Sunday, December 21, 2008

How To Eat Hot Pot

Either you love it or you hate it…or you just kind of like it. Perhaps you’re simply not that keen? Whatever your feelings about Hot-Pot it’s erm…well, it’s hot. And it comes in a sort of pot, if you’re not too fussy about your definitions.

There are a lot of intricacies in successfully completing consumption of this most local of delicacies, and I felt it was the right tie to guide you carefully through the thousands of social faux pas* available for you at the local Shabu Shabu, all of which I have at some time tried to tiptoe around, some of which I’ve collapsed headfirst into with an unfortunate disregard for anyone sitting nearby, or the crowds of people watching through the window. Please bear in mind while reading this that I am a paranoid hypochondriac with acute something-wrong-with-my-stomach syndrome and a lump in my foot that everyone keeps looking at.

There’s no right or wrong way to enter the hot-pot shop, that would be taking things too far*, so let’s get straight to the nitty gritty: If there’s any nitty gritty in your hot-pot, walk out, this clearly isn’t the kind of establishment you’re accustomed to.
Firstly, unless you’re extremely pretentious and go for seafood, you have a choice of meats to accompany the basic set of vegetables, do-pi, do-fu and possibly an egg. Choose what you want – what do I care? After it’s been boiled to death and slathered in sauce, it all tastes the same anyway. Just make sure that after you use your chopsticks to transport the semi-frozen raw meat to the pot, you dip your utensils in the boiling water for a moment rather than transferring the bacteria-laden juices straight to your mouth.

If you are already eating, then you’ve either:
(a) forgotten to go and get sauce, or
(b) found one of those wonderful places where they do it for you – well done.
The sauce is a mixture of barbecue sauce, garlic chili and various other condiments that dip everything in before you eat so that it doesn’t taste like something semi-frozen that’s just been inexpertly boiled by someone so bad at basic food preparation they spend all their evenings in a hot-pot shop. If you’re anything like me, the exact proportions are a frustratingly well-guarded mystery, and so I you should get someone else to do it unless you want to spend the whole meal waving you hand in front of your mouth and making strange hooting noises*. If you’re like me, and let’s hope you’re not, this saucing of the food is an extremely messy business, and it’s worth knowing that the tissues are kept at knee-height under the counter. I suggest securing two packs before you start. Finally, if you’ve got it right the sauce should taste rather divine – that’s because it’s laden with more calories than the whole of all the food in front of you put together and will eventually kill you.

Don’t get obsessed with one type of food. For me it’s do-pi, for you it could be anything. Obviously. But probably not chicken testicles. You can order extra portions of anything, and they’ll bring you a big plate of it which looks good for about ten minutes, when you’ll have eaten so much of it that if you ever see any of that particular type of food again you’ll throw up. Which is unfortunate, because there’ll still be three-quarters of a plate full in front of you. Whatever you do, don’t throw up into the eponymous hot-pot, this is considered bad form.

If you’re going with a local person, for god’s sake don’t order rice. We Westerners have a tendency to want to fill up quickly, usually with potato or bread based substances, but rice will do the trick too. Ordering rice will mean that after half an hour you’ll be sat, feeling completely full while your friend, like the Energizer bunny just keeps eating and eating and eating. Three hours later you’ll have lost the will to live and be obsessing about that lump in your foot again. If you’re going with more than one local person, cancel any engagements you might have thought you were going to have that week, because it’s going to be a looooong meal. Do bear in mind, though, that ex-pat bosses generally don’t accept “we’re still at the Shabu Shabu and someone’s just ordered more lamb” as a reason for missing work the next day. Local bosses would probably come along and join in the ‘fun’.

After an indeterminate amount of time, during which you may or may not have considered tearing out your own eyeballs, all the food will be gone.
“Ah,” you might think, “thank the heavens and all the little baby angels – check please!”
I’m afraid you’re sadly misguided, and have forgotten to consider that having had all manner of rootsy, festery, carcassy things bubbling around in it for the last week and a half, that liquid left in the pot will make a darned good soup. Etiquette insists that you now spend a good hour transferring it to a bowl and drinking it. If you survive this, do not desire month-old ice cream scrapings or burnt popcorn and have the whereabouts of three or four hundred NTD upon your person, why you’re home free. Well done.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Video Promo for New Show

Is now up at:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UXASJ0zmrdY

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Ruefang

As part of an ongoing problem with panic attacks, and possible agoraphobia I am honour bound to accept each and every invitation to leave the safe haven of home, even when every inch of me is screaming this is a bad idea.
‘Have you heard of Jinguashi?’ said Anita that Sunday morning. We were laid in bed reading the Sunday papers. I find this an incredibly disappointing experience, as the Taipei Times takes all of fifteen minutes, while she’s often still wading through her wigwam of news until late evening. The next day.
‘No, I’ve never hear-,’ I started, before realizing that the very article I was reading was actually about a POW who endured torture at the hands of the Japanese down a mine in… Jinguashi. ‘Actually, yes – terrible place. They tortured people there. Down a mine.’
‘Huh?’
‘Yes, in the Second World W– oh never mind.’
‘We will go there today.’
‘Well, it sounds a bit … brutal. How will we get there?’
‘Fifty –minute train from Main Station, then forty-minute bus from Ruefang. Then back to Ruefang to see Old street and eat snacks.’
‘Ooh no, that’s too much transport, I’ll probably…die,’ I finished weakly, aware that I was probably losing this argument.
‘Get ready, we’re going twenty minutes later.’
Twenty minutes later we went.

You can’t deny the beauty of the Taiwanese coastline – I know, I’ve tried – but it just can’t be done. As the bus twisted and turned towards Jinguashi proper, we passed the imposing hillock of ‘Teapot Mountain’ and the ocean revealed itself. Serene, blue and seemingly infinite. Just about everything I wasn’t, being trapped in the middle of the immense gaggle of tourists somehow smushed into the bus.
‘Help,’ I gasped towards Anita, but she was having her own problems. She had recently been on an expedition to climb Jade Mountain, Taiwan’s highest peak, and now the sight of anything over a few feet was apt to send her into shuddering flashbacks of doom.
‘Teapot…’ she pointed out the window. ‘Don’t make me climb the teapot.’
I gave up trying to get her attention, and decided to focus on my breathing techniques and trust the relaxing scenery to get me through until we got there. Eventually we did get there, and whether I ‘got through’ is anyone’s guess, but at least I didn’t throw up, soil myself or kick the bucket.
‘Gold Ecological Park!’ said Anita, as if this was the moment our whole lives had been waiting for.
‘Right, good,’ I said, trying to walk off my queasy. ‘What is there to do here?’
‘Use our ticket!’
She held up the tickets we’d bought at the station – a tourist deal that allowed us a combination of four things in the area, including bus rides and entrance fees. We’d already used one on the bus, so this was number two. After the exciting transaction, we queued up outside ‘The Living Environment Museum’ or some such thing for ten minutes. Once inside, we packed into a small theatre, where they showed a history of this small, Japanese style, house. It had ‘seen the glories and vicissitudes of life over the last 80 years’ which sounded vaguely saucy and ‘witnessed the beautiful relics and glorious landscapes left behind when the mines closed down’. It occurred to me that if only the North East of England could see it like that, we might have been alright.
Next they showed us old photos of the Taiwan Metal Company workers, explaining their living conditions and concluding that their lives were very, very simple’ while showing a picture of a group of women.
‘Is this implying that their wives were retarded?’ I whispered to Anita.
‘That’s not funny.’
‘You sound surprised – you’ve been with me almost five years, you should be prepared for ‘not funny’ by now.’
‘Shhh.’
The presentation ended by telling us that this little building ‘will be a space for the use of people in the future’, which is about as meaningless as it gets, but at least it was ten minutes when I didn’t have to be back on that bus.
The most interesting thing about Gold Ecological Park, apart from the overall air of quiet calm, and a great view of the ocean, is the Museum. It was in the museum that I got to touch the largest Gold Bar in the world, which at 220 kilos is almost a whole Rick Monday. We then had to troop past various things made of gold, including the motherboard for a laptop. At this, Anita’s money-based instincts immediately kicked in.
‘Gold! In our computer!’
‘Yes, but only tiny amounts – just plating, really.’
‘It not matter – still more than on my wedding ring!’
‘Yes, but your wedding ring is plated with love.’
‘Hmph!’ she said and stalked off to look at some POW memorabilia.
After we’d exhausted all the museum’s possibilities we traipsed outside and she tried to convince me to have some taro ice-cream, which the area is apparently famous for.
‘I don’t want any.’
‘Why? Huh? Today you are a lousy husband.’
‘I am not a lousy husband, I’m just… difficult. I don’t want one because (a) it seems like almost everywhere we go is famous for taro ice-cream, or something. (b) it’s about fifteen degrees, and in Taiwan that’s practically sub-zero.’
She hmphed again and we went off to investigate the bus timetables back to Ruefeng.

Imagine more people than you’ve ever seen in your whole life crammed into an alley no wider than a dwarf’s anal crack. Now imagine that crammed into each side of that vertically challenged person’s dirtbox driveway are a variety of people trying to sell multifaceted crap to all of those people. You’ve just imagined Ruefeng Old Street, well done you.
On the plus side, some of that crap is actually quite palatable, and they do sell that thing where they wrap ice cream, peanut brittle and coriander in a warm crepe. I usually hate coriander, but here it’s strange out-of-place-ness gives me a perverse thrill, like finding old photos of Great Aunt Ethel in a bikini.
‘Is this crepe thing famous?’ I asked Anita, while hoping she wouldn’t notice that, despite my previous protestations, I was now eating ice-cream.
‘Yes! Very famous.’
No surprise there, just about every conceivable kind of Taiwanese food is ‘famous’. This is mainly because of all the programmes reviewing night market food. If I see one more shot of a preternaturally perky girl talking with her mouth full, I’m going to buy a Subway franchise.
After about ten minutes, despite the fact that they also sold hot crisps on a stick, I began to hate the Old Street. There were just too many people, and it was getting increasingly difficult to see anything, pause anywhere or move my arms.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said.
‘Help,’ said Anita, as she became trapped in a confusion of people and transported towards a hot-pot shop.
‘Do you want to go to that hot pot shop?’ I asked.
‘Not really!’ she was starting to panic.
I barged forward, grabbed her hand and extricated her, but a few moments later everything ground to a halt. This was the first human traffic jam I’d ever seen outside of a queue.
‘We’re not moving!’ I said.
‘I know – help!’
‘We’re not moving!!’
‘Help!!’
My legs were starting to get shaky and I could feel the first twitterings of a panic attack starting to build.
‘I have to get out of here!’
‘Me too –help!’
Things were getting worse, I was now experiencing a rush of blood to the head and the floating, otherworldly feeling that usually preceded catastrophe.
A mother and her four children thrust past us, her shrieking something about making way for small children. Anita, usually the most considerate person you could meet wanted to take advantage of this.
‘Go with her!’
I started to follow her.
‘Hey! Take me with you!’
Oops. I grabbed Anita’s arm and we forced into the woman’s path.
‘等待一分鐘,’ screamed the woman.
‘等待一分鐘 yourself,’ I screamed back, as we escaped into an empty side street.

Just in front of the Train Station, Ruefang Town Square is populated by the kind of men who, if you got in a taxi and saw them driving, you’d get out again. Then call the police. These men were making an afternoon activity out of coughing, spitting, sneezing and just being generally foul. Despite the company, we decided to take a rest on one of the benches to collect our wits.
‘What did you think of today’s trip?’ asked Anita.
‘Well…’ I considered this carefully. ‘Before today, I had some problems with anxiety, but now I think I’ve got Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.’

Monday, November 17, 2008

Natural Science: The Panic Attack

As part of rehearsals for my new show, I've been putting together a sketch on panic attacks. Here is a rough cut:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMOQZQRLQQ

It will work much better live, I hope!

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

As the nurse stood by my intravenous drip with a bottle of Clorox and a disarmingly unsure smile, I wished I’d learned the Mandarin for ‘You’re not going to put that in there, are you?’ But I hadn’t, and in any case I was dying. So I just kept quiet.

Things were not going well at all. Now, whenever anyone asked for any first impressions of Taiwan, my answer would have to be: the most agonizing stomach cramps you’ve ever had in your life, followed by five hours stuck to the toilet bowl, crapping so hard you were sure your intestines were now in a drain somewhere. If Anita hadn’t fortuitously come back home a little bit early and called an ambulance while there was still some semblance of a human being left, I honestly think I might have done an Elvis.
As it was, on the way to the hospital, sirens yowling us faster and faster through the night, I started to cry.
‘What is it baby?’ Anita leaned over me and tried to smile, but she couldn’t kill the worried, and somewhat exasperated expression crinkling her forehead. We were only a week and a half into my stay, and quite clearly this was not how she had imagined the start of our life together.
‘Well, it’s… it’s…’ I hiccupped, but the sobs were winning.
‘It’s what? Are you sad because you will go to hospital?’
‘N-no, it’s….’
‘Because you broke our toilet?’
‘No, n-not that, it’s…’
‘Ah,’ she nodded. ‘It is because you feel you let me down.’
‘Erm.’ I swallowed a little of my tragedy and tried to compose myself. ‘Well, yes – a little bit. But it’s mostly Freddy.’
‘Freddy? Because he is dead?’
Which started me off again.
Freddy had been my best friend since the age of fourteen. He was a short, eternally optimistic guy who suffered from a rare skin disorder that left him looking like he had just walked out of a fire. He never seemed to let it get to him though; countered every stare with a smile, or the offer of an autograph, and turned his alarming appearance into an advantage by becoming one of the most well-known and well-liked guys in school. Even a bout of tongue cancer, shortly after a big move to Edinburgh, wasn’t enough to stamp on his irrepressibility. Although the partial amputation left him barely intelligible at times, he still had the same spark in his eyes and a witty, though occasionally garbled, retort for every occasion. What finally did for poor Freddy, just a month before my trip to Taiwan, was lung cancer. Right up to the end though, he kept his spirit. On one of the last times I visited him, I was accompanying two mutual fiends who hadn’t seen him since the disease struck. We arrived late, and the two were nervous about seeing our pal and how he might look. Fred, too, was nervous that they wouldn’t be able to handle his extreme loss of weight and elderly demeanor. As we walked through the door, he lifted a hand weakly in salutation and said:
‘Guys, you’re too late – I died yesterday!
So I was crying for Freddy, because he wasn’t so long gone, and the ambulance, the feeling of helplessness, the hospital stay awaiting me, it was all too reminiscent of what he must have gone through in the few weeks before his death. I was also crying because I imagined that the feeling in my bottom was akin to what he must have felt in his chest, and that while he had wasted away from lung cancer, I was about to experience the long and dramatic fall from grace that came with a tumor of the arse.

Never ever, and I’ll repeat this for dramatic effect, never ever get so incredibly drunk that you decide to order some kind of food that you wouldn’t usually eat if your life depended on it. My second weekend in Taiwan, I was feeling fairly brave and had already secured a job. So when Anita suggested we venture out a little, meet her sister and two nieces to go for some local Taiwanese food in town, I readily agreed.
‘Here’s to everyone,’ I hoisted a virtually empty bottle of Taiwan beer, dribbled the remnants into a glass and drank.
‘Everyone,’ Anita echoed, and her sister did the same. The two nieces – seven and nine years old – ignored us, squabbling over the last few pieces of something that had once been a duck, but now looked more like John Hurt after that thing exploded out of his chest.
‘Baby,’ Anita said, having adopted this as my name the moment I landed on Taiwanese soil, ‘you want to try some special food?’
Her sister seemed to understand what this meant, and looked like she might be about to start salivating. I thought back to the intestinal stews, poultry feet and fragments of anus that I had turned my nose up in the last ten days and decided that it was time to let caution fly out of the window.
‘Of course! Bring it on!’
Perhaps ten minutes later, a big bowl of steaming pink seafood arrived.
‘This like tiny shrimp,’ Anita explained. ‘Very delicious.’
‘Right,’ I tried to sound hopeful, but I wasn’t feeling it. To me, that bowl appeared to be filled with hundreds of dirty pink fingernail clippings. ‘Erm.’
‘Deerishes,’ the sister pronounced, scooped up a whole community of them with her chopsticks and filling her mouth.
‘Really,’ said Anita. ‘It’s true. You try.’
‘Oh well.’ I chugged back half of a newly arrived bottle and balanced a very modest triplet of cerise commas into my mouth.
‘God! These are delicious!’
By the time the two nieces had disappeared the rest of the duck and were ready for this latest dish, it was too late. All the dirty pink fingernails were in my stomach, plotting their revenge.

The first day in hospital was the worst. I had no idea what a Taiwanese medical facility would be like. My only memory of foreign emergency care came from visiting a friend in the middle of the Hungarian countryside, so I was understandably afraid. Thankfully, Wanfang Hospital had actual beds, proper nurses and when it was time for medication, they didn’t send round a box of different colored tablets with a homeless man who kept asking you which ones you thought might be for you. Unfortunately, what Wanfang hospital did have was an old man with a very persistent moan in the bed next to mine. After several early morning hours of trying to stuff bits of the bed into my ears in order to muffle his cries of ‘Ayohhhhhhh’ and the babble of his chattering relatives, I rang the bell for the nurse.
‘Can you make him be quiet?’ I asked politely.
‘He’s dying,’ she answered in surprisingly good English. It occurred to me that she might have had a lot of practice in that particular phrase.
My initial reaction wanted to be ‘any idea what time? I’m trying to get to sleep’, but I rather tenderly said nothing and decided to put up with it. He did, in fact, expire a few hours later, allowing me to get some much needed rest. Unfortunately for me and everyone in my immediate environment, during those scant hours of unconsciousness, I shat the bed. This may or may not have been some kind of cosmic revenge for my near indelicacy concerning the old man.
‘If you are the same this afternoon, the doctor will do… examination.’ The nurse was replacing my bed linen, while I sat on a rather uncomfortable wooden chair.
‘What kind of examination?’ I winced and clenched my arse cheeks; things were happening again.
‘Rectal.’ She pronounced carefully, giving a big smile.
I pondered the idea.
‘Can you tell the doctor that if he sticks anything up there, I can’t be responsible for what might happen?’
‘What?’ I would have to try simpler English.
‘If he puts anything inside me, I might have an accident.’
‘Huh? Accident? Falling over?’
‘No. Look, tell the doctor that if he puts anything up my bottom, I’ll shit on him.’
I think she understood that. In any case, there was no further mention of rectal examinations.

Ironically, just as I was shitting all over Taiwan, it seemed Taiwan was doing something similar to me. I had left a reasonably well paid and respected job as a teacher trainer in the UK, after realizing that things were going pretty well with Anita, but we needed to take it to the next level. We had slowly built up a relationship over two months, but then she went back home, and for the next half a year we were forced to survive on intercontinental phone calls.
‘How are you,’ I would ask, desperately, barely even able to remember what she really looked like.
‘I’m fine,’ she would answer, always the same. ‘But I miss you.’
‘I miss you too.’
‘Love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Then one day…
‘I love you too, but… I think you are never coming here.’
There was such sadness in her voice, such resignation to an awful, but certain truth, that I immediately realized it was time to, well… shit or get off the pot. Within a month of that phone call I had resigned my job, packed my flotsam, jetsam, knicks and knacks and booked a flight to Taipei.
‘You mean you are coming!’ She exclaimed with joy, when I told her the news.
‘Yes,’ I exhaled, the tone of her voice instantly wiping away the doubts that had been keeping me up at nights.
‘But… what will you do here…?’
‘Erm…’ I hadn’t really thought about that. ‘Love you?’
‘Ha, ha. That funny. But really, what will you do here?’
‘Well, I suppose… I’ll teach English. That’s what I was doing before I got into teacher training.’
‘O-kay.’ And the tone in her voice this time made me wonder if I’d somehow got it spectacularly wrong, and that English was in fact Taiwan’s first language. Perhaps all the people from there I’d met so far were simply retarded, and your normal Taiwanese person spoke the Queen’s tongue more fluently than I did.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Well… for teaching English here you just need a white face.’
‘I have a white face!’
‘I know… but it’s too easy.’
‘Erm…I could wear black make up?’
‘No, I mean it’s too easy to get teaching job here, so quality very low, so some people think English teachers are similar level…’
‘Similar level to…erm... office workers?’
‘Oh no! Office workers quite respected.’
‘Right…maybe… well… cleaners?’
‘No, no, not. What I’m thinking is - in the street, with the rubbish…?’
‘Trash collectors?’ My heart sank.
‘Ah! No – cockroaches.’
‘Cockroaches?’
‘Yes, cockroaches.’

‘It is salmonella poisoning,’ said the doctor halfway through the second day of my incarceration, a grin on his face. ‘We have found it in your… stool.’
But as a fully fledged hypochondriac who’d been laid up in bed for a day and a half with agonizing stomach pains, I was fairly sure what I was actually experiencing was:
(a) Chronic Death Syndrome
(b) An extreme case of Chronic Death Syndrome, or
(c) Just Plain Death.
I wasn’t going to let this go without a fight. Surely someone couldn’t go through this much pain and still be expected to live.
‘Are you sure it’s not dysentery?’
‘No, not dysentery.’ He smiled again, and started to move away.
‘Appendicitis? I have a specific pain in my left side. Very painful.’
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you even going to check?’
He shook his head sadly. This was clearly a man who had my number.
‘Not dysentery, not appendicitis – not death syndrome that you told my nurse about. Salmonella.’
‘Necrotizing phlebitis?’ I offered as a final gambit.
‘Huh?’
‘Page 63 in the medical dictionary,’ I offered helpfully.
He gave me a kind look, smiled again and left. That same doctor was back a few hours later to inform me that I did not have the South African organ-eating virus last heard of in the 1850’s. But by then I was onto something else anyway.
‘I’m…’ I gasped, not sure whether I was putting it on or not, ‘short of breath. Very. Difficult. To. Breathe.’
‘Yes?’ I was relieved to see his look of concern.
‘Yes.’ I nodded emphatically. ‘Yes!’
‘When did this start?’
‘Two hours ago.’
‘You had this before?’
‘Ah…’ I considered lying, but couldn’t summon the energy. ‘Well… sometimes when I think about breathing too much. Sometimes I find it difficult to breathe then, but then something takes my mind off it and I’m okay again. Maybe. Maybe it’s just in my head. I don’t know.’
He began to look unsure, so I gave another few gasps to underline the seriousness of my possibly imaginary condition.
‘Okay, I order an ECG.’
‘Wow, thanks!’
Bingo! An ECG – that would sort everything out. My long suspected hole-in-the-heart syndrome would finally come to light. At last, I was about to be medically exonerated; no longer would society look down on me as the whinger, or cast knowing glances whenever I came down with another ‘symptom’.
A nurse arrived some time later with the contraption, and attempted to arrange it on my body.
‘Difficult to attach to you,’ she confided, after about half an hour of trying. ‘You Westerner very tall. Not sure where to put wires.’
Once more she attached the rubber suckers all over my body, looked at the screen, sighed, then took them all off and tried again.
‘That’s it!’
She fiddled with the dials for a while, made a few curious, and rather worrying noises, and gave her horrifying diagnosis:
‘Nothing there!’
‘Nothing there!’ I repeated, clutching at my empty chest in terror. ‘Nothing!!?’
‘Nothing wrong there.’
‘Oh.’ I calmed down and tried to make like nothing had happened.
‘And what about the hole?’
‘There is no hole.’ She patted the machine maternally. ‘This new machine.’

Taiwan, upon leaving the airport for the first time, felt like Singapore. It was the middle of summer, so as you left the air-conditioning a wall of dense heat hit you, and it took a few minutes to adjust. Even the short walk to the taxi had me feeling as squeezed of moisture as a dead sponge.
‘You will get used to it,’ said Anita, climbing into the cab.
‘When?’ I asked desperately, wondering if I’d make a mistake after all.
‘Just few days. Also, you are lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Yes, you not have to worry about meeting my parents.’
Oh God, I thought, they’ve heard about the unholy union, disowned her and cut her out of the will.
‘I’m sorry. Are they unhappy about us?’
‘No! They have gone to America to stay my Aunty for a while. She live in Las Vegas.’
‘Because of me?’ I was confused now.
‘No,’ she gave me a frown. ‘Because of having a holiday.’

Seventy-two hours later I was more or less accustomed to the temperature, and definitely accustomed to not having to meet her parents yet, there was enough to be getting on with. What I wasn’t accustomed to was being told by every language school I tried that I was overqualified, and really was lowering my expectations too much by applying for their job.
‘But I’m happy to teach here!’ I argued with one Taiwanese woman, who was insistent that my experience, qualifications and ability to wear a shirt and tie put me out of her league.
‘You not happy here. You go other place!’
As I turned, exasperated, I bumped into one of the teachers about to go into class.
‘Hey,’ he lazily lifted a hand with a cigarette in it and acknowledged me.
‘Hi.’
‘Nice threads, dude – is that a tie?’ He fingered it curiously.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ I answered, feeling vaguely silly.
‘You from Head Office?’
‘No…ah… nice shorts. But there’s a hole in your t-shirt.’
‘Yeah, I know. But my other one’s at the laundry. You know what it’s like.’
Well, I did now.
Just as things were getting desperate, and I had resorted to buying Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Stop Worrying and start Living’ in an effort to postpone suicide, I struck lucky.
‘I got something for you,’ said Anita as she came in the door from work. ‘I got it from work.’
It was a copy of Taipei Times – one of three English language newspapers in Taiwan.
‘Thanks. Did something interesting happen today?’
‘No – there is a classified section of jobs in back. Maybe more quality – because they can afford advertisement.’
She knew what she was talking about – Anita worked as a Marketing Executive at one of Taiwan’s top business magazines, and spent a large part of her day examining advertisements in different magazines and newspapers. The upshot of this was that:
(a) she earned enough money that my lack of a job was not life threatening
(b) if you offered her a magazine to read for pleasure, she would curl up into a ball and start to make weeping noises.
I looked in the paper, and sure enough, there in the back was an advertisement
for an English teacher at He-Ping Junior High school.
‘This is no good,’ I said, after excitedly reading through the requirements. ‘They want someone with twenty-five years experience and a double Masters in Linguistics and anthropology.’
She laughed.
‘Do not worry. They just try to get better applications than other schools.’
‘I really don’t think I can get this job.’
‘Yes, you can get it.’
‘What makes you so sure? I don’t have that much experience or those qualifications.’
‘Yes, but you have some of experience and some of qualifications. That will be enough.’

By the third day of hospital life I was able to summon enough energy to slowly hobble over to the window and look outside. It was a wonderful, blue-sky day and I could feel the intense heat trying to get through the glass and into my air-conditioning. Outside, sixteen floors down, people were doing what people do when they’re not languishing in hospital or dead: visiting the 7/11, waiting for the bus, grabbing some chicken-to-go at KFC. At which point my stomach decided to remind me that I hadn’t eaten for over seventy-two hours. Up until that point I had hardly thought about food, hunger had seemed a far-away, otherworldly concept. Not anymore.
‘Oh God,’ my system rumbled alarmingly and a faint, light-headedness washed over me. I looked out again, but now it was even worse. Not only could I see into the KFC and the people there enjoying their meals, but I could even… yes, it was impossible but true. I could smell the Colonel’s secret recipe. And, as I continued staring at the KFC, more tempted than a pedophile in a playground, my eyes were magnetically drawn to the sign. Colonel Sanders’ big white face turned fractionally in my direction and gave me a great big dirty wink.
‘Are you okay Mr. Andrew?’ came the nurse’s voice from behind me.
‘No. Colonel Sanders is winking,’ I admitted, like it was a dirty secret. ‘Colonel Sanders is looking at me and winking.’
‘Oh! You disgusting!’ said the nurse, perhaps not completely understanding me, and stormed off to try and get me committed.
The next morning, despite the protestations of several members of staff who claimed that I had both threatened to defecate over the doctor and was having pornographic hallucinations, I was allowed out.
I took a taxi home and staggered over to the phone, in need of moral and emotional support. My parents, back in the UK – surely they’d make me feel better, that good old blend of care, wisdom and comfort.
‘Hi Dad.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s Andy?’
‘Andy?’
‘Andy, your son Andy.’
‘Right. Well the rugby’s on.’
‘Oh… well, it’s just that I’ve just come out of hospital.’
There was silence.
‘Dad?’
‘Oooh, nice try. What was that?’
‘I’ve just been in hospital for a few days. I’ve had salmonella.’
‘Well that was bloody stupid, wasn’t it? I told you to stay away from that stuff – me and your mam won’t touch it.’
‘Right, erm, well I’m okay now.’
There was silence.
‘Dad?’
‘Sorry – the adverts. What was that?’
‘I’m okay now.’
‘Oh you think you’re okay, but it always comes back you know – your Great Aunt Ethel had it in her back for seventeen years.’

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Chapter One

I had it narrowed down now: She was definitely Thai, Indonesian, Japanese or Malay. Well, or Burmese. God, it was getting worse – the longer I stared at her, the more cultural traits I began to discern. Was that a hint of Japan around the eyebrows? Something almost… Turkish about the way she held her head? Could that be… could that be traces of Siberia in those amygdaloid eyes?
‘John.’ I tapped the shoulder next to mine on the sofa, interrupting its morning coffee. ‘You’re an English teacher - what does ‘amygdaloid’ mean?’
‘What?’
‘Amygdaloid. It just popped into my head. I must have got it from you.’
‘It means almond shaped, Andy. Staring at that new bird again, are you?’
‘I am not,’ I said indignantly, ‘It’s got nothing to do with that, it just popped into my head and I wanted to know what it mean- oh Christ she’s leaving? Quick! Should I say something?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’ll be back in forty-five minutes.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because she’s in my fucking class, mate, and we’ll be taking another break in forty-five minutes and she always comes down to the Coffee Room in the breaks and you know that, and I know that you know that because we’ve been having this same conversation, or variations there-fucking-of for the last week.’
‘Are you angry?’
‘No mate. This isn’t angry. Angry was last weekend when we took them all on that day-trip to London and five of the wops decided to be two hours late for the bus home. That was angry, this is just marginally choleric.’
‘Okay… you know you really shouldn’t call them wops.’ I tried to adopt a frown of moral superiority. ‘It’s racist, and this is a language school after all.’
‘Exactly.’ He finished his coffee and stood up.
‘What do you mean, ‘exactly’?’
‘Well what better place is there to be racist? It wouldn’t do me much good down WH Smiths, now would it? Well – not in Cheltenham, anyway. I did once have a good go at a Nigerian bloke in a bookshop in Wolverhampton, mind you.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘No, language schools are where it’s at if you’ve got any racist tendencies. Jim Davidson would have a fucking field day in this place.’
‘John, we really do need to talk about this at some point.’
‘No we don’t. In terms of Teacher Training for the new lot, you might be the boss, but us experienced guys, we’re way beyond your conformist cack.’
He turned and started to leave.
‘Are you going back to class?’
‘Well they won’t teach themselves!’ A dawning look of revelation came into his eyes and he lifted a hand to his mouth, suddenly lost in a thread of thought. ‘Mind you, with a bit of work…’
‘John.’
‘Eh?’
‘John… the new girl…’
‘What, you finally want me to tell you her name? Where she’s from? About fucking time.’
‘Erm…’ Did I? Did I really want to know? Wouldn’t it destroy my delicately designed daydreams, take away the illusion of imagination, shit all over my parade? ‘Well… go on then. Yes. Yes, I want to know. Tell me everything.’
‘Okay. Her name’s Joyce and she’s an Egyptian prostitute.’
‘Joyce,’ I said desperately, as he walked out. ‘But my Grandma’s called Joyce!’

With John gone, I was now the only person in the Coffee Room, alone with the horrific revelation and the sense that, perhaps, I was doing it again. Having made it to Head of Teacher Training at a fairly prestigious language school by thirty-two I might have been ahead of the game professionally, but in the book of love I was still struggling through the prologue, checking every fifth word in my dictionary. During over a decade of traveling the world training English teachers, I had clearly failed to learn the very basics of how to judge people: Laura, the Spanish massage therapist, Edit, the Hungarian girl I always seemed to bump into on the same street corner, Choi, the Korean karaoke singer. And now Joyce, the Egyptian prostitute. Mind you, going on past form she would fit right in. At least there was some honesty this time.
‘I might even just pay her, and have done with it.’
‘What you say, mate?’
‘What?!’
‘Sorry, I coming back for cup of char to drunk in the classroom.’
It was Amy, a Taiwanese girl who had been at the school for several months. Her English appeared to be actually getting worse, though now it was sprinkled with local flavor and inappropriate slang.
‘Hi, Amy.’
‘Cheers Mr. Andy. Why have you got on the horse’s face?’
‘The hor...? Oh! Erm…’
I knew Amy fairly well; she was one of the ‘guinea pig’ students who had proper lessons that she paid for every morning, and then got experimented on by my trainee teachers for two hours every afternoon. You could always tell the ‘guinea pig’ students, as they wandered round in a constant state of confusion and were prone to horrific flashbacks, often needing me to step in and do some careful counseling to keep them taking the classes. So I knew her fairly well, but did I know her well enough to unload all of my emotional baggage?
‘Is it because student Anita?’
‘Who?’ I had no idea who student Anita was.
‘New student Anita. She in teacher John’s class. You watching her every day like she is Eastenders soap opera.’
‘Oh, no. Well, I am, but that’s Joyce - the Egyptian girl?’
‘Huh?’
‘The new girl in John’s class, that’s Joyce. From Egypt.’ Something in John’s tone of voice was coming back to haunt me, and at that moment I realized I was being had. Though, of course, Amy would never have to know that. I would just pretend there was another new student, a mysterious Joyce from Egypt and then before Amy would get the chance to meet her she… would die. Somehow. In a nice way, perhaps.
‘Mr. Andy, I think you have got had. By Mr. John’
I considered her words for a moment, before deciding that this way was slightly embarrassing, but in the end a whole lot easier than inventing someone that didn’t exist, giving them a life and a schedule that didn’t coincide with Amy or anyone she knew and then killing her off. Even if I did it in a nice way.
‘Yes. Yes, I think I have. He’s funny, Mr. John.’
She nodded her head. ‘Yes, he funny. But he doesn’t like the wops.’
‘Amy, you can’t say that.’
‘I can now.’ She said cheerfully. ‘Mr. John make us repeat several times for improving pronunciation. I can also make sentence with it.’
‘No, don’t make a sen-’
‘The wops are two hours late, as usual.’ She enunciated perfectly.
I was starting to get a headache, and not just because John’s class was, in fact, mostly made up of Italians, but also because now someone other than John and the other teachers, most of the trainees and the lady who came in to clean three times a week knew about my obsession. And it was a student. Mind you, Amy probably hardly knew this Anita, she’d only been in the school for five days.
‘Anita is also from Taiwan. On weekend we go to London to get Europe visa. I introduce you in Monday.’
‘What?’
‘It okay.’ she patted me on the shoulder. ‘She very friendly – don’t shit yourself about it.’

It’s funny what three days without much sleep can do to you. As I found myself back on the sofa that Monday morning I was a shadow of what I had once been. All around me students of all nationalities buzzed like bees, sharing the weekend gossip, finishing their homework and trying to get the coffee machine to make cappuccinos by shaking it furiously as the liquid came out.
‘Fabio, stop that,’ I said to the Brazilian teenager. ‘It is not going to make a cappuccino just because you shake it. That’s not how coffee works.’
He turned from the machine, a delicious looking cup of foamy cappuccino in his hand and stalked past me with a look of haughty indignation.
I slumped further into my seat. I was so tired that even the rudimentary arts of beverage preparation had become a mystery to me. If I was being outwitted by South American teenagers, perhaps it was time to stop being so ridiculously hung up on foreign girls, staying awake at night wondering what might be and risking dismissal by hanging around the Coffee Room all day. There were three teacher training courses going on, and I was only marginally involved with any of them. For the last few days I had managed to fob the actual input sessions off onto two of the more experienced teachers and one freelancer that we occasionally brought in. My participation now ran to spending three afternoons a week watching trainees attempt to teach grammar to pained looking students, while wondering just how I might be able to convince the new girl to join the group. On the one hand, having her there would give me something nice to fantasize about while the trainees stumbled deeper and deeper into the mists of English grammar, but on the other hand I would be exposing her to something that was probably closer to water-boarding than it was to education.
As if to prove my point, Ed walked into the room looking red-faced, confused and every one of his fifty six years. This was normal for Ed – well, for the three weeks I’d known him in any case
‘Hiya Andy.’ He sounded relieved to see me. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the lesson I have to teach this afternoon.’
‘Yeah? What’s up?’ I said without much enthusiasm. Although one of my duties was to help calm the trainees down before their observed practice, it rarely did any good and Ed was failing the course so absolutely that it really wouldn’t have made much difference to the end result if I’d offered to do the class for him. Actually, given that I hadn’t taught proper students in a classroom for several years, it would almost definitely make things worse. Not that this would matter much to Ed in the end anyway; his goal was to open a carpentry workshop in Paris, with an English as a Foreign Language classroom in the loft.
‘Well, I’m having a bit of trouble with this grammar point.’ He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a folder bulging with badly organized notes.
‘Mr. Andy!’ It was Amy.
My heart dropped a beat and I smiled politely at Ed’s notes, trying to guess a way out of this situation and find out what was happening with my obsession.
‘Erm… that’s great Ed – listen, I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t you…’ I looked around me, desperately trying to find someone appropriate. Ah, there he was, scooping up the last of the foam with a spoon and looking rather pleased with himself.
‘Why don’t you go and talk to Fabio, he’s a very strong student. It’s always best to get these things from the student’s point of view.’ I tried to sound knowledgeable and professional. ‘They are the ones, after all, who are taking the lessons.’
‘Sure.’ Ed didn’t look convinced, only disappointed. ‘Right-o then.’ And he lumbered off towards Fabio, who had a look of growing horror on his face.
‘Amy!’ I turned to give her my full attention. She was alone, and looked rather distraught. ‘How was your trip?’
‘Oh, it was the dog’s arse,’ she said. ‘We go there at seven o’clock in morning and wait four hours. And too many people, so have to come back the next time.’
‘Oh no. And, erm, how is…’ I looked around the room as if to indicate someone who should be there. ‘Anita?’
‘Oh, a good news for you!’
‘Oh no.’ God, she hadn’t told her all about me, had she? I was hoping for at least a few weeks of fantasy before it all went horribly wrong and I found out she was a married lesbian who found my appearance about as enticing as unwashed anal hair.
‘She comes to the practice lesson this afternoon. She will be hamster!’
‘Guinea pig,’ I corrected. ‘We call them Guinea Pigs. Did you tell her about me?’
‘No. You can to tell it to her after the practice lessons. Today, East-enders soap opera episode will be love story!’ She paused and thought for a moment. ‘Or like horrible surprise show with Jeremy Beagle.’
I looked over at Ed, l who was completely lost in conversation – on several different levels – with Fabio, and I knew, I just knew what kind of television we’d be making later on.

‘So then,’ said Ed, ten minutes into his half hour slot. ‘That was my ice-breaking in activity. Does everybody feel… broken in?’
From the looks of the nine students, they most certainly did feel broken in. Anita was sat in the middle, and somehow, now that I knew her country of origin, her features had achieved an undeniable Chinese cast previously unnoticed. Right now that Chinese cast was doing a fair approximation of disappointment, with a hint of having been cheated and a liberal splosh of staring accusingly at the trainer in the corner every now and again. For once, I was not staring at her, in fact I was concentrating studiously on Ed, in the hopes that he was somehow an underappreciated genius and that the lesson so far had been an ironic gesture aimed at reminding us all what not to do in a practice lesson. Any minute now, it would all come together and by 4:30 we’d be cheering the perplex-faced carpenter as we hoisted him on our shoulders and paraded him round the room.
‘Good,’ said Ed, staring at something written on his hand. ‘So now it’s time for the grammar…bit.’
The students tensed up. I wondered whether he would find it terribly upsetting if I went for a coffee at this point, but decided I needed to see this through. At least it would give me and Anita something to talk about – a shared tragedy that might bring us together, much like the Titanic brought people together. Well, those of them that didn’t drown, anyway.
‘The passive tense,’ he started, ‘is a tense. In English.’
Some of the students were nodding. At least he was still on safe ground, it remained to see whether he was going to stay there, or wade off towards an iceberg.
‘Can anyone give me an example of the passive tense in English?’
Hang on, this was actually quite good. He was going to rely on the students’ knowledge to get him through. Of course, what that meant was they would be teaching him, rather than the other way round, but at least he wasn’t going to be leading them completely up a small, sewage filled river and throwing away all the manual propulsion equipment.
I made a show of nodding and pretended to write something in my notebook, in order to give Ed some encouragement that everything was okay. He noticed my enthusiasm, smiled, and tapped the side of his nose, indicating that he knew exactly what he was doing.
‘Yes, you.’ Ed pointed at Amy, who had her hand up, and then struggled for her name. ‘Erm… the small cute Japanesey girl who’s been here a while.’
Great. We were in safe hands now. Full of inappropriate slang and slowly losing her communicative grasp of English she might be, but fifteen years in the Taiwanese Education System meant Amy had an expert grasp of English grammar. Just very little ability to use it. She was good enough for a few spot on examples though. Well done, Ed!
‘Active sentence.’ She leaned forward. ‘For example: ‘The boy kicked the balll’. Passive sentence, for example: ‘The ball was kicked by the boy.’
She rested back in her chair and the Saudi Arabian boy in the next seat gave her an admiring glance that probably had more to do with her denim shorts and tight t-shirt than the grammatically correct examples.
‘No, no no…’ tutted Ed, filling me with unease. ‘No, that’s not right. Active sentence…’ he raised the volume of this voice ‘…THE BOY KICKED THE BALL!’
Oh no.
‘Passive sentence…,’ he continued, lowering his voice to a whisper, ‘the boy kicked the ball.’
Oh Christ.
Eight of the nine students now had their hands up, and were looking really rather confused. The ninth student, however, was staring intently at me; a frown on her face that for the first time made her look really rather Germanic.

‘Right, Emily – you get off to Room 13 and do the session on phonetics, Ben, you’re in the teaching practice room, observing the trainees, and Harry…’
‘Yeah?’ Harry was our freelancer and was in the middle of packing his rucksack, ready for an afternoon over in Bristol doing some external assessment on an end of course practical.
‘Harry, could you just pop out and grab me a coffee from the coffee room before you go?’
‘I’ve got a train to catch – why don’t you get it yourself, you lazy sod?’
‘Well, I… I sort of can’t.’
‘What do you mean you can’t?’
‘Actually,’ Emily piped up from the door, ‘we’ve been getting him bloody coffees for the last two days. Anyone would think he was hiding from someone.’
Ben nodded vigorously in agreement, his glasses almost falling off.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha,’ I said. ‘Very funny, yes. Hiding from someone. At my age. Oh, come on.’
‘Oh honey, who is it then?’ Although only in her forties, Emily saw herself as something of the den mother.
‘I know who it is,’ said Ben, picking the teaching practice room keys off the table and heading out the door. ‘The cleaner told me.’
‘Fess up Andy,’ added Harry. ‘It’s not one of the trainees is it? I don’t think I could go through all that again.’
I shook my head, fiddled with my pen for a bit and then decided that given I’d told just about everyone else in the school, there was very little point in keeping quiet.
‘It’s Anita, the new Taiwanese student.’
‘Awww, she’s cute Andy. Nice choice.’ Emily gave her cocked head comforting smile, which was meant to be encouraging and maternal, but always came off as false and slightly patronizing.
‘I’d do her,’ said Harry, ‘but right now I’m off to Bristol to watch a very tasty bit of crumpet get an ‘A’ in her final lesson.’
‘Oh, hello dear – Andy, isn’t this her?’
‘Huh?’ I dropped my pen and experienced the familiar tingling of a panic attack.
‘Hello Mr. Andy. Why you are shaking like leaves?’
‘Oh, thank God – Amy, how are you?’
‘Hello there little Amy,’ said Harry. ‘Come to see your Uncle Harry, have you?’
‘No,’ said Amy, shaking her head. ‘No, I didn’t come for that.’
‘Leave her alone Harry, she’s only tiny,’ tutted Emma, before disappearing outside.
‘What’s up Amy?’
‘Well… it’s Anita.’
My heart took a swan dive into my stomach.
‘Look – I’m really sorry about Ed. He got confused. I should never have let him teach that lesson.’
‘No, no – it was very useful lesson! Before that lesson we think passive tense is something else absolutely. Now we know very well to just speak more quiet if we do not know who the agent of the action is or do not care.’
‘Erm.’
‘It much more easy than changing the grammar around!’
‘Yes… yes, well. So… so did everyone… they liked the lesson?’
‘Oh yes! It was… top hat! He help us to remember very hard.’
‘Yes, he did rather, didn’t he?’ I said, remembering the various sentences Ed had made them repeat in a whisper for about twenty five minutes.
‘So…h-how is Anita, then? I didn’t see either of you yesterday. Or the day before.’ Of course I didn’t, I hadn’t left the office since Monday. Not even to go to the toilet.
‘No – we had go back London to get visa yesterday. Anita okay, she misses you.’
‘What?’ A warm glow started to expand through my body; maybe everything was going to be okay. ‘She misses me?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said… you said that she misses me?’
‘Oh! No - she message you,’ Amy pronounced carefully. ‘She message you that she will be in Hamster class again today. Teacher Ed say he will teach present perfect continuous, and we are very look forward to it.’ She leaned in closer and whispered. ‘We are very look forward to it…passive!’

‘I had have not understanding that very well,’ said Amy, who appeared to have gone slightly cross-eyed. We were sat in the coffee room, drinking espresso as strong as the machine would allow and waiting for Anita. She had promised to meet us after the lesson, but we’d had to leave her outside of the practice classroom, when she got into an intense and impenetrable discussion with a Taiwanese guy I’d seen hanging round her for the last few days.
‘Don’t worry about it Amy,’ I said. ‘The first time you learn about the present perfect continuous, it’s always confusing.’ Especially, I mentally added, if the orang-utan teaching it has somehow managed to mix it up with every other tense in the English language system and then just decided to teach it anyway. The result was that Ed had inadvertently shown them how to form a mega-tense, consisting of twelve individual tenses in the same sentences and referring to just about anything that happened, has happened is happening or will happen. Consequently, there were thirteen puzzled, but quite excited students now loose in the building who believed they had just learnt the whole of English grammar in thirty minutes. Like a plague, this was going to get passed round the whole student body in the next day or so and was quite possibly going to get us closed down.
‘Here she is!’
I stiffened, and found I was suddenly unable to turn my head to greet her. I was frozen in place, my heart woodpeckering away like it had a forest to get through.
‘Hello Amy. Hello teacher Andy.’
‘Hello… Anita.’ I stared forward, aware that this probably seemed quite strange, but my hands were shaking again and I was undergoing some kind of temporary paralysis. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
Thankfully, she appeared from behind me and took a seat on the sofa.
‘What Samson want to talk you about?’ Asked Amy.
‘Oh, he wanted me.’ She said matter of factly.
‘He wanted you to what?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she turned and gave me a heartburn-inducing smile. ‘He wanted me.’
‘Oh. Well… I see.’
‘He too young,’ said Amy. ‘He only nineteen or twenty.’
Anita pushed her playfully. ‘How old you think I am? Huh!’
‘You thirty one – you told me that,’ Amy answered, perhaps rather too indiscretely and Anita folded her arms in a huff.
‘Oh don’t worry,’ I said casually, desperate to get my relative maturity into this conversation somewhere, ‘I’m thirty two, so you’re young compared to me!’
She smiled. ‘Thank you teacher Andy.’
‘I got to make like some wind,’ said Amy. She stood up. ‘See you later crocodiles.’ And she left, proving that she had a fair bit more tact and awareness than I’d previously given her credit for.
‘Erm, so… Anita. How are you?’
She gave a distracted smile and sighed.
‘Well… I am very flat-chested.’
‘Erm…’ Oh fuck.
‘I am really, really flat-chested.’
What was this, some kind of test?
‘No, not really,’ I tried. ‘In any case, I…I don’t mind. It’s not that important.’
She wrinkled her nose.
‘Not important? Amy say you like me, but you don’t care I am flat-chested?’
‘No, I don’t care.’ I tried to inject some compassion into my voice; there was something very wrong going on here, and I felt completely out of my depth.
Now she looked like she was going to cry.
‘But…but we had…having to, am did wait at Europe Visa office all day for second time, and I feel so flat-chested and…’
‘Hang on,’ I interjected, a feeling of despair washing over me. ‘You mean frustrated, don’t you.’

And that’s how it all began.