. She tried to escort me back to the main gate, although I finally convinced her that I knew my way around campus reasonably well.  In the end, she had given me well over an hour of her time and would take nothing in return.

Now, mind you, this was the most expensive letter I have ever mailed—180 kuai—so dear in every sense that one of my beloveds, who knew how much this vote meant to me, decided not to cast a vote that surely would have canceled out mine. My family is huge and of all political persuasions, but we love each other above all else.

Before I got any election results, I had an email pop up from Siren, Catherine, Gina, and Cathy who had planned to bring groceries to my house on Saturday and make jiaozi (dumplings) with me. The email was informing me that now I should expect twenty people. I shouldn’t worry—they were bringing all the food. But! Even if I seat every one on my cold tile floor, I don’t have forty chopsticks! Before I finished that thought, another email popped up saying that they had decided to rent a flat for the day and that they would meet me at Gate Two and then they would take me there. Well, my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and I had been warned throughout our summer training—we wouldn’t make it in China if we weren’t flexible and “prepared” for all sorts of last minute changes. I tried to digest that thought as I noticed that CNN, the NYT, the Guardian and other elections sites were still refraining from making any projections. I’d have to forget about the elections for now.

Thanks to texts and emails from home, as well as reports from some students who rushed to my office as soon as they heard the election results, I eventually learned who won.

But, of course, the US election is not the only change of leadership afoot. My Putonghua and Hanzi are both so bad that it’s hard for me to get a good reading of the Chinese coverage of their own leadership change during the 18^th Party Congress. The only thing I can really read is pictures, and from them I can tell that everyone must dye their hair—men, women, young, old. They all have pitch black hair, even if they’re 86 years old. From pictures, I can tell that the Chinese media coverage of natural and manmade disasters here and abroad is amazing. Beyond that, I have no clue what else is covered and how well or what my students know about their government. I do know that any of my seniors who anticipate becoming party members must compose some special essay right now, and I believe that once a party member, always a party member—no exit. I have no idea what the implications are. I don't know much. I’m still a seven year old in this respect, too.

So, back to the jiaozi party that is mushrooming into something else. . . tomorrow. Before I go to bed, I should study my students’ names and faces. I have 180 of them, and I can name most of them in class, but I’m often at a loss when I suddenly bump into them on the street. The students I remember best have names that depart from the usual “Cathy," "Sally," and "Sam” and are either nature names like “Iris," "Rainbow," "Apple," "Rose," "Daisy," and "Snow” or—crazy names like “Pain," "Potato," "Guess," "Gallop," "Snail," "Soon," "Echo," "and Monk.” Somehow, maybe not surprisingly, the students with the most unusual names are also some of my most intellectually distinctive students.