May 25, 2007: Beijing to Jiangmen

This is not going to be a very happy post.

Most of my life I’ve lived in a bubble. I’ve never hung out with any women who I had to pay for (I only paid for her dinner or price of admission, not her presence); I’ve never put any kind of crushed, dried vegetation that was then rolled up in a piece of paper into my mouth, much less proceed to light it and inhale the resulting fumes; I’ve never drunk any kind of previously mentioned vegetation, in a fermented or otherwise form or anything comparable to it, unless you count the other night at dinner when I put a little Coca-Cola in my hot water, making it look closer to the beer that everyone else was drinking. I got a pretty smooth amber-to-stout color out of the recipe. But I only attempted it because I was feeling edgy.

The other students in my group, as they get to know me better, are seeing my bubble more and more clearly. They like to give me a hard time about it. I’m not sure if they are trying to just be funny or if they are serious about their criticisms of my puritan lifestyle. I would guess the preliminary of the two is the object of their comments because oftentimes I’m better at making fun of myself than they are. They appreciate and even compliment my wit in these circumstances. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, the situation will proffer an opportunity to satirize both my naïveté and the shady, sad lifestyle of many of the individuals in the group.

After mixing my Coke and water and drawing the attention of the group, I took a sip. “Oh, I feel happy and worry-free,” I said with all the soberness and innocence I could muster. “I’m supposed to act like a jackass now, right? Quick. Somebody think of something stupid for me to do before this goes away.” So amidst the giggles that my comment solicited, people started throwing out…stupid ideas. “Clear off the table! It’ll hold you while you dance.” “That waiter is just waiting to be told that he’s loved!” “I’ll bet you could do at least 2 full flips off of the roof outside!” “Where’s the karaoke machine?” Later on, the headliner of the hecklers, as he retells the story, states how my reaction is unfortunately very accurate to some peoples’ experiences when drinking.

So, basically, we all make fun of each other.

The last night we were in Beijing, a whole big group of people went to a club. They had a pretty rough time of it, from what I could tell. My roommate went and never came back to our room. A few had to be carried back to their respective dorms because they were ‘too wet to walk.’ Turns out everybody made it back in as many pieces as they left, just the pieces that came back were mangled and not pretty. I really didn’t care that much. Am I terrible because of that? I had given them all a hard enough time the previous 9 days, hoping to help, that I was just too tired to give them more grief/grace, depending on how you want to look at it.

I didn’t care, that is, until we got to the Beijing airport and I had one girl in front of me pushing a laden luggage cart with all of her hung-over might and another one half walking, half being carried by me, having to stop every so often to stuff her head into a garbage can so that she doesn’t start retching all over the hallway. And yes, everyone else was half an airport ahead of us, so we were the last ones to the check in counter. We got there as all right as was possible. After I got my canned co-ed situated, I went straight over to have a talk with Rick, one of the teachers. “Looks like your little ‘remember we’re ambassadors and don’t let it get out of hand’ speech you gave yesterday morning didn’t quite do the trick,” I report.

“What do you mean?” comes the query.

“I just walked all the way through Beijing airport carrying a hurling, hashed female while trying my best to encourage another one to keep going so we don’t miss our flight; and this because they decided to go get tanked out of their took us last night, and no one could help me with them because they were just as smashed!” I didn’t want to get too excited before he gave me some explanation. Rick is a scientist—maybe he wanted to study the effects of traveling tankards. He’s somewhat of a moralist—maybe he wanted them to get so hosed that they would never want to try it again. Ignorant, naïve me could not have been prepared for the answer:

“If you’re in Ireland, you think you can get a good perspective of the culture unless you go to the pub?”

I just stood there speechless. I tried to bring up some nonsense about how I know the culture better than anyone else without ever getting close to the bottle; and I mentioned, silly me, an MCC policy about alcohol consumption. I’m pretty sure the rules limit a student’s sobriety somewhere between stone cold and dry as a bone. I didn’t memorize any book of rules or anything, but I have heard from more than one teacher about a student on a different trip losing a $15,000 scholarship because of one beer. But rules and cultural understanding are beside the point, in my legitimate albeit old-fashioned opinion. Common sense, responsibility, and not making a jackass out of oneself seem a little more significant to me in the long run.

Hopefully my classmates will decide to adopt heretofore-mentioned basic human characteristics. Until then, I’ll stick to my milk and occasional Coke and water.