He was smoking.

It was his legal right. I just wish he didn’t do it on the bus.

I opened the window to get me some air, but the man behind me only laughed and kept puffing away. I always came off public transportation in Tianjin smelling like nicotine even though I don’t smoke myself. There was no occasion to turn around tell him to put it out. In fact, I’m sure others on the bus wanted to ask him for a puff, but they were minding their own business. I just sat back wishing people were still worried about SARS. Then the busses were nearly empty.

Bus 95 turned down Weijin Nan Lu off of the Wujiayao Dajie using the Balitai interchange. The curvy freeway style interchange in the middle of the city was always fun to ride, rising up and down like a roller coaster. It lifted you up just high enough to see the lay of the area. Nankai University was just to the northwest. Beyond a few buildings to the south I could see the TV tower, which was much like the Seattle Space Needle. And if I squinted, I would still be able to see the Otis corporate building standing like an enormous flashlight shining upward. Of course the air pollution obscured it so a glimpse was all I could get.

Settling down in my seat, I kept wishing the smoker would just get off. There was a McDonalds and a KFC along the way (they’re always kitty corner from one another around here) and I just hoped he was riding along to find lunch. I was.

But as the bus wound around stopping at every place along the road, people getting on, people getting off, and I stared out the window at the bicycle riders and all the Huali taxis, letting the air blow on my face to keep the cigarette smell from getting into my hair (unlikely to work, but I ought to try), my thoughts mused over everything and nothing at all. There was too much coming to my senses that was so repugnant and exotic that it was best to ignore it. I mean, how does one deal with the sight of dirt and trash on every street corner and side?

Funny, with the construction all around building up for the 2008 summer Olympics, you’d think the government would also improve other things along the way, such as adding trash cans or something to at least encourage the locals to drop trash in a can rather than on the ground. A friend of mine called all the bushes on the curbs ‘plastic bag catchers’ because they were always covered in thin plastic bags people casually discarded on the street without even a thought. Would it change at all when the Olympics arrived? Smirking at the dirt on the curbs and in the gutters, I didn’t think it was likely. The main pollution problem had more to do with average Chinese person than with government clean up. Attitudes rarely change overnight. Smokers on busses had to care about things other than where he could get his next nicotine fix and what his rights were.

Besides, I just saw a man hock a lougie just on the street over there, and a kid was squatting on the sidewalk as his mother watched as he laid a warm one on the tile. It was nothing new. I’ve seen worse. No wonder SARS had been such a scare. Most people just didn’t know what was sanitary. I just couldn’t figure how that country had gone from an advanced super power with the highest technology and scientific inventions of the ancient world to what all the locals now called a ‘developing country’.

I could blame Mao, I thought as I glanced at the new legal tender the government issued. He was on every one now. They used to have nice ones with people in cultural costumes. Though I didn’t agree with Mao’s politics or how he set himself up as a god, it wasn’t entirely his fault his country became a crumbling polluted state. Their country had crashed down long before Mao Zi Dong had run in into the ground destroying the ecology, the economy, and most of the sanity of China. I couldn’t completely blame Chiang Kai Shek, though he contributed to the problem by ignoring that famine during WWII up until it was too late to really fix things while many people died. Most people in China blame the Dragon Lady, the old empress. But really, even she could not be blamed entirely. After all, a leader doesn’t have to be followed. A tyrant can be overthrown. Besides, Germany had been run into the ground by war twice after being a grand empire, and look at what it is today—a peaceful, clean country. It had to be a culture thing.

Actually, I knew it was. After teaching English in a college among children of people who had participate and been victims of the ‘ten years of madness’, the time where Mao and his little red book did its damage, I learned much simply by keeping my ears open. Old Chinese culture of community-over-individualism compounded with Mao’s nationalistic form of Marxism, which removed all freedom of thought, created a group of people that, as a social entity, remained like children. Then they had kids.

Glancing about at their posterity in the streets as the bus turned another corner, I felt like mourning the state of things. In comparison to the indomitable spirit of the westward expansionist pioneers who disliked government interference of any kind (my ancestors), many of the locals of China that I knew were not only dependant on the government for permission to do things, but also incapable of accountability for their own actions. I once tried to teach my students, while also instructing them on how to draw up a survey to gather information, to be aware that they (as citizens) were part of the reason their city was so dirty. Yes, they were full aware it was dirty. Yet, they still seemed to think that dropping trash was nothing, and that the major pollution in China was in the air from the factories. Funny, though the air pollution was pretty nasty, I really hadn’t noticed it as much until the second year when I developed my first sinus infection after getting my first bout of bronchitis ever. I was still taking antibiotics for both, though that foot massager was insistent he could cure me after three foot massages.

I had even assigned my students to write an essay on what individual citizens could do to improve the environment in the city. After collecting those and reading them, I started to lose heart that my efforts would reach them. Some mentioned planting trees, which was a highly publicized Hollywood thing that they keyed in to without any problem, but almost all of them talked about petitioning the government to do something rather than listing what an average Chinese citizen could do on a daily basis. And here I was thinking about the good citizenship award I got as a child for simply picking up trash when I lived in Vegas. Such an idea never occurred to them.

This, ‘let the government take care of it’ attitude is what led to the trashy state of the nation, I believe. A person could smoke where he wanted, drop his butts, ash and cartons everywhere, eat a meal from a plastic bag, drop that bag and let it fly into the bushes, drink a soft drink, drop that can on the ground until it rolled in the gutter, hock a lougie on the sidewalk, and when he needed to make a dump, all he needed was to find a wall. And then after all that, he would complain about how dirty his city was, taking no responsibility for his own actions. This is no exaggeration. I saw it all the time. When we did the surveys on littering in class, I asked how many would drop trash if they couldn’t find a can and how many would save their trash and search for a can. It was astonishing how many would just drop it.

I thought about this a lot while I rode to my favorite café with this man smoking right behind me on the bus. My asthmatic sister would have keeled over and asphyxiated from his smoke while all he cared about was his right to smoke and not about those he was affecting. My sinus infection certainly wasn’t getting any better from inhaling the toxic stuff. Still, there was no law yet against smoking on the bus.

Yet.

Two girls had gotten on, and I overheard them chatting. I could understand only a handful of their words, but one did glance at the man, gave him a glare as she whispered to her friend that she would be glad once the Beijing Olympics started. Then they were going to adopt a no smoking-on-the-bus law.

Hmm. A law.

Why does it always take a law to make people to the right thing?

I sighed, sticking my nose out the window as the smoker cast back something somewhat offensive to the girls we all overheard. I could see the girls bristle then snap back at him. It would start into a fight. Then everyone would gather to watch. That’s why I never got involved. It was a local problem. It needed a local solution. I had learned the hard way that it was not a foreigner’s place to give lectures on improving a nation she did not belong to. After all, who wanted to hear from a stranger that your country is a mess? I know Americans sure don’t. We have our own little messes to deal with, ones of another kind.

The bus rolled into the station. It was a dirtier corner than most of the dirty corners, junk heaped up to one side with a driveway in desperate need of washing. The curb itself was crumbling.

The smoker got off.

So did I.

He turned one way.

I went another.

His smell was still on me though. I would not be able to get rid of that until I got home to shower and wash my clothes—after a good airing out.

With still a good walk to go, I started out, crossing the street as the cars whizzed by me. They never stopped for pedestrians, but then they didn’t need to. Every Chinese driver kept his eye on the road and not his cell phone. The cops made sure of that. I had to walk under the train tracks along side the cars, ignoring the senseless telephone numbers spray painted on the walls that made the city look even dirtier. When I reached the other side where the city leveled out a bit with shorter apartment houses and lots of independent fruit and veggie sellers on the street, I looked to the left. There, just over the small fence was the little book café. There I could get a bagel and read a book right from off the shelves. They also sold macaroni and cheese. I usually came for the quesadillas and the smoothies, a wonder since cold drinks are not common in China.

The shop itself was easy to miss. It was stuck between a laundromat and some other shop like a slice of meat between two chunks of bread. Only the door and window showed that the place had life. I went in, listening to the clanging of the bell as I stepped inside. Most booths were empty. Even the upper stand where they had performers come at night was bare. One of my friends knew a cellist and a keyboard artist, and had finagled them to perform there before their big Christmas concert at the city’s performance hall downtown. They actually dragged me up to sing Christmas carols while they had played in the café. It was more than a little embarrassing with all the English language students from all the local colleges staring up at me as I attempted to sing without my voice cracking. I certainly wasn’t a professional. And it wasn’t the same as singing folk songs for my students to illustrate a point in class. Students tended to forgive their foreign teachers somewhat.

But at lunchtime only a few people came in, mostly to purchase food that they would have a great difficulty finding and buying at a reasonable price. I usually traveled across town from one bus station to another to get there. The only other foreign food options we had were KFC and McDonalds—but anyone with sense would get sick of fast food after the first month. Even Pizza Hut did not offer what I was looking for. Besides, if I wanted to order pizza, I would have gotten it from the Pizza Box, which delivered where Pizza Hut had yet to do so in China. The Pizza Box pizza also tasted better, especially the one called the Mongolian Horde.

I walked to the counter, looking up at my options just as my friend Lisa came in. She was Chinese, local of the area though not the city. Her English was impeccable and she was now studying Korean and French. Funny though, she was an art major that had studied at the college I taught at. Not my student, but a friend of a friend.

“Hi!” She waved to me as she approached. Lisa didn’t really like American food, but she did like some of the soups and sandwiches they sold here. Her friend also owned the store.

“Hi.” I looked back at the menu. “What are you going to order?”

“Oh, I already ate,” she said.

I smiled. She probably did. The last time she and I ate out together, I took her to try pizza for the first time. She wanted chopsticks, but the waitress gave her a fork instead, telling her we did not eat pizza with chopsticks. She also had wanted to order a large pan of pizza, but luckily I insisted that we buy one personal pan, just in case she didn’t like it and I had to eat the whole thing. She didn’t like it. However, the way Chinese people express their dislike when they feel you were trying to be hospitable is to pretend to like it and then pretend to be full. I told her then that she didn’t have to like it. She sighed with relief and let me eat the rest.

Most Chinese people don’t like cheese.

I feel the same way about tofu.

Lisa had tried to get me to eat tofu so many times. I just couldn’t stomach it. However, the difference between Americans and Chinese is that Americans don’t go around pretending they like something they really don’t like. Face saving really is an Asian custom. It took a while for Lisa to get used to that with me. I also had to learn how to tactfully let her know I wouldn’t eat another piece of tofu even if it were the last thing to eat on the earth.

So we stared up at the menu as I at last ordered a sandwich and a smoothie. I was really in the mood for that anyway.

“So, are you going to buy it?” Lisa asked, tilting her head at me with a smile.

There was a book on sale in the store that I had been adoring for the past month. I’m not usually an impulsive buyer, but I do latch onto some things and think about them a while before getting it.

“Yeah.”

It was a book on Chinese dragons. I love dragons. Wrote a paper on dragons once in a Myth course in college because I was so obsessed about them.

The store sold other things. Paintings, Chinese calligraphy, and even bibles. It was a Christian bookshop besides a café. Despite what most westerners believe about China, it is actually rather free when it comes to religion. A Chinese citizen can choose whatever faith he wanted, just as long as it did not infringe on politics or the safety of others. Perhaps that was why the Fa Lu Gong group was getting so much flack. The last I read in the China Daily, one of their devotees tried to catch SARS and spread it, attempting to break into a hospital with infected patients. Of course, the China Daily is politically skewed.

I suppose most of the arguments against China came from Mao’s era. There were times I really wished my family back home understood that time goes on in the world, and Mao died along with much of the old communist ways. I knew it, especially when I haggled with local merchants on a daily basis to buy shoes and eggs, also watching Wal-Mart moving in just up Weijin Lu and its competitor Carrefore out on Baidi Lu, full of business. Besides that, religion was alive and well. Catholic mass was held in a church downtown near the main shopping district, there was a large Christian organization my friend belonged to that also ran several charity organizations, and several of my Muslim students invited me to dinner in their own specialized cafeteria. Buddhism was still in practice besides. On nearly every Buddhist holiday the locals would be out burning ghost money on the street. The ash piles alone took some weaving in and out around when I walk from the bus stop to home. Trampling on someone else’s religion wasn’t a good idea.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” I asked as we walked to our booth. When my lunch was ready, they would bring it to me.

Lisa sat across from me. She had changed her mind and ordered a smoothie. “I heard that you were planning on going back to the U.S.. Is that true?”

I nodded. “Yes. I’ll be leaving once the term is over.”

She stared at me with questioning eyes. “But why are you leaving? Don’t you like it here?”

I hated the pollution. My sinus infection was not completely going away. I was getting sick all the time now, and I was also tired of my friends sending me to hokey foot massagers claiming that three massages could get rid of bronchitis. He hadn’t and I had to go on an I.V. anyway. But I didn’t hate living there. I knew I would miss it.

“No, it’s not that.”

My students asked me all the time if I missed my family. I hadn’t. I liked living where I was, and my family was like some distant dream. Besides, I had not gone home during Christmas or Thanksgiving or summer the entire time I was off at college. I had to work my tail off just to get through without putting myself into debt with a loan. I was scot-free, debt free and, basically free to roam. I wasn’t going home for that.

“I just feel it is time to go back,” I said.

Lisa gave me a skeptical look. I wondered mildly what was going on in her head. She wasn’t exactly a forthcoming individual.

“Is something wrong at home. I talked with your boss, and she thinks that you have a family emergency calling you back.”

I smirked. That was why boss was living in China and not in England with her husband, or so that was how the rumor went. “No. No family emergency. It is just time.”

I think my friend gave up trying to understand me. She gave a small shrug and accepted the smoothie from the waitress.

“So, what do you have planned for today?” I asked her.

She smiled at me. “Tennis. Then I go to my English class.”

Lisa still studied English with an American teacher. She uses it for the company she works for, mostly dealing with foreign businessmen. I reminded me of a former conversation we had about her teacher catching her cheating on an assignment. At the time Lisa had not comprehended that what she was doing was cheating. After all, the Chinese educational system is a lot different from that in the US. Her teacher had asked them to write sentences with their vocabulary words, but Lisa had copied her sentences from a dictionary and turned those in. Of course her teacher rejected them, but I had to explain to Lisa why, and that had led to an argument. After all, her teacher said it was Chinese culture to cheat and that made Lisa feel insulted.

I can’t exactly blame her. The Chinese were taught to learn from the masters. Copy the masters. Copying was considered learning. It took a bit to explain that her teacher didn’t want copied sentences but sentences from Lisa’s own brain. I think eventually it sunk in.

Not that blatant cheating wasn’t also rampant in my classes. It was a question that had been weighing heavily on my mind since I had caught many of my students copying each other’s homework, including a research paper with the names whited out and then photocopied. I mean, how stupid did they think I was?
We went and sat down in the booth after we paid for our lunch, me taking another book off the shelf. I’ve been skimming Yell-o Girls

recently. I had just finished The Kitchen God’s Wife

. One of these days I’d like to read an upbeat story about China than all these negative gripy kinds of stories. I was so depressed after reading The Kitchen God’s Wife

. Honestly, it makes life look like this grueling ordeal. I prefer to think that we are to live in the pursuit of happiness, that it is the object of our existence.

I noticed a framed calligraphy hanging on display for sale near by then pointed it out to Lisa. “What does that say?”

She turned around and glanced at it. “Oh. It says ‘hope’.”

I lifted my eyebrows. It looked nice.

“Are you thinking of buying it?”

I nodded.

Lisa gave it another look then said, “I can do that. I can paint one for you.”

She was an art major. I was sure she could, but I didn’t want to put her out. Guanxi was a big thing in China. Gifts and favors were part of relationships, but that also meant owing people afterward. It was another thing I really didn’t like. Friendships with strings attached bothered me.

“No, that’s ok,” I said.

“But I can do it, and it won’t cost you anything.” Lisa didn’t look too happy that I was putting her off.

I felt immediately uncomfortable. Between a two tight places, I really didn’t want her to make one for me. I was also picky about end results. I saw what I wanted and I did not want to be obliged to accept a gift that might not even turn out how I wanted. “No, really, that’s ok. I just want that one.”

Lisa went silent. I knew she wasn’t happy with my choice, but she was used to foreigners and our independent way of doing things. It wouldn’t really affect our relationship.

The waitress brought our orders. The quesidilla looked delicious.

We parted after lunch; Lisa going one way, me going another. I waited at the bus stop on the corner, trying to ignore the heaps of trash that really ought to have been hauled away rather than packing down with wet and flies. Everyone stared at me, the spectacle known as lao wai. I had learned to ignore all the staring eyes. It was a waste of time to tell them that staring was rude anyway.

When the bus came, I climbed on and found a seat next to the window, looking out once more. Thinking one more of everything and nothing at all, my mind floated back to Lisa’s and my conversation about cheating. It wasn’t just a problem in school. Chinese people did not value originality in the same way as the country I had grown up in. Passing all the copy-cat advertisements on the street, the poorly edited spelling on billboards and that ridiculous one that had Abraham Lincoln juxtaposed next to the phrase The Declaration of Independence, I often wondered if they even paid attention to what they were copying. I had stationary with poorly written English poetry on them, bought as a joke to send home.

And as my trip back to the university campus was coming to its end my mind went back to the words my Aussie co-worker said when I mentioned the troubles I had with the photocopied assignment in class. He had said, “I had one former student, now graduated, relate something similar to me and then said, ‘Plagiarism is an elegant offense.’”

An elegant offense, huh?

I wryly smirked to myself. Had I cheated at all in college I would have been expelled. Often I wondered what it would be like if the threat of expulsion were real for my students when they cheated. I knew that if I made a complaint to my department head about my student’s cheating they would do nothing. I was the outsider. This was their system.

But he had expounded on it. “Just think of all the four kuai DVDs on sale and the mock name brand shoes everyone wears. Everyone is plagiarizing in China.”
I didn’t want to think about it actually. I was sick of seeing brand name things spelled wrong and having all the DVDs I bought turn out to be pirated pieces of junk. I couldn’t even buy a DVD in a department store without finding that the special features didn’t work and the subtitles were written in screwy English. I even saw a fake Harry Potter book on sale on the street, cheap paper and a completely fraudulent story. I found nothing elegant at finding second-rate copies everywhere. This was beyond cheating.

I wondered to myself if that would ever change. Tradition had a way of creeping out in ugly ways when exposed to modern culture. American culture was the same. Our boldness and do-it-yourself attitudes passed down the generations from our pioneering ancestors had turned into the cocky imperialistic business attitudes the rest of the world hates so much. The Chinese respect for the masters had turned into rampant plagiarism and lack of originality. Personally, I think our people are both shameless.
The bus turned into the station. It was the end of the line.

I got off, looked around and drew in a breath as I scanned the road. Four lanes, dusty and dirty, construction was still going on to prepare for the Olympics. I would be happy when it was all done. I picked a spot to cross the street, a place where others were slipping between the cars that would not stop for us but honk their horns as they rumbled by. At least with others I would not get hit.

On the other side of the road, I walked towards our campus gate, nodded to the guard then crossed the front campus quad where the new buildings stood. They were recently 3 years old, the insides already cracking and the plaster coming off from such quick, cheap and hasty construction. Passing by them I entered the old campus, glancing at where they were digging up the lawn to build a fishpond that would become a mosquito incubator in summer. I would rather have the lawn. Passing the umbrella trees, the large carved stone bust monument in the small park between buildings, I at last came to the foreign expert’s accommodation. My Aussie co-worker was eating lunch in our small cafeteria. Half the food spread out on the table would be cold by now, the rice already exposed to the air and the celery and cashew dish I liked so much was now getting soggy from that sauce they poured on it. Stuffed anyway, I was glad I didn’t have to eat shrimp for once. Passing by with a small wave, I went up the stairs to our floor.

On the second floor I turned to nod at the door guard who was shelling nuts for supper and chatting with another of the housing staff. I went down the hall, took out my keys, and opened my door. Going inside, I put my keys on the coat hook then walked to my bed where I lay down. I had no classes that afternoon. Happily I had weekends off.

Another day done.

I closed my eyes, deciding to take part in the Chinese custom of taking a two o’clock nap. Not all culture differences were unpleasant. Actually, I’m glad for them. After all, I do believe in the expansive world where we collect all the good from every culture…I just keep wishing we could also throw away the bad.

Oh, well, maybe later.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.11.2009

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