How Much Is a Smile Worth?

This small village in Yunnan Province has been here continuously for over 800 years. The bent old man walking steadily up the narrow stone-paved street is at least that old. At first, I can’t see his face. He wears a cap and carries a cloth rucksack and miner’s pickax over his shoulder. I gauge his height at slightly above my belly button; his shoulders and spine are bent but his stride is sure. As he passes alongside me standing on the sidewalk, he notices my gaze and stops, turning his neck sideways, and god smiles through him.

He pauses to unburden his shoulders and take in this strangely unoccupied white man. He seeks nothing and radiates incessantly from some unseen source. As he sits on the stoop of one of the tourist shops edging the lane, I notice that he is of the local Na Xi nation, not the Han race comprised by most Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etcetera. His face is dark brown. His hands are black. The shop owner leans over the counter from inside and asks him firmly but politely to move away. The man glances at him only briefly, dismissing him with a friendly wave of his hand, as if to say, ”these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

The man looks up at me on the sidewalk and I can see that he knows I love him. We smile at each other for a while, and then he removes a recycled plastic bag from his rucksack and takes out a mangled lump of scrap metal. I can’t really see what it is. It’s gold colored and twisted and he holds it in his hand unassumingly, smiling at me as if to say, “isn’t this cool?” I ask, “what is it?” and he makes some hand gestures, but doesn’t speak. I sit down next to him on the stoop. I am neither his son nor his brother. I am simply a fellow traveler.

I hold this gem in my hand and inspect it appreciatively. It’s been melted and pounded. I can see a pattern of screw threads, torn apart, inside the mutilated lump–a conquered fragment of reason. He signals that I can have this for five yuan (75 cents), and I nod and look it over some more. He shows me a brass hinge from his bag, sharing art with a connoisseur. I pat my hand on his knee and hand him a ten-yuan note, ecstatic with my purchase, and wonder in awe at the question, how much is a smile worth?

Part 4: Cheese (or if you prefer: Pizza)

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what the fourth food group was (after coffee, wine, and cigars). But I’ve heard so many friends abroad say “I can’t live without cheese” that I had to go with it. And then if there was any doubt, just thinking about pizza clinched it.

Getting cheese in China is a problem. The regular supermarkets usually have a small shelf or two a couple feet wide with processed cheese slices and that’s it.

Not sure there's any cheese here.

I found some real cheese at one store which had exactly two choices from Land O’ Lakes: cheddar or mozzarella. There are a few western stores (not in my neighborhood) that have expensive imports and one can find a few real cheeses there. Then there are some fake-out cheeses, such as the “brie” I bought that was labeled in Germany. Brie comes from France, I thought. But hey, from the point of view of China, this is like the difference between Illinois and Indiana. Anyway, it was really bad—barely edible. The only thing in common with brie was that it did have a crust.

The cause of difficulty in making a pizza in China is not clear to me. One needs wheat flour, tomatoes, perhaps garlic, and of course cheese. But really, under these circumstances, one could certainly settle for mediocre bulk mozzarella, and that is available here.

So what goes wrong? Well, the first challenge is to somehow keep the flour, dough, and crust free from sugar. This is strangely almost impossible. I suspect there is some maxim that adding sugar makes things better. Whatever the reason, sugar magically appears in the strangest places. I picked out a beautifully toasted piece of garlic bread in a coffee shop bakery, made with butter on French baguette. Perfect. I could hardly wait to take my first bite. Damn! Sugar. Foiled again.

Pizza Hut is the second most common restaurant chain here after KFC. I finally decided to try it (I like Pizza Hut just fine in the US) and called a number for delivery where an English-speaking person gets on the phone. I could not order a plain cheese pizza—not available. So I ordered some “Italian” pizza with preset toppings. To make a long story short, receiving my pizza required about six phone calls and my presence outside on the street in front of my apartment complex. When I got back home, the pizza was a bizarre concoction containing no tomatoes or tomato sauce but lots of barbecue sauce. It was awful, and nothing like Pizza Hut pizza.

The funniest pizza story comes from my English friend Mark (“that’s so wrong on so many levels”) who was thrilled one evening to be ordering pizza at a purported good pizza restaurant. Menus commonly have lots of weird English mistakes, so when he saw “fruit pizza,” he thought they must have meant “vegetable pizza.” Being a vegetarian (in China? don’t ask me), he ordered the fruit pizza, thinking to himself, “there’s no way.”

Way! The pizza came topped with slices of orange, banana, and apple, and it was swimming in a large pool of water, an outcome predictable by any experienced cook. Mark sent it back and ordered a different pizza, which never came. This is one of the more dramatic illustrations of why I eat Chinese food in China.

Part 3: Up in Smoke—Cigars in China

My dream of walking down to the corner store in China and buying Cuban cigars was quickly shattered. [I promise to get back to students and teaching soon.] You might think that after leaving the US and its embargo against Cuba, there would be no problem. But in reality, many countries have high Cuban import taxes (e.g., Italy), some countries have high tobacco taxes in general, and a few do not have a sizable cigar-smoking population to support sales. As far as I can tell, China is in all of these categories.

I learned quickly that the Chinese basically don’t smoke cigars, with rare exception. I have heard from Chinese friends that cigars still vaguely belong to a surviving caricature of a capitalist high-roller and that Chinese who smoke them are suspected of doing so for image reasons. Cigarettes are everywhere, for as low as 70 cents a pack, and I did once find a pack of cigar-like cigarettes that tasted OK. One cigarette stand had a pack of five unrecognizable cigars, but they were so bad I threw them away after a few puffs.

The only place I’ve found real Cuban cigars is in super high-end western style hotels. They sometimes have a bar or small lobby shop with a humidor of good Cubans. The prices are exorbitant, though. A Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure #2 that one can reliably mail-order elsewhere for $8 costs $40 at our local Hyatt. I did slightly better at a different fancy hotel (not-so-randomly called the “Landisson”) where I had an awesome Bolivar Corona. I haven’t yet tried mail ordering from within China. Customs inspection and duties are pretty injurious here, but that’s a topic for another day.

One day when I was first here a Chinese regular at the café I frequent gave me a Cuban Cohiba. I was so excited! But it turned out to be fake. The label and the rolling quality were good, but it was not a Cuban cigar and tasted mediocre. I’m sure he didn’t know (he smokes cigarettes that cost $20 per pack), and I’ve since given him a real Cuban Montecristo #4. He seemed to really enjoy it, but I’m not sure about the details—he speaks only Chinese.

I recently found a very small cigar boutique kiosk in Hangzhou Tower, an upscale urban mall with perfume counters. First cause for concern: they sold only Cohiba, Davidoff, and Montecristo (these are the Gucci of cigar brands). I asked them to unlock the case, but even though the individual cigar boxes had all been opened, they would not sell single cigars. It was bizarre. I bet they sell no more than two boxes per month. In retrospect, I think they’re a gift shop. No actual cigar smoker would buy anything there.

Cuban cigar options in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is a totally different story—cigar city! When I visited recently for a couple of days, I spent a glorious afternoon with my friend Doug Shaw from California touring the cigar lounges—called divans—of Hong Kong. The first place we stopped was the famous Cohiba Cigar Divan in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. I smoked a Partagas Serie D Limited Edition at Doug’s suggestion, and of course it was fabulous. (The night before, I had had Hoya de Monterrey Epicure #1. The #2 has always been a favorite, but I have to say that there is something richer and pleasantly coarser about the #1.)

American Expats.

The divan is a small, elegant cave with seating for about eight and some standing room. We talked at length with a couple of intelligent and interesting expat Americans. On the other side of the room guys in ties were saying, “they have the margins all figured out and dialed in for about five years,” and “we own the properties, so it’s a pretty good one-off gain.”

The cigar taxes are weird in Hong Kong. Cigars there are pretty expensive, but if you buy cigars mail-order from outside of Hong Kong, they’re very cheap—go figure. So, I haven’t quite found that elusive corner cigar shop, but I’m enjoying the stops along the way. Next up…Part 4: Cheese Stinks in China. And then I promise to get back to adventures in teaching.

Part 2: The Veritas About Vino

“Very…OK,” is how my friend Todd described Chinese wine in a recent comment here. Chinese red wine is readily available and it is quite palatable, especially the better stuff served in restaurants with meals. It’s harder to choose in stores, and sometimes it’s pretty bad—kind of like crap-shooting the Trader Joe’s $5 shelf.

I’ve been to a few supermarkets with western items (such as Metro) that have a surprisingly rich selection of familiar wines from Chile, Argentina. South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and also France and Italy, roughly in the $10 and up range. I bought a selection of these and was surprised to find that many of them were not good–even wines that I considered reliable (e.g., Argentinian Malbec). I haven’t really figured this out yet, but my current theory is that these countries send their worst stuff to China on purpose. I hope that I’m wrong, but that’s what it seems like.

In the high-end supermarkets downtown, one can buy Margaux, St. Émilion, and Pomerol (for some reason, Bordeaux is in) for $60 a bottle. Cheap Bordeaux (the kind that Trader Joe’s has) is a good bet. In general, the best bang for the buck here is French table wine. Todd explained in his comment: “as I recall from my time there, the Chinese government brought in the French when they decided that ‘China will now make wine.’”

Chinese white wine is scarce. (There are stories of drunken debauchery involving something translated as “yellow wine,” but that’s made from rice and has higher alcohol content than white wine.) I’ve found some mediocre California chardonnay for about $17.

I had a funny wine experience at a high-end “café” restaurant here in the neighborhood that makes good versions of some western food, such as Lasagna Bolognese. I ordered a relatively expensive glass of red wine, and it was spoiled. I put the bad wine on the edge of the table and ordered beer with my meal. The full wine glass remained until I asked for the check. After telling them that the wine was bad (which I can say in both English and Chinese), there was much discussion behind the bar, resulting in a friendly and confident presentation of the bill with the expensive wine marked down to 80% of its original price. I said, “no, this wine was bad, so I won’t be paying for it,” which was a really radical concept for them, but they eventually dealt with it. Some young Chinese people at the next table who spoke English took a friendly interest and asked, “you do not like the wine?” I said, “no, I like the wine, but the wine is spoiled, like meat gone bad.” New concept.

Beer is yet another matter. Chinese beer is 2.5% alcohol (an ordinary beer is about 5%) and tastes lighter and thinner than the lightest, thinnest American beer.

This is how much it takes to feel a buzz.

The Tsingtao here is completely different from what’s exported. It’s OK as an inexpensive beverage with food, in place of, say, mineral water. Certain imports are commonly available—for example a drinkable version of Heineken. Then there are weird Chinese-made hybrids to be avoided, such as the “Budweiser” that is basically marked-up thin stuff in a bottle with a Budweiser label on it. I don’t yet understand what the point of that is.

So I get by with French table wine and Dutch beer at home, and I enjoy the Chinese wines and beers at restaurants.

Next…Part 3: The Unsolved Cigar Problem.

The Four Food Groups—Part 1: Coffee

When I moved to China two months ago, three of the four food groups were suddenly missing from my life and the fourth was seriously broken. That’s coffee, wine, cigars, and cheese. This is Part 1 of a four-part series. To set the stage…I love coffee and I’m expert at making it. Though I’ll happily drink generic coffee at Denny’s without complaining, at home I grind fresh-roasted whole beans and make a perfect brew.

So after landing in the school guest dorm, my first order of business was to figure out coffee. I had prepared for this eventuality. In my suitcase were a Melitta thermal carafe with cone and filters, a mill grinder, and a bag of Joebella gourmet coffee beans fresh-roasted in California. I had actually gone to the travel store in San Luis Obispo specifically to get a power converter for the coffee grinder. (It also works with my electric toothbrush.)

Let me explain that the Chinese do not “get” coffee. And yet there are coffee shops everywhere in Hangzhou. In a one-block radius around my neighborhood, there are about a dozen. Problem #1: none of them opens before 9:30 AM. These coffee shops appear in the form of a posh cocktail lounge-type establishment with modern-style sofas in spacious sitting areas served by trained professional staff in uniform. It’s very weird. Problem #2: the cheapest coffee—one cup, no refill—costs about five dollars, and it goes way up from there. It takes ten to fifteen minutes to make each cup.

So after almost 24 hours of traveling and a night in a student dorm bed, I was really excited as I set up all this equipment. I wasn’t just another addict smugly slapping the veins in his arm after successfully smuggling in some smack. I was a gourmet coffee expert smugly slapping the veins in his arm after successfully dragging a portable Starbucks to China in my suitcase.

So I carefully—almost ritualistically—placed the filter in the cone on top of the thermal carafe and prepared to grind the beans. I pushed the button on the grinder and…holy shit! The grinder broke!! God dammit. I couldn’t believe it. I pushed the button again and again, like a rat in a cage, and nothing happened. God DAMMIT! I opened the grinder lid and stared bleakly at the half-cracked beans. There had to be a way—necessity is the mother of invention, I encouraged myself. Mortar and pestle—no. Hmm, let’s see…I know! I pulled out my Leatherman multipurpose tool (every stagehand has one), which features a serious set of pliers. Excellent, I thought, I can manually crush the beans.

After five minutes of giving my Leatherman pliers the workout of their life…um, not so much. I’m here to tell you, though, that I persevered and poured sub-boiling fresh water through those barely-cracked-by-pliers beans. And it reminded me of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy asks Linus, “how’s the hot chocolate?” He responds, “it tastes like hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it.” Lucy offers pensively, “I better put in another brown crayon.”

It turned out, actually, that my grinder was not broken. I figured out the next day that it was just jammed—with the blade stuck electrically in the middle due to the 50 Hz power (instead of 60 Hz in the US). That’s my theory, anyway.

So the next task, a couple weeks later, was to try to find passable whole coffee beans. This is really bizarre…as I said, there are several coffee shops per block in my neighborhood with every kind of bean imaginable in jars behind the bar—Brazilian, Mandheling (Sumatra), Kenya AA, etc.—but coffee beans are not for sale anywhere. Over time, I found one or two friendly coffee shops that will sell beans to the funny begging American, but it’s nonstandard and almost all shops say “no” when asked. The grocery stores don’t even have ground coffee in a can—it’s instant only. (Starbucks has beans for about $50 a pound, which doesn’t count.) It turns out that the best way to buy coffee beans in China is over the Internet (which requires reading Chinese characters).

So between my Chinese friends at the café and my Chinese friends who shop online, I should be all set. I think I’ll have another cup of coffee.

Next…Part 2: The Veritas About Vino.

China Notebook: Desire and Gratitude

My best excuse for not blogging for several weeks comes verbatim from the notebook I carry everywhere in China. A candid and intimately personal note to myself says, simply: “overwhelmed with desire and gratitude learning a new culture, like in Italy.”

I don’t remember what caused me to write this exactly, but it doesn’t matter—I experience this several times a day. The Italy reference is to my first time living in Italy, when I was ten and I literally became an Italian kid. Though I cannot claim any such transformation as a middle-aged cultural explorer in China teaching physics in English, there is something in my bones about this.

What else is in this notebook?

I take the bus a half hour to work each day, and I started trying to work on the audio Chinese course I downloaded from Pimsleur. There I am on the crowded bus with my iPhone earbuds repeating out loud over and over in Chinese “I CAN SPEAK…I CAN SPEAK.” This daily study schedule did not last. Aside from making a spectacle of myself for the morning commute, students and travelers kept coming up to talk with me in English. Plus, I often share the bus ride in conversation with any of several colleagues that live in my neighborhood. One of the most interesting people I met was a young guy from Nigeria who was studying electrical engineering (in Chinese) at the nearby university. Yes, there are black people in this city of 5 million. Both of them seem quite nice.

Speaking of iPhone, my iPhone is now a very thick and heavy iPod touch, due to the complete and utter evilness of AT&T. I do not have strong enough words for how badly they suck.

I’ve actually learned more British than Chinese. Good friends, among my colleagues, come from England, Wales, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. My favorite quote comes from Mark, an English vegetarian who teaches economics, who interrupted a conversation about exactly how to eat chicken feet—a common dish here—to deliver one of his trademark comments, imploringly and passionately: “that’s so wrong, on so many levels.” The Brits can have their own strange fixations, from an American foodie point of view. We commiserate about the lack of access to cheese, and then they turn around and ask the local cafe to make beans and toast. Go figure.

I don’t even now where to start about food. One moment I’m in an Anthony Bourdain episode–this is a whole blog (or three)— “Weird Shit I’ve Eaten.” The next I’m in the equivalent of 7-11 looking for bourbon and trying to figure out what that smell is. I’ve sat with families as a friend and guest. I cooked Italian meat sauce for Chinese guests at my home (they loved it). I was asked to contribute a recipe to the local café and chose Julia Child. Though there is very little resemblance of anything here to western Chinese restaurant food, I did have some really great spare ribs. No one here has ever heard of “dim sum”—I have to explain to them that it’s a Cantonese phrase for dumpling.

My students amaze me and challenge me and warm my heart every single day. The best of them continue to approach me on break and after class like eager college students asking penetrating though sometimes naive questions about the physics. It really is about the physics. They want to know and understand. One of my most mature and worldly students doesn’t study much because he’s too busy learning music and practicing his drum playing for the several bands he’s in. I got roped into playing and singing at a school wide music competition and became an instant rock star. My guitar students and Chinese friends have me learning a Chinese song and teaching John Fahey American fingerstyle guitar.

This is a partial preview of what I’ll be writing about next (with photos). Please let me know what you’d like to hear about.

The Chinese Word for Wok is Guo

My students saying "hello to America."

“MICHAEL!!” A chorus of smiling Chinese faces yelled back at me. It was my first class of Chinese high school students and I had asked, “do you remember my name?” I had been introduced at the weekly Monday morning assembly and flag raising ceremony. “Do you remember where I’m from?” I grinned at them. “CALIFORNIA!” The reply was instant. I drew a map on the board and explained about Michigan, where I grew up.

I’m teaching physics to Chinese kids who want to go to the US for college—or the UK or Canada. The Hangzhou Foreign Language School is a public high school of about 3000 academically select students—similar to one of our top magnet schools in the States. Most kids do well and most families are wealthy or upper-middle class. The cream of the crop—about 300 students—attends the Cambridge A-Level Centre on campus, where I teach. All classes are taught in English and students are expected to sit for the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE)—a gateway to college abroad.

Acceptance at a highly ranked college—preferably a US college—is the goal. Everything else leads to that. Right away, that’s different from even the most well-to-do suburban school in the US. The New York Times recently described the phenomenon well in  The China Boom.

Students are polite and eager to learn. No one exhibits ADD; everyone pays attention. Yet no one raises their hand; no one asks a question. Over time, this relaxes a bit, and students whisper to each other and look things up on their electronic dictionaries. (Cell phones are strictly forbidden in class, though there’s one in every pocket.) When coaxed, a rare student, timid and tentative, even asks a question.

So this is my new job and I like it. Coincidentally, a good friend of mine (whom we shall call Mr. M.) just landed a middle school job in a poor urban district in the US. He emailed me about his first week. I am not making this up.

Yesterday I walked into my seventh grade English support class to find six kids chanting and pounding the classroom conference table with their fists. It was straight out of Lord of the Flies. If I wasn’t a teacher I would have laughed my ass off. Since I was their teacher I put the campfire out, but remembered to laugh inside. On Tuesday I said “shit” on the phone within ear shot of three students as we were reviewing class rules. The rule we were reviewing was #5, which states, “we agree not to use profanity in the classroom.” The three students told me I need to learn the rule and repeat it with them during our choral response. I did. We all laughed. On Thursday a really solid spit ball raced by my right eye, missing me by two inches. For the first time I felt like a true rockstar…who had to stop the show because a beer bottle was thrown on stage. Mr. M. stopped his performance to call out the punk ass sitting in the fourth row. My first full week of teaching middle school is complete, and my first full weekend of recovery has begun.

Meanwhile, across the globe, several students come up after class to ask me questions about the physics lesson. During lunch break, a couple of girls come in and cheerfully ask permission to clean my classroom. Apparently they didn’t make their beds properly in the dorm and have been sent, penitent, to do my bidding. I find this vaguely uncomfortable, but it’s their system, so I capitulate after only a small pause and ask them to sweep the floor, please.

Students are aggressively interested in scoring well and getting ahead. But they won’t raise their hand or ask a question. When I demand that of them, kindly but firmly, they look down at their desks. During the first week, asking a shy student to repeat what she said a little louder nearly brought her to tears. This central conflict of learning cultures is part of what we work on as western teachers. As one student put it in the Times article after transferring to a US college, “Chinese values require me to be a good listener, and Western values require me to be a good speaker.”

It’s a lesson in paradoxes about cliches and Chinese culture. Suddenly at the end of class one day the speaker on the wall blares some vaguely Spanish sounding pop-orchestral march music. A moment later someone out in the yard blows a referee’s whistle. The kids jump up and run outside, and in a few moments, there’s a streaming procession of students running around the school en masse for exercise, kind of like the running of the bulls but with no bulls.

And then, the next day, I hear from my colleague in English that they’re reading Animal Farm for class. Really. I just finished reading it myself.

English ability is a big deal and separates the students dramatically in their ability to interact academically with me in the classroom. One day I concocted an example of comparison having to do with thermal physics involving heating a needle and a large metal object on a stove. I know, I thought…a wok. That will be instantly be understandable. Well, guess what… “wok” is not a Chinese word at all—it’s pure English. They had no clue what I was talking about. The Chinese word for wok is guo.

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Double Vision Update

 

My double vision has cleared up. The antibiotic-side-effect explanation was complicated by the quickness of onset and the slowness of fading. An ophthalmologist friend suggested that it was at least as likely that the condition was caused directly by a viral infection. We’ll never know. In any case, it has cleared up. Thanks to family and friends for the concern and support.

The Evils of Antibiotics

This was supposed to be a post about the school and the students in China. Instead, it’s going to be a post about how I came to be sitting at home not teaching even though my stomach is all better.

Over the weekend, I picked up some bug, probably through eating or drinking something. My western colleagues here tell me this happens to every one of us within the first few weeks, no matter how carefully we eat and drink. So I spent the weekend with the typical symptoms: mild to moderate stomach cramps, low-grade fever, and severe diarrhea. This post shall not include pictures.

After a day or so of this (yes, I kept myself hydrated and salted), I took an antibiotic prescribed for exactly this situation and these symptoms. Ciprofloxacin, commonly called Cipro, is an antibiotic in the fluoroquinolone class, used to treat a variety of infections caused by bacteria. Unfortunately, it also seems to cause double vision in some patients, such as me.

Double vision?!!

Yes. Double vision.

So a half day and two doses later, I not only continued blowing liquid out my butt, I couldn’t grab the toilet paper sitting right in front of me on the counter…cause I was seeing double. I HATE that when that happens.

One cannot fully appreciate the outrage of encountering unacceptable and unexpected side effects from prescription drugs  while pursuing only moderately desirable outcomes until one is actually sitting there seeing double, powerlessly wishing to trade it in for weeks of diarrhea. At least I’d be able to read while sitting on the toilet. I could wear Depends to work. Now I can’t read, I can’t work, I can’t even walk down the bloody sidewalk. What madness is this? How come nobody told me? How could I be so stupid?

The correct way to analyze these questions rationally is to multiply the probability of desirable outcome times the magnitude of  benefit and compare it to the probability of negative outcome multiplied by the severity of that outcome. This elementary yet deep concept is called “expected value,” or “expectation value,” and should be taught in all middle school mathematics. Unfortunately, many students in the US don’t see this until some college course, such as statistics or quantum mechanics. I’ll be looking for it in Chinese curriculum.

The idea here, quite simply, is that a 90% chance of reducing the duration of diarrhea and stomach cramps from 3 days to 1 day is not worth risking a 1% chance of some debilitating side effect. But this isn’t really explained to patients and understanding this requires doing your own research and looking at the reported incidence for each side effect. Since typically around 50 side effects are listed (remember, it would be a liability not to list a possible side effect), this becomes impractical, if not impossible.

Cipro, by the way, may be one of the rogue drugs that by any reasonable analysis really should be removed from the market. I’m not capable of having an unbiased opinion at this point (because I’M SEEING DOUBLE, dammit)…but Cipro has been associated with painful tendon ruptures, tendinitis, liver damage, and other severe complications. There is one specific study about diplopia (double vision). They found that the double vision went away after discontinuing the drug.

I’ve emailed one of the authors to ask if his data give a hint as to when this will go away, since secondary reports vaguely say “quickly,” which has not happened. Tomorrow I’ll be on my third day of double vision. I spoke with a doctor on the phone, but he doesn’t know what to do. And how should he? It’s some obscure side effect of some weird antibiotic. He said wait and see. In the meantime, I’m not teaching and I’m not working and I’m scared. Like so many things in life, you don’t really understand until it happens to you.

Leaving San Luis Obispo for China

I will never be a Californian.

Oh, I’ve tried. In 1990, I moved from the Midwest to Santa Barbara, California, for ten years where I did physics research, started a computer consulting company, and taught private high school. My daughter, Kristin, was born there in 1991. At the time, I thought Santa Barbara would be my new home: it is extraordinarily beautiful, vibrant, and seems livable.

I eagerly met Californians at work and in town, but over time, I noticed that all my friends were from elsewhere—back east or the Midwest. Santa Barbarans were friendly—genuinely friendly—but only to a certain shallow depth. Anything further was off limits. My first inkling of this came early on at my new research job when I realized that despite repeatedly inviting my work friend and colleague over for dinner or out on the weekend, he wasn’t interested. He always said no. I learned through similar results with others that this was the norm. I simply wasn’t in the club.

So over the years, I developed close friends from elsewhere and life had a certain California rhythm. There was men’s group on Tuesday, massage on Wednesday, meditation group on Thursday, yoga on Sunday, and Roller Blading after work. But nobody got too close outside of these activities’ boundaries and no one ever just hung out. No one ever called to say, “bring your guitar and a six-pack—we’re hangin’ out.” After ten years of this, combined with the effects of the severe economic brutality of Santa Barbara, I threw in the towel.

Fast forward…after almost a decade back in the Midwest, I moved to San Luis Obispo, California, for work. San Luis Obispo is a small university town surrounded by farmland, much like my hometown of East Lansing, Michigan. Near the ocean and hemmed with hills, San Luis attracts a mixture of university types, business people, and a few retirees and tourists. The food and restaurants are quite good per capita. There is an Apple Store. I had visited SLO only once or twice when I lived in Santa Barbara and I expected more of the same social malaise. I could not have been more wrong.

Doug Shaw, Sanctuary Tobacco

In only two years in San Luis, I have made more close friendships—with intelligent, kind, and authentic friends—than in all my ten years in Santa Barbara. I was fortunate enough to meet Doug Shaw, owner of the Sanctuary cigar shop, when I first moved to town and from there I met many locals and Californians. My San Luis friends genuinely opened their lives to me as a friend and we have shared our joys and sorrows. I have made deep and lifelong friendships. So it is with many tears that I leave San Luis Obispo for Hangzhou, China.

Professionally, I am leaving a beloved American institution—the community college—at a time of great disappointment and increasing dysfunction in community college funding, staffing, and oversight. The community college is a bridge between the educational standards and achievement that leads to functioning prosperously in society and the realities of students lacking in funds, high school preparation, or family support. Community colleges, like most areas of public life, have been hit hard by the long-term assault on US public education and by the general austerity sweeping the US. More about this another time.

So I am teaching physics at the Cambridge A-Level Centre in the Hangzhou Foreign Language School, a selective high school of approximately 3000 Chinese students. We have about 300 of them at the Centre, where they take all their subjects in English and prepare to sit for the Cambridge International Examinations, a gateway to applying for college abroad. The ‘A’ in “A-Level” stands for advanced. The students are eager, motivated, friendly, and smart.

I have been warmly welcomed and supported in arriving here by colleagues both foreign and Chinese. There is a fascinating collaboration between the cultures in this endeavor. There is no mistaking the momentum.  Our work is consequential and our efforts messy. I can’t think of a more exciting place to be working in education.

And so I—a Michigander, transplanted to California and shipped off to China—will be chronicling my teaching pursuits and Chinese encounters along the way. I hope you’ll subscribe to this blog and join me on the adventure.