Ni hao lao shi?

The halfway point of my teaching gig is fast approaching, which warrants an update on my trials and tribulations as an educator. I’m starting to adapt to life in the jungle, but it’s not necessarily getting easier. Never have I had a job where success is so intimately tied to preparation. The time I invest in assembling lessons directly correlates to whether or not I can create the illusion that I’m actually an experienced professional.

Also included in this equation is the quality, or lack thereof, of the textbooks I’ve been assigned to teach. The books I use for my 7th to 10th grade students are mostly useful, but the travashamockery of an educational device known as “New Concept English,” which I have been relegated to use with my 6 graders, should be cordially invited to a book burning party. It would be a disgrace even if it was written in the 1950’s, but unfortunately it was published as recently as 1997.

Tucked neatly amongst a surplus of Britishism laden lessons, such as “Sorry, sir” and “What make (car) is it?” are assortments of confusing, annoying, and offensive situations. For example, a few lessons feature an unusually busty French exchange student. I buried my shamed face in chalk encrusted hands on several occasions after subjecting my students to the audio tape featuring Sophie, and her equally ridiculous and inaccurate French accent.

“Ha eeh, mah eeh nay um eez Soh fee. Nigh us to meet yew.”

The list of grievances could proceed indefinitely, but several other egregious offenses come to mind. Actual quotes from the text, which are intended to be repeated by the students, include such gems as “Would you care for some whisky?” “How about a cigarette?” or “Let’s go have a drink. There’s a bar next to the station.” The epitome of the book’s message can be wrapped up in the following example. A lesson about opposites featured various images and captions, such as a dirty mechanic and a clean nurse. Corresponding with an image of a “busy hair dresser,” was a woman kicking back with her feat up, while a mountain of dirty dishes sits idly by the sink in the foreground. The caption is “lazy housewife.”

So, as the semester has progressed, I’ve shifted towards abandoning the book completely and creating my own lessons from scratch, which is far more time consuming, but less conscience crushing. The combination of terrible teaching materials and the inexhaustible energy of 12 year olds, who are trapped in the confines of the classroom from 7am to 7pm, make my 6th grade classes by far the most difficult.

Luckily, this age group has an incredibly long attention span when it comes to hangman. I’ve realized, in the thinking outside of the box which goes along with being in another country, hangman is a really strange and violent game to teach small children. Anyways, they love it, and wouldn’t mind if it consumed every available minute of class time. However, there is a growing league of saboteurs who are intent on seeing the helpless man perish, constantly guessing letters such as z, x, and q, followed by a chorus of giggles from fellow saboteurs when an appendage is added to our sacrificial stick man. So, you can imagine their disappointment when they accidentally succeeded in solving the word “crazy.”
Taming these swarms of “Bebe’s Kids” has taken a toll on my mental stability. Most folks find it hard to imagine me directing the energy of a large group of children, and rightfully so. My usual carefree attitude is incompatible with commanding a mass of ten-second attention spans. I’ve been able to step my game up, but it requires such a departure from my ordinary state of being that it completely drains my energy reserves. I’ve adapted my daily routine by including afternoon naps and occasional meditation to repair the resulting psychological dissonance (I guess that Psychology degree is finally paying off).

These kids do have one redeeming factor, which is the unconditional enthusiasm and adoration they express towards their lao shi. This is most often manifested in the incessant screaming of my name whenever they spot me on campus, which may be the easiest “Where’s Waldo?” the world has ever seen. Sometimes, they show hints of being wiser beyond their years, and they manage to reach me on a deeper level. In the lesson about opposites which featured the lazy housewife, I was able to at least teach them the difference between hot and cold, and clean versus dirty. As the lesson was winding down, I put myself in a vulnerable situation by asking several all or nothing questions, such as, “Am I fat or thin, tall or short, and most importantly, am I young or old?” I wasn’t really concerned about the first two, but given my recent realization about being almost a decade removed from high school, I had doubts about the potential responses to the final question. To my surprise, all 168 of the little ones emphatically agreed that I was young, which resulted in me rewarding them with wild praise and temporarily forgiving them for their past transgressions.

For the most part, my experience with the high school students has been much more relaxing. Despite being prone to dozing off in class, before being violently awoken by my fist against their desk, they become actively engaged when I present them with an interesting lesson. Lively discussions have revolved around such topics as how to meet a girlfriend in America, which was essentially a crash course in terrible pick up lines. These kids are all planning to make it to the U.S., so don’t be surprised or offended if a lightweight Chinese boy approaches you and asks if your feet are tired. If you don’t know the line that follows this question, I would suggest remaining in blissful ignorance.
In a completely unexpected turn of events, I had to break up a full blown fist fight in my 10th grade class. During an otherwise innocent game of poker, there was apparently some instigation going on in Chinese, which ended up spiraling out of control. It took exactly 2 seconds of having my back turned for all hell to effectively break loose. Reacting to the horrified looks on the faces of my other 8 students, I did a one-eighty to find the remaining two in the midst of exchanging some passionate haymakers. In hindsight, I ran a significant risk of getting caught in the crossfire, but I immediately entered the ring and managed to shut down the dueling hormone factories. I thought my reaction was swift, but not before plenty of blood had been shed, and a pair of glasses crushed and tossed out the window. I still haven’t figured out if this event was an indication of the increasing Americanization of China, the behavior of the spoiled little emperor generation, or some other outside force I have yet to comprehend.

My brief halftime conclusion is that everyone should experience being a teacher at some point in life. Standing on “the other side” provides a perspective that’s hard to grasp when your just one of many menacing faces behind a desk. It’s a constant challenge that’s about as comfortable as sleeping standing up, but it’s a guaranteed escape from monotony that provokes constant creativity. There have been rare days I’ve cursed my current profession, along with my present nation of residence, but usually by the time the weekend rolls around I look back at the week in a favorable light. Basically, my experience as a teacher is similar to being a Raiders fan for the last few years. I put up with a lot of bullshit, and constant disorganization, but when even the slightest things go well I celebrate like I’ve won the Super Bowl.

Back in the day...

Since breaking out of the bubble of adolescence and into the collective pool of adulthood, I’ve acquired an increasing hunger for the wisdom of my more youth-impaired acquaintances. My assumptions about people over the age of thirty used to be that their conversations revolve solely around stock prices, arthritis, and nutritional values. Since clearing this mental hurdle I’ve obtained a bounty of valuable information and insight to life, which had previously eluded me. Although there’s times when I miss the feeling of being part of an exclusive mind-state that’s incomprehensible to adults, it’s impossible to turn back now that I know how much they have to offer. I recently had a mind blowing revelation that an entire decade has passed since I was in the identical position as my tenth grade students. My philosophy as a sixteen year old is now so foreign to me that my high school experience may as well have happened here in China. Anyways, I’ll save my viewpoints about my own personal aging process for a later date, but the point here is that as people age, they generally, or hopefully, become wiser and more interesting. This is the model of thinking that recently led me down a historical rabbit hole about a certain tier of the Chinese population.

Like any typical midday Wednesday, I was riding home for lunch on the city bus, staring blankly out of the rickety, blemish infested window. I was snapped out of my teaching induced daze, by a scooter silently blazing through my field of vision. Piloting the vehicle was a trendy looking Chinese kid, engaged in an animated conversation on a cell phone, while maneuvering the handlebars with his free hand. Clutching to his midsection for her dear life was an elderly woman, who I will assume was the kid’s grandmother. For a brief moment, while overtaking the bus, our eyes met, and the look on the woman’s face seemed to echo my exact sentiment of the moment; “China is so confusing.” The look in her gloomy, black eyes conveyed a feeling of being lost in the storm of change that has blanketed China’s recent history. I began to think of the tremendous transformation she's witnessed in her days. As soon as she vanished from my field of vision, my mind departed on a tangent, creating various imaginary biographies of her life leading up to this moment where she made eye contact with a rare lao wai, “foreigner,” on a city bus.

Eventually, I decided her fate as being born in the 1930’s to a large family in a small rural village, while Mao was leading a diminishing group of communist peasants on the long march. Her childhood memories probably consist of various forms of back breaking manual labor interspersed with various wars against outsiders, or between opposing Chinese groups. As a teenager, she witnessed Mao’s rejuvenated group rise to power, proclaiming the Peoples Republic of China. Maybe she met her husband while working in a steel factory, then participated in China's population explosion by birthing a handful of offspring. There’s no doubt she’s endured years of mass starvation, possibly claiming the lives of her own family members. She’s lived through Mao’s death, China’s ensuing economic reforms, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and most recently the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In her lifetime, she’s seen China go from suffering repeated, embarrassing exploitation at the hands of foreign invaders, to recently surpassing one of those countries, England, as the worlds 4th largest economy. Now she’s riding on an electric scooter, clutching onto a teenager in designer clothes talking on a mobile phone, being observed by a Californian.

Realistically, my language skills won’t allow me to directly obtain the information I would like from this woman's generation, but I cant help but wonder about their interpretation of modern China. I assume they must resent the naiveté that's likely rampant among the younger generations. All of my students were born in the era of China’s meteoric rise on the world stage. Certainly, in those 72 hours of weekly schooling they're indoctrinated with volumes of Chinese history, but if they’re anything like me in high school, they likely fail to grasp their position in the grand scheme of things. The only reality they know first hand is a China where you can buy anything your heart desires, burritos not included, where plasma screens and neon lights cover every available public space, and designer pants flash you the peace sign (see below). They can probably rattle off a list of dynasties and famous battles, but how would they possibly be able to comprehend obtaining food with ration tickets, or any of the other day to day realities of their predecessors?
Some members of the elder echelon of society seem to walk around with a subtle, mischievous smile glued to their face. It’s a look that exudes the advice, “Yeah, life is good now, but don’t get too used to it, or you’ll never be able to survive what I’ve been through.” This portion of the population has an unparalleled perspective of the world after living through the majority of 20th century China. Their world is a vastly different place than it was when they were children, or even compared to when they were 50. It's beyond my own comprehension as to how they're able to adjust to a society that bombards them with bizarre new images and icons, such as the aforementioned peace pants, that inspire feelings of intense confusion that I can only describe as WTF?! Who knows if that old woman on the scooter was even born in China, or what the exact sentiments are of the elderly, but one thing is certain, reality is in constant fluctuation in modern China. It's a frightening prospect, but my students could see more transformation in their lifetimes than was witnessed by their grandparents. Where that will leave China is unknown, but hopefully some wisdom and peace signs will be exchanged in the process.

Hi, Haibo.

After a torrential first four weeks of teaching in China, I was rewarded with an 8 day vacation to commemorate Chinese National Day, the annual celebration of the founding of The Peoples Republic of China on October 1, 1949. To demonstrate my nationalism, I escaped on a two hour bus ride to one of China’s, and therefore the world’s, most rapidly developing cities, Shanghai.

After briefly passing through several random rural enclaves, mountains of concrete began to sprout from the horizon as we approached one of the various satellite neighborhoods that are leeching onto Shanghai for dear life. Supposedly, each month the city expands with an addition the size of Houston, Texas! Before I could ask if we had reached our destination, we were floating through an ocean of air conditioning units, satellite dishes, and BMW’s.

Eerily reminiscent of my entry into Sao Paolo, Brazil, my entire field of vision was blanketed by concrete monstrosities and an army of cranes racing to increase the scope of this modern metropolis. I gazed wide-eyed out of the window like a country bumpkin completing a pilgrimage to the big city for the very first time. For more than thirty minutes we cruised along the elevated expressway past countless, identical apartment buildings, piercing the roof of a surprisingly clear sky. As the bus lurched to a halt, the passengers poured out onto the street, disappearing into the overwhelming anonymity that only a city of 20 million people can provide.

Navigating through the chaos, it didn’t take long for me to sharply revise my perception of China, which had been almost entirely based on life in quiet, little Huzhou. Quickly catching my attention was the existence of multiple foreigners on every block. Doing as the Chinese do, I found myself staring curiously at each one that crossed my path. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 foreigners living in Shanghai, and with this large population of foreign appetites comes a vast increase in the diversity of dining venues. Opportunities for culinary indulgence pulled me in every possible direction. My 5 days can mostly be summed up by my meals, which included a Brazilian steakhouse buffet, spaghetti Bolognese, a bacon mushroom burger, iced lattes, and Johnny Walker. Consuming almost anything my heart desired, strolling by Pizza Hut and Prada boutiques on tree lined streets, and hearing an array of non-Chinese languages, all nurtured the strange feeling that I was no longer in China. I could have easily been in any big city in the U.S. or Europe, which was an unusually disappointing feeling. All this points to a peculiar conundrum; Shanghai appears to be China’s least Chinese city, yet it seems to be the embodiment of everything that's currently taking place in this vast land.
Shanghai is developing at a staggering pace with increasing foreign influence, and the results are equally upsetting and amazing. I wonder how it’s possible for such blind expansion to continue without ruthless repercussions down the road, while simultaneously being in awe of the monumental organization and creativity required for such a place to even exist. While wandering the labyrinth of streets and expressways, you can’t help but catch the contagious feeling that you’re undoubtedly located in the center of the known universe.

Through most of China’s history, it has regarded itself as the center of the earth, most evident in its name, Zhongguo, or literally, the middle kingdom. To observe a single serving of this epic history, I paid a visit to the Shanghai museum, which is widely regarded as the best in China, featuring four floors of national artifacts spanning 5 millennia. My visit fell on the first of October, National Day, and as a result, entrance to the museum was free. The price for free admission was waiting in a line that came snaking out of the building and maneuvering myself around the masses once I made it inside. Most impressive was an exhibit of ancient, intricately adorned bronze sculptures. Admiring the exhibited works and contemplating their history provoked many a deep thought, but equally intriguing was observing the ways in which the museum patrons interacted with the exhibit. There's something strangely ironic about flocks of Chinese tourists taking pictures of a 5,000 year old bronze wine vessel with state-of-the-art cell phone cameras.

In retrospect, my time in Shanghai was an eye opening and perplexing introduction to one of the world’s greatest cities. It’s a place in constant motion and transformation where everything is for sale. It’s a poor peasant selling oranges to a Scandinavian tourist, while sharply dressed men abrasively chant, “Rolex, Rolex, Rolex,” in the ear of each male passerby. It’s where western appetites are satiated at unreasonably inflated prices and curious minds are further confused upon departure. Basically, it’s a city, and a country impossibly attempting to meld 5,000 years of continuous civilization and a communist façade with modern capitalistic globalization. Despite the difficulty of this endeavor, along with its center-of-the galaxy aura, Shanghai seems like an incredibly optimistic place.

This feeling is currently being conveyed by Haibo, an apparently friendly, sky blue, cartoon spokesman for the Shanghai 2010 International Expo, aka the world’s fair. Within a 50 mile radius of downtown Shanghai, you’re never likely to be more than 100 yards from some kind of Haibo manifestation, his ever waving hand greeting you at every turn, in preparation for an event that doesn’t begin for another 20 months. The expo is expected to generate over 50 million visitors during its five months of existence, which is impossible to comprehend, based on my experiences in the already overcrowded subway stations, continuously brimming at capacity. I don't doubt that Shanghai will be well prepared for their exhibition to the world in 2010, I just hope by that time I'm able to better comprehend this crazy place.