Chapter 253

For the third night in a row, I vividly remembered my last dream, which is weird, I only recall incoherent bits and pieces usually. I was in some kind of bunker full of technological shit, with Madam Vice-President Kamala Harris. Why?! Fouille-moé.

I walked the dog, did a yoga routine, and watched a video about the minimum wage. Every economics study (and hell, a decent high school macroeconomics class) concludes that raising the minimum wage leads to unemployment, inflation and other undesirable outcomes. Despite getting increasingly seduced by conservative and libertarian political talking points as I age (and also, not wanting anything to do with the cringe regressive left), I’m still a social-democrat at heart, and it’s a bit saddening that rationally and pragmatically, the only system that works is free-market capitalism. I remember reading Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Or There book, it was mostly shit, but there was one paragraph that was pretty poignant, about his visit to late-80s Bulgaria:

[...] it seemed to me strange that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know Communism never worked and I would have hated living under it myself, but it seems to me none the less that there is a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appears to work is one based on self-interest and greed. Communism in Bulgaria won’t last. It can’t last. No people will retain a government that can’t feed them or let them provide toys for their children.

I got to the office, and some students brought me flowers and cards. It’s Teachers’ Day in China, for some reason they set the date at the beginning of the school year rather than a bit later, which means that you get handwritten cards from students whom you haven’t really established a rapport with yet. Nice, but also a tad meaningless. The twelfth-graders gave me one with a bunch of inside jokes on it, and that was much more touching.

There were three classes on my schedule in the morning, and I went through them like the good working bee I am. The grade-11 class didn’t go that well, I had planned to do too much, and didn’t have time to finish. I’ll have to change my planning a bit, you have to be flexible in this line of work.

The school gave me a meal ticket for the dining hall, since it’s Teachers’ Day. I think I only ate there once since I started working here over three years ago, not that it’s bad, but I like going back to my apartment 5 minutes away, eat lunch in front of the TV and hang out with the dog. It breaks the day nicely and makes time go by faster. But now, I didn’t have leftovers in the fridge so I thought I might as well give it a go. I got to the cafeteria, crowded with thousands of teenagers wolfing down their R n’ S or lining up at the counters, and an employee pointed me towards the secluded area where staff and teachers eat. There were students in there for whatever reason, but the line was much shorter and I soon had my aluminium tray piled up with rice, a big meatball in a mysterious sauce, pig feet, tofu cubes and some kind of bacon. I ate while reading a novel on my phone, it’s called Fear and Loathing in Pattaya, and though it’s atrociously overwritten and full of punctuation, grammar and capitalization mistakes (including the sin of pluralizing word’s with apostrophe’s, something retard’s do), I have to say that those amateurish books written by sexpats with an over-inflated view of their expertise on Thailand and Thai culture is one of my biggest literary guilty pleasures.

I had two more lessons in the afternoon, and listened to a lot of grindcore in the office in between. Most grindcore full-lengths are about 20 minutes long, it’s more than enough, with such an intense assault on the ears.

One of the head teachers came to me, with the eleventh-graders’ English homework. It consists of translating words in isolation, and some slots were left blank. She was alarmed by how weak they are, yet she, like all the other Chinese staff members, would amputate one of their fingers with a spoon rather than speak to the students in English. God forbid they get some immersion and learn in a sustainable way, nah, let’s just ask them to look up words in their dictionaries and copy them. “I’m teaching them those words, look, there are three vocabulary items per lesson, they’re on the opening page of the PowerPoint and I tell them to write the words at the bottom of their notes” I can’t write the notes for them, can I?

I got home, relaxed a bit, and later the girlfriend, the dog and I walked to the Japanese restaurant and had a fantastic meal. Then she had to go back to her school, she forgot to clock out, and could be fined 100 yuan if she doesn’t do it before midnight. Can’t she just call someone who could fix it with 10 seconds on a computer? No. She has to go in person. What a dumb, inflexible, bureaucratic system they have. So I went to the bar nearby and drank with old friends, catching up and swapping all sorts of dumb stories. The dog was wandering around, he has absolutely no shame or filter, and would go to everyone eating a meal and scratch their legs. That gets him rewarded with food, so he keeps doing it.

Walking home, I stumbled upon a new brewery that opened just before I set off on my summer trip. The dog was on the long leash, and he walked through the open doors before I even thought about going in, attracted by the scent of barbecued meat a group was eating around a wooden table. They laughed at this unexpected sight, and excitedly invited me in, with that Chinese gregariousness. I looked at the beer list on the chalkboard and asked the brewmaster, a stocky guy with an unkempt beard, to give me whatever, and he handed me a pint of osmanthus flower flavored ale, a style done by a few Chinese breweries. It was very pintable, and cheap too. I stayed there chatting with the friendly bunch, the place was quite cool, with a very minimalist decor, we were pretty much sitting right among the big fermentation tanks.

I was in bed just after midnight, read a bit, and crashed.