Luck

If you know me, you probably know that Christmas Eve is one of my favorite days of the year.  No, there's no orgy of wrapping paper and gifts, no roast beast -- and no, I'm not even Christian.  But I love tradition and I love family and I love anticipation, and on Christmas Eve I get all three:  decorating the tree, finishing the advent calendar that my grandfather carved decades ago (a small bronze cast of Notre Dame rotates in and out of ultimate spot), helping my mother cook, watching the cats try to outsmart the Christmas tree, and most of all, listening to the King's College Choir's set of Lessons and Carols.

If my family feels holy about anything, it is architecture and music.

Afterschool

Today is the first time in two years that I've had an end-of-marking-period "afterschool," in which I stay after school (duh doi) with kids so that they can do work.  Traditionally during these things, I tell the kids I can stay until the custodians set the alarm.  In Federal Way, that was 10 p.m., though I never had a kid stay that late; I think the latest was around 8:30.  Here, the alarm is set at 6 p.m., so I'm staying two days in a row to make up for it: today and tomorrow.

Because afterschool always comes near the end of the marking period, it coincides with me being ridiculously stressed out.  I dread it a little bit the day before it happens.  After all, here I am, trying to figure out kids' grades, drowning in paperwork, unsure what I'm teaching the next day, and totally unable to get work done while kids are actually in the room, so why am I taking valuable time away from my life?  Don't I need this time for, you know, EVERYTHING?

(And it's not like I can use afterschool for doing any of this stuff.  "Why don't you just grade while we're in here?" a girl once asked, to which I responded, "Do you actually want me to grade your work when I'm this distracted?  Because I don't think you do.")

Kids These Days

"So," says the bartender/airport check-in lady/person waiting in line with you, as soon as they find out that you're a high school teacher: "What are they like?  Kids these days?"

They always give an ironic little smirk when they're saying it -- as if to proclaim their awareness of the innate ridiculousness of the phrase, to insist that they're not like the fuddy-duddies who they imagine are the ones usually asking this question.

Still, it's barely a question.  They already know their answer.

What I Wouldn't Write

I.  Needles
 
A few months before I moved to Beijing, my parents -- who know me well -- bought me six or seven books on China.  I eventually read my way through 4.12 of them (damn you, Oracle Bones!), but the one that immediately caught my attention was China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua.  I read through it in about six hours, and was riveted by Yu's account of his country: by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, these essays/memoirs/ruminations on his own personal narrative and a wider Chinese history caught at me.

In one of the essays ("Reading"), Yu recounts how, as a child of the Cultural Revolution, he became a voracious reader (the story involves him asking random strangers on the street for books, hoarding tattered copies of French classics with missing identifying marks (like titles or authors), and his older brother punching a librarian in the face).  In another, he describes the first time he saw an execution.

In a way, the most poignant of his stories comes from the introduction.  Here, he tells us that when he was eighteen, his job was to go to factories and inoculate workers.  His team would reuse the same needles again and again.  One day, they inoculated children, and the children cried when the needles came out.  When he examined the needles, he saw that they had become so barbed that they ripped out little pieces of skin when he withdrew them.  He had never noticed before, because the workers had never complained.

In Transition

In the eleventh grade year of Language & Literature at my Beijing school, we read an essay by David Sedaris entitled "Chicken Toenails, Anyone?"  In this essay, Sedaris (fresh off a trip to Japan) goes to China and has some culture shock.  Because he's Sedaris, he reacts to his culture shock with brutally funny observations; disappointingly, he uncharacteristically spends too little time reflecting on what his reactions to China might mean about him.  The usual Sedaris self-deprecation is mostly absent, and he goes for low-hanging fruit: dirt, organ meat, and China's ever-present bodily fluids.  He takes delight in comparing China's chaos to what he observes as Japan's careful aestheticism.  As my students said, it's not that what he says about China isn't true, it's just that it isn't complete.  

Last Days

For those who don't know, these past few days have been my last in Beijing.  I'll be moving back to New York City after a seven-year hiatus, which fills me with joy and trepidation and excitement and basically All The Feelings, which will have to wait for another blog post because this post is about Beijing.

I just reread my post from my first days here, and it's a little odd (but completely satisfying) how these last days have been their echo.  It is mildly-to-grossly polluted, just as it was when I arrived.  I went to Tiananmen Square on the way to the Forbidden City yesterday, and still managed to be bewildered by the place: surely I'd never gotten that close to the portrait of Mao before?  Was the flagpole always that far away?  (Answer:  you came into the square from a different subway exit, Crawford, ya ding dong.)

Divestment

Last night, I stayed in the Holiday Inn down the street from my apartment. Mine was the kind of hotel room that I dreamed of when I was little:  a colorful little pod, it seemed to have sprung out of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon or some half-remembered Babar title.  The shower wall curved in wavy fish glass against the neat white queen bed, a minimal-but-comfy green sofa was tucked into the corner by the window, and a bright blue space-conserving Murphy desk completed the picture.  The whole effect was simple, clean, warm, and cozy: a nest.

I, Procrastinator

Just to warn you, this essay is a little bit off the norm.  I'm not talking about travel or place or my family or, um, anything respectable.  Instead, I'm going to talk about a subject that makes me squirm with shame.  I'm going to talk about procrastination -- and specifically, teachers who procrastinate -- and specifically, me.

Honestly, I wasn't even going to post this.  I wrote the bones out as a sort of therapy-kickstarter-thing, and to put it on the internet seemed self-indulgent.  But my friend Shari (a magical creature who is good at words and feelings and making me feel like a loved human being) seemed to think would be okay, so here it is.

(Does recognizing something as self-indulgent and doing it anyway make it less self-indulgent, or more?)

A Lack

A little more than a year ago, I posted about the South Korean ferry sinking.  That tragedy immobilized me.  I didn't cry, but I raged; I walked around with a sick, rotten feeling sunk deep in my stomach.  I'd never lost a student before, and I couldn't fathom losing an entire junior class.

Now there's an empty chair in my classroom.

We all know why it's empty.  The sixteen of us -- fifteen of us -- have been in this classroom since August of 2013, when we first came together for 11th Grade Language & Literature.  I've loved this class dearly for the last year and a half, despite the bizarre gender ratio:  thirteen boys and three girls.

Two girls. 

The Living and the Dead

With the usual apologizes to Dodie Smith:  I write this sitting next to a saltwater pool in Cambodia.  A waterfall patters into it from a balcony above.  Surrounding the pool are a mixture of trees:  palms, bougainvillea, bamboo.  Some trees I can't identify, but they are by turns gnarled and youthful in appearance, with dusty dark and spiderweb-like fresh green leaves.  Two large earthenware pots are full of water and lotus flowers.  Enclosing the pool (beyond the trees) are the white-and-wooden walls of the boutique hotel we are staying in; with their orange roof tiles and dark wooden balconies, these buildings manage to exude an aura both cozy and sleek.  Black and orangey-cream tiles line the floor of the bar to my left in a checkerboard pattern.  A red Chinese lantern hangs from one of the taller trees, and in the pool, a medium-sized rubber yellow deer floats exhaustedly, happily, incongruously, on its side.

Today, I turned down what will probably be my only chance to see Angkor Wat.  On what will probably be my last day ever in Siem Reap (my aunt and I take the boat to Phnom Penh tomorrow), I spent most of the day inside, asleep.

Let me explain.