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.