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.

Amidst the beating of basketballs against pavement, cries in Chinese and crackling of my dumplings, then, I was a little surprised to realize I also heard violins and flutes.

I leaned towards the window a little to hear better. Maybe it was the PA system playing some patriotic tunes again. A little odd for basketball background noise, but not uncommon. But if it was a recording piped through the outdoor speakers, why was there that vibrating feeling every time I heard a kettle drum? And a recording’s pitch wouldn’t be off-kilter like this, would it?

I never knew my school had an orchestra!

I asked Tiantian about it, whom I found coaching a student through some weekend exercises in the office. “Maybe you can play with them!” she laughed.

It’s already a little strange to think that I actually like to hear pitches clash if only for nostalgic reasons, but even stranger is the thought that there are people who never knew that I actually identify with music so strongly. Many people. Makes me feel a little older realizing that now there are “phases” in my life that divide the people I know.

The dumplings were decent, I reflected as I munched on them, but if I ever cook for other people I should probably work on getting them to be a little less slimy.

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.

The instruments came from the HuaYueFang music store that I’ve scoped out multiple times before, and where I got the free erhu demo lesson last week. The two young storekeepers, who by now I know as Benny Fang and Miss Ye, always look happy when I walk in and have been very friendly and helpful with both my music questions and Chinese. Actually, the guitar and erhu together should have cost 1280 kuai and the erhu case that they threw in another hundred kuai or so. But both Miss Ye and Benny (both of whom can’t be much older than me) immediately said that they’d discount them for me, and afterwards Benny said in his fledgling English “of course I’ll discount it; I think you are a good person.”

Of course I was happy with getting the instruments at all for any price, and the discounts were certainly nice, but I wonder if I could have gotten the price down even more by being a hardass. On the other hand, what I may have lost in further price reductions, I’ll gain by having good relations with those two shopkeepers for the rest of the year, which may be very useful considering I’ll be taking lessons there too. This episode made me wonder about the two modes of getting what you want as an expat in a foreign country (especially China) – bully your way through or smile and hope for the best. By nature I avoid confrontation like the plague, so I always default to the latter. It has its pros and cons – I feel like I build a sense of community among new friends who will be much easier to deal with in the future, but I could also be suckered (for instance, if Benny and Miss Ye are actually not as beneficent as they seem, it might be feasible – though unlikely – that they are still getting a hefty profit from me). My approach also just plain doesn’t work in some environments (I absolutely hate going to Dongmen, the clothing and electronics bazaar market where the sales clerks can only be called hawks and from whom a stupid smile will get you nothing).

But there are certainly other expats who are quick to assert themselves defensively. I dislike it because I think it makes us all come across as jerks, but I’ll concede the street smarts that accompany it.

Anyway, whatever, what am I overthinking for! I’m a musician again!

It was a very interesting weekend, and I should really dedicate the time to write about it, but I just don’t really feel like writing a blog post (still got this weird laziness towards blog writing that’s been with me since four days ago.)

But the obligation exists, so here it is in a very non-literary bullet point list:

Saturday
– Traveled to the Dongmen shopping bazaar in Luohu District with Hunter in search of some cheap shirts. Couldn’t find any. Instead, found a lot of frustrating shop clerks with sub-par wares. My Chinese isn’t good enough to bargain aggressively, yet. My usual way of dealing with people – getting on their good side, which here means playing the fool very often with my bumbling Chinese – certainly won’t work on the jaded hawkers of Dongmen. We didn’t get any shirts.
- In the evening the Yucai School Group foreign teachers were picked up by our contact teachers and taken to a fancy evening dinner at the Garden City megamall. There we were ushered into a private room, which by Chinese standards isn’t uncommon, but even by Chinese standards this was an extraordinarily fancy room. My suspicions about the fanciness of the evening were proven correct when Roots (the head headmaster of all the Yucai Schools; real name Liu Genping, but “Gen” means “roots” so that’s what everyone calls him when he’s not looking) showed up. He was accompanied by a few secretaries from the main Yucai office and the headmaster of Yucai Second Primary. Also in attendance: not only our handlers, but our handlers’ handler, another office lady in the main Yucai office named Lily. Then Judy from the Shenzhen Education Bureau. And finally, to top off the evening’s list of important VIPs, the Shenzhen Foreign Affairs counsel, who alone was responsible for every single foreigner in Shenzhen (probably more people than are in all of Wyoming).
- Going to a Karaoke bar with said VIPs.
- Singing ridiculously with said VIPs.
- Dancing to My Humps with said VIPs. Most mortifying experience of my life, watching Roots shimmy to that.

That karaoke bar, by the way, was the most ostentatiously extravagant place I’d ever been to, almost as large as one of my 50-student classrooms and done up like a Vegas hotel lounge. A long way from LA’s Koreatown, boys and girls.

Sunday:
- Teaching a day’s worth of classes on a weekend, because in China, school missed due to holidays is made up for on the weekends.
- Going to meet up with Kami, Hunter, Murray, Emily and Katie for an evening foreigner rendezvous.
- Remembering only when I got there what they had been planning to do on said rendezvous. Walked through the door of Milan Hair Style and laid down for a spa hair treatment and massage along with the other prone and satisfied Americans. Struck up a mostly one-sided conversation with my own amused hairwasher/masseuse guy.
- Remembering only when I was called while having said hairwash that the Yucai Third Middle Single Teachers’ Midautumn Festival Dinner banquet was that night. Ran over to the restaurant after hair wash and joined in the eating of such delicacies as pig faces and chicken bones. Nana and Tiantian were not enthusiastic about the pig face, but remembering the marshmallow turtle shell and snake hoods of the fancy banquet yesterday, I felt like I could do anything.
- Dreading the much-talked about karaoke session rumored to follow the dinner. Apparently last year’s was pretty riotous and all the teachers got absolutely wasted.
- Escaped from having to go to it when it turned out that this year, most all of the teachers were studying for a professional exam.
- Came home early and decided to go shopping in the evening.
- Visited again the music store at Gongye Ba Lu to ask if it was possible to rent guitars there. No, but I could get a discount on a cheap guitar. Tried a few out and chatted with the girl there as I did so, who by this point remembers me from all my previous bumbling-ins. Conversation was all in Chinese!
- Walked over to the grocery store to find eggs and butter for my cookie baking experiment (I have one of Shenzhen’s rare toaster ovens in my apartment) and agar powder for a coconut jelly recipe. Asked an attendant about the agar. No luck. Asked another attendant about the butter. One 15 minute search and 5 other consulted attendants later, the response: “We don’t have butter here, because this is a Chinese grocery.” I did find the eggs, though. And another pack of dumplings with Jackie Chan’s smiling face on them.

And that was my weekend, in bullet form. Ta da.

But, I got bored of sitting around and decided to go out. It also helped that I was hungry again.

First stop:
兰州拉面。A hole-in-the-wall noodle joint south of my school, which has a couple of tables and a gigantic menu covering one of its two visible walls. The proprietress, after shooing away the lackey who could not communicate intelligibly with me (an incident which, I felt for the first time, was not my fault) brought over a plate of super tasty noodles. When she brought them over I set aside my notebook that I had been lesson planning in, which she immediately scooped up and began reading out loud from. “Lesson…Three…Movies. Ha, I can still read some English!” she crowed to the kitchen staff.

Second stop:
Beside 兰州拉面 there is a small grocery store that I had spied a while ago, but never ventured into. I did. Then decided to walk over to the better grocery store a block north.

Third stop:
华乐坊。 A music shop on Gongye Ba Lu (Industrial #8 Road) that I had scoped out many times before. On the way to the better grocery store, I poked my head in and asked the proprietors about taking erhu lessons. The pair, a young man and a young girl, perked up and told me that the erhu teacher would be free to speak with me in half an hour.

Fourth stop:
满家福. The “better” grocery store, closer to me than Walmart but better-stocked and cleaner than the one next to my school. Purchased: a jar of sunflower oil, a moon cake to taste, and a pack of frozen dumplings with a smiling Jackie Chan in chef’s hat and apron emblazoned on the wrapper. (Similarly, Jet Li can be found on subway endorsements sipping from a carton for the Chinese “I Love Milk!” ad campaign.)

Fifth stop:
逸林建身室. One evening while I was returning home I heard techno raving from somewhere above my head. Confused, I looked up and saw on the second story of the corner store a large sign in which I somehow recognized characters for “gym.” The entrance happened to be next door to the music shop, so I walked up the stairs and immediately got lost in a sea of pink tutus: ballet class was in session on the dance floor next to the stairwell. After finding the information desk and explaining again that I was not a retarded adult but a foreigner, I was treated to a tour of the facilities and settled down to hash out in my broken Chinese a yearly charge. The final price: 1380 kuai for a year. While I could run for free on my school’s track, there are no weights to lift here, and 1380 seems a pittance to pay for that for an entire year.

Sixth stop:
The music store again. After waiting for a little while, the erhu teacher emerged from a room after a young girl dashed out ahead of him. After speaking to her grandmother, apparently about some instrument repair issue, he turned to me and spent fifteen minutes on a bench outside introducing me to the rudiments of proper erhu positioning and bowing, which was difficult because of the language barrier but not impossible. A small crowd gathered around us to watch, including the friendly shopkeeper I had spoken to earlier. One man laughingly said to him “You said that he was going to teach a foreigner, but he does not look foreign!” The shopkeeper laughed and explained to the others: “He is, ah, I am going to say something bad…” he faltered in Chinese, then looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “FUCK,” he happily proclaimed in English. I started. Without skipping a beat, he resumed in Chinese: “This kind of word, 香蕉。” I recognized the word for banana. He chuckled and looked sheepish. “Is this offensive to you? I am sorry. Some do not like it,” he asked. I smiled and said I didn’t mind. The derogatory expression for being “yellow on the outside and white on the inside” had always amused more than bothered me. The free erhu lesson on the Chinese sidewalk continued for another ten minutes, after which I asked the shopkeeper how much an erhu would cost to purchase. Answer: there are 680 kuai, 1180 kuai, and 2280 kuai models. Thanks, I’ll come back in two weeks after I get my paycheck. Bye!

Seventh stop:
TEA 元素。 As I approached the bubble tea cafe I saw one of the attendants I had met the other day eating outside with another attendant. When he saw me he got up and motioned me inside, smiling, and I asked him to please, don’t worry about me, thank you, enjoy your dinner, haha. I got some rose tea and thanked the friendly tea guys, but I have things to do at home, I’ll stop to sit and chat another day, bye.

Turning the corner to walk back to 育才三中 (school-slash-home), I came face to face with a young lady who started upon seeing me – Samantha, one of the Year 2 English teachers who also lives in my dormitory. “Hi, what are you doing?” she asked in her perfunctorily-correct-but-always-vaguely-confrontational English (part of language exchange in this case is getting used to friendly people who unintentionally sound hostile). I explained. “Ah, OK. I am going to the bank. Will you be in your room later? I have some questions to ask you,” she commanded with a smile. Okay. See you later. I wondered what she might think about my Ikea lamps, but fortunately I never had to worry about their sanctity being broached as she later phoned in her questions – about the proper way to address an English letter – instead of stopping by.

Proud of myself, I returned home from my circular jaunt around the neighborhood, whose people I am starting to get to know. Yesterday I had noted that while I had a lot of time here in China, and many goals to accomplish with it, I hadn’t really started yet on any of them. Resolved as of yesterday and partially done today: make a list of goals and tick them off, one by one.

- Exercise, both cardiovascular and weight training. Now in progress.
- Learn erhu. Now in progress!
- Write. Partially in progress; this blog is going very successfully, although the other writing project isn’t.
- Write letters to friends back home. Must first find out my home address, something I keep forgetting.
- Learn to cook. Not yet done, although I’ve almost finished assembling my kitchen.
- Learn Chinese. While my conversational Chinese is getting better by speaking to people, I haven’t really opened my books yet.
- Explore your neighborhood. Done! : )