In Defense of Mr. Panda

A couple days ago, one of my students invited me over to chat with him at his desk. He wanted help buying a Blackberry from Canada. I had only recently discovered that the Blackberry was something other than an aggregate fruit, but I told him that I'd see what I could do. We shot the bull for a while. He asked me what my goals in life were, and I told him that I had no idea. He suggested that I stay in China for the rest of my life, and I told him that we'd just have to see about that. He laughed. Then his face clouded over.

"Mr. Panda," he said, "we all have a problem with you."

"Okay," I said. "What's up?"

"I'm fine, thank you," he said, and continued. "The problem is you are treat us like middle school student. We all think this. We tell the other teachers about the problem."

I stood there smiling like a total galoot.

"The subject things is too simple," he said. "We are knowing all the subject things already. We all think so."

The classroom was silent. All eyes were on me. I told the kid that I appreciated his honesty and that I would try to include more challenging material in the future. My students, who were supposed to be acting out break-ups, sat watching me until it was clear I had finished speaking. Then they resumed air-smacking their ex-boyfriends across the face.

That sort of confrontation is uncomfortable, but not unusual. My students often pull me aside to criticize what I am teaching them, or the way in which I am teaching them. They level their criticism with the same passive-aggressive trajectory familiar to those of us who have worked the U.S. temp agency circuit: they butter me up with chit-chat and a handful of compliments, then comes a long laundry list of things I need to do differently. For my part, I hear them out and weigh their suggestions on the long bus ride home. More often than not, I do find some truth in what they're saying. I am not a teacher by trade, so I have much to learn from my students. But on this particular occasion, I was more than a little irked. I am confident in what I am teaching this semester. I certainly don't treat my college sophomores like middle schoolers, but if my classes seem elementary, that's because they are: I planned them that way. Anyhow, I'm not one to argue with my students, so I'll just have to argue with myself. In the proud tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, I would like to write a short apologia in defense of that teaching alter-ego of mine, Mr. Panda.


In Defense of Mr. Panda

I. Of Criticism: That I'm Cool With It
I find it hard to imagine any of my students directly criticizing a Chinese professor, which is to say, I can't see it happening. Ever. But my students - intimidated as they are by my body hair, terrified as they are of talking to me - are not afraid to challenge me. I respect their nerve and to some extent I nurture it. They are, after all, college students. And I, perhaps, am a professor. So it is natural, even desirable that they should question my authority. I often question it myself.


II. Of Language Barriers: That They Exist
The same students who tell me that my class is not challenging enough tend to have a hard time expressing themselves clearly. And there are certain phrases that my students have been taught - namely You had better - that come off a lot more aggressively than they mean them to. You had better teach more difficult subject things ... You had better not treat us like middle school children ... I have learned over time not to take offense, because I am almost certain that there is none intended.


III. Of Last Semester: That It Was Weird
I set the bar too high last term. Although my students were seniors and English majors to boot, and though they possessed bottomless vocabularies and could name all the tenses and moods, I made the mistake of assuming that they were advanced speakers of English. I launched the class into debates on the perils of technology and overpopulation. They talked a lot, and I listened. My students spoke of art and beauty. They experimented with the language and enjoyed themselves immensely. In that sense, last semester was a success. But I run into my former students on the street every now and then and ask them how they're doing. They don't know what to say. They scratch their heads and mumble a few Chinese stall words before asking me if I have eaten. They have studied English for twelve years, and by now they are English teachers like me.


IV. Of This Semester: That It Will Be Less Weird
I opened the 2010 school year with a lesson that I dubbed How To Talk To Your Local Laowai. I introduced my students to casual greetings - what's up? what's happenin'? But be careful, I cautioned them: if you ask what is happening, your friends will worry that you are experiencing an existential crisis. Now if you ask what's happenin', everything's cool. And when we ask you what's happenin', we don't want to hear your life story. We don't want to know about your shih tzu's bladder control problems. No. We expect you to say not much - or nothin' if you're into the whole brevity thing.

My students took notes. They committed the magic words to memory. And the next week, when I asked them what was up, they said in unison: nothin' - not nothing, mind you, but nothin'. It was my greatest triumph. For twelve years, these kids had been conditioned to blurt out "I am fine, thank you, and you?" In a span of eighty minutes, I managed to reverse that, at least temporarily. I was awfully proud of myself.


V. Of Confusion: That It Exists
This afternoon, while my students were acting out break-ups, a fellow English teacher wandered into my classroom and started tinkering with the computer. He put Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the stereo and cranked the volume all the way up to drown out the ruckus. Then he stood watching my class from the hallway. Eventually, he shook his head and wandered off. So the fact that my students are speaking sometimes poses problems.

The students themselves appear puzzled by my classes. Each and every one of them has expressed a burning desire to improve his or her oral English, and yet when I give the class a prompt and twenty minutes to practice speaking in groups, my students grow listless and resume studying the long lists of SAT words they keep hidden under their desks. They seem most comfortable when I am talking, or having them recite things.

Every once in a while, I catch flack for teaching slang.

"You had better not teach 'what's up,'" one of my Chinese coworkers told me the other day. "It is not good Oral English. The students can only say 'nothing.'"

"Yes, but that is how we greet each other in the West."

"But how about 'How do you do?' That question makes more options."

"If I ask my students how they're doing, they will all say 'I'm fine, thank you, and you?'"

"But you had better not ... "

And so on. The name of the course I am teaching is Oral English, but everyone seems to expect me to do all of the talking, and to teach "Proper Oral English," the official language of Toastmasters International.


VI. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Not A Total Galoot
A couple teachers and a handful of students are wary of my syllabus. But I am not. For the first time in three years, I am confident in what I am teaching. I daresay I might even have some crude epistemological theory lurking behind my lesson plans. Or perhaps I shouldn't daresay that.

You would be amazed at what linguistic feats my students are capable of. I can give them a long list of American jivetalk and they'll have everything memorized by the end of class. They can read quantum physics extracts in English and understand them. But they stumble over the simple things: greetings, small talk, chit-chat, farewells. Of my 500 students, perhaps a handful can navigate a basic conversation. And yet most of them can define the word "lugubrious" and use it in a sentence.

Fundamentals. I can hear Dick Vitale barking in my ear. Dribbling, passing, boxing out - free throws, baby. The last thing my students need is some uppity laowai pummeling them with more flowery vocab words. What my students need is class time to hone their conversational chops. What they need is more variety in their basic English diet. In short, I want them to spend less time on alley oops and windmill jams, and more time at the free throw line.


VII. Of Chinglish: That It Is Intransigently Obstreperous
As I have written in the past, Chinglish is not the absence of English. If anything, it is an overabundance of bad English.

My students have spent a decade tackling English by rote memorization. At present, I find them tumbling headlong into the yawning abyss of English vocabulary. I can only guess as to why vocabulary is so coveted here, while oral English remains almost completely neglected. Vocabulary is more testable than speaking, I suppose, but that can't be the whole picture. In any case, I won't go into the why? question here. But it is important to bear in mind that, for most of these kids, the process of learning English has always been a race to acquire new vocabulary. They want to develop their speaking skills, of course, but they've never had an opportunity to do so and they're not sure where to begin. Mr. Panda's Oral English class is something completely unprecedented in their fifteen years of education. I don't talk - they do. And instead of quantity, I am shooting for quality, which means taking things slow and drilling the pants off of English fundamentals. So although I anticipate that some of my students will regard my class as a regression of sorts, I see no point in building a high-rise on such a shaky foundation.

The vocabulary my students memorize for their exams is often (to put it mildly) useless or outdated, incorrectly defined or poorly framed. Meanwhile, while they're busy cramming their minds with billions of counterfeit million-dollar words, their conversational skills are languishing, rooted as they are in stock phrases and transliterations, many of which are obsolete or contextualized poorly, and so on.

With all of this in mind, I would like to present to you, dear Reader, my crowning pedagogical achievement, a work of art that took me nearly two man-hours to produce: The Tree of Chinglish.



Fig 16.7: The Tree of Chinglish

Imagine, if you will, that you have successfully dissected a college sophomore's brain. And imagine that you are wearing a pair of neurotranslator goggles that allow you to see just what is going on down there in the English Department of young Xiao Wang's cerebral cortex. To make things more visually stimulating, your goggles generate a crappy-looking clip art tree called The Tree of Chinglish.

Your first observation is that the Tree's leafy boughs are weighed down with all sorts of polysyllabic gobbledygook that you vaguely remember from the ACT test you took, lo those many moons ago.

Scrolling slowly downward, you arrive at the trunk of the Tree, which is made up of the loadbearing fundamentals of language. You notice that it is a dangerously skimpy trunk, indeed. You realize that the huge, weighty canopy of polysyllabic gobbledygook at the top of the Tree is being held up by what amounts to a mere twig of English catchphrases. And many of the catchphrases, you notice, are of questionable utility: what a pity? you had better? and what the heck is filial piety, anyway?

But the truly frightening thing is not the catchphrases in and of themselves, but the lack of diversity in that twiggy little trunk. There is exactly one word for general greetings - HELLO! - and only one short phrase for inquiring about someone else's state of being - How are you? - and no more than one way to respond to inquiries about one's own state of being - I'm fine, thank you, and you? Why, if some well-intentioned British aristocrat were to mosey on by and say Cheerio! instead of HELLO!, the whole Tree of Chinglish would go tumbling right over. And if that Tree falls, poor Xiao Wang's heteromorphic paucity is likely to felicitate his priggish interlocutor.


VIII. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Sleepy
So you can see that teaching basic conversational English in China can be surprisingly complex. In a way, I have to trick my students into forgetting a lot of what they have already learned. I have to manually replace "what a pity" with "that's too bad," "you had better" with "you oughtta," and so on. At the end of the day, my students don't seem to believe that I am teaching them Real English. I am not Dr. Zhang or Professor Liu, after all. I am merely Mr. Panda.

It has proven difficult for me to write this apologia for Mr. Panda. Thanks to my clumsy, soy-slick typing fingers, I managed to delete everything three times in as many days. In rewriting it twice from memory, I found that the words no longer fit together the way they did the first time. Another thing is: it is hard to write critically about one's students, particularly when they are as enthusiastic and determined and wonderful as my own. And another thing: I was irked at the start of this post, but having reached the end, I am no longer irked. As I prattled along, I became less concerned with defending Mr. Panda, and more interested in figuring out just why teaching Chinese undergraduates is so challenging compared to, say ...

No, I suppose teaching in general is difficult. Like writing, teaching demands that you perform the greatest magic trick of all, that you transfer invisible ideastuff from your mind to another mind, so that that mind can one day transfer your ideastuff to another mind, and on and on ... But though it is a magic trick, that doesn't make it impossible. It takes patience, yes, and it is often frustrating. But the rewards, simple and unglamorous as they are, are many. I, for one, find great pleasure these days in bumping into my students on the street.

"What's up?" I'll ask the kid.
He hesitates. He fumbles around for those dreaded words. I'm fi - ... no. Have you eate - ... no. Then he smiles.
"Nothin'," he says.

Oh, sweet nothin' ...

Webster's Folly

A few weeks ago, the Italian got me thinking that Chinglish was the product of a lot of heady linguistic differences between the two languages it attempts to weld together. But now it seems to me that technical difficulties might have more to do with the problem, namely the cheap-o electronic dictionaries that my students (and no doubt the signsmiths) swear by.

Yesterday, my tutor was trying to explain why I should use one Chinese phrase in place of another.

"The second phrase is more, hmm," she said. "I don't know how to describe it."

She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case and punched in a few Chinese characters. Then she tilted the screen towards me. I almost spit up my chamomile tea.

Circumbendibus, said the dictionary. She pressed a button and a robot voice uttered the word for good measure: CIR-CUM-BEN-DI-BUS.

"What is that?" I laughed.
"Is it not correct?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never seen the word in my life."

What my tutor wanted to communicate was that one phrase "sounded nicer" than the other, and what we ended up with was circumbendibus. I wrote the word down in my notebook, but she caught me and crossed it out.

"No," she said. "I'm embarrassed."
So I wrote it on the palm of my hand when she wasn't looking and stole off after class to look it up in a dictionary, except none of the dictionaries I use seemed to have it.

Today, because I had fifteen minutes left over towards the end of class, I wrote up a list of the most common Chinglish mistakes, or at least the most common ones among my 350 students and the thousands of strangers I have taught pro bono on the streets of Nanchong.

1. humorous: Keith is so humorous.
How about: Keith is so funny.

2. clever: Keith is so clever.
How about: Keith is so smart.

3. you had better: You had better call me after work.
This is by far my least favorite Chinglishism. I am aware that it is Chinglish, and yet it never fails to rub me the wrong way. In the States, we tend to use "You had better" when we're making threats - "You'd better not look at my sister that way" - or scolding underlings, so even if a well-meaning friend of yours tells you that "you had better" do something innocuous, you still have to fight the impulse to smack them across the face.
How about: You should call me after work or You ought to call me after work - or better yet, You oughtta gimme a call after work.

4. play with me: If you're not busy after work, you should come play with me.
This is a direct translation from Chinese. In Mandarin, you ask people - even if they're crotchety 67-year-old pedants - whether they'd like to come play with you after work. The word "play," in this case, means "to hang out." But in English, the phrase has some unintended connotations: either that you are an oversized child, or that you are a very naughty girl, indeed.
How about: If you're not busy after work, we should hang out.

5. our China: Our China is developing rapidly.
You will often hear the Chinese refer to China as "our motherland," so perhaps this isn't so much a language issue as it is a difference in national identity. Never in a million years would I refer to the United States as "my America" - I sometimes live there, but it belongs to somebody else. Anyhow, when my students refer to "our China" in English, I can't help but imagine that they're boasting about a new IKEA dinette set.

6. campurs: I live on the old campurs, but I go to school at the new campurs.
Here I had to play around with phonetics to make my point. I proved to my students that they could produce the sounds "cam" and "piss." Then, I had them put the syllables together. "Campiss," they said. "Campus." Yes! I smacked my eraser on the podium and a plume of chalkdust clouded my ecstatic features. My students murmured the strange new word to themselves: campus, campus, campus. Then a lower, more urgent murmuring started at the back of the classroom and worked its way to the front: could it be that they had been learning the wrong pronunciations all their lives?

7. pander: The pander bear is China's national treasure.
This has baffled me since my arrival. My Chinese name is "Pan Da" and my students can pronounce that well enough. And yet their mascot is the "pander." Nobody likes a panderer. So I wrote "Pan" and "Duh" on the board. "Panda," my students chanted, "panda panda panda panda panda!" I had to cut them off like a conductor: my class was starting to sound like a Deerhoof song.

After the bell rang, a rush of students smothered me at the chalkboard, demanding to know whether what I had said was true: was campurs really campus, and pander panda, and all the rest?

It's true - I proclaimed - yea, verily, I tell thee, it is true.

My students covered the board in white, yellow, pink, and blue phonetic symbols.
"But Mr. Hu always told us to pronounce it like this."
"But in middle school we learned to say it like this."
"I've always pronounced it this way."

I was entering dicey territory. It's an uncomfortable spot to be in, a self-proclaimed literary hack like me with little to no technical training, righting the wrongs of unseen Mr. Lis and Mrs. Lus and Dr. Zhangs. But it's all true, I told them, "pander" is completely wrong and "panda" is entirely correct.

One of my students wrote the word "ship" on the board.
"How do you pronounce this?" she asked.
"Ship," I said.
"But I learned sheep!"
"Sheep is wrong. Ship is right."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. She pressed a button.
"SHEEP," quod the robot, smugly.
I checked the screen and saw that the IPA symbols were indeed "ʃip," that the dictionary called for a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis where a large oceangoing vessel should have been. So was this the problem, after all? Crummy low-end electronic dictionaries? I stood there wondering whether I should outlaw the blasted robots from class.

"So, Mr. Pander - Mr. Panda!" asked one student. "If my teachers are wrong and my dictionary is wrong, who can I trust?"
For lack of a more qualified authority, I shrugged and said, "Me."

But I suppose the electronic dictionary isn't such a bad invention, even if yours happens to have been programmed by a handful of drunks working the night shift at the Suzhou Guanchang Electron Stuff Limited Factory. An electronic dictionary will at least get you in the ballpark most of the time. I am reflecting, now, on the year I taught Hangman Studies in Korea. The day in question was probably a Friday, and almost certainly the last class of the day: my energy was spent and my students had seized control of the markers, the erasers, and the whiteboard. They were too hyper to play an orthodox game of hangman, so they scribbled a beard and an afro on the man at the gallows - it was me - and drew a giant vat of bubbling, steaming liquid under his feet.

"What is that?" I asked.
"Teacher, please wait," said the artist, and he slipped his electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. He punched in a few Korean characters and held the dictionary up for all to hear.
"SULFURIC ... ACID," said the robot voice.
"That's great," I laughed. "That's great."
I could no longer tell, at that point, whether my laughter was sincere.
The letters on the board were "F _ C K."
"Teacher, now you guess!"
"Let me think about this one," I said. "U?"

Milgram Experiment

Because I am chronically three minutes and 37 seconds behind the rest of the world, every morning I miss the bus and wind up riding shotgun in one of the Toyotavans that wait for me just off campus. The drivers charge me ten yuan, which is two kuai more than a taxi, and ten times more expensive than a bus. But it's well worth footing the bill for companionship and a complimentary lesson in Sichuanese, and the comfort that comes with knowing the Toyotavan cannot exceed thirty miles per hour, which gives me ample time to grab the "oh shit" handle prior to head-on collision.

This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.

I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.

And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.

"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."

Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.

"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."

I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.

When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.

"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."

I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.

After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"

She looked up. She wasn't crying.

"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.

She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.

As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.

"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.

One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.

There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.

"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."

Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.

I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.

"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."

It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.

The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.

I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.