June 30, 2006

Hi All,

We have finished our first year of teaching in China. We had our last regular class session during the week of June 5-9, then gave our final exams during the week of June 12-16. It’s been a terrific year, and I’ve become very fond of the students. I was afraid I’d get misty-eyed at the end of all ten classes during exam week, but I managed to keep a pretty straight face until the last class on Friday. We turned our grades in to the Dean’s office on the 19th, and that was our last act as teachers for the 2005-2006 school year.

We had intended to leave for Beijing a day or two later to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, dust and sand storms, and other sights in China’s capital city. We ran into a delay, however, in getting our residence permits renewed. Most teachers manage to get residence permits within a few days of the applications. When we arrived last fall, it took two months for us to get our permits. We were assured at the time that renewal would not be a problem. I guess it wasn’t, at least by comparison with last time. We have them now, and it only took three weeks. Not having the permits isn’t a big problem as long as we stay in Fuyang, but we can’t leave town without them. So we’ll see Beijing another time.

In the meantime, the unoccupied time at home gave me lots of time to work on photographs. The donandkate.org website may never get off the ground, at least not from Fuyang, but our son Vic steered us to Flickr.com and that has proven to be a very helpful tip. We now have lots of pictures you can see on Flickr. I have uploaded photos from our first month of orientation in China, Fuyang Teachers College, the city of Fuyang, and our travels to various places in China. There are also pictures of Vic and Beth’s wedding in July 2005, just before we came to China (I managed to get the wedding photos up before their first anniversary). And there are some pictures from our brief stay in San Francisco before flying to Shanghai. I’ll let you know in future updates as additional pictures go up.

Farmers have just finished the wheat harvest in the Fuyang area. I knew China produced quite a lot of wheat, but I hadn’t realized how much is grown in Anhui Province until we saw very large wheat fields during our train trip from Hefei to Fuyang in May. In early June there were suddenly dozens of small combines on the streets around the college’s West Campus, where I teach. They are similar in shape and design to combines that were used in the Kansas wheat harvests in my summer farming days during high school, and a few of them come in John Deere green. But they are very small by comparison. The cutting bars and paddle wheel rakes are just over six feet wide, and the grain bins in the combines are quite small, so frequent unloading of the harvested grain would be necessary. There were so many of these small combines on the streets during the early morning hours and in the evenings that I suppose they could send in whole squadrons of combines to harvest the fields quickly while the weather is good. The streets here have four lanes for motor vehicle traffic, bounded by curbs and narrow islands, then an outer lane on either side for bicycles, handcarts, pedicabs, and pedestrians (these distinctions are a lot more theoretical than actual; all of the traffic seems to go wherever it wants). In the evenings, I would sometimes see old people in the bicycle lanes with small piles of wheat and shovels. They would throw a shovelful of wheat up in the air, letting the wind carry the chaff away. They would do that several times, then scoop the good grain into large cloth bags. This is clearly not the primary way of preparing the grain for market, but it is an ancient harvesting procedure that I have read about but had never seen before. In the week after the harvest was finished, clouds of smoke came rolling through the city. I guessed, correctly, that farmers were burning the wheat stubble. I asked why they didn’t turn the stubble under instead of burning it. The answer was pretty simple. The farmers don’t have the tractors and equipment to disk or plow the fields after the harvest. Our students constantly make the distinction that the U.S. is a developed country and China is a developing country. There’s a good example.

One other thing about the harvest: I got to thinking about my summer jobs working for farmers during high school and — according to the calendar — my high school days ended forty-five years ago! Now I’m way too young for that to be possible, and the only logical explanation I can see is that the Bush administration has been messing with the calendar, and Cheney and Rove have covered it up so that most people haven’t even noticed. Think about it.  Aren’t some of you suddenly much older than you’re supposed to be?

Speaking of old, you can hear some old American music in China. Kate and I were in the local KFC a while back and the music in the background was “On Moonlight Bay” from around 1950. For some reason the Carpenters are very popular in China, and their song “It’s Yesterday Once More” is huge here. In the fall semester, when one of my students wasn’t prepared on the day of his two-minute speech, he sang “It’s Yesterday Once More” as a desperation move. In May, on a bus from Jiuhuashan (a mountain where many Buddhist temples are located) to Hefei, there was a young Buddhist monk sitting a couple of seats ahead of us. Graceful robes and shaved heads still generate some serene and transcendental images for me, but they came crashing down when the monk’s cell phone rang and his ring tone was “It’s Yesterday Once More.”

That same bus to Hefei left the Jiuhuashan visitors center with only a handful of passengers. It looked like we would have a lot of elbowroom on that trip, and I was fixing to move up to the empty seat beside the young monk for a little conversation. We hadn’t gone a hundred meters out of the gate when the bus began stopping to pick up passengers along the road. Two Buddhist nuns got on, along with lots of other people. Within a few minutes, the bus was packed. When all the seats were filled, tiny little plastic stools were put in the aisle until the aisle was packed with travelers perched knees-to-spines. When the aisle was jam packed, a few more people stood up in the very front and in the door well. I don’t believe anyone was passed up for lack of room on the bus. There is simply no such thing in China as a bus with no more room for passengers.

One thing I have really come to miss in the past year is big hardware stores. I’ve always been reluctant to pay for services I think I can do myself, and homeowners never run out of fix-it projects. Throughout my adult life, most weekends have involved at least one trip to a hardware store. There’s just something comforting about acres of electrical connectors, plumbing fixtures, molly bolts, plastic anchors, and power saws. We had a little trouble the other day with our upstairs toilet. It decided not to shut off when the float came up, but to just keep on running so that water dribbled out of the little hole where the handle goes. We’re not homeowners here, so I sent word through the English Department to the Foreign Affairs Office that we had a plumbing problem. A couple of hours later a man came to the door with a bamboo pole about four feet long and a bag of tools. He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t think to ask my Chinese tutor about plumbing vocabulary, so we made signs and gestures at each other. The bathroom is small and there wasn’t enough room to look over his shoulder, so I’m not entirely sure what all he did. I know he found something in the tank to adjust with a screwdriver. After a few minutes he turned around all smiles and indicated that he was finished. I was gesturing for a test flush before he left, but he was down the stairs and gone. I went back up and did the test flush on my own. What he had accomplished was to make the water fill the tank faster so you didn’t have to wait quite as long for the water to come dribbling out by the handle. There are times when a man just has to get wet and dirty to prove his superiority over balky appliances. We don’t have a Home Depot in Fuyang, but there’s a little electrical and plumbing shop across the street from the main gate where I’ve bought a couple of fluorescent light bulbs and a piece of plastic hose. I’ve learned to communicate with the lady who runs the shop.  She’s quick to pick up on gestures and pictures. I drew her a picture of the problem, and she came back carrying a sealed plastic bag with the entire insides to a western toilet for 12 yuan ($1.50). Somehow these things always take longer than you think they will, and we had visitors twice during the wet and dirty part, but we had a toilet that would shut off when it was supposed to by late that night. There was just a small drip where the hose connected to the new fixture. It’s a rare project that only requires one trip to the hardware store. I went back the next morning for a new hose (6 yuan, or 75 cents), and we now have victory over the dribbly commode. I didn’t use but half of my 12 yuan kit this time. The problem was regulating the water coming into the tank; the water goes out just fine, and you’d have to take the tank completely off the back of the stool to replace the flapper. One of these days, though, I’ll get the urge and I’ll have that tank off just to show it I can.

While we’re talking about plumbing, the Chinese have devised a very clever stopper for sinks. I’d never seen one like it until we came here. What I’ve mainly seen in the U.S., apart from simple rubber stoppers, is the kind that goes up and down in the drain hole. There’s a little rod sticking up by the faucet handles that you push or pull to make the stopper go up and down. In my experience, these often don’t work real well, and they are uniquely designed to catch and hold every hair that goes down the drain. In China, the stopper is a chrome or stainless disk with a rubber ring seal on the outer edge. It just turns in the drain. Push it down flat to hold the water, then turn it upright to let the water out. It seems pretty clever to me.

We will leave on Sunday, July 2, for Nanjing in Jiangsu Province. We will spend July at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary helping members of the faculty with their English. The seminary here is not what you would expect in the U.S. As in many other countries, professional education in China begins right after high school, so it is not a graduate level school. Several faculty members are preparing for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test and will apply for graduate study in schools in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. We’ve been in Nanjing briefly, but this will give us a chance to really see the city. We’ll be at the seminary as representatives of the Amity Foundation, which is headquartered in Nanjing. Amity is also bringing in a group of about sixty teachers, most of them from the U.S., for an intensive Summer English Program in July. After a few days of orientation, this group will fan out to colleges across China to work with middle school English teachers to help them improve their English. Four of these summer program teachers were supposed to be in Fuyang while Kate and I are in Nanjing, but there has been a snafu in the permitting process, so those teachers are now being assigned to other schools. While in Nanjing, Kate and I will assist with the orientation of the Summer English Program teachers, and we will also meet with them at the end of July to review the experience with them before they head back home.

In August, we will make a quick trip back to the U.S. Our daughter Rachel is due to have a baby in late July, and we will go back to meet the new grandchild and see as much of the family as we can while we’re there. We had not planned to be in the U.S. until July 2007, but we can’t wait another year to see the baby. You can all expect to see baby pictures in the Fall. Along with Nanjing in July and the U.S. during part of August, we plan to sandwich in trips to a few other places in China before starting the Fall semester in September.

There is more information about our work and life in China on our Mission Connections page of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Web site. You can learn more about the Amity Foundation and its work, which goes far beyond teaching English, at its Web site.

Shalom y’all,

Don and Kate Lindsay