M A C V A Y S I A

Yes, I’m still here! As you can see, I’ve been blogging less these days. One reason is that I haven’t had much time for blogging. Another reason is that I haven’t really been in the mood to blog. Of course, I’ll still be sharing my stories, observations, etc. I’ll still write, because I love to write. But lately I’ve been writing more in my private journal—which I’ve been keeping since 1998—and less in my public one. I’ve been writing more about stuff that’s on my mind than stuff that might be entertaining to others. Maybe what’s on my mind would be very entertaining to others, I don’t know. Looking back at my old journal entries has certainly been entertaining for me. It’s interesting to see how I was, and how I’ve changed—and in some ways not changed at all—since back then. I’ve been writing in that journal more often lately because now that I’ve got a baby on the way I’ve got some things to work out, some priorities to put in order.

So what’s new? Well let’s see…well, yesterday we took the 862B to the last stop and met up with our friend Trevor, who took us to a nearby hospital for a checkup. The hospital is deep in the heart of Guangzhou, in an area that Trevor says was quite unsafe for tourists and just about everyone else until only about a year ago. Guangzhou’s quite a place, the heart of the wealthiest province in China; the place people flock to from all corners of the country to make it big. Unfortunately only a few hit the big time while the rest hit the skids. Most of them simply blend into the grimy streets and fade away; others put up a fight and resort to petty crime. Happens everywhere I guess. I was about to go into a rant about how this country is more capitalist than America—the ‘pay or die’ health care system is one of the big reasons we’ll never settle here—but it’s the weekend and I’m not in the mood for negativity. Anyway, we walked past a nine-storey wholesale shoe market that cost about RMB 20 billion (someone hit the big time!) and finally reached the hospital, the name of which I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s a specialist hospital for women and children.

We were supposed to go for this checkup last weekend but couldn’t because the water at our college was off again and we hadn’t had a shower in two days. The water problem appears to be getting worse and we sometimes find ourselves waiting like dogs at breakfast for the water to come back on so we can get cleaned up before it goes off again. Sometimes we have water all day; other days it comes and goes; sometimes it just goes. Some of the student dormitories only have water for two hours a day: one hour of hot, one of cold. Sometimes, when the water supply is unaffected and the pressure strong, we have no electricity. When we woke up Friday morning the power was off and it didn’t come back on until that evening. We had a lovely candlelit dinner at our favourite restaurant in the city, where, surprisingly, the power was also off…but that was still the outskirts I guess, not in the city centre, where it seems every skyscraper is covered with neon billboards that flash blindingly bright all night and an outage of even a minute would cause heads to roll.

But I digress. Registration at the hospital yesterday was way cheaper than what we’d paid at Southern hospital a month before, but as we sat in the waiting room I almost began to wish we could have paid a lot here too (Southern was really crowded the day we went but I paid a couple hundred extra and suddenly we were VIPs, jumping the line and getting the ultrasound lickety split). Yesterday, however, we waited for a while. We fnally got in to see the doctor and she asked Leen some questions, then she put her on the table and pulled out the doppler so the baby could sing into the microphone. No singing, but we heard the baby’s heartbeat. That made us feel better. Then the doctor said everything seemed OK, and asked Leen to do a blood test (for Down’s Syndrome, etc.) that would cost about RMB 600. That was a littlet better than the RMB 800 we thought it would be, so we went for it.

For the blood test we had to go to the ground floor and wait with all the sick, screaming children and tired, anxious mothers. In almost every direction I looked I saw two things: babies and small children hooked up to saline drips, and babies and small children pissing and/or shitting on the floor. It was tough to see so many sick babies, but I wasn’t so surprised to see kids relieving themselves on the floor. As I’ve mentioned before, seeing things coming out of people’s bodies is pretty commonplace here. I must say, however, one thing I saw yesterday was really cool. They don’t use syringes here to take your blood, but tiny needles attached to tiny little hoses. And the nurse who took Leen’s blood (five vials of it) was pretty good, as she barely left a mark. Leen didn’t even need a band-aid.

After lunch we took the metro to another part of the city, where we were joined by a twelve-year-old girl whose mother is a friend of Trevor’s. Mother wanted daughter to practise her English so daughter (whose name I forget) tagged along with us. Trevor swore she wanted to practise her English but every time we said something to her she just put her hand to her mouth and giggled like…well, like a twelve-year-old girl. We all walked over to One-Link Plaza, a huge wholesale market that leen and I had visited once. It’s quite a place, with all the ‘made in China’ products you can imagine, including some you wouldn’t, like air guns that look exactly like real AK-47s and other assorted toys that would get you shot by a SWAT team. I also found the full-sized antique rifle that is actually a lighter, and this time I pulled the trigger without burning hundreds of hairs and a layer of skin from my forearm (although I did get a little scare from a mobile phone that is actually a lighter). I also managed to walk out of that market yesterday without cutting any fingers on the various highly illegal knives that can be found there. And I managed to walk out of there without spending a lot of money. So this was definitely a better visit than the last one.

After our escape from the wholesale market we parted ways with Trevor and his giggly friend (who actually did speak a few words of English in between giggles) and took a taxi to the Garden Hotel, then found a hair salon nearby and both got our hair cut. There’s a barber shop on the college campus but I was advised that it’s under new management and not even the local teachers will go there now. One of the college staff has a barber shop too (or ‘hair house’ as he calls it) and I could get a free cut there, but sometimes I like paying a bit extra for a good cut. At that place near the Garden Hotel we each got a wash (actually they washed my hair about four times and spent at least fifteen minutes massaging my head and neck) and a decent cut for RMB 55. Money well spent. Speaking of money well spent, we followed up with a big fat meal at Subway. Then we took the 862B back to the college and relaxed for the rest of the evening.

Things are OK at work. I’m busy as usual, both with classes and with the ever-present miscommunication and politics. But lately things have been going quite well. I achieved a victory of sorts that makes me think I might be making some progress here. One of my teachers was doing his own thing, teaching his own lessons without following the syllabus whatsoever. No matter which class he was supposed to be teaching—grammar, listening, speaking, reading, or writing—he would just teach the students idioms, many of which are either slightly dodgy, completely incorrect, or both. He calls his method ‘Passion English’ and thinks the students will learn more easily if they remember words that have similar sounds such as bra and breast. And he ties such words together in ways that really stretch the imagination but mostly just test my patience. In fact, it seems he can’t get through a lesson without making some joke about women or bodily functions. For example, I observed his class a couple of weeks ago and shook my head as he taught the students that toilet tissue is called shit paper. He also taught them to say that someone who is lying is ‘full of shit’, which is true but not something we should be teaching the students.

Last semester I gave him plenty of warnings but he happily ignored them because he’s got some kind of special status here (for example, he’s a ‘professor’ and the college has to have a certain number of professors). A couple of weeks ago I made another official complaint and said I didn’t necessarily need them to fire him, I just didn’t want him teaching classes in my programme. The deans discussed it and told me a few days later that they couldn’t even do that, because they didn’t want to make him angry or do anything that would harm his reputation. The president of this college is one of his students at the school’s adult institute in the city, and he and the other deans consider the guy to be our best teacher, despite the fact that the head of the department of foreign languages (that would be me) considers him to be the worst of the twenty teachers in the department. Sure, his enthusiasm and pacing are great, and the students love him. But he’s not teaching them anything.

So I spoke with someone else, who spoke with the guy, and we found a solution. The teacher in question came up to me in the teachers’ room last week and announced in front of everyone present that he would no longer be teaching classes in my programme. He would begin following a textbook, but not in my classes. And that was it. I got what I wanted, and he got to save face, something that is always a huge consideration here in China.

Not much else has been happening. Oh, I found out about another interesting local remedy. A Malaysian teacher in my department was stung by a bee while hanging out her clothes and when she went to the campus clinic she was told she should put breast milk on the sting. She wandered around the campus for a while until she found a woman with a baby and asked her, but the woman said her baby hadn’t been breastfed for the past ten days. But she gave it a good try and managed to squeeze out a single drop, which the teacher rubbed on the sting. She swears it helped.

So that’s some of what’s been going on with us. Nothing major, just the usual fun and frolic. Now it’s Sunday afternoon and we’re being quite lazy. Looking forward to another week of fun and frolic. Maybe I’ll tell you about some of that too.