Fool me once. Or twice. OK! Fool me all the time!

Never once has a person in the street shouting at me “Excuse me, hello, you speak English?” ended well for me.

There was of course, the incident in my first month here where I was waiting on a busy street for a friend and a man came out of nowhere shouting at me “GOOD AFTERNOON GOOD AFTERNOON!” And it threw me off my game because, really, who says good afternoon? And by the time I realized that I’d responded to him, he’d made his way across the street and was shaking my hand, telling me things like “I am Mickey Mouse, you are Cinderella. I’m here visiting my sister.”

Then it turned into a debacle in the middle of the street when he grabbed me really firmly by the shoulders and started to do the European kissing on both cheeks thing and I kept shouting “We don’t do that in America! We don’t do that in America!”

He didn’t actually get to my wallet, and this is mostly because it was at the bottom of my bag underneath a scarf, cardigan and a newspaper. I stumbled into a store to get away from him and watched him sprint off to, well, wherever it is he came from.

But, I thought, never again will I respond to people who speak English to me on the street. So, I ignored the women in People’s Square who greeted me with “Welcome to Shanghai! Welcome to China!” There was a woman who went down the line of people waiting for the metro who kept asking for the time – no time for her! Get a watch, lady! There was a really strange incident when I was walking home late after work and passed a van and two men in track suits got out after me yelling “Hello! Hello!” Definitely ignored them. And walked really, really fast. Then I thought of Run DMC and the nephew on the Sopranos that was also fond of track suits.

Things were going well, until tonight when I was waiting outside a metro stop for a friend. A man in a suit came out of nowhere and said, “Excuse me, hello, you speak English? May I bother you?”

See, this is his story: He’s from Beijing. Likes America! Hates to ask, but there was a problem with his washing machine, and he lost all his money. (Right, I don’t know how we got from point A to point B, either)

The sad thing is, if I were a better student, I would have been able to take care of the situation because last week we actually learned how to say “I don’t have any money.” But like 80 percent of the other Chinese things I learned it escaped my leaky sieve of a brain about 2 seconds after class ended.

The man eventually left (maybe it should have been me that left, but, I mean, I’m always the one who leaves when a stranger is trying to beg money off me. Why can’t they be the ones who leave first?). I watched him as he walked to the intersection and looked around, confused to the point that I though well, maybe there was some sort of terrible washing machine tragedy and all his money was….somehow…washed, I don’t know, away?

It could happen, right?

Have I talked about how hard the beds are in China? 

Of all the things I read about or people told me about before I came to China, no one told me about the hard mattresses.

When I got to Shanghai, I had flown for about 16 hours straight with little sleep on the plane. At that point – from traveling to the airport in Detroit and checking into the hotel in Shanghai – I had been awake for well over 24 hours and I was really ready to sleep.

But, when I sat down on the hotel bed it was like sitting on a concrete slab. I actually got up to look at the bed to make sure I hadn't sat on something (like a piece of plywood). After I went to bed, I kept waking up to roll over because whatever side of my body I was sleeping on kept going numb.

My apartment also came furnished with a rock-hard mattress. Some people splurge on their own soft mattresses from IKEA or pick up heavy feather beds, but the hard mattress doesn’t bother me enough to make the trouble of dragging a feather bed home on the metro seem worth it. (This is how lazy I am.)

I’ve heard it’s just because Chinese (and maybe other parts of Asia, I haven’t been anywhere but China in Asia, so, listen, I'm not really the authority on Asian mattress customs) think that hard mattresses are better for your health. 

Just for the record, my health has been the same. (So, for those of you who like to look at the glass as half full, the hard mattress hasn’t done any damage! For those that like the glass half empty, I haven’t found my health to be better in exchange for an uncomfortable night’s sleep.)

I feel like posting a photo of my mattress is insufficient and let's just frankly say not something I want you to see -- so I'll just post one of the alleys in the villa compound where I live. I also wish I had a scooter!  

I work in a mall

The view from work.

During the first few days I arrived in Shanghai, I already started getting the hint that, among westerners here, those of us who teach English (especially at the private language schools) are at the bottom of the expat food chain.

When asked what I do by various expat architects, bankers, engineers and art dealers I’ve gotten the eye roll and the “Of course” when I tell them I teach English. (As in: Eye roll, “Of course you teach English, everyone teaches English.”)

“I teach English” is apparently code for “I have a liberal arts degree and I wanted to live abroad.” 

And maybe some people don’t like that. But me – I have a liberal arts degree. And I wanted to live abroad. It’s sort of supply and demand. I can give the kind of instruction they’re looking for, and in return, they gave me the opportunity to live in China. I can’t help you with your banking investments. 

I don’t want to start an “import/export” business. I traded on the marketable talents I had.

I went to see a musician last week and he opened with a song about a guy who comes to Shanghai with a desire to soak up the culture, but things seemingly fall apart. In the song, he fails to learn Chinese and ends up “teaching English in a mall” before he packs up and moves back to America.

I teach English in a mall.

It’s true.

A good chunk of the private language schools are housed in malls. In fact, on the floor I work on there are at least two other private language schools.

So, I teach English. In a mall. It’s a job. But even in the short time I’ve been here, it’s a job that’s given me the opportunity to be somewhere I never actually thought I’d be.

Plus, look at the view from the teacher’s office at my school! 

As an added bonus, my school is just around the corner from this doner kebab place where I get these little pieces of heaven for 6 yuan -- which is less than a buck in USD!

Communication and/or mental breakdown

Studying Chinese at Starbucks....

I was at a Starbucks inside a large, busy bookstore this week with a friend, studying after our Chinese lesson. A man came over to the table next to us with a stack of books and gestured at the chair. I had seen him before , making movements with his hands – like he was drawing or writing something in the air – and I thought he was looking at us but I thought I was just mistaken. When he pointed at the chair near us, speaking in Chinese, we thought he was asking if the table was free. We gestured that it was free, but when he sat down he turned his chair towards us. We continued to study, but soon he was reading out loud to us in Chinese from the book he was holding. When we ignored him, he got louder and started pushing the book at us, pointing at Chinese characters.

I just started Chinese lessons, so the focus has been more on saying hello and learning our numbers, rather than “Leave me alone.” So we just kept trying to tell him we didn’t speak Chinese and then started ignoring him again. He would leave the table – one time going up to a security guard, saying something to him and Chinese and gesturing at us – then come back and start reading to us again, pointing at words.

Finally, when the man had gotten up again, a woman at another table called an employee over and spoke to him in Chinese. Then when we asked her what the man with the books had been saying to us, she told us there was something wrong with him, mentally.

 Eventually, workers had a loud argument with him before he left. Then, an employee gave us coupons for free coffee because we were “disturbed” by the man (which, was actually the most interesting part of the whole incident).