Protein

While waiting for the school bus a few days ago, a Chinese man in a suit introduced himself to me as "Happy, like happy to meet you!" Happy is an English teacher at another school. During our conversation he asked, "have you adapted to the food in China yet?" When I first got here I took about five dumps a day, all of them horrible and messy. After three weeks or so, they regained a firm consistency and occurred at intervals not quite so unsettling. I told him I had adapted. He told me he thinks Chinese food is too greasy, which is the closest thing I've heard to a Chinese person badmouthing something Chinese.


It's hard to find good sources of protein here. Save for a few places in the downtown area, most restaurants won't have a chicken cutlet or piece of steak on the menu. Meat dishes are generally huge bowls of vegetables with some minced pork or beef sprinkled on top. I rarely stay full after eating at a restaurant for more than an hour or two.


Chinese people eat a lot of carbohydrates. Rice and noodles aplenty. The only satisfactory explanation for how they live off of this is that they're humanoids evolved from plants and derive all nutrition from sugar. I've tried to ask people about protein in both Chinese and English but they never have any idea what I'm talking about. They understand that I'm talking about nutrition and recommend drinks that are marketed as nutritious but contain more sugar than vitamins and protein. Good for a plant person maybe.


Since I managed to clean out the atrocity Sean left in my fridge, I keep my kitchen stocked with jars of peanut butter, eggs and boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I get my fucking protein. 


Recently, I had my first experience at an all-you-can-eat buffet in China. The place was expensive. For Nick, Andrew and I, it cost about 115 yuan in total. As one of the hostesses led us to our table, I noticed the restaurant was train-themed. The layout was a confusing mess of fake train platforms and staircases. The waitresses (although they don't actually do any waiting since it's a buffet) wore conductor's uniforms. The seating areas looked like train cars. They looked just like train cars. The chairs were like chairs on a train. There were even fake windows and curtains. It was just like a train. It was just like a real life train.


The hostess led us up about three flights of stairs to our table and hit on Andrew for a bit before leaving. She mentioned that she graduated from the school that we teach at, which was possibly a lie, then left. Throughout our meal she would repeatedly pass by our table with another waitress and once commented, with disbelief, on the fact that we were still eating more food.


Most of the food was prepared hours before we arrived, sitting out on unheated trays and getting cold. Despite this, I enjoyed almost everything I tried and ate about three full plates. The food you really come to a place like this for, though, is an endless supply of raw meat that you fry in the middle of your table. I don't remember how many of those fatty meat strips I had but what I do remember quite vividly is already being very full by the time we started eating them. Because they were sliced so thinly, however, it didn't feel like I was eating too far over capacity. It was probably as we continued to polish off tray after tray, making sure not to leave a single piece behind to avoid a wastefulness fee, that Andrew's admirer made her comment about us still eating being a weird thing.


When we got up to leave, I immediately regretted the amount of food that I ate. My stomach felt like a mass completely separate from the rest of my body. Andrew mentioned that he was also in a moderate amount of pain. We began our descent and my stomach was feeling increasingly awful. I felt like a bad thing might happen in the near future. I hoped I could prolong the inevitable spew that was to come until we made it outside. I kept my head down and without any real logical justification, placed my hand in front of my mouth.


At the bottom of the staircase, between us and the door, the entire wait staff of the restaurant lined up on both sides of our path. They waved and said "bye bye!" as we passed. Right as this was happening, a preliminary wave of vomit rushed up but I managed to contain it in my mouth. When the second came a few seconds later, there was really nothing I could do. The vomit spilled out over my hand and onto the floor as I passed by the employees. I didn't look up to see but I'm certain they were all aware of what was happening. I kept a normal walking pace to the door, hoping that maybe if I didn't act too alarmed, they wouldn't look for anything out of the ordinary. But, of course, there's no real way to walk by two walls of people and vomit without drawing some attention.


Once out the door, I jogged to the side of the restaurant and finished up. Unwittingly, I did this directly in front of a side entrance for the staff. A man came out of the door, looked down at the pile and then stood in front of it. I think he was assigned the duty of blocking the mess from view of the public.


A lot of Chinese people often bestow upon foreigners undue praise, which comes off as patronizing more than anything. I've gotten sick of it. When people compliment me on my Chinese before I've spoken any, I don't really take it to heart. I didn't get to see the looks on the employees' faces after I began to throw up but I fantasize about it every day. Sometimes I do this during small talk with strangers. While the person in front of me is paying me some manner of empty compliment, I think about those poor waiters and waitresses who looked on, probably mortified, as one of their foreign customers who they were ogling at with curiosity just an hour earlier, was spewing uncontrollably while calmly walking out the door. I like to think that they all now hold the belief that Americans do not have that all-important instinct to stop eating when it's time to stop eating. If I were to run into one of them on the street, I suspect they wouldn't compliment my Chinese, which is how it should be.


The only downside of the night was that in vomiting, I lost all my fucking protein.

Cocktail Party

My friend Andrew teaches a class on English for use in a business setting. He teaches two classes of graduate students either the same age as us or a little older. He was given a textbook to assist in creating lesson plans. Andrew indicated to me that this textbook has been slightly less useful than a satchel of urine in preparing for his teaching duties.

A man named Peter attended one of Andrew’s classes and talked with him afterwards. Peter teaches in the same department as Andrew and informed him that there was an upcoming cocktail party for teachers and students in said department. Since Andrew was not only a teacher in the department but also a white foreigner, they would be more than glad to have him attend. When Andrew mentioned this to me he also remarked that they would probably be some amount of glad to have me attend as well since I too, am a white foreigner. There would be free food and drink at the party. All who attended would be expected to dress formally.

Unrelated Engrish picture to break up walls of text

On the day of the party, I was planning on heading to campus to meet with a student of mine named Heky (Pronounced Hi-key, I think. The name’s supposed to be in English but I’ve found no evidence of that being the case) who asked me to help her prepare for an oral English competition. The TV network CCTV holds an annual competition for college students around China to recite a speech they’ve written. I think there’s a monetary prize involved. I figured editing Heky’s speech wouldn’t take too long so I’d have plenty of time to go to the cocktail party, although I still wasn’t entirely sure if I was actually invited.

Andrew and I headed to the bus stop, him in a suit, me in my everyday slop t-shirt and jeans. As we passed through the extensive roadwork along the way, Andrew got dirt and mud all over his pretty little pants so I gave him some tissues to clean up. I carry a pack of tissues with me everywhere I go in case of a shit emergency because most public bathrooms don’t have toilet paper, including those at the school. There’s always a chance that your shit will be a squishy mess. When taking such a shit in an eastern style toilet, you run the remote risk of staining your pants. A student of mine named Jacob who has been using eastern style toilets his entire life told me that he recently had such an accident. If this happens, tissues won’t be of much help. You can, however, use them to wipe the tears from your eyes as you spend the rest of your day walking around in public with poopoo stains on your pants, mocked and ridiculed at every turn.

We arrived at the campus and headed to our respective destinations. On the way, we ran into Peter. Andrew introduced us and Peter told me to come to the party. Delighted, I went to the cafeteria to meet with Heky, where I figured we’d go over the speech. Without going off on too long a tangent, I'll mention that my meeting with Heky took a lot longer than it should of, involving her telling a kid to fuck off, taking me on an uncomfortable date-like outing and suggesting that I take her speech home with me to edit on my own time. If I ever write about Chinese college students tricking their foreign teachers into going on dates with them, which isn't uncommon, I’ll be sure to include further details regarding this event.

Lots of words so far. This advertisement has something to do with abortions

When Heky suggested that I take her speech home and go over it by myself, I replied that I wasn’t very fond of that idea. We returned to the campus and went back to the cafeteria and went over the whole thing. It was about global warming. Another student of mine, self-dubbed “Snower,” came to join us. I think I’m going to talk about names in an upcoming class. When I told them I was going to the cocktail party, they insisted on bringing me to the classroom. Chinese people tend not to believe me when I tell them I’m capable of performing basic functions such as recognizing locations I visit daily by myself. We took the elevator up to the fifth floor and as soon as the doors opened, I saw a crowd of Chinese people in suits and dresses in front of me. Among them was Peter.

Peter spotted me immediately and went, “Ah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” He came over, grabbed my arm and whisked me away from the elevator. He led me into a large room filled with more Chinese people in suits and dresses. He continued, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” as he dragged me into the center of the room. A dozen or so students surrounded me and Peter said “Okay,” then left. One of them handed me a glass of wine. They began asking me questions.

“Where are you from?”

“Are you going to be our teacher?”

“Do you know Jackie Chan?”

“How do you like China?”

“Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?”

“Would you marry a Chinese girl?”

For the next few hours I would be given drink after drink and pinned against a wall by drunk, eager Chinese grad students. It was really fun. The pictures that follow came from renren.com, the Chinese equivalent of facebook. A bunch of students added Andrew as a friend and he managed to find a couple of photo albums.

A table of wine. The wine is a lot like Hawaiian punch in regards to both taste and alcoholic content

It's cool that Andrew is talking to all these girls. The person who took this picture is either twice his height or standing on a chair. Possibly even a table.

Eventually the initial group around me thinned out. I had arrived pretty late and people were starting to leave. I was only swallowed into an inescapable vortex of Chinese people two more times throughout the night. The first was when I pulled out the book I’m reading, The Power Broker, to show them pictures of New York and Americans. I think the motion of opening my backpack caught a lot of people’s attention.

In this picture, I'm the second from the left in the foreground

The second time was when one of the guys, the one who looks like he’s smelling my head in the picture above, asked me if I can dance. I didn’t think there could be a wrong answer but apparently “sure” was just that. He changed the song to something remarkably similar from the one that was already playing and told me to dance. The people around me began to spread out and form a circle. I didn’t really have it in me to let down a room full of well-dressed Chinese people so I said I would as long as Andrew did too.

Dohohoh

Andrew was opposed to the idea and cursed at me for a while. I started several chants of “dance!” both in English and Chinese. Eventually he jiggled his pecs. Everyone was astonished and several people actually screamed. Then, apparently, my dance wasn’t good enough and I was expected to jiggle my pecs as well, which I couldn’t.

Dohohoh

Things continued to happen. One of them asked me if I knew of the show Friends. I told him that I was familiar with its existence. This caused several of them to repeatedly nod their heads at me and ask me how I was doing. This was a reference to one of the show’s characters, Joey, who asks women how they’re doing in many episodes of the show.

My arm, although clearly bent, appears to be flush against the wall

This was posted on renren as a comment regarding the previous image

The two guys in the back are mocking us

I talked about the NBA with a group of guys for about twenty minutes. I don’t know shit about the NBA but it’s one of the most popular conversation topics. It’s a really easy conversation to have. The conversation follows this pattern:

“Do you know Kevin Garnett?”

“Ke….wen…”

“You know Boston? Boston Celtics?”

“Yes! Yes! Boston!”

“Garnett.”

“Ah!! Garnett. Yes, he very good. Ehhh. Jamesuh.”

“Lebron James?”

“Yes!”

“Oh yeah, he’s great.”

“Yes!”

“Do you know Allen Iverson?”

“Ibur…son…”

The guy on the right rules. I didn't speak to the guy on the left but I'm fairly confident I can say the same for him

Eventually, I checked my phone and saw that we had five minutes to catch the last bus home. A posse of students accompanied Andrew and I out of the building, fearing that we wouldn’t be capable of finding the bus we take every day. It seemed we were too late and the bus had already gone. The students then led us to the main gate and all at once started instructing a cab driver how to get to our apartment building. He wasn’t familiar with Lin He Jie but thought he had the idea after a while. We got in and sure enough he made a wrong turn. After he corrected it we decided we didn’t want to pay a fare any greater than the meter was already showing so we walked the rest of the way. We stopped once to pee on a building. I had to go pretty badly so I was glad we didn't stay in the cab.