green apron monkey

some kids

The east city kids have grown on me. They are noisy little bastards but I've decided that they are alright, other than a few little punks.

Since I have an English Corner for practicing conversation at the end of each day, whichever kids I'm teaching are the last ones out of the school. THat means I have to walk them to their parents or the bus.

(By the way, a conversation class for first graders is a really, really bad idea).

Since they like making noise, I have them march and count in cadence, like the older kids do. Except, my kids count the cadence in English, which amuses the hell out of the security guards. For some reason Chinese kids love playing at being little soldiers, so it amuses the kids too.

At the end of every day I lead a little army of cuteness out the gates of the school.

SOme of the kids are pretty awesome.

Thomas WHen Thomas smiles, you can see all his teeth. It makes him look kind of wolfish. He likes to crawl up to the front rather then walking. He is a troublemaker of the charming variety. Once, I accidently made him cry by giggling at a picture his mom took of him in stage makeup.

Isiah and Sasha THey sit next to each other. Isiah is the smallest kid in first grade. Sasha has one of those Chinese elf girl haircuts. They aren't my best students but they are my cutest.

Audrey When I arrive to class ten I get dog piled by seven year olds. I look like a fullback being tackled by a defensive line. Audrey is always the last one to be pried off by the TA. Audrey is probably the smartest girl in First grade, but she might be the clingiest.

Frankie Frankie is the ugliest seven year old I have ever met. But he's whip smart, funny and energetic. He was the first kid to successfully pronounce Austrailia and he does his damnedest to work it into any sentence.

Ralph There are smarter kids in my second grade but none more enthusiastic. Ralph wants to be the first to play every game. He's one of the few kids who gets out of his seat too much in a helpful way.

Cloe Bent on teaching me Chinese, but mostly concentrates on "wo da ni, hao bu hao" (I hit you, would that be good?) Apparently it's funny when I say "bu hao."

Ally Ally gives me choclate. What can I say?

Ian Ian looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He's one of those shy, smart kids. He smiles a lot and tries to help me with characters.

I am downright amazed at what can be destroyed with just a hammer

"Where are you going?" Mark, our school's marketing guy, is really nice, inquisitive and overly helpful.

"I'm going to the bathroom," I tell him.

"Be careful," he says. I scowl.

Henry Blodget wrote in Slate last week that one of the Chinese words for foriegner, lao wei, has a very definite connotation of buffoon. Of course, foriegners in China are forever doing silly things, putting themselves in dangerous situations and railing against the commonest features of life. In other words, we look like grown-ups but must be treated like children.

"Thanks Mark." I can't keep the sarcasm out of my voice. And thank god he can't detect it because he does not deserve it.

I continue on my way to the bathroom thinking myself lucky that Mark didn't offer to help. Then I get to the third floor.

Our school has been preparing to move for some time, but without the preparing part. A nearby construction site has gotten out of hand and our building is consequently marked for destruction. When I get to the third floor I see that perhaps our moving date is closer than I had previously thought.

There is broken glass and rubble everywhere. The doors have been ripped off and the interiors of the rooms shredded, the glass broken. So I realize Mark wasn't just being a foriegner nanny.

The bathroom is still intact though. I have to climb a small pile of broken glass to reach it's uriney confines.

I don't know how it goes for the rest of China, but in the case of our building, when it is time for it to be destroyed this is not done with dynamite or a wrecking ball. It is done by a legion of guys with hammers. Gettin in there an breakin shit.

They also don't necessarily tell you when they will start. Yesterday there was a third floor. Today there is not. It has been replaced by a bunch of guys breaking stuff with hammers.

Now that's culture shock.

gratitude

One thing that is likeable about Chinese people is that a lot of them really really love foreigners. By that, I mean, they are fascinated by foriegners, they wish to give themselves and China face by impressing foriegners.

Americans really care less about how foreigners see their country. We do not treat foreigners as guests. I have a fondness for the Chinese way. It's sweet and endearing.

Sometimes it's a bit strange.

Last night Dongsheng Da Sha was putting on it's P-day foreigner fest. The entertainment started off with some karoake. That's about normal. Almost everything involves karoake.

Then a chick in military fatigues with a red beret switched on a fog machine and started doing some sort of musical martial arts routine. It was supposed to be entertainment, but it just looked like the military police had come to tear gas us.

Now that's culture shock.

The only weirder stage act I've ever seen was Ke You kindergarten's Christmas recital. That involved a few 4-6 year olds in animal suits and broadway stage make up, shouting semi English and bouncing around to Chinese trance music. I have never desired to be hallucinating so much in my life.

The floor show wound up with more karaoke, though this time there was a girl with a saxophone. She did nothing to shake my conviction that no one Chinese should ever be let near a saxophone.

Guitars: sure. Saxophones: no.

But the fact is they really tried, evn though they have no idea what foriegners like (Guiness) and don't like (Michael Flatley). I'm grateful for all the effort that is made on behalf of clumsy, goofy weiguoren.

what it sounds like from inside my head when my head is in east city middle school

dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences
dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences
dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences

"Hey foreigner! hweeeellloooooo HAHAHA!"

dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences
dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences

"eh! Eh! Old foreigner. Hallo!HALLOO!"

dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences
dontgetupsetatculturaldifferences

"HELL-o! HUHLooooo! ha ha ha!"

link whoring will continue . . .

Triple bonus points for usage of the word "mollycoddled".

English Mike's Tips for China Safety!

. . .my safety checklist is in my head, and comprises of these things:
1.) Remember open manhole near apartment, hazard when drunk.
2.) Remember drivers in China can't actually drive, take care when under the influence and crossing the street.
3.) Try not to piss off the boss, can be hazardous to your hearing.
The exposed wires, upside down plug sockets, loose plug sockets, faulty fuse board are really a secondary concern, this is China and you get used to those sort of things, and being molly coddled is not really required.

Me vs. Mandarin

China and I have a healthy relationship over movies and food. I learn most of my mandarin either buying DVDs or ordering food.

I am, in Mandarin, an enthusiastic blunderer. I like to try it but I generally make a hash of things. On the tones, I am hopeless. I can eventually make myself understood, but it's not pretty.

Last week, we went shopping first for knickknacks, then for DVDs. By way of knickknacks I bought an old poster of Mao with Lin Biao. Of course, for some reason I thought Lin Biao's name was Li Peng. Chinese names largely do this to me. Then again I could not find a Chinese person to correctly name poor old Lin Biao. They could tell me that I paid too much for it. They always do that.

There is no haggling in the DVD store. But some language is required. On this day, I had to figure out whether a group of Chinese, Japanese, French and German movies had English subtitles. This I can do. I asked the sales clerk, "this have not have English subtitles?" four times for four different disks.

Then came another problem: The Graduate. The Girl and I have run through about four different copies of The Graduate with zero of them working. I have no idea why China or our computer hates The Graduate, but it was starting to get frustrating. I had worked through my pile of foreign movies and got to this one. I have no idea how to say, "does this work?"

The clerk looked at The Graduate. "Have English," she said. I tend to bring down the level of Chinese in a room. But she could see I was not happy, even after being reassured that Dustin Hoffman would be speaking English, with subtitles if I so wanted.

I scrunched up my face into an apology for what I was about to do to her language. "This have not have movie?" She giggled, but comprehended and tested the disk out.

"Have."

Suddenly, I remembered that I had left my poster of Mao and Lin on the second floor of the shop. I started to walk upstairs. The clerk, alarmed that she had just spent ten minutes going through this and listening to my crappy Mandarin, said something to me that I didn't understand. It was probably, "don't wander off, retard."

I groped for a way to reassure her. "I don't have Li Peng." Sometimes your brain just doesn't grope hard enough.

She was kind of awed by that statement. She let me go upstairs without fuss. Probably just to find out why I thought I should have Li Peng.

I grabbed my poster. I showed it to everyone, "This, I have Li Peng."

Nobody told me that it wasn't Li Peng. I would have understood that. I had to wait to get home to a history book to find out that my poster was of Lin Biao and that Li Peng was the charming fellow who took over the premiership after Tianamien. You can't expect all of your brain to work all the time.

english mike's page

New link up to a good friend, who by my tyrannical decree shall live under the webname "English Mike." Mike apparently has some wicked flash skills. He has a lot of pictures of the lao wei here in dongying and a little slice of what we like to call the "French Guy Incident."

rubble! an odyssey

People want to know, what's Dongying like? How does a foriegner get along in it? What's the feel of the city? For the answers to these questions it's best to go to the Expat's Guide to Dongying.

As useful as The Expat's Guide is, there is, alas, something missing from its pages. The feel is just a little off. This is a lack that I can very definitely put my finger on, not some mysterious je ne sais quois. What the Expat's Guide lacks that Dongying has in spades is simply this: piles, rubble and hookers.

One of the more impressive piles near my kindergarten.

There is a brisk pile derived economy in Dongying.

Certain parts of the city have a "recently shelled" look to them.

This is where the sidewalk ends.

One of the many piles of kittens to be found around town. Other popular piles include puppies, meat and shiny.

Jeez, this place has a lot of hookers. According to the locals, only foreigners ever visit hookers. By our estimate there are about 46 foreigners living in Dongying. About half of those are (more or less) heterosexual females. The number of hookers would be impossible to estimate but 500 would be a good basement estimate. Either the locals are totally full of it or these figures speak volumes about the expat sex drive.

Taking pictures of hookers is hard. If they see you they will start bellowing at you to come get your hair washed.

[Note: good photos by The Girl; crappy, oddly composed photos by otis]

the dong is cold

It's cold, cold cold. Time to buy long underwear and DvDs. Time to settle in for a slightly dull winter.

guide to the dong

Shelley's updated his website, adding what is a nice concise guide to Dongying. It's all very useful and only going to get more so. Still he has not totally captured the poetic spirit of Dongying. For that he would need more pictures of piles of things; rubble, garbage, kittens.

No joke about the music in Ming Tien Coffee Language, though.

day in the dong

I'm carrying things back to our apartment. I find Nick playing guitar in the square next to our house. I ask him how it was going.

He says that families are having their picture taken in front of him as if he's some sort of monument. He's drawing a crow but not holding their attention.

I congratulate him on being Dongying's new novelty act.

Later a small persistant flower seller (we all call him the flower child) will see Nick ($$$$$$!) and begins to harass him. He will start to grab Nick and Nick's guitar. Nick will flee, leaving behind his dream of conquering Dongying's music scene.

I continue back to our apartment through the dirt mall. There is a child, crapping through split pants on the grass. There's a dead colorful bird on the ground next to the birdseller. The ice cream seller tries to talk to me again, but the only thing I understand is when she asks me if I understand and tell her I do not.

yelling in englese at cabbies

This has happened twice now.

Motorcycle taxi drivers think it's a good negotiating tactic to point out that I am a foreigner and should therefore pay more. I consider what occurs afterwards to be a quick lesson in American consumer psychology. I spit out what few words of mandarin I know, pointing that my TA is zhong gou ren and therefore she shouldn't have to pay extra. Mostly I just make it clear that I would rather walk than be charged more for being a foreigner.

Finally the cabbie concedes, a bit baffled. I swear that some of the motortaxis expect you to want to pay more for being a foreigner. They are totally thrown when it annoys you.

dance, monkey

The first thing to get used to is being an alien. I don't mean an alien resident in a foreign country. I mean the big, black eyes and enlarged head bit. Children will be awed or upset by your presence. Adults will try unsuccesfully not to stare. They've seen things like you on television, and maybe their friends have told them about the lao wei they saw when they were in Shanghai or Beijing. But they've never really believed until now.

Lao wei is one of the few mandarin words that I know. It's the not too rude, not all that polite word for foreigner. I hear it here and there. It amuses me to cause such fuss. I rather like being a public spectacle (anyone who has shared a dance floor with me can attest) and I have a kind of malicious anticipation at all the little weird things I am going to do to shock and astonish onlookers.

Now, I also want to be able to interact with people using more than a few broken sentence fragments, and say a complete sentence without hashing up the tones. But I also plan on using my foreigness as an excuse to tell people that I just ate a couch and that my pants are on fire.

Shelley, my host, says that he feels weird when he goes back to the states now because no one stares at him. He has gotten to like being a freak, a talking monkey.

I've never minded people thinking me odd. I've always been distinctly uncomfortable with being taken seriously. Talking monkey is a role I could seriously get used to.

first impression

There are two Dongyings. West Dongying is run by the state oil company and East Dongying which is run by some other part of the party. The school and Shelley's apartment are in West Dongying.

Thepeople are stylishly dressed, and the food is tasty. It also has not made me sick yet, and I have made a few questionable decisions (I ate some raw leeks without thinking about it). Still more attention has to be paid to the food you eat, and also where you are walking.

THey have no homeowners associations around here, and sidewalk maintainence consists of sweeping. There are smashed, cracked and nonexistant sections of most thoroughfares. Not to mention the pools of mysterious (and not so mysterious) liquids. Dongying is not a good place for high heels. Yet, the female residents, mostly stylishly dressed, somehow persist with them. Go figure.