Week 26 - Dead Rats and Live Wires, or, No Longer Living in a Safety First World

And so, a little bit richer and a little bit wise.... well, mostly just a little bit richer, we can officially bring the Zhaoqing chapter of our life to a close.

Was it worth it? I'm not entirely sure. The added paychecks are certainly quite nice. Working just 6 days with them allowed us to take a trip to Taiwan, as well as financing most of our pending trip to Southeast Asia. On the other hand it was a pretty miserable gig, and one that I essentially had to drag myself to every week. I really disliked the students at this school, and I did not form any kind of connection with the staff either. Even more so than in Foshan, one get the impression of being taken advantage of. Perhaps worst of all, this position has forced me to give up having any real semblance of a weekend in two months. When you only have a finite amount of time in a foreign country, having to give up a large percentage of that time to babysit crappy kid who are even more unwilling to learn than average is a pretty raw situation to be in.

True to form, this last week in Zhao was absolutely insane. We were told a week ago that we would have to do "demo lessons" for some parents this week. No, further instructions were not provided. I was, however, informed a few days later that I was going to do a cooking demo.

"Cooking? Great, I can cook",  said to this little waif of a woman. Even by Chinese standards Betty was pretty small. If she hung upside down on some monkey bars for a few hours and really stretched herself out she may have been able to reach 5 feet tall. Maybe.

"Fantastic!", she said, "Then you will have to make sushi".

"Uh.... I don't know how to make sushi", I replied.

"Do you like it?"

"Sure, I love sushi".

"Well", she said with a huge smile, as if everything had been solved completely, "you must be very good at making it then".

So dumbfounded was I by this leap of logic that I just let it go. How does someone even reply to that? When dealing with the clearly enormous language and cultural barrier that is at play, a barrier so big that it allows Betty to think "Jon enjoys eating sushi so therefore he's clearly a veritable sensei when it comes to cutting and preparing raw fish in the traditional Japanese style", I have finally learned to leave things be.

After arriving in the somewhat provincial town of Zhaoqing for the last time, we took a final stock of things in our second apartment. This apartment, which I have mentioned used to belong to a guy named Arby who got deported, has sort of been our home away from home since December. Laura and I jokingly call it our summer home (THE JOKE IS THAT IT'S THE WINTER! DO YOU GET IT?). Arby left behind a lot of crap, and now that we knew that he was never allowed to come back to China we felt that the only appropriate thing to do was to steal pretty much everything we were able to.

Before shouts of "uncalled for!" and "you dirty rotten scoundrels!", it is worth noting that this is pretty much standard fare around here when this sort of thing happens. By the time it was clear Arby wasn't coming back, a lot of the Chinese teachers and nearly all of the foreign teachers had come over and picked over his things. Back at the end of December we showed up to the apartment one night to find most of the stuff missing. It was really confusing, not to mention upsetting! It was a damn good thing we never kept any valuables there.

Also of note is that the school "purchased" a lot of "new things" specifically for Laura and I. I felt that it was morally acceptable to hang onto these things since they were supposedly obtained for our benefit. After discovering  that a lot of the things that they claimed were new were not new (such as the disgusting crumbling mattress), and that a lot of the other things were straight up stolen (such as the comforter with the security tags still on), we felt justified in taking whatever we wanted back to Foshan.

In the end we got away with some pretty high quality olive oil, lots of cleaning supplies and shampoos, a life-saving space heater, and a single pillow. I wanted to take both pillows, but in the end only the one would fit.

After taking stock of the things that would come back home with us, we went to bed and prepared for our enigmatic "demo lessons".

As it turns out, the demo lessons were actually quite straightforward. For one of the 40 minute periods during both the morning and afternoon shifts, the parents of the children were going to come and observe the lesson. This is, at least on the surface, a method for allowing the parents to see the kind of education their kids are getting and to ostensibly feel a lot better about the serious cash they are dropping to get their kids a leg-up on the competition (read: about 300 million other elementary school aged people in the country).

This too, has a feeling of scam about it. I was told slightly ahead of time that I had to teach the kids a lesson that they had already learned before, and was encouraged to pick a lesson that they knew extremely well. The children had apparently been rehearsing all week in an effort to appear like they knew more English than they actually did. For the first two 40 minute classes of the day, I "taught" my demo lesson about 5 times. It was rehearsed like a play, and the assistant teacher Betty made sure that each student was able to answer their questions and that everyone looked like a little genius. I was made to promise not to ask any questions that were not well-rehearsed. At the same time, it was made clear to me that I was supposed to treat all of this like a brand new lesson.

To put it bluntly, the school was trying to fleece the parents. The school wants the parents to think that all of the children are little geniuses who are learning at such a high level that they already know all the answers to all of the lessons, even ones they haven't heard yet. The demo lessons had to include several elements of the "features" that the school offered, including text book learning and audio-visual materials. We were expected to do things that we NEVER actually do with the kids, just so that the parents feel as though they are getting their money's worth at this $100+ (USD) per day training academy.

It is not the first time that I have been made to feel like a bit of a worm in China, but it is definitely the most slimy. Going back and forth from both schools for 2 months as really highlighted just how much worse the kids in Zhaoqing are at, well, everything. They are paying more money for a much worse education because the school in Zhaoqing has a better facade and less competition. I lightly make fun of my school in Foshan pretty frequently, but any given child who is 9 or older is actually quite competent at getting their ideas across in English. In Zhaoqing, children in the same age cohort are absolutely floundering by comparison.

One of my 8 year olds in the morning literally does not know the English alphabet. He gets through A, B, and C and then just falls apart. For the demo lessons, we rehearsed the word "apple" with him about 50 times, and then the Chinese teacher told him that any time I called on him, he should say apple. Like a little performing seal I went along with this ruse, and every time I asked a question to which the answer was apple, I called on little Ken.

The sushi portion of the demo lessons went very smoothly. Surprisingly enough, it actually IS very easy to make sushi. Betty made a brief power point about how to make sushi, which I was supposed to "teach" to the students and their parents, but it was decently made enough that I was able to follow along just fine.

Of course, they didn't have any traditional sushi ingredients. For this I am somewhat thankful. I'm not sure I would trust this school to buy fresh, quality fish and then to also store it in a safe way until it was needed. No, instead of fish we had sausages and cucumbers. So very traditional! China has a lot of great food, don't get me wrong, but sausages are not something that the Chinese make well. Luckily the soy sauce and the rice and the cucumber blocked a lot of the stale, preserved, rubbery taste of their bland and crappy sausages.

The parents were impressed. I was originally only supposed to do the Sushi demo one time that day, but it went down such a storm that our boss asked me to do it again in the afternoon. Not too bad for someone who doesn't actually know how to make sushi, eh?

A weird incident occurred during the afternoon session. Before doing the sushi demo, I had to fill time for about 20 minutes. What we had decided on (and rehearsed) was that I would "teach" the kids some basic food words such a "mango" and 'hungry". One of the words that I taught the kids was the word "full". As with all of my other lessons, I teach vocab words to the Zhaoqing kids by showing them photos. Since we do not get much assistance from the Chinese TAs, and since my fluency in Chinese is not yet strong enough for me provide written vocab lists, pictures is often the best way to get a concept across. For the picture "full", I showed a woman holding a bowl of food. Her face was down-turned, in an expression that clearly indicated "I do not want to eat any more of this", and her stomach was a little bit bloated. All in all the picture was, if I say so myself, quite good at getting the point across. I had shown this slide to my morning class, as well as my kids back in Foshan. Everyone so far had gotten the intended meaning, and no incidents had occurred.

In the afternoon class, however, the slide came up and everyone freaked out. All the students started giggling uncontrollably, and the parents all averted their eyes, clearly embarrassed. Something about the photography was apparently inappropriate. I've been thinking about it for several days now and the only conclusion I can reach is that the woman was wearing a tank top which meant that her shoulders were bare. I've been told that this is occasionally considered inappropriate or rude in Asia, although barring this potential situation I have never come across someone actually taking offense to bare shoulders. In fact I see young Chinese women with tank-tops on all the time in the summer. I suppose I'll never know. At any rate, I quickly moved passed that slide and had to distract my audience with another topic.

Bus rides to and from Zhaoqing were always very strange. There's a bus every 30 minutes departing between the cities, so you would think that things would be consistent. These drivers, you tell yourself, have probably done this run a thousand times. No room for unexpected things.

This was never the case.

Buses frequently were 20-30 minutes late. They also departed early more than once. How can this country get anything accomplished when the bus you bought a ticket for leaves ten minutes early? The bus ride is supposed to take roughly 2 hours, but absolutely zero of the twelve journeys we took lasted that long. We were always an hour late or an hour early.

Something that happened almost every time we went to ZQ was that we would stop for gas at the scam station. I call it the scam station because it was located less than 10 minutes away from the final destination. Why couldn't the bus driver just drop us all off and then come back for gas? Because, you see, when we went to the gas station we were forced to get off of the bus and wait in a "waiting area" for half an hour. This waiting area has a little convenience store inside of it, with snacks that are marked up a good 300% from what they are normally priced.

The rides home were never worse, per se, but they were always different. I think we had the same driver every single time. He drove like a maniac! Slamming on the brakes left and right, I memorized a few Buddhist prayers to say every Saturday evening as I clung to my seat for dear life. One time, I kid you not, this bus driver PULLED OVER AND PICKED UP A HITCHHIKER! He looked like some kind of hatchet-wielding serial killer. Haggard is a word I do not use often, but it is one that I will apply judiciously here. I did not do any napping on that bus trip, I'll tell you what.

Speaking of picking up random hitchhikers, I feel as though China has become so much weirder since 2015 hit. I don't know what it is, maybe I just got lulled into a false sense of security these past few months, and am just starting to notice it again. Whatever the cause for my shock and awe, I have seen some crazy things this week.

The weirdest thing might just be the baby that we saw while out for a jog last week. We were on the "greenway", one of the public walking areas in the city. Lately the greenway has lost some of its charm. The water levels have gone down a lot, since winter is the dry season, and the sludgy mud that has been revealed in the canals smells absolutely foul. Additionally, now that we do most of our exercising in the afternoon we see a lot of teenagers who are on their lunch break. They like to make fun of "fat Americans" who are out running. Obviously the solution is to ignore them, but one can only take so much ridicule before it goes to one's head. It's not very fun to go running anymore.

But anyway! This baby! So the other day Laura and I were out for a jog and we saw this baby playing along the pathway. We could not tell what the baby was toying with, but as we got closer our eyes widened with horror. Low and behold, the baby was playing with a dead rat. No, I don't mean he was standing near it or poking it with a stick, he was full on playing some imaginary game with this rapidly deteriorating corpse. Where were his parents, I hear you asking? Well, they were right there. The mother was looking onward at the baby, fondly aware that her baby was having a nice time playing with this free toy. I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry! I wanted to snatch that baby away so fast. What is the best thing to do in this situation, though? Never mind the language barrier, where does someone even begin to explain to someone who thinks that it's okay for their baby to play with road kill that this is not a good idea? I just shook my head and kept running, perhaps a little faster than before.

A close runner up for most zany observance this week as the man clipping his fingernails and toenails on the bus. No, it wasn't some nervous tic where he bites his nails (something that I still struggle with). This dude had nail clippers with him and was fully going to town on his hands and feet. Human debris was flying around everywhere; he made no effort to collect the leavings. This is my life, people.

Sunday after coming home from Zhaoqing, Laura and I went to explore the giant pagoda in the center of town. Looming over us like a smaller and more Chinese Empire State Building, on a clear day you can see the pagoda from most locations in the Nanhai area. We had never been to the pagoda before. Leon, one of our coworkers, mentioned visiting it a few months back and saying that you couldn't get very close. The whole area was apparently under construction.

Throwing caution to the wind, and with little else better to do, we decided to check it out. We got lucky! The park and the pagoda itself were no longer under construction, and were open to the public. Leigang park is one of my new favorite places in town, for sure. Lots of beautiful green spaces, and not too crowded despite being a newly opened tourist attraction. I definitely plan on going back soon.

The park had no admission fee, and neither did the pagoda. We spent about an hour climbing stairs and exploring the grounds. We ended up at the very top of the big Chinese monolith looking out on the city. Even though it was slightly smoggy (what else is new?) the view was actually fantastic. It was the best and most comprehensive glance I have thus-far been able to enjoy of the city I now call home. We even managed to spot out some other city landmarks from our high vantage point. Look! There is our school! Oh, there is that KFC we go to sometimes! Even the loud, annoying Chinese children that were hanging off the railings and screaming 8 stories down to their parents couldn't ruin the mood. Well, they did ruin it a little bit. I mean, eventually we just couldn't take it anymore and we left in a huff. Before the huff though, it was a great time.

On our way out of the park I decided to check off another item off of my "China Bucket List", and I bought a stalk of sugar cane. These things sell like hotcakes all over the place. It has to be one of the most popular things for street vendors to sell, at least in Foshan, Zhaoqing, and Guangzhou. Something about gnawing on a huge plank of what is essentially wood had kept me from attempting it up until this point, but after climbing the pagoda and feeling, for the moment at least, especially Chinese, I went and bought some.

It was so unbelievably delicious! A little bit like chewing on a honey comb, eating sugar cane has somewhat of a learning curve. There are parts of the woody pulp that cannot be chewed down or digested, and ultimately have to be spit out. On the other hand. the stuff that you can swallow is perfection. Extremely sweet, cold, and terribly refreshing, I truly think sugar cane might be my new favorite snack. A precursory glance around the Internet indicates that raw sugar cane and raw sugar cane juice are extremely healthy in modest portions, which is just another reason why I'll be munching on this a lot more often from now on.

The work week did not yield too many noteworthy stories this time around. We were informed recently that the last 2 weeks in January would be spent preparing for a "winter camp", and as such that all of our classes were cancelled. I suppose that means this past week was my last week of classes this semester. It did not end with any sort of hoopla. Most of the classes this week were cancelled last minute as well, because the kids needed to study for some exam they were taking in another class.The semester is not going out with a roar, but a whimper.

One thing that did happen, though, was grading day. Since the entire student body (nearly 2000) took an exam, there were a lot of papers that needed grading. Not only did they cancel all of the classes for the foreign teachers so that the students could take the exam, but they also recruited the foreign teachers to help grade all of the papers. So, on Thursday afternoon the seven foreign teachers and about 30 other Chinese teachers all piled into the communism room (have I mentioned the communism room before? No? I'll talk about it next week) and spent 2 hours speed grading.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but it was insanity. The communism room is extremely echoy, and the 30 Chinese teachers were all SCREAMING at each other the entire time. There is no such thing as "indoor voices" in China, and whether you are 6 inches or 6 miles away from your friend, Chinese people talk with the same volume. I took my ipod and my headphones with me and blasted some tunes as loudly as possible, but I was absolutely unable to drown out the cackling of 30 gossipy Chinese women. Between the smog and the noise levels, Thursday gave me one of my worst headaches yet.

The grading actually went by very quickly. The teachers design the tests so that they can be speed graded. All of the questions are arranged in columns and rows, and then the answers are selected so that it can be marked up at a glance. For example, on the pages I was grading, column 1 was all TRUE, column 2 was all FALSE, and column 3 was all TRUE. Obviously this brings the validity of the test into question, since I imagine it does not take a genius to figure out the system and to just answer the questions in a geometrical manner, but who am I to judge? I'm just a big dumb foreigner.

With the image of an echo chamber filled with screaming Chinese ladies stuck firmly in your head, I will now take leave of this blog for the time being. Tune in next week where I talk about life-threatening smog and the creative ways to dodge boredom when there's absolutely nothing to do at work for the whole month!