Having Fun All The Time

This morning was cooking western food day in my classes; it was the last full-class meeting for both of my 50-student classes, so earlier this week I went to the second-biggest city in the province, Xiamen, to buy some taco shells and hot sauce and cheese and to do some sightseeing, and then I came back two nights ago with a long list of things to do (prepare for family to arrive in China, finish final exams, rehearse for yet another singing performance, find students for the English class I want to teach this summer, and make tacos with 100 students).

Yesterday I ran around all day doing these various tasks, and as I was about to go out shopping for tomatoes and chicken for the tacos one of my students reminded me that she had invited me to go out to a big fish dinner that night with some of the other teachers from our department.

So I wrote out a list for some other students to go shopping and gave them some cash and went out with the teachers to a big meal of steaming bowls of fish soup and lots of beer.

I could tell right away, as soon as we started eating, that the students were planning on getting me unconscionably drunk. The restaurant was one of the small classic gritty ones with peeling gold paisly-textured wallpaper and a cigarette-smoke-stained ceiling, chairs that wobbled when you moved and a big round table with a sort-of lazy Susan glass platform in the center. Immediately one of the tougher female students (these were the students from my adult training class, all about 28-40 years old) started toasting me and making me down shots of beer. In the first 20 minutes I probably drank the equivalent of four beers. Needless to say, by the time midnight rolled around and we called a cab to return back to school, I could hardly keep my eyes open and my Chinese had become completely incomprehensible.

I came back to the school with three other students, seated in the cab with 20 pounds of chicken, 30 pounds of tomatoes, a hot plate-like cooker and pots and pans and stuff in bags and boxes on our laps. All of us pretty much drunk (I must say that I do not particularly enjoy these overdrinking experiences, but they seem for the most part harmless and certainly make the dining experiences lively). Our class started at 8 a.m. the next morning, and I still wasn’t clear how we were going to cook the chicken and prepare everything.

Of course, when I woke up in the morning at 6 o’clock, none of those things had become more clear. Also it was dumping down rain outside, and my apartment is a 10 minute walk from the teaching building. And I had to carry a big cardboard box of food and a big electric cooker to the classroom.

So I showered and carried the box of stuff there, and then waited for the first few students to arrive. They brought the chicken and explained that they could chop it up into small pieces, ala the classes Chinese dish gong bao ji ding (cubed deep-fried chicken), and then fry it with the chili powder I had brought. That sounded like a good idea, so I told them they could start and then headed back for my cooker.

But, in my still-dazed state, I forgot my keys when I left the classroom, so I walked all the way back to my apartment in the rain, hiding under my umbrella but still getting soaked in the downpour, and then when I got to my apartment realized I had no keys and decided that the only option was to kick in my door, Jean Claude Van Dame-style.

At first this idea seemed stupid, but after a couple of hard kicks I realized it was fun, and on my third kick I had it. I kicked the hell out of the door and the lock broke off the door frame and the door flew open. I grabbed the cooker and dashed back out into the rain, then dropped the cooker in the rain as I tried to open my umbrella, then got it all organized finally and got to class.

So by now I am completely soaked, hungover, tired, and still have to figure out how to make some kind of sort-of western food with my classes.

But here is where my fawning ode the the efficiency and organizational skills of my students comes in. By the time I got back to my classroom they had organized the desks into little work stations and were dicing tomatoes and pre-boiling chicken in the first cooker. In about 30 minutes with a bit of instruction the students had prepared a huge bowl of fresh salsa (tomatoes, green chili peppers, diced onion, sugar, lemon juice), and deep fried/stir fried the chicken in little cubes with onion and peppers and chili powder. We cut up some cheese and olives I had bought in Xiamen and I showed them how to put the tacos together.

The students were pretty consistently refering to the salsa as “salad” in Chinese so at this point I basically explained that they should put the deep-fried chicken on the bottom, and the salad on top, and then chow down. I told them they could try some cheese if they wanted, but when they ate the cheese most of them exclaimed “bu hao chi!”, which basically means “tastes bad!” even though it was real cheddar and mozzarella from the U.S. and tasted good to me. So we just ate tacos with Chinese deep-fried chicken and salsa on top, and to me it was decent, if not good (the taco shells were meant to be heated up in an oven, so they were kind of bland and too chewy).

The thing I forgot to consider was that tacos are inevitably messy, and become messier when you are eating stir/deep-fried chicken that is dripping with grease, and become still messier when you have no plates or napkins. So instantly the floor of the small classroom, with 50 students all eating grease-bomb tacos, was coated in oil and tomato and fried chicken.

I should add here that in the couple of weeks leading up to this little cooking event, my students pretty regularly asked me when we were going to cook pizza/hamburgers. They asked me this even after I explained that we were eating neither pizza nor hamburgers, but something called tacos which is a kind of Mexican food. The students, after hearing this explanation, inevitably continued to call our upcoming food either pizza or hamburgers, having no frame of reference to imagine what this taco thing might be. Last night, though, on the way to dinner, I did overhear one student saying to someone else on the phone that it wasn’t pizza, or hamburgers, but something like that.

Up until today I used to find that a little annoying — peoples’ inability to imagine that American food consists of anything other than pizza or hamburgers or fast food. But this morning before class I guess I just understood it a bit better. There is just no way for them to get that it’s not either of those things. It’s like snails: in English we have one word for snails, and that is “snails”. But in Chinese cuisine there are a ton of different kinds of snails, and none of them are called the word “snail”. The word “snail” exists in Chinese, but nobody eats “snails”. Snails live outside and you find them on the ground. The things you eat are not snails. If you say, I ate “snails” (wo1niu2) for lunch today, a Chinese person will look at you with shock and explain that that is impossible, even if you ate snails with them. This is so complicated and abstruse that even I barely understand it. It would be ridiculous to expect that an average American who had never gone to China would know anything about this — likewise with Chinese perceptions of American food.

OK, so we made the tacos, the students were amazing, they cooked and diced and boiled and fried, and I was amazed to find that, even though I heard plenty of “it tastes really bad!” throughout, at the end of both my classes everything was eaten up. In the second class, in particular, probably because it was closer to lunchtime, the students ate all 6-7 pounds of chicken and 6-7 pounds of tomato in less than 10 minutes. And they ate most of the cheese, too.

At noontime when the classes were over it had stopped raining and four of my students helped me carry everything back to my apartment, and on the way one of the training students asked a student from my younger class if she liked the food. My student’s response was, in Chinese, “it was so-so…it’s just that we’re not used to eating it”. This was great — the kind of response I was hoping for. It means not necessarily that the food was bad but that it was different enough from their past experience to actually kind of be Western food. The tacos weren’t good, and the chicken was kind-of Chinese (even though there was no soy sauce in it), but they were Western.

And, as a bonus, when we were near my building, the same student told me, in English, and out-of-the-blue, without my asking anything about the class: “I like the Western style of teaching. I feel that in the Chinese education system our classes are too boring. But in the Western system the teachers do more interesting things, and then the students can learn more outside of class.”

I laughed and asked her if that meant she liked my class.

“Yes, of course,” she said. And then she added: “It’s not like our other classes. In our other classes, we are always preparing for tests. We have too many tests.”

This reminded me of the CET-6, which I blogged about last semester and which she then told me the students would all be taking again tomorrow afternoon. This particular student had failed the CET-6 last semester (along with virtually all the others in the class) and was no doubt facing pressures from all directions to pass it this time.

The students handed my stuff to me when we got to my place, gawking at the smashed door lock and peeking curiously into my place, and then I wished them luck in tomorrow’s tests and they headed off to lunch.

Finally I got a chance to rest a little after last night’s excitement, and actually I opted to write this post. In ten minutes I’m off to give a few spoken English exams and then in the afternoon I’m headed to the city to hand out flyers for this summer’s class and buy World Expo tickets for my family.

I realized that with every month that passes in China I become slightly more poor; my $600 per month salary is just about $100-200 too small to sustain my student loans back home and my perhaps slightly too spendy lifestyle here. So I am taking little bites out of the I saved in Portland before I came out here. So wish me luck with finding students for that summer private English class.

Or some kind of magical falling-from-the-sky kind of luck with fiction writing. My latest and I thought best yet story that I submitted to about 10 journals earlier this year has been rejected from all but 3.  : )   But there are still those 3.

It is so hot in Fujian right now you could fry an egg on my sunburned back.

It is hot enough to melt the flip flops to your feet.

Then again, it is June, which is officially a summer month, I guess. It’s hard to believe I have been here for just a few days shy of seven months, but anyway.

I am shortly about to venture out to town with a couple of students to try and find some “Western” ingredients so that we can make tacos in class next week. Which I am excited about. The students always ask me what I used to eat in America, and I invariably have to answer Mexican food, because that was the staple of my diet (after mac and cheese, which they would hate anyway because of the cheese part).

I went to the supermarket by myself last weekend to scope out the food options and found some diced beef and “cheese” that tasted like cream cheese mixed with butter mixed with flavorless gelatin. So cheese is out. But I’m hoping that with luck we’ll be able to find the necessary ingredients for taco shells and salsa, and then we can fry up some chicken or beef and make approximations of tacos.

Things have progressed pretty well the last month or so, despite the lack of posts. I got my residence permit and reimbursement for the Hong Kong trip and an offer to stay indefinitely. Which is cool. I tried to get a new apartment on campus but found that all the other apartments are about in the same shape that mine is in, and when I asked if the newest building we looked at also had rats, I received the reply that every building has rats, with a chuckle. Luckily I have gotten used to them, and they haven’t been in my apartment nearly as much the last few months (mainly because I stopped leaving the screened window open at night, which somehow they were coming in through, although I’ve no idea how).

Next week I’m giving final exams and then family is arriving for a two-week tour of the country. We’re going to get out and explore Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Yangshuo, which is supposed to be one of the nicest and most fun tourist destinations in China.

And I think I am gradually fumbling my way towards being marginally conversational in Chinese. There is still a ton of work to do, but that part of life is always interesting and exciting as it progresses.

This summer a friend and I are gonna try to teach private English classes and that will hopefully bring in enough bread to at least cover my student loan costs for the next year, if it goes really well. If it doesn’t go well, I’m thinking that it will at least be a good experiment in trying to work independently here.

And I met an American who’s been living in this town for three years, volunteering at an orphanage that is somehow linked to his church back home. He’s my age and certainly seems to be doing good work here, so next week I’m going to go to the village where he works and hang out with some kids.

More later. Off to buy taco stuff.

This week a friend of a friend, whom I had never met (the friend of the friend), came to visit me from a huge city (Guangzhou) several hundred miles west of here where she also teaches English.

The trip was a little slapdash. She had a few days off and took the sleeper bus here from Guangzhou, arriving on Monday morning, and had about two and a half days to stay here and see Fujian.

The idea, before she arrived, was to travel down to Xiamen, about five hours away by bus, to spend some time there and see the sights. But when I realized she wouldn’t get here until 6 a.m. Monday morning I backed off that plan a little, thinking it would be too rushed to cram in a trip to another city in Fujian if she wanted to see any of my base city.

It turned out that we managed to get to Xiamen and see my city at the same time, a feat which involved hiking around here for one day and taking a cruise around on the backs of some motorcycle taxis, and then the next day rising fairly early and deciding to go to Xiamen anyway, even though we couldn’t stay in a hotel there because neither of us had our passports with us.

It was fun, if tiring. Monday was tomb-sweeping day in China, a holiday for honoring the dead by visiting their tombs  in the mountains and lighting small fires by them and burning incense with family. So we swung out of town and started up a country road that my professor, when he was still here last month, had shown me, and walked a few miles into the country. We saw lots of tombs untouched, and then a few with families milling around, burning incense and I think eating. We climbed up a hill and saw a tomb up close and, next to it, another under construction.

The tombs are sort of scattered around the evergreen-and-bamboo forested mountains of Fujian, oval shaped, made of gray and red stone and brick, resembling a female oraface or a bisected papaya. The mountains in Fujian are pretty and misty and lush-looking, resembling in shape and size the Green Mountains in Vermont where I lived for five years in college. They look prime for skiing to my native Northerner’s eye, but as far as I know snow falls here only once a decade or less. Once you put the city behind you walking on those roads, it would be easy to forget about the large, clogged city you left behind if not for the smog that still lingers in the air even miles away.

We came back to town after an afternoon in the hills, walking on the way back past the enormous steel mill in this city that has essentially swallowed whatever town was there before. There are small residential streets where people still make a life as the ten-foot-wide blue dump trucks from the steel mill rumble by all day, leaving behind trails of exhaust and dust, and whatever industry churns inside the blue steel walls of the factory that stands above the small houses.

Then we ate and considered watching a movie and then went home instead. We were both tired from the walk and planned to go to Golden Lake the next day. But when I woke up rain was dumping down and I realized that anything we did would have to be indoors. There being nothing to do indoors in my city, I proposed that we catch a bus to Xiamen and see what we could in an afternoon. If we had to be sitting around inside all day, at least we would be moving.

This made me feel better after waking up and seeing the rain. We went downtown and bought tickets for a bus leaving ten minutes later and hopped on board. That was at 11 a.m., and I figured that at least we would be there by four and would be able to see some of the city, no matter how early we had to come back. I was exicted. I’ve lived close to Xiamen for more than five months now and haven’t really seen any of it except the bus station, and I knew I would be satisfied to get just a taste of it.

I felt that way for the first three hours of the trip, buzzed because of hopping on a bus with no set plan for return, and then I started looking out the window. Long stretches of tumbling, slanting mountains drifted by at first, interrupted only by 30-second stretches of darkness as we passed under mountains. Then the mountains began to flatten and the air thickened. It looked almost like twilight, even though it was only two o’clock. The air was thick with smog and occasional rain, and we began to see factories, but not just factories — huge industrial compounds of factories, whole towns made into factories or factories made into towns. Many seemed to be oriented towards stone mining or refining and furniture manufacture. It was one of those moments when you don’t willingly step back, but feel shoved back to marvel at the vastness of production that our world requires, and the system that allows it to exist thusly — the size of those factories that produce towels, desks, chairs, stone steps, whatever, that no doubt find themselves post-production scattered all across the world, used by every kind of person, all manufactured in this little vein of mountainous land between here and there.

Once, around three in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a town going by — smoke rising from the factories, the factories seeming to be all there was of the town, the air thick and twilightish, a long row of maybe 1,000 middle-school students walking along the side of the main road in front of a factory in their nylon school uniforms, returning home, probably, from school, in the middle of all this.

Then it started to rain harder and the traffic on the highway stopped for maybe an hour. Just stopped, no explanation, no idea of what was ahead of us. People got off the bus to socialize and smoke cigarettes on the road. Somebody lit one on the bus. It seemed to be getting later more quickly. I wondered if going all this way had been a good idea, and thought about my classes the next morning.

Eventually the traffic cleared up and we passed by the scene of the accident. Most of the debris and all of the victims appeared to have been cleared away. What was left were five or six cars piled together inside a tunnel and pushed to the side of the road to let traffic through. The bus picked up speed and a half hour later we were inside Xiamen and it was raining hard and 5:30 p.m. We hailed a cab to the bus station and got train tickets back for 10:30. This gave us about four hours to explore, and we went to Gulangyu (a small island just across from the city that was British-settled a century-or-so ago) and walked around for a while, ate, bought a souvenir, and went back to the train station.

We had hard sleepers, which turned out to be comfortable enough, but for some reason I couldn’t sleep. My visitor-traveling companion spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend and I put on my headphones and turned the music all the way up. I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, feeling lonely and worried about being awake to get off the train when it arrived back home. An old man, who I had been a little rude to when we got on the train (he had told us we had the wrong bunks and I had insisted he was wrong, until, of course, I realized he was right — I still can’t really read Chinese) had told me that we would arrive around 6 a.m. but I didn’t know how we would know.

It turned out to be not a problem. The train steward woke us up at six and swapped out our tickets and fifteen minutes later, as I stood on the smoker train looking out the window, I saw the first signs of my home town out the window; I knew we’d be there in about five minutes.

I felt fine after we got off the train. That had been my first real trip in China where my Chinese skills had been sufficient enough to handle all the stuff involved with booking tickets, finding sightseeing stuff, buying food and other necessities, talking to cab drivers. But it wasn’t just that. The morning had one of those feelings that you get when you have been moving for a while, when you’re dead tired but not ready to sleep. There were a few people riding by on bicycles this early, dressed in ponchos and boots for the rain, but still not many people on the street. We hailed a cab and went home and I showered and spent a couple hours preparing for class and then slept for ten minutes.

For my afternoon class my friend came and actually taught the class a tongue twister, and they were amazed to meet another foreigner and, as always, incredibly warm and excited and eager to learn. It was really fun, and it was really nice to see someone else’s teaching stlye, to get some new ideas and to get some tips and constructive critiques of my teaching. I got off class and my friend packed her bags and got ready to go. We caught the bus to the bus station, grabbed some Lanzhou noodles to go and I saw her off on the train platform.

Before she left, we sat in the waiting room and watched Chinese Informercials for skin whitening creams and laughed and made fun of the T.V. It was fun, and I learned a lot just in three days about what it is like to be a foreigner in a major city (Guangzhou, where she teaches, is huge, and there are a ton of foreigners there — it was interesting to hear about her experience and how different it has been from mine; she makes more than twice the money, for instance, is not nearly such a spectacle to the locals and has a lot of foreigner friends and, as previously mentioned, a foreigner beau), but as we waited for the train I didn’t really feel like eating and I couldn’t stop feeling surprised at how much I felt I was going to miss this person who I hadn’t even known three days before.

This was a repeat of the experience I had a month previously, when a professor  and friend from my undergrad college stayed here for a month and I spent some time with him almost every day. Seeing this place through both of their eyes definitely changed it for me, and also made me realize that in the day-to-day, when I am here, even if I am not actively missing home or the people I know and love back there, there is a lot I am missing.

So, I walked out of the train station after she left and headed back outside. It was getting darker again and the rain was settling down now; the streets were wet but it was barely drizzling on my neck. I sat on a bench for a while and thought about it, about what it means to go somewhere and then come back, to do things that you do just because you want to, not because you know how they will end up or what they will mean.

Then I got on the bus and came back home, one foot after the other, happy and surprised like always, but also sad again to see someone go.

I was just walking home from dinner and I overheard one of the most common forms of greeting in Chinese, only this time it was a little different.

The question, in its full-sentence form, would be, “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

This time, though, it was just “Chi fan le”, which, directly translated, means, “Eaten dinner.” (I’m pretty sure it was a greeting, not a response to above greeting.) Not exactly a question, or a statement, just a few words thrown together which, in context, have an obvious intent.

Lots of Chinese phrases are like this – if you took them out of context, or if you knew only the vocabulary but not the everyday speaking habits, getting along in China would be totally bewildering. Well, more bewildering than it is in the first place, anyway.

So it got me thinking. Speaking hones a language down to its barest elements. It simplifies statements or questions that, when written, become overly structured and laden with grammar, but when spoken, are simple, elegant, bearing only the necessary elements.

One of the first things I realized when I stepped into the classroom here to teach English was that I would have to make a choice between teaching the grammatically correct form of the language or teaching it how it is spoken. For example, when teaching students how to express a desire for me to repeat something – something they often, surprisingly, didn’t know how to say (they had always said it in Chinese to their English teachers, when they had to), I started to think: should I teach them the grammatically correct sentence we would use to express this? – “Could you please repeat that?” or “Could you please say that once more?” – or should I teach them something natural, i.e. something we would actually say in English, like the phrase “Come again?”

The problem is that for most English speakers, these kind of slangy, natural expressions arise from almost nowhere. They’re not something we ever study while we are in school (standard language classes in formal education pretty much exclusively focus on grammar, writing, the formal word, and completely ignore all the brilliant little idiosyncracies of speech, except maybe for linguistics classes in college, I guess) but those idiosyncracies are, in a sense, the heart and soul of a language. They are the way we communicate, the way we express ourselves when we are working with others, sharing ideas, problem solving, arbitrating the problems and solutions of our work, school, and whatever lives, but they are totally (as far as I can tell based on my conscious awareness of them and the active mental catalog I had of them when I came here to teach) ignored.

Let me give you an example of an idioscyntratic phrase that is pretty popular in English, and that you will have heard a bunch of times if you’re a fan of the T.V. show “The Wire”.

The example is this: “That’s on me” or “That’s on him/her”

This is a simple expression that would have absolutely no meaning at all to a Chinese mid-level learner of English. To a native speaker, especially when heard in context, the statement obviously has to do with assigning a person who bears the blame/burden for a particular blunder or responsibility. But for someone who is learning/has learned English, it could only possibly mean that something is “on” someone. Like a ketchup stain or a pouncing dog. More likely, it’s just going to look like a meaningless line: article, preposition, pronoun. Wha?

Let me give you another example. Early on in my time here, when I had already started teaching, some students helped me sign up for the Chinese chat client QQ. As I mentioned in my previous post, QQ is the ubiqitous MSN-messenger-like chat client in China. But also, since this is China, everybody’s handle, or identifying name on the service, is in Chinese. Which means I rarely knew, in the beginning, who was messaging me. So, of course, one of the first time I got a message from someone on QQ (probably a “hello” or a smiley face; those are pretty run-of-the-mill), I responded, quite innocently, “Who is this?”

I remember sitting there for about three minutes with no response from the person. Then, finally, the student sent me her response:

“What do you mean?”

At first, I was astonished. But then, after some thought, it made sense. If you didn’t know about the oral English habit of using the article “this” rather than a more direct statement using a pronoun, i.e., “Who are you?” or “I am (blank)” in conversation, it would be impossible to be certain of the meaning of the sentence “Who is this?” So I was one line into an English conversation with one of my students, and she was already totally baffled. Great.

Over time I have managed to become aware enough of these English idiosyncracies or differences from Chinese-language idiosyncracies to know when one is coming out of my mouth, so that when an entire classroom of students suddenly appears dumbstruck after I have said something relatively simple, I know how to slow down, back up, look at the phrase, write it on the blackboard, explain it, without getting frustrated or confused at why they don’t understand. It’s true, they have very broad vocabularies as language learners (I’m surprised at how often they throw out words like “simultaneous”, “inevitable”, or “identical”), but they haven’t had exposure to the authentic spoken language, the real living breathing, burnished and raw thing – the thing that is so rare in text books and teaching materials – to know what I’m talking about when I say something like “after you”, or “slow down”, or “I’ll get it” or “could you please hand me that pen”, or…. “Who is this?”

Which, in a way, is a shame, because if they had got the chance to put half the energy into learning speech that they have put into learning reading, writing, and vocabulary, they would be pretty damn near fluent, I think.

But for me, it’s interesting to learn these pared-down, gritty sayings that only make sense if you understand context, frequency of use, and how simple language can be when you have to say it.

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“You eat yet?”

Like Tarzan speak, in a way (and I’m grateful to Chinesepod.com for teaching me these kinds of idiomatic speech patterns in Chinese rather than trying to cram grammar down my throat). But it works. And it’s damn beautiful.

Peace out from China.

Well, classes and the semester have started up again, which means that I am again back in front of groups of 50 students at a time, trying to help them figure out the actually pretty difficult language that is English.

Luckily I think I’ve figured out how to teach English a bit better this semester, so the stress level involved with preparing for and teaching classes seems to be way lower now. Part of that has to do with simplifying and streamlining what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, and part of it also has to do with the fact that this semester I just have fewer students.

Part of “simplifying and streamlining” the teaching process, for me, I think, meant just making it more boring (for me, not for the students, I hope). In my first semester I think I spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to create new lesson plans and different ways of teaching. I went all over the place with my lesson plans and activities, trying everything I could think of or find on the internet. In a way, I think that was good because I tried a lot of different things and learned about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. Then again, I also spent a lot of time in-class explaining my new lesson plans to students. I mean a LOT of time. Which I don’t think is a very productive way for them to practice their spoken English. Which was supposed to be what the class was about.

(Just to record it here, some of the things I tried in class included: call-and-response scripts, writing dialogues and performing them, handing out slips of paper with questions on them and timing the students and asking them to ask and answer them in pairs, giving the class disicussion questions and tearing my hair out while the whole class proceeded to sit around and chat in Chinese and play with their cell phones, lecturing on the present perfect and present continuous and past perfect tenses and trying in vain to get the students to practice them, trying to teach them songs and having them tell me that the songs were too fast and too hard to sing, and on top of that not being able to sing the songs myself, attempting to get the students to practice basic conversation by teaching them simple phrases like “how ya doin’?” and “how’s it goin’?” and then realizing that the students already knew these phrases but still couldn’t use them in basic conversation, for reasons unknown, trying to teach the students pronounciation of vowels and then realizing that they had already learned the vowels but pronounced them strangely for reasons that I couldn’t determine at all, and only determined by accident, usually, months later, & etc, &etc. Most of these lessons were relatively painful and stressful, because the students didn’t understand them and I was trying them cold for the first time. & etc.)

So this semester I have significantly pared down what I am trying to do with the hope that if I can simplify things a lot, and focus on helping the students practice a few key skills, like taking basic English sentence structures and creating new sentences creatively, and like retelling stories from our readings using creative twists of the tales — I’m hoping by doing this stuff we’ll be able to make real progress. I’m also using audio recorders this semester to record the students’ speech and play it back to them with critiques of their pronounciation and suggestions recorded by me. So I’m hoping that will help. There’s evidence that it will. When I logged into QQ (China’s MSN-like chat client) the other day, one of my students messaged me and told me that she liked the new class structure — and also that last semester she hadn’t understood my classes, so mostly she had just read the book in class. This is the kind of thing that happens in classrooms here often, I think. They’re so big and so unwieldy, and teachers tend to lecture nonstop with little knowledge of what is going on out among the ranks, that if students don’t like a class, or don’t feel that there’s anything to learn from it, they sleep, or read, or play on their phones. Which I guess isn’t different from the U.S. at all.

More on teaching later. For now I’ve got to run back to my dorm because someone is helping me to fix my internet today (I hope). Hurrah. That means HFATT should come back to life shortly.

Oh, and here’s an awesome first-time kind of basic guide to teaching oral English in China. When I stumbled across it, it was a revelation:

http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/guide-to-teaching-in-china

See you next time.

: )

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the wedding reception of one of my older students.

The happy couple bowing to assembled friends and family.

The wedding reception was rather like a wedding reception back home. There were 100+ family mambers and friends in attendance, and the bride and groom spent most of the evening strolling from table to table, toasting people and thanking people for coming.

A table all ready for some tasty dishes. Note the round glass plate that conveniently spins, allowing all at table to enjoy the many dishes that comprise each meal. And the watermelon seeds. One weird thing about the dinner -- there was an unexplained Bandaid on the soy sauce bottle. Ew.

We ate, and then after dinner went to the newlyweds’ new condo to have some tea and play some traditional Chinese wedding games, which were a little risqué.

The games included the following:

• The bride lighting cigarettes for all the men in the room, while everyone around her tried to blow out the lighter.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to snatch, using only their mouths, a piece of candy dangled down to them on a string by a friend standing on a chair.
• The bride and groom simultanously trying to lift, using only their tongues, a chopstick from a big beer bottle.
• The bride and groom simultaneously trying to convince me to eat some puffed rice that had been strewn all over their bed, telling me in broken English that it had something to do with good luck and with their likelihood of having a son, and then me eating said puffed rice to widespread applause.

I have some photos of those games, too, but am not sure about the privacy boundaries regarding post-wedding risqué games, and so will have to let you use your imagination.

All in all the wedding was fun, and I was glad I went, and as a bonus I learned a couple of new Chinese blessings:

Zao sheng gui zi — Meaning something like, I hope you have a boy and therefore implicitly not a girl (that was the translation I was given, anyhow)

Bai tou xie lao — Meaning something like, I hope you grow old together happily

I also got some action photos from the same class…

Teaching outside on a sunny day...students sometimes say I look very serious when I teach, which I guess I can see from this photo.

And number 2…

Teaching outside, same class, Cosby sweater.

And number 3…

If I had known that one day English language-learners would have to read my handwriting on a blackboard, I would have worked harder at my penmanship. Apologies for my creepy lack of a face in this picture.

And finally, KTV (karaoke) on Christmas Eve. Oy, there was a lot of drinking, and I nearly ruined my phone by dropping it on the hard tile floor, and I nearly got blown up when somebody threw a large bundle of lit fireworks on the sidewalk in front of me, and I had to literally run away from my students so that they would let me go to sleep that night, but it was fun…and we had a totally premium karaoke suite.

Those glowing blue windows are the TV's on which the song lyrics are displayed. I sang "My Heart Will Go On" (very popular English song here, I think because of the Chinese-style flute intro), "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, and "Desperado". And a children's song in Chinese, Two Tigers (which goes to the tune of Frere Jacques).

I taught my last class today, and learned that the whole visa situation could turn out to be critically not as easy as I had been led to believe it would be. So today has actually been consumed with anxiety about that, but I’ll write about that some other time if the anxiety turns out to be validated.

I’ve been here three months now, and the six-week Spring Festival vacation is about to begin. Let’s hope I can stay here after that’s over.

Peace out for now. Much love to you all.

: )