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

  I told the others about the new toilet paper policy. Dianne did what they asked, but Margaret’s immediate and final response was, “Hell no.”

  Margaret and I turned out to be a typical Northerner and Southerner. I would inevitably tell fibs so I wouldn’t hurt feelings, obey customs and try new, “interesting” foods that were proffered. Margaret would not, with a few exceptions. She never did tell the Chinese that she disliked their food, and she felt guilty for depriving them of this truth. Margaret did things her way and as far as I could tell she did not feel the pressure to placate the Chinese that I felt. She also never got to experience the seven man plumbing crew. Lucky dog.

  WHAT IS A CHINESE PICNIC LIKE?

  (the “good class” with Dianne, Margaret and me)

  After teaching for a month and a half, when the chill of winter started to leave the air, my best class of students who Margaret and I had, by default, started to call the “good class,” invited us on a picnic at nearby Tien Mien Mountain.

  They were the good class because they all showed up, raised their hand to answer questions and volunteered to speak English without us having to beg or call names from the roll. They seemed to get excited when I gave them an in-class exercise like building a story about a Chinese student visiting an American home. In my other classes the students seemed to like working in groups on an exercise, but when it came to speaking they were terrified. Most of them seemed to put forth very little effort. Some students in my other classes would completely refuse to do an exercise that involved working alone or presenting in front of the class.

  The good class told me that they had scored the highest on their school examinations and they and another class of juniors were going to be getting their college degree, while four of our sophomore classes had tested poorly and would only be receiving an associate’s degree after four years.

  According to my students, the mountain that we would be picnicking on that day was made famous when the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote about it. They told me that it was a mountain that had been split in two by the Yangtze River. Now one half was on one side of the river and the other half on the other side.

  The students asked that the “other foreign teacher” join us as well. When we asked Dianne to come along she agreed and told us that she had wanted to ride a boat on the Yangtze all her life.

  The three of us went with twenty students who insisted on carrying large shopping bags of food as we headed off of the school grounds at 9 a.m. I thought it was a bit early for lunch, but the students were so eager that we complied. A packed city bus took us to a small country road twenty minutes north of the school. Since there were no buses directly to the mountain, we got off the bus and then split off into small groups of four or five to take other vehicles. After much bargaining between the students and the drivers we got into three-wheeled automobiles to travel the rest of the way to the mountain.

  When we got there I wondered if our students had gotten the words “hill” and “mountain” mixed up. This “mountain” was about six stories high. We saw many students from other classes climbing up one side of it. Our students decided that too many people were climbing at this time and that we should go directly to the picnic spot they had chosen. I thought that we would lay down our blanket and have our early morning picnic near the mountain. As it turned out, we were only at the beginning of our journey.

  We walked by several ancient looking buildings that were nestled into the side of this hill-mountain. They were all part of an ancient Buddhist temple. The buildings were painted yellow with the red tiled roofs that curled at the ends. Festive red banners with Chinese characters hung from the roofs.

  (Buddhist temple in Wuhu near the Yangtze)

  When we came to the bank of the Yangtze River, we started taking group pictures. In almost every photo we took, the students would hold up their fingers in the bunny ears sign or the peace sign. I never learned which it was. The students told us that we were waiting for boats that could carry our group to the other side of the river.

  About thirty minutes later, a ramshackle boat pulled up to the bank. The students began shouting to the small, rough looking captain. Kristy, the class monitor, came over to tell us what was going on.

  “It is too expensive,” she said. “He sees you three foreign teachers and wants a lot of money. It is too expensive, I think. We will wait for another boat.”

  The way it worked was that boats would see groups gathered and come by to offer their services, like unofficial water taxis.

  The next boat’s price must have been acceptable because the students told us to get on. They refused to allow us to pay. The boat docked in the sand. One of the workers put one end of a ten-foot long plank on the boat and lodged the other end on the shore. We all held hands to board the boat like a line of paper dolls. The students made sure that the three of us got on carefully screaming, “Take care,” repeatedly. They made sure that at least two of them had their hands on us at all times. Dianne and I couldn’t help but laugh at how they mothered us. This was behavior I had seen in Linda and thought it was only because she was in charge of us; obviously it was a trait many Chinese shared.

  (a boat on the Yangtze)

  The ride to the other side of the river was short and rocky. Then we started our trek to the campsite, where we would picnic.

  By crossing the Yangtze, we had entered another city called Chouhu (pronounced Chow Hoo). Our student Wendy was from Chouhu. She walked along with us pointing out sunflower fields. She said that many Chinese cooked with sunflower oil. She told us that we would be having the picnic near a very old Buddhist temple in Chouhu. On the way to it, we passed a gravesite that Wendy said was the spot of a very important battle between the Communist army and the Kuomintang, which was the group that overthrew the last dynasty in China and ruled before the Communists took over control.

  We finally made it to another “mountain” in the middle of a wooded area where there was another small building with a red tiled roof – the Buddhist temple. It was the spot the students had chosen for a picnic. The building was much less grand that the last temple we had seen. It was one small building that had turned a dingy white color over time. Two, snarling, plaster lions guarded the door. Multicolored triangle banners hung from the trees.

  (the little Buddhist temple)

  The students chose an outdoor spot that had a small bench nearby with bamboo and other trees for shade. Then I noticed what was in the large bags that the students had been schlepping. They had packed woks, burners, matches, fuel, chopsticks, noodles, vegetables, meats and spices for our picnic. I thought that we were going to be eating cold Chinese foods that were the equivalent of sandwiches and chips. I didn’t know exactly what that might be, but I certainly didn’t expect our students to haul woks, uncooked noodles and vegetables five miles to cook us hot meals.

  The students told us to sit on the lone bench nearby. They gave us some crackers to eat while we waited. They had also brought some cold, spicy noodles for us to eat while they prepared the hot food. Then they busied themselves with getting the woks ready. They seemed very organized as they worked. In teams of about five they squatted and began setting up woks, lighting the cooking fuel and preparing each dish.

  (me and Wendy)

  (Chinese picnic food)

  When the students told us the meal was ready, they gave us each a bowl and chopsticks. Then they invited us to taste all of the dishes with them. Watching what they did, we proceeded to walk around from wok to wok scooping up hunks out of each with our chopsticks.

  One dish was bok choy, which is a vegetable with crunchy white stalks and green leaves, and other vegetables and a sausage-like meat that was prepackaged. I avoided eating this substance for fear of more bathroom woes. Another dish had flat noodles, bok choy and tomatoes in it. The third contained skinny noodles, a kaleidoscope of vegetables, tofu and a spicy sauce that was so hot it brought tears to my eyes when I tasted it.

  After we finished eating
, it was decided we should play games like charades. They broke off into teams and started acting out English words like “horse,” “happy,” and “girl.”

  By the end of the meal and the games, it was around one o’clock and I hadn’t used the bathroom since we left our apartments. The long walk had dehydrated me, but after our lunch I had to go. A group of four girls was going to a nearby bathroom. I tagged along. Although Margaret and Dianne had both told me that they needed to go, they declined.

  When we reached the public bathroom, the girls and I charged in and I saw the worst bathroom I’d seen yet. From the outside, it looked like a small concrete building on the top of a slope. On the inside, it was dark and had just two holes that were dug deep and were open to the outside. There were no dividing walls. The stench was putrid. One of the girls started to unbutton her pants and squat down when I yelled out “Whoa!”

  Perplexed, they just stared at me.

  “I’ll just wait outside,” I said.

  They covered their mouths giggling and then said, “No, teacher, you go.”

  “Okay, uh, can I be alone?”

  They looked at me like I was crazy. Then, speaking Chinese to one another, they reluctantly went outside and left me alone. As fast as I could I tried to squat down and go before I threw up from the smell. As I was squatting, I made the mistake of looking down into the hole, which was illuminated from the bottom by the light outside. I saw bloodstained tissues and flies circling the waste. I peed as fast as I could and ran past the girls telling them that I would meet them at the picnic spot. When I got back to Dianne and Margaret I gave them a full report.

  Before leaving the picnic site, we took a quick tour of the temple. It was so plain on the outside that when I saw the ornate gold statues of queens and kings inside, I was somewhat shocked. Some of the students lit candles and bowed their heads before these statues. Dianne decided that we should give the temple some money for letting us have a picnic there. She put a wad of Yuan into an offering.

  Then we started the trek back to Tien Mien Mountain. As we walked, the students wanted to sing English songs, so we sang “Jingle Bells” and “Red River Valley” for thirty minutes because those were the only songs they all knew.

  After an hour we finally made it to Tien Mien Mountain. We took another ramshackle boat ride to the other side of the river. There we found out that we would be traveling back to school in a different manner than we had come. In groups of four or five we climbed into the back of small, soft-top vehicles that looked like miniature army trucks. We bumped along home for about half an hour. When we arrived back at the school at four o’clock, the three of us were so tired that we all went to our apartments for a long afternoon nap.

  ROAST PRICKLY ASH

  After a few weeks in China, the weekends became my time to travel. Buses and trains could get me to the surrounding big cities easily. I went to see more of China, but in each new city I ended up scouring the place for Western food. I was in the pursuit of a Mexican restaurant, hamburgers or any meal that did not include rice or noodles.

  Margaret, Dianne and I would find coffee houses that claimed to offer a “Western breakfast.” One of these places was Paris’s Nighttime Western Coffee Restaurant. It was ornately decorated with plush couches, high tables, carved wooden walls with red and gold paint and flamboyant pillars and statues sprinkled throughout the dark interior. The music that played varied from the McDonald’s theme song “I’m Lovin’ It” and Chinese pop to French classics and “When a Man Loves a Woman.”

  The Western food on the menu was “ham sanwitch,” which was pink mystery meat and a barely fried egg, sunny side up. When we attempted to order bread, using words from a book we brought with us, the waitress ended up bringing us a sweet pastry with red bean filling.

  (Dianne and Margaret inside Paris’s Nighttime Western Coffee Restaurant)

  Over the months we spent together, Margaret, Dianne and I ate in many places like this. Clearly Western translation was not their specialty, but they boasted western food nonetheless. In restaurants like these, we would find the most amazing English names for Chinese dishes. Some of the best names were: Tough Mother’s Drunk Fish, The Garlic Burned the Bullfrog, Rough Hot Belly Slice, Bomb the Crab Willow Fragily, and (my personal favorite) Pig’s Tail of Mixture of Salt and Roast Prickly Ash. It could only make us wonder what was lost in the literal translation. What could Roast Prickly Ash really be?

  I guessed that the Chinese might find some of our food names confusing, too. What would they think of donuts, bear claws, ladyfingers, Buffalo wings, deviled eggs and…hot dogs? Now that’s a name that might really through them off.

  Eating local meals that included meat – like the ever-present fried rice and fried noodles – I wondered if the Chinese ate dogs like I’d always heard they did. Once, in an attempt to get her Oral English class talking, Margaret had students stand up and give short talks about Chinese culture. One student that presented stood up sheepishly and said that he knew what Westerners thought of the Chinese eating dogs. As soon as he said the words “eating dogs,” the class monitor turned around in her seat and shook her head vigorously at him. Margaret was intrigued and asked him to go on, but he refused to say anther word and sat down in a huff.

  Two of our best students, Helen and Eva, who were in our “good class” of juniors, invited Margaret and me to dinner once. We found they spoke English so well that hours sitting with them were actually fun and enlightening instead of agonizing and labored.

  Helen and Eva were not only interested in our experiences in China, they were also curious about life in American and open to telling us about some of the aspects of China that others, like Linda, was more secretive about.

  At the first dinner with Helen and Eva, we got into a conversation about Chinese people eating dogs. Eva was particularly eager to fill us in on Chinese eating habits. She claimed that eating dog was still very common, but she said, “I have never tasted it.”

  She claimed that her family dog had been taken when she was growing up and they had accepted the fact the dog had been eaten.

  Eva also told us about Chinese people eating monkey brains out of the skulls of live monkeys. She told us that the monkeys were usually babies. They were caught and kept in small cages. The monkey was guaranteed to be alive while its brain was eaten. This was a delicacy in China and they were very expensive. If the monkey died while being eaten, then the customer didn’t have to pay. So it was important that it remain alive. Eva told us that a small chisel was used to crack the monkey’s skull and that the hot brains were then scooped out and eaten.

  (me, Eva, Helen and Margaret)

  By June, Margaret and I were so starved for diversity of food that we ventured to the five-story Walmart in Wuhu (said “Wa Ma” by the Chinese). Margaret had discovered it while wondering around on a day off. We had heard about a Korean restaurant on the third floor of this Walmart, which turned out to be very swanky by Wuhu standards. It had escalators and other upscale restaurants and shops on the five different levels. Only the rich in Wuhu shopped in Walmart because you couldn’t bargain there.

  When Margaret and I walked into the Korean restaurant on the third floor, we found it was immaculately clean with light wood floors, tables and chairs. Bamboo stalks divided the restaurant into segmented rooms and gave it a cozy feel. We were the only patrons for lunch on a hot spring day and we sat at the tables with sweat dripping down our backs. We were immediately served free appetizers, which were five small dishes of assorted vegetables in tiny bowls. One bowl contained kimchi, a Korean signature dish that tastes like spicy cabbage. The other vegetables turned out to be mashed potatoes, pickles and some items that looked like leeks, green beans and beets.

  When we looked at the menu, we found “Dog Casserole” prominently listed on the page of specials.

  At that point, Margaret refused to eat any meat for lunch (it was a testament to how desperate we were that she would even stay and eat at all). We brief
ly considered buying another jar of peanut butter in Walmart, but we decided to get the assorted vegetable salad at the restaurant instead. When it arrived, it had an extra large scoop of “meat” in the center. When we asked what it was we got a familiar response, “Maybe pork.”

  We left the Korean restaurant and bought crackers and cokes in the Walmart. Even after eating these crackers and drinking the cokes, we felt psychologically hungry. We wanted a prepared meal that did not contain rice, noodles or dog.

  THE HARDEST WORKING FAMILY IN CHINA

  Growing up, the hardest working families that I knew were two Greek-American families that ran the local grease-pit, The Sugar ‘n Spice Drive In Restaurant, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It was a restaurant that started in 1961 in the days of saddle oxfords, poodle skirts and muscle cars. The Spice, as it’s known by patrons, still serves a mix of American favorites like hamburgers and onion rings and Greek delicacies like souvlaki (steak on a stick) and baklava (delicious nutty pastries) and it has lasted through the likes of McDonald’s, drive-through windows and Chinese takeout.

  It is a landmark in my hometown and I worked there for two summers after high school. During my shifts I saw how hard it is to work day in and day out in a place where you ingest grease just by breathing the air and your skin smells like onion rings at the end of the day no matter how many times you shower and scrub it with soap.