Normal life goes on...

On friday I got a call out of the blue to teach an afternoon class at an elementary school. I had done this once before and it had been ok. So, because I needed the money I went. I walked to the elevated train station only to see a train go by right before I got there. When I finally got to the platform, I had to wait another 10 minutes to get into a crowded, smelly train. Then I transfered at Xizhimen and again at Fuxingmen until I got to Wanshoulu. In all, this took me about one hour. One hour in which I could not sit down. One hour in which I was constantly surrounded by crouds of people. When I finally got to the school, things went well. I played games with the kids and before I knew it, the two 45 minute classes had passed and I had earned my RMB200.

After the class I went for dinner with Alex, Catlyn and their friend who also worked at the school. It was nice to see them and to catch up. They are leading good lives as English teachers. They are busy and they are making tons of cash. We talked about the usual things, that is the more recent fuck ups of the communist party. This time, we talked about bird flu and Harbin. I told them that I had seen an article that 300 people had died in Hunan but the government had been able to largely cover it up from the outside world. Of course, this has chilling paralells to both the SARS outbreak and current fiasco in Harbin.

After that dinner, I went to a second dinner with my classmates. Again, it was a birthday celebration but this time it was for three of my class mates, none of whom I would consider friends or even associates. These meals are becoming more of a symbolic obligation than a pleasure as all we ever do is spend money on food and force light conversation. This time, I couldn't even get drunk because I have a cold and I did not want to aggrivate it. I went home after dinner and did the usual internet surfing before finaly going to sleep early, before midnight.

I woke up bright and early today. I did not want to wake up so early, but once I was up, there was no going back to sleep. I watched my roommate get dressed up in a suit and go off to an ad shoot and then I resumed my long neglected reading of "Atlas Shrugged". I am proud to say that I am half way through the book, but I am beginning to wonder if I will ever have the time to finish it outright. After 500 pages both the story and the characters have become rather predictable and the main theme of the book, namely that captalism is a powerful creative force and is the best system for everything, has gotten a bit old. Part of me wants to finish the book out of the sheer pride of finishing it, but part of me wants to move on to more relevant reading material.

Chris called around noon. We arranged to meet at the cafeteria where he told me about his latest female frustrations. I won't get into it here, but he always seems to prevent himself from ever getting with the girls he likes. For his sake, I hope he can change this. After lunch we went on a walk through the beautiful campus of Bei Da (the best university in China) and then down through Zhongguangcun (Beijing's "high tech" park) and Carrefour. Carrefour is always always an experience. It definately has the best selection for lots of different items but because of this it is always packed full of people. The best strategy is usually to get what you want quickly and leave. We did this. After getting my electric toothbrush replacement heads and some darts for the dart board, along with the stuff Chris got, we left.

We had to hurry getting back to campus because I had arranged to meet David and Christin for dinner at 6:30. In the event I showed up at 6:50 only to see Simoneta (an Italian classmate of mine) waiting there alone. Ten minutes later David showed up and we walked off to the restaurant. On our way we ran into Christin (David's Korean girlfriend) and Kevin (an American classmate). It turned out that the restaurant we wanted to go to was full so we walked another 20 mintues to go to another one which, as luck would have it, was also full. Thankfuly, there were lots of Korean restaurants in this area so we didn't have to go far to find another one. When we finally got to eating, the food was good and I had a good time.

Not much else to report...

Rae is coming soon...

Marc

Drinking with officials…

Long post.... the part about the officials is at the end. If you are only intersted in that, just skip ahead.

On Sunday I had a good dinner with Max. This time, instead of making me feel bad about myself, I got to meet his interesting friend and have a good night of conversation. Max is a really good guy. He is smart and interesting, which is by far my favorite kind of person. I do hope that he and Gloria are able to find a nice place in Vancouver as that means that our friendship will probably last longer. They might have more reasons to come to Canada, at least to visit.

These last two days have been a real emotional roller coaster. The first few days of the week were ok. I studied more, and I could feel a bit of progress in my Chinese. The problem was that I was feeling very tired and to some extent stressed because of my job applications. Then, on Tuesday night I didn’t sleep well.

Wednesday I was not in a good mood, I didn’t nap and by the time dinner rolled around I was very tired. For dinner I went with Simonetta (my Italian classmate) to Marco’s (another Italian classmate) new dorm room to eat Simonetta’s pasta. After, because Marco’s Chinese girlfriend was there, we spoke Chinese. After I said something, Marco made a joke about correcting my tones. I can not stand this. I said that I don’t like him correcting my pronunciation. It is rude and I would not do it to anyone. When he tried to defend himself, I became more intense and said that he was extremely annoying when he did this and it really pissed me off. For some reason, I didn’t leave immediately after so he took me aside and asked me what was up. I said that I over reacted but he really did annoy me and that I would like it if he would stop correcting me. I then went home. I felt terrible because at one point Marco was on his way to becoming a friend, but now he is just an annoying guy that I tolerate but only so much. I slept early last night.

This morning I decided that I did not want to go to class. This decision was made easier by my boss at Modern English who offered me RMB450 for spending half the day going out past the fourth ring road and giving a demo class at a retreat for a bunch of government officials and business people.

I was very nervous about the lesson. I was told that it had to be a business lesson for government officials who had lots of contact with foreigners but I don’t really have much business experience so I just didn’t know what to teach. I looked on the internet for “American business etiquette” and took down some notes on things that I might be able to teach. Then, in the taxi on the way to the Modern English head office, I made up a little lesson plan.

When I arrived at the office, I saw all of the Modern English people that I have been dealing with for so long. I don’t know it is a badly run company and all of that, but I really feel at home there and I will be a bit upset to leave this company. Victor was there, as was the woman who was in charge of the Pingdingshan affair, as were some other people. It turned out that the Pingdingshan woman, Doris, was going to be taking me and my co-teacher out to the place.

The ride was quick, there was not much traffic. When we got to the resort it was more or less what I expected. It was a hotel, a building for meetings and recreation, and a few villas for VIPs all built around a small, man-made lake. A man, Mr Wang, came out to meet us and took us to eat lunch. After lunch, we went to sit in on the meeting and wait for our turn to speak.

The meeting was very boring. It was a bunch of people talking about their pet projects. The first speaker we heard was the principal of a school which has a good international student exchange program. He talked for 45 minutes, including a 5 minute non-sequitor about how the Americans stole a big silver bell and melted it down to make coins. Other presentations were about people’s dealings with foreigners or other self-aggrandizing subjects. When we finally got to speak, we gave a 30 minute, uninspired lesson about how to say “nice to meet you” to a class of 50, embarrassed, unenthusiastic, middle aged government officials and business people.

After the meeting, they invited us to dinner with them. We sat at the same table as Mr Wang, the person running the retreat. He is probably some high official in Chongwen district in Beijing. He told me how he had just been to Canada, although only for 20 hours while changing planes. He said he liked Vancouver, although he didn’t really have much of an impression of it.

Of course, the good part of the meal was the alcohol. Soon after we started eating, the toasts began. Between toasting Mr Wang, being toasted by Mr Wang and making the rounds of all the tables, I probably had more than 10 shots of “Mengguwang” alcohol, some pretty good stuff. After most of the drinking was done, Mr Wang asked the question that all Chinese people love to ask: “what do you think of China?”, or actually in this case “what do you think of the character of Chinese people?” I was about to answer with the “different people are different” speech, but then I realized I should just tell him what he wants to hear. I went on about how everyone is so friendly and how everyone is very optimistic about the future. He then told me that I had made the right decision learning Chinese and coming to China.

After dinner, he walked us to our car. He asked me what I thought of the meeting. I said it was long. He said that government officials have to work very hard for China to develop. I don’t know if he actually believes that the bullshit, boring, time wasting, self aggrandizing waste of government money is “hard work” or actually helping the development of the country, but he seemed to think so.

To me, he is the model of everything that is wrong with an undemocratic system. He is confident in his own powers of good and also secure enough in his power to waste large sums of government money on pointless meetings. What reinforced this feeling was that the people I was working with were all laughing when he was talking about his responsibility toward the people and how he was doing hard work, like this meeting, for the benefit of the people. This is an attitude that is the natural result of a lack of accountability and one that can not change until there is more responsibility in the system.

Marc

Still no Chinese friends... But Rae is coming in less than two weeks, so I don't know if I will even bother. Maybe I am just too set in my ways, maybe I have been here to long for it to have any novelty value.

I went to a good party on friday. My Chinese-Bangladeshi neighbour, David, convinced his Korean girlfriend, Christin, to have a party. It was cool because it was the usual people from my class along with the Bangladeshi crew and a bunch of Turks and other random people who are friends with the Christin's roommate. To my surprise, only about half of my class was invited. Despite being Korean, Christin did not invite most of the Koreans or any of the Japanese or Indonesians. I guess this reflects the social structure of the class. The party consisted of lots of drinking, dancing and general merry-making. Marco, my Italian classmate got terribly drunk and spent much of his time acting the part of a drunk.

David is a very smooth guy. His style of speaking is sometimes a bit off-putting, but when it comes down to negotiations or making you feel comfortable, he is a natural. At 9pm the security guards came to tell us to turn down the music. David talked to them and they went a way for a while. When they came back a half hour later David told them that we had just graduated from university and this was our way of celebrating. When they came back for a third time David went and bought them beer. Throughout this whole period, the music never went off, or even down. I know that I would not have had the guts, or the skills of persuation to pull it off the way he did. Throughout the whole night despite his girlfriend being the host, he was definately the mack of the party. He was dancing with all of the pretty girls and the was general centre of everything.

At 11;30 David rounded us up to go clubbing. After much consideration and deliberation, we decided to go to the cheaper and closer S-Club rather than the further and more expensive, although much more lively Vicks. In the event, there were no people at S-club when we showed up. This was ok because we were a big enough group and made our own fun. After several hours of dancing, talking and drinking, we called it a night at about 3:30 and went home.

Yesterday was nothing special. I studied a bit, watched some Chinese TV, some CNN and tried to read the Chinese paper. At night, I went out for dinner with Chris and Karin, an Israeli girl. We had a good time talking about the differences between Chinese and Western culture (an old standby converstation here) and then went back to Karin's place where we all watched "Million Dollar Baby". The movie was good and I would reccomend it to anyone who likes movies with happy endings.

Aside from all of this, I am applying for two jobs. The first is an internship at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. It pays ok and the work looks interesting, but it is in Beijing, which is not so great for my relationship with Rae. The other job is based in Vancouver and is a research position with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Right now this is my prefered choice because the work should also be good and I would be able to live in Vancouver near Rae. Of course, I would also have the much higher standard of living associated with living in Canada. I handed in the APFC application on friday before the party and I will send out the embassy one tonight. The way I see it, I am fairly well qualified for either job and should hopefully have a decent shot at getting at least one. These jobs are also exactly the kinds of jobs that I want right now and are the only things that can save me from English teaching or a menial job in Canada.

Tonight I am meeting Max for dinner. It has been one week since I have seen him and I think my Chinese level might have actually deteriorated. Either way, he will want to speak English most of the time and that is ok with me.

I guess I should get by to my application...

Life is getting a bit too normal.

Nothing particularly intersting is going on in my life right now. I know this may sound strange given that I am in a foreign country, and a particularyly foreign one at that, and living the life of an exchange student, but I must say that life here is not nearly as fun or active as it was in Singapore. I am still working, still going to school, still living the life of an outsider in a country I have not fully accepted.

On sunday I went for dinner with Max. He sent me a text message at around 7 pm and came over soon after. It turned out that he had just come from his economics class so he was in the area. As usual we talked mostly in English for a while on varying topics. At one point, he asked me if I had Chinese friends in the university. I instinctively answered "not many". He, probably knowing me better than I thought, then asked "not many or none at all". At this point I paused. It had not really occured to me that I didn't have any Chinese friends at my university. Of course I didn't. Of course I have not been speaking Chinese outside of class and a few other narrow circumstances, but I had just avoided thinking about it. At the time, however, I downplayed this fact and tried to get the conversation onto more agreable subjects. Towards closing time we started talking about economics. He had brought with him his course outline for what must have been his microeconomics course and I wanted to take a look at it. It was fun translating all of the different terms and jargon from Chinese to English with him. It also showed me that there was virtually nothing that this course covered that I did not cover in 3rd year honours micro at UBC and, furthermore, that this course was not mathematically rigorous. The other interesting thing was that economics is called "Western economics" (西经济学） as opposed to Marxist economics which is still manditory, but is just done as an obligation, not as an area of serioius study.

The next day, shamed by my lack of Chinese friends, I went to the library with Chris. I guess I hoped that I would be able to meet people there. In the event, I did not much like the library. I know it is unfair to compare it to the libraries at UBC or even NUS, but this place was just so institutional. The lights were hard on the eyes and the chairs were not particularly comfortable. Furthermore, as opposed to the carrals at UBC, all of the studying was done on big communal tables, which might not have been so bad if it were not for the books... The books were clearly the worst part of the whole experience. As the library is a crowded place, it can be hard to get a seat. Unfortunatly, this problem is exaserbated by people leaving their books on the table to save their seat when they leave for dinner or whatever else. It is even common practice, I am told, to leave books unattended, and thus to monopolise precious seating, for hours at a time. Like so many things here, if someone had just thought it through... During one study break I finally talked to a Chinese person, or rather she talked to Chris an myself. This girl apparantly had lived in East Africa for a year importing and selling second hand cars. Normally, this would be a very cool experience, but the only things she talked about from it were how white girls were somehow strange for going out with African guys and how African people are generally bad to begin with. When we asked her why this was the case, she talked, as most Chinese people do, about their culture blah blah blah... Come on, if she really believes this racist shit, why is she talking to Chris and me in the first place? The conversation did not go on much longer.

Not much happened on tuesday... I studied a bit, pretty much the same goes for today. The plus side, however, is that I have been studying and I now feel much more prepared for my lessons.

Now the only unaccomplished goal I am left with is finding Chinese friends. How do I go about finding friends who are worth talking to and won't just lecture me on "Chinese culture". Someone who is even remotely intelectually fulfilling to talk to... Someone who can talk to me about something other than practicing his oral English (yes, this is a very common topic of conversation with Chinese peopler here). Maybe it is too much to ask...

Marc

Another week over. I worked a bit, I went to class, I went out and had some fun.

Yeseterday I worked after class. It is always a bit tight to make it from my school to the Modern English language centre in 50 minutes so I take a taxi. The class was a bit fun because the topic we did was flirting. I got people to do a little role-play where people flirted with eachother and most of the students were pretty into that. One thing I discovered is that "flirt" translates into something decidedly less innocent in Chinese, as a result, most people were unwilling to admit that they flirt at all.

Last night, I went out for dinner with Catlyn and Alex. We met at Fuxingmen and found a Beijing style restaurant where we ate lion's heads and drank baijiu. It was a good time. They are good people and fun to talk to. I think they are really adjusting well to life here. They have even been learning a bit of Chinese, but just enough to get around without too many troubles. We all agreed that the quality of life is not so great here, but they seem to be having fun anyway.

Rae was supposed to hear from her graduate advisor today about whether she can drop her French class and come to China two weeks earlier. She didn't come online or respond to my emails, so I will just assume the worst. This is truely unfortunate for me because apart from not seeing her for another two weeks, I will also have to get my visa extended in the next few weeks rather than flying down to HK and Taiwan for a little traveling. The positive side of her later coming is that I will be able to make a bit more money before she arrives.

This weekend I am going to work... I don't know why I agreed to it, but I am doing two demo classes tomorrow in the morning and the evening and then my regular class on sunday afternoon. It really fucking kills my weekend. The worst thing is that I don't even make that much money for it... for all of my inconvienience I will only be working about 4 hours. I just hope that the two full days of classes tentatively arranged for monday and tuesday.

Hungry... going to eat...

I did a big demo class today. It is always fun to speak in front of a big audience, especially when it is for doing something as simple as teaching English. I taught them about the life of a Canadian university student, something that I thought they would be interested in. I guess they weren't really that interested because they didn't answer my questions or voulenteer to say much so I changed the subject to parties more quickly that I expected. Once I was on that subject, things went better and I was able to caputre their interest, especially for the game of truth or dare I staged. In the end, there were three or four students who signed up, which I think is not so bad for an event like this. Hopefully, some of the other students present will sign up later.

After I was done teaching, a girl came up to me to talk about Canada. It turned out that her uncle is living there. She said that he got his money by stealing it from the republic of China. I, being conscious of Taiwan, thought that she meant the Republic of China (the formal name for Taiwan). Upon mentioning this, serious awkwardness ensued. Just then, another girl came up and told me that she wanted to study in Canada. Of course, she did not know anything about Canada and only wanted to go there because it is eaiser to get a visa for than the US. I pretty much just told her that she should not go to UBC because her English would not improve at all. To be honest, now whenever I meet people like her I feel like telling them not to come to Canada at all. I just can not stand seeing people like Roger using my country and my government for a free education and free healthcare while cursing the country and people the whole time.

After the class, Victor invited me out for dinner. Victor was the Modern English manager I met when I went down to Henan. He was also sent by the head office to help them set up. Talking to him I found out that the Henan school ended up closing down at the end of the summer. They, or rather Shaun, lost a lot of money on the whole thing, it is really too bad. Of course Shaun was a non-English speaker with no experience in education or management so he didn't really know what he was doing from the start. Apart from the Henan school, Victor and I talked about language learning and the state of Modern English in general. I think he has a very bad, and very typically Chinese, strategy for learning a foreign language. Most of it is based on memorisation and imitation. After my experience in my current course, I could not disagree with him more, but out of politeness I nodded my head and said that memorisation is a useful tool.

Today at lunch, I had a sort of interview about a job that I might get. The good thing is that it is only two days a month and it pays 1500 for those two days. The bad thing is that it is an army run elementary school. I don't really like the idea of working for the 'people's liberation army' but maybe I can get over that feeling for some easy money. The thought of making half of what I made all last month in two days is really exciting and definately too good to pass up.

Tomorrow, I should get back to studying again. It has now been a few days and I think I might fall behind if it goes much longer. Practice is important, but learning new things is perhaps more important for me right now... I guess I should continue working at it...

It grows late, I didn't sleep enough last night...

I got paid today. It was nice o finally get something for all of the work I have been doing in the last month. It also makes me a big step closer to being able to travel in December when Rae comes.

I had exams last week. They were not that big of a deal as they don't really count for much in the grand scheme of things and that they are pretty much impossible to cram for in a short time. I ended up getting 80 in writing, 92 in listening, and 77 in reading. I have not yet checked my speaking score, but I imagine it is good because I generally speak and understand Chinese better than I read or write. Having exams made me stop and think about how far I have come since I started classes. I can definately notice improvements in my Chinese level in all aspects. I am especially happy that I can understand the general meaninng of newspaper articles as well as understand most things on television, including some news programs. It is giving me real hope that I will be able to achieve the goal I had before I came of being functional in Chinese by the time I leave.

On saturday I went to Tianjin with Max, Gloria and their friend Mr Hu. It was nice to get out of Beijing, even if it was only to another Chinese city under the same cloud of terrible particulate filled smog as Beijing. It was also nice to have a day of Chinese immersion and to feel like I have some local friends here.

Tianjin used to be a treaty port. It was one of the cities where foreigners stationed their armies and conducted their trade with China. As a result, Tianjin is filled with Western architecture from the middle of the 19th century through to the middle of the 20th Century. However, the Chinese do not see this as part of their heritage and have no problems tearing down old Western buildings, even if they are only replacing them with condos shaped like grotesque romanesqe temples. In one particularly disturbing example, right in front of where they are demolishing beautiful Italian villas and buildings, they have built a new "Parisian" style bridge complete with garish gold statues of topless Western women. I am still not sure how this is ridding the city of foreign influences or beautifying it in any way. I think Max summed up the Chinese feeling pretty well when he talked about the 8 allied powers and told me to go study Chinese history.

Our day in Tianjin was pretty typical of Chinese tourism. We visited the university, which is the oldest in China, we ate at the most famous restaurant in town, and we bought the local pastries before taking a walk down the standard pedestrian shopping street (of which there is one in every Chinese city) and singing a few songs at a karaoke place. Unfortunately, because we only spent a few hours there, I didn't get any idea about what life is like in Tianjin, or any real feel for the city at all. I could barely even make out that Tianjin people have a different accent from Beijingers. Regardless, I was quite happy to get away from Beijing, even if I was unable to get away from its polution.

It is very late and I should go to bed. I have a very big day ahead of me tomorrow and I dread going through it as tired as I will be.