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.
