Journal: But You Can't Choose Your Fish

I've had koufu (a fortunate mouth) lately. On Thursday there was a free lunch for the teachers, on Friday Tie Cheng treated me to dinner, and then this weekend it has been raining ex-students. I bumped into one named Bill on the street yesterday, and he invited me to dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that his "uncle" owns (probably not a blood relation—kinship terms are used quite loosely in chinese). The main dish was a nice big carp. Then today, another student from last semester called Martin took me to lunch. Clearly quite comfortable in the role of host, he ordered a bunch of dishes and I didn't know what to expect until they came out one by one. The centrepiece: carp!

Apart from the fish, there are other similarities between these two third-year students. Both of them have got a tutoring job at the moment, and visit their students' home every day. This seems to be by far the most common part-time job among college students. Neither of the boys is particularly pleased to be majoring in english, but their story is the same as most students I've spoken to: their parents chose their major. Bill is hoping that if he studies hard for the postgraduate entrance examination then he can shift into the field of law (he wouldn't be the first student to change direction so sharply), and he has already started preparing although the exam is still more than a year away. Martin, who confesses that he is better at playing drums and guitar than he is at studying, is not planning to sit the postgraduate entrance exam. But he has recently had the epiphany that his job prospects probably depend a lot on how much he can improve his english before graduation—hence, lunch with me. Many english majors are frustrated that when they go looking for a job they are not only competing with other english majors but also graduates in other fields, some of whom have been diligently studying english on the sly for years. At a nationwide undergraduate english speaking competition earlier this year, the winner was an accounting major.

A lot of my friends are students. That's not very surprising of course, after all I'm only a few years older than they are and we have a lot of other things in common too. Even when I went travelling during the summer holiday, the random encounter that I found most pleasing was talking to a university student who was staying in the same guesthouse as me.

The part of me that wants to live happily here is glad just to be making friends, but the part of me that wants to know China as accurately as possible wonders if I shouldn't venture outside the safe world of the campus now and then. Riding the train during summer, I really hoped that it would set me down in some remote one donkey town, but I was forgetting that this is China, not sparsely populated Australia. All those dots on the map that the express trains whiz past are actually cities with hundreds of thousands of people.

Of course there is my friend Yu Yongguo, who lives in a village between here and Dalian. There are about a thousand houses there, with narrow roads between them but no real addressing system. Needless to say, the time that I tried to find my own way to his home on his birthday, I failed. I've had some fun times with him, but we don't really connect: our ages are different, our background is different, and anyway, I'm very bad at making small talk in any language. Now that I have other friends, I don't contact him very often. I do have a few anecdotes, though. Like the time he wanted me to call his wife and give him an alibi, so that he could spend the night with his girlfriend (I refused, and so did the girlfriend!). Or the time he wanted me to help him translate something into chinese: it turned out that his brother-in-law was trying to sell several bottles of "Spanish Sex Drops" (which claim to heighten female arousal) but not having much success because the directions were in english. I was too embarrassed to write about this when it happened. Not because of the product, but because in hindsight my translation was really terrible. I was able to explain the directions, but I rendered the name of the potion as "Spanish Lewd Water". Or he might have written down "Spanish Silver Water", which is a homophone—I couldn't read the handwriting.

Of course there's lots in the "good wholesome fun" column too. The time he invited me to the beach, and picked me up in his minibus with the whole of his wife's extended family in the back was interesting. You can choose your friends, but you can't choose how your friends will surprise you.

hahaha Spanish Lewd water. Is that the guy you gave the mini washing machine to?

matt [homepage] 28.10.2003 , 14:12

I guess the whole thing is though, no matter where you go, you will find that the same sorts of people will gravitate towards you. And you to them. I guess if you went out to a little town in the middle o'nowhere, if you could find one, you would find the one person out there that was like you. C'est la vie.

lisa 05.11.2003 , 00:17

So lisa, have you found that you gravitate towards todd?

geoff 14.11.2003 , 16:48

Ummm....I guess so? lol I just think, from personal experience, that no matter where you go, you will find people that are similar to other people that you meet. Todd, you should have noticed this by now. You will have something in you that automatically finds the familiar in the unknown. That is the basis of my theory. I'm planning on writing a book.....

lisa 17.11.2003 , 00:04

I have noticed that, Lisa. But I'm not certain it's the same for everybody. I'm quite choosy when it comes to friends, and I'd rather be alone than hang out with a person that I didn't respect.

Todd 19.11.2003 , 20:40

Announcement: I've just discovered that those two characters, "lewd" and "water", when put together actually mean sexual fluid (I found a mere 14000 references on Google). So I'm really, really hoping that the guy wrote down "silver water".

Todd 02.03.2004 , 23:30

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