The upside of walking around with a cane all of today: I kind of felt like Watson from the BBC Sherlock series. Limping with attitude.

Unexpected Encounters with Sexism

 Yesterday afternoon I ended up twisting my ankle pretty badly while playing basketball. The perks of this were that I got to sit in bed, browsing the internet all day today without feeling guilty about it. The bad news is that I have to make up the three classes I missed today (no substitute teachers in China) and that if I have to hear one more person connect my injury with my gender, I swear to Jesus, Mary and Joseph that I will lose it.

I've been living in China for over three months now and have visited here many times before, but this is the first time that I've encountered sexism so blatantly. Of course I knew that it existed in China. Here at my college, my English majors are made up almost completely of women, and the engineering and math majors are largely male. One of my male friends was taking part in an English speech tournament and told me without shame that “boys usually get special treatment because there are less of them.” My own students will casually perpetuate sexist ideas. In many of our class discussions, I have come to understand that it is the male who is expected to buy the house, hold down a job, buy a car, and support the family. The women, on the other hand, usually gets a few years in the workforce after college before settling down and having a child by (at the latest) 30 years old. This is, of course, a terrible situation for both sexes—men are under huge pressure to be the providers for the family, and women have almost no choice but to get married and become a stay at home mom.

Anyhow, I'm getting sidetracked. I am plenty aware that sexism exists in China, but this is the first time that it has been applied directly to me. I have been spoiled in so many ways as a visitor here, and my Western label serves as a pass for many Chinese cultural norms. In China, women tend not to drink, go out to bars, or work out a lot. They also don't wear shirts that reveal their collarbones or shoulders. As a foreigner, I get to bypass all that and am for the most part free to stick to my familiar Western etiquette. Since twisting my ankle, however, I have received countless seemingly harmless comments. Let me list a few:

“Girls need to be more careful when they play basketball.”

“You probably shouldn't have been playing with boys, they are more rough.”

“Be more careful, girls are weaker than boys.”

“You need to go to the gym more to strengthen your legs so you won't get hurt.”

The last comment in particular irked me because since coming to China, I have been working out almost every day (more than most of the male teachers or students I know), and have been very proud of how strong and fit I've become.

But apparently, if I'm a girl, I must only be going to the gym to watch the strong, muscly men at work.

China is a fascinating, captivating place, but sometimes I forget that it is still, in many ways, a developing country. Sexism can seem like a relatively harmless thing when it's just an idea, but suddenly when it affects you personally, it becomes very real, and incredibly infuriating.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

I made a pillow fort today. That is all.

We Can Dance if We Want to

So I know I promised this post a LONG time ago (along with the Chongqing video, which is still in the works), but it's finally here!!

At long last, you get to see our National Day Performance, in which the foreign teachers dance a self-choreographed dance in front of thousands of people. I have done theater in the past, but this was by far the biggest audience I've ever been in front of, and it was both terrifying and tons of fun.

Without further ado, here is the video and you can see for yourself just how ridiculous the whole thing was. Unfortunately, the video cuts off the end of our dance, which is actually the most impressive part, but you'll just have to use your imagination for that. We were just one act among many, many others--though the others were much more professional. Regardless, we had a ton of fun with it, and the students loved it.

Silent Reading

30 eyes glued to their paper,
their lips crumpling,
tongues coiling with
silent words.
The air is filled with the faint hiss
of breathy syllables,
all weaving together
into a blanket of white noise.

Visitor!

This past week, I've had a visitor come and visit me in Pengshan: my good friend Nicole! She and I took many Chinese classes together in college, and this month she was traveling around China doing research on animal rights for a research paper in her final year of college. When I found out that she was coming by Chengdu, I insisted that she had to stay with me while she was here! Over the last week, we've had a blast. On Sunday, I took her into Chengdu and we visited a couple places that I have been meaning to go, but haven't gotten around to seeing yet: the local antique market and the Chengdu Zoo.

We went to the antique market first, and it was delightful! It consisted of a ton of stalls full of old Chinese artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, and other knickknacks.

One stall even had an old phonograph!

I could have spent hours there sorting through everything, but we had other things planned, so after an hour we headed off to the Chengdu Zoo.

Actually, we had originally planned to go see the Panda Research Base, which Chengdu is so famous for. However, google maps led us astray and instead of taking us to the breeding grounds for adorable pandas, it took us to a very industrial part of Chengdu, with no pandas to be found. Luckily, when we consulted the map, we discovered that we weren't actually far from the zoo, so we decided to catch a bus there instead.

Zoos have always been a conflicting experience for me. On the one hand, I love animals, and it's a treat so see so many exotic, beautiful animals in one place. But on the other hand, it's always slightly depressing to see them pent up in cages. And yes, I know there are a lot of justifications for zoos and that it's not like they can just release zoo animals into the wild, but that doesn't change the fact that zoos always make me a little uncomfortable.

The Chengdu Zoo, however, was even more depressing than usual. Their selection of animals was impressive and varied. I got to see some animals that I had never seen before in any American zoo:

This was my first time seeing a Golden Monkey. They're native to Sichuan!

The squirrel monkeys were adorable.

A beautiful White Tiger.

Some baby deer.

A hippo at feeding time. Look at that jaw!

But, while the animals themselves were gorgeous, their habitats left a lot to be desired. With the exceptions of the pandas and some of the monkeys, most of the exhibits were far too small for the animals containing them. The tigers, in particular, were almost all on edge, pacing the lengths of their enclosures. Additionally, most of the cages were open to the sky, which meant that visitors were throwing them bits of food to tempt them closer to the windows. At nearly every cage, the animals were right up near the edge, begging for food. Lastly, some of the animals' sleeping areas had large windows in them, which not only meant that they did not have somewhere to retreat to when they became agitated, but also that people were constantly banging on the glass, trying to get the animals to wake up and do something more interesting!

The lack of "zoo etiquette" was astounding. Simple things that are pretty ingrained in our culture (don't feed the animals! don't bang on the glass!) were simply ignored, and it made me realize how much I've taken that for granted. I can't say that going to the zoo was a pleasant experience, but it certainly made me think. What else is common in our society that is an anomaly elsewhere? What else have I taken for granted?

Halloween in Chengdu

For anyone who doesn't know, my favorite holiday out of all of the holidays (yes, including Christmas), is Halloween. I'm not totally sure what makes it my favorite; it's a combination of many different things. I love the spooky atmosphere, the unashamed delight in macabre subjects. I love scary movies and stories. I love carving jack-o-lanterns, feeling the squishy mixture of goo and seeds slip between my fingers as I scoop it out of the center. I love the crisp autumn weather and the smell of dead leaves and chimney smoke. I love the costumes, the ghouls and the ghosts, the witches and monsters. But most of all I love the childish nostalgia that Halloween brings. On All Hallow's Eve, everyone is a child again. We all feast on candy and play pranks and run underneath the pumpkin orange moon because we can, because we're alive, and tonight corpses and death are only a joke that we can laugh at and dance away.

And I was going to be damned if being in China meant missing out on Halloween, which is why, on Friday after school let out, all of us Americans banded together in our quest for Halloween festivities and made the hour long trek to Chengdu.

We spent the afternoon stopping by The Bookworm, our favorite coffee shop and bookstore, and then headed over to People's Park. It was my first time seeing the park, and it did not disappoint. Unlike western parks, it did not have many open places, but was instead a network of trails that wound around trees and streams and hills.

A monument at the edge of the park.

Vendors sold fruits and nuts along the street outside.

Sunset at Tianfu Square.

After poking around Chengdu, it was time to head back to our hostel and get ready for a night out. Brenna and I were actually the only ones that put any effort into our costumes. I went as a broken China doll, and Brenna made a lovely zombie.

Our taxi driver got quite the scare.

After hanging out at the hostel for a little while, we met up with some of our Chinese friends at a bar downtown. We spent a couple hours just hanging out an chatting.

Devin and Wayne had beautiful singing voices

Around 12, we left the bar in favor of the nearby clubbing district, and danced into the night. In the end, it turned out that Halloween wasn't a very big holiday in China, and while I saw a few other people with costumes, we were definitely not the norm, and drew even more attention to ourselves than usual. Do I regret it? Not one bit. I got tons of complete strangers telling me that they loved my costume, and even more doing horrified double-takes as I walked by, which I treasured even more than the compliments. I might live in China, but there's no way I wasn't going to celebrate my favorite American holiday.

As a reward for the crazy night, we all slept in late the next day, and treated ourselves to brunch the next morning. It'd been ages since I had a western breakfast (and breakfast is by far my favorite meal), so it felt like sunshine and rainbows on my taste buds.

See that expression on Brenna's face? Pure bliss. PURE. BLISS.