喝醉的中国人 (Drunken Chinese People)

The official word for ‘drunk’ in Chinese is ‘he zui.’  Several weeks ago I asked my tutor for other, less formal terms.  Plastered?  Smashed?  Wasted?

“No,” she answered.  “Just ‘he zui’.”

I find this dearth of synonyms confusing (and probably not truthful), especially considering how frequently I seem to be surrounded by drunken Chinese people.  At the fancy dinner party I went to last week, one woman became loud and raucous after several shots of baijiu, Chinese hard liquor.  Her performance was nothing, though, compared to the man who started a fight and then collapsed on the floor of the Latin Music Pub, an establishment whose depressing ambiance was only compounded by the inaccuracy of its name.  Most uncomfortable of all, though, was the man who shared a taxi with me two nights ago.  He was passed out in the backseat, and the driver assured me that he wouldn’t mind if we took a little side trip to drop me off at my apartment.  The drunken man’s friends, however, caught us before we left, and had a loud argument with the driver while their girlfriends staggered around in their high heels and threatened to toss their cookies all over the hood of the car.

漫谈性交 （A Casual Talk about Sexual Intercourse)

Yesterday six of my friends and I woke up before sunrise, rode a train for two hours, and then hired a black taxi in order to visit Tongli, a pretty canal town outside of Suzhou and current home of the Chinese Sex Museum.  Although tasteful might not be the best word to describe this establishment, several other adjectives come to mind.  Poetic, perhaps, for gracing several exhibits with beautiful captions like:

“There was a wooden penis inside a wooden pillow and it was used by a nun.”  Eclectic would also be appropriate, considering the baffling display of a T-Rex skeleton battling a Stegosaurus skeleton, or maybe desperate, as evidenced by the innocuous looking flautist sculpture that was labeled, simply,
“a musical prostitute,”  and the innocent chair that “two people could have intercourse on.”  Regardless of the truthfulness of the exhibits, a good time was had by all, and it gave us a chance to rest our feet and listen to the birds in a lovely garden surrounded by enormous genitalia.

餐厅 （Cafeteria)

Today I ate lunch at the school cafeteria.  This experience proved to me that, for all the cultural misunderstandings Chinese and American students will continue to encounter for decades to come, we will always have cafeterias in common.  It was set up like a food court at home, where you could choose whatever ‘restaurant’ had the best looking food and then pay with a special student debit card.  The only real difference was the food itself; understandably, it was all Chinese, and it all appeared to have been recently drenched by an oil typhoon (pun!).  I had a broccoli and meatball dish with a bowl of rice, accompanied by an ice-cold glass bottle of freshly packaged yogurt.

我叔叔的衣服 (My Uncle's Clothing)

I think my host father’s ski jacket has improved my relationship with my family.  He lent it to me when he realized that I didn’t have any appropriate cold weather clothes, and it is enormous (in my defense, the average high in Nanjing in December is almost 60 degrees, this has just been an unseasonably freezing winter).  People have grabbed my arm only to end up with a fistful of padding, and I have been known to block doorways.  One time, during a game of charades, a classmate pantomimed an obese person walking into an elevator; “Kevin!” guessed my classmates, correctly.

Since I’m too lazy to put on my blue jeans right after waking up, I tend to go down to eat breakfast in the ski jacket and my soccer shorts.  My calves, shivering in the cold, look like puny little sticks holding up a giant black lollipop.  Whenever my family sees me, they laugh and look at my legs.  “Comfortable?”, they ask.  It’s better than silence.

The picture is the next step in the logical sequence that started with my writing personal blog: a collage featuring pictures of me, and only pictures of me. 

比较好的饭馆 (A Nice Restaurant)

On Friday my family hosted a dinner party at a ‘nice restaurant’ near our apartment.  It was raining outside, but two men in uniforms worked outside in the parking lot, instructing patrons as to how to park their cars without hitting the other Cadillacs and Lexuses.  Upon entering, I didn’t see any tables; instead we were in a bright, silent atrium with a crystal chandelier and white marble floors.  A woman in a thick white fur cape and a red sequin dress led us down a white hall, turned the corner at a recreation of one of Monet’s haystack pictures, and then swept up a black marble staircase, keeping far enough ahead of us so that nobody could step on the long train of her gown.  My parents had reserved a private room.  Plates of fish, sweet potatoes, and other cold specialties were already waiting for us, sitting on a Lazy Susan that turned automatically.

I had a good time.  The guests were an eclectic bunch, including my sister’s flute instructor and a twenty-year old Nanjing University student who speaks no Dutch, halting English, and plans to study business in Holland next year.  Before dinner, my Dad’s best friend (who had already taken me on a tour of Nanjing) asked me to help him translate a business email.  He is a pet supplies salesman, so a lot of the language in the email was specialized, but I was pretty sure I translated it correctly.  I got a little nervous, though, when he told me afterward that his company’s contract with Walmart depended on his interpretation of the message. 

This is a picture of me at a skewer stand in Shangri-La.  I think I was wearing the exact same clothing.

感恩节(Thanksgiving)

Yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving.  Weeks ago our program coordinator arranged a traditional American meal at a German beer garden down the street, so as the sun went down on Thursday afternoon we all emerged from the dormitory with our nicest clothes on and hiked down the street to the restaurant.  The meal was surprisingly authentic.  The only exceptions were, as I explained to my Chinese teacher (who was sitting beside me), that the cranberry sauce was actually and jam and that the bowls of kiwis were not entirely necessary.  The background music was Michael Jackson; after dinner we tried to leave, but they tempted us with glasses of free Tang and Sprite and encouraged/forced us to stay and listen to a cover band perform renditions of the Beatles, ABBA, and Rihanna.

This is a picture of my class.  My only white classmate is missing.

In the spirit of the holiday, I’m thankful for this opportunity to study abroad, I’m thankful for all my friends at home that I’ll be able to see in a month, and I’m thankful for my family (who I got to skype with for an hour and half today).   

新的家教 (New Tutor)

Today I bought a comforter for my mother.  I found it in a five-story department store, and while a group of four saleswomen labored to assemble it I sat down nearby and pulled out my textbook to do some homework.  Another employee, curious about what the strange foreigner was up to now, peered over my shoulder; I was working on a multiple choice exercise, and as I circled the answer for the first question she cheered “Correct!” 

We struck up a conversation.  She asked me about life at a prestigious school like Nanjing University, and I asked her the answers for all my homework questions.  As I left, I heard her joking with her coworkers.  Nanjing University must be easier than everything thinks, she said – she had finished that assignment in no time at all.