Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

My cactus is dead

Or at least dying. I bought it a few months back to decorate my apartment. It's only a few inches tall and along with its pot, can be carried in the palm of your hand. Once, it had a fat yellow bulb on top, loaded with spines. Now I look and I see that the nub has shriveled and deflated into a green lesion hanging off the cactus.

The untimely death of my cactus has likely been due to the cold temperatures. One major drawback to my apartment is how there's no central heating in it. Instead I rely on two air conditioners, one in my study and one in my bedroom, to keep me warm. Often times I cover myself in a blanket or walk around in my winter jacket rather than waste the electricity.

But today has been rough. Even now as I type my feet are numb.

I woke up this morning to 13 degree weather, the coldest day thus far in Xi'an. The air conditioners had been off all night. I shivered like an icicle as I put on my clothes. At times, my breath became fog. And everywhere I go in my apartment I feel like I'm stepping on ice. I have a habit of walking in my socks. Unfortunately my apartment floors are all tile and thus absorb cold quite nicely; I miss carpet.

Oh well. My electric bill will certainly go up these next few weeks.

My apartment

My apartment building is new. It also happens to be built on a graveyard.

I learned this from my neighbor, who was heard this from a teacher at the University. Apparently much of the local area used to a be a site for ancient burials. So when construction is ever done, they often find old artifacts and such from past dynasties.

I have to say I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. But the culprit is usually from the noise outside. (I report no feudal poltergeists visiting upon me yet.) I often hear cars beeping their horns, buses shrieking their brakes, construction jackhammering the concrete, and so on; every noon I also hear some patrotic music played on some speaker down below, the blaring of a Chinese choir whispering up to my apartment. But out of all the sounds though, maybe the most surprising are the fireworks, the crackle or siren clatter of them, echoing throughout the street on a seemingly daily basis.

Chinese people really do love fireworks, exploding them for whatever joyous occassion, usually weddings and holidays. From my apartment's 21st floor, however, the fireworks really sound more like a building crumbling to the ground. When fall festival came around, I woke up thinking the city was demolitioning an entire neighborhood.

There are some other small problems with my apartment.

When I first moved in, I realized my two air conditions weren't working. One had been installed in my study, the other in my bedroom. They hang up near the corner of their ceilings like plastic vents of sorts. But for some reason they would not turn on. Maybe the air conditioners were broken I thought.

Turns out the they were fine. Rather the problem was the electrical outlets I had them connected to. For some reason, when they were finishing my apartment, the workers forgot to install electrical wiring in the outlets. So basically I had these plastic sockets in the wall, with no purpose at all. The school had workers fix it in about a day, and the air conditioners were finally up in running.

Another problem has been the moisture in my apartment. My bedroom wall has a long window that faces to the outside. About every other day, condensation will fog up the glass. But with no where else to go, the water eventually drips down and onto the wall beneath. This ruins the paint. Now I have ripples and streaks of charcoal black going down the surface. I open the windows and wipe the condensation off them, but its a hassle and sometimes I just don't feel like doing it, especially now the weather has been cold.

Recently though, the school has tried to fix probably the biggest problem. My bathroom has been leaking.

Whenever I take a shower, water falls to the tile floor. But overtime, this water has seeped beneath through the tile floor and into the nearby surroundings. Already its caused some crumbling to one of the walls nearby. Two of my neighbors, who live on the same floor, have the same problem.

The school came up with a solution. They'd put glue on the crevices between the tiles on the bathroom floor, preventing any further water leakages. That sounded good. Until I saw the glue.

The workers came in on Tuesday morning. With them they carried a slab of wood. On the wood was smeared a thick glob of this glue. For maybe an hour they pasted about an inch and half of it, along the crevices of the bathroom by using metal scrappers.

I watched a little while as they did it. The glue had a toxic stench like most construction materials do, but what put me off the most was how it looked in the end. It was ugly. Like someone had used tattered masking tape to cover all the tile lines on the bathroom. Better than having it leak, I guess.

"It takes 24 hours to dry," One of the school administrators overseeing the repair job told me.

I gave it 36 hours just to make sure. So for two days I didn't take a shower, instead just washing my hair from the cold faucet in my kitchen sink. When having to go, I tip-toed across the bathroom, trying not to disturb the still drying glue.

Finally, when 36 hours had passed, I decided to use it, not caring where I stepped. Sonuvabitch.

The glue did not dry. I got some on my socks, and chunks of it on my bathroom slippers. Clearly it was not dry. But really I didn't care, I needed to take a shower.

I expected that perhaps the next day it would be dry. I was wrong. Along with all the other days I thought it would finally be dry.

I eventually learned that the glue would take 24 hours to dry on a hot and sunny day. If in a cold and secluded area, the glue would dry in a week.

A week later, parts of the glue had been stripped off from my bathroom floor. And still, small sections of the glue are still not dry. Whenever I step in it, I hear the sound of my bathroom slippers sticking on the floor's surface wherever I go.

My neighbors have had a harder time with the glue. One entered the bathroom without slippers, getting glue on his bare feet. Another had to wipe it off her friend's wheelchair.

I talked about this with my neighbor and she said it just goes to show how Chinese people are often more concerned about the short-term rather than the long-term. They want to build the apartment now and sell as many units as they can, rather than try and ensure upkeep over time. You can look around the older apartments and see, she said. I had noticed. In Xi'an, there seem to be only new apartments and old apartments, nothing really in the middle. When it comes to the old apartments, they look generally look decades old, dirtied and stained by soot, the metal grating on the windows rusted.

When you've lived in a society where food wasn't always avaliable, people become only concerned with what they have now, she explained. Looking to the future is more of luxuary. And even as China is propspering, there still is that mentality, especially among the older generations.

Very interesting I thought. Goes to explain why people in Xi'an hardly ever wait in line for anything. I remember trying to buy tickets for a tourist attraction, when four different people just cut in front of me, even as waited near the front of the ticket booth.

My neighbor added that in her experience, often times Chinese people will try to also come up with cheap, but effective ways to fix things. Sometimes it works brilliantly she said. Sometimes it doesn't, hence my bathroom floor.

The school plans to try and re-do the bathroom job over this winter break. I hope I'm traveling off somewhere when that happens. And even though my apartment does have problems, none of them are a real big deal to me. But if I actually owned this apartment I would be pretty upset.

Day after Thanksgiving

I guess I had a belated Thanksgiving dinner.

The day after the holiday I bumped into a few students at the school, who asked me to play basketball with them. After we played I took them out to dinner as my treat. We ended up playing this memory game, where everyone has to count off from 1 to 15. On a certain number you have to do a gesture, like clap or say a certain word. If you messed up you had to eat from a plate of tofu we had left over. I must of had ten pieces from the dish but it was hilarious. My Chinese students are quite good when it comes to playing dinner games.

I enjoy getting to know my students, but its often hard to find things to talk about. Since I'm their teacher, I try and force myself to only use English when speaking with them. Our conversations, thus, often feel like they're stuck in the realm of the elementary, hardly ever getting beyond simple questions and responses. Students, who I'm sure can give me entire speeches on their backstory, instead give me a "Yes" or a headnod, sometimes before giving a short pause. Answering back also requires a bit of mental work on the part of the students, making me feel like I'm back in the classroom.

Though I'm trying to teach them English, it recently occurred to me how much of a barrier it can be.

Yesterday I was with a student trying to help her prepare for a test. She's very nice. But up until that day my impression of her was that she was often nervous, unsure of herself, and shy. But when I spoke to her in Chinese I felt I was with a completely different person. She seemed much more confident, her speech straight-forward and clear, no longer riddled with small accents and errors like her English speech.

It was also strange how when I spoke with her in English, she seemed more curious, perplexed at, times and more interested in what I was saying. But then when I spoke to her in Chinese, she seemed a bit bored; just one other normal conversation to her.

It's interesting how language can make someone into two different people. Sometimes I feel the same way. I have the English side of me, and the Chinese side of me, both created and perhaps limited by the language I'm using at the time. I can be myself when using English, saying accurately whatever I feel. But when using Chinese, I sometimes feel I've become a dumbed-down version of myself.

It's easy to explain yourself in the native tongue when all you want is some noodles or your Internet fixed, or even your own concise backstory. But with Chinese people I'm often asked complex questions like, "Do you like America or China better?" "What do you think of the Taiwan issue?" "What do you think of Barack Obama?"

In English I would give a long elaborate answer to thoroughly explain what I think. But with Chinese, I often find myself scratching my head, trying to remember vocab words, and instead giving a long "um" as part of my answer, hoping whomever I'm talking to can fill in the blanks. "How does one say recession/democracy/unification?" I think. "God, I can't believe I forgot those words."

I suppose I'm just acting like some of my own students. When I can't express myself in Chinese, I'll instead just nod, purse my lips, and give my mind a mental break. It makes me extra quiet.

Being able to come up with the words is one thing. But how I say them is also important too. In English, sometimes my speech is sadly, littered with expletives, especially when I'm with friends. "Crap" "Shit" "Sonuva..." and so on. It's also just a form of sarcasm too. But resorting to Chinese dirty words, not the same. "Wang Ba Dan" "Hun Dan" "Ma De Bi" words I learned from movies and my parents when they were angry. It's funny to say them, but still, not quite same.

Lately at night before I go to sleep I'm finding myself thinking in Chinese now. In my head, I'll rehearse what it is I want to say when faced with a more complicated question. Like silos of Mandarin are spilling all into my head. "I should of said this," I'll think.