I don’t know if I have it in me to narrate in full everything that happened on Lushan, but I am going to start writing about it and see where I end up. I guess I have been avoiding thinking about it—-the same way I avoid thinking about my middle school years and most of grad school. Things went wrong from the start. I occasionally get mildly panicky in large crowds. I start sweating like a summer ham, my heart rate goes up and I feel an overwhelming desire to be somewhere completely quiet and alone. I don’t belong anywhere near Nanchang train station. There were so many people at the train station all trying to buy their tickets at the last minute from these crappy little kiosks where everyone is smashed up against each other so tightly that you can’t really move. Nightmarish. Amy was in front of me waiting for her turn to buy tickets behind a lady who must have been illiterate because even I could figure out in thirty seconds what it was taking her fifteen minutes to accomplish. Well, the kiosk to my left cleared up so I stepped in front of it. Yes, that is cutting, but after the first five months of my time in China the total lack of anything resembling a line going anywhere respected by anyone has been such a complete joke that I gave up on lines and now I stiff arm grannies, students, and toddlers without remorse. Especially grannies. They are the worst. They will elbow you in the kidneys, blow smoke in your face, and then cackle about it to their friends while you have to wait for the next bus in the rain without an umbrella because you are a stupid foreigner and did not know that there is only one law in China, the Law of the Jungle. I never wanted to punch a senior citizen till I came to China, never even thought about it. Now I dream about it. In any case, apparently the one place they really care about lines in China is the train station and the guy behind me immediately started yelling at me. Now I am not tall but this fellow was way too small to be yelling in my face when I was already not happy about where his hands have been for the last ten minutes. At the last second, Amy pulled me out of the crowd saving this guy from taking the beating of his life and saving me from a Chinese gulag. (Thank you baby!) Eventually we got our tickets and caught our train to Lushan. Stay tuned next week for Lushan Part Two: “Trapped on a Mountain in the Middle of Nowhere and Paying a Lot of Money to be There.”
Thought I would write a little before I go to bed. I am about to move downstairs. Not a huge move, but it will mean there will be one more floor between me and the constant tribal music that is happening upstairs. I really do live one floor down from the Belgian Congo…the horror. Nah, I like everybody here, but the music is relentless and it will be nice not to have to hear it every day. Getting the room ready to move into has taken a while. The previous occupant had clogged the toilet and couldn’t fix it himself. After a week or two of begging and bullying the repairman to come over and fix it I called my FAO and she sent the building manager, Mr. Wu—who is also the main character of my next book Wu’s on First, to take care of it. (I have suspected for a while now that Mr. Wu is actually a hitman posing as a building manager during the day for a while because I have never really seen him do anything that actually involves managing any building anywhere. He mostly chainsmokes and drives around all day doing odd jobs like making sure all the American teachers have the worst possible computers with the slowest possible internet connection for the most possible amount of money. This is really a once a semester task for him which leaves him all the time he needs to assasinate whoever has it coming out there. Just a theory.) In any case, I was shocked that Mr. Wu came over himself to unclog this toilet. Maybe trying to save money on a plumber, mostly I think it was a simple case of hubris—the kind that usually gets a man killed Greek tragedy-style. When he knocked on my door he was already at full swagger, with the perpetually dangling ciggarette at the corner of his mouth, weilding a plunger like an itinerant swordsman, and mumbling at me in his gravelly Nanchang dialect. He had no idea what was waiting for him. A crime had been committed, a crime against both man and nature. I prefaced my explanation of the situation to Mr. Wu with, “Josh did this, not me.” When Mr. Wu gave me a blank look and I followed with, “the tall American guy.” At the very least that means I didn’t do it, and Wu nods like he cares and proceeds to open the bathroom door. Now he cares. He starts coughing immediately and switches to a fencing stance and begins to attempt to jab at the toilet while standing as far away as possible from possibly the grossest thing I have ever seen. And then he starts swearing. Swearing and coughing and smoking and plunging and then more swearing. I had to walk into the other half of the apartment because I almost started laughing and I did not want to get hit with that plunger. About five minutes later Wu was beat. He was covered in sweat and still waving the plunger around and asking me more about who Josh was and what he had done. Did Josh own a pet? Did that pet die? Did Josh flush that pet? Does Josh flush used hand towels, or other various household objects? When did he clog the toilet? (Three months ago.) Does Josh have an older American sister he can introduce him too? What does Josh eat every day? I had to plead ignorance to almost every question and I commiserated wit him the best I could. In the end, Mr. Wu called a plumber over and they had to pull the toilet out of the floor to get it unclogged. Don’t ask me why. I am just giving you the facts here. To this day Josh still claims that it was poo and poo alone that clogged the toilet of my future home.
I was waiting in the rain for Amy at the market street last night and I noticed a shop had blue roses. I had never seen blue roses before, was already thinking about buying Amy flowers, and they matched her coat so I bought a dozen of them. It turns out that about half of my six hundred students all saw me holding the roses in the rain last night because everyone was trying to eat on the market street, instead of going home where they have no heat, and now all of them want to know who the flowers were for because blue roses have a special meaning that I didn’t know about. It turns out Chinese florists have been dyeing white roses blue for centuries because blue roses are incredibly romantic. Amy loved them.
I want to write about all the things in my life here. I will just delete the Facebook post. This has become my journal and I know it is public, but only my family and friends read this thing so I think it is okay to write about some private things every once and awhile. I am now in a serious relationship with a kind-hearted and very beautiful girl named Yaqiong, aka Amy. We have been spending a lot of time together for a while now and a week or two ago (time kind of flies by here) I had a dream about her. We were walking around the Botanical Gardens (the UGA gardens) in spring and we were happy and that is about all I can remember. I don’t know why but I told her about my dream very casually and instead of calling me a weirdo she told me that she thought that it was a wonderful dream. I think from that point on we both just wanted to spend as much time as possible together. My determination not to say anything about my feelings crumbled when the other night, while I was walking her home from a friend’s birthday party, she asked me if I could ever have a serious relationship with a Chinese girl. I told her that if the hypothetical Chinese girl in the question was her then the answer was: definitely. 宝贝，我爱你！
I held practice finals for my Friday class and I ended up learning a lot about them because one of the conversation topics is family. They are very trusting—maybe because I am their teacher. I can’t tell their stories, but maybe I can get them to write down their stories and post them here themselves. They are cool kids.
So going back to this past Sunday, there was no electricity and no power so I wrapped up with a good book and read and napped for the afternoon. At five the power came back on so I cleaned and mopped. Sunday is usually family dinner night but something else was happening and some students came over for dinner instead. It was my turn to cook so I made some pasta with sausage. Eating pasta with chopsticks is always fun. Ceci (left) and Amy loved it even though I burned the sausage. After dinner we played Kinect Adventures till their curfew (most students have curfew check-in at 10:30 and their power gets shut off at eleven.) And that was Sunday night.
Here is an email I just received from one of my seniors:
Our dear teacher John,
You are so dedicated and full of passion when teaching us , which gives us a certain kind of American warmth . Wherever you go ,and what ever you do ,we will miss you .
I will never forget your smiling face to us when leaving.
Best wishes ,and living happily in China .
Yours ,
echo
