Christina in China

Somehow, every Chinese English speaker in Jiangyou must have compared notes and decided on a couple sentences to say to me this week: “Christina, Christmas is coming. How will you spend your Christmas Day?” and “The weather is getting colder and colder!”

Okay, so I’m using a bit of hyperbole. But still. I’ve been asked this at least ten times in the past four days. I’m wondering if this is a typical Chinese way of saying this. I don’t know, since I only have about three people that will talk to me in Chinese on a semi-regular basis.

My answer? “I don’t know yet.” Honestly, I’m just trying to grade all of these listening exercises, write out final exam study sheets, write a Christmas play, get copies at the printing house, do lesson prep, and keep up with my Chinese study, which I feel like has stalled for this semester. And wash my clothes. And stuff.

Christmas is on a Sunday this year, so I luckily don’t have to go to class on Christmas Eve OR Christmas Day, which is quite nice. Eunice and I will go to the church in Zhong Ba on Sunday morning and then will probably want to watch the program. (They asked her if she wanted to dance and wave flowers as part of the Christmas program, but she firmly declined.) Then, who knows? I’m getting worse and worse at planning ahead. The only thing I want to do anymore is sleep, really. Break is coming soon–one more week of classes and then final exams.

For some reason, my Chinese classes were canceled unexpectedly today, so I spent the day finding cheap books to buy for the CEE library off Amazon.com and writing a Christmas play for my freshmen. Ever tried to explain the virgin birth in words accessible to freshman ESL learners? Not tremendously easy. I failed miserably on Wednesday. I know I lost them because at least seven of them started text-messaging on their cellphones. We’re going to act the play in my classes next week. This week, we’re learning to gracefully say goodbye and learning “Away in a Manger,” which they say is a beautiful song.

Speaking of grace, or more appropriately lack thereof, today I was drying my clothes inside the house in my library and forgot to take them down. No big deal, you think. The library is, after all, the warmest room in my apartment. I didn’t think at all about until two boys were INSIDE the library choosing books, and Future, one of the four-year sophomores shot me a worried look. Oh well. It was more convenient (and face-saving) for me to pretend that a rack of my bras and underwear was not hanging up in the library right beside the notebook for them to check out books. So I may have completely lost face and perpetuated the stereotype of the “loose Western woman” with the boys of Class 1. Who knows when I’ll get another visit.

“Oh, well,” I tell Future. “I forgot.”

She pauses. “I think it’s okay.”

This week Eunice dug up some Christmas decorations that were hand-me-downs from other foreign teachers and gave them to me. So Sugar, Future, and ANOTHER girl named Future helped me decorate my living room–tinsel on the lampshade, the water cooler, and the doorframe; stocking on the hook on the door; beads and ornaments and a star on the foot-and-a-half tall Christmas tree; nativity scene on the table. Sugar tried to hang Mary, Jesus, and the angel on the tree by their halos, and I said (in a fairly Chinese fashion, I later realized), “No, no, no, no! You can’t put it there!”

Eunice also found two Santa hats with white braids hanging from them, so you look like Mrs. Claus. Or shengdan nuhaizi (“Christmas girl”) as Chen Fang put it yesterday. I wore one and made the other girls take turns wearing the other. They then decided that the boys should wear it. We laughed. I sang “Lean on Me” and “Hero” by Mariah Carey at Sugar’s request, and Sugar taught me the chorus to a song called “Ai Wo Haishi Ta” (“Love Me or Him”) by a Taiwanese singer named Tao Zhe (?).

I’m being taken to sing KTV (to go karaoke-ing) with my Monday advanced conversation group. Eight of us in a room eating shao kao and then singing a mishmash of Chinese and English songs sounds like a good way to spend a Saturday night to me.

So apart from the intelligent boys of class one seeing my skivvies, it’s been a good week.

Ho ho ho.

Tags: China, Christmas, Jiangyou

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 5:36 am and is filed under Jiangyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.