Green Futures

Jul 21, 2009

Monday, July 13 we had a completely free day. It may be the only completely free day that we have on this trip, and I am confident that we all took full advantage of it. Most of my fellow partners took the opportunity to explore Nanning. I spend the entire day inside, re-writing my presentation based on my powerpoint slides and the off-the-cuff oral version I had been practicing back in Chengdu. It was slow going, but by dinnertime, though I had not left the hotel once, I had finished writing my presentation, and gave it to Fan Laoshi for help editing and correcting any problems.

Flushed with liberal doses of both success and cabin fever, I sought out companions to go meander the streets for an hour before we had to be back for dinner. Finding no one around who wanted to go, I struck off on my own to see what this city Nanning was all about. It was a perfect experience.

Though we were staying in a posh 4-star hotel, the building towered over the surroundings – it was unmistakable for many blocks all around. The rest of the area was full of more modest 3 to 6 story buildings. I found a bakery that sold quite passable “German” bread, bought some fruit, and found myself exploring China’s most pleasant apartment complex that wasn’t massive or in the suburbs. It had grass, tress, and evidence of someone with both a green thumb and artistic abilities who landscaped it. Further on, I found myself peering down crooked lanes, and crooked lanes peered back at me with mutual interest. I found out that a wooden stool costs 5 Renminbi ($0.80), and explored the back alleys which formed the main roads for many of the citizens of of this city. It was fun and exotic and reminded me of some of the Beijing hutongs when I first explored them. But unlike Beijing, these hutongs had their own ecology independent of tourists. Meanwhile, the sun slanted down through the bricks and concrete. It was hot, I was sweating, and I felt like I was in some Oriental city from Arabian inghts – updated for the modern day.

The conference was held by ESS (I think it stands for Education and Science Service, but don’t hold me to it), a non-profit organization funded primarily by overseas Chinese which works to improve rural Chinese education. They build libraries, work with schools and teachers, and hold annual conferences. This conference had about 300 participants, with key speakers in the morning and then multiple simultaneous tracks in the afternoon. The first day’s morning was entirely taken up with the opening speeches and ceremonies. The FS kids had not fully anticipated the extent to which Chinese formality can bore one, and they had not adequately prepared. I managed to bring my laptop, however, and in the sweltering auditorium (air conditioning is expensive; the wind is free), I half-heatedly listened to the Chinese official’s long-winded speech while writing some of  this update.

The other FS participants, after a couple hours of this, got creative and began a “each person writes one sentence of the story” game and a “A draws a picture, B writes the caption, C can only look at the caption, and draws a new picture.” This second story morphed from “It’s really hot” to “All Chinese people love apples” with Isaac Newton somewhere in the middle.

Lest you imagine that my descriptions of the weather in Nanning as exaggerated, I should mention that all the Chinese participants also thought the experience was a sweltering one, and even made it into the concluding remarks (one day they even tried to move the main speaker, but had to move back  because the room was too small). For this reason, you can imagine our unabated joy when we FS students discovered that we would be presenting in the library. Specifically, we would be presenting in the library’s air conditioned presentation room, which also sported theater-style seating and three different projector screens.

The conference lasted four days, and four of us presented each day. I was scheduled for the third day. The first day of presentations went well, though I felt that the question-and-answer period was a little bit a of a circus. In order to prevent wildly off-topic or unintelligible questions, all questions were written out and given to Fan Laoshi, who would re-write in legible and comprehensible Chinese the reasonable questions (and, honestly, a number of the off-topic ones as well). This meant, however, that we didn’t know who had asked what question. This has benefits and harms. The benefit is that the audience is more willing to ask questions (because they don’t have to lose face or be put in the spotlight by asking a question – a cultural aspect which surprises many Americans who are perfectly happy asking whatever they want), but it also means that if the presenter doesn’t understand the question, there may  be no way to clarify. Of course, the way to solve problem, as the presenter, is to simply read the question and answer it as you understand it, and then move on to other questions. Alas, many of my worthy companions fell into the trap of trying to get clarification, resulting in a lot of awkwardness and eventually cultivating a habit of asking the general audience, “Are you satisfied with my answer?” to which asinine question the audience of course applauded; what else would they do? But to be fair, the presentations themselves were very good.

By the evening of the first day, Fan Laoshi was able to finish her corrections, and gave4 me her corrected document. I quickly realized that the formalized, final version of my presentation was far too long. In practicing it, I routinely hit 40 minutes – twice the length it was supposed to be. I realized I could probably whittle it down to 30 minutes, just by increasing my speed, but I couldn’t easily cut out anything without harming my presentation’s completely. My presentation had three major parts, first describing my own experiences which resulted in my voluntary reading habits, then discussing parental influence on voluntary reading, and finally discussing teacher influence. The teacher’s influence part was the most important, and so shouldn’t be cut. My own experience was the least “educational” but also included the only humor and interesting parts. The parents section could be cut, but then there would be no connection between my own experiences and the advice for teachers. Once again, I found myself stumbling across problems rooted way back in April, when we were told that our presentations had to include examples from our own experience – so I included them even though they didn’t really fit. After smoothing the connections into a streamlined presentation, I was stuck with something too long. This presentation was my curse!

I eventually cut out parts of my conclusion that were designed to re-emphasize points already made, and simply decided I would have to go over my time limit. This decision, irresponsible though it may sound, was actually not that bad. Our time was scheduled to include a long question and answer period, but only after all four presentations were done. If I went over, we would simply have less time to answer questions – and that might not be a bad thing. Furthermore, while most of the conference attendees were in their 40s, the ones who came to our presentations were almost exclusively students from the teaching college where the conference was being held. And Chinese college students, like college students everywhere, care very little about formality.

Of course, there were two other aspects of drama that made my presentation preparation even more thrilling. The first was a miscommunication between the conference organizers and FS. The conference organizers screwed up our schedule, and while I was supposed to present on the third day, their schedule had me presenting on the first, day, in the first slot. In a near panic, and with visions of staying up all night continuously practicing my presentation, I scrambled over to Fan Laoshi’s room, where she assured me that we would be presenting by our original schedule. My second bit of excitement came the next day, when I read the titles of all the other presentations at the conference. Not only were there a couple individual presentations on how to encourage reading that sounded suspiciously like mine (including one main speaker), but there was an entire track on it! My presentation would be like a country kid taking his mutt Rover to the L.A. annual dog show. Luckily for me, as I mentioned above, almost none of the regular conference attendees came to our presentations, so I relaxed once again.

I had hoped to listen to some of the other lectures on reading skills to see what my competition was like, but when I realized I had only a day and a half to memorize and rehearse the new incarnation of my presentation, I opted to skip out on the regular speakers and instead focused on practicing In that 36 hour period, I must have rehearsed my presentation at least 12 times. By lunch on the day of my presentation, my throat was getting scratchy and I worried that additional practicing would mean I would have no voice when doing the real deal.

To cut the suspense short, my presentation went fairly well. I still had to read fair portions of it, but the audience laughed at the right places, I didn’t making any grievous mistakes, and I think I managed to stick around 30 minutes. A success in my books. My three fellow presenters had agreed to cut the ridiculousness out of the Q-and-A period, and it went really well. I ended up having the most questions, and all of them quite interesting. A memory-based sample includes: “Is sustained silent reading the only way to teach reading?”, “Some families in America believe in a religion. Do they prevent reading books of other religions?”, “What do you do if your students only want to play computer games and don’t want to read?”, “In the countryside, many parents are illiterate. How can they encourage their kids to read if they themselves can’t?” I was very confident in my responses, and answered as many questions as possible. And, despite what they may have thought of my presentation, everyone thought I did really well in the Q-and-A session – my fellow presenters, the audience, and, most satisfyingly, Jin Laoshi, the head of the ACC and FS program, who gave me a high-five and told me I should become a professor. It was definitely a heady finale to my tortuous presentation experience.

There were two Americans at the conference who didn’t speak any Chinese. We were therefore assigned to act as interpreters for them as they listened to the other presentations, which were exclusively in Chinese. We were interpreting, not having seen  the material before. It was extremely stressful, and really tough work! Thankfully, the 16 of us were divided so that each person only had to do one morning or afternoon. I realized that I needed to make sure I understood the meaning of the speaker before I could translate, which for the presentation given by the thousand-word-a-minute rambling “2 hour introduction to all of social, educational, and neuro psychology” meant I gave rough interpretations in paragraph chunks – if I couldn’t figure out where she was going, interpreting a couple sentences made no sense. Luckily for me, I had taken many courses on the material she was covering, and so was familiar with much of her content.

My charge wanted to listen to the last day of FS presentations, which made me extremely happy – the reduced speed, complexity, and length of our presentations all worked in my favor, and I also had the added bonus of having heard a couple of the presentations earlier, when we were practicing them back in Chengdu. I found that when doing simultaneous translation, however, you still have to wait for the end of the sentence. Otherwise you have awkward English sentence which make perfect grammatical sense in Chinese, such as “The influence popular music has on students’ education means what?” (instead of the proper English,  “what is the influence of popular music on students’ education?”). I clearly need a lot more Chinese ability and a lot more interpretation training before I can quit my day job.

In the midst of all this academic stuff, one of my fellows, Weilu, fell sick, struck down by a dehydration-induced fever. There may have been more to the story, but Chinese people don’t have a habit of telling their underlings more than they need to know, and what they need to know is not much. Fan Laoshi, while great, has certainly not lost this aspect of her culture. So, I’m not sure what it really was, but it was fairly serious, involving a hospital visit, and a crash course in recovery and a recuperation.

While our language pledge requiring us to speak only Chinese is firm, it is elastically firm in ways that are not true of the regular ACC program. Of course, our Chinese is good enough and we are immersed in the language enough that speaking Chinese isn’t a hardship. It does, however, get in the way of forming a deeper relationship with your classmates, since we aren’t using the language of our culture – so while the cats (our teachers) were away at the hospital, the mice made the best of a bad situation and treated ourselves to a 2 hour English dinner. I was the only one who didn’t speak English, but that’s because I feel that if I sign a pledge, I should keep it. I never said I was normal.

One day we got out of the elevator on our 11th floor of the hotel and discovered that the entire floor was wet, covered in tarp, and there were industrial fans blowing around. I thought there might have been a water pipe which burst or some equally disastrous calamity. No, they were just cleaning the carpet. Welcome to China!

The days at the conference were pretty fun, in hindsight, and quite relaxed once my presentation was finished. I got into a discussion with one of the college students in which we explored whether science could explain all the important questions, whether all of human thought and psychology could be reduced to brain impulses and biochemical reactions, and where morality fit into the equation. It reminded me once again that of all the things to do, I really do love most talking with people and reading. Giving a presentation is boring, but answering questions is fun. Studying Chinese is painful, but talking in Chinese with people who have interesting ideas, backgrounds, and things to say is worth it. I wish we had more opportunities to simply talk with people as a part of the program. In some cases, I’m sure I would learn more. On the other hand, I would probably still be illiterate in Chinese if I had my way.

One continuous problem at the conference was our shrinking supply of clothing of all sorts, and the nearly daily demands on our wardrobe for formal clothing, which inevitably was sweaty within two hours. The former problem we never solved, and resorted to wistful thinking about the 4 Renminbi per load washing service in Chengdu as we re-wore our least-malodorous clothes. I solved the latter problem by shelling out three dollars to buy a short-sleeved button-down shirt, which I put to good use the next day when I had to help Jin Laoshi (the head of ACC, who was also at the conference, but as a main speaker).

Jin Laoshi had asked me to help her with her presentation, which had to do with learning and memory. My psychology background at Swarthmore was quite lacking in this area, which I frequently regret. Since high school I have been very interested in learning and memory (and its close companion, forgetting, with which I have a long and close relationship), but none of the professors at Swarthmore are particularly interested in it, so I had to take courses in other areas and pick it up where I could. Still, from my scraps here and there I offered a few suggestions to add to her lecture, and I ended up getting a main-stage role in a couple of her examples, and even ran one of my own examples testing memory retention of discrete objects, which is roughly 7, plus or minus 2. I flashed 9 different scenes (a volcano, a lake with the setting sun, a jungle, etc.) and Jin Laoshi asked how many scenes they had seen. They guessed 7, happily proving our point about short-term memory retention limits. The unexpected result of this was that for the last two days of the conference, I was no longer a random foreign student – everyone knew my name. I would be unsuspectingly standing in the elevator with some random Chinese people and one of them would say with a chuckle,  “Guo Jiande!” (my Chinese name). It was a little unnerving, as I had not expected fame status, but fun all the same.

The closing ceremony of the conference was blissfully and unexpectedly short. The highlights included a mistake in the comments given by two of our student representatives, in which they mixed up the name of the hosting university. The president of the university was speaking next, and when he made a point of saying “I am the president of Guangxi Teaching University” (using the mixed up name that our FS students had just used), Situ Dan and I looked at it each other sharply with a mutual “Uh oh! This could be ugly.” But the president, bless his heart, had a sense of humor and turned it into a joke. And, in typical Chinese style, no closing ceremony can end without a song – all the major and minor speakers and organizers got on the stage, the audience all stood up, and we had a rousing and sappy round – no, two– no, three! — of a feel-good friendship song which had been, of course, used at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

(Incidentally, mentioning the Olympics reminds me of an amusing incident back in Chengdu. We went to the museum of the ancient Shu civilization in Sichuan, thousands of years old and having nothing to do with modern China. The whole museum was expensively and professionally arranged and decorated, and our tour guide was excellent. Yet on display prominently at the very beginning of the exhibit was nothing other than one of the Olympic torches used in the over-the-top, around-the-world torch relay that China engineered for their Olympics. It’s incongruous and crazy.)

After the closing ceremony, many pictures were taken. I noticed that eight or so college students they had roped into donning qipaos and acting as the graceful hostesses of the conference were all sitting in a cluster looking mildly bored. I seized the opportunity, and managed to get a great picture with them. Somehow being in China makes me a lot bolder than being in the US. Of course, part of it is cultural expectations. Everyone expects a foreigner to be a little wacky – so why not play into it?

To further increase the incongruity of the final day, while checking out we realized that the conference replacing us was nothing other than an international Asian beauty pageant! We all felt we should have stayed for that as well – not only did they appear to be much better funded than our measly and insignificant conference on how to improve basic education for the impoverish Chinese peasants (as we packed up, they inflated a massive banner over the driveway and were wheeling in cart after cart of beer, soda, and other beverages), but we also figured the girls in our group could participate! I managed to get a photo with the poster, and am determined from now on to tell people that I went to China to judge at their beauty contest. Of course, it’s probably just as well we didn’t stay. I hate pomp and arrogance, and as we waited on the bus I saw some of the future candidates. They all had perfected the beauty-destroying arrogance which seems to poison everyone who goes into professions which grant fame based solely on appearance. Much as I disapprove of the Communist plans to send intellectuals into the countryside to get some perspective on life, I feel it might have done some of those contestants good. But perhaps I judge them too harshly – especially as I didn’t see their fashion performance.

In any case, we bade farewell to Nanning, and our bus trundled off to Daxin county, in the southwest of Guangxi province, which is in the southwest of China. Along the three hour road, we were treated to the most beautiful sunset I had seen in many many months. The greens of the lush rice patties and tree-covered mountains were blazed with the golden rays of the setting sun, while the clouds above twirled in whipped hues of purple, blue, and orange. Guangxi, has a peculiar geological topography, which results in small but very steep thimble-shaped mountains, only a couple hundred feet high and less wide than high. It made for beautiful scenery that was a perfect end for the conference, and an auspicious beginning for the third part of our program: the summer camps.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Once again, it’s been about two weeks since my last update. Maybe this will be my habit. As I type this my laptop is bouncing up and down in my lapin a most violent manner, even though the highway looks quite even, straight, and well paved. Let my never look down on Pennsylvania road quality again.

Despite the jostling, I am in high spirits. We have left Chengdu with its sun-less, moon-less, star-less world behind behind and we are on the way to new adventures among the verdant underbrush and under the powder-blue sky of southern Guangxi province.

Also left behind, was the first half of my program, the three weeks of presentation preparation, teaching practicums, and standard language study mixed in the bag for good measure. I am quite ambivalent about those three weeks for a number of reasons; The Field Studies program is now in its third year, yet I feel (and the evaluation forms filled out by my classmates confirm many agree with me) that there are many aspects that still need significant revision. We spent far too much time on some things, had too little time to do others. Some things we should have done, we didn’t, and other things we didn’t need to do, we did anyway.

In my own experience, I felt that those three weeks tried to accomplish too much simultaneously. They essentially mushed three distinct projects (presentation preparation, teaching practicum, and traditional ACC-style language study with textbooks and vocab quizzes) all into one program, with less than perfect results. They also tried to squeeze other things in, like occasional classes on translation from English to Chinese, which were interesting and useful, but also didn’t really fit into anything else we were doing.

My experience was further dimmed by some miscommunication (or poor planning) with the teacher who was assigned to help me with my presentation. Beginning with the first day, she expected me to have my powerpoint presentation is a fully presentable form, and so insisted that I give a practice presentation based on my scraped-together-in-a-spare moment powerpoint, rather than on my meticulously crafted (though still, of course, needing modification) written speech. It went downhill from there, as I spent most of my time working on improving the presentation (inserting pictures because it was boring without them, restructuring the context, hearing that my pronunciation needed improvement – all things worth working on, but missing, in my mind, the central element: a written base to work from. Given that the presentation has to be in formal Chinese (and my speaking experience are almost all with casual or colloquial Chinese), this was a constant problem: my presentation was always a mix of formal (where I could) and informal (where I couldn’t) grammar and vocabulary. I imagine it might sound something like, “Educators able to instill these habits into students…  are just dandy. ” But I never could find the time (or sacrifice it from other things) to write up a comprehensive new speech based on my new powerpoint. Hopefully I’ll get it done before I give my speech. In any case, it will soon be over, and the haunting feeling of the executioner looming over my shoulder will, one way or another, be gone.

(con’t Sunday, July 12, 2009).

As I typed out the date, I just realized that I have been in China a month already. It simultaneously does not feel that long, and yet I feel like I’ve been in China forever. That life back in Meiguo (er, America) must have been an exceptionally vivid book I read, or a nice and pleasant dream. It’s far removed from a life of chopsticks and bargaining, of daily planned activities involving waking up with the sun (or occasionally before) and free time (almost as hard to get as cheese).

One other thing we left behind in Chengdu was the cloudy sky. Chengdu is on a plain mostly ringed by mountains, creating a basin which traps the clouds and means that for most of the year, the stars, moon, and sun are articles of faith (“belief in things yet to come, the hope of things unseen” according to Hebrews 11:1) rather than daily facts of life. Instead, the grey life I had come to associate with Beijing also has come to define Chengdu. One critical difference, however, is that the grey of Chengdu, unlike Beijing, does not coat the inside of your nose with blackish powder after a couple hours.

We did have some interesting experiences, however, and I should hasten to say that my own perspective of Chengdu comes almost exclusively from my 11th-story room window, and the small restaurant across the road, and not from, say, visiting the people or the interesting sights. ACC arranged  for three guys from Habitat for Humanity to come and talk about their work on the Sichuan earthquake relief, which was quite interesting and worth listening to; I previously knew only the basics of  what HFH did, and hearing how they worked out the details of helping the people increased my respect for the organization greatly. Many of the principles that I learned on my two Mission to the World trips to Belize were also employed by HFH, which made me wonder if there is some “service-oriented NGO handbook” that gets disseminated to all the pertinent organizations.

Another time ACC finagled a couple dozen first-year college students at a local “normal” (teacher-training) university to come and to our presentations. I felt bad on their behalf, as they had to listen to 80 minutes of us stumbling through our presentations (four presenters per room). Our sympathy for them, however, decreased significantly when they had no questions to ask, creating a somewhat awkward silence, in which our ACC teachers and other ACC students asked questions to pass the time. The general feeling was, “How can people who are studying to be teachers have absolutely no questions to ask about our experiences or presentations, as they are all related to education? In America, any random college student, regardless of major, would have questions.” Our teachers reminded us they these girls (90% of the students were girls) had only finished the first year of college, and had come out of China’s educational system.

By this point, we knew a lot about China’s primary education system, or at least some of its greatest weaknesses as compared against the American system. Mostly these boil down to the following:
1. backbone of rote memorization and total absorption of teacher’s material.
2. no focus on cultivating initiative, creativity, imagination, exploration, analysis, and cognition in students.
2.complete orientation to success on the entrance exams to high school and college – if you fail, you fail at life. Pretty much literally.
4.Long school days (10 hours) followed by as much homework as can be completed before students fall asleep in exhaustion.

In addition to the above, there are the usual problems of economic disparity between the poor countryside and the rich cities. Another problem, but one we touched on indirectly, is the propensity of students to cheat. It’s common and easy– everyone does it. One of my teachers admitted to us that she had cheated in college. So, to return to our Chinese college student audience, it’s not surprising that they had no questions, but it is depressing: they are the future of China’s education .

That mostly sums up the academic side of the experience. Mostly it was a lot of work, and not particularly interesting to write about. Luckily for you, my readers, we also had the opportunity to occasionally have a moment of fun (despite my report thus far to the contrary). One Saturday we went to a museum on the ancient history and culture of Sichuan. To those who have never been to a Chinese museum, that probably sounds really cool. To those who have been to Chinese museums, it sounds like a lot of wasted time. In this case, those with experience would be the onces surprised – the museum was quite interesting, and extremely well made. Someone (i.e. the government) put a huge amount of money into making the museum a classy and profession affair, and even more surprisingly, they succeeded.  It was a very valuable experience.

The first Saturday (directly following the end of my last post) we went to the countryside to visit the district where the “left behind” kids expert lived, and spent half a day hanging out with the kids and their families, and then going to a bamboo museum and learned how to make a simple bamboo fish and horse. It would have been a good experience, except I was completely exhausted, and even the locals admitted it was exceptionally hot. That and other reasons (we didn’t fully prepare what to do with the kids, etc.) made the experience less than it should have been.

We managed to go out and eat Sichuan food (hard not to, seeing as Chengdu is in Sichuan, and they are famously proud of their culinary feats). Sichuan is most renowned for its spicy food. Unlike other areas known or their spicy food, however, Sichuan has not one but two distinct types of spicy. The first is what Americans normally think of when they think of spicy – the other is “ma” which roughly translates as “numb” — it is powerful enough to numb your mouth. Every dish has both. We discovered that in Sichuan, there are “hot” and “not hot” options. The spicy options have a liberal dollop of spice (approximately only dollop per five mouthfuls of food). You can ask for “no spice,” and  the hard-bitten restaurant owner will give you a conservative dollop of spice. In addition to spice and ma, Sichuan also favors the hot (temperature-wise) dishes. So they get you three ways. If it’s a hot day out, they get you four ways. Every table has a healthy role of toilet paper for patrons’ needs. After the first day or two, however, I got used to it, and after leaving Sichuan, found myself surprised at how bland everything tasted.

The last night in Chengdu, we all went to a sampler-plate of Sichuan theatrical performances, including comic sketches, singing, face-changing, tea performers, and shadow puppets. It was great fun,, and even more fun to relax and enjoy the performances. Of course, once we returned to our dorm, we had to begin our take-home portion of our final text the next morning.

From Chengdu, we flew to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi semi-autonomous region. To all intents and purposes, this is the same as the other provinces (which are essentially the same as American states). The difference lies in the fact that this is particularly designated for a specific minority group (the Zhuang people). Tibet and Xinjiang are also semi-autonomous regions. Of course, simply because the Chinese government claims a region is designated for a specific ethnic minority doesn’t mean that only those people can be there. In fact, in Guangxi Zhuang people are still a minority (though 90% of all Zhuang live in Guangxi). When 92% of a country’s population is one ethnicity, it’s hard to find a place where they aren’t a majority. Especially when it activity enacts policies to relocate members of  majority ethnicity to minority regions (such as Xinjiang, where the population of Han Chinese has gone from 6% in 1949 to 40% today).

My first impression of Nanning was: humid! Getting off te airplane, even before we left the building we were welcomed in the moist embrace of Nanning’s air. Furthermore, even though we arrived around 9 pm, it was quite hot. An inauspicious beginning, but one that I happily ignored. I was quite excited to leave Chengdu, to leave our daily vocab quizzes and grillings over my presentation for a new adventure. So the heat made no difference to me, and instead I looked eagerly around at a new place.

The first thing I noted were all the trees and grass. Perhaps more than any major Chinese city I have yet been to, Nanning understood the importance of greenery, and how to properly landscape. Beijing recently has tried to greenify the city, but in awkward bureaucratic fashion, it has planted in evenly spaced rows tens of thousands of ugly, stunted tress pruned almost to nothing. Nanning, by contrast, has lush, full tress, round bushes, waves of green grass. It almost reached American standards. I was pleased as punch. Over the net few days, I would only be more impressed with it.

The second things I noticed was the moon, shining down on me with a chipper gleam. I gave it a nod of recognition and appreciation, as one might an old friend one hasn’t seen in a long time, but with whom you do not need to waste words on reuniting.

We were put up in a four-star hotel, which was quite spiffy. This is the hotel we are staying at for the conference. Of course, I once again realized that I am not cut out for the high life. I found the bellhop costumes faintly ridiculous on the Chinese fellows, and they couldn’t bear to let me sit down on the luggage cart (even though it was more comfortable than the ornate wooden thrones they offered instead). If I ever become really famous, I better become so famous that I can sit on a luggage cart if I I want, and not just famous enough that I have to abide by the silly customs of formal life.

After arranging all our stuff, I ventured out with four or five other of the FS students to explore our new city. We would be leaving in the morning for the seaside, but might as well take advantage of our night of freedom. We wandered down a lane next to our hotel, and found a whole bunch of food carts. In America, these would be hot dog stands. In China, they sold all sorts of things, from soup to grilled  vegetables and various animal innards. Most of the items looked like they had “indigestion” written all over them. Each cart was illuminated by a single electric light bulb, and in the darkened lane, dozens of motorcycles and electric bicycles slowly careened around the pedestrians. I basked in it all, and was especially pleased to see that fruit was about half the price as it was in Chengdu (which was, in turn, about half the price of fruit in Beijing). We bought some grilled veggies, I bought a watermelon, and we feasted in the night.

The next morning at 6:30 we rose, ate a palatial breakfast at the hotel, and piled into the bus for our three hour ride south to the seaside, called “North Sea” (because it is north of Vietnam). On that road, I slept, read, and began this post. We were accompanied on our entire trip by Little Kang, our tour guide, his two silent lackeys, and our grim bus driver, Old Deng. Little Kang, despite being ethnically Zhuang, was completely Chinese. In our three days with him, he managed to mention at least once each day how much men his age (approximately thirty, I’d guess) appreciate bikinis – they feel it is is very “ha-teh!” (“hot”) . It was rather awkward for us, but he took it all in stride. It didn’t help that in the afternoon we ended up going to a “museum” which included a “performance” starring some relatively scantily clad divers.

This museum was, in fact, a museum, despite my quotation marks. It was very interesting, and had many interesting aquatic displays. It also had a lot of kitsch, such as the black-lit tunnel with futuristic paintings of Star Trek Enterprise sailing underwater with jellyfish. There was a section on western explorers (prominently displaying a bust of Vasco de Gama, who was the first European to round the ominously-named Cape of Good Hope at the horn of Africa on his way to India), which jarred with the rest of the China-centric exhibitions.

The performance was a relatively boring sea exhibit, with divers playing with animals, feeding a turtle, etc. We could see them through the glass walls of the room. It was so loud and claustrophobic, however, that I desperately wanted to leave, and almost just left on my own. To my relief, my classmates felt the same and we left the show to the crowds of Chinese.

After the museum experience, we made it to our new hotel, which was appropriately beach-themed, and brought back memories of the vacations on the Outer Banks. An afternoon of swimming in the shockingly warm water ensued, a nice dinner with a lot of seafood (which others told me was quite excellent; I still abstained from most of it).

The next morning, Sunday, we were scheduled to go to Wendao island, which apparently had a church built a long time ago. I figured it was appropriate. Unfortunately, an incoming typhoon shut down all the ferries, leaving us with no opportunity to get to the island (but we were better off than the tour group that had spent the night and now was stuck there!). Our wily tour guides, quickly sensing a refund approaching, managed to save their earnings by offering an alternate sight: the “hongshu” forest. “hongshu” literally translates as “redwood”, leaving us with impressions of a majestic redwood forest nearby. Fan Laoshi, our Chinese teacher-cum-shepherd disabused of this idea, and left us with the vague idea that the trees might be mangroves, because they had something to do with the sea and water.  Most of us decided to go.

It turned out that hongshu may indeed be a part of the mangrove family, but if so, they are the malnourished orphan cousins of the Florida mangroves – these trees rose to a lofty height of five feet off the ground. Of particular note is that they grow in the tide pools, and so to get the carbon dioxide they need, each plant has between 500-800 roots that descend into the sand and then curve back up to poke above the water level to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air. The seeds also sprout and grow a bunch even before they fall from the tree. I suppose otherwise they would suffocate in the water before they could row enough roots. All throughout the miniature forest of hongshu. were thousands of tiny holes in the sand – the humble homes of thousands of thimble-sized crabs. They scurried around in a most entertaining fashion, and the local guide said they survived on the seeds and leaves of the hongshu. There were also birds which ate the crabs and tiny fish from Darwin’s fantasy book: they swam, but also hopped onto the land – for what reason, I cannot fathom. Eric, a program-mate, said they taste good, though.

Walking further on, we were supplied with hand rakes, woven bamboo baskets, and pointed in the direction of a tree-free beach. We were going to look for buried treasure! After attempting to venture out in my shoes, I eventually gave up, took them off, and braved the crabs. They were too small to do any harm, but the possibility of stepping on them a thought I did not cherish yet could not put aside. In true Chinese fashion, there were migrant workers there. They arrived before the day broke, and left only when darkness fell or the weather turned bad. They, too, had come for treasure. While we were half-hearted at best, they were quite serious. For  every kilogram of crabs they could gather, they would earn about forty Renminbi (about $7). Not bad!

Much mud, sand, and muck, and many silly pictures later, we washed off and all squeezed onto the cart to take us back to our tour bus, where we picked up the poor saps who had turned down the chance to go to the “redwood forest”. Another sumptuous lunch later, we were on the road back to Nanning, having cut short our trip by one day instead of wasting time seeing alternative, B-rated sights. It was a short but sweet vacation. The next day would begin the second serious part of our program: the educational conference.