Having Fun All The Time

Today I was teaching class and had a realization when a student read a sentence from a dialogue we were working on.

The sentence was: “I’ve got two potential applicants for the position in your company.”

A single student read the sentence, because recently whenever I’ve introduced new material to the class I’ve been asking them to read it one-by-one, rather than in the group, so that I would have a chance to listen to the students’ tone and word emphasis carefully.

In this case, when the student read the sentence, she had no pronunciation problems in terms of the individual words. She produced the sounds of each word perfectly, as if the rules of pronunciation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the IPA) had been hard-coded into her brain (which they pretty much have, by this point).

But I noticed a problem. It was that she wasn’t using tone and emphasis to indicate that the word “two” was in fact the number two, not the word “to”.

For example, take a look at two sentences:

“I know to dance.”

“I know two dances.”

Do me the favor of ignoring for a moment that “I know to dance” is kind of a nonsense sentence, and think about this question: What is the pronunciation difference between these two sentences? Of course, as a native speaker of English, you know that the word “to” is pronounced more like “tuh” in the first sentence, whereas the pronunciation of “two” in sentence two is louder, clearer, and longer, with a long “ooh” sound at the end.

But what is the pronunciation difference between “to” and “two”? Can you explain it?

After teaching English as a second language for a year and a half to age groups from college to primary school and everything in between, I don’t remember anymore if I could have succinctly answered that question before I came to China. But I doubt it.

I certainly had zero familiarity with the IPA, and didn’t even know, at the time, that my soon-to-be students would have been relying on the IPA to learn the pronunciation of words since their childhoods when they first started studying English.

For most of my first year of teaching, in fact, I still had no idea how to write or read the IPA, much less, for that matter, how to teach the individual sounds of English other than standing in front of my students and saying, “It’s thhhhhhh. THHHHHH! Put your tongue between your teeth! Watch me! THHHHHHH!”

But that’s because I hadn’t taken the time to learn the IPA. Every time I looked at it I got a headache. The IPA is that pronunciation coding that you find in some dictionaries when you look up English words. It’s the one that virtually all native English speakers ignore, because they never had to learn it.

I still hate looking at the IPA, but I’ve learned its value. Just to give you a peek at what it looks like, here’s the sentence above that my student read, rendered in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

aiv gat tu: strɔ:ŋ kændədəts fɔ:r ðə markətiŋ pəzɪʃən jʊr lʊkiŋ tu: fɪl

If you put this string of funny looking characters in front of a Chinese student in middle school or above, she can read it. I learned it because last semester I grudgingly taught a course in English pronunciation. I started teaching the class  only knowing a few of the several dozen characters, and by the end I knew all of them, just by bloody in-class repetition of use and by having to teach the students the letters one-by-one.

The necessity of the IPA for language learners is pretty obvious. If you have no inborn knowledge of English, and you reference the dictionary, and it tells you that “pretentious” is pronounced pri-ten-shuhs, how are you supposed to know how to read that any better? Is the i in pri the same as the i in prize? Or is it the i in ship? The IPA solves that kind of problem by giving a character whose pronunciation is always the same.

But the funny thing about it, and the reason I say that your (meaning native English speakers in general) understanding of language is too simple, is that Chinese people are generally shocked and confounded when I tell them that we never learn the IPA in school in the United States, and that most native speakers don’t even know what the IPA is.

How, then, could you learn to read? How could you see a five syllable word on a page and produce it flawlessly, without ever learning a system to explain English’s idiosyncratic, deeply flawed spelling system? (For reference on the “deeply flawed” part see approximately half of the comedian George Carlin’s stand-up material.) The answer is just that when you are born in a language, and are then surrounded by it every day during the formative period of your life, the first 8 to 15 years, you are exposed to so much of that language that you learn it naturally.

But that concept is difficult to understand for someone who grew up in a differently language. Thusly for me and Chinese. When I first started studying Chinese, the fact that every Chinese word has a tone (flat, rising, dipping, or falling) was overwhelmingly frustrating to me. It seemed impossible that anyone could ever speak that way truly comfortably, truly fluently.

Of course, I was wrong, and over the past six months I have been at times surprised to see myself finally expressing Chinese sentences with minimal thought applied to tones but the tones actually coming out right. All it took was constant exposure and a kind of unhealthy obsession.

Even uttering the most basic word in the beginning, “hello” 你好 or nǐ hǎo, was nearly impossible. I could produce the correct tones when sitting alone in my apartment, but I would walk out the door, go to the convenience store outside, open my mouth, and an aberration would come out. Something not even close to the proper tones.

Because foreigners across the board have sucked at Chinese tones since the beginning of time, when I meet people they often greet me with intentionally mangled tones, as though they think it will be easier for me to understand that way. Cab drivers do this the most. I open the cab door and deliver the accurately pronounced “hello” that I’ve worked on for nearly two years, and they give me a very weird sounding hello in response.

My landlord does this, too. At this point I’ve lived in the little apartment that’s adjoined to his and his family’s for eight months, and I’ve had numerous lengthy conversations with everyone in the family throughout which I’m confident nearly all my tones were correct, but every time I see him he still gives me a “hello” with crazy tones, as if he thinks all laowai (foreigners), even ones who can speak Chinese, still can’t tell a wrong tone when they hear it.

Every time he does this, I can’t help thinking of what it would be like if a Chinese person lived in the U.S. for two years, learned OK English, and then every time he ran into his landlord, he received a loud “HERRO!” in greeting.

My Chinese teacher in my first year was a young Psychology teacher in my department named Ms. Li. The reason I got her as a teacher was (as I learned later) because she could speak pretty good English. Ms. Li is just a few months older than me and thin and attractive, with light freckles on her nose and cheeks and a wide, slightly tan face.

One experience I will never forget is her trying to teach me how to pronounce the word “umbrella” 雨伞 or yǔ sǎn. Those little up-side-down triangles over yu and san indicate that each of the characters should be pronounced with the third tone, a slow, low, dipping tone.

But the thing I didn’t know, and Ms. Li didn’t know to tell me, was that when there are two third tones in a row in Chinese, the first one becomes a second tone.

Ms. Li didn’t know that. Of course she knew it, in that she produced beautiful spoken Chinese every day, by dint of a native speaker’s effortless, masterful control of a language. But she didn’t know it consciously in that she could teach it to me. She couldn’t explain it to me. She could only sit there, and say: “Two third tones. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn!”

There are things we don’t know. And there are things we don’t know we don’t know. And then there are things we know, but we don’t know that we know. Those things, maybe more than anything else, consist in language. And that is one of the major things I have learned in my time here.

If you want to learn a language, you must do so in chunks. You must find audio recordings of native speakers conversing at natural or near-natural speeds (forget all of those useless Rosetta Stone tapes. They are all bullshit) and you must push yourself to copy their pronunciation as perfectly as possible.

You must remain flexible. You must remember that there are rules, but every rules has an exception. You must focus on memorizing words, and then stop memorizing words for a while and practice listening, and then practice pronunciation, and then do tongue twisters, and then walk around town talking to anyone who will talk to you, and then go home and memorize more words, and then do the cycle all over again.

You must alter your strategy every month or so and focus on something new, but then you must also have consistency. You must do the same thing every day. You must do things to get yourself in the company of strangers who can’t speak English, you must go on boring trips, go to dinner with people you don’t like, sit for hundreds of hours listening to people talk and not understanding them.

You must slowly, gradually, allow yourself to expand. You must never wonder if it’s worth it. You must understand that you will never speak the language as beautifully as the clumsiest native speaker. You must accept that painful truth. You must keep going anyway. You must gain confidence gradually, and then lose the majority of it in one disastrous encounter in which communication fails completely. You must gradually regather confidence.

You must forget the you who couldn’t communicate at all in the tongue you can now speak. You must realize, now, that you are worse than a child, even in the language that you now speak. You must accept that your skills in your native language have actually become slightly weaker, that there are new words, new concepts, that have actually emerged since you left your native country that you now know nothing about.

You must do all these things to learn, but why? I don’t know why. Because it’s interesting. Because in the beginning every week you realize that you have taken a step forward, and you said something. And then a few weeks later you said something even better and longer, and then a few months later you sort of had a conversation, and then several months later you understood everything she said to you, and then a year later you spent a whole day with someone without uttering a single English word, and then you come to know someone in that language, and then you laugh in that language.

It’s not about thinking in Chinese. It’s not about dreaming in Chinese. Anyone who has studied Chinese seriously for more than a few months has done both, I think. It’s about becoming a person in the language you want to speak. Building yourself up in a new language, a new person, of sorts, but the same person. It’s about all those things. And along the way, you learn that language is a hell of a thing.

I was in my apartment studying Chinese last Friday when the earthquake struck and the tsunami hit Japan. One of my high school students sent me a text message that said simply:

“News Alert: Tsunami Hits Japan After 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast”

After learning that the tsunami wouldn’t at all affect the province I’m in, my first thought was about my friend Mami, a Japanese teacher who lives on the coastal capital city of this province. I see her every week or so. I met her last summer while I was traveling in Fujian. I was worried that the tsunami might have been near her home, because she’s from a beach town. But Mami is from Okinawa, the far South of Japan, and after a quick scan of the news it was obvious that Okinawa hadn’t been damaged by the tsunami. I called her an hour or so later (I figured her students would be jamming her phone with messages, so I didn’t call right away) and she said everybody in her family was fine, but she wasn’t sure about some friends who were living in northern Japan.

A photo of a whirlpool off the coast of Japan from the Sendai quake - pulled from ChinaSmack.com

Actually, the first day the news didn’t sound so bad. The New York Times reported that only a hundred or more people had died. This sounds strange now, since the headlines are saying that more than 10,000 have died, but the first day it didn’t seem so bad.

The thing I dreaded the most that first day was hearing what Chinese people were going to say about it. I assumed, since Chinese are  generally very open and unabashed about their negative feelings toward Japanese (and vice versa, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve never been to Japan so I don’t know), that people would gloat and be happy about the horrible disaster. I braced myself for what I assumed would be a few days of jarring, insensitive comments.

It turned out that I underestimated people, at least the people I know. I first asked my close Chinese friend Mike what he thought about the disaster, since that evening I was in his family’s house and the news was on the TV.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said in English. “Of course there is some negative history between the two countries, but this kind of natural disaster is no one’s fault.”

Since I know that Mike is generally more open-minded than the average Chinese, I asked him if he thought other people would be happy about the disaster.

“Zhege wo bu dong,” he said. I don’t know about that.

So I decided, in my Sunday speech classes with the high school students, to use the Japan earthquake as a discussion prompt. All of my students were interested in talking about the event, but their faces all grew a little austere when I asked them if people would be happy about it. One student of mine, Anthony, whose English is pretty good, saw it coming and addressed it before I even asked her.

“Of course, there is some bad history between the two countries. But if anyone thinks that the earthquake is a good thing, that is wrong. This has happened to innocent people,” she said (after asking me in Chinese how to say “innocent”).

One of my students, Rachel, said that she had already donated money to a rescue organization in Japan. She added, looking a bit shy, that she had donated much more money when an earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China in 2008, killing more than 68,000 people. “Because I should give more to my country,” she said.

Among all the people I’ve talked to, everyone has seemed gravely sympathetic to the Japanese over the disaster, perhaps because the memory of the Sichuan earthquake is not too distant. And it has been pleasantly surprising to me to see people be sympathetic, especially since in recent months the Chinese have been pretty vocal about their disregard for the Japanese. Last fall there were protests all over China, even in this small city, after the Japanese Coast Guard detained a Chinese fishing vessel captain after his boat crashed into a Japanese vessel in contested waters.

Another photo from the earthquake - pulled from ChinaSmack

Last semester I even got into an argument with a student from the English department when he told me, with no prompting from myself, that Chinese hate Japanese. I confronted him on the opinion and tried to make it clear that it was offensive to me, which ultimately seemed to offend him. Eventually, the student actually got up from the lunch table and walked away from me, a sign of disrespect no one had ever shown me here. I tried to resolve it by getting up, stopping him, and explaining that as a foreigner I didn’t understand some things about Chinese culture, and that my intent was not to disagree but to learn. That seemed to calm him down, but it was still an awkward encounter, and after that I decided not to talk to Chinese about Japanese if I could avoid it.

But a levy seems to have broken: I sense little animus from Chinese towards Japanese now. The Chinese government sent a team of rescuers to try to help out in the country, and even on ChinaSmack (where the Internet hate-speak that all Internet users spew out is translated from Chinese into English) comments were supportive of Japan, and in the cases where people decided to say something offensive (“Because it’s Japan, I’m so happy”) there were other commenters who kept them in check (“The entire world will look at the reaction of Chinese people, can you please not make us lose face? Don’t forget that only yesterday Yunnan had an earthquake, do you want to completely lose face for Chinese people?”).

Of course, all this is in the face of a complete nightmare going on in the country next door. I just read in the Times that 400,000 people are homeless, well over 10,000 dead, and a nuclear power plant is fomenting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Mami, my friend in Fuzhou, has gotten in touch with her friends in northern Japan and said that they’re all OK, but none of them can get back to their homes. They don’t even know if they still have homes. And my other Japanese friend, who is still in New York, may have friends or family in the same situation or worse.

It’s reason to be grateful to know that I, and the people I’m closest to, are all in safe places. And I guess comforting that even though the country next door has been crippled by a very sad natural disaster, at least people on this side of the map care enough to put the past aside.

Well, I’m back at my desk in China, studying Chinese, reading books, and scrambling, somewhat, to prepare for classes that I completely neglected to prepare for while I was home. Which was just as well, because it gave me time to hang out with people, get caught up as much as possible on what had been happening in my friends’ and families’ lives for the past year or so and just enjoy being there.

It was definitely a huge recharger, seeing friends especially and being around people who I relate to instinctively; at first it was unfamiliar and a little scary, I think because I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to relate or connect anymore for whatever reason. But when we did it felt good, as you’d expect, and made me question all over again whether I really wanted to go back to China.

Of course, not having anything else lined up, I had to come back. And now have been back for about three days. But the hard things about coming back are not the ones I expected. I’ve found that it’s basically just a horrible bitch to get over the time difference and the germs that you’re exposed to during long-distance travel, that moving from China to America and America to China is basically the same in that your first couple of days in either place is challenging physically and mentally, just because you have to confront a life that you haven’t confronted in a while, and do it on a severely mangled sleep schedule. Apart from that, and from a nasty cold that set in after my first day here, it’s been smooth — I was surprised at how natural and normal it felt to walk into my apartment building and put down my bags in the apartment I hadn’t seen for 5 weeks. Similar to how it used to feel to arrive back in Oregon after having been on the East Coast for a week or so, except in this case I was a hell of a lot farther from home.

Even that seems pretty remarkable to me. On the way to the airport I asked my father how long he thought it would have taken to get to China 100 years ago, and although I don’t know I assume it would be at least weeks and probably months. Now you can do it in a day and a half and feel like you never left.

Some observations from being home:

American food consists mainly of cheese and fried beef. That’s OK, but it becomes a problem because I love those foods. Particularly cheese. The fact that cheese is hard to come by in small-town China is extremely good for my waistline.

After a year in China, it takes about three weeks not to be stunned every time you see a person of non-Asian ethnicity.

After a year in China, even if you hate everything about Fox News, it is for some reason just intrinsically interesting to watch on TV. I have no idea why about this one. I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe it has to do with how Fox News presents a simplified, uglier version of Americanism that is pretty close to the Chinese idea of what Americans are. I don’t know. That’s just a theory and I don’t think it’s true. It’s just fascinating, is all. The English voices, the big loud Americans, the bright colors, the extravagance, the extreme theories and unadorned Americanism. It’s weird. I couldn’t get enough of it, like picking at an itchy scab, so satisfying. I’d never even watched Fox News before this trip back to the U.S., but every time I saw it this time I was transfixed.

China quickly becomes a weird almost inaccessible washed-out memory. After a week home I found it difficult to recall lots of things, but now that I’m back that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t seem to have forgotten any of the language.

People in the U.S. are interested in China. I ended up having a lot more conversations about China than I expected with people who seemed genuinely interested. I kind of expected people to be pretty indifferent, because it’s such a far-away, weird, obscurely unknown kind of place. But people were pretty interested across the board, not too judgy, just asked questions and listened, which was really cool.

Now that I’ve woken up after a 15-hour night’s sleep and am feeling much better than I did the last two days, I think I’m getting used to things again and not feeling completely destroyed by the time change, I’m getting a bit more glad to be back. Not completely there yet, but getting there.

In October 2009 I left the U.S. to fly to China, to some city that I probably couldn’t have pointed to on a map if you asked me. I left by car; actually my mom drove me from my parents’ house in New Hampshire the five hours down to JFK in the middle of the night; we arrived after midnight and waited outside a brightly lit airport restaurant for the check-in counter to open. After I checked in we moved to the second floor, because it seemed a little quieter, and sat by a big wall of windows –it was still night so the windows were black — and waited for the time when my plane would board.

When it came time to go board I didn’t feel like I was consciously walking and moving and talking anymore; I was swimming in a mixture of emotions, just fighting to keep moving. And then, of course, saying goodbye to my mom felt like saying goodbye to the last person I knew in the world; the idea that I was going someplace where no one knew me or was likely to know anything about people like me was not just in my brain but enveloping my whole brain with fog. I guess I’m a creature who generally shies away from change, even though I have managed to find it pretty consistently in life for the past ten years.

Hugging my mom and saying bye was the first time that I felt like maybe bagging the whole thing, the whole idea, and just saying nope, take me home: Not goin’. Can’t do it.

Of course I didn’t do that. I recently returned home for the first time after about 15 months in China teaching English and studying Chinese. At a certain point I decided to go, and, knowing that it would be a disaster to let fear or anxiety get in the way of that plan, and wanting very much to stay there and have an immersive experience, I stayed.

I think a lot of people would not have such a hard time leaving home to go live in another country like China for so long — some people are better at it than others. But that saying-goodbye moment was very difficult for me — maybe the toughest thing that I’ve done.

The good news was, as I discovered, that was also the hardest thing I would have to do. Before I left, a friend who knew somebody who had also taught in China recalled a quote about the initial going-away experience: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water, and when you land realizing that the water is only a foot deep.” I wouldn’t say that arriving in China, adjusting to the culture, making friends and learning the language, was as easy as wading around in knee-deep water, but it was a lot easier than I imagined it to be when I was waiting in the U.S. to leave.

I spent 15 months there. I learned, more or less, how to be a decent ESL teacher (although I know I still have a lot to learn about being a teacher). I made Chinese friends who I’ll definitely remember forever and had experiences that have totally changed my worldview. I managed to become fairly conversant in Chinese, although I also have many more years’ work ahead of me on that front. But I made it through, and none of the bad stuff I imagined before I left happened, or if some of my fears turned out to be true (getting sick from the water or street food, for instance), they weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined they could be (getting sick from water or food was never a major inconvenience — it happens, but I certainly never had to go to the hospital for it, for example).

So in the end I would say that the maxim about going to China was half-true. Or maybe I would offer this modification: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water and remembering, oh yeah, I can swim.” Life in China isn’t necessarily harder than life in the U.S. : it’s just different, in a thousand fascinating ways.

So I’m going back in a month to continue teaching, with the hopes of reaching a level with my Chinese so that I can be certified as proficient, which hopefully will help me go in new directions that I maybe haven’t even thought of yet. And I’m looking forward to going back. When I was in NYC last week and walked by a Chinese man playing an erhu and all the memories came flooding back to me, I knew I wanted to go back. So I’m gonna. Hopefully I can find some people who want to go to Sanming to teach, too, because that school needs good teachers.

As anybody who has taught English in China for a while knows, there’s a special kind of English spoken here, which has garnered its own term in Chinese and in English. That is Chinglish, or, in Chinese, Zhong1Shi4Ying1Yu3.

What that essentially means is that because students in China largely learn English in a “vacuum”, i.e. without interacting with foreigners, there are certain funny, weird, incorrect or only partly incorrect phrases that pop up a lot.

One of the first ones you hear on coming to China is, of course, “My English is not very well”, which is usually accompanied by a second of squinting and intense thought as the speaker tries to decide if she should say “well” or “good”.

There are others, and I have learned over time that it’s pretty useful in classes to directly explain the Chinese phrase I’m correcting, and then explain how to say it in English. The reality is that most students, when they speak English, will be directly translating from Chinese to English in their heads as they do so; they will not use the most natural or high-frequency English phrase. So it’s more effective teaching to “back in” to teaching oral English here sometimes — that is, start with the extremely common Chinese phrase you know they will one day translate incorrectly in conversation, and explain how to say it right.

For example, the Chinese phrase wo3you3shi4. I have something to do. That is how most students translate wo3you3shi4 (which literally means “I have an event”, but is the Chinese equivalent of “I have a previous commitment” or “something came up that I’ve got to take care of”. Students often say, “sorry, I can’t come to class because I have something to do.” Isn’t my class “something to do?” I have occasionally replied in jest. Confusion. Nobody gets the joke. It’s best just to teach the language and avoid subtle mockery.

Is it delicious? This is the question students ask when they want to know if something (you’re eating) is good or not. Someone, at some point, decided that it would be a good idea to translate the Chinese phrase “hao3chi1″, meaning, literally, “good eat”, into the word “delicious”, when in fact in spoken English we just say “good”, or “tasty”, as in, “how’s your food?” –”it’s good”

I want to play with you. This has been uttered to me by more than one student, and when I first heard it I thought I had somehow stumbled into some kind of twisted seventies softcore skin movie. You want to play with me? What? Unfortunately Chinese students never learn the correct translation of the word “wan2″, which actually means “hang out” or “do something together” but is tragically translated in English textbooks as “play”. So Chinese college students are always “playing” together in English, when they should be hanging out.

It is very fashion. This statement is the result of the words fashion and fashionable being one and the same in Chinese. And since clothes is a topic often mentioned in textbooks and lessons, the mistake pops up with annoying frequency. Yet another weird Chinglish phrase that is hard to kill.

Can you borrow me your book? Again, the result of the words lend and borrow being the same in Chinese, hence the common error.

Of course, just as there are crappy ways of translating Chinese into English, there are awkward and ugly ways of translating English into Chinese, and I utter them every day. So this isn’t a mockery or a critique of Chinese learners of English, just a short list of things that their teachers should correct them on. I’ve devoted a lesson to these four phrases for all of my classes, and the result is always nice. Just learning how to say these five things correctly goes a long way in making their English sound more authentic.

Teaching them how to correctly use the slang word “sucks” really helps, too. As in, I suck at basketball, my shoes are sucky, he is a sucky guy. Telling the students that suck means, po4, jiu4, mei2yi4si5, bu4hao3, lan4, wu2,liao2, all in one word tends to help them grasp it, I find.

Because having authentic English speakers in the classroom makes your ears feel better, and makes your students a little more fun to be around.

I’m not sure who reads this, but if any of the readers of this blog are interested in teaching English in China, please leave a comment with your email address.

The university where I work is looking for more teachers after something went awry with the two additional Americans who were supposed to come.

Of course, it’s a complicated process and anyone who came would have to wait at least a couple of months in order to get expert licenses and visa papers squared away. Oh yeah, and I guess packing up your entire existence.

Anyway, on the off chance, let me know.

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.

Before I left to go on my visa run to Hong Kong, I really tried to find a site on the web that would explain everything to me. But I couldn’t find one. So I want to create a quick guide here to going to Hong Kong to change your visa status.

The whole thing is actually pretty easy, and once you get to Hong Kong there are so many English speakers that you really have nothing to worry about.

Here’s what you need to do: If you have a tourist visa and you want to switch it to a Z visa, there is no way to do that in mainland China. You have to leave mainland China to go to the embassy for your country (or, if you’re like me and hate waiting in lines, you can pay a travel agent in HK to go to the embassy for you). A great place to go is Hong Kong, because it’s close to the mainland and easily accessible and you don’t need a visa to enter Hong Kong if you’re U.S./British citizen.

What you need: You need a Foreign Expert’s License from the provincial capital of whatever province you intend to work in. This is a pink-colored piece of paper that says you are a foreign expert. You also need a letter from the Provincial Capital directing you to apply for a Z visa at the Hong Kong Embassy for your country.

NOTE: The letter MUST say Hong Kong. If it says “apply forthwith at the nearest embassy in your home country”, you will have to send it back to the provincial capital to be changed, which could be a delay of another week or so.

You also need a passport-sized photo for the application.

When you actually get to Hong Kong and apply for your Z-visa, the embassy or travel agency (whichever you use to get your Z visa — I used Shoestring Travel in Kowloon and they were quick and decently helpful and relatively cheap) will take the original documents away from you and just give you back a passport with the Z-visa in it. The Z visa will have a “duration of stay” of 000 (zero) days on it. But really this means that you and your employer have 30 days from your date of entry to mainland China to get a temporary residence permit so that you can stay in China. The residence permit can be valid for up to 12 months and allows you to travel in and out of China freely.

How to get to Hong Kong: If you’re relatively new to China as you’re thinking about going to China to apply for a residence permit, your Chinese skills might not be so good and you might be worried about expensive Hong Kong. I would say the first one, traveling with weak Chinese skills, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and the second one, HK being expensive, you can’t do anything about.

But you should be able to get to HK pretty cheaply, especially if you’re in sourthern China.

Here’s how: Go to Shenzhen and take the subway from there to Hong Kong Go to this web site and look up the train schedule from your city to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is in mainland China, right next to Hong Kong. If you take a train to Shenzhen, you can get off the train and inside the Shenzhen train station you can go through mainland China customs and cross over to official Hong Kong, and then take the Hong Kong subway to HK. (Once you get off the train in Shenzhen this will all be easy, because there are signs throughout the train station that say, in English, “HONG KONG”. You just need to follow these signs through the train station [most people will go that way] and you will find customs and the subway). The web site linked to above will give you pricing and time schedules for the trains going to Shenzhen. In my experience the site has always been accurate.

You have to actually go to the train station to buy train tickets in China. So go to your local train station and figure out how to buy the tickets you need. Basic Chinese should be able to accomplish this. You can say “dao4 Shen1 zhen4″, they will ask you what day, you say the day, whether you want a soft sleeper or hard sleeper (ruan3wo4 soft sleeper/ying4wo4 hard sleeper) and presto, you’ve got your ticket. (From what I understand, you can’t buy a train ticket more than 10 days in advance in mainland.)

If you’re traveling a really long ways and have money to spare, soft sleepers aren’t bad. There’s less cigarette smoke and it’s theoretically more secure because you get a small cabin with only 3 other people, so there’s less risk of someone poking around in your stuff. The beds are about the same in terms of comfort. The difference between the two is just that hard sleeper you share a whole train car with maybe 80 other people in 3-stack bunks, whereas soft sleeper you get a more secluded (and quieter) cabin with 4 bunks, 2-stacked.

Overall I think both are pretty safe. If you are traveling with a lot of stuff and are seriously worried about someone stealing your stuff, go with the soft sleeper, but if you’ve just got a bag of clothes and a camera, keep your money and passport on your body and sleep with your camera by your feet or head, and put your bag of clothes wherever. Nobody wants to steal a bag of clothes anyway.

When you get on the train and find your bunk, just relax. Someone will come and take your ticket from you. They will give you a plastic card. Keep this card. When you are close to arriving at your destination, they will come back and get your card from you, which will of course wake you up if you’re sleeping. If they’re taking your card, it means you’re almost there so you can get your stuff together. If you want to ask someone when you’re going to arrive, you can say “wo3men shen2me shi2hou4 dao4 Shen1zhen4″ (I’m not good at Chinese so the grammar here is probably wrong, but it gets the message across).

In Shenzhen, it’s easy to find the border. Cross the border and take the subway to Hong Kong. The HK subway is labeled in English and now that you’re in HK it will be super easy to get around because at least half of the people around you are fluent in English.

Once you’re in Hong Kong: If you have your papers with you when you arrive in Hong Kong, it will only take two to three business days (maximum) to get your visa. You might be able to do it in less than 24 hours.

If you’re like me and had to go to Hong Kong to wait for your papers to come in the mail, you might have to hang out for a while. If this is the case and you’re trying to reduce expenses, I would recommend staying on Lamma Island. It’s way cheaper than anywhere in HK and it’s easy to get to by a 20-minute ferry ride and much more relaxing. If you’re staying in HK for a while and want to keep costs low or just not stay in the busy city, just go to Lamma. But, if you want to stay in the city and money isn’t really a problem, SoHo is nice. If you want to stay in the city and you want to save money, the ChungKing Mansions in Kowloon (hostels) are definitely the cheapest place to stay in the city. I stayed in the New Peking Guest House (actually called the Peking Guest House once you arrive there) and it was satisfactory, about 180 HKD per night for a tiny private room.

I think that should cover most everything for someone who has to go to HK to change visas. Once you get your Z visa, of course, you have to return to mainland and still get your residence permit, which requires that you have a foreign expert’s card, which is like a second passport, kind of. So that’s potentially another hassle if your employer is as unhelpful as mine was. But this little guide should get you through the trip to HK and back without costing you too much money.

If any travelers in this situation actually stumble across this and have any questions, I’m happy to answer.

And remember to have fun while you’re in Hong Kong. : )

One of the good things about getting a visit from a friend who is also a teacher in another part of China was that I got to hear how her employer had helped her handle the hurdles of moving to the country to teach.

For her, the process sounded remarkably easy once she got the job. Her employer handled all the paperwork before she left the U.S. and provided her with ample assistance finding a suitable apartment when she arrived. They also offered her a pretty hefty salary — not big by U.S. standards, but not small either (she makes almost three times what I make, but she works 30 hours a week to my 12 and she lives in the third-largest city in China while mine probably doesn’t even make the top 100, so that’s the explanation for that).

They also reimburse her each month for a fraction of the flight costs to the country, so that when he contract is up she will have been reimbursed the full amount.

You can probably guess what all this explaining is leading up to…yep, my coming-to-the-country and paperwork situation has been so different from hers as to be totally unrecognizable. My paperwork was not even really started before I left the U.S., I went to Hong Kong about four-ish months in to change my visa status, and now the matter still hasn’t been entirely settled. (I won’t go into details here, but…you get the picture.)

The reason my visa experience has been so much more convoluted is itself convoluted and involves miscommunications, bureaucratic snafus, lackadaisical administrators and probably a fair measure of cultural differences. Suffice it to say that between my school and I, the visa issue has been at times hairy, at times thorny, and even on a couple occasions bordering on antagonistic.

So, a little bit after my sixth month in-country without the visa issue fully resolved, I delivered an ultimatum of sorts. Being nice and friendly had gotten me nowhere, being accomodating but firm had also gotten me just about nowhere, so I decided to make things as clear as possible: get the visa situation taken care of this month, or I’m going to make like a tree and get outta here.

This did seem to make the message much more clear. But things have not taken shape as quickly as I would have liked them to. So I am still holding my breath, in a sense. Which would put me close to seven months of breath-holding. But, things other than that seem to be moving along fairly nicely. And I have been promised that the visa will be done within the week. So when I know, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing about it here.

Till then thanks for tuning in.

: )