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