Talking About Chickens

September 26, 2012

A conversation with a Chinese co-worker

Her:  Where are you from in the US?

Me: Arizona.  Do you know it?

Her: No

Me: Do you know where California is?

Her: Yes, yes in the West!

( I show her with my hands how Arizona borders California and Mexico.)

Her: Mexico?  So have you been to Mexico?

Me: Several times, it’s really close to where I live.

(She hesitates like she’s thinking of how to say something delicately, then uncertainly…)

Her: Ashlee, I have seen in movie that in Mexico they had very rude way of killing chicken.

(In typical Chinese fashion I can tell she’s trying to tell me something but she’s doing it indirectly.)

Me: What do you mean?  Tell me what they do.

Her: They just take the head and…

Me: And… (I make the gesture of breaking the neck with my hands)

Her: (Her eyes get wide with horror) Yes!

(At this point I think about the endless restaurants and markets  I have seen in Shanghai with birds hanging in the window or stacked up on trays.) 

Me: Well…how do you do it here?

Her: We just cut the.. (She pauses and then slices the side of her neck with her hands.)

Me: You cut the neck and let the blood drain out?  (She nods)  Yeah.  In America we just cut the head off with a knife. (I didn’t think it was possible but her eyes get even wider in horror.)

Her: YOU do this?

Me: Oh, no no no!  I don’t do it myself, I buy the chicken that way!  They cut the head off at the butcher.   

Her: (Shakes her head) I could never.

Me: Oh no, neither could I.  I don’t want to kill the animal I just want to eat it.

Her: Yes, yes exactly

Me:  I don’t  think I could eat it if I saw it killed either.

(Elaine agreed with me but I’m sure she was just being polite.  I find it hard to believe that she hasn’t seen many, many animals killed in front of her before she eats them.  Just yesterday my friend from Texas had a difficult time calming her 10 year old son down after he saw a chicken be killed at a sidewalk restaurant.  Freshness is very important to the Chinese, so in many places the food is killed right before it’s served.)

I proceeded to tell my Chinese friend about how back home my cousin hunts deer (really he hunts elk, but that would be too difficult to explain I already had to explain ‘hunting’). And I tried to tell her a funny story about my aunt trying to butcher one of my cousin’s deer on the kitchen table and get everything cleaned up before his wife got home.  I’m not really sure she understood all of the story, but at the end she said…

Her:  You can do this in your country? Hunt?

Me:  (I could see images forming in her head of Americans running around waving guns and killing wildlife at random) Yes, but not everyone does it, only some people.  And you have to have a permit for the gun and for the hunting.

Her: (Relieved) Ohhh.  We can’t do that here because China has many laws about guns.

Me:  Yes I know, but no one hunts for food?  Even outside of the city.

Her:  There are many laws protecting wildlife.

Me:  Yes, in America we have laws like that too.

Her:  But here, still some people do it against the law.

Me:  Yes in America people do that too.

Fear and Earwax

September 25, 2012

So today the thing I feared most about coming to China happened....I got sick and had to go to the hospital.
First let me assure you that I am totally fine and it wasn't really as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be.  The thing is, before I came to here I read countless stories about unsanitary hospitals and how unreliable the adulterated medicines can be in China.  Even the Department of Public Health told me to bring my own hypodermic needles when I go to the doctor because theirs may not be clean and my regular doctor wrote me a prescription for penicillin to have filled in the states and take with me ‘just in case’.  It’s no wonder I was freaked out, right?
Here's what happened:
About three or four days ago my left ear started feeling clogged.  It was constantly popping and if I pressed anywhere near my upper jaw I felt cracking and pressure.  Everyone around me has been getting colds and I figured I must be getting sick too.  However, it was getting increasingly uncomfortable and then last night I woke up in the middle of the night and my hearing in my left ear was completely gone!  I panicked!  I thought for sure I had an infection or something and that my eardrum was going to rupture right then and damage my hearing forever. (I’d like to interject that I know nothing about medical science and that I have a vivid imagination.)  After the longest 12 minutes of my life, my ear popped and my hearing returned.  But I slept the rest of the night sitting up because every time I lay down the clogging feeling returned.  So weird!
The next day, I knew that I should have it checked out by a doctor but I was freaked out! Not only by getting Chinese medical care but also about missing training.  I was pretty worked up by the time I approached my trainer, Angela, and asked her for help. 
She immediately called HR who contacted my insurance agent.  Within two hours I had talked to my agent 3 times.  During that time she set an appointment for me with the doctor, contacted HR for a copy of my passport, then had it faxed over to the center I was training at so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the hotel for it, texted me the address to the hospital in Chinese so that I could show it to the cab driver, she even had both a nurse and a doctor call me to talk about my symptoms and about what would happen at the hospital.
After 4:30pm the medical center only has emergency service so my nice Disney trainer let me leave an hour early to make it there by 4pm.  I took a cab to the international hospital and the cabbie’s face was grumpy when he picked me up but once I showed him where I was going, he started acting extra nice. Before I exited the taxi he even mustered an English ‘Thank you’.
Upon entering the hospital, which I discovered is really more of a medical center that deals mostly with foreigners, I was greeted by friendly English speaking staff. It was a professional and clean atmosphere and the front desk lady knew exactly who I was saying, “Oh you are here about your ear!”  An English speaking doctor examined me and as soon as he looked inside my ear he said, “Your ear canal is clogged with earwax.”  (Gross!)  Then he whisked me out to a sweet-faced nurse in a bright coral-colored.  It was the most cheerful uniform I’ve ever seen, outfit trimmed with white piping accessorized with matching white shoes and a coral nurse’s hat.  The nurse lead me to another doctor.  While she translated what was happening the smiling doctor flushed my ear with saline solution (I think), scraped and swabbed the inside and prescribed some drops.  She wore gloves and a mask, opened all of the instruments in front of me making sympathetic sighs the whole time.  I was so relieved.   
Now I’ll spare you a description of the many disgusting and fascinating things that came out of my ear (I was so tempted to take a picture) but I will say I feel a lot better.  I had no idea how much I wasn’t hearing. As soon as I left the building I felt like an entire world of sounds had been opened up!  If I could’ve run to a mountaintop and started spinning around and singing Julie Andrews-style I would have!  
So in the end, my fears and my ear problems were alleviated.  It’s good to know that in an emergency I’m not alone in China.  I have Disney and I have a solid insurance company and I have dear China friends that worry about me. Several volunteered to go with me to the hospital.
One more thing I’d like to point out: Have you ever arrived at a doctor’s office or Urgent Care and had to wait an hour before someone would help you? Not at the Chinese hospital, they took me as soon as I arrived.  Eight different people helped me and I was out of there in 30 minutes!  That includes paying at the cashier the total cost of about $14.  (Which is probably expensive by Chinese standards but I paid it happily.)

What's in a name?

September 24, 2012

Over the past few days I’ve been doing classroom observation at Disney English centers.  I can’t describe to you how truly adorable these little kids are and how excited I am to work with them! 

Now my understanding is that it’s typical for Chinese students (everywhere, not just at DE) to choose an English name to go by in the classroom.  Many keep these names when they get older and study abroad or if they go into a business where they interact with a lot of English speakers.  Often they just go by the pinyin form of their Chinese name (Weiran, Cheng Cheng, etc.)  And sometimes they choose a name because it is either close to the sound of their Chinese name or has a similar meaning.  Unfortunately, there seems to also be a lot of choosing names that are old fashioned or that aren’t really names at all.

During my observations and from looking at the names written on the work displayed around the center, I noticed about 65% of the students have typical English names like Jason and Abigail, but the others…well…here are some samples:

M= Male, F=Female

Clement (M)

Fergus (M)

Estelle (Seriously, this is a name chosen for a 5 year old)

Vivian (Along with Kitty and Candy this is one of the most popular names for girls!)

Rain (M)

Snake (M)

Lightning  (M)

Sky (M)

Cherry (F-I’m told fruits are popular)

Brown (M)

Encore (F)

Scottypippin (mushed together to make a first name)

Apple (F)

Dragon (M)

Lovely (F)

Go-go (F)

Cinderella (F)

Winnie (M, I’m pretty sure it’s after Winnie the Pooh)

Lemon (F))

I was telling these names to some of my friends that have taught English in China before and they contributed other names :

Eleven

Hello Beef

Smile

Green

Boot

Kinky

Handsome

Dollar

And my favorite name ever:

iphone4

September 22, 2012

First let me share a couple of pictures I took while I was walking to work this week....

 Martial Arts practice!

Today...

I was feeling a little homesick so I was relieved when Stacy and Chelsea came bounding into my room and invited me to go with them on a hike to She Shan Basilica.  I was intimidated by the idea of hiking with two Colorado girls, but agreed to go anyway.  On our way out of the hotel we ran into Courtney and Krit and they decided to join us. 

We didn’t know much about the site except that it is a Catholic cathedral located at the top of a tall hill.  (A novelty because Shanghai is as flat as Florida!)  Turns out that it’s 22 miles SW of the city, about 40 minutes by metro.  When we arrived at our stop, we exited the metro station and could see the basilica from where were.  It looked like it was 7-8 miles away and we hadn’t really planned how we were going to get over there.  We wandered around for awhile trying to find a bus or a bike rental place, then I approached two guys and asked for help.  They turned out to be two shy, German students and they were as lost as we were.  
Finally we all decided to take cabs over to the hill.  There is a service in Shanghai that you can text an address to a phone number in pin-yin (the system of translating Chinese characters into a Latin script) and it will text you back with the address written in Mandarin so that you can show it to a cab driver.  We did that and then were on our way!

The hill turned out to be a very light climb through lovely bamboo groves.  Here are pictures from the trip………….     

 I think this picture seemed much funnier when we took it.  It was so silly that they were advertising steak at the coffee shop.  I'm so glad to have met Chelsea, she is confident, adventurous and hilarious. 

Silly girls at the entrance to the hill. The many steps to the top represent "The Way of Suffering", the road that Christ took to his crucifixion. 

 Pagoda half way up the hill.  You usually find these near Buddhist temples, set up as a place to store sacred relics and writings.  I thought it was odd to see one set up next to a Christian church, maybe it makes the church less Western. 

 Taoist yin yang symbol...another strange thing to find at the base of a Catholic church

 View of the suburbs of Shanghai from the top of the hill.  

(Don't worry that's not smog, it was a humid, rainy day)

 The Basilica of Our Lady of She Shan is supposedly the largest in Asia (though actually it is a typical cross-shaped cathedral about the size of St. Pat's in Waukon).  It was built in the 1920's on top of a chapel built in the 1860s by Jesuits.  During the Cultural Revolution it was greatly damaged, with all of the stained glass smashed out but has since been fully restored.

 Me in a typical public, squat-pot toilet at the basilica.  Sometimes I actually prefer to use these over the public Western toilets because you don't have to touch anything...unless you loose your balance.  Unfortunately there's usually no toilet paper, and it can get smelly because paper is not supposed to be flushed, but rather tossed in a waste basket inside the stall. 

I took this picture for my sister.  Nikki Langer:  Come to China!  Exciting Adventures Await!

 Several Chinese people stopped to snap pictures of us while we were taking this picture.  

Those crazy foreigners!

Back at the bottom of the hill there were no cabs, so we negotiated for someone to take the five of us back to the metro station in his van for 30RMB (about $6).  I've read about people doing this in China and it was fine for us this time but I don't recommend it.  Not because it's unsafe, (violent crime is virtually non-existent in China) just that it's a really good way to get ripped off.

By the time we got back onto the metro we were starving!  Chelsea actually started to get sick from the Advil she’d taken on an empty stomach.  This sweet Chinese couple that didn’t speak English started fussing over her, asking her what was wrong and telling other people to move over on the seats so that she could sit down.  As soon as we got back to our neighborhood we went to a Japanese noodle place for dinner and soon she felt better.  Just as we were finishing up we got a text that two of the Chinese assistant trainers from Disney English wanted to come meet us.  Seizing the opportunity to make friends with some of the local staff, Stacy and I decided to hang back and wait for them.

                                                                        Stacy and Brittany

Stacy entertained the girls by telling them all the words she knows in Chinese, which a friend taught her back home.  Turns out all the words were curse words.  The discovery was pretty funny. 

Brittany is sophisticated, smart, and no-nonsense. She told me that she used to be a workaholic Graphic Designer and that, up until a year ago, she could read and write English, but could barely speak at all.  She learned conversational English from watching Friends.  (Phoebe is her favorite character).

                                                                       Flora and Me

She is laughing because every time she would look at the camera I’d say a Chinese curse word (which I will not repeat here).  She loved it and in typical Chinese style she covers her mouth when she laughs.  Adorable.  

Flora just graduated from university with a degree in Applied English.  She is so sweet and friendly, I adore her!   Also, she told me that she loves to watch New Girl and Vampire Diaries in English. (She thinks Damon is cute but I told her I think he has crazy eyes.)

I loved having dinner with these spunky young women but being with them made me think about how much I miss by not having access to Mandarin.  An explanation:

To get on the subway you have to pass through a security check, guards either wave you through the gate or pull you and run your bag through an X-ray machine.  I’ve noticed that as soon as the foreigners approach the gate, the guards drop their hands and turn their heads, avoiding eye contact while we pass right through.  Things like this happen often.  In shops, restaurants, etc. they will help you if you ask but often I notice that people look uncomfortable with our presence.  It’s not that they are trying to be unfriendly, but they seem nervous that we might try to talk to them in English.  I think that they are afraid of having to awkwardly communicate and to possibly ‘lose face’.

In both the restaurant, and at the supermarket we visited after dinner, staff turned to Brittany to explain things about my transactions without even glancing at me.  I have been in so many stores and restaurants, and I know that there are things that should've been communicated but haven't been because it's just easier to move the foreigner along.

I hope to learn some Mandarin while I'm here, but right now it seems like an impossible task.  Sigh.