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| Proof! |
For the past few days, the smog has been gone from Beijing. Beijing is beautiful in the blue. The temperature is hovering in the high eighties. And school has begun.
My days are beginning to fall into a normal schoolish pattern. School stretches and swells outside of its normal boundaries in time, filling my non-school hours; after a two-day school week, it took me thirty-two cumulative hours of sleep over the weekend to recover enough for the current five-day week, and the last eight hours were full of troubled dreams.
So, business as usual for the first days of school. Fortunately, I still love teaching. I still love my students, whoever they are. I can now confirm to you that freshmen are the same the world over (this morning I passed one fourteen year-old putting another fourteen year-old in a headlock whilst singing the "song that never ends") and teenagers are wonderful in China just as they are in Federal Way.
In
order to obtain a residence permit here, you must go through a
medical checkup. Sounds simple enough, right? You go to a hospital and
they run a bunch of tests on you: TB, HIV, a chest x-ray, a brief
physical, etc. I dreaded it, but only for the usual I-hate-hospitals
reasons. I envisioned that I would be sitting in a typical exam room
wearing an too-small hospital gown as I waited for a doctor who would
come in and perform a physical and then send me off to a technician who
would draw my blood and run some tests on me. "It'll probably take a
few hours to get through all of us," I decided, "so I'll bring a book."
Nope.
When I landed in Beijing, the first thing I noticed is that you can taste the air. The runway area tasted strongly of exhaust. The gate area tasted of rubber cement. And as soon as I went down to the baggage claim, I could taste the smog: acrid, gritty, and yet somehow silky on my tongue. And it wasn't even a bad pollution day.
I did my usual bargaining with whatever-god-is-listening while I waited for my bags to arrive ("if my black bag survived the trip intact, I PROMISE I'll buy a new one for the next trip!"), and tried to eavesdrop on conversations around me. As usual in a foreign country, I couldn't. Unusually, though, I couldn't even recognize basic words; not a single Latin or Greek root stood out to me. I knew this was going to happen, obviously, but there's still a certain amount of terror that seizes hold of you when it becomes real for the first time and you see that you are functionally an infant in your new world.
