Of all the numerous things about living away from Canada I miss, trust is more poignant than them all. It is–more than family, friends, air quality or money–the thing that is most likely to cause me to eventually leave China.

When Addie contracted aflatoxin poisoning, it really forced front and centre a sense that I had only peripherally been exposed to through news articles and conversations with Chinese–trust is a commodity China is dangerously short on.

When you put this into the larger context of how much we rely on trust in our day to day lives, the gravity of its absence is frightening. Trust that the water coming out of your tap is clean, that the milk we drink is safe, that the meats we buy are fresh, that the cell phones we use wont explode, that the electrical wiring in our apartments wont electrocute us in the shower.

And further, extending this from the faceless products and constructions of daily life, to the “professionals” we rely on. Trusting the shopkeepers, the police, the vets, the journalists, the doctors — and when they all fail, the judges and the law.

Trust is required for all these things. Trust, faith really, is needed to be able to move about your day-to-day routine. Needed so that you aren’t paralyzed by the thought of what a lack of trust in any of those things might entail.

But my trust is gone. It was whittled thinner and thinner over my time here and then broke completely when a high-end imported dog food we trusted was left to spoil in a Guangdong warehouse.

The painful part is I understand it. I understand why it seems almost everyone in China is only looking out for themselves. Not necessarily pulling the trigger on things that will hurt others, but certainly complicit in evil actions so long as it doesn’t directly affect them or theirs. If no one is looking out for them, why should they look out for anyone else?

Call it history, culture, learned behavior. Tell me it’s not all-spanning, not everyone, not all things. Explain to me that development is everywhere, things are changing, just one more generation… Then rest your life, or the lives of those you care about on that ideal.

I often use the analogy of a single drop of oil in a barrel of water when explaining to Maggie why she can’t trust the Chinese news she reads. It doesn’t matter if 99% of that barrel is water, if there is just one drop of oil, it’s spoiled.

Living in China is like playing the Windows classic Mindsweeper on the “easy” setting. You can click and click and click and most of the time you’ll be fine – but that one random time you’re not — game over.

So, our new dog, Button, is sick. Again, we are forced into a position of hoping we can trust experts telling us what is wrong and what we need to do. We trusted the vet we bought her from that we needed to give her the medicine she suggested to solve the problem. When that didn’t work we trusted a second vet (the most lauded one in Suzhou) that he really had never seen anything like this problem, and trusted that we actually required the litany of expensive tests he prescribed. We trusted that he, one of the truly “qualified” veterinarians in Suzhou, was actually dumbfounded and had no idea what was wrong with her. And maybe he didn’t.

But after digging for just a few minutes online, after our trust in the experts had worn out, we learned that her symptoms fit a perfectly normal and common problem with female puppies and that it was nothing to worry about and rarely something to treat.

So… do we trust that the doctors were both clueless? Trust that they just didn’t tell us the details? Or trust that they, like so many others, simply had their own agendas, and not the health of our dog or the peace-of-mind of her owners, when giving their diagnosis? Trust that maybe they just wanted to string out an otherwise inexpensive problem as long as they could.

And this is “just a dog”. These problems certainly extend to human medicine as well. Doctor’s prescribing unneeded drugs is the norm, not the unethical exception — ordering costly procedures and tests under the guise of caution all in an effort to bump up the bill at a patient’s most vulnerable hour.

In any Western country my thoughts about this would be considered overly cautious at best, and paranoid at worst. But this is China. Whatever wonderful gifts this country has to give, trust simply isn’t one of them.

Arriving at the university with ten minutes to spare, I realized I should have given myself more time. The yard outside the foreign language department was a mess of 外国人 all politely pushing to see the classroom placement list.

Things were organized in typical Chinese fashion. A sort of chaotic mess that leaves you feeling like you should know where things are, but just can’t seem to wrap your head around it. Eventually I found my name – in Chinese – on a list posts on a random wall away from the posting board.

Fully expecting to walk into class today and ace it – if you remember, I was told I could either go into Level 1 Chinese (as that’s where my reading/writing is at), or I could tough it out and try out Level 2, allegedly where my speaking/listening is. I took the easy road.

For whatever reason, administration had different plans and wrote a nice big “2″ beside my name. Not having the energy to try and navigate the clusterfeck of red-tape that it might be to get things changed, I bit the bullet and bought my books.

Now 20-25 minutes late for my 汉语 class, I walked in on a scene familiar to anyone that’s taught ESL – the “getting to know you” class. Man, this is my first-day standby whenever I need to start a new class. It’s a great time killer, takes absolutely nothing to prepare, and the students are generally comfortable with it – good to see that crosses languages.

Taking up the last available seat in the classroom beside a self-proclaimed Korean Tai Tai and a rather nice American girl, I went to work trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Basically we were instructed that we needed to present the class with five sentences about ourselves using “是“.

I was initially nervous that I’d be far behind this group of students, most of whom were indicating that they had studied formally for at least a year previous. As it turned out everyone was equally nervous, and rusty, so we all had a good laugh.

After an hour and a half of this, we took a break and then reconvened for our second class – 口语. This proved a much more difficult class. The teacher, who can’t be more than a year or two out of university herself, is a doll, but seemed to crave our blank looks of utter confusion.

I made it through though, and aside from having to try and make sense of a two page dialog that I only know every 5th word of, I think I’m doing alright. It’s comforting to see that despite me being a bit over my head in the Level 2 class, I’m not alone.

So yeah, with nothing but positive things to say about my first day, you might be wondering about that “sick and tired” bit. Mid-way through the second class I started yawning uncontrollably, but assumed it was just not having had a great night’s sleep.

Getting home, I was doing everything to keep my eyes open. I couldn’t figure out why I was so tired. Then, while eating lunch and watching some South Park with Maggie, I turned to her and asked, “why is it freezing in here?” Looking at me with that screwy face only a wife can give a husband, I knew I’d caught a bug.

It’s now 8pm and I’ve been sleeping all day. I feel horrible, but slightly better than when I first started to crash. I’ve had this feeling before, and think it’s likely stomach flu/food poisoning. Fun.

Will see what the morning brings, but it’s somewhat disheartening that I might already be playing hooky and it’s only the second day.