Faith restored
When you live in China and you have problems with Chinese culture or bureaucracy, the best help you can ask for is from a Chinese friend. I am so lucky to count Robyn as my friend here in China. She is honest, she is patient, she is knowledgeable, she is understanding of the Western mentality, and she’s seen it all before.
Yesterday, during the exercise challenge, Eileen and I bumped into Robyn, or I should say we jumped into Robyn arriving here at the branch school to pick up her nephew. She and I promptly made plans to get pedicures and manicures this evening around 8pm. I proceeded to have my horrible encounter with the Kindergarten office staff and came home and wrote about it. Whoever said that writing soothes the soul didn’t think very carefully about the fact that you’re practically reliving each maddening detail of a moment in time and needless to say, I was no more calm when I finished posting earlier this evening than when the experience happened.
I finished my post in a huff, donned a coat – it is getting chilly in the mornings and evenings here in Wuhan – and I left the frat to meet Robyn at the supermarket-McDonald’s-dance complex that seems to be the center of my community on weeknights and the weekends. It is pitch dark as soon as the sun goes down in the neighborhood because we are protected from the street by very tall condos and the street leading to the entrance to the Baoan Hua Yuan (Baoan Gardens community) is lined with still-leafy trees. There aren’t street lights and so I was walking along, secretly fuming and wondering how to approach the subject with Mr. Ye. I hadn’t gone more than a block or so when I heard a small voice reciting, “a kite, a kite, kite, KITE, K-ITE, KI-TUH” and I was soon passing the little voice and his mother. He made a noise to denote that he was through reciting and she gently pressed him to continue. I’m teaching this word along with “car”, “computer”, “doll”, “ball”, “balloon”, “football”, “aeroplane”, “boat” and “bicycle” to my 1st graders and so I assumed the little boy was a student here at the branch school. All three school are teaching from the same book – Chatterbox – and all three schools are on the same schedule for teaching units.
As I passed the boy and his mother, I cheerfully called out from the darkness, “Very nice work!” To which the little boy said, not skipping a beat, “Thank you!” I couldn’t stop smiling on my way to meet Robyn. Here I was, ready to write off China and the smallest gesture was made to remind me of my insanity and to pull me back to earth, as if my kite-of-crazy had lost it’s wind.
I think the scene was a salient foreshadowing of things to come. This mother wants her son to learn English so that he can speak to foreigners and potentially have a wider future because of that skill. And here they were, walking home from the supermarket when BAM, the little boy’s practicing is praised by a foreigner her son has never seen before. Kind of crazy, if the think about it. And what’s more, later this evening, I ran into another student from the branch school and had a lovely three sentence conversation with her, though I think her foreign teacher is dropping the ball because she didn’t know “balloon” or how to answer the question, “What’s your name?” in English.
I continued on and made it to the supermarket by 7:40pm. I was twenty minutes early and the dancing was in full swing. Wanting to jot down a thought I had while walking to the supermarket, I entered with the intention of buying a pen and paper, but couldn’t bring myself to add to my already enormous supply of both. I returned to the dancing and was mesmerized by the group of women leaders. The huge courtyard in front of the supermarket and McDonald’s is filled with at least one hundred women each night and morning, dancing to mostly traditional Chinese music with one or two leaders who stand on a “stage” made up of the entrance steps to the supermarket. I watched several dances and found myself wanting to know more and more about the women moving fluidly to songs about the mysteries of the ancient Tang Dynasty. I was lost in deep thought when Robyn tapped me on the shoulder. And then, all of my bile from the Kindergarten experience and growing frustrations with the school and Season came flying forth and got all over Robyn.
As she told me once I was finished venting and complaining, she’s heard it all and I’m not the first to make these complaints. But what I love about Robyn is her candor. She told me that she had been under the impression that I didn’t have a very strong American way of thinking, but that, after the half an hour of venting, she saw that she had been mistaken. She reminded me that it was extremely unusual for an employer to reimburse money for a fake yi bai kuai and that I should consider myself lucky. We went back and forth for a while about expectations and getting to what was really bothering me when Robyn broke it down for me: “Lillis, you forget that you’re in a Communist country. You say that you’re upset when your plans are affected by the school’s decision to rearrange schedules, etc, but the school sees you as belonging to its cause and its organization. Therefore, the school expects you to change your plans for the good of the organization. Because you have a job, your time is no longer yours – it belongs to the school, and the school’s time and energy and money belong to the state, so, essentially, the school sees you as belonging to the state and you wouldn’t dare tell the state that you want reimbursement for a fake 100 kuai that it supposedly gave you…”….and on and on. And you may now find me completely dense, but I had completely forgotten this, that I was in a Communist country and that that means I no longer have the personal right to be affronted, embarrassed, angry, or anything else I felt today. However, as a Westerner and as a visitor to China, I will often react with a Western mentality and this is what Robyn’s final point was: the most difficult part of running a business that brings foreigners to China is trying to explain culture. And to make a long story short, Robyn managed to turn my terrible day upside down, so much so, that when I left her I was pink with happiness and forgiving of the whole situation. I do plan on writing to Mr. Ye to inform him of the occurrence so that he can maybe tell future foreign teachers to be careful and always on the lookout for counterfeit money.
After Robyn gave me a gentle but firm dose of reality, we went to the spa we’ve been meaning to visit for weeks now and I got my nails done while Robyn had a relaxing facial. The girl doing my nails and her friend across from her were both quite interesting looking – not typically Chinese, in my mind, and listening to their gossip and chatter, though I didn’t know what they were saying, was comforting in a strange kind of way. I like being reminded that not everything is Communistically run in China. You can find an amazing manicure and piece of mind right around the corner. When it came time to pay my bill, I took out my reimbursed yi bai kuai and held my breath as the cashier analyzed its authenticity.
