China Fatigue

I've been in denial about this for about a week now, because I didn't think that it would ever happen to me, but I think that being human, I fall prey to the normal cycles of life. In China as an expat there seem to be three general parts to the cycle, adoring China, tolerating China and being fatigued by China. Now, as a professed China afficcionado, I assumed I would hover somewhere in the adoring China area forever, but recently it seems, a country that I love so and have such admiration for its culture and history, has done everything possible to try to make me not like it. I still love my students, my Chinese friends, my daily life, and the parameters of my once in a lifetime experience, but I am exhausted by the concept of NOWISM that I think i explained earlier this year. I'm tired of being the foreign puppet in a school that now has no real interest in foreign teachers even though the name of the school is Luohu Foreign Language School. See my school used to be the best in the district according to the standardized tests that are given to each grade every year (these are the end all be all to any student's existence). Well last year they didn't perform as the best school and so, 4 of the 5 principals were fired or something and the new people in administration feel that oral English is no longer important, and stdized. test prep is what should occupy 12 hours a day, 6.5 days a week for each student. That is why I sit here on December 30 realizing that i am on vacation 2 weeks earlier than planned, b/c the school cut out oral english class for the students to prep for semester exams. I was told last Friday night, at a Christmas dinner hosted by my school that i was to test every one of my students this week, give them a grade and then i was done. It's VERY difficult to test 30 students during a 40 minute lesson and I found myself using up every spare break of both mine and the student's breaks to test. But even my grades are superficial, the other foreign teachers say that if the head teacher of the grade doesn't like my scores, they'll change them to be more appropriate (aka 7's become 8's or 9's). Haha, pretty crazy. However, I got it all done and felt relatively good about the job I did. In between all this testing I've been running around town trying to plan and arrange tickets and trips with three different people over this 6 week break. With Adam, I'm going to Shanghai and Hangzhou, with Jenny, I'm going to Chongqing and Chengdu and with mum i'm going to New Zealand, yah!!!! However, planning takes so much time!!!! I now have a profound appreciation for all the family holidays mum planned for me as a child. Then I needed to clean my apt. from top to bottom and the mop just wasn't doing a good job on the floor...so Cinderella style I washed every floor in my apt (both bedrooms, living room, bathroom and kitchen are stylin' in tile). So as I was leaving school last night about 5 (45 minutes late b/c I had to meet students after school to test) on my way to meet a friend in Nanshan to plan the details of our Chengdu trip I get a call from the secretary in my contact teacher's office and she tells me this, "uh Kristen...haha.....Mr. Yang wanted me to call you and tell you that you are moving out of your apt. tomorrow and moving into the school dorm, ok? Can you pack your things?" I came unglued. I called Mr. Yang and didn't yell but professed extreme anger, which i'm sorry to say spilled over into a few tears. I have no problem moving in to school, many teachers live at their schools, but it was the way in which it was handled....giving me 24 hours to pack and leave and creating the bigger problem of: where wiere adam and mum going to stay when they came to visit. Mr. yang said "no problem, they can stay in a spare dorm bed." I didn't know what else to do but go home and start packing. Well my two teacher friends who are also foreign english teachers (in their 50s) heard about this and came over with boxes to help me pack. i think they were more upset that me and Andy called the school and talked about this being "crap" and "unacceptable" and even threatened quitting. But at the end of the day, it was 7pm and no one was around to make and changes or give an explanation. So I packed for 5 hours, went to bed at 2 on a sheetless bed and prepared to move. I'm pretty sure I came close to having an anxiety attack, but this morning Mr. Yang came through for me. The school is allowing me to stay in my apt. until the first week of next term in feb....after all my company leaves. Somehow it all worked out. But I cannot put into words what it feels like to be an educated person trapped in a bureaucracy that is completely crass that expects things to happen at a moments notice and most of the time what they want to happen is entirely illogical.

My thought for the moment: How can a country have such deeply rooted traditions of propriety(no shoes beyond the door of the house, no boys and girls dating until they're 18, the sacredness of tea drinking) be the same country that runs itself completely devoid of courtesy.

Current Mood: Confused; I love China, but like I said, it's doing a lot to try to make me hate it.

Merry Christmas Everyone

My friend Hayley organized a group to go carolling this past week. We attracted quite a few crowds around town and I'm fairly certain there are many photos of us off-key, slightly off-kilter singers floating around the city. What good fun it was.

A Perfect Sunday

I decided to leave Hong Kong well enough alone this weeked. The SAR already has enough "visitors" (aka detainees) for awhile. My tickets for mum and my trip to NZ are awaiting a pick up on my part but there just wasn't any logical reason that I needed to go traipsing around HK Island when South Korean farmers, Greenpeace and anyone else with anguished protesting dreams that include jumping into Hong Kong harbour, were creating problems for the police and the WTO Conference. I suppose this meeting as compared to ones in Cancun or Seattle, has been relatively mellow. However, border patrol between the Mainland and HK was seriously stepped up and many parts of the city were shut to pedestrians. Perhaps next week I will go and see Tammy! who is going to be staying there for 5 days.

This weekend ended perfectly and started quite well, but was frustratingly dissapointing in the middle. On Friday Jenny and I went down to the train station market to visit our neighborhood tailor, Molly. Jenny wanted a suit made and I was just along for the ride, or so I thought. Jenny picked out great fabric and on our way out, in the usual quite unplanned fashion, my eye was caught by a blue and yellow stripe broadcloth fabric. I decided quite impulsively that I could spare 80 kuai and could get a new button-down shirt with proper LONG sleeves. Well once Jenny and I become excited about the fabric, Molly and I inquire for the price of 1.3 meters of fabric. I have to admit that I wasnt' doing a whole lot of paying attn at this point b/c Mr. fabric-selling man had this mole with 4 extremely long hairs coming out of it and it was honestly difficult not to do just a little staring. It was determined that fabric man would not sell me 1.3 meters, b/c it was the end of the bolt and there were only 2.5 meters left and no one would want the 1.2 meters that would be left. Grrr. I wanted that shirt. Well, Molly, being a good tailor negotiated with the man, and for 5 kuai more she got the man to agree to sell me all 2.5 meters. I took the deal. Then, Molly spent the next 45 minutes trying to convince me that in addition to the long sleeve button-down shirt that I wanted made, that now there was enough fabric to make a matching pair of long stripy shorts....with a draw string - apparently that was a key part. Ha ha. I finally convinced her that I just wanted a shirt. The extra fabric could be returned to me. I'm hoping this shirt is awesome....I just want something with honest to goodness long enough sleeves.

Jenny and I then most amazingly happened upon the most perfect present for a certain soon to arrive houseguest and that totally made my day, b/c lets face it, men are impossible to shop for. We then headed to Dongmen for some great noodles for dinner and found an awesome hole in the wall store that honestly must have had 100,000+ scarves and an equal number of hats. For 50 kuai I got a wonderful pink scarf and a crazy blue plaid one. Before you ask to see them, let me save you the trouble.....I no longer have them. See, I think my poor luck in the city had yet to wear off. The lady put my scarves in a bag and I carried it in one hand along with my other bag with Christmas presents. Somewhere between the time I left Jenny to head home on the bus and my house, the scarves went missing. At first I was furious at home; I assumed i'd once again been robbed by someone slashing my bag, but no, this time I am forced to blame the bag. It was a nice thick plastic bag with a heat-sealed seam on the bottom, only on this bag the seam came undone somewhere and my scarves got left behind. After I was done being mad, I realized that in US$ it was only 8 dollars, but still, it's the principle of it. From now on, I'll BYOB....Bring your own Bag. My canvas bag won't get a magic hole in the bottom.

I had planned my entire weekend around a birthday party for Barbara's husband Andy. I slept in Saturday morning, did some cleaning, went for a run and then......at 4pm i get a call from a very ill sounding Barbara, informing me that the party was cancelled due to food poisoning. I felt terrible, being ill is never fun, but also frustrated at the same time. I am tired of feeling like a marionette puppet here, always at the mercy of someone else. Im not sure anyone who doesn't live here can understand fully just how often plans fall through. Once or twice is fine, but when I waste an entire Saturday or a weekend that I could have travelled for that matter, it's annoying. Another example, the education bureau is hosting a HUGE banquet for us for Xmas, but it's a week until Xmas and we still don't have a date for it, and on that weekend I also have three other things that people would like me to do: A dinner hosted by my headmaster, visit Tammy in HK and Christmas with my good friends Qingling and Xiaosha. Well, seeing as the Bureau is the most important thing in my life....they pay me, I cant do anything until the dinner date is set, but that also means I'm leaving three other parties in limbo. GRRR.

But......


Sunday made up for all of my weekend frustrations. Jenny and I decided to go in search of Deng - Deng Xiaoping that is. He is often awarded the title of founder of the city of Shenzhen, as it was his idea to create this city from a wasteland of a fishing village 25 years ago. His memory is etched in stone on top of Lianhua mountain in Lianhua park. So Jenny and I went....and came away with so much more than just a gandering at Deng. The park is easily the most amazing thing I've seen in Shenzhen. Now I'm a sucker for parks, but seriously Lianhua is wonderful. There were thousands of HAPPY people roaming around. There were fields filled with people flying hundreds of beautiful kites, children blowing bubbles, an old man doing cartwheels. It was surreal. This scene doesn't happen on any normal Shenzhen road. It made me happy seeing and watching others be happy. Fields were filled with kite-flying families, where else in the world does that happen? I now make it my mission to return there on a regular basis for it is an oasis of happiness in a city ostensibly driven solely by money.

Are you ready for your close-up Ms. Nelson?

Well, I've done it. I finished my very first hat ever and I must say: it's really not bad at all. I however will learn from some mistakes that I made....next time use round needles and make pom pom larger at the top.

OK, so my apt. has been relatively warm (in the room in which i choose to drag the orange-light-radiating heating fan into) for the past few days. So long as I keep reapplying chapstick and keep my sunglasses on, this method of heat is fine. I'm beginning to wonder however if this light is UV friendly or not. If not, my living room might be akin to a life-size microwave and something from 8th grade science class suggests that such living conditions are not prudent. Ha, oh well, it's China and I totally take what I can get.

That said, yesterday, the coldest day yet, the power in my entire neighborhood was shut off from 8am until 8pm for what reason i am not quite sure except that there have been rumors of power shortages in the city so maybe this is a systematic conservation. Yesterday I had no power and today my school and all of the shopping streets had no power. I swear there were more policemen in the hypermarket monitering shoppers shoppings in the dim emergency lights than there were actual shoppers. But...i get ahead of myself. Yesterday no power, my apt. was freezing, and on top of that, I was actually stuck in my building with 30 or so other angry tenants for about twenty minutes at 8:30 on my way to work. See, the main door to my building is electronically locked and then boltetd into the tile floor, so when the power went out, so did the apparent ability for us to leave and enter the building b/c whoever had the manual keys was no where to be found, go figure. Finally three police officers and the mail man kicked open the door, shattering the tile floor. Some sort of brawl ensued afterward, i assume over the broken floor, but i couldn't stay around to loiter (such is the popular passtime aroudnd here) b/c i was late for class. I am lucky that I live on the 5th floor b/c the stairs are still manageable, but if i were on the 15th floor, whew, that'd be a whole other story. All the grandparents on my floor were pretty much housebound yesterday too. Usually they take the grandkids out in the strollers and push them around the neighborhood, but without elevators, getting 80-90 year old people, strollers and infants down to the ground floor becomes a real chore. The lady next door spent an hour yesterday pushing her granddaughter in her stroller up and down the corridor on our floor. After I got home from running errands in the evening the power was back on. Good thing i don't really keep perishables in the fridge...that would have been trouble.

Today I was surprised upon my arrival at school for two reasons: first Barbara's classroom was taken over for a meeting so one of us had to teach a full class of 70 (i love surprises) and second, there was no power. Hmph, well since i usually teach the students in their own classroom, i told barbara i'd take the first two classes of the day and she could take the last two. The first class of the day were Junior 1s (12yr olds). This week I am doing a Christmas lesson. I asked them what they knew about Christmas and really they know quite a bit. I had to do some minoring correcting...Santa says "Ho ho ho" and not "Ha ha ha" like my student Abner thought. They thought it was hilarious when I demonstrated a good "ho ho ho, Merrrrrry Christmas" and repeated it after me a good many times. Then, on the worksheet i had given them were the words for Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. In all the rest of the classes earlier in the week I've had different students read the various stanzas and we go over words like "pout" and "goodness" and then we listen to good ole' Frank Sinatra sing the song via MP3 file on the computer. Only.....yes that's right, no power today. So, for one day and one day only Ms. Nelson sang in front of her 70+ person classes. I asked if they would rather just read the song one more time, but NO, they HAD to sing it. So I then apologized for having the world's worst voice, cleared my throat and belted out the song. Thank goodness I teach clever children and they caught on after one time through and my creaky voice was able to blend into the rest after that. However, my solo performance ellicited a classroom full of cheering and clapping - oh how they patronize me. It was much worse when I had to sing for the class of 15 year olds. My voice was scratchy and the high part of the song: he sees you when you're sleepin' he knows when you're awake he knows if you've been bad or good.... that part...man i really sounded bad....I even had the boys who usually sleep in the back were paying attn. just so they could laugh at me. All in all it was good fun and it was a good segue into my activity for the day: helping santa decide if three particular children had been naughty or nice this year and what they should get for christmas.

Speaking of segues, here's a blunt one: I was robbed on Monday. I am now part of a Shenzhen statistic, and am now minus an ipod and a little pride associated with being someone who was stupid enough to have something stolen, except I wasnt' really stupid. I had gone downtown to meet with a travel agent to check on tickets for Auckland and i brought an empty backpack so i could go grocery shopping on my way home. I had nothing in it, b/c thieves easily steal from backpacks. Instead I had my wallet in one zipped pocket of my jacket and the ipod in the other (you're supposed to split your goods in case a thief slices your pockets he'll only get half). Well on the but i kept one hand on my wallet and the other hand held on the raill; the bus was packed solid. My ipod was zipped in my pocket and my earphones in, but somewhere on the way home the earphones fell out of my ears, but I didn't notice, it was hot and crowded on the bus. Well I get off at my stop and my earphone cord is hanging out of my jaket and my pocket is unzipped.....someone stole my ipod. I'm really very angry about it and I think it's b/c I find myself walking around now looking at everyone as a thief. I carry nothing on me now, not books, no electronics, just money to get me where i need to go. I hate that feeling of distrust, but it won't get better for awhile. There are articles in all the papers lately about thieves being bussed into Shenzhen for the up and coming chinese New Year b/c tons of visitors with money will be in the city. Yuck! how crummy is that?!

The twisted part is that i still love it here....does that mean something is wrong with me?

Two weeks until Adam comes.....6 weeks until mum comes and in between that, perhaps a trip to Chengdu for the Chinese New Year. Five more weeks of teaching in this semester. Next week the kiddos are going to LOVE me....I found Home Alone on VCD to show them. They deserve a film....Barbara shows her students films all the time, I never do. Next week, yes, they'll love me. It'll make up for the earsplitting singing I did

On the third week before China Christmas the Foreign Language School Higher-ups Gave to me.......

......an oscillating Chinese-style mode of heating an apartment.

After freezing for 5 nights in a row in an apt whose temp was down below 50 degrees, I walked in to my bosses office on Wednesday and asked if there was anything he could do to make my apt. a bit warmer (ie a space heater) b/c I was really miserable. I came to school with pantyhose on under my pants and then wool knee socks over my stockings, then a sweatshirt, a fleece, and a north face jacket on top, and mittens. I taught all day long in this apparel b/c classrooms are concrete and not heated. Last week I was confiscating NBA magazines in class, this week, knitting needles, from both boys and girls. So, Thursday I get my heat! It is an oscillating heating fan....basically looks like a cooling fan except it gives off heat reflecting in the form of bright orange light off of a huge silver dish in on the backside. It makes me warm, but I fear this bright orange light is bad for my skin. Friday morning as I watched the news and ate breakfast at 7am, I felt the need to put on my sunglasses, for i fear the light from the fan is too bright and drying to the eyes, hahah. Though, an additional plus is that the orange light kinda feels like the glow of a christmas tree in my living room, makes me feel a little more festive.

Below are random elements from the last week:



The Christmas ornament that I made for Jenny for her Birthday. I finished this last week while huddled under blankets wearing fingerless gloves and wishing that I had finished knitting my hat. I was so cold!
He's a skating penguin. I gave him to my friend and "Chinese Mother" XiaoSha b/c she invites me to her house to eat almost every weekend.

In Kristen's free time she's been doing what? Making ornaments!

I was in charge of making the roll-out sugar cookies ie, I had to use the cane-like stick to roll out dough that did not want to be rolled out. But the result was amazing angel and tree cookies that you'd never ever otherwise get here. The pastry chefs at Meg's school were entralled by our method of cooking (dough mix in a bag). We had to do some improvising.....melting the in metal bowls in the industrial oven, as there wasn't a microwave. We also did not have a proper rolling pin and I had to instruct meagan how to convert farenheight temperatures to celsius by using her cell phone calculater. But....two hours later we had over 150 cookies. Yum Yum, talk about a sugar high.

Meagan, me, Hayley and Patty stopping to pose for a photo as people arrive for the holiday festivities in Longhua. We had carols, we had holiday beverages, we had a gift exchange....we even had a visit from Santa!

Here's the kinds of Christmas decorations that line my city's streets. Here on Hongli Lu is the Christmas Pumpkin! At night is quite an electrified site on the the corner of two bustling streets, however I would have to argue that the two blue monkeys riding on the golden dragon outside of the Hilton by the train station are a slightly cooler holiday decorations than this pumpkin.

December and Hong Kong....just me and 900 million-zillion of my closest tourist pals

The Christmas tree in Central, complete with guitar-playing mechanical Santas surrounding the base of it.
Here are the ladies looking all perky after realizing that the Starbucks in HK serve Gingerbread Lattes. Caffeinating on the train was the name of the game.

Me and Julia rocking, literally on the Star Ferry...for those prone to seasickness, today was not a day for you to harbour cross on the Star Ferry.

Cute little loquacious boy who sat in front of for the 5 minute harbour crossing.

Mere and Julia aboard the Star Ferry on our way over to Central from Tsim Sha Tsui

Italian Lunch (my first Italian food since July) at Fat Angelo's.

Garden next to the Bank of China Building

Wouldn't it be most amazing to work here and argue against human rights injustices? Give me five years or so........

One of the Ocean Liner's whose port of call is HK. The fruity cruise yuppies disembark and go shopping in Harbour City....men with pink sweaters tied around their necks and women with piles of makeup on. What are they trying to prove?

HK Convention Center. Take note, you'll be seeing a lot of this on the news in the next two weeks with the WTO Conference being held in HK. When they talk of farm subsidies and world price supports, I guarentee good old HK Island will be in the background.

Just a little gander over to the Island side. It has been reallly hazy in this here part of the world recently...no rain. But, it is going to get cold b/c of the monsoon kicking up trouble southwest of us. Bring on the lows in the 40s...without a heater in my apt. i might add. If you don't hear from me at all in the next two weeks it's b/c i'm buried under three thick duvets and hibernating in my bed/

Welcome to HK in the winter my friends. This is me standing along the avenue of the stars in Kowloon. (incidently in this photo I was mere meters from the new bronzy glory of Bruce Lee, the most recent statued addition to the Avenue)