Today in class, everyone was sitting down at waiting so I asked them to come up to the chairs at the front (I have about six free-standing chairs which I put facing the first row of bolted-down desks), which is what we always do to start discussion. I got blank stares. I was fed up, so I just went and sat down and started reading. A few minutes later, I took roll and handed out homework, then went to play games on the computer. After another five minutes, a few students came up to the front chairs. Eventually they were all seated for discussion, so I came over and asked why they were sitting like that.

"We should do what the rule is."

*sigh*

My point was that class is started by the students, not the teacher or the bell. That they should take charge of their own learning, not wait to be told facts that they won't remember or believe anyway. What point did I get across? Apparently, that I'm a jerk who should be obeyed so I don't get them into trouble.

I hate my teaching.

I believe I've found the source of all the mosquitoes in my apartment every night. I think it's the huge window in the hallway with a dubiously fitted screen of suspect integrity, which looks out on a swamp.

My tolerance for spiders is predicated on their ecological services, particularly the consumption of other insects. The spiders in my apartment are conspicuous failures at their vocation.

I read Coming Home Crazy, a book by Minnesotan Bill Holm, who went to Xi'an in 1987 to teach for a year. He's a much better writer than I, and I recommend the book. But it bugged me a lot while I was reading it. I'm very jealous, not of his experiences but of his ability to have them. He was very outgoing, had many friends, traveled a lot, had many amazing experiences, performed a lot of music, taught eager and enthusiastic students who asked many engaging and hilarious questions, and came back a changed person.

This is not my experience, and not my personality. I always notice the problems first; after a day of travel I want to go home, when people shout "hel-lo" I avoid making eye contact, and the food just flat out scares me.

The new American teachers (the Fishers) made me realize just how cynical I was, and how glass-not-merely-half-empty-but-actually- knocked-over-and-smashed I am. I see guys working on bricks and think, "Those poor sods. And that dumbass working the jackhammer without any ear protection - can he hear anything at all anymore?" They look and see, "Those guys are amazing. They work all day long; they're so strong."

So I suppose that if I rethought my experiences I could probably find a lot of amazing things in them. Then I could do the things Bill Holm did, have a wonderful, life-affirming time, and be changed forever. Part of the problem, though, is that I'm in a different China. In just 15 years, people's live have changed dramatically. Life isn't easy, but it doesn't suck nearly as hard for most people. And as we've learned in America, the easier life is the uglier people can get. So instead af students desperate for knowledge, I have students who are pissed they didn't get into a better school, know they may never leave the country, have unpleasant job prospects, live in a society more ruthlessly materialistic and more morally bankrupt than the United States, who in short don't want to be here. So, while I'm happy to live in an apartment that's essentially as comfortable as I had in the US, I'm jealous of Bill's students. And I'm jealous of the kind of person he is, the one who likes people, likes weird food - is extroverted.

But a little bit of me wants to believe that he was miserable a lot and then, when he was writing it all up, he sugar-coated his memory and tacked on a few happy homilies.

The standard response to any criticism of anything around here is, "China is a poor country." For example,

"Why is the classroom full of garbage every morning?"

"China is a poor country."

"And ...?"

"If we threw away the garbage the people who clean would not have a job."

"Well, you may be paying them but there's still a lot of garbage in here."

Actually, the cleaning situation got a lot better after I brought first a broom and later a mop and bucket to the class. The trash still accumulates all week, and on Monday mornings (when I have half of my classes) I can easily sweep up a few square feet of garbage from the front two rows, but the cleaners come Monday afternoon and Wednesday, having had only 36 hours of abuse, is relatively clean.

The part that upsets me isn't the mess, and it's not China-specific - plenty of people are disgusting, oblivious slobs in the US too. I feel a deep mental anguish at seeing obviously, blatantly non-optimized situations. All of the cases where two seconds of forethought would have made a huge difference. All the tragedies of the commons. The new teachers, stunned by the loud squealing of the rats in the stairwell the last few days, are trying to fix the problem for our half of the building. They've put notes in Chinese and English on all the doors, asking everybody to put their garbage out in the morning instead of at night. The point, the tragedy, the thing that upsets me, is that, because Mao and the Party have done so much damage to the social fabric, even these trivial steps are invisible to many people who have only in the last ten or twenty years stopped worrying about food, gained basic freedom of movement; who still have to tune out the 6:30 wakeup music and the propaganda painted on the walls.

China's poor, but in addition to the hundreds of millions of poor peasants and the hundreds of millions of poor migrant laborers, China is poor in psyche. In China the daily lies required for survival are too obvious to ignore. I want to go home, back to Seattle where if I don't watch TV and don't seek out all those liberal (pinko?) web sites, I won't have to see poor people, won't have pick my way past manual laborors as I go from my heated apartment to my computer-equipped classroom, where I can pretend that everything and everyone is okay.

At the end of an especially unhappy day, like today, I think it's a good idea to recap some silver linings.

Guilin is extremely dense. While this makes everything crowded, it also means, despite a population equal to the City of Seattle, nothing is more than three or four miles away, and a combination of walking, bussing, and taxis is quite adequate. Cars simply aren't needed. (Though you'll see plenty of Lexuses on the construction sites, when the big potatoes come to collect their kickbacks - I mean, oversee the work.)

Few buildings have elevators. This is tremendously cool, as it means everybody takes the stairs and you never have to watch some torpid buffoon summon an elevator to get to the second floor.

Because of the national habit to take a 2 1/2 hour lunch break, including nap, 2:30 can actually be a productive time because nobody is suffering from food coma.

The weather continues to seesaw between 90 degrees (and 100% humidity) and 55 degrees, with the occasional downpour and thunderstorm for variety. We passed through some sort of dew point on the way up, and for two days every smooth, hard, flat surface was covered with condensation. I came out of the classroom an hour after a rain shower and the tiled ground was soaking wet under the covered areas and dry where exposed to the sky. This was weird.

Yesterday after lunch, I went and climbed the little peak behind campus. The air was very clean, thanks to the rain, and visibility was probably ten miles or more, and the sky had neat gray clouds instead of being featureless and oppressive, and the view was fairly green.

I was hanging out in the Foreign Affairs Office when I ran afoul of Chinese tonal homophones again. Lu Dan was admiring her reflection in a glass cabinet door and I looked up the word for mirror in a handy dictionary and suggested that she needed one.

jing4 - falling tone - mirror. jing1 - level tone - sperm.

Everybody laughed, Lu Dan turned red, and it was a while before anybody would explain to me what I'd said.

Every day in China one encounters assaults on one's physical being. Combine massive overpopulation, dense cities, and an complete lack of segregation between cars, bicycles, people (trucks, motorized trikes, the occasional pig, etc) means that you are at risk of collision literally any time you walk outdoors.

Seattleites and visitors may recall the horn on the Bainbridge ferry. Just before departure the horn is ... detonated ... and everybody on the top deck flinches a good foot or more. Today I was making copies across the street in preparation for the teachers' class and a tour bus set off a horn of equal volume. In an attempt to eschew exaggeration, I have produced qualitative evidence to bolster my claims: the Chinese tour bus horn was as loud as the Seattle ocean ferry horn because I jumped the same amount: at least a foot.

Nobody else nearby even flinched.

I would love to see hearing loss statistics for China. There seems little regard for the concept that human bodies can be damaged by the environment. The exact opposite of Japan, I guess.

At the dining hall tonight the televisions were especially loud. I cornered a student and did my best to avoid leading questions:

"Can you hear the television okay?" "Yes." "Do you think it is loud?" "No, it is not loud."

The television was loud enough that, from ten tables away, normal conversation was impaired.

I think they ought to put signs up at the border: "Welcome to China. Suffer."

In China, there are a fairly strict set of rules regarding school nomenclature. A University offers a full selection of courses, has undergone assorted certification, etc. An Institute is smaller and usually less prestigious, though some are famous. There's another grade below, but I forget the name.

GUET is an Institute. But several years ago, GUET decided to promote itself to University - in English. The web address still has the letter I, as does some old stationary, but now everything in has a U.

Hold up both hands in front of your body, arrange your fingers the shape of a "W," and repeat after me, "what ev-er." (Fourth tone, then third tone.)