2008-4-10, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

The Nervous School Teacher


The suited young man was visibly shaking in his nervous approach. He was clean shaven and wore the ovular wiry framed spectacles of the educated Chinese. I’d already finished my fried pancake breakfast (think chewy with garlic and hot sauce, not fluffy and Aunt Jemimah), and was sipping my instant coffee in this dirty-as-expected train station canteen. [as I write this，ten minutes out of Hohhot on the sleeper train to Yinchuan， an old lady just emptied her daughter‘s catheter into the trash can and pushed the trash can right back my way] After numerous firtive glances, Mike Lee, as he styled himself, worked up the confidence to come over and ask me the usual tired questions the answers to which, if it were not for pity on all the English learners out there, I would be tempted to have printed out onto a multilingual fact-sheet. Mike Lee’s English was worse than usual and his nervousness made me really uncomfortable, and this was by far the most intersting thing about the second least intersting person to approach me in Hohhot. When he, explaining he was also visiting Hohhot for the first time, asked if he could see some sites with me, I declined as politely as I could and ran away. A more graceful exit than the one I would perform a few hours later, surprsingly drunk and feeling very out of place in an illegal but not much hidden card room in a converted first floor apartment near Hohhot’s main mosque.

The lost Ghanian

Not a minute and 50 meters away from Mike Lee,

“Hello, do you speak English?”

No Chinese person has ever asked me if I speak English in English – it is assumed that the languge is inherited with my skin color. A very pasty color these days, wholly in contrast to the dark brown of the young African man approaching me.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Can you maybe help me? I arrived here yesterday after a 40-hour train journey from Guangzhou. I was expecting to get in contact with a friend of a friend who can offer me an English teaching job. Unfortunately, I continuously call and call， and it continues to say his phone is not working。”

“I’m sorry, I just got off the train, I’ve only been in town twenty minutes. I guess if you call the number I could listen to what it says?”

“You understand Chinese?”

“Sometimes,” I smile. He dials up the number, hands me his phone.

“Duibuqi, ni fada de dianhwa yi wufei…”

“It says his account is out of money.”

Contemplative pause.

“I don’t have anything but this phone number. Do you know anywhere I could find a teaching job here?”

It seemed at first very strange that he should imagine that I, some random gringo who got off a train and ate breakfast would have any such idea. But it occured to me not just that in his present position it could only hurt no to try, but that, in fact, I did have an idea. On the sleeper train from Beijing I met a student of the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University. A nice girl named Haiting who cannot for the life of her pronounce her future profession: a veterenarian. She said a friend of hers might have some time and be interested in showing me around town to practice his English, so I took her phone number.

I called Haiting and asked if this friend of hers could meet us, thinking it easiest to explain in person my lost Ghanian friend’s predicament. As we waited for her to contact this friend and, we wandered around the area of the train station．So far, Hohhot looked like any other medium-sized Chinese city, if perhaps more spread out. Dusty in a more natural, yellower sort of dustiness. I was looking for a China mobile store at which I could add money to my phone. The first three mobile stores all told me to go to down the block and turn left. Until I completed the circuit and met with success. As we walked in this big circle, I learned that he had orignally come to China with a business partner who was then deported – something to do with a Chinese girl gone sour. So this guy was now lookig for a teaching job – but why in Inner Mongolia he could hardly explain as well as I could.

Haiting called back and apologized that her friend was busy, so I explained the situation over the phone. She knew of a private English school and agreed to track down and text the contact information. Soon enough we got in contact with the school, who said they’d call him back. I left him waiting by the station, and will forever wonder what became of him.

The curious Shanghaiese


He beat even Mike Lee as the least interesting person to approach me. But I liked him better, as he didn’t try to speak more than a few words of English at me. Instead he followed me around the Dazhao Lamasary asking every detail about application procedures to American graduate programs, costs of living, and ranges of salaries for different levels of education in San Francisco. These are not the oldtiredquestions and I enjoyed hearing his perspective on my estimated answers as I admired the Tibetan art and the trilingual inscriptions in Mogolian, Chinese,and Sanskrit. This lamasery dates from the Silk Road days, when Tibetan Buddhism flourished in what was then the Barbarian capital of all of Mongolia, centuries away from becoming a civilized part of the Middle Kingdom.


The Mongolian MInotLF

I ran off not because Tana was hitting me up for money, and not really because she was lying to me, but because she was lying to me insultingly poorly. Tana is a 37 year-old Mongolian single (or perhaps not?) mother who works for Hohhot’s water utility and likes to spend her Friday afternoon drinking Baijiu with her coworkers and soon enough with young American boys from the next table over. She also, it must be said, had the face of a 27 year-old and a singing voice far more suited to the steppe than a public utility office.

Refreshingly, Tana and her two coworkers did not want to practice their English. As a group, all they wanted was to share in the, ahem, refreshing delight that is Baijiu with their new friend. Tana, however, it later became clear, also wanted thirty yuan to finance a bit of gambling. And for me to take her to America. And, it increasingly seemed, was going to want something else from me soon enough which, it must also be said, was also involved in the decision to run away. Question my masculinity if you must, but I was unwittinly force-fed Baijiu after finishing my lunch of Mongolian oat-noodles. After polishig off the rest of the current and the the next bottle, I could not refuse their invitation to come play Mahjong. I don’t know how to play Mahjong. The illegal but not much hidden Mahjong-room stuffed into a first floor apartment was terribly crowded. I was promptly kicked out for not knowing how to play and taking up space in which someone ele cold be losing their money. Tana followed me out and led me further into the somewhat delapidated apartment complex of grey dust-stained seven story blocks, cracked roads, and school kids in P.E. suits running around, screaming. Outside the next gambling operation Tana stopped and batted her eyelashes.

“If I lose money in poker, can you give me some more? Like, maybe 30 yuan?” while all the wile tryng to hold my hand, etc. I told her no, and she said let’s go anyway.

While the name of the game, pouke is a sinicizatin of Poker, the game they were playing in this second crowded smoke-filled apartment was not poker as I know it, but rather something very much resembling that gold-old drnking game “asshole”. From what I could quickly gather of the rules of the game, and the expressions of the other players’ faces, my good friend Tana was doing quite well, in fact. Until suddenly she looked at me, big Monglolian pleading eyes, and said “oh no! I’ve just lost! I need, um, thirty yuan. Okay? So you need to give me thirty yuan.”

“I don’t think you just lost.”

“Oh no! Really, I just lost. I owe the others thirty yuan, if you don’t pay I’m in trouble.” She smiled, and grabbed my hand, squeezed it suggestively.


I refused again, and she shook her head, stood up, and stepped into the next room. A minute later I was acrosss the river and eating beef dumplings beside Hohot’s main mosque, wondering at the grey areas between putting out and prostitution.

The irl who an’t say Gs
I wandered over to the Inner Mongolia Museum, only to find it very closed and myself with nothing to do for five hours until my ten o’clock train onwards. Wandering back in the direction of where I thought I’d seen a coffee shop, a diminutive girl dressed in the plain style of the Chinese college student appeared out of nowhere.


“Hello!”

Her tone was that of an old friend bumping into another on her way home. This startled and confused me until I was distracted by those oldtiredquestions. I think if I print that fact-sheet I’ll have to laminate it.

But, Suzy, as she styled herself, was not akwardly shy, spoke both good English and patient Mandarin and was, unlike most random people who cross the street to come speak English at me, pleasant to talk to as we continued down the street and past the where- what- and how-…-are-yous yawn. Suzy didn’t know where the coffee shop was – the average Chinese college student cannot afford the relative luxury prices of real coffee. This I understand. I found it anyway, and possibly more to my own surprise than to Suzy’s I asked her to join me for a cup.

As we sat and compared studying each other’s language, it became clear that she has a fairly limited but severe speech impediment. My limited training in phonetics allowed me to pretty easily understand the symptoms, but my total lack of training in speech pathology left me at a loss to explain it. Since I was still drunk, I perhaps did not consider that I might have just been blowing her a bubble only for it to be burst by the reality of the fact that not only are speech therapists in China few and far between, but like hell she has the money to pay for that. And if you don’t get at something like that until adulthood it can take years of hard work to retrain your mouth.


I’m not sure if giving her false hope makes me a bad person.

Suzy bought me some sweet, dried goat cheese that I didn’t like until the third time I tried it and walked me to the train station, another night on the train for me.