上课, Teaching.

I taught my first class today, and it was great. I’ve learned that the more I perform and make a fool of myself, the more students enjoy the class, and the better they feel about participating. Lots of running around and pantomiming got my students all speaking, and despite a girl who looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head every time I called on her and a guy who refused to make eye contact, I think everyone had a pretty good time. The game that we played at the end of class (I wrote “true” and “false” above boxes on the board and had kids answer questions I asked them by racing to the board and touching the correct box first) had everyone excited and other classes that got out a little earlier than mine watching through our doors. My students are all “Radio and TV Directing” majors, and they have all taken English before, but most of them are very hesitant to speak. I had each one fill out a survey, and some of the best answers to questions are below:

What is your English name?

Lucky

Bluce Liu

Hao Long

Toxic

Enlighten

Star

Bunny

Wing

Cherry

Grom

Remiel

Cairn

Sorrry

What do you hope to learn in this class?

First: Grammar

Then: Rap off

“I hope to learn thinking better”

I wrote the above part after my first class, and now I’ve had a little time to reflect on my teaching job. I teach one class of art majors (described above) and four classes of freshman English majors. Here are some observations in no particular order.

Students are really shy. Their written English is much better than their spoken English, so one of my primary goals is to get people speaking as much as possible, and it’s a challenge. Some students refuse to talk. Some students talk at barely above a whisper. Some students ask their friends for the answer to whatever I asked them every time I send a question their way. I try to have one competitive activity in each class so that people are really motivated to speak, and those who are reluctant to speak or speak too quietly usually get easier questions or have to deal with me running to the other side of the room and shouting “WHAT?” respectively. These things seem to be working, but slowly. Another thing that I’m trying to do is speak some Chinese in each class. This works because I inevitably make some (or a lot) of mistakes, which I’m hoping shows students that it’s ok to make mistakes. As my Chinese gets better, I’ll try to speak more to help explain directions and to help people feel comfortable.

Students pick really silly names sometimes. The above names are a good sample. I have students called: Voltaire, Tubaha 1900 (your English name, not your WoW screenname), Rain, Sky Fire, Stone (all four elements), and many more. The students who don’t have English names I either think of an English name that sounds like their Chinese name, give them a name that seems suitable (but they usually manage to do this on their own: Cairn is huge and built like a pile of rocks, toxic looks like a gothic punk rocker) or name them after one of my friends. This last one seems odd at first, but it helps me remember their names, and they can be happy knowing that they are named after someone who I like.

Some of my non-major students never bring their stuff to class. For the first couple classes I had to hand out 5 or 6 pens per class. After a little while, I threatened to make people buy pens when they forgot to bring one. Then, I had a better idea and found a giant pencil and now I give it to students who forget their pen. The embarrassment has kept the pen-forgetters from forgetting frequently, and now they at least ask for a pen from their classmates when they forget.

At the start of my class, I took pictures of each of the students in the class below their English name on the board. This helps me study their names in-between classes. Without fail, the first time I tell students that I want to take their picture, I get absolutely bug-eyed, mortified looks. “You want ME to go up THERE in front of the whole class so you can take my picture??” Really, the bug-eyed mortified looks are not too uncommon. I’ve started using a badminton shuttle-cock 羽毛球 to call on people (and have them call on each other) to help randomize who I call on, and when it lands in front of someone or hits them on the head as sometimes happens, they look absolutely terrified. The other look I get from students on occasion is pure vitriol. I sometimes move students from the back to the front of class, or call on students who have been playing games on their phones, and they always look both horribly wounded and pretty angry.

Playing games is great. I play lots of games that I used to play in Spanish class, like “race to the board” where students have to race to the board and write the answer to the question I’ve asked. The first to do so scores a point for their team. I like to play hangman, but if I use the vocab words from the book, students count the number of letters in the word and guess whole words with the same number of letters rather than guessing individual letters. I played a game last class where I post a story on the wall and students work in teams of two. One has to go look at the story, then repeat it in parts to their partner who re-writes the story. The students loved the game, but it wasn’t a great success because:

Students cheat a lot! More than you would believe. In the story game, several students just stole the story off the wall to copy. Once I stopped that, some students just took photos of the story with their cell phones and then copied from there. The team that won cheated a lot, as did the 2^nd place team, so I refused to give them the promised prize for the game. I think maybe the next time I play that game I’ll make anyone who I catch cheating re-start.

Pretty much all of the students are stoked to have a foreign teacher. I handed out a questionnaire to all of my students on the first day of class, and my last question is for them to write one thing that they would like to ask me. I answer pretty much all of their questions on the next day of class. I get a lot of the same questions: Why are you in China? Do you like it here? Do you like Chinese food? What’s your QQ number? Do you have a girlfriend? How long will you stay here? Who’s your favorite basketball star? What’s your favorite color? All of my students say hi to me outside of class, and when I’m out playing basketball or tennis, my students love to join in (for basketball) or watch (for tennis).

In all, I’m really enjoying teaching so far. I think that if I walk out of a class and think it was fun for me, it probably was for most of the students. Classes where I come out going “ooh, that was painful,” the students probably think the same thing. I think I’m going to show a movie in my class, right now I’m thinking “Cool Hand Luke” because the English is pretty easy to understand, and it has a lot of American culture. Let me know if you have any other good ideas for American movies to show to the class. Off to go lesson plan for this week.

Raising the bar.

I was thrown out of a club in Chongqing this weekend. Not for anything that I did—rather because I was unwilling to purchase a bottle of cognac priced in the thousands of yuan (and probably because I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt too). I ended up at such a place because my friends and I were looking for a “bar.” We asked some random passerby where we could find a bar, and ended up in a club straight out of “lifestyles of the rich and the famous.” After wandering around for a little longer, we went home, barless. This is not uncommon in my experience. Either I end up at a western style bar full of expats, or I go get a beer at the convenience store. As I wandered home, I wondered: why aren’t there more bars in China?

First several reasons that could be true but probably aren’t:

1) There’s not a drinking culture in China. This certainly isn’t true, as anyone who has been to a banquet can attest to.

2) Maybe it’s that there isn’t the same kind of drinking culture that makes bars popular. This seems a little more true, but banquets seem like the type of social drinking environment that appears in bars, and the piles of bottles I see on peoples’ tables while eating shaokao also supports social drinking. Also, drunk driving checkpoints all over Chongqing around midnight support the hypothesis that people are getting drunk somewhere other than at home.

3) Bars are popular, you just don’t know how to find them. Plausible, but I’ve asked quite a few locals and have only ever really ended up at foreign bars (except in Chengdu, where there is “bar street” next to the east gate of Sichuan University. More on this in a bit) or KTV or night clubs.

4) KTV is the Chinese version of bars. This seems more likely than any of the above, but KTV doesn’t really offer a situation where you meet other people—you go to a room with your friends to have a good time. However, KTV might be the closest Chinese equivalent to bars. I’ll mention this later.

Now, I’m writing this not because I really love bars (I only sort of like bars) but because it seems indicative of something that I’ve read a lot about but haven’t directly experienced: that a middle class in china is largely lacking (less than ¼ of the population), but growing quickly. I think that bars are a really middle-class thing. If you’re poor, you can’t afford the cost of alcohol at a bar (generally double what you can find across the street at a convenience store) and if you’re rich, you end up buying an expensive bottle of cognac at the club. If you’re middle class, you go to the bar and meet other middle class people. At a bar you’re paying extra for your alcohol to subsidize the cost of the experience; you’re paying for the atmosphere, not the 哈尔滨 beer in your hand. In fact, the middle class is willing to pay a lot for atmosphere. Look at shopping malls, suburban streets, movie theaters, etc. Incidentally, those are all interesting things to look at in China. I have still seen very few suburban developments (more apartments—there’s a higher premium on space in China than in other places where suburban expanses abound), but lots of new shopping malls and movie theaters.

Lots of new fast food restaurants that cater to the middle class. In the US, fast food is something that is more popular among lower classes. It’s often cheaper than making food at home, and especially in our health conscious world, those who can afford to eat out in a more healthy way will. In China, fast food is more expensive than the noodle shop around the corner, but it offers AC, booth seating, someone to clear your tray of food, and a distinctly western atmosphere. I just had a Big-Mac in Chongqing, and it tasted just like a Big-Mac from Denver, CO. Because I’m a big fan of the big mac index, I had to see if the cost-taste relationship is a factor in the index. The proliferation of donut shops is another indicator of China’s emerging middle class.

Back to bars. In Chengdu, there’s “Nine Bar Street” next to the 川大east gate. This street is populated by 9 bars overlooking the 锦江. These bars appear to cater to a Chinese crowd rather than the largely expat crowd present in other Chengdu bars (like Shamrock). I can’t be sure, but I think that most of these bars are relatively new (less than 5 years) and are getting more popular. Evidence of a quickly growing middle class? I think so.

Back to KTV. If KTV is the Chinese middle class alternative to bars, then it’s rise in popularity over the last five years means that it has become a middle class staple. The KTV-as-bar theory suggests that people go to KTV as a way to unwind after work or on the weekend. Gesang Zeren of Sichuan University agrees, saying,

"Our culture values the cultivation of self-restraint. People are not encouraged to be aggressive and show individuality. But, in KTV clubs, they can unleash themselves and perform anything they want. It's a way to relax. Chinese people also tend to shoulder pressure internally instead of turning to others for help. It's a good way to vent their emotions, whether it be depression, pressure, happiness or aspirations. Singing can help express various emotions."

So probably, the general lack but growing popularity of bars is both attributable to a general preference for KTV and a small-ish middle class. However, KTV and a variety of other factors help to put a face on what we’ve been told for the last five or ten years: that China’s middle class is on the up and up.

峨眉山 (Emeishan)

Emeishan

峨眉山

On our second day at the University, our waiban told us that we have a week off before we begin teaching, and asked if we wanted to do anything before classes start. We all decided that we would like to go to EMeiShan, one of the four most important Buddhist mountains here. 峨眉山 is a couple of hours from Pengshan, and the peak is at 9800 ft. (Pengshan is about 1500 ft.). Our waiban decided to arrange a trip for us to go there for two days. The next day she said we could go on a tour with a group of other Chinese tourists for 500 kuai ($80) with transport and lodging. Our group decided that was a little too rich for us, and that we wanted to go on our own. After hearing this, our waiban petitioned her department to send one of the foreign teacher assistants with us as a guide (probably to keep us out of trouble). Our assistant’s name is Emily, and she’s really nice and helpful and speaks really good English (and hikes really fast). It took us several hours and 4 or 5 busses to get there, but when we did the air was much cooler and the sky was a very pretty shade of blue. Our first stop on the mountain was the monkey zone, a pleasant 2 hour hike past some neat stone sculptures, up a canyon to see Macaques. Each of us was armed with a bamboo stick just in case the macaques got unruly. The monkey zone was unlike any other monkey experience I have ever had. Basically, the paths herd tourists into a little area where the monkeys steal anything not strapped to your pack. To make money, people sell “monkey food” (hard corn kernels) in packages that the monkeys steal as soon as you’re near them. Then, there are several park people who have trained monkeys to sit on your head if you pay 20 kuai for a photograph. The same people try to keep monkeys from sitting on anybody who hasn’t paid so that they can get their photo money. This ultimately results in monkeys jumping all over people (because they are trained to do that) and then getting chased away by park people with sticks. Total mayhem. There was one good scam going where one monkey sat in the middle of the path out of the monkey zone and grabbed onto people and wouldn’t let go unless you fed him. Right next to him was someone selling “monkey food” at double the price. Brilliant. I was less interested in the monkeys (I’ve had enough monkey “encounters”) but really excited by the mountainous terrain surrounding me.

From there we took a bus up to the highest road-access point on the mountain (about 2000 feet from the top) where our group split up. Penny and Robin and Emily (mom and daughter and our guide) decided to stay at the base and take the gondola up to the top in the morning. The rest of us decided to hike to the top of the mountain in the dusk and try and find a place to stay so that we could see the sunrise from the top of the mountain the next morning. On our way up we passed a group of Chinese university students who spoke a little English. I hiked with them the rest of the way up, and found out that they had begun at the bottom of the mountain that morning, climbing about 8,000 feet. When we made it to the area where we could stay, they helped us find a hotel and took me out to dinner (which was instant noodles, the only offering on a mountain where the only way to get food up there is having porters bring it). Our group had 5 people in a room with 3 pretty small beds, and our friends who helped us had the same sized room for their 7, so one of them came to stay in our room so that everyone could stay 2 to a bed.

We all got up at 4:30 the next morning to climb to the top and see the stars and then the whole sunrise. At 4:45 someone from the hotel came and knocked on every door to get everyone up to see the sunrise. We joked that the checkout time was 5 am. My Chinese and American friends all hiked to the top together (another half an hour) and secured a spot at the railing of the monastery to watch the sunrise. It was beautiful watching the sky grow steadily lighter, and fun to listen to everyone cheer as the sun breached the horizon.

However, my favorite part was watching in the West where the Himalayas appeared in the clear morning air before disappearing in the clouds.

There were hundreds of people at the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise, and many many more once the gondola started running. I became an instant celebrity and had my photo taken with tons of people, including what seemed like all of the possible permutations of my 7 friends. A couple people took the gondola down, and Matt and I decided to try to make them wait as little as possible, so we ran down the mountain. I wish I had gotten some better pictures of all of the stairs. We made ourselves even more visible than we already are by running past all of the people slowly making their way down the mountain.

You should be able to see all of my pictures from Emeishan here:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.554467321362.2051968.48101395

Leaving Shanghai and beginning in Pengshan

The Shanghai institute was over before it really began. We had several notable adventures with the institute—going to the Chinese circus, going to a famous Chinese garden, visiting the Bund, going up to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center, and visiting a Buddhist monastery in Shanghai. I ate tons of good food, bonded with fellow Shanghai institute friends over everything from being really tall to reading Nietzsche, got lost, got found, practiced Chinese, and lots else. Despite the institute seeming much too brief in retrospect, it seemed to last forever when I was there, probably as a result of all of the stuff I did. By the end, everyone seemed to be getting the hang of China, and most of us seemed pretty excited to move on to our respective universities and settle down.

While pictures explain much of the above better than words, there were a couple of experiences that are worth writing about (because I didn’t take any pictures). On our last night in Shanghai, our group went out to KTV. KTV is Chinese karaoke, where your group rents a room with several karaoke screens and a few microphones for an hour or two and belts out whatever English songs you can find on the KTV register. This is unbelievably fun. I had a great time singing: whatever backstreet boys I could find, “Since You Been Gone,” “Lose Yourself,” and many more. I discovered not too long ago that I love playing rock-band (thanks cousins) and KTV is kind of like that, but with a group all singing and no scores to tell you how bad (or good, in some people’s cases) you are. I learned that at my university there are a couple KTV rooms provided specially for teachers, where they bring you snacks and drinks for free. I plan on making this a part of my weekly routine for sure.

The other experience was playing some ultimate in Shanghai. I found out about a pickup game online and emailed the organizer about times, and decided to go play with the team. Thanks to Jeremy, Matt and I both had China Ultimate jerseys to wear. A couple days before the game we decided to go to (it was a 2 hour trek on the subway to get there) my friend Phil from the China team that went to worlds contacted my because he saw that I was in Shanghai on facebook. He and I had traded jerseys after our game at worlds. At the game, I was surprised to run into a bunch of other people who I know from ultimate: Matt Knowles, Miranda Roth, Jia Xie, and this guy called John who I played against in Fort Collins when Matt and I played for The Worst Team Ever. After practice Matt and I were invited to play on the Shanghai team at any tournaments that we can attend. The first one was too expensive, but hopefully we’ll get to go to one in Hong Kong in October.

四川大学(Sichuan University)

Well, I made it. After two weeks of trying just about every day to get internet set up, it finally happened. After being told that it was impossible because I have a 聘过电脑（apple computer), and then buying a wireless router to have it sit in my room for a week and a half, then being told to just change my operating system, and finally, having every conversation end with "we'll look at it tomorrow." Ultimately, it took a bunch of ethernet cords, a modem, a router, wire strippers, several handheld testing devices, and 5 guys to get it set up.


Stripping some wires
testing 123
Hacking into the wires in the wall directly

And the result: I now have pretty fast wireless internet. Woohoo!

Here is what my apartment looks like now:
Desk

Living Room

Out my front door.

I have a lot written about the last few weeks which I will start uploading. Stay tuned.