Sat Jun 20, 2009
Life abroad is always a series of successes and failures. Sometimes you get a good streak and you have success after success, and you begin to think that you’re doing so well, you might as well never go home. Other times you just want to be back home: you are lost, robbed, a practical deaf-mute, and suddenly discover you have picked up the strongest, newest strain of diarrhea — with no restroom in sight (for those who are worried, this has not happened to me — yet). But most of the time, life is a mix of them both, often in quick succession. Let us consider the last few days as an example of what I mean (but first, let me catch up up on what I did in the couple of days after my last post).
I once again displaying my prowess as a second-year Chinese student (one which I felt uncomfortably comfortable in) for the new ACC teachers to practice on, and pretended that my mispronunciations were all a part of the role I was playing. Sometimes it was true. Afterwards I returned to the hostel, where I bumped into my nameless truck-driving lawyer friend (whom I eventually discovered goes by Matthew), and he said he was just on his way out to the Silk Market, and did I want to come along with him? I had to laugh – the second-year lesson that the ACC teachers had been practicing was all about going to the Silk Market to bargain and buy things. The Silk Market, for those unfamiliar with Beijing, is a large building with 6 levels, in which one can find fake pearls, fake rolex watches, fake silk qipaos (also known as cheongsams – the famous narrow Chinese dresses), electronics, and everything else under the sun that a tourist in China would want. Knowing its reputation as a tourist trap par excellence, in all my many trips to Beijing I had never been there before – so when Matthew mentioned it right after a whole practice lesson on it, I figured it was an omen I could not resist. Besides, he promised me that I could get a good second-hand cell phone there, and I also wanted to buy a watch and some pants. At the last minute, Jake came along too.
We set out, and first went to the secret sub-market where tourists don’t normally go and the prices can be somewhat cheaper. There we had fun chatting with some of the tiny shop clerks (tiny here modifying both the clerks and the shops) – the one who sold Jake a pair of sunglasses even promised to give us a present if we came back and sang a Chinese song to her satisfaction. Matthew, meanwhile, was displaying some of the wiliest bargaining tactics I’ve seen, by only putting 73 yuan in his pocket, and then bargaining down the lady who was trying to sell him a briefcase from 450 yuan down to 90 yuan – but there he and I differed, for he wouldn’t pay more than the 73 in his pocket, on principle that that was how much he had put in his pocket, even though he had much more tucked in his waist pouch and the briefcase was definitely worth 90 yuan, as he himself admitted later.
Our next battle came at the watch counter, where I bargained a watch down from 350 yuan to 30 yuan. It is probably fake, but so long as it tells time accurately, I am happy. I made the critical mistake of not taking up the clerk’s offer to resize the band before I paid, so I feel a little like some suburban gangster, with my loose-fitting stainless steel watch. Always get everything done before the money leaves your hand – and at the worst, before you walk away from the counter.
Other adventures of the Silk market included seeing a bona fide cheap, second-hand Nokia cell phone – but one that looked like it had been used to toast marshmallows. I ended up buying a new one plus SIM card for 330 yuan. We engaged in another long briefcase-bargaining-battle which turned interesting when an off-hand comment about Mont Blanc pens, which are apparently the classiest in the world, got us ushered into the back room where we could buy, among other things, Mont Blanc pens! China never ceases to amaze.
The Silk Market Expedition ended with a surreal coincidence – as we were walking to the escalators, Matthew bumped into one of his old friends who was going to be leaving China the next day and wanted to burn some yuan before going. Along with him were some Chinese folks he knew. Then, who should walk around the corner, but the three Swedish guys who were staying in our hostel! Thus we formed a large group of people who mostly didn’t know each other (friends of friends of friends of friends, in some cases), and chatted away for a good hour. I came away with some contacts from Nanning (where I will be going in July for the FS conference at which we have to give presentations), Jake got the information of a Chinese guy who is studying near his college in Connecticut, and everyone had a good time.
The next couple days I kept having the best intention to go to the American Embassy, but kept failing. Somehow 2 o’clock would roll around and I’d realize I didn’t have time to get there before they close at 3 pm. I have this hope that they will have some job that they need a recent college grad who majored in Chinese and has mediocre Chinese skills to do, and that pays pretty well, and that no one else has applied for. I guess this shows that four years kicking around college and the wider world still leaves some ability intact to dream unrealistically.
Instead of making it to the embassy, though, I did get some other things accomplished. Matthew roped me into going exercising with him early one morning (this will shock you all, I know), and so I went jogging with him and did some chin ups and whatnot. I can intellectually understand some of the appeal of exercising, especially once you get good at it, but I have to say, after not doing any serious exercise for some ten years, it’s amazing how miserable it can be to run a little and do a few other exercises. Still, I’m a sucker for trying new stuff, especially if people personally invite me, and Matthew was a good sport about my pitiful showing.
Two summers ago Freeman-Asia gave a group of five Swarthmore students and a professor a grant to do research; I was one of those students. This year another group of Swarthmore students were doing different research with the same grant, and I knew most of them; I had also helped one of them polish up her grant application earlier on in the process. So one day after visiting my old restaurant haunt to find that the family still hadn’t returned, and might not return in the foreseeable future, I headed over to the university district where my fellow Swarthmore students were based, and had a pleasant dinner and evening with them, complements of Freeman-Asia. They were right at the end of their trip, and seemed to have had a great time.
The Nokia cell phone I bought was a fake. There was no way I could tell this just by looking at it, since it had the logo and was still sealed. Not being a fool, I had tested all the abilities at the Silk Market booth, and it all seemed good. It wasn’t until I returned home and tried to send someone a text message that I realized it couldn’t read or write Chinese – something I had never thought to test, this being China, home of the Chinese text message. I tried to take it to the Nokia outlet guys, who coonfirmed that it was a fake, and there wasn’t a way to fix it.
I had liked the fellow who sold it to me, which was part of why I had bought it instead of continuing my search for a second-hand phone. I also had discovered, in my day or so of use, that I didn’t like the fell of the phone – so I was rarin’ to give him a piece of my mind, and more importantly, get my money back. I was prepared for a tough fight, because there is little that small shop keepers like less than to take back sold goods. When I got there, however, my small fear was confirmed — the guy was gone! There was no way I could convince the girl at his shop that some other person had sold me bad goods (even if she believed me, she’d never admit it). I determined to make another pass, and realized that I was in the wrong aisle (most of these shops are almost entirely identical), and my target was there, trying t make a sale to another hapless foreigner. Some strange sense of fair play prevented me from busting in and telling the other foreigner to flee the false goods. Also, the shop certainly sells both ral and fake stuff, and the battery he was buying might have been real. Also, it would hurt my chances of getting my money back.
Mentally all geared up for the fight, I stated my case calmly, and that the Nokia people had said it was a fake. The fellow accepted it without comment, and we agreed that I would keep the SIM card (which was real, and couldn’t be resold now anyway), and he would give me back 230 yuan. Flushed at my easy victory, I happily browsed the rest of the Silk Market, smiling at earnest people trying to sell me things, knowing that I wasn’t going to buy a scrap, but enjoy looking at all the beautiful thigns none-the-less. One shop keeper, disconcerted at my good cheer, shouted after me, “Why are you still laughing?” Life was good.
Directly after my Silk Market success, I went one subway stop over to find the “China World Tower 2”, which was made more difficult by the sheeting of rain coming down and the fact that the Chinese name, which I didn’t know, was completely different. The one plus was that there was a virtual city underground, and I was sure I could get there without ever having to pop up to the surface. The problem was that I didn’t know how to get there. I had arranged to meet with a Swarthmore alumnus who had done a Fullbright in China, had friends who had gone into the Foreign Service, and was back here interning at a law firm in Beijing. I thought he might be able to give me some pointers, or maybe a job or something.
Fifteen mintues late but still dry, I finally made it to my destination and my man. Over a fine and expensive meal of steak, we talked about some of the above topics, and I realized once again that my biggest problem may be my lack of direction – I would be happy doing any number of things, but nothing really sticks out to me as my passion – law, economics, education, government, etc. They are all great, but I can’t prove I’ve been preparing my whole life for any one of them. As a result, even jobs I could do easily are difficult to obtain, and I a feel a little like trying to fast to start a car on ice – the harder I try, the more I end up stuck where I am. I left the lunch with all my elation at the cell phone escapade deflated. I did learn some things, though (or re-learned) it rarely hurts to over-dress slightly, and you really should have clear, thoughtful, and pertinent questions prepared and memorized. Also, allocate more time for finding a new place than you think you’ll need.
On my way out, I saw the office for “Wall Street English.” Despite still being dressed like, well, a backpacker, I girded up my loins and went forth to brazenly ask if they had any job openings. I got a business card and a informational brochure. All their teachers need TESOL certification, so that idea went to that happy place most good ideas go.
On my last full day in Beijing, I decided to do some more shopping. I had managed to lose my USB stick, I wanted to get a lock for my laptop, I needed an ethernet cable for my room in Chengdu, I still needed a cell phone. This called for a trip to Hailong (“Sea Dragon”), the electronics emporium of Beijing, over on the other side of town. A hour and a half later, I had myself a wind-up ethernet cable ($1.5), and proceeded to get the rest of the things I needed, including a keyboard to give as a present to my hostel, to replace the terrible one they had. The whole deal was less than $20. On my way out I realized that I still hadn’t bought the cell phone. Having learned my lesson, I went to a legitimate place, where I haggled around the different places, until I got down to an LG for 230 yuan. Considering I paid exactly the same for a fake phone, I figured I couldn’t complain at all. As we were signing the onionskin receipts and making sure everything was in order, I heard some foreigners exclaim. I looked up, and saw to my immense surprise, Jake, TK, and Hector! In another astonishing coincidence, we had independently gone to the exact same store on the other side of Beijing (and, by all rights, they shouldn’t have even known about the electronics district). I helped TK buy a camera phone, and after some hassle in getting cash, we got back to the hostel together, and after chatting around with other folks at the hostel, we ended up going out to have a late dinner, and talk about life.
TK was complaining the the waitress completely ignored his order. It was true that our waitress (who looked about 16, but was probably closer to 19) seemed pretty enamored of Jake, who fits the Chinese image of the ideal foreigner: male, tall, white skin, blue eyes, curly light brown hair. We got the order made eventually, and we were joking that the waitress was ignoring him because he is half-black (on a serious side note, racial discrimination, especially against black people, is probably worse in China than in the US). The, to make only dig the hole deeper, she came back, and in the process of leaning over the table to look at some dish we wanted to add, she spilled on open bottle of beer on TK! It was a good time, even though it meant that the complicated schedule they had worked out for massages they completely ignored, which I felt badly about. (though, it did also strike me as funny that, because they were afraid of what the front desk people would say if they came back too early from their “massage,” they instead stayed across the street smoking for about half an hour).
The next morning I again went out running with Matthew. Life is pain.
Afterwards I went to meet up with one of my old Beijing friends, “Esther” Zhao Yan. She changed jobs and got married since I saw her last, and she seemed a lot more grown up than I remembered before (but that just might be that we know each other longer now and my Chinese is better). She surprised me by saying that she really didn’t like the big city and wanted most to just live in the country and farm. It seemed strange for a young woman in the capitol who was wearing fashionable black and white clothes (I told her she would fit in perfectly in Manhattan, something not true with most outfits Chinese people wear), and also wanted to buy a car within two years. Still, she seemed quite earnest about it. I hope she manages it.
The late night out with Jake and company, the early rising with Mathew, and the killer workout all combined to make me want to do nothing more than sleep all afternoon, evening, and night. Unfortunately, I was leaving for Chengdu, where my summer starts in earnest. Instead of a solid nap, I instead hauled all my worldly possessions (which I’m convinced weigh at least as much as I do) to the subway, then out of the subway, onto the bus, off the bus, and into the train station. I think I did it from sheer force of will than any physical energy. After arriving at the station I revived a little bit, and looked around my crowded waiting hall, trying to guess who might be the lucky folks who get to sit next to me for 25 hours.
I ended up getting into the train fairly quickly before my car filled up, which was key to getting my large suitcase safely tucked away on an upper rack where I could happy forget about it for a day. I enlisted the help of a initiative-taking spry older man, who had immediately shucked off his shoes and stood on the seats arranging bags. My bag safely stored, and myself safely sequestered in my seat (a window seat! What luck! Window seats are the only ones that are near the miniature table, which is the crucial element necessary to secure any semblance of sleep which does not leave you looking like Igor the hunchback or a b-rated horror movie zombie. Instead, you only look like a common drunk or hobo.)
Next to me was a couple in their forties or fifties who didn’t have the “let’s chat and become good friends” look about them. Across from me was a girl, maybe 16 or 17 (I later found out that she was 20). She was reading a book, which was a good sign, but also seemed like the really shy uneducated migrant worker-type, and I knew from my research two years ago that the young women are often too shy to talk to a foreigner. I began to worry. It was going to be a long trip. I had never before had problems meeting interesting people on the train, and had booked a hard seat (instead of one of the sleeping bunks) on the sure gamble I would meet some this time around as well.
Next to the girl was a middle-aged fellow, with a strange hair cut – mostly bald, but with enough hair left to square off the top of his head. He looked like a salt-of-the-earth type, and I figured he was my best bet. Almost certainly, by the end of the train ride, we would be friends. Next to him, was a scrawny fellow (and I can say this from personal experience as a scrawny fellow), who I was afraid was also too young to really be much good for conversation – too much like the girl.
Not an impossible situation, but certainly one that required some thought and preparation. I decided to start off cautiously, and pulled out my own book to show solidarity among book readers and to give me some cover as I watched them interact. There might be a good opportunity for me to jump in, but I needed to let it happen naturally. The middle-aged fellow (whom in my mind I dubbed “Michael,” probably because he resembled another similar-looking fellow I knew in Beijing whom I named Michael) started up a sporadic conversation with the two youngsters in what I took to be the Chengdu or at least a Sichuan dialect; this was good. It meant that he was already greasing the wheels of social interaction, which would make my eventual entrance that much easier. It also meant that he was interested in conversation, another good sign. The girl was surprisingly chatty, and the kid was okay too. I only understood maybe 1 in every 50 words.
As I had anticipated, the couple next to me were complete duds. I don’t think they said anything even to each other for the entire trip, a remarkable feat, but one they worked together on to achieve. This kind of harmonious cooperation in marriage is something that that awes and inspires.
My first major breakthrough came when I picked up on the tail of a conversation in which Michael was saying something about going back to Chengdu while working in Beijing. This was material I could use. I asked what he was returning to Chengdu to do, and turns out he was going to buy himself a house. He then asked how we much a house in America cost, and I had to do some rough guesswork and multiple conversions, before coming up with a tentative $100 per square meter estimate. I have no idea if that’s right, but it across the basic point: houses are a lot cheaper in America than in China.
My second major breakthrough came after darkness fell, when I opened up my bag of tricks (I.e. my backpack) and pulled out one of those twisted metal toys – you have to find the right orientation and it suddenly slides apart. Otherwise, it’s stuck. I always pack a few of these conversation-starters when going abroad, and never know if they will be a success or failure. This time I hit gold. Michael was fascinated by it, and probably spent a good 45 minutes trying to get it to work, and then re-trying it once I showed him the trick (after, I admit, struggling for a bit at first). I also drew a small crowd of folks, which reminded me of my very first train ride in China, where I ended up playing chess against a migrant worker, much to the excitement of the whole car. Once interest was lost in the toy, I packed it away, satisfied that this trip was not going to be a failure after all. It was then that I heard the Christmas carols.
Someone – no, a couple someones – were singing songs in Chinese to the tune of famous Christmas carols. Under the (genuine) excuse of needing the use the bathroom, I got up, and on my way back found the source of the singing: a bunch of college-age looking men and women were sitting there, and the ones on one side of the aisle were playing cards and singing what were, in fact, Christmas carols – lead by none other than the spry old man who had helped me put my bag up on the rack!
Now, my original seating required all my machinations to achieve success with the people I was given – but this was an entirely different situation. College-age kids playing cards on a train are practically begging for some college-age foreigner to come up and become best friends. It’s in their nature. So all I had to do was stand around looking awkwardly at them playing cards for five minutes before a conversation sprang up. Turns out they were indeed Christians, most of whom had converted a few years ago when in college (they were all now in graduate school of some sort), and were on a short term mission trip to Chengdu for the summer (I learned this later, after bemusedly listening to two of them trying to convert me!). Not having been able to befriend any bona fide young Chinese Christians in my various travels through the middle kingdom, I saw this as a chance in a lifetime. I happy squeezed in with them, and had a grand – if often frustrating – time answering really tough questions (“What do you think, education-wise, children most need?”, “Why do many American Christians act like this life matters, instead of the next life?”, “What are you really looking for in life?”). We also played many card games; they taught me Chinese ones, and I taught them Pig. They then introduced me to a game they called “Murderer,” which they assured me everyone in China knew. It turns out it was nothing more or less than “Mafia”, the game I played at so many drama and summer camps!
The rest of the trip sped by. I had never expected such a grand opportunity to meet up with great people, and it was reinvigorating to see such vitality and certainty in the truths of matters that most people in China don’t even understand . . .
(Continued Saturday, Jun. 27)
My last post was interrupted by Situ Dan (known in America as Dan Stair), who invited me to go out with some of his friends. More on that later.
The rest of the train ride to Beijing was long, fun, and mostly uneventful. It ended with my teaching my new friends “Indian Poker” — a game in which everyone gets one card and puts it on his forehead face out without looking at it. Each player can therefore see everyone else’s cards but not his own. You then proceed to have rounds of betting and attempt to trick people with high cards to fold and those with low cards to stay in the game – while also trying to figure out what value card you have by how others react to it. It’s a game usually played when drunk, but while completely sober we still had a great time. Furthermore, it was so humid and we were all so sticky from spending 24 hours cooped up in the train that we could stick the cards on our foreheads and they stuck there on their own.
After arriving in Chengdu, I made the final leg of my journey by bus to the Southwest University of the Minorities (SWUN). Desperately exhausted, I dozed off at least a half dozen times on that bus, each time frantically waking up afraid I had missed my stop (which was not very clear). One arriving and wandering around with my baggage for a while, I finally found the Foreign Students’ dorm, fell down on my bed, and fell into blissful sleep.
The next day, I felt a familiar scratchy feeling my throat. This cold would be my constant companion even to today. Sometimes I can fend off colds with a solid dose of sleep and rest, trimming them down to a 2-3 day ordeal, and I was optimistic about this one, but unfortunately the ACC lifestyle prevented sleep, rest, and recovery. Hopefully this weekend will give me the boost I need to kick the cold.
The next day, Friday, I didn’t have too much to do. I explored some, get more settled in, and met up with Situ Dan, the only fellow Swarthmore student also participating the FS program this summer. He had already been in Chengdu for a week or so, and had lived here for six months last year, so he was fairly familiar with the place. That evening he was going to meet up with some of his Chengdu Chinese friends, and he invited me to go along. I happily accepted.
Cross-culture and cross-language friendships always have an element of uncertainty to them. For instance, the girl we met up with was either a kindergarten teacher, someone who worked in an office for the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), or both. But she was not a police officer or a member of the army. That’s not a lot of information to go on, but that’s all we managed to clear up in an evening of conversation.
We originally planned to have dinner and then meet up with her boyfriend (who, we later discovered, was not actually her boyfriend – Situ Dan had guessed wrong, based on different standards for intimacy between friends in the US and China), but she asked us something about washing our hair. I was confused and wasn’t sure if this was some slang, or maybe I misheard, but I wasn’t sure how to react. I had showered that morning, and felt no strong need to wash my hair, but maybe if this was some Chengdu custom – or maybe I misheard? Turns out our friend just wanted to wash her hair, and that’s it. We went to one of the profiled hole-in-the-wall hair salons which have a lot of girls with stylish coiffures guys with funky hairdos (which always worry me slightly, because I don’t want to get my hair cut and end up looking like a Chinese rock star, and while our friend was getting the works, Situ Dan and I wandered around the lively district and confirmed with each other that Chinese people are really strange.
We eventually got dinner, and Dong Dong, her-not-boyfriend showed up with his small but enormously fluffy snow white dog, QQ (QQ is also the name of the most popular instant messaging service in China. Having a QQ number is as essential as having a cell phone – which is to say even the beggars on the streets probably have a QQ ID). We finished dinner, and headed off in his car for the bar district. Several hours proceeded in which we all spent a lot of time chatting, playing games, and eventually befriending the table next to us, which was filled with middle-aged guys who had dozens of funny stories about English and Chinese cross—language puns. Despite being in a bar district, drinking was moderate, and we didn’t get drunk. I wish my peers back in America would do that. I don’t particularly care for alcohol in the first place, but the culture that surrounds it in America is quite revolting.
Returning to SWUN late that night, we arose early in the morning to take our oral ability exam. Situ Dan made the excellent point that there is no better way to prepare for the exam than a night out on the town with real Chinese people, speaking real Chinese. Consequently, we could consider our previous night’s adventures as nothing more than a period of serious study and preparation for our oral exam. The exam went passably. Because we were supposed to take the written exam on Sunday morning, and I had already arranged with my Christian Chinese friends to go to church with them on Sunday, I asked the teachers to let me take the written ability exam Saturday, which I did right after the oral. The written exam was, to put it mildly, a failure. I had two hours of misery (interrupted by a trip back to my room to get more toilet paper to deal with my now leaking nose). ending with an unfinished essay.
Still reeling for that test, I began this post in the afternoon feeling that the ups and downs of a fruitful life abroad were tough to fathom. Situ Dan swung by my room and said we was going out with his former Chengdu roommate. Always ready to meet new people when abroad, I weighed the chances of doing harm to my health and decided the risk was worth it.
We ended up having a great time. His friend, who survives on money given to him by his parents, started Situ Dan by revealing that he has been taking classes at the best college in Chengdu for several months. Who knows if that’s actually true. In any case, a high school friend of his also went out with us, and we had a great dinner at a random restaurant. In the course of the evening we learned about a mysterious explosion of a Chengdu bus (one on the same line we were riding at the time), and how he would only ride non-air conditioned buses after that — because the bus that had exploded was air conditioned, and so the windows were sealed. The hammers for breaking the glass had been stolen by enterprising bus-goers, and so nearly all the people on the bus burned to death. After that, many people carried their own hammers when they rode the bus.
After dinner, we went back to his place, which was one of the filthiest dens of cigarette butts, trash, and other junk I have ever seen used as a living space. We played a couple hours of Mah Jong, during which I managed to lose $3. Not bad for two hours of entertainment and a free dinner!
Sunday I managed to make it over to our arranged meeting place, in front of a McDonald’s, and in the process also located the American Consulate in Chengdu (when I asked if anyone from the consulate ever came to the church services, they said no; go figure.). The “church” was actually a converted apartment with eggshell padding as soundproofing. It was apparently specially for college-age types, and most of the 40-50 people there were nearby college students. The hymns were almost all tunes I recognized, and the words for the most part I could get. The sermon, also, was both good and easy for me to follow, the main thrust of which was that since Christ has already overcome the world, we need not fear anything. All in all, a grand worship experience. Afterward, six of us walked two blocks to have lunch and I realized that the place we had lunch was right near where the girl had washed her hair!
In the afternoon, ACC began in earnest. We had a 3.5 hour meeting in which everything under the sun was explained to us, and we ended with a signed pledge not to speak English, our textbooks, homework assigned, and the promise of a vocabulary quiz at 8 am the next morning Welcome to ACC.
Monday to Thursday was something of a blur. I went to class, I did homework, I tried to find a way to get my computer to connect to the internet (I can’t get on their wired network for some reason), I made massive revisions to my presentation, I practiced my two classes, and I blew my nose a lot. I usually didn’t eat breakfast, I never went more than ten minutes’ walk from our dorm, and I rarely slept.
(Continued Sun, Jun 29)
Chinese rural education was the topic of this week’s texts, and the content is interesting and mildly novel. As I had been very interested in Chinese education for a while, I was already familiar with most of the basics, and so didn’t find the texts absolutely riveting. Two incidents that did make our week more exciting were the visits by someone was the principal of a middle school, and also a major force in researching and helping “left behind” children (completely unrelated to the children in the Left Behind books). These kids are left behind in the countryside to be taken care of by relatives while their parents go to work in the cities. It is quite a big problem in China, as these kids often have both educational and psychological problems as a result.
It was fascinating to listen to the lady speak about her experiences, and at one point she put up an essay written by one of her “left behind” students for a contest. She explained that this student had in the year previous not written a single character on his final exam, and that this essay was the longest things he had written It was maybe a hundred characters long. It was entitle “One Person”. It said, “I am one person. One person laughs, one person cries, one person lives alone … Last week I scored last in the class. I don’t want to score last again.” As she read it, I begin to realize I needed to rub my eyes. Situ Dan afterwards told the lady that he almost started crying.
The second event was Thursday morning. ACC arranged for about twenty-some high school students from a local international IB-program private school to talk with us about their experiences ands discuss any questions we might have. Talking with them was very interesting, as they all intend to study abroad, and so didn’t take the national standardized test which is for all intents and purposes the single factor which determines where you go to college. Their courses are also all taught in English.
This difference, however, actually made them more interesting. They were of course very familiar with the standard high school experience, and so could speak to that, but also speak to the reasons why they were doing a different system. More than one of them expressed the desire to simply find satisfaction in life, rather than become rich and powerful. One girl said, “A lot of people ask what your dream is. This is silly, because most dreams are impossible or not worth attaining. Some people want to become lawyers, or other people want to become really rich. I’ll tell you, I don’t have any dreams. It’s true, I don’t have a dream. I like to play drums, but maybe I’ll become a businesswoman, like my father. I don’t know. What’s most important is that you find enjoyment in life, not what you do, ir what your dream is.”
When asked about their middle school experiences, their stories were all about the same: each year was harder, culminating in the third and final year, in which they would be at school from 7 am to 9:30 pm, and then go home to do homework. On weekends they would be given as many as twenty worksheets, each of which would take 1-2 hours to complete. Because to get into a good high school, you have to take a miniature version of the college entrance exam. Again, it’s a one-shot deal.
These students recognized the flaws in their educational system (at one point I asked, “Would you say that American high school graduates and Chinese high school graduates are at about the same educational level?” “Yes.” “Then does it make sense for Chinese kids to be spending twice as much time in school as American kids?” “No, not at all.”). They also, however, pointed out that reform must come slowly, and that a wholesale adaptation of the American system of education would not only be inappropriate, but actually fail. These are points that most Americans (and, to be fair, I think most people everywhere who point out flaws in other countries) tend to forget, ignore, or never realize. Change takes time to be effective and productive. And cultures shape, limit and define the possibilities for change.
Thursday afternoon ended with our serious (i.e. graded) practice presentations. I had stayed up until 1 am the night before, and then gotten up at 6, to beat my powerpoint presentation into something that looked like it could become professional one day. My presentation, as I had said, under went a massive restructuring, including the almost complete axing of one section, the merging of two sections, and other exciting changes which would be okay in English, hard in Chinese, and extremely difficult and time consuming in formal, conference-level Chinese. My presentation went about as I expected. I was awkward, tripped over some words, did not use enough formal language, but definitely got my points across. My teachers complained that my presentation was too long (23 minutes; my limit was 20 minutes), which to my mind didn’t matter a whit – of course as you become more familiar with a topic you get faster, so I’d easily be at 20 minutes by the time I have to actually present. It bugged them, though. All in all, nothing to be proud of, but I got it done.
Thursday night I was exhausted, and went to bed at 9 pm, sleeping an extravagant 7.5 hours before waking at 4:30 am to finish the take-home portion of our weekly exam before the 8 am deadline. From 8-10 am was the oral portion of the exam, which was a 4-student dialog based on two television news clips. Two of us had seen one, two had seen the other; we had to explain to the other two what the content of the movie was, they would ask us questions to clarify, and then we would ask them questions to test their understanding – and repeat with everything reversed. It ended with some discussion questions posed by the teachers.
Friday afternoon, after a lunch with the professors compliments of ACC, we spent an hour traveling out to a spanking new elementary school the schools.
Like everything else in China, were poorly made, when Sichuan had their earthquake last year pretty much all the schools in the area collapsed. The government did an investigation and found no fault in the construction plans and work. On the one hand, I don’t blame the investigators for their result, because its true that most work like that is shoddy. Everyone cuts corners where they can, from the head of the company down to the lowest worker. On the other hand, maybe there really was no fault in this case. On the other hand, the schools all collapses and crushed their students. Maybe it’s a similar case to the Army Engineers and the Louisiana dikes.
In any case, this school was the combination of formerly three elementary school. Each of us American teachers were to teach three periods, with 10 students in each class. I was to teach my psychology class twice and my Greek Myths (which I had edited to become “Greek Fables”) class once. I spent the bus ride copying my outlines into my notebook.
Everyone was really excited – the kids, the elementary school teachers, and us. I was quite antsy for the half-hour we spent getting stuff organized before the teaching actually began. The kids were already there, and kept peeking around the corner of the door to look at us. They had already begun summer break, but they came back especially for us.
We finally got the go-ahead, and 16 Americans went to 16 classrooms to teach 160 kids 116 different subjects. I started off wonderfully, with the kids awed that I could write on the blackboard with my left hand (almost everyone in China either naturally or per force writes with their right hand). I hit my first bump when I wrote a simple character wrong, they immediately shouted out that it was wrong, and I blanked on how to write it, writing it wrong again. I solved the problem by getting different kids in turn to write the rest of the words on the board (even the ones I definitely knew how to write). My lesson went really well. I was giving them an introduction to psychology, some of its uses, and then focused on teaching them the 6 basic facial expressions (“basic” because anyone anywhere can recognize them at above chance): happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust. I also taught them one of the differences between westerners, who focus on the mouth to determine facial expression, and easterners, who focus on the eyes, using the different popular internal emoticons as example. In America, it is more common to use :) to express happiness, while in East Asia it is more common to use ^_^. Similarly for sadness it is :( and v_v.
All in all, the psychology classes went really well. One went fast, the other went slow, there were minor bumps along the way, but they were pretty straightforward. I knew exactly what I wanted to teach, I found the material fascinating myself (“Why are those six the basic ones?”), I had some engaging and fun activities to reinforce the learning, and the kids were great to teach.
The final class, Greek Fables, was a tougher nut to crack. I was less confident about it, and had less control over the pacing than with the Psychology class, given what I wanted to do. I wanted to give a brief explanation of what Greece is (they didn’t know; the closest guess was that it was a city somewhere), its influence on Western culture, and then discuss what a fable is and what use they serves. I’d then tell them the story of the grasshopper and the ant (the grasshopper plays all summer, the ant works all summer – come winter, the grasshopper starves to death and the ant lives), and get them to guess the moral of the story. They then pick a moral and write a fable for it.
This batch of students were much more shy, however, and barely answered any questions, even when it was clear they had ideas to express. I also had decided on the bus to try getting them to work together to write a moral, and to perform it, so as to engage them a little more. This failed. Conducting emergencies maneuvers, I returned to my original plan (and thank the lord forgiving me the foresight to bring two more sheets than I needed, since I had two extra kids). By the end of the class, everyone had written a moral, and was well into finishing their stories. Sadly, only two kids actually finished it by the time class ended. Even so, I consider the class to be a success, even if not a shining one. I was especially pleased at my ability to spin a captivating story in Chinese to the kids, and I will improve it next time.
Once again, one of my gambles paid off big-time as a stroke of genius. I had settled on little “army men style figures of cowboys and Indians as gifts for my students, but while at the dollar store I scoped out their other offerings, and amidst fake flowers, 2 liter bottles of soda, and other miscellanea, I found gold: small capsules which dissolved in water and expanded to become foam animals. They were small, light, fun, novel, and cheap. When I gave kids the choice of the inflatable animals or the army men, they dove into my plastic bag of inflatable animals with such vim and vigor that I feared first for my bag, then for my animals, and then for myself! I only regret that I did not buy twice or three times as many, because I will run out long before the summer is over.
All in all, teaching the kids was the funnest, most exciting part of the week. I didn’t feel nervous at all, I think they enjoyed it, and I certainly found the job quite a grand time, much more so than I was expecting, really. It made me reconsider how much I might enjoy teaching English here in the future. I might find it barrels of fun. For the rest of the trip back and during dinner I was all wound out with the adrenaline of success. Free from any homework, I happily sat alone in my room and soaked up Spanish and Portuguese short stories, translated into blessed English, until I fell into the sleep of those who have finished a week-long forced march ending with a victorious battle.
That’s all for now – I save the weekend for another day, as I have miles yet to go before I sleep – and a lovely vocab quiz waiting for me in the morning.