Quittin' time

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It’s been a whirlwind of whacky these days. A lot of it revolves around the teacher training and my new roommate.

I’ve mentioned Liyang before. She’s the office assistant to John Bentham the program manager and we sit next to each other when I am in the office.
She recently needed a place to live and since I have a second bedroom that seems to get few visitors (yes, you) I offered it to her.

Her aunt and 80-something granddad (armed with digital camera and cell phone) helped move her stuff, not allowing me to help.
“So what do they think of you living with a foreign man?” I asked.
“They don’t say anything,” she laughed. “Since I lived two years in Norway, they know better.”

It wasn’t long before things started changing. First, it was the aie. Chen is the cleaning lady who is known around the office for bossing others around about how to do things. She comes to my apartment and for $1.25 an hour cooks some dishes, cleans and does the laundry. But she’s a bit eccentric, that is, not too sharp and Liyang was having none of it. I think the last straw came when I bought lightbulbs and Liyang asked Chen to replace the dead ones. She worked on one ceiling fixture, but neglected the other not 10 feet away.

Now we have another Chen aie who is a go-getter. The house it cleaner, papers and books organized, beds made, laundry hung, everything shipshape. I commented to Liyang about the new woman’s skill. She just laughed at how I put up with the other’s silliness for so long. Sometimes, I explained, the devil I know is better than the one I don’t know. And with limited language skills, I remain at the mercy often of taking what I can get.

Liyang admits that she doesn’t know how hard it can be to live in China. In Norway everything is organized. Here, the organization is more like chaos. The stuff gets done, but it requires more attention.

I really like Liyang because she exhibits the promise of an emerging China. Smart, efficient, proactive. We’ve been watching the TV show Arrested Development and she gets nearly all the jokes. And when practicing to take the GRE, a graduate university qualifying exam, she scoffed at tallying a perfect score on the math. “Just about any Chinese student can do that,” she said to a guy who scored below 50 percent, “We’re all good at maths, but we lack creativity.”

Just take Exhibit A, Chen’s lightbulb limitations. And that illustrates the other big part of emerging China, the huge number of people referred to as ‘toothpaste,’ people who won’t do anything until squeezed. The older term for those kinds of people is abacus, for the same reason, but with more attention being paid to health and appearance these days, the toothbrush has replaced the bead box.

I’ve now been in China for just over a year and in the three days we were left with out either Chen, I realized how soft I’ve become. I’ve gotten pretty used to my privileged lifestyle, coming home to cooked dinners and clean laundry. And it doesn’t bode well for my return to the US where I will once again become intimate with a toilet brush.

That’s right, I’m returning to Mei Guo (Beautiful Country). Amy and I have been carrying on an iRomance for more than a year, spending a total of 3 weeks together since I left and we both want to see if there is something more to it so I’m moving back to Denver so we can check things out. Understandably, Amy was reluctant to quit her job and rent her house out and come over here for such a tentative relationship so, having the privilege of a contract, I exercised my option and told the boss last month that I was going to leave Shanghai.

He wasn’t terribly happy about it, but he understands.

See the thing of it is, teaching 12 classes a week and running the teacher training program dropped me into the Shanghai Lifestyle of ‘working-all-the-time.’ Plus, being a program administrator was feeling like a dysfunctional relationship. Normal problem solving is always a challenge, but in a cross-cultural environment, it is especially difficult. The promise of an office assistant evaporated when the person I was waiting more than a month for called the weekend before her start date to say she wasn’t coming. That left me to search for someone on my own. Then there is the usual Chinese situation of people not being on the ball enough to tell me that appointments I’d made had been cancelled or that materials I’d asked for were sitting on a desk downstairs. This kind of thing takes constant vigilance around here. And then there were my own blind spots of not having created procedures for stuff like tracking student applications, developing curriculum and writing new materials. I had to face it. I’d never run a teacher training and in the four months I have been at it, I’ve discovered it is a complex system and I’d dropped a lot of balls. It reminds me of something a photographer named Mike Mathers told me once when I was talking about building my own house without really knowing how. “Get a professional,” he said. “Because if you do it yourself, it will cost you twice as much and you wouldn’t want to live in it.”

To wit, its become rather clear that the program needs someone more skilled at this kind of thing and besides, with a pending offer from Amy to build a different kind of program, I’d like to try that. Again. (At least I have some experience with those sorts of projects.)

It’s not clear when I will be back in the States. I’m considering a trip to India before I leave Asia. That country is yoga’s spiritual home and I’d like to pay it a visit. And I don’t know what I will do once back in the US nor how long I will stay. It’s all a bit of a mystery…

So now I have another month or two in China before I leave. And there’s nothing quite so bittersweet as knowing that one’s time is limited in a place. I know I’ve said this before, but knowing I am going gives me more appreciation for the pomello sellers and puffed-rice purveyors. I even had a laugh at being taken by my local bike mechanic. I showed up the other day to get my chain oiled and he noticed my crankset was loose. Instead of letting me ride a loose bike like everyone else, he saw an opportunity and quickly condemned the mechanical menace, so now in less than four months of ownership, every single bearing on my crap bike has been replaced at least once. Oh well, another $5 down the drain. I just love being able to piss away $5 knowing full well that if my bike was a car in America, it would have cost me real money.

I’ll miss this place, especially people like Liyang. But I’ll have some memories, maybe a picture or two and if it doesn’t get stolen, she’ll have my pink bike.

I’m out - John

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