At Shanghai Zoo

While I’m sure I’ll at some point write a blog about my second stay in Chiner (which concludes in a week) I got permission to publish something written by my good friend Jason who taught with me in 2007-2008, currently teaching writing at some Spokane university while doing his master’s there. He’s great and better at writing than anyone in the world. This is the summary/understanding of the China year I wish I could have written. My favourite line:

There seem to be two major categories for English teachers.  Kids looking for an adventure, and, if you’ll pardon my language, fucking freaks.  It makes sense to be a freak abroad where foreignness by its very nature guarantees attention and diminishes the cracks and pathologies obvious to those back home.  I don’t blame, pity, or disavow them in any way.  “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” as Milton wrote, or, more to the point, “Better to be somebody in Shanghai than a yahoo in the Yukon.”

I first came here as the former, am now definitely the latter.

—-

at shanghai zoo

            This was my last month in China. 

            Somehow I had managed to survive the preceding eleven months in Shanghai with my pre-China sensibilities relatively intact.  My tolerance levels for grime, incessant noise, wildly aggressive salesmanship, incomprehensibility and inconvenience had increased, but my core remained whole and undiluted, an indivisible, lazy American thing lying deep in my soul that intemperate, Chinese public school students, a peristently smog-laden sky, and impossibly cramped commuter buses had not been able to compromise, at least not in full.  I had grown accustomed to this impenetrable world while remaining the same indivisible self I had been back home.

            (At times, though, I was not as sure about this as I would have liked, and in those moments America felt like a half-remembered dream….)

            “Longxi Road,” announced the pleasant, female android voice over the train’s speakers.  Shanghai Zoo was the next stop.  The metro system in China is marvelous.  New, clean, it features all the accoutrements necessary for a fully modern system.  On the platforms at most stations you can find electronic bulletin boards announcing train arrivals and, on the ground, injunctions to “Let passengers off before boarding” that will, I assume, be followed at some point in the future.  Above the benches I watched as a little, blinking red dot snaked its way down a green bar representing line 10.  “Shanghai Zoo,” the android voice politely declaimed.  The doors slid open with a solid, hydraulic shuffling sound that I found pleasant for no particular reason.

            I left the train station.  The zoo was nearby, a five minute walk if that.  The sky was overcast, the July air humid as always, an immense, invisible comforter that smothered the entire city and at times made life outdoors impossible.  There is something antithetical to human striving about never being dry.  Nevertheless, I was in high spirits, buoyant almost, as seemed necessary for survival in such wet weather.  After eleven months I was going on a date with a Chinese girl.

            She said her name was Rachel.  Like virtually all Chinese who interacted regularly with foreigners she had taken an English name and used it exclusively in our conversations.  I never learned her Chinese name, her real name, the one her friends and family called her by.  To my present embarrassment I realize that I had not ever bothered to ask.  It was something I took for granted, the Anglicized monikers, classroom after classroom with Chinese students who went by Cathy, or Mike, or Peter, or Jenny or Jacob.  There were the occasional amusing outliers, a five year old I tutored whose parents had chosen the prestigious name ‘Whiskey’ for him, a school coordinator I worked with who went by ‘Smart.’  My own father, a retired Air Force colonel and no friend to Chinese communism, has a namesake, a first-grader named ‘Scott’ who I had the honor of naming at the beginning of the school year.  He was an awful student.

            Rachel and I had met the August previous soon after I arrived in Shanghai.

            “My name is Rachel!” she cheerfully disclosed at the BSK office.

            “Nice to meet you,” I said.

            “Are you familiar with the show Friends?”  I had a feeling that the forthcoming explanation had been well rehearsed.

            “Yes I am,” I replied. 

            To be honest I am only familiar with Friends in passing.  I’m a Seinfeld man.

            “Do you know the character Rachel?” she asked.

            “Jennifer Aniston’s character?”

            “Yes!  That’s who I’m named after.”

            I believe Jennifer Aniston would have been pleased to know this.  Rachel was one of the few employees at BSK, the English school I worked for, who could by god get things done.  Not that the other coordinators were willingly obtuse, not in all cases at least, rather, the language barrier at times was insurmountable.

            I might, for example, ring the office and say, “I need to call in sick.”

            “Hello?”

            “Hello.  I need to call in sick today.” 

            Teachers, self included, were always calling in sick.  Work was an enormous inconvenience.

            “Hello?”

            “Sick!  I’m calling in sick!”

            “….”

            “….”

            “Hello!”

            Rachel, conversely, was always reliable, her English excellent, and her manners impeccable.  She had an affinity for clothes with Disney characters, a not uncommon sartorial predilection throughout Asia.  Whether the adults didn’t realize that t-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were largely limited to children’s fashion in the west or they were too remote to care was never clear to me.  Adults of all ages could participate in the Magic Kingdom’s fashion offerings and I almost envied them the freedom to wear whatever they wanted.  Eventually, I suppose, China will become sophisticated enough for western irony as well, and then the herd will have its way with ‘childish’ vestments, and anarchy will be channeled into narrower outlets.  [As an aside, rabbits are considered good luck in China.  This has led to Playboy brand clothing—with its famous bunny silhouette—being among the bootlegged items in high demand.  There is no sensation quite like the admixture of amusement and alarm that comes from seeing a seven-year-old swathed in a black and white Playboy velvet tracksuit.]

            Rachel took to me almost immediately.  I say this with the common pride that any man admits to when recalling a female admirer. I would like to claim that it was my effervescent charm, sterling wit, or exotic good looks that ensnared her in my seductive web when, like most men of common pride in matters of love, I have to admit that it was all a bit sudden and mysterious.  Maybe it was my big American nose.  While abroad it took me a long time to accept the exclamation “Your nose is so tall!” as a compliment.

            She admitted to her infatuation during a party at the apartment I was renting with two other teachers, Derreck and Katie.  This was close to a month after my arrival in Shanghai.  All the teachers were riding the natural high that comes with being whirled halfway around the earth.  We were dizzy with excitement and could not imagine that the inevitable irritation and depression the veteran teachers had warned us about would ever happen.

            “You’ll go up and down, up and down,” Mark, a Canadian alcoholic had told me.  “You’ll be happy happy happy for the first months, and then you’ll sink all the way down.  Then your mood will pick up and you’ll be happy happy happy, and then you’ll sink again.  It keeps going up and down, up and down, until it levels out in the middle.”  I met my share of Marks while traveling and working abroad.  They all had the same bloodshot eyes and maladaptive social repertoires.  There seem to be two major categories for English teachers.  Kids looking for an adventure, and, if you’ll pardon my language, fucking freaks.  It makes sense to be a freak abroad where foreignness by its very nature guarantees attention and diminishes the cracks and pathologies obvious to those back home.  I don’t blame, pity, or disavow them in any way.  “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” as Milton wrote, or, more to the point, “Better to be somebody in Shanghai than a yahoo in the Yukon.”

            A chance moment during the party happened to find me alone with Rachel in Derreck’s bedroom.  She, lightly inebriated, myself, dumbfounded at my good fortune.  If I recall correctly, and it behooves me not to in this instance, she was dressed appropriately for an informal house party.  In my mind’s eye I’ve placed her in a black skirt that terminates just above the knee and a white blouse that adheres to the skin in all the right locations.  Nary a Goofy or a Mickey to be found.  She wasn’t wearing her glasses either, a lustreless accessory that always lent her an accountant’s mien, and she’d set her wavy hair free to fall lightly on her shoulders.

            “I really like you!” she said with a charming slur marking her accented words.

            “Thanks,” my classy, dim-witted reply.

            “You’re soooooo cute!” she said.

            I had no response immediately available since I was still, at this point in my life, hopelessly unnerved by female attention.  What was the proper tactic?  The cool brush off, a shoulder shrug that indicated this wasn’t the first time today I’d had those words offered to me?  A counter-compliment?  Something about her earrings?  I’d read in a magazine that women love having their earrings complimented.  Or, a bold, atavistic voice spoke from deep within my loins, why don’t you shut up and kiss her already?  The moment was perfect.  Her face framed in soft, orangc, incandescent light, was meeting head on my desire for female contact and wish to fulfill her sexy foreigner fantasies.  She leaned in, her eyes closed. 

            Then again, my rational brain observed, those earrings were just begging to be complimented. 

            The dilemma was rendered moot.  The door burst open and Chris Richie appeared.  He was a one-time member of some fraternity and had the tattoo to prove it.  Nice enough guy.  His eyes took in the tableau before narrowing into an amused and knowing stare.  He called us into the living room.

            “Come on,” he said.  “We’re taking pictures.”

            Pictures, the perfect substitute for absent memories.  I looked at Rachel, gave her the best what-are-you-gonna-

The photo in question that was being taken. Chris Richie front right in white, Jason hidden behind him.

do-grin I could manage and followed her out into the living room.  There were at least twenty people milling about and I could feel their inquisitive stares, or at least I imagined them with enough intensity for there to be no difference.  What were they doing in that bedroom?  What’s going on between those two?  I imagined they could see the Robert Plant-sized bulge in my jeans and felt exhilarating shame.  I smiled for the cameras that flashed, encoding me on SD cards at 8 megapixels a pop, betraying everything, my tall nose, wrinkled Aeropostale shirt that was slowly being bleached vomit-orange by Shanghai’s washing machines, my ill-fitting jeans, everything, including the pride and embarrassment I felt at having (maybe) been the center of attention.  The cameras made simulated motor noises to let everyone know when the pictures were being taken.  I’ve never seen them.  They’re probably on Facebook.

            Rachel left almost immediately afterward leaving me nonplussed.  What abour romance’s first, sweet buds?  Or, to put it in plainer terms, where was my kissy-face?        The apartment deflated suddenly as the group left en masse.  The apartment’s reality, which had only recently been recessed by human frivolity and the latitude that accompanies it, came to the forefront.  The kitchen and living room were filled with dirty dishes and empty Tsingtao beer bottles.  There were high heel mark indentations in the parquet.  Would the money to repair it be taken from our security deposit?  The less said about the bathroom the better.  I stumbled to my room, the smallest in the house, for which I paid less rent than my roommates, and sat on the bed in an exhausted, hazy stupor.  On the wall above my bed was a framed picture.  I lived in that small space for over ten months and to my amazement I cannot recall what image the picture held.  It’s gone.  Nothing.  Piled on the small dresser to the left of my bed were the books I had lugged over the oceans.  My Herodotus, Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Virginia Woolf.  Ever the insufferable intellectual.

            I passed out at some point.    

            The next morning I felt terrible.

*          *          *

            We had monthly meetings for BSK.  I looked for Rachel during them.  They took place behind a restaurant with the same name.  “That’s odd,” I remarked to Derreck during an initial visit to BSK’s headquarters. 

            “What’s that?” he said.

            “I know the school is back there, but this restaurant has the same name.”

            “Oh yeah, BSK, how about that.”

            “It’s a little weird, don’t you think?”

            “Yeah, it is weird.”

            “Pretty weird.”

            “Yeah, pretty weird.”

            “Yeah.”

            I still think it’s weird.  If I could have articulated the question in a manner that would have allowed for back and forth communication to actually occur, I would have asked a Chinese BSK coordinator about it.  “Did you know there’s a restaurant out front that has the same name as our school?  Is it pretty weird to you?”  Which came first continues to puzzle me to this day, the restaurant or the school?  The chicken or the egg is a cakewalk by comparison.  Was the restaurant there to provide additional income for the school?  Was this a money laundering operation for the Triads?  Did an enterprising chef have a sudden epiphany and decide that while dim sum was amusing and all, life was better spent corralling young, itinerant foreigners and passing them off as qualified English instructors? 

            In case you were wondering, the cuisine served at BSK restaurant was much like the lessons served by its school.  Meh.

Unrelated.

            Secret Triad base or not, the teachers had duties to fulfill and, as I mentioned, meetings to attend.  The teaching center for BSK, behind the BSK restaurant, was situated in an average-sized, three-story building, meaning it was larger than a flower shop but smaller than a Super Walmart.  The first floor had two large rooms that served as meeting areas and, so we were told, would be used as a space for true to life teaching simulations that are still waiting to happen.  The second floor was BSK’s nerve center, where twenty to thirty Chinese coordinators, our “colleagues” as we were asked to refer to them, sat at computer monitors and tirelessly checked their personal emails while ignoring all my calls.  There was something slightly awe-inspiring at seeing that many coordinators, I mean colleagues, serving an almost perfectly analogous number of teachers.

            “If this was America,” said Derreck, “you would have a secretary and maybe four or five people, if that, to work with the teachers.”

            “Is that a fact?” I replied.

            “Think about it.  This operation is costing way too much.  They could get by with a lot less people don’t you think?”

            I nodded as seriously as I could which is more difficult than it sounds.  Derreck had been a teacher at a prestigious public high school in New England for years.  I had recently completed six months’ hard labor at Hollywood Video.  I deferred to his opinion in this matter.

            BSK’s nerve center operated, like many Chinese businesses, as a kind of hive that appeared to be missing a queen bee to call the shots, a unkempt Tron world without Master Control.  Never, outside of the American Department of Motor Vehicles, have so many people been called to do so many things so inefficiently.  I’ll give a brief example.             Purchasing and activating my cell phone, which Smart was kind enough to assist me in doing, took over three hours.  In the cramped store, where the walls were filled from ceiling to floor with red, inscrutable Chinese text on white paper, and tesselated, page-sized flyers, orange and green, crafted and affixed with a precision that would have driven Escher mad, at least two employees were available per customer.  This meant one employee did all the talking with Smart about different cell phones and payment options, while the second employee nodded helpfully and got paid the same amount as the first.  After choosing our cell phones—we went with the cheapest—Derreck and I were directed to take a slip to the cashier who was at the store’s far end.  After paying the cashier we brought back our receipts to the cell phone vendors who gave us our phones.  After deciding on a pay-as-you-go plan Derreck and I were given another slip by the cell phone vendors to take to the cashier who gave us receipts to give back to the cell phone vendors who activated our phones.  I’ve made the process sound too simple.  I wish I could better express the length, tedium, and tears the process involved.  Alas!  Even my powers of digression have their limits.  If we had decided to buy accessories we would probably be there today, shuffling slips and receipts back and forth in an endless, Kafkaesque regression.

            Tony, a Chinese friend, explained it me once.

            “There are many people in China,” he said.

            “OK,” I said.

            “They all need jobs.”

            “I see.”

            That’s it.

            Moving along to BSK’s third floor we discover a few dorm rooms for incoming teachers and, I imagine, any unfortunate English students who weren’t savvy enough to run when they saw what the BSK experience entailed.

            Chinese Mom: Ting!  Why are you home?

            Ting: Mama!  The school was a restaurant!

            Chinese Mom: (confused)

            The monthly meetings at BSK took place in the large mock classrooms on the first floor.  Whenever we had them I attempted to get Rachel’s attention as she whirled around the room with characteristic efficiency, dispensing teaching assignments, passing out vital materials, getting papers signed and others stamped, all that plus contending with my exuberant waves and silently mouthed “Hey Rachel”s.  She would grant me a “Hey Jason,” as she swept by with her unsexy librarian glasses perched perfectly on her nose, oversized Donald Duck t-shirt billowing after. 

            The meetings had initially come across as a good idea.

            “We will be sharing the idea and helping you make the activity,” assured Helia during a typical meeting.  She was a friendly middle-aged Chinese woman, and also, I believe, the only Chinese employee at the school who was a licensed teacher.  Wonderful!  I would love nothing more than to share the idea and make the activity, I thought to myself.

Unrelated.

            We never did share the idea or make the activity.  After the the first month the meetings became albatrossesque in their inconvenience.  Having to attend a meeting meant that for myself and many other teachers we would be forced to travel after a long, deathly grind in our classes to BSK HQ in Puxi (pronouced, as best I can render it, “pooh-she”).  Puxi is Shanghai’s eastern district, and for those teachers working in Pudong, the western district, attending the meeting meant adding another two hours to the daily commute.  Failure to attend meant being fined five hundred yuan—just over seventy U.S. dollars.  If this seems like an insubstantial sum to you then you’ve never been to a developing nation or graduate school.  For that amount you could buy one hundred bootlegged DVDs available on street corners and in alleys around the city, or buy sixty-two rice, noodle, potato, and beef bowls from the friendly neighborhood Muslim restaurant.  It was a sum that rode the fine line between inconvenience and necessity.  There were teachers who decided not to attend, but I’ve never been able to forego a bootlegged DVD or rice noodle, potato, and beef bowl.  Whenever Katie my roommate said, “Let’s go get Muslim food,” I had the yuan on hand, and if that meant attending a crummy meeting in a weird building halfway across Shanghai then the devil would have his due. A man needs to draw the line somewhere.  Maybe I would pick up a bootlegged copy of Bloodsport on the way….

            As the year went on the meetings devolved into strange pantomimes in which Helia and her helpers would lovingly ask that we share our ideas for in-class activities and for fostering stronger bonds between English teachers, students, and schools.  These appeals took place while the teachers, self-included, imagined our classrooms and experienced gross cognitive dissonance.  I can close my eyes now and see my fifth-grade class at Zhangjiang High Technology Park Elementary School—actual name!—in its typical state, which is to say roiling in complete and utter pandemonium.  At this point I ask my audience for sympathy, at least a small amount, as I relate that we poor, humble foreigners had been deceived by myths and legends surrounding the communist educational apparatus.  During my one-week training course, intensive as it was useless, at a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course in Provo, Utah, I had been assured by my instructor that:

            “Chinese students are disciplined.  You’ll be amazed when you see the differences between their schools and our schools.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked.

            “You’ve been a teacher in American public schools, right?”

            “Yes, I was a sub.”

            “You’ve had students act up before, right?”

            “I have.”

            “In China, if a student is acting up all you have to do is give one of these.”

            Upon saying this she fixed me with a hard glare.  On a hard glare scale of Betty Boop to Clint Eastwood it was maybe, maybe a Roger Moore.

            “That’s all it takes,” she continued.  “After you do that you’ll see the student straighten up and fold his arms.  Like this.”  She held out both arms parallel to her body, hands flat, palms facing down.  She placed her right palm on her left forearm.

            “That’s how they cross their arms in China.  It demonstrates respect.”

            I recalled a Davy Crockett story from my youth.  According to legend the frontiersman’s hard glare was powerful enough to freeze animals in place and cause their hearts to burst.  He looked, they died.  Badass.  In the story—as I remember it—Davy Crockett went tramping through the countryside inducing massive coronary attacks in small woodland creatures with his steely gaze.  No squirrel, no rabbit, no deer, bear, or bison could walk before him without soon having arterial blood foaming from its nostrils.  One night, in the story—as I remember it—Davy came across a possum holding close to a tree branch.  He fixed it with his righteous, mighty, murderous eyes.  There was no effect!  By rights the critter should have been convulsing on the ground, its soul making its way to the Rainbow Bridge, but instead it remained attached to its branch.  The infuriated Davy redoubled his efforts and for the next eight hours did stare mightily at the indomitable possum.  Those hours passed slowly, night finally yielding to day with the battle not concluded.  Only with the coming sun did Davy discover that the possum was not a possum at all.  A hard knot in the tree that was shaped like a possum had fooled our hero.  Davy laughed to high heaven when he saw on closer inspection that the knot he had been staring at all night had been transformed into petrified wood!  He continued his merry, merciless way through the trees, assassinating furry critters, until at last he reached the Alamo where he discovered that heavy artillery is immune to even the evilest evil eye. 

            The end.

            This is the power I imagined I would possess.  Whenever an unwary first-grader refused to share a toy I would give them the look.  Whenever an unthinking high schooler was caught chewing gum—or whatever they chew in China, betel?—I would give him the look.  While it wasn’t as keen or as terrifying as seeing blood fountain from a raccoon’s ears, I was happy to think about the look.  I rehearsed it in my head.  I stalked China’s schools, giving the look wherever it was needed.  I stalked China’s cities.  From the corner noodle shop to the Party Congress, no one would be spared my withering, authoritative gaze.  What Nixon had started I would consummate.  World peace was at last within humanity’s grasp.  All it would take was…the look!

            Political applications aside, I did feel energized about the work I would be doing overseas.  As any teacher can attest, classroom management is an important issue and I was beside myself with joy that it would be a non-issue in Shanghai.  That meant I could get straight down to the business that every competent teacher is engaged in, filling young minds with useful information that will carry them to success and glory forever and ever and ever.  They were already fixed in my mind, my perfect, shiny, robot students, repeating as one unstoppable unit the vocabulary words I taught them with hardly an accent to be discerned.  “What color is the sky?” I would ask.  “Blue!” they would chant together, and then we would share a healthy laugh as one, America and China blissfully united through education’s towering majesty.

            Imagine then my shock and surprise, my bewilderment, my cognitive dissonance when I discovered that elementary and middle school students in China are akin to American elementary and middle school students, which is to say they’re all horrible, ill-disciplined monsters that are begging, begging me to bring back corporal punishment.  Or, returning to the meeting, as Samuel put it:

            “Helia, the little shits won’t keep their mouths shut.”

            Samuel was a large man.  He had a penchant for plain black t-shirts and slicking his straight hair back into a thick ponytail.  If a film script called for a ‘stereotypical night club bouncer’ who ‘engages in fisticuffs with the protagonist’ Samuel would fit the role to a stocky T.  I took some pleasure in knowing that this hulking man was having a Kindergarten Cop moment since it let my ectomorphic body frame off the hook.  Thinking upon it further, I suppose that when you’re in elementary school every single adult you come across is a giant and even a solid foot of difference in height doesn’t matter all that much.

            “Have you tried the point system?” Helia responded.

            Helia, with her large lenses in their sensible, circular frames, her tidy hairdo crowning a slight body and mousey face was asking us to maintain discipline through the point system.  Certain body postures and nonverbal expressions may be culturally limited, but I’m reasonably certain that the eye-rolling and collective groaning gave a clear and convincing message.  She looked confused.

Unrelated.

            Helia’s solution to any in-class infraction, minor or grievous, was to make recourse to the point system.  The point system is exactly as it sounds.  A classroom is divided into three or four teams.  Good behavior—answering questions, finishing an assignment, keeping your damn mouth shut while teacher is talking, etc—is rewarded with points, while bad behavior—screaming, spitting, gesticulating stupidly, etc—would be met with erased points.  The system was foolproof, except for two things:

            a) There was nothing to reward the students with.

            b) There was nothing to punish the students with.

            I mean this in the absolute sense.  The points go up and down for the teams, then class ends, and what follows for the winners and losers?  For the first-graders, sure, you could bribe them with stamps and stickers for being the winning team, for having the most points when the bell sounds.  The fifth-graders were about as interested in stickers as they were in Roth IRAs.  They also knew, unlike the first-graders who could be controlled at least temporarily with imaginary threats, that the foreigners ain’t gonna do nothin’.  After dealing with BSK teachers for years the older students knew that we happy-go-lucky American dopes were complete and utter pantywaists compared to their actually-terrifying Chinese teachers.

            “The carrot and the stick,” Ryan said to Helia, picking up where Samuel, broad shoulders sunken in defeat, had left off. 

            “Here’s the carrot,” Ryan continued.  He held up a pack of Ultraman stickers for everyone to admire.  They were very nice Ultraman stickers.  Sparkly.

            “Now where’s the stick?” he asked.

            “What does this mean?” Helia responded.

            Ryan was silent for a moment as he regrouped his thoughts.

            “OK.  We give them the stickers if they’re good, right?”  He had retreated from idiom and was now attempting an assault based strictly on reason.

            “That is correct,” Helia replied.

            “What do we punish them with if they’re bad?” asked Ryan.

            A silence descended over the room.  We were curious, the ones who had rooms that gave way to intractable anarchy, who went into class with a silent countdown running down the minutes before utter dissolution rendered instruction impossible.  How do you tame fifty Chinese eight-year-olds for a solid hour without any outside support?  I wanted to know.

            “Have you tried taking away points?” Helia finally responded.

            Again with the eye-rolling and the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the sackcloth and ashes.  Then, could I complain really?  What had I been expecting?  Helia reaches beneath the podium and removes a baseball bat with rusty nails hammered into it.

            “What you are wanting to do with your students is have the bad student come to the front.  The one who make the noise.  Then you give him like this—”

            Helia swung the baseball bat through the air at approximately the level of a twelve-year-old’s head.  She generated a force and intensity with her thin arms that belied their appearance.  I could hear a solid whooosh! as the bat plowed through the air.

            “Then after he is on the floor please to keep going.”

            She followed this by drawing the bat straight over her head and bringing it down in devastating two-handed strikes that terminated inches above the floor.

            “I think after the student is die you will not have the trouble any longer.”

            I think that would have satisfied Ryan.  It certainly would have satisfied me.  Not, of course, that I would ever use such an extreme measure, instead I would take comfort in knowing that it remained open as a possibility.  Well, this is pretty bad, I would think to myself as I mumbled my way through a grammar lesson in a room filled with recalcitrant students.  But if it gets worse there’s always the baseball bat with the rusty nails sticking out of it.  I would stroke the chipped wood and run my fingers over the orange, oxidized nails while the classroom went to pieces, secure and empowered by the knowledge that at least the final decision would be mine.

            Once the meetings had ended to heads shaking in unison and assertions that “these things are such bullshit” and the like we would scurry our separate ways to eat spicy lamb and cartilage skewers cooked by sidewalk vendors, get drunk at an American-friendly bar like Blue Frog or Window’s Scoreboard, sing karaoke and decline to purchase women at KTV bars, smoke dama, the poisonous, powdery hash the Muslims sold along Nanjing Road, take a motorcycle taxi around the city for the sheer stupid hell of it or find pleasure and diversion in any of the million other hypnotizing, neon-lit spectacles that Shanghai had to offer. 

            I was after something else entirely.

            “Hey Rachel!”

            I made it a point to touch base with her once she had finished her numerous tasks.  The meetings were generally over around 9 p.m.  At that point we were both exhausted from our full days, although her day probably did not end when mine did.  There was always more paperwork to be filed, schedules to be arranged, teachers to accomodate.

            “Hey Jason.”

            Her hair was pulled back.  In the fluorescent light I could detect flyaways, stray hairs that refused to stay settled.  The party and her drunken affection had been two months ago, and could have been a lifetime away for all the warmth she had demonstrated since then.  Not that I could understand why with my limited male capacity for social understanding.  It made no sense at all.  I texted her constantly and told her how much I really, really, no really, liked her, and it was to no avail.  She retired in almost direct proportion to my pursuit’s aggression and I was blind to the mating dance, that most ironic and agonizing of human pursuits.  I had no practical skills in the matter.  My upbringing in a conservative religion had prepared me to do nothing with a woman save marry a righteous one and pray babies into her womb.

            Which is why I decided to go native.

            “Say Rachel,” I said.

            “Yes?”

            “How do you say “like” in Chinese?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Like if you liked somebody,” I said, “or something,” I was quick to add.

            “The word in Chinese is ‘xihuan.’”

            “So how would you say you liked somebody?”  Casanova could have taken notes.

            “Wo hen xihuan ni.”

            My memory isn’t acute enough to remember her exact facial expression while she was saying this.  All the same, since it is the author’s prerogative to reconstruct reality according to an internal, poetic exhortation I’ll amend the last dialogue line to the following:

            “Wo hen xihuan ni,” she said, sighing, while her eyes rolled back into her skull.

            “Wo hen xihuan ni,” I repeated.

            “Yes.  This is a good pronunciation.”

            “How would you say “love” in Chinese?” I asked next. 

            Moving in for the kill!  At this point in time, nearly four years removed from the event, I find my fingers less than enthusiastic about hammering out these enfeebling moments.  Move on to the public spitting or questionable cuisine or funny teaching anecdotes and spare me! exclaims the ego.  Alack!  These are exhibitionist times, I can do no other than wallow in my aesthetic woe.

            “Ai.”

            “Ai?”

            “Yes, but this is…a very strong word.  You do not use this regularly when talking to a person.  Do you understand?”

            “I think so.”

            I didn’t understand.  Did she want me to say that I loved her?  Right now?  In the teacher training room?  While we were both so poorly dressed?

            Then she breezed away again, leaving me by myself.  I ran to catch up with Katie at the bus stop on Tanggu Lu.  Leaving the school, I passed through the narrow aperture that separated the BSK restaurant from a neighboring drug store.  The street outside opened into a massive roundabout.  Cars blurred around the rotary, their tail lights glowing with the pale intensity of a soporous demon’s eyes.  Above rose Shanghai dressed in meretricious green and blue neon, jagged spires festooned by brittle white light, and saucer shaped hotels erupted from the city’s fecund surface and jostled for growing room.  I hurried on, suddenly frightened that I would miss my bus, miss Katie, and become lost in this infinite metal, concrete, and bamboo space that expanded outward the closer I came to its center.

            Already forming in my mind, an unconscious comprehending that would later ensnare me like a constricting, invisible serpent, was the idea that the little understanding we outsiders had been granted was all we deserved.  Beneath my smug, self-satisfied American veneer was a fear predicated on my inability to comprehend and thereby control my environment.  “This is a world that will not share its secrets with you,” they whispered, the skyscrapers, half-burned out buildings populated by the derelict, the bored, intimidating prostitutes in pink-lit store front windows, the migrant workers in blue coveralls who avoided eye contact with the locals, the mahjong parlors filled with drunk businessmen, the faux-Rolex salesmen, and the numberless beggars in dispositions of wide-ranging agony.  No, this world remained hidden, the world where children sat quietly in their seats, where the words made sense, point systems prevailed, and two employees per customer was the norm.  There would be no access no matter how loudly I cried for it to fit my standards, a fixed standard I had carried with me over the Pacific, outracing the sun to the horizon, a selfish, imperialist standard encoded in my synapses that would not allow me to experience the city-in-itself.

            A low guard rail made of long, circular steel pipes separated the sidewalk from the curving street.  On it sat middle-aged Chinese men in ribbed white tank tops stained with grime.  They watched me as I swept by, I could feel their eyes upon me, eyes staring from wizened faces that had seen impossible things in the past fifty years. 

            Then and now I could not possibly imagine what they were thinking.