I'd been put in charge of organizing the staff Christmas
dinner/Secret Santa gift exchange. We
had a generous budget of 2000 RMB. My
Chinese still isn't good enough to make reservations over the phone, so I had
to ask one of my awesome coworkers to do it for me. Only two of my coworkers couldn't attend--one
was ill, the other was on annual leave.
I have to admit the Secret Santa thing was kind of exciting. I'd drawn my boss, a lovely Filipina lady who
is Catholic like myself, so I grinned as I tied a red "Jesus is the Reason
for the Season" ribbon onto her gift bag.
I'd gotten her a lovely tropical plant and a seaweed mask, which I
thought was fitting for an islander.
Saturdays tend to be a bit rough for me sometimes. I usually start at 10:40 am with three
classes in a row. The good thing is that
I'm usually done one or two hours before most of the other teachers. Two of my American coworkers joined me down
at Mingyue for a quick "pre-game"
beer while the staff took their time prepping the table for two large hotpots.
There were these big ceramic bowls with sort of metal
chimneys sticking up in the middle--like a volcano or something. Full of charcoal, the chimneys had waves of
heat and tiny trails of smoke coming out the top; the water in the ceramic
bowls was at full seething boil. One
bowl was the spicy one, and the other one was flavored with milder stuff.
We trooped out to make our own dipping sauces; there was a
buffet of ingredients: chili sauce,
vinegar, scallions, Chinese parsley, chopped nuts, sesame seeds, sesame oil,
sesame paste, garlic, etc. Literally 30
small salad bowls full of different things to create your own potion. I'm a fan of sesame oil, so I loaded up on
that, among other things.
I know it sounds obvious, but the hotpots were REALLY hot by
the time we returned to the room. They made our faces turn red. In
broken Chinese, I asked my coworkers to name many of the ingredients, cold
and/or raw on their plates waiting to be cooked. It was fun to throw in thinly sliced beef or
pork, prawns, lotus root, yam, winter melon, pre-cooked quail eggs, and lots of
other stuff--and then fish it out! It was like camping, in a way, which I
adore. Just trying to get the
eggs, for example, out of the boiling, oily water with chopsticks took more
skill than eating should have to take. We
giggled or groaned, trying to help each other.
Eventually, we all had to get plastic Chinese soup spoons, and even my
Chinese coworkers used them.
I begged forgiveness for peeling the shells off my prawns
with my fingers--after two years in Micronesia, the idea of eating seafood with
a utensil was impossible, but I didn't want to offend my coworkers--who somehow
managed to neatly nibble the prawns out of their shells with delicately-held chopsticks. Every 20 or 30 minutes, a restaurant staffer
would enter the room with a huge steaming kettle of water and add some to the
bowls, making clouds of steam that evaporated quickly.
I may have been on my second or third Budweiser (which I
usually can't afford) when it was present time.
None of my Chinese coworkers celebrated Christmas, but they'd sure
gotten into the spirit. And they'd
gotten some great deals. Our Secret
Santa budget had been 50-60 RMB per gift, and some of my coworkers showed up
with huge tote bags full of stuff. I
really don't know how they'd done it--other than the fact that they were
locals, of course.
Another of my coworkers had made a silly paper crown for an
American guy who sits next to me in the office.
It had come down to Thai food or hotpot, and he'd successfully pushed the
vote for hotpot. "We have an
announcement--the King of Hotpot, everyone!" We laughed, and the coworker who'd made the
crown videoed the King's speech with her smart phone.
My gift was a solid cube of soap from L'Occitane that smelled
like linden. It was from the lone Brit
in our office, who would be leaving the next day. So far, two foreign teachers had left and two
had replaced them; the local turnover was higher, with four out and four
in. That's just in the six months I've
been working.
I still haven't made any solid decisions about my future
here. My contract is up in July
2014. I hate the pollution, and there is
a painful awareness of just how many people 20 million is when you must push
your way through them on a daily basis.
But I've met and/or seen Chinese, American, Irish, Italian, Kiwi, Canadian,
Indian, and German ex-pats, just to name a few.
I love the diversity. There's a
Chinese man I met who's been teaching English to Maori children in New
Zealand. I've seen a beautiful Chinese
woman speaking German on her cell phone.
I've listened to Johnny Cash and Enya while eating lunch at a restaurant
named Southern Belle with an Aussie and a Brit from my Chinese class. I love knowing THE WORLD EXISITS--something
that we don't really KNOW in Spokane, I'm sorry to say.
At the same time, I long for crisp blue skies; for an all-day
chat with my sister over a cinnamon roll from the Rocket; for the purr of my cat
next to my ear as he sleeps; and for the absence of constant construction
noise. Everywhere I've been, everything
I've seen--nothing compares to the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, it's
mountains and its trees, its clear streams and quiet hiking trails. I can't imagine living in Shanghai forever,
that's for darn sure!
No comments:
Post a Comment