Voices in my Head

After about one month in Baoding, something marvelous happened:

I started talking to myself again.

I mean... non-stop. Like, eh - in a good way. I've never really thought about how often I talk to myself. I just do it. It's kinda like how you (if you're normal and healthy and sane) don't normally think about breathing.

You just do it.

And then, when it's gone, you're dead, so you don't actually know that it's gone.. except for those initial few minutes when you're suffocating and...

Well. This metaphor failed.
Let's forget the metaphor then.

In August of 2010, when I started teaching in Memphis, Tennessee, that little continuous conversation with myself stopped. I just... pretty much stopped talking to myself.

I hope I'm not giving Memphis a bad rep. I don't mean to, if I am. I love Memphis. It's a great city - and, once I stopped teaching there, I fell in love with it. The usually sarcastic "Welcome to Memphis" greeting that people gave me last year.. I would say sincerely. It's completely different from the north, and it's my first experience with the "real world" after college.

Teaching there was really very very very hard.
Yes, some of it had to do with the hard work - but I can work hard. I woke up at 4:00am to get ready for class, I crashed at 8:00pm - exhausted - and I spent my weekends lesson planning.

And while most of my colleagues' problems were with the administration and the school itself (And I agree with them because those problems were... unspeakable), I had another little problem to deal with: I just honestly didn't think very much of myself as a teacher.

I said to a colleague of mine: "I know it's a lot of work, but... I think it'd be a lot easier if I thought my students were actually learning something."

A lot of it was lack of training, yes. Lack of experience. Lack of.. guidance, maybe. But I spent time in the classroom trying very hard to do something that I didn't think I was very good at.

That was hard.
All of that combined together made the voice in my head go... quiet.
And I didn't even realize that it was gone. I was too busy and too tired to notice its absence.

Then BOOM! WHAM! Half a year later, halfway around the world - while I was riding my bike through campus in China - that voice just popped right back in! And I wanted to write again and think and talk to myself.

It was only then that I realized what I had lost, and it was only then that I got excited that I at last had it back.

Part of it's just time. I had time to recover. My life here is pretty relaxed. I can do what I want to do when I want to do it. I've been keeping myself busy, but it's all stuff that I enjoy doing.

Most of it, though, is confidence I think. I actually think I'm... a good teacher here.

And I have my classroom.. wall mate.. in Memphis, who taught me a lot (sometimes overtly, but mostly by example) to thank for that.

So, um... yes. The latest update:
The running conversation in my head has returned!
Huzzah!
If, er, you care. Yep. I'll try and post something more substantial next time.

Until then - Happy Thanksgiving!

The Rest of Day 1

After we saw my place - our first apartment - we were both a little disturbed.

I have to be honest here.
We Americans have a certain image of the world - forgive the generalizations. And when we were confronted with the cloudy skies (It's not always cloudy, but it often is), the dirty streets (Here.. yes. Always is. Almost always is.), and our dark apartments (the flash actually made the apartment look a lot better)... well, we didn't look all that happy.

The part of me that was somewhat imagining a small city in China to look like a smaller version of Hong Kong or Beijing was surprised.

Of course, another part of me - the part that wanted to come to China and the anthropologist part of me - was ecstatic. Yeah. People pour trash into the street gutters?

No problem!

People throw trash everywhere, you see. Leftovers, scrap food, and just... trash... gets dumped onto the sides of the roads by street food vendors. Even some small restaurants dump their trash out in the open. Mostly, they try to pour it down the sewage system, but of course not everything falls through the sewage grates.

Inside restaurants, people throw stuff on the ground. Used napkins, bones, shrimp peels, and whatever it is that people don't want to eat... that gets thrown onto the ground too.

Even at tourist sites, people just casually throw their water bottles over their shoulders into the bush.

One of my students told me that she cried when she first moved to Baoding for university. She took one look - and one sniff - and spent the entire day in tears. "Baoding is really dirty," she said.

Understatement, much?

I get the sense that localers are a little embarrassed by the trash in the streets - at least, when they're talking to foreigners about it. They don't want to say too much... but two months here (that's not a very long time, I know) have shown me that hey! The trash doesn't actually pile up over time. It's always there, but there isn't any more of it.

"I wouldn't throw it on the ground if I didn't know that someone was going to sweep it up," says an American teacher who has taken to heart the When in Rome... thingy.

So yeah. All this trash creates loads and loads and loads and LOADS of jobs, even if it's not particularly efficient.

Just a thought.
AH!
I went on a tangent. Why was I talking about trash?

Right- So that first day, the two people from the foreign affairs office who showed us around noticed the look on our faces (I was grinning maniacally, I think. Why? I don't know). So someone decided to introduce us to one of my neighbors.

Out came Maggie, a 50-some year old American English teacher who has lived and taught in China for the past five (I think?) years. She came out, smiled at us, saw the look on our faces, and immediately proceeded to calm our fears. She's one of those people you get to know without needing to talk to at all - she makes eye contact, smiles a little, and nods in understanding.

Emotional damage control? Check.
Then we needed to move Hannah's luggage up five flight of stairs. Someone made a phone call, and BAM, just like that - we met our second American English teacher.

This really tall expat came into my apartment, where we were all waiting.
He looked around the room.
"We have some new foreign teachers here," one of our leaders said.
And this guy - we'll call him John - looked right past me, extended his hand to shake Hannah's, then relaxed. He was ready to help out with the luggage.

I stood, a little awkwardly. Raised my hand a little bit.

"Oh, uh. Hey. I'm an American teacher," I say.

He looked at me for a second, surprised. And then suddenly - apologetic. OH!

Yeah, that's right. American here! He thought that I was a new employee from the office.

...Yeah.
Actually, all this build-up and introduction of some other American teachers?
I just really wanted to tell that one story.

Hm.
Yeah.
Well.

While I'm at it, I might as well tell you what happened the rest of that day.

John helped with the luggage. We relaxed for a moment. Then Mr. Kou proceeded to take out a cigarette. He offered one each to both Maggie and John (sorry about all these names), and I did a double take. Inside Hannah's new apartment, they were literally taking a smoke break.

INSIDE the apartment.
No questions or permission asked.

It was interesting.
I think Hannah might have been screaming inside, and I wouldn't blame her.

Then our leaders (aka bosses aka people from the foreign affairs office) left. We grabbed dinner with John and Maggie at a nearby restaurant, where we quickly ran into another facet of Chinese culture - and one that I was very familiar with.

When we were done eating, before we were ready to pay the bill, John stood up casually, walked over to the cashier, and paid for all of us.

My response?
"Oh wow. That's very Chinese of him."
And then a quick but failed struggle in which my own cultural background pushed me into the fight to pay the bill.

After dinner - and an awfully long day - we each went home to absorb in the facts and details of our new lives in Baoding, China.

My internet wasn't working, my kitchen was a literal grease field, my bathroom was flooded (I had showered), my couches were moldy, and I didn't have a pillow.

Still, armed with a taste for adventure like the Gryffindor I am (It was nearly a 3 way tie, but the online tests say my Gryffindorness edge out a couple of points ahead of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff!), I was ready.

...Yes. I just ruined a dramatic final sentence with an unnecessary parenthesized thought.
Oh well.