Some scattered thoughts

It’s been a while. Let me tell you, spending 48 hours within a week on a plane is not good for your health. I lost my voice last week and I’m just now getting it back. After spending a week in America, I returned feeling very disoriented, like my brain was floating overhead, only attached by a string. Last week was a culture shock explosion. I didn’t really have time to deal with being back in America and then I was thrust back into China, this time without the buzz and glitter that new places give off. So it was just my same little town, Zhangjiagang, now with the food not tasting quite as good and the realization that beds in China are really hard! When I sat down on my first American bed, I felt like I was lying on a mattress filled with marshmallow fluff. And then I came back here and figured out that I sleep on a wooden box with a thin mattress pad on top of it. I was wondering why I would wake up with my shoulders asleep when I slept on my side.
Food in China. Seriously...THIS picture is thought to be appetizing enough to blow up into a five foot tall poster. Random meat chunks in a pool of oil and salty broth. Do I only feel this way as a former vegetarian? Or are people agreeing with me here?

Luckily, having no voice gave me an excuse to show the kids a movie last week while I allowed my brain to find its proper place back inside my head. I chose “Freaky Friday” and they loved it! The best part is I forgot that a pivotal scene takes place in a Chinese restaurant! I leapt out of my seat in the first class I showed it to and exclaimed in my raspy mucus voice, “This is what we THINK Chinese restaurants are like in America. We love Chinese food. See! Chopsticks!” and then the film went on to show lots of cultural stereotypes of Chinese people that I hope flew right over the kids’ heads. At one point, Lindsey Lohan starts talking about some “strange Asian voodoo” and a couple of the kids in my more advanced classes kind of chuckled to themselves. Also, at the Chinese restaurant in the movie there are fortune cookies BUT trivia fact--fortune cookies are an American invention. Most Chinese kids have never heard of them.

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I never had the chance to talk about my trip to Hangzhou. It feels like I went there YEARS ago. It was a great trip. I definitely want to go back there again because there were a couple of things I didn’t get to see. One part of that trip that has stuck with me these past couple of weeks is the Six Harmonies pagoda, or in Chinese, the Liuhe pagoda. Pagodas are these multistoried towers built for Buddhist religious reflection. They are all throughout China, and this was my first. In addition to its religious purposes, the Liuhe pagoda was built in 1165 as a lighthouse for boats on the Qiantang River which is faces. Inside, I could really feel that it was a spiritual place. Something about the form itself--the inscribed hallways that built to be paced while contemplating and the way space inside the building was manipulated to give a feeling of both connectedness and disjuncture.

The pagoda, my travel companions, and myself. Kind of a sucky photo, but you can see what a pagoda looks like.

My favorite place was on the second to last floor, the one floor where the supporting column in the center of the room was exposed. It was a massive block of wood, round and covered in flaking red paint. I sat down to one side of it, facing the bridge that crossed the river, and the three people I was traveling with joined me, each of us facing a different direction with a different view. The “Six harmonies” that the pagoda is named for symbolize both the six principles of Buddhism (something like this: do not fight, do not be greedy, do not seek, do not be selfish, do not pursue personal advantage, and do not lie) and the 6 directions: North, South, East, West, Heaven, and Earth. At that moment the pole was heaven and earth and each of us one of the directions. After contemplating our view we switched until we had seen what we could from the windows in all four directions.
One view from the column. Do you see what I mean about the hallways and the space inside? Probably not and this photo doesn't really do it justice. It was early evening at this point and the light wasn't good.

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This past weekend was the first I stayed in town for the whole weekend. On Saturday I slept for sixteen hours, not including the two or so hours I spent asleep in the movie theater in town watching the new James Bond movie dubbed in Chinese. When I woke up on Sunday morning I felt amazing. It’s all thanks to melatonin, a hormone that the human body naturally produces to enable sleep. I take a melatonin pill sometimes in the States, and I found it here at a Chinese drugstore. By the way, Chinese drugstores are fascinating places. The melatonin was on the shelf wedged between the cow placenta pills and the kangaroo essence tablets. I wonder what parts of the kangaroo are included in its essence and what benefits this essence has for human health? Seriously, I am really interested in Chinese medicine. This particular drugstore had a few English labels (how I found the melatonin), but no English explanations.

When I was in Hangzhou I went into a beautiful Chinese pharmacy and saw lots of scary fetal roots in jars, tree bark and other random plant matter in cases, and jars and jars of herbal medications. People had prescription slips filled out that they brought to a window and got a bag of some herb handed to them. I like the use of natural ingredients to treat ailments and I really wanted to know what everything was. I want to take a class on Eastern medicine.

Here are the roots that remind me of fetuses. Is it just because they are floating in jars?

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Sunday morning, Mary Beth and I went to a Korean church service. We were invited by the priest and the church’s president one time at the expat bar. The church consists of a room at the nicest hotel in town, The Guomao. The altar has the hotels logo on it in big block letters, and organ music is played from a macbook in the corner. During the announcement portion of the service, in the middle of a bunch of Korean, I heard “Rachel” and everyone turned to look at me and applaud. I swear, I don’t think a room of Asians applauding me will ever get old (or a room full of people from any continent for that matter, but it just doesn’t happen as much in North America). One of the church members owns a Korean restaurant in town and after the service every Sunday he serves up a big free meal for everyone who attends. And it was so tasty! Korean food is much lighter that Chinese food with less oil and more vegetables. I liked the kimchee (pickled cabbage) so much that the restaurant owner had his wife, who handmakes it, package me up a big box of the smelly stuff to take home. And then he took us for a golf lesson at Zhangjiagang driving range! Sunday was the first day it stopped raining all week and it was a clear crisp fall day. This man, Mr. Shee, used to be a professional golf player in Korea and now teaches golf as a side job. He gave us a free lesson and it was really fun!
Me and Mr. Shee. He kept telling me that I looked like Tiger Woods. I asked him how and he said because I was tall.

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Even though after coming back I felt sort of harsh towards China, I’m getting to love its ways again. I think my emotions are really tied to how much sleep I am getting a night. Though sleeping on a hard mattress and eating Chinese food are sort of getting old, two mundane activities I really enjoy doing are going to the post office and getting my bike fixed. The post office is really old fashioned. They use envelopes straight out of the 1920’s and the lady working there had to use a paintbrush dipped in a bottle of glue in an old brown bottle to close it. And when I go to get my bike fixed, usually they don’t charge me anything for labor but only for parts which means nine times out of ten I sit there on a stool about three inches from the ground watching this sweet man tinker away inside a dark dirty alcove where he keeps his tools with his bedroom in the back room behind a door and when he is done he sends me off with a smile and a wave.

To close, an anecdote from when I was still attempting to teach last week before my voice was completely gone. I made up a lesson about superheroes because the kids all love comic books so much. For the warm up I had them name all of the superheroes they could think of and then describe each super hero’s super powers. One kid said Mao Zedong and when I asked the class what his super powers were, they came up with this (granted, it was a lower level class): 1. has many wives 2. saved China 3. is talkative.

And here is a picture of a typical scene at the expat bar. EF boys and an Indian businessman:


Alright well I am off to tutor a Korean kid, but first I'm going to stop and pick up a Diet Coke and chug it because I fell asleep in both of our last two sessions.

-Rachel