JUSTINE BARRON’S SLOW-TRACKED LIFE (PART 2): i bought you! (please love me)

When I turned eight, I felt an urgent need to express myself in a loving way to another warm, living being. I begged my parents for a pet.

I may have been acting out. Some things in my life were changing fast, and I felt out of control. For instance, the year before I looked like this:



And suddenly, I looked like this:



Once a fresh-faced blond, now I had mousy brown hair and teeth spitting out of my mouth on a weekly basis.

To cope with the disappointments of growing older, I wanted a cute little pet to call my own. Most of my friends had them, but I was allergic to cats and dogs; I was missing out on all of that cuddling and attention.

We did have a parakeet, Connie. She let me touch her, for a week. But then we bought her a mirror, and she stopped letting anyone touch her and started smoking. (My mom smoked in her direction while watching TV.) Connie spent all day looking at herself, smoking and complaining. She seemed too much my mother’s pet to fulfill my needs.

So I picked out a cute little hamster with mousy brown hair like mine.



ENDOWMENT

Unfortunately, despite the physical match, my hamster and I failed to bond.

I may have screwed up with the naming. I don’t have that gift for naming; I’m not creative like that. Like, I had a pile of stuffed animals, but I named them according to species: Tiger, Bear, Seal-y. I gave them their true names, unlike my friends who slept with Princess Patty the Pig and Mr. Snuggles. I also assumed I was different from my friends in how I “loved” my stuffed animals: I used them for my evening sexual pleasures and then tossed them on the floor, where they spent the night. I felt guilty about this, as I’m sure some rapists do.

I’m saying, I had a complex that I might not be nurturing enough for a pet. And these insecurities seized upon me when I finally named my new hamster, after much tortured deliberation…Coco-Sweets.

What a terrible name! I hated it right away! I got stuck between two choices, and didn’t like either, so I put them together…It sounded like a cheap breakfast cereal. It embarrassed me to say it.

I really liked the hamster though, if not her name. She would stuff her cheeks with food and bury it across the cage. When stuffed, you could see the outline of the corn pieces in her bumpy cheeks. Sigh. It killed me with the cuteness and science of it all.

BONDAGE

Sadly, Coco-Sweets did not return any interest in me. Aside from hiding food, she spent all of her time focused on one thing only - running away from me. If I tried to hold her, she’d run from one arm to the other, jump to the nearest surface, and run away. If I directed her towards my face, say for a kiss, she’d flip around and run away.

Coco-Sweets spent her short life on this earth strategizing and executing one brilliant escape from captivity after another. She figured out how to escape from her first home, a square metal cage with a big wheel in the middle.



Instead of running in circles, Coco-Sweets would spend hours climbing the wheel from the outside, stretching out and balancing it steadily with her mighty little hamster thighs and then carefully opening the two locks on the top with her nose, in a circle, until she could pop open the lid and run away.

We piled books on top of her cage, but she’d balance on the wheel and move her hamster head back and forth until the books fell off, one by one, and then open the lock and run away. She’d conduct these escapes late at night and sleep all day in preparation - more rejection of our play time.

I tried to accommodate her needs. I got her in one of those clear hamster balls and let her “run free.” But Coco-Sweets (no fool) would hit the wall and just stop there, unwilling to put on the show of a happy pet.

We got her a larger home - an “environment” more than a cage, really - with multiple rooms connected by plastic tubes. I was even jealous of its size.




But Coco-Sweets (tough mistress) spent all of her time climbing a plastic tube, balancing herself against its slippery edges, and using her hamster nose to undo the lid (tightened by my strong father) and run away.

I was impressed. I told my friends that my hamster was clearly a genius, reflecting well upon her owner. I said that to cover up for my deeper feelings of resentment, frustration and worry.

I bought you! Why don’t you love me back? It’s your job!! You ungrateful…



MENTAL TORTURE

I purchased Coco-Sweets to gain a sense of control over my life, but instead she made me a ball of anxiety. Every morning, I would open the door to the den, filled with dread that she would be out of her cage. If she was, I would scream like a maniac.

Hamsters in cages are very cute; hamsters out of cages are rodents running around the house.

My parents would usually find her under the couch in the den (a scary place), but a few times, Coco-Sweets wasn’t there. I’d sit in school all day, worried and unable to concentrate. Once my mother showed up and poked her head in the classroom: “We found her! We found Coco-Sweets!” “Thanks!” I replied, then, whispering, “But don’t say her name out loud. It embarrasses me!” It turned out that Coco-Sweets had climbed sixteen stairs and was under my parents’ bed.

Once I brought Coco-Sweets to my friend’s house for a pet play date. I left her for awhile. When I came back to check on her, she was just climbing out of the top of the cage with my friend’s giant dog in the corner watching her, literally licking his lips.

Coco-Sweets became an everyday reminder of the worst-case scenario: death. It didn’t help that my brother would tease me by holding her over the garbage disposal.

HITTING BOTTOM

Then it happened: the worst-case scenario. In a reckless mood, I played with Coco-Sweets on the kitchen counter. I let her walk near the edge, and she fell - a skyscraper’s distance in hamster height - landing on the hard cold floor. I killed her, I thought. And regretted my whole life.

I picked her up, and she stood there, frozen in my arms. Then, gradually, she began to move, very, very slowly coming to life. She shook off the trauma, slowly walking towards my face, looking scared and vulnerable. She needed me. I kissed her.

In her nearly brain-dead state, Coco-Sweets and I finally had a moment. What a sweet little pet.

She recovered in an hour and was running again. What a relief.

FREEDOM (AT LAST)

Anyway, the school year ended, and my family and I took a trip to Europe, my first trip abroad. We left Coco-Sweets and Connie in the pet store where we bought them, and I left behind all of my angst and worry.

Europe was…beyond the very best. I saw Stonehenge and the Louvre.





I saw the Pompidou Center in Paris which blew my mind about what architecture could be with its tubing around the outside (It reminded me of Coco-Sweets’ home.). I went to Holland and saw boobies in the Red Light District and Anne Frank’s house and had profound, ineffable feelings about the social order. In Europe, my mind felt creative and happy for a change. I wasn’t obsessed with controlling everything.



We came back and went straight to the pet store. I was excited to see Coco-Sweets and start on a new, healthier, less codependent path together. They handed me my hamster, but her skin looked lighter. I mean, it wasn’t her. “Oh sorry, wrong pet. Ha. Oops!” They came back with another hamster, not her either. And another! It turned out that Coco-Sweets had died, and they were trying to pawn off another hamster on me.

I cried and yelled at them: Excuse me?! I might just be nine years old and not great at naming pets, but I’ve just come from the Red Light District, okay? Give me a little credit. I know my own hamster!

A year’s worth of frustration and tension poured out of me, newly liberated from my experience abroad. I protested in anger at their mistreatment of Coco-Sweets and their condescension towards me. They were speechless. My father shrugged.

I was angry and sad, but in my heart, I felt that Coco-Sweets was, like me, finally free. I pictured her escaping their entrapment, running away to the Giant Supermarket next door, and exploring the aisles as I had explored Europe.

I didn’t want a substitute hamster and never got another pet after that. A new me was born in Europe, the authentic me, who didn’t exploit animals by naming and controlling them. We may not have connected in life, but in her death, little Coco-Sweets, or “Hamster”, and I blazed a trail for the freedom and voice of the small, brown and oppressed.

Disclaimer: I haven’t owned another pet since, but I did kill about a dozen rats and mice while living in Manhattan.        
     

Read Part 1 of “Justine Barron’s Slow-Tracked Life”

                                                                   
                                                       
 
Justine Barron writes, performs, and tells stories around Los Angeles. Her work includes award-winning film and television scripts and numerous personal essays and comedy shorts. She is a three-time Moth Storyslam winner and regularly performs her stories around town. She also performs with the improv comedy teams “Twig Storm” and “The Beatles(s).” Her comedic work is found online at www.justinebarron.com and twitter.com/justine_emma.

Image credits belong to Justine Barron and stock.xchng.

FAMILY ALBUM: grapefruit LISA NASH

In my parents’ yard there is a grapefruit tree. It grows by the southeast corner of the house. It’s huge, and obscenely generous. Every December it bears hundreds of grapefruit, maybe even a thousand, round and globe-like.

The tree appeared on its own one year when I was in middle school. Mom thought maybe one of us had spit out a seed while wandering through the yard. We guessed it was citrus, but we didn’t know. I hoped it was an orange tree. It finally bloomed when I was in high school, pushing out tiny green fruits at first, the right color, but too round to be limes. They grew and grew and lightened bit by bit. Finally in the fall, we could tell that they were grapefruit. The first taste that Christmas confirmed it.

There were a few fruits that first year, then more, and more, and more. Now my parents bear up under the weight of almost a thousand grapefruits a season. If they meet anyone new in the weeks between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl, the first question on their lips is always heartbreakingly hopeful: Do you like grapefruit?

Whether you would see a yearly gift of a thousand grapefruit as a blessing or a curse depends on your views of grapefruit, I suppose. In my decade as a grapefruit pusher I have discovered that opinions run extreme when it comes to grapefruit: you either hate it, or you love it.


Caption: Thanksgiving, late 1940s. New York? Gramma is second from the right.

Blessings and curses arrive together all the time. When I was young it seemed like it was the sadness that came to chase the happiness down and ruin something good, like when my grandmother, the one grandparent I really knew and loved in my childhood, died about five hours before I won a full college scholarship. I remember sitting in the main office of Lincoln High School with the other recipient, staring in the beaming faces of the principal and her assistant.

Don’t you want to call anyone? Ms. Bunch asked me, pushing the phone across her desk at me. Dial nine first.

Dad picked up when I called home because he and my uncles were there planning the funeral. His voice choked, half from pride, he said, and half because they just really needed some good news. I felt sorry for myself then, at 18, thinking how I had missed out on being really happy because I was so sad about Gramma.


Caption: Three brothers: Paul, Jim and Ray (my dad) in my parents’ front yard

Six years later on my wedding day in a shower of holy water, I looked across the altar at my new husband and my best friends in the world in matching wine-red dresses; after we toasted and gave our speeches at the reception later that day, three of them barely spoke to me again, having outgrown me like an old shoe. Or perhaps I outgrew them.


Caption: Signing the shoe: Bridesmaids and me

When I was 32 weeks pregnant with our first child, my water broke as I got up to get dressed for work. Eleven hours later I was a new mother, exhausted and terrified but elated that he had survived.

The next year was a blessing and a nightmare, feeding him every two hours around the clock, worrying obsessively about germs and immunity, scrutinizing his every move for evidence of a delay in speech, movement, or emotion. Every night when I laid him down to sleep I was pretty sure he would die by the morning. You’re so lucky, friends would say. You never really had to be all that fat. And I could only smile blankly, exhausted.


Caption: My husband Ben and our tiny son, Chris

After he turned a year old, and I started sleeping at night again, I began to see that it wasn’t really that nightmares had to come with each good thing; rather, it seemed like something good came to follow every nightmare, if I just waited long enough.

This afternoon, my son, who is now a smart mischievous four-year-old, made his first joke. Holding a pointed potato chip between his fingers and flying it around the room, he looked at us and smiled. It’s a rocket chip, he said, and burst into giggles. If someone had told me about moments like these I might have had more courage in the early days when I was spending more time sterilizing tiny plastic widgets than sleeping. It’s funny how the hard things seem to fade in black and white, even the really hard things.


Caption: Chris and me picking grapefruit this Thanksgiving

There is only a six percent chance that a baby will be born premature for no apparent reason, but I bet the odds of having a surprise grapefruit tree in your parents’ yard is even smaller than that. Every year we bear our burden of the fruit in equal parts joy and dread. I like the mixed blessing of their fresh-squeezed juice, bright and bitter all at once.

Lisa Nash has lived in Tallahassee, Florida for her whole life. She almost got away in her early twenties, but she met her husband and discovered it was the perfect place to raise a family, so she stayed. She has her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University, and works as an online teacher and tutor of college composition. She writes about the myths and rhetoric of American motherhood at her blog The Guilted Age, and is a regular contributor to Modestly Yours. Occasionally, she shaves her legs.

Image credits: Ray Colletti, Lisa Nash (Thanksgiving) and Miguel Jimenez (wedding).

EDUCATION: they say one bad apple spoils the bunch CHRIS O’ROURKE

 

It was the summer before my first semester teaching college. I was on a train from Providence to Philly, sitting in the café car, which was in the older style, more conducive to conversations occurring spontaneously between commuters. This doesn’t happen much anymore for two reasons – technology and distance. At least that’s what I’ve been told by relatives who work for the railroad and hate modern technology. The ride through New England was as picturesque as any Rockwell painting. Just outside Stamford, I saw an old fisherman with his arms around a young boy looking into the horizon as they stood on a run-down pier. The train pulled into New York as the sun was setting. As we waited in the station, a tall gentleman asked me if anyone was sitting at my table. I only had another hour on the train so I could tolerate the lack of leg space under the table. Usually, I would just lie to the person and hoped they would move on.

The man was tall. He was thin too, not gaunt looking, but thin enough for his age. He dressed simply and well. Basically, his suit and tie looked new. Maybe he shopped at the same Target as me? I never found out. His face was friendly and clean shaven, he couldn’t grow a real beard if he tried. His hair was brown and combed to the left. He had the hair of an elementary school principal. The one thing that stuck out from his attire was the watch. He wore a calculator watch and I saw this watch from out under his cuff as he extended his right arm while he spoke on the phone.

The reason I noticed so much about this gentleman is that I just completed BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series. Holmes in one episode blurts out, “You see, but you do not observe!” I thought I would make this a hobby of mine on the train ride home. I was a little drunk so the accuracy of my observation is not entirely accurate.

“Can I see your watch?” I asked.

“Oh, this? Yeah, sure.” He handed me the calculator watch. It had Indiglo. It was breakthrough stuff in the early 90s. A blue glow would light the background of your watch when you hit a button— unlike watches in the 80s, which, if they came with a light, would only light a small portion of the background. I mentioned this to the man, pointing out that the watch wasn’t authentically retro. His reply to this information, head lowered- defeated, was “I know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Chris.”

“My name is Peter. Nice to meet you.”

“What do you do? Where you headed, I mean.”

“Oh, I’m on my way to D.C. Just finished up a conference in New York.”

“What for?”

“I’m in politics.”



“What do you mean? What’s politics? Are you a clerk? Fundraising?”

“Yeah. The last one. I was raising money, my organization, was up in New York for a big fundraiser over the weekend. We’re a grassroots organization.”

“Oh. So the watch? What’s that about? It doesn’t really go with your whole thing.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a reminder. It reminds me what I’m working for.”

“What?”

“The watch, the suit, I needed a watch to go with the suit. But the suit isn’t totally what I’m about. So I wanted a watch that would remind me that I’m working for the people. I got into this organization to work for the people. And the calculator watch reminds me about the people. What do you do?”

“I’m in education. Teacher. A teacher for hire.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s nothing. I just say teacher for hire as a joke cause I’m not certified. I teach at a community college.”

“I used to teach.”



The man paused. He was listening with a look of utter intent during our conversation and now he turned away. He placed his right hand over his mouth. The calculator watch appeared again from under the cuff of his pristine white shirt. At this moment there was only about a few other passengers in the car with us. It was unusually quiet for the route between New York to D.C., or in my case, Trenton. The man sat and looked across the aisle in the direction of the window opposite from us.

“How long you’ve been teaching?”

“Well, I’ve never really taught before, I’ve only subbed. I start in a couple of weeks. It will be good. I think—”

The man interrupted me. “I taught, and I taught for a long while. I was a good teacher. The best in my district and then when I went to the college level, I was even better.”

I didn’t know how to react to the man’s claim of being a great teacher. I was compelled to ask more. “Do you have any advice?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything.”

The man shifted his body to where his shoulders were now more square with mine. “Ok. I can tell you a lot of about teaching. More than you really need to know. But one thing I know is important, probably the most important thing, is understanding the human animal that is the modern student. Some people will try to talk to you about relating to the kids. That’s out the door. Don’t do that. Don’t try and relate to them. Once you graduated you were already out of touch with whatever level of schooling you just graduated from. You’ll lose ‘em if you try to do that.”



At this point I was finishing off my double of Jack and Pepsi. It was mostly melted ice.

He continued, “Now, making them think you’re trying to relate to them is a psychological technique that takes years of experience, a style of manipulation that you just can’t learn on one train ride. Forget that for your first year. Keep it simple.”

This was more than I wanted.

“‘Know the classroom’ is one I hear a lot and I’ve seen it online a bunch. This actually is a valuable skill. It will help you take the class by storm. See, let me just cut to the chase— what you need to do is have total and utter control over your classroom. I come from a long line of Irish cops. My grandfather beat his father, my father beat me, and we are all a bunch of control freaks. Crowd control has kind of been a thing in our family. I have pictures of my great-grandfather in riot gear from the 20’s. My dad passed the gear onto me after he died. But the point is, the modern student is one that must be controlled. Got me?”



I was slow to respond. Partially because I didn’t know what to say to this man who initially appeared so reserved and mostly because the alcohol had made me tired.

He continued, “When you want to rule a classroom, you’ve got to be able to identify all of the characters in the class. Your first year you’ve got to be like the head detective, like a real Sherlock. You’ve got to know them before they know you, and you’ve got to begin manipulating the shit out of them. Come up with names for them if you want, but get a hold of that classroom at any cost. Like on your first day. Get to know the classroom so show up about two hours early. Know how the blinds work. Where the chalk is. How to turn on the Smart Board. You probably won’t use much classroom technology the first day. Get to know them. Play a game or something that allows you to get as much information from them as possible. Find out things they don’t like and are possibly afraid of. Students will give you a lot of information on the first day. Most of them will be nervous. When you walk into the classroom identify the quiet kid and make sure you can separate him in your mind from the hot popular girls and the shy kid.”

“Isn’t the shy kid the same as the quiet kid?” I asked.

“No, the quiet kid has something to hide. The shy kid has something he wants to say but hasn’t got the confidence to say it. You can work him good. You don’t really have to worry about the shy kids as giving you any shit. The quiet kid I would always be a little more careful about. You can have a real Columbine on your hands there or Patty Hearst kind of situation.”

“What? He wants to be kidnapped?” I took another sip from my drink, it was going down faster than I cared for.

“No. But he wants to join in on things with you, like mocking the shy kid or making fun of the adult learner. The adult learners can be real problems at the college level cause they’re insecure about being back in school. They’ll go to the Dean on you so hopefully you don’t have any your first semester. Also, try to have sex with one of the hot popular girls because that will create tension between them, and there’ll always be two cause they travel in pairs. And the tension will help you …”



“I’m only in my first semester at the college.”

“Yeah, but you’ll see a lot of high school shit carries over especially in the first year. Those girls will think they’re still hot and popular. Don’t worry about the awkward dorks either. They’re so awkward and dorky that they’ll want you to like them. So they’re easy to control! Who else?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re kind of going here.”

“If you don’t want the advice I can shut up.”

“No, keep going.”

“Keep going? That’s what I thought. You’ll have your jocks, even at a community college, you’ll have your jocks for sure. You’ll have to sacrifice the self-esteem of the dorky kids and nerdy chicks to win over the jocks. The jocks will love you if you dislike the same dorks as them and rip on the object of their sexual frustration for the next year which will be the attractive nerdy girl. Nerdy girl learned in high school not to like the jocks and now she’ll be coming into her own that first year of college. The jocks haven’t figured out why they hate her yet and it’s because they want to fuck her but they’re still operating on some weird high school dictum to hate all nerd - male or female. It’s weird. The shit really hasn’t changed since the 80s.”



“Who else do we have?”

“I really don’t know. I’m a little lost.”

“Oh, right, the angry kid. Angry kid and quiet kid could be the same student. It depends. They might switch roles throughout as well. Angry kid is usually filled up with a lot of ideas about college from his family. These students usually come from a conservative background politically or they’re Christians. They’re filled with stories of mythological liberalism or they just don’t like anyone else and they don’t know why, just that ‘everything will be different.’ Angry kid you just have to manage. Handle him and give him a passing grade if not higher. Or, if you’re going to fail him make sure he doesn’t know where your office is. Also, try to get the Dean on your side at some point before the semester ends, if she’s a fat Dean try to use food to win her over by midterm, I had this Dean once who was into fetish wear and I found out by looking at his computer when I was waiting in his office. And don’t forget how you dress and …”



The man went on and on. He talked about Arizona and his days as a teacher for juveniles in a remote desert town. He listed the reasons a teacher should carry a retractable baton at all times. He told stories of working in the inner city and a student pulling a knife on him. How he said to the kid, It’s always the knife with you wops, and then beat the kid in front of his classmates. The man wouldn’t stop talking. He just built more and more momentum from his own speech.

It was frightening me a little. He went on about games that teachers can play to pit three students against one. He had a nickname for this game that I forget now.

At my stop the man became silent. I didn’t know why, I was so engrossed by the utterly useless and horrible advice he was giving me I had lost track of time. He turned away from me and gestured toward the window. It was my stop. I grabbed my laptop bag, computer, and other things and rushed off the train. I tried to thank the man and looked back as I stumbled off the car. I got around to the window and tried to wave at the man from the platform but he had already turned and was facing the other direction.


 

                           

                                   
When he’s not grading student essays, Chris O’Rourke is writing short stories and performing stand-up in the Philadelphia area. Other projects include: starting a surveillance company with his ex-cop dad. Follow him on Twitter.

**Photography Notes: Film stills and movie posters shown throughout this piece belong to the following (in chronological order): Teachers, Election, Half Nelson, Dangerous Minds, Class of 1984, Bad Teacher, The Breakfast Club, and American Teacher.

TRAVEL: 中国：有一个问题。(china: there’s a catch) REBECCA LEIB

Almost one month ago, I returned from a month long trip to China and I hope to never. Fucking. Go. Back. There. Again. 

I think I should backtrack for you. 

Pre-China was a rough year for me. My freelance jobs were waning and uncertain. My commercial agent dumped me. My writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had acquired a stalker. The car I had since I was 16 would periodically catch on fire. I broke up with this guy because he was a jerk, just as my psychic told me. 

I mean, I HAD a psychic. 

The year was crazy. 

So, I decided to drop it all and visit my brother in China. He had been there a year, teaching aviation terminology at a college in Tianjin. I figured, this was the time— I’m basically unemployed, broke, and no pesky awesome love of my life is holding me back. So, why not? I loved to travel. I fancied myself a great traveler, one who was open to change, reconfiguration, and enlightenment. I would go to the Great Wall. I would interact with the people. I would try lots of foreign foods. I would learn, love and eat. And maybe pray. Just like that book that I never read, and won’t ever read.  Because that book, like China, is shit.

I arrived in Beijing on the 4^th of July and with my fancy backpack and my Lonely Planet.   

I was ready.

The first thing I realized was that China was hot. Really hot. When I landed in Beijing, it was approximately 94 degrees and smelled like hot garbage. Oh Rebecca, I thought, my dumb American olfactory senses aren’t used to how others live!  Surely it’s just the initial shock of being in a foreign land. Then, I tried to catch a cab from the airport and realized quickly that there were NO LINES ANYWHERE IN CHINA. And I don’t mean no lines like, water park fun-time no lines, I mean strangers en masse pushing each other like cattle. Lines. The Chinese? They don’t believe in them. A line to catch a train? NO way. A line in a fast food restaurant? Why bother? Lines were for people who want to get where they’re going faster, and in an orderly fashion.

The Chinese were having NONE OF IT. 

With more than a billion people in each city I visited, feeling the hot breath of a Chinese person on my neck or their shirtless bodies haphazardly pressed all up against mine became routine. Also, I had not gotten my period in two months, which irritated me. 

OPEN your MIND, REBECCA, I thought to myself, as a Chinese person jammed their umbrella right into my collarbone, taking my cab and spilling open my carry-on bag. These people don’t have Facebook, or blogs! They barely have Fresca or free press! Your body is soft, sensitive, and American. HARDEN UP! Of course, I did.

Then, there was the food factor. Most of Chinese food is weird animal parts, deep fried and in gravies. I ate it with gusto, thinking that my palette was too narrow if I didn’t like what I was eating. Chinese food also wreaked havoc on my digestive system. I had the worse diarrhea you could EVER IMAGINE. THAT YOU COULD EVER FUCKING IMAGINE. I MEAN, near CONSTANT. 

This is the point in the piece where shit gets REAL.

IT’S FINE, I told myself. Your. Body. Will. Get. Used. To. This. Just find the public bathroom, and shit n’ vomit in this HOLE,  like everybody else. You see, eastern toilets are just holes in the ground, and its BYOT and S, which means bring your own soap and toilet paper. If you don’t have it, no worries.  NOBODY does. NOBODY FUCKING DOES. The COLLECTIVE POPULATION OF CHINA DOES NOT WASH THEIR HANDS. NOBODY. AND DEFINITELY not that shirtless smoking dude who just served you your deep fried scorpions in orange gravy peach sauce.

Rebecca, I said to myself, it’s COOL. These people survived the Cultural Revolution. They have thousands of years of oppressive dynastic rule. You can handle a couple pieces of rabbit cat sate served to you by dirty Beijing fingers. GET USED TO IT. 

By week two, spitting and shitting in public were other elements of China that I was “EXPERIENCING.” Mothers would hold their children over garbage cans in parks (and in corners, if there were no garbage cans) to let their kid piss or shit. At first, I thought, that’s weird— there are holes for such specific purposes, as I just mentioned. Because of all of the pollution and the food, which is high in fat and oil (the food, not the pollution), the Chinese people were oozing liquids CONSTANTLY. It was a normal day in China to see a kid shitting in the grand ballroom of a train station, or to be sitting on a jam packed train and feel the spit of the old man next to you as he hacked a fat loogie onto the floor of a bus, then wiping it around with his foot. 

We were both ashamed.

I still didn’t have my period, either. But, luckily, according to fourteen Chinese pregnancy tests, I wasn’t pregnant.   

Even the things that were supposed to be beautiful just seemed ugly, and I blamed my narrow American self. In Qi Yan, I saw The Terra Cotta Warriors. They are these statues— each one unique, built by thousands of craftsmen. They were recently excavated and are BREATHTAKING. These craftsmen made it  their life’s mission to complete The Warriors, and after they did so, they were SYSTEMATICALLY SLAUGHTERED BY THEIR DICKHEAD 21-YEAR-OLD EMPEROR (as my tour guide proudly told me). I went to see the Pandas in Cheng du, who are in captivity because they BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR NEWBORNS, ALMOST KILLING THEM BEFORE THEY REACH MATURITY (Pandas should be extinct, my tour guide proudly told me!). In my brother’s city of residence, Tianjin, we saw the famous Tianjin opera. The theme: RAPE. 

There was no tour guide to explain this to me. Loud and clear, CHINA!

I kept thinking about how I was a terrible human being. How I must not be appreciating all  that this wide world had to offer. What was wrong with ME? I was also super anxious about, you know, MAYBE BEING PREGNANT. And if not, maybe the lasting and perhaps permanent damage China had wreaked on my reproductive system.

One of the last nights of the trip was a particularly long night of travel— we missed our flight because the Chinese airline just decided to CHANGE the time the plane was leaving, so we had to take a total roundabout way. We had booked a hostel, but the booking didn’t go through because the Internet wasn’t working, so we went to a shitty hotel with barely any walls and a bed that was a glorified mat. I was thirsty because the water in China is undrinkable and I was out of my bottled water. I was hungry, had been shitting up a storm, and just wanted to sleep. So, I got into bed and started drifting off… when I heard in the next room, a man spitting, just hacking up a storm.

I snapped. 

I climbed on top of the bed and screamed at the top of my lungs: GUESS WHO  WOULD LOVE TO GET THIS SHIT BED COVERED IN THEIR DISGUSTING, STICKY MENSTRUAL FLUIDS?!! GIVE UP? ME! ME!! I WOULD LOVE TO BLEED ALL OVER THIS GODDAMNED BED RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE UTERINE LINING AND THE BLOOD-ENGORGED EGGS FLOW THROUGH MY BODY, OUT OF MY THIGHS AND ALL OVER THIS BED— ALLOVER IT. DID YOU HEAR THAT? HAPPY FUN TRAILS HOTEL? DID YOU?!! 

But rarely in this life do we get what we wish for. 

My brother rushed into my room to calm me down and bring me clean water. And no, I did not menstruate all over the bed. The last part of the trip I combated my ethnocentrism with quiet resignation. I was ignorant. I was white. I was privileged.  And, I was probably pregnant with a definitely unwanted child.

I was everything I hated in travelers, and in mothers. And yeah, as I read this I realize that I sound like a total dick.

Maybe I am a total dick.

BUT—

WHEN I GOT BACK ONTO SWEET, SWEET AMERICAN SOIL, TO MY DELIGHT I BLED ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY! I have never been so happy to buy tampons, like, ever. Even now, I think— man, I ’m pretty thankful for newspapers. And, good cuts of meat. And, my right to vote. And, for soap coming standard with western style toilets.

感谢，让我明白我妈的生活！我没有怀孕！(Thanks, China, for making me appreciate my shit, child-less life!)

Rebecca Leib was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She has her BFA in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA in writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also an alumni of the Second City Conservatory, IO-West and UCB. Rebecca likes to teach, draw and perform and can be seen performing regularly at iO West, The Moth Storytelling Competition and UCB-LA. She has been published for art writing in Beautiful/Decay, Art Ltd., ArtNews, Artillery and writes pop culture pieces for TVgasm, Girls Talkin’ Smack and Gawker. She has a weekly column for the Los Angeles-based humor blog, http://www.saysomethingfunnybitch.com/ that you can check out, if you’d like. 

**All photography in this piece is provided by Rebecca Leib or her brother— on location, in China.