Chinaaaargh!

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…..the keen amateur plumbers we have here are full of boundless enthusiasm, in inverse proportion to both their expertise & selection of plumbing tools. However they race up & down the stairs trying to somehow switch off the torrents of water which pour out of pipes & fittings because the water hasn't been turned off while they are dismantling them. Both Mike, straight after his trip to Hainan in the summer & George, having his bathroom sink replaced, have been treated to the bonus of an indoor pool in their apartments as the small bathrooms fail to cope with the deluge. With the humidity here of course the water seeps into any furniture & under the wooden floors creating huge mould problems. The plumbers have been promoted well above their level of competence & I'm pretty sure they have failed the competency test for alternative employment as speed hump monitors.....

…..I thought the count of building cranes, only those visible from the Wenchang bridge near the school, had reached a peak but, as dozens of new buildings are finished, construction starts on others at a ferocious pace. On a recent rare, clear day, I lost count at over 70 (!!!).....

…..Steve has an invitation for the two of us to play on a kids talent show. The original plan is for us to arrive at 10.30am for a 2pm recording! We refuse but agree to arrive at 1pm to do 2 songs. Finally, after 4 hours of being stuffed around, we perform our short set at around 5pm, after threatening to walk out if the fee was not increased, which reluctantly it was. For a brief moment I saw the headline, “Yangzhou TV show director recovering in hospital after being bludgeoned by guitars...”.....

…..Steve & I are in the first phase of our move into corporate gigs. Eric, an American who has been in Yanzhou for a shorter time than I have, is fluent in Chinese & can even speak the local dialect. He's working for 2 Chinese brothers who have a wine & food import business &, because they've lived half their lives in the USA, Eric is now their link between the Chinese & foreigners. They a little suspicious when Eric suggests us to play for a launch of their products in the Jing Hua Cheng, or Living Mall, a big shopping complex in West Yangzhou. Eric starts to get nervous that they won't like it but in the end everyone is very happy with the outcome. We're booked for a repeat next month, so it can't be too bad.....

…..Najiyah, an American teacher who has sung a few times with us, turns up with Alicia, a newly arrived African-American from Los Angeles, who has the most incredibly infectious laugh. She loses the plot after I make what would be an everyday comment in Australia. One of the staff asks for my phone number. I don't know him so I ask why. “For Steven”. “Who's Steven?” “The boss”. (I have forgotten the boss' name by this time). Finally the confusion is cleared & I give him the phone number. Alicia asks why it was such a confusing exchange. I tell her, “Well, I didn't know him from a bar of soap.....”. Whatever that sound was that she made I can't even begin to describe, then she collapses in hysterics. It turns out that, like most Americans, she's not familiar with British or Australian idioms. I don't know what will happen when she meets Ronnie, the proprietor of Ronnie's Aussie bar, but fair dinkum, it'll be a ripper when she does, my bloody oath it will.....

…..I should add referring to a (male) Chinese teacher in my office as, “as camp as a row of tents”, elicited raucous laughter from an English colleague, a knowing smile from the Australian but totally blank looks from the 2 Americans present.....

…..Chinaaaaargh! Sing out Friday, return performance. Hong Hong & another TV station employee bugging me with different & conflicting requests for songs, availability. I tell them it's the Chinese method not to give me my school timetable until the day before I start teaching & no, there's no way I know whether I'll have special classes in 2 or 3 weeks time. Drip feeding information is how you do things at the TV station, you must know everything else in this country works the same way.....

…..”What does the fox say?” If you haven't heard the song, by a Scandinavian band called Ylvis, then the recent foreign teacher's performance, for Teacher's Day, would make no sense whatsoever.....

…..although Chinese characters don't constitute an alphabet as such in practice it's the same workload as having an alphabet that, instead of having 26 letters, has about 40,000 &, to be functionally literate you need to know at least 5,000 or 6,000. I'm nowhere near that yet, (ie: I am not even semi-literate). It's a humbling experience. Still, my recent volume of correspondence with the TV station must be improving this a little. It's like putting together a model with 40,000 different Lego blocks, some of which fit together, some of which don't. Who needs computer games, crosswords or quizzes when you live here. Every interaction is a combination of all three.....

…..I discover that a lot of my kids are unaware that in English, (& most European languages as far as I know), the given name is first & the family name last, unlike the Chinese, with the family name first. I make it a part of the lesson. They obviously realise Chinese is hard to read & write as I get a standing ovation nearly every time for just copying a kid's Chinese name above the English names for comparison.....

…..George, our very English English teacher, finally met a lady who'd been under his nose all the time. He's been at the school for 4 years now & has been increasingly close to Rosa, one of the Chinese English teachers, for a while. He finally announced that they'd been to Nanjing to sign the necessary papers & so he's married, for the first time, at 56. Rosa is a divorcee with 2 children, one of whom is at the school, the other living with family in Huaian, a city about 3 hours by bus north of Yangzhou. Though Rosa's English is pretty good, maybe he'll finally have to start learning some Chinese now for the family visits.....

…..it should have been obvious that we didn't have time to work out a new song a few hours before a live show but, having made it to the TV station on the scooter with my guitar we agree to try again next week with some proper rehearsal beforehand. I'm keeping the Jason Mraz song, “I'm yours” up my sleeve as it's so simple it couldn't possibly go wrong … could it? On a later trip of “resurrected” contestants from previous shows I actually get through to the final round on the show before thankfully being seen off buy a girl who sings at the One Bar, (where I got the shirt I am wearing on TV specially made at the manager's expense for a gig he called us to do there!). She was singing & dancing, my electric violin & song weren't quite a match. Still for a hack singer it wasn't too bad an effort.....
(Links below, if you can get them to work).

…..some people walk through the shop to the reception desk of Betty's family's small hostel next to the little room where Betty has her violin lessons. A man who doesn't look Chinese starts asking me, in halting Chinese, what we are doing. It turns out that the Lille symphony orchestra are to play in Yangzhou tonight, (damn it! Wish I'd known), & are just doing a bit of sightseeing on the popular tourist street. He finally agrees to play some Bach on my violin. The woman I assume is their guide is actually a Japanese orchestra member, so she can at least make sense of most of the written Chinese. Still, I walk back down the street with them to help them to order some food. He would like to give me a free ticket but isn't authorised. I'm a little behind on my study schedule too, Still, I'm sure there'd be a few seats available.....

…..early October, still sometimes too humid but the temperature in my room is now around 24C, very nice. I still have the bamboo mat on the bed, sometimes a thin cover, & now on occasions wearing a t-shirt at night. Winter draws on.....

…..the internet still generally kind of works & the proxy that bypasses the Great Wall often stays connected but it's still dodgy, especially with those troublemakers in HK trying to upset harmonious relations in the community with outrageous requests to choose their own leaders, as though the three candidates chosen by the central government are not choice enough. How could they imagine they know better?.....

…..someone sees me at a gig in Yangzhou & likes the music, so I'm asked to play a few songs at a wedding in Taizhou, about an hour by bus east of here. As they do not appear to be short of a few bob the whole extravaganza takes on an epic feel. Peter Jackson & James Cameron could be directing the whole show, which makes Ben Hur look like a school fete. The size of the hall itself, in Taizhou's swankiest hotel, could serve as a hangar for an Airbus 380. Hundreds of invited family, friends & colleagues watch as, from the stage the groom, clutching a bunch of flowers, deafened by the nearby speakers & blinded by the laser light display, tries to focus on the far distant curtain at the other end of the cavernous hall where his bride is silhouetted by a spotlight as she stands behind a white curtain almost the width of the room & does a pretty good impersonation of Whitney Houston singing, “Ahhh-e-aaay, will always love you-oo-eeeh-ooh-oo-oo” before the curtains part & they make the long march toward each other. There's an over amplified MC, singers, a band, dancing girls, more laser lights, huge screens showing the day's preparations in video, oh, & me. Good fun but a bit too much.....

…..retiring to the Pauliner beer house in town afterwards, where the couple have laid on beer & snacks for a select few, it's on a more human scale, chatting with people at a smaller table, listening to a girl singing with one guitar & no laser lights.....

…..I notice a disturbing trend at the wedding where, of the 5 young women at my table, 3 are smoking, (also the singer at the beer house appears to be a chain smoker). It was really uncommon to see any women smoking when I first came to China & thankfully most still don't. Is this another aspect of western “culture”, like junk food, that they could well do without?.....

…..the trip to Taizhou is also a chance to catch up with Miss Piggy & her little Buddha, almost a year old now. It takes a while for him to warm to this strange looking “round-eye” but I finally get him laughing by simply rolling a drink can to him then drumming a few notes on it with a ballpoint pen & I'm happy because, well, when you make a baby laugh, you just have to laugh too. It'll get more complicated from here on, sonny. If the above is what a wedding entails in 2014, just think about what you may have to go through in 25 year's time.....

http://www.yzntv.com/city/folder249/2014/09/2014-09-2084915.html I'm yours

http://www.yzntv.com/city/folder249/2014/09/2014-09-2084917.html Destination

http://www.yzntv.com/city/folder249/2014/09/2014-09-2084919.html Moon Lake

http://www.yzntv.com/city/folder249/2014/09/2014-09-2084921.html The End...

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Photos

Miss Piggy & her son
Fei Fei & Ling Zi En in Taizhou

View of the school from the bridge
2009 to 2014 Then and Now

New Apartments, East Yangzhou
Just one small group of dozens under construction

New construction, East Yangzhou
The whole of eastern China is like this.

Wedding, Taizhou
The happy couple

Wedding, Taizhou
This quick snap does not do justice to the epic...

Grandma & Ling Xi En, Taizhou
Miss Piggy's son with her mother in law

Sunday Lesson, Yangzhou
With my students on Sunday

Financial centre rising
Our school being dwarfed by new constructions

Comments

[sylvuk]

Great Blog
Great to read all your news. Seem to have been a bit out of touch over the past few weeks but I can see you haven't exactly been idle! The clips unfortunately I haven't managed to play yet as they just keep buffering & stick. I shall persevere. Good luck with the exams this week & hope life calms down a bit when they are over. Fancy old George getting hitched! Must be something in the water!!!! xxx