Getting Settled in the City of Perpetual Gloom
20 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: China City Living, markets, shopping
A green-eyed monster was here. I knew it when another foreign teacher complimented Sarah, a post-doc student assigned to help me transition to life in one of China’s largest cities, the City of Perpetual Gloom. To me, the green-eyed monster was a minotaur which shook its head furiously and threw its horns to either side. They were big horns too. The kind that would pierce, rip, and crush if they ever connected with your heart.
“Wow, your English is very good,” the other teacher said. Ingratiation oozed from his pores.
He was one of those nice guys. He reminded me of myself, actually. Maybe that’s why I wanted to smack his bitch ass up. Yes, welcome to China. There are people here who speak English as a second language better than those who call it their first and only language.
Now that I was back in China I was reminded of harsh climate. At first I thought the bone white sky would get to me. I felt like an alien crash-landed on a strange world. I told myself to be thankful the place had more visibility than Yoda’s swamp planet, Dagobah. There was drizzle that made the sidewalks slippery from a mélange of dried cooking oil, mold, phlegm, and the undifferentiated effluent of this country’s Industrial Revolution.
A Portrait of the Teacher by a Young Student
14 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: Classes, Obama, Students
A student from my underground literature class wrote an article about her experience with my teaching method. I had been helping the student develop her writing skills so that she could perform well on the GREs as her dream is to go to graduate school on edge of the prairie in Garrison Keillor Country — a place I had fond memories of from a journey I took in a former life. What follows is an article she wrote about my class for a Minneapolis/St. Paul based e-zine called China Insight.
In the article, she recalls the first day I introduced myself to the class. Her perspective can be compared with mine as I had written about it too in the post “Back to School.”
What follows is an excerpt from her article:
Teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four in Mao Country
06 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: Literature, Orwell
Every Wednesday evening six Chinese girls came to my apartment. By the middle of the Spring 2010 term at Xiangnan University in the home province of Uncle Mao and General Tso, I had come to depend on them to keep me happy. They were junior English majors and picked English names like Tina, Victoria, Christie, Helen, Cherries, Emilia, and Emma. Without their attention, kindness, and passion, I surely would have gone crazy as is so much the fate of many foreigners who come to China looking for love or a new life. But I am getting ahead of myself.
It was a dismal cold day in March when I met with the vice dean of the English Department. A frigid mist blanketed the campus. The college itself clung to the sides of a green karst peak. It was the day before the official start of the Spring 2010 term. Students were still arriving from holidays spent with their families in the countryside and the cities. And I had just returned from a tour through Yunnan, Laos, and Vietnam to prove to myself that a nuclear winter had not in fact descended upon the heartland of China, and that this information had somehow been censored by the government in order to a maintain its grip on social harmony.
A Day in the Life of a Fake Teacher in the Real China
24 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: education, favors, gao kao, journey, private schools
One day I found myself squealing like a pig in front of children. I pushed my nose up, grunted, and oinked. We were playing a simplified version of charades. It was a Sunday afternoon in the bleak of January. And this being China, it was bleaker than bleak. The dean of my university had loaned me out to a private high school as a “favor.”
My latest rendition caught the students’ attention. Girls stopped texting and boys ceased roughhousing long enough to look up and shout “pig!” in unison. I asked the teacher if they’ve played this game before, adding, “They’re very confident.” Either the blood of Shakespeare coursed through my veins or the children were very smart.
I spent the next ten minutes striking curious poses. I shapechanged into a frog, duck, and cow. By some feat of thaumaturgy, I even managed to turn an ordinary seat into a flying bicycle, which I rode around the room. But the archfiend boredom was in the room as well. It stalked the children. One by one they fell prey it. I wondered if I could win their hearts and minds back if I showed them the wonderfullest trick of all – the coffin trick. That is escaping from a coffin after it had been nailed shut.
Goodbye Year of the Ox
31 Dec 2009 Leave a Comment
Since I only teach three days a week, and spend most of my time studying, reading, blogging and sheltering from the cold, wintry rain it is easy to forget where I am. A quick jaunt about the campus quickly reminds me that I’m not in Pennsylvania anymore.
Just beyond the dingy metropolis, my university was nestled at the feet of a jagged, tent-like mountain, green with bamboo, shrubbery, and leafy sword blade foliage. Students roamed the campus in packs on their way to classes, parties, or speeches. Every day at lunch and dinnertime a campus wide loudspeaker system blares out happy-go-lucky pop music, advertisements and announcements in Chinese as well as English sound bites. Stray dogs – enough to provide a respectable cast for a Disney movie – scampered to and fro on errands with or without some tasty piece of trash held in their mouths. Somebody’s chickens pecked at piles of trash. There was the smell of burning trash in the air, and students sang, and played flutes and erhus . They smiled and practiced their hellos on me.
