Fuddland

Entries concerning the daily goings-on in my own life during my residency in China.

This category is a subcategory of China.

Getting to know the streets Chengdu is proving to quite tricky. Normally I have a fairly good sense of direction, but—after being spoiled by the ease of a navigating grid-based city such as Suzhou—I’m finding it difficult to get my bearings on the sprawling, criss-crossing roads of Chengdu.

Compounding the organic layout of the city are two further annoyances. Almost every street is undergoing major roadworks, and every day a different one of them has been cordoned off (slogan: “The inconvenience today is to facilitate tomorrow”). It’s not so much “inconvenient” as “ridiculous” that a taxi going to the supermarket costs twice as much as it does making the return journey.

A more permanent confusion is that the street names in my neighbourhood are all Fang-something-or-other. Fangcao East Road is perpendicular to Fangcao Road, and someone was clearly having a bit of fun labelling the junction “West Fangcao East Road”. And then there are two Fangcao West Roads: First Fangcao West Road and Second Fangcao West Road.

One of the other Fangs (Fanghua Street) is in the shape of a horseshoe: its entrance and exit both intersect Fangcao East Road, which I just know must have led to some confused rendezvous, with both people insisting that they are indeed waiting on the corner of Fanghua and Fangcao East.

But I’m sure it’ll get easier to find my way around over the coming months. Right, time to head off to work. I’m sure my front door is here somewhere…

The good news: following a bout of pretty heavy rain, the massive scary spider has gone.

The bad news: we don’t know where. Eeeek!

The best news: the kitten is still around.

I’ve been living in Chengdu for just over two weeks now, gradually expanding my neighbourhood as I find places to eat, drink and be merry. Our new flat is much larger than the pokey little number we had in Suzhou [but at three-quarters’ the price], with a marvellous-sized kitchen and—being on the ground floor—we even have a good-sized back garden all to ourselves which we’ll be able to enjoy more once we get some furniture out there.

Actually, there are two other reasons why we’re not currently making more of the back garden. The first, main reason is that a cat decided to give birth to her two kittens there several weeks ago, and being feral she’s rather wary of us. Sadly, a few days ago I found that one of the kittens had not survived. [It was noticeably smaller than its sibling and walked with a limp, so was not off to the best start for a feral life.] It was given a simple burial under a nearby bush, two chopsticks marking its resting place. The surviving kitten seems stronger and we hope it will soon be big enough to escape the confines of the garden and be able to fend for itself.

While I was looking for a suitable place to dig the hole I almost walked face-first into the second reason why the garden isn’t my favourite hang-out at present: the most alarming-looking garden spider I’ve seen.

[There’s not much in those pictures to give you a sense of scale, so let me assure you, those are not taken with a macro lens. The spider is about nine feet in diameter. Think Shelob only scarier.]

My role in my new job has been rather undefined so far, but that’s the nature of the beast as the organisation reorientates itself from focussing on emergency relief towards project-based sustainable development. While I get to grips with looking for grants and putting together proposals there are plenty of other things that I’m much more comfortable with for me to do when I need a bit of a break: sorting out the website; organising and verifying the information that is coming in.

Despite being about 1,200 miles closer to Europe than Suzhou, Chengdu is definitely has a more “Chinese” feel about it, being a lot more inland and, moreover, not trying to soak up the overspill of Western influence from Shanghai that Suzhou has been attempting over the last fifteen years. It’s the fifth biggest city in China but, much like London, it doesn’t feel overwhelmingly huge. Yesterday I was taken out of the city for the first time, to see a nursery school only a couple of hours’ drive away in the countryside that had partially collapsed in the earthquake. We are hoping to fund the rebuilding, but the contractors have come back with quotes several times higher than originally estimated. Which reminds me, I must look up the Chinese for “cowboy”, I’ve a feeling it’s going to come in handy over the coming months.

The bigger-than-usual National Day holiday is coming up later this week and we hope to see a bit more of the city—including checking up on the pandas I saw over two and a half years ago.

I had oh-so-very high hopes for this eclipse.

My attempts at viewing the Cornish Eclipse in the summer of 1999 were thwarted by overcast skies, so I was quite excited to learn that the path of the total eclipse of the century was passing straight over Suzhou. I decided that heading out to Tianping Hill would give me a good vantage point, surrounded by trees below and noticeably less pollution than the downtown area.

But, as much of the rest of the eclipse-watching world found, when the day arrived there was nothing to be seen but an overcast sky. Ever the optimist, I got together my camera, tripod and newly-purchased solar filters and was soon making the ascent in the light drizzle.

About halfway up, the skies opened and the rain went from drizzle to downpour in a matter of minutes. In my morning grogginess I’d forgotten to pack an umbrella, but a passing pair of students sidled up to me and offered me one as they huddled under another. It soon became obvious that the Sun was never going to be visible, so I thanked the two girls for their loan and headed back down to catch the bus into town. I was still on the bus when the darkness descended, which was impressively swift and all the more eerie for the torrents of rain that were hammering the roof and roads.

Still, at least I got a couple of decent shots of the lotus pond at Tianping Hill before the rain started … and there’s still next January to look forward to.

Today marks the third anniversary of leaving my home country to spend a year in China, and a quick look outside my window confirms that, yes indeed, I am still here. If I wasn’t a mite busy today I’d take stock and perhaps try to summarise the last thirty-six months of being a resident of the Middle Kingdom [save for a month’s holiday in the UK and Ireland at the halfway-point].

As it is, you’ll just have to do with a photo of a cute baby sticking out his tongue over his Dad’s shoulder.

After having a pretty light schedule for the last six months or so, it’s been a fairly busy month or two as I picked up several part-time teaching gigs, mostly at summer schools for kids and teens. With the more strictly-enforced visa restrictions causing problems for a vast swathe of the foreigners who have been, up to now, able to enjoy relative freedom in where they worked, those of us who were lucky enough to have the right kind of visa are much in demand, and it has really been a case of me deciding how busy I wanted to be.

One summer school is just four boys between the ages of 8 and 11, three afternoons a week, which is easy and fun: a bit of reading, a bit of practising-short-talks-to-impress-grandparents, and a good smattering of games.

My approach is to try and make these things as laid-back as possible, to give the kids a chance to enjoy their summer holidays despite being forced to attend classes by their evil parents. My crowning achievement [teaching-wise] is to get them to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. At the beginning of the course these kids would read aloud until they got to a new word and just stop dead, look up at me and expect me to provide them with the pronunciation and meaning. I was happy to do this for a while, but eventually they needed to realise that Teacher David isn’t always going to be around and it’s useful to be able to check definitions and pronunciations themselves. [Since they learn English as a foreign language at school, they’re all entirely familiar with the phonetic alphabet (unlike me).] It took me three lessons to get them all to remember to bring dictionaries, but now they look words up without prompting. This might not sound like much but it’s a skill that bewilderingly lacks in most students I come across, adults as well as children.

One of their favourite games is one in which I write new words up on the board, and call out the definitions of them. The students line up two at a time at the other end of the classroom and have to race to the board and be the first to touch the word that matches the definition. Being boys, they tear down the room at worrying rates, each trying to trip or otherwise impede the other before crashing into the wall, often randomly hitting the board until they land on the right word. It’s hugely entertaining for me as well as them. I think I might try it with an adult class next time things are getting a bit boring.

We had more snowfall yesterday and the pavements and roads are still covered in icky dangerous ice and slush, and the novelty has long since worn off, so I’m upping sticks and getting out of here.

Tomorrow morning—snow permitting of course—I’m flying out to the warmer climes of the province of Yunnan in south-west China [just next door to Vietman], for what I hope will be a nice break from city life. I did have an unofficial self-imposed rule that I never wanted to fly domestically in China—I’d much prefer to take the cross-country train like I did to Sichuan around this time last year—but having been actually laughed at by the man in the train ticket office when I enquired as to the chances of a booking this late in the day, I was pleased to find a pretty good deal online.

I’ll be landing in Kunming, the capital of the province, but I’m not planning on spending more than one or possibly two nights there—just enough to get my bearings.

My first destination proper is a place called Yuanyang. You know that clichéd image you have in your brain of rural China: rice paddies tiered down hillsides in a valley that stretches off into the misty distance; farmers with ox-driven ploughs working the land—that sort of thing? That’s Yuanyang. It should be a lovely few weeks. Fingers crossed the snow doesn’t ruin everything!

As reported earlier this week [by myself and much of the world media], we’ve had a couple of flakes of snow. It couldn’t have come at a worse time of year: every year the Chinese Spring Festival holiday sees the largest human migration on the planet, as people return to their hometowns from all over the country and abroad, to celebrate the coming of the New Year.

The chaos that ensues cannot be overstated—in 2006 the number of journeys undertaken by people exceeded the 1.3 billion-strong population of the country, and last year’s weather was mild by comparison. People save up all year long to be able to afford the train or bus tickets, and the majority cannot afford the luxury of the sleeper carriages on the very long journeys. So when the snow fell, this turmoil and discomfort was plunged into absolute chaos. Hundreds of thousands of people have been stuck, desperately waiting at freezing-cold train stations in the hope that the trains start running again. The government urged people to cancel their plans, but with time off so few and far between for most people here, along with the long and deep traditional importance of family ties, this is their one and only chance to make the trip home to see loved ones.

Here in Suzhou the local authorities appeared to have no idea how to deal with the snow: people armed with bamboo-shoot brooms were apparently told that clearing the snow off the top of roadside shrubs was more important that getting it off the cycle paths, forcing cyclists onto the already-dangerous roads. But such a decision pales into comparison to whichever ludicrous city official gave the go-ahead to clearing the snow of the roads using water cannons.

It’s not just the transportation that has been hit; the price of fruit and vegetables has doubled overnight. I talked to my regular local vegetable market trader this morning and he said he has very few crops at the moment, and those that he has are of bad quality. He showed me his hands that appeared to be swollen to about twice their normal size, and a deep purple in colour, presumably due to harvesting his supplies in freezing temperatures.

With all this gloom and worry, it is hard to imagine anyone actually enjoying the snow here in Suzhou, but there have been plenty of people out having fun. Everywhere you look, snowmen have appeared on street corners, outside shops and in parks, and spontaneous snowball fights have been having all around. I dragged a friend out to Tiger Hill on Sunday to take photos of the gorgeous scenery, the fruits of which you can find both my Flickr photoset and that of my friend Sara.

The Bookworm had the second of its regular quiz evenings last week, and for a special treat I presented the participants with a round of ten maths- or physics-based questions to provide some contrast to the fun they’d been having up to that point. I tried to strike a balance between questions requiring general knowledge and those that people could possibly work out, and was pretty impressed by how some teams did. The highest score for the round was 8.5 out of 10—see how you’d have fared [no cheating, and I’ll be deducting points for use of calculators!]:

1. In Einstein’s most famous equation, E=MC². What do the letters E, M, and C represent?

2. A right-angled triangle has two shortest sides of length 5cm and 12cm. What is the length of the hypotenuse?

3. A perfect number is a number whose factors add up to twice the original number. As a non-example, the factors of 10 are 1, 2, 5 and 10, but 1+2+5+10 does not equal 20, so 10 is not a perfect number. What is the smallest perfect number?

4. What is the total if you add up all the whole numbers between 1 and 100 (inclusive)?

5. One million seconds is roughly 11 days. To the nearest multiple of five, how many years is one billion seconds? (American billion.)

6. Imagine you loop a rope tightly all the way around the equator so that its ends meet exactly. You now want to raise this rope by 1 metre above the ground all the way around the Earth. How much extra rope would you need? (Answers to the nearest metre.)

7. If a boy weighs 60kg on Earth, what would he weigh on the Moon? (This is not a trick question!)

8. (a) What is the next number in the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. (b) What is this famous sequence of numbers called?

9. (a) How many zeroes are there after the 1 in a googol? (b) How many zeroes are there after the 1 in a googolplex?

10. Complete this famous quotation often attributed to Newton: “If I have seen further than those before me, it is only because…”

Late last year work began on the first of four planned underground lines in Suzhou, a huge construction job which I imagine is made even more difficult given the city’s extensive network of canals and generally chaotic roadways, especially in the city centre.

Major roads are having to be diverted, making rush-hour even more frustrating for commuters, and all the enormous construction vehicles and equipment—not to mention the tonnes of excavated mud and unsightly makeshift temporary accommodation for the migrant workers—will be putting a serious strain on Suzhou’s reputation as one of China’s most beautiful cities until work is completed in about four year’s time.

So it’s 2008 and I’m still in China. This year-long stay is now almost two-years long. Recently it’s again been time to decide what to do next, as my current work contract [and hence my residence visa] expire at the beginning of February.

Since I got back to Suzhou in September, you may have noticed a distinct drop-off in the regularity of my postings. There’s no particular reason for this, I’ve just been going about a pretty normal day-to-day life: teaching; meeting friends for drinks or having them round for dinner; dating; finding lovely new hang-outs; generally, just having a grand old time, but nothing spectacularly worth writing home about.

Although it’s been a long time since I studied Chinese in earnest, I’ve been picking up more and more of the language here and there—I can now recognise a pretty fair smattering of characters, useful for reading streetsigns and bus timetables, and have been making more of an effort to send text messages in Chinese to my Chinese-speaking friends. So I think I’m going to be enrolling at Suzhou University for a semester after the Chinese New Year. They have a well-recommended programme for learning different aspects of Chinese: you can focus on spoken Mandarin, reading, writing, or a combination of these. Most of the classes take place in the morning, which means I can do enough part-time teaching in the afternoons and evenings to keep me solvent, as long as I’m careful not to wear myself out nor not leave enough time for homework.

The company I currently work for has offered to keep me on as a part-time teacher, so that will provide at least some of my employment, but perhaps more importantly, they will arrange to renew my visa, which from past experience, is not something to be sniffed at. I’ll give the course and the working part-time a semester and see how it goes from there.

Well what let-down that was! After the warnings, the evacuations, the class-cancellations [so not all bad news], what did we get here in Suzhou? The equivalent of an average rainy day in the west of Ireland. In the end, the typhoon travelled a lot further inland than initially predicted, and its windspeeds dropped to that of a child blowing the seeds off a dandelion clock.

Unfortunately other parts of China did not get off so lightly, with landslides claiming at least five lives, thousands of homes wrecked, and disruptions of power supplies in areas further south of here, plus the evacuation of around 2.7 million people in the Shanghai area. [To where were they evacuated? No one seems to be saying.]

Still, at least now I know what the difference is between a hurricane and a typhoon: the former originate in the Atlantic, the latter in the Pacific; typhoons tend to be stronger due to the warmer Pacific air, but aside from that there’s not much to distinguish the two. The difference between these two types of low-pressure system and a cyclone is left as an exercise for the reader. [For a bonus, mildly-amusing pub-factoid, you may also want to find out what a “willy-willy” is to our Australian brethren, although I’d be careful how you search for that term.]

Since I’ve been back I’ve been teaching at a nursery school on Wednesday and Friday mornings, but tomorrow’s class has been cancelled … because the non-panic-inducingly-named Super Typhoon Wipha is set to lash the east coast of China over the next few days! Right now it’s only pouring with rain here, but it’s getting stronger by the hour. Perhaps it might be wise to invest in a rainhat…

The rumours were true! After a last-ditch two-pronged-pincer-movement strike, I finally have my year-long Chinese work visa. The last few days of warfare went like this.

Firstly, I called in reinforcements I had been reluctant to fall back on up to now, in the form of an acquaintance I made last year. He’s an Irishman, the boss of a clothing company based here in Suzhou, with several key strengths:

• He’s a very nice man and offered to help me out when I talked to him ages ago about possible visa problems should I resign from my [now former] employer.

• He knows my ex-manager personally, and is as much a fan of her as I am.

• But he also knows, and is on very good terms with, her brother-in-law—a very handy mediation route here.

• By lovely coincidence, he is also good friends with the Irish owner of my ex-company—in other words, he’s pals with my ex-boss’s boss.

All of which add up to some substantial guanxi, the deadliest weapon in modern China’s business world. So he set about talking to the brother-in-law, to find out of there was some kind of give-and-take that would get me the letter of release I so desperately needed to secure my work visa.

He called back later to see what I thought of a peace offering: in return for a letter of release, I would agree to not harm the reputation of the company by going on the record [that is, contacting newspapers etc.] about their recent treatment of me [and other employees in the past]. I agreed in principle to this idea, and the brother-in-law was given the go-ahead to approach my ex-manager.

The very day I set these events in motion, a new hope appeared on the horizon. My new employer told me—and I was highly dubious given the lack of success of their efforts to date—that all I needed to provide the authorities with was a photocopy of my original letter of release—that is, the one I got when I left Benxi. As highly-organised-person would have it, I did indeed keep a photocopy of that letter before handing it over to the police when I first arrived in Suzhou.

It turned out that the photocopy was enough, and it was this that got me my visa. Which is just as well, as the go-between route went rather quiet at my end after the initial contact was made. I’m not sure what transpired between my ex-manager and the brother-in-law, but what I do know is, soon after she was contacted, my ex-manager arranged to have a meeting with my new manager.

She tried to insist that I also attend this meeting—a request that my new manager refused, much to my relief. At the meeting, she demanded that my new manager fire me. She told him I had a habit of breaking contracts early. Unfortunately for her I’d already been open with my new manager about my reasons for leaving Benxi and her comany, and he sympathised with both situations. It also kind of blunts her point when you know that she asked me, on my last day and in two subsequent email messages, to stay on with her company.

Nevertheless, she clearly didn’t want me working for anyone else, and even went so far as to offer to transfer one of her current teachers to replace me. This says a lot about how much she values the services of her teachers, if she’s willing to send one over to a new employer simply to get back at someone who dared to resign from her company.

But it appears to be all over: I have my visa, and that’s all I really care about. I think a celebratory drink might be in order.

There’s a rumour going round that my visa application has finally gone through, and that my passport now contains a valid working visa for the full year.

I’m going to remain healthily dubious until I’ve seen it with my own eyes, later this afternoon. Fingers crossed…

The part of Suzhou where I live goes by two names: to English-speakers it’s called SIP—Suzhou Industrial Park—which, for me, conjures bleak images of factories, vast warehouses and smoke-spilling chimneys. Contrarily, the Chinese name is Yuan Qu—Garden District—which sounds altogether much lovelier, with lush green parks, skipping children and tweeting birds.

The reality is somewhere in between: there is certainly a large number of factories and office blocks littering the area, but in the residential parts, amongst the apartment complexes, are little pockets of green, constantly maintained by a small army of workers continually weeding, planting non-weeds, picking up litter and sweeping all things sweepable. In the last few weeks spring has sprung right over itself and almost become summer temperature-wise, but the blossom is out in full force.

Question: have I just never noticed it before now, or is it quite unusual for one tree to have two very different shades of blossom?

One year ago today, I arrived in China.

Gosh, that went by a bit quickly.

From my Google Calendar Daily Schedule email:

David, here is your schedule for:
Thu 15 Feb 2007
On holiday
All Day

Not just all day, Mister Google Calendar: for all of the next sixteen days. One week on, two weeks off—if only the rest of the year was going to be like this.

So it’s 2007 and I’m still in China—I have to admit, a small part of me thought I wouldn’t stick around to see the New Year here, but I’m very glad I have done so.

Without wanting to count my Chinese chickens, things are looking up: I am on the verge of signing a year-long contract with a new language school which promises only sixteen hours of teaching a week. There will of course be office hours and extra-curricular activities on top of these, but if I’m just sitting around then I hope I’ll use my time effectively and carry on with my Chinese studies. But the best result of the negotiations so far is that—staggeringly—they have agreed to give me the entire month of August off in order to make a trip back to the UK to see family and friends. I offered to sign a thirteen-month contract to make up for it, but due to Chinese Spring Festival falling in February each year, they said I may as well finish in February 2008, at which time they hope I’ll sign another year-long contract [I’m promising nothing!].

I’ve not signed anything yet, but unless they reveal themselves to be the devil in the next week or so, or I stumble across a significantly better offer, then I think this is as good as it’s going to get, employment-wise.

Further good news came when my temporary living conditions were offered to me full-time [or, for the foreseeable future at least—I don’t like to impose but it’s such a lovely flat I’d be a fool to refuse an offer like this even if it’s only for a couple more months]. I think the fact that the cats like me was what swayed it. My top tip so far for 2007: if you want people to like you, the pets are key. [Hopefully that won’t be the best piece of advice I can come up with for 2007.]

The next chapter in the saga of my employment in China. Having handed in my notice, I began trying to plan my next few months, specifically with regard to location, accommodation, vocation and communication.

Communication

Finally getting fed up with not being free to commit myself to a dedicated course of Chinese lessons—due to the possibility that new teaching work could be scheduled at short notice and at any time of the day, morning, afternoon or evening—I decided that once I’d handed in my notice there was less chance of my being assigned new teaching duties, so I signed up for eight weeks’ worth of Chinese classes, three times a week. I’m in the middle of the second week and I’ve already learnt more vocabulary than I’d managed to pick up since arriving in Suzhou, as well as putting to good use the basic stuff I’d been taught in Benxi.

Vocation

After handing in my notice, it became more and more obvious that, in terms of finding a new employee, my timing [last day at current job: December 9] was a little off: school and university semesters will only have a couple of months of their first semester left, then break for Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, so are more likely to be wanting new employees to start at the beginning of March. This was rather too long for me to go without work, so I approached my current boss with the offer to finish up the several courses that I am in the middle of teaching, instead of stopping halfway through and her having to find a suitable replacement. [Recruitment is still a seriously difficult problem for her.]

Of course she didn’t immediately agree to this idea, despite it saving her a lot of bother, and the couple of times I asked her for a decision, she tried to convince me to stay on until my original contract-end date of mid-June, which I flatly refused. Finally, last Saturday we sat down and she agreed to pay me part-time [that is, hourly instead of the full salary] to do a few hours a week for the remaining lessons. This gives me a little extra pocket money to tide me over, as well as plenty of free time to crack on with the Chinese study.

Accommodation

The downside to the aforementioned deal is that I lose the flat that comes with a full-time job, so I’m currently being very nice to a couple of friends in the hope that I can crash at their places whilst I finish up my teaching commitments and Chinese course—everything concludes in the first week or so of January.

Location

So, what then? I’d like to take a few weeks in January and early February to get out of Suzhou and see the rest of the country; now that winter is drawing in and things are a bit drizzly around here, I thought a trip down to the south of China might be in order—although the idea of a snow-covered Great Wall then catching up with some friends who have taken residence in Xi’an [northern China] is also appealing.

Whatever I do, I’d like to return to Suzhou after a few weeks, having found one or two good reasons [mostly one really quite lovely reason] to stick around a while longer. There is the issue of my visa to figure out: it expires mid-February, and depending on who I talk to, it’s either a doddle to extend it or I’m illegal the moment I leave my job and must return to the UK first if I want a new one—I’d like to avoid the latter case if at all possible, as it invalidates my travel insurance policy, which is otherwise good until next August.

It’s still all a bit too up-in-the-air for my liking, but things seem to be iterating towards resolution instead of in a worse direction, so I remain optimistic.

Some mildly cool news: sometime next year I’ll have a few of my photos in print. I was recently contacted by picture researcher for the UK division of a well-known publisher, who had come across my silk factory photos and decided they were suitable for a new childrens’ book they’re working on, and wanted my permission to incorporate one or two or three or four of them into one of the chapters, with the offer of full credit and a complimentary copy of the book.

After some cursory checking I went ahead and gave my permission—I’m no professional photographer and didn’t want to blow this probably-once-only chance by demanding payment. Besides, I’ve no clue what would have been a good amount of money to ask for. That’s about as much information I have about the book until my copy arrives in the post, but rest assured I’ll be carrying it around for the next six months after it does pop through the letterbox, as well as more-than-doubling the value of all the copies in bookshops by signing my name across the relevant page.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to disappear into a pseudo-hiatus like that, I just lost the will to weblog for a while there. Let’s see if I can get back into the swing of things over the next week or so.

Time seems to have slipped away recently and I’ve gotten behind on writing about a couple of things, so here they are in abridged form.

Doctored

Completely slipping my mind until a copy of my certificate arrived in the post the other day, on the 13th of July 2006 my name was read out in a big hall with lots of smartly-dressed people—it’s possible some people clapped at this moment—and I was, finally, officially, anti-climatically, a PhD. Why are degree certificates always so dull-looking?

Tong Li

A few weeks ago I went with some friends to a satellite town of Suzhou named Tong Li. It’s a very traditionally-built water town [that is, based on a network of canals, much like Suzhou but much smaller], and enjoys protection from modern developments in an effort to preserve its heritage. The simply-constructed buildings are no more than two stories tall; the shopping streets offer the usual array of silks, paintings, fans, teas and tea-pots, and small family-owned restaurants, at which we enjoyed a varied meal including my first sampling of fried eel [very salty, but I think this was the soy sauce].

The newest addition to Tong Li is the Museum of Ancient Sex Culture, detailing China’s long history of [sometimes devious, some might say] sexual practises, including scary-looking foot-binding tools—the shoes were just impossibly small. Some interesting statues, old and new, were dotted around the grounds, but the most interesting objects were inside, where unfortunately photography was banned. So-called “trunk bottoms” look like innocent ceramic ornaments in the shape of a fruit, but open them up and you find a tiny sculpture of a young couple in flagrante delicto: this was passed from mother to daughter on her wedding night [placed at the bottom of her suitcase, hence the name], and was the single piece of sex education imparted to the new couple—the groom has been told nothing by his parents.

[Photos in the Tong Li Flickr photoset.]

We get some pretty impressive storms here in Suzhou, and yesterday’s was the most vigorous yet: throughout the day we had rolls of thunder, but it wasn’t until the evening that the skies opened. Within minutes the streets were like rivers—six or seven inches of water spilling over the kerbs onto the pavements, branches falling onto the roads. The thirty seconds or so I took to get from the taxi to the bar soaked me to the skin.

Before I went out, I shot this thrilling movie from my prison cell bedroom window:

Look out for the fork lightning and terrific thunderclap around the 1:40 mark—so loud it sets off all the car alarms in the area.

Usually after a storm we get some respite from the thirty- to forty-degree heat, but today it’s like no rain ever fell: the streets are bone dry and the temperature’s rising. More storms are predicted for later today however—maybe a second soaking will cool this place down for a bit longer.

Almost six months in, the last couple of weeks have been the lowest point of my time out here so far, in terms of homesickness. Whether I became ill because I was feeling down, or I started feeling down [in part] because I was ill, I’m not entirely clear, but certainly the two coinciding wasn’t particularly good timing.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget where I am: if I stay indoors, write one or two emails, visit some English-language websites, chat to a few friends over some instant messaging programme or other, and watch a couple of DVDs, then to all intents and purposes I could be anywhere at all in the world. But as soon as I step outside to head off to work or even just to buy a few groceries, then China hits me full in the face once more, and nothing is annoying me more these days than the whispers of laowai that I can hear as I walk past—even in the city of Suzhou, which is home [temporary or permanently] to some ten thousand immigrants.

The teaching aspect is going well, with some new classes to keep things fresh, and getting to know students in the longer-running courses better and better, but I’m getting so tired with the antics of my boss that lately I’ve been wondering if it’s worth putting up with, or if I’d be wise to head off to pastures new before I become completely disenchanted with the entire experience. Up to now we’ve generally had three full-time teachers, but as of this week, due to a contract ending, we’re now down to two. The workload is not back-breaking, but we do need at least one more teacher [preferably two] to distribute things a little more fairly, and herein lies my main beef, having been witness to the so-called recruitment process.

The suitability of teachers can, apparently, be judged on the smallest of discretions: one guy made the mistake of turning up for his initial meet-and-greet in shorts—okay, so he should have thought to smarten himself up a bit, but it was thirty-five degrees outside, so perhaps he could be forgiven? No, it meant he wouldn’t be a professional teacher, even though he had several years experience of teaching in Chinese schools on top of a Masters degree in education.

On another occasion I was asked to explain what an applicant meant in their CV by describing themselves as “gregarious”, so I hazarded that he was sociable, out-going, friendly. This was interpreted as “probably going to be regularly throwing parties at his provided accommodation”, and his application summarily binned! I tried my best to explain that everybody sells themselves in CVs, and his use of that word was likely nothing more than him trying to be original when describing a personality that would be a big boon in a teacher, but to no avail.

More seriously, it seems teaching in China is one place where prejudice is alive and well, and unashamedly so: I’ve been told that people of certain races are not marketable as teachers, and hence will never be employed by my company; to clarify, if you’re not Caucasian, don’t bother applying. And even within this ethnic group, there is plenty of room for discrimination: according to my employer, Americans are generally not to be trusted, but, much to her distaste, she must have at least one on staff for the American-based companies which want to use our services. Luckily for me, British and Irish people are in her good books—which kind of makes me want to screw her over just to level the playing field for the other nations.

So I’ve been asking myself if I shouldn’t make a stand and leave on principle, and at the moment there are two main reasons why I haven’t:

• it’s not financially viable for me to quit right this second and move to another city in China—a couple more months and this won’t be a problem

• sadly, from reading a few things here and there as well as other anecdotal evidence, even when I can afford to hunt around for a couple of months for alternative employers, there’s no guarantee that I wouldn’t be leaping out of one frying pan only to land in another, equally sizzly frying pan, with a serious dent in my finances

There are some seriously good pros to staying put—lovely flat, nice city [once this summer heat calms down it’ll be even nicer], very decent pay-packet—and as I say, the cons could well be cons wherever I go. Of course, there are some enlightened schools around willing to take on foreign teachers from all backgrounds, which might mean a more pleasant employer, but the students I have here are good people and I’ve nothing against teaching them.

For now, I’ve decided the solution is to try and change things from the inside—I always seem to get myself involved when things aren’t as they should be [by which I mean, of course, they aren’t how I think they should be], be it being the postgrad representative or rearranging the kitchen to make it more spacious [last weekend’s task as soon as my soon-to-head-home roommate departed for a week’s holiday], so I’ll be voicing my opinions at every given opportunity, and if they get me in trouble, well, at least it’ll be for the right reasons, and I could well be supping a pint in the Lansdowne before Christmas.

Another first this week: my first being ill enough to visit a doctor. Actually, I wasn’t that poorly—just a standard case of manflu—but upon turning up to work looking suitably pathetic [headache, body-ache, fatigue, distinct “please cancel my classes” look…

Read the rest of “Chinese medicine”…

My friend Tara’s flat is on the twentieth floor, offering some pretty decent views of the surrounding buildings….

Read the rest of “Vertigo”…

Do the curly locks of the golf caddy on the left of the photo look vaguely familiar? That’s right, it’s none other than yours truly, helping out a clothes-designing friend of mine by being a clothes horse for her…

Read the rest of “Shooting the shoot”…

Every year around this time, in London, Leicester and I’m sure many other places, we experience the phenomenon of Flying Ant Day, sending people scurrying into their homes, battening down the hatches, sealing the vents, and donning breathing apparatus until…

Read the rest of “Ants schmantz”…

Teaching adults is a lot less work than teaching children—since coming to Suzhou, I’ve not had to raise my voice once, making for a much nicer feeling in my vocal chords at the end of an average day [the fact…

Read the rest of “Load”…

I remember watching an interview with Keanu Reeves around the time that Speed came out, in which he was asked how he felt doing his own stunts—in particular, during the car-chase scenes. He said that the stunt coordinator had taken…

Read the rest of “Dodge City”…

Long-term readers may recall my mild obsession with photographing the bats that flitted around my back garden in Leicester. The other day I almost had the opportunity for some close-quarter bat snaps. Coming home in the wee hours of the…

Read the rest of “Bat in the flat”…

Just over a week after arrived I was treated to my first day off work, and took the opportunity to see something of Suzhou other than my flat, my workplace or the supermarket. I’d been given a handy tourists’ map…

Read the rest of “Exploring Suzhou”…

The train journey was utterly uneventful. Every time I looked out of the window, I saw nothing but farmland—seemingly every spare inch was given over to agriculture of some kind, be it genuine farms or wall-to-wall allotments behind every house….

Read the rest of “Hello Suzhou”…

Since we have a whole seven days off work, starting tomorrow night, Alan and I thought it might be fun to get out of the city for a while and head north, up to Manzhouli—the city where I was originally…

Read the rest of “Shenyanged”…

Continuing my efforts to traverse the stairs of my block of flats in not total darkness, tonight I decided on a different strategy: knowing that, on occasion at least one hand would be occupied with carrying shopping, I thought that…

Read the rest of “Clickety-crack”…

I’m about ready to submit an article to The Lancet, describing a previously-unreported but widespread medical condition that I’ve dubbed “Benxi Knee”. In many of the blocks of flats here, the stairwells are illuminated by sound-activated lights; there are no…

Read the rest of “B’s Knees”…

Thanks to Sarah and Ade, my Easter wasn’t entirely chocolate-egg-free [and their healthy contribution to David’s Jaffa Cake Appeal was most welcome too]….

Read the rest of “Easter Sinoday”…

The middle of April, Easter weekend, and it snowed! A good couple of hours’ worth of fairly heavy fall, which settled on the trees and rides at the local park, making for a pleasant if surreal walk back from lunch—I’ve…

Read the rest of “Surely Bing never dreamt of this?”…

A group of us foreign types took a hike up the highest of the mountains surrounding Benxi: Pingding Shan [平頂山, Flat Top Mountain]. We cheated by taking a short bus journey to the outskirts of the city, which rises part…

Read the rest of “Pingding Shan”…

It’s the tones that kill me. I can handle the fact that, early on, there are simply a lot of words to memorise. It’s to be expected—in all languages, to get any kind of grip on the basics, you just…

Read the rest of “Learning the language [beginnings]”…

The question on at least one person’s lips is: why did I choose to come to China? And the short answer is: *shrug* why not? The slightly-longer answer goes something like this. Towards the end of my Ph.D. I was…

Read the rest of “Why am I here?”…

I can’t quite believe I’ve been here for two weeks already—everything has been both entirely vivid and a complete blur—and because I’ve not really said so explicitly yet, I should clear up precisely where “here” is: I am not, as…

Read the rest of “First fortnight”…

I now have a broadband connection in my apartment. After a week on a dodgy, unsecure wireless connection that was so temperamental I actually pencilled lines onto my desk to ensure I always placed my laptop in the one and…

Read the rest of “Got myself connected”…

The China Eastern Airlines flight from London to Shanghai was surprisingly empty; not only did I have two seats to myself, but if I’d wanted to, I could have moved into the middle of the ‘plane and stretched out across…

Read the rest of “The flight”…

And 5kg under the weight limit too….

Read the rest of “Packed!”…

Ever have one of those mornings where you wake up and realise you’re emigrating to China later that day? Eep!…

Read the rest of “Dawning”…