October 5, 2007

Hi All,

After spending most of the summer in the United States with our family, we are now about a month into the new school year. I was expecting to waltz through this third year at Fuyang Normal College without breaking a sweat. Kate and I had slogged our way through two years of teaching oral English to freshmen and expected the same assignments this year. We had two years’ worth of freshman lesson plans in the bag and had already weeded out the really lame and pitiful ones. Coasting through this year was going to be the payoff for our labors during the first two years. We had our ducks in a row and our poop in a group, just waiting for the frosh to arrive.

Teaching assignments

Freshmen in military training.

Our freshmen come to the campus a week or so later than other students, then spend their first two weeks in “military training,” defying the best efforts of their drill instructors to get them to march in step and in straight ranks and files. Left and right seem like new concepts to many freshmen. Since we would have no freshmen to teach in the opening weeks of school, we expected temporary assignments to teach upper classmen, same as last year. On Thursday evening before the first Monday classes, Jiang Wengan (“Richard,” the long-suffering young teacher who is our English-speaking go-between with the Foreign Affairs Office and Foreign Language Department) came to deliver our assignments. Kate drew the anticipated freshman classes; I got mostly sophomores, who have already experienced our polished and well-rehearsed freshman show. The coasting lurched to a sudden stop before I even got headed downhill. Now I’m hurriedly cobbling together a new curriculum for sophs. 

Our first year’s freshmen, now juniors, got their TEM-4 results this week. They took the test in April and have waited nearly five months to find out how they did. The TEM-4 (Test for English Majors, taken in their 4th term or semester) is the principal hurdle to be cleared as second-year students. Among those who passed, the mood seems to be more relief than celebration. For those who did not, the feelings of despair and failure are nearly inconsolable, at least for now. Along with the usual classroom stuff, this is a time for offering a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on while some of our kids straggle through an engulfing sense of shame and a bruising blow to their already-shaky self-esteem.

Fuyang Teachers College has two campuses, roughly a mile apart. Students with higher scores on their college entrance exams go to the West (or new) Campus, while students with lower scores go to the East (or old) Campus. There are English majors on both campuses. For the better facilities and living conditions on the West Campus, parents pay less in tuition and fees than other parents pay for the more dilapidated facilities on the East Campus. Until the 2006-07 school year, our college had never had more than two foreign English teachers at a time. Last year, the college hired two young men in their twenties, one from Australia and one from the United Kingdom, but they did not return this year. There were some problems getting their visas renewed, and the young men were not particularly happy here. During our first two years in Fuyang, I taught most of my classes on the West Campus, and Kate taught on the East Campus. In this way, all of the freshmen English majors had native English speakers as their teachers for oral English.

This year, there are ten classes of freshmen English majors on the West Campus. With both of us teaching there, we have all of the freshman and sophomore English majors from that campus in our classes. I have six classes of sophomores (the same six I had last year as freshmen), plus two classes of this year’s freshmen. Kate has the other eight. As of now, there is not a foreign teacher available for the East Campus frosh. This is pretty distressing to Kate, who has invested a lot in the kids on this campus. She’s been beating the bushes for last-minute foreign teachers and has turned up two good prospects from the United States who have applied for the positions. We’re hoping that the college will act quickly to hire them and get them over here.

By now I’ve had four weeks of classes with the sophomores and we’ve each had one week of classes with the freshmen. The standard arrangement here is two back-to-back 45-minute class periods per week, with a ten minute break in the middle. We often continue the class right through the break. The freshmen, of course, are getting the polished and refined freshman curriculum. With the sophomores, I’m concentrating on public speaking and debate—finally, a usefulness for my lawyering background.

This week, however, school is out for the week-long National Day holiday. October 1st is National Day, the anniversary of the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. The week-long holiday is called Golden Week and features massive shopping, something like the big mall spree that begins on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s not a time when any right-thinking person wants to hang around retail centers, especially if you have any concern for “personal space.”

Editor of the Amity Echo

I also have a new duty this school year. I am now editor of the Amity Echo, a monthly online newsletter for Amity teachers. I agreed to do this last spring, when I thought we would be cruising effortlessly through this third year of freshman classes. So I’ve been wheedling teachers for articles, with pretty good results so far. Of course, I’ve been bribing them, too, promising margaritas at the winter conference for contributors. We found a really good Tex-Mex restaurant in Chengdu during the winter conference last year. This year’s winter conference will be in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, and I’m seriously hoping they have a decent Mexican restaurant there, though the closest thing mentioned in the Lonely Planet is a place with New Zealand cuisine. Tequila is not easy to find in China, and I’ve promised quite a few margaritas.

New photo business cards

Last spring I decided that what we really needed were business cards with our picture on them. I set up a draft on our laptop, printed it, and took it to a copy and printing shop near the campus. I took a student along to translate when I talked to the printer. It seemed to me that we had an understanding about the job, but I told him I wanted to see a proof before the cards were printed. My student translator told me his response to this was “no.” When I went by the shop the next day, though, he showed me the proof. He had made several changes in typestyles, and the photo of Kate and me was not lined up with other information on the card, so I indicated that I wanted the card to look like the sample I gave him. I didn’t have the student to translate this time, but the printer seemed to understand what I wanted. When I picked up the finished cards the next day, not a single one of the changes had been made. When I asked why he didn’t make the changes, he said he didn’t have time. The information on the cards was correct, even though they didn’t look the way I wanted, so I took the 1,000 cards and ordered another set with the corrections made. We gave away the first thousand in no time. When I went to pick up the second set, all the corrections had been made and the cards were just the way I wanted, except for one thing. He had made our photo line up evenly with the text by stretching the photo so that we are conspicuously elongated. We’re going through this set pretty quickly, too, and I’m hopeful that the third set will be just right.

End-of-term questionnaire

Students gather information about different learning styles.

During the week of our final exams last spring, we gave each student a questionnaire asking for feedback on the various elements of our oral English classes. We asked them to evaluate several events and activities on a scale of 1 to 5. In addition, we asked them to tell us which parts of the class had been most helpful for them and which had been least helpful. Interestingly, the same four items were at the top of both lists: small group discussions, pair work, dialogues, and vocabulary. I put all of my 300-plus students’ responses into a composite form and emailed it to them.  Since I have my West Campus students from last year again this year as sophomores, I was able to structure a lesson around the questionnaire results and focus attention on different styles of learning that students exhibit.

The event that got the highest marks of all was the Christmas party in our apartment. For most of the freshmen, that was their first occasion to be in a foreigner’s home, and we gave them free rein to look everywhere and at everything. The time was very brief, only about a half hour per class. We took pictures, had refreshments, and entertained roughly 1,200 students, teachers, friends, and several complete strangers during the Christmas season.

Murder mystery

Chinese students are accustomed to a pretty steady diet of lectures and rote memorization in their classes. Once they get past the initial surprise, though, they take pretty quickly to the more active and participatory style of our lessons. Because we teach oral English, we look for ways to get the students engaged in speaking English.

Students engaged in the murder mystery.

They generally respond well to activities that have them up out of their seats, moving around, and interacting with each other. We’ve had them conduct surveys of their classmates asking questions such as “Would you marry someone if your parents seriously disapproved of this person?” “Do you think it is more important to make a lot of money or to enjoy your job?” and “If a classmate asked you for the answer to a question during an exam while the teacher was not looking, would you tell him/her the answer?”  To our dismay, two-thirds or more of our students answered “yes” to that last question. 

The event that finished second only to the Christmas party was the murder mystery we staged during the last week of regular classes. That high mark was especially gratifying to me because I wrote all the materials for the murder. Each student was given a role as either a guest or an employee of a small hotel where a man is found dead in the lounge. Each had some information about his or her own character, something they had seen or heard related to the murder, and some juicy tidbit about another character. Each student had to talk to all the other members of the class to gather all the available information and clues. There were, of course, reasons to suspect everyone in the room. At the end of the exercise, the students were given the opportunity to solve the mystery by stating who killed Mr. Deadman, how they killed him, and why they did it. Usually at least five or six characters were identified as the killer. The prize for the winner was a Snickers candy bar.

CCTV-9 English-speaking contest

CCTV-9 is China’s television channel for English language broadcasts. It features frequent news and weather programming, plus features on Chinese history, culture, ethnic minorities, business, places of interest, and the like. Some of the broadcasters are native English speakers, most are Chinese, and the quality of the English spoken is consistently very good. CCTV-9 sponsors an annual English-speaking competition for college students. Preliminary rounds are held in colleges across China, with winners advancing to province-level contests in their provincial capitals, then on to a national final. The topic for the beginning rounds this year was “Global Citizenship Begins at Home.” Several students approached Kate and me to discuss the topic, and we shared some ideas with them. We attended both nights of the campus competition and were roped into being judges on the first night. A few of the speeches showed some originality, and a couple showed a good understanding of what global citizenship might mean. Most followed a common pattern we’ve observed in previous speaking contests. Somehow, many of the students seem to find the exact same speech somewhere, probably on the Internet, and copy it. We heard identical phrases over and over, and it doesn’t seem to bother or embarrass anyone, including the contest judges, that most of the contestants have all plagiarized the same source. We heard repeatedly, for example, “In my opinion, global citizenship is a challenge and an undertaking,”  “reaching hearts and hands across continents and boundaries,”  “saving every drop of water.”

In addition to giving the speech, each contestant had to answer a question about the topic from one the judges. When it was my turn to ask a question, I asked the speaker to describe how being a good global citizen would be different from being a good citizen of her country. This seemed like a pretty fundamental issue to me, given the subject of the speeches, but it threw her so far off balance that she was unable to give any real answer at all. Critical and analytical thinking on issues like this just is not emphasized in Chinese schools, and the pat suggestions for good global citizenship beginning at home consisted of “being kind to our families” and not littering.

One student, in particular, stood out in my mind as having a real grasp of the issue, and she spoke about international relations, shifting alliances for power and influence, competing demands for resources, and the need for balancing economic growth and technological development with preserving an acceptable level of clean air and water and limiting hostilities around the globe. She will be one of a handful of students from our college moving on to the next level of competition.

Internet blockage

It is no secret that the Chinese government controls the distribution of news through most Chinese print and broadcast media. They also try, with less success, to regulate what is available over the Internet. Still, some Web sites are blocked in China. I’ve never been a Wikipedia user, but a friend told me during our first year in China that the Wikipedia site was blocked here. I’ve tried to reach it a few times, just to see if I could, but I’ve never gotten there. In the last few months, Flickr.com has been blocked. I can get to our page at Flickr.com, but not to any photos. Other Amity teachers here in China have had the same experience. So, now I have another excuse, besides procrastination, for not uploading new photos. Just can’t do it from here. 

Since we’ve been in China, I’ve relied primarily on email reports from the New York Times and the Washington Post to keep me up to date on the news. For the last several days, I’ve been having a unique problem with the Washington Post. I still get the emails, with headlines from stories in several news categories that I’ve requested. When I click on a headline, the story opens up for me to read.  I have about enough time to read a paragraph or two before a box pops up saying that the news item cannot be found. Then the news item, which obviously had been found since I was looking at it and reading it, disappears and is replaced by a “page cannot be found” screen. I’m still able to read most of the articles, though slowly and piecemeal, by opening them repeatedly and navigating quickly before the “can’t be found” box shows up. I don’t know for certain why this is occurring, but it seems likely to be the result of an effort to restrict access to the site. 

New construction on campus

East Campus. Hauling stone for the creek walls.

Last year we saw a complete halt to all construction work on the new campus. There were reports of misappropriation of funds, a college official going to jail, and the appointment of a new college president. Now construction has begun again. From the windows of our classroom on the fifth floor, we have a bird’s-eye view of two enormous cranes and a deep excavation that is underway for a new library building. A brick and plaster wall has been built around the construction site. There appears to be no entrance or exit for trucks, so the earth removed in the digging is being piled up next to the wall and now towers over it.

East Campus. Building stone walls on the banks of the creek.

Work was begun last spring on a project to beautify a creek on the East Campus. You may have heard of that creek where some unfortunates find themselves without paddles. This is not mere legend; the creek is quite real and runs through the heart of our college. We cross it several times daily going to and from classes, shops, etc. The creek bed has been deepened and widened and rock walls built along both banks. Workmen are now preparing to pour concrete sidewalks fitted with charming white handrails along the water’s edge. Some nearby off-campus stretches of the creek have been completed and even have grass growing along the banks. The creek is certainly becoming more attractive visually, but won’t really be an inviting venue for leisurely strolling until the contents of the creek are improved. The air would be sweeter downwind of a feedlot.

Linquan County

Students at the Linquan County English School.

In June, Kate and I were invited to visit an English language school in Linquan County, about a two-hour drive from Fuyang. It was a special Saturday school program to provide supplemental English lessons to students from the local schools. The students ranged in age from 5 or 6 to maybe 11 or 12. We spoke to the students, their teachers, and parents, and they sang and performed for us.

Linquan County. 1,000 year old tree. Note the origami cranes on the fence.

We spent a good part of the morning in an outdoor session at the school, followed by a tour of the area. There were two special sites that we were shown. The first was a thousand-year-old tree. The tree stood inside a walled compound, the door to which was locked. It took our driver a few minutes to find someone who could let us in. Once inside the enclosure, we saw that it also housed a rather rudimentary shrine. The tree was further enclosed by an iron fence within the walled area. The tree itself seemed to have been badly damaged by lightning or disease; its largest, tallest branches were dead and bare of any leaves. Smaller branches underneath were covered with leaves. There were several strands of paper origami cranes hanging from the fence surrounding the tree, and a faded yellow banner described the tree’s significance to the community.

The second place of interest was the three-thousand-year-old burial site of someone who was prominent at the time. We’ve seen other ancient burial sites in China, usually walled and enclosed and with the purchase of a ticket necessary for admission. This one stood completely unsheltered in a small patch of farm land. Three goats were tethered at the base of the mound, and a well-worn path led to the top. There was a sign at the base, not far from the goats, identifying the burial mound. At the foot of the mound was a plain metal box for burning incense. Children played and flew kites on the mound.

Wheat harvest in Linquan County

Linquan County wheat harvest. Laying the wheat in rows.

What was really fascinating in Linquan County was the wheat harvest. They were cutting and stacking the wheat by hand. They used short-handled scythes, more like large hooked knives, to cut the wheat. The workers would squat down on their heels and cut a section of wheat as far as they could reach, then stand up, move, and squat down again. Other workers laid the cut stalks of grain in neat rows on the ground while other workers picked up armloads from the rows and stacked them in large piles. From these piles, the wheat stalks were loaded onto hand carts and carried up to the paved road. This was the most surprising part.

Linquan County wheat harvest. Spreading the wheat on the paved road.

All the cut wheat stalks were spread out on the road for the traffic to drive over.  The people of Linquan County have determined that cars, trucks, and buses running over the wheat serve as an effective way to separate kernels of grain from the stalks. After the grain has been exposed to a sufficient amount of traffic, the straw is lifted off with pitchforks and the remaining grain is swept into piles. Grain from the piles is scooped up in shovels and thrown into the air for the chaff to be carried off by the wind.  The wheat, when free of chaff, is placed in bags. The entire community seemed to be involved in the harvest. We saw everyone from teenagers to old folks, men and women, working in the harvest. I’d never seen anything like it before, and except for the part about cars and trucks driving over the cut wheat (the only mechanized part of the process), it was like stepping back a few centuries in time. 

No “right of way”

I have written from time to time about the seemingly chaotic nature of traffic in China, as well as the penchant for pushing to the front at ticket windows, McDonald’s counters, and bus and elevator doors. I offer this hypothesis: Chinese culture does not recognize a “right of way.”

In traffic—pedestrian, motorized, or the kind requiring pedaling—it is every man, woman, and child for himself, and it doesn’t matter who was there first. Cars entering onto main streets or highways from smaller side streets do not yield to oncoming traffic. When they are ready to pull out, they do, often right in front of an approaching car, truck, or bus. The driver of the oncoming vehicle does not slow down, but swerves into another lane, often into oncoming traffic, while blowing the horn. Any conduct on the streets seems to be approved as long as one is blowing the horn. A functioning horn is as essential to driving in China as a steering wheel or brakes. Unlike in the United States, blowing the horn doesn’t mean “get out of the way;” it means “look out! I’m coming through.” Everything with wheels relies on a horn, bell, or some form of noisemaker for getting through traffic. When visiting in Suzhou in the Spring, we saw that the pedicab drivers there had rigged a clever form of bell-jangling gizmo that we haven’t seen elsewhere. Four or five bells were attached to a rusty old sprocket wheel salvaged from a dead bike and mounted over the pedicab’s front wheel. Where the pedals used to fit onto the sprocket, there would be a short axle with a thick rubber wheel around it. The pedaller pulled a lever on the handlebars, and the rubber-covered axle pressed down against the front wheel which spun the sprocket and jangled the bells. Pedicabs without the bell gizmos barreled through traffic with a vocal “ho ho ho ho” warning system.

When the doors open on an elevator full of passengers, others outside will push into the elevator before exiting passengers can get off. I often see people pushing their way onto the school’s shuttle buses by swimming against the tide of people getting off. At the end of a class session, students in the hallway will rush into the room before students who are leaving can make good their escapes. Standard practice at ticket windows, bank teller windows, post office windows, and KFC counters is to elbow one’s way in from the side waving a handful of money and shouting one’s request. It still surprises me that Chinese who are edged out by more assertive ticket or burger buyers seem to take no offense. When edged in front of these days, I often tap the edger on the shoulder to point out that a larger, long-haired, bearded man in a flowery shirt was there ahead of him (or her). When tapped on the shoulder, they will invariably yield without protest, but I always have the feeling that my expectation of taking my turn is a foreign and not-altogether-welcome intrusion into the normal ways of doing things. Still, with the Olympics coming next year, the Chinese government has become very image conscious and is issuing directives about spitting, littering, and other common habits that will not sit well with foreign visitors. In Beijing, they have “queue-up days” once a week to teach people how to stand in line. 

Fashion update

When Kate and I first came to China, we were struck by the fact that we rarely ever saw women in skirts or dresses; everyone wore pants. We also never saw shorts or bare midriffs. Girls’ clothes might fit like a thin layer of paint, but everything was covered.

This has all changed. Now we see girls in skirts and dresses every day, and very short shorts are fairly common, too, along with occasional glimpses of bare skin between jeans and shirts. I think we may conclude from this that traditional Chinese morality is in rapid and irreversible decline under a relentless barrage of Western influence. Or maybe just that kids are kids and fads and fashion change like the wind.

There are lots more photos you can see at on our page at Flickr.com. We may not be able to upload more pictures until our return to the United States.

We have a home page on PC(USA)'s Mission Connections Web site that tells more about our work and life in China. You can learn more about Amity at the Amity Foundation Web site.

Shalom y’all,

Don and Kate Lindsay

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 244