For various wha-acky! reasons I’m tending the XIS kindergarten for an hour a day. This is actually a really easy gig: I'm basically babysitting. The hardest part of the job is getting them to clean up their toys in time for lunch.

Working with children has been the hardest part of this job, for me. The younger the kid, the more inexplicable s/he is. Teenagers are easy to understand, and (relatively) easy to communicate with. They’re basically little adults with jaw-droppingly awful judgement. But kindergarteners are like these demented dwarfs...they do bizarre random stuff and have bizarre random explanations for why they did it. For example: they suddenly acquired this mania for hugging my legs and standing really really close. WTF?

Also interesting: girls lead boys at all ages. (Warning: gross stereotypes follow.) I remember, around the time I hit puberty, hearing adults say, over and over, that girls develop faster than boys. I thought this meant girls start acting adulty and quit playing with toys at a younger age than boys. This is undeniably true. Sixth grade girls are clearly training at being women, sixth grade boys still play with pokemons or yodas or whatever. What I never realized is that this is true at every age.

Kindergarten girls switch effortlessly between Korean, Mandarin and English...they jabber all the time, about everything, and construct complex games that mimic the real world, with money exchanges, power hierarchies, and little bits of math or spelling. Games like “vegetable stand” or “kitty school” or “international banking”. They have these (to me) frustratingly cliquish games that involve social ordering, and play in big, well organized groups. A girl playing alone is playing alone for a reason and maybe not a good one.

Kindergarten boys play games like “piling up all the blocks” and “wearing a hat.” (I exaggerate. They also play “driving a car” and “watching television.”) They play alone or in little pairs, and when they get roped into the complex little-girl games they are clearly at a disadvantage. I feel a little sorry for kindergarten boys. Maybe this explains the hugging? Maybe, like dogs, tiny children can smell emotion and the boys realize that their developmental lag makes me a little sad, and they’re trying to comfort me.

I realize none of this is remotely new to anyone who’s spent any time at all around children (read: everyone but me.) But I remember none of this from my own kindergarten years. Maybe I was (like other boys?) too socially retarded to notice? (Hey Mom: little help here?) That’s the upside of a developmental lag, I guess: realizing you’re behind the girls is one of the skills you have not yet acquired.

Jenny’s mom is visiting from Oregon for about 10 days...and while the highlight of her visit is the, y’sknow, visiting, part, we’re sorely glad for the haul of loot she brought with. A lot of this stuff is from our storage cache in her garage, some she thoughtfully provided new: shoes, jeans, books, climbing gear, oatmeal bars, hot chocolate and fifteen pounds of whole bean coffee. And a french press.

So last Thursday I brewed my first cup of coffee in China. Yes, I’ve had espresso drinks at the local (overpriced) java shack, but I can’t get it immediately upon rising, in my own kitchen, while I do my daily sudoku. Like so much I’ve missed from Oregon, I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I had it again. (This is why I don’t want to visit Oregon for the Christmas holiday.)

Funny how this little helping of stimulants can affect me. Life seems a little bit brighter now.

The health ish just keep piling up here in Phoenix Villa. Friday at about 10:30 a.m. I began to feel achey/chilley/sore all over in a lovely flulike way. I know it was 10:30 exactly because I felt just ducky at 9:30 but like I’d been mugged by a hundred monkeys at 11:30.

So: I’ve been nursing this weird not-quite-flu thing since Friday. The fever broke last night, so in theory today I’m fine, so why is it I’m so cranky? Probably because you can’t find aspirin anywhere in our neighborhood

The scarcity of some items here (e.g. good coffee) can be easily ascribed to the local economy. Well-paid locals make about $1/hour; they certainly can’t affort $4 mochaccinos. On the other hand, the scarcity of other items (e.g. cheese) is due to the fact that Chinese people just don’t have a taste for it.

But seriously: no aspirin? It’s practically free in the States. Yes, you can get it here, but you have to go to a western pharmacy (we know of only one in town), or a big speciality store like Metro.

You don’t realize what a miracle drug aspirin is until you have to fight body aches, fever, sore throat, and chills without it. I took some of the local “flu medicine” and it did bupkiss for that stuff.

I am an ugly enough American to want the following items to be copiously available in every country in the world:

• Free public restrooms (actually, China does pretty well on this score)
• Ice
• Aspirin

Is that so hard? It’s not like I’m expecting everyone to speak English, or open Starbuckses.

And: Bismarck has been suffering from some kind of skin infection. Maybe ringworm. He’s been to see a local vet twice now (third visit today), and it still doesn’t seem to be improving.

OK, I’m done complaining now.

Minutes out of the shower yesterday our house phone rang. Jenny and Bismarck were out for an early morning jog, and I was a little out of sorts, having showered in the wet room, not the main bathroom. And when the phone rings, unexpectedly at 6:30 you just know it’s something bad. Moreover, the call wasn’t on my cell phone, which is where I usually get work-related phone calls. On the other end was Jenny. She was screaming...I could barely make it out, but something was very, very, sorry-we-moved-China, I-hope-I’m-dreaming wrong.

Then she said, clearly, I can’t move.

My stomach dropped to my feet. Immediately I thought the worst: she was hit by a car, she’s paralyzed, how is it possible she can even speak?

I asked Are you OK? What happened? Should I call 119? [the emergency number] Do you need an ambulance?

No, she said, I was running and stepped wrong and now I can’t stand on my foot.

She told me what intersection she was at and I ran, full tilt, down to the main road where I jumped on top of the first cab I saw. At that early hour traffic is light and we made it in quick time to the intersection where Jenny was. She was sitting on the curb and in excruciating pain. Bismarck was helpfully licking her face. After some difficulty tracking down a second cab (and after waving off a freelance ambulance, and then, once in the cab, going to the English-speaking “24 hour” clinic which was WTF!?! CLOSED!?!? and finally stopping at home to drop off Bismarck and to pick up Jenny’s wallet) we made our way to the emergency room at Zhongshan hospital.

Immediately this was really really intimidating. I felt less than useless. Jenny could clearly understand everyone better than I could, and she was the one in pain. But once I grokked the situation that I needed to pay for all the proceedures before they proceeded (and that, in Chinese fashion, the person checking you in and doing your paperwork is unhelpfully not the person who takes your money), the ER went smoothly. They wanted 10元 (US$1.25) for the admission, and I filled out the minimalistest admission papers imaginable. All they needed was her name and birth date.

My U.S. readers may want to pause and re-read that last sentence and recollect on your own E.R. experiences in our native land.

For my non-U.S. readers: I have a little experience with U.S. emergency rooms, and here’s how they work. Someone you know does something like damage their ankle running. You debate for about half an hour whether it’s so bad you need to go to the E.R., because the experience will be so awful. Eventually you decide to go. You bring a toothbrush and big book, and maybe a change of underwear, because you might be spending the night sleeping in the waiting room with the 40% of Americans who use the E.R. as their only form of medical care. Unless your friend is bleeding out her eyes you’ll be waiting 2 to 4 hours just to see a nurse. She’ll wait at least an hour just to get admitted. All that free time is good, because you’ll need it to fill out the notebooks of paperwork that verify your friend’s name, address, identity, entire medical history, employers, and about half a dozen Important Numbers, not least of which is the insurance number (you do have insurance, don’t you?) Then, when she finally does get admitted they put you in a tiny room (alone, if you’re lucky), where you wait another hour for a doctor to stop in. During that interim a nurse entertains you for about 3 minutes by taking your friend’s temperature, blood pressure, height and weight. Then the doctor comes in, looks at your friend’s foot, asks about two questions, then says, yep, we better x-ray that. So someone has to call radiology, and you need a special piece of paper to take with you, and they have to call an orderly to push you there in a wheelchair...this will all take about 30 minutes. Eventually you get to radiology and...geez this is getting tiring. Suffice to say, an E.R. visit in the United States is a day long adventure and will set you back, at minimum, $300. Minimum. If they do something exotic like x-ray your foot, we’re talking thousands of pretty American dollars. And the whole experience is wrapped up in paperwork so byzantine that you need a special piece of paper signed before you can go home.

This is not how it works in China. In China, a country where you have to provide four forms just to leave the country (true!), and three forms (with a photocopy of your passport) to withdraw money from your own bank account (also true!), you can walk into an emergency room, put your name on a piece of paper, pay $1.25, and a doctor will look at you in, I dunno, 15 minutes. In another 15 minutes (after paying 200元 [$24]) they’re taking x-rays of your foot, in another 20 minutes the doctor decides the foot’s not broken but that you’ve pulled a ligament, wraps the ankle up tight, gives you a prescription for an analgesic cream (68元 [$8.50]), and bang you’re good to go.

But here’s the hell of it:

I can speak Mandarin at maybe a 3-year-old’s level. I can read 400 characters, about 1/10 what a literate adult can read. I’m pretty handy with the English, heck I gots me a college degree or two, and wunnathem minors in, whatchadink, English. Despite all of which I can understand Chinese hospital paperwork better than American hospital paperwork.

We should be seriously ashamed of the American medical system. Seriously. It would shame people in a developing country. Seriously.

Back to the story:

Jenny got out of the E.R. by 8am and we were home again. Our maid was in (she comes Monday and Thursday mornings), and knew of a traditional Chinese cure. She walked to the corner Chinese pharmacy (note: not very much like a Western pharmacy, more like snake-handling witch doctors, if snake-handling witch doctors wore white smocks and kept the snakes in tasteful, scientific-appearing packages under glass, not unlike at a perfume counter, alongside aspirin that costs 32¢ a tablet) and bought a bottle of something that smelled kind of Vick’s Vapo-Rubby, and a package of “pain plasters.” This put me to thinking a lot about the power of placebo and the value of folk medicine but I’m still processing a lot of stuff so I have to save it for later.

Jenny was laid up the rest of the day, and I stayed home and played nurse. But not the fun kind of nurse who wears saucy outfits; rather the kind of nurse who does things like wrap your foot in the weirdly effective sticky ace bandage or rub on the analgesic cream or apply pain plasters or run to the food mart to buy frozen corn because don’t they sell any fricking ice anywhere in this country? not to mention aspirin for anything less than 32¢ a pill? We just got an x-ray for $24 (and they let us take it home!) but the aspirin costs 32¢ a pill?

Jenny stayed home again today but is pretty much able to walk again. I borrowed a pair of crutches from the school nurse, and she’ll try going into work tomorrow. The swelling has gone down but the ankle turned a really cool blue color.

The best stories are the ones that start out really, really horrible, with your wife screaming on the phone that she can’t move and end with wacky pharmacy hijinks, and the wisdom that no matter how crappy you feel about your job or your weird life situation or loneliness or ennui, at least you’re still alive, and so are all the people you love. You can go to bed with a clear heart, wake up tomorrow and not be such an arrogant ass, because now you know all that life-is-here stuff, like what’s really important, and the difference between an adventure and a tragedy.

I’m given to understand culture shock comes in stages. I don’t know what those stages are and I’m kind of loathe to find out. But I think we’re in a stage now where we compare everything here to life in Portland. Barely an hour goes by when I don’t think of something else I miss. We really miss the rain for Pete’s sake. The homesickness is abetted by our job situations which, to put it politely, are not only less than ideal (which we expected) but also less than was promised (which we did not).

During my last serious jag of under- and un-employment (2001–2002) I could take some solace in a life well lived. Conversely, if our jobs were better, China would be more fun than it currently feels. From the spoiled-Westerner point of view, you pretty much need either a> happy work life or b) happy life life.

So: News:

• Jenny and I hired a Mandarin tutor, a nice-seeming guy named Mr. Yu who also tutors a few expat families with kids at the school. We’ve only had one lesson but it feels a little like we’re back in the game, language-wise. On that topic: many (most?) of the foreigners we know speak less Mandarin than we do, and I frankly don’t know how they survive. You can’t give directions or order food in English, for example. I guess you can get pretty far with pointing and grunting.
• I went bowling last week which was pretty much like bowling in the states (run-down mid-80s vibe, half-empty lanes, jokey college kids on one side, and the serious 200+ average guy with his own ball on the other), but with better service
• Thai food is worse here than in Portland. A lot worse. I don’t think this is because it’s “bad” here, but rather that it’s just so very good in Portland.
• The weather is now always exactly the same. 26C, dry and hazy. Air pollution of all kinds (smoke, haze, smog, dust) is omnipresent. This week I stepped outside during the day and was hit with an odor exactly like L.A. smog. You know the homesickness is bad when you’re homesick for L.A.