Getting bikini-ready

This will be my last post for a while. I will be heading to the jungles and beaches of Thailand and Cambodia for my month-long New Year’s vacation. In the meantime, I am spending this week in Changde with my boyfriend in preparation for the trip: Booking hostels and beach resorts and, more importantly, getting my winterized body ready for a bikini.

Fortunately for me, my boyfriend recently joined a newly renovated gym near his apartment. I went for the first time three nights ago for a spinning class. I have never tried spinning, but I thought to myself, I know how to ride a bike, so how hard could it be?

Spinning, it turns out, is torture. The worst part is that the class is in a small room enclosed in glass, so everyone in the gym walking by or on a treadmill can witness the pain. The bicycles have these heavy metal wheels that can only be stopped by pressing a level under the handlebars. A couple times I tried to stop and nearly toppled off the bike.

“Are you OK?” my boyfriend asked over the thumping bass of the music.

I turned around on my bike seat and looked back at him. “This is hell,” I said.

“It’s only been five minutes.”

Forty minutes to go. I considered faking a stomach cramp and slipping out the door, but I knew I would get hell for it from my boyfriend. So I tried to tap into that burst of energy I experienced the last mile of the Chicago Marathon, when I was so exhausted I could have collapsed to my knees but instead pressed on, saying to myself like a mantra, “Forward, forward, forward.” I could do it then, after 25 miles, so I could do it now on a stationary bike amidst flashing disco lights.

That burst of energy didn’t come. I struggled. I panted. My thighs quivered. I did not even try to hide my exhaustion. I pedaled slower than everyone else. A chubby man in glasses on the bike next to me pointed to the black knob on my bike frame and said, “You can turn it to the left to make it easier.” Even he, that chubby, bespectacled man, was pedaling faster than me.

I tried to focus on the thumping bass, tried to bring a foot down with each beat. I was a little behind the beat, but the music drove me to pump faster than I would have otherwise. So, song by thumping song, I got through the Spinning Class from Hell.

Encouraged that I survived spinning without making (too much of) a fool of myself, I agreed to try an aerobic dance class last night. For a non-dancer, I can honestly say, OK, not too shabby. The directions were pretty straightforward. Side step, side step, hop hop, shimmy shimmy, shake your butt (pictured above). Repeat.

Next on the agenda: Pole-dancing class.

For once, a sunny Sunday

The weather this Sunday was unseasonable warm, a preview of spring. The timing was perfect for the students because Sunday afternoons are the only times they do not have to be in the classroom. People shed their coats and came out of hibernation from indoors. Here was the scene from this afternoon

Learning Chinese with my chopsticks

One of the delights of living in China is eating Chinese food. For someone who cannot handle her hot food, I have learned to tame the chili pepper. And as my concentration has shifted away from trying to control watery eyes and sneezing from the spiciness, I can now eat meals and listen to the words flowing around me.

The scene from last night: At a restaurant near the school is myself, my upstairs neighbors -- who I call big brother and big sister, my Chinese tutor Mr. Tang and his wife Mrs. Mo, and Ms. Huang and another Mr. Tang, a couple that teaches at my school.

We have a room to ourselves and the table is full. Our dinner: Lamb hotpot with rice noodles and spinach, Japanese-style tofu, eggplant and green beans, beef with hot peppers, pig stomach soup, spicy duck and river fish. Not to mention the three kinds of alcohol: Bai jiu (white rice wine), huang jiu (yellow rice wine) and tian jiu (sweet rice wine.) Yes, Chinese people love their rice so much that they eat and drink it.

My greatest Chinese lessons have come from such dinners. As I stuff my face, my ears stay open. What was once a gurgle of consonants in throats now carry meaning. The stock went up up up and then down down down ... My son is in Wuhan, on break from graduate school ... If you want your child to get better grades, you must tell the teacher to move him to the front of the classroom.

My dinner companions shift from putonghua -- standard Mandarin -- to a variety of dialects. I can't understand every word they say, but the idea is there. I know when they are talking about money or education or food. Usually the topic falls within those three categories. I can follow the string of conversation, from "Ms. Zhou's son has a fever," to, "Did you hear about so-and-so's husband dying of cancer," to "Drinking wine everyday is good for your health."

I only wish my Mandarin were good enough to put in my two cents. On the other hand, being the silent observer has its perks: My chopsticks are always moving.

And now Miss Lee covers The Beatles

To be honest, I don't have a singing voice. On top of that, I have horrible stage fright. But before the New Year's break, I found myself in front of about a thousand junior students and teachers singing to a karaoke version of 'Hey Jude."

'Hey Jude' is not one of my favorite Beatles songs. It is, however, within my vocal range and familiar to the students -- The song had been playing for weeks over the campus loudspeakers. I figured if the students didn't understand the words, at least they would recognize the tune.

So in the days before the performance, I practiced my heart out. I recorded my voice, critiqued my pitch and tried my best to imitate Paul McCartney's phrasing. In the end, I don't think all the work was necessary. The students would've been happy if I just clapped and hummed a tune. They're very accepting.

The rest of the show was a mix of traditional Chinese folk dances and some very non-traditional hip-hop/pop/break dancing that made me wonder to myself at what age it was appropriate to wear midriffs and sequin short-shorts. (The junior students are 12-14.)



For a culture as conservative as China's, the show at some points was straight-up pornographic. Girls simulated sex moves by thrusting their hips back and forth. They dropped down to their knees in front of boy dancers and shimmied up to their feet. Sitting next to the headmaster, I wondered what was going through his head. Then I looked at the younger kids watching the show. Was this what they would hope to dance like and look like when they went through puberty?

Compared to the all the butt-shaking going on, my performance was probably the tamest. No skin (I wore a turtleneck) and certainly no movement waist-down. But also no booing, so I'll call that a success.

Beijing: Culture School

I have been a bad blogger. Nearly a month without a post. A little about my week in Beijing with my brother. More on the way.

Beijing in December is bitterly, ruthlessly cold. Through a down coat and double layers of pants, I still felt the wind cut through. A bit of Chicago in China, I suppose. That's the bad news about Beijing. The good news: The bitter, ruthless cold drives away tourists this time of year, so my brother and I had most of the country's great landmarks to ourselves.

We visited nearly all of the great sites. This was what I called a cultural self-education. The trip was particularly special because it was my brother's first time to China -- and I don't count our trip to Taiwan two years ago as visiting China, although most Chinese would probably disagree with me.

Our first stop was Forbidden City, home of emperors during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. For all its hype, the palace complex exceeded our expectations. Here I felt China -- at least during those 500 years the palace was occupied -- was the center of the world. We wandered hall after elaborate hall. The Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Hall of Central Harmony and then the Hall of Preserved Harmony and many, many more. All the halls just started to blend together in the end. I wondered how the eunuchs were able to find their way around back in the day. The English audio tour my brother and I listened to gave brief descriptions of each structure, but I can't tell you much now. What I can say is, standing on that ground, I was proud to be Chinese.



The feeling of awe continued at the Summer Palace, the playground of the emperors, and at the Temple of Heaven, the sacrificial alter to the powers above. Here the building for cleaning and killing the animals, the tracks to wheel them through the complex, and notice here the nine steps and nine circles of the Circular Mound Alter. The precision of the temple's construction and the complexity of the rituals struck a curious contrast to Chinese life now. In most Chinese cities I have visited, there is no order. There is no such thing as waiting in lines; there are cars that play chicken with pedestrians. I savored the quiet of the former slaughtering ground.

The Great Wall was my favorite. We climbed the stretch at Badaling, the most touristy part of the Wall but not packed on this day. It was so windy that I gripped the handrails as we climbed up or slid/ran down for a couple hours. Panting, calves sore, we stopped often for water and Oreo breaks and took in the scene. It wasn't the Wall so much as the view around us that made me think how far away I was from home and how exhilarating that was.

Dear pen pal

I got an enthusiastic "YEAH" when I asked my tenth grade students if they wanted to make American friends. Tucked under my arm was a first-class envelope from the USA; inside, 60 letters from eighth graders at a south-side Chicago school, the cause of weeks of my students' anticipation.

My friend is a teacher in Chicago. Before I even started teaching in China, we started discussing having our students be pen pals. Many of his students have lived in Chicago their whole lives and most have never left the city. The same with my students. The furthest they have gone may be the school we are at now. A pen pal would show them a slice of the world that they aren't able to see themselves. My friend and I weighed the option of going electronic. It would take less time and cost less money to send. But we are both a bit old-fashioned when it comes to these things and in the end we both favored traditional snail mail. There's an intimacy in handwritten letters that an e-mail just can't capture, a bit of magic in "being able to open letters that traveled all that distance," he pointed out.

Last week I picked up from the school office a plump cushioned envelope containing the letters and eight snapshots of the students in their classroom. The Chicago students introduced their families, listed their hobbies and asked what life was like in China or, as one student put it, "over there." They wrote about Chicago, nicknamed "The Windy City." "Probably because it gets really windy," one boy wrote. Another student wrote that Chicago has "a lot of big buildings. Like the Sears Tower in Down Town Chicago. We eat a lot of greasy food, which is why we are the fattest country in the world. What about you?"

The Chicago students' curiosity was evident in their questions. All kinds of questions, about family, school life, the Olympics (Did you see the Olympics? ... I saw the Olympics and it was really cool.) In one letter (in fact, in just one paragraph alone) a girl asked, "What is your favorite sport or thing to do? What kinds of food do you like? What things are popular in China? How's life and do you have any problems?"

Sentence by sentence, my students uncovered the meanings behind the crooked, rounded or scrunched up letters that looked so unfamiliar to their own neat script. Sometimes we ran into cultural hurdles, words that not even their dictionaries could explain. One Chicago student wrote, "How are you? I'm feeling chipper." ("Um, it's like really happy," I translated.) "And what are enchiladas?" one of my students asked about her pen pal's favorite food. My crude explanation: They're like flat pieces of bread with meat and sauce in the middle. It's a kind of Mexican food.

My students eagerly offered their friendship, as well as services as tour guides in the future. "If you come to China, I can act as your guide." They suggested seeing the Great Wall and offered to take their new friends to their hometowns for delicious food. They closed their letters with "Welcome to China."

Wandering the streets of old China

My school gives us weeklong breaks every month. I know, it's a bit ridiculous. It's an awful schedule for learning but an awesome one for making quick trips within the province, which is what I did last weekend.

Feng Huang -- which means phoenix -- has retained much of the feeling of ancient China, especially in its architecture. Overlapping rounded shingles, curved rooftop eaves, carvings of fish and animals, a Red Wall now faded to a muddied crimson. If you can ignore the Las Vegas neon lights at night, the village is quaint and quite charming.

Feng Huang is home to the Miao ethnic minority group. Tiny old women in turban-like hats hawk colorful woken mats and scarves and silver trinkets. It's easy to get lost (which we did the first night) in the narrow side streets and alleys lined with shops that sell more woken scarves, more silver trinkets, rice wine and candied kiwi slices (highly addictive).

Along the river, tourists can pay 3 RMB (the equivalent to about 50 cents) to don the attire of the ancients. OK, probably not even close to the attire of the ancients since these costumes were made of polyester, but I still felt like a princess for 30 minutes. (Yes, that's me in hot pink and sneaks.)



Maybe it's residual Maoist militarism -- it was also popular for women to dress up in olive military uniforms adorned with red Commy stars and pose with plastic machine guns. (Peek through the bushes like you're about to ambush the Japs!)

My favorite part of this trip (and probably my favorite part of life) was eating. At night the streets line up with outdoor grills with a sizable display of skewered vegetables, meats and tofu, noodles and rice, whole fish. Without the grill, it would look just like an outdoor market. The great thing about this type of ordering is you don't have to say a word, just place the skewers in a plastic basket and the man behind the grill will prepare to perfection with some sauces and spices.



The village is ideal for being lazy. Eat late, sleep in and walk around aimlessly. Click below for more photos from the trip.