A Trip to Dali

So my schedule’s a little weird this week. Wednesday was the Mid-Autumn Festival (a national holiday), so Pengtun got Wed-Friday off. Excellent, right? Five day weekend! No, no. We traded Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for last Sunday and this whole weekend. I teach an evening class tonight and have my normal Thursday and Friday schedule tomorrow and Sunday. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, everybody was talking about the three-day vacation, but… I mean… we don’t actually get time off. Somehow most people didn’t seem to notice that fact. At any rate, it’s been really nice to have three vacation days back-to-back-to-back, even if it means having a seven-day work week starting tomorrow.

To take advantage of these three days, some of us Heqing folks decided to bus down to Dali. Dali is one of two cities in my area of Yunnan (the other being Lijiang) frequented by Chinese and Western tourists alike. Dali’s the bigger of the two, by quite a bit, and I’d say there’s more of a permanent expat population there than one would find in Lijiang. In fact, one of CEI’s American Fellows this year has lived in Dali with her family since she was twelve. (Her Dad works in agricultural exports or something.) There are a lot of Western restaurants and a bar street of sorts and little inns approximately every three feet. It’s a nice place to walk around and just chill out.

Mark, Ma LiJun, Arianne and GaoShan (two girls from JinDun, another of the Heqing schools) and I went down together on Wednesday afternoon. Buses leave frequently and take about two and a half hours. It’s a pretty ride, mostly through mountains. I took some pictures of the trip back up and will post them soon. Once arriving we wandered through the streets and found an inn. Since there were five of us, we split two rooms, with two of the girls kind enough to offer to share one of the double beds. While hardly fancy, the hotel was nice enough, with a fish pond and sit-down flushing toilets. There was even a shower in my room! Of course, the floor of the shower was kinda falling apart, but the water was warm and there was enough of it that it didn’t take me three minutes to rinse the conditioner out of my hair. Plus there was a big mirror. The beds were also a bit harder than what I would have liked, but they were perfectly adequate. And what did we pay for this place, you might like to know. Eighty kuai a room, or 32 kuai a piece. About five bucks. Not bad at all.

After dropping our stuff, we wandered in search of dinner. I was ridiculously excited at the prospect of eating something not Yunnanese—I’d seen Tibetan, Xinjiang, Indian, and Western places coming in. As we headed back towards town center, I suddenly heard someone yelling my name. Now, in the states, if I hear someone yelling “Emily!” I turn with half my attention, knowing that it could very easily be a different Emily. However, I was in Yunnan, China, and the two kids with American accents who’d come with me to Dali were standing right next to me. I turned around, and it was Kristin—my American roommate from the Lincang STP!! We had a rather epic, running-at-each-other-and-big-hugs reunion. I was so, so happy to see her. And as it turned out, she was far from the only one. There were like a dozen CEI folks who’d come up from Lincang for a couple of days. So many hugs, so many smiles, so much catching up (and I feel as though I barely got started in that respect. I wish I’d had more time with them). A lot of schools only found out they got Friday off on Tuesday night (thank you, rural China), so plans had been hastily made. Since the Lincang kids had already ordered, the Heqing folks decided to do dinner alone and meet up again later for some revelry.

We walked for quite awhile, trying to find a suitable restaurant, and eventually settled on a place that Ma LiJun and Gao Shan said was known for its pizza. They were not mistaken. It was by far the best pizza I’d had since leaving the States—thin-crusted and cheesy. We also supped on banana fritters and fruit salad, and I even got a can of seltzer water. I felt very indulgent indeed. Of course, Western food is more expensive than Chinese, but it still wasn’t that bad pricewise, and totally worth it considering the circumstances. The restaurant/bar is owned by a Scotsman and had expat bar tenders—something I’m not sure I even ever saw in Beijing. Bad Monkey, Dali, Yunnan, China. If you’re ever in the area, check it out. Bad Monkey, in fact, became CEI’s spot for the evening, which was a ton of fun. It was just so fantastic to see everyone and hang out American style. I really, really miss the Lincang people. Heqing is great, but it's isolated. I'm about seven hours from the nearest non-Heqing fellows, if I counted correctly.

A little after one, I was sleepy and decided to wander back to the hotel. An amazing thing about China is that I felt totally safe doing this. There are so many places in the States where, that late at night, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable walking around alone. There are places like that in China too, but they’re far fewer.

The next morning, I strolled alone, wandering through the mix of stone and asphalt-paved streets that mark the city. I got to an area where there were suddenly no expats, so that was nice. Dali is a lot more integrated than Lijiang, in the sense that the “Old Town” is not just for tourists and entirely distinct from the new town. It feels healthier in that sense. That being said, there are definitely still areas more touristy than others, and it’s nice to have the option to meander away from them.

The Heqing folks (who’d gone to bed earlier than the Lincang folks—the other four all went back to the hotel at least an hour or two before me) met up for breakfast at the famed German Bakery—Bakery No. 88. Oh my goodness. I’d heard about this place from a bunch of last year’s fellows, so I was really excited to try it, and it was heavenly . just a little café, with IKEA-esque fixtures and tableware. (I know for a fact that the silverware is from there, because it says so.) They have a small collection of imported cheeses and other products, but the real treat is the bread. I had excellently chewy and flavorful ciabatta with cream cheese and homemade raspberry jam. I also splurged on a bottle of Italian olive oil and a loaf that turned out not to be the whole wheat sourdough I was told it was. I’m not crazy about the flavor, but still, it’s bread. I want to make friends with the workers there. They seem really nice, and I get the feeling I’ll be paying that place a visit at least once every time I’m in Dali.

After some more wanderings, including a stop by an English bookstore where I found a bilingual copy of “Horton Hatches an Egg” (Yay Dr. Seuss!) we ran into some CEI folks again and said our goodbyes. Then it was off to…well, Wal-Mart. Not a place I ever shop in the states but, unfortunately, one of the best places to find things in China. And find things I did! I got rotini and skippy peanut butter and ground cinnamon and dried black beans and a small bag of brown rice. No cocoa powder or chocolate chips could, unfortunately, but you can’t have everything in life.

We bussed back home after that, quietly content. Dali really was just a breath of fresh air, and I hope to get down there fairly regularly. It’s just far away enough that I won’t be tempted to go every weekend, but it’s close enough (and cheap enough to travel and sleep) that I can get there easily. I know that last year’s fellows had local friends (Chinese and otherwise) who lived in Dali, and I think that’d be really cool. It’s weird though. I’ve really never had to make friends without something major in common like school or a job. I don’t know how. We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.

Also, random moment of the day: I went into town to go shopping this morning, and I took one of the little cars that runs along the road from school to the town center. I was squeezed in next to two older Bai ladies, and one of them reached over and grabbed my arm, looked at it for a second, let it go, said something in her dialect that I couldn’t understand, and continued her conversation with the other lady. I don’t know if she was interested in my arm because it was white or because it was fat. I’m hoping for the former.

This Episode Brought to You by the Letter m (and i l y o h e n )

As I’ve written on a number of occasions, my language woes here are many. I have trouble articulating myself properly, speaking to my students, making small talk with teachers, etc. Just last week my banzhuren (the woman in charge of my class) came over to me saying something about a book and 25 kuai and I, to this day, do not understand what that was about. Apparently, however, I was not supposed to pay the 25 kuai (that much I could ask and understand the answer to), but two days later she showed up with a copy of a review book for me and the news that my students would be receiving theirs over the weekend. Why, and who’s paying for them? Mysteries both.

So that’s a classic case of language barrier in action. Another comes pretty much daily, when I stand in front of my class and say something in Chinese (like “last name”) that results in fits of giggles from my students. At first, I ignored these outbursts, but now I’ve started to question them with: “我说什么错了？”(What did I say wrong?) Sometimes the kids will tell me, and other times they won’t. I suspect that when they won’t it’s because I’ve said something inappropriate, but, again, mystery reigns.

Every Monday, I am obligated to attend two meetings: a full faculty meeting at 3 PM, and an English department meeting at 10:25 AM. The full faculty meetings are usually long (although not painfully so) and dull, as much for the local teachers as for us CEI fellows. I sorta try to pay attention, but my language skills do not allow me to glean full comprehension of anything and do not even let me catch the gist of some topics. I always bring my little vocab notebook and scribble away; sometimes this allows me to acquire such useful words as “lawn” and “bonus;” at other moments, my listening skills and the speakers’ accents combine in such horrifyingly inaccurate ways that my dictionary spits out engineering and computer science terminology. I keep trying though.

The English meetings are both nicer and scarier, because they are smaller. There are perhaps ten English teachers at our school, all of whom speak English with varying degrees of success. A few try to engage Mark and me in English conversation, while others will utter a word of English only under extreme duress. These meetings are casual, with teachers throwing around various questions and ideas for the classroom. Mark and I have been mostly quiet so far, except when practicing English with those teachers who have shown interest. We try to follow along as best we can, and when conversation moves slowly enough we sometimes can at least get the main ideas. However, the English teachers truly like to talk, and sometimes a particular topic gets them fired up, and everybody starts to talk at once. When this happens, I’m screwed. It’s a cacophonous mess, the universe’s sense of order ripped into spheres of utter chaos. If I can ever come to understand those moments, I will feel as though I am the best non-native Chinese speaker in existence. For now, Mark and I just wait for passions to cool.

So those are all distinctly language-based examples of communication difficulty, but there’s other sorts of communication too. I have two excellent stories for you that nicely illustrate this point: The Wuzixi (Noon Study) that Wasn’t, and The Bank Account Debacle

The Wuzixi (Noon Study) that Wasn’t

So, last Thursday I was to teach my usual noon study. It’s only a 35-minute class and quite casual. I normally just let the kids have a study hall, and that was my plan for Thursday too. However, when I arrived at my classroom, I saw that it was already quite occupied, and not with my students but with my banzhuren and what looked to be my students’ parents. I remembered YiMing saying something about there being a parents’ meeting on Thursday during lunch, but this description had not included the idea of there being fifty adults in my classroom when I expected to be able to use it. Lunch ends, after all, at 1:20, which is the time my class was to begin.

At first, I assumed the meeting was just running late, and I tried to keep my kids (congregated in the hallway just outside the door) on the quiet side. However, with 1:30 quickly approaching and my kids growing ever-more-antsy, it was clear I needed to take more drastic action. There was nowhere to go but outside, so that’s where I took them. I lost a few of my boys along the way, but it couldn’t be helped. After all, my class was one of two or three without access to their rooms, and I had an assortment of not-my-students tagging along, bringing my count of 49 up to at least 60. So I led the kids out and we made a circle, and I improved like mad. We did chants and songs and name games. I shouted myself hoarse and then some. All the while, I kept an eye on our room, in the hopes that at any moment the door would open, the parents would leave, and we could return to normal. No such luck. At 1:55, the time my wuzixi was scheduled to end, I let the kids go and I went back to drink some tea and soothe my poor throat. My banzhuren never said anything to me, so I guess that’s what I was expected to do?

The Bank Account Debacle

Last Sunday (I know, banks are open on Sunday! What a concept), Ma LiJun, Mark, and I went to the Agricultural Bank of China to open accounts. Our school does direct deposit, and because we hadn’t yet opened bank accounts we hadn’t been paid for September. Ma LiJun’s account should have been pretty straightforward to set-up. She would just need her government ID card and a couple of other easily-acquirable things. Mark and I, being Americans, required our passports and an official note from our school stating that we were employees there.

Once we arrived at the bank, we discovered that Ma LiJun could not, in fact, open an account, because her old credit card number was from a different province and thus they couldn’t find a record of it. Why this makes any sense at all I really don’t know.

Then it was Mark’s turn, and mine. Nervously, we handed over our passports and the note. At first they were confused as to how to use a passport rather than a Chinese ID card as a proof of ID. Once they figured that out, the real problems began. American passports, you see, list one’s surname on one line and follow it up on the second with one’s first and middle names. Our note from the school had our first names first and last names last and included no middle names at all. We tried to explain that middle names were not important in America and that only the first and last names mattered, but they wouldn’t budge. Much more important than the lack of middle name, however, and even the fact that the names were written in different orders, was the fact that while our passports had our names written in all caps, our school note had only the first letter of each name capitalized. MAJOR issue! Big, big problem! As Mark and I spent our first weeks here teaching the alphabet, we were able to explain, using proper terminology, that in English there’s (in this situation) no difference in meaning between big and small letters, but according to our teller that was absolutely not true, and having all caps versus just the first letter in caps meant that our names were entirely different on one form of ID than on the other. BIG problem.

So, in short, none of us opened accounts that day (don’t worry—we got a new note and opened them two days later).

On Recognizing One’s Own Limitations—Or, How I Ended up with 49 Chinese Essays

So, funny story. On Monday night, my students had their first test. We’d had a quiz before, during which I caught five cheaters. I was disappointed, but I figured it was the first major assessment, and that, after seeing the pretty rough consequences faced by said cheaters, the problems would diminish rapidly.

As I had before their quiz, before Monday’s test I discussed, in great detail, the consequences for cheating and what exactly constitutes cheating. This includes looking anywhere but at your paper or straight up, having anything on your desk aside from a pen and your test paper, rummaging in your desk, etc. My kids also have to put their English books and notebooks on the floor where I can see them too. I don’t take chances. I want to create “testing barriers” of sorts to erect around each student, but I haven’t found manila folders or something similar yet. I’m on the lookout.

Anyway, the test was going just fine for perhaps twenty minutes. Then, in the very back row, two very, very good students put their heads together, looking at the same paper and whispering.

I didn’t want to do it. Every part of me wanted to believe that they weren’t cheating, that Alanna was just asking Caroline a question for clarification, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Ultimately, they’d heard the rules the same as everyone else, and I knew I had to follow through.

I made my way slowly to the back row, sighed not for dramatic effect but because I really, truly didn’t like what was about to happen, and ripped up both of their test papers. I informed the class that those two students, and their team (my class is divided into four teams), would lose five points. The two girls would also, naturally, get a zero for the test.

After that, the test continued without further incident, but I was most displeased and did not pretend otherwise. This is where the problems came in.

Each evening class runs for two hours. I’d given the kids the first half hour to study, they tested for about half an hour, and then I still had an hour left. My original plan was to play an English name game. No no. Instead, after collecting the last test paper, I decided it would be an excellent idea to lecture the kids (in Chinese, naturally) about why cheating was wrong. Never mind that I couldn’t do it properly, with the nuance and emotional appeal I could put into an English speech. Never mind that I had not planned out, at all, what I was going to say. Never mind that I was relatively sure the two girls whose tests I’d taken probably hadn’t cheated at all. I take cheating very, very seriously, and my class needed to be told exactly why.

I drew diagrams on the board, I asked rhetorical questions, I presented them with the stoniest face I can muster. Fifteen minutes, and probably 50,000 mistakes later, I was done. But there were forty-five minutes of class left. This is where I should have stopped. I should have had the kids do some mindless English copying or sit silently or something. Instead, I decided I may as well forget about that fact that, in addition to not being able to speak Chinese, I cannot read it, so I informed my students that they all needed to write me essays about why cheating was wrong. They were to be silent, and writing, for the remainder of class.

I was brutal. Every time I heard talking, I deducted points. They’d never seen me go without smiling for half as long. At 8:25, I collected their papers (some of which were mercifully short), dismissed them with a “You should think about how to make tomorrow better” rather than with my usual “Thank you, class,” and swept back to my room.

Then I laughed, because I realized that I now had 49 essays, in Chinese, that I needed to read. This took hours but went better than expected. Five or so essays I simply could not decipher, because whether in the states or in China, middle school boys can have some darn awful handwriting. While reading the rest, however, I learned new words, like “shameful” and “look down on,” and I even had two students ‘fess up to having cheated on the evening’s test. (The two girls whose papers I’d taken, as expected, had not, but I still had to give them zeros for breaking the rules.)

Did my kids learn? I’d like to hope so. I guess next test I’ll find out.

Did I learn? Well…at least maybe if I continue to do things this stupid my Mandarin will improve faster.

Adjustments, Adaptations, and Absolutes- Part 2

Sunday night. The kiddies are all in class right now, poor things, but I have a few hours of freedom and a good night’s sleep ahead before Monday sweeps me away. It’s been a nice couple of days. This morning Mark, Ma LiJun and I went into Heqing proper to go shopping. I found an absolutely awesome (and huge!) outdoor market a little over a week ago, so we went through there scooping up fresh noodles, fresh tofu, and as many veggies as I thought I could consume before they went bad (which is not many, I’m sad to say. Man do I miss having a fridge). I also found peanut butter at one of the large supermarkets in town, so peanut noodles are officially back on the menu. So’s banana bread, one of these days, but I have to wait for my bananas to go bad first.

This was actually a three-day weekend, because Friday was “Teacher’s Day.” It’s kinda a big deal in China, more so at some schools than at others. Pengtun’s celebration was relatively relaxed. We had a “meeting” during the afternoon where a few teachers and administrators gave speeches while the rest of us munched on peanuts, sunflower seeds, tea, candy, and fruit. A few hours later, the teachers and their families gathered again for dinner. Overall, I don’t feel like I got to know the teachers any better, but it was still nice just to see their children and things. And, of course, I appreciated the three day weekend. I also got a gift—a plastic wind chime with little blue birds on it—from one of my students.

The last few days, I’ve been trying to get myself into a running habit. Call it a New Year’s Resolution, if you will. Now, those of you who know me well know that I despise running—that I will walk for hours and hours and hours but flinch at the thought of running more than a block. That hasn’t changed. However, last year at this time, I hated long bike rides, or at least long bike rides that were anything but flat. Not having a car, however, pushed me into biking a lot, and by the time I moved back to Georgia last summer, I could handle hills with relative ease that had me feeling near death earlier. I’m kinda hoping for the same result with running, but, well, we’ll see how it goes. Nobody should be surprised if within two weeks my running career comes to an end. I’ve noticed two things about running here as opposed to running in the states. The first is that this place is gorgeous. My pathetic little walk-jog things take me along paths beside rice paddies and marshes, fishermen and farmers. Mountains and clouds, of course, make up the backdrop. The second is that if seeing a white girl walking around is funny and interesting to locals, seeing a white girl trying to run around (and only slightly succeeding) is downright hilarious.

Running aside, there’re a few other things, in no particular order, that I’d like to muse about. Do enjoy.

Cleanliness and Organization

This afternoon I cleaned my room properly. Oh, it felt so good. I swept and I mopped (mopped!!) and I scrubbed. I did laundry and organized the kitchen (somewhat). And then I washed my feet, enjoying thoroughly the sensation of walking about barefoot without my soles quickly becoming the same color as my hair. I’m not a slob, but if I acquired Chinese language ability at the same rate this room acquires dirt, I’d be fluent by next Tuesday. My room, as I’ve said before, is very nicely sized and very nicely equipped. However, there’s no “hiding space” beyond my cloth wardrobes (which are filled with clothes), and the space under my bed. I don’t have a closet in which to stick those random things that I might need every once in a while, which is why I have things like my space heater randomly squeezed into corners. I am getting used to having these everything in plain view, but it still adds an air of “temporary” to my space that I’m in the process of finding additional ways of combating. I’m considering buying a small, inexpensive rug to cover up some of my beautiful concrete floor, but no decisions yet.

Plain Hot Water

I’ve always been really into cold water. At home, I guzzle it. In fact, at home I rarely drink anything except cold water, tea, and, occasionally, milk. In the summer my list expands to include iced tea and seltzer. Chinese people are not nearly as into cold water. You can get it quite easily—there’re bottles everywhere—but there are also superstitions regarding cold beverages and women’s health, etc. When I studied abroad, I mostly drank bottled water, so my water was usually room temperature. Here, I mostly drink water that I grab from the taps by the cafeteria and boil. (By the way, the word for “boil” in Chinese literally translates to “open,” so you’re “opening” the water. I love that.). I don’t have a compelling reason. It’s not that I can’t afford bottled water, certainly, as it normally runs around 1.5 kuai (20-25 cents), and it’s not that I don’t have time to walk five minutes to the nearest convenience store. At any rate, for my first week or so, I mostly drank either tea or boiled water that I’d left to cool to room temperature. Then, one day, I noticed myself drinking straight up hot water. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to do this, but suddenly it became my habit—not that I don’t still drink a ton of tea and lukewarm water, along with the occasional chilled bottle.

Laundry

As I mentioned above, I did laundry today—two small loads of it. I feel like laundry, more than almost anything else, hammers in for me the difference in the handling of time between some places and others. Many teachers in Heqing have washing machines, although driers are more or less a rarity in China. The students and the locals, however, do not, and neither do we fellows. That was a choice on our part, and one that we could still change. Washers run, from what I’ve heard, around 500 kuai. If we split that four ways, it would hardly be a huge burden. Yet, I appreciate doing the work myself. I appreciate squatting in my kitchen, scrubbing socks, observing as a task that involves no more than ten minutes of my time in the States, including folding dry clothes, turns into an hour or more. It’s so easy, with washing machines, to not think about what’s going on—to just know what temperature to pick and that, when I go back to the basement/Laundromat/wherever my clean clothes will be waiting to be popped into the drier. I don’t think about the soak cycle and the rinse cycle or any of that—except that now I do, because I am the rinse cycle.

Schedule

My schedule is weird. I have some days where all my classes start and end within two hours and others where my first obligation begins more than twelve hours before my last. The last two weeks, I’ve been pretty casual about what’s work time and what’s chill time, but that wasn’t working very well for me, so yesterday, I sat down with iCal and tried to set out a reasonable way to organize my non-class/meeting time. I now have established prep, Chinese study, exercise, cooking/meals, and, of course, breaks. I’m going to try to follow my schedule very closely this week to see how it goes, and then I’ll make changes as need be. Last year, it was so awesome to be done with work when I went home, and I’ll definitely miss that here, but I’m hoping that my set up “office time,” as it were, will lead me to feel like there’s more of a divide between work and fun. I’ve already labeled my desk as my “work space” and my couch as a “fun space,” and while I leave skype on wherever I am, I try to avoid gmail and such things when I’m at the desk. Likewise, I try not to do prep/grading on the couch or on my bed. I do expect that as time goes on I will acquire more responsibilities and thus have less time to myself, but for now I think having a relatively set schedule is best.

Mood Swings

I’m moody here. To be honest, I can be a bit moody anywhere, but it’s more pronounced here, and I don’t like it. I don’t like being unable to predict how certain things will make me feel, unable to gauge how I’ll react to particular situations. What I’m really struggling with right now is accepting my current emotional volatility and trying not to dwell on it too much. I have a whole lot of time left, and presumably I’ll mellow out at some point, but for now worrying about the mood swings is probably worse than the mood swings themselves.

Well, that’ll do it for now, mostly because I’m tired and want to do a bit more prep work for tomorrow. On the tired note, please excuse this post’s not necessarily being quite as nuanced as some of my others. I know I should probably have written this when I was a bit more detail-oriented, but oh well.

L'Shana Tovah

It’s Erev Rosh Hashanah—the beginning of the Jewish New Year. I got out of class about forty minutes ago, at 8:30 PM, and came back here to my room, to do whatever prayers I could. I don’t have a proper prayer book of my own, but I found a rather unallowable copy of a mahzor online and downloaded it. Of course, most of what I’m doing this Rosh Hashanah would be considered unkosher by many. I’m not attending services, I’m working, I’m on my computer, and I’m praying completely by myself. I’ve lit Shabbat candles alone on many an occasion, and I’ve done Hanukkah alone, but being without a Jewish community for the High Holy Days is new for me.

This isn’t my first time celebrating in China. When I studied abroad, I attended services at Kehillat Beijing, a liberal alternative to Chabad. It was an almost entirely ex-pat congregation, with some folks just around for a year or two and others who’d spent most of their adult lives in China. I remember being surprised by the familiarity of it all, from the prayer books to the food to the little kids in kippas running up and down the aisle. Although I didn’t go to services regularly during that semester, I really appreciated the welcoming people I found there, and if I ever move to Beijing I’ll definitely get involved.

The last two years, of course, I’ve been in Minnesota, where I was given the incredible opportunity to lead services at Mac. I learned a good chunk of the Conservative mahzor and was able to spend the time with a community I truly love. I miss that now, in the same way that I missed my childhood congregation in Virginia when my family moved to New Jersey. At this point though, I’d take almost any Jewish community.

Judaism is very much a communal religion. Technically, you’re not even supposed to do many prayers without a minyan—a group of ten people (or ten men, depending on how Conservative you are). I’ve never spent a Rosh Hashanah I can remember without a service of some sort, without a group of people who share some background with me. I’m the only Jew in Pengtun. It’s quite possible I’m the only Jew in Heqing, in fact. There are a fair number of Israeli tourists up in Lijiang and down in Dali, but as far as I know nobody put any sort of Rosh Hashanah thing together.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m sad. It’s just…quite different, especially when contrasted with the last two years. As is the case with everything here, I’m having to make adjustments, decide on my absolutes, and find a balance.

So, in terms of Rosh Hashanah, I decided it wasn’t a good idea to skip my classes. I could have, fairly easily, switched with another teacher, but I felt like without the justification of services there was no reason for me to do so. I'd only be alone, instead of with people, and when you're celebrating the birthday of the world, I think it makes sense to be with people--even my little Chinese students. (Yom Kippur’s different. It’s a Saturday this year, but if it weren’t I would definitely skip.) As it happens, Thursdays I have all my classes from 11:15-3:45, so the morning and later afternoon are completely free. I plan to do what I can in terms of replicating a service in my room tomorrow morning, although I’m missing some key components (like, you know, a torah. And a tallit. And a shofar. And a congregation). Aside from that, I’ll probably take a walk next to the lake/marsh by the school. I’ll take some time to feel the world.

The weather’s changing. It’s back to grey and white today, but Monday morning the clouds were made of wisps, licking the tops of the mountains. We could see them properly—surrounding Pengtun, scratching the sky, sunlight catching on patches of earth. Monday night, Mary and I took a walk out to the road that runs by the rice paddies behind the school. It was pitch black, enough so that we had to be careful not to fall into the rice paddies, and the heavens were full. I’ve grown so accustomed to cloudy nights that the number of stars I could see took me by surprise. Blue skies, and starry nights, never fail to make me at least slightly more cheerful, and while I’ve never forgotten what a special place I’m in, Monday made it easier to keep in mind.

I did, also, make honey cake today. It came out surprisingly well, all things considered. It’s certainly not as good as an oven-baked one, but my little rice cooker is a fighter. I had to use instant coffee though, and I didn’t have vanilla, or lemon juice. Oh well. It still tastes good. I have an apple on reserve for tomorrow as well, and, of course, more honey. There will also be a rice cooker challah in the works at some point in the near future. I’m a bit more nervous about how that’ll turn out. Needless to say, it will not be a pretty braided loaf, but maybe I can spiral it…?

I was thinking, earlier this week, how amazing it will be to have not one, not two, but three New Years in this place. Rosh Hashanah is the first, and then January, and finally the Chinese New Year—which will be mine: rabbit. I’m provided with a lot of good excuses for reflection. What kind of a person do I want to be this year? By the time the year of the rabbit rolls around, what do I want to look back and smile at from the proceeding months?

The answers to some of those questions are obvious. I want to be a person better equipped in terms of linguistic and cultural understanding, and I want to be a better teacher. I want to have mastered the art of cooking pancakes on a hot plate. All of those things, I think, will develop naturally, just by virtue of my being here (and loving pancakes). But I also want to be more outgoing. I want to embrace my world here in a way that, so far, I’ve been reticent to. I want to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable, in such a way that what’s uncomfortable for me now stops being such.

For now, I’m lucky to be able to take these ten Days of Awe as true time for thought.

First Week of Class

Alright, so clearly I never posted the second part to my “adjustments” post. I do intend to write it at some point, but this week I started classes, and I’d rather write about that.

So, last Sunday night around 9:30 PM, we got our teaching schedules. I was lucky, because my first class was not until 11:15 Monday morning; I was unlucky because in addition to that morning class I was to teach a wanzixi (evening “self study”). Now, the translation of “zixi”—self study—would imply a study hall-like setting. No, no. While the “zaodus” (morning reading periods) and “wuzixis (lunch self studies) can be used as homework time, almost every teacher teaches during the wanzixi. For me, that meant needing to plan an extra hour and a half of class for the first day of school.

Schedules in China are different from schedules in the States, but then, what else is new? Basically, each class of students here at Pengtun (and at middle schools all over the country) makes up a “ban.” Rather than switching classes like their American counterparts, a Chinese ban owns a classroom for the course of the year, and the teachers switch room to room. That much I can sort of understand, although it is too bad that students are limited to one group of peers for all of their courses. What makes less sense to me is why the schedules are different every day of the week. For example, on Monday I teach in the late morning and I teach the evening study. On Tuesday I teach the morning reading period (from 7:10-7:45), first period (from 7:50-8:30) and third period (from 9:35-10:15). I don’t think there’s a single period of the day that I don’t teach at some point. At least I don’t teach Saturdays. The ninth graders only have Sundays off, but seventh and eighth graders get a full weekend. They even get out at 4:30 instead of 8:30 every Friday. But then they have to be back at 6:30 pm on Sunday. Fun stuff.

I really don’t know who thought up the idea of keeping these kids in school from 7:10 AM-8:30 PM (or 9:30 PM, for students who live here instead of at home). It’s crazy. Granted, they have a full hour and twenty minutes for lunch, and two hours for dinner, so students who live off campus can go home if they wish—but seriously, that’s still over nine hours in a classroom every day. Homework? Only a little, because when will they do it. Extra-curriculars? Faggedaboutit.

The classes are also quite large. Pengtun has the smallest class sizes of the CEI schools in Heqing, and I’ve got 48 kids. The classrooms are no bigger than the ones I worked in last year (in fact, they might be smaller), so there’s not exactly room for the kids to get up and move about. One disadvantage to not having a classroom of my own is not being able to arrange the desks how I’d like and stick bunches of stuff on the walls. As it is, the desks are in your classic rows. I do throw the kids for a loop though, pretty much daily, by making them swing around on their benches halfway through class and face the “back” of the room. In general, it’s abnormal for teachers to move past about the fourth or fifth row of students, so the fact that I not only circulate among all the desks but make the back kids the front kids is pretty revolutionary. But whatever.

I’m slowly (more slowly than I would like) getting used to having 48 students all at once. I think the most I’ve ever had to deal with before is about 25, maybe 30. I’m used to learning names in a day or two and knowing a good bit about each of my kids. It’s going to take me a lot longer to do that this time around. It would take me longer in any case, because of the language barrier, but the number of kids compounds the difficulty. Plus, with 48 kids it’s a lot harder to monitor cheating, and cheating runs rampant at my school. I mean, we’re talking every assignment, even the ones I very, very clearly state are not for a grade. I’m cracking down pretty hard—there are harsher penalties for cheating than for any other rule infraction—but it’s still really challenging to catch everyone and to get the kids to understand why they shouldn’t do it.

I suppose one of my biggest adjustments in general is remembering that I am, for the first time in my life, a real teacher. I have had so, so many informal teaching experiences, from camp counseling to tutoring to afterschool classes to being the unofficial but defacto sub in Chinese last year, that it’s hard for me to remember just how serious this is. This is planning with units and textbooks and province-wide tests in mind. This is keeping track of grades and forming my own assessments. This is taking 48 children, some of whom have never studied English before, and giving them a super strong foundation that will (hopefully) get them through the high school entrance exam in three years. To do this means not only teaching them the material effectively but getting them invested in it—making them excited about learning English and willing to put in the work it’ll take to do it well. In that sense it’s terrifying. Of course, school is important everywhere, and at every level, but if you’re teaching seventh grade Spanish in the States, you’re not contributing directly to whether or not your students will be eligible to attend school past ninth grade. I am. And I’ve been a “real” teacher for all of five days. Hoo-boy.

I’m definitely enjoying my students. On the first day, I let them all choose English names by picking three from a hat and then selecting their favorite. It’s pretty surprising how many of their names suit the personalities of the kids who selected them. Most of the names I let them choose among were people or characters that I know well. Not all of them got picked, of course, since I had about 10 more names per gender than I did students of each gender, but I’ve got my dad, a sister, an aunt and uncle, a cousin, a grandpa, college and childhood friends galore, professors/mentors from Mac, Harry and Lily and Ginny, Luke and Leia, Zoe and Simon and Serenity (the latter two of whom happen to sit next to each other), William and Leland (Adama) and Laura (Roslin), Alanna (of Trebond), Malia (as in first daughter Obama), etc. Am I a geek? Yes. But It’s pretty fun.

They’re a simultaneously shy and rambunctious group, so I’m having to push a lot of students to speak louder when they’re called on and to shut up when they aren’t. It’s a process, but I do think that most of them at least like me. It’s a start. I should have a year with them—possibly two, since it hasn’t yet been decided whether or not we’ll teach the same ban for eighth grade—so at any rate, I’ve got time.

Teaching aside, there’ve been several interesting elements to my life since my last post. The first is Lijiang. Lijiang is among the only cities in this area of Yunnan that tourists (both domestic and international) frequent. There was a major earthquake there in the 90s, and China rebuilt it to draw in outsiders. So there’s a large city with all of the modern amenities found in most Chinese cities of its size, and then there’s the “Old Town.” As someone pointed out last weekend, it’s interesting how all Chinese “Old Towns” seem to sell the same things. There were four kinds of main shops—skirts, tea, bags, and jewelry. There were also local specialties like woven scarves and shawls and walnut cakes. I did buy one of the scarves, and I also bargained for a bag, since I didn’t bring a medium-sized purse from the States. The Old Town did feel somewhat artificial, but it was also really pretty and nice to walk around, and although some of the homes were rebuilt after the quake there are others that have been around for centuries. I wouldn’t want to live there, but I can see myself spending a weekend there sometime later in the fall/winter, when I need to get out of Pengtun for a bit. (There are inns a-plenty, and they aren’t very pricey.) But yes, Lijiang has international tourists and an expat population. Thus, I saw my first non-CEI-affiliated Westerners since leaving Kunming well over a month ago. I was worse than the Chinese folks here in terms of my wide eyed staring. It was pretty funny.

We also went out for “Italian” food—CEI’s treat. The food wasn’t that good—the tomato cream sauce was nice, but my ravioli itself was pretty tasteless. Nonetheless, it was a really pleasant ambiance, with big, comfy chairs, wooden facades, a wine rack, etc. I got to use a fork and a knife…and a TOILET! Not a squat toilet, but an honest-to-God, Western sit down toilet. There was even toilet paper and soap in the bathroom. I honestly gasped when I walked in. I hadn’t used a toilet since Kunming either. It was very exciting indeed.

This week I also went into Heqing city by myself for the first time. It’s not far, but I’d still been nervous to take the bus in alone. I did on Thursday, and I found an awesome market where I bought really delicious things to cook with. Some lady even gave me a tomato, despite my attempts to pay her for it.

Oh yes. The cooking update. I am getting better at using a hot plate and a wok, but there is still much to learn. I did make a pretty excellent apple cinnamon coffee cake earlier this week, but today’s attempt at a chocolate/white marble cake was less than successful. It mean, it cooked fine, but it isn’t chocolaty enough in the chocolaty bits, and since I have no butter or vanilla extract the white bit is pretty bland. Oh well. In general, I’m getting frustrated with how many fewer palettes I’m able to play with here than in the States. I’m sure I will get good at preparing a lot of Chinese dishes, but I miss things like beans and rice and feta cheese (and cheddar cheese. And parmesan cheese. And cheese). I did, however, manage to find cumin powder last week, so that was exciting. Yay for spices.

Well, that’ll about do it for now. Happy Saturday, everyone. (Actually, Sunday, now. After 24 hours of not being able to access blogspot through my proxy, I bit the bullet and bought a VPN CEI recommended. The bad news? I’m down $60. $60 American bucks. The good news? That’s for a year’s subscription, so I should have slow but consistent access to the sites China blocks.)