in-between, this is how we do

On my last day in Shenzhen, I woke up early and sorted through my things. I cleared my desk of the things I had made ready for the single day and ran a final check through my suitcases. Even though I was leaving them here for a few days, I wanted all to be ready when I returned from Fuzhou, so that when I returned I could just swing by my room to grab my luggage and quickly be off on my way to Hong Kong and America a week from now. I checked through another bag, too: one full of chocolate boxes and messages on index cards. It was this one that I lugged with me towards the English Department office.

I spent the last day at Yucai Third Middle gifting these boxes to teachers and administrators as farewell presents, and taking group photographs with students who requested them. All of them have treated me very kindly this year, so while the Center for Teaching and Learning in China, the organization that brought us foreign teachers to Shenzhen, did not recommend or mention procuring farewell gifts, I still wanted to show my appreciation. I even got some wonderful farewell gifts of my own from some administrators, including a miniature crystal replica of an ancient imperial vase and a long scroll inlaid with calligraphy and paintings from Kaifeng. Students were coming and going as well, asking me to sign “yearbook” like sheets and giving me class photographs with warm goodbye messages written on their backs. One student even gave me a dual-language book, a handmade card proclaiming how moved his heart had been by my casual coursework and a little Chinese flag upon which he had written “No matter where you go, you will always be a Chinese!” And two hugs.

So you can imagine how my heart sort of fell when I woke up this morning in Fuzhou to two emails from unnamed students.

“Do you like bitch?You always sleep with bitches!!
Fuck you!!!
You deserve a foreign teacher!!!
You are so ugly!!
你还以为自己很帅是不是？！！自恋狂！！其实你丑的要死！！还留胡子干嘛！！丑死了！不要脸！！中文又不会说！！亏你还是中国人！！死在美国算了！！就好别污染了中国的土地！！
天天make love小心得Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome！！
还那么矮！！矮子一个！！
快点死到美国去吧你！！
傻子一个！”

Here’s the bottom half via Google Translate:
Do you think you handsome is not it? ! ! Narcissism! ! In fact, you die ugly! ! Why has a mustache! ! Ugly dead! Shame! ! Chinese can not speak! ! Loss you’re Chinese! ! Death in the United States forget! ! Like not pollute the land of China! !
Make love every day of getting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome! !
Also so low! ! A dwarf! !
Early death in the United States go you! !
An idiot!

[I assume that it's Google Translate that makes it more incomprehensible.]

The second email had a picture of a dog, and some Chinese underneath it that mentioned something about the inviolability of my dog-ness and that I eat shit.

After some initial shock, I began wondering what to do. At this moment my grandma came in the room and asked me in Chinese if I was ready to come join breakfast. I smiled for her and replied in my shoddy but improving Mandarin that I would be there in a second. When she turned around to leave, I signed onto QQ, the Chinese version of AIM and GChat, and sought out a Yucai teacher to lodge a complaint.

The teacher I found on QQ was perhaps the one I had the best relationship with. She said “Oh, maybe it is because they love you too much…I have some students who hate me too.” She would look into it, she promised me, and with that I left her alone. I think I am Chinese enough to know that it’s embarrassing to drag others in to do my disciplinary work. But I was tired of these students constantly harassing me, and these words nettled me to the core.

After leaving QQ, I wondered again if this was really the best way to deal with the situation, and thought about one past episode that had also left a bad taste in my mouth. A few months ago as I was finishing a lesson for Class 12 and bidding them farewell, I overheard a girl mutter in Chinese “and don’t come back.” I raised an eyebrow and indicated my understanding. The girl flustered. “You didn’t hear anything!” she and her mates yelled at me in English. I was less than pleased. Insult me first, and then deny my displeasure the next? But I left it alone and left.

Class 12 is the one which I have the most peculiar relationship with; they were the class that claimed me the most, and simultaneously aggravated me worst. Clever and rambunctious, they were unimpressed with my lessons unless they were games, which I could sympathize with – given the circumstances of our employment, all of us foreign teachers were quite aware that our teaching was for surface appearances only, since our once-a-week “communicative language teaching” techniques are too soft and fuzzy to really help Chinese students tackle their difficult entrance examinations. At the best of times, the classes we each taught were passed in frivolous fun as ways to let kids blow off steam. Some students appreciated this levity more than we expected and more than (English) words could describe. But at the worst of times, our lessons were considered laughable, and ourselves, as foreign goofballs who were wastes of clumsy effort.

Class 12 embodied both the best of times and the worst of times. Usually they paid as little attention to my lessons as they could, chatting with each other loudly while I lectured, playing video games, or making fun of me in Chinese. Only competitive games could get their prolonged attention, and to be fair, they excelled at them, showing the full range of their cleverness. But they also treated me like a celebrity buddy instead of a teacher, always reaching out to shake my hand and calling my cell phone at all hours of the day (I never found out how they discovered my telephone number, and they refused to tell me). Even the videos you saw from Monkey Ray on this blog came from that class. It was all a lot of affection, but a little too much and was starting to get in the way of work, I thought. So after “don’t come back” girl opened her mouth, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could draw a line in the sand. That evening I logged onto their QQ chat network and started ruffling feathers, asking for the name of the offending girl. My inquiries were met with some alarm. “Why is he making such a big deal out of this?” they typed to each other in Chinese they assumed I didn’t understand. “andrew, just forget it, OK? u are being sensitive to much,” a few told me in English. Eventually, a few students came forward. “Andrew, the girl is a friend of a friend of mine, and they tell me that she was only joking, and that it is not a big deal, OK?” I was dubious, having actually seen her disposition in person. But if they were going to play Spartacus, there wasn’t much I could do.

After that episode I warily retreated again from dealing too much with Class 12 outside the classroom. But the celebrity idolizations continued. My phone kept ringing, and they found new phone numbers to call from faster than I could log each number into phone memory. A few girls tried to bully me into having lunch with the class, and they kept badgering me about it till the end, refusing to accept my explanations that I had no time. My email inbox filled. That was okay; it was less of an intrusion than the phone calls, especially since I had given them my email address, but some of them seemed more like love letters than regular emails, one girl even going so far as to dedicate a post in her blog to me. It was nice to a point; after which it became a little worrisome (especially in the comments where I noticed they were trading my phone number around like it was a Pokemon card). I recognized that I was not only dealing with some cultural gaps; in teaching middle school students, there would also be a maturity difference, and while communication might help bridge the first, only about five years could fix the second. So I decided to try to put some more distance between my students and I.

But distance hadn’t worked, as this email evidenced. I reflected again on that time, and how uncomfortable my sleuthing around for the girl’s name had seemed to make them. The teacher on QQ to whom I had reported today’s email had also seemed to want to downplay it as much as possible. Maybe my raising a scene was just as culturally off-putting for them as their evasions were for me. I suppose it is, after all, pretty American to raise hell. In China, maybe it’s better for everyone’s pride if the conflict can be dealt with quietly, and as few people implicated in public as possible. And Andrew, shouldn’t you know how to deal with these things? You’re a Chinese, aren’t you? According to the mystery student’s email, no, I’m evidently a lousy excuse for one. But Chinese or not, I can still play anthropologist.

Maybe it would be better if I engaged with the surly kid myself. I replied to the email telling them that I was very upset, and asked if they really meant these opinions. A more thought-out, cordial reply came back. “In China,do not reply another’s email is a very not polite thing. I know, I am a little 过分。So, I am sorry. I hope you will reply your students emial in the future.” Well. It is so “very not polite” that it’s worth telling me that I sleep with dogs, that I’m narcissitic and that my beard is ugly? I mean, come on! My beard is quite handsome.

Then I thought that perhaps the kid just didn’t think that he or she had really been that offensive, as terrible as it sounded to me. I recollected that every day in class I routinely overheard my students telling each other in casual Chinese to fuck off, or that they’d fuck each other’s mothers. “We were never like this when we were growing up,” my parents noted. “We were very good.” Be that as it may, I also remember one day speaking to one of my favorite students from Class 7. She was in the middle of telling me about her family when a boy came by to tease her in Chinese. She whipped her head around and let fly in Chinese “I hope your baby is born without skin” and then turned back to me sweetly without missing a beat. “Oh, you understood that?” she said, not very shy. The class laughed around us.

After a few more emails exchanges, the kid sent one that read “And,you are a Chinese,but you said you wasn’t a Chinese,and I think you don’t love China. I am very disappointed……
Ok,goodbye…I don’t want to talk to you either…”

Arguably, this is the point that bothered me more than threats of fucking (the word is so cross-cultural) or AIDS-getting did: that I wasn’t “Chinese.” (I don’t think I ever actually said that I wasn’t Chinese to my students, but for that matter I also never claimed to be handsome – they said that of me, and I always demurred. Very perplexing, and possily pathological.) Anyway, it’s not that I think I have anything to prove in that department. But an accusation of my un-Chinese-ness is not exactly how I wanted to end a year in which I was trying to explore my Chinese-ness and Chinese society. It is such a narrow-minded, jingoistic thing to hold against me. Suddenly things clicked together – crazy people who jump off buildings, crazy people who stab kids, crazy people who emigrate and raise Amy Tans and Maxine Hong Kingstons and crazy people who torture landowners and intellectuals with public beatings. The feeling was as if, upon being kicked out of the circle of hospitality and told to fuck off, I saw all of China’s shames and pathos as an outsider might. I didn’t want to consider this the definitive picture of China. But as I’ve walked through the haphazard and gritty market streets of Fuzhou with my grandma clutching at my arm, I kept wondering if my time in Shenzhen had been spent being entertained by a pleasant fantasy, a superficial veneer of politeness underneath which still lay a distrust of my belonging, my loyalty, and my identity.

If so, it might be because much of the treatment and goodwill towards me here has been extended on a perhaps shaky basis: the assumption that I am just like them, and that my Chinese blood speaks for the rest of my body and mind. On occasion, these same kinds of all-encompassing assumptions on the part of Americans have bothered me too, though they manifest in an opposite way – because my thinking and behaviors are American, my foreign colleagues sometimes maintain that they ought to override whatever ancestry I have. When you come to America, you’re expected to speak perfect English or at least be learning to, and you had better assimilate into American culture, otherwise you’re a lazy immigrant. If you’re one of the Overseas Chinese who is returning to the Mainland, you are forgiven some eccentricities, so long as you can already speak your “mother tongue” perfectly and you fervently proclaim your love for your “mother country.” Both of these attitudes are so narrow-mindedly tiresome.

America and China are opposite sides of the coin in ideology and culture, but in the demand to assimilate with the majority to the exclusion of all else, they are just the same as the rest of the worst of humanity. “You’re either with us, or against us,” said Bush, and Minutemen rednecks and the Arizona legislature nod their heads in agreement. “You’re either one of us or you’re not,” says this student, and every Chinese guy who told me to shave off my beard to look “more Chinese” and the students who whispered that I was “a Japanese” in class think the same. How terrible our tribes can be.

Interestingly, though, while America’s worst will villify and persecute the “other,” mainstream Mainland society seems to not care to deal with it at all. Cultural isolation and holding us “foreign experts” at a polite arm’s reach away from doing any real work/damage in class demonstrates this. In fact, it seems to be that it’s the things that the Chinese don’t consider as “other” that are threatened instead – me and certain contested geopolitical territories. (If they can read between lines, that should be the dig that gets this blog banned for good.)

I had realized this a few months ago, but my student’s accusation brought it to mind once again. It touched a nerve because it was right for all the wrong reasons – all of them offensive in their narrow-mindedness. It’s true that I don’t love China – that would imply a blind devotion. I’m an independent thinker, like the best of Americans. Hell, I don’t even love America (though I appreciate it). But isn’t it a very Chinese characteristic to still be proud of your family, no matter how shitty it is? I am proud of China. I’m proud to be a part of the singular, magnificent heritage and culture it has stewarded, even if I am wary of the racial homogeneity and circular logic that also sustains this pride. I can’t love faults like those. And the longer I have been here, the more I have seen. But I became teary at the Olympics opening and I still defend China’s perspective when Westerners bludgeon it with their neoliberal New York Times accusations. No matter what you think, you can’t escape your ancestry. Blood is thicker than water and rhetorical arguments.

I told the student this. “I am proud of China, but it is different. You grew up in only one country, with one culture. I do not think you understand our feelings.”

He or she responded with an ameliorating “well, can you tell me now if you are already back in America?” and “Are you really going to report me?”

Hahaha, you’re a funny kid. Little fucker.