Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Peter Hall
Sias University
Henan Province, China
I am living in Peter Hall which is the housing dorm for foreign faculty (AKA: all the American faculty). I don’t know how many there are of us because people come and go. But there may be as many as 125 people at any one time. Most of the faculty is young people in the middle of trying to figure out what they want to do when they grow up. Then there are the married couples who just retired and want to try something different. There is a growing group of middle aged people who got laid off and are now desperate to find any sort of work. Then there is the faculty who work for Fort Hayes University and are receiving a salary commensurate with US wages. The young teachers who are hired directly by the SIAS University are making $500 a month. And while that is a great salary here, these teachers are still paying off their student loans and paying health insurance and speak openly about their poverty lifestyle and they worry about missed opportunities to make better money in the US.
I have an apartment on the third floor. It has a living room, a bathroom and a large bedroom. My housing is better than I had anticipated. My bed is only the box spring with a foam mat on top of that. My shower is huge and has six water jets that seem to be glued shut. For a while, the water did not come out of the shower head but rather around the rim of this large shower head which made difficult to shower. My shoulders got wet but my head stayed dry. The toilet has flooded the floor four times in two weeks and that does not seem to concern the maintenance crew.
I have a water fountain right outside my room where I can get clean, safe hot and cold drinking water. I have a TV but I only get Chinese stations. I have a coffee pot and I bought a blender. So it is sort of just like home.
We all eat together and there are designated eating times but they seem to slide back and forth each day. Breakfast starts around 7:00 AM and I never make that which is a shame because that is the only time coffee is served. The lunch starts somewhere between noon and 12:30. And every time I go to lunch at 12:45, lunch is over and the staff stands around and tolerates my lateness. Dinner is advertised to start at 5:00 but it is never ready before 5:30.
Breakfast has two kinds of eggs and very greasy bacon that isn’t really cooked. There is some bread and oatmeal and the yogurt is served in a pouch which you drink.
Lunch and dinner are just about the same menu every day. On one side of the serving area, there is a salad bar which the Chinese don’t understand. They put out huge clumps of lettuce, some long carrot sticks, green raisins, peanuts, olives, cherry tomatoes and a few dolloped of seasoned mayonnaise and some oil.
On the entrée side, we have chicken, lots of chicken, usually four different varieties. There are chicken wings, chicken balls rolled in sesame seed, chicken and green beans, curry chicken and a roasted chicken which is just dumped in a pot and people can pick away at it. On Thursdays, we have baked potatoes. On Friday, we have microwave pizza.
Last week, we had salmon which caused a little bit of a problem. The chef only makes portions of food for 15 to 20 people. That way there is very little waste. When something is served and that portion is finished, that’s it for the night; there is no replenishing the food choice. So last week, just the first 15 of us got the salmon. I wasn’t aware of this practice of one portion and done. So I mentioned to people, who arrived a few minutes after me and sat at my table, to try the salmon. Well there was none left which irritated most people. So I discovered that there is an unwritten rule: if you get something to eat that the others didn’t get, shut up about it. Don’t rub it in. Ok, now I know the rules.
