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.