China Birthday

I’m 24 years old. I’m in my mid-twenties—no longer a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old but a 2-year veteran of the “real world” (whatever that means).

As with so many other stages in life, I’ve reached this point only to realize that “wait, I still don’t know what I’m doing.”

I have a clear memory of little 2^nd-grade me walking up the stairs of Mary Munford Elementary School, gazing at the gargantuan fifth graders up ahead, and knowing, without a lick of doubt, that these kids understood what was going on. They had everything all figured out.

Only, then, one day, I was a fifth grader, and there was still a lot I didn’t get. But middle schoolers, they were sure to understand it all. …Nope.

Well, perhaps once I was in high school and knew how to drive, or perhaps once I got to college, or got to be a senior in college, or graduated from college, or went to live on the other side of the world…. Oh. So all the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood doesn’t just show up one day?

Shucks.

Anyway, I’ve celebrated my last several birthdays away from my family, but this was my first time celebrating abroad, and, because I have a summer birthday, it was also my first time celebrating on a regular old workday. Hence, much of my day didn’t feel all that birthday-like. I’d told my students that I wanted my present to be good behavior, but for my first two classes that was apparently too much to ask. I got to skype with a friend for about ten minutes during the afternoon, and Malijun gave me a beer, but but frankly, I was pretty mopey until after my 3 o’clock class.

I still had a couple of hours before my evening marathon class, so I decided to bike into town for bubble tea and also pick up a bar of chocolate to supplement the ghiradellhi Mark was kind enough to bring me back from America. I made a rice cooker cake. Specifically I made a mint mocha cake (chocolate with hints of mint and coffee) with a thin coffee frosting/filling between the two layers and a bailey’s (again, courtesy of Mark) chocolate glaze over top. It was, unfortunately, rather ugly when done, so no pictures. But it was darn tasty.

The first half hour of the evening class was its usual self—reviewing vocabulary and the like. Then, after the five-minute break, we went outside and spent the next half an hour playing basketball against Yiming’s class.

Class 82 has major troublemakers who happen to be talented basketball players. Despite a rule stating that only two of my class’s top five players could be on the court at any moment, we crushed the opposition. Meanwhile, I took pictures of my kids (whether they wanted to be photographed or not). Here we have Mike and Zach, and Laura and Sam (Samantha, she now insists, after the mortifying discovery of Sam listed in the textbook as a "boy's name").

Yiming’s class went in at 7:30, and we stayed out until 8. (I’d decided over the weekend that I might have an evening class on my birthday, but I was not going to spend the whole two hours fighting my students into being quiet and listening while we covered real content.)

Some of my kids opted to keep playing basketball, and a few asked if they could go back to the classroom and do homework, but I managed to corral the rest into learning all about the very important American staples of duck duck goose, octopus tag, and red rover. It was silly and fun. After I shepherded them back inside, I saw that the trustworthy girls I’d allowed to go in early and start their homework had,

in fact, decorated the entire blackboard with birthday wishes. The

class sang me happy birthday in English and Chinese. I got presents from two students and notes from a few more (see pictures of presents. They are epic things, they are). Touched, I thanked them profusely. Then it was homework time. Most kids were tired enough from all the running around that they either buckled down into work or at least kept quiet so their classmates could. All in all, it was a lovely class.

After the bell rang, I headed back to my room. Mark had candles leftover from Malijun’s birthday a few weeks ago, so I stuck them in my cake and got the gang over. Yiming’s girlfriend, who was visiting from Hong Kong, made a small fruit salad, and Yiming gave me a plant that’s currently sucking up sunshine on my windowsill. We ate the cake (sadly for me, no leftovers remaining), and just relaxed for a little while before splitting up so we could all get work done for Tuesday morning. It was not a typical American birthday, perhaps, but that doesn't mean it wasn't memorable.

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.