In China, the debate continues…

In the new building, we have much nicer bathroom facilities than in the old building. As in, there’s actually ventilation and more than two stalls per floor. (We even have a few Western toilets now, which quite surprised me.) The signs for the bathrooms are an attempt at bilingualism: below the Chinese characters is written “Toliet”.

I told this to Lindsey and she pointed out that it now rhymes with the word “Joliet”, a city outside Chicago. But the problem with Joliet is the debate over how it’s pronounced: “jolly-et” or “joe-lee-et”.

Tolly-et or toe-lee-et? Hmmm.

Indirect speech

The Year 10 English teachers (4 Chinese and 3 Western), had a meeting to go over a report drawn up by an outside consultant. The consultant tested a sampling of students in all eight classes of Year 10. The results were, by and large, not surprising.

There were two or three points in the report that were important:
1 Students across all proficiency levels make similar grammar mistakes, the most frequent of which are problems with past vs. present tense and subject-verb agreement.
2 Vocabulary use is much lower than expected, given how much time is spent on vocabulary in the classroom
3 Students perform very well on highly controlled tasks, like multiple choice, but their scores plummet when asked to do something less controlled and more productive (e.g., write complete sentences on their own). The Western teachers find this to be an alarming problem. It seems to be less of a concern for the Chinese teachers.

The first matter was dealt with fairly quickly. I have little opportunity to work with my students on grammar, other than correct it as problems arise. Kimi, the Western writing teacher, is going to be allowed to teach more grammar in her class, which is what she’s been asking for.

The second two matters are, in the minds of the Western teachers, closely linked. I brought this point up again at the meeting: the kids have four totally separate English classes. Two are general English classes taught by Chinese teachers, two are “fluency” classes taught by Western teachers. I have no idea what they’re learning in their general English classes except that I’ve been given a copy of their textbooks. I need a better way to reinforce vocabulary they learn in those general English classes. The Westerner teachers (Listening and Speaking, Writing, and an extra fluency class for the top students) focus on production much more than the Chinese teachers.

Our students are given lists of one hundred(!!) new vocabulary words each week to memorize. Barely half of them do well on their weekly vocabulary tests. And those that do memorize the words almost never know how to use them correctly. What I’ve been asking for is to have a copy of the students’ vocab lists so that I can incorporate the words into my lessons.

The Chinese teachers thought for a second. I know, said Christina, you should think of important vocabulary words, make a list for the students each week, and you can test them on it the next week.

The Western teachers all looked at each other. I almost laughed. This is exactly the problem. They want to “grow the students vocabulary quickly”, but the data and our own classroom experience shows that the kids, if they do learn the vocabulary, can’t use it. For us, it’s not a matter of adding new words, it’s a matter of contexualizing (even my top students are dreadful at guessing the meanings of words from context) and strengthening the words they already know.

In the end, we decided that the Western teachers would have input on the weekly 100-words list. Good enough, I guess.

The meeting confirmed three things for me. One, the philosophy of testing here is very different than in the West. Here, exams and tests are not a measure of how well learning and teaching is happening; it is the entirety of learning and teaching. Two, this school is in many ways, not a real IB school. It is a Chinese school with IB classes and IB slogans. Independent inquiry, critical thinking, and real, functional language use are things that Chinese classrooms just don’t facilitate. Finally, we all know that the point of Year 10 English is to prepare the students for IELTS (an international English-language proficiency exam) so that they can get into a university off the mainland. Assuring that once they get to university, they have any idea what’s going on is not a high priority.

Angry River

My school has an annual activity called China Week during which the students spend a week working on community service projects around China. Seeing how the other half lives, basically, and remembering that most of the country’s children do not, in fact, attend private high schools and live in gated communities and wear brand new Nikes.

I had signed for a trip to go to the far western area of Yunnan, in the southwest of China. We’d be visiting a few towns up the Nu Jiang (Nu River, which the locals call the Angry River). I was excited about this for several reasons. For one thing, the service project was to work with a growing health services charity which our group leader has been involved with since its founding. It does excellent emergency work for the local Nu and Lisu people and has set up a few much-needed health clinics in the area.

Two, the Nu and Lisu people are two of the smallest ethnic minority groups in China and live in a very remote area. Anthropologists refer generally to the people of eastern Burma, northern Vietnam, northern Thailand and southwestern China as “hill tribes” of southeast Asia. They have some very interesting history. In this case, the rare thing about the Nu and Lisu is that many are Christian, due to British missionary work in the late 19th century. Even rarer, the Lisu also have a written language (in Latin characters) as a result of the missionaries. The trip involves flying to Kunming, a sleeper bus to Dali (I think), a bus to Liuku which would serve as our home base, and then a truck up into the mountains for the tiny villages. If I’m ever going to volunteer with health service and if I’m ever going to an area this remote, it would be through this trip. It would be very hard to get there on my own.

Three, it’s in western Yunnan! Way up in the mountains, rugged landscape, and deep valleys with rivers. In fact, the town we’d be staying in is the Three Parallel Rivers scenic area. The three rivers being the Nu Jiang, the Lancang, and the Jinsha. In English we call them the Salween, the Mekong and (a tributary of) the Yangtze. It’s listed by the UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that Year 10 students (my students) don’t participate in China Week. Which means that Year 10 teachers (that’s me) can’t go. Booooo, I say. Maybe I’ll be able to get there someday, and hopefully before the government puts the area underwater. That article is from almost two years ago, but the issue is still in debate. Recently, the government has been displaying more disunity over the Three Gorges Dam project, which hopefully will slow development of the Nu River.

Verb tense

Past, present, future: updates galore. WordPress and my internet connection are not friends, so there are several updates below this one of what has built up over the past few days.

This weekend:
Ate a mountain of food at a buffet, played pool with English, Irish, Colombian, American expats, found a nice little BBQ/beer garden near where I live, found a very nice supermarket near where I live, went to a Catholic church in Guangzhou, found a bookstore with English language books, and bought the most expensive ice cream in China to date (28 kuai! That’s like $3.50!).

Today:
Watch my students debate whether Chinese high school or American high school is better, watch my students fail their vocabulary tests, prep for a Year-10 English teachers meeting, try to find somewhere in the building where I can print lessons for the rest of the week (it took four days to get internet in the new building, eight days to get photocopiers, and we’re still waiting on the printer), and try to figure out where in China my package from UPS is.

This week:
Print lessons for week, grade exams, write grade reports, buy candy for winning teams, start Year 10 Debate Team, buy things to make horchata (most elusive ingredient? limes, oddly enough), figure out if there’s any way I can give a PowerPoint presentation to class, and find a photo hosting site I can use here.

Websites I miss right now:
Livejournal, Wikipedia, BBC, Blogger/Blogspot, Flickr

The surprising truth about how I make myself feel better.

Saturday October 13, 2007
Okay, after that depressing interlude, I thought I’d tell you about how I got out of my funk: I did laundry.

Laundry is great. It’s easy to do, and it’s productive, and you can do other things at the same time. If someone calls and asks, “What are you up to?” I can say “I’m doing laundry”, even if I am, in fact, watching a movie and eating a pack of marshmallows (a delightful facet of Chinese junk food: marshmallows are a legitimate candy and come with a wide variety of flavors, shapes, and fillings. I love marshmallows). And then the clean laundry gets spread all over my apartment to dry, visual proof that I am the kind of person who gets useful things done. And it makes my apartment smell better.

I used to hang the laundry on the pole that runs over my wee balcony outside, but then my clothes would smell like outside. So now I have t-shirts over my couch, pants draped across my chair and tv, towels over the door, and socks and underwear hanging from the light fixture.

In fact, this week, while doing laundry I did not sit and watch a movie. I tried, actually, but the DVD of Letters from Iwo Jima I bought is in Japanese with Chinese subtitles, despite the packaging promising me English. Instead of a cinematic exploration of the Japanese experience at Iwo Jima, then, I cleaned my apartment. My apartment is small and I don’t have very many possessions, but it took about 45 minutes to put everything away. Pretty much everything I own was in the wrong place.

Everything is back on shelves, in the wardrobe, and hanging on hooks again. I have room to walk and sit on my bed again. Tomorrow, there will still be unhappy things in my life, but I’ll have dry towels and room to sit on my couch. Where I watch movies and eat marshmallows.

Downhill

Friday October 12, 2007
My grandmother had told me to stop swearing here, so I’ll refrain from the melodrama, but it’s been a rough week.
1 My uncle Mac died while I was on my trip. It’s not a surprise, but it’s sad to hear. I’m concerned most for my mom and grandparents, but I’m sure it’s been tough for everyone.

2 My sister’s having an “unhappy with how/what my life is” moment. My older sister’s in and out of the hospital trying to figure out if the crippling pain in her lower back is a kidney infection.

3 My apartment is a complete mess. I spent the week in a rut: too tired do any productive work, or unpack properly, or put things away, or cook decent food; too many things to do and worry over to sleep enough.

4 My school canceled a day and a half of classes. For one of my classes I literally had no warning, and for two of my classes, I found out a day and a half beforehand. It’s not like they just decided to have a sports festival yesterday. They had time to notify the teachers. In the abstract, this angers the Western teachers because of the lack of respect for our time; on a more concrete, this puts two of my classes a whole week behind the other six classes. Ughhhh.

5 My girlfriend’s birthday was Wednesday and I tried really hard to make it nice. But we were both tired and she’s been sick this week, and I’ve been cranky. We went out to an Indian restaurant and then we hung out and then we had an almost-fight. Not an angry yelling kind, but a long emotional kind.

6 My wallet and phone were stolen in Yangshuo. This didn’t bother me at the time, but since I’m having a bad week, I’m adding it the list. Plus, it ended up causing me the most painfully long experience with an inept bank teller that I have ever encountered.

7 The internet in my apartment isn’t working. Occasionally it will work for a bit, but not regularly. I still can’t access my email in the apartment. At work, internet used to be great. But after the holiday, we moved to a new building. In the new building, we only have wireless. My office doesn’t have access yet. In the offices where there is access, I can’t get it to work. My computer says it’s connected to the wireless network, but I can’t get any information from the server. I go crazy without the internet.

The grilled cheese phenomenon.

Thursday October 11, 2007
On RAGBRAI, we have a saying: If you’re not having fun, lower your expectations. In China, I’m calling it the grilled cheese phenomenon.

After I’d been here a few weeks the school gave me a small part of my relocation/airfare money. To celebrate, I bought butter. Butter is 20RMB at my market, which is only about $2.50, but for a grocery item it’s pretty expensive. I used it to cook myself eggs, potatoes and toast. If I had black pepper, it would have been perfect.

That same weekend Lindsey came over and I decided to make grilled-“cheese” sandwiches. The only cheese available in my market is tiny packages of what I assume is cream cheese, and individually-wrapped processed American cheese slices. It is even more expensive than butter. Additionally, all bread in China is slightly sweet (maybe unless you find a proper Western bakery), even the wheat sandwich bread I buy. On top of that, I only have a wok on a hotplate, so I had to be really vigilant about not letting the sandwiches burn, although they still cooked too quickly to allow the cheese to melt. So I microwaved them a few seconds to melt the cheese.

We ate our almost-burned, slightly soggy, slightly sweet, fake cheesy grilled-cheese sandwiches while sitting on the couch, eating off plates on my folding chair (I don’t have a table).

And it was one of the best grilled-cheese sandwiches I’ve ever had. Also the worst, but delicious.

Coffee, pizza, margaritas, tortilla chips, Jim Carrey movies… the bar isn’t set high. Though I think Chinese waitresses must be confused why foreigners keep ordering coffee, since we all grimace at the first sip.

Yesterday the grilled cheese phenomenon happened when my lone American student gave her speech to the class. It wasn’t a good speech, but! Naturally spoken English! Dramatic emphasis! Pauses between sentences! Like music.

I’m already anticipating the reverse culture shock: searching Chinese restaurants for scallion pancakes, actually attempting to make good tea, scouring Asian groceries for red bean and soy bean ice cream bars, finding strange comfort in absurd game shows and operatic Chinese melodramas on TV.

As seen on RMB.

October 1 is National Day, commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Everyone gets at least one to three days off. I, and anyone else with a decent job, got a full seven days off. Generally speaking, it’s a pain traveling around China with the billion other people traveling as well. So, first the bad, so we can get on with the interesting. We got into Yangshuo at 4:30 am, which meant we negotiated our room and tour on way too little sleep with an aggressive hostel proprietor. We actually did really well on our room price, especially considering prices routinely double or more during national holiday weeks (i.e., Golden Weeks). It was all probably a wash though, as we agreed to unnecessary things that we overpaid for on our activities bookings. The second thing is David lost his Grinnell swimming hat on our trip to Longsheng. I still miss my Grinnell cricket hat that I lost in London, so I know that’s pretty sad. I also had my wallet and mobile phone stolen from my bag when I fell asleep on a minibus. This isn’t the end of the world, but it is super annoying and puts me out probably 700-800 RMB (about 100 USD). Finally, on the last day, we went out on a bike ride, which I had really been looking forward to. Unfortunately, as soon as we got onto moderately rough roads, one of the bikes proved to not have a functioning derailleur. In case I ever needed proof, I now know that riding a bike with no derailleur and no seat (it was way too low for me to sit on and I couldn’t adjust it) in the very hottest part of the day will make me overheated and pretty cranky.

But! On to the many better things… Lindsey, David, and I got ourselves onto the overnight bus to Yangshuo, in neighboring Guangxi Province, at 8:30pm Tuesday night. We around 4:30 in the morning, spent an hour negotiating prices at a hostel right off Xi Jie (the main road) and were immediately on our way to a boat tour of the YuLong River. The scenery was fantastic, and the area is heavily touristed, which means unending opportunities to pose with (and pay ) local boaters with their cormorant birds and water buffalo. We were delighted to learn that the Chinese call water buffalo the same thing as we do—shui nu (water cow). Lindsey will now not stop calling me her shui nu. Shway new!

The stunning backdrop to all this local commercialism are spectacular limestone karst peaks (pictured on the back of the 20 yuan bill!). We chilled and strolled in the town of Xing Ping, and ate some street food. Deep fried taro cakes are like delicious hashbrowns. Delicious hashbrowns on a stick. David wanted to try to take a more leisurely bamboo raft ride, which he loved the last time he was there, but we clearly were on the wrong part of the river for that.

Back in Yangshuo we slept and ate and cleaned up a bit. At dark, we took a boat to see the cormorant fishing. I was skeptical, but it was actually pretty neat. It was a lovely night, and yeah it’s a little staged, but it’s still cool. The fishermen take the cormorants out by lamplight, and push along on a raft while the birds swim and catch fish. Some of the birds’ necks are tied so the fish can’t be completely swallowed. Then the fishermen scoop up the birds, and empty the fish into a basket. The birds are as beautiful in the water as they are awkward on land, like penguins. Lindsey and David took the opportunity to pose with a bird on their arm. I’m scared of birds, so I didn’t.

We walked Xi Jie and I marveled at 1) the sheer amount of stuff for sale, 2) the masses of tourists, 3) the quantity of white people, and 4) the quality of English spoken by the shopkeepers. Yangshuo has made itself into a major tourist destination for Chinese tourists and a backpacker/tourist mecca for foreigners. Reasonably priced beer (and unreasonably priced beer), pizza, milkshakes, English-menus, pancakes, and money-making abound, in what is generally a starting or ending point for a trekking jaunt across the southwest of China.

The second day was the best day of the trip for me. We took a bus to the area around the town of Longsheng, known as Long Ji Ti Tian (Dragon’s Backbone Terraced Rice Fields). We ended up walking around and above a small village called Ping An. Again, it was crowded because it was a holiday week, but it was beautiful. As far as the eye can see, terraced rice fields ripple down the folds of the mountains. Guangxi is an autonomous ethnic region in China, and the Zhuang people built and maintain the rice terracing. The Zhuang, Dong, Miao, and Yao people all live in the Long Ji area and ethnic tourism has recently taken off. Around every bend Yao women shout “hello” and try to get you to buy bracelets and postcards. Yao women wear black clothing embroidered with bright pink designs, and also have extremely long hair, which they will demonstrate how they brush and style for a price. The Zhuang women I saw seemed to be less interested in selling trinkets—perhaps because they own more in the area? The women are distinctive for their black pants with embroidered hems and colorful turbans (which are often modern printed bath towels, I noticed). We stopped at a teahouse on the way down the mountain and drank some very tasty Long Ji Cha (dragon flower tea), admired perhaps the best view of the trip, and read an article in China Daily about tourism in Long Ji. Since 1999 tour revenue has gone from something like $31,000 USD/year to $1.45 million USD/year. That. Is. Insanity. It also explained why the fields didn’t look wet enough to be rice fields—more water is being diverted for tourism purposes so the fields aren’t kept flooded. This whole trip was a fascinating exploration into tourism. I think there was a class offered at Grinnell about tourism? I wish I had taken it.

We slept in a bit on Friday. Lindsey and I went out in the morning and had a look at Yangshuo while it was a little quieter. We ate a standard Yangshuo (i.e., not Chinese) breakfast—bread, coffee, yogurt smoothie, scrambled eggs (usual Chinese breakfast: rice, hardboiled egg, broccoli, corn; maybe dumplings, buns, chicken if you’re being fancy). In the middle of the day we went out on our bikes. Except for the part that sucked (as mentioned at the beginning), I enjoyed it. We took a quick walk through a small Buddhist temple, biked by the famous Moon Hill, and ended up at the lovely Yangshuo Mountain Retreat.

David is working on the consummate expat experience: entrepreneurship. Check out the link in my blogroll for the Blog of Dreams, a joint project he and Lonnie, an American professor friend, are working on. David took tons of photos for the blog during the trip, and interviewed some friends of his who are involved with the Mountain Retreat. It’s absolutely lovely, far calmer than most of Yangshuo and right on the smaller, quieter Li River. Unfortunately, I was too tired and hot to do much socializing, and spent the time trying Yangshuo style fried rice, consuming four different kinds of liquid and sitting on a bamboo chair watching rafts float by.

We took one last stroll along Xi Jie. Shops in most of China ask for higher-than-reasonable prices when you ask how much something costs. This reaches comedic proportions in Yangshuo. David was told a t-shirt was 100 RMB. Lindsey wanted a tablecloth; the shopkeeper said 400 RMB. I helped her bargain it down to 175. The upside to this is that you don’t casually acquire stuff you don’t need, since you have to be in the mood to work for it. There was a chess set I was moderately interested in, and would have picked it up for about 120 RMB. The woman started with 320. I could probably have worked it down to 160, but I just didn’t care that much.

Somehow, Lindsey and I couldn’t sleep at all on the way back, despite being on a sleeper bus— objectively more comfortable than the bus we took to Yangshuo. It also took longer, and we got to Guangzhou about 6:00am (which is good. If we had gotten there earlier, the metro wouldn’t be running yet). An exhausting but fun trip, and definitely a much-needed vacation from school.

I am, of course, full of plans for about twenty other potential trips around China. We’ll see how many I can squeeze in

Ups in China

Sept 30, 2007So my parents sent me a package via UPS, which was pretty exciting for me, as the package contains my new eyeglasses. Yay, vision.

Two and a half weeks ago or so, my dad sent me an email with a message from UPS: the package was in a warehouse in Beijing, where it was being helds on the grounds that it lacked release by power of attorney. I called the customer service hotline and talked with a woman who told me it was in Beijing because it had a Beijing postcode instead of a Foshan postcode. I took this as Chinese for “I don’t why your package got to sent to Beijing and we don’t know where it is right now.” She took my email address and said she would send me some paperwork. I took this as Chinese for “I’m supposed to tell you something.”

I didn’t get any emails, which didn’t much surprise me. I kept meaning to call back to harass them about this more, but a week passed and I just couldn’t get the motivation up. A voice in the back of my head, the voice that justifies my being lazy, reasoned that doing nothing would probably be about as productive as trying to do something.

This morning scores a victory for the voice that advises me to be lazy. The package is currently in the Gunagzhou airport. UPS called the Foreign Affairs office, had me fax a signed copy of my passport this morning, and I’ll pay a 50 kuai tax when it arrives.

Assuming it does arrive.

Our only question in the end is, do the Chinese also associate the moon with madness?

This post has been waiting a fwe days because sometimes I just can’t access WordPress. It makes me antsy.

students get snack time twice a day. Yesterday they had some sort of green fruit that smelled very citrusy. In class eight, one of my favorite classes, Cindy gave me one.

“What is it?”

“Orange. “

“Then why is it green?”

She consulted with Mandy in Chinese for a moment, then told me, “Chinese orange.”

It was super tasty. They made faces and told me it was “not sweet”. I taught them the word “sour”. I think it was sweet enough; it wasn’t bitter like most oranges, which I don’t like.

As I was leaving school on Tuesday, my class eight students surrounded me, yelling “Hallo teacher!!” They are by far my loudest class. Yuly turned around and stumbled her way through saying “Happy Mid-Autumn Festival”, which caused everyone to break out into laughter.

“Thank you! Happy Moon Festival to you. Will you eat mooncakes?”

“Yeeeessssss!!!!” they chorused.

“Are they good?”

“Noooooo!!”

That evening I went to Panyu to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival with Lindsey. As we must do on festival days, we had a big dinner: potatoes in vinegar, tofu in spicy sauce, green onion pancakes (with which I’m quickly becoming obsessed), and beer.

We walked around the fair area, where there were lots of vendors selling toys and food and tea. Anything neon, blinking, glowing, and noisy, or preferably all of those, were a big hit. Children walked around with paper lanterns with candles burning inside. China does a lot to mess with your ideas about safety standards. We also watched part of a dance show—some traditional dance, some Britney Spears.

Another traditional thing to do during Mid-Autumn Fest is answer riddles. There were areas set up with riddles hung on banners. Whoever yelled out the answer won a prize. You could also win prizes in the carnival area. The fullness of the moon should remind you of reuniting with the fullness of your family, so most things are very family/kid-oriented. We watched children win prizes by moving as many ping-pong balls as possible with a pair of chopsticks and playing Chinese piñata (hit a drum and a gong while blindfolded).

We ate our mooncakes in Lindsey’s apartment. Well, we only ate one. They are much too dense to eat very much. They were the Cantonese kind with preserved egg as a filling. Alas, the kind we had was more square than round like the moon, but we ate it anyway, The pastry shell is delicious, sweet and buttery. It’s incredibly dense and heavy. The filling is indescribable—like very smooth peanut butter, or Vaseline, in texture and appearance. It tastes vaguely sweet and nutty, maybe like almond. But the yolk in the middle is a bit salty, and definitely more egg-tasting. Lindsey says northern mooncakes are more likely to have meat fillings; ew. I would like to try the Taiwanese mooncakes, which apparently usually have fruit and cream inside. Lindsey tried Hong Kong mooncakes in her Chinese class. She said they were very good.

Here is Tai Shan, our baby panda, eating some of our mooncake.