First Week of Class

I can imagine that there are probably more than a couple of readers that I’ve lost because I’ve taken too long in between posts. Just so we can both be on the same page in terms of expectations, I’ll say that I’m probably going to be posting just about every week to two weeks, which, given the typical length of each post, seems appropriate. There might be the odd post here or there, but in general I would expect about one big one each week, especially towards the end of the week and the weekend—all 16 of my credit hours are packed into the first three weekdays, so Thursdays, Fridays and the weekend will be left for throwing myself into learning Mandarin, maybe practicing taiqi or some other kind of martial arts, reading, and posting on this blog. Thanks to everyone that’s read and especially to those that are still reading.

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I’m teaching seven speaking classes this semester and one writing class. As mentioned above, in total, that’s 16 credit hours—a full course load. In all, as it stands right now, I have just about 200 students in those eight classes. I say “as it stands right now” because, during the first three weeks of the semester, the students have the option of jumping in and out of classes that seem more or less conducive to their interests and study habits. So, because of the National Day holiday coming up two weeks from now, my classes will really not be set in stone until the second week of October—a frustrating prospect, when my job is largely to become quickly familiar with 200 students so that they feel comfortable speaking in front of and writing for a foreigner. For many of the freshman, I’m the first white person they’ve ever had as a teacher or as an acquaintance, and their reactions largely tell me that their minds are pretty blown by the whole scenario.

For the past two weeks previous to Monday I’ve been slowly picking away at the preparation process, so by the time last Saturday and Sunday rolled around, I felt quite comfortable with what I had set up. Walking into my first class on Monday made me feel even better—35 freshman faces stared up at me from their desks with a mixture of nervousness, amazement and excitement on their faces. This was their first ever class at Tsinghua. Many of them come from small towns in more rural provinces, and the fact that they had a young-looking white kid standing in front of them waiting to teach them how to speak English must have subsequently been quite a trip. I made a point of welcoming this first class to the university, and, as I did with each subsequent class, I informed them that it was an honor to be their teacher. I told them that I believed that, throughout the semester, there would be a tremendous amount of teaching being done not just by me but by them, and I mentioned that several assignments had been shaped in order to help them teach me a little bit more about this incredible new country I’m trying to wrap my head around a bit more.

The syllabi I’ve set up, which are largely the same for all of my speaking classes, are pretty comprehensive; I made sure to include some heady vocabulary and phrasing in there, so that we had something to go over on the very first day of class. For many of them, I think it was all a bit too much of a shock. I teach three freshman speaking courses for English majors. After each one, several students would hang around outside the classroom, wanting one of two things: 1) my mobile phone number so that they could have more time to practice their English/talk to me about basketball, or 2) a new syllabus that actually made sense. Several students went so far as to say that they literally understood nothing that I said. On her way out of class following the end of my third class on Monday, a girl repeated to me what she had said once already during class discussion: “I would like it more if you made this class fun.” When she had said it in front of the class earlier, I laughed and said that I’ll try to find a clown suit over the weekend and I’ll wear it to class on Monday.

Most freshman at Tsinghua have somewhere between 5 and 10 years of intensive experience with English. The issue is that this experience is almost entire relegated to reading and writing, and not to spoken English. By making the syllabus so comprehensive and (in typical fashion for me) wordy I had really thrown many of them into a bit of a tailspin of nerves and anxiety. There is also a somewhat dramatic quality apparent in these frazzled students somewhere in there, but I think this conclusion is tied into students perhaps making their situation sound worse with the hopes of me losing faith and making the course uselessly easy. For a student to say that they understood “nothing”—which several of them emphatically confirmed and reconfirmed, several times over, in English—seems to me a bit much.

Seven people showed up to my second class on Monday. During our orientation three weeks ago, we had been told by the department that all classes with less than 10 students enrolled would be cancelled. I asked the class if they had ever heard of this regulation, to which one girl replied, “oh, don’t worry—there’s more than 10 people in this class.” I responded by asking here where they were, then, on the first day of class. She laughed nervously in my face. I asked them to go around the room and to mention, in their oral introductions, from which province in China they were from. All seven of them let out a laugh simultaneously—“we’re Korean,” they told me.

The classes in the department are segregated by nationality; some classes have all Chinese students, and others have foreign students, the biggest contingency of which come from South Korea. Korean students enrolled at Tsinghua have an infamous relationship with the Department of Foreign Languages here. At our orientation, several different teachers spoke up to complain “about the Koreans.” In past classes that they had taught, several teachers noted that attendance and plagiarism were severe problems amongst their “foreign”/Korean classes. Apparently, several students had been failed but subsequently were granted a passing grade by the department after they went over the teacher’s head and appealed to one of the deans. The appeals process only involves the Chinese dean of the department and the complaining student, while the teacher of the course is left out of the equation. As one of my colleagues asked rhetorically outside of the conference room following the end of the meeting, “who goes to school in China to learn English, anyways?” Or so I’ve heard, many of the Korean students end up at Tsinghua after having been rejected from the universities in South Korea and America they applied to with more comprehensive English programs. The key factor in this whole equation seems to be money—parents of Korean students are willing to pay, and Tsinghua is more than happy to have the business. Left without much incentive to perform while going to school in a foreign country where partying is cheap, the Korean students in the department have gained the reputation of being unappreciative and lazy. They act, of course, just like many students from middle-class and upper middle-class families in America when they encounter the freedom and responsibility of university life. They are frequently cited as at times some of the most fun students to teach, as they are generally much more extroverted than their Chinese peers.

I have two foreign classes in total. All of my students in those classes are Korean, with two exceptions: in one class, there is a girl from Myanmar and another from Kazakhstan. The girl from Myanmar (formerly Burma) repeated her name to me at least six times, spelled it for me, and I still had absolutely no clue how to pronounce it. I also have two Uygur (pronounced “WEE-gur”) girls in two different classes. Uygurs are a famous (or infamous, to the Chinese government) ethnic minority from the largest province in China, Xinjiang, which takes up essentially the entire northwest quadrant of the country.

Like Tibetans, Uygurs speak a different language (a Turkish dialect), follow a different religion (Islam), and have had since they were incorporated into the country in 1949 an active secession movement that has been given to bouts of terrorism around China. During the Olympics, it was supposed threats by Uygur separatists that was marketed as the government’s excuse to crack down even further on security regulations designed supposedly to “protect” both Chinese and foreigners in the country—arbitrary measures like not allowing any foreign residents living on university grounds to have anyone stay overnight at their apartment, rules that are still in effect now and that will probably remain in effect for the foreseeable future. After my writing class on Tuesday evening, the Uygur student walked up to me outside and introduced herself. She at first just told me her name and thanked me for a nice first class, but as I was riding away she practically shouted into my back: “I’m a minority student!” I stopped in my tracks and turned around, and asked her where she was from. She was impressed that when she said Xinjiang (pronounced “szhin-jiang”) I asked if she was a Uygur. We talked for a moment about how I had heard about their culture from a friend in Boston who had done a lot of work to invite a threatened Uygur scholar to come study at her university, less for a visit and more for purposes of finding a safe haven outside of China. She sighed, kind of nervously smiled, and said, “yes, well…” It was the kind of sigh that told a hell of story. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Jena as the semester moves on about what it’s like to not conform in a country that is unhealthily obsessed with falling in line and not asking questions.

In many ways, the uniqueness of the people and the challenges that the foreign students pose to me might end up making them some of my most interesting students. One of the quirks that struck me like an anvil falling from the sky was when many of them, in their oral introductions to the class, brought up the issue of weight problems. When Jay, a Korean third-year student, stood up to introduce himself during my second period class on Monday, the words coming out of his mouth practically rumbled out of him—he looked a bit awkward, but the sheer size of him seemed to command the student’s respect. He was wearing a sweatsuit and looked as if he was either coming from the gym or heading there after class. He looked like he could have been a defensive end on the high school football team. “I used to be very fat,” he declared to 12 or so perfect strangers. “Very fat—over 100 kilograms. Then my father made me run 8 miles a day. I ran a lot and slowly got less fat. Now I enjoy staying in shape when I am not studying.” I commended Jay straight-facedly for his resolve and thanked him for his introduction. Earlier in the day, another girl had stood up and said something to the effect of, “I am a fat girl. I enjoy food very much, but maybe too much.” Again, I tried not to flinch in shock lest in be interpreted by the class as a malicious reaction. I told her that I did not think that she was fat—which, by American standards certainly, she wasn’t. It seemed as if the female Korean students in my classes were particularly preoccupied with weight issues, but there were comments made by Korean men as well as male and female Chinese students. I didn’t quite know what to say when each of them cited something about their weight in their introductions. It was something that, gauging by class reaction, was slightly embarrassing, but which was clearly discussed very openly anyways outside of class. I know that, at least in Chinese culture, extreme thinness (to an American’s eye) among women is a highly-valued characteristic. It seems as if weight is just something that is way more out in the open and subject to dialogue over here.

By far the biggest surprise of the first week was how much more accomplished the non-English majors were than the English majors in terms of their English skills. Three of the English major speaking courses I’m teaching are freshman courses, so although they’ve had a bunch of exposure to reading and writing English, many of them have never heard nor spoken much English at all in their lives. Zhang Nainai came up to me after our class on Tuesday morning looking very upset; she was one of my students who apparently did not understand anything at all about what had just happened in the last hour and a half of my class. She looked close to the brink of tears and could hardly express herself in English, under as much duress as she was at the moment. “I’m from a small town in Hunan,” she said, “and you’re the first foreign teacher I’ve ever had. The other students, I can tell they can see what you’re saying. But I can’t. What can I do?” I told her to, first of all, not worry so much—“it’s a long semester,” I told her, “and I guarantee you that you were not the only student in there who felt confused.” After she spent about ten minutes reiterating how scared she was about the class and about not doing well, she excused herself for taking up too much of my time and ran off. The foreign/Korean English majors that are second, third, and fourth year students are generally on about the same level in speaking ability as the Chinese freshman that I have. During their introductions, when I asked any of the girls whether or not they had many hobbies, the two most popular responses were “no” and “shopping”—one word answers. The most articulate answer I had came from Ralph, who had clearly had a thorough background in English. After standing up and brushing himself off, Ralph tousled his expensively-styled hair and broke into an extended metaphor comparing himself to a peach—“soft and fuzzy on the outside, sweet on the inside.” That drew giggles from the girls and high-fives from the boys in the class. I laughed gently and thanked him for the very poetic description.

Many of the engineers, architects, biologists, chemists, designers, and artists that populate the speaking elective courses that I teach actually possess a much greater knowledge of textbook English grammar than I do. Their pronunciation of course needs frequent correction, and they sometimes phrase things improperly, but they seemed to understand everything I said and I understood everything they said. They speak slowly but precisely, and there wasn’t one bit of heady vocabulary that escaped the grasp of at least one person in each class. Pressed for time because I had taken too long explaining the syllabus in one class, I said that we only had about one minute or less for each of the 35 of them to stand up and introduce themselves to the class. I’ll be damned if one of them took more than 45 seconds, and all of the each managed to fit in everything I requested of them—Chinese name, English name if they had one, major, and then “something about yourself that I wouldn’t know by looking at you.” Their responses were thoughtful and funny, and they were so efficient that we were left with 10 minutes to kill before the class ended. I opened up the floor for them to ask me questions, and I was barraged. Most poignantly, a girl asked me what differences I perceived between “perhaps the old, backwards China I was expecting and the new, modern China” I saw here in Beijing. I clarified that I wasn’t expecting to see cow pastures outside the campus walls, but that I was surprised particularly by how much the Haidian District (one part of which I learned tonight is known as the “Silicon Valley of China”) looks like a central business district and not an outlying neighborhood. These were by far my best students, and I think that three classes worth of them (around 110 in total) is going to make for some intelligent, heated discussion as the semester moves on.

I also began taking Mandarin lessons this week. There is a small language school down by the subway stop that is run by a Korean company that was recommended to me by a colleague, and, after my first class on Thursday night, I was happy with the teacher and the pace. I went again yesterday evening, and will be going to the class for an hour an a half, five days a week for the foreseeable future. The class is an eclectic one, to say the least—one Portuguese language teacher from Macau who teaches at Beijing University (BeiDa), a post-doctoral Japanese thirty-something also working out of BeiDa, an Icelandic girl, two Puerto Ricans, and a Norwegian. It’s a small class, so there’s plenty of time for the teacher—Teacher Ming (Ming laoshi), a young Chinese woman in her late 20s—to hear and correct all of our pronunciation at multiple points throughout the class. As of yet, I haven’t been asked to pay for any classes, so there’s another boon.

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I met Rob and his son, Doug, on the plane ride over from Newark into Beijing when I was first heading over to Paul’s place in Hong Kong before heading to Beijing. I met him while still sitting in the airport in New Jersey. Doug, who was about 7 or so years old, wandered over to me, fascinated by my headphones and egged on by the faces I was making at him. After a few minutes we were leafing through his Star Wars picture book together, looking for pictures of explosions. At one point during the flight over, John came by where I was sitting and reading and struck up a conversation about what I was going to be doing in China. He explained that he was in the scooter business—in the scooter machinery and parts business, specifically—and that he had been commuting back and forth between North Carolina and his supplier in Shandong province periodically for several years now. At first, the trips were to simply check on and fix some hiccups that were happening with the supply line, but China soon grew on him and he’s begun to spend more and more time over here as the years have passed. He’s a bright-eyed Stanford graduate who looks the part of a Californian intellectual, and the conversation was essentially an introductory lecture on “Foreign Chinese Entrepreneurism 101.” After we finished our conversation on the plane he handed me his card and told me to drop him a line when I settled in. I did, and today when he was in Haidian getting buying a camera lens he gave me a call and we met up for some fried rice, kung pao chicken, and a couple of beers. As I was sitting there talking to him about how things were getting on with the job at the university, it began to occur to me just how big and at the same time how small the world is, and how strange it is how these relationships that one forges while traveling or living abroad seem to literally fall out of the sky.

It was yet another moment of pleasurable vertigo, a feeling that has occurred several times over the first month or so I’ve been here in town. Dodging buses and scooters on the ride up Zhongguancunlu and into campus’ west gate, I couldn’t help but feel slightly integrated into this blossoming global city. I smiled at the ridiculous sense of pride washing over me as I smelled the mixture of sewage and willow leaves hanging in the night air. I've been sniffling constantly for the past week or so: seasonal allergies, I think. Every night it's getting colder now. Soon the mountains to the west of school will start changing colors as leaves begin to fall, and I will go hiking there. Autumn is coming in Beijing.