Erin and the Container Hearts

I've put considerable thought into what matching tattoos on Seb and I would look like. Currently I'm lobbying for bookends. Not like the sad ones from that Simon and Garfunkel song but pretty much the sad ones from the Simon and Garfunkel song forty years before it's relevant enough to evoke sadness.
Anyway, he's not the tattoo sort--but he will be if he ever falls into a coma.

My birthday has come and gone in a flash and a flurry of other people's kindness. Seb and I went into the city and partied last Saturday night. We tried to go to this American restaurant called Charlies Kitchen, but it was not to be.  Mingtian as a suggested reservation time is the last thing you want to hear when you haven't had a burger in 4 months.
We still had a goodly amount of fun. Our friends gave me a succulent and we ate copious portions of succulent meat at a German restaurant. We were there with a German exchange student who was a good sport about the whole thing. Plus I learned three new drinking games, including two played in Chinese.
I also palled around with a pair of puppies. Total success as evenings go.

My birthday wasn't technically until Tuesday and Sebastien woke me up before my 9 o'clock class with coffee in bed and a cake and cream puffs on the table. He likes to hide my presents. It's really cute because I usually forget until my pillow is suddenly lumpy.  The pinnacle came attached to the card which read, "Something to celebrate your father by and complete quests left unfinished." The box he handed me was playing the Legend of Zelda opening theme for NES and turned out to be my kindle on to which he had installed NES and SNES emulators. He had including not only my personal favorite titles, but all the games I used to watch my dad play and am super nostalgic for as well. Upon unboxing I hit start onceand tapped Fred into the account of the first character bank, because as I reminded Sebastien for at least the fourth time, my dad named his saved game after me. For dinner that night we made pizza from [post Universe invention] scratch and my student gifted me with a scarf she describes as being China red.

Sebastien's parents sent a second package to make up for the one we all assumed  was lost in the mail back in September and they both showed up on the same day. We now have 4 pounds of coffee and something like 27 chocolate bars. Best of all, the oatmeal cookies from the September box were still edible. Or they were until we consumed them all.

I finished Infinite Jest two Fridays ago and read the Magician King and The Book Thief in quick succession. I love the idea of books that have books of their own. It lends such a richness to that universe. Midterms went smoothly for us and this weekend we're heading back into the city to do a Thanksgiving approximation with the other Laowai we know.
It's hard to remember a time in my life where I didn't hate Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. They were never the best of times. Lots of yelling and stress, kids table ranking--plus whose idea was it to start mashing up carrots and turnips? Why is that even a thing??

 I sometimes think that if I could just have my own little family in a far flung corner of the world I could enjoy these sorts of events. But the duty of family is always scraping at my knees trying to get me to cry a lot and eat food I don't enjoy. If it weren't for novels or the X-Files marathons of yore, I'd have never have made it this far.
I'm sure we'll make the best out of this gathering. I'm really looking forward to seeing faces of people who I haven't talked to offline with since this summer.

For our contribution we made chocolate chip cookies, three kinds of crepes, roasted red peppers in an olive oil, rosemary and garlic marinade, and we'll share our last terrine that we smuggled into China from France.
Speaking of France, Sebastien's colleague, Jerome, went recently to Beijing and brought us back a Camembert....
These aren't exactly what you would describe as lean times.

There is snow on the ground and there are slippers on my feet. There's a scarf around my neck and hot cider in my cup. I'm wearing flannel in a tidy living room, and as I sit here upon my couch dipping an "extra" chocolate chip cookie just deep enough to leave morsels only slightly cold on the inside. I am relaxed and warm and I can't help thinking of something a Chinese American friend once told me, "White people smell like butter."

Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and embrace who you are.

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Double Happiness.

Last weekend Seb and I went with the family out of the city and tried crawfishing. When we piled into the car I certainly didn't expect to be spending the afternoon hanging strips of meat into a pond off a bamboo pole, drinking green tea out of a pint glass and eating watermelon. But when in Chengdu...

That Monster in the middle is Seb's!

Sebastien and I were told one evening last week that we were invited to a dinner for our host father's cousin to fancy restaurant on campus. I'm a pretty big fan of places I can walk to so I readily agreed. He told us it was to commemorate his cousin's baby's first hundred days. Apparently it is a very important tradition in ensuring the heath and luck of the child. Alternatively you can choose to commemorate the first 40 days and arguably it's a tradition more popular in the north. When giving a gift for this event one typically gives clothing or toys for the baby or a monetary gift with the base rate 200 kuai (the equivalent of 33 US dollars)  This sum increases exponentially the closer you are to the family. Money for any holiday should be given in red envelops because the color is associated with luck and happiness. Even numbers are auspicious therefore you could give 400 kuai but not 5. Sadly we were only taught about the customs of gift giving the day after we celebrated this. Wah wauh. Jerks squared. But the food was great!

We're keeping good company here at Sichuan Normal University.
Originally, I thought there would be 19 of us because they called us the China 19. Turns out that's our year and there's a reason I wasn't named Einstein. (I'm not german, obvs)
They've spread out the 72 of us between three different Unis where we all study Chinese and learn how they want us to teach English. We're in class for about 6 to 7 hours a day, six days a week. Needless to say that in three short weeks we've already gotten pretty close with the 23 fellows at our school. The vibe is wicked positive because we naturally have a lot of common ground. Most folks within our group are experienced teachers, have lived abroad and have one or more other languages under our belts. I'm pretty excited by the opportunity to be around so many other teachers who understand why I want to be here, and as cheesy as it sounds, I'm excited to see what they have to teach me.

Language class: Whelp, due to uneven class sizes I had to do my bi-weekly Language evaluation with a different teacher. This put a few bruises on my ego because she was all geared up to test me on things we didn't cover. Colors? Fruit? Refrigerators and electric fans? Don't you want to hear all the adjectives I memorized?
I also had to face the fact that I've hobbled my progress by allowing my husband to order lunch for me. Neither does it help that our host family uses the local dialect around the dinner table. Unless I feebly interject something along the lines of, "I buy coffee at the store, everyday," I don't even get to do passive learning through listening.
My true gift where language acquisition is concerned is that I don't expect to understand everything. I can sometimes see my friend's eyes spinning as they attempt to translate whole sentences in their heads.  France taught me to focus on the one or two words I did comprehend and extrapolate.

Say it with me, 朋友 !

They've arranged things so we design a two week curriculum for students in pairs. This is really awesome on Peace Corp's part because we have support and p2p critiques even as they've given the tools and expectations to realize a course, rubrics, scopes and sequences. It's a lot of responsibility for us but just imagine our TEFFL trainer having 250 lesson plans to read and give feedback on. My counterpart is a rad guy and a capable teacher so we had a lot of good pre-teach sessions. Our students range from 13 to over 20.

We've done three days of teaching thus far. We taught together on Monday but today was my first Kessel run. I'm really proud of certain elements from my lesson but feel like I still have a lot of distance to cover before I'm satisfied with how I'm preforming. I'll teach again Friday and then again next Tuesday and Thursday.

All my students had English pseudonyms, save two. I scribed them a hearty list of tight-jean names like Chaz, Kipp and Chloe but one of the two wanted a T word name so we went with Tina. The other girl picked Katie because my counterpart actually had names like Mary and Jane on his list.
Truthfully, I had misgivings with according them Western names--it feels like a denial of self--but then I remembered how much fun it was to pick one in Spanish class. Especially for the kid who got to call himself Jesus.

More next week, until then sing Tom Petty songs in your head for me!

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All your jiaozi are belong to me

One of the stated goals of the Peace Corps China mission is to promote cross-cultural awareness. Both their Chinese counterparts and direct American supervisors are quick to stress the multualization of this awareness. It is with this in mind that I explain what I've gleaned of family life here in China.
Sebastien and I moved in with a host family on Friday. We now live with a grandmother and father, mom, dad and 10 year-old-girl. In Chinese culture, the woman typically doesn't take the man's family name. This is interesting when you consider that the Chinese write their last names first. So in this family the Mother has the family name and thus first name Yan while the daughter, Father and Grandfather all have the first name Jian. This also means that the grandmother has a different first/family name and her's is Tang.
We were all given Chinese names to use in our communities and in our classes and mine is Mai Qi. In English it sounds like (My Chee) Sebastien's is even cooler Lao Hao Tian and his means big blue sky.
Name giving in Chinese is a very involved process that I've only just scratched the surface of, but I know your Chinese name may be chosen because it rhymes with something auspicious or has the same letter of one of the popular surnames.

With my host family we typically eat rice porridge in the morning. There is usually a second grain added to the mix. Yesterday we had a kind of pea and today it was corn. To this warm bowl of tasty, we add pickled vegetables, home roasted peanuts, hard boiled eggs and any left over meat dishes from last night's supper. This morning we had duck with hot peppers and short strips bacon. Each person uses serving chopsticks to add as much of the various sides as they like.

Lunch and dinner are quite similar. Each person is given a small bowl of rice to which they may add a few morsels at a time of the various meat and vegetable dishes. If you've ever had a Sichuan dish you know that by and large the food in our house is spicy. We're quite pleased with this arrangement.

On Sunday afternoon my grandma showed us how to make dumplings. The filling was pork, garlic, ginger and green onions. We boiled as much as we could eat in the wok and set the rest in the freezer for later. She made a special sauce but I haven't learned the trick of that yet.

Jiaozi = 饺子 = wontons = dumplings

There is a piano here, a western toilet, a flat screen tv, a balcony with a vegetable garden and we even have air conditioning. The hardest part of my life right now is meeting the goals set for my language requirement. One of the difficulties with that is we're trained to emulate standard Mandarin from Beijing and here in the Four Rivers province of Sichuan, the phoneme ling becomes lin.

Another such challenge is American intonation. Intonation is not the same thing as tone. We use intonation at the end of the sentence to indicate a question. Or we stretch out the word to play at sarcasm. When these habits come into Chinese speaking, the entire idea you were intending to convey is lost.  Another difficulty I personally am facing is many of the words in Chinese are homonyms to words in French. Bu means no in Chinese but in French it's the past tense form of 'to drink'. Likewise, the pronunciation for le and la are inverted between the two languages.

If I don't pass my practicum but the Peace Corps is still willing to keep me on by the end of my two month language and teacher training, I will be required to meet with a tutor four hours a week for the first semester. I don't see this as a real loss, as an affordable tutor was a budge item of mine anyway. That and nail clippers. I can't find the flipping things anywhere.

Have an excellent week, everyone.

Find your balance, or at least your footing. So sayeth we all.

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Ghost Dance

Of all the founding fathers, I'd say that Sitting Bull has always been my favorite.

Right after him would probably be Thomas Jefferson, though. Not because of his hip black girlfriend(s?) or the fact that he supported the French revolution, no, I'm all up on his pantaloons like white on brown rice because that man was a gentleman and a scholar and he had a well planned day.

He'd get up in the morning and start his first class: Meteorology.  He'd measure the wind direction and a bunch of other junk about the climate. If he was around today he'd be that guy online saying dumb shit like, "Rise and Shine Facebook!" because he was up at first light. He also behaved like your typical Star Wars fan when it came to Jesus.  He couldn't get down on all that water into wine ish so he did a fan cut of the Bible. 

Midichlorians, srs?

Imagine him on twitter, he'd always be in fights with your crazy conservative uncle. (Hashtag Separation of church and state.) Not on twitter? Well, basically, if you were Facebook friends, you'd hide his feed two weeks after you accepted his request but you'd surreptitiously check in on him whenever you wanted to feel better about your station in life. 

Lol, Jefferson is such a tool.

He'd have a blog too. 

Second class, Journalism. A dabbler in all kinds of crazy crap from "horticulture" to slavery, he was always getting tons of mail. If we put that into a modern day context, we see that he'd be mostly in the comment section dispelling myths and magic. Such a hero.

He only ate two meals a day.

His teeth were not made of wood and his wife had a much cooler name than Martha.

He'd study law and foreign languages in the afternoon because he was esentually a Tenenbaum.

After all of that, I imagine he had recess, which amounted to fathering children and supporting armed revolutions and attending to other ambassadorial duties...such as they were. 

These factoids were impressed upon me when I had to do a book report on him with some bratty rich kid I tutored back in DC. We took notes side by side while his mom loaded one of the dishwashers in their kitchen. Next week she could barely hide her venom at the fact that he only got a B on the accompanying test. Thinking back, I should have maybe appealed to her egoism and feigned culpability. But as far as I could tell, the kid did his best and paying me to parent wasn't going to make him suddenly better. Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh in calling him a brat; it's not his fault he was going to grow up playing lacross and calling his mother by her first name.

Atanyrate, I'm trying to be more like Jefferson insofar as I'm spending more time studying. I would murder everyone I lived with if I only ate two meals a day but I've started getting up before ten and have consistently worn non-pajama based pants for more than half the day. In terms of studies, I do French in the morning and Chinese in the afternoon. I recently was able to translate this phrase in public so I know I'm on the right path...
It says 'I speak Chinese.'

Um, the rest of that probably says other things, too. Who can tell under all that MS paint blur?

Of course I don't actually speak Chinese, but I'm not so afraid of the characters that I simply dismiss them as a foreign script anymore. Paso a paso... 

Seb and I bought our plane tickets back to the States. We'll be landing in Washington in early May. By George, it's time we unpacked our storage space and drive it all back to Ohio.
We lived in the Capital city for 5 years so I'm going to be pretty excited to return and do some real white people shit like grabbing BBQ at Rocklands and heading down the hill to Glover Park to watch drunk adults play softball. I'm a little pissed I'll be missing Cinco De Mayo--that shits almost as cool as Pi Day.

Pi day, pi day gotta get down on pi day.

Things are drawing to a close but we still have a bunch of doctors appointments to run our way through. A couple of paychecks to collect. A few more big meals to make, one more mega teuf and then it's au the fuck revoir, Paris.

Some people in my position might be sad to be quitting the City of Lights, and whereas it's true that I love the language, the cut of the clothes and the quality of the food, I'm not good at sticking around anywhere for very long. So instead I'm going to take as much of it with me in my suitcase and in my heart as I can. Paris was never mine, she just let me crash on her couch for a good stint. We both are starting to feel like I've overstayed my welcome and soon my visa will be up anyway. 

I've made a lot of great friends it's true, but I no longer view time and separation as permanent obstacles; I therefore don't fear leaving them. I know this sentiment is naturally acompanied by a certain naivete, for anyone of us could die at any time. I guess what it comes down to is my death will mean I cease to exist, matter or care. And as for yours, well, the best I can do is deal with that Ghost Dance when I have to. Presently, I'd rather be remembering the good times and chasing that ever elusive better things to come. So now you're free, Mordecai. Aller, go. C'est parti ! 

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Where are the hardships?

There are good ships and there are wood ships and there are ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are friendships and may they ever be.
Best toast ever. Toast is great but don't let it get too hard. Now hardships, those are something else.I am rereading the PDFs the Peace Corps sent me because I have to check a box that says I did that.

There are a lot of half-contemptible things in these documents. Apparently, for example--I may not drive in my host country, or while traveling to any other country where the peace corps currently has volunteers. I may ride a bike, but I may be discharged from my service if I operate one without a helmet.A lot of the documents want to prepare us for disappointment and loneliness and existential questions about not being able to communicate. It's going to be interesting experiencing those tribulations for a second time.

When we moved to France, Sebastien did not have the same linguistic handicaps that I did. He had been visiting France since his early childhood and his greatest problem with speaking is that he's too creative with words. So I'm going to do my best to be compassionate towards him and that newness even as I struggle myself. In some ways, being in a couple for Peace Corps service makes us lucky--we will have each others hard won companionship  after all. In other ways it will be more difficult, as it has been in France, as it could only be in a country with which neither party has any cultural ties.
But we will have dim sum, that's something.
I wanted to share with you a few quotes from the manual that I found particularly amusing.

"Your host families have probably even been warned that you’ll be unintentionally boorish now and then and that they shouldn’t take it personally."

So that's cool. Anytime I fly off the handle, throw the baby out with the bathwater or cry over spilt milk I can just look at my host family levelly and remind them in English, they had been warned.
Better still, there is an entire section of one manual titled: Where is the hardship?
That had these two gems:

"Doing without is part of the image and mythology of the Peace Corps, and some Volunteers associate it with success. In truth, there is no such equivalency. Even if you do have hot running water, you can still cover yourself in glory just as easily as a Volunteer who sleeps under a date palm and takes sponge baths."

TIL that some people in the Peace Corps get to sleep under date palms, and this fact apparently renders me jealous. But it's an interesting point to make. Just look at all the stuff I won't be taking into industrialized China:

Lol, just kidding. Of course I'll bring duct-tape. 

And I admit that I do find myself a bit wrapped up in the mystique of hardship (and camping.) Nobody's culture should be treated as an opportunity to camp, I actually know this but there is something excited in me that just loves to pack and be prepared and takes great pride in having expected outcomes and then encountering them. I actually prefer those things to pitching my tent in the rain or playing with magnesium and steal, trying to get a fire lit.
...but if I'm being completely honest, playing with magnesium is actually kind of worth it.
Even still, I know that China is going to be a changing experience. It would be limiting to imagine just how. But I might actually feel guilty -guilty, I say!- for not suffering enough. Graciously, the manual urges me to rest assured that I will suffer. Existentially. Possibly to the point of depression induced sickness.

"So in the meantime, don’t worry: It’s still noble work even if the shop on the corner does carry M&Ms. They’re probably stale anyway."

Talk about injustice!
I take it back, please don't.

I've been walking around realizing that I actually enjoy Spring. And it turns out I'm also really going to miss Paris.
 I feel kinda silly for saying that. But there are a million things to celebrate right on my block. How many times  in my life will I ever live near a coffee roaster again? The lady behind the counter knows how I like my beans ground. moulee pour un cafetier italien. Pas de sac. Comme d'habitude. She always says warmly before she wishes us a good sunday.

One time, I was in the mood for a burger but didn't have the dinero for Chez Jeanette so I walked into a bucher shop about two doors down  and asked them if they had any ground beef left. The butcher furrowed his brow  at me and picked up what I considered to be a good cut of meat. Feeling certain that I had mispronounced steak hachee, I tried again, very polity to say it more slowly. He just rolled his eyes and dropped the meat in the grinder.
Just like that.

There is a Pankistani man who sells ripped DVDs from on top of a box every night, right across from where all the free degustations are hosted. He's always so cordial when we talk that I actually look forward to our small intereactions.
I hope he never gets caught.

Feth, I love it here! No decent brunch places but hella good, Indian food four businesses at a time.  I can't even bring down the trash without smelling fresh mint or apples from the fruit stand below our flat. Not to mention the roasted chickens and pigs each time I step on to the balcony, in winter. A short stroll on Saturday gets you to la fontaine Saint Michel where you can manage to find kebab for 50 centimes cheeper than on my street. Or closer even, les forum des Halles if you want to spend an afternoon in the FNAC pretending you can afford a two euro pocket edition.
I have so many good memories of the canal Saint Martin. Drinking cheep german beer along the quai with Clement while he plays his guitar. By bike past the banlieue Saint Denis onward and further till the sidewalks end and the fields begin.

The Fete de la Musique. June 21st, you'll always be there. That was my main reason for coming to France that first summer in 2009--even if I was still in Madrid at the time.
I'll miss you, Summers nights taken by storm and by foot. Hearing accordion players playing non ironically from my bed.
Amazing falafel in the Marais. The best kurdish food I've ever had. A hotdog stand that juices fruits and sells bagles. Ti-punch. Seeing whole skinned rabbits along side the chickens in shop windows.
Coming back from class by velib.
And walking back to my flat with a hot baguette against my side on a crisp Autumn's eve. It's memories like these that keep me so addicted to adventuring.

Our weekend was pretty full. 
On n'a pas fait que la fête, mais comme meme.
We went to my favorite bar, Le Mauri7, on Friday night. Sebastien and I kept it light. The rest of the gang got back around 6 AM. I had to teach Saturday morning and so I wasn't trying to over do it. I'm glad I didn't either, because Saturday was beautiful and Seb and I walked all around the 12th arrondissement along the Promenade Plantee. The city has converted an old raised train line into a garden. We did the whole length, back tracked and then walked home through Bastille  and in through the Marais and back along the Seine. 
Went to a great house party last night not far from here and really enjoyed ourselves. Today I have  to update the FTP server for my class but I plan to do that from bed. It's cloudy and I just want to read. I think I borrowed a book from someone last night called Charly 9. It smells like cigarettes and rhum so I don't want to touch it today. But last night I was very exicited to start reading it.
Makes me wonder what tomorrow will bring. Likely more hardship and peace corps paperwork. But I feel existentially prepared for such an onslaught. I will face it with his hand in mine and by the grit of my teeth. I will likely also have coffee. Ground. For an Italian coffee maker. No plastic bag. Like usual.
Bonne Dimanche.

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Temporary Everythings

Well, what do you think? It's was my first. I was 18 and I picked it off the wall of a tattoo parlor in Hampton Beach. It's two characters supposedly, life and be present....a Carpe diem a of sorts--I don't know, that's what the artist said, and that's what others have told me. I can't read Chinese. It might as well be Korean.
In my more radical days, when everyone had half their head shaved and we'd all walk around in shorts patched with dental floss,  I would tell anybody who asked that  it was Kanji for "cultural appropriation."  They would laugh indulgently at the imprudence of youth and go back to their kale and quinoa burritos. It seems to me now that our our towers were much more ivory than we imagined because regular people don't know what cultural appropriation is and Kanji isn't even a form of Chinese.
Flippancy  has long been my way of saying I don't walk to talk about it.And I don't either. I was so impetuous I nearly got the character for rain written on my body.

It's tribal, so whatever.

For awhile I  felt guilty because I wasted a great tattoo location for a language I don't speak from a culture with whom my familiarity extends only as far as the understanding that their New Year is different than my own.  And for a long time this was a sufficiently humorous punishment. But I'm too busy mispronouncing every French word I know to think too long on it, these days. 

Yet even here in France I've remained in pretty fair contact with the United States. Obama or one of his minions sent me an email ever three or four days up until his second inauguration. Apparently they need a lot of help or money, or maybe just something for the interns to do--so they send me emails. It isn't the life I would have chosen for them, but it's the cards they were dealt
I've been dealt a new hand myself- DHL delivered a package yesterday with a letter from Obama and he wanted to talk about Kennedy's legacy and commitment and, the Peace Corps. It was signed with the fattest permanent market possible or had been photocopied to the point where his signature no longer resembles the original. Very exciting stuff.
Yes, mis amigos, we've finally got our destination and it's finally time to tell you that we expect to be moving to China to teach English at a University. We'll not know where exactly or when exactly until they feel like telling us. We've got visas and vaccinations to attend to, miles to go before we sleep and a whole lot of promises to keep.  I think we could not have done better in terms of comfort and as some of you may recall I planned to live in China at some point in my life anyway. I'm excited for a fresh chance at adventure.  Best of all, we will be trained in Mandarin--so I may learn what my tattoo says after all.  


Anything could still go wrong and knock us out of the running--it's been quite a process. But that's life for you. Carpe Diem, indeed.

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