On Finding a Perfect Scapegoat

Thanks to an intensive 8-week long course on understanding the international experience and a handy session on understanding culture shock during pre-service training, I knew my good mood when I got to China wouldn’t last. You get that beautiful honeymoon period where nothing bothers you, everything is great and novel and new, and you feel like you can tackle any challenge.

After about two to three months, the literature says, this will all come crashing down on you.

I only knew this intellectually, not practically, and I was prepared for a crash. What I got instead was a whimper with the perfect masking elements.

To understand, we need to go back to my land of three weeks ago. My water heater is prone to fires, so I can’t leave it plugged in all day. I wanted to take a shower, so I went and plugged in the heater, and busied myself with other tasks for the next hour. When I stood under the shower-head and turned the water on, I’m greeted with a stream of freezing cold water.

Well, okay. Maybe I just needed to reset the power cord. Did that, waited another 30 minutes, and checked again. Still icy.

Perhaps it’s that the outlet (lovingly secured by tape to the wall) that had finally given up on me. Carried my electric kettle to the bathroom, plugged it in, hit the power switch.

Well, shoot. That worked.

I tinkered around for a little while longer before realizing I needed to just call the waiban assistant and have him send someone over to check it out. No problem, someone will be by in the evening. I put a pot of water on the stove to use for cleaning myself and washed my hair in the sink. Again – no big deal, I’ve been a grad student before. My personal hygiene habits have seen challenges greater than this.

I retired to my desk and started looking over my lesson plans for the week. Around 6PM I heard a knock on my door – the workers are here already! I answered it and instead found a very angry women yelling what I first heard as l’eau shui. I stared at her uncomprehendingly – why does she keep yelling water water at me? – until I realized she was saying loushui – leaking water. We went into my bathroom where she continued yelling and I, still not understanding, mustered up my best – Wo de reshuiqi huai le, suoyi wo buyong shui, hao ma? My water heater’s broken, so I won’t use water, okay?

Satisfied with my answer, she turned and left.

The repair guys finally showed up with my waiban assistant in tow and gave me the bad news – a part inside the heater malfunctioned, and they need to special order it. It should be a couple days. Since the National Holiday and Mid-Autumn Festival season was upon us – I knew this meant I’d be without hot water for well over a week. But no big deal – I’ve got the fighting spirit! As they left, I mentioned to the waiban assistant that the woman below me had come up, could he please go and find out what was wrong with her apartment and what I had to do with it?

The next morning, I get a phone call. It’s the waiban assistant. My toilet is apparently leaking water into the downstairs apartment. The workers will come over soon, but please don’t use the toilet.

The workers came, they fixed the toilet, and left me with a message: don’t flush it for at least 10 hours. Well, okay. That’s not so bad. I can just use it for what I need and flush it at the end of the evening. I’ve lived in some crunchy places in Portland, this is okay. Day goes by, I flush the toilet before bed – all seems fine.

7am the next morning, my phone wakes me up. The toilet is still leaking. The workers will come, but do not use the toilet under any circumstances. Not until tomorrow. I ask my waiban assistant – what should I do? He gives a little laugh and says he doesn’t know. I ambled over to another foreign teacher’s house, explained the situation, and get myself a copy of the key. This should be, if not great, at least okay.

By midday, I realized how bad this situation truly was. I stopped drinking water and moved my eating down to a minimum. My at-home attire generally consists of pajama bottoms and ratty t-shirts. Every time I needed to use the toilet I had to get changed and walk down five flights of stairs and to the other side of our teacher’s compound. Because I didn’t want to seem impolite, I also had to mentally prepare myself for 15-30 minutes of post-bathroom-use conversation. This is the introvert’s worst nightmare.

As the day went on, I developed some awful cramps on my left side. I canceled dinner plans with a student. I stayed in bed almost the whole day, unwilling to do anything. I told myself: I can get through this day, it will be better tomorrow.

The next morning I woke up, and I feel an almost instantaneous need to vomit. I rushed to the bathroom, but I’ve got nothing. Feeling weak and nauseated, I tried to prepare for school. By the time I needed to catch the bus, I realized that standing up in front of a room of students was just not possible. I called the school and canceled my classes for the day. I called another student and canceled our lunch plans. I retreated to bed and stayed there the whole day, the pain in my side growing worse every hour.

By evening, the pain was unbearable. I knew what my problem was: if you remove or complicate access to a normal bodily function, this will result in the body revolting and ‘shutting it down’. I called up the foreign teacher and asked to go over to his place. Getting ready to go, the nausea hit me again. This time I threw up twice. At his place, I explained my situation, and requested some castor oil. He says he doesn’t have any, and then busies himself on his phone while I paced around his apartment in visible pain.

What happened, of course, was that he called the waiban assistant. He showed up and said, “We’re going to the hospital.” I refused, saying Peace Corps does not allow me to go to the hospital without their consent. Thinking I was making a simple trip – I had left my apartment without anything but my keys. He insisted again, and led me out of the apartment by my elbow. We started walking towards the gate of the teacher’s compound, and I again vehemently insisted that I’m fine, I don’t need to see a doctor, things are just a little blocked. And then, of course, I vomited again.

This is one of those things that you maybe have just assumed to be true: throwing up in the middle of claiming you are fine immediately negates all those claims. I have experienced this hypothetical, and let me assure you: all of your assumptions are 100% true.

We hailed a taxi, and while I head through the city streets in the back of your mind, let’s address some other assumptions that may be at a little closer to the front of your mind.

That stereotype of Asians as miraculous doctors, so therefore their in-country hospitals must also be modern medical marvels: This is not true. Maybe in big cities it’s true, but in my rural town – not so much. Lights everywhere are out and a cloud of cigarette smoke greets you at every turn. Hot water does not flow from the sinks, there is no clean piece of paper spread across the bed for your benefit, there is no such thing as privacy.

But wait – surely it can’t really be filthy, can it? Here’s the thing about China. There is a marvelous attention to detail with respect to cleanliness as long as the surface is ankle-level or below. The streets are sparkling and there’s any army of people out with brooms all day long making sure there’s no trash. The other surfaces are not so lucky. The walls are grimy, the pillows are matted with substances I do not want to consider the provenance of, and like I mentioned – hot water is not so much a thing.

What was that about privacy? Like everywhere else in China, the hospitals are crowded. There is no distinction between a waiting room and an examination room. The doctors have dozens of patients to examine at once. What this also means is that the patients get to creep in on everyone else’s business. Being a laowai (foreigner) in this situation only antes the attention up ten-fold.

So let’s drop those assumptions and get out of that mind-cab. We’re at the hospital surrounded by other people all really, really eager to see what’s up with the foreigner. My protestations have failed, so I get ushered through my stomach palpations to an x-ray. Nothing turns up (no surprise there) so they take me to the grand finale: a sonogram.

Now, I don’t know about you, but in my head, sonograms are only used to determine one thing. Lying back on the bed, alternatively cringing from the pain and shaking with laughter, it came as no surprise when they told me I was pregnant. It also came as no surprise when – though the language barrier – it took a good few tries to really convey the impossibility of this diagnosis. I know exactly how pregnancy happens, and I tried as many ways as I could to assure them that I had found myself in no such pregnancy-inducing situation. Barring divine intervention – which would be a ridiculous blessing to bestow on a non-believer like me – there was just no damn way this could be true.

Finally convinced, they took me to one final room. The doctor there examined me briefly, wrote out a prescription on a sheet of paper, and handed it to my waiban assistant. We scurried across the traffic to a nearby pharmacy to get the prescription filled. My waiban assistant typed the characters into his phone’s translator and showed me the results: castor oil.

In other words: exactly what I had sought out from a neighbor hours before.

I get deposited back home, and finally called Peace Corps. Sure, they yelled for a little bit, but we also laughed about the fact that I came out unscathed, survived a ridiculous process, and learned the hard way that I should never leave my apartment without everything the Peace Corps gave me ever. Oh, and also that when toilets break it is not considered princess-like behavior to call them up and demand to be moved to a hotel. Lesson(s) learned.

So how does this deal with my honeymoon period ending, anyway?

I was already feeling lonely and exhausted and wanting to stay home all the time anyway, so this gave me the perfect excuse. The week following was the National Holiday anyway – everything is closed for a week, so it was easy to avoid going out in public. I had had such a trauma with the toilet, and my water heater was still in disrepair, it was so much easier to claim recovery than it was to go out and deal with the crowds and the staring and just feeling othered all the time.

It was nice to have a chaotic situation to bear the brunt of the blame so that when I finally cleared out of my fog I could look back and so clearly see what I had been going through. It’s good too, because rather than bemoaning my own lack of motivation and digging myself into an even deeper emotional rut, I was able to use my bathroom situations as a scapegoat. Also, instead of just telling people I was sad for a little while, the story transforms into That One Time I Got Dragged to a Chinese Hospital and Told I Was Pregnant. Much more audience-grabbing, I think.

This week I’m feeling much more myself. I am back to reading books, studying Chinese, and hanging out with my students. I’m cooking almost all of my meals and the rest I share with friends in my community. The idea of sitting in bed all day sounds awful rather than appealing, and even though going through such a rocky period wasn’t the best, I’m glad it at least gave me a few good stories.

And best of all, I’m back to having a functional shower and toilet again. Turns out the problem with the toilet was that when you have excess cement around – the best place to dispose of it is NOT in the plumbing system. Once they cleared all that out, the leaking stopped and full functionality began.