the post-it note justification

Jintang, Chengdu, Sichuan Province (09/09/2013)

Location: Arts and Sciences College of Sichuan Normal University

Population: 35,000 students

不闻不若闻之，闻之不若见之，见之不若知之，知之不若行之；学至于行之而止矣 不聞不若聞之，聞之不若見之，見之不若知之，知之不若行之；學至於行之而止矣

(Bù wén bù ruò wén zhī, wén zhī bù ruò jiàn zhī, jiàn zhī bù ruò zhīzhī, zhīzhī bù ruò xíng zhī; xué zhìyú xíng zhī ér zhǐ yǐ)

'Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand'

Chinese Proverb

 

'Good Morning, Rachel!'

It is Monday morning and I have just been enthusiastically greeted by my first class of twenty second year university students as I walk through my classroom door. They are already seated in neat rows at the front of the room, paper out, pens at the ready, smiling and eager and ready to learn.

They are also twenty five minutes early to my lesson.

It could only be China. Teaching here is always an adventure. Sometimes it's frustrating and exhausting and you want to bang your head (or the students) against your desk just to get a response other than blank bemusement.

Sometimes you have to trick them into speaking because through a deadly combination of shyness, Chinese teaching methodology (students should be seen and not heard) and puzzlement at the mad Englishwoman gesticulating at the front of the classroom they are occasionally struck dumb. I put them in groups and sneakily sit next to them to hear them speak. I set True or False quizzes, making them stand up if they think it's false and sit down if they think it's true. Five questions in they're so sick of mimicking a jack in the box they're yelling the answers at me. Sneaky plan success.

Sometimes it's worrying. A lesson on family ends with us discussing the royal family and what the students would do if they were King or Queen for the day. Most of them help the poor, or go shopping or travelling. And then there's the student who stares in utter bafflement because they have genuinely no idea. There's also the student who grins and offers up the suggestion of 'killing the King and Queen because then I could do what I liked.'

It's difficult to know which is more terrifying- the pupil with the Machiavellian streak or the student with no imagination.

Most of the time though it's brilliant and hilarious and very easy to feel a great deal of affection for your students. One day, for example, teaching body parts and illness, we role play going to the doctor and I circle the class listening to them pretending to be ill. Then this genius bit of acting happens:

Boy One (clutching his stomach and groaning): Oh Doctor, I am very ill.
Boy Two (feeling his forehead): What's wrong?

Boy One: I am pregnant.
Boy Two (laughing): What? And who is the father?
Boy One: You are.

It's the moment when a student successfully uses the right words you've taught, then makes an imaginative leap and can make a joke in English that makes teaching worthwhile. Or seeing one student gently help another who is struggling to think of the right word. Or watching them pretend to give a news report, faces creased in concentration as they recall the correct vocabulary and intonation.

Mostly though I just enjoy watching them learn. 

 

There's a proverb in China that if you actively involve children in your lessons they'll learn and remember. So I make no apology for playing a lot of games with my students. Rock, paper, scissors. Pictionary. Charades. Twenty questions. Hangman. Anagrams. My students stick post-it notes on 'volunteers' (read: victims) to learn body parts. We watch and discuss film clips to illustrate points I've made in the lesson. Blackadder, Robin Hood, Man Vs Food. The more disgusting, funny or scary the better. We listen to songs to work out the lyrics: Rihanna's California Kingbed is good for doing body parts, Adam and the Ants' Stand and Deliver for crime, Madness' Our House for family, (though it's only as I'm watching that I wonder whether it's culturally appropriate for my class to be watching a man in drag play mother round a house).

My students are kind in unexpected ways. They leave me greetings on the blackboards. They set up the computer for me before I get to lesson, close curtains, find missing erasers, offer me their food, fill up my water bottle and take me into town to show me where to buy the best snacks. One of my students, Stephanie, makes it her personal mission to get my trousers turned up because 'Teacher, I am very concerned your pants are too long. We shall go and make them shorter.'

Our first weekend in Chengdu and unsure how to get back to the university, a student who speaks very little English buys bus tickets for me and G, shows us the correct bus, travels with us, then hails and pays for a taxi for us once we reach the local town afterwards. She flatly refuses any offer of reimbursement.

Being a teacher here is often funny and sometimes difficult and mostly amazing but always a privilege. Nothing will compare to that first moment, standing in front of twenty eager faces and opening my mouth and teaching. It felt odd and amazing and right. Like I'd always done it.

That first lesson, one of my students brings a note explaining their friend cannot come. I open the letter, expecting a few vague lines about illness and promises of future attendance.

Instead it begins:

'Dear Honorified Rachel...'

It could only be China.



the sichuan situation

Jintang, Chengdu, Sichuan Province (02/09/2013)

Location: A 28 hour train ride from Beijing to the very West of China.

Population: 12.5 million.

Famed For: Being the home of China's Pandas and the gateway to Tibet.

 

 

For twenty eight hours, China rolls past the train windows in a myriad of forms and colours. Leaving behind Beijing and the light rain that has begun to fall, the train speeds through the endless suburbs of towering apartment blocks, passing by shabby restaurants, pebble-dashed schools and lines of washing. The sky changes, becoming clear and sunny, then darker, clouds gathering at the corners like school children waiting for a fight. The landscape morphs into watered fields of rice and old men bent in half, picking the tender shoots. Tall bamboo sways in the wind and the mist begins to roll in as the ground starts to rise and fall becoming lush, green and mountainous, dotted here and there with ramshackle farm buildings and shabbily dressed locals, skin sun darkened and wrinkled.

 

Stepping off the train at Chengdu train station, the air wraps round us in greeting, hot and wet as though we've walked into the bathroom after someone else has showered. Sweat slicks our skin, shines our hair and presses our clothes close against our spines. Walking even short distances leaves the napes of our necks damp, faces flushed. The sky is missing, as though someone has reached up and painted it out in big, blank strokes of dirty white smog. Unlike cloud it has no texture, no shape, nothing to define the edges of it. It simply hangs, featureless and heavy over the city.

We are, however, an hour out of the city by car and as my flatmate G and I drive along the motorway in a taxi organised by our contact, Beata, the sky begins to reappear in patches of blue. We are living on campus at our placement at the Arts and Sciences College of Sichuan Normal University, and that turns out to be another pleasant surprise because the university is really rather impressive.

A large arched gateway manned by uniformed guards serves as the entrance. Beyond that is a tree lined avenue with a large bubbling fountain and rising behind it is the grand entrance building, made of light, skin coloured stone. A small lake with the glint of orange fish lies in the middle of the campus and everywhere is green and verdant and lovely. A black butterfly the size of a human hand flits over my head.

Our apartment is habitable enough, needing only a touch of TLC and some light cleaning. We are on the sixth floor though and there is no lift. No internet. No drinkable water. No air conditioning. No gas for our stove. We have only one key between us. Also, a colony of wasp-like insects inhabit the crack between the tiles and the window in our bathroom. Whilst they seem docile enough it does add a Fear Factor style element every time we need to use the shower or toilet.

I have decided I can never visit Australia.

Our neighbours, on the other-hand are lovely. On the floor below is Gregory, an American whose two great loves are coffee and guns. He's been here so long he knows all the tricks and tips and most importantly fixes our TV so that we have HBO movies, rather than just the ironically named Chinese state news channel - CCTV News - in English. He gives us hot chocolate and oatmeal cookies and speaks of a mythical shop called Metro, which stocks foreign foods including real cheese and Heinz baked beans. As proof of this he shows us his kitchen cupboards, containing an altar to the god of western foodstuffs- Coffee, Frosties, Pasta, Quaker Oats and Snickers.

 

Mark, who’s Dutch, smokes and who is generally tall and cool lives on the second floor with his Chinese girlfriend Elaine, (also a teacher and very excited about hotpot and teaching us to cook authentic Chinese food). After trying the canteen food, I too am very excited.

 

Finally there’s Joshua, a laid-back American, with dreadlocks, tattoos and his own rock band. He’s also the leader of our department.

 

They encourage us to tell Beata about the things that need fixing in our flat, especially the wasps. So we do.

 

Beata smiles blankly at us as if we are stupid for not realising that wasps are a design feature of every Chinese home. We explain we want them gone. She laughs at us.

 

'Aah, disgusting!' she giggles.

 

Friday morning there is a knock on the door. Outside is a tiny Chinese man who smiles, points at the paper in his hand, (which is all in mandarin) and then walks past me and into our bathroom. He flushes our toilet, grins and gives me a thumbs up. Then he leaves. The whole experience takes no more than a minute.

 

I am still not sure what has happened. I am, however, reassured that our toilet now has the approval of a stranger.

 

Beata comes to see us the next day. 'Is your toilet working now?'

 

'The toilet was always working,' I explain. 'It's the wasps that are the problem. Wasps.' I flap my arms and make the buzzing noise.

 

'Ah!' Beata nods. 'Wasps. I will sort this out for you.'

 

A week later the wasps are still here. On the upside, a man is now installing air-conditioning in my room.

 

I may have to work on my mime.

the city made of history

Beijing (29/08/13-01/09/13)

Population: 20.18 million.

Famed For: Being the Capital of China.

不到长城非好汉 (bú dào Chángchéng fēi hǎohàn)

'He who has never been to the Great Wall is not a true man.'

Chinese Proverb

 

 

The Great Wall of China is literally breath-taking. Undulating across the land, it dips and curves to follow the contours of the hills it sits on and in the morning light it emerges from the densely forested slopes like a great grey snake or the tail of a dragon, with it's ridged scaling turrets and winding pathways.

In some places the ascent becomes so steep and the steps so high and narrow that the handrail is the only thing left to cling onto. It stains the tourists' palms rust red and tests the muscles in your legs and the steel of your nerves. At some points the path becomes too constrictive to stop without blocking the way, so, with lungs heaving, you push onwards up towards the small fort that marks a stopping point.

But the view. Everything is worth it for the view.

It makes you feel...small.

Walking one of the new Wonders of the World, on steps which were two thousand years in the making, built by slaves and peasants and soldiers now long gone, for one of the world's oldest civilisations and here you are, one person casually standing on so much history.

The sense of perspective is both refreshing and terrifying. It's also coloured with a huge sense of achievement, because despite being one person you have in some way conquered the Wall, and followed in the footsteps of thousands of people before you.

 

You are now part of the history.

I stop to read some of the graffiti that has been scrawled along the Wall by previous travellers, hoping for some words of wisdom, some sense of profundity.

Eva + Carl woz here - '99

I can only assume they too were overwhelmed by the sense of history.

 

Meanwhile, in the heat of a cloudless blue sky day, the roof of the Forbidden City gleams gold and bronze and the sunlight picks out the small dragons that rest on the edges of the tiles. The white stone floors are impossibly bright against the sunburn-red walls and everywhere there is a sense of both grandeur and space. It's very different to a British Palace or a UK Stately Home, whose buildings are full of carpets and paintings, antiques and statues and so much clutter.

The Forbidden City exudes minimalism. The many Halls feature gleaming floors, a golden throne and perhaps a few vases as tall and wide as a grown man. The rest is space (the artefacts having mostly been moved to special museum rooms to the sides of the palace complex).

 

It means you have to use your imagination to travel back to 1420 A.D (when the Palace was finished) to imagine the smell of incense, food, the perfume of flowers thick in the air, servants running to and fro. The sound of courtiers trying to obtain favour, the echo of gongs, music from lutes, harps and drums. The Emperor seated on his throne, conducting affairs of state. The Empress sipping steaming fragrant tea. The concubines, secluded in their rooms, plotting their next political move.

 

Admittedly, this is quite difficult when half a dozen people try and take your photo at the same time.

 

To really gain a sense of just how big the Palace complex is (and to escape from the crowds) we took the short walk up to the top of Jingshan Park, directly opposite the Forbidden City. And once at the top the whole of Beijing unfurls like a large gilded flower opening at dawn, the hilltop providing a 360 degree view of the capital. The Forbidden City gleams and suddenly you can understand why they call the Palace a City because anything less would be ludicrous. It simply is that big.

Like the sprawling mass of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City seems larger than life, an impressive feat of planning, building and engineering. It's as though everything in Beijing is seen through a fairground hall of mirrors- everything is bigger, stranger and more exaggerated and it's been deliberately built like that. It almost seems like a type of madness, this obsession with size and grandeur.

But when you live in a country that contains one seventh of the world's total population, why do anything small?