Transitions

Some things that surprised me in my first few weeks transitioning from the Middle Kingdom to the Midwest:

I found myself wanting to speak in Mandarin to people...like the lady I almost bumped into at the mall. I started to say 對不起 (dui bu qi) and then caught myself in time to cough out a quick excuse me. And when my sister's friend brought her little girl over to visit, I wanted to tell her how cute she is by saying 你很可愛 (Ni hen ke ai)! But realized that wouldn't make any sense to the American toddler.

When I got lost on the way to Bible study two weeks ago, after driving around fairly aimlessly for 20 minutes, it dawned on me that I could stop and ask for directions. In English! No translation required.

For the first couple of days I felt like people here were driving way too cautiously...obeying traffic lights, not weaving in and out of lanes, not driving on the shoulder, not coming to a dead stop in the middle of the freeway...but having had to now commute to St. Paul from Waconia daily I am back to thinking people here are crazy drivers.

Leaving China

Choosing to leave China was probably the hardest decision I've ever made as I normally do not believe in giving up on things, but no matter what I tried, things were just not getting better. Even so, I am sincerely happy I returned to Shanghai the past six months as I met some really amazing people, got to see old friends, and had many wonderful experiences. Since I got back to Minnesota on Monday, I've been thinking about the things I'm going to miss...and the things I'm not going to miss about living in China. Here is my list so far:

What I'm Going to Miss:

1. My friends
2. Xiao long bao
3. My friends
4. $3.50 Foot massages
5. Spicy chicken hot pot
6. Not having to drive
7. Four day weekends
8. My friends
9. Having time to exercise daily
10. Cheap shoes
11. $1 DVDs
12. My students
13. My friends
14. Crab apples covered with honey on a stick
15. Free massages with $1.50 haircuts
16. Milk tea
17. Regular hot pot
18. Making dumplings
19. My friends
20. Cell Group
21. Shanghai Community Fellowship
22. Office hours with my students
23. My friends
24. Fresh produce easily accessible for sale on the street
25. Roasted chestnuts for sale on the street
26. Free tea at restaurants
27. Learning and speaking Chinese

What I'm NOT Going to Miss:

1. Incessant honking of car horns
2. Risking my life every time I crossed the street
3. Living with rats (on my last night in Shanghai my friend and I witnessed a large rat climbing up the outside of a pipe in the hallway of my apartment. ewwww.)
4. Living with cockroaches
5. Living in a building with rotting walls on the verge of collapsing
6. Having to wake up an hour early every morning to turn on the water heater to have 5 minutes of hot water for my shower
7. Not having access to a kitchen and not having a kitchen table
8. Being woken up by a salesman shouting about deals through a bullhorn
9. Being woken up by the old lady aerobics tape blaring behind my apartment
10. Being woken up by Fur Elise
11. Sleeping on a rock hard stiff bed
12. Preparing lesson plans on MLA formatting
13. Teaching about logos, pathos, and ethos
14. Not being able to drive
15. Having to store all of my food in the refrigerator so it wouldn't attract rats or bugs
16. People shoving
17. People smoking everywhere (restaurants, subway stations, schools, stores, respiratory wing of the hospital, etc.)
18. Being cold 90% of the time even while sleeping with 3 wool blankets, 1 cotton blanket, socks, a t-shirt, a sweater, long pants, and a scarf
19. Worrying that my lesson plans were too short or too long or boring or difficult to understand or not educational enough
20. Cracked and bleeding skin from the dry air
21. Not getting my mail
22. Having no clothes that fit me well and not being able to buy clothes since I can't even fit into XL sized things.
23. Bargaining
24. Crying every time I go shopping
25. Having chest pain every morning (which miraculously stopped once I returned to Minnesota. Not exactly sure what that was about... maybe had something to do with pollution.)
26. Squat holes
27. Having to carry toilet paper everywhere
28. Being threatened by my employer
29. Working 6 days a week since a teacher's work is never really done (God bless teachers!)
30. People spitting
31. Learning and speaking Chinese

I know there are more for both lists, but I think that's enough for now.

2009 Spring Festival: Homemade Dumplings and Moxibustion

Yesterday was Chinese New Year's Eve or the night before Spring Festival, which is the cultural equivalent to Christmas in America. My wonderful neighbors Jim and Yanzi invited me, Meizi (a friend I've mentioned before in this blog), and Bob, a colleague of ours, over for a night of eating delicious homemade Chinese food and cooking dumplings. Yanzi, with Jim's help, spent the afternoon cooking our feast while Meizi and I ate sunflower seeds and chatted in the living room. Bob stopped by a little before the meal began, bearing a huge box of fruit, a traditional gift given here on holidays.

Here is a picture of Meizi posing next to our table before we sit down to eat.


After we devoured our meal, we chatted for awhile, and then early in the evening Yanzi and Meizi set to preparing the dumplings FROM SCRATCH, which involves lots of chopping, mixing, kneading, and boiling.

Here is a picture of Yanzi and Meizi working on mincing the celery, cabbage, and ginger, which they will add to ground pork and salt to make the dumpling fillings.


After the chopping comes the making of the dumpling casings. Yanzi kneads the dough, pulls it into strips, and then separates the strips into balls, which she then rolls into small circles.


Once the casings are made, we use chopsticks to place a small portion of the celery pork or cabbage pork filling onto each piece of dough. Here Yanzi does this with ease.


And then the casings are pinched shut to seal in all the savory ingredients.


Jim contributes by chopping the garlic for the dipping sauce.


As a 外国人 wai guo ren (foreigner), I feel pretty lucky to get a chance to try my hand at making dumplings. Meizi and Yanzi lend their expertise, telling me that my dumplings look good. I know they are just being nice, but I don't care because I am having such a blast!





The last step: boiling. The dumplings are brought to a boil, then the water is drained and new water is added. This happens three times before the dumplings are fully cooked and ready to be eaten.


And at last we can enjoy!



After feasting on dumplings, we settled down to watch various Spring Festival galas on TV...and do some moxibustion. This TCM technique is supposed to help with circulation and the flow of energy in the body. Yanzi, who studied TCM, insisted that it feels good and is healthy for you, but anything that involves a large flaming wick and big red welts can't be THAT relaxing. I decided to pass...for now.

Simple in Some Ways

Once you get past being able to distinguish the different tones and aside from having to learn thousands of characters, Mandarin is really not that difficult of a language. In many ways it is incredibly practical and straightforward.

For example, the character for day 日(ri) rose out of a drawing of the sun coming up over the horizon. Mountain 山 (shan) also looks like a crude sketch of a peak. And since no new characters can be created, new words must be formed from existing characters. Like when computers were invented, the characters for electronic and brain were combined to name this more recent technology.

And one of my favorite terms is what the Chinese call "everybody." In English, this is such a generic label, showing no relationship, but in Chinese, everybody is said as 大家 or in the Romanization of characters, as "da jia." By themselves, da means big and jia means family. So, "everybody" is a "big family." Isn't that cool? I love the connotation this has. What a great way to think of the populace, not as a mass of people, but as family.

Thoughts

I find my thoughts and feelings fluctuating rapidly. Here are some of the things that have gone through my head in the past hour:

I am gleeful that my computer is working again! I can't believe how after everything else fails slapping something on your palm fixes it.

I should go for a run.

I should go to my office and complete lesson plans.

The Chinese will cook and eat anything...and somehow make it taste good.

I miss cheese.

Does my sweat really smell like sour milk since I eat dairy products?

Everyone is pregnant.

I have been cold for 77 hours straight.

I want to stay in bed all day.

I want to see ALL of China.

I didn't know someone could pleasure an ear. Ear cleaning is a very interesting business.

I can't believe rats are kept at bay in the middle of the night by hearing bad Chinese war TV shows.

I am so glad I have a rat problem rather than a spider problem. That I could not live with.

I am so thankful for my kind neighbors.

Yong qi has expensive massages. What a let down.

Xylitol is good for my teeth. So is tea.

Rats

Last night I was woken by what I'm pretty sure was a rat giving birth in the built-in cupboard above my closet. There were the sounds of muffled shufflings, claws on wood, and high-pierced screeching. I bolted upright in bed and flipped on the lamp next to me, hoping light would protect me from anything about to shoot out from behind a door to gnaw me to death. But apparently light and me shouting "Go away I want to sleep" is no deterrent to rat birth. The noises continued for another 15 minutes and then I just stared at that cupboard for about another hour before finally feeling safe enough to lie down and try to fall asleep again...with the light on of course.

I've heard something scampering around at night for some time now, but have tried to convince myself that it's the rain outside or people moving in to the apartment above me. After last night,though, I can no longer lie to myself. There's no mistaking rat shrieks for new neighbors or inclement weather. Although tonight the cupboard is oddly silent, so maybe it wasn't rat birth I heard, but really rat death.

A trip to the doctor

It'd been about 4 weeks of battling this wretched bronchitis when I finally broke down and decided I needed to go to the doctor. In China, as far as I can tell, they don't have clinics like in the US. Instead, they head straight to a regular hospital. My supervisor's girlfriend and now friend of mine, Meizi, generously offered to take me to get checked out. So I got my supervisor to cover for my last class of the day and met Meizi at the front gate of campus. We hailed a cab and went to the First People's Hospital of Shanghai.

I had the choice of paying an extra $30 to go to the "upscale" western half of the hospital where there are no people lying around on cots and the nurses speak English, but I opted to save my school the money and go where the rest of the population gets care. I still think I made the right decision, but man did it take a lot of time and energy to get a diagnosis. I think we went back and forth between various windows and buildings literally about 20 times. After paying and filling out a name card, we got in to see a doctor in a small room crammed with 12 other people all listening to my complaints. I guess you just get very friendly with all the other patients around you. :o)

The doctor ordered that I get an EKG, CT scan, blood test, and a urinalysis. I'm not quite sure why all of this was needed...and I was so afraid of them taking my blood, I started crying. For one, I'd barely slept the night before, so I was exhausted and just an hour earlier I'd learned that one of my students passed away. Plus, I've read stories about contaminated needles being reused at hospitals here and I'd just read a book detailing the spread of AIDS at blood banks in a nearby province. My poor translator and support, Meizi, had no idea how to react to my tears. I finally calmed down and realized all they were going to do was a finger prick. That I could handle.

Then came the urinalysis. I have finally gotten used to the squat holes here and can use them with ease, but a new dimension is added when one is required to squat and pee in a small plastic cup. And once one successfully pees in the cup, one must pour the urine into a small glass vile and carry that down the hall without a cover to the testing station. I am so embarrassed to say that during the transfer from cup to vile, I spilled. So now I have pee on my pants, oh, and I'm walking around braless from building to building because I had to take mine off for the CT scan. What a day!

Three and a half hours and numerous tests later, the diagnosis of bronchitis was affirmed. I was sent home with a z-pack, some kind of medication used for pneumonia, and orders to rest. Hey, at least after all that I know that my heart is working well and I don't have a blood disorder!