An American in Chengdu
Shining English
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In high school I was a Lincoln-Douglas debater, and spent many Saturdays in various Colorado high schools arguing about the individual versus the collective, feminism, individual rights versus state stability, censorship–all topics about which no one really needs to hear a high schooler’s opinion. Accordingly, usually the only other people in the room when I debated were my opponent and the judge, though final rounds might garner more of an audience. The drama and comedy events would draw spectators, but only teammates who’d already committed to spending Saturday in the high school. Even our parents wouldn’t think to show up unless we made it to a big tournament like State or National Qualifying.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I first agreed to help judge a “Shining English” speaking competition a few months ago for the campus English club, and found it was designed to be entertaining. Held in a large room full of uncoerced spectators, it was set up like a TV show, complete with smartly-dressed MCs (one male, one female), visual effects (projected onto a screen on the side of the stage), and decorations.
On Friday I judged my second Shining English event, this one a drama competition. It started out with dramatic music and some scripted conversation between the MCs (“Vivian, have you seen the movie Avatar?” “Why yes, I have” “Do you remember when X character says to Y character, ‘you’re not in Kansas anymore’?”), then quickly segued into a play by the first of the eight teams, a sort of CliffsNotes version of the Wizard of Oz. In all eight plays the performers lip-synced along with dialogue tracks they’d pre-recorded, which I thought must increase the level of difficulty significantly. Most included impressive costuming and at least one dance number. Some threw in fake commercial breaks for laughs. All this in about 10 minutes each.
In my favorite play (which took second place), James Bond moonwalked onto the stage where the evil queen was consulting her talking mirror, and agreed to assassinate Snow White. However, when he showed up at her door disguised as a deliveryman and bearing poisoned Haagen Daas, Snow White insisted that he try some too. Then Bond returned for a quick interlude with his wife like Patrick Swayze in Ghost (complete with a few bars of Unchained Melody) before he was whisked off to the afterlife to join a game of poker. Then the whole cast joined in a dance number set to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.”
Shoes
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Here’s an email I received today. Although I already have plans for Sunday, the email enlivened my workday with the questions it raised: Who thought up this idea? A clever marketing professional at the shoe factory? A local government official listening to a big-footed foreigner complain about his shopping travails? Speaking of big-footed foreigners, why am I one of only four recipients of this email?
Dear Teacher,
Here comes an invitation from foreign affair office of Sichuan Province.
There is an activity visiting the shoes city on March 28（this weekend）. It will show you many beautiful shoes and the process of making shoes, if you like one of them, you can book one and give your size to them, the workers in shoes factory will make one for you.
If you are interested in visiting the shoes city, please reply before 12：00AM of March 26 （tomorrow noon）.Best wishes
[an employee in the foreign affairs office of my university]
Year of the Tiger
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Chinese New Year (known here as Spring Festival) is in two weeks, and I’m starting to get the idea that it’s kind of a big deal. This is when universities take their between-semesters break, and the powers that be have declared that the foreign teachers should get the entire month of February off. Tonight, as my final official duty before my vacation begins, I went to the school’s holiday party for teachers.
About a dozen of us had gathered on Thursday to coordinate a performance of a song; I was told I’d be handed the mic for a four-line verse, “since you are a foreigner.” This afternoon I practiced the lines, and when I sang them for Samantha just before the dinner started she declared my performance satisfactory. There was probably no connection, but she spoke much more Chinese to me this evening than usual, and assured the nurse sitting on the other side of me that “she can speak some Chinese.”
I needn’t have worried too much about giving a perfect performance; the sound system was bad, and most of the groups even less practiced than ours. In one group the men were dressed in silk jackets and the women in cute red suits with white trim that made them look like Santa’s Chinese helpers. Their singing was no less terrible than the rest of ours, however. In addition to the songs, there was a skit with a nurse and three slovenly patients, of which I understood nothing. The best performance was by four 20-somethings who danced to an R&B song.
The performance quality was really beside the point, though: the important thing for a Spring Festival celebration is that it be renao (“bustling with noise and excitement,” according to one translation). To this end there were gifts (one dispensed to each of us when we came in, others distributed by a raffle, and still others by performers after each song), toasts (someone would come by our table about twice a minute for this purpose, and we’d all stand up and touch glasses), exploding tubes of confetti, and, of course, the performances. There was much merriment and little conversation.
After about an hour and a half the room was suddenly half-empty. This, it seems, is how Chinese banquets normally end: early, and with few goodbyes. I walked home with my loot: fabric stool that can also be used to store things, a lucky red envelope with some token cash, a set of ceramic bowls with plastic lids for storage, and a large tin of mango-flavored candy. I’d also gained an intangible grasp of this concept of renao.
So happy new year, everyone! I probably won’t be blogging while traveling, but I’ll try to do the trips some justice when I get back. Here’s the plan:
Feb. 1-10: South to Kunming and Xishuangbanna with Cecilia
Feb. 12-18: Deano visits Chengdu; we see the local sites, including those long-snubbed pandas
Feb. 19-28: Malaysian Borneo with Deano, plus a few days in Kuala Lampur.
Furniture
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The move to the new office reminded me of a rant I’ve been meaning to post for some time, on the subject of Chinese 
furniture. This picture, of the table and one of the chair in my apartment, is a good illustration of my reasons for complaint. Note that the table has two levels. The bottom one could, I suppose, be used to store a napkin holder, condiments, or anything else that didn’t fit on a laden table. Or diners could use it to play backgammon during the meal. Yes, in theory, the possibilities are limitless. In reality, though, I never see people using these under-table shelves for anything. Their primary effect is to make the table simultaneously too high (I feel a bit like a munchkin sitting at one, and after awhile my shoulders begin to ache) and too low (my knees don’t fit comfortably underneath).
And then there is the chair. It’s made out of wood, and lacks even the basic concessions to the human form that Americans expect of, say, metal folding chairs. More comfortable chairs are certainly not difficult to find in China, but this one is typical of what usually greets my posterior in places such as hotpot restaurants and Chinese language classrooms, both of which involve sitting for upwards of an hour and a half.
Exhibit B: My new work desk. It's a great desk. Except for those pesky ergonomics.
New office
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Before I left for a short trip to the States a couple of weeks ago, Samantha and I went to scope out our “new” office building. It’s actually an old building where Samantha used to have her office, but it’s been undergoing earthquake repairs. I was excited to see it, especially given that one doesn’t see many of these traditional buildings left around Chengdu.
Only a few people had moved in so far, and Samantha claimed a spacious office for us. She explained that it was past the office charged with the correspondence-course students, who have to show up by the hundreds twice a semester to take care of something or other in person. She didn’t want people coming by our office every few minutes asking where the correspondence-course office was, a problem we should avoid in her chosen location. She procured keys and told me to come to work in the new office on my return.
A few days in to my trip, however, she emailed me to say that the vice dean had decreed I should have an office with a heater, which meant a smaller one than we’d selected, and one on the path to the correspondence-course office. I’d finally learned to cope with unheated offices with the help of long underwear, an electric foot heater, and hot tea, so I was a little unhappy that the vice dean had chosen this time to treat me like a delicate foreigner, whether I liked it or not.
The smaller, heated office is spacious enough, though, and will be a nice place to work once the parade of students coming by to ask the whereabouts of Teacher Zhao passes. We tolerated it on Monday, but on Tuesday I found Samantha hiding out in our old office across the street, avoiding distractions.
Bad education
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Over the last few class sessions I showed the Michael Moore movie Sicko to the spoken English class of doctors. They 
seem fascinated with the American health system, so I thought they might like it; on the other hand, I worried it would be beyond their English comprehension abilities. So I played it with English subtitles and wrote down words and phrases to discuss after the movie finished. Many of these were insurance-related: deny, co-pay, deductible, pre-existing condition. Others were political: lobbyist, campaign, tax dollars.
Sometimes I was surprised at what the doctors already knew. They didn’t need to be told that “the Hill” means Congress, or who Richard Nixon was (“Watergate!” someone said immediately). They knew about the Cold War and the Third World and didn’t need any explanation about Guantanamo Bay. By comparison, no one knew that cab is another word for taxi, and they were unfamiliar with the expressions “put [someone] on [a medication]” and “take [someone] off [a medication].” I wasn’t surprised to find that educated Chinese knew about the less-savory bits of recent American history, just that this education was so thorough as to include English terminology.
At one point Moore pokes fun at American attitudes toward Cuba by saying that the island is “where Lucifer lives.” Later, when I asked the class whether anyone knew what Lucifer was, several immediately said “Fidel Castro!” Not exactly the point Moore was trying to get across.
Aftershock
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“Did you feel the aftershock this morning?” Samantha asked a few days ago as we were sitting at our computers. I hadn’t. She said that she’d felt her bed shake at around 1:00 am, and had just been reading about the magnitude-4.9 aftershock that hit at that time.
This led to a conversation about the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (as people call it here). Samantha was teaching at the time, she said–it was 2:30 in the afternoon. When the earthquake started about half of the students ran out of the classroom, and she stayed with the other half, telling them that they were safe. She knew that the building, less than a year old at the time, had been built to withstand a magnitude-8.0 quake, so she wasn’t afraid. But, she said, if she’d known how big this quake was, she would have been afraid. The building swayed for three minutes.
Afterward the staff and students weren’t allowed to go back into the buildings for two days, until they could be inspected. It took Samantha two hours to find her husband, who works on the other side of campus, because phones weren’t working and because he had gone to find their 12-year-old daughter at school. She and the other teachers stayed on campus with with students for the two days until their dorms re-opened because the students weren’t allowed to leave. The teachers at her daughter’s school did the same.
Samantha said she doesn’t like to watch natural disaster movies anymore, which is interesting since by her own account, the disaster itself wasn’t so bad here. As far as I know, no buildings collapsed in Chengdu. But the immediate aftermath–a city of four million people made suddenly homeless, unable to reach their loved ones by phone to be assured of their safety–is something I can’t fathom. And I certainly can’t wrap my mind around the enormity death toll, which official figures put at more than 69,000. That’s more than twice the population of Ithaca, NY.
Moon cakes
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The Mid-Autumn Festival is coming up, and moon cakes are everywhere. The supermarkets have tables and tables of them in big, showy gift boxes. There are versions in humbler packaging, as well. The filling options range from strawberries to bacon. One student (not my student–it wasn’t bribery) even gave me a foam moon cake on a key chain. It smells like vanilla. I can neither confirm nor deny rumors that I mistook it for the real thing and tried to take a bite out of it.
Yesterday I went by the school’s international office and picked up my official holiday gift, one of those big showy boxes of moon cakes. I haven’t actually tried one yet, and am hoping they’re bacon-free. But with packaging this pretty, the taste almost seems beside the point.
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- Moon cake at last
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- And inside… more boxes!
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- The box, with matching gift bag
The big day
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I taught my first lecture today—my first lecture ever, not just in China. I think I made it through without any
The classroom
catastrophes, but I’d be interested in knowing the students’ feelings about that.
There are several major differences I’ve already noticed between the American and Chinese education systems. In China, for example, undergraduate and graduate education for doctors is combined into one eight-year program. My students are in their fourth year. I’m co-teaching Medical English, which has two sessions, one on Tuesday and one on Friday, each with about 50 students. So I’ll deliver the same lecture on Friday.
These future doctors have years of English under their belts, and of them told me that all of their classes are taught in a mixture of Chinese and English. One challenge for me is discerning what words and concepts are old hat for them, and which bear extra explanation. Which brings me to difference number two: Chinese students don’t ask questions. And its close corollary: they don’t volunteer answers. Sure, you can ask the class a question; I saw Samantha do this when I sat in on one of her lectures. The students will mumble the answer—or something—in a voice just loud enough for their immediate neighbors to hear. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear a person or two in the first couple of rows say the right answer, and you can say, “that’s right, it means surgical repair of the kidney.” Or whatever.
Perhaps the most significant difference, though, is that—at least at this school—students do very little work outside of class. Instead they go to class from the Spartan hour of 8:00 am until shortly after 5:00 pm, with a break for lunch, and then their time is their own. At the end of the semester they’re expected to study hard for a week or so before final exams.
The major advantage for teachers, of course, is that there’s no grading. Also, you can teach straight from the book, since the students probably haven’t reviewed it on their own. You can even use class time to have them read short passages before discussing them, because 90 minutes is an awfully long time to fill. But how to avoid boring the students (and myself) to death with endless recitations of facts, definitions, and pronunciations? Therein lies another challenge.
Today, after many definitions and pronunciations, and some calling on random students to answer questions about the text, since no one would volunteer, I had the students read the introduction to a review article on kidney regeneration. Then they had to work in groups to come up with one question (per group) about the passage to ask the rest of the class. This went reasonably smoothly, though there were some duplicate questions. Several people even volunteered to give answers. Then I came to the last group.
“Our question was already asked,” said the designated speaker, who’d been one of the most engaged students that day. “But here is one: What is this article about, and what is it not about?”
No one volunteered. I called on someone, but she said she didn’t know.
“Ok,” I said. “Who can tell me what it’s not about?” I thought this was a no-brainer, as the last two sentences of the introduction were something like “Since so much has already been written about chimeric kidney-regeneration methods, we won’t be discussing them here.” No one would admit to knowing that, either. I explained what the article was about and wasn’t about, and how we could tell from reading the introduction. Then I threw out a spontaneous question of my own.
“But this first paragraph isn’t telling us what the paper is going to be about, is it? Why include all of this about increasing rates of diabetes and higher demand for kidneys?”
I might as well have asked who wanted to demonstrate kidney transplantation on two of their classmates. It seemed I was telling them something completely novel when I finally revealed that the first paragraph was telling us why we should care about the topic of the paper. Why regenerate kidneys if there are plenty of healthy kidneys to go around?
It was an eye-opening interaction, though it’s possible that I’m reading too much in to it. What I think I saw when the light bulb went on in my head is that these students have never been asked to read anything critically or analytically; they’ve read purely for information. It was the second time in a week that I thought maybe I really could put my foreign expertise to use here. We’ll see. First I have to learn to talk more slowly when nervous.
Staying healthy
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When I came in this morning, there was a thermometer on my desk. Office mate Samantha told me that all teachers are now required to take our temperatures each morning; in my case, I’m to report mine to a woman in the international office by 8:30 am.
It had already become clear to me that China is taking a much different approach to H1N1 prevention than the U.S. At my last job, at an American university, the only measures I noticed were signs (illustrated with cartoon pigs) in the bathrooms that encouraged us to wash our hands, and a family-sized bottle of hand sanitizer in the coffee room. On arrival in the Beijing airport, not only did I have to walk through a thermal sensor, but all the passport agents were wearing masks. Then there was the trip to the travel medicine clinic. Yet here at the medical school, there’s no soap in the bathrooms, much less hand sanitizer dispensers.
But at least in this case, I wasn’t being subjected to extra medical scrutiny as a foreigner. I popped the thermometer into my mouth. Half a minute later Samantha’s eyes widened as she glanced across the desk at me.
“I think you can put it here,” she said, gesturing to her armpit. Oh god. This was a used thermometer, wasn’t it? I hadn’t gotten an armpit-temperature since childhood, but it was definitely preferable… if only I’d known.
I came in at 36.1, which seemed a little cool to me. But maybe that’s just the nature of armpits.
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An American in Chengdu 