The Internet is Broken

The internet is broken. The earthquake I mentioned earlier ripped up some undersea cables outside Taiwan. I had assumed, wrongly, most international net traffic was now done through satellite. So accessing American web servers now is extremely difficult. All data is being rerouted to Europe and is getting clogged up, so pages hang endlessly. Blah. For some reason, Google still works flawlessly so I have this and my eMail working. I suspect they have an Asian mirror.

I've read it's going to that it's going to take at least two weeks to fix, so no calls home for about that long.

such and such

So I'm in a creative dry spell now. Too many people are reading this blog. Not in mass numbers, mind you, but I'm the number one result of people searching for my company. That means I can't really rag on the company - not that there's much to complain about, but what there is is typically worth writing about. So new recruits, our competition, and even my school are reading this. There's too much pressure to make everything shiny-happy. That sacrifices a lot in the way of the entertainment value for you, the reader, and me the writer... it's just not as much fun to write about China right now.

So... I need to take a break and think about where I'm going next where Treyopia.

Thanks for keeping up. I'll get some innocuous pictures up soon.

And for those curious, here was my Christmas agenda:

Friday - The company takes us out for burgers, BBQ, and "Chinese" gift giving... and beer. It gets cheaper the more you drink, down to 50 cents for your fifth beer. Needless to say, most of us get to our fifth beer. Then karaoke. I destroyed Freebird.

Saturday: I organize an outdoor hot pot dinner [hot pot: a big bowl of boiling hot water, pepper, garlic, etc that you drop raw meat, tofu, and veggies into and pull back out. Usually insanely spicy and perfect for cold weather]. Africans and Americans unite for Christmas carols much to the bemusement of our Bai Shi Zhou neighbors. Confusion reigns about whether or not we accidentally ordered dog and dropped it in our pot. We wind up at an all-Chinese dance club, where later they cleared the floor for circus midgets in clown costumes.

Sunday: deliver Christmas gift to Hera. An ant farm and a pendant. She could care less about the pendant...

Monday: Went out to have dinner with Hera and the industrial wastelands of Longdan district... two hours away. Wow. I figured she and her coworkers needed some Christmas jeer. Their SOB boss wouldn't give them the day off. Bear in mind they work 10 hours a day six days a week, and sometimes more without overtime. It's time to burn that factory down...

We felt that Taiwan quake all the way out here. They made us evacuate the Nanshan Education Bureau building in the middle of class. Thanks God there wasn't a tsunami going towards the Philipines as was feared. This is the third big quake on December 26th in four years... kinda strange, ey?

Night Run [Macau, pt 1]

I'm a liar. I've been peddling untruths to myself, friends, and lovers for years and it's time to come clean. Unless you're taking a day trip to a national park, traveling is never ever cheap. Ever. I've created the most elaborate Excel spreadsheets to spread my lies in slick emails. I've told countless friends the only cost of Bonnaroo is gas money and the ticket, and since each car is packed with people the travel costs are negligable. And, hey, food doesn't count 'cause you'd be eating at home anyway, right? Right?

This time I was absolutely convinced I could do a weekend run to Macau for under $60. Not just me, mind you, I also offered the trip as "my treat" to an initially reluctant travel companion. I had a website promising me they would ferry me across the Pearl River delta for 80rmb up till 9:30 at night and I had a quasi-reservation for a double room at a guest house for 150rmb. Add buses and meals, and wa la... an über-cheap side trip to that Portuguese bastard child of a forfeited colony opposite Hong Kong on the delta.

The other myth that's become obvious to me over the past few weeks is that I can plan. I can research and improvise just about anything... but plan? No. Not a chance. My "plan" was to look up the characters for "ferry terminal" and scout them out at the bus stop an hour before the last departure. That was it.

First we were running late because I had to conduct my first ever phone interview [I invite you to speculate what that means] so after making Hera wait outside my apartment in the cold for half an hour, we had to get a cab to the ferry terminal. 40RMB. We get there and learn a) my ferry company doesn't really exist, and b) the company that does exist sent their last ferry to Macau an hour earlier, and c) by the time we decided to ferry over to HK and take another to Macau, the last HK-bound ferry was pulling out of dock.

At this point a rational set of characters would have called it a night and tried to set out again in the morning. No such luck that your humble narrator and his guest were rational thinkers. We wanted to go to Macau. That was that, obstacles be damned. We decide to go to Lou Hu to look for a night bus to Zhuhai [Mainland border city of Macau]. For Jacksonville readers, imagine being in at the Gate gas station on A1A in between Ponte Vedra Beach and St. Augustine and deciding you need to catch a Greyhound in downtown Jax to Orlando at that very moment - 9:45 at night.

So we hopped another cab [add 40 RMB] back to Bai Shi Zhou to get on the subway to Lou Hu. When we get there we discover that, alas, all the buses were gone already.... but wait! A dashing young gentleman offers to have someone drive us to Zhuhai for 500 RMB. I turn to walk away. 350 RMB it is. We're now at 430 RMB [$53 USD], for those keeping score at home, and we haven't even left Shenzhen yet.

So at 11am on a Saturday night I get into a strangers van with my Filipino friend for a two hour drive through China's industrial wastelands to a city I've never been to. Though expensive, I know it was a good deal because our driver was angry. Very angry. He drove fast and blared his Sino-Techno out of a small 8" sub in the back of his can [take the most mediocre house music you've heard, strip away all but the barest of melody, run it through a $20 Radioshack keyboard to get that 4-bit MIDI effect in full, increase it to a happy hardcore 250bmp tempo, and wa la! You're a Chinese DJ!].

Guangzhou, the third most populous city in China and shoe factory capital of the world, was the mid-way point at the north corner of the Delta. Our driver pulled off the highway here and into a dark parking lot of what, in America, would look like an abandoned strip mall near MLK Drive. Businesses closed but people hanging out in the shadows outside. Our driver stepped out and was swarmed by six or seven men who looked angry. He disappeared inside the mob.

"Should we be worried, Trey?" Hera asked.

It was a very reasonable question.

"Yes. I think so, maybe a little bit anyway," I giggled back. I was worried a little bit. The situation was weird and becoming a bit too fluid. We had bitten off a little more than we could chew when hired a driver who didn't speak any English to drive us two hours in the middle of the night to a town I was familiar with through Wikipedia. But that's precisely what made the situation so fun [and funny] to me.

Our driver came back, opened the side door, and grabbed Hera's backpack. We correctly assumed we were switching drivers. We left our nightclub-on-wheels and drove off with our curious new driver.

"Ni hao, pengyou [hello friend]"

No response.

"Where are you from?" I asked in Chinese.

No response.

"Do you like Zhuhai?"

No response.

"Friend, do you speak Chinese or only Cantonese?"

No response. Nice.




- - - - too be continued [with pictures] - - - -

Yellow Smocks

Before I went to Amsterdam I'd never seen a prostitute before. Well, I have a memory of a prostitute coming and putting her leg on our families rental car when we were in Miami in '93, but that's just too weird to have really happened. In Amsterdam they were more like zoo exhibits than anything else. They were presented as tourist attractions. I'd never seen one in her natural habitat though.

Even on the famed Emerson and Phillips intersections in Jacksonville, which I once lived not too far from, I never saw one. Ever. Everyone said they there with the crack dealers but I never saw them either. I think my parameters of "normal human behavior" are just too wide to spot someone dressed eccentric enough to scream, "approach me for solicitation of sex and drugs."

Everyone claimed that the late nigh barber shops in Tianjin were all sin dens, but every time I looked while driving by they were doing legitimate business. But Shenzhen. Wow. Different story. Obvious isn't even the word. Apparently, we compete with Thailand on the sheer numbers of women coming to look for work and deciding the indentured servitude at a factory just wasn't what they had in mind when they left the farm.

Within a five minute walk I could count at least ten businesses of scandalous intent. Juries out on what they really are, precisely, but they're neon lit establishments with big glass windows with couches overflowing with bored young girls in short white dresses. There's always one booth for cutting hair and not a single customer. For that matter, I've never seen anyone coming into or out of one of these places. They're just kinda there. Existing.

Though prostitution is against the law, I've never seen a crackdown on the brothels like I've seen with street vendors [or reporters, or...], so it came as some surprise to read this in an article about prostitution in China in the International Herald Tribune today:

At the end of November, officials in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown, got the bright idea of reviving the Cultural Revolution for the purposes of temporarily cracking down on its prostitutes.

This came to pass as a face-preserving measure after a regional television station broke with decorum by mentioning the existence of this industry in a city famous throughout Asia for its sex trade.

To send the message that Shenzhen was actually a clean and proper place, the police dressed several dozen prostitutes in identical yellow smocks and marched them through the streets of Futian district, to be shamed by a jeering crowd and have their names and hometowns announced to all.

What's even stranger is no one I know had any idea this happened until we read about it on international websites. The news here is strictly "happiness abides," so things like this rarely get reported. Curious though, ey?


Tags: Treyopia current events news prostitution Shenzhen China Chinese Asia Cultural Revolution persecution

Multi-Post

I've been a bit sick, hence my slowness of posting. I was warned about eating the fried street food, but did I listen? Noooo. When I saw a dude frying banana's I just had to have one. And fried chicken on a stick. And now I'm paying.

It wouldn't be so bad if they Chinese didn't have an entire system of make-believe medicine. Err, "traditional medicine." When I was battling a cold earlier in the week I went to 7-11 to buy Children's Tylenol. They girls almost refused to sell it to me. The side of the box for their preferred medicine had written in plain English, "pear seed extract, grape stem, apple root,...". I got my Children's Tylenol with an orange Fanta Slurpee. I won.

As I type this I hear my roommate shout across the apartment "hot water!" every time I sniffle. Cold water, of course, is bad for your health. Dontcha know?

What's wound up saving me is Google's English-Chinese translator. Just find the scientific name for the medicine you need.

_____________________


Shenzhen is the land of homesickness. I just realized it after Hou Li told me one of her friends here from her home province is going back. It was too much being so far away. For my own part, I've had two bouts of acute homesicksness. It's not at all what I thought I'd be. It's short, spiky, and acute. It makes its attack and runs. It comes when you least expect it.

_____________________

And alas, the pictures I promised. Hera and I went hiking on Lamma Island last weekend. Great hike. Both of us being from beach towns, we wanted to find the nicest beach Hong Kong had to offer. Along the way we perused abandoned villages, which I'll write more about later.

Breakdown

It finally happened. I snapped in class. A breakdown of sanity and will to go on. Wednesdays are my longest days flush with 8 classes. I couldn't fall asleep last night so I came to work with about four hours of nocturnal slumber. I'm also fighting off a chest cold with Chinese traditional medicine. Advil Cold and Sinus > Flower juice. Trust me.

A strong KFC coffee and a lot of tea propelled me through the first part of the day, but then I had my afternoon nap. It was just a taunt, I needed more. Then third graders. Love the little tykes, but they take everything out of you.

And then one of my one of my favorite playful 4th grade classes. I wanted to play 20 Questions. It's a surprisingly useful game in that when the kids get into it, they're clamoring over each other to speak English and rack their brains for adjectives so they can win.

With sixth graders it takes about three minutes to explain it. Usually a light will go on in one kids head and they'll start stammering "I know, I know!" and I'll have them explain it in Chinese. With this one last fourth grade class that never happened.

My first trial game is me thinking of someone. I make it easy.

"I'm thinking of someone in America...", I begin.

"When is your birthday?"

OK, so they have the question part of 20 Questions down. I ignore it and move on. I whisper into a different kids ear, "ask me if it's a boy or a girl."

"It's a girl! Great question!"

Hands raise. They get it!

"Teacher, what is your favorite color?"

No... no they don't.

I pick another hand. "Who is your wife?"

I played politician and pretended to hear the question I wanted [hey, maybe they're taught to answer Jeopardy-style], and responded, "Nope! Not my wife! I don't have a wife."

"Is it a Panda?!"

I put my head into my hands. I had two choices. Weep or laugh. So I laughed until I weeped. All the fatigue hit me at once, all the frustration of the language barrier. Everything. I wanted to walk away and sleep in some damp corner underneath the stairs.

I picked another hand, hoping.... hoping...

"Do you like Chinese food?"

I walked to the door. I remembered a sign I gave Jordan Schemmell a few years ago. He's the man who got me into education. It was a bulls eye and said, clearly, "BANG HEAD HERE." I picked it up in a gas station on I-95 coming back from a Radiohead concert in West Palm. Actually, it was less a gift than him taking it from me. Several times last year I would draw just such a bullseye on my whiteboard and bang away. American kids understood that it was a perfectly rational response to irrational situations. They would draw it for me sometimes.

So I banged my head on the door unable to stop laughing.

"Teacher, what are you doing?!?" they said. Three kids pulled on my arms to drag me away from the door.

I tried explaining the game again. I had the brightest kid explain in Chinese. I asked in Chinese if they understood.

"Yessss!!!"

I went over what we had so far... a girl... in America... and she's not my wife... why doesn't someone ask me if she's in my family?

"Do you like hamburger?"

I went back to the door for sweet, sweet catharsis.

I remembered I came prepared today. I had backup. The educational equivalent of an air strike, napalm to an inattentive classroom. It was a bright, shiny, fast but long overdue DVD from the school library. It has an airplane drawn on the disc so I assumed it had something to do with aeronautics. I hadn't seen it, but it was in my bag for just such an occasion... either for a really bad class or if I was too tired or sick to really teach. I had never used it. It was more there for comfort, a soft hand to hold and bring me out of bed on tired mornings telling me "it's OK... you have me if things don't work today. Get up, cowboy, take that shower and get to the bus stop!"

Bottom line: teachers, bring backup!

A pig, who just happened to speak Latin, came to me and said "Ethay eadhay eachertay atway ymay oolschay ustjay askedway emay aboutway Eyopiatray... oopsway"

[uploading many, many awesome pictures]

A Few Pictures

One of the things I wasn't expecting when I came to China was Wushui, the Chinese version of the siesta. People just kinda stop what they're doing and konk out after lunch if that's what they feel like doing. My school even gave me keys to conference room and told me pull together four chairs for a makeshift bed. Most people just doze out wherever their work station is.

These next pictures are of the morning calisthenics the kids do every morning at 9:45. The high school kids run out to the game field, universally known as a playground here, while middle and high school all stand in front of their classrooms. It's kind of a choreographed dance move with aerobic tendencies set to a delightfully creepy McDisney song holding it together. It was all in tight formation when I first started, then the kids got sloppy. There were two weeks of intensive re-education where the teachers would have the class practice during the 10-minute breaks until they got it right. It's starting to get a little sloppy again...








There really is no sense of "wait, that's mine" with kids. They love walking off with or hiding my bag, peering into my tea thermos, wearing my sweater, or looking through my schedule book. I habitually find some student grabbing at my arm hair because they've never seen it before. I even had a third grade class whose latest inside joke was to poke their fingers at each others butts in "no no" spots. I was the special guest for the encore of yesterdays show. A new shiny phone was just to awesome a thing to not pass around. Thus, they photographed your humble narrator. Four hours later almost all the hair got whacked off. Again.