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.
