Loose and Periodic Cross The Road.

our quiet side road

Death had to be hovering nearby. Our taxi driver swerved, banged his horn, slammed on his brakes to avoid a bus pulling out, cut up other cars avoiding a collision by millimetres, smacked the horn again and nearly ran over a cyclist, and I viewed all this when I was almost delirious from three hours sleep in 48 hours, jet-lag, and brain melting humidity. How was I going to be able to live here when surely I was going to get run down just going to the shops?

I'd assured myself I'd prepared well. I'd read about Beijing's crazy traffic, but speeding through the city on the way to train station, it had been busy but orderly - packed cycle lanes fenced off from the roads of nose to tail traffic. Here, there were parked mopeds in the cycle lane, so bicycles and scooter and these ubiquitous moto-carts in spilled out in to the car lane, where buses and taxis jockeyed to occupy the same bit of potholed tarmac at the same time. Oh yes, and even if the pedestrian crossing was working, cars and bikes and those damn moto-carts that snuck up on you without you hearing until you had to leap out of their path at the last minute could still turn.

“How do you cross the road without dying?” I asked my new found friends at dinner. They were still alive after a month, so I figured they had to be doing something right.

“You just have to step out. The traffic will flow around you.” This was not entirely the response I had hoped for. The only image of flow I had was of my body flowing into the road under the wheels of one of the lumbering green buses that my taxi driver had suicidally refused to defer to.

On those first solo trips to the supermarket or park, my concentration on the traffic was so great I didn't even notice the yells of 'hello' that would infuriate me so much in later months. I'd risk whiplash trying to keep all areas under surveillance, yet still a horn parmp or bell ring would send me leaping forwards in panic. A month passed. Nothing hit me. I became more confident, and made sure I never told my parents about how we'd stand in the middle of six or eight lane roads, waiting for the gaps to appear, or the maniacal taxi drivers that would bring me home most nights.

Spring came. I'd learnt to ride on the back of a bike without holding on, or flinching in terror as cars squeezed past. I'd step out and let the traffic flow around me. One day, on the way to the supermarket, I stood on the white line as a bus thundered past on each side, only centimetres of swooshing air between me and several tonnes of metal. My residency was stamped.

* * * * *

This is an exercise I did for my writing class, and I thought, recycle, save the world...or my fingertips from suffering typing related erosion. Anyway, the point of it was to use a combination of loose and periodic sentences, preferably topped off with a soliloquy. I kind of flaked out with the soliloquy, as the nearest I ever get to one is rushing about before I leave the house in the morning, patting various pockets going, 'Phone. Lunch. Argh, do I have my locker key? Do I have my security card? Forgot my scarf. Where's my scarf? Which fool put my scarf in my bedroom when it should clearly be left by the door?...' and so on. I figure I can persecute you all with it, but I might leave it a few weeks before revealing to my fellow students that I have the brain of an eighty year old who goes to the shop in her slippers.

But anyway, back to concept of loose and periodic. Does anyone else think periodic has got a really bad deal here in the naming stakes? Loose sentences are well, loose, and long, and delaying gratification. Loose sentences probably spend their down time being bought champagne cocktails and dancing on tables. Whereas periodic sentences... I imagine them loitering in an under heated area of the office, and trying to impress the newbie with their hard won precise knowledge before slinking off to eat a cheese sandwich alone.

Or, you know, that could just be me.

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Horizons Shrink To Fit Expectations

One of my ‘to dos’ on my Before 30 list is to write a book. For years now, I’ve had a nebulous idea for a novel and its central character floating around inside my head, but I’ve never started writing out any of my ideas. On Saturday night I sat in bed with an old school notebook and pen and finally began to turn the main character into a person, with a voice and a history. (Yeah, I’m not sure what happened to the twentysomething rock n roll lifestyle either.)

The title phrase was one that appeared about half way through my writing session, and whilst it perfectly describes the conundrum my character has found herself in, as soon as I wrote it I realised that is a problem I see every day, in myself and people around me.

Why has it taken me years to even start sketching out preliminary ideas about characters? Because my expectations, had, over the years been shrunk by the drip-drip effect of people saying that there was no point pursuing writing, as there was no way I’d ever be able to make a living out of it, or get published. It’s too hard, impossible, a fantasy. And I made the mistake of allowing other people to control my expectations, to fix my horizons.

Perhaps this haze of characters and ideas will never become a finished novel. Perhaps it will and it will never be published. Perhaps it will just be, well, rubbish. But at least I will have tried, overcome the most debilitating hurdle of thinking that you can’t do something and set my expectations of myself MYSELF.

I saw the same problem in most of my Chinese students. The real problem was not that they were incapable of decent spoken English, but that they had convinced themselves that it was too hard, that I would laugh at them, that it would excruciatingly embarrassing, that they JUST COULDN’T DO IT.

This wasn’t only the case with my high school students, where it took the entire first semester working on mainly overcoming the ‘I can’t do it’ block before we could really start working on their speaking itself, but even with the IELTS* classes I taught. These students had some of the best understanding of English I came across in Shijiazhuang, and were capable of formulating and expressing very sophisticated ideas in English, but stumbled because of their self-doubt and the ingrained belief that Chinese people are no good at oral English.

I could tell when a student, or even a class, had started to overcome their own externally imposed sense of limitations – suddenly there were smiles, an eagerness to talk to me outside of class, students volunteering to take part rather than having to be (almost literally in the first few weeks of class) dragged to their feet, a mischievousness and sense of fun in answers, even answers and opinions shouted out. To watch and to help this was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life, and has not only inspired me to overcome my own ‘I can’ts’ but made me aware that they exist in the first place.

What are your ‘I can’ts’, how have you overcome them, was it worth it?

*IELTS is an exam that non-English speakers need to take before being admitted to universities in English speaking countries. Most of my students were aiming for postgraduate study in Australia or the UK, where the requirement of gaining an average of 6.5 across writing, reading, speaking and listening requires skills beyond those developed at university, with speaking being the area that often dragged down the average mark.