Before I left the United States I read an article on Monster.com that identified China as an expatriate “sweet spot”.
“Sweet”, I thought.
Wait, what does this mean--an expat sweet spot? Thousands of Americans, Canadians, English-speakers of all types, all ages, come to China to teach English as a second language. Why do we do it? Are we running away from something? Is it an old-fashioned desire for adventure? Something new? Political frustration? I can only answer this question for myself.
I came to China for the opportunity of doing a job that interested me, and with a desire to learn a new language, broaden my experience of life, and feed my imagination. I graduated from UCA a year and a half ago with an English degree and no clear ideas about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, other than read William Gibson novels and adopt stray cats. I was also insanely jealous of all my talented friends who were going places and doing things. And although it's petty, I'll admit, I wanted other people to be envious of me. My boyfriend Chris was an easy sell (although showing him the movie Iron Monkey may have helped) and we left within three months of applying for the job through the internet.
Our school has 9,000 students, but only one building for classrooms. My classes are very large, but there are always outstanding students in each one, students who are steadily becoming friends. The city itself has 400,000 people and weather depressingly similar to Arkansas’s. There are “very famous” mountains nearby that we “can see from the college”, according to our Chinese host and fellow English teacher Ronda, but the smog has not lifted since we’ve been here so we must take their existence on faith. There are, however, many potted plants decorating the entire campus. They are moved around daily and I am constantly surprised and delighted by the ingenious arrangements of marigold pots.
The students live 6 to a room in very narrow dorm rooms with no heat or air-conditioning and sometimes no running water. They come from all over China, many from Inner Mongolia and the neighboring provinces. They are often very poor and are always very timid. They have been studying English since they were in elementary school, but I am their first foreign teacher. They are very nervous in class and blurt out strange things, like "Teacher! I love you!"
I have learned to keep a straight face when my students they tell me their “English names”, names they pick for themselves off the internet. “Banana,” Banana says, when I ask her name. “Iceberg”, Iceberg says, “because I am introverted.” “Panty,” Panty says, and I laugh. “Oh come on! Where did you get this name?” I ask. She looks at me like I’m crazy. “This is my name. Of course my parents give this to me--Pan Tee.” Oh crap. “This is your Chinese name?” “Yes.” “Oh, well,” I clear my throat, “I was laughing because I have a friend with this name too. A good friend. I thought it was quite a coincidence.”
This is one of the many little lies I have told to Chinese people to smooth over awkward situations. At a big dinner for our department three weeks ago I refused to eat a bloated frog floating in a bowl of soup when one of the other teachers dangled it over my plate. “Oh god,” Chris said, “you can see it’s little toes.” I quietly tell the closest teachers that in the city where I come from we have an annual festival to celebrate toads. “It is considered very bad luck to eat toads,” I continue, “because they eat the bugs that make us sick. So we celebrate them.” “A frog festival?” Ada asks, incredulous. “Yes, we uh, eat lots of fried food and children race toads....” “They raise toads?” “No, they uh, they make them hop fast.” Luckily we are interrupted by the communist head of our school, our inebriated boss Jacky, and the dean of our department Hans, who come into the room for the fifth time to toast the new teachers with the traditional cheer "gambei", which means "drink it all". After chugging five glasses of beer I start to bloat up like a toad myself.
To Chris's delight, the Chinese teachers and administrators call him Christ, thinking this is the proper abbreviation for Christopher. He refuses to correct them. This week the foreign teachers were asked to judge the freshmen in an English competition, and our names were written on the overhead projector at the front of the auditorium. The word "Christ" appeared on the students' shirts when they stood up to give their speeches. "Look, ha ha!" Chris nudges me several times, pointing at his name, and I ignore him. He nudges Jennifer and she sits still for a moment and then exclaims, "Jesus Chris!" During the middle of her speech one of Chris's smiling students turns to him and says: "I have a very good teacher: Christ!" Everyone claps.
We met some of the other foreign teachers a week ago at the Oak Bar, a place downtown that serves western drinks and has a plastic dartboard that looks like it was fished out of the sewer. The other teachers are a strange collection. Milli is Indian with an impeccable British accent and she teaches middle school, a job I envy. Kathy is Australian and endlessly optimistic. There are several mean-looking older American men, who have brought their much younger Chinese girlfriends with them. There is also a young, attractive Irish couple, Merric Fitzwilliam Clougherty and Maegan O’McGallagher (names have been changed to enhance their Irishness). I immediately push my way into their booth to talk with them about Ireland, or what I call “the most beautiful place on earth”. Merric tells a story that I can’t remember now because I was too busy fantasizing about our future life together in the town of Killarney, raising sheep and holding hands.
Later I ask Kathy what she did in Perth before she came to JiuJiang to teach college students. “I was a lawyer,” she says. I cough into my martini. “Wow,” I said, “that’s a good job. I worked at a movie theatre.” Long pause. “I, uh, like movies.” She nods and continues talking about herself, and I narrow my eyes and imagine that she is Nicole Kidman. “…it was hard on me emotionally. I thought I would like to travel and spend time around positive people.” She points to Chris. “It’s so good that you have your boyfriend with you.” I look at Chris and imagine him in Killarney at sunrise wearing a cable-knit sweater, watching a dog that’s watching a flock of sheep.
We walk home around the two big beautiful lakes in the middle of our city, completely at ease. We pass through the large park on the lake nearby our college. During the day old men and women come to this park to play games--checkers, cards--go fishing, or do laundry. They sometimes bring their dogs and cats with them and feed them rice from painted bowls. Groups of amateur actors and singers perform operas. Men and women play the erhu, a bowed instrument that sounds wild and sad, and makes me think of migrating birds. A Buddhist temple, flanked by willow trees, is at the edge of the park. The other day I stopped outside the temple to peek in the door. There were women weaving cloth, and fallen ashes from large incense sticks across the table under a golden statue of the Buddha. Two women motioned for me to come in; I held my stomach and shook my head, backing out quickly. This temple is where women pray when they want to have a baby.
At night the town is quiet and safe. We sometimes walk to the lake and watch the neon lights shine across the water. During the day cars honk continually, music blasts, people yell and laugh, fireworks bang in the back of alleys and men clear their throats and spit on the sidewalk, sounds Chris and I call “traditional Chinese music”. Once when a student asked me how life is different in my city compared to JiuJiang I tried to explain how much quieter it is in Conway. I wrote down the words “noise pollution” and tried to explain this concept. When I was met with blank stares I digressed into a story about how last New Year’s Eve I was running down the street shooting a roman candle at my boyfriend when my neighbor and her obese friend came out and started screaming at us and threatened to call the police...”You see, it is il-le-gal to make loud noise.” They nod, eyebrows furrowed. “Americans are so big,” Banana says. They all nod.
Recently I tried to tell my class about our Independence Day celebrations, since their own nation’s day is October 1st. “We have fireworks,” I say. They look at each other and then at me. “You know--BANG!” I mime lighting a firework. They nod, blasé. It occurs to me that fireworks are old news to Chinese people, thousands of years old. “We also barbecue, and uh, cars are sold for very cheap!” They nod again, one student later tells me: “On Nation’s Day in China we can get cell phones for very cheap.”
“You can’t explain our sense of humor to the students,” Jennifer tells me over dumplings. Jennifer is another teacher at our school, a 33-year-old from Arizona. I once asked her what she did before she came to China. “I was a counselor at a camp for juvenile delinquents. One of the girls broke my leg in three places, so I decided to do something different.” Today she is sitting with her glasses perched on top of her head. Like so many celebrities before us, Jennifer and I have take to wearing sunglasses to avoid the stares of strangers. “Like, I told my class today how I was walking down the street and slipped on a fish.” True to form the Chinese student Ryo sitting beside her nods with a straight face. Slipped on a fish, uh huh, of course. “In the street! The middle of the street! And there wasn’t just one fish, there were lots of them!” Jennifer laughs. Ryo speaks to the waiter and turns to us. “Do you want tomatoes?” she says in her low voice. We look at each other and nod. “Tomatoes, sure, why not?” I’ve learned that to accept a strange offer from a Chinese waiter usually ends with either an amazing culinary experience or flashbacks from my days in the high school biology lab. Today it is the former. We are served a huge plate of mash potatoes with green onions and peppers, the first potatoes we’ve had since coming here a month ago, and they are goood. “Where are the tomatoes?” I ask, mouth full, not expecting an answer.
Recently Chris, Jennifer, students John and Kevin, and I all took a trip to the capital of our province, Nanchang. The city was clotted with Chinese tourists, off work and out of school for the Nation’s Day holiday. We skip the cultural attractions in favor of shopping at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, I’m not lyin’. People were crowded wall-to wall in the store, which was in many ways similar to the Arkansas Wal-Marts--yellow smiley faces advertised the extraordinarily low prices, and big cages of flip-flops and rubber balls stood in the middle of the aisles, right where I needed to push my cart through, dammit. One section unique to the Chinese Wal-Mart was the live seafood section, where you can select the future entree of your dreams from tanks of live turtles, crabs, and eels. As I was walking away I saw a man hold up a squid and yell at an employee, emphasizing his anger by shaking its tentacles around, probably saying something like “Bwaaa! This squid is puny!”
On the long bus ride back home the TV at the front forces us to watch pop music videos and kung fu movies starring men with eyebrows that look like hairy caterpillars. Kevin, who has recently bought a cell phone for a low low Nation's Day price, shows me all the extra features it comes with. He pulls up a screen with a woman in a leotard. "Look, I can make her do yoga." He pushes a button and she bends over backwards. He pushes another button and she stands on one foot. "What is the point of that?" I ask. "Yoga is very good for your health," he responds. I decide not to say anything further, recognizing this as one of those conversations that could go on endlessly. I start twisting my nose ring and he snaps a picture with his phone. "Look!" He says, and I see myself on the screen, with a finger up my nose. "Great Kevin, that's just great." He giggles and shows John and Chris. When we get to the bus station we decide to walk home by the far side of the lake, through the willow trees where the young couples come to kiss each other. We try to embarrass them by making catcalls, but they are unfazed.
Happily back in JiuJiang I am reflecting on all the things we have experienced since we’ve been here. Like all travelers, particularly Americans, we have brought a ton of cultural baggage with us (not to mention a ton of actual baggage). Our interpretations are entirely our own, with possibly no resemblance to what is actually happening around us. We are obnoxious and racist and naive without meaning to be, but we are also slowly adapting to our new environment and continuing to keep an open mind. With the help of our students and my “Chinese the Easy Way!” textbook we may eventually be able to become bicultural.
I have also learned that I miss America, a place where I am free to say that Taiwan is getting a raw deal. I tell my students Native American myths, tall tales of Paul Bunyan and the story of the headless horsemen who haunts Sleepy Hollow. I read with longing about the newly minted nickel that has a smiling Thomas Jefferson on the face. I want to watch the movies that I used to avoid; I choose National Treasure over The Royal Tenenbaums, because it’s so big-budgeted, so bad, so bombastically American, so absurd.
Chinese culture is absurd to me because I don’t understand it, and American culture is absurd to me because I do understand it, and I am absurd because I still long for it. I have lost all my fixed point of references that anchored me to the world, and this is terrifying and also desperately exciting. I no longer want to be envied, I want to share my experiences and encourage other people to come to China. When I think about the future I am so happy that I made this decision, my best decision.