| One night, as I was walking through the hallway to get to my dorm room, I saw a group of students jumping as high as they could in their bedclothes trying to touch the ceiling that was out of reach. Some of them fell onto the ground and crashed into each other and into the walls as they leaped into the air with all their effort. They asked me to try, so I repeatedly made attempts to touch the ceiling, but I could never do it. Then Franklin came out of nowhere and jumped only one time effortlessly and touched the ceiling, and then went into our dorm room like it was nothing. I came in after him and told him I was impressed by how high he could jump, and he told me, "I know all about jumping high." I wasn't sure what circumstances in his life required that he jumped high, but it was true, he did know how to jump high. As we sat on our individual bunk beds trying to relax after a full day of teaching, I asked Franklin to tell me about Cameroon (Franklin's country), and he told me many things about the political gangsters there that easily bend the rules to suit their purposes and have no remorse for any opposition. He also told me stories about warriors in his country that would use magic to make themselves "bullet-proof," and people who speak out against the government only to not wake up the next day without any signs of being murdered. Franklin said, "They just don';t wake up." I didn';t know how much of his stories was myth or reality, as I have never experienced anything like that, but it was very interesting to listen to his stories, and he seemed to strongly believe in them himself. Later, Jackie called Nathan on his mobile phone from Hefei. Jackie invited me to come and visit Hefei after the second summer camp was over, but remembering that Summer told me that she didn't love me, I told Jackie that I didn't have time to visit. I had no desire to see Summer after that. Nathan was constantly being followed around during breakfast, lunch, and dinner by Ke Yan, one of the young female classroom teachers. Daler could not believe how much she was attracted to Nathan. "That girl loves Nathan so much!" he said. Nathan said she was "too young to love," but still spent much of his time with her. Franklin and Caro became my greatest allies during this time since Nathan was distracted by his other duties. The three of us would leave the school during mealtime to go to a restaurant that was part of a small connection of stores and workshops across from the school. We had to cross a dusty, divided four-lane road that was visible over several miles, bending down and out towards the edge of the city. There was a lot of construction happening in that area. Roads were being fixed, and tall buildings that had dark green protective covering over the buildings' unfinished frames, to keep workers from falling out of the walls, were rising up near the school. Not Franklin, Caro, nor I could tolerate the food at the school cafeteria since it didn't seem nutritious. It had also been known to make people sick, including some of the students and myself, so we would walk to the restaurant every day and order fish, French fries and scrambled eggs. Franklin taught the restaurant owners how to make French fries since they can't be found anywhere but in a few western restaurants in China. The restaurant looked almost like a two-level condominium that had been converted into a restaurant. There was a small aquarium near our table where the owners kept their fish with just enough water to keep them alive and floating for customers to choose from. Franklin was concerned that some of the larger fish in the aquarium had been drugged. He said that any small restaurant that serves large fish probably used drugs to catch them, drugs that are harmful to human beings. He knew more about China than I did, so I followed his advice not to eat the large fish just in case it was true. I had a lot of trust in Franklin because of his honesty and genuine personality. Daler was getting very concerned about us leaving the school grounds and tried to prevent us from ever leaving again. He tried to get the cafeteria workers to cook the food differently so that we would want to stay and eat. He also tried to get Nathan to enforce his role as dean of the foreign teachers, but he didn't think it was his responsibility to tell us what to do. Then I remembered that Daler had to bribe the police to let us stay at the first summer camp. It was possible that he had to bribe the police again and didn't want us to be seen by them walking to and from the restaurant. On the sixth day of the summer camp, Daler told us that the police were coming to the school to discuss something with him. He wanted all of the foreign teachers except Franklin to stay away from the school until the police had left. Franklin was supposed to stay and represent our group of foreign teachers to the police. Willimas took Daler's van and drove Nathan, Caro, a classroom teacher named Zelda, and I to a place called Alligator Lake to pass the time. Along the way, there was a concrete strip of road near the entrance to the city that was more tore up than any road I had ever been on. It looked like it had been jack-hammered by The Goliath from the bible, and it took us five minutes, whomping the whole way through, to drive a distance that should have taken about 30 seconds, with a steady line of traffic in front and behind us. I felt sorry for anyone who had to take that road and tear up their vehicle to go to work everyday. It might not have been fixed for a long time because it was a busy street, and there might have been no other route that people could take in that part of the city. Closing down that section of the road could have caused huge traffic problems. We entered into Alligator Lake, which was a small amusement park where alligators were of course the main attraction. Not many people were there that day as we walked through the park searching for anything that looked interesting. Perhaps the city's interest in alligators had been exhausted itself, or it could have just been a slow day. We eventually found an area where there were walkways that weaved in between about a dozen pools of water where there were hundreds of hungry baby alligators swimming below us. There were not any protective barriers of any kind separating us from the alligators, which led me to believe that it might be a petting zoo. Some of us thought it would be amusing to play with the little alligators, and held sticks in front of them to see if they would attack. They approached the sticks cautiously, but we were surprised when none of them tried to bite. Then we started waving our hands down at the groups of alligators that had come to investigate us for increased excitement, but they still didn't do anything. Willimas crouched down and started spitting on the alligators' heads, and that seemed to get them a little angry. They would swallow some of the spit as it floated on top of the water, as though it were a delicious meal, and looked at Willimas with their heads just above water, waiting for their chance to get even with him. After he spit on them, he started waving his hand in front of them again, when one of the baby alligators leaped out of the water like a dolphin, and nearly snapped a few of his fingers off. Willimas withdrew his hand quickly and stood up with the look of a close call on his face, but even that didn't take the comedy out of him, and the rest of us laughed. He was the only one of us the alligators were mad at enough to leave their cool habitat to snack on. As we were leaving the alligator pools, we passed by someone selling baby ducklings from out of a box for customers to feed to the alligators. The poor ducklings got terrified and moved into the corner of the box when anyone approached. They must have sensed what their ultimate purpose in life was. Willimas said he was going to buy some of them and feed them to the alligators because he thought it might be funny. The rest of us couldn't understand the humor or watch him do it. He even took pictures of it while it was happening and came back chuckling. It's not that Willimas was necessarily a cruel person. I think Willimas just saw the world as one big sitcom, but the audience wasn't laughing with him this time. When we returned to the school hours later, Daler greeted us with some unfortunate news. He said that the police demanded that we leave the school immediately. We didn't want to leave our students and our friends in the middle of the summer camp, but there wasn't much choice as we saw it. We could face an unknown form of punishment if we decided to disobey the police. I heard that China has some of the worst prisons in the world, and I wasn't trying to come back to the United States like, "Yep. They sure are!" Franklin, Nathan, and I went back to our dorm room to have a private conversation about what we should do. Nathan had always mentioned that he had friends from America living in Beijing, and when he would say Beijing, he always made correct usage of the pronunciation since he was already a skilled Mandarin speaker. The J in Beijing is pronounced just as the J in jingle. So when Franklin asked Nathan what he was going to do, he had only one word for him. "Beijing!" Franklin started laughing hard at him because his question demanded more than a one-word answer, and he said, "Sometimes Nathan is a clown!" Even though we had a moment to laugh, the atmosphere around the summer camp began to become flavored with danger. |
| China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling Summer camp no more |
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