Afternoon laisons

 

I've been seeing a married woman I met online a few hours a week for the past two months. We meet at a third location for about an hour and a half, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. I've never met her husband, but he sounds like a nice guy. During these meetings, I give this woman, I'll call her Z, something her husband can't.
English lessons. Z is from China and we were connected through a volunteer English teaching program in my county. I taught English as a second language full time in China and Japan for four years in the 1980s and part time in Philadelphia as a volunteer in the nineties. In both cases, I was teaching classes of varying sizes, seldom of fewer than a dozen. This is one-on-one tutoring.
The books and materials my student and I have been given are terrific. I had some decent teaching material in my previous stints, but nothing like this stuff. It makes sense that teaching material evolves, of course, but compared to what I had in China in 1985, material twenty years out of date then, this is like comparing a laser printer to a slate board.
Z has been in America for four years and if you met her you might be surprised by how low her level of English is and judge her negatively for it. I know better. She lives with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren in a large suburban house. Her daughter and son-in-law have high-paying jobs and are the breadwinners of the family, and Z and her husband's role is to take care of and teach Chinese to the grandchildren, who are four and seven years old. I begin each class with an exercise I call Weekend English. On Tuesday, it’s, "What did you do over the weekend?" and Fridays it's, "What are you doing this weekend?" The suburb Z and I live in is not especially diverse, so when Z said she spends her weekends meeting up with six other Chinese ex-patriots who live within walking distance of her house, I found it hard to believe.
She’s getting better and speaking and says her level of confidence is increasing. I’ve told her that learning a new language is like climbing a slippery mountain and that you’ll go up some steps and sometimes fall a few steps and get discouraged. Her understanding of that was in a way that made me think she’s already experienced it.
I am awful at learning languages and it was a source of feeling extremely bad about myself. Nearly forty years later, I remember vividly sitting alone on the platform of a small train station on a hot night and trying to grasp a concept in the Japanese language instruction book I had. It was a good book, one used in U.S. colleges at the time. I just couldn’t get it even though other foreigners who did what I was doing could. I realized that if I had a gun with me, I’d put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger. It was one of the two strongest urges to commit suicide I’ve ever had, and it frightened me. Good thing Japan has strict gun laws!
Z is a basically happy woman, so I don’t worry about that with her. But still, I’m careful to make her language learning experience a positive one as much as I can without being insincere.

Foreign friends

In 1985, I lived in China for a year. I made many friends, but one in particular was a woman who was one of my students. It wasn't a sexual thing. It was simply two personalities that got along well. She was happily married and I always called her Mrs. Li, instead of by her first name (which is really her second name, the way westerners would use them). In case you don't know, that's common in much of Asia to do so. Only very close people, like parents, siblings or spouses, would go beyond that.
Mrs. Li and I still keep in touch a few times a year. She's a few years older than I am, now in her early sixties and she's had a good life. She worked as a translator and traveled to Europe for work, which made her one of the relatively few people of her generation who saw countries outside of China and flew in airplanes. (When I was in China I knew sophisticated urbanites who had never ridden in a passenger car.)

The Chinatown Gate in Philadelphia.

As good as the English is of my foreign friends (I have a few others), when I write to them I tend to boil my ideas down more than I would for my fellow native speakers. I know they'd be able to figure things out, but I don't want to write something that has them searching for a dictionary every three sentences. When I write to them, I tend to keep things simple and direct. A bonus to this is that it makes me focus on what I'm writing.
Here's my latest to Mrs. Li:

Dear Mrs. Li,

Happy Year of the Dog! As you may remember, I am a dog.

I hope that you and your husband are well. I am not so well, to be honest. The bone condition that made my right leg strange has come back in a different form and one that can't be treated well. I will have my right leg amputated on Monday, February 26th. The amputation will be at the hip, so I'll be using crutches for the rest of my life. Sadly, I doubt I'll ever visit China again. The amputation will be done to minimize the chances of the bone condition from spreading, but it will probably spread anyway and there is already a little bit of it in my lung. It can't be treated with chemotherapy or radiation, only surgery, so if more of it spreads I will die, maybe as soon as six months from now, not longer than a year or so.

Is there any chance you'd ever come visit here? My parents left me money, so I'd be able to pay for your and your husband's trip.

I hope that the new year's celebration hasn't been too noisy and stressful for you.

My best,

Why I ate this awful thing

After yet another doctor's appointment in the city a few days ago, I went to Philadelphia's Chinatown before taking the train back to the suburbs. It's just a few blocks from the station. In a bakery where they sell sesame seed balls I like, they also had the confectionery you see in the photo. 
I bought it and ate it for breakfast the next day.
It was huge; that's a full-size dinner plate it's on.
It looked better than it tasted, which I knew it would because I'd eaten a few before when I lived in China for a year in 1985.

A Chinese pastry.

The city I lived in, Guiyang, was considered backward even by other Chinese at the time. Even though it was the capital city of its province, Guizhou, the Lonely Planet guide's first sentence about it in the first edition of their guide to China was, "Frankly, this place is a dump."
The university I taught at wasn't in the city proper. If you didn't know where it was, you'd never see it. It was a mile or two up a hill and when you were there you felt you were in the countryside. There were rice paddies farmed by Miao farmers, hills with nothing on them but long grass, horse-drawn carts, mangy dogs, and a huge reservoir I never saw the other side of that I swam in every morning. 
On days off, I'd ride into the city on my heavy, black bicycle that had hand brakes operated by solid metal rods. Nothing in the city was like anything I'd experienced in other cities, but after some months there and thanks to the few other western teachers I knew (there were so few of us, just around seven, that we all knew each other and did things together) I found some western things I liked. Penguin Classics and chocolate bars at the Friendship Store. A grocery store that sold ground coffee and British style biscuits.
And a bakery run by an enterprising man from Hong Kong that sold pastries like the one here. They were a Chinese version of English style pastries and for all I know they're perfect, but aren't for me.
After shopping and wandering around for the day, I'd sometimes buy one and take it back with me. I'd take it into the house I shared with two other teachers. We each had our own sections of the house, with a bedroom, living room and bathroom. On chilly nights, dirty from my day in the city the long, uphill ride home, I'd take a trickle, as I'd call it because of the extremely low water pressure, and eat my pastry with a cup of tea before going to bed. 
It wasn't good but it at least resembled something I'd get back in the States, even though I rarely did (I've always been a fairly healthy eater).
It was, in other words, comfort food, and now with a terminal illness it falls into the category of food I've been eating more of lately.
I doubt I'll be eating any more of these, though. One every two decades is enough and, as I said, it didn't taste good to me.

The Loser blew it in China

The Complete and Total Loser taught English for a year in China. The year was 1985 and the city he was in was Guiyang. The word Guiyang means “precious sun” because there was so little of it and the Lonely Planet travel guide began its brief description of it by saying, “Frankly, this place is a dump.” It was not a popular destination for tourists. The Loser liked it because of that. He wasn’t always being hustled for money by people on the street. Also, to do anything on his own he needed to learn at least some Chinese. He’s bad at languages but he found that the best way to learn about the city and the language was to go out, wander around and let himself get lost.
The Loser had a long break during the summer halfway through his year there. He headed east. A major leg of his trip was along the Yangtze River, which flows that way. It’s the longest river in Asia and this was before they built a huge hydroelectric dam on it. He traveled by river boat. Most of the people on it were Westerners, like him, and most of them were Europeans.
The trip took about five days and one evening the boat pulled into Wuhan and tied up at a dock. They were to stay there for the night because the next day’s trip was scenic and too dangerous to navigate in the dark. They all got off to see a bit of the city. The Loser had become friendly with two Swedish women about his age—mid 20s. He liked their great accents, and they got off to walk around together. Being the cautious sort, he used his limited Chinese to make sure the boat was staying there that night. He asked a guy who worked on the boat and he said yeah, which he said in Chinese. He said other things that were beyond the Loser’s listening ability so he just smiled and nodded idiotically as if he understood. People always tell y0u more than you want to know.
The women and the Loser walked around the city enjoying ourselves, with him using his language skills to get around, sample street food and buy little things. Most of what they did was just talk and people watch. It was a hot city and a hot time of year but it felt nice. They wandered out of sight of the dock, but they could hear a boat horn in the distance. It was a little romantic, the Loser thought.

He started having a funny, new feeling. There he was with two nice women—Europeans!—and guiding them and talking and feeling sure of himself. And they were listening to him and looking at him when he spoke. He realized that this new feeling was confidence. He’d never any confidence with women but now the Loser felt an inkling of what it’s like to be a cool, smart guy who does. He was feeling that a page may have turned in his life, that knowing how this felt would take root and grow and become a part of his nature and that he would soon take his place among others and live the life of the man he was meant to be. The Loser would be the kind of man who approaches any situation with self assurance and poise. He would be, not the kind of man who reads GQ and Esquire magazines; He’d be the kind of man who doesn’t need to read GQ and Esquire. He would be the kind of man who can wear sunglasses without feeling that people are laughing at him behind his back, and who can put his hands on his hips sometimes instead of in his pockets. He’d be the kind of man who would one day buy—and wear—a leather jacket.
By the time the three of us walked back to the dock the Loser wasn’t walking with his shoulders hunched, looking down a few feet in front of me. Instead he was looking far out into the wide river with my head held high. And that’s where our boat was. It had left the dock. He’d been wrong and now the three of were lost in China.
The women looked at the Loser now with faces contorted with fear, worry and anger. “You said it was going to stay here all night!” one said, her accent no longer appealing.
The Loser had the usual response that men use when they’re flat-out wrong: “No!”
They ran to the dock and shouted and waved and we could see tiny figures waving back as the boat chugged away. Someone had written on the dock in a bizarre language. Swedish. It was one of the women’s friends and the message said they’d wait for them in the next city if they could get a boat or bus there. None of them knew how they’d get to that city. They were screwed and the Loser felt two inches tall.
The story has a happy ending because it turned out that he wasn’t completely wrong. The boat stayed in Wuhan that night but not at that dock. It went down river a mile or so to moor until morning so other boats could use the dock. It was probably what the Chinese man had been trying to tell the Loser. The women found a Chinese man who spoke English and through him they found someone with a small boat who took us out to our boat. The other Swedes on the boat, the ones who’d left the message, said they did their best to get the boat to wait for them and even got them to blast the horn.
In those days when you traveled with someone for a few days, you’d usually exchange addresses with them when you parted. It was the 1985 equivalent of liking someone on Facebook. You’d write a postcard, maybe two just saying hi, it was nice to meet you. In this case, though, the women the Loser had nearly stranded in China didn’t ask for his and he didn’t dare ask for theirs.
It was a happy ending because they found their way home. But when it comes to women, the Loser has been lost ever since.

The Loser is Guilty

Wouldn't it be great if you could turn emotions on and off? The Complete and Total Loser's first choice would be guilt, for it is the recollection of guilt, unlike sadness or anger, that makes you feel it with the same thigh-pounding sting you felt just after your transgression even years later. Its nearest equivalent in that sense would be embarrassment.
The Loser, being ever a Loser, has much guilt, often over small things his victims have surely forgotten by now. Ripping up the sole print of his baby picture in 1971. A broken lunch date with a friend in China in 1985. There are times the Loser wishes everyone he's ever known vanished. Of course, the bereft loved ones they'd leave behind would only compound his agony.
And lacking any degree of empathetic foresight, he'd continue to offend.
Even small things wake him at night. Take this stink bug pictured above. Tiresome, non-native American pests, the Loser finds a few a day for days in a row, crawling slowly about his apartment, buzzing his small reading light at night. They're harmless, no threat to people or crops. They just crawl around, often stopping and calmly dying where they stand.
Not the one here. Oh no. The Loser put it outside on a fairly warm day. In other seasons that gives the creatures more than a sporting chance. But on this day, the forecast was for bitter cold that night, and the Loser knew it.
Guilt.

How to Lose Weight

He's getting fat, the Complete and Total Loser. He was fat before, and lost it. This was eight years ago. Now his weight has crept back up and he's had to loosen his belt a notch. His clothes don't fit. When he walks down the hall at work he feels parts of himself rubbing together. His aging knees hurt. Three flights of steps leave him panting.

An overweight man struggles to fit in a train seat.

So much is known about weight control, how to lose weight, the right foods to eat. He wonders in his stupid loser head how he let twenty pounds of fat adhere to his never svelte frame.
He'll lose this weight. His motivation is high; he has so many strikes against him he can't control (bald, short, poor, crippled, bad personality) that this one thing he can control, he will.
When dieting he remembers the best advice about food he's heard in his life. It was in China, when he lived there for a year in the mid-1980s, and came from a Chinese man who was in his mid 50s yet had a physique he envied as a 25-year old. It is this: "Better always to be a little bit hungry."
A dozen years later he bought an early Arnold Schwarzenegger movie most laughed at derisively, yet it has one scene in which the future governor talks about eschewing comfort and luxury and how wanting to accomplish more makes you live life more fully. The movie is "Stay Hungry."