Fabric Market Prowl

I discovered the wonders of the Chinese fabric market during one of my first weeks in Shanghai. Hundreds of tollbooth size cubbyholes were overflowing with fabric within a three-story warehouse. Walking through the labyrinth of corridors, I pushed aside the overgrowth of sample patterns hanging right above eye level and weaved around the ends of fabric outcroppings stabbing out from their enclosures. Moving at anything more than shuffling pace caused vertigo from the kaleidoscope of vision-assaulting colors.

The experience was intimidating and exhausting for a China novice. I bought one dress and did not venture back to the wilds of the fabric market until I absolutely had to purchase a winter jacket.

Selecting the booth that contains a desired pattern is barely the tactical stage of the upcoming ballad-worthy campaign. The fabric type, color, and alternations must be debated in a combination of choppy English, accented Chinese exclamations, hand gestures, and universal moans and cheers. The final barrage comes with the negotiation of the price. That discussion is typically not successful unless the customer fake walks away and a calculator is thrown. When I bought my “North Face” bag at the fake market, the saleswoman actually set it on fire to prove the bag was fireproof. THAT is how successful Chinese transactions are done.

Today when my friends and I decided to go on a fabric market shopping spree, we braced ourselves for the onslaught of pushy booth attendants and spontaneous fashion bad ideas. We armed ourselves with strategically separated bunches of Yuan, the ultimate Walk-Away-At-This-Price list, which was cross-referenced and catalogued, and the following Do’s and Dont’s of the Fabric Market:

DO: Take a friend who will honesty tell you that the outfit you are trying on makes it look like you are one step away from living in a back alley apartment with sixteen cats, a stack of cheesy romance novels, and a carpet medley of cigarette stumps and packing peanuts from worthless QVC purchases.

DON’T: Take an in-and-out shopper or a boyfriend. If sitting on the plush couches at American stores is purgatory, than waiting through the pattern selection, color decision, texture arrangement, measurement debacle, and price negotiation would be considered inhuman treatment. They will burn you in effigy or write revenge songs about the experience and not share any of the royalties.

DO: Have at least the type of clothing preferred in mind to avoid the indecisive person’s meltdown.

DON’T: Wear the jeans to be copied. As I found out today, stripping to the skivvies in a packed Chinese anything is not for the modest or toga-phobic. For the record, the bright blue clump of fabric that I was given while the seamster measured the jeans only drew more attention to the fact that I was pants-less. (Special shout-out to my friends who held-up my “dressing room” during that episode.)

DO: Know the cuts and colors that would keep small children from breaking into tears.

DON’T: Listen to the booth operators. Few people can successfully pull off a pea soup colored muumuu regardless of how much “that bulk will go away when tailor-made”.

DO: Break out of the neutral button-down black hole and be adventurous. It’s China after all.

DON’T: Go native. Rhinestones, pictures of kittens, and glitter effects are never fashionable...particularly on the same dress.

DO: Develop guangxi with the seamstresses. Bring them customers, holiday gifts, food, kidneys…whatever it takes. My friends and I managed to have business suits custom-made for fifty US dollars because we are at hugging level with one seamstress and her mom.

DON’T: Befriend the other foreign shoppers! Every customer is a piranha within the deeps waters of the fabric market. The best deals are limited, and “tourists” and “newbies” are easy to spot. If someone oozing trepidation or hesitation is sensed within a two-booth radius, duck down a different corridor. Otherwise, the avid fabric market shopper might get lumped in with the group receiving the “800 Yuan friend-price discount”.

Remember to follow the rules and good hunting!

Fish Bowl Effect

To celebrate a friend’s birthday, we traveled to an unequivocally expat district called Xintiandi. Like nowhere else in China, the area has the feel of a high-end outlet mall (with restaurants and bars instead of Ann Taylor stores) stuffed into the narrow alleyways and brick buildings of traditional Chinese architecture.

Although tens of thousands of foreigners live in Shanghai, in a city of sixteen million that number would barely qualify for its own zip code. Yet, foreigners, lured to the promise of deep fried food and toilet paper in the bathroom stalls, congeal together in what are dubbed expat zones. Gubei, the French Concession, Xintiandi, Pudong, which is for all practical purposes Little America…these areas would be considered base in the giant game of Sino tag.

Last night we gathered in a tiny lounge bar on a side street in Xintiandi. We found our reserved table directly across from a window into an alleyway and began enjoying our first drinks of the night. Natural human curiosity tugged my eyes upward every time someone walked passed the window. Dim and badly backlit, people walking in the alleyway appeared to be barely more than dully colored outlines in the harsh yellow light.

I paused mid-sip when I witnessed the triangle nemesis float across my view: the tour guide flag. I traced the adversary as it turned the corner behind the brick wall of my sanctuary, bobbed across the window to my right, and passed the glass door located slightly behind me.

The tour group trailed behind the flag, completely mezmorized. They were a Chinese tour group so they weren’t getting the Look-How-Western-China-Appears tour, they were experiencing the Look-At-The-Westerners tour. The Westerners in question were us…behind glass enclosures….like exhibits in a natural history museum.

One man actual walked passed the window, came back, and pressed his nose to the glass while ogling the marvels of women drinking together in a bar. With the sickly saffron light shining behind and the fog accumulating on the window from his breath, for a split second I felt throw into a zombie movie where poor lighting is the substitute for state-of-art makeup in presenting zombie creepiness.

Another tour (this time of foreigners) was only a few steps behind and was anxious to witness the wonders of the expat watering hole though this time the nose-to-glass incidences were marginal. Many foreigners just have not quite mastered the staring prowess of the Chinese.

I’ve gotten used to the stares, double takes, and slyly taken pictures. China is still fairly homogenous and with my curly hair, significantly pale skin, and blue eyes, I know I stick out from the masses. I even smile and flash the peace sign for the strangers’ pictures now. Tonight, I reach a level of exhibition not often matched in China’s most developed city; I spent my evening in what is roughly equal to a fish bowl showcased at a popular aquarium.

For Charity's Sake

Twice a year the students emerge from their PSP-induced cocoons to throw a charity fair. The students flood the two cafeterias, set up booths, and guilt or blackmail friends and teachers into purchasing anything they could smuggle from their parents’ homes.

The primary school and middle school each hosted their own charity fair yesterday in separate cafeterias. Each fair was distinctly different in the selling prowess and hawking techniques of the participants.

Armed with the merchandise of the average corner convenience store (plus some terrified hamsters), the primary school students were ruthless when it came to turning those innocently hopeful faces up to the approaching teacher with a handful of smashed brownies bits that were decidedly larger five hours ago when Mom sent them in a neatly packaged container in the morning. The only escape to be found was in the fourth grade corner, where the youngest students were too preoccupied eating the treats meant for selling while playing with the toys meant for selling to notice some out-of-breath teachers with half-eaten rice candy and bits of Indonesian noodles stuck to their clothes.

Occasionally, a small proportion of parents actually excavate the crinkled beyond recognition announcement flyer from the bottom of their child’s book bag (among gorged and leaking pens and half-chewed Hi-Chews). These altruistic parents participate, and suddenly the primary school charity fair develops a new miraculous element called the Samosa Stand.

Surrounding the small scattering of parent-assisted food booths were swarms of selling-piranhas in little kid form. They create a formable minefield of puppy dog eyes and pouty lips, requesting the purchase of one of their slightly wet, slightly used notepads. The Littlest Match Girl might have reached a very different fate if she had taken lessons from these miniature moguls-in-training.

The middle school kids were too cool for parental guidance and so disasters ensued, which is actually just a standard day for me. At one in every half dozen booths, the students actually discovered the secrets to food vendor-ship. Forsaking fashion, a group of boys wore facemasks and surgical gloves when pouring generous glasses of home-mixed Lipton ice tea. Other booths were not as successful like the group of girls that had yet to cook a batch of pancakes on their little hibachi grill without batter implosion for the entire time I waded through the charity fair.

After purchasing cookies and cream ice cream that I had to eat with a toothpick, a postage stamp size rice crispy treat, and a bubble tea that was suspiciously low on bubbles, I felt my charity fair contribution soundly fulfilled and headed back into the school building, where I knew, regardless of how overzealous of sales associate, no student would willingly follow.

Haiku or Hi-Chew?

My English classes are currently suffering from an infestation of sentence fragments. They sneak into their writing, leaving little ‘So’, ’And’, and ‘But’ droppings all over the page. Just last week, six different fragments starting with ‘So’ muddied one unfortunate student’s test essay.

A fondness for fragments has been an ongoing problem all year, and, I’m assuming, the students’ entire writing career. Regardless of how many times we go over eliminating fragments, their extermination abilities have plateaued. As I write ‘fragment.’ for the sixty-seventh time across homework, I am struck with how my students’ quick and dirty writing style reminds me of a square-dance barker.

In an effort to curb their fragment use, I decided to implement a ‘One Haiku per Fragment’ requirement. For every unintentional fragment the student uses in a graded assignment, that student owes me one haiku poem. If they want to write fragments so much, it might as well be a structured assignment. Either my students are going to love poetry after this initiative or scour their work for anything remotely appearing in fragment form.

As I was explaining the new effort today, one of my students instantly perked up at the mention of ‘haiku’.

“Hi-Chew?” he asked enthusiastically.

I simply thought he had mispronounced the type of poem until I remembered that Hi-Chew is the name of a chewy candy here that I jokingly suspect is laced with nicotine considering its popularity.

“No, not Hi-Chew, haiku.”

The beaming face suddenly became crestfallen. For a moment my student thought he would be able to bribe his English teacher with candy. Possibilities abounded.

As much as I love Hi-Chew, come Friday, he will still owe me a notebook worth of haikus with or without a sugar coated lining.

Cheese

Today was the moment of the school year that, in my youth, I would await with a mixture of dread and unrequited optimism that this year would maybe…just maybe be better than last year. Today was Year Book Picture Day. While I magically learned the trick of smiling on request in college (though keeping my eyes open still eludes me), my primary and secondary education years are well documented with terror-stricken cringes in elementary, looks of surprised confusion in middle school, questionable fashion choices in junior high, and unsuccessful attempts at coy poses in high school that just made me appear inflected with an incurable malady.

The photos that many hope are among the boxes ruined in a basement flood are the pictures from that “Awkward Phase”. At twelve and thirteen years old, kids experiment with their own grooming, and the accompanying photos are usually those pictures mostly likely to end up torched in the campfire of poor adolescent decisions.

My students’ attempts at personal hygiene impact me every day. As I walk down the aisles, I hit pockets of perfume and cologne that knock me back a step and I am left to wonder if the student recently fumigated his apartment with Axel Body Spray. The make-up dry-runs would provide amazing inspiration for any Hollywood zombie fest make-up artist.

The typical lapses in their English education in favor of puckering in poorly concealed mirrors were thrown into hyper-drive because of picture day. As the moments dwindled before their turn to go in front of the photographer, I found myself having to quell a primping mutiny. It started with a few mirrors hastily stuffed back into secret compartments within their book bags or pencil cases whenever I glanced at the offending student. Next, the brushes came out of hiding. When I told one girl to put the brush away, she protested and said, “But it’s picture day! Two more seconds.”

She yanked that brush through her already detangled hair at hummingbird speed. The girl only really accomplished a look that suggests she just touched the static ball at a science museum.

Before too long, enough beauty products came out of undetectable crevices that I thought my students collectively robbed the Avon store down the street. One student had a vat-sized hairspray bottle large enough to keep Miss American contestants pacified until the Talent Show portion of the competition. I had to confiscate three mirrors…from the same boy.

I actually pardoned one boy’s mirror obsession because he was near meltdown stage after a girl accused him of wearing eyeliner. He frantically explained that the gallon of hairspray he used was leeching the black dye out of his hair, which drifts across his eyes, and giving him the unintentional Emo appearance.

At that exchange, I resorted to the old teacher trick of turning towards the board so the students couldn’t see me chuckling. I actually DID think he was wearing eyeliner, but since many of the students have adapted Flock of Seagull and other 80s hairstyles, I thought male make-up was just par for the course.

Moments before the bell rang when I had given up all semblance of returning my students to their lesson on myths, I tried to reassure one of the most frazzled girls that the Year Book Picture wasn’t that important, but she countered me quite thoroughly. “Yes it is! I don’t want people looking at my picture and say, ‘Wow, she’s ugly’, and I know they do because that’s what I say about other people!”

Well…that’s a different lesson entirely.

China Germ Warfare

I spent my childhood in the dirt. If a way existed to scrape, bump, bruise, cut, puncture, scar, strain or dislocate myself, I was fully aware of it by age seven. I might be the only person who ever dislocated a middle finger by pulling up sweatpants (at the well-worn age of eleven).

I wasn’t the most graceful growing up either. Every face-plant I took in the gravel parking lot of high school as I tried to figure out those most torturous of beauty accessories, high heels, was my vaccination against the ground germs that survive in scrapped knees and blisters.

Arrogantly, I thought myself fairly acclimated to a wide slice of those minor bugs and viruses out there. After all, I have traveled in six continents now, and except for a rather unfortunate night spent in an outhouse in Kenya’s Tsavo desert, I have survived microscopic assaults fairly unscathed.

…but China, with its 1.3 billion people and highly congested cities, is a utopian playground for the type of germs that would eat those American wussy viruses for lunch. This week a large proportion of the first year foreign teachers have fallen captive to one of these Asian super bugs. I am definitely one of them.

In late autumn when I just had the ‘sniffles’, the enthusiastically helpful Chinese teachers insisted the best remedy for me was fresh air. While snow flurries drifted on jet stream-worthy breezes, ALL the windows in the middle school were thrown wide open. I would sit at my desk in enough layers that even Randy from A Christmas Story would mock me as I mumbled about how Shanghai doesn’t have any fresh air to let into the building.

This current impairment is too tough for mere “Shanghai Fresh Air” to cure. To find relief I must enter the realm of Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM…you know it’s important if it has its own acronym). One of my officemates handed me a huge glass bottle covered with Chinese characters that I cannot read but I assume list all the cautions involved with taking the medicine. The warning probably was along the line of “Do not take this medicine if you still have moments of chopstick inaptness or cannot tell the taxi driver that you want to go to Wulumuqi Lu without giggling slightly”.

Taking the risk, I poured myself a spoonful of what had the density and coloring of car grease. Surprisingly, the medicine must be the inspiration behind Mary Poppin’s cure-all because it tasted like pure sugar, and it worked. (Eli Lilly take heed.) I have never felt so instantaneously better. Within 48-hours my cough lost that certain rumbling that sounded like I was in imminent danger of losing a lung.

Unfortunately, the germ, sensing its defenses crumbling in the lung, has fortified itself and is currently in siege-mode within my nasal cavity.

My students have, of course, been showering me with concern and support. Their get-well wishes include:
“Wait, say that word again, it sounded funny.”
“Teacher, do you have a disease that turns your nose red?”
“Try saying this tongue twister!”

I guess I should have been prepared for micro bacteria warfare since I work in the largest Petri Dish imaginable: Middle School.