Journal Entry - August 29, 2006
We arrived in Chengdu after three days of almost solid travel. After a short rest in a hotel, we woke up to China. Our first experience was breakfast in the hotel. There were a number of other Chinese travelers, business men, families, couples, all having Chinese breakfast. No one spoke any English, and none of the food was familiar. We picked some food at random, some of which we liked, some of which we didn’t. After breakfast we went back to our room, packed up, and went to the lobby to check out and call our contact at the university. The scene on the street outside was our first real look at China.
There were pedicab drivers with cell phones, Chinese characters on everything along with a surprising amount of English, and a little alley across the street with open stalls selling fruit and vegetables. The only building that didn’t have store fronts on the street was empty and marked for demolition.
We called our contact at the Office for International Cooperation and Exchange of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, who told us to sit tight and we would be picked up in a cab. About an hour later, our two personal assistants drove up in taxi, saw that our baggage wouldn’t all fit, got another taxi, and we took off for our apartment in the “Foreign Expert’s” dormitory of the university. Our assistants, Ann and Lynn, were two young English majors whose English was good and who were to be our invaluable right hands for the next several weeks.
The apartment was spacious, well lit, with a large living and dining room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, and an on-demand gas water heater. The kitchen was medium sized, with no cabinets, a two burner gas hotplate, a microwave, a small refrigerator, and an electronic device the size of a small dorm fridge with a glass door that turned out to be a “dish sterilizer”. We don’t really know what it was, but we used it to store the few dishes that came with the apartment. (As strange and dysfunctional as the kitchen was, it was better than the kitchen in our permanent apartment in Ya’an.) Everything was coated with a thin layer of oily soot. We immediately got to work cleaning and setting up.
We came to China with a few clothes and some teaching materials and books, so one of our first tasks was to go shopping for all the things we would need to live. Our assistants took us all around, translating, haggling for better prices, keeping us out of trouble in the anarchic traffic. (The traffic is bizarre. There will be an entire blog entry devoted to the subject.) Chengdu is a large city, so there are many things called department stores or supermarkets. The distinction is almost irrelevant in China; with the exception of electronics, books, and furniture, a retail establishment is either tiny and specializes in something, for example, plastic house wares, fabric, used cell phones, fruit, or lumber, or it is huge and caters to just about every domestic need, including groceries, small appliances, clothing, linens, etc. They are like Walmarts, including the sources of the non-food products, except that they fit just as much stuff into much less space.
All that setting up didn’t result in much of a functional kitchen. We never really cooked at home, just boiling water for tea and toasting a little bread in a frying pan for breakfast. Once, we boiled some soybeans that we bought at an open air market, and managed to scramble an egg or two for breakfast. Mostly we ate out, and most of the time we ate at the university dining hall. We could have eaten at the fancy sit down restaurant reserved for faculty, but we preferred to eat at the student cafeteria because it was basically a chow line with the food laid out and slopped onto trays. We would typically get rice or noodles and a couple of vegetable dishes, more than we could comfortably eat, for about $.75. It was all done with a special kind of debit card. The card has the advantage that the food handlers don’t also have to handle money, which helps keep things sanitary, or more precisely, keeps conditions from becoming even more unsanitary than they already are.
After a couple of days of setting up, cleaning up, shopping, and jet lag recovery, all accompanied and assisted by Ann and Lynn, we set about our first real task in China, buying musical instruments. There is an excellent viola da gamba maker in Beijing that we planned to visit later with the hope of buying an instrument for me, but Gina also wanted to buy a nice mandolin. We went to an area of Chengdu, near the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, where there are a number of musical instrument shops. What we discovered about mandolins is that despite the fact that most of them are made in China, nobody plays them here, so they are immediately put into shipping crates and sent to the U.S. If we wanted one, we would have to go to Beijing. While we completely failed to find a mandolin, we did buy a violin for Lou to fiddle around with while waiting for the instruments we really want.
Once we got all of our settling in and shopping done we went to Ya’an, where we would be teaching during the regular academic year. Although to us it’s a big city (300,000 people), to the Chinese it’s so small that hardly any of them have ever heard of it, even people from Chengdu, which is only 80 kilometers away. While there we stayed at the guest house where we would be living later, met some of the people we would be working with, walked around the campus a little, and took a walk into the countryside. It’s quite beautiful, with mountains all around, and very condensed. I rode a bicycle from one end to the other in about fifteen minutes, and in five minutes we can walk from the guest house to mountains.
Then it was back to Chengdu and the beginning of the English Summer Camp. We each had four classes of 45 minutes every week day, plus delivering two lectures each to large audiences over the course of the three weeks. Other than that we were free to roam around as we pleased. There were altogether about forty foreign teachers at the summer camp. They ranged in age from just over twenty to over seventy and were from all over the English speaking world, U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, South Africa, the Caribbean. There was at least one non-native speaker, a German who had just finished his masters degree in Scotland. Some of them had been in China for a number of years and had lots of good advice for us. Others were basically tourists who were trying something a little different. We ended up hanging out with four or five of them on a pretty regular basis, checking out different sites around the city and comparing notes about teaching Chinese students.
One thing we made a special point of doing was going to some of the temples in Chengdu. They are in varying states of repair, depending mostly on how many Chinese tourists they attract. Some are quite crowded. Some Chinese are tourists just like us, some come specifically to burn incense and pray, some just to sit and relax. There is a long tradition of Taoist and Buddhist monastic temples having vegetarian restaurants, and all three of the temples we went to in Chengdu have them. Temple restaurants specialize in imitation meat dishes. For instance, at one Gina had “Chicken and vegetables” and I had “Squid with sea slug”. Odd, but good.
The most important reason that we did the English summer camp at the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China was to prepare for teaching at Sichuan Agricultural University, and we now know that it was a very good idea. Teaching Chinese students is in many ways the same as teaching American students, but it is very different in some very important ways. The biggest difference is that Chinese students don’t raise their hands, ever. You ask a question, say, “Who can tell me the main idea of the story we just read?” No hands go up. “How many of you have had a native speaker of English as an English teacher before?” No hands go up. “How many of you can understand what I’m saying?” No hands go up. “How many of you speak Chinese?” No hands, but at least a few puzzled looks. They almost never raise their hands for anything at all. That makes it difficult when your teaching style is based on a back and forth conversation between teacher and students.
Another thing we learned is that although their understanding of grammar isn’t bad and their vocabularies vary from not bad to pretty good, they can be very difficult to understand. They tend to rehearse their sentences, which is natural, and then say them as fast as they can. The speed with which they speak, coupled with what is for Chinese speakers an almost impossible language to pronounce correctly, make it a real challenge for a teacher to understand his or her students. One of our constant bits of advice for our students was “Slow down”.
After three weeks of teaching, we collected a few phone numbers and email addresses, said good bye to our fellow teacher friends, packed up our apartment, and boarded the bus for Ya’an. When we arrived, our first task was to set up housekeeping all over again, this time in an apartment about half the size. We had a little bit of help with the shopping from a fellow foreign teacher at the beginning, and then we were off on our own. Not having personal assistants was a challenge, but we had been in China long enough (four weeks) that we were able to interact effectively with store clerks and cab drivers. We got set up pretty quickly and were ready to go on to the next task, going to Beijing to buy musical instruments.
Unfortunately, we hit a snag. The reason for the trip to Beijing was to see Wang Zhiming, a violin maker who has recently started making excellent violi da gamba. We had corresponded with his wife, who speaks some English, via email. They knew that the purpose of our trip was to decide whether to buy a gamba, and that if we liked the instrument and we could agree on a price, we would buy it right away and take it back to Ya’an. However, no one in China, including Wang Zhiming, actually plays the gamba, so no one has strings for the instrument. If I wanted to play the instrument before buying it, which of course I did, I would have to order strings from the U.S., wait for them to be delivered to Ya’an, and then take them to Beijing. We had found this out and ordered the strings while we were still in Chengdu, but the strings had still not arrived when we got to Ya’an. We ended up waiting a week in Ya’an for the strings to be delivered. There was probably an extra day or two of delay because the university is on vacation during July and August, which delays the normal delivery of mail. We finally got the strings on Monday, August 14th, and flew to Beijing the next day.
We checked into a very nice hostel in Beijing and made contact right away with Wang Zhiming. He and his wife proved to be some of the most charming and generous people we have met in China. They wined and dined us and showed us around the town. They took us to several music shops to look for a mandolin for Gina, introducing us to friends in the musical instrument business in Beijing. In addition to all that, they took us to their house where I looked at several seven string basses, tried one out, and bought it. It has inlay around the edges and intricate carving on the scroll, but most importantly, it has a very nice sound, very clear throughout the range of the instrument. It came with a hard case with wheels and a fairly nice bow. I’m very pleased.
As it happened, our hostel was right down the street from a whole row of instrument shops, where Gina and I spent a morning looking for a mandolin. We found four on that street and Wang Zhiming’s friend found four more. All of them were cheap junk except for two. None of them were tuned correctly, and two of them had the eight strings set up as equally spaced separate strings, rather than as pairs. The prices varied widely, from $25 to $250, which, along with the incorrect tuning, indicated to us that the Chinese have no real knowledge of mandolins. Of the two decent instruments Gina liked one more than the other. We bargained the store owner down to $50 including a case, an extra set of strings (we were surprised that they had them) and some cello rosin for the gamba.
After we bought the gamba and the mandolin it was time to return to Ya’an. The gamba can’t go in regular airplane luggage, so we planned to take a train back to Chengdu and catch a bus from there. The hostel staff was there to help us reserve train tickets, but unfortunately, the train was full for the next three days. You can’t reserve tickets more than three days in advance, so we waited until the next day to try again. We got the same result, no tickets available. So we waited another day and still couldn’t buy the tickets. Finally we asked the hostel staff what was going on. They were calling at the earliest possible opportunity but the tickets were always sold out. They explained to us that it was all a waste of time, that you have to know someone to buy a train ticket during the busy season, and they didn’t have the right connections. We didn’t bother to ask why they didn’t tell us that to begin with. At that point we were in the position of having to return to Chengdu on an airplane, which meant buying a third seat to put the gamba in, which we did.
Meanwhile, we weren’t just sitting around at the hostel. We rented bikes for a couple of days and rode around some of the old parts of Beijing. There are all these little alleys and gates and old compounds full of people. There were a couple of large lakes with taverns and tea houses along their shores. We visited a couple of old palace compounds. We went to a park which was built by the emperors over several generations that had lots of temples and statues and such. On the last two days we went to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, both of which were very impressive. Then we were finally able to leave Beijing and come home with two weeks left before school starts.
A student of Gina’s from the summer camp who adopted “McTracy” as his English name had extended an open invitation to visit him in his hometown not far from Ya’an. A day or so after we returned from Beijing we got a call from him asking when we could come. Since we have to report for duty on September 1st, we picked the weekend of August 26th and 27th, since it would leave us most of a week to get ready. We took a cab down to the bus station on Friday to buy tickets and then caught the bus on Saturday morning. This was our first travel arrangement that we did entirely by ourselves and it went off without a hitch. We spent the day in Mei Shan being wined and dined and generally shown around by Gina’s former student and his family. His father is the city manager, so we were treated quite well. They took us to a famous temple dedicated to a famous family of poets from Mei Shan, took us to nice restaurants, and put us up in a three star hotel, the nicest one in town. We went for a walk along the river in the evening, where, since we were the only non-Chinese people in a city of almost half a million, we were instant celebrities. The next morning they saw us off at the bus.
This was not the end of our summer adventures. We had briefly met all of our foreign English teacher colleagues. They are Lawrence, an Irish forester who is teaching English here and consulting with local governments in western China on forestry issues, Pierre, who is from Toulouse, France, and John and Chandra, a couple from Minnesota who both recently graduated from college with teaching degrees. We’re the oldest in the group by about twenty years. They’re a pretty social bunch. We’ve gone out to dinner together a couple of times with them and some of their Chinese friends. Pierre has a Chinese girlfriend name Dai'ou who is a graduate student in animal genetics at the university and speaks excellent English. She is very friendly and generous with her time and has agreed to tutor us in Chinese in exchange for violin lessons. On Monday she invited us to go with her, Pierre, Lawrence, and one of her female friends to go hiking in the mountains for a couple of days. It was an amazing trip, about which we’ll write more later. Now we’re back in Ya’an, resting up from all of our travels, getting ready to spend the year teaching English.