Journal Entry - September 25, 2006
Sorry we haven’t been doing a good job of keeping up with the journal. Now that school has started, we’re actually a little busy. We each had only one class the first week of school, so we didn’t really start teaching until the week of the 11th. Gina has two classes of Oral English for English Majors, about 25 students in each class, and three TOEFL classes. The TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) is a test that is used for foreign admissions to U.S. graduate programs, among other things. Gina is one of four teachers who are working with a select group of sixteen students who, if they can pass the TOEFL, will go to the U.S. as part of a program in Turf Grass Management sponsored by the University of Michigan. She and the others teach TOEFL classes two or three times a week, two hours at a time, to this group of students. The students will do nothing but study for the TOEFL with classesfor four hours every morning, five days a week for the entire year. If they pass the exam at the end of the school year, they will be admitted to the exchange program. If they fail, they will have to change their majors, and therefore their career plans. A year sounds like a long time, but the TOEFL is a difficult test, and they have a long way to go before they will be ready.
Lou has one class of Oral English for English Majors and three classes of Reading for Masters Students. The reading classes have about 80 students each. They are much too large to give the students an opportunity to actually speak English. The English department is vague about what Lou is supposed to do and they haven’t provided any materials, so Lou is making it up as he goes along. It’s a good thing we had our magazine subscriptions forwarded so we have some English language materials to teach with.
Like all Chinese students, these students are very reluctant to volunteer information, opinions, questions, anything at all. We have had to adapt our Western teaching style to students that don’t respond. It can be very frustrating, but we’re gradually figuring it out. Instead of asking open ended questions, we have to ask questions with very specific answers, and then have the student that responds justify his answer. It’s a real bonus if the student is incorrect, because the rest of the class will then be much more ready to offer an opinion. They just have to wait until the first penguin falls in the water before they are willing to take a risk. We have learned to lavishly praise that first penguin, correct or not.
One of our goals in coming to China is to study the language. We’re gaining a certain proficiency just by going out and dealing with the necessities of everyday life, but we also want to spend some time really studying. One problem is that we are at different levels and it wouldn’t work very well to be in the same class, so we have been looking for individual teachers. Gina and Dai Ou have started trading Chinese lessons for violin lessons. It works well because Dai Ou's English is very good and they are both beginners at what the other is teaching.
Lou has just started studying with, Xie Xiaojie, a friend of Dai Ou's. Her English isn’t as good as Dai Ou’s, which is probably an advantage, since more of the communication will take place in Chinese. Dai Ou says that her puthonghua is very good. Puthonghua, what we call Mandarin Chinese, is the standard dialect, and it’s difficult to find someone who is good at it here in Ya’an, where the dialect is sichuanhua.
We have been through quite an adventure with bicycles. Lou’s blog entry on his bicycle gives you some idea of the type of bicycle we have been dealing with. The biggest problem is that bicycle theft is endemic. The likelihood that an unlocked, unguarded bicycle in a public place will disappear within ten minutes is nearly 100 percent. The brakes on Lou’s got so bad that it was dangerous to ride, so he borrowed a bicycle from another foreign teacher. He and Gina popped into a classroom building while no one was around, and the bicycle promptly disappeared. Since all of the bicycles for the foreign teachers are provided by the University, we now had to replace the stolen bicycle. We had been looking for a used bicycle for a while to replace the broken down one Lou was using, but couldn’t find one. Everyone here will tell you that it’s foolish to buy a new bicycle because it will be stolen very quickly, locked or not, and it’s true that most Chinese have bicycles that look almost as bad as Lou’s. But when the borrowed bicycle was stolen, we decided that we couldn’t wait longer. We bought a new bicycle and then went to a lock store and bought two high tech locks. Chinese lock technology is at least as good as their bike technology is bad, so the locks we got are not going to be easy to defeat. We’re hoping that we’re finally done dealing with bicycle problems.
We have started a weekly class with the local office of the Public Security Bureau (the police, or PSB) that issues passports and exit visas to Chinese citizens and work permits to foreigners. It became apparent when we were setting up our contract this summer with the University Foreign Affairs Office that the FAO wasn’t going to be able to get our work permits to us in time. The person handling our paperwork at the FAO went to the PSB and asked them to expedite our applications as a favor. Since all favors in China have to be repaid, the FAO promised the police that we would teach them English. We didn’t really have a choice in the matter, and we weren’t told about it in advance, but it has turned out to be fun. The passport office at the PSB has five people working in it, and two of them already speak passable English. We teach them once a week for an hour on Friday afternoons. We start by splitting them into two groups, beginners and advanced, and then we get together at the end of class and sing songs or play some game. They love it, so we do too.
About three weeks ago we went to a local primary school, Xiao Xiao Ba Hao (Primary School #8) and talked to the English teacher about visiting one of her classes. We went last Thursday. When we walked into the classroom, the students, 52 fourth graders, erupted in wild cheering. The teacher directed us to the back of the room, we sat down, and she resumed her lesson. She took the children through a rapid series of call and response exercises. The new words for the day were crab, shark, dolphin, and whale. The new sentences were What’s this? and It’s a ... The students were quick to catch on. After a while she played a game, similar to telephone, except that it was competitive. The word was passed from front to back in a single column, with the first column to finish without changing the word won. The students were very eager to please, except that the ones at the back, that is, close to us, were much too excited about the lao wai (us) to pay full attention to anything else.
Back at the university, it turns out that the freshmen start a week after everyone else, and the first thing they do is three weeks of military training. The training is for both sexes and is military in appearance only. They dress in identical camouflage fatigues (camo colored sneakers instead of boots) and march around in lines for a large part of the day. The sun rises at about 7:00 here in the western end of a very wide time zone, and there is hardly anyone around before that. But the freshmen are up and out by 6:30, when the military music starts blasting over loudspeakers. They are ordered around by screaming drill instructors, actual military, with megaphones, shouting out the marching counts. Yi! Er! San! Si! (One! Two! Three! Four!) echoes off the buildings and mountain sides. It’s quite a sight to see them marching four abreast, with the line stretching out of sight down the boulevard in front of the Foreign Guest House. But despite the military discipline, it’s easy to see that by and large they don’t take the training very seriously. They aren’t very good at marching in time, and many of them are looking around or chewing gum.
We found out that there is a small local temple, and knowing that temples often have vegetarian restaurants. It turned out to be an adventure. We went by ourselves, which is already adventurous, since we wouldn't be able to speak. The temple is quite close, like everythng in Ya’an, only about fifteen minutes by bike. It’s way out at the end of town, in a little neighborhood across one of the rivers, up against a steep mountain side. It’s definitely a poor part of town, with old, one story residential buildings mixed with small factories. Right in the middle of this Chinese version of urban blight, was the entrance to the temple. We went in and said to a couple of young men lounging around in the courtyard that we wanted to eat. We weren't able to ask if there was a restaurant and where it was, but we assumed that they got the idea because they nodded, motioned us in, and told us to wait. One of them went and got a monk, who, once he understood that we wanted to eat, brought us into another little room, gave us each an apple and some hot water, and again told us to wait. People were coming and going, trying to speak to us, and giving up after a while. We had no idea what was going on. At one point, a monk managed to get across the idea that they don’t eat meat, and we managed to tell them that we don’t either, which seemed to make a good impression.
After a while an old woman came into the room and motioned for us to follow. We were led up through the temple complex, which was on the side of a mountain, and up to the main pavilion, where there was a large statue of a buddha with a thousand arms. It was under construction, but looked impressive nonetheless. At this point, we had been there for at least a half hour, and we still had no idea if or when dinner would happen, whether there was an actual restaurant, whether they were making a meal just for us, or something else. After looking at the thousand armed buddha and the view from the pavilion, we were led back to the living quarters of the monastary. We sat in a small room with an alter at one end and a large screen television at the other. It turned out to be the front room of the old woman's apartment. We were given more hot water and we sat and waited for a while. There was a lay person there who was very devout. He showed us how to bow to the altar and say certain words, and insisted that we do it. He put some effort into asking about our religious leanings, making various gestures from his understanding of Christianity and Islam. He was busy proselytizing when the head monk came in and gently told him to knock it off.
Finally, we were taken back down to the hall by the temple entrance. It turned out that there was no restautant, but we were invited to eat with the temple community. There were four monks, the old woman, and the lay person. The meal was very simple, rice, tofu, and some vegetables. There was more than enough to eat, and they insisted that we fill ourselves up. It was very informal and quite satisfying. When we were done, they invited us to come back on a particular day. We didn't quite understand, so we left it that we would come back some day.
Our little foreign community is quite sociable. We often get together with the other foreign teachers to go out to eat, or play mahjong, or just sit around and chat. Someone will make some sort of western treat, like cookies or pie, and invite everyone over. Being the newcomers, we’re constantly asking the others for advice on how to deal with everyday life. There is a significant amount of conferring about our teaching responsibilities, especially for Gina and the others that are teaching the TOEFL classes.
Yesterday was Chandra’s birthday. We went with some chinese friends out to a “bar”, really more of an outdoor restaurant, and had a mixture of Chinese barbecue and other food. We were right next to the big river in town, which was very pleasant. There is a row of bars along the river, and strolling musicians were going from one to the next. By coincidence, someone else was celebrating something, we don’t know who or what, and put on a fireworks display over the river that lasted at least half an hour. The university always gets each foreign teacher a cake on his or her birthday, and Chandra had brought hers along. Instead of regular candles, it had a big plastic flower that, when the fuse was lit, first put on its own display of miniature fireworks, and then opened up on its own with a lit candle on each petal. Amazing. When we were done we came back to the residence hall where the two of us and Dai Ou played Happy Birthday on violins and gamba.
The Chinese national holiday, their version of the Independence Day, is next week, and the whole country takes a week off. Pierre and Dai Ou have invited us to go trekking in the mountains west of here for five days. We will be at about 14,000 feet elevation the whole time, with a guide and pack horses. We have had to buy hiking boots, since we didn't bring ours, and we've rented a tent, sleeping bags, and air mattresses. It promises to be a big adventure. We'll tell you all about it next time.