Christina in China

The Chinese above = possibly butchered.  (Supposed to mean “A little busy/hardworking.”)

Today’s one of those days in which I planned it out this morning, in 45-minute increments.  5 periods.  Lesson prep during my breaks.  Home for dinner quickly, then back to school for an hour (hour and a half?) of phone calls from freshmen.  Ai yo…  I had a terrible class being blown off by Class 3.  It was like magazine reading, cell phoning time, chatting out loud with friends time, like I wasn’t even there.  So I threw my hands up and tried to teach them the “zh” sound in “pleasure.”

So many things I haven’t done yet.  Good teacher stuff.  Plan “how-to” speeches for my froshies.  Plan a pizza making party for some.  Go to Feng Laoshi’s house.  Email Sharry.  Email millions of friends from home.  Set up tutoring with Petrel.  And all I want to do is go to Palm Springs Coffee and read A Thousand Acres….

Geez Louise, I need to send thank you notes that are seven months overdue.

Julie Bender, a CEEer from Chongqing who’s our pastoral care person, is coming to see Eunice and I this weekend.  Making paper flowers with some class 3 girlies on Friday, movie at Eunice’s.  Church English class Sunday and church.  Spend time with the neglected host family and compadres.  Sometime study the neglected Chinese…

On a completely unrelated note, last night, Hugh, Eunice, and I sang “My Guy” at the Foreign Language Department annual program, in front of hundreds of people.  My friend Chen Fang was one of six MCs (who also included Murry, Star Lee, and my students Onion and Elaine).  But my student Joan, who sang and did a comedy thing as a Sichuan farmer woman, was the star of the night.

I’m running on adrenaline but not sleep-deprived.  I hate being busy.

(Wow, all these blogs!  I’m finally finishing all the blogs I’ve had saved and hadn’t finished before.  Who knows why?) 

I may have written this before.  I know I’ve said it.

When I was in college, Elizabeth Weaver told me that I should be on an island somewhere, somewhere without time or schedules.  It was kind of an interesting revelation for me, out of the mouth of someone else, which is where these things come from.  Not from my brain.  It was the same semester that I was learning to be not-quite-so-cerebral-and-esoteric, interacting with RAs and girls on my dorm floor.  The same semester that I was beginning to unguiltily sleep until eleven or noon on Sundays, enjoy the day, and go to Menno Group in the evenings.  And Menno Group, although I rarely keep in touch with people from there, taught me a lot, too.  How to go to church in a living room with no pulpit and no sermon, to worship in my own way with songs and guitar, to pray and light candles.  And then there was lit theory class and Lanthorn, which taught me that a lot of people that I think are brilliant and interesting might actually think I’m worth hanging around.

Eunice says that her first year in China was the best year of her life, when she was freed from all the expectations people had for her, when she came into herself.  I feel like that year was my senior year at Houghton, when I figured out what I thought (well, approximately) about war and peace), when I had some friends who started to hammer the idea into my head that it was important to do things like sleep for at least seven hours and clean a path across the floor, when I realized that I need to look for beauty, in words, in song, in people, to survive.  I started to find my voice in writing and value it.  I learned how to, along with Josh, build a friendship into a “relationship,” whatever that means, and preserve it.

And, with Elizabeth’s comment, I realized that I’m the type of person who just likes to be, just likes to be with people and also be alone to think, just likes to listen, to find enjoyment in work but work unhurriedly and in a way that preserves relationship.  In a way that I haven’t exactly learned how to do yet.

It’s odd.  I love China, but the same time pressure type things are here, at least in a teacher’s life, as were there in high school, at Marshall, at Houghton.  Sometimes I wish I’d found that island, or that little village, or wherever, where I can forget time.  I forget time more at my host family’s house that anywhere else in China, but even there, I can hear the school bells, the medley of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Jingle Bells,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” that plays every 45 minutes during the day and every hour or so every evening, to signal the beginning or end of classes, or as a warning to get up or go back to the dorms.  7:00 am to 10:00 pm, divided up in intervals, reminding you that time is still ticking on.  But they people there know how to shua, hang out.  Shua de ban tian, hang out for a really long time.

I realized the other day that the need to shop or buy the latest things or “make up” (as Chinese students often say) or really look in mirrors apart from brushing my hair in the morning was just not there anymore.  As was the need to measure up or compare to or compete with old high school or college classmates, at least not on the same scale, as it was before.

Maybe I’m never going to find the island.  Or the little village.  Maybe I just need to make the village wherever I am, in Gainesville, Florida, if need be.  I’m not afraid, of staying here for the next four months.  Or of going back to U.S., moving to Gainesville and finding a job and a community there.  And then wherever life takes me.  I’m not afraid of being in a “serious relationship” or working through the “Hey, now we live in the same city and have to relearn how to interact in everyday life!” fun.

Josh gave me a CD for Christmas that I’ve been listening to a lot this term.  Andrew Peterson.  Listening to Andrew Peterson is, at least for me, always a good idea.  It gives me that dose of pure beauty and affirmation that pain exists melted into one that I need to survive not just in China but anywhere.  In one of the songs it talks about being in “the far country,” not at home.  I’d be mistaken if I said that the far country was China.  At the risk of sounding over-spiritual and sappy, the far country is the world of parents leaving and ladies dying of cancer (“without any meaning,” as I literally translated my auntie’s words the other day) and power plants that belch out smoke that hides the mountains past Pingwu.  I’m convinced that good life and good work are not a dichotomy; somehow they fit together, but I don’t know how yet.  I don’t think that heaven is an old folks’ home where we all sit around playing bingo (or mah jong, if you will).  I think that we’ll work and know how to balance it at last.  Maybe that’s what heaven means, good rest and good work and good worship.  Time and grace to do it all.

This week, I was talking about telephone protocol in class, and I had the bright idea of telling my freshmen to practice calling me on the phone this evening.  So here I am, in Eunice’s house, with the phone ringing every minute and a half with my freshmen.  I don’t know what came over me, but it’s certainly a trip, hearing all these freshmen call.  Just a minute, I said “hello” and got a receiver-full of laughter.  I hung up.  They can call back when they’re not laughing.  I figured that a phone call was a useful skill to be able to have in English, and who knows if any of them will practice with each other.  So here I am, telling 65+ freshmen that it was nice talking with them.

The saddest part is the fact that some of them have incomprehensible pronunciation of their English names.  Zolas that sound like Ronas, Serenas that sound like Srees, Cheryls that sound like Sarahs.  I can hear all of their dormmates in the background, prompting them, or, usually, giggling at their fumbling.  So this is a blog entry interrupted by phone calls.

The highlight so far is tiny, bright-faced Brandy from class two, who not only gave her “ask for leave” speech (a very Chinglish phrase that means that you want to be excused from coming to class) but gave it unhesitatingly and with a plausible excuse (a headache) and concluded her phone call with, “Well, I need to be going.  It was nice talking with you,” that sounded rather sincere.

This year, I’ve been stressing proper politeness: adding intro phrases like “May I ask” to personal questions, giving a proper goodbye.  In a few weeks, I’ll be doing proper ways to invite people to dinner, etc.  I told a sophomore boy, Star Lee, that it was nice talking to him, and he just laughed and said, “Why?”

Yeah, it’s a cliche phrase, but it’s one we use.  And I’ve started to believe it, sometimes.  It is nice talking with them, most of the time, except when I’m in class and feel like I’m a dentist pulling teeth, except that the teeth are English sentences. 

Recently, though, it hasn’t been.  This is partly because I’m been recklessly skipping English Corner, with the excuse that I’ve been hanging out (another phrase I’ve been emphasizing this year) with my host family.  So my interactions have been more interesting–a trip to Xi Shan (West Mountain) Park with a group of girls from class five, among them Angelina, who drew Chinese out of me and confessed rather easily that she missed her parents.  They are in Guangzhou, da gong, which just means working, often away from your city.  She hasn’t seen them in a year.  And Petrel and Future, who don’t have the best intonation or pronunciation in the world but with whom talking never seems like dentistry.  Emma and Judy at Hugh’s house two weeks ago, who talked, of all things about househusbands and San Francisco and David Beckham and how George W. Bush likes to cook.  Emma is bubbly and pop-culture aware and very smart, a four-year student.  She has kind of a goofy face with teeth that seem a bit crooked.  “I chose my English name because of a famous person,” she said.  “From a famous novel, right?” I asked, thinking of Austen.  “No, the actress from Harry Potter, Emma Watson.  I like her very much.”

And today, after class let out, after four periods straight of prepositions of position (against, beside, underneath, and all the like), quizzes, telephoning dialogues, and the listening book, I met my Monday night girls from last semester.  It rained yesterday, hard rain like I’ve never seen in Jiangyou, and again last night, but the sky was clear today.  The sun was big, as I say in Chinese.  “If we walk together outside, our small group will become a very large group,” said Sharry, and I laughed, agreeing.  So we carried desk chairs out to the side of Teaching Building 9, by the ping-pong tables, and talked.  About funerals and weddings, Chinese and American.  How dates (zaozi) would make you have children early (zao).  How, when people die, the family wraps a white cloth around the deceased’s head and stays up all night, playing music, the family gathered together.  And later, someone throws corn seeds, which people must catch in their garments.  Men wear black arm bands for a week after the death, and the next day people set off firecrackers to scare away evil spirits.

I’d forgotten what a treat it was to be with them.  I hadn’t gotten together with all of them in a group, Cathy, Sharry, Silvia, and Veronica (minus Wendy and Joan, who didn’t come) since I’d come back from Spring Festival break.  Sometimes it takes a long time without seeing people to remind me–or even let me know–who I consider dear.

The phone had stopped ringing for at least twenty minutes and startled me when it rang again, with someone whose name sounded like Nell.  I have no Nell in these two classes, and she didn’t ask any question, just asked me what I was doing.  She hung up before I could ask her to spell.

This weekend was a Chinese immersion weekend, or as much immersion as I get.  After I left Eunice’s on Saturday morning, I went to the market with my auntie.  When she asked me if I wanted ribs or duck for lunch, I told her ribs, and two people complimented me on my Chinese from the two or three or words.  It would be nice if it were true.  We bought herbs and dried dates, meat straight off the hanging rack and chopped with the cleaver, twenty fresh farm-raised chicken eggs, and, later, paper money and tiny paper sets of clothes and shoes to put on grandparents’ graves.  I talked to the men working on the road, to the ladies gathered at the house of the other “auntie,” who, despite living in the countryside with water pumps and chickens, have a niece getting a Ph.D. in the United States.  To Wang Shushu (uncle) who came home late and jolly having had a bit of Chinese liquor.  And then on Sunday, as I sat in church, in the front, between Yuan Cao Hui and some old ladies who added their own whispered prayers to Pastor Yao’s, I took notes on parts of the sermon without having them translated.  It was easy stuff, talking about Luke 2:52 and Jesus’ upbringing, Jewish education.  But having a few notes–that they memorized the Law of Moses and started religious school when they were six, notes about Jesus going to the temple, about his wisdom, that we should also teach our children–made me feel somehow connected, a part.  Understanding more, finding the often seemingly endless sermons less incomprehensible (though still something I can only get a basic meaning of) and actually something that it pays to pay attention to.

And then after church and the family of a lady from the church who’d died, another story in itself, I went with Yang Jing, the retired-steelworker-turned-church-worker-and-song-leader, to her apartment.  Eunice calls her the “aggressive chorister,” and to be honest, she often turns me off, with her fawning over my use of simple phrases like “God bless you,” or my use of chopsticks, her constant squeezing of my hand or pulling me in certain directions on the road.  But at her house, I felt more comfortable, looking at her pictures and seeing her when she was young, with her daughter, with her vocational seminary classmates.  And then letting her take me to the bus stop and put me on a bus back to the school and my home.

It was nice talking, and not just in that eating-your-granola-sort-of-way.  Maybe that’s the greatest victory of the semester so far.

This week, I sat at a rice porridge (xifan, for all you China-experienced folk) hot pot dinner and spoke little to no English.  Granted, I didn’t speak much Chinese, either.  But I could keep up with the approximate meaning of the conversation.  I got a joke, after it was explained to me.

And yesterday, I initiated two conversations with my colleagues in the department in Chinese, showing the pictures in last year’s Lanthorn to Zhang Laoshi and talking to Liu Ya Ping, who is already patient and taught me Chinese children’s games last weekend.  I learned how to say confidence (zixiang, I think, but maybe I forgot).

I told my auntie about how I missed my family in the U.S. and semiunderstood her response about mother-daughter guanxi and how it’s special.

I asked Petrel to find someone to tutor me informally in Chinese, rote memorization of sentences and phrases with a tape recorder to improve fluency and vocabulary, and she offered to do it herself.  For that matter, I’ve started speaking a little bit of Chinese to people I normally speak to in English.

I had a Talk with Josh on the phone last week.  The important but good kind.  (No break-ups in the future.)

Last weekend, at the little country retreat (nong jia le) where the foreign language department teachers went to shua, I stubbornly refused to give up on the kids jumping game the kids and Wei Dan and Liu Ya Ping were playing.  I kept trying until I got it.  I asked Xiong Hui Xin (Wendy) to explain and teach me shen ji, a card game.

I tried to explain some of the conditions of West Virginia to Lai Laoshi in Chinese.  All the sentences were muddled and had to be corrected, but it was a step.

I washed my clothes in the brown stream again, this time a bit more easily than last time but still with aching legs.

I spoke to little kids riding their bike home from school and understood the response they made under their breath.  (How guai ya!  “Wow, weird.”)

I’ve started taking others by the arm (Petrel, Future, Chen Fang, Anna) when we’re walking instead of waiting for them to take my arm.

It’s small steps, I think.  Little steps toward bravery.  I want to keep taking them–to seek out relationships instead of just hanging out with the people who most aggressively pursue me.  I want to not be afraid to raise topics that encourage my students and friends to think.  I want to read and write instead of surfing websites in my free time.  I want to try to penetrate the Western membrane that coats China and get to the culture underneath.

After seven months here, I feel like I’m just starting to tap what’s underneath.

An email I got recently from the nanpengyou.  This is the type of thing I don’t get much in China, needless to say.

Subject: Repent, O heathen girlfriend
“That’s right, Christina: As your good Protestant boyfriend, I’m calling you
to leave your evil, Bible-study-neglecting ways & turn back towards the
light of Sola Scriptura.  After all, Jesus didn’t die for you so you could
ignore pondering Old Testament books.  Do not go the way of Saul, who
ignored God & died disgraced, killing himself in battle with his own sword!
If he would’ve had his half-hour quiet time everyday, reading his Bible,
perhaps instead of remembering King David, we’d remember King Saul.”

Ha.  It’ll be nice to see him again regularly, so that things are more smart-alecky on a regular basis.  I like smart-alecky.

Anybody remember my little black, green, and orange peacoat?  Like a wonderful mom, my mom scanned in some pages from the Houghton yearbook and sent them to me.  The applicable pages, which of course are the pages that either Josh or I (or both) are on.  My senior picture was taken by either Danielle or Alex, lying in the fall leaves, with wearing my coat with the orange and green leaves.  I miss my coat.

I always think of this coat when I see people wearing cool things in China.  The art teacher in our department, Ms. Zhang, always wears cool things, funky pants, long denim coats, plastic glasses.  Ms. Feng, who is one of the Chinese teachers (similar to an English teacher at an American college) is another person who wears cool pants.  Anna, Eunice’s former student who’s now at Sichuan Normal in Chengdu, taught me a phrase: Ni de kuzi hao ku o!  Basically, “Wow, your pants are cool!”  I sometimes say this to Ms. Zhang or Ms. Feng.  I feel sad because I miss wearing cool pants, at least pants that I think are cool.  Or cool coats for that reason.

I took the bus to Nanchong last weekend to shua with CEEers and have a birthday party for Phil and Justin, two CEE friends.  It was fun and relaxing, and I think part of what makes it so fun is that I feel like these people retain their personalities so well in China.  Catherine is very interested in ideas and has all these experiences, like teaching in the primary school from hell or growing up in Singapore or backpacking in her 20s, that she can extract funny stories from in a moment’s notice.  Holly is learning to play the erhu, a Chinese instrument, with old people in the park, brings her bowls to a restaurant for makeshift “Chinese takeout,” writes on her bathroom wall tiles in erasable marker, and plays a bunch of eclectic folk and rock and country and stuff on her Ipod.  Phil has this loud voice, is funny and sarcastic, goes off on rants about babies or Da Shan, this Canadian expat in China who’s a celebrity because of his perfect Chinese.  Justin is bookish in this dryly funny and interesting way that reminds me of Rachel Ingraham and other Houghton people.

I think the thing I miss about my couch coat is that it’s not just my couch coat that I don’t have.  I feel like I was kind of quirky in college and high school, and I’m not really quirky here.  Weird (qi guai)—I am a foreigner after all—but not quirky.  When I came here, I kind of thought that I should be “professional,” since I am 22 years old, after all.  I brought my practical sweaters, my practical black coat, my practical knit pants.

How much of my identity can I keep here?  It’s odd because so much of what I love—literature, writing, playing music, singing in a choir or even just at Menno Group, somewhat thought-provoking music and movies (well, at least more thoughtful than most Chinese pop music or the Hilary Duff movies that students like) just feels a world away here.  I can’t believe that last year about this time, I was writing a paper on Oleanna, stories for Writer’s Workshop (or at least trying to convince myself to write stories), and helping people struggle to get the Lanthorn put together.

Today in my Chinese tutoring with Mrs. Lai, I learn how to talk about my college life.  Last night, as my auntie sat in bed, her feet under the covers, watching TV and waiting for my uncle to come home, I used my dictionary to find words that my little Chinese textbooks hadn’t taught me: editor, graduate student, transferring.  We sit in the classroom on the third floor of Building 8, the stark concrete walls decorated with posters students have made, with inspirational messages on them.

Mrs. Lai looks tired as she often does but yet so patient, me pointing to places on my Chinese map of the U.S. and trying to talk about my experiences in college.  I pulled out the scanned yearbook pages, the copy of the Lanthorn, my graduation program.  I show her the artwork, and she teaches me words: abstract, self-portrait, humor piece, essay.  She laughs as she tells me that slang for “ugly” in Chinese literally means “abstract,” as in an abstract painting.  I laugh, too.

And I laugh as I stumble over sentences, trying to use words that I know to convey more abstract ideas.  I tell her that in school, I liked to read modern American and international novels, that I enjoyed religion and philosophy.  That next year, Rachel is going to Boston to study in seminary.  That my mom likes teaching better than studying, but that her school wanted her to get a doctorate.  That I was a dorm leader in college and got a free dorm room for helping the students on my floor. 

Mrs. Lai, as usual, wears her tinted glasses, her pair of jeans, her red scarf, a pair of tall boots.  Her face is round, her hair stretches past her waist.  She, I realize, is an individual, is distinctive, and yet is kind enough to teach me Chinese from scratch, writing each character stroke-by-stroke, telling me each tone, stopping my bad grammar with a “time out” sign with her hands.  I tell Mrs. Lai that I lived at home for two years because my dad was sick, and she tells me how to say “help care for.”  Her daughter’s experiences, she tells me in a sentence that I can surprisingly understand every word of, are the same as mine.  Her father, Mrs. Lai’s husband, died when she was four years old.

She’s a good girl, too, Mrs. Lai tells me.  Studies hard.  And somehow, I catch that Mrs. Lai is telling me that my father would be proud of my Chinese study if he knew.  It was something that countless people have told me in English, and yet it strikes me when she says it in Chinese.  Not at the time, but as I think back.  I don’t really understand a lot about Mrs. Lai or even what she says.  In my relationship with her, like with so many people, makes her a much less rounded character than I would like.

Every week, we both become less flat characters to each other.  New words add lines to the caricatures that we unwillingly are.  I realize that so much of my identity feels tied up in ideas—ideas that I write about, listen to in music, read about in books, talk about over cups of coffee with friends at bookstore cafes or late-night diners.

And without the ideas, I feel somewhat lost, somewhat directionless.  I comment on how much dirt is in the air, how many classes I have today, how delicious the food is, how it’s warm because the sun’s out.  I envy my students sometimes, the four-year students, who can tell me stories they read about househusbands or explain the educational system in China or give me dormitory gossip or name off various types of pollution.  And yet I am still struck by Mrs. Lai, who I communicate with haltingly at best.  She is one of the people that I admire most at this school, because she is a single mother and a teacher teaching ancient Chinese literature and standard Mandarin in the English department (a pretty thankless job), because she treats me like an adult and not like a child despite my vocabulary.

I know a lot of personality can be conveyed just by mannerisms, the way you do things, the way you carry yourself and such.  I’ve felt freer recently, like I wasn’t trying to impress anyone or appear more like a lao da, an authority or experienced person.  It’s nice to be goofy, to ride a kids’ bike around the concrete courtyard of Auntie Pu’s and Uncle Wang’s house, to whistle, to sing as I’m walking up the stairs in the office building, to laugh at myself. 

I still miss the ideas, though.  How’s that for an anticlimactic ending?

            I’m hiding out in Eunice’s apartment right now.

            Sometimes I feel guilty about this.  After all, I came to China not to be in Eunice’s apartment but to be in China, outside, with Chinese people, not by myself typing on Microsoft Word.  Last semester, I found myself hiding out in order to escape and sometimes had to make myself go outside just because I felt like being outside for a little bit and being annoyed was better than being inside and feeling afraid of something imaginary.

But oddly enough, I’ve heard nary a “laowai” call in the past couple weeks and am feeling pretty good about being in China.  To the question, “Are you used to being in China,” the question that I get all the time in both languages, I feel like I can answer that, yes, I am.

I’m still in Eunice’s apartment, though, this afternoon, not in the office, not in the classroom with the Thai students, since I’ve dropped some of my Chinese classes.  Like the supposed “culture” class that really is working through a grammar textbook.  (Can’t fool me!)  I don’t feel like I’m escaping anything.  This morning, I found that I had more things to say (or muddle through saying) about my college life to Lai Laoshi that I had time to say.  Yesterday evening, I taught Wang Xue, one of my “cousins” how to play Uno, explaining in broken Chinese, which I found is not quite as easy when you don’t know how to say “skip” or “reverse.”  I don’t feel panicky or weird for the most part about being in China.

I just feel like I need introvert time.  When I was a kid, I hung out by myself a lot or with a constantly changing “best friend.”  But I mostly read.  And then sometime in my teen years, I discovered that I liked books but that I also liked people.

Last weekend, in Nanchong, someone mentioned that the CEE people, at least the ones that I sometimes hang out with, always mention the Myers-Briggs when we get together.  I’m an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs: extroverted, intuiting, feeling, and perceiving.  Which basically means that I’m an artistic, unpractical, procrastinating type.  The other characteristics are very definite, but I’m closer to the line on the extrovert/introvert trait, which I sometimes forget.  I’m finding myself in China often in the same boat as I was in at Houghton.  Wanting to be with people, to “make the most of every opportunity,” whatever that means.  But the poor little introvert side has given up even trying to speak up.  At my host family’s house, I try to spend time with them, since I’m only there in the evenings and weekends (and mornings when I eat my rice porridge and pickled vegetables and wash my face), and in the weekends, I’m often away, at church, doing stuff with the foreign language department, or something.

So I have come to several conclusions:

Conclusion the First: I should not feel guilty about not assigning homework to grade in listening and speaking classes.

Conclusion the Second: I should not feel guilty about only having 3-4 hours of Chinese class a week because I’m getting practice with my host family.

Conclusion the Third: I am allowed to sit in Eunice’s house and listen to music or type on the laptop or read a book and do other things that My Little Inner Introvert likes to do.

It’s like my own little anti-guilt constitution, to which I can add that I don’t have to feel guilty about not being fluent in the language here or about the fact that my students aren’t fluent in English or about the fact that I can’t accept every invitation from people who ask me to go see peach blossoms or come to their house and shua (Sichuanhua for “hang out”) or fold paper roses.  Or that I’m not staying longer in China.

            I guess what I’m really saying with “hiding out” is that I’m taking down time, which is a perfectly normal human activity.  It’s not like I don’t relax—after all, playing Uno with a 13-year-old or watching and semi-understanding Chinese TV is not exactly brain surgery—but it’s also not I-time, introvert time.

Conclusion the Fourth: All this blah-blah-blah to say that I’m resting like every other member of the human race.

No, not one of the strange ones that I’ve had recently, like missing plane flights and not being able to leave China or people being knifed to death.  I don’t know why I’ve had these dreams

This is the good kind of dream (meng4 xiang2, in Chinese, as I learned two weeks ago).  Yesterday, MCC sent me their magazine for this month about Christian churches in Syria, and I really enjoyed reading it: A) because, to be honest, I don’t give much thought to Syria and thought it was cool to read about people there, and B) because it reminded me that there are places outside of China.  Odd how culture-centric you become after about six months.  On Yahoo, the only news I usually read is anything with China in it or a major U.S. news story.  But there are so many places I’m curious about and fascinated with, so this was just a good reminder.

So, my dream.  Yeah, traveling, but not just traveling.  Traveling and connecting with Christians around the world and writing about their lives, churches, culture, everything.  A book, maybe?  Articles?  Learning a bit of language if I can but probably trying to find people that are “embedded” in the country, like how some of the CEEers do with North Americans that visit China.

I would love to see how things are different in different places.  Just try to encourage them by a smile and prayers and translated conversations.  Maybe stuff some envelopes or do some menial work or teach a bit of English if needed.  But mainly just unashamedly observing and learning and recording.

Eunice says that jobs like this exist.  I’ve never heard of this.  I don’t know if I’d want to do this for a job, but for a year, maybe toting along a certain English literature M.A. candidate, it would be cool.  Even if I had to fund it myself and just write a book afterward.  About a year ago, Tommy said that he thinks you need some sort of rationale for this sort of thing, and I think if I was writing, I could find a rationale.

I just think about churches in Central and South America, in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, how they’re all so incredibly diverse and have their own sets of contributions and problems.  So yes, if you ever hear about someone who’s giving away money to people that are willing to make contacts with Christians in other countries, let me know.  Or even if you have your own ideas.

Anyway.  Back to the country I AM in, gotta study some Chinese and then teach class.  Just thought I’d share.

As you might have guessed, “sawasdee kaa” (accompanied by a little bow where you press your palms together in praying style) is how you say “hello” in Thai.  This is one of a grand total of two phrases that I can say in Thai.

Language learning, obviously, has not been a big emphasis of my time here, but I’m feeling spoiled because it’s so warm, so easy, so cheap (well, compared to America, not to China).  The CEE conference was lovely and informative, time afterward has been lovely and spent with fellow CEEers.  I’ve browsed in used bookstores and eaten more Western food that I’ve eaten in the entire last five months in China.

And I don’t know if I’m ready to go back, but I will go back anyway and be happy when I get there.

Longer entry later.

As of Friday afternoon, I finally finished being a teacher for the first semester and can now become just a regular laowai/backpacker again. I had been plugging away on check-marking about 600 papers, turning my scribbled notes on oral exams into actual scores, and then transforming all the other little scribbled check-marks into actual numbers. Then calculating the actual final grades, which turned out to be much more mafan than I imagined. But I finally got into a regular routine of punching away at the calculator, and lovely people like Eunice and Liu Chang Zhu, one of the headteachers in the department, whose given names incidentally mean “long bamboo,” helped me. The venerable and wonderful Ms. Xiao, getting up from her desk, said to me, “Tao Le, bu yong ji. (Tao Le, no need to hurry.) You see, I have not finished my scores either, and I have a meeting.” In exactly that combination of Chinese and English.

So yes, I’m finished. And it’s not a minute soon enough, as my energy has been waning. So what else to do but to…travel. Hugh is going to Hong Kong. “It’s just like San Francisco,” he says. He’s staying at the Kimberley Hotel, buying books and music at the HMV, and drinking good, coffee-snob-friendly steam-brewed espresso. Eunice decided she didn’t want to travel, so she’s going to have a spiritual retreat here in Jiangyou, at the various coffee shops across town, trying a new one every day. And up till a few days ago, I thought I was going to go to Kunming and Lijiang and then hike Tiger Leaping Gorge like every other foreigner that comes to southwest China. I realized this the most fully when I was in Chengdu with Josh for a day, staying at a backpacker place. Everyone was heading to Kunming/Lijiang/Tiger Leaping Gorge next, as if there was a chip in their head that told them when to go and where. Beijing –> Xi’an –> Chengdu to see pandas and fly to Tibet –> Tibet –> Chengdu –> Yunnan. After Yunnan, they go to Yangshuo. I know it.

But…I’m stubborn. And I don’t want to be like every other foreigner that comes to southwest China, and I have this unexpected vendetta against English menus and lots of tourists. So I’ve been living on Eunice’s computer and in my Lonely Planet and have decided to take the train to Guiyang in Guizhou Province, then another train to the smaller-than-Jiangyou city of Kaili, then various forms of transportation to the Dong, Miao, and Gejia villages in the area. It’s not a highly traveled area, and it may be cold. But it will be safe since Guizhou is, after all, south of Sichuan, and it’s the dry season. I was thinking yesterday, and I thought about what a great opportunity this is for me, what a unique opportunity. I’m in a non-English speaking country, but I have the advantage of being able to speak enough Chinese to get around with minimal difficulty in a country where it’s very hard for non-Chinese speakers to get around. In the future, I might be wandering around in countries where I can’t speak the language. So might as well stretch my legs and be brave here.

One of the villages I’m planning on visiting doesn’t have a bus there. You have to ride on the back of a horse cart or somebody’s tractor. There is no guesthouse that I know of–you have to ask one of the families and pay them to let you eat dinner with them and put you up for the night. I suppose probably a lot of people back in West Virginia would say I’m crazy, but one thing I’ve learned is to watch out for myself but also that you can’t live your life in fear. And that sometimes it’s freeing to depend on the hospitality of strangers.

I actually haven’t bought a train ticket yet. I have to get that in Chengdu, I think, and it could possibly be sold out. In which case, I’ll just buy a ticket to Panzhihua in south Sichuan and then catch a bus to Lijiang…because even though I’m slightly annoyed by English menus, I do like good pizza, and I’ve heard that it can be found there. I haven’t had pizza in five months. Eunice laughed tonight when I said that I had printed out the train times and information for two different places.

“It’s like Greek tragedy,” I told her. “On a much smaller scale, of course. Let the fates decide.” So however the fates decide, it should be interesting.

Regardless, I’ll be catching a train or bus to Yibin, where I’ll meet my student Joan (I don’t want to print their Chinese names online for everyone and his/her cousin to read) and hang out with her in the village in the Bamboo Sea National Park where she and her family live.

Then I’m returning to Chengdu, the place where all roads lead in western China, where I’ll meet other CEEers and fly together to Bangkok! Two weeks of warm, warm, warm places. I’m excited about taking off my long underwear for the first extended period of time in three months. Heck, I’ll even shave my legs for the first time since September. We’re staying in Bangkok for two days before our flight to Chiang Mai, where our CEE conference is. So I’ll get a whirlwind introduction to the chaos that is Bangkok and just shua (Sichuanhua for “hang out”) for a bit, see this big enormous golden palace, and eat a bunch of pad Thai noodles.

CEE’s paying for not only our flight to Bangkok but also the connecting flight to Chiang Mai. Yes, it’s a meeting, but it’s at a resort with a Thai restaurant and a swimming pool and Thai massage and an elephant you can ride. So it’s not a real meeting.

And after that, I’m probably going to head even farther south and fly to Phuket (pronounced POO-kit, for all you giggling smart-alecks), which is a beach town in the southwest with crystal blue water and seafood and banana pancakes and guesthouses where $25 will buy me a week of lodging. So I am going to do nothing but shua shua shua all day. Read a book, journal on things to update the blog with (so many things!), sleep on the beach, get a suntan so that all my Chinese friends will think I’m ugly…

After I fly back from Phuket to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Chengdu, I’m going to go to Sharry’s home and see her family for a couple days before coming back to do lesson prep, clean my house that will be inevitably dusty from being un-lived-in for a month, rest, and (maybe, maybe, maybe) work on getting moved in to my new host “family.” The latest possibility is that I’ll move in with Sister Yang from the church, the lady that sings off-key to teach the songs to the congregation, lives alone in a small apartment in the steel factory worker housing, works full-time at the church teaching literacy classes to the grandmas and leading Bible studies and doing those work-at-a-church sorts of things. Ms. Yang, who up till last week I thought was Ms. Tang, is one of those older ladies that dye their hair and squeeze people’s arms as a source of affection. She’s also trying to learn English…which I’m kind of leery about, since “trying to learn English” often means that someone wants me to teach them English. But it would be really nice to have someone who would just speak Chinese with me so that my two-year-old vocabulary could get better.

So yes. New possibilities. I only have 2000 RMB (about $250) to my name right now, plus $25 American that my Aunt Laura and Uncle Mike sent me, and I’m traveling for four weeks, though I might have to withdraw a little money from my American bank account. I have no final plans, no train tickets, no hostel reservations, and no real agenda. I’m taking a mini-backpack with an extra sweater, a bathing suit and sandals for Thailand, underwear, socks, a book to read, the scissored-out pages of the Lonely Planet for eastern Guizhou/Lijiang/Yibin, my digital camera, a small Chinese dictionary, pictures to show to strangers that I meet, a notebook to journal, a tiny Gideon Bible, my travel sizes of everything from anti-diarrheal meds to shampoo to earplugs, and a plastic bag of food for the train. I’m just going to buy a couple cheapie Thai batik shirts and pants/skirts when I get to Bangkok and keep them for souvenirs.

I love the way I can travel now, layering on all my extra clothes on my body, wearing the same sweater for a week before washing it, carrying a tiny bag. I’ve got no super-Christian complex, but I love that I can kind of understand what Jesus said when he sent out the disciples, two by two, when he told them to take only a small bag with them and to go to whatever town would receive them. It’s about simplicity, about the freedom that comes from taking a day at a time, about not being fanatical about being well-dressed or even a bit smelly. But mostly about trusting God and about learning how to accept hospitality from other people–to empower them by letting them take care of you.

I’ll update at least one time in the next month, but until then, zaijian!