It
took me seven hours to get to Beixin from Wuxi on October 1st.
It would normally take three hours. I first took the bus from Wuxi
to Taixing and then caught a public bus to Beixin.
I
felt the weaving and swerving of a coach bus whose driver seemed to
be F1ing it on his way to Taixing.
I
stood in a crowd at the Wuxi bus station for a hour because the bus
to Taixing was late. Expecting the bus to be on time, I became
stuck in the rush toward the bus entrance gate, when the bus's
number was posted on the board above the gate, and then I wasn't
able to go back when I realized the bus – it being October 1 –
was delayed. So, I had to stand in place, a compact place with tens
of others, for an hour not knowing when the bus would leave.
I
had to stand for a hour on the bus that I took from the Taixing bus
station to Beixin where my in-laws live. I didn't realize that the
bus was a city transit bus, not a coach, and didn't bother to join
the initial rush to board the bus.
I
felt boredom of the countryside. Nothing to do but stay in a room
and hide from the crowds and the noise and the filth.
I
feel utter disgust when walking down the street on which my in-laws
compound was located, and so I went back to inside their compound to
hide.
At
my local Pizza Hut, I read the menu and couldn't find a listing for
pepperoni pizza. I peevishly gave the staff and the manager the
what-for. The menu had changed they told me, but they did make a
pepperoni pizza for me. To place the order in their computer
system, they had to enter it as an order for a deluxe pizza with all
the toppings and then hold about ten toppings except the pepperoni
I
walked through the Hui Shan Wanda Mall observing the locals be
consumers while I listened to a podcast speculating about what was
happening in Hong Kong. Mention was made of the Tienanmen incident
and the persecution of the Falun Gong.
I
had a good meal at the Grandma's Restaurant in the Sunning Plaza.
The shrimp cooked with garlic as well as the garlic fried potatoes
were to die for!
I
took Tony to the grocery store in the basement of Sunning Plaza to
show him the toys on display there. As far as I know, the grocery
store is the only one that still sells Tomica toy cars and Plarail
train sets in Wuxi. I also showed him a Ultraman figurine in a
display case that was in a Japanese package. He looked at it and
told me that it was an Ultraman Uglu. I then saw that it said so on
the package. However, I couldn't tell if Tony could read the
package or his knowledge of Ultraman characters and figures was that
extensive. I mentioned this to Jenny and she said she was wondering
too about how Tony could have known.
Tony
& I are a sight for other passengers when taking the Wuxi Metro.
I didn't notice this as much when we were riding the bus, but
because the train seats face each other, I notice lots and lots of
stares. I can even look down a couple cars from where we are
sitting and see people staring at us from that far away.
In
the second bedroom of Casa Kaulins, which had been a study, Jenny &
I put in a bed for Tony. (No longer would he sleep with us, was the
hope.) The day before we were to do this, we had to do some
cleaning and to move some stuff about. I saw that we either had too
much stuff or too little space in the second bedroom, and so I
decided that some things had to be thrown out. One thing we threw
out was a metal stand for our flat screen television (that we bought
six years ago). Since the television was on a wall and wasn't ever
going to be moved, I convinced Jenny that we should trash the stand.
So, I took it out and left it by a nearby trash bin. Ten minutes
later, I came back to the bin with more trash from the second
bedroom, and I saw that the stand had already been taken by
somebody. A little later, I found a CD player which I showed to
Jenny and that she told me to trash. The player wasn't working as
far as I could remember, and anyway, was rendered obsolete by all
our newest electronic gadgets. I took that player out and stuffed
it into the trash bin with the bags of normal refuse. Returning
again ten minutes later with more trash, I saw that someone had
taken the player. As I then told Jenny, some stuff you can't sell,
but you can give it away for free.
In
a discussion about Hong Kong goings on, a student asked me how
demonstrations and protests in the West were covered in the West.
“Did Western governments try to tell the people they were no big
deal?” I didn't know how to explain to him that the media in the
West wasn't government controlled and that most people heard the
government views through private, not government media filters.
So
we put the bed for Tony in our second bedroom. And so for the first
time, we tried to get him to sleep in a bed other than ours. He
surprised us by actually falling asleep in his new bed. We had
expected him to resist. He didn't however stay the whole night
there. At about three or four in the morning, he came back into the
master bedroom and fell asleep beside Mom. As expected, he wasn't
comfortable with sleeping by himself.
I
have had a student, English name of Change, in some of my classes.
Way back when, I had a student name Hope, in classes. Yes. Hope
and Change.
Change
took the name because his Chinese name is Qian Jie. The Qian which
in Chinese means money. Funny, I told him because change is
sometimes what we call the money we may have in our wallets or in
our pockets.
Rare
readers may remember my mentioning that I took part in the recording
of a commercial, for our school, for which the theme was
backpacking. Well, the second Thursday in October, I was sitting on
the subway train, minding my own business as it were, tapping out
pinyin on my Ipod in order to test my knowledge of the Chinese
characters that I was looking at on my Ipad, when I looked up at a
video screen and saw someone reading a map of China. That map was
familiar to me, and then I saw Edith's image and (Edith is the
redoubtable one who is a study assistant at my school.) I realized
that they were showing the commercial in which she and I had stood
together for the recording! My first reaction was to smile, my next
was to feel sheepish. The subway was crowded, it being the morning
rush hour, and I wondered if the other passengers would look at me
and notice that the foreigner on the train was in that commercial.
When images of my backpack, that I had used as a prop in the video,
appeared, I instinctively turned the backpack about so that no one
on the train would recognize it. (The map of China was a map I had
had for years folded away on a shelf near my desk at school. I used
it as a prop on the commercial)
When
I do order pizza for pick up from my local Pizza Hut, they give me a
lot of plastic forks which I take to school and use to eat Xinjiang
Noodles.
Walking
on the subway platform, I noticed that the tile flooring was very
uneven: so uneven that if I was dragging my feet as I walked, I
would have tripped and fallen on my face.
When
I saw the backpacking commercial a second time, I saw more of the
video including a shot where I was walking with a backpack on my
back into a building. My posture looked atrocious, I thought. I
then had a passenger nearby point at me, in a questioning manner,
after she noticed that video and then me sitting on the train. I
nodded my head up and down to indicate that it was me in the video.
It was the first time, in four years, that I have had a stranger
indicate that they had seen me in a commercial that was being
displayed on a nearby video screen.
The
second night of the Tony new bed era, I slept with Tony on his new
bed. The mattress was hard and had a wooden headrest. He slept
soundly; I was my usual hard-to-get-to-sleep self.
A
student told me that during the Golden Week holiday, she had gone to
a friend's wedding and became very displeased. The reason? The
Groom. He's a bad man. A week before the wedding, he had gotten in
a car accident in which he was driving a car at speeds over 140 km/h
with three girls he had met in a pub. He told his fiancee about the
accident and told her to not say a word about it to his parents. On
the wedding day where the tradition is for guests to go to the Bride
and Groom's home, the Groom was a terrible host: he hadn't cleaned
his apartment, he didn't provide food for anyone, he let the guests
fend for themselves for chairs to sit in, while he had two computers
on so he could play computer games. And he didn't talk to anybody.
Of course, I asked the student why her friend was marrying this man,
and the student told me that her friend was 26 years and wanted to
get married before it was too late.
In
mid-October after Tony got his new bed, I was sleeping in two beds
every evening. Tony wanted me beside him when he fell asleep. When
he would fall asleep, I would go back to my & Jenny's bed. But
in the middle of the night, Tony would come to our bed, and so I
would move to his bed to finish out the night.
I
feel rage as a green light comes on and I can't cross because of all
these right-turning vehicles not stopping for the red light.
On
the night of Thursday, October 16, history was made as Tony, for the
first time, spent the entire night in is bed. (Dad did join Tony in
the new bed at 5:30 AM because he was worried about Tony.)
On
Saturday the 18th, Tony was up at seven AM. I don't know
if it was on purpose, but he asked to play with my Ipad Mini. Tony
is now obsessed with first person shooter games... One of which I
had downloaded the previous night.
Coming
to the subway station at 9:00 PM one evening, I didn't have to have
my bag run through the x-ray machine. The workers had gone home.
Presumably, they were getting rest for their daytime shifts when
passengers do have to have their bags x-rayed.
I
took Tony for a wander around the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza on a
Saturday. There were numerous shows being put on in the Mall's two
courtyards, including car displays from dealerships hoping to boost
sales. (Look to the things seen entry for October to learn what we
saw) Tony jumped into the driver seat of as many of the cars as he
could while I stood by feeling that we shouldn't be doing this
because we weren't planning on buying a car ever. And then while we
were looking at the cars, some dancing girls and models came out. I
wanted to watch these girls wearing showy silvery dresses but Tony
grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away. The little bugger.
Doing
a salon class about tools, I felt compelled to give the student
nicknames because the topic seemed a barren one for which to start
conversations. The students were mostly urban apartment dwellers
who had never picked up a tool in their lives. Eric, I called the
Hammer; Justin I called the Axe; and Chris, who loved to eat, I
called the Bucket.
Late
October, I got to take part in another school commercial to be shown
on the video screens of Wuxi Metro trains and stations. Standing
beside the redoubtable Edith, I said a few lines of introduction
about the topic of comic books.
I
got the news of the Parliament Hill shootings from the Drudge
Report. A little bit later that day, I had a student tell me what a
peaceful country Canada was. I mentioned the shootings to him and
he said that he had heard about them. So it was news in China.
The
death of the reserve corporal, who was performing honor guard duties
when he got murdered, impacts me in a slight way. I was a reserve
corporal many years ago in Brandon and Winnipeg, Manitoba. I took
part in a few twenty one gun salutes marking the opening of a
session of the Manitoba Legislature. I can just imagine the horror
for this man's family and friends. He was taking part in the most
benign of military activities and got killed.
After
I learned of the shootings, Edith came in and excitedly told me all
about what had happened in Canada. She thought that ISIS was
responsible and that she wanted all ISIS killed. Apparently, they
were a problem in Western China.
Jenny
& I celebrated our 8th anniversary on October 27th.
I hope that when I die, I am still married to her. I have the
Catholic attitude when it comes to marriage. A marriage is forever
and indissolvable . Divorce is a horrible thing though I don't
deny that it is sometimes necessary. But most divorces in this day
and age are frivolous. On October 27th, 2006, I made the
vow of till death do us part, and I will be damned if I ever break
that vow.
As
it got into late October, I found myself spending more time in
Tony's bed than my & Jenny's. One evening, Tony didn't go
through the preliminaries of falling asleep in his bed and just went
to sleep in our bed; leaving me to sleep in his bed all night.
Washing
my hands in the bathroom one morning, I noticed Tony had left some
of his Ultraman figurines beside the sink. Tony has no notion of
putting things in one place. I constantly have to chide him to put
things back or at a proper place, whether it be the remote in the
remote pockets we have placed near the television or dirty clothes
in the hamper instead of on the floor of the bathroom or living
room.
Buying
a coffee at the 85 bakery, near our school, lead to some momentary
confusion for me. I took the coffee, in the 85 paper cup, upstairs
to my office desk where I added the cream and sugar. I then got up
from my desk to look at the bulletin board and noticed a paper cup
from 85, similar in size to the one I had just bought, sitting on
another desk in the office. I was momentarily startled. What was
the cup doing there? I thought. Had I been adding cream and sugar
to a coffee that wasn't mine? I picked up the cup on the other desk
and saw that it was empty and felt relief. I asked my colleague
what that cup was doing there and he told me that it had been
sitting there since the day before.
In
order to make another commercial for a school, I was taken to a
bookshop with the redoubtable Edith. I hadn't been in a bookshop
for a long time and I liked the feel of it again. It brought back
some pleasant reminisces. I even liked browsing through all the
Chinese volumes. A series of books called Old Photos (老照片)
was particularly interesting to flip through. The books featured
old black and white photos of ordinary Chinese people from
throughout the 20th century.
On
the Wuxi Metro, I look ed up from my my Ipad Mini to see a video
with a foreigner in a yellow shirt shuffling on his feet as he
talked into a microphone. The foreigner was me so I quickly look
back down at my Ipad Mini.
On
October 30th, I spend the entire evening sleeping in
Tony's bed because Tony was sleeping with Mom and occupying my place
on her & my bed. Tony tells Mom that he hates the new bed. So,
as of October 31st, Tony has slept only one complete night there.
I
had students liking my explanation for the phrase getting a taste
of one's own medicine. “Imagine!”, I said to the students,
“that you kidnap your math teacher and take him to a dark room
where you make him do math homework and tests. That would be giving
him a taste of his own medicine!” The idea of this was extremely
popular with the high school aged students.
For
the last two weeks of October, I had an annoying cough that was
either the result of a cold or Chinese air pollution.
At
the Nanchang subway station, the trains coming from opposite
directions will usually arrive at the same time. One time I got off
my train at the same time that Sally, a Chinese co-worker, coming
from the opposite direction got off her train. We greeted each
other but we didn't talk. I was listening to my Ipod and was very
caught up with a particular podcast episode to which I was
listening. Later, Sally told me that it seemed to her like I didn't
seem keen on talking to her because I scowled when I saw her. I
didn't deny what she said, and told her about wanting to listen to a
podcast.
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