Week 19: Pizza Pizza, Tastes Great, or, Whitesploitation?

Folks, we are almost upon the momentous occasion of week 20!

Can you imagine? 20 weeks in China? How insane. It's really surprising that I haven't just given up and come home yet. Who'd have thought that I'd be able to put up with (so far) 19 weeks of unlivable weather, strange food, bizarre customs, smelly streets, and cockroaches.

I am unsure if I have changed as a person or not, but it is starting to feel like I have. Things that used to annoy me are getting to be pretty commonplace, and things that I never thought I'd be able to contend with have happened to me and I've overcome them. I have learned that living abroad is definitely not for the faint of heart, and I have also come to the conclusion that I am most definitely NOT faint of heart.

This week will be forever burned into my memory as the one where we discovered the pizza challenge.

There is a bar in Foshan called The Lizard Lounge. It is owned by a British guy and is "western" themed. I had heretofore never been to The Lizard Lounge, but this week my coworker Nathan alerted me to the fact that they do a pub quiz every other Tuesday. Now, if you know very much about me at all you will know that I enjoy a good beer and a good quiz more than just about anything. I jumped at the opportunity.

Upon arriving at the humble establishment, I was also alerted to the fact that this Lounge for Lizards also does pizza. One particular creation of theirs is the "Belly Buster", a 20 inch monstrosity that's sold at the actually not unreasonable price of 180 Yuan (30 bucks). With the pizza comes a fateful challenge. If one single person can eat the entire pizza, he or she wins immortal fame and glory, as well as getting a drink coupon and their money back on the pizza.

I had considered doing the challenge myself, but ultimately decided against it for the time being. There were just too many variables. How big is a 20 inch round pizza anyway? It's not like I had any way of figuring that out. I was also unsure of how thick the crust is and how many topics it came with. These things matter, people!

This was not my first encounter with an eating challenge. Back at U of M I once placed 3rd in a burrito eating competition with about 20 participants. I won a T-Shirt! I'm still proud of that shirt, but I also remember how absolutely terrible I felt for the next day and a half after scarfing down 3 of the biggest and most stomach-churning Mexican creations I had ever encountered. The last burrito was secretly covered in "diablo sauce" by the way...

Anyway for my first quiz night at The Lounge, I opted against the challenge. The same can not be said for Leon and Chris, two of my compatriots. These boys both attempted the challenge, but in the end only Leon succeeded. It was just as fun cheering him on as it would have been to eat the pizza myself, I think. Also, Laura and Zac and I ordered one of the big guys to split among ourselves, so we were able to taste the perfection.

I have to say, it's definitely the best pizza I have had in China. It reminded my so much of home that I daresay my eyes may have watered a little with each bite. These could have been the spicy peppers the pizza was so prodigiously laden with, of course, but I think we all know the truth.

Leon was a total champ. He ate the first half of the pizza without even batting an eye. The second half provided the bigger challenge, but he was ultimately victorious and he barely even had to slow down. Chris performed very admirably, only failing to digest 2 of the 10 gargantuan pieces.

Having witnessed the fury and cheese-stuffed drama of the Lizard Lounge pizza challenge, I am considering putting forth my candidacy for next time. Splitting 1/3 with Laura and Zac left my satisfied, but I could definitely had put away a lot more with minimal effort.

The quiz itself was a lot of fun. Nathan was the quizmaster (probably why he wanted us all to come out!) and he puts on a tough quiz. After 50 1 point questions, the highest scoring team had, I believe, less than 30. Our team (The Lovely Ladyboys) did not win, however we had a respectable score in the middle of the pack.

Most excitingly, I learned that ANYONE can be the quiz master, you just have to be the first to volunteer. Channeling my best Jennifer Lawrence, I volunteered as tribute for the December 9th games. I am excited to test my skills as a quiz master. I've been on the other side of that relationship for so long that I think I have what it takes to write some good questions. We will see, though. The trick, I think, is to have just enough easy ones that everyone has a good time with it, but to have enough hard ones that there's a legitimate challenge.

This week we also had a "meeting" with all the other foreign teachers and our boss, Angel. These meetings are always strange, confusing, frustrating, and sometimes even a little bit hurtful.  As I have tried to convey these last 133 days, communication is the most maddening aspect of my Chinese career. The problems do not arise from a language problem, so I'm led to conclude it is a cultural discrepancy. This does not really encompass the difficulty or the problems, however.

Everything in China is absolutely last minute. If there is something that a teacher or a boss MUST tell us, it will always be moments before it must be done. Classes are cancelled or rearranged, seemingly at random, and we are always told about it when we are ON OUR WAY to the classes. The teachers are always saying things like "As you know, the class has been cancelled", or "remember when we told you the other day that class was cancelled". Of course, nobody ever actually gives the advanced notice. I'm not sure if they actually THINK they gave us the notice, or if that's just part of the culture, to act like everyone knows everything all the time even when they have no proper way of knowing.

So anyway, these meetings with Angel are like the zenith of these problems. We have the meetings maybe once a month, and Angel always tells us about things that are happening in the next few days (or hours!!!) as if she told us about them two months ago. These frustrating events are compounded by the backhanded criticisms that are always so easily dealt out during the meetings.

Now, I know for a fact that this IS a cultural thing. Offering criticisms or complaints about people's behavior or personal appearance is something that is a lot more common in China and something that doesn't have the same sort of flavor as it would in the US. It's expected and completely normal, and no one gets offended by it. Trying to be the seasoned world traveler that I am, I try to let these things roll off my back, but I was raised in America and I cannot help but be hurt sometimes by the way that we are spoken to. These criticism sessions, it is also worth noting, come from the children. Even though we are THEIR teachers, Angel apparently goes around once a month with a survey and asks the kids in the classrooms what they do and don't like about us. She then takes their comments and passes them on to us, insinuating that the children are always right in every situation. 

Some examples of the things that we have been told are that we are too boring, that we don't smile enough, that we don't dress "fun" enough, that we should sing and dance more, that we should play more games in class and that we need to do less school work. The kids say that we act "too much like parents" and "not enough like their friends or siblings"

I appreciate that even though they are children they are allowed to have opinions about us, and that they should be taken into consideration. However, I take issue with the fact that Angel accepts "we need to do less school work" in school as something that WE SHOULD DO! They are in school and they are kids, it's not surprising or even wrong that they don't want to do the work, but it is frustrating that our boss is siding with the kids on these issues. I also think that telling us we don't "sing and dance" enough is really a relevant issue to teaching English lessons.

Oh well. I try to take these with a grain of salt, understanding that the feelings I feel or just cultural and they are not meant to be personal It's just that in these meetings, coupled with the general confusion regarding events that are springing up like so many rotten-smelling roses, it can be a lot to handle.

This week we learned that the children were having "field" day all week, and that classes would be cancelled or rearranged without warning. There was also the matter of the field trip. Apparently next Tuesday (12/2) there would be a field trip to a place called Gaoming. We asked for more details, but our answers were characteristically vague and unhelpful. All that we really walked away knowing was that the field trip would happen, and that we were required to go too. In addition to the "field day" events of this week, we were told that next Thursday and Friday (12/4 and 12/5) would be "Sports days" and that all classes were cancelled. I still as of this writing don't really know what this entails.

The final order of business was Midterms. Even though at the beginning of the year we were told by Angel and also Nathan (who is in his second year here) that there are no midterm exams at this school, Angel told us at the meeting this week that we should "already be preparing the midterm examinations". We were given a few (very) rough guidelines surrounding what is expected the be tested during the tests, and we were told to give the children the midterms the week of December 8th.

Now, it was also suggested that we spend time in class "reviewing for the midterms", but when I highlighted the fact that we couldn't very easily plan review lessons when classes were scheduled to be cancelled or rearranged without warning all week, and when half of the week's classes were guaranteed to be cancelled the week after that. Angel offered no advice in this matter.

Armed with a whole lot of facts and no understanding of any of it, I planned the next few weeks' worth of lessons very tentatively.

My little kids have been learning the Days of the Week lately, and it has to be the most mind-numbingly boring lessons I've ever had to teach. The Chinese teacher insists that we continue to spend more time on the subject, even though it was clear from lesson 1 that all the kids knew the days of the week already. Very frustrating (but what else is new!)

Thanksgiving came and went this week almost entirely without note. Thursday is the day we work 12 hours, so we were not able to do anything festive. Even though there are some foreign-based and American-owned restaurants in Foshan none of them were doing anything special for the day. One or two of the teachers knew to wish us a happy day, but otherwise it was just a Thursday. Not wanting to be complete downers, Laura and I bought some wine, cheese, and crackers and had a "Thanksgiving feast" after work by ourselves. It was nice and not sad at all.

In other news, Christmas sentiments have swept China. We were worried after the lukewarm reception that Halloween received and the nonexistent recognition of Thanksgiving that Christmas would sort of be glossed over as well (which, obviously they wouldn't recognize Thanksgiving. There's no reason for them to even know what it is. It still made me sad though). Thankfully this is not the case. There are a lot of decorations all over, and people seem to be excited for the season. A lot of shops are playing Christmas music and some of the employees have even started wearing Christmas hats.

It's funny how the rampant commercialism that would normally annoy me at home is actually becoming a bit of a lifeline tethering me to the good feelings and nostalgia that I miss so dearly over here. Laura and I have taken to sitting in Starbucks during our lunch break once or twice a week, slowly sipping our holiday-flavored sugar coffees and just basking in the familiar and the comforting. I have dealt with missing my friends and family very well so far on this trip, but I can already tell that Christmastime will be my ultimate trial. I miss so many of the traditions and yearly happenings that it is causing an aching deep inside. Of course, maybe that's just the overly sugary coffee drinks...

Speaking of winter, the weather has once again taken a delightful turn toward the chilly. All this week it's been in the 50s, and it's been wonderful. Yes, the Chinese people are taking it very hard. They all look like they're on their way to a skiing trip in the Andes. Laura, the other foreign teachers, and I are all loving it though. I finally got to wear the hoodie that I brought from home, and I've been able to wear pants all week.

The cold has also highlighted another one of China's delightfully annoying problems. Not content with just being the fire-ridden Hephaestian cauldron that it is 9-10 months of the year, China also manages to make 50 degrees feel downright frigid. You see, there is no central heating in China. They don't see the point of it since it's so hot most of the time. There is also no insulation anywhere. They don't even know what it is. Our school is made entirely of concrete and steel and rock and tile. 

So, even though 50 degrees would be a bit brisk at home, over here it seeps into your very soul. It's not so bad at first, but after a few hours you get very sick of it, and there is no reprieve from it anywhere. Most stores and businesses are open-air shops, not having true front doors or walls. Even rooms that have 4 walls are absolutely riddled with drafts and windows that can't shut properly. From the moment you pick your head up off your rock-filled pillow in the morning until you plot back down onto the board-stiff bed in the evening you are frigid. Bathrooms and morning showers are an exercise in misery. I am sitting here at school typing this post and am lightly shivering, knowing full well that I will not be able to find a place with any warmth any time soon.

Unless we are on a bus. Then they have the heat on as high as it will go and we all sweat through our multiple layers.

The Chinese people combat this by wearing the aforementioned Mt.-Everest-Ascent-Grade winter wear. I have considered buying some, but surprise surprise, they don't have anything in my size anywhere in this country.

Relatedly, we have a bathroom scale in our apartment that was left behind by our foreign teacher predecessors. I noticed yesterday that, in addition to the weight (in kilograms), there are also swaths of green, yellow, and red along the bottom of the scale. I peered more closely and with the aid of my Chinese app was able to translate what the signs mean.

The Green band said "Too skinny", the yellow "healthy weight" and the red was "dangerously fat". You'll be pleased to know the "Dangerously fat" zone is centered on 60 kg. You'll also be pleased to know that I am nearly 30kg heaver than that. The red band spins around almost two times before we get to my weight. For those of you playing at home, 60kg is about 130 pounds. Dangerously fat, indeed.

This weekend was another quiet one, although on Friday night we went to our first Chinese Club. Unlike a lot of the other bars and clubs that we have been to in China so far which have either been friendly to foreigners or even catered to them specifically, Show Bar and Victoria were two clubs that were BY the Chinese and FOR the Chinese. Overall the experience was not too different. It was still loud, crowded, and hot. The DJs were playing generic club music, and the smoke and laser lights were all too familiar.

One of the biggest differences was, of course, the attention that we got. We were definitely "unique" and "interesting" in our whiteness at this club. People tried to talk to us, tried to dance with us, and tried to buy us drinks basically the whole time. It would have been flattering if, after nearly five months, we weren't pretty used to it.

The other big difference was the "show". Show Bar features live entertainment in the form of a dancing show twice a night. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. The dancers, two men and two women, were all Caucasians. The "plot" of the dancing show roughly involved a King, two Queens, and a Joker, and seemed to be based loosely on a deck of cards. What the show was, though, was very exploitative. It was clearly one of those not-too-rare moments in China where the entire point of the activity was "Gee aren't white people goofy looking?". The audience laughed and jeered as the four performers did a number of dances that ranged from sexy and scandalous to purposefully comedic and and silly.

I won't say that I was offended, because I wasn't. It didn't hurt me or bother me in any way. Similarly, it would not be accurate to say that the performers were being abused or mistreated. I'm sure they are paid decently and the audience was largely respectful of them during and after their performance.

What it did make me was uncomfortable. I didn't like that people were laughing at people who looked like me for the sheer fact that they looked that way. I sort of just wanted it to end. 

I will say is that it was a very eye opening experience. As a white American male it is very rare for me to witness anything like that. To highlight the title of this week's post, it definitely felt like Whitesploitation. The whole purpose of the show was to highlight how silly and different white people are. This sort of thing can obviously not even begin to compare to the centuries of mistreatment, prejudice, and oppression that white people have dealt out to other races, but I will say that it allowed me to understand things from a slightly new perspective. I hope that I am able to use that perspective to become a better person moving forward.

On a final note, Laura and I will definitely be going to Taiwan over Christmas. I can't wait to visit another country! Exciting things coming up this month, folks.

That about wraps it up for me this week. Stay tuned for next week when I share the insane experiences I lived through on "the field trip".