Marie was Right

Let's get one thing straight. We did not AT ANY POINT tease the wild monkeys. We showed them nothing but respect and affection. The savagery that followed was ENTIRELY of the monkeys’ own wily devising. Our only mistake, and it was a big one, was not turning around and running the hell away as soon as we saw this Kindly Reminder.

It was November 2012. The Yali fellows—Steph, Marie, Hayley, and I— as well as our dear friend Papaya, a Changsha native who speaks perfect English and is one of the best people in this world, were headed on our first group adventure to the wild forests of Hunan Province. We were thrilled to get out of the city, immerse ourselves in nature, paint with all the colors of the wind.

We took an overnight train to Zhangjiajie, a national park northwest of Changsha. We hadn’t even gotten out of the parking lot when we saw our first monkey, sitting demurely under a fiery red maple tree. A pleasant morning to you! his friendly eyes said. Come take a picture with me! I’m harmless and also your friend! We obliged. 

Hubris

When I was little my parents took me to an orchard somewhere in Connecticut to pick fruit. I was pretty young—I have no memory of Chris being there, and we all know that kid would have made his presence known—and I was having a great day. Even greater when I noticed an adorable orange caterpillar scooching across the road in front of me. Being much closer to caterpillar height than my parents, I saw it first and squatted down beside it, watching its hairy little body fold and straighten, fold and straighten. I was delighted. But when I stood up, I noticed another caterpillar a few feet ahead of the first one. And another. And another. And another. Dozens of caterpillars filling the road, all folding and straightening in repulsive lockstep. A shiver ran through my tiny body. One caterpillar is adorable. 100 caterpillars could take me down. Simultaneously terrified that I would not be able to avoid crushing the caterpillars accidentally and that the caterpillars would rise as one to crush me, I started to cry and had to be carried to the car.

And so it was in Zhangjiajie. We’d been charmed by charismatic sub-arboreal Monkey #1.  But then we crossed a little bridge into the park proper, a bridge hanging over a wide, rocky river, a river teeming with monkeys. My spine tingled. Too many monkeys. In video footage from that very moment, most of us still seem to feel pretty positively about the monkeys (probably due in large part to the considerable distance between the hoard and us). Everyone except Marie. “Monkeys jump in your face and kill you,” she declared. “So I’m ok with us moving on.” Perhaps a bit spooked, we continued our trek and it was probably around this point that we saw the aforementioned Kindly Reminder.

This is where the monkeys got really crafty.  They saw that the tide of public opinion might be starting to move against them. We were ok with the monkeys from a distance, but we had Marie’s insistence and the park’s own posted warnings to make us wary. So what did we come across next? Let’s call them the decoy monkeys.

The decoy monkeys were sitting on the path: A mother monkey cradling a tiny baby monkey. They were the cutest, most adorable, most lovable monkeys I have seen before or since, the kind of monkeys that make you believe that there really is love in the world and you’ve felt it and seen it with your own eyes. My heart melted. Marie didn’t know what she was talking about. Monkeys were the best thing that had ever happened to any of us.

Decoy Monkeys

This was of course, all part of the monkeys’ evil plot. The decoy monkeys knew damn well what they were doing. They probably weren’t even mother and child, just the most adorable monkeys Simian Central Casting could scare up on short notice. These were the monkeys best fit to lull us into a false sense of security, to lower our collective guard. And they played their part beautifully. Only Marie remained unswayed. We didn’t turn back.

So far the path had been flat, but before too long we reached the base of the mountain. We stopped for a quick, fortifying snack. Our snacks were in a plastic bag, and they were glorious. Birthday Cake Oreos, sunflower seeds, and, our prized treasures, double layer cheese crackers called 3+2s. We ate a little, then tied the bag back up and hung it on Marie’s backpack. The climb commenced. Marie and Steph were leading the charge with me in the middle and Papaya and Hayley at the rear.

Now shit gets real.

Papaya and Hayley see the monkey first. He tears past them on the path and they watch, frozen, as he launches himself at Steph and Marie.

Panic ensues. Steph and Marie start to scream, Steph letting out the wordless cry of a frightened person, while Marie spews forth an endless litany of “I DON’T LIKE MONKEYS I DON’T LIKE MONKEYS I DON’T LIKE MONKEYS…” She turns her back on our attacker, leaving our treasures utterly exposed. The monkey stands up on its back legs and with one practiced swipe of its claws slices the bag open, leaving our snacks to tumble out onto the ground. The gleeful monkey unhurriedly surveys the options, grabs the 3+2s, and sticks the whole package in his mouth. By this time, Hayley and Papaya, in an act of unthinkable bravery, have joined the fray. Hayley begins hissing and stamping her feet at the monkey, and Marie starts shrieking “THE MONKEYS ARE HISSING!!!!” The monkey, having secured his spoils and registering that our group is noisy and annoying and includes certain members who seem to hold an offensive prejudice against his species, prances off into the brush. It's over. It's all over. Hayley grabs the remaining snacks and begins trying to shove them into the nearest backpack, Steph’s, but Steph is squirming, unwilling to become the next potential monkey magnet. Because she's seen them first: from all sides, a hoard of monkeys—monkeys running down the path in front of us. Monkeys climbing up through the woods behind us. Too many monkeys. Marie starts screaming that we should run back to Changsha, and Papaya starts yelling that we need more humans.

You’ll notice that there’s no mention of my role or my activities during this time. That’s because, probably in following with some keen defense mechanism, my memory of this event has been erased—I’ve had to rely on notes I took at the time to compile this account. Let’s just assume I was being brave and quick-witted and not hiding behind anyone else.

We somehow got ahead of the monkeys and started sprinting up the hill. The monkeys followed at a leisurely pace, but every time we stopped to catch our breath, the monkeys gained ground. They certainly could have caught up with us if they’d tried, but they had our 3+2s already. Now fear was their game, and boy were we scared.

As we dragged ourselves on, the pack of monkeys dwindled until they’d decided, it seemed, there was better game at the base of the mountain. And we escaped, pouring sweat, half-crazy with fear, but physically unscathed.

 

The diehards

We passed a quiet night at the lodge on the mountain, and headed down the following afternoon. As we crossed into monkey territory, we strategized, each creating our own monkey war cry to be used all at once in case we had to defend ourselves, war cries such as, GAHH! EEEE! RRRAA! and I DON’T LIKE MONKEYS!!!!!

But as we descended, the mountain was eerily silent, ominously monkey-free. Had it all been dream?

Lo and behold, at the bottom of the bottom of the mountain, set off from the path, sat one huge, glowering monkey. We got your 3+2s, his evil eyes whispered. Next time, your souls. And your Birthday Cake Oreos. Those looked good.

I will not be returning to Zhangjiajie.

Small Victory

Sometime in the November of my first year in China, I went across the street to buy a recharge card for my cellphone from one of the many newspaper stands lining our street. I bought the card without much trouble, and, since I’d bought plenty of them in the past, I brushed aside the salesman’s instructions as to how to use it. Yeah yeah, scratch the back, type in the code, I’m not an idiot. Only when I got home that the code-covering stuff refused to be scratched away and, in trying, I scratched the code underneath to smithereens. The card, which at 100元 (about $15) was probably my biggest purchase of the week, was totally useless. This hadn’t happened with any of the other millions of phone cards I’d purchased—either it was fake or defective.

Here was a turning point of my time in China. Up until then, my Chinese had been what I’ll call the “Fine as long as everything is fine” variety. I could ask for things and say thank you. Clarifications, subtleties, problems, and disagreements of all sorts were way out of my league. But something about that phone card lit a fire under me. That was my 100元, dammit, and I was gonna put it on my phone.

I stomped all the way back to the newspaper stand, thrust the ruined card under the vendor’s nose and started yelling in what was probably barely coherent Chinese about how he had sold me a defective phone card and how I wasn’t having any of it. He yelled right back at me that he had TOLD me I had to scratch it off LIGHTLY (So that’s what he was saying before when I thought he was just explaining how to use the card. Oops. Whatever.). I demanded a new card or my money back. The man, who was probably not used to having to work so hard to understand a shouting match opponent, finally told me that he would write down my name and then I could come back in five months and get a new card. Five months? FIVE MONTHS? It seemed like a strange tactic, since the cards don’t expire for years, and I wondered if he was hoping I’d just forget. NO WAY, PHONE CARD SELLING MAN. I’LL SEE YOU IN APRIL. He wrote my name—裴莉—on a piece of paper and I left, not sure if I’d won or not.

So I came back in April and explained my plight to the completely different person now sitting in the stand. To this day, one year later, I have no idea whether this new person had any idea who I was, whether she’d ever seen my name on the little piece of paper, whether she believed my weird story. But you know what happened? 1. SHE GAVE ME A 100元 PHONE CARD. 2. Every time I pass her stand, we wave and smile at each other. I’m honestly not sure which is a bigger victory.

How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Write the Blog

I’m back! It’s been a very, very long time. Rather than offering a weak excuse (I’m taking a Chinese calligraphy class! We’re doing a musical! Our snacks were stolen by monkeys! All true.), I’ll just get to it. I’m hoping to cover current things and go back to old stories. Things will have a less frantic tone (as does, thankfully, my life) but I hope that reading it will still be enjoyable. Rest easy: I have certainly not stopped making a fool of myself.

To commemorate this new beginning, I will teach you how to draw a heng stroke (read: a horizontal line) in shufa, Chinese Calligraphy:

1. Imagine you are holding a thin, footlong brush with a pointed tip.
2. Starting at the left side of your paper, make a tiny upward diagonal line (no one will ever see it but the gods will know/smite you if you skip this step). This step is called Ni.
3. Cover the line entirely with a dab of your brush. (Dun)
4. Leaving the point in the same place, turn your brush counterclockwise about 60 degrees. (Zhuan)
5. Pull your brush across the paper. Push hard at the beginning, lighter in the middle, harder at the end. This is where you’re actually writing the line part. The line should slant diagonally upward. (Xing)
6. When you’ve almost reached the right side, turn your brush up slightly. (Ang)
7. Turn your brush down sharply and lift it gently. (An)
8. Flick the tip of the brush back up. (Hui)

WHAT.

If you have done all steps correctly, your heng will be breathtakingly beautiful. In the great paradox of shufa, the top will be perfectly straight, but the bottom will curve gracefully. It will look something like this:

A heng stroke written by my teacher during my first class 

If you have done any of the steps incorrectly, your heng will be bad in one of many, many, many ways. It could look like this:

A bad heng

Or this:

A bad heng 

Or this:

It seems like you're not really trying

Here are some other shufa rules:

1. Keep your brush perfectly perpendicular to the paper at all times.
2. No sitting
3. Elbow up
4. Something about breathing I don’t fully understand because it, like the rest of this, was explained to me in Chinese.

Speaking of Chinese, I am getting quite a vocabulary lesson. Here are some words I have learned: “Horizontal line,” “vertical line,” “diagonal line,” “a different diagonal line,” “brush tip,” “lift,” “gentle,” and a special word for “bad” (cha) used to describe subpar work. Eek.

My teacher, 周老师 (Zhou Laoshi), is a Changsha native. He’s a small middle-aged man with a military hat, a strong Changsha accent, and, as of late, a small ponytail. He is very good at shufa. Starting, about a year and a half ago, one of my sitemates and I started going to his Monday evening classes from 7 to 9. Last year, when I was still learning all of the basic strokes, I brought in weekly homework for Zhou Laoshi to review. You can tell he likes your homework when he draws little circles next to a character. You can tell he doesn’t like your homework when he says it’s cha. Or when he writes the characters again over your characters. Or when he crumples up your paper and puts it under your ink bowl to catch the drips.

At first, this all, plus my pretty utter lack of understanding, stressed me out a lot. Plus, I was very bad at shufa, because an important part of learning shufa (and probably most things worth learning) seems to be being very bad at it for a long time. But I really, really love the way the characters look when they’re written well. A good character is not symmetrical (that’s another one of the rules) but it has a definite balance to it. At the same time, it’s a little dangerous, with cliffs and steep drops and sharp angles. So I spent a lot of time last winter in the living room, tray table stacked on top of the coffee table to make a surface of the right height. I cranked out stroke after graceless stroke, on paper so thin it crinkled under the wet ink, until I had more or less gotten the hang of it. Now I have good days and bad days—in a recent class, my characters all looked like sad little men about to topple over—but Zhou Laoshi seems relatively satisfied.

When we first arrived, our foreignness made quite a stir. We weren’t the first foreigners our teacher had met, he told us, but we quickly became the ones he knew best. People were surprised that we were interested in learning something so archaic, wondering, I guess, what use we’d possibly have for Chinese Calligraphy. We were even interviewed by a local newspaper—“foreign girls take interest in Chinese culture!” 

Class is made up of about 15 students, some regulars and a rotating group of drop-ins. One woman is called the banzhang, the head student. She has a round face that reminds me vaguely of Princess Leia’s and produces a constant stream of jokes that I don’t understand but leave the rest of the class howling. There’s the older woman who must have started only a few months before me, who writes quietly and beautifully at the corner table, and the younger woman who one time pressed a Tupperware of homecooked fish into our hands at the end of class. The dad who’s always at the small side table, who sometimes drives us home and can somehow pronounce my English name perfectly. The quiet older man who writes huge sheets of small characters almost as beautiful as Zhou Laoshi’s (the studio’s trash can is full of discarded practice sheets I’d be thrilled to give or receive as wedding presents). Halfway through class, we all stop writing and crowd (or in winter, huddle) around a small table and drink tea out of cups with our names painted on them and chat. Sometimes people bring snacks, and then everyone spends a lot of time getting everyone to eat the snacks.

 This is the teacup with my name, 裴莉

And over the many months, I think I’ve become one of the crowd.  When new people arrive and exclaim over me, assuming I won’t know that they’re talking about me, my classmates answer their questions for me. “She’s from America.” “She’s half-Asian.” “She teaches at Yali Middle School.” “She’s been in China for almost two years.” “Just ask her—she understands what you’re saying, even if you speak in Changsha dialect.”

That last one is blatantly untrue. I understand about 20-40% of what anyone is saying in Changsha dialect and maybe about 75% of what people say to me in Mandarin. But it’s nice, really nice, to have them on my side: rattling off my personal details, defending my Chinese. Because they saw me the November after I moved to Changsha, a silent, basically-incompetent-at-everything version of myself, trailing along behind my bubbly sitemate, who had to turn every 40 seconds to translate everything for me. And now most Mondays I show up to class on my own, having braved a 40 minute busride through Changsha’s rush hour traffic, pulling out my brush and paper, making conversation, writing characters that are not glaringly embarrassing. I think I can sort of handle myself! I like to think maybe they’re a little proud.

Zhou Laoshi is in red and white stripes. Front center and to the left are my former sitemates, Steph and Marie.

GUYS I'M A TEACHER IN CHINA NOW

 

Ok. Well it’s been a long time since I’ve written. But GUYS here’s why it’s been so long: I’M A TEACHER NOW!! And it turns out BEING A TEACHER TAKES A LOT OF TIME.

I’ve been at it for about six weeks now, and let me tell you another thing I have learned about teaching: IT IS NOT EASY. And also: CHINESE STUDENTS PICK CRAZY ENGLISH NAMES FOR THEMSELVES. Here is a sampling of my students’ names (Yes, I really use them in class. And I don’t even register the ridiculousness anymore.):

To Be, Seraphim, Water, Villard, Shulamite, Lion, Water, Passion, Moonlen, Coach, Silence, Mummy, Crocodile, Brain, Sherlock, Edison, Hiccup, and Captain Jack Sparrow.

This phenomenon leads to classroom interactions like the following:

Ms. Peters [Walking up to a table of boys who have been “writing in their journals” for the past five minutes]: Guys!! What are you doing?? Why are your notebooks totally blank???

Student: My name is Blank!

So it was.

Most of our students, including just about all in the preceding list, brought their names with them from previous English classes. For the ones who didn’t have an English name, I brought in a list of fairly common American names (which, by the way, I did not pick strategically enough, leaving me with classes full of Tims, Toms, Jims, Jacks, Jeffs and Johns. Dammit. NO ONE SYLLABLE BOYS’ NAMES NEXT YEAR. Also, side note, there may well be a Chinese student in my class named after you, because I figured my friends’ names would be easier to remember. Sorry I’m not sorry.) from which they chose.

Sometimes, though, they don’t want to pick from the list and come up with names out of nowhere. I tried to convince Villard to pick “Kyle,” but for unknown reasons, his whole class thought that “Kyle” was the craziest, most ridiculous name ever. So he went with Villard. Whatever.

Since they only use their English names in our class, these names don’t seem like a big deal to them. What they forget is that their English names, to us, are their real names, since they THE ONLY NAMES WE KNOW THEM BY (if learning 130 English names was hard, 130 Chinese names, complete with tones and characters, would have been pretty much impossible). This makes it problematic when they change their names without telling you. Especially when they do it multiple times. Yeah, Jack/Jordan/Tom, I’m looking at you. When Franky became Archimonde, he at least had the decency to let me know.

Alright alright alright let me back up and explain some things. I work at Yali Middle School, confusingly named since it is actually a high school of about 4000 students in the equivalent of tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Some of them live nearby with their families in Changsha, but many of them board on Yali’s campus, where I also live. I teach 130 15-year-old students, divided into four classes. Three of the classes I see three times a week each, and the last class (for reasons too complicated and boring to intone) I teach just once a week. My class is called Oral English, and it supplements their formal written English classes, taught by a Chinese teacher. They call me Ms. Peters. Sometimes, for reasons I can’t really figure out, just Peters. Sometimes Peter.

Now, in case I’ve managed to hide this fact from you, I went to a New England prep school and. At the time, I thought I was worked pretty hard.

I was wrong.

These students have class from 8:20am to 5:30pm. They have a twenty-five minute break in the morning, during which they head out to the main field and do physical exercises, like, I don’t know, running around the track. In the evenings the students who board have mandatory self-study in their classrooms from 7 to 10. 10:30 is lights out in the dorms, where they sleep eight to a room, and they’re up by 6:30 the next morning. They have classes some Saturdays and even the occasional Sunday. Their schooling all leads up to a huge two-day test they take June of their senior year. The dreaded 高考 (literally “high test”), is the only factor determining their college acceptance. Let me say that again: Their grade on the高考 is the only factor which determines their college acceptance. Colleges don’t see their transcripts. There are no essays, no resumes, no APs. No interviews. No letters of recommendation. Sick on the day of the test? Tough it out or wait until next year. This is not a schooling system designed to minimize student stress.

*          *          *

No big deal, but we’re sort of celebrities on campus. This is partially because we are pretty obviously foreigners in a school and a city that is quite extremely racially homogeneous. But it is also partially because we gave a speech to the entire school at the first day of school opening ceremony (little did I know when I entered that hellish contest in Beijing that my Chinese speech-making career had only just begun). Since no single Yali room is big enough for all 4000 students, only about 800 got to watch our speech in person. Never fear—the ceremony was live-broadcasted to the rest of the students. So sometimes, when I pass students around campus they look at me with wide “WOAH I never thought I’d see you in person” eyes. Unless they’re wide “WOAH remember when I and also all my classmates listened to you publically butcher our native language cause I sure do” eyes. In any case, they notice when we go by.

Many of our students have been studying English for many years, and many of them speak fairly well. Most of them, though, have had little contact with American English speakers, and our accents and speaking speed are jarring to them. I have developed a classroom voice (about twice as slow and twice as loud as my normal speaking voice) which I use with my students—sometimes as Marie, one of our two second-year Yale-China teachers, and I are walking back to our apartment for lunch after class, we have not quite snapped out of it yet (HOW. WERE. YOUR. CLASSES?).

Our students are in their first year at Yali, so their English levels are all quite different and have not had a chance to be leveled out much by common classroom experience. It is, I’ve learned, a really good idea (but also pretty difficult) to anticipate which words will be new vocabulary, so you can come up with a good simple definition or a Chinese translation. Defining on the fly gets a bit dicey:

All too real Scenario 1:

Ms. Peters: Hang on do you guys know the word “represent” means?

Class: No…

Ms. Peters: Oh. Um. It’s when something stands for something else.

Class: …

Ms. Peters: OK. Watch this. [Ms. Peters draws four stick figures on the board.] This is my family. [Points to the tallest one] This is my brother. Now, is this REALLY my brother?

Class: …

Ms. Peters: NO!! MY BROTHER IS NOT A BLUE STICK FIGURE ON A CHALKBOARD IN CHINA!!!

Class: …

Ms. Peters: THIS PICTURE REPRESENTS MY BROTHER. I CAN USE IT TO TALK ABOUT HIM EVEN THOUGH IT ISN’T REALLY HIM.

Class: …

Ms. Peters: Um, well now that we’ve got that down…

Unfortunately hypothetical Scenario 2:

Ms. Peters: Hang on do you guys know the word “represent” means?”

Class: No…

Ms. Peters: It means 代表.

Class: Oh! Got it!

But, you know, you live and learn. Plus, I think some of them actually did get that stick figure thing. And the ones that didn’t at least looked up when I started shrieking about blue stick figures in China. Sigh.

It’s also hard to judge what kind of assignments will work and which ones will flop. My homework assignment on idioms, asking students to define some given idioms and use them in a sentence (How hard can that be??) fell unfortunately into the latter category:

"The snake was in cold blood."
"We walked along the street neck and neck."
"The winter comes and I get cold feet."
"The man ran amok because his car was broken."
"When I made mistakes, I lost my face.”

On the other hand, I asked them the next week to write a short paragraph analyzing Billy Collins’ awesome “Introduction to Poetry,” (read it!!!) a poem we’ve been studying which explicitly encourages students to look imaginatively and closely at poetry, to explore its many facets, to connect with it in a personal and visceral way:

“We should love the poem and love the life. If we don’t love the life, we can’t understand what the poem say. We should be careful to read the poem. And we should read every words. To understand the poem’s emotion. We shouldn’t read poem quickly. If we do that, we will feel boring and we don’t like the poem anymore. So let’s love the poem and life.”

Let’s.