Journal Entry - April 20, 2007
Our lives have continued to be very busy lately, maybe even busier than last month. We are requiring some of our students to spend a little time once a month in an English speaking environment, which means lunch with us, coming to our office hours, or coming to English Corner. As a consequence, we’re getting pretty big crowds, and attracting more attention from people who aren’t our students.
We have also taken some of our students on the road. We have had our English majors creating performances based on a children’s book, and they performed three times this week at a local primary school. This school specializes in teaching two foreign languages: English and Chinese. That is Mandarin Chinese. In this part of the country, the people speak a dialect called sichuanhua, which is different enough from Mandarin Chinese that people from other parts of the country have a hard time when they first come here. Our students performed three times and were very well received.
Our graduate students have also been performing, sort of. We have put them into small groups and assigned them topics for research, with short presentations of their results. The presentations have ranged from very polished and professional, with amazing graphics and great stage presence, to students who were so nervous they could barely speak. We’re definitely departing from the standard Chinese educational methods that they’re used to. Some of them are responding very well, and some aren’t.
Our office hours has gradually changed into a sort of activity hour. We have been getting bigger and bigger crowds, and they aren’t just coming with questions about class. Mostly they come just to have a chance to hang around with a foreigner. Gina started playing cards with her students, and it has really caught on. Now on Tuesday afternoons, our apartment and the Guest House dining room are full of students playing cards, Scrabble, a game called Guess Who, word games, and other things. The students are very interested in the things in our apartment. There is often a group with a big map spread out on their laps, or a book. We have to remind them when it’s time to go.
A couple of weeks ago we had a typical great experience that came out of nowhere. We got a call from the teacher that I worked with last semester at the vocational school. She invited us to a “fire party” at the school. We of course had no idea what that was, but we were game. We showed up at the school gate on a Friday night at about 7:00. There was a big circle of students in the cement courtyard of the school and a sound system with very large speakers, playing Chinese pop music at an incredibly high volume. A girl was standing in the center of the circle singing. She was belting out a pop tune and doing very well. It turns out that most of the students at the school are ethnic Tibetans, which is why they were standing in a circle. After a while we realized that in addition to the sound system there was a karaoke machine. Some of the students were pretty good, some of them weren’t. As each student performed others would run into the circle and give the performer a balloon. Some of them ended up with too many balloons to carry.
We of course were given seats of honor at the head of the circle, handed bottles of water, and asked if we could perform. “Do you have a performance?” We were offered the use of the karaoke machine, but since we can’t read the Chinese and we don’t know any of the songs we declined. Instead, we decided to sing a two part campfire song. There was the usual thunderous applause for anything foreigners do, especially foreigners with some connection. After our rendition, the singing started to wind down and the fire was started. There was a modest pile of wood in a large wok-shaped basin, and the students reformed the circle around it. As the fire got going the sound system started playing Tibetan dance music and students started doing a typical Tibetan circle dance. We were dragged into the dance, and despite never having done it before, we weren’t much worse than average and better than some. The dance continued for a couple of songs, and then it started to drizzle. After a couple of minutes the rain intensified and suddenly everyone ran inside and abandoned the fire. Just like that the party was over and we were politely put in a cab back home.
That rain was the last precipitation for a little while. The weather here has definitely turned. The daytime temperatures have been in the 80's, and are atypically sunny. The air is the clearest I've ever seen in China, and the views of the mountains around the town are spectacular. Last weekend I took advantage of one of these beautiful days and rode out into the country side. It was rice planting time in the little valley that I rode up, and I got some nice pictures.
Ruth and Emily (Gina’s sister and my daughter) will be visiting for two and four weeks, respectively, starting this weekend, and we have been busy arranging their trip. We’ll be heading to Chengdu tomorrow on the bus to pick them up at the airport. We’ll all be heading off to Lijiang, a preserved older town in the mountains in Yunnan province, for the May Day week long vacation. We’ll be posting another journal entry when we return.