Paranoia
Funny, I taught this word to one of the cooler co-teachers about three weeks ago. Paranoia and Schizophrenia. Not sure why, now that I think about it. She comes by to try the words out on me occasionally: "Liiiilllllisss....can you feel me behind you? If so, you're acting PARANOIA!" She says she is "schizophrenia" and I tell her that I am "schizophrenia" too. (You know, the whole Gemini thing, which I now categorize as yin-yang since I'm in China.) I've also taught that it isn't polite to say something is "retarded" even though American high schoolers (and some of us in our twenties) would often have you thinking otherwise. Daisy and Winnie (she chose her name after watching a Winnie the Pooh cartoon - you can't NOT love this girl) are very cool Chinese twenty-somethings and they take English seriously, that is, they take mastering it like a native seriously. So, when someone does something silly or foolish or wears an excessively frilly shirt or a t-shirt doused in Engrish, the girls call it "Ree-ree", which has a long explanation as well, but let's just leave it at the recognition that I'm removing the inappropriate use of the word "retarded" from the vocabularies of young and popular Chinese women and that means I've sort of infiltrated the English slang spoken in China!
Back to Paranoia. This afternoon, after watching a show-lesson - a post to follow all about show-lessons - the foreign teachers were herded into a very fancy conference room a couple of floors above our office at the main school and treated to fruit plates and a lively power point presentation by the local "Entry and Exit of Foreign Aliens Security Sub-Prefectural Branch of Hubei Province". In other words, policewomen gave us a talking to. Actually, one policewoman gave us a talking to and the other slept through most of the lecture. And here's where the paranoia comes in:
The beginning of the lecture expounded on the merits of the three or four cultural sites worth seeing in Wuhan, you know, in between our busy schedule of teaching English and staying out of trouble. The policewoman, who introduced herself as Xia and then Summer, dove immediately into the meat of the lecture: no getting drunken and doing drunken things that would cause shame to our foreignness. Pardon my paraphrasing; I am at least using vocabulary as it was presented to me. There was a moment of explaining how to obtain a visa in order to enter China, which caused many snickers to rumble forth from the smart-aleck teachers in the room who wanted to shed light on the obvious fact that we all had to already know how to procure the visas because we had actually managed to arrive in China already. But Summer had a great sense of humor and tried to add a little spice to her basically bland presentation of DON'TS FOR FOREIGNERS. She told us about the teacher who had gone and gotten drunken and then had been touched with a knife nine times by another, angry foreigner who was drunken too, probably. When touched didn't bring forth the response she was looking for, Summer stabbed the air harshly until we chanted in unison, "Stabbed nine times?"
At one point in the lecture, I had a difficult time suppressing a smile and suddenly felt the watchful stare of the second policewoman on me. I immediately became paranoid, "What if they've read my journal? What if they monitor it and I've already 'said too much' and this whole lecture is a rouse to help them ferret out my bad behavior or at least some sort of confession on my part?" The more I thought about it, the more I started to secretly shudder. My palms went clammy and my face started to glisten with nervous perspiration. I wished the policewoman would just look away so I could get a moment of relief and think about my escape without her watching my every move. I couldn't stand it any longer and stole a surreptitious glance: Her face was pointed defiantly in my direction, eyes closed, mouth slightly open and head lolling on the verge of dropping to her chest. I laugh now to remember it. Sort of.
Almost everything the speaking policewoman warned us against has already been performed by one of my fellow foreigners and probably last weekend, if not every weekend. I'm even guilty of staying out past 10pm and drinking in public. Robyn's been recruiting foreigners for positions in Wuhan for three or four years now and she's not had major security problems with any of her recruits so I don't fear being locked up anytime soon, but I do plan on being a little safer than maybe before, if only to prevent another opportunity for Summer to create a power point presentation and for the silent policewoman to prey upon me with her Chinese sleeping torture technique. Eesh, I'll have nightmares, I know.
