As mentioned in the previous post, I'm attending class at night trying to get my Chinese past sentence fragment-based banter (which can go a surprisingly long way over here) and into a new realm of maybe a complete sentence or two per "conversation" with Chinese friends and the various different Chinese institutions I buy things from--taxi cab drivers, waitresses, post office attendants, fruit vendors, etc. In an attempt to speed things up a bit, I jumped a textbook and went from the first of two Elementary Chinese classes to the first class of a two-level Intermediate Chinese curriculum. It's been a hellish past week or so trying to catch up with the work that I missed (I jumped into the class a week after it began), and in the class itself I'm usually found drinking a cup of black tea, trying to stay alert to perhaps every third word I hear.
On top of the dizzying speed with which dialogues are read to acclimate learners in the course to the real pace of Chinese speech, the young Chinese woman who teaches the class uses forced-march approach to storming through the textbook as if it was a battlefield to be won. My current laoshi ("teacher," literally translated as "old master"), unlike my last Chinese teacher who was content to chat in English for minutes at a time, throws us the occasional English word-or-two explanation in class as if they were pieces of gold. She is pleasantly merciless in a way that only a Chinese teacher could be. She has a type smile that can make you feel more stupid than a slice of toast. If you offer an example or make a comment that makes a limited amount of sense, the curdling "Ahhhhh?!" that she lets out is like a public execution is front of the rest of the class. Her slight stature, dedication to her craft, and the occasional "hen hao" ("very good") that she throws out when you finally get something right is enough to dull the sting of the emberassing moments. Whether or not you study because or her or in spite of her, it doesn't really matter, but most of the students seem to feel that the semi-berating is worth it--the classes feel like they're working, and each night class ends with headaches (at least for me) and the feeling that something had to have been accomplished in the last hour and a half.
The thing that also prevents me from getting too put off by our laoshi is the fact that I find her to be a fascinating cultural specimen--a real aiguoren, "love country person," an ardently nationalistic young Chinese woman. In typical Chinese fashion, money seems to be always lingering in her consciousness; very fifth example sentence she gives us in class has something to do with money--making/having/winning it and being happy, wanting it and being jealous, losing it and being sad, etc. Her smiles, bespeaking a pity for the stupidity of these foreigners who seem like they never will get this language right, also have embedded in them a pride that can be frustrating sometimes. We are the lions and she is the lion tamer, so it would seem. Last night in class, when the term for double-decker bus (双层车, shuangcengche, "pair of floors bus") came up, in broken English I commented how you could find those buses in London; as I put it then, they are "London buses."
She turned to me and her face dropped as if I had just said something terribly wrong or insulting. Smiling more pityingly than angrily, she wore an expresion that seemed to say, "You no so little, you ignorant foreigner." She then said, "Beijing ye you"--"Beijing has them, too." Given her tone and facial expression, the additional implication was something like: "and those are the only double-decker buses you or I need to know or care about."
My Japanese friend sitting to my right, who is no stranger to picking up on jingoistic Chinese rhetoric (the Japanese and Chinese have a very tense relationship stemming from repeated economic and military incursion by Japan into China throughout the 20th century), he kind of chuckled a bit to himself, as did another student. After a weird second or two, we moved on.
It felt as if I had just insulted my teacher's mother with what I said. I didn't think the comment had any political valence whatsoever, but this is what happens in a country that disavows political dialogue in favor of centralized control, thereby politicizing even non-political conversations and imbuing citizens like my teacher with a kind of paranoia which has to be absolutely exhausting to maintain. Many people, in conversations about China and the United States, describe their native country as "my China" and the US as "your America." There's a kind of internalization of nationalistic sentiment here that mixes individual and national identity in such a way that to compliment China is to directly compliment that person, and to deride China is to directly insult that person. This is why teachers here at the university really don't care very much what books I teach, Orwell or otherwise; they understand that the education system has already inculcated into young Chinese minds--the Chiense minds that are allowed to speak their minds, at least--a kind of synechdochical relationship that turns many people into thought police for themselves.
For all her quirks, my teacher is a great one. Although it's a lot of work, I think that the course is eventually going to pay off big time in terms of progress I make with the language. Who knows which pity is justified--her for my ignorance, or mine for hers. For now, I'm content to let them both cancel out en route to learning some more characters.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Writing English in Chinese
It's entirely possible that I'm losing a bit of my English ability as I make room in my head for all of these Chinese characters. Many people comment on how, every once in a while, the simplest English vocabulary words escape them in the middle of a conversation or, in the case of those I work with, sometimes in the middle of a class. I've found that, especially as I'm furiously writing down notes in both English and Chinese in language class each night, I end up spending about as much time jotting down the English as I do writing the 10-, 12-, 15-stroke characters next to their definition or explanation. In Chinese, if you want to write well (which I can't), you have to concentrate so much on fashioning each individual lines--a slanted hook, a thinning vertical stroke, a rounded-yet-angular swoosh--that, when you switch back to a familiar language like English, the focus on strokes doesn't quickly leave you. If you look at several of the less-complex characters, it might become apparent how, when you're trying to get things down quickly, you tend to do a lot of erasing and scratching out not just of the Chinese on the page, but the English as well: A 会 B 阳 C 忙 F 作 T 行 S 已 e 包.The above is computer Chinese and lacks the styling of practiced, written Chinese--an art form that many Chinese are apparently beginning to forget as word processors continue to replace horsehair pens and rice paper throughout the country. (I don't know if it's a direct result of the digital revolution, but I've already seen a Chinese friend or two forget how to write a character he/she should have known in the midst of writing down a note, a set of directions to a restaurant, etc.) Of the Chinese art that I've seen so far, I find the calligraphy by far the most compelling. Whereas a great deal of other Chinese studio art (particularly modern art) is frequently based on mimicry of western art forms, it's always refreshing to see the idiosyncrasies and mood that even a single well-crafted character can evoke. After thousands and thousands of times of writing this one word, it may look as if, for instance, late Ming and early Qing dynasty artists were rushing through their scrolls, possessed as they are by white space and a few either too-thickly or too-thinly brushes lines--lines that could have, it looks at first, been written by a child. After thousands of years and thousands of times writing these characters over and over again, the art had become a controlled act of letting go, concentrating while relaxing. The simultaneous intensity in ease is in each one of those characters, sculpted with artistic carelessness, with a type of sprezzatura you really don't see anywhere else in Chinese society.
Maybe it's the long history of these strokes that is trying to express itself as I stumble across my notebook every night in class. My struggling mind can't help but conceive of the strokes that comprise the alphabet as being imbued with the same type of meaning each individual stroke is granted in Mandarin, where even a small dot added to a character can completely change its pronunciation and meaning. If you forget to dot an i (or a lower-case j), no one is going to stumble confusedly through the rest of a note you just quickly wrote to them. I haven't really asked around much about the writing confusion (as opposed to the word-forgetting and speaking mix-ups) but it's funny how, even if it's only in my case, how the brain can mix things up. Tack onto the confusion between English and Chinese the fact that the language is interpreted through a intermediate, illustrative language called pinyin, and it perhaps gets easier to see how things get a bit muddled after a while.
I just saw the word, "mix," and thought of the Chinese character for "dumplings" (jiao, 饺), which contains the same radical as the character for "father"--ba, 爸. 饺子--jiaozi--dumplings--are eaten just after midnight on the first day of the Chinese New Year because, contained within the character for "dumplings," there is a cross, interpreted by Chinese as an intersection of time--of years, the old one and the new. Hence the presence of the same cross in the symbol for "father" (爸), where family generations intersect.
Now look at "mix" again. Imagine being able to look at a word with an "x" and therefore being able to determine that the word has something to do with something overlapping, changing--mixing. That's what Chinese is like. Interestingly, you can of course look at the "x" in "mix" in just that way you look at the cross in 爸 or 饺; a mix is a cross between different things, a mixture. Tricky Romans--creating words that do in fact have a form that follows their function after all.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Year of the Ox
Chinese New Year is determined not by western calendars but by the lunar calendar that has been used in China for thousands of years. The holiday usually falls at the end of January or the beginning of February. This year, festivities commenced on January 26th. The New Year marks the beginning of what is known as the Spring Festival. (That the Spring Festival commences in the depths of winter seems a bit confusing.) For 15 days following New Year’s Day, the most important of all the Chinese traditional festivals carries on. Families travel back to their hometowns to celebrate with their parents, and the whole country comes to something of a complete standstill while the cities are empty and the only sound you hear at night, rather than car horns, are fireworks—tons and tons of fireworks going off not only at night, but during the day as well. The festival has been described to me numerous times as “Christmas for Chinese,” with similarities lying of course in the quantity of celebrating rather than in what is being celebrated, at least for Christians.
I was initially hesitant that I had chosen to spend the holiday this year up in Harbin, but when I was invited back up to the ski mountain to spend the evening with some new compadres, I was psyched. In the meantime, some counselors from the camp lingering in Harbin before their flights left kept me pretty busy. Following Tom’s visit to my hotel room to drop off my pay, I thought that I was going to have two days of vegetation ahead of me before I jumped on a bus, then another bus, then into a cab to get back to the mountain. Instead, I received a call later that afternoon asking me if I wanted to go to lunch. As Tom had worked in Harbin for a year or so before he moved to Guangzhou, he knew of some good restaurants where some awesome northeastern Chinese food was to be had. After a fine lunch involving some seasoned, boiled pork that was practically falling off the bone, I decided to head out with Tom’s friend and a couple of the counselors to see some more sights and to do a bit of shopping.
We headed towards what Tom described as “the real Zhongyang Street,” a series of underground and above-ground shopping malls near the train station varying in levels of flashiness, and looked around for a bit. It turns out that Harbiners enjoy ice cream even in the depths of winter—it’s cheaper in winter, and the ice cream that gets made in Harbin is reputed to be the best in China. The stuff I had was great, at least. Other than the ice cream, I didn’t buy anything else while we were shopping. I was interested in maybe getting a “I came all the way to Harbin in winter and all I got was frostbite” –type of t-shirt, but apparently they don’t have those in China. We stopped by the Adidas store in one mall looking for t-shirts in general, and the price for the running shirt we looked at was 350RMB—insane, more than western prices. The two guys I was with were on a mission for one thing: Harbin sausage. We stopped by a market on our way back to the bus and, after they tried a bite of one kind of sausage, they proceeded to buy up a collective 400RMB-worth of the stuff. Two massive plastic bags full of sausage to be brought back to their families and friends for sampling. I’m sure they’re both having sausage fiestas with their families down south right about now.
That next morning everyone finally left town, and I left for the train station, where the long-distance buses took off. It was New Year’s Eve, and I was surprised by the lack of people running around trying to get on the bus and train with me. The temperature had come up a bit since the first day or two I was in Harbin, so waiting outside for the #6 wasn’t as impossible as it would have been 48 hours previous. The bus that pulled up looked like it had been constructed before the Cold War. A canvas flap hung over the front grate to prevent freezing cold air from seizing up the engine inside. As the driver came haphazardly around the turn into the ice-covered lot, the body of the bus swayed a couple of feet back and forth on its chassis. I didn’t know how much to pay, so I dropped a kuai into the box and no one said anything. I had clearly paid the correct amount.
I was told that this bus should take about an hour, and that I should get off at a place called “Ha Dong Zhan.” I knew that dong was “east” and zhan was “station,” so I felt confident that I would know the place when I saw it. We were indeed heading east, out of the city on the same route that we took when Sophie and I were in the cab a week before. We passed rows of older apartment buildings covered in decorative stone ribbons and bows, with finely-ivied column caps supporting the facades. Modern streetlights powered by the sun hung arching over the road, while modern-looking gateways made out of thin, twisted steel passed overhead as well. As we moved slowly out of town, the bus stopped several more times, and after about 20 minutes it was full up. I had overpacked for the trip, as usual, and finding a place for my large backpack was becoming more of a challenge. I was forced ultimately to place it down between my feet, in a filthy mix of crumbs, dirt and spittle, as the crowd on the bus became shoulder-to-shoulder. As we got closer to the station outside of town, the crowd thinned, until there was only a half-dozen people on the bus when we arrived at Ha Dong Zhan.
A gigantic gray block stood in front of me, marked in gigantic Chinese with the characters I was looking for. Nothing but a few windows broke the imposing front of the building, and the entrance off in the distance looked miniscule in the scheme of this architectural disaster. I walked across a deserted lot towards the “Warming Room” and was a bit disturbed by the fact that, despite the presence of well-worn paths through the snow outside, there was no one else around this building that could and felt like it should be filled with thousands of people. Inside the warming room, orange plastic seats were arrayed by the hundreds, with maybe 4 bodies sitting in them in total. I walked out and over to what I learned was the train ticket office, where I was directed finally to the bus station across the lot. I asked someone inside the bus station if I could get a ticket to Bin Xi, and the woman shook her head, hesitated, and then shook her head again. “Hold on one second,” she said.
The movie continued. The woman walked briskly out of her office, across the expanse of the bus station’s deserted waiting room floor, and up into a “guarded” stairwell. I heard her footsteps all the way as she rose several stories into the air and reappeared on an elevated walkway overlooking the waiting room, where she walked down past a series of unmarked office doors, knocked on one in what may have been a random fashion, and went inside. In a few seconds, she exited the office, same expression on her face, walked back down the walkway, down the loud stairs, and out onto the floor. “There are no more buses to Bin Xi today,” I think she said, “but one bus goes through Bin Xi, although it’s not supposed to stop there.” I figured out this conversation maybe 20 minutes later while I was sitting on said bus, but at the moment all I could say was, “that’s alright,” not really sure about what I was confirming as “alright.” I was walked outside to a more comfortable-looking coach bus, threw my bag underneath, and got on, relatively sure though not certain that I was going where I wanted to go.
Not only was I escorted onto the bus and shown a seat by someone, but while I was getting off of the bus to get a bottle of water, I smashed my head on the overhead compartment, completing the image for everyone on board of the clueless, clumsy foreigner. I “saved some face,” as the Chinese love saying, when the bus got much more crowded and I gave my seat to a package-laden elderly Chinese woman heading home for the holidays with gifts for her children and grandchildren. When the attendant came back and asked why I wasn’t sitting and I gestured to the woman next to me, the shocked face of “maybe the foreign barbarian isn’t as much of an oaf as I originally thought” came across her visage as she remarked something to the effect of, “Why is it that it’s only the foreigner who acts Chinese on this bus…” When another older woman got onto the bus a few minutes later, a young Chinese guy sitting behind me jumped up quickly to give her his seat.
As city turned to factory turned to farmland outside the windows, I stepped aside as a slow steady stream of Chinese trickled off the bus and out into the white countryside. A woman or a man would shout to the driver to stop to get off on the side of a road where all that there was to be seen in any direction was a single small home, off in the distance down long, snowed-in drives. The images of not-unpleasant desolation continued until we arrived at a corner in the town of Bin Xi, which, although built up with colorful street signs and various different shops, was deserted. Scores of three-wheeled cabs whipped around street corners, picking off waiting pedestrians one by one, until one stopped in front of me.
For 40 kuai I was taken out through town and again into the countryside, along a road that was sometimes paved and sometimes not, around corners that I thought were going to kill us both. The cabbie, a native of Bin Xi, knew the exact limits of his whip, and, although we did have a couple of slides at different points, it was never anything too serious. What was pretty interesting was when, after the road split in two for each direction of traffic, we saw bearing down on us on the same side of the road various different coach buses and SUVs who apparently didn’t understand that they were supposed to be on the other side of the median. It was nothing that a little breaking and pulling off to the side couldn’t fix, but I couldn’t get why everyone liked our side of the road so much more than their own. The driver would honk at his friends as we passed them by, men dressed in black talking on cell phones, walking around the 3 or 4 villages that we passed through. An older woman dressed in a couple of sweaters and a shawl walked along the bitter cold roadside from one village to another, the patterns protecting her head covered in the brightest colors I had seen in Heilongjiang.
I finally got to Jihua around quarter after two in the afternoon, and the several guys that I knew there luckily hadn’t forgotten about me. They were pretty impressed that I had not called at all on my way up to ask them for help or for further directions. I was thinking that it would be okay to stay in a spare bed in the worker’s dormitory down the access road, but apparently that is strictly verboten for foreigners. Instead, because I was “very good friends” with some of the guys that worked there, I was given a bed upstairs in the lodge for 40 kuai a night—awesome deal, considering that I was at one of the nicest (as well as one of the only) ski lodges in China and there wasn’t really a whole bunch of other options, no matter what price they said. Before I had even put my stuff down in my room upstairs I hurried up to the restaurant on the second floor, where I had two giant plates of food. I hadn’t eaten practically nothing since dinner the night before, and I was famished. I went back downstairs and waited at the bar for my friend, Zhang Long, to get out of work behind the boots counters.
In a food coma from lunch, I passed out on the bar table for a few minutes and was woken up by Long to help me getting my stuff up to my room. Before I had put my bag down on my bed, anticipating a bit more rest before dinner, he began smilingly pushing me out to door to go downstairs for New Year’s dinner. I was escorted up to the banquet hall where there had to have been about 600 Chinese—the entire mountain staff, their friends and families—sitting around large round tables with feasts arrayed out in front of them. Full chickens, fish, potatoes, vegetables, sweet and sour pork, everything. Shows were going on on the stage in front of the crowd, and members of the audience were able to voice their approval with kazoos and cheap plastic clapping devices. I got a bit of a round of applause as I walked through a sea of reddened faces to my seat. I was so pissed I had just pounded all that friend rice instead of this feast, but I sat down and did my best to polish off a bit of the food I had in front of me.
I was sat at a table with several other guests invited by the boss of the resort, I believe. The son of one of the families sitting there spoke great English, and we struck up a conversation about the typical things: what I’m doing in China, where he’s studying, where we’re both from, etc. In the meantime, the four or five guys I knew who worked at Jihua came up to me with various groups of people to introduce me to, holding bottles of beer in their hands to pour into my cup for a celebratory toast. My new friend sitting next to me at the table, Dazhao, mentioned jokingly that I was “a dead man”—I was the only white guy in the room, and my friend’s toasts had emboldened some other random dudes to walk up to me for a toast as well. The bombardment only went on for maybe a half hour, and the thing that saved me was the fact that someone had wisely decided to use as beer cups the tiny paper cups typically used with office water coolers. In the meantime, I was happy to both up the ante in terms of the revelry that was being had that evening, while at the same time getting to taste some of the finest beer China has to offer.
As we sat around the table drinking and chatting, Dazhao explained to me some different Chinese traditions involved in the New Year’s Eve meal. If a family is wealthy enough, a fish is always eaten on New Year’s Eve, because the Mandarin pronunciation of the word for “fish” and the word for “savings” is pronounced identically. A fish eaten at New Year’s bodes well for a year upcoming where more money is put in the bank. (This tradition helped to shed some light on the Chinese’s reputation as being tremendous savers rather than spenders of money, and how hopes of unlocking the consuming power of this country have a very long way to go.) Every New Year’s, tons of people in the north of China will also eat dumplings throughout the Spring Festival. The character for dumplings contains two distinct crossing strokes that, during the Spring Festival season, stand for the intersection of two years, the one coming and the one going. Until that evening I also hadn’t known which of the twelve animals on the Chinese zodiac was represented by this year; we are now in the Year of the Ox.
As I sat there talking to Dazhao about Chinese traditions, Yijing, my friend from Yunnan, sat next to us and threw in his two cents every once in a while. After every sip of beer he would rub his eyes, until the whites of his eyeballs became even redder than his cheeks. As some folks began to saunter out of the room getting prepared for the CCTV-sponsored television bonanza that began at 8pm, a string of singers continued to come up to the microphone, each one a bit worse at singing and a bit more red than the last. Long tapped me on the shoulder and ask if I wanted to sing a song, and that’s all it took for the entire table to begin to plead/demand that I get up and sing something—it was Chinese New Year, after all! It was a tradition!
No problem, right? I did buckle eventually, knowing only one song to the point that I would be willing to sing it a capella in front of three hundred Chinese. It’s a poem by Patrick Kavanagh sung to the tune of “Dawning of the Day.” The poem/song is popularly known as “On Raglan Road.” If you’re to ask any self-respecting balladeer to sing this song, even on St. Patrick’s Day, most will abstain and will tell you that it’s already been sung the best it ever will be by the banjo player Luke Kelly, formerly of the Dubliners. I figured that probably no one in that room had any idea who Luke Kelly or Patrick Kavanagh were, so I seized my opportunity:
On Raglan Road, of an autumn day, I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday rue;
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street, in November, we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge;
The Queen of Hearts still making tart, and I not making hay—
Oh I loved too much, and by such by such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind, I gave her the secret sign
That’s known to the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. Without stint, I gave her poems to say,
With her own name there, and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May.
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly, my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should a creature made of clay:
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
Moving at a slow pace, taking maybe four minutes, I got through the entire thing. The first verse was a mess as I tried to find the right key, but by the third verse things were swinging along nicely. The intonation was decent, and I hope that, with Dazhao’s explanation to the crowd about the song’s content before I began, some of the effect carried across the language barrier. The song was a tremendous amount of fun to sing, and I can see how so many Chinese and people everywhere get addicted to that feeling. Luke and Patrick may have done a couple rotations in their graves, but they can appreciate the uniqueness of the situation, I’m sure.
The rest of that evening was taken up primarily with watching television—lots and lots of it. People in China love TV—absolutely love it. All of the programming is strictly controlled by CCTV in Beijing or by their satellite organizations in the provinces, of course. The crown jewel of their programming season is the marathon that they have in the run-up to and immediately after midnight on New Years. From 8pm until 2am, cable was awash in floor shows, game shows, talent shows, comedy skits, and acrobatic acts. Some of the comedy was difficult to understand, but some of the acrobatic exhibitions were absolutely out of this world—you didn’t have to speak Chinese to understand what was going on there. Pairs bouncing up and down on sprung balance beams, guys swinging from trapezes without nets, people walking around on giant rubber balls… pretty eye-catching stuff. And then there’s also the synchronized dancing, a la the stuff you saw in full force during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Organizing the hordes into an effective whole of course has its insidious political undertones, but this doesn’t take away from the tremendous beauty and skill involved in these performances.
While we were watching TV is Dazhao’s room, I tried to get some conversations in Chinese going with the dozen or so kids sitting there around me. As they cleared out, Dazhao and I spoke in fluent English about China and America. We began by talking about TV, naturally, about how Chinese television is controlled by the state, and about how many Chinese are obsessed with TV. Before Dazhao brought it up (as all educated Chinese do when this conversation happens), I accepted how, in American, content on the news and on TV is controlled by corporate rather than government interests—a point that is used to demonstrate that, while they may be sheep in a political sense, we are the sheep of a consumer culture based on endlessly buying or buying into shit. This point is of course a good one, but the counterpoint, dealing specifically now with news programs and the like, is that, whereas westerners are instructed in their education to be skeptical, that the truth is elusive, thereby allowing us to realize (sometimes despite ourselves) that everything we see on TV isn’t true, citizens in China are given only one explanation for all events by a government who claims to expound on the absolute truth composed of all of the information you need to know, conveniently packaged into television news programs and newspapers distributed by government-controlled organizations. There is no skepticism, no questioning—increasingly, some is being allowed, but only within the strict framework of an ideology that doesn’t undermine the government’s fundamental identity as an entirely benevolent force only for righteousness and justice. This is why, when you provide many Chinese with a valid, logical counterargument to their opinions on a certain issue, many feel confident in simply saying: “You don’t understand,” or “You’re wrong” without further explanation. They are exposed here, in the “Middle Kingdom,” to news purported to be all there is to know and all one needs to know, news that is ahead of the curve of that talked about at night in capitalist news programs vying for their viewers’ wallets. In China, it’s strange to say, “believing is seeing” when it comes to political/economic matters; everything educated folks need to know about the worldwide political situation they already know, and any contradictory information that is provided isn’t accepted on its own terms, but is instead accepted in terms that they’ve been internalizing since grade school or it’s rejected as false.
Of course students are prepared in school and in discussions with hard-line friends and adults for all of these counterarguments, and these conversations with friends sometimes turn into bitter disputes with rivals who in the light of political identity come to appear as enemies. Such was the case when, at a bar one night several months ago, I was talking about the academic scene in China with a guy who had two PhDs from Chinese universities in paleoanthropology, and who could speak English and French as well as Chinese. What was a fascinating conversation turned sour when, turning the conversation on a dime, he mentioned how “Chinese (and this is the way things are phrased over here—all of us, not “some” or “most” or “a few”) think of Americans as children.” It was said smilingly and, I thought, smugly, and I don’t know if I took it in the way it was meant (I still review the conversation in my head periodically, checking for clues), but over the next half an hour I went from speaking forcefully to yelling in defense of my views that, despite the youth of our nation—and not our civilization, despite the efforts of guys like this dude to demonstrate that Chinese civilization and writing in fact predates Egypt and hieroglyphics—our country’s reliance on the human faculty of choice, reason, and their offshoots to generate progress demonstrates an acknowledgment of people as adults, as opposed to the system of infantilizing forces of authoritarian regimes that rely on the government to be the hopefully-benevolent “parents” of a people whose political minds are actively atrophied in the hopes of achieving stability through the rule of an extremely powerful few.
AAANNNYYYwwaaayyss, this is my opinion, generated by what may have been a misinterpretation of a statement made by what maybe have been a friend while we were both drinking one night at a place called the Taku Club covered in neon lights and frosted glass. That whole aside was generated because I wanted to make the point that many Chinese feel as if they have the inside scoop on westerners in their realizing that the western media is largely controlled by certain interests, and that this believed-to-be exclusive realization leads to a snotty tone when they talk about these things that makes me want to go nuts. Getting back to the conversation with Dazhao, in continuing to use the boob tube as our conversation generator, Dazhao came up with the point that one of the thing you most popularly hear people say on CCTV is that “I didn’t have a choice”—“I sold my daughter because,” “I moved to the city because,” “I moved back to my hometown because…” Inside my head, as we were talking about the lack of choices available to Chinese, I was becoming increasingly ashamed of ever having felt (and, to some extent, continuing to feel) oppressed by the western and perhaps particularly American privilege of having so many life choices to make at this juncture in my life. (And this is the scary thing about authoritarian regimes—they work and thrive largely because people either don’t want to or feel they are incapable of making some of these tough decisions… They function, as I see it, on the desire that many of us have to be slaves, to one extent or another.) That I sometimes turn this time into a time for worry as opposed to a time for celebration is ridiculous, and Dazhao showed me that. The fear is, of course, that you make the wrong choices. As Dazhao put it, though, at least you can lie on your American deathbed at the end of your life and say to yourself soothingly, in Sinatra’s words, “I did it my way.”
To just stay on this very interesting series of conversations that I had with Dazhao for just a little bit more time: One of the other points that became clear in our conversation was how much Chinese know about American history specifically, how much they pride themselves on that knowledge, and how the education here appears to try to throw into alignment the history of post-1949 China and that of the United States. To name a few similarities that often come up: both revolutions were violent and conducted in resistance to the encroachment of foreign powers; both were based on experimental political ideas; and (this is the one you hear most about) both had/have their dark chapters in terms of acknowledging equal human rights for all citizens. This system of connection extends deeply into the Chinese idea of where “New China” (post-1949 China) has come from and, more importantly, where the government says New China is going—that is, into the position of global dominance that the United States currently enjoys. In political discussions about American history, some Chinese I’ve spoken to, before you check them, will go so far as to say they have better insights into the implications of events in our history than Americans do, assumedly mixing as the education system here does the progress and implications of Chinese history over the past sixty years with that of the relatively-young American nation. This vision/version of historical connectedness is extremely flawed—China and the US are two completely different countries coming from cultures espousing opposite political ideologies—but it allows for valuable insights, not so much in terms of projecting where China is going (as the government would have its citizens believe) but in terms of being a foreigner trying to understand the relationship between China and the rest of the world. As I came to see, Dazhao, too, was a member of the cult of George Washington, a famous figure here in China as he is often linked up in history books with Mao Zedong. The difference, Dazhao pointed out, was that, after battling during the revolution and serving two terms, Washington chose to step down, while Mao’s rule took on imperial proportions to the extent that he was planning on naming his son the ruler of China. Dazhao quoted for me the saying in Chinese equivalent to the English Lord Stanley’s (?) statement that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and how it was amazing how Washington didn’t fall into this model. I didn’t get into the fact that George Washington was surrounded by a slew of extraordinarily educated, brave founding fathers savvy in the political, military, and cultural affairs of the day who had helped to design a government based on accession of rule to other qualified participants, but the idea of Washington as a completely virtuous, upstanding American god wasn’t one that I wanted to wreck that evening, in my mind nor his.
Right at midnight things were interrupted by the explosion of fireworks going off outside the lodge’s front entrance. I snapped to attention and went running down the stairs as fast as a 6-year-old on Christmas morning, and caught the final 10 or 12 seconds of the display. The first word that comes to mind to describe Chinese fireworks, before “beautiful” or “colorful” or “elaborate,” is “loud.” Some of them seem to simply be quarter-sticks of dynamite sent up into the air that flash for a second and send out a shockwave of sound energy. They are the loudest goddamn fireworks you’ve ever head, so loud that your ears are left ringing and the tea ripples in your glass. The show at Jihua was a bit short for my liking, but I had a feeling that at some point, either here, in Harbin, or back in Beijing, some more fireworks would be available to watch or to be set off myself—awesome. After going back inside, we had some dumplings—called jiaozi in Chinese—delivered to the room. It is custom to eat jiaozi only after the New Year has begun, but after not having had much dinner around 5pm I was definitely ready for a good feed. The dumplings put me in an excellent mood for sleeping, which I did soon after polishing off the last one on my plate.
I spent the next morning writing and listening to music—mostly Liam Hayes’ new album, “Fed,” and some reggae dancehall and dub emceed by Kevin Martin, otherwise known as the Bug. At around 11am, Dazhao walked in to continue conversing—I was getting the impression that he was intent to get in as much English practice as humanly possible while I was around, and I was happy to oblige. I explained to him that my plane left for Beijing from Harbin the following afternoon and that I was planning on catching a cab tomorrow morning from Jihua back to the city. He then insisted that I come back now with his family to their home in Harbin to stay for the evening. I threw my stuff into my bag, got my passport back from the front desk, said a too-quick goodbye to my friends from the lodge, and jumped on the bus back to Harbin.
Before falling asleep for some of the ride, we spoke about the drinking culture in China, fresh on my mind after the previous night’s bacchanal. It didn’t seem fair or polite to single someone out for endless boozing. Although I don’t usually have much of a problem handling the requests that came my way, many Chinese men are routinely forced to drink until vomiting by friends, co-workers, and clients, despite knowledge of the common Asian biological aversion to alcohol, all in an attempt to “man up” and save face. Using the “tradition” argument—it’s been happening for a long time, therefore it’s correct—Dazhao explained that, particularly in business, bosses and clients believe that with alcohol comes honesty, just like in the west: “in vino veritas.” In more friendly situations, the idea isn’t so much competition (so he says—it is definitely about competition) as it is about self-knowledge, knowing your limits, and knowing what the point after which you will lose control of yourself—forget people’s names, knock things over, vomit, etc. Unfortunately, if the table hasn’t seen you vomit before, statements like “I’ve had enough” usually don’t go over too well—the presumption is, if you’re not knocking things over, or forgetting things, or puking, you haven’t had enough. The problem is that, once you reach this state, you begin to embarrass yourself and “lose face,” Chinese social suicide. I dropped the conversation eventually and just passed out, the gerbil in my head exhausted from having been running to nowhere for so long.
Mr. and Mrs. Qi asked the bus to stop and we jumped off onto the side of main road outside the center of Harbin. Dazhao’s parents stopped to by some stuff for dinner at the market while we brought our things back to the apartment, located on the eighth floor of an apartment building located in what Dazhao described as “the ghetto” or Harbin. After settling in, I began writing down some thoughts on the past several days as the Qis prepared a New Year’s Day feast. Dazhao’s doting mother took to some tasks she had been meaning to get after before they left for the ski mountain—one of them involved fixing a wall socket by sticking a screwdriver into a mess of wires behind the drywall, which didn’t seem quite kosher, but Dazhao was overseeing things and his background as an engineer suggested that, if his mother was going to fry herself, he’d probably say something. When she had finished up what she had planned to do, she darted around the modest apartment observing our every move. When she saw me pull out my second tissue to blow my nose, she insisted I was getting a cold and needed to take some pills—vitamin C, not acetaminophen. “Not these,” she said, pointing to the western medicine. “These will just get you more sick.” I took the vitamins without comment, smiling.
At one point I went into the kitchen to look for a while at Mr. Qi making dinner. As Mrs. Qi later admitted, “Unlike in most Chinese families, he’s the cook—I just do what he says in the kitchen!” In just about every other matter, it was Mrs. Qi who acted as the spokeswoman for the couple. Mr. Qi was a very reserved, handsome but quiet man who always looks tired and who smiles often. They both work for the same bank, where they make a combined 6500RMB a month—less than I make alone through my job. I watched Mr. Qi make the obligatory New Years’ jiaozi by quickly rolling up spoonfuls of diced shrimp, a minced bok choy-like vegetable and scrambled eggs into small dough pouches he pinched off with his flour-encrusted hands. He actually gave me a shot at baoing things—that is, pouching-up some dumplings. In classic, overly-meticulous style, it took me about 10 minutes to do three, so I was taken off bao duty and went back to writing at my laptop, arrayed as it was out on the ping-pong table/organizing platform in the center of the living room.
Dinner was spectacular and consisted—like any proper Chinese dinner, as Dazhao explained—of at least four courses: some sweet pickles, some boiled pork mixed with cabbage, a full rotisserie chicken, a small river fish for good luck, and of course plenty of dumplings. All of us had a bit of beer, with me and Mr. Qi continuing on at dinner with the drinking. I was amazed to see how folks in Harbin—in accordance with their enjoyment of ice cream in the winter, I suppose—like their beer cold, like back in the States. (I would say “back west,” but I realize that, particularly in the UK and Ireland, warm beer is practically a national pastime.) “It’s more refreshing,” Mr. Qi commented, “and it brings out the taste in Harbin beer.” The dinner conversation consisted mainly of small talk about where I was from and what I was doing in China. When we began to discuss my ancestry and my Irishness came up, Dazhao mentioned laughingly in English how his Mom loves Irish, “’cause they fight with the British, too.” He translated what he said for his mother, who gave the Chinese “mmm” in response—a sound made by many Chinese when uncomfortable subjects are broached, in which brevity is inversely related to the moment’s significance.
For the first time in my life that night I saw the movie, Kung Fu Panda, which every person I meet in China seems to love. It was in fact a very enjoyable movie, and I’m sure it has allowed many people in China to learn a great deal of English, based on its popularity. But if I read one more essay or cover letter using the quote from that movie spoken by the wise turtle under the peach tree—“Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, and today is a gift—that’s why they call it the ‘present’”—I am going to go completely insane. The sentiment is excellent, but in the Chinese drive to duplicate what has worked in the past rather than using something from past successes to create something new, clichés pop up at an astounding rate in the speech and writing of people over here, and it gets tiring hearing the same lines over and over again. Anyways, it was a great movie—heart-warming and all that as well as entertaining.
The next morning, before heading out to the bus station, I had an amazing breakfast at the Qis consisting of leftovers from the night before as well as some fruit salad, some different kind of cabbage, and what they described as “emperor’s rice.” Up by the volcanoes in northern Heilongjiang, there is a town called Wudalianchi, outside which I was told there are rice fields fed by spring water and guarded by army patrols. The rice from these fields feed those inside the walls of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese equivalent of the Capitol and the White House rolled into a single, secret compound next to the Forbidden City. Mr. Qi was able to get his hands on some through a client of his at the bank; if you are not Hu Jintao or his cronies, you apparently cannot eat this type of rice unless you know someone who’s pretty important in the government. The rice was pretty damn good—kind of had an “al dente” texture to it. Usually, most sticky white rice tends to ball up into these clods where you lose the sensation of eating individual grains. The Wudalianchi rice grains kept their integrity, and it did in fact feel like you had a mouthful of individual, fairly dry rice grains in your mouth while you were eating them, despite the fact that these grains stuck together so they could be eaten easily with chopsticks.
After the imperial rice, I was yelled at for not having my slippers on by Mrs. Qi, who insisted that, if your feet get cold, then your liver gets cold, which makes you much more prone to sickness. She also mentioned under her breath that a cold liver is bad for sex, as well. After taking a few more vitamin C pellets and throwing some more in my bag for the road, I packed up my stuff and was taken down to the airport bus station near Dazhao’s home by cab. We had exchanged cell phone and email information with one another that previous evening, so there was nothing left to do but say goodbye in the abrupt Chinese way—a simple handshake, a smile, then turn and go.
I was initially hesitant that I had chosen to spend the holiday this year up in Harbin, but when I was invited back up to the ski mountain to spend the evening with some new compadres, I was psyched. In the meantime, some counselors from the camp lingering in Harbin before their flights left kept me pretty busy. Following Tom’s visit to my hotel room to drop off my pay, I thought that I was going to have two days of vegetation ahead of me before I jumped on a bus, then another bus, then into a cab to get back to the mountain. Instead, I received a call later that afternoon asking me if I wanted to go to lunch. As Tom had worked in Harbin for a year or so before he moved to Guangzhou, he knew of some good restaurants where some awesome northeastern Chinese food was to be had. After a fine lunch involving some seasoned, boiled pork that was practically falling off the bone, I decided to head out with Tom’s friend and a couple of the counselors to see some more sights and to do a bit of shopping.
We headed towards what Tom described as “the real Zhongyang Street,” a series of underground and above-ground shopping malls near the train station varying in levels of flashiness, and looked around for a bit. It turns out that Harbiners enjoy ice cream even in the depths of winter—it’s cheaper in winter, and the ice cream that gets made in Harbin is reputed to be the best in China. The stuff I had was great, at least. Other than the ice cream, I didn’t buy anything else while we were shopping. I was interested in maybe getting a “I came all the way to Harbin in winter and all I got was frostbite” –type of t-shirt, but apparently they don’t have those in China. We stopped by the Adidas store in one mall looking for t-shirts in general, and the price for the running shirt we looked at was 350RMB—insane, more than western prices. The two guys I was with were on a mission for one thing: Harbin sausage. We stopped by a market on our way back to the bus and, after they tried a bite of one kind of sausage, they proceeded to buy up a collective 400RMB-worth of the stuff. Two massive plastic bags full of sausage to be brought back to their families and friends for sampling. I’m sure they’re both having sausage fiestas with their families down south right about now.
That next morning everyone finally left town, and I left for the train station, where the long-distance buses took off. It was New Year’s Eve, and I was surprised by the lack of people running around trying to get on the bus and train with me. The temperature had come up a bit since the first day or two I was in Harbin, so waiting outside for the #6 wasn’t as impossible as it would have been 48 hours previous. The bus that pulled up looked like it had been constructed before the Cold War. A canvas flap hung over the front grate to prevent freezing cold air from seizing up the engine inside. As the driver came haphazardly around the turn into the ice-covered lot, the body of the bus swayed a couple of feet back and forth on its chassis. I didn’t know how much to pay, so I dropped a kuai into the box and no one said anything. I had clearly paid the correct amount.
I was told that this bus should take about an hour, and that I should get off at a place called “Ha Dong Zhan.” I knew that dong was “east” and zhan was “station,” so I felt confident that I would know the place when I saw it. We were indeed heading east, out of the city on the same route that we took when Sophie and I were in the cab a week before. We passed rows of older apartment buildings covered in decorative stone ribbons and bows, with finely-ivied column caps supporting the facades. Modern streetlights powered by the sun hung arching over the road, while modern-looking gateways made out of thin, twisted steel passed overhead as well. As we moved slowly out of town, the bus stopped several more times, and after about 20 minutes it was full up. I had overpacked for the trip, as usual, and finding a place for my large backpack was becoming more of a challenge. I was forced ultimately to place it down between my feet, in a filthy mix of crumbs, dirt and spittle, as the crowd on the bus became shoulder-to-shoulder. As we got closer to the station outside of town, the crowd thinned, until there was only a half-dozen people on the bus when we arrived at Ha Dong Zhan.
A gigantic gray block stood in front of me, marked in gigantic Chinese with the characters I was looking for. Nothing but a few windows broke the imposing front of the building, and the entrance off in the distance looked miniscule in the scheme of this architectural disaster. I walked across a deserted lot towards the “Warming Room” and was a bit disturbed by the fact that, despite the presence of well-worn paths through the snow outside, there was no one else around this building that could and felt like it should be filled with thousands of people. Inside the warming room, orange plastic seats were arrayed by the hundreds, with maybe 4 bodies sitting in them in total. I walked out and over to what I learned was the train ticket office, where I was directed finally to the bus station across the lot. I asked someone inside the bus station if I could get a ticket to Bin Xi, and the woman shook her head, hesitated, and then shook her head again. “Hold on one second,” she said.
The movie continued. The woman walked briskly out of her office, across the expanse of the bus station’s deserted waiting room floor, and up into a “guarded” stairwell. I heard her footsteps all the way as she rose several stories into the air and reappeared on an elevated walkway overlooking the waiting room, where she walked down past a series of unmarked office doors, knocked on one in what may have been a random fashion, and went inside. In a few seconds, she exited the office, same expression on her face, walked back down the walkway, down the loud stairs, and out onto the floor. “There are no more buses to Bin Xi today,” I think she said, “but one bus goes through Bin Xi, although it’s not supposed to stop there.” I figured out this conversation maybe 20 minutes later while I was sitting on said bus, but at the moment all I could say was, “that’s alright,” not really sure about what I was confirming as “alright.” I was walked outside to a more comfortable-looking coach bus, threw my bag underneath, and got on, relatively sure though not certain that I was going where I wanted to go.
Not only was I escorted onto the bus and shown a seat by someone, but while I was getting off of the bus to get a bottle of water, I smashed my head on the overhead compartment, completing the image for everyone on board of the clueless, clumsy foreigner. I “saved some face,” as the Chinese love saying, when the bus got much more crowded and I gave my seat to a package-laden elderly Chinese woman heading home for the holidays with gifts for her children and grandchildren. When the attendant came back and asked why I wasn’t sitting and I gestured to the woman next to me, the shocked face of “maybe the foreign barbarian isn’t as much of an oaf as I originally thought” came across her visage as she remarked something to the effect of, “Why is it that it’s only the foreigner who acts Chinese on this bus…” When another older woman got onto the bus a few minutes later, a young Chinese guy sitting behind me jumped up quickly to give her his seat.
As city turned to factory turned to farmland outside the windows, I stepped aside as a slow steady stream of Chinese trickled off the bus and out into the white countryside. A woman or a man would shout to the driver to stop to get off on the side of a road where all that there was to be seen in any direction was a single small home, off in the distance down long, snowed-in drives. The images of not-unpleasant desolation continued until we arrived at a corner in the town of Bin Xi, which, although built up with colorful street signs and various different shops, was deserted. Scores of three-wheeled cabs whipped around street corners, picking off waiting pedestrians one by one, until one stopped in front of me.
For 40 kuai I was taken out through town and again into the countryside, along a road that was sometimes paved and sometimes not, around corners that I thought were going to kill us both. The cabbie, a native of Bin Xi, knew the exact limits of his whip, and, although we did have a couple of slides at different points, it was never anything too serious. What was pretty interesting was when, after the road split in two for each direction of traffic, we saw bearing down on us on the same side of the road various different coach buses and SUVs who apparently didn’t understand that they were supposed to be on the other side of the median. It was nothing that a little breaking and pulling off to the side couldn’t fix, but I couldn’t get why everyone liked our side of the road so much more than their own. The driver would honk at his friends as we passed them by, men dressed in black talking on cell phones, walking around the 3 or 4 villages that we passed through. An older woman dressed in a couple of sweaters and a shawl walked along the bitter cold roadside from one village to another, the patterns protecting her head covered in the brightest colors I had seen in Heilongjiang.
I finally got to Jihua around quarter after two in the afternoon, and the several guys that I knew there luckily hadn’t forgotten about me. They were pretty impressed that I had not called at all on my way up to ask them for help or for further directions. I was thinking that it would be okay to stay in a spare bed in the worker’s dormitory down the access road, but apparently that is strictly verboten for foreigners. Instead, because I was “very good friends” with some of the guys that worked there, I was given a bed upstairs in the lodge for 40 kuai a night—awesome deal, considering that I was at one of the nicest (as well as one of the only) ski lodges in China and there wasn’t really a whole bunch of other options, no matter what price they said. Before I had even put my stuff down in my room upstairs I hurried up to the restaurant on the second floor, where I had two giant plates of food. I hadn’t eaten practically nothing since dinner the night before, and I was famished. I went back downstairs and waited at the bar for my friend, Zhang Long, to get out of work behind the boots counters.
In a food coma from lunch, I passed out on the bar table for a few minutes and was woken up by Long to help me getting my stuff up to my room. Before I had put my bag down on my bed, anticipating a bit more rest before dinner, he began smilingly pushing me out to door to go downstairs for New Year’s dinner. I was escorted up to the banquet hall where there had to have been about 600 Chinese—the entire mountain staff, their friends and families—sitting around large round tables with feasts arrayed out in front of them. Full chickens, fish, potatoes, vegetables, sweet and sour pork, everything. Shows were going on on the stage in front of the crowd, and members of the audience were able to voice their approval with kazoos and cheap plastic clapping devices. I got a bit of a round of applause as I walked through a sea of reddened faces to my seat. I was so pissed I had just pounded all that friend rice instead of this feast, but I sat down and did my best to polish off a bit of the food I had in front of me.
I was sat at a table with several other guests invited by the boss of the resort, I believe. The son of one of the families sitting there spoke great English, and we struck up a conversation about the typical things: what I’m doing in China, where he’s studying, where we’re both from, etc. In the meantime, the four or five guys I knew who worked at Jihua came up to me with various groups of people to introduce me to, holding bottles of beer in their hands to pour into my cup for a celebratory toast. My new friend sitting next to me at the table, Dazhao, mentioned jokingly that I was “a dead man”—I was the only white guy in the room, and my friend’s toasts had emboldened some other random dudes to walk up to me for a toast as well. The bombardment only went on for maybe a half hour, and the thing that saved me was the fact that someone had wisely decided to use as beer cups the tiny paper cups typically used with office water coolers. In the meantime, I was happy to both up the ante in terms of the revelry that was being had that evening, while at the same time getting to taste some of the finest beer China has to offer.
As we sat around the table drinking and chatting, Dazhao explained to me some different Chinese traditions involved in the New Year’s Eve meal. If a family is wealthy enough, a fish is always eaten on New Year’s Eve, because the Mandarin pronunciation of the word for “fish” and the word for “savings” is pronounced identically. A fish eaten at New Year’s bodes well for a year upcoming where more money is put in the bank. (This tradition helped to shed some light on the Chinese’s reputation as being tremendous savers rather than spenders of money, and how hopes of unlocking the consuming power of this country have a very long way to go.) Every New Year’s, tons of people in the north of China will also eat dumplings throughout the Spring Festival. The character for dumplings contains two distinct crossing strokes that, during the Spring Festival season, stand for the intersection of two years, the one coming and the one going. Until that evening I also hadn’t known which of the twelve animals on the Chinese zodiac was represented by this year; we are now in the Year of the Ox.
As I sat there talking to Dazhao about Chinese traditions, Yijing, my friend from Yunnan, sat next to us and threw in his two cents every once in a while. After every sip of beer he would rub his eyes, until the whites of his eyeballs became even redder than his cheeks. As some folks began to saunter out of the room getting prepared for the CCTV-sponsored television bonanza that began at 8pm, a string of singers continued to come up to the microphone, each one a bit worse at singing and a bit more red than the last. Long tapped me on the shoulder and ask if I wanted to sing a song, and that’s all it took for the entire table to begin to plead/demand that I get up and sing something—it was Chinese New Year, after all! It was a tradition!
No problem, right? I did buckle eventually, knowing only one song to the point that I would be willing to sing it a capella in front of three hundred Chinese. It’s a poem by Patrick Kavanagh sung to the tune of “Dawning of the Day.” The poem/song is popularly known as “On Raglan Road.” If you’re to ask any self-respecting balladeer to sing this song, even on St. Patrick’s Day, most will abstain and will tell you that it’s already been sung the best it ever will be by the banjo player Luke Kelly, formerly of the Dubliners. I figured that probably no one in that room had any idea who Luke Kelly or Patrick Kavanagh were, so I seized my opportunity:
On Raglan Road, of an autumn day, I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday rue;
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street, in November, we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge;
The Queen of Hearts still making tart, and I not making hay—
Oh I loved too much, and by such by such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind, I gave her the secret sign
That’s known to the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. Without stint, I gave her poems to say,
With her own name there, and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May.
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly, my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should a creature made of clay:
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
Moving at a slow pace, taking maybe four minutes, I got through the entire thing. The first verse was a mess as I tried to find the right key, but by the third verse things were swinging along nicely. The intonation was decent, and I hope that, with Dazhao’s explanation to the crowd about the song’s content before I began, some of the effect carried across the language barrier. The song was a tremendous amount of fun to sing, and I can see how so many Chinese and people everywhere get addicted to that feeling. Luke and Patrick may have done a couple rotations in their graves, but they can appreciate the uniqueness of the situation, I’m sure.
The rest of that evening was taken up primarily with watching television—lots and lots of it. People in China love TV—absolutely love it. All of the programming is strictly controlled by CCTV in Beijing or by their satellite organizations in the provinces, of course. The crown jewel of their programming season is the marathon that they have in the run-up to and immediately after midnight on New Years. From 8pm until 2am, cable was awash in floor shows, game shows, talent shows, comedy skits, and acrobatic acts. Some of the comedy was difficult to understand, but some of the acrobatic exhibitions were absolutely out of this world—you didn’t have to speak Chinese to understand what was going on there. Pairs bouncing up and down on sprung balance beams, guys swinging from trapezes without nets, people walking around on giant rubber balls… pretty eye-catching stuff. And then there’s also the synchronized dancing, a la the stuff you saw in full force during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Organizing the hordes into an effective whole of course has its insidious political undertones, but this doesn’t take away from the tremendous beauty and skill involved in these performances.
While we were watching TV is Dazhao’s room, I tried to get some conversations in Chinese going with the dozen or so kids sitting there around me. As they cleared out, Dazhao and I spoke in fluent English about China and America. We began by talking about TV, naturally, about how Chinese television is controlled by the state, and about how many Chinese are obsessed with TV. Before Dazhao brought it up (as all educated Chinese do when this conversation happens), I accepted how, in American, content on the news and on TV is controlled by corporate rather than government interests—a point that is used to demonstrate that, while they may be sheep in a political sense, we are the sheep of a consumer culture based on endlessly buying or buying into shit. This point is of course a good one, but the counterpoint, dealing specifically now with news programs and the like, is that, whereas westerners are instructed in their education to be skeptical, that the truth is elusive, thereby allowing us to realize (sometimes despite ourselves) that everything we see on TV isn’t true, citizens in China are given only one explanation for all events by a government who claims to expound on the absolute truth composed of all of the information you need to know, conveniently packaged into television news programs and newspapers distributed by government-controlled organizations. There is no skepticism, no questioning—increasingly, some is being allowed, but only within the strict framework of an ideology that doesn’t undermine the government’s fundamental identity as an entirely benevolent force only for righteousness and justice. This is why, when you provide many Chinese with a valid, logical counterargument to their opinions on a certain issue, many feel confident in simply saying: “You don’t understand,” or “You’re wrong” without further explanation. They are exposed here, in the “Middle Kingdom,” to news purported to be all there is to know and all one needs to know, news that is ahead of the curve of that talked about at night in capitalist news programs vying for their viewers’ wallets. In China, it’s strange to say, “believing is seeing” when it comes to political/economic matters; everything educated folks need to know about the worldwide political situation they already know, and any contradictory information that is provided isn’t accepted on its own terms, but is instead accepted in terms that they’ve been internalizing since grade school or it’s rejected as false.
Of course students are prepared in school and in discussions with hard-line friends and adults for all of these counterarguments, and these conversations with friends sometimes turn into bitter disputes with rivals who in the light of political identity come to appear as enemies. Such was the case when, at a bar one night several months ago, I was talking about the academic scene in China with a guy who had two PhDs from Chinese universities in paleoanthropology, and who could speak English and French as well as Chinese. What was a fascinating conversation turned sour when, turning the conversation on a dime, he mentioned how “Chinese (and this is the way things are phrased over here—all of us, not “some” or “most” or “a few”) think of Americans as children.” It was said smilingly and, I thought, smugly, and I don’t know if I took it in the way it was meant (I still review the conversation in my head periodically, checking for clues), but over the next half an hour I went from speaking forcefully to yelling in defense of my views that, despite the youth of our nation—and not our civilization, despite the efforts of guys like this dude to demonstrate that Chinese civilization and writing in fact predates Egypt and hieroglyphics—our country’s reliance on the human faculty of choice, reason, and their offshoots to generate progress demonstrates an acknowledgment of people as adults, as opposed to the system of infantilizing forces of authoritarian regimes that rely on the government to be the hopefully-benevolent “parents” of a people whose political minds are actively atrophied in the hopes of achieving stability through the rule of an extremely powerful few.
AAANNNYYYwwaaayyss, this is my opinion, generated by what may have been a misinterpretation of a statement made by what maybe have been a friend while we were both drinking one night at a place called the Taku Club covered in neon lights and frosted glass. That whole aside was generated because I wanted to make the point that many Chinese feel as if they have the inside scoop on westerners in their realizing that the western media is largely controlled by certain interests, and that this believed-to-be exclusive realization leads to a snotty tone when they talk about these things that makes me want to go nuts. Getting back to the conversation with Dazhao, in continuing to use the boob tube as our conversation generator, Dazhao came up with the point that one of the thing you most popularly hear people say on CCTV is that “I didn’t have a choice”—“I sold my daughter because,” “I moved to the city because,” “I moved back to my hometown because…” Inside my head, as we were talking about the lack of choices available to Chinese, I was becoming increasingly ashamed of ever having felt (and, to some extent, continuing to feel) oppressed by the western and perhaps particularly American privilege of having so many life choices to make at this juncture in my life. (And this is the scary thing about authoritarian regimes—they work and thrive largely because people either don’t want to or feel they are incapable of making some of these tough decisions… They function, as I see it, on the desire that many of us have to be slaves, to one extent or another.) That I sometimes turn this time into a time for worry as opposed to a time for celebration is ridiculous, and Dazhao showed me that. The fear is, of course, that you make the wrong choices. As Dazhao put it, though, at least you can lie on your American deathbed at the end of your life and say to yourself soothingly, in Sinatra’s words, “I did it my way.”
To just stay on this very interesting series of conversations that I had with Dazhao for just a little bit more time: One of the other points that became clear in our conversation was how much Chinese know about American history specifically, how much they pride themselves on that knowledge, and how the education here appears to try to throw into alignment the history of post-1949 China and that of the United States. To name a few similarities that often come up: both revolutions were violent and conducted in resistance to the encroachment of foreign powers; both were based on experimental political ideas; and (this is the one you hear most about) both had/have their dark chapters in terms of acknowledging equal human rights for all citizens. This system of connection extends deeply into the Chinese idea of where “New China” (post-1949 China) has come from and, more importantly, where the government says New China is going—that is, into the position of global dominance that the United States currently enjoys. In political discussions about American history, some Chinese I’ve spoken to, before you check them, will go so far as to say they have better insights into the implications of events in our history than Americans do, assumedly mixing as the education system here does the progress and implications of Chinese history over the past sixty years with that of the relatively-young American nation. This vision/version of historical connectedness is extremely flawed—China and the US are two completely different countries coming from cultures espousing opposite political ideologies—but it allows for valuable insights, not so much in terms of projecting where China is going (as the government would have its citizens believe) but in terms of being a foreigner trying to understand the relationship between China and the rest of the world. As I came to see, Dazhao, too, was a member of the cult of George Washington, a famous figure here in China as he is often linked up in history books with Mao Zedong. The difference, Dazhao pointed out, was that, after battling during the revolution and serving two terms, Washington chose to step down, while Mao’s rule took on imperial proportions to the extent that he was planning on naming his son the ruler of China. Dazhao quoted for me the saying in Chinese equivalent to the English Lord Stanley’s (?) statement that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and how it was amazing how Washington didn’t fall into this model. I didn’t get into the fact that George Washington was surrounded by a slew of extraordinarily educated, brave founding fathers savvy in the political, military, and cultural affairs of the day who had helped to design a government based on accession of rule to other qualified participants, but the idea of Washington as a completely virtuous, upstanding American god wasn’t one that I wanted to wreck that evening, in my mind nor his.
Right at midnight things were interrupted by the explosion of fireworks going off outside the lodge’s front entrance. I snapped to attention and went running down the stairs as fast as a 6-year-old on Christmas morning, and caught the final 10 or 12 seconds of the display. The first word that comes to mind to describe Chinese fireworks, before “beautiful” or “colorful” or “elaborate,” is “loud.” Some of them seem to simply be quarter-sticks of dynamite sent up into the air that flash for a second and send out a shockwave of sound energy. They are the loudest goddamn fireworks you’ve ever head, so loud that your ears are left ringing and the tea ripples in your glass. The show at Jihua was a bit short for my liking, but I had a feeling that at some point, either here, in Harbin, or back in Beijing, some more fireworks would be available to watch or to be set off myself—awesome. After going back inside, we had some dumplings—called jiaozi in Chinese—delivered to the room. It is custom to eat jiaozi only after the New Year has begun, but after not having had much dinner around 5pm I was definitely ready for a good feed. The dumplings put me in an excellent mood for sleeping, which I did soon after polishing off the last one on my plate.
I spent the next morning writing and listening to music—mostly Liam Hayes’ new album, “Fed,” and some reggae dancehall and dub emceed by Kevin Martin, otherwise known as the Bug. At around 11am, Dazhao walked in to continue conversing—I was getting the impression that he was intent to get in as much English practice as humanly possible while I was around, and I was happy to oblige. I explained to him that my plane left for Beijing from Harbin the following afternoon and that I was planning on catching a cab tomorrow morning from Jihua back to the city. He then insisted that I come back now with his family to their home in Harbin to stay for the evening. I threw my stuff into my bag, got my passport back from the front desk, said a too-quick goodbye to my friends from the lodge, and jumped on the bus back to Harbin.
Before falling asleep for some of the ride, we spoke about the drinking culture in China, fresh on my mind after the previous night’s bacchanal. It didn’t seem fair or polite to single someone out for endless boozing. Although I don’t usually have much of a problem handling the requests that came my way, many Chinese men are routinely forced to drink until vomiting by friends, co-workers, and clients, despite knowledge of the common Asian biological aversion to alcohol, all in an attempt to “man up” and save face. Using the “tradition” argument—it’s been happening for a long time, therefore it’s correct—Dazhao explained that, particularly in business, bosses and clients believe that with alcohol comes honesty, just like in the west: “in vino veritas.” In more friendly situations, the idea isn’t so much competition (so he says—it is definitely about competition) as it is about self-knowledge, knowing your limits, and knowing what the point after which you will lose control of yourself—forget people’s names, knock things over, vomit, etc. Unfortunately, if the table hasn’t seen you vomit before, statements like “I’ve had enough” usually don’t go over too well—the presumption is, if you’re not knocking things over, or forgetting things, or puking, you haven’t had enough. The problem is that, once you reach this state, you begin to embarrass yourself and “lose face,” Chinese social suicide. I dropped the conversation eventually and just passed out, the gerbil in my head exhausted from having been running to nowhere for so long.
Mr. and Mrs. Qi asked the bus to stop and we jumped off onto the side of main road outside the center of Harbin. Dazhao’s parents stopped to by some stuff for dinner at the market while we brought our things back to the apartment, located on the eighth floor of an apartment building located in what Dazhao described as “the ghetto” or Harbin. After settling in, I began writing down some thoughts on the past several days as the Qis prepared a New Year’s Day feast. Dazhao’s doting mother took to some tasks she had been meaning to get after before they left for the ski mountain—one of them involved fixing a wall socket by sticking a screwdriver into a mess of wires behind the drywall, which didn’t seem quite kosher, but Dazhao was overseeing things and his background as an engineer suggested that, if his mother was going to fry herself, he’d probably say something. When she had finished up what she had planned to do, she darted around the modest apartment observing our every move. When she saw me pull out my second tissue to blow my nose, she insisted I was getting a cold and needed to take some pills—vitamin C, not acetaminophen. “Not these,” she said, pointing to the western medicine. “These will just get you more sick.” I took the vitamins without comment, smiling.
At one point I went into the kitchen to look for a while at Mr. Qi making dinner. As Mrs. Qi later admitted, “Unlike in most Chinese families, he’s the cook—I just do what he says in the kitchen!” In just about every other matter, it was Mrs. Qi who acted as the spokeswoman for the couple. Mr. Qi was a very reserved, handsome but quiet man who always looks tired and who smiles often. They both work for the same bank, where they make a combined 6500RMB a month—less than I make alone through my job. I watched Mr. Qi make the obligatory New Years’ jiaozi by quickly rolling up spoonfuls of diced shrimp, a minced bok choy-like vegetable and scrambled eggs into small dough pouches he pinched off with his flour-encrusted hands. He actually gave me a shot at baoing things—that is, pouching-up some dumplings. In classic, overly-meticulous style, it took me about 10 minutes to do three, so I was taken off bao duty and went back to writing at my laptop, arrayed as it was out on the ping-pong table/organizing platform in the center of the living room.
Dinner was spectacular and consisted—like any proper Chinese dinner, as Dazhao explained—of at least four courses: some sweet pickles, some boiled pork mixed with cabbage, a full rotisserie chicken, a small river fish for good luck, and of course plenty of dumplings. All of us had a bit of beer, with me and Mr. Qi continuing on at dinner with the drinking. I was amazed to see how folks in Harbin—in accordance with their enjoyment of ice cream in the winter, I suppose—like their beer cold, like back in the States. (I would say “back west,” but I realize that, particularly in the UK and Ireland, warm beer is practically a national pastime.) “It’s more refreshing,” Mr. Qi commented, “and it brings out the taste in Harbin beer.” The dinner conversation consisted mainly of small talk about where I was from and what I was doing in China. When we began to discuss my ancestry and my Irishness came up, Dazhao mentioned laughingly in English how his Mom loves Irish, “’cause they fight with the British, too.” He translated what he said for his mother, who gave the Chinese “mmm” in response—a sound made by many Chinese when uncomfortable subjects are broached, in which brevity is inversely related to the moment’s significance.
For the first time in my life that night I saw the movie, Kung Fu Panda, which every person I meet in China seems to love. It was in fact a very enjoyable movie, and I’m sure it has allowed many people in China to learn a great deal of English, based on its popularity. But if I read one more essay or cover letter using the quote from that movie spoken by the wise turtle under the peach tree—“Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, and today is a gift—that’s why they call it the ‘present’”—I am going to go completely insane. The sentiment is excellent, but in the Chinese drive to duplicate what has worked in the past rather than using something from past successes to create something new, clichés pop up at an astounding rate in the speech and writing of people over here, and it gets tiring hearing the same lines over and over again. Anyways, it was a great movie—heart-warming and all that as well as entertaining.
The next morning, before heading out to the bus station, I had an amazing breakfast at the Qis consisting of leftovers from the night before as well as some fruit salad, some different kind of cabbage, and what they described as “emperor’s rice.” Up by the volcanoes in northern Heilongjiang, there is a town called Wudalianchi, outside which I was told there are rice fields fed by spring water and guarded by army patrols. The rice from these fields feed those inside the walls of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese equivalent of the Capitol and the White House rolled into a single, secret compound next to the Forbidden City. Mr. Qi was able to get his hands on some through a client of his at the bank; if you are not Hu Jintao or his cronies, you apparently cannot eat this type of rice unless you know someone who’s pretty important in the government. The rice was pretty damn good—kind of had an “al dente” texture to it. Usually, most sticky white rice tends to ball up into these clods where you lose the sensation of eating individual grains. The Wudalianchi rice grains kept their integrity, and it did in fact feel like you had a mouthful of individual, fairly dry rice grains in your mouth while you were eating them, despite the fact that these grains stuck together so they could be eaten easily with chopsticks.
After the imperial rice, I was yelled at for not having my slippers on by Mrs. Qi, who insisted that, if your feet get cold, then your liver gets cold, which makes you much more prone to sickness. She also mentioned under her breath that a cold liver is bad for sex, as well. After taking a few more vitamin C pellets and throwing some more in my bag for the road, I packed up my stuff and was taken down to the airport bus station near Dazhao’s home by cab. We had exchanged cell phone and email information with one another that previous evening, so there was nothing left to do but say goodbye in the abrupt Chinese way—a simple handshake, a smile, then turn and go.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Camp, Pt. 2
Two other foreigners came up to Jihua to teach with me. Rob and Melissa are a couple from Guangzhou who spend their time down there both teaching English and, when deals arise, exporting goods from China. Rob had been to Guangzhou a couple of years ago before he arrived for his current stay in China, and was inspired by the other folks in the expat community he saw exporting goods back to their home countries—Mali, Morocco, Poland, the list went on. Melissa is Chilean and met Rob (an American from San Francisco who’s mother is Chilean) while he was traveling in Santiago looking for customers interested in buying cheaper Chinese goods. One never knows what kind of people they’re going to run into during these types of experiences, but I ended up having a great time working and commiserating with the two of them while I was up north.To incentivize the learning process and good behavior, fake money called “xue bi”—“snow money”—was given out when students answered questions correctly in class or when they did something friendly or polite. The “xue bi” was in turn used to “buy” lunch and dinner—each meal was perhaps 10XB. One afternoon’s activity consisted of the student’s buying lunch and dinner from the teachers using their xue bi. They had to use their English and the haggling skills that they were taught in class earlier that day, or they weren’t supposed to receive any lunch. The exercise went excellently—the students used mostly English and many of them displayed fine negotiating skills, a necessary skill set in China—but there was one problem: the school had miscalculated and had only brought up enough food for lunch, not lunch and dinner. The kitchen could not handle an order of such size on such short notice, apparently. Because we were in the middle of the Manchurian hinterlands and there were no food stores around, nor means to travel to get and transport that much food back to the lodge, it was determined that the students would have to go without food that night. We’re talking about 75 young children, taking classes and skiing all day in an unheated ski lodge in Siberia, not being provided with food for over 18 hours. Sophie insisted that the foreign teachers have some dinner and, while she was dining with us later that night, she mentioned how proud she was of the many students that forwent some of their lunch in order to provide other students with food later on. The situation was insane. In a culture accustomed to “eating bitter,” as it is said idiomatically in Chinese, what would seem unacceptable to many in the West came off here as a character-building exercise.
After an early, massive breakfast the next morning, the students were ready not only for a half-day of classes but also for an afternoon of skiing. How the counselors managed, in maybe 20 minutes each day, to get everyone bundled up and equipped with correctly-sized boots and skis, I don’t know. The students all got out to ski every day that week, and for the most part they were comfortable—as comfortable as a 7-year-old can be when they’re outside for two hours in -10C weather. Ski instructors tried to teach everyone how to form the “pizza slice” to control their speed, but most of the kids just bombed down the bunny hill, running over whatever it was that got in their way. After the first day, earlier that week, of total pandemonium, the students were taken inside and berated for their insubordination by the camp’s principal—a funny guy named Tom who could barely speak any English himself. After that meeting, the new groms were a little bit more receptive, and all of them were able to complete the “Big Challenge” on the final morning of our time at Jihua, which consisted of them slaloming down the bunny hill without falling down.
It was extremely interesting to see how counselors treated and disciplined younger Chinese when they got out of hand. The general policy seemed to be that, until someone gets hurt, or starts crying, or becomes so distracting that it’s physically impossible to continue, the troublemaker is to be ignored. I was told at the beginning of camp that many of these children were extraordinarily spoiled, and part of the instruction that went on at the camp had to do with learning basic manners, such as holding doors and saying “please” and “thank you”—a skill set lost on most Chinese over the age of 20 or 25. (They older folks had other things on their minds besides manners 20 years ago and before.) Although there was some instruction that went on, it was clear that, based on other cues, it was in fact the kids—particularly the boys--were holding the reins. One example seems pretty instructive: During an activity period one afternoon, a child stole a marker from another child to use on his drawing. The other child grabbed the marker to take it back, and a pretty violent tugging contest ensued that deserved intervention by a counselor. Instead of firmly demanding that the students cut it out, the counselor—a young girl—came over and herself grabbed the marker, throwing her hat into the ring in the child’s game of tug-‘o-war. The largish boy who had stolen the marker then began to yank doubly hard, actually causing the counselor to scream. After a couple of seconds the stealer tore the marker out of both of their hands, turned around, and walked back to his table—now having firmly incorporated the messages that “might makes right" and that such childishness is an acceptable way of solving an argument in the future. The counselor said nothing after having had the marker ripped out of her hand. Instead she smiled sheepishly, turned around and walked away.(In the typical Chinese family, limited in size by the One Child Policy and with the attention of six people [four grandparents and two parents] therefore focused on the development and success of a single person to bring honor and riches to the family, the formation of what are called “little emperors”—spoiled brats—is very common. With the older boys [and some girls, but fewer] that I have as students at Tsinghua, this mentality is extremely prevalent; though many of them come from backgrounds that even by Chinese standards are considered very impoverished, most of them have been coddled endlessly since their birth, contributing to the growth of tremendous egos. As time wears on, these enormous egos invariably clash with one another in the classroom, in sports, and in other arenas leading to some impressive senses of entitlement, selfishness, and competitiveness in many young people. Selfish, competitive children are far from a novelty everywhere, but when they put here in an educational environment espousing blind, ardent nationalism that the Party tries to inculcate firmly into students’ heads at the secondary and tertiary levels, this egotism gets readily infused with national identity, and the implications get very scary, very quickly.)
While the newbies polished their skills on the bunny hill, I took to one operational chairlift running at Jihua that whisked you up to the summit of the hill less than a thousand feet tall. At the top, you had three options: 1) the wide, steep run that went directly down the hillside—the one that was favored by those at the mountain trying to show off their skills; 2) the curving run with one steep section that curled to the hill on the other side of the lift; and 3) the run that took you less steeply down towards the bunny hill. Each run, if you bombed it, took less than 30 seconds. They were the longest runs open at the resort at that time, and I skied each one maybe 15 or 20 times. Although the temperature fluctuated between quite comfortable and really freaking cold throughout the week, the conditions remained amazing—it snowed every night, and the lack of people skiing these runs insured that, on every run down, there was a bit of new snow to turn into and touch. The powder was light and dry and plentiful. The only thing that was missing was some length. It was the first double chairlift that I had sat on in a very long time, and it may be the last time for some years before I sit on a chairlift again. I was able to ski four days, two hours each day, while I was working up at Jihua, at it was a pleasure to have numb cheeks, frozen nose hairs, and raccoon eyes again.
I was skiing in China. Even ten years ago, this would have been unimaginable--for Chinese, I mean, but also for me as well. Yabuli, the country’s oldest and most prestigious resort (also located in Heilongjiang outside Harbin) is relatively new, and I was seeing all around me the first generation of China’s recreational skiing community. All of the instructors at the mountain were under 25, and barely any of them had been skiing for more than several years. They had “caught the bug,” just like those in the ski community in America. It was funny to see how the attitudes carried over from one country to another in terms of the “ski bum” culture. Television and the internet has certainly had a certain level of influence in this regard, but it was funny to have the Chinese equivalents of “hey dude” and “ripping” dropped on me while I was getting my equipment on or off or waiting in the lift line. There’s something about skiing that has people smiling all the time, both in America and in China, despite the numb feet and the snotty noses.
At 350RMB a night for a room, the lodge wasn’t cheap. The parking lot was filled with Audi A8Ls and BMWs, Porsche Cayennes and Land Rovers. Unlike the parents of the students I was teaching, these were the northeastern elite I was rubbing shoulders with—the wealthy bureaucrats from Beijing, traders with interests in Japan and Russia, factory owners from the massive industrial area outside Harbin. There was plenty of money being generated, and these folks were doing a heck of a job spending it on equipment that, even by American standards, was pretty fierce—Fischer ski boots, Atomic skis, Oakley goggles, Carbon ski jackets, etc. This is the new Chinese nouveaux riche, the envied class of Chinese businessmen and politicians who, at one point, might be killed for being associated with bourgeois values. (I had to snap a picture of a group of guys, appearing to be up at the mountain on a business conference, who threw on their goggles, scarves, skis and poles before going outside.)Later on one night, after reading some more of Johnathan Spence’s super-good history of modern China, I was getting restless and decided to buy a few beers to pay back the guys behind the ski boot counter who had lent me a pair of boots for the demonstration in class. (Expecting similar treatment at the ski rental counter earlier day day, I explained that I was a teacher and that I needed a pair of skis for a demonstration in class, to which the reply was: “No card [pronounced ‘ka’ in Chinese], no skis.” Jackasses.) While I was upstairs buying beers, I saw a young guy from Yunnan who I had been talking to the night before, and I asked him where his friends were. I threw the beers into my backpack and we walked out the front doors of the lodge into the cold, snowy evening. It was the first time since I left America that I could look up at night and see the stars in the hard jet-black ceiling overhead.
After walking maybe a quarter-mile, out of eyeshot of the lodge, we arrived at a pretty abysmal-looking cinder block of a dormitory and walked into the first floor. In rooms with concrete floors that perhaps measured 3 meters by 3 meters square, they had pack 6 people into three bunk beds. There was mud and dirt everywhere and a lot of smiling going one of the three white people at Jihua walked down the hallway. I was shown to the boot guy’s room by my new friend, and realized when I arrived there that they are in fact roommates. I pulled four beers out and introduced myself to the four guys sitting and standing around the small room. Besides my friend working with ski boots, two of these guys were servicemen—waiters/busboys/attendants—and the third was a ski instructor. All of them were enrolled at universities in Harbin, and had taken the jobs at Jihua to make a bit of money while on Spring Festival break. They made 28 kuai a day—about $4—for 10 hours of work. When I couldn’t understand or speak in Chinese, the ski instructor’s knowledge of English was good enough to do some basic translation. We drank and chatted, talking about their boss, their homes, and their plans for the upcoming Spring Festival—Chinese New Year, that is. It was eventually determined that I could and should come back up to Jihua for New Year’s, and we then discussed for some time the details concerning how to get out of Harbin and up to Jihua by a combination of buses and cabs. The four of them were tremendously exhausted from the day of work, and drank the beers more out of politeness than a desire to get jovial. I left as soon as the last 600ml bottle was finished, and told them that, if I had any problems, I would call them on my way up.
The next afternoon we left Jihua for Harbin, where we would be seeing some of the main attractions around the city. As we drove away from the resort, following a bit of crying and whining that we were leaving the wonderful fantastic happy land that is the Harbin Jihua Ski Resort, the bus fell silent as every single student and teacher passed out. Sleeping was not an option for me, as the bus seats were so small that I felt as if, every time the driver broke a little, that my knees were going to snap over the back of the chair in front of me, folding into a sandwich some unsuspecting sleeping student. I took out the music player and listened to the White Stripes and Rolling Stones as the white country flowed past beside the bus. The only thing that seemed to be being carried around by trucks and dropped off on the freezing cold street corners was case upon case of beer—a staple of the diet in Heilongjiang, home of China’s oldest brewery. Because of the alcohol content, beer must have been a lot easier to move around than, say, fruit, which has a chance of freezing and spoiling while sitting on the back of the truck. Using handcarts to push piles over wood back towards the village to heat their homes, men without gloves and dressed all in black pushed their loads along dirty roads, smoking cigarettes and chatting with one another, almost certainly about plans for the upcoming holidays. Farms turned into factories painted an eye-numbing assortment of loud, crass colors—key limes, powder blues and browns, hot pinks—as we moved on towards the outskirts of the city. The traffic began as soon as we passed by the first sets of apartment buildings, used to house the factory workers toiling outside town and the merchants, bankers, hucksters and dealers toiling within. I took us an hour to travel the same distance that took 10 minutes while we were out on the highway.
Until the Russians decided to ask the Chinese to continue a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railroad down through Manchuria to their port at Vladivostok, Harbin was a sleepy fishing village. (The name is actually Manchu, not Chinese, and means “place for drying nets.”) The Chinese agreed to the railroad, and from the beginning of the 20th century onwards Harbin became the center of commerce and trade in northeast China. Goods bound for or coming from Moscow and Europe were transported down Zhongyang Street—the longest walkway in China, covered in cobblestones that cost a dollar a piece in 1900—from river to train station or from train to river. Japanese and Russian traders formed large neighborhoods in the city, lending to Harbin’s architecture and fashion sense a European and otherwise foreign flair renowned throughout China. In the last decade, Harbin has also become famous because of its annual Ice and Snow World, which, as you may have guessed, is constructed entirely out of ice and snow and illuminated at night by thousands of fluorescent lights frozen into the ice.
After dropping out bags off at the hotel downtown, we jumped back into rush hour traffic and trudged an hour across town to a restaurant close to the Ice and Snow World, which we’d be visiting after dinner. The food was awesome—very hot, unlike any of the foot at Jihua, and plentiful—and it went quickly. We piled back into the bus for the drive across the frozen Songhua over to the Ice and Snow World, which looked spectacular off in the distance as we came up and over the bridge. The entirety of Harbin is built on the south side of the Songhua; the Ice and Snow was located on the desolate northern bank, about a mile across the river form the heart of the city. We got off the bus and were cold instantly—I could not feel my feet within five minutes of stepping on to the snow. It was so cold that, when we finally got inside to look around, my camera had actually frozen—it would still turn on, but the mechanism extending the lens to take pictures at first would move very slowly and then not at all. The kids were miserable right from the first moment, but I was told by Sophie that we would meet back at the bus at 9:30pm. I wandered off, snapping photos of the icy Chinese temple, Disney castle, Notre Dame Cathedral, and other monuments, all made to size. They had ice slides set up for those willing to have their butt go as numb as their fingers and toes, and I took a go on one of them, bouncing around a bit and then jettisoning out onto the snowy ground at the bottom.
After about 20 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and retreated into a small warming station where I was forced to buy a coffee for 20RMB—well worth it. I sat there for an hour, chatting with the wait staff and warming my feet by the radiator, and waiting for the feeling to come back. After having a beer after the coffee to steel myself against the chill, I made my way out and back across to meet the group near the exit. I realized then that there wasn’t a chance in Hell that they had made it this long, and that I probably should have headed back much earlier than I had. I started to run back towards the exit and as I came around Cinderella’s castle I heard Tom off in the distance yell, “KEVIN!” When I got up closer I saw that the entire upper portion of the jacket in front of his face was frozen completely solid from his breath. He had on neither a hat nor gloves, and had been standing there waiting for me—in temperatures lower than -25C—for 30 minutes. I apologized profusely for not figuring to come back earlier, but he simply laughed and chatted me up as we walked back to a bus full of students chomping happily on hulu—sugar-coated fruit on sticks.
Appeased by the hulu and unfazed by memories of the cold from the night before, the students got up the next morning to check out another famous sight near the city’s center—the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. A Russian Orthodox building with the trademark onion-style roofs garnishing its turrets, the cathedral, along with the Ice and Snow World and Zhongyang Street, was one of the three most famous sights in the city. The morning was just as cold as it was the evening before, and the students lasted about 6 minutes outside before chants of, “When are we going to get to buy things?” started erupting.
As we drove to Zhongyang Street, now a ritzy shopping area right near the cathedral, kids pulled bankrolls of 100RMB notes out of their pockets, comparing cash with other students not based on the total numerical amount of money they had on them, but by the thickness of the stack they were brandishing. After arriving, the two busloads of students ran from the bus door to the tourist shop, where they proceeded to spend exorbitant amounts of money buying flasks, babushka dolls, bottle openers, scarves, chocolates, and other random trinkets to bring back home to their families. Thinking that I had some time to walk around and take a couple of photos, I almost missed the bus as it headed off towards one final lunch together as a group.
It was sad to say goodbye to many of the students who I had spent a tremendous amount of time with that past week, and who had put in a lot of effort in classes up at the ski lodge. After a busload of children bound for Guanxi and Guangdong left, what remained of us headed back to the hotel. As I read in my room, the students trickled out by taxi and by bus out to the airport. The goodbyes were quite abrupt, but they all have my email address and I hope they contact me at some point.The only thing left now was receiving my money. Alex and Jeanette had left earlier in the week, and I stupidly forgot to ask them whether or not they had had any problems getting everything they needed from Tom. After dinner later on that night, Tom mentioned that he’d be by my room the next morning with my pay for the week—he had left his ID up at the mountain and needed it to make a withdrawal from the bank, and it was getting shipped back down to him in the morning. I didn’t press the issue and ask for some kind of insurance or anything, but at the clock approached noon the next day I was regretting that I didn’t, until someone knocked on my door. I was handed a stack of red Maos, my pay for the week minus the fees for the extra nights I’d be spending in the hotel and the pair of rented goggles that I’d misplaced one day while skiing up at Jihua. With that, my business with the camp was concluded.
Camp
Six or seven weeks before the semester ended, I received a call one day from a co-worker explaining that she had heard from a visiting professor at the university the he had pretty nice-looking bit of work for a week during Spring Festival break, but that he didn’t want to sign on for it because of the location. The job entailed working as a camp counselor/English teacher for 7- to 12-year-old Chinese students for a week up at a ski mountain outside of Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, the northeastern-most point of China. The elderly visiting professor from whom my friend had heard about the job was in no mood to spend his break time freezing his ass off in Manchuria, up on China’s frontier with Siberia, whereas I had made it clear to several folks as the semester had worn on that I was very interested in visiting Harbin, even if it was during the wintertime, when the temperature is known to get down around -20 degrees Celsius fairly regularly.
The theme of the camp, needless to say, was “A Journey to Ice City.” The company is based is Guangzhou, and I initially was denied the job because it was not practical for me to come down to Guangdong province to do some preparatory work and practice classes before the camp began. I explained to the contact person, Sophie, that I have an MA in English and decent experience teaching at the tertiary level and some experience with secondary, but that did not seem to matter. At one point during the interview over the phone she had asked me, I would presume after simply hearing my voice, “You don’t have to answer this question, but I’m interested to know: How old are you?” I told her honestly that I was 24, which elicited a bit of a chuckle, which in turn had my face getting a bit red at the other end of the line. I called back several days later to hear that the company was looking for a teacher based somewhere in the south that they can see before the camp begins, and that they would call me if anything happened. I was kind of bummed, but started making some other plans to travel during the time that I was planning on working.
On Christmas Day, a couple of weeks later, I received a call from Sophie telling me that I did in fact have the job and without missing a beat that I needed to sign the contract she had just sent to me via email by the end of the day. After I had signed, I needed to fax the email back to her. She asked me several times how much time it would take, and I told her several times that I would try to get it done by that same afternoon, but no promises. With my brother in town for the holidays and with classes to manage, I was running around like a nut already and the phone call took my completely by surprise. (I luckily did not have class on Christmas Day and was able to spend it for the most part with Bri, my friends, and my colleagues.) At one point at around 1pm and at another point at around 3pm I received a call from Sophie asking what was going on. By the second call—her third call of the day, the call that morning being the one that let me knew I had the job (her presumption was immediately that I still wanted it and would take it)—I kind of lost it. I forcefully commented that it’s “____ Christmas Day!” and that she’ll have the material when I got around to it. I didn’t let her respond and she called back a bit later apologizing, informing me, as I already knew, that the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas (most don’t, but there are many Christians in China who do celebrate the holiday—but they don’t get off from work) and that she had forgot entirely about the day. I told her that I was sorry for the outburst, and reiterated that I would have everything done soon.
Thus was the beginning of my first experience with employment in China outside of the university. Although my initial impressions led me to believe that the time I spent at the winter camp in Heilongjiang was going to follow what I have heard is the typical Chinese model for such things—an organization that, despite careful planning of how things should go, take far too little time anticipating different plans of attack if things do not in fact go according to plan—I was quickly reassured that things might go somewhat more smoothly when I saw Sophie waiting to pick me up outside the Harbin airport. We took a bus into downtown Harbin where, before heading out of town to the ski mountain, we stopped to eat some dumplings next to the train station. Although the dumplings tasted quite good, the boiled water that we were served to wash down the meal had a bit of a metallic taste to it and smelled vaguely. I thought again about how well-prepared the dumplings may have been after all. As I’ve said before, by the time I get back to the States I am sure that I’ll have an iron stomach and a Superman-esque immune system.
What was more striking about the restaurant in Harbin was that, while we were eating, I observed the most heated argument I’ve seen yet here in China. What started as a typically loud but inoffensive conversation between a waiter and a busgirl standing behind us escalated into the two of them slapping and pushing one another to the point where the waiter needed to be carted off into another room by two members of the kitchen staff. As he was being dragged out, he screamed epithets at the waitress, who needed to be consoled by the remainder of the female wait staff in the dining room. I turned back to see Sophie looking down at the tableful of food in front of us, apparently unfazed by the ongoing scene. When she raised her head after things had calmed down a bit, she had the Chinese nervous smile on her face and explained to me how “northern Chinese people speak much more bluntly than southern Chinese people.” The next thing out of her mouth was, “How do you like the fish soup?!” I looked down at the tofu and fish heads bobbing in the broth and front of me and could smell not the odor of the soup but the aroma of dirty tap water wafting to my nostrils. “It’s okay,” I said, “but I like the dumplings more.”
After waiting online in the cold for a few minutes, Sophie made the executive decision to cave and to charter a cab up to the mountain for 200 kuai, despite the jeering laughter that such a price fetched among the black cab drivers surrounding the front of the bus station. It was at that point, when I saw her splurge on a cab as a necessary “company expense” when the bus would have sufficed, thereby going against the instincts of incredible frugality that characterize so many Chinese, that I realized that I had fallen into the midst of an organization that was very well-funded. There were 75 students up at the camp, and I would learn later that the parents of each student had paid 10,000RMB each for their child to be provided with a full ski suit, plane ticket, English instruction by native speakers, skiing, and sightseeing. The next day, before we headed out to do a bit of skiing, I was handed a pair of snow pants and a ski jacket that would easily retail at a department store here for 1,000RMB. That, along with my daily pay of 400RMB after taxes, allowed me to make money my going on vacation to Heilongjiang—pretty fantastic deal.
The students at the camp had all come from the south of China—primarily from Guangdong, Guanxi, and Hunan provinces, but there were some from other provinces and Hong Kong as well. More specifically, they came from cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhulai, and even Xiamen in Fujian province, all of which are designated as Special Economic Zones by the Chinese government. These cities are the trading gateways for all essentially all of the goods that come in and out of the country. All of their parents, in Chinese terms, are exceptionally well-off—they are the owners of factories, chains of warehouses, and construction companies. The Chinese counselors and administrators talked about how, for these people, 10,000RMB is a drop in the bucket. The most common thing noted by the other Chinese teachers to indicate the wealth of our students was how many cars their students’ families owned. Most families owned at least one really nice car or two pretty nice car, and some students families had as many as 3 or 4 nice rides sitting in their garages back down south. Since the chairmanship of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, when car ownership was officially declared to be one of the Party’s primary barometers for a prospering China, cars have become the most obvious of a plethora of material goods one might see affluent Chinese brandishing around Beijing, Shenzhen, or anywhere else in China—in the same way these objects are wielded in the developed world, to some extent, but the word “brandishing” really comes to mind when you see it done here. (Elaborate PDA devices designed with external speakers for playing music are another type of thing constantly being brandished around city sidewalks.)
I mostly slept during the ride up to the Jihua Ski Resort, but awoke periodically to see cityscape turning into factories turning into the snow-covered fields of the heavily-cultivated upper North China Plain. The landscape was composed of rolling countryside spotted by little towns where those who worked the fields along the roadside lived. We came through a gate indicating that we had entered a national park area, and within five minutes we were at the front gate of the lodge.
The main lobby was certainly designed to give those coming into the building an impression that they had in fact arrived at a “4-Start Resort Hotel”—despite the fact that there was no internet in the entire place and only 6 hours of hot water in the rooms every day. The clear glass ceiling high above allowed the building to be lit with lots of natural light, illuminated the lacquered wood that comprised the trim and railings of the lodge’s interior. The rooms, unlike the lobby, were heated and were also extremely comfortable. There was even enough room in mine to push the two twin beds aside to practice some bagua at a couple of different points during the five days I stayed up at Jihua.
After I tossed my stuff into my room, I got to meet the rest of the gang. Sophie and I walked into a room where maybe a dozen Chinese folks were huddled around a conference table talking in Chinese about teaching plans. When I entered all 12 shot up to attention, began clapping, and then broke into a jubilant welcoming song—first in Chinese, then in English. Songs, in fact, were to remain a theme of the week, as they became a key means of teaching some new vocabulary words to our classes. It was here that I was handed my uniform for the week--a set of snow pants and a ski jacket with a zip-out fleece--siiiiick! I was handed 7 pins and specifically instructed to put them on my fleece "over your heart, where the students will be able to see them so they can know who you are. " As if there would be a chance of them confusing me with the other tall, blonde white guy walking around the ski lodge...
The vocabulary program focused primarily on simple sentences and words that were pertinent, during the first half of the week, to ski culture and winter living and then, in the second half of the week, to knowing the important tourist sights in Harbin. Before the camp began, I had received by email, looked at and even corrected for the camp the Student Handbooks that each student would have in front of them for each lesson, so I knew a bit about what was coming. Sophie informed me that my role would be as an assistant to a Chinese instructor that will actually be in charge of the class—sounded good tome me. I was not ready, therefore, when the first class began and my co-teacher, who was standing at the back of the room, quieted the students down then turned to me, standing in the front corner of the room with a dumb look on my face, with a facial expression that said: “Take it away!”
Within about thirty seconds of attempting to walk the students through the definitions of vocabulary words (we were talking about northeastern Chinese food that day) as they were written on the wall in behind me, the co-teacher jumped in front of the class to declare that it was time for “games.” The students, some of whom were beginning to check out given my lecturing technique, snapped to attention and immediately were into the idea. Using flashcards with pictures of the objects on them, my co-teacher—a 24-year-old girl from Shenzhen whose English name was “Sweet”—had the students in an uproar as she demanded that students raise their hands and scream “Kevin! Kevin! Let me try!” to be chosen by me to guess the correct answers to questions. What would have felt like a 4-hour-long class had I been teaching it came to feel like an hour-long class with Sweet leading the way. I apologized briefly after the class for my slow start, and she went on to ask if I had much experience teaching younger children. I said I hadn’t, and she mentioned simply how I “should try to play more games.” “They have very short attention spans,” she mentioned, “and if you don’t keep them busy you will lose them.”
There was much that I learned from Sweet throughout the week about the Chinese style of teaching that I will carry back with me into the classroom even at Tsinghua, where my students at times have accused me of “not using beautiful pictures” or “not being enough fun” in class. When I mentioned that my focus dealt more with substance than with style, and as I kept feeling over and over again that what they wanted wasn’t a teacher but a dancing monkey, I now understand a bit better some of the methods used with younger children as they begin to learn the English language—methods that are elaborated upon in later English education in China. Songs are a big deal—considered a useful, fun way for remembering and using vocabulary and proper grammar—and visual aids are also critical. Students here, even at the university level, routinely let out gasps and exclamations when a pretty picture pops up comes up in my PPTs. Particularly in the context of English classes, which at Tsinghua are only two credits and are therefore and for other reasons taken less seriously by students, students often seem that they don’t want to learn so much as they want to be entertained. Until I went to camp, I was under the impression that, for the most part, learning and entertaining were mutually exclusive.
On that day and on subsequent days we followed our initial discussion of new vocabulary terms with discussions about how to use those terms in spoken sentences and then in paragraphs. Each morning, the students had 3 hours of class, with a 10-minute break in between 90-minute sessions. Considering that the students in my class ranged in age from 6 to 13 years old, their behavior was nothing less than incredible. In general, they sat quietly when asked to do so, but were able to let loose while remaining in control of themselves when asked to yell and scream enthusiastically for the teacher’s attention when questions were asked. Their desire to have their answers heard when questions were asked, particularly among the boys, was so competitive that some students began to cry when they weren’t called on, eyeing down with a murderous stare those that were chosen to answer the question that was rightfully theirs. Even in children this young, the competitiveness that characterizes the Chinese education system had been clearly indoctrinated. All problems were forgotten when on one moning I walked into the classroom dressed in a full ski suit—including scarf, goggles, and ski boots. Not only did the kids lose it, which was very rewarding and a lot of fun to watch, but they now had exact visual and situational representations to call up when they thought of the term “scarf,” or “ski goggles,” or “a pair of gloves.”
Needless to say, the students taught by Sweet and I performed spectacularly on the series of examinations that were given out by the camp at the end of the week. There were a dozen idiomatic English expressions that the students had to memorize, as well as perhaps a half-dozen songs. During the final exam—which consisted of all 75 students walking around a conference room and coming up to one of 10 or 15 teachers to be quizzed on a small aspect of the course—I was quizzing kids on the first 6 of the idiomatic expressions they were supposed to be studying throughout the week:
1) Love me, love my dog.
2) Bread is the staff of life.
3) Learning is the eye of the mind.
4) No cross, no crown.
5) Knowledge is power.
6) Where there is a will, there is a way.
Idioms are a feature of any language that confuses newcomers, but I’m not sure if several of these interpretations really helped the students understand the nature of these statements. I still have no idea who said or who says, “Love me, love my dog.” Bread is the stuff, not the staff, of life, and “Learning is the eye of the mind” is worded confusingly. A month before the program began, I was sent the PDF containing these statements and wrote some corrections down, but it would appear that the camp was already too far along in the preparation process to go back and adjust things. In any case, during the exam students would walk up to me and rattle off these six phrases. If they couldn’t pick their way through all six—sometimes with a bit of assistance on my part—they were sent back to the “study table” to brush up on their “Crazy English.” A couple of students cried when I sent them back to the drawing board following a bad showing, but most did fantastically well, despite the fact that they were 8 year olds studying English in the midst of a ski trip to Manchuria, thousands of miles away from home.
Another fascinating feature of the camp, and the Chinese Spring Festival season more generally, is the number and elaborateness of the dramatic performances or variety/“floor shows” that so many Chinese dedicate gobs of time to either participating in or organizing. The camp at Jihua was no exception. On the first night, it was the camp counselors who led things off with a two-hour-long performance explaining to the students the genesis of the situation at Ice City—I’m not sure about specifics, but a princess, a magician, a dashing hero and an evil prince and his cronies were part of the story. For two hours, as I was squirming in my chair, most of the students sat quietly; although many ignored the proceedings they at least remained seated and quiet. (I went behind the stage the next day and discovered a couple of drained bottles of baijiu sitting on the floor, then realizing that it was only with a bit of help that the instructors were able to get through the entire program.)
The primary student performance was a variety show labeled the “Prince and Princess Competition.” It lasted three hours and consisted of select students participating first in a fashion show, then a variety contest, then a group advertisement a piece of skiing-related material of their choice. (Chinese television, like American TV, is absolutely awash in coverage of fashions shows; the number of men and women in Beijing walking around with clothing plastered city names like “Milan” or “Rome” or “Paris,” or terms like “Milano” or “Fashionista,” is pretty striking. It makes sense that, in the country in which so many of the world’s clothes are produced, that in a now-prospering China fashion has become something of a national obsession.) As each pair of students—one girl, one boy—strutted down the runway that the teachers had set up, I began to notice that the boys had on as much, if not more makeup—eye shadow, eye liner, etc.—than the girls had on. Several students broke it down during the variety show and started dancing like professionals in hip-hop and samba styles, and some had brought musical instruments from their homes to play a tune in front of the crowd. After the first hour, I was having fun; after the second, I was getting tired; after the third, I was praying things would end soon.
The theme of the camp, needless to say, was “A Journey to Ice City.” The company is based is Guangzhou, and I initially was denied the job because it was not practical for me to come down to Guangdong province to do some preparatory work and practice classes before the camp began. I explained to the contact person, Sophie, that I have an MA in English and decent experience teaching at the tertiary level and some experience with secondary, but that did not seem to matter. At one point during the interview over the phone she had asked me, I would presume after simply hearing my voice, “You don’t have to answer this question, but I’m interested to know: How old are you?” I told her honestly that I was 24, which elicited a bit of a chuckle, which in turn had my face getting a bit red at the other end of the line. I called back several days later to hear that the company was looking for a teacher based somewhere in the south that they can see before the camp begins, and that they would call me if anything happened. I was kind of bummed, but started making some other plans to travel during the time that I was planning on working.
On Christmas Day, a couple of weeks later, I received a call from Sophie telling me that I did in fact have the job and without missing a beat that I needed to sign the contract she had just sent to me via email by the end of the day. After I had signed, I needed to fax the email back to her. She asked me several times how much time it would take, and I told her several times that I would try to get it done by that same afternoon, but no promises. With my brother in town for the holidays and with classes to manage, I was running around like a nut already and the phone call took my completely by surprise. (I luckily did not have class on Christmas Day and was able to spend it for the most part with Bri, my friends, and my colleagues.) At one point at around 1pm and at another point at around 3pm I received a call from Sophie asking what was going on. By the second call—her third call of the day, the call that morning being the one that let me knew I had the job (her presumption was immediately that I still wanted it and would take it)—I kind of lost it. I forcefully commented that it’s “____ Christmas Day!” and that she’ll have the material when I got around to it. I didn’t let her respond and she called back a bit later apologizing, informing me, as I already knew, that the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas (most don’t, but there are many Christians in China who do celebrate the holiday—but they don’t get off from work) and that she had forgot entirely about the day. I told her that I was sorry for the outburst, and reiterated that I would have everything done soon.
Thus was the beginning of my first experience with employment in China outside of the university. Although my initial impressions led me to believe that the time I spent at the winter camp in Heilongjiang was going to follow what I have heard is the typical Chinese model for such things—an organization that, despite careful planning of how things should go, take far too little time anticipating different plans of attack if things do not in fact go according to plan—I was quickly reassured that things might go somewhat more smoothly when I saw Sophie waiting to pick me up outside the Harbin airport. We took a bus into downtown Harbin where, before heading out of town to the ski mountain, we stopped to eat some dumplings next to the train station. Although the dumplings tasted quite good, the boiled water that we were served to wash down the meal had a bit of a metallic taste to it and smelled vaguely. I thought again about how well-prepared the dumplings may have been after all. As I’ve said before, by the time I get back to the States I am sure that I’ll have an iron stomach and a Superman-esque immune system.
What was more striking about the restaurant in Harbin was that, while we were eating, I observed the most heated argument I’ve seen yet here in China. What started as a typically loud but inoffensive conversation between a waiter and a busgirl standing behind us escalated into the two of them slapping and pushing one another to the point where the waiter needed to be carted off into another room by two members of the kitchen staff. As he was being dragged out, he screamed epithets at the waitress, who needed to be consoled by the remainder of the female wait staff in the dining room. I turned back to see Sophie looking down at the tableful of food in front of us, apparently unfazed by the ongoing scene. When she raised her head after things had calmed down a bit, she had the Chinese nervous smile on her face and explained to me how “northern Chinese people speak much more bluntly than southern Chinese people.” The next thing out of her mouth was, “How do you like the fish soup?!” I looked down at the tofu and fish heads bobbing in the broth and front of me and could smell not the odor of the soup but the aroma of dirty tap water wafting to my nostrils. “It’s okay,” I said, “but I like the dumplings more.”
After waiting online in the cold for a few minutes, Sophie made the executive decision to cave and to charter a cab up to the mountain for 200 kuai, despite the jeering laughter that such a price fetched among the black cab drivers surrounding the front of the bus station. It was at that point, when I saw her splurge on a cab as a necessary “company expense” when the bus would have sufficed, thereby going against the instincts of incredible frugality that characterize so many Chinese, that I realized that I had fallen into the midst of an organization that was very well-funded. There were 75 students up at the camp, and I would learn later that the parents of each student had paid 10,000RMB each for their child to be provided with a full ski suit, plane ticket, English instruction by native speakers, skiing, and sightseeing. The next day, before we headed out to do a bit of skiing, I was handed a pair of snow pants and a ski jacket that would easily retail at a department store here for 1,000RMB. That, along with my daily pay of 400RMB after taxes, allowed me to make money my going on vacation to Heilongjiang—pretty fantastic deal.
The students at the camp had all come from the south of China—primarily from Guangdong, Guanxi, and Hunan provinces, but there were some from other provinces and Hong Kong as well. More specifically, they came from cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhulai, and even Xiamen in Fujian province, all of which are designated as Special Economic Zones by the Chinese government. These cities are the trading gateways for all essentially all of the goods that come in and out of the country. All of their parents, in Chinese terms, are exceptionally well-off—they are the owners of factories, chains of warehouses, and construction companies. The Chinese counselors and administrators talked about how, for these people, 10,000RMB is a drop in the bucket. The most common thing noted by the other Chinese teachers to indicate the wealth of our students was how many cars their students’ families owned. Most families owned at least one really nice car or two pretty nice car, and some students families had as many as 3 or 4 nice rides sitting in their garages back down south. Since the chairmanship of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, when car ownership was officially declared to be one of the Party’s primary barometers for a prospering China, cars have become the most obvious of a plethora of material goods one might see affluent Chinese brandishing around Beijing, Shenzhen, or anywhere else in China—in the same way these objects are wielded in the developed world, to some extent, but the word “brandishing” really comes to mind when you see it done here. (Elaborate PDA devices designed with external speakers for playing music are another type of thing constantly being brandished around city sidewalks.)
I mostly slept during the ride up to the Jihua Ski Resort, but awoke periodically to see cityscape turning into factories turning into the snow-covered fields of the heavily-cultivated upper North China Plain. The landscape was composed of rolling countryside spotted by little towns where those who worked the fields along the roadside lived. We came through a gate indicating that we had entered a national park area, and within five minutes we were at the front gate of the lodge.
The main lobby was certainly designed to give those coming into the building an impression that they had in fact arrived at a “4-Start Resort Hotel”—despite the fact that there was no internet in the entire place and only 6 hours of hot water in the rooms every day. The clear glass ceiling high above allowed the building to be lit with lots of natural light, illuminated the lacquered wood that comprised the trim and railings of the lodge’s interior. The rooms, unlike the lobby, were heated and were also extremely comfortable. There was even enough room in mine to push the two twin beds aside to practice some bagua at a couple of different points during the five days I stayed up at Jihua.After I tossed my stuff into my room, I got to meet the rest of the gang. Sophie and I walked into a room where maybe a dozen Chinese folks were huddled around a conference table talking in Chinese about teaching plans. When I entered all 12 shot up to attention, began clapping, and then broke into a jubilant welcoming song—first in Chinese, then in English. Songs, in fact, were to remain a theme of the week, as they became a key means of teaching some new vocabulary words to our classes. It was here that I was handed my uniform for the week--a set of snow pants and a ski jacket with a zip-out fleece--siiiiick! I was handed 7 pins and specifically instructed to put them on my fleece "over your heart, where the students will be able to see them so they can know who you are. " As if there would be a chance of them confusing me with the other tall, blonde white guy walking around the ski lodge...
The vocabulary program focused primarily on simple sentences and words that were pertinent, during the first half of the week, to ski culture and winter living and then, in the second half of the week, to knowing the important tourist sights in Harbin. Before the camp began, I had received by email, looked at and even corrected for the camp the Student Handbooks that each student would have in front of them for each lesson, so I knew a bit about what was coming. Sophie informed me that my role would be as an assistant to a Chinese instructor that will actually be in charge of the class—sounded good tome me. I was not ready, therefore, when the first class began and my co-teacher, who was standing at the back of the room, quieted the students down then turned to me, standing in the front corner of the room with a dumb look on my face, with a facial expression that said: “Take it away!”Within about thirty seconds of attempting to walk the students through the definitions of vocabulary words (we were talking about northeastern Chinese food that day) as they were written on the wall in behind me, the co-teacher jumped in front of the class to declare that it was time for “games.” The students, some of whom were beginning to check out given my lecturing technique, snapped to attention and immediately were into the idea. Using flashcards with pictures of the objects on them, my co-teacher—a 24-year-old girl from Shenzhen whose English name was “Sweet”—had the students in an uproar as she demanded that students raise their hands and scream “Kevin! Kevin! Let me try!” to be chosen by me to guess the correct answers to questions. What would have felt like a 4-hour-long class had I been teaching it came to feel like an hour-long class with Sweet leading the way. I apologized briefly after the class for my slow start, and she went on to ask if I had much experience teaching younger children. I said I hadn’t, and she mentioned simply how I “should try to play more games.” “They have very short attention spans,” she mentioned, “and if you don’t keep them busy you will lose them.”
There was much that I learned from Sweet throughout the week about the Chinese style of teaching that I will carry back with me into the classroom even at Tsinghua, where my students at times have accused me of “not using beautiful pictures” or “not being enough fun” in class. When I mentioned that my focus dealt more with substance than with style, and as I kept feeling over and over again that what they wanted wasn’t a teacher but a dancing monkey, I now understand a bit better some of the methods used with younger children as they begin to learn the English language—methods that are elaborated upon in later English education in China. Songs are a big deal—considered a useful, fun way for remembering and using vocabulary and proper grammar—and visual aids are also critical. Students here, even at the university level, routinely let out gasps and exclamations when a pretty picture pops up comes up in my PPTs. Particularly in the context of English classes, which at Tsinghua are only two credits and are therefore and for other reasons taken less seriously by students, students often seem that they don’t want to learn so much as they want to be entertained. Until I went to camp, I was under the impression that, for the most part, learning and entertaining were mutually exclusive.On that day and on subsequent days we followed our initial discussion of new vocabulary terms with discussions about how to use those terms in spoken sentences and then in paragraphs. Each morning, the students had 3 hours of class, with a 10-minute break in between 90-minute sessions. Considering that the students in my class ranged in age from 6 to 13 years old, their behavior was nothing less than incredible. In general, they sat quietly when asked to do so, but were able to let loose while remaining in control of themselves when asked to yell and scream enthusiastically for the teacher’s attention when questions were asked. Their desire to have their answers heard when questions were asked, particularly among the boys, was so competitive that some students began to cry when they weren’t called on, eyeing down with a murderous stare those that were chosen to answer the question that was rightfully theirs. Even in children this young, the competitiveness that characterizes the Chinese education system had been clearly indoctrinated. All problems were forgotten when on one moning I walked into the classroom dressed in a full ski suit—including scarf, goggles, and ski boots. Not only did the kids lose it, which was very rewarding and a lot of fun to watch, but they now had exact visual and situational representations to call up when they thought of the term “scarf,” or “ski goggles,” or “a pair of gloves.”
Needless to say, the students taught by Sweet and I performed spectacularly on the series of examinations that were given out by the camp at the end of the week. There were a dozen idiomatic English expressions that the students had to memorize, as well as perhaps a half-dozen songs. During the final exam—which consisted of all 75 students walking around a conference room and coming up to one of 10 or 15 teachers to be quizzed on a small aspect of the course—I was quizzing kids on the first 6 of the idiomatic expressions they were supposed to be studying throughout the week:1) Love me, love my dog.
2) Bread is the staff of life.
3) Learning is the eye of the mind.
4) No cross, no crown.
5) Knowledge is power.
6) Where there is a will, there is a way.
Idioms are a feature of any language that confuses newcomers, but I’m not sure if several of these interpretations really helped the students understand the nature of these statements. I still have no idea who said or who says, “Love me, love my dog.” Bread is the stuff, not the staff, of life, and “Learning is the eye of the mind” is worded confusingly. A month before the program began, I was sent the PDF containing these statements and wrote some corrections down, but it would appear that the camp was already too far along in the preparation process to go back and adjust things. In any case, during the exam students would walk up to me and rattle off these six phrases. If they couldn’t pick their way through all six—sometimes with a bit of assistance on my part—they were sent back to the “study table” to brush up on their “Crazy English.” A couple of students cried when I sent them back to the drawing board following a bad showing, but most did fantastically well, despite the fact that they were 8 year olds studying English in the midst of a ski trip to Manchuria, thousands of miles away from home.
Another fascinating feature of the camp, and the Chinese Spring Festival season more generally, is the number and elaborateness of the dramatic performances or variety/“floor shows” that so many Chinese dedicate gobs of time to either participating in or organizing. The camp at Jihua was no exception. On the first night, it was the camp counselors who led things off with a two-hour-long performance explaining to the students the genesis of the situation at Ice City—I’m not sure about specifics, but a princess, a magician, a dashing hero and an evil prince and his cronies were part of the story. For two hours, as I was squirming in my chair, most of the students sat quietly; although many ignored the proceedings they at least remained seated and quiet. (I went behind the stage the next day and discovered a couple of drained bottles of baijiu sitting on the floor, then realizing that it was only with a bit of help that the instructors were able to get through the entire program.)
The primary student performance was a variety show labeled the “Prince and Princess Competition.” It lasted three hours and consisted of select students participating first in a fashion show, then a variety contest, then a group advertisement a piece of skiing-related material of their choice. (Chinese television, like American TV, is absolutely awash in coverage of fashions shows; the number of men and women in Beijing walking around with clothing plastered city names like “Milan” or “Rome” or “Paris,” or terms like “Milano” or “Fashionista,” is pretty striking. It makes sense that, in the country in which so many of the world’s clothes are produced, that in a now-prospering China fashion has become something of a national obsession.) As each pair of students—one girl, one boy—strutted down the runway that the teachers had set up, I began to notice that the boys had on as much, if not more makeup—eye shadow, eye liner, etc.—than the girls had on. Several students broke it down during the variety show and started dancing like professionals in hip-hop and samba styles, and some had brought musical instruments from their homes to play a tune in front of the crowd. After the first hour, I was having fun; after the second, I was getting tired; after the third, I was praying things would end soon.
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