Day-trip to Kaifeng

"...t-h-E-m-u-m" : Kaifeng Chrysanthemum Festival

...and I finally sneaked some pictures to show you the paparazzi we experience (p.s. I was standing right in the middle of this paparazzi crowd):

Interactions with Students

I’ve had some very interesting and memorable conversations with students in my apartment this week. Just a few hours ago, Julia and two of her friends taught me how to play some card games, and while we played, one of the girls, Molly, told me about a novel she’d finished this weekend – a love story. I asked the girls if they like love stories.

Julia answered, “Yes, but not always, because sometimes they are unreal.”

“In American movies, the love stories are almost always the same,” I said. “There is a woman who is unhappy,” to which all three girls smiled and nodded, “and then the unhappy woman meets a man,” and they laughed, “and the man makes her completely happy. He makes her life perfect. I think this is unreal.”

They each nodded.

“There are some love stories that I think are real,” I said. “I will tell you one. The story is about a man who is very sad. He is always sad. He loves a woman, but she does not love him. She marries another man, and the sad man does not get angry. The sad man becomes friends with the woman’s new family – her husband and her children. One day, a war begins. The woman’s husband is taken by the war, and some men say that they will kill the husband. The sad man loves the woman so much, he decides to dress in her husband’s clothes, and go to the prison to play a trick on the men there. He makes the men believe that he is the husband, so the husband is set free, and the sad man dies in his place. Isn’t that a great love? He loved this woman, and he expected nothing from her. He asked nothing of her, but he died so that she could have a husband and her children could have a father.”

The girls were quiet. They had all listened so intently, which sort of surprised me. I had told them a slow-English version of A Tale of Two Cities. An American student would have been bored to tears.

“Yes,” Julia said. “It is great love.”

Later, I told the same story to my Monday afternoon class. I was encouraging them to use English to describe their favorite books. I asked them in the last few minutes of class if they wanted to hear the story of my favorite book. I immediately heard a unified seventeen voices shouting yes – they wanted to hear. It was the same sort of response I’d had from Julia and her friends. When I told my class the story, they listened just as intently. The bell rang, and when I told them I didn’t have enough time to finish, they all shouted, “stay, stay!” So I told them the rest of the story, and I don’t think there was a face in the room that wasn’t looking straight back at me.

It amazed me both times how much a simple story interested them. Now I’m glad I think I’ve found a way to their hearts.

The first time I tried to get a student to practice English by telling me the story of a favorite book, he was a very low-level student who had come to my room to make-up the midterm exam. His name was Chase, and he understood about one fourth of the things I was saying to him.

Finally, I began my last resort “do you like” questions. Somewhere after sports and food I finally got to books.

“Do you like to read?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like novels?”

“Yes.”

“What is your favorite book.”

A confused expression.

“The one you like the most.”

A smile…then another discouraged look.

“You don’t know the English name?” I said.

He nodded.

I leaned forward and annunciated each word: “Tell me what happens in the book. Tell me the story.”

He looked downcast, and before he could say the dreaded phrase, “My English is very poor,” I hastened to say,

“Is it about a man or a woman?”

At hearing such a simple question, he began to try. I saw in his face that he suddenly thought maybe he could tell me the story.

“It is… about… a man,” he said, ever so slowly. I tried as hard as I could not to look away for a second, to stare straight at his face the whole time he struggled to get the words out. I wanted to act as if it were taking him two seconds to say what really took him thirty.

He continued: “The man… he travels to… every place.” He stopped, scratched his head, and started again: “He travels to every place… look for… look for…”

I wrote on a piece of paper: “The story is about a man who travels to every country. He is searching for something. He is searching for ______.” I finished reading what I’d written and looked at Chase. “What is the man looking for?” I asked, and I could tell he was trying very hard to find a word for the thing.

He said a few other words. He tried to tell me that he related to the character in the story. “He is like me,” he kept saying.

But we couldn’t finish the sentence I’d written, and we kept staring at the blank dash on my paper.

Chase gave up and changed the subject. “I like story about a boy and a girl,” he said.

“Ah ha,” I replied. “You like romance.” I drew two stick figures with a heart between them, and said the word again, “romance.”

He smiled and nodded. “Long time ago… my heart was hurt. My heart…is still hurt.”

I imagined a high school girl laughing as she told Chase that she loved him. Chase continued to try to talk about love with me, and I wasn’t sure if the subject was chosen by him or forced on us by his limited vocabulary. As we continued looking at the heart on the paper and trying very hard to find the words to talk about love, a knock came at the door.

It was a Russian international student, the only one I’ve had in my class. He speaks a little Chinese and even less English. He sat on my couch with an English to Russian dictionary and looked at me.

I glanced from one to the other of their silent, uncomfortable faces. The level of “depth” I felt I had reached with Chase was suddenly gone – no more talking about love. We were back to likes and dislikes, hobbies, sports, and the number of siblings we had.

The Russian student did seem to understand more than Chase, but he would respond to my questions with even shorter answers. It was a hard game – asking him a simple question, then turning and asking Chase a simple question, then thinking of another simple question. The silent moments were long and there were a lot of them.

Finally, I asked the Russian if he liked Chinese food.

“No,” came a very decided answer.

“No?” I said. I was so used to reassuring all the students that I liked the food here, I’d never heard anyone so blatantly dislike it.

“I don’t like peeg,” he said.

“You don’t like…?”

“Peeg!”

“Oh, pig.”

“I am mooslim,” he said.

“You are… Muslim?”

He nodded.

“Oh, I see,” I said.

Chase looked confused, so we tried to help him understand.

“Religion?” I said.

“Buddha?” Said the Russian student, and unsuccessfully spoke a few Chinese words.

“Islam?” I said.

Chase’s eyes still darted from one to the other of us.

I wrote on a piece of paper:

Islam

Buddhism

Christianity

“Religion,” I said.

The Russian student eventually found the right Chinese word for Buddha. Somehow Chase began to understand, so I wrote some more words on my paper:

Islam –> Muslim

Buddhism –> Buddhist

Christianity –> Christian

I pointed to each line. “This one,” I said, “believes in Allah. This one believes in Buddha, this one believes in ‘Jesu’ – Jesus.” And then, on a sudden thought, I wrote on the paper,

Atheism –> Atheist

“This one,” I said, “believes in no God.”

Chase clapped his hands. “Me,” He said, and pointed with his thumb.

I suggested that many Chinese believe the last option, and the Russian student seemed upset by this. He kept pointing at Buddhism and Christianity, but Chase had nodded his head in agreement with me.

I tried to clear up the matter. “Maybe some Chinese people believe this,” and I pointed to Buddhism and Christianity. Then I pointed to Atheism: “Many Chinese people believe this.”

Both students seemed satisfied. We abandoned the conversation and for the next hour I taught them how to play Uno. The Russian student caught on quickly, but Chase had trouble understanding the rules. He kept trying to lay the wrong colors down, and one time he laid his last card down and made a triumphant chuckling sound. The Russian and I both pushed back the card and said, “No, it must be green.”

If someone could only have seen us – a Chinese, Russian, and American; an atheist, Muslim, and Christian – stretching a first grade vocabulary to express our views on love and religion before sitting down and playing cards for an hour and half. Neither student left until I told them I had class work to do.

I was only a substitute teacher for the Russian student’s class. The real teacher came that weekend, and I haven’t seen the Russian since. And though Chase sits in the front row every Monday, he has not come to visit me again.

The End of Culture Week

Where to begin? Culture week has ended, and so much has happened in the past two days. The low points have been exhaustion, perpetual sickness, two classes this morning that went terribly, and a mad rush with absolutely no free moment that’s lasted through the past four days.

High points, however, occurred recently. This afternoon was a high point: today was Europe Day, and so I put on a very Chinese rendition of a traditional Norwegian dress (blazing red phoenix patches included), and walked to the campus’ Italian Square where our Europe team had constructed an Eiffel Tower, a Viking ship, a wooden castle, and giant poster boards displaying pictures of Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, England, and I don’t know what else. I didn’t want to wear my dress and I didn’t really know what was going on when I first got there. I had a table all to myself, with apple juice concentrate, bottles of Sprite, some paper cups and a board I’d made that displayed the lyrics to a Viking drinking song.

The faces of the students were incredible today. They loved the dress that I wore, and I couldn’t walk across the square without someone asking me to pose for a picture. They thought that everything the foreigners did was exciting – from the stamps I put in their homemade paper passports to my strained singing into a megaphone and apple juice concentrate mixed with Sprite. I saw many of my own students at the Square, and for some reason my conversations with them were easier than they’ve been at any other time. One of my students gave me a banana, and another student -- not one of mine -- listened to my drinking song, talked with me for awhile, and reappeared later to beckon me out from behind the song lyrics board and give me a warm milk tea.

“Because you are working so hard,” he said. “You have to sing the song many times today.” He asked me if I was cold, and he told me that he knows all the foreign teachers work very hard. “I had a foreign teacher in middle school. All my classmates were very bad, but he was so patient with them.”

When I saw him standing with the milk tea in his hand, I felt like all the culture week madness was worth something. I was feeling full from my banana, but I drank the tea anyway.

It was a redeeming afternoon all around – the banana and the milk tea and the students swarming around me to get Scandinavia stamps. Before today, it was hard to be excited about Culture week because I didn’t know how much the students loved it.

Last night I performed a Korean pop dance with three other teachers at one of the evening culture week shows. Today I heard that the students posted videos of our dance on Youku, the Chinese version of Youtube. Even the graduated girl at the front desk of Peter Hall was ecstatic that I was performing the dance. The girls at the front desk videotaped the entire show that night, so that the girl who was left on duty could watch everything later.

While I went to dance practices and planned for the drinking song activity, I thought everything we were doing was ridiculous, and in reality it probably is. But Culture week has been a breakthrough: I’ve finally taken part in something that’s meaningful to the people here.

The breakthrough was badly needed. Just this morning, before the festivities in Italian Square, I administered my last two midterm exams and found that the majority of my students had understood nearly nothing of all I’d said in class for the first four weeks. I received blank stares in response to the questions that I thought would be easy. I sat in the very back of the classroom to give the exam. I told the students to stay quiet, but they wouldn’t stop talking, even after I threatened to give a zero to anyone who said a word.

The classroom is one of my largest. It seats at least two hundred people. The ceiling and back wall are lined by large pipes wrapped in foil. During class, we hear water running above our heads, and today drops intermittently fell on my shoulders as I watched pair after pair of eyeballs widen and look around wildly. I heard muttered Chinese words all morning, and every now and then an English word.

When the exam was over, and the last student had left, I sat in the back of the classroom with my forehead on the desk. I don’t know when I last felt a thing was so impossible.

The lows can really be low here, but today at Culture week, I think I felt the first sort of redemption for them.