Today is one of those days you don’t forget. I am presently sitting in the study of my new apartment on the campus of Huaihua Railway Number One Middle School on a computer provided to me by my school. More on that later. First let me back track 24 hours to when I still lived in Changsha in a hotel with 50 other foreigners, worlds away from where I am now.
Last night was the last evening of my teaching orientation. To celebrate we had a banquet with all of us volunteer teachers, some representatives of the Hunan department of education, and our Chinese teachers of the past few weeks. I wore a suit jacket. It was a fantastic meal full of elaborate dishes and beer paid for by a certain principal, whom we had all just meet that night. I also made a toast in Chinese, which went over well and garnered me a compliment from the Chinese members of the audience. Towards the end it became more like a graduation party as we all posed for picture after picture and drank toast after toast. Everyone was on top of the world looking their best.
Of course we couldn’t all just go to sleep. So we gathered in my hotel room for some casual drinking and dancing before heading to a laid back place called Freedom House. There I learned a great new drinking game involving phoenixes and the flapping of one’s arms. After that we danced at a nightclub before me and some others went to McDonalds for a midnight Big Mac. I fell asleep sometime around 1:30.
Waking up I had a headache, but knew I needed to finish packing, eat, and buy a present for my liasion. Down into the blazing hot Changsha morning I went, first hitting up Whacko market for a fruit basket. The fruit basket was kick ass, yet as it turned out almost a waste of money. So at 10:00 or so all 54 of us went to meet our schools’ representatives and leave the insulation of life in Changsha. It was so hot that by the time we all meet our liasions we were all drenched in sweat, not really how you want to meet someone for the first time. Regardless I went back to my hotel room with the two school representatives from Huaihua Tielu Yizhong. Quickly packing my remaining stuff was followed by a long wait for the elevator and many hugs goodbye. After a lunch of numbing-spicy pork noodles we got a taxi to the Changsha south bus station. This station is far far away from Changsha and half and hour later we arrived there. The sun now hotter than ever.
Here in the bus station I made a fatal error. I put down my awesome $10 (American) fruit basket as we rushed to get bags through the x-ray machine that no one cared enough to watch. We moved on yet the fruit basket stayed. Catching the 1:30 bus to Huaihua me and my Liasion, Nancy, rolled out of Changsha. The other English teacher, David, stayed in Changsha to get my Foreign Experts Certificate, which, by the way, I can’t wait to have.
Oh what a bus ride! It was 5.5 hours long following a brand new expressway that was just completed in 2007. First following the hundreds of industrial buildings and factories that fill Changsha’s outskirts then striking into the tamed countryside of western Hunan. It was rather surreal trip. First, me and the other volunteers had really only stayed in downtown Changsha so after 10 minutes of driving I was somewhere I had never been. So I was naturally glued to the window. Also, the bus people decided (possibly because of me) to show two American movies: Herbie Fully Loaded and The World Trade Center. So me eyes darted between the rich landscape of Hunan outside and Lindsey Lohan’s breasts and later poverty stricken villages and a melodramatic version of 9/11. Those movies were like pinching myself to bring me back to reality. The people on the bus were all very kind and genial, already I was beginning to love the people of Huaihua. Me and Nancy had lovely conversation and I was already sure our relationship would be a good one. About 3 or so hours in we hit the mountains, big tall mountains. Remined me of driving into the adirondack mountains that line the west side of Lake Champlain in upstate New York. Nature in China never looks old, it’s always the traces of human civilization that seem the oldest. Forests never look old and trees usually seem as young as the skyscrapers dotting the bustling cities of eastern China. But out here on mountains too steep to be farmed the forests looked healthy and thick. The villages were made up of hand-made wooden houses whose design surely is thousands of years old. Of course there were plenty of power lines and billboards for China Mobile, but it was beautiful country and an area I hope to return to. I took a bunch of video and as soon as I can figure out how to hook my laptop up to the internet I’ll post the video on Youtube (hopefully before the site is blocked, again).
As the sun was setting we entered the dusty city of Huaihua. The tall mountains gave away somewhat, a wide river and an unfinished new road followed the bus into the city. Nancy told me that the only reason Huaihua is a city is because of the railroads coming here during Mao’s time, before it was no more than a village. (I just learned that the city got its name from a Song dyansty official who was banished here hundreds and hundreds of years ago) But the city looks to me like a monument to the age of Reform and Opening that Deng Xiaoping started. All the buildings are young, yet terribly worn out from the booming population and ever present pollution. The pollution, by the way, seems worse that Changsha. Everyone here burns coal to cook, heat their homes, and power their air conditioning. It is a colorful yet dusty city due to the large billboards advertising the thousands of small businesses that line its hilly streets. Huaihua looks nothing like the gleaming images of Beijing that I see every night on CCTV. The title of this post comes from one of the propaganda slogans splashed on billboards and public buses throughout the city. “Huaihua is my home” is always followed by phrases urging the protection of the environment or the proper use of local resources, but I can’t help but think the local Communist Party leadership is welcoming me to my new home.
Nancy and I got a taxi to the school and I stared starry eyed out the window as Nancy argued with the driver over his inflated price. Advertisements with pictures of suave white men sold clothing above the one and only KFC, while an old woman searched through the trash for plastic bottles. The school sits atop a steep hill and is beautiful, a bastion of education for 3,000 teenagers in the middle of this teeming nation. My apartment is in the teacher’s dormitory. I have a luxurious spread. This place has 6 rooms, plus a balcony. A TV, computer, microwave, bath tub, stove, water cooler, air conditioner, and a fridge/freezer are some of the amenities that I now live with. It is furnished nicely and the left-overs from the previous foreign teachers that lived here are providing me with surprise afyer surpise. I’ve been unpacking while listening to the Kings of Convience and I just watched the US beat Austrailia in basketball.
It’s all very new and I keep telling myself these streets, neighboors and daily routines will soon become a part of my life as well-known as my life in America. But this evening as I walked back to my apartment from the local supermarket I looked up at the stars in the sky and I felt deeply alone, more so than I have in a long long time. Nancy told me the local teachers college may have a couple foreigners teaching there, she’s not sure. Surely though I am the only American living in this city of 400,000. My new life now begins.
