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.