Another month, another six
blogs I didn’t write.
Semester five is about
halfway through, and at this point I’ve not written in an embarrassingly long
time. Not that it is any consolation, but I have thought about writing. In
fact, I have two half-written blogs from this month taking up space on my hard
drive.
Not that any of that
matters. What matters is what I publish. My lack of output is directly related
to the amount of work I have this semester. I am teaching the PC-standard 16
hours per week. However, the overwhelming part is that of those 16 hours, I
have seven different preps in a week. It is, in a word, yucky.
Despite having 553 things
to do at all times, I have been feeling incredibly guilty due to my lack of
updating. Combine that with a weird instance from last weekend and not yet
writing a post about Halloween, here I am writing instead of grading the 120
midterms on my tea table.
I don’t think I need to
give a history lesson about Halloween—that’s what things like Wikipedia and The Halloween Tree are for—so allow me
to suffice to say it’s a western thing. Therefore, it is common for Peace Corps
volunteers, working on Goal Two, to do Halloween-related shenanigans inside the
classroom or out.
One of the Lanzhou schools
plans a big Halloween party every year, and so the local PCVs throw together
costumes and attend. During my first year, I won the costume contest with a
large visual pun that no one understood (I was a ruler). Last year, I repeated
victory with a Halloween stalwart—the toilet paper mummy.
The problem is that with
these crowd-pleasing costumes is it leads to a huge number of Chinese people
wanting to “take photo with you” It is a huge increase over the normal amount,
and because of the occasion, all of them have no qualms asking. This is all
fine and good, but makes for a pretty dull party, as the thing people want to
take a photo standing next to.
Because of all this, I
decided to do something different this year. I wanted to have a costume that
was smaller and less outstanding, which I mean in the literal way: I wanted to
stand out less. Also, this year there was a zombie run planned before the
party, so I needed something I could easily don post-run.
I decided to be a Chinese
street sweeper.
I had or could pick up
most of the attire and accouterments already, and I had one thing that I
thought was especially great. This summer, I nabbed one of the “volunteer”
armbands that the workers often wear from the Olympic park in Beijing (that
blog is coming, too; I promise). I use sarcasti-quotes around volunteer because
it has the characters for volunteer, 志愿者
(zhiyuan zhe), but as most Chinese
people have explained to me, the word is often only used to denote assigned
jobs and work as opposed to freely offering.
As
you can see, it was a perfect costume for hiding and not drawing attention to
myself. I am proud to say it worked. I walked around pretending to sweep the
floor (and actually sweeping the floor when I got bored) most of the night.
Some
Chinese people came up to me speaking Chinese, asking me what I was doing
there. Other Chinese people observed me from afar. As in the photo, I spent
most of the night at a ninety-degree angle. It was amusing to listen to Chinese
people argue about how to ask me “can you stand up” in English because they’d
forgotten.
Anyway,
the reason I’m sharing all of this is preamble to the reaction that has left me
befuddled. I feel like it is one of those instances that say something profound
about… something. At this point however, I don’t have the time or mental energy
to unpack it, analyze it and try to make sense of it. So I’m just going to
leave it here…
I
had multiple students come up to me and tell me point-blank: Your costume is
not good. It is bad. You should get a new costume—a better costume. Your
costume is plain.
Like
I said, I don’t know what to make of it. It could be any number of things…
If
you’re interested, my friend made a very short video of the zombie run and
party (yours truly makes a few appearances outrunning zombies). Happy Halloween,
everyone.
And if you noticed, yes! I did change my banner to properly reflect a left-handed chopstick user.
You have to remember, a street sweeper isn't the most noble of jobs to some people. Many of the poorer students might even have family that has to do that, and it might be sad or embarrassing to them. To Americans, I could see how it could be cute, but maybe it's kind of insulting to them? Like, why would you dress as someone others strive not to be? How often do you see someone in America dress like a janitor?
ReplyDeleteI'm with Amanda on this. And, my dad is a janitor. Slightly offensive.
ReplyDelete