We're going to a party. It's a birthday party.

Today I wanted comfort food, and a lot of it. I decided to buy a cake. I don’t feel the need to explain myself about this. Cake in China: They don’t use butter cream or fondant, but straight whipped cream. This isn’t my favorite icing, but it’s edible. A “two-layer” cake is really the size of a one layer cake in America. The cake itself is okay, but I was raised on box cakes, and really nothing beats those for me. They cook chewy dried fruit into the cake. Cakes are for birthdays and for special guests. I was served a special guest cake when I had lunch at Susan’s, but her son served it to me, and I had spent the whole morning walking in the park with him, and watching him pick his nose and put his hands down his pants. And he served it with his hands, no utensils required. So I nibbled at it, and didn’t really get farther than that. I went to a shop across the road and pointed to a small cake with a rose on it. I thought they served the ones off the shelf, but the lady at the cake shop started making it right there. I left and went across the road to my favorite noodle shop. The noodles are good, but I really go there for the roast beef. A word on roast beef: Since I first discovered roast beef two weeks ago, I have eaten it at every possible turn. I know that roast beef is available in America, but not like this.
It’s the garlic (dasuan) sauce that really gets me, and the scallion pancakes you eat it with, like a wonderful roast beef taco. I make my own dasuan sauce, which is really the best part of the whole roast beef entrée. What I like about this noodle shop is that they have a wall of pictures of the different foods they serve, and I can just point to a picture, smile, and nod, and thumb-motion “to go, please”, and that’s that. I’ve started doing this every two days. I would do it every day, but one serving of roast beef lasts me for two days. I make some dasuan in my kitchen, pop around the corner to the outdoor market and buy some scallion pancakes, and stop by the noodle shop for some roast beef. It was a nice system. This is what has changed. There is a boy. Two boys actually. This boy has been in my life since the first month I was in China. I often would take long walks, and when we saw me on the street, he would yell, “Hello!” I don’t know why, but he just was there every single time I walked by, and every time he would say hello to me. So then A Jing took me to the noodle place, and this guy was there (per usual). His Chinese name is something like Han Si Lo, but in my head I call him Han Solo, so as to remember. Every time I go there he’s there, with his younger brother. I mostly didn’t pay them any mind at first, as I was really preoccupied with trying to communicate the phrase “niu ro” (beef) effectively enough to not have to point to the photo like a retard every time I went there. But then something happened, and now everything is ruined. Last weekend I went in and ordered my usual roast beef, and it is my custom to stand next to the door, leaned up against the wall, waiting. That time, however, Han Solo was prepared for me. He had apparently asked someone, or consulted a dictionary, or something, because he had a piece of paper, on which was written, “Please, sit down, what is your name?” He painstakingly read these words to me like they were all one sentence. I just stared at him, so he guided me to a chair and sat me down, and then sat down across from me. I was so confused. The care with which he did this reminded me exactly of a situation in a movie in which one character has some very bad news to break to the other, and so gently sits them down, sits down across from them, and looks at them with tenderness and/or pity. And for some reason, my first thought was, Oh no, he’s going to tell me they’ve stopped selling roast beef. Now, every time I go there, he sits with me, and doesn’t speak, but looks at me tenderly and smiles occasionally, and, this is the strangest part, when I give him the 20 RMB for the roast beef, he holds it in his palm like it’s a gift, or he pats it. He looks at me when I approach with a face reminiscent of a dog’s wagging tail. He meets me at the stairs. I am almost certain this guy has a crush on me. No one has ever had a crush on me in my entire life. When I was in high school, I imagined someone having a crush on me (god, especially a cute Asian boy) would feel really incredibly cool. But all I am concerned about is how this is affecting my roast beef intake. Now I feel shy to go there every day, because who the hell spends 50 RMB a week on roast beef? And I’m already like this stereotypical fat American, the fattest person in Qinzhou. Today was like the grand finale. I went in and ordered my roast beef, and then went back to collect my cake. She had made me a birthday cake. A beautifully decorated birthday cake, covered with colorful flowers and candies like confetti.
It said “Happy Birthday” in English, and even came with candles and tiny Styrofoam plates. Since I was going to eat this cake alone anyway, it reminded me of this thing my friend Kaitlin once told me. She said that Charlie Chaplin’s favorite joke went something like this: This guy walks into a bakery and asks the baker, “Can you make a piece of bread in the shape of a gondola?” And the baker says, “I don’t know, it’ll be hard, but I’ll try.” So the guy comes back, and the baker shows him the bread baked into the shape of a gondola, and the guy is really impressed, etc. The baker says, “Just let me wrap that up for you”, and the guy says, “That’s okay, I’m just going to eat it here”. When I first heard this joke, I was completely not impressed. I think I might have even said, “Why would he do that?”, and Kaitlin said, “That’s the point, why would he have a piece of bread made in the shape of a gondola if he’s just going to eat it alone”. However, the joke has definitely grown on me, and now when I think of it, I almost laugh out loud, even when I’m alone and cold. That’s exactly how I felt about this cake, like if this lady had known that she went through all that trouble just for me to go home and eat a slice of it alone, and cold, she would probably have felt the same way as the baker in the joke. This added to the awkwardness of knowing that you’re just buying an entire cake to eat by yourself in your apartment. Pathetic. So I awkwardly took my cake to the noodle shop to pick up my roast beef, but it wasn’t ready. Han Solo sat down and started gesturing at the cake. I said, “Wo bu dong” (I don’t understand). He went to the back room and brought out his brother, who asked, “Your birthday?” So obviously I have several options.

“No, it’s someone else’s birthday. It’s a gift for them.”
“No, I just bought this cake to take home and eat by myself.”
“No.”
“Yes, it’s my birthday.”
Or I could make some lemonade, baby.
“Yes, it’s for my birthday party. I’m going to need two orders of roast beef to feed everybody.”

Obviously, I chose the latter, got two orders of roast beef and didn’t look like a pig, and in this way, I thought I could avoid going back to the noodle place until at least after the weekend. This was not to be. A Jing came by tonight to have dinner with me, and where should she take me but said noodle joint. This time Han Solo had a translator, so he hovered around our table and watched us eat the entire evening, asking A Jing to ask me all the questions he had obviously so desperately wanted answered. In no particular order they were:

How old is she?
What does she do here?
What’s her job?
What’s her name?
What does she do on the weekends?
Does she like my noodles?
Does she like roast beef a lot?
How much did her coat cost?
How long will she be in China?
Tell her she should stay five years.
Does she like my noodles?

But the last question is the one that brought about the difficulty:
How was her birthday party?

At this point A Jing starts laughing, and tells me, “He thinks you had a birthday party today with a cake and candles, and served everyone roast beef!” My face went completely blank, as my mind tried to quickly figure out a way to deal with this situation.

“Yes, it is my birthday. I had some friends over and we had cake and roast beef.” Fine, except that A Jing knows I don’t have any friends.

“No, it’s not my birthday, but I lied to him and told him it was to avoid looking like an idiot. Obviously that has backfired.” That might work, except I’m pretty sure A Jing wouldn’t understand a single concept expressed there.

“No, it’s not my birthday. He is mistaken. Must have been someone else he was thinking of.” Also fine, if it weren’t for the fact that I am the most easily identifiable person in Qinzhou, in equal parts because of 1. the fatness, 2. the Americanness, 3. the hideous, bright orange coat.

I went with the “change the subject quickly and completely” tactic on this one. I asked A Jing to ask Han Solo if he would teach me to make noodles. This distracted everyone, including myself, because A Jing was surprised and amused (thinking I was flirting with Han), Han Solo was pleased and enchanted, and I was humiliated and curious. Let me explain about Han and his noodles. Apparently, his little shop is famous, and mostly all he does all day is stand and make noodles from dough. It’s very difficult. He takes a piece of dough, and pulls it out long, and then folds it in two and stretches it out long again, and he repeats this until he has a handful of long, thin noodles. His noodles are delicious, and he’s very proud of himself and his technique. So he took me to the kitchen, which is in the front of the shop, and open, which is where he always is when he greets me. His younger brother came up and started talking to us, and Han was so shy. To show off he showed me how he could pull the noodles out really thin, even thinner than angel hair pasta, and I was duly impressed. He didn’t try to speak much, but that was because his younger brother was doing all of the talking. They were like caricatures of a younger and older brother. The older one was handsome, quiet, smart, practical, and talented. The younger one was dorky, loud, outgoing, talentless, and flirty. I hate how people here are too polite to translate literally what people are saying. I read this situation like a book. Little brother (speaking Chinese all the while) points at me, points at Han, makes goofy faces, Han blushes, kneads dough, looks at me, smiles like puppy, A Jing blushes and says something to little brother in playful, scolding voice. A Jing translated, “He says his brother wants to live in America.” Come on. I think it went something like this, “Hey, my brother likes her, he keeps asking me how to say things in English so he can talk to her. She should marry him and take him to America.” They made me practice saying his name over and over, Han Si Lo, Han Si Lo, Han Si Lo, and then the little brother would ask me intermittently, in English, “Do you remember his name?” Han gave me the dough to try and stretch it out, and it just plopped down around my knees, and I couldn’t get it back up. Little brother started laughing, and Han punched him in the back, between the shoulder blades (that had to hurt), then picked the dough back up and smiled at me, stretching it for me and handing it back. So this is the root of my problem. I am too shy to talk to him. I don’t know what he’s saying to me in Chinese, and I feel like a fool. After the birthday cake incident, I really never want to show my face in that noodle shop again.

I also want to mention something about cold weather. I don’t think I knew what cold weather was before I came here. Because you don’t know what cold weather means until you live without heat. When you live in America, you are constantly going from one heated place to the next, your home, your building, school, work, the supermarket, the restaurant. Wherever you are going, it’s probably going to be heated. If you spend time in the cold, it’s for fun. Snowball fight, sledding, build a snowman. I only go to two places, school and my apartment, and neither of them is heated. The students sit in their gloves and coats while I teach (in my hideous coat, which is distracting for all of us). Then I go back to my apartment, which has generally been colder than outside. Today in the middle of my class at the primary school, the freezing rain turned to snow, and came down hard. Everything was covered by the time I got out of class. It was beautiful, but so sad. I knew I would be going home to my unheated apartment, to my three hot water bottles and my 16th rewatching of Ice Age. I knew I would make some hot chocolate, and crawl into bed wearing my coat and gloves. I knew I would think longingly of the warmth of Florida and the comfort of Ashley Jane. I knew my internet would not be working, because it wasn’t working before I left for work either. I suddenly realized that this is what cold weather really means to some people (homeless people, for instance). It means you’re not going to be warm again for a long time. It means that every single thing you do, taking a piss, boiling some water, heating up dinner, washing the dishes, and especially taking a shower, is now a horrendous chore that you have to do to the almost musical accompaniment of your chattering teeth. No more standing in the kitchen watching the sun rise, no more going for leisurely walks, no more comfort, at all, even a little, for four more months. The knobs on every radiator in my apartment are stuck, or perhaps they’re not meant to be turned. The next time I see Flora I’m going to demand heat. The people downstairs turn their heat on, and sometimes that makes my own radiator hot, but not enough to heat the room. Not even enough to take the edge off the biting cold. The strange thing, though, is that these are the silly inconveniences that make me stop, sometimes, in the middle of my day, and burst into a giddy grin. It’s a thing like slipping into my bed with a cup of hot chocolate in my coat and gloves that almost brings tears to my eyes. Sometimes I stop, and I have this feeling of nostalgia, but not for the past. I will pause and realize, “This is going to become one of my fondest memories”, and I feel that happiness that feels like sadness again. Maybe that’s what that feeling is, nostalgia.

Cloud Gate

This morning A Jing and I went to Yunmen Shan to watch the sunrise. I found out Yunmen Shan meant Cloudgate Mountain. My alarm didn't go off, and she woke up late too. You have to enter the gates before 6:00 a.m. to get in for free, so we ran into the street and took a taxi. The taxi took us to the summit and we ran for the gates. We both forgot our phones, so had no way to take pictures. As most of you can imagine, I quickly realized I had made a terrible over-estimation of my own physical ability. Halfway up the mountain I realized that my body had completely given out, and was trudging forward through sheer force of will. Luckily, I highly esteem my force of will, and so it got me to the top. Every 30 steps or so I would stop walking and look back down the mountain and out at the view. Yes, I wanted to look at the beautiful view, but more than that, I wanted an excuse to stop and take a rest. I kept saying to A Jing, "Let's just have another look." A smoker should not climb mountains. It was pathetic. I also quickly realized that a thermos of hot chocolate was useless to me, as I was beginning to sweat profusely, and a bottle of water would have been better. But when we got to the top, this breeze suddenly hit my face hard, and my face was so hot. A Jing and I sat on the edge of a jutting ledge, and she was terrified, and I was fearless. The view from the ledge was clear and expansive, and we watched the sun rise. We shared a thermos of hot chocolate. I smoked a cigarette. We visited the ancient temple on the top of the mountain and lit incense for our families, for their health and happiness. We wandered around the rocks to try and find the best views. I wish I could have taken pictures, but it's probably best, as my hair was greasy and wet and plastered around my face by the time we reached the top. As we sat on the rocks and looked out at the mountains, we began talking about ourselves. She said she wanted to do nursing abroad, anywhere, but she really wanted to go to America. I told her I loved to travel, and I really wanted to see more of China. We talked about what we would do when I came home with her for the spring festival, also called the new year festival, also called winter holiday. She said we're going to stay with her parents for two weeks, watch the festival and climb Yellow Mountain in her hometown. Then we'll go south to visit some friends of her parents, see the biggest river in China and ride a boat down it, maybe see Shanghai. I hope these plans work out, because it sounds incredibly fun.

When we climbed back down (which was much easier), we went to have breakfast at a noodle shop. Lo mein, pronounced something like lah mee-in, with beef slices and green onions. It was delicious. We had two Fantas and ate our noodles with raw garlic. But suddenly it was nine, and I had plans to meet Susan and go to her house to learn to make dumplings. On Halloween, my students taught me to make dumplings, or so I thought. But I had assumed that the filling was just meat and chopped green onions. It's actually a good thing Susan showed me, because it's actually a lot more complex than that. You boil these Chinese carrots, they're something like carrots, except they're green and yellow. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure they don't have this kind of vegetable in America. I'll have to ask someone who knows. You chop and boil these Chinese carrots, and while they're boiling you chop green onions and ginger, mix it all up in a bowl with some meat, and add soy sauce, salt, and a kind of spice that I recognized the smell, but couldn't name. I'll ask someone who knows. Then you mix flour with water and make dough, which you roll out into little circles and put the stuffing in the middle and fold them up. Susan was really fast at folding them, but I was terrible. I thought my practice last week would have made me better, but it didn't. We sat and made dumplings and then ate them, and I came home.

As I Lay Freezing: A Coat Story; accompanied by Hot Water Bottle: A Love Story

Today was like a really crappy Family Channel movie about being fat and going shopping with your mother, who just doesn't get it, except without any of the emotional baggage. Flora took me today to buy a coat, because the past two nights have been the coldest nights of my life. No heat, bad-quality linens, no coat, sleeping-in-winter-boots kind of cold. So Flora became worried that I would become ill again, and took me downtown to the fancy, teenager-infested part of the city to buy clothes. We went to all these different department stores inhabited solely by hip, thin young Chinese teenagers. Flora and I both looked like we lost our way and wandered into another reality. It reminded me of how it felt for me when I was a tweenie to go into a place like Abercrombie and Fitch (which was huge in the mid-to-late nineties, wasn't it?), places where I knew I didn't like the clothes, and even if I did they probably wouldn't fit anyway. Flora would immediately go up to the sales girl and say, "We need your biggest coat, because she is very fat around the middle". This also instantly made me think of tweenie-hood, and how far I must've come, because if my mother had said that to a sales girl back then, I would have been mortified, but today when Flora said it, I just nodded in agreement and patted my belly, totally complicit. They all nodded in understanding. This is really a story about how I ended up with the most hideous coat in all of China, possibly the world. See, Flora has no taste. I only say this, because I feel I have been taking my own mother for granted. I was never one of those kids who was embarassed to be seen with my mother, but I did hate shopping with her. Now I see that this was not because she has no taste, but because I have none. It was also because I just hate shopping for clothes. It's all so much work. To be sure, you really do have to try it on, and that means taking the clothes you're already wearing off, and then putting others on, and then taking those off, and then putting your original clothes back on, over and over and over. It's really torture for someone who gets bored as easily as I do. And I was skeptical about buying a coat in China anyway, or any clothing for that matter, because someone told me that they don't carry any plus sizes. Which isn't true, actually, as I have been dragged shopping for clothes three times now (twice by my students, who I am beginning to realize see me as a massive doll that talks funny), and each time there are some, though not many, plus size clothes. So each place we went to, there was maybe one jacket that fit, and not at all well, but I hated them anyway. That's because the women's jackets that I've seen are all neon colors, or they're made out of that sateen sheeny material that was really popular a few years back. As far as I can tell, the late nineties are still really big here. So I would point out a simple black or brown coat, possibly red, warm-looking, not too noticeable, and Flora would be horrified. Apparently all of those were men's coats. That's another thing, I definitely have noticed that clothing is more ambiguous in the states. Though, obviously, men and women have different clothing sections, a lot of things are pretty gender-ambiguous. When I looked at these coats, I thought the men's coats looked that way, but a woman wearing a man's coat here is much more noticeable than at home, and Flora was scandalized I would even bring it up. I started to get bored and tired, and I decided that I was just going to buy the very first coat that fit me normally, no matter what it looked like. And I did. But I really shouldn't have. Let me lay this down for you: Bright orange. That should really be enough, but there's more. Fake zippers, you know what I mean, the kind where you unzip them and there's no pocket. Just a dozen decorative zippers. Faux fur-lined collar (of the kind that was really popular at stores like Old Navy back in the nineties). And the grand finale, folks, shoulder pads. Shoulder pads the likes of which I have never before seen on a coat. I look like a giant orange football player. I put it on, and some woman came up to me and said, "This is a very flattering color on women of your race," and I was thinking, "You must hate us." So let me recap: Bright orange. Decorative zippers. Faux fur-lined collar. Shoulder pads. I'm gonna have to find reserves of confidence enough for the entire suicide ward of a city hospital to fill the void this coat has left in my self-esteem. But I'm also not vain enough to be impractical, and it's only the beginning of November, just going to get colder and colder. So what the hell?

But I'm also not practical enough to avoid being just a bit vain, so I made Flora ask the sales girl for a warm vest as well. That is what I'm wearing now, and it's keeping me toasty so far. A nice, subdued hunter green. Average number of zippers. No fur collar. No shoulder pads. (No sleeves either, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.)

On another note, I want to comment on my night with the hot water bottles. It seems I never knew what I was missing. I filled the three bottles with boiling water from my kettle and then sat them under the blankets on my bed, evenly spaced, and went to finish up some e-mails. When I crawled into bed an hour later, freezing cold and dressed like an arctic explorer, I felt the most comforting, enveloping warmth spreading through me. It was like taking three shots of whiskey back-to-back. I snuggled my feet against the bottle at the bottom, I cuddled my arms around the one at my shoulders, I nestled against the one by my side. Who needs pets? Who needs lovers? I've got hot water bottles. If I were going to write a book about this experience, I would call it Extremely Warm and Incredibly Comforting.

If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today?

In my main class, the one with the advanced English students, that I teach every week, it had come to my attention that some of them thought the class was too easy. This was a rumor that may or may not have been true. In any case, I decided to really challenge them this week, to express complex thoughts and feelings. I made a presentation called "Creative Questions, Creative Answers", where I had a list of questions that would be very simple for a native English speaker, but very difficult for someone just getting their first real foothold in the language. Here are the questions and some of the answers:

If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today?
Most girls said something like, "I would go to see my parents, and eat whatever I wanted, and spend time with my friends". One girl said, "I would lay in my boyfriend's arms until I died upon his bosom". Another, "I would lay in bed and cry."

If you had one million RMB, what would you buy?
Almost everyone said, "I would buy a big house, and a cool car, and lots of beautiful clothes." A lot of them mentioned giving money to their parents. Sandy said, "I would build a big house where people can live if they have no home, and I would build a school where students could study if they didn't have any money." I think she was thinking about her two younger siblings when she said that.

What's your favorite English word, and why?
Some interesting answers were "Spirit", "Journey", "Angel", "Time", and "Sweet Potato".

If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
Some people went with things like, "I would make all people healthy", "I would make no war", "I would make no hungry people anymore". But others went with, "I would make myself beautiful (rich, etc.)" Someone said, "I would make myself strong, because I don't want to cry anymore". I guess that answer kind of shocked me. I feel like, if I were completely honest with myself, that's what I would have said, too. And one girl said, "I would make China rich and strong so I can live a better life, and all Chinese can live a better life". A few other girls said something similar, about making China better, making it the leading nation, making it richer, giving it more power. And Sandy said, similar to her above response, "I would make all children free to learn, and free to have books and pencils." A bit heartbreaking, that.