I Grew My Boobs in China (14 page)

The first course came in a steaming pot accompanied by five empty bowls and a big ladle so we could serve ourselves.

“Oh, soup. Nice,” Bree said, leaning in over the pot. I dug right in to the cloudy, white liquid and found chunks of different vegetables and pieces of boney pork and a few mystery body parts.

“Mom, this is like pig artery. One of those big fat tubes that goes into your heart!” I said out of the side of my mouth. I searched desperately for a napkin to ditch it in.
I’m getting rid of whatever the heck this is.
One way or the other, I was sure of that.

“Don’t think about it, just keep chewing,” she said, keeping a smile on her face and talking through her teeth so as not to draw unwanted attention.

“You like? Very good!” Larry said, causing Mom to jump and nod overly enthusiastically. I rolled my eyes at her and continued chewing to no avail. The tubular chunk of pig artery was as rubbery as a balloon, and it squirted fatty juices with each bite. Fed up and tired of chewing the unchewable, I swallowed the throat-stretching lump whole because I couldn’t figure out how else to get rid of it. Before I could choke it down, a train of male servers placed four main courses in front of us. It was by now quite apparent that food came in communal dishes rather than as individual dishes.

Oh my gosh! That was only the starter!
I thought, gulping once more to force it all to keep going down.

“What is it?” Mom asked politely, leaning in over the steaming plates. I was pretty sure I’d rather not know. Having visited the markets, how could I be surprised to see what was served to us? The first dish came with lots of little legs that had once belonged to hopping swamp creatures. The skin was very thin and peeled off in dangly threads of speckled green.

“Is very nice!This frog. The leg. Leg. You know? And this, rabbit.Last one, duck. Is very nice!” Larry said, nodding his head robustly.

“Well, there you go, Savannah,” Ammon said smugly, as if he had cooked it himself.

“Yah, well.Pft! They’re tiny,” I mumbled, feeling a bit short-changed because they were nowhere near as big and meaty as the ones I’d seen outside for sale.

“After all, if it’s on your plate, it should have some edible parts! Or is this just a garnish?” I whispered to Bree, who was sitting next to me.

“Well,
he
certainly found something edible,” she replied, nodding towards Larry who was already busy with his chopsticks.

“Well, that’s not hard to do when you eat the whole dang thing at once!” I exclaimed, as I continued to watch him from across the table. He was crunching on a frog leg, bone and all, as he picked through the other dishes. To my left, Mom was delicately nibbling on a leg of her own.

“Think of all the little froggies that had to die for us – don’t waste them,” she said with a pout, as she forced herself to eat more. Every dish was soaked in Szechuan spices, preventing spicy-food haters like Bree and Mom from eating as much as they’d like. The duck meat came still attached to sharp shards of bone. The rabbit was also boney, as if it had simply been hacked at with a butcher’s cleaver instead of precisely cut. I spent a lot more time and effort sifting out cartilage and bone chips with my tongue, similar to the way you might work grape seeds out, than actually swallowing, but Larry seemed to have no such problems.

“I think you forgot one key word in that request, Ammon! Normal.
Normal
food!” I said.

“Well, sweetheart, you ain’t gonna
find
‘normal’
here,” he growled at me with his mouth full.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Ok seriously, let’s not do that again,” I said as we climbed the five flights of stairs, the very last obstacle before I could finally collapse onto my lumpy mattress on the ground, though even this inadequate bed grew more appealing every day.

“Yah, that was scary,” Mom puffed as we climbed.

“Tell me about it. Did you see the price of it?” Ammon shuddered, “We
can’t
do that again.”

“How much?” Bree turned to ask.

“Like, fifteen bucks!!”

“Seriously? Isn’t that, like, pretty reasonable?” I asked, stopping to massage the kinks out of my thighs.

“Hell no! We’ve been averaging five bucks a day
for
all
of us!” he retorted.

“What?!Really??? Wow!!” Bree exclaimed.

“If we want to make this year last, we really can’t
do that anymore,” Mom agreed.

“I think we should. It was SO delicious,” I teased, thinking that an annihilated food budget would drain our funds and get us home sooner.
Furthermore, if what I just saw was the high end of the available food selection, I am scared to death to imagine what a low-budget meal could include. What next? Grass-stuffed intestines?!
I didn’t doubt the others would willingly subject themselves to something like that just to stay the full year.

Chapter 15

Back to School

The sun and all its servants were well on their way to another successful day. We were up early, but it was late by Chinese standards. The rhythmic thud of hand tools banging on cement framing disturbed our sleep every morning at five. Labourers’ muscular arms swinging repetitively just across the alley were silhouetted behind our window’s drab curtains. The equivalent of a few baseball teams’ worth of players was working on a new, five-story building. At home, the same job would take five men using modern cranes and machinery. Here, where they didn’t have access to contemporary equipment, they counted on manpower to do the job, and the constant pounding never seemed to stop.

As I was slowly peeking out between heavy lids and wondering for a few moments where the heck I was, the locals had already thrown back their blankets, brushed their teeth, had a cup of tea or two, eaten two dozen dumplings with sauce, and long since biked or carted their way to work. Finally crawling over to the window, I observed the narrow alleyway between the new construction and our hotel. The workers were scattered like ants, crawling and hanging from the elegant scaffolding made of bound bamboo stocks. Once again I was amazed by the strength of these plants, which were clearly used for more than just panda-bear food and making rafts.

“Yah, bamboo’s one of the strongest plants in the world.Harder than red oak. It’s like nature’s form of steel. And it’s one of the fastest growing, too,” Ammon had told us back on the Yulong River.

“Some varieties grow as much as three feet a day!” Mom had added.

“You can practically sit and watch them grow,” Ammon agreed.

Although bamboo was clearly up to the job, I couldn’t even count how many western-style “safety regulations” were being broken. Not a single worker wore a hardhat or safety harness.

“I’m not going,” I said, turning away from the window.

“Oh yes you are!” Mom said definitively, leaving me with little choice.

The night before had ended with a surprise invitation to visit Larry’s high school a few villages away, where he made a living as an English teacher. I had secretly wished that we wouldn’t take him up on his invitation, that we could just make up an excuse not to go. I really wanted to spend my only free day sleeping in, but my resolve crumbled when I heard Larry’s final words, “Is honour, is honour.”
It clearly meant a lot to him.
By the time morning came, though, I didn’t care as much about Larry anymore.

“Well, if you don’t want to go, just think of it as volunteer work,” was Mom’s encouragement for the start of the day.
Oh joy!!! Just what I need at six o’clock! – Volunteer work! Pft! What I need is my pillow, some earplugs, and some more sleep.
So of course, twenty minutes later we met Larry downstairs with nothing more than a few yuan, the clothes on our backs, and the one thing we had to offer: our native tongues. We travelled an hour down the road in a minibus to an even smaller village than Yangshuo. Students on foot and riding bicycles lined the small road.

“This is my school!” he announced proudly once we’d walked a few blocks and turned the corner where a white, four-story building with bold Chinese writing stood.

“So when does school start?” Ammon asked, observing the hundreds of kids still pouring in from all directions.

“School start every day from seven-forty in morning until five. Is like this six times of week. And Sunday, they go study on homeworks,” Larry told us.

“Really? Wow! In Canada we only go five days a week, and it ends at three o’clock. And school doesn’t start until nine in the morning,” Ammon told a surprised Larry. The students’ stares, smiles, and giggles overwhelmed us as we stood in the crowded schoolyard. We would not go unnoticed, that was for sure.

“My class there. See window?” he proudly pointed up to one on the second floor where the balcony wrapped around the building.

“And how often do you teach?” Mom asked him.

“Every day I teach two hours English. I have two classes.”

“What age group do you teach?”

“My students are thirteen to sixteen. So sweet kids.” It was obvious how fond he was of them. The wide age range reminded me of the
Little House on the Prairie
series, where the school was just one big room with only one teacher for all of the kids. I had always thought that was strange.

“Oh, really? Our schools teach one age. Sometimes they have split classes where they have two ages, but mostly, kids the same age are in a single classroom. How many students do you generally have in each class?”

“About,” he stopped to calculate, “I have about fifty students each class. Forty-five to fifty kids in one class. Oh, my students will be so excited!” he continued. “They had never guest like this before. They will be so happy. So best surprise for them.”

“Really? They’ve never had a native English speaker visit before?” Bree asked.

“No, no. Never. Never they see white person. You know, they living out in small village, no tourist come, they don’t travel. I meet foreigner sometime, from hotel I meet, but never they have time. Never they want come.”

I began to get nervous and the butterflies in my stomach took flight. I didn’t like school presentations at the best of times, and that was in my own schools, where I would generally be forgotten and overlooked. With each curious stare, I came to realize more and more that I was about to get up in front of fifty students around my age who were not likely to ever forget my face. I thought about something that Shean, Mom’s long-time childhood friend who was once an RCMP officer and was now an anaesthesiologist, had emailed only a few days earlier. While sharing our family tales in his operating room, one of his colleagues, who was born in a small town in China, said he could still remember the first white tourists he had ever seen some thirty years before.
I’m not qualified for this. I’ve never done anything like it!
I thought, stressed by the thought that in this case,
I
would be that first tourist.

“Well, we are excited to meet your class,” Mom assured him.

We saw the orderly field where bikes of the approximately two thousand students were stored for the day. Hundreds of them were neatly lined up in covered rows. The main extra-curricular activities available to the kids were football (aka soccer) and ping pong.

“Asians and their table tennis!” Ammon laughed, recalling the many rambunctious matches he’d played with ESL students at home. But these were not the flimsy green tables with folding metal legs we were accustomed to using. Instead, theirs were just big blocks of cement. A line of stones gathered from the fields was piled across the middle and used as a net. My first thought upon seeing their tables was,
Heaven only knows what they use for the ball and paddles.

“My kids very young, and only short time they have each week English learn. They know small English, but very smart!” I could imagine that they would have very few, if any, opportunities to practice, living in a remote village with no English exposure.

We made our way to the first classroom on the second floor. The bell had already rung, and the school grounds were much quieter now that the students were waiting in their classrooms. Larry had asked us to stay outside so he could first explain our presence and settle the students. From what I could see from peeking in the windows, they were already mostly sitting quietly at their desks.
Settle the students? Dude! You’re not even in there and they’re just sitting at their desks. Is this a joke?! They totally knew we were coming! But they couldn’t have known, because we only arranged this visit the night before. They must be this well behaved all the time!
He first greeted the students, and the class simultaneously responded with a roaring “good morning” that made me take a step back. This was obviously their regular morning routine. To prepare them for their lesson, he gave a little speech about a special surprise, and then invited us in.

By the time I got into the room (being at the end of the line, as usual), they were all wide-eyed and looking alternately at us and then at their classmates. Some flashed big smiles, while others hid their faces behind their hands. A few had probably seen us in the schoolyard, but all looked equally surprised and excited.

The building appeared larger and more impressive from the outside than I’d expected, but the interior was much more like what I’d anticipated. The students sat behind beaten-up wooden desks, and the ceiling showed various signs of green and yellow leakage. The floor was unfinished, rough cement, and the once-white walls were brown and stained, but surprisingly clean for all that.

I stood at the front of the class feeling a bit dizzy from having all those kids watching me. Larry sputtered a few things in Chinese and then asked us to start introducing ourselves, conveniently handing the class over to us.
As if that’s not intimidating; how do we even know where to begin?

“Hello,” Ammon blurted out with a smile.
Well, I guess that’s a good start.