Adding to the cast of characters
My first few days in Jiangyou felt very full and very strange–but a good kind of strange. The kind of little-kid excitement that I normally have, except up another level.
My apartment is not bad–in fact, sometimes I forget that I’m here, thinking that it’s very much the same as an apartment in the U.S. Everything that I need is here–semifunctional computer, good air conditioning, a bed, a sort of grubby shower that has lots of hot water most of the time. I even have some good bug spray, which is useful to kill some of my inch-long creepy-crawly roach “friends” that kept visiting me. I sprayed one night, and the next morning, thirteen of them had crawled out to die.
The first day I was here, Eunice showed me around the campus. There are 9 or 10 main class buildings, plus a couple student dormitories and teacher apartments, an office building (called “the library”), outdoor student cafeterias, and a nice auditorium and square where there are performances and such. The campus is very nice, actually. Nothing plush, but there are some pretty flowers and shade trees. It’s a good break from all the concrete that seems to quickly be taking over China. I sat in on one of Eunice’s sophomore conversation classes, which was an excellent glimpse of teaching for me and helped me feel more at home. We went to the office, got my desk, and met some other teachers.
I must say that I have tremendous admiration for Chinese teachers. Some of them teach up to 25 or 26 50-minute class periods a week, and these are classes with somewhere between 35 (for a small class) to 55 students. Many of them teach intensive English reading or composition classes, where they have to read huge stacks of papers. They have hundreds of students, and none of them have a private office, just a big departmental office of about 30 or so teachers and teachers’ assistants (called “head teachers”), where each one has a desk. They’re required to be in the office every period when they’re not teaching, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. In other words, they work hard.
I was prepared for no contact in English with my coworkers, but I was pleasantly surprised. I ate lunch my first day (and, well, all the subsequent weekdays) in the teachers’ cafeteria, affectionately referred to as the “push-in-line buffet.” The three foreign teachers (Eunice, Hugh, and I) eat at a table with Miss Li and Miss Xiong, whose English names are Sicily and Wendy. Both of them speak very good English, and so does Miss Xiao, another teacher in the department, who teaches Intensive Reading, Composition, and English Teaching Methodology (whew). Wendy is amazingly fluent: she teaches oral English and acts as translator for Hugh and me a lot of the time, and she’s used to dealing with foreign teachers. So she’s a huge help. She’s also very warm, very funny, and very accomodating, always saying that it’s a pleasure to help. She’s small and petite, with a ponytail and glasses and a huge smile. According to Eunice, she and her husband, who is an engineer and has traveled to the U.S. on business, are about the cutest couple ever.
The evening of my first day, Hugh, the other foreign teacher, took me out to eat, and we took a little mini-tour of the area near the school. Now I should introduce Hugh, who will definitely be a recurring character in my blog. Hugh is 51, my mom’s age, which I remind him of. He’s tall and has thick curly black hair with gray streaks in it, and when he’s thinking, his eyes get huge as he tries to think about how to say something to a student. When I asked him what he did before coming to China, he said that his main occupation was “academic spouse” and that he worked various odd jobs and had been a lit grad student at the University of Washington before he decided that he wanted to read actual literature, not just theory, and decided not to be a grad student anymore. And then when being an academic spouse didn’t work out, he “ran off and joined the Peace Corps.” He was in nearby Mianyang for nine months before being evacuated because of SARS, and when he came back, he got a job here, at Jiangyou Normal School, and has been here for about two years, I think. Oh, and Hugh’s Chinese name is Jin Hu (translated from Hugh Jenkins), which means “golden tiger.” He always has his students over to his apartment, and he ends up watching teenybopper movies like Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. He says that the first time he came to China, he brought textbooks about linguistics and the history of the English language, and now he’s wised up and brings twenty fashion and hair magazines from the U.S. Hugh is funny, this kind of dry sense of humor that reminds me of my brother Paul or someone like Allen Barry or Carl Gay from high school.
Anyway. Hugh and I walked around the school, then across the railroad tracks and to the part of town near the market, one of the places where you can catch a bus to Zhong Ba, which is what people call downtown Jiangyou. I don’t know what it means. Zhong means “center,” so Zhong Ba probably means “center” something.
I go to bed early here. I usually go to bed between 10:30 and midnight, but sometimes I fall asleep at 8:30 or 9:00 pm, with the construction workers still working on the new dormitory behind my building, with the sounds of students walking and chatting outside my window, in another language that I can barely understand, and it’s all so new and yet oddly soothing.
Tags: Jiangyou
