Huangshan and Jiuhuashan are highly
regarded and beautiful places, but it is hard for us to see them
without comparing them to the Rocky Mountains. Jiuhuashan’s
highest peak is 4,696 feet above sea level; Huangshan’s
6,104. That’s way higher than any peak in Rice County, Kansas,
but not all that high as mountains go. I have to remind myself
that I’m not in Texas anymore, and that these mountains
are prized for qualities other than size.
Many people told us that Huangshan would be too crowded to enjoy
during the May holiday. That turned out not to be the case. While
there were lots of visitors to Huangshan and Jiuhuashan, it did
not seem especially crowded, and we were able to move around quite
easily. Where the crowd materialized was in the Hefei train station.
We went by bus from Jiuhuashan to Hefei, then by train from Hefei
back to Fuyang. We were able to buy train tickets, but they were
tickets with no seats. In China, when all the seats have been
sold, they keep on selling tickets, and people stand in the aisles.
We ran into a couple of Fuyang students in the train station,
and these seasoned young travelers took us under their wings.
First, we all hurried into a passenger car and sat down. As people
came who had tickets for these seats, Kate and I would get up,
but the students would push us down again, and we would all squeeze
together to make room. We seemed to be claiming squatters’
rights. In any event, people with seat tickets seemed unperturbed
that extra people were sharing their seats. In our particular
section, there were 15 people squeezed into seats intended for
10, but we were all sitting down.
The May travel outing provided many opportunities for me to exercise
my fledgling Chinese language skills. Trying to learning Chinese
from a book on my own didn’t work at all during the first
term, so when we returned from the Spring Festival break in February,
I went in search of a Chinese tutor. I refer to “Chinese,”
though there are dozens of languages and dialects spoken here.
The official language of China is Mandarin, or Putonghua, which
means “common language” or “common speech.”
I connected with Lucia, a junior majoring in English, who has
been a world of help. I have lessons with Lucia twice a week,
an hour each on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. On Saturdays,
Lucia comes to our apartment, but I get my Wednesday lessons in
the classroom building on campus in a room that has a lot of student
traffic, so it’s not exactly a private lesson. My first
Wednesday lesson was very entertaining to the assembled student
onlookers, so I reminded them that I never laugh when they speak
English and that I didn’t need the discouragement of their
laughing when I spoke Chinese. They’ve been quite supportive
ever since. The students seem to appreciate having a chance to
trade places and be the native speakers who can help me practice
Chinese. They are so quick to say “my English is very poor”
that I think it’s good for them to have the opportunity
to operate from a position of strength when they are my practice
partners. My Chinese certainly isn’t very good; I don’t
even know how to say “my Putonghua is very poor” in
Putonghua.
Our travels during the Spring Festival break in late January
and February were a strong incentive to get to work on my Chinese.
Train tickets can be purchased for soft sleepers, hard sleepers,
soft seats, hard seats, or no seats at all. Buses, similarly,
can be express buses, milk run buses, luxury seats, ordinary seats,
or knees-under-your-chin triple-decker bunks. During the May holiday
we were quite successful at buying tickets for our destinations.
In time, we hope to actually know which kind of tickets we’re
buying.
I bought a kite early in the spring and finally got out on a
recent Saturday morning to try it out. The kite is bigger than
any I’ve had before, and a rather strong wind was blowing,
which made for a pretty hard pull on the string. I let out all
the string I had, then hauled it all back in. The kite string
came on a reel, kind of like an oversized fishing reel, and cranking
it back in was a chore. But I felt very successful, seeing as
how many of the Chinese students hadn’t been able to get
their kites airborne on a special kite-flying day a few weeks
earlier (which took place on a Sunday when we were judging the
middle school speaking contest, so I didn’t get to stay
long).
There is quite a bit of public English in China to help travelers
find their way around. Signs are often printed in English, along
with Chinese of course, in train depots, bus stations, and other
places frequented by tourists. A good proofreader could work wonders
here. Imagine trying to produce public signs in Chinese with only
a Chinese-English dictionary and limited working knowledge of
the language, and I think you can approximate the challenge many
Chinese sign-makers face. From reading the signs, it is apparent
that some sign-makers find the letters of the alphabet to be as
much an assortment of indecipherable lines and shapes as Chinese
characters are to those of us attempting to understand a non-alphabetic
language for the first time. Hence, “Waiting Room”
appears on windows in the Fuyang train depot as “Walting
Koom.” A sign on a shop window in Tunxi advertised “China
Paintiwg Gallery.” The adjacent window read “Undertakdomestic
and Abroad Vakius Exhibitions.”
Other sign-makers show a fair acquaintance with English basics,
but fall shy of the mark on the intricacies. Visitors to the Bamboo
Museum in Anji are discouraged from snapping photographs by “No
Photing” signs. A warning sign in the bathroom of our Tunxi
hotel said “Take Care of the Slippery.” And some public
English is simply baffling, like the eatery in Hengshan named
“Domestic Life Taste Soil Restaurant.”
During our oral English classes recently, we had the students
conduct surveys. They were matched up in pairs with questions
to ask their classmates. Westerners may think of China as a dogmatic,
authoritarian country, but turn 30 Chinese students loose in a
room and they’re all anarchists. We plan these lessons in
the hope of orderly discourse, and we instruct the students to
work in pairs, one pair talking to another until all their questions
have been asked and answered, then moving on to another pair.
Our students, however, are no more inclined to gather in tidy
foursomes than to wait in line at a bus stop. Within a minute
or two of beginning the survey activity, all 30 students are clustered
in a tight knot in the center aisle of the classroom, with never
a foursome in sight. The pairs have all split like little zygotes
on their way to something more complex. One student will grab
another by the shoulder and turn her around to ask her a question,
never mind that she was already answering someone else’s
question. I wouldn’t say that I’ve surrendered on
the orderly foursome approach; I prefer to think of it as accommodating
a cultural difference for the sake of rapprochement.
I have, however, drawn a line in the sand with regard to who
holds the questions and how they are held. Each pair gets a card
with two survey questions on it. For some students, the survey
becomes a race, and they can go faster by handing the card to
another student to read than by asking the question aloud. This,
of course, thwarts the speaking and listening objectives of oral
English. So I’ve become rather strict about the question
askers holding on to the cards and keeping the words facing them,
with dire warnings to question answerers about not grabbing the
question cards out of the askers’ hands to read them. We’ve
had definite progress on this front, as well as on the English-only
rule. It is also, of course, easier and faster for them to ask
and answer questions in Chinese than in English, but we’ve
made significant gains on the speaking of English in English class.
Some of their survey results were surprising, and a few would
be unsettling to Western ways of thinking. One of the survey questions
was, “If another student asked you the answer to an exam
question and the teacher wasn’t looking, would you tell
him the answer?” Two-thirds to three-fourths of the students
answered “yes.” Our most recent college experience
prior to the Fuyang Teachers College was our son Vic’s years
at Davidson, which had such a strong honor code that sharing exam
answers would have been unthinkable. The companion question was
“If you worked in a store and saw another employee stealing
merchandise, would you tell the manager?” A large majority
of students said that they would not.
Students were asked which they thought were more successful—marriages
where individuals choose their own partners or arranged marriages.
They were nearly unanimous in choosing marriages based on love
and personal choice, generally on the grounds that you could live
happily all your life if you married some one you love. They were
stunned when I explained that about half of all marriages in the
United States (where arranged marriages are pretty rare) end in
divorce.
Most students answered “yes” when asked whether boys
and girls should be brought up differently. Most also said “yes”
when asked if some behaviors were appropriate for men, but not
for women. Smoking and drinking were mentioned most often in my
classes as OK for men but not for women. Being soldiers and doing
heavy labor were also mentioned, along with observations that
men weren’t good at taking care of babies and men shouldn’t
wear skirts. An aside on the smoking issue: the China Daily reports
that 60 percent of Chinese males over fifteen years old are smokers,
compared with 4 percent of Chinese women. The tobacco companies
must love China. The Chinese are heavy smokers and not much inclined
to sue.
Another question asked where students would like to go on vacation
if they could choose any place in the world. Students have been
so curious about America—American college life, American
music, American TV and movies, American celebrities—that
I assumed the United States would be a prime destination. Not
so. Actually, the United States was hardly mentioned at all, except
for Hawaii. France was highly popular, along with Spain, Italy,
England, Canada, Korea, Thailand, and Australia. Kate says that
her students have frequently commented on 9/11 and how dangerous
it must be to live in the United States. This seems to be the
main reason why her students didn’t list the United States
as a vacation spot. My students, on the other hand, have never
once raised this concern in any conversation with me. I don’t
know what this may bode for Chinese tourism in the United States,
but China already has a Disneyland, and the relative values of
the dollar and the yuan make it much more attractive at present
for Americans to be touring in China.
We spent three Sundays (Easter, Palm Sunday, and the Sunday before
that) involved in an English-speaking contest at Fuyang’s
Number 1 Middle School. This is the premier middle school in the
city, situated on a brand new campus with lots of computers and
high-tech stuff that would make the college students envious.
It’s a select school, and the English-speaking contest was
part of the selection process for students who want to go there.
So the participating students came from schools all over the city
in the hopes of finding their way into Number 1.
On the first Sunday afternoon, we spoke to the 112 students who
would be participating in the contest, a number that had already
been whittled down from about 400. Kate talked about middle schools
in the United States, and I lectured about preparing and giving
a speech. It was largely a hey-kids-look-foreigners-speaking-English
spectacle, dressed up as an exercise in listening to English by
native speakers.
The kids were eager and earnest, though, and it was an enjoyable
afternoon. As it happened, during these three weekends we were
always trying to finish the lesson plans for our regular Monday
classes after the contest stuff on Sundays, but dinner with our
Middle School hosts was a socially obligatory part of each Sunday’s
activities. So the lesson preparations ran late each Sunday night.
The second Sunday we left our apartment at 7:30 a.m. to judge
the contest. There were two other judges. One was Sandra Bell,
a Canadian teacher who had arrived in Fuyang the night before
and will teach at No. 1 M.S. for the rest of the term. The other
was a young Chinese English teacher from No. 1 M.S. The Chinese
teacher and I judged the students’ prepared speeches, after
which the kids went to another building where Kate and Sandra
asked them questions and scored their responses. We heard half
of the speeches before lunch, and then in Chinese fashion we took
a two and a half hour break before hearing the other half. As
pressed for time as I was feeling, I did not find the long break
as relaxing and refreshing as it was intended to be. (I’ve
never before been among people so preoccupied with being tired
or needing a rest. One of the earliest sentences Lucia taught
me to say in Chinese was “Let’s have a rest.”)
Anyway, we wrapped up the contest around 5:00, and dinner was
served at 6:00. We were recruited for this contest by Cameron,
a college senior we got to know when we first arrived in Fuyang.
Cameron graduated in January and took a teaching job at No. 1
M.S. When he signed us up, it was for two Sundays. He told us
at dinner on the second Sunday that we were also expected to judge
the finals the following Sunday. |
