September 21 — Tariqa's second turtle died today. The first died while we were on holidays, and she has decided that she has had enough turtles. She doesn't want any more to die. Bless her heart, she is such a little trooper. She has taken Taalan's recent medical problems with calmness and understanding. Taalan has talked a little about how he is feeling inside and seems glad to have me around. The IV drips are a minor nuisance to him now and seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe this has been a growing experience for him.
September 23 — Taalan's stomach seems fine now. We will keep a close eye on him, though, and he knows that he needs to be careful and not run around too wildly.
I start teaching around the 7th of October. Until then I am playing my yangqin [a Chinese dulcimer] and taking Chinese lessons along with Emily — listening skill and conversation mostly — a real challenge for me. I am also trying to keep up with Tariqa's Chinese characters, though I am not sitting in on her class. She has memorized today's lesson and is practicing by reciting the Chinese text to me. Hope to hear from you soon.
October 3 — I start teaching on Tuesday of next week. I have 2 hours on Monday and Friday afternoons and 6 hours on Tuesday and Thursday. I will need to teach all morning and the 1st class in the afternoon. This will change our jiaozi-eating day to Tuesday. [They eat dumplings once a week at the restaurant.]
The children are doing well. Bobbie took Tariqa into town this morning; they went to the park and shopped for a birthday present. Bobbie said that she has started to understand from watching Tariqa what it means to live by the heart. Tariqa offered her seat to several people on the bus and insisted on throwing her garbage in the trash. They met some of Bobbie's friends who were very surprised that Tariqa was wearing such ordinary clothes. They imagined that, since we were Americans and therefore rich, we would wear expensive, fancy clothes. This country is such a funny mixture of naivety and worldliness.
Hyon [our Korean friend who lives in Florida] is worried about Beth coming to China. [Beth is another friend from Florida. She has two children, is finishing a college degree, and wants to come to Xiangtan to take our place at the university.] So many of the Chinese use foreigners to get what they want, especially men who want to leave China. Hyon mentioned a young woman who had married a young Chinese man. For a year they had a lovely honeymoon in China. When they came to the USA, the man's behavior completely changed. He had what he wanted and didn't care about anything else. Apparently the girl is really miserable and the man intolerable. Hyon worries that Beth will become a similar target.
I was walking around campus today, noticing all the changes since we first came. All the private little places are gone. All the bushes have been removed, such as in the little park and pavilion on the south campus near the teaching building. Every place that has been re-landscaped or dug up has now been planted in those spider type plants that grow in little clumps. They never fill in, so you can't use the areas for sitting or sports or even for walking. The whole area behind the new teaching building has been planted in them, as well as all around our apartments. As usual this practice makes no sense whatever to me, as the area still has to be weeded. Of course that never happens on our campus, so the areas just grow weeds, cannot be played on, and never fill in, so if you walk across it you end up with mud caked to your shoes. But, this is progress, I suppose. For the first two months it looks great. Oh well, enough of that.
October 17 — I spent a nice morning with Frank [Fang Yuan, our Chinese friend and savior] yesterday, talking as usual about many interesting topics. He mentioned that in his day all the best students went into the civil fields of study. Today the military gets first pick of the best students in all fields.
I also had a great discussion with my businessmen students on Monday night, talking about wedding traditions in China. It is interesting that the bride's parents do not come to the wedding at all. The parents do not want their daughter to leave because, when she leaves, she is not longer part of their family. The parents thus are often very sad, and crying is not good luck at a wedding. The groom must prepare a new home for the bride before the wedding. Then he comes to the bride's house with a cock, a couple of carp, five kilos of pork, and a box of rice. He also must have many envelopes with money in them, which he slips through the opening between the doors. Usually the children of the family get the money. They count the money and won't open the door to let the bride out until they are satisfied with the amount. The bride must bring a quilt to her new home. She sews peanuts and peppers into the quilt to insure fertility, and also a little money. To ensure the birth of a boy, the wedding bed must be prepared by a married woman whose first-born is a son. She gets the money in the quilt as payment for this service. Everything that is worn by the bride and groom should be new and white, with one red article to ensure prosperity and happiness.
I am going to have a nap now as I have already taught four hours this morning and I have another class after lunch. I woke up at 4 a.m. last night because tiny mosquitoes had gotten through the cracks around the screen and were eating me. As usual, I couldn't get back to sleep.
October 19 — It's time again for the annual English speech contest. Emily is helping with the speech students this year. The leaders explained to Emily that the most important thing in the speech contest was to win first prize and acclaim for the university; therefore it was acceptable for a foreign teacher to write the speeches for the students. Emily declared that this was cheating and she would have nothing to do with it. No at all, was the reply, all the other universities did the same, so it wasn't really cheating. Emily shook her head and said that didn't make it correct. She would offer suggestions for improving the speech, but would not write it. She told me later that she had a vivid image of us beating our heads against a brick wall for the last three years on this same topic.
Yesterday the speech students called to see if I, too, could help them, so they came for 2.5 hours this afternoon and will come again tomorrow. A young man named Clark, who used to visit us, is one of the contestants. We discussed what their speech meant to each of them. All of Xina's comments were negative, so I suggested that she rethink her speech if she didn't really believe in it. Xina said that she had already rewritten her speech three times. When I asked if she had liked any of the speeches, she said she liked only the first one, which dealt with simple everyday moments such as a child's first step, holding your child for the first time, and looking into its eyes. It had been rejected as neither modern nor progressive. I told her that if this was her understanding of success, then say it, but to paint the pictures with her words so that others will see the same thing. The speech committee will hate me.
The third girl, Soma, decided herself to rewrite her speech from scratch, which was a relief to me. It was not a bad speech, but was straight from the Communist Party line. I couldn't fault it, of course, but it was such blatant propaganda that it turned my stomach. It will be interesting to see what they bring tomorrow.
October 26 — As of today I have washed my hands of helping with the speech contest. You remember the speech that was so party line? Well, I mentioned it to Scott later and he told Emily. [Scott and Emily liver together.] She was puzzled because she had seen Soma's speech only an hour before they came to see me, and it wasn't like that. The next morning, Friday, one of the girls took both speeches to Scott to have him make any extra suggestions. In the daylight it was obvious that the speech had been photocopied from some other source. When he asked the girl, the whole story came out...
After Thursday's speech workout, Mrs. **** had asked the girls, basically forced them I guess, to call me late at night and ask if I would edit their speeches. She then gave them a plagiarized speech to get corrected, telling them to say it was theirs, since I hadn't seen their real speeches. She also told them that if they gave her own speech they might be severely disciplined. On Friday morning Xina still did not know if she was giving her own speech or the photocopied one that I had unknowingly corrected. Scott called me to let me know what had happened. I was so angry that they had betrayed me that when Jane [our liason with the Forign Language Department] called a little later to ask me to record the speeches onto cassettes for the students, for the first time ever I refused. I told her that until I had an apology from the person responsible, I would no longer be involved in the speech contest. She was very shocked that I had actually refused to do something for the college. I told her that I felt used, that it was a very poor way to repay the 3 years of dedicated service I had given this college. After nearly begging me to help her out, I again refused and said goodbye to her.
Apparently she then called Scott and asked for him to help. He was just as angry about the whole thing and also told her very firmly that it was not acceptable in any way. At first he wasn't going to say much, but when she started to say to him that it wasn't cheating and he really didn't need to view it as such, he unloaded his mind about what was and was not the problem. Jane then asked him if Emily would be willing to do it. He said that the problem was not going to be solved by just running down the line of foreign teachers. None of us were willing to be involved in this kind of shoddy operation. He hung up and immediately called me, only to find I had been called first. I have never been so disgusted in my life. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow will bring. Poor Jane kept trying to apologize to me and I refused to accept it because she wasn't the one behind it. What really burned me was that Mrs. **** used Jane and these kids to do her dirty work for her.
Anyway, that's that. I had a fun evening with the freshman students who came over last night, playing Rummikub and Careers, while Taalan played Chinese chess and taught one girl American chess. I also washed five loads of clothes, marked about 75 assignments this afternoon, and typed in all my student-name lists and the first set of marks.
Yesterday was field day at the primary school and there were no classes in the afternoon, so naturally the apartment was full of kids. I was teaching a class and then had my Chinese lesson, which Bobbie is now teaching. When I came back, it looked like a cyclone had gone through the place. Taalan helped clean up on his own initiative last night in the living room, but the rest of the apartment was still a shambles, so we cleaned house all morning too. It was a busy day. I had lots of energy, though, because Scott had called me early this morning and I was so angry. It made for brisk, frenzied cleaning for awhile until I got the energy turned to a positive direction. That's enough unloading... In all we had a good day except for the phone calls, and the children were very good.
Taalan had an exhausting experience this afternoon. He was on the way home on the bus from pingpong practice. Where the road narrows at the city limits, just after the really bad potholes, they have been digging up the road, resulting in long delays going in or out of town. There was a major accident. Taalan talked to someone who had seen the whole thing. A motorcyclist had zipped out directly in front of another bus. He misjudged the distance and the bus couldn't stop and went right over top of him. As the bus was trying to stop, another bus from another direction came plowing along, as they always do when they are late due to traffic. It couldn't avoid the first bus and slammed right into the side of the bus. Not only was the motorcyclist killed but also several people in the first bus where it was hit. It happened just before Taalan's bus arrived on the scene. He says that they had been packed in like sardines, even worse that usual, with the attendant pushing and shoving people around to force room for others to get on. When they got to the accident, she started pushing people out the doors, telling them they needed to walk from there. Everyone had to get off, so Taalan walked from the railroad underpass all the way home. It took him a little over an hour and a half. For two hours, only motorcycles were able to squeeze past the accident, and Taalan wisely refused to do take a motorcycle taxi. A nice lady who lives at the Normal University walked all the way with him, sharing her popcorn with him and giving him encouragement. He said he ran 1000 meters at school yesterday, but it was nothing compared to his walk today. He was one sore footed boy when he got in, but thankful to be safe.
November 7 — On a brighter note, Tariqa got her first 100 percent on an exam in Math. She is doing division up to 6. [She has just begun second grade.] She had a rocky start understanding what was going on, but is doing great now. I am very proud of her. The children are taking midterm exams tomorrow. Tariqa only has exams in math and Chinese. Taalan had four tests today and has another three tomorrow. He got his first results back — 69 in math. The highest score was 88, and 12 students out of 25 failed the test, so in reality he did very well. He is afraid that he will fail Chinese, because the third unit was on ancient Chinese history and he doesn't know anything about it. There is so much to study and so many new words for him to learn. On the unit test he got 37 percent. I told him that it wouldn't be the end of the world if he didn't pass.
I bought one of those huge suitcases today. You know, the ones we always laugh at when we see them clogging the carousels at the airport. It is large enough that the embroidery above the bed will fit into it. I paid 180 yuan for it, and it is good quality and rolls well. I call it my pony, as I can walk holding onto the handle without bending over and it follows along wonderfully. Tariqa has been rolling it all over the apartment. I have started packing and took the paintings off the walls today, so the apartment looks pretty bare. I am slowly sorting through drawers and cabinets, packing what I want to bring and sorting out what I want to give away.
I gave Bobbie my nine-pointed stained-glass star tonight. I told her I had made it and that it would remind her to shine brightly. She hasn't gone back to her old boyfriend; she seems truly over that, thank goodness. Her latest test is from her mother, who wants her to take an exam for a government position instead of trying to find a job in her field [engineering]. She is adamant that she does not want to work for the government. She loathes the people who work there. It's the first time that she has seriously fought with her mother about anything.
I have cut back on my extra activities. I am not taking Chinese lessons anymore and will only give a few more English lessons. I may be increasing my study circles, though, in order to complete the sections we are working on.
Lately it seems like yelling is the only way to get the children to do what I ask. If I talk nicely, they either ignore me completely or Taalan says "OK, mom, in a minute." Then he promptly forgets. I told him this evening that I would mirror how he acted. When he asked me to make him a sandwich, I would happily say "OK, Taalan, in a minute," and then promptly forget to do it. He was a little surprised, so we had a discussion about promises and keeping your word how there is no difference between the two. We'll see if it has any effect or not. Maybe it is just the near-teen syndrome. I sincerely hope not.
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