May 27, 2008

Hi All,

We are down to our last five weeks of classes before the curtain comes down on our teaching-in-China adventure. Here are the latest observations.

Chinese surprises

They’re called Chinese surprises, and they occur often to foreigners in China. You attend an event as an interested spectator, and you are called to the front to give a speech. Students ring your doorbell as you’re preparing dinner and announce that they’ve come to escort you to their class party. The dean sends word on Friday night that a car will be waiting for you at 7:30 Saturday morning to take you on a day trip to Bozhou. Classes for the new term begin on Monday; on Sunday you receive a list of classes you are assigned to teach, and they aren’t the same classes you’d been told about before and were prepared to teach.

Last week I went to visit the No. 1 Middle School in Yingshang, a town about an hour’s drive from Fuyang. My lecture to the students was to begin at 3:00 p.m. Mr. Wang, who teaches English in the college’s Education Department, arrived at our apartment at 11:00 a.m. to escort me to a private car where his old college friend, Mr. Jiang, the head English teacher at the No. 1 Middle School, was waiting with the driver. It was Mr. Wang who arranged my visit to his friend’s school. We went directly to a restaurant in downtown Fuyang and were shown to a small private room with a round table, the standard arrangement for such meals. Mr. Jiang visited with the young woman who was serving our room about the dishes for the meal, and we sat down to chat while waiting for the food. We were presently joined by another college friend whose name I didn’t get and who did not speak English. Though both Mr. Wang and Mr. Jiang speak fluent English, the conversation was nearly all in Chinese.

Fuyang hasn’t come around to a no smoking policy in restaurants. The majority of men in China are smokers (more than 60 percent, according to the China Daily), and it is the custom for a smoker to give cigarettes to every man present when he pulls one out for himself. Mr. Jiang is a heavy smoker, so I was offered cigarettes several times. I stopped smoking 30 years ago, so I declined a lot of cigarettes, but with all the second-hand smoke we inhale in China, our lungs may think we’ve been chain smoking all along.

A Chinese surprise occurred when a placemat was laid in front of me and the place was set with two forks, a knife and a soup spoon. While the other four men shared several Chinese dishes, I was served a t-bone steak with tomato and vegetable soup, a green salad, orange juice, and a glass of red wine. It was the only time in three years that a dinner host has ordered separately for Kate or me. They watched with interest as I ate my Western-style lunch; they may have just been curious to see how it was done.

Visit to the Yingshang No. 1 Middle School

After lunch, on our way to the school, Mr. Jiang told me that my two-hour lecture period had been extended to three hours and that a one-hour session with English teachers had been added at 2:00. This was not really surprising; invitations to foreign teachers are frequently modest affairs when proposed, but mushroom into considerably more after the invitation is accepted. When initially proposed, my visit to the No. 1 Middle School was to take no more than half a day; I was home again a little after 9:00 p.m., so by one way of reckoning the time involved, it was nearly two hours shy of half a day.

The meeting with teachers was surprisingly quiet. On other school visits, teachers have come armed with complex questions about linguistics and teaching methodology that I’ve been woefully ill-equipped to answer. In Yingshang, the teachers had little to say other than to welcome me to their school and ask a perennial student question: Are you accustomed to the life here? So I filled the hour with anecdotes about our experiences as teachers at the Fuyang Teachers College (more often referred to as Fuyang Normal College).

My session with the students was a by-invitation event, with about 250 of the school’s best English students allowed to attend, along with most of the taciturn teachers from the previous hour. We met in an auditorium with theater seating; there was a full house, with a couple of dozen students standing in the back. The students in the audience were mostly Grade 3 and 4 senior middle school students, generally the equivalent of juniors and seniors in high school, though with an innocence and naivety not common in U.S. high schools. The stage was equipped with a computer, PowerPoint projector, and screen, so my presentation was heavily illustrated with photos. Even the better students often find it difficult to understand spoken English, so being able to present key information visually and illustrate it with photos makes the activity more comprehensible.

I had been asked to deliver a lecture on American culture, which I have come to interpret as “anything you want to talk about.” I did show-and-tell about our family by way of personal introduction, showing pictures of our children and grandchildren. The first part of “American culture” involved photos and tales of Chase, Kansas, and Austin, Texas, the two places I’ve called home for most of my life. A picture of Willie Nelson drew no response, but a photo of a large field of bluebonnets got a loud collective “wah!”, a common Chinese expression of surprise, as did a picture of our old house in Chase.

From Chase and Austin, I moved on to the state of Texas.  NASA and the Alamo didn't impress, but the armadillo was a big hit. They are basketball fanatics over here, so I knew I’d score points with Texas’s three NBA teams. The kids mmmmed appreciatively for the Mavericks and Spurs, but were on their feet and roaring for Yao Ming and the Rockets. I also gave them an introduction to public education in the United States, with particular emphasis on high school. Chinese students are surprised to learn that American parents don’t have to pay tuition for their children to attend public schools; the public schools aren’t free in China. Mr. Jiang mercifully called for a break in the middle of the three-hour session, after which I wrapped up my presentation, leaving most of an hour for questions from the students. The students had lots of questions, from the predictable “How can I improve my oral English?” to “What do you think about Tibet?” and “Did you know the Olympics will be in Beijing?”  (Chinese students seem to believe that foreigners are completely detached from the world while in China. We are repeatedly asked if we know about the Beijing Olympics, and lately the question is whether we’ve heard about the earthquake in Sichuan.) The session ended just after 6:00 p.m. and was followed by a clamor for autographs and photos. I really do enjoy having a crowd of teenagers pressing around me, and I’m concerned that students in the United States will not recognize my celebrity and that most of them will probably graduate without having my signature scrawled onto the flyleaf of a textbook.  There are some things I’ll miss about China.

The visit to Yingshang ended with dinner in a local restaurant, hosted by the headmaster of the No. 1 Middle School and with the English teachers included. No forks, no steak, all Chinese, and, as usual,  twice as much food as we could eat. As we were eating, Mr. Jiang commented to me that foreigners think the Chinese serve too much food at banquets and that much food is wasted. I indicated my agreement with that view. Then he assured me that any food left over would be taken home and eaten later, so that there would be nothing wasted. When we had eaten our fill and toasted each other sufficiently, we all stood up and left. The bowls, platters, and tureens of uneaten food were all left behind.

The college evaluation

Our college has just completed a week-long evaluation by a team of eagle-eyed fault-finders from the Education Bureau. Preparations for this evaluation began a year or more ago and include significant physical improvements. A formerly scrubby dirt soccer field now has Astroturf, surrounded by a new synthetic track. Streets that were dark before now have red, green and white lights shining up through the trees, and a cluster of streetlights stand at either end of the bridge over the creek that runs through the campus. The creek itself is now outfitted with paved and lighted walkways on both sides. Several buildings have been painted, and the windows in some have been replaced. Street signs with maps and arrows now direct campus visitors to every possible destination, and classrooms are marked with new signs, too.

Amity colleagues in other colleges have been through this process and have been required to spend countless hours creating a year or more of back-dated lesson plans and other records. Our college did not ask us to do anything at all for the evaluation, even though other teachers had to give up a week of vacation at each end of the six-week Spring Festival Break to work on records and documentation. Kate and I were content to be left out of the loop this time.

The evaluators arrived on May 11. In an act of last-minute beautification, the stairs leading up to the entrances of buildings were ornamented with row upon row of potted flowers. The college was playing for high stakes; its application for university status would go forward or not, depending in large measure on the evaluators’ findings. Teachers on the Monday shuttle bus were noticeably better dressed than usual, including Kate and me, in anticipation of classroom visits. Nonetheless, a dark cloud descended over the college as the news spread: the evaluation team was disappointed to find that neither students nor faculty wore uniforms.

Throughout the week of probing and examining, college officials appeared to be tiptoeing through a minefield, well dressed but not well rested, and eager for it all to be over. The evaluation ended late Friday afternoon. By evening they were carting the potted flowers away from building entrances. 

Within a few days, the word on the street was that the college had received eighteen of a possible nineteen points or, according to a different rumor, fifteen of a possible sixteen. In any event, we apparently managed to get a very good score on the evaluation, with the result that university status is expected to be conferred within the next year or so, but probably not before Kate and I return to the United States in July.

Nancy’s cousin’s wedding

Li Ping, who goes by the English name Nancy, has been a close friend during our stay in Fuyang. She was a student in the college when we arrived, and her grandfather was a retired teacher in his 90s who lived on campus. Nancy transferred to Anhui University in Hefei, the provincial capital, and earned her degree there. She is now in her late twenties and preparing for grad school. She came to see us a few weeks ago and invited us to attend a relative’s wedding. 

She was quite intent on learning the precise English term for her relationship with the groom-to-be. She tried to explain that she was related somehow through an uncle. The vernacular for family relationships is much more specific and complex in Chinese than in English. The Chinese don’t just have “uncles.”  In China, your dad’s older brother is da bo; his younger brother is shu shu.  Da bo’s wife is da ma, while shu shu’s wife is shen shen. There are parallel sets of terms for your dad’s sisters and their husbands and your mom’s siblings and their spouses. There are separate terms for older and younger brothers and sisters and for maternal grandparents (wai po and wai qing) and paternal grandparents (zu mu and zu fu). After half an hour of earnest exploration of her family thicket, I lost interest in how Nancy and the groom were related.

But I wanted to go to the wedding. Kate had already made arrangements to be with a group of her students that Saturday, so Nancy and I agreed to go together. I asked when we needed to leave, and she was uncertain. I asked her when the wedding would begin, but she didn’t know. I asked, with just a hint of grumpiness, how we could go to a wedding if we didn’t know when it would happen. As it turns out, we’re not in Kansas any more. Nancy explained that when a couple marry, there are two days of family gatherings and dinners before the more public wedding on the third day. On the third day, friends and relatives gather at the groom’s parents’ home to wait while the bride rises, spends some time with her parents and family, dresses for the wedding, and then, when she’s darn good and ready, climbs into the back seat of flower-covered car and is taken to the groom’s family home. We were invited for the third day, and we agreed to get an early start so as not to miss anything.

We arrived in Funan, a small town in the Fuyang District, before 9:00 a.m. The groom’s family home was a two-story building with a large open courtyard on one side. The narrow dirt street overlooked a small river where a flock of white ducks could be seen. A few goats were tethered on the hillside leading down to the river. Men were lighting long strings of firecrackers along the street to celebrate the wedding and kill time until the bride showed up. Forty or fifty people, including several small children, had already gathered by the time we arrived. Nancy introduced me to several of her relatives. Apart from “hello,” very little English was spoken, so we smiled and nodded and had long, pumping handshakes.

An outdoor kitchen had been set up in the courtyard with two large woks, one the size of a bathtub, perched on top of brick and mud fire enclosures. The fires were lit and food for the luncheon was simmering. A few ducks and chickens not on the day’s menu waggled around among the pots, indifferent to the crowd. The groom’s mother gave me a tour of the house and was especially proud of the addition they had built for their son and daughter-in-law. It is the custom in China for parents to buy a home for the newlyweds when their children marry. In this case, the parents had added a large two-room apartment on the second floor, with tile floors and colored recessed lighting in the ceiling, but no trace of a bathroom or kitchen. Those would be shared with the family downstairs.

The bedroom in the newlywed’s apartment was furnished with a large bed and two black-and-white night tables, two couches with red-and-white vinyl upholstery, wardrobe closets, and a small vanity and chair. The second room was empty. A small group of women and children had gathered in the bedroom to chat. A small child peed while sitting on one of the red-and-white couches (diapers aren’t used much here), and one of the women wiped it up with a towel. Two aunts (I think) came into the bedroom and placed red peanuts and garlic under the bed linens for good luck. Before the one-child policy, the more peanuts under the bedding, the more children the marriage should produce. It was the couple’s wedding day, and they would spend their wedding night in this room, but the room had not been cleaned. Under the peed-on sofa were several empty beverage cans and cigarette butts. A half-dozen or so partially filled plastic cups sat on the vanity, and the floor under the couches and table was covered with thick dust from the recent construction. 

The groom and two male cousins arrived while we were gathered in the bedroom. The groom wore a new dark blue suit with the brand name label still sewn onto the sleeve of his coat. (It is a common practice, at least in the Fuyang area, to leave these labels attached to the sleeve.) The suit would have been a good fit for a taller, heavier man.

Around 10:00 a.m., a red car bedecked with flowers arrived, followed by two large trucks. The flowered car stopped down the street while the trucks pulled up to the entrance to the courtyard. The trucks were filled with wedding gifts. We watched as men unloaded large traditional Chinese wooden couches and chairs, swivel office chairs, tables, lamps, several large bright-colored and embroidered bed covers, air conditioners, a refrigerator, and a Honda motorcycle, all while the bride remained in the flowered car. 

Nancy explained that the bride does not get out of the car until all the gifts are unloaded and carried up into the apartment (the empty second room was jammed full now). Then she is given a report of the quantity and types of gifts. If she considers the gifts to be sufficient, she gets out of the car; if not, they negotiate until she is satisfied. Our particular bride seemed satisfied, came out of the car, and was carried by the groom into the courtyard. I had asked Nancy earlier whether this would be a Western-style or traditional Chinese wedding. The bride and groom in a traditional Chinese wedding both wear red. Western-style white wedding dresses have become very popular in China, though the white dress, often accompanied by a tuxedo for the groom, is about the only element of a Western wedding that has been imported. As it happened, the bride wore a long, full, off-the-shoulder dress in the style of an American wedding dress, but in pink. 

The groom carried her into the courtyard and set her on her feet in front of a small table on which there were candles, fruit, and what appeared to be a bottle of baijiu (a clear and very potent alcoholic beverage commonly served at banquets). What little there was in the way of a wedding ceremony happened there, and it was no solemn assembly. There was no priest, judge or village elder to preside, and there was no music, exchange of vows or other liturgical elements that we associate with weddings. It involved small children shooting confetti and spraying the bride and groom with strings of colored goop from aerosol cans while the groom’s two goofball cousins taunted them and pushed their heads together. In keeping with tradition, the bride was not supposed to exhibit any pleasure in the goings-on, and our girl’s performance was quite convincing. I thought the two cousins deserved a swift kick and a lecture on grownup behavior, but I kept that to myself. From what students have told me about traditional Chinese weddings, it does not appear that much of the tradition was observed on this occasion.

When the goop-spraying and pushing were completed, the groom carried his bride piggyback up an outdoor staircase to their new second-floor apartment, and we all followed them up the stairs. Once inside the bedroom, the newlyweds sat primly on the edge of their bed, and an apple on a string was dangled between them as the two yokel cousins again pushed their faces together. The bride, a very pretty young woman now hitched to a somewhat nerdy husband with two juvenile cousins, was once more convincing as she pretended not to enjoy the fun. As the only foreign guest at the wedding, the aunts insisted that I should be in a photo with the bride and groom. They put me in the middle, but I thought it best not to stand between the newlyweds. I moved to the side so that the bride was in the middle, and that’s where I’ll appear somewhere in their wedding album.

A wedding feast was served at noon. No room in the house was near large enough to accommodate all of the guests, so we gathered in small groups in every available room. Being good and generous hosts, the groom’s parents served food in abundance, and the beer and baijiu flowed freely. Cases of beer were stacked by a courtyard wall, and I had said jokingly to Nancy that the groom’s father must have bought a truckload of beer. She replied, not joking, “two truckloads.” The meal was terrific. What I had seen simmering in the woks hadn’t looked particularly appealing, but what they brought to our table was delicious. During the course of the meal, the bride and groom approached each guest for a toast with baijiu. They served each guest according to how much they thought he or she could handle. I got a rather small amount, but men they knew better often got full glasses of the stuff; the toast required downing the whole amount and showing an empty glass afterward. The bride poured herself only a couple of drops each time.

Things got quiet after the meal as people headed home to take naps or sleep off the baijiu. As Nancy and I were preparing to leave, the groom’s father took my arm and led me outside. He didn’t speak English, but it was evident that he wanted to show me something important. We walked through the chickens and down the hill toward the river to a small roofless brick structure right on the bank of the river. He motioned toward the entrance. It was an outhouse with a drainpipe flowing directly into the river.

And a neighborhood wedding

Soon after I went to Nancy’s cousin’s wedding, Kate spotted a black, flower-covered wedding car parked just outside our apartment building on campus. She went out to join the neighbors and see what was happening. As people were loading gifts into cars, she saw a man walk by with a very large live fish wearing a red bow. She was told that the live fish was a traditional gift and was often accompanied by a live chicken or goose, though Kate spied no gift-wrapped poultry. A student friend tells us that the tradition of giving fish and poultry as wedding gifts has about died out. The preferred gift these days is money in a red envelope. Since I hadn’t had time to shop for a fish, money in a red envelope is what I gave to Nancy’s cousin and his bride.

Young American visitors to Fuyang

Sixteen English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) from the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIED) were hosted by Amity Teachers at two colleges during the week of April 20-26, 2008. The ETAs were all recent college graduates from the United States enrolled in a year-long program at HKIED to enhance language learning and cross-cultural opportunities for future teachers. The program is sponsored, in part, by the U.S. Fulbright Commission. The ETA program is in its first year at HKIED, and the joint effort with Amity was a pilot project that may well become a continuing cooperative endeavor.

The sixteen ETAs, along with their HKIED supervisor Manie Cheng, met for the first time in Nanjing with Amity official Liu Ruhong, Amity host teacher Lynn Yarbrough from the Jiangsu Institute of Education, and Kate and me on Friday, April 18. Eight of the ETAs remained in Nanjing with Lynn, while Manie and the other eight took a Saturday evening train to Fuyang with us.

Foreigners are a common sight in Nanjing, but there is reason to believe that the twelve known non-Chinese all simultaneously present in Fuyang during that week were a record for the city. The twelve included the eight ETAs, Kate and me, a Japanese teacher named Maya, and Jimmy, a young man from Cameroon who has been in Fuyang for the last few months. When moving about the city en masse, the ETAs were a traffic-stopping, jaw-dropping spectacle and an endless stream of cell phone camera moments. (Holy ipod, Batman, there’s a whole bunch of ‘em!)

The Fuyang group of ETAs taught all of our classes for the week, and our students loved them. They were easy-going and friendly, and students felt quite relaxed with them. During the mid-class break, the ETAs served peanut butter and crackers to the students, a first-time experience for most of them. The ETAs also visited classes in local primary and middle schools, as well as college English classes taught by Chinese instructors and classes in education and biology. On the side, they danced, sang, spent their lunch breaks talking to students, ate just about everything sold by the North Gate vendors, and played American-style football and threw Frisbees with the neighborhood kids. Kate directed traffic and kept everyone on schedule as the group’s den mother.

Of our eight ETAs, one was born in Korea and adopted as a baby by a couple from Tennessee; one was born in California to parents who had immigrated from Korea; one was born in California to parents who were Japanese and Filipino; one was African-American; and the other four were white and had European ancestors. Our Chinese students were quite surprised to hear native English coming from people with Asian faces.  But they look Chinese! We have talked about ethnic diversity in America frequently with our students, but having this group on campus for a week really brought that lesson home.

At the end of the week, we took the Friday midnight train back to Nanjing for a final wrap-up session and celebratory dinner on Saturday. It was clear from the discussion that both groups of ETAs had had exceptionally good experiences and that students at both colleges had gained a much broader understanding of Americans and American life, in addition to the opportunities to practice their English with smart, friendly, and approachable young native-English speakers who won’t see 60 for nearly four decades.  From where we sit, it looks like the HKIED/Amity connection was successful on the trial run and ought to be continued. We’ve already put in for a Texas branch of the program for next year, and Manie says she’ll be there.

Student debate

I was asked to be one of the judges for a recent English language student debate. There were two teams of four students each; five of the eight debaters were from my sophomore English classes. I had gone the week before to watch the student try-outs. About twenty students competed for the eight slots. The topic for the debate was “Which is more important: the economy or the environment?” The four other judges and I were to use a ten-point scale for each speaker. Up to four points could be awarded for the content of their arguments, four points for their use of English, and two points for stage presence and bearing.

There were three young women and one young man on each team. The first speakers for each side delivered opening statements setting forth the major issues for their side. The statements were substantive and well worded, but read from a prepared text without once looking up. These two were not my students; mine have been thoroughly drilled on the importance of making eye contact with listeners. The back and forth arguments were surprisingly good, the best I’ve heard in one of these events during our three years in Fuyang. Three students in particular, all sophomores in my classes, offered well-reasoned and articulate arguments in response to opposing speakers and when advocating their positions. One was a young man, Bob, on the environment side; the other two were young women, Candy and Annie, on the Economy side. All three were quite adept at acknowledging certain good points made by the opposition, but countering with additional facts and arguments for their side. On the other hand, the young man on the economy team, also one of my sophomores, went way off the deep end. John was a strident advocate and refused to recognize the validity of any argument from the environmental side. When asked by an opponent, “What good is economic development if we destroy our planet?”  he countered boldly, “If we destroy our planet, we can find another planet!”

When I’ve served as a judge in the past, I’ve often felt that I was using quite different criteria than the Chinese judges, and those I’ve given the highest marks have rarely been the winners. The debate results, however, were right in line with my scoring. The economy team won, on the weight of Candy and Annie’s performances, and in spite of John’s. Bob from the environment team was named “Best Speaker.” I gave Bob, Candy, and Annie nearly identical scores and would have considered any of them deserving of the Best Speaker prize. For my service as a judge, I was given a certificate in Chinese and a thermal tea jar of the kind that all Fuyang teachers carry. You load it with tea at home and keep adding hot water all day long. This jar, however, has a strainer at the top to keep floating tea leaves out of your mouth, a feature I’ll appreciate.

Foreign language singing competition

Singing competitions are rather common occurrences at our college, and this latest one was sponsored by the Foreign Language Department. The 25 five best singers or groups were selected from preliminary rounds to perform at a big show in the West Campus auditorium. The foreign language for most of the songs was English, though a few were sung in Japanese. Several of my students were included among the performers. There were two large groups of 25 to 30 students. The first was a mixed group, about half men and half women, who sang in Japanese. Our neighbor, Maya, a young Japanese teacher, had coached the group and went up on the stage to sing with them. Maya also provided the kimonos for two girls who sang a duet in Japanese. The second large group consisted of about 30 young women who are juniors now and were among my first freshmen when we arrived in Fuyang. They were all dressed in identical long, white, sleeveless dresses that they had managed to borrow somewhere. It was the first time I’d seen them wearing make-up. They looked good and sounded good and walked away with the second prize.

It’s harvest time

The wheat harvest has begun in our area. A few days ago, the fleet of small combines made its annual appearance on the streets near the West Campus. These are combines that cut a swath about six feet wide. Each year at this time, a swarm of these harvesters cut and gather the wheat from the fields surrounding Fuyang. In fields that are too small for the combines, or inaccessible to them, the harvest will proceed with manual labor. Men and women, young and old, will go to the fields. Some will be armed with short-handled hook-bladed scythes wielded from a squatting position in front of the standing grain. Others will stack the cut grain in rows, while still others carry the grain in armloads to a central stack. When the grain is dry and beaten from the stalks, it will be thrown in the air with shovels to let the wind carry off the chaff. The remaining grain will be bagged for milling or for use as seed next year.

This one week out of the year when the combines are here is the only time when farming in this area is heavily mechanized. Otherwise, farming here is done by hand, with the aid of a water buffalo, or occasionally with a small walk-behind garden tiller. When we see the combines on the street, we can be sure that next week we will be breathing the smoke from fields of burning stubble. Farmers here have no effective means of turning the stubble under, so the fields are burned.

Eye-catching footwear

I don’t recall ever paying a lot of attention to women’s shoes before, but lately I’ve been noticing some really interesting and colorful combinations of shoes and stockings. In the United States, unless things changed when I wasn’t watching, women’s hosiery generally starts at the top and goes all the down to cover their feet. Over here, hose that start at the top are likely to end above the knee, just below the knee, at mid-calf, or at the ankle. Only rarely do they seem to go from top to toe. Many, however, cover the feet but go up only to the ankles. Hosiery that starts at the top is usually black, sometimes with a white or colored pattern. The anklet kind are generally white or some variety of skin color, though they, too, are sometimes black.

When Fuyang girls are freshmen, they all wear sneakers. By the spring of their Sophomore year, about half of them are routinely wearing high heels, and the proportion of high heel-wearing coeds continues to rise during their junior and senior years. Their shoes are really bright and flashy in loud yellows, greens, reds, and purples. Glittery gold and silver shoes are popular, as well as shoes with big rhinestones, and they sometimes wear their heels with bobby socks. The girls who are still in sneakers are also wearing silver and gold shoes, along with Converse All-Star knock-offs in neon colors.

I first started noticing the shoes during the Spring Festival holiday when we were in Hong Kong.  I took a picture of a young woman wearing striped socks and bright shoes.  I’ve been photographing shoes ever since. I haven’t become a bawdy old fetishist. I just have an anthropologist’s interest in cataloging interesting footwear.

T.P.

I don’t think I’ve ever told you about bathroom tissue in China. It’s different. For one thing, it doesn’t come with a hollow cardboard roll in the center. It’s a solid roll of paper. Instead of suspending it from a roller, you drop it into a plastic container about the size of lunch box. The lunch box hangs on the wall in about the same general position relative to the action as where you’d expect to find a roller back home. It seems a more efficient way to package the product, without all that dead air space in the middle.

There is no standard size for a roll in China. They run from about five to seven inches or more in width. Sometimes they are two-ply, sometimes three-ply, sometimes both in the same package. Softness does not seem to be among the main objectives of the manufacturers. The rolls are perforated, but not at the same place on each ply, and the idea that the paper will tear along the perforation is about as certain as the notion that traffic will stick to the right side of the road. Now, don’t get me wrong. You can find tissue on a hollow cardboard roll in the stores, but it occupies a small niche position in the tissue market, probably offered so that foreign customers will recognize what they’re buying.

When you go traveling, it’s prudent to tuck a roll of your own into your suitcase. Hotel rolls, overall, are very small—about the size of a coffee mug—and that includes a large hollow spot in the center

EV-71

On a more serious note, you may know that Fuyang has had some incidents, including fatal incidents, of the avian flu or bird flu while we have been here. In the latter part of April, Kate read in the China Daily about another virus, EV-71, that was attacking and killing Fuyang children. The following day, students began asking if we had heard about the virus and shared what they had been told by teachers and had read in the local paper. Students were concerned because the May Day holiday was quickly approaching, and they were worried about becoming sick themselves or carrying the virus home to younger members of their families. Two students at the college did become sick, we’ve been told. Local kindergartens were closed.

I now know from Kate’s research that Enterovirus 71 (EV-71) was first described in 1969 during an outbreak with central nervous system complications in California. Since then, EV-71 infections have been associated with a number of outbreaks with wide clinical manifestations, ranging from mild hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) to severe neurological complications and deaths. The World Health Organization said that cases in Fuyang began to crop up in early March, but a sharp increase was seen beginning in mid-April. As of early May, nearly 4,000 cases had been reported in Fuyang, resulting in 22 deaths, with more than a thousand people still hospitalized, 42 of whom were in serious or critical condition.  A report in the May 4th China Daily stated that all the registered patients in the Fuyang outbreak were children aged 1 to 11, with 80 percent of them under 3 and most fatal cases being children under the age of 2. A May 12th report stated that all children killed by the disease to date had tested positive for the intestinal virus EV-71.  As of May 13th, a total of 25,000 individuals on China’s mainland had been sickened with EV-71, with a death total of 39 from six provinces, the majority of them here in Fuyang.

EV-71 is spread from person to person by direct contact with nose and throat discharges, saliva, fluid from blisters, or the stools of infected persons. Small children are the most vulnerable to the infection.

The Sichuan earthquake

By now, everyone knows about the catastrophic earthquake that has shattered Wenchuan and the surrounding area in Sichuan Province. We have had several emails from friends and family inquiring as to our well-being, and we are entirely safe and well. Sichuan Province is in western China; Anhui Province, where we live, is in the East. We are roughly 750 miles from the epicenter of the quake. There was no damage from the earthquake in Fuyang, but it was felt here. Many people reported feeling the tremor, and Fuyang was mentioned in some international press reports because the chandeliers in the Buckingham Palace Hotel downtown were seen swaying as a result of the earthquake. I had just concluded a noontime English conversation group and was alone in the classroom at the time of the quake. I was not aware of the building shaking, but did feel a momentary dizziness which I think must have been a physical reaction to some slight movement of the building. A few minutes later students came rushing in for our 3:00 class asking if I’d felt the earthquake.

While we were not directly affected by the earthquake here, most of our Amity teaching colleagues are farther west and closer to the quake’s epicenter. Our friend Connie Wieck, a long-term Amity teacher, is on leave this year and studying Chinese language in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. Connie is safe and well, as is her apartment building.

Two other Amity teachers, Tomas and Rachel Stenback, were at Longnan Teachers College in Chengxian, Gansu Province. The earthquake did severe damage to many buildings at their college, including dormitories and apartment buildings. After the earthquake, the Stenbacks spent the night outdoors on a soccer field, along with all the students, teachers, and other people living on campus. Rachel described their hurried escape from their fourth floor apartment with the building shaking violently and building materials falling on them as they ran down the stairwell. The damage was so extensive at their school that the remainder of the semester has been canceled and foreign teachers have been sent home early.

The toll from the earthquake is grim: more than 60,000 confirmed dead as of this writing, with the death toll expected to reach or exceed 80,000; hundreds of thousands injured; more than 25,000 still missing; and five million or more people left homeless. Our students are well informed about the earthquake and its effects on the people of Sichuan and western China. Students have been donating money and collecting clothing, blankets, and other urgently needed items. There have been candlelight vigils led by students and observance of a period of silence in memory of those who died in the earthquake.

The Chinese government has received generally favorable press for its response to the earthquake. Premier Wen Jiabao, in particular, has made earthquake relief his personal mission, touring damaged cities, comforting victims, and directing the relief effort. He played a similar highly visible and personal role in the government’s response to the unusually severe winter weather in south China in February.

There is a rumbling groundswell of hostility and unrest, however, with regard to the deaths of so many children in school buildings that collapsed. In several cities in the earthquake zone, school buildings collapsed while other buildings sustained little or no damage. The response of grieving parents is that it wasn’t the earthquake that killed their children; it was shoddy construction. Preliminary inspections of some collapsed school buildings have shown that there was little or no steel reinforcement in the concrete structures. Tales of corruption and kickbacks among local officials are commonplace, and some local or provincial officials will likely be identified and penalized for corners that were cut on school construction.

Our sponsoring organization in China is the Amity Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) established by Chinese Christians more than twenty years ago. The teaching of English is only a small part of Amity’s work in China, and they are actively involved in the relief effort for victims of the earthquake. Amity representatives have been on-site in Sichuan since shortly after the earthquake occurred. We are happy and proud to be affiliated with the Amity Foundation and to support their contributions to the relief effort.

If you wish to contribute to the relief of victims of the earthquake in China, you can support Amity’s work through their American partner organization, Church World Service.
  
A parting thought

The Olympic torch relay was getting prominent treatment in the news in China and around the world until the earthquake became the compelling headline and news event. For now, at least, although the torch relay has resumed after a brief suspension due to the earthquake, it is off the front page. The protests by supporters of Tibet have been quieted in light of the catastrophic effects of the Sichuan earthquake, though they will likely resume as the opening of the Games draws closer.

The students we know here are patriotic and love their country. They trust their government implicitly. They don’t think, “my country, right or wrong.” It truly has not occurred to many of them that their country could be wrong. They show little comprehension of the Tibetans’ grievances and readily accept the government’s portrayal of the Dalai Lama as a terrorist intent on dividing the country and destroying China’s Olympic Games. I wish I could leave them with some appreciation of the inherent value of questioning authority, even if only in the most private of conversations. We were brought here to teach English, not politics or social reform, and that’s what we’ve done.  Still, having kicked against the traces for all these years, this willing and unquestioning acceptance of the party line is baffling to me, whether among the Chinese or in the United States.

Going home

Our last week of regular classes ends on June 20, with our final exams ending on June 27. We plan to make one last quick trip to the Longman Caves in Henan Province, site of some 100,000 carvings of Buddha and his disciples, then return to Fuyang to pack the last of our stuff and say our last farewells to students and friends here. We’ll leave Fuyang on July 10 or 11 for a short stay in Shanghai, then catch our flight to the United States on July 14th.

We’ve had a tremendous experience in China, and now we’re looking forward to being back with our family. Our most sincere thanks to the Amity Foundation, Church World Service, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for their support during these last three years. You can find out more about the Amity Foundation and their work on their Web site. The Web site for Church World Services has much helpful information. There is more information about our work and life in China on our home page on the Mission Connections page of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Take a Presbyterian to lunch.

Shalom y’all,

Don and Kate Lindsay

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 99