40 Hours in Hunan
Alyssa, Maggie and Penny arrived at the Zhuzhou City train station at dawn on Saturday after a night of eating bitter. They had taken the overnight train from Guangzhou and sat in hard seat, the lowest of the four classes of train travel in China. You sit on hard, nonreclining seats. You're crowded in among hundreds of people. Smoke fills the air. The lights stay on all night.
As a providential consolation, the sun rose radiantly over Zhuzhou as they arrived. It was to be a perfect spring day. The gals said they spent the long journey gabbing and playing dirty Mad Libs and registered no complaints about hard seat. "It's an essential part of the Chinese experience," Alyssa said.
She's right. For the large majority of Chinese people, including all of my students, eating the bitter is the only way they ever travel. And they count themselves lucky. A huge number of Chinese people never leave their hometown, never see the inside of a train. Travel is still a luxury out of reach for tens of millions, especially villagers.
The gals were tired but, more urgently, starving. We went to the restaurant row behind campus and slurped noodles in a little brick shack. They laughed at me, sitting on the kindergartener-sized pink plastic stool. Every place on restaurant row has the same plastic stools, all pastel colors. I eat every meal on them and had long ago forgotten that I might make an odd sight, sitting there slurping noodles with my head between my knees. It's an essential part of the Chinese experience.
Back at my apartment, my mobile phone rang. "Daniel, this is Muggsy, can I come over and see the beauties?" "Yes," I replied, "but they're tired, so don't stay too long."
And the calls continued from my freshman boys. Albert wanted to see the beauties. So did Risky.
We had walked through the student section of campus en route to the noodle shack. The sight of three young Western women -- Alyssa blonde and American, Maggie and Penny brunette and English -- escaped no one. Word spread. Boys flocked. For about twenty minutes, the three beauties sat on my couch as Muggsy, Albert and Risky visited my room and chatted with them in English.
The gals tolerated their role very patiently, despite their exhaustion from a sleepless night eating bitter. They teach in Zhaoqing (JOW-ching), a mid-sized city in southern China, not far from Hong Kong. The sun hadn't visited Zhaoqing in a week, and neither had electricity because of a power shortage. Anywhere was better than there. As all visitors do, they commented on the natural beauty of this campus, and spent a lot of time on the small deck outside my third-floor apartment, soaking in sun and listening to birds chirp.
After a long snooze, we set off on Saturday afternoon in a taxi from the front gate of campus, destination Changsha.
I had pulled a coup: just 100 yuan for the taxi ride. Normally, it's minimum 120 yuan for one passenger, and 20 yuan for each additional. Soon, we realized why it was just 100 for the four of us.
Our taxi driver, a kid in his early 20s, raced down the State Highway for the Insane as if he was Alberto Tomba on the slalom course. His car was standard-issue red Volkswagen cab, yet he passed other cabs -- and motorbikes, and blue dumptrucks, and rickety country busses -- as if they were stationary slalom poles, to be weaved around and left in the dust.
The only respite from the frenzy came early in the trip, when we hit a 200 meter patch of rugged, rocky dirt road. He actually slowed down, although not much, and we bounced around the cab like grasshoppers. "Is the whole trip going to be like this," Alyssa asked. "No," I replied. "The paved road continues soon." And so did the insane pace.
His M.O. was consistent: there is a car blocking my path in the right lane; I will turn into the left lane and pass the car, while accelerating; once in the left lane, I will check for oncoming traffic; if there's an obstacle coming toward me, I will accelerate more, honk my horn ten times and flash my brights. "This is like driving through Iowa," Alyssa said. I thought of what an easy answer "State Highway for the Insane" will make for many future questions. To what do you attribute your hypertension? Where did you develop a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ? There are no atheists in Chinese taxis.
In record time, we arrived in Changsha and met my student, Rhonda, and her father, Mr. Zhuang, at a restaurant along the Xiang Jiang (river). The city has spruced up the riverfront considerably in the recent past. There's a vast concrete plaza, an outdoor ampitheater, a walking path and a row of new, modern bars and restaurants.
The place we went is probably the nicest. It's two stories high, with shiny polished tile floors and walnut woodwork. The front wall is made of glass, affording perfect views of the waterfront. An actual terra-cotta soldier and horse, borrowed (or stolen?!) from Xi'an, are in the restaurant's entrance. In addition, it has central air conditioning.
Mr. Zhuang is a professor of thermal (I think) engineering at a Changsha college. On the side, he designs and installs air conditioning systems for private homes and, more commonly, for new upscale restaurants. Such as the one where we ate.
Anyone would love Mr. Zhuang even if he were merely an engineering professor. He moves through life at top speed, all the time. He laughs constantly. He's generous to a fault. Alyssa said he's the easiest to be around of any Chinese guy she's ever met.
Being the air-conditioning guy, however, has made him a demigod. This was my third dinner with Nancy and her father, each one at a new upscale restaurant where he's installed the A/C. We get the best table, the most careful service and our choice of exquisite food. At one of the places, he eats free for the rest of his life. At the others, he gets a huge discount. It truly pays to control the temperature. I used to call him Mr. Changsha. At dinner, we developed a new name for him: Mr. Cool. He liked it. "Hen hao," he said, giving the thumb's-up. "Very good."
We ordered oolong tea to start. A meticulously groomed man, dressed in shiny white silk pajamas with purple trim, arrived at our table. In his right hand was a teapot, with a brass spout, 18 inches long and the diameter of a straw.
He positioned my teacup just so and assumed a sideways karate stance: his knees bent, his left arm pointed diagonally downward, the teapot held in his right hand, next to his head, with the spout also pointed diagonally downward, parallel to his left arm.
Boiling water launced out the brass spout, holding its round form and straight line until landing in the middle of my teacup, about two feet from the spout. When the cup was about full, the man jerked up on the pot, and the stream quit abruptly. No splash. No dribble. Fine art.
We were eating together to celebrate Rhonda's recent victory in the university's English speech contest. This cemented her place as the top English student in the school, all ages. Her victory surprised me little. From the first day of class, she's been a leader and a willing accomplice in all my goofy lessons. When the assignment was to plan a trip anywhere in the world, she was going to visit Tibet. In a helicopter. With her pet lizard. When we thought of which animal we most resembled, Nancy chose a pig. "All I do is eat and sleep," she explained. "I think a pig's life is quite lovely."
More impressively, she has the rare and remarkable ability, in every situation and under every kind of pressure, to be herself. When the Communist Party pursued her and tried to coerce her into joining, as they do all the top students in the school, she passed. "I want to study abroad in the future," she said. When the university held its annual beauty contest to celebrate International Women's Day, she declined. "I told them I have no interest in such things."
However, she's no dissident. Like all her classmates, she lists "making China strong" as her primary objective in the future. Unlike most of her classmates, though, she doesn't cave to university or Party pressure and dutifully obeys her conscience. She's thoroughly courageous, in her quiet way, and positively humble. Plus, she has a great sense of adventure, no doubt passed down to her from her zany father.
After our meal, we ventured across the street, to the riverfront, and flew kites. Mr. Zhuang had offered to rent us a boat and take us on a river cruise, but darkness was quickly taking over the sky and a gusty wind was tossing our hair around like a blowdryer. A bad night to be on the water, but great conditions -- indeed perfect conditions -- for flying a kite.
Somehow I was entrusted with flying the kite Mr. Zhuang rented for us. It was nothing fancy, just a rainbow parallelogram with a thin stick stretched corner to corner and a modest tail. I hadn't flown a kite since childhood, but it shouldn't be that difficult, I reasoned. About three dozen other people were nearby, jerking at and yanking on strings. Their heads were tilted back, as if looking at a skyscraper, and they kept close watch as the colorful objects at the strings' other end -- long-tailed dragons, plump frogs, black hawks -- danced in the jetstream, high above us, almost out of sight. I wanted to be them, and so I began.
I'd run a bit and simultaneously let out line over my right shoulder, then stop and check status. Inevitably, my kite would be floating about a story off the ground, would flail and soar and jerk in the wind as soon as I stopped, and, inevitably, nosedive straight into the cement. I was the only thing more active than the wind, sprinting when it appeared my kite would fall, yanking hard, letting out line, giving and cutting my line's slack until it got so confused it would just up and quit.
And it wasn't without its hazards. The rare moments of hope, when the kite would flutter airborne for more than ten seconds, quickly turned to despair as my line got tangled with one of the dozens of others, and my kite faceplanted, again, into the cement. Running was treacherous, as well. Of course, I was looking back as I ran, up toward my rainbow in the sky, blind to the other kite flyers in my collision course of a path. But those were the lucky times. I finally gave up when, on about its tenth descent, my kite landed, head level, directly in the path of a young couple, out for a romantic walk along the riverfront, only to be closelined by a crash-landing rainbow parallelogram.
Through all the misadventures, Alyssa, Penny and Maggie were more supportive and helpful than I deserved. They gave me pointers, retrieved the fallen vessel wherever it landed, expressed deep, unfounded faith in our rainbow's ability to fly beside the dragons and frogs and hawks soaring high above, in the deepening darkness and gusty breezes of the Changsha sky. As our rainbow dove time after time, I reasoned that the cause of crash was everything but me -- the winds were too gusty to get it started, our kite was too lightweight to make it, the air was too crowded with other kites and strings.
After our rainbow clocked the young couple, however, I had a chance to pause and look to my right. There was Rhonda, holding a spool similar to mine, her right hand steadily guiding her string, her eyes trained on the airborne black whale at the string's other end, soaring effortlessly many stories above us, dancing peacefully beside dragons and frogs and hawks. God bless her, she let me hold the spool and string for a few minutes, just to feel what it's like, and, amazingly, the whale didn't nosedive.
Sunday morning began with a trip south down the State Highway for the Insane, destination Zhuzhou City. We passed a procession of a few dozen villagers, carrying circular flower arrangements and solemnly trooping to the countryside to clean their ancestors' tombs. It's an annual holiday, Qing Ming Jie (Tomb Sweeping Day), in which the living tend to the dead, picking weeds, dusting the gravestone, burning money and leaving flowers.
We arrived at the Zhuzhou City train station so that the gals could get tickets home. We were to meet my Chinese teacher, Joan, a 24-year-old English teacher at my university who just graduated from the Zhuzhou military college. She's a very elegant, traditional Chinese girl who still lives with her parents and donates every yuan of her salary to them. I always suspect she's a closet Christian, for her consideration of others is straight out of the Christian ethic, as is her blind, boundless faith in my ability to learn Chinese.
After a few minutes' wait, I spotted Joan running toward us, nearly at a sprint, across the vast plaza in front of the train station. When she reached us, between exhausted huffs she apologized for being late and said she wasn't sure exactly where we were supposed to meet. I looked at my watch: 9:58. We were to meet at 10 a.m. For her, arriving later than we did, even if still early, was face lost. She helped the gals buy tickets -- they'd have to eat bitter all the way home, too -- and suggested that we go to Yan Di (YON-dee) Square for the day. I invited her along but she declined, as she had an appointment with her puppy to rid it of its fleas.
The city is divided by the Xiang Jiang (river), which begins its course in the north of Hunan, out of Dongting Hu (lake), in a city called Yueyang. It flows south, through Changsha, through Zhuzhou City and down to the province due south of here, called Guangxi, where it emties into another river, Li Jiang. We took bus 2 from the east side of the river, where the train station is, to the west side, where Yan Di square is. A gentle rain fell as we traveled west.
Just before the bridge, and just past McDonald's, a look out the left window of the bus revealed a single man, shirtless and wearing an orange hard hat, swinging a sledgehammer, pounding away at the remains of what once was a twelve-story brick building. He was three stories above ground, standing on a foot-wide concrete platform. All that was left of the fourth story was its white tile facade, and the man was working feverishly, and alone, to eliminate it, swinging the hammer sidearm, its bamboo shaft bowing as if it was a graphite-shafted driver. No safety glasses. No net. Just a man and a sledge and a mission, high above Zhuzhou on Sunday morning, and a captive audience of waigoren below.
We got to Yan Di square and, voila, no more rain. Yan Di square is a vast concrete plaza, said by Zhuzhouians to be the second-largest square in China (although the same claim is made of nearly every square in every city, resulting in a roughly 2,000-way tie for second, behind Tiananmen in Beijing). It's dwarfed by a gargantuan granite statue of Yan Di, who was some kind of healer in ancient times. The statue makes him look like a Chinese Viking, horned and bearded and bulky, garbed in a Flinstonian toga.
A big square, a windy day, perfect for flying a kite. We bought another rainbow parallelogram and ordered it skyward. Alas, more frantic dashes across Yan Di square ended in more nosedives, and another unsuspecting couple got clocked. This time, at least there were dozens of small children dashing across the square, their kites meeting the same fate as ours. We weren't alone in our failure.
Our kite grounded as a dangerous weapon, we wandered around the square eating cotton candy. It was Sunday in spring, and so hundreds of children were there with their families. It didn't take long for them for find us and, more specifically, me. Similar to gnats, Chinese children tend to swarm around the tallest living thing. Unlike my students, for children being "a beauty" is secondary to being "hen gao" (hun gow), or very tall. And so I, the big guy, found myself surrounded by perhaps 60 kids.
They extended their usual greeting -- "WAI-GO-REN!" -- and simultaneously, but not in unison, shouted "hello, how are you, I'm fine thank you, how are you" and "what's your name." Nightmares of my time in kindergarten returned, except that this was worse: I couldn't escape, and I wasn't getting paid. The kids all wanted autographs, and so I signed "SHAQ!" on their notebooks.
After the kids left me, they'd migrate to Maggie, then Alyssa, then Penny, and get all our autographs on the same sheet. When it finally ended, Maggie and Penny were a bit miffed at how I signed my name. I assumed they thought it was dishonest to pretend I'm Shaq Daddy. Instead, they have never heard of someone named SHAQ!, and instead thought I was writing "SHAG!" on the precocious children's notebooks, which raised some moral qualms. Shaq is completely unknown to them, as foreign to Brits as a Brit cricketer, or even footballer, would be to Americans. Every Chinese 12-year-old knows Shaq, but he's a total stranger to adults from England.
Immediately west of the square is the Zhuzhou TV tower, a sleek, rounded glass and steel needle that's the highest point in Hunan and, again according to Zhuzhouians, the highest TV tower in China. We entered, hoping to get to the top and get a kite's-eye view of the city.
The tower's ground level looked deserted, a vast, wooden floor gleaming in the sunshine that poured in through the glass walls that surrounded it. It looked awkward, like a big waltz or a political rally or some big event should be occurring there, but instead it was empty. For me, the greatest tragedy were the two ping-pong tables, resting idly in the afternoon sun. I cast my usual excited eyes toward them, gestured slightly and, voila, a flat-topped, middle-aged man appeared, wide-eyed, hurrying toward me with two paddles and an orange ball. Booya.
We volleyed, and about five more tower employees woke up from their siesta and gathered round the table. Soon Penny was playing with another of the cable guys, and before long they rigged up a few badminton nets and Alyssa and Maggie batted around the shuttlecock with still more cable guys. And we spent half the afternoon this way, having heaps of fun with our new friends.
If the mob scene of children represented the downside of being waigoren, here was another reminder of its upside. No questions asked, an entire staff of adults, including the boss, gladly shucked off work for the afternoon for the chance to entertain us. Of course, they thought we were entertaining them, which is another beautiful aspect of being a waigoren. Who's having more fun -- them watching us, or us watching them? Probably a tie, and thus we both have heaps of fun.
After a few hours, we put down our racquets, hopped on the elevator and did what we came for originally: impersonate kites. After riding the elevator up, we found ourselves 286 meters above Zhuzhou City. I don't know how high it is in storeys, but high enough that Zhuzhou looks orderly from there. Streets form straight, orderly lines and intersect at right angles. Taxis and dumptrucks don't cut each other off or flash their brights ten times or sit on their air-raid siren horns. Parks resemble the produce section, with bunches of broccoli gleaming and verdant, arranged in a tidy circular formation. Yan Di, the granite Chinese Viking, looks like a pipsqueak. It's like watching Zhuzhou City on prom night, prim and proper and tidy.
Our tour guide then took us to the seventh floor and the revolving restaurant. As with the rest of the tower, not a soul was there, and yet a waiter, in a tux, greeted us and asked us if we wanted tea. We must have been his first customers in a month. Seeing him made me think of the guy hammering away on the third story earlier in the morning, probably getting paid half of what the tea guy was making for the perpetual break that is his job. Anyway, he served us our tea and they set the restaurant to "revolve."
The restaurant revolved with the velocity of an ant, and with each movement, we could hear metal gnash against metal and a chain clank. "This is so China," Alyssa said. Over tea, Maggie talked of her morbid fear of heights, and Penny told of her mother's four husbands, including a man named Pancake but not including her own father. And yet, in the Bedford neighborhood where all branches of the family -- ex-husbands, step-brothers of step-sisters, half-cousins of step-aunts -- still live, "we all get on well," she explained. In fact, the various factions often have holidays together. Except for Pancake. For me, being with Maggie and Penny was an added cultural experience, just as my introduction of Shaq must have been to them.
Next we slurped noodles at a restaurant, on land, with waitresses dressed in red plaid jumpers that made them look something like the Chinese Family Robinson. Then we set off on a walk from the west side of the river to the east, but not before we stopped and got a Coke at KFC. There two KFC women employees, wearing red polyester KFC skirts and red polyester KFC vests, and flashing the standard permasmile, led a dozen or so five-year-olds in various cheesy dances, including the Hitchhiker with Chinese characteristics. The dancing kids are a staple of fast food joints in China. I guess it helps assuage the guilt of cluttering up their arteries and causing borderline hypertension at age 8. Plus, it's priceless entertainment for the waigoren.
While crossing the bridge, another oh-my-China sight: four men, shirtless, sound asleep atop slabs of concrete in the bed of a dumptruck, moving fast and blaring its horn in midday traffic. Perhaps one of them was the one-man destruction crew from the morning. A guy can use a rest after felling a twelve-story building.
On the other side of the river, we met my friend Kelly, fresh off a day's teaching at the English school where she works. Kelly just graduated from college and is in charge of the children's teaching at Enchampion, the A-standard English school in Zhuzhou. She's a Zhuzhou native and has kindly shown me the best places in town for crayfish and snails, both coated in la jiao (red pepper), of course. She's also mentioned that her mom is the city's bonsai tree gardener, and so off we went with Kelly, destination her mom's bonsai garden.
Kelly directed our cabbie to pull left into a dark street off of Construction Road, Zhuzhou's main industrial road, littered and smoggy and reeking of "stinky tofu," a street delicacy in Hunan. Instantly, we turned and found ourselves below a canopy of trees, driving up a hill along a twisty tree-lined road that felt like northern Minnesota. The abrupt shift in landscape amazed me, from concrete and steel to trees and green, in just one turn.
The cabbie dropped us at the gate of the park, which is where Kelly's family's apartment is. She went in to change out of her teaching dress and into something more casual. I noticed a pickup hoops game in progress, so I joined. Unlike most Chinese I've played with, these guys were both big and coordinated. Battle ensued, and when Kelly finally re-emerged from her apartment in jeans and a black sweater, my gray V-neck t-shirt didn't have a dry spot left. It was brilliant.
The five of us -- Kelly, Alyssa, Maggie, Penny and I -- walked into the park.
more later.
Last class
It's the last week of class, amazingly. What happened to this year? In each of my classes, I read three stories to my students: "Teacher-Diplomat" (about my first week of classes last fall); "Manabu's Lesson" (about the heroism and courage of learning a new language) and "On Fire" (about the intensity of Hunan food and, similarly, my students' intense devotion to their teachers).
Prior to the classes, I was a wreck. I spent two days tweaking the language to be more approachable for my students. I rehearsed the reading over and over on runs, to steel myself against breaking down in tears. I wore pants that roll up easily, to wade through the flood of my students' tears. I expected laughter. I prepared myself for outrage, always a possibility when writing about people, no matter what you've written.
Whatever their reaction would be, I expected a strong reaction. It was our last class. We were best friends from the first day last October. We would be on separate continents within weeks.
I passed out a copy of each story to each student, and began reading. Each student's eyes were focused on the paper in front of them. The first laugh line passed. Silence. Eyes trained on papers. The next laugh line passed. Silence. Eyes trained on papers. Emotional moments came. Silence. Eyes on papers. I walked around the room, trying to make eye contact. Eyes on papers. Blank expression on every face. Colorful moments came. Silence. Eyes on desks. Jokes about their classmates. Silence. Eyes on desks.
The room resembled an empty church. My beloved students were statues. Time stood still. I immediately assumed my stories must be incredibly stupid, to draw zero reaction from anyone. For a writer, especially reading live, silence is the most brutal reaction. Outrage, vitriol, rants, all are great compared with silence.
After the first story, I asked if they had any questions about the language or anything else. Eyes on desks, silence. I asked if I should keep reading, or if it would be better to quit for today. Silence. My best student, Nancy, finally mumbled, "keep reading," still looking at her desk.
And so I kept reading, and they kept staring at their desks, completely silent, completely blank. It was the longest reading I've ever given. Total, uninterrupted torture. What made it especially agonizing was that the stories were, no doubt, meant to be funny and emotional. It's one thing to draw no reaction to a serious treatise. But when you try to be funny and you're trying to elicit emotional responses, and you're met with silence, it's double torture.
After the reading, we went outside and posed for three photos: one Swedish (glum faces), one Chinese (normal happy expressions) and one Phillippino (jumping-to-the-sky, fist-pumping giddiness). The students came straight back to their usual life, full of energy, goofy and spontaneous and great. Just as I've known them to be, every minute of this year, save for the fifteen minutes in which I read my stories. It made me feel worse: it wasn't just an off-day. They had their usual spunk. It's just my writings that put them to sleep and dulled their senses.
We said goodbye, some students gave me presents and cards, but it was nothing like the heart-wrenching experience I had expected. I figured that, after all, I must not have had a bit of an impact in their lives. I can't imagine a more dramatic anti-climax.
Beginning that night and continuing now, however, all the emotion I expected came flooding out of my students. In cell-phone messages and phone calls and email messages, they gave me all the reactions I had expected them to give in class. Breezy's reaction was typical [excerpt]: "in today"s class,i feel very sad, because i were award that was our last class together with you. when you are reading your articles,i had to try my best to stop my tears."
And so, even on the last day, I learned that I still have a lot to learn about this culture. The last day of class brought us full circle, to the first day of class. On that day, I asked questions and students stared at their desks, silenty. I told jokes. No one laughed. I asked for volunteers. It took a lot of prodding to get any.
In both cases, my students felt uncomfortable, and the way they express discomfort is to keep silent and look at the floor. It had been so long since they had responded to me in this way, but it is their natural, culturally conditioned way.
Their silence on the last day reminded me of how courageous they were throughout the year. At heart, they're not the animated, spontaneous, verbose kids they became during oral English class every week. They put on a new personality for me, to match my own, another gesture of their generosity. I never would have appreciated this without the final class, which felt like torture but now makes me feel even better about my beloved students, makes me appreciate anew their heroism in learning English.
