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.

Casablanca in Beijing

(Spoiler warning: if you haven't yet seen the movie, some of the information below may give away some things. The movie is such a part of American culture that I don't know if there's much spoiling to be done, but anyways, there's your warning.)

I watched Casablanca (1942) for the second time ever a couple of nights ago. The first time I watched it was immediately after I checked it out of the Foreign Languages Department video library--it was one of a number of recent and classic English-language movies they've made available for students and teachers at the university. I had some extra time before the finals rush to give it a look, and then I had some time again the other night to look it over a bit more. I had heard that it's supposed to be one of the greatest movies, if not the greatest movie, ever to come out of Hollywood. Even after the first viewing, it was pretty apparent why--stellar performances from Bogart, Bergman, and Henreid, great chemistry between Bergman and Bogart, a great story that mixes something classic with something exotic. It's amazing how well affecting the film remains even after 65 years.

Seeing the movie in China, surrounded by China, had me looking at it a bit differently. The nature of Casablanca as a kind of Limbo was very striking and of course is a critical part of what makes the plot so fundamentally interesting. No one there is quite sure who is in charge--indeed, it is a nightclub owner who ultimately seems to be the most in command of the action throughout the movie. I found one of the most interesting characters to be the conniving police chief, Louis Renault--the guy who is supposed to be in control. One of the most interesting, jarring moments in the movie for me was when, as the final raid of Rick's Cafe Americain is being conducted, the Prefect notes how he is "shocked, SHOCKED that there is gambling going on in this establishment" as he is handed his stack of chips, his winnings for the evening. It is of course a tremendously humorous moment given Claude Rains' character and delivery, but something astonishingly insidious, of course, lays beneath the humor. Kafka was the best at explaining the simultaneous thoughts of humor and terror that these moments evoke. I am in a place now where law, like morality in general, is quite relative--different from moment to moment and from person to person. Based on the whims of officials like Louis Renault, businesses are opened and run out of town, lives are made and lost. The letters of the law are vast, varied and eloquent, but the law is nothing without enforcement, and it is only as stable as the morals of those implementing it.

Casablanca is a place where everyone's coming and going, where no one seems to be sticking around for good and where everyone seems to be waiting for something different. Most come to Casablanca to try to escape. Aside from the massive community of travelers that makes up a significant portion of the neighborhood that I live in, it also seems that many of these people are looking for something different. Many--myself included, in some ways--are looking to escape in one way or another. People come to a place like China with many different kinds of intentions--some good, some less than good. There are many over here looking to exploit the instability of this place, people like Peter Lorre's character, Ugarte, in Casablanca. The exchange rate is favorable to most currencies, and (with the bear-hug the government is now giving to capitalist economic policy) the new religion of this place has become--aside from the State--money. Everything has a price.

Rick's greatest triumph would seem to be, towards the end of the film, his final rejection of moral relativity. When he takes Renault hostage, he finally becomes a chooser, a man who accepts the human responsibility of discerning ethical situations by himself, rather than having those decisions foisted upon him by interests who have other things besides solely an endless search for righteousness in mind. Rick always knew the angles, but his apathy was poisoning any good intentions he may have had for those besides himself. There is, I think, in this country many intelligent people who also see the angles and who have the power to do things, but who have had their desires sated with their respective "nightclubs"; with economic expansion here has come the promise of wealth, which in turn has people caring less about human rights while they're struggling to participate in the predatory system of capitalist economics that the government is currently struggling to simultaneously propagate and hold together. Folks here have been presented with the most insidious form of control--not the reality, but the convincing illusion that they are a chooser. As a friend of a friend mentioned to me in (as a matter of fact) a nightclub when I first came to Beijing, "This country is incredibly free, more free than America . . . if you don't talk about politics." I imagine that you can anticipate what I had to say in response.

From now on, by the way, I'll be playing 22 quite a bit more when I hit the roulette tables down in Atlantic City.

Never, Never, Never, Never Give Up

For the past month, I've been remiss in getting some more posts up here. I apologize for that, and I hope I still have some of you checking in from time to time. Following a visit by a brother, end-of-semester shenanigans, grading, and now, moving (I think), things have been quite busy. But this blog, if I have anything to say about it, is far from dead, and I hope that I'll be able to catch up--in terms of both quality as well as quantity--in the coming weeks. I am off from work until the end of February thanks to the Spring Festival holiday, so this should leave me with quite a bit of time for both writing and dawdling. I hope everyone is well, and I'm looking forward to hearing some of your comments of the following.