Big Z

Larry and Eric are my oldest Chinese friends. We met last year on the basketball courts across the street just over a year ago. Larry and I met on a Tuesday and he took Matt Werner and I to the Great Wall on Thursday. That just doesn't happen in the states.

The three of us have been pretty tight but they never came to my studies and didn't really seem interested in the Book. So I thought, well maybe He just wants me to be a silent witness to them - praying before meals, not swearing on the court, letting my light shine via actions.

But then last week Monday was Mid-Autumn Festival (China's version of Thanksgiving), which meant that we were school-less. So I gave 'ol Larry a call and asked if he wanted to do anything crazy on our day of freedom - do jumping jacks on the Great Wall, go streaking through Tiananmen Square, or have a mooncake eating contest. His idea, "How about we read the Book together." I replied, "What an amazing idea. I've been hoping and praying you would say that someday."

Last week we explored Creation and now we're going to read through the book of Luke together every Sunday night. Tonight we got through half of chapter one, where Gabriel appears to Zechariah, and they couldn't pronounce Zechariah, so we called him "Big Z" and Elizabeth, "Little E."

It couldn't get much better than tonight - play some ball, eat some noodles, read about Big Z with some phenomenal friends...

米佳

Tai Chi Padowan

So my friend Jasper is a tai chi master. He invited me to join him in the park on Friday morning at 7:00am for a search for my inner peace.

I'm not sure if I found inner peace, but I found out that I have the balance of a prepubescent hippo and that I've got a pretty solid friend in Jasper - so patient and selfless.

So raise your mugs of coffee / orange juice / hot toddy to Friday mornings with a friend.

米佳

Mr. Make

Teaching Chinese kids at the dawn of their pubescent years is a challenge and a joy.

One of those joys is the names I've been called. They range from...

Mr. Mike Mrs. Mike Miss Mike Mr. Matt Mrs. Matt Miss Matt Mr. Maaaaaaaaaaaaa Mr. M Mr. Mard Miss Mmmmmmmm John Wayne's offspring

But here is a new one from a great kid named Luke from Class #8 - Mr. Make. I guess after a year together maybe he chose to remember my invaluable Sound of the USA lesson: "YEEHA!! What a cowboy says." I guess in the end its more important to remember your teacher's lessons rather than their name.

He gave me this card while I was at the urinal, doing what men do at urinals. Luke was not shy. His envelope made me giggle.

米佳

Cha Cha Cha Chia!

China - The Land of Unfortunate Hair

I feel like I could create the sweetest coffee table book in history with this title (ok, maybe not as mind-numbing as a coffee table book about coffee tables that would fold into a coffee table). I would compile 182 pictures of beautiful humans who have taken their beautiful black hair and destroyed it. Some of the hairdoos here in the Jing are like putting a ratty army green tarp over Michelangelo's David. It's not really that sad or funny, just kind of unfortunate.

I put myself into the hands of one of these individuals a few days ago when I got my locks lopped off. My theory was, he didn't cut his own hair, which might mean he has better taste than what he is wearing. Well, this fella with a lime green Chia (cha cha cha chia!) pet on his dome did a fantastic job, and for $2.99 I'll be back.

米佳

Mooncake Madness

This past Monday was the Chinese version of Thanksgiving: Mid-Autumn Festival.

They celebrate the full moon with these glorious little sweet discs called mooncakes. They are so dense that I could probably only bench press seven of them. The flavors range from: "Meat Lovers" to "Egg Yolk Surprise" to "You Will Regret Eating Me in 39 Seconds" to "You Now Have 2.7 Cavities." I've probably consumed 28 this week...

I guess that Chinese people don't really like them, they are too sweet (they don't have America's sweet addiction, but they also don't floss ... so catch 22). So people will buy a really expensive box of mooncakes and give them to a friend and the friend will re-gift it to another friend and so the mooncake madness continues.

米佳

Day of Days

September 8, 2011 anno domini was an amazing day. Here are some highlights:

5:49am

Wake up and realize the Packers kick off in a few hours. Smile. Fall back to sleep. Drool.

7:00am

Wake up, shower, make some instant coffee, don’t floss.

7:38am

Meet the ladies (Becca Balge, Heather Korb, Megan Ziel) at the Zhichunlu subway stop to ride downtown to the best sports pub in Beijing – Paddie O’Shea’s (Irish owned. Irish operated. Irish tempered.)

8:17am

Swoop upon an unsuspecting taxi waiting at a stoplight (like capturing a wild mustang while its taking a wee) and persuading the cabbie in kindergarten Chinese to take us to Paddies.

8:29am

Find Paddies, sprint to the door with a racing heart and green and gold blood coursing, only to find the doors locked.

8:30-8:32am

Yank on doors and knock while silently cursing myself for not calling ahead.

8:33am

A kind custodian opens the door and I plead with him to let us in to watch the game we’ve traveled over an hour to see. He consents.

8:34am

We enter an empty Paddies and start futzing with the TV and remotes to find the game we’re dying to see.

8:37-9:15am

We fruitlessly futz but the channel won’t deviate from some crappy soccer game. Someone spots an Aaron Rodgers’ jersey on the ceiling. We are frustrated – it’s like a man who hasn’t eaten for three weeks has a Big Mac placed inches away from his face. He can look, he can even touch, he can futz with it, he can smell it, but he can’t eat it.

9:17am

Call Emily Heidtke to look up online another sports bar in the Jing. She gives us the number for Frank’s Place.

9:19am

I call Frank’s Place and the woman gives me the name of a foreigner named Wish who works there who could help me out.

9:21am

I call the Wish and wake him from a drunken slumber / coma and in a groggy Middle Eastern flavored accent he tells me that they are showing the Packers as we speak.

9:22am

Sprint out of Paddies.

9:24am

The kind custodian tells me I forgot my backpack inside.

9:27am

We pounce on another unsuspecting taxi and he drives us to the Place of Frank.

9:40am

Spring down the road and giddily hop the stairs to the bar and swing open the doors to hear the voice of Al Michaels and see the Green and Gold on a flat screen TV.

9:41am

Group hug.

10:05am

Meet Gordon and Big Miami, the only fellas there, play some pool and watch Randall Cobb be a man.

11:49am

Leave the bar in ecstasy of a win.

2:00pm

Ride the san wen che (3 wheeled bike, with a little trailer on the back. It’s what garbage men and poor people use to lug their goods) to Haidan Three Self Church and buy 2 boxes of BOOKS. Conceal the boxes with a bag and bike home. I got a ton of looks and laughs. I guess seeing a big blonde gringo pedaling this little bike was the equivalent of seeing an Amish dude driving a Hummer with Jay-Z blasting from the speakers… It was awesome!

6:18pm

The Professor (Tim Malchow) and I go to a hole-in-the-wall Xi’an restaurant and eat some fantastic vittles – a noodle dish that I adore and Chinese spicy sloppy joes.

7:38pm

Buy a nai cha (milk tea) with tapioca balls - nectar of from above. I’m addicted to this stuff… If I could have a bubbler in my house that spouted any liquid (ala Mr. Deeds), I would choose green tea milk tea with the occasional tapioca ball (just to keep me on my toes).

7:42pm

Walking past the noodle shop, I see the owners six-year-old son named Chen Zhao Ming playing guns with some other kids with cigarette boxes. I met this xiao pengyou (little friend) on Tuesday while eating chuan’r (lamb kabobs). So I snuck behind him and when he turned around he exclaimed with a smile, “MI JIA!” (my Chinese name).

8:00pm

Planned Saturday Study, part one of a four week series on DISCIPLE.

11:38pm

Went to bed a happy man.

Christmas Everyday

Sorry my friends for being a horrid communicator. Its great to be back in the Big B and life here is nothing short of a beautiful blur.

This year I'm teaching 880 students! I thought 440 last year was a lot. But this year Becca Balge and I are teaching all of the 8th graders and freshmen Oral English. Name cards are my bestest friends. The 8th graders wear red sweat suits and the freshmen wear a teal green, so it's Christmas from Monday through Thursday from 8:00am to 12:20. Chinese school uniforms are the ugliest but probably the most comfortable uniforms on the planet. Here is a shot of them doing their morning exercises. Kind of an intimidating sight when 880 kids move, stomp, and thrust in unison.

I'm really glad that I could stick with my kids from last year. It was quite the self-esteem boost to walk into Class #5 and receive a standing ovation. I love seeing their faces and looking in those dark eyes and trying to treat each one as an individual blood-bought soul, but its tough to do when there are 880 blood bought souls. Ninety-six percent of these kids spent their summers taking classes and primping there cerebellums rather than be Tom and Tanya Sawyer. It makes me sad to see the avalanche of pressure, hopes, and dreams dumped on these kids by Mom, Dad, Grandpa, and Grandma. When you are the one hope for your family's future, childhood vanishes like a fart in the wind.

I also started taking a Chinese class for an hour and a half Monday through Thursday in Wudaokou (the Gringoland of Beijing). So I'll hop on the DeLorean (my faithful rusty steed) and scoot from school to school. I can't tell if I like being a teacher or student better.

Alrighty, I better scoot and squeeze in a run before dinner. I'm running a Marathon in Hangzhou (near Shanghai) on November 7th. So if I stop posting, its either because my lungs are too blackened to breath, I've been taken out by a taxi, or I got lost.

Your brother. His peace.
米佳 Mi Jia

4:56

I woke up from the jello pool, that is dreamland, at 4:56 this morning. Alert and refreshed. So I tossed on my running shoes and bandanna and iPod and went on a run.

I love getting up before the sun. It makes me feel like I've got a jump start on the day and the rest of humanity, but I'm so lazy it happens about as often as the Vikings win a Super Bowl. The streets are normally teaming with angry taxis and a black haired sea in a rush to hop on the bus or subway. But not quite yet. The streets were silent and I felt completely alone as I ran. It started to drizzle when I hit the Bird's Nest and turned into a full out downpour when I turned for home. And 12.24 miles later I slowly climbed the steps up to the Cloister, smacking my lips to turn on the lights (Here in China, a lot of lighting in stairwells / outside are turned on via sound, so whenever I walk into a dark room I'll smack my lips. Turns out this is a tough habit to break.) as a soggy body of jello.

It was a treat to run in America - clean air and quiet roads. But I'm running a marathon on November 17th in Hangzhou, China, so I better get used to blackened lungs and dodging taxis.

- m -

Back in the Big B

I'm back in the Big B!

Our flight rolled in at 4:50 am.

Jon picked us up from the airport and we rode the subway. He brought roses, but they weren't for me (I was on the same flight as his wife, Kim).

As I looked out and saw a smoggy city and heard the honks of an armada of taxis and smelled the glorious smell of grilling chuan'r and hugged my friends from the alley I thought to myself, "It feels good to be home."

- m -

W.W.T.J.D.?

What would Thomas Jefferson do?

Matt and I kept whispering that to ourselves during the Annual Spring Choral Concert.

Our kids (10 classes of 44 kids) were dressed up in matching outfits with makeup liberally applied to their beautiful Han cheeks. My favorite was Class 1's communism-green shirts with the red star staring at me in sort of a Christmas-gone-bad color scheme. Every class sang a song praising the Motherland. Fostering national idolatry in fertile young minds.

I guess it wasn't very different from the "Family Nights" of my youth. The week before school lets out when kids with freckles are singing patriotic songs on a sweaty May night in the Midwest. I guess if one of my Chinese friends came to our family nights they would ask themselves, "What Would Mao Do?"

Patriotism is a fickle thing. You adore what you are bred to adore. You fight for what you are taught to protect. You wear ugly green shirts with a red star because you are told to.

But one thing I have learned these 10 months out East - is that no matter your skin color, hair color, eye color, language, religion, ear lobe girth, upbringing, political roots, or boxer or brief preference - every human has a hungry soul, a stained heart, and a longing for relationships. Despite all those thorns and canyons, the same River runs through us all.

- m -