Chinese "Friends" in Bars

With the addition of two young American Peace Corps teachers in Zhangye this term, the "Friday Nights for Foreigners" tradition that began last term has been much more lively. We always meet for dinner on Friday, and this term we generally end the evening bar-hopping on European Street. Yes, that was "bar-hopping"; Zhangye, with its nearest international neighbor being Mongolia, has a cooler bar scene than my American hometown. In particular we've come to like two: "Gary's Friend's Bar", with the owner's girlfriend being a generally agreed front-runner for Most Beautiful Woman in Zhangye, and China Fire. China Fire has a good logo to go with a great name: the place is covered in posters with a flaming huo, the character for "fire".

Strange and amusing things usually happen when foreigners stay up past the time that decent people go to bed in Zhangye. Last time I went out, we attracted an unwelcome, but not unusual, amount of attention at Gary's Friend's Bar. This was, of course, focused on Danielle, who is not only foreign but a young female with blonde hair. She was double-teamed or triple-teamed this time, with a guy on each side, one of whom Gary was sure was Japanese. To this he would only respond confusingly, in English, "I am Japanese guide-o!". By the end of the night, Danielle told me "I think I've been told 'I love you' more times tonight than during the rest of my life combined". I had my own new best friend, who was drunk and mostly repeated the same conversation about seeing me play guitar at Hexi University, occasionally adding emphasis by playing air-guitar and saying "very beautiful!" in English.

Stephen also got a lot of attention, as his beard and long hair also make him a particular novelty. The owner of the bar, Gary's friend, insisted he looked like someone, whose Chinese name didn't make sense to any of us. Finally he found a photo in a magazine: Viggo Mortensen, best known for playing "Aragorn" in The Lord of the Rings. Apparently worried that the hero among us might be under-armed, he fetched a large and expensive-looking dagger (from where, I have no idea) and insisted that Stephen accept it as a gift. Someone soon pointed out that "hey, you look like him too!", referring to the poster of Kurt Cobain on the back wall. To anyone who has felt embarrassed about not being able to tell Chinese people apart, I assure you that they can't tell us apart, and are probably less embarrassed about it. As the swarming of weird, drunk Chinese men began, Stephen, who normally leaves early because his school is farther away, asked "is it usually like this after I leave?", and we assured him it was nothing out of the ordinary.

In an earlier night at the "Halloween Bar" (giant fake spiderweb on the wall), Danielle attracted a particularly persistent friend. As can be seen from the picture (which Danielle may or may not appreciate me putting on the internet), he had had a fair share of alcohol, and was getting a little too close for her comfort. Interacting with locals who pay no attention to the language barrier is generally a good thing, but possibly Danielle finds an exception in sweet nothings being whispered into her ear in unintelligible Chinese, peppered with the occasional "I love you" in English. But then again I could be wrong.

Live in Zhangye Prison

As probably goes without saying, performing rock music inside a prison to a crowd of Chinese criminals was memorable. For some reason, none of the Chinese people I was with seemed to find it as amusing as I did. The daily stares from Chinese people haven't fazed me for a long time, but as we walked through the room towards the stage, I couldn't help but feel self-conscious about a few hundred convicts turning in unison to watch my every move. The performance was on a rather official-looking stage in the cafeteria, with a red banner about World Aids Day; it seems the prison has a decent entertainment budget.

I hadn't practiced with them for months, and even on the stage I had not the slightest idea what songs we were playing. I finally asked Little Ma what song we were going to play first, and he just said "don't worry, we're playing the songs you know". For some reason the Guitar Club is not keen on learning new songs. The music went over pretty well with the audience, which included the guards at the front, and Little Ma knows how to entertain a crowd (not that I ever know what he's saying). The power went out during the middle of a song, which was slightly awkward (I'll refrain from making any cheesy comments about our "rocking out" here), but otherwise things went well. A few of the inmates actually performed, with mixed results, and I was unfortunately talked into a poor performance of an English song. I refuse to sing in front of a crowd of three in America, yet in China somehow I'm willing to sing in front of more than 200 prisoners. And Hotel California reared its monstrous, outdated head again, with just me and Little Ma playing guitar. I hope there aren't any serious long-term effects on my taste in music from my stay in China. But I think my favorite moment was near the end, when my friend encouraged the crowd to join him in a sing-along of a song that everyone but me seemed to know by heart, and I was treated to the spectacle of dozens of hardened young men singing their hearts out to a daydreamy Chinese song from the inside of a prison. Just when I think there are few surprises left in Zhangye...

A Very Chinese Ticket Hall

Anyone who has traveled in China will appreciate this:

http://pinyin.info/news/2006/typo-of-the-day/

Jawdropper, Showstopper, Collarpopper

Little Ma, the "rock star" of Zhangye, called me this afternoon for the first time in a while. He told me he wanted my help translating something that was in English. The idea of trying to translate Chinese for someone sounded exciting, although I was sure I was in over my head, whatever it was. That's him in the picture, which is from an earlier night at a dance club (and Gary can be seen doing what he does best in the background). When I arrived at his shop, there was an amusing scene: Little Ma and several of his friends hunched with furrowed brows over a big, fancy effects pedal for electric guitar, which had instructions and markings that were entirely in English. It was an elaborate, complicated effects pedal which would take me a couple of long afternoons in a basement to master even in English, so I wasn't of much use at all. Oddly, the Chinese for things like "flanger" and "effects parameters" haven't come up in my textbooks yet. However, I did get the chance to pick up a few useful guitar-related words along the way. I'm meant to go back tomorrow afternoon for practice, and then perform with his band at 3:00. I asked where the performance was, and he laughed and said at a jianlao, a word I didn't know. So, I looked it up in the dictionary: prison. Apparently a policeman invited him to perform there (he seems to know a lot of people). He also mentioned 1000 something-something which I didn't understand, and I can only hope he meant there would be one thousand inmates there. This should be interesting. I've been getting bored of his guitar shop, but maybe he's worth staying friends with after all.

Beef Noodles and Hot Pot: A Very Chinese Evening

On Tuesday night a man that me and Andrew have befriended invited us to come down to his noodle shop, and I will describe the night to give an idea of a typical evening of hanging out with Andrew and his Chinese friends (who, due to his previously mentioned conversation skills and friendliness, are numerous). We started off with a couple of bowls of Beef Noodles, the specialty of his and many other small noodle shops. Beef Noodles originally come from the capital of this province, so our students are proud of them and easily excited by their mere mention. Andrew had the idea of us watching him make the noodles and taking pictures and video of the process with my camera, which more than pleased him. When asked if that would be ok, he loudly said something very similar to "Of course you can take pictures! I am very happy!" I've always wanted to get a better view of the noodle-making, and it turned out to be picture-worthy in all its noodle-wacking and cauldron-bubbling glory.

After cleaning up (I decided against documenting the dish "washing" process) with his wife, he took us out for a second meal further down the road. His mother-in-law also came, a jovial and meddling woman who I found amusing. She spent much of the evening trying to talk us into letting her fix us up with a wife or two, possibly her unmarried daughter. Despite our protests and excuses, our friend (who I'll call Little Liu, as in the Chinese habit of putting xiao, little, in front of a friend's surname) insisted on taking us for hot pot. However, it was a simple place with a hot plate for every table and not the usual two-hour extravaganza in a fancy restaurant. The owner of the place, who had a used-car salesman cheesyness I kind of liked, was delighted to see two foreign and Chinese-speaking customers. He soon requested a picture with us, and jetted off to borrow a camera. He presented us with a plate of fruit (gifts are not unusual, but in all cases previous have been something I don't want), and tried very hard to treat us to some beers with him. But it was a school night, and we are, of course, responsible teachers.

After saying goodbye to our Chinese friends Andrew suggested a quick stop for naicha, "milk tea", at a place we like in front of the school. I had been fairly quiet during the evening, because Andrew's Chinese ability is well ahead of mine and I think and speak too slowly even when I do understand the conversation, and liked the idea of ending things in English. It's actually Andrew who usually carries the Chinese conversations, and there are few pauses. This didn't last long, however, as a man who was obviously drinking with his friends got wind of Andrew's Chinese, and was especially amused by a few words of Zhangyehua (Zhangye dialect) we could muster. He invited himself to sit down with us, and this time we didn't get out of drinking, as he had bottles ordered and glasses poured before we had time to protest. We insisted on leaving after just a few glasses (and mind you, in China they drink beer out of shot glasses), but he managed to exchange numbers with Andrew and promise to invite him out to eat sometime. Luckily he didn't take to me, mostly asking me what I was thinking about so quietly and why I insisted on saying things to Andrew in English. In those four hours, me and Andrew paid exactly 4 yuan, for the milk tea, which is the equivalent of 50 cents US. On the walk back home, Andrew complained about the hassle of having given this stranger his telephone number. And then we thought about that for a second, and marvelled at having a life in which the big annoyance of the day was agreeing to being taken out for a free meal.

English Plays: Chinese Students Are Not Shy

I have often thought when doing role-plays in class that many of my students would make fine actors. So, I was happy to discover that all classes in the English Department would perform plays. They worked on the plays for weeks, and a final set of the 12 best were selected, down from the original number of perhaps twice that.

To my surprise, I was invited by one of my classes to take a part in their play. The role was that of a guitar-playing father, and out of 270 students I know of one who plays guitar (in another class), so I suppose I was right for the role. This was class 6, one of the most outgoing I've taught, and though the script was kind of weird, they turned it into an entertaining performance. The story, which they took from the internet but judging from the script was definitely written by Chinese English students, is about a dishonest candy salesman in front of the school gate, who makes dirty candy that makes the students ill. It was highlighted by talking, dancing candy ("I'm dirty!" "I'm ugly!" "I'm dirty and ugly!"), no less than two Aqua songs ("Barbie Girl" and a song that repeated, loudly, "come on let's go get it on!"), and the charismatic performance of Alice, the candy salesman with a drawn-on mustache. In the play I have two daughters, who ask me to play guitar in a ploy to get money from me, and were appropriately whiny. My students are better actors than me, and they had to encourage me to really get angry at the daughters when they trick me.

The final performances took place last Friday evening in the music hall. Many students went all-out when renting costumes and having their hair done, and some of them I had a lot of trouble even recognizing. After several "no"s, I finally got it across that I was not interested in wearing makeup. The picture below is from rehearsal; none of my pictures of the actual performances came out decently. Half of the plays were put on by classes that I teach, and I had seen rehearsals of several of them, so I had been looking forward to it for a while. The first play was Snow White, which I knew from rehearsal was one of the best, and I was very impressed. This was put on by a class which sometimes irritates me this term, due to their lack of enthusiasm on Friday, but in fact their English is very good. Another class, who are a teacher's dream and my favorite to teach as of late, did a very successful rendition of Cinderella. This class has always done amazing things with role-plays, and they love the stage. The student who played the wicked stepmother was perfect; Andrew has admitted to being afraid of her in the past. There was full-on ballroom dancing featuring the entire class in costume, and in true Chinese style, Cinderella was taken away on the back of a bicycle at the end. Another highlight was a Chinese story about two lovers (both played by girls) and a severe, disapproving mother, which was written by the class and did well with the judges.

Phillip, the teacher from England, was confident that the play I was in would win first prize simply because it had a foreign teacher in it. I doubted it very much, because although our play was good several others clearly deserved it more, and I figured he was just being cynical. However, sure enough, when the results came in it was our play, The Pocket Money, which was victorious. I was happy for that class, but also quite annoyed at how much I seemed to have affected the outcome. I disagreed with the results in general (Cinderella didn't even place), but it was an exciting night, and easily one of the highlights of this term.

Censorship? What Censorship?

I was simply stupified when I read this:

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6130970.html

As it mentions, China has the most sophisticated internet censorship in the world. You can't even read this blog in China (I can only access the page for updating it). I also like the comment about the "legal problems" of journalists.