Chapter 69

And I passed! Third time’s the charm. I showed up at the testing center at 7:10, which was an excellent idea as only 10 minutes later the line-up was 50 meters long. I was in the first wave to go in, drove though the circuit without triggering their hyper-sensitive “You stepped over the line, you retard!” computer. A huge weight off my shoulders, there’s another practical test coming up but this one should be much easier.

Key word “should”... A guy from the driving school sent me a message on WeChat about the content of that third test, an enormous wall of text in Chinese. I can read Chinese characters, but rather slowly and with mental effort that makes my brain hurt. The part I read thus far is about when to use regular headlights and when to use high beams, I wonder if every Chinese person has really passed that test, at night half the cars on the road blind everyone with their brights and half don’t even bother turning on their headlights.

I made it to the school by 9 and went to the lab. My students were finishing up today’s experiment, and the teacher I asked to cover me wasn’t there. “Where’s she?”, I asked, and got shrugs in return. Half an hour later I saw her in the office, she thought the lab was later in the morning. I guess we’re both lucky nobody got hurt, in that chemistry lab with 88 different things that can injure you, and also that the students did the lab and answered all the questions on their own, without being prompted to do so.

During the break I stumbled upon an article being shared on Facebook about teachers in Quebec being physically attacked by students. The comment section was filled with anecdotes of being spat on, called racist slurs, stabbed with pencils, thrown shit at, having their cars vandalized, threatened, and other joyful things like that. Meanwhile, I teach high schoolers who, when left unsupervised in a chemistry lab for an hour, not only don’t destroy anything, but they take the initiative to complete their lab assignments. And people still wonder why I’m still in China and not really interested in teaching “back home”.

My grade-11 class went well, then I rode home. The dog looked at me with “I fucked up” eyes, he had chewed the girlfriend’s earbuds, so I put him in prison. He escaped, crafty little bastard that he is, and I gave hime the silent treatment. The girlfriend has been reading about dog psychology, she suggested we try a new approach when he does something stupid, instead of punishing him we just show him the thing he destroyed, make disappointed sounds and then pretend to ignore his existence.

There was a leftover salad in the fridge, that the girlfriend brought from work. I added shredded cheese, bacon and a hard-boiled egg to make it a meal. Later in the afternoon I got the shits, not sure if it’s the salad, or maybe I undercooked the bacon (unlikely, it was burned black, the way Tyrion Lannister likes it), or maybe it was the tea I’d been drinking. Unpleasant.

I took the dog out for a walk before heading back to work. There was a group of elderly ladies sitting outside gossipping as they always do, the dog went to sniff one of them. She gave a big toothless smile and said something to me in a language that is not Mandarin. It’s weird, the push to get the whole country to speak a common language is quite recent and still a work in progress the further south you go, and you have old people here who don’t really speak Mando or not at all. They couldn’t communicate if they went elsewhere in China, and even in the city they have trouble, yet it’s not as if they’re immigrants, they were born here and the language just changed around them.

One of the old people in our apartment building has a pretty cool bird, and sometimes brings him out and hangs the cage on a tree branch. I went to look at the bird, and felt a bit sad for the poor thing stuck in that tiny cage. “Ni hao!”, he chirped. Awww that’s nice.

That reminded me of that time I went to a tourist site by a mountain in central China, one of the knick-knack shops had a parrot outside. I went and started saying Chinese swear words hoping he’d repeat them, and the shopkeeper just pointed at a sign that said “Don’t say obscenities to the bird”. I laughed so hard, I guess I wasn’t the first to do that. She didn’t even look mad or annoyed, just stoically pointing at the hand-written sign as if it happens all the time.

I went back to the office, did some class prep and looked at memes online. Some people coined the term “super-straight” to talk about those who are not interested in dating transgenders, and the SJWs flipped a switch, calling it bigoted and transphobic. It seems to me that the idea that trans people are entitled to have sex with every straight person of the opposite gender they identify as is a bit rapey and against the concept of informed consent that feminists have been pushing (rightfully so), I mean, yeah, even if you don’t want to invalidate trans-men or trans-women’s identity, they are pretty damn different than people born with that gender.

I had one class, teaching nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions with halogenoalkanes (whoopdeedoo) and then another small block of free time. I watched one video by Soph, the teenage girl who made huge waves last year with her incredibly astute commentary on society, and who got banned from YouTube due to her opinions not being kosher. It’s been a while, now I have to catch up on her content, it’s really great. This video was about pornography addiction and metastrophilia, a word I heard for the first time ever and refers to the attraction to things that disgust.

I had another class then went home and took a quick nap, then headed to the gym and had a little jiu-jitsu open mat. This time five people showed up, and we could have some nice rotations. All of them were blue belts, so they were better than me, but I could hold my own for the most part, defend against some attacks and positions (though I was utterly useless when it came to other positions, notably side control) and even threw some attacks of my own, including a cool arm triangle. I suspect he gifted it to me to some extent but it’s about practicing, improving and helping others improve.

There were other people in there, training kickboxing. When I walked in, some old stocky guy parked his food delivery scooter and walked in, I thought maybe someone in the gym ordered takeout, but no, he changed out of his Meituan delivery driver uniform, put on a pair of shorts and gloves, and went hard on the bag. Waimai guy by day, fighter by night, all day.

On the way home I stopped at a corner store to get milk and toothpaste. Now I’m really not the type of guy to get attached to brands, but there’s one toothpaste brand I always buy. Not that it’s of a higher quality or anything, but because it’s hilarious: heiren yagao, or “black man toothpaste”, with a smiling African guy in a tuxedo and top hat as their logo. They used to go by “Darkie” as their English name, with a much more, say, unflattering drawing of a black guy, but changed it to “Darlie” in the 90s.

I went home, famished and hungry and sore. I opened a liter bottle of homebrewed IPA and made falafel, using a mixture of chick peas, onions, garlic, cilantro, flour and spices that I ground up in the food processor, shaped into balls and deep fried. It was OK but not a great success, I used the oil from the fried chicken I made two days ago and it was darkened with burnt bits, which made the falafel taste a bit carbonized. I still devoured them, in a tortilla with onions, tomatoes, lettuce and a sauce I made by mixing yogurt, hot sauce and garlic.

While I was busy in the kitchen, I put on an album by Clipping, which is made up of a black dude rapping and two skinny white hipsters making dark electronic beats. They stylize their name as clipping. (no capitalization, and with the full stop) which is a bit dumb, but the music is pretty cool, reminding me of Death Grips but way less abrasive. Then I watched more of the UFC prelims, it was a great card, with a high level of talent even in the undercard, and exciting KOs and submissions. In one of them, colorfully eccentric and usually goofy flyweight Tim Elliott turned it up and brutalized his opponent Jordan Espinosa, calling him a woman beater after a story emerged on Facebook in which one of his friends alleged he choked her after she refused to have sex with him. It was caught by the cageside cameraman, and Espinosa, all bloodied up and trying to stop Elliott’s forearm from grinding his face and neck, replied “You don’t know the whole story”. It’s a brutal sport where things can get personal, and now that they hold fights in empty arenas, not only do you hear the strikes much more clearly and the fighters can hear their coaches and even the commentary team, you can also catch such moments in which the fighters talk to each other.

I felt like listening to hip-hop, so I put on a mixtape from Termanology. His duet album with Slaine, Anti-Hero, is my favorite rap album released in the past 10 years so I wanted to hear what the Boston lyricist’s solo stuff sounded like. He’s got solid bars but I have to say Slaine steals the show and is the one who makes the album such a great listen.