Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Read online

  They went on to say we should teach our classes as we saw fit. The curriculum and structure of the classes would be completely up to us. Then they asked us to go to a dinner with them on an eating street downtown sometime soon. They made no mention of sitting in on our classes, which one of us should teach what or rules and regulations we should follow. We felt liberated and overwhelmed by their lack of direction. They told us how diligent their students were and told us to teach using the latest methods, which was exactly what the president of the school had said.

  Soon after they arrived, the deans left. Margaret and I decided that I would teach American culture and she would teach oral English and Bible stories. We knew that we would have to help each other and rely heavily on the Internet since neither one of us had ever taught before nor were we sure what learning level the students were.

  Luckily, our apartments had resources left by past teachers like sheets of idiomatic expressions, old tests and student journals. In my apartment there was a poster with “I’m a Little Teapot” spelled out and a drawing of a pot. I couldn’t imagine that the same grade level that was learning to tip over their spout could learn about American culture, too.

  CHINESE COLLEGE LIFE

  It was a complete shock to me to find that our little university in China was the antithesis of mine in America.

  When I was in college, I clearly remember walking to classes alone because my friends didn’t usually choose the ones I did – like politics and music, history of theatre and symphonic literature. I loved everything about the liberation of college. I made myself get up for early classes by promising that I would get a French vanilla cappuccino from the school snack bar beforehand. I made plans to meet up with friends in the library in the afternoons. I met new people in my classes whose notes I knew I would need to borrow in the future. College gave me my first taste of independence and freedom.

  About three weeks into the school year at Anhui Normal University, I was invited into one of the girls’ dorms and I found out that the female students lived in rooms with six students. The boys lived in rooms of eight to ten students. Each dorm room was about ten feet wide and twelve feet long with anywhere from eight to twelve bunk beds packed in. The spare bunk beds were used as storage and laundry space. In each of the rooms I went into there were lines of rope covered with wet laundry drying. At least fifteen pairs of shoes were stacked beside the doorway and there were more piles of shoes on the small two-foot by four-foot balcony. Each girl wanted to show me her tiny bunk, which they had tried hard to infuse with personal flare. I saw Hello Kitty stickers over one and two posters of Chinese pop stars with long manes of curly, jelled hair.

  Compared to my college experience, these students were packed in like rats. They shared these rooms with the same girls for four years. I wondered how in the world they got to sleep at night and how many incidences of cat fights there were every year. And what if you got stuck with dullards or mean girls? There didn’t seem to be an easy way to switch roommates. The students that the girls roomed with were also their classmates. They moved in herds to class and they ate and studied together. From what they told me, they stayed in the same class and the same dorm rooms with the same roommates for four years! I couldn’t have imagined a more stifling and codependent situation. It seemed more like a boarding school to me than a college.

  When I described my college experience, I couldn’t help but notice how privileged and spoiled it sounded. I found I didn’t want to talk about what college was like for me or what my home life was like. None of these students could drive or probably ever would drive a car. They had never flown in a plane. Many of them had never been out of their province, much less traveled to other countries. I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was compared to them. I felt an overwhelming sense of shame because of it. More than anything else, I wondered if their creativity and independence was being stifled because of the roommate and classroom situation.

  Another phenomenon to me was that my students would have their friends hand me notes when they couldn’t make it to school saying things like, “Teacher, I go to hospital. Please forgive me, teacher. I see you next week.”

  The first time this happened, it seemed endearing and even funny to me. Then, as the notes started to add up and the seats started to empty, I understood. The joke was on me. Margaret was having the same thing happen in her classes and so I decided to institute an attendance policy that included a dean’s signature on notes. This seemed to curb the students’ absences, but it didn’t stop the cutting completely.

  I assigned journal homework that counted as forty percent of the students’ total grade and I gave multiple warnings when it was due. When I collected the journals, I was surprised to see that many of the students hadn’t done a single assignment and half of them were supposed to be done DURING CLASS. It baffled me that they would turn in journals with no work in them. When I gave back the journals with poor grades on them many of these same students who had done no work came to me and gave me presents and begged me for a second chance saying, “Teacher, please, forgive me. I did not do the work.”

  I knew that I was in a rural area and a poor province, but I was gift-wrapping my students’ grades and they still wouldn’t do the work. It didn’t seem like very Chinese college behavior to me. It seemed like American slackass high school behavior.

  I AM AMERICAN, YOU ARE CHINESE

  One day I ventured to a school store to buy a prepaid phone card. I bought these regularly after Linda showed me where to buy them and told me how much they should cost. They were my link to home until George and my parents learned how to use Skype and call me. As soon as the small, old lady in the store saw me walk in, she pulled open a rickety drawer in an old wooden desk and pulled out a stack of phone cards. She knew that there was nothing else that I wanted or had any clue about asking to buy.

  This day as I left the store, I passed a circle of old men and saw Mr. One, the school driver, was among them. He was wearing his usual black dress pants, buttoned down shirt and old, tan leather, bomber jacket. He smiled at me and nodded his head as usual. I paused and decided it was time to utilize the Mandarin I had learned from listening to language CDs and repeating after them.

  “Wo shi Meiguoren. Ni shi Zhongguoren,” I said using the back of my throat as much as possible to mimic the tones I had heard. It meant I am American, You are Chinese. It seemed so silly after I said it, but it was as much as I was sure of from the CDs. Also, I didn’t think I should ask Mr. One his name since I already knew it.

  After hearing these two sentences, Mr. One’s eyes lit up with understanding and kindness. He began repeating my sentence to the other men in the circle and following it up with rapid fire Mandarin. He might have been saying, “The American is a friggin’ genius,” but from his eyes I guessed he went on to say something like, “You gotta give it to her! She’s trying.” He was like a proud father hearing words from his toddler for the first time.

  He walked towards me, shook my hand, and asked me questions, or at least I thought he probably was.

  “Wo hui shuo yi dien pudong hua,” I responded, meaning I can speak a little Mandarin. This was true, but then again, I had just spoken almost every word of the Chinese I knew by the end of that very sentence. Mr. One continued to shake my hand and speak to me as if we were now close confidants. Finally, he let me go and backed into his circle of friends, no doubt to continue the morning gossip, but I could feel his smiling eyes follow me up the path to my apartment.

  I learned a lot from that brief encounter. The Chinese, like us, appreciate someone’s attempt to learn their language. I had literally told Mr. One nothing new, but my words said to him that I was trying to learn his language, to understand his culture and to get to know more about his people. He appreciated it and his approval drove me to learn more.

  Over the coming months, I would look for him on campus and share my newest sentences. Still, I would hear him repeat my first sentences to others when I came ne
ar.

  WAKEY WAKEY

  “Yeee, er, san, suh, wooh, lyoo, chee, bah, jeeyo, shur.” That is one through ten in Mandarin as best I can spell it. I heard those numbers repeated every weekday morning at 8am sharp over the school loudspeaker. They were a rude awakening, because I’d fallen into a pattern like I was back in college again. I slept as late as possible, usually until around 10:00am, I napped in the early afternoon and stayed up until almost 2am every night. It was a fabulous existence from a rest point of view.

  The first morning I heard it, I jumped ass out of bed thinking we were under attack. I heard a booming voice telling us to evacuate in rapid staccato Chinese. That was before I could count in Mandarin.

  I left my apartment to find out what was going on. I followed the small school roads until I saw the basketball court. There, on the pavement, surrounded by ten hoops, were hundreds of students in equidistant rows doing short hand, leg and body movements in time with the counting. The students seemed to have done this routine many times before. They weren’t exactly exercising. It was more like a rhythmic dance that reminded me of quick, lazy Tai Chi. Then again, they were college kids and this seemed more like the kind of thing I did at camp.

  I asked a student about this ritual of waking students for morning calisthenics before school started and was told that it was for disciplining freshmen and it wasn’t optional. The counting only lasted about ten minutes. Then the morning report started, followed by the morning music. The report told of general news and the occasional message from President Hu Jintao. The music was always the same. It came on again at lunch and in the afternoon, always the same music morning, noon and night. It was a mix of Chinese Opera, Chinese pop, American pop and Italian Opera. I loved to hear Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye” in the afternoon. It told me that the day was over. And the Chinese Opera? Well, I got over it, but I never warmed to it because it always sounded to me like cats being mutilated.

  Although I never slept through the morning counting, it was nice to have this ritual through the workweek. Then again, don’t you indoctrinate people through rituals, chanting and repetition? Part of me wondered if this was a control effort by the communist party. I never found out, but I did learn how to count as if it were second nature or had been burned into my brain.

  HOW MANY CHINESE DOES IT TAKE TO FIX A TOILET?

  The second week I was in China, I had my first Tuesday off work. I only worked four days a week for a total of eighteen hours. In that way, it was the easiest job I had ever had. I thought I would spend that whole first day off relaxing in my apartment and relishing not having to stand up for hours in front of a room full of expectant Chinese youth struggling to understand me as I explained American holidays, sports, politics and customs. Instead of being relaxing though, my day started out with me waking up early to wait for Linda to come see about my broken toilet, which had a fresh bowel movement in it because I couldn’t wait and there was nowhere else for me to go to the bathroom the night before.

  See, dysentery waits for no one, Margaret and Dianne weren’t home and I didn’t want to brave the English building toilets, which were glorified holes with no toilet paper and the smell of stale sewage hanging in the air above them. Worse than that, if students were in there they would look over the three-foot high stalls and stare at me and I couldn’t stand that. I should have resisted the rolls I ate on the street the night before that had “meat” inside them. But I was finally starting to like the taste of steamed dumplings called Bao-zi (pronounced bowtza), so I ate two of them before I realized that they were lukewarm. They must have been sitting out for hours. I downed a Coke afterwards hoping that it would cook the meat churning in my stomach and make it less toxic. Obviously, it did not.

  When the doorbell of my apartment rang, I expected to see Linda, but instead I was face to face with two Chinese men standing in the doorway. They did not speak any English and one of them was good looking. He was the first man I had found attractive in Wuhu. He looked somewhat like a Chinese Pierce Brosnan in his suit. He had short, straight, jet-black hair, a tan face and a lean, tall body with broad shoulders and a thin waist. He didn’t look like the plumber to me.

  The two men were standing apprehensively in my doorway and they wanted to come in, but, as I had learned, no one in China enters your home without putting on slippers. It is very important in their culture not to dirty up someone’s home, even if that home was incredibly messy to begin with like mine.

  I stood at the threshold of the door in my tube socks, mesh basketball shorts and oversized, hoodie sweatshirt wishing that they would go away or that I looked cuter. The bathroom needed airing out and my face desperately needed some makeup. When I tried to open up a window to let some fresh air in before they came, the pane of glass that was in the windowsill above the toilet nearly fell out. It wasn’t so much sealed in as it was propped there precariously.

  After beckoning them in by doing my best impersonation of a crossing guard, I shook my hands at the line of slippers and footies and motioned that they didn’t have to wear anything in my apartment. They ignored my hand signals and finally opted for the footies. After they strapped them on over their shoes, I reluctantly showed them into my miniscule bathroom. Feeling my still weak stomach do a flip at the smell, I stayed outside, unwilling to see their reactions to the full toilet.

  Then three more men showed up at the door. One by one they put on the footies and headed into my bathroom until there were five Chinese men staring at my toilet. Not one of them spoke a word of English. The men were all crammed into the tiny bathroom like cigars in a pack. They stayed for what seemed like an hour, holding a summit over the toilet. I was mortified. On this freezing cold winter morning, my normally clammy hands were dripping sweat and my cheeks were flushed with embarrassment.

  Then, unexpectedly, another man showed up to fix the Internet on the computer. His name was Mr. Wong. Fortunately, he spoke some English. The men in the bathroom told him what was going on. I used him as a translator to tell them, ‘No, I did not put anything hard in the toilet; if by hard you meant something other than poo (Mine can be tough obviously).’ I omitted telling them that I had flushed some dental floss down the toilet. However, I was pretty sure that one of them would find out anyway and deport me.

  Mr. Wong, who was a little round man with a round smile and hair that stood at attention on the crown of his head, got to work on the computer. I stood (in my hoodie and mesh shorts) in the middle of the apartment between the living room and the bathroom looking at the backs of the five bobbing, black heads hoping they would fix the toilet and get the hell out of there.

  A seventh man, who turned out to be the actual plumber, showed up with an ancient-looking machine with a long, skinny hose on the top of it. As far as I could tell it was some sort of old-fashioned pump. Peeking into the backroom when the handsome man and a few others left for a break, I saw the plumber plunging the hose down into the toilet with his BARE HANDS. There was brown water sloshing all over the bathroom floor. He would plunge the hose far down into the toilet. Then the machine would start making a gurgling noise and he would try to flush the toilet. He wasn’t successful. Each time he tried plunging, more brown water slopped onto the floor. Finally, he took his machine and left my apartment, leaving me a bathroom floor completely covered in sludge and a still-broken toilet. How many Chinese men does it take to fix an aboveground toilet? More than six.

  After the plumber left, Mr. Wong finally finished re-installing the Internet. He had seen my small, family album on the desk and he used his little English and an Internet site to show me his family on the computer. They looked stoic – like those unsmiling pictures from Civil War America – lined up in front of a small shack. When he pointed out his thin, striking wife to me, I felt a huge pang surge through my chest for George. I wanted him to know what it was like in Wuhu. I wanted him with me.

  When Linda finally called, she informed me that the plumber would be coming back with another ma
chine that might fix the toilet. Might? I wondered what would happen if they couldn’t fix it. Clearly there weren’t many real toilets in China for the plumbers to practice fixing. I was spooked. I didn’t think I could bear having to go to the campus squat pots every day. And what about going in the middle of the night? Would I have to start using the sink?

  The plumber came back the next day and brought a new machine with him that looked like an old timey vacuum. A small assistant with an eager young face was with him. After the plumber fixed the toilet, he promptly left with the vacuum. The assistant came to me speaking in Chinese and making hand motions towards the bathroom. I called Linda to translate. After he spoke to her, I got on the phone and she told me that the toilet was fixed and the school would pay for it. Then she asked me, “Have you been putting paper in the toilet?”

  “Yes.”

  “You cannot put paper in the toilet,” she said. “It will damage the toilet. You must put the paper in the trashcan.”

  I figured this beat the hell out of having to do my business in the sink.

  “Tell the others that they should put the paper in the trashcans, too.”

  When I got off the phone with Linda, I was so excited to have a fixed toilet that I turned to the small assistant. He was smiling broadly. Thanking him profusely with words and gestures, I suddenly threw out my arms to hug him. His eyes bulged and I immediately realized my faux pas. I pulled my arms back as soon as I could, but because I had started to swoop forward like a mama bird and he had nervously extended his arms out in reaction to me, we clasped forearms in an awkward embrace. I saw it in his eyes – I had gotten fresh with him on accident. I nodded my head quickly and said my best Chinese thank you once more and walked quickly towards the door.