The Fast State Nine Number Six

An unexpected perk came to me the other weekend as I was whiling away my days here in China with the opiates of World of Warcraft and aimless philosophizing. This perk came by way of Jackson, who being on infinitely more intimate terms with the locals than I, had been offered a job of sorts by the owner of a local bar. Jackson didn't want this job, for reasons that I forget but possibly had to do with the 'details' as provided by the bar owner: it was far away from Xuchang, would take two days and a night, and that it was very important for a white person to come. These being the terms Jackson outlined to me as he looked for a replacement in order to do right by his friend, I knew that I couldn't say no to such a mysterious and likely inconvenient offer. Although I was quite enjoying my totally apathetic days, opportunities like this are frankly my raison d'etre for being in China at all, and my growing laziness was overthrown. I was signed up immediately, and I made a point to clarify as few details as possible for fear of talking myself out of it.
This journey, which it turned out was to the northern neighboring province of Hebei (Beijing's province), took about four hours during which I had the pleasure of being seated in the back of a sedan between two largish Chinese men who had clearly enjoyed several Chinese hot dogs for breakfast, and must have somehow surreptitiously continued to enjoy them throughout trip as accounted by the persistently fresh nature of the odor. The man who sat to the left of me was the heavier of the two and was clearly somewhat well-off as he owned a GPS unit that was occasionally consulted unsuccessfully. I know this, because the man had the unwavering belief that if the unit was in some way failing his expectations, he would shake it vigorously as if it were an Etch-a-sketch, which was often.
Arriving at Hebei, I inadvertently learned that the purpose of our trip was to sell herbicides and other chemicals to local farmers at a meeting the next morning using our hotel's large dining room. After being told this, I was let free to wander the city of Handan, which I quite enjoyed up until I made the (obvious in retrospect) mistake of filming some blowing sand. Currently my camera is still being cleaned out, and hope is maintained that it will be fixed before I leave on my trip. That night, though, meaning ten o'clock as everyone prepared for bed, I was told that I was to give a speech the next morning. I was then shown two pages of speech written entirely in Chinese. When I told them that I could not actually read Chinese fluently, they were briefly concerned, but then I was told not to worry because nobody in the audience (and they themselves, in reality) could understand any English. The plan developed that I was to give a speech in English, and one of the fellows I had ridden up there with would 'translate' what I was saying by reading the company-provided speech. This was fine with me, and became even more so after a short attempt to discover the actual nature of the Chinese speech (I was apparently a farmer from America, and I loved their herbicides very much, also my mother used them) and decided to give a speech that solely entertained myself. After all, if the audience wasn't going to understand what I was saying, they were going to be paying attention to how I was saying it, and so I had better be saying it with passion. With conviction! Luckily for the herbicidal company, and especially luckily for the audience of farmers that day, I have always had a fondness for (and a tendency towards) inflammatory religious rhetoric. What follows is the rough text of the speech I delivered that day to around a hundred and fifty southern Hebei farmers:

'Good morning, friends and colleagues.

As many of you know, my name is Phil Orlandini, and I am extremely pleased to be with you here today representing the proud American consumer.

[Chinese name of company and product, pronounced very slowly and loudly with exaggerated tones] is a product without equal. Famous both in China and all the world, the Fast State Nine Number Six is an incredible technological breakthrough, surpassing all previous accomplishments in the field of herbicide.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you today as one who has seen the Light of Fast State Nine Number Six, yea even as to a messenger unto thee. Be no longer plagued with the foul locust, weevil, or caterpillar! I tell you now that they shall be culled by divine wrath embodied as the Fast State Nine Number Six! Trust in me, and the foul hordes of thine enemies shall be hurled back into the oblivion from whence they came!

But I sense that some of my brothers and sisters remain in the shadow of doubt. Caution has served you well in the past, but the promised day has come, my brothers and sisters! Your vengeance is nigh, and the weapon of the divine is in your hands! Smite the creeping vermin of the earth! Purge the unholy and many-legged from your verdant fields!

As a humble messenger, I leave you now. There are many flocks that have yet to receive this awesome, nay, olympian gift. But as my departure from you is but a new beginning for me, I adjure you heed this summons to action today and begin your own journeys. Vaya con Dios.'


I managed to more or less stick to this because once I got going halfway through I stood up and stopped paying attention to the Chinese speech being read into the microphone next to me. Aside from the heavy drinking that occurs with the majority of male interaction in China, that pretty much capped off the weekend for me. Everyone came by and told me how impressed they were with my volume, shouting across the entire room like that, and my hosts seemed pleased that I had made an effort. After double checking to make sure that nobody had understood a word that I had said, I relaxed and enjoyed the Hebei lunch, which was much better than what I was used to in Xuchang.

Sometimes an adventure can sneak up on you, even when you've resolved yourself to boredom in your final days.

The retrospective blog post

Or rather, the retrospective blog post that I WAS going to, and now am not. Instead, head over to my good friend Constantine's blog and read the interview that she was kind enough to conduct with me about my time here!

http://constantineintokyo.com/2010/05/24/midnight-runner-one-man%E2%80%99s-experience-teaching-english-in-rural-china/

She's a pro at this, and I was drunk, so overall it makes for some decent reading.

Five thousand miles overland

The end is nigh!

As I'm sure all five you who read this have noticed, there have been some definite phases to my time here in Henan. Not all, unfortunately, were conducive to writing a witty and entertaining blog, as was my goal in establishing this. However! This time has passed, and I will tell you why.

Now is the time for optimism, largely because I have somehow managed to survive the majority of this second semester, and have amazing, AMAZING plans for my exit from Asia. I never really re-read my own posts, so I don't know if I mentioned this before, but after the incident in which I was fired and almost deported for daring to question the various beliefs held by my students regarding such topics as the ethnicity and political allegiance of Genghis Khan, the bondage in which all Taiwanese are kept, and for using the Great Helmsman as part of a logical argument when discussing whether one person was ever worth more than another - after that episode, my work ethic went way, way up. I was terrified, I couldn't afford to fly myself home! And guilty! I knew that, unrepentant as I might be regarding my delight in aggravating others with the Socratic method, I wasn't a very good teacher. So, after my re-assigning, I resolved to try my very best to learn how to become the teacher that these kids deserved. And I did, too! I actually tried to work for a living for the month that I had (all this happened right near the end of the semester, so I only had a little while with my new students). I made lesson plans, I tried to be entertaining, I read books and many internet articles about how to be a real teacher. By the end of that semester, I felt pretty good that I had managed to go from showing up in class and spending the first twenty minutes hemming and hawing until simply picking a random topic and assigning discussions on it, to using power points and including vocabulary.

And you know what happened when I turned in all of my actually graded final grades? My co-teacher told me that the grades were too high, and that only bell curves were acceptable. Maybe some of you are more familiar with how things are done in the American school system than I am, but I was incensed by this. I had assigned the grades that these kids had earned, and a bell curve would totally screw over most of my students, which it did. After that, I realized that aside from a few bleeding sores that shouldn't be prodded, the system that I was participating in was largely insensate to anything that I did. The students didn't care about the class, and they would rather do anything else than attend it. The school clearly didn't care if the students learned anything (this was made even more obvious several months after, when I took the CET-6 for fun and to see just how thouroughly these kids were tested on English - see my other post about Chinese standard tests for an idea of what the CET was like), so why the hell should I care either?

This was the attitude that began my second semester. The first thing I did was to tell all of my classes that attendance would never be a factor in their grades, which was the truth as far as I could tell, since the school didn't expect any kind of accuracy in grading, it just wanted its bell curve and no students complaining to it. Then, I told the students that their grades would be based entirely on 'how hard they tried', and that there would be no tests or assignments of any kind. My theory, I explained, was that the point of my class was assisted English practice, and so that was what we were going to do. Then, I also made them re-arrange all of their classes with me so that I would never have to wake up earlier than 9am, and also had four day weekends every week.

This tactic was a success, and is currently a success, because my attendance dropped off by about 90% in the second week, and now, one month out from the end of the semester, I am averaging one or two students showing up per class. This makes my life, and I'd like to think, their lives, much easier and more productive. I figure that since I'm a terrible teacher, and not willing to force myself to become a good teacher, the less time of theirs that I waste on my inept presentations and bungled activities, the better for everyone. They seem to agree, because this whole year I have gotten away with this without a murmur of suspicion from my employers, who are presumably unaware of the fact that my average class size is one and half, and that my average class length is around thirty minutes, usually revolving around walking with the student to get lunch or buy snacks, after which I go home. If I manage to get away with this for the entire semester, it will be by far the biggest con of a job that I have ever even heard of (outside of nepotism-based employment, I guess), and quite frankly the last one that I ever want to participate in. I'm so bored, you see! I'm starting to look forward to my classes as a break from having SO MUCH free time in which there is nothing to do! Well, that's not the only downside, if it even is a downside, it's the paranoia that's really getting to me these days. If anyone had even the slightest idea how it is that I do my job here, I have no doubt that not only would they fire me but they'd run me out of this town so fast that I wouldn't even have time to grab my fake new Mona Lisa hanging in my bedroom.

And on to the next topic, this paranoia is compounded by the fact that I actually want to stay until the end of my contract now! I have spent some time thinking about how it was that I actually wanted to leave, considering that I'll be free of my 'obligations' here easily two or three weeks before my residency permit expires, and what started as a vague desire to take a long train journey has become something truly epic. Having an unhealthy predisposition for hostile landscapes, and an inexplicable desire to spend multiple days on a chinese train, I found that I could combine the two into a trip to Xinjiang, China's far north-west province. At first, it was just a train ride from here to there, with half of my time being spent on the trains just covering the vast distances required. Then, I saw that Mongolia and Xinjiang share quite a bit of border, and I remembered that Mongolia loves Americans so much that we don't even need visas to stay in their country for up to 30 days. So, I figured that I could stay in Xinjiang up until the last day allowed by my residency permit, and then hop the border over into Mongolia and kick around there for a week or two before flying back to the States from Ulaanbaatar, the capital and location of half of the country's population.

But then, I realized that getting my legal time in China extended was pretty cheap, and the plan expanded to include about double the time in Xinjiang so that I could travel around the entire rim of the Taklamakan desert by bus and car, seeing the many ancient ruins of the silk road civilizations as well as the fast-fading Uighur culture. As I priced out the costs of travelling by bus and car, and staying in decidedly non-touristy cities, I realized that the less people wanted to go somewhere, the cheaper it was for me, and that practically nobody wanted to go where I wanted to go. So, my time commitment went up, and my daily costs went down - and then I read that Mongolia is the number one country in the world for camping and hitchhiking.

So currently, the plan stands as thus: Spend two to three weeks in Xinjiang, traveling around the driest and hottest desert in Eurasia during the hottest month of the year, and then attempt to cross the China-Mongolia border at a point that is 'rumored' to have allowed one or two foreigners through in the past three years, but is primarily crossed only by trucks bearing Chinese goods or oil from the Xinjiang oilfields. Once I've successfully charmed/bribed/annoyed my way through over the border, I'll be three hundred miles south across the Altai Mountain range from the nearest Mongolian city of 90,000 people, Khovd. Khovd is almost 1,600 miles from Ulaanbataar, and according to Wikipedia, 'is considered remote even for Mongolian standards.' The middle of nowhere for the most sparsely populated country in the world. Once I make to this part of the plan, I'll have about twenty days or so to make my way to the capital in order to catch my flight on time. I have no idea what will occur during this time period, and I am making no plans, but I am bringing a fair amount of cash, a tent, a sleeping bag, and things like vodka, cigarettes, and candy in order to make friends.

So, you can see that I have a lot to be excited about these days, and pretty much spend all of my copious free time reading about Xinjiang or Mongolia, learning Mongolian and Cyrillic from the 1993 Peace Corps language handbook, and watching Frasier. Since I'm saving money as much as possible until this awesome, awesome trip, probably nothing exciting will happen between now and probably a week after I get back to America and have time to write about what happened. Plus, I won't shave until I get home! I have this image in my head that showing off the luxurious neck beard that my Dutch genetics have blessed me with will make me friends among the Muslims in Xinijang. While this is normally a rule for me, I get the especially strong feeling that I'll need to ingratiate myself to as many strangers as possible in order for me to survive this journey without a good deal of suffering at the hands of my own clueless foolhardiness.

Mood Swings and Tiger Stripes

In the last couple of days, I've been pretty moody. Considering the past five months have been the most existential and imbalanced of my whole life, that's saying something. In terms of notable events, it all started with a sudden resurgence of interest in taking advantage of my location due to the fact that it both became financially feasible for me to pay for a ticket home, and the ever-growing threat (partially because I am deliberately provoking it, in small steps) of being fired once again. With the surety that as soon as next week (relatively speaking from about a week ago), I could be fired and have to head home. While this thought made me quite happy, it also reminded me that for most of the time I have lived here in Xuchang, I haven't really acquired the stories that I expected from myself. Sure, crazy shit happens all the time because this is rural china, but that doesn't count. That's daily life! That doesn't make for good stories, I needed to get out and start really doing some shit. This trend in extremely impatient adventurism resulted in an impromptu trip to Luoyang and the famous Shaolin Temple, which I will go into detail on at some other point. Suffice it to say for now that the famous Shaolin Temple is currently a modern Chinese Disneyland, full of ten foot plasma screens, blaring music, and extended go-carts to ferry about the fat Chinese tourists that can't handle the slightly inclined half-mile complex. It was worth going, because now I've been to the Shaolin Temple.
Anyways, I told you that story so I could tell you this story: I've never had long hair, which I define as past my eyes. Thanks to my total lack of trust in chinese competency in general, and observable disgust with every chinese hairstyle that I see parading around a foot underneath my own, I hadn't gotten around to getting a haircut for around four months. My hair was in danger of becoming actually long, with my vision being constantly obscured and irritated by dangling locks. Possessed with my new gung-ho drive to make whatever time I had left in China as memorable as possible, I decided that something would finally be done about these no doubt gorgeous and luxuriant but highly aggravating and inconvenient curls. I got a great suggestion from Julie that I simply dye it all some insane color, which suited my mood perfectly. I was in China, everyone already looked at me like I was a freak, and I might as well do something interesting since I wasn't in danger of alienating anyone I cared about. Once arriving at the hair 'salon', I ended up changing my mind about that a bit, since it occurred to me that my employers might very well fire me for one last step over that boundary of professionalism that I have ridden roughshod every day since my first week. Having learned from Kelly that the dying of hair usually involves bleaching the hair thoroughly first, I decided to just do that part first, and then come back later for the color once I had gauged my ability to get away with it. Also in consideration was the maintenance of my escape fund, which somewhat limited how extravagant I could make this project. This is how I looked when I arrived:



Note unruly, unkempt, beast-like hair.This is how I was looking after the first treatment, which involved much painful combing:



I kept this for about two days, and then my moodiness kicked in again and I swung the opposite direction from optimism. I got pretty upset, for reasons only vaguely relating to the hair, and decided that by God, if I couldn't solve my problems then at least I could make drastic changes to something in order to feel better. As the bleaching (predictably) did horrible things to my hair, making it all clingy and spiderweb-y, in addition to still being unmanageably long, I decided that I was going to get rid of it all. I had kind of wanted to anyways.

And so here I am, with the longest hair I've ever had, and a horrible, horrible bleach job.

It was not without it's zaniness, but I couldn't take having that shit fall into my eyes any more.


So, after borrowing Indy's shaver, change was done upon the world, and I felt better. I kept all the hair, in a garbage bag, and something amusing is going to befall somebody I know with it. No specific ideas yet, but there was too much gold-yellow hair sitting on my bathroom floor to let go to waste.

The end result will be with me for a while since I'm not going to actually shave it. I am quite excited for the prospect of my hair growing back out with weird little tips of orange-gold!

You can see the mottled, tiger-stripey quality of the bleaching, but I think it looks cool. Also, I had just taken a shower and it's decided to be hot in Henan lately. Also, it was like 1 am, after an intense period of time, when this all went down, which is why the weird stare and state of immoderate undress.


So, that's how my experiment with long, bleached hair went. And you know, I really did feel much better afterwards.