letter to Michelle, my sister-in-law, on Nov. 18
Do you love China? Every person I meet -- and I am the Beatles everywhere I go, meeting hundreds of people, blowing kisses, singing songs -- asks me if I love China. Of course I freakin love China, I tell them. And then they provide a litany of possible excuses for me not to love China: but what about the food, the weather, the language, the government, and on and on. The truth is, I can find only a few complaints: I wish Chinese had bigger feet, so that I could buy new running shoes; I wish that the ping-pong gym was open longer hours so I could get more practice; I wish I spoke Chinese. Other than those petty things, I am infatuated with my daily life in China and continually find new reasons to love it.
My fear is that the daily sights -- a woman walks by in a business suit, carrying a live, flapping fish; a scrawny antique of a man shuffles by, carrying fifty pounds of water, suspended on two buckets on either end of his shoulder pole; elderly ladies gracefully dance around, doing their tai-chi with swords at 6 in the morning; my students bump into each other, reciting English aloud, pacing the streets with nose buried in their book -- will cease to amaze me someday. For now, every day is an adventure, every trip out of my apartment an occasion for some wonderful surprise.
I also wish that I knew how to teach. We have nothing in the way of textbooks, no ability to make copies, we're given zero direction. The other American here, an elderly man named Rauol, told me, "as long as you get them speaking English, you're doing your job." And so, every class, we speak English, but I pay little heed to introducing new vocab, emphasizing finer points of grammar, etc. Of course, I correct these things as I hear mistakes made, but I follow no structured plan from which my students can learn and chart their progress. Granted, they take four other English classes: grammar, reading, writing, listening. Perhaps my class, oral English, should be only what it is: conversation, a chance to put into use all the skills learned in the other classes. But, I still feel like a slug, like I'm failing my students a bit.
To be sure, my students treat me like the emperor. I cannot imagine students more obedient, diligent, eager. And so, so, so sweet. Each of my seven classes meets just once a week, and I dearly miss my students in the interim.
I spend every spare second with my best friend here, Manabu Kawahira. He's from Okinawa, he's 5-foot-2, he teaches Japanese, he's vicious on the badminton court and he's desperate to learn basketball. I think my experience would be dramatically less great if Manabu weren't here. He's the best of friends, absolutely without self-pity, always eager to follow along whichever scheme-du-jour I have cooked up, absolutley lovingly hilarious in the English language and loyal to death.
Every day, we have dinner and debrief: all the beautiful women we met, all the opportunistic schemers who approached us, all the bureaucratic bullshit, all the zany, wild characters and events that define daily life. We have created an entire mythical village out of the characters we've met in Zhuzhou. Each character has a single name, immediately recognizable only to us: Skye, Julia, barber, Homosexual, Mongolian, Jessy, Ms. Linyanfa, Mr. Yo, Mr. O and on and on. The best days are those in which two or more characters are together at the same time for us to witness and tell about. Bliss would be a roomful of all the weirdos we love. Can't a guy dream?
It's a pity God's not dyslexic, because I could easily occupy 42 hours every day writing about my daily existence. I have not been excited about writing like this since grad school, and I am far, far more excited now even than I was then. Every second not spent writing, I itch to write. Every experience, every day, instantly finds its place and structure in the story I will write about it later. If an idea strikes in the middle of class, I desperately want to flee so I can write it down. My mind is writing constantly; I wish, again, that God could turn dyslexic and make my days 42 hours. A simple request, really. A few people have written and said my blogs might turn into a book. Of course, my mind races even faster, my fingers pound the keyboard with even greater urgency at the thought.
My main limitation is my lack of Chinese. Manabu and I study Chinese every morning, from 5:30 to 7, and I take an individual, 2-hour lesson from a teacher four times a week. I am manic to learn this language, so that I can be a reporter here and get deeper into the society. All the important things -- food, shopping, teaching -- my pipsqueak vocabularly gets me by. But, I desperately want to master this language, talk to the tai-chi ladies, the blind masseuse, the fancy ladies carrying flapping fish. If ever there was a society where every last human is a character, it's this one. And I'm a sucker for great characters but, at present, my Chinese is just too sucky to converse much. Ugh ugh ugh.
Of course, I'm giddy with my experience and will probably hate it all within a month. For now, though, my plan is to learn Chinese this year, publish a book about my experiences, move to the north, on the coast, after next year, and write write write. There's a book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, that's my Bible. The author, Peter Hessler, wrote it about his two years teaching in a little town, and it became a bestseller. Now, he writes from China for all the bigwigs: New Yorker, National Geographic, Boston Globe, NYT. I envy the man, and I've emailed him, hoping to meet him in Beijing in January. My long-term goal is to work at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I think I can be happy living in China at least until 2008.
First, though, I must learn the freakin language, so I should get to sleep and rest up for my 5:30 lesson tomorrow morning. It would be my greatest joy to introduce you and Bob to all the wonderful weirdos, the surprises around every rice paddy, that define my blissful existence in Zhuzhou. If someone else were living this life, I would get cranky and bitter if the person didn't force me to come and experience it for awhile. So, I don't want to return to you and Bob being cranky and bitter, so I'm telling you: visit if you can. It will thrill you. Cripes, I must stop my Zhuzhou proselythizing, or however it's spelled.
Say hello to your neighbors and parents for me.
Love,
Dan
