Chapter 306

Another day, another dollar. I didn’t have classes in the morning, the lab sessions got canceled due to the upcoming midterm exams, and the strong grade-11 class is so far ahead that I feel it would be unfair and unneeded to do more review and practice. So I gave them free time.

During the lunch break I started the second season of Dave, the semi-autobiographical comedy TV show featuring rapper Lil Dicky. I thought the first season was flawed but had some hilarious moments and a very original self-deprecating current throughout, so I started the next one. It was pretty damn good.

In the afternoon I had a few more classes and also a staff meeting, and it was my turn to write down the minutes so I had to be attentive. There was minutiae about the exams and professional development sessions soon to be given by the corporate office, and also comments on the grade-10 students, who are immature, disruptive and also refuse to speak English. Oh, no shit?! You’re saying that an anti-immersive environment where English is treated as a dead language to study like a found mummy and where the foreign teachers are used as props at best and annoying naggers at worst will lead to students not being engaged in learning the language? I’d have never known.

I got home, and the girlfriend came in soon after, for a change. She proposed we go eat at a Sichuan restaurant, so the three of us headed there. I got beers from the microbrewery next door and we ordered all our classic favorites: fried chicken, julienned potatoes, mapo tofu, beef slices cooked with green peppers, and chicken gizzards with sour green beans. Heaven.

The restaurant is a tiny mom-and-pop affair, and their kid is usually there. Sometimes they sit him at a table with an iPad at full volume, but now he was playing with a piece of scrap metal and a piece of wood, embedding them in one another and banging them.

The girlfriend asked me “Which one do you think is more annoying? The iPad or this?”

“Definitely the iPad! I don’t think he’s annoying at all now, and he’s developing his creativity and doing something with his hands. When he’s plopped in front of a stupid cartoon with the sound on, not only he’s annoying the whole room, but he’s becoming dumber and fatter instead of being a curious energetic child”

We walked home, and I did a bunch of writing, catching up on my diary after the weekend spent traveling. I browsed some WeChat groups and discussion forums, and some people seemed quite alarmed. One guy sent me a government notice urging people to have enough supplies of food and water at home, in case of disaster like flood or typhoon or earthquake, and in another group, people were forwarding videos showing movements of troops in the cities of Hangzhou and Wenzhou. And then mama-in-law asked me what does the Western media say about the situation in Taiwan now. Six PLA planes were caught flying over Taiwanese airspace, and when I tried to dig for info, the VPN was malfunctioning for what is in my case the first time in months. I could get it to work for a few minutes at a time, and I accessed a website from the Ministry of National Defense of the ROC (Taiwan) saying “CAP aircraft tasked, radio warnings issued and air defense missile systems deployed to monitor the activity”

So, holy shit, are we heading to war?! I sure as fuck hope not. I wanna train jiu-jitsu, listen to music, read books, travel, hang out with my girlfriend and my dog, all the while working a job that finances my simple life and is not too taxing. I don’t wanna go to the gulag or dodge American missiles.

I went to bed, a bit stressed. When I’d hear something outside I’d go “What was that?! A jet plane?!?!?! Oh no, it’s just a car leaving the parking lot... or wait, is it a police truck rounding up foreign residents?!?!?! Are they about to bang on the door?” I thought about packing a bug-out bag, but where would I go? Should I bury a bag of supplies 10 km from the city, in a place I can easily reach with my bicycle or on foot on secondary roads?

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