The Land of China, Part 1

In baseball, there is a time-honored maxim that "hitting is contagious" - that is, that good hitting inspires more good hitting. I think the same sentiment applies to writing. After reading an excellent piece about fatherhood by my good friend Steve Orders, it occurred to me that the old "Bank of Barron" has been collecting dust for more than two months now. Luckily, I'm spending the next month and a half at my school's front desk, where I'll be resuming my receptionist duties. Not a ton happens during the summer, which means I really have no excuse not to write. In fact, it was this very job, with its wide swaths of free time in front of a computer, that enabled me to start the blog a year ago.

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was all over the place.

While cleaning out a drawer yesterday, I came across a journal that I kept during my time in China ten years ago and was immediately overcome with nostalgia. My first thought was the obvious, "I can't believe it was ten years ago." My second thought was that it is incredibly unlikely that I will ever take a trip like this again. I don't just mean that it is unlikely that I'll return to China, although I guess that's true too. What I mean is that I now have a wife and kids, and a house with a lawn that needs to be mowed, and the inclination to want to make at least a little money during the summer instead of just bumming around a foreign country. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in the unlikely event that I ever return to China, it won't be for six weeks and it won't be entirely without an itinerary and it won't involve a sketchy program I found on the internet.

The story of my trip is pretty convoluted actually, and when most people asked me about it upon my return, I tried to provide the Reader's Digest Program: "I tried to teach English in China. It didn't really work. I ended up basically bumming around the country for six weeks instead. In spite of my disastrous experience with the teaching program, it was actually a great trip."

Here's the longer story, as I remember it:

At some point during the 2006-2007 school year, I decided that rather than return to summer camp for the umpteenth time, I wanted to do something a little spontaneous and adventurous. So as one does, I combed the internet for all sorts of weird programs abroad. One of these was a summer camp in - I kid you not - Siberia. (On beautiful Lake Baikal, "the Blue Eye of Sibera"!) Thankfully, my dad talked me out of this one. I had never longed to go to China, but the internet was rife with
opportunities to teach English there. Almost all of these programs offered only volunteer work, and volunteers were required to pay their own airfare, but housing and meals were generally free. At school one day, I happened to talk to my colleague Krista about my search and it turned out she was looking for something similar. She referred me to a program she had been considering, which offered American teachers the chance to spend a summer teaching ESL at schools in China. We both interviewed (a rigorous process consisting of a ten minute phone call), and after filling out some paperwork and paying a visit to the Chinese Consulate in Glover Park to procure a Visa, we were on our way together.

Lake Baikal does actually look pretty impressive. On the other hand, summer in Siberia still sounds like a questionable proposition.

Some months before the trip, we were told that we would be stationed in Yangzhou, a "town" with a population of around 4.5 million - or more than a half million larger than L.A. While Yangzhou's description in Lonely Planet sounded appealing enough, we wanted to see more of the country too, and so we arranged to fly to Beijing a week early, to fit in some sightseeing before getting down to business. This part of the trip was fairly conventional. Krista and I stayed in a small hotel in a "hutong" or narrow winding alleyway near Beijing's massive main train station. In a few days there, we hit most of the biggies: Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, lunch at the famous Peking Duck Restaurant, a long hike on the Great Wall.

We meant to travel down to Tai Shan, the sacred mountain south of Beijing, but due to a combination of mishaps and poor translations, we missed our train there and wound up going instead to the city of Nanjing, which we actually found quite lovely. Its Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum looked like it had been

Nanjing's humble memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Chinese aren't really into subtlety.

built for a god and could only be reached by climbing approximately 7000 steps, but it was indeed an incredible sight, unknown to most westerners. The next stop was Shanghai, a few hours away, where were to meet our fellow volunteers at small hotel. It was there that we would be sent off to our posts at various schools around the country. Now in the hands of this organization we had found via Google search, we would be forfeiting our autonomy. And it was at this point that our trip went off the rails.

Part Two to come...