Ah, China. This week was a notable one, especially considering the poetic qualities of how it ended and how it began. I shall call this week 'Janus Politic', because I am only familiar enough with the roman god Janus to know that he had two faces, I think.
This week started with my return from a delightful 26-ish hour sojourn to the scenic (read: artificial lakes and poorly constructed late-90s buildings pretending to be historical relics galore) to Kaifeng, the go-to spot in northern Henan for street food. The street food was good, but not as good as the foot massages and sexual liason-themed public bath houses. Of course, that's supposing that there is any other kind, and if reading Dan Savage's column has taught me anything (which it has in fact taught me quite a significant percentage of all things that I know about sex) it's that public bath houses are really only facilitators of hot man on man lovin'. Kaifeng's are no different, which is why we wore shorts to the bath and probably half the reason why we were thrown out even though we had been told staying the night was okay. I digress, though, from the Political theme of this week and this post. Namely, upon my return to sedate and comfortable Xuchang out here in the rural sticks of China, I was informed that due to my prior antagonization of my students into the activity I like to refer to as 'thinking', I was being fired by my department. Now, this was cause for a little concern, as questions like 'when?' were avoided at first, until it became clear (in the chinese sense of the word, which means you imagine/delude yourself of 90% of the concept based on 10% of hints you think you understand) that I was in fact being given a 'test' of one week to see if I could do well with my classes. If I didn't, then I was canned with as little as three days to pack up and vacate the country. If I did well, then ostensibly I would be allowed to continue as before, minus any actual challenging of my students. Although I did not come here to teach, as I have often said before, but in fact to be a parasite/bum and feel bad about it, I felt that my chances of passing this 'test' at this point were pretty slim, so I began to count my blessings that at least this time I had managed to last more than a month and learned valuable lessons along the way. Plus, my home is a nice place, and I'd frankly be pretty happy to go back there. I'd just rather stay here.
So anyways, I get underway with this 'test' week, thinking that although they have probably already had enough of my antics, maybe I could pull something off by guilt tripping all my classes into giving me a good 'grade' for the week. Also I did actually try to become a better teacher, and in the process actually learned quite a bit. Alas, imagine my surprise when on Wednesday my handler called me into her office to tell me that instead of letting me finish the 'test' week, her department (the department overseeing the hiring and keeping of all foreign teachers, not the department of foreign languages that was sick of me) was going to cancel my classes for Thursday. Now, this was all quite perplexing and I'll save you my two-day learning/extrapolation process, but what I think actually happened was that my handler department yanked me from classes, told the languages department that they were pre-emptively firing me on their recommendation, and then re-assigned me to the international business school without telling my formerly employing department, otherwise they might have formally petitioned to have me fired, and then the handler department would have had to dredge up a whole new teacher somewhere just in time for the new semester. So while I gather that I came pretty close to getting fired and sent on my way for being a social malcontent and otherwise corrupter of the youth, I guess like many things with Chinese bureaucracy I will just never know how close exactly.
Tonight, Friday of that week, I ended it with an excellent hot pot dinner (which if any of ya'll reading this come visit me, you will be taken to this because it was the single best dinner I've had in China since arriving at Xuchang) followed by a skeezy bar for a nightcap before we all took different taxis home. However, this skeezy bar proved to be more fun than it's 28 yuan watered-down half-shot of Jack Daniels indicated, as we were treated to a very fit Chinese ladyboy in leather doing a pole dance, followed by drinking with the owner, Mr. Ma, and his older sister which we insisted we refer as 'Red Sister' in the sort of nun sense. At this point the evening took a turn to the better, as we (mostly me, being with Indy and our Chinese friend Vivian) proceeded to down about 300 yuan of Mr. Ma's alcohol according to his menu prices. Mr. Ma went from tipsy to falling down over the course of telling us about his professional photography, to telling me that he had fallen in love with Vivian and my reluctant informing him that Indy was her boyfriend, to Mr. Ma challenging me to a drinking game, losing, and then insisting that I had lost, as well as all of America, and attempting to start a fight with me or possibly Indy via proxy. It was difficult to tell with my command of Chinese, but it was all quite entertaining, and his shots were so incredibly watered down that I could drink them like iced tea, so when Vivian quite urgently told me that we should leave as he stared at her and whispered 'so beautiful', I was pretty amenable. This was followed by the yelling and falling down that I guess was the attempt to start a fight over China/U.S. superiority, but I didn't understand any of it.
Hence, the side of politics in China that I don't like, and gets me fired (almost), and the side of politics that gets me hundreds of yuan of free alcohol as well as a fun night.
