February 1, 2008

Hi All,

Kate and I are safe, warm, and dry in the midst of the most severe winter that most Chinese can remember. We are in Guangzhou in Guangdong Province. It's cold and wet here, but the temperatures are above freezing and we have a hotel room, so we are not shivering in the dark as many others are with all the snow and ice that has paralyzed much of the country. Even though traffic is moving routinely within the city, most trains, buses, and flights into and out of Guangzhou have been delayed or canceled for the last several days because of the heavy snow and ice in other areas.

Guangzhou is south China's largest railroad terminal and a connecting point for most trains going north. The major train line from Guangzhou to Beijing has been closed because of conditions in northern Guangdong Province and beyond. The TV news reports that there have been as many as 800,000 people stranded in the Guangzhou train station, nearly all of whom are hoping to get back to their hometowns for Spring Festival. 

Spring Festival

Spring Festival, which comes in the dead of winter, is a week-long holiday celebrating the Lunar New Year and is China's most important holiday. The Lunar New Year begins on February 7th this year, ushering in the Year of the Rat. The Spring Festival is a family holiday, and millions of Chinese return to their hometowns for the occasion. For many Chinese, this may be the only time during the year that they see their families, so the gathering of the family for the holiday is especially important. 

Migrant workers and their families

Many of China's working poor are migrant workers—people from the countryside who migrate to the cities, often faraway cities, to find work. Children are left in the care of grandparents while parents work elsewhere to provide for the family. A number of our students at the college have grown up this way, reared by grandparents with only brief and infrequent contact with their parents, sometimes two or three years between visits. It is a long-established custom here for working adults to support their aging parents, who in turn look after the grandchildren while their adult children are at work. Though that custom is beginning to change, three-generation households are still the norm in China. In the case of families of migrant workers, however, children and grandparents typically remain “at home” while the lynch-pin generation of working adults moves about from city to city taking any kind of jobs they can find wherever they can find them. The work available to migrant workers is generally menial, with long hours and short pay. It's a difficult choice that many Chinese families make, and it’s often the only option available to parents if they want to put their children through college. The decision is both altruistic and practical: doing without in order to provide the opportunity for better-paying jobs and brighter futures for their children through higher education also increases their prospects for security in their old age. The hard trade-off for all concerned is that they are necessarily absentee parents. Still, the meager livelihood they can earn as migrants is more than they could manage as farmers. 

Note: A Chinese farmer, unlike farmers in the United States, is simply someone who lives in the country, referred to here as "the countryside." Chinese farmers own no land; they may be allowed the use of a small tract of land, but it can be reallocated to other people or for other purposes at any time. No tractors, no bank loans. Most Chinese farmers, especially those who opt to become migrant workers, have little more than their own physical labor, a hoe and shovel, and sometimes a water buffalo.

Many of those who are stranded in the Guangzhou train station and in train and bus stations all across China, are migrant workers. For them, the prospect of not getting home for the Spring Festival may well mean that another year will go by before they see their children. So they wait and hope the weather will clear up in time.

A severe China winter

It snowed twice in Fuyang before the fall term ended and we left for the holiday. Both were light snows, an inch or two on the ground, enough to make the campus prettier before it turned to slush and mud, but not enough to cause traffic problems.

Amity teachers waiting at the Guiyang airport.

During the winter school break each year, Amity schedules a conference for all the Amity teachers. These are held in cities in south China to provide some relief from the winter cold for teachers in cold northern regions. This year's Winter Conference was in Guiyang in Guizhou Province. Kate and I started tracking the weather in Guiyang during November and December and were concerned that the temperatures there were often colder than what we were experiencing in Fuyang.

When the term ended and all our grades were entered into the college's computer system, we headed south. Our first stop was in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, where it was snowing. 

After a few days, we moved on to Chongqing, on the Yangzi River and close to the Three Gorges Dam. Chongqing is not a part of any province, but is one of China's special municipalities under the control of the central government.  With more than 33 million people, Chongqing is China's largest city. It was snowing in Chongqing, and our flight to Guiyang was delayed by about seven hours. During the delay, we were taken to an airport hotel and provided a room where we could rest comfortably until our flight was ready for take-off. At the time, it was thought the plane might be delayed until the following day.

We saw no snow in Guiyang. Instead, it rained and froze. Sidewalks and streets were slippery. They were passable at first, but got continually worse. One customary highlight of the Winter Conference is a two-day tour of Amity projects in the area. This field trip had to be canceled because the roads, including some that were in remote areas with little traffic, had become too icy for safe travel. 

When the conference was over and it was time for us to leave, many of us had plane tickets with departures scheduled for Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday. We got our first clear indication of trouble when the Thursday afternoon people showed up back at the hotel Thursday night. The airport was closed; no flights were coming in or going out.

Nonetheless, we lined up early Friday morning to go to the airport, hoping for the best.  Kate and I had tickets for a Friday morning flight. There were several teachers with earlier flights than ours, so we lined up for taxis in order of our scheduled departures. Our next clear indication of trouble popped up when taxi drivers refused to go to the airport because of the icy road conditions. We managed to persuade some drivers to take us by paying 100-150 yuan for a ride that would have run 35-40 yuan on the meter. Now, you may question the judgment of folks who would pay triple the fare and more to drivers reckless enough to venture out on the ice when the more prudent drivers wouldn't go there. In retrospect, it sounds a little dicey to me, too, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Kate and I and another Amity teacher, Richard Hansgen, wound up in a 150-yuan cab with a driver who passed up the main airport road for first one shortcut and then another. On the first shortcut we were climbing steadily uphill when he stopped the cab to chat with another driver coming down the hill.  After he'd finished his visiting, he seemed surprised that the taxi wouldn't go uphill from a standing start, so he backed all the way down the hill and tried a second shortcut with a steeper hill and a hairpin curve. Sure enough, we didn't make it around the curve, but also, despite some sideways sliding, didn't slip over the edge and plunge to a catastrophic end. We just backed down a second hill, after which he took the main road and we reached the airport with no further difficulty, as did all of our Amity colleagues.

We gathered in a group, about a dozen of us, watching each other's luggage and waiting for news. The first planes began moving into and out of the Guiyang airport around noon. When the airport folks knew that an incoming plane was off the ground and on its way, they would assign it a gate number. Then we could check our luggage, get boarding passes, and feel a good bit more optimistic about going somewhere. Our 10:25 a.m. flight left Guiyang around 5:00 p.m. or a little later. That was Friday, January 25. Our flight to Guangzhou took about an hour, and we've been here ever since.

The extent of the winter storm conditions

There has been little else on CCTV-9, the English-language channel, apart from coverage of the snow storms and travel conditions. Severe winter weather has covered most of China, including areas in south China that rarely see freezing temperatures. At first, the newscasters described this as the worst winter storm in a decade, then they upped it to two decades. The next day, it was the most severe winter in 50 years, and that was soon amended to 60 years.

Millions of people have been stranded by the ice and snow. I've already mentioned the staggering figure of 800,000 who have been stranded at the Guangzhou train station (actually, many have been moved to a convention center and others to a third location to get as many as possible indoors). The government has been strongly discouraging holiday travel, urging people to stay where they are through the Spring Festival holiday. This seems to have had little effect. The number of people at the train station grew from a reported 100,000 to 200,000, then to 500,000 before finally reaching 800,000, the largest figure I've heard. Very few people seem to be abandoning their travel plans. The reporters have interviewed countless people who all seem determined to wait this out in the hope of getting home for the Spring Festival.

The reporters have been rather delicate in their descriptions of the conditions, noting that people who are queued up waiting for trains are unwilling to leave the queue for any reason and are relieving themselves whenever and wherever they can. The vast majority of these people will have no place to sit except on the floor, and that must be a pretty undesirable place to sit by now. Kate described a bit of the coverage that I missed: some people were trampled by the crowd when a train departure was finally announced. 

In addition to the millions stuck in train and bus stations, many are stranded in cars, trucks, and buses along the highways, iced in and unable to go forward or turn around and go back. There are reports that many are out of gas and have no source of heat.

Large sections of the country are without electricity. Power lines are sagging and breaking under the weight of accumulated ice, and several large, steel electrical towers have crumpled and collapsed. It appears that we got out of Guiyang in the nick of time on Friday evening. By late Saturday or early Sunday, CCTV-9 was reporting that half of Guiyang, a city of nearly two million, was without electricity and that about half of Guizhou Province was dark as well.

We heard early this morning that some roads were now open for travel and that more trains would be operating as of today. Even if the storm were to end today, it would take several days for all the people who are stranded to get moving again. An early end to the severe weather doesn't appear to be in the cards, however. More snow, rain, and freezing temperatures are forecast for much of China, including parts of southern China.

China's response to the winter storm conditions

China's response to the storm conditions has been quite heartening. Food and hot water is being provided to all the people who are stranded. Trucks with chains on the tires are hauling food and hot water to people stranded on the highways. We were even offered free meals in the Guiyang airport when our flight was delayed.

Special agents have been sent to bus and train stations to issue refunds to people whose transportation has been delayed or canceled. The refunders may not be all that busy though, given that most people seem determined to stick it out until they have a bus or train to take them home.

There are some snow plows and other snow removal equipment being used, but the number seems quite limited, especially in the south where such equipment is rarely needed. We have seen TV coverage showing hundreds of people clearing streets and highways with picks and shovels. Many of these are soldiers in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Can you imagine clearing a multi-lane interstate highway by manual labor with picks and shovels? That's what is going on here.

Visits to country schools

Country school classroom.

During the fall, we were invited by the Fuyang Education Bureau to visit country middle schools within our district of Fuyang. In Chinese parlance, small towns and rural areas "belong to" a larger city and more specifically to a particular district of the city. There are ten such middle schools in our district. Our Education Bureau contact is Jonathan Li. My schedule fit better with Jonathan's than Kate's did, so I've made the three visits that have been done so far.

A country school in China is not at all the same as a country school in central Kansas. I was picturing small schools with a few overworked teachers and a small number of students. I have learned that Fuyang's country schools range from one thousand to two thousand students, roughly half of whom live in dormitories. Quite a different beast from the Banner School outside of Chase.

Don with country school teacher.

The visits follow a regular formula. I observe a middle school English class taught by a Chinese teacher, have a discussion with a group of the school's best English-speaking students, then a session with the school's English teachers. Before, after, and in-between, I am Elvis incarnate, surrounded by swarms of kids pushing and shoving to touch me, get my autograph, and say "welcome to our school." For those of you who haven't been rock stars, it's an amazing feeling. I try not to let it go to my head, but I'll confess that I've taken to carrying soft-pointed pens that work better for autographs (regular ballpoints poke holes in the paper). At first, Jonathan tried to shoo them away so that I could "have a rest." Now he understands that my beleaguered ego thrives on that attention and only starts shooing when I've wrecked the schedule.

The classes I've observed have been excellent and have been conducted almost entirely in English. One knock on the English teaching in many Chinese schools is that they teach English in Chinese. To my surprise, I've been able to understand just about every word spoken, whether by a teacher or student, in all three classes. The teachers have been enthusiastic and engaging, always encouraging students and rewarding their efforts, contrary to the stern, punitive stereotype of Chinese teachers.

The conditions they work in are challenging. All three classes had a very large number of students; one classroom that would have comfortably held 25-30 students with a little elbow room and space to move around had more than 100 students in it. There was no elbow room, but they all seemed to be attentive and involved in the lesson.

Country-school Elvis sighting.

I dread the sessions with the English teachers, because they are looking for help and advice that I am just not equipped to give, even though I have a certificate designating me as a "foreign expert." The teachers know their deficiencies, and they're looking for ways to improve, but I don't know enough about linguistics or teaching methodology to help them very much. Even so, I am applauded and thanked profusely at the end of the session, as if I'd been much more helpful to them than I really was.

Finally, like most Chinese occasions, a big meal follows, lunch or dinner, depending on the hour. I've come to enjoy these banquets more and more over the time we've been here. There are frequently only one or two other people at the table who are confident enough of their English to venture any conversation, but I'm more at ease in this setting than I was at first and don't feel near as much the outsider as before. It's a good thing. We still have seven more of these schools to visit.

Uncle Albert's will

Uncle Albert's will.

We are always looking for ways to keep the students speaking in English in ways that will hold their attention and keep them involved. During the fall I devised a new activity involving a recently deceased bachelor uncle. Each student has a role to play as a niece or nephew, one of Uncle Albert's only surviving relatives. Each cousin knows something scandalous or has an axe to grind with another cousin. Albert's will leaves his entire estate of $137 million to all of the cousins collectively, on the condition that they can reach a unanimous agreement as to how much money each cousin will receive. If they fail to reach the agreement, they each get $1.00, and all the rest of Albert's estate goes to Miss Tootsie La Bomba, who was "such a comfort" to Albert in his declining years. The activity has generated very spirited discussion and very few unanimous agreements. 

Halloween

We moved the Halloween party from our small apartment to a weekly English corner in a large open room. Squeezing a few hundred people into our apartment was predictably unworkable the first two years, though we tried it anyway. This year we had our freshmen make Halloween posters for decorations, and we bought about half a ton of candy to distribute as "trick or treat" goodies. We'd seen kids get a little crazy in our apartment when bowls of candy appeared, but there was so much mayhem at the English Corner with students literally diving at bags of candy that I was concerned for the safety of the bag holders. There's a cultural difference at work there that I just don't understand.

Mock trial

Mock trial.

We attended a mock trial put on by the Law Department students. Law is an undergraduate major in China, and law majors can be licensed to practice as attorneys after graduation. The mock trial was, of course, conducted in Chinese, so we didn't understand much of it, but a student friend described the proceedings for us. Similar to American mock trials, there was a plaintiff, a defendant, two attorneys for each side, witnesses, a court clerk and a bailiff. Instead of one judge, there was a panel of three judges. What I found most intriguing about the trial was the very limited role of the attorneys and the active role of the judges. The attorneys had very little to say in the matter. It was the presiding judge who questioned the witnesses and elicited most of the evidence in the case. There was no jury, so the panel of judges issued the verdict. 

Christmas

Mary and Joseph in student skit.

We teach our freshmen about major U.S. holidays, including Christmas, with sessions on both its religious foundation and its cultural elements. Since the sophomores I have this year have already had these lessons, I had them perform skits for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. They didn't always remember things exactly as I'd explained them. I had one skit about "Hallowmas," with suggestions for making, rather than buying, your Hallowmas presents.

Two Christmas skits acted out O. Henry's story, "The Gifts of the Magi," but one group added a new ending. After it was established that Jim had sold his watch to buy combs for Della and that she had sold her hair to the wigmaker to buy a watch chain for Jim, they had dinner and went to sleep. While they were asleep, Santa came and returned Jim's watch and Della's long hair. 

Another skit was a portrayal of the nativity, with a pregnant Mary going with Joseph to Bethlehem. In this skit, they were turned away from several inns before being allowed to stay in the stable. In a display of Chinese modesty, a sheet was held up to give Mary some privacy during the labor and delivery. The sheet then became swaddling cloths for the baby, who was played by a large stuffed pig, it being the Year of the Pig over here.

Christmas parties

Student friends Annie, Susan, Iris, and Lynn May decorate the tree.

We continued our custom of entertaining students in our home for Christmas. Four students helped us decorate the apartment. We started the Christmas parties two weekends before Christmas with 40-minute sessions for each of our classes. We went all day and into the evening on Saturday and Sunday of the two weekends preceding Christmas, with one Friday evening in the schedule so we could include everyone. We had upwards of 1,500 visitors this year, including students, teachers, friends from Fuyang, and a few total strangers who followed the colored lights and came to see what the foreigners were doing. We took 1,450 photos to the photo shop for developing and, as usual, still have a handful left of people no one seems to know.

Amity's agreement with the college provides that we could take two days off for Christmas, but we chose to go ahead with the usual teaching schedule. Christmas came during the last week of classes before our final exam, and it seemed easier to go ahead and teach than to take the time off and then make up the classes we'd missed in time for the exam. 

We had two places to be on Christmas Eve. Kate went to a Christmas Eve service at the Fuyang Christian Church, accompanied by a young teacher and a few students. I went to the English Department's New Year's celebration. That's not a typo. They had the New Year's party on December 24th. To top things off, they had a Christmas card competition, and the deadline for submissions was December 31st. Really.

New Year's party on Christmas Eve

Parties here are different from parties back home. Parties here involve lots of performances. People sing, dance, do comedy routines, skits, and short plays. So the New Year's party was in the auditorium and was a variety show. There are quite a number of student productions of this kind throughout the year, many of which are competitions with prizes awarded for the best performances. The New Year's show was just for fun. Kate and I are invariably introduced as the show begins, and then we are led up to the stage when the show is over to be in the cast photo. This time, since Kate was at the church, it was just me in the photo, but everyone asked "Where is Kate?"

The Christmas Eve service at the church had a surprising feature; everyone in the church was given a red Santa Claus hat to wear. It was a packed house, as most Chinese church gatherings seem to be, and though conducted in Chinese, the carols were familiar. 

The word is out

Our students know that this will be our final year of teaching in China. This has led to some misunderstanding, including holiday emails and text messages asking us if we are back in the United States already. There's an innocence and naivety about Chinese students that is both charming and frustrating. Several have asked if our mobile phone number would be the same when we get back to America, as if text messaging from Fuyang to Texas would be a local call. Others seem utterly perplexed as to why we are not staying here permanently. I remind them that we have family, and I've asked some to imagine how it would feel to them if their parents were far away for two or three years at a time. Many of the students don't have to imagine that. They know how it feels, and for some of them we've become surrogate grandparents. When the time comes, leaving will be difficult because we have developed very strong ties to many students. Email isn't the same as being together, but we do expect that some of these friendships will continue for a long time.

That's all, folks

By dumb luck or good fortune, we have a warm, dry spot for the duration of the winter storm here in Guangzhou. We've already been here longer than anticipated, and we've seen most of the sights recommended by The Lonely Planet. We've dropped plans to visit some smaller towns of interest, but still expect to get to Hong Kong, which is warmer than Guangzhou, then on to Hangzhou and Shanghai.

We've been invited to a retreat in Korea for all of the mission workers in Asia appointed by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We'll fly from Shanghai to Seoul on February 19th, returning to Fuyang on February 26th. We'll be two days late returning for the Spring term, so we'll have classes to make up right away.

Shalom y'all,

Don and Kate Lindsay

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