Originally written: Fall 2011 Contains some footnotes for vocabulary and grammar that foreign students might have difficulty with.
Have you ever had a joke where the setup is just too good for a punchline[1]? The setting is too out-there, the characters are too quirky, the entire situation is just too pregnant with humor for anything you say to really top it. Here’s one—three white guys walk into a condom shop in China: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. It sounds like the setup for a really bad joke, but it’s not. Because it actually happened.[2]
My friends and I were walking along one night in Kaifeng, a little podunk town in the middle of nowhere China, going out for some late-night snacks: myself, my good friend Adam, and my good friend Richard. On our way to the night market, a cornucopia of cheap foods and amazing tastes (though not always so amazing smells), we happened to see a particular kind of sign that only comes out at night. Set inconspicuously in the middle of the side walk, in big red block-characters set against a background of white, it said 避孕药, which literally translates to “Avoiding pregnancy medicine”. Seeing this (being the most literate of us three in Chinese characters), I pointed it out to my two friends, and we all snickered in our male-centric[3] way at the frankness of the awkward translation. Walking past the sign, I turned around for no reason I can now recall, and saw the back of the sign said 安全套, literally “protective coverings”. Taking about two seconds to recognize the Chinese word for “condoms”, I couldn’t resist but point this translation out to my friends as well. We all got a good giggle out of it, then Adam said all of a sudden, “Hey, Richard, didn’t your wife say you needed to get some of those?” A pause. Then Richard, in his tall, awkward, gangly sort of way, replied, “Yeah.”
So, three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. They want to buy one box of condoms. This actually happened.
The funny thing is, it didn’t have to happen on that particular street, on that particular night, or in that particular city in China. You can find little hole-in-the-wall[4] condom shops all over the place, all sporting equally awkward signs when translated literally. One of my favorites is 成人店 , which really just means “Adult Store”, a common enough term in America, but when translated literally becomes “Becoming a man store”, which has so many more implications. There are also the signs advertising “Objects for his or her self-pleasure”, where we would use the euphemistic “Toys”; “Products for Husband and Wife”, which we just snicker at; and “Night-Fire Shop”, for which I cannot think of a more appropriate translation.
But it’s not just the sex stores that give off this image of a strangely promiscuous China; hotel rooms have raised my suspicions as well. I remember travelling to Anyang, an even smaller city in the same province as Kaifeng, where the six of us travelling together stayed three to a room: three girls in one room, and three boys in the other. In each of these rooms, there were three separate beds, as we had expected. Also in the rooms was the standard package of a water bottle, soda, and snacks, with a little price card on the side saying how much each product cost if used or taken. Less expected was the additional package, which we dubbed the “pleasure package”, containing condoms, male- and female-flavored lubricant, and a razor. This one had no price card. I don’t know what kinky[5] things they thought were going to be going on in a room with three separate beds, but they were ready for it.
Here’s the punchline—I still have no idea whom all these products are supposed to be marketed for. Obviously there’s a supply of sex-products in China, so basic economic logic says there must be a demand. But where is it coming from? My first assumption as an outsider and an American was that it was coming from the young, unmarried crowd in Kaifeng, and especially suspect (as always) were the college students. My suspicion was grounded both in experience with American colleges as well as observations such as the hotel down the street from campus that rented rooms by the hour and the predominance of sex shops in the area around the university. (I recognize now that my last observation may have been biased—I spent my time around campus, and thus it was around campus that I saw sex shops. The hotel in Anyang with the “pleasure packages”, for example, was nowhere near the university where I stayed.)
However, there was a problem with this assumption that quickly became apparent. While the market right outside of campus was primed for casual sex, the attitudes within campus were emphatically not. Now of course it is impossible to know the minds and attitudes of every student on campus; we as teachers are witness only to a very small handful that pass through our classes, and even then the topic of sex is not usually openly discussed. However, if our few observations could be taken as representative of campus culture, this would seem to be a university of romantic virgins. That is to say, a great deal of emphasis and credulity is placed on the idea of an exclusive, life-long relationship with a “one true love”, at the expense (perhaps) of any notions of casual dating and short-term romantic or sexual relationships.
Obviously I have to qualify those last conclusions quite a bit. If our observations of a few students’ attitudes could be taken as representative of the entire campus, this might be true. It is possible that we have just happened to talk with a handful of romantics whose views do not reflect those of the campus at large. It is equally possible that, even if this romantic idea of “one true love” is more popular here than on college campuses in America, it would not necessarily preclude casual romantic or sexual relationships. Perhaps the two ideas are far enough removed that they don’t interrupt one another, that it does not seem strange to both wait for one’s true love and in the meantime partake in relationships that have more immediate gratification. Or perhaps every relationship is assumed to be one’s true and lasting love, and so it is unproblematic to have sex with a girlfriend/boyfriend.
Regardless of these complications, there remains a discrepancy between the material environment that seems to support casual sex[6] and the social environment that does not[7]. This discrepancy does not exist in China alone – America certainly exhibits a similar condition. But somehow it is more striking in China, at least to a foreigner and an outsider; perhaps it is a symptom of learning Chinese, that once you recognize the characters for “adult store” you start seeing them everywhere. For three white guys walking into a condom shop in China, it was a cultural as well as personal experience.
______________________
Notes
[1] The last line of a joke, the one that makes everyone laugh.
[2] This is an incomplete sentence. However, it is used here for emphasis (see pages 8-10 in Vol. 1)
[3] Concerning males—all three of us were guys.
[4] Small and without advertisements
[5] Strange and sexual; sexually deviant
[6] This includes the sex shops and availability of condoms and contraceptives.
[7] This includes the romantic ideas described above, as well as the report from some students of a lack of any sex education.
Showing posts with label backlog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label backlog. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Backlog -- So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop
Originally written: Fall 2011
So three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. It sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but it’s not.
So we were walking along in Kaifeng, a little podunk town in the middle of nowhere China, going out for some late-night snacks: myself, my good friend Adam, and my good friend Richard. On our way to the night market, a cornucopia of cheap foods and amazing tastes (though not always so amazing smells), we happened to see a particular kind of sign that only comes out at night. Set inconspicuously in the middle of the side walk, in big red block-characters set against a background of white, it said 避孕药, which literally translates to “Avoiding pregnancy medicine”. Seeing this (being the most literate of us three in Chinese characters), I pointed it out to my two friends, and we all snickered in our male-way at the frankness of the awkward translation. Walking past the sign, I turned around for no reason I can now recall, and saw the back of the sign said 安全套, literally “protective coverings”. Taking about two seconds to recognize the Chinese word for “condoms”, I couldn’t resist but point this translation out to my friends as well. We all got a good giggle out of it, then Adam said all of a sudden, “Hey, Richard, didn’t your wife say you needed to get some of those?” A pause. Then Richard, in his tall, awkward, gangly sort of way, replied, “Yeah.”
So, three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. They want to buy one box of condoms.
First off, this condom shop is tiny. It looked bigger from the outside, but on the inside two big, glass display tables take up most of the room. In the glass display directly in front of us: condoms. In the glass display to the left: contraceptives. On the wall behind the contraceptives: dildos and other toys. In the back of the room: a bed (not as kinky as it sounds, this is for the store owner), and a grainy, black-and-white television set. The three of us fit in the room, but uncomfortably.
Second, the store owner is having the best day of his life. He gets this huge, toothy grin as soon as we walk in, and you know this will be a story he tells his grandchildren one day, when they’re old enough. (“You won’t believe what walked into my shop the other day.”)
Anyway, I get to work helping Richard buy some condoms, and Adam gets to work sight-seeing. We quickly ascertain that there are two distinct kinds of condoms in the shop: the brand-name 20-25 RMB condoms, and the 10 RMB condoms with pictures of naked ladies on the boxes. Adam is convinced that the latter would make the best souvenir from China, but we go for the brand-name.
In the end, there is no punchline; or maybe the whole situation is the punchline—three white guys working together to buy a box of condoms in China. As we leave, Adam waves over his shoulder and says in Chinese, “明天见”, or “See you tomorrow”. The guy just laughs.
So three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. It sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but it’s not.
So we were walking along in Kaifeng, a little podunk town in the middle of nowhere China, going out for some late-night snacks: myself, my good friend Adam, and my good friend Richard. On our way to the night market, a cornucopia of cheap foods and amazing tastes (though not always so amazing smells), we happened to see a particular kind of sign that only comes out at night. Set inconspicuously in the middle of the side walk, in big red block-characters set against a background of white, it said 避孕药, which literally translates to “Avoiding pregnancy medicine”. Seeing this (being the most literate of us three in Chinese characters), I pointed it out to my two friends, and we all snickered in our male-way at the frankness of the awkward translation. Walking past the sign, I turned around for no reason I can now recall, and saw the back of the sign said 安全套, literally “protective coverings”. Taking about two seconds to recognize the Chinese word for “condoms”, I couldn’t resist but point this translation out to my friends as well. We all got a good giggle out of it, then Adam said all of a sudden, “Hey, Richard, didn’t your wife say you needed to get some of those?” A pause. Then Richard, in his tall, awkward, gangly sort of way, replied, “Yeah.”
So, three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. They want to buy one box of condoms.
First off, this condom shop is tiny. It looked bigger from the outside, but on the inside two big, glass display tables take up most of the room. In the glass display directly in front of us: condoms. In the glass display to the left: contraceptives. On the wall behind the contraceptives: dildos and other toys. In the back of the room: a bed (not as kinky as it sounds, this is for the store owner), and a grainy, black-and-white television set. The three of us fit in the room, but uncomfortably.
Second, the store owner is having the best day of his life. He gets this huge, toothy grin as soon as we walk in, and you know this will be a story he tells his grandchildren one day, when they’re old enough. (“You won’t believe what walked into my shop the other day.”)
Anyway, I get to work helping Richard buy some condoms, and Adam gets to work sight-seeing. We quickly ascertain that there are two distinct kinds of condoms in the shop: the brand-name 20-25 RMB condoms, and the 10 RMB condoms with pictures of naked ladies on the boxes. Adam is convinced that the latter would make the best souvenir from China, but we go for the brand-name.
In the end, there is no punchline; or maybe the whole situation is the punchline—three white guys working together to buy a box of condoms in China. As we leave, Adam waves over his shoulder and says in Chinese, “明天见”, or “See you tomorrow”. The guy just laughs.
Backlog -- Toilets, or Something Like Them
Originally written: Summer 2010
Do you carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper in your pockets wherever you go? Do you pick it up with your wallet when you leave the house; find it coming up in casual conversation amongst friends? Maybe you have small panic attacks when you pat your pockets and find it's not there, or start stealing napkins from restaurants to replenish your store. In a pinch, you'd share with close friends or even complete strangers. All of this you do in China, or at least I did, because hand sanitizer and toilet paper are not the public commodities that they are in America. Public and many private bathrooms simply do not have them, so you keep some on hand all the time. TP comes folded up in little travel packets like tissue, and unless you're in a big, modern city like Beijing or Shanghai you don't ever flush it--there are wastebaskets in the stalls for used toilet paper. Hand sanitizer is usually the alcoholic kind you don't need water for that comes in small, handy containers. But toilet paper and soap aren't the only items many Westerners will find conspicuously missing in bathrooms; another one is toilets.
Toilets in the Western sense that is; toilets that you sit on. These toilets do exist in China, and in many establishments you'll find stalls set aside for their type, but far more prevalent are the squatting toilets. Squatting toilets are a study in the art of minimalism of toilets--they generally consist of two places to set your feet and a hole or trough in between. The actual quality varies--I've been to some very nice restrooms with clean and even esthetically-pleasing stalls for squatters. I've also been to some not-so-nice ones, often with cigarette butts sitting in the trough. So basically the same range you'll find in bathrooms across the world. Squatting toilets operate effectively as the name suggests--you stand where the footpads indicate, straddling the trough, lower the necessary garments, then squat down so that your knees are up around your chest, and you're set. It may take awhile to perfect your stance, find your center of balance and build up your thigh muscles enough to make you a proficient squatter, but the first time you find yourself in an emergency situation with only a squatting toilet in sight (this will happen), you'll find you can comport yourself well enough.
Still, the Chinese do have an advantage over us. They've been doing this since infancy. Very many Chinese children, in lieu of wearing diapers, will have a slit in their pants right at the crotch. In the city where I was staying at least, it was not an uncommon sight for such a young child to squat down wherever they happened to be standing outside to take care of business. Just another hazard of life in the city.
But even among all the crazy bathroom situations I found myself in during four months in China, I'd reserve special mention for the bathroom in my dorm room. Actually, this bath area was in most respects very nice and familiar: it had a sink area, a shower, and even a sitting toilet, and it was private to our room; much better accommodations than you found in Chinese students' dorms or plenty of American dorms for that matter. But this bathroom had a peculiarity that made it memorable to my roommate and me, and it seems to have been unique to our case. The shower was not set off or separate from the rest of the bathroom in any way, not even a curtain--you just had a nozzle on one of the walls and a drain opposite of it. With most setups like this, the drain is imperceptibly lower than the rest of the floor, so the water flows down from the floor into the drain, leaving most of the bathroom reasonably dry. Ours was the opposite. The drain was apparently raised imperceptibly from the rest of the floor, like one of those trick holes in mini golf, so that the water actually flowed away from the drain onto the rest of the floor. And it always gathered at the lowest point on our bathroom floor, which was apparently the toilet. So every time we took a shower, and sometimes as long as twelve hours later, we would have a moat surrounding our toilet. This just generally made life difficult and prompted one of our first attempts at communication with the residential maintenance man (the first of many), in which Tim gamely tried to explain our problem. "Zhe ge you shui. Zen me mei you shui?", which I can only translate as "This (tapping the floor with his foot) has water. How to not have water?" The man basically shrugged and told us to leave the fan on, which helped to speed up the drying process, but even with that and our futilely trying to sweep the leftover water toward the drain each time after taking a shower, we never fully resolved the problem. We just lived with it.
So, here's my advice to all future travelers in China. Get used to the idea of squatting, and quickly--it's actually more hygienic and physically appropriate than the way we do it in the West, and it's an experience you're probably not going to miss out on however hard you try. Carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper on you at all times; steal napkins if necessary. Don't flush the toilet paper. And don't let the bathroom situation dictate how and where you travel in China--you'll do just fine.
Do you carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper in your pockets wherever you go? Do you pick it up with your wallet when you leave the house; find it coming up in casual conversation amongst friends? Maybe you have small panic attacks when you pat your pockets and find it's not there, or start stealing napkins from restaurants to replenish your store. In a pinch, you'd share with close friends or even complete strangers. All of this you do in China, or at least I did, because hand sanitizer and toilet paper are not the public commodities that they are in America. Public and many private bathrooms simply do not have them, so you keep some on hand all the time. TP comes folded up in little travel packets like tissue, and unless you're in a big, modern city like Beijing or Shanghai you don't ever flush it--there are wastebaskets in the stalls for used toilet paper. Hand sanitizer is usually the alcoholic kind you don't need water for that comes in small, handy containers. But toilet paper and soap aren't the only items many Westerners will find conspicuously missing in bathrooms; another one is toilets.
Toilets in the Western sense that is; toilets that you sit on. These toilets do exist in China, and in many establishments you'll find stalls set aside for their type, but far more prevalent are the squatting toilets. Squatting toilets are a study in the art of minimalism of toilets--they generally consist of two places to set your feet and a hole or trough in between. The actual quality varies--I've been to some very nice restrooms with clean and even esthetically-pleasing stalls for squatters. I've also been to some not-so-nice ones, often with cigarette butts sitting in the trough. So basically the same range you'll find in bathrooms across the world. Squatting toilets operate effectively as the name suggests--you stand where the footpads indicate, straddling the trough, lower the necessary garments, then squat down so that your knees are up around your chest, and you're set. It may take awhile to perfect your stance, find your center of balance and build up your thigh muscles enough to make you a proficient squatter, but the first time you find yourself in an emergency situation with only a squatting toilet in sight (this will happen), you'll find you can comport yourself well enough.
Still, the Chinese do have an advantage over us. They've been doing this since infancy. Very many Chinese children, in lieu of wearing diapers, will have a slit in their pants right at the crotch. In the city where I was staying at least, it was not an uncommon sight for such a young child to squat down wherever they happened to be standing outside to take care of business. Just another hazard of life in the city.
But even among all the crazy bathroom situations I found myself in during four months in China, I'd reserve special mention for the bathroom in my dorm room. Actually, this bath area was in most respects very nice and familiar: it had a sink area, a shower, and even a sitting toilet, and it was private to our room; much better accommodations than you found in Chinese students' dorms or plenty of American dorms for that matter. But this bathroom had a peculiarity that made it memorable to my roommate and me, and it seems to have been unique to our case. The shower was not set off or separate from the rest of the bathroom in any way, not even a curtain--you just had a nozzle on one of the walls and a drain opposite of it. With most setups like this, the drain is imperceptibly lower than the rest of the floor, so the water flows down from the floor into the drain, leaving most of the bathroom reasonably dry. Ours was the opposite. The drain was apparently raised imperceptibly from the rest of the floor, like one of those trick holes in mini golf, so that the water actually flowed away from the drain onto the rest of the floor. And it always gathered at the lowest point on our bathroom floor, which was apparently the toilet. So every time we took a shower, and sometimes as long as twelve hours later, we would have a moat surrounding our toilet. This just generally made life difficult and prompted one of our first attempts at communication with the residential maintenance man (the first of many), in which Tim gamely tried to explain our problem. "Zhe ge you shui. Zen me mei you shui?", which I can only translate as "This (tapping the floor with his foot) has water. How to not have water?" The man basically shrugged and told us to leave the fan on, which helped to speed up the drying process, but even with that and our futilely trying to sweep the leftover water toward the drain each time after taking a shower, we never fully resolved the problem. We just lived with it.
So, here's my advice to all future travelers in China. Get used to the idea of squatting, and quickly--it's actually more hygienic and physically appropriate than the way we do it in the West, and it's an experience you're probably not going to miss out on however hard you try. Carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper on you at all times; steal napkins if necessary. Don't flush the toilet paper. And don't let the bathroom situation dictate how and where you travel in China--you'll do just fine.
Backlog -- The Ladies in the Lime-Green Jackets
Originally written: Summer 2010
“By the way, guys, the sex was great.” This is how another one of our American friends, Martha, an English teacher at Henan University, bade us farewell each time upon leaving our dorm for the teacher housing on campus. This despite the fact that we never had sex. She enjoyed referencing the apparent fact that anytime an exchange student had a foreign visitor over to the dorms, at any time of day, it was automatically assumed by the residential staff to be for sex. You could tell because these ladies, aged twenty to forty and usually very somber and stoic in their lime-green jackets, would start to giggle uncontrollably as soon as you escorted your friend up the stairs to the dorm rooms. It was very funny and almost cute, if you could get past the individual embarrassment and apparently promiscuous image you were giving to your race and culture as a whole. But they were perfectly fine with it—there were no limitations on visitation, so long as you met your guest in the front foyer (which I suspect was as much for their own amusement as for any security measures). With Chinese visitors, however, this was not at all the case. Chinese students were not allowed in the foreign dorms past the foyer. We once argued with the lady at the front desk for ten minutes to get visitation rights for a Chinese friend for an equal amount of time, but that was the one exception to the rule and accompanied with much suspicion. Their logic really seemed to be: “Let the foreigners screw all they want, but keep them away from the Chinese girls” (or guys—the foreign dorms were both sexes, so either would apply; and maybe later I’ll relate the views I encountered in China on homosexuality). What made this whole situation even stranger was that, a few weeks into living there, we discovered the foreign “dorms” weren’t really even dorms at all—it was a hotel operated within the university grounds, where Chinese families constantly were checking in and out! Of five floors, only the top two or three were ever occupied by foreign students, and we would share this space with Chinese residents for weeks at a time. How the ladies distinguished between the Chinese customers and the Chinese students I’ll never know, but they did so consistently and were unbending on their rules regarding the latter.
Now, I don’t want to give an image of the residential staff as green-clad goblin wards monitoring the sex lives of their foreign charges. On the whole, they were wonderful ladies to whom we became rather attached by the end of the semester. If you went down early enough in the morning, around 6:30 or so, you would see them all lined up in their lime-green jackets, receiving their orders for the day from their superior who seemed in her thirties and wore a variant of a business suit that was decidedly not lime-green (it was navy-blue, I believe). They would then disperse to their various duties, which included manning the front desk, cleaning on all of the floors, clearing out rooms after customers or students left, and informing you, motherly-like, whether you were wearing enough clothing for the weather outside (this last one wasn’t actually an assignment, they just seemed to enjoy doing it, especially to me). If you came in late enough, after midnight I believe, they would have to unlock the doors for you; and if you came in really late, you’d have to knock hard enough for one of them to emerge from their tiny one-room office/sleeping quarters behind the desk, looking disheveled but often still sporting that lime-green jacket. They were fine ladies, and you went to them first if you had any questions about anything—they didn’t speak a word of English between them (actually, the youngest one might have understood a bit), but they were a tenacious bunch for understanding or being understood despite this. I came to think of them affectionately as our first line of defense in China, and not just against the possibility of Chinese girls sneaking into our dormitories. If we had a problem, these competent ladies had us covered, and if they couldn’t help us, at least we’d have a hilariously drawn-out sign language conversation trying to figure out whom, if anyone, in the city could. (Actually, due to frequent practice, theirs was among the first Chinese I began to understand competently.)
At the end of the semester, I really wanted to find some kind of small gift to express gratitude to our interesting pack of caretakers. I had brought with me from the United States a collection of St. Louis paraphernalia—namely some souvenir MLB All-Star baseballs and St. Louis Cardinals ball caps (I personally have no interest whatsoever in the sport of baseball, but it’s American, right?). They were the kinds of gifts that seemed cheesy and impersonal enough that you’d be embarrassed to give them to your close friends, so they had been sitting on my shelf the whole semester long collecting dust (not entirely true—I gave one baseball to a friend’s father for his birthday; he expressed polite interest in it before setting it aside for I assume the rest of his natural life). But after some reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was just the right social distance from the ladies at the dorms to make the gifts not potentially awkward and maybe even a little touching. So, on my second to last day there, I went down, baseballs and caps in hand; I had to look up the word for baseball first (棒球 bàng qíu), as it isn’t a very popular sport in China and they weren’t certain to recognize the type of ball or the team. I made it down all five flights of stairs without being seen –I felt strangely conspicuous with my cache of baseball paraphernalia in communist China- only to find absolutely nobody at the front desk, or on the first floor at all for that matter. Not willing to go back up five flights of stairs, caps and balls in hand in defeat, I sat down in the front foyer and waited. The ladies I was waiting for were not the first to pass through there, and I feel like I got more stares than usual sitting there with my collection, though that might have been my imagination. Finally a familiar lime-green jacket appeared, and I rushed to explain my intentions and my gifts to her. I’m not entirely sure what happened in this transaction –I was generally fairly proficient at communicating with them at this point- but she said something in a hurry that I didn’t understand and then left; she came back not two minutes later with her superior trailing behind. Asked to explain the situation again, I did, explaining how baseball was an important sport in America and this was the team from my hometown. This time the superior took one of the hats I proffered, and after her the other employee claimed one of the baseballs as her own. Both of them thanked me very graciously and made a point of doing so throughout the day. It was a rousing success. My favorite reaction however came from one of the other ladies, a diminutive and quiet middle-aged one at maybe 5’4”, who was one of the few we had never managed to draw into conversation or much interaction. She was apparently so taken with her cardinal-red baseball cap that she went immediately into the little office to see it in the mirror (it contrasted horribly with the lime-green jacket),came out with the biggest (and perhaps first) smile I had ever seen from her, and I believe she wore it proudly for the rest of the day. I very much liked those ladies in the lime-green jackets, and I somewhat hope that, through all the sign-language speaking and sex-crazed foreigners they host, they remember one bringing baseballs and Cardinal’s caps from St. Louis.
Backlog -- Eating Dog
Originally written: Spring 2010
Alright—in the interests of honest journalism, I should admit that I did not actually eat dog while in China. I did have a rather lively conversation about it though with a group of other American exchange students, one of whom was a vegetarian; a Scottish guy from our class; and a girl from Kazakhstan. We were all out for lunch together at a restaurant near the campus, and I’m not sure who thought it would be a good topic to introduce to the table, but it was introduced. And once a topic such as that is put on the table (figuratively speaking), it’s hard to take it back off. I’d say we spent anywhere between half an hour to a full hour talking about it, during which time we all gorged ourselves indiscriminately on a number of meats that we probably didn't know the origins to. But the general consensus was that, given the opportunity to eat dog, we’d probably give it a try. The vegetarian at the table was vehemently opposed to this, for reasons that I suppose are rather obvious, but he seemed even more disgusted with the thought of eating dog than just eating meat in general (not an unusual sentiment, and one that many habitual meat-eaters share). I think the Scottish guy, who we called Scottish Mike on account of the fact that his name was Mike and he was Scottish, might have actually eaten dog before, but I can’t remember his comments on it if so. The girl from Kazakhstan didn’t speak English, and so didn’t understand what we were all babbling about or why the vegetarian was getting so agitated until somebody was thoughtful enough to translate it for her into Chinese (otherwise we tried to talk through the whole lunch in Chinese, but it’s hard to get really emphatic about something in a foreign language). Overall, it was a very interesting lunch.
Now, just because I didn’t eat dog in China, that doesn’t mean I didn’t try some weird stuff while I was there. Like congealed lamb’s blood. Yes, I did eat congealed lamb’s blood, and I discovered that I had a taste for it. It’s served (at least as I had it) in little rectangles, the consistency of which reminded me somewhat of Jell-O, such that the individual squares can easily be broken down into smaller pieces with chopsticks (we all broke off very small pieces for our first try). It was a dull brown color, with a kind of pock-marked surface. As for the taste, I really can’t find a suitable comparison. Perhaps you just have to try blood for yourself to appreciate it.
As stated in My Darling Clementine, I was kind of a picky eater before coming to China. The thing about China was, there was absolutely nothing familiar for me to fall back on; eating at Chinese buffets in America does not provide any point of comparison I could find. So I was either going to radically expand my palate, or I was going to starve, and I am too much a fan of eating (and staying alive) to make this decision difficult for me. Needless to say, I probably could have gotten by without eating lamb’s blood; but once you start trying new foods for the first time, a sort of reckless abandon takes hold of you, and suddenly you’re ready to eat (almost) anything just for the novelty of it; this will eventually wear off, either with habituation to your new foods or enough bad experiences. Fortunately, and to China’s credit, I never once regretted trying something new (except for the corn on the cob in Beijing—that was terrible). There were some things I tried once and decided not to try again (mostly spicy foods) and some things that I just was not willing to try at all (such as live scorpions skewered on a stick—also in Beijing). But overall, my time in China presented a great addition to my previously narrow tastes.
If you ever find yourself in China, here are some dishes I would recommend:*
Sweet and Sour Tenderloin (糖醋里脊 tang cu li ji): Surprisingly, this seems to be one of the few Chinese dishes we got right in the West. It’s even better in China.
Peking Duck (北京烤鸭 bei jing kao ya): It’s famous for a reason. Also ridiculously complicated to eat, especially with chopsticks. Have a Chinese person help you.
Sweet Potato Mud (红薯泥 hong shu ni): Oh my god it’s delicious. A more flattering translation might be sweet potato paste, but you just eat it directly with a spoon. It’s also piping hot when served, which might not be immediately obvious, so be cautious.
Chinese Cabbage and Tofu (白菜豆腐 bai cai dou fu): I don’t care if you hate it in the United States, you’re not allowed to say anything against tofu until you’ve had it prepared for you in China. This is my personal favorite tofu dish, and very mild for beginners to start on.
Anything with cucumbers (黄瓜 huang gua) or eggplants (茄子 qie zi) in it: It’s all good.
Dumplings (饺子 jiao zi): Duh. You can also try variations such as bao zi (包子), which are steamed stuffed buns, or many others that I didn’t bother learning the names to.
Peach Juice (桃汁 tao zhi): Not technically a dish, but a delicious sweet drink. Usually comes in a box carton.
Oatmeal Flavored Ice Cream: I don’t even remember how to write or say this in Chinese, but it’s wonderful, and there are ice cream vendors all across China.
Oh, and dog (狗 gou). I hear it’s great.
*note: I am using simplified characters (简体字) in writing the names of these dishes, because that’s what you’re most likely to see in mainland China.
Alright—in the interests of honest journalism, I should admit that I did not actually eat dog while in China. I did have a rather lively conversation about it though with a group of other American exchange students, one of whom was a vegetarian; a Scottish guy from our class; and a girl from Kazakhstan. We were all out for lunch together at a restaurant near the campus, and I’m not sure who thought it would be a good topic to introduce to the table, but it was introduced. And once a topic such as that is put on the table (figuratively speaking), it’s hard to take it back off. I’d say we spent anywhere between half an hour to a full hour talking about it, during which time we all gorged ourselves indiscriminately on a number of meats that we probably didn't know the origins to. But the general consensus was that, given the opportunity to eat dog, we’d probably give it a try. The vegetarian at the table was vehemently opposed to this, for reasons that I suppose are rather obvious, but he seemed even more disgusted with the thought of eating dog than just eating meat in general (not an unusual sentiment, and one that many habitual meat-eaters share). I think the Scottish guy, who we called Scottish Mike on account of the fact that his name was Mike and he was Scottish, might have actually eaten dog before, but I can’t remember his comments on it if so. The girl from Kazakhstan didn’t speak English, and so didn’t understand what we were all babbling about or why the vegetarian was getting so agitated until somebody was thoughtful enough to translate it for her into Chinese (otherwise we tried to talk through the whole lunch in Chinese, but it’s hard to get really emphatic about something in a foreign language). Overall, it was a very interesting lunch.
Now, just because I didn’t eat dog in China, that doesn’t mean I didn’t try some weird stuff while I was there. Like congealed lamb’s blood. Yes, I did eat congealed lamb’s blood, and I discovered that I had a taste for it. It’s served (at least as I had it) in little rectangles, the consistency of which reminded me somewhat of Jell-O, such that the individual squares can easily be broken down into smaller pieces with chopsticks (we all broke off very small pieces for our first try). It was a dull brown color, with a kind of pock-marked surface. As for the taste, I really can’t find a suitable comparison. Perhaps you just have to try blood for yourself to appreciate it.
As stated in My Darling Clementine, I was kind of a picky eater before coming to China. The thing about China was, there was absolutely nothing familiar for me to fall back on; eating at Chinese buffets in America does not provide any point of comparison I could find. So I was either going to radically expand my palate, or I was going to starve, and I am too much a fan of eating (and staying alive) to make this decision difficult for me. Needless to say, I probably could have gotten by without eating lamb’s blood; but once you start trying new foods for the first time, a sort of reckless abandon takes hold of you, and suddenly you’re ready to eat (almost) anything just for the novelty of it; this will eventually wear off, either with habituation to your new foods or enough bad experiences. Fortunately, and to China’s credit, I never once regretted trying something new (except for the corn on the cob in Beijing—that was terrible). There were some things I tried once and decided not to try again (mostly spicy foods) and some things that I just was not willing to try at all (such as live scorpions skewered on a stick—also in Beijing). But overall, my time in China presented a great addition to my previously narrow tastes.
If you ever find yourself in China, here are some dishes I would recommend:*
Sweet and Sour Tenderloin (糖醋里脊 tang cu li ji): Surprisingly, this seems to be one of the few Chinese dishes we got right in the West. It’s even better in China.
Peking Duck (北京烤鸭 bei jing kao ya): It’s famous for a reason. Also ridiculously complicated to eat, especially with chopsticks. Have a Chinese person help you.
Sweet Potato Mud (红薯泥 hong shu ni): Oh my god it’s delicious. A more flattering translation might be sweet potato paste, but you just eat it directly with a spoon. It’s also piping hot when served, which might not be immediately obvious, so be cautious.
Chinese Cabbage and Tofu (白菜豆腐 bai cai dou fu): I don’t care if you hate it in the United States, you’re not allowed to say anything against tofu until you’ve had it prepared for you in China. This is my personal favorite tofu dish, and very mild for beginners to start on.
Anything with cucumbers (黄瓜 huang gua) or eggplants (茄子 qie zi) in it: It’s all good.
Dumplings (饺子 jiao zi): Duh. You can also try variations such as bao zi (包子), which are steamed stuffed buns, or many others that I didn’t bother learning the names to.
Peach Juice (桃汁 tao zhi): Not technically a dish, but a delicious sweet drink. Usually comes in a box carton.
Oatmeal Flavored Ice Cream: I don’t even remember how to write or say this in Chinese, but it’s wonderful, and there are ice cream vendors all across China.
Oh, and dog (狗 gou). I hear it’s great.
*note: I am using simplified characters (简体字) in writing the names of these dishes, because that’s what you’re most likely to see in mainland China.
Backlog -- My Darling Clementine
Originally written: Spring 2010
Clementines have become an object of nostalgia for me. They evoke strong memories of rocking back and forth in a darkened, moving bunk; bent over and cramped so that my chin is nearly resting on my knees; strangers down below and camaraderie with the girl across from me; and the taste of peanuts. Perhaps I should backtrack a ways.
I didn’t just stay in Kaifeng for the entirety of my four months in China. I traveled around with some friends, seeing the sites, visiting the cities people outside of China have actually heard of... in effect, being a tourist, which is a role I’m quite happy to take. When we traveled to cities outside of the province, cities such as Beijing (北京), Shanghai (上海) and Xian (西安), we generally took overnight sleeper trains. You may be familiar with overnight sleeper trains –I’m certain they exist in most corners of the world- but China was the first place I encountered this form of transportation, and it may be some of the details are different than in other countries, so I will describe them here.
Overnight sleeper trains, as the name suggests, generally depart in the evening to nighttime hours, traveling all through the night, to arrive at their destinations early the next morning. In the place of normal seats, passengers spend the trip on individual bunks, where they will hopefully sleep most of the journey to arrive refreshed at their destination in the morning (this has rarely been the case to my experience). The bunks are stacked three on top of each other, six to a ‘cabin’, which has varying degrees of privacy. At the foot of the bunks runs a narrow passing lane, which may have small tables and fold-out chairs mounted to the wall of the train car. It’s not spacious.
My friends and I seemed to have a habit of getting the top bunks on all of our trips, which never made any difference to us but they seemed to be the last ones to fill up. To get to the top bunk, you would either climb up a tiny ladder at the foot of the bunks (which in fact serviced two bunks, yours and your neighbor’s on the other side of a thin wall separating your ‘cabins’); or, in more enclosed cabins, there would be hand- and foot-holds on the inside of the cabin to help you climb up and down (you inevitably used the edges of your lower bunkmates’ beds as well). The space between the top bunk and the ceiling was minimal though, so upon attaining the foot of your bunk you would have to sort of launch yourself in horizontally because you hardly had enough room to crawl (for the lower bunks, it was the bunk above that imposed this limitation). Once upon your bunk, there was absolutely no question of sitting upright, though you could swing your legs out over the side and hunch your body over into a position that resembled sitting. So that’s what we did when our bodies didn’t want to lie down.
On my first overnight sleeper, coming back from Beijing to Kaifeng, a trip I suspect of somewhere between nine and eleven hours but I can never remember, I became miserably feverish and spent some of the most claustrophobic, weakened, temperature fluctuating, motion sick and overall awful nine to eleven hours of my life wondering why this trip wouldn’t end. I ended up being sick with fever for almost a week after that, and though I’m fairly confident it had nothing to do with the train ride itself, I bore a grudge against overnight sleepers for a long time afterwards.
But they were the cheapest, most convenient way to travel, so we kept using them when we had somewhere far away to go. On what was to be my last full weekend in China (I had to leave a week earlier than I had originally planned, due to Visa issues with France), we went to Xian, one of the four (now counted as eight) ancient capitals of China and home to the famous terra-cotta army. My roommate and frequent fellow traveler, Tim Schutt, had fallen ill the day before (the day after he had bought his ticket) and so opted out of the long train ride and the trip. That left me and my other American classmate, Lauren Jones, to make this final trip.
On our previous overnight journeys, we had learned the necessity of bringing snacks—I had a bag of shelled peanuts I had bought the day before on Breakfast Street, and Lauren bought a sack of clementines from a vendor standing outside the train station as a last-minute thought. They were rather small and had already passed into that kind of old and mushy stage on the outside that I would have disdained from eating back home (I was kind of a picky eater before coming to China). But she bought them, getting at least six for something under one American dollar, and we took them on board the train. Once we were situated in our tiny space on the top bunks, same cabin, as per usual, I realized (not for the first time I’m sure) that I really liked being in China, even in its most bizarre, claustrophobic little sleeping cars, and I was going to regret having to leave. As the train started moving with its telltale rock back and forth, Lauren and I were sitting on our bunks across from each other, legs swaying over the side, backs hunched against the ceiling, sharing my bag of peanuts and her clementines across the bunks. Pretty soon –it was already late when we started- the lights in our cabins went off, and we were left in the semi-dark sleeper train heading toward the ancient city of Xian, feasting on our peanuts and clementines. And I believe those mushy old clementines were the best I ever tasted.
Clementines have become an object of nostalgia for me. They evoke strong memories of rocking back and forth in a darkened, moving bunk; bent over and cramped so that my chin is nearly resting on my knees; strangers down below and camaraderie with the girl across from me; and the taste of peanuts. Perhaps I should backtrack a ways.
I didn’t just stay in Kaifeng for the entirety of my four months in China. I traveled around with some friends, seeing the sites, visiting the cities people outside of China have actually heard of... in effect, being a tourist, which is a role I’m quite happy to take. When we traveled to cities outside of the province, cities such as Beijing (北京), Shanghai (上海) and Xian (西安), we generally took overnight sleeper trains. You may be familiar with overnight sleeper trains –I’m certain they exist in most corners of the world- but China was the first place I encountered this form of transportation, and it may be some of the details are different than in other countries, so I will describe them here.
Overnight sleeper trains, as the name suggests, generally depart in the evening to nighttime hours, traveling all through the night, to arrive at their destinations early the next morning. In the place of normal seats, passengers spend the trip on individual bunks, where they will hopefully sleep most of the journey to arrive refreshed at their destination in the morning (this has rarely been the case to my experience). The bunks are stacked three on top of each other, six to a ‘cabin’, which has varying degrees of privacy. At the foot of the bunks runs a narrow passing lane, which may have small tables and fold-out chairs mounted to the wall of the train car. It’s not spacious.
My friends and I seemed to have a habit of getting the top bunks on all of our trips, which never made any difference to us but they seemed to be the last ones to fill up. To get to the top bunk, you would either climb up a tiny ladder at the foot of the bunks (which in fact serviced two bunks, yours and your neighbor’s on the other side of a thin wall separating your ‘cabins’); or, in more enclosed cabins, there would be hand- and foot-holds on the inside of the cabin to help you climb up and down (you inevitably used the edges of your lower bunkmates’ beds as well). The space between the top bunk and the ceiling was minimal though, so upon attaining the foot of your bunk you would have to sort of launch yourself in horizontally because you hardly had enough room to crawl (for the lower bunks, it was the bunk above that imposed this limitation). Once upon your bunk, there was absolutely no question of sitting upright, though you could swing your legs out over the side and hunch your body over into a position that resembled sitting. So that’s what we did when our bodies didn’t want to lie down.
On my first overnight sleeper, coming back from Beijing to Kaifeng, a trip I suspect of somewhere between nine and eleven hours but I can never remember, I became miserably feverish and spent some of the most claustrophobic, weakened, temperature fluctuating, motion sick and overall awful nine to eleven hours of my life wondering why this trip wouldn’t end. I ended up being sick with fever for almost a week after that, and though I’m fairly confident it had nothing to do with the train ride itself, I bore a grudge against overnight sleepers for a long time afterwards.
But they were the cheapest, most convenient way to travel, so we kept using them when we had somewhere far away to go. On what was to be my last full weekend in China (I had to leave a week earlier than I had originally planned, due to Visa issues with France), we went to Xian, one of the four (now counted as eight) ancient capitals of China and home to the famous terra-cotta army. My roommate and frequent fellow traveler, Tim Schutt, had fallen ill the day before (the day after he had bought his ticket) and so opted out of the long train ride and the trip. That left me and my other American classmate, Lauren Jones, to make this final trip.
On our previous overnight journeys, we had learned the necessity of bringing snacks—I had a bag of shelled peanuts I had bought the day before on Breakfast Street, and Lauren bought a sack of clementines from a vendor standing outside the train station as a last-minute thought. They were rather small and had already passed into that kind of old and mushy stage on the outside that I would have disdained from eating back home (I was kind of a picky eater before coming to China). But she bought them, getting at least six for something under one American dollar, and we took them on board the train. Once we were situated in our tiny space on the top bunks, same cabin, as per usual, I realized (not for the first time I’m sure) that I really liked being in China, even in its most bizarre, claustrophobic little sleeping cars, and I was going to regret having to leave. As the train started moving with its telltale rock back and forth, Lauren and I were sitting on our bunks across from each other, legs swaying over the side, backs hunched against the ceiling, sharing my bag of peanuts and her clementines across the bunks. Pretty soon –it was already late when we started- the lights in our cabins went off, and we were left in the semi-dark sleeper train heading toward the ancient city of Xian, feasting on our peanuts and clementines. And I believe those mushy old clementines were the best I ever tasted.
Backlog -- The Picture of Kaifeng I Never Took
Originally written: Spring 2010
If I were to take a picture to capture all of Kaifeng, the city where I stayed and studied for the majority of my four months in China, I know exactly where it would be. It would be on a street, affectionately labeled “Breakfast Street” by myself and a few fellow exchange students, not far from the South Gate of campus. On this street there is a breakfast stall (one of many) which serves the most delicious dumplings and wheels of flatbread (baked with bits of green onion) for a measly fee of two kuai—approximately 30 American cents. This will get you five dumplings and half a wheel of bread, which will be put in a little gridded plastic basket, and you will take it back to one of the tables set out on the wide sidewalk right by the street. For these tables, some description is necessary. They are rather long tables, each of which could probably sit six to eight people comfortably, and they are lined up three tables in a row, head to head oriented toward the street (it’s a very wide sidewalk). These tables are also, at most, two feet high. If you were to run into one, you would bruise your shins and possibly trip over it or onto it. A toddler might sit quite comfortably at these tables, which in fact they do in large numbers (this stall seems to be one of the more popular for whole families to come and eat breakfast). To facilitate sitting at these tables for all ages there are little three-legged stools with dull red seats that manage to be just a bit shorter than the tables. Sitting at these stools, your knees are bent somewhere up around your chest, above the level of the table, so you’ll have to reconcile that yourself somehow (women often keep both knees together to one side of the table, in a sort of side-saddle position; men generally take a straddling posture). Seated thus, you will pick up two chopsticks at random out of a large tin can whose label identifies it as Baby’s Powdered Milk (they are all labeled this—I don’t know why) and proceed to eat your breakfast crouched out on the sidewalk at a toddler’s table filled with strangers. And it will be one of the most delicious breakfasts you’ve ever experienced.
None of this will appear in the picture. This is all in the background, the setting from which the picture will be taken. It’s a setting I placed myself in most mornings of the week during my stay. For the picture itself, I will be sitting on one of those small, three-legged stools where I eat breakfast, aiming out across the street towards the nearby intersection. Perspective is important to me. The same shot standing wouldn’t work, for reasons I have never fully articulated even to myself. Maybe it’s just a very literal reading of taking the picture “at ground level.” I’ll also need a person standing fairly close by to give a sense of scale. But the conditions also have to be just right. I want it to have rained the night before but be sunny in the morning, so that I can capture the standing water that gathers across swaths of the road and even comes up to fill some of the empty tiles on the sidewalk, while also getting all the vendors that stand out on that same road anyway selling their wares to similarly intrepid customers and pedestrians. The bicycle and motorbike crowd don’t have to worry much about it, they drive right through without raising much of a splash, often with children or other groceries perched precariously on the bike with them. Extra points if I catch one of them in crossing. There will probably be a vendor directly in my line of sight, but that’s fine; the background of the picture has limited interest for me, it’s the foreground details that should stick out. The multi-colored tiles of the sidewalk, very pretty on sunny days but somewhat treacherous right after a rain, when stepping on the wrong one could send a spray of muddy water up your shorts (an experience I still recall vividly from my first day in Kaifeng). The vendors, with their shops or stalls or trailers depending, selling bao zi, fried breads, peanuts and bananas. The customers, impossible to describe them all, often paused on their bikes in front of stalls or standing and talking to the shopkeeper.
There are other variables that should be left open and fluid—the amount of activity on the street; whether or not one of the breakfast stand workers is crossing my field of vision; the little children that swarm this stall and skittish stray animals drawn to the promise of food. In the city of Kaifeng, and in China in general (and perhaps on a scale even larger than that) one should not plan too much. I never took this picture, and I’m not sure why. It may seem that the conditions I was looking for were too specific, too ideal, but they really weren’t—I saw the scene described above many mornings. Maybe I was afraid an actual picture somehow would miss something that I wanted, and the memory would be tarnished by an incomplete representation. Or perhaps I just never really felt like taking a camera to breakfast. Regardless, it is this missing picture that inspired me to put together this “album”, and thus it is the first of the collection.
If I were to take a picture to capture all of Kaifeng, the city where I stayed and studied for the majority of my four months in China, I know exactly where it would be. It would be on a street, affectionately labeled “Breakfast Street” by myself and a few fellow exchange students, not far from the South Gate of campus. On this street there is a breakfast stall (one of many) which serves the most delicious dumplings and wheels of flatbread (baked with bits of green onion) for a measly fee of two kuai—approximately 30 American cents. This will get you five dumplings and half a wheel of bread, which will be put in a little gridded plastic basket, and you will take it back to one of the tables set out on the wide sidewalk right by the street. For these tables, some description is necessary. They are rather long tables, each of which could probably sit six to eight people comfortably, and they are lined up three tables in a row, head to head oriented toward the street (it’s a very wide sidewalk). These tables are also, at most, two feet high. If you were to run into one, you would bruise your shins and possibly trip over it or onto it. A toddler might sit quite comfortably at these tables, which in fact they do in large numbers (this stall seems to be one of the more popular for whole families to come and eat breakfast). To facilitate sitting at these tables for all ages there are little three-legged stools with dull red seats that manage to be just a bit shorter than the tables. Sitting at these stools, your knees are bent somewhere up around your chest, above the level of the table, so you’ll have to reconcile that yourself somehow (women often keep both knees together to one side of the table, in a sort of side-saddle position; men generally take a straddling posture). Seated thus, you will pick up two chopsticks at random out of a large tin can whose label identifies it as Baby’s Powdered Milk (they are all labeled this—I don’t know why) and proceed to eat your breakfast crouched out on the sidewalk at a toddler’s table filled with strangers. And it will be one of the most delicious breakfasts you’ve ever experienced.
None of this will appear in the picture. This is all in the background, the setting from which the picture will be taken. It’s a setting I placed myself in most mornings of the week during my stay. For the picture itself, I will be sitting on one of those small, three-legged stools where I eat breakfast, aiming out across the street towards the nearby intersection. Perspective is important to me. The same shot standing wouldn’t work, for reasons I have never fully articulated even to myself. Maybe it’s just a very literal reading of taking the picture “at ground level.” I’ll also need a person standing fairly close by to give a sense of scale. But the conditions also have to be just right. I want it to have rained the night before but be sunny in the morning, so that I can capture the standing water that gathers across swaths of the road and even comes up to fill some of the empty tiles on the sidewalk, while also getting all the vendors that stand out on that same road anyway selling their wares to similarly intrepid customers and pedestrians. The bicycle and motorbike crowd don’t have to worry much about it, they drive right through without raising much of a splash, often with children or other groceries perched precariously on the bike with them. Extra points if I catch one of them in crossing. There will probably be a vendor directly in my line of sight, but that’s fine; the background of the picture has limited interest for me, it’s the foreground details that should stick out. The multi-colored tiles of the sidewalk, very pretty on sunny days but somewhat treacherous right after a rain, when stepping on the wrong one could send a spray of muddy water up your shorts (an experience I still recall vividly from my first day in Kaifeng). The vendors, with their shops or stalls or trailers depending, selling bao zi, fried breads, peanuts and bananas. The customers, impossible to describe them all, often paused on their bikes in front of stalls or standing and talking to the shopkeeper.
There are other variables that should be left open and fluid—the amount of activity on the street; whether or not one of the breakfast stand workers is crossing my field of vision; the little children that swarm this stall and skittish stray animals drawn to the promise of food. In the city of Kaifeng, and in China in general (and perhaps on a scale even larger than that) one should not plan too much. I never took this picture, and I’m not sure why. It may seem that the conditions I was looking for were too specific, too ideal, but they really weren’t—I saw the scene described above many mornings. Maybe I was afraid an actual picture somehow would miss something that I wanted, and the memory would be tarnished by an incomplete representation. Or perhaps I just never really felt like taking a camera to breakfast. Regardless, it is this missing picture that inspired me to put together this “album”, and thus it is the first of the collection.
Backlog -- Introduction
I'm cheating slightly, because I don't know what to write on my new blog, so I'm creating a "backlog" of materials that I think should go on the site but were written before the Errant Terran came into existence. I'm a strong proponent of recycling.
I like this idea, however, because these are all writings that would have ended up on this blog anyhow, at some point or another, in some form or another. All of the stories are related to what I will be doing on the Errant Terran--maybe if I gather them all together, I'll figure out what that is. I'll start by introducing some of them to you and giving a bit of context.
The first five stories are all from a "collection" I had in my head, and collected mostly in one notebook, called Pictures of China I Never Took. They were written about my first trip to China, and to Kaifeng specifically, in the Fall of 2009 as an exchange student from Beloit College. Note, they were not written while I was staying in China--most of them were written in France, in the Spring of 2010, on the backs of pages scribbled over in desperate franglish[i] which were my class notes for that semester. I was having a rough time with my language skills and subsequently my studies that semester abroad, and looking back upon what seemed a much simpler semester in China became one of my favorite past-times. It also just seemed to take me that long to sort through those experiences in China and start putting them to definite words.[ii] Thus, Pictures of China I Never Took was already a sort of backlog even when I first wrote it; I suppose most writing is, barring some stream-of-consciousness and prophecy.
I always intended to write more than five stories for this collection. I had vague aspirations that they would be published as a sort of 'series' in a travel magazine (or better yet, a book), which at one point I attempted to see through, but with no result. The second story, "My Darling Clementine", I did recently submit as a writing sample to another travel magazine, Glimpse, and I am waiting to hear back from them.
The next two pieces, "So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop" and "Narrative Essay", were written almost two years later, during my current stay in Kaifeng, though neither with any intent of publication larger than my classroom. I was teaching narrative essays, but the class was still having difficulty distinguishing "narrative" from "narrative essay" (in my basic definition, a narrative tells a story, while a narrative essay tells a story and explores an idea from that). So I decided to go ahead and write an example of my own--both a narrative and then a narrative essay expanding on it, to show how you could move from one to the other. The problem was, the only narrative I could think of that was interesting enough to write about was the time, fairly recently, when two other foreign teachers and myself had walked into a condom shop just a block down from campus and what we saw there. It was a funny story, maybe rated PG-13 for some "sexual themes", but not what I'd had in mind when I assured my class I could give them an example later that week. Still, true to my word, I sent them the narrative, and maybe a day later an even more condemning narrative essay about what I'd observed of the 'sexual culture' around college campuses in China. I'd taught that you couldn't write an interesting essay about something that didn't interest you; maybe I should have tried then, in the interests of political correctness. Still, nobody called me out on it, and Adam, the other writing teacher, reported that it at least garnered some interesting discussion when he introduced it to his writing class. And now that upwards of 300 students in China have read my views on sexual culture in China, I don't have many qualms left about putting them on my blog for you to read as well.
So, those are the contents of the backlog thus far. They are chronological, though with a 2-year gap somewhere between them. From here it should get interesting--anything 'new' that I add will probably actually be older, and more specifically relevant to what I'm writing elsewhere in the Errant Terran. I won't just add old materials willy-nilly, though not all the connections will be to China specifically. So we'll just keep going and see what else is unearthed in this blog.
I like this idea, however, because these are all writings that would have ended up on this blog anyhow, at some point or another, in some form or another. All of the stories are related to what I will be doing on the Errant Terran--maybe if I gather them all together, I'll figure out what that is. I'll start by introducing some of them to you and giving a bit of context.
The first five stories are all from a "collection" I had in my head, and collected mostly in one notebook, called Pictures of China I Never Took. They were written about my first trip to China, and to Kaifeng specifically, in the Fall of 2009 as an exchange student from Beloit College. Note, they were not written while I was staying in China--most of them were written in France, in the Spring of 2010, on the backs of pages scribbled over in desperate franglish[i] which were my class notes for that semester. I was having a rough time with my language skills and subsequently my studies that semester abroad, and looking back upon what seemed a much simpler semester in China became one of my favorite past-times. It also just seemed to take me that long to sort through those experiences in China and start putting them to definite words.[ii] Thus, Pictures of China I Never Took was already a sort of backlog even when I first wrote it; I suppose most writing is, barring some stream-of-consciousness and prophecy.
I always intended to write more than five stories for this collection. I had vague aspirations that they would be published as a sort of 'series' in a travel magazine (or better yet, a book), which at one point I attempted to see through, but with no result. The second story, "My Darling Clementine", I did recently submit as a writing sample to another travel magazine, Glimpse, and I am waiting to hear back from them.
The next two pieces, "So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop" and "Narrative Essay", were written almost two years later, during my current stay in Kaifeng, though neither with any intent of publication larger than my classroom. I was teaching narrative essays, but the class was still having difficulty distinguishing "narrative" from "narrative essay" (in my basic definition, a narrative tells a story, while a narrative essay tells a story and explores an idea from that). So I decided to go ahead and write an example of my own--both a narrative and then a narrative essay expanding on it, to show how you could move from one to the other. The problem was, the only narrative I could think of that was interesting enough to write about was the time, fairly recently, when two other foreign teachers and myself had walked into a condom shop just a block down from campus and what we saw there. It was a funny story, maybe rated PG-13 for some "sexual themes", but not what I'd had in mind when I assured my class I could give them an example later that week. Still, true to my word, I sent them the narrative, and maybe a day later an even more condemning narrative essay about what I'd observed of the 'sexual culture' around college campuses in China. I'd taught that you couldn't write an interesting essay about something that didn't interest you; maybe I should have tried then, in the interests of political correctness. Still, nobody called me out on it, and Adam, the other writing teacher, reported that it at least garnered some interesting discussion when he introduced it to his writing class. And now that upwards of 300 students in China have read my views on sexual culture in China, I don't have many qualms left about putting them on my blog for you to read as well.
So, those are the contents of the backlog thus far. They are chronological, though with a 2-year gap somewhere between them. From here it should get interesting--anything 'new' that I add will probably actually be older, and more specifically relevant to what I'm writing elsewhere in the Errant Terran. I won't just add old materials willy-nilly, though not all the connections will be to China specifically. So we'll just keep going and see what else is unearthed in this blog.
[i] There is no satisfactory term for the undiscriminating mixture of French and English; though I suppose, historically-speaking, the term could be “English.”
[ii] This also seemed to be the case for my language acquisition—I did not speak such fluent Chinese until I had arrived in France a month or so later.
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