food for thought.

Twelve days and I'll be waving goodbye to Hohhot from the seat of a plane.

Struggling now to name all the things I will - and won't - miss about this bizarre city and the six months I've spent here.

School. Lesson plans. The blistering heat. The stinging dust. My six-legged housemates. The tendency for my water to be inexplicably switched off at nine o'clock at night when I'm hot and sweaty and tired and needing a shower. Well, no.

But the kids, yes. Their squeals of "Katie-mao!!" My neighbours. The street life. Chinese diet Pepsi. The smell of barbecued meat wafting into my apartment. The men who take their pet birds for walks in their cages every morning. The stares and guffaws and shouts of 'waigouren!?' when I make my daily chug around the park. Yes, yes, yes.

And oh, the food. More than anything, the food.

wo bu chi rou [I don't eat meat] was - and still is - the single most important group of words I've managed to string together in my otherwise limited Chinese vocabulary. True, I've been laughed out of many a restaurant by drumstick-chewing, marrow-sucking Mongolians, and there has been more than one occasion when my tofu been cunningly served with slithers of mutton.

But, when they want to, Hohhotians do vegetarian like nobody else. Especially when it's from a stained two-wheeled stall on the side of the road.

Street food, I've been told, is dirty food. Poor man's food. They don't clean things. They re-use the oil. It's not safe.

Maybe. But it's damn good.

Roadside liang cai [cold vegetables] isn't just a side-dish; it's an adventure in vegetarian gastronomy. Tofu sliced, tofu marinated, tofu shredded; seaweed in black, white and purple; eggplant, seven kinds of fungus, beans, bloated peanuts; frilly mushrooms, chilli potato, cucumber, carrot, noodles; shapeless crunchy stuff that I'm yet to identify.

The man who runs my favourite stall greets me like an old friend. He parks his battered motorbike-drawn business about twenty minutes' walk from my apartment; it's worth every step. Thirty-odd stainless dishes of every kind of vegetable and seaweed and soybean derivative I've seen. Many I haven't. Oil-soaked and laced with cumin. Divine.

While other customers take their pickings away in a bag, this guy gives the waigouren a bowl and a pair of chopsticks and lets her sit on his motorbike to eat.

A boon to his business, surely. All for five kuai [about a dollar].

And the adventure isn't just gastronomic.

Of course, I'd like to think that the owner of the foot-long black hair entwined in my seaweed had bathed recently. That they used a good shampoo. That, at least, their hands were clean.

I'd also like to believe that the fingernail-sized body I once found floating in the oil at the bottom of my styrofoam dish didn't have a face. That it was a seed, a strange kernel, a slither of tofu, perhaps.

Has it put me off?

No. I've been back. And I'll go back again.

Perhaps it's the same principle I've applied to many of my experiences over here. Be it teaching five-year-olds how to say "There are FIVE apples!", explaining adverbs to adults, showering in the dark or chowing down on unidentifiable fly-infested roadside cuisine.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

When I cross over the Chinese border in a month's time, it'll be with a steely determination that I can - and will - do whatever I want.

And guts of steel.

the wheat from the chaff.

Jerry, I fear, will always struggle with English. Consonants and dipthongs stick in his throat; words just don't make their way out of his mouth. He sits alone in class, quiet, fidgeting. Ten years old and an enigmatic loner.

I give out scraps of paper and ask the kids to draw a map of China. Most produce a lopsided kidney bean. I pass Jerry's desk and he's halfway through sketching the entire Asian continent; every contour and groove as geographically and politically accurate as if he'd traced it from an atlas. Regional place names in perfect Chinese pinyin.

Later, between my crap Chinese and his crap English, it transpires that he wants me to keep his masterpiece. I do.

Jessica lucked out in the looks department. Pug-nosed and pudgy with cauliflower earlobes and a voice ["Kay-TEEE-ah, Kay-TEE-ah. FINished-ah."] about as musical as potato peelings being sucked down a drainpipe, her saving grace is her brilliance. Her English, on good days, rivals my adult students.

When I head for the door at the end of class, it's with Jessica's stubby nine-year-old arms wrapped around my waist. And with "Kay-TEE-ah, goodbye, I miss you..." screeched at my departing back.

Wing-eared Jack, in pastel shorts are too small for his chunky buttocks, could be the son of Shrek. Smart, and smart-arsed, Jack has driven many a teacher [Chinese and foreign] to suicidal exasperation. He's locked me out of the room, scattered chairs and muttered insults I don't care to have translated.

Jack waves when he sees me now. He laughs at my jokes. He stands when I ask him to. I dunno what I did; I don't care to find out. I just know that Jack would rather be smacked over the head with a book than told to write fifty lines for homework.

Susan is fifteen. She looks [walks/talks/dresses] twenty-one. I've had to boot Ali in the groin more than once for ogling her. She's invariably bored; her mates are all out shopping or giggling over milkshakes with their first boyfriends.

I ask her if she enjoys class.

No, she says.

In the middle of a a board game last week, Susan snatches my marker. She writes, in perfect cursive, "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you."

"Katie, have a good trip," she says. Beatific smile.

Five months down, three weeks to go. And it turns out I actually like these brats.

That I'm going to miss them. That, months and years from now, I'll be wondering what they're doing, what they've become, whether they remember their weird yellow-haired foreign teacher who came from some unpronounceable place in the outback.

Today Mike is wearing a t-shirt that says COC-BOY.

I point at his head.

"Nose!"

I point at his nose.

Sloppy grin, lolling tongue.

"Mon...key."

Well. Some of these brats.

flogging the rocking horse

I'd put up with his foot-swinging. With his kicking his shoe across the floor, with his sliding off the chair.

I'd turned my back when he'd dropped his pencil case for the ninth time and thrown the flashcards at the door instead of handing them to me.

It's when I point to the colour black - after twenty-nine minutes of drilling and chanting and games and Find-Me-A - that I nearly lose it.

"Bla-nana!" he slobbers. Triumphant grin.

We hadn't even covered fruits in this lesson.

Mike was lucky that day. Had I another five minutes, I'd have spent them washing his blood off my hands. Instead, I calmly left the room and went to my next lesson.

A few months ago, Mike's stunning display of ignorance would have been the final blow. Sent me to the window ledge of a fifteen-story building. Or the bottle. Anything to redeem my apparent utter failure to elicit a simple "It's black."

Experience [read: apathy] has mollified me.

I've since learned that for every nine kids who pick up "It's a GREY elephant!" within minutes and bounce out of class with a book full of Happy Points, there's invariably a tenth who will stare vacantly.... blink slowly.... and, eventually, painfully, produce a goldfish-like 'o'.

Or, a blanana.

Some I can't blame. It's the weekend; the kids are at school because Mama and Baba have [besides fat wallets] dreams of little Johnny becoming CEO or a bank manager or the next Bill Gates. China's job market is fiercely competitive; extra tuition is sometimes just one of many desperate attempts to help their little ray of sunshine climb to the head of the food chain. Meanwhile, Little Johnny would rather be out roller-blading or squashing ants with his [less well-off] mates in the park.

Some kids, of course, are just plain thick.

Sunday, 6.25pm. Five minutes left of my twelfth - and last - class for the weekend. I've been teaching since 8am. I'm tired. The kids are tired. The room is stifling. We're learning about the weather.

It's Harry's turn to be in the Hot Seat. The word on the board behind him is 'sunny'. The rest of the class has to mime the word. He has to guess it. It's a game we've played many times.

Kids are pointing at the sun beating down outside. Kids are drawing circles in the air. Kids are fanning themselves and gesturing at an imaginary sky.

Harry blinks slowly.

"Winter."

Rules are forgotten. Kids are leaping out of their chairs. Frantic pointing, yelling, fanning, gesturing. Hot! It's so hot! Summer! Today! Outside!

Harry opens his mouth again.

"Snowing."

I think it was a hyperventilating Tom Three who eventually screamed it in his ear. I don't know. I just know that by the time the poor kid mumbled 'sunny', my last shred of sanity had left the room and was dropping ice cubes into a tumbler.

I care. I do. But sometimes I think the parents of kids like Mike and Harry would have been better off investing their two thousand kuai in the kid's retirement fund. Or a new car.

Or another school.

[five weeks to go]

the best things come in small packages.

A teacher on the cusp of her retirement once told me, you aren’t made a teacher, you’re born one.

Her words rang true the other night as I walked out of school feeling, well, crap. Exhausted. Had struggled through severe sleep deprivation [read: hangover] to lead brattish six-year-olds in a pointless game of duck-duck-goose before teaching a lacklustre ninety-minute adult class.

Left class guiltily wondering if I’d sent my students away more confused about English than they were an hour previously.

That voice in my head at work again, bludgeoning me with the steely blade of self-doubt.

Thinking, not for the first time, f*** it. I’m not meant for this.

Appetite lacking, but limply agree to meet Ali for dinner. Food, after all, fixes all.

First restaurant shoos us away, owner making vague gestures at closing. Bemoan craving for spicy tofu and a stiff drink to mark general crappiness of evening.

Rice it is, then. Onto our local, Mary’s.

Salvation. Ever-welcoming Muslim mother scrambles to her feet. Ushers us inside, clears our usual table. Round face, bound in headscarf, eagerly awaits to be ordered in our [my] bad Chinese.

Cue eleven-year-old daughter [and restaurant namesake]. Bright-eyed, pony-tailed Mary bursts from her bedroom [a wall away] still in school uniform. Urgent babble between mother and daughter; flurry of excited hand gestures transfers attention to us. In painstakingly slow Chinese, Mary explains to us ming tian wo yao kao shi …. tomorrow I have… something. The rest is lost in translation; even Ali’s four-lessons-a-week worth of private Chinese lessons fail us.

Then a shabby exercise book is fetched. Click. Kaoshi: exam. Mary wants to read to us.

Few things get between me and my dinner. But, that night, over chopstickfuls of rice and egg and green tea and a badly-animated school book, we hear our little waitress speak slow, careful English for the first time. We hear about Zip and Zoom and what Zoom thinks of Zip’s school canteen. We guide Mary’s timid pronunciation of “is”, “they” and “it’s”. We test her grammar, her spelling.

I drop noodles and tofu all over the table in between nods of encouragement and “Yes, good!”

Forty minutes later, I sign my name and a smiley face at the bottom of her Unit One vocabulary list; she has managed to get nearly every word right. We praise her; she returns a shy “thank you” before babbling away in enthusiastic Chinese. Draws us a map of how to get to her school from the restaurant that is her home.

We leave. Mary is smiling. I’m smiling. The table is a mess.

So, maybe I’m not a teacher. Maybe I’ll never get my adult students to say “thank you” instead of “sank you”. Maybe I’ll never get those spoilt over-privileged children to stop throwing my pens around the room or pinching me on the arse when I turn around.

Whatever. I feel good again.

a pound of flesh. plus some.

Hohhot just turned up the hot.

Two weeks into summer. Thirty-two degrees. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Just an endless blue sky, a searing sun and hairy sweaty bulging bellies at every turn.

I knew summer here was going to be hot. Google told me so. Wikipedia told me so. Lonely Planet, Aston, the ancient volume of Encyclopedia Britannica gathering dust on my parents' bookshelf. The whole damn world was warning me.

But back when I signed that contract in January, I figured - ah, I'll handle it.

The things we learn.

This is only the beginning. July, I'm told, can [and will] hit thirty-nine degrees.

[someone save me]

Am mildly comforted by the fact that I’m not the only one suffering. The local park is littered with panting bodies stretched out in hammocks or on the footpath. The more desperate are joining the dead fish and stinking rubbish in the lake [read: cesspool]. Students gasp their way through Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in our airless forty-degree classrooms. Young and old Hohhotians are sucking down iceblocks for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Chinese women especially fear the sun. God forbid their skin be a shade beyond milk-white; the slightest tan is as undesirable as finding a cat hair in one's noodles. Those who dare to venture into said disfiguring rays do so beneath a [suitably garish] umbrella, long sleeves, gloves and a hat. And, to be sure, a skin-bleaching sunblock.

Men - unfortunately exempt from Snow White rule - are zealously rolling their shirts up. Great hairy swollen paunches saunter alongside the taut midriffs of mohawked teenagers; shirtless middle-aged men sit glistening over warm beers in restaurant windows. No gut is forsaken.

But when that cursed ball of fire sinks below the horizon, all is forgiven.

It’s like flicking a switch. Summer evenings in Hohhot are riot of food, beer, street stalls, plastic tables and bad music blasting from bad speakers. Once-quiet streets are clogged with hawkers [bellowing handbags nail clippers Spongebob socks slingshots ] who jostle for space amongst street food stalls [frying noodles skewered meat seaweed tofu]. Daytime dust and pollution are choked by the stink of oil and grease and chilli and barbecued flesh of godknowswhat animal.

Life resumes. People eat, gossip, laugh, sing, cry, shout, drink, yarn, eat some more. People celebrate being able to breathe freely; being able to stand up without their arse sticking to the chair.

The crowds, the noise, the joy, the sensual pleasure of it could almost make one forget the stifling sickness of the day.

Then I wake in twisted sheets and too-thick air with sandpaper mouth and stinging eyes. Solid wall of heat burning through my limp curtains.

Frizzy hair. Swollen feet. Sweaty backside.

And my neighbour's glistening girth.

Twelve goddamn hours to salvation is just too goddamn long. Bugger this; I'm going home.

grass, dust and hand-picked lamb.

In a city with few drawcards [bar whimsical foreigners trying to make a buck by teaching English] Hohhot's proximity to the famous, guidebook-proofed Mongolian Grasslands is, quite possibly, its single saving grace.

And nobody lets you forget it.

Ah, the grasslands, they say. Very beautiful. Very green. Lots of green. Lots of trees. Mountains. Horses.

Not like Hohhot, they add. Hohhot; very dry. No green. You must go to grasslands.

Now, a hundred and forty kuai down, I can say I've seen the sodding grasslands. I've also experienced Chinese tourism at its "organised fun" best.

Eight am. Arrive at pickup point ten minutes late. Wait with bored-looking driver. Fellow tourists fail to show. We leave.

Ninety minutes later, scenery drifts from patchwork farmland and various mud-brick villages to open space. Wide open space. Acres of it, stretching over plains and hills and into the distance. Occasionally dotted with a sheep or goat.

And vague brushstrokes of green that could pass for blades of grass.

At this point, tour guide [bored 20-something girl in sneakers and sequinned Micky Mouse t-shirt] eventually swivels around in her seat to toss us the magic word: grasslands.

Right.

Arrive at what appears to be centre of Organised Fun. Van deposits us between tethered horses, motorbikes and rows upon rows of 'traditional' Mongolian yurts. Yurts turn out to be motel rooms [for the serious tourist], complete with key, starched linen and TV.

So it begins.

Turns out our deliciously cheap fee for the Exclusive Grasslands One Day Tour only covers half the fun: getting there. Dumped in the middle of the desert, we are now expected to either get on a gleaming quad bike [200 kuai per rider] or the back of a mangy horse [240-500 kuai per flea-bitten rump].

Or, kick around in the dust.

Deliberations. We choose the bikes. I get a battered two-wheeler and its beer-bellied, cowboy-hatted owner.

Now permitted to undertake our First Real Experience of Traditional Mongolian Life, we are driven to a lonely yurt made of white tarpaulin slapbang in the middle of... well, grasslands. Yurt is conveniently equipped with tables, chairs and sour-faced yurt-dweller-cum-waitress. We are fed traditional Mongolian fare of biscuits and milk sweets [from store-bought plastic packets] and weak tea [poured from thermos].

Back to Yurt City and lunch. Large dining hall peppered with listless Real Mongolians dressed in Real Traditional Costumes [over their jeans and Converse sneakers]. And snap-happy tourists. Tour pamphlet has promised meal of traditional "hand-picked lamb"; assume this to be the platter of grey gristle and bone delivered alongside dishes of vegetables [glistening with monosodium glutamate]. Dining experience is accompanied by soothing traditional music [played on Yamaha keyboard]. The vegetarian eats the celery.

Showtime. Costumed men gather in centre of circus ring for curious wrestling match in which objective seems to be none other than to pull one's opponent to the ground. Crowd cheers politely.

More costumed men. Horses. Men gallop on horses and attempt to pick up something [dunno what] from the ground. Crowd cheers politely.

Show over. Back to bus.

Not, however, end of Organised Fun.

Arrive back in [beloved] Hohhot. Sleepy tourists deposited at doors of ... factory.

March with other tourists past Live Examples of Authentic Workmanship: scores of downtrodden workers hunched over desks sewing/hammering/painting leather canteens, trinkets and wall hangings.

March on. Factory becomes showroom. Endless maze of cured leather canteens/trinkets/wall hangings/handbags interspersed with jade bracelets, carved knives, stuffed animals, rugs, sheepskin slippers.

Piles of packaged dried beef. Packaged dried milk. Packaged dried lizard.

Some twenty minutes later, waiguorens exit factory. Empty-handed. Find van. Wait.

And wait.

Last of fellow tourists emerge a full hour later, happily shopped out and happily laden with bags of dead animal products.

Well. The Grasslands.

Tick.

what the guidebook forgot.

June.

Doesn't seem quite real. The first three months have flown [ dragged?] by. So long ago it seems that I got off that plane and breathed in China's [minus-five degrees Celsius] air for the first time.

Have I settled in?

Culture shock still bites. It's the little things that still make me gape. Little things that jolt me out of my complacency; remind me I'm still here, remind me how un-Chinese I am.

That make me realise how, in many ways, China and I are still holding one another at arm's length.

And how, in many ways, China and I are still utterly fascinated with one another.

• the spitting. Chinese can spit. I wake every morning to my neighbour's particularly gutteral, hacking, phlegm-filled expulsion. I dodge parcels of it on the street every day. It's an art form; one I am yet to master.
  
  
• dignity [lack thereof]. Women's toilets lack locks; sometimes they lack a door. Children are not exempt; in lieu of nappies, babies and toddlers wear crotchless pants and simply squat - or are held by parent making 'whisss whisss whisss sounds - wherever nature calls. Street corners and restaurant steps know no mercy.
  
  
• privacy [lack thereof]. Whole families sleep, eat, watch TV, cook, wash, spit and fight within fifteen square feet of one another. A family of indeterminable size [up to twelve people at any one time] live on the bottom floor of my apartment building in a room the size of railway carriage. Most night I see them [through open door] crammed around the two double beds, bowlfuls of noodles/meat/soup/bread in hands, TV blaring, three mangy dogs wandering amongst it all.
  
  
• advertising. Cabbage, dates and apricots are something to yell about. Or, to tape oneself yelling about and play [on loop] from a tinny ghetto blaster tied to the back of a battered donkey-drawn cart.
  
  
• etiquette. Consumption of one's noodles should be heard by one's grandmother in Shanghai.
  
  
• fashion. Anything goes. Fuschia-pink spandex, green denim, floral print, sequins, bows, ribbons, feathers, giant silver buckles. Together.
  
  
• road safety. Mothers with child balanced on the back of a scooter [the latter using both hands to eat an ice cream] will drive, utterly blase, in front of a bus.
  
  
• comedy. A waigouren returning a "hello!" is the funniest thing most Chinese have ever heard.
  
  
• children. Those between the ages of four and eight embody the proverbial Duracell bunny. Minus the OFF switch.
  
  
• tradesmen. Usually lacking in tools/skills/English. But get the job done
  
  
• street food. Oh, joy. At three in the morning, nothing is more satisfying, more alcohol-absorbing, more lip-smackingly divine than a three-yuan, piping-hot egg pancake fried on a street stall and eaten from a plastic bag.
  
  
• road safety #2. At three in the morning, taxi drivers are sometimes more intoxicated than their passengers.
  
  

China, I do love you.

But, bloody hell, you're hard work sometimes.