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.

Bootleg

The English majors at the Jilin Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering don't get to pick what classes they want to take. A major is essentially a complete curriculum. When the kids choose their major, they are placed in a class with around twenty other students. For the next four years, these are their classmates and they take every single class together in the same room unless they need to make use of one of the school's few garbage resources. One of the classes they are required to take is called English Film and Television and I am apparently the resident expert because every Monday I have to watch the same movie three times in a room with garbage resources.

The last movie I watched three times in one day

My first day teaching was a Monday, so I had my film classes. I took the opportunity to assess what kinds of movies the students have seen and what I should show them. Across the board, they're used to a maturity level of roughly PG. Popular actors include Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Tom Hanks. I didn't have to ask them to know that social and political issues should probably be avoided.  They're all squeamish when it comes to gore and violence and haven't seen many horror movies. This makes me really sad. I think every child should have at least one early traumatic mature movie experience. Some of my experiences of this nature included watching The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Last Action Hero.

With that information I began looking around. I knew that once I got the internet connection I was promised, I could get ahold of movies more easily but until then I'd have to buy DVDs. Nothing I brought with me would be suitable.

I like the way you lickin' that fetus, girl

I've yet to find any DVDs here that aren't bootlegs. A lot of them are collections of 15 or 16 movies on two discs. These movies will often have something in common with one another, like the starring actor.

It's not really blu-ray

When I found this in Ou Ya I was surprised to find that they sell collections like this for about 8 yuan (roughly a dollar and change). It's got some good stuff like Road to Perdition, which I probably won't be able to show them and Big, which I probably will. This is the most normal DVD I've found since I've been here.

A man sells DVDs from the back of a pickup truck across the street from me. I paid him a visit and saw a Will Smith collection similar to the Tom Hanks one I already owned. I thought it was interesting that I so easily found collections of movies with two actors that the students unanimously requested. I didn't buy the Will Smith one yet but I intend to. In addition to many Will Smith movies, the collection also has Beverly Hills Cop 1, 2 and 3, none of which feature Will Smith.

Like I said earlier, the last movie I watched three times in one day was Home Alone. After an initial failed attempt to stream it on Youku, the Chinese equivalent of Youtube that ignores all copyright laws, I decided to show them The Wanderers off of my USB stick instead. As soon as I plugged in my flash drive it got a virus, which was fun. With the exception of four or five kids in each class, everyone fell asleep. Probably because the audio quality was bad, the characters all talk over each other and there weren't any subtitles. I don't consider this class to be one of my most successful ones. I decided to look for Home Alone on DVD.

Do you recognize that kid? It's the kid from Home Alone 3. What about those people behind him? Let's take a closer look.

Still can't place them? The're the cast of National Lampoon's Dorm Daze and Dorm Daze 2, which everyone in America has both heard of and enjoyed. I mentioned before that the movies on these DVDs have something in common. See if you can guess what the common ground between Home Alone 3 and Dorm Daze is.

Other "Super Little Rascal Managing a Household" movies in the set are Casper, Surviving Christmas, Little Miss Sunshine, Jingle All the Way and Me, Myself & Irene among others. I found out that there are four films in the Home Alone series and French Stewart plays Marv, Joe Pesci's character, in the fourth one. That's kind of upsetting. In any case, I found Home Alone and I entered my classroom the following Monday confident that nothing could go wrong. As a bonus, the DVD had Chinese subtitles, which the students love and I'd rather have them understand the movie than struggle to follow along and lose interest. Much to my chagrin, the A/V system in the classroom decided to give me a big fuck you and stopped functioning ten minutes into the class. It worked out alright though because I got to hold my classes in the marginally superior A/V room next door where the movie played without a problem.

Pictured above: Kumar, of "Harold & Kumar" fame, with the Klumps, of "The Nutty Professor" fame

There are bootlegs in Ou Ya, there are bootlegs in the back of people's pickup trucks and there are bootlegs in a marketplace on a downtown street called Hongqi Jie. The market is a large, underground area with rows upon rows of DVDs, CDs, weapons and plastic goofy shit. This is the place to come when you want to buy a movie for yourself. The selection is enormous. I came here with Nick about a week ago to see what it was like.

If you're a foreigner, people shout "DVD!" and "CD! Music!" as you walk by. It doesn't matter whose shelf you choose to look at because they're going to sit you down on a stool and keep you there until you've seen every single product that they offer. If you're a foreigner trying to buy anything that doesn't have a price tag, you probably shouldn't pay more than 30% of what they ask. Chinese salespersons are the best actors in the world. While we were sitting there, the lady who was helping us was nothing but pleasant. She kept complimenting me on my fledgling Chinese. I picked out 6 movies and figured I wouldn't take anything higher than 30 yuan for all of them, 5 a piece. Nick picked out a few and then asked, "How much?" All of a sudden the woman wasn't smiling and pulled out a calculator to display the price because my Chinese was so good and all. She showed him something like 45 for three movies and a TV show, which was way too high. I asked how much for all of mine and she showed the same.

Haggling is a process but I enjoy it. After I said "too expensive" she got really angry and started cursing us out. I said 30 a few times but she was pretending not to listen. Nick put the TV show back and I put 3 of my movies back. We asked how much for 6 between the two of us. Still 45, so we walked. Nick mentioned that he feels bad walking since they spend a lot of time taking everything out of boxes to show us. As far as I'm concerned, fuck anyone who's knowingly trying to rip me off. Or unknowingly, incompetence is no excuse.  Sure enough, in about 20 seconds the other woman from that row came running after us and asked us to come back. We got it for 30 and that woman who was first so pleasant, then serious, then angry wore this shit-eating grin like we were still getting ripped off. A few days ago I asked a Chinese friend if 5 was a good price and he said he wouldn't take more than 3 a movie. I hope that bitch spends the rest of eternity in Hades, removing stacks of movies from a box that never depletes. That's a little rough, I'm sure she's a wonderful person in other settings. In any case, this is what I spent my time fighting for.

The aliens use bows and arrows, it's on the back of the box

                           

Based on the popular Nintendo series, Roll is played by a man in drag and the only Asians in the movie are robots

And a Werner Herzog movie but the cover isn't funny. Thanks for your time.

Sean's Apartment

I teach English at the Jilin Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering. I live in a city called Changchun, which is situated in the Northeastern province of Jilin. The province borders North Korea, Russia and Inner Mongolia. It's supposed to get cold soon. I have an apartment in a gated apartment building complex called "Zhonghai," which literally translates to Middle Sea and less literally translates to Mediterranean. Last year, the apartment belonged to Sean.


I know a lot about Sean.

The cross is Jesus and he's telling the observer that he's the bread of life

An accurate depiction of a crucifix

Real cute

Fuck you Sean

Ask me anything about Romans 8

Real cute

Mediocre caption

Nice

 The other item of interest Sean left behind was an open package of meat. He left this sitting in the freezer while it sat unplugged for a month, swimming in a pool of yellow water and maggots. I would have taken a picture were it not for the unbearable stench of rotting flesh. That shit was seriously the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life. It made me dry heave, which a smell has never before caused me to do. In that regard, I guess I should be thankful for the new experience and all.

I was not very happy about all these things when I first moved in but I have since grown very fond of my apartment.

Since Sean doesn't really have anything to do with China, the rest of this post will be a list of notable people I've met since I've been here. Some of them will come up in future posts, assuming I write future posts. I should also mention that I came here with a good friend of mine named Andrew. There's a lot to love about China but there are times when you need an American around. As Andrew has put it before, one day you're bound to order pig anus in a restaurant and it's better to have someone to laugh about it with than to stew in your lonesome misery. Andrew studied abroad in Shanghai for a semester and was fairly certain he ordered pig anus.

Andrew holding evidence that Chinese people enjoy stupid cat shit just as much as Americans

Allen - I'm not sure what Allen's job is exactly but it entails trying to take advantage of Andrew and I every chance he gets. He picked us up from the airport when we arrived and before greeting us, began explaining that we will not be paid the amount of money stated in our contract for the first month. I have a lot to say about Allen and will most likely dedicate an entire post to him. He's a scoundrel and a manchild and his malevolence knows no end.

Black Stallion - Black Stallion. English students in China pick their own English names. Sometimes they aren't names. A marketing student at the university who seems to be some kind of assistant to Allen. Along with Allen, he met us at the airport. He's as awesome as you might expect someone who picks the name Black Stallion to be. You'd have to be to work for Allen all day.

Emily - One of my students. On the first day of class she asked me what my religion is. I told her I'm a Jew and she kept commenting on how clever I am. During class the following week, she asked me if I could cut open my head and give her a piece of my brain so she could gain some of my Jew cleverness.

Nick - Another American who has been here for a year. Knows the city very well and has a good sense of fun. A man who goes to the same gym as Nick asked him to marry his daughter and offered a dowry that included a house, car and restaurant.

Wayne - Another American who has been in China for ten years. Wayne enjoys Star Trek and Linux, which are both on my list of things that make me instantly like someone.

"Ü Mi Guy" - Ü mi is corn. Many street vendors sell corn. A few of them record audio loops on a megaphone that play over and over and over again as they bike up and down the street. One stands out far above the rest. His promise of reasonably priced corn beckons all. I came up with a drinking game that involves Ü Mi Guy and passersby who stare at us white folk that may or may not be fatal. Testing will begin in the near future.

Guess what they don't sell here

The Entire Second Floor Sales Staff of Ou Ya - Ou Ya is essentially a Chinese Wal-Mart. There's one right around the corner from Zhonghai, so Andrew and I have spent a lot of time here getting cleaning supplies and whatnot. The employees spot us immediately and know we're looking for things that we have no idea how to say in Chinese and have been an indispensable help. I had to buy a drying rack for my clothes and the closest thing I could come up with was "after clean clothes put place." These ladies found it.

Bruce - Bruce is a student at the college. He is representative of a large number of people I have met who approach me and simply say, "Hello, I would like to be your friend." They study English and aren't shy about talking to foreigners. We exchanged phone numbers and later that night, after finishing "Scanners," I saw that I missed two text messages and the following correspondence between Bruce and I ensued:

09/20 20:03 Bruce: hi,paul.goodnight! i want know more about you....
09/20 20:22 Bruce: Maybe you are busy now .It is ok,hope meeting you next time!
09/20 22:20 Me: Hi Bruce. Sorry I didn't respond to your messages until now, I was watching a movie. It was nice meeting you today.
09/20 22:22 Bruce: it is ok.Have a good sleep! Tomorrow will be wondeful.Good night,Paul
09/20 22:25 Bruce: it is OK.Good night!Paul Tomorrow will be wonderful ! Sorry for my slow writting....
09/20 22:37 Bruce: it is ok.Have a good sleep! Tomorrow will be wondeful.Good night,Paul
09/20 22:38 Me: Good night Bruce.

At that point I think Bruce was satisfied and waited until the next day to contact me again. So far whenever people have given me the wanna be yo friend routine I've said fine and given them my number but a few more Bruces could change that.

I think that rounds it off nicely. More to come.