Esperanto and a Drug Proposition

In China, traveling by hard seat on trains is always a good way to meet people. The trip home from Guangzhou was no different. The 10:45 pm train was SO so crowded that there were people trying to squeeze onto seats that weren't theirs, people squatting down on the floor, people everywhere. I was seated on the opposite side of the aisle from Nhu and Jenna, surrounded by four university student-age friends. I tried to make small talk with them, but after first insulting them because I thought they were speaking Cantonese but really they were speaking Changsha dialect, and then asking a few questions and discovering that they neither went to university nor worked and that they lived in Changsha but had just come to Guangzhou to "play" for the weekend, I gave up. I had the aisle seat, but the girl next to me let me take the window so that I could sleep and she could play cards with her friends. Nice. She was cute, small, and had lots of small tattoos on her wrists, hands, and shoulders, strange for a young girl in China.

I slept on and off until 3 am, when I woke up and stared out the window for a while. The girl next to me asked to switch back seats if I wasn't going to sleep, and I let her have her seat back. Then, this older man across from me struck up a conversation. He asked the usual questions, where I was from and what I was doing here, before explaining that he was a teacher of English and Esperanto at the Changsha Foreign Language Institute. CRAZY. Esperanto* is the world language that I knew was invented some time ago and was supposed to incorporate lots of different languages but never really caught on.

Anyway, so I was really interested and kept talking to this teacher. His spoken English was not so good -- his main foreign language was Esperanto -- and so we continued the conversation in Chinese. He taught me some words in Esperanto (Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? = Can you speak Esperanto? and Kiel vi (fartas)? = How are you? and Dankon = Thank you). I asked him about how useful he thought it was and he said it was SO useful because you could go anywhere in the world with it; he said with English you can only go to the UK or the US, but with Esperanto you can go anywhere because people all over the world speak it. I listened carefully, but thought about how so many more people all over the world speak English and so if you speak that, then you're pretty set. He said that Esperanto has also helped him to be able to study new languages, and to get to know some really good people from other cultures. He and some students were just coming back from an international Esperanto conference (either in Guangzhou or Hong Kong, I didn't ask).

Then I talked to one of his students for a while in English so that she could practice. She told me how Esperanto was a designed as an international second language so that it would be EVERYONE's second language, and we'd all be on a level playing field. Like there wouldn't be native speakers, like the US and UK have with English, and everyone would just have started from the same place, and so when they communicated in Esperanto, it would be with a level of mutual understanding that they both had worked hard to learn this new language, along with a tolerance for the other person's culture. I thought that was a nice, idealist, good international relations kind of a goal, I just didn't know how practical it was, given that it had been around for a while and not caught on really. She kept saying how nice Esperanto speakers were and how English speakers were not so nice. Just to make sure she realized it, I said that this observation made sense because of the differences in the makeup of the pool of people she was sampling. There are so many English speakers that of course some are going to be good and some are going to be bad; furthermore, the people who have studied Esperanto are more likely to be those who are on the more open and international-minded side. So yeah.

*In case you were wondering, Esperanto was invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof of what is now Poland but was at that time part of the Russian Empire as a universal second language in order to foster peace and international understanding. I looked it up just now and Wikipedia says that the vocabulary comes from the Romance and Germanic languages while the phonology comes from Slavic languages and there is evidence that learning Esperanto first is better preparation for later language learning than learning any other single language. Makes sense. There are between 100,000 and 2 million (what an insane range, I know) fluent speakers, and about 1000 native speakers of Esperanto.

One of the girls in my section (the university-age people) was trying to listen and understand what we were talking about, but her English wasn't good enough to chime in. I felt bad leaving her out of the conversation and so when the other girl left to go to the bathroom, I asked her what she had understood and she told me and then I was like yeah, wow, your English is so good, and then told her what we'd been talking about in Chinese. And then the cute, tattooed girl next to me woke up and we all talked together. She said her name was So-So*, but that wasn't her real name, even these friends she was hanging out with didn't know her real name. After a bit, she typed it into her phone and showed me her real name, which she hated. I felt privy to a big secret and it made me feel special. She was only 19 and an interesting mix of child-like innocence and grown-up-world hardness. There was something about her that really attracted me, some mysteriousness that made me want to learn more about her. She showed me pictures of her and her boyfriend on her phone, and when I expressed interest in seeing more, she took out a Keropi sticker book (like Hello Kitty, kid stuff) and showed me her collection of sticker pictures of her and him together. They had been together for more than three years (which struck me as very grown up), and she was going back to Changsha for his birthday. I asked her for her favorite songs and she wrote some down for me. We teased back and forth about stupid stuff, like watching each other sleep, using a lot of the same teasing/kiddy phrases that little kids use to tease each other (我不理你！- I'm not talking to you! and 不要碰我！- Don't touch me!) and those kinds of silly children's jokes.

They were all rich and lived the party life. Soso played Usher, Lil Jon, and Ludacris' "Yeah!" on her phone and I was tapping my feet to it and she asked if I liked to dance. I said yes, and asked if they went out dancing (clubbing) a lot in Changsha. She said yes and said that if I wanted to come I was invited. Then she asked me if I did "anything else" and I didn't understand. I thought I had heard wrong, or missed some part of the conversation for the context of that question. After she said it again three times, and I was like eh? What do you mean? Can you say that again? She finally was like... "you know, other stuff, other stuff, like [smoking motion]". And I was like (in my mind) OOOOOOOOH! DRUGS! and my eyes got big and I was like NOOOOO, I don't do that stuff. And she was like cool. And we went back to our conversation about music.

Interesting. I'm kind of proud of the fact that I got close enough to a stranger in China that I was offered (kind of) access to drugs. Yay for my Chinese getting better! :)

Before I got off the train, the teacher gave me his card and told me that if I wanted to teach Spanish, they had an opening, and he would love it if I would come teach there. I told him I was most likely going to study Chinese in Nanjing next year, but that I would pass the news along. So, if you want to teach Spanish in China in a REALLY awesome city, let me know and I'll hook you up! :)

Guangzhou - Green Grass and Students' Love

Nhu is now 22! For her birthday, the three of us took a trip to Guangzhou for the weekend. Ligaya (the Xining vol), Tracy (her girlfriend), and Ben (the Guangzhou vol) all just happend to be there too (because of the VIA Post Switch, where two VIA vols at different posts switched jobs for a week, so Ligaya and Tracy were on their last day in Guangzhou and Ben was just coming home from Xining, so awesome that their trips overlapped). It was SOOOOO nice to see all of them!

The most interesting thing about my impression of the city of Guangzhou is how green it is -- we spent so much time in parks and on playgrounds. It was a really nice change from the usual concrete, glass, and pollution of other major cities in China. Our cab drivers complained about the pollution in general, but for the days we were there, the sky was blue and the weather was like 70 degrees. It was gorgeous.

Parks in China all come with not only normal playground stuff for kids like slides and seesaws, but also exercise equipment for adults. It's SOO awesome! There are people working out on the (just metal but always colorful) eliptical-type things, people doing sit-ups on the bench-y type thing, people doing quad leg lifts on that machine. It's not hard core by any means, but it's a pretty good workout for the old people who come. They even have a massager machine (like a swing-y thing with two rods with bumps) that you can use to massage your muscles out after. :)

This is me failing to do a straight-up chin-up. Sad, huh? I blame my shoulder. :) But yeah, all the muscles are gone... And those saggy, faded jeans in the picture? Yeah, I'd been wearing those every day for four weeks (yum) because they were the only jeans I had. Another awesome thing about Guangzhou is that it is the shopping capital of China! The next day, we just shopped till we dropped. I bought two near pairs of jeans, for a total of $9. Sweet, yeah? They're tight and short. Yay for China! I like them short because then they don't skim the dirty ground or get wet in the cafeteria (GROSS), so it works out. No one in China cares what I look like anyway. :)

We were just park maniacs, and after dim sum, we spent the rest of the day at Yuexiu Park in the middle of the city. We found a nice grassy hillside overlooking a river and sat down to just take it all in. It was so nice to see GRASS. WOW. I never knew how much I loved and appreciated the feeling of grass under my feet. I just wanted to roll around in it and slide down the hill, but I was scared I wouldn't be able to stop myself and would just keep going into the river at the bottom, haha, so I settled for doing cartwheels and jumping up to try to touch tree branches. SO FUN! :)

The best thing about the whole trip was Ben's students putting on a surprise Welcome Back Ben/Farewell Ligaya and Tracy party. Ben works at GETCH, Guangzhou English Training Center for the Handicapped, and he has about 60 or so students, among whom he has lived and worked for the last year and a half. He's an amazing guy, really has a special gift, and he would do anything for his students. They, in turn, love him to death, and rely on him for a lot of help, whether it be calling him to come help carry their groceries home or just asking him to take the time to listen to their individual battles with having a handicap in a handicap-averse country like China. It's pretty tough sometimes, but at the same time I feel it was moments like this night that make his job/post so rewarding.

Ben had just gotten back from Xining and all night, his students were like "Ben, why'd you come back? We didn't even miss you!" (kind of sad, yeah?) and Ben was just like :( but then around 9 pm, we heard singing and one of his students told him (and us) to look outside. Ben lives on the fifth floor, so we looked down over the balcony onto the open/play area and all his students were standing in a heart-shape holding up their cell phones (it was dark so it was magical) singing 月亮代表我的心 (the song Nhu and I sang at that hengyang foreign teachers banquet - yueliang daibiao wo de xin) and it was just so amazing. So moving. I thought I was going to cry, and the party wasn't even for me! Haha... then we all gathered in the meeting room and there were snacks and drinks on the table and the students had put together a program of mini games and contests, SO fun, dancing and singing contests, and it was just hilarious. The dance party was great. :)

The rest of the trip went by quickly, as we just went shopping all day the next day, ate at a vegetarian restaurant (which was SOOO ono, I was blown away), and then took a train home. Good trip. :)