A Few Firsts

Well I’ve had a couple of firsts the past few weeks since I last wrote, not the least of which was my first Christmas both away from family and out of the country. I don’t really want to make a habit of this, but despite my homesickness, it ended up being a wonderful day. I woke up missing my family’s usual tradition of opening stockings, drinking coffee, and eating my mom’s homemade coffeecake. But I got myself up, made myself a cup of tea, answered some emails, and waited for Nathan to get home from work (he, unfortunately, had class on Christmas morning). When he got home we walked down to the north gate of the college and got some wraps for lunch. Chinese wraps are not altogether different from American wraps in concept, but their ingredients and method of preparation differs. Basically, you pick whether you want meat, an egg, or both, and then they will fry whichever you choose while at the same time frying a tortilla (which is not actually a tortilla, but a Chinese version of the same thing). Then they slather it with some sort of sesame paste/soy sauce mixture and ask if you want it “la jiao,” or with spicy pepper sauce. Which of course, I always do. After these sauces are spread over the whole tortilla, they ask which of the toppings you want. Usually you can choose from leaves of lettuce, cucumbers, tofu noodles, seaweed, thin strips of cooked potatoes, and bamboo shoots. Then they fold it up and voila, you have a Chinese wrap! Whenever we’re feeling in the mood for something fried that is similar to a Western meal, we head to this wrap stand. Cheap and delicious. After we got our wraps we stopped at the veggie market to pick out food for our Christmas dinner which we had decided would consist of a green bean casserole (which wasn’t really a casserole because we don’t have an oven and had to manage it on the stove, but you get the idea), mashed sweet potatoes, and mashed regular potatoes. We got our veggies and then stopped at the grocery store above the market to get some milk. With all our ingredients in hand we headed home to open presents, which we did while listening to Nat King Cole and sipping hot chocolate. After opening our wonderful gifts we spent the rest of the afternoon reading the books we received from our families. Then dinnertime came around and, of course, it wouldn’t be dinner in China if something unexpected didn’t happen. Turns out the carton of dairy we had purchased earlier that day which we thought was milk was actually a slightly vanilla-flavored yogurt. Since we needed a milk-like substance for all three of our dishes and were too comfortable indoors to go back out to the store, we decided to use the yogurt. It actually turned out just fine, thankfully, and didn’t make any of the dishes too sweet. We ended the night with a nice bottle of Chianti and some dark chocolate my parents sent, watching Love Actually, with our makeshift Christmas tree of books lit up beside the TV.

The second first I can tell you now because I came through it less emotionally scarred than I was expecting to be. My freshmen students had asked me a few weeks ago if I would participate in a dance with them as a part of the freshmen foreign language student New Year’s performance. It was not until a week or so after I agreed to this that I was told that the dance was the “We’re All In This Together” dance from High School Musical, a song I had hoped to never hear again after my first college roommate’s obsession with that movie. Begrudgingly I taught myself the dance two days before the performance this past Wednesday, my only consolation being that if Phil from Modern Family could proudly dance along with this song, so could I. Wednesday night came around and just minutes before the show was to start my students informed me I didn’t have to do the whole dance with them but that they would pull a few of us teachers from the audience to join in the end of the dance with them. Thankful for this, I relaxed a bit, and when the end of the dance came along, I allowed my students to drag me up on stage and I had my first (and hopefully last) public performance of any number from High School Musical.

The last, and perhaps the most endearing, first happened this past Thursday. At noon I met up with my department for a New Year’s lunch in a fancy room of one of the school’s cafeterias. There was an abundance of good food and entertainment including the persistent insistence of the male faculty members that all of us foreign teachers (there are four of us in the department) join them in drinking baijiu, a quite strong and incredibly pungent Chinese liquor. If there is one thing I was prepared for by my reading of Peter Hessler books this past summer in terms of Chinese university life, it was the competitive baijiu drinking at any sort of meal or banquet. Thankfully only one bottle was purchased so we were saved from getting into too much trouble, but I suspect this was only because a few of the teachers still had classes to teach in just an hour. This was not a first though, for this happens at most any faculty gathering. The first came when, after this lunch, I turned on my phone to find a text message from one of my freshmen students saying that it was her birthday and she wanted to give me cake and asking where she could meet me. I said I would head to my office now, if that worked for her. About ten minutes after I got to my office she knocked on the door and came in carrying a large cake box. I said happy birthday and we chatted for a few minutes about what she was doing for her birthday. Her parents had come into town to visit her and they had just come back from lunch and would be spending the rest of the day together. She then said that she had intended to give me a piece of cake, but her mom had misunderstood this message and had bought me an entire cake. In disbelief I tried to understand, thinking I must be confused… “But it’s your birthday, Shirley, you should have this cake to celebrate!” She explained she would have another one with her parents, but she wanted to give this one to me to celebrate her birthday since I am the first foreign teacher she has had and she has really loved being in my class. At this point she said that she had more she wanted to say but couldn’t express herself fully in English. We chatted for a few more minutes and then said goodbye. I can definitely say this was the first time I have ever received a whole cake for someone else’s birthday, and what made it all the more special was that it seemed like this just seemed like the natural thing to do for her—why would you not give someone else a gift on your own birthday? I was deeply touched by her kindness and sincerity.