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.