Nov Traffic, buses

Traffic is pretty terrible in China. And by “pretty terrible” I mean “highest per capita death rate for auto accidents”. But here’s what  I hate, and it’s not the traffic, or the danger therein.

 I hate getting on and off buses.

 I don’t hate taking buses. I don’t even really hate the pushing and non-queuing (much as I love a good queu).

 I hate,  hate, that everyone tries to exit and enter at the exact same time. No waiting for people to get off, before you try to cram your way on. Or not yourself, but maybe shoving your kid on the bus before anyone can get off. And of course, standing in front of the door, and never moving an inch, no matter how many people re getting on or off. The back of tje bus is frequently empty, while the front, near the door, is jam packed. Arrrrg.

Elevators and trains are much the same.
Traffic, and worse, getting on or off a bus.

Nov 15 Itching for wanderlust, as per usual

Making plans for Spring festival, which is the Chinese New Year, which is in February. Spring? I don’t know. The “mid-autumn” fest was in early September, which some people like to call “late summer”.

Alyssa might come to visit, which would be totally, completely awesome and I am super excited. We’re looking to go to Sichuan for spicy food, amazing tea, pandas, and Jiuzhaiguo, a spectacular scenic park. Then on to Xian for the obligatory Terracotta Warriors for a day. Then, of course, Beijing, for Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and the Great Wall. Alyssa wants to squeeze a trip in to Yangshuo as well; it all depends on how much time we have.

There’s still a short list of places that aren’t too far that I’d like to go on a weekend: Shenzen, Hong Kong (I don’t really want to go to HK, but I feel I should), Xiamen, and maybe some others. We also have a week in May, when I’d love to go to Mongolia. And in summer, maybe spend some time traveling Southeast Asia before going back to the States.

Too exciting to think about.

Nov 16 Gay censorship

Yep, sure enough, the students voted to debate gay marriage. I was doing some research on line and came across some interesting stuff. Here’s something particularly interesting:

This article was published on a website about GLBT life in Beijing: http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=6e81ad04d8330315bc84d1befc65d002
and here’s the exact same article plagiarized and censored by China Daily: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-06/23/content_453867.htm

Neat! Thanks, internet.

Nov 12 Developing

So at the beginning of the semester I was asked to put together a formal debate for the Year 10 students. This would be their English language activity fort the school Open Day which is a Very Big Deal to the school. It took a lot of typical Chinese miscommunication and all, but we put together a list of ten students from the best class and ten students from the all the other classes together and have started organizing the teams and preparing the topic.

The students have had two meetings and it seems pretty certain that they are going to choose gay marriage as their topic. Yep. Gay marriage. That should be interesting. I’m excited.

I am however freaking out a little to see that in the freshly-printed guidebook to the Open Day (Dec 8!) my name is listed as “Lecturer” for the Year 10 activity. Yikes.

In other news, this weekend, I finally got my glasses from UPS and not-from-UPS I got a very painful ear infection. Then I got lots of free medicine (ibuprofen, antibiotics, and ear drops) to take care of it. I’m feeling better and looking nerdier.

Nov 8 Language

Everyone I love loves language.

I live in a foreign language now and when I want to, I can feel like I don’t exist. It’s like becoming Ishi. It’s a startlingly physical reminder that you exist according to society, and society exists according to language. It’s fascinating. I wonder how long one could survive in a country with more than one billion people if one were totally verbal-linguistically isolated and illiterate.

Feeling kind of crazy.

Nov 5 New roommate and a trip to Portuguesa-Chine

There is a thing about people who went to my college, which is that we all generally assume that we’ll get along, or should at least try. Thus, when I learned recently that Annie, a fellow alum, was moving to Guangzhou, I went ahead and emailed her. We’d never met and she didn’t know me at all, though I’ve read her blog off-and-on for some time. We emailed back and forth, and she arrived in Guangzhou at the end of October. Ta-da, I have a new roommate. She’s been living with me for the past week and a half, and, as it turns out, decided to work at the same school I work at. When she moves, it will just be a matter of dragging stuff up a few flights of stairs.

Similarly, there are two alums living in Macau. Lindsey and I have hung out with Nissa a few times, and I vaguely know Becky. Despite these tenuous connections, of course we stayed with them Saturday night. And of course we had an awesome time.

Macau as a whole was very pleasant, even more so than I anticipated. Macau is a tiny peninsula and two islands (Taipa and Coloane) jutting off China into the South China Sea. It’s a former Portuguese colony and is most well-known today for outgrossing Las Vegas in gambling revenue. I worried that the casinos would be sort of relentless, and the neon glitz would overrun the Portuguese buildings and the European-Chinese gardens.

Not so. We spent an entire day (hours and hours) walking from the north end of the peninsula to the south end. We ate street food and took in a great Buddhist temple and rambled over a very curvy bridge through very lovely gardens. We saw a small exhibit of artistic teaware and Chinese-style watercolors of Lisbon. We went to the old cemetery and the ruins of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, including a vertigo-inducing climb up the back of the faÁade, and a collection of Japanese Catholic sacred art. The Asian-Portuguese syncretism was endlessly fascinating to me. Lots of Macau is very ugly (they have particularly offensive apartment buildings crammed in everywhere), but so much of it is interesting. Also, approximately 50% of businesses in Macau seem to be bakeries, groceries, food stalls, or small diner-type places, which is no drawback for me. I think I ate four or five buns and tarts on Saturday.

We got to the southern tip of the peninsula too late to see A-Ma Temple (Goddess of the Sea; “Macau” derives from “A-Ma Gao”, or “Bay of A-Ma”), but it was perfectly decent to loiter in a square, watching kids play soccer (and playing with one particularly adventurous six year old). We walked east and the casinos and hotels lit up before us, reflecting in the water. A joy of tacky aestheticism.

We crossed to Taipa and met up with Nissa and Becky for food and drink. Real beer! In a tavern! Conversation! Grinnellians! Some really fantastic and hilarious conversation with them. In the morning, we ate at a little Portuguese restaurant, and I think the next time I come to Macau I must make time for a proper Sunday morning: coffee and a newspaper on the sidewalk outside one of the cafÈs near the square. We also bought a few things that are cheaper or easier to find in Macau to take back with us to China (spices, good chocolate, better-than-Chinese wine).

Crossing back over the border was also fine. We ate at the Chinese equivalent of a truck stop, and I loved it. We bought exceptionally cheap DVDs out of a closet. Excitingly, we discovered that we now know enough Chinese to negotiate a bus schedule and buy tickets. Things like that are good reminders that as much as I don’t know, I’m getting a lot a better.

Nov 1 Halloween

I went to my school’s Halloween program yesterday. I was dead exhausted all day because I didn’t sleep much Tuesday night, and instead of taking a nap I did laundry and cleaned the apartment.

The opening number was a lovely zombies-dance-to-Thriller ensemble. Fantastic. There were songs and skits in Chinese and English, most of which were pretty uninteresting as these things go. The dance routines were all more interesting than the songs. The kids were really happy though. My Year 10 students, in black and white costumes with black umbrellas, dance very stylishly to some French chanson-type song.

At the end of the show, a student invited me to the “Spooky Hallway” on the fourth floor, where we waited a long time, chatted with other students, and then finally, entered the hallway of doom. people jumping out of lockers, scary masks hanging from ceilings, dark rooms, a blood-splattered bathroom… you get the idea. One of the students held my hand the whole time. There’s slightly less personal space her in China

When I explained to my students that it’s rare in America for students to hold hands with each other, they looked a little confused. It means they’re dating, to hold hands and hug each other a lot, I said. No, no, they protested, even girls together and boys together? It means they’re dating, I repeated. Here, it’s not unusual for my students if boys sit in each other’s laps or pet each other on the head and for the girls to walk hand-in-hand and lean on each other and so on.

English activity

Around the beginning of the term, I got asked/told to be in charge of the Year 10 activity for the school’s English Activity Day. It’s taken a while to sort out what this entails, when it will be held, etc. But last night we had our first meeting (as in, Monday morning Nelson said, “Rachel, we need to have our first meeting. It will be tonight at 7:30. Can you get all the students together?”)

Year 10 is going to have a debate: ten students from class 5 (the top class) will debate ten students taken from the other seven classes. The meeting went pretty well, given that it was last minute, only 25 minutes long, and half my students still aren’t really sure what “having a debate” even means. We need to decide on a debate topic by Thursday though. Ideas tossed around at the meeting include how much should we sacrifice the environment for economic gain? Should China continue to pursue hydroelectric power? (I really like that one.) Nelson tossed out the question of whether, as a Chinese school, BGY is too Westernized. The kids panned that pretty quickly as a really lame idea. Class 5 is really on about doing something social, and really want to talk about whether we should respect gay people. That was a surprising topic to come up. We’ll see if it pans out though, as several other students are decidedly uncomfortable talking about gay things.

It all went well until the very end when Nelson, bless his little Chinese teacher instinct, stood up and announced to the class, “I just want you all to realize how important this activity is. December 8th is the activity fair, and your debate will be at 1:30, the most important part of the day. It is when the most people will be there, and your debate will be in the school theater, the biggest room in the school. Visitors, international guests, principals, your teachers, your parents, and classmates will all be in the audience. Thank you.”

I had a mini-meeting with five students after this to assure them that this was not that big of a deal, that they would all do really well, that nothing bad would happen, that there would not be thousands of people watching, that everything would be okay. So silly.

Interestingly, lots of the Western teachers have commented on the sort of farcical nature of these “English activity days”, with highly contrived speeches, and performances, and so on, all designed to show off how well our students speak English, even if they’ve just memorized a speech half-written by someone else. Selina, probably my best student, voiced exactly the same complaint, regarding Nelson’s it-is-very-important-you-do-well-in-front-guests speech, saying, “I always feel like I’m an advertisement for this school.”

The state, the money, and the life.

I moved to China without knowing very much about it at all. Most people develop an interest in a place, and then decide to go there. I’ve done it the other way round. Being in a state of near total ignorance about a place means that everything everywhere is a new piece of information.

It’s especially helpful to be around Chinese fifteen-year-olds all day, because teenagers are at the most exciting age of intense negotiation between their Self and Others. As they define themselves, they define the China around them and I get to see how they conceptualize the wider world. Very often, in the weird wonderful ways things coincide, my students provide microcosms of insight into larger situations.

For instance, I’m having all of my students give speeches to the class. Nothing long, just six or seven sentences to see how well they can speak in front of a group. Some of the speeches are about wh dogs make good pets. Some are more interesting. (I really loved one girl’s speech about why she loves Hello Kitty: “I like her small eyes and like her big ears. I hope everyone loves Hello Kitty even though she hasn’t a mouth.”).

A couple of the speeches recently have touched on the ambivalence of China’s growing wealth. It’s an especially germane topic considering the recent close of the 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress (see here for a decent article summarizing the economic considerations). There is no doubt anywhere that the pace of growth over the past three decades has been astounding, and little doubt that the current rate is untenable.

All of my students are very wealthy. Their parents own companies and businesses around the PRD (Pearl River Delta), which is either the richest area of China, or the second-richest, depending on whether you ask someone from the PRD or someone from Shanghai (the other richest area). I’ve heard, though can’t find the source for this, that five percent of all manufactured goods in the world are made in the PRD.

So it’s interesting to hear one student tell the class that rich people are not happy. He explained that it is important to work hard to be happy, but that working hard to be rich won’t make you happy. Incidentally, the Chinese seem to have a thing for “we must be happy”; they have less concern for “we must create conditions conducive to happiness”.

Another student talked about the detrimental effects of modernization on her town. She lives near Shunde, and the factories around her town mean that people can afford cars, better apartments, and to send their kids to expensive schools. It also means the sky is rarely blue and “flowers are eliminated, because the village needs room for more buildings.” She misses her town.

Economically, Shunde has lots of aquaculture and flower production, but it’s an absolute giant when it comes to household appliances. From here north to Guangzhou or south to Shenzhen, factories and warehouses and shipping centers stretch out beteen towns. Shunde is home to Galanz, the most valuable brand in China and the largest producer of microwaves in the world, Midea, the largest produce of electric fans in China, Rongsheng, the largest producer of refrigerators in China and more. I don’t know the name of the company, but the largest bicycle production base in the world is also here.

Like so much else in the Chinese economy, poor environment affects small towns and the poor much more. After all, my student might see fewer flowers at home, but her parents pay to send her to a school where a team of gardeners clip the trees into Dr Seuss shapes and tend plants set in pleasing patterns. The people who pave the roads and build the houses in her town cannot think to send their children here. Even in private estates, though, it’s true that the sky rarely is blue.

Alas, none of my students express this sentiment as hilariously adorably as Lindsey’s 10 year old students:
in the middle of a lesson conjugating the past tense of “to be”
Simon: Miss O! I think the money is very important!
Lindsey: Oh… you do? Why do you think that?
Simon: I like the US dollar and the HK dollar and the RMB! You can have many thing.
Lindsey: What else do you like?
Simon: My father, my mother, my grandfather. 
Lindsey: Which is better, your mom or money?
Simon: My mother!
Serena (urgently raising her hand): Miss O, Miss O!
Lindsey: Yes…?
Serena: I think the…. life is important!
Lindsey: I agree.

Photo work?

So, testing out the photo things again. Sorry this is wonky, I don’t have as much time as I would like to really tinker around with things here and figure out how they work. So it’s all rather patchwork. At least I know how to do the easy stuff (like update!).

I’m using photobucket as my image hosting, which I don’t really like, but I’ve already gone to the trouble of adding lots of photos.

Here are links to photobucket photo albums:
Here’s an album of photos showing what my apartment is like.

Here’s an album of random stuff from around Guangzhou.

Here’s an album of photos from the trip to Yangshuo.

Here’s a link to my whole photobucket site