The Southeast Asia Journals: Part One

Various e-mails from December 2009

Subject: Merry Christmas from China

Dear Friends and Family,

...in five days I will begin a month-long excursion through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand with three other foreign teachers... I have a very important visit I want to make [in Vietnam]... As some of you know, last semester I helped a friend at school with his Thesis project: a Jarai-English dictionary. The Jarai people are an indigenous tribe that comes from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The indigenous people of Vietnam are known as the Montagnards -- mountain people... My friend's name is Lap Siu. He is Jarai, and because his father fought on the side of the U.S. during the war, Lap immigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a teenager. Two of his sisters had to stay behind, and he has not seen them in the fourteen years since he moved to the States... I worked with him briefly on his dictionary project in my last semester at school, and now would like to try to see his sisters in Vietnam during my travels. Currently, I have only their addresses, a phone number, and three travel companions who are willing to try to get to them. The Vietnamese government has in the past restricted travel in the Highlands... One American did recently visit Lap's sisters, so I know it's possible to get to them. Seeing them would be very special for me, for my travel companions, and for Lap and his sisters. We will try to go to them sometime in mid-January.

Subject: First Official e-mail of the Southeast Asia Sexies

Distinguished members,

At the first meeting, our secretary Joe Matar FORGOT to take the MINUTES! So there will be no record of what we said or did. It was a complete waste of time.

Yours sincerely,

Joe Lennon

RE: First Official e-mail of the Southeast Asia Sexies

Distinguished members:

One more costly mistake like that, and I move we hold a vote to appoint a new secretary.

Sincerely,

Anonymous distinguished member

Fellow timewasters:

I believe if you refer to the SE Asia Sexies Official Rulebook, you'll find that a new secretary is only brought in when the previous one dies. Therefore, I will be continuing my sub-par performance in my current position for the foreseeable future. I would urge the other members not to attempt to plan some sort of uprising/murder to push me out of my position. That would be far too predictable.

Regards,
Disgruntled Secretary

Fellow Distinguished Members,

As you know, I take my self-appointed position of treasurer very seriously and am greatly insulted by the lack of sexiness presented by Joe Matar. This will not be tolerated. Therefore, I motion that we demote him until he can prove his current position in our elite group is indeed deserved.

Sincerely,

Concerned Member

1.1.10

I’m writing from my first train ride in China. Rachel and I are off to Guilin to meet Joe Matar and Joe Lennon, to begin our month-long excursion through Southeast Asia. We have named our group the Southeast Asia Sexies, and I’ve saved a series of e-mails we’ve sent to each other over the past two weeks. Most of the travel decisions have been left up to the Joes. Rachel and I are proud of ourselves, I think, for even making it safely to our train in Zhengzhou this morning. We woke up at six, and caught a bus to Zhengzhou with the help of a Chinese friend. We had a wonderful breakfast at McDonald’s (hotcakes, hash browns, and coffee), and were at the train station by ten thirty.

Now we are on our way, and I only hope we have all we need. A passport and three thousand kuai are tucked away in my coat’s breast pocket. The past two to three days I’ve been frantically trying to get information about the Central Highlands from people who have been there. Lap told me he knew an American vet who was able to visit the Siu sisters. I e-mailed the vet, Benny, but had no response. When Lap tried to get a hold of him for me, we fared better. Benny has offered to connect me with his contacts in Vietnam. I still don’t have all the info for the contacts, but I’m hoping there will be an e-mail in my box by the time we get to Hanoi.

I want to get to Lap’s village and see his sisters. I’ve brought his completed thesis, the Jarai-English dictionary – all 125 pages. He also sent me a Jarai letter and pictures to give to his sisters, so I have those with me as well.

There is no info about the Highlands in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and next to nothing about it online. The nearest big cities to the village are Tuy Hoa and Pleiku. We need a translator and a van, which I just don’t think we’ll get unless we get a name and number from Benny, someone trustworthy that can be our guide.

I’m looking now out the train window, at the railway yards and the backsides of gray buildings. Everything looks desolate, but once or twice we’ve passed a small platform of people. I see factories with cement spires and smokestacks -- metal structures that I can’t describe and don’t really know the name of. They probably made the clothes that I’m wearing.

A couple is patiently trying to converse with me, and I wish I understood what they were asking. I told them the little I can say: “I come from America. I am a teacher.” I think they’ve given up now. They are silent, but probably watching me. Maybe God is giving me patient Chinese people so that my desire to learn Chinese will grow. This morning at McDonald’s, a young boy was talking to me. He seemed so disappointed that I couldn’t respond. He stood and stared at me for a long time, and I guess maybe he was hoping I would remember how to say a few more words. He left and brought back French fries and ketchup, told me they were for me, that I should eat them. Then he stared at me again, but I couldn’t tell him any more than I told the couple on the train just now.

1.3.10

We arrived in Guilin at six in the morning. Joe Matar was waiting for us at the station. After putting our things in his room at the hostel, we wandered empty streets hoping to find breakfast. Around eight, we finally saw a sign with a picture of baozi, so we went inside and ate anything familiar – baozi with pork, dumplings, hard-boiled eggs. We took a van to the Li River and paid too much money to ride a bamboo (actually it was PVC pipe) raft down-river to Yangshuo. It was rainy and cold, but the mountains were pretty. We got to Yangshuo that evening and found a westernized tourist town. There’s a McDonald’s, a KFC, and lots of little coffee shops and bars. We ate at Dumpling Dynasty and had coffee at a café near our hostel.

1.4.10

We go to meet the final Sexy today. We’ll take a bus from Yangshuo to Guilin, and then take the train to Nanning, our last stop in China.

Yesterday we rode bikes outside of Yangshuo, on a path between the hills and the Yulong River. We rode through villages and even, by accident, crop fields. We left at eleven and didn’t get back to the hostel ‘til five. It was much more enjoyable than the cold bamboo ride the day before; the sun was shining, the sky was as blue as it ever is in China, and the hills weren’t hidden by clouds.

A guidebook in a café said that we don’t need a permit to go to Pleiku, a city near Lap’s village in Vietnam. But permit and guide are likely needed for travel around the Higlands, it said. It gave a name of a travel agency in Pleiku – Gia Lai travel. We might be able to get a guide, permit, and van there. It is probably the next best option if Benny’s contacts don’t come through. The guide said Pleiku is accessible by bus…

I’m writing from the bus now – that’s why my writing is shaky. We were late getting to the station because our breakfast was slow, and I doubt we’ll make the one twenty train out of Guilin. We’ll have to settle for the next closest time.

1.6.10

We are on a bus bound for Hanoi, backing out of the bus station in Nanning. Vietnam is within our reach. I’m glad, because I’m ready to leave China. I’m half-hoping that the change of culture will curb the complaints that have been voiced within our little group of travelers: it’s obvious that my travel companions are just as ready as I am for a break from the gray skies and pushy crowds of China. Much as we may attempt to love the country, sometimes we are overcome by the parts of it that we don’t like. I don’t expect to find less crowds or cleaner streets in Vietnam, but a change of scenery and people may draw our attention away from the challenges of living in the Chinese culture.

Hanoi was a break from Chinese culture. The first, obvious changes were the motorbikes that flooded the streets, the readable street signs, and the French influence that we saw in the buildings and the food. We could eat French bread from street stands, and find coffee on almost any street.

One of the highlights of Hanoi was my visit to Hoa Lo prison, known to American POWs as the “Hanoi Hilton.” When I went to the prison, I was reminded of a PBS documentary I’d seen many years ago, a documentary about the conditions the POWs lived in at the prison. The prison has striking yellow walls (like a lot of buildings in Hanoi, actually…I found out later that yellow was once the color of royalty in Vietnam…don’t know if that has any bearing on the prison walls, or the popularity of the color throughout the country today). It was these yellow walls I remembered seeing in the documentary; despite them, the building looked drab and dark to me.

The museum within the prison presented a description of the POWs conditions that was very different from the one given by the documentary I’d seen. The museum has pictures of the prisoners playing basketball, decorating for Christmas, smiling into the camera…

1.9.10

We left Hanoi today for Ha Long Bay. We booked a tour through a company that was much cheaper than many others, though our guidebook told us that we’d get what we pay for. The junk we sail on is no luxury liner – the rooms are small and smell musty. Our lunch was seafood…I didn’t like it much. We have just concluded a thirty-minute wait for the one-night, two-day customers to kayak in the bay (we purchased a two-night, three-day tour, so we will kayak later)… we’re not sure why we had to wait, but we are reminded of the guidebook’s warning. A few in our group are angry because we have just discovered that drinking water was not included in the price of the tour. The bottled water on the ship is over-priced.

I really don’t mind the setbacks of the tour, if you want to call them setbacks. I like having a small boat, warped floorboards in my bedroom. The view of the bay is lovely. We’ll sleep on the boat tonight, and tomorrow we’ll kayak and go biking and hiking on one of the islands.

1.12.10

We are on the train to Hue – we should be there soon. We have a nice four-person sleeper on the train, though we are fairly certain we saw a mouse run past the door last night.

We’ve spent enough time together now, our traveling group, that I probably speak for everyone when I say I’m happy for any chance to be alone. I’ve had enough experience of hostel dorms and close train and bus rides to develop a new appreciation of privacy and quiet.

1.14.10

We have been in Hue the past two nights. From what I understand, Hue was sort of the seat of government when Vietnam was still an empire. Joe L and I wandered the old citadel yesterday, where empire officials lived and worked. The guidebook said there wouldn’t be much to see there, but I walked around inside for two hours. Vietnam stopped using it in the forties – by then the emperor was only a figure-head because the French had occupied the country for some time. It’s strange to think a place could so quickly experience abandonment and deterioration; parts of the citadel have already become ruins.

While in Hue we also visited the tombs of three emperors, some of which have also fallen into ruin.

It was also outside Hue that I experienced my first Vietnam War site: we took a bus several hours north to the former Demilitarized Zone. The seventeenth parallel is on a tiny strip of Vietnam where one could easily visit the coast and cross the Laos border in one day. This part of Vietnam looked more like the Vietnam that I had pictured before arriving in the country: hills, trees, rivers. It still doesn’t look exactly like the jungle I imagined it would be, possibly because of deforestation caused by Agent Orange and napalm, or possibly because Hollywood movies didn’t give me an accurate portrayal of the landscape. We drove through Tuan Anh, a city once occupied by the U.S. Marines. Near the parallel, a rusted American tank still sits on the side of Highway One, and nearby is a memorial to the North Vietnamese soldiers.

Our bus drove us across the Hien Luong Bridge, above the Ben Hai River, the barrier between what was once North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

The advertised highlight of the tour was the Vinh Moc tunnel – twenty-eight kilometers, thirty-eight entrances, with meeting rooms, a hospital, a bathroom. At one point three hundred Vietnamese lived in these tunnels.

Though Vinh Moc was much taller and wider than the combat tunnels I later toured in Cu Chi, there were times I felt frightened by the closeness of it, especially when I had to stop and wait behind other tourists. The tunnels were too small to stand in, and they were stuffy and hot. The exit we took led right to a stone wall along the sea. What a sight that must have been to the people cooped up in the tunnel, after spending a weekend or weeks in the darkness.

There was a very short Vietnamese man in a red cap that followed me through the tunnel. He walked close behind me with a flashlight, and when I stood with a camera in hand at the stone wall outside, he pointed at the sea. I guess he was showing me where the good photos were. He kept brushing my shoulders and back, as if the tunnel had left dirt on them, but I don’t think there was anything there. I realized later that he wanted money.

After the Vinh Moc tunnels we went to the site of the former American base at Khe Sanh. American accounts of the battle that took place there differ somewhat from the account given at the tour ... my tour guide made it clear that the siege of the base was a momentous victory for the communists. The museum on the site called it the "hell" of Khe Sanh -- which, no doubt, it was. The communists laid siege to it for seventy-seven days. According to our guide, there were 30,000 men killed in action.

I was curious to see what would be left of the base. Everything was blanketed in fog when the bus stopped at the site of the base. Mist billowed over the few things that remain at the site -- aircraft remains, sandbags, a sign with a picture of the air strip that once existed. A man was walking through the mist with a wooden tray, selling rusted Vietnamese and American dog tags, pins, and medals. I started to bargain with him, but then I thought maybe it was wrong to own, even more so to bargain, for the dog tags of a dead soldier. It suddenly seemed irreverent for something like that to be sold as a souvenir. I walked through the bunkers, looked at the pictures in the one-room museum. The fog made everything seem surreal.

Traveling...

Hello from Vietnam!

I am in the central part of the country right now, in a city called Hoi An. I've been traveling with three friends since January first, and won't return to China until early February.

Thus, the blog silence.

I'm keeping notes and pictures to put up when I get back - until then, I probably won't be on here again.

Happy New Year (though a little late for the West and a little early for the East)!

An Yang

Here are some pictures from a short trip I took with Sias at the beginning of December.

Cool drum tower downtown:

Not so roomy inside...

And steep stairs...

Red Flag Canal, outside of An Yang, was built in the fifties by workers from the area. They did not have the modern machinery that we use now, so many people died. One of my students from An Yang told me her grandfather worked on this canal.

From hiking trails around the canal:

This dragon reminded me of Smaug, from The Hobbit:

And a short clip of us climbing through one of the mountain trails at the canal:

Christmas at Sias

“The Christmas is coming…”

I keep hearing students say this phrase. The first time I heard it, I was reading a note from a student – it was a note that came with his gift to me, a wind chime with dangling wooden dolphins. He wrote:

Hi Annie. I am sorry I bother you. But you know the Christmas is coming. Maybe it’s a long time. But I afraid I will forget it. So I give this to you as a Christmas gift. I know you need something to make your house more beautiful. So I think it’s a good thing. I hope you like it. You are a cute girl and smart. Though I am not your student. But I think we can be friend. But if you think I will not be a good friend, say “NO” it’s ok! But I hope Yes! Hope you have a great Christmas.

Your Jim

Jim’s Christmas gift came in November. During the last week of class in December, I was flooded with more: apples; paper cranes; a decorative plate with Chinese characters; a stuffed Santa; a metal figurine of a green girl wearing leaves in her hair and holding a wand; traditional Chinese knots; and even a fresh brown egg with a picture carved in its shell.

The oral English classes had a strange schedule. The English teachers gave students the final exam during the first week of December, but then had a week of class after the exam was finished. We had already graded the exams and turned in the final grades for each class, so in the last week I didn’t even give my students a participation grade. The grades, the exam, everything was finished – I guess we just went to the classroom for one last hoorah. I told my classes the history of the Christmas holiday and taught them Christmas carols. In the last thirty minutes, I gave them green paper and stencil cut-outs so that they could make Christmas cards. I tried to explain that they could give the cards to their friends, but each class inevitably lined up almost single file at the end and stacked their Christmas cards into my hands. Some cards had faces drawn in the paper ornament cut-outs that I’d given them. Some had stocking shapes, or Christmas trees, or paper cranes. Some of them were addressed to me, and some of them weren’t. Here are messages that were written inside:

Dear parents:

Merry Christmas!

I have a lot of words want say, but I don’t have more time.

In my heart, you are important. I love you forever.

Your son,

Ty

May my Annie Teacher more and more beautiful! May my classmates Happy forever!

-Lily

Dear Annie:

You’re so beautiful.

You like my sister.

Merry Christmas Day.

We will miss You!

Yours Sarah.

To Annie:

I hope you very happy every day and you have a good healthy, and I wish you more beautiful and more beautiful. I hope you can find a very good husband. Ha Ha.

Your student:

Adam

Annie:

May everything beautiful and best be condensed into this card. I sincerely wish you happiness, cheerfulness and success.

Ian

To: Annie teacher

I’m very happy learn English from you!

I wish you have a happy Christmas Day!

You are our friend. Forever!

You sweet smile warm us! happy every day!

From: Myra

I want a notebook computer. (blak)

Happy new year to everyone I have known.

Bobby

One card, addressed to me, said, “Best wishes for you!!! My honey.” Another had written on the cover, inside a bulb ornament, “eat it and you will become more and more strong!” Another one addressed to me had a cut-out of a stocking on the front, with an arrow pointing at the foot. It said, “The best present in.” There were others I liked: a drawing of a jack-in-the-box with “smile” written beside his mouth, or a Chinese-looking monster with stocking legs, a bulb ornament head, and eyes drawn in each end of a ribbon’s bow.

Sias campus, I’m told, looks much more festive this year than it has in the past. There are flags and lights strung criss-cross across European Street, and colored lights strewn over the bushes that line the walkway to Peter Hall (the foreign teachers’ hall). Pictures of Santa Claus are pasted everywhere. The Chinese sense of Christmas style, though comforting, is somewhat different from the Western sense. Here is a picture of a Christmas tree that’s been set in the middle of our campus’ Italian Square:

Since this photo was taken, students have written wishes on white note cards and hung them all around the lower half of the tree.

The foreign teachers do what they can to add to the Christmas spirit: we had a contest in Peter Hall for the best-decorated floor. My floor won a few awards...

Our idea: make snowmen of ourselves

My students helped us decorate

I bought a Christmas tree of my own. I thought it would be a worthy investment for my first Christmas away from home.

Classes have finished completely now. Half of the foreign teachers have returned home to America for the Christmas break. The rest have stayed here. There are a few reasons why I’ve decided to stay. You can see them here in a letter I wrote to my family not long ago:

Hey fam,

Culture week is finally over, at least for me. Today is North America day, but I am not really going to be involved. I did my part yesterday and sang a viking drinking song in the middle of a square and wore a traditional Norwegian dress (and stamped passports and posed for pictures about every 5 seconds or less :). The students really seemed to love it all, so I guess it was all worth it in the end. I had one dance last night, and that was my last. Now a little bit of my cold came back and I'm planning on getting some alone time in my room today and maybe watching a movie while i lesson plan!

I got your package, mom, and it rocked! It felt good just to be able to read the labels and names of what I'm eating (even though I don't usually read labels...just knowing that I could if I wanted to was a comfort). I ate a Reese's right away and I think it was the best Reese's I've ever had. A nice ending to my culture week work.

I wanted to send you this e-mail to make clear to everyone that I am not coming home for Christmas. That's not an easy thing for me to say, but I realized I had left things hanging for you since I'd left, not giving you a definitive answer on the subject, though in my own mind I think I had decided awhile ago that I'm not coming back until the school year is over. Last week, I felt some doubts about whether or not I should really stay here over Christmas, because I started to miss you all very much, but the more I think about it and talk with other teachers, the more I feel this is the right thing to do. I don't really have the finances to go home andtravel in China and start paying off my loans. And I don't think it would be very wise for me to leave after only being here three months, adjust to America for a month, and then come back to adjust again for four months. Adjustment-wise, I think it would be better to just stay in Asia. I also hope to get to see a lot during January and part of February: I hope to start making more definite travel plans with the teachers now that culture week is over. There has been talk amongst some of us already to stay at Sias through Christmas and then go North for the Harbin ice festival, and from there make our way South and maybe even eventually move into Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

I hope that you understand. I think I will ask Bob to use my decision to stay to benefit the students in some way -- I might have some opportunities to visit some of them over the break. Even if not, I know he can use the time to equip me to teach the second semester, to keep me thinking about the Chinese people, to keep me working at understanding foreign cultures, and all-in-all to return to Sias more prepared to serve students again.

Missing a Christmas at home will feel like a sacrifice even if I see all of Asia while I'm gone, and since it will feel like a sacrifice, I figure I'll ask Bob to make it a sacrifice for the sake of the students. I would be lying right now if I said the students were my motivation to stay here over Christmas. Mostly, I just think it would be good for me in the long run, but I do believe Bob can, regardless of my motivations, use my staying to benefit students. So I'm thinking of it this way -- "Bob, it's better for me adjustment-wise and financially to stay here... so since I'm staying anyway, make my stay a sacrifice that benefits the students."

Love you all and miss you!

annie

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.