China Randoms Pt. Deux

- While the Chinese may have math and badminton on lock, they're not too hot on guessing nationality, and this applies to literally all of the foreign teachers working at my school, not just me. Since coming here I have been called American, British, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Singaporean. I was listening to a class of little kids talk about me in Chinese a month ago and the conversation went something like this:

Kid 1: "What country is the teacher from?"

Kid 2: "Isn't he Chinese?"

Kid 3: "The teacher's American."

Kid 2: "No, that's impossible!"

Kid 4: "Yes, all Americans have gold (i.e. blond) hair and their skin is very, very white."

Apparently, this misinformation continues for a while. I was talking to a girl at a bar who told me that "my appearance was Chinese" but finally convinced her that there are in fact millions of blacks, Hispanic and Asian people who live in America and are also American.

- Earlier this week I went on a date with a girl who I hadn't seen in quite some time, mainly because she only gets four days off a month and because I'm a negligent dick. We went to a nice restaurant that she knew but I then made the mistake of letting her order whatever she wanted, which included three awesome dishes as well as chicken's feet and some sort of fish/donut combination. About halfway through dinner, she started to make gagging noises and I briefly considered getting another to-go box for the hairball which seemed imminent. Apparently she had choked on a fish bone and died shortly thereafter. Only kidding, she did in fact live through the fish bone ordeal but I have since devoted my spare time to figuring out a fool-proof way to eat fish that has all the bones left in it.

- I have been here more than six months and they are still playing reruns of the Beijing Olympics. This wouldn't be so bad if they played interesting matches, but so far it has been limited to weightlifting and some gymnastics. If they're really starved for stuff to put on sports TV, they could at least play American football, as the whole world should. As an aside, they do play classic boxing matches (we're talking Jack Johnson from the early 20th century), which is neat.

- While I was out a few weeks ago, I became thoroughly convinced by the end of the night that my hands had shrunk. I'm normally not a fun drunk, but I was particularly aloof this time, seeing as I was staring down at my hands at a club. The point here is that people need to stop putting roofies in my Singapore slings.

China Randoms

"I'm going to kick you in the balls until you die, but first let me have a look."

(A Chinese girl said this to me and I'm interpreting it as the pick-up line I think it was meant to be.)

Funny shit can happen in the most random places, case in point was the saga of me trying to buy a decent pair of pants and then getting them tailored. About three weeks ago I turned downtown Wuxi inside-out trying to find a pair of khakis that didn't make me look gay (this is not a homophobic insult, even gay men would have mistaken me as homosexual if I had worn pants like that out in public). Finally I found a Dockers store and paid through the nose for a pair of khakis after mistakenly believing they were on sale (dignity prevents me from disclosing their price). At one point during the trying-on stage, I told the saleslady that I knew what she meant in terms of the pants size (I could see they were 31/32) but could she please find a smaller pair. Then, like something out of a movie she replied (verbatim) "I know you know I know your meaning, but we don't have any shorter pants." Her wording initially confused me but then I understood, and laughed involuntarily. That didn't make her too pleased. Because someone apparently believes that everyone has 32+ inch legs over here meaning I had to get them tailored and was sent to the middle-aged lady sewing department staffed by six clucking hens operating sewing machines. They seemed to get a kick out of me and at one point a lady told me to go take my pants off which suprised me before I realized they did in fact have changing rooms.

On a totally unrelated note, I got third place (out of five) in a singing competition at the local mall for a rendition of "Drive" by Incubus...some people thought I should have beat the sketchy-looking Canadian who got second place by singing a tone-deaf version of a Chinese love song, but this fails to take into account the judges couldn't understand a single word in the song. Except of course, the word "Drive".

Spring Holiday Abort & The Real Reason Slumdog Millionaire is a Great Movie

The original intent of this post was to give a probably overdue update of my activities in China, specifically what went down on my Spring Festival/Chinese New Year vacay; however, that idea immediately exploded when everyone in my Spring Festival group got sick within the first day of the trip and we cut our holiday short by a couple days. Unless you find cases of food poisoning funny or amusing (and they can be), please believe when I say that I went out west in China, the city was big and dirty and I had KFC for breakfast once.

Before I went on vacation, I watched Slumdog Millionaire and in typical me fashion came away from the movie with a general opinion that differed from everyone else who I saw the movie with. First let me say right off the bat, I liked Slumdog Millionaire, I found it to be an earnest resourceful film that was entertaining even when it was predictable (you knew the musketeer question was going to rear its head at the end). If I was an asshole teacher I'd give it my least favorite grade of all time, an A-/A; i.e. bordering on great, but with a few hiccups. I'm confident that my personal opinion of the film can be accurately summarized by detailing both my favorite and least favorite scenes from the film, because both of them happen at the end anyway.

First, my least favorite scene: the ending (where Jamal and Freida Pinto, a.k.a. Hotty McHotthott, meet in the train station). It was sappy, predictable and something I might've been able to make in a movie (ergo, not very good). For a film that was driven by the "realness" of Jamal's life circumstances, seeing him alone in a train station with a hot chick that he stalker-ishly pursued for his entire life was a little much for my tastes, but I'm sure it made girls cry, so there's that. In much the same way as the death scene with Jamal's brother made me think "what compelled them to put this in the movie?" I came away from Slumdog with the sense that they probably had such little time/money to work with that scenes that should've ended up on the cutting room floor didn't.

This in no way means that I didn't appreciate the periodic breaks from reality that the film made (see: Jamal pushing his brother out a window), in fact, my favorite scene is the strangest one by far: the bhangra dance number at the end. Before anyone scoffs at this notion, first of all, get f-ed for scoffing because I am deadly serious about this being the best part for me. I for one, am a huge fan of irreverant breaks from character in movies and the dance number with every main character and extra in it made me lose my shit. The music was awesome, the dancing was Indian and Freida Pinto was in it, need I say more? My American and British friends poo-pooed the scene; some said it almost ruined the movie for them. To those people, I say you are uncultured phillistines who should be beaten mercilessly until you have flashbacks of life lessons from your parents. As someone who looks at things objectively for their entertainment value, that was easily the best part of the movie, and from what I'm told is something of a tradition in Bollywood, so if you want to be ignorant your whole lives keep telling yourself it wasn't a good scene, you're probably the type of person that doesn't wait around for the outtakes of movies at the ending credits and therefore useless.

This Could Not Happen in America, a.k.a. the Chicken Foot/Bath House Story

This is a two-part story in that it occurs over the course of two days, namely the Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. It begins with the night before me and another teacher left for Shanghai to watch the Tennis Masters tournament at the local watering hole, let's call it "Jason's" (because that is the real name, silly). I arrived with some other teachers at about 11 PM and started playing pool/foosball and shooting the shit, per usual. All of a sudden, one of the cute bar staff girls comes up to me and asks me to play Connect Four with her (this is not innuendo, it really is that game from the early 90s). Needless to say, it will be a cold day in hell when an American loses in Connect Four to a Chinese girl, so to make a long story short I beat her ass and then we played foosball and pool. At about 12:30, the bar closed and instead of going our separate ways, the teachers, staff and some other patrons all decided to go to a local club because most of us were drunk. On the way there, me and Connect Four Girl start flirting (in Chinese, because she speaks virtually no English) and then making out while her friend takes pictures. Nice. Let's take a moment to appreciate what happened to me in an abstract sense. I was totally in with this cute Chinese girl (and yes other guys told me she was cute, ass) having done nothing but playing games that I would have voluntarily played anyway. I didn't have to initiate contact, nor make the first move...the only thing that would have been better/easier is if we had first played Crossfire instead of Connect Four. I dare anyone to find me a similar scenario of this happening in America, especially when you consider what happened next:
We get to the club and Connect Four Girl (from this point on, to be known as Ada) is all over my shit but mercifully not in the clingy gold-digging way that usually characterizes Chinese female/foreigner interaction. We dance, we make out. We dance some more followed by protracted periods of making out and more incriminating pictures. Food arrives to the table because some people are lightweight pansies. Ada then proceeds to make out and exchange food with me at the same time, like a mother sparrow feeding her young. Things were peachy until the fourth round of feeding, when I couldn't see what she had in her mouth clearly. As she got closer to me, I realized she had the toe from a chicken's foot in her mouth (considered a delicacy by most Chinese and fucking weird by others) and fully intended swapping spit with me so I too could eat it.
At this point, the evening reached a crossroads. I decided that if I did eat the chicken's foot, then I wanted there to be payoff at the end of the night. Because I was drunk, the part of my brain that is opposed to eating chicken's feet was force-fed snow until it died, Russian KGB-style. For those of you considering eating chicken's feet, I can tell you it's not as bad as you think, but if you can get away with only eating one, that would be optimal. Because I'm an idiot, I stayed at the club until 5 AM instead of going home to rest up prior to taking the train. I thought I had everything locked up until I saw the teacher who was going to Shanghai with was in the same cab as me, but on his arm was a key to the locker that his bag (and therefore, our tennis tickets) resided in. Caught between a rock and a hard place, I decided to be a good friend and forget the girl, instead opting to go on a drunk search-and-rescue mission that amounted to nothing. I hope that fruitless quest by itself gets me out of some time in purgatory because I was not a happy camper when I got five hours of sleep and had to haul ass to the train station.
Side note: me and Ada are still talking. She texts me inappropriate messages in Chinese. I told her to get MSN so she can add emoticons to her inappropriate messages.

The second part of the story takes place in Shanghai after we watched a couple tennis matches. Upon exiting the stadium my friend and I realized we had no idea where in the blue hell we were and that we had also missed the last train back to Wuxi. Compounding this problem was the fact that neither of us had brought our passports, which is a must for getting a hotel. At about 2 in the morning our options were becoming increasingly limited, until a friend texted us and suggested that we stay the night in a massage parlor/bath house. If you think this is a sketchy idea, you are correct sir, especially when you consider that some massage parlors interpret "staying the night" as Viagra-powered orgies with the walking STDs that work there.
So our first goal was finding a bath house where we could just pass out and then maybe have girls wank our puds. Having accomplished this after two failed attempts we then proceeded to get two hour-long massages from girls who had no problem massaging every part of the body, probably even the colon if you let them. However, the massage parlor girls were very considerate, leaving to go home at 4 in the morning but not before tucking us in so we could sleep on the same tables where we got the massages from. At the time this idea sounded smarter than Steven Hawking's black hole theory, because I was so fatigued that I didn't care that I was practically nude, sleeping on a massage table in a bath house in Shanghai. Because being covered in Johnson & Johnson baby oil and cockteasing isn't conducive to sleeping in, I woke up as early as possible the next day to catch a train, any train back home but not before eating fast food for the third meal in a row and witnessing a murder. Just kidding with the last part, but it's not really shocking given what you just read is it?

China Observations

1. Chinese powerwashing: this is the term I've given to the ubiquitous cleaning technique used by Chinese people everywhere, that being water and a dirty rag. I understand that in most areas, people don't have the disposable income for Windex and paper towels (and that the Chinese aren't as wasteful as Westerners, so they probably wouldn't use paper towels anyway), but in certain stores or buildings, I know that the staff can take a trip down to the B&Q (Chinese Home Depot) and get real cleaning materials. Chinese powerwashing is literally used for everything, from cleaning your house (I had to re-clean mine), to washing windows, to wiping down furniture and other household items. I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but a. the water in China isn't clean to begin with and b. you just move the dirt around without really cleaning anything.

2. Chinese architecture: a lot of people think that because Chinese people can build high rise apartments and other structures in half the time that it takes the West, this means the buildings are half as safe. There are assuredly two sides to this argument, so let's assume that first, Western contractors suck in that they get paid a lot of money to scratch their ass and take their sweet time building things and second, that Chinese buildings aren't as safe as European/American ones. Why, you ask? If you've ever seen Chinese contractors, you know that aside from the professionally (Western) trained ones who know how to operate machinery and draw blueprints, the people who actually bring in the materials and put them together use techniques that probably haven't varied much since the Great Wall was made. Case in point, there is a nice high rise apartment development going on right next to where I live, so everyday I walk past the skyhooks and scaffolding while also noticing the people putting up walls and windows with almost no equipment.

3. I am an interesting anomaly in this country: as a Korean-American, I'm not really Korean but often mistaken for Chinese. Most Chinese people think I'm Chinese, and most Korean people think I'm Korean, showing that there isn't a good method to tell Asians apart. Westerners, however, lose their shit when they figure out I'm really American. Europeans always tell me how nice it is that Wuxi is becoming such an international city and grill me about the Presidential election and the Americans I've met are happy just to have a fellow expat to talk to (Americans aren't as well represented here as the Brits and Aussies). That being said, because I am a dick I do take advantage of this situation purely for my own amusement. Exhibit A: I wait for Westerners to try and awkwardly communicate with me via gestures and staring before I talk to them in English and tell them that I'm from Detroit. Exhibit B: I go along with it when Chinese people talk to me in Chinese, but if I really don't feel like carrying on a conversation I'll say, "You know I'm not Chinese, right?" (in Mandarin)...they then feel awkward and usually leave me alone.

Before I Forget, More China Moments

Some China moments that aren't long enough to put into story form, so I'm writing them down now:

A conversation which took place yesterday:
Me: So how do you think the US was able to win a gold medal in the Olympics this year but not in 2004?
Mick (28 year-old male): I think this is because the United States used many black players that were very good athletes. For instance, the black man is very powerful and can jump very high, but the yellow man is naturally not as fast.
Me: You know what, I think I agree with you.

During my first week here at a restaurant:
Waitress: Hello, where would you like to sit?
Me (not fully understanding what she said): I ordered dumplings. (Points at receipt)
Waitress (in a voice used for slow five year-olds): I KNOW you ordered dumplings, I asked you "where would you like to sit."

In a class for low-level kids
Me: Is Maggie here? (The boy who took the English name "Maggie" raises his hand)
Me: You know Maggie is a girl's name don't you?
(Class laughs at his expense)
Me: From now on, your English name is Markus. (And yes, I wrote it down on the attendance form spelled with a K, though this is subject to change.)

While I was lost downtown, looking for a park
Me (to an elderly security guard): Excuse me, where is the nearest park?
Guard: The nearest what?
Me: PARK.
Guard (looks at me with a benevolent grandfather stare): Ahhh yes, the park. I know that place well.
(Chuckles in that "oh, you rambunctious young people" sort of way)
Guard: Yes, yes, if you go north from here and take several turns, the nearest park should be in that vicinity.

It actually turned out that the park was the next street up and I was about to come across it anyway. This just shows you that old people are always looking for someone to talk to about anything.

My Favorite China Moments Thus Far

As someone who has lived in China for five months altogether, after a while you start picking up on certain trends or cultural facets that can only be described as "China Moments". What is meant by this is a certain instance of behavior that is so outlandish and weird that it could only happen in the relatively unregulated developing world. Before I go on, let me mention that these observations are not meant to castigate China or imply that the Chinese are inferior to Westerners/Americans in general; they are merely to point out that certain cultures have not gotten the memo on certain things.

This first post contains the stories:

"Caution: Floor Slippery When Pee-Soaked"
The largest foreign supermarket in China is the French-owned Carrefour, in both number of stores and the size of each particular location. This is the place where the middle/upper-middle class in China goes to do their shopping in a pseudo-Western style atmosphere that involves chicken feet in the meat market. While walking into the store on a Wednesday afternoon, I stopped suddenly at the front entrance of the store and was apparently the only person appalled at what was going on: not two feet to my left was a child of about four, with his pants down, peeing right on the welcome mat (and probably getting urine on my New Balances. Not cool, you little shit.)
"Well this is likely because the kid is unattended with no authority figure present", I thought to myself. Nope. Right behind him was a person who appeared to be his older brother, calmly directing the toddler as to what imaginary fire should be put out next. Bear in mind, little kids peeing whereever the hell they so choose is common practice in China. Barbaric, right? Maybe, until you realize where they're coming from. In China, most people have never had the disposable income for a convenience such as Pampers. As a result, kids clothes come with a flap on it so that they can make number 1 or 2 when nature calls (though hopefully down a sewer grate or in a bush as opposed to plain sight.) Would it be nice if they had a waste collection pouch stapled to their leg? Yeah. But I doubt bratty American kids would do any better without diapers.

"Balls to the Bench"
One of my initial concerns upon arriving in Wuxi, China was the presence of a gym in the vicinity. As it turns out, there is a fitness club that looks suspiciously like a California villa called "Better" not a ten minute drive away from where I live where Chinese and expats alike go to flex in front of mirrors and run in place. This place has it all, cute staff (female, you homophobe), helpful trainers (male, you misogynist) and ping-pong tables on the top floor. One thing I was not prepared for was how some Chinese men conduct themselves in a state of undress. Today, I saw a heavyset man calmly walking back down to the lockerroom in nothing but his underwear/compression shorts. That means he took off almost all his clothes and walked around in plain sight where all the cardio machines are. You are fat and middle-aged buddy, put a tent on the circus.
My favorite part however was when I actually made my way into the locker room: there is a bench right next to a fan when you walk in where everyone likes to cool off after working out. Seated on the bench was yet another fat, middle-aged man with his nether regions firmly plastered on the wooden bench, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Gatorade in the other. He looked at me wearing my Under Armour and iPod strapped to my arm. I looked at him wearing his birthday suit and wang strapped to the bench. After a five second-long curious cultural exchange stare, I went to my locker and decided to come back next week with Chinese rice liquor (baijiu) to sanitize the place where he sat.

"The Food"
China's cuisine is a fascinating case study in that for every dish they have which you could eat every day, there is a corresponding one that looks and tastes like Satan's anus. Ironically, the best food in China comes from the various ethnic minorities or the Taiawanese proving that historical repression = good food no matter where you are (read: African-Americans). To call "typical" Chinese food eclectic would be an insult to the Chinese; since I arrived in September I've already had toad, jellyfish and chicken feet. If you're wondering why so many foreigners stick to Kung Pao chicken, this is probably why. The best food I've had here has been from a hole in the wall restaurant run by a Uighur family (the Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang Province) and their food is fucking delicious. Like the Greeks, the Uighurs realized early on that lamb, when prepared right is naturally tastier than any other kind of meat and like the Greeks, they staved off a million Persians at Thermopylae in 540 B.C.E. Only kidding. Uighur food is prepared simply but consistently with seasonings and marinades that are so good they could probably cook poop with them and the only thing I'd say is "well...I guess I'll wait until next week to eat it again." Moreover, the people at the restaurant have grown to appreciate the fact that I pay them enough to put their children through school. Hopefully this will be enough to prevent them from spitting in my food when they're having a bad day a la "Waiting".