Posted from: Beijing
I don’t really understand what’s happening.
Russel pointed out once – and yeah, ok, this has probably been widely circulated in some chain email and has lost all its novelty to everyone else but me – but Russel pointed out that Keanu Reeves has exactly two facial expressions: confused and determined. In which case my hair just got shorter, my eyes got beadier, and my chin just got more feminine, ‘cause it’s been one or the other all day.
School started again. I’d try to write something about the in-pouring of fresh-cheeked youth, the burgeoning classrooms, old women gibbering through tai-chi forms on the tennis courts, but really I was just happy they cleaned all the sunflower shells and used sanitary products out of the gutters before the semester got going.
Also: am tired of child-poo. Am especially tired of child-poo on the sidewalk. Note to China: Crotchless pants bad. Diapers good. The 21st century has arrive-ed.
Anyway, that’s really where the trouble lies. School started again, easy as that. I mean, what happened to Red Tape, Official Office Product of the Communist Party? No ripping out tufts of hair in the advisor’s office. Not a single uniformed bureaucrat took it upon themselves to stamp my forehead with the school seal. No one demanded admission forms, eye of newt, or a fingernail clipping from the left hand of God.
After you’ve lived in China long enough, procedural smoothness doesn’t so much leave you at ease as it does leave you waiting for Godot.
Our Comprehension teacher, who Marta and I initially pegged as “stupidly loping”, turned our text (originally intended by the authors to incite us to bolt out of class and force a huge wad of money into the palms of conveniently loitering CCP treasurers) into a lecture about the grammatical intricacies of the phrase “tear down statues of Chairman Mao.” So yeah, things are looking up until his summary destruction, and his replacement arrives carrying a songbook and a very proletarian tape recorder.
