I have a lot of catching up to do. Its been a long and tumultuous ride this past month, and its all wound up right here, with today, and the following INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE:
Ligaya and I swung by early, just after my 10:20 ending of class and subsequent baozi run came to an end. We swung by the office of our employers - Mr. Yu and Ms. Wang. Yu seemed to be wiping tables with a dirty rag when we walked in. Ligaya called him out on this rather uncharacteristic action, and he sheepishly recoiled at the suggestion. We sat down and he prodded us about the post exchange. Ms. Wang arrived a few minutes later, in a bustle as always, knocking around documents and fumbling with the office's various dial-able objects.
They joked with us and we joked with them. It was a disarmingly cheerful environment.
What the hell was going on? Where was the pretense of botched classes, complaining students, angry landlords, or the suggestive rhetoric for self-correction?
Found it, the pretense had been gobbled up by a request to humor a media tool for an interview. An interview on the "future of Qinghai Province." Wang paid us our monthly salary and spend an extended period of time searching for the english word for "weizhi" a term which expresses when one pays someone before the payer goes to the bank for the withdraw of the money, with connotations of paying someone slightly ahead of their regularly scheduled payment time. The closest term decided upon was "prepay."
After being prepayed, I went home and graded 3 papers out of a stack of 30, and drank a pot of coffee.
I arrived back at the office building an hour later. I was joined by Josh, a pink-clothed American studying Chinese, Tibetan, and TCM (with connections to an unclosed US agency), and Abe Sensai, the resident Japanese teacher. We were now informed to inform the reporter about our impressions of change and development of the province in the wake of the recently ended People's Congress in Beijing. I assumed that a whole lot of nothing happened there (in public) and so this would just be a chance to sucker us into complementing Xining, Qinghai, and therefore China. Mr. Ao, another school official, told me that now that China had freedom, issues could be discussed. In the past, he told me, when teachers had issues, they came to this office, and the issues were taken care of. This office, I realized, was a miniature version of the Chinese government, and it itself expressed all of the great things that modern China was capable of! This truly was a multi-scaled harmonious landscape!
Five minutes later the other foreigners and I were trapped in a room somewhere between an interrogation chamber and a sleazy motel room with a young Beijing girl nervously shaking a digital recorder. We were to be interviewed for China Radio Int'l (CRI)!!
Moments later I was complementing Xining, Qinghai, and therefore China. I stressed the convenience of my university life and the good traffic of the city. I had the mic on me twice, but every-time my soliloquy went astray, I lost her attention and CRI's recorder. The first misstep was a brief diatribe against the dearth of helmet wearers in China and the absence of public education about the dangers of head injuries. "There must be a law-" I was saying. The second misstep was when I mentioned the shamefully low English levels of most of my students, which I said was a geographic problem resulting from lack of lower education funding in more remote provinces. "My students can hardly speak a sentence of English-" Yoink!
Abe droned on twice to her about the dangers and deplorability of the hormones and pesticides used to increase food yields in China. He did this in both Chinese and Japanese. The young lady gave an empty smile as Abe drew over his body with his hands the negative influence of contaminated meats. The hormones mainly affect the human lungs in sort of a pumping action, apparently. A negative pumping action.
After the interviewing was done we were all released. Josh discovered our little CRI representative had studied Burmese in Beijing, a fact which prompted him to get her phone number. She motioned him with a thumb-pinky phone and mouthed
