The last post was not meant to be anything deep, provocative, or, as I gather from my comments, mystifying. All I was trying to do was share a small part of that day that I found especially amusing and demonstrative of the "little things" that make China different. (Really, when was the last time you've seen a waitress dump water on the floor next to you before handing you the cup? It didn't even faze her.) Looking back at it, I see it was poorly written and thus my point did not come across. For this I apoligize appropriately.

Tales from Xi'an are on their way. Sorry for the delay.

Moment of the day:

I went for dinner at the local ma la tang (hot soup) shop. While I was waiting for my order, a waitress came by with a tin pot of tea--minus a cup. She rushed off, then rushed back with a cup in one hand and a small stack of white paper napkins in the other. She put down the napkins, but before handing over the cup, she looked into it and, without a pause, chucked it over her shoulder sending water splashing to the floor. Not missing a beat, she set the cup down, then whisked away.

I am back from Xi'an. There is much to say about the trip, but other things are on the brain. I'd rather rant about them and as it is a blog, my blog no less, I find it only appropriate to do so. I promise to write more about Xi'an later.

Okay. Iraq.

I just saw some of those pictures that have apparently been circulating the mainstream media while I was down living it up (some might say down) in Xi'an. WHAT THE FUCK?! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON OUT THERE?

There is the possiblity that some of the photos were staged. (By something mythical left-wing conspiracy group who's actually got their shit together and are out to get the Bush administration?) My thoughts are based on the belief that they were not. If they were staged, however, I don't think my thoughts would be much different, but there would be more questions to answer.

(Note: I started writing this in narrative form, but it got a bit out of hand. I realize lists are not very creative and do indicate a certain lack of literary ability, but this is the best I can do to keep things organized.)

Thoughts provoked by said fucked up pictures:

1. What was it like, sitting behind the eyes of the people who orchestrated the photos? (The photos I'm thinking of specifically are the series that include the girl holding a leash with the prisoner on the floor at its end and the simulated gangbang.) Where was it exactly that the current in the stream of thinking took a turn and produced the "this is a good idea" idea? And what did the "continue, this really is a good idea" idea sound like against images and sounds (as how I imagine it) of the humilated prisoners groaning and jerking while limbs were being shamlessly smacked and shoved into a sick and twisted Macy's store front.

2. Are we all, essentially, weak and capable of things like this? Is cruelty just a fundamental element repressed by "respect" and "concern" in safe and comfortable environments, only? And could I, put in the right circumstance, be so inhuman? I suppose that if I was some hick from Nebraska who hadn't seen anything taller than a wheat field before I got to boot camp, who barely made it through a rudimentary public education, who maybe had seen three non-White people before cable came in, who was thrown into the middle of the desert, in the middle of the world, convinced of a mission to do good, while being shot at by those I was sent to save, that that breadstick that kept it all together in my mind WOULD snap and I COULD look into the face of another human being and see nothing but soulless flesh.

3. There really is nothing that can be done to change things in the world, is there? I'd like to think that there are things that we, as individuals, can do to make things just a little bit better all around. It's a general goal of mine to live this way, but there is a very cynical part of me that really believes that change cannot be forced. Change will result when imbalances reach critical mass and maybe only (human?) nature dictates when that happens. (I'm still not voting for Bush, however.)

4. Is anybody (who has power and sway to make rather urgent foreign policy decisions) concerned about the country's image in the world? It seems to me that people don't usually let things like occupation and tortue slip from the mind casually. The Jews won't let go of the Holocaust (or at least many of those with power behind the camera) and more than half of my students openly hate the Japanese for violence most of their parents can't remember. Don't people think about this? As an American in the world I will have the stigma of this atrocious time attached to me for the rest of my life. Thanks Uncle Rummy.

This is an excerpt taken from an article in the Boston Globe. It also upsets me.

-----------
"The cost of Iraq -- $4.7 billion a month, according to the Pentagon -- already almost matches the $5 billion a month average spent on Vietnam in today's dollars. If Bush gets another $75 billion this year, he would close in on the halfway point of Vietnam spending in just a year and a half.

The diversion of resources and the obvious loss of opportunity for America's public school children is almost incalculable. Assuming even the conservative guess by Hagel of $50 billion in additional funds, that would make $216 billion in war appropriations. That sum is:

Nearly four times the budget of the Education Department.

Nearly double what the General Accounting Office said in the mid-1990s was needed to repair the nation's schools.

24 times what it would cost to fully fund the congressional appropriation for No Child Left Behind.

43 times what it would cost to enroll the remaining 40 percent of eligible preschoolers still not in Head Start.

848 times the cost of the Even Start family literacy program, which Bush proposed to kill.

1,800 times the appropriation for the national math-science partnership between high schools and colleges, which Bush proposed to kill.

6,352 times the cost of a program to help pay secondary school counselors, which Bush proposed to kill.

12,000 times the cost of a national writing project, which Bush proposed to kill.

19,600 times the cost of a program to support "gifted and talented" students, which Bush proposed to kill."
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Any comments, especially from very old folks, or links to interesting related items, would be greatly appreciated at this point.

I will get up off the couch now. The shrink's looking bored anyway.

Okay, I concede: it’s been nearly a month since my last post. I see that the number of hits to my site has almost doubled since that last post and I reckon 95 percent of it can be attributed to Karen, Baron and my father.

This is something I started but never finished until today.

...

Not a single one of my students had heard of St. Patrick's Day before I introduced it to them. Only a few of them could confidently point out Ireland on a (poorly sketched) map and three confused the country for Iceland. To establish a thread of relevance to the holiday for my students, I told them the origin my own family name (this surprised them greatly as they had never before considered that I might actually have a family name), then I went on to explain that St. Patrick was, more or less, the missionary who brought Christianity to Ireland and that's why we drink green beer.

The response to this history lesson, without exception, was head scratching and window gazing. One girl asked how the beer got green. For my own interest’s sake, I told the next three classes that St. Patrick was a hero with magical powers who saved the Irish people by chasing the poisonous snakes out of Ireland and this went over much better. The students even got the idea of "tying one on" for their English teacher.

I'd been very homesick for Boston recently and I’m sure that St. Patrick’s Day had something to do with it. Going out and getting smashed on the occasion of your Irishness is the rite of every person chosen to be born Irish and there’s no better place to prove it than Boston. In fact, the holiday isn’t even necessary.

My fear of missing out on proper libations that 17th was eased when Benny called that evening around 5 o’clock to ask if I had had dinner yet. I told him I didn't and he said "come down and we'll have dinner. Right now." Getting used being expected at engagements of which I know nothing until there's someone at my door or a car waiting outside, I put on my coat and went straight out. "It's dinner for the students going to the UK," Benny told me on our way.

A handful of seniors are on their way to the UK for a year and I’ve been assigned to improve their oral English. Benny approached me about this the week prior and with the promise of a significant increase in salary, I agreed. The students must take an English entrance exam I have been selected to help them "build their confidence in speaking and listening."

"But Benny, I have an American accent," I said with concern. "Can't you do a British one?" he asked. I couldn't tell if he was serious or not. "Uh, I guess so, I mean I used to be able to do a pretty good one, uh..." I said. Then I asked, to gauge exactly what kind of accent my future students would be facing, what school they were headed to and he said "the University of Swenze." Eh? "Swenze?" I repeated. "Swenze...Sweense..." he kept trying. "Swansea?!" I asked, "Swansea? The Swansea in Wales?" He looked at me as if it was impossible that I be confused. "Yes, Swansea," he confirmed. {insert the bit where EVERYONE goes "why the fuck would students from China ever want to go to Swansea?", followed by the imagined people in Swansea asking each other "how the fuck did students from China come to Swansea?"} I looked at Benny and with all seriousness and said, "if these kids are going to Swansea, it really won't make a difference if their English teacher here has an American or British accent."

The handful headed to Swansea were seated at the table when we arrived and it was obvious that they were waiting for me (I still haven't caught the "I'm important because I'm a teacher" vibe yet). Canuck was already there and dominating the conversation. (Conversation is not quite the word as it generally describes a delivery and return of spoken information. "Interrupting silence and preventing polite chatter" is much more accurate.) I took my place next to the head of foreign affairs, Chen Yang.

The first TWO HOURS of dinner were extremely boring. Plates and plates of things I wouldn't eat came out (thankfully, Benny eventually remembered that I don't eat meat and ordered some excellent pumpkin dish) and students stood stone faced while Canuck kept talking. Most of the little talking done, not by Canuck, was in Chinese and at one point, Chen Yang insisted that each student ask a question in English. Most of the questions went to Canuck and most of them revolved around his non-foreign face. Attention came my way when one girl said to me, "I think you look a litte Chinese." I explained I was in fact half Chinese and she said, "Oooh! You have very beautiful eyes." (The Chinese lug about jugs of flattery and never hesitate to douse it on foreigners, or on each other for that matter. Just another pump to my ever inflating ego...)

Beer was served beer to the men in the group (I politely declined) and slowly, very slowly, mouths opened up. Mostly Chinese came out, but the odd "do you like Jennifer Lopez?" question was thrown my way.

Canuck and Chen Yang consumed freely and by the fifth or sixth round, the dinner party almost sounded like a dinner party. Even the women drank. But only after the urging of Mr. Chen. (I was given half a tiny glass.)

In China, beer is drunk "bottoms up" from 6 oz. glasses. Men are always expected to chug their beer when toasting and in familiar situations, women do the same.

I never feel too comfortable engaging in anything more than a casual beer with people I have to see in a daily professional setting, but when the girl who told me I had beautiful eyes toasted me (she proved herself hardier than most of the men in the group that night), I was told it would be poor form NOT to chug the beer just served to me. The toasting ritual is really more a challenge than a formality, it seems. Especially when those not involved scrutinize the ability with which the toastees can consume. As it was my first beer that evening all eyes were on me. The student, Gloria, lifted her glass, I did the same and in three gulps flat, my beer was gone. (It was a tiny glass, remember.) There were cheers all around. Benny leaned into my ear and asked if I was okay. "Of course," I said. Another round was served and this time the boys in the group toasted me. Glasses were tipped and I put them to shame. Chen Yang, unabashedly smashed himself, looked at me and announced "this is the first time I knew Maile could drink beer."

The evening continued and the students really did get to talking in English. Bottles and bottles of beer were poured and the men, like most men, I reckon, boasted about their abilities to consume. "My father taught me how to drink," proudly declared Canuck. He continued, as if revealing family secrets, "the trick is to eat a lot first, go to the toilet a lot and drink a lot of tea." I, and I think any Westerner who can drink with any confidence would argue that loading up on food before drinking and diluting the system with tea or water is flat out cheating, however, the men agreed with Canuck’s wisdom. The drinking continued. Faces reddened and trips to our private toilet (complete with a Western toilet and toilet paper--luxury!) became very frequent. After each trip I made, one of the girls would discreetly pull me aside and sincerely ask if I was okay. “Yes, I’m fine,” I said each time, not at all understanding their concern.

Chen Yang eventually left the scene and the group got rowdier and rowdier and Canuck egged on the drinkers. (I kept pace, but didn’t overinduldge. Knowing when too much is too much in the foundation of any Bostonian’s first year of college. ) Trips to the toilet became more and more regular and I soon discovered that the visitors were not only relieving their bladders, but their stomachs as well!

Collars were loosened, more bottles were ordered and through Canuck’s self requested renditions of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” the unmistakable hack of puking rang out from the toilet. No one seemed to notice, or at least make any indication that this was out of the ordinary and the only time anyone seemed overtly concerned was when I went. I assured them, consistently, that I was fine, and I was.

The drinking continued, much to my amazement, and it was in those final hours of St. Patrick’s Day that was truly proud and thankful to be Irish. While the Irish suffer the stigma of a fondness for the drink, and sometimes deservedly so, I can safely say that I, and those I know who make it through life without the assistance of AA, know that vomitting is sure fire sign that it’s time to put down the bottle and go home.

The throng eventually spilled out of the restaurant late that evening, much to the relief of a staff obviously anxious to get home. We made our “nice to meet yous” and “have a good evenings” and I started in the direction of the walk home. Benny stopped me. “Wait a moment,” he attempted to say importantly. The students left and Thomas and I stood there in the cold and waited. Five minutes later a slick black car pulled up.


“The car is for you...to go to your apartment,” he put together slowly. “Are you joking?!” I asked. The restaurant half a block and across the street from the foreign teachers apartment building. Benny reasoned that as it was a cold night and there was much drinking had, it was more convenient to call a car for the brutal 150 yard walk. (In his defense however, I do admit that the walk involves an incline of at least 35 degrees.)

“Benny, you can see my sofa from here!” I said and pointed, hoping that, even through the alcohol haze, he could see the ridiculousness of the formality. He opened a car door for me and instead of arguing, I took off in the direction of my apartment. The effort of walking the half block home, even in the cold, was less than that of getting into the car, waiting for everyone else to get into the car, riding the 100 yards, waiting for the chit chat in the car to subside, then waiting for someone to open the door for me again; even when taking into consideration that I had already waited five minutes and the driver was probably distrurbed from a nap “for my convenience.” Benny and Canuck, seeing that I was almost home, followed suit and caught up with me.

“Aren’t you drunk?” Canuck slurred. “No, not at all,” I said. Really, I had maybe three beers when it came down to it. Three beers on top of all kinds of saucy Chinese food.

“Wow, man, you’re really something,” he congratulated me, “I’m so fucking pissed.” I fell behind the swaggering men and was careful to avoid their stumble the remaining 25 yards home.

No, this isn't a proper post. I have just been assigned an additional 12 hours a week of classes and I'm beat. I will post something soon, but until then, here are some funny things my students have done or taught me.

1. Britney Spears is fat.
2. Eating in the wind will make you sick. This is because the cold air sneaks into your lungs when you open your mouth to take a bite.
3. The Chinese don't learn to swim because they are afraid of drowning.
4. In class we had a discussion game. The students chose ten people (famous and otherwise) to be in a hot air balloon together. The balloon suffers and tear and the students must choose who gets thrown out in what order. In one class the final decision came down to me and Chairman Mao. None of the students could bring themselves to voting me out of the balloon, but only three openly said that I should live instead of Mao. Feeling their tension, I sacrificed myself. I did win out over Bill Gates, Michael Jordan and Thomas Edison, however.
5. Clothing in China doesn't "fit;" clothing is "suitable."
6. "Famous" is pronounced "fay-murs," because the dictionary says so (Chinese-English dictionaries really do say so).
7. KFC is gourmet dining.
8. Whitney Houston is admirable because she had to "overcome the people looking down on her because is black."
9. If someone was born June 18, 1982, they are 23 years old. At birth, the Chinese are one-year-old, and another year is added at the new year (though not on the birth date). This makes me 25.
10. Although most of my students cannot differentiate "it" and "eat," all of them know the difference between "shit" and "sheet."

**I am working on post about St. Patrick's Day that I was going to post a couple of days ago. That's not working out, so here is something a bit shorter about the city.**

The students are slowly warming up to me. In my most difficult class, the class with the three bad girls (who I've moved to the front of the class with positive results), the students have actually started to ask me personal questions. "What do you do in your free time? Where do you eat? Do you like to go shopping? Do you have any friends here? What are your plans for the weekend?" This came as a quite a surprise, and relief, as all I usually get from this class is blank stares and timid glares.

We talked about shopping and they told me that the shopkeepers are probably ripping me off because I'm a foreigner. "I know," I said gravely, then in pantomime, I illustrated how I shop. The first step, I explained, after item selection is to approach the shopkeeper and ask "Duo quan?," how much? (The students were impressed that I had come this far already.) Then the shopkeeper gives me some outrageous price, then I say "wo bu dong," I don't understand. (They laughed.) Then I gesture for the shopkeeper to write it down for me. The shopkeeper does so. I look at the outrageous price, put my hand to my chest in shock, gasp, let out a dramatic "bu hao!," no good!, then quickly walk away. (The students liked this.) Inevitably the shopkeeper calls me back, we haggle and I walk away with the desired item and less money in my pocket than I should have put out.

"I pay too much!" I lamented. "Because you are foreigner," they said as if it wasn't obvious. As I already had my students' attention, I taught them the verb "to bargain," and asked them how much I should really be paying for things. "Start at 25%" confirmed several of the girls, "only pay a little more." "25%?!" I asked. I really was paying much to much. "Yes, next time we help you," they volunteered. "My mother is very good at bargaining," I told them, "if the shopkeeper says 100 kuai, she's say 5 jiao!" (If a kuai is a dollar, 5 jiao is 50 cents) They laughed. "Because she is Chinese," the students concluded. Then one girl, one of my three bad girls, so aptly said, "all mothers are good at this."

As indicated my students' favorite pastime, capitalism is alive and well in China. You can buy almost anything here in Dalian (except corn tortillas and refried beans) and on the weekends, you can buy it in the streets. On the 10 minute walk between the bus station and Carrefour (the French supermarket) you'd be hard pressed not to trip over any of the dozens men and women hawking wares from their arms or from carts or sacks set up on the sidewalks. Peddlers flank either side of the wider sidewalks and from their plots they yell out at passerbys. On any given Sunday on any given sidewalk you can find skewered meat hot off the grill, roasted corn on the cob, dried dates sold by the ji (Chinese mass measure), apples, pineapples (peeled, with the eyes removed), socks, pantyhose, lace curtains, red bean mochi, foreign and domestic cigarettes, posters, CDs, hair pins, shoelaces, belts, lighters, shoes, rubber slippers, candied hawberries, strawberries, grape tomatoes, toilet paper, super-absorbent cleaning cloths, kitchen knives, Q-tips by the hundred, peanuts, roasted chestnuts, cast-iron kettle popped popcorn and even puppies--tiny, furry, puppies showcased from a duffle bag. (I put all of my self-control into not stopping for the puppies. If I did I know I'd have problems with the school for bringing one home.)

I made my way through pavement exchange to meet Brummie and Michael at Carrefour last night. Brummie invited me and and through me, Michael, to a laowai party. Every other the month, the foreign teachers at his school, Liaoning Normal University, get together to indulge in wine (a luxury), cheese (more of a luxury) and English and French conversation (a welcomed change from the Chinglish we normally hear).

The party was hosted by Rodney, a sharp, nearly-sixty, retired teacher from England. There were also a few French teachers, an Italian teacher and several Chinese English students. The only other American was Bob, a pasty faced face man from southern Illinois with long, stringy white hair hanging from a balding head. Bob, who looks like he left his 50s at least a couple of years ago, spent much of the night occupying the attention of the few young Chinese girls in attendance. (A note to my male pals reading this: PLEASE COME TO CHINA. Americans are few and far between and the only men the Dalianese see are dirty and old and on the prowl for a young Chinese girl to snatch up. If you guys came, at least there'd be a range--you'd be dirty, young men on the prowl for a young Chinese girl to snatch up.)

The conversations, as I can see it only appropriate when a group of teachers get together, revolved around teaching and the differences between Chinese and Western schooling. These conversations generally boiled down bitch sessions (You have overhead projectors?! I dream of overhead projectors! We still use chalk at my school!), which was good, as it seemed that everyone needed to do a bit of venting. What was interesting, though, was that the Chinese students there joined in with their own complaints and observations. This I have never seen before. The only explanation that I have for this sudden release of independent opinion and voice discontent is that, being in a group of Westerners, the students felt safe enough to do so. Not only did they gripe about their educational system and make suggestions for improvement, they also griped about their lot in life in general.

I talked with one girl, Ashley, who spoke very good English and decent French, for some time and she told me about her own early 20s crisis. She asked me why I left Los Angeles when I studied filmmaking and I told her I didn't like it and thought that it was more important to travel and study as much as you can when you're young. "Will you go back to work in the movies?" she asked. "In one way or another I would like to," I said, "but we shall see." She nodded in agreement. "I understand," she said, "I had a job after I graduated for more than a year. It made me very unhappy, very depressed. Like I was suffocating." These were her words exactly. "So I quit my job and now I study French only."

We really are all the same. I used to think that the affluence in the U.S. and the insatiable need to "keep up with the Joneses" or whoever happened to be on television that week, were, in large part, responsible for the culture that has bred the unhappy 20-something. While I'm not sure if I've changed my mind, yet, the phenomenon is obviously a lot more widespread than what my limited eyes have seen. If there was ever a group of people to develop a way to live without ever having to have a job, without a question in my mind, my generation would be it.

What the hell is going on out there? First Haiti, and now Spain? Has the world always been fraught with such constant crisis? I am somewhat limited in my access to world news here (maybe a good thing) and much of my news comes from the BBC World Service, so I can't imagine what you are seeing on Fox News (the most played up and terrible, most likely) and CNN (somewhat accurate, we hope). There is an English station here, but I never watch because the news anchors' English is just painful to listen to. That and the news itself is poorly presented and obviously filtered. A lot of what I hear on the radio runs along the lines of "it's just a sign of the times" and "terrorism is the 21st century's plague" blah, blah, blah. Any comments?

It never ceases to amaze me that, despite the media becoming more and more of a pervasive force in our lives (as Westerners), there hasn't been much effort made to raise public awareness of how media is made. People just absorb without question. Often, anway. Just think about it how much the word "terrorism" is thrown around the media. It once had a very specific and powerful meaning and now it's used like pepper and table salt. Take a boring topic, add "terrorism," and now the story is interesting and people get scared and upset. Just like when that asshole Cheney called the teacher's union a "terrorist group"--yeah, it was a stupid thing to say and a lot of people got pissed, but I bet a greater number of people heard it, didn't think about, but felt it. And now, on a very, very, small level, but on a certain level indeed, a large number dimwits associate the word "terrorist" with "union." People are simple and the media is powerful. This is my take anyway, and I have digressed.

We have lost two of the foreign teachers. One returned to New Zealand for "family reasons" (the reason could be found at the bottom of a bottle, I reckon) and the other, a middle-aged American who is not bashful about telling anyone who will listen that many of his students remind him of his ex-girlfriend, left because he felt the students were "unteachable." The more I see the more I find that the "teaching in China" market is rampant with middle-aged men who couldn't hack it in their home country so they come here looking to pick up a young girlfriend who doesn't have the cultural wherewithal to sort out the losers from the not, or even the uglies from the not. (How lucky I am to be biracial!) The flipside of this however, is that many of these girls take to these creeps for fairly selfish reasons, anyway, namely money and the possibility of getting to leave China. So I guess it all works out. Plus, this also means that there will be more hapa-haoles in the future and that's a good thing 'cause I plan to unite them and take over the world. We are genetically superior, after all.

I digress again. Yes, two teachers are gone. One has been replaced already by the ideal laowai: blonde hair, blue eyes, big nose and the fact that she's Israeli and speaks with a heavy Hebrew accent doesn't seem to bother anyone. She and her Chinese husband moved in a few days ago AND they put her in charge of teaching AMERICAN AND BRITISH CULTURE. As the only NATIVE SPEAKING person AND the only AMERICAN here, I can't imagine why the blonde-haired, blue-eyed ISRAELI got the class, but that's China for you.

After re-reading this I find a certain negative tint to this post. Not my intention. I'm actually pretty content.

I've lightenen up on my classes, that is more music and games, and my students are slowly starting to respond. I did lay down a pop quiz last week and most of them failed it. (Several failed because I caught them cheating. "The beast" came out on quiz day. No talking, no dictionaries and no cheating. The first one I caught cheating got their paper ripped from them and crumpled in front of the class.) My pop quizzes have only five questions: three vocabulary words, one sentence to write and a throw-away, "Tell me ANYTHING else you have learned." Most of the students were baffled by the throw-away and didn't even answer it. (Independent thinking is definitely not a strong suit of the Chinese. All they expect from oral English is to memorize dialogues.) I was pretty disappointed that my students did so poorly and they were pretty embarrased for being poor students. I told them that if they bombed the next quiz I'd start loading them up on homework, which I don't like doing (more homework for them means more homework for me and I know they're already busy writing lines and lines of words like "agoraphobia"). Thankfully, I think the quiz made them take me more seriously and since I've seen more notebooks and just a little more participation. I think I might throw another quiz at them just to keep them on their toes.

I also got a haircut. It's very short and now I look like a Chinese girl. Or boy. Maybe not that short, but definitely short. Canuck took me to the hair salon, but his coiffure vocabulary proved less than helpful and I left the floor with more hair than I have on my head. But it looks alright and I'm getting used to. It will grow back after all. And I only paid 10 kuai. (That's the going rate. About $1.25. For a salon cut with shampoo. I see now why all my students look like rock stars.)

Yes, this post is boring. I will try better next time.

Yes. It has been some time since my last post. Please accept the usual excuses.

Brummie and I went out for a night on the town on Saturday. The Birmingham native (UK not Alabama) is also a Dalian teacher and blogger (you can check out his blog at choina.blog-city.com) and I first got in touch with him before coming to China. As it turns out, the guy is a real kick to the head (good thing).

We met at the train station and made an impromptu shopping stop at Victory Square (just a name, there's actually little square about it). The shopping center at Victory Square is actually a sprawling network of shops UNDERGROUND and anyone who enters risks never coming out again.

Brummie and I, both being film geeks, me more so, only made it as far as the DVD store closest to the entrance. We played "have you seen this? well it's not as good as his first film...you know, the one with {name of obscure Hungarian actor here}” and then agreed that Drop Dead Fred is a good movie. About 20 minutes into our game I got the feeling someone was watching me. A well-dressed businessman in his fifties standing next to me shamelessly stared. I moved to the other side of the very small store and he followed. I made eyes at Brummie and he returned the look, acknowledging the guy's odd behavior. I looked back to the guy and half-smiled. "You speak very good English!" he yelled at me. "Yes, I do," I said, taken aback. "How?" he asked. "It's the only language I know," I said English teacher slowly, as I've learned to do with most people here. "You're British!" he concluded. (Everyone here thinks I'm British. Pear-shaped tones, Dad.) "No, I'm American," I told him. "Your parents are Chinese?" he asked. "My mother is Chinese. My father is American," I explained for the hundred and seventh time that week. "But you have black hair?!" he said as if I've really ruined his day. My hair is really brown. "All people with Chinese mothers have dark hair," I announced. Basic genetic theory is clearly amiss in Chinese education. "You don't have blue eyes and gold hair," he argued. (Blonde is not in the Chinese-English vocabulary.) "No. No one with at least one Chinese parent has blue eyes. My father has blue eyes," I offered. He stared at me some more and said, "I look you outside. I think you are Chinese woman." Realizing this guy has been watching me much longer that I thought, I got uncomfortable. Fortunately, Brummie jumped in to rescue me with "Have you see this one with Tom Hanks?" and I left the businessman to his own mental quandries.

The Chinese have taken bargaining to an art form. The skill with which my own mother can haggle someone to a half penny brings tears to my eyes. Haggling, however, requires a certain command of the language of transaction, as well as a bit of theatrics and the ability to just walk away if an agreeable price cannot be determined. I have yet to refine my haggle skills here, but I make an effort at every chance. With Brummie in tow, who speaks enough Mandarin to get by, I figured we stood a chance. We made our selections and I lumped them together for bargaining power. The sales girl told Brummie 60 kuai for the lot. I looked at our loot, then at the sales girl, pokerfaced. "Tell her 40," I ordered. He did. She looked at us with feigned exasperation. "No! No! Impossible!" she said in broken English. "Yes! Yes! Good!" I said. She looked at me realizing that I, not Brummie, was in charge of the deal. "No! Too little," she said. "Yes!" I said again. Then I grabbed my collar and said "good customers!" And then something happened that I didn't expect. She buckled. "45," she offered and I handed her the cash.

Foreigners are routinely ripped off because 1) they don't know the going rates for things, 2) they don't know how to haggle and 3) things are so cheap anyway that they'd rather just put down the asking price and not bother with the routine. The Chinese know this and milk it for what it’s worth. This was the first time I have successful haggled on my own in China and Brummie was duly impressed. "I've never been able to get them down at all," he said. "Whenever I try, they just flat out reject and then I give them more than what they asked for, just out of guilt.” We made off with our goods and a glow of a victory (immediately followed by the feeling that I should have started at 30 instead of 40).

Lonely Planet lists the Xinhua Bookstore as an English language bookstore. In my humble opinion, a copy of a Portugeuse-English dictionary, the Berlitz guide to Cuba and William Shatner’s (only, hopefully) sci-fi novel, does not an English bookstore make. There were loads of how-to-learn English books, but those don’t count. Brummie and I browsed stacks of books, just for their covers (I wonder if Winona Ryder knows she’s on the cover of the Pride and Prejudice) and split without a purchase (the first time in a long time I had been to a bookstore and not bought anything).

Dinner was had at a curry house (a nice change) and then we made our to Er Chi Square to go to a jazz bar that Brummie had been to before.

Dalian is a fairly developed city. The population of the city center is somewhere around 2 million. Different countries have occupied the port city, namely Japan and Russia, so one would think that the sight of a foreigner wouldn’t rouse more than a longish glance. Not so. I can slip through a crowd and as long as I don’t open my mouth I get pushed and shoved just as any of the 1.29 billion others. Brummie, on the other hand, has blondish hair and green eyes and wherever we went we got attention. Lots of attention.

“It’s got its perks,” said Brummie when I asked him about it. “For example, whenever I don’t know what to do, I just look lost and someone will come to my rescue. It’s how I get by,” he said proudly and that fact was only proven as the night continued.

We got to Er Chi Square by a cab driven by a man only too excited and proud to have not one, but two foreigners as passengers. Brummie did all the talking and the only part I understood was “America! England!” with a hearty thumbs up. We got out of the cab and Brummie said “this is the part where I tell you I’m not too sure where the bar is because I was drunk the last time I was there. I do remember what the front door looks like, though.” (Brummie studied philosophy at university and the comment didn’t surprise me.) We walked. In circles. And triangles. The great thing about being in a new city is that getting lost is really more an extended tour than annoyance. Even in the cold.

We eventually came close to where we started when a car beeped at a us. We looked over to see the our cab driver who asked us, I can only assume, what we were doing walking around in circles. Brummie got out his phrase book and asked for the jazz bar. Cabbie didn’t know, so he got out of his car and hailed down another cab. They had a brief discussion then made the general hand-circling-in-the-air gesture for “somewhere around here.” Second cabbie drove off and first cabbie stopped another. More hands circling in the air. First cabbie looked at us again then shrugged his shoulders.

We continued into the night until we came upon an English school. “They’ve got to have somebody there who can speak English and point us in the right direction,” I reasoned, “let’s stop in here.” He thought about it for a second, “oh yeah, right.” We marched in and said “hello” to the man behind the counter. “We’re looking for the jazz bar,” Brummie said. The man behind the counter looked at me and started rattling away in Chinese. “What’s he saying?” I asked Brummie. “I don’t know,” he said. Then I said very slowly “wo bu hui shuo putonghua,” I don’t speak Chinese. The man ran into a back room and brought out another gentleman. “Hi, we’re looking for the jazz bar,” I said. “I don’t speak English,” the second guy managed. “Isn’t this an English school?” I asked. “Yes, English school.” Brummie got out the phrase book and between the four of us we determined that the jazz bar was, in fact, somewhere in the area. A third guy came out, words were exchanged and then someone said “wait a moment.” The third guy at the English school, who also did not speak English, did know where the jazz bar and offered to take us there. Most of the way, anyway.

The jazz bar is located across the street from Augustus’s Pub (Vegas has Caesar’s Palace and Dalian has Augustus’s Pub). The bar serves imported beer and all of the waitresses are pretty and wear yellow dresses. The bar also proved to be quite the laowai hangout and Brummie and I played my new favorite game, count the fat, old, ugly white guys with the young Chinese girlfriends. Forty minutes of the game produced a total of 6 couples.

The waitresses are used to laowai and are good at small talk in English. One of the waitresses, however, was especially curious about me and kept repeating a word neither of us understood. Brummie handed her a Chinese-English dictionary and she perused it for several minutes before arriving to her meaning. She pointed to me and pointed to the word: half-breed. I laughed. “Yes, I’m a half-breed,” I told her.

Brummie and I had several imported beers, blathered about not much, spoke French to some Canadians (one of whom’s girlfriend wrote down the name of my school in Chinese so I could make it home), and got out. Brummie needed cash, so we walked to the ATM and on the way a small girl selling roses attached herself to him. Literally. She wrapped herself around one of his legs and refused to let go. Brummie dragged her for 25 yards yelling “wo bu yao” (I don’t want), but she held on fast. I stepped in to pull her off, but to no avail. Brummie shook her off and we made a run for it. “What the hell was that?” I said. “Oh, doesn’t that ever happen to you? Happens to me all the time. It’s annoying,” he said. The down-side of being a laowai.

We had a shot of Jose “Luervo” at Augustus’s Pub, then got a cab home. The cab came right up to my building on campus, then took off, leaving me in the cold (not a problem), slightly intoxicated (not a problem), to grapple with a front door chained from the inside (a problem). Shit.

I tugged on the door as if it made a difference. It didn’t. I walked around the building for an alternative entrance. No dice. I looked for an open window and found two, both barred. I yelled up into the night for the Canuck. Dust in the wind. I looked over at one of the dorms to find all kinds of activity. If worse came to worse I could knock on a door and crash there until morning. I came back to the front of the building. One window, on the third floor, was illuminated by a flashing television. Somebody was up, I reasoned. I rummaged the ground for rocks. No luck, but I did find a peach pit and a bottle cap. Good enough. I chucked both up at the window and the peach pit nailed it. I recovered both objects from the dark and tried again. I continued this shameless behavior until I lost both the peach pit and the bottle cap. I went back to the front door to see if it had undone itself while I was drunkenly lobbing small blunt objects at a window when the building manager came running out. “Dui bu chi” I said, “I’m sorry!” She returned the gesture repeatedly and let me in. Then she gestured “I heard something outside and came down to have a look and I’m glad I did because here you are and what are you doing out at this hour anyway?” “Xiexie,” I managed “thanks,” and I went to bed.

The next morning Canuck came down and I told him the story. “Why didn’t you just ring the doorbell?” he asked. “What doorbell?”

Last night I went out with Michael for dinner. I ate, he paid (much to my feigned refusal). We chatted for some time and I learned two things about him of exceptional note: 1) he is 193 centimeters tall, that is 6 feet 6 inches! and 2) he is "outstanding."

"No really, I am," he affirmed. This topic came about because he first told me that he thought I was unusual. "Very unusual. I haven't met any foreigners who like jiao zi," he said. "I love jiao zi. My mother used to make very good jiao zi," I told him. "You have some Chinese thinking," he concluded, "very unusual." I then heaped garlic and red pepper into my dipping sauce. "You like this?! Foreigners don't like spices! They like plain food only!" he said, "hm, yes, very unusual." Tired of being scrutinized, I looked at him at said, "You're very unusual, too. You are not like other Chinese people I know. And you are not like any of my students." He looked very proud of himself and that's when he declared, without the slightest trace of condescension, arrogance, or exaggeration, "Yes, I am outstanding." He works hard at it, he informed me. He went on to tell me that believeing in your own outstandingness is the only way to succeed in life (ironically, my mother says exactly the same thing and that's not Chinese--the longer I stay here the more I see that my mother is truly exceptional). Then he listed a number of other outstanding attributes including taking first prize in the schoolwide English speech contest, without proper training, AGAINST all the English majors. "I know I'm the best student in the school," he said matter-of-factly and with very good humor.

Michael is also very popular. During the course of my meal and the walk home he bumped into at least half a dozen people he knew. I mentioned it and he said, "well, yes, I'm very tall."

I'm afraid only my Boston friends would get this comparison, but if you took all the defining qualities of Myles and combined them with Komla's, take away the philosophy angle and put a Chinese face on it, Michael is what you'd end up with.

Canuck knocked on my door five minutes after I got back from dinner. "I'm fucking pissed," he declared using the British/Commonwealth meaning of the word. "No shit," I said to the staggering, head rolling man whose pores were releasing Tsingtao beer. "Today's my birthday," he announced, "let's go get a beer." We went down to the local restaurant where you can get a liter bottle of Tsingtao beer for 2 kuai (24 cents). I snacked on pumpkin fries--my new favorite--while I listened to him ramble. The beer in front of him was his fourth in two hours. "You're the only one in the restaurant who can understand me," he slurred. "I want a woman," he yelled out, "but no dogs!" The other patrons looked at us in a very polite Chinese under-my-breath kind of way, and we laughed. "See?! No one understands." We finished our beers, I headed home and Canuck went out into the night in search of a haircut. (Some of you hip to the Chinese way might catch on that more than a cut can be rendered at a hair salon, especially late at night. Canuck, however, really was looking for a haircut and I heard him go up the stairs just a few minutes after I came home, having failed in his search.)

Something I ate that evening came back to haunt me in the middle of the night and by morning I was in no mood to even attempt to teach anything to my students. My first class consisted of a writing game where each student takes out a piece of paper, writes two sentences, the beginning of a story, then folds the sheet over leaving only the second sentence in view. They pass the sheet around the room, each student adding a sentence based on the one seen and by the time it reaches the original author, a silly story is created. Little is gained from this exercise, save for a couple of giggles and lots of time wasting. The activity worked remarkably well, I did practically nothing AND it took up almost the entire class time. My second class did the same activity, which they managed to fuck up as many of the students suffer from I-know-everything-so-I-don't-have-to-listen-to-anything syndrome, and we did a listening exercise with the Beatles song "Hello, Goodbye." My intro to this activity included a bit about the band and one girl knew who John Lennon was. "What happened to him?" I asked. "Dead," she accurately stated. "How did he die?" I pressed. Whispering. "Anyone?" I pleaded. More whispering. "He got very ill," one person ventured. "Suicide," another guessed. One guy in the back who never opens his mouth made an effort to speak. "Alan?" I coaxed. "Accident," he said in a way that sounded more like "acid trip." "What?" I queried. "Accident. Car accident," he managed to let tumble. Most of the kids are my sister's age, and I know it's Communist China, but really, the Beatles are the grand pubas of the "pop" that my students are always raving about (in a way that make ME feel very old). "No, no, no," I said disappointed, "c'mon guys, this is history. John Lennon was killed by a fan. He was shot. It was a very sad day in America. You need to know this. It was December 8, 1980, to be exact." Eyes started to roll back into their more familiar housings and I started the activity for fear of losing them. Afterward I asked the class what they thought of the song. "Very boring," said one of my more eager students. "We want a love song next time."

It is in this second class that I have the three dissident girls. Each one of them came up to me at break, meekly apologized for their behavior in the previous class, and two of the three turned the "special homework" I assigned. The other girl, in lieu of said assigned "special homework," gave me a two-page hand-written letter explaining her "not politeness behavior" came from a lack of understanding "because you are foreign." (Yeah, I'm sure she'd pull this shit on one of her Chinese teachers.) There was also a thick layer of ass-kissing in the letter ("you're pronunciation is so good, just like tape," "I know you are serious teacher") and I was about to re-assign her the task, but realized she probably put more time and effort into it than the other two who both asked to learn more about Disneyland.

My new approach to lesson planning is more games, more music, more pronunciation (their pronunciation is GOD AWFUL, as Canuck put it after sitting in on one of my classes) and fuck the grammar. The students who care will make an effort and the others will leave me with more time to watch bootlegged DVDs in my palatial "foreign expert" digs. Not that I'm getting cynical, but I think that's just the way things work. No point in killing myself when good enough is just that.

I keep my curtains drawn almost always. As my sister put it, my room is a batcave. I don’t know when I developed this habit, or why, but it has been with me for some time. The plus of living in a batcave is, on days like this when my first class isn’t until 10A, I can sleep in without interruption. When I did eventually decide to emerge this morning, I slipped on my school issued pink rubber slippers, accented with Chinese characters and soccer balls (a Dalian thing, I think), and clapped into the kitchen in search of some breakfast. My eyes adjusted to the bright light of day and lo! it was snowing out! Everthing was dusted with half an inch of the the white stuff and fluffy chunks slowly came down to make their contribution. A survival instinct, developed during my time in Boston, kicked in. IT IS SNOWING--MUST DRINK TEA. I ran downstairs for some hot water. (You can’t drink the tap water here. Everyone has a giant thermos to carry boiled water and every building has a boiler.) IT guy was downstairs. “It’s snowing!” I told him. Nothing like stating the obvious. “Yes. It’s very cold today,” he said. I heard Benny, he and IT are roommates, down the hall. “Benny! It’s snowing!” I ran over to him and he acknowledged me, but without any humor. “Yes. I’m busy. See you later.” He said something in Chinese to IT guy and they left. I looked at one of the women who keeps up the building. She doesn’t speak English, but no matter, I pointed out the window and said “Look! Snow!” She looked at me, then grabbed her elbows and said “cold.” These people don’t know how good they have it.

Today’s classes were Business Administration majors. We started the class with a warm-up exercise using “he,” “she,” “his,” “her,” something the Chinese have a huge problem with as they don’t make gender distinctions in their language. The exercise was pretty simple, I admit. The students stand up, one assigns “he,” “she,” “his,” or “her” to five people or objects in the room, passes the buck to another student then sits down and it goes until everyone is sitting. We got to the back of the room where there were three girls who hadn’t gone, but were sitting. “Why are you sitting?” I asked. Three blank stares. I repeat my question, this time very slowly (I find blank stares often mean that I am speaking too quickly) Pause. “This is too easy,” one girl explained, “we know this already.” Another goes on to say that the previous foreign teacher went over the material and they felt that they don’t need to participate because they already understand. “Are you prepared to read a text and not make any mistakes,” I asked half-threatened. More silence. The bravest of the girls said she’d probably make some mistakes. “Then what’s the problem?” I asked, “the other students are doing it.” The Chinese are very much like the Japanese in that conformity is a big deal; most will fold under peer pressure. More silence. I asked another student why she thought we were doing the exercise and she, rightly, said it was because Chinese people often make gender mistakes. By this point all eyes were on me and the three girls. The students still standing and waiting for their turn were looking nervous. I looked back at the girls. If any foreigner were ever prepared for a stare down with Chinese women, it would be me (thanks, Mom). One girl managed a weak, “it’s too easy.” Not wanting to make the situation more uncomfortable than it was, I said “Fine. If it’s too easy, it’s too easy. Fine.” I quickly finished up the warm-up.

The rest of the class went poorly, at best. Lot of sighs, yawns and praying (that is heads knocking against desks). The classes here are set up a lot like how they were in grade school. The good students sit up front while the bad students sit at the back and pick their noses. At break one of the “up front” students told me “We would have more patience for your class if you sang some songs.” What the fuck is up with the Chinese and wanting me to sing songs? Another girl chimed in, “Yes, we like songs.” “I don’t know any songs and I can’t sing,” I said definitively. “That’s okay, you can teach easy songs,” the first guy offered. “What kind of songs?” I asked. The girl said “Love songs! We like romantic songs!” I desperately scanned the are for something to affirm that I was in fact in an institute of higher learning. “Maybe,” I said.

Romantic songs girl then asked me if Chinese students were any different from American students. I looked around to see my college sophomores giddily flipping through fashion magazine and girls, with arms linked, sitting in each others’ laps (they also hold hands, and as much as I’ve seen it, it still catches me off guard). “Yes,” I said. “How?” she eagerly pressed. Not wanting to get too into it, I told her that in my experience, many college students travel great distances to go to college, far from their families, and they must become very independent. I added that in class discussion in very important. “The students always speak in class,” I said, hoping she’d catch my drift. “Oh,” she said, “what else?” I knew any other response would reveal certain frustration, so I said “they’re just different.”

The Chinese educational system revolves around rote memorization and English is taught piecemeal. On more than one occasion I have caught my students writing row after row of vocabulary words like “reconnaisance” and “contemporary,” for their other English classes. Before my hour and a half of Oral English, my class of 31 must endure another hour and a half of Business English. The class is taught by a Chinese English teacher who uses a giant textbook with lessons that revolve around things like “the affability of his rhetoric falls within the constructs of established...” They have a ten-minute break, then come to me where I grapple with convincing them that their friend Mary is a “she” and most sentences really do need verbs.

Foreign teachers are hired, almost exclusively, to teach Oral English--to be the real McCoy in sound and ear. What has happened, and I don’t if it’s because most teachers here are inexperienced and often poorly educated themselves (this is changing), or if it’s the Chinese view of Westerners, is that proper lessons have been replaced by a foreign song and dance. (I can’t imagine the students get away with all this singing and dancing with their Chinese teachers.) I was told by the other foreign teacher that for many students, Oral English is a bit of a blow-off, and given the work load from the other classes, a welcomed one. (This isn’t always they case. I have four or five students in every who really do make an effort to learn.) So the schools bring in these foreign teachers, at a pretty penny, I might add, they garner the prestige of having “foreign experts” on their faculty and very little learning actually goes on. I can only think that the school is aware of this, but I have seen no effort on their part to create an effective learning environment--as a teacher, I haven’t even seen a syllabus, a school calendar or any indication of what is expected of me and it took them a week to get me the class textbook. The book, and you can only call it that because it’s two covers with pages between them, is hated by students and teachers alike; with good cause--it’s crap. I expressed my concerns to a teacher at another school and he assured me that all of this is completely normal. “We had quite a rigorous training session before I started teaching,” he said. “Really?” I begged with a glimmer of hope in my eyes. “Yes,” he said, “it went something like ‘teach English good.” Enough said.

I pulled teeth until lunch and I felt so bad that I let the class go without any homework, EXCEPT THE GIRLS IN THE BACK. Ooooohhhs! poured from the walls. The rest of the students scampered out and I made my way to the back of the room, conscious to keep it cool. I took a very diplomatic approach to it all and in a way that bordered passive aggressiveness (I hate passive agressiveness--it is so unlike me), told them that I appreciated them expressing their opinions and that communication between students and teachers is very important. Then I told them they had special homework. I assigned them to go home and write down 20 things they wanted to learn and find more interesting than my exercises. They didn’t know what to make of it. One girl said “20? Too much.” I replied, “You’re very clever, you can come up with 20 things. Each.” Smiles all around and I let them go to lunch. We shall see what they come up with, but I swear, if I get three identical or highly similar lists, fucking-A, they will do it again!

To spin things 180 degrees, one of the three girls returns to class moments later with an extraordinarily (by Chinese standards) tall guy named Michael. “His oral English is very good. He wants to meet you,” she says. (At least she got the “his” and “he” part right.) Michael starts rambling away in very good British-tinted English. “I’m very nervous,” he said. I’m went about packing my things and he followed me around the room, out the door, down the hall and down the stairs. “I like English very much,” he announced. “Here it comes,” I think. Canuck prepared me for this: he wants English lessons.

Michael is a third year computer science major. He explained to me that he took all of the English courses available in his major. After that he was left to his own devices. “The other foreign teachers, the Australian guys (he said ‘guys’), they were good friends of mine,” he continued. So good, in fact, that one of them let Michael sit in and audit one of his classes. “But then that ‘terrible woman’ who is in charge found out and made me leave because I was not paying for the class. Now, I am not allowed in this building,” he said as we left the building. “I WANT to pay for a class, but they won’t let me.” Aside from being the tallest person I’ve seen in China, next to the little kids at the English Corner fiasco, he speaks the best English. The Chinese English teachers speak pretty well, but their listening skills are crap and they can’t follow natural conversation (too many contractions, phrasal verbs and slang). Michael, on the other hand, has a keen sense of linked sounds and uses a lot of slang himself. You can tell he’s spent a lot of time with English speakers. “The students in this building don’t care about English. They don’t want to learn. I WANT to learn.” You can’t say he isn’t observant.

We continue outside where a group of students were apparently waiting for me. A group of my better students. Skylar, who oozes “teacher’s pet” (but at this point, I need allies), apologized profusely for today’s class. “We were very boring,” she said. “No, don’t worry about it. Maybe I was just boring today.” I told them I appreciated that they worked very hard, and smiles all around, they went to lunch. Michael kept following me.

“I want to be your friend.” (I want English lessons.) “Did you come to China alone,” he asks. “Yes,” I reply. “I can be your guide!” he offers (I can exchange something for English lessons because I don’t want to pay.) “Do you speak Chinese?” he queries. “Idiar,” I make out. It means “a little.” “I can help you! he exclaims. (You need me. And I need English lessons.) We made it to the dining hall and he offered to buy me lunch (See! I’m a nice guy! Please give me free English lessons!). I beat him to the card swipe (we all have debit cards), but he bought me a manto. It was rapid fire questions all the way. “Are you a student?” he asks. “No,” I said. “You must be a recent graduate,” he concludes. “No, I graduated three years ago,” I inform. “But you’re younger than me,” he reasons. What?! “I never told you how old I was,” I retort. “The other students told me,” he said. The man had done his homework.

I told Michael I had to get back to my apartment because I had things to do. “Oh, you live on campus!” he said, “you must live in the foreign experts apartment!”

Ding! Two nights ago Canuck came down and asked me if someone had called that evening. No one unexpected had and he told me that someone he didn’t know just called and he was pissed about it. “It’s starting,” he said with a ring of paranoia. “They know where we are. Crank calls, students calling at 7A and pleas for English lessons. Goddammit.” He stomped off to find the foreign affairs liaision to ask if he had given the number out.

“Did you call the other foreign teacher the other night?” I asked. “Yes,” he said proudly, “I wanted to introduce myself, but the teacher said he was very busy and didn’t like being called by people he didn’t know. He seems very arrogant.” I explained that Canuck had taught in China for some time and he’s very protective of his time and privacy. Michael put two and two together. “So you must live in the apartment where the Australians lived! I have you’re number. Can I call you?” (Somebody should have my number. I don’t.)

So here I am trapped like a rat. How funny is it that I’m paid to teach lethargy with eyes while the one person on campus who really cares about English my is up my ass for free lessons.

“Maybe we can work out an exchange,” I offer. I’ve been meaning to get a Chinese tutor, but before I make that suggestion I ask him where he’s from to assess his accent. “This is my city. I am a Dalian boy,” he says proudly. (Michael is very different from any of the other people on campus that I’ve met--I’d go so far as to say that he has a personality. So far, the only people I’ve encountered with any kind of character are the local salesmen--but what is Michael, really?) Ding! Ding! Ding! Better than Chinese lessons, here is somebody who can get me off campus and into the real city! (This has been a goal of mine of late. The school is highly protective of me. I’ve asked them more than half a dozen times to show me where the local pool is and even for that they blow me off. The foreign affairs guy has gone as far as telling me that the buses to town stop running at 7P, when the signs on the bus say they go until 10P at least.) Furthermore, Michael is not one of my students and not a colleague--no conflict of interest and no claims of favoritism or excessive demands.

“Give me your number,” I told him. “I want to see the city. And what time does the main gate really close? I was told it was 10P.” He looks at me to gauge if I’m serious. “The gate never closes. Who told you that? I go out late to the movies all of the time,” he said. He walked me back to the apartment building, telling me about how much he likes English and how he hopes to study in England one day. Then he says, “Don’t forget. I’m Michael. Very tall. Like Michael Jordan. Easy to remember, right?”

I get back to my apartment and five minutes later Michael called. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, short of breath, “I wanted to tell you I just went down to ask the guard about the gate and he said it never closes. Also, here is your telephone number.”

Talk about yin and yang for one day. My next class went rather well. We had a discussion and talked about linked sounds which was a completely new concept to my students (they actually have had years of listening class and not a one of them knew that “was a” sounds much more like “wuza” in normal speech). You win some and you lose some.

The students in China are not what I expected. First off, they're very hip--way hipper than I can ever hope to be. Messy hair with wispy ends is all the rage and only the very plainest keep their natural color. That goes for girls, as well as boys. Even my non-Fashion Design majors have a keen sense of what to wear and all of it is very much in line with what is seen in the best of Japanese fashion mags.

My students are also very big. I came to China expecting to be a monster among them (no really, stop laughing--I was a monster in Japan) and in general they tower over me. They do tend to have rather slight frames, though there are several chunkies in the crowd, but on average, the people here are bigger than the people in Kona. I have been told the Northern Chinese just are bigger and that has to do with Russian and Manchurian influences. I've also been told that the little Chinese that I envisioned are found in Southern China and the people in the North refer to Southerners as monkeys.

It is true that education is greatly valued here. That goes back to Confucius. The students do work like hell, especially in high school when their futures ride on the performance on one college entrance exam, but the students I have are hardly bookworms. On the first day of class I did the very usual, very boring exercise where the students introduce the person sitting next to them. On the list of things they like to do for fun, the most frequently heard response was 1) shopping, 2) playing video or computer games and 3) playing basketball. (Yao has had a great effect in making the sport popular, or so I gather.) Eating and sleeping are ranked in the top five and was consistently popular among girls and boys.

The students also described their partner's future ambitions, and as far as my understanding of how the world works goes, theirs are just as unrealistic as any American college freshman's is. A good majority of my Fashion Design majors want to be "famous fashion designers" and a good percentage of my Business Administration majors want to be "rich CEOs" and/or millionaires. I asked my fourth future millionaire exactly how he planned to become a millionaire and he thought for a moment and said "I don't know yet." A number of girls also had futures that relied on "catching a good husband."

Granted, the introduction exercise was just that, an exercise, but hearing my students tell me about their grand futures only reminded me of myself, not too long ago, sitting in Film Theory and Criticism and fantasizing, with serious intent, about the day when I would be swimming in filmic accolade as I churned out masterpiece after cinematic masterpiece. (I still think about movies a lot and I've even taken to carrying around a notebook to jot down interesting observations or ideas for characters, but let's face it, I have missed my self-assigned deadline of an Oscar at 23.)

I hate to be cynical (okay, no I don't), and I admit I don't know how things work in China (there may very well be a high demand for fashion designers), but I wonder what will happen to these rising stars three or four years down the road when Milan refuses admittance and there are bills to pay. Will it be like how it is in the States? Will they take jobs in retail while they spend evenings sketching summer collections? I do know that in China the social structure is different and educated people do not take menial jobs, but will that change, too? Will these kids sit around with their friends and bitch about how Bruckheimer is a hack and who gives a shit about Hollywood, anyway (oh wait, that's my friends) while they slave the day away in underpaid service jobs? I sure as hell hope not.

Anyway, I digress.

Another funny thing about my students is they all have English names that they got to choose. Most of them have typical names like Mike, Jennifer, Andy, Michelle--and I have a Vivian in each of my five classes. Some names are creative. I have girls called Ivan, Ice, Lemon and Red Moon. There's a girl who spells her name Eali, but pronounces it Ally. The other thing about choosing your own name is that you can change it at will. Between this semester and last, five of my students found more suitable names for themselves. And in one of my classes, when I passed out slips of paper and asked the students to write their English name on it, there was a boy who informed me that he didn't have an English name. I told he that using his real name was fine by me and by the time I made it around the room he had dubbed himself Chris.

This concept of creating a name for yourself intrigues me and now I am on a mission to find myself a suitable Chinese name. What most foreigners do is take a Chinese sounding version of the name they already have. The Chinese people I have encountered have suggested I do this as Maile sounds like Mei Li and that's easy 'cause Mei Li actually means something. It means "beautiful." I don't like thid at all as I feel like it places too many expectations on me. I would much rather have a name whose Chineseization closer resembles a word like "wheelbarrow" or "shoelace." But what I did learn today is that there is a Chinese word for cannon and the combination of "beautiful" with "dangerous weapon" I like very much.

This is Beautiful Dangerous Weapon, signing off. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Benny asked me Wednesday if I wouldn't mind visiting his community the next evening for "something like English Corner." "Just to talk with some people from my community," he said. Glad for the opportunity to get out and see "real China," I agreed. Benny also added that in exchange for my time, I would get some money. Bonus!

English Corner is something of a phenomenon here. Learning English seems to be high up on the list of "things to do" for a lot of people and schools and communities have set up weekly English Corners for people to get together and practice their English. I have read and heard from other teachers that being invited to English Corner goes with the territory of being a native English-speaker in China.

So Benny comes by Thursday and we're escorted into the city in a slick black car (they don't seem to have other types of cars in China). There was another gentleman in the car, his name I never caught, and apparently he is the director of the community we were visiting.

China is highly organized (hear me out on this one.) The levels of government are broken down into smaller pieces, just like in the States--federal, state, county, etc.--and here, at the lower levels, there is the community, then the street. In the city, the street breaks down even further into buildings. The community we were headed to for "something like English corner," was the Red Rock Community (that's the translation, anyway.) All of this was explained to me on the way. Mr. Director didn't speak a whole lot of English, so I relied on Benny for interpretation.

Half way there, Benny also says to me, "they want you to give a little speech." Speech?! I asked him what they wanted me to say and he said "tell them something about English. About how to learn English." Now as an English teacher (or so I am now), you'd think this wouldn't be such a difficult topic, but really, when you think about it, how many things can you really say about learning English? Practice a lot, talk to other English speakers, watch English movies, listen to English radio...the options are limited. We continued on our trip and I thought about the things I could say and then Benny added, "there's also going to be some singing and performance. It's kind of a ceremony." What?! The gears slowly turned in my poor mono-lingual brain; my "talk with some people in the community" at the "kind of like an English Corner" was quickly developing into some much bigger.

The conversation in the car was light and casual and Benny mentioned to Mr. Director that I was in search of dried soy beans for my recently purchased blender/juicer/soy milk maker. They pulled the car over right then and there and stopped for beans. Mr. Director got me two kinds, regular soy beans and some black beans that I should add to the mix, at a one to three ratio, to improve the flavor of the milk.

We get to the community center to find a huge and growing group of people gathering for the GRAND OPENING OF THE RED ROCK COMMUNITY ENGLISH CORNER. My nerves started in. I was introduced to various leaders and directors (including the district director, a relatively high ranking party member). I soon discovered, a native English speaker was promised for the event--ME, in grubby jeans and all.

We were lead into a room to wait and Benny asked me "so what are you going to say." I told him I thought I should say nice things about Dalian and then tell them to practice a lot. Something like that. He said "they want advice on how to improve their English. And remember to speak very slowly and use simple words." Anxiety started flowing from my extremities into my torso.

We were called into the room and given seats close to the front. The crowd had grown substantially--there were probably more than 100--and it included small children, housewives, politicians, a block of soldiers in stiff green uniforms and round caps, grandfathers and students. Two hosts took centerstage, that is the front of the room under the portraits of the "five great leaders," the first being Mao and the last being Deng. (I didn't recognize the others.) I sat politely as they rattled away in Chinese.

At one point people got up, presumably as they were introduced, and Benny got up next to me. He sat back down, then hit my leg, which I took as a cue to get up. Unfortunately, it was not my cue to get up, and he grabbed me to sit down again. "I will tell you," he yell-whispered. A number of people got up and spoke. An elderly man, who Benny explained was an English teacher, talked for awhile, then brought out an easel with English phrases written on it. Then, out of nowhere, he broke into an abbreviated rendition of "We Shall Not Be Moved." I did my best not to react as the only reaction I would have produced at the time was shocked laughter. I whispered to Benny, do you know this song?" "No, do you?" he asked. "Yes, it's an American song." I said. "What is it?" he asked, surprised that I knew it. Not wanting to get to into it, I told him I'd explain later. Elderly English teacher did a beautiful job singing the song, but all I could do was wonder what these people would think if they knew it was a song sang in the Black churches in the South before it became a political song during the Civil Rights movement. I did notice the "Jesus is my savior" part was removed from the Chinese version, however.

Eventually I was approached with the microphone and I got up in front of the crowd. Hundreds of eyes looked up at me with grand attention. Another teacher relieved some of the pressure by introducing me in English. Then he said "Do you have a song for us today?" Song?! "No. I don't. I can't sing." I said in desperate honesty.

(Anyone who knows me knows that, while I enjoy singing, if that's what you want to call the brutal noise that emanates from my throat, I am no damned good at it and really self conscious about it. Some of you smartasses will say "what about karaoke?" to which I reply: 1) how many months of karaoke Thursdays had it been before I actually had the nerve to get up a participate? and 2) how many drinks had I had before I even did that? The last time I sang publicly, while of sound mind, was in grade school.)

"We were told that you're a very good singer," said the English teacher. "You have been misinformed," I said. "You don't know any songs?" he queried. (I was later informed that the Chinese love to sing and all Chinese people can sing and apparently, at the drop of a hat, will.) I thought about it for a second and the only song I could think of that I knew I wouldn't foul up was "Happy Birthday." I looked at him, obviously jilted. "No."

The silent disappointment was deafening.

He then told me to tell them something about English. I rambled through a thank you, said I was happy to be there, told them I'm a teacher, told them I was impressed with Chinese students, then told them to practice speaking at English corner, find original sources of English material, movies and what not and to practice some more. Benny got up and translated for me. Then he looked at me for more. "That's it," I said. "That's it?!" he asked with a look that indicated I needed to say more. "That's it."

We sat back down and a couple of people came over and talked to Benny. Then Benny said they wanted me to do a skit. "Sure," I said, "what do they want me to do? Tell them to give me something," I said. "You don't know any?" he asked. What they hell did I think I was? Some magical instant English machine programmed with songs, theatrics and volumes of sound learning advice? Then he told me that they wanted me to correct some people's pronunciation. Okay, I told him. People went around the room and practiced phrases posted on the walls, but somehow I was never given a mic and no attention was ever directed my way, so I sat their quietly and listened to heavily accented attempts of "what is the day today?" and "I am happy everyday." Then Benny told me that I should answer questions. I told them I would be happy to do that and they gave me a mic. More talking in Chinese, then silence. A teacher finally asked me whether British-English or American-English is harder to learn and I told him that British-English is harder for me to learn, but shouldn't make a difference to anyone trying to learn the language. Then he asked which I thought was better and I said it didn't matter, but he looked at me for more and I said American-English is more popular, especially for business. "I think so too," he said with satisfaction.

More people came over to talk to Benny and this time around they didn't seem very pleased. Benny said I needed talk more and I told him flat out, "I would be happy to do what they need me to do, but I have no idea what is expected of me." They look at me angrily and talked to Benny some more. Benny leaned in and said "They don't want to pay you." Fine by me. I had no idea what was going on from the get go and by this point I just wanted to leave. "Okay." I said nonchalantly.

Young children got up to speak and sing. Benny told me all young people in China know Edelweiss, which was proven, as was a keen fondness for anything by the Carpenters. The ceremony ended and I made to leave, but got swarmed by young children. In nearly perfect English, I was bombarded with "My name is Ling, what's your name?" and "You look very young, I was wondering, what is your birthday?" and "Do you like Chinese food? What is your favorite?" I was floored. These 8-year-olds spoke the best English I have heard since coming to China and that includes my university students and their Chinese teachers. The crowd dispersed and we headed to leave, but then I was stopped. They wanted my picture in front of their English Corner sign. I obliged and we headed out.

Dirty (maybe dirty is too strong, but definitely unfriendly) looks abounded. We lost our escort to a cab and I was stared down as I made my way. Benny made goodbyes and I maintained a look of confusion, anxiety and I-didn't-do-anything-wrong, though I really felt that I did.

Benny invited me to dinner later and I declined. We made it back to campus (after a tour of the city with a cab driver who, after having gotten lost, stopped the cab in the middle of the street and asked a guy on a motorcycle for directions) and then Benny insisted that I have dinner with him and his roommate in a sly, but clear "I'm not asking, but telling" way, and as he is my liaison to the school, I obliged.

My failure to perform at the English Corner made me "lose face." When things don't go accoding to plan or social expectation, someone will inevitably lose face, and the proper thing to do is to make an effort to minimize casualities. Everyone in China operates not to lose face. (I was told that part of why SARS became such a big problem was because the government tried to keep a lid on it in effort to save face.) Being a Westerner, even a part-Chinese one, this isn't that big of a deal to me, however, I took Benny, and the people responsible for bringing me to the ceremony, down with me. Although I feel a bit bad about that, I know I wasn't the source of miscommunication and it's not like I was unpleasant or intently rude to anyone. At the end of the day, all I can say, with a heavy American accent, is "Oh, well." Benny did eventually apologize for the way things turned out, and we chalked it up to general miscommunication and left it at that.

Much of this face stuff was explained to me by another teacher. I also described the event to the Canuck and he said what probably happened was money changed hands and an English song and dance was promised, unbeknownst to the song-and-dancer. Song and dance was not delivered so people got pissed, people lost face and I wasn't paid. Canuck said that that happens all the time in China and as a foreigner, even a sort of foreigner, I should expect more of this kind of shit in the future.

Good did come out of it all, however. I scored a sack of beans, I hung out with awesome little kids, AND, this is the best part, I can be confident that I won't be asked to anymore English Corners! Not all foreigners can say that.

Monday’s classes were cancelled so we could get our mandatory physical exams. A slick black car escorted us into the city where we met up with Pat, another foreign teacher, a kiwi in his 40s.

The Travellers’ Medical Center was packed to the gills with people: other foreigners getting examined, but mostly Chinese people looking to get visas to go abroad. The Kiwi, a really loud chap who I’m convinced suffers from some pop-psych abbreviation, probably OCD, made himself busy in picking up girls in the waiting room.

The medical exam first involves several pages of paperwork with questions like “Have you ever suffered from toxicomaniacal behavior” (public drunkeness, I figure) and “Are you of sound mind?” Then there was a blood test (I met the cutest British guys, teachers at the Dalian College of Translation, while they were holding their arms with cotton swabs. I gave one of them my e-mail address. I haven’t memorized my phone number yet.). Next was a chest X-ray, then a eye test, then a cargiogram of some kind, blood pressure and lung inspection and then I waited for the gentlemen in my party who had to go through another examinination I was exempt from. I was not give too many details as to what it was, but apparently the ordeal involved “getting molested by a guy not wearing any gloves.”

We came back to a feast hosted by Benny’s boss and his boss, a lady called Mary. Kiwi had two large beers and dominated the meal with squawking that made everyone feel uncomfortable (I heard later from Canuck that the Chinese present couldn’t understand a thing he said). Whenever anyone gives him the look of non-comprehension, instead of speaking slower, he just speaks louder.

Canuck and I have made a pact to look out for each other, in light of the other foreign teacher., Oddly enough, I think our compatibility comes not only from the fact that we’re North Americans, but also that we’re Chinese. But not Chinese Chinese. Old school Chinese. Old school as opposed to the way Chinese people are now, and that is different from the people in my family. Reflecting on this phenomenon, this is what I think happened: my generation’s parents left China a long time ago. They went to the US or Canada, or wherever, but because they were so different from their adopted country’s people, they lived in relative isolation and kept the values current to the time. In the mean time, China had a revolution, then things modernized. However, the values of the old Chinese were passed on (as much as they were) to the American (Canadian)-born first generation. A case of the “more Chinese than the Chinese.”

Anyway, Canuck’s a decent sort and I’m glad he’s around. And he really is kind of like a big brother. To hear him talk of his loathing for dust (complete with scrunched up facial expressions)...it only reminds me of my mother talking about something like ugly babies or Mormons.

I made my first trip into the city Sunday. Thomas, the Canuck, served as my fellow adventurer and interpreter (having someone who speaks Mandarin around is damned handy.)

Dalian is beautiful. Tall buildings, well maintained parks, street vendors, movie theatres, old buildings, new buildings, department stores, subways (in the British sense--underground paths to safely take you to from one side of the street to the other and you can pick up a new pair of jeans or a writstwatch in the process), trolley cars, and buses...it's a real city. What's most impressive is that it's really clean, minus an exception. The Chinese find it acceptable to spit anytime, anywhere. And there's nothing modest about it. You'll see an old guy standing on a street corner and he'll look you straight in the eye, hock up a wad and project it five feet onto the side walk, almost as if he was greeting you.

The Canuck and I wandered about for awhile, I had a roasted sweet potato (I could eat one every day), then we set out in search of either the Carrefour, or Wal-Mart. Despite the sun and clear, blue sky, Sunday was colder than a witch's tit. After 45 minutes of aimless wander, I casually suggested to the Canuck that maybe our powers of intuition alone would get us to Wal-Mart before my ears broke off in brittle pieces and maybe he should put his Mandarin skills to use and ask someone to point us in the right direction. "I don't know how to say Wal-Mart in Chinese," he said. "I betcha it's Wal-Mart," I offered. Still, we wandered.

When I was travelling with Ahearn, I noticed he, too, often felt that his powers of intuition would lead us across the great North American continent, so I concluded that the Canuck, was suffering from some chromosomal (or chromosomatic, for Russell) disorder, so I resigned myself to wandering about in the cold, unable to ask for directions myself.

Our wanderings took us into the Dalian Friendly Department Store, a multi-level, marble walled behemoth offering the finest and latest imports from all parts of Asia, Europe and North America. The prices were very similar to those in the states (to be read: more than what I can afford), however, three things came from the visit: 1) I bought a set of beautiful pillow towels (leave it to the Chinese to make something to put over your pillows so you don't have to wash the pillowcase) for 15 kuai a piece; 2) I found the cleanest toilets in all of China (yes, there were still holes in the ground) and 3) someone told us that bus 15, picked up in front of the store, would take us to Wal-Mart (or as the Chinese say it, War-a-Marr).

Wal-Mart is located in Olympic Park. Olympic Park is, as the name implies, a park. The only thing Olympic about it that I could make out was, in the middle of it all, there is a giant structure of the Olympic rings. I can't make sense of any of this, but I reckon it has something to do with the general Chinese pride associated with the Olympics being hosted in Beijing.

The store itself is actually underground, and it's huge. It looks nothing like Wal-Mart at home or on the mainland; it sells fresh food, there's a bakery, a huge freezer section, as well as the usual Wal-Mart dry goods part. The funny thing is, is that it's all very Chinese. For 1.7 kuai, I bought a bag of fresh manto (white buns). I got spicy tofu skins, and mochi balls with red bean paste. Milk comes in small plastic bags, the yogurt is liquid and you can buy tofu, fresh, and you take it away in a simple, small, plastic bag with handles (minimalist is the only way to describe packaging here). It was also in Wal-Mart where I saw my first other foreigner: a guy, being tugged along by a slim Chinese girl.

When you look around Dalian, “grim Communist China” is the last thing that comes to mind. There are slick, black AUDIs and Mercedes; tall, irredescent glass buildings, with more to come and at the Wal-Mart, families wait in long lines to pay for baskets of STUFF. The young people here take their fashion cues from Japan; baggy jeans, blue hair, frizzy permed hair and hip-hop gear are not that unusual. Rickshaws, blue Mao caps and unisex, government issued jackets are exist more in minds of Westerners (or maybe just the ones I know) than in the contemporay Chinese.

We made it back to campus, gear in tow and fingers attached (did I mention it was cold?). Benny called later that evening, and with the tone, pitch, accent and delivery of any-member-of-my-mother’s-family-just-pick-one asked “where have you been?” I’m very much treated like a little sister here, which is kind of annoying, but by the same token I can appreciate that, as my host and employer, they wouldn’t want to lose me. It is Communist China, after all.

I opened the curtains Saturday morning to grey, fog and drizzle. I spent much of the morning cruising the internet, then arranging my apartment. I'm slowly settling in and getting the things I need for proper living, but high up on my list things of "things still needed" were salt (to make saline solution for my gums) and towels (so I could dry off after a shower I was hoping to eventually take).

The campus here is pretty big and there are a number of shops and places to eat close to my buiding. I ventured out into the cold (much to the protest of the housekeeping lady who doesn't speak ANY English, but made it clear to me that it was too cold to go out, especially without an umbrella--I swear she must be a relation), all by myself, in search of said salt and towels.

I went into the store I had been to the night before and looked around to find nothing was obviously salt. I turned to the young girl (she looked about 15) behind the counter and said in very poor Chinese ni hui shuo yinwin ma?--do you speak English?, to which she responded with a look of utter confusion. Then I said, slowly and clearly, do you speak English? More confusion. I pointed to the bag of sunflower seed she was snacking on and she made to get me some, but before she did, I grabbed a candy bar and said SWEET. Then I pointed back to the sunflower seeds and said SALT and pointed to my tongue hoping to indicate that I was talking about taste. I pointed back to the candy and said bu, the word for not. Two of her friends were hanging around the counter and they chimed in with what I believed to be explanations of my analogy charades game. The girl looked at me with more confusion, but also with an earnest desire to help me (most likely so I would leave and she could get back to her friends). I pointed to the seeds, said SALT, then gestured shaking salt onto foods and eating it. More suggestions from her friends. The girl ran over and handed me a package of spoons. I shook my head no. (I was seriously beginning to doubt any ability I might have as a teacher of English. I mean if I can get the concept of salt across, how could I ever explain the past perfect?) One of the girls offered an idea and the sales girl lead me to a store in the opposite side of the building and handed me a plastic bag filled with a white powder. Hallujah! I have salt. The girl left with her victory and I was left with my bag of salt. Or so I thought. I squeezed the bag and noticed a bit of a sticky quality to its contents. I looked on the shelf where it came from and saw things that looked remarkable sweet; something I took to be brown sugar, honey. Shit. Back to square one. Young girl behind the counter No. 2 also did not speak English, but fortunately a student came in, and although she did not speak English, nor did the next person who came in, a third girl came in who did speak English, and after prefacing her conversation with "My English is very poor" (every Chinese student I have met says this, and really most of them speak much better English than I expected, and often better than the majority of students I had in the States) she explained to girl behind the counter No. 2 that I wanted salt. After that, between the five of us, we determined two things: 1) the Chinese word for salt is yan, and 2) neither store I had been to carries it. I went back to the first store, bought a towel and made it back to my apartment.

That afternoon Benny came by to take me to meet the English department. Thomas, the other English teacher came along. He's Chinese-Canadian, born not in Canada, and speaks perfectly fluent English with a trace of a Chinese accent (I think I am the only person here capable of detecting this). He also speaks Mandarin which has proved only to be an asset.

The main building on campus is a giant cold cell block. The halls are long and grey and dim flourescent lights hang every several feet. I can only imagine what the bathrooms look like. We met with several ladies who names I have already forgotten and whose titles I never caught and we sat down and hashed who was to teach what to whom. After some confusion, ironed out by Thomas in Mandarin, I was assigned the non-English majors.

One of the ladies Gu Xiumei (she wrote her name down for me), a very sweet woman, told me that my classes were actually in another building and insisted that she show me where there were right then and there. We went out into the cold and rain and she was careful to share her umbrella with me. (Chinese women are very affectionate with each other--then often walk arm in arm--and as an idea, I think it's nice, but in practice, it has caught me off guard more than once so far. As a cold Westerner, I find any physical contact from a person I don't know, unless either of us in three sheets to the wind, to be somewhat threatening, and definitely inappropriate.) So my classes are in the new building. The main hall has high ceilings, decorated in modern art deco (is there such a thing?) with blue and white and black. The walls have marble trim, the railings to the staircase are polished nickel and the second floor hosts a modernist installation. Gu Xiumei lead me to her office, introduced me to the president, gave me two dry erase markers, a bottle of ink (both of which I had to sign out for, a signature on one page for the markers and a signature on another page for the ink) and took me to the classrooms.

My students are fashion design majors and business administration majors. I have three classes with the fashion design majors, and two with business administration. Instead of the students coming to me, I go to them (dashed are the ideas of a Anglo-themed classroom complete with map of Hawaii). Gu Xiumei lead me to each room. We walked into one of the fashion design rooms, one of the few rooms that wasn't locked, to find a student, sketches and designs tacked to almost every surface, and a white dry erase board with FUCK! in big letters scrawled across it. I chuckled. Gu Xiumei looked at the board, and then at me, then laughed nervously in a way that made me wonder if she understood what was written on the board, or if she was just laughing because I was. I didn't say anything about and we left.

At least I know they've got their basics down.

I am in China.

I am sitting in my gigantic room, just one part of my gigantic apartment on campus at the Dalian Institute of Light Industry. I just got back from dinner with Benny, a Chinese English teacher and his roommate Andy. (A perk of being Chinese is that you get to pick a Western name for yourself.) The food here is awesome, even on my very limited vegetarian, soft foods diet (the soft foods part they understood after I explained the oral surgery, but the vegetarian part got "...really?! Completely vegertarian? No fish or poultry?! Really?! Why?!) We had candied taro, tofu in all shapes and sizes, some mushroom dish that would put Baron's Hamakua fungal jungle to shame and I had almond milk (nectar of the gods).

{I'm tired now and structure is a challenge, so excuse the lack of style in this post. Let's cut straight to the part where I go through how I got here.}

Two days ago, Karen and Baron found me in a heap on the floor in the middle of my room, unpacked and undressed. "What were you doing last night?!" queried Karen in a tone reserved for disappointed mothers. "Uh..." I replied.

I stuffed my shit into the luggage and we made it to the airport in time for me to be the last in line for check-in. I had a suitcase, a box and an overstuffed duffle bag that was far too heavy to be considered carry on, but the fine folks at JAL said nothing. Being the last in line to check-in, I was also the last in line at security and as usual, I was searched to the nth degree, my laptop was scruntinized and despite my name being announced over the PA system, security insisted that I take off my boots for inspection. I made it to the plane and 600 eyes glared me down as I made it to my seat.

Honolulu was uneventful.

The flight to Tokyo was awesome. I don't know what happened with my seating--my mother may have had something to do with it (she has a gift for these things)--but I got to ride business class in the upper bubble of the 747. The seats recline almost all the way and each person has their own television screen that pulls out from the armrest. The food is quite good and the stewardesses (it seems that there aren't stewards on JAL) greet every beck and call with the utmost patience and good manner.

JAL doesn't fly into Dalian in the evenings, and I flew into Tokyo at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. Because JAL is so awesome, I got to spend a night in Narita (as a part of the service) at the Nikko Hotel. Having nothing to do before my flight in the morning, I took a bus into downtown Narita and discovered that there isn't much to downtown and even less after 8 p.m.

The trip down was not without merit, however. I had a tofu steak omlette and a Kirin on draft for dinner at a teppanyaki place that was open until midnight. The guy behind the grill spoke excellent English, due largely to the fact that he went to high school in Missouri ("about two hours from Kansas City.") He told me that teppanyaki is typical of Osaka, where he was originally from. The omlette consisted of a block of grilled tofu placed onto a thin layer of egg, then wrapped. Some kind of dark plum barbecue sauce was smeared over the top, then the chef streaked the mess with flavored mayonnaise ("What kind of mayonnaise is this?" I asked. "Normal mayonnaise," he said. "No it isn't," I said. "Yes, it is," he insisted. "Well, it's not like mayonnaise in the States," I said. "No, it's just regular mayonnaise," he said. "This mayonnaise has flavor," I said. "Oh," replied. It really did have flavor, and it was good.) The chef slid the omlette along the grill to a space in front of me. So good...

After dinner I had 45 minutes to kill before the next and last bus back to the hotel. Most places were closed so I wandered around the train station, the convenience stores and a book store.

At one point nature called and I went back to the train station to look for a place to respond.

I have been to Asia before and the concept of squatty potties terrify me. The toilets in the Narita train station did offer one Western toilet (ironically, it was reserved for the handicapped) in a row of porcelain holes in the ground, but I knew that such luxuries would not be available in China, so I convinced myself that I should go for the squat, just for practice, in a place that I knew would be clean at the very least.

The secret is in the knees.

I hung up my coat and bag on the hooks so conveniently provided and undid my trousers. I inspected the situation and worked out the process in my head (I couldn't soil myself after all, I was miles away from my hotel and a new set of clothes) before squatting over the bowl. I carefully tucked the waist of my jeans and my knickers firmly under my knees, then went to town. VICTORY! For the first time in my life I mastered the squatty potty, and what's more, I did so without bringing damage or shame to myself or my clothing! I got up from the squat and WOOSH! A sensor, placed squat high, detected my movement and triggered the bowl to flush once I got up. "What the fuck is this," I thought, "they've got motion sensitive flushes and yet they haven't figure out how to get the fucker up out of the ground?"

Feeling accomplished, I went back to the bus stop only to discover that I missed the last bus back. A group of English speaking people were waiting at another stop, so I went and talked with them. They were a conference group from Star Alliance, an airline organization. I got to chatting with one guy and as it turned out, they were waiting for a shuttle to a hotel not far from mine. He didn't think anyone would notice if I hopped on with them, so I did just that.

I sat and talked with the guy for a bit and when I told him I had come from Hawaii, he said "oh, you should talk to her, she's from Hawaii, too," referring to a woman in the group. She came over and told me that when she saw me she knew I was from Hawaii (or California), 'cause I "didn't look quite Japanese." She told me she lives in LA now, but was originally from Kaimuki.

Kaimuki...I thought about it for a moment. "You know the Sekiyas?" I asked. "Oh yeah, I know the Sekiyas," she said. "You know Baron Sekiya?" I queried. "I totally know Baron! We were friends in school!" Talk about a small fucking world. So here I was on a bus in Narita, headed to a hotel where I didn't stay and talking to some woman who I met that night about whether or not Baron Sekiya got married and had kids. I told her that I'd be e-mailing Baron soon and she said, "well, tell Baron that Laurie Fukunaga from Kaimuki said 'Hi.""

I caught a 660 yen cab back to my hotel and crashed. I took advantage of the complimentary breakfast the next day, sat next to a couple of wicked hot Aussies on their way to LA and made it to the airport in time to buy a new camera (Canon A80--it's awesome).

The flight into Dalian went without incident and I got to see snow covered moutains in Japan and groovy (literally) hills in Korea on the way. The view into Dalian itself was rather gloomy. It's very industrial, rows of houses, buildings, but appparently, that's just the area closest to the airport. Looking out the window I had a moment of "what the fuck am I doing here," but reminded myself that I'm a big gilr and whatever mess I get myself into, if it is a mess, I'm obligated to see through to the end.

I passed customs without incident; really much notice at all (I should have packed more Miller). All of my luggage arrived and I was greeted by Benny and Mr. Yang, the Foreign Affairs officer. Both were very pleasant and I even detected a sense of humor between them.

And here I am.