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.

IN OBSCURE URBAN CHINA EVERY DAY IS A CELEBRATION

The kitchen is clean. I repeat. The kitchen is clean.  After eight or ten hours (I am not exaggerating) of concerted work, we have transformed our miniscule kitchen from place in which food would instantly become inedible into a place in which food can be prepared!! Quite a change, to be sure, and it was not easy: WE HAD TO CLEAN EVERY SINGLE ITEM. And once we have gas in our stove, we will be IN BUSINESS.

Let me rewind. There have been a lot of changes in the past two weeks, so I have constructed a HELPFUL GRAPHIC for clarification.

So last time I wrote, I was on the long train ride from Beijing to Hong Kong, where, as you already know (thank you, HELPFUL GRAPHIC!), we spent 10 days in teacher training. 

Hong Kong was pretty sweet. For one, I finally met all the fellows on the program. There are twelve of us this year, split into three sites: Changsha, Hong Kong, and a small town in Anhui province. Each site has two second years and two first years, which is an awesome system, because all of the clueless newbies (who can't always manage to read street signs, order food, deal with the post office, or lock bathroom doors) get to move in with wise, competent, wonderful people who have lived our new lives for an entire year. They know what is up, and that is a crazy thing. As you'll see, this post's photo has captured all of the fellows (minus photographer extraordinaire Sabrina!) having a nice professional meeting in business attire. Sorta.

We stayed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where four of the fellows teach during the year, and, um, turns out it is the most beautiful place in the world. The campus is on a hill, and our dorms were at the very top, so we could see out over the water, which has grassy mountain islands emerging out of the mist. Yeah. For the ten days we were in meetings pretty much nine to five (real world, I do NOT remember giving you permission to enter my life), but afterward we were FREE TO EXPLORE HONG KONG. 

Sadly, we did not explore Hong Kong.

Truth be told, I have never spent so long in a major city of the world and seen so little of it. But before you get all judgey on me here, let me inform you that learning how to be a teacher is hard and at times little stressful (we each had to give two 20 minute practice lessons, using each other as our practice students, and if you think that it trying to explain what the word "direction" means to your friend who speaks perfect English and is maybe definitely just messing with you is not stressful, clearly you have never tried it), and we were tired. And even if we did not go in search of Hong Kong's finest cuisine, THE CAFETERIAS AT CUHK WERE PRETTY DARN TASTY. And even if we did not experience Hong Kong's most renowned tourist attractions, THE SWIMMING POOL AT CUHK WAS PRETTY DARN FUN. I have no regrets.

And in actuality, Yale-China took us on some adventures, including a nighttime ride in our own private trolley through the streets of Hong Kong. This was pretty awesome, not least because we were served AVOCADO sandwiches on board. Plus I sat next to Abigail, one of those wise second-years I was telling you about, who is one of the CUHK fellows. Given that she's lived there for a year, she actually knows things about Hong Kong, and she told me interesting things about the different districts of the city we were passing through like that one of the buildings is supposed to look like giant koalas are climbing up the side of it!! So I learned some things and, better yet, I learned them from the top deck of an avocado-laden private trolley. Not too shabby.

And our last night, we went on a ferry ride to Lama island, where we had a delicious seafood dinner. The food was wonderful, but the rides to and from were even better-- it was dark on the way back and we zoomed by the Hong Kong harbor (including, you guessed it, the building that looks like koalas are climbing up the side of it!!), lit up really beautifully.

And then, the next day, we were off in many different directions. Some of the CUHK fellows stayed put, others went off traveling for the week before classes started, and the Anhui fellows (including, very sadly, Beijing buddies Gabe and Alex!!) peaced Anhui-ward. Hayley and I, accompanied by one of our wise second-years made our way to Changsha. And one glorious overnight train ride later (Get on the train. Go to sleep for 9 hours. Wake up. You have arrived. I think I love trains.), we had arrived at our new home.

*          *          *

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how I have come to live in Changsha, otherwise known as Obscure Urban China. Thanks to HELPFUL GRAPHIC, you already know where in China the city is. And thanks to my hooky in medias res opener (I was an English major, after all)(but actually I just wanted to brag with no context about how clean our kitchen is because it took a long time to clean and is really very beautiful now), you know a little about my apartment. Here are some other facts about Changsha:

1.   Changsha is the capital of the Hunan province.

2.   Changsha has a population of about 7 million, which, if it were in the US, would make it the second most populous city, second only to New York. But, get this, it is only the FORTY-FIRST MOST POPULOUS CITY IN CHINA, which makes it the Colorado Springs of China. GUYS, the Colorado Springs of China has 7 MILLION PEOPLE. And now I am one of them.

3.   Changsha is some big entertainment capital, so the nightlife is supposed to be pretty cray. I have not sampled it yet, and, sadly, I'll be unlikely to report on it here if ever I do. 

4.   The food in Changsha not as spicy as everyone warned us it would be. Or else everyone is just taking pity on the poor clueless waiguoren and toning it way down. OFFENDED.

5.   Not too offended, though, because the food in Changsha is really, really good.

6.   Changsha cabs are extremely inexpensive. Yesterday, a ten-minute cab ride for four people cost 11 kuai, which is less than $2. WHAT? Also, when you get in, a soothing voice says, “Welcome to take cabs in Changsha,” which is oddly comforting.

But, best of all, Steph tells me that Hunan manufactures something like 80% of the world's fireworks. So there is a massive fireworks display every single Saturday of the year. I caught the tail end of this week's, and even partially obstructed by buildings and through unglassesed eyes, it was pretty badass. The hilarious thing is, there are fireworks going off ALL THE TIME here. I hear them at least three times a day. 

HERE IN CHANGSHA WE CELEBRATE ALL DAY EVERY DAY. Why? BECAUSE WE'VE GOT THE FIREWORKS, DAMMIT, AND WE’RE GONNA USE THEM.

I think I am going to love it here. 

I’M ON A TRAIN AND IT’S MOVING FAST AND

(Note: This post is actually from August 12th-- I wrote it on the internetless train and then neglected to post it. Updated updates coming soon!) 

Hayley: It’s like we’re on the Harry Potter train!!

Gabe: Only a lot worse.

It is hard to express how little space there is right now. Currently, I’m in a compartment whose size Gabe has aptly compared to a “slightly-richer-than-average-girl’s closet.” And right now, aside from the two of us, there are five other people in here too. There are six beds, stacked three high on each side of the compartment with just enough space for a person to pass in between them. I’m on my top bunk right now (right about where the slightly-richer-than-average girl’s spare sheets would go), and there is certainly not enough room to sit up, so I am writing this lying on my back, nestled among all of my earthly possessions. 14 hours down (most of them spent asleep, rocked by the surprisingly soothing jostling of the train). 10 to go.

But, really, I'm just happy we're on this train at all, given that I left packing until the last second and then sort of almost made us miss our train (SORRY GUYS). It was raining when we left Beijing, and it was really only due to the kindness of some of our CET buddies (THANK YOU KARUNA AND KELLIE) that we got ourselves and our absurd amount of luggage into cabs and to the train station before our train, you know, left.

To explain: we’re on our way from Beijing to Hong Kong, upon which all the Yale-China fellows, first- and second-year, are converging for teacher training and bonding and merriment before we all split off to our different sites. It turns out Hong Kong is a LONG WAY AWAY. LIKE 24 HOURS ON A TRAIN. We haven’t actually secured substantial food so far this morning, so we’ve been subsisting on:

1.     The three extremely fuzzy peaches we bought off of the fruit cart last night

2.     A small package of dried pineapple I bought last week

3.     Some horrifying crumbly plastic-wrapped sausages labeled only “Muslim food” which Alex brought and I refuse to touch

4.     Gum

And I can’t speak for Gabe, but I am having a great time on this train, personal boundary / hunger issues aside.  We’ve so far been able to take part in some pretty fun train activities OH MY GOD I just remembered I have candy in my bag hang on hang on hang on hang on. OK, ahhhh, much better. Where was I? Yes, ok, train activities. We’ve been passing around The Phantom Tollbooth, best book of all, currently in Hayley’s possession, and soon I’ll get to reread it. Last night before bed the four of us played some cards, to the extreme amusement of the drunk guys next to us, who kept yelling “MONEY!!” out of apparent disappointment that our game of gin rummy had no stakes. And Alex brought forty balloon-animal-balloons with him, so we spent the morning trying to figure out how to make balloon dogs, to the extreme amusement of the six-year-old Chinese girl on the bunk across from Gabe who is endlessly entertained by the waiguoren (foreigners) who’ve invaded her family’s train compartment. We are really killing it on this train.

Thank you, by the way, for the good vibes I received right before my speech competition—I felt an overwhelming surge of fortitude in the moments right before I had to speak, and I have only you to thank. If you’ve spoken to my father recently, you’ll know that I won a bronze medal! What you probably won’t know is that I tied for third out of seven competitors total. NEVER BEFORE HAS THE WORLD SEEN SUCH A CHAMPION, etc. But it was miraculous even to fill 5 minutes with grammatically coherent Chinese, and I’m just happy that I managed physically to get through the experience without tu­-ing (you can probably figure that one out)(it means vomming).  

It’s actually sort of mindblowing to look back on the summer in Beijing—over the past 8 weeks, we made our way through the Chinese textbook I used (and then forgot) over my entire senior year of high school. And then we went through an entire new, longer textbook as well. We’ve learned something like 650 vocabulary words, and probably 1000 characters or more. And, most unbelievable of all, we can kind of speak and understand Chinese. Kind of. Meaning if we are in a familiar situation (cab, restaurant) and nothing is going horribly wrong, we can usually figure out how to communicate what we want.

Some situations are still too hard for us to manage with our dignities intact. Like the post office. Even though there was an entire chapter of our book dedicated to post office vocabulary (at which I scoffed at the time: Post offices, HAHA, who uses them anyway, WRONG), every time we go in there we manage to get every postal employee in the joint laughing at us, as for example, we repacked the entire contents of one of Alex’s suitcases into tiny cardboard boxes on the floor of the post office. We’ve agreed to disagree as to whether whipping out his magic set (conveniently located at the top of the suitcase) made matters worse or better.

But I guess if there’s one thing I’ve learned over this summer in Beijing it is that laughing, sometimes hysterically, at your own incompetence is often the only way to bear it. Especially in a situation like ours, in which incompetence is utterly inescapable. You might get weak alcohol in orange bowls instead of hot and sour soup because you got the characters mixed up. You might ask what time your friends want to eat manure. You might announce to your class that, at your university, you live in a backpack. You might accidentally ask your roommate’s mother on skype if she thinks you are sexy (disclaimer: only 2/4 of these were me). It is a little freeing, for a fairly type-A Yalie, to accept these mistakes and embarrassments as an inevitable part of daily life.

On we go, to Hong Kong, where we’ll be back to zero with the language thing. And I’m going to find some food on this train if it is the last thing I do. ONWARD!

 

IT'S A TRAP

To begin, a short play in one act.

Hypothetical friend: Yo, Liz, do you like it when people watch you do things at which you are inept?

Liz: No. I very much do not like that.

Hypothetical friend: In your current life, at which activity do you feel most inept?

Liz: That’s easy. Speaking Chinese.

Hypothetical friend: Hm, ok. Now, at what time of day would you be least interested in participating in any kind of activity?

Liz: Let’s see… probably a weekend morning any time before noon.

[CURTAIN]

So I am pretty freaking displeased that THIS SUNDAY at SEVEN-THIRTY AM I am going to a contest at which I will be asked to SPEAK CHINESE in front of what could potentially be a LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE. In fact, it is sort of my worst nightmare.

How did I get here? Simple. I was bamboozled.

 A few weeks ago, my Chinese teacher announced that if we entered a program-wide speech contest just within our little school, we would get out of that week’s speaking test. And the speaking tests aren’t all that bad, but the thing is, if you don’t have a speaking test, then on Friday, as soon as you’re done with the written test (at like 9:30 am) YOU ARE DONE FOR THE DAY AND CAN GO BACK TO SLEEP. No sane person turns down an offer like that. There was another thing she said about how if you did well you’d go on to some further competition, but that seemed irrelevant.

And the preliminary contest itself was no big deal—I gave a five-minute speech about my family (there were five topics, all of which I “prepared in advance,” and then I drew one randomly) in front of four teachers in a classroom. It went ok, I guess, except I mixed up my family words and accidentally said that my dad was starting college in the fall and then ran out of material four minutes in. Instead of enacting my emergency time-killing plan of listing the birthday and favorite beverage of everyone I know, I panicked and ended up muttering, “I…really…like…my…family…” and a bunch of other things so ungrammatical I won’t attempt to translate them here.  BUT in a truly horrifying and baffling sequence of events the judges (moved no doubt by my father’s bravery and commitment to his education) gave me third place out of the 100- and 150- level students. And the top three from each bracket have to go to this BEIJING-WIDE SPEECH CONTEST FOR FOREIGN STUDENTS EARLY IN THE MORNING ON THE WEEKEND. It’s some kind of sick joke.

To make matters worse, I have a sneaking suspicion some of the other students can actually speak Chinese. And oh my god, we have 16 topics to prepare!! The only one I feel confident about speaking on is “Is learning Chinese hard?” because I have a lot of feelings. If it is any of the other ones—“The gift Beijing has given me” or “My American university” or “My weekend activities”—I am screwed.

Yeah, the topics are pretty easy. But that just makes my impending incompetence all the more humiliating.

All I have to do is learn Chinese between now and Sunday morning, which would be easy, given that I’ve mastered tones and characters (I have mastered neither). Except that Chinese has these horrors called, wait for it, MEASURE WORDS.

Measure words are sneaky little trolls that lurk between numbers and nouns. So like you can’t just say “five eggplants”; you have to say “five measure word eggplants.” And you can’t say “this eggplant”; you have to say “this measure word eggplant” (for reasons unfathomable to me, however, “My measure word eggplant” is wrong wrong wrong).  And there are a million different measure words!!! You have to learn them and remember which one goes with which noun!!! An imperfect parallel with English are those cute little words we use to talk about groups of animals—a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and so on. Now imagine that you have to memorize one of those words for every noun you learn. NOT SO CUTE ANYMORE.

At least the measure word-noun pairings make sense. OH WAIT THEY DON’T. So like you use zhang for flat things like maps and paper and photographs. But also beds and tables. But not letters or envelopes. And there’s a measure word for items of clothing: jian. Yi jian chenshan is one shirt. But do not even think about using jian for skirts. No, the measure word for skirt, as for other “long, thin objects” is tiao. Other tiao nouns are pants and fish. Ba is used only with chairs, rulers, and umbrellas. I am not making this up.

*          *          *

Nightmare-inducing competitions and grammar patterns aside, things are progressing well here. For one thing, we have discovered that breakfast is secretly the most delicious Chinese meal. It turns out, right across the street, literally a twenty second walk from our dorm, we can buy jidan guan bing, which are fresh eggy crepes brushed with spicy garlic sauce and wrapped around a few leaves of fresh lettuce. They are, without exaggeration, one of the most delicious foods I have ever eaten. Plus, the lady who makes them totally recognizes me now! I AM A LOCAL.

And we’ve been traveling, both around Beijing and to other tourist destinations. A few weeks ago, we went hiking for the weekend in Anyang! In gorges! On my birthday! What is this life??

This past weekend Gabe, Alex, and I went to the Forbidden City, which is one of the main tourist attractions of Beijing. I am terrible at tourist attractions though, because unless I know a lot about the history of a place (which I still do not but SOON I WILL READ ALL), I can do little more than wander around and express approval for the nice turtle dragon statues. They really are nice. The picture at the bottom is from the Forbidden City—we posed normally and then the Chinese tourist taking the picture yelled something about how we were too close together (we think), so we jumped apart into the unawkward positioning you see below. He seemed much happier.

*          *          *

This Sunday morning around 9am my time (that’s 9pm Saturday night if you’re on the east coast of the US—I am serious enough about the following request to do the supercomplicated time zone math), if you can spare any good thoughts please, PLEASE send them my way. In return, I will proclaim to the assembled masses your birthday and your favorite beverage. 

ZAO GAO

Something I’ve neglected to mention is that the four Yale fellows (Hayley, Alex, Gabe, and I) and most of the other American students on this program are all living with local Chinese students as our dorm roommates, so they can help us practice and learn about Chinese culture and things. So the other day Alex’s roommate Xin Tong asked me what my zhuan ye was, and I was extremely excited because I knew both that zhuan ye means college major AND how to answer in Chinese (I KNOW RIGHT). But when I responded with an oh-so-confident, “Yingwen,” his face fell. Because, as he managed to express to me, who spends their college career studying the language they were born knowing how to speak?? For God’s sake, didn’t I know it already?? In an attempt to salvage the situation, we frantically looked up the word for literature, and I hurled it at him in a panic—WENXUE WENXUE WENXUE—but the damage was done: Xin Tong thinks I’m a bit of an idiot.

I didn’t think this would be a problem, because I’m not an idiot, and I assumed that this would become clear in the ordinary course of things. But, um, I’ve spent now a good amount of time with Xin Tong (he is actually awesome and takes us all on outings), and, um, he still asks me to count things out loud. Like to count to nine. In English or Chinese. And this has forced me into a realization: If you were to start with the assumption that I am stupid, which Xin Tong unfortunately has, NOTHING I DO OR SAY IN THIS COUNTRY WOULD LEAD YOU TO CHANGE YOUR MIND. After all, here is how I spend my time:

1.     Studying words he knew as a toddler

2.     Mispronouncing words he knew as a toddler

3.     Misunderstanding words he knew as a toddler

4.     Doing stupid things as a result having a functional vocabulary smaller than that of a toddler

I contend that, except for that one time I didn’t lock the bathroom door right, all of the questionable situations I’ve gotten myself into have been a problem of language confusion (And even the bathroom thing would have been better if I had known Chinese and didn’t have resort to wordless yelling)(But that did work). And not all of these errors can be solved with Google Translate.

Take crossing the street, for example. I keep almost getting hit by cars, but I realize that it’s because I’m mistranslating the pedestrian signals. When I see the little green walking man, I think he means, “Traffic has stopped; proceed across the street.” But I’ve figured out that what the Beijing little green man means is “Now’s as good a time as any to risk life and limb; proceed across the street.” And I’ll tell you, in this context, the countdown feels somehow more ominous.

While we’re on the topic of traffic, something I haven’t figured out is where exactly cars and other vehicles are allowed. No matter where I am walking, there is always a a bike/scooter/sedan/16-wheeler creeping up behind me and then blasting its freaking horn in my ear. I AM SORRY I THOUGHT THIS WAS A SIDEWALK I HAVE MOVED ARE YOU HAPPY. Anyway, none of this is winning me many points with Xin Tong.

So now I have come to the question and answer I come to every post and every day of my life: What is the solution to all my problems? LEARN CHINESE. Last post I told you about tones and why they are standing between me and functional humanhood. Today I will tell you about Chinese characters.  Guess what: They are hard to learn.

In all the languages I’ve studied—Spanish, Italian, Latin, Korean (XIN TONG ARE YOU LISTENING)—once you know how to say a word you can also write it, because there is, you know, an alphabet. But with Chinese, you learn the pronunciation and tones and then this whole other category called characters!!! Which correspond to syllables, meaning a single word can be made up of two or three or four of them!!! With multiple strokes you are supposed to do in the right order!!!!! And the real zinger is that if you don’t know a word you see on the street or on a menu or in the doctor’s office, you can’t just sound it out—you have to write it into a fancy smart phone app (I don’t have one) or look it up in a Chinese dictionary (Difficult and time-consuming because of the no alphabet thing. Also I don’t have one) if you want to know how to say it. Ugh.

The one saving grace is that characters are made up in large part of different recognizable parts, called radicals. Radicals have their own independent meanings. For instance, here is the radical for “Water”:氵

Extremely helpfully, this radical appears in the characters for watery things like:

thirsty: 渴

sea: 海

shower: 洗澡

Before you get too excited, it also shows up in the characters for things absolutely unrelated to water like:

pretty: 漂亮

to not have: 没有

OK, if right now you are thinking, “Gee, I don’t know about absolutely unrelated, Liz-- Water is pretty and seems like an important thing not to not have,” do NOT talk back to me, but also GOOD GOOD YOU WIN. Finding ways to make radicals make sense in your mind, even when they don’t really, is Liz-Approved Method Number One For Learning Chinese Characters. The problem is, as we’re learning more and more characters, they are becoming less and less distinguishable. It’s no longer enough to remember that such and such character starts with that radical that looks like a backwards t because now we know ten that start with the backwards t!!! EESH!

Which brings us to Liz-Approved Method Number Two: make up elaborate stories. Take zao gao, which means What a mess! The characters are a little complicated, so I’ll make them nice and big:

糟糕

Confusing, right? Now think: “GRAB YOUR CHRISTMAS TREES AND YOUR SUITCASES AND RUN BECAUSE ALIENS ARE ABOUT TO ATTACK TOO LATE THERE’S ONE HOVERING OVER THE GRASS WHAT A MESS.” If you don’t see Christmas trees, suitcases or aliens (actually there’s just one alien), I promise you that if you find yourself trying to learn 35-50 new Chinese words a night, you will see crazier. And you will love it.

Bedtime now, because I have to get to class early tomorrow; I, um, accidentally slept through the first hour of class today due to an unfortunate alarm-setting error, 糟糕! 

Please don’t tell Xin Tong.

IS THE GREAT WALL REALLY THAT GREAT??

YES. YES IT IS. But more on that in a bit. First I will tell you about my ultrasound.

As I mentioned in my last post, we need a health exam for our work visas and when we tried to go our first week of classes, the doctor's office was closed because of dragon boats. So the next week, we arrived again at the clinic and followed the welcoming "Medical Examination for Aliens" sign to a desk where we got our instructions: a form with a list of 7 or 8 stations and room numbers. Our task was to visit each of the stations and collect signatures confirming we'd done all the things. A scavenger hunt! Sort of.

The problem is I don't speak much hospital Chinese. Complex medical terminology such as "lie down," "open your mouth," "take off your shoes" are not in my repertoire, aural or oral. And it turns out, your command of the language seems to determine whether you feel in control of your medical care and or, well, like an alien. With very few pertinent words at my disposal, my only option was to present myself at each station and then brace for impact.

So yeah first I got an ultrasound. I don't appear to be pregnant. I don't know what else one gets an ultrasound for so I can't speak to the presence of other ailments as found/ruled out by this test. I really wanted to yell IS IT A GIRL??? but I decided at the last second that my humor would likely go unappreciated. Then I got a full body x-ray. I think. In the next room, terrifyingly mislabeled SURGERY, a guy touched my neck a lot. I have no idea what he was looking for, and my neck is extremely ticklish, so you can guess how that went. And 25 seconds after walking into the EKG room, I was lying on a bed, covered in suction cups. That was honestly one of the strangest moments of my life. I hope I passed all the tests, and maybe when I get my results, I’ll figure out what the neck thing was all about.

To avoid situations like this, I should just learn to speak Chinese already, right?! BUT. TONES. Ok, I'll make a confession: I used to think that Chinese tones were like good table manners: everyone expects you to use them and maybe sneers at you if you don’t, but in a pinch you can get along without them.

NOT TRUE.

Tones are the difference between “I like to play ball” and “I like big balls.” They are the difference between the verb “to be” and the number 10. They are the difference between a cab driver gaping at you, shaking his head, and leaving you on the side of the road and a cab driver opening his door, letting you into his car, and driving you to your home. In other words WITHOUT THE RIGHT TONES NO ONE WILL HAVE ANY EARTHLY IDEA WHAT YOU ARE SAYING. And I rarely have the right tones.

But there have been a few minor successes. I know about that cab driver thing, because I lived both scenarios. Meaning that, YES, the second time, I said something that got us to our home!!! I spoke Chinese!!! There is hope!!! (I said one word: dongwuyuan. It means zoo).

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Let me paint you a picture. You are sitting on the Great Wall of China, about to dig into the lunch that you have been hoofing up and down battlements for several hours. You pull out the chocolate croissant you were delighted to find last night at the shop next to your school. You bite into it, waiting for the sweet, creamy chocolate to hit your taste buds. But, hang on, something is wrong—the chocolate isn’t really that sweet, and, worse, it’s sort of crumbly but also chewy. What in god’s name is happening??

You, my friend, have just been Red Beaned. And trust me, it has happened to the best of us.

Turns out red bean is a very common filling-type ingredient around here. And it’s pretty sneaky. You can find it spring rolls when you're expecting pork, in popsicles when you're expecting strawberry, and, yes, in croissants when you're expecting chocolate. Poor red bean has a pretty raw deal—it’s not bad tasting! You're just always looking for something else! (This problem can be filed under the “Not a problem when I read Chinese” heading, along with, you know, most things.)

The only other thing I have to say about food here is that it is both delicious and extremely inexpensive. Tonight, Hayley and I bought ourselves a full restaurant meal for a grand total of 32 kuai, or about 5 dollars and 4 cents. Ice cream bars on the street can run anywhere from 16 to 60 cents (this is a pretty big problem, actually, as I’m learning that stinginess and not health-consciousness is all that’s been keeping me from eating a hundred ice cream bars a day). Cold milk tea is 63 cents! FOOD HEAVEN. THAT IS WHERE I LIVE.

Also, via pointing at menus with photographs, I’ve found this sweet, spicy chicken dish (for various reasons I have unvegetarianed for my China stay, with all intentions of starting back up again after) with scallions and peanuts and huge slices of hot pepper. I love it. It’s amazing. I felt pretty legit for a while: I’ve found this authentic Chinese dish all on my own! I have a culinary identity here! I win Chinese food! That’s until I found out what it’s called: Gong bao ji ding. Yep. The authentic, unique Chinese dish I have fallen in love with is Kung Pao Chicken.

*          *          *

Things can be frustrating here, but China threw me a bone that could have made up for a hospital full of surprise EKGs and a bakery full of red bean croissants. And that bone was called Last Saturday. Because last Saturday 1) We went to the Great Wall and 2) It was sunny.

Clear, sunny days are rare around here (and rarer still in Changsha, so I hear), but it’s almost worth the scarcity for the overwhelming joy I feel when the sun finally does come out. After two weeks of cloud and smog, I was pretty much beside myself with happiness when I stepped outside into a world of crisp shadows and warm light and BLUE SKY. My Chinese vocabulary didn't seem up to expressing the depth of my feelings, so I mostly just pointed to the sky and made wordless happy noises.

And the Great Wall itself is stunning. With most historical-destination-monument-building types, you get there, you look at it for a while, maybe you can check out the inside or climb on top of it, and then you’re pretty much done. Not so with the Great Wall. You can walk along it for hours, so you have an activity, AND you are seeing it from a new angle with every step-- new segments of the wall curl out from the mountain as you go. And you don’t have choose between seeing it and standing on top of it—the best view of the wall is from the wall itself! Plus there is a lot of cool history, none of which I know. YET.

More reasons I think Great Wall is awesome:

1) The mountains are breathtaking, and you are standing right there in them.

2) You can buy these killer coconutty popsicles right there. On the wall.

3) You get exercise!! But for real, and without even meaning to!! 

4) Also visiting the wall are groups of Italian tourists speaking Italian (I am who I am)

So, yes, as my mother commented, I cannot get over the Great Wall. And, as my brother responded, that was kind of the point.

So it Begins

So here I am China, where I’ll be living for the next two years as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow. I’m in Beijing just for the next eight weeks, on an intensive Mandarin Chinese language program, and then in August I’ll head off to Changsha, in the Hunan province in southeastern China to teach English at Yali Middle School.

I’ve been in Beijing for more than a week now, unbelievably. My program, made up of about seventy mostly-college students, is housed in a tiny campus in northwestern Beijing, and things are starting to feel familiar, at least on a logistical level: I know which bank won’t charge me ATM fees, how to do laundry, where to jog (when air quality allows, which lately it doesn’t), when the shops on my street close down for the night. Our schedule here is pretty set, too: my Yi Bai Ban (beginner level) class starts at 8:30 AM and continues, with intermittent breaks, until lunch at 12:30. Lunch is followed by a one-on-one practice session with one of the language teachers, and then the rest of the afternoon and evening are free. We study and run errands and explore and find food and go to bed early so we can get up in time to eat breakfast and start everything over again.

On Monday morning at 8:15am, we signed our language pledge, in which we vowed only to speak Chinese for the duration of the program. The pledge is a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week kind of deal, though, thankfully, writing is ok (hence the existence of this blog), so on campus and off, it is all Chinese all the time. I mentioned that I am in the beginner-level class; in fact, all four of the Yale-China fellows are. Which means that, by signing this pledge we were in effect signing away our ability to communicate, for the immediate future at least: Monday was a quiet, quiet day. That afternoon Hayley, my fellow fellow in Changsha, and I walked in near silence to the grocery store and back, grunting and pointing and laughing and squeaking and miming and occasionally managing a sentence (“We can’t talk!”) in Chinese.

Things have improved from there—just over the past week, we’ve learned enough survival vocab to have little conversations. But living under the language pledge has meant a real shift in how I experience the world. For one thing, talking about things has become suddenly way harder than doing them. This morning, for example, the Y-C fellows had to miss our first Chinese test to go get the prerequisite medical exam for our employment visas, only to find, after over an hour of travel on multiple forms of public transport, that the clinic was closed for the Dragon Boat Festival this weekend. The three-hour journey was not nearly as frustrating as my attempts to recount the tale every time someone asked, “So, how was your first Chinese test?” since I’ve yet to master the Mandarin for “miss,” “employment visa,” “clinic,”  “closed,” “dragon,” “boat,” or “festival.”  Or the past tense. The version I’ve been eking out — “We don’t take test because we go to doctor.  Doctor not there.  Bad.” — doesn’t quite capture all the subtleties of the experience. Plus now everyone thinks we’re sick.

On the upside, the yogurt here is to die for.  It’s a little thinner than American yogurt, so you can, and are expected to, drink it with a straw jabbed through the top of the container. I was put off by this at first (the drinking, the jabbing), but it really is delicious, and I now eat /drink as many little cups of it as possible.  Also, since we all actually know the word for yogurt—suannai—it’s quickly become a conversational as well as a culinary staple. An additional plus is that we live about seven minutes from the Beijing Zoo, where you can feed a giraffe out of your hand for less than a dollar!! Obviously I did, and obviously it was really, really, really awesome. I plan to make giraffe-feeding a weekly activity, maybe to celebrate the completion of our weekly exam.

And, ok, while this language business (ie. not knowing any) is a pretty enormous hassle, it’s also really exciting—starting from nothing, we can make huge strides from one hour to the next. Every day we become better equipped to handle our everyday lives, and every trip to the supermarket, every voyage on the subway, every conversation with a waiter is a hilarious little adventure. And I’ve picked up a few essential phrases to help me express at least my incompetence, phrases like bu dong (I don’t understand), wo bu zhidao (I don’t know), and my personal favorite wo wang le (I forget). Wo wang le is so fun to say, and so inexplicably hilarious to me, that I’ve started throwing it into conversations where it doesn’t belong, just for the joy of it. This tendency added to my lack of proper tones (TONES?!) makes me, I’d imagine, nearly impossible to make sense of.

But there’s a certain joy in the freedom that comes with having no idea what’s going on. Last night I wandered into an unknown restaurant with the three other Y-C fellows, and we sat down before realizing that 1) the menu was all in Chinese and 2) it was a hot pot restaurant, the kind where you get a big vat of boiling water in the center of your table and then you boil your own noodles and veggies and meat right there in front of you. Equipped with either of these facts, we probably would have avoided the place altogether (we have enough trouble communicating in restaurants without extra procedures and complications), but since we were already sitting, we decided to brave it. Lo and behold, an English menu was produced, and we fumbled our way to a truly delicious adventure of a meal, with the four of us us diving our chopsticks blindly into the boiling broth for each new bite.

HERE WE ARE!  IN CHINA!  DRINKING YOGURT AND LEARNING CHINESE!  WO WANG LE!