The Holidays in Beibei

Celebrating the holidays in China are a little different celebrating them in the United States.  The biggest problem when it comes to celebrating the holidays is the lack of certain food items and other decorations that you might need.  But, that lack of certain items is what makes celebrating the holidays in China memorable.  The adventure of finding what you need from the store or being creative and making substitutes is all part of the fun.    

Thanksgiving was the most difficult Holiday to celebrate in China because it requires a lot of cooking and many of the food items that we consume in the U.S. either can’t be found or require planning way in advance and a lot of money.  So to prepare for the big meal, the Foreign Students Office transported me and the rest of the English teachers to a big supermarket in Chongqing called Metro to buy what we needed.  We were able to find everything but cranberry filling and a turkey.  Not having a turkey wasn’t so bad, we decided to substitute some roast chickens and ducks that could be bought on Thanksgiving Day.  The food situation was figured out.

We still had classes to teach on Thanksgiving, so we did not have the luxury of having the full day to cook and prepare for the big meal.  But, because everyone had split up responsibilities for cooking or acquiring certain dishes, the feast was organized on time.  This was the most diverse Thanksgiving dinner I had ever consumed.  We had stuffing, gravy, rolls, roast duck, roast chicken, some Indian dishes (cooked by a Pakistani teacher), roasted sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, rice porridge, and carameled apples.  It was quite a feast.      

    

Celebrating Christmas in China wasn’t too difficult, the Christmas season had arrived in Beibei.  All of the shops, supermarkets, etc….. all had Christmas decorations, Christmas music and staff dressed in Christmas outfits.  I had never seen Christmas in Beibei before.  When I studied abroad in Beibei two years ago I couldn’t even tell that Christmas was around the corner.  From my understanding, Christmas is the new fad in China (at least in rural China now).  

To celebrate Christmas Jess (my girlfriend remember) and I started the day with a nice breakfast and then opened the Christmas presents that we got each other and then presents that my mom sent both of us.  Then we relaxed for the rest of the day watching Christmas movies.  In the evening Jess and I participated in a Secret Santa get together with many of the other teachers in our building and then went out to eat a fancy Chinese meal. 

It is easy to get home sick during the holidays (I have experienced my fair share of it) when you don’t have your close friends and family around.  But, celebrating the holidays in China has allowed me to get away from tradition a little bit and make some unforgettable memories.        

Final Exams

After experiencing giving final exams to my students at the end of the fall semester, I decided that I would not give final exams during spring semester.  Now before you start thinking I am a lazy teacher or something, I will tell you what happened.  So remember that weekend excursion that I went on with the other foreign teachers and Chinese professors?  I was able to have many of my questions concerning the final exams answered during that time.  What I found out was not very uplifting.

To start things off, I found out my Oral English class is only worth ten percent of the total English grade of each student (that explains why I only have a twenty five percent class attendance).  So by estimates I should have about four hundred students combined in my eight classes that I teach.  WOW! That means I have to give about four hundred oral exams within one week.  So I asked questions concerning time and space to be able to give all of the exams.  Can we have a room reserved for each of us to take these exams?  Can we have students use class time, lunch time and the early afternoon to take their exams?  These requests were simply out of the question (there goes my idea of a three minute final per student).  We got laughed at when we asked for a reserved room and my question concerning using out of class time to give the exams was answered with another question “But when will the students be able eat their lunch and take their nap?”  At this point it really dawned to me that we were not being taken seriously by anyone so I was not going to give a final exam that could be taken seriously.  So I decided to give each student a one minute oral final exam with me.  It was the only way I could get through all of the students within the class periods.  It was a bad idea.

Now the final exam was only sixty percent of the total grade and the remainder was class attendance.  So how was I going to remember the students who have either shown up to class all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, or never.  All I could do was estimate because we were never given a class list for any of our classes.  I knew I was going to see many unfamiliar faces and the best I could give them was a D if they completed the final exam.  I thought I was very fair.  I gave better grade to students I recognized and I only failed students who did not show up for the final (I wouldn’t know who they were otherwise), if they didn’t complete the final, if they couldn’t understand my very simple questions or if they just were silent beside the occasional “umm”.  I have some very memorable examples of each.

There were only a couple students who did not complete the final exam.  One student tried to recite a paragraph that he had memorized (very commonly occurred by many students who all tried to talk about their hometown) but had run out of material after thirty seconds.  I tried to engage him in conversation by asking him simple questions but he just didn’t understand anything that I said.  He would just respond with, “Thank you teacher, bye bye”.  Eventually he walked away from me even after I told him that he had not finished the exam.  Another student who walked away from me was a very weird fellow. He was one of my students who would just use my class as a study hall and would try to pretend that I was not there when I would try to get him to talk.  During his exam he spoke gibberish for twenty seconds before stopping mid-gibberish, twitched his neck and then stormed out of the building after a brief second of awkward silence.   

I also did have some fun with the students who would stick around for the full minute but would only recite a short twenty second speech about their hometown.  I would try to help them by asking them simple questions about their home time like, “What is the food like”, or “what is famous in your hometown?”  But usually they would just stare off into the corners of their eyes in silence or mumble “na’ge…….na’ge……” (“um” in Chinese). 

Like I said earlier, giving a one minute oral final exam to four hundred students is a bad idea.  I had to have the oral exams be taken outside the classroom in the freezing cold hallway (and usually I was for 60-90 minutes at a time before I got through all of them).  Also giving determining sixty percent of someone’s total grade based off of a one minute oral exam is ridiculous.  I have decided that I will not give a final exam next semester, but instead I will make attendance the one hundred percent of the grade by randomly taking attendance. 

Since submitting grades I look back at this experience I see both agony and humor.  I also now have a tremendous amount of respect for college professors.  

Lil Minnesota Comes to China

Saying goodbye to friends and family before leaving to live in another country for an extended period of time can be very difficult, but saying goodbye to your girlfriend can be even more difficult.  Friends and family will always be there for you when you return, but can the person that you are in a relationship with do the same?  Long distance relationships tend to have very low success rates, but on the positive side, that is the only kind of relationship that I have known with my girlfriend Jessica (Jess).  Ever since we started dating our relationship was a long distance one.  She went to college four hours away from mine and her home in Shoreview, MN is four hours away from my home in Ashland, WI.  Every time we got together we would go on a trip somewhere or put together an itinerary to maximize our stay with each other.  Now since I have moved even farther away to live in China, our relationship has really been put to the test.  We would have to go three and a half months before we could be together again.  So we made travel arrangement for her to come and visit me so we could travel around China together.  Finally the day of her arrival, December 14th had finally come around and I needed to go to Chongqing to pick her up at the airport.

Going to the airport by myself was going to be interesting.  I had to take one of the last busses leaving Beibei to Chongqing, get off at a specific bus stop, and then find a taxi to take me to the airport.  A Chinese friend of mine taught me a couple of useful phrases to help me along my journey, such as “Driver please tell me when we have arrived at Jia Zhou Hua Yuan”.  Eventually I arrived at the airport but had four hours of waiting to do before she would arrive, so in the meantime I camped out in the airport’s KFC to eat a snack and played games on my laptop.  Finally, at 1:45am, she walked through the terminal where she found me waiting (if you want to know the romantic details just ask Jess or me in person).  Getting back to Beibei was quite the journey too.  We had to take a bus to a specific bus stop to catch a taxi to bring us back to Beibei.  We arrived back at my apartment at 2:30am. 

Finally our China adventure together had begun and with the starting point being in Beibei.  I still had a week of teaching to do (finals week) when Jess arrived but this gave her a good opportunity to experience where I lived and get a little bit more acclimated to being China before we departed.  

The Weekend of Answers

The end of the semester is approaching and already I am having flashbacks of finals week at St. John’s; long hours spent studying in the library and few hours spent sleeping.  And this year I am giving final exams to all four hundred sum graduate students.  Just like my lack of experience in teaching, I have no experience giving final exams (no guidance here either).  So I began emailing several Chinese faculty and asking a lot of questions (December 5^th-9^th).

When do I have to give final exams to the students?  What format do I have to use for the final exams?  When do I have to have final grades turned in? When am I free to leave for vacation?  What resources are available to me for the final?  I sent several emails to different people trying to find out some answers (this is the second week of December already).  Basically I was not able to get any questions answered because nobody knew what was going to happen for the rest of the semester yet.  Talk about frustration!  How can I start planning for my winter vacation when I don’t even know when finals are?  St. John’s or any other University in America would have had the whole year planned out way ahead of time.  Even though I was unsuccessful in finding any answers through emails I was not totally left high and dry.  What I found out was that the foreign English teachers and I were going to go on a trip to Wu Shan with some of the other Graduate Chinese Professors during the weekend.  I was told to bring a change of clothes and my passport because we would be staying overnight.  Somewhere, at sometime during the trip I was told I would finally get some answers. 

It was 7:00am on a Saturday morning and there I was standing and waiting for a bus to pick me and the other teachers up from gate number six.  We had no idea what was going to happen during this weekend’s get-away with the other professors.  All we could do was follow along and hope that we get some answers.  

Shortly after boarding and finding our seats in the back the bus departed and a tour guide began to speak into the microphone.  I wish I could tell you what she said (If I could have, this story about my weekend trip would be a lot less exciting).  Soon after she finished speaking she handed out itinerary sheets and then sat down.  It did not matter that we were able to get one of the itinerary sheets in the back of the bus because like the tour guide, the sheets were in Chinese.  We would continue on with the trip not knowing details.  After driving for four and a half hours we finally stopped at a small town along the Yangzi River to eat some lunch at a restaurant.  At lunch we found out that the next stop in the trip was a famous temple that was about thirty minutes down the river. 

When we arrived at the Zhang Fei temple I noticed something about it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look like it was 1,700 years old.  Apparently the whole temple and its relics were relocated about fifty meters up the hill in order to preserve it from the rising waters levels of the Yangzi caused by the Three Gorges Dam.  The temple was kind of interesting but, most of it looked new and I couldn’t read or understand anything.  After spending about an hour at the temple we boarded the bus and were back on the road again for two more hours of driving.  Soon after arriving we checked into a hotel and then gathered into a large conference room to discuss issues that came up during the semester and answer any questions that me might have (it’s about darn time!).

The meeting was very comical (at least to me) and different from any kind of conference meeting I had ever participated in.  The meeting began with one of the administrators giving a long welcome speech followed by some speeches of a few other faculty members (all spoken in Chinese of course).  While these speeches were going I had to keep myself from smirking because for one, I can’t understand anything in their long speeches, and two, there was a very entertaining show of several people trying to figure out how to solve the microphone technical difficulties in an environment that didn’t need microphones (no one knew what they were doing).  When the speeches were finished everyone in the room split up into three small discussion groups to discuss any issues that had come up during the semester.  Finally we had our questions answered.  Following the meeting was dinner at the hotel and then a short trip to a shop to buy snacks for our early morning the next day.

I began the day at four thirty in the morning to embark on our next part of the trip to an unknown destination to do any unknown activity.  We loaded up onto the bus and headed out on the road again.  After a couple hours of driving we arrived in a town called Wu Shan.  There, we would get on a ferry and travel up the Yangzi River to a part of the Three Gorges.  The river there was quite breath-taking.  The sun was shooting beams of light through the gray clouds and burning away the morning mist.  Being a major river, the Yangzi is a major shipway for cargo ships and cruise ships.  Did you know that the Yangzi is so deep now because of the Three Gorges Dam that you can take a large cruise ship all the way from Shanghai to Chongqing?   

Eventually we got crammed onto a medium size ferry and headed down the river.  Despite it being cold, I wondered up to the viewing deck and was fortunate enough to get a window to take pictures from.  We passed underneath a massive red arched bridge and passed by many cargo ships, and small towns.  After about an hour and a half we disembarked at the Three Gorges to do some “hiking”.  I say hiking with quotation marks because I am used to hiking in the United States where you hike in the wilderness, walk on soil and are relatively alone when you do so.  Here, hundreds of people are funneled onto a stone stairway that is two persons wide (more like standing in line if you ask me).  I did not hike to the top because I was too impatient to deal with the congested trail.  To return we took a ferry to the bus and then drove for nine hours back to Beibei.

Even getting simple things in China such as buying a pair of shoes is not easy in China.  It kind of takes the fun out of it when you can conveniently buy everything you need at one location (like at Walmart or Target).  Here, everything requires a journey and leaves a good story to tell.   

Learning Chinese is a Piece of Cake…….

The alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians thousands of years ago.  The alphabet teaches you the basic sounds of a language so you can apply them in reading, writing and speaking of a language.  Gaining knowledge by applying basic concepts is how we are taught in schools in America (western thought).  In Chinese there is no alphabet so you have to learn the language in a different way; lots repetition and memorization.  But how are adults from the western world supposed to do that?

The Chinese language is a very ancient language.  Its modern written language comes from pictographs that have evolved over thousands of years so there is no alphabet.  Having no alphabet makes learning Chinese one of the most difficult achievements in the world.  If you want to sit down and read a newspaper in Chinese, you have to know on average a minimum of two thousand four hundred different characters.  Now how does a person who has been educated using western thought learn that many characters when there is no alphabet?  Step one; learn how to learn Chinese.

If you think you can memorize several thousand characters with flash cards, be my guest because you can only get so far before the brain reaches its limits and then starts to forget.  Of course there are some basic characters that you have to memorize in the beginning (and it will be as familiar as a bunch of scribbles).  These basic characters are important for learning most of the rest of the characters.  Simple characters such as the character for wood 木 for example.  When you look at it and use your imagination you can see a tree with roots (stick figure tree).  Even just training your mind to use your imagination allows it to organize and make sense of the basic characters.  When you have memorized the basic characters you can start to learn the more complex characters.  Now you are applying your western style of learning to a language that has no alphabet.

Learning the complex characters takes more time than the basic ones. Now you have to apply basic concepts that you learned but you also have to memorize quite a bit still.  Complex characters are composed of basic characters called radicals.  Like the character for chair 椅 has the radical for wood on the left side of the character.  This shows that wood has something to do with the character; when you picture a chair in your mind is it made of wood?  You can learn Chinese when you can make some sense of it.  Step two; find an outlet to learn Chinese from.

I have been studying Chinese for two and a half years now and still have a very difficult time finding an outlet of which to study Chinese at my skill level.  Here in Beibei the university has provided us with a Chinese teacher to teach us introductory Chinese.  I have learned introductory material in a classroom setting three times now (which does me no good).  I am at an intermediate level and need more than what that class provides.  I have thought of a few ideas; read children’s books and get tutored by some of my Chinese friends while I teach them English.  Also it helps being immersed in the language by living in China. 

Isn’t it amazing how you can distinguish how people learn knowledge based off of how they learn their language?  Whether it is applying basic concepts (western thought) or memorizing all concepts (Chinese).  We shall see how I progress as I continue to learn this language.  Every day I can read more on the restaurant menus and street signs and the people become more understandable.  Piece of cake right?

Burgers and Fries to Replace Stir-Fry and Rice

During the summer of 2010 my sister and I drove from Hattiesburg, Mississippi to our home in Ashland Wisconsin; I had just finished a summer internship at the University of Southern Mississippi.  During the long 20 hour drive we traveled through Mississippi, part of Tennessee and Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin.  When we entered the state of Illinois, we set sail into the endless sea of corn fields.  It’s a pretty boring drive when all you see is corn on the side of the road.  But isn't it also amazing?  Corn is the crop that feeds our industrialized food system. 

During the Chinese National Holiday I traveled to Chengdu China by fast train and was able to see much of the Chongqing and Sichuan landscape along the way.  The first thing that struck me was that there was no endless sea of corn and there were no large scale farms.  The hilly and mountainous landscape was dotted with small farming plots which all seems to be taken car of by different people and had many different crops growing in them.  Seeing this gave me a good idea for a class lecture.  I wanted to know what my students thought about using the industrialized food system in China.

First I showed my students the documentary film Food Inc to give them a good all around view of the way food is made in an industrialized system (the movie certainly makes you think more about where your food came from).  Then in the class following the movie we discussed what answers they came up with to this question, “Should China ever adopt the industrialized food system so as to independently feed its large population?”   Over all the results were about half and half for adopting or rejecting the food system.  The main argument for adopting the food system was to help overcome feeding the large population independently even though the consequences were great.  The arguments rejecting the food system were many.  Students used arguments stating environmental problems, emigrational problems, cultural problems and health problems.  None argued for human or animal rights (kind of a touchy subject here in China).         

 Yes the industrialized food system is great. We Americans are able to spend less of our annual budget on food than most people in other countries around the world.  Our grocery stores don’t have seasons anymore, and they have an average of forty thousand different products to choose from.  One of our major exports is food because we can produce so much of it so cheaply.  Other countries cannot compete with our food system.  For example, think about how widespread McDonalds is in the world.  McDonalds is everywhere (over 31,000 restaurants in 119 different countries world-wide).  Go America!  Right?  Also keep in mind many Americans don’t know how to cook, can’t afford to cook healthy food, don’t eat together as a family and have some sort of health problem related to their diet.  And don’t forget the large carbon footprint and all of the human and animal rights violations that are created by manufacturing this super cheap food.   

Personally it makes me feel disgusted when I see a McDonalds in the Forbidden City in Beijing or KFC in downtown Beibei.  American fast food restaurants don’t belong in China and frankly neither does the American industrialized food system.  Chinese food is a big part of Chinese culture; culture that comes from how the food is grown, processed, cooked and then eaten.   China is already losing a lot of its culture by being on the fast track to modernization.  Why should burgers and fries replace stir-fry and rice?  With an industrialized food system already in America, I wonder what food-related culture we Americans have lost (how food is grown, processed, cooked and eaten).              

The Toilets in China are Different

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top.  You cannot not reach the higher levels of the pyramid without fulfilling the lower ones first.  The part of the pyramid that I am stressing here is the physiological part; more specifically excretion. 

In America we have public toilets everywhere so you don’t have to stress out or worry about what to do when nature calls.  Every public restroom will have privacy, have toilet paper and have a sink to wash your hands.  I don’t mean to put the American public restroom system on a pedestal; I have experienced my fair share of dirty, stinky and scary public restrooms in America.  But of all of the dirty, stinky, and scary public restrooms I have experienced in America, none have prepared me for public restrooms in China.

In China the idea of a toilet is completely different.  You don’t sit down and relax while you do your duty, you have to squat over a porcelain hole in the floor (the dreaded squatting toilet).  I don’t know about you but I find it very difficult to relax in that squatting position even if I am using facilities that have burning incents, calming tradition Chinese music playing in the background, and beautifully decorated stalls (my hips and knees are just not used to it).  Even becoming comfortable with using a squatter in a nice environment like the one that I just described, is difficult.  I used to have nightmares about using squatting toilets (not really, but I definitely avoided them like the plague) and that didn’t change until I brought myself to the brink of disaster.  Sometimes you eat something that your body just doesn’t agree with and your body will spring into action (out of the blue) and give you the five minute countdown to find a toilet or else……  I could be ten or fifteen (or longer) minutes away from home (my beloved western style toilet) and refuse myself to use a nearby squatting toilet and hike all the way back to my apartment (I would not suggest doing so).  Like I said, my fear of using a squatter took me to the brink of disaster before I finally gave it a try. 

Now even though you may have become comfortable with using squatting toilets doesn’t mean that you have gotten comfortable with public restrooms.  It is very important to remember which public restrooms are nice and which ones look like and smell like a sewage tank.  You don’t want to be forced to use a public restroom that smells like ammonia so bad that it burns your nostrils and makes you eyes water or one that doesn’t have flushing toilets.  Just the environment of a public restroom can give you nightmares that continue to scare you away from ever using squatters.  When learning to become accustomed to squatters, it is wise to purposely go to places that have very well kept restrooms (like at a nice café or restaurant). 

After becoming accustomed to using squatting toilets I have come to understand the reason of their design (I have allowed myself to rise to a higher region of Maslow’s pyramid!).  When you use a squatting toilet, you are not touching anything (except for your shoes on the ground) so it is cleaner.  Can you imagine using western style toilets in an over populated country like China (kind of gross if you ask me)?  Anyway, when you visit China, the sooner you can get over your fear of using a squatting toilet, the sooner you can start enjoying yourself by allowing yourself to rise past the bottom region of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Just have patience and an open mind and everything will be more enjoyable.