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.

…Lee, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1980s, said she resented Lim’s characterization of traditional script as obsolete. “Chinese characters are so beautiful, why would you give that up?” she said. “How could 5,000 years of history go away that easily?”

Simplified characters were introduced in the 1950s by the Chinese communist regime to improve literacy rates among the country’s mostly rural population.

At the time, anti-communist politicians and refugees fled and settled in Taiwan, where they continued the use of traditional script.

Before diplomatic relations were established between the United States and China in the 1970s, the traditional form was commonly taught here. To switch to the simplified form says something about Taiwan’s place in the world and who speaks on behalf of Chinese culture, said David Lee, past president of the Arcadia Chinese Assn.

“In the heart of Taiwan, it’s a crisis because the Taiwanese feel they are so small, there’s nothing they can compete with China, not militarily, not with population,” Lee said. “But if there’s something they can . . . insist upon, it’s culture and the language. And script is part of the culture.”

Personally I have invested all my time into learning simplified text, and even though I am mostly still illiterate in this country, it is always an ironic relief to see Mainland China’s 简体字。 Only here am I ever able to use what I’ve learned – not in Taiwan, not in Hong Kong, and not even in any Chinese community or establishment anywhere in America. This feeling of linguistic isolation really gets to me when I look at menus and signs written in Traditional script in America, as if even despite my best efforts I never will broach even the slightest bit back into that cultural heritage.

Even when I passed the immigration and customs border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, I remember breathing in a warm feeling of recognition and belonging when I saw the sign “Welcome to Hong Kong” hanging from the bridge awning – and then breathing it out in a sigh of disappointment when I saw it repeated in Traditional script underneath. Chinese-Americans don’t have a shared sense of community spirit yet – as evidenced by the article – and we are each different in how we relate to our heritage, but for me and the importance I place in language and the written word, this is my Chinese-American dilemma: implicit sensations of belonging and exclusion, always confusingly wrapped into each other in the same current of cross-purposes whenever I see Traditional script.

It sounds like I am a proponent of Simplified for selfish purposes. I won’t deny that, and I won’t deny Traditional its beauty or the implicit meanings and connotations that it richly holds which I won’t ever be able to understand to the same level that I can analyze an English text (sadly). But languages have turning points where they change and evolve – English itself softened its angular Teutonic inflections after the Norman conquest of England, which forced French influences upon it to such an extent that even Middle English is drastically different from Old English. And even after that, major events served to twist it even further into its modern form today, and Modern English is also proving to be very malleable.

I think I know literary scholars who would be on both sides of this argument: those calling for the preservation of the cultural richness of Traditional, and those who would be excited to see the evolution of a new dynamic iteration of language (whether or not Simplified is that, I don’t know, but it’s a change at least).

Anyway, I brought them up because not only are they cute new roommates, but I can crassly use ‘em as a metaphor here. Like, “Andrew has not posted for such a long time – perhaps he has withdrawn into his hermit shell again.” I had previously been averaging a good rate of posting 5 days out of the week, and this is the first time I haven’t for an entire week – I did better when I wasn’t even here.

The reason for this is that I’ve finally settled into a good solid routine aimed at achieving all those goals and enjoying all those hobbies that I wanted to try for here. During the school days when I’m not teaching, I sit in the English Department office and study Chinese and write my book. After class I go for a run on the school track and to the gym a few blocks north to lift weights, and next week I’ll probably start going to that hip hop dance class that they offer just to see what it’s like. I’m also practicing erhu and guitar, and when I can manage to get into the music room, piano too.

I think I’m doing all these things to forestall a future midlife crisis (hello, hip hop dance) and also to fully enjoy all these hobbies that I wanted to explore and appreciate before I shelve them for medical school next year. I also want it to be time well-spent in a useful way, with hopefully a finished book, good health, better Chinese and better musical skill being tangible results of the year (of course I am also hoping for an elusive answer to questions like “why am I here” and “who am I,” but those are slightly less tangible, especially when I am unsure how to phrase those questions anyway). After all, even though this is a “year off,” it’s still real time spent and a real year of my life.

But these self-improvement and self-fulfillment activities do take up a lot of time, which is why I’ve posted less frequently here. More worrying, though, is that they’ve also been distracting me from being here in China. Other Chinese teachers who I had earlier met on promising terms have recently been saying “Oh, where have you been? We haven’t seen you for some time, you must be very busy.” I should probably work harder to integrate myself with the school teachers more, and that means among other things playing basketball with them after class (even though I hate basketball because I suck at it, plus the childhood fear of jammed fingers – try playing the piano sometime with jammed fingers). So far I’ve had a good cover; many of the teachers here are too busy preparing for a rigorous professional test that, if they pass, would bump them up on the income bracket with better pay, better benefits and something like tenure, I think (it seems like the graduates of certain universities get this automatically, but others have to work for it). That test is tomorrow (加油!) so I better get back into the social groove quickly. Maybe I’ll make some cookies for people with my toaster oven…at a pokey rate of six cookies a batch….

Talking to the teachers here and opening up to them more would take some additional effort on top of the nice schedule I’ve lined up for myself, but it would be worth it for the Mandarin practice and the sense of inclusion into the community here. But no matter how integrated I become here, I am starting to realize that my little life here in the Shekou neighborhood of Nanshan District in Shenzhen – read, the most westernized neighborhood of a particularly new and affluent district in a special city experiment with capitalism – is probably not going to give me a good answer for the question “what is China like,” although of course there is no discounting that Shenzhen’s situation is to be uniquely appreciated as part of that answer. Even harder to grasp is a general answer to the question “what is my place here in China, and who am I when I am here and who am I when I am not” – because so far it seems like there isn’t too much of a difference, and not to the credit of whatever erudition of self I might have. My parents are coming to visit in two weeks, and I can just imagine the look on my dad’s face when he gets here: looking quizzically around for signs of the poignantly complicated China he remembers leaving, for the smell of nightsoil and the yells of roadside cart vendors, and warily thinking of all the things that a father knows and would rather his son not. He will look around at the Nanshan suburbia with some puzzlement and then might laugh: “Well Andrew, it seems China came to you instead.”

Unless they’re ethnically Asian, many of whom found that Chinese tutoring schools and Chinese parents would rather have a white person teach their children English. There being no equal opportunity laws in China here, this is done quite openly, and I know of a few ethnic Americans who have been sent letters plainly telling them that their application was appreciated but not of the, hm, persuasion they were seeking. And that’s just for the ESL chain schools and institutions; the individual families who could hire personal tutors for their children don’t bother asking them at all.

Happily, this situation has been much different for me, mostly because I am in the more open-minded Nanshan District I think (these suspicions being confirmed only a few days ago by one of our program coordinators, which I can write about later). I have had one tutoring offer already (though it was put on ice later for lack of participants), and nobody here seems to doubt my English skills. But still, I haven’t and probably won’t do any teaching work outside of Yucai Third Middle, simply because…of time!

Already I have found plenty of things to do:

- Run and work out at the gym on Gongye Ba
- Practice three different musical instruments (guitar, piano and erhu) and even doodle around with jazz piano when I can
- Write fiction (which still hasn’t really gotten anywhere yet, but I’m hoping to at least start before NaNoWriMo officially starts
- Practice Chinese
- Catch up on my reading list (Working right now on Yu Hua’s Brothers and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore)
- and oh, a new project, try to figure out some music production software like Sony ACID or FL Studio.
- PS: maybe one day make a video montage too.

So suddenly having all these projects to do is taking time away from keeping this blog as current as I’d like, to speak nothing of finding additional employment! But I reason it this way: with so many projects and hobbies to find fulfillment in, for me right now, time is more valuable than money. Especially with medical school looming imminently in the near future, I think this year is my year to basically take care of everything that would otherwise manifest as a terrible, terrible midlife crisis (band, anybody?). I may not have as much pocket change as other expats, but I’m not really here for the reasons other expats are, either. More on the that (which I’m still discovering anyway) later.

But they are always very friendly to me, in particular one older man who I often see when I’m returning home.  I sometimes chat with him after I enter, and he is very patient with my poor Chinese speaking.  But lately I feel like I’ve run out of things to talk about (difficult to expand when your vocabulary is so limited), which has made things a bit more awkward when I come home these days.  I never had this problem with taxi drivers since you could always have the same conversation over and over…but then, taxi drivers don’t return wallets.

Anyway, I saw the older guard again tonight and started chatting with him.  This quickly led to the expected conversational roadblock.  To hedge around it I stammered something about maybe one day learning how to play that game I often saw people playing, and to practice with him to alleviate his boredom.  He kindly figured out what the heck I was talking about and supplied the necessary noun: Xiangqi (象棋)!

Digression:

I have never figured out exactly what Chinese chess is. I suspect that there are multiple versions of it that are in fact all completely separate games, and often misconstrued by Westerners as all being the same thing. There is a version that I’ve seen all with only white pieces (its name is still a mystery to me). There is xiangqi, this aforementioned version that I always had in my closet at home but never mustered the courage to interpret because of the necessity to first be able to READ the pieces (they are labeled in traditional script). There is also that version that you all know made by Hasbro, with the six-pointed star and the marbles. I have a feeling that, as usual with Western misconceptions, this last version is like food from Panda Express: it bears absolutely no resemblance to nor does it originate from the real thing, but Westerners don’t know any better. (Except, confounding this is the fact that my mother used to play it, but evidently by a different set of rules than my elementary school librarians were used to, who called me out on my “incorrect” application of such. Bother.)

End of digression.

The older guard led me into the guardhouse to show me a xiangqi set that he and the other guards kept around to battle off the wuliao with. He explained to me the meanings of each labelled piece, sometimes referring to pictures in his military-interest magazine (at least I think that’s what it was; a tank was on the cover and a few generals’ portraits inside). Then he sent me off with a laugh and an extra xiangqi set to learn with!

This is kind of exciting; if I learn how to play it, I might be able to one day intersperse myself into a street gathering of old men and play with them. Or, barring that adventurousness, I could always play with the friendly guards.

To help the process I carry around a little steno pad. I think other people must think I’m crazy when I randomly stop walking down the street, pull it out and jot some notes to myself before I forget them. Maybe I am.

Like many other days, I wandered around Futian with some of the other CTLC teachers after our group Chinese lessons (that is, the classes that we go to learn Chinese in, not the ones we teach in English). I ended up spending the entire evening with them just meandering around and playing board games at the NYPD pizza stand again in central Futian. While it’s been nice to get to know my friends here (last night Hunter hosted dinner for 8 of us in Nanshan District at his apartment nearby the Walmart, and we chatted late into the night), I am a bit concerned that my Chinese isn’t making as much progress as it could if I were to “go native” as another CTLC guy (whom I don’t know very well, but don’t feel like that’s a problem) kind of condescendingly put it once.

Tomorrow the Yucai Group schools are making their foreign teachers go to dinner together for some function that they only told us about a few days ago, so I’ll see Katie (Yucai First High), Emily (Yucai Second Primary), and Hunter (Yucai Third Primary) again while I rep for Yucai Third Middle.  Following that is a Sunday of teaching Wednesday classes…what?  On Thursday the week-long October holiday begins…and so I have to teach Wednesday classes twice in one week?

Who knows why that makes sense.  Thing is, it probably DOES, but I’m just illiterate.