I've been so busy experiencing ffice:smarttags" />China, I've had no time to write about it for quite a while. But now here we are, I shall tell some stories. For one, last week I finally stopped making excuses and accepted an invitation to go to a student’s house for dinner. At first I thought this seemed a bit of an odd invitation but apparently teachers go to students’ houses all the time for dinner in this country, and it even encourages me in my contract to do stuff like that. As well as the three-person family there were another couple of Chinese women at this nice little dinner party as well as, to my surprise, a Sierra Leone man and a New Zealander. We had a lovely dinner of about 15 different dishes, and I managed to splash my soup all over the place by dropping chicken in it, which I explained away by laughing and saying ‘oh dear, I am awful at using chopsticks’, which made everyone else laugh at me too and made me feel awfully patronized and wish I hadn’t said that and fume invisibly and silently for a few minutes, mainly because I made everyone laugh at my ability to use chopsticks when I can use chopsticks perfectly well, it’s just being in a country where they like to put loads of jaggy chicken bones in their soup that caused the problem, but I could hardly have said that. Obviously I was just being childish so I soon snapped myself out of that. After dinner, which was very very nice and I don’t want to seem ungrateful with my chicken bone soup reference, we played mah jong for hours on end, me with my beginner’s luck winning everyone’s pretend money, and always thinking I should get going, then being drawn into ‘just one more game’, and starting to realise just what’s going on at those little stone tables all over the place under the trees around which all the oldies gather. I shouldn’t have put off accepting the invitation for so long, this was the most Chinese culture I had experienced in one evening since I arrived in the country.

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Tonight I had quite a different interesting time. I have a student friend who is an actress on local TV and a model in her spare time. She has several times called me to ask me to do some catwalk modelling with her, but I’ve unfortunately been busy (not that I can picture myself ever getting up on a catwalk, I’d get the giggles and never be able to take it seriously). But this evening, we had arranged to see each other anyway, so when she called to say that instead of coming to my flat she would pick me up in a taxi and take me to Chongqing TV, I couldn’t have thought of a reason to say no even had I wanted to. At the gate, she called a director and he had a car come pick us up and drive us through the guarded gate and along a few hundred metres to the door. Around some winding corridors and up a lift, I met this man, who I’m told is very important and has directed a 30-year-old soap opera from its first days. Well, I think that was what they said. But now, thinking about China's past 30 years, I suppose that's rather unlikely. I also think that my friend Angel has been in this programme, but I can’t be sure. Another thing that I picked up was that I will probably be starring in this TV show sometime soon, but again, I’m not certain, although I think it’s probably a little important to find that out! The latest Chinese song I have learnt is called ‘Chess piece’, and I really felt like I could sing it and mean it tonight as my friend tries to make me a star, and I just go along with it all, not really having any say but assessing the situation along the way and thinking yeah, this is quite fun, imagine me being on telly! me being an actress! that’s another childhood dream I could tick off my list… and therefore not protesting or trying to take back any kind of control, but sitting back and going with the flow. After a short chat in the office, we drove to one of the director’s many houses where I was shown the beautiful flowers in the garden, and his elderly father lying in bed, before being given a seat and a coffee while the director tended to some men who came to fix his fax machine. Halfway through this apparently over-complicated procedure, he reached into the top of a cupboard and brought down a bag and gave it to me as a gift. I don’t know if this is normal, but having been told never to refuse gifts from Chinese people, I made myself looked delighted as I opened the bag and studied the expensive men’s wallet set and electric men’s razor. I looked up at Angel, still with a happy smile on my face, to see if she thought this was normal, and she was also smiling happily, apparently not in the least bit surprised that her boss had just given me a gift of swanky men’s items. Then again, she is an actress. I thanked him gratefully, making use of my own amateur skills to keep my veneer smooth as I chuckled inside at how strange this all was.

After the fax machine was fixed and the coffee was drunk, we said goodbye to his housekeeping mother and drove up a mountain to a hotpot restaurant. Hotpot, which I have talked about before, is a great thing to eat with friends and a risky choice when with strangers. I remembered this as I sat there wondering how on earth I could keep this polite manner up while avoiding making myself ill with all this horrid stuff that they like to eat here. Usually, I will make myself try anything once, both to be polite and to be adventurous, and although I had already had cow’s stomach before so the latter could not apply, for politeness’s sake I smilingly stuffed a big flappy knobbly grey sheet into my mouth when it was kindly served onto my plate by the driver. The director asked the required, ‘tasty?’ and I automatically replied, ‘oh yes, lovely’, which I immediately regretted as then the driver smilingly fished out another piece from the bubbling oil and plopped it into my bowl. I was still chewing my way painstakingly through the first bit, which was tasting less and less ‘lovely’ all the time, so I had no choice but to look at Angel with a pleading smile and ask her in English if she would mind having that as I couldn’t manage. To this, she suddenly tuned into what was going on and told them they shouldn’t be giving me cow’s stomach as I didn’t like it. I felt quite stupid and like I’d been caught red-handed after having just said how nice it was, but at least I didn’t get any more of that stuff. I did get more strange parts of animals, as the others, as good Chinese hosts, eagerly dished out random stuff from the hot pot into my dish, but I stopped asking what it was and just ate it, resigning myself to being a chess piece for the evening. 

After dinner we piled back into the car and started off, only to drive into a ditch as we exited the car park. This was a super-expensive car, so no-one was too pleased, and we spend the next 15 minutes gathering rocks to minimize further damage on the return to the road. A quick stop for a check with some torches at the director’s house on the way past revealed only a little paint scratching, so it wasn’t too serious, and then the director was dropped off somewhere before the driver took me and Angel home. As I said, many things are less than clear in my mind, including the serious likelihood of an imminent acting career for me, ha ha, but I’m sure that I’ll find out soon enough, and who knows, maybe soon I’ll find myself being a real life celebrity.