Mexican Dinner

I'm not sure what the inspiration was (likely homesickness), but we decided to have a Mexican dinner in Shanghai at Janette's house. I initially made the video to show my family what my corner of the world looks like and it didn't turn out half bad, so I hope you like it. Here's a recap of the weekend.

Knock on wood

    If there was ever going to be a day for the government to deport me, it may be today. Although, knock on wood, I’ll say it’s unlikely. As my friends and family found out this summer that I’m on my way to China, the overwhelming majority of the feedback consisted of cautionary tales and suggestions. Their concerns didn’t surround my health, diet, living accommodations or urban crime woes. Cue O Fortuna, Uncle Mao is out to get you (and this time, it’s personal). My dad went as far as to say, “You just don’t know communism.” Meaning, you’d be afraid if you knew better.

“You’re saying the government is lying to us, right?” is the semi-question from a student that made me think the sentence with which this blog post opens. A colleague asked me to speak to his class about the western tenets of journalism, covering objectivism, advocacy journalism, media conglomerates, state versus corporate ownership, etc. 

I finished a comment on the political implications of public accessibility to only one news source and heard someone murmuring the translation in Chinese to his classmates. I tuned in and in the absence of my voice, he spoke louder. Of his last couple sentences, I deciphered, “...... China.... Chinese government... China.”

That’s not what I said. I talked about how indiscriminate criticism by a variety of organizations, from NPR to the New York Times to NBC, all contributed to giving the news credibility. There was no mention of China. 

I asked, “What was the last thing you said?”

“You’re saying the government is lying to us, right?” he said with a ‘Who, me?’ expression.

I was irked. I didn't state the implications as facts, like he had relayed. 

“No,” I said. “I’m asking, how can you know one way or the other?”

“We can trust the government.”

“Why do you trust the government? Isn’t trust earned?”

“We can trust them.”

I felt the sting of regret after my next question, “Because you want to or because you have to?”

The feeling was temporary because the entire class intervened chorally, “Have to,” ending the conversation.

This encounter evidences the one comment I want to tell people about China right now: It is no Soviet Union.

Sure, when President Barack Obama visited last week, activists and bloggers were detained for the duration of his stay. The judicial system is corrupt and harsh. Local Party politics is the best business next to religion. Worse, the Great Firewall has prevented me from watching all those darned kitten-laden youtube videos that evidently merit an iPhone app. 

Meanwhile, due to China’s investment in infrastructure, American cities are going to look old and run down by comparison in a couple years. They’re fairing better than any other country against the Great Recession. Higher education is becoming increasingly accessible. Also, China’s clean energy program is giving Nor-Cal a run for its money.

However unconstrained the government’s power may be, unlike the USSR, pure paranoia isn’t used to substantiate public policy.

The ‘why do you trust the government’ conversation provokes hostilities, making it difficult to have. Various events from the Alien and Sedition Act to the creation of Gitmo nourish my skepticism, but my Chinese counterparts here don’t have a reserve of comparable examples. Tiananmen Square is not a buzz word for violently quelled student-led pro-democracy movement. Stating or implying it makes you an accuser.

Most importantly, though, my time here so far has been lovely. My students, in their uninhibited excitements, are lovely. The older folks who gather in groups of up to 40 on street corners and parking lots for their morning tai chi and evening dance routines are lovely. The ritual gatherings with my friends/urban family are lovely. Learning Chinese has been excruciating. In that department, I ain’t getting no love. 

Halloween. Polly, moi, Ale, Lizly and Janette in Suzhou

*Btw: After the rant in my previous post, I thought this particularly ironic.

Sociacommarxism

Uncomfortable silences aren’t new to my classrooms.     

     "That's right. In which other countries is Chinese spoken?"

     "Singapore."

     "Good, where else?"

     "Hong Kong," a student says.

     "Hong Kong is part of China," another one adds quickly.

     "Taiwan," someone says without raising their hand.

     Before I can validate the answer, it happens, "Taiwan is part of China."

     Deep uncomfortable silence. I fight back a smile.

     The students at Suzhou International Foreign Language School are not your typical Chinese kids. By nature of being a private school, their parents are well off, many of them owners of the Chinese factories we often generalize about (and I don't mean that rhetorically).

     So we start with a few soft pitches to the class: What's a good work to leisure time ratio? What profession would or wouldn't you like to have? Then I evoke a couple literal head scratches across the room. Do men and women have equal job opportunities? In three out of four of my high school classes, there were voices to repudiate the knee-jerk "yes's!"

     Should people be allowed to form workers' unions? Everyone seemed indifferent to the concept. Should they be allowed to strike? "No, because factories can close," echoed as the first answer each time, then silence.

     This time, I was the one who found the subsequent silence irksome, almost bewildering. Momentarily glancing at the Chinese teachers conducting my evaluation, I trudged on. Why do workers strike? Okay, why do they want more money? To get rich? Who depends on the worker? What kind of expenditures do families have (especially ones who work in factories)?

     So I'm in Marxist China, admittedly at a privileged institution, trying to provoke one of my commie students into defending the notion that workers should have the right to negotiate fair wages. I have ideas about what makes China communist, but it sure as hell is not the redistribution of wealth.

Happy 60th birthday People's Republic of China.

Questionable signage...

I expected to find these sorts of signs here, but that didn't diminish their noteworthiness.

Suzhou International Foreign Language School. Naturally, my school's acronym is SIFYLS

.... uh, silence

For the fourth time I shouted, “Where is the soap?” to an unresponsive crowd of 40 second graders, trying not to watch the spectacle that sidetracked my usually trigger-happy students. To my left, the homeroom teacher was dragging (and I mean dragging), a typically inattentive kid towards the door. “The soap is near the.....” The little guy was clawing the air, meanwhile slipping out of his shirt to escape. She lets go. I saw him break into a sprint in the direction of his seat and as he got there, I watched him mull over another dilemma: Uh, what now? He turns towards the back of the class, then realizes he’s trapped. With one Vader stare from the teacher, the poor kid crashes on the floor behind his desk. “Correct, the soap is near the T.V.” He got his chair back ten minutes later. 

Several days earlier, my tenth graders gave me an uncomfortable silence in class that I should probably start getting used to. It’s not easy coming up with discussion topics in a country where anything remotely political draws artificially blank stares. 


Science, I thought, would provoke appropriate yet thoughtful conversations. Would you eat genetically modified vegetables? Meat? Do you think computers will think on their own one day? Do you think couples should be able to choose the sex of their baby? Complete yet faint consensus to answer the last question, no. Why not, I ask. “No, because boys and girls are the same,” a bright female student says firmly and pointedly. Everyone’s eyes become fixed on one location and their stares transfixed. Within a third of a second I realize: oh shit, the one child policy, male preference, its social consequences, disproportionate male-female population..... shit.

Uncomfortable classroom situations haven’t deterred me from getting another teaching gig in Shanghai. I took the job because the pay is not bad and I get to commute to Shanghai on the weekends, though there’s a catch. I will be teaching English to kindergartners.

The People’s Republic of China is celebrating its 60th birthday, so I’ll be in Shanghai for a while taking advantage of a week long holiday. 


I’ll put up another post in a couple days of English grammatical curiosities and atrocities I’ve captured so far in China. Some are ‘laugh so hard you pee a little’ funny.

Let there be light.

Holding a pair of socks in my hand, I asked a woman at the market in Shanghai how much she wanted for them. 75 yuan(¥), nearly 11 dollars. Politely smiling, I replaced the socks exactly where I picked them up and started walking away. She grabbed my arm, how much am I willing to pay for them? Well, considering they’re tiny pieces of cloth I wear around my feet, no more than ¥5, I said. After two more attempts to walk away, I finally paid ¥20 for four pairs.

Polly and I took the 40 minute ride on the bullet train to Shanghai on Friday evening, in time to catch dinner with her sister and Lizly. (Polly, Lizly and I are neighbors and teach for the same school). I can’t fathom the electricity bills of cities in China, at least of the ones I’ve been to, considering the intensity of the pyrotechnic designs on every window of every building and skyscraper, including the outlines of highways and overpasses. In the meantime, there are tens of thousands of people around at any given moment. We arrived during rush hour, so the subway stations looked like an over-boiling pot of water with people constantly coming to the top and the subway cars bursting at the seams.

We went out Friday and Saturday night to various well-known places. I didn’t realize how accustomed I had become to Suzhou’s nightlife, which is populated mostly by Chinese but gives you ample opportunity to spot and mingle with foreigners. Most of the places I visited in Shanghai consisted of an overwhelmingly expat crowds. There is no question as to whether I enjoyed myself, but there was a different dynamic. Running into other foreigners when you’re out is fun, but I find places frequented by large groups of westerners to be a little tense. The prospect of moving to Shanghai is very appealing. Although, I don’t know if the issue of homogenous expat crowds will prevent me from doing so, or prove to be a temporary deterrence. Considering Shanghai’s close proximity to Suzhou, I’m sure there will be many more visits.

Shanghai is getting a little crazier right now because the International Expo is going take place there next year. Just as in preparations for the Beijing Olympics, half of the city is being renovated, because one can never have too many rainbow-hued lights adorning one’s manmade structures.

*Btw, the last three pics are from Suzhou. And click on any of the photos to get amazing resolution.

**We also took a ride on a bike-taxi in Shanghai... here's a quick video.

Nǐ hǎo Suzhou

I can only blame the belated creation of this blog on how good the dumplings (пельеми) and chǎo miàn are (‘chow mein’). It certainly feels like I’ve lived here more than two weeks. I was given my own furnished apartment, rice cooker and chop sticks included, on the top floor of the staff building on school grounds. Driving through Shanghai, construction cranes are scattered about the city and on the horizon as far as the eye can see. While on a bridge, I counted 28 cranes, all building structures with at least 15 floors. Suzhou, where I live, is aesthetically pleasing because although it seems just as much under construction as Shanghai, the development shares the city with large patches of green trees. Initially, the humidity was unbearable but it’s already acquiescing to fall.

Classes started just after that weekend. I teach about 20 lessons a week, 2nd graders and 10th graders. And yes, WTF is the deal with how spaced out those are? I had no say in choosing my classes, but así es la vida. Before I arrived, some told me Chinese kids may not be as rambunctious because, supposedly, they take their schooling far more seriously than Western kids: bullshit. Many are bright, but I have the spawn of Satan in at least five of my classes. The most remarkable difference I noticed is that the high school students are not nearly as awkward as those back home.

I always look forward to teaching my 10th graders because they affectionately poke fun at each other during class. Some take their English names more seriously than others. One girl’s name is Phantom and several boys insisted their names were Potato, Loofy and Big.

The 2nd graders, on the other hand, are responsible for my insomnia and sudden weight loss. Exaggerations aside, 90% of the time they’re lovely children who quarrel over hugging me and holding my hand, but when it’s a bad lesson, it’s awful. Luckily, it’s only happened a couple times, and it occurred right after lunch when they’re aching to take a “nappy-nap,” or during the last period, when they’d been in their 8th hour of learning that day.

As for my Mandarin, I have a tendency to learn verbs more quickly than nouns, so shopping, especially looking for a particular item, is a Las Vegas show production. I went hunting for an electric tea kettle and found myself staring at a selection in an electronics store. An employee started talking to me (ahem, at me) in Mandarin and my instincts produced: Nǐ yǒu (point at kettle) um...... (point at the price tag) xià? Translation: You have (point at kettle) um.... (point at the price tag) low? That was early in the game. I’ve since found a language buddy, a Chinese teacher, with whom I exchange English tips for Mandarin lessons. Earlier today I was able to explain to the taxi driver who everybody was in the car and how we know each other.

I’ll try to keep these entries short (the future ones will be shorter) because I know these things become taxing to follow. The internet in my building is down right now and most likely will not be up for another two weeks, so returning a messages may take a couple days.

Que esten bien. До побачення :)