Wuxi Drift: The Slow and Infuriating

“So, in an attempt to convert this blog/forum/space from a place for me to go on unsubstantiated rants about various things that I don’t know enough about or whatever it has become into a real blog or at least something more closely resembling a real blog, I’ve decided to try to post things more frequently. So for the time being please enjoy this probably misguided and likely short-lived attempt to speed the pace of my posts.”

Ahem, right, well, I wrote that about two days after I posted the last entry. It seems that my attempt to convert it into something more closely resembling a real blog wasn’t so successful. Instead of trying to come up with some sort of lame excuse of my own, I’ll let the immortal words of Jake Blues as he groveled at the feet of an angry Carrie Fisher do the talking for me: “Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.” Yeah, well, all that stuff happened and I didn’t finish writing this entry until now. I mean, how can you argue with floods and locusts?

Anyway, I’ve wanted to write about this particular topic since the first few weeks I got here. I suppose laziness had a lot to do with my not writing anything about it until now. Aside from that (and the locusts), I really have no excuse for not having given you guys a window into what it’s like to go shopping for food here a long time ago. It’s definitely a different experience than back home, that’s for sure. Obviously the sheer volume of people packed into the space available for breathing and moving is far greater than anything I can remember back in the States. I suppose I should mention at this point that I live about two minutes from a very large supermarket called Carrefour. It is a French-owned chain of supermarkets that is extremely successful in China. Like when they have sales on staple items, people’s lives are literally in danger. That’s how popular the chain is here.

Anyway, I live near one of the two that we have here in Wuxi, so I tend to go there a lot. It also happens that I have to pass by the building on my way to work every day, so I get to endure being pestered by people trying to hand out flyers for who-knows-what on a twice-daily basis. I frequently get harassed by people handing out flyers for the gym across the street where I already belong. I don’t know how to say that I’m already a member. Not that it would matter anyway as there somehow seems to be a fresh rotation of people out there every day, resulting in my getting bothered pretty much without fail. A couple of times I think I’ve managed to give a scowl fierce enough to deter some of the younger, more timid girls, but that’s about it. For a while, they pushed a flyer on me that had some ghastly picture of what appeared to be an older woman doing the splits in full 80s workout paraphernalia, but fortunately those times have passed. It really did look like one of the Golden Girls was limbering up for some yoga or Tae Bo or something. I think the first time I saw it, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. After a moment’s consideration (and throwing up a little bit in my mouth), I think I cringed involuntarily and resolved to try not to look at it again.

But back to what I was saying about shopping here. After I penetrate the outer wall of flyer-wielding scouts, I have to pass by the entrance/exit to the scooter-parking alley thingamajig that’s connected to the Carrefour building. Crossing the mouth of this thing is like those times in Mario where you have to jump over some chasm or tube, except that there’s some ball of lava or spiky flower that issues forth from the chasm or tube that tries to kill you. Fortunately, these objects tended to appear at regular intervals, thereby allowing you to time your jump and escape the object. Naturally no such interval exists in this situation and you must cross at your own peril. At this point I should mention that people here regularly drive their scooters and bikes on the sidewalk at the same velocity that they would if they happened to be on the road or on the designated road that exists just for them next to almost every road in China. Why don’t they drive on this road you might ask? Well, if anyone knows the answer to this question, please let me know. But for now, I’m going with the “because it’s China” explanation. It works well for most things here.

Anyway, because people lack either the common sense or the manners to decrease their speed in deference to relatively helpless pedestrians who may be walking on the sidewalk, you can never really tell how fast people are going to come out of this thing. So you can approach this problem in one of two ways. You can slow your pace to a crawl in the hopes that you can catch a glimpse of an oncoming vehicle and take evasive maneuvers before it can strike you or you can act like a Chinese pedestrian normally does while crossing the street and focus your gaze straight ahead, thereby making it look like you don’t see the aforementioned oncoming vehicle. In the latter case, the burden of making evasive maneuvers thus shifts from the pedestrian to the operator of the vehicle. However, in most cases, the pedestrians just outside of the Carrefour inexplicably abandon their normal stony gaze and adopt the creeping strategy, thus creating a sizable mass of people near the entrance to the parking alley, ironically making it more likely that someone will be struck. I choose to adopt the stony gaze strategy whilst increasing my walking speed, hoping that I won’t be T-boned by some vehicle and sent crashing into the wall of scooters that serves as the left flank of this gauntlet. I haven’t been hit yet, but there have been some close encounters.

So once you’ve successfully navigated the ball of lava/speeding scooter obstacle, you can then approach the entrance of the building, which is curtained by those big plastic strips that look they were shredded from one over-sized piece. Every time I go there I still feel like I’m walking into a meat freezer or something. I half expect Uncle Paulie to meet me there with a pair of boxing gloves. I then avoid eye contact with the next wave of flyer hander-outers and continue into the building. The actual supermarket is on the second floor, so you have to walk through the first floor to get there. The first floor consists of a revolving door of shops that seems to change with every new visit. Except that it’s the same four different kinds of shops, just with new owners. It’s like walking into your house every day to find that your furniture has been rearranged in a new setup. Of course this feeling is fairly normal since this was a regular occurrence in my parents’ house back in the US. In my house we didn’t have gnomes that hid the car keys, we had gnomes that moved the furniture. And we actually didn’t have gnomes, we had my mother. After some consideration on this subject, I’ve decided that my mother’s gift from China may or may not be a Chinese construction crew. These guys are capable of anything from rearranging a row of plants to building an entire store in about a day. A new store literally pops up here within a day or two days of the old one closing down. And that includes the destruction of the old shop and the construction of the new one. That’s how fast things change here. I don’t know how they do it. My guess would be shoddy construction materials and methods and dirt-cheap, semi-skilled labor. But that’s just a guess.

After you pass the row of shops and the obligatory KFC, you turn the corner and generally find yourself confronted with a small hedge maze of shopping carts. On the one hand, it’s easier than a hedge maze because you can see over the carts and therefore it doesn’t require the Shining or some other extrasensory skill to navigate. On the other hand, it’s more difficult because other people are also trying to make their way through the maze at the same time, only they’re carrying bags and piloting shopping carts of their own (which they often ditch in the middle to contribute to the maze). Once you’ve made your way through the maze, which grows more fiendishly complex as the day wears on and more and more people leave their carts in the hall, you get to walk past the food court. The food court’s not too bad really. They have cheap, fairly good Chinese food. There’s also a Japanese restaurant there, which seems to be pretty successful despite the insistence of some of my students that Chinese people don’t like Japanese food and won’t eat it. I’ve eaten there a few times and the experience was pretty good. I would recommend it, at least if you don’t mind old people with bags of cans sitting down near you and staring at you until you finish your Coke or whatever other canned beverage you may be enjoying. I imagine that they’re worth money if recycled (the cans, not the people of course), much like in the States. Considering that they (the people this time) don’t really bother me much due to the fact that I’m usually wholly engrossed in the task of eating my meal, it’s not a problem. But I can see how most normal people might find this disturbing.

After passing the food court and a few shops selling wallets, purses, and fake (?) jewelry, you turn another corner and go up this escalator-type thing. It doesn’t actually have steps; it’s just flat like the people-movers in most airports these days. It’s actually pretty useful for bringing shopping carts into and out of the supermarket. On the way up you see signs warning you to watch your head. For some reason unknown to me, there’s a picture on the sign of someone hitting their head on what appears to be a water faucet. As there are no water faucets to be seen on the walls, ceilings, or floors in that area I am puzzled as to the origin of the faucet on the sign. Nonetheless, I remain wary.

Anyway, once you reach the top, you are presented with a fairly normal large supermarket. You make your way to the stacks of plastic baskets near the entrance and pick through them until you find one that is actually clean. The first few aisles are clothes and shoes and things as the supermarket resembles a cross between a Target and a Safeway. If you wander off to the right instead of entering the aisles immediately, you head into the electronics and home appliance sections. These sections can be particularly obnoxious because the store has commissioned the employees in these sections with the task of harassing you if you even approach the aisle to look at something. These people are undeterred by the presence of headphones, my telling them I don’t understand them, my telling them I’m just looking, and oftentimes, my obvious lack of interest in what they are trying to peddle, which is without exception the most expensive product of the lot. I do try to be nice to them because I know they’re just doing their job, but I must say that I would be more likely to buy a product if they would just give me a chance to look at the options before shoving the most expensive one in my face. I may not end up buying the most expensive one, but at least I would buy something instead of rapidly making my way to another section of the store.

Having said this, I’m not sure if I prefer the employees in that part of the store, or the ones in the other part of the store, who instead of actively bothering you take the passive-aggressive approach by standing in the middle of the aisle in large groups chatting. Since this is a Chinese store, there are large numbers of people trying to move through the aisles with their carts at all times, so these employees often function as a clot in the aisle, preventing the vital flow of patrons through the store and trapping many unfortunate shoppers in massive mid-aisle jams. I am usually able to run these miniature blockades without incident, but there have been a few times when I literally had to push someone’s cart out of my way to get out. This is partly due to the peculiar habit of Chinese people to never, ever give up ground once it has been gained in any sort of situation. This tendency most commonly rears it head in traffic situations, but can also apply in almost any other situation. In this case, the shopper has rolled their cart up to the aforementioned clot of people and even after surveying the situation refuses to back up, which action would release the people trapped inside and clear the way for them to go through. I can’t even remember how many times I have seen this in traffic or in the little road that goes through my apartment complex. I’ve seen cars sitting in front of each other waiting for the other to move for minutes on end while both blare their car horns uselessly. Any Western car driver would immediately recognize the need for someone to reverse and would do so as soon as possible so as to clear the way quickly and get on with their business. For whatever reason, that doesn’t happen here. They just sit there in this comical face off until someone backs up. I don’t know if this is a “losing face” thing or if it’s just an ingrained habit not to give up anything once it’s been gained, but it’s absolutely mind-boggling sometimes.

So like I was saying, every time I go in I have to decide whether to blast my way through the food section of the store or go play Pacman with the employees of the appliances section. I might pick the appliances section if only because it’s unlikely that I will have to worry about keeping my footing there. If you go to the section of the store where meat and various other living and/or freshly dead animals are sold, you are likely to slip at some point or other on a puddle of some liquid that couldn’t possibly be water, due partly to the color of the liquid and partly to the viscosity of the liquid. After doing the whole “hands flailing, half-split, feet moving in cartoonish wheels” thing, you regain your balance and look down furiously at what you just slipped on and immediately regret doing so as you inevitably find it to be some shade of brown and of a thickness somewhere between water and phlegm. The main reason this bothers me, other than the fact I spend enough time dodging obstacles on the road outside without having to worry about what sludge I might be stepping in at the supermarket, is that I generally try to maintain a pretty rapid pace while I’m there. Why do I do this you might ask? Well, as it turns out, I am confronted with the worst shopping situation I could possibly face when I go to the supermarket. How so? Every single customer there shops precisely the same way I do. Those of you who have ever been in a grocery store or movie store with me before know that I tend to make decisions very slowly and deliberately. I’m pretty sure that more than one of my friends has been about ready to punch me in the face as I sat there deliberating over beer or some other choice in the supermarket. Well if you think I’m deliberate, you should check out a Chinese shopper. They completely redefine the word.

It’s kind of like being caught in an extended slow motion sequence, which would be really cool if I was dodging bullets, fighting an eight-foot-tall Russian giant with the acting skills and personality of a Chinese dumpling, or roundhouse-kicking someone in the face with a cowboy boot. Alas, none of these things happen when I go to the supermarket, so it’s just me trying to make my way through a crowd of thousands of shuffling Lemmings. It’s really changed my shopping experience from a leisurely, almost cathartic process to one in which I begin with a strictly defined purpose and execute the plan as rapidly as possible while trying to maintain my sanity.

But here I am rambling on and I haven’t even described the phenomenon I mentioned in my title. As it turns out, aggressive employees and the ever-present puddles of mystery liquid aren’t my only problems. Probably the biggest problem is your average shopper, or to be more accurate, your average shopping cart. For some reason that I have yet to determine (though I’m beginning to suspect that it’s simply to increase the exposed amount of shopping cart with which other customers have to deal), all the shoppers at Carrefour pilot their shopping carts at a peculiar angle. Instead of pushing them straight, they turn them in such a way that they resemble those cars in the third installment of the Fast and Furious movies. I believe “drifting” is the term. However, as far as I can tell, the prospect of a shopping cart overflowing with cooking oil, chicken feet, and duck necks that is piloted by either a tiny Chinese woman or worse yet her scrawny kid at a speed unsafe for confined spaces is far more fearsome than the prospect of being struck by some oversized micro-machine being piloted by an equally diminutive wannabe gangster. I almost want to apply the term popularly associated with those cars, “rice rockets,” to the rolling potential shin- and hip-bruises I encounter at the supermarket, but I feel like a might be crossing a line there, so I won’t. I mean, my sarcasm has limits too, you know?

I engineer my exit from the supermarket using a method reminiscent of the movie “Donnie Darko” where the title character can see where the other characters will go in the future. Unfortunately I have no such vision, forcing me to guess the future paths of the other shoppers. On the bright side of things, however, I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal. Anyway, I visually map the expected trajectories of the shoppers closest to me, perform several complex algorithmic operations in my head, and decide the next directional adjustment to my course in something like a tenth of second. I then have to utilize my cat-like reflexes to weave my way through the crowd to the checkout lines, where I get the usual staring routine and people looking into my basket to see what the foreigner is buying.

As I lack a grappling hook and a speeding subway train in the vicinity, it’s harder to make a quick escape after paying for my food than I would prefer. After purchasing my items, I go down the people mover, being careful to watch out for any water faucets that could be lying in wait. I silently mourn the loss of the “Sensuous Breast Cream” ad that used to be posted at the bottom of the people-mover and curse my lack of teleportation abilities. As I make my way out of the place with my massive bag of groceries, I suppress the urge to swing it at anything that stands in my path, or hold it in front of me and crash through the line of flyer-wielders like a bowling ball. Just because some actions are appropriate in America doesn’t mean they’re appropriate here.

Alright, well that pretty much concludes today’s “blog” entry. In next week’s exciting episode, MacGyver defuses the economic crisis and brings peace to the Middle East using a cuff link, a potato peeler, and an empty Coke bottle. Unless of course an old Chinese woman gets to it first… Be sure to tune in!

Chinese First Date

As those of you who pay far too much attention to my facebook profile have noticed, there has been a change recently. My “relationship” status has not actually changed so much as simply disappeared. Perhaps this seems like a strange thing to do and maybe it even seems insulting to whomever may have prompted that change in my status. Fortunately for me, I’m fairly certain that the girl in question (1) doesn’t have a facebook profile (2) probably wouldn’t care one way or the other and (3) already knows why our relationship has to stay in a slightly secret place. Our relationship hasn’t exactly been what most people would define as “normal” from the beginning anyway. I would guess that the official relationship part began when she sent me a text message one day that read: “Can I treat you as my boyfriend?”

As you may have guessed, she is Chinese and knows some English. However, she doesn’t always say quite what she means to say. She often confuses the words “hungry” and “angry” which has led to some comical exchanges. She misuses phrases as well sometimes, like the time she sent me a message saying that she was about to “hit a shower.” At least she was close on that one. It’s funny how even one word or letter can change the entire meaning of a sentence. This was wonderfully demonstrated by the message I got after I placement tested a girl for EF one day: “Is there a sex girl you test today?” I’m not entirely sure why she sent me that since the girl I tested wasn’t really very sexy at all. I suppose this was just her fishing for compliments and reassurance, but at least it was funny. My personal favorite was one I got recently when she had a day off and apparently had nothing to do: “Honey, I’m a little boring.” I think I actually laughed out loud in the office when I read that one. I have to respect her for her efforts though. I’m sure I make far worse mistakes when I try to speak Chinese.

Anyway, back to the story. You could say that my reply to her request was a little strange/not the appropriate romantic reply: “You may treat me however you wish.” But then again, I’m not exactly known for my Oscar-worthy performances when dealing with women, Western or otherwise. In retrospect, that was probably the least awkward way that situation could have unfolded. It prevented a face-to-face meeting with me over-thinking about what to say and then executing it so clumsily that it backfired in that way where one or both of you look away with a slightly horrified expression on your face while you secretly wish you were somewhere else. You know, that feeling where you wished you were mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, or doing some other mundane task that would prevent you from actually being in front of that person staring down, scraping your toe on the floor, and thinking furiously, “Oh great, what could I possibly say to fix this?” Almost any guy who has been in a serious relationship and has a tendency to say stupid things (I can think of at least one of you aside from me) has faced this situation before. So, having mercifully exchanged this major form of awkwardness for a relatively minor one, we became a couple.

Of course, many girls would claim that the “relationship” starts at the first date rather than the day that they officially become boyfriend and girlfriend. And having learned long ago not to argue with girls no matter how right you are and how wrong they might be, mostly because they could do absolutely anything in an argument including throw a knife at you (you may have forgotten about that, Lauren, but I haven’t), I suppose I should take the few of you who actually read this thing back to the night of my first date with this girl. Admit it, you want to hear about it. Many of you remember my brief posts in college detailing my encounters with various women and the inexplicably awkward things that were said on both sides of the equation. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ll never, ever live down the “live strong” remark. Well, this is basically an extended version of one of those experiences. The only thing I can say in my defense is that it’s been a pretty long time since I was on a date, and an even longer time before that one, so if you combine “lack of practice” with my already naturally diminished romantic capabilities, the result of the equation isn’t going to be George Clooney or anything. Oh, and throw in the fact that I’m in a foreign country on a date with a girl I don’t really know and who doesn’t speak a ton of English, and you just know that the chances of having this thing go off without a hitch are painfully slim.

I guess the actual date process started when I timidly asked a certain Chinese girl if she wanted to have dinner with me sometime. With absolutely no trace of emotion on her face, she told me she needed to check her schedule, proceeded to do so, and said she was free Wednesday (or maybe it was Thursday; women are better at remembering these things). I said okay, I’d send her some messages about a time and place where we could meet, and then I walked away feeling like I had just made an appointment to see the dentist or something instead of setting up a date with a girl. Eventually we decided that finding a place to meet that we were both familiar with would be better than trying to meet at the restaurant since neither of us really knew of a place that the other could find. So after some back and forth, we finally settled on a place. I had passed by it a couple of times before, so I was pretty sure I knew where it was. Of course I’m aware of my own utter incompetence when it comes to directions and finding places, even when I’ve actually been there before, not to mention the obvious tendency of things to blow up in my face at the prospect of meeting or talking with a female. With this in mind, I called a friend and confirmed the location of the building in front of which I was supposed to meet this girl. I also figured I would set aside some time and get to the area early, just to give myself some time to wander in case I couldn’t find the place immediately. I thought I was pretty clever, but I should have known it would take more than human ingenuity to shake the monkey on my back. I should have known the magnitude of this monkey from the expression of the last Chinese girl I met and talked to the first time, a girl I had absolutely no romantic feelings for whatsoever, but whom I somehow managed to terrify completely. But some little part of me hoped that maybe just for once fate would leave me alone and everything would go as planned. Naturally, I wouldn’t be writing this entry if such was the case.

I took a taxi to the area in which I had seen the designated building before. I didn’t see it immediately, but I was still fairly confident of the direction I needed to walk, so I checked my watch and set off. I still had about ten minutes or so to get to my destination. I had originally planned to give myself more time, but I also suffer from a tendency to be late, which struck again in this case. Cut me a little slack though, I was trying to look nice for the first date I’ve had in a really long time. Anyway, I started walking around the area where I had seen the building previously but, not surprisingly, I couldn’t find it. I started to circle the block in case I was on the wrong side of the block or something. However, unbeknownst to me, the building had just recently started to undergo some renovation and so was covered by a big scaffold and a green tarp. Considering that a good 20% of the buildings in China are currently covered in these scaffolds and tarps, it blended in fairly well with the surroundings. Needless to say, I missed it. This sent me in an ever-widening search circle that in reality took me farther and farther from where I was supposed to be. In the midst of my frantic searching, I realized that it was past the time I was supposed to meet the girl, so I sent her a message explaining that I couldn’t find the place and asking for a little guidance. I didn’t get a response for about five minutes, so I sent another message just to see if she was there. I started to get a sinking feeling when I didn’t hear from her for five minutes after that. Well, a sinking feeling in addition to the disappointed/incredulous feeling I had gotten earlier when I couldn’t find the building. I figured it was possible that she had stood me up as part of the cosmic joke that my love life had largely become or as part of a real, tangible joke that someone may have played on me. I mean, if someone had actually pulled this off on me, I would basically never have a response to them in any sort of argument. No matter what I said, they could always say, “Hey, remember that time that you thought were going on a date with that girl you liked, but instead she didn’t show up, and you ended up wandering around downtown for like an hour?” and that would be the end of the argument. These are just some the things that were going through my mind at the time.

Well, fortunately for me, it was no joke. However, unfortunately for me, the cell phone network had chosen that particular time and place out of the whole time I’ve been in China to scoop up my messages and send them to message limbo, where they were condemned to wait until they were no longer urgently needed. I finally did what I should have done long before that and simply called her number. After the requisite confusion and some more wandering I managed to finally meet her. She was already upset because it was getting late and she was really hungry from not having had lunch. So now not only was I late and had been wandering around frustrated for about an hour, but I had a hungry, slightly sulky/whiny girl on my hands. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even blame her for being mad at me. Frankly, I was trying not to be mad at me.

Anyway, having managed to clear the disguised building and vanishing messages hurdles, I thought maybe my troubles were mostly out of the way. As usual, my optimism merely served to set me up for greater disappointment. After walking around for a little bit and finally receiving the messages she had sent me about 25 minutes earlier in the process, we began to realize that nearly every restaurant was closed. The only restaurants that seemed to be open were noodle places. And as it happens, I was on a date with the one Chinese person out of 1.3 billion that doesn’t like noodles. I’ve often accused her of not being Chinese after I learned this fact, but she keeps insisting that she is. Her appearance combined with her ability to speak Chinese would seem to support her claim, but I still have my doubts.

By the way, my inner monologue at this point looked something like this: “HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE! WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THE BUILDING AND THE MESSAGES AND THE ONE GIRL OUT OF 1.3 BILLION WHO DOESN’T LIKE NOODLES! WHY? HOW!? THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE!! AAAAAAGGGGGH!” Luckily for me, I hadn’t been recently unfrozen from a cryogenic state through an unnecessarily long and comical process, so none of this found vocal form. But it was definitely going through my brain on a big banner for the next half an hour or so.

At any rate, what this meant was that we had to go from one restaurant area to another looking for a place that was still open that didn’t serve just noodles. Considering that Wuxi is similar to Charlottesville in that practically everything in town except the bars closes at about eight or nine, the odds were very much against us finding a place. But we were both starving since neither of us had eaten lunch, so we were desperate. I figured our situation was pretty bad.

And then I got lost. Again. She kept asserting that I must know where I am. I kept saying, “I assure you, I don’t.” I told her that it was her city, not mine. She should know where we were. To this day, I really don’t know if she knew where we were or not. If she did, she wasn’t helping. In fact, instead of helping, she was now complaining that her feet hurt. She had some grounds for complaint I suppose since she had worn high heels, expecting that she wouldn’t have to walk far. Clearly she didn’t know me well enough at the time that she made that decision. At some point during our wanderings, I started to see the humor in all this and started laughing. She asked me why I was laughing, made a noise of frustration, and then told me, in accented English, “I want to kill you.” I admitted to having a similar desire and we walked on.

After walking for somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour, we spotted a McDonalds. I knew we had reached a low point in the night when she begged me to eat there. I adamantly refused. I had already ruined the date, so I wasn’t about to go make things worse by her taking her to McDonalds. I had at least a little bit of pride left. Not to mention the fact that I knew full well that I would never live down taking a girl to McDonald’s on a first date. I mean, I might as well give up if that’s the direction my love life is headed. So, after refusing her request and enduring a repetition of her earlier desire to kill me, we moved on. By this time, I only knew of one other place that we could actually get any food. I had been avoiding it all night because it happened to be a bar. But of course it’s not just a bar. It also happens to be one of the two bars that all the foreigners in Wuxi hang out in. I might as well put up a billboard on the main street of the city with this girl and I holding hands or something. But we had no other choice, so we took a cab there and went in.

When I walked in with the girl, I entered that awkward territory where your friends see you, but they’re not really sure if they should talk to you because you’re with a girl and clearly on a date and they don’t want to be rude. But on the other hand, they don’t want to ignore you because that would also be rude, so they’re kind of sending you toned-down/secret greeting signals. I also had to put up with some knowing glances and snickers from my friends at other tables during the meal, but that was really nothing compared to the problems I had dealt with earlier in the night. So we ate our meal and I was reminded once again that Chinese women attack their food with the same gusto and table manners of a pack of wolves tearing into the kill. And no, this was not just because she was really hungry and tired. She eats like that all the time.

Anyhow, we made some small talk and such during dinner. I didn’t learn anything earth-shattering about her. In fact, I learned more about her from her behavior after the dinner than from anything that she said. After the plates were cleared, she started wiping down the table thoroughly and organizing all the objects on the table perfectly. Apparently she’s a clean-freak almost to the point of knocking on OCD’s door. The look on her face as she walked around my apartment for the first time was priceless. Her reaction upon walking in was to shake her head, look at me sadly, and then said, “You should clean it.” However, to my surprise (and delight I should add), she couldn’t take the dirt for very long and soon set about cleaning the place herself. I certainly didn’t complain. But I should get back to the date.

The rest of the date after the food mostly consisted of me shaking salt on the table and blowing it to her side of the table to upset the careful balance of cleanliness and order she had worked so hard to achieve. I suppose this stemmed from the childish behavior I’ve always seemed to display at meal tables. Anyone who ate with me or in my general vicinity in high school will remember that when I wasn’t busy eating every piece of food in sight, I was whipping it across the table at someone. But aside from my bizarre behavior in indulging my need to somehow be obnoxious during the date, she was behaving in a way that I thought was a little bizarre at the time. While we were talking and blowing salt all over the table, she was busy playing with my arm hair. I’ve since realized that nearly every Chinese person is curious about arm hair. They just rarely put their curiosity on display by trying to touch it, so I didn’t really know what to think. However, it occurred to me that the very little kids that I teach obviously have no sense of social shame and indeed have no feeling that it would be inappropriate to touch someone without good reason, so they’re always grabbing my arm and looking at my arm hair. But they do it without the knowledge of a social barrier, whereas this girl knew well enough that it’s considered impolite to touch someone out of sheer curiosity. I figured it meant that she felt comfortable enough with me to cross that social barrier. It seemed to me to be the best sign out of anything that she had said or done to indicate that there would be the possibility of a second date. That was really the only thing I could hold onto, because at the end of the night when all was said and done, and we were going our separate ways, there wasn’t even so much as a goodnight kiss. But what can I say? My body hair has never before or after given me so much hope.

I'mmmm Baaack!

Alright, I know it's been a while since I updated this thing. Ive been... busy. But for now, I'm back. After reading my last post, in which I went on at great length about the things that irritate me here in China, I felt it would only be appropriate for me to list the things I like the most about living, working, and simply existing here. I am afraid that my last post may have given people the impression that I don’t like living here, but that is simply not true. As you’ll see from the very first thing on my list, China speaks to many of the things I enjoy most in life. In fact, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t currently engaged in an internal debate about whether I will come back after I finish my contract here or simply extend the contract for a bit and stay a little longer. But that’s for later. On to the list:

THE FOOD

Everyone from my best friends to even casual acquaintances knows about my love for food. I would travel back in time just to shake the hand of the person who coined the phrase, “the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” The sheer percentage of time that I devote to thinking about food explains more than I’d care to admit about my personality, including the glacial pace at which I tend to make decisions, eat a meal, and perform other basic functions in life. So it should be no surprise that the quality of the food here and maybe even more the availability of food here is a major selling point of this country. I love the fact that I can get good food pretty much any time I want, wherever I want. Many of the restaurants close a little earlier than I’m accustomed to eating dinner (ten o’clock anyone?), but that’s not usually too much of a problem. There’s always street food. Some people might worry that street food isn’t very clean or whatever, but it actually tends to be cleaner than getting food from a restaurant. You can stand there and watch the people cook it, so you’re pretty much assured that nothing will get into your food that you might not want in there.

When you order food from a restaurant, or if the school you work for happens to order food from a restaurant for you, there is a chance that you might end up with something in it that has more legs than most of the animals you’d normally find in your food. I suppose it could be classified more as an insect than an animal, but semantics aside, it still shouldn’t have been in my food. I suppose I should be thankful that it wasn’t alive or something and of course that I found it before I had consumed it or part of it. The restaurant graciously allowed me to have that meal for free. Of course, if I wanted another meal in its place, I had to pay for it. So basically, they offered me a free cockroach. There was talk of getting a new restaurant for lunch orders, but since we moved to this one because the previous restaurant left the same six-legged gift in someone else’s meal and chances were good that whatever restaurant we switched to would have the same problem, there was some shoulder-shrugging (including mine) at the staff meeting and ultimately no change was made. For the reasons I just gave, it wasn’t much use causing a ruckus. I just pick through my food a little more carefully these days. Perhaps some of you think that this is gross, but I suspect that there’s probably worse stuff in most of the fast food in America. I trust the people working in the kitchens here more than the disillusioned, possibly malicious and/or incompetent teenagers working behind the scenes in many restaurants in America.

However, that being said, I will admit that the conditions at some of the restaurants can sometimes be less than, ahem, sanitary. As it turns out, cockroaches are not the only living creatures to frequent many of these restaurants. I went out one night with a bunch of friends to celebrate someone’s birthday. We went to a restaurant that the other guys have been to before. For some reason, they had a big problem seating us. Now I know there were quite a few people in our group, but there were tables all over the place, most of them large enough to suit us. They moved us from one table to another, but nothing was right for them. Then they decided to move us to our own room. So we started walking in and settling into seats in this room when someone spotted something in the corner. You know what it was? A pile of poop. There was a big pile of cat poop in the corner of the room. But the most unbelievable part of the story? The other guys started to sit down and call seats on the far side of the room. Fortunately, someone regained his mind long enough to suggest that we leave the room and sit somewhere else. We eventually did so and I ate enough spicy food to send me home to the bathroom in the middle of the work day the next day.

Anyway, disgusting anecdotes aside, I love the food situation in this country. I just bought an entire meal today for about 15 RMB, which, after accounting for the recent jump in value of the RMB against the dollar, is a little over two dollars. It’s hard to knock any country in which I can get a meal for the equivalent of about two American dollars, even when I’m not actually making dollars anymore. It doesn’t get much better than that.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the second thing on the list of things I like most about China:

THE JOB

Ranting Continued...

Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this thing, so I should get to it. On this week’s exciting episode, I’ll be continuing my holiday rant. The celebrations just ended here in China, so I can still technically call it a holiday rant.

Complaint the Second

In my last entry, I believe I started listing my main complaints about China so far. The next thing on my list was cutting in line. Now, in person, Chinese people are some of the warmest, kindest, most hospitable people you will ever meet. I can’t say enough good things about interacting with them on a personal level. However, once you get out on the street or into any sort of impersonal situation, you become one of the billions of other people in China, and they can care for you as much as they care for the next pebble on the street. I guess I can understand the mindset that takes over when you’re jockeying for position in a crowd of thousands to try to get train tickets or to get to an aisle in a supermarket (shopping here definitely deserves its own entry). Most of the pedestrians here would just as soon walk over you as walk around you on the street, including me. In that respect, the city reminds me of New York. However, the one major cultural difference is that Chinese people have little to no regard for lines. If they walk into a fast-food restaurant or a convenience store and see a line, the first thing they do is walk to the counter in front of everyone and try to order or hand the cashier money for their purchase. I can’t tell you how infuriating this is the first few times it happens to you. It’s even worse for foreigners because we don’t have the same grasp of the language that the Chinese do and so it’s difficult for us to do what they do. We also have a respect for lines that’s been stamped on us by years of cultural training in the West.

Chinese people have no such stamp. In fact, you get so much practice ignoring the presence of other people/drivers while getting around here that it’s easy for you to pretend that there is no line when you walk into a restaurant or convenience store. You simply do what you want to do as if they weren’t there. Perhaps if you don’t acknowledge that there is anyone there, no one loses face or something. This might be the key to that phrase from the blog I linked to way back at the beginning of this adventure that described the traffic in Beijing. The author mentioned an old guy with a face like marble who was pedaling his way through the entire mess as if nothing else was there. This is exactly what people do here. They just set their faces and do what they please, oblivious to everything else going on around them. Of course, there’s something to be said for this philosophy, particularly when you’re competing with about 5 million other people in and around the city to get what you want. Sometimes it makes me think that this is some sort of a Hobbesian society, where it’s essentially every man against every other man. And while it’s true that most people here cannot be compared to the life Hobbes envisioned for those living in a state of nature, there are a select few that could be described as, “nasty, brutish, and short.” But it’s not even these few who cut in line. It’s everyone. And it still makes me really angry. I feel like I should also point out that manners regarding lines still exist in plenty of other highly populated countries.

Anyway, we may have a disadvantage when it comes to the language here, but the advantage we usually have as foreigners here is that we’re bigger than everyone. If you carefully maneuver yourself so that you cover most of the possible entry points to the counter, you can usually achieve success. This often involves a blockade consisting of you and two or three other friends. Most of us, including me, have also reached the point where we are perfectly willing to deploy elbows to maintain the integrity of the blockade. Since the amount of time you find yourself waiting for the food is already frustratingly long, any method you can use to speed up the overall process seems to be completely justified. The worst is when old people come and literally push their way past everyone. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it. Older people are revered here, so you can only look on helplessly as they shove their way to their chosen destination. Unless they’re beggars. If they’re beggars, young or old, normal Chinese people will be quite aggressive in driving them away. I suppose I still haven’t fully figured out how the age system interacts with the class system here. I’ll learn eventually. Anyway, back to cutting in line. The only major incident that I can think of that’s resulted from cutting in line or an act related to it was when a woman took the menu out of my hand while I was ordering. Now, I consider this to be one step below taking the food itself out of my hand. And those of you who know me well know better than to try to take food from me. So I snatched it right back, mentally noted the surprised look on her face, and went back to ordering as if she hadn’t done anything in the first place. I have to say, I felt pretty satisfied afterward. Who knows? Maybe there’s something to this philosophy of doing whatever you want after all…

Complaint the Third

My final complaint (for the moment) involves the use of cell phones here in China. The most annoying habit that people here have is one that used plague America. It appears that just as America has grown out of it, we have passed it on to the Chinese. This is the practice of speaking into your phone as if you need to shout to make yourself heard, regardless of the presence of any background noise or interference on the phone. People here tend to answer their phones as if they’re bellowing at a friend standing across a large river or chasm of some sort, particularly if they happen to be in an enclosed space such as an elevator or something. If I had a better grasp of the language, I would start assuring cell-phone shouters that the person on the other end will hear them, even if they reduce their decibel level below that of a jet taking off. I’m not sure it would have any effect, though. For some reason beyond my understanding, Chinese people seem to insist that every function involved with the use of their phone is at full volume. I’ve only been witness to one instance in which someone’s cell phone wasn’t ringing at the loudest setting possible. One. That’s it. My roommate and I, both immediately aware of the magnitude of such an occasion, ultimately concluded that the volume button on the phone must have been catastrophically damaged. There’s no other way that phone was going off quietly.

The last aspect of this noise complaint involves those people who let their phones ring interminably because they just like to listen to the music on the ring tone. I’m aware that American people do this too, but this in no way makes it any less reprehensible. As the beats of some Chinese pop song vibrate every object within five feet of the phone, I often find myself thinking, “You have approximately three seconds before I send that cell phone ricocheting off your cranium at high velocity.” This is another one of those things that annoyed me in America and seems to have made it’s way over here as well.

And while I’m on my soapbox, I’d also like to make some scathing comments about the situation involving my wallet. Now I will freely admit that I lost my wallet while I was on vacation in a city in southern China purely because I’m an idiot and for no other reason. I got warm while walking around and decided to take the jacket off and sling it over my arm. It somehow didn’t occur to me that gravity would come into play at some point in this situation and my wallet would fall straight out of the pocket into which I had placed it earlier. Well, it did and I lost it. I canceled my card and mourned the loss of about 300 RMB (approximately $40). I figured it could have been much worse. However, a couple of days ago, one of the women who works for English First told me that someone had found the wallet in Xiamen, found a business card belonging to my boss, and phoned the company. I thought this was great. The woman who works for EF talked to the woman and had to act as a kind of relay for a little because the day I received the news about the wallet is my busiest day of the week. So I gave the CC (EF employee) the answers to a couple of logical questions, such as how much money was in the wallet and what kind of card was in the wallet. I went on about my business, thinking I might actually get the wallet back soon. Then the CC came back with more questions. What was the color of the card? What was the bank on the card? Again, how much money was in the wallet? What color was the wallet? Slightly puzzled, I answered these questions as well and went back to teaching my class. Then when the day was finished, the CC told me that the woman wanted to talk to me in person. After being assured that the woman who found it spoke English, I called the number. No one picked up for a couple times, then finally a Chinese woman answered, listened to me speak English for a few seconds, started shouting at me in Chinese, and hung up the phone.

Now I have no idea what this woman is thinking. Is she doubting that this is my wallet? I lost the wallet in Xiamen and I work for EF. She found an EF business card in it with my boss’ name on it in Xiamen. I’m the only EF employee who was both in Xiamen for the holiday and who lost a wallet. I’ve accurately described the wallet and the card. Now it’s possible that someone else took the money that was in there, but you’d think all the things I listed above would pretty much confirm that this is my wallet. We’re not investigating the Kennedy assassination here for crying out loud. The evidence seems pretty cut-and-dried. What else could she possibly need to talk to me for? Why does this have to be such a hassle? Why can’t she just send the wallet to EF and be done with it? And now, she won’t pick up the phone when I call. Why all the effort to track me down and make sure that she talks to me and only me if she won’t answer when I try to call? WHAT IS GOING HERE? Just like Will Ferrell in Zoolander, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I swear, sometimes I just don’t understand people.


Next Time, On Batman

Will Batman escape from the clutches of the Joker? Will he be able to save Gotham from this week’s dastardly plot? And most importantly, will I manage to calm down and be less crabby in my next entry? These and other important questions will be answered on our next episode. I’ll write an update about how things are going with the teaching. I’ve recently gotten a class of 3-6 year olds, so things have been… interesting. Remember, same bat time, same bat channel.

The Holiday Edition

Season’s greetings to everyone! I hope you are all having a great holiday season, enjoying good food, family, and perhaps some gifts here and there. I have decided that, in the spirit of Christmas, I will air my pet peeves about China so far. Okay, maybe that’s not so much in the spirit of Christmas as it is in the spirit of robbing gifts, ornaments, and stockings from little Cindy Loo Who. But let’s pretend that this year the singing of all the Who’s in Whoville did not prevail upon my heart to grow three sizes larger, and instead I retreated to my mountain lair with my tiny dog-reindeer to make petty complaints about a country I couldn’t possibly understand in three months. Sound good? I thought so.

Complaint the First

I’ve been here for three months and there’s one aspect of living here that has stuck out the entire time: the traffic. Even the first few hours, when I was stuck in a massive typhoon-induced traffic jam, I saw people riding their bikes in the pouring rain in the middle of a highway. I thought it was strange and more than a little dangerous, but I thought maybe that was the only way they could evacuate. Okay, I didn’t really think that because that would still be pretty silly. To be honest, I’m not sure how tons of people aren’t killed every day trying to do this. Of course, there could be some city service that comes by every morning and scrapes flattened people and bicycles off the road. They already have big machines that look like Zambonis (the machines that clean the ice in hockey) that come by and wash the streets at night. The strange thing is that they play music that sounds like the music that ice cream trucks play in the States. I’ve always wondered if some poor kid has heard the music and come running, only to be mauled in some unfortunate Chinese Zamboni accident.

Anyway, back to Chinese traffic. You know how there are distinct, well-known rules of the road that almost everyone follows in America? If you can imagine the complete opposite, you might be close. Basically everyone does exactly what he or she wants to do, from the person on the scooter to the guy driving the dump truck. This probably sounds like the recipe for absolute chaos, and you would be 100% right. If you think watching people ride their bikes in the highway is surreal, try having a car drive straight at you while you’re walking on the sidewalk. You look down to make sure that you haven’t somehow wandered into the road without knowing it. No… no, you are in fact still on the sidewalk. Then the sound of the car honking at you brings you back to reality and you realize that you are going to have to leave the designated walking area because someone wants to drive their car on it. Of course, this will sound less strange when you know that people regularly park their cars on the paved areas in front of buildings. In fact, people park their cars pretty much anywhere they please here.

One of the best ways I can think to describe the traffic here is to say that it’s kind of like that game Frogger, except that the frog has the right of way most of the time. In the States, pedestrians’ rights vary according to the traffic laws of each different state. Here the pedestrian generally has the right of way. I say that it is similar to Frogger because trying to cross the street in China closely resembles that game, except that it’s from a street’s eye view. You might say that it’s nothing like Frogger because the object of the games is not to be smushed and since the pedestrian is nearly untouchable, there seems to be no way you could lose this game. However, it is like the game because you, much like the frog, frequently end up in the middle of a road with cars whizzing past you. How does this happen? Well, as I said, the big bargaining chip you have when dealing with cars is that the cars will do almost anything on the road except hit a person. So, the basic strategy to crossing the street is to keep moving out further and further without giving up any ground. And, even though the cars will generally avoid hitting you, this does not mean they’ll slow down. In fact, the standard procedure is to speed up so as to get in front of the car in the lane next to them, then change lanes and go around you. Basically, the way pedestrians and drivers behave here is the exact opposite of the way one would behave on the road in the US. People walk into the middle of the road in front of cars because they know the cars won’t hit them and the drivers speed up when they see a slow-moving or stopped object in the road so that they can get around them more quickly.

Keeping these things in mind, you have to put your prior experience and every instinct for self-preservation aside, and just step out into the road. At the halfway point of crossing, you often find yourself in a gap in the little plastic dividing fence that sits on the double yellow line. I can say with certainty that these fences exist for the sole purpose of keeping cars from crossing into oncoming traffic to pass cars on their side of the road. I know this because I have been in numerous taxicabs when they have taken advantage of the lack of a fence to do this. If there is no fence, you end up standing on the two double lines in the middle of the road, hoping that no one will cross it at the moment you happen to be standing on it. Of course one of the best tactics for getting across is to walk to one side of someone crossing the road on a scooter. I’ve seen car-on-car accidents and scooter-on-scooter accidents so far, but no car-on-scooter accidents. They make very effective shields.

There are a couple of other things that you will need to remember when crossing the street. One of them is that cars will generally barrel around a corner when they have a green turn signal instead of yielding to pedestrians who have a green walk signal at the same time or even slowing down to account for the presence of pedestrians at all. I’ve been involved in some intense games of chicken when crossing the street like this, but I’ve won every time so far. Why have I been driven to these lengths when it would seem that anyone with common sense would know not to challenge a car in this sort of situation? Well, first of all, if you know me, then you know that I possess a significantly smaller amount of common sense than the average person to begin with. But mainly, it’s because of the honking. The honking here is absolutely atrocious. People honk when they want to change lanes, they honk if the first car isn’t already in motion when the light turns green, they honk whenever someone is trying to do something stupid on the road (which is pretty much constantly), they honk if they even suspect that someone is thinking of crossing the street, and they honk if they don’t like the shoes you’re wearing. Well, I’m not sure about that last one, but it’s certainly possible. But the worst is that the drivers here honk whenever you happen to be walking within sight of them. It can be perfectly clear that you’re aware of their presence and are not anywhere near them, but they’ll still honk at you anyway, as if they fully expect you to dive in front of their grill at any moment. This happens to me almost every time I enter or leave the grounds of my apartment complex. Some car comes up behind me and honks at me even though it has plenty of room and I’m standing there looking at it so the driver doesn’t feel compelled to remind me of his presence. For this and other honking-related offenses, I have declared war on the cars and drivers in Wuxi. I have limited this war to the cars because the scooters don’t pose as much of a threat as cars and because the other type of vehicle on the road represents a nearly unstoppable force: the buses. The one thing that you must remember at all times when walking near the street is that the buses will not stop for you. They don’t stop for anyone and the drivers don’t take kindly to delays of any kind. If you are even a fraction of a second too late trying to catch a bus here, you can forget it. They even honk at police cars with impunity. These things are merciless.

You would think that such a system would produce fatalities, but I haven’t seen any really bad accidents. The most likely reason for this is that at times, traffic can get so congested that it’s nearly impossible to build up any speed. It’s not unusual for me to be the fastest-moving object on the road or sidewalk. Often the cars can’t go anywhere and I’m pretty sure that I have about twice as much motive power as most of the scooters here. Sometimes I feel like some sort of frowning missile as I dodge pedestrians, stray animals, street vendors, and the ever-present gobs of spit on the sidewalk at high speed. I always disliked walking in crowds and malls (I’ll devote a whole post to shopping at some point) back in the States, so I knew it would be bad in China. But it’s really not so bad once you get used to it and you learn to avoid certain things and situations, like knowing that every person over the age of 40 will inevitably veer into your path as you’re walking. I’m not sure how it happened, but there must be something written into the genetic code of the people here that doesn’t get triggered until they hit 40. After that, it appears to be scientifically impossible for them to walk in a straight line. However, armed with this knowledge, you can make a move in advance and successfully avoid a collision. I think I’ve learned most of the tricks I need to be able to maneuver on the streets here. And when it gets really bad, and here I mean a traffic jam of such epic proportions that not even the people stuck in it can move, I have the ability to physically remove most of the objects in my path. This has only happened once and I needed to move several scooters and shoulder past countless people and vehicles before I could burst out of the blocked roadway. But I escaped to tell the tale.

You might ask how I learned to use these physical methods and how I don’t think it’s rude to act this way. Well, I learned them by dealing with my next pet peeve:

Cutting in Line

To be continued…