We have begun another semester of teaching in China. We have switched students from last semester; I will be teaching four classes of sophomores and Anne will teach the four freshman classes. As an experiment in mentorship and consultation, we have broken each class into groups of four. Each group has a distribution of good and not-so-good students, so the better students have the job of helping those who need help. Thus far it show some promise of working. Their first assignment was to choose a name for their groups. In my classes, names ranged from Wild Strawberry, Apple Tree, Supergirls, Shining Star, and Half & Half to Beauty & the Beast, Flying Porpoise, Magic Baby, Naughty Casper, and Tough Biscuit. Anne has groups called Daughters of the Sea, Black Ducks, and Foreign Love. I'm happy with just about any activity in class that stimulates the students to talk together in English.
After a week of chilly, gray, and damp weather, we are getting a breath of spring. The thermometer that we brought back from America registered 70 (21C) yesterday. Soon we will be back to the gray and the damp. The farmers are active in their fields, weeding vegetable patches and preparing for the spring rice planting. A husky young man is working with his ox, plowing small fields that have been flooded. Both he and the ox are hard workers, but he seems to think the ox could work harder and that the ox is hard of hearing. As the ox plods along, it tears off mouthfuls of grass at the edge of the field. When they reach a corner or turn, the man lifts the plow and carries it around the corner as the ox turns. The man shouts his instructions and after a few seconds the ox begins pulling. Occasionally its front hooves will break through a patch of soft earth and it flounders on its belly. The man shouts and uses his switch as the ox rolls around, gains its feet, and plods onward. At the end of the day, the ox is turned loose to eat in peace. The irrigation ponds are depleted from flooding the fields, so we need more of that damp weather.
The children have discovered the outdoors again. Taalan has been playing basketball, football (soccer), and American football with his buddies. Marble season is probably a few weeks away, but kites already have made an appearance.
We spent Spring Festival in America. We had no problems with travel or airport security, except that our small pocketknives were confiscated at the first airport. We hadn't thought of it until it was too late to put them in our checked baggage. We made a quick stop in Tokyo and flew overnight to San Francisco, where we rented a car and drove to Carson City. Traffic was orderly and the streets were unlittered. We attended our daughter Ami's wedding, which was held at the arts center. They are members of a Renaissance Fair group, and Ami made all of the period costumes. The ceremony was lovely and mercifully short, as it should be. The groom wore his hand-made chain mail as part of his outfit, and looked quite impressive.
While we were in Carson City, the Olympic torch happened to pass through on its way to Salt Lake City. According to the paper, it would travel within two blocks of our friend's house where we were staying. We bundled up and lined up with other folks from the neighborhood. The morning was chilly, with strong winds from the mountains that gusted to 50 miles an hour or more. We stood around and waited, shivering. The crowd was colorfully arrayed. Many people were carrying American flags; one lady sported a fashionable flag jacket and matching hat. An advance team drove by and distributed small flags to wave. One side was a flag and, in the best tradition of capitalism, the other side was an advertisement for a local Chevy dealership. Finally we spotted the flashing lights that signaled the advent of the torch. A woman was jogging slowly towards us. A young man of unusual appearance alighted from a van, carrying an unlit torch. He had on a splendid white sports outfit. His head was shaved except for a strip of hair along the crest of his head that stuck out 18 inches like some rock-star Mohawk. It was dyed red, white, and blue and waved back and forth in the wind. He and the woman met, touched torches, and his sprung into flame. The crowd cheered as he trotted off down the street.
We drove back to San Francisco and caught a midnight flight to Ft. Myers. We spent a blissful week there with my mother and sister. My brother drove over from Palm Beach County and we had a picnic in the park. We spent time at the beach. We picked oranges off the tree behind the house and squeezed fresh juice. We caught up on pizza, cereal, cheese sandwiches, and oven-baked food. You would think the children had suffered from some unknown-to-medicine nutrient deficiency, because during the time we were in Florida they ate three and a half gallons of kosher pickles! Tariqa was now old enough to play cards with Grandma, and we enjoyed many games of pinochle and screwball rummy (may I). We played shuffleboard, and Taalan became a regular at the bocce courts. Bocce is an Italian game where you toss balls down the court and try to knock the other team's balls away and leave your balls closest to the target ball. It's similar to curling at the Olympics, except that the Italians apparently aren't accustomed to ice or brooms. We watched the Super Bowl and the beginning of the Olympics. Anne helped my sister with her stained-glass projects. We dressed in shorts and went barefooted. We read the comics and filled in the crossword puzzles. In all, we lived a totally different life than in China.
We drove over to the eastern coast and stayed with friends there. Taalan met up with his old friend Steven and they went to the state fair together. After a few days we got a call from my sister. My mother had fallen on her way to the refrigerator and broken her hip. We drove back the next morning after seeing Henry, our 98-year-old friend, in his nursing home. As we came in, he was playing catch with a group of fellow geezers in wheelchairs. He was happy to see us and quite talkative, but he often would start a sentence in German and finish it in English. My mom was in the hospital for the remainder of our stay. She was moved to a rehab facility when we left, but it was uncertain whether she would be able to walk or get around well again. We're considering returning to the USA to live near her, but that's another story.
We called our airline to verify our vegetarian meals and our outbound schedule, and they asked for our local phone number in case of problems. On the day of our flight, we got a call. The flight to Toronto would be delayed and we would miss our connecting flight, so they had arranged for us to take an earlier flight to Toronto on another airline. Luckily we already were packed. We rushed to the airport and changed the tickets. We were told that, because we had changed tickets on short notice, the computer's terrorist-profiling software had selected us for a complete search. All our luggage was politely but thoroughly searched, and we managed to get the bags re-closed and passed through all the other checkpoints without incident. We flew overnight via Toronto and Vancouver and arrived in Hong Kong in the morning, a two-day trip by the calendar. We spent five days in the greater Hong Kong area, meeting with some China friends, and caught an overnight train back to our home province. It was the end of spring festival (Chinese new year), and many people were heading back home.
While we were in America we noticed that the mood had changed. Flags were displayed everywhere, especially on cars. We found a resolution to be tough against the nation's enemies. To a moderate degree, of course, this attitude is sane and laudable, but we had the impression that the public's mood was also insensitive and paranoid. We found little thought given to a dialog with the "have-not" nations of the world, and little interest in working with them to resolve the root causes of injustice, poverty, and the resulting discontent. One day I took the kids to a small park. I got out my camera to take a few pictures of them. In less than a minute I was approached by a husky man wearing a police-oriented shirt and a gun on his hip. He politely asked what I was doing with the camera. When I explained that I was simply enjoying the park with my children, he relaxed and said he was off-duty and accompanying his daughter on a class outing to the park. The teachers, he said, were suspicious of my motives and had asked him to check me out. I can understand the need to feel more secure, but at what price to our souls?
We had a uniquely Chinese, but similarly surreal, experience last Friday. Our waiban knocked on the door and told us there would be an American-band rock concert in town that night. He didn't know the name of the band or their style of music. We went downtown to a small hall in a new hotel, found some good seats, and waited. The band came out; they were mostly of my generation. Their musicianship was tight and competent, but not outstanding. We strained to make out the English words of their first song and shared a look as we realized that the message was definitely Christian. After two songs they retired and a typically Chinese variety show followed. We saw several dances in ethnic costumes to stirring, patriotic music. A Chinese man performed on soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, and erhu, a traditional two-stringed, bowed instrument. Two young women from Xi'an performed a combination of contortions and balancing. For example, one bent over backwards until her head was facing forward from behind her ankles, and the other did a handstand while perched on the knees of the first. They were quite amazing. Two young men performed some Shaolin kungfu with swords and tumbling. One of them took a sewing needle and threw it through a sheet of glass. The needle actually pierced the glass and burst a balloon on the back side, without shattering the glass. Several door prizes were awarded by drawing ticket stubs from a box. The band returned; the vice-mayor of Xiangtan and some other Party officials presented them with a large flower bouquet. Their first song was in Chinese, and the message was something like "If you find Jesus, you will be a just man." The rest of the concert was in English and quite openly Christian, with titles such as "Hey you, I'm into Jesus" and "You gotta believe (in Jesus)." We were stunned that Christianity could be so openly proclaimed in China, and that the government seemed to be supporting it. On our way home, I asked our waiban if the government policy was changing. He replied, in a masterfully noncommittal way, that this was a form of cultural exchange and that China had opened its doors to the world... Given the rate of change in society and the number of factors influencing it, probably no one can say for certain what the shape of China will be tomorrow.
Dear friends: We try to maintain a non-provocative profile in China. I’m simply reporting our experiences and reactions. Please don’t send us email concerning the previous two paragraphs; this is not the proper format for further discussions.
Well, back to a more mundane reality. We had a heavy rain this morning, and now the weather is sunny and warm again. I began teaching a new class today, after having been given two days' notice. None of the students had the textbook I had been told to use; they said it was unavailable. Once again, my lesson plans flew out the window. This is, still, China, after all.
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