I went to bed around midnight but never got around to sleeping. My mind did crossword puzzles for half an hour, amused itself with half-baked puns and not-quite jokes. Then it jolted me awake at 1 AM with an idea. I hustled to the study and sat down in front of my laptop. I cracked my knuckles and typed the following:
"What if there were a bank where you could walk in, hand over your money, and the teller would give you an equivalent amount of food in return ..."
In that goofy frame of unconscious mind, The Bank of Food struck me as a sturdy foundation for an 800-page utopian novel. My magnum opus. But before I'd even broken ground on the second paragraph, the fog began to part, and I realized that, yes, such banks already exist. They call them restaurants. Dumbass.
By then I was fully awake and, given my work schedule, I decided that this was not a good thing. So I went back to bed and lay there reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Nothing like a thousand-page novel about a prison cell to put a man to sleep, I figured. But I have always been a carcerophile, so I read and kept reading until my Kindle ran out of juice. I was horrified when I checked the clock again and saw that it was 4:30. I needed to be up in two hours. Well, shit. I had committed myself to another zombie Monday. So I went back out to the study, dumped a couple kilos of Nescafe into a preexisting vat of lukewarm waterlike fluid, and drank my first cuppa of the stillborn day. I started writing, and I wrote until my laptop ran out of juice, until the shaded windows started glowing. I parted the blinds and saw that the sun was coming up. The sky was pink.
I took a birdbath in the sink, brushed my teeth in the shower, and poured all my Nescafe proceeds into a plastic water bottle for the road. I started walking to school. It was 6:30.
Mornings are by far the most pleasant time of day in China, and it's really a shame that I'm never awake for them. China's circadian rhythm doesn't start pounding until 7 AM, so I had a solid half-hour to enjoy the sounds of Nanchong rather than its ruckus, its sights rather than its spectacles, and its windborne aromas rather than its airborne diseases.
The streets were empty, aside from the occasional geriatric tai ji guru, sculpting and slow-mo chopping the air. They say you can kick a man's ass that way, but I imagine it takes a while. There was an oldster dance troupe in the square behind the Confucius statue, a bunch of grandmas two-stepping to a Chinese Salt 'n Pepa jam pumping from an old school boombox propped up at Confucius' learned feet. I caught my first heckle of the day at 6:47 AM, a scaldingly loud lao-WAI from a college kid, and all I could muster in return was the saddest, weariest "Why?" face, a face that made me shudder, and my heckler, too.
I've been rooting for winter this year. A first for me. As a native Nebraskan, winter is not something I would wish upon anyone, least of all myself. But summer hung around a bit too long, if you ask me, lingered like a stale barroom conversation well into the middle of October. I'd long since wanted to call for the tab and move onto the next thing, though I knew full well the next thing was another gray and miserable November in Nanchong.
That Monday morning, winter came in with the Pepto Bismol dawn, and Nanchong was once again all mud and London fog and puddles so deep that you'll lose your shoes in them if you're not careful. Just the way I remembered the place.
The sidewalk tiles are the same wherever you go in China, the same alternately off-red and bright yellow bricks, etched with the same pattern of parabolas, on and on forever. The sidewalks in Nanchong were laid either in great haste or with awe-inspiring laziness. If you had a mind to do so, you could pluck the tiles out one by one with a pair of chopsticks. If it's rained sometime in the past week - a safe bet in Nanchong - the tiles will spurt murky black water all over your pantlegs when you step on them. On at least two occasions that I can remember, the tiles have belched up live toads. Which isn't all that surprising. There are toads all over the place in Nanchong. You very rarely see them alive, but come autumn, the streets are practically tarred with squashed toads and artistic splashes of dried black toad blood. The other day, I saw a live toad that was as big as a small dog. I know this because there was a small dog standing right next to the toad, unawares. So I had time to compare. The toad hopped and the dog ran for its ever-loving life.
Nanchong winters are not Nebraskan winters. There is no snow, for one thing. And the temperature seldom drops below freezing, for another. But by some hideous miracle of humidity and air pressure, the winters here are perhaps even worse than the ones I've grown to know and loathe in the American Midwest. It is, as they say, a damp cold. It's colder indoors than it is outdoors. And likewise, you are colder inside than you are outside. You'll find yourself sweating, even as your bones have turned to icicles. It is a murky, gloomy, dead sort of cold. And yet I couldn't wait for it to come. And now it is here. And it will remain here through March. Or April. Winter, too, will wear out its welcome.
The classroom was frigid and dank as the Château d'If. My students were already watching an overdubbed version of The Gods Must Be Crazy as I ascended to my rightful throne. I clicked "stop" and my students groaned.
"Actually, today, we're going to finish watching The Joy Luck Club - "
NO!!!!! they shouted in unison.
"Boring!"
"Sad!"
A first. My students love The Joy Luck Club. Unconditionally.
"We want watch this movie!"
Watch this movie! they chanted, watch this movie!
And another first: I was legitimately pissed off at my students.
"No. This movie is in Chinese," I snapped. "This is an English class. I was nice enough to let you watch a movie today. So if it's boring to you, we can always, oh, I don't know, practice speaking English or something - "
NO!!!!!
I put on the film and took my place in the very back row of the classroom, where the desktop graffiti is vulgar and amusing. I've watched The Joy Luck Club sixteen times by now. Buy me a beer and I'll recite the whole damned thing for you.
Something I neglected to mention in my last post: I'm actually very popular on campus, at least among those students who actually know me. My former students adore me, and I adore them. Which only makes my college life all the more schizophrenic.
On my way out to lunch, I passed a trio of sexually frustrated twerps, and one of them barked, "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU."
"Thanks," I muttered.
In the next instant, a gaggle of young ladies spotted me and started giggling.
"Mr. Panda! Hey! What's up?"
My old students.
"Howdy, ladies," I called out, suddenly jovial. "How you doin'?"
They giggled some more, and I smiled all the way to the next heckler.
It was noon and I had another four hours of teaching ahead of me. It was already a full 24 hours since I'd last slept. I had three hours to kill before my first afternoon class and no money to spend, and the tiles spewed raw sewage all over my shoes as I walked. And I walked, just looking for somewhere ... to go.
Showing posts with label the joy luck club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the joy luck club. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
High Loon
And so my second semester in China ends as suddenly and chaotically as it began. This morning, I noticed a 48th student sitting all by her lonesome in the back row of the auditorium. After a series of idiotic squints, I managed to make out the blunt features of my blunt-spoken supervisor. I broke into a sweat. My knees buckled and trembled. I assumed, as I always do when confronted by an authority figure, that I was in deep shit. I mentally packed my bags, visualized the concourse of the Chengdu International Airport, and ran through my resignation speech as I switched on the projector screen and cued up The Joy Luck Club. Then, I sat in the very front row for about fifteen seconds before my supervisor snuck up from behind and swatted me on the shoulder.
"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.
"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.
"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."
The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.
"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"
So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!
I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.
So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.
"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."
A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.
But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.
"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."
Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!
There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.
"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"
And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.
"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"
This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.
At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.
Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?
"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.
"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.
"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."
The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.
"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"
So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!
I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.
So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.
"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."
A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.
But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.
"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."
Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!
There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.
"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"
And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.
"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"
This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.
At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.
Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?
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