Public Humilation: The Best Workout Regime in the World

The gym guys look a lot more pleasant in their leaflet.

 No one really joins the gym because the thought of picking up objects and putting them down again sends a tingle down their spine. People join because they kind of hate how they look and want to do something about it.

So all gyms everywhere exude an aura of self-punishment, despite whatever marketing mojo has gone into presenting the place as some kind of utopian crèche for adults. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy working out, it’s OK, really. I just resent having to cause discomfort to myself while some woman cries out, “Ladies, aren’t you loving this!” down the microphone. – as they did in my aerobics class back home.

That’s why I love my local gym. It doesn’t pretend that you’re there to enjoy yourself – it wants you to sort yourself out however much pain and/or humiliation this involves. Brusque and burly gym assistants have a habit of showing up behind you on the weight machines and forcing you into a much more effective (torturous) position. They will stand there until they’ve made sure you’ve completed an adequate (excruciating) number of reps, at which point they’ll pull you out of said machine and shove you into another. And if you’re caught twiddling your thumbs they’ll make you do lunges across the room as their buddies line up to laugh while you sweat. And in the height of summer, when temperatures soar to sweltering 40 degrees, they won’t turn on the fans. Because, you know, air-cons are for sissies. 

Even the yoga instructors, who are supposed to be the happy clappy feel-good people, have no qualms about aggressively pushing and pulling you into the appropriate position. One of first things I learnt to say (scream out in anguish) in Chinese was “Body no can do!” And even when the pain stops and its nap time you’ll never even come close to Nirvana what with the Kung Fu boys grunting and throwing chains at each other right outside the room.

Then there’s the motivational factor. Expats, especially women, often complain about the way locals like to point out how big we are compared to the Chinese. Commenting on someone’s spare tire is so ingrained in the Chinese psyche that there are a plethora of Kindergarten songs with the words “She is fat! She is fat!” in the chorus. I always know I’ve skipped one too many aerobics classes when one of my students produces his textbook and points at the phrase “you have a little puppy fat” in it. But of course, those least likely to hold back on matters of body weight are our gym instructors, who have gone so far as to make my colleagues cry.

Ostensibly, calling someone fat here is not supposed to be taken as an insult, but is considered an amusing observation. At my school, there tends to be one slightly overweight child per class who is the subject of endless derision, and, I believe, not so much because they are overweight, but more because they stick out – in the same way that slightly taller students, and students from other provinces have trouble integrating. And while the pressure to conform is rife in schools across the world, crudely pointing out the things that make a person different here is no taboo, so anyone who does stick out will constantly be reminded of this fact.

Obviously I feel for these kids, and while I in no way approve of their treatment, I have also noticed that they tend to be my most remarkable students – the funniest, the most creative and the most willing to try out new things. It’s like they’ve developed such a thick skin that they are impervious to feeling embarrassed or ashamed.

There is something to be said of the abrupt way the Chinese handle things, the fact that they do not expect people to take offence, and by extension, do not really take offence themselves (unless, of course, you say anything mildly disparaging about their glorious and wonderful country). Coming from a country where every sentence is pock-marked with “please”s and “sorry”s and endless meanders around the truth, it can be refreshing to live somewhere where people tell it how it is, and expect you to do the same.

When I first arrived, a woman who’d taken me out to dinner promised she’d find me a rich Chinese man. I spluttered, made polite jokes about it suggesting I wasn’t interested and hoped she’d get the message. A few days later she came up and told me she’d arranged a date with a nice “Judge-man”. The conversion that ensued lasted way longer than it should have done. I spent ages explaining that while the Chinese marry quite early, which is of course, perfectly OK, we married later. Then she intimated that the guy didn’t want to marry me either, and told me that we could just be “special friends”, which was even more awkward because I gathered she had been advertising my wares as a western concubine. In the end, I just spat out “Look, I’m not interested” convinced she’d hate me for the rest of her life, but she just shrugged and nodded. And guess what? We’re still friends.    

Made in China, Maybe

Back home people eye any “Made In China” product that costs over fifty quid with caution.  There’s no point in splashing out on something that’s inevitably going to fall apart after a year and it’s fair to say that the Middle Kingdom’s goods aren’t really built to last. But the exported stuff’s the crème de la crème of Chinese goods – the delights left behind for us to savour are of such poor quality that toys can become toxic, electronic devices spiteful, and innocuous items like a table or window pane, deadly. 

Everything always falls apart, or is just on the cusp of doing so. A pair of speakers will emit decent enough sounds for about two weeks before its starts wooshing and growling. A new DVD player will point blank refuse to play half the DVDs you feed it, for no apparent reason other than that it just doesn’t like them. And if you were lucky enough to acquire a remote when purchasing the appliance, you’ll get to play the fun “which button is actually Pause if not the one that claims to be Pause” game. And nothing quite fits its socket, which means getting wires to work at all requires numerous clever little balancing tricks – like what people had to do with their TV antennae in the 60s during blizzards and typhoons.

And I can’t ever close my bathroom door without cutting my fingers, nor can I enjoy a Yoga session without worrying that an overzealous attempt at the warrior pose will result in my leggings falling apart and my exposing myself to the group for the hundredth time.  

Sometimes I wonder why manufacturers don’t try to step up their game. There certainly is a market here for affordable products that won’t kill you. “Der China Knigge”, (“The China Handbook”), written by a German/Chinese couple suggests that cultural attitudes workmanship maybe part of the problem. Yu-Chien and Petra Kuan compare a German builder with that of a Chinese in a rather mawkish attempt to explain the Chinese to the Krauts through national stereotypes.

They describe how the Chinese like to improvise, whilst the German delights in measuring things. A German builder takes pride in a table he has built precisely according to plan, while his Chinese counterpart would be chuffed with himself were he able to put the whole thing together without ever consulting said plan or even a ruler.  Where “genau” (“exactly”) is the catch phrase of the Germans, write Yu-Chien and Petra Kuan “Cha bu duo” (“more or less”) is the calling card of the Chinese.  

This “cha bu duo” culture does go someway to explaining why my new Chinese laptop likes to shed its keys and why the treadmill displays poltergeist-like characteristics. It also offers some enlightenment as to why I never really know what my timetable is, or when my holiday starts. It’s pretty much impossible to get a straight answer from any of my superiors – all they ever say is “maybe” or “maybe not”. Nothing is ever precise, nothing goes to plan. On some days, your table will fall on you or else you’ll be forced to watch X-Files in purple, and on others, you’ll show up to school to find a dozens parents sitting around expecting you to play games with them, or to discover that your office and all your belongings have miraculously disappeared. And every little errand turns into a never-ending story of woe. “Maybe tomorrow we will put paper in the printer”, “maybe the man with the stamp will be here after lunch”, “maybe we should meet tomorrow at 11 .35”, “Maybe the courier will deliver what might be your passport tomorrow afternoon and maybe he will be at one of your two schools and if not then maybe I might put you on hold if you try to call me.”

I understand of course that, as far as possible, cultural norms are to be tolerated. I’ve been reading the Tao recently and have got to the part about being like water, all flowing and relaxed and impervious to petty annoyances of this mortal coil. But I reckon the guy who wrote that book had never had deal with a Chinese courier service.

The world according to a Taiwanese factory owner

For many foreigners here, making local friends boils down to giving private English lessons. And to some citizens, having an English teacher/friend isn’t just useful, it’s a status symbol. Such is the case with Amy’s* most lucrative freelance job – tutoring a Taiwanese factory owner. Tim* has ten sports cars, two mansions, his own clothing company and is near fluent in English thanks to all those elite schools he attended. But what he found he lacked was an English acquaintance with whom he could go to dinner and confide in. So he approached Amy at their local gym, after it was established that there’s would not be some kind of a “special” relationship, she agreed to teach him.

 Amy drew up a set of lesson plans that would help Tim achieve his ostensible aim – to be able to “go to America and confront his rivals at Walmart”. She soon realised, however, that these plans were null and void. Each week their session would begin with Tim asking Amy what she’d be teaching him, only to for him to launch into a tirade about something or other a few seconds later. Amy now describes the job as more of a “counseling gig for the morally corrupt” rather than English teaching per se.   

So without further ado, may I present the highlights of their interaction.

 On Working Conditions

“I am very angry today, Amy.” Tim says slumped over the dining table. A maid comes in with snacks and disappears unnoticed. “What’s wrong?” Amy inquires. “Running a business is so much harder these days, and it shouldn’t have to be”. He sighs. “People keep wanting things from me”. Amy helps herself to a biscuit. “Like who?” she asks. He looks her in eye. “Everyone - my workers, mostly. They’re being very, how do you say?” He pauses and squints “ah yes, they’re being very unreasonable”. He shakes his head. “It’s very unfair”. Tim’s elegant wife comes in with coffee. She smiles weakly at Amy behind thick lipstick until Tim shoos her away. “Why are they being so unreasonable?” Amy asks. Tim scowls. “Well, it’s your fault actually” he starts angrily, but collects himself. “I mean, you Westerners. Not you, I’m not angry at you…” He giggles nervously. Amy blinks. “You have this thing; I forget how to say…” He pauses. “We don’t really have a word for it, but you have this, um, expression…” He sucks in his cheeks, quizzical. “I don’t know what you mean” Amy says. Tim gets out his electronic dictionary, and starts feverously tapping away at it. “It’s very hard to explain… I can’t… ah wait, here it is.” He passes the device to Amy. The box on the screen reads “Human Rights”.       

On Road Safety

“You will not believe what happened to me the other day!” Amy takes a seat. “What happened, Tim?” He snorts. “Well, I was driving at night with a few of my friends.” He shakes his head. “And you just won’t believe what happened to me, Amy.” He pauses for dramatic effect while Amy props up her head with her hands. “I was, the police – they stopped me!” Amy sat up. “Why?” she asked. “Were you driving too fast?” Tim looks confused. “That doesn’t matter, Amy, I always drive well.” He brushes his hand aside. “Amy, listen. They, er, how do you say, they checked me for alcohol?” “They breathalysed you?” she asked. He nods angrily. “Why? Had you been drinking?” He clears his throat. “That’s not the point!” Amy cocks her head sideways. He continues, “I can drive no matter how much I have had to drink. I’m not like other people.” Amy groans inwardly. “What do you mean?” she inquires. “My, how do you say, er, tolerance is much higher than normal people’s. I can drink as much as I want and can still be an excellent driver”. Amy loses her patience. “But everyone’s reactions slow down when they drink. That’s just a scientific fact” Tim goes silent, surprised by her outburst. “You don’t understand” he says softly. Amy shrugs. “No, I really don’t” she mutters under her breathe.

On Love

“We are all animals, Amy” Tim says after emptying the dregs of his soup into his mouth. “And when animals want something, they get it, don’t they?” He puts down his bowl “Um, maybe” she mumbles. She thinks of something to say while Tim turns around and scans the room for a waiter. He spots one dashing about from table to table and yelps at him to bring more beer. “I’ve been thinking about having a, what do you say? Um, an extra-marital, um, what’s it called?” he says as he’s waving frantically at the waiter.to hurry up. “An extra-marital affair?” Amy asks, nervously tearing up her napkin. “Ah yes, of course, an extra-marital affair”. An expressionless waiter shows up with a beer bottle and Tim turns to face Amy again. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, you know, but last time I had one my wife was quite unhappy.” His eyes widen. “I don’t see why it should bother her, it’s none of her business” he says earnestly. Amy sips her beer, Tim sits back, sighs, and gulps down his drink. He starts up again; “Who do you think are the most beautiful race in the world, Amy?” Amy coughs. “Well I…” she trails off, hoping this is another one of his rhetorical questions, but he just sits there expectantly. “I don’t know” she proffers, “the Japanese, maybe?” “THE JAPANESE?!” He gasps. “No, no, no, no. Certainly not.” He shakes his head furiously. “The Japanese, they have pans for faces!” He takes a deep breath. “No, Amy, the most beautiful women in the world are the Russians. Never forget that”. He goes silent and stares into space. “Yes. Russian women” he finishes.          

Things to do in Foshan Continued

Attend a Primary School Party.

I remember my first school party. There were fizzy drinks and mini éclairs, a dark room with an underwhelming disco ball, an overenthusiastic music teacher spinning god knows what while disparate groups of preteens shimmied around awkwardly, or else sulked in the corner and promised themselves they would never show up to any social gathering ever again. School parties are like a rite of passage, they teach us the most valuable life lesson of all – that we should never let grown ups organize our fun.

Chinese school parties are no different in this respect, only here; sulking isn’t a privilege afforded to its guests, nor is attendance optional. Everyone must be there, and everyone must have fun. And “having fun” means sitting quietly in a two hour long assembly while various teachers totter about on stage pontificating. A slide show with pictures of beaming children reels in the background and every so often shaking students are shoved on stage with an instrument. A play may go on for a bit, one with some little girl in a pink wig running after her glass shoe and her prince and into the arms of Santa Claus. It will be cut short, however, by the principal, who will leap on stage and start screaming at the students for not paying close enough attention to the entertainment his staff had so painstakingly put together for their benefit. He will then accuse them all of having worse manners than the Japanese.

If this sounds a bit too drab then don’t worry, there are more up-market events you can get paid to attend.  There’s our school’s “Tea Party” for example, that’s put on for its high paying “international” elite (their school fees are twice the standard rate).  Same venue, but there’s lemonade and fancy table cloth and “this old man” playing on loop. It’s a more intimate environment where every student is placed near a foreign teacher and a pile of animal pictures. A woman yaps on stage in Chinglish and introduces fun games like “name the animal” and “describe the animal” while 10 year-olds tuck into buns with plastic knives and forks. And what is any high class event without a party photographer demanding students and teachers enact lively discussions about panda bears in front of the lens?  

 Grow your own mould farm

Where May is the month of the toad, March is the month of the mould. In Chinese textbooks, English people are described as “obsessed with the weather” because ours is incredibly “changeable”. But changeable in what sense? Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it rains, and sometimes it’s quite warm. Guangdong weather is bipolar by comparison. You get the summer months of excruciating heat when you’re constantly drenched in your own sweat, a winter so cold even the rats stay in, and that month of non stop thunderstorms where the roads become rivers and partially submerged motorcyclists in plastic ponchos glide eerily through the waters like jet-skiing Jedi. And then there are the damp days, where the air is so thick you can barely breathe and nothing is ever dry. You could hang your clothes for days and still they’ll stick to you like a slimy second skin. And everything you own starts to fall apart or else turn green.

One morning you’ll wake up to find mould on your wall. It’ll be a little patch at first, but big enough to catch the eye of any visitors. You start scrubbing, ashamed – and think “is this another grown up thing people do? –They remove the goopy toothpaste from the end of the tube and they regularly shrub walls to ward off mould? Why did no one tell me?” You scrub and scrub but it just won’t go away, so you put a faux post-it reminder over it and hope that no one will ever know. A few doors down someone else is scrubbing their chopsticks wondering why in God’s name a clean pair have sprouted mushrooms overnight. She gives up and buries them at the bottom of her bin – because no one can ever know. And a door down from her, someone else is staring at their chopping board, aghast. He cleans everything everyday, how could this have happened to him? He scrubs and scrubs so that no one will ever know. We all scrub secretly, at our wardrobes, the top of our fridges, our books and our bins, but somehow everything still gets contaminated.

Take a break from all that scrubbing, it won’t do much good anyway. Instead, take pride in your little fungus farm, watch it grow until it gets furry and give each little patch a nice little name. If you fancy a project then I’d suggest setting up some kind of a competition with your peers, or maybe a website where you can all upload snapshots and rate each others fungi. People will look at anything old rubbish on the internet these days.

Things to do in Foshan (as illustrated by citizens aged 5 and above)

  

The internet seems to encourage lame lists like these so I thought maybe if I do what the internet wants me to it’ll find me a job for next year. And besides, this city could do with a little tourism boost, I think – because there isn’t really much listed in the guidebooks so nobody bothers with the place and that’s a shame because maybe if more people came here someone would do something helpful like put up English signs or order the motorbikes off the pavements or maybe even sort out their whole rat infestation problem.

I can’t really file this piece under any form of luxury tourism; the closest there comes to spas over here are too soviet-looking to appeal to anyone with who expects moderately pleasant living conditions on holiday. Nor can Foshan be sold as any kind of partying hub – the closest we have to a club is a nightmarish vision of a place combining Disneyland’s darkest moments with a high class brothel from the 19^th century (and by the way, China, table dancing electric violinists… not that cool). And as for cultural landmarks, if you love Batman movies, you’ll adore our city centre. Otherwise, anyone looking for a city with any semblance of soul should carry on their search. (Granted we have one pretty awesome temple where Bruce Lee used to train, but I’ll write about that another day when I’m feeling less sarcastic.)

So all I have left is adventure tourism, of the “there’s nowhere to rock climb, bungee jump, or white water raft” variety. You know, for all those intrepid traveler type who just adore cultural immersion. So here goes:

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Toad Hunting

Ok, so I know I mention them a lot but really, there’s loads of creative scope with this deeply cultural experience. Prime time is of course right now which I assume is mating season, unless of course they are all harbingers of the apocalypse and the end is nigh. Hop in a cab after nightfall and ask your driver to take you to the nearest swamp (or abandoned building site which is basically the same thing) and worry about weapons when you get there. There is always some plank, tile or soldered metallic what’s-it lying around and all you need to do is toss them into the murky green waters until that incessant all-consuming croaking ceases to be. Other possible techniques that have been brought to the attention of Zao Gao Publications include Napalm, a combination of drinking straws and darts, or getting the princesses of the world to pucker up by Foshan’s multiple cesspools of vermin.   

Hospital Hopping

There’s nothing a Chinese beaurocrat enjoys more than compartmentalizing compartments into compartments of compartments. For example, if you need to get to the police station (speak from personal experience – not that I’ve been taken in for any anti-toad militia activity, mind) you’ll have to have visited at least 3 to get to the one you actually need. Same goes for hospitals, of which there are billions dotted around that all specialize in very particular health problems. Go and develop an indiscernible ailment of some kind and get shunted around while various doctors put you on the drip (their go-to cure for everything), charge you money for a variety of antibiotics they’ve chosen at random, eventually scratch heads and tell you you’re some other hospital’s responsibility. This little adventure ranks high on our “full cultural immersion” list.     

Bakery Roulette

Guangdong province is globally renowned for its native delicacies. Indeed, all people seem to do here is eat, so you’d assume they’d get that right. There’s dumplings, noodles, tofu, a plethora of delicious vegetables you’ve never even heard of (Metaconvulvulous, anyone?) and so much fresh fruit that you may end up overdoing your 5 a day and get vitamin poisoning. (Don’t eat a whole pineapple in one sitting, it’ll make your mouth go numb). But if there’s one thing these culinary geniuses haven’t quite got down, it’s imitating our inferior cuisine, particularly our breaded foodstuffs - though not for want of trying.

There’s a bakery on every corner, each with the promise of bread rolls and sandwiches and all those savory wheat-based snacks you once took for granted back home. Buy a bun and find out what’s inside. Sometimes you might get lucky, there’s one place here that sells chicken wraps which almost taste as they should (although I’m pretty sure they sneak some sugar inside there) , and if you look in the right places, you may even find a baguette that hasn’t been dowsed in syrup. But chances are you’ll end up with a snack that’s 50% sugar, 10% fluffy pork, 10% spam, 10% rice based substance that pretends to be cheese, 15% sauce made out of a mixture of caramel and mayonnaise and 5% wheat. And trust me; it will give you a stomach cramp. Other delights you may come across include fake pizza (sweet bread, check, sweetened red sauce of some kind, check, spam, check, rotting vegetables, check) and fake hot dogs (a similar premise). This adventure can be combined with the aforementioned “Hospital Hopping” experience.      

Play Time

Get yourself to your local greasy spoon at around lunch time and you’ll see its entire clientele gathered round the TV watching one of China’s many beloved costume dramas. Study its characters carefully as they weep and wail at each other’s feet, scream at each other during prolonged sword fights and curse the heavens with abandon. Note how perpetually tear-stained women with painted white faces are either just about to faint or are else clasping the corpse of their unfortunate lover, and that men with moustaches that droop down to their feet always seem to be storming off somewhere unless some unpleasant Japanese man has put them in a cell and is circling them brandishing torture implements. It’s like Eastenders meets a shoddy school production of Oedipus Rex, but with better costumes.

Now that you’ve mopped up on Chinese TV it’s time to go out into the world and do a little play acting of your own. Where the Chinese are deeply moved by expressions of extreme emotion on screen, they get quite confused or else bemused when you exhibit even the slightest bit of frustration, fear or exasperation. If a taxi driver on a motorbike chases you around a parking lot, for example, it will baffle him to see you run away swearing. If you’ve raised your voice so as to get your students to settle down, they’ll chortle away as if you’d just sprouted a red nose and clown shoes. If you’ve just realized your passport has gone missing while completely alone in a hostel far far away from where you live, staff will take one look at your panic-stricken face and disappear. Ring the bell a hundred times and they return looking so disconcerted you half expect them to pull out a crucifix (or whatever the Chinese equivalent is – a jade statuette of lettuce that emits good feng shui, perhaps) and shout “Be gone with you, psychotic beast”.

  

So if you’re feeling theatrical, the Chinese act as the perfect audience. Have a mental break down in the middle of the road and have onlookers point and laugh. Pull a strop while a crowd forms and watch them whispering about whether or not to have you sectioned. Curse the skies and maybe you might even get an applause...

To be continued, maybe.

Mind your manners

Nobody ever comes to Foshan. Nobody except English teachers, the odd businessman from the Ivory Coast, or perpetually sullen Russians. Spotting a fellow expat is as surprising as seeing a car giving way, and in both scenarios you find yourself staring at the subject with amazement, suspicion and sometimes even a little bit of fear.

The more time you spend here, the more prone you become to panicking in the presence of expats you haven’t met before, because anything you do will seem somehow inappropriate. You could ignore them, but that may be considered rude - a symptom of an “I’m the only westerner in the village” complex. Or you could nod, but then they might think you’re trying to say “Hey, I’m white and so are you! Let’s be friends.” Or you could even start on some small talk - but that means actually having to talk to someone, and all you’ll ever find out about them is stuff you both already assumed anyway. Chances are, you’re both English teachers, and you both really miss cheese. If you happen to meet in McDonald’s you’ll both promise each other that you’d never in a million years frequent the place back home.  

Or you could avoid all of the above and hide behind a bush. But last time I did that I fell into some chewing gum and was trying scrape it off as the middle-aged American walked past, probably wondering why I was stroking the foliage with silly string. Of course, I know that I’m a ridiculous person and that I tend to over-think everything - But I also know I’m not the only expat who suffers regularly from a social-skills brain freeze.

My friends and I like to joke about all the bad manners we’ve picked up and what would happen if we couldn’t unlearn them when we go home. Stumbling upon an expat in the street always serves as a reminder that there’s a place in the world where it’s inappropriate to stare, grunt instead of speak, elbow old ladies out of the way and spit out bones onto the dinner table. In that moment, your head’s in a cross-cultural whirl. It’s searching desperately for the right passage in that western etiquettes manual you have stored in your brain somewhere but barely ever use anymore.    

And that manual’s telling you that you shouldn’t have gone out in a nightshirt, skirt and hiking shoes. It’s telling you that darting your head around like a ninja ferret in case you get run over or walk into a rat kind of looks weird. It’s telling you that brushing your hair every so often isn’t particularly a bad thing, but while it’s doing all that, it can’t work out the part about meeting new people.  

I think I’ve shown in previous posts that in order to stick it out here you need have a good sense of the absurd. And most people I know with that faculty are a bit eccentric themselves. Being here exacerbates that, because regardless of how normal you think you’re acting, in the eyes of everyone else here you’re always an oddity. And in many ways that can be liberating - social mores are so boring and tiring sometimes. But then again, I guess they’re also kind of handy when it comes to having a social life.



It's not all over 'til the fat toad sings

It’s definitely a toad. A giant toad. Maybe he’s looking for a lady toad?

Anyway, students had just sauntered out of my office. “Happy Birthday” followed by a verse from Puddle of Mudd’s “She fucking hates me” rings out and I’m headed towards my illustrious international class, an extra-credit thing that was designed for the best students in the school but is really a rather expensive playgroup for the ones with the most money.  I arrive early but there’s still a bunch of kids crowded around my computer playing games. I ask them to sit down but they all have that manic “I’m about to beat the boss” nerd face on and it’s only when I put my arms around the monitor and start shouting “My computer! Mine! Mine!” that they go away.

Students turn up and start chasing each other around the room. 4 or 5 boys stand in a row hopping until they lose their balance and the last one hopping cries out triumphantly. Two kids come up to me, one gesturing wildly and the other bobbing his head to his MP3 player. The latter says nothing but hands me his headphones. I listen politely for 5 seconds and hand them back. “Is Taylor Swift, Sarah.” He says. “Is cool” and carries on bobbing. The other kid pushes him out of the way. “Sarah, Sarah, I….” I turn to him. “Sarah…I…Sarah….me…..er…er….Sister” and recounts the rest of the story through the medium of mime. Think he’s trying to tell me that he had fallen into a pothole over the weekend, and had to have his sister pull him out. Pat him on the head and ask them both to sit down.

Realise I’m supposed to teach them all about gravity and that my teaching assistant’s nowhere to be seen. Drop a pen a couple of times and hope they cotton on, with moderate success. 5 students join me on the podium and start debating what the hell I’m on about in heated Cantonese. I look on gormlessly for about 10 minutes until I hear one of them say “Ne-u-to-ne”. My cue. “Yes. Yes. Newton. Right. The apple. On his head. Excellent” and try to reclaim the podium. I draw some dodgy diagrams on the board, drop more pens (some by accident) and spend the rest of the lesson working on how to pronounce “Newton” with them.     

A tango rings out and it’s time to go. I walk through the hallway and bump into the absent teaching assistant. “Ah, Sarah, because today I had a meeting with the team leaders, so I couldn’t come.” Damn those pesky team leaders, always foiling my plans to give vaguely comprehensible lessons. She smiles weakly. I nod and ask her if she’ll be there tomorrow. She looks worried. “Um. Maybe not” (Chinglish for “Hell no”) “Because the team leaders…” she starts, but then walks off. Another meeting, I assume. I wonder if the team leaders actually have names, or whether they’re just some higher power intent on ruining my life. I assume they do have names, but reckon I’m not told them in case I were to try to talk to them directly instead of through my immediate superior, thereby rupturing the entire fabric of the universe.

Go away toad.

Grab my things from the office. Friend hands me a pile of papers with “what are you wearing today?” written on each page and the outline of a body over which students are supposed to draw clothes. She looks kind of disturbed. I leaf through the pages to see that most have been decorated with penises, boobs and piles of shit. I try not to giggle. “They’re only 6 years old” she laments. “Why are they all so evil?”

  

Dash out of the school and attempt to cross the road where the bus stop is, but it’s as big and scary as a motorway and some of the cars are driving in the wrong direction. A Chinese woman strides past me without a second thought so I run along beside her, using her as a kind of safety buffer against the traffic. Once we reach the other side I take a better look at my bodyguard, and notice that she’s heavily pregnant. I think fondly of the days where crossing the road only cost me a few teeth and not my whole moral compass.

Its gone dark within seconds so I look to the sky. A big grey smoggy cloud’s speeding towards me, like the end of the world monster thing in “The Never-ending Story”. It’s karma in the form of a vehement and completely unexpected thunderstorm and it’ll be here in seconds, so I start sprinting. I see my bus is in the distance and flail my arms while wailing at it but it drives off just as I reach my destination drenched in acid rain.  

I sulk until a girl takes pity on me and shields me from the storm with her umbrella. She starts speaking Mandarin – I think I can work with this. “My teacher said English people never leave the house without an umbrella, because it always rains in England.” She looks me up and down as I sweep my soggy fringe aside. “I forget it at home” I respond, putting some new vocab to good use. A lie, but I’m too damp to piece together the response; “English people see good weather and assume it’ll last for at least 5 seconds”.

We exchange numbers and agree to be best of friends. By the time I get home, a swamp has formed all around us, and I enter my flat stinking of sewers, calves caked in mud. But at least toad’s loving it, he’s croaking away jubilantly like his paddling pool’s magically transformed itself into a water park.

Shower, socialize, go out onto the balcony to try to shush toad (students are a lot more responsive), go back inside to read. Something flies into my hair. Jump up and wack my head about a couple of times until a cockroach plops onto the sofa and starts to scamper about next to me. Resist the urge to squeal and run away and instead pounce on it like a ninja (the kind that uses insecticide sprays on their victims). The winged ones have eggs, apparently, so I keep on spraying it well after it stops moving, as I don’t want to end up playing host to roach orphanage.

But now I have to sit on the balcony as my flat smells as I’d imagine Napalm would and I don’t want to be found lying on the floor with my legs in the air like dear old mama roach. But I’ll be OK out here for an hour or so - I’ve got my book, I’ve got my laptop, I’ve got my toad.