National Day Omissions and Recent Weeks

In addition to new events, there were a couple things that happened over the National Day week that I forgot to write about. I think they are noteworthy so I'm going to fill in the omissions. This is going to be another long one.

The first thing that really happened over the National Day week was that I severed my relationship with Susan. It was the morning of the first Saturday of the week, and we were supposed to by train tickets to take a day trip to Changchun. There were several events leading up to me deciding that I really didn't want to hang out with her anymore. We had tentatively made plans to travel to Shenyang for a couple days over National Day, but I had decided that I wanted to spend the week studying. My class was really stressing me out because I was so far behind, and I determined that I would be best for me to study during my time off. I told her that I didn't want to travel anymore. When I told her this, she asked to come up to my apartment the next day to talk about it. I agreed. She came up in the morning, and I had afternoon class that day. I had a dictation test, so I was ready to chat with her for a minute then get ready for the test. She spent an hour in my room trying to persuade me to go with her. Once she realized that I wouldn't, she tried to convince me to just go on a day trip to Changchun. Her insistence broke me, and I conceded. After I told her I would, she said something along the lines of, “Now let's go to lunch.” I said I had to study but told her that we could have dinner that night.

That night, Andrew called me and asked to have dinner. I invited him to come with Susan and I. That night it was raining. I was the only one with an umbrella, so we all crowded underneath. I walked them back to their dorms. I we went to Andrew's dorm first then Susan's. After Andrew left, Susan started talking about Andrew. She said that she knew him already and didn't like him. When she would hang out with Brian (a previous English teacher), he would come with both them. She said he was invasive. She asked me if I liked him. I said I didn't know. I just met him and he seemed nice. She put a disgusted look on her face, hit me in the arm, and walked inside.

The next day, I agreed to help Andrew with an English speech. There was a school wide English speech competition, and he made it through to the second round. We were in the foyer of the library, and I was helping him with his pronunciation when Susan walked up. She said, “What are you doing out of your room? Don't you know that foreigners aren't allowed out of their rooms?” She was half joking, half pissed off to see me with him. She asked me why I wasn't studying. I told her that I was helping Andrew and that I would study later. She started asking me questions in Chinese really fast, so I wouldn't understand. I told her that her Chinese was bad.

The Friday night just before National Day started, I had dinner with Crystal. His friends had left, so it was just he and I. Susan saw me there. She walked up to me and said, “What are you doing out of your room?” I assumed that this was a running joke that she had with Brian. She told me that we would by the tickets to go to Changchun the next morning. After she left to eat with her friends, I told Crystal that she wasn't very nice to me and that I wouldn't go with her to Changchun.

The next morning I met her in front of my building at eight to buy tickets. I immediately told her that I didn't want to go with her because she wasn't very nice to me, and I wasn't going to spend my free time with someone who treated me that way. She asked what she had done. I told her that I didn't appreciate her trying to influence who I spent my time with, pressuring my into going in the first place, and talking to me the way she did. She tried to tell me that she was only kidding and that she and Brian did this all the time. I told her that you can't kid with people like that unless you have a certain relationship, and I thought that we didn't have that type of relationship yet. She made a huge scene. The event took over an hour. There was a wedding in my building that day, and people in the wedding party came at one point and asked us to move. The situation had left her reeling. She started crying a couple times. She kept saying that she would never say that she liked Americans anymore. I told her I didn't really care. She said that I ruined her National Day. I didn't see why the time was that important, and I wasn't about to spend a whole day with her just to wait until after the week was over. She said that she thought we were friends, and I said that I thought I was only someone with whom she could practice her English. Despite her saying otherwise, she kept saying, “Now who will teach me oral English?” The amount of drama in the situation would have lead the people watching to believe that we had been dating for at least ten years. It was one of the worst break-ups I experienced. She was the worst girlfriend I never had.

On day early in the week, Crystal and I went down by the river. The river is really low right now, and there is a muddy island in the middle. There is a walking bridge going out to the island, and people were there flying kites. We sat down on the steps on the embankment leading down to the river to watch the kites. A homeless kid came and sat down next to us. He was young, but he also looked very small for his age. His skin and clothes were dirty, and his sweater and pants were too small. One of his elbows was large and disfigured. He could not pull the sleeve over his elbow. His fingernails were long and dirty. He picked up a stick and started picking out the dirt from underneath his nails. He started asking Crystal questions about me. He told Crystal that he was fourteen years old and that was an orphan. His arm was disfigured because he was working on a building, and he fell off. I asked Crystal if he was asking for money. He was. I tried to tell the kid that I wouldn't give him money, but if he was hungry, I would buy him food. Either I was speaking poorly or he was trying to ignore me because he didn't acknowledge me. He and Crystal talked for a second longer, and Crystal handed him three yuan. The kid sprinted off. A couple seconds later, he had three small loaves of bread, and one loaf already had giant bites taken out of it. He was ripping into it like he had never eaten before. He thanked Crystal and walked away.

Sometime early in the week, I went to go study somewhere outside. There is a small park next to our school. I was walking through campus on the way there when I ran into Mark. He asked if he could join me, and I agreed. It was my first time going to the park. It is small and shoddy. There were many older people there playing card, board games, and ping pong. I sat down with my book, and people gathered around as I had hoped. I read out of my book, and the people in the park corrected my pronunciation. A kid with an English book walked up to me. I gave him a little English lesson. When I was done studying, one of the people who gathered around wanted to take Mark, another student from our school that had gathered, and myself to lunch. I was really excited by this prospect, so I accepted the offer.

This guy could speak no English, so Mark was translating for me. We went to a restaurant near by, ate meat, and drank beer. This guy starting telling stories about himself. Here is what I gathered. He said when he was fourteen years old, he joined the army. For some training exercise, his platoon got dumped into the middle of nowhere. Everyone starting getting sick. Luckily, this guy's father was a doctor and had taught him the secrets of Chinese medicine. Some people died, but he was also able to save many lives. Later in his experience with the army, he had come to Harbin. A couple years ago, there was a big flood. The Songhua River came well over its banks and into the city. The military was responsible for putting up the sandbags to keep the river out of the city. Things didn't go well, and two of his friends died. Mark also said he was saying that eating snake was good for your skin. I look over at this guy, and he makes the hand motion of a bow and arrow, then eating a snake, then patting his face in approval of his good skin. I asked, “Wait, did he eat the snake raw?” He said yes. He said now he is a doctor and a dentist. After looking at his teeth for about an hour, that made me think he was lying more than anything else he said. That those teeth were the teeth of a dentist was too fantastic for me to believe.

I forgot one small detail about the first snow of the year. That morning, Crystal sent me a message. Here it is:

This morning when I wake up,It is snowwing heavily in the sky.The first snow comes here silencely this year.My eyes turn brighten suddently,enjoying the snow,my heart is still and clean,my feelings are fantastic and excitting. I look at the angel flies into my heart and dream like a springchicken and charming girl.My long expectation at last comes to a real and amorous world.

I thought it was beautiful poetry. I especially like how he busted out 'amorous' right there at the end. Impressive.

I had my second round of my new classes last week. I have a book for these classes, and last week was the first time I got to use it. Although I enjoy the freedom I have to teach whatever I want, the book provided some welcome structure. I definitely made it easier on me and made that part of the class fly by. After my second class, I was walking to the dining hall to eat dinner, and I ran into some of the girls from my class. They too were going to dinner, and I asked if they would like to eat with me. We gathered more students from class on the way to the dining hall. By the time we got there, we had a group of ten for dinner. They were nice, and their English is much better than my Engineering students. There was far less of the huddle up and discuss phenomenon over dinner. Afterwards, they asked what I was doing. I told them that I needed to buy some food. They offered to show me a market near school that I didn't know about, and I accepted the offer.

This market was another night market. It was much nicer and cleaner than the other one I knew about. The prices were cheaper as well. I had bought some apples and oranges when we came across a large crowd. In the middle of the circle of people, there was a fight of sorts. It looked like it had been going on for a while when we stumbled upon the situation. One man was punching and kicking this other man. He was furious and probably drunk. His punches were thrown like a girl, and his kicks had no velocity either. Maybe he had just tired himself out or broken his hand already. The other guy had blood pouring out of his nose. He was completely punch-drunk and would have been on the ground were it not for the two other guys holding him up. The relationship between the guys holding him up and the fight was strangely ambiguous. There were not holding him there to be hit; they were not leading him away to safety; they were not trying to break up the fight. They just back-peddled and wheeled the other guy around the ring of people, so when he received blows, there was no force to them anymore. One of the girls said, “My mother told me not to watch.” We walked away.

That was the most helpless I've felt since I've been here. There was no way I could have figured out what was going on. I wanted to see this public beating come to an end, but there was no way I could jump in there and stop it. I couldn't tell anyone to call the police. It could have been over nothing, or this guy could have completely deserved a beating; there was no way I could know. All I know is that someone had done something wrong, and there was no way I could know what it was and rectify the situation.

One night, I was having dinner with my normal group of students (Dave, Crystal, Fred, and Brad) as well as one of the two girls in that class, Rainbow, and I found out some interesting news. Dave, Fred, and Brad had received some sort of invitation to join the Chinese Communist Party, and they accepted. I was a little surprised given that they are the only group of Chinese people I have been around that have shown some level of disapproval with the government. I asked them why they accepted the invitation, and they said it was an honor. I asked Rainbow if she was a party member. She said she already had joined. Fred made a hand motion to me that suggested, “You and I don't need them.” The three of them still had to take a class and a test in order to become a party member. They have been taking the class at night the past two weeks, and they just the test yesterday.

That night when the others had gone to there class, Fred and Rainbow came back to my room to help me with my Chinese. After spending about twenty minutes trying to pronounce the word for 'hot' to Fred's satisfaction with Rainbow laughing the entire time, I told him that we were going to practice some English. After talking about some simple things with the two of them, Rainbow gave me some important information. All the students in the class are in line to receive a job from Caterpillar; however, there are some caveats. One of them is that they have to pass an English test. Once I heard this, my heart sunk. I'm under the impression that this job is a huge opportunity for these guys. They will make exponentially more money working for Caterpillar that they would going back home and being farmers. Fred took Russian all throughout school, and has only studied English for one year. I'm not very confident in his ability to pass this test with his current abilities and rate of improvement. Now I have a project I can be passionate about as an English teacher.

My decision to stay in Harbin and study has yielded dividends already. Class is much more enjoyable and beneficial I understand what is going on, and it isn't frustrating. I have a pretty good grasp on both the oral and written sides of what we have covered so far. Last Wednesday, we had our mid-term, and I got a ninety-five. Granted, it was really easy; nevertheless, it was nice to have it quantified that I was doing well in the class.

Our soccer team is receiving a sponsorship. A new club in town called Box is going to be our sponsor. They're going to pay for our field usage, get us jerseys, and they are building an indoor soccer area in a large empty room in the back for the winter. I think it is a very wise decision on their part. If foreigners come to there club, locals will come too, and if they give of all these benefits, we will certainly come. To commemorate the sponsorship, they gave us two hours of free drinks on Saturday night.

The next day we had a soccer match. We played the professors from Heilongjiang University. My string of consecutive starts ended at one. We almost had enough players on our team for two full teams, and I got to play the whole second half. We won four to two in a hard fought contest. It nearly came to fighting at one point. One of our players got tangled with one of their's on a tackle, and as our player was getting up, their player pushed him. These last couple of games have been intense. The theory is that these teams don't want to lose to foreigners even in friendly games, so things get rough. I'm still just happy to be trying to kick things.

This past week has been defined by some humbling moments. I went to the market to buy some fruit, a broom, and a mop. I bought my fruit and found vendor selling cleaning supplies. There was a basket there that I thought would be got for my toiletries. I asked how much it was. The vendor said two-fifty. I asked how much the broom cost. Three. The mop. Four. I have found that if you are buying anything here it is good to try to bargain a bit, and if you want to buy multiple items, you can regularly get them all for less than what they say they cost individually. With this in mind, I added up the cost of each item and told the vendor that I would give her ten for all three. She stopped for a second to add everything up, and she agreed to ten. I was pleased and surprised that I didn't have to haggle, and I went on my merry way. On the way back, the lack of debate made me question what had just taken place. I stopped and added again. Two-fifty plus three plus four is nine-fifty. I laughed at myself for having pioneered some new bargaining techniques.

Before an afternoon class at HIT, I arrived a little early. I hadn't eaten lunch, so I went to the supermarket there to grab some food. They have vendors in the grocery store that make dishes for you to take to go. I found a vendor with pictures on the front of their stall I could point at and say, “I want that.” The vendor couldn't tell what it was, so someone read what it was to the vendor. I watched people to figure out what I was supposed to do in this new supermarket. A guy received his food and walked right up to the cashiers at the front of the store. I got my food and did the same. When I got to the cashier, she said something to me and look displeased. I figured that this was not what I was supposed to do. I walked back up to the vendors to pay there. Not knowing how to say, “I need to pay for this,” I pointed to my food and opted for, “I want to by this. Where do I buy this?” They referred me to other vendors that they thought also sold the dish that I had. When I arrived at those vendors, they said they didn't make the food I had, and I'm telling them, “No, you don't understand. I want to give you my money.” I figured that this method wasn't working, so I went back to the cash registers. I found an open cashier and tried to explain my situation. “I did not buy this. I want to give money for this. Where do I buy this?” Then, the vendor that made my food found me and brought me back to her stall. I apologized and paid. She wasn't angry, but I could tell she was thinking, “You are so retarded, foreigner.” I walk to my classroom to eat the food I had fought so hard for. I open up the bag and look into my plastic bowl. There are tentacles popping out everywhere. Nowhere in the picture was there anything that looked remotely like tentacles. I ate all the vegetables and rice. On the bright side, now I know what to do if I ever want to eat octopus. I've struggled with the grocery store, but hopefully, I've put those days behind me.

That is all for this time. Hopefully, I'll have another post up soon. The number of e-mails I have received from home has dropped recently, and I really appreciate them. I look forward to hearing from people. Checking my e-mail is the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and when I get home from class, so please, afford me the pleasure of reading your e-mail.

National Day

It has been quite a long time since my last post, and I apologize for that. Much has occurred in that time. I had a week long holiday for National Day. Unlike my previous posts, I will only hit the highlight events, so those of you who enjoy reading about every time I went to the bathroom or changed my clothes are out of luck. This post is hefty nonetheless.

During the week of National Day, I spent a lot of time with Crystal. I opted not to travel, so I would have time to catch up in my Chinese class. Most all of the foreigners I hang out with traveled, and most all of Crystal's friends went home for the week. This lead to us hanging out for most of the week. He helped me find the jersey for our soccer team and negociate the price down. We ate most of meals together and wandered around the city quite a bit.

One night, he was in my room helping me with my pronunciation of "c" and "t" in pinyin. After about 30 minutes of practice, I finally got to a point where he was pleased with how I was saying the two consonants, and we started looking at one of his English books. It was one of the books that had stories and phrases in English translated into Chinese. I am really entertained by these books; the phrases have in them are hilarious. Most of phrases from circa 1950. My favorite from this book was, "You're such a sucker!" I encouraged him to use it. Crystal made me read one of the stories in the book. It started with a guy talking about falling in love with a girl at first sight. It then turns out this is a flashback, and he married this girl, had children with her, grown old with her, and now she is dead. For a short and simple story, it was skillfully arranged. I went back to the beginning of the story and asked him if he ever felt that way about someone. He said that he had. When he was in high school, he had a girlfriend. He said she had the most beautiful eyes. He said he loved her. She told him at the end of high school that she would not stay with him if he didn't get accepted to a famous university. After he took the university entrance examination, he knew he didn't score well enough, but he didn't tell her. Once she found out that he was going to our university, she ended the relationship. When Crystal went home last summer, he found out she had married. I asked him if the guy she married went to a famous university; he said he didn't know. He defended her. He said that in China, people are very poor, and they have to think about those things before love. He was obviously hurt in talking about the situation but seemed to understand.

I spent most of the Sunday through Tuesday of National Day playing basketball. I played with a team of students from Guangdong Province. They were very nice, but they all speak Cantonese. My Chinese improvement is limited when I hang out with them. I managed to master the Mandarin phrases for foul, that's not a foul, nice play, our ball, and their ball over the course of the week. We caught the attention of a group of friends who were all at least my height and very skilled. They were certainly the best players I have seen here. Everyday we would play intense games with them, and they would ask us to come back the next day. On Tuesday, we were playing, and I stepped up into the lane to steal a pass. A guy was cutting toward the pass at full speed, and a collision ensued. I caught a headbutt to my right cheekbone. It put my right on my butt. When I tried to stand up, I fell back over. Luckily, people had crowded around to catch me. I definitely got a concussion; my head was spinning. I kept playing anyway. I'm not sure why I did. I was certainly trying to save face, but trying to act tough is normally out of my character. It was a poor decision. I got a nice bruise, and my teeth hurt for three days. Afterwards, I decided I wasn't going to play again until my head felt better, but I ended up not playing again until after the holiday ended.

On Wednesday, I opted to swim instead of playing basketball. I invited two of the students from Guangdong, Mark and Sam, to come with me. It was a good swim, and Mark and Sam were much better swimmers than my students. That is not to say that they were good swimmers. The showers at the pool are always an interesting experience. I had not taken a communal shower since high school football, so communal showers have drifted out of my comfort zone. My first successful dialogue in Chinese was in the showers. It was the first time I went swimming. Only one middle-aged Chinese guy and myself were in the showers. I was without soap. He offered me some shower gel in Chinese; I accepted. He asked me where I was from; I told him. He said something; I told him I didn't understand what he said. Then he made a hand motion complimenting me on my chest hair. It was nice to be able to communicate in any context at that point, but I was not exactly comfortable talking in that setting. Mark and Sam to that discomfort to a new level. They went to the showers before I had finish swimming, and they were still in there when I arrived. I cleaned off and turned around to leave, and one had his hands pressed against the wall leaning against it while the other was giving him a good, hard back scrubbing. They offered the same to me; although I was tempted, I humbly declined. I dressed and quickly slipped out.

Another one of my students who I named Patrick also could not go home for the break. He invited me to play Counter Strike, a first-person shooter computer game, with him. I had played Counter Strike (more commonly referred to as CS) with my brother, so I accepted the invitation. In the gaming community, Chinese people have an aura surrounding them. They are supposed to be video game playing machines. You can ask my brother; I am not very good at this game, so I was a little intimidated going into the experience. When we played one-on-one, I was relieved to discover that he was only slightly better than me. Then when we played larger games against others in the internet cafe, I dominated. However, I realized I was probably playing against country kids from the university who have never owned a computer, so I reconsidered my swelling of pride.

Patrick invited Crystal and I out to dinner one night. We went to an open-air night market near the university. I sat down at a table while Patrick and Crystal gathered food from the vendors. Patrick came back with come things I wasn't prepared for. He bought grilled cocoons, pre-hatched chickens, and tiny baby birds. I was certainly willing to give all of them a try, but I was disappointed that I didn't have my camera for empirical proof that I have eaten these things. I will grade each of the three on the internationally recognized Ryan Murphy one through ten rating system. First, I tried the cocoons because they were the food I was most worried about. They we not bad at all, and I think if I knew what to expect, I could have even enjoyed them. The we crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside. They didn't have much taste outside the flavor of the charcoal. All in all, I would give it a five out of ten with room for improvement after several consumptions. Second, I tried the pre-hatched chickens. They look like little chicks in the fetal position still in the shape of an egg. They are clearly identifiable, and have a little bit of feathers on them. You just eat the whole thing. I took one bite and swallowed. My eyes watered, and I dry heaved. The chicken in itself was not bad, but biting into it and eating the yolk was too much for me. I wasn't ready for the yolk, and I don't like to eat eggs. For me, I would give it a one out of ten, but for someone who likes chicken and eggs, I think it has potential to be a Chinese food favorite. The last of the adventure foods was the baby birds. They weren't too bad. There wasn't much to eat on them. They were crispy and had a good taste, but after the fetal chickens, I couldn't really enjoy them. I would give them a four out of ten. Crystal also had never eaten these foods, and he seemed to enjoy them less than myself. He said that Patrick is from the south of China, and in the south, they eat all sorts of animals like rats, snakes, and cats. I asked if they had eaten dog, and the both said it was delicious. I will eat it given the opportunity. We also had other things like beef, pork, noodles, and the smelly, dried tofu that makes the street smell like Chinese people shit. (Two notes on this. The smelly tofu actually tastes good, and yes, I do know what Chinese people shit smells like. People just drop a load on the sidewalk sometimes. I saw my first baby taking a crap on the street this week. All the infants where clothes with detachable butt-flaps. Mom pulls the butt flap down, cradles the baby under the knees, squats down, and those cute little cheeks are about an three inches from the sidewalk. I also saw a pile on shit on the sidewalk literally the size of a football yesterday. This looked like a giant pile of the fake doodoo you can buy in prank stores and it appeared to be human in origin. Seriously, someone's bowels released entirely.) Over the course of the past two weeks I have also eaten eel, squid mantle, chicken hearts, sting ray, and pig intestines. Most were not that good. I would eat the sting ray again, and the pig intestines turned my stomach. I gave them a good try too, but in the end, I thought I was going to throw up.

Friday was the Mid-Autumn Festival. By then, Fred had returned from home. I started rattling off in Chinese to him when he returned, and I think he was impressed. However, when he started trying to ask me questions, I think he realized my improvement over the course of the week was limited. He came back with callouses on his hands from working in the fields. The whole time I had the idea that my students were lounging around at home like I would be on a holiday, but this brought about two realizations. These kids really are farmers' kids, and National Day is a harvest holiday. Students get off of school so they can go help in the fields. Crystal and I went and gathered nuts, fruit, and moon cakes to eat that night. The three of us went down by the river and ate until we couldn't eat anymore. We bought way too much food. Downtown was bustling all week, but that night it was very crowded and festive. People were performing songs and dances on a large stage in front of the flood monument. Fireworks were being set off, and little red lanterns that were like miniature glowing hot-air balloons hovered above us. Crystal tried to explain some of the stories surrounding the festival to me, but I didn't understand. Here is what I gathered. There is a beautiful woman who lives in the moon, and there is a pig/man/god that lives in heaven. That's all I got. He told me that while the rich people in the cities are out celebrating, many peasants are still out in the fields working at night to finish the harvest. I found out that Fred had a crush on a girl earlier, so Crystal and I teased him about it for most of the night. We saw a cute little puppy running around, and Crystal got a kick out of me saying that it looked delicious. It was a good evening.

On Wednesday, I started my two new classes. Both went relatively well. I followed the same sort of format as I had for my first class with my other students. I introduced the class and myself, and I gave them time to ask me questions. Both classes were tour management majors. The second class only had one boy in it. I asked the classes who had a boyfriend or girlfriend; no one would tell me. In the earlier class they told me that Confucian ideals prevented them from being open with their romantic relationships. Also, their teachers would be angry to find out that the were dating their classmates. Eventually, the novelty of getting to embarrass their classmates lead to the students pointing fingers at who was dating someone. In the earlier class, there were several couples in the class. In the second class, I specifically asked the one boy if he has a girlfriend. I teased him after he said no because he had his pick of a class full of girls without any competition.

One girl in the second class asked me the most interesting question I've been asked by a Chinese person. She asked me what I think happiness is. After fumbling around for a minute, I had to confess that I had no clue and I should be better prepared to answer this question because of my education. Maybe my education makes that question harder to answer. I told her what some Greeks though because they were the ones that thought individual happiness should the aim of ethical systems. I asked her what she thought. She said it didn't come from wealth or status but it came from spiritual development. I asked her what she meant by spiritual development, and she gave me the example of treating elders with respect. It was a good Confucian answer.

Thursday morning, I woke up and looked out the window to check the weather. It was snowing. I was shocked. I had worn jeans and a t-shirt up until the beginning of the week, and even then, it didn't seem like it was getting that cold. It wasn't just flurries either. These we giant snowflakes coming down pretty hard. Lets just say school would have been closed in Georgia for two or three days, and people would have been rushing to the grocery store in a panic to buy batteries and bottled water for the ensuing blizzard. Nothing stuck to the ground, but it was still really exciting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it has snowed in Athens in nearly two years. The nice weather seems to be drawing to a close. Right now its cold and raining, the worst kind of weather.

On Friday, I administered my first test. It was an English basketball game. I graded by giving each student fifty points to start. For every time they appropriately used a phrase we talked about in class, they got ten points. For every time they attempted a phrase but used it inappropriately, they got five points. Every time someone spoke Chinese, they lost ten points. It was quite entertaining. I laughed at them, and they laughed at themselves. I was impressed with the enthusiasm. The most commonly used phrases were, "pass," "nice shot" (or nice shoot for the less adept), and "out of bounds." Another common phrase was, "No Chinese!" when someone would try to talk in Chinese. I was very pleased with how it went. After the "test" was over, I played with them for a while.

On Friday, I went out with the Germans and company. We stumbled upon a Chinese KTV bar that I enjoyed, but the reviews were mixed, so we left. We ended up going to the default hang out for foreigners, Blues. It has a really bad reputation, and I've been gathering stories about the place. I've heard tales of epic fights, machete wielding Chinese people, and KGB bosses, but every time I've went, these things have been absent. In a way, I want to see some of this craziness but stay out of the way and never come back. The last time I went I really enjoyed myself, and that evening continued the trend of enjoyment. There was much dancing and enjoyable chatting with a waitress. One waitress was trying to get Marc and I to buy a three hundred yuan special of a bottle of rum paired with a bottle of vodka. We got to use our favorite phrase, that's too expensive (but said in Chinese with disgust). Marc played his favorite game with her for a while. It goes like this, "What is this? This is a (blank)." I could tell she was impressed of his knowledge of table, chair, and varieties of alcohol. We kept trying to get her to tell us her name, and she was only interested in us buying three hundred yuan worth of liquor. A little later, I caught her flirting with a waiter, so I took the opportunity to tease her. I asked if they were in love and if he was her boyfriend. In the end, she got the best of my playful teasing. She told me to go sit somewhere; I expected her to come back with some surprise for me, but after I sat there by myself for a couple minutes, I realized that she had won the battle of teasing and playful harassment.

I resumed my international soccer career on Saturday. Much to my surprise, I got to start, and I played the full 90 minutes. Its not like we were without subs either (although we did have fewer subs this week). This doesn't mean that I'm any good; it just means that I'm surprised. We lost six to three. I'm not really sure how much I had to do with that; I can't really tell all the times I mess up. Sometimes its really clear to me, but not always. We had some problems with the officiating and the other team. The other team kept taking dives, and the ref gave the other team two unwarranted plenty kicks, hence two easy goals. The problems with the ref were a little unexpected considering he is a player for our team. Some of my teammates were very angry. I can't really get angry out there; I'm happy to be out there running around aimlessly. Playing soccer still too much of a novelty for me to take that seriously. I did some good things. When I was in position and marking the right man, I think I was pretty effective on defense as a result of being physical. I also headed a couple balls away as a result of me being at least a head taller than everyone on the other team. My favorite moment of the match was when I had the ball, and Mark instinctively call for the ball using my Chinese name. I passed it to him, and we had a good laugh about that after the game.

Saturday night, we bid farewell to three of the Germans. Heiner, Eva, and Hannah are all leaving over the course of the week. Their internships are over, and it is time to get back to Germany and finish studying. We had a big group of people dine together to send them off. I'm sad to see them go because I enjoyed our little crew. They are fun bunch, and hopefully, I will travel to Germany one day and reunite.

Mr. Lu and I finally rescheduled our canceled trip to get a beer. Sunday, we went to a place called Golden Hans. There were Chinese people dressed in German clothes as waiters. I wish I had a picture. I will most certainly go back and get the picture because the beer is free at lunch. Not only is the beer free, they have different varieties of beer as well. They had a dark beer (which I think was a porter, but it could have been a stout) and a wheat beer (which is my favorite). I learned some very interesting things about Mr. Lu over lunch. He is the only Chinese person I've met that has been out of China. Our school has a partnership with the University of Greenwich, so he traveled to the UK to visit their sister school and tour. He went to Greenwich, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, and Belfast. I was impressed. He is getting his doctorate at HIT in Economics and Technology. He is going to try to apply for a scholarship to study in the UK after he gets his doctorate, and he really wants to go to the University of Edinburgh. He has lived in Harbin his whole life, but he really wants to leave to go to another university in another city. He has been working at our university since he graduated. Somehow we got started talking about his relationship history. He told me that when he married his wife he didn't love her, but he has come to love her. There parents introduced them and essentially arranged the marriage. He said that he thinks love and marriage are things that exist independently of each other and are not biconditional. I interjected that marriages may fail in the US because we expect to love in marriage. Also, he told me about a girlfriend he had when he was in university. He loved her, but she moved south after they graduated. She wanted him to come with her, but his parents wanted him to stay with them in Harbin. He decided to stay, but that ended the relationship. He said he was sad for years afterwards. I'm coming to understand how different the social conventions are in China and America in respect to relationships. In relationships, nothing is taken lightly here.

On a final note, I have withheld all the pictures with myself in them from my picture site. I was trying to grow a really long beard, and then suddenly reveal it. The plan didn't work because I got tired of the beard. I will now reveal the pictures of myself since I've been here. Hopefully, I will do a better job of putting up a post in a reasonable amount of time, but I can't ensure excitement in that time period. Send me an e-mail, and tell me what you think.

One Month Analysis

This post is almost entirely analysis. There are no fun stories. I'm sorry. There is just insight into the things I have been thinking about since I've been here. Its the National Day holiday this week, so I have had time to gather my thoughts a bit and share them with you.

My first month here has already come and gone. I have been very surprised by my experience here thus far. Other than three hours of panic on my first day here everything has been perfectly fine. The transition was not hard at all. I'm completely comfortable here, and I'm disappointed by that. Everything has been too easy, too familiar. I feel like greater culture shock would have yielded greater rewards. In a situation where I would have undergone intense culture shock, I would at least know that I would be experiencing a culture radically different from my own. Sure there are little things that are different, but life here is shockingly similar to home. Marc presented me with a thought experiment while we were at Wudalian Chi. He told me to pretend everyone in Harbin was speaking English and think about what would be different. I couldn't think of anything at the time. He said Harbin would just be a shitty industrial town in northern England. Other than everyone staring at me, maybe that is a good analogy.

When I went to Spain, life there was distinctly Spanish. I'm disappointed with the picture I'm getting of what Chinese life looks like because it doesn't strike me as very Chinese. Here, the moments that I have been struck that I am actually in China have been few and far between. Almost all of those moments have come from older people around the river and in other public places playing music or traditional games. I think the rest have come from being confronted with poverty. Everyone else seems to be working all week for the opportunity to go shopping or out to eat on the weekend. I judge that to be pretty similar to home.

I think almost all the English teachers here have two reason why they are here, and I am no exception to these reasons. Of course this is an over generalization; my experiences are too limited to make valid statements about everyone who comes to teach here even if that were possible. The first reason I think one comes to teach here is that one has failed to achieve by some standards. Most teachers here I don't think are smart enough or disciplined enough to cut it in the average nine to five grind at home (not that the average worker is particularly smart or disciplined; I just think that most teachers here are a cut below that). Here they can work very little and receive relatively large amounts of money without any particular skill other than speaking English. They are at least smart enough and brave enough to leave the system that they know to find ways to gratify themselves. I don't think I'm exempt from this analysis. I think if I had done better on my LSAT the first time around or got accepted to Teach for America, I wouldn't be here. I was more excited about this opinion than the other two, but I think that if I would have succeeded with either of those, I would have taken those opportunities. And what better way is there to spend your time reeling from unexpected failures than to go abroad?

Despite my two failures of my senior year, I think I will be a productive member of society. I'm solidly back on the law school track after taking the LSAT again in June. I think my optimism for my future in light of my perspective on the futures of some of the other teachers has lead me to attempt to identify myself with the students. The students are learning Chinese because they are still looking ahead to accomplish more, and that is how I would like to think of myself.

The second reason that someone comes to teach in China from a Western country is a dissatisfaction with their home country in some respect. Some of it is political. I bet some of it is resentment against a system where they could not cut it and be happy. Some of it is cultural. I think I lack the bitterness for the first two reasons. Granted, I'm generally critical of our political system, but I don't think I would ever leave the country from frustration with it. Not yet at least. Also, I believe that I have the skills to make in Western society. I was in no way unhappy before I left. The time I spent at school was certainly the most enjoyable years of my life. That leaves the cultural option.

I think I am here as a cultural discontent. Woodstock, Georgia is a wonderfully safe, secure, and privileged place to grow up, but it is about as culturally sterile as a place can be. I feel no strong connection with the place, and it think that that is because there is no connection to be had between the place and where it is. I think that if I'm placed in the suburbs of any major city, I get a very similar safe, secure, and privileged experience growing up. I feel like it should matter where you grow up, and it should make a difference in who you are. I've been raised with this broad national identity of suburban life. Peers in my community that have embraced Southern culture have done so arbitrarily and inauthentically considering that they just moved to Georgia from cities across the country several years earlier and their home lives more closely reflect the culture of their parents than the South. In some ways, I am also attracted to the idea of the South (like ideas of Southern hospitality, friendliness, and close community), but I could never embrace the better parts of the South in a Southern way because I never lived there.

In relation to Woodstock, Athens was a bohemian paradise. I had such greater exposure to new ideas and music; it afforded me many learning opportunities. However, the majority of Athens is simply imports from the same sterile suburbs from which I come. Those same suburbanites seemed equally arbitrary and contrived in embracing the bohemian as those embracing the Southern. I don't think anything was particularly hip about our upbringing in the suburbs, and it seems like many students at UGA are latching on to those cultural values to compensate for the lack of any culture in Metropolitan Atlanta. I'm not sure how one authentically becomes a hipster, but it didn't seem quite right to me. Maybe its a second generation thing; your parents have to be artists, academics, or musicians before you can be genuinely hip.

I think this feeling of dissatisfaction with Harbin is very revealing in light of the second reason why I came here. I think most of us look at the West as modern and materialistic and at the East as mystical, spiritual, and connected with the traditions of its past. None of my conceptions of the East have found resonance in Harbin. I wanted to find a distinctive, local culture, and I've found this global culture of consumerism and capitalism. Local, authentic culture strikes me as meaningful and valuable whereas this broad, one-size-fits-all culture of consumerism strips places of local culture.

After I signed my contract, Kaylyn bought me a book about Harbin. It was a thoughtful gesture; it was a way of conceding that I was leaving. It was a South Atlantic Quarterly special edition issue solely about Harbin and Manchuria. Frustrated with Chinese one night this past week, I abandoned studying and picked up the book. After reading the introduction, I reached the first article, “Local Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of the Native Place in Modern China” by a Duke professor by the name of Prasenjit Duara. The beginning of the first paragraph reads:

The modern preoccupation with the hometown or native place is a significant component of the modern representation of the local or the regional. During the first half of the twentieth century the local – embodied particularly in the native place – was pervasively, though not only, represented as a site of authentic values of a larger formation, such as the nation or civilization. This representation of the local as authentic was frequently dramatized by the threat of ascendant capitalist, modern, and urban values.

The article was about the same things I'm struggling with in my experience here, only about one hundred years ago. It examined the debate from the time period about which values were authentic and beneficial.

This article indirectly provided me with two counterpoints to the rant I have to this point been espousing. The first is that what is authentic is always relative. I'm probably looking for Harbin in a state that some of the people one hundred years ago would have argued that such a state would be too modern and devoid of local and authentic values. Maybe one day in my future, I will long for the good ole' days of my suburban youth when I'm living an urban life and have to listen to my neighbors scream and pound their headboard against the wall. I'm sure if America moves away from the suburban lifestyle, there will be people who look upon that time period with the same sort of nostalgia that I have for other cultures and lifestyles.

The second counterpoint is the way it has always been is not always better. One of the authors cited in the article argued from modernization as a way to escape the backward values and lifestyles of the past. I can see room for positive change in almost all cultures, and I think that maybe I had been ignoring that.

I'm going to make an ad hominem circumstantial argument against myself. It is really easy to condemn the materialism of another culture while you type on your laptop next to your iPod wearing your name brand shoes. I think I need to keep in mind that having things is nice, and most of these people haven't had things. Because I have so much, I can take things for granted. I should be happy that they can now start to have the things that I enjoy. I just wish there was a greater filter on the things that they so readily accept from Western culture. Why not have nice things as defined by Eastern standards instead of a Mickey Mouse watch?

With that said, I think its time to note the things about Harbin that I have enjoyed. In the most tension with what have said throughout this post, I have appreciated Harbin as an international city. I have dined with people from all over the world, and that is quite the nice luxury. The weather has been absolutely spectacular so far. I been running around in jeans and a tee shirt most days. The only other addition on the other days has been a light jacket. I'm trying to take advantage of the this weather before the city freezes over. The people I have met have been exceedingly nice. My job is very rewarding and quite easy, so I have no complaints there. I'm learning Chinese very quickly; I'm eager to see where I will be in the end if I keep learning at this rate. Other than a couple of days of cravings, I have hit Chinese food hard and with much delight. Most importantly, the Songhua River is a beautiful place, and the parks alongside its banks are teeming with people doing interesting things. I wish I wasn't so far away or I would go there on a daily basis.

This has been a week long holiday, so I have had time to do interesting things. Expect a post sometime this weekend or early next week with good stories. Until then, please stay in touch.