5 Day Immersion (rough draft)

Shi Laoshi, Sam, Annie and I boarded the bus from Deshengmen to Yanqing. There was hardly any space left, and we got the last four seats in the very back corner. The bus roared to life and an incessant, high pitched humming sound came from behind my head, and then we began to go. Our immersion had officially begun. The English we had forsaken earlier that day was just getting us ready for the tremendous journey ahead. I finished my English homework reading and began to read 神奇宝贝, which is Pokemon in Chinese. The landscape changed drastically over the hour and a half we rode, from a cityscape to the great wall winding its way over treacherous mountains, to our destination, surrounded on all sides by mountains. The biggest one looked like a knife stabbed at an angle into the ground. The lot of us got off the bus and hailed a cab to take us to the school, arriving at 3. It was a large building on the outside of the gates, and as we pulled up, every window in the main building was filled with students waving at us and shouting, 哈罗. “HAAA-LUOOOOO!” We waved back at them and felt their overflowing warmth as we walked into the campus and our jaws dropped. The campus was enormous. It had buildings as far as the eye could see, with sports courts jumbled between them, hallways under stadium seating for the track field and bikes parked neatly in corners. We dropped off our stuff in the dormitories before they split us up and put us in our separate classes. I was gaoyi shiyi ban. I walked in and they made me introduce myself before picking a lottery number, number 7, and kicking out the corresponding person from her desk. I was now sitting in the very front right of the class room. Classes continued from when I entered at 3:30 all the way until 5, when we got out for an hour and a half dinner break. One of the kids pulled my arms and said, “Run.” I didn’t ask questions, I just hopped over my desk and ran out the door after him. We bolted down the flight of stairs and out the side door of the school building when he led me through a shortcut in the track fields. While we were running, we saw some other people coming up quickly behind us and through the gates that surround the field, we saw people running wildly, like an entire army of undead were at their heels. A minute and a half of a flat out sprint later we arrived at the cafeteria, with hardly any line for the food. My new friend, Li Yan, bought me my lunch and we sat down in the back of the cafeteria. His friends soon followed. The food was pretty decent, and the kids all asked me questions, that look like a blur when I think back on them. We finished up our meal and then they took me to play ping pong. I wasn’t too good and they all demolished me. Sam came over to another table and played, though unlike me, he’s good, and held his own against the Chinese kids. We all returned to class at 7:30 and then they had to do a self study until nine. I was beat by the end of it and when the bell rang, three of my classmates said they were my roommates and we went back to the dorm. It was cold in there. I chatted with them and then went to bed.
The alarms went off at 5:47, and I remained huddled under the blankets, as cold as the frigid air outside. It was nothing like the warm weather of Beijing I had just left. I got out of bed and threw on my uniform jacket, which was the only thing that I took off. It just served as a protective layer against dirt. Three of my 5 roommates got up and went to have lunch in the cafeteria again. We ate baozi and soup, both of which warmed me up. The soup felt like drinking liquid vitality. We went back to the dorm and woke up the other two before heading to the classroom across campus and sitting down in our seats to start class at 7. The classes varied and my comprehension of the topics did too. At 10 the bell rang and we all went outside to line up, we then ran in lines, in perfect unison, each step matched every other classmates step, until we got to our designated place in the field. We started the calisthenics by massaging ourselves. First our ears, then our temples, then our head and last our neck. They believe that doing this makes their heads clearer and that will help them test better. We then moved onto a dancing routine, and while we danced we heard the shouts of the gaoers from a different stadium and I could only imagine what they were doing behind those walls. Afterwards, most of the classes returned to their classrooms except mine and a couple others. We were having gym class and I went and played basketball with the kids. I actually did something and people wanted to have me on their team. Classes dragged on after gym class repeating the routine above, with a lunch break scheduled in from 12 to 1ish. I played ping pong again during the dinner break and I felt that I was getting better. Self study went on for a while and I felt extremely cold. We went back to the dorm and even the blanket was cold.
I woke up on my third day of the immersion feeling like I would rather die than get out of bed, but I didn’t want to waste my precious time immersed in the school system. So I went to class, head throbbing, mind fuzzy and for some reason understanding everything that the teachers were saying. But I didn’t care what they were saying, I was cold. It was unlike any cold I’ve ever felt in my life. I clawed for warmth within the threads of my clothes, hunching over and answering when called on. We had morning exercises and with each step I took, my head felt like exploding. My body ached and at the end of the exercises they made us run back to the school. We got in and sat back down in our seats when the loudspeakers blared, “You didn’t run perfectly enough, do it again.” We went back outside and did the whole thing over again, but stopped in front of the school where they made us stand in the sun, for which I was grateful, and gave us a speech. We went back to the classroom again, and had chemistry. The teacher put chalk against the warped inward, green chalkboard and asked me if I remembered any of it. I shook my head and eagerly awaited the lunch bell to go and get something warm to drink. I wasn’t even hungry. I drank two hot chocolates when I went to lunch. Each sip felt like warmth was flowing through my veins. It was the best hot chocolate I have ever had. I drank it and I didn’t feel as bad as I did before and some of the kids took me to a museum, the Yanqing Museum. I asked my friend Yali how he felt about Mao and he said he was 80% good 20% bad. That was a bit of a deviation from the norm. Yanqing had felt the wrath of the War of Resistance against the Japanese back in the day, and there were many exhibits about it. I suddenly lost my second wind from the hot chocolate and went back to the classroom where I passed out on my desk and slept until someone woke me saying English was starting. The teacher had me read a passage aloud, but my voice was in pain. And I should’ve known something was up for my voice had surpassed the deepness of James Earl Jones. When I finished the page long passage, the entire class stood up and applauded. My sick voice was music to their ears, and music class was next. I was getting ready to go to class when one of my classmates pulled me aside and said, you’re going to the nurse. I just stumbled to the office with him and they took my temperature. It was 39 degrees. And I began to wonder if that was high or not. Apparently that is very high. They wanted to take me to the hospital, but a call to Bi Laoshi convinced them that I should just go to the dormitory and rest. They gave me lots of bitter Chinese medicine, and I went to my bunk and slept. The person in charge of Judelou dormitory came in and covered me up with more blankets and brought hot water, and a canteen filled with hot water. He told me to drink it, but I just put it under the blankets and let the heat radiate out and get trapped under them. I went to sleep. Darkness, then I’d open my eyes and I’d see the same guy walk in and say, drink more hot water, before fading back into darkness. I came to again and the room was completely in twilight. I shuffled to the restroom and back, which was one of the most painful walks of my life. My entire body ached. Every single part. I went back to sleep and my roommates came back looking at me, and caring for me, tucking me in and making me more of the Chinese medicine. I told them I could do it, but they wouldn’t let me. I went back to sleep with my whole body in pain, dreaming of what comes with banana milkshakes.
I had gotten nearly 15 hours of sleep when I awoke on Saturday morning, ready to head back to the classrooms for a half day of classes. Luckily my class only had self study and I could relax and take it easy from the day before. I had brought a copy of Brisingr with me and started reading that to kill the time until we had to leave. By the time the clock struck 11 I was willing to go and destroy Montana for ever having encouraged this man to write such a waste of my time. Yali took me back to his village. We got on a bus and rode until we were in the middle of nowhere. The only thing was this road and in both directions you could see nothing. This was where we got off and began walking through the fields on the side. Barren apricot trees were planted as far as the eye could see. No tree donned even a single leaf. We kept walking until we hit a bunch of new looking houses with an ancient looking one here and there. I was welcomed into the village of 东红寺.We went to his house where I met his mother. They lived in a courtyard house and it was completely barren on the inside. They had a guard dog chained up in the garden in the center. He barked at us and I felt bad for the emaciated shepherd. We walked around the village and talked with his grandparents on both sides. They told me haunting stories of the War of Resistance against Japan. They told me how the bombs had rained down from the sky and killed their friends and destroyed their houses, they told how they ran into the fields and hid among those very same apricot trees I had walked through to get here, and how the Japanese invaded a nearby village and many of their friends were raped and murdered brutally. This is why there were some ancient buildings littered among the newer ones. Those were all that had survived. The Japanese didn’t even bother coming into the village, according to Yali’s mom’s side grandma, because it was already gone. Laolao, was upset and the memories brought tears to her eyes, and even the man imitating a dolphin on the TV couldn’t lift her spirits. I don’t do her stories justice; I can’t possibly with how little time I spent with her. There were other villagers, but I didn’t ask them about the war, they were only interested in me. We saw the water tower, which used pressure to push all the water into the pipes, before walking to the ruins of a temple and played ping pong outside of it. We headed back to his house and his dog, huzi, barked excitedly at us before we started playing Chinese computer games, and he told me the problem with school text books only being used once. The inside of his house was the exact same temperature as the outside of the house so I went to bed in everything I had. It was a meager 10 degrees outside.
I woke up the next morning to a draft from the window and the wind beating against the window pane. I looked outside and it was snowing. We hung out indoors for the whole time, and I watched huzi outside, shivering in the snow. He was trying to huddle in the lone blanket that he had, but it was already frozen stiff and against the ground. He took shelter under a piece of firewood hanging out from over the pile. We walked back to the bus station. The snow covering Yali’s black hair, and made him look as if he aged thirty years. I felt the snow, whipping around wildly, get stuck in my 5 day beard. There was already an inch and a half and it hadn’t been snowing for long. We walked back through the apricot trees, and I imagined what it must have been like, running through these trees away from everything you ever had or knew as well as away from death. We waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes. It felt odd, two others came up too, a deaf, mute married Chinese couple. What an odd lot as the bus pulled up, two Chinese adults signing to each other, one white person wearing a Chinese high school uniform and a high school student. We got on the bus and were off. The way back looked completely different covered in snow. The buildings wavy roofs now looked as if the waves were breaking. The snow kept falling and it felt like a blizzard. We got out at the bus stop and headed to the school, where they showed me where they were raising deadly scorpions in their dorm, and then a friend’s house. We chilled there, in the warmth of his apartment, before he gave me a gift that was a Scrabble-like Chinese game. It is a blast, and soon after we departed for lunch and then met up at the Bus station with Sam. We had not been able to get a hold of Annie so the two of us hopped on the direct bus back to Beijing and talked about our adventures, before getting sucked into some homework that we had put off. The bus went back through the change in landscape, from snowy mountains, to mountains, to cityscape. Beijing was still cold, but there was no snow. Chris was waiting at school for me, and when I got there, I ended my language pledge and spoke English for the first time in 5 days. I had a lot to say.