November 8, 2005

Hi All,

Kate and I are now three weeks into our careers as teachers of English as a foreign language. Our classes have gone well, and we’re feeling very good about the whole thing. The students make it easy for us to enjoy teaching. They’re bright, earnest, and eager to learn. We have a little more than 550 students between us, and very few of them have ever spoken to, or even seen, a foreigner before. (“Foreigner” and “foreign teacher” as used here seem to refer mainly to Americans, Brits, and other native English speakers.) Only five or six of my students report having had a foreign teacher in middle school. (Middle school in China includes the equivalents of both junior high and high school in the United States—referred to as junior and senior middle school.) It is considered a special privilege among students to have a foreign teacher.

We are teaching only freshmen, and many of the upper classmen we have come to know have expressed disappointment at not having classes with us. We’re doing our best to offset that by being available to students as much as we can. Fuyang Teachers’ College has two campuses—East (the old campus) and West (the new campus). Kate and I have worked out our teaching schedules so that each of us can give our full attention to students on one campus. Kate teaches about 250 freshmen on the East campus, and I have about 300 freshmen on the West campus. When we’re not in class, we spend time with any students who want to talk with us. Kate has been sitting on the steps outside an auditorium between classes and drawing crowds of visitors and onlookers. She’ll move her conversation circle indoors when cold weather sets in. I have lunch in the West campus canteen (student cafeteria) most days and am always surrounded by students who are curious and eager to talk. Many of the students are quite shy, and I can sometimes actually see them building up their courage to speak their first words to a foreigner. I would have loved to have seemed imposing and formidable as a lawyer, but I shoot for a more friendly and welcoming demeanor now. Still, students often tell me that they have seen me around the campus, but were afraid to speak to me.

The freshmen spent their first two weeks on campus in military training. From what we observed, this involved mostly marching and physical training. Their uniforms were navy blue and white warm-up suits, so they looked more like young athletes than soldiers-in-training. Uniformed military instructors led the marching drills, but with limited success, at least if marching in step was an objective. I don’t think our freshmen’s marching would have impressed a Texas marching band director.

In our first class sessions, we had students share information about their hometowns, families, personal interests, and what they would like to learn about America. They wrote this information on notecards, then introduced themselves to a partner. The partners then introduced each other to the class. I was struck by the many generous and complimentary comments that were made in addition to the requested information. For example, “my partner’s English name is Christina, and I think she is a lovely girl;” “the people of her hometown are very warm and friendly;” “he lives with his mother, father, and younger brother, and he loves them very much;” “she likes to sing songs, and I think she sings very beautifully.”

Our students’ oral English skills are better than we had thought they might be. The stories we heard from other Amity teachers and older students had prepared us for students who would not be able to understand much of anything we said. A senior with quite good English skills told me that she had not been able to understand her American teacher for the first two months of her freshman year. So it has been quite gratifying to find that our students can follow our instructions most of the time. They were able to write down a passage that we read to them with a pretty high degree of accuracy. We’ve learned to speak a little more slowly and distinctly, but that seems to be all that is needed for them to understand us. We’re still a little bit awed by the responsibility of teaching anyway; I don’t know what we would have done if our oral English students couldn’t understand our oral English.

Our students treat us with a mixture of affection, wonder, and respect. They seem genuinely excited to have us as teachers. At the same time, they seem to doubt that we can handle the most ordinary tasks. Students ask every day how Kate and I manage to buy food and do other ordinary day-to-day things in China. They seem to see our very limited ability to speak Chinese, coupled with our foreign-ness, as reason to assume that we must be lost and hopelessly adrift here. They take our arms and tell us “be careful” when we cross the street. They tell us the prices of things in stores, even though the prices are printed in familiar Arabic numerals. They ask hourly whether we are tired and advise us to take a rest. They applaud when we walk in and hang on every word as if we were omniscience itself on life in America, but they fear we’ll get lost if we try to cross campus without a student escort.

We spend so much time talking to students that sore throats are becoming a concern. Some students are a little hard to understand because their English skills aren’t too good. And sometimes when I can understand the words, I still don’t understand the conversation. Last week I was talking with a young woman, and she asked me “are those the only clothes you have?” We hear some pointed questions now and them, but I was still surprised. It’s true that I wear jeans and my springy shoes just about all the time, but I didn’t know what to say. As it turns out, she wasn’t implying that I never change my clothes. She was concerned that I hadn’t worn a jacket and it was getting chilly.

Our students are very eager to learn about American holidays and customs. We worked a session on Halloween into our lessons in late October and followed it up with a Halloween party in our apartment on Halloween night. We invited all of our students (550 of them), plus a lot of other students and teachers, about 650-700 in all. We don’t know how many came, but our apartment was packed elbow-to-elbow for four hours and often spilled out the door onto the lawn in front. We had bought more than 2,200 pieces of candy for trick-or-treating, and the crowd had eaten all the candy, plus all the fruit on hand, by about 8:00 p.m. I carved three jack-o-lanterns for the occasion. Pumpkins here aren’t like the ones in the U.S. They’re long and thin. We bought two of them for show-and-tell in our classes, and a friend brought us another one that was closer to the traditional shape. The students were fascinated with them, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

We’ll also spend some time in class on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah. Thanksgiving will be an ordinary teaching day, but we’ll make lots of phone calls to the family. I don’t think there’s any chance of finding a turkey here, but we couldn’t cook one anyway since we don’t have an oven. With a recent case of bird flu in Anhui Province, we won’t be having chicken either.

We not sure yet just how we’ll spend Christmas. It’s not an official holiday in China, but the growing Western influence here has made Christmas trees and lights readily available, from what we’re told. We have one string of lights that was left behind by the previous American teachers. They also left us six red-and-white Santa Claus hats, three of which are Mrs. Claus hats with blond pigtails hanging down. And the department stores here have lots of new stuff on the shelves—especially toys, electronic gadgets, etc. It looks like the Christmas shopping season in the United States. I think we have time off for Christmas under an agreement that the Amity Foundation has with the college. Christmas is on a Sunday this year, so we wouldn’t have any classes or other responsibilities that day anyway. We have been approached by a few Chinese Christians on campus, and we plan on sharing Christmas together. We’ll be observing Christmas from a very new perspective this year.

There are a lot of competitive activities in the college. We’ve been to several karaoke-style singing contests and have been quite impressed with the poise and grace and stage presence of some of the students. There was a marching competition for the freshmen on their last day of military training. Their marching drills involved a kind of stiff-legged, flat-footed step that some of them had not quite mastered. On October 28 there was another freshman competition involving morning exercises. The freshmen are rousted early each morning for body building exercises. (Many others, including the elderly, are up early and exercising voluntarily.) In China, “body building” leads to limberness, flexibility, and general good health, not bulging masses of muscle. The freshmen competed in class groups doing their morning exercise routines as a sort of close order precision drill. The competition was held on the new football field, and it was necessary to walk across or around the field in order to get to the bleachers. There was an enthusiastic chorus of “hellos” as I passed by the frosh lined up to compete. We go to these events and enjoy watching the students perform, but we don’t understand what the announcers are saying, so we often leave without knowing who has won.

It’s the same way with the signs, banners, and posters that are all around the campus. Kate and I are the only two people in the college who can’t read them, so we tend to be the only ones who don’t know what’s going on. We’ve asked some teachers and students to help us out and let us know when things are happening, and that has helped, though the news sometimes still gets to us at the last minute or late. This is my first experience with illiteracy. I know I wasn’t born with a book in my hand, but I don’t remember not knowing how to read. I’m sure Mrs. DeBold (kindergarten) and Mrs. Walker (first grade) taught me to read, but I just don’t recall ever looking at words and not knowing what they said. Until now. Learning to speak Chinese is tough enough, but reading Chinese seems much more difficult. It’s hard for me to imagine a six thousand year old civilization without an alphabet. I look at rows of Chinese characters that seem almost indecipherable to me, and I am tempted to dust off that old cliché – “it’s all Greek to me.” But I learned Greek many years ago, and it seemed orderly and manageable, thanks to the pedantic Professor Shirts. It had an alphabet. With no ABC’s, I’m having a hard time getting a grip on written Chinese. I’ve learned about a dozen characters so far. I can read and write the characters for big and small, many and few, up and down, come and go, one, two, and three. But recognizing “big” on a poster with fifty other words doesn’t go far toward reading comprehension. I’m told there are discernable patterns to the characters that do not require a rosetta stone; I’m hoping to find them sometime soon.

Some visual images of China

Girls with ponytails

We first noticed the ubiquity of ponytails during our three weeks of orientation in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province. We had college students assigned to us as tutors, most of whom were girls, all of whom wore ponytails, as did just about all the other girls we saw on campus. When we started teaching here in Fuyang, I did a statistical analysis to test my one girl-one ponytail hypothesis. I have 302 students, 263 of whom are girls. That seems to be about the usual boy/girl ratio in college English departments. Of my 263 girl students, 225 (or a mere 85.6 percent) have worn ponytails to class. If you have a clever idea for the next big fad in ponytail holders, there’s an opportunity for you in China. I think our students here have as much uniqueness and individuality as students in the United States, but their individuality doesn’t extend to hair color. Hair colors among my students run the spectrum from black to very dark brown. Of my 302 students, 298 have black hair, and four have dark brown hair. Even the few salon coloring jobs I’ve seen usually produce only brown or reddish highlights on black hair. So far I have seen one Chinese blond, a young man in the doorway of an electronics store downtown sporting a flamboyant peroxide-yellow hairdo with blue stripes. Even so, he drew fewer looks from passersby than Kate and I.

Tall guys

At five feet ten inches, I’m taller than most of the people around me, but there are a lot of tall guys—six footers or taller—in the college, and I have one girl in my classes who is taller than I am. Basketball is quite the rage in China. There are several open-air basketball courts that we pass on our way to or from our apartment, and they are nearly always full of guys playing basketball. These are unlighted courts, but the guys will still be playing in the dark at 10:00 p.m. They play basketball in the rain. NBA games played at night in the United States are broadcast live in China in the morning. There will be swarms of students surrounding the TVs in the canteen watching the fourth quarter during lunch. We get a lot of Houston Rockets games because of Yao Ming, but we get to see other teams, too.

Girls with umbrellas

Girls carry umbrellas on bright sunny days to shield them from the sun. During the summer, virtually every girl we saw outdoors was under an umbrella. Rainy days are a secondary purpose for umbrellas in China.

Girls on bicycles

There are fewer bicycles on the streets here than I had anticipated, in part because the upwardly mobile are acquiring motor scooters and motorcycles. There are some very quiet, non-polluting electric-powered motor scooters here that seem to have captured a sizeable share of the scooter market. But bicycles are still a common mode of transportation in China, and many young women ride them in traffic while holding umbrellas and talking on cell phones. We also see many young women riding sidesaddle on the backs of bicycles – usually behind another girl, but many times behind a boy. We occasionally see dad pedaling while mom rides sidesaddle and holds the baby.

Babies with bare bottoms

Diapers are not in general use here, and baby clothes are made with open-air backsides. It was a little startling at first to see young children toddling down the sidewalk, or being carried by parents, with their little behinds on parade. You can imagine the potential misfortune that came to mind, but I have yet to see a single parent with you-know-what dripping down his sleeves. I recently read an online article about diaperless potty training (I didn’t go looking for it; it was in the Times or the Post) by an American anthropologist and mom. Apparently it’s quite common around the world and seems to work pretty well. I expect the diaper lobby and wall-to-wall carpeting will keep it from catching on in the United States, though.

Days off

The Chinese have a different approach to work days, weekends, and holidays. From what I’ve read, it seems that most people here work five or five-and-a-half days a week, though some people seem to be on duty all the time. Regular college classes are taught Monday through Friday, but some elective or special classes are held at nights or on Saturday and Sunday. If a holiday falls on a school day, we’ll have that day off, but then we’ll have to make it up by holding classes on the weekend. Banks and post offices are open about twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But everyone takes a two-hour lunch break (down from three hours before October) and goes home for a nap. Kate and I aren’t accustomed to napping in midday, which leads to more concern that we’ll be tired and endless advice that we should rest.

Not a single egg roll

Maybe we thought we knew a thing or two about Chinese food because of all the take-out meals we brought home from Wok ‘n Roll in Austin. We’ve been in China for more than three months, and we haven’t seen an egg roll yet.

Police

We have encountered a few in the course of getting our permanent residence. They seem to be both courteous, and I have yet to see any police officer or military personnel carrying a weapon. We don’t see a lot of police or military personnel, but there were uniformed military guys on campus trying earnestly to teach the freshmen to march, and the police department is only about a block down the street from the East Campus where we live. The absence of firearms seems noteworthy.

Weather

The weather is starting to get a little cooler. Not cold yet, but a jacket is needed. We spent the last 26 years in Austin, where winter is little more than a rumor. We saw miniscule flurries of snow there only a couple of more times than the Astros have been to the World Series. We had heard that winters in Fuyang would be cold and wet, so we stocked up on winter wear during a five-week training stay in Vermont in the summer. We mailed it all to ourselves, and it arrived a few weeks back, so we think we’re ready for winter. My winter coat is bright red, so with these white whiskers I’m already hearing a lot of Father Christmas comments (the Brits were in China ahead of us or they’d be Santa Claus comments). The weather here may actually be quite similar to the weather in Kansas where I grew up—very hot in the summer, cold and snowy in the winter. And it’s as flat here as Kansas, too. I remember that the school buildings in Kansas were heated, but that’s not necessarily the case here. Luckily, both of our classrooms are full of heat-generating computers, and that should help.

Weight loss

The line about Father Christmas brings to mind another very good reason for living in China—weight loss. I’m down a little over 30 pounds from what I weighed in the spring. I lost about half of those pounds while we were homeless itinerants in the United States, from May (when we sold the house and left Austin) through July (when we flew to China). The lack of a pantry and refrigerator was beneficial. The rest I’ve lost over here on a pretty good diet of vegetables, fruit, and chicken (before the bird flu incident), modestly supplemented with Oreos and the occasional Snicker. Many of us who are new Amity teachers this year have been shedding pounds, with the exception of a few who brought no excess weight with them and have, therefore, missed out altogether on this particular benefit.

There is still no news to report on the Don and Kate website. I’ll be trying to upload it again soon and will let you know if it works. In the meantime, you can see a colorful photo and read a little more about us on our home page at Mission Connections on the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Web site.

That’s all the news for now. Our best wishes to you all for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Shalom y’all,

Don Lindsay
Fuyang Teachers College