Immigration and Indigestion

I've so far played squash at 3 different places in Beijing. In the Xidan shopping district, there is an underground mall where, on the 3'rd level below ground, they offer various activities like table tennis and rock climbing, in addition to squash. There are two glass-backed squash courts, and shoppers stroll along right behind the back wall. A couple of my students were good enough to lead me there a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, although it's a perfectly adequate squash facility (and relatively accessible for me), from what I've seen it seems that that place never gets any decent players, just hackers. The people working there confirm that. So I probably won't be playing there much.

But in that first visit I did get on the court just to hit the ball alone -- it'd been weeks. A little crowd of 10 to 15 shoppers built up watching me whack the ball -- no doubt the foreigner was an important athlete, perhaps making a stop here on his way to compete in the Olympics. Seemed appropriate. I don't get this kind of respect in Toronto or New York, where players have the bad grace to sometimes even beat me.

I've also played against partners here a couple of times, once with a Swede employed by Ericsson Corp. (the major cellphone infrastructure provider in China) at the SAS/Radisson Hotel, once with an ex-New Yorker at the Kempinski Hotel. Both those hotels are in the Chaoyang District, which is in the northeast part of Central Beijing. That's where most things catering to Westerners are. It seems the Chinese here (unlike Hong Kong) have yet to discover squash. Unfortunately Chaoyang is not particularly quick to get to from where I am. I still don't have an idea how I'm going to manage regular games around here.

The Sanlitun area in/near Chaoyang is where they have many Western-type bars and restaurants. Strolling there at night my first time after a squash game, lugging my rackets and squash bag, I was repeatedly approached by touts: "Lady bar, lady bar, lady bar"; "CD DVD VCD CD CD CD." Lady bar I think I can figure out. One man explained the details (unverified): 100 yuan (it's 8.3 yuan to the U.S. dollar) for a woman, another 100 for the room, and 20 for a drink. So I guess this sort of thing is not unknown even here in the capital.

But why were a million people all along this bar-lined street hounding me about CDs? What was that all about? Some kind of karaoke thing where they get you drinking, singing, maybe rent you some companions? I asked one or two but of course they spoke no English, they just wanted me to follow them inside the bars or restaurants, and I didn't feel like interrupting this first exploratory walk.

My next time in the area, daytime this time, hordes of people were again (!) pressing "CD DVD VCD CD CD CD" upon me. "What is this man selling," I demanded of one who seemed to know a few words of English. I finally followed one of them some ways into an alley -- my operative assumption so far has been that no one around here is interested in hitting me over the head -- where he dug a plastic bag out of some cranny in a wall and, unwrapping it, presented a dozen or so CD's. A lady who'd followed us unearthed her own plastic bag and offered a bunch of VCD's.

Who would have thought it? They are indeed selling CD's, DVD's, VCD's. The CD's were 8 yuan (about a dollar), the VCD's 15 yuan. But could it be that copyright law was not being thoroughly respected?

It's funny -- the diversionary matter in that Microsoft/Thailand article we did in class emphasized the growth potential reflected by the fact that 84% of software in Thailand is pirated. This place was starting to look a lot like that country.

After my embassy visit (described last time) I strolled through another area -- Wangfujing. I was approached by a couple of smiling women, about 25 and 40 respectively. The younger one was the other's student, they said, and they were eager for a chance to talk English. How nice, I thought, someone wants to talk to me -- and can. I'd been about to go into a bookstore, and we stood outside the entrance talking for a few minutes. After a while I suggested we sit down some place and have a drink. They countered by suggesting we go to their school nearby -- some kind of art institute -- where we could sit and talk.

I vaguely sensed something was a bit awry -- they didn't seem fully focussed on the conversation. Something, I was to learn, was distracting them -- they had an agenda, they were on a job.

I blithely said, "Sure."

Arrived there, the elder one used calligraphy to draw my name, with surrounding good wishes for success, while the other showed me a pile of her paintings. Then the pitch came: some of the students were poor and struggling; they needed support for their art studies.

I said I needed some help too, with some translation at the bookstore. And, despite their reluctance, their doubts about a payoff, and embarrassed hints they dropped about a "tip," I led them back there and had them explain to the staff that I wanted an electronic English to Pinyin dictionary. (Pinyin is the alphabetic system for transcribing Chinese.) Side note: Where are the entrepreneurs in China? This seems to be an obvious product that'd be in demand by many foreigners, but for some reason it's available nowhere. (I have however seen one that can do this indirectly, with Chinese characters in an intermediate step.)

Futile mission accomplished (this store didn't have such a thing either), we went back out, where I told them I had no tip to give them but hoped they'd gotten the English practice they said they wanted when we met. They took this in stride, and we all smiled and said goodbye. And kept standing there.

"Well, goodbye again," I said.

"Goodbye."

No movement.

"Are you staying here?" I asked. (To accost another hapless foreigner?)

The embarrassment mounting, the younger one finally caved in.

"No," she said with a smile, "we go back to the school now. Bye bye!"

I had driven them away.

The trouble with being true to life as in these letters is that you make a lot of enemies among readers who come to hate your character. The upside is that it's a pleasure to just be yourself -- just like all those corporate ads for soft drinks and clothes are always urging (except in those cases it's really conformity they're pushing). Freedom of expression, freedom of identity. These are wonderful things when you think about it.

Not 10 minutes later, still in Wangfujing, I was again approached by a lady who had some English at her disposal.

Oh, how nice ....

She was an art student.

Oh no!

A couple of "situations" have come or are coming to a head here which it might be worth relating at this juncture.

There is a single eating place that's right on campus. It's where I and the students regularly eat, though the students eat in a special student section and make do with the fixed student menu (which is not too good). The single long table is covered by a thin type of plastic sheet. The standard practice of the students is to leave refuse of all kinds -- discarded bits of food, egg shells, etc. -- on this sheet, where they have been sitting. When you arrive there, you look for a place to sit that does not have its little mound of garbage. The flies, however, don't object.

I'm generally of a practical bent, and I saw an opportunity for reform here that would benefit everyone. It's brilliantly simple, really: Why not a rule saying don't leave crap on the table?

I discussed this once with one of the more mature students and his friends. He observed that this would involve changing people's behavior.

Sure. What of it?

He and his friends agreed that everyone would support this in principle. But they would never follow the rule. I threw out some possible encouragement/enforcement mechanisms: fines, shaming, monitors, returnable deposits.

The upshot of the discussion, in a nutshell: a lot of students would end up detesting me if I ever attempted to institute something like this, and anyhow the reform would never succeed. "Uriel," he said, "forget it."

This place is so much like the West in some ways.

I've generally been joining them for breakfast, but eating lunch and dinner in the general (non-student) area, ordering off the menu, with usually one or more students bringing their food over and joining me.

The general area has the same thin plastic sheet system for covering the tables. Of course this is familiar in Chinese restaurants in the West. With the difference that in the West, the sheets are considered disposable.

I'm all for the environment, but the charm of arriving for a meal at a table bearing numerous traces of feasts past, sometimes including the odd discarded toothpick, has quite entirely dissipated.

Not all is as it might be with the food either. There appears to be only one species of fish in the restaurant's repertoire, an inferior species that would be better off extinct. I can alternatively order a dish of chicken morsels -- but with half of them, on chewing, I find some hunk of sinew or cartilage which I then have to fish out of my mouth with my fingers, or spit out, to line up in formation alongside its brethren on one side of my plate.

Now all my "culturally sensitive" readers are hating me for my ethnocentric intolerance.

But I've explained to the restaurant staff that I want only the chicken meat. This is not impossible to achieve if you want to serve a customer what he wants. Another restaurant not far from here will do it, but these people won't. What happened to the love and adulation for the "foreign expert" that I was supposed to be basking in? It seems to recede whenever Mr. Meng, our optimistic Executive Dean, is not around.

Plus, not so seldom, I find myself feeling a little queasy in the stomach after a meal. Read into that what you will but, not to get too scatological, I'm spending a little more time on the toilet than is strictly my custom.

The situation is rather awkward. I have no kitchen, just a little bathroom sink. I can't cook for myself here. I've taken at times to simply not eating, but this is not a long-term solution. Absent reliable food, I've started occasionally eating Cadbury chocolate bars -- it's not exactly food but at least it comes in a sealed wrapper from the West.

I finally spoke to Mr. Meng about this. He's always shown much solicitude. I told him I'd like him to speak personally to the staff at the restaurant. I did not want to get sick. I wanted clean, healthy food. I wanted proper chicken meat. And I wanted reasonably clean surroundings.

He understood completely, and we went off together to talk to them.

"Should I come along," I asked. "There's no problem of losing face or whatever?"

"No no no, nonsense, of course not, come."

A few staff, including the cook, were hanging out outside the restaurant, having a smoke. Meng offered cigarettes all around, prefaced with a couple of jokes, and nicely explained what I wanted. He's really quite charismatic, people like him. It was explained to me that the weather changes could have caused my upset stomach (one doesn't point out in such circumstances that there haven't even been any), but that they would make the food cleaner from now on. And cleaner surroundings too. (Something was also mentioned about a waitress with overly thick fingers, but that was somebody else's issue and I didn't want to derail the important thing by inquiring into what that might be about.) We went away, everyone happy.

My very next meal, the next day, I was conducted to just about the filthiest table I'd seen yet. Yes, it even had the toothpick.

I nicely pointed out several prominent pieces of prior-meal residue to the waitress and moved to another table which was a little less dirty. Conditions did not improve on subsequent visits. I took to folding the plastic sheet away from my edge of the table, over the center, and eating on the tablecloth underneath. It was practical and should not have been too big a deal, since I was not sullying it, but it had the drawback of potentially looking like a statement.

Also subsequent to Mr. Meng's chat with the staff, I was served a fish undercooked enough that it was bloody in parts. I kept mum, leaving those parts uneaten. I was alone that time (holiday week, students away), but when I got a bloody fish a second time I had a witness with me. I pointed it out to her. No question about it, this was a pretty clearly undercooked fish. She got up to speak to the staff about it. There were sounds of discussion that could have been an argument -- I couldn't tell -- so I got up to follow. There appeared to be some kind of argument and we were told we could not speak to the cook because he was busy cooking. I couldn't tell what this refusal signified -- embarrassment on the part of the cook?

They kept saying they would cook me a new fish. But fixing one problem after the fact wasn't the point. I wanted clean and healthy food from now on, consistently.

Just to send the message that something irreparable had occurred, I said I would have no fish that night. I would buy noodles from the store and eat them in my room. But henceforth the food had to be ok. Yes yes yes, ok, they were sorry, ok, no problem.

Only one day later, the waitress who went off to add hot water to the instant coffee I brought from my room returned the cup with lukewarm coffee. The smile was gone, she was close to scowling. Were there deliberate hostilities going on at the place where I get the food I put in my body?!

I thought it time to raise the assertiveness ante.

I summoned the waitress to my table.

"Ask her what she's mad about." I plucked a translator who happened to be in the vicinity -- a soft-spoken girl, unfortunately, who seems the antithesis of assertiveness.

There was a lot of jabbering from the waitress -- presumably a defense. My translator listened with angelic patience. I had to remind her she was there to translate. A 5-minute stream of Chinese was eventually rendered as: "She says she used boiling water."

I tried to get the waitress to put her fingers in the lukewarm liquid, but she drew back.

"How," I asked, "did I manage to cool this down so fast?"

Of course we got nowhere. Then the waitress announced she was going to get the manager. He was brought to the table.

I mentioned about the fish and, jabbing the table 2 or 3 times with my finger, I said with an equable expression: "I don't want to die in this place."

He said something and went off -- I would guess in a huff. According to my translator, he'd said he would cook the fish and get my coffee himself from then on.

Had I discovered irony in China?

Anyhow, I've resolved that it's worth any inconvenience to myself and/or the school, for me to completely avoid that place from now on.

The other "situation" is also difficult. During the email exchanges leading to my visit to this school, before my departure from Canada, it was put to me that arriving with a tourist visa might be a lot quicker and easier all around. Someone even insisted that working on a tourist visa was legal if the authorities approved. I raised the issue in a public discussion list on China jobs, offering the view that a teacher would have to be nuts to subject himself to the trouble and blackmail such a situation invited.

Some concurred; others said it was done routinely in China and posed no problem. I stood by my view. There is thus some considerable irony in the fact that I subsequently arrived here with a tourist visa and that that is still my status.

But I wasn't completely dumb about it. The school dean's letter (drafted by me) invites me to come to China and do tourism. It stipulates the firm understanding we arrived at in advance of my travel: while there might well be a prospect of employment, there would be no question of working before a work visa was arranged; just informal conversation sessions with students.

After a couple of days of these sessions, it began to seem too silly to insist on a format that avoided the appearance of formal instruction. Mr. Meng had said the visa could be switched to a work visa in one or two weeks. Why be so scrupulous? So I just segued directly into conventional classroom teaching. The important thing was that I was not being paid money -- and we have definitely adhered to that aspect of the arrangement. So, so far, I've been teaching for free (which actually is not much different from the salary).

But the weeks went by and nothing was happening with my visa, so last Tuesday I gave Mr. Meng a ring expressing concern. My concern was his concern, and he took me out for a very fine lunch. Nevertheless, this could not go on.

We'd switched from Plan A to Plan B, I told him. As of now, we were switching back to Plan A: no visa, no work.

He completely understood. He appreciated and was grateful for my having helped out til now. Much as he needed my teaching, he could not ask me for this a second time. (I agreed; it'd gone on too long.) He would personally get behind the visa matter.

That was the holiday week. Saturday the students returned to the school. Saturday night my phone rang. It was Mr. Meng. First time I'd heard from him since our lunch. He wanted to request, as a personal favor, that I continue my regular teaching beginning the following morning. (I hadn't even known classes resume on Sunday.)

There is a line beyond which accommodation becomes stupidity. I'd sure hate to cross it. Mr. Meng was tied up for two days -- he'd mentioned a serious illness in his family. I said I'd give him two more days.

I kind of missed the fun of getting before the students anyway.

I had two groups in succession. I told both that I had an announcement that would make some happy and maybe one or two of them a bit sad: this would be my last day teaching them for some indefinite period of time.

I gave them time to register this, then began moving on to the reading I'd assigned for the holiday week. They would have gone right along with me.

What is it with these people? I gave them a little lecture, explaining about lemmings walking off a cliff together and describing what goes on in the corporations they're headed for after their schooling, where it's just like with lemmings except it's humans and the cliffs are figurative. And I told them one of the things university should teach them was to ask the question, "Why?"

OK already -- "Why," they wanted to know.

I explained thoroughly about Plan A and B and so on.

Later a student privately opined that a Plan C might be in store for me if appeasing me became too troublesome for Mr. Meng. But surely getting me a work visa has been the intention all along (?)

Also, Mr. Meng and I plan on co-authoring a book that -- who knows? -- could even be successful. He is the founder of a big China-Israeli cooperative research institute at China Agricultural University, as well as of this college. He has met top leaders from the Israeli state; he has also lived there. He's got a story, and we figure I'm the one to tell it.

I mentioned to the class that I'd just been to the quite splendorous Temple of Heaven. (Readers, you don't need me for descriptions of such major sights. Check http://google.com or http://yahoo.com for info.) I drew a 5-second sketch on the board, intending to ask them what part had burned and been rebuilt in the 1800's. Unbelievably, virtually none of them could recognize the structures I was talking about -- they'd never been there, or hadn't since they were children. This major attraction is easily accessible, not very far from Tiananmen Square. It also features a pleasant park with plenty of greenery, and the entrance fee is negligible. The site draws tourists from far-off lands, but apparently for the students that's just it: it's for tourists.

The reading assignment had been a section in our "Strategies for Success" text pertaining to academic honesty. We talked about the various ways cheating hurts the cheater and the community. I then asked various students for an estimate of what percentage of all things that are graded at this college -- assignments, tests, etc. -- would involve cheating. I got 6 or 7 guesses. The high was 30%, the low 10%, most said around 20%.

My guess is that that understates it.