Ricky the Psychopath

In my line of work, Saturdays and Sundays are the hard days.  I work at a cram school, which is basically school for when you're not at regular school.  Playing?  Enjoying your childhood?  God forbid! (Wait a minute, there is no god.  God is the opiate of the masses.  How foolish of me.)  On Saturdays, I have five classes, or ten hours.  On Sundays, I have four classes, or eight hours.  Some people say it must be easy ("all you do is play games with kids") but it's exhausting to spend your 10 of your 14 waking hours being kicked/sneezed on/clambered around on by screaming kids.  By the end of the weekend, I feel like Bloaty the Pizza Hog from Invader Zim:

"What more you askin' for?"

My very last class on Sunday is a kindergarten class.  These are kids who have never been in a classroom before, and spend most of the class either crying, or performing various bodily functions.  It's one last hurdle to get past before my weekend (that is, Monday and Tuesday).

It is in this class that I have a kid that I call Ricky the Psychopath.  I call him that because his name is Ricky and he's a psychopath.

This kid, a five year old, embodies why I will never have children: because children are jerks.  Lots of people tell me "you know, your kid could be the one to cure cancer".  True, but more likely they'll end up being like Ricky the Psychopath.

Among his various offenses are using his considerable size to bully other kids in the class, yelling swear words in Chinese when I'm trying to talk, and grinding my chalk into a cocaine-like powder.  What I really don't get is that his parents and I are working together to help him improve his behavior, and they seem like actually good, conscientious parents who take an interest in his education and want him to do better.  And yet they ended up with this kid.

There's a good side to everyone, of course.  It would be unfair if I didn't say that Ricky has one too.  He has a baby sister in the same class.  He is very protective of, and a perfect gentleman to, her.  A Catholic theologian, Bishop Robert Barron, once said that with the right training, a bully can become a knight.  This is what I'm trying to do with Ricky.  I think it's possible, but it will take time.

So anyway, last week I was trying to teach some new letters of the alphabet.  Ricky and I had the following exchange:

Me: M is for Milk!
Ricky: (whacks the kid next to him.  Kid cries.)
Me: Ricky!  Say sorry, or time out!
Ricky: (punches me this time, while screaming)
Me: Five! (This is a system that I worked out with his parents.  If he gets five warnings in a class, he loses five minutes of playtime at home.)
Ricky: WO CAO NI MA!

This is a Chinese insult that means "I'll fuck your mom".

I tried to keep a straight face, and failed.  It was the most unintentionally hilarious thing I'd heard in weeks.  I don't think I've ever laughed that hard at a five year old before.  I have no idea how he learned that expression, but hearing him squeak it at me in genuine, if impotent, rage was the kind of thing you couldn't write down.  Hey everybody, new rule: you're not allowed to say that if you are anatomically unable to do it.

And yes, Ricky got a time out for that.  No sticker after class either.

Backdiapers and Breast Cancer

Chinese parents are weird.

China is a weird place in general, but there's something that happens when a kid pops out that sends Mom and Dad on a one-way trip to Loonyville.  This is a list of bizarre things that Chinese parents do or think:

--First, backdiapers.  My friends and I invented this term one night over (a lot of) beer.  Backdiapers are a kind of towel that Chinese parents stuff into the nape of their kids' shirts.  The purpose is to soak up the sweat that pours off the kids' backs in a constant, unutterably foul torrent of Old Testament proportions.  Chinese kids sweat a lot, you see.  This is because...

--Being cold will give you breast cancer.  Chinese people have a weird thing about being cold.  They drink their water hot, for example.  Even if the thermometer's at 100 degrees (that's 40 celsius), moms will interrupt class by coming in and turning off my air conditioner, because their kids will "get cold".  I speak from experience, as when I was in Hangzhou there was about a month-long period where it didn't go under 100, day or night.  Meanwhile, the kids were wrapped up in sweaters with sweat pouring down their faces and backdiapers so thoroughly saturated that you could wring them out.   There are a few justifications they use for this, among them that being cold, or even drinking cold (i.e. room temperature) water causes breast cancer.   Given the level of competence among most Chinese medical professionals, I would not be surprised if they're the ones disseminating this information.  For the same reason, many parents don't let their kids shower in winter.  This aversion to cold is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, as is...

--Letting your kids crap on the street.  Diapers aren't super big here, so most kids who are old enough to walk but not old enough to control their, ahem, functions, wear pants with an open crotch.  When it's time to go, they squat down wherever they happen to be--on a street, in the market, in an underpass--and let it rip.  Of course to a sensitive and effete laowai like myself this is shocking, but it's a centuries-old practice that, if you think about it, is much more environmentally friendly than using diapers.  It also makes the parent's job easier.  For instance, the other day I was on a train.  I was sitting near the corridor reading my book when a Mom hustled by, holding a toddler.  At the end of the car was a communal trash bin.  She took the kid, dangled him over the bin, and started up...

--The piss whistle.  This is a high-pitched whistling noise that parents make.  It triggers a Pavlovian response in their kid that opens the floodgates.  As I sat in the train that day, desperately trying to focus on my book, the mom held the kid out, started whistling, and sure enough he unleashed a stream of pee into the trash can.  By the way, this whole time, they were right across the corridor from the bathroom.  Which tells you something about the quality of Chinese train toilets.

Pretty nasty, if you ask me.  But some other Chinese parenting habits are heartwarmingly affectionate.  Or at least, they toe the line between heartwarmingly affectionate and disturbingly helicopterish:

--Feeding their kids.  The other day I was walking down the hallway at school when I saw one of my kids.  He was reclined on a chair, with his parents standing over him.  Dad was holding chopsticks and a bowl to the kid's mouth, shoveling in food.  Meanwhile, Mom was holding a glass of (presumably boiling-hot) water to his mouth and pouring it in at intervals.  The kid was doing nothing on his own, just laying back with his mouth open like he was at the dentist.  This kid was five years old, and his parents were watering him like a plant.  One Chinese friend of mine does this with his nine-year-old daughter, and the lunch lady at our school cafeteria has actually done this to me.  Incredible.

This one, though, I can understand.  Think about it: the parents (or at least the grandparents) grew up during Chairman Mao's time--that is, the single worst famine in all of human history, coupled with not being able to eat what you did have (thanks, communism!)  This is the first time in living memory where a kid in China can reasonably be expected to have enough to eat--and even then, that's only in the cities.  Parents can't get that food into their kids fast enough.

Shovel away, I say.

I'm Korean

So, right now I’m living in a city called Guiyang.  It’s the capital of Southwest China’s Guizhou province:

By Chinese standards it’s kind of a backwater, and there aren’t a lot of expats living here.  Guiyang is a place where it’s quite unusual to see a foreigner, and people aren’t used to it.  In fact, even the most basic knowledge about foreigners escapes many people—they just don’t know what the crap they’re seeing when we walk by.  For example, Guiyangers (?) seem to be unaware of the fact that if you’re white, you’re (probably) not from Africa.  Outside my apartment the other day, I walked past a pair of guys sitting on their electric scooters.  One turned to the other and said, “That African sure is tall.”

Another time, I was at the mall.  I was washing my hands in the bathroom, and a guy walked in. “Whoa, Xinjiangren!” he said.  He meant that I was a Uyghur.  The Uyghurs are Turks* from western China.  While not exactly "Chinese" looking, they usually have darker complexions and black hair.  I, on the other hand, look like I just walked off the set of “Triumph of the Will”.

But that’s all small potatoes compared to what one guy said yesterday.  I was downtown, walking to work, and as I walked by, he waved and gave me a cheerful “Anyeonghaseyo!”

That’s “hello” in Korean.  Apparently, in this guy’s mind, Koreans are six-foot-tall white people.  Astonishing.

*Speakers of a Turkic language, not people from Turkey.