It's Gettin' Hot in Here (So Hot)
25 Nov 2009 1 Comment
in Teaching Tags: gym, oppression, recreation, smoking, yoga
“Wow, you ah sooo stro-ooong.” The tone of his voice turned each of the last two words into something bisyllabic. The student had been scoping me out. This is what it feels like to be a zoo animal or a celebrity in America, and just an ordinary foreigner in Chenzhou, China. My job was to be a teacher. But I was also working off the clock as a professional foreigner.
I was in the university gym and recreation center. It was below freezing outside and Crazy English Mountain was dusted with snow. There were no heaters in the school, and you could see your breath in the air. I had been working up a good sweat. Steam rose up from me. An exotic mélange of hip hop and Persian traditional came from the aerobics floor — and there was a sharp crack as somebody broke an eight-ball rack. A dying treadmill droned and squeaked.
Now the student wanted to touch my biceps. “Can I feel it?” he asked.
Preserve the harmony at all costs. That was the cowardly lion inside me. “Oh no, you better not. I have a bad cold right now. Maybe H1N1.” By now, I had been in China for three months and had grown used to the Chinese practicing weird English.
