the color of its countries

It's been a while since I've updated. A lot has happened, not least of which was the occupation of the Suvarnabhumi International Airport by PAD protesters. It's bad in the sense of absurd inconvenience -- lots of everyday people are getting stuck, if not actually threatened. My partner, Josh, got stuck in Singapore and had to change his flight to Phuket and ride a bus for most of a day to get home. Thai Muslim Hajj pilgrims who've sold their rice fields to fund the journey are stranded. All around, it's a ridiculous situation. But the Supreme Court ruled that the party in power was guilty of electoral fraud (I'm reserving judgment on that one) and will proceed to disband the coalitions, so with a bit of luck that will calm the protestors down before anybody really gets hurt.

In the meantime, I'm safe and sound, and for my part I can't think of a much nicer place to be stranded than Thailand.

I'm working away happily at two and a half jobs, one of which is teaching kindergarten at Mater Dei, a prestigious Catholic all-girls school in the middle of town. I was a little reluctant to take the job at first; I had some negative experiences teaching little kids in China, and was also secretly a little worried that the sisters would discover I was living in sin (gasp!). It turns out Thai Catholics are really laid back, though, and most of the people here are Buddhist anyway, predictably enough. It's a wildly disorganized environment from a bureaucratic standpoint, but I don't really mind being bumped around from classroom to classroom without any warning. If my teaching suffers, I think it's their loss, not mine. At least, usually.

Anyway, today was another one of those "Surprise!" days. As I finished teaching my first of four periods, the head English teacher rushed in to apologize and tell me that one of the classrooms had organized a visit and demonstration with some soldiers, and the other classes had all decided to participate at the last minute. It seems to be part of the ongoing series of "stop everything, Kotchaporn's mom the chef is here to teach us how to make smoothies" / "Natcha's mom the air hostess is here to look pretty and give us airplane snack boxes" / etc. It's like an ongoing impromptu career day month. The upside: suddenly having an extra hour to sit in the computer lab and print out animal pictures. The downside: one of the girls is inevitably tearful when her parent has to leave to go back to work.

They're cuties, these girls. I get more hugs than I can handle every day. It's awfully good for morale, though I've taken to carrying hand sanitizer in my bag, since they're still growing out of nose-picking.

I have a lot of adorable photos to share from last Sunday's school exhibition. They're on Matthew's computer, since for the third time in five years I left my camera cable behind in North America and have had to stick my memory card in his camera to retrieve any photos. I'll post them soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to creep back downstairs and spy on these soldiers. While their uniforms aren't nearly as sexy as the semi-ridiculous skintight Thai cop uniforms, I did catch a glimpse of them going through their paces, and they appear to have added a rather saucy move that involves planting a fist on a cocked hip. Silly. I love it.

Labels: teaching, thailand

That's Thai for "elevator," or actually for "lift," of which it is a Thai phoneticization. At least, that's what thai-language.com would lead us to believe, and since the word passed my trusty "Google image search the foreign word and see if the result is what you expect" test, I'm buying it.

But I'm digressing. I actually just wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a difference between China and Thailand: here, as in America but unlike in Chengdu, the elevator close-doors buttons do not bring the doors whooshing together with satisfying promptness. I find myself mashing the button with impatience every time I ride, and then I have to smile: it's just another habit picked up in China, like stomping in dark hallways in hopes that the lights are hooked up to a (in Chengdu, ubiquitous) noise detector. Or blowing your nose farmer-style on the pavement.

Matthew says this -- the elevator doors, I mean, not the nose-blowing -- has to do with who manufactured the elevator, not where it's installed. There are apparently four major elevator manufacturers in the world, all from different countries, and I guess they decide whether the close-doors button is a placebo or not. Says Matthew, anyway. You could probably check Wikipedia. I'm too sleepy to investigate it properly.

I've been in Bangkok for twelve days now: a rather dreamy, lazy twelve days, but I don't believe I've really wasted a moment. I'm still job-hunting and procrastinating the apartment search, but Matthew did the math and we're not really losing any money staying at a guesthouse rather than renting an apartment day by day, so it seems prudent to wait until we know which neighborhood we'll be working in -- I hear dreadful things about the traffic.

Bangkok is just how I left it seven months ago: gorgeous. This is the tail end of the rainy season, so we get an hour or two of thundershowers each day, often in the afternoon. The streets of the little neighborhood around our guesthouse are lush with potted palms and plumeria and other tropical plants I can't name. The sun shines and the sky is the same lovely blue I got re-accustomed and re-attached to in California. And there are big, dramatic tropical rainclouds drifting in all the time and reflecting the setting sun in more-than-Oriental splendor (thank you, Rudyard).

There's a chance I'll be whisked away on an eight-day Buddhist meditation retreat this week: a rather unexpected opportunity. But if not, you'll be hearing something soon on any number of interesting subjects: gubernatorial elections, vegetarian food, "true love," urban Thai flora and fauna... so wait and see.

And in the meantime, I'm just awfully glad to be here.

Labels: bangkok, thailand, travel

It's mid-morning and I'm snuggled in bed enjoying one of the biggest advantages of my new job: I almost never have to rush in the morning anymore. Today I'm not due in until 3:00, so I'm planning on dedicating the next hour or two to snuggling and meditation on contentment. Circadian rituals of this sort -- morning snuggling, bedtime with stories, and mealtimes made sacred, which may or may not properly fall under the heading "Circadian" -- have taken center stage lately. My job is secure, undemanding, and pleasant, if a little boring at times. And I suppose such enthusiastic appreciation of the requiring-little-thought aspect sounds unambitious of me, but because I'm very definitely planning on leaving China at the end of the summer, I don't worry that I'm atrophying.

The more important discovery is that it feels really, really good to make these small things important, and that their positive impact on my emotional well-being is not to be underestimated. I'm making mental note of that. I'm also noting how important it feels to dedicate a certain amount of time each day to make a loved one (or more than one of them, if tending to friends via internet counts) feel loved, trusting that they want to do the same for you. That is something that had been slipping out of my life and getting subordinated to other stuff -- important stuff, I guess, but stuff that didn't make me feel centered to nearly same extent. I'm challenging myself not to forget this in the upheaval that's sure to unfold over the next six months.

One of a few odd Japanese phrases that asserts itself in my head periodically is "Moshi hentai dattara..." which means "If (s)he's a pervert..."

I'm pretty sure it came up in a class conversation, probably in some kind of "What would you do if someone... ?" scenario. I think it was one of numerous cases in which I succeeded in creating a grammatical sentence all by myself, but the teachers couldn't believe I had the right word because it was a bizarre comment to make, so they tried to extract some conventional meaning from my sentence and frame it correctly for me. I already knew that "hentai" meant pervert, partly because Yoichi and Nick (the boys I mostly lived with in Tokyo) used to accuse each other of it a lot as a joke.

Anyway, I got confirmation that that was the proper way to discuss a hypothetical pervert, and it's actually the only way I remember the conditional structure to this day.

I bring this up because a few weeks ago (maybe just two, or maybe more than a month; time is flowing oddly these days) reports went around the office of some guy who had been sneaking in and snapping photos in the ladies' toilets. It made me laugh, because it seemed like such an old-fashioned way to be taking advantage of nice ladies. More than that, it made me laugh because Sichuan food goes in hot and, like as not, comes out hotter (see 拉肚子), which means that unless he had a coprophilia kink -- entirely possible, I acknowledge, but still probably unlikely -- then I reckon he captured a lot more than he bargained for, poking his camera under the doors of the squat toilets like that.

Gross.

Anyway, for a day or two the female students and Chinese employees were all of a titter about it, and Shirley, the charming and rather feisty girl who makes our schedules, took to ushering me protectively to the bathroom by the arm and standing guard. Which brings me to a new point: I get hustled around by the elbow all the time here. Exclusively by women, I should note; I think the unspoken rules of platonic male-female contact prohibit that sort of thing, along with a lot of stuff I miss, like hugging. I'm still working on translating the nonverbal signals. Where I come from, or at least just to me, taking somebody by the elbow and steering them across the street says, "I have zero faith in your ability to negotiate traffic without being killed, so I'm going to treat you like a child. Silly foreigner." Or else, I suppose, "I am scared to death of cars and I think both our lives are in jeopardy at this moment, so I'm going to cling to you for all I'm worth." Which is more justifiable, actually -- some of the drivers here are hair-raising indeed. But I don't think it actually means either of those things. I think it means almost nothing at all, except perhaps the most casual show of affection between female friends. Maybe not even affection -- maybe just a public demonstration of the relationship or something. Or maybe it's more intimate than I think, and these girls are trying to nudge things along a bit on the intimacy scale using nonverbal cues. Or maybe they really do just think I'm going to get myself killed in traffic, but I'm hoping not.

Some things in China have clearly succumbed to the pressure of the population and are efficient purely out of necessity. For example, the button that closes elevator doors here actually works: within one second of pressing it, the doors close. You can even use them to slam people in the doors if you want, which is something I once did semi-accidentally when a drunk James tried to follow me home from a tutoring-session-turned-nightclub-visit. (I still don't know how I allowed that to happen.) For safety reasons or simply because nobody's that impatient, I've never known U.S. elevator doors to do that; my friends used to joke about the button being a placebo in some sort of secret large-scale behavioral experiment. That's most definitely not the case here. In fact, I've drawn glares when I'm the closest one to the button and I let the doors close in their own time instead of scrambling to press it.

But quickly closing doors aside, a trip to the supermarket today left me standing in the checkout line forever. I don't know if it's because supermarkets are a relatively new trend here and have yet to get a high enough volume of customers to need a really high-efficiency checkout system or whether this just comes part and parcel of the general Chinese tendency towards inefficiency -- stronger, some have argued, in Sichuan than in other places. I've heard it said that this is partly due to wage systems that expect employees to be on the premises, if not actually accomplishing work, all day every day. (Although isn't that more or less the case with clocked American jobs, too?) I also reckon it's something to do with the fact that labor is awfully plentiful and terribly cheap in China, so there's been little push to automate. These are all rather wobbly claims and I wouldn't be prepared to support them, but one point can stand on observation alone: Chinese people seem about as averse to lining up as kitties are to swimming. You can see this in action when ordering food at street stands, getting on the bus, waiting for a taxi, buying tickets -- anyplace, really, including waiting to check out at the supermarket, where little old ladies have more than once zipped in front of me while I'm not paying attention. It does not make for efficient, orderly processing of customers.

Anyway, the girl ringing up my purchases was also responsible for bagging them, and she seemed to have no particular system in mind for accomplishing this. North American supermarket baggers do their work so efficiently that I'm quite certain they've been through rigorous training on how to approach weight distribution, breakable items, stacking protocols, division of food items from cleaning supplies, separation of meat from foods that won't be cooked, etc. I could be wrong: perhaps it's just enculturation in action, and those are all Western mental categories being subconsciously imposed on my groceries by the baggers? Maybe Chinese groceries live free of this sort of conceptual segregation? I sort of doubt it, honestly -- I think supermarket employees just suck at bagging here. I'm befuddled when I think of all the group training meetings I keep stumbling in on at Chinese restaurants and shops... I can't help but wonder what on earth they're learning. Bookstore assistants don't know where the different genre sections are, supermarket employees can't bag to save their grannies, receptionists can't transfer calls or find the stapler or make copies, other people spill tea on your lap or tangle you up in the clothing you want to try on; I'm going to cut the litany short before I get carried away, but in general, there seems to be a lot of overzealous-but-bumbling assistance. Which is confusing, when I compare it to my experience of Japanese service. It's certainly true that the emphasis on service is much the same -- that is, the apparent feeling that nothing is worth paying for if it doesn't include three nervous girls in uniform bobbing and hovering. Japanese service, however, tended to be crisp and quick and slick to the point that I felt bumbling and oafish just standing there trying to buy something. But I really need to break the habit of comparing China and Japan; it really is sort of apples and oranges. Or maybe yuzu and pomelos? Except it turns out that I've never actually tasted yuzu, so I have no idea how it compared. And they're both citrus, right? So that may not be apt at all, merely gratuitously regional.

Er, anyway. Potential bigoted speculations on cause aside, I had been cut in line by a young mother and an old couple before I finally made it to the register (I really must learn to queue more aggressively), and the ringing up and bagging up took another ten minutes, so by the time I made it to the elevator I was getting a little agitated. And then elevator appeared to have been programmed in some peculiar and not-obviously-systematic way, and since everyone else wanted to be shuttling between the first and third floors and only I wanted to go to the fifth, it swept from my floor to the ground floor without ever going higher at least six times before I lost count. And so I nervously and absentmindedly consumed an entire packet of sub-par Oreo knockoffs (which is to say, cookies labeled as Oreos, only in Chinese, and with a different taste from normal, which I suspect is due to cheaper ingredients). They're never really as satisfyingly Oreoey as the ones my mother so scrupulously withheld from me as a child: maybe just because these are easily accessible whenever I want them? I still suspect the ingredients. And in any case, I ate probably 15 or 20 of them by the time the elevator finally decided to go up past my floor, and I spent the rest of the evening regretting it pretty fervently.

Which brings us back to what is probably the only really worthwhile part of this much-more-windbaggy-than-planned post: the title. And that's how you say tummyache in Chinese.

Phew. There. I hope that was edifying.

Labels: China

that "Milk Mung-bean" ice cream is delicious. Who knew? It tastes very little like either thing, but rather like cucumber and hami melon and coconut combined. "Bean club" brand, Beijing Olympics logo on the package. Go try some. Maybe Chinatown has it.


(You may wish, at this point, to unsubscribe from the e-mail notification function, as inane posts of this sort will most likely become frequent. Look, I warned you.)


Redemptive educational content:

绿豆 (lǜ dòu) - mung bean
冰淇淋 (bīng qí lín) - ice cream

You may be proud to know that those were both words I had already learned.

Okay, good night.

Labels: China, edutainment, food

I hope I've lain fallow here long enough to shake off any potential readers. I tend to blog better when I can pretend nobody's listening.

I've officially given up on presenting any sort of coherent or well-informed opinions on anything current or regional here. With nine months living in China under my belt and a couple of politically skewed pseudo-historical accounts on my bookshelf, I do generally have the audacity to make sweeping generalizations in conversation, but my friends put me in my place often enough to make it clear that I really shouldn't try to claim any authority on paper. It is also the case that I've spent enough time denouncing those who do presume to pontificate that I'd be a rotten hypocrite if I kept up the attempt.

So it's not really that I don't have it in me to be a windbag -- see previous posts if this is in doubt -- but when I go back and read it, I feel like an ass, and then I stop posting. So if I do manage to keep up with this, which may be a bit of a stretch anyway, it'll be in a rather humbler vein: things I find delightful, ridiculous things that happen to me, bizarre dreams I have, and perhaps the occasional YouTube video that isn't of me.

And that's that, really. I'd advocate against commenting on this post, as I'll probably blush and hide in the bathroom and you'll never hear from me again. If you keep mousey quiet, though, we might make it out of the doldrums.

Fingers crossed,

yrs, ever affly