On a fine sunny Sunday, I ventured down to Cuihu Park, Kunming's answer to New York's Central Park or London's Hyde Park and a little of Marrakech's Djemaa dl-Fna thrown in (although at night, my own neighborhood looks like a tiny nighttime Djemaa el-Fna, can't beat it). Cuihu's got to be one of the best parks in the world. The name means Green Lake and it dates back to the Ming Dynasty. It's right in downtown Kunming, a breath of fresh air amid the drab concrete buildings and honking cars. It's got Hanzhou-style arched bridges crisscrossing four small willow-lined lakes, brightly colored pavilions, vendors selling food, and traditional Chinese musicians. Beautiful Siberian seagulls spend the winter here. Did I mention it's free? On a sunny Sunday, this scene is nothing short of glorious.
I was asked to pose for four or five photos with Chinese strangers, but really when are the Chinese strangers? I saw an old minority woman in traditional clothes and bound feet. She hobbled along. I saw a beautiful young Bai woman in traditional dress out for a stroll with her parents. I heard some amazing music and listened for an hour or so. During this time, I read some Jack Kerouac: "Food is always better eaten in doleful little pinchfuls off the ends of chopsticks, no gobbling, the reason why Darwin's law of survival applies best to China: if you don't know how to handle a chopstick and stick it in that family pot with the best of 'em, you'll starve. I ended up flubbing it all up my forefinger anyhow." I can't remember the last time I used a fork or knife.
Right now is dry season in Kunming, so the sun is bright and the sky is majestic. Just about every day. The mornings and evenings are a little chilly, jacket weather, but by the afternoon the weather's figured itself out enough to be perfect. Some leaves have turned colors, but other flowers are blooming and the grass is green. I stepped inside a music shop and tried playing the erhu, a Chinese two-stringed violin. Also I dabbled with the yueqi, the "moon guitar." They had a few more instruments, but I had an intense cold and a runny nose, so it was time to stop sniffling and head home. I stumbled through the flower and bird market in Kunming Old Town (or what's left of it, unfortunately), very fascinating. I peeked in a Chinese antique shop--these are always the best. Old coins, stacks and stacks of Little Red Books (required reading during the Cultural Revolution), Mao buttons, the obligatory Japanese samurai swords leftover from the occupation.
I have been here three months now. I have had three colds. Each cold was treated quite effectively with Chinese medicine and a trip to the mountains and fresh air. Last weekend I had a cold and went up to Xi Shan/The Western Hills with one of my classes. "Hills" is an understatement. We left early Saturday morning and found a "bread bus," a 17-seater that would drive us from the bus station up, up, up into the hills. It started out pleasant: students taking turns singing folk songs, including a new one about the railway to Tibet. Soon it became apparent that this driver was extremely aggressive, his right hand permanently pressing the horn, cigarette dangling from his mouth, occasionally driving the bus into the bicycle lanes when traffic was too congested and ignoring red lights. He did not relent when we reached the winding roads of Xi Shan. We zigzagged up into the mountains, whizzing past 500 year-old Buddhist and Taoist temples, dodging dogs and pedestrians, horses, cars. Soon some students became carsick. By the time we reached the village at the top, each side of the bus had a girl hanging out the window, vomiting, gasping for fresh air and escape from nausea. The driver did not relent with his mad dash to the top or blaring that horn.
We stayed at a hotel in the mountains that served us a home-cooked meal in the courtyard. Some students elected to play mahjong or sing karaoke, but it was too nice to be inside. A few of us hiked up through the karst topography of Little Stone Forest. It is obligatory to shout a "Hoo!!!" at any significant peak. Others will respond. I think the Chinese, being mountain people through-and-through, do it best. Maybe this is worldwide. I don't know. I'm from Iowa, where the highest point is Hawkeye Point, on the Sterler Farm in Osceola County, a pitiful 1670 feet above sea level. As I write this, from the ground floor of my apartment building, I am already 6,265 feet up, 1000 feet higher than Denver. Lhasa, that city down in the valleys of Tibet, is twice as high as here. And that ain't nothing. We peered down hundreds of feet off sheer cliffs to the massive and toxic Lake Dian (an unnatural chemical green from all the surrounding factories). In the middle of the rocks, wherever possible, were boards set up vertically, holding about 36 brightly colored balloons. For 2 yuan, you could shoot a BB gun and try to pop them. These were all over, along with people selling plastic bird-shaped whistles that gave a tweet tweet. Way up in the mountains! Where did they come from? We talked with some Kunming locals way up there, whose dialect was difficult even for the students from neighboring provinces. One man in a worn suit jacket told me, "Be careful up here. Your life is valuable but mine is worthless." What do you say to that? Even if you could speak Kunming-hua?
After returning to the hotel, I had a long nap. I got my own room, and the door opened out into a view that stretched into eternity sunshine Shangri-La. We had a home-cooked supper, this time inside, and persuaded the hotel owners to get a bonfire going in their courtyard. So they took a big old wok, filled it with wood, and we had a warm fire going in no time. There was some fire dancing, a game of "hot potato," but instead of a potato, it was played with a chopstick. And we played some truth-or-dare. This was nothing like American truth-or-dare. I think the most risqué moment was when a male student had to carry a female student around the circle on his back. In front of everyone! Or when a girl had to call her boyfriend in Inner Mongolia and tell him that she loved him. In front of everyone! There is an innocence and freshness here that we have somehow lost in America.
The next day, we hiked up another hill, this time straight up, through a tree (not stone) forest, to a summit that gave us an inspiring view of all of the whiteness of Kunming City and beyond. At top was a 150 year-old Buddhist pavilion and a very modern military radar station, done in traditional Chinese style, arched roofs and all. After returning for lunch, it was soon time to go back to Kunming. I was exhausted and slept on the bus.
One student woke me up. "Koby wants to meet us at Baita Road." "Huh? Why?" "I don't know." So we got off at Baita Road. Sure enough, Koby was there in suit and tie along with a friend. They quickly escorted us to a fancy karaoke hall, to a private room filled with about 10 familiar faces. They insisted that I sing some English hit songs. Let me warn you about Western pop music in China: it's bad. Everyone loves Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," (and all of Titanic for that matter) which they insisted I sing. Also, they wanted to hear me sing some Michael Jackson (who is still huge here, along with Michael Bolton and Kenny G and the Backstreet Boys, seriously). One time, a friend, a really cool and trendy guy, broke out his top-of-the-line MP3 cellphone and played "Right Here Waiting" by Richard Marx.... The cheesier the better. "Sleepless in Seattle" is by far one of the most popular movies in China. So please, America, please Europe, please whoever, send some better Western pop culture over here to China, at least for my sake.
After karaoke, we went out to eat, had some delicious lotus root (a delicacy I haven't seen in the States), eggplant, tofu, and a big pot of sour fish soup. About ten people came back to my place for a night of singing and playing guitar and drinking beer and by then I was really exhausted.
Thanksgiving was last week. Many students wished me a happy Thanksgiving, but it didn't really feel like Thanksgiving. First of all, I had to work. Second of all, Lester and I went for supper at a Xinjiang restaurant and ate naan bread and watched Uighur traditional music videos. The only pilgrims around were those on the road to Mecca.
This week I've gotten a couple of calls out of the blue from parents in the neighborhood who want me to teach their kids English. The first group was four 12-year-olds, very well behaved, two of them who spoke better English than some of my grad students. I showed them Google Earth on my computer, zoomed in on my school where I teach. I zoomed in on my Kunming apartment, then I whisked them around the world to show my father's house, zoomed out to show my tiny hometown, then to Oregon to show my girlfriend's apartment, and back to China to show the Forbidden City of Beijing. I love Google Earth. It was fun.
Tonight, however, was different. I had five 5-year-olds show up, and two parents to supervise. It was madness from when I opened the door. I tried to teach them some vocabulary, but when I could get two or three of them to focus, the other ones would start digging through my apartment which was not kidproofed to begin with. They broke two things, shouted, and fought over markers. I finally got them to focus and draw pictures of Yuka and me (Yuka, you are blond and have green skin). They liked to draw pictures of butts (Pigu! Pigu!).
29 November 2006
21 November 2006
I've been here long enough that life is starting to eek out some sort of pattern. So I'll try to elaborate the best I can on daily life in my home, Bailong Village.
1. Midnight.
Chinese people typically go to bed early and get up early. After 11 or so, the bustling street that runs past my house is dead. Maybe you can see one or two people going home, and a guy selling barbecue under a red lamp, lit by a car battery under his grill. By now the bars are closed, the street vendors are packing up, and most people are asleep. Up and down my street there are about 20 hotels with flickering neon signs; many students live here illegally instead of in the dorms. Bailong Village isn't really a tourist destination. However, a little outside my village, on the main road connecting Bailong Village and downtown Kunming, I do still hear the big blue construction trucks blaring their air horns up and down the street 24 hours a day. The mosquitoes are a nuisance year round.
2. Morning.
I usually wake up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. I go to the kitchen, turn on the propane-fueled hot water heater, and hop into the shower. Chinese bathrooms of the middle-class lifestyle typically have a sink, a western-style toilet, and a very, very small bathtub. There is no shower curtain, so water sprays everywhere. Apparently, you can buy a shower curtain & rod (very rare items) at one of the Wal-Marts downtown, but I don't go to Wal-Mart, not even in China. The sink has two faucets, but no hot water comes from them. On top of most of the apartment buildings here are giant solar panels that heat tanks of water. Most people get their hot shower water this way, and don't have water heaters. You can't flush toilet paper down the toilet as the sewers can't handle it.
One superior form of Chinese engineering is the thermos. You will see these thermoses everywhere. The thermos is huge, holding about 2L of water, and keeping it hot for *days.* I boil a kettle of water a few times a week so I can enjoy a cup of Nescafé instant coffee or a glass of water in the morning. (Coffee and chocolate are very hard to find here, especially those of decent quality. There are a few coffeeshops downtown, but it's expensive.) Also, you can't drink the tap water, so the water must be boiled or bottled.
Each morning at about 6:30, I hear a person dribbling a basketball down to the apartment complex's court. At about 7:30, young children start swarming the preschool next door to my apartment. Around 8:00, senior citizens congregate on the basketball court to practice tai chi, tai chi with fake swords, tai chi with folding fans, traditional dancing, balancing a tennis ball on a racket while moving around, basketball, anything. Senior citizens in China lead very active lives. There is a bus from my apartment complex up the big hill to the college. I live away from campus, a good 20 minute hike up a steep hill. So the college bought a bus to ferry the teachers up and down a few times a day. It's pretty crowded in the morning as most teachers have class at 8:00. Many things here are pretty crowded.
I put on my jacket and usually have breakfast at the open market; a big bowl of freshly made rice or wheat noodles, mint, cilantro, pickled vegetables, and chili pepper set me back 2.5 yuan, about 30 cents. I see people brushing their teeth and women washing their hair in the street. Cleaning ladies are sweeping all the garbage and other debris up. There are a lot of stray dogs, but all of them are very small. I am told that owning a dog is forbidden in Kunming, but it hasn't stopped anyone. At the open market, you can get dogmeat noodles, so I am told.
Alternately for breakfast, I'll buy a piece of pocket bread stuffed with grilled tofu and other mixed vegetables and spices for 1 yuan, about 12.5 cents. It is unbelievably delicious. The owners make everything from scratch and cook it up on the back of their bicycle. You'd be surprised at how much goes on and comes off of bikes here. Sometimes I ride my bicycle up to school instead of taking the bus.
It is also convenient to take the sanlunche (三轮车), one of the splendors of the Orient. This is a three-wheeled vehicle; the front half resembles a motorcycle, and the back half is an enclosed square box with two padded benches and curtains for privacy or warmth. It's usually powered by a motorcycle--some call it an auto rickshaw, but sometimes it's powered by foot. It's very important to negotiate the price before getting in! The driver wears a thin red plastic helmet.
I teach in the main teaching building, a seven story contraption that many people here call "Budala-gong" (布达拉宫) because of its resemblance to Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. Chinese buildings six stories or less do not typically have elevators. Almost everyone, including myself, lives in six-story concrete buildings that bear a striking resemblance to one another. Almost every building here is made of concrete and covered with white bathroom tile. I walk down the dark hallway to my class. The hallways are usually unlit. No buildings in Kunming have central heating. I have about 35 students in each class, a blackboard, and chalk. There are no computers, overhead projectors, or texts in my classes. Each class lasts two hours with a ten minute break halfway through. I also take Chinese classes in this building. The bathrooms in the building are somewhat clean, although a bit smelly. The men's restroom is indicated with a "男" and the women's with a "女." The toilets are the typical squat toilets and there is usually water all over the floor. When you use a squat toilet, your back faces the wall. Toilet paper and hand towels are almost never provided in Chinese restrooms, so remember to bring your own. Also, did you remember not to throw the toilet paper in the toilet?
Afternoon.
I usually eat lunch with my students or with my Vietnamese classmates from my Chinese class. It is very rare to eat alone in China. My college has two main dining halls (very crowded at meal time), a Muslim restaurant (my favorite place to eat, although it's usually a 10 minute wait to get in the door), and a third small dining hall. Near the Muslim restaurant there is a long line of students filling their thermoses up with hot water. I often see my students lugging their thermoses to class. The metal school-lunch tray comes with a large serving of rice (0.7 yuan, about 9 cents), then a variety of fixin's in the buffet line, ranging in price from 0.6 yuan to 2.5 yuan per item. Chinese students often complain about the quality of cafeteria food--I assume this is the case of students anywhere--and I assure you that Chinese cafeteria food is much better than the cafeteria food I ate in the US & England. Also there are a few a-la-carte options such as noodles cooked in a clay pot, fried rice, Chinese burritos, bread, sweets. There is an attached convenience store where it's even possible to buy beer. It's not too bad eating there, although I pass on the ever-popular "Coffee Cola."
Most people have a two or three hour siesta after lunch. I have a three hour break and usually come home after lunch, check my email, and chat with Yuka whenever she's online. I am constantly reminded that it's important to take a nap, so I try to do that, but it's very strange for me to sleep during the daytime. I head back up the hill for my afternoon class, and have supper around 5 p.m. with my students. I often eat with Koby, the basketball superstar who knows everyone in Bailong Village. He tirelessly recruits other students to come with us, and usually tries to invite pretty girls he doesn't even know (it hasn't worked yet). He is the kind of student who learns more outside of class than inside, so it is a great opportunity for him to improve his English (and he is undoubtedly improving).
In the late afternoon, the street fills up with fruit vendors selling apples, oranges, pomegranates, pomelos, durians, bananas, pineapples, grapes off the back of bicycles. Also there are a few larger horse-drawn carts selling watermelons. There are many people selling snacks from their stalls. This chaos is set in the middle of the street, with all the vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians, and the shepherd boys bringing their flocks home from a day at the pasture. Each day it's a sight to behold and a chance to pinch myself and remind me that I'm in China. Wow.
Evenings.
After supper, I usually return home again. This is one thing I like about China: not so many cars, so people are always out walking around; it's inevitable that you will run into people you know, especially if you're a foreigner. It is a good time to make plans for the evening. Around dusk, all the barbecue people set up their red canopies and knee-high tables and ankle-high stools for a night of some serious grilling. Next to my apartment complex there is a restaurant of some repute. People go here for birthdays, celebrations, and occasionally weddings. It is a rowdy restaurant. Public vomiting is not really frowned upon here like it is in the US, and more often than not, you must watch your step in front of this restaurant, if you know what I mean. My colleague & friend Marietta said, "It must say something about the food there."
At the entrance of my compound, a guy on a motorcycle brings a daily big barrel of milk and people line up with their pots to fill up. Milk is popular here, but scarce. It usually comes from Inner Mongolia. I say, if you want to make money in China, sell milk. I've often been given a packet of milk as a treat, although I'm not a big fan of milk, I must be polite as it's relatively expensive. It is a person of status who is a milk drinker.
At my apartment complex in the evenings, the center of everything is the basketball court. The activity lasts from about 8 p.m. until 11 p.m. There are kids running around with toy battle axes, games of soft-volleyball with serious officials and whistles and cheers and flipping scores; old men standing around, smoking, and shooting hoops (simultaneously).
This is a bare-bones view of what goes on in Bailong Village daily life. There is plenty more that adds color and confusion and joy to my experience, and I'll get to that next time.
1. Midnight.
Chinese people typically go to bed early and get up early. After 11 or so, the bustling street that runs past my house is dead. Maybe you can see one or two people going home, and a guy selling barbecue under a red lamp, lit by a car battery under his grill. By now the bars are closed, the street vendors are packing up, and most people are asleep. Up and down my street there are about 20 hotels with flickering neon signs; many students live here illegally instead of in the dorms. Bailong Village isn't really a tourist destination. However, a little outside my village, on the main road connecting Bailong Village and downtown Kunming, I do still hear the big blue construction trucks blaring their air horns up and down the street 24 hours a day. The mosquitoes are a nuisance year round.
2. Morning.
I usually wake up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. I go to the kitchen, turn on the propane-fueled hot water heater, and hop into the shower. Chinese bathrooms of the middle-class lifestyle typically have a sink, a western-style toilet, and a very, very small bathtub. There is no shower curtain, so water sprays everywhere. Apparently, you can buy a shower curtain & rod (very rare items) at one of the Wal-Marts downtown, but I don't go to Wal-Mart, not even in China. The sink has two faucets, but no hot water comes from them. On top of most of the apartment buildings here are giant solar panels that heat tanks of water. Most people get their hot shower water this way, and don't have water heaters. You can't flush toilet paper down the toilet as the sewers can't handle it.
One superior form of Chinese engineering is the thermos. You will see these thermoses everywhere. The thermos is huge, holding about 2L of water, and keeping it hot for *days.* I boil a kettle of water a few times a week so I can enjoy a cup of Nescafé instant coffee or a glass of water in the morning. (Coffee and chocolate are very hard to find here, especially those of decent quality. There are a few coffeeshops downtown, but it's expensive.) Also, you can't drink the tap water, so the water must be boiled or bottled.
Each morning at about 6:30, I hear a person dribbling a basketball down to the apartment complex's court. At about 7:30, young children start swarming the preschool next door to my apartment. Around 8:00, senior citizens congregate on the basketball court to practice tai chi, tai chi with fake swords, tai chi with folding fans, traditional dancing, balancing a tennis ball on a racket while moving around, basketball, anything. Senior citizens in China lead very active lives. There is a bus from my apartment complex up the big hill to the college. I live away from campus, a good 20 minute hike up a steep hill. So the college bought a bus to ferry the teachers up and down a few times a day. It's pretty crowded in the morning as most teachers have class at 8:00. Many things here are pretty crowded.
I put on my jacket and usually have breakfast at the open market; a big bowl of freshly made rice or wheat noodles, mint, cilantro, pickled vegetables, and chili pepper set me back 2.5 yuan, about 30 cents. I see people brushing their teeth and women washing their hair in the street. Cleaning ladies are sweeping all the garbage and other debris up. There are a lot of stray dogs, but all of them are very small. I am told that owning a dog is forbidden in Kunming, but it hasn't stopped anyone. At the open market, you can get dogmeat noodles, so I am told.
Alternately for breakfast, I'll buy a piece of pocket bread stuffed with grilled tofu and other mixed vegetables and spices for 1 yuan, about 12.5 cents. It is unbelievably delicious. The owners make everything from scratch and cook it up on the back of their bicycle. You'd be surprised at how much goes on and comes off of bikes here. Sometimes I ride my bicycle up to school instead of taking the bus.
It is also convenient to take the sanlunche (三轮车), one of the splendors of the Orient. This is a three-wheeled vehicle; the front half resembles a motorcycle, and the back half is an enclosed square box with two padded benches and curtains for privacy or warmth. It's usually powered by a motorcycle--some call it an auto rickshaw, but sometimes it's powered by foot. It's very important to negotiate the price before getting in! The driver wears a thin red plastic helmet.
I teach in the main teaching building, a seven story contraption that many people here call "Budala-gong" (布达拉宫) because of its resemblance to Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. Chinese buildings six stories or less do not typically have elevators. Almost everyone, including myself, lives in six-story concrete buildings that bear a striking resemblance to one another. Almost every building here is made of concrete and covered with white bathroom tile. I walk down the dark hallway to my class. The hallways are usually unlit. No buildings in Kunming have central heating. I have about 35 students in each class, a blackboard, and chalk. There are no computers, overhead projectors, or texts in my classes. Each class lasts two hours with a ten minute break halfway through. I also take Chinese classes in this building. The bathrooms in the building are somewhat clean, although a bit smelly. The men's restroom is indicated with a "男" and the women's with a "女." The toilets are the typical squat toilets and there is usually water all over the floor. When you use a squat toilet, your back faces the wall. Toilet paper and hand towels are almost never provided in Chinese restrooms, so remember to bring your own. Also, did you remember not to throw the toilet paper in the toilet?
Afternoon.
I usually eat lunch with my students or with my Vietnamese classmates from my Chinese class. It is very rare to eat alone in China. My college has two main dining halls (very crowded at meal time), a Muslim restaurant (my favorite place to eat, although it's usually a 10 minute wait to get in the door), and a third small dining hall. Near the Muslim restaurant there is a long line of students filling their thermoses up with hot water. I often see my students lugging their thermoses to class. The metal school-lunch tray comes with a large serving of rice (0.7 yuan, about 9 cents), then a variety of fixin's in the buffet line, ranging in price from 0.6 yuan to 2.5 yuan per item. Chinese students often complain about the quality of cafeteria food--I assume this is the case of students anywhere--and I assure you that Chinese cafeteria food is much better than the cafeteria food I ate in the US & England. Also there are a few a-la-carte options such as noodles cooked in a clay pot, fried rice, Chinese burritos, bread, sweets. There is an attached convenience store where it's even possible to buy beer. It's not too bad eating there, although I pass on the ever-popular "Coffee Cola."
Most people have a two or three hour siesta after lunch. I have a three hour break and usually come home after lunch, check my email, and chat with Yuka whenever she's online. I am constantly reminded that it's important to take a nap, so I try to do that, but it's very strange for me to sleep during the daytime. I head back up the hill for my afternoon class, and have supper around 5 p.m. with my students. I often eat with Koby, the basketball superstar who knows everyone in Bailong Village. He tirelessly recruits other students to come with us, and usually tries to invite pretty girls he doesn't even know (it hasn't worked yet). He is the kind of student who learns more outside of class than inside, so it is a great opportunity for him to improve his English (and he is undoubtedly improving).
In the late afternoon, the street fills up with fruit vendors selling apples, oranges, pomegranates, pomelos, durians, bananas, pineapples, grapes off the back of bicycles. Also there are a few larger horse-drawn carts selling watermelons. There are many people selling snacks from their stalls. This chaos is set in the middle of the street, with all the vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians, and the shepherd boys bringing their flocks home from a day at the pasture. Each day it's a sight to behold and a chance to pinch myself and remind me that I'm in China. Wow.
Evenings.
After supper, I usually return home again. This is one thing I like about China: not so many cars, so people are always out walking around; it's inevitable that you will run into people you know, especially if you're a foreigner. It is a good time to make plans for the evening. Around dusk, all the barbecue people set up their red canopies and knee-high tables and ankle-high stools for a night of some serious grilling. Next to my apartment complex there is a restaurant of some repute. People go here for birthdays, celebrations, and occasionally weddings. It is a rowdy restaurant. Public vomiting is not really frowned upon here like it is in the US, and more often than not, you must watch your step in front of this restaurant, if you know what I mean. My colleague & friend Marietta said, "It must say something about the food there."
At the entrance of my compound, a guy on a motorcycle brings a daily big barrel of milk and people line up with their pots to fill up. Milk is popular here, but scarce. It usually comes from Inner Mongolia. I say, if you want to make money in China, sell milk. I've often been given a packet of milk as a treat, although I'm not a big fan of milk, I must be polite as it's relatively expensive. It is a person of status who is a milk drinker.
At my apartment complex in the evenings, the center of everything is the basketball court. The activity lasts from about 8 p.m. until 11 p.m. There are kids running around with toy battle axes, games of soft-volleyball with serious officials and whistles and cheers and flipping scores; old men standing around, smoking, and shooting hoops (simultaneously).
This is a bare-bones view of what goes on in Bailong Village daily life. There is plenty more that adds color and confusion and joy to my experience, and I'll get to that next time.
14 November 2006
Chairman Mao gave me a call on Saturday morning to let me know there was a bus load of Vietnamese students waiting outside my gate. I hopped in and we all headed to the zoo, up in the mountains northeast of Kunming. As you remember, this is not Mao Zedong, the founder of this great nation, but Prof. Dr. Tran Van Mao, the director of the Center for the Environment and Sustainable Forestry Development at Vietnam Forestry University. His business card reads, "Outstanding Scientist of the 21st Century."
Chinese zoos are not like American zoos. And this happened to be a wild animal park. If you want to have your picture taken holding a monkey, you can do that. If you want to take a bamboo fishing rod and lower a hunk of meat down to a tiger, you can do that. If you want to climb on a (tamed) tiger and take a picture, you can do that. Etc. The animals' living conditions weren't as bad as I initially feared and there were some interesting species: Himalayan griffins, red pandas (they look like raccoons), white tigers. Oftentimes in China, I feel like I'm an animal in a zoo and people are watching me. This wild animal park was a pleasant diversion from all that--people had *real* animals to look at rather than random foreigners.
As far as I could tell, kids were turned loose in this huge park (it took us all day to go through). Next to the leaping tigers and somersaulting bears, I saw some 12 year old boys chugging a beer, but none of the adults around seemed to mind. Times like these remind me I'm not in the US. We often ran into a group of 12 year old girls. It was fun trying to communicate with them because none of us foreigners spoke much Chinese (the Vietnamese are here on a language program and are also beginners, most of them at about the same proficiency of Putonghua as I am).
I think we stopped at least eight times for a snack/meal break. When I had earlier stepped onto the bus, I noticed bags and bags of bananas, apples, oranges, potato chips (Oishi brand--cucumber, wasabi, and spicy flavors), bottled water, peanuts, sunflower seeds, etc. I thought this was for lunch, but instead we were constantly stopping to eat. I suppose the Vietnamese are just as crazy about food as the Chinese. These breaks lasted at least 20 minutes, so you can imagine the amount of food eaten by about 25 youngsters.
When it came time to leave the park, the large group had split into two. I was part of the first group, and waited about an hour for the second group to come. In the meantime, I bought a boiled ear of corn and enjoyed some corn on the cob like I was home in Iowa. One distressed-looking Chinese woman came up to me. "Excuse me, do you speak English?" Of course. "Well, I'm trying to get back to the Sakura Hotel and I'm afraid I missed the last taxi. I'm from Hong Kong and don't speak Mandarin too well. Can you help me?"
A Chinese woman asked me to help her with Chinese. For all of you who think that "Chinese" is just one language, here is your counterexample. In Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese which is completely different from Mandarin (which is spoken in Kunming, although Kunming has its own dialect, still more or less Mandarin). The similarity between the languages is something like Spanish and French. The written language is basically the same, but Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese characters while Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters. So even a short note may be very difficult to understand, and many people here are only semi-literate.
I mustered up my best Chinese and asked one man how she could take the bus back. "Mei you," he shot back..."don't have" or "no" or "I don't know what to say to this foreigner." She tried her best in Mandarin. Her tones sounded very natural but her language flow was stop & start just like mine. Eventually, we got her a taxi and she was very grateful. She said if I am ever in Hong Kong and need a help, I can call her. All in all, very strange.
We posed for some pictures with the 12 year-old girls. They were delighted to jump on my back (two at a time) and make funny faces around the foreigner. I'm not sure who the culprit was, but someone yanked out one of my hairs for a souvenir!
Later that night, a few close friends and I went out for dinner at a fancy Thai/Burmese restaurant set up in an old house. We got to sit out in the courtyard. Very nice. But our lingering there inadvertently caused some hurt feelings.
I told my students and some other people I would be having a party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), which serves as my local. I told them it would begin at 9:30. Due to some traffic jams and other nonsense, we didn't end up getting back to Bailong Village until 10. I thought, no problem. No one comes to a party at the beginning, right? Like with my French friends...if a party is supposed to start at 9:30, no one will show up until after 11. But in Chinese culture, if a party begins at 9:30, people start showing up at 9. Some people were worried that I had forgotten about them and wasn't going to show.
But the mood quickly changed. As soon as I entered the door (actually as I was coming down the street), I was showered with balloons, gifts, a bouquet of 2 dozen red roses, an enormous cake, and tons of cheers. I was overwhelmed. I've never had a birthday like this. I started to become a little emotional, tears welling up in my eyes, my voice cracking a little, until....POP! POP! POP!
One of my mischievous students named Koby (presumably after Kobe Bryant) held a candle to the balloons nearest my face and I was met with an explosion and an immediate smell burnt rubber and scorched hair. I had pieces of melted balloon all over my head, my eyebrows were singed, my sideburns toasted. Happily, Koby got it too. He disappeared after that, and reappeared about 40 minutes later with his head shaved.
We carved up the cake and the festivities truly began. In China, a cake is a big, big deal. I cannot overstate it. It is not only admired and eaten, but also smeared all over the birthday boy's face (students' too, can't forget that). At midnight, a completely unassociated patron came down from upstairs and started breakdancing.
All in all, it was a great celebration. I had my hair plucked out, lit on fire, and cake thrown in my face.
I took it easy the next day. Some students showed up at my apartment and took me out for lunch at a nearby restaurant. For supper, one woman who teaches philosophy at a nearby university took Lester and me out to eat at a very fine Chinese restaurant. This time it was bamboo root, goat cheese and tomatoes, some vegetables I've never seen before in my life, and braised tofu. She took us for desert to the Prague Cafe on Wenlin St. and treated us to cheesecake, something I thought I would never see in China. It was delicious.
This woman's English name is Emily and she is from Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage town in Yunnan. She is ethnic Naxi and can read and write the Dongba script, which is the only remaining hieroglyphics system in the world. She's been to Hawaii and Europe to give lectures on it. So a very entertaining lady. I think Lester has a crush on her. She invited us to Lijiang (the old part of the town) to her house and promised to treat us to authentic Lijiangese cuisine. I will take her up on that.
Many holidays in China are based on the lunar calendar. People have two birthdays in China--solar & lunar, and the big day is on the lunar (I found out that my other birthday was back in September, too late). I am beginning to appreciate the lunar calendar. At first, I thought it was some arbitrary and unpredictable, outdated system for keeping time. But I'm realizing that this calendar is much more in touch with the change of seasons, the weather, the rhythms of every day life. Perhaps the good ole solar calendar is best for iron-clad accuracy and leap years and such, but isn't it strange that the first day of winter is December 22 this year? Hasn't it been winter for a few weeks before that? To the Chinese, Winter Solstice (Dec. 22) is "Midwinter," which makes more sense to me.
On Tuesday, November 7, it was noticeably cooler, as if there was a distinct change in seasons. One of my students told me, "Today is the first day of winter, so we must go out to eat something hot and then we can stay warm all winter long." Two other students found another way to keep me warm: they gave me a small bottle of Erguotou Jiu ("twice distilled spirits"/二锅头酒), which is 56% V/V firewater from Beijing. I'm a little nervous to open that, so it remains on my kitchen counter...
So we went out to eat with four Chinese and a Vietnamese. After the lengthy meal (no, I didn't eat dog) and plenty of toasts, including being encouraged to shout "Vietnam Mun Nam" which apparently means "Vietnam is Number One," we went next door to my friend's pub. They had a small campfire burning on the sidewalk. It was actually very cozy and reminded me of home. Until someone showed up with a serving of fried grasshoppers (I had to try that...they remove the legs and it's not too bad, a little oily). The owner of the bar, who speaks very good English, broke out his erhu (二胡/two-stringed Chinese fiddle) and started playing folk tunes. His friend builds traditional Chinese instruments, and he plans on introducing us when the opportunity arises. I've been very keen in learning a Chinese instrument even before I arrived here in the Middle Kingdom. Here is a video of Wang Guowei playing the erhu.
My film club continues well attended, and volleyball has ended tonight with a sound drubbing by the administrative dept. The coach of the Foreign Language Dept. is a Ms. Jiang, a former sergeant in the Chinese Army. I was a benchwarmer, but still part of the team. ....! Hao qiu! I am seeking redemption once basketball starts. Last year, the Foreign Languages Men's team was last place. That will not happen again this year, I assure you. Most people here stand about eight inches shorter than me.
Last weekend, I ate. And ate. First, I got invited to go out to eat with one of my students for her birthday. We went to a Chongqing hotpot restaurant. As soon as I walked into the haze, my eyes started burning and I had to sneeze. Food from Chongqing and Sichuan (Szechuan) in general is HOT. People were coughing and noses were running. It was a fine meal. Not sure about the duck intestines. In hotpot, anything goes. And afterwards, about 15 of us hit the KTV (karaoke) palace for a grand ole time singing Hotel California and drinking Coors Light in a private room.
On Saturday, I visited Heilongtan (Black Dragon Pool/黑龙潭) and took in the beautiful park, the enormous gold temple carp (koi), the paddle boats that look like goofy cars on the water, the ancient Buddhist temple, and fragrant incense. There was a pagoda from the Han Dynasty, a Ming Dynasty inscription, a tree from the Sung Dynasty, you name it. History was rich there, a thousand years back in one place. Even got in free, because my friend's sister works for the Parks Bureau.
That afternoon, we went to a teahouse Golden Horse Gate, drank some fine Yunnan tea, and met some cousins of my friend's. These people whom I have never met before took us out to a very fancy restaurant serving mushroom hotpot. This time the crazy ingredient was sheep stomach. I was glad to meet a Thai woman who speaks very good English, an adorable three year-old girl and her new Barbie, a man called "The Graduate," and another man curiously named "Saddam Confucius." The host provided a large plastic Coca Cola bottle filled with bootleg baijiu from Xishangbanna.
On Sunday evening, my student Koby showed up with two other students and invited me to eat at a Hunan restaurant. I have a lot of stories about Koby. I believe his heart is entirely made of basketball. He speaks a thick Hunan dialect which makes it hard for his countrymen to understand him. He likes to flirt with girls, although he doesn't seem as successful as he wishes. He also adores Michael Jordan. (And it goes without saying, Yao Ming.) Koby's a great guy.
The Hunan food was delicious, and very different from the Yunnan food I've been eating. I've heard that each province in China is like its own country, and I'm beginning to believe it. We had braised bean curd, carp soup, some mysterious thing that my students claimed was tofu but tasted like sausage, and huge river snails. On the way back, I expressed a curiosity in some long sticks a man was selling off the back of his bicycle. What was it? I ended up shoving two five-foot sticks of sugarcane into the back of a taxi. That's the snack for my 8:00 a.m. writing class tomorrow.
To eat sugarcane, you need a machete; that's how cool of a snack it is.
Later on, I got a massage on the street, right in front of the Guangdong Development Bank's front door. There are usually three or four older blind people giving 45 minute massages for 10 kuai (about $1.25). They laugh at my poor attempts at speaking Kunming dialect. The massages are different from the US, and seemed to be based on some Taoist principles. This time the massage was mostly directed at my head, including a painful thirty seconds when I thought the old man was going to crush my skull. But, as always, I came away feeling like a million bucks and slept like a baby.
Chinese zoos are not like American zoos. And this happened to be a wild animal park. If you want to have your picture taken holding a monkey, you can do that. If you want to take a bamboo fishing rod and lower a hunk of meat down to a tiger, you can do that. If you want to climb on a (tamed) tiger and take a picture, you can do that. Etc. The animals' living conditions weren't as bad as I initially feared and there were some interesting species: Himalayan griffins, red pandas (they look like raccoons), white tigers. Oftentimes in China, I feel like I'm an animal in a zoo and people are watching me. This wild animal park was a pleasant diversion from all that--people had *real* animals to look at rather than random foreigners.
As far as I could tell, kids were turned loose in this huge park (it took us all day to go through). Next to the leaping tigers and somersaulting bears, I saw some 12 year old boys chugging a beer, but none of the adults around seemed to mind. Times like these remind me I'm not in the US. We often ran into a group of 12 year old girls. It was fun trying to communicate with them because none of us foreigners spoke much Chinese (the Vietnamese are here on a language program and are also beginners, most of them at about the same proficiency of Putonghua as I am).
I think we stopped at least eight times for a snack/meal break. When I had earlier stepped onto the bus, I noticed bags and bags of bananas, apples, oranges, potato chips (Oishi brand--cucumber, wasabi, and spicy flavors), bottled water, peanuts, sunflower seeds, etc. I thought this was for lunch, but instead we were constantly stopping to eat. I suppose the Vietnamese are just as crazy about food as the Chinese. These breaks lasted at least 20 minutes, so you can imagine the amount of food eaten by about 25 youngsters.
When it came time to leave the park, the large group had split into two. I was part of the first group, and waited about an hour for the second group to come. In the meantime, I bought a boiled ear of corn and enjoyed some corn on the cob like I was home in Iowa. One distressed-looking Chinese woman came up to me. "Excuse me, do you speak English?" Of course. "Well, I'm trying to get back to the Sakura Hotel and I'm afraid I missed the last taxi. I'm from Hong Kong and don't speak Mandarin too well. Can you help me?"
A Chinese woman asked me to help her with Chinese. For all of you who think that "Chinese" is just one language, here is your counterexample. In Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese which is completely different from Mandarin (which is spoken in Kunming, although Kunming has its own dialect, still more or less Mandarin). The similarity between the languages is something like Spanish and French. The written language is basically the same, but Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese characters while Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters. So even a short note may be very difficult to understand, and many people here are only semi-literate.
I mustered up my best Chinese and asked one man how she could take the bus back. "Mei you," he shot back..."don't have" or "no" or "I don't know what to say to this foreigner." She tried her best in Mandarin. Her tones sounded very natural but her language flow was stop & start just like mine. Eventually, we got her a taxi and she was very grateful. She said if I am ever in Hong Kong and need a help, I can call her. All in all, very strange.
We posed for some pictures with the 12 year-old girls. They were delighted to jump on my back (two at a time) and make funny faces around the foreigner. I'm not sure who the culprit was, but someone yanked out one of my hairs for a souvenir!
Later that night, a few close friends and I went out for dinner at a fancy Thai/Burmese restaurant set up in an old house. We got to sit out in the courtyard. Very nice. But our lingering there inadvertently caused some hurt feelings.
I told my students and some other people I would be having a party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), which serves as my local. I told them it would begin at 9:30. Due to some traffic jams and other nonsense, we didn't end up getting back to Bailong Village until 10. I thought, no problem. No one comes to a party at the beginning, right? Like with my French friends...if a party is supposed to start at 9:30, no one will show up until after 11. But in Chinese culture, if a party begins at 9:30, people start showing up at 9. Some people were worried that I had forgotten about them and wasn't going to show.
But the mood quickly changed. As soon as I entered the door (actually as I was coming down the street), I was showered with balloons, gifts, a bouquet of 2 dozen red roses, an enormous cake, and tons of cheers. I was overwhelmed. I've never had a birthday like this. I started to become a little emotional, tears welling up in my eyes, my voice cracking a little, until....POP! POP! POP!
One of my mischievous students named Koby (presumably after Kobe Bryant) held a candle to the balloons nearest my face and I was met with an explosion and an immediate smell burnt rubber and scorched hair. I had pieces of melted balloon all over my head, my eyebrows were singed, my sideburns toasted. Happily, Koby got it too. He disappeared after that, and reappeared about 40 minutes later with his head shaved.
We carved up the cake and the festivities truly began. In China, a cake is a big, big deal. I cannot overstate it. It is not only admired and eaten, but also smeared all over the birthday boy's face (students' too, can't forget that). At midnight, a completely unassociated patron came down from upstairs and started breakdancing.
All in all, it was a great celebration. I had my hair plucked out, lit on fire, and cake thrown in my face.
I took it easy the next day. Some students showed up at my apartment and took me out for lunch at a nearby restaurant. For supper, one woman who teaches philosophy at a nearby university took Lester and me out to eat at a very fine Chinese restaurant. This time it was bamboo root, goat cheese and tomatoes, some vegetables I've never seen before in my life, and braised tofu. She took us for desert to the Prague Cafe on Wenlin St. and treated us to cheesecake, something I thought I would never see in China. It was delicious.
This woman's English name is Emily and she is from Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage town in Yunnan. She is ethnic Naxi and can read and write the Dongba script, which is the only remaining hieroglyphics system in the world. She's been to Hawaii and Europe to give lectures on it. So a very entertaining lady. I think Lester has a crush on her. She invited us to Lijiang (the old part of the town) to her house and promised to treat us to authentic Lijiangese cuisine. I will take her up on that.
Many holidays in China are based on the lunar calendar. People have two birthdays in China--solar & lunar, and the big day is on the lunar (I found out that my other birthday was back in September, too late). I am beginning to appreciate the lunar calendar. At first, I thought it was some arbitrary and unpredictable, outdated system for keeping time. But I'm realizing that this calendar is much more in touch with the change of seasons, the weather, the rhythms of every day life. Perhaps the good ole solar calendar is best for iron-clad accuracy and leap years and such, but isn't it strange that the first day of winter is December 22 this year? Hasn't it been winter for a few weeks before that? To the Chinese, Winter Solstice (Dec. 22) is "Midwinter," which makes more sense to me.
On Tuesday, November 7, it was noticeably cooler, as if there was a distinct change in seasons. One of my students told me, "Today is the first day of winter, so we must go out to eat something hot and then we can stay warm all winter long." Two other students found another way to keep me warm: they gave me a small bottle of Erguotou Jiu ("twice distilled spirits"/二锅头酒), which is 56% V/V firewater from Beijing. I'm a little nervous to open that, so it remains on my kitchen counter...
So we went out to eat with four Chinese and a Vietnamese. After the lengthy meal (no, I didn't eat dog) and plenty of toasts, including being encouraged to shout "Vietnam Mun Nam" which apparently means "Vietnam is Number One," we went next door to my friend's pub. They had a small campfire burning on the sidewalk. It was actually very cozy and reminded me of home. Until someone showed up with a serving of fried grasshoppers (I had to try that...they remove the legs and it's not too bad, a little oily). The owner of the bar, who speaks very good English, broke out his erhu (二胡/two-stringed Chinese fiddle) and started playing folk tunes. His friend builds traditional Chinese instruments, and he plans on introducing us when the opportunity arises. I've been very keen in learning a Chinese instrument even before I arrived here in the Middle Kingdom. Here is a video of Wang Guowei playing the erhu.
My film club continues well attended, and volleyball has ended tonight with a sound drubbing by the administrative dept. The coach of the Foreign Language Dept. is a Ms. Jiang, a former sergeant in the Chinese Army. I was a benchwarmer, but still part of the team. ....! Hao qiu! I am seeking redemption once basketball starts. Last year, the Foreign Languages Men's team was last place. That will not happen again this year, I assure you. Most people here stand about eight inches shorter than me.
Last weekend, I ate. And ate. First, I got invited to go out to eat with one of my students for her birthday. We went to a Chongqing hotpot restaurant. As soon as I walked into the haze, my eyes started burning and I had to sneeze. Food from Chongqing and Sichuan (Szechuan) in general is HOT. People were coughing and noses were running. It was a fine meal. Not sure about the duck intestines. In hotpot, anything goes. And afterwards, about 15 of us hit the KTV (karaoke) palace for a grand ole time singing Hotel California and drinking Coors Light in a private room.
On Saturday, I visited Heilongtan (Black Dragon Pool/黑龙潭) and took in the beautiful park, the enormous gold temple carp (koi), the paddle boats that look like goofy cars on the water, the ancient Buddhist temple, and fragrant incense. There was a pagoda from the Han Dynasty, a Ming Dynasty inscription, a tree from the Sung Dynasty, you name it. History was rich there, a thousand years back in one place. Even got in free, because my friend's sister works for the Parks Bureau.
That afternoon, we went to a teahouse Golden Horse Gate, drank some fine Yunnan tea, and met some cousins of my friend's. These people whom I have never met before took us out to a very fancy restaurant serving mushroom hotpot. This time the crazy ingredient was sheep stomach. I was glad to meet a Thai woman who speaks very good English, an adorable three year-old girl and her new Barbie, a man called "The Graduate," and another man curiously named "Saddam Confucius." The host provided a large plastic Coca Cola bottle filled with bootleg baijiu from Xishangbanna.
On Sunday evening, my student Koby showed up with two other students and invited me to eat at a Hunan restaurant. I have a lot of stories about Koby. I believe his heart is entirely made of basketball. He speaks a thick Hunan dialect which makes it hard for his countrymen to understand him. He likes to flirt with girls, although he doesn't seem as successful as he wishes. He also adores Michael Jordan. (And it goes without saying, Yao Ming.) Koby's a great guy.
The Hunan food was delicious, and very different from the Yunnan food I've been eating. I've heard that each province in China is like its own country, and I'm beginning to believe it. We had braised bean curd, carp soup, some mysterious thing that my students claimed was tofu but tasted like sausage, and huge river snails. On the way back, I expressed a curiosity in some long sticks a man was selling off the back of his bicycle. What was it? I ended up shoving two five-foot sticks of sugarcane into the back of a taxi. That's the snack for my 8:00 a.m. writing class tomorrow.
To eat sugarcane, you need a machete; that's how cool of a snack it is.
Later on, I got a massage on the street, right in front of the Guangdong Development Bank's front door. There are usually three or four older blind people giving 45 minute massages for 10 kuai (about $1.25). They laugh at my poor attempts at speaking Kunming dialect. The massages are different from the US, and seemed to be based on some Taoist principles. This time the massage was mostly directed at my head, including a painful thirty seconds when I thought the old man was going to crush my skull. But, as always, I came away feeling like a million bucks and slept like a baby.
Chairman Mao gave me a call on Saturday morning to let me know there was a bus load of Vietnamese students waiting outside my gate. I hopped in and we all headed to the zoo, up in the mountains northeast of Kunming. As you remember, this is not Mao Zedong, the founder of this great nation, but Prof. Dr. Tran Van Mao, the director of the Center for the Environment and Sustainable Forestry Development at Vietnam Forestry University. His business card reads, "Outstanding Scientist of the 21st Century."
Chinese zoos are not like American zoos. And this happened to be a wild animal park. If you want to have your picture taken holding a monkey, you can do that. If you want to take a bamboo fishing rod and lower a hunk of meat down to a tiger, you can do that. If you want to climb on a (tamed) tiger and take a picture, you can do that. Etc. The animals' living conditions weren't as bad as I initially feared and there were some interesting species: Himalayan griffins, red pandas (they look like raccoons), white tigers. Oftentimes in China, I feel like I'm an animal in a zoo and people are watching me. This wild animal park was a pleasant diversion from all that--people had *real* animals to look at rather than random foreigners.
As far as I could tell, kids were turned loose in this huge park (it took us all day to go through). Next to the leaping tigers and somersaulting bears, I saw some 12 year old boys chugging a beer, but none of the adults around seemed to mind. Times like these remind me I'm not in the US. We often ran into a group of 12 year old girls. It was fun trying to communicate with them because none of us foreigners spoke much Chinese (the Vietnamese are here on a language program and are also beginners, most of them at about the same proficiency of Putonghua as I am).
I think we stopped at least eight times for a snack/meal break. When I had earlier stepped onto the bus, I noticed bags and bags of bananas, apples, oranges, potato chips (Oishi brand--cucumber, wasabi, and spicy flavors), bottled water, peanuts, sunflower seeds, etc. I thought this was for lunch, but instead we were constantly stopping to eat. I suppose the Vietnamese are just as crazy about food as the Chinese. These breaks lasted at least 20 minutes, so you can imagine the amount of food eaten by about 25 youngsters.
When it came time to leave the park, the large group had split into two. I was part of the first group, and waited about an hour for the second group to come. In the meantime, I bought a boiled ear of corn and enjoyed some corn on the cob like I was home in Iowa. One distressed-looking Chinese woman came up to me. "Excuse me, do you speak English?" Of course. "Well, I'm trying to get back to the Sakura Hotel and I'm afraid I missed the last taxi. I'm from Hong Kong and don't speak Mandarin too well. Can you help me?"
A Chinese woman asked me to help her with Chinese. For all of you who think that "Chinese" is just one language, here is your counterexample. In Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese which is completely different from Mandarin (which is spoken in Kunming, although Kunming has its own dialect, still more or less Mandarin). The similarity between the languages is something like Spanish and French. The written language is basically the same, but Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese characters while Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters. So even a short note may be very difficult to understand, and many people here are only semi-literate.
I mustered up my best Chinese and asked one man how she could take the bus back. "Mei you," he shot back..."don't have" or "no" or "I don't know what to say to this foreigner." She tried her best in Mandarin. Her tones sounded very natural but her language flow was stop & start just like mine. Eventually, we got her a taxi and she was very grateful. She said if I am ever in Hong Kong and need a help, I can call her. All in all, very strange.
We posed for some pictures with the 12 year-old girls. They were delighted to jump on my back (two at a time) and make funny faces around the foreigner. I'm not sure who the culprit was, but someone yanked out one of my hairs for a souvenir!
Later that night, a few close friends and I went out for dinner at a fancy Thai/Burmese restaurant set up in an old house. We got to sit out in the courtyard. Very nice. But our lingering there inadvertently caused some hurt feelings.
I told my students and some other people I would be having a party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), which serves as my local. I told them it would begin at 9:30. Due to some traffic jams and other nonsense, we didn't end up getting back to Bailong Village until 10. I thought, no problem. No one comes to a party at the beginning, right? Like with my French friends...if a party is supposed to start at 9:30, no one will show up until after 11. But in Chinese culture, if a party begins at 9:30, people start showing up at 9. Some people were worried that I had forgotten about them and wasn't going to show.
But the mood quickly changed. As soon as I entered the door (actually as I was coming down the street), I was showered with balloons, gifts, a bouquet of 2 dozen red roses, an enormous cake, and tons of cheers. I was overwhelmed. I've never had a birthday like this. I started to become a little emotional, tears welling up in my eyes, my voice cracking a little, until....POP! POP! POP!
One of my mischievous students named Koby (presumably after Kobe Bryant) held a candle to the balloons nearest my face and I was met with an explosion and an immediate smell burnt rubber and scorched hair. I had pieces of melted balloon all over my head, my eyebrows were singed, my sideburns toasted. Happily, Koby got it too. He disappeared after that, and reappeared about 40 minutes later with his head shaved.
We carved up the cake and the festivities truly began. In China, a cake is a big, big deal. I cannot overstate it. It is not only admired and eaten, but also smeared all over the birthday boy's face (students' too, can't forget that). At midnight, a completely unassociated patron came down from upstairs and started breakdancing.
All in all, it was a great celebration. I had my hair plucked out, lit on fire, and cake thrown in my face.
I took it easy the next day. Some students showed up at my apartment and took me out for lunch at a nearby restaurant. For supper, one woman who teaches philosophy at a nearby university took Lester and me out to eat at a very fine Chinese restaurant. This time it was bamboo root, goat cheese and tomatoes, some vegetables I've never seen before in my life, and braised tofu. She took us for desert to the Prague Cafe on Wenlin St. and treated us to cheesecake, something I thought I would never see in China. It was delicious.
This woman's English name is Emily and she is from Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage town in Yunnan. She is ethnic Naxi and can read and write the Dongba script, which is the only remaining hieroglyphics system in the world. She's been to Hawaii and Europe to give lectures on it. So a very entertaining lady. I think Lester has a crush on her. She invited us to Lijiang (the old part of the town) to her house and promised to treat us to authentic Lijiangese cuisine. I will take her up on that.
Many holidays in China are based on the lunar calendar. People have two birthdays in China--solar & lunar, and the big day is on the lunar (I found out that my other birthday was back in September, too late). I am beginning to appreciate the lunar calendar. At first, I thought it was some arbitrary and unpredictable, outdated system for keeping time. But I'm realizing that this calendar is much more in touch with the change of seasons, the weather, the rhythms of every day life. Perhaps the good ole solar calendar is best for iron-clad accuracy and leap years and such, but isn't it strange that the first day of winter is December 22 this year? Hasn't it been winter for a few weeks before that? To the Chinese, Winter Solstice (Dec. 22) is "Midwinter," which makes more sense to me.
On Tuesday, November 7, it was noticeably cooler, as if there was a distinct change in seasons. One of my students told me, "Today is the first day of winter, so we must go out to eat something hot and then we can stay warm all winter long." Two other students found another way to keep me warm: they gave me a small bottle of Erguotou Jiu ("twice distilled spirits"/二锅头酒), which is 56% V/V firewater from Beijing. I'm a little nervous to open that, so it remains on my kitchen counter...
So we went out to eat with four Chinese and a Vietnamese. After the lengthy meal (no, I didn't eat dog) and plenty of toasts, including being encouraged to shout "Vietnam Mun Nam" which apparently means "Vietnam is Number One," we went next door to my friend's pub. They had a small campfire burning on the sidewalk. It was actually very cozy and reminded me of home. Until someone showed up with a serving of fried grasshoppers (I had to try that...they remove the legs and it's not too bad, a little oily). The owner of the bar, who speaks very good English, broke out his erhu (二胡/two-stringed Chinese fiddle) and started playing folk tunes. His friend builds traditional Chinese instruments, and he plans on introducing us when the opportunity arises. I've been very keen in learning a Chinese instrument even before I arrived here in the Middle Kingdom. Here is a video of Wang Guowei playing the erhu.
My film club continues well attended, and volleyball has ended tonight with a sound drubbing by the administrative dept. The coach of the Foreign Language Dept. is a Ms. Jiang, a former sergeant in the Chinese Army. I was a benchwarmer, but still part of the team. ....! Hao qiu! I am seeking redemption once basketball starts. Last year, the Foreign Languages Men's team was last place. That will not happen again this year, I assure you. Most people here stand about eight inches shorter than me.
Last weekend, I ate. And ate. First, I got invited to go out to eat with one of my students for her birthday. We went to a Chongqing hotpot restaurant. As soon as I walked into the haze, my eyes started burning and I had to sneeze. Food from Chongqing and Sichuan (Szechuan) in general is HOT. People were coughing and noses were running. It was a fine meal. Not sure about the duck intestines. In hotpot, anything goes. And afterwards, about 15 of us hit the KTV (karaoke) palace for a grand ole time singing Hotel California and drinking Coors Light in a private room.
On Saturday, I visited Heilongtan (Black Dragon Pool/黑龙潭) and took in the beautiful park, the enormous gold temple carp (koi), the paddle boats that look like goofy cars on the water, the ancient Buddhist temple, and fragrant incense. There was a pagoda from the Han Dynasty, a Ming Dynasty inscription, a tree from the Sung Dynasty, you name it. History was rich there, a thousand years back in one place. Even got in free, because my friend's sister works for the Parks Bureau.
That afternoon, we went to a teahouse Golden Horse Gate, drank some fine Yunnan tea, and met some cousins of my friend's. These people whom I have never met before took us out to a very fancy restaurant serving mushroom hotpot. This time the crazy ingredient was sheep stomach. I was glad to meet a Thai woman who speaks very good English, an adorable three year-old girl and her new Barbie, a man called "The Graduate," and another man curiously named "Saddam Confucius." The host provided a large plastic Coca Cola bottle filled with bootleg baijiu from Xishangbanna.
On Sunday evening, my student Koby showed up with two other students and invited me to eat at a Hunan restaurant. I have a lot of stories about Koby. I believe his heart is entirely made of basketball. He speaks a thick Hunan dialect which makes it hard for his countrymen to understand him. He likes to flirt with girls, although he doesn't seem as successful as he wishes. He also adores Michael Jordan. (And it goes without saying, Yao Ming.) Koby's a great guy.
The Hunan food was delicious, and very different from the Yunnan food I've been eating. I've heard that each province in China is like its own country, and I'm beginning to believe it. We had braised bean curd, carp soup, some mysterious thing that my students claimed was tofu but tasted like sausage, and huge river snails. On the way back, I expressed a curiosity in some long sticks a man was selling off the back of his bicycle. What was it? I ended up shoving two five-foot sticks of sugarcane into the back of a taxi. That's the snack for my 8:00 a.m. writing class tomorrow.
To eat sugarcane, you need a machete; that's how cool of a snack it is.
Later on, I got a massage on the street, right in front of the Guangdong Development Bank's front door. There are usually three or four older blind people giving 45 minute massages for 10 kuai (about $1.25). They laugh at my poor attempts at speaking Kunming dialect. The massages are different from the US, and seemed to be based on some Taoist principles. This time the massage was mostly directed at my head, including a painful thirty seconds when I thought the old man was going to crush my skull. But, as always, I came away feeling like a million bucks and slept like a baby.
Chinese zoos are not like American zoos. And this happened to be a wild animal park. If you want to have your picture taken holding a monkey, you can do that. If you want to take a bamboo fishing rod and lower a hunk of meat down to a tiger, you can do that. If you want to climb on a (tamed) tiger and take a picture, you can do that. Etc. The animals' living conditions weren't as bad as I initially feared and there were some interesting species: Himalayan griffins, red pandas (they look like raccoons), white tigers. Oftentimes in China, I feel like I'm an animal in a zoo and people are watching me. This wild animal park was a pleasant diversion from all that--people had *real* animals to look at rather than random foreigners.
As far as I could tell, kids were turned loose in this huge park (it took us all day to go through). Next to the leaping tigers and somersaulting bears, I saw some 12 year old boys chugging a beer, but none of the adults around seemed to mind. Times like these remind me I'm not in the US. We often ran into a group of 12 year old girls. It was fun trying to communicate with them because none of us foreigners spoke much Chinese (the Vietnamese are here on a language program and are also beginners, most of them at about the same proficiency of Putonghua as I am).
I think we stopped at least eight times for a snack/meal break. When I had earlier stepped onto the bus, I noticed bags and bags of bananas, apples, oranges, potato chips (Oishi brand--cucumber, wasabi, and spicy flavors), bottled water, peanuts, sunflower seeds, etc. I thought this was for lunch, but instead we were constantly stopping to eat. I suppose the Vietnamese are just as crazy about food as the Chinese. These breaks lasted at least 20 minutes, so you can imagine the amount of food eaten by about 25 youngsters.
When it came time to leave the park, the large group had split into two. I was part of the first group, and waited about an hour for the second group to come. In the meantime, I bought a boiled ear of corn and enjoyed some corn on the cob like I was home in Iowa. One distressed-looking Chinese woman came up to me. "Excuse me, do you speak English?" Of course. "Well, I'm trying to get back to the Sakura Hotel and I'm afraid I missed the last taxi. I'm from Hong Kong and don't speak Mandarin too well. Can you help me?"
A Chinese woman asked me to help her with Chinese. For all of you who think that "Chinese" is just one language, here is your counterexample. In Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese which is completely different from Mandarin (which is spoken in Kunming, although Kunming has its own dialect, still more or less Mandarin). The similarity between the languages is something like Spanish and French. The written language is basically the same, but Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese characters while Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters. So even a short note may be very difficult to understand, and many people here are only semi-literate.
I mustered up my best Chinese and asked one man how she could take the bus back. "Mei you," he shot back..."don't have" or "no" or "I don't know what to say to this foreigner." She tried her best in Mandarin. Her tones sounded very natural but her language flow was stop & start just like mine. Eventually, we got her a taxi and she was very grateful. She said if I am ever in Hong Kong and need a help, I can call her. All in all, very strange.
We posed for some pictures with the 12 year-old girls. They were delighted to jump on my back (two at a time) and make funny faces around the foreigner. I'm not sure who the culprit was, but someone yanked out one of my hairs for a souvenir!
Later that night, a few close friends and I went out for dinner at a fancy Thai/Burmese restaurant set up in an old house. We got to sit out in the courtyard. Very nice. But our lingering there inadvertently caused some hurt feelings.
I told my students and some other people I would be having a party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), which serves as my local. I told them it would begin at 9:30. Due to some traffic jams and other nonsense, we didn't end up getting back to Bailong Village until 10. I thought, no problem. No one comes to a party at the beginning, right? Like with my French friends...if a party is supposed to start at 9:30, no one will show up until after 11. But in Chinese culture, if a party begins at 9:30, people start showing up at 9. Some people were worried that I had forgotten about them and wasn't going to show.
But the mood quickly changed. As soon as I entered the door (actually as I was coming down the street), I was showered with balloons, gifts, a bouquet of 2 dozen red roses, an enormous cake, and tons of cheers. I was overwhelmed. I've never had a birthday like this. I started to become a little emotional, tears welling up in my eyes, my voice cracking a little, until....POP! POP! POP!
One of my mischievous students named Koby (presumably after Kobe Bryant) held a candle to the balloons nearest my face and I was met with an explosion and an immediate smell burnt rubber and scorched hair. I had pieces of melted balloon all over my head, my eyebrows were singed, my sideburns toasted. Happily, Koby got it too. He disappeared after that, and reappeared about 40 minutes later with his head shaved.
We carved up the cake and the festivities truly began. In China, a cake is a big, big deal. I cannot overstate it. It is not only admired and eaten, but also smeared all over the birthday boy's face (students' too, can't forget that). At midnight, a completely unassociated patron came down from upstairs and started breakdancing.
All in all, it was a great celebration. I had my hair plucked out, lit on fire, and cake thrown in my face.
I took it easy the next day. Some students showed up at my apartment and took me out for lunch at a nearby restaurant. For supper, one woman who teaches philosophy at a nearby university took Lester and me out to eat at a very fine Chinese restaurant. This time it was bamboo root, goat cheese and tomatoes, some vegetables I've never seen before in my life, and braised tofu. She took us for desert to the Prague Cafe on Wenlin St. and treated us to cheesecake, something I thought I would never see in China. It was delicious.
This woman's English name is Emily and she is from Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage town in Yunnan. She is ethnic Naxi and can read and write the Dongba script, which is the only remaining hieroglyphics system in the world. She's been to Hawaii and Europe to give lectures on it. So a very entertaining lady. I think Lester has a crush on her. She invited us to Lijiang (the old part of the town) to her house and promised to treat us to authentic Lijiangese cuisine. I will take her up on that.
Many holidays in China are based on the lunar calendar. People have two birthdays in China--solar & lunar, and the big day is on the lunar (I found out that my other birthday was back in September, too late). I am beginning to appreciate the lunar calendar. At first, I thought it was some arbitrary and unpredictable, outdated system for keeping time. But I'm realizing that this calendar is much more in touch with the change of seasons, the weather, the rhythms of every day life. Perhaps the good ole solar calendar is best for iron-clad accuracy and leap years and such, but isn't it strange that the first day of winter is December 22 this year? Hasn't it been winter for a few weeks before that? To the Chinese, Winter Solstice (Dec. 22) is "Midwinter," which makes more sense to me.
On Tuesday, November 7, it was noticeably cooler, as if there was a distinct change in seasons. One of my students told me, "Today is the first day of winter, so we must go out to eat something hot and then we can stay warm all winter long." Two other students found another way to keep me warm: they gave me a small bottle of Erguotou Jiu ("twice distilled spirits"/二锅头酒), which is 56% V/V firewater from Beijing. I'm a little nervous to open that, so it remains on my kitchen counter...
So we went out to eat with four Chinese and a Vietnamese. After the lengthy meal (no, I didn't eat dog) and plenty of toasts, including being encouraged to shout "Vietnam Mun Nam" which apparently means "Vietnam is Number One," we went next door to my friend's pub. They had a small campfire burning on the sidewalk. It was actually very cozy and reminded me of home. Until someone showed up with a serving of fried grasshoppers (I had to try that...they remove the legs and it's not too bad, a little oily). The owner of the bar, who speaks very good English, broke out his erhu (二胡/two-stringed Chinese fiddle) and started playing folk tunes. His friend builds traditional Chinese instruments, and he plans on introducing us when the opportunity arises. I've been very keen in learning a Chinese instrument even before I arrived here in the Middle Kingdom. Here is a video of Wang Guowei playing the erhu.
My film club continues well attended, and volleyball has ended tonight with a sound drubbing by the administrative dept. The coach of the Foreign Language Dept. is a Ms. Jiang, a former sergeant in the Chinese Army. I was a benchwarmer, but still part of the team. ....! Hao qiu! I am seeking redemption once basketball starts. Last year, the Foreign Languages Men's team was last place. That will not happen again this year, I assure you. Most people here stand about eight inches shorter than me.
Last weekend, I ate. And ate. First, I got invited to go out to eat with one of my students for her birthday. We went to a Chongqing hotpot restaurant. As soon as I walked into the haze, my eyes started burning and I had to sneeze. Food from Chongqing and Sichuan (Szechuan) in general is HOT. People were coughing and noses were running. It was a fine meal. Not sure about the duck intestines. In hotpot, anything goes. And afterwards, about 15 of us hit the KTV (karaoke) palace for a grand ole time singing Hotel California and drinking Coors Light in a private room.
On Saturday, I visited Heilongtan (Black Dragon Pool/黑龙潭) and took in the beautiful park, the enormous gold temple carp (koi), the paddle boats that look like goofy cars on the water, the ancient Buddhist temple, and fragrant incense. There was a pagoda from the Han Dynasty, a Ming Dynasty inscription, a tree from the Sung Dynasty, you name it. History was rich there, a thousand years back in one place. Even got in free, because my friend's sister works for the Parks Bureau.
That afternoon, we went to a teahouse Golden Horse Gate, drank some fine Yunnan tea, and met some cousins of my friend's. These people whom I have never met before took us out to a very fancy restaurant serving mushroom hotpot. This time the crazy ingredient was sheep stomach. I was glad to meet a Thai woman who speaks very good English, an adorable three year-old girl and her new Barbie, a man called "The Graduate," and another man curiously named "Saddam Confucius." The host provided a large plastic Coca Cola bottle filled with bootleg baijiu from Xishangbanna.
On Sunday evening, my student Koby showed up with two other students and invited me to eat at a Hunan restaurant. I have a lot of stories about Koby. I believe his heart is entirely made of basketball. He speaks a thick Hunan dialect which makes it hard for his countrymen to understand him. He likes to flirt with girls, although he doesn't seem as successful as he wishes. He also adores Michael Jordan. (And it goes without saying, Yao Ming.) Koby's a great guy.
The Hunan food was delicious, and very different from the Yunnan food I've been eating. I've heard that each province in China is like its own country, and I'm beginning to believe it. We had braised bean curd, carp soup, some mysterious thing that my students claimed was tofu but tasted like sausage, and huge river snails. On the way back, I expressed a curiosity in some long sticks a man was selling off the back of his bicycle. What was it? I ended up shoving two five-foot sticks of sugarcane into the back of a taxi. That's the snack for my 8:00 a.m. writing class tomorrow.
To eat sugarcane, you need a machete; that's how cool of a snack it is.
Later on, I got a massage on the street, right in front of the Guangdong Development Bank's front door. There are usually three or four older blind people giving 45 minute massages for 10 kuai (about $1.25). They laugh at my poor attempts at speaking Kunming dialect. The massages are different from the US, and seemed to be based on some Taoist principles. This time the massage was mostly directed at my head, including a painful thirty seconds when I thought the old man was going to crush my skull. But, as always, I came away feeling like a million bucks and slept like a baby.
06 November 2006
Last Friday I went to a presentation at my college, given by a student named Victor who speaks very, very good English. He is one of the lucky few Chinese who have had the opportunity to travel abroad. He just returned a few weeks ago from a trip to Thailand and Australia, visiting a former English teacher from this college. It was a fine presentation, given in English, and included plenty of pictures. It was very interesting hearing a Chinese person's take on Western culture, which is just as alien and wild as what I am experiencing here. But I was mostly amazed with his experiences in Thailand.
In the West, we have the tendency to lump Asian cultures all together. My students were shocked when I told them that many, if not most, Americans think that Japan, Korea, and China are all basically the same. Victor showed some pictures of Thai high school students. Each day starts out with a 25-minute meditation session. There is great respect for the teacher in Thailand. When students have a question for their teachers, they kneel on the floor and ask, looking down the entire time, while the teacher sits in a chair. Although most students are very respectful here, I assure you this never happens in China!
On Saturday, I went to my colleague Marietta's birthday party. I was given the task of carrying the birthday cake to the restaurant. As I wrote earlier, cakes are a big deal in China, enough to make men sigh and women swoon. They are not as sweet as in the West, but still delicious, and exquisitely decorated with fine cuts of fruit and cherry tomatoes. The cake comes in a hard plastic box, and there is a ribbon around the box that functions as a handle. We boarded the bus and rode downtown to a restaurant, with this heavy cake suspended from my right hand.
Of course, the bus was very crowded when we boarded, and continued filling up as we got closer to downtown. Kunming buses are not unlike Tokyo subways during rush hour. I was smothered by the back door, and had to dodge the sheer humanity pouring out of the bus at each stop while jostling to make room for an influx of new commuters. All this with a heavy birthday cake dangling from my right hand. The ribbon cut into my hand. My fingers were beginning to go numb.
I was too tall to see out the windows, so I had no idea where we were, and had no idea when we were getting off. Stop after stop after stop. I was hungry. I get irritable when I'm hungry. I'm from rural Iowa, and sometimes feel stress at having to deal with so many people in such a confined place. I mean, come on, China's huge, let's spread out, people! I couldn't transfer the cake to my left hand because an elderly Bai woman had me pinned to the wall. The bus reeled to a stop. People lurched forward. The cake swung forward too, like a heavy pendulum from my purple and blue right hand. At this point, the cake became my sworn enemy.
After about an hour bumps, jerks, sways, and other lessons in momentum, it finally came time to get off this rolling coffin. I quickly shifted the cake over to my left hand. But remember this hand was also tired. This was the trusty hand that was gripping the overhead bar for the past 60 minutes. This was the hand that held both me and the cake in place, rather than careening through the mass of people in front of me, rather than toppling over the hard plastic seats and grandmothers and infant children beside me. So this heavy cake now dangled from my left hand, like a loaf of lead. I wanted to eat this cake, not out of hunger but out of animus.
We walked a block or so down Wenlin St. and met up with the rest of our party. There were three other Americans, a Swiss German, and three Chinese. We stood in a circle and chatted. On the street. I dared not put the cake down on the street due to propriety. I've seen what people and stray dogs do on the street, especially on a Saturday night, especially in this area, a center of Kunming nightlife. Why don't we just continue to the restaurant? Surely it must be near. Surely we could sit down and eat and have a very nice conversation. We could admire this cake, we could carve it up and devour it until it was no more. But the conversation continued, the cake wrenching my hand down to the center of the Earth.
Suddenly there was a moment of relief. It was like the angels had flown down and were supporting me. There was no burden. At this moment I looked down and saw the ribbon snap. The weight of the cake was too much. Marietta's birthday cake plummeted from my left hand and toppled to the ground. It somehow landed upside down, splattering frosting across our shoes and smearing white glaze across the concrete.
No one said anything for a few moments. Finally someone reached down and picked the cake up. It was still edible, however mangled. I was given the task of carrying this cake, this time supporting it from the bottom, into the restaurant. I got many strange looks from the restaurant staff...what's this strange foreigner doing carrying a busted cake? My fingers were sticky. We finally arrived in our private dining room, and the cake got placed on a side table.
Later, as we left the restaurant, the aftermath was still there on the street.
We went to a karaoke bar. In China, karaoke is very popular, almost like a religious experience. Friends will rent a private room with a TV, microphone, jukebox, and a case of beer. I danced with 60 year old women. It was great.
On Halloween, I went out to eat hotpot with Chairman Mao, his son, and my friend Dinh. My volleyball game was rained out. I'm on the Foreign Languages Department volleyball team. So I went down to a Halloween party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), my local. There were decorations, a few masks, but not many costumes. One girl dressed in a space-age uniform was selling Coors Light for 10 kuai a bottle. It got a little out of hand, though. One guy started smashing glasses and flipping tables. He was trying to fight another guy. I got out of the way and went upstairs. The police came, but I made sure not to be involved.
My English film club got off the ground last week. I had one student working diligently to reserve a room for showing movies. Finally, we got a hold of the person in charge. We needed a room with a DVD player, a sound system, a projector, a big screen, and lots of seats. I thought this would be a very difficult thing to procure. She asked me how many students. I went for the gold. I said all of them...about 150. She asked me how many times I would need it. I told her I needed it every week for the rest of the semester. No problem! This was about two days in advance, so I didn't have a chance to communicate the good news to everyone. However, it was well attended. Keeping with the holiday theme, we showed Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas to about 60 students. I had to leave in the middle of the movie to play a volleyball game. We beat the Landscape Design Dept.! I made it back in time for the final credits, but this was for my students, and they truly enjoyed it. They even brought popcorn, which is popular here. I expect this week to be bigger.
Last weekend was my birthday weekend, and I am working on writing all about that, but I'll save that for next time.
In the West, we have the tendency to lump Asian cultures all together. My students were shocked when I told them that many, if not most, Americans think that Japan, Korea, and China are all basically the same. Victor showed some pictures of Thai high school students. Each day starts out with a 25-minute meditation session. There is great respect for the teacher in Thailand. When students have a question for their teachers, they kneel on the floor and ask, looking down the entire time, while the teacher sits in a chair. Although most students are very respectful here, I assure you this never happens in China!
On Saturday, I went to my colleague Marietta's birthday party. I was given the task of carrying the birthday cake to the restaurant. As I wrote earlier, cakes are a big deal in China, enough to make men sigh and women swoon. They are not as sweet as in the West, but still delicious, and exquisitely decorated with fine cuts of fruit and cherry tomatoes. The cake comes in a hard plastic box, and there is a ribbon around the box that functions as a handle. We boarded the bus and rode downtown to a restaurant, with this heavy cake suspended from my right hand.
Of course, the bus was very crowded when we boarded, and continued filling up as we got closer to downtown. Kunming buses are not unlike Tokyo subways during rush hour. I was smothered by the back door, and had to dodge the sheer humanity pouring out of the bus at each stop while jostling to make room for an influx of new commuters. All this with a heavy birthday cake dangling from my right hand. The ribbon cut into my hand. My fingers were beginning to go numb.
I was too tall to see out the windows, so I had no idea where we were, and had no idea when we were getting off. Stop after stop after stop. I was hungry. I get irritable when I'm hungry. I'm from rural Iowa, and sometimes feel stress at having to deal with so many people in such a confined place. I mean, come on, China's huge, let's spread out, people! I couldn't transfer the cake to my left hand because an elderly Bai woman had me pinned to the wall. The bus reeled to a stop. People lurched forward. The cake swung forward too, like a heavy pendulum from my purple and blue right hand. At this point, the cake became my sworn enemy.
After about an hour bumps, jerks, sways, and other lessons in momentum, it finally came time to get off this rolling coffin. I quickly shifted the cake over to my left hand. But remember this hand was also tired. This was the trusty hand that was gripping the overhead bar for the past 60 minutes. This was the hand that held both me and the cake in place, rather than careening through the mass of people in front of me, rather than toppling over the hard plastic seats and grandmothers and infant children beside me. So this heavy cake now dangled from my left hand, like a loaf of lead. I wanted to eat this cake, not out of hunger but out of animus.
We walked a block or so down Wenlin St. and met up with the rest of our party. There were three other Americans, a Swiss German, and three Chinese. We stood in a circle and chatted. On the street. I dared not put the cake down on the street due to propriety. I've seen what people and stray dogs do on the street, especially on a Saturday night, especially in this area, a center of Kunming nightlife. Why don't we just continue to the restaurant? Surely it must be near. Surely we could sit down and eat and have a very nice conversation. We could admire this cake, we could carve it up and devour it until it was no more. But the conversation continued, the cake wrenching my hand down to the center of the Earth.
Suddenly there was a moment of relief. It was like the angels had flown down and were supporting me. There was no burden. At this moment I looked down and saw the ribbon snap. The weight of the cake was too much. Marietta's birthday cake plummeted from my left hand and toppled to the ground. It somehow landed upside down, splattering frosting across our shoes and smearing white glaze across the concrete.
No one said anything for a few moments. Finally someone reached down and picked the cake up. It was still edible, however mangled. I was given the task of carrying this cake, this time supporting it from the bottom, into the restaurant. I got many strange looks from the restaurant staff...what's this strange foreigner doing carrying a busted cake? My fingers were sticky. We finally arrived in our private dining room, and the cake got placed on a side table.
Later, as we left the restaurant, the aftermath was still there on the street.
We went to a karaoke bar. In China, karaoke is very popular, almost like a religious experience. Friends will rent a private room with a TV, microphone, jukebox, and a case of beer. I danced with 60 year old women. It was great.
On Halloween, I went out to eat hotpot with Chairman Mao, his son, and my friend Dinh. My volleyball game was rained out. I'm on the Foreign Languages Department volleyball team. So I went down to a Halloween party at the Lao Chang Ji Jiu Ba (The Old Record Player Bar), my local. There were decorations, a few masks, but not many costumes. One girl dressed in a space-age uniform was selling Coors Light for 10 kuai a bottle. It got a little out of hand, though. One guy started smashing glasses and flipping tables. He was trying to fight another guy. I got out of the way and went upstairs. The police came, but I made sure not to be involved.
My English film club got off the ground last week. I had one student working diligently to reserve a room for showing movies. Finally, we got a hold of the person in charge. We needed a room with a DVD player, a sound system, a projector, a big screen, and lots of seats. I thought this would be a very difficult thing to procure. She asked me how many students. I went for the gold. I said all of them...about 150. She asked me how many times I would need it. I told her I needed it every week for the rest of the semester. No problem! This was about two days in advance, so I didn't have a chance to communicate the good news to everyone. However, it was well attended. Keeping with the holiday theme, we showed Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas to about 60 students. I had to leave in the middle of the movie to play a volleyball game. We beat the Landscape Design Dept.! I made it back in time for the final credits, but this was for my students, and they truly enjoyed it. They even brought popcorn, which is popular here. I expect this week to be bigger.
Last weekend was my birthday weekend, and I am working on writing all about that, but I'll save that for next time.
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