Hello, my friends. Or should I say, ni hao wo de peng yo! That’s right, peng yo means friend in Chinese! Yes, like VIVIENNE peng.  Also it’s pronounced “pung.”  VIV WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US??

Anyway.  I’m still in China, which seemed unfortunate yesterday, and maybe even the day before, but today, my fifth to last day at this school whose name I don’t really know, except that its something like qi xi hua something, I have realized I am going to miss these little kids who think I am an authority figure, and who love me so much because they do not understand the mean words I sometimes use in addressing them.

This is Eric on Halloween.  I think he was really confused as to why I’d made him put on a pumpkin costume.

This is my older class.  The girl on the lower right is Pearl.  She’s the runt.

When I first wrote about the school I work at, I mentioned the basic punishment the Chinese teachers use that would get them fired if they worked in America: arm pulling, slapping, crazy nasal Chinese yelling.  But those were the early days!  I have seen these teachers get SO MUCH MORE CREATIVE since then.   I’ve made a list (because why write cohesive paragraphs ever again?) of some of the reprimands and scare tactics the Chinese teachers have used in my presence.

1.  The turtle.  Every classroom at this school has a classroom, a napping room, and a bathroom.  There are two Chinese teachers in each class, and one ayi, which means aunt.  An ayi is any kind of housekeeper, cleaning lady, or nanny, and the classroom ayis clean the classroom, administer lunch and snacks, and put them down for their naps.   They change their pants when they pee themselves too.  As far as I can tell the ayis are either way stricter and meaner than the teachers or way nicer.  They are also always much older.

Anyway, in one of my classes, there is a turtle in the napping room that they keep like  this:

Yeah, I don’t even.  What? Does that even count as a class pet?  Is it a class pet, or something waiting to be eaten?  I have no idea, but the last few times I checked, this turtle was back there, like that.

Anyway, a few times when the kids were getting rowdy and they mistook my shouting at them for further merriment (I mean, how would they know?  Tone obviously doesn’t help because Chinese sounds so angry. I often think Linda and Hannah are getting majorly real with each other but then it turns out they’re just talking about the cost of their sweaters) the ayi has come out of the nap room with this poor specimen, wrangled it out of his little marble bowl, and gone around the room threatening the kids with it.  She holds its head up to their mouths and acts like she’s going to drop it on their heads.  They are understandably really scared because I have no doubt she’d actually do it.  Anyway, the kids fucking hate this turtle.  If it is a class pet, it totally sucks.

2.  Tape.  Once this kid Johnny was talking out of turn (I guess? I didn’t notice) and the teacher that looks like Sailor Moon TAPED HIS MOUTH WITH PACKING TAPE, FROM EAR TO EAR. Like, each end covered one of his ears and connected over his mouth.  It was actually kind of horrifying.  Johnny looked so sad and humiliated.  This didn’t stop me from taking a picture because you can’t make this shit up!  Um, I’m not going to post it here because that would be really creepy I think.  But if you want to see ask me when I get back to America. 

Oh, a few minutes later she also taped this kids hands together with the packing tape.  I also took a picture of that.  And earlier that day she blindfolded this kid I call Zoolander and made him stand in the corner for the whole class.  Naturally I also took a picture of poor blindfolded Zoolander but I’m putting here a different picture of him on a better day:

3.  Glue.  Hannah, the worst TA in the world, does this thing when the shouting and excitement of the children is distracting her from putting on fake eyelashes (she uses her iPhone as a mirror).  She gets a glue stick and drags an unlucky kid over to her chair, where she threatens to gluestick his or her mouth shut.  Then she and the kid get into a physical squabble as she acts like she’s actually going to do it.  Would she actually do it?  HAS she?  I’m not sure but she definitely moves like she could.  Also, the worst part is that when it’s time to pull out the glue trick she makes her class pet, this little girl called Fiona, go and get it for her.  

4.  Syringe.  Okay, this only happened once and I’m not sure what it was all about.  But the ayi in one class came out of the nap room with a loaded syringe and was kind of going around holding it up to each kid, turtle-style.  But was it even meant to scare them into being good?  They did seem scared, but this ayi is generally really nice.  Maybe she was just saying, “hey, whose syringe is this?”

5.  Banishment.  Sometimes I’ll be teaching, going along, doing my thing, when suddenly a hand will open the door, thrust a screaming child inside, and close the door.  This child continues to scream in the corner.  Sometimes a teacher goes over to say something to it, and sometimes everyone ignores it.  The child is forced to stay in this new world for some time, until his teacher comes back and takes him to his home classroom.

1. The pens here are amazing.  Why in America do we have to go through life paying DOLLARS for shitty, dull pens when we could be paying YUAN aka CENTS for the best pens ever.  The tips are usually smaller than 0.5 rather than larger like they are in America, which means they are amazingly precise and the ink is always very smooth.  Furthermore they are always cute baby colors and decorated with cartoon characters and urge you to “live happy life love” or “smile happy bunny love.”

2. Traffic.  I’ve already been over this but it’s out of control.  I got a bike so now I’ve experienced what goes on inside the grind.  You are allowed to ride MORTORCYLES on the SIDEWALKS here.  Meanwhile, people often stroll casually in the middle of the road.  I have been hit (lightly, it must be said) by both a bicycle and a CAR while walking on the sidewalk—wide, not particularly busy sidewalk.  The plus side of this is that even if you are in danger at all times you can also put other people in danger.  You can ride your bike within an inch of an old person and they don’t even blink.  In New York, old people scream if a kid rides a scooter on the other side of the street.

3. I think I am turning into a bad teacher, sort of like Cameron Diaz in “Bad Teacher” (which I own on DVD along with every other borderline good movie that was recently released in the US).  I don’t think four year olds are remotely cute any more.  They’re just little assholes.  I forget that they’re little kids and impose grown up personalities on them, which makes it really pathetic and inappropriate that they’re always saying “foreign teacher its my turn” and “ME ME ME” and picking their noses and then trying to give me a high five.  In every class there’s a kid whose parents probably pay for private English lessons who shouts out the answer before any one else can and always wants to go first when we play a game.  He (they’re all boys) should probably get the most stickers and the first turn, but instead I ignore this kid because he is a needy little suck up and I don’t like him.  There is a teaching assistant and the Chinese classroom teacher in the room when I give English lessons but none of them can speak English too well so I am actually pretty free to express my opinions, and since the kids can’t understand me either I don’t have to worry about damaging their tender impressions and feelings.  This little girl squeezed a squeaky toy RIGHT IN MY EAR the other day. I looked at her and said, “you are a bitch.”  And no harm done.

4. A few weeks after I got here, I got food poisoning and a bacterial infection and a fever that is apparently super high in Celsius, so I had to go to the hospital.  I found a hospital on the American embassy’s site that was supposed to have English speaking doctors and clean, Western accommodations.  I got to take my first trip across the river to Pudong (the Brooklyn to Puxi’s Manhattan, if Brooklyn were all office buildings and macromalls and wealthy expats.  Maybe Brooklyn is not the best comparison but is across the river from the center of the city and it is part of Shanghai).  When the cab dropped us off we were met with a full on Chinese emergency room, by which I mean we walked in the door and saw an absolute chaos of people, already all on stretchers and attached to tubes in the lobby, surrounded by tons of family members, most of whom were standing and smoking right there in the open door.  We walked in and asked for the foreign doctor.  The lady looked kind of confused and pointed to the left.  We walked down the hallway to left, which was filled with more people on stretchers, but all of these people seemed to be rapidly losing blood from grisly head wounds. I’ll just cut to the chase and say that it turns out that there WAS a nice little doctor’s office for expats at the back of this public display of infection, and the five antibiotics they prescribed me only cost like $40 altogether and they had an English version of Elle magazine.  But for a minute there it was totally “omg.”

5.  It’s funny when you see someone on the metro who looks like an Asian person you know back home (Vivienne? Jae? This guy I went to middle school with? Are you reading this?) and you’re like “OH H…oh right.” I’m in China.

6.  The newspaper headlines here are what I think they were in America in the seventies, like “Government Drafts Copyright/Environmental/Filial Piety Law” (except for that last one).  The main English language newspaper here is the China Daily, which is mostly written by Chinese people who seem like they were probably the best student in their English class in high school or college.  What I’m saying is sometimes the paper reads like it was put through freetranslation.com and then edited with a thesaurus.  By that I mean you often come across big words in sentences that make no grammatical sense.  But they have the New York Times Crossword puzzle every day and some of their articles on Sundays.  It’s a pretty good paper over all.

7. I know more and more Chinese every day.  Some thing I can say: “the foreign teacher does not understand.” “She cannot eat shell fish.” “I do not want to buy [a fake bag or watch].” “pork soup dumplings.” “right around here is good [for use in taxis],” “I am not Chinese,” and “I like rabbits.”  I can also say bird, chicken, beef, milk, flower, little cat, ice cream, sleepy, boiled dumpling (which is the same word as sleepy! But with different tones), bread (which in Chinese is literally “noodle ball”), rice, plate, and eggplant.  And I can count to one hundred.  For some reason I get a lot of wrong numbers calling my cell phone all the time.  If I see a number I don’t know, I always answer “wei,” which I don’t think means hello but it is how they answer the phone here.  Then they go off in Chinese, to which I’ll say something like “I like rabbits and pork soup dumplings.”  Then they talk some more, repeating somewhere in there the words “rabbits” and “pork soup dumplings” and the question word “ma” before I finally cut them off and say “I am American.”  We both have a laugh and hang up.  Chinese people can be very good-natured when you’re not sitting in their seat in the movie theater (seats are assigned here, what’s with that?).

I teach English to four, five, and six year olds.  I have three grade 1 classes (grade 1 of four year kindergarten that starts at 0) and one grade 2 class.  The kids are so cute and so smart, except in the stupid class where they are both less cute and smart, which might be a coincidence.  The school I teach at is a private school, but there is no public education at that age, so it’s not a fancy private school.  This means it is mostly pretty nice but the bathrooms are byo paper and soap to the squat toilet. Ugh.

I don’t actually work for the kindergarten, I work for a company that outsources English teachers to kindergartens.  There is one other teacher from the company who works at my kindergarten.  He is English, so English that he says things like “bloody” and “Norf” instead of North. This may be appropriate, since he is English, but it get’s on my nerves.  Working on my tolerance, but it’s hard when Chinese people cut in line so much.

There are two Chinese TAs named Hannah and Linda that speak some English who come to our classes with us and translate things for the kids.  A lot of my teaching is just running around going “this is a table! Let’s dance!” but the TA is very useful.  For a long time I thought Linda, who I mostly work with, was a major bitch, but slowly I have realized that she is just a cold person, a Chinese person, and also that she understands less English than she speaks, which is confusing.  She says funny things.  Once Linda said to me, “your eyes are so big. So, so big.”  Which isn’t something you expect to hear, even if on the other hand is it sort of obvious.  A little bit later, she said “is your hair naturally like that?”  No, I have to go to great lengths to get this plain brown color and frizzy texture.  Comments like these have made me wonder if she thinks I’m actually some kind of off brand Chinese person rather than an American.

The school is harsh. If you had to come up with a stereotype for a Chinese kindergarten this would probably be it.  Even though the kids are only four, they have 45 minutes of English every day.  They are really well behaved, probably because they don’t want to be corporeally punished, as they often are. Hannah usually  sits at the side of the room holding the mallet for the class xylophone.  Any kid that get’s out of line gets the mallet to the head.  The Chinese teachers are also fond of grabbing the kids ears and pulling really hard when they’re bad, which looks like it sucks.  Sometimes they also just pull their little bitty chairs out from under them, which is kind of cute!  Whoopseys! At first I was horrified but now I think maybe it’s good for them.  They are awfully orderly and well behaved.  Once a little girl in the good class got out of line and was pulling on my sweater, and the Chinese teacher swooped in, got one hand on her crotch and one on her neck, lifted her over her head, and took her to the napping room, where I heard screams.  Sorry kid!

In spite of all this violence, the Chinese teachers think that me and Will (the Englishman) are terrible threats to the childrens’ safety.  On the school trip, I was goofing around with some kids on the sidewalk and one fell down and hit his head because of the excitement.  He was fine, but the next day his teacher was complaining to Linda about how I’d made the kid fall down.  If they didn’t always point at me while they talk in Chinese about me, I probably wouldn’t notice, but alas.  Anyway, about ten minutes later the teacher dragged the same kid I’d endangered across the floor by his wrists because he was being bad.  Go figure.

Lunch at school is often a whole fried fish, which all the teachers eat flawlessly with spoons.  I have no idea how this works.  Somehow they’ll eat every bit of fish, leaving a perfect skeleton on the tray, only using a spoon.  Meanwhile me and Will brutalize our fish and choke on a few bones before giving up and just getting extra rice.

All of the Chinese teachers are women and most of the are pretty young, in their twenties and early thirties.  A lot of them are good looking and they’re all really skinny because Chinese people are all really skinny in spite of all the rice and greasy food they eat (still trying to figure this out and then get in on it somehow). They have a teacher’s uniform which is a short sleeved polo dress and a long stripped cardigan.  Many of them wear black plastic glasses because they are the rage in China right now (trends seem to be exactly three years behind the US),  so basically they all look like American Apparel models. One of the hotter ones looks exactly like Sailor Moon.

Linda confided in me the other day that she thinks the teachers are all vain and materialistic (or rather, she said they “show themselves too much” and “they will be jealous of each others clothes”).  I have to agree.  Since the school trip was an occasion for photos, they all wore a whole lot of make up and brought their A game hotness.  Paleness rather than tanness is the standard for attractive and trendy skin here, so the trip was like night of the living dead, if the dead were all making peace signs with their hands.  Hannah took a series of glamour shots of the two of us with her iPhone and then proclaimed the pictures “fat in face.” I hope she was talking about herself.

I’ve been in Shanghai for about a month.  The apartment I got is on Huaihai Lu in the French Concession which I think is an area that may have once been conceded to the French in some kind of colonial sitch but I haven’t asked. Anyway, Shanghai’s best quality that everyone seems to agree on is how outrageous the mix between old and new is.  For example, my apartment on Huaihai Lu is on the fourteenth floor in a high rise, across the street from Cartier and next to a McDonalds (to be more specific a hip-hop themed McDonalds.  Who knows why!).  Around the corner, however, are tons of tiny hole in the wall restaurants where you can’t order in English or get an English menu and everyone dries their underwear on lines on the sidewalk and guts fish in the street.

Before we found the apartment, the teaching company we are working for put us up in a hotel in an area pretty far south that I think of as the middle of nowhere Shanghai but is still, you know, a city.  The side streets of this area were more authentically Chinese than our new neighborhood, by which I mean there were more old guys in the streets playing cards and a lot of people barbqueing suspicious meatstuffs on the corners.  The motel, however, was a Super8, but since it is China, maybe a fake Super8.  In any event, we lived there a week while we got settled into the city and tried to find an apartment.

Like I said, the side streets in this area contained a lot of hanging around on the sidewalks.  We noticed these stores, or houses, next to our hotel that looked like open living rooms with people just hanging around and watching tv in them, but they seemed to fit in with the everything out on the street vibe of the neighborhood.  We wondered if they were maybe massage parlors or travel agencies (I don’t know).

On the night we got the key to our new apartment we were heading back to the Super8 to get our stuff.  we walked by the curious stores and Laszlo recognized some of the characters and said that it was possible these were brothels.  We looked at the people watching TV and realized they were actually young women wearing satin outfits and heels and putting on makeup, in a neighborhood with absolutely no clubs or bars. “Ohh.” We said. Then we walked into our hotel, next door.  “Maybe people take the hookers to our hotel? I hope not” I said.  In the lobby, we saw a woman in heels signing in with the hotel security guard.  She was with a nerdy looking guy with a computer case.

Upstairs, we opened the door and saw another card advertising some kind of sex service that we’d been getting every day.  “Ohh” we said.  That explained that.  We packed really fast, suddenly feeling out of sorts in the shitty room we’d begun to call home.

In the lobby, we got caught up at the front desk.  We needed some kind of official receipt so that we could register our new residence with the police (China is full of random bureaucratic obligations I don’t understand).  Laszlo got involved in some long argument or misunderstanding with the man and the woman at the front desk, who didn’t want to give us the receipt.  Even though the hotel was in an area where no tourists go and where no one speaks English, both of the front desk operators had English nametags.  The woman’s said “David.”

While I was standing there uselessly, I saw the lady who had been with the computer case guy earlier come out of the elevator alone.  “Laszlo” I pointed while he did all the work with the hotel people (I don’t speak Chinese! So basically he’s my babysitter), “she WAS a prostitute,” I said.  A minute later another done up woman came out of the elevator alone.  It was starting to dawn on me that the hotel we’d stayed in for a week was basically an extension of a brothel.  I wanted to get out of there so I walked closer to the desk and yelled helpfully at David, who was actually a very nice looking girl in secretary glasses, “We need a RECEIPT!”  Weirdly enough this prompted the guy to print something, but then everyone just continued to argue, or something, in Chinese.  Then ANOTHER woman in heels came through the lobby.  “There are prostitutes in the hotel!” I yelled, again helpfully, at David.  She said, “Guess the world ain’t always so nice as the one your pretty little white head has seen,” and took a long drag of her cigarette.  Actually, she just blinked through her glasses.

Eventually we got the receipt and moved across from Cartier (thank god!).  But I was really itchy for the next few days and Laszlo got some weird rashes, so I spent some time insisting that we had gotten scabies from staying in a dirty sex hotel.  This turned out not to be the case but I bet you wish you’d been around to hear me whine that I’d (probably) gotten scabies (indirectly) from a prostitute!

I have never had a blog before because I am too neurotic about being an asshole.  But my time has come!  Perhaps someday my readership will be as great as a certain London rose…

Anyway, I moved to China.  Here are some things about China:

1.  There are long straight black hairs everywhere.  In the back of cabs.  On the desk in the teachers room at my school.  On seats in the metro.

2.  Traffic laws here are (probably) only suggestions.  If I get out of here alive I will be surprised.  Buses go through red lights all the time.  I’m not sure if this is an actual law or if the city just hires the worst drivers to drive professionally.  Also, most people get around on electric scooters, and electric scooters don’t even have to follow any traffic laws at all.  So if you’re walking and the light says you can walk, you still have to watch out for a ton of guys on electric scooters with women side saddle on the back and their toddlers standing on the medium between the seat and the steering wheel.  In New York, certain streets don’t have pedestrian lights.  For example twenty foot long streets in the deep West Village will often have no walk sign.  Here, a street at a huge intersection might just be free of pedestrian lights.  Also, you can catch a cab from the opposite side of the street on a two way road.  Just put your hand out and the driver will make a u-turn right through those double yellow lines.

3.  Today at school I saw one of my especially cute students in the hall, chucked his chin and ruffled his hair and said “Herro!!”  Whoops.

4.  Candy stores here mostly sell shrink wrapped sweetened chicken feet and other flavored animal parts.

5.  Everything is SO CHEAP.  The currency here is Yuan, which people call “kuai” which I think is like saying bucks or quid or something.  But I just call it monopoly money!!

MUCH MORE LATER!

I’d write “goodbye” in Chinese but I actually don’t know what it is.