Sunday, August 22, 2010

Away and Under the Weather: Part 1

The end of this month will mark my six months in Hong Kong!! And there is one culture shock that I haven't had to deal with yet here...until now. I finally got sick in Hong Kong. It's just a run-of-the-mill flu, but it's painful and it really sucks when it's in another country. Being sick here, though, is actually not so bad. I am allowed to take sick days if I really need them and if I do need to go to the doctor's I can look up where to go (in English!) on the Internet. I have not always been so lucky though and getting through the last few days I've had to remind myself that this is not the worst I've ever experienced.

I have been very fortunate that I have never contracted any truly foreign disease, broken anything, or fell into a fire pit while drunkenly trying to hurdle it (which happened at least once a summer to someone in Korea). However, I have had plenty of normal mishaps and illnesses that are a little more interesting (in retrospect) since they happened abroad. Here are my top (or maybe bottom) five.

#5 New Year's Resolution: Work Somewhere with Sick Days

This is actually two stories but they're related. My first two New Year's in Korea did not go so well. I learned a lesson from both experiences. Unfortunately, it was the exact same lesson that just didn't stick the first time.

New Year's Eve of 2006-2007, I made it through a nice buffet dinner by the beach but not to the midnight countdown. I could tell I was getting sick and went home. I had been a little sick (mostly from hangovers) before in Korea but nothing I couldn't handle since I didn't have to be at work until about 3:00pm. I loved that part of my job. The downside? No holidays or sick days. And I mean it. I worked every Western Holiday and most Korean Holidays. On the two days of the year we did get off for absolutely mandatory Korean holidays, we made those up on weekends. And as for the sick days, when you are hired from another country (over the phone) mainly for being a native-speaker, it's because they don't have many just hanging around. And I worked for the rare company that didn't have Korean co-teachers in the classroom. For the first year or two in Korea, there was no one to replace us if we got sick. So we were politely told that we don't have sick days. The reality of this didn't really hit me until that first week of 2007.

And it wasn't just me that was sick. Four of our five teachers were sick that week. I was shaking with chills and fever for two or three days, living on pain medication. One of the other teachers was leaving his classroom every few hours to puke. And another teacher seemed to have contracted both our strains of the flu simultaneously. This was the week we realized our lack of time off. We worked December 31st and January 1st...at a school. We all taught sitting in chairs with our winter coats, hats and scarves. We were obviously sick and the kids didn't really bat an eye. It was expected that we would still be there. Oh how I missed the Western work ethic...

The next new year went on much better. I made it through midnight with a good crowd of people at a house party near my own house. I was getting a little drunk but not New-Year's-quality wasted. I was feeling very spirited as well since my friends made some homemade eggnog. Thank you Canadians!! At least, I felt that way until the next morning. I know what a hangover feels like, and I know when it's more than just a hangover. This was more. And I knew exactly what the "more" was: raw eggs. I was so in the spirit and grateful for something that resembled home (I don't even drink eggnog at home!) that I had two glasses. In a usual hangover, my head hurts so much, it tells my stomach what to do. I had that going on a little but my stomach was doing flips all on it's own too, and way more often than any normal hangover I've ever had. And so I had to tell myself again, so maybe it would stick, work somewhere with sick days.

#4 Korean Remedy: Stop Talking So Much

No one really knows why they get TMJ. It could be long term stress or you could have bit an apple wrong once. Any which way it happened, my jaw started popping on one side a few months after being in Korea. I ignored it like an idiot and eventually couldn't open my mouth wide enough to put two fingers in between my teeth. Around the same time that my mouth locked up I had a cold brewing as well with a pretty sore throat. That was enough sick for me to finally bring myself to go to the hospital.

Someone told me about a hospital that had one English speaking nurse for the whole hospital. (It sounds bad but there wasn't a huge demand and it meant that I was guided around the hospital the whole time.) She was a really nice nurse and I got to know her well over the years. I went back many times after that for acupuncture which is cheap and common in Korea. (That leads to whole other stories about med students, needles, and traditional Eastern sludge medicine.) The nurse took me around to all the doctors I needed except the Dentist for my jaw. Apparently, the local expert on TMJ had offices just down the street and I could go there (alone) after I was done at the hospital. First, though, the doctors needed to look at my infected throat and yet I couldn't open my mouth. And so I cursed my stupidity and procrastination as they shoved a scope down my nose and I watched my throat open and close on the video monitor next to my bed. Will I ever learn?

I found the dentist's office, opened the sliding door, and the first thing I notice is the shoe rack next to the door with a nice array of slippers to choose. Oh, Korea. Take your shoes off at home, restaurants, and now the dentist's office. The girls at the counter looked at me like I was the first Waegook (foreigner) they'd seen walk through that door. This may have even been true. But I knew what to do by now in situations like this one. I just handed them my ARC (Alien Registration Card, got to love the honesty) and sat down. They seemed quite pleased about this.

Fortunately, most doctors, most places you will go will have to know some English because some of their textbooks in medical school were in English and/or English proficiently is a requirement to get in since med schools have high standards. I actually got to see one of those textbooks because it was the best way this Dentist could explain what had happened to my jaw. And it didn't look like a med school textbook. It looked like a book written at a high school science level. Between that and some pretty pictures, I sussed out that the cartilage between my jawbones had actually popped out and the two bones were rubbing together. This was just the imagery I needed to forget about the tube down the nose. At this point, his wife, who was the other dentist at the Bubu ChiKwa (literally "Couple Dentist"), was finished with a patient and came over. She spoke much more English than her husband and was actually thrilled to be practicing. What a great day for them.

"You should come when the jaw is popping, the dentist can make a splint to fix it. Now it's bad, maybe you need surgery." Great, thanks for the guilt trip and terrifying possibility in the same breath. "He tries to put back first manual." Manual? Not a splint but not surgery? Exactly how do you pull the jaw apart enough to put the cartilage back "manually"? I figured this one out as it was happening. That piece of cartilage wants to be between the jawbones so if you separate them, hopefully it will just pop back in on its own. How do you separate them? The dentist sticks his thumb into the patients mouth and grabs the lower jaw. Then through a few quick moves in different directions, tries to dislocate the jaw just enough to allow the piece to pop back in there. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have to go through the anticipation of knowing what he was about to do. The idea would have probably been worse than it actually was.

"The doctor did a good job, no surgery." Did he just dislocate my jaw? "We make you a splint now. You come back every month to adjust the splint." Which all turned out to be over $800. "The doctor gives you a list of foods not to eat." No cuttlefish, no problem there. "And you need to stop talking."

"Um, I'm a teacher, it's my job to talk."

"Stop talking so much."


______

More stories to come! My current sickness is catching up with me and I need to sleep.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Serenity of an Ex-Pat

Today is a culture shock day. Actually, it's a little bit of a culture shock week. Step one is now complete! I have recognised why I feel like crap and will now work it out through writing. Here we go...

Even for us non-religious types, now is a good time to remember the serenity prayer:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the Courage to change the things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

The only problem here is that you're not asking for the "intelligence" or "common sense" to know the difference between the changeable and unchangeable. You are asking for wisdom; something that comes with time and experience. And while many things are universal, many things that you don't think of are not, and your wisdom isn't always transferable. In a new culture, all that "wisdom" you have stored to deal with everyday annoyances gets challenged in ways that are not just difficult but seem ridiculous as a way to be challenged. It's like telling a runner, "Ok, you know we're going to make your hurtles higher, but we're also making them 'S' shaped with a pit of pickles on the other side." Yes, people will be speaking a different language, staring at you, and offering you food that you would prefer to eat blindfolded. But why can't you find painkillers at the convenience store, why aren't the trash bags with all the cleaning supplies in the grocery store like they're supposed to be, and why is the naked pow-wow of old women eating hard-boiled eggs in the locker room?!?

Most of those things actually refer to stuff I dealt with in Korea. I am in Hong Kong now which is a huge step towards the Western world compared to where I was before. But even though most people speak English and I'm not the only white person the locals have seen this month (in fact, the "locals" here are often white), I am still in a new culture and am therefore occasionally still shocked. And even though this is my third foreign country and am working on four years of experience in new cultures, I still don't handle the culture shock all that well.

Yesterday was my day off. I was tired and wanted to relax around my apartment, watch TV on my computer and celebrate my new refrigerator by cooking some dishes I wouldn't have to throw away when there were leftovers. Mission accomplished; I cooked, I watched, I relaxed, and I didn't leave the apartment. This is a bad move. Staring at a screen all day in a sealed apartment will give you a headache. Hong Kong extreme pressure systems, pollution, and the jack hammer in my office building that followed me from classroom to classroom the next day don't make headaches any better. When you're at home, you know where to go to get headache medicine (assuming you don't already have some at home like you should) and you know which kind to take based on years of experience and your mom telling you, "No, take the other one, you haven't had any food and that's more for sinus pain." You are wise and know how to take care of yourself.

But the headache came on too late last night and I didn't know if anything close would be open. I didn't have any on hand because when you move from one country to another, you don't rent a U-haul; you take your clothes, a few reminders of home, and pray you don't get charged for excess baggage. So instead of finding pain killers, I just ignored it and went to sleep. Here is one of those wisdoms that actually is universal: If you ignore a problem, it just comes back a bigger pain then before. Not only did I wake up with the same headache, but now I have to get ready for the day and try to find a place that sells pain killers before going to work. I found some but they weren't so much the best painkillers for the job, but the box with the most English that fit the profile. I made it over the 'S' hurtle but definitely stepped in the pickles.

Case in point number 2 for "don't ignore a problem you would normally fix with ease" is my dead roommate, Mr. Flying Cockroach. A few days ago I saw my first cockroach inside my apartment. Very common in Hong Kong but I decided to ignore that it would be a problem for me. I was debated on trying to kill it--even though it was high enough to fall on my head if I hit it wrong--when it took off flying and did a little spin around the room before landing in the same spot. That was it, too new, too foreign, close the door, pillows to seal the bottom, he'll be gone by morning. And he was. I whipped up some homemade roach killer and set it in the room, but that was the only proactive thing I did to get rid of him.

So, as my headache is really taking shape last night while video-chatting with my mom (from staring at the screen more, I love you Mom!), my lazy-ass method of dealing with something I don't want to learn to deal with comes back to attack me, literally. I almost gave my mom a heart-attack when I look off to a part of the room she can't see and start screaming bloody-murder. Mr. Flying Cockroach has decided that he wants to leave his room and share in the common area and is now flying at my head. Once I tell Mom that I am not being attacked by a home invader, I look back to see that my scream has sent him back in the room. This time, I even do a half-ass job of ignoring him. I closed the door but didn't put the pillows at the bottom. Five minutes later, Mom is asking why I'm screaming again as he comes in from under the door. I, of course, fly to the other side of the room, determined not to hang out with my new roommate. But he's headed for my bedroom, this guy has balls. Mom is still on skype giving me helpful advice like, "Kill it, KILL IT!" or telling me I should spray him with roach killer I don't have because I was in denial that I would even have roaches, let alone ones that fly and want to hang out with me. I finally work up the adrenaline to attack him and after after 5 minutes of failed tennis shoe torpedoes and discombobulating whacks with a broom ("Kill it, KILL IT!"), I finally hit him a few times with the hard part of the broom and take him directly to the hallway trash. RIP Mr. Flying Cockroach.

I'm too tired and already have enough of a headache that I won't prepare myself lunch for tomorrow (more ignoring), go to bed, and wake up with my still present headache and no medicine. I pick up my mail, a beautiful announcement for my friend's wedding that I can't attend back home. I get to work and the jack hammer follows me from room to room until I decide to have lunch early to run errands. Errands that I can't run because I left my ATM card at home. And since I didn't make lunch, I need spend what little cash I have on lunch. All pretty menial stuff that adds up to a stressful couple days in a foreign environment. So now I propose the Ex-Pat's Serenity Poem with apologies to whoever wrote the first one:

I must find the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Wisdom to see the things that I can change,
and the Courage to learn the difference all over again.