An American in America

September 1^st, 2011.

It’s been exactly six weeks since I got home.  This last week was a bit strange for me; my facebook feed filled with farewells from friends (I like alliteration today, apparently) headed back to China. They’re starting their second year now. I could be too, if I wanted to, but instead I’m here.

‘Here,’ at the moment, is my parents’ house, and ‘here’ will likely remain my parents’ house until January or so. When I got home, my plans for this fall were unclear. My friend and I had planned to live in Virginia together, but unfortunately the housing didn’t work out, which left me with a choice to make. I looked into heading up to DC, and I thought about spending this whole year in Berkeley, but ultimately I realized that what I really wanted, more than anything, was family time. For the last six years, I’ve seen my parents and sisters about once a semester, and after I begin grad school, there’s no telling where I’ll be or how often I’ll be able to get home. So I’m here now, and, for the most part, glad of it.

Of course, I’m still processing China. Not a day, or an hour, I think, goes by without me thinking about my students, my TFC friends, my old Heqing stomping grounds. I wonder what Pengtun is like now and how much it will have changed by the time I see it again. And yes, sometimes I wish I was still there. But mostly I don’t. Mostly I just find myself grateful for the time I spent and for the time I’m spending here.

Here is singing in a choir again, meeting my Dad for coffee, going to the gym with my Mom, going shopping with my sister, cooking for everyone. Here is bike rides, like the ones in China but longer and far less beautiful but somehow still deeply satisfying. Here is scrapbooking a year’s incredible experience, studying econ so I can take the foreign service test, keeping up with Mandarin. Here is still unemployed (for now), but here is a research project at the museum, volunteering as a Hebrew School teacher and musician at the synagogue, helping with an interfaith youth group my sister’s a part of.

It would be pretty great if I could say that all my pre-Yunnan inhibitions and social awkwardness were vanquished by a year where I was always out of my comfort zone and got used to it, but alas, I fear that my constant exposure to risk in China made me crave even more comfort than usual. I think that’ll change though. Ultimately, I think that, although I am an American in America, I’m also an American in flux. I don’t have both feet on the ground quite yet. And, for now at least, I’m ok with waiting. I’m ok with taking time to figure things out. Yunnan taught me nothing if not patience.

So, this is it. The last entry. However, I do intend to start posting on my food blog soon. So, for anyone who’s interested: Em Bakes. I’ve been cooking up a storm down here in Georgia. Stay tuned, folks. And thanks for listening. Your constant support, through email and skype and comments and facebook and everywhere, meant the world to me.

Over and out. 

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….