Ready to run, not really....

So here is the uniform that was given to me by the incredible Mr. Fish. He is my liaison here at the school and never seems to surprise me when he shows up at my door at 7am with an English grammar question, or tells me that there are a group of police officers that want to take me to lunch, or when I asked to fill the gapping whole that is my living room window he simply said " maybe in a month, maybe."

He truly is a great guy, who is sort of reminiscent of a Chinese monopoly man. So I recently told "Fish" that I would be running the Great Wall Marathon in Beijing. He was thrilled and actually didn't believe me for a good week or so. Lately whenever I see Fish he likes to smile and then dash past me and yell "first one to the top of the stairs is the winner," as he puffs on his 18th cigarette of the day. Yeah it's real funny after the tenth time when you are lugging around poster boards of Old McDonald's farm. So today I was on the bus headed into town and Fish called me on my cell phone. He told me he had something to give me and that i should come to his office as soon as possible.

He was very excited to present me with my very own Wulingyuan #1 Middle School track suit that I can wear on race day atop the Great Wall. This is what the students wear almost everyday so I plan to just come to class wearing it some time and see how much they freak out. I think it's pretty spiffy, now I'm really ready to roll.

Spainaird At The Door

Today, while I was mid "salute the sun" during my yoga video in the living room, I heard a knock at the door. I was surprised because the knock by no means was a China knock, which usually consists of a harsh banging, an attempt to open the very locked door and repeated yelling all within a matter of seconds. No, this was a faint and perhaps even foreign knock. I opened the door and a woman about mid-thirty was standing there with one of the senior English teachers at her side. She had a mid sized back pack on and was drenched from the rain.

She came in after telling the teacher thank you for taking her from the main gate of the school to my apartment and proceeded to put her stuff on the floor. Now you can imagine my surprise at this point, as I have never known a western foreigner to come to Wulingyuan the entire 8 months that I have been here. She explained that she was walking around town and someone came up to her and with a brief exchange of words gave her my phone number. I later managed to figure out that this random Chinese solicitor was in fact my friend Mr. Zhong, who naturally thought he should send this wandering European looking soul my way, but still at the time struck me as all very odd. So this lone traveler landed on my door step and was somply looking for some advice and a dry place to put down her pack on this rainy evening.

She explained that her name is Kristina, she's Spanish and she has managed to hitch hike from Spain to Hunan China. She started in Spain, traveling to Russia, Mongolia, northern China, Shanghai and then cut across to Hunan. She managed to go this whole distance without paying for a single train or plane ticket and only a handful of bus tickets. Her goal is to hitch hike from Spain to India. She was very friendly, a little loopy but had lots to share with me about her travels, including an impressive dvd of pictures. Her pictures from her Mongolian winter were incredible! She hitch hiked through the Gobi desert alone in the middle of winter! She stayed in yurt houses with local Mongolian families and lived off of rice, yak meat and grain alcohol for nearly a month.

She said that her travels only became really excited when she entered into China. She claims that the way she gets around hitch hiking in China is to stand on the pay toll islands and wait for people to stop and drill her with a barrage of questions. She has been picked up by the police several times in China and taken to police stations where she has to claim that she actually wants to hitch hike and that she doesn't need to be driven to the nearest big city. I can see this being a bit of a common problem for the average white faced foreigner as Hunan is not exactly the Disneyland or Golden Gate bridge of China. It's more like the Arkansas of China with some counties just south of me that are so underdeveloped that foreigners aren't allowed step foot in within the county lines. If you happen to find yourself in such counties you can be picked up by the local police and put on the next train bound for the capital city of Changsha. Additionally, Kristin doesn't speak any Chinese so I can't really imagine how any of these conversations and explanations happen. I have a hard enough time flagging down mini vans with door missing and trying to convince them that I actually do know where I'm going and that I intentionally want to go to some random town in the next county over.

The Chinese bumpkins who she hitches these rides from must think she has absolutely lost it, as the Chinese refuse to see why western travelers voluntarily like to "rough it," ala lonely planet style. People even have a hard time watching me take off for the weekend with my backpack on or even head out to the fields and go running for an hour or so. For people who have spent their lives doing back breaking labor and riding on the hard bed of a truck to and from work, they can't imagine why a person from a developed country would willingly submit themselves to this "real life" experience.

So Kristin asked to leave her things in my apartment and headed out of the school with only a raincoat on and a few yuan in her pocket. She refused to stay in my apartment as she knew that i wasn't expecting her and really didn't want to impose. I have no idea where she is planning to stay but I guess I will hear more about her travels tomorrow when she comes to pick up her things. I thought I was living a random China life but she seems to take the notion of unpredictable and boundless adventure to another level.

LEAVE ME ALONE CHINA!!!!

There are days when I can handle China just fine and then there are the days when all the little things add up and just make me want to put a hole through my cardboard excuse for a bathroom window. Here are a list of the annoyances as they happened today. You can be the judge are these things extremely annoying and would drive any sane person batty, or did i just wake up on the wrong side of a my hard mattress-less China bed?

1. Construction starts at 6:45am which consisted of loud banging and shouting/ hawking worker bumpkins creating enough noise to force me out of my bedroom.
2. The internet doesn't work, again. (I know i should be grateful to have it here since most people don't, but still it's nice to wake up to an email from a friend or family member especially when you can't sleep at 6:45am.)
3. The mound of laundry I have to get through just so I can have clean socks has to be washed item by item in my bathroom sink.
4. I hurt my hip running and have been icing it everyday but since ice packs don't exist in China I have been resorting to putting Beer cans in my shorts.
5. I can't plug in the refrigerator unless all other appliances are turned off due to a lack of electrical outlets so I have to wait 3 hours to freeze my beer can ice packs so I can ice my sore hip.
6. I dropped a beer can and it burst all over the kitchen and myself.
7. I went to the post office to mail my entry form for the Great Wall marathon and the woman at the counter assumed without asking that I wanted an envelope for mail being sent to foreign countries. When I returned the envelope with Beijing written on it she yelled at me and told me that I did it all wrong and made a huge scene so that the entire post office could see that I was a total idiot for writing on the wrong envelope. She then charged me for a new envelope after overcharging me for the fancy flowered foreign envelopes.
8. I went to the atm machine and two dirty little boys stood at my feet asking me what my pin number was and when i told them to go away they tried to snatch my receipt when it came out of slot. I grabbed it and stormed out of the bank as everyone around laughed.
9. As I got some corn to eat from a vendor on the street I looked next to me on the sidewalk and woman was squatting and holding her pantsless daughter between her legs helping her make a poop on the sidewalk. I really wanted to enjoy that corn too.
10. Throughout this whole venture into town I was assaulted with the normal "hellos" which I should mention aren't "hi, nice to see you" hellos they are drive by assault "HA-LOW!!!"'s that are always followed by laughing and pointing amongst a group of friends.
11. Went to the grocery store and a seemingly nice worker grabbed me by the hand and in the local language started shooting questions at me, and all I could make of it was, "what do you think, ok???" So she dragged me to the back and tried to force a huge partially rotten watermelon into my hands and when I told her I didn't want it she was like, "gosh why not, what's your problem I'm even giving it to you for 3 kuai." I told her I didn't feel like being fooled into buying her day old fruit so she wouldn't get in trouble by her boss.
12. Getting cut 3 times in line at the check out by men smoking inside the grocery store who just shove me aside and place their food on the counter. AND THE CLERKS WHO DO NOTHING ABOUT IT!!!!!!
13. Thinking I was nearly going to die on the van ride home because the driver liked to play chicken on the narrow roads with oncoming dump trucks, three wheeled carts, buses, cows, motorcycles and tractors, all without using his headlights!!!!

Ok so that's about it you can be the judge, complainer or no??? You think I would be used to all this by now......

All that junk!

I'm sitting on the grass outside my apartment reading my book and relishing in the fact that I don't have class and have five hours until I have to be anywhere. Spring in Wulingyuan on its good days can be spectacular- flowers, a running river, kids playing outside and eating pineapple. I'm leaning against a tree and smiling across the lawn to my neighbor who is an old woman who likes to spend her warm afternoons outside bundled up in a padded jacket, long dark polyester pants, and little black shoes sitting on small wooden chair with her hands clasped in her lap. For myself, a moment of reflection, writing about the quaint nature of this place while running my toes through the grass.
Mid sentence and mid thought that was probably orbiting around the ideas of culture, expression, communication I'm stopped by the abrupt blast and following crackle of a dated radio. The song that continues to play from the tiny tape player sitting at the side of the old woman comes to me from a far away memory of sweaty frat parties and general debauchery. "My Hump" is the song of choice for this woman taking her afternoon rest in the sun of the Chinese countryside. "What ya gonna do with all that junk, all that junk up in that trunk?" "My hump my hump mu lovely lady hump." My own mother would have a hard time identifying these words and phrases as her native tongue. The beauty of the whole expose was watching this woman just lean against the back of her chair close her eyes and let the lyrics of "My hump," fill the air.
Who knows who told her this was a song worth listening to or if anyone informed her that the topic of the song happened to be about the pride a woman has for her curvy figure and because she is so abnoxiously proud of it she chooses to refer to it as her "junk." These are the moments that I really love China when you realize that so many things are lost in translation and the intersection of culture is nothing short of utterly hilarious and ridiculous.

Monkeying around!

A little less than half an hour into our hike up Tianzi mountain which happens to be one of the beautiful scenic areas in my extended backyard, I came upon something a little too wild and rare to make me just continue on. I stopped with a sudden "oh my god" and made Rick stand perfectly still fearing that his towering stature might jolt the little creature into a spring board attack. I was imagining armies of monkeys swinging down from the trees and popping out from the hillside to defend their territory from these odd looking creatures.

The little monkey just stared at us and Rick was able to get some great photos and videos while I had a little moment of panic that I shared with a fellow monkey friend who decided to follow me down the path and take a monkey squat at my feet. We continued on and to our surprise on our way back down we came across what seemed to be a national convention of monkeys. I was nervous at this point and got a little squeaky trying to express to Rick that we really needed to get out of here quickly and quietly, as they really had us beat in shear numbers. At this point I had lost him because Rick was like a little kid at the zoo who stands in front of the don't fee the animals sign and still manages to find that piece of popcorn in his pocket to throw to the monkeys. So he bent down to have a national geographic moment with the monkeys as I proceeded on down the path trying not to make eye contact with the barrage of little Buddhas holding court.

Suddenly I hear a screeching and hissing sound come from behind and turn around to see a 6'2'' man running down the hill with camera in hand trying to escape a pack of ten or more raging monkeys. Teeth were barred, they were ready to go down with a scrappy fight and tackle the intruding giant hairless, poll like monkey who simply got to close to a precious baby and mother. Rick's risk taking, adventurer photography actually did pay off and we now have a great picture of momma and baby monkey to prove it. However, in the future I would like to proceed with relaxing hikes in nature without flashing images of rabbies shots and helicopter rescues to Hong Kong hospitals due to severe monkey afflictions.

A Dose of China Reality......Yet Again.

I will let this letter that I received under my door at 10:30pm last night basically speak for itself. The context being that student Kelly slipped this letter under my door after school last night. She is trying to help a fellow classmate who unfortunately recently failed his county wide oral English exam. All students must past this basic proficiency exam if they wish to go to college and major in something pertaining to social science or humanities. Kelly is a very perceptive and generous seventeen year old and has immense drive to help others, often me included. Saturday evening she came to me again at 10:30pm after her classes were over for the day and explained her friend's situation and asked me if on Sunday I would be willing to tutor him. Oh course I was willing and the next day spent my Easter Sunday sitting under a tree outside my apartment waiting for this student to arrive. I waited for about three hours and he never showed. This is the letter of explanation that Kelly slipped under my door that she was too embarrassed to deliver in person.

Natalie,
Hello!
I'm sorry about today. Because there is something with the boy-my friend. Today he went back home to get the money which is to give to the school. Because his family is too poor that he need to make parts of money by himself. He often work for other farmers to get a few money. In order to collect more money, so he worked for others the whole afternoon. He asked someone to take a message to me to let me say sorry to you. We really feel sorry about this thing and we didn't want to waste your time on purpose. I hope you can understand us.
About my friend the boy GuoDong. I really want to help him and indirectly give some money to him, but he didn't accept. He thought that he is able to run his life well and he should try his best to complete his study. He is very great I think. I can learn many life knowledge from him!
- Kelly

Two remarks, first I have to note that the school schedule for this student's grade consist of school Monday- Saturday 6:00am- 10:30pm and Sundays 7:00am-12:00 and then resumes at 5:40pm and finishes at 10:30pm. So this student was tilling the fields in order to pay the school fee from 12:30-5:30pm on his one free Sunday afternoon.
My second remark, just pertains to the observation that the dean of the school waxes his new white Honda complete with MaoZeDong dashboard ornament every weekend, and his wife seems to enjoy a new fur lined jacket every time I see her. China?????????

No Crybabies!

I don't know if it's something in the rice porridge that they feed these children, or the lack of incessant Tyco toy stimulation, or the constant attention from a grandparent, aunt, cousin, sibling or neighbor but these Chinese babies really never cry. They always seems so passifyed like little opium doused Buddhas, that make their way through the day on motorbikes, crowded buses, and congested trains.

One thing I have noticed though, when the children are of an immobile age they are rarely put down in contraptions such as strollers, car seats, or play pens . Since these plastic commodities come from the world of privledged child rearing, these babies are simply held or hoisted on a back and taken out for a day with grandma. They seem to generally be pretty content watching the world go by and rarely do you see them kicking and struggling against the confines of their little carrier contraptions. They also are tossed around like they have about twelve lives, as I noticed yesterday when I was sitting in my apartment listening to the sounds of two year old YuanYuan playing outside my door. He generally runs around the entire campus looking for adventure until you hear his grandma screaming out the window for him to come back about a half an hour after he's been gone.
The other day as I was sitting at my computer and listening to YuanYuan play at the top of the stairs when I heard the inevitable thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud as he had toppled down the entire length of the concrete stairs. There was the silence before the storm, where I sat and cringed at my computer imagining the purple hue swelling his face and the gasping, soundless scream gaining strength. I walked outside and he began to cry and wail so I picked him up and the crying stopped after about a thirty second catharsis. His grandma came out and said, "oh, he's ok, maybe next time he will learn." That was all the time they were going to spend on that trauma, and rightfully so because YuanYuan needed to get back to important sessions of playing Automan at the top of the concrete stairwell.

Inspiration please?

"Character is what we are in the dark."-Dwight L Moody

I thought this was appropriate for how I was currently trying to navigate through my battles in China.
Dark as of now would be the relentless day to day struggles of teaching and living in China. Though I also have been thinking about this dark as the situations we find ourselves in where we have to act on our strongest beliefs when they fall outside of the realm of approval, glory or incentives.

13 year olds- Cages? or Clothes Lines?

Today was probably my lowest day of teaching for the following reasons. I had to teach 4 Junior 2 classes which are the 12- 13 year olds(really enough said there,) I ran out of construction paper and the closest store to sell it is an hour by bus, and by the end of the day I lost my voice and my mind.

When i was 13 and knee deep in a pre-teen tantrums my grandmother always used to tell me that I wouldn't understand how frustrating and heart breaking it is to watch your teenagers turn on you and see you as the object of their struggle until you yourself were a parent, who is just trying to do what's right. She was right on, not that teaching and parenting are exactly the same, as I get to pack up my stuff when that bell rings and head home to pop in a dvd and forget the chaos with the help of some canned laughter eventually leading me into a two hour cat nap on the couch. I do however, see now that the problem with teenagers is that they need someone to blame because their lives are so out of control so they choose the first person who tries to lay any ounce of authority on them, introduce foreign English teacher Natalie. Not only am I trying to lay down some expectations and create some tangible results in the form of oral English skills, but at the same time these students see me as an extremely easy target.

I walk into the classroom and the students are already bouncing off the walls with boiling angst from the last ten classes of the day where they have been scolded, embarrassed, hit, doubted, ridiculed and driven into the ground with monotonous Chinese drilling. So, you can expect that the moment the bell rings for my class to begin these hormone raging, over worked, under exercised teenage students are ready to have a field day with the one authority figure who in their minds can't really cause them too much trouble. I obviously refuse to hit, scold, or ridicule a student when they act out (not saying that I wouldn't love to pull a chair out from under a student every now and then.) So I am left with more subtle forms of punishments to be used when there is a behavior porblem, which often times doesn't land with the impact I had intended especially when you are dealing with a group of eighty.

Today was just like any other day except for the fact that I knew I had a lesson plan that was going to hit on all the necessary criteria that makes for a great class ie, reviewing previous chapters which boost their confidence, using colorful visuals (handmade), giving clear examples of the grammar points in the beginning of the activity so no one was lost, role play involving a student led activity, and a collaborative project where the students get to make their own class UFO! What I have come to learn that no matter how hard you try or how much effort you put into something you really can't make a hormonal, insecure and frustrated teenager cooperate if they have already decided that its just not in the cards for that day.

I hope that I am painting a clear enough picture when I describe my Junior 2 students, because they in no way resemble that really smart and quiet Chinese kid who was in your Science class in sixth grade and always worked two chapters ahead of the rest of the class. That notion of a Chinese student is one that is born out of an specific cultural experience namely rooted in the pressures of being an immigrant and trying to work within a system that doesn't make allowances for non-native speaking, first generation students. Within the Chinese school system you have the full spectrum of students just like any typical American public middle school, the only difference being they're all Chinese and they're all extremely overworked. You have your nerds, suck ups, model students and then you have your too cool for middle school, latest trend wearing, mouthing off know it alls, followed by your angry, hyperactive, possibly ADD troublemakers. So in each class you have a good mix of each of these personality types and with a class size of about eighty students you can have multiple behavior problems all exploding at the same time.

The lesson was called "What were you doing when the UFO arrived?" The main grammar point was to talk about the past tense and work on using the pattern "what were you doing_________" and "I was________." Simple enough I thought as they had just been tested on this chapter the previous week. So we reviewed the words UFO, alien and reporter and then I asked two students to volunteer to be the reporters. These student took a series of questions outside to review for ten minutes. I had the same set of questions and I told the class they had just seen a UFO and they would have to describe it to me so I could draw it on the board. As they described the UFO and the alien I drew it on the board and then we reviewed it together before i erased the picture. Then i called the reporter students to come back inside and interview the students about the UFO they saw, while the reporters had to recreate the student's UFO with a drawing on the board. The lesson went pretty well but somehow every class got off course and led me to kick some students out, stop the entire activity and in one class just pack up and leave.

In one class I started by telling the students to get out their English books and turn to the chapter we would be reviewing and one of the students cursed like a little Chinese sailor-something pertaining to my mother when I came around to his desk and asked him where his book was. Another student told me not to call on him because he just wanted to sleep. Amidst all this there was the usual comic book reading, math homework desperately being copied, tape player being listen to, fire being lit in the back and general cocauphony of sound, it was a normal day in the Junior 2 classroom.

The thing that gets me the most is when the students talk about me in Chinese and think that I don't understand. In one class I made all the boys who were late from the soccer field stand outside in a line and say "Teacher Natalie, may I come in?" before they entered. After telling them to repeat it over and over because they wouldn't look me in the eyes or tried to get by with mumbling, finally nine out of ten of them came in and took their seats. The last student was the most difficult student though also very bright and knew exactly what he was supposed to say. He stood in the doorway and mumbled 'mayicomein?" I told him to repeat and he laughed straight at me and said "mayiNOcomein," and then looked at his buddy in the front row and in Chinese said "haha-but I don't want to come in!!" So I simply slammed the door at that moment and said, OK no problem!!! I tried to continue on with the class but was rudely distracted by a student who decided to hawk the biggest loggie so the whole class could hear not once but three times right onto the classroom floor. I then asked him to stand up and answer a question pertaining to the lesson and her merely shrugged his shoulders wound up again and hawk a big one right on the floor in front of me. "Out!!" he was out of there and went to join his buddies in the hall.

I then told the students (in Chinese so that I could be understood by everyone) that I felt that they didn't respect me or my class and that I could go to any other school in the county that wanted a foreign teacher. I told them that I really wanted to teach them English and that I left my family and came all the way from America to teach them and that I didn't feel like wasting my time if they didn't want to learn. Yet again one of the smart-ass students in the front row turned to his friend next to him and in Chinese said "Oh, do you miss your Mommy??" I turned to him and said "yes, I do, now OUT of the classroom!!!" So the class proceeded from there, as I had to take a deep breadth turn towards the black board and swallow the lump in my throat that was gaining strength and about ready to make me lose it in front my pre-teen army.

The hardest part about teaching this age group is that amongst all the trouble makers and kids who are constantly trying to find something to fight against or a way to prove themselves are the students who go unnoticed because they are getting by with good behavior. Most of the girls in my classes are fairly well behaved and are at least respectful to me even if they don't have the slightest idea of what's going on in English class. These girls though too often have to take the back seat to the negative attention that is given to the boys. I try to focus on the good that is accomplished in my classes whenever a students is brave enough to answer a question or volunteer but it gets tiring when you feel like the nagging considerably outweighs the encouraging.

I haven't lost faith in my ability to be a good teacher as I still teach seven classes of Junior 1(11 year olds), five classes of Senior 1(16 year olds) and one class of Senior 2 (17 year olds,) which are for the most part gratifying, fun, and effective. In other classes I have been able to teach grammar, songs, games, conduct interviews, write class poems, put on skits, play jokes all while using English and helping the students to build confidence in their speaking skills. I have my rough days with some of these classes too but at the end of the day I don't feel like the Wicked Witch of the West coming to enact punishments, shush until i'm blue in face and be on the other end of a chaotic 80 vs. 1 tug of war.