Journal Entry - October 11, 2006
One of the biggest problems we have teaching English in China is photocopying. The University provides no curriculum beyond title of the course, e.g. “Oral English for English Majors” or “Reading for Masters”, and no materials. We are told that the course content is “up to us”, and to photocopy anything we need. Just don’t make too many copies, however many that is. Consequently, we spend a lot of time and effort getting copies made. What we are used to as teachers in the U.S. is unfettered access to a photocopy machine that is within a few feet of the classroom. There is no such thing here. The university has a copy center, but it’s hours and location aren’t very convenient. If I get a brilliant idea for tomorrow’s lesson and want to change my plans, it better not include photocopies because the copy center closes in the early evening and doesn’t open until after classes start. They’re also pretty slow and their equipment is antiquated, which means that the quality isn’t always very good. The women who run the copy center are very friendly and want to be helpful, but there’s not much they can do when their best printer smears every name tag it prints. On top of all that, there’s the language problem to deal with. At least one copy job of 160 sheets was done wrong due to miscommunication and wasn't discovered until too late the night before an 8:00 class. Yesterday, I gave my class a twenty minute reading assignment and then raced off on my bicycle to the copy center to make copies of the quiz that they would take in the second half of class.
Life as an English teacher in Ya’an remains exciting, but it’s starting to become more routine. We are doing more food shopping and cooking at home, although we still eat at restaurants or the dining hall most of the time for breakfast and dinner. Our little domestic scene at home is a haven of western food, music, and culture. When we walk out the door of the Foreign Guest House, we are instantly in China, but we are starting to get used to it. It’s no longer surprising or even noticeable to see all asian faces and hear only Chinese. We hardly notice the staring. Hearing “hello” from strangers barely makes an impression.
We’re also getting much better at finding vegetarian food. We have a small number of restaurants and noodle shops where they now know us and understand what we mean when we say we want it without meat.
Chinese National Day is October first, and the first week of October is a holiday for almost everyone. For our vacation week we were invited to go trekking in the part of Tibet that is in Sichuan province. It has several advantages over the actual province of Tibet. It’s close by, foreigners don’t need special permission to go there, and there are very few western tourists so everything is quite inexpensive. We walked in the mountains for five days and had many amazing and wonderful experiences. We’ll write a blog entry or two about it giving all the details and lots of pictures.
The holiday week was also the week that Sichuan Agricultural University was celebrating its hundredth year anniversary. The university had gone all out and arranged a number of events, culminating in an extravagant variety show. Workers had been getting ready for weeks. A number of construction projects had been started on campus and in the town around the campus. They even went so far as to tear down a couple of somewhat run down buildings near the campus gate, evicting the residents and landscaping the sites. The biggest construction project by far was a new administration building. The site had been nothing more than a hole in the ground when we first came to Ya’an in August, and by the middle of last week it was a large new building with a huge atrium, a parking garage, and lots of shiny glass and marble.
On Friday night, the last night of the anniversary celebration, a huge crowd assembled in the plaza by the new administration building in front of a temporary stage. The show started with a few fireworks. Then there were a number of dancing and singing acts, mostly put on by students, and of professional quality, complete with lights, elaborate costumes, and computer generated backdrops on a giant screen. There were speeches, in Chinese, of course, and a poet from Beijing read a dramatic ode to the university. Finally, to tremendous applause, a pop star from Taiwan was escorted on stage.
At this point, the police dropped the barricades around the plaza and a huge crush of people flooded in. The crowd was soon so dense that we started to feel claustrophobic. We decided that we didn’t have to see the rest of the show and went home. Later the sky was lit up in the direction of the show and we could hear a tremendous fire works show. I was sorry to miss the fireworks, but this is China, and there will be many more opportunities.
One thing that happened on our trek in the mountains was that my glasses were broken. They weren’t so bad that I couldn’t wear them, but they needed to be fixed as soon as possible. As soon as we got back to Ya’an, I went to a couple of local opticians and was told that they would have to be fixed in Chengdu. This presented a small problem. Because of the university’s hundred year celebration, the town was full of visitors. There were ten thousand alumni, as well as many visiting dignitaries from around China and around the world. The last day of the festivities was Friday, so all the buses to Chengdu on Saturday, the day we needed to go, were packed. We just barely managed to get tickets for later in the day than we wanted. Added to that, all the students that had gone home for the holiday were coming back to Ya’an on Sunday, so again, it would be hard to get tickets. Since you can’t reserve tickets over the phone, we left for Chengdu not knowing how we would get back. Our first task in Chengdu was to try to secure tickets for the trip back, but the university bus was sold out and the public bus tickets didn’t go on sale until the day of departure.
We went to the optician that had sold me the glasses and they happily repaired them for free. We then met with our friends Ann and Lynn and went to a huge German Walmart lookalike to shop for western food that we can’t get in Ya’an. The store stocks mostly Chinese goods, but there is enough of an expatriate population in Chengdu for them to make money selling foreign goods. Ann and Lynn were fascinated by all of the strange foods. After that we checked in to the hostel and treated Ann and Lynn to dinner at an Italian restaurant. As an Italian restaurant, it wasn’t quite what we’re used to in the U.S. The pasta was dry and we had to look carefully to find any sauce. It was also different from what Ann and Lynn are used to, although they thought the Italian pasta was interesting in comparison to Chinese noodles. It was a learning experience for all. After dinner we said good bye to our friends and went back to the hostel in time to get some sleep before getting up at 6:00AM to beat the crowd at the bus station. The next morning we arrived at the bus station three minutes before the departure of a bus we didn’t expect to be able to get tickets for, but were surprised to be ushered directly on to it, and arrived back in Ya’an in good time.
We had made a date the previous day to have dinner with Hong Xia, a friend in Ya’an, but soon after we got home Gina started to feel a little ill. This created a problem, because we didn’t have a phone number for Hong Xia. Either I would have to go meet her, or we would have to stand her up without being able to let her know. In the end, I met Hong Xia as we had arranged and Gina stayed home. When I got back, Gina was in the middle of the stomach upset that is standard for visitors to China, except that she had a bad case of it. She was vomiting regularly for about five hours. She finally stopped throwing up late that night, and cancelled her classes for Monday morning. Although she isn’t completely back to normal, she has been able to teach and eat a little for the last two days.
Since Chinese holidays come in long chunks rather than individual days, we won’t have another one until the middle of January. So we probably won’t be having many more adventures like trekking in Tibet for a while. In the meantime, just living here day to day continues to be its own adventure.