Journal -- Follow-up to "So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop"

backlog reference: So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop

My first unintended trip to the condom shop with Adam and Richard was not to be my last. In fact, it spawned two separate trips back to the same shop at later points in the year, to different purposes and ends.

The first was when I was writing the narrative and narrative essay for "So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop." At the time that I wrote it (probably mid-October), it had already been at least a few weeks since I had actually walked into that particular shop with Adam and Richard. Most of my attention at the time had been given to communicating with the shop owner to buy what we had come for, and the details of the shop itself were sketchy in my mind. So, to provide detail of place in the narrative, I decided that I needed to go back for further research. (Yes, I realize that going to a sex shop for 'further research' sounds rather suspect, but that's journalistic integrity.)

So, late on a weeknight, when the sky was turning dark and my skin color didn't immediately single me out as one of the handful of foreigners on campus, I set off, alone and on bike, back to the condom shop. I pedaled along the right side of the street, keeping an eye on the left where I knew the shop would be. Eventually the familiar block-letter sign came into view (this was actually one of the revisions I made based on my second trip--I had originally written that the sign was "red, with white block-characters" when in fact it was white, with red-block characters). I crossed the street and parked my bike a discreet distance from the condom shop--despite their frequency, I'm still not sure whether it's reputable to be seen entering one. I was about one door down from the entrance, between another shop and a restaurant.

I had just locked my bike and steeled myself to enter the store, when out from the restaurant directly behind me walked a student I recognized from my freshman class. (I teach both freshmen and juniors at Henan University--the juniors I teach writing, and the freshmen I teach conversation.) He didn't see me, but he didn't keep walking either. He just stood outside the door of the restaurant, a few feet away from me, waiting for something. A few moments later, another one of my freshman students showed up from across the street, and they both stood there talking. At this point, I decided the jig was up, and instead of trying to sneak away quietly I figured the least suspicious thing would be to at least say hi to them and say that it was a chance encounter (which it was!). So I did that.

"Teacher!" one of them said in surprise (they still call me this more often than my actual name, despite my efforts), "What are you doing here?"

"Oh!" I responded dumbly. "Just... riding around on my bike." I patted my bike as I said this, to lend strength to the otherwise absurdly vague lie. However, a side effect of speaking to people in a language not their own is that it requires them to focus on the form of the conversation more than its content. Whether because of this or because they didn't feel the need to question their English teacher more closely, my students seemed satisfied with that answer. I turned to the attack--

"What are you doing here?"

"Our classmate is having a birthday. A group of us are here celebrating it." A pause. "Would you like to come join us?"

I am naturally shy, and usually refuse spontaneous invitations if for no other reason than I feel awkward accepting them. However, if I said "No," on top of being rude, they might repeat their question of "why?", and I had yet to come up with a more acceptable answer than "I need to research this condom shop." So I said "Yes!" with unusual gusto, and we all went inside.

Thus, my first lone misadventure to the condom shop ended up with me at a freshman birthday party in a restaurant two doors down from my intended target. The only "research" I got out of it was that I had reversed the colors on the sign outside the store. I later talked to Adam about my problem, who as I mentioned in my original narrative had much more leisure to look around the condom shop the first time we went in, and he provided most of the details you now see in the narrative.

That was my first attempt, and the experience was sufficient to scare me off from the condom shop for another two months. Then, for different reasons, I tried my second attempt, which ended much more successfully.

Journal -- Introduction

One of the main deterrents to writing a blog for me is that my journalistic instinct is effectively nil. The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of the matter (the last of which snuck into the wh-questions by a clever rearrangement of its letters) don't really excite me, or at best provide a very short thrill.

I can't even keep a personal journal to save my life. I have one, a nice hard-bound, black-covered book with the title "Journal" printed handsomely across it, given to me by my high-school history teacher upon my graduation with some warm-hearted advice written inside the front cover. I have four entries written in it during the month of August, 2007, my first semester in college. The next entry is from October of that same year, a short three-line entry wondering where September had gone. Then nothing until August, 2008, where I repeat the procedure with three entries in August, then an entry in October, again mystified about the disappearance of September. Entries after that become even more haphazard. I'm convinced the only thing I've written in there that I will remember is a one-line entry on the day of my first arrival in Beijing, so jet-lagged and disoriented that I wasn't even sure what date to put down:

"August 15/16

A behemoth carried me to China today, walking atop the clouds."

Who knows...

But of course things do happen in my daily life between those large gaps in journal entries, and some of them even bear recording. It's the kinds of things friends and relatives want to hear about when they ask you about China, and it's the kinds of things you figure you'll always remember, but you won't. So I'll write some of them down here: stories and experiences that don't necessarily fit into any of the other topics I write about on this blog, but that just happen in daily life. This is a new attempt at keeping a journal. We'll see if we can make it through September.