Back in Beijing

26 July

My apologies for the delayed posting, but I did not want to subject anyone to an undignified rant. Before I summarize my time in Chengde I need to give another apology. This one to my aunt for waking her up at 5am because I took a friend’s word that Denver is 12 hours behind China, and I need not double check with Google. Therefore, instead of calling at 7am to wish my uncle a Very Happy 60^th Birthday – I called at 5am. All I can say is that at least I didn’t pull her out of bed by her ankles like my father used to do!

Living in Chengde is living in continual frustration. I had a great experience with some unfortunate occurrences that seem so much more dire than they really are when I was living through them because I lived on the thin line between “throwing in the towel” and “I can do it, I can do it.” The teacher I was assigned to in Chengde spoke less English than I did Chinese; which for anyone who has ever taken foreign language is horribly irksome. If I had a question on grammar or the specific meaning of a vocabulary word, the answer was in Chinese, and that really doesn’t help me since I don’t speak Chinese.
I was determined to stick with it, and was studying on my own outside of class because otherwise I was just not learning anything. The problem here is that I had class six hours a day (9am-12pm and 3pm-6pm) which leaves precious little time to study because I need to socialize with my host and have some time to just myself. I wound up burning myself out in a week and a half. I saw no point in going to class where the teacher would just talk at me and I would vaguely participate, counting the minutes till I could be released because I had already taught myself the chapter – or was in process of learning it. 

At the end of my second week, I contacted LTL to cancel the classes or assign me a new teacher because there was no reason for me to pay for classes that I was not attending to due to my incompatibility with the teacher. I honestly have no idea if my first teacher is capable or not because I could not understand him. I needed a teacher capable of explaining grammatical points in English, and he was not. In any case, LTL had new teachers for me Monday. Both were English proficient, but class was conducted in Chinese. My determination and willingness to study however, had been depleted during my first two weeks. I faithfully attended class, but I was not completely engaged. I did not learn a tremendous amount of grammar, but I did learn a lot about the differences between Chinese and American cultures.  For instance, in China retirement is compulsory for women at 50 and men at 60. University in China is three years instead of the American four, but attendance is restricted based on your high school exit examination scores. This high school exit examination decides the course of a Chinese person’s life. The students decide if they want to take the Science (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) or Arts (Politics, History, and something I can’t remember) examination. Which examination you take limits which universities you can apply to. This is further restricted by the score you receive on your examination. In effect, the quality and type of education you receive is decided when you are eighteen. I personally, have changed my life goals, and therefore the education I want about six times since I was eighteen. 

Then just to compound the level of frustration I lived in, my host’s husband’s father fell ill and had to go to the hospital. My host’s mother came to stay with me for the weekend while my host went to visit her in-laws with her husband. This was fine, her mother made me lots and lots of tasty dumplings. What I did not understand was that my host’s in-laws were caring for her daughter, and because of the hospitalization she brought the baby back to live with us. Anyone who knows me, knows how well I deal with babies. I smile, waive, give them a toy, and consider my duty done. This baby doesn’t even have the advantage of being a blood relation, so I within a day I was far into “throwing in the towel” territory and rapidly approaching hermitage in my room with my headphones cemented into my ears. The B-movie and Disney sections on Netflixs probably saved my sanity. A friend of mine here had to travel to Beijing on Thursday, 25 July, and so I skipped out of Chengde a day early with him; only to get trapped in a car for four hours with a sketchy driver that was definitely cheating the toll system, and had no idea how to get to our final destination. I say cheating the toll system because he exited the toll road twice before Beijing only to make U-turns and get back on the toll road. He also stopped on the road, hopped over the guardrail, and got a toll ticket from some guy going the other way. 

These are all just things that happen in life, no matter where you are living. When you are living in a foreign country though, the rules and your tolerance for these unexpected life events changes. I am back in Beijing, and soon I will be able to laugh about all the tribulations; recounting them to friends as “look what I survived” stories.