Chapter 341

I woke up at 6:30, lazed in bed for a bit longer, and then took Triangle Face outside. I brought a bag of garbage down, and one of the old women washing their mops outside by the tap excitedly asked me to give it to her. She must have known with her sixth sense that there were recyclable materials in there.

I went to school and taught mass spectrometry to the twelfth-graders before supervising a lab session. At lunchtime I ate a Cornish pie and a bunch of hard-boiled eggs, and then went back to teach more classes.

We had a meeting in the afternoon. The principal talked about the upcoming Christmas celebrations, or lack thereof. Last year, we had a big talent show, we sang the Chinese version of Jingle Bells, and my Hells Angels coworker dressed up like Santa Claus, but now, Christmas-themed activities are banned or at least severely discouraged. I’ve been in China for almost as long as Norman Fucking Bethune so I’m very unphased by shit like that, one year the Chinese embrace the holiday period and all the kitsch and consoomerism that comes along with it, the next year some higher-up in a baijiu-induced stupor tells his minions to snuff the evil barbarian foreign influence on the masses, and thus the cycle goes.

We also normally go to the city’s fanciest hotel for a staff dinner, subsidised by the corporate office, but now they said they can’t give us any budget for anything done outside of the school grounds. The principal pushed against that and showed us the e-mail exchange he’s had with some head honcho in Shanghai, to no avail. I shrugged, it’s really not a hill I want to die on, I can take it or leave it and will just go along with whatever they decide upon, whether we go to the Marriott and fork the bill ourselves or we just order some pizza at the school or both. That also got people speculating whether the head office just used that as a pretext to save a couple thousand yuan, it’s a bit of a stretch but I can’t imagine those “education consulting” companies, who were racking up the rems like Scrooge McDuck only a few years ago, to be doing extremely well in the current circumstances. Whatever, they keep paying me handsomely and on time so I’m a happy worker bee.

I went home, got changed and quickly went to the gym to do my shoulder workout. Then I rode to a bar to the western part of town to meet some pals, and we went to the apartment of one of them to have a little barbecue. Well, little, there was a mountain of meat, way too much for the six guys that were there. I played two chess games while the charcoal was getting ready, lost them both, one of them in a rather embarrassing matter. Ah well. Then I manned the grill, flipping sausages and ribs and burger patties and chicken wings, it felt very primal and very good. We keep getting told by goody-two-shoes that we should go vegan or eat bugs to save the planet, but there’s something hard to replicate about grilling meat with a bunch of homies.

It was a pretty civilised affair, though beer was consumed and some vulgar conversations were had, and I was on my way home just before 11 to get to bed at a reasonable time.