The Chinese Teacher

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.