"No school madam....the Typhoon...it kuai daole (comes soon)"

As a little girl in Jakarta I remember leaving school early and not returning for a number of days because of bomb threats. One time a real bomb was even delivered to the US Ambassador’s house and school was dismissed for almost a week. As a third grader, these impromptu holidays were amazing as I really had no grasp of the concept of being sent home because someone had called claiming to have planted a bomb at an international school with 2000 kids on campus. Even the bomb-sniffing dogs that darted amongst students as they piled on buses headed for home at 9:30 in the morning didn’t phase me.
Well today I can add a new kind of “day-off” to the repertoire that formerly consisted of snow days (in Dallas this was really more of a “threat of snow and perhaps a bit of ice” day) and bomb-scare days…….today is “typhoon day.” Apparently Tai Feng (Typhoon in chinese) Pearl is swirling her way between HK and Taiwan at this very moment aiming to smack into Guangdong province (where I live) this evening. I had heard some hoopla from teachers and in the newspapers here, but didn’t really take it seriously especially not to the extent of school cancellation because lets face it, Chinese kids go to school 7 days a week now, when are they going to make up this day (possibly 2 days) of school? I got up this morning and as I brushed my teeth and got ready for my 8am class I heard the headmaster over the loudspeaker and despite my diligent efforts at Chinese I continue to have a fiercely difficult time understanding anyone speaking Chinese over a loudspeaker….it gets really garbled. What I did catch were snippets of going home, safety, typhoon this evening etc. didn’t catch the “class is over now” part apparently. I head to class and my kiddos are sitting in the dark with the head teacher in the front of the class. A few words exchanged in Chinese (much to her surprise….apparently word does NOT travel around school that I speak Chinese….but that’s good though, only a few classes know that and the rest diligently speak English to me all the time instead of a steady stream of Chinglish just b/c they are lazy and know I understand) and I learned that class was cancelled. It’s all very strange to me. The storm isn’t supposed to come until after 8 tonight, I walked around my neighborhood this morning and it was truly business as usual at every store. I suppose time will tell as to whether or not it was worth sending the kids home or not. All I can say is that the administration will make me really mad if they try to get me to make up the missed classes on Saturday and Sunday this weekend, b/c my 3 close friends and I have planned a birthday (mine)/engagement bachelorette (not mine) outing to Macau for those two days. We want to see the gardens, architecture and eat Portuguese cuisine…..not visit the caninedrome (dog races), formula one racetrack, or the casinos.
In other news, I met a really interesting fellow last week. I went with my friend Andy to teach an English Corner lecture at the University here in the city and I happened to meet the university’s president (a good friend of Andys). But…he is not just a university president, he is also the equivalent of a Senator for Guangdong Province and……he’s a world champion Scrabble player. Yes that is right….world champion, apparently there are competitions on a scale greater that your kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. He has this idea that he can further English education at the university level by teaching students to play Scrabble. If not for the typhoon, Andy, his wife and I were going to head out to the university tonight and Scrabble it up with the English students.
I had the most wonderful holiday in Beijing at the beginning of this month. At the start of the holiday I was ready to admit that I was ready to go back to America. But after a week in Beijing with my good friend Tammy, I have now changed my jig…..I don’t want to leave here. There is so much China has to offer and while I don’t think I will return to live in Shenzhen, I certainly want to come back and live somewhere in China (hopefully Beijing, Shanghai or HK, but Kunming where all the NGOs work out of is also wonderful). After talking with the University Pres, Ben, for awhile I felt that there really is a place for me here. He asked me what kind of law I was going back to the states to pursue and to be completely honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to tell him about aspirations for practicing human rights law in China, but I was feeling sure of myself that day and so I told him. He laughed and then said that would be a good job for me. He said that there are many people who know a lot about China, and conversely many people that know a lot about America, but very few that understand both and can speak both languages. But he seemed to think that I did and thought that people who understand both sides can do a lot more good.
Writing about leaving China reminded me of a funny episode in Beijing. Tammy and her friend Kevin and I were hanging out downtown and we decided we wanted Korean food for dinner (Kevin and Tammy are originally from Korea). Well Tammy decides that we need to check out this North Korean Restaurant in Wanjing (just northeast of downtown Beijing). The place is one of two restaurants owned by the North Korean government outside of their country and whenever gov’t officials from NKorea head over to Beijing, they eat there…even Mr Kim Jung Il. The fuwuyuan are brought in from North Korea as well. The food was wonderful and not expensive…the ambience was completely over the top and the evening ended with a 4-woman North Korean “rock band” belting out Korean tunes while wearing sparkly green tops. In the middle of the meal Tammy and I felt compelled to make a little small talk with the fuwuyuan and turns out they don’t stay in China too long, the gov’t keeps sending over new servers every few months, and…..I was the only waiguoren (foreigner from western country) that had been in there in months. That led me to think for a moment that perhaps CIA peoples were camped out in the apt. complex across the street, seeing what kind of rifraf came and went in the restaurant and that would make them suspect me as a spy or something, haha. Hmmm, we’ll see if the US wants me back in a month when I attempt to return via LA. Also, in the middle of dinner Kevin’s mum called on his cell, from NJ to see how he was doing. When he told her he was in a NKorean restaurant, boy she gave him quite an earful. She told him not to go the bathroom alone otherwise someone might bang him over the head with a pot and take him as a prisoner back to NKorea. We really had our wild imaginations going that evening.
I am in the middle of reading an excellent book at the moment called “My Country and My People” by Lin Yu Tang (Last name is Lin, in Chinese the last name goes first). I was written in the 1930s but does much to explain why China and the Chinese are the way they are. It got a lot of criticism in China when it was first published b/c it did point out elements of Chinese culture that were perhaps slightly unfavorable but he defended his work by saying that he could criticize b/c he still had immense faith in his culture. I strongly recommend it.
For some reason I’ve only recently put my college classes on China to use in debunking why things in this country are done is such a gosh-darn illogical manner. Then I remembered that the President (Hu Jintao until 2012) is the head of the Communist Party as well as the government, which would be kind of like having the head of the church in the US be president for ten years. While people argue that this really isn’t an issue b/c gov’t postings are open to people not in the Party, the reality is that the Party is indelibly intertwined with every element of the gov’t. What is even more unique is that for every post in the gov’t there an equal ‘shadow post’ in the Party….a behind the scenes fella. Then what becomes even more astonishing is that a Party member with a lower ranking than a gov’t official of a particular province, prefecture etc. will always outrank the gov’t officer despite the officer having a technically ‘higher’ post. Thus education and rising in gov’t ranks is not terribly important; it remains that Party affiliation is the most prevalent marking of power.