brewing

This is a start. 

In the afternoon I drank tea. Really, really good 铁观音 from high on a bedroom shelf in Sam's house. His mom insisted on sending it home with me a few weeks ago  when she found out I liked it. After this incredible search to find the right stuff. She climbed up on the ladder and pulled out all the boxes. Fancy gifts in fancy oversized packaging, tea and alcohol and who knows what else, all of it looking appropriately expensive cradled in the red and gold fabrics. Five minutes in, I found she and the aiyi in the unused bedroom juggling boxes. I instinctively jumped to catch the one that fell to the floor, and made a few attempts to dissuade them from the trouble . . . but in the end I left them there because I could see that's what she wanted.

Then coffee with Johnson at SPR so we could go over his IVEP application.

These are probably the reasons that I'm still wide awake at 3, surfing baking websites and trying to keep a promise.

last saturday's joy

Shuai Ye

It's better to walk to the yoga place - find yourself five minutes away at 10 when the class is to begin - and back, than to not go out at all, I think. In the park I met Teacher Liu with his wife and granddaughter, and another erhu player who urged me to pick the instrument up occasionally so as not to lose the skills. I think I've already lost the skills, I told him. Nonsense, he said. You can't lose them, they're still there in your head.

nothing wrong with that

Yesterday I bought an electronic (sorry Tim, but I AM still grinding my coffee by hand?!) scale. Back at the tiny shop that I'd found before. The exceptionally friendly boss recognized me right away. Her husband was there this time, and funny! He thought I was English. I said US. He said, mmm, the US and England "耍得很好" (play well - the way you talk about the relationship between close friends or a couple). I laughed hard with them and found myself opening up when they asked the usual questions. I'm not married, but I have a boyfriend. He's from Nanchong. "Does he treat you well?" the immediate question from the woman. And then the usual about how Sichuan men “下厨房” (enter the kitchen) and are "怕耳朵" (fear being pulled around by their ears). I avoided the potential extent of that conversation, and let myself delight instead, in how she loved his jokes. I didn't really get any more after that first one, but I enjoyed them all, watching her eyes light up as she laughed.

we two both foreigners here

I take it as a compliment that the couldn't-have-been-13-year-old (he claimed he was 15) overdid the grilling of the two tiny lamb kebabs . . . we were having such a fine time chatting. American movies and such. When I climbed up out of the underground Uni-mart,  he had taken off his belt and was swinging it like numchucks, but quickly held it down beside him when he realized I was going to be a customer. 

We talked, me open and gently prodding, his curiosity getting the best of him. He was born here, but it's obvious that Mandarin is not his first language. Mine neither. It took us long minutes to try to communicate simple ideas. At first I mistook his shyness for disgust; he would turn his head down and away when I utterly missed the point. . . . but I was in that mood where laughter comes freely, and in the end we were friends.

every American has a dream

My students still don't have their textbooks, so I'm scrapping the whole idea of loosely following the content. I'm searching online for that poem about sweeping. How it is the cure for every ill. Justin had it scrawled on his kitchen, white tiles in Wanzhou. 

The other day Phil and I were trying to piece together our memories of the Wanzhou trips . . . piece together enough to separate the train rides and bus rides, tacos and icecream turkeys, sleeping on Justin's couches or where did we stay? a Thanksgiving, an Easter, hikes to the mountains, a terrible awkward birthday party we never wanted to attend, the Tujia pizzas, that time I cried the whole weekend about making Johnny move out. Memories that involve Scott and Emily, Jen, Christina. We never went after Justin left, did we?

Couldn't find the sweeping poem, but I found this one. Which I like very much.

Like Lilly Like Wilson
By Taylor Mali 
www.taylormali.com 

I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door. 
Lilly Wilson, the recovering like addict, 
the worst I've ever seen. 
So, like, bad the whole eighth grade 
started calling her Like Lilly Like Wilson Like. 
ŒUntil I declared my classroom a Like-Free Zone, 
and she could not speak for days. 

But when she finally did, it was to say, 
Mr. Mali, this is . . . so hard. 
Now I have to think before I . . . say anything. 

Imagine that, Lilly. 

It's for your own good. 
Even if you don't like . . . 
it. 

I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door. 
Lilly is writing a research paper for me 
about how homosexuals shouldn't be allowed 
to adopt children. 
I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Like Lilly Like Wilson at my office door.

She's having trouble finding sources, 
which is to say, ones that back her up. 
They all argue in favor of what I thought I was against. 

And it took four years of college, 
three years of graduate school, 
and every incidental teaching experience I have ever had 
to let out only, 

Well, that's a real interesting problem, Lilly. 
But what do you propose to do about it? 
That's what I want to know. 

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing; 
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it 
change before your very eyes. 

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali, 
but I think I'd like to switch sides. 

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it, 
but to enjoy it! 
That changing your mind is one of the best ways 
of finding out whether or not you still have one. 
Or even that minds are like parachutes, 
that it doesn't matter what you pack 
them with so long as they open 
at the right time. 
O God, Lilly, I want to say 
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that? 
I want to say all this but manage only, 
Lilly, I am like so impressed with you! 

So I finally taught somebody something, 
namely, how to change her mind. 
And learned in the process that if I ever change the world 
it's going to be one eighth grader at a time.

Trying to meet up with Charity in the big station is the first exercise of many during the trip in challenging cell phone culture. My "little smart phone" only works in Sichuan province . . . and we ain't in Sichuan anymore. I use a public phone to call Charity and tell her I'll wait at the Northeast exit. But when I climb up and out the exit is complicated, with three floors. I choose the middle one, and wait. The weather is much colder than I brought clothes for. Wind. I watch the other waiters play with their many-featured cell phones, wonder if I could charm them into letting me send her a message.

When she doesn't come I wonder nervously downstairs to see her (I think it's her) squinting at a map of the station. She begins to walk away, and I follow after, disturbed by how unsure I am that it is her. When I touch her shoulder to turn her around, our reunion is underwhelming, like meetings of loved ones here are. I don't hug her, though I want to.

She has come more than an hour to the train station to meet me, but she dismisses her own hospitality, saying, "I've never seen the Shanghai South Train Station" - a backwards excuse we delight in making to our friends. No one ever means exactly what they say and you're not SUPPOSED to take anything at face value.

We bus back out to the outlying district of Shanghai where she is stuck in (forgive me) nothing of a life. Just work (and nothing to hold her there) and trying to make it another year or two when the college loans will be paid off and she can return to Sichuan. An older cousin and his family but she doesn't see them often. No money to go out on the weekends. No ping-pong in the common room because someone would call her boyfriend and tell him she's hanging out with other guys. You could mistake the place for any small city, China. We spend two days between the hotel room they have rented for me and the restaurants where we eat lunch and dinner with her boyfriend, who is nice, and gentlemanly in every patronizing way. She stays with me at the hotel and finally we have someone to whom we can tell everything.

On the second night we gang up on her boyfriend about the dinner choice. We want dumplings. He wants to go back to the same Sichuan restaurant where we had (granted, a very tasty) lunch. We win. The dumplings are terrible. I buy microwave popcorn and we go back to the hotel to watch TV.