A hundred bowls of dumplings

A hundred bowls of dumplings. I'm a bit overwhelmed thinking about it--hosting three different oral English classes on three different evenings for three different jiaozi (dumpling) extravaganzas in my fourth-floor apartment, a stone's throw from the university.

But who could turn down these enthusiastic cooks?

The first crowd waited for me at the foot of the hill, some holding bags of extra groceries, half of them dressed like they were going to a prom. A few like me figured blue jeans were okay on a Saturday night, but I did a quick change when I saw the finery most were sporting. Another class, on another night, met me at Gate Two of the university, all of them wearing matching white T-shirts. It was easy to keep track of them as we traipsed on down Tiansheng Road.

Three times on three different nights we made thirty some bowls of dumplings--and various other favorite dishes from home. Whether really fabulous or just first-time cooks, they immediately dived in to the activity,

and nobody left before at least trying to clean up and mop the floors. 

What would they be doing otherwise? My students say that most but not all would be in their dorms with their three (girls) to five (guys) roommates, and in their rooms some would be surfing the web or playing video games. Most, though, would be studying. That's what they do on weekends. They study a lot. Even on vacations.

And when these students aren't studying, they're working, eating, or doing other things together. They're together almost 24-7 for four years. They might not have brothers and sisters, but they have thirty-some classmates who might as well be.

This study-around-the-clock culture certainly comes with a price and the exam culture has some unintended negative consequences, and yet, I think the West might do well to look East. Others are, including Andrea Orr who wrote The United States Can Learn from High School Students in India, China and Chen Huabin in Parents' Attitudes and Expectations. It's not that the schools are better in the East--I don't think that's the case--but the priorities in the larger culture support what's going on in the schools. Learning and teachers are privileged in the culture, and home-life supports learning from the earliest age. Students grow up with an expectation to hold some personal desires in check for the sake of a long-term goal.                                                        

My students this semester are scholarship students who hale from all over the country, and they'll return to their home provinces to teach English for at least ten years. That's the deal. And do they mind? Well, most do want to be teachers but, even if they aren't smitten by the idea, they are pragmatic. They take precious little for granted. They know there are millions of Chinese twenty-somethings competing to fill the untaken spots, wherever they are. 

In the meantime, they're thrilled when they have a little reprieve--something so simple as making dumplings at a teacher's place.

Two Feathers in China

Who knew what I'd find at the Chongqing North train station--huffing through the double doors just as the last call was being made to board the train to Chengdu. I needed to make another journey through the beautiful terraced mountains of Sichuan to do routine Peace Corps business in Chengdu, "close of service" tasks that every volunteer must do. And there, as I was debating whether to board the train alone or not, came Two Feathers in her huge bright turquoise T-shirt and baggy below the knee denim shorts. Her white roots proudly peeked through her brown hair, pulled back in a long, long braid. Nothing about Two Feathers is normal in China, where even the petite street sweepers and construction workers wear their hair in tidy buns with glittering hair clips. Nothing about Two Feathers is the least bit normal here, and yet she is beloved.

Why was a bit of a puzzle to me, at least at first, because I've certainly witnessed foreigners whose ways were so odd, so removed from Chinese reality, that they just didn't succeed in establishing much rapport. Not the case with Two Feathers, whose students at Chongqing Medical University look after her and take her everywhere--and yet learn from her, find her an amazing eye opener.

Two Feathers is a volunteer, a year behind me, also serving in the municipality (think province) of Chongqing. When she heard I was going to Chengdu, she decided to go with me so that together we could pay a visit to the host family who took each of us in when we first arrived in China. In the summer of 2012 during "pre-service training" I lived with Li Ying and her husband Peng Laoshi. Then, in the summer of 2013 while I was traipsing around China, Two Feathers lived with them, her first summer in China. My Chinese is not the best (a masterpiece of understatement), but Two Feathers was dependent on me--so I did all the negotiations in train stations, buses, taxis, foreign student dormitory, and so on--I was the one to carry the conversation with Li Ying and Peng Laoshi.

It was absolutely wonderful to see them and to taste again some of Li Ying's fabulous cooking, including an incredible catfish dish. I'd never seen Li Ying so radiant, so happy--possibly because her pregnant daughter was visiting. We saw pictures of their recent travels and heard about plans to visit relatives in San Diego.

Now Two Feathers hasn't always used her Native American name--in fact, she had to stage a silent protest at Rutgers to be allowed to have it called out at graduation. Her protest involved wearing a mask in keeping with her Apache traditions, but a mask that also had some red, white, and blue because she was a Vietnam veteran who had served in the military until retirement. That service was her ticket to an education, which she got only later in life--none of her eleven older siblings had degrees.

If she grew up poor and an object of discrimination in all the complex ways that race, class, gender, and ethnicity are bound together, she hasn't let any of that deflate her spirit. In a husky contralto, she talks non-stop and just charges ahead. She has 180 students--not altogether but in just one of her speaking classes--which for Two Feathers is no problem. She adapts a group plan until it works, gets them all talking, keeps them all accountable, and spares them nothing. She gets them on fire. None of her stories are censored and she elicits from them all kinds of stories and testimonies that I find utterly amazing. She keeps her ear close to their needs, finding all things medical for her medical students and tapping video clips of contemporary pop stars for her undergraduates. She meets them where they are and seems to find them.

There's nothing standard about this person--not her English, not her appearance, not her manners, not her approach to anything. And yet driving all of it seems to be a will to make the best of it, and that is deeply Chinese. She just goes, ever resourceful in her attempts to connect, to help, to teach. By all accounts, she reaches them, with students crowding into her classroom, into her apartment, onto QQ, and offering to take her anywhere, protecting her, helping her.

Utterly amazing Two Feathers (left).

Chicken bones

Who knew that a little chicken bone might eclipse the excitement of pulling off what Wu Dan insists was China's first writing-across-the-curriculum conference. Wu Dan had come to Beibei from Xi'an to help me facilitate what was to be a bilingual workshop for several dozen folks (our maximum capacity), some coming from as faraway as Beijing and Hainan. We were relieved to have it behind us, winding down at a little outdoor cafe when Wu Dan introduced me to a dish I'd never had before and will never have again--Xinjiang Da Pan Ji--meaning "Xinjiang big dish chicken." Don't misunderstand--I love food from Xinjiang and this was delicious--but never again will I risk eating little bits of chicken with even littler bits of bone hidden inside.

Xinjiang Da Pan Ji (photo credit way below)

As soon as I realized something wasn't going down, I excused myself in search of an out-of-the-way trash can where I could spit. But I couldn't really spit--instead half gagged, half coughed until I nearly wet my pants, with volumes of glue-like spit swinging from my fingertips. As I tried to dodge the crowd on my way back to Wu Dan, I was approached by "Daisy" and her sister, two kind women I have bumped into on repeated occasions. They magically produced some tissue for me to use, but I couldn't speak to thank them. Back in my apartment, things calmed down a bit--eventually I could talk, had stopped coughing up volumes of that viscous stuff and could even take about half an ml of water. Wu Dan and I thought it safe to skip ER and see if the damned thing would resolve itself by morning.

It didn't. I shooed Wu Dan on her way, her early morning flight to Xi'an, and called the Peace Corps medical staff in Chengdu. Beat it to the ER, they advised. So, at Gate 2 of the university I met my dear friend Xiaodan who accompanied me to not one but three hospitals before the day was done, each one a little better than the previous one, all packed with people squeezing into examination rooms whether it was their turn or not.

Although I could swallow a drop or two of water successfully before I went to bed the night before, that was no longer the case. I couldn't swallow my own saliva--let alone anything to eat or drink--and surreptitiously spit into a steel water bottle every other minute, dumping it whenever I found a good bush. What had been mid-throat now seemed to have lodged near the base of my throat, too low for the ENT at the first hospital to see and too high for the gastroenterologist to do an endoscopy, he said. Nonsense, said the Chinese Peace Corps doctors who were monitoring things by phone. Ditch that place and go to Southwest Hospital in Chongqing.

An hour or two later, Xiaodan and I found ourselves in a labyrinth of gigantic buildings--a massive hospital complex with beautiful outdoor courtyards and fountains and impressive statues inside. We zigzagged back and forth, following different folks' directions, before we finally found the ER, where blue capped nurses doubled as receptionists, both taking your blood pressure and checking your passports at the check-in counter. Less dingy than the last hospital, this one was just as packed. People, some with big baskets of vegetables on their backs, squeezed into elevators--sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, twenty people--creating shouts of dismay from people in the back.

The ENT department was in a clean, spacious area, and we found the ENT surfing the web in a room like a college computer lab. He directed us to another office--high ceiling-ed and mostly empty except for a little desk, an examination chair and a doctor. The round mirror strapped to the second doctor's forehead reflected bright light down my throat but, alas, he could see nothing. That meant we needed an endoscopy, but, that would be impossible before the next day. The first doctor was solicitous but waited patiently while we consulted our Peace Corps doctors. Given that they would fly to Chongqing to be with me unless I came to Chengdu, where they were, I hoofed it to the train station where I found myself standing behind a humpback about 4 and a half feet tall. When someone tried to cut in front of him, the woman behind me started a row that drew in about half a dozen voices before things calmed down. I booked the next train to Chengdu, enjoying a beautiful two hour journey through western China's terraced mountains, listening to my seatmate drown out the children's songs on the other side of him with an English movie that he put on pause and replayed every few lines, sometimes repeating a turn of conversation ten times before moving on.

The Peace Corps staff was out in full order awaiting my arrival. When I stepped from the train onto the platform, Cheng Dang called to say he was waiting for me, and indeed by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, there he was. He sped me to what is perhaps the best hospital in southwest China, where Dr. Gao pulled up on her bicycle and Dr. Bing was waiting inside--along with half of China, some in their pajamas. Every hall was teaming with people, many from far flung areas.

Even after living in China for almost 22 months, I still find myself amazed by the scale of everything. The sheer number of people. An ordinary day in a Chinese hospital is like December 23rd in a big-city department store in the US. You simply can't see the floor.

Hospital gurneys with patients in waiting, many in colorful ethnic clothing, were surrounded by family members--extended families, it seemed--many of whom went freely in and out of nearby conference rooms where other patients were being seen. So it was in the IV room where I spent the night along with two dozen others, most snugly tucked in under colorful blankets from home. Having not even a toothbrush, let alone a blanket, I was ready to just chill in every respect, but Dr. Gao noticed, pedaled home, and returned to cover me. Husbands patiently washed wives' foreheads, daughters repositioned fathers--one even changed the man's underpants. The teenager seated next to me seemed to be dying of pneumonia, his lungs rattling when he wasn't spitting into our little shared wastebasket. His sister changed his socks, his brother with long hair neatly held back with a headband looked on solicitously, and his father tended him all night. If I actually snoozed off for a few minutes, I'd awake to see his father staring at me with gentle curiosity, softer than the stares I get all day long on the street.

The Peace Corps medical staff had to wait in the hall but they checked on me regularly, and both doctors were there in the morning to accompany me to another building. Plan A was to have an ENT slither an endoscope down my throat to get those bones hiding down at the base; Plan B was general anesthesia and surgery. I was ushered into a room where the last patient was still collecting his things and was placed on my side on a table. Staring at cutting edge imaging machines, the specialist skillfully guided the thing down my throat (no anesthesia), roaming around while I tried not to gag. Ah! She got a piece and tried to withdraw it. Four more times. The end of her scope had a bright light doubling as camera and she shot pictures of our four prizes inches away from my drooling mouth. No need for Plan B, although I'd still have to hang out in Chengdu at Peace Corps headquarters until my throat was healed enough to take liquids and a tiny bit of soft food. I revisited old haunts on Sichuan University campus, where Peace Corps China headquarters is, and read up on things in the library, having nothing with me from home, certainly not a laptop.

I have had phenomenal medical care my whole life, but the China Peace Corps medical staff is just the tops. Smart. Humane. Pro-active. Spunky. Up to date. They're amazing. Thanks, Drs. Gao and Bing--Kandice and others. Li Li.

Well, my reputation for hospitality is at a low ebb. My sister Mary learned that if you go to China to visit me, you might end up spending half the time at the police station; my friend Wu Dan learned that a visit here isn't complete without lots of spit and chicken bones.


PS I know a surgeon and a nurse anesthetist at home I can't wait to see!

Xinjiang Da Pan Ji photo credit: https://www.google.com/search?q=da+pan+ji&client=firefox-a&hs=YlW&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=RPpxU8zfNtG1yAT5n4Ag&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=1188&bih=648#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=bR9wz9QiDh3G7M%253A%3BScz7xOp2yViQJM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fdevelopingcityblog.files.wordpress.com%252F2013%252F02%252Fxinjiang-da-pan-ji.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fdevelopingcity.net%252F2013%252F02%252F17%252Fbest-xinjiang-food-in-shanghai-2%252F%3B701%3B396

Botched job in Oklahoma

Stuart changed things. I could hear  something disturbing in the next classroom, a cane zinging through the air, striking some unfortunate soul. Stuart changed the way I heard all that. He could see that I was aghast and quickly whispered, "We have corporal punishment, but we don't have capital punishment." That was many years ago when I was an exchange student in New Zealand.

Perhaps I've told you this story before, so transformative was it. I didn't become a fan of corporal punishment, but I never thought about capital punishment the same way again. Before that whispered conversation in my biology class, I'd never even thought about capital punishment. I just didn't know at the time how few "developed" countries still had capital punishment. Most had outlawed it a long time ago and along with it an "eye for an eye" morality. What was "normal" in my country had ceased to be acceptable in most European countries and many other places. New Zealand.

Most of my adult life I lived in Missouri, a state that ranks right up there with Texas and Florida in its zeal for executions. China. Iraq. Some Missouri executions have been botched, just like the inexcusable situation with Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma last week. In Missouri, I expressed my dissent, usually silently at vigils outside the governor's mansion the night before an execution. Nobody noticed much or cared, aside from a cub reporter for the university newspaper desperate for a story to cover.

Alas, I might be confused about rats (as James and Emma made clear in the comments), but I'm clear about this: Human beings are not rats. No human being is a rat, not even Clayton Lockett. I fear that the most upright, law-abiding human beings can allow themselves to commit unspeakable atrocities IF they first allow themselves to think of the "other" (whoever it is, innocent Jews or not so innocent Locketts) as something other than human.

I'm living now in a country that shares with the US a horrific history of executions. My sense is that few Chinese people question the appropriateness and practicality of them. I hope that changes, that both  the US and China can step into the modern age before too long. We can leave "an eye for an eye" morality behind us.

(I realize I've lost all credibility among some of my readers. I got a pretty good drubbing last week and may be in for another this week. . . I intimate that I value a human's life more than a non-human's, even if my point is something else.  That's probably going to get me in more trouble.)

Rats!

The first peculiar thing was finding one of my favorite socks, a little Smartwool sock, stuffed between that bathroom pipe and the window, about four or five feet up from the floor. How the hell did it get there? Can't see the sock in this photo, but you can imagine that this pipe is not a place that even the most absentminded of us might leave a sock.

 

My suspicions were loosely confirmed a morning or two later when I saw something scurrying along the window sill. But just what was it? A small rat? A big mouse? It almost flew--in fact, when I first saw it I thought it was a bird. I'm not sure which one of us was more startled. Next day a critter (same one?) almost made eye contact with me before flying off the edge of the ledge separating my little study from the kitchen. I'm guessing that the fella likes apples and peanuts, given the clutter left in two little porcelain bowls. When I told Mrs. Niu about my visitor, she immediately brought me some traps, the sticky-glue type. I had no idea if they had D-Con or anything else in the little cups in the center of the sticky traps. With a squinched up face, I opened one of them.

Well, the next morning I stopped on my way to the hot water pot. Poor little fella! There was somebody about five inches long (not counting the tail) on the stick-em, determined to get away but stuck. What a cruel, slow death he was facing.  I just couldn't stand knowing that little fellow was struggling on a glue pad, and I finally just put the wok over the whole thing so I didn't have to see it. What a coward, eh? 

My pity was pretty shallow—given that I think nothing of the fate of most rodents when they're not dying on my kitchen counter, and given that what I really wanted was a cup of coffee and couldn't quite get to my coffee pot. Believe me, I have no fans among rats, since once upon a time I was the executioner for hundreds of soft, fat little vitamin D deficient rats, all of whom were sacrificed in the name of medical research.

Shallow though my pity was, I did have some, and I found myself marveling at whatever life force was still in that little kicker, desperately trying to save his life. I found myself thinking of my father, who was no vegetarian but was, well,  an unusual gardener. He had a little non-lethal trap, and he'd take his never-ending supply of prisoners up to the top of the hill and let them out. My father was a pretty smart man—a chemical engineer who knew what the odds were of those prisoners running right back down the hill. He knew. But he didn't have the heart to kill them.

Meanwhile, I'm guessing my visitors are Sichuan Jumping Mice, and I found myself reading a bit about these sweet little forest dwellers (although I haven't seen the belly of one of these fellows to see if the telltale Y marks are there). I'm still not sure if my they're rats or mice, because I have also spotted some rat photos that look just like my uninvited roommates. So, my day turned to night, and before going to bed I looked at the wok hiding one now-quiet little critter's body. My dreams were laced with thoughts about cruelty to animals. I thought more about being an all out vegetarian instead of an almost vegetarian. (My vegetarian-leanings have more to do with energy management and resources than with killing animals, but still I'm no fan of concentrated animal feeding operations--CAFOs--and such things.)

In the morning, I summoned the courage to lift the wok and just take care of business. There the little guy was, still as anything and covered with scraps of paper and cardboard from the rat trap. I turned away for a second, putting the wok in the sink. I was just reaching for materials to bag the rest of it when I looked again.

Gone!

Rats! I already confessed that my pity was rather shallow. Now, I'll have to confess that I'm a little bit fickle, too. What now?  I looked with mixed feelings at the other trap, still empty. Just exactly what did I want? 

I wasn't sure. I thought about just getting rid of the damned sticky trap but didn't--I was in a hurry to meet Haixia. A few hours later I found myself back in my apartment, and I can't say exactly what I felt when I saw the other trap with some quarry. Was this the original fighter, the one who had gotten away?

Back. . .