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December 12, 2005
Hi All,
We’re down to the last three weeks of our first semester
of teaching in China. Students are very interested in American
customs and holidays, so we’ll be teaching them about Christmas
as a religious holiday (this week) and a cultural celebration
(next week). We’ll have a week of final exams beginning
immediately after New Year's, and that will wrap up the term.
We seem to have gone from newcomers to old hands overnight.
Annual sports meeting
Classes were cancelled for two days in November for the annual
sports meeting. This is what the Chinese call it in English. It’s
an intramural track meet with endless public address announcements
and surprisingly few athletic events. The warm comfortable weather
had given way to a pretty brisk chill by the time of the sports
meeting, so it wasn’t quite as enjoyable as it would have
been a week or two earlier. Nonetheless, Kate and I turned out
to cheer on the students. There were a few running events, a long
jump, and a high jump event, plus a few short demonstrations of
martial arts and body building exercises at the beginning. One
exercise demonstration involved a troupe of middle-aged (or older)
women who wielded large folding Chinese fans that they snapped
open and shut in unison with smart popping sounds. I see these
women doing their morning exercises on my way to catch the bus
most days.
The one-legged standing competition
The sports meeting was held on a Wednesday and Thursday. Two
students came to our apartment on Tuesday evening to tell us that
we were each to participate in an event. This was the first we’d
heard of faculty events. Kate was to be in a race that involved
carrying a basketball under each arm, but she was given the wrong
location and missed the event. I was entered in the men’s
standing-on-one-leg contest. I went to the right venue, but didn’t
know that this was the lone indoor event, so by the time I found
it I was late. When I got there, nine guys were already up on
one leg. I was told to join the other competitors. Now I’ve
spent a lot of years in odd pursuits, but I’ve never given
much thought or effort to standing on one leg. I was a complete
flop. The springy shoes didn’t help. I lasted only a few
seconds before putting my foot down, tried again with similar
results, then accepted defeat graciously. Of the nine others,
two were conspicuously wobbly and they both worked up a sweat
teetering and hopping around on one leg to stay upright. One managed
to remove a layer of clothes in the process. The first wobbler
fell out after 38 minutes; the second held on until the 41 minute
mark. The other seven appeared generally calm and relaxed, and
two looked like they had gone into a trance or fallen asleep.
Apart from occasional stretching and flexing, they were nearly
motionless. At 44 minutes, some of the contestants began to talk
and laugh among themselves. To my surprise, a man who I had picked
to be one of the likely finalists dropped out after 48 nearly
motionless minutes. At about 50 minutes, an old woman began to
circulate among the remaining six one-leggers, talking and joking
with them, and two more fell out at 51 minutes. Another two fell
out after 53 minutes, leaving only three in the contest, one of
whom was fidgeting and two who seemed quite serene and appeared
capable of standing on one leg for another day or so. In a surprise
finish, the two serene guys both put their feet down at the same
moment, as if on cue, and walked off, leaving the fidgeter to
claim the championship at 59 minutes. Maybe this will be a new
event in the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
The cold
We live on the east campus, and I teach on the west campus, so
I take the 7:40 shuttle bus to school each morning. The bus is
mostly filled with teachers, and I am daily struck by the general
cheerfulness of the faculty. They all climb aboard with smiles
and cheery greetings, and I really do mean every day. They just
don’t seem to be experiencing the life of plodding drudgery
that some Westerners would expect in a Communist country. The
people around us seem quite genuinely happy and jovial. I suppose
they could be following a Party memo about making a good impression
on the foreigners, but I’ve rarely seen a go-to-work crowd
back home that didn’t include at least a few grumps. Cheerful
as they seem to be, the men still dress like morticians—black
and dark grey from top to bottom, with some dark brown thrown
in for variety.
It has taken a turn for the colder here, temperatures in the
low 20s at night, just above freezing during the day. It’s
our first experience with buildings that aren’t heated in
the winter. Fortunately, our classrooms are full of computers
that give off a good bit of heat and are fairly comfortable. Many
other rooms aren’t heated at all. We have pretty good heat
in our apartment, but the students do not have heat in their dormitories.
And to make matters worse for them, the place where they shower
is in a separate building and is a pretty long walk for some of
them. The girls have told us that, when they wash their hair,
the ends freeze before it gets dry. Some students seem to really
suffer from the cold, while others hardly seem to notice it. Walking
back to our apartment after an evening English corner, it was
dark and well below freezing, but there were dozens of guys still
playing basketball in the cold and dark. There is no let-up in
outdoor markets because of the cold, and most little stores still
leave their doors wide open. We see open windows in classrooms,
dormitories, and on the buses. Two students who have become especially
close to us came to help us decorate our Christmas tree last weekend.
We asked them whether they could stay warm in their dormitory
rooms. They both said they could not, that they only had one blanket
apiece and it wasn’t enough. These are girls from very poor
families, and just buying another blanket isn’t an option
for them. We had extra blankets in the closet and sent them back
to the dorm with a blanket each. These aren’t old, out-dated
buildings that were built before indoor heat was invented. Students
in the brand new dorms on the west campus don’t have heat
either. It is a very different understanding of what features
are necessary in a public building. In the United States, we wouldn’t
consider heating a classroom or dormitory in the winter to be
optional; here, cold buildings in the winter are just an ordinary
fact of life.
Traffic
A 68-year-old retired teacher who lived on our campus was killed
recently when hit by a bus. I commented in an earlier message
on the apparent chaos of Chinese traffic and the surprising ease
with which buses, taxis, bicycles, and pedestrians seemed to intermingle
without frequent mishaps. I compared the intermingling with choreography.
That observation is withdrawn. I’ve learned since that the
number of traffic fatalities in China is quite high.
Teaching
Our students don’t have written homework assignments—It’s
an oral English course—but we saw samples of their handwriting
on a dictation at the start of the term, and we peer over their
shoulders to see their notes during small group discussions. My
third grade teacher (God rest ye merry, Mrs. Payne) would have
been very pleased with their penmanship. There’s not a chicken
scratch or scrawl in the whole group. Everyone’s handwriting
is clearly legible, and some students’ penmanship is downright
elegant. I’m wondering if their childhood practice in making
legible Chinese characters is the reason for this.
Chinese students like to dish out unnecessary advice like sitcom
mothers-in-law. They tell Kate and me that we should eat more
soup and other hot foods; we should have a big lunch and eat only
porridge for dinner; we should take a nap at noon so we won’t
be tired; it’s getting cold, so we should wear more clothes,
but we shouldn’t keep our apartment so warm. The students
are giving two-minute talks in our oral English classes, and many
of their presentations are loaded with exhortations and advice
to their classmates about being diligent in their studies, respectful
of parents, or friendly with peers. A common conclusion goes like
this: “I think if you do these things you will become a
very good student, get a good job, and have a happy life. That’s
all.” Nearly every student presentation—introductions
of partners, two-minute talks, reports of small group discussions—ends
with “that’s all.” It was quite charming at
the beginning. In the spring term we’ll be working on other
ways to exit the podium.
Best and worst inventions
Our students worked in small groups recently, compiling lists
of the greatest discoveries and inventions of all time. In all
79 small groups in my ten classes, there was a heavy emphasis
on recent consumer products: telephones, cell phones, television,
computers, the Internet. Computers and telephones were on nearly
all of the lists, along with electricity or electric lights. There
were 32 votes for paper; 21 for fire; and four votes for the compass.
I had one vote each for the wheel, language, oil, water, the refrigerator,
the washing machine, the camera, and the ballpoint pen. We also
asked them to list the worst inventions and discoveries of all
time. Cigarettes led the bad list with 34 votes, followed by plastic
bags (29), nuclear weapons (27), disposable chopsticks (5), fast
food (4), and one vote each for chocolate, firecrackers, gambling,
piracy, fire, ammunition, rubbish, pollution, and poverty.
Thanksgiving
We spent the last full week of November telling our students
about Thanksgiving. They are very eager to learn about American
holidays and customs. I pulled a lot of pictures from the Internet
to illustrate the lesson—pictures of pilgrims and Indians,
the Mayflower, turkeys, a sleigh (we sang “Over the river
and through the wood”), pumpkin pie, and a Norman Rockwell
painting of a family Thanksgiving dinner. The picture of Squanto
teaching the pilgrims how to plant corn showed him holding a fish,
so I asked the students if they planted fish in China to grow
more fish. (It was much funnier live than in the retelling.) Kate
and I both had classes to teach on Thanksgiving Day, but we had
a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner that evening. No turkey was
harmed in the preparation of Thanksgiving dinner at our house,
but the world is one chicken poorer than before. Actually, we
haven’t been associating much with poultry since the bird
flu incident occurred in our province, but we had some chicken
breasts in the freezer that we had bought before then. I made
some dressing to go with the chicken. It wasn’t like the
rye and cornbread dressing we usually have, but it turned out
to be rather tasty. We don’t have an oven, so we cooked
it in the microwave, then browned it a little in a wok. We also
had sweet potatoes, green beans, and a very nice dessert that
Kate made from apples, raisins, walnuts, and brown sugar. We topped
the meal off with a bottle of Chinese white wine. As far as we
can tell, the Chinese don’t pose a serious threat to French
or California vintners, at least not yet, but this bottle was
quite good. Overall, we thought our Thanksgiving dinner was a
rousing success, and we’ll probably have another meal quite
like it on Christmas Day. We have two more of those chicken breasts
in the freezer.
It is fourteen hours later in China than Central Standard Time
in the United States, where much of our family lives. We started
making calls to the family around 10:30 p.m., which was 8:30 Thanksgiving
morning in Texas and Oklahoma. We talked to my Mom, my sisters
Pat and Jean, and to our daughter Rachel and son Jose, finally
wrapping up the calls some time after midnight. Then we were up
early Friday morning to call Vic and Beth, our son and daughter-in-law,
before our 8:00 classes. At 7:00 a.m. it was 6:00 p.m. in North
Carolina, where Vic and Beth were spending Thanksgiving with Beth’s
parents.
Text messaging
We received several phone calls from students and friends wishing
us a happy Thanksgiving and probably forty text messages on our
cell phone. We know who sent about eight or ten of them. Students
send us text messages all the time, but they don’t often
say which of us is the intended recipient, and most of the time
they don’t identify themselves. So we receive frequent messages
saying things like “I think you are very kind. Wish you
happy forever.” But we don’t know which of us the
message was sent to, or who sent it. I usually send reply notes
to our anonymous correspondents saying thanks for their good wishes.
Whenever we can identify a message sender, I add them to our contact
list so that their name will pop up with any future text messages.
Sometimes we get text messages in Chinese, which of course we
can’t read. I respond to those with a note explaining that
I can’t read Chinese and asking them to please try again
in English. For several days in a row I received repeated text
messages in Chinese. I replied several times with my try-again-in-English
note, but kept getting more notes in Chinese. I was getting a
little perturbed at some persistent but unknown student correspondent,
so I showed one of the text messages to a student for translation.
He explained that it was a weather forecast sent by the Post Office.
I stopped asking for the English language version.
Bozhou
The English Department took Kate and me and a visiting teacher
from Hefei (capital of Anhui Province) on a Saturday outing to
Bozhou, a very old city in northwest Anhui. It was about a two-hour
drive, and we arrived just in time for the final minutes of the
herbal medicine market. Bozhou (pronounced Bo-jo) was home to
a famous doctor several centuries ago and remains a major market
for traditional medicines. What we saw first were dozens of outdoor
vendors with rows of very large bags of medicinal products. There
were several varieties of ginseng root, and mingled among the
seeds, powders, roots, and blossoms were dried beetles, scorpions,
seahorses, and snakes. The snakes were coiled in perfect circles.
There were also starfish, deer antlers, deer tendons, and numerous
other things that I couldn’t identify.
Beyond the outdoor street vendors was an enormous indoor market
jam-packed with vendors with even bigger bags of goods. We were
told that Bozhou is a wholesale market for traditional medicines.
It was 10:00 a.m., and the vendors were covering up their wares;
the market is only open from 8:00 to 10:00. |
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