Chapter 282

Up at 6:30, on this beautiful Saturday. Those Chinese holidays are a bit of a bizarre deal, you get a long weekend or even, in this case, a full week off, but you also have to do some make-up days. So I went to work like the good working bee I am, except that rather than carrying honey or whatever bees do, I teach advanced chemistry concepts to students of various academic ability and motivation and even in some cases an English proficiency similar to my own Russian proficiency. That leads me to at times wonder what the fuck I’m doing there and what’s the goddamn point of this one-size-fits-all education, but I’m not paid and judged by my ability to convey understanding of those concepts, I’m paid to be there and not cause too much trouble.

I’m still mostly happy with my lot in life. It could have been much worse, for instance, I could have been born in Paraguay. I also like that I am not micro-managed, and enjoy a bit of flexibility. I was allowed to leave a bit early to run errands, so I got home, hopped in the car, and went to the big central wet market. By the fish and seafood section, you can buy enormous blocks of ice, and I put one in my cooler before dragging it to the trunk of my car. Then I went home, rode my bike to a Muslim noodle shop, and wolfed down a quick lunch before going back to work.

We had a meeting during the lunch break, hence why I asked for a bit of extra time. All the staff were present, and the principal started at 12:20 on the dot.

“Good afternoon, thanks for being here, I’m sorry we have to cut our lunch break short but it’s the only time we can all be together. Today we will...”

“GO TO THE CORNER OF THE ROOM AND TAKE PICTURES!” the Chinese principal shouted in 185-decibel Chinese at one of her minions, interrupting her counterpart. He looked annoyed for half a second, but put his game face back on and continued his introduction. You are often condescendingly lectured by Chinese people (and panda fellaters*) about social harmony and faaace but are also constantly witnessing behaviors that are objectively rude, like all those times I was talking to a group of students and then someone came in and without a verbal or non-verbal “Excuse me”, started babbling at them as if I wasn’t already talking. It’s very tiresome.

So to reiterate, a big part of our job entails not causing trouble and not antagonizing the (very easily antagonizable) local populace. The current principal understands this well, in a way his predecessor did not, and that caused immense bitterness in the relationships between different branches of the staff.

The meeting was mostly about resit exams. Students can retake exams they feel they didn’t do well in, and oftentimes end up doing worse than the first time around since they’re now several months removed from the course, but they still try. They also talked about a schedule change coming up, as the government mandated that the students also take Chinese history, geography politics and literature on top of their already overly ambitious Cambridge curriculum. So now we’ll start earlier after lunch, finish later, and the students will be even more overworked. Great.

Another piece of news was that the Srilankan economics teacher, though he’s been in quarantine forever, isn’t cleared yet by the Powers-That-Be to come back and teach, so he’ll teach via Zoom. My British coworker and I exchanged glances. That teacher speaks with such a thick accent that I often don’t understand his small talk, and I wonder how it will translate to online lectures. I’m not disparaging him as a human being deserving of dignity or saying he’s not a nice guy, just wondering how the students can follow along.

I had a few more classes in the afternoon, and in between I did some planning for the practical sessions and listened to Clown World news. The Lotus Eaters talked about the phenomenon of British university students seeking sugar daddies, which isn’t completely new of course but has blown up in the age of the internet and a mercenary, nihilistic form of feminism. It might seem a bit innocuous, but the ramifications of this, among other soecietal changes, run very deep and denote seriously fucked male-female relations. “We’re totally screwed” was a conclusion uttered more than once through their analysis. Meh.

I went home, packed the cooler full of beer and ice, grabbed a small backpack, and drove to a small park by a lake. I met with the other hare, he had already marked half the trail for tonight’s hash run. We marked the rest of the trail together, and then he headed back to the starting point. The dog and I went to the bar for a small pre-lube and to grab something to eat, then we headed to the starting point with some other hashers. About 20 people showed up, and we had a nice trail, with a “Meathead” theme and various calisthenics exercises at random spots. Two beer stops and about 6 km later, we got to the circle, drank more beers, and my fellow hare got baptized in the fraternity of Hash House Harriers. A great time was had by all.

Then we walked a block east to the microbrewery, but it was closed. Weird. I had talked to the boss and he was expecting us, and it was barely after midnight. “What’s the matter, you hate money?”, I wrote to him on WeChat. So the gang headed to another bar, I opted to go home. It had been a pretty long day already. The dog still had energy, amazingly, even after all this walking and running.

*Panda fellater: a foreigner with a borderline creepy affection for every aspect of Chinese culture and politics, often going to great lengths to explain how you just don’t understand and being an apologist of even the most indefensible aspects of said culture. Antonym of “dragon slayer”.