love letters from my 34th summer

This past week, the day after Christmas, I took a break from being a slacker/part-time terrorist and became the host the Foreign Language Department Christmas Party. This “party” had the entire usual “Craptacular” fair except that all the skits and songs were either in English or Japanese, and I was the co-host. John Pasden at Sinosplice has already written the definitive entry detailing the strange and wonderful nature of Craptaculars. I’ll wait here while you go read it.

I agreed to be a co-host as a favor to all my friends—the teachers and students—in the Foreign Language Department, but also because I yearn to be in front of people wearing a fake grin and Santa Hat. Along the way, I’d like to think I learned a couple of things. First, I lobbied for them to replace the word “Party” with “Event,” “Gala,” or even the more increasingly user friendly “Craptacular.” I explained that it was simply misleading to call it a “Party” if there was no food. I was shot down immediately. I was reminded that even though the Communist Party isn’t always concerned with food, they don’t go around calling themselves the “Communist Gala.” Also, I was reminded that there are no details of any finger food being served at our own Boston Tea Party, only tea. Laid low by two irrefutable historical facts, I agreed to host a “Party” that had no food. But I still chafe at the term. I will say that.

Second, I learned that I am an idiot, and not an attractive one. You see, my co-hostess was a freshman Business Japanese Major who speaks fluent Japanese, fluent English, and Standard Mandarin. During the event she also displayed an amazing singing voice when she flawlessly (I’m told) sang a song in Japanese which had a little rap break in the middle. Also, she is funny, tall, and pretty. People may have showed up to see the silly foreigner host the show, but they soon forgot he was there. Standing next to her, I finally realized what male cheerleaders back in the States must feel like—all that hard work and the only people looking at you are the ones who want you to mess up.

Things went off almost without a hitch. It started a little roughly. At the beginning, while we were on stage honoring all the “important” people who were there, more “important people” kept being spotted. Small, hurriedly scribbled notes were repeatedly hustled onto the stage long after we had stopped recognizing the “important people joining us that evening. So we had to keep interrupting our hilarious opening monologue which I had carefully written. At the really subtle yet clever good parts of our opening dialogue, we would have to stop and introduce somebody else—me in English and her in Chinese. We would end up saying something like: “Oh and we want to also welcome Zhu Fan who is the Chairman of the Department of Hair Technology and Truck Driving.” Then we would go on only to have another small note slipped into our hands moments later.

Finally, I put an end to the madness, and made a blanket recognition. “To all you really important people we missed: you are so important that speaking your name out loud at a Christmas Party would almost sully your refined and noble standing among us, so we will all now take a moment of silence and say your beautiful names silently to ourselves while rocking slowly back and forth.” That seemed to work well enough.

Then we were off. My co-hostess and I took turns introducing acts. Every so often, we would break the monotony up by appearing on stage together. At these times we would charm the crowd with bits of “spontaneous conversation” about the last Britney Spears song and dance or the next excerpt from My Fair Lady. All the performances were by the freshman English and Japanese Language students. I was so proud of all of them for their hard work and their polish. I know I am being bias, but this was the best Foreign Language Christmas Party (without food) that I have ever seen. I also commend them for their patience when the mics didn’t work right or I pronounced their names wrong. I always blamed the latter problem on the former.

Girls wore a lot of make-up with tell-tell clumps of glitter. Boys performing in Japanese plays painted on their little mustaches and beards with black markers. Whirling dervishes of flashy skirts rustled between performances back stage. My co-hostess switched back and forth between English and Japanese flawlessly. I managed not to trip and fall or drool. It’s all heady stuff when you are in the middle of it. The only problem I had with the entire evening is that the Japanese uniforms in an earlier Japanese play were the same uniforms used by the Prince’s guards in Cinderella. Suddenly Cinderella had much more of an imperialistic feel to it. I hope she is happy now but I suspect she was just scared of his guards. I’m not sure she really wanted to live happily ever after with a Japanese Prince with an unhealthy foot fetish.

At the end, a foreign teacher dressed in a Santa outfit came onto the stage to the applause of five or six hundred people. All the performers came out for a curtain call. After that, we all danced off the stage to that endless bunny hopping favorite, “Left, Left, Right, Right, Turn Around, Go, Go, Go.” And suddenly, the day after Christmas, I was very much in the Christmas spirit.

Part 1

So far I have only been on the set of the movie four days. The movie people assumed that the only foreigners able to act in this movie would be English teachers. Of course, English teachers (when busy not working) work during the week, so all scenes involving foreigners are shot on the weekends. Of the three “foreign assassins,” only one is a teacher. He is from Canada. The other guy, “head honcho assassin,” is from France. He has a cool French English assassin accent which makes me very envious.

I get along really well with the French guy. I hate when people make stereotypes based on what’s engraved on the outside of a person’s passport. But allow me to do this once. The French make a national sport out of being unlikable and pretentious. This guy is not like that. He is pleasant and laid back. In fact, he’s alright in my book—which is a very short and shallow book.

The Canadian guy is a nice guy too. He has one small quirk that reared its ugly head during the 17 to 19 hour days of filming. He asks a lot of questions (Chinese film directors aren’t used to people asking 50 questions within a two minute period about a 10 second scene). Most of his questions are usually a variation of the same few questions. Let me give you a brief sound-bite of an actual conversation. He usually asks these questions to people who don’t know the answer or can’t speak English.

Canadian Guy (who is stronger than me and will kill me if he reads this): “What are we doing next? What’s going on? What’s happening? Are we done? Was that one OK? Are we gunna do it again? Does anybody know? Should I hold my gun here or here? Where is he standing? Pretty good, aye? Oh, so, what now? I ran too fast, right? Uhhhh? Aye?”

Everyone else: (crickets chirping)

Canadian Guy: “So, anyway, what?”

But he has lots of good qualities. He is a good pool player. He is in great shape for a guy who asks lots of questions. He has all of his original hair. He has only this one little quirk. I’m sure I have a millions of faults. I just happen to be blissfully unaware of any of them.

Due to a lack of foreigners who are as bad as we three foreigners, they chose two Chinese guys to be foreign assassins too. I happen to get along with them the best. I spend most of my time on the set with them practicing my horrible Chinese. One of them does speak pretty good English which helps a lot. We also have a Chinese translator who carefully translates all the director’s instructions into English for us.

Weekend One (Displaced Homeowners Aren’t Quiet on the Set).

So we arrive to the set early in the morning two Saturdays ago. First, we went to Wardrobe. My uniform consists of black cargo pants, black boots, and a really, really tight black tank top. If I raise my arms above my head, the shirt comes past my belly; and I look like Homer Simpson. That deep look of concentration etched on my face during the entire movie isn’t my amazing acting ability at all. It’s me sucking in. The tank top is just too tight. Whatever size it is in Chinese size, I need to the one up three sizes. The wardrobe people seemed to think the tighter the better. I complained a little to which they said: “Yeah, it is tight. Great, huh?” I also was provided with a plastic gun, holster, black hat, black clip on night light, and ear plug microphone.

Next we went to Make-up. The make-up lady told me I was so perfect for the part that she didn’t know how to make me better. She tried anyway. She put camouflage paint on my face. I think this was a new thing for her—the camouflage paint. At first, I looked like a raccoon. Luckily they found some pictures in a magazine of some real human soldiers, washed my nocturnal mammal face off, applied the paint in a soldierly streaked fashion, and declared me more perfect. Next, they applied a tattoo to my arm. A nice man drew a tattoo on my bicep with a blue ball point pen. But if you took a couple steps back and looked at it. It looked exactly like…somebody had drawn a tattoo on my arm with a blue ball point pen. I kept looking at it and thinking, “there is no way I am getting paid.” Luckily somebody showed up with some press-on tattoos about an hour later. The ball point pen marking were washed off, a real looking barbed-wire design was applied, and I felt a little better at my prospect of seeing some money for my trouble.

The first weekend was pretty easy. Even though we were on the set for a long time each day, we probably spent only about four hours the entire weekend actually being filmed. The rest of the time I spent sleeping, reading, eating, joking with the crew, and talking discussing history with the really pretty Hong Kong actress. I also spent my time entertaining the lone child actor in the movie with crazy songs, ethnic dancing, magic tricks (consisting of juggled fire, levitation, and a hunger strike on a large platform above the set for forty-five minutes—during which time members of the crew jeered me with bowls of rice and chicken feet), crazy faces and puppet shows. Hey, nothing’s too good for the kids.

This portion of the movie was set in a poor part of town in a very poor looking house. Rather than go out and built an elaborate set, the movie just moved into a real house in a poor part of Haikou, dug two large holes in it, moved all the equipment outside into the courtyard where three other families lived, and went to work. It was almost surreal seeing people’s underwear flapping in the breeze above an “important” director who is bent over thousands of dollars worth of filming equipment.

A lot of the filming was done outside in the courtyard too, or in the little side street entering the courtyard. A lot of scenes had to be re-shot because people would wander outside their house right into a scene. These homes don’t have indoor plumbing. The only water pump is in the courtyard. During the course of the day the filming was halted by old ladies vigoursly scrubbing their green vegetables near the sound board, venders pushing their carts right through a tense hostage scene, and children taking quick and noisy showers under the water pump before going to bed.

One incident in particular made me happy. An older lady decided it was time for supper. She began cooking her food outside over a small brick oven on a wok. Despite the director and crew constantly shouting at her to keep it down, she went on with her noisy stir-frying. There would be no “quiet on the set” until her family was fed. Finally, the director decided everyone should take a thirty minute break an let her finish. Hurray for the little people!

When it was finally time for us to act we were chomping at the bit. As it would turn out, our entire actions over the course of these first two days consisted of us jumping into holes and climbing out of holes. That’s it. I spend months physically and mentally preparing for this role, and they waste my obvious talent on something that Vin Diesel could do. It’s a travesty. It’s like putting Anthony Hopkins in a role opposite of Carrot Top, or like putting any actor or actress (be they human or animal) in a movie opposite Brendan Fraser. Don’t get me wrong, I’m great at jumping into holes and moderately good at climbing out of them (even though the tank top rides up). But I am especially good at coldly cracking people’s neck with one swift motion or, when it’s my time to exit, gagging convincingly on strychnine (it’s a horrible way to die). Sadly, at this point, it seems nobody in China will ever know.

Two other cool things did happen during this first weekend. First, I did get paid at the end of each day. Secondly, the kid actor was a joy to be around. He is about eight years old. He knows more English than most of the crew, and he has all that wonderful curiosity and energy that only kids possess. Whenever he wanted to know the English word for something, he would point at it and say “What’s your name?” Together, he and I explored the inside of people’s homes and the backstreets of Haikou. All the time, he was constantly pointing at chairs, lamps, coconuts and kneecaps and saying: “What’s your name?”

The next day, I was disappointed when he came back to the set and somebody had corrected him. He was now saying: “How do you say this?” Why would you ever correct something so cool? To be continued… (Coming Soon: Part 3– A Speaking Part In a Dangerous Hole)

This weekend was the official beginning of my Asian acting career. I am playing the role of a foreign assassin in a miniseries that will be shown on CCTV 1 next fall. I take my acting seriously. Other people might roll out of bed (wash their face and brush their teeth immediately), throw some clothes on, and show up to the set and try to “be” a foreign assassin. Well if you do that, guess what? Over 1.4 billion people will be able to tell that you aren’t really a foreign assassin. They will assume, and maybe correctly, that you are really a tax-evading accountant from Iowa whose only acting experience is pretending you are an ESL teacher.

There are a few of us actors who don’t work that way. We are method actors. We don’t act; we become. We are the great actors of our generation: Daniel Day Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, John C. Reilly and of course, Gary Coleman. We put ourselves into our roles so well that even when the camera isn’t running, we are still in character. Take Gary Coleman; on TV he was a short, wisecracking kid. In real life, even though he is in his thirties, he’s a short wise cracking kid. He can’t turn that kind of genius off and on. So about two week ago, I begin researching my role as a “foreign assassin.”

First, I shaved my head all the way down to the skin. That’s right; I’m a bad, bad man now. Somebody from Minnesota who teaches at the college where I live said I look like Jessie Ventura now. That’s a big compliment I guess if you like wrestling or come from Minnesota or are a Nazi. Wait, is that redundant? But still, Jessie Ventura is a scary man in some circles. Plus, he’s a foreigner which is totally what I’m going for here. If I show up to the set looking Chinese, I’ll be out on the street in no time. So shaving my head was a good step in the right direction. I have to say, I have a beautiful shaped head. Thanks mom and dad! I just hope my hair grows back this time.

Foreign assassins sneak up on people before they crack their necks, slit their throats, sell them term life insurance, or drug them. So, I began practicing sneaking up on people. I have been going into super markets these past two weeks, sneaking up on the girls working there, spinning them around, and asking where the light bulbs are located. This is not as easy as it seems. First of all, there are about seven girls per aisle in the super markets in Haikou. They are hired by individual companies to promote their product. So when you ask these girls where the light bulbs are located, they will most likely say, “I don’t know about light bulbs; please buy some Alpo dog food.” These girls are also likely to follow you around and see what’s in your shopping basket. When not busy harassing you with pleas to buy their companies bug spray or coconut juice, they will be chatting with each other in groups of five or six. Factor in me being the only six foot tall white man dressed in all black wearing camouflaged paint on his face sneaking around the produce section, my chances of success go way down. I am no closer to finding light bulbs than when I started. But still I try. I’m starting to understand why you don’t hear a lot about foreign assassins. It’s a freakin’ hard job.

The other thing I know about foreign assassins is that they don’t have American English accents. Usually they have French English accents (Jean Reno in the Professional), Spanish English accents (Antonio Banderas in any movie not staring Melanie Griffin [I want to change this per comments, but I can't now.]), Russian English accents (John Malkovich in Rounders) or British English accents with a tinge of Michigan (think Madonna after she became famous). So I have combined all these accents to create one amazing foreign assassin accent. Of course, all this would be more useful if I had a speaking part in the movie.

So after two weeks of sneaking around Haikou dressed in all black, ordering my food in Chinese with a French accent, and mixing baijiu with sawdust to make bombs in my apartment; I showed up to the movie set on Saturday feeling like an authentic Foreign Assassin. First, I signed my contract. They didn’t understand why I insisted on using a different name from the one on my passport; but once the camera started rolling, things became very clear for them. To be continued…. (Part Two – Foreign assassins are required to do their own stunts)

This past weekend I went to the the small hamlet of Baoting. It’s in the southern part of the island, not too far outside of Sanya. Baoting is the name of the county and its chief town. Four of us, three Americans and one Chinese education official, went down that way to hold lectures for some Li Minority English teachers.

I have never really considered myself a small town person; Asheville, N.C., my hometown, is perfectly middle-sized. Here in Hainan, the small towns I’ve seen consist of a one main street slicing through the middle of town, several small narrow streets intersecting Main street and ending abruptly within five kilometers in any direction, and a square or park in front of the government building in the center of town. The design and simplicity of these towns give me heart. I imagine I could parachute into any small village in the world and feel my way out of town by locating the town square and walking down the main street.

Looking down on Baoting is Seven-Fairies Mountain. It’s a striking, many-peaked mountain that is visible from anywhere in the town. To me, it looks a bit like the many spiked back of some sort of dinosaur. It used to be named Seven-Fingers Mountain, but not too long ago, the powers that be decided that having a mountain named after a hand with too many digits didn’t reflect favorably the town’s many normal handed residents. Even this weekend, as I talked about hiking the mountain with the teachers half of them still referred to the mountain as Seven-Fingers Mountain. In Chinese folklore, a Chinese god had seven strikingly beautiful fairy daughters. I have been told telling a girl that she is as beautiful as Seven-Fairies is still a fairly common expression. I have yet to try this compliment out, but I’ve filed it way. Oh yes, I have.

As we drive up to the middle school and parked, we are met with dozens of students who want to get a look at the foreigners. Some of them had never seen a white person in real life. Sorry, I’ve ruined it for all of you. We are there to talk to the teachers, but they begin to beg Mr. Zhu, the education official, to let them sit in on the lectures. Thankfully, he relents. Students’ wanting to be taught is not an everyday occurrence even in Haikou. While we are comparing, Haikou has three KFCs, one McDonalds, and a TCBY. Baoting has a mountain named after beautiful fairies, freshly grown green tea, and water buffalos that wander drunkenly down the middle of Main Street. Where would you rather live? As I’m taking all this in, I’m wondering how I can move here. Even Mr. Zhu is struck by the beautiful simplicity of this town. “In the countryside, people live the pure life,” he says.

So we split up the teachers and students into three groups and begin to lecture them about English teaching methods and about the Christmas holidays. We have two hours, so I try to be as thorough as I can on the holiday’s part. I even explain Kwanza and Hanukah. Unfortunately people in Baoting now think the menorah is what goes on top of the Christmas tree last. Sorry!

I also talk about the commercialism that is plaguing the Christmas season lately. The idea of people stressing themselves out by shopping and buying too many presents for each other sounded strange to these teachers. How can you spend more money than you have? I can see the discussion veering into the nasty mine-field labeled “My Credit History,” so I begin to talk to them about teaching English.

Having taught 100 Li/Miao minority teachers in Baisha for a month this past summer, I understand what these teachers are up against. They have at least fifty students in each class. These students already have a dozen other subjects including two sciences and two maths. The teachers’ first job is to finish their textbooks. There is not enough time to cover all the material or practice oral English. Most students here in the countryside simply don’t see the value of English. If you spend most of your free time helping your parents hand-plant rice, you have never even seen a native English teacher in real life, and you are forced to spend all your class time writing difficult English words in a thick, daunting textbook; would you? I can’t change this. The teachers can’t change it.

I really think my job is to encourage them. So I give them a grand pep talk. I tell them that even in America teachers are overworked and underpaid too. Teaching is an investment. One child sees your passion for English. He or she learns it well, pursues it, goes to college, and makes Baoting proud. You can say it’s because you cared so much. I mean this, but it sounds cheesy as I say it. Any second now I’m going to tell them that “teach a man to fish” rubbish and then I’m going to have throw myself off the fourth story balcony. I stop abruptly and ask them to tell me about their lives as teachers. They do.

I let them complain. I shake my head at their stories. I have heard all this before. They have it rough. Their teaching material is geared towards passing tests and not really learning the material. Unlike this school in the middle of Baoting which has electricity, running water, new buildings, and shiny new basketball goals; many of them work in rustic settings far away from the central township. Some of these teachers teach in schools so remote you need a day to get there by foot after you’ve parked your car near a river and swam across. Many teachers live at these remote schools during the week. They grade papers by gas light, sleep on tiny wood bunks, and eat whatever the farmers bring them as tuition. It’s a big sacrifice. I nod as if I know what it’s like to be them. I don’t though. I can honestly only tell them I’m glad that somebody has the character to keep teaching against all these odds. I shake their hands and thank them for being good teachers. They blush and protest. They lower their heads and then try to thank me for giving up a couple days to talk to them.

Later about sixty teachers and twenty students are all singing The First Noel together. Outside, palm trees are swaying softly and tenderly in unison. Back inside, voices are echoing down those gray halls at the Baoting Number 1 Middle School. They all have copied the song down so they can teach it to their students later.

“They like to sing, but we usually don’t have time,” I’m told. I always found the song a little boring and stiff myself—until now. I am here in Hainan to write educational grant proposals and educational materials for the Li and Miao people. Sometimes, sitting in my office in Haikou, I forget what the teachers look like. They are more than just bleak numbers and poor statistics. They are these beautiful, conscientious teachers who worry because their students aren’t getting better at English. And they are earnestly and innocently singing a Christmas song because maybe their students will like it.

So I’m recharged and determined as we are later driving out of town and back to Haikou. The windows are cracked and the air is so fresh and cool that I want stick my head out like a dog. Maybe someday I’ll come back here and live and teach; maybe it will be the “simple, pure life.” Or maybe it will be the hardest, most challenging task I could ever attempt. Most likely, I will never find out. We drive towards Haikou, and the Seven Fairies fade away.