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.

—-

I was waiting at Immigration in the line for foreigners, one of the few Asians there.  I had my nose buried in a book I had just brought back with me from Hong Kong when a white guy carrying a full load of suitcases stooped down to grab a bag I almost bumped into without seeing.  ”Oops, sorry,” I said by reflex.

He grinned.  ”Must be a hell of a good book, you’ve been reading it this whole time on the ferry from Hong Kong,” he said.

I smiled.  ”Well, you know, it’s a hell of a boring trip, too.”  He laughed and walked forward in line.

We came up to the immigration windows side by side and kept up our conversation.  He was in Shenzhen for a trade show, just in from a month of travel around the world, and was due to go home to Atlanta soon.  I told him I was finishing a year of English teaching here.  The eyes of the Chinese immigration officers darted from me to him, and back again.  We were cleared, and parted amiably at the baggage inspection station.

At the exit of the ferry terminal there was the usual crowd of men holding signs for just-arrived people and others lounging around who perk up seeing you come.  I noticed that the man I was just talking to was accosted by one of the perky latter, who summarily took his suitcase for him and began leading him and his wife towards the parking lot.  They looked confused but game and followed, seemingly more to chase after their suitcase than anything else.

Something clicked in my head and I gave chase too.  ”Hey, did you say you were going to Futian?” I called out.  The couple stopped and turned in their tracks.  ”Uh, no, we’re going to Shenzhen,” they replied.  Confused, certainly – Futian is a district of Shenzhen.  I felt, weirdly, like a local, just for a brief moment.  ”We’re supposed to go to the Marriot?” the man added.  By now we were beside the Chinese man’s car, a bright red sedan with the trunk already popped open, the driver in the middle of stuffing the accosted suitcase into it.  He too was looking at me quizzically.  ”Well, I’d recommend going by one of the official taxis,” I said, and pointed over to the line.  ”He’s a black cab driver,” I added when the man pointed at the driver.  ”Oh, well, thanks a lot, then we’ll get a taxi then,” said the man.

But I was already moving away fast and barely acknowledged the thanks.  I wanted to get out of the Chinese driver’s gaze as soon as I could, having plucked his day’s wage from him – for a foreigner!

—–

The Starbucks experience in Hong Kong is much different from that in Shenzhen.  In Hong Kong, the inside of a Starbucks feels much the same as the outside of one.  It’s all the same, everywhere, there – clean surfaces and modernist tendencies.  But in a Shenzhen Xing Ba Ke, the difference is like a pressure gradient, catching you up in a sweeping gust towards an interior space that feels like an oasis of Western cleanliness, predictability, and manners.  I spend a lot of time in them.  By now the baristas at the Coastal City location recognize my face, and at SeaWorld they greet me by name.  Not my proudest accomplishment in traveling the world, but it makes things feel a little more like home.

As I was settling into a chair and wiring up my electronics for a session of writing, the decibel level of the place suddenly ratcheted up, like it had become a Chinese bus at rush hour.  But the brash, grating yelling was in English.  I was confused and looked around.  A gaggle of adolescent boys had stormed in, speaking loud obscenities with the arrogant confidence of those who assume nobody else in the room can understand them.

“Fuck you!  Let’s go hang out at Matthew’s place.”

“No, you pussy.  What, you actually got something?  You don’t need to get something at Starbucks to hang in one.  What?  A muffin?  God, you’re such a nerd.”

“Screw you!”

They must have been expat kids from the nearby international schools.  The civilized Chinese patrons of Starbucks glanced over and visibly tried to ignore them.  The staff awkwardly buffed tables around the little gang of ingrates.  I tried to also, but the snatches of conversation insisted on hurling themselves into my ears, especially when one boy called out both mine and my brother’s name.  ”Andrew, Matthew, come on, let’s go.”

“Fuck you!  We’ll stay right here for now, this is cool.”

“He’s an AMERICAN, so he for sure knows!”

“Well, YOU did it with a BLACK GIRL!”

The noise quiets for a moment as if the group is mutually weighing the severity of this accusation.  On the other side of the room I am mentally slapping my forehead in disgust.  Separating the world into racial lines has been, I have found, a characteristically Chinese habit, borne out of centuries of willful cultural isolation.  But I shouldn’t have forgotten that Westerners, especially bratty kids, have already perfected the art.

The group briefly digressed with a show of hands as to what exactly constituted second base.

Punks.

—–

I had returned to the tailor for a third time, to get fitted for two suits: a gray one with a hatched pattern, and a navy blue set with thin dark pinstripes.  Luohu Commercial City, where the Chinese woman named Stephanie Lark operates her shop, has been painted to me before in terms essentially amounting to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” but some of the best tailors and deals can be found there all the same, and Stephanie with her excellent English and trained eye has made it into the tourist recommendation books even in sartorial Hong Kong.

“I think I’d also like to get a suit made with a Mandarin collar, and a topcoat as well,” I mentioned to her in passing.  I was standing in the hallway with half a suit on, and two of Stephanie’s assistants poking and pinching it.  ”这样合适吗?” one asked me.  ”这样不错.可不可以把裤子弄断一点?” I responded slowly.  In a manner more professional than I’m used to here, they didn’t bat an eye at my Chinese.  ”可以,” they affirmed.

Stephanie passed by.  ”Sure, we can talk about another suit,” she breezed.  She noticed the assistants talking between themselves about my fitting.  ”你听得懂他们说什么吗?” she said, asking if I understand anything they said.  I laughed and replied in Mandarin that I got a little of it, but maybe it would be better if she parsed over things again with me one more time.  She smiled and I took the suit off behind a jury-rigged curtain in their tiny office, and jumped back into my casuals.

Together we looked over my options.  ”What kind of material would you like for the topcoat?” she asked me.  She pointed to three fabric samples pinned to the wall.  ”This one is very heavy, but the herringbone pattern is very nice.  Will you be in a warm or a cold place?”  After some discussion we settled on a medium weave.  ”Send me a picture of the design you want,” she told me, switching to Mandarin, and then we started in on the Mandarin-collared suit my mother and grandmother recommended that I try.

“Of course we can do a Mandarin-collared suit,” Stephanie had said when I asked her about it a week ago.  ”This is the traditional Chinese clothing!”   Now she was taking my shoulder measurements for it.  ”Do you want satin buttons?  If you want a very traditional look, we can do that for you.”  I hemmed.  ”No, that is okay, I am fine with regular buttons.”  ”Ok, what about the pockets?  Do you want two or four?”  I thought of the four-pocketed military jackets that Mao was always seen in photographs wearing and hemmed again.  ”Two is going to be okay, thanks.”   She looked at me and laughed.  ”Oh, so you want to be both East and West with this, right?”  ”I have to be,” I said a little sheepishly.

After the measurements were done, she wrote everything down on a sheet of paper and then paused to look in the air for a bit.  ”Hmm…”  She scribbled down a number, and then handed it to me.  ”I will give you a discount on the topcoat, but please do not tell anybody else I sold it to you for this little, otherwise I will get in a lot of trouble!”  I voiced my thanks.  ”Oh of course – you may have an American passport, but you are still one of us, you are still Chinese!”

—–

In the end, I guess it’s not absolutely necessary that I figure out what exactly is down these tunnels.  It’s been a privilege that I had the chance in life to just uncover their presence at all, maybe.

You can’t conquer every mystery and paradox you see.

But now I’m not so sure.  Faced with the prospect of a forced performance, I would kind of just shrug and compare it to any other time I was asked to play the piano for guests as a child – more casual than the apocalyptic insecurities exploding in your young head make it out to be.  In fact, I’m even now considering a (kind of ridiculous) morning trip into Hong Kong tomorrow to find some Vince Guaraldi sheet music (you know, A Charlie Brown Christmas and all that good stuff.)  I wouldn’t mind at all playing some of those things if I had to (the annual problem just being that by the time I’ve practiced the tunes to snuff, Christmas is usually over).  But instead of a nice and classy piano shindig, my office teachers have asked that I instead learn a dance with them for a holiday celebration in which all teachers at Yucai Third Middle must enact a performance.

This would be a separate deal from the Bureau’s Christmas gathering.  Since I had made some vague plans with my cousin’s family in Hong Kong to go to a theme park for the holidays, I had kind of assumed that I could wiggle out of it by claiming family obligation and disappearing, so I had kind of only half-listened to the appeals of Nana and Wang Laoshi on behalf of the less loquacious left side of the office to learn this dance with them.  But one day when I was sitting at my desk at the front, Wang Laoshi swept into the room and hurriedly closed the door behind her, laughing something about not wanting to be seen.  I looked around behind me.  Four lady teachers looking like they were conspiring something diabolical suddenly noticed that I was in the room with them.  “Aiyah!” yelled Nana, who rushed forward and turned me bodily around.  “Andrew!  Don’t look!”

What would you think was happening?  I didn’t have to guess; actually, once before already the lady teachers of the Third Year English Department had turned our office into a quick changing room and forgotten Andrew the Foreign Teacher like just another piece of mute furniture, so they fixed the problem in much the same way.  But when I heard the tinny lightening bolt sounds of Asian pop music clatter out of a cell phone ringtone, half-heard dots connected in my head and I suspected the dance.

Turning around yielded the sight of four middle aged Chinese ladies sashaying to the clashing sounds of that cell phone and to Nana’s relayed instructions.  “You have to thrust your hips to the side while throwing your hands up,” she was coordinating, just like an aerobics coach at the front of the office and next to my desk.  I sat there in some bewilderment watching them all for a moment until I recognized the music. Oh the horror.  Anything but this.  No.

It was a popular song in South Korea that I had heard about only by virtue of associating with too many Asian people in Los Angeles.  The Wonder Girls may be the girliest girl group from a country that beats out even China for putting superficial American materialism on a pedestal: Julia had delighted once in subjecting me to a YouTube video of their single entitled “Gee,” which had faintly horrified me.  The song that my Chinese colleagues were now dancing to, and asking me to participate in, was the girl band’s other song called “Nobody,” which more than faintly horrified me since the only time I had seen it had been in this video here:

I found it truly monstrous.

Suddenly two other lady teachers burst through the door and watched my office wiggle around on their heels for a while.  One of them cried “too complicated, I’ll never learn this!” and promptly fled.  I considered my own escape options.  “Wiggle your butt more girls!” yelled Nana, who evidently did not think first about whether I understood her Mandarin or not.

Somehow I got out of there, but the next day Nana and Wang Laoshi were badgering me about this again.  “This is not just a girly dance,” protested Nana to my complaints.  “See, look, I will find a video of boys dancing it for you.”  I looked away. I knew what she was going to find and I knew it would not help to ease my mind at all.  Maybe there’s still a way that I can claim family obligation.

Nana found what she was looking for.  “Look, here it is,” she said.

Yes. Not a girly dance at all.

For that reason I feel a little silly every time I wind up in one of these Starbucks cafes. It’s guaranteed wifi for my itouch, but still – sometimes I wonder, what am I doing, why did I come thousands of miles to sit in a Starbucks when I am practically from Seattle (close enough)?

It looks like home and feels like home and tastes like home, but it doesn’t sound like home. The ever so slight dissimilarity might be what is getting under my skin.

That or the red holiday cups. Yen asked me if I was going to be lonely over Christmas. I replied that I didn’t feel like it yet since it didn’t FEEL like Christmas – having warm weather unchanged since October, coworkers that don’t mention it and not yearning for a cathartic break after an apocalyptic finals season; these things made me forget that it is already December and that I’ve been in China for more than four months now.

But a gust of cold wind and the darkly sweet taste of a grande toffee nut latte both sink into my bones like home, like reminders that shimmer imperfectly against the traffic fumes along the bus stop and the glittering neon of Chinese mall advertisements, like the Chinese that I hear in the air always flickering in and out of the borders of my understanding, with differences ever so discreet and mild but still like the whispers of a simulacra telling me that I’m not quite in the right place after all.

Hum. ‘Darkly sweet’ is kind of a poor descriptor there. A lightning bug compared to the right evocative word (although I’m aware that the consumer charm of the words ‘toffee nut latte’ kind of spoil the effect from the start). Something to work on, I suppose.

Today as I walked to the bank to deposit my monthly wages (even though it’s only $700 US per month, I feel like a rich man!) and exited the school gates a blast of Flo Rida’s “Right Round” trailed my departure. I actually turned my head around to look up towards the upper floors of the school and said aloud “I KNOW I didn’t give them that.” Chinese students returning from lunch turned their head and waved at the foreign English teacher talking to himself.

—–

Something else I learned during an impromptu Department photo session (like picture day!): while we say “Cheese!” when we get our mugs shot, the Chinese say “qie zi!” which means eggplant.

I don’t want to do that.

But thanks to those of you who have been sticking around to read this despite the increasing lag time between posts. Since NaNoWriMo is almost finished (which is not to say that I am – with the laptop dying I think I’m officially out of the running to finish this novel by December) I should be back on track with things soon.

Hijinx of the day: In Hong Kong yesterday I bought one of those Nike+iPod sensors, which talk to your iPod while you run and keep track of how far and how long you run. They say that you have to buy special Nike tennis shoes to install them into, but I just took my trusty pocketknife (which I have thanks to Julia) and a hotel sewing kit (which I have thanks to Mom) and voila, my right shoe now has GADGETRY installed into its tongue.

I am immensely and disproportionately proud of myself for this.

Oh, and thank you Mary David for the letter I received today! Proof positive, folks: the address given in the “Contacting Andrew in China” page here on this blog is accurate and it takes about a week until I receive mail (provided that it’s a small, regular sized letter of about an ounce or so). I have some stationery (thanks to Mom) but I’m still on the search for Hello Kitty prints to send to an un/lucky few of you.

It’s also a little inconvenient since that heater I thought my room had turned out not to work. Though of course I guess I shouldn’t have assumed that a sun symbol on my AC’s remote control meant that it could also act as a heater. I’ve resorted to turning on my toaster oven and leaving it running to warm up the room a bit!

I used to stick the turtles up against that toaster oven too, in place of a heat lamp, but they died two days ago when the cold front came in and I left them on the porch (which until then had been a warmer place than inside).

Also dead with the cold: the remaining battery life of my laptop. Looks like I’ll be spending more evenings in the office with the computer here.

If you are thinking of watching dramas in Asia, it seems that Korea has the monopoly right now with the most sophisticated industry and products. In college I would visit some friends and find them avidly downloading and watching Korean dramas. A few months ago I saw a report in an Asian newspaper about unsuccessful government attempts to ban Meteor Garden, one of the older and more famous Korean dramas, in China because of its “encouragement of materialistic pursuits and desires” or something like that. And even in the latest Chinese novel I read (Brothers by Yu Hua, it was okay) there is a character who talks big about making fortunes but is too busy watching Korean soaps to successfully begin his enterprises. I wouldn’t mind trying them myself (after taking the MCAT last summer I ended up watching a particularly silly Taiwanese drama, rationalizing to myself that I would do it to learn Chinese). Again the rationale is that I would learn Chinese from the practice, but it doesn’t seem like the Korean soaps would help much with this.

It turns out, however, that my aunt and uncle are fans of Korean soaps too, and actually as I’m writing this they are sitting beside me watching one. “It’s in Chinese too,” my uncle showed me. I hadn’t realized that they were all dubbed and subbed in Mandarin and Simplified Chinese – of course they would be if the market for them here was so huge, I belatedly realized. I was used to seeing the English fansubs that my friends furtively downloaded and hadn’t thought that I could get any such useful translations.

So here is a dangerous precipice that I am standing over. Before I fall in, does anybody have any recommendations so that I know at least which cliff is the best one to jump off of?

Daily Summary Update: I spent the weekend here in Hong Kong again with my family. At this point, my parents have left and are home in Olympia already, but my grandmother is still visiting Hong Kong and my aunt/uncle as well as my cousin’s family all live here. Aidan was particularly rambunctious today – he’s learning a lot of new words.

Nanowrimo Update: If I’m going to finish, I need to write about 2000 words a day at this point. I don’t know if I can make the deadline anymore.