Aaron Frohrib: Hero

One of our closest foreign friends, both in terms of distance and relationship is Mr Aaron Frohrib: professional hero, semi-professional English teacher.

On Thursday we were able to go and visit him in Dao Xian, just 2 hours away by bus, to help celebrate his 25th birthday. It was kinda lucky that we were spending Thursday night away from Lanshan, for that morning Anthony had decided to do some tidying up. Anthony is not generally known for his housekeeping skills and one particularly nasty situation that had arisen there involved his fridge.

People here are generous to a fault and we have been given all kinds of stuff that we neither want nor need, including food. We have no kitchens, no appliances, no utensils, no way of preparing any kind of food whatsoever...but we do have fridges. Don't ask me why. So we can store food, and when we get given left overs they usually just go straight into the fridge until we can sneak out at night and throw it away. Sometimes these left-overs get forgotten though. When they are remembered, they're usually in the kind of state where you'd rather you hadn't. This was the case with Anthony's fridge. He'd become aware over time that there was stuff in there but, as he'd never had cause to open it, he'd never managed to get round to actually doing something about it. We'd always talk about what new life-forms may now be lurking in there and how one day he'd have to open it up but always at that time, he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Three months passed by.

So on Thursday while clearing out some rubbish I went round to Anthony's. Before I'd walked into his apartment the stench hit me full force.

'Oh my God you opened your fridge!'

As I turned to run back out the door I could hear Anthony mumbling 'oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh Jesus!'. He came out soon after me, holding a plastic bag at arm's length. We walked over to the skips near the English office as fast as we could without drawing too much attention, threw the bags in and ran for it. As we left one of the old women who sifts through the garbage for reuseable stuff came running out of the shack next door, eager to see what goodies we wasteful foreigners had left for her. She had a surprise in store and that's for certain. Poor woman...

Anthony's apartment still stank to high heaven, so we sprayed it with air freshener, left the windows open and went to catch our bus to Dao Xian.
Aaron came to China at the same time as me and we all had our inductions together in that first week many many months ago. In the meantime we'd become good friends and he'd come over to Lanshan quite a few times. This was the first time I could spend any decent amount of time in Dao Xian though. That night was his birthday and we all had a big dinner together with his colleagues and Liana and Liz, two other foreign teachers in the city. It was fun, and nice to chat to other foreigners. At the meal they served these special birthday baozi (steamed buns) that had been pulled to a peak at the end and dabbed with pink dye. It looked like a plate of nipples. No idea what all that was about.
The next day we had to head back to Lanshan for a farewell lunch so had to leave Dao Xian by 9.30am. Aaron had wanted to show us a nearby tower though, so we got up at 6.30am and went to take a look. The tower was pretty cool. About 400 years old and quite beautiful. It had received some restoration, but was still pretty abandoned and uncared for and Aaron noticed a big chunk of stone on the ground that had fallen off the pinnacle since he'd last been there a few weeks before.It was fun to explore. The stairs did not circle up continuously but you had to walk through different corridors on each level, and at times on the ledges outside to reach the next set. There was nothing left inside but I could imagine that it was pretty amazing back in it's day. At the top the stairway opened out onto a wide open parapet, where we sat down to eat big dragon-eye fruits and admire the morning view.We spent about an hour here. It was peaceful. I wish we could have stayed longer. It was Aaron's last few days in China and he was flying back to California very soon. His Chinese experience has been a very special one. He has become a local hero after saving a boy's life. A few weeks ago while walking along the river with some students he saw a young kid struggling out in the water. Without a second thought he stripped off his clothes, dove in and pulled the kid to safety where he managed to successfully revive him. He is so modest about it but you know he'd do it again in a split-second. My eroded vocabulary doesn't have enough good words to do him justice now. He was on TV for his act and a load of my students who had met him before came to tell me how they saw Aaron on TV, and that he was a hero for saving a boy's life. They already loved him, now they'll never forget him. We won't either.