On the seventh, when I was scheduled to have my modeling photo-shoot, I went outside my apartment to meet the girl and she immediately apologized profusely saying that we were unable to take the photos on that day because of the extremely bad weather. I looked around, I looked up, then I scratched my head. The weather was warm and the sun was shining down out of a clear blue sky (albeit with the normal smog). I was about to ask what she meant about terrible weather when I was slammed in the face with an extremely heavy wind. Wind by itself isn't really a problem for taking photos, but in Zhengzhou, wind brings massive flying dust clouds of dirt and grit. I narrowed my eyes against the blast and felt my skin being scoured. I had to agree with her then; the weather was indeed unsuitable for an outdoor photo session.
Instead, she insisted on taking me out to buy me things. I told her I could buy things for myself, but she had her goal set. She had made up her mind to buy me things before I had come out of my apartment. She took me to the supermarket and told me to try a bunch of junk food snacks. Having gathered all these things, I brought them all back to my apartment and then we went out for lunch. She paid for lunch too. She also brought me to lunch twice more after that, spending money like it was water (all the restaurants were fairly expensive). I think I had my first encounter with a relatively rich Chinese person.
I'm in a bit of a bind when it comes to paying for other people here. I do insist on paying for other peoples' lunches and dinners too because of my guilt about getting so much free stuff, but my students are having none of it. A couple of days ago, when I insisted on paying for a student's lunch too adamantly, she actually ran away from me - literally running. I ended up eating lunch alone.
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After my first week of class, I realized I had made a fairly dumb mistake. I had given all my students an email address at which they could contact me if they had any questions about the course, but of course I had been thinking like a Canadian - everyone has a computer and an email account right? Well, not in China. Most of my students don't have a computer and as a result they see no reason to have an email account. Instead, they use QQ messenger (something like the Chinese version of MSN or AIM messengers) on their cell phones to keep up with all their friends and pass along important information.
I already had a QQ id number, as I had been corresponding with Chinese people for many months in an ultimately futile effort to learn Chinese well enough before coming to China, so I shared the number with my students. Wow, was that ever an interesting experience. I was hit with an avalanche of requests for becoming my contact (which was expected), but what I hadn't counted on was that my students then shared my number with all their friends too (not just my students). I'm apparently some kind of minor Chinese internet celebrity now. Photos of me are being passed around all over the net. I've been randomly contacted by friends of friends of friends of my students from all over Henan (河南) and even places as far flung as Liaoning (辽宁), Xinjiang (新疆) and Yunnan (云南) provinces.
I really can't handle that level of attention very well, so I frequently set my messenger status to invisible (so I can see who is online but others cannot see if I am online).
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It seems that I should have paid more attention to the workmanship of my bike before buying it. Not that I would have known what to look for, really, but nevertheless it may have saved some trouble. I bought the bike, as you'll recall from my previous post, at a very disreputable little market five minutes walk west of my school.
After that, I used it a couple of times going back and forth from school, but on the third day, as I was on my way to teach, my entire pedal shaft fell off on the left side of the bike. I had to walk to class and ended up being five minutes late. My students told me: "Teacher, we'd appreciate it if you came to class on time." I wryly held up my bicycle's pedal so they could all see it. They weren't impressed. Apparently, Chinese students expect their teachers to follow the unofficial American postal worker's creed of "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds", which is an inscription on the former post office of the James Farley building in New York City, itself derived from a translation of Herodotus' Histories (8.98) referring to the couriers of the Persian Empire. I promised I'd do my best to be on time in future.
After class, the girl who had spent so much money on me (she calls herself Joyce) brought me to the campus bike repair guy. He regarded me silently, with a piercing glare, then abruptly took my bike and gave the missing pedal a quick look. With a derisive grunt, he snorted, spat out some phlegm, then rooted around in his repair kit for a minute. This guy is the real deal migrant worker type. He looked like a rough man with a hard life. Despite his filthiness and gritty demeanour, I found myself admiring his skills as he deftly pulled out a new part and screwed and hammered my pedal back into place. The price tag for this service, new part and all? 1 yuan (15 cents). I would have gladly paid ten times that amount (and would have paid maybe 100 times that amount in Canada), but I guess he's catering to students on a limited budget.
I had more problems with the bike later, as you'll read further on, but I have had no problems with this man's repairs.
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One of the more interesting things I have done is to watch my students various intramural basketball playoff games. I have 4 classes of about 90 students each, but each of my classes is actually three classes of 30 students each combined into one (so I actually have 12 classes combined into 4). Each of these groups of thirty students has a basketball team. I couldn't attend all the games, but I did attend three of them. The first team I went to watch had disqualified themselves from the playoffs because they used players that were not in their own class.
The next two games I watched were one of the semi-finals (which my students won) and the finals. The finals were a big deal. Both teams had my students in them, but I had been invited there by the supporters of only one of the teams, called 国二 (guo er), which is the name of their class.
Unlike in English, the Chinese seem to have only one cheer, which all sides repeat over and over again at a really high volume. They say the name of their team, followed by the cheer: 国二，加油！(guo er, jia you! guo er, add oil! This is roughly equivalent to saying "add oil to the fire to make it burn more strongly"). Their cheering of 加油！加油！加油！is so deafeningly loud that I can hear it easily through the walls of my apartment about 400 metres away. The cheer is said by the girls while they watch the boys play.
The girls also do cheerleading, dressing up in matching outfits and doing dances for the crowd. However, I have to say that their cheerleading efforts are quaint, cute and extremely conservative compared with North American cheerleading. The girls do a little choreographed dance in the middle of the court (no pompoms or acrobatics) and what they wear is childishly cute rather than sexy. Since most of these girls also happen to be very short, I could almost imagine I was watching 10 year-old girls pretending to be cheerleaders. Of course these are twenty year-old girls, and their timid dancing is mostly a result of a conservative patriarchal culture that punishes girls who are too sexual. In fact, most of the girls (if not all) would probably be mortified to be seen wearing the clothes that western cheerleaders wear. The lack of great athletic performance is mostly due to the fact that they have no coaches. There isn't much history for cheerleading here and the lack of experience and athleticism in the performances really makes the performance feel even more childish. The girls all have fun doing it though and everyone's enthusiasm for the game itself is really infectious. It just really made me reflect on how much men's opinions can affect what women do and what they wear in society.
Anyway, 国二 won the game and the school's intramural championship, which was really exciting. Everyone took pictures of the trophy and the players. Then the girls decided I was also worthy of being photographed, so they all started taking photos of me instead of the team. I guess the team figured that if they couldn't beat me, then they had better join me. I now have plenty of pictures of myself holding the basketball trophy with the basketball team standing around me. It really felt like a red carpet moment. I still don't understand these things.
Since the post would be monumentally long if I included everything I've done in the past two weeks, I've split it into three parts. The picture is of one of 国二 with the trophy.
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