Journal Entry - September 9, 2006
One of the biggest problems we have in China is dealing with the banking system. We were paid in cash at our summer camp job in Chengdu and were told to expect the same in Ya’an, so we opened a savings account. (I have never seen a check in China, and I'm not sure such a thing as a checking account exists, although the ATMs mention them.) Since we got stuck in Beijing waiting for a train, we spent more money there than we expected, and we were basically broke by the time we got back to Ya’an. We wouldn’t be paid again until the end of September and we didn't have enough to last us. There is a hefty charge on both ends of the transaction for a cash advance on an American credit card, and I had resigned myself to paying it just so we could eat during September.
Although it had been tremendously complicated and had taken almost half a day, we had gotten a cash advance in Beijing to pay for the viola da gamba. Therefore, I assumed that we could do the same in Ya’an, but I was mistaken. I went to every branch in town of the Bank of China, where we have our account. (You need an account to accomplish anything at a bank more involved than getting change.) I was told over and over to use the ATM, which I would do just to have the slip of paper showing them that it didn’t work. Eventually I was told that it can’t be done in Ya’an at all, and that I would have to go to Chengdu to the main branch during certain hours. Of course, those hours are during the week, and we can only get to Chengdu on the weekends.
So I went to our contact at the Foreign Affairs Office and told her the problem. She arranged for us to get our September pay in advance. That was great, except that it was during registration for the fall semester, so the finance office was closed. Finally, she just loaned us enough money to get through the next few days. What a mess.
Our semester started off with a bang, sort of. It wasn’t quite what we were expecting. We were told to “report for duty” on Friday, September 1st. We hadn’t yet received our teaching schedules for the fall semester, and we were hoping to find out what we would be teaching and when. We went to the Foreign Affairs Office, where our boss works. We handled a couple of small issues with our contact there and then went to officially meet our boss in his office. He asked us how we were getting along and we said fine. Then he asked us if we were busy that evening. We said no, and he said there would be a dinner at 7:00, and would we mind telling the other foreign teachers. Then we left. That was it. Still no schedule, no teaching materials, no idea what we would be doing or when we would start doing it.
That evening, the foreign teachers met the Foreign Affairs Office director and staff plus two people from the English Language department and we all walked to a fancy restaurant in town. We were shown to the usual private room and the food started showing up, along with a constant flow of beer and wine. The director started things off with a couple of toasts, and then said that everyone would have to offer a toast at some point in the evening. The director would declare “gambei” whenever he made a toast, and sometimes when someone else did as well. “Gambei” is a Chinese word that means that everyone must drain his or her glass. It was always quickly refilled by the two waiters assigned to our room.
Eventually, the flow of food slowed and then stopped, the director declared that we were done, and we all got up and left, only to reassemble on the sidewalk where the next destination for drinking was announced. A couple of cars were called and off we went to an outdoor venue that was only about a ten minute walk away. Once there, the beer started flowing again. Over the next hour or so, a few friends and acquaintances of the director showed up, one after another, until the group occupied a couple of tables. We were having a good time despite the language barrier, but it was getting late. We felt that being the oldest in the group, we could get away with leaving first, so we don’t know how things ended up.
The next day, we were off to Chengdu. We had ordered a pair of glasses for Lou. Like almost everything else, they are so inexpensive here that we decided to upgrade Lou’s glasses to what Gina has. A pair of glasses with graduated lenses and the super light, flexible titanium frames, which cost around $700 in the U.S. can be had here for about $95. They were ready to be picked up, so we took the bus into the city, about a two hour ride, and made a weekend of it, staying at a hostel, meeting up with some Chinese friends, and doing a little shopping for the western products we can’t get in Ya’an, like cheese and bread.
We picked up the glasses without a hitch, never a given when it’s just us dealing with a Chinese store keeper, and met one of our friends. We went to our favorite, non-touristy temple for lunch. She had never been to a temple restaurant and was surprised at all of the food with fake meat. We were surprised at her surprise, but we shouldn’t have been. China is such a large, diverse, and complicated place that we often find ourselves introducing our Chinese friends to things with which they are unfamiliar.
For example, that evening we took three of our friends to an Indian restaurant. They were completely out of their element. None had never eaten at a restaurant with forks and knives. None were familiar with the food being served in courses rather than a sequence of dishes that come one after another, or with the concept of each person ordering a meal that is his or her meal, rather than each dish being communal. We had’t really intended to induce extreme culture shock, but it was interesting to see others experiencing it instead of us.
The five of us then retired to our hostel to play mahjong. It turned out that one of the Chinese, the youngest, had never played. Everyone else in the group except for Lou was occupied with getting drinks or finding the bathroom, so the guests at the hostel were treated to the bizarre spectacle of a white foreigner teaching a Chinese person to play mahjong. The pleasant strangeness of the evening was rounded out by the fact that the person who won was the beginner, and the only person who scored nothing was the most expert player. The fact that she was Chinese wouldn’t normally have to be mentioned, but it was an unusual day.
We returned to Ya’an Sunday night and got up Monday morning, the first day of classes, still with no idea of what or when we would be teaching. We had been told many times not to worry, so we didn’t. That afternoon we went to a local elementary school and made contact with the English teacher. While we talked, there was a crowd of curious faces in the doorway. After some initial confusion about our purpose in being there, she was delighted that we were interested in finding out about her school. We made a date for later in the week to go back during one of her classes.
Finally, on Tuesday we were called to the Foreign Affairs Office for a meeting with the English department. We were given our teaching schedules, but no class lists, and had a brief discussion of what we would be teaching. One class was supposed to have started on Monday, but the materials had not yet arrived so the class was being delayed a week (and extended a week at the end of the semester.) All classes are two hours. Lou has four classes a week and Gina has five, for a total of eight and ten hours of teaching a week. For this amount of work we get a full time salary that is quite generous by Chinese standards. We finally have something to do, except that there is really not a defined curriculum for any of the courses except those that prepare a small group of students for the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) exam. We get to do pretty much whatever we want, which is a blessing and a curse. We’ve started to teach, but because we make it up as we go along and because it occupies so little of our time, it doesn’t feel like it provides much structure to our days.
Meanwhile we continue to set up our apartment. We went to a seamstress and bought a piece of cloth for a door curtain. Gina had planned to sew a sleeve on one end and a hem on the other, but changed her mind and decided to have the seamstress do it. We went back with the cloth, and after convincing her that nothing was wrong with it, we started the process of telling her what we wanted done with it. It took quite a lot of going back and forth, gesturing, miming, using a tape measure, and drawing pictures, all of which involved four people talking at once, Gina, Lou, the seamstress, and her husband. We weren’t at all sure whether she knew what we wanted, but suddenly she was cutting and then sewing on her foot pedal powered sewing machine. In the end, it took her about three minutes and was done perfectly, and she refused to take any money for it.
Our days are so full of new experiences that I could write another thousand words if I had the time to write and you had the time to read. That's all for now.