Chapter Seventeen

I try to be as cynical as possible. It makes for fewer surprises. So it really pisses me off that I didn’t see this coming. Lillian will be delayed for just a few more days, and will I please please please sub for her until she makes it in? Me. A substitute schoolteacher. In China.

I said absolutely not, but my sister is a courtroom attorney and had all her arguments queued. The final argument was to burst into horrific sobs when I paid no heed whatsoever to arguments one through whatever, and the rest of the conversation was just an unhappy blur. I was had, and I knew I was had. Here I am lying against my sister’s nested pillows watching her pirated sex DVDs on the school’s computer while she attends our dying green mother.

So, at ten past eight on Monday morning, here I am climbing three flights of concrete stairs amid a surging sea of white-over-blue uniforms and querulous gazes en route to Lillian’s first class of spring semester at Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence.

Life is so whatever.

At least I know how to fake it. I stroll into Room 403 with such nonchalance, tossing Lil’s clipboard onto the desk and turning to erase the board with such aplomb, even I believe I’m a teacher. Behind me, the classroom is a riot of hoots, shoves, pseudo-laughs, and slammed textbooks, altogether equal in volume to any American public school that comes to mind.

No problem, I tell myself, writing my name on the board in a patient wavering line. I spent three hours online last night learning how to manage a classroom. That’s what it’s called now. Teaching, you no longer even attempt. It comes down to three things, they say. Talk loud, show no fear, and continue with the lesson no matter what.

I can do that.

For about two and a half days.

As I await the late bell, I survey Room 403, which is all windows left side and right. Fore and aft are nothing but old-fashioned green chalkboards. A few rags remain at this or that window where the curtains have rotted away. A few cheap plastic ventilation fans dangle miserably from the walls. It’s a somewhat chill February morning. Many of the windows don’t close. All the girls are heavily bundled, arms wrapped around themselves, shivering. The boys, fresh from pre-school basketball, are sleeveless and frisky. One boy torments the girls by throwing all the windows open, and they reward him with high wails. I watch as the nearest girl struggles to close the windows behind him. As soon as she takes her seat, the same boy throws them all open again.

This is going to be interesting.

The students’ wooden desks, sixty or more in number, are packed so tight that walking among them would require turning sideways. We won’t be doing that.

My desk, actually the common desk of all Room 403 teachers, is a disaster of broken chalk-bits, scraps of filthy rags, a few blunt, eraser-less pencils, and now Lillian’s clipboard and my bottle of Binihana purified water. I’m standing on a ten-inch wooden stage, beneath the framed blood-red flag of the People’s Republic of China, trying to look gun-boat authoritative.

“They’re mostly sweet kids,” Lillian has told me, “but not necessarily all that bright, okay? This is a vo-tech high school, remember. Just keep it simple and you’ll be fine.”

Mostly sweet, I’m thinking. Lillian has never had these particular students. We may have Wang the Ripper right here on row three.

As mentioned, this school is wholly funded by the government-owned telephone company, which finds itself in regular need of warm bodies with opposable thumbs and not too much upstairs. These kids are certifiably dumb, but they know the score. Their futures are already written, and it doesn’t make much of a read. They have fallen to the lowest rung of a ladder leading nowhere. Of course their attitudes are going to stink.

Finally, the bell rings for what seems a full minute. As soon as it ceases, I bellow, “Good morning, class.”

It doesn’t come out clath because yesterday a dentist with crooked teeth reattached my crown, I think with Krazy Glue. Dr. Xylophone’s office is in the dental wing of an enormous government hospital where Ursula and I stood in line at three consecutive windows before sitting on our hands for an hour. Finally we arrived at a tiny cubicle where Dr. Xylophone smiled broadly with jumbled teeth. During the entire procedure, an unidentified woman stood just behind his shoulder and stared into my mouth. Afterward, I asked Ursula who that woman was. “Next customer,” she said.

Now, with an awful extended groan of wooden chairs against careworn tile, all fifty-odd students rise to their feet. “G-o-o-o-m-o-r-r-r-y-y-y-t-e-a-c-h-u-u-u-h,” they reply in slow-motion then remain standing, awaiting my instruction.

“Sit,” I say, gesturing.

They sit.

Ah. Piece of cake.

Now I spend fifty minutes speaking with exaggerated volume and clarity, drawing maps and pictures on the chalkboard, miming and telling amusing stories with words of one syllable or less, students meanwhile staring perplexedly or else sleeping on their arms. Lil has said they all have had three to five years of English. I’m not sure they’ve had three to five years of Mandarin. Later on, I get the same impression of students in Rooms 406 and 301. It’s somewhat freeing, actually, as I can say anything I want. At one point, I find myself reciting the Gettysburg Address.

Finally, a bit dizzy from the exertion, I carry Lil’s clipboard back to the office she shares with the other four English teachers, all of them Chinese, and sprawl in her tiny chair.

Joe looks up from his computer screen, a cigarette going in the ashtray. “Julian, the students say you look very like your sister.”

I stare at Joe for a moment. “I’m pleased to hear that.”

Joe likes this reply. He goes back to his emails.

Head spinning, I fiddle with Lil’s papers for a few minutes, stealing occasional glances at the real teachers to see what they’re doing. Bobby is humming along with a DVD of the Peking Opera. Jeff is keying something into his computer. Trish’s chair is empty. Joe is stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray crowded with butts.

Lil has no Monday afternoon classes, which means I’ve basically survived day one. On reflection, it could have gone considerably worse. My best moment may have come during the morning’s third class, when I ran out of memorized speeches and extemporized insults. “Very well,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Let’s rumba.” I began to dance in a little circle, right hand on my belly, left held aloft, gyrating beneath the blood-red flag. Perhaps expectedly, the room exploded into astonished shrieks and howls. One of the boys leapt flatfooted onto his desk and began to gyrate, tossing his head so that his comb-over reached his shoulder. The girls mostly screamed and covered their mouths. Two other boys jumped onto their desks.

Those kids couldn’t rumba worth a damn.

“Julian,” teacher Bobby says now, switching off the Peking Opera, “it’s time for lunch. You can go with Trish and me to the school lunchroom. Very economical.”

“Also very chip,” says Trish, lifting her purse.

Seconds later, Joe is locking the English faculty office behind us and I’m trying to keep up with Bobby and Trish, who are all but sprinting across the palm-lined campus, seeking every possible advantage over the white-over-blue herd moving clumsily in the same direction, every nostril filled with scents of cooked meats and simmering sauces. Even I’m getting excited. Trish slows a step to say, “Julian, please, how is your mother?”

“Senile,” I reply, beginning to pant, “but she’ll probably die soon.”

“Ah,” says Trish appreciatively. “Is also alive your father, too?”

I tell her I’ve no idea who, where, or if.

Trish wags her head sincerely. “You are so lucky have the beautiful sister like Lillian, always take care of your mother and father. Also very tall and fat.”

And chip, I want to say, as the crowd slows to squeeze itself through the double doors of the lunchroom. The aromas are so palpable now you could weigh them on a postal scale. Ahead of us, students are grabbing trays, soup spoons, and chopsticks before hurrying toward whatever food station that beckons, there to turn sideways and reach past the others to grab this entree and that.

The rice station catches my attention. It is an enormous barrel with several enormous metal serving spoons stuck like shovels into snow. It’s very white of course. Don’t bring up brown rice with the Chinese. They look at you as though you’re tragically ill-informed and not a little rude. Rice grows fluffy and white, just as you see it on the plate, and everyone knows it. For a moment I watch the boys heap mountains of the white, semi-congealed goo onto their melamine platters, piling up far more rice than I’d ever imagined a single person could eat at a sitting. A glance at the tables shows boys raking rice into their mouths with both hands, a spoon in one and chopsticks in the other, their faces lowered to plate level. I’ve seen this same thing on the street, where grunt laborers unable to afford anything more substantial sit along the sidewalk at lunchtime forcing down billowing clouds of the stuff.

I decide to pass on the rice. I also give the soup station a wide berth, though both Bobby and Trish are as happy as lottery winners to come away with brimming bowls of the stuff. I’m sorry. Soup is a woman’s idea of something to eat. Watered-down food. Oh give me some. I also pass on the slippery plastic chopsticks standing upright in a pail, preferring the wooden pair in my pants pocket. I end up with a plate of something resembling Chinese cabbage, a pasta dish with a beefy red sauce, and the main course which I think is a pork and spinach casserole. With cheese. And mayonnaise.

“You no get the soup?” says Trish, alarmed, as I join her and Bobby at the table.

“I no want the soup,” I reply.

“No?” asks Bobby, equally surprised. “In China, we say soup is wonderful for the health. I will get you some.”

“I don’t want any,” I say as Bobby hurries away.

“How was your first day of teach the Chinese students?” Trish asks with a bright smile.

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” I tell her, removing the plates from my tray. “Tell me something. Do any of these kids know a single English word?”

“I don’t know,” Trish says happily, blowing across her soup spoon.

I look around. This lunchroom seems more or less identical to its American counterpart, minus the circulating armed security guards and drug-sniffing canines. I notice a refrigerator near the milk station—the Chinese are religious about milk consumption, though most of them are lactose-intolerant—whose glass door reveals ranks and files of chilled longneck Kingway beers.

That’s different.

Bobby returns with my soup. “Here you are, Julian. I also brought for you a spoon.”

“You really shouldn’t have.”

The spinach turns out to be some kind of seaweed, but the ground beef could actually be ground beef, however fortified with equal parts powdered duck’s egg and unfortunate neighborhood dog.

I learn from Bobby that he was a farmer before becoming an English teacher. “I was the first person in my family to have a real education. Really I was extremely lucky. Most farmers never have a chance to change their life.”

Trish gushes, “Bobby is very special teacher. Always have the highest—” She confers with her colleague for a moment. They decide on the word evaluations. She continues, “I think that Bobby can be very good government official.”

Bobby laughs modestly. “I’m not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, so there’s no possibility of that. I don’t care. I have a good career teaching in the school, and soon I will retire.”

According to Lil, most Chinese schoolteachers are in it for the little incentives doled out regularly by headmasters. Corruption, I think it’s called. At the better Chinese schools—this is not one of them—before grades go out, teachers are inundated with fat red envelopes full of cash from parents. Tucked inside are gushy thank-you notes carefully spelling out the name of the little tyke in question. Not that the American Teacher is entitled to any such perks; still, one can only intuit that there could be the occasional little cutie just really in need of an A. Though how one might know she is both female and a cutie is a question unto itself, given the identical parachutes the students wear, and the fact that the girls employ not the least trace of make-up. Theoretically, the short ones are the boys. The shorter ones, the girls.

Bobby and Trish top off their meal with fresh apples, Bobby using a folding knife from his pocket to carefully remove their skins. Afterward we place our trays on a wet conveyor belt and stroll back toward the English faculty office, for which Bobby possesses a personal key. I take a seat at Lil’s desk and watch Trish and Bobby pull folding cots from behind their desks and pop them open. Within five minutes, each is snoring. I take a look at my watch. Quarter of one.

Miller time.

As I tiptoe away from the English faculty office, I encounter Joe walking the other way, keys in hand.

“Julian,” he says blandly, “tonight there is a dinner in your honor. I will call your room at six o’clock.”

“Uh, actually, I always take a nap at six o’clock.”

“I will wake you up,” he says pertly.

“How… perfect.”

Joe likes this reply.

I return to Lillian’s apartment with a massive frontal headache and a whole new appreciation for solitude.

She has till Wednesday.