Cultural Meltdown Number Two



I sent my friend Leah an e-mail today, which among other things, contained a description of what I have termed "Cultural Meltdown Number Two." It won't make you laugh, so read no further if you just want to be entertained. Here's an excerpt from my e-mail:

"I didn’t tell you about my cross-cultural meltdown number two. Last Saturday, Mikayla and I took the bus downtown to meet a Chinese English teacher named Lily. We met in the square, had lunch in the basement of WalMart (strangest thing ever! They have a Wal-Mart here that is sardine-can crowded. I haven’t actually been inside that part, but we did go up to the fourth floor where there’s a movie theatre...surreal to find it. The basement is like a little food court except it’s all Chinese food. What?!) Then we walked down the main shopping street and wandered in and out of stores. On one street corner there was a little girl, maybe five or six, wearing a yellow sweater and pink shoes. Her hair was in two perky pigtails. She was squatting down to what looked like a tripod on the ground made of thick steel pipes. On top of the tripod was a piece that spun around in circles, covered with a dirty washcloth. The little girl put her mouth over the spinning piece, bit down on it, and lifted herself up off the ground so that she was balancing. All the pressure was on her mouth around the washcloth. Then she kicked her feet up over her head so that her bellybutton was pointed up at the sky...remember, her face is still looking out at you, while biting the washcloth...and from that position she started to make the rotating piece she was clamping onto spin around. Every bone must have been out of joint, especially the vertebrae in her neck, which was impossibly doubled over. There was no one with her that we could see, but the Lily said that the girl was probably a child from the country whose parents had sold her to a sort of manager and that he was probably nearby. I couldn’t stop crying. The street we were on is the busiest shopping street in the city and people were streaming by us and staring (because they always do) and I was crying and I didn’t care.
I don’t want to turn away from atrocity and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I know horrible things happen in the world, and most of the time I hold that abstract thought at arms’ length, fully present in the ordinary details of life. To some extent, maybe that’s necessary. Maybe it’s a cop-out and I should pour myself out to break the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke. Regardless, being confronted with this little girl and my own imagination of what her life must be was overwhelming in that moment, and I cried, hard. I don’t know our father’s purposes. There was nothing for me to do in the situation but think for her, and I did, and I have been, and I believe those thoughts are powerful and effective. --Sigh— I didn’t mean to say so much, but it is good to write these wrestlings out."

That was Cultural Meltdown Number Two. I'll tell you the story of Number One another time...it's more lighthearted, but it was a meltdown at the time.

And the ordinary details of life continue without regard for the weight of the world's suffering. I'm teaching a full 16 hours a week...Oral English to four sections of freshmen. I'm still discovering my team's quirky delightfulness with joy. Here are some pictures of us eating noodles Chinese-style. The idea is that you pick up a sheaf of noodles with your chopsticks, engulf them with your mouth, and bite off the dangling excess so that the extra falls back into your bowl of soup. It's best to guide the falling noodles back into the bowl with your chopsticks so that broth doesn't splash on you...I have not mastered this skill yet.


Mikayla and I



Emily and Dan

Ten Snippets and Snapshots



1. Last week, Alli and I had the team over to our apartment for a spaghetti dinner in honor of finally getting our kitchen scrubbed down. The 10x6 foot cubby is equipped with a gas-powered, two-burner stovetop that sits in a sort of low window seat. (This picture is actually of Emily and Mikayla's...our's wasn't that rusty.) Grease and grime from eons past was encrusted over the walls, window, and stove, and I shredded a green scouring pad to ribbons, literally, going over it. Unfortunately, even though our kitchen was clean, the gas tank was empty, so Alli went down to Dan's apartment to cook the pasta while I made garlic bread and brownies in our toaster oven upstairs. Although we are getting quite good at slurping up noodles with chopsticks (Nanchang is famous for its homemade noodles), we rounded up enough forks from our four apartments to make the use of chopsticks uneccessary. From L to R, Emily, Steven, Dan, Mikayla, Alli, and Adam. It was our first home-cooked meal in Nanchang. Pancakes and blueberry muffins have since made an appearance.


2. In the center of Nanchang, a ten-minute taxi ride from our campus, is Bayi Square. Nanchang's best shopping is squeezed in around the square, including a Wal-Mart. Do not be decieved by the name...it is not like Wal-Mart in America...it's more like New Year's Eve at Times Square. Bayi is full of people flying kites and milling around, and at night there is a water fountain extravaganza set to music and lit up by multi-colored lights. The water rockets high into the air and plummets in shimmering droplets of amazingness.


3. This is Dan holding extra-long chopsticks for easy access to that hard to reach kung pao chicken across the table...or for cooking.


4. Pizza Hut!!! Only the posh and elite of Nanchang come to dine here, and they have kechup!


5. Mikayla Jo and I.


6. Night on the town with teams NIT and ECIT, the other two teams in Nanchang.


7. Our favorite baozi (steamed dumpling) restaurant/hole in the wall is right outside the university's back gate where there are also fresh fruits and vegetables piled for purchase. The restaurant was so humid from all the steam that Mikayla's camera lens fogged up as she was taking a picture of Emily and I. They cook it in wicker baskets stacked on top of each other placed over steam. Go baozi!


8. So, our bathroom has a shower head that runs hot water most of the time, but get this...there's no actual shower! The shower head is in the bathroom with the toilet, the sink, the washing machine, and the much beloved drain in the floor, which we squeagie the water towards while we're still dripping. I like it! It's like a mini-sauna/rainforest/carwash type experience.


9. About fifty of us who came to teach for a year stayed in the coastal city of Quinhaungdao, four hours east of Beijing, to learn how to teach. One morning Alli, Mikayla, Abby, and I woke up at 5:15 and ventured in search of the beach to watch the sunrise. Sadly, it was one of those opaque mornings that I've only ever seen in China, like someone has taken a giant can of foggy spray paint and misted the whole world. The sun was barely coming through, but Mikayla snapped a picture of Abby and I on the beach. There were fishermen untangling nets along the shore, and some who had been fishing all night, gliding towards land in wooden boats.


10. The Great Wall, yet again, but let's be honest. It's classier in black and white.

Random fact of the day: Instead of subjecting their children to diapers, Chinese mothers clothe them in pants that have a slit in the bottom so that tiny bare butts are romping around all over. The precise logistics of this method of potty training are as yet unknown to me, but for a country of 1.3 billion people, it kind of makes sense.

Battleship With Water Balloons

Outside the foreign expert apartment building in which I live (I am a foreign EXPERT!), there are twelve full length basketball courts and a large track. Currently the entire freshman class of Blue Sky University, enrollment 46,000, is undergoing military training. It is mandatory and will last for a week. They are wearing camo pants and matching white shirts in the 90 degree heat, but it gets better. Across the courts are rows of seven-storey dormitories, and mounted on top of the dormitories are large loudspeakers which have been blaring the same two patriotic marches unceasingly for the past several hours. One has an operatic chorus. (!)* The tiny stick figures are marching in squares, sometimes stopping with outstretched legs, toes pointed for the drill sergeant’s examination. They are masters at holding still. All of it strikes me as extremely funny. This would not fly on an American campus.

The freshman’s attitude about all of this is indecipherable from my fifth floor window, but I fully intend to ask my four classes on Monday what they’ve thought of the training. For a collectivist culture, I’d imagine that they don’t feel particularly resentful, but then again, it’s really really hot here and although I’ve never worn it, I don’t think camouflage breathes well.

If wishes were fishes to be had for a penny, I would like to open my window, take a giant water balloon launcher, and play real-life battleship with the battalions below.

*rasied eyebrows

Random fact of the day: Almost without exception, there are no clothes dryers in China.

Pictures from the last two weeks, in no particular order...