糟糕！ The Adventures of Tom

Lunch with the Education Bureau for Teachers’ Day.

“Here, have a seat in this tiny chair-bench thing.”

Students sent down to the market day street to clean up after market day. Caught this scene.

All in a day’s work.

We started teaching on September 1st. We had classes that day (Thursday), Friday, and Monday. Military training took place Monday-Thursday. Friday was Teacher’s Day. Monday was Mid-Autumn Festival, and Tuesday was the wedding of a local teacher (we weren’t invited).

Military training week was executed by some lower-ranking People’s Armed Police from Yunxian. In short, students were “taught” how to march by being yelled at by frustrated 20 something-year-olds.

Gareth and I enjoyed watching them make many rookie teacher mistakes, like one guard (what PAP “soldiers” are called) who befriended the small group for whom he was responsible. Unsurprisingly, they performed terribly. Those who were stricter with students had much better results. These two descriptions somewhat align with my teaching style last year (the guy who couldn’t control students since he was just “nice”) and the guy who could through high expectations and discipline (this year).

With all of the breaks, it’s been a strange start to the year. Fortunately, my students are starting to settle in to the rhythm of the school year. I’m teaching 7th grade again, which makes it a little awkward when I see my students from last year. “Why aren’t you teaching us this year?” There were a lot of factors, including “You guys are way behind and I don’t want to make it any worse,” “I already understand the 7th grade curriculum,” and “You guys are a year more into puberty and I don’t want to smell what you can produce with your body.”

My new banzhuren (homeroom teacher/head teacher) is the husband of my banzhuren from last year. The new banzhuren genuinely believes we have the worst behaved class of 7th grade. I win! Two years in a row! But the fact that I can control my students this year feels great. I was worried about some at first, and they’re coming around slowly. There’s some real learning going on in my classroom and I’m proud of them.

Scenes from Military Training Week (9/6-9/8/2011:

A little big for middle school.

Local teachers generally sat around and didn’t do much.

“With a little help from my friends …”

Remember little kitty? It's dead. It actually died three or four days after the previous post. I was going to bed late one night and I got a text message from River: "Tom, I think our cat is dying..." So I ran over to his room and, well, River was right. It was hardly breathing and felt very thin. It hardly responded to touch. By the morning, it was clear it was dead. In one of the more sad but funny moments of the past year, River said to me before first period, "Tom, it's really hard..."

"Cute" in Japanese.

We gave it a proper burial. In preparation, River dug the grave. He wore light blue dish-cleaning gloves and used a small spoon as a shovel. Another funny but sad moment of poor kitty's existence. We'll miss you, little guy.

We have a new friend in Dazhai. A few weeks ago during summer training, a first year fellow came across three kittens that were about to be drowned because nobody wanted them. I had trouble swallowing this reality at first, but thinking about how many thousands of kittens this happens to each day made me feel glad for these three that happened to be saved. I've grown up with cats my whole life, and one of the first cats I grew up with was saved from the beach in Saudi Arabia by my uncle Warren. Clever turned out to be one of my favorite cats we ever had (perhaps because I was around her from such a young age).

I'm still a bit worried about our new kitten. All of the recipes for kitten formula I've seen involve some kind of something we don't have here - evaporated milk, corn syrup, Pedialyte, or KMR (a special kitten food formula). So instead, we've been feeding it cow's milk. It's not ideal as it apparently gives kittens gas, but at this point I see it as either excess gas or dying.

Here's our cute little kitten:

Sleeping with his/her bowl.

Close-up.

Out kitten still has a long way to go, but it's really cute and needs lots of love. Fortunately, River and I have plenty to share with our new-found friend.

Whatever, I'm cute.

Quarter on left, again. Please give me my mom back and let me stop meowing. Please. Please.

I killed a lot of ants. A lot of ants. After using up a bottle of mold blocker, I picked up a bottle of bug killer the next morning. That was used up within ten minutes of purchase, so I got a second bottle soon after. It was super effective!

A quarter on the left to show scale:

Dead. Lots of dead.

All gone. Now I’m left to deal with mold. Yes!

Perhaps even worse (though maybe not), some of the regularly annoying local teacher children were playing outside of my room today. Little did they knew that they bag they zipped their little friend up in was previously occupied by thousands of ants and ant food/maggots. Oops.

As I’m typing this, I’m paranoid and a little creeped out. I keep feeling things that aren’t happening, and occasionally feeling things that are. I swear I’m not crazy…

After a long and busy Summer Institute, I’m finally back in Dazhai. We now have two new Chinese fellows, both females, to help us along the way. So now instead of four manly men, we are a group of four manly men and two womanly women.

My return to Dazhai came with little fanfare. River, Gareth, the two new fellows, and I all went to one of our favorite restaurants for dinner (it’s one of the two good ones in town). After chomping on fish, eggplants, and “Waffle House potatoes” (what are essentially deep-fried hash-browns), we came back and watched Paul, a new movie, in Gareth’s room. After some good laughs, it was time to turn in for bed. Well, it’s the same night and I’m still up, so you can probably guess that didn’t happen right away.

If you remember, I dealt with mold at the beginning of last semester. It ended with me using lots of bleach and buying a 1,400 RMB dehumidifier. Too bad it couldn’t run all summer because my pillow was covered in mold when I got back today, so in the garbage it went. It wasn’t nice anyway and my new one is awesome, so I’m ok with it.

The trouble came when I went to light some incense to banish the mold smell from my room. A few small ants were crawling on the windowsill by my incense holder – which caught my eye because I had very few in my room last year. (I should also quickly mention that I switched rooms with River for this year because I won when we drew straws. His room last year is bigger, so I chose to switch.) I didn’t think much of the ants until I saw a few more crawling on the curtain. Despite trying to crush as many as I could, there seemed to be almost an infinite number of them. That’s when I pulled my bed back to look at the bottom of the curtain, and, well, you take a look:

Yeah, it wasn’t good.

Yikes.

A closer look at my night.

It wasn’t good. I didn’t know where to start. I considered joining Richard, who was seeking refuge from the mold in his room, at the hotel down the street. I then thought about whatever nasty chemicals we had lying around. There was no bleach, but I did have some anti-mold spray. I checked out the label: “3 (trihydroxysilyl)propyldimethyloctadecyl ammonium chloride” sounded poisonous enough, so I went to town on the miniature ant colony and its pile of white somethings (eggs? food? space-matter?).

Most of the critters began to slow, but some identified their attacker somehow and began crawling on me. With ants crawling on me and biting all over, I began to slap myself every time I got nipped. It was a masochist’s favorite version of whack-a-mole.

The super-mold-poison eventually worked its magic and with the ants sufficiently subdued (read: dead), I picked up the infested bags and tossed them outside.

Tomorrow’s lunch?

I’m now in my chair at my desk and ants continue to crawl on me. I feel a bit like Gulliver: restrained, crawled on, and attacked by little annoying creatures. Though I don’t think the citizens of Lilliput bit Gulliver in his underwear. Wish me luck.

At the beginning of dinner on Friday, Popo offered to give us a treat to take home - zongzi (粽子 zòng zi). You can read more about zongzi through this Wikipedia link, but in short, they are "a traditional Chinese food, made of glutinous rice stuffed with different fillings and wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves. They are cooked by steaming or boiling" (from Wikipedia). They're traditionally eaten around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival because, as legend has it, locals threw the treats into the river where a respected man had just killed himself so the fish would eat the rice and not the man's body. I had my first zongzi when I spent a month in 2004 studying Chinese in Taiwan. Cut the string open, peel the bamboo leaf back, and enjoy the sticky glutinous rice treat.

One of Popo's zongzi from Friday evening (5/27/2011) ready to be opened and enjoyed.

Gareth and I sat around for close to 45 minutes after finishing our meal. We're both pretty contemplative at times, and sitting around with nothing to do (as happens frequently here) can lead to interesting conversations about how this experience will shape us for the rest of our lives. They're fun conversations, but lounging in a fly-infested cafeteria while Popo tells you, "They'll be ready right away!" can get old pretty quickly.

After nearly 40 minutes of waiting, Gareth decided to jet back up to the room. I couldn't blame him. Just a few minutes later, Popo proved the old adage true: good things come to those who wait!

Popo does her thing.

Back in my room, I delicately cut the string that kept the the zongzi sealed and slowly peeled back the leaves to expose the steaming hot sticky rice. With each bite, the freshly cooked glutinous rice would adhere to my lips for a split second before I rounded up each grain with my lips and tongue. It was simply too good to not enjoy even the smallest piece. I have to admit that I even licked up the few grains of rice that stuck to the bamboo leaf. Though these zongzi didn't have the red bean fillings I loved so much in Taiwan, they were delicious. Thanks to Popo and her crew for all that they do for us!

Popo is our chef-extraordinaire. She's somewhere in her 70s, and she and her three daughters (or somehow-related family members) cook dinner for us every night. Popo means "grandma" in Chinese (婆婆 pópo), and is a general name to call an old woman. She and her daughters break their backs each day to prepare meals for us that delight our Western palate. While the local teachers prefer things like organs, pickled vegetables, and oily pig fat, Popo and her crew serve us up with scrambled eggs with tomato, minced chicken, and fresh cauliflower. Lucky us!

I once showed up late to a meal because I was making copies and I ended up eating with Popo and her family of cafeteria workers. One of the daughters served as a mildly useful translator, as Popo and the other works speak dialect-laced Mandarin that I can only partially understand. The daughter said how Popo is over 70 years old, is almost totally illiterate, and worked hard her whole life to bring good things to her family.

One of the cafeteria workers peels vegetables during dinner.

Popo's appearance is unforgettable, too. The first thing you'll notice is that she loves wearing hats - sometimes the blue bonnet you'll see in an upcoming post, and in the winter months, her favorite head accessory is a black NBA beanie. She doesn't dare hold back a smile, and it seems that she makes her life as joyful as possible - how could you survive the last 70 years in China without an optimistic view of the world?

Though her positivity is her most obvious feature, she has characteristics that indicate that her life hasn't been all roses. Her outer features betray her every effort to appear as if she's had only a wonderful life. Her teeth that come through with each gleeful smile are almost all capped with silver and many are broken. Her skin is leathery and wrinkled, the result of a tough life spent working outside. Popo isn't afraid to express her true opinions, either. When the school takes us out to eat and doesn't inform her that nobody will be eating, she ends up wasting food and money. There have been multiple occasions when that no-BS attitude – which must have gotten her through so much before – rears its head.

Popo's life, now spent cooking food for students and teachers in Dazhai while surrounded by her family, is pretty good compared to other locals. She has a stable job, gets to be around her loved ones, and interacts with different people all day. Her life is comfortable. She can afford to have fun, to smile, and to relax a little bit. The tough-as-nails Popo still lives, but fortunately doesn't need to come out as much as I imagine it did in the past. I imagine Popo's been through a lot so she certainly deserves to live quite decently.

OK, so maybe it's pink. Last weekend we had a training session in Yunxian, the closest city to Dazhai. We went out to hot pot after our day of training and one of the Chinese fellows I ate with ordered brain.

Brain: It's what's for dinner!

I was weirded out at first since that's not something I've even heard of Chinese people eating. Though being in the land of scorpion-eating and bull-penis-chomping (a surprisingly delicious delicacy Gareth and I had in Sichuan), little is still surprising in terms of table fare.

Sean, the Chinese fellow, carefully cut up the brain and discarded the cerebellum - I guess that's the "gross" part - and loaded the other part of the brain into a slotted spoon to cook in the hot pot. After about 15 minutes, a pale version of the formerly-pink brain emerged. I was a bit reluctant to try it at first, but ended up giving it a go. It was silky smooth. The taste was a little more organ-y than I usually like, but the velvety texture reminded me of other delicacies that have been missing from my life like fine cheese. That's right, eating brain reminds me of cheese. What have I become?