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.