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XguoXmas

Drudge Report has all green links, and they turn red when you click them. How festive.

On Christmas Eve, I was asked to judge at the closing ceremonies of an English song singing competition. The contestants sang things like Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and… honestly, I can’t remember any others. After the competition, there were several performances by other students. There were two dance groups, a “rock” band (a relative term in China), and… the foreign teachers. I sang Mika’s Lollipop, badly. I wish I’d taken a video of it, but I forgot to bring my camera. You can watch the official music video here. I added the lyrics:

A few hours after the competition, the English department had dinner a restaurant near campus. The food was dericious. The Americans were marooned at a table separate from the others, except for a few Chinese English professors who sat with us. I spoke with Helen for a while about various topics, particularly what it’s like to teach Chinese students. Sometimes she had a strained look on her face, like I was being overly critical, but she agreed with many things too. She may have taken it a little personally when I said I have to reteach a lot of things that my students learned incorrectly in high school, and how I cringed when I visited a Chinese English professor’s class and heard him correct an incorrect pronunciation with another incorrect pronunciation. At the other tables, everyone was drinking a lot of wine (which is actually liquor, but they don’t really distinguish between the two) and being ridiculously loud and obnoxious. I think the male teacher at the American’s table was disappointed to have to sit with us. He kept insisting that I drink wine, but it’s really strong, and I don’t like drinking wine or liquor anyway. “I don’t drink wine, I only drink beer.” “OH! You want beer??? Ok! I’ll get you some!” That wasn’t what I meant.

A while later, “You want more beer?” “No, no, bu you, bu you.”

I took off early to go meet some other American teachers at the children’s hospital to sing Christmas songs. The normally 20 minute bus ride took 45 minutes because of all the traffic. I felt stupid, watching empty taxis driving by, wishing I’d taken one instead. But I wouldn’t have known how to tell them where to go, so I’d grabbed the bus. I got there for only the last 20 minutes or caroling. Donning Santa hats, we sang to a mostly empty waiting room (they had visited individual patients earlier) and Finn gave an interview to a local news crew. We all belted out one last “Jingle Bells” and split up for the night. Keli, Abbey, and I went to Mai Dang Lao (Micky D’s) and filled up on fries and double cheeseburgers. It was packed. I’d never seen so many people there. A fluffy, girly version of “Jingle Bells” repeated interminably on the radio. I figured on such a busy night, it was a good strategy to get people to eat quickly and get out.

Christmas Eve in China is similar to Black Friday in America. My family asked me if it was people buying last minute gifts at discount prices for Christmas, but I don’t think that’s really the point. Most people don’t seem to exchange gifts on Christmas here. I think its simply a marketing ploy to move stuff, and sponsor a big shopping holiday. There are a few important differences. Instead of opening very early, the shops stay open until late. The stores didn’t start to shut down until about 1 or 2a.m., and the movie theatres ran until 7a.m. The other difference is that there aren’t throngs of people stampeding into the store and fighting over merchandise, both because the stores have already been open throughout the day, and because I think Chinese people just wouldn’t do that. This is not a shopping intensive culture. People are happy to get deals, but its not competitive the way it is in the U.S. Young women may buy ridiculous looking outfits, young men may love all the electronics they can afford, but they purchase it in a dignified, non-newsworthy way.

We met some of Keli’s students at KFC in Wuyan, the major shopping district, and started to comb through the stores for gifts and deals on things for ourselves. On our way up the street, there was a stage outside a grocery store with small performances designed to attract attention, like we have plenty of in America. Keli nudged me, saying, “Sean, if we go up close to the stage and make a lot of noise, they’ll probably invite us up.” I gave her the look, and we pushed our way through the crowd, cheering at everything however insignificant. Almost right away, the lady on staged motioned for us to come up. A few of the students accompanied us to translate and shoot video (which you can see below). The girls did the Macarena, and we all sang Jingle Bells. We all must have sang it 60 or 70 times in the past 4 days. At the end, they gave us 50 kuai (about $8) gift cards to the grocery store to the left of the stage.

As I predicted, a number of our students had been in the area and noticed us. As soon as we got of stage, all three of us had students from our classes greeting us and laughing.
We hit Sanfu next, a clothing and gift shop sort of like Urban Outfitters, or a mini-department store. We ran into more students, some of whom stuck with us for the rest of the night. Candy was glued to me, pointing out and explaining everything. We were all goofing around throughout the store, and embarrassing the students. I insisted on buying one of the artificial, decorative plants in the store, pretending I didn’t understand that they were telling me it was not for sale. I showed them how we could take price tags off of merchandise and put them on the plant, and then tell the store clerks that we wanted to buy it. I also tried on women’s hats and scarves, and made sure people noticed, just to embarrass the cadre of students around me.

Chinese stores are peculiarly different than American stores in a particular way. You are not permitted to pick up several items around the store and then take them to a check out counter. Instead, you have to ask a store clerk to set aside what you want to buy, and they give you a ticket with the item bar code and price on it. You collect tickets for everything you want to buy, and take them to the checkout counter. Once you’ve paid, you’re given a receipt. You then go back all around the store, verify you’ve paid, and collect your items.

A constantly evolving group of us bounced around a number of other stores throughout the night. Some people would leave and go their own ways, while others would join us. I continued to goof around with students, holding lingerie up to myself, asking if they thought it would look good on me. Candy was really shy about going anywhere near the bra section of stores. I insisted I needed up choosing a bra for a friend. She asked, “Is your friend Chinese, or American?” I laughed, incredulous she would ask. I replied, “Um, she’s biracial! Her dad is Chinese, and her mom is American, so she’s got one big one, and one small one.” She thought that was hilarious.

Walking from store to store, Candy had this mischievous smile on her face. I noticed it, it was so obvious. I asked her about it, and she said, “I’ve never been out this late before. This is so crazy! I’m just so excited! This is crazy!” It was only 11p.m. when I asked her. She would go on to repeat it throughout the night. “I can’t believe I’m still out! I lied to my mom.” By the time I was 19, I was staying out late almost every night. But there is a curfew at the university here. At 11p.m., the power is shut off to all dormitories and everyone is forced to go to sleep or stay awake in pitch dark. No computers, no lights. And it is almost impossible to get into the dorm if you have not returned by that time. They can’t even charge their phones… I always have people plugging their phones in in morning classes. So staying out that late is a real event for her.

She even had class at 8 a.m., but was determined to stay out all night. We went back to McDonald’s around 3 a.m. (it was Keli’s and Micah’s third time there in 24 hours; also, by this time, “Jingle Bells” had ceased.) We were ready to leave at 4 a.m., and the girls were invited to stay at Keli’s, but they went off to go to a movie instead. In the morning, I had this message on QQ from Candy:

“I’m sorry to tell you that I’m late for class this morning.But i really enjoy the crazy night.It’s the most crazy thing i have ever done. And i like to go shopping with you,you are really a nice guy. If you want to go shopping next time,Just call me,it’s my pleasure to help you!”

We had all tried to go to a movie together earlier in the night, but there were no movies with subtitles. A new theatee had opened in Wuyan where we thought there might have been subtitled movies available, but the students refused to go there because one of their teachers had told them the “new” smell of the building was poisonous, and they should wait a few months before visiting it. Keli and I told them their teacher was probably just trying to scare them, or was stupid. Anyone who has been in a Chinese public bathroom KNOWS what  poisonous odor is like.

Christmas morning started as a white Christmas, and I meant to take a photo, but the sun came out later in the morning and melted it before I got up for the day.

I spent 3 hours vegging around my apartment, talking to students on QQ (Chinese chat platform) and fending off countless text messages saying things like “I am Christmas! Will you marry me? Then we will be Marry Christmas!” and simpler things like “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”  Once I got going, I wrapped gifts in the English language “21^st Century” newspaper and delivered gifts to a few students. I got Carly a collapsible storage box that doubles as a small chair. It had a decorative pink lid. I got Christina an issue of Chinese Vogue. There are many fashion and style magazines available in Chinese at a newsstand down on the main road, and I figure most college girls would like to read them, but they can’t afford to buy them. Christina really seemed to dig it. A half hour later I texted to thank her for the hat she got me, and she replied to say she was reading the magazine. I said, “You gotta study for your exams! I feel like a bad teacher for getting you a gift that is distracting you from your studies!”

I stopped at the DVD store to find something for Shining’s mom. Last summer, Shining mentioned that her mother really likes classic American films with suave romantic types. I found Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, Ben Hur with Charlton Heston, Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, and Gone with the Wind. Gone with the Wind is remarkably famous overseas. Several Chinese over the years have told me they read it or saw the movie, and one Sudanese I used to work with had read it when he arrived in the U.S.

I zipped over to Wuyan (a relative term, during rush hour) and picked up a snazzy cigarette case I’d seen the night before for Shining’s dad. Some of them had dragons or $ on them. He’s a difficult guy to read, and I wasn’t sure what he would like, so I got a nice silver one with a neutral design.

The Americans all had dinner together at a restaurant down the street from the DVD shop. I arrived a little late because of the traffic, and found most of them trying to figure out how to play a decent game of mahjong. I helped Micah and Debbie piece together an impossible puzzle of a Chinese shopping district. It’s difficult to solve a puzzle with displays Chinese writing in the picture.

Each of us brought a universal gift and played Dirty Santa. I was one of the last to choose a gift, and after Finn had encouraged everyone to choose his, I finally did. He insisted, “Read the card, read the card!” I opened it. In ink from a dying orange or red marker, it read “From: Finn, To: Whom It May Concern.” We chuckled. I tore off the wrapping paper to find a package of Andes mint chocolates. I was genuinely scared one of the last few people would steal it from me, but only the older adults were left, and they weren’t very competitive. Keli actually said she was disappointed because there was no fighting or obnoxious gift stealing. She’d been part of Dirty Santa’s where physical struggles and name calling had delightfully marred the night. I honestly think I got the best gift in the pile. I’ve been munching on these things all day.

Dinner was fantastic, with many typical Chinese dishes, none of which I could begin to name. There is one dish that the restaurant considers its specialty, which tasted like Greek spinach pies. I think I probably ate more of them than anyone. The night before, Finn had been interviewed by the local news at a children’s hospital where we had gone caroling. There was a TV in our room at the restaurant. The broadcast happened to come on as we were finishing eating, so we sat around to watch it.  They first visited and interviewed Peter at his apartment at the medical college. It was funny to all of us, as Peter started talking, to hear a translator speak over him. In the second part, Finn is being interviewed in a Santa Claus outfit. Immediately after, the camera pans across our group, and you can see me in the background, and Keli and Abbey in the foreground, singing “Jingle Bells.”

After dinner, I rushed home to wrap the gifts to take to Shining’s parents. I got a little lost walking around their apartment complex. I hadn’t been there for months, and it was very dark. They don’t have street lamps in many areas. Every night, when it is clear, it is still amazing to me how well I can see the stars in a city of 3.5 million. I remember the city was always very dark at night in India as well.

After some wandering and strained recall, I was 99% sure I had found the right place. I hesitantly knocked on the door. “Shei??” “ZHONGGUO MAMA! IT’S ME!” They unassuredly cracked the door open to see who it was. “SHENG DAN KUAI LE!!” “Oh!, SHENG DAN KUAI LE!!” They were very gracious for people who had someone knock on their door at almost 11:00pm. I came in and gave them each their gifts, and some apples. Many Chinese give their friends and family apples on Christmas. The Chinese word for apple (ping guo) sounds similar to the word for safe (ping an), so giving apples symbolizes a wish for them to be safe and happy.

I don’t think either of them had ever received a wrapped gift in their lives. Zhongguo Mama (Chinese mom) looked at the gift and set it on the coffee table. Zhongguo Papa (each are pronounced differently than in English; the first syllable is unstressed, the second syllable stressed: ma-MA! instead of MA-ma!) went to another room to set his gift down and came back to sit adjacent to me on the living room chair. I motioned as if tearing the “giftwrap” off (I imagined they must think Americans all wrap their gifts in newspaper) and said “kimen! kimen!” Like Carly and Christina, Zhongguo Mama carefully removed the paper. She was surprised to find a stack of DVDs. I tried to explain they had Chinese subtitles and some had Chinese voiceovers dubbed throughout the film, but I think she simply figured it out herself. I motioned to the other room, to Zhongguo Papa, to go get and open his gift. After the same cautious removal of the paper, he opened the box to find the cigarette case. He seemed rather pleased, but as reserved as he is, and with the cultural barrier, I still have a difficult time reading him. We talked for a few minutes and stared and giggled, knowing we couldn’t understand each other. I called Shining to translate. They asked me why my Chinese hadn’t improved. Argh. I spend all my time teaching.

Talking a while longer, they wished to go to bed. Zhongguo Mama packed up some peanuts and baozi (similar to dumplings) for me. They were made my Nai nai, Shining’s grandmother. “Sheng dan kuai le!”

I went home and talked to Shining for a bit, read the news, and video chatted with my family in three different households, one by one, repeating the same stories. I could barely keep my eyes open. By 2:30 a.m. I finished the last video chat and slept for 12 of the next 14 hours, exhausted from everything going on in the past week.

It was a helluva Chinese Christmas.

P.S. I made some pancakes and eggs the other day, but without a flat pan, I was forced to make both scrambled eggs AND scrambled pancakes. Mmmmm. Wok cakes and wokled eggs.

It’s the Cheesiest…

Today while helping Betty and Dale with pronunciation, a package arrived. I opened it immediately to find clothing, dry milk, Ovaltine, Oreos, and 4-12 packs of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. FORTY EIGHT BOXES.

I’m not sure why my parents only sent me a 6 day supply of a 5 year old’s staple diet, but NO COMPLAINTS HERE. I’m actually giving a few boxes away as a Christmas gift to my American buddy Keli. She tolerates all my inappropriate jokes, what my mother has gently called a “strange sense of humor” in the past, so she deserves it. I also got Christina an issue of Chinese Vogue and a Dirty Santa gift for Christmas dinner, a box of dark chocolate mint sticks. I met a woman in the candy shop who is running the store for her mother over the holidays. She is from Shiyan, but lives and works in Shenzhen now. Her English was fairly good, as she had studied for several years in New Zealand.

Yesterday I found a grocery store that has GERMAN FRUIT LOOPS (I think they’re German, there are about 10 different countries on the label). And fruity they are!

I met an English major from another school at the same grocery store who strolled around Wuyan with me for a while. She pointed out a restaurant 3 stories up that I never would have otherwise noticed. It was a Western restaurant which had just opened that day. Neither of us cared to eat yet, and she had to go back to her campus, but Keli came to meet me later and we tried it out, hoping to find a Western restaurant that would stand out from the others.

It didn’t. It was the same as the others, except that each table in one section of the restaurant was equipped with internet-enabled (a relative concept here) computers, with monitors mounted on the wall next to the table. It wasn’t very useful, but came in handy to settle a few conversational disputes throughout the evening. At lunch this afternoon, Betty and Dale asked me if table manners and restaurants differed greatly from those in America.

“THEY SURE DO,” I exclaimed. “People do not spit out bones and peppers onto the table in the U.S.”

“How do you get rid of something from your mouth?”

“Spit it into a napkin and fold or wad it up.”

“Ooooooh. Much more polite.”

“And we do not clear our throats and hack up phlegm wads on the floor in restaurants. It is also illegal to take a dog into a restaurant.”

People here frequently bring their barking dogs into restaurants and sit them on a chair or under the table while they eat. One very annoying, but not gross, difference is that menus are loaded with stock photos of foods that are not available at the restaurant. Doubly annoying is that they don’t say so, they just bring you the closest thing to what is pictured. I ordered fried shrimp the other night and got a plate full of bony, clawed popcorn chicken. Restaurants are also frequently out of or discontinue items that are printed on the menu. And the cheese they use on the pizza is always one sharp short of a cheddar. There is an expression for this among Westerners, at the least the ones I have encountered since I got here:

“This is China.”

The English books here are loaded with bland, stilted, cheesy, and horribly archaic example conversations of almost no value or interest to the students, and are mottled with spelling and grammatical errors. It’s an uphill battle to teach English here from every direction… disinterested students, a half-assed effort from publishers, inadequate classroom resources, and long outdated administrative policies. I’ve always wanted to share a piece of what I combat here, and I finally found myself in the position to write about it immediately. Check this out:

A: How about coming out for drink on Tuesday?

B: I’ve got some letters to write on Tuesday.

A: Why don’t we go on Wednesday then?

B: I’m afraid I have to go to a meeting on Wednesday.

A: Can you go on Thursday?

B: Sorry, I’ve got to do some homework on Thursday.

A: Well, let’s go on Friday, after work.

B: I can’t. I’ve got to wait for a phone call on Friday.

A: Could you manage Saturday, then?

B: I’m afraid not. I’m going to the theatre on Saturday.

A: Oh dear. Sunday, perhaps?

B: It’s impossible. I’m going to visit my sister on Sunday.

A: Well, maybe next time.

B: O.K. Next time.

Yeah, man. NEXT TIME. I think you covered about 6 next times by the end of that conversation and got shot down like a TWA flight bound for Paris. The aggravating thing about this is that the students learn to be obnoxiously incessant. There is no cultural context in the practice conversations. Check out this gem from unit 6:

B: I’m so glad we have air conditioning.

A: Me too. I don’t know how people stand it in the old days with only fans and shade trees to keep them cool.

B: I guess it took a strong, pioneer spirit.

A: Well, I certainly don’t seem to have it.

It sounds even worse on the audio component. I’m very disappointed that most of the materials here are in British English. We have a whole nation of people here trying to claw their way out of poverty, and for many of them, moving to an English speaking country is the only option. Social mobility is notoriously low here (which makes the social activist braying of homeless advocates and working class champions in the U.S. even more nauseating.) Their solution is to propagate the speaking habits and pronunciation of the back corner of Western civilization. It’s a, heh hem… “pity.”

I feel like I spend most of my time trying to undo the often irreparable damage the Chinese education system has inflicted on its subjects’ English speaking skills. Most of the instruction they’ve gotten up until my class is from Chinese English teachers who don’t know how to speak English themselves. (I cringed when I heard a professor correct a student who said “jayer” to say “jay-oh.” The word was “jail.”) Another sound they have trouble with, which took me 8 weeks of class to notice, is “ee.” “Sweet” comes out at “swayt.” “He is” comes out as “hay is.” “Cheese” comes out as “chayze.” Most of my students are capable of correct pronunciation in the short run. When I practice it with them, they’ll say “thank you” and “girl” almost perfectly. But 10 minutes later they fall right back into the habit of saying, “The gerr said sank you.” Many of them just don’t care, and are perfectly satisfied with saying it incorrectly. One student told me, “you’re not going to change us.”  Most of them, I think, WANT to have perfect English, but aren’t really willing to put in the hours and practice to do it. A lot of them are excuse makers. I hear a lot of the same excuses from them, across all classes. I can’t figure out if they give the same excuses because they are the only explanations they know how to say comfortably in English, or if they’ve been taught to respond with stock excuses in either language. Some are keenly aware of the second phenomenon. To illustrate, Nate and Tony told me this joke one day:

A Chinese woman is driving down a highway in America one afternoon. As she comes to a bridge, she suddenly loses control of the car, veering off the road and into a river below. Moments later, a policeman drives by. Noticing the woman in distress, he stops and yells to the woman. “HEY! HOW ARE YOU?” The woman replies, “FINE! THANK YOU!” The policeman drives away, and the woman drowns a short time later.

I told this joke to Keli, who thought it was lame, but laughed that the woman died. “Why was that necessary? The joke was done!” “THAT’S THE WAY THEY TOLD IT TO ME! I’M JUST RETELLING IT!” As I rewrite the joke now, I see that there is no explanation as to why the driver lost control of the car. It may simply be implicit, having been an Asian woman driver. OOOOH!

Don’t take all of this too seriously… I feel I just spent a lot of time whining about the bad stuff that goes on here. The restaurants are dirty, and the Chinese food restaurants (which are just called “restaurants” here) are even dirtier, but the food is often body-numbingly delicious and incomparable to Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The students, for all their disinterest and laziness, are not different in such respect to many American students. (There are many other very strident differences, which I’ll try to remember to discuss another time.) Individually, most of my students are great kids. They just aren’t always so good as whole classes. And you have to remember I’m in a still-developing backwater town in the middle of nowhere, where many standards are not up to par that other cities here are beginning to approach. Much of what I’m saying here is not true throughout the country, and not even true throughout Shiyan itself.

Pretty soon I want to post a commentary on why China’s growth is overrated, and causing unnecessary anxiety in the West. China is a power player and will be a sizable force to contend and cooperate with in the next century, but there are immense, underlying problems here that will continue to hold it back for generations to come. These problems are rarely reported in U.S., partly because the big media outlets are unaware of them, partly because branding China as an invincible monster grabs a lot of ratings. Even many Chinese do not believe China is as powerful and influential as Americans think it is. Americans should be focusing on their own problems. Smile, everyone. Say, “CHEEEEEEESE!”

Wintertime and KTV

I’m going to try something new here… writing shorter posts to let you all stay updated on what’s going on with me and to practice my writing more frequently. Winter is struggling to move its way into Shiyan. After a few cold weeks in October and November, the 60s and 70s kept pushing its way back into the mountains. But it looks like the cold air might stick around for a while this time. It’s supposed to snow an inch or so in the next few days. My apartment is cold. The radiators are old steam-based units, and there is no way to turn it up or down. I huddle next to an electric radiator a lot of the time, and wear a lot of warm clothes, but I’m concerned whether its going to be sufficient once the temperature starts diving into the 20s and teens.

My apartment has three doorways, two directly to outdoor patios, and there is visible space beneath them. Although, the building is solid concrete, so the heat seeps through the walls much more slowly than in my last apartment. The air is so dirty in my apartment all the time, though. Its hard to breathe inside sometimes. There is no ventilation system at all. Each room smells like something different nasty. I got some girly smelling Roman candles a few weeks ago, and that clears things out a bit, but the tiny candles are no match for a place this size.

The days have turned from obnoxiously sunny to a gloomy gray reminiscent of Michigan winters. I am frequently asked if I’ve gotten used to Shiyanese weather, but its actually better than in Atlanta. It has stayed warm here a few weeks longer than my home base, and it sounds like Atlanta beat our first snowfall by a couple of days. Neither region is accustomed to snowfall.

I went to KTV a few nights ago. Years ago, perhaps even just one year ago, I’d have been way too shy to really sing at KTV. I CANNOT SING WORTH A DAMN. I have a whiny, nasal singing voice, and I have a hard time matching the key of the music. (My dad once walked in on me singing in my bedroom, and said “I can’t even hear myself think!” Let’s hear YOU sing, Dad!) But I really belt it out. I think soon I may become the obnoxious one no one wants to invite. Last time I went, maybe a month ago, a businessman on his last night in Shiyan whom we met in Mai Dang Lao came with us, and remarked “How’s he singin’ like that? He ain’t even drunk!” It took a lot of tries to get Tristan (from Amsterdam) to sing himself, but after several shots of AK-47, we finally got him singing “Beat It.” It was good to see him sing, because no one wants to be defeated. We all wanted him showin’ how funky and how strong was his fight. We were really indifferent to who’s wrong and who’s right. His friend, Darwin, from San Francisco, hated China. Apparently, he spent most of his time in the hotel room, because he “just wasn’t feelin’ it.”

I got several more class preps to do for the week. (Comment on this post if you have any idea how annoying it is to have to do this.) See ya’ll next time!

XXX

I have a couple of weeks with fewer classes. I’m glad I can get back in the swing of things with blogging. I am never bored, never without things to do, and mostly things I WANT to do. I’ve never been happier in my life since I moved to China, although I am very sorry to have missed the birth of my sister’s first baby. I waited for over a day knowing she was in labor, that her water broke, that she’d been given the epidural, that she had gone into surgery to give birth by Cesarean Section, and finally, at 4:31 a.m.,  I woke up to a phone call from Kennesaw, GA to learn that baby Liam had been born a few hours earlier that day. Tricia was doing very well, but had a few problems with the epidural and a lot of healing to do from the C-section.

It sounds like they’re both doing well now. The only one not doing well might be Bayleigh, but she’s a great little puppy dog, and is probably having fun with all the visitors.

I had the best birthday ever since I was 10 years old, when my parents gave me my first non-family exclusive birthday party to memory. (We rode go-carts and played putt-putt all afternoon. “Happy Birthday Sean” was written on the venue’s marquee. It was awesome.) Shining surprised me with a wonderful birthday video, having enlisted the help of my family and friends. We watched it many times, and it was better each time. My dad is a goofball when you can drag it out of him, and my niece and (now other) nephew are hilarious.

Video (Warning: A few inside jokes between Shining and I in the video are a bit vulgar, but like, FX vulgar, not Spice Channel vulgar.)

The day before my birthday, we took the 45 minute cab ride to Wudang Mountain, a very well known vacation spot with Daoist (Taoist) temples hundreds of years old. Apparently, Confucius lived there for many years during his studies. At the peak is a large monastery, and how they built that and the thousands of stairs leading to it, I cannot fathom. It would be a Sisyphean effort to hike to the summit from the base, requiring at least a few days and 40 pounds of supplies, so we first took a 40 minute bus ride flanked by sheer cliffs and hairpin turns to a small town of narrowly constructed hotels, shops and restaurants, to within 2 hours hike of the peak. “Peak,” I think, is a relative term, as the mountain system is dense and mottled with columns of mountains in the immediate area.

There were three stops along the way. The first was a temple the size of a city block. This one was more commercial than the others, with many hawkish shopkeepers selling many of the same wares available at the tourist center where the bus lines originate. A few were unique, including a number of teas locally grown and artwork by the shopkeeper himself. He even offered to customize the work with whatever we wanted, but Shining and I were not interested. One lady sat us down and let us taste several different teas. She laughed at me because I held the teacup like a woman, with only my thumb and index finger. But the cup was incredibly hot, and I was trying to hold it at the very top edge.

At the second stop was a lake and staging area where plays and Wushu demonstrations were held, but nothing was going on at the time we were there. A small building near the stage was adorned with photos of the site, dignitaries who had visited, and shots of movies that had been filmed there, including Will Smith’s son and Jackie Chan in the reimagining of Karate Kid. Shining and I, of course, took some inappropriate photos with statues along a pathway, which you can see in the video. We are brilliant people.

The third stop was another temple, but we didn’t think the 50 yuan admission was worth it, so we hung out and ate ice cream until the next bus came along. The was a large, metal cast turtle in a pond in front of the temple entrance. An ACTUAL turtle floated on the surface, facing the metal cast turtle, and we imagined he must be thinking his turtle thoughts like, “YOU ARE MY LORD AND MASTER, GIGANTIC METAL TURTLE. ALL THAT IS KNOWN AND IMAGINED COMES FROM THEE. I COWER IN YOUR METAL TURTLE PRESENCE. IF IT IS REQUIRED OF ME TO SACRIFICE MY TURTLE LIFE, SO BE IT!”

Finally reaching the end of the road, and absolutely starving, we checked into a hotel immediately and went to dinner. We asked for something special, and the waitress offered us wild rabbit that was caught in the mountain region nearby for 150 yuan. We thought that was too much and declined, and she counter-offered for 100 yuan. We took it.  We also got a large bowl of rice, bamboo, eggs and tomatoes (my favorite, but none is as good as Shining’s) and soup (anything soupy is Shining’s favorite.) I rarely drink beer, especially with Shining, but it was my birthday… I drink what I want! The waitress suggested a particular beer, saying it was specially made or something, but all the beer here tastes the same… like club soda… including this one. But I was very happy with it.

I always read whatever is available in English. The menu had one page in English, with the word “WELCONE” upside down on each page in rainbow colors. The page in English guaranteed that all prices at the resort would be up front and non-negotiable, and that no food, by law, could be wild game. If either of these terms were violated, we were to report it immediately to one of the many police stations throughout the mountain complex, one of which was across the street and within sight of our table. So the possibilities were that what we were eating was not wild rabbit, was illegal wild rabbit, and/or that the first price offered was well above what the restaurant was willing to serve it for. So I guess Shining and I are fugitives now.

We were already exhausted, and it didn’t take long to fall asleep after dinner. We awoke at 3 a.m., in time to hike to the top before the sun rose. We were told it would take about two hours, and we would probably see other people on the trail.

We didn’t.  The numerous shops along the way were all shut, the keepers sleeping on small beds behind the counters, closed in by corrugated metal doors. The only other semblance of human presence along the way was the stone-built path. Most outdoor tourist sites throughout China are poorly maintained and littered everywhere with trash, which is often heartbreaking, but Wudang Mountain is fairly well taken care of. The only deposits of trash I recall were at the bottom of a sheer drop in heavily trafficked areas, such as a lookout point.

It was dark all the way to the very top. We were only armed with an LED and an incandescent flashlight, a handful of bottles of water, and several layers of clothes. Shining and I don’t exercise much, but we handled the trip pretty well, only resting a few times. The 3 hour prescription became just over a two hour hike. It gradually got colder, and sometimes, it seemed, darker as we ascended. There was a dull, nearly full moon that was visible for moments at a time through the tree. Some kind of animal, at one point, was screeching and scamping through the trees and underbrush. We didn’t see any animals other than birds once the sun arose, so I’m not sure what kind of animal it must have been. I, and maybe Shining too, had a sense of nervousness about whether we were going the right way, and whether we might get lost in the dark and end up in Vietnam or something, but in the daylight it became clear that all trails eventually led to the top.

Once we reach the summit, we could just see the crawl of daylight coming into focus. There was no sunrise, the Sun obscured by clouds, fog, and doubtlessly a slight haze of pollution blowing east from Shiyan. A few of the residents were just starting to get up and move around. Soon, the shop opened, but food would not be ready for a while, so we bought a few packaged sausages and some kind of cereal with yoghurt or soy milk, I’m not sure.

To reach the very top of the mountain and explore the temples, there was a fee of 20 additional yuan (over the 210 yuan ticket to enter the park), and a half hour wait. They refused to allow anyone in until 630 a.m. The temple was well maintained, but was not in remarkable condition. It looked as if it were ignored for many years, and then begun to be taken care of for commercial purposes at some point, but not restored. Some of the paintings we tattered, the wood cracked, the plaster crumbled, the walls bowed. It was evident but nonetheless difficult to sense how old the monastery had grown. It is rare in America to visit a building more than a hundred years old, almost impossible to find one more than 200 years old. These temples were 700 or 800 years old, thousands of miles from my world and even that of my ancestors, and cultures apart. At the same time, Confucius, its former resident, would change the way people think and behave through generations of Chinese, a country that has come to be, and will continue to be, an significant force in the lives of billions of people. Some of that happened there, where I was standing, wishing I had some hot chocolate.

We explored the mountain for a few hours longer. There are many smaller temples and worship sites throughout the area. Some of the really cool stuff, the stuff that makes you feel like you’re on a real adventure charting uncharted territory, were off trail and around the corner of rock faces. Simple things, unremarkable, but private and gently concealed from those who stick to the path.

Later that afternoon we returned to campus and napped for a few hours. Then one of my classes threw a birthday party for me at a nearby restaurant. They got me some gifts, like plants and traditional Chinese decorations. When they sang “happy birthday,” the third line went “happy birth-day to yoo-ou!” without using my name. We also sang songs together and played games. They are a really sweet bunch of kids.

AmerTVican

There is so much to blog about that it keeps me from blogging. A list of funny and somewhat remarkable instances has grown in my notes amid paperwork, lesson plans, and tiny adventures throughout the city.

Some time ago now, the teachers convened to learn that we were expected to deliver lectures to incoming students, whose English is very limited, on American culture. It was up to us what we were to speak about, and my first lecture became an expose on American television.

Attending the lectures is voluntary and offered to first year students who, by the evening of each lecture, have spent the entire day from before the sun arises in mandatory military training.

It started out in tedium, with statistics on American viewership and a demonstration of tele-technology, that Americans watch up to 8 hours of TV a day assisted by the vast libraries and graphical interfaces of TiVo and On Demand. It wasn’t clear to me whether the students understood the demo videos I played, but what we both wanted was to watch the long list of clips I downloaded from YouTube earlier that afternoon (frantically, I should add, since I waited til the last minute.)

I structured the flow of the lecture to follow American television through a normal day of programming from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m.  The times aren’t precise, you’ll notice, as syndicated shows play at all times of the day, but the purpose was to give them an idea of how the shows are often concentrated in time blocks throughout the day.

At 7 a.m., the morning shows drill their way into the supple minds of the newly awoken American psyche. Al Roker’s big belly (let’s face it, he’s still a big guy) jiggled away as he picked apart the motives of the Hills couple who got kicked off that reality show in the jungle, the one with the evangelical Baldwin brother. I emphasized that the morning shows not only promote celebrities and deliver morning news headlines, but also highlight human-interest stories. The Good Morning America clip reported on a 12-year-old girl who had a sempiternal sneezing episode hilariously dubbed “machine gun sneezing.” Throughout the report, the mother sobbed, and the little girl sneezed. Twelve would be an awkward age to have such an affliction, if it is at all real, when kids are calling classmates boyfriend or girlfriend for the first time, but there is doubtlessly some kid with a Savior complex who’s hell bent on showing what a great guy he is by dating the weird machine gun girl.

At 8 a.m., the kids shows come on. I played a Barney clip of him singing,  “I love you, you love me.” The whole point of the lecture was to display the broadest range of the American televisory environment possible, but it still felt like an awkward, condescending minute-and-a-half of childishness. I couldn’t wait for the clip to end, imagining that if China had a Barney-type show, it would be a terrifying dragon instead of a lovable dinosaur.

Nobody had heard of Katy Perry, but a few had come across Sesame Street. I showed the controversial clip of Katy Perry chasing Elmo around singing an age-appropriate modification of “Hot and Cold.” They seemed to dig it, and I repeated the clip in several classes.

I spoke with Allison for quite a while one night about teaching English, based on her experience last year in Japan. She made me aware of the power I have to break up the doldrums of the typical college routine by jazzing up my students with an energy and enthusiasm forgone in most of their other classes. My English majors class is on Thursday morning, and I realized it could my prerogative to get them pumped up for the rest of their day. I decided to play an upbeat, popular American music video at the end of each class for the rest of the semester. Katy and Elmo’s “Hot and Cold” was the first in this series. Next up, “Single Ladies.”

Many Americans might leave for work at 9 a.m. looping “Hot and Cold” in their heads, charged up to face a hectic day, but the drunks stick around to catch the judge shows and get dragged right back down to the place that makes it okay for them to drink themselves back into oblivion once their hangover passes. My audience watched Judge Judy and Judge Milian of the People’s Court spank a few bottoms. (Did you know Judge Wapner is still around? He recently published his second book.). Make sure to watch the People’s Court clip, Milian really goes nutsoid on the defendant. Spoiler alert: he loses the case.

By 10 a.m., housewives have finished all their chores for the day (haven’t they?) and nestle down on the couch with a bag of Lays and a Diet Coke until its time to make dinner. This is when the banshees of the View descend (or ascend, I suppose, from Hell), and is also where all the backtalk to the Mister at dinnertime comes from.

DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE IS JUST A JOKE, AND A RESULT OF THE AUTHOR’S MASCULINE INSECURITIES, TACITLY AWARE OF WOMENS’ SUPERIORITY IN EVERY THINKABLE WAY. IT NEITHER DESCRIBES NOR REFLECTS THE OPINIONS OF SEANCAUFFIEL.WORDPRESS.COM, IT’S PARENT COMPANY SEANCAUFFIEL, OR IT’S SUBSIDARIES, OF WHICH THERE ARE NONE.

The View is often very political, and it’s a good bet to stay away from that in Chinese classrooms, even if it is not related to China. I’m very concerned about speaking of American politics and freedoms in a “this is what you don’t have” manner. I chose a clip with Taylor Swift discussing the Kanye West debacle, partly because of the lack of political content, and also because I know the students love to gawk at blonde haired, blue-eyed aliens.

11 a.m. rolls around and the drunks have woken up from their post Judge Judy nap just in time for the Maury Povich “you-are-not-the-father” freakshow. This is one of the clips (along with JJ) that the students would say they did not like at the end of the lecture. I warned them in advance that it was okay if they did not understand what the show’s guests were saying, because I did not understand much of it either. “WHAT YOU SAY!! I AIN’T NO MOTHA-BLEEEEP FATHA, SHE JUST A SLUT, SHE DONE A HUNDRED OF MY NI..BLEEP..AS!” Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to download Jerry Springer. Is that unfortunate?

It’s the afternoon now, and anyone who has time to watch TV at 1p.m. is probably dim enough to get involved in the familial affairs of the Spencers and the Quartermaines. (Admittedly, I had a summer like this in 1991.) I felt like the lecture stalled a bit with a very over dramatic face-slapping bitchfest between two superficially shrewish women of I-have-no-idea-what-random-clip-of-a-soap-opera I chose.

The unfiltered nature of live television pervades American culture everyday in scripted and hard-hitting happening-now car chase formats that both reflect our hunger for the unexpected and stresses our hearts with uncertainty. I demonstrated this with live CNN broadcasts of the oil rig disaster in April and of 9/11.  You’ll see in the 9/11 video that as the broadcast was running, the commentators were still speculating about the explosion “inside” the building of the North Tower, and then astonished at a second internal explosion of the South Tower. They could not see what the viewers witnessed, live video of the plane ramming the second building. I emphasized the fear and confusion of that day as scores of channels converted to continuous coverage of the slow leak of dubious reports about the disaster. I still get chills and feel deep sadness when I see the awful footage of the worst day in America since World War II. We lost many of the finest America has to offer that morning. News in progress, 2 p.m.

Despite its popularity, the 4 p.m. slot is hardly worth writing about. Oprah’s freakshow is less obvious than Maury’s, masked by a veneer of sociability, shared struggle, and globbed with celebrity worship. The obvious choice to show the students was the Tom Cruise Incident.

It should be obvious, but I learned something about American television while assembling this lecture that I’d never noticed so easily before: it is largely a series of news broadcasts with interludes of talk shows. Good Morning America and the other morning shows, trash talk, court, late night comedy, mid-afternoon Oprah, and four major 24 hour news outlets with local news satellites. I had to include an example of 7 p.m. evening cable news with Fox News maven Shepherd Smith in the line up. I again highlighted the live broadcast format; confuse us in the morning, scare us in the evening. But in a fair and balanced way.

My time allotment didn’t leave space for any cable TV. I mostly ignored the reality shows and premium movie channels.  I think broadcast TV still has a pretty firm grip on primetime programming, so I showed portions of my favorite shows (30Rock, House, How I Met Your Mother, The Office) and some that I despise (American Idol, Law & Order SVU, Wife Swap, and worst of all, the Big Bang Theory). I gave them a taste of the half hour comedies and typical police/medical dramas that run after 10 p.m.

I included in primetime TV Americans’ obsession with sports, showing MLB, NBA, and NFL games. Of course, they loved the NBA, but took the opportunity to chat aimlessly during the MLB and NFL clips. No one here knows anything about baseball or football. Some do not immediately understand the difference between “football” and “American football” because they have encountered it so infrequently.

There are only a few things worth covering at the end of the day (at least, those which are appropriate, i.e. no “Girls Gone Wild” commercials). I played clips from both David Letterman and Jay Leno. Both shows are less flashy and story based; with mostly dialogue and cheap satire, a lot of the jokes were over their heads. Finally, I ended at 3 a.m. with infomercials. Anyone who has flipped through channels after 1 a.m. in the U.S. has been marauded by the merciless OxyClean and ShamWOW ads. The OxyClean guy died young of a heart attack with cocaine in his system (is it hard to believe he’d been doing coke?) The second was attacked, clawed and bitten, by a hooker in Florida. I hope those ShamWOWs sop up blood.

As of publishing this, I’ve just completed by second lecture, titled A Day in the Life of the Average American. I emphasized that I am not the average American about whom I was speaking, but I based a lot of it on my family. My brother’s family in particular, but also my parents, friends’ families, work colleagues, etc. It didn’t seem to go over as well, and I wasn’t as energized for it as I was for the first one, but the audience loved it. The TV lecture was the first in the series for all the American teachers, and I was super disappointed that only 16 people showed up to a room of around 200 seats. I must have had 40 for A Day in the Life Of, and they asked questions for a good half hour.

I had a great time delivering both lectures, really, but I’m glad they are over. It really takes a lot of pressure off my time and schedule, and I can move on to some other things I’ve had waiting. It’s time for me to search for students to give private lessons to boost my income.

The Journey Was Long – Like, 1:47

I wanted to put this in the sidebar as a fixture of my blog, but WordPress doesn’t allow flash based widgets. This is an animation I put together for little other reason than to practice using some iMovie features I hadn’t used yet. It’s hardly blog worthy in and of itself, but perhaps it’ll make your day anyway.

The music is used without permission, as Baz Luhrmann and I are no longer speaking to each other, nor have we ever. The song is Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen. Go get it on iTunes, or tell’em I said to so no one will sue me.

The video is meant to be proportional to real-time, about 1 second per hour of travel, but some flights appear to move more rapidly than others. I think the “slower” flights are just less similar to the actual flight paths than the “faster flights.” I’m also not quite sure, even with titling, how the video ended up being 107 seconds, because I’m sure it didn’t take me that long to get here. But the trip was 2,246,400 seconds ago, so perhaps I have misremembered some details.

Where I be Livin’

I like my place, and hope you like it too.

This is the first time I’ve used iMovie 09, and it is a veritable piece of junk. I watched a demonstration from the Macworld Expo, delivered by the lead engineer of the overhaul from iMovie 06. He made everything seem so eaaaaaaaasy, but its slow (I’m on the lowest end Mac possible, though) and the interface is difficult to work with. Very basic improvements could make it a tad easier to use, but still more difficult and less intuitive than the old model. I will admit that titling is much easier and the video stabilization is a good new feature, but video editing is one of the primary reasons I went for Mac, and I feel like I should have the option to choose from the old or new versions.

There are a lot of weird cuts and transitions throughout the video, partly because I’m playing around with the program, partly because YouTube rejected my first video for being too long. I had to pare it down a minute-and-a-half.

I’m spending way too much time alone in my apartment, so I am very happy to have gotten my first request to meet a student. I didn’t come here to get away from anything or just hang out, I really want to help my students learn and improve their English. I’m willing to work quite a lot with them outside of class, and I hope that this student’s request is the beginning of a trend to take advantage of my willingness to invest a lot of time in my work.

He showed up around 4pm, and I have no idea how he knew where I lived.  Perhaps I should have taught him the word “stalker.” He didn’t bring up any particular reason he’d requested to meet with me, so we limped along in small talk. He told me where he was from, and of course I didn’t know where it was, so I pulled up Google Earth. He had never seen it before, but didn’t seem to think it was all that remarkable.

I insisted that I was hungry, so we went to the supermarket to get some food, which turned into an excursion up and down the main road running by campus. We checked out some grocery stores and back alley markets. In one market, there was butchered meat displayed in open air with no ice or refrigeration. He told me it wasn’t safe, which I had gathered. It smelled very much like KFC when meat fell behind fryers and was left  for the next shift to find and fish out hours later.

We stopped by his dorm briefly where a few of my other students lived. He told me that they have to pay 2 yuan every time they take a shower. I felt bad because I can stand under hot water for as long as I want to for free in my apartment. I just don’t know what to do to make this guilty feeling go away. Perhaps I’ll go take a steamy showe…. oh! Damn.

He called up some other students that didn’t live with him, and we all met for dinner at a restaurant just off campus. We had soup, chicken mixed with vegetables, fish, and french fries (some of the best I’ve ever had). We all had good conversation, and they were not shy. Tony (whose English is very good) told me he’d heard there was no law in America requiring citizens to pay taxes. I quickly corrected him. “No, no, no, no, no…. no…. no, nah huh.”

My class monitor Sweetie texted me to see if I was available Tuesday night. A group of students want to hang out, and apparently they have a “surprise waiting for me.” At first, I thought she meant they were getting me a provision, stock, or store of food or other things necessary for maintenance. But no, she definitely meant “surprise.”

KT993-1

Wowza, whats it like to walk into a college class with no training, armed with little more than some Toastmasters experience and a working knowledge of my native language? Its not half bad to tell you the troof. In the previous post, I described the receipt of schedules and text books, but I neglected to emphasize that there was no training involved, no orientation, or anything else you might expect in a new job. It was only incidental that I even met the other teachers.

Debbie and Billy have been incredibly helpful. They are my parents age, and at least as cordial. Billy is a retired computer programmer, or something of that nature, who closed his career a few years early to teach English in a more meaningful pursuit. He recently told me something to the effect of, “they pay you peanuts, but you’re really making opportunities for these kids.”

Debbie has a mannerism very much like my mother, even crotcheting during a meeting just yesterday. She spent a few hours of her own time preparing me for my first class. She gave tips on how to get the ball rolling on in-class lessons, advised me on the kinds of classes I would likely see (English majors are mostly girls, elective classes are mostly guys) and gave me an idea of what kinds of things these kids need to learn. Many of them have to take certification tests, and I need to steer the curriculum in that direction. Many of them also intend to be translators, so I need to make sure they know more than vocabulary and pronunciation, but also idiomatic and proverbial language and a thing or two about American culture.

As part of each lesson, I designed a “weekly,” which is one idiom, one proverb, and three to five vocabulary words. They tend to grasp the idioms and proverbs better than I expected.

I have a textbook to work from for my elective classes, but it turns out the English majors have completed the book they were to use this semester, so I get to write the curriculum, a la the “weekly” described immediately above. I have all kinds of ideas, all of which revolve around identifying specific holes in their understanding and expression of English when writing and speaking, while also engineering their English for American social and work environments.

For example, many of the students speak pretty good English, but even standing next to them, I can baaaaaarely hear them. After straining to hear many students on the first day, I finally said, to the speaker, “one second,” to the class, “class! I need you to speak up! SPEAK LOUDER!” I’m speaking as if they are 30 yards away. “Americans are loud and obnoxious, you must speak from here!,” cupping my mid-section, “use your diaphr…” they won’t know what that is, “your lungs! to speak very loudly, or you will not be able to communicate with Americans as well!”

It is somewhat inaccurate to put it that way. What I really want them to do is to speak more assertively. But on the spot, I thought that volume was the first step in that direction. Maybe we can deal with body language later and eye contact later.

It is easy to speak quietly when practicing a foreign language. Brian Tracy remarked in one of his books that the reason most people never even attempt to learn a second language is that they are scared of looking foolish. But many Chinese (Shining excluded) speak very softly even in their own language. When they speak English, they speak even more softly, and their very good pronunciation and not-so-bad word usage cannot come through. “Americans are loud and obnoxious! SPEAK UP!”

So one of the ideas I have in mind, and I actually want to do this next Thursday, is to split the class and have them line up in opposite corners of the room. Everyone will have a single sentence to read from a slip of paper that I have written before hand. (I can’t wait to come up with 36 unique sentences for this thing. Yikes.)  First in line in one corner of the room will the read the sentence out loud to the person on the other side of the room, and will repeat it until loud enough that the person on the opposite side of the room can hear it and repeat it exactly. Then each of those people will go to the back of their respective lines. They won’t learn in one sentence to speak more loudly and more clearly, but they’ll at least get an idea of what it feels like.

I also have some ideas for role playing, theatrical performances to practice expression and inflection, dialogue games, debate and discussion of abstract ideas, and several others. I don’t want them to merely speak English, I want them to communicate in English.

I’d been up all night so slept the afternoon away the day before my first class. In the early evening, there was some pounding on the door. I got up and pulled on a pair of shorts and shirt, and answered. Shining’s mother (Zhongguo Mama) and two aunts (Gugu and Jie jie) filled the landing with bags of groceries, including snacks, bread, jam, cookies, rolls with red bean paste, potato chips, and re gan mian, a local dish of noodles only found in Shiyan and Wuhan, translated “hot dry noodles.”

They all came in, and after the groceries were unloaded and placed on shelves, they wandered around inspecting my apartment. It was kind of funny. They wanted to make sure things weren’t falling apart. I don’t recall exactly what now, but they pointed out and asked about a few things. Of course, I responded with shrugged shoulders. We sat in the living room, and Gugu playfully harassed me as usual.

They continued to gaze around the apartment from their chairs and had brief discussions about one thing or another. They’re charming women, but yappy.

They tired of that and started talking to me. I could often pick up what was being spoken about when listening to Shining on the phone back in the States. “She said this…,” “I know,” “and this…,” “I heard,” “..and I just found out that…,” “oh… oh, no I didn’t catch that. Hahahaha.” It’s tougher over here, perhaps because of the greater breadth of conversation, but I can still understand some things. Zhongguo Mama spat out the time we were leaving for dinner. “Shuo de ti kuai le,” then laughter, and repeated, “shuo de ti kuai le (speak too fast),” until she said it slowly enough that I could understand “5:30.” My first thought was, “so, we’re all just going to sit here for an hour and half?”

I looked at my phone, and it was 5:15. Well, I had slept quite a bit, hadn’t I?

I was not ready to go out, still sleepy, but thought if I got ready and went out (and I didn’t have much choice anyway), I’d wake up and be fine. I was.

We went to the same restaurant as I’d gone just a few days earlier with the other teachers and office staff. It is housed in a 4 star hotel, and the food was very satisfying. A few days prior, most of the food was fairly Americanish, but I knew it would be straight up Chi-uh-nese this time. It was, and it was even better.

In my experience, when a large group of Chinese go out for dinner, there can be up to an hour or longer time span over which guests arrived. This time it was about a half hour, and because the ladies and I arrived first, we sat around the coffee table and drank tea. It is remarkable how easy it is to have a pleasant conversation with people who do not have a common language. We were not discussing the social disposition of rural Chinese women immigrants to urban industrial economic regions throughout the country, but nonetheless, a pleasant, however narrow, conversation. It elucidates how much communication exists in voice tone, eye contact, facial expression, body language, and gestures. I don’t want to exaggerate, though, it was mostly, “Whats this in Chinese…? Ah. In English? Sofa!… Sofa!…. Couch!” Laughter.

The man I would describe as my boss arrived last. Huang hired me and took care of all the paperwork. He speaks pretty good English, but he doesn’t always understand me. It was good to have him there. We sat next to each other at the table. “It is the place of honor, when seated at the side of the table farther from the door.” “Ah, really? I just like that I’m right in front of that air conditioner.” The room was pretty warm.

I don’t know the names of most of the foods we ate, but there were many vegetables, soup, fish, peanuts, mushrooms, shrimp, fruit, re gan mian, some kind of muffin things, and several other dishes. There was lively discussion, most of which was outside my understand, but Huang translated occasionally. A lot of what he translated were compliments to me. I wanted to compliment these wonderful people back, but I’ve always felt awkward complimenting people immediately in return, because it seems to compromise sincerity, so I was gracious and thanked them.

At one point, we had a brief discussion about banned literature in the 1960′s. From underground outlets like friends and relatives, Shining’s dad had read many Western classics when he was young. He particularly liked Hemingway and (I will never understand how so many Chinese have gotten a hold of this book) Gone with the Wind. Whenever it comes up, I remark that that book was written where I’m from, and the house in which it was authored still stands just a mile from my apartment. No one ever seems to understand when I say so. The conversation moved to Chinese literature, and it was insisted that there are 3 Chinese books one must read to fully understand the culture. One was “Three Kingdoms.” The second, I do not recall. The third, they did not recall.

The re gan mian came in a gigantic bowl after everyone had finished eating, but we all stuffed a little bit more into our bellies. Dinner ended, and they packaged up and gave most of the leftovers to me. Shining’s parents dropped Huang and I back on campus. “Xiexie, zaijian!” “Zaijian!”

—————————————————————————————————-

It was 10:30 and I was exhausted again. I hadn’t really prepared for class at all, but I thought I could sleep most of the night, get up a few hours before class, and have plenty of time to build a Powerpoint with an introduction, grading criteria, class structure, etc. I got up a little later than I wanted to, but I had plenty of time to make a very good Powerpoint. I only ran out of time to include pictures, but I have all semester to show them pictures.

Abraham from the English department was supposed to assign a student to take me to my first classes because I didn’t know my way around campus. I’d told Huang the night before at dinner that no one had been assigned to me, so he met me 20 minutes before class time and took me to my room himself. Walking to the building, my mouth was bone dry, but we were already bee lining for the building, and I didn’t want to stop him while I bought a bottle of water. I’d just have to deal with it. He pointed out buildings and rattled off the building numbers, which I would never remember the first time.

We scaled 6 floors of stairs, exacerbating my dry mouth and throat, and reminding me how out of shape I’ve grown. “Whats up, everybody!” There were a few light gasps as I walked in before the class. I think up to that point, almost all of their English teachers were Chinese who spoke English as a second language. I knew they’d all had either Debbie or Billy the year before, but certainly never a young American guy (who they seem to think is much closer in age to them than I really am.)

We had trouble getting the computer set up, and once we did, my Powerpoint was in 2007 format and wouldn’t open. I am smart enough to have brought my laptop, however, so pulled it out and woke it up. More gasping. I guess most professors don’t carry around laptops. I changed the format of the Powerpoint and plugged my hard drive into the classroom computer.

I started by introducing myself. I hadn’t had time to put in pictures or even a map of the U.S., so my first slide was mostly blank, with the words “Who am I?” at the top. I thought this would let me eat up time, because its easy to ramble about yourself, and I could avoid ending the class early. My biggest fear was running out of PowerPoint slides and not having anything left to do with 40 minutes of class left to go. (I’ve had 5 classes now, and I don’t run out of me, I run out of time. Filling two 45 minute sessions is much easier than I ever thought it would be.)

I spoke about myself for about 30 seconds. I didn’t look at anyone as I was speaking. I ran out of things to say. I had this glut of blank mindedness, doubt that they could understand “marathon” and “business economics” and “diabetes research,” if anything else at all, and I was just plain damn nervous.

I wasn’t perfect thereafter, but I hit as much of a stride I as I would hit all class on the very next slide. I relaxed more, but was still uncomfortable with whether I was speaking too loud, whether I had good posture, whether I was interesting, and mostly whether I was speaking sslloowwllyy enough. But I kept the common public speaker angst in check, and I felt mostly fine. After class, I would feel pretty damn good. Even a little elated.

I ran through the slides, and then got to my time killer. But it was also the most productive part of the class. I asked each person to come up, one by one, and answer a list of questions. Basic stuff, like “Tell us about your family” and “Where have you traveled?” Things they had probably practiced in previous courses. I told them repeatedly over the course of the class that they didn’t have to answer all of the questions, but they continued to answer every one, and, despite the time constraint, I let it go.

The exercise was more for me than for them. I wanted to access three things: 1) I wanted to hear how well they could speak. 2) I wanted to see how well they comprehend, for which I interrupted them to ask questions based on what they said about themselves, and 3) I wanted to learn some things about them.

Some things I didn’t expect but maybe should have were that most of them had not traveled. Many of them were from small villages in Hubei, and they had never been outside their home province. A handful had been to other cities in China, and only one had walked on non-Chinese ground, in Thailand and Singapore. Also, in spite of the one-child policy, many of them had siblings. The one-child policy is not strictly enforced outside of major population centers.

As I was speaking about earlier, I encouraged students to speak louder, and most of them would repeat themselves at no greater volume. So, I just kept increasing the volume of my voice, sort of making a target for them, or at least raising the bar so that even if they spoke much more softly than me, it might be much more softly than me and at a normal speaking volume.

So, poor girl, the 8th or so student came up to the front, and turning to take her place across me she had her back to me, and I accidentally shouted “HEY, WHAT’S UP!!!” and she cowered down and ran back to her seat. She hadn’t taken more than a few steps before I figured out that I scared her, and I was saying “No no no no no! Come back, I was just saying hi! Just saying…” but she continued all the way back and took her seat again before she understood that I was only saying “hi” obnoxiously loud. She was giggling, and came back up. I apologized, smiling, and she spoke about herself.

A few minutes later, I saw a girl all the way in the back typing on something. It looked like a cell phone, and I didn’t want to do it, but I thought as the professor I ought to: I said “hey.. you, right there,” pointing, her head down, “you… you… you, right there, can you? get her attention?” No one seemed to understand I was trying to talk to her, or at least, thought looking confused was better than taking action to get her to look up. After quite a few tries, she peered up slightly, then bolted up into a solider’s “at attention” posture, eyes slightly raised, chest out, arms rigid at her sides. I was a little stunned, she looked like she was ready for me to smack her, or at least shout her down and humiliate her.

Shining has told me about growing up in Chinese schools. It sounds like The Wall. Teachers habitually verbally abuse the students. They yell at students, and will often advertise who got the lowest grades on a test before telling them they’re worthless and stupid in front of everyone. Teachers are more respected in Chinese culture than doctors by convention, but that kind of teacher-student relationship is still the status quo.

“Could you not use your cell phone in class?” I honestly didn’t even care. “Its a dcty.” “What?” A few other students with her, “Its a dictionary!” Oh. “Oh, ok. Sorry, you’re ok. You can… can sit down. Sorry.” I wanted to go over to her and give her some big apology. I felt bad. Later, after break, one kid came back about 1 minute after the bell. He asked for permission to come into the room. “Sure, just come on in, whatever.” These poor kids expect me to abuse them.

This submission to pedagogues came out also, in my opinion, in some students overly formal address. Two or three, when beginning to speak about themselves, started off by saying “Teacher, we welcome you to China, and hope that you are very happy here. Thank you for being our teacher, and welcome to our country.” Perhaps they were just being nice, but it sounded so official. I won’t lie, I appreciated it. It was nice of them to say.

At the other end of the spectrum, I felt like I came off as kind of a jerk. I was instinctively combative on some very serious issues with people I had just met. “Oh, really? Well, I HATE rap music. Does anyone here really listen to rap music?” “Seriously? You like Carrie?? Reeeally? What about Samantha? YOU DON’T LIKE SAMANTHA? Oh, well, ok, I like Charlotte, too.” (That second one was prefaced by, “Yeah, I saw that. My girlfriend dragged me to it when it came out.” She didn’t really drag me to it, though. I was down. But dudes can’t tell roomfuls of strangers that they like Sex and the City.)

Some of the kids have funny English names. Chinese first names are often actual words. I could be wrong, but it seems to be similar to the way Native Americans have names like Running Bull and While Cloud. So, they like to choose English words they like as their name instead of an actual name. In other classes, I have a Fun, a Dazzle, and a Cherry. Among my English majors, I have a Beer. This guy was a smart ass loudmouth during the first class, but I actually really like him. When he came up to speak, the first think he said was, “I am Beer, and IIII looove America!” and pumped his fist. Another girl said, “My name is Pantene.” I asked her to repeat it, because it sounded like she said the name of the shampoo. “I am Pantene. Maybe you use it. Shampoo.” Oh. And finally, my class monitor introduced herself to me. The monitor is somewhat like a TA. “Hi, I am Sweetie.” I had to ask her to repeat it too. “Sweetie.” So, now, since I have to refer to her for problems, being my class monitor as she is, I find myself saying, “hey, Sweetie,” all the time. I feel like alky creep in a diner at 4 am talking to a gum smacking waitress. “Get me some pancakes.”

During break, Beer came up to the desk and stuck his cell phone in my face. He wanted to take my picture. I complied, gave about as compliant an awkward smile as I could, and he went back to his seat. Then I noticed that he gave it to the girl next to him. I said, “Whoa, whoa, is that your phone?? Why did you ask him to take it?” I knew I was embarrassing her. As many questions as I ask the class throughout the lecture with no one comfortable with speaking up, they were all happy to say, “She’s shy! She’s shy!”

After class, Winnie (yes, she named herself after Winnie the Pooh) and Pantene walked out about the same time as me. I asked if I did alright, if the class went ok. Winnie said I was speaking too fast. I asked many times throughout class if I was speaking too fast, and NO ONE would tell me. No one wanted to be the one who thought I was speaking to fast. I assumed they would tell me when I asked, but what the hell? I was in school less than six months ago, and even college seniors will not speak up to say they don’t understand something in class. Winnie told me she and Pantene thought I was handsome.  Aww.

I went back to my apartment, like I said before, a little elated.

Music and Schedules

I’m struggling to blog right now, as I’ve been working so much the past 2 weeks on my computer that my fingers and wrists and arms and elbows and legs ache. Even though I’ve spent almost all my time in the safety of my apartment up to now (I just have to get things right here before I venture outside), I have a tremendous amount to blog about, more than I may ever get to before moving on.

Spending all my time inside, I’ve made rounds on old music many times over, tracks I’d forgotten or never knew I had. On my PC, my music was always tucked away in a million folders, and it was easy to never think about what never came to mind when building playlists in WinAmp, but in iTunes, music just keeps popping up out of nowhere. Shining and I had fun listening to Yellow Fever, a Bloodhound Gang song that encompasses every offensive Asian stereotype short of bad driving in the crudest language possible. Other songs pop up, taking me back to the periods of my life during which I listened to them most. I still remember the lyrics without having to think about them, and still sing the wrong lyrics in my head in all the same places.

On the second day of corporate finance, three years ago, I opened my laptop, and out came blasting Smashing Pumpkins, the last thing that was playing before I put the computer to sleep on my way out the door that morning.

I used to oxidize rat fecal samples and isolate tissues from porcine heart stents to Frank Zappa and Lovage. I listened to a lot of Mindless Self Indulgence in the weeks after Josh Murphy died, working all day in a yellow room to find the outside world slightly blue for several minutes after emerging from completing experiments.

Nirvana takes me all the way back to middle school before I knew I liked music. I remember playing the cassette tape of Nevermind in my bedroom on a sunny afternoon in Cincinnati in 1994, shortly after Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. Territorial Pissings was the first of a long string of noise laced, amelodic music that would undergird my music collection over the next ten years.

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Chinese do not use clothes driers. I have to hang my clothing outside to dry, which is fine because I used to do that with some of my clothes on a regular basis anyway. What I’ve noticed, though, is that I now find lint all over my body at the end of the day.

I haven’t seen the lady at the shop in the past several days. There has been another man there lately, who I saw once before with her. I wonder what she’s up to. This man is not nearly as good at selling me cup noodles as she was. I love the orange juice here. It’s very pulpy.

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I was late for the first of one meeting of teachers on the first floor. I was told repeatedly it was at 3:30pm, but apparently it started at 3. I entered in the middle of a discussion about the unfairness of the schedule, because a few classes had been scheduled for Saturday. I’ve worked most weekends for long stretches in both of my last two jobs. Teaching for two hours on a Saturday afternoon for only 7 of the 20 week semester didn’t seem significant to me. But the others, especially the girls, were insistent that there was no way they were going to work weekends.

The administration was in a bind because students had already registered for those classes, but our contracts specifically stipulate that we are not required to work weekends. They really tried to reason the others into accepting Saturday classes, but they didn’t get very far. They suggested that they would have to talk to every individual student to avoid rescheduling the Saturday classes to a time those students already had another class during the week. Huang took me aside after a few minutes and asked me if I would be willing to teach the Saturday class, and I said fine, but it turned out there was more than one. I was already scheduled for one of those. I really didn’t want to do more than one.

They eventually decided to force the schedule change and moved the Saturday classes to Wednesday. I think that probably works for everyone. It was the administration’s fault for scheduling the classes that way, and they corrected as they should have. I had a problem with two elements of the situation: 1) one of the girls had such a bad, insulting attitude during the conversation, which I saw immediately. In fact, she has had an attitude about a number of things since we arrived, and it really gets on my nerves. 2) Whatever happened to working hard and making yourself available to your employer a least a little above and beyond their expectations? Both sides seemed at fault to me, and everyone should have been able to cooperate a little better. Chinese are notoriously disorganized, which is fine. You just have to go with the flow and keep your cool. They put on the Olympics afterall. Give them a break!

One last thing, these schedules are crazy. Its not nearly so straightforward as U.S. college class schedules. The semesters are 20 weeks long, and many of the courses are only 7 or 10 weeks long, so you start and finish them mid-semester. My schedule changes every several weeks. Study the photo above. Another odd thing is that the infrastructure is not completely modernized. I heard many dorms do not have glass on the windows. They are open air. The climate is very similar to Atlanta, and it gets cold in the winter, so these kids have bundle up full time in a few months. Compared to that, my place is a luxury apartment, which you all will see soon.

Next blog will tell the story of a wonderful dinner earlier this week and my very first class the following morning. Tune in again soon!