A grumpy TV star in a zombie apocalypse

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TV show: (my bit starts about 6 minutes in...):

http://www.yzntv.com/city/folder249/2014/08/2014-08-1681175.html

…..the great triumvirate of things that foreigners in China have to live with but will never fully accede to or really get used to:

1. the usually poor, often really bad & not infrequently downright appalling air quality, though it's disturbing how quickly you feel yourself growing to accept, on what should be a bright summer's day, barely seeing the outline of a building less than a kilometre away. In summer on a bad day, when you step outside you're hit in the face with 35C+ & about 80%!o(MISSING)r 90%!h(MISSING)umidity but it looks like a midwinter's day in Scotland. This summer has been, & still is, at time of writing, grey, wet & humid, with a combination of moisture & air pollution making respiration akin to breathing soup. A quick glance at a photo of an Australian sunset, or maybe a Tibetan sky, is an instant reality check.....

2. The elephantine weight of control over the internet. Sites that yesterday you accessed with no problem suddenly out of bounds. A company like Google or a news site that has, (shock, horror), mentioned something critical of the government, suddenly not accessible, English language websites that take forever to load. Proxy software that will sometimes stay connected for hours, at other times will drop in & out & make any research, web-surfing or other erstwhile normal activities totally impossible. Within the confines of the country any news on social media sites deemed “inappropriate” are quickly excised, never to be heard of again. Thesaurus sites, I just discovered, are “unauthorised” via Yahoo, which is still on side with the government here. Still, when you have 2,000,000 (yes, that's right...!) underpaid drongos employed to “monitor” the internet I guess this is the sort of random, nonsensical, pointless & counterproductive “control” you get. For some foreign websites, imagine an arthritic slug, swimming through treacle, viewed in slow motion.....

3. Spitting. By which I mean loud, public displays of hawking, hacking, expectoration anywhere, anytime. I'll include here under the same category nose-blowing which, in particularly virtuostic street performances, involve leaning forward at 45 degrees, closing one nostril theatrically with a finger, exerting the full pressure of 2 lungs through the remaining nostril, &, in one fell swoop, twirling the remaining strands of mucus squarely in the middle of what has already landed on the pavement. Returning to simple expectoration, it is slowly becoming the domain of mainly older people but now & again .....

…..apart from having developed 360 degree vision, through frequent participation in the 2 wheeled zombie apocalypse that is a Chinese bike lane, I have not actually previously been spat on. However, I am on my way to west Yangzhou, during a busy time in the late afternoon. Now, if you are riding a bike in any of the great deserts of the world & you turn your head to spit, chances are at worst you might offend a wayward lizard but, in a city of 4,000,000 in the rush hour chances are there will be someone nearby! I am just about to overtake another e-bike when the man, in his 40's or 50's, turns his head & … yes, you guessed … No, he didn't hit me, (otherwise this rant would be truly epic), but far too close.....

…..”Oi”. That should be a pretty universally recognisable utterance. He does the Chinese thing & stares straight ahead as though enclosed in a bubble. My bike is quicker than most so, when I draw level & repeat my inarticulate but unmistakeable personal address & he still ignores me I accentuate it with a friendly punch on the arm. I ask him in Chinese, “why did you spit without looking”. No, this foreigner is not there. If I stare ahead long enough he will cease to exist & I won't “lose face”, (a terrible fate here). I'll probably never know whether he thinks there might have been some problem with spitting in a crowded bike lane or if he's still riding around “saving face” by pretending the world around him doesn't exist.....

…..seismic changes are however happening & affecting the very core values of society. For instance, as I cross a busy intersection, I notice a policeman, not as usual just casually observing the organised chaos passing before his eyes, but on the left side of the lane, stopping a woman travelling in the opposite direction. I don't catch anything of what he says to her but she looks so surprised he could be saying, “You're not allowed to travel the wrong way”. I quickly dismiss this thought as too preposterous but, on checking with my hosts while having lunch with my student, George, & his family, it appears that, at least on the middle, busy section of Wenchang Road, they are actually enforcing this sanction, apparently with a ¥20 fine, against what most people here must be completely unaware could possibly be an infraction.....

…..while travelling the wrong way, especially while texting, (very common), talking to your friend nearby or generally being zoned out, (ubiquitous), or riding without lights at night, (practically universal), is inconsiderate, stupid & dangerous it's not a huge problem where the lanes are wide, it's not rush hour & people stick to the right side. This rant concerns the recently drastically reduced bike lanes on Wenchang Zhong (Middle) Road, which are now only 2 bikes wide, with a pavement at the same level, (usually crammed with parked bikes), people in busy times riding the wrong way either 2 abreast or trying to overtake! They look absolutely astonished when they are almost knocked flying, hear my new air horn, or alternatively get a quick lesson in English profanity. I have been trying to resolve the phenomenon into the “cultural differences” box but so far no incident has made it any further than the “bloody stupid, moronic, dumbarse idiot” box, & is unlikely to progress further.....

…..further to this I should add that I took an online test (of unknown provenance), recently which claims to estimate your approximate vocabulary in English by familiarity with increasingly obscure words. Mine came out at approximately 33,000. I notice on recent & more frequent trips on the road in Yangzhou, this reasonably respectable vocabulary is being compressed, like a white dwarf star, into the following 2 muttered phrases; “What the #$&* are you doing?” & “You #$&* idiot”.....

….talking of which, the latest hazard I discover as an older man on a bike, coming towards me the wrong way suddenly swerves. Luckily it causes me to jam on the brakes, thus avoiding being ripped off the scooter by a rope, at around neck height when I encounter it, that 2 women working on a nearby building site have stretched across the bike lane.....

…..rant(s) over but still on the subject of bikes, Dave, one of our travelling companions in Tibet, made his planned bike trip from Golmud. Getting off the train from Lhasa in this town, I understood his original idea was to get as close to Shanghai as possible before getting his plane home to the USA. Catching up with him back in Yangzhou I discover he cycled around 2,500km in 3 weeks, across the desolate Qinghai plateau, at high altitude, & ended up in Yunnan, in the South-West of China. Good effort.....

…..Paul, our Director of Foreign Teachers, also has a bike, a 250cc motorbike to replace the tiny 110cc model he's been riding. While I have been at the school trying to catch up on the studies I didn't do in Tibet, he's been trundling around Zhejiang having zen moments of clarity with the humid air caressing his scalp etc. I should remind him to get a helmet.....

…..I've mentioned before the insane amount of elaborate packaging that encases stuff like moon cakes during the autumn festival, presentation boxes of tea, sweets or other delicacies. It's really not possible to “break” tea & sweets really only require minimal packaging to survive. What about eggs? Ha! They are sold in a plastic bag. A plastic bloody bag! Even though my scooter has pretty reasonable suspension the sunken manhole covers & other irregularities which quickly appear on even recently surfaced roads, mean an attrition rate, & a tendency to go for omelettes, when you finally get them home.....

…..our friend Chris, (formerly Amy!), turns up to a gig one evening with a new t-shirt, “Smoke for a poke”. She is mortified when I explain possible interpretations of this gramatically questionable but otherwise innocuous looking collection of words. a) she just liked the t-shirt & didn't really consider the actual lettering, b) on translation confused “poke” with “poker”, the card game, c) had no chance anyway of discovering any double-entendres to otherwise perfectly respectable words. The t-shirt wasn't as cheap as the sentiment emblazoned on it.....

…..I am invited, by the director of the Yangzhou TV show, Chang Xiang Xing Qi Wu, (Sing Out Friday night), to do a song on a TV show. However the fact that it's a kind of “Yangzhou Idol” is only revealed when the director's intern mentions “First or second place” & “competition”. What? You didn't tell me.... However, trooper that I am, I persevere. It ends up being another exercise in Chinese methods of organisation, management & dissemination, (= reluctant release), of information. It finally takes 4 visits to the station, including 2 complete days, to finally work it all out, get my guitar connected, do interviews, appraise the backing musicians of a song they've never heard, etc.....

….. I'm a songwriter & a muso of sorts but this voice competition so, while I can hold a tune, I know I don't have the ace card of a great singing voice. So I play the other cards I have been dealt. Being a foreigner is probably worth a king, maybe a queen for an original song, both firsts for this show. It's also about Yangzhou's Ming Yue Hu, or Bright Moon Lake & Nana, the director's intern assistant, has translated the first verse & chorus for display on screen for the viewers. Instant suspicion! I'm told by Cici, another intern who speaks reasonable English & is tasked with looking after me on Friday, that it doesn't appear strange or ridiculous in Chinese. That's the best I can hope for. A Jack! A ten in the show for dropping a line a friend taught me in the local Yangzhou dialect. We're close to a Royal Flush now.....

…..half an hour before the show starts I have everything in order, fairly confident about being able to respond to the questions in intelligible Chinese when the female host approaches me with a great idea. She explains some elaborate repartee involving the difference in meaning between “kong pa” (afraid, as in “I'm afraid I can't do that”) & “hai pa” (“scared”). I know the director has sent her to present the idea. Being unable to formulate, “Get stuffed” in Chinese I settle for, “Wo kong pa wo bu yao shuo de zhe yang”, or “I'm afraid I do NOT want to say that”. The concept of defying your boss is pretty alien to Chinese culture. I think she hopes the director will just assume I forgot those lines.....

…..in the end it's good fun, my colleagues Roger & Andy, Andy's girlfriend, Alice, & another new teacher, Rishi, turn up for the live performance &, being first on, I get a reasonably respectable mid-range score of 3,200 out of 5,000 from the panel of 30 citizens of Yangzhou. It's really about the voice, not the song. The lady after me eventually wins. Never mind a wine glass, she could shatter a beer mug with hers. 3,800. The next contestant gets 3,500. Great. One more over 3,200 & I don't have to return & lose another 3 days of my life! However the girl singing the Shania Twain song only gets 2,500, another contestant, in a rather overblown operatic performance, gets the gong & doesn't even get to finish his song, which must be about as public a “losing of face” as you could imagine. Now I'm worried. However the last 2 are just ahead of my score so I save face but don't have to suffer the next round. Perfect! I also seem to have made good friends with the music director, Zhu Laoshi, (Teacher Zhu), who invites me to lunch on 2 days of the rehearsal &, considering my degree of musical illiteracy, is remarkably accommodating, not to mention generous. Even on the second day I'm not even allowed to buy the drinks. “You are guest in China”. I have been a guest for the past 5 years!.....

…..Rishi, teaching Grade 8, the teacher who'll be working closest to me this year as I've opted for Grade 7, arrived a month early with the intention of expanding horizons, travelling around China & making a new start after a series of boring government jobs in London. He's in his late 20s, (not a problem), & a vegetarian, (a huge problem in China!). I have been busy with catching up on my courses, TV, gigs at the Secrecy bar &, by the time I catch up with him he's had far too much time just hanging around the school & Yangzhou, almost in a state of pre-traumatic stress disorder, full of doubts about teaching, not really confident to travel. I take him the only two vegetarian restaurants I know of in this city of 4 million & also a short, 2 day trip to the Tianning Pagoda in Changzhou & then the Red Lion Aussie bar in Wuxi, about halfway to Shanghai. I manage to negotiate or bluff my way through the fact that he has forgotten to bring his passport, though I did remind him the night before. I also manage to get the concept of a meat-free meal through at a small eatery in Wuxi, thus he was able to eat his first breakfast of fried noodles ever. He's loosening up a little.....

…..the highly publicised push against corruption in China is affecting me, though not seriously! After agreeing with our Director of Foreign teachers to play my “Bright Moon Lake” song for the Yangzhou Government Foreign Affairs Department I am informed that, because of the efforts to weed out lavish expenditure by officials the planned one hour gathering has been trimmed to a half hour & my (free!) performance cancelled.....

…..new teachers Tim, a big, American ex-soldier in his 20s who has been teaching in Korea for a year, & Katie, from England but of Czech parents, recently in Palestine, complete our foreign teachers team. They hit the ground running & are into China immediately, not without raised eyebrows on both sides at times, but I think they will have a ball. Steve, who took his girlfriend Amy with him to England for the summer, has returned & is keen to resume our musical partnership. We have already played at a huge wedding & have work lined up for the weekend. A few people have even recognised me from the TV show. I can sign my name in Chinese IF, (IF.....c'mon, I bought a new pen, just in case), anyone ever asks for an autograph.....

…..latest news. Rishi, who has been consumed with doubt since he arrived, has bought a ticket & will fly back to London from Shanghai on Saturday, 2 days before the start of term. It seems all our efforts to include, encourage, fortify & embolden him have come to naught.....

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Photos

Interview & TV show
Ben's & Erin's mural of the Sydney Opera House makes a great backdrop

Sunshine's Birthday Party, KTV, Yangzhou
26 today! Choosing a song

Foreign Teachers meeting
Getting ready to start teaching next week

Foreign Teachers, 2014
In an informal mood

Rishi at Tianning Si, Changzhou
Admiring the view from the world's tallest wooden building.

Tianning Si Pagoda, Changzhou
At 153m the world's tallest wooden building

THAT T-shirt!
Probably the last time we'll see this one.
Sorry, phone quality pic...

Carving, Tianning Si, Changzhou
Stunning craftsmanship

Fanersai
Shen Yue's adopted stray. Fan er sai is the Chinese transliteration of "Versailles" (!)

Fanersai, Cat-in-a-box
Sorry, phone quality pic...