Where I Live and NSO

I live in Wenjing. A suburb of Chengdu. My housing complex consists of about a dozen buildings, with each building divided into two parts connected by a parking structure. Each building is four stories with six apartments on either side.

I share the apartment with Dr. and Mrs. Wong and Tristan. The Wongs and Tristan have rooms upstairs, and I have the bedroom downstairs. We have a very spacious living room, a tiny kitchen, and a miniscule front yard. I am surrounded by trees, trees, and more trees. Sometimes I feel like I’m actually in Oregon, but then I think, even Oregon doesn’t have this many.

There is a lot of construction. As in, I am surrounded by ginormous apartment buildings that are all half-way completed. They are all covered in green screens that protect the buildings from the weather.

The sky is always grey. And it rains a lot. I finally bought an umbrella today. That was a big accomplishment. Also, I’ve never experienced humidity like this. I don’t look forward to running errands in the afternoon because I end up drenched in sweat. Gross.

I learned from my boss that there really are government spies out and about. Certain people regularly get checked up on, and it is not uncommon to have one’s email hacked by the government. As one of my coworkers said, “In America, privacy is a very big thing. In China, you still have your personal privacy, the government just needs to know about it.”

A few months ago when I was emailing my boss, he said that he noticed that it took two days for emails to reach him after I sent them. Turns out, this was because his emails were being intercepted. Apparently, he had found himself on the government’s radar after contacting some church people via email. (My boss is from Hong Kong where there aren’t the strict laws regarding religion. Now that he’s in China, things are a bit more complicated for him…) Luckily, the laws don’t apply to me, I just can’t talk about religion at all with anyone except from a historical perspective.

We had New Student Orientation on Saturday. Tristan and I sat in the room as the different Chinese teachers spoke to parents about their expectations for the students. Dr. Wong translated everything for us. This worked out well, that is, until it was his turn to speak to the parents. Since he too spoke in Chinese, we have no idea what he was saying. Tristan and I then had to introduce ourselves. This worried me because I didn’t know what the parents were expecting from me. Turns out, none of the parents knew English, and (as I was later told by my boss) I was only there so that they could see that they were paying for a real American to teach their children English. In China, appearance is all that matters to people, and I, in all my almost albino-like glory, was just for show. I tried to let them know my goals for their kids, but I don’t think they understood. They just cared that white people were teaching their kids. Tristan then got up and gave a long spiel about what he planned on teaching their children and what his expectations were. His introduction was really good and clear, so it was obvious to me that he had taught before. In fact, I later found out that he taught the exact same students last year.