zimatravels

     My book will have to wait because the professor I know in Nanjing University has been able to get me a job teaching this semester.  Nanjing University is probably rated in the top three universities in all of China.  My students are quite literally the cream of the crop, skimmed from every province through China based on high test scores.

     As a full time teacher, I teach conversational English 12 hours a week.  In return for my teaching, I receive a luxurious (by Chinese standards) room all to myself.  It has a private bathroom with running hot water, but the water constantly changes from warm to scalding.  Nanjing is nine hours north from Hangzhou by train, so I was extremely glad to learn that the room has heat.  Alas, I found out they only turn the heat on for 30 minutes every evening!  I also receive two to three times more salary than the Chinese teachers, but it still only adds up to the dollar equivalent of about $135 a month.  At least it’s income rather than all outgo.

     When I first moved into my room in the Foreign Experts’ Building, I noticed there were some unnecessary doors to my room.  “Why is the peephole on an inside door rather than an outside door where it would be possible to see someone knocking?”  I also wondered at the peculiar position of the peephole.  It was off to one side and quite low.  I could guess it was low because the Chinese man who put it in was probably short, but why off center?  I speculated that the previous teacher had arrived in pre-peephole days and had put up her name card in the center of the door.  The man installing the peephole hadn’t dared move it.

      One morning, at 7:30, there was a knock on the outermost of my several doors.  Not having a peephole in that door, I sleepily opened all the doors to the hallway.  Three Chinese men stood there.  One held a can of red paint.  Another held a small paintbrush.  The third one held nothing.  They eyed me suspiciously, wondering what possible reason I could have for not arising at a suitable hour.  The spokesman of the group spoke to me in Chinese.  When I indicated I couldn’t understand Chinese, he yelled louder.

     Bewildered, I asked the help of another teacher passing by.  “Oh,” the other more talented Chinese-speaking English teacher replied after the spokesman repeated himself, “they’re here to paint identification numbers on your bed, desk, and chairs so you won’t be able to take them with you when you return to America.”  Why hadn’t I thought of that?  The three men marched in officiously and performed their duty.

     As I was settling back to sleep, I heard a loud chanting outside.  I looked out curiously from my narrow balcony.  A column of yellow-hatted little men were marching by, each with a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other.  They stopped at the building next to mine, and began their attack.  Later, someone explained that the building under attack had been especially renovated to be a guesthouse for the important 90th anniversary celebration of the University.  Now that the celebration was over, it was to be gutted and rebuilt as a sports arena.  “They change buildings like shirts,” I thought sleepily.

     Soon I heard the metallic clink of the hammers just outside my several doors.  The kitchen construction they had started a couple of months earlier was being dismantled!

     Just another logic-defying day in China.

This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, taken from my travel journal of 1992.  Modern China continues to tear down and put up buildings at amazing speed and frequency.