When my alarm goes off, it is gray. I am in a bedroom mostly barren. My suitcases are open on the fake wood floor. The walls are just off-white: the color doesn’t seem to change in different lights at different hours. I’ve slept now two nights in China. I have not drunk water or eaten food in about six hours, which is several hours longer than I’ve slept. My mouth is dry and my head is trying to leave my body, go backpacking across Central America, journal, and find itself. I try to explain to my head that I’m already in Shanghai, where there ought to be plenty of self to find, should it come to that; and also the reason I’m awake – and the reason I haven’t drank water or eaten in a while – is that the school has printed “health check” on this morning’s schedule: my head has to come with me. My brain, forcibly restrained by my skull, agrees to release my legs on the condition my lower intestine is allowed to picket its existence. There are times it is funny to be hungover. This is not one of those times.
I stagger the long kilometer to the gate. Tom Collins joins me. By the time I arrive at the gate, I don’t remember if we left our compound together or not. If we did, there wasn’t much talking. It looks like rain.
French 75 is not on the bus: Only new recruits are making this trip: a crowd of eager white twenty-somethings and one bitter, hungover white twenty-something. I’m not sure where we’re going, exactly. We pull away from the school in what looks like the opposite direction of last night’s debacle. But I can’t place us: I have no sense of direction, and it wouldn’t probably matter: all I see are boxy gray buildings with small windows; both the buildings and the windows replicated evenly, forever in every direction. Shanghai is one gray tile in a hall of mirrors; refracted infinitely. I try to sleep and don’t.
When the bus stops, I have still not vomited, which is a narrow and earned victory. I’m furious I’m not allowed to drink water, and am gently reminded by recent history that my pain is some 400% my fault. I tell recent history to fuck itself with a barstool.
It started raining on the way over, and now it’s pouring, and it’s considering hailing: just to rev the motor a little and feel alive. The new teachers make nervous, introductory small talk, most of which serves to identify rain as wet (very wet, observe the most ambitious souls). We make our amphibious landing at a building somewhere in Shanghai. It is boxy and gray. The lobby inside is tiled, suspiciously clean, and also gray.
We mill inside and forms are dispersed. They’re extensive but boilerplate medical questionnaires: pre-existing conditions, allergies, recently touched a monkey?, and the rest. The form does not ask, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”, which feels like a missed opportunity. For the section about previous health conditions, I almost write the truth: I almost write that in college, I twice suffered an arrhythmia, which is sort of when you get a seizure but just in your heart. I look around. This facility looks more like a morgue than a doctor’s office. There’s like a 10% chance they make Soylent Green in the back. I have no way of contacting anyone I trust, and very little money, and I need to get set up and paid with as little interference from the Chinese government as possible. I lie on an official form: as far as the PRC is concerned, I have no medical history whatsoever.
I haven’t yet seen any of the Chinese faces from my Skype interviews, and it’s unclear who’s in charge. Tom, less poisoned than I, meets his new coworkers casually and easily. I decide to try it with my own brand of nauseous, deadpan mumbling; a presentation 6/10 respondents call “deeply uncomfortable” and 3/10 call “Is that really how you spell ‘nauseous’?” I find a table to set my form. The woman next to me signs a large, lilting “Angela[!]” on hers. I squint at it. “Ahnn-GEE-lay,” I sound out, carefully. She smiles thinly at me. “It’s ‘Angela,’” says Angela. Angela and I are not going to be friends.
Forms signed, we line up at a counter with our passports. I’ve done this a lot in the last 48. The officials at the desk grunt; barely looking up: the universal sign for, “Yep, that’s totally a passport.” This accomplished, the white people mill some more and the Chinese stare at their desks. I’m still not certain why we’re here, or what we’re meant to be doing; and not merely for reason of boilerplate existentialism.
One of my fellow teachers fills a plastic water cup from an available dispenser. “Are we allowed to drink?” I ask nobody in particular. A blurry shape to my left says, “Oh yeah. You just can’t eat.” I decide it would be impolite to murder my third day in China, so I resist the urge. I’m also not sure whom to murder, should I take to it, since I still don’t know why I’m here or when the checking part of the health check begins. I also don’t know why Blurry Shape thinks it’s okay to drink, when I read in one of the school’s infinite documents that we couldn’t. I’m not sure I want anyone checking my health, since they seem to be uncertain what they’re checking for. I drink some water.
“Yeeeaaaah, man, Achtung Baby. It’s their best album. It’s so alive.”
I turn. The man speaking has passed his 20s and maybe his 30s, which makes him an outlier in this crowd. He is very bald – shaved – and is so devoted to what he’s saying that he seems to move, mildly electrocuted by his own vision, a lot more than he actually moves. (This is not to imply he is still.) His head is very proportional in all directions. It’s too carefully rounded at the edges to be a cuboid, but it suggests one. His eyes, which are quite blue, seem to not have lids. He’s reptilian, but muscular – alligator, not crocodile. But then alligators never expend such energy, except in the kill. His mouth doesn’t open as wide as his eyes, which are screaming. I decide to be part of this conversation.
“I still think Joshua Tree’s their best,” I offer, breaking the circle and freeing the wide-eyed boy suffering revisionist U2 criticism.
“No waaay, man,” says the coked-out gator. His veins strain, which may be a perpetual condition. When he says “waaay,” it doesn’t take longer than saying “way;” but it’s obviously how he spells it. Something about emphasis. “Achtung Baby is the best album of the 90s.”
“Wow.” I don’t think Bono believes Achtung Baby is the best album of the 90s. (He thinks it’s Zooropa.)
“When you hear it,” says the alligator, “it could’ve been recorded yesterday. That’s how present it is, maaan.”
It could have been, if yesterday you also built a time machine. I hold out my hand. “Sazerac.”
“Red Bull Vodka,” he says. Keeping the motif, he shakes hands like a gator would a key deer. (Your hand is the key deer.) (I grew up in Florida. Shut up.)
Red Bull Vodka and I are interrupted: The crowd begins to file out of the lobby. As before, I’m not sure who’s leading the party, so I try to situate myself at the tail of the line. Learning by watching others learn by doing, I walk down a dirty white hall and turn into a small locker room. Inside, I’m reprimanded in Mandarin. An attendant shoves a robe in my face. Another attendant is explaining, very loudly, “Key here!” He demonstrates, inches away from another teacher’s face, by pulling a key on a plastic coil around his wrist. “Key here!” I put the key there. We’re similarly directed to the slippers, and told to lose the shirts and shorts. I robe up.
Still operating mostly by feel, I wander back into the hall, and am reprimanded by staff: “Here! Wait in here!” “Here” is another blank, white antechamber. There are chairs around a circular table, and some other chairs against the wall. Robed teachers fill the chairs. A massive, cylindrical fish tank fills the table. The table seems to have been built specifically to accommodate this fish tank. There aren’t many fish in the tank. The ceiling is very high. It’s the waiting room in a dentist’s office, if the dentist is Goldfinger. The teachers don’t look comfortable. I know I’m not, though my discomfort is only half due to the fish room.
The teachers float theories about what comes next, usually in the form of a statement:
“It doesn’t take very long.”
“Just weight and height and blood test.”
“There’s not a blood test.”
“Is there a blood test? I’m not good with needles.”
“Look at these fucking fish,” Red Bull Vodka chortles. “Check this shit out, maaan.”
“Yeah,” someone says, “that’s just China. You get used to how fucking backwards everything is here, you know?”
The air is heavy, but not too hot. Crickets merge with cars in the distance; a low hum with a sharp edge. The cigar is good, but the Kirkland Signature “Golden Margarita” prefab mix isn’t. I drink it anyway: I haven’t seen Stout and Americano in years. It’s good to be back in Chicagoland.
“How long do you think you’ll be there?” asks Americano. She’s tolerating the cigar because I’m around; she sits upwind of Stout and will feed him mouthwash in the a.m.
“Well, the contract is one year. But the pay’s good, I think, and if it works out – teaching music at the high school level, at an international school in a major city – I think I’ll stay three to five years.”
Stout exhales a plume. “Wow, man.”
“Yeah,” I say, warming to this topic, “It would just be really cool, I think, to be in my early thirties with a fluent handle on Mandarin, years of teaching experience, and my student loans mostly covered. And I want to learn more about the place, right? If it’s the future.”
“Do you get worried about that?” asks Americano.
“Not really.” I’m not. I’ve never voted; I’m not terribly patriotic. I think America pretty much runs the same, year in and year out, into the ground; as different groups of Americans yell at each other about poorly understood nonsense. So I don’t mind if China’s the future – what the hell do I care? I’ll adapt.
I tell them this. I say, “I think we’re so scared here of anyone else being in charge that we don’t stop to think that it might be a good thing to have a non-American empire around.” I like the sound of it as I say it: “China doesn’t seem aggressive, from what I’m reading. They seem to just kind of want their own space. I’m excited to get a feel for a different way of living; to learn another culture. We always just assume these places are backwards, but I think that’s just American. I don’t hear anyone who lives there saying that.”
We’re called out of the fish room. We are clumped, by the staff, in roughly even numbers outside gray doors. There are seats in the hall next to each door, and wherever there’s a seat open, a white person is directed to sit in it.
“Okay, number one? You have number one?” a Chinese attendant asks me.
“No?” I guess.
“Sit here,” she directs. “Number one.”
I stand and wait. When the teacher at the end of the line is ushered into
“number one,” the Chinese staff berate us in mostly English: the person next to the empty seat needs to move over. More agitation follows: we must all move over. I’m standing, so I catch the most heat: “Sit! Sit here!”
“I can stand.”
“No, sit!”
I do.
“Here!” One space over.
And so it becomes clear: We’re on conveyor belts. The conveyor belts feed into the rooms. The belts are uneven in length – different numbers of chairs outside each door – and they are unordered: you can go from one belt to the other is just about any sequence. However, if you are in the belt, you must sit down, and you must move over one seat every time a compatriot leaves the belt to enter the room. It’s a very rigid system facilitating approximate organization to unclear ends.
It’s my turn in time. I turn inside a door and am told “Stand here” by one staff member. Another staff member feels my lymph nodes and shines a light in each eye. I’m told to stand on a scale. I’m told to leave the room: “Go to number six.” The doors aren’t numbered. I ask around until I find number six. I’m told to sit down and to move one seat over. I’m starting to worry there’s a butcher in the last room.
The exams are not all alike: some are simple and standard, like a vision test and the basic collection of biometric data. But some are a little more exotic: One room (“Number five! Your turn!”) is very dark: it’s hard to see; only a bright lamp pointed at the entrance lights anything, which is as obscuring as illuminating depending on where you stand. I’m ushered in, and wait further: behind a curtain, a doctor (?) works on another teacher. I hear the doctor (?) grunt, glumly. The teacher exits, looking puzzled. “You!” is me, so I walk around the curtain to find a cantankerous puddle of a man seated next to a bed. He’s also seated next to an ultrasound machine, with the display pointed towards the doctor and away from me.
He indicates I’m to disrobe. At this moment in my life, it does not help to have seen both Deliverance and Alien. I lay on the bed. He spackles my stomach liberally with cold gel, and goes to work. I’m not an expert on ultrasound technique, but I’m pretty certain that pressing the tool harder doesn’t help it see better. I manage, again, not to vomit. Satisfied that it’s a boy, the technician (?) throws his tools to the side and mops off the excess goo. He doesn’t get all of it, but makes up for imprecision with quiet, angry energy. I look forward to my breast exam next (“The best part about be-in’ a wo-a-maaan…”).
Finally – prodded, poked, and pulled to the satisfaction of the People’s Republic – I make it to the last station. Well, the last station for me: depending on where you were sorted in the conveyor belt, this could be the dreary middle. But it’s my end: a large room with three brown chairs and one Chinese blood tech poised over his arsenal of needles. The chairs, incongruously, are leather. And large. Two of them serve as theaters of operation for the technician. The other one is just a seat at the theater. Actually, we have two seats in the theater, really: because the technician has to switch between the two bloodletting thrones, two people get to watch one other person make needle face. When it’s my turn, I try a stoic mien. I settle for not fainting (needles are like really sharp).
Not everyone is so lucky. The kid next in line for the chair is somehow paler than I am, and I don’t think it’s for reasons of Carlsberg. He really is a kid: round of face and form; thick but not obese; calf-fat and curly-haired. Sandy blonde; blue-eyed; not of this half of the world, and wishing by the look of him to quit the whole thing. His name I get later: Whiskey Ginger.
W.G. breathes so that you can feel the weight of his ribs on his lungs. “Sometimes I faint around needles,” he warns the lab tech. The tech looks at him dumbly. This doesn’t mean that the tech doesn’t understand, but rather that he doesn’t see what this information has to do with him: awake or not, it’s going in (which, fun fact, was the working title for The Cosby Show).
The other guy in the room is dark-haired, laconic, and named Paloma. Paloma looks past the tech, past the needles, and past China; to some place he maybe used to be happy. I don’t know what I look like, but I assume not chipper. The tech is blank as obsidian, which makes him the cheerful one in the room. Saying nothing, he allows some final protests and direction from Whiskey Ginger, then calmly punctures the vein. A man of his word, W.G. promptly faints. When he does, his eyes roll back and his lids flutter, and I want to ask the tech if it was as good for him. Paloma’s eyes, half-hooded till now, leap out of his skull. The rest of him doesn’t move. Blood drained, the tech and tech’s suddenly available assistant spit some Chinese at Whiskey Ginger, who lolls into woozy consciousness.
The tech points at Paloma. “You now.”
Welcome to China.
I never learn what the check is for. Presumably, it was discovered that I (a) don’t have breast cancer and (b) do have a non-zero blood alcohol content. No Chinese official – at the stations, or at the front desk of the medical center, or later at the school – ever explains, so the teachers come up with their own theories:
“They said something about polio. Did you hear about polio?”
“No, they’re trying to make sure you don’t have AIDS.”
“It’s all about AIDS,” agrees another person who is not a doctor and does not speak Mandarin.
“The main thing is they want to make sure you’re not a drug mule.”
Personally, I think they’re all right: I think the dour medical team was checking everything. If your nation fits the population of the United States after the decimal, and (historically speaking) you just got running water like a month ago, you’re probably not super into custom, personalized medical care. Everyone gets every check. I got an ultrasound to make sure I wasn’t a drug mule, and also to make sure I wasn’t pregnant.
We have time at the facility to dwell on these questions, because we do not leave the facility. Not for 90 minutes, in which time my stomach devours itself, collapsing matter and rendering me, corporeally, a portal to another dimension. (I am not sure if the vision test picked up on this.) When we finally do leave, it’s abrupt: one of the officers of our school’s Foreign Affairs Office announces, almost inaudibly, that we’re leaving. Then she walks out the door. That’s it: follow or spend the rest of your days on the conveyor belt.
Back on campus, we stagger out of the bus and are guided to a classroom.
Then, and only then, do I get some food. The Foreign Affairs Office distributes assorted goods to us: liquid, chunky yogurt in a milk carton, a bottle of water, and a baked good wrapped in plastic. The baked good is sort of a hot dog, and sort of a pretzel – the pretzel baked around the hot dog. It’s very greasy, and flaked with some sort of powder. It smells like a wet fart. It makes the noise of a peeled suction cup as I remove it from the plastic. It is just about the most disgusting foodstuff I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, I’m very hungry.
I devour it whole. If the conveyor belt said I was in good health, I’m not anymore.