MFW Living in China

你看他穿得多土!

Just look at this fucking dork！

Getting Buff

I sometimes work out at the gym on the college campus where I live. You have never seen a more troubling assortment of overused gym equipment. The keen Chinese business-sense of the woman who manages the place includes the strategy of “never-upgrading-anything-ever,” while gladly collecting membership fees. There really aren't any other options for me if I want to get my hands on some free-weights, aside buying my own.

The leg press makes me fear for my life. It's like sitting under a guillotine, and whenever I climb out of it, I imagine the rusted steel restraints breaking. The weighted press would easily slide down and crush my legs. It's funny, because since I've been going there, I've seen more than one machine with a busted cable. One was a leg extender, another a row machine. I wondered exactly how much stress it takes before one of those cables wears out. Thirty years worth? Well, it wouldn't be a shock to discover some of those items have been there since the 80's.

The place is decorated with these oddly dated photos of body builders. Not sure if they're meant to be inspirational, but I noticed very few of them (if any) are photos of bulked-up Chinese males. Are males of European descent the only ones capable of exhibiting a desirable physicality in their opinion?

The Chinese dudes that go there do some pretty interesting things. Some of them arrive to work out wearing a jacket and jeans. I guess they don't own workout clothes or something. Other guys, after they have had the slightest bit of muscle development, start walking around with their shirts off. In my opinion, they are nowhere near the stage where they've got anything to be proud of, but that doesn't stop them. I sometimes feel embarrassed for them. Put a fucking shirt on.

I heard a couple of Chinese dudes by the bench presses making the loudest grunts as they worked, and when I turned, I saw they had the lowest amount of weight possible on the bar: five pounds on either side. I guess it was high time for them to graduate from lifting heavy writing utensils, like sharpies and highlighters and such. But that's the saddest part of the gym: many of the dudes there aren't getting the nourishment they need to support muscle growth. Protein is hard to come by in China, as they sprinkle meat into meals like a seasoning as opposed to a crucial source of nutrients. It seems they much rather fill their bellies with cheap rice or noodles. As it happens, I think most Chinese folks I come across are malnourished. If you saw the standard garbage considered edible on this campus you would understand why.

Every once in a while, I'll see the true Chinese meat-heads strolling into the gym. These guys have actually have found a way to bulk up despite the nourishment and environmental constraints that come with living in China. Needless to say, performance enhancing drugs are a likely explanation. I don't think that kind of growth would be possible without them. It really makes we wonder about substance control in this country. Someone told me recently in one of my classes that steroids are not illegal here.

Zhong Guo Hua

They say that moving to China is the best way to learn Chinese, hands down. After studying the language for a few years, I'm going to report on some of my personal experiences, and how my decision to live abroad has affected my learning:

I used to have a much more methodical learning process with which I approached the language. I would follow along with coursework, spend hours practicing my characters, and sit with a tutor. But as I realized the probability of mastery would call upon an astronomical degree of memorization, and I would never achieve a useful grasp unless I was able to absorb several words and characters at a time, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed.

It's not just the problem of reading a word, it's also memorizing the tones. And after you've memorized the tones, you still have to think about your accent and the way the Chinese traditionally use the word. And even if you've got that down, it doesn't mean that when a Chinese person says the word to you, you'll recognize it. And then you've got the whole issue of multiple dialects to consider.

Television tries to make things helpful by providing Chinese subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Even the Chinese don't always understand each other, but they hope that characters (different blotches of lines and shapes) will unify their experience. There have been times when I've been able to read whole strings of characters, and know the tones, and still not understand a damn thing. It's because different combinations of characters have a different meaning, and then the challenge is compounded by slang or weird idioms. Sometimes it feels practically impossible to figure shit out. “Get a Chinese girlfriend,” some people advised.

Let's just put it this way: if the Chinese language was graded by the criteria of how effectively it facilitates meaningful communication, it would get a D minus. Let's say that one day someone decides to create a language for the sheer purpose of concise and efficient expression: No one would come up with Mandarin. The language is a tradition of bad ideas that have been compounded by more bad ideas, strained through a sieve of simplification, then stratified by regions and hopeless variations. I visualize Chinese as a system that ties together circular strings of logic where English is designed to provide sturdy rectangular shapes. The manifold learning capacities it calls upon are so different, it's like practicing to ride a unicycle over a tightrope (while spinning a plate on your nose and juggling fish).

And it's unavoidable: after you come to know a few phrases and have the most basic vocabulary, Chinese people will attempt to engage you in conversation. And then you get to experience the joy of understanding only half of what is said, and looking like an ass when you try to reply. It never fails, whenever I get in a cab, I'll end up riding with Chatty Chang. He'll always want to tell me his whole life story. Or worse, he'll want me to describe the intricate details of my own. There are basic, stock phrases that I always have on hand, but I have to be careful. Inevitably, the conversation crosses into nebulous territory, where only the most skilled Chinese linguists may apply.

I was standing at a food stall, getting some grilled chicken. Some Chinese kid came along and started making snarky comments to the owner about me. I couldn't understand exactly what he was saying, but I knew that he was talking shit. He kept looking over at me, in that kind of loathsome manner that comes with Chinese player-haters. Eventually the food owner asked me a question about whether I wanted my chicken spicy or not, and I replied in Chinese.

The shit-talking-kid's eyes bulged. He said with incredulity, “你会说中文吗?” “You can speak Chinese?!”

I just said, “会.” “Yep.”

The kid swallowed, his face suddenly red. Lacking the courage behind his contempt, his buggy eyes darted back and forth before he nervously stepped away. Lesson learned. Don't assume that just because I'm foreign that I can't understand what the fuck you're saying. Even if most of the time I can't.

Comparisons

The kids in one of my classes wanted to ask me about comparisons of expenses between the US and China. I was explaining to them, “Unless you live in a rural area, where no one wants to live, and there are very few jobs, it is nearly impossible to get by without making over fifty-thousand dollars a year. At least that has been my experience. You can survive on about forty-thousand a year, but it would be difficult. And I'm talking about living comfortably at least, in a cheap apartment, with basic internet, utilities, a cell phone, some student debt, and making car payments. You would still live in toxic conditions, with some crime, surrounding poverty, and dangerous neighbors on drugs.”

My students were shocked. “Forty-thousand dollars a year?” they asked. “That is so much though!”

I shook my head. “That's not really anything. But it depends on where you live,” I told them. “In most places in the US, you will be broke making forty-thousand a year. And let's just pray that you can find a job that provides basic medical insurance, because if you don't have that, illness can destroy your financial life.”

“I guess that's one of the things I like about living in China,” I explained. “Things are relatively affordable. You can sustain yourself on about three hundred dollars a month if your rent is covered. Take for example this Pepsi bottle.” I held up a plastic bottle of “百事可乐.” In the US, you may spend as much as two dollars for this item. In China, you pay about three yuan (about fifty cents). Same goes for several other things in China. When I was living in the US, I was lucky to keep myself fed and healthy on less than one hundred and fifty dollars a week.”

“I guess China isn't such a bad place to live after all!” one of my students said.

I almost snickered, because in my head it was the equivalent of someone saying, “I guess the smell of poop isn't so bad after all!”

But that's just the thing: maybe it isn't, in comparison.