Moving On

Last night, I lit a candle, as I often do on Fridays. Actually, normally I light two, as it’s Shabbat, but last night there was only one, and its makeshift candlestick was a few drops of wax dripped onto Mark’s old hard-drive. My real candlesticks are wrapped in socks, which have been nestled in a knit hat and then deposited into a knit bag currently residing in the top of my suitcase.

I have less than an hour remaining at Pengtun Middle School.

My room is as bare as it was when I moved in—far more so, in fact, as I’ve essentially cleared it out but for a corner of the kitchen in which resides a spattering of items to hand down to next year’s fellows. I’m actually taking less than I’m leaving. I organized our last class as an “auction” where my kids could use their class points to bid on such exciting items as notebooks, bags, American money, and “Miss Emily’s Tea Mug” (which went for a frightening $800). And last night I gave my coat hangers, some bowls, and a lot of school supplies to my few students not at home for the weekend.

So, other than one small box of books I mailed last week, everything I’m carrying back to America fit into one suitcase, one briefcase, and the backpack I took with me for my new year travels. Packing, which always seems such a formidable task prior to commencement, always seems to manage to happen quite quickly once the first step is taken.

There’s going to be a lot of travel over the next day or so. A bus ride to Heqing. A night bus to Kunming. A cab to the airport. A flight to Beijing. A subway (actually three, I think) to the south train station. A train to Tianjin. Once I arrive in Tianjin, I’ll have two or three days there and a couple in Beijing before getting on the biggest plane I’ll have seen in over a year and experiencing the longest 7 minutes (4:03 on 7/21/2011 to 4:10 on 7/21/2011) of my life. Then it’ll be a short little O’Hare to Atlanta hop—a trip I’ve taken probably half a dozen times en route to Mac.

For now, there’s me and my couch and perhaps 40 minutes of stillness. Stillness has been a rarity of late, so I’m trying to enjoy it. This is, in fact, the first time I’ve written more than a couple of paragraphs (this “final” Pengtun entry has been started and interrupted at least three times). Hopefully there will be time enough to finish and post prior to getting on the road. And once I’m in Beijing I hope to finish a half-completed entry about the travels of last week’s break.

The last few days have been full of 3+ hour farewell dinners, visits from my kids, and lots of lesson planning. On Tuesday evening all the TFC fellows shared dinner and drinks and silly awards. Mine was for “Culinary Excellence” and involved two cookbooks, which’ll be fun to play with. We also got gifts from both the elementary and middle school administrations, so I now have beautiful silver bracelets that I’ll never be able to wear without thinking of this year.

This morning I finally got a chance to zen as I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of mango-chocolate chip pancakes (a dish that would be at home in any American kitchen but for the fact that it was prepared in a wok and consumed with chopsticks). It was quiet, most students at home, the pitter-patter of what seems eternal rain competing ever so slightly with the music I was streaming.

I biked into town to drop off some pictures I’m printing for my kids, then met up with Arianne and her mother for lunch. We actually went to the same noodle place all the fellows ate at on our very first trip to Heqing, back last August. I hadn’t been since. It seemed like a nice bit of closure.

Then I went to empty my bank account and rode home with the equivalent of well over $1000 dollars in my raincoat’s inside pocket. This huge sum of cash was made even more dramatic by the fact that the highest value bill in China is 100 kuai, which means that I had many, many, many bills. I sure hope I don’t get robbed between here and Atlanta.

The rest of the day’s been quiet as I finished packing, scrubbing down my room, and making several trips to the trash pit. A couple of my girls who stay on campus most weekends called me up to the classroom, so I went to sit with them for a few minutes. I hadn’t expected to feel anything related to the space, but as I walked through the nearly empty room, seeing each student in his or her seat, I came close to tears. It was almost a relief—knowing that, despite its challenges, this year’s work has had enough positive impact on me that its end carries mourning as well as joy.

There are lots of things I need to process, and luckily once I’m home (in 6 days!!) I should have time to do just that. And I’ll probably have things to say about Beijing, and about reverse culture shock once I’m back Stateside, so this is by no means goodbye to the blog. It is goodbye to Pengtun, to Heqing, to the world that’s formed my life for the last year. As much as I’ve looked forward to this day, actually walking out of that school gate suddenly seems a heavy task. Change, even when desired, is hard. But it’s time to go.

Slipping Towards Sunset

My family and some friends have known for awhile, but just to clear up any confusion, I’ll go ahead and say straight up that I’m planning on returning home this summer rather than remaining in China for a second year. There are a number of reasons for this—some organizational, others purely personal—and I don’t feel like a public blog is the best forum to discuss them. So, suffice it to say, this was a decision that took me a long, long time to make, and although it’s got its downsides, overall, it’s right for me.

Nonetheless, I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been able to be a part of this place that will, every day, affect the way I think about life once I’m home. For all its challenges, this is perhaps the most personally worthwhile experience I’ve had, and I remain so humbled by the degree to which the people who call Heqing home have let me make it mine, for this short time.

I’ve got exactly five weeks left as of today (Thursday, here in Yunnan) before hopping on a plane to Chicago and then on to Atlanta. I’ll be going to Beijing a few days before that, and I’m lucky enough to be able to zip off to Tianjin for a day to attend a family friend’s wedding!

Anyway, during these last bits of time I have here, I’m trying to absorb as much as possible, to live as much as possible. This is made slightly harder by the rain, about which I have composed a not-entirely-original poem:

Rain, rain, go away
Though the fields want you to stay
You make it grey all day
So I want to go home today

I’m affected strongly by weather. Always have been, really. It’s amazing how sleepy the rain makes me. Lesson planning through the last month was already gonna be something of a challenge, just by nature of it being the last month, but now it’s gonna be laced with the extra difficulty of overcoming grey. Ah well.

On the plus side, living in a generally rainy environment these days makes the non-rainy moments all the more wonderful. Tuesday, I biked into town for what has become a mostly weekly ritual of meeting up with Hallie and Arianne and Mark for bubble tea. Only, that evening, we were also having dinner with Yiming and Malijun and Yiming’s girlfriend, who’s visiting from Hong Kong. Because of this, we ended up being in Heqing until close to 8, at which point the sky was beginning to turn towards dusk.

I rode back alone (Mark had to stop by the store, and the Chinese fellows don’t have bikes), starting out on my usual route and then branching off to take a dirt road I’d not tried before.

It was a beautiful evening. Quiet, with a touch of a breeze, cool without being cold, as is so often the case in the basin here. Pedaling along, I caught the glances of the last of the farmers coming in from their fields. The older men, brows furrowing atop eyelids, often give me slightly hardened looks, trying to place this strange figure in her coral rain jacket. I don’t think there’s ever any sort of resentment, just interest in the disruption from normalcy. Women, young and old both, are often more forthcoming, smiles tentative but frequent. The younger men, students or those who should be but didn’t test in, are typically the only potentially aggravating sort. I get “hello” from a lot of people, but it’s the teenage and 20-something boys that really like to shout it, over and over, usually beginning just as I’ve passed by and continuing until I’m out of earshot. On good days, I grin at the silliness of it. On bad days, I roll my eyes and occasionally mutter things in English that it’s probably fortunate they can’t understand.



Tuesday evening, clouds caressed but didn’t smother the sky. Streaks of pink blended into pale blues and whites outlining the western mountains. The tower, the one we hiked to three months past, stood in steady black, crowning the highest peak, a vessel for the waning sun’s rays peaking through to drape over the stone, the earth, down into the rice paddies below. And to the north, layered cloud upon cloud upon cloud, grey to silver to gold.

I biked through the dirt paths dividing field from field, listening to the soft songs of waterfowl, witness to the simple but captivating beauty of this place. Heqing has modernized a great deal but still runs, in some respects, like I expect it has for centuries. Farming is done mostly by hand. It’s quiet, no machinery disrupting the rhythm of planting and harvest and everything in between. I’ve grown used to the sight of rice paddies dotted by men and women, the latter’s hats wrapped with bright scarves. Sound comes only from the motorized wagons and from the main road, something that didn’t exist not so long ago.

Rural China is full of frustrations, especially for those of us accustomed to a first world standard of living. But moments on my bike, feeling free as anything; moments wandering through Heqing town and through the market in particular; moments with my students when they’re being the silly but loveable young teens that they (sometimes) are; those are the times when my smile bursts forth. Those are the times I want to remember.

Mumblings of a Country Bumpkin

It’s getting harder for me to keep my languages straight.

In the past couple weeks especially I’ve found myself using more Chinese words when talking to family and friends back home and I’ve found myself in more situations with local teachers, and my students, where I’m about to start speaking English. Part of this, at least on the English-instead-of-Chinese end, is connected to the fact that I’ve been trying to use more English in the classroom, beyond what my kids are capable of understanding, just to get the sound in their ears. But let me tell you, it feels pretty darn silly to be standing in front of 40-something tweens, in the middle of a grammar explanation or the like, only to find oneself needing to stop and recalibrate.

You know what else feels silly? Trying to eat spaghetti with a fork and spoon. It’s so much harder than I remembered! This is my reward, it would seem, for eating everything except oatmeal and soup with chopsticks. The thing about chopsticks is that they’re very good for multitasking. The fork-and-spoon spaghetti was a delicious pasta primavera I ordered for lunch at a café in Lijiang. I’d gone up for the day to get some major lesson planning done, and I succeeded—a whole week’s worth of lessons in 3 hours. The cappuccino probably helped. But, anyway, I was working as I ate, which is not uncommon for me. What made it difficult is that spaghetti with a fork is more or less a two-handed operation. You have to twirl it on the spoon, and then what do you do if you get too much? It’s so much easier with chopsticks, where you just pick up what you like, slurp it in, and, if necessary, use your teeth to cut it off. I might eat like a country bumpkin, which I suppose I am here, but at least it’s less embarrassing than trying to shove a huge mouthful of spaghetti into my mouth while praying that the fancy Chinese tourist sitting two tables over keeps looking at his cellphone and not at me.

Speaking of noodles, sad news. My favorite kind of rice noodles here, ersi, have never had an amazing shelf life, but until recently they’d last 2 or 3 days after purchasing and before molding. No more. I bought ersi Saturday morning, made dinner with them that evening, and then intended to use the remainder for dinner on Sunday…only to find a speckling of green and white spots. Alas. Summer is in many ways a wonderful thing, but it means that food purchases must be smaller and more frequent, although I can always go to the cafeteria and buy vegetables if I find myself unable to get into town.

Getting into town is seeming less and less an “event,” however. Earlier in the year, I went in about once a week, sometimes twice (on Friday and Sunday) and usually spent quite awhile wandering about. Getting into the city typically took 15 minutes of waiting for a bus and standing crammed up against all the other riders, and walking from the bus stop to the grocery store to the outdoor market and back to the bus stop required at least an hour or so. However, with my bike, getting into town takes 15-20 minutes of pleasant peddling along back village roads, and zipping about Heqing takes hardly any time at all. It’s nice to feel as though I can go in on almost any weekday I like, even weekdays when I have evening class. So as long as it’s not pouring down rain I imagine I’ll continue to get into town much more frequently during the rest of the year.

Unfortunately, the rain seems to have arrived. I want to go into town this morning, and I suppose at some point I shall bite the bullet and just go, but the deluge is making me less than inspired.

In other news, my kids can beat me at basketball. That’s not entirely unexpected, but it’s humbling nonetheless, particularly when, in the course of beating me, they manage to accidently knock me to the ground, legs flying in the air. Granted, I pretty much ran right into my sturdiest and strongest boy, so I guess I asked for it. I grinned and let two concerned girls pull me back to my feet. My head hurt, but my pride ached more.

On Sustainability (and the Goodness of Mangoes)

Last week I was skyping with a friend and we had an exchange that went something like this:

Friend: My house is getting chickens! And I’m trying to figure out what to do with this week’s veggies from the CSA (that’s Community Supported Agriculture , not Confederate States of America).

Me: That’s so awesome. Man, I miss being sustainable.

Me:…. Except that I’m probably more sustainable here than I ever have been in my life. So I guess I miss being American-Hippie-Sustainable. Hmm.

The thing is, whether it’s a fad or a legitimate shift in people’s lifestyles and politics, American-style ‘sustainability’ can be quite fun. It’s fun to go to food co-ops farmers’ markets and to justify spending more than at a typical grocery store because you’re supporting local/ethical/organic/(inset other green adjective) produce/dairy/meat. It’s fun to make more and more food from scratch so as to avoid supporting big, scary corporations. It’s fun to walk and bike around during the non-snowy months in Minneapolis, availing oneself of the pedestrian highway to get to work/the store/the lakes/wherever. It’s fun to have power challenges where one finds non-electricity draining activities to consume one’s time for a day a week or the like.

Generally speaking, the practices that I think of as “sustainable” in the American context are also very pleasant ones, particularly during the warmer months, and indeed, during the winter months I would have killed for a car (my housemates from last year can both attest to this), and I kept the heat down only to save money. Basically, I liked sustainability when it was convenient.

This year, I am very, very sustainable, and not really by choice. I don’t use a flushing toilet more than a few times a month, on the occasions when we’re in Dali or Lijiang or one of Heqing’s “fancy” restaurants with other CEI folks (we’re TFC now, by the way—Teach for China). I shower three times a week at most, and with solar-heated water at that, and beyond that wash my hair once or twice a week in a basin with a kettleful of water I’ve boiled on my hotplate. I hand wash all my laundry, and it air-dries. And I obviously don’t have a dishwasher. Having running water in our rooms now means that I use more than I used to, but I’m still pretty conservative I’d say. I certainly drink less water than I did in the States, since I have to boil it first and more liquid means needing to use the bathroom more, which is something I’m less than excited to do. Frankly, life here is dirtier. I’m dirtier, my clothes are dirtier, my room is dirtier (dirt manages to make its way in regularly, no matter how much I sweep, since there’s no way to completely seal the door from the outside). You get used to it.

I don’t think I’m using all that much electricity—lights at night, and the hotplate several times a day for boiling water and for cooking. I also use the rice cooker at least once a day. My computer’s plugged in most of the time, and I charge my phone once or twice a week, but that’s about it in terms of appliances.

Generally, when I’m in a motorized vehicle it’s a public one, and even those I’m using less and less. Now that I have a working bike I mostly ride that into and around town, so I only end up bussing to Lijiang and Dali every several weeks. And once I’m in town I buy all my produce, eggs, noodles, and tofu from the market, so that’s all very local. I joke about the people at the supermarkets thinking that the only things I eat are oil, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, sesame seeds, nuts, oatmeal, sugar, chocolate, flour, powdered milk, and instant coffee and bubble tea, because I never buy my “fresh” food there. And since I’m trying to cut back on sugar, flour, and chocolate my purchases at the supermarkets are getting smaller and smaller in nature. Even at the supermarket, many products are from Yunnan or neighboring provinces; it’s just the nature of China.

As I don’t have a refrigerator, I’m less likely to have food go to waste, because I buy it in small enough increments that it’s difficult to forget about it. (There are no crispers or “behind the big Tupperware of leftovers” spots for rogue veggies to hide.) I’ve also, shall we say, entirely dismissed any notions of food safety being based on temperature. Is this a mistake? Perhaps. But I remember being nervous, last summer, about having eggs and veggies out on the counter for a couple of hours. Now I leave eggs out for as long as it takes me to eat them (I buy six at a time, usually, about once a week), and the order in which I use my veggies/other fresh food is based mostly on speed of decay (tofu, greens, and fresh noodles, I’ve learned, should be used within two days tops). Generally, unless something smells or feels off, I consider it good to go.

And, aside from food, I really don’t buy much. I get toilet paper/napkins/paper towels/tissues (it’s a one-size fits all kinda thing—what we would consider four distinct products, with perhaps some overlap, under duress, between tissues and toilet paper, is simply sold as “sanitary paper” here and used for all four purposes). I buy yarn occasionally, and toothpaste and shampoo and the like even more occasionally, and I’ll get steamed buns and rice noodle spring rolls and bubble tea when I’m wandering about town, but on the whole it’s rare for me to spend more than 100 kuai in a week unless I’m mailing a package, adding money to my phone, or heading to the Western Food land of Lijiang or Dali.

Of course, this year I’m also taking two trans-Pacific flights, so how those jaunts alone impact my carbon footprint…well, it can’t really be helped. And, aside from the monster flights, I’ve flown (for me) seldom. Beijing to Kunming way back in July, and then Kunming to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong, and Kunming to Lijiang over the long break. None of those flights was more than three hours, and Kunming to Lijiang was just a baby hop of 45 minutes. I spent my last five years in the States living in Minnesota with my family in Georgia, extended family in California, and friends all over, so it was rare for me to go more than three or four months without flying somewhere.

As for how I’ll maintain my sustainable lifestyle, or not, once I get home, well, we’ll see. I fantasize about my bathroom in Georgia—the one next to my bedroom with a flushing toilet and a shower that always provides hot water. I’m sure I’ll buy more clothes and the like, because I’ll enjoy the fact that not everything in America is covered in glitter, and I’ll probably wash those clothes in a washing machine, and more often. But I’ll continue to buy as locally as I can, and as ethically as I can. I’ll be aware of the gift of a hot shower and a flushing toilet more than I ever have been. I’ll treasure ice and water that needn’t be boiled before drinking. And perhaps I’ll try to come up with ways to be American-style sustainable that are not only pleasant but also a daily reminder of the manner in which most people live in this world of ours.

On a different note, living in a farming community has given me a deeper appreciation for seasons of different crops. There are some veggies, like broccoli, that I continue to purchase regardless of the season, but a lot of the fruit especially that makes its way to my kitchen is based on what’s looking best these days. I’m learning more about the lengths of different crops’ seasons. Cherries, for example, were absolutely everywhere for about three weeks, and then they disappeared entirely. Plums have been around for a month or so and don’t look like they’re going anywhere (in fact, they’re getting bigger), and mangoes are now 4 kuai a jing, meaning that I got 3 large, ripe ones for about $1 USD. I pray that mango season is a long one.

I’m not sure there is anything quite so wonderful, in terms of fruit consumption, as gorging oneself on a perfectly ripe mango. I love fruit, and I’m not sure mangoes are my favorite flavor-wise, but they’re just so much fun to eat! Cutting around the seed, “popping” the cubes open, cutting around the seed some more, taking the seed with both hands and slurping mango pulp such that it gets absolutely everywhere and when all the orangey goodness is gone you’re left covered in juice, feeling six years old, fumbling for the faucet…good times.

Hooray for Bubble Tea! (and other musings)

I have said, on many occasions, that a good number of my issues with living in China might be resolved if only there were a coffee shop closer than an hour away.

My dear friends, one of my most desired standard-of-living wishes (up there alongside “toilet” and “shower” and “oven”) has come true! Sorta.

It’s not actually a coffee shop. It’s a bubble tea shop. Really creamy, thick, sweet-but-not-too-sweet bubble tea. There are many CEIers relatively obsessed with bubble tea, but until January (when this place opened) Heqing didn’t have any that didn’t taste like plastic. We didn’t know about it until last week, when Arianne went and told Hallie, who went and told me, etc. We met up on Friday and ordered, settling at a table upstairs. While ambiance isn’t necessarily the shop’s strongest suit, that one table on the tiny balcony is a place where it will be absolutely lovely to grade or read or whatever in the future. Plus, bubble tea! They have a relatively large small cup, which goes for 5 kuai here and would likely go for close to 5 dollars in the states. The other awesome thing is that this gives us a place to hang out in the city, where, really, there aren’t places to just go and sit unless you’re at a restaurant. So, hooray on all counts.

As we set out from the tea shop, the workers there—young guys probably around our age—asked if they could take a picture with “the first foreigners to come to their store.” So we posed, Backstreet Boys blasting from behind the counter, as they took several shots. Such is life for Americans in Heqing.

At this point, all five of us are entirely accustomed to attention, desired or not. Most of the time it’s just fine. Sometimes it’s funny, like when little kids I walk or bike by stare at me as they would perhaps a UFO. Sometimes it’s embarrassing, like when my bike falls over as I park it in front of the yarn store and before I can right it myself I find a small pack of nearby shop owners coming to my aid. Sometimes it’s annoying, like when I’m walking along, having not-a-very-good-day, and teenage construction workers say “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.”…you get the idea. Or when I’m standing on the side of the road waiting for a bus into town and the cars that sometimes have seats in the back for passengers and sometimes have pens in the back for pigs slow down such that it’s quite difficult to tell whether they’re stopping to pick me up or simply pausing to gawk for a moment.

Sometimes it can be a source of entertainment, if I’m bored and engage just for the heck of it, like when folks in Dali take pictures of us (not subtly at all, I might add) and I encourage them, in my best enthusiastic and sarcastic tone, to take more. Sometimes it’s endearing, like when I take the scenic route back from town and end up pedaling randomly around villages trying to make my way to my elusive pepto bismol colored-home, which locals are more than happy to help me find. Or when I’m in the vegetable market buying ersi and ask a question of whomever I’m buying from, which all 5 of the noodle sellers try to answer at once.

This week I’ve begun to appreciate a little more the non-academic impact I’m having on my students. Some of it connects with the “Oh my god, a white person!” thing. We had our midterms yesterday and Thursday, and, as such, every teacher was assigned 5 periods of proctoring (11 hours in two days. Oh joy, oh bliss.). Since the classes are shuffled for testing purposes, each room had three kids from my class. When I entered the room I was assigned to one evening (don’t you want to take exams from 6:30-8:30 PM after having already taken 3 during the day? I know I do), a girl in the corner covered her mouth and practically leapt from her chair. While her reaction was the most extreme, it was very clear that other students also took interest in my arrival. Then I saw one of my boys and greeted him in English with a “Hey, Kendall.” He looked up with a nonchalant “Hey Miss Emily,” and then went back to his geography textbook. Rowan walked in a minute later and asked me if I’d be proctoring. We chatted briefly about the test he was about to take and he went to his seat. Then Peter strolled by the window, yelling “Miss Ou!” (the first character of my Chinese name) on his way to his classroom.

My kids know me. And in 20 years, whether they’re working in Beijing or farming in Pengtun, they’ll have had the experience of knowing an American (and a left-handed one at that. I still catch kids trying to take notes with their left hands occasionally) at a very young age. I’m not saying it’s going to shape their lives, but it has value, especially for folks immersed in this homogenous community.

I’ve also remembered, this week, that I love them. They’ve been driving me absolutely bonkers, and grading their last big test made me want to break into the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I have in my kitchen, but I do love them. It helps that I’ve been loosening up more in the classroom, even as I’ve gotten stricter in terms of reporting to the principal. I like to have fun with my kids, and I like to be silly, but for much of this year I’ve been pushing and pushing myself to emulate my very stern local counterparts. All that’s really succeeded in doing is making me angry and my kids rebellious. So I’m trying to, for lack of a less clichéd term, be my normal teacher self again. Stay tuned on how that goes. It’s certainly put me in a better place mentally, so that’s gotta be worth something.

The weather’s changing again. We had nothing but blue skies, with some chubby puffy marshmallow clouds, for months. But over the last few weeks we’ve swapped all-day blue for blue mornings (mostly) and a gradual blowing in of big clouds and rain. But the thing about living in the basin here is that it can look like it’s about to downpour and not spill a drop, or it can be partly cloudy and pouring. Arianne and I discovered this last weekend, when we went biking in the hills around her school and got pretty darn wet when the seemingly more-blue-than-grey sky opened on us. Luckily, lushly green rice paddies look just as lush and green while wet, and my camera didn’t get messed up. Unluckily, my school doesn’t like rain, or at least thunder. The power goes out a lot—not for more than a couple of hours, most of the time, but a lot…like right now. At 8 PM on a Saturday night…. No, I am not making this up. Thank goodness for my lovely Mac’s ridiculously long battery life. Now where did I put my candles?

Grocery Run

This morning after class I went into town—Heqing City. I didn’t need anything special, so I was in and out within an hour and a half. A trip to town always begins with walking a block from the school gate out to the Dali-Lijiang road that connects those two tourist spots and goes right past Heqing. Actually, from what I understand (although I could certainly be wrong), today's two-lane highway more or less follows the path of the "Horse and Tea Road," which some folks might better recognize as the "Southern Silk Road." There are two kinds of vehicles, both costing one yuan, that shuttle people to the city: 19-seater buses that I would say hold up to 40 when things get really crowded, and what I think of as “Oregon Trail” cars—five seater cabs with an arched wagon-like piece of canvas covering two benches in the pick-up truck style back. These benches hold 3-4 people each, but often there are also 5-6 people (or 3 people and a couple bikes) crammed into the small standing space between the benches. Kinda hard to picture, perhaps. I’ll try to remember my camera next time.

You flag down either kind of transport by sticking your arm out, and it’s a short ride—5-10 minutes, depending on how many times we stop to pick up or drop off more passengers. This morning I had to wait more than 10 minutes before a bus arrived. Normally, they’re much more frequent, and it was kinda chilly. I was wearing my fleece and an excellently warm alpaca scarf, but I haven’t broken out my hat or mittens much. Gloves are pretty common here, but we’re talking cute little skin-tight gloves or motorcycle gloves, not my Norwegian snowflake mittens. And, for whatever reason, I don’t see a lot of hats except for those worn by the Bai women, and those aren’t winter-knit caps. However, I’ve decided that I don’t care. Minnesota-trained or not, my hands and head are chilly.

Anyway, when I go to town, I almost always need to go both to the market and to the supermarket. Today I go to the market first, which is on the far side of town (keeping in mind that the “far” side of town is all of a 10-15-minute walk from the closer side). Once off the bus, I first have to walk through the meat and fish sections. There are two wheelbarrows full of pig heads. I have no idea why. There’s a lot of blood on them. There are always pig heads (and feet and legs and everything else), but there are not usually wheelbarrows fully devoted to the storage (display?) of pig heads. It’s really quite upsetting. So glad I don’t eat pork. In the fish section I try not to look at the flopping and suffocating piles, but peripheral vision—what can you do? Again, so glad I don’t eat fish.

Once free of the animals, I move to the potato trucks. The first time I bought potatoes, I thought they were russets and only discovered after scrubbing them in my sink that they were, in fact, red-skinned potatoes. The (mostly) ladies who sell them sit by small fires to keep warm. I buy eight—it is Chanukah, after all—and pay 5 kaui.

Then, crossing over the piles of discarded, rotting scallions and cornhusks, I make my way to my broccoli lady. I started buying broccoli from her a couple months ago, and she knows that, although I often buy other things, broccoli is always on the list. Today I supplement my large crown of broccoli with two sizable tomatoes and an eggplant, paying 7 kuai for the lot. Produce is getting a little more expensive as weather turns cooler, but there’s still plenty of it, and since it’s not hot I can buy more at one time. When I first moved here, I could really only buy veggies I’d eat within a day or two. Now I can leave food by the window and it’ll keep much longer. It’s pretty awesome.

I’ve recently rediscovered onions. Not that I’d ever not known about or liked onions, but I hadn’t really been buying them. Today I look around for one of the onion-ginger-garlic sellers. They often have other things too, but generally if people have garlic or ginger they seem to specialize in all three. I grab two red onions (I don't know if I've ever seen white or yellow onions here, actually) and 3 bulbs of garlic and pay 4.5 kuai.

The tofu lady I go to today gets into a long (because I have major accent issues) conversation with me about whether or not I can tutor her high-school-aged niece in English during the break. As over the break I won’t be in Heqing, I say I can’t do that, but who knows? Maybe next time I’ll ask if she wants me to meet with her niece on the weekend or something. At least she doesn’t seem annoyed as she cuts and bags up my 1 kuai slab of fresh tofu (about 2/3 of the size you’d get in a box in the states).

My noodle lady knows that I’m always after ersi— fettuccini-sized chewy rice noodles. I pay 1 kuai for a nicely-sized handful before moving past the many varieties of ground pepper and into the fruit lane. Here I stock up, bagging 6 or 7 clementines, 5 bananas, and 4 apples for 12 kuai.

Produce total: 30.5 yuan, or $4.50 at today’s exchange rate.

I walk past stalls bursting with socks, slippers, DVDs, and all manner of other things out of the market gate. I’m kinda hungry, so I approach a steamed bun seller and hand her 5 mao (half a kuai) for a small but warm roll, munching as I walk to the store. The market is at one end of one of the main streets cutting through town, and the supermarket I like to go to is almost at the other. It’s maybe a 10 minute walk. I pass by restaurants, clothing stores, blanket stores, convenience stores and the toilet paper store (all it sells is TP—I kid you not), as well as stands hawking papaya slices (sour and dipped in salt and chili powder, so not really my thing), spam hot dogs, and french fries. When I reach the store, I hand my backpack to the woman behind the counter (it’s not allowed inside) and grab a basket. I need a few things here: soy sauce (5.9 kuai for a 500 ml bottle), salt (1.3 kuai for a 500g bag), sponges (2.9 kuai for 4), tissues (3.8 kuai for 10 pocket packs), and sesame oil (a bit pricey at 10.8 kuai for a 180 ml bottle, but so worth it). When I reach the sesame oil aisle, I realize that I’ve forgotten the characters for it. Scanning the many bottles, I experience a brief moment of concern before centering myself and letting the characters surface once again in my mind.

Store total: 24.7 kuai ($3.71)

On my way back to the main road and my bus home, there are a few flower shops, a gaming den, and countless convenience stores. I drop into one and pick up 4 eggs for 3 kuai. Eggs are running pricey these days, but I'm a bit protein-conscious lately so I still like to keep a stock.

I wait for a minute at Heqing’s one stoplight but eventually end up jaywalking anyway, passing building supply shops, fruit and breakfast stands, and more restaurants before arriving at the seemingly arbitrary place where one can almost always find a bus waiting. Seats are already full, so I grab a handle, cushioning my eggs as best I can. This is always the scary part. I guess 10 AM on Friday is busy, because before long I find myself pushed far forward, directly behind a middle-aged gentleman and his cigarette. I'm forced to relinquish my handle in favor of the top of his seat. There are “no smoking” signs in all of the buses, but I think they’re paid about as much attention as the technical maximum capacity.

Three or four minutes after I step on, the bus sets off. We pick up two more people on the way out of town and let off a few before we get within range of my school. I yell “师傅，下车！” (Driver, get off bus!) which is, I’ve learned, the standard “Please stop” request. He pulls over and I step around people and baskets of produce to shove my not-at-all-graceful-but-at-least-efficient way down the steps. A dart across the street, a five minute walk, and I’m home again.

Back to the Grind

Well, it’s been a lovely week, but now it’s Thursday, which means we start classes again tonight. Today is, in effect, Wednesday, with tomorrow becoming Thursday and Saturday filling Friday’s shoes. At least we still get Sunday off. There’s an interesting article in the NY Times this week about how China’s handling the holiday schedule in general; in effect, we aren’t the only ones who are confused.

Adventures were nice. We first went to Shaxi Old Town, busing along mountain paths, competing for space with huge trucks and little motorcycles. I fell asleep as we were leaving Heqing and woke to a crazy sharp turn, at which point I giggled sleepily and pointed out to Mark and Ma Lijun that we were all going to die. No idea if I said this in English or Chinese. That’s been happening a fair amount lately—of course I’m always speaking Chinese to the local teachers/people in town, but when I’m talking to my CEI coworkers I’m managing to have whole conversations where afterwards I can’t remember the language I used. The same thing used to happen when I was studying abroad in Beijing. I’m guessing this is a good thing?

Shaxi is pretty and quiet, with far fewer tourists than I’d imagine most places had for National Day. That being said, I was shocked to spy not one or two but a good dozen Westerners wandering about, and some of said Westerners were children! I’ve seen many 20-somethings and retirees in Lijiang and Dali, but Shaxi was the first place where I’d seen young families. We think the most likely explanation is that these are families living in China who wanted a quiet place to go with their kids during the holiday. Shaxi’s good for hiking, and there’s a nice river right outside the old walls, with a few pretty bridges and farmland views. If Lijiang is the Disneyland version of a “Chinese Old Town” and Dali is the Cool Big Brother, Shaxi is the closest I’ve seen to the real deal. It still has the tourist trappings of handmade shoes labeled with American sizes, as well as its fair share of inns, but ultimately it seems as though a lot of the people there are just the people there. I liked that.

We stayed not in a traditional inn but rather in a house with a separate building containing three guest bedrooms. It was perfectly comfortable and in a nice location, with a pomegranate tree and a bunch of other plants in the courtyard. Plus a hot shower! Actually, interesting moment. Shower aside, the bathroom was an outhouse much like the one at my school—the only notable differences being the lack of a door and the fact that it was for one person rather than a dozen. If I’d encountered such a bathroom more than two months ago I would have had to pee like crazy to even consider using it. As it was, I didn’t blink.

Our time in Shaxi was spent wandering stone-paved streets…and hiding from the rain. Yes, rain. Rain that started the morning after we arrived and made mountain climbing, along with most other outdoor exploration, less than enjoyable. After spending an hour escaping a downpour by drinking tea in a nice little shop with an equally nice but not so little german shepherd, we decided it was probably best to move on. So where to go in the rain? What’s in Yunnan that doesn’t require good weather? Dali!

So the three of us piled into a van and then later onto a bus, and although we didn’t save any time by leaving from Shaxi instead of from Heqing, we knew we were headed to a good place. Of course, the holiday meant major traffic, but we still got there without too much trouble. Then there was the issue of finding a hotel. Because our bus was delayed, and the holiday week was only half over, we ended up with no choice but to share a relatively pricey room—at least compared to what we’re used to paying. Still, it was nowhere near expensive by American standards, and we had a place to dump our stuff. We introduced Ma LiJun to Indian food (not very good Indian food, unfortunately) and wandered around. Dali is just a very open, very free-feeling space. I really can’t get over how grateful I am to have it close. During our wanderings, I bought a purple hanging that is currently masking some of the white space that is my room. It’s quite pretty, with flowers and butterflies tye-dyed onto it, and it makes me happy (happier than is probably reasonable) to see it on my wall.

The next morning marked the closest experience I’ve had to a “coffee shop chill time” since getting here. We ate breakfast at the German bakery, and then we just hung out. I didn’t actually have any coffee (I haven’t, in fact, since getting to China), but I sipped on tea and we chatted and I did a little writing while Mark was responsibly lesson planning and Ma LiJun went to the bank. It was just quite lovely in every way. Then the day got even lovelier when we met up with May! She’s one of this year’s American fellows, but her family and she have lived in Dali since she was twelve, so she was home visiting. We went out to lunch together, and then May took us back to her house where we drank more tea, chatted about our schools, and met her parents and adorable seven-year-old brother. It was a really nice feeling to be in a house, to chat with some new people, and to hear more about Dali from someone who knows it well.

Because we all had colds (I’m only just now getting over mine—slept twelve hours straight a few nights ago, which I never do), we decided to head back home. Ma LiJun stayed the night in XiaGuan, the modern city right next to Dali, but Mark and I took a bus back up to Heqing. We left at five with plans to get into town at eight, but instead we didn’t make it back until after ten, because our bus stopped for about 45 minutes—twice. It was quite wretched, really, and made all the worse when the driver decided the best way to improve upon the situation would be to blast Chinese pop. I have a rule of thumb regarding my iPod that if I ever have to turn it way up to block out other sound, it’s not worth it. That ride was an exception. Upon arrival in Heqing, Mark and I discovered, much to our surprise, that our humble little city possesses a red light district. We had the pleasure of walking right by it on the way to find a cab. Luckily, nobody came out of the buildings, so there was no need for me to pretend to be Mark’s wife or something.

The last two days have mostly been about recovering from my cold, getting laundry done, and trying to think through the next couple weeks of class…which start in ten minutes. Guess I better get over there, huh? Ah well. Vacation was nice while it lasted.

Happy 61st, China!

Yesterday was National Day, and thus we get time off. A whole week, as it turns out. Of course, our week off started yesterday, and we didn’t find out for sure we were getting a week until Wednesday, which made planning difficult. As it stands, Mark and Ma LiJun and I are leaving this afternoon for a village about 3 hours away and then deciding after a day or two there whether to venture elsewhere. I’m really excited. I’ve never done this sort of “follow the wind” travel before, but it should be fun. And Yunnan is so beautiful that I don’t doubt we’ll find cool things to see.

Yesterday, my first day off, I kept it local—doing a major room cleanup in the morning and then strolling out into the villages behind the school in the afternoon. My original plan was to find a back path to Heqing that I could walk along without fear of being hit by a tour bus or a tractor, but before long I stopped paying too much attention to where I was, rather just wandering indiscriminately. It’s worth noting that, when wandering rural China, you never really know where you’re going to end up or what you’re going to end up trekking upon. Yesterday’s walk encompassed nice, concrete, sidewalk-like roads; packed down dirt (and sometimes mud) paths; skinny, almost-dumping-me-into-the-rice-paddies trails; and straight up bush wacking. My tiva’d feet got a taste of the local stream, my bag picked up many friends in the form of burrs and needles, and I terrified/herded about 100 ducks before warranting the attention (and mercy) of a local farmer, who allowed me to cut through his courtyard to get back to the main road. It was, all in all, a quite lovely afternoon, despite the embarrassment and need for extreme foot washing. There are new pictures of my wanderings, as well as Lijiang and Dali, at http://anamericaninheqing.blogspot.com.

Today marks 11 weeks since my arrival in Yunnan. I wonder how long it’ll take the weeks to add up enough that I stop counting and default to months. I have been teaching for a month now, officially. In some ways it feels longer, but I still have quite a lot I need to improve upon. The kids will have their first “Monthly Test” shortly after the break. These tests are modeled off of the prefecture and regional tests students are subjected to on a quarterly basis, and they are really, really dumb. So far, my students have learned the alphabet, a few simple greetings, ways to introduce themselves and others, and a few scattered colors and nouns. Everything I’ve taught them (with a few exceptions for classroom commands like “stand up”) is in their textbook. There are other things in the book like acronyms (because BBC and UFO are really terms that first year English students need to know), and I’ve been putting those things aside in the interest of teaching them, y’know, practical English. Unfortunately, China and I do not see eye to eye on what constitutes practical English. Thus, if I want my kids to pass their test, after the break I will need to spend significant time teaching them things that absolutely are not important to first year English study. It’s quite frustrating, but everything from here builds to the end-of-ninth-grade Zhong Kao. If they don’t pass that, they don’t go to high school, so I have no choice but to bite the bullet as far as content and test prep are concerned.

I’ve been in a slump since getting back from Dali—more homesick and less motivated than usual. I’m really hoping this is just a short thing that I’ll snap out of soon, but I don’t know.

Last night, I watched “Beauty and the Beast” in Chinese. It was glorious—classic Disney fun with the added benefit of me being able to write down some vocab words. I intend to do quite a bit of Chinese Disney watching in the future.

Anyway, that’s all for now, folks. I’ll post about my 2-5 day adventures upon my return.

Adjustments, Adaptations, and Absolutes- Part 2

Sunday night. The kiddies are all in class right now, poor things, but I have a few hours of freedom and a good night’s sleep ahead before Monday sweeps me away. It’s been a nice couple of days. This morning Mark, Ma LiJun and I went into Heqing proper to go shopping. I found an absolutely awesome (and huge!) outdoor market a little over a week ago, so we went through there scooping up fresh noodles, fresh tofu, and as many veggies as I thought I could consume before they went bad (which is not many, I’m sad to say. Man do I miss having a fridge). I also found peanut butter at one of the large supermarkets in town, so peanut noodles are officially back on the menu. So’s banana bread, one of these days, but I have to wait for my bananas to go bad first.

This was actually a three-day weekend, because Friday was “Teacher’s Day.” It’s kinda a big deal in China, more so at some schools than at others. Pengtun’s celebration was relatively relaxed. We had a “meeting” during the afternoon where a few teachers and administrators gave speeches while the rest of us munched on peanuts, sunflower seeds, tea, candy, and fruit. A few hours later, the teachers and their families gathered again for dinner. Overall, I don’t feel like I got to know the teachers any better, but it was still nice just to see their children and things. And, of course, I appreciated the three day weekend. I also got a gift—a plastic wind chime with little blue birds on it—from one of my students.

The last few days, I’ve been trying to get myself into a running habit. Call it a New Year’s Resolution, if you will. Now, those of you who know me well know that I despise running—that I will walk for hours and hours and hours but flinch at the thought of running more than a block. That hasn’t changed. However, last year at this time, I hated long bike rides, or at least long bike rides that were anything but flat. Not having a car, however, pushed me into biking a lot, and by the time I moved back to Georgia last summer, I could handle hills with relative ease that had me feeling near death earlier. I’m kinda hoping for the same result with running, but, well, we’ll see how it goes. Nobody should be surprised if within two weeks my running career comes to an end. I’ve noticed two things about running here as opposed to running in the states. The first is that this place is gorgeous. My pathetic little walk-jog things take me along paths beside rice paddies and marshes, fishermen and farmers. Mountains and clouds, of course, make up the backdrop. The second is that if seeing a white girl walking around is funny and interesting to locals, seeing a white girl trying to run around (and only slightly succeeding) is downright hilarious.

Running aside, there’re a few other things, in no particular order, that I’d like to muse about. Do enjoy.

Cleanliness and Organization

This afternoon I cleaned my room properly. Oh, it felt so good. I swept and I mopped (mopped!!) and I scrubbed. I did laundry and organized the kitchen (somewhat). And then I washed my feet, enjoying thoroughly the sensation of walking about barefoot without my soles quickly becoming the same color as my hair. I’m not a slob, but if I acquired Chinese language ability at the same rate this room acquires dirt, I’d be fluent by next Tuesday. My room, as I’ve said before, is very nicely sized and very nicely equipped. However, there’s no “hiding space” beyond my cloth wardrobes (which are filled with clothes), and the space under my bed. I don’t have a closet in which to stick those random things that I might need every once in a while, which is why I have things like my space heater randomly squeezed into corners. I am getting used to having these everything in plain view, but it still adds an air of “temporary” to my space that I’m in the process of finding additional ways of combating. I’m considering buying a small, inexpensive rug to cover up some of my beautiful concrete floor, but no decisions yet.

Plain Hot Water

I’ve always been really into cold water. At home, I guzzle it. In fact, at home I rarely drink anything except cold water, tea, and, occasionally, milk. In the summer my list expands to include iced tea and seltzer. Chinese people are not nearly as into cold water. You can get it quite easily—there’re bottles everywhere—but there are also superstitions regarding cold beverages and women’s health, etc. When I studied abroad, I mostly drank bottled water, so my water was usually room temperature. Here, I mostly drink water that I grab from the taps by the cafeteria and boil. (By the way, the word for “boil” in Chinese literally translates to “open,” so you’re “opening” the water. I love that.). I don’t have a compelling reason. It’s not that I can’t afford bottled water, certainly, as it normally runs around 1.5 kuai (20-25 cents), and it’s not that I don’t have time to walk five minutes to the nearest convenience store. At any rate, for my first week or so, I mostly drank either tea or boiled water that I’d left to cool to room temperature. Then, one day, I noticed myself drinking straight up hot water. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to do this, but suddenly it became my habit—not that I don’t still drink a ton of tea and lukewarm water, along with the occasional chilled bottle.

Laundry

As I mentioned above, I did laundry today—two small loads of it. I feel like laundry, more than almost anything else, hammers in for me the difference in the handling of time between some places and others. Many teachers in Heqing have washing machines, although driers are more or less a rarity in China. The students and the locals, however, do not, and neither do we fellows. That was a choice on our part, and one that we could still change. Washers run, from what I’ve heard, around 500 kuai. If we split that four ways, it would hardly be a huge burden. Yet, I appreciate doing the work myself. I appreciate squatting in my kitchen, scrubbing socks, observing as a task that involves no more than ten minutes of my time in the States, including folding dry clothes, turns into an hour or more. It’s so easy, with washing machines, to not think about what’s going on—to just know what temperature to pick and that, when I go back to the basement/Laundromat/wherever my clean clothes will be waiting to be popped into the drier. I don’t think about the soak cycle and the rinse cycle or any of that—except that now I do, because I am the rinse cycle.

Schedule

My schedule is weird. I have some days where all my classes start and end within two hours and others where my first obligation begins more than twelve hours before my last. The last two weeks, I’ve been pretty casual about what’s work time and what’s chill time, but that wasn’t working very well for me, so yesterday, I sat down with iCal and tried to set out a reasonable way to organize my non-class/meeting time. I now have established prep, Chinese study, exercise, cooking/meals, and, of course, breaks. I’m going to try to follow my schedule very closely this week to see how it goes, and then I’ll make changes as need be. Last year, it was so awesome to be done with work when I went home, and I’ll definitely miss that here, but I’m hoping that my set up “office time,” as it were, will lead me to feel like there’s more of a divide between work and fun. I’ve already labeled my desk as my “work space” and my couch as a “fun space,” and while I leave skype on wherever I am, I try to avoid gmail and such things when I’m at the desk. Likewise, I try not to do prep/grading on the couch or on my bed. I do expect that as time goes on I will acquire more responsibilities and thus have less time to myself, but for now I think having a relatively set schedule is best.

Mood Swings

I’m moody here. To be honest, I can be a bit moody anywhere, but it’s more pronounced here, and I don’t like it. I don’t like being unable to predict how certain things will make me feel, unable to gauge how I’ll react to particular situations. What I’m really struggling with right now is accepting my current emotional volatility and trying not to dwell on it too much. I have a whole lot of time left, and presumably I’ll mellow out at some point, but for now worrying about the mood swings is probably worse than the mood swings themselves.

Well, that’ll do it for now, mostly because I’m tired and want to do a bit more prep work for tomorrow. On the tired note, please excuse this post’s not necessarily being quite as nuanced as some of my others. I know I should probably have written this when I was a bit more detail-oriented, but oh well.

Adjustments, Adaptations, and Absolutes: Ten Days in Pengtun- Part 1

A lot’s been happening around here, and I have a lot to say about it. I was planning on posting one long entry, but as it happens I’ve just written a good two pages on one aspect of my time, so I think I’ll split this up.

As an introduction to these posts, I’d like to share a Chinese word—习惯 (pronounced SHE-gwan). Like many Chinese words, this one can be a noun or a verb, and can be used to express “accustomed to,” “adapted to,” and “habit.” One of the most common questions I’m asked here is “你习惯了马？” (“Are you used to this yet?”) and my response is typically “有的习惯，有的还没有”(“Some things I’ve gotten used to; others I haven’t yet.”) My existence these days is all about 习惯 –ing, about taking who I am and what I’m like and adapting it to my new life, about finding the balance between what I can and cannot change about myself. It’s about maintaining some routines, despite the difficulties involved in putting them in the rural Chinese context, dropping others, and taking on new ones.

Every morning here in Pengtun, I have a morning routine much like the one I’ve had for most of my life, wherever I happen to be. I need to go to the bathroom, I need to get dressed, I need to wash my face and brush my teeth, and I need to eat breakfast—which often includes a cup of tea. In the States, the completion of this routine typically necessitates walking from my bedroom to the bathroom around the corner, using a toilet and a faucet, pulling clothes from my dresser, and wandering to the kitchen (or, for my first two years at Mac, the dining hall) to put together something to eat. Here…not so much.

When I wake up in Pengtun, it’s to the sound of my phone alarm. I do intend to buy a little clock but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Once awake, I pull on a jacket, since the mornings are chilly, and walk from my room down the stairs, outside ( well, out from under the roof, as everything beyond my room is outside), and to the outhouse. Oh…the outhouse. We are becoming such fast friends. I’m going to go into some details on the Pengtun bathroom situation, so if you don’t want to read them, you might want to skip this next paragraph. You have been warned.

Chinese bathrooms are not like Western bathrooms; that is a simple fact. Almost everywhere you go, the bathrooms will have squat rather than seated toilets, and you are expected to provide your own toilet paper (and soap, if there’s a sink available). Also, rather than flushing your toilet paper, you place it in a wastebasket, because Chinese plumbing systems are too delicate to handle it. I’m basically used to that. Pengtun’s bathroom situation, however, is a bit more extreme. First of all, these “toilets,” if they can be called such, do not flush at all. Rather, they consist of rectangular holes, perhaps a foot and a half by half a foot, dotting a concrete floor. Under each of these holes is a ramp, doubtless intended to carry whatever waste one produces to the pit beneath the bathroom. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work, and as many people do not avail themselves of the outhouses’ wastebaskets (one in front of each hole), the top of each ramp is typically covered in used toilet paper, pads, and all manner of things. Also, there are no doors on the stalls, “stalls” being used in the loosest sense of the word here, since they consist of concrete walls, to the left and right of each hole, perhaps three feet high. When squatting, of course, this guards one from view of those in neighboring stalls, but it does nothing to prevent people walking by to their stalls from seeing all. There are no sinks near the bathrooms, at least with hot water and soap available, so I usually just go back up to my room and wash my hands there.

The other fascinating facet of bathroom use is outhouse culture and etiquette. Mark and I laugh about this, because we feel like we need to have a better understanding of what’s going on there if we want to network with the local teachers. See, my instinct, as an American, is to use tunnel vision upon entering the bathroom, glancing to the side only as much as is necessary to see if particular “stalls” are occupied. For Pengtun girls (and boys, according to Mark), it’s a different set of rules entirely. During breaks between classes, it is not unusual to see two or three girls standing in front of a stall, chatting casually with a friend using the bathroom. It is also not unusual to see people on cell phones while taking care of business. Now, I know plenty of American girls (myself included) will chat stall to stall (or stall to sink) when in a community bathroom with friends, but this situation just seems a little different.

After the bathroom, it’s time to wash my face. In the kitchenette section of my room, I have a faucet and a sink (which consists of a basin with a drain that drops to the floor where there’s another drain). The sink is very convenient, because it gives me a place to dump waste water. The faucet is very inconvenient because it does not provide me with water. Nope. Instead, I have a large bucket and two large containers meant to hold hot water. So, every day (or twice a day, or every other day, depending on how much water I’m using), I take my empty hot water bottles down to the taps outside by the cafeteria, fill them up with nowhere-near-potable water, and bring them back up to my room. If I want to use the water for washing, I pour it into my bucket. If I want to drink it, I boil it and then pour it back into one of the hot water bottles, which will keep water warm (although not boiling) for a day or so. To wash my face and hands, I pour a mix of hot and cold water into a basin. I inherited a half dozen or so of these basins from last year’s fellow, and I’ve assigned each of them a different use. I have a face/hands washing basin, a foot washing basin, a sponge bathing basin, a laundry basin, a dishwashing basin, and a “drying rack” basin. I also have different towels for everything—floor towels and dishtowels and a hand/face towel and a foot towel. Having basins and towels “assigned” like that makes me feel like everything stays cleaner, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

Not having super convenient, unlimited access to hot and cold water both has definitely made me a lot more conservation-focused. I try to reuse when I can—pouring used hands and face-washing water into the foot washing basin, and draining cooking water into the dish washing basin. The lack of immediately potable water has also caused me to start drinking less water than I do in the states—although perhaps that’s got just as much to do with not wanting to go to the outhouse very often. I know, I know…I need to stay hydrated.

I suppose I should also take this time to explain our shower situation. We, the CEI fellows, have access to a shower. It is located in a building perhaps three-five minutes walk from our dorm, and it is open from Monday-Friday, 8-5. No word yet on how that works when holidays roll around. It makes perfect sense, of course. Why would anybody want to shower outside of business hours? This shower is solar-heated, which means that the availability of hot water varies. I’ve had showers that were cold for the first half and then warmed up, I’ve had showers that remained lukewarm the entire time, and I’ve had hot showers. Water pressure is subject to the same fluctuations. I’m a bit concerned about the situation, because it’s chilly here now—as in, August—and I’m not at all looking forward to the wet hair walk from the shower to the dorm in the winter, especially if the shower is not a hot one. The nice thing about the shower is that it is a single room, which locks, so there’s no issue with privacy, and there’s a barrier behind which you can leave your clothes/towel without fear of soaking them. When it comes to the weekends, that’s what sponge bathing is for. I haven’t tried washing my hair in a basin yet, I’ll admit, but I’ll let you all know how that goes once I do.

Anyway, dressing, and breakfast, remain much the same as in the states—the only notable differences being the tea leaves (rather than tea bags) in the bottom of my cup, and the use of honey rather than brown sugar as a sweetener for my oatmeal. Actually, though, I found brown sugar in Lijiang yesterday! (more on Lijiang later—don’t worry).

Another morning habit I’ve recently adopted (or re-adopted, as it were) is MPR—Minnesota Public Radio. I love MPR, and I listened to it constantly in the Twin Cities. I woke up to it on many a morning, cooked dinner to it on many an evening, and basically let it be my soundtrack when hanging around the house. I’ve been a member for two years, although I let my membership lapse when I moved here. Maybe I should rejoin though, and keep giving my five dollars a month, because I just learned that I can stream it internationally! On one hand, it is, of course, a bit odd to be hearing the 6:30 PM news at 7:30 AM, but just because we’re dealing with different times of day doesn’t mean we’re dealing with different worlds, and it’s really comforting to hear the people whose voices I’m used to. Plus it’s an excellent way to keep up with the news when I’m not trolling The New York Times and to keep tabs in Minnesota in general.

What’s interesting about my morning routine is that I’m already basically used to it. Sure, I’d prefer a real bathroom, and I do kinda grumble in my head when I have to go lug water from downstairs, but ultimately I’m having fewer issues adapting to this particular facet of my life than I thought I might. We’ll see about the winter though—I’m not going to want to put on my knock-off North Face every time I have to go to the bathroom.

As for my other routines and adaptations, you’ll have to stay tuned to part two. Which I may post before long, if the power comes back on. God, am I glad I have a new laptop with an excellent battery life….

Emily’s First Yunnan Cooking Experience (and Some General Food Thoughts)

Here marks the last of my “backlogged posts.” It’s all new from here, folks! Also, as an addendum to this post, two days ago I attempted rice cooker corn bread. It turned out ok, but I really need to find baking soda/some sort of baking soda substitute/have baking soda sent from the US. Ma LiJun actually said it was the best corn bread she’s ever had, but I think that’s mostly because Chinese cornbread/cake and American style cornbread are very different animals. Today I might try to do tortillas, but, again, baking powder/soda would be nice…. I also plan to get lunch from the cafeteria this afternoon, just to try it out. I’ll keep you updated.

Also, check out my newest batch of pictures! http://anamericaninheqing.shutterfly.com

For lunch on Friday (today, at the time of this writing), I decided it would be a lovely idea to break into my cooking supplies and the food I bought in Heqing yesterday and try to make some lunch. I should explain that I really lucked out in terms of kitchen inheritance here. My room has a hot plate, a kettle, a wok, a medium sized pot with a lid, a steamer, a knife, a cutting board, and several cooking utensils, as well as a few bowls and a plate. Yesterday, I replaced the rice cooker that was already in here, because it was cracked on the bottom and generally did not inspire confidence as far as cooking safety was concerned. Now I have a new one (recommended by Ma LiJun) that came with a steamer of its own. Convenient indeed! I can’t wait to make mantou (steamed buns). I also bought some chopsticks, a glass mug for tea, and a trivet (which, in retrospect, seems rather unnecessary, considering that I don’t exactly have a dining table/chairs).

The girl who lived here before left containers of cooking oil, soy sauce, rice wine, and a couple other things I haven’t gotten around to translating yet. Yesterday I bought eggplant, broccoli, peppers(hot and not, although the hot ones weren’t actually hot), garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. For lunch I put together a stir fry of sorts. I don’t usually fry eggplant, so I used more oil than I intended to, and I didn’t bother to look up what each of the buttons on the hotplate means, but altogether I think it came out relatively well. I also over or undercooked the rice or something, but then, I almost never use rice cookers (or cook white rice—I use brown at home), so I think that’ll just take a bit of adjusting to

I will need to get better at cooking for one person; I made too much rice (which I saved), and a little too much stir fry (which I ate, since I have no real means of keeping it/reheating it). I’m so accustomed to cooking for 2-3 people, or at least cooking with the intention of leftovers, that I’m really not at all used to judging how much I’ll want to eat in one sitting. There’s no fridge here though, and no microwave. I suppose I could reheat things on the hotplate, but I need to get better at using it before I want to try that.

Veggies (at least the ones in the supermarket where I shopped yesterday) are cheap. My eggplant was 3 mao, which is less than 1 yuan, which is in turn less than 20 cents. My garlic was 1.2 yuan for 2 bulbs, my ginger was 4 mao for a knob about the size of toddler’s hand, my peppers (two relatively small red and two long and thin “spicy” greens) were 1 yuan total, and my broccoli was 1.5 yuan for a huge crown. So, I spent a grand total of 4.4 yuan, or 65 cents, according to the 6.75 exchange rate I saw last time I checked. In contrast, the “chocolate milk peanuts” (I had to try them—not bad, but they didn’t taste like chocolate or milk) were 1.9 yuan for a small package. Still cheap compared with the US, perhaps, but more expensive than my most expensive veggie. A chicken sandwich at the knockoff KFC-type place we passed by in Lincang was 15-20 yuan, which is pricy even by American standards, what with “dollar menus.”

In Lincang, I indulged in a lot of 2-4 yuan ice cream bars and 6.8 yuan packs of oreos, because CEI gave us “debit cards” of sorts to use at the school store, but I’ve decided that I want to avoid such purchases as much as possible here in Heqing (I have half a pack of oreos left from Lincang and will not allow myself to buy more). When I studied in Beijing, I lost some weight, mostly, I think, because I ate far less sugar than at home. I’d like to reduce my sugar this time too. It’s easy to see why prices like those above (1 dollar oreos and 22 cent broccoli) are one of the reasons there are far fewer overweight folks here in the Chinese countryside than in the US. I do wish they did more whole grains here though—not gonna lie. And, as always, I would like an oven.

“The Power of the Juice Cup” and Other Tales

One week ago, the principals, vice principals, and a spattering of teachers from our schools came to Lincang’s for three days to participate in CEI’s not-so-accurately-titled “Principals’ Week.” The purpose of this, to my understanding, was to allow us fellows to form a solid foundation for understanding and working with our school staff. Of course, what actually emerged from our time together were a series of incredibly awkward and frustrating interactions interspersed with moments of hilarity. Since arriving in Heqing, I’ve continued to find myself in very interesting (and sometimes very awkward) situations. I’ve learned a lot about Chinese culture, American culture, my current limitations, and a host of other topics I can’t name separately right now.

At any rate, I think the best way to illustrate my recent activity is through a series of short stories. Please enjoy.

The Power of the Juice Cup

Last Monday afternoon/evening, the day before most of the Lincang folks departed for their schools, the Lincang Educational Bureau sponsored a “Beer Party” for CEI and the staff of our placement schools. No, don’t think Oktoberfest. However, there was a fair amount of beer and a fair amount of “ganbei”-ing (the Chinese equivalent of toasts which, when properly executed, necessitates emptying one’s glass entirely). During dinner, the drinking and toasts continued. Drinking is a very important social thing here in China, but, as a woman I am luckily much less pressured towards consuming copious amounts of alcohol than my testosterone-laden companions. This does not mean I am exempt from participating in toasts, and by the end of the evening toasts had been made by basically every principal of every school to every other principal (and the table where he was sitting).

At the time of each toast, whoever was offering it would go around pouring beer into eggcup sized glasses (Chinese teacups, for those who are familiar). The only way to avoid being “beered,” as it were, was to have a cup full of something else. This is where juice saved the day.

Although I was not hugely enjoying the unidentifiable-except-for-sugar flavor of juice on our table, I greatly enjoyed being able to partake in all of toasts without drinking what would likely have amounted to at least 4-5 cups of beer. For those properly gambei-ing, and thus finishing a cup with each toast, I hesitate to imagine the number of beers sloshing around their stomachs by night’s end.

So, a word to the wise (or at least those with low alcohol tolerances). When it comes to Chinese parties, remember always the Power of the Juice Cup.

Americans will be Americans

Monday night was the last that we CEI fellows had together before setting off for our schools. I had originally thought, despite it being our last night, that we’d have a relatively chill evening—perhaps watching a movie or something along those lines—because Tuesday morning we still had events and meetings going on.

Nope.

Instead, most of the American fellows, a number of Chinese fellows, and quite a few staff members ended up going out, hanging at a bar, and playing the eccentric mix of American and Chinese drinking games that tend to typify our group in the same way as Chinglish. Later that evening, CEI managed to take over the bar’s (very small) dance space. The locals were mostly amused, luckily, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Bars and dance spaces aren’t usually my thing, and I’m not the only one in CEI who wouldn’t normally find him or herself out until 1:30 AM before having to get up at 6:30 AM the following morning, but there was just a feeling of abandon in the air. For all of us, it was a last opportunity to spend time as Americans do rather than being concerned with behaving properly. Plus, after so much time trying to be formal and extra extra polite with our principals, we wanted to let loose.

Oh. You’re the new teachers from CEI.

On Thursday morning, the fellows from all three Heqing schools met up in Heqing city to get Heqing phone numbers and generally orient ourselves to the town. On the way in, our principal insisted that another teacher accompany us (despite protests that it was very easy to take the bus and that we wanted to practice going in on our own). However, on the way home, we had no escort, and as we all crammed onto the bus we realized that we were not positive exactly where we had to get off.

(I should explain that the buses we can take to and from Heqing proper are not like American buses with set stopping points. Instead, you wait by the side of the road, pretty much wherever, to get picked up; you pay one yuan; and when you want to get off you yell “stop!”)

I was personally cool with just looking out the window and yelling stop when I saw aI’ familiar part of the road. Ma LiJun, however, being practical, asked a few of the locals jammed into the space next to our seats if they knew where Pengtun Middle School was. They did. Moreover, they knew that we were the new CEI fellows who would be teaching at the middle school. It’s sort of amazing how quickly word travels. I’ve certainly run into people since I got here who have no clue who I am, but Colin was saying on Thursday that CEI is “a known commodity” within Heqing. And that’s with the ten Americans here last year. Ten Americans being more or less known within a whole city. I’m not sure yet if I’m pleased or displeased with that situation, but it’s certainly interesting.

White People are Scary

My second night in Pengtun (and my first out to eat without the principal and other VIPs), Ma LiJun, Mark, and I went to a restaurant around 6:45, which is quite late for China. As such, we were the only ones there, with the exception of the family that runs the place. This family included 2 little boys (one perhaps 4 or 5, the other less than a year). While we waited for our food, Ma LiJun decided to go over and say hi to the kids, and I followed suit. The five year old seemed happy enough with this situation. The baby (who had seemed quite content enough) immediately started crying. And this is why white people are scary. Or perhaps it was the curly hair.

Long Walks and Local Interest

Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I decided that I really needed to get off campus, so I went for a walk. There’s a lake/marsh thing behind our school with a pathway alongside it, so I took that for a ways, meandering randomly and figuring I’d be able to make my way back to school eventually. As I walked, I came up alongside these older two ladies and they tried to talk to me. I say “tried” because they had to repeat basically every question at least once and half of them I didn’t understand at all. But we had a lot of smiling and whenever we reached a fork in the road they gave me advice on which way I should go to see pretty things. Eventually we parted ways.

After that, I ended up walking through rice paddies on the concrete strips that border the irrigation lines, and I cut through a village on the other side. I was trying to get to the mountains, which were very close by, but everywhere I walked there was a lot of corn between me and them, and I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of cutting through someone else’s crops without a set path like in the rice paddies.

My wanderings brought me within earshot of what sounded like a recording of Beijing Opera, so I followed a very muddy, very wet path to what turned out to be a spring with some pretty bridges and pagodas and places to sit. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a water bottle with me, but it’s nice to know where the spring is and how to get there.

After that, I started trying to make my way back. All along the roads and paths, people were staring, of course. Kids were the most fun. Usually, they would stare and stare, and then as I got closer they’d giggle and look away. I’d smile and say “ni hao,” and then a lot of them would giggle again and, in a fit of sudden bravery, yell “Hello!” before turning away once again. Also, I apparently do not always make babies cry, because one little guy was just fascinated with me. So that made me feel better.