Youngest and Oldest Kids: Adventures of the Chongqing Nanny

I get along well with youngest children; most of my best friends and men I've been out with are youngest kids. I'm an oldest, so perhaps it's just an easy paradigm to fall into. My second year, most of the new volunteers assigned to Chongqing were guys. (New volunteers arrive every July; because we serve for two years, you serve with a different group your first and second years.) And almost all of them were youngest children.

Because I'd already been in Chongqing a year when the new volunteers arrived, I was happy to take on the role of 411 if they needed it. I told them about getting around the city and food and shopping and whatever else they needed to know. But then I started getting calls from restaurants, asking me to talk to their server to order their dinner. One of the girls sometimes called me and she was always "Hey, can you help me out? I've tried and it's not working." But the boys were like, "Hi, order my food, 'k thanks bye." I started to get annoyed by the boys. I started to feel like I wasn't their friend, I was their nanny. On the one hand, it was flattering they thought I knew so much. On the other hand, I'm not your mom. It's funny now to me how easy it was for us to fall into this pattern, because both sides were willing to take on the role of youngest/oldest. (Yes, I am stereotyping-- not all youngest or oldest kids act like this. But we did.)

I finally told them I felt like their nanny, not their friend, and I didn't like that. They started making an effort to make sure they knew I was their friend first, nanny second (haha), balance restored. Even now I sometimes still get emails asking for help with something Chongqing-related. I'm happy to help out. And they taught me more about being very laid-back, carefree and fun-loving. Youngest and oldest: it's a dynamic that works.

Happy Halloween! Hope you have a great time. Be safe! Here's a picture from last year I don't think I've shared before. He didn't know what to be for Halloween, so like a good nanny I took him in at the last minute, gave him my Chinese silk dragon robe, cut off the sleeves of this t-shirt, blew dry his just-washed gym shorts with my hair-dryer and gave him a (make-up based) black eye. I also taped up his hands but it disappeared by the time this picture was taken. I had to rush him past the guards outside my apartment because at the time they were still housing swine flu quarantinees in my building. But look at him: would YOU mess with this boxer? I still love the memory of us trying to get a taxi in our Halloween getups. Crazy Americans.

Quiet Time and Meditation

What do you do for quiet time?

I like my quiet time very early in the morning. In China I had the habit of waking up verrry early because the birds that lived in the bamboo growing outside my window also got up early. Older people did daily tai chi in the courtyard outside my apartment at the break of dawn. I loved seeing their quiet, uniform movements. It inspired me to find quiet time of my own.

I began the habit of sitting quietly every morning on my mat, thinking about what was important to me that day and what I wanted myself to know. I hesitate to call it 'meditation' because I wasn't trying to clear my mind, have some kind of experience in enlightenment, etc. I just wanted to focus my energies and be aware of what I was bringing into myself in the best way possible.

Now that I am home, I've had more time to focus on this process. I downloaded some podcasts about meditation that focus on breathing and relaxation. I've been reading a book my good friend J. sent me about forgiveness of yourself and others, and being positive. It sounds new age-y, but it's an important message. I started paying attention to the messages I send myself, and so many of them were negative. I've made a conscious effort to change that. I guess I always felt if I weren't really hard on myself, I wouldn't be a better person? I'm realizing that when you send yourself positive messages, you feel inspired to change things in a positive way. Positive reinforcement works with yourself, too!

Focused quiet time to reflect isn't easy. It requires you to give up a lot of your own ego. That has been the hardest part for me. Often I cry after this kind of meditation, but I think it's a good thing; it's releasing all those hard feelings I've had for myself and others for so long. If you don't have quiet time for yourself now, I challenge you to start taking 1 minute, then 2 minutes, and so on, and think about what message you want yourself to know. You are really smart, incredible people. I hope you all believe that about yourself.

Fish Sellers and My Block in Chongqing (Yangjiaping)

I’m going through pictures and videos I took while in China, and I’ll be posting the ones that I think share a lot about what it was like to live in China and Chongqing and that I hope will be of some interest to you. They’re all short videos, 2 minutes or less.

This first one was a common sight on the sidewalk at night; small sidewalk restaurants sold fresh fish pan-broiled in hot spices with veggies. As you can see, there is a basin of oxygenated water keeping the fish alive. You pick out the fish you want and the guy weighs it on the scale; you pay by weight. As you can also see, the fish was flopping around too much. It really shocked me to see this the first few times, and then I got used to it. When he chucks it down the sidewalk, he’s throwing it to the person who will cook it. I know we think it’s gross to kill and eat meat on the spot, but without access to good refrigeration, this was the safest way to eat meat in China for a long time, and now it’s tradition.



This second video is of the block where I lived; it begins as I step through the main gate where my apartment was located, and continues to the end of the block. The thing I remember most is all the noise of this street. This was during the lunch/naptime block, so there were fewer people on the street.

This block is where I caught buses to go to the train station, bus station and to V's house and the entertainment/shopping district of Shapingba, where a few other friends lived. (I had to cross the street and walk a ways further to take buses to R.'s and T.'s homes.) This block is also where I bought beauty items, tea drinks, street snacks and other misc. items. Crossing at the end of the block led to the subway station and the Yangjiaping (my 'hood) main entertainment/shopping district, where we went for the big grocery store, bank, movies and nicer restaurants. I spent a considerable amount of time walking this stretch of my city, and I made friends with some of the sellers who set up on this block.



If you have any questions about anything you see in the videos, please ask and I will answer in the comments.

Traditional Chinese Comb Gift, Neat Thermos

I didn't know before I lived in China that wooden combs are a traditional gift to give to girls/women, especially as a goodbye gift.

At the tourist neighborhood of CiQiKou in my city, there were shops selling decorative wooden combs and hairpins, but I didn't think much of them, I thought it was just a tourist trap item. But in the days before I left Chongqing, I received several nice wooden combs as a going away gift.



They’re made of wood and painted with enamel. All the combs I received came in these nice boxes and were made by the same company; I’m not sure if this company is well-known for combs, or if they are the ones who sell in my area of China. One student wrote cute little messages for me all over on the box itself:



The combs are often stylized, such as this yellow comb I use on a daily basis and is carved to look like a fish:



All of the female volunteers I know were given combs as gifts, so I think it’s a pretty common practice, but one I’d never heard of. I asked someone why a comb was a traditional gift and she said, “Because it’s useful and beautiful.” Yes, they are both of these things! I find the wood makes my hair look more smooth than using a plastic comb, too.

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My Chinese friend Cassie gave me this neat little pale pink/gray thermos as a going away gift; she knows I took a liking to the Chinese custom of drinking hot water and tea, so this was a really thoughtful gift. It’s extremely lightweight, well-sized for your hand and the thermos lid has this neat screw-off compartment for holding dry tea, instant coffee or any kind of mixer. Ingenious! It’s made by Tayohya, but I couldn’t find any stores selling these in the U.S. online. Maybe in Chinatown I’ll come across one. I use it constantly, it’s very well-suited to being carried around.

Gratitude And Socks

You guys, let me be honest for a minute: the past month has been tough.

I gave up my apartment in San Antonio to go to China, and just before leaving I moved all my stuff to my mom’s. So that’s where I am while I job search, at my mom’s. This is not a bad thing at all; I’m closer to my brother and sister and extended family, and my mom is easy to live with. BUT, it’s certainly not where I want or expected to be. I’ve had to change my attitude the past week or so; I’m choosing to be grateful for gifts and opportunities I have in my life right now, rather than focus on what (I think) I lack. One of the great things is that my mom lives in a colder climate than San Antonio, so I get to indulge my love of socks.

I LOVE socks—cute and versatile and less expensive than buying shoes and purses. In San Antonio I hardly ever got to wear socks because it’s just too warm most of the year; I had an extensive collection of chanclas, but hardly any socks.

In Chongqing, I wore tall socks all winter long because it was so bitingly wet and cold and I didn’t have indoor heat. My sister sent me some great thigh-high gray socks, and I had a nice collection of argyle over-the-knee socks. It was popular in Chongqing to wear thick ‘skin colored’ (meaning, Han skin coloring) footless tights with socks over the top; I did this look with skirts and chunky heels mostly:



I wore through most of my socks and threw them away when I was packing to come back. Now, with winter approaching, I get to replace them!

Some of my favorite socks I get at REI; Smartwool socks are very warm and long-lasting—these were the only socks I took with me to China that made it back with me. I highly recommend them, and they come in both cute and functional. This pair is now on my wish list:



You can see some more here.

The Joy of Socks and Amazon also carry great over-the-knee and knee-high socks. Target, too, but I couldn’t find any online today.

Happy socking!

Shanghai Pictures, Plus When The Care Bears Go Too Far

I found some pictures from Shanghai I never posted, thought some of you might enjoy seeing them. They are all cell phone pics, though, so not super high quality.

A hot water dispenser, very common in China. The Chinese characters say 'caution scalding', meaning scalding water, but the English 'care bear!'?? I can't even call this Chinglish or a mistranslation, this is just a joke someone played, right?

British style telephone booth, a cultural relic of the British occupation of Shanghai I assume. I was amazed how clean and empty the sidewalks of Shanghai were, compared to Chongqing:

An apartment courtyard; this picture makes me so homesick:

Little places to grab a cup of afternoon tea or coffee.

An aquarium in the pedestrian tunnel. I remember thinking how fancy Shanghai is compared to Chongqing, based on the underground tunnels alone. Wouldn't it be cool if your job was to take care of pedestrian tunnel aquariums?

In contrast, this is what I saw most nights on the sidewalk outside my gate in Chongqing. My taxi pulled up to this:

My American Bed, With Chinese Characteristics

I had a great bed before I went to China-- a deep pillow top, to which I later added a tempurpedic foam topper. Ahh... like sleeping on a cloud.

Chinese beds are usually one piece, not two, and therefore quite a bit more firm and less cozy. It's not exactly like sleeping on a box spring, because there is a thin layer of padding, but it's close. At first these beds felt really uncomfortable, but give yourself two years, you get accustomed to things you never imagined you could. Here's my apartment bed; it's a little hard to tell, but I had a box platform, then the boxspring style mattress on top of that.

I liked these box bed platforms, I imagined they were a design relic of the traditional 'kang' bed, where hot coals were placed in the box's empty space to heat the bed overnight. Believe me, with no indoor heat, I would've loved a kang bed!

Here's a bed at our favorite hostel in Chengdu. You can see the wood plank and thin mattress we slept on, and it's actually quite comfortable, I slept very well on this bed. (Not my legs, btw.)

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So, now I'm back in America, back to a big fluffy American bed...and it was really, really difficult for me to sleep on. My back and neck hurt all the time. I finally had to admit: my big American bed is now too darn soft and cloud-like. So this week I gave in to my Chinese characteristics and removed the top mattress, and I'm back to sleeping on just the box spring, with a foam topper. Ahh...so firm and familiar! And no more back aches.

Next time I have a sleepover, I guess it will need to be someone familiar with Chinese-style beds.

Bodily Functions Are For Everyone, Even The Vaginal Ones

Most of you know Chinese culture views privacy differently than American culture, most easily explained as 'there isn't any expectation of privacy in Chinese culture.' I knew this affected personal space, family and friendly secrets, neighbors knowing what you're up to all the time, everyone always in your bidness, etc.  but I didn't realize it also extended to the body.

It does.

In my experience, bodily functions aren't considered private in China. Sneezing, burping, coughing, passing gas, peeing: all these things are viewed as natural functions of the body, so you don't have to say excuse me, you don't God Bless anyone, and you definitely don't feel embarrassed when they happen...if you're Chinese, that is! Many North Americans...it might take a while to get to that point. (I think this is also why babies and little kids pee everywhere and no one freaks out. Babies pee and poop...why NOT on the sidewalk?)

When you first get to China, you're probably going to get sick. I can't think of anyone in my group who didn't get sick, but we have doctors available 24/7 and they will ask you all kinds of questions about the quality and quantity of your poop and whether or not you see anything weird in the toilet bowl. After a while, you kind of get used to talking about these things. (Some more than others!)

I knew I had become pretty comfortable when I was handed a bag of medicine at our January training conference, just prior to my trip to Hainan Island. (Sidenote: before we went on vacation we had to submit an itinerary; the medical staff checked it to give us any special medications we might need before going to that area, like malarial drugs.) I was sitting with a bunch of my guy friends when I opened my bag, which included a box of Chinese brand vaginal yeast infection suppositories. I pulled it out to inspect more closely. "Um, why do I have this? Why did the medical office give me vaginal suppositories??" Now, usually the last thing a group of 20-something guys wants to discuss is vaginal suppositories, but they started firing questions at me:

"Let me see it...yup, that's what it is."
"Hmmm...DO you have a yeast infection?"
"Is there anything weird going on down there?"
"It includes a finger glove? Open it up, let's see it!"
"So THAT'S how you say 'vagina' in Mandarin!" (He was joking, he already knew!)

I wasn't embarrassed at all to be discussing what the medical office thought was possibly wrong with my vagina with a table full of guys I see on a regular basis. Thanks China, for giving me the gift of no shame.

(Endnote: my friend C., who is super awesome but lives in another province so I hardly ever got to see him, piped up with the correct answer: "Wait-- did they also give you malaria meds? You need the suppositories  in case the malaria medicine gives you a yeast infection." C. was the hero that day!)

It also made me laugh when a good friend went home and literally the first thing she said to me when she got back was, "I have diarrhea." Only in Peace Corps...

Adventures in Mind Control

I wrote about this briefly before, but I want to expound on it today.

As a university teacher in China, I was coming to the cultural game about 20 years late; my students all shared the same cultural background, and because culture just 'is' in China, not very often do they explain or expound upon cultural reasoning or traditions.

So sometimes things like this would happen: I devised a lesson plan for my English major students to help them feel more comfortable using the subjunctive tense, i.e. 'If I were...., I would....' and so on. I made the theme 'Superheroes', something I thought they would enjoy talking about, and asked them to choose what superpowers they would have and how they would use them for the benefit of humankind.

After giving them time to prepare, I asked a few students to share their answers with the class. "If I were a superhero, I would have the power to read minds so I knew if anyone was going to do something bad, and then I change their thought so they wouldn't do it." The second student I called on stood up: "If I were a superhero, I would read minds so I could stop people from doing bad things before they did them." Third student: "If I were a superhero, I would read minds so I could change their thoughts and stop all the bad things." And so on.

After about the 5th student, I asked them, "Did all of you choose the power to read minds and stop bad things before they happen?" 35 head nods. "No one wants to fly, or change into an animal, or become super strong?" 35 confused faces look back at me; how would these things help humanity, exactly?

The uniform answer my students gave surprised me, because I was thinking like an American: I was giving them a choice. And their answer was to take away choice. My students were not accustomed to choices, and for them, this was probably the hardest part of my teaching style to adapt to. It's possible that mind control was the only logical answer for them to give, but it's more likely one student had this idea and the others decided to co-opt it as a safe choice. There was no need for them to have different answers; it's American teachers who want diversity, not our Chinese students.

My students have not been raised to make choices. Asking them to form groups of their own choosing met with blank stares, until I taught them how to do it. Asking them to sign up for a time to take their oral final exam prompted the question "Why don't you just tell us in what order to take it, like our other teachers?" (My answer: "Because I'm an American teacher and we like to give choices.")

I often felt that this issue of choice was the biggest dividing line between me and my students: I asked them to do it, knowing they'd dislike it, and they liked me as a teacher despite my insistence on occasionally asking them to make choices. But my second year, I changed the theme from Superheroes to something else.

Awkward Questions

When we agreed to be Peace Corps volunteers in China, we also agreed to never ever, ever, never, ever discuss the ‘3 T’s’ with any Chinese Nationals: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen Square. Those topics were pretty easy to avoid; I think the entire time I was in China, people only asked me about them 3 or 4 times. And it is fairly easy to deflect conversations in China; if you change the subject, they accept that means you don’t want to talk about it. But there were other questions asked that weren’t necessarily verboten, but for me, awkward to answer. Such as:

1. “What do you do in America to spot the counterfeit money?” There is a problem with counterfeit money floating about in China. It’s quite common to be passed fake money, to the extent that if you get fake money from an ATM, the bank is not responsible for reimbursing you. (The safest way to get money is from a teller, because they check it before they hand it to you.) So you learn to inspect the paper on everything higher than a five, and if you do get fake money, you can make a scene or decline it or whatever. Or try to pass it to someone else. So when the business teachers asked me how we spot fake U.S. money, it felt awkward to have to admit we don’t really have the same size problem. One of them said,"But how? Your money is easier to counterfeit than ours!” Um, I don’t know. We just don’t really have to worry about it. I mean, I know there is counterfeit money, but not in daily rotation like there is in China. I still don’t really have a good answer for that.

2. “Why do Americans just say ‘Korea’ when they really mean ‘South Korea?” My answer: it’s tradition to just say ‘Korea.’ Follow up question, “What if you want to talk about North Korea?” Answer in my head I didn’t say out loud, "’Most Americans don’t talk about North Korea.” In China, there is South Korean and North Korean. In America, there is usually Korean and North Korean. My students picked up on this. They are smart kids.

3. “Do you have to have a visa to go to Hong Kong?” No, American citizens don’t need a visa to go to Hong Kong. “Oh, in China we have to have a visa to go to Hong Kong.” I never really said anything after that, just something lame like, “Oh.” But inside I was cringing.

All of these questions were asked out of sincere curiosity; it’s just that the answers made me feel a bit awkward. Luckily, they were usually short conversations.