Having Fun All The Time

This past weekend was the labor day holiday here in China. We had no classes on Monday; I took a long weekend and left town to spend some time with some friends in my old small-town China hangout.

When I came back, I paid a visit to my usual Xiamen haunt–the cafe in Jimei–because a student wanted to lend me a book she had just finished, “I Want to Talk to the World” by Hanhan. More on that when I read it.

I ran into a foreign friend and we chatted for a while. When I asked my friend about the holiday, my friend answered thusly: “Well, I went on a boat ride; and it started out fun, but ended horribly.”

The story was this: My friend had gone on a trip with a large group that was a mix of foreign teachers from Xiamen and their Chinese friends. They had rented three boats and driven them out away from the coast, where they tied the boats together and simply hung out and enjoyed the late spring day.

A couple of foreign guys were swimming in the water. One of those guys invited his girlfriend, a student at the university where he taught, to jump in. She couldn’t swim, so sombody got a life preserver from the boat and held it in the water. The two guys waited in the water, with the life preserver. They expected that she would jump in the water, float up to the surface, and then she could hold onto the life preserver.

She jumped in. For some reason, she didn’t float back up. A Chinese woman in the boat started shouting, “—- is in the water; — is in the water!” It took a moment for my friend to realize that this meant somebody was drowning. The people in the boats slowly flew into a panic. Those who could swim began diving and searching for her. Nobody could find her. Somebody called the police. No police boats came. The passengers told the hired hands driving the boats to separate the boats to continue looking. They found nothing.

My friend thought perhaps the girl had hit the water, panicked, began flailing her arms, and driven herself further underwater. It’s certainly imaginable. Jumping into the ocean can be very intimidating, especially deep, opaque water like the kind they were in. I can swim, but being in deep ocean water can still make me feel a little panicky.

I wasn’t there that day so I can’t give any more detail than that. They didn’t find the girl’s body that day, but they looked as long as they could; they continued looking long after it was clear that if they did find her, she would be dead.

I felt sick for a day after I heard the story. I’m not sure why. I think part of the reason is because of the way it happened: People having fun, no flicker of an idea of death in any of their minds, and then, suddenly, death right in their midst.

It also bothered me because I am a foreign teacher in the same city. I know my students well; I know some of their parents; I know my colleagues fairly well, too. Although I only know one person who was there on that boat that day, I know the incident was deeply troubling for that person. It must have been devastating for everybody else. And there’s the young girl who died.

The story is also an example of failed cross-cultural communication of tragic proportions: There’s the foreign guys who may not have really known to what degree the girl “couldn’t swim”. (Most Chinese I’ve met say they “can’t swim”, but they often mean, on clarification, that they don’t know how to swim in a formal way, but they know how to stay afloat. This girl really, really couldn’t swim, it seems.) There’s the girl herself, who may not have felt comfortable expressing hesitance to jump in; or if she did, clearly was not emphatic enough about it. And then there’s the people on the boat–the woman screaming “— is in the water!” without anyone initially understanding–who failed to communicate efficiently enough to find the girl in time.

The whole thing is a nightmare. It should never have happened, and yet it did. It is shockingly sad and undoubtedly shockingly painful to everyone involved. And it says a few things: For one, foreigners in China are not always as safe as they believe themselves to be. We talk about the crazy traffic, the lax safety standards at construction sites, but we also take unnecessary risks sometimes. Two, you must know and respect other peoples’ boundaries and not push them to take risks they don’t want to take. I’m not saying anybody was convincing anybody in this instance–I don’t know if they were. But it’s clear that if these guys were trying to convince this girl to jump in, they’re going to regret it as long as they live.

This is the third time an acquaintance of mine has been present when somebody else drowned: In the second instance, a child drowned in a pool. In the third, a high school classmate of mine drowned in a river in our hometown when he got a cramp while swimming.

All these instances were very different, but all were completely sickening in their simplicity, in how quickly the deaths occurred, in the helpless regret those present surely felt. All occurred while people were ostensibly having fun nearby, which only adds to the horror.

Actually, Wikipedia puts it pretty succinctly:

Drowning itself is quick and silent, although it may be preceded by distress which is more visible. A person drowning is unable to shout or call for help, or seek attention, as they cannot obtain enough air. The instinctive drowning response is the final set of autonomic reactions in the 20 to 60 seconds before sinking underwater, and to the untrained eye can look similar to calm safe behavior. Lifeguards and other persons trained in rescue learn to recognize drowning people by watching for these instinctive movements.

So when you’re near open water, keep your eyes open and be safe. It might seem like a beautiful, balmy day; but there’s danger right by your side.

I have neglected this blog badly over the last two months, mostly due to a major move to a new city: Xiamen, located about four hours south of the small city of Sanming where I lived for two years.

Bus Stop -- This is the bus stop right on the beach outside my new room.

Xiamen is also located in Fujian Province, the mountainous, subtropical chunk of land in southeast China on the Taiwan Strait. My previous city was located in the mountains in the center of the province (Fujian is roughly the size of Pennsylvania), where the air was a bit thinner and the winter a bit colder. I loved Sanming, and was drawn to it initially because of those mountains. The university where I taught was surrounded by small, lush peaks that reminded me of Vermont in the springtime; the town of Sanming itself was nested in a valley and split by a river. The place was simple, small, easy to navigate, and surrounded by natural beauty (even if the city itself wasn’t beautiful).

But in my first year in Sanming I often took excursions down and out of the mountains, south to Xiamen. The highway out of Sanming is beautiful; on the smoggy four hour ride the mountains slowly diminish to hills, and eventually you arrive at the mile-long Xiamen bridge which carries you to Xiamen Island.

The city of Xiamen basically consists of this egg-shaped island, about eight miles long and inhabited by almost two million people. The island itself is beautiful and quite modern, consisting of a major downtown area in the southwest section and several sparsely inhabited areas to the east. The northwest part of the island is mostly heavy industry and north of the island is a spur of land called Jimei, which consists of dozens of colleges and universities, the main one being Jimei University, which is where I now work.

In terms of comfort, Jimei is definitely a nicer place to teach than Sanming University. The classrooms where I’ve been teaching so far are air-conditioned and clean, in new buildings with nice landscaping and quiet teacher’s lounges. After teaching a spring of sweaty classes in the stifling heat of Sanming in 20-year-old cement buildings with walls covered in mold, moving to Jimei felt like being shot into another universe.

The beach across the street from my new place. On the weekends I stay here, and during the week, when I have to teach, I go back to the campus, which is far away.

However, along with the improved living conditions comes a huge decline in my “specialness”. In Sanming, I frequently was asked out to eat by coworkers and superiors; I dined a few times with the head of the university (the Party Secretary) and I probably ate with my dean fifteen or twenty times. They showed a great deal of respect and appreciation for my work and my presence in Sanming, and I treasured those dinners not really for the food but for the chance to become familiar with the teachers I was working with. I also got a lot of Chinese practice drinking and eating with the gang of ten-or-so middle-aged, rather sexist male colleagues who worked in my department. Mostly, I just felt like I was very connected to the school community as a whole and that the other teachers really considered me a colleague.

In Xiamen, I’ve been out to eat once with the two administrators in the foreign affairs office who handled the paperwork to bring me here to teach, and that is all. I have, of course, spent a lot of time with the other foreign teachers, but as far as integration into the community of Chinese teachers goes, there has been none of that. So the ability to experience the goings-on in a Chinese university has been significantly curtailed, but with several benefits: mainly, my apartment is nicer, my classrooms are nicer, and my city is more modern.

The island of Xiamen. You can't see it well in this map, but to the north, east, and west all is bodies of land which are parts of Xiamen City. Nearby to the east is also Jinmen, an island about the same size as Xiamen but which is controlled by Taiwan.

If I had one complaint about Xiamen, at this point, it would be this: traffic is horrible, horrible, horrible. About a month after arriving here I rented a room on the southern end of the island so that I could go down and enjoy the beach and the city environment on weekends (i.e. escape from the university, where bright-faced college students are everywhere, watching you everywhere you go and muttering laowai). The distance between the university and my new room is about ten miles, but it takes me three bus transfers and almost two hours to get there. This is mostly because the public transport system is kind of a mess, and the traffic is super bad, and the island is (like all of China) overpopulated.

Chinese people say it all the time, and it is true: China has too many people.

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.

Sit down at the piano. Notice the keys spread out before you, black and interstices of white. If you don’t know how to play piano, you see a meaning that is hidden by foreignness. Your eyes discern nothing among the keys; but your hands long to reach out to them, to coax some melody from the percussive depths of the instrument before you as easily as you hear it in your mind. You long infinitely for that talent, for that mysterious ability which you know will in all likelihood forever remain hidden from you.

And that gap between you and the person who can sit down, who you see sit down before the piano and place her hands on it, depress one key and then another, open a river of metered sounds, harmonic, rhythmic layers of fifths and half-steps without any evident thought or effort or hesitation, you wonder privately what is the difference between that person and you.

Now you are the piano player. Someone you know sits down at your piano and reaches out tentatively to the keys that are so familiar to you. She presses one key timidly, and then another, and familiar sounds rise to you, and you hear the song that you once played, the one with no chorus, no tempo, no tune at all; the lost song of the hands that long to play but cannot, the hands that are strange to the piano. This person is close to you, knows you, but in this way she does not. And in this way the person in you who knows her does not know the person in you who can sit before the piano and play beautiful music. They are not the same. They cannot be the same. They cannot even know each other.

Why did you sit at the piano all those hours, practicing? What did you want to learn? What did you want to see or experience that you could not experience any other way, except to do this, to become a stranger, in some way, to yourself? Why else would you have sat there for so long, bent in sweet labor over the worn keys, sometimes playing sweet music and yet sometimes only practicing, producing sounds so that your hands would know, so that your hands and some deep part of your mind would understand where to go, so that they would forget that person who was a stranger to the keys, so that person would in fact disappear, so that even if you never played the piano again after this day you would always look at the keys and know, that part of you would always remain.

Why else did you bend over the keys and play alone for all those days and years, except to lose yourself, to become unknown, to change and become a stranger to your former life, so that life could be clearer, could be more easily understood, could be new, in some way? And who is that person who sits down before the piano and looks strangely at it, and produces the music of someone who doesn’t understand, who is only groping in the dark for a song that she can hear in her mind but never bring into the world? What does she see and what does she feel when she looks at the keys before her?

The other day I was trying to buy some sneakers, and I realized, after hearing the phrase for maybe the 100th time, that I may have learned the most frustrating words in Chinese.

I was trying to buy some sneakers in the Puma shop in my town, and they informed me, as has every other store in my town, that they don’t have my size.

So I asked them if they could order a bigger size. And they said no, sorry. And I thought about this for a while, standing in the Puma shop, which is a Western brand, surrounded by shoes that you could find in any mall in the U.S., and I asked the obvious question: “Why?”

The Chinese word for “Why?” is Weishenme? And here’s an example of how magically simple and dramatically different Chinese is from English. If you want to tell someone that there is no explanation for the thing they are confused about, if you want to tell them that there is no reason that they can’t do something that they want to do, if you want to drive a stake of pure frustration through their feebly beating heart, all you have to do is add “don’t have” before “why”, and watch their even-keeled demeanor crumble before your eyes.

The phrase for “there is no why” is “meiyou weishenme” (don’t have why). I feel like I hear this phrase every other day here. From friends, shopkeepers, coworkers, supervisors, everybody and his brother. And every time I hear it a little piece of me sqirms and squeals and perishes like an earthworm thrown onto an iron woodstove. And I’m pretty sure it’s the most frustrating phrase in Chinese. Obviously, I’m a newbie to Chinese so there are a million phrases I don’t know, but one of my base assumptions here is that the most frustrating things are often the simplest.

So needless to say I am now wearing sneakers with soles that are falling off, that smell as though they were shit inside by some kind of loathsome golem from whatever part of the underworld is responsible for farts, rotten meat and stinky tofu.

In other news, I just got back from Guangzhou the other day. I spent five days there with my friend, Natasha, who visited me in Sanming back towards the end of winter. Guangzhou has a surplus of foreigners, so it was actually super interesting to hang out with native speakers for a while and get their perspectives on China. And refreshing, in a way, to be able to commisserate with other foreigners about all the ridiculous cultural stuff that drives me crazy here. Sometimes it really feels like I’m in a vacuum here, which is probably good for my Chinese but frequently makes me feel isolated and paranoid and uncomfortable.

The downside of the trip is that Guangzhou is basically the asshole of the world, city-wise. I would never recommend going there unless it’s specifically to visit someone who’s worth going there for (which was true in my case). I used my Lonely Planet Travel Guide to explore the city for a few days, and was totally disappointed. The Lonely Planet guide actually makes out the King’s Tomb in GZ to be one of the “best museums in China”, but it was actually a wretchedly boring, unimpressive, display of old jade remains of a tomb that was discovered in GZ a couple decades ago.

I also got hassled by the cops in GZ. I was having a beer with Natasha in a quiet western style bar and three cops came in, walked directly to our table, and asked to see our passports. I didn’t have mine on me, so they took me to the police station while Natasha went back to her apartment to get it for me. I was a little drunk and said some things to the cops that I shouldn’t have, which probably didn’t help any. In the end they just fined me 50 RMB. But it pissed me off because it completely ruined our night and also it’s not like they asked any of the Chinese in the bar for ID. It was obviously just a scheme on the part of the cops — picking on foreigners to make a little extra cash for the department. And what they hell is a foreigner going to do except pay the fine?

So after waiting a couple extra days because of a dearth of bus tickets back to town, I arrived back in Sanming three days ago. And immediately fell ill to a case of the bad-water stomach. And classes begin next week. But I barely have any. And I have a bunch of private students now so I’ll be able to afford life.

And I discovered some cool music mixes at this site: http://radiomagnetic.com/category/shows/radiovava/

I made what I now consider an excellent decision yesterday, which was to buy a mountain bike.

The bike is epically cool, shiny red with Shimano gear shifts and brakes and front suspension. I paid 790 RMB for it, which is about $115, confirming my theory that bikes in the U.S. are conspiratorially expensive (my guess is that the same bike in the U.S. would cost $500+).

Of course, as soon as I took it out into Chinese traffic to drive home I crashed. It didn’t help that the rear brake on Chinese bikes is apparently on the left-hand side, versus the universal right of the U.S.

So I started riding home and of course a gray SUV literally launched into my lane, driving straight into traffic from the perpendicular road on my right without slowing down or stopping, and then stopping directly in front of me.

I had about 15 feet, which would have been enough if I hadn’t instinctively hit the right-hand brake (my knee-jerk brain had not yet learned that the brakes were switched), which launched me directly over the handle bars and the bike cartwheeling over me.

I immediately unleashed a storm of profane English on the driver of the SUV, who looked at me and held out his hands and shrugged in a half-apologetic way, and then cruised away.

Of course, I know that this kind of driving is so common in China as to be de facto or maybe even actual law, as is taking a right-hand turn on a red and not yielding to pedestrians, which everyone just sort of accepts, even though it is totally dangerous and makes the pedestrian traffic lights pointless.

But it still totally pisses me off, because at the end of the day the logic seems to boil down to pedestrians, motorcycles and bikes basically all have to look out for cars, and the fact that the whole arranangment is incredibly dangerous doesn’t seem to register for anyone.

Also, the other day I saw this clip from China Smack that included a pretty interesting/rather depressing photo of the aftermath of a car/motorbike accident: A day in the life of a member of the “ant tribe”

After the crash, though, I quickly pulled myself together and realized that I, and my bike, were OK, and then after lunch I went on a four hour bike ride into the mountains. Lately I have been hiking almost every day and have been realizing that getting out into the mountains pretty much makes everything better. And it turned out the bike ride pretty much did the same thing.

Except with the bike ride, once you get to the peak of your journey, it’s all downhill from there. You just have to watch out for cars.

I am sitting in perhaps the grossest Internet bar on the face of the Earth writing this. At the moment my apartment at the college is being renovated, so I can’t access the Internet there, and the place I’m staying has no Internet, so this is my most convenient choice.

The cigarette smoking in here is heavy and the clientele is mostly teenage boys playing video games, clearly at several hour-long stretches. The Internet bar actually wraps around the second floor of a really dingy indoor mall and there is a “Jico’s” fast food restaurant attached to it. Air conditioning is limited, which means that there is a smell of sweat and oily skin and cigarettes that sort of feels like it’s soaking into my skin, and the chair I am sitting on and desk I am typing on have a blackish sort of patina that is obviously the result of thousands of hours of continual use with no cleaning.

The point of all of which is to tell you that I will probably be making posts much less frequently this summer, as the environs for web use have become much less amenable to creative thought.

My friend and I started our teaching class last week. We have nabbed about a dozen students so far, which means that I might stand to make a few hundred extra dollars this summer, and also I landed a one-on-one teaching gig that pays 9 USD per hour, which is a joke of a wage considering it’s just one-off tutoring and four hours a week, but in this corner of the world that’s significant enough.

Ah, that’s really all I can think of right now. The nasty chair I’m sitting in is too distracting, as is the teenager who is sitting next to me and eating a chicken sandwich and spitting on the floor and smoking and playing Warcraft III all at the same time. The filth and debauchery is staggering.

Today I taught 140 ten-year-olds English at the same time. I was asked to do this about 4 weeks ago by a superintendant of a local primary school while I was deeply inebriated at 6:30 in the evening (heavy drinking is par for the course when dining on a professional basis here; my liaison and I were doing some partying on the company, so drinking vast quantities of beer was mandatory). But even then, when he asked me, I didn’t say yes. What I said was: “I will definitely consider it.”

It turns out, as I learned weeks later, that this phrase in Chinese actually means “yes, no problem”.

So last night at about 5:30 p.m. I started planning for my first primary school class.

Based on my university class teaching experience, I knew approximately nothing about teaching primary school. So I went with safe, easy stuff. I decided to try to just play “Simon Says” with them and then teach the words from the chapter in the book via Powerpoint-slideshow, and then to teach them to sing a song (knowing how to play guitar is incredibly valuable in situations like this, because you can just pull out the guitar and everybody is happy; you’re not just some English-speaking stroke at the front of a classroom who wants everybody to sing some off-tune song with limited vocabulary). I finished my Powerpoint at about 10 p.m. and then turned out the lights and went to bed.

The next morning a teacher from the school picked me up at 8:30 and told me that the class I would teach would be about 150 students, which is 100 more than I expected.

We went to the school and did the normal Chinese introductions, sitting in an office and drinking tea and smoking cigarettes (which, interestingly, I learned that smoking indoors will be banned nationwide as of Jan. 1 next year…which to me seems like going to New Orleans and telling everyone that drinking is not allowed anymore after next week) and then I went to class. And there they were, all 140 of them.

The room was about the size of an ordinary classroom, with a big counter at the front of the room and a chalkboard and a computer with digital projector. The students were lined up in front with mini-chairs, 12 to a row, packed together in a way that would make a fire-code inspector shudder. I realized that playing Simon Says with all 140 of them would lead to inevitable injury and possible trampling, so I just asked the first three rows to play.

Explaining the game was a little tricky and I got hung up on explaining that when I didn’t say Simon Says they were supposed to not move at all, and just say “You didn’t say Simon Says”…after about 10 minutes of trying the game we got to the point where they did both (clapped their hands and said “You didn’t say Simon Says”). Luckily one of the Chinese teachers understood my meaning and chimed in to help me explain the game, but they still didn’t quite get it. So I played it for another five minutes with them and then moved on.

After that I taught for another 30-ish minutes with I think at least the bare minimum of efficacy. Using basic Chinese phrases like “read after me” and stuff like that was enough to manage the class, pretty much. We practiced the words and made some sentences, and then sang “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes”. By the second verse they were pretty fidgety, and I was totally sure that the school’s teachers had warned them to be super well behaved for my class, so I decided that was all I had for them and let them go.

The funny thing was, after class was over the students decided they wanted my autograph and I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of cute 10-year-olds thrusting little cartoon-decorated pads of paper and pens at me. Which, even though it was completely ridiculous, you can’t say no when kids ask for your autograph, so I scribbled my English name in maybe 50 notebooks and then one of the teachers dragged me out of the room.

We hung out for a while longer and then, as is the custom when getting together with folks on a professional basis here, went out for a big elaborate meal and some midday drinking.

I definitely felt relieved that the class was over (I had been pretty nervous about it when planning the prior evening), but then I also know that primary school teachers here face the pressure of teaching and managing huge classes of occasionally unruly children nonstop here.

Classes are rarely smaller than 50 students, can be as big as 60 or 70 even in primary school, and the children are (as all children are everywhere) loud and occasionally misbehaved and difficult to control (although they are much more obedient than American children; I commented to one of the teachers that if you crammed 140 U.S. kids in a classroom for one hour, the school would quickly be reduced to cinders).

Primary school teachers simply do not have it easy, and the material they have to teach is not simple. Even in the fourth-grade English book I was teaching from, the students were already past just conjugating verbs and into making complete sentences, learning intermediate vocabulary like “dragon kite” & etc. After 6 months of Chinese study there were still some sentences that I could not translate from English to Chinese without a dictionary.

So at lunch I looked around at the other primary school teachers sitting with us and when they complimented me and said “You are so hard working — you must be tired” I definitely had to answer….no way. (Although, honestly, they would have said this to me even if I had showed up to the class in my pajamas and just read aloud from an English newspaper to the students*.)

After lunch I went to a colleague’s home for tea before returning to the college in the afternoon, and we got to talking about the education system in China, which is something that everybody seems interested in here, especially vis a vis the U.S. education system.

I think most people in the U.S. are aware of how hard the Chinese education system drives its students. The stereotype is that Chinese kids are wizards at math and science and study approximately 90 hours a day. But it’s tough to get a real feel for how hard the kids are really working. We also know that a lot of U.S. students are totally overloaded with extracurriculars and exhausted all the time in America in the race to get into top universities.

But, I think, here, the pressure is definitely greater. From grade 1, students’ whole existences are basically centered around the Gaokao, which is the college entrance examination in China that determines whether and where students go to college. At present, I still know little about the actual content of the Gaokao, but I do know that it is super hard and that it is singularly important in determining a student’s chances for college admission. From what everyone says, it is basically the only thing that matters. Which means that from a very young age Chinese students are basically bred to be test-taking machines, containers for information, 10-hour-a-day studying animals.

To someone with a progressive educational background from the U.S. it is totally obvious that that kind of educational system and college admissions process is fraught with all kinds of terrible dangers and inadequacies, mostly having to do with the inadequacy of testing in determining students’ potential for success in life and the dearth of critical thinking skills that a rote-learning curriculum results in. But those are platitudes. And the Chinese people in my university, including the students and especially the young teachers, all are very aware of the issue and aware that the students are overworked and aren’t getting what they need. But as far as fixing the problem goes, there seem to be few answers and a lot of people who are afraid of letting go of the old rules/old system.

As little as I know about the subject now, I think it will become more and more important as time goes on. People here, especially because of the limited number of offspring they’re allowed to have, care a LOT about their kids’ educations and futures. And as they understand more and more (as we’re still struggling to understand and accept in the U.S.) that testing does almost nothing in terms of guaging a student’s chances of success, stuff has gotta change around here. Or at least, based on the number of people who keep asking me what the education system in the U.S. is like (this is the #1 question I get asked by students and teachers), I think it will.

A couple of other interesting notes from conversations/reading:

The only “private schools” in China are actually schools for people who are not registered to go to public schools; so, whereas in the U.S. we generally take pride in going to private school and pay a lot of money to do so and expect a better education from them, here the private schools are considered the shoddier option across-the-board.

Plagiarism is much more common (or has been in the recent past) in school systems at every level here, from middle school through university. In the lower-level grades (that I have taught, i.e. in my experience) it seems to be a symptom of the rote-learning atmosphere — it’s not the process of discovering knowledge that’s important, but the acquisition of the correct answer, so what’s the harm of looking up the best answer and copying it word-for-word? — whereas in the higher echelons of academia it can be simply a matter of finding research published in another language and translating it and putting one’s name on it…which, again, could be a symptom of the rote-learning environment.

That said, the level of material that is covered in Chinese classroom simply annihilates the material covered in U.S. schools. I don’t know the statistics and specifics, but I can say that these kids are learning math, science, and language concepts at a very young age that we wouldn’t even dream of teaching the same-aged kids in the U.S. It’s very advanced and very hard, and it leaves no doubt that some very smart people come out of the education system here.

That’s all for today.

: )

*I have actually tested the penchant of people for complimenting me even when there is no logical basis for doing so…case in point: in the afternoons I usually go running on the college’s track. Usually I run a decent amount, and look extremely sweaty and exhausted at the end of my run. Often students ask me how many laps I ran, and after I tell them 6, or 8, or whatever it is, they invariably say “Wow, you are very strong”; but on some occasions I have lied and said 1 or 2, and their reply remains exactly the same.

I have been relatively absent from these pages lately due to a number of factors, including the semester beginning, a former professor of mine from college visiting my base city in China, the Internet in my apartment being broken, and some rather turbulent personal stuff that I probably won’t comment on much.

More posts are forthcoming, but for now, especially since I am writing on a broken keyboard in a loud, fluorescent-lit Internet cafe, I will just have to sign off having assured you that HFATT is not dying, just experiencing a temporary lull.

Hope all is well in the West.

: )

This post is about to go all over the place.

When I came back from Hong Kong, I got to spend a few days in the hometown of a very generous colleague of mine, hanging out with his extended family members as they celebrated the Chinese New Year (“CNY”).

Chinese New Year is by far the biggest holiday in China. It’s evquivalent to Christmas in the U.S., except maybe even bigger, because hundreds of millions of Chinese all over the country tend to go back to their hometowns for at least a week or two to be with family. (I think in the U.S. we treat Christmas as a big deal, but most of us don’t necessarily always go back to our hometowns.)

One of the things I enjoyed the most about spending CNY with a big Chinese family was just hanging out with lots of people in their homes, while they talked and laughed with each other, ate food, encouraged each other to drink a lot of wine, and played games with the kids in the family and otherwise let everybody lounge around and spend time together. My Chinese isn’t good enough to really converse with people yet, so I spent a lot of the time smiling and nodding and not saying much; but it was still refreshing to feel a little bit of that family “vibe”.

One of the characteristic things about the winter here is that people tend not to use indoor heating in southern China, even though the temperature can drop low enough so that it can feel really cold inside (like around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). So people tend to spend time at home in fuzzy slippers, with long underwear and robes and sweatshirts on. Basically the most casual of casual attire. And they dress thusly even when they are having the whole family over for the afternoon/evening to celebrate, so as I was hanging out with people for CNY, folks were often in big comfy robes and hoodies and fuzzy slippers and etc. Which meant that I could dress however I wanted (those of you who know me well know this means mismatched flannel shirts + hideous Cosby sweaters + a hideous cardigan of some kind). Almost as if I were hanging out in my own slovenly apartment, except I wore jeans to their house and not pajama bottoms.

I mean, I did go to an environmental liberal arts college in Vermont where wearing pajama bottoms to class was the norm, but there are some standards of dress that I could never let go of (I always found it slightly repellant when other people wore pajamas to class in college, especially when those people were comfortable scratching, rubbing, leaving the crack exposed or any other combination of activities that should be limited strictly to private quarters).

Anyway, for some reason the winter dress style in China doesn’t bother me like it did in Vermont. Probably because although people do occasionally wear long underwear-type pajamas in public, they A.) generally put pants over their long underwear when they go outside, and B.) actually don’t use wasteful indoor heating when it is 50 degrees outside and when just wearing more layers would suffice, which I think probably saves a lot of money for them and a lot of fossil fuels for the rest of the world. I still actually haven’t found a pair of long underwear that fit me, and now the weather has gotten warm enough again where I won’t need them, but here in China, it all makes sense.

And I recently learned the Chinese word for long/thermal underwear. The literal translation is, apparently, “autumn clothes”, which seems appropriate. We don’t really have such a set word for this style in American English, as far as I know, but apparently the Aussies have a great combo of set phrases to describe someone who is dressed all pajama-y and thermal-grungy in public.

The term Australians use for those ugly, underwear-like pants is: “tracky dacks”. This word comes from the word “track pants” but appears to be sufficient to refer to any kind of hideous, not-for-public-eyes lower-body wear.

And another word Australians apparently can use for someone who looks like they have totally let themselves go and is just wearing tracky dacks in public, or in private, appears to be: “daggy”.

As in, I’ve just been at home all weekend hanging out in daggy tracky dacks and I haven’t shaved or taken a shower and I’ve been drinking milk from the carton and eating Flav-R-Ice and Ramen and watching episode after episode of the Wire.

Also, check out the Urban Dictionary’s explanation of “daggy”:

Australia (and New Zealand) are sheep-farming countries and our populations are familiar with many of the aspects of farming livestock. a “dag” or “dags” is the colloquial term for the dung which collects and mats into the fleece immediately surrounding a sheep’s anus; it hangs in dried-out dangling clumps which make a sound when the sheep runs, hence the phrase “rattle your dags”.

There’s a great example of various uses of these words at this blog, too: http://gailkav.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/daggy-tracky-dacks/

Ricky, at center, is the king of Track Pants

I have thought track pants were a worthy form of ironic attire since I first saw the show “Trailer Park Boys”, in which one of the main characters is always decked out in track pants, an ugly houndstooth shirt and a gold chain. He is definitely one of the most stupid characters I’ve ever seen depicted onscreen and I think that’s why I like him so much. Lots of people hate “Trailer Park Boys” because the comedy strikes them as obvious and transparent, but I always enjoyed it.

I told you this post was going to go all over the place. Since I got back to Sanming I have been sitting at home reading, writing, and studying Chinese. This lifestyle may lead to somewhat fragmentary thinking. But, classes begin again in less than a week so I will probably have more interesting things to write about then.

: )