Shell in China

You take the good,

You take the bad,

You take them both and there you have,

The facts of life…

A little kickback to the 80’s and The Facts of Life, but I thought it was appropriate for the time being. Lately it has felt like everything that is happening is falling on one extreme or another on the spectrum. Thad and I have been feeling some frustrations with some people in China, but then, just when we feel so irritated we want to scream, someone else does something to restore our faith. To illustrate, I will give you an example of each, both of which happened on the same day!

When I was in Chengdu a few weeks ago, I picked up some postcards. (Yes, that means some of you will possibly be getting one in the mail!) I spent a good deal of time filling them out on Friday morning and then I took them down to the post office at the end of the road. I have mailed postcards from there before, so I expected it to be an in and out operation. Boy was I wrong! I went in and asked to send them to Meiguo (America) and the man behind the counter told me he couldn’t. He said I had to take them to the big post office in town. I was annoyed because I know they mail them from there and I got the feeling he just didn’t want to deal with me because I was a foreigner. I figured I would just go back on Monday and try again. When Monday rolled around, Tomas, another foreign teacher at the school, told me he mailed a couple of letters from the post office that morning and that I should try again because the man wasn’t there. So after lunch I hurried on down with my postcards in hand, only to walk in and see…the man!! Arg!! I figured I would give it another try, but again he told me no! I then, using me horrible Chinese skills, got a little grumpy with him, telling him that I knew my friend had mailed stuff from there that same morning and that I wanted him to take care of mine as well! Eventually a woman came out of the back and pushed him aside and took care of it, but the whole experience was not a pleasant one. I really feel like this man just didn’t want to deal with the blonde girl with a strange accent. He made it clear that it was easier for him to push me off onto someone downtown than for him to try and help. I walked away from the post office rather fed up with China.

My faith in the kindness of Chinese was restored later than same day. Thad had a boil behind his ear that he needed to have drained at the hospital. It wasn’t a huge deal and he knew what had to be done because he had the same thing one time in the States. He asked a fellow teacher to go with him, just to be safe on the translation part. To make a long story short, (I am sure you can get the long one on Thad’s blog in the near future!) he had it drained and the doctor that did it was very kind. The attending nurse happened to be the woman who lives across the hall from us and she was also helpful. After doing the small procedure, the doctor told Thad that he would not charge him for it because he knew that Thad was far from home and because Thad came here to help the people of the town! How sweet is that?!? Thad paid for the medicine to keep from getting an infection, but the procedure itself was nothing. Needless to say, it made both of us feel a bit better about the frustrations we have been dealing with lately.

So, back to the theme song of our wonderful 80’s sitcom: there is good and bad and you deal with both, and that is what makes life!! While nearly everything is different when you are living in China, everything is the same as well. There are frustrations and high points and it is the combination that makes life what it is!