Aug 14, 2009
Ziyang Summer Camp
From Daxin, we returned to Nanning, where we flew back to Chengdu for a breather. It was really not much more than a breather, as we left the next afternoon for our second summer camp, in Ziyang county of Sichuan. The morning was spent doing laundry, and I managed to squeeze in a visit with my Chengdu friends as well. In the process of heading over to their place, I began to notice that Chengdu’s omnipresent cloud cover was a bit darker than usual – quite dark, n fact! As nearly complete darkness descended, I remembered that there was an eclipse scheduled for that morning, and it had arrived right on time. It amused me to observe that the city had prepared well: for the five minutes or so of the eclipse, all the street lights turned on! Afterwards, we got to catch up with our former Chengdu teachers and have lunch with their current students, who are all Americans who teach Chinese in America, and want to improve their language and teaching skills.
The trip to Ziyang was fairly uneventful, as it was a mere 2-3 hours away from Chengdu. In the spirit of the monkey wrench, however, our vans arrived – minivans! These vans could comfortably squeeze eight people, as they had promised, but only if those eight people had no luggage. What resulted was a minivan full of people with their bulky luggage piled on top of them.
After arriving in Ziyang, which looked a lot bigger and more advanced than Daxin (leading us to wonder exactly how “rural” this experience was going to be), the first van of people checked in. The second half of our group got delayed, so we decided to take advantage of our good fortune (in not being the delayed group), and split off to explore. After losing the girls to a clothing shop, us men continued to wander, until I realized that we would probably have plenty of opportunities to walk in the vicinity of the hotel, but not to explore further away. We grabbed a taxi, and told him to take us to the nearest interesting place. He didn’t understand, so we told him to take us to the nearest city square. A short while later, we got off at a relatively unexciting square with a rusty old excuse for a children’s amusement park. We played around on it for a while, much to the consternation of the couple kids and old ladies scattered around; after purchasing some candy (for gifts and prizes for the kids) and other necessities at a nearby supermarket, we made it back in time for another scrumptious and superabundant dinner.
After dinner, we again felt the urge to find a pleasant diversion before we got back into teaching. Several options presented themselves, but one that most appealed to a number of our group was getting a massage. Massages in China are extremely cheap, and a few of my program members swore by them, Of course, there is a dark side to massage culture, as massage parlors are a frequent front for brothels; but the other students assured me that so long as your explicit that you want a legitimate establishment, you can avoid any misunderstandings. I figured, so many people (including middle-aged women!) had sung the praises of massages, I ought to give it a try sometime.
We were set to head out, but then the hotel told us that they had their own massage parlor, so we, feeling irrationally deflated, agreed to just stay at the hotel. We ascended up to the top floor, and then took the stairs up another flight, with red lights illuminating the hall. We were a little unnerved, as it is also common for very high class hotels to have less high-class portions. It turns out that we need not be concerned – this time, at least, the place was legitimate. The massage was about $10 for an hour and a half of foot washing and body massage. I was unnerved by the experience (I’m not one for strangers touching me, generally speaking, much less a massage…), and further discovered that when you are mostly bones and skin, the beneficial effects of a massage are negligible. I can’t say the experience was unpleasant, and it was fun to chat with the other four of us, but definitely not something I’ll be particularly excited to do again, especially if it requires paying money. Still, at least now I can say I’ve tried it.
(As a brief interlude, as I am writing this, I am here in the remote province of Qinghai, where in front of me an Australian is teaching a Tibetan employee of our hostel how to eat fried eggs with a knife and fork. I never realized that there are a fair number of rules that might not be intuitive; like how to hold your arms, whether or not to lick the knife, etc. It is quite amusing.)
The next morning we were greeting with pouring rain. It was a treacherous day for our party; getting onto our bus, one of my program fellows slipped and fell, soaking her pants. This bus, incidentally, was a regular public bus that we had hired to drive us for those three days. It clearly had not been modified too much for our use: every five minutes the loudspeaker would cheerfully admonish us, “Please be careful, the bus is about to stop!” Once it even announced a specific stop name.
Back at the Nanning conference I wasa discussing the mishmash of formalty, fussiness, and failure that seem to plague Chinese events. As I said then, for the Chinese, “Everything must be perfect – but nothing ever is.” This was exemplified over and over again during FS, and the Ziyang program was no different.
We were supposed to have a short oening ceremony (whici is absolutely necessary, and cannot be skipped = whatever we Americans might think), and then get right down to business; teaching class. Becausee it was raining, we went to our cllassrooms and would listen to the ceremony over the loudspeakers (I was quite amazed that even these rural schools have wireless microphones and a schoool-wide sound system. I guess it’s standard in most American schools too, but I hadn’t expected that particular aspects would be ensured, while other things, such as hygenic bathrooms, were neglected.).
After waiting awkwardly with my students for a good while, the time to begin class finally arrived, with no word from the loudspeaker. I proceeded to begin teaching class, and taught my first session. At the end, the loudspeaker finally voiced its will: all the foreign teachers should go to such-and-such a classroom . It turns out that we had spent the entire first half hour waiting for a lingdao (I think it was the principal, but his true identity is a mystery that mortals cannot know), who hadn’t shown up. Fan laoshi wanted to go on anyway, but she was told we had to wait for the lingdao, whenever he appeared. Our seecond class period was thus coopted by an elaborate andlong-windedopening cremony consisteing entirely of fei hua (literally, “waste words”; empty speaches).
The only really redeeming aspect of this disruption of the day happened at the expense of Ke Ruiqi, one of my fellow program participants. She was walking back to her classroom in rain (it was still pouring down). I was following a few steps beehind, so I had a glorious view of her slipping, and falling comically bottom down, into a several inch puddle. It would have made Charlie Chaplin proud. I felt bad for her, of course, as her skirt was completely drenched and she had no other clothing with her, but I still can’t help smiling when I replay the image in my mind. And she did get anther skirt lent to her.
Unlike Daxin and Chengdu, at Ziyang we taught both middle school and elementary school kids. This made our teaching more interesting, because we had prepared and perfected our lessons for elementary school kids, and some of our activities wouldn’t work as well with older kids. On the other hand, we could do more advanced things with middle school kids. At the end of the first day, the middle school teachers and the elementary school teachers were all quite happy with their lot and didn’t want to rotate! By this point, aside from some modifications I had to make to teach middle school, I had memorized the lesson plans and knew more or less exactly how they would run. I was always surprised, however, at how different each class could still be; and it was entirely because of the kids. My teaching didn’t change significantly within a day, but some classes were amazing, and some were terrible. It made it kind of exciting to see how my fortume would be each time I walked into a classroom.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but – Chinese students are great. Even though the Chinese educational system has serious problems (including cultivating millions of passive-response learner who can’t take initiative or think creatively), one nice effect is that Chinese students are extremely obedient. You tell them to do something, and they do it, just like that. It makes teaching much easier (and I say this as someone who is not naturally inclined to simply follow orders). And though about thirty minutes after my final class I would realize I was utterly exhausted, while teaching I was compleltely involved. It was fun.
The Ziyang school had an interesting layout. At the top of the hill was the kindergarten. Behind it, down the slope, was the elementary school. Behind that was the middle school (I didn’t see a high school).. It seemed pretty convenient, actually, and made our split-teaching not too troublesome.
(I am writing this particular section while on a long distance bus, populated predominantly by the Hui minority group, who are Muslims. My writing was just interrupted by a long argument that occurred over and around me between the crusty old man sitting next to me by the window, and a middle-aged fellow. The entire argument was conducted in a language other than Mandarin. The argument centered around a brown bag the old man, who had been sleeping, sequestered next to the window. The middle aged fellow wanted him to put it up top, either because he felt bad that I had little space and put my bag in the aisle, or because… or some other reason, I suppose. I think he was trying to set up folding chairs for the extra passengers and wanted the space my bag was taking to put down a chair, but even after I moved my bag of my own volition, he did not take any action, other than to continue his side of the vigorous argument. The old man, who while placidly sleeping seemed harmless enough, turn his cataract-covered eye on the younger fellow and defended himself vigorously, like a cornered wombat. The entire spectacle sounded something like a conversation between two people with speech impediments replayed at triple speed. No one said a word to me. I love China).
The second day of teaching was also interrupted by a peculiar interlude: we only taught in the morning, and then rushed back to our hotel to get some extremely messy and bad-tasting boxed lunches which we ate on our bus as we trundled along to a completely different school. They also had been holding a summer camp with the help of Chinese college students from Shanghai, but theirs was music and dance focused. They were holding a ending party, and we were a sideshow attraction bussed in, for who knows what reason. They had a perfectly good show without us, and we had never taught (or seen) these students before. Because we were participating in their ending party, we also were unable to have one with our own kids on the following day. Consequently, there was a lot of bad feeling among us about the whole deal, as we felt like we were being jerked around like some toy everyone wanted.
Nevertheless, we put on our smiling faces and the party went on all right. We sang our two Chinese songs, even getting others to jump up on stage and sing with us; the latter half of the show I missed, because of a frenzy that followed us at all the summer camps: name signing. The kids everywhere would hand us notebooks, envelopes, scrapes of waste paper – anything that could be written on, and insist that we sign both our Chinese and our English names. At this particular ending party, it went to new levels – swarms of students begging us to sign not only miscellaneous paper products, but also their shirts, and even umbrellas! I had a baby foisted at me and asked to sign his back, which he took in good spirit. We had to beat them off as we made our escape once the party ended.
The next two evenings, a bunch of us found a courtyard and played ultimate frisbee, a game foreign to these lands. It caused a great stir, with more people showing up each time to watch on the sidelines (as some of the tall, handsome male fellows took to playing shirtless, I suppose it’s not surprising that while the Chinese guys weren’t as interested, there was a large crown of girls from the nearby high school who formed a solid portion of the spectators). It was lots of fun, but the spectating was a bit odd. They don’t get many foreigners in Ziyang. We eventually took to strolling the streets instead.
On the third day we finished teaching. Once again, the niceness of the kids was amazing. They helped wipe the blackboard, and even wouldn’t let me take my own tray down (the first day I had been too fast for them). It really felt kinda special to be there. We had a quick and simple (by Chinese standards) closing ceremony, and after another bate of frenzied name-signing piled into the buses headed for home (Chengdu).
We were on a tight schedule, because by this point our clothing situation had become critical: only a few of our group had any clean clothing whatsoever, and even they were down to their last day. Fan Laoshi had called the laundromat and convinced them to stay open an extra couple hours so we could wash our stuff. They assured us they would, but Fan Laoshi, worried that these were empty promises, called them every few hours to remind them that were still coming, and to update them on our progress. To to their word, and to our great relief, they stayed open.
The laundromat could easily be the basis for a television sitcom. They had all the necessary cast of characters: the elderly, somewhat senile grandparents who speak the incomprehensible local dialect, the middle-aged couple who run the place, their pretty 20-something daughter, and a couple younger kids and miscellaneous others of ambiguous relationship. They all pretty much lived there. And, of course, there would l be regular characters who come in, and the episodic features. This episode was the weird parade of foreigners with their bags and bags of clothing and strange habits.
The next day was Sunday. I had been looking forward to finally getting back to church (I had not anticipated that our lives would be planned out with no regard for the Lord’s Day; especially since during our stay in Chengdu we had the weekends free from class) with the Christians I had met back on the train when I first went to Chengdu. I was particularly excited, as one of them (the one who insisted on writing up a detailed outline of each sermon in English for me – and her English was very good) told me that her fiancee was going to be there that week, and I could meet him. Our plans originally were for us to leave Chengdu at after noon, which would have been perfect; but alas, Fan and Tang Laoshi decided that it would be better to leave at the crack of dawn so we could go to some interesting sight that would take us a 12 hour bus ride to reach. They were really keen on it, and the rest of the students didn’t mind, which left me in a bad position. If I had known in advance, I would have talked with the two Laoshi’s privately, but since they had already made the announcement and folks had no problems, I was in quandary. I felt I couldn’t really require they all sacrifice whatever this thing was, and so I reluctantly held my peace.
To clarify, now that our second summer camp was over, we now had some free time to go visit more cool places and do stuff. Originally there had been plans for a second conference and a third summer camp, but they both fell through (one because of the ridiculous fear of Swine Flu, the other because lingdao said so). As a result, our keepers had arranged for a visit to mountainous rural western Sichuan, where there be Tibetans, yaks, and high altitude grasslands. We were on our way to some particularly scenic grassland, but at about hour 10 of our trip, we encountered a problem. The first 10 hours were defined by breathtakingly beautiful views of mountains and the snaking Dadu river beneath us. I say breathtaking not only because the views were stunning (they were) but also because we were pretty close to those cliffs, and also, we were getting up to where the air is thin. Around the 10th hour, however, we found ourselves on the road that had been washed out by a heavy rain the day before. It was extremely bumpy, and the bus rocked its way slowly over the muddy road. I was sitting on the cliff-side of the bus, and so had a clear view of the several hundred-foot drop, with nothing but about a foot of road between us and it. Barriers, be they metal, concrete, or wood, are luxuries we Americans enjoy, but that the cliffs of Sichuan proudly deny.
Eventually, Fan and Tang Laoshi, plagued with visions of us all plummeting to our death on their watch, called off the last portion of the trip. We instead backtracked about an hour, and then waited in the bus for another hour or so as our tour guides tried to find accommodations for us in the mountain town of Kangding (we had previously booked a place up on the grasslands). Going a little mad with cabin fever, I somewhat plaintively asked if we might be able to leave the bus to cross the street and play on the public exercise machines that dot the Chinese urban landscape. It was a simple diversion, and yet one that we took great pleasure in.
We ended up not finding a place in Kangding, and instead swung off a few kilometers to a hot springs resort that had seen better days. It was acceptable for our needs, however, and it was a neat place in its own expensive way. It was here that I once again chose to take up my long-abandoned attempt at running. At the prodding of a hostel friend in Beijing I had run a couple times there, but then prompted stopped once I left. Among the 15 other participants in the FS program, however, there was a good eight or so who ran religiously. And as we were no longer busy with real work, I decided to join my roommate and two other guys for a quick jog before dinner. Of course, I picked the worst possible day since my departure from Beijing: running in Beijing is stupid because it is extremely polluted; running in Kangding is stupid because it’s at a really high altitude. I ended up with a headache for a good couple hours after our little excursion, but it was entertaining while it lasted.
Our trip to Western Sichuan was rife with problems, and at the time (without the rosy-tint fuzziness that time brings), distinctly not fun. We were constantly hampered by our group size and safety concerns, which seemed to restrict us at every turn – another grassland we hoped to visit as an alternative was also canceled because of bad roads, and a leisurely hike along a different road was called off because of fears we would hit by cars. In the end, we spent an hour or so by a clear mountain stream skipping rocks but feeling quite dissatisfied with te constant let-downs, especially after a 12 hour trip starting at the crack of dawn to get way out there.
Our tour guide, incidentally, was an interesting character. A Tibetan who had decided to make it in the city, he ended up working for a tour company. He had great stories to tell, could sing really well, had amazingly white teeth, and won the favor of more than one of the girls on the trip. His legend lived on long after our paths had diverged.
A later venture into Kangding proper produced interesting results. We bought scarves, yak cheese (which wasn’t very good), giant bread disks, and feasted on a traditional Tibetan dinner, which was delectably scrumptious. It was great to wander the town which was shaped somewhat like a starfish because of the steep mountains that restricted its growth. I bought a few Chinese books, and had a great conversation with a Muslim minority shop-keeper about his life and story: he came from Gansu province to sell souvenirs in the summer and household necessities in the winter. Some of oru group even went to see Terminator II dubbed in Chinese at the local movie theater.
The next morning, our Western Sichuan adventure came to a close. Leaving behind the mountains and a failed vacation, and were off to a new place: the Panda Research Base a couple hours outside of Chengdu.