In The Meantime...

Taking a break from holiday stories and pictures, I need to recap what's been going on in the intervening two weeks since I came back to Lanshan. I was back roughly a week before school was due to begin, and seeing as the school canteen was not open, I was invited to eat with our foreign affairs officer, Susan.

Every day.

Twice a day.

For a week.

It was intense. When not eating at her house I was taken along to visit her family and eat with them. I think I must have met a good thirty different family members. One thing the Chinese do well is family. No matter how distant the relationship, they were still family and I met and drank with them all. I have no real idea who most of them were, as the Chinese also use terms like brother and sister pretty loosely and the words for aunts and uncles on the mother's side are different to those on the father's, but one fact I was certain of was that I would always have a good time as long as Susan's niece was invited.

She's the little girl I'm holding in the picture above, with her mother on the right, Susan on the left and random relations inbetween. She is one of the sweetest little girls I've ever met, and we've become firm friends. She always runs out to hug me if I walk by her mother's shop. It's so cool. She doesn't make me drink rice wine, she cracks open seeds for me and I actually understand almost everything she says as she speaks so deliberately and simply.

So, I'm hanging out with a five year old, is that so strange?!?

I did find some friends my own age there though, with some of Susan's cousins, who took me up a nearby hill one day to visit a tiny temple (ie. wooden shack with a couple of incense holders and a picture of Chairman Mao) where we had an amazing view of Lanshan. The three pictures above are taken panning from left to right. It all looks bigger in the picture than it actually is in real life, but most of the peripheral areas are pretty spaced out. I found out that the whole county of Lanshan has just 350 000 inhabitants, so the town's population can't be huge. The tall building under construction is a new hotel and to it's left is the town square. So far there are only
buildings on one side of the square, but the town is expanding rapidly, so will soon catch up I'm sure. You can also see just how easy it is to get out into the surrounding countryside.

There were two shows put on over the past fortnight. One was in celebration of a new supermarket that just opened and featured some of my students dancing, while the other was in honour of Women's Day and featured us! Both were kinda strange. It seemed like everyone in the supermarket show had been made to walk through a glitter shower before coming onstage and had a massive advertising sketch with girls


dancing around carrying baskets and saying 'I bought meat!' while 6 men in make-up and high-waisted trousers marched around them in a circle out of time to the music. Bit odd. It did have some cool kung-fu kids and a dragon though.

For the Women's Day show it was originally planned for Anthony and Seven to read a Chinese love poem together onstage. I had no part to play. When we came back though, we were told that they'd had a better idea. Our roles as propaganda material for the school are starting to become more and more pronounced.

Anthony and I were to write two sentences in Chinese in gold paint on big red boards behind two of my students as they read out a poem. Anthony had to write 'I love great women', while I had to write 'I love Lanshan county No. 1 middle school'. After doing this we were interviewed onstage by two non-English speakers, which was a complete farce,
but everyone laughed so I think it went down well.


The rest of the show was pretty boring and consisted of many women reading poems dressed up either in flouncy dresses like princesses or butch suits like militant feminists. Chinese poems are something else. I don't think the words 'rhyme' or 'rhythm' are in modern poets' vocabularies. I can barely begin to describe how awful some of those poems were. They were just spoken prose, which is ok, except the speakers kept trying to add emotion so artificially that some lines were started with a big sighing 'aaaahhh' and ended with each word getting louder and louder and louder until they literally pierced your ears. You'd have to hear it to understand but I just wouldn't want to have to put anyone through that. By the end of the show the hall was almost empty and this was despite the organisers giving away holidays to people in lucky seats. The final draw had to be made a couple of times over before they picked a seat that was still occupied!



Last weekend our 'group' of teachers got together to go eat and celebrate women's day together at a restaurant nearby. By the time we ate there was only one woman present, but that didn't really seem to matter... We had taken it fairly easy with the rice wine and were quite pleased with ourselves, until Mr Li the principal and Mr Feng the communist party chairman walked in.

Suddenly 3 new kettles of wine appeared on the table. Bit of a worry, but karaoke had been cancelled for the night, so we had reason to celebrate and finished it all fairly easily. Now feeling pretty buzzed, we wanted to go out. So we headed over to Happy Tom for some ice-cream, managing to collect a random crazy girl on the way who now won't stop phoning us. After ice-cream we went to the bar. It was fairly dead. We ordered a beer, and then a bottle of red wine. I don't know why exactly, because it's bad stuff, but Anthony had just learnt the word for it and had it written on his hand so I guess it made sense at the time. We finished it off with a couple of young Chinese people stood by the bar. The girl had the wierdest hair. Perms are big here, and so was hers. All except the fringe that is, or most of it anyway. The edges of her fringe were permed but the middle section wasn't. This way it looked like she had two big tassels hanging either side of her forehead, which shook around every time she moved her head. We were chatting away and mentioned how Lanshan has no clubs or late-night places to go to, or so we believed, but our new friends told us they knew differently. Being pretty drunk now we demanded to be taken. The first place looked the part, but was completely empty, so we left to find somewhere else. We ended up in a karaoke bar. Typical.

We totally gatecrashed a private room but no-one bat an eyelid as we walked in. Wierd-hair-girl went straight away to go dance with the air conditioning unit and Anthony was sick on the floor. I don't think anyone noticed though so it was ok. Not long afterwards the guy took me outside and tried to explain that these people were not just drunk. He did a sniffing motion with his fingers over his nostrils and I knew he didn't mean poppers. We'd just crashed a coke party! Not the first and certainly not the last, but at that point it didn't matter whether these guys were shooting heroin or drinking herbal tea - we were in a ktv room dancing to bad bad music and I had to get out. As the four of us stood outside it became apparent that Anthony and wierd-hair-girl were getting a little close. Not wishing to be a third wheel I left them and went home. Besides, it was getting late. The time as I walked through the school gate? 11.30pm.

Next morning I was woken up at 7.30am by a knocking on my door. 'David...David...'. It was old Mr Li, the driver's father and ex-vice-principal. I turned over and pretended not to hear. Anthony had mentioned he wanted to take us for breakfast, but I was not in the mood for being sociable and was likely to be seeing any breakfast I would eat twice over, so decided to ignore him. 'David...David...'. This time he came round to my bedroom and was banging away on the window. F**k OFF!! I couldn't possibly ignore all this anymore so had to get up and see what he wanted. It was breakfast alright, with some teacher from some school or something. I couldn't really understand what was going on, so without a shower or even having brushed my teeth I was ushered out and into a waiting ma-ma-yo.

Anthony was with me and we recapped the previous night - or rather I recapped it for him. He couldn't remember anything. How he got home, when he got home, if he was alone...or where his coat was. I told him his coat was now most likely concealing a big pile of sick in a random ktv room and that he'd probably best be ready for some angry brothers coming to beat him up for defiling their sister. He had no idea what I was on about.

So we arrived at breakfast - a steaming bowl of mixed internal organs and a few plates of random foodstuffs. Not the toast I so badly needed. I miss toast... While picking through some noodles Mr Li explained to me that I had a new job. A woman who joined us at that point had just opened up an English-language school for children and had asked him to run it. He'd then decided to engage us as advisors, going there every weekend to watch over the classes and give the teachers some feedback and tips. We'd be getting 50 yuan each for our trouble.

What?

This was all a bit sudden. Where was the 'would you like to...'? Did I have a choice? Apparently not. He also revealed that after breakfast we would go to the school for a publicity photo-shoot. Great. Unwashed, unshaved, unable to see properly yet and about to have photos taken. Just perfect.

The school itself was nice though. Brand new and with about 30 kids there that morning. They were in classes of about 10 and their ages ranged from about 5 or 6 to 11 or 12. We had photos taken infront of the school, in the classes and with the students. We found out that we would only be expected to spend 2 hours there each weekend - Anthony on Saturdays and me on Sundays. It didn't sound bad at all. I had perked up by then and even managed a smile for the photos. The kids were nice and I thought, this could be fun. The picture above shows me with a few of the students. See the girl in red on the left? Very cute. Lovely red jacket. What brightened my day most was whenever she turned round and revealed what was written on the back. I didn't know 'Slipknot' merchandise extended to childrenswear?

We managed to stave off calls for us all to eat lunch together as Mr Li likes his rice wine a little too much, but we couldn't disappoint the old man so arranged another date for the next weekend. After all, he was already a little disappointed that Anthony couldn't bring him back the Viagra that he'd asked for. Apparently there's nothing he'd like more right now.

A little more than I needed to know. I can't help thinking that if he drank a little less wine he needn't be asking in the first place...