An American in Chengdu
Year of the Tiger
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Chinese New Year (known here as Spring Festival) is in two weeks, and I’m starting to get the idea that it’s kind of a big deal. This is when universities take their between-semesters break, and the powers that be have declared that the foreign teachers should get the entire month of February off. Tonight, as my final official duty before my vacation begins, I went to the school’s holiday party for teachers.
About a dozen of us had gathered on Thursday to coordinate a performance of a song; I was told I’d be handed the mic for a four-line verse, “since you are a foreigner.” This afternoon I practiced the lines, and when I sang them for Samantha just before the dinner started she declared my performance satisfactory. There was probably no connection, but she spoke much more Chinese to me this evening than usual, and assured the nurse sitting on the other side of me that “she can speak some Chinese.”
I needn’t have worried too much about giving a perfect performance; the sound system was bad, and most of the groups even less practiced than ours. In one group the men were dressed in silk jackets and the women in cute red suits with white trim that made them look like Santa’s Chinese helpers. Their singing was no less terrible than the rest of ours, however. In addition to the songs, there was a skit with a nurse and three slovenly patients, of which I understood nothing. The best performance was by four 20-somethings who danced to an R&B song.
The performance quality was really beside the point, though: the important thing for a Spring Festival celebration is that it be renao (“bustling with noise and excitement,” according to one translation). To this end there were gifts (one dispensed to each of us when we came in, others distributed by a raffle, and still others by performers after each song), toasts (someone would come by our table about twice a minute for this purpose, and we’d all stand up and touch glasses), exploding tubes of confetti, and, of course, the performances. There was much merriment and little conversation.
After about an hour and a half the room was suddenly half-empty. This, it seems, is how Chinese banquets normally end: early, and with few goodbyes. I walked home with my loot: fabric stool that can also be used to store things, a lucky red envelope with some token cash, a set of ceramic bowls with plastic lids for storage, and a large tin of mango-flavored candy. I’d also gained an intangible grasp of this concept of renao.
So happy new year, everyone! I probably won’t be blogging while traveling, but I’ll try to do the trips some justice when I get back. Here’s the plan:
Feb. 1-10: South to Kunming and Xishuangbanna with Cecilia
Feb. 12-18: Deano visits Chengdu; we see the local sites, including those long-snubbed pandas
Feb. 19-28: Malaysian Borneo with Deano, plus a few days in Kuala Lampur.
Geography
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When a Chinese person asks where in America I’m from, it gives me a chance to practice the tongue-twister that is the 
Chinese translation of Colorado: ke lwow la dwow (here written phonetically instead of in pinyin, for full tongue-twisting effect). Then my new acquaintance invariably says, brightly, “Oh, the Grand Canyon!”
The same thing has often happened to me in Europe (minus the Chinese), and even sometimes when talking to fellow Americans. I don’t know what respectable river confines itself to a single state (do people think the Mississippi River only flows through Mississippi?), but yes, it is a little confusing that the Colorado River runs through the Grand Canyon in the state of Arizona. It’s interesting to me that the world over, the name of the river that carves the Grand Canyon is apparently deemed important enough information to include in school books, but the name Arizona is not.
As of this week I’ve stopped correcting people who think the Grand Canyon is in Colorado. It’s impressive that they have any association at all with the name of one of the 50 states in one of the world’s 200 or so countries, even if that association is a tiny bit off. After all, most Americans find Colorado indistinguishable from the other “square states in the middle,” believe it to be completely mountainous, and/or think it’s freezing cold and snow-covered all winter. And then there are those who think that Alaska is an island off the coast of California. If we don’t really need to know the location of the Grand Canyon, then why would a Sichuanese?
Actually, there is one setting in which my new nod-and-smile policy could plausibly backfire: a trivia contest. Let’s say the question is, “In which American state is the Grand Canyon?” Teammate A says it’s in Arizona. But teammates B, C, and D insist it’s in Colorado. Then Teammate C settles the argument: “But I met someone from Colorado, and she said the Grand Canyon is there!” The teammates lose and brings everlasting shame on their families.
Fortunately, the odds of someone I meet both getting that question and having a teammate who knows the correct answer are vanishingly small. So I’ll take my chances.
Move
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I moved on Monday. The powers that be at the school decided that my old place was due for a complete renovation, so they moved me into another school-owned building a bit further from work. Though it’s been a huge hassle so far I think it will turn out to be for the best, as my old place didn’t get enough natural light and was moldy. I’ll get more exercise now that I live on the fifth floor instead of the first. The neighborhood is lively, with lots of little shops and old men playing cards on folding tables set up on the sidewalk. And then there are the architectural features of my building, such as a parking garage for bikes. I’ve never seen such a thing in the States, but there’s one at work, too. It’s nice to live in a place where bicycling is so common, though not so nice that leaving a (locked) bike parked on the sidewalk overnight is tantamount to kissing it goodbye.
Here are a few picture of my new building. Once I get the apartment itself cleaned up, I’ll post pictures of it on Flickr.
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- The lobby of my new building. The curvy ramp on the right goes to the bike garage; the curvy staircase to the left goes to the courtyard.
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- The courtyard is built on the roof of a row of shops. It’s a nice green space.
Christmas
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It seems to me that the assault of Christmas is so total in the US that it can’t fail to induce a certain cynicism in most sane
The Wangjiang River on Christmas. There are a few lanterns above the trees on the left.
people. The mandatory shopping! The carols! The decorations! The carols! The sweets! I try to ignore it for two months, and then I go home, where the tree is already up and decorated. I put the presents I brought into gift bags, and there it is: Christmas, with little effort required on my part.
This year, however, I felt there wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas unless I made it happen myself. It happened that my last spoken English session with the doctors fell on the 25th, so it was obvious what the theme of that day’s lesson should be. But how to stage a non-depressing Christmas party at 10 am in an unheated, fluorescent-lit classroom? This would require some preparation.
On my trip home I stocked up on candy canes, some decorations, and miniature stockings. I found more decorations in China. Since I don’t have an oven, I got the number of a local woman who delivers bagels to a friend and, with Samantha as a mediator for the rather complicated transaction, put in an order for cookies shaped like angels and Christmas trees. I chose a song to teach the students (Santa Claus is Coming to Town) and a movie to show (Elf, for which I put together a vocabulary sheet). I coordinated a Secret Santa gift exchange among the students.
All this paid off on Christmas morning, as the students were wonderfully enthusiastic about everything from getting their pictures taken with “Santa” (me in a Santa hat), to opening presents, to the napkins I’d bought that had Christmas tree designs printed on them (apparently they’re just used to the white kind here).
That afternoon I went to a small get-together hosted by a Canadian and a Scot, where the broken remains of the Christmas cookies were a big hit. We ate treats and chatted, played a trivia and charades games, and had a white elephant gift exchange in which everyone was too polite to take anyone else’s gift.
We moved on to someone else’s apartment for dinner, an informal but bountiful spread of Sichuan dishes. I headed home around 10:00. Near the bars and clubs along the river, Christmas didn’t look much different from any other Friday night in Chengdu, though perhaps it was a little busier. As I crossed a bridge I saw people lighting fires under red lanterns, and stopped to admire the result: star-like points of light rising up to keep the moon company. This may be a holiday tradition, but I suspect that, like dodging trained monkeys, it’s just something to do when you’re out on a weekend night.
In conclusion, I’m still not sure what exactly Christmas means in China, though it looks like an excuse to decorate, wish people merry Christmas, and perhaps have a party. But I had a great time in my role as Christmas ambassador.
Furniture
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The move to the new office reminded me of a rant I’ve been meaning to post for some time, on the subject of Chinese 
furniture. This picture, of the table and one of the chair in my apartment, is a good illustration of my reasons for complaint. Note that the table has two levels. The bottom one could, I suppose, be used to store a napkin holder, condiments, or anything else that didn’t fit on a laden table. Or diners could use it to play backgammon during the meal. Yes, in theory, the possibilities are limitless. In reality, though, I never see people using these under-table shelves for anything. Their primary effect is to make the table simultaneously too high (I feel a bit like a munchkin sitting at one, and after awhile my shoulders begin to ache) and too low (my knees don’t fit comfortably underneath).
And then there is the chair. It’s made out of wood, and lacks even the basic concessions to the human form that Americans expect of, say, metal folding chairs. More comfortable chairs are certainly not difficult to find in China, but this one is typical of what usually greets my posterior in places such as hotpot restaurants and Chinese language classrooms, both of which involve sitting for upwards of an hour and a half.
Exhibit B: My new work desk. It's a great desk. Except for those pesky ergonomics.
New office
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Before I left for a short trip to the States a couple of weeks ago, Samantha and I went to scope out our “new” office building. It’s actually an old building where Samantha used to have her office, but it’s been undergoing earthquake repairs. I was excited to see it, especially given that one doesn’t see many of these traditional buildings left around Chengdu.
Only a few people had moved in so far, and Samantha claimed a spacious office for us. She explained that it was past the office charged with the correspondence-course students, who have to show up by the hundreds twice a semester to take care of something or other in person. She didn’t want people coming by our office every few minutes asking where the correspondence-course office was, a problem we should avoid in her chosen location. She procured keys and told me to come to work in the new office on my return.
A few days in to my trip, however, she emailed me to say that the vice dean had decreed I should have an office with a heater, which meant a smaller one than we’d selected, and one on the path to the correspondence-course office. I’d finally learned to cope with unheated offices with the help of long underwear, an electric foot heater, and hot tea, so I was a little unhappy that the vice dean had chosen this time to treat me like a delicate foreigner, whether I liked it or not.
The smaller, heated office is spacious enough, though, and will be a nice place to work once the parade of students coming by to ask the whereabouts of Teacher Zhao passes. We tolerated it on Monday, but on Tuesday I found Samantha hiding out in our old office across the street, avoiding distractions.
Birthday
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My 30th birthday was Sunday, but I did most of my celebrating on Saturday. Cecilia and her mother had me over for a
Cecilia's cake. The raisins on top spell "birthday" in Chinese.
birthday lunch, which was also attended by Cecilia’s girl-cousin (who has changed her English name from Rose to Phoebe), her boy-cousin, two aunts, and an uncle. Cecilia’s mother and one aunt cooked long and hard, filling the table with one vegetable dish after another. For dessert, Cecilia had baked her first-ever cake, which, she forewarned me, was “catastrophical.” I admit it wasn’t the most elegant cake I’ve ever seen, and it was a little too sweet, but quite edible.
For the evening I’d made a reservation (my first in Chinese, quite a test of the waitress’s patience) at Chengdu’s nicest vegetarian restaurant. Explicitly vegetarian Chinese food is quite different from what you get if you go to a regular restaurant and order vegetable dishes. It’s part of a tradition that grew out of Buddhist and Taoist temple food and involves elaborately-rendered fake meat dishes. My favorite on Saturday was the “Peking duck.”
After dinner we went to sing karaoke, or KTV as they call it here. Karaoke in Asia isn’t the ritual of public humiliation that it is in the States; instead, you get your own room with your friends and hope not to be privately humiliated. Also, Chinese don’t go to KTV to sing cheesy pop songs ironically. They want to sound good. In short, I think the foreigners and Chinese at my birthday party brought with them somewhat different KTV expectations. Fortunately no one seemed to get too annoyed, even when I and another American belted out the chorus of “No Scrubs” from memory (for some reason, no written lyrics were provided for that one), or when Cecilia and Phoebe nearly punctured our eardrums hitting the high notes on some cheesy pop song.
Another cultural difference that came into play that evening involved who pays for a birthday celebration. In the US, of course, the birthday person is the guest of honor, and usually doesn’t pay for anything on his or her birthday. In China, though, the birthday person is the host, and pays for everything. I was a little worried that this would lead to some awkwardness if my fellow foreigners tried to pay and the Chinese guests felt they should, too, so I tried to pay for dinner and KTV discreetly. It seemed to work well, though most of the foreigners insisted on giving me some money later.
Overall it was a fun and delicious celebration.
Bad education II
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The doctors have invited me out to dinner a few times since our initial outing. They’re very interested in learning drinking-related English words; the last time they ended up toasting each other and saying “do a shot!”, “I shot you!”, or simply “shot!”. Tonight I heard two students practicing their new phrases thusly:
Forrest (toasting Nancy): I want to drink you under the table.
Nancy: I think I will drink you under the table.
Forrest: I think my alcohol tolerance is higher than yours.
I’m not sure whether to feel proud or to start planning a lesson on the health consequences of alcoholism.
Car repair
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There’s a little shop just outside the gate to my apartment complex that’s literally a hole in the wall. It sells drinks, packaged snacks, and, purportedly, Amway products. The proprietors also do car repair; on most days I see vehicles parked on the street outside with their hoods open, being worked on. Because who needs a garage when you have a convenience store and a bit of unused street space?
Bad education
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Over the last few class sessions I showed the Michael Moore movie Sicko to the spoken English class of doctors. They 
seem fascinated with the American health system, so I thought they might like it; on the other hand, I worried it would be beyond their English comprehension abilities. So I played it with English subtitles and wrote down words and phrases to discuss after the movie finished. Many of these were insurance-related: deny, co-pay, deductible, pre-existing condition. Others were political: lobbyist, campaign, tax dollars.
Sometimes I was surprised at what the doctors already knew. They didn’t need to be told that “the Hill” means Congress, or who Richard Nixon was (“Watergate!” someone said immediately). They knew about the Cold War and the Third World and didn’t need any explanation about Guantanamo Bay. By comparison, no one knew that cab is another word for taxi, and they were unfamiliar with the expressions “put [someone] on [a medication]” and “take [someone] off [a medication].” I wasn’t surprised to find that educated Chinese knew about the less-savory bits of recent American history, just that this education was so thorough as to include English terminology.
At one point Moore pokes fun at American attitudes toward Cuba by saying that the island is “where Lucifer lives.” Later, when I asked the class whether anyone knew what Lucifer was, several immediately said “Fidel Castro!” Not exactly the point Moore was trying to get across.
Flickr Photos
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