Having Fun All The Time

Last year at about this time, I was moving into a friend’s apartment to stay for the month of June while he went back to his home country (Camaroon) to see his family. My friend was another foreign teacher at the college, and he had long paid for his own apartment in the city center, even though the college also provided housing on campus for us foreign teachers.

The place was pretty spartan. He had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small bathroom with no hot water and a dining room slash living room. He had furnished the apartment with a folding aluminum table in the kitchen, about five blue plastic stools, a more than 10-year-old bed in the bedroom, a typewriter stand with a computer on it next to the bed, a TV on a TV stand in the corner of the bedroom, and a bamboo mat on the floor of the second bedroom. There was a poster of a young Chinese pop-star-looking model half torn off the wall of the second bedroom (left by the previous resident) and a laminated picture of a Chinese woman that a student of his had cut from red paper. Aside from a refrigerator that stood in the kitchen with a bowl sitting on top of it, and built-in closets full of clothes, that was all that he had in the apartment. He had lived there for more than a year.

Despite the black hole of charm that this apartment represented, however, it was an improvement from my previous living situation. The apartment I had on the college campus was old and unclean, and located too far from the city. So I was glad to move into my friend’s apartment in the city.

His apartment quickly proved to be not to my liking, though, mostly due to a serious roach problem. I remember one night in particular that I was spending with my girlfriend at the time, after we entered the apartment I turned on the light, and then quickly turned it off again. “Are you afraid of cockroaches?” I asked her in Chinese.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait outside for a minute,” I said. She stepped outside, I went back in, turned on the light, killed as many Cheeto-sized roaches as I could before they all scattered out of sight (about three or four), and then poked my head out the door. “OK, you can come in now,” I said.

After that, I simply decided to move into the newest building I could find in the city. This is an urge I have never had before in any place. I’ve always gravitated towards old places, places that I thought had more of an austere look and seemed a bit weathered. But that changed after I dealt for a while with dirt, roaches, rats and bats. I became a lover of new things, and in this way came to understand, to some degree, not to romanticize poverty or to intuitively reject development as an idea.

This is all a rambling way to introduce the place where I now live, which is called “Sunny City”. Before I moved in here the place looked ridiculous to me: about 20 brand-new apartment buildings in a huge cluster, built on top of an underground shopping mall. The buildings are all around 20-stories, which by my reckoning means there are around 2,000 or more apartment units, which is pretty vast. The grounds are all nicely landscaped and well tended. There is at-your-door garbage pickup. There are security cameras. Like most Chinese construction, the buildings are already showing signs of wear and deficient building — there’s a crack in the wall of my bedroom, and for some reason for months all the kitchen fans on this side of the building seemed to blow backwards directly into my apartment through my kitchen fan. So that was awesome. But other than that, it’s mostly OK. I haven’t killed any roaches or wild animals in my home for a year, which has been very nice.

But there is one thing that is maddening about the place — one thing that I realized recently would never be accepted in the U.S.: the noise.

The thing about Sunny City is that the buildings were considered complete before any of the apartments’ interiors had been designed or built. Half of the apartments in the park haven’t been sold or lived in yet. That means that even though there are already a ton of people living here, every time an apartment is sold it must be built on the inside. They are selling these fuckers a la carte. And building an apartment’s interior is, it turns out, very loud.

Last weekend they were resurfacing a wall in a unit just below mine, which mean that there was a guy with a hammer and chisel taking the tiles and the concrete binding agent off the wall, and it took him four days. He started at 7:45 every morning. I know this because the noise sounded like it was right next to my head, and it was impossible to sit in my apartment without feeling like I was going nuts when the chiseling was going on. It lasted about six hours each day. No writing happened on those days. At one point I resorted to picking up a corner of my very heavy bed and slamming it on the floor, in the hope that it might make him stop (yes, clearly illogical).

At one point, I remembered with nostalgia the nice notes the landlady used to put up in the elevator in my apartment in Portland, Ore. when the water was going to be off for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 10:30, when no one was going to be home anyway. Even then the notes seemed absurd. Just turn off the water, lady — do you really think we’re gonna complain? I used to think. Now the elevator note seems like an exotic and incredible fairy tale. Nobody else in this building seemed particularly disturbed by the hammering last week. It just happened, and people accepted it. And this happens all the time. People are much more willing to accept rude and abrupt intrusions into their personal space and nice quiet bubble, to an extent that Americans’ finickiness and insistence that others’ respect their personal space and right to peace and quiet and safety seems completely absurd.

The best example I can think of is that the last time I went home, I was shocked to learn that you’re not allowed to use cell phone on long-range buses in the U.S. I had forgotten this in my time in China. The idea that someone was telling me not to make phone calls to respect others’ who might want to rest seemed laughable when I heard it, but it was great when I wanted to take a nap. You never find that here. It seems a long range bus ride is a license for the loudest imaginable person to start shouting into his cell phone here.

This idea extends to so many things in life, including accepting the decisions of authority. I have been astonished to see the gentle, almost blithe acceptance by people here of decisions from above — decisions that make me bridle as though someone had taken away one of my basic rights, or denied me food, or something. In my first couple of months of teaching there was a sports meet at the university for which all classes would be canceled for a couple days, and I didn’t find out about it two days before. How could they not tell me? I said to myself. Don’t they know that if they had told me a head of time I could have planned some travel, or something? Now I’m just going to sit at home with nothing to do. I was sincerely, unashamedly pissed off. Then the next day, when, because of rain, the sports meet was canceled and class was back on the following day, I was even more pissed. What if I had made plans to travel somewhere?! I chafed.

But people around me just accepted it, as I’ve seen them do time after time here over the past two years. An order comes down from above, and everybody follows it. There is no use complaining. Complaining only makes people upset and angry. You’re better off just going along with it.

The cultural difference was hammered home last week when I was describing to my Chinese teacher an ordeal involving an alum from my college in the U.S., who I had helped the university invite to China to teach. They had strung him along for a month, saying that the position, and then at the last minute, in a mysterious, completely unexplained twist of events, they had changed their minds and said they had enough foreign teachers. He had put off job searching for a month and several people had spent a lot of time communicating to prepare for his trip out, not to mention the Chinese books he bought to get ready, and the kind of mental preparations you have to make for a trip like that. But the word came down from above, and the people who informed him and me of the change passed on the information nonchalantly, as if they couldn’t imagine a world in which another option aside from indifferent acceptance was possible.

When I told my teacher about this, I used the word “disappointment”, cuozhe, and her reaction was confusion.

“No, I think that word is too strong,” she said. “You should use a lighter word.” Her eyes looked straight ahead as she searched for a word, as if the story didn’t even warrant a negative label — really, as if this was actually how things should have gone. Then she came up with a word. “This is just a small trouble,” she said, using xiao (meaning small) and mafan, which is the kind of word you use when you don’t want to put ketchup on your fries because opening the little foil ketchup packet is too mafan. “You can just call it a small trouble.”

By now I could almost expect this reaction, and I felt a weird mix of guilt but also frustration. Guilt because I knew for a fact that she, my teacher, had experienced much worse in her life than I could ever imagine, and therefore really did see the problem as just a small trouble; and frustration, of course, because I am an American, and some part of me — I would even say some slightly spoiled, self-righteous part (characteristics that aren’t necessarily always bad) — wanted to insist. No, this is not just a small trouble, he wanted to say. This is a tragedy!

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.

Before I came to China, my former professor, who helped get me the job here, recommended that I read a book by Peter Hessler about two years the author spent living in rural Sichuan as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Hessler came to China in the late 90s to teach English at a lower-level university. He was one of the first foreigners to live in the city since the communist takeover in 1949, and the book was basically a straight-up account of his time as an English teacher. He supplemented the narrative about his experience with several vignettes about people he met while living in the small city of Fuling, but mostly the book was about what it was like to be an English teacher at a university in small-city China.

On the first page of that book (the book is called River Town), Hessler writes,

When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

When I read the book, I didn’t know it, but it would be basically a guidebook to my entire first year in China. The town that I moved to, Sanming, has a population of about 200,000. I’m an English teacher at a lower-tier university. My students, like his, are largely from the countryside. I am one of only a few foreigners in town. I rarely see anyone who isn’t native Chinese. The environment is isolating at times, inspiring at the same time, very different from the world I knew before socially, historically, economically, linguistically.

That book was a completely indispensable guide to me in the beginning. Especially with regard to preparing me, mentally, for the discipline it would take to make progress learning Chinese. One of the best things about Hessler’s book is how he patiently describes the process of learning Chinese, from the high-level, like realizing, from month to month, that he could read and understand more than what he could before, to the very specific, like describing his method for studying Chinese characters:

And so Soddy’s question remained: How do you spend your spare time? When I finished teaching I would sit at my desk, which looked out across the Wu River to the city, and I would write:

学   学   学   学   学   学   学   学

While I wrote, I pronounced the word over and over, as carefully as I drew it:

“Xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue.”

I would write the same character about a hundred times total, and then I would think of ways in which it was used: xuexi, xuesheng, xuexiao. And I would write it on a flash card and put it on a stack that grew steadily on my desk–between five and ten a day, usually.

After I had been in China for about three months, I re-read his book, and seeing how quickly his Chinese had progressed, I became extremely jealous and copied his method precisely.

That was for writing. I had different tools available for learning speaking and listening — better tools, most likely, since I had the Internet at my fingertips, something he didn’t have. I still struggled to keep up with the pace that he made in the book, feeling myself slowly slipping behind as one year became one and thensome (Hessler was practicing reading newspapers at the end of year one, and I’m just getting to that point now after a year and a half). But it was to a large extent his book that pushed me, gave me a goal to shoot for when there was nobody else around me who was trying as hard to learn Chinese (except Chinese school kids, but a foreigner could never compete with them). It was that way with so many things about China — I had read Hessler’s book, and saw the astonishing things he learned and the things he had to do to learn them, and to a large extent I just copied. I learned some of my own tricks along the way, improvising and also reading blogs of other China expats. But his book was the bible. It was the Alpha and the Omega for me in the first months. I am eternally grateful for it.

But, after finishing his second book, Oracle Bones, a few days ago, I think I have found a book about China that I can be more grateful for. I am about to slip from reviewing to fawning, but this is a blog: Oracle Bones has changed everything in subtle ways; after I got through the second half of the book my whole idea of China and Chinese people was changed, and I read the second half just in awe, the book two inches from my face. It seemed like every few pages I was either tearing up or laughing. It was one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had since Henry Roth tore my heart to pieces in Call It Sleep when I read that novel four or five years ago.

That is, of course, largely because China has become so huge in my world over the past year and a half. Certainly if I had never left the shores of the U.S. and hadn’t struggled for almost 18 months to find a life that seemed sane here, I would not have been so gripped by Hessler’s account of his time in China from 1999 to 2002. But I think there is something transcendent about this particular book (it goes far beyond his third book, Country Driving, which came out last year and which I read last spring) — something that portrayed Chinese people, and how their lives have been driven, torn, shaped, annihilated, by history, that has made this book special to me. Like beautiful fiction, which I wouldn’t have thought a book that is essentially a piece of long-form journalism could ever approach.

To start, Hessler sprinkles the book with fascinating facts that remain imminent for the average expat: Chinese is “logographic”, meaning that each character represents one spoken syllable; a linguist named Zhou Youguang was the main architect of pinyin, the system by which Chinese is romanized (417); the ubiquitous Chinese dish in America called General Tao’s Chicken is named after General Zuo Tongtang who expanded the Chinese empire in the Qing Dynasty (377); and that, after Chinese writing was invented 3000 years ago, “the heavens rained millet and the ghosts wept all night long” (289). Also that the word “oracular” exists.

These are snippets, random notations that were significant to me as a reader, giving sense to things that formerly made no sense. But the true beauty of Oracle Bones is Hessler’s narrative achievement, how he takes a string of unrelated stories and binds them. And, by doing that, how he demonstrates the subjectivity of history. Hessler’s book is not a history book, and it’s not merely a work of reportage: it’s a book about the Chinese world and how mercurial our interpretation of that world is, how it is always changing, how its story is malleable to the point of almost falling apart at any moment, like pizza dough, except in the hands of an experienced teller.

At one point, he breaks away from his whole narrative about China to explain his feelings about journalism as a craft, field and profession:

When I had first arrived in Beijing, the translation from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away–American culture, English literature–and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.

But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker–more than two dollars–was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.

Whenever I received copies of my New Yorker articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap–that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman”, and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.”

These paragraphs attest to someone who has done some serious thinking about his role in a country where the majority of people are still scrambling to eat, yet where an American can also conduct interviews, write stories, and make a six-figure salary in U.S. dollars. This is an idea that has been prominent in my mind for over a year. Since I arrived in China I have been diligently taking notes, studying Chinese, trying my best to make sure that I am observing everything completely. I do it not necessarily with the idea that I will write a book, as Hessler did, but simply to record. I want to know what I have been thinking and seeing and experiencing, whether or not I ever write a book about it. But there is something strange, something tarnished about that act. It’s the same problem that all journalism has. You watch, you observe, you note, you write. But what if somebody doesn’t want to be observed? What if somebody doesn’t want to be written about? Your job, your work, is to take a living person and reduce them to words. What happens if they don’t like what they see? How are you supposed to reconcile your work with that fact? This question involves all of journalism, eventually. I imagine, sometimes, a Chinese person going to America and writing a book about his or her experience. How much of what he or she saw, and then noted, and then wrote, would be true? Perhaps it is all about experience. What is relevant to the viewer, the subjectivity about it. I suppose what I appreciate about Hessler’s writing is that he doesn’t deign to be authoritative: he is always there, or at least usually there, admitting that what he sees is limited by his perspective.

The book, as I mentioned earlier, is also about the malleability of history. This is one reason why I hate history books. They are Swiss cheese in my eyes. A history book’s flaws are always at the fore of my mind when I read one. It’s so obvious that history is limited by the perspective of the time in which it is written, but that is so rarely made clear in the writing. Hessler makes an effort to do that. The most powerful story that Hessler follows in his book is one that he admits he knew from the start he would fail to ever learn the facts about: the story of Chen Mengjia, a Chinese scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (the period under Mao Zedong’s reign in which China turned in on itself and destroyed many of its cultural relics) and later committed suicide. Hessler splices the story of Chen Mengjia (his given name means “dreaming of home” — Meng4jia1) through the whole book, introducing it briefly and then moving on to other things, touching on it again 50 pages later. We slowly discover that Mengjia was a great scholar who studied the famous oracle bones, the 3000 year-old fossils on which the first Chinese characters appear, who criticized Mao and the party in the 50s for simplifying Chinese characters, and we hear different stories about his death: he committed suicide out of pride after being labeled a rightist, he was killed by Red Guards, he had a racy love life, he was faithful to his wife, until finally, toward the end of the book, Hessler writes about his encounter with Chen Mengjia’s younger brother, Mengxiong (dream of bear). The interview is tense, and becomes moreso when Hessler shows Mengxiong a photocopy of one of the last letters his brother ever wrote — a letter Mengxiong has never seen:

In China, people often speak circuitously when confronted with an uncomfortable memory. The narrative emerges loosely, like string falling slack onto the floor; the listener has to imagine how everything connects. Sometimes the most important details are omitted entirely. But when the Chinese do decide to speak openly, their directness can be overpowering. Often, there is no visible emotion: just the simple straight words. And something about seeing his brother’s letter causes Mengxiong to pick up the story and pull it taught. For the next hour he speaks without fatigue.

He tells about how his older brother had been persecuted, and why, and how he eventually tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills, but failed. So Mengxiong went to his home, and there encountered Red Guards (the activists who, with Mao Zedong’s support, worked to destroy artifacts, ideas and people who were perceived as “traditional” during the Cultural Revolution) who detained Mengxiong and Mengjia’s wife, shaved off half their hair as a form of punishment, and proceeded to beat them:

“…they took off their leather belts and started beating us. First they used this part–”

The old man touches the leather tip of his belt. Then he slides his hand to the buckle. “After a while, they used this part, the metal. That’s when I started bleeding. They were beating me on the head, and I was wearing a white shirt — it was summertime. It turned entirely red with blood. They weren’t beating Lucy on the head like that. After a while, I was getting seriously hurt, and I asked them to let me get some bandages at the local clinic. I explained that otherwise I was going to bleed too much, and I promised to return immediately. Finally, they agreed. But while I was at the clinic, I made a phone call to my work unit, and they immediately sent some people over. They explained that I was a good person, and the Red Guards let me go. On my way home I saw my wife–not the same wife you’ve met, but my wife at the time. I told her to hurry home. That was a terribly dangerous time. That evening you could hear them all night long, knocking on doors and beating people.”

Mengxiong explains that he couldn’t visit his brother again, and shortly after that his brother killed himself. The sad thing about it, the most immediately sad thing after you read about the brutality, is simply that the people being beaten were often scholars, people who had invested themselves in knowledge and the past, and in many cases in understanding the outside world–Mengjia and his wife had both lived in America for a time. And that is precisely what they were beaten and humiliated for–they had ideas that seemed dangerous. China was working to destroy its past, in a period of self-immolation, and also was working to destroy anything that hinted of the outside world. In that case, anyone who has pursued knowledge is suspect. When the past and the outside world are the enemies, what else is there? There isn’t anything left. That’s what these interviews make clear. That’s what’s so tragic about the whole thing.

And what’s so beautiful about this book. Hessler sees things, meets people, that you can hardly hold in your mind without feeling that it will burst, and yet he writes so stunningly clearly. China is his onion. And as he showed in River Town, he has such a capacity for understanding it, such a gift for learning about things so quickly and absorbing them so deeply, and yet holding on to himself, the reader can only stand and watch in awe. Hessler took a great leap of faith when he wrote this book that his reader would understand the perspective that he was looking through. That’s what lends the book such clarity, such greatness.

Early on in the book, Hessler visits the North Korean border and finds himself in a field in the middle of nowhere, looking at a border marker with no one around. This is the true feeling of the book: wherever Hessler goes, he has the clarity of someone who has been hiking for days without seeing a soul:

I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hand low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.

When I read this book, I get the feeling that Hessler could be writing about any place, and it would still be this good.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later. Off to buy taco stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“You eat yet?”

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

Peace out from China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next time.

: )

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

The happy couple bowing to assembled friends and family.

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

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

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

The games included the following:

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

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

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

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

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

I also got some action photos from the same class…

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

And number 2…

Teaching outside, same class, Cosby sweater.

And number 3…

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

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

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

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

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

Peace out for now. Much love to you all.

: )