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.

Trip to Wudalian Chi

On Friday, I went to dinner with the same four students that had taken me out to dinner. I told them that since they took me out the first time, I would take care of dinner the next time. We went to a restaurant near our school that I pass by twice daily on the way to and from the bus stop. What caught my attention about the restaurant is that it has a sign on it that says KTV. KTV is karaoke, and I thought that would be something fun that would could do together. When we got there, the vote for KTV didn't pass, so we just ate instead of having both dinner and entertainment. We got a private room. The waitress handed me the menu to order. When you go to a restaurant here, the waiter or waitress hands you the menu and stand there until you order. Instead of feeling pressured to order, sat there with the menu for a minute showing my students all the characters on the menu that I knew. I conceded the menu to them to order. The first dish that came was a plate of pig joints. We received packets that contained chopsticks, a plastic glove, and straw. We all put on our one glove and picked up our pieces and started eating. The knee was the best piece, so they gave it to me. After struggling to eat off of the knee effectively, they gave me another packet, so I could use a second glove. They completely cleaned the bones; I could only stomach the meat but not the fat, ligaments, and cartilage. I felt bad wasting the best piece. They summarily put their straws to use. They slid them inside of the bones and started sucking out the marrow. I decided to give it a try, and it wasn't bad. It tasted like the rest of the meat but the consistency of a thick liquid. Think of a warm, meat flavored smoothie or milkshake. The rest of the food was really good, especially the sticky rice cakes that we had.

When I went to eat with Susan when I first got here, I was shocked at her tone when she talked to waiter. It is in no way abnormal to yell for the waiter; that is just how you get them to come over after you order. After we had been sitting for a while, she yelled for the waiter and said something to him in an agitated cadence. I asked what she said to him, and she told me, "I said, "I'm hungry; hurry up." Sven was telling me that those of higher classes really distrust and talk down to people of lower classes and occupation. He theorizes that since people try to take advantage of people with money, the upper classes think those serving them are trying to cheat them and treat the lower classes like lesser people. I know Susan's father is a math professor, and teachers are very respected in Chinese culture. I expected my students to yell for the waitress when we needed things. They quietly slipped out of the room and asked humbly for whatever we wanted. I wonder if they treat waiters and waitresses with more respect because they come from a similar stratus of society.

Joking around with me, Crystal asks, "When are you getting married?" I say, "In a long time. When are you getting married?" Fred jumps in, "Tomorrow." I snap back, "Are you the one marrying him?" This spurred a pretty serious discussion of relationships and marriage in China. I asked when they seriously wanted to get married. Dave answered that he wanted to get married at thirty. I asked him why he wanted to wait that long, and he said that he wanted to wait until he had enough money. I asked if the reason why guys buy expensive western clothes and spend lots of money in bars is to show women there that they have lots of money so they have the chance to get married. They adamantly agreed. I asked that if they have to do this because there are so few women. Again, they agreed. Dave interjected, "I think this is a bad thing. Most women are just interested in money, but not all of them." I was very satisfied with his analysis and reluctance to generalize.

Since Crystal lives in Henan province, he can't go home for the National Day holiday next week. The other three guys all live in Heilongjiang, so they are all going home. Since I'm still feeling pretty far behind in my class, I asked if Crystal would be my tutor during the holiday, and I offered to pay him for his time. Right when I said I would pay him, all of them rang, "No, no, no." They informed me, "We are friends; we don't talk money." I apologized for offering and said that I appreciated the cultural lesson. After dinner, we all went back to my room for a little while, listened to music, and taught me Chinese phrases like "Dear, I'm hungry; can you cook dinner?"

I had to get up early on Saturday to go to Wudalian Chi. We had a personal bus for our group of ten. In our party, there were five Germans, one Austrian, one Chinese, Sven (representing Switzerland), Mark (representing Holland), and myself. A fair amount of the conversation was in German over the course of the weekend, leaving myself and Bo Feng (our Chinese traveling companion) oblivious to what people were talking about. It didn't matter to me at all; I've become quite good at spacing out when listening to languages I don't know. The drive there took six hours. It was a really nice drive. The was a long conversation about Christianity, politics, and race in America. Since I have lots of opinions on those subjects and tend to get excited when they're brought up, I think I dominated conversation a little bit. To be fair though, I have a bit more knowledge and experience on those subjects than those with whom I was discussing. It was really interesting to get European and Chinese perspectives on the subjects. I was really impressed with Bo Feng's knowledge of America politics (with Europeans, knowledge of American politics is almost expected). Of Chinese people with good English speaking ability, he is by far my favorite. He is interested in the aspects of America that I find interesting, and I appreciate his sense of humor. What he finds funny is very strange and goofy. We were surrounded by flat farmland dotted by white birch trees. As we got farther north, the yellowing of the leaves on the white bark created a beautiful effect. Having lived in rural Russia for seven months, Sven said that it really reminded him of Siberia. I was encouraged to find this out. It was exactly how I pictured rural Russia whenever I have read Russian literature.

When we arrived, we ate a big lunch and headed to the main attraction in the area, Laohei Shan. Wudalian Chi is a series of volcanoes that just pop out of the plains. I was a bit disappointed when I arrived. There were six or seven bug bites on the horizon with a couple lakes in the middle. Laohei Shan is the supposed to be the most popular of the volcanoes according to Lonely Planet. We were all surprised when arrived at the gate to find that entrance to the park cost sixty yuan which is very expensive for Chinese standards. However, the price lead to several funny moments. Sven kept quantifying the value of each of the views. This lead to the Sven-o-meter, a device that measures the value of tourist sights. Its quite a complex device. Sven says how much he thinks something is worth, and I place one of my forearms horizontally while the other gauges it Sven's measurements in relation to the cost of entrance. Another good moment was when we were told that we couldn't bring lighters into the park. Sven had to explain to us that the village has been peaceful for the last twenty years and that they didn't want us to light the volcano. The sight itself was nice in addition to light-hearted attitude of the group. The mountain was surrounded by a lava field that looked like the moon. Mark walked into the lava field, took the moon from America, and claimed it for the Netherlands. The walk up the side of the mountain to the crater was nice. We were surround be trees, and that was a first during my trip here. I made a Chinese friend on the walk up. I managed to understand one of about every six or seven phrases he said to me. I managed to find out that he was from Xiamen in Fujian province, and he gave me a bottle of water since I was lacking one. When we reached the top, he got me to take a picture with him. The crater was impressive, and the views and the wind off the top of the mountain were refreshing. The walk back down was not so fun.

We briefly returned to out hotel because it was getting cooler. For sunset, we walked to Hao Shan, another "mountain" just on the outskirts of the village. I think "Hao Shan" is the name because even though their was nothing saying this at the mountain, a near by street was named Hao Shan. On the top, there was a Buddhist statue and tow pagodas. The trees on the top were a collage of reds, yellows, greens, oranges, and browns. By the time we got there and reached the top, it was almost completely dark. It was a nice place to go to conclude the day.

We walked back into town for dinner. We went to a place near our hotel. When we got the bill, back it was far more than we expected. A debate between Bo Feng and the staff ensued. They charged us twice as much for two dishes and almost double for our beer. It took about twenty minutes to get the bill from 170 yuan to expected price of 104 yuan. Granted, they difference in expense is not that great when it taken from the standard of Western currency, but it is greatly disrespectful. No one likes it when someone tries to take advantage of you.

We walked out of the restaurant, and everything in the town had shut down. Since it was relatively early, we looked around for something to do. We were referred to a KTV place. We walked over, and we opened the door to what looks like the inside of the a trailer. The room is small, there are two couches, and the walls are covered with tanish cloth. There is a strobe light, bad techno is blaring, and there are three middle-aged men dancing poorly. The owners take us upstairs to a room for KTV. They bring out the song book, and the only western music is from Classical composers. We leave. One the owners comes back out. He has traveled to the depths of the basement to a secret vault and pulled out the tome of Western music that he hid because nobody uses it there. We go back up to the room only to find out that they didn't have the CD that went with it.

We walked down the street to another place. They immediately put some familiar music on, and spent the rest of the night singing. If I had to estimate, the town has about four hundred people at the most, but it also has two KTV places. On the walk back, the vast majority of the lights in the town were off, and I saw more stars than I had seen in a long time.

The next morning we went to a different set of lava fields after a quick breakfast. The place wasn't too large, but it was interesting. The lava field at Laohei Shan were completely barren; these had different trees and shrubs creeping out from between the rocks. We left there and went to a spring. This spring supposedly had minerals in it that were healthy. People came with water jugs and filled them from the spring. It just tasted like carbonated water to me, but when I lifted a car later, I knew it had to be the water. We wandered into an outdoor market. There were fish, meat, fruits, and vegetables lined up on the sidewalk. We went into a bakery and had some chocolate covered pastries and moon cakes. Moon cakes are the food that people give each other for the Mid-autumn Festival during the National Day holiday. The vendors tired to pitch their products to us in Russian, and we had to let them know that we weren't Russian.

Our admission to the spring also included entrance to one of the lakes. It seems that you have to pay to access anything worthwhile here (or sometimes you have to pay to see thing that are not worthwhile). The lake was first place I have been where it fit my preconceptions about what China would look like. There were pagodas beside a lake that was lined with tall reeds. The reeds were rustling in the wind, and they were backed by yet another lava field. It was my favorite part of the trip.

We left the lake and went to a Buddhist temple and monastery that was on the far side Hao Shan. Fed up with charges to get into places, most everyone decided not to go in, but I was really interested. I paid the fifteen yuan entrance fee and went in. After paying the monk at the door, I starting spraying pictures. The temple area was filled with statues. Smaller ones were free standing in the courtyard; larger ones sat inside temples. All of the statues were of warriors except for two golden buddhas. There was a fat buddha and a skinny buddha. There were three temples inside the walls of the compound. The largest temple was under renovation. I walked around transfixed by people worshiping and throwing coins into a metal tower. I walked into the second largest temple. There was a female monk kneeling in prayer. I was taking pictures of the inside of the temple, and I turned in her direction to take a picture. She was not pleased. She covered herself up with a jacket, then immediately pulled it off to start yelling at me. I had no clue what she was saying, so I just walked out. I definitely understand I was being disrespectful, but in another sense, when you open your temple to tourists, charge admission, and have a gift shop, the sanctity of the place is lost. Also in my studies of Buddhism, I never found anger as trait a practitioner should express. At the same time, I realize that an individual monk has no control over whether her temple is open to the public and can understand her frustration in having her worship disturbed; I should have been more respectful.

After waiting for a couple minutes, the monk at the door let the rest of our group into the temple for free. We walked around for a minute then walked up Hao Shan again to get a better view in full daylight. When we got the Buddhist statue at the top, there was an old woman with red ribbons. She gave us each one to tie on the trees for good luck. We asked if we had to pay before we took them, and she said it was a gift. After we had tied them on the trees, she asked Bo Feng to get us to give her some money. She asked for five yuan at first, then two, and she said it was nothing to us. Bo Feng told her it wasn't right of her to tell us that it was a gift then ask for money. When we walked away, she untied the ribbons we put on the trees.

I really enjoyed the trip. It was two great Autumn days. Getting out of the city was nice, and I found rural Heilongjiang province beautiful and interesting. I've posted many pictures from the trip on the picture sight, so check them out. As of Tuesday, it will be one month since my departure. I've been thinking about a lot of things about China, home, and the relationship between the two, so I'm going to provide my analysis of my first month here in my next post. Thanks for reading, and keep the e-mails coming.

All Work and No Play Makes Ryan a Very Dull Boy

Sunday morning, I got up early to take some pictures and do some studying. After walking around and taking some pictures, I sat down in a park by the river to study. Everyone is up early on Sundays. People are playing badminton and ping pong. Adults are doing exercises like Tai Chi and inline skating. Children are jumping around on playgrounds with their grandparents watching. I sat on a bench next to a playground. Slowly, people started gathering around me. When they saw I had a book of Chinese lessons out, they started asking me questions. I did my best to answer them; it was good practice for speaking and listening. I got quite a bit of free tutoring on my pronunciation and characters. Elementary school children would show me how to write the characters. I would help them pronounce the English words in my book, and they would help me pronounce Chinese words. Younger kids would run up to me and say, "hello." They would immediately get embarrassed and run back behind their parents' legs. It was good fun, and it was really productive way to study.

At eleven, I met up with some friends to go to Sun Island park. The park is a short boat ride across the river. We grabbed some food before we crossed because the food in the park is very expensive. I went back to a street vendor I had bought from earlier in the week. He remembered me and was very excited that I returned, with friends no less. After a few of us purchased some food, I asked him if we were friends, and he confirmed what I had expected. This street vendor is not Chinese, and I learned how to ask what country people are from this week in class. I can't wait to return and ask.

The boat trip across the Songhua River was nice. We had a Chinese person with us, so we got tickets across and back for two yuan compared to the ten yuan that the Lonely Planet guide told us we would have to pay. Sun Island was a surreal place. It is a giant park that is perfectly landscaped. Mark compared it to Disney World without the rides, and I think that is an accurate description. Nothing there felt authentic; the entire environment was perfectly controlled. There were dear and squirrels that you could feed out of your hand. Every bush was unnaturally shaped. For a while, we enjoyed the welcome break from the constant hustle of the city, but the combination of not being able to sit or lay on the grass with Kenny G-esque music blaring from speakers everywhere in the park wore down the group's spirits. By the time we left, most of us were more than ready to go.

We all had dinner together at one of the outdoor beer gardens on Zhongyang Dajie. It was a feast of street food and beer. A member of our party opted for the grilled cocoons we saw earlier in the day. They are still moving before you put them on the grill. I took care of the beer. Beer is ten yuan for a pitcher and you put down a five yuan deposit on each pitcher. I got us three pitchers of beer. When I went back to the counter to take back the pitchers and redeem my deposit, they wouldn't give me my deposit back. I got the Chinese member of our group to talk to them and explain to me what was going on. They said I needed a receipt to get my deposit back. They never gave me a receipt in the first place. The people working there certainly recognized me purchasing the beer, and it was just a little way to take fifteen yuan from me. It really bothered me. First, its such a short-sighted decision to not just give me my deposit back. I'll most likely drink hundreds of yuan in beer over the course of my time here, and I will never go back to that beer garden. I will go to the one on the next street in either direction when I want to go to a beer garden, and when my friends and I go out, I'll request that we go to another one. They took fifteen yuan from me and lost out on several hundred yuan in potential business. The second reason for it bothering me is that it reveals how easy it is to take advantage of me. I have been very lucky so far; I really don't have the capacity to do anything if some takes advantage of me. I'm lucky I lost out on about two dollars, so I can have my guard up for people who are after more money or worse.

On Monday, I had Chinese class in the afternoon. I got up early to study before class. When I was walking out of the my school to go study at HIT, a student approached me. He introduced himself and asked if he could come along. His English name is Andrew, and he speaks very well. On the way to the bus, he told me, "I have a very good personality." We chatted for a while on the bus. He said he was very interested in American culture and language. We found a place to study at HIT. He studied English and I studied Chinese. He had a dictionary and was just writing words and phrases out of the dictionary on a sheet of paper. He is not and English major and he says that he gets up two hours before class everyday to go to the stadium at school and practice his oral English. He helped me with pronunciation. We got to one word, and he was making me repeat it. The word had a "d" in it, and I guess he wasn't pleased with my pronunciation of it. It must have sounded like a "t" to him because he said to me, "Sometimes in American English 'd' is pronounced like 't', but not in Chinese." I told him that we never pronounce "t" like "d". He repeated, "No, but in American English, sometimes 'd' is pronounced like 't'." I decided to let it go.

Then, something clicked for me. I realized that the reason I don't like students like Andrew and Susan because they try to tell me about things I already know, and moreover, they're wrong. I didn't come to China to have Chinese people tell me what are the famous American brands or how we speak. Dave, Crystal, Brad, and Fred can barely speak to me, but when I talk to them, they can tell me about things that I have no clue about. I find out things about rural life in China, and they ask me questions, rather than thinking that already have the answers. Susan and Andrew tell me things about themselves. They say that they are brave or have a good personality. My other students leave it to me to interpret what type of people they are. Susan and Andrew in a sense treat me like I'm stupid, and the other guys give me something to learn and learn something in return.

In class on Monday, we had another dictation test over the vocabulary we had been studying. On last Thursday, we had a dictation. I missed most of my tones on my pinyin and knew three characters. On Monday, I got all my pinyin right except one tone and only forgot three characters. The time spent studying over the weekend really paid off, and I was really encouraged.

After class one of the Russians invited me to eat dinner with him. His name is Nikita. He was the Russian who was particularly interested in car cost, average salary, and exchange rates at our class lunch. It was one of the hardest experiences I've had communicating with someone since I've been here. At lunch with the class, the Russians could work together to come up with the words they wanted to say, but that night, it was just he and I. Despite the difficulties, it was one of the best conversations I've had since I been here. We talked about each other's homes. He said Russia was an "evil" place; he followed this statement by throwing fists and saying, "Boom, boom, boom." He told me, "In China, American boy can walk around at night, but in Russia, no." We were talking about my family, and he was asking about the things we have. He got to another point where he was reaching for words. He put his hands in the shape of an oval on the table. I said, "Egg...chicken." He spread his hands open like the egg cracking. I said, "Born." He said, "Yes, sometimes I ask 'Why I not born an American boy.'" I was taken back by such a simple and profound question. I thought for a second and replied, "I ask myself the same questions: 'Why was I not born a Russian boy?' or 'Why was I not born an African boy?' I don't know why. There is no reason. I am just lucky." With that, my whole analysis of China had to be turned around back on myself. The only reason I can condemn materialism is that I have everything I need and want. The ability to look down materialism is a luxury in itself provided by having more than enough. I already have everything I want, and it is only because I am in that place that I can look and the Chinese and be perplexed by why they want more than what they have. I should keep in mind how fortunate I am to be born in my circumstances and approach everything else with that understanding.

This week has been entirely consumed by Chinese class. I have been in class for four hours a day, and outside of eating, the vast of majority of my time has been spent trying to learn characters. I am not displeased with the class; I think it is very good that I'm getting intensive Chinese lessons. However, so much of my time has been focused on the written side of the language, and what I really want to do is improve my oral Chinese. Its nice to go into the city and understand that that building is a bank, but I would rather focus my time on trying to talk to old men in the park. The amount of new vocabulary we get daily is mind-blowing. We average twenty words a day. There is no possible way to integrate that many words into your functional vocabulary, but if you really go after it, you can memorize the characters. Really, the class is geared so students can pass the written exams. Passing them is a nice thought, but that never has been my intention in learning the language. I'm not sure if I'll try to take the same class next semester. I think I'd rather go take would I've "learned" this semester and go out into the city and figure out how to use it.

Thursday night, I had dinner with one of my students. Her English name is Rainbow. Two students with whom I had played basketball saw me and approached me, and I asked them to join us. I asked them their names again, and they gave me Chinese names. Rainbow suggested that I give them English names; I readily agreed given that Chinese names are pretty inaccessible to me. The names are three syllables long, and if I'm going to remember three syllables, its going to be a word that helps me survive here. At the end of the meal, I gave them their names. I chose Chris and Mark. They asked me what the names meant. I told them that in America, we only pick names because they sound nice, but normally, the names don't have a meaning. They were disappointed.

After my experiences naming people so far, I've given some thought on how I'm going to administer English names from now on. First, I thought I would give them Biblical names. Some Biblical names are names we use in America, and they have a story behind them that has a meaning. Then, I thought about trying to tell Bible stories to students in a way they could understand, and I abandoned that idea. Then, I considered giving names of philosophers and theologians. Those names certainly have ideas associated with them, but explaining those ideas would be even more difficult than Bible stories. Then I came up with the perfect idea. I'm going to give names from the TV show American Gladiators. The names certainly have the sorts of meaning that they are looking for, there are names for men and women, and there is a ready-made list of names. I can't wait to write about my new friends, Nitro, Laser, and Ice.

This weekend I'm taking a trip to Wudalian Chi. It is a series of volcanoes that last errupted not long ago. And by not long ago, I mean 1720. In the last erruption, the volcanoes had lava flows that blocked a river to create barrier lakes. It'll be scenic, and I'm looking forward to the fresh air and hiking. I will return with pictures and stories. I would love to return to some e-mails from home as well, so please, keep them coming.

The First Week of Class

True to my word, I have made an update in a reasonable amount of time given the detail I choose to write in. I feel that I should warn before you start reading that some of this post is R-rated. There is profanity and reference to morally compromising sexual behavior. This is fair warning; if you think you may be offended, then don't read further. Really, I don't think any of it is that bad, or I wouldn't have put it on here. I have to confess that I have edited some events thus far for my readership, but I'm very excited about adding in the profane this time. I think the entertainment value will compensate for potential offensiveness.

After a full week, I'm feeling pretty good about my Chinese class. At times, I felt so lost that I had no choice but to laugh at myself, but all-in-all, I feel like it was a very productive week. Despite my fluctuations in studying discipline over the course of the week, I have made some substantial gains. I have added several words and phrases into my functional vocabulary, which I feel like is the most important part to me. My listening ability is really weak. I have not figured out how to effectively identify initial sounds, final sounds, and tones. Considering that these are all the parts of listening, I'm not in a very good state there. If I keep up at this rate, I'll be able to talk to people and have no clue what they're saying back. I'm confident that it'll come with time. Its a hard thing to practice on your own time though.

The most exciting part of the class has been riding around on the bus and being able to identify some characters out in the city. For some, I can identify them, know what sound they are, and maybe know what they mean in the context; for others, I see them I know that I should know them because we've been over them in class. The written language has already lost its completely foreign look. We had a reading class on Friday that broke down the characters into their components. When you approach the characters as combinations of those components, the whole written language becomes far less intimidating. You can look at a twenty stroke character and identify all the components. Sure, it'll take a long time to write and master those strokes, but you feel like you can manage it. The book is very annoying at times because it only provides the steps to writing the some of the new characters you get with a lesson; the rest you have to figure out on your own by looking at the character and applying the rules for the order of the strokes. Nevertheless, learning characters still has the feeling of a pleasant surprise, and I hope I can keep that perspective on learning them. I think it will keep that side of the language from becoming too frustrating. Mark was telling me that the amount of class time the program gives you after one year should be sufficient to take the test to be able to attend a Chinese university, the HSK 6. The prospect of having my Chinese ability quantified that concretely is exciting and will give an ultimate goal to work towards.

I only had one class to teach this week. It was on Thursday morning. After being in a Chinese class for three days and staring at the teacher blankly for a good portion of that time, I was able to identify that look and sentiment in my students. I needed to make my class a bit more simple. I decided on what I'm doing for a mid-term and final for the class. Since basketball is their core interest in American culture, the mid-term will be a basketball game. I'm going to spend a couple sessions extensively going over basketball vocabulary, and in a couple weeks, we're going to have an English-only basketball game. For the final, students will get into pairs and prepare a dialogue about anything we have talked about over the course of class. Their dialogue will be one minute long. After that, I will jump into their conversation for another minute, and they must successfully respond to what I have to say. I think I'll be a good examination of their abilities to form good English phrases, pronounce them, and know vocabulary around one subject well enough to have a conversation about it.

For rest of the first session, we did an exercise on introductions. I figured it would be a good way to learn everyone's names and assign English names. English names are absolutely essential for me because like I said, my listening skills aren't that great. Someone will say their Chinese name to me; I'll try to repeat it; laugher ensues. Then they say it again slowly, and I do better with it. I made them say things to each other like "Hello, my name is... Nice to meet you. Where are you from? What do you do?" Then we talked about other things you could talk about when you meet someone. I guess it was a lesson in small talk, and I don't know if I'm the best person to administer such a lesson. I went around the class and listened to them talk to each other, then I made each person introduce themselves to me in an effort to learn each student's name. If they didn't have an English name, I gave them one. Only one person was dissatisfied with his name. I tried to use the same method as I used with the students with whom I went to dinner; I listened to their Chinese name and picked names with the same consonant sounds. I gave a guy the name Bo. Everyone started laughing, and he looked displeased and asked for a new name. I asked what was wrong with the name Bo and asked if it was a curse word. No one answered. I changed his name to Kit which was quite the random name to pull out. During the break, I asked some students what Bo means in Chinese. They said it means cat. I didn't think that it was that bad of a name, but I could concede that Cat is not as cool of a name as Crystal or Robot.

For the second session of class, I talked about American profanity and racial slurs. I justified teaching them about it by saying that they were an important part of American culture. If you can use profanity with someone you know or vice versa, then it is a sign of comfort in a relationship to speak freely. If someone is using profanity or racial slurs around people they don't know, that is a really good sign that it is a bad situation, and you should probably get away. Despite my rationalizations, I taught the lesson because I thought it would be fun, and I knew they would be interested and wanted to know. I know that when I'm learning a language one of the first things I want to know is how to curse. Let me assure you, the lesson was most certainly fun. If you ever get the opportunity to have twenty-five Chinese people practice their pronunciation of "God damn it," take advantage of it. My favorite part of the class was when I created a dialogue to help understand the proper way to use the term "bullshit." I created a basketball scenario to put the use of the word into a context they could relate to. One side of the class said, "That's a foul!" The other side responded, "That's not a foul; that's bullshit!"

In regard to teaching about racial slurs, I think it turned out to be a really good part of the lesson. I told them that these were things that are unacceptable to say regardless of the context. A bit of a history lesson is necessary to explain the racial slurs and the racial tensions associated with them, and I think that lesson is essential to understanding the current state of race relations in America. If anything in my lesson accomplished the goals of teaching about American culture of in a way that could be beneficial to my students, I think it would be this part of the lesson. Some of the students looked a little uncomfortable at the end of class, so I surveyed whether they thought the lesson had an acceptable subject. They all said yes, but it wouldn't be the first time that they have withheld information from me if they really felt otherwise.

My Chinese class is divided into four fifty minute sessions separated by ten minute breaks. During the last session on Friday, class got a little rowdy. A Russian girl named Katie started passing notes to the Canadian guy in our class named Jack. She was on the other side of the room from him, so every time a note was passed it was a big production. Everyone got involved. I was sitting beside Jack, so I got to read the notes. She was writing to him, "I want to go out with you tonight." and "I want to go dancing with you." Amused by the sophomoric behavior, I suggested to Jack that he send back a note that provided boxes that she could check yes or no in to find out if she liked him. Everyone stopped paying attention; they were spent after an intense week. I wasn't like the teacher could discipline us either. She would have just said things in Chinese to us that we couldn't understand, and we would just look back at her with vacant faces. For example, one of the Russian guys in class forgot to bring a pencil. The teacher starts talking to him and hands him a pen. Jack is in the back cracking up. He has been teaching in China for a couple years, so he knows oral Chinese. I asked him what she was saying to him, and he told me that she said, "Coming to class without a pencil? Why did your parents send you here? Does your mother know you don't have a pencil?" The Russian guy was not embarrassed in the least because he didn't have a clue what was being said.

After class, Mark, Sven, and I had lunch with this guy named John. He is an older guy from the Mid-West, and he is going on his third year here. Hearing him speak to waitress was extremely encouraging. Don't tell my mother this, but it made me want to spend more than a year here to achieve that level of oral fluency. Afterwards, I had plans to go swimming with the same group of students with whom I've been eating and two other students, Allen and Jackie. Sven and Mark decided to join. It was a funny scene. The students all had matching swim suits and caps because they had the same swimming class. They looked like a swim team, but could barely swim. They had been swimming for years, but no one had ever taught them anything. This was juxtaposed against Mark and Sven, who are stronger swimmers than myself. When the three of us were tired and leaving, the students stayed to swim. But they weren't really swimming at this point; they were just sitting on the side of the pool. Mark said it was a good example of Chinese dedication.

Mark invited me to come to dinner with some guys from his class. It was a Russian guy's birthday, and I accepted the invitation. When I was walking to the bus stop to meet everyone at HIT, I walked past all the street vendors that are set up on the weekends. I was walking along, and I heard someone say America in Chinese. Knowing that I probably spurred the mention of the word, I looked up to where I heard the word coming from, and there is this man about fifteen feet to my left in his 40s or 50s staring strait at me. He is looking pretty pissed (possibly in the British sense of the word as well). He just keeps speaking in a loud angry tone while unwaveringly staring at me. I just keep walking. I look down at my shirt. I am wearing a shirt that has a stars-and-stripes recycling symbol on it and says, "America Recycles Everyday." I promptly zip up my jacket. It was a warm night. There was no reason to bring my jacket in the first place. No one had been anything but extremely nice and excited to me when they found out I was an American.

I arrived at HIT a couple minutes early because it is hard to gauge how long it will take to cross town in the buses. Mark and I met up with the Russians outside of the international student dorm there. It was a guy named Vanya's 19th birthday celebration. Somehow, we immediately get talking about basketball. Maybe because I'm tall and American, people assume I play basketball. I'm glad I do because I'm not sure if I could really relate to anyone otherwise. We agreed to play together sometime. In our group there were five Russians, one girl from Hong Kong named Joy, one guy from Barcelona named John, Mark, and myself. I got put in a cab with Vanya, Joy, and John. We had a nice discussion about politics. It started when I made mention to the law the prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sundays in Georgia. I've made mention to that law a couple times since I've been here to get a rise out of people. It sparked a good discussion of American politics. Having become interested in Spanish politics last summer when they legalized same-sex marriage, I asked John what he thought of Zapatero, Spain's current president. John had some criticisms of the current Spanish government from a Cataluyian perspective. He is in favor of independence for Catalan, but he started talking about how independence would hurt trade for Catalan by inhibiting trade with the rest of Spain. Vanya jumped in with an analogy about how the fall of the USSR hurt trade in Russia because resources, production, and assembly for products are now in different parts of Russia and former Soviet states. He says it has reduced Russia to an energy dealer. Our cab arrived first, and when we got out, I really appreciated that I was one of four people standing on the sidewalk from completely different corners of the world. Harbin is a very international city, and I appreciate the opportunity it has provided to speak with people from every continent.

Harbin has also made me extremely jealous of the language education systems of other countries, especially those in Europe. For example, Sven learned German, French, and English before he graduated high school. He spent seven months in Russia, so he can chat with the Russians in their tongue. He has also been in the language program here in China for a semester, so he is the wise sage that has experience learning the language and can offer advice to Mark and I when we voice our frustrations. Mark can speak Dutch, German, English, and French, and now he's making the effort to learn Chinese. I feel ashamed when I think about my Spanish speaking ability in relation to their English.

The restaurant we went to was very good but also strange. It was incredibly nice. We all walked past a doorman wearing a grey, three-piece suit while we were dressed in jeans and t-shirts. All guests had there own private room, but it was unnecessary at that point. We were sitting down to eat after eight, and the Chinese usually start eating dinner no later than five thirty. The restaurant was called Around the World, and our room was the Russian themed room. The entire room was made from wood. There was a fireplace with a matryoshka (those dolls that stack up inside each other) on it; the Russians informed us that they are only for tourists. There was no music, and the room was eerily quiet. Each seat at the table was set with twelve plates and twenty-six pieces of silverware. Vanya took the head of the table, the Russians lined his left side, and the group of "others" flanked his right. Most conversation stayed on its own side of the table with Vanya pivoting between the two. Beer came, and the language barriers loosened.

Vanya told us a story of one of his first nights in Harbin. A group of his friends went out to dinner, and we looking to go out afterwards. They start looking up the word for disco in the dictionary, when they stumble upon the word for striptease. Inspired by their discovery, they decide to take that course of action. They get in a cab and ask the driver to take them to a striptease. The driver asks them if they are looking for expensive or cheap. After hearing the price range on expensive, they determined that they are in the cheap market. The taxi takes them to this hotel. It is ninety yuan to get in the door. They pay and go in. They are taken to back a room with a bar, and all these women are lined up and the bar. At this point, Vanya struggles a bit with his English; he says, "These women are..." I fill in for him, "Prostitutes." The story continues. Their Chinese is not that great and the people in the hotel begin telling the Russians prices for their services. It is two hundred for a room for three hours. It is three hundred for a striptease. It is one hundred for sex. Mark chimes in, "Three hundred for a striptease, and one hundred for sex. Do they fuck with their clothes on?" Vanya says that they decide its getting late; the dorms are locked at midnight; they don't want to pay the money, so they just go home.

The group of Russian we ate with are from Moscow. They were telling us about the differences between themselves and the eastern Russians that are here. They feel like they can't understand the other Russian here. They said that all the eastern Russians care about is going to clubs and fighting. They come back the next day and brag about how they fought. We also had a long discussion about vodka, and the Russian traditions surrounding it. The food was excellent, and Vanya picked up the tab. I figured each meal was about fifty yuan, and in dollars, that is nothing (a little over 6) for the type of meal we ate. Given the exchange rate is four rubles to one yuan, it was a particularly generous gesture. Vanya said that it was his birthday, so he picked up the bill. Mark and I protested that that is the opposite of how it is supposed to go. He wouldn't hear us out.

Given that it is one of the only place in the city the foreigners go to, we all went to Blues after dinner. After a long week of work and class, everyone was in extremely high spirits. The group of young Aussies was there, and given our relatively new relationship, I was flattered by the warmth of their greeting. The mood definitely rubbed of on me, so much so that I actually made my way to the dance floor for a decent part of the evening. That is a very good indicator of the sort of state I was in. Really, I the reason I danced was because Oren was there and he was dancing. He was wantonly flailing himself about having a great time. It was absolutely hilarious. When people aren't taking themselves seriously, I really enjoy dancing. I ended up wearing someone's tie around my head on my head. I think it was discovered on the floor and bounced around a couple people until it ended up finding a home as my headband. It was the first time I really enjoyed myself there.

Tomorrow, I'm heading across the river to Sun Island. It is supposed to be a very pretty place, and I have been carrying my camera around a bit more. Tomorrow, there should be a picture update. Also, if your interested in a different take on some of the same places and events, Mark gave me the link to his blog. I read it, and I found it in many ways confirming of my experience. The URL is http://kruuemel.waarbenjij.nu. The URL is in Dutch, but he writes in English. Be sure to send me an e-mail.

A Small Problem

I just put up a post that details the last week. I started writing it before the two previous posts, so it isn't at the top of the page. The post is titled Teaching, Studying, and Such. Scroll down to it, or you can click on the title in the taskbar on the right.

Good News/Bad News

So this Monday, I started a Chinese class. Its at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Its going to be great. HIT is one of the best schools in China. My class is filled with people from all over the world. There are plenty of Koreans and Russians. There are three Africans, two Arabs, one Canadian, and myself. Its intensive; I'll have twenty hours of class a week. That's four hours of class every weekday on top of my (extremely light) teaching schedule. I think I'm going to really learn Chinese. Last night I memorized eleven characters. I was so excited because when I came here, I was content just learning oral Chinese. I was too intimidated by the characters to even make an attempt on my own. It was very rewarding to start down a path you never thought you could travel and feel like you could make it.

However, there is a price to this class beyond what it costs in tuition. For one, I am already behind. The class has already met for a week before I started. I'm twenty hours of class behind, and I have to learn what I missed on my own time. That means I probably won't go out, wander around, and run into unexpected things like I have been doing. By the time I catch up, I think I'll be too cold to want to wander aimlessly. Plus, I'm already on backlog for about a week of things I need to write about for the blog, and I expect updates to continue to be sporadic and become less eventful. I've made notes on things I want to write about, but I'm afraid the events will lose significance in my mind as time passes. I'm going to write about last week as soon as possible.

With that said, I had my worst moment since I came to China today. I had just walked out of the gates of HIT after class. I was walking toward my bus stop when a little homeless girl walked right in front of me. She was maybe two years old at the most, and she was incredibly cute. She had a thick, fluorescent pink jacket on that had the same tinge of dirt as her face and hands. Her mother was sitting up against the fence in the shade with an infant wrapped in burlap cloth. The little girl asked me for money. Surveying my pockets, I determined that I didn't have any change, but I had large bills and a one yuan bill and a five yuan bill. The one yuan bill was my bus fare back home. I decided against giving the girl money. I walked past. The little girl runs in directly front of me and says something I don't understand. I step to the side to go around her. She side steps right in front of me. I go to walk to the other side of her. She slides in front of me again and wraps her arms around both my legs. Her head came up to just above my knees. She looks at me and starts talking. I don't understand. I say, "I don't have money. I don't have money." Her mother starts talking to the girl. I can't understand. Everyone else is walking past. People are looking at me because I have been stopped there for a while. Finally, I push my hand on the girl's head to keep her in the same place. Holding her still, I step out of her grasp and around her. I start walking to the bus stop again. She runs as fast as she can beside me, but at my walking pace, she can only keep up for five steps. She drops off and walks back to her mother.

A couple steps later, I see my bus. I'm about fifty yards from my stop and determine that if I don't run, I'll have to wait for the next one. I run, hop on the bus, and quickly slide my one yuan bill into slit in the cash box. The driver looks at me and says two yuan. I look left into the bus. Its one of the air-conditioned buses with extra seats that cost two yuan. I have to slide my five in the cash box and sit down.

Johnny told me about a conversation that he had with an old homeless man. Johnny asked him how much he would get in a day. The man said sometimes he could make eighty in one day, but he doesn't get to keep it. The old man told him about the beggar "pimp" who goes around and takes ninety percent of what the beggars receive everyday. The pimp is a big strong guy, and the homeless are old men and women with kids who are weak and malnourished. If the pimp isn't happy with what he gets, he can beat the beggars freely without worry of repercussions. Apparently, this system is the norm for China. I don't present this story to validate or invalidate my actions today; the ethical questions in giving money to homeless people are beyond where I have attempted to reason. I presented this story to show the added complexity to ethical question in China.

I'd like to thank everyone who has let me know that they are reading. I appreciate the compliments, and I'm glad I can share a bit of this experience with you. Continue to write me. I'll try to have more of my exploits and pictures up here as soon as possible.