Chapter 301

The girlfriend shouted at me from the bathroom. It was 6:20. “You didn’t flush the toilet! Now it’s full of 屎!” I groggily got up and went to investigate, turns out I had pressed the flush button, but it clogged and now it was full to the brim with soupy malatang. I poked the toilet brush in there and it went through in a brown maelstrom.

Then I took the dog out for a stroll, and rode to work. I had a lazy morning with no classes, a Chinese teacher took my scheduled lessons for herself, to catch up on all the classes that got cancelled because of the holidays and sports days. So I listened to the Metal Minded podcast live as it happened, two French grindcore bands got dithyrambic reviews, called “the best grind albums of the past two decades”. I listened to the Gummo LP a bunch of times already and it’s indeed excellent, but not quite to that level I’d say. And the new Blockheads isn’t out yet, the guys got a promo copy from the label, and I’m eager to put my grubby hands on it when it comes out. I love the Blockheads, they are grindcore royalty, and I have a big poster of them on the wall of my home gym like a teenager (well I am a teenager, albeit an overgrown one). I also listened to more of that war metal, a compilation of demo tracks and splits by an American band named Crurifragium. It was filthy and raw and felt like it was recorded with a Fisher Price toy, but weirdly enough I got into it. That sub-subgenre doesn’t get unanimous appreciation even among fans of the most extreme forms of metal.

A physics teacher asked me if I can cover one of her classes. About half the students were gone for a resit exam, so I just let the remainder self-study. Sometimes my job is pretty damn easy.

After lunch time though, I waddled back into suckitude. Crazy Class were dead asleep, and didn’t budge when I first turned on the lights five minutes before the scheduled start, then when I gently told them to wake up (as if I’m their goddamn mother) and then kicked their desks. Some gave me hostile glances and put their lazy-ass heads down on their desks, most didn’t move at all. Meh. So I walked out, confusing the two or three students who have their shit together. “Come and get me in the office when they’re ready”, and because he doesn’t speak English, I repeated in his language and he nodded.

When I got in, they were all upright, likely after a harsh yelling session by a homeroom teacher. I didn’t say a word, and wrote in Chinese on the board “review for the mid-term exam” and “be lazy little monkeys” and had a vote. Some jokingly voted for the second option, but the first one won by a landslide and we went over exam questions from last year.

Then later in the afternoon I taught the strong eleventh-graders, and it went wonderfully. It’s as if a cook tasked to make spaghetti carbonara would get better results if he was given farm-raised eggs, imported pecorino cheese, pancetta and homemade pasta, as opposed to a handful of Lego blocks, strawberries, paper clips and instant ramen noodles.

(Some might make a metaphor like that but talk about good ingredients versus rotten ingredients, but it’s the opposite of what I want to convey here. I’m not saying they’re bad per se, just unsuited to the task, and conversely, there are things you can accomplish with Lego blocks that you can’t with a lump of Italian salt pork. Like I said before, it’s a disservice to everyone involved, except maybe the tiger moms and the school administration, who’ll go “Yay! Mission accomplished” if and when some of those students manage to eke out a D or even a C through joyless rote memorization to overcome their academic shortcomings and inability to speak English)

Still, when all is said and done, I’ll do what I’m paid for. And I count myself lucky, I used to work in schools with not just one or two classes that were unpleasant to teach and gave me a “what the hell am I doing here” mood, but a whole schedule packed with them, including students with, ahem, undiagnosed mental illnesses*. Also, it could always be way worse, I could have been born in Mauritania, for instance.

I got home, uploaded a bunch of stuff on my mp3 player, and listened to some Chinese punk that an online acquaintance has sent my way. The Die Chiwawa Die! and Struggle Session split as well as the Hell City LP were pretty cool and will enter my ever-increasing rotation. Then I headed to the gym. I did deadlifts, I can one-rep about 350 pounds, I think it’s pretty cool but there are also people who use it as their warm-up, or bench press weight. I didn’t feel super good, but went through my whole workout anyway. Maybe I was sleep-deprived.

I bought meat at the stinky market, a big slab of pork for only 11 yuan, less than 2 dollars. Apparently in the West, dud to the bidenflation, you can now only get a pea-sized chunk of meat for that. I was ready to start cooking when the girlfriend asked if I want to come meet her at her school with the dog. Though I was a bit sore, I said why not, I had to go give him a night walk anyway, so we hopped on the longboard and went. I got there and understood why she called me, she was visibly drunk, after some kind of school function, and needed me to drive the car back.

I made dinner, by throwing in succession the pork, onions, potatoes, green beans and scrambled eggs in the wok, and seasoning the whole thing copiously. I also made a quesadilla. It was fantastic. I love food.

*There are no mental illnesses in China. The kid with the hanging jaw who can only produce guttural “GNUUURH” noises, fights with his classmates, is constantly distracted and has tremendous mood swings is completely normal, OK?! That’s what happens when the culture of “saaaaving faaaaace” meets with the one-child-policy and a general inability to produce a diagnosis to begin with, due to the confucian lack of critical thinking that afflicts even their medical personel.