O.J., Bad Roads

I am routinely eating much better now at a restaurant just across the street. With the students back from holiday, I've also made a few off-campus outings to nearby places with them. Although we are out in the boondocks, the area is very built up and we seem to have everything around here, including big supermarkets and millions of restaurants.

I went out for dinner Tuesday night at a big restaurant nearby with a group of six happy, chattering students. We had a few preliminary dishes, then Peking Duck, and we drank beer. Price was under $4 U.S. each. After dinner I tagged along with most of them who wanted to go to the local pool hall. One of my students, a smart and athletic young man, seems to be a virtuoso at the game. I don't know pool but I was pretty impressed when he indicated a plan to pocket a ball after three bounces -- and actually carried it out.

The night before, I went out for dinner with a different group of six happy students, at a different restaurant, this one only a one-minute bus ride from here. (We don't walk because of lethal road conditions; see below.) We had ... Peking Duck! Total for 7 people: about $10 U.S.

Having had no choice in numerous meals here but to use chopsticks, I'm becoming rather adept. I'm also starting to think that maybe with merely a vocabulary of 100 or 200 essential words one could get by.

The temperature in the hotel rooms here has generally been just fine since I got here. Tuesday night I discovered that that's only because the temperature outside had been just fine too. A nasty wind from the mountain assailed us through the night, and as you might have guessed by now the hotel walls offer little resistance. Also, we have regularly spaced panels along the corridor walls -- seems to be how maintenance gets to the pipes -- but the panel doors don't close securely. That wind made those doors slam shut again and again til, reluctantly accepting the reality that such problems never solve themselves, I ventured out of bed into the frigid air to go set all those doors wide open.

Say, do any of you find all this irresistible? If so, drop me a line. We are desperate for more English teachers. You meet the basic qualification if you're a native speaker.

Sunday I taught two of my four groups of students, Monday the other two groups. (Each group is about 25 students.) I mentioned in my previous missive that I'd remarked to the Sunday class on their unnaturally low curiosity level. Apparently word travels. When I told the other class Monday morning that I might not be teaching them again for some time, the class nearly startled me by almost shouting "Why?" in unison.

I also mentioned I was taken aback Sunday that students weren't familiar with the Temple of Heaven. But that was nothing next to a new revelation which left me flabbergasted in Monday's class. Seems that can still happen at this stage.

We were discussing another New York Times reading, "Justice, New York Style," September 16, 1999, by columnist Bob Herbert. The column describes a remarkably stupid arrest of a woman on suspicion of stealing a ring from a store. The woman, whose two children were expecting her to pick them up shortly from the dentist's, was taken away in handcuffs, strip-searched at the police station, and then charged, even though the search failed to turn up the ring, no one claimed to have observed her taking it, and the store videotape that supposedly showed her near the ring had not even been preserved as evidence (it'd been recorded over).

Herbert's opening line sets the stage: "Celeste Goring-Johnson would be considered a soccer mom if she were white and lived somewhere other than Brooklyn."

To convey a thorough understanding of what was going on, I drew a timeline showing the general sequence of events: crime commission, arrest, the laying of charges, and trial. The fundamental police error here was the arrest and the laying of charges, which should never occur if there is no prospect of obtaining a guilty verdict at trial. However, there are cases where there's nothing wrong in principle with making an arrest and laying charges, even though a guilty verdict is not ultimately obtained. To illustrate this, I made what I intended to be a 5-second reference to O.J. Simpson.

Here's the mind-boggling part: can you believe this central icon of the American imagination, a character over whom the entire nation obsessed for a whole unbelievable year and more, is not even known here? There is no mistake -- a student who's been to the U.S. translated the name into Chinese. These people do not know the man. They do not know the story. They don't know about the Dream Team, the racist detective, the bloody glove! I had to explain to them: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." (Did I get that right?)

I'd have thought that during that wonderful year, the name O.J. was on the lips of every pygmy in the remotest reaches of the Himalayas (or whatever).

I've had a number of pending notes that I didn't have a chance to relate before, but since for reasons you all know I seem to have a little more free time now I'll make a stab at getting some of them down.

First, it's worth mentioning that everything relating to roads and motorized vehicles is completely insane here. I know of two students, among the 100 I teach, who have already been struck by cars in the past month (no serious injury but enough in each case to warrant a visit to hospital). Reader, reflect on that a moment. That is a staggering 24% annual accident rate.

"Death-defying" does not aptly describe the behavior of motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians; "death-inviting," "death-ushering-in-with-a-red-carpet," is more like it. My practical reform bent cries out for only one thing: Wipe out this whole system and rebuild everything from scratch. But then I often felt like this in the West too, whenever I was waiting in line at an airport or at a bank.

You routinely have cars swooping within inches of pedestrians or bikers. This is so normal that even the near-victims are completely unfazed. In places I regard as lethally hazardous mangling pits (anywhere cars are permitted), you have pedestrians blithely moving about, some with such ludicrous faith they have their backs to oncoming traffic.

That green walking man symbol at intersections with traffic lights? You can try to point to that happy green fellow after the cars have mown you down, if you like. The symbol is apparently not universal enough. If the man is promising pedestrians they have the right of way, he is a liar.

One maneuver drivers are constantly pulling is the abrupt left turn that cuts off oncoming traffic. Also, driving on the right is a mere guideline, to be dispensed with when inconvenient. Taking taxis is a moral decision: are you prepared to be the instigator of an innocent person's maiming or violent death? The other day, as we bore down within inches of a bicyclist, I said and gestured "Stop! Stop!" The driver had no clue what I could even be talking about.

I told Dean Meng two days and no more. But it's hard to be absolute with a friend who's got some real headaches. There are 100 students with significant holes in their schedules. There are also some issues with the schedules of the other teachers. Meng's got problems -- as well as some weighty distractions. Today he's in a conference with the president -- I mean the president of China, Jiang Zemin. Meng is one of the organizers of an engineering-related conference taking place today at the Great Hall of the People.

He asked me so nicely, I agreed to at least take care of dispensing some readings to the students, to be discussed once I'm back teaching (we're expecting it to be a week or two). I prepared a diskette with an exciting reading and related comprehension questions: "Lying to Get the Bad Guys," a February 20, 2000 New York Times column by lawyer/writer Scott Turow about a Los Angeles police scandal that was expected to result in the overturning of hundreds of criminal convictions. But then the campus's only printer was broken, so I had to photocopy something a little less thrilling.

I've got to rush off now for squash game #4 at the Kempinski -- it was arranged on my behalf with a Chinese partner who speaks no English!