Christina in China

Tonight I’m nursing a cold. I’ve popped a couple Day Quil (the last two I have) and have been drinking hot water and blowing my nose a lot. Several people are getting colds. I think Eunice gave me hers, because she has a fever today. (Tangent: Ever explained the phrase “gave someone a cold” to a non-native English speaker? It’s pretty funny.) It’s partly because of the weather, which has been shifting strangely between so-cold-you-can-see-your-breath and so-warm-you-can-take-off-your-coat.

I also attribute the cold partly to the fact that my house is cold. Even as I type this, I feel like a whiner. My house is not that cold. It’s about 46 degrees Fahrenheit, and every time students come in, they remark on the warmth of my little library room. Cold is relative. So, for that matter, is little–my little library room is not that much smaller than students’ dorm rooms, which house eight or so students on bunk beds.

At MCC orientation, they warned us about it, and recently I haven’t been able to shake it: that nagging sense of guilt. Two weeks ago, Josh called me for our weekly (or so) phone call, and we ended up talking about being white and rich and privileged. I sent my mom an email about this, and she asked if there was some hidden money that she didn’t know about. We don’t, after all, think we’re rich.

* * * * *

The church in Jiangyou is over a hundred years old. As winter draws near, the church gets colder, since it has no heat. I’m not even sure it has doors. It’s made of concrete and wood beams and stands down a little alley off the old street in Zhong Ba. The old street, with its pig heads on slabs, fish swimming around in shallow tanks, live chickens and ducks in cages, doufu and noodles and vegetables of every kind, chestnuts roasting in barrels over hot coals, and women embroidering shoe insoles, is one of my favorite places to walk down, although I always feel conspicious. The church is packed with hard wooden pews, and you usually have to walk on one of the concrete ledges along the side to get to a pew on the farthest side of the church.

Inside the church, there is a light that looks like it might have been nice years ago. Out of five or so bulbs, there are two still burning. Otherwise, people see from the light that streams in from the doors or the spaces between the clay roof tiles, the bare light bulbs that hang from the ceiling, or the light from the platform. For decorations, the church has a few plastic flowers hanging from the wooden beams, which are also draped with what looks like Christmas tinsel. There is an out of tune piano, a pulpit, a out-of-place picture of a clipper ship, and a large framed piece of paper with the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments in complex Chinese characters. On the right wall, there are red wooden characters that talk about loving country and church. There is also a list of people’s names that have donated money for the new church that is to be built.

The church has no hymnals provided. Everyone buys his or her own or looks off the person beside them. In the back sit a lot of old ladies, who I’m not sure understand a lot of the sermon. When we pray together, Eunice prays for the old ladies and men who are illiterate and can’t read their Bibles.

It was about a month after I started going to the Jiangyou church before I figured out the offering. There is no collection, only a wooden box by the door, where everyone puts in their money before they leave.

* * * * *

One day at lunch, Hugh tells a story. A few years ago, he was doing a Halloween lesson in one of his oral or culture classes. For the sake of being interactive, he brought in a roll of toilet paper, to throw around the class and demonstrate the pranks that people do on Halloween.

“I threw the paper up in the air,” he says, “thinking that we’d be picking it up from the corners of the room and from the rafters for weeks. But as soon as I threw it, the entire roll of toilet paper was gone, snatched up, torn into little pieces and put into purses to use as napkins or tissues later.”

* * * * *

Petrel, one of the sophomores with an excellent vocabulary, explains to me about sleeve covers and washing one’s clothes. Many of the students here wear sleeve covers: pieces of fabric cinched at the end with elastic that they put over their coats or their sweaters to keep the sleeves from getting dirty while they are writing or, especially, eating.

“If you wear sleeve covers,” Petrel says, “you only have to wash your clotheses once a week.”

I imagine some of my friends saying a collective “ewwww” at this, but one day, as I watch the students from my window, I understand. They are outside the dormitory building, washing the clothes by hand at a sink. The air is cold; you can see your breath. But they use cold water and roll their sleeves up, scrubbing their clothes with a bar of laundry soap on a washboard. They get chillblains in the winter, not frostbite but some sort of viral infection from the damp cold, from getting wet and not getting dry enough again.

Petrel and her family rent an apartment in Chengdu. They used to be farmers but now live in the city. But Petrel tells me one day that she has three winter outfits. It would be too much trouble to have much more than that, she tells me. After all, how would you decide what to wear every morning?

I explain that people in the U.S. change their clothes every day and that they think you’re strange if you wear the same shirt two days in a row. Petrel and her friend laugh. Preposterous, they think.

They look at my Harry Potter book and say that they’d like to buy one, but it’s too expensive. I tell them that they are about $20 in the U.S. Their eyes lose focus as they multiply by eight in their head and come up with 160 yuan. “Wow,” they say. I try to alleviate the situation by telling them that eating out in the U.S. costs about 8 or 9 bucks, but this doesn’t seem to help the matter.

* * * * *

In China, I live in a little, dark apartment. It has two bedrooms–one with a bed, one with a computer and three bookcases–the library. I have a refrigerator, a wok, a toaster oven, a microwave, and a washing machine. In the bathroom, kind of dirty, with a grime in the corners that won’t go away, I have a sink that won’t spit out water with any sort of pressure and a bathtub, a broken shower head, and a hot water heater that will give me 20 minutes of hot water. I have a couple chairs, four little sofa chairs, a water cooler, a TV, and a DVD player. In the toilet room, I have a Western-style toilet. I have three heaters, only one of which works.

In the U.S., people would turn up their noses. After all, some people said that my brother’s really nice apartment was crappy and that he shouldn’t live there. But here, I have a nicer apartment than almost anyone, with appliances that many people don’t have.

“Students feel more at home in your apartment than they do in mine,” Eunice says.

I ask her why, and she says, “Because it’s kind of cold and ugly and small. They can identify more with it than with my apartment now.”

And I agree with her. It is kind of cold and ugly and small. But we huddle in together, eat guazi, and laugh, and somehow, we find ourselves warm again.

* * * * *

Every time students come to my home, they immediately go for the photo albums on my coffee table. I have pictures of my family, my friends, Houghton, West Virginia, travels to various places. Eunice speculates that it’s a nervous mechanism; many of them are not quite at ease at my house, speaking English with me, and want something to do with their hands. But I’ve visited the apartment of one of the other, wealthier, teachers at the school, and the photo album gazing was a pretty central activity that day, too.

I put the pictures there in hopes that this would be common ground. Look, here’s my family. I have family, just like you, friends, just like you, a hometown, just like you. But recently, I’ve been thinking that it just exaggerates the differences.

A few weeks ago, my mother sent me a letter, along with a picture of me with Rachel Ingraham, a friend from college, when Rachel visited me in West Virginia. We’re standing on the porch of my house, wearing scarves in our hair, spaghetti-strap tank tops, knee-length skirts, sandals. At first, I hesitated putting it out. I’ve tended to err towards modesty here, since a bunch of people have stereotypes that all Americans are like people in the movies, that Americans are “open.” “Open,” as the students use it, can mean anything from open to new ideas to open about sleeping with anyone and everyone. So I thought twice about putting out the picture, lest a bunch of students in Sichuan would think that Rachel and I were “open.”

“Who is this?” they ask first. I used to tell them the word “classmate,” but Rachel wasn’t my “classmate” in the Chinese sense. So I tell them that she was my “schoolmate,” one of those English words that only exist in China.

They nod. The next question, I haven’t anticipated. “Wha,” says Future in the same breathy, astonished tone that all of them use when they’re surprised. Waa (my version–I don’t think pinyin actually exists for Sichuanhua) is the first part of the expression wassay, which is basically the Chinese wow. “What is this building?”

My house has always seemed normal to me, but as I look at it, I see what she’s surprised at. The white columns and railings on the front of the porch, the red speckled brick and tidy blue vinyl siding, the pond in front, the lawn and landscaping in the front, the white wooden deck chairs on the front. I picture the houses along every road in Sichuan–the houses with bathroom tile architecture, bricks, concrete, or sometimes very basic mud brick tiles.

“This is my house,” I tell Future.

They all huddle in, eager to see. “It’s so graceful,” Future says. “Can I say graceful for a house?”

“Elegant might be better.”

“Yes,” she says. “Very elegant.” I look in her eyes to try to figure out if there’s sadness there, but there doesn’t seem to be any. Sometimes I can glimpse a bit of an emotion that looks more like wistfulness than sadness. She just looks happy now, happy to be looking at the picture.

Sister is another sophomore. She wears a constant ponytail, speaks English with neat but clipped pronunciation, and has a slightly squared face. She has circles under her eyes often. She is a good girl, I would say to Chinese friends, a girl that is sweet and studies hard and is proud of things like her hometown Lanzhong’s famous pickled vegetables. “If you had a foreign boyfriend, you could marry him and have a house like that,” she says to Future.

Future pauses for a moment. “That’s okay. I just want to find someone I love and have a family and live in Yibin.”

Sister looks a bit askance at her, and now Future does have a wistful look, but I know that the look isn’t because of America but because of Yibin. She misses there, misses her family, misses the spicy Yibin ranmian rice noodles and the Chang Jiang.

And this is what makes me write this blog entry, what helps me during my time here. My students, who navigate the world of the countryside and city, the rice and rapeseed fields and the supermarkets, the funerals where people stay up all night with the deceased and the pop music that sounds just like Britney Spears in Chinese. They study hard and work hard and take care of each other, and these students, the best ones, are fluent in a foreign language in a way that I alternately envy and admire.  Although they learn English, they have their own language and their own dialect that we foreigners have to learn or perish here.  I don’t feel sorry for them because they don’t really feel sorry for themselves.  I don’t feel sorry for them because in many ways, their ways of doing things make more sense than mine do.  Especially here.

The resilience and distinctiveness and uniqueness that they have keeps me from any kind of pity for them. And the fact that what many of them want is not another America. It is their own way.

When the Christmas season was approaching, I was afraid, really afraid that I was going to sink into a funk and have a hard time climbing out again. I’ve been really surprised that this hasn’t been the case at all.

If anything, I feel like I’ve almost been showered with blessing. With Christmas songs at church that are translations of the old favorites from home. With new ways to look at the Christmas scriptures. With a tiny Christmas tree, tinsel, a stocking, a mini-nativity scene, and a stocking inherited from previous foreign teachers. With Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God CD that’s kind of in constant rotation at my place. With a gift of a Chinese knot from Sharry. With the hilarity of teaching a Christmas play to my freshmen students. Most of all, with good wishes from students and coworkers and friends.

I did my Christmas play with my freshmen all week. By Friday’s last class, Class 2, I had the thing pretty much down pat. I had a student write the Chinese translations of new words on the board (virgin, God, stable, manger, angel, bless) and told the students how they should act the play. And then they performed it, my play that I adapted to big classes, with 25 narrators, 7 shepherds, three different angels. I borrowed props (daoju, as Miss Liu, one of the headteachers taught me) from Eunice’s apartment: three plastic stools to be the manger, a gray blanket for swaddling cloths, a little girl doll dressed in red Chinese silk to be Jesus, three candles for the wise men’s gifts, a piece of gold tinsel for an angel halo. “Wassay!” said the students as I walked into the room.

And, in a freshman oral English at Jiangyou Normal sort of way, Class 2’s performance was wonderful. Athletic, volleyball-playing Rachel was a good Mary, acting surprised when the angel spoke to her, stroking Jesus on the head while we sang “Away in a Manger.” Soft-spoken Nikki was a wonderful Joseph, reflectively saying her line about not wanting to embarrass Mary. All three angels (creative license on my part) wore their halo, spoke loudly, and waved their arms, as the class demanded. “Fei, fei, fei! Fly, fly, fly!” said the students, laughing. The wise men came on cue. The shepherds crowded at the front of the room, and Franklin, the boy with pretty good English whom the girls secretly tell me they think is handsome, looked astonished as the angel appeared.

Most of my Chinese friends say that Christmas is the same as Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year. “Chabuduo,” I say. “Almost.” There’s no nativity for Spring Festival, but there is the element of family reunion, which they think is the most important part. That and the fact that their parents give them money.

It’s a good comparison for them, and I think that it’s what makes them dote on us foreigners during the season. I think they imagine being away from their families on Spring Festival, and the thought doesn’t appeal to them.

Dean Zhao is one of those people who likes to take care of foreigners on Christmas. It’s a Christmas tradition for Mr. Zhao to cook a huge dinner for us and invite some of the English teachers over to talk to us. This year, it was at Mr. Zhao’s house in Zhong Ba. So Eunice, Hugh, and I, along with Ms. Xiong, Ms. Xiao, Mr. Long, and Mr. Huang, all English teachers rode the school teachers’ bus to Mr. Zhao’s house near a place called Maluwan. The Canadian teacher at the middle school, Carmen; his son, Denny; and his sister, Debby, were there, too. And Mr. Zhao’s wife, Zhang Ye; his daughter; Mr. Li (the assistant head of the department); and Mr. Li’s wife. So a big crowd.

Normally, these kinds of big crowd dinners, with lots of toasting and such, make me nervous. But this was as close to an American get-up-and-mingle-party as I’ve seen in China, and maybe they did that intentionally. In any case, it was wonderful. I made jiaozi with Ms. Xiao, her putting in the meat filling with chopsticks and crimping the edges, me trying to learn, both of us talking back in forth in a strange mix of Chinese and English.

Mr. Zhao’s dog, Hei Bin (which, I think, means “black ice,” but I could definitely be wrong), decided that the most fun thing was to hump my leg for like twenty minutes. To which I decided that I needed to chastise the dog in Chinese. “Haiyou liang ge laowai! (Hey, there are two other foreigners here!)” I told Hei Bin, which made everyone laugh and say that I was making progress in my Chinese. Ah, low expectations…

Mr. Zhao and Zhang Ye made hotpot, the singularly most famous Sichuan dish. There are different kinds of hotpots (Mongolian, to name one), but Sichuan hotpot is what people mean when they say huoguo around here. A big frothing pot of dark red oil and water liquid, with Sichuan lajiao floating on the top. People add the vegetables and meat, and then you fish it out with your chopsticks, dip it in your bowl of vinegar and garlic and green onion, and eat it, bite after deliciously spicy bite. Tonight, we had lamb, three kinds of mushrooms, lotus root, potato, seaweed (haidai in Chinese–literally “sea belt”), carrot, and lettuce heart. Plus, we had some delicious shrimp, which had the feelers and eyes still on it, so of course, I had to move its feelers and make it talk. “Hello,” I said, waving the feelers. “Ni hao.”

“Gosh, we can’t take you anywhere,” said Hugh, rolling his eyes.

We had crab, too, little crabs that Miss Xiao taught me how to eat. And homemade chun juar, spring rolls, with spicy vegetables in the middle. And lazi ji, chicken with lots of hot green peppers and mushrooms in it. Fruit salad.

The conversation was good–light-hearted holiday conversation with the people there. Talking about students with slightly shy Mr. Huang, who teaches English composition and Japanese. Laughing with pregnant Ms. Xiong, who wore Eunice’s red Santa hat all evening, which looked funny with her blue sweatpants and sherbet-colored Korean maternity coat. She continually filled her plate. (“I have to eat more for my baby,” she always explains.) Small talk with the Canadians. Introductions with the Chinese speakers. A lot of, “Zhege dongxi zenme shuo?” (“How do you say this in Chinese?”) on my part. Toasting, but short, good-natured toasting, with the foreigners saying, “Shengdan kuaile! Xinnian kuaile!” and the Chinese saying “Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!”

Perhaps the great triumph of the evening was having a conversation of more than two words with Mr. Zhao. Granted, some of my Chinese had to be translated into understandable Chinese, but this man has the thickest Sichuan accent ever, and just to understand complete sentences of what he’s saying is a gift. And there they were, as if the language static in my head had cleared like the pollution and fog over Jiangyou clears after a rain. Mr. Zhao talking about how Yuandan (Western New Year) and Xinnian (Chinese New Year) weren’t the same, telling me that Josh & I could go to Emei Shan, saying how the countryside often used the nongli (lunar calendar).

I may not have said much in response, and I definitely didn’t speak much beautiful Chinese, but I got to say one of the most wonderful things an American in China can say: “Wo ting dong.”

I understand.

In Chinese, I tell Ms. Zhang, Mr. Zhao’s wife, that their house is very big and beautiful and thank her for letting me come. She asks me about my Chinese name, and I tell her that it is close to my English last name.

“Tao Le,” she says. “Le tao tao.”

I consider smiling and nodding but instead ask a question. “Le tao tao…shi shenme yisi?” I ask. “What does it mean?”

She smiles. “Kai kai xin xin de yisi.” (Very very happy.)

“It’s a good name,” says Ms. Xiao in English. I nod, and three of us get into a taxi to go home. As I listen to Mr. Huang banter with the thick-accented taxi driver, certain words jump out at me, but I don’t grasp for them. I just sit there, letting them fall around me, listening to them speak, listening to the strange, raucous beauty of this language that I barely know.

* * * * *

This week, I have gotten (count ’em!) fourteen Christmas cards from students and one from Dean Zhao, my boss. Incredible. I came back tonight, and there were six more of them, slid under my door by students who had come to my house to watch a movie and found that I wasn’t home. They’re absolutely wonderful. Here are the messages (all messages as they are):

————–

Miss Turner,
Merry Christmas to you! Wish you the blessings of a beauiful Christmas season. At this Christmas season and throughout the New Year, may you be blessed with every happiness!

Yours,
Xenia

————–

Dear Christina,
It’s my pleasure of knowing you. The time we shared together is aways wonderful. We have learned anther interesting culture and custom from you. Thank you for giving us so much happyness and knowledge.
Wish you a good Christmas!
Happy everyday!

Your sincerely,
Dale

————–

To Christina:
At Christmas and forever, may peace and love fill your heart beauty fill your world; and contentment and joy fill your days.
I hope you hear my wispers for blessing and happiness with Santa Claus fall down and surround you forever.
Forget to ask you: are you well and healthy? My greeting is knocking your beautiful door now just for this Christmas Eve, regardless of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and regardless of cloudy, sunny, windy and rainy day…!

Yours,
Zola

————–

Christina:
Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year!
We wish you become more and more beautiful! And everything goes on very well! Thank you for your teaching!

Yours,
Joelle, Elaine, Barara, Olivia

————-

Christina:
Bless Christmas! I wish silver chorus in church strikes your beautiful skirt lightly and you can feel my quiet and peaceful love in it!

From: Candy

————

To my best teacher, Christina

Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year!

From: Virginia and Rachel

————

Dear Christina:
China is a beautiful country.
I hope you like it and like me.
I’m happy to make friends with you!
I hope you have good days in China!
I hope you are more and more beautiful!
I wish you: Happy everyday!
Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas!

Your student:
Tessa

———–

To Christina:
I hope everything goes well and Merry Christmas! My English is not well. May I ask a favor of you?

Your student:
Amanda

———–

To Christina:
Wish you merry Christmas!

from yours:
Christine

———–

Dear Christina,
Thank you for giving me classes. I like you speaking English very much. You are a kind teacher and friend for us. Best wishes to you.
Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year!
Happy Every Day!

yours student & friend,
Rain

———–

To Christina:
I hope you are happy everyday! Merry Christmas to you!

Veronica

———-

Dear Christina,
Wishing you and those around you a very merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year. Thank you for your hard working and devotion.

Mianyang Elementary Education College
12.23.2005

———-

Tao Le:
Christina,
Merry Christmas! (Shengdan kuaile!)
Happy New Year! (Xinnian kuaile!)
Smile Everyday! (Weixiao mei yi tian!)
I wish you will become more and more beautiful!
You are really a good teacher, I love you with my heart! I’m very lucky to be your student and friend.

From Cherfin

———-

To Christina:
Merry Christmas!
Happy Everyday!
It’s my privilege of knowing you, also it’s a beautiful surprise. I can feel you kind-hearted and pretty from your sweet smile. How wonderful this time was! We went to your warm house to watch film, chat, eat sun-seeds and sweets. Way to go!
That you see the card at the second time may be in America. In any way, I’ll rember you for ever. So will you, ok?

From your sincerely,
Tanya

———

I have to say that the last two made me cry almost. I’m sure that when I’m back in the U.S. and am reading them someday, I probably will cry, remembering these girls and the effort they took to write a note in their second language to me. I used to wonder how I would make it through Christmas and the whole adjusting to China bit without constantly wishing I could go home.

And now I find myself wondering how I’m going to be able to leave.

Where to go, where to go…

I use these sentence fragments often, and I’m trying to remember if I used them before I came to China. Eunice says I’ve been picking up really bad Chinese grammar. The other day, I said, “How to say…” in a kind of reflective way, but she thought I was saying it as a question. She was, understandably, horrified.

As if I wasn’t a little bit unfocused enough, with giving students final exams next week, Christmas this weekend, doing Christmas plays in class this week, having Josh coming next Tuesday, finishing work next Friday, and feeling slight teacher/student/China burnout, now I keep thinking about where I’ll travel. So I thought that I would tell you, loyal blog readers, and have you give me your opinions about where you think I should go.

With Josh here, we have to spend some time in good ole Jiangyou, but then we have time to travel to maybe one more place that’s not too far away. I was thinking Xi’an, the city with the Terracotta Warriors and the old capital during one of the forever-ago-dynasties. Since Josh is not going to get to see the Great Wall (his fault, not mine, ha), I figured I should take him to see something terribly historical and important in China. If I have time, I’ll take him to see some pandas in Chengdu because pandas are cute and fun and basically do nothing but sleep and eat bamboo.

But even with my trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, paid for by CEE, staying at a nice resort hotel and then a week going somewhere else in Thailand (don’t know where yet), I still have three weeks! Unbelievable. I’ve decided that I want to visit some students. One of my students, Joan, lives inside the Bamboo Sea in southern Sichuan, a place that I really want to visit. Basically, the Bamboo Sea is this enormous bamboo forest and not-incredibly-visited national park, where some scenes from Wo Hu Cang Long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ) were filmed. I also have an invite from Iris, one of Eunice’s sophomores, who lives near Joan, and from Sharry, who lives near Chengdu. I have many more invites, but Eunice and Hugh inform me that after a couple days of playing ma jiang and cards, sitting around the fire, watching Qing Dynasty soap operas on TV, and being forced to gorge yourself with more food than humans should eat, you’re kind of ready to just go somewhere else without so much hospitality for the rest of your vacation. I’m really looking forward to it, though. For the glimpse of average, non-city life and also for the chance to spend time with some wonderful students.

So, loyal readers, where do you think I should go in my other two weeks? This is something new, an interactive blog. I’m going to let you help me decide. Here are the choices, in no particular order:

1. Hong Kong. Here’s a picture of the famous skyline and the harbor. I actually know a girl from SALT Orientation who is working with a Hong Kong-based human rights documentation group who has graciously agreed to let me stay on her couch if I wish. Pros: Dude, it’s Hong Kong, one of the biggest cities in the world. That skyline is gorgeous. People speak English. There are tons of things to see: city stuff, temples and cultural stuff, hiking on the other islands, etc. Trisha has been living there for four months and would know way more about the city than I would. There would be good coffee and international food. There would be Chinese food that’s different than chuan cai (Sichuan food). It would be warmer than here. Cons: Dude, it’s Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is expensive, even with no housing cost. Not exactly a peaceful getaway. Lots of tourists. Even with discounted plane fares, it would put me back over 1000 kuai (a month’s salary for me) just for the airplane ticket, and a 30-ish to 40-hour train trip does not sound fun to me.

2. Yunnan Province – Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and Kunming. This is one of the favorite haunts of backpackers and English teachers in China. Yunnan, although not Thailand-warm, is still warmer than northern Sichuan this time of year. Kunming is apparently one of the coolest mid-size Chinese cities–I’ve heard that it’s clean and not the dump that some cities are. From there, I could go to Lijiang, along with every other Chinese backpacker. Lijiang is apparently one of the most worth-it touristy places in China, though, I hear. A bunch of the city was hit by an earthquake, and (surprise, surprise), the cheaply built concrete buildings were all leveled to the ground. The ones that survived better were the ones in the Old Town. But the town has pumped a lot of money into reconstructing these old buildings, cleaning up the trash, making it feel tranquil and peaceful and “old” to encourage tourism, which might feel fake. Lijiang is the home of the Naxi minority people. Pros: Naxi (non-Han Chinese) culture. Different food. A pretty canal and wooden buildings. Western conveniences. Cafes to sit in and journal or reflect or study Chinese or read all day if I want to. Not TOO far away. Warmer than Sichuan. Tiger Leaping Gorge is supposedly beautiful and a hard hike, though not impossible, says Eunice. Cheaper than Hong Kong. Cons: All those other laowai. Feeling kind of like you’re in a fake place, that people are milking the “minority” thing for tourist money, whether Chinese or Western. Not seeing “real life.” The danger of just hanging out with Americans, Canadians, and Brits the whole time. The strange feeling I get when I think, “Wow, how quaint! You wear cool clothes and speak a different language! Let’s take a picture!”

3. Guizhou Province – villages around Kaili. This is the off-the-beaten-path choice, although not completely off-the-beaten-path, since it does appear in the Lonely Planet. So other people have been there. But these places are some of those places where there is one guesthouse, no showers, and little English spoken. And no banana pancakes. But Guizhou is cheap, it is isolated and apparently really pretty, you can see many different peoples (Dong, Miao, Yao, Gejia, etc.) and their customs without a minority “theme park” feel, from what I’ve read. Pros: Beautiful, isolated scenery. A chance to see how life is like outside Chinese cities. A chance to see how non-Han Chinese people live. Cool buildings like this drum tower. That weird feeling of accomplishment you get when you go somewhere without flocks of tourists. Riding on a crowded bus on a rickety road with chickens in the aisle. Way cheaper than Hong Kong, cheaper than Lijiang and Kunming. Cons: Being cold. Not having a lot of conveniences that I have here in JY. The risk of eating dog meat. Farther away than Yunnan (though not as far as Hong Kong or Guangxi). Riding on crowded bus on a rickety road with chickens in the aisle.

4. Guangxi Province – Guilin and/or Yangshuo. Guangxi Province is really famous for these karst mountains that look kind of like something out of a dream or a kids’ picture book. The wonderful Lara visited Yangshuo with her sister Kristin and Kristin’s friend last year and thought it was one of her favorite parts of China. Guilin is more of where the Chinese tourists flock to, and Yangshuo is where the Western backpackers flock to. There are all sorts of backpacker cafes and hostels and souvenir shops. Apparently, they have a street called West Street, named for all the laowai that hang around there. But apparently, it’s easy to rent a bike and get out into the countryside to see the Li River, the beautiful mountains, villages, and the fields. Pros: Beautiful, different scenery. Chance to get out and ride a bicycle in the fields. Warmer than Sichuan (I think). Coffee, banana pancakes, and laid-back atmosphere. I could either hang out and do some thinking about China and life in general or rent a bike and see stuff. Cons: Coffee, banana pancakes, and (ai yo) all those other laowai, who tend to tick me off when they complain about stupid stuff like Chinese bathrooms. Pretty far away. People thinking they can gouge me because I’m in tourist country.

5. Guangxi Province – villages around Sanjiang or Longsheng. This is another not-quite-so-visited place. This is another village area, where you ride some sketchy buses but get to see rice terraced hilltops and a different way of life. Pros: Guangxi’s Zhuang people. Feeling like I’m actually in China, not Americanized China Disneyworld. Village life. The neat architecture, like this bridge. Cheap. Cons: Not so relaxing. Not so easy or convenient. Pretty far from Jiangyou. Not tremendously warm but warmer than Sichuan (I think).

I could probably combine a couple of these — Guizhou with Guangxi…or Guangxi with Hong Kong…or Guizhou with Hong Kong.

So, chums, what do you think? If you were me, where would you go? What would you do? Post a comment and let me know!

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.

I found this article online at a website called http://www.chinese-forums.com. I forget how I stumbled across that website, actually. It’s been a long night of looking at places to travel to during my Spring Festival break. Anyway, if anybody out there’s learning Chinese…or at least making a valiant effort…this might be inspiring/helpful.

I’ve actually done a couple of these things. My students laugh because I have an enormous amount of little white slips of paper with Chinese characters and pinyin on them in almost everything in my living room. I have two notebooks–one for characters and one for words. Alas, what I might not get through cleverness alone, maybe I’ll get a bit with persistence….

This article says: “According to a random survey I found on the Internet, people considered Chinese to be the hardest language in the world. ” I wonder if I’d have come to China if I’d known this. Probably. I’m stubborn.

As I tell myself often: “Man man lai.” “Take it easy.”

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When he was a kid, the great basketball player Magic Johnson used to wake up before dawn in the cold Michigan mornings to go out to the basketball courts to shovel snow. After shoveling, he’d play both before school and after. Charles Barkley, similarly, used to spend an hour a day jumping over a four-foot high fence. Over and back, over and back, until his legs were tremendously strong and he could out rebound anyone. Both of these guys later went on to become NBA legends. Of course, they both had natural talent and were born a bit on the tall side, to say the least. But more than that, their secret to success was “Conan the Barbarian”-like determination and a love for the game.

When studying Chinese, if you just want to travel around and simply just get by, I’d recommend buying a set of tapes and the Lonely Planet Phrasebook. My old Canadian drinkin’ buddy traveled all around China knowing less than 30 words, but he had the LP phrasebook. He’d point to something he wanted to say in English, and then the Chinese person could read the Chinese characters, and my friend got his meaning across.

But if you want more, if you want to have conversation, if you want to eventually read a bit or become fluent, then like Magic and Charles, you’ll have to put in a tremendous amounts of work and develop a love for the process itself.

According to a random survey I found on the Internet, people considered Chinese to be the hardest language in the world. There’s no doubt, it’s hard and will take a lot of work. So the most important thing to keep in mind is that you can learn it as long as you develop a passion for it. I’ll first go over some of the general principles and then get into some techniques for learning.

General Principles

1) Find the Joy in Learning Chinese. Like people who become great athletes or accomplished musicians, you will have to spend thousands or hours studying and practicing. Many people give up. I think you will only be able to get through the frustrating initial phase if you are able to find the joy in learning the Chinese. I can’t stress this enough. Other posters have mentioned that the long hours of studying became worth it once they could understand even just a bit a dialogue from a Chinese movie. For some, inspiration might come from being able to understand a taijiquan or kung-fu teacher in Chinese. For me, because I’m a political junkie, it was being able to understand some local Beijingers explain their views about the soon-to-be Iraq War II in 2003. You can always read a synopsis of public opinion of China in the New York Times or some other newspaper, but it’s another thing to hear about public opinion from a Chinese person in Chinese while eating grilled mantou and yangrou chuanrs (goat meat sticks). In other words, because studying Chinese takes so much time, if you are able to find enjoy the process of learning itself, then your odds of success will increase.

Personally, I think China will experience a political opening up sometime in the next 5-20 years. When this happens, I predict that 10 years later popular culture will flourish like never before. Movies, TV, pop music, the news media will go through a brilliant renaissance that will rival anything in China’s past. Surely I’ll want to be able to appreciate and understand Chinese culture when this happens.

2) Read about the language itself. Chinese is unlike any European language. You will have to think about the language in a different way. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to read about the language on www.zhongwen.com . Also, on this site there are many people who have generously contributed solid advice. Names like Quest, Roddy, Altair, Gato and others come to mind. Go through a lot of the old posts and look for knowledge about the language itself.

3) Wait for the “click”. “I’m an idiot” “I don’t get it”. You’ll probably say this to yourself many times when first starting to learn a language. Don’t worry. Everybody feels this way. At some point if you keep studying diligently you’ll probably experience a “click” in your mind. All of a sudden all the confusion will kind of go away and things will become crystal clear.

When studying Chinese, this phenomenon is even more dramatic. I sometimes think that learning Chinese is like riding one of those old, white, rickety, wooden rollercoasters. You get in the rollercoaster car, and then you start off very slowly. You go up and up, climbing at a very slow pace. Then you have a moment at the top when time seems to stand still. Then in ecstasy you fly downwards with exhilaration, going over small hills that seem like nothing compared to the tall initial ascent. In your first year you have to learn tones, pinyin, radicals, characters, word order, how characters compose words…etc. All of this is very difficult and very new. In Spanish, in contrast, in the first year lots of the vocabulary like patio, Universidad, gracias ,loco, yo quiero,…etc, is known to most Americans. The difficulties start in the second or third year when you have to memorize gigantic verb charts. With Chinese, it seems, many of the difficulties smack you right in your bruised face in Day One. But if you keep working hard and don’t give up, you’ll get over that original slow uphill journey and make it to the exhilaration of actually being able to communicate with real Chinese people or being able to understand a bit of popular Chinese media. After the first year, you’ll continue to have problems in learning Chinese. But like the rollercoaster, none of the problems later on will be as dramatic and nerve-racking as the first initial ascent.

Techniques

1) Listen to the basics of the language until it becomes automatic. When I first started, I listened to the pronunciations of the pinyin and tones a million times, in the car, at home, when I had insomnia. Listen to it as many times as it takes until you know how every possible pinyin pronunciation.

2) Find good starter’s materials. Some people have recommended Pimsleur (perhaps someone could recommend other starter’s material?) Be sure that the material focuses on listening and speaking. It would also be ideal if it focused on practical dialogues.

3) Learn the radicals. Almost 90% of characters are composed of a radical along with a pronunciation component. The radical tells you something about the meaning of the character (is it a metal?, does it refers to something you do with your hand?, does it refers to water?, does it refer to a dragon?…etc) The pronunciation part gives you a rough idea about how the word sounds. For example, look at the following characters and see if you can tell which part they have in common. 饱, 抱, 刨, 跑, 炮. Well, it’s the 包 part. As the pronunciation component 包 tells you that it is pronounced either “bao” or “pao”. You’ll notice that the initial consonant has sometimes changed, which is due to the long evolution of the spoken language. The non-包 parts in the above example are the radicals, which give you info as to what the character is about. The first one, for example, is 饱 (bao3, to be full) Thus, the common question, “你吃饱了, 没?” Are you full? In this case, the radical tells you that this “bao” refers to food.

In any case, there are a lot of radicals. You probably don’t need to memorize all of them at the start, but I’d memorize the 30 or 40 most important ones. Then on a Friday night, while your friends are all going out on the town to party and find some sweet ladies or handsome fellas, be a geek and sit at home and spend a few hours practicing looking up unknown characters in the dictionary by identifying the radical. After a few months of practice looking up unknown characters you’ll become good at knowing which part of a character is the radical and which part refers to pronunciation.

4) Visit free websites. Good ones are this website (of course!), http://www.zhongwen.com, http://www.china.org.cn/english/847.htm …etc.

5) Label things in your apartment. Before I came to China I labeled all the things in my apartment with the Chinese characters, pinyin and tones. So every time I went out the door, I could look at that object and see 门口 (men2kou3, door). I don’t think my roommate was all that happy about this though. This, by the way, can also be a conversation starter. Back when I was in Boulder, Colorado I met a Beijinger. I showed him my keys that I had labeled 钥匙 (yao4shi). He was quite shocked, but my keys worked as a good thing for striking up conversations.

6) Enroll in a class or find a teacher. Obviously, an experienced native speaker is an invaluable resource. Like others have said, it’s good to find a teacher that will honestly correct your pronunciation and give you encouragement.

7) Find good learning materials. I’m sure lots of people can suggest things. After two or three months I used “Rapid Literacy in Chinese”, which I highly recommend.

8 ) If you are in China, buy a small notebook to write down new stuff. When I first came to China, I brought my small notebook with me wherever I went. When I saw a new character or learned a new word, I’d write it down. One of my first meals in China was a bowl of hot soup, with vegetables, noodles and a ton of fiery spice. I asked the people what it was called. I mistakenly wrote down malatan, because that is how I heard it. Later I found out it was 麻辣汤 (ma2la4tang1). However, when people saw my book, they generally laughed their asses off, and pointed out all of my mistakes. In other words, my poorly written book served as a conversation piece and I had many Chinese people teaching me for free.

9) Buy music on DVD’s and CD’s. When I first arrived I went to the store to buy a bunch of CD’s, in order to try to find the Chinese Radiohead or Pink Floyd. However, I ended up buying VCD’s, which are kind of like poor quality DVDs. This turned out to be a wonderful blessing in disguise because I was able to listen to the lyrics of the songs while reading the characters. Anybody who has unfortunately heard the Macarena knows that music can easily get stuck in your head, whether you want it there or not. Chinese words from my Wang Fei’s VCD were stuck in my head, and because I saw the characters go by karaoke style dozens of times, I learned many characters fairly painlessly.

10) Make flash cards. On one side write the character, on the other the pinyin and English. Chinese words are usually comprised of two characters. For example, if you plan on not dying, you should probably learn the word 水 (shui3, water). The word “hand” is 手 (shou3). You can combine these to make 水手, “water hand” means “sailor”. So, in order not to forget水, learn it in another context. You’ll probably want to buy a bottle of water, which is 一瓶水. If you’ve learned a bit of Chinese history, you might have heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a wacky rebellion against the Qing Empire led by some David Koresh-types. Anyway, the “ping” of Taiping is 平, which roughly means “peace”, “fair” or “level”. When combined with 水, it becomes水平, or level (as in, “My Yiddish level sucks”).

The point is, for every new character I learned, I tried to memorize it in two different contexts. This increased my chances of remembering it. Also, learn the characters for the Chinese words you already know. For example, Beijing is the so-called “North Capital” 北京. 南京 Nanjing is the “South Capital”. Clearly, 京 means capital. Similarly, 北方 (Bei3fang1) means northern part, or northern part of China, while 南方 (nan2fang1) means southern part, or southern part of China. But you’d better learn 方 in at least one more context, so learn 地方 （di4fang1, place）, with 地 meaning “ground”.

11) Also, if you are in China, whenever you get in a taxi or go to the store, chit chat. Say 你好 (nihao, hello), but also say something else to show the person that you can speak Chinese. For example, I sometimes say something like, “今天的天气太热!” (Today’s weather is too hot!). Then you can go from there. You can practice your set phrase with your teacher until you can say it perfectly. This is important because most people assume that foreigners can’t speak Chinese, so they probably won’t start the conversation.

12) Listen for key words. When somebody speaks, maybe you’ll only understand 20%. Don’t worry. Listen for the key words. Then say, “你的意思是….” (So what you mean to say is…” In other words, rephrase what you think the person just said using words that you know. Then from the facial expression, you’ll be able to see if you did get it right or not.

13) Speak with fluency. “Fluent” is a concept that is hard to define, and a place that I may never reach. But what I call “speaking with fluency” is another thing that can even be done by beginners. Here’s a drill that you can do. Take some semi-complex words in English or whatever your native language is. Then use small and basic words to define it. For example:
Dictionary- if you don’t know a word, you can find it in this book
Extradition- when a bad guy from my country is in your country, and my country wants him back
Watermelon- it’s a big fruit (use your hands to demonstrate). It is sweet and red.
Bank- a house where people put their money.

So when you speak, you may not know the word or concept in Chinese, but you can probably think of some small words that can express the same thing. In this manner, you can have fairly meaningful conversations after only a few months of study.

14) Learn the phases that will help slow down the conversation. , “请,说慢一点” (Literally, “Please, speak slow one dot” or as far as it’s meaning “Couldjya speak a bit slower please?” Also, 请,再说一边 Literally, “Again speak one side” meaning “Could you please say it again.”

15) Da Shan, a famous Canadian guy that speaks perfect Chinese and insecure foreigners love to nitpick and criticize, has a useful learning Chinese show you can watch for free on CCTV-9. If you can, watch it.

16) Combine formal studying with extensive exposure to Chinese. In basketball, the best players are the people who have gone through formal training with coaches showing them how to pass properly, how to box out, how to shoot with the right arch, how to work as a team. But the best players also play a lot of hoops in their free time, play “horse”, play “21”, watch basketball on TV, cross train, and lift weights. This is comparable to studying Chinese, with the textbooks and classrooms comparable to formal coaching and playing in organized leagues. The playing on your own is comparable to chit chatting, watching TV and movies, listening to music and the radio, reading the paper, scanning the Chinese Internet, studying on your own, writing characters again and again.

17) Combine determination with a deep passion for learning. People loved to watch Magic Johnson play not only because he was good, but also because he was so creative, happy and passionate about basketball. People loved to see Stevie Ray Vaughan play guitar because he was inspirational. He used to play so hard and with so much passion that he would even tape his calluses back on after they had fallen off. It sounds a bit cheesy, but if you can find this sort of passion and enjoyment in learning Chinese, I have no doubts that you will improve and get something meaningful to your life out of it.

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Is it sad when you log on the computer, check your email, and ten minutes later are just too exhausted to write anything? Somehow, reading isn’t tiring, but lately writing seems like it takes about as much effort as lifting a car. Granted, it’s easier at Eunice’s house (where I am right now) on her new laptop, not on my computer, where I have to keep moving the mouse to keep it from freezing up.

Today, I stayed in my house. I had an American breakfast (chocolate milk, an orange, and cinnamon-sugar toast), a Chinese lunch (loose leaf green tea, dry spicy tofu, and rice), and an American dinner (scrambled eggs and some fried potatoes with Italian seasoning and Parmesan cheese that Eunice gave me).

Things I miss about the U.S.:
Friends, family, and a certain boyfriend
Long talks and movies with Josh at Parlett House or in Ashland, goofy/serious conversation and coffee with Rachel I. in the writing lab or Walldorf or East or wherever
Feeling a part of church…and having church in my own language, whether Menno Group or Huntington First
Speaking English whenever I want to
Giving hugs–not something that Chinese people do, really
Looking like everyone else and not being stared/laughed at
Not feeling like I’m being cheated whenever I buy anything
Pizza, good Italian pasta, cereal, Mom’s West Virginia cookin’, macaroni and cheese, cookies/brownies/other baked goods, big pieces of grilled chicken, broccoli (surprisingly, I haven’t seen any here at all), cheese (and I don’t even like it that much)
Heated rooms–I’m starting to wear my coat and my long underwear when I teach
A bunch of wonderful CDs that I somehow managed to leave at home and that my mom can’t find (The Normals, Patty Griffin, Nickel Creek, Caedmon’s Call, Norah Jones, Nichole Nordeman, and others–sad)
Having more than one English channel on the TV
Hanging out with people without it being some elaborate cross-cultural communication exercise
Being able to see movies like Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia when they come out (in a theater, not from a bootleg)
Whole grains
Drinking water from the tap
Spending Thanksgiving with family
…and last, but certainly not least…COFFEE. Lately, in a fit of desperation, having six bags of Starbucks ground coffee but no way to make it, Eunice soaked a washcloth in boiling water and then used it as a coffee filter. In another fit of desperation, I googled “Starbucks” and found out that there are not one but TWO Starbucks stores in Chengdu, about 2.5 hours away, where I have a few newly made friends. Can we say weekend trip?

Things I would miss if I wasn’t in China:
My students (well, most of them), their smiles, and their enthusiasm
Chinese food…fried rice, dry-fried green beans, tiger skin peppers (just green peppers fried in soy sauce and vinegar), fried noodles, dumpling soup, spicy noodles, spicy cabbage, turnip soup, tofu and vegetable soup, spinach, pea greens
Green tea, flower tea, and chrysanthemum tea
Sweet potato chips, chewy sweet potato strips, amazing sunflower seeds, little waffle bites (my name for them), little crunchy rice snacks, noodle pitas, slightly sweet popcorn, Chinese bread
Tang yuan, sticky rice flower balls with sweet insides
Eunice’s homemade bread and granola
Eating with chopsticks
Friday night movie nights–hearing the students gasp, ooh, and aahh over the funniest things
Watching students do Tibetan dances on the square
Seeing bamboo and palm trees
Getting to know my coworkers
Getting my hair dry-washed and straightened (only done this once, but I’ve gotta do it again)
The library in my apartment
Public transportation (I actually like this)
Riding on trains
Only having to change clothes a couple times a week
Learning and speaking Chinese when I have the chance
Traveling to cool places
Being a role model and a confidant
Laowai time with Eunice and Hugh and sometimes other CEEers
Feeling like I really do have to have faith, even just to go outside and go shopping or talk to someone
Teaching (though it vacillates, depending on the day)
Feeling a huge thrill whenever I get mail, whether from China or the U.S.
Appreciating simple things more
Listening to people play the erhu or the guzheng (instruments)
Looking forward to new experiences

So yes. The realism has set in, but I enjoy being here, I truly do. It’s becoming less like a thrill ride and more like home. And I like that.

A public service announcement:
If there’s anyone out there still reading this, don’t stop! I know that I’ve been delinquent at posting and that the past couple have been serious, but there’s more crazy junk coming. Right now, I have 10 hours a week (plus homework and character learning) of Chinese study, good conversations to be had in the evening, 12 hours of week of teaching/papers to read/lesson prep during the day, etc., plus trying to hopefully edit some pieces of writing for a writing contest, which may or may not get done. Oh, and trying not to lose all of my friends back in the U.S. because of lack of communication.

But the moral of the story is…hang in there. Soon to come, I have long-overdue entries on the celebrity-esque visit to a middle school, me almost falling off a cliff on a horse, me traveling by myself and making a friend in Chinese, what church is like in Jiangyou, my quasi-Thanksgiving near the Yangtze River, culture shock and things that suck, more about students and friends, karaoke with other teachers in Jiangyou, more pictures, and some amusing Chinglish.

And now off to read homework and study Chinese.

I remember pulling into the campus at Houghton for the first time with my mom, watching everyone moving in, and thinking, “Oh, crap.” I was so happy to be away from Marshall that I had all of these unrealistic expectations in my mind, like that I would meet tons of people, that the entire school would welcome me–the new transfer girl–with open arms, and that after a month, I would know everyone. We would stay up late eating ice cream and watching movies, and I would be fat and sleep-deprived but happy. (Okay, maybe there’s a little hyperbole there.) In any case, my expectations were really wrong, especially since I figured out very early that a lot of people already had their groups of friends, and the ones that were interested in getting to know me were relative introverts, and I thought they didn’t like me. So much for intuition.

But sometimes the intuition is correct. When I came to China, I thought that one of the things I would love most would be talking to students, getting to know them. For once, I was right.

After all these fairly long, semi-coherent blog entries, I’ve decided to write what I usually write best: some short fragments. These are students, the ones who talk to me in class or visit me in the evenings, who worry about me eating dinner alone, who constantly ask me if I like Chinese food or if I’m used to life in China or if people in the U.S. really own lots of cars. Some of them are my students, some of them are Hugh’s students, some of them are Eunice’s students, but they, more than anything else, are the reasons why I smile and laugh and love China. They are my life here.

* * * * *

Cathy is the first student to visit me in my apartment, the first or second week of class. She comes with her friend and classmate Ralley, as most of them always come, in pairs or threes or fours. Cathy is short with a round face, a perpetual ponytail, and bangs swept to the side, and although to my American eyes, she looks quite normal, she writes in her journal that she doesn’t have a good figure. The first thing Cathy tells me is that she’s sorry to bother me. The second thing is that her oral English is very poor. I’ve gotten used to these phrases, as every student who visits says them, but Cathy seems to have this look in her eyes when she apologizes, as if she’s wistful and joyful at once.

Cathy borrows Charlotte’s Web from the library in my house her first visit, and when I loan the book to her, I doubt that she will make it through. Many of my students freeze when they see a page of English. But on her third visit, she returns with Charlotte’s Web. “In my eyes, this is a very good book. I like this part,” she says, smiling and paging through the book to a picture of Fern feeding Wilbur the pig with a baby bottle. “I think it’s very sweet. And Charlotte is very clever.”

I am impressed and loan Cathy Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. She comes back in a week and a half, again pointing out her favorite passages—when the little boy Fudge cuts all of his hair off, when the older brother Pete gets mad at his mother and says that he can’t possibly be her son.

She visits once, sometimes twice a week, always with a new phrase that she’s prepared or a phrase in Chinese that she wants to teach me. Often she asks me questions about my life, my life in China, or the United States, and sometimes she mentions a bit of information about her family in a roundabout way. One day, she squints her eyes and tightens her mouth and says, “Some people are rich, and many people are very poor.” Then she pauses and says, “But I don’t want to speak bad about my country.”

A few weeks later, she tells me that she has a brother, which many of my students do. He may be a real brother, or he may be a cousin, I don’t know. “He is seventeen,” Cathy says. “He…he…” She has stumbled over a word. “He not at school.”

“He quit school?” I offer. “Left school?”

“Yes,” Cathy says. “He left school.” She tells me that there was not enough money for both of them. “So I have to study very hard.” I look at her with a sense of wonder, this girl who her parents chose to send to school instead of the boy.

I am not supposed to have favorites, especially not after six weeks, but I do, unintentionally, and I’m dishonest with myself if I say that I don’t. I make every effort to treat them the same, but Cathy makes me smile, with the phrases she looks up in her dictionary to practice on me (“So how have you been these days?” she asks one day with a satisfied look), her favorite phrase “in my eyes,” the little trinkets she brings to show me like the three laminated photographs of her hometown or her classmate’s ticket to the famous Grand Buddha carving in the city of Leshan.

“You are kind,” Cathy tells me one day, and I think that I have never heard a better compliment.

* * * * *

They are in every class, the students in the back, the silent ones. There are two groups of them: the ones with sullen faces and the ones that look simply lost, even when I say simple questions like, “How are you doing today?” I feel guilty sometimes when I look at the lost ones. Some of their names I know, some I don’t. As I look at their faces, I want to know their stories, but their English isn’t good enough to tell me. Maybe it will get better, but maybe it won’t. As for the sullen ones, they don’t want to tell me. They sit back with arms folded, slouched in their seats, sometimes text-messaging on their cell phones. But I feel a tinge of pain for the others, the ones that their middle school teachers and others left behind, because they obviously aren’t the students that will raise the test scores, that will make school and teachers alike “gain some face,” a factor that is always lingering under the surface here in China. I feel a tinge of pain at the feeling that I have that, no matter how much I slow down or try to be elementary, I will never know what they have to say. That, at least to me, they will always be silent.

* * * * *

I meet Future and Happy at Eunice’s house the first Friday in Jiangyou, the night when Eunice watches English movies with her students. In the room, there are about 15 or more of them crowded together, some of them sitting on plastic stools, all of them intently watching the subtitles of Sister Act 2, listening to Whoopi Goldberg, Lauryn Hill, and crew sing “O Happy Day.” The students, all girls, turn around and look at me as I come in the door. I smile crookedly, wave, and say hi, and they all smile. When there are six white people in a city, being one of them instantly makes you a center of attention.

After the movie is over, they all turn around and look at me while the intrepid ones, particularly a petite girl named Rona with a pretty smile, a soft voice, and chin-length hair, ask me the requisite questions: “How long have you been in China? Do you like Chinese food? Why did you come to Jiangyou?” Along with Rona, a girl whose English name is Future, who has deeper golden-brown skin than most Chinese girls, asks if she can visit me in my house, and I say yes.

I see Future again on a Sunday night. Actually, she sees me first, as I am walking into my building in the dark. “Christina!” I hear someone say. “We wait for you!”

As I turn around, I see two smiling girls in the dim yellow light of the street lamp. They carry gift-wrapped boxes. “Happy Teachers’ Day!” the girls say, putting the boxes into my hands. “Do you remember us?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” I tell them as we climb the steps to my apartment. In the light, I can see their faces—Happy’s round and pale, with a wide, crooked-teeth smile, and Future’s more slim and golden. I open my presents. They have given me a wind-up wooden Ferris Wheel music box with imitation Winnie-the-Poohs on it and a mug and saucer set with a strawberry and the word “FBAISE” unabashedly on the front. I find out later that the word isn’t as nonsensical as I think, that fraise is the French word for strawberry, but then, I just smile and say that I love the gifts. It isn’t a lie.

Future has come with a purpose: to ask me what a nun is, something that puzzled her from Sister Act. She has another purpose, presumably, to check out the new, big-eyed foreign teacher. I explain about nuns, how they choose not to get married because of religious reasons. “Oh, that is very terrible!” she exclaims. I explain that this is because they want to pay attention to God, to help the poor, and other things, but her forehead is still wrinkled after my explanation. I want to smile.

Over her weekly visits, I find out that Future is a four-year student, one that will eventually go to Sichuan Normal University and get a bachelor’s degree in education. That she is from Yibin, a town famous for its “wine” (actually liquor strong enough to sterilize medical instruments in) and its nearby bamboo forests. That her parents moved to Guangdong Province, where the booming city of Shenzhen is, to find work and that she hasn’t seen them in a year. “It’s so terrible,” she tells me, her eyes big and expressionate.

Everything for Future is “so wonderful” or “so terrible.” She strikes me as a very different sort of Chinese, from her dark skin, to her rounder eyes, to the way she speaks English, to the hyperbole she loves. She tells me stories about her military training last year when she was a new student: “We had to stand there…and we couldn’t move…even when it was raining or hot. We just stood there for hours. It was so terrible.”

She tells me about how she wishes she had done better on the college entrance exam and gotten into a better college. She tells me about a friend who is miserable at college in Chengdu and wants to quit. “What should I tell her to do?” she asks me. She stresses over the College English Test that she has to pass in December and asks me to teach her words for various things and offers to cook me vegetables one night.

She tells me that she’s twenty-one, and when she learns that I’m twenty-two, she smiles. “You’re like my sister!” she says. I smile and say yes.

Future visits me every week, sometimes twice a week, with her shining eyes and her big smile. One week, she complains that her classmates tell her that she’s too dark, which is a curse here. I laugh unintentionally, and then when she looks at me, I explain that girls in the United States spend hundreds of dollars to have dark skin. Then she laughs, too, and says that she can’t have light skin, no matter how many skin creams she uses. I tell her that she’s beautiful anyway.

Her eyes look brighter. “Let them talk,” she says.

“Let them talk,” I agree.

One day, after the other students leave, Future stays and, before I know what she’s doing, proceeds to sweep up the granola and fruit peels on the floor, straighten up my papers, and organize the stack of DVDs on my table. She asks me what I would do tomorrow, and I told her that I was thinking about going to Xi Shan park in Jiangyou. She shows the normal Chinese horror at the thought of someone going somewhere by herself and tells me that if I can’t find anyone, she’ll come with me.

“Are you sure?” I ask. “Are you busy? Do you need to study?”

“All week long I study,” she says. “Tomorrow I want to relaxation with you.”

* * * * *

During my Chinese tutoring sessions, my Chinese teacher, Mrs. Lai, often ropes some English-speaking students into translating things for me. One Thursday morning after class, she asks one of my students, Marina, to translate for me. Afterwards, Marina tells me, as an aside, “You speak Chinese very much.”

I am getting pretty good at deciphering Chinese English. I say thank you.

That night at home, my phone rings at 9:30. “Hello,” I say.

The voice on the other end is hesitant. “Hello? Christina?”

“Yes,” I say. “This is Christina.”

There is a pause. “Christina,” the voice says, “this is Marina, your student. From class four.”

“Oh, hi, Marina,” I tell her.

She pauses again. “Today, with Mrs. Lai, I translated for you,” she says slowly and methodically. “I said that you spoke Chinese very much, but I wanted to say that you spoke Chinese very well. I think this is a very bad mistake. I want to say I am sorry.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” I tell her, slightly startled at a five-minute phone call apologizing for one wrong word. “Thank you for calling, Marina.”

“It’s my pleasure. I’m sorry to trouble you,” she says. “Have a good night.”

And then she is gone.

* * * * *
I teach six different classes of oral English, some with as few as thirty-five students (an amazingly small class for China), some with over fifty. Two of these classes have little experience with oral English or English at all, but unlike some of the others, they are eager to learn. My first meeting with Class 4 is unexpected. One day, as I relax in my apartment, enjoying what I think is my free time, I get a phone call from the English office, saying that my class is waiting for me. I am not aware that I have a class, but I go to the building, apologize in very simple words to the students, and go on. Many of them have semi-blank looks on their faces, but they have wide smiles.

After class, three girls wait to talk to me. One of them, a relatively tall girl with a shy smile says, “I want you to give me an English name.”

I look confused and look at the card she’s holding out. It has an English name on it. “Do you want to see the paper with the English names on it?” I ask.

She laughs a little bit and looks at her friend, a wide-eyed girl with a ponytail who introduces herself as “Janey.” They whisper what sounds to me like gibberish but is what I’m starting to recognize as Chinese. “But I want you to give me one.”

I try to think. “Um,” I say, then I write down the name Alexandra. “This is the name of my good friend from college. My classmate.”

The girl in front of me pauses and smiles again. “How to say it,” she says, in what I figure out is a question. I help her. A-lex-an-dra.

The first week’s journal assignment is to write a half page about “yourself or your hometown.” When I read Alexandra’s journal, she has written three pages. “You said this name is the name of one of your good friends,” she writes. “I hope that I can be your good friend, too.” She writes that she admired students who could talk with the foreigners and that she was resolving to improve her oral English so that she could communicate with the foreign teachers.

At English Corner the second week, Alexandra, Janey, and 15 of their classmates come. After it is dark, we go inside to Hugh’s house. Most of the students there are my freshmen, the eager ones that smile and look confused. After a while of trying to make awkward small talk, Alexandra, Janey, and another girl named Marian look frustrated. “I…” Alexandra says. “I don’t know how to say.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, motioning to one of the juniors sitting beside us. “You can tell her, and she can tell me.”

I watch as the three of them suddenly become animated, talking quickly, motioning with their hands. “They say that they want to talk to you, but they don’t know how,” the junior says. “They don’t know what topic to talk about.”

The girls look embarrassed, and I tell them that it’s okay. I find a piece of paper and a pen and start writing English words on it. “Mountain,” I write. “River. Valley. Waterfall. Buildings. Hills.” I draw a picture beside each word.

“Tell me about where you live. Where are you from? What does your hometown look like?” I ask them.

They tell me the names of their towns, then give simple, halting descriptions. “There are rivers and trees and hills there.”

Alexandra’s and Janey’s oral English skills aren’t amazing. Their sentences still sound like they are directly translated from Chinese, not having English word order yet. But they try, persistently. They come to my house or to English Corner every week, practicing the little English they know. They borrow books and tapes and return them. They ask me questions and seem delighted at the answers.

One day, they ask me about my opinion of their oral English. I tell them that they are making a lot of progress, that they are getting better. “You are more brave every day,” I tell them. “You are less shy, and that’s wonderful.”

* * * * *

I assign journals in my oral English class, partly because I assign topics that we will later talk about in class, and I like for them to at least have some vocabulary to work with. But it’s partly for selfish reasons—I want to know their lives. One student writes in her journal about how she is only happy at night, how she feels alone among her classmates, how she is sad. Another writes, “Why is that the rich man get richer and the poor man get poorer. I am the later.” But most of them are positive, upbeat. Students write the proverbs they learn: “Where there is a will, there is a way.” “Study very hard, every day make progress.” “Practice makes perfect.”

All of them introduce their hometowns, and all the hometowns sound the same. In a way, I suppose they are, in the way that most small Chinese towns are the same—house after house, brick or cement or mud, depending on how rich or poor the family is. Fields. Roads. Trash. And people drinking tea and playing cards—the game they call “Landlord”—and sitting at the ma jiang (mah jong) tables. But they miss these towns, I can read it in their words. For some of them, coming to Jiangyou from their countryside towns is a shock to them, as much as coming to this city in China is a shock for me. When they ask me if I miss my home, I think that there is genuine emotion in their questions.

Precocious Wendy, who sometimes talks to me during breaks in class and who has become part of an advanced conversation group I’ve started, writes about herself in nearly perfect English. She is taking the self-study exam to get a real bachelor’s degree in English, which my other students will not have. She says she is not thin and beautiful, but she is smart. She wants to be a translator, not a teacher, so she has to concentrate on her studies. Her parents, she writes, are farmers. Whether she means them to be or not, some of her words are poetry: “I spend the money that comes from flood and sweat.”

“Welcome to my hometown,” some of the students write in their journals. “Welcome you to visit my hometown,” others write. It isn’t grammatical, but much of it is genuine.

* * * * *

I hear of Sharry before I meet her. “Do you have Sharry?” Eunice or one of her students (I forget which) asks me on the first week of class. I shrug my shoulders. “She should be in class two or three,” the person says.

“No, no Sharry in class two or three,” I say, and then I hear me about this girl, how her English is very good, how her aunt used to be an English teacher at Jiangyou Normal, how nearly their whole family are Christians now. I’m intrigued.

I finally meet Sharry in my Monday afternoon class, Class 4. She is inexplicably in a class with many students that speak little English at all, so we do pronunciation lessons and simple dialogues and questions about likes and dislikes. I learn Sharry’s name because she volunteers answers, because she stands out, in a quiet way, not in a know-it-all way.

At church one Sunday, a college-aged girl with a round face and pulled-back hair sits by Eunice and me. This in itself is unusual, since the Jiangyou church has few young people and definitely no young people that have Chinese-English bilingual Bibles. Before the service, she talks to Eunice and me in English. Afterwards, she tells Eunice that we should all eat lunch together, but Eunice and I end up eating lunch with some of the pastors from the church and a visiting professor from the Christian seminary in Chengdu.

The next day, during the break in my Monday afternoon class, a girl comes up to me. “Did Eunice translate the service for you yesterday?” she asks.

Finally, things click in my brain. “Oh, Sharry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I know who you are, but I didn’t recognize you yesterday.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, in typical Chinese fashion. “Maybe I can translate for you sometime.”

I smile. “Maybe you can.”

After the National Day holiday, Sharry visits me at my house, a plastic bag in her hand. “I brought you some preserved eggs,” she says, and then she stays and talks. I am nursing a cold at the time, and she leaves quickly.

“I will pray for you. God can heal your sickness,” she says, in a way that reminds me of Michelle, my resident director at Houghton, who would pray for our papers and our sniffles and our relationships with our boyfriends. “Have a sweet dream.”

Sharry visits me at my home occasionally, though she’s busy. Aside from studying for the self-study exam, she studies for the CET-6 (the College English Test), a test that is a level higher than even the sophomores usually take. She passed the sophomore-level English test when she was in senior school, also passed her proficiency exam in Japanese, and wants to learn Korean. She likes sports and chatting on the Internet. She paints. She prays for her friends. She reads a young adult English novel every week or so. And she stands out, not in a know-it-all way, not by dominating conversations like many of my students with good English do. She writes in her journal about not taking revenge on people but turning the other cheek.

She seems calm, yet I can tell by the way she looks that there are brilliant things going on under the surface. One day, I am talking with Sharry and some other students in a group. As I glance at Sharry, wearing knee socks and a black woolen jumper embroidered with pink stars at the bottom, it startles me—that at that moment, she looks like so many people I know. As she sits there, her cheeks tensed, eyes squinting, body slightly leaning forward, she reminds me of Rachel Ingraham or Sarah Richards or Josh or Kelsey Harro or the Huths or Mari Lamp or a score of other creative people that are struggling to reconcile things in the world, things in heaven, and things in themselves.

One day, I get an email from Sharry unexpectedly during the weekend, while she is visiting her aunt in the nearby city of Mianyang. She writes honestly, tells me about a problem in her life, and I’m amazed that she would be so honest with me, a foreigner that she’s known for two months. She ends her email by saying, “If you have some trouble, we can share happiness and sadness together.”

And I remember thinking that if there is hope for this crazy country, it’s in people like this girl.

* * * * *

Most of my students are two-year students, students who studied at the “vocational” high school at Jiangyou Normal and who will go to find jobs as teachers after two years. But I teach one class of four-year students, students who already have admission to Sichuan Normal University, a relatively big four-year university in Chengdu. These students

Some of them come to my house one night, and one of them, Minnie, asks me, point-blank, “Christina, are you lonely in China?”

I tell her that, yes, I am.

“I talked to my classmates, and we want to spend time with you around American Christmas. We can teach you to make some Chinese food,” Minnie says. “We all love and admire you very much.”

I try to imagine how this could be true, how students that I had taught a grand total of four lessons to could possibly feel this way, but the way Minnie says it, with her beaming face, she looks so guileless and honest that I can sense she’s telling the truth.

Another day, in class, a student gives me back my copy of Charlotte’s Web, quickly becoming a favorite book among the students here. “I repaired your book,” the girl says, pointing at the spine of the book that she’s carefully taped with white tape. “Thank you. I was mowed by it,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t hear you.”

She tries again. “I was very emotion.” She traces a line down the side of her cheek with her finger, and as she leaves, I realize what she was trying to say: “I was moved.”

Sometimes I am moved by them, at the ways their garbled words are unknowingly poignant, at the ways they are strong and resilient, at the ways they are still so innocent at 18 or 19 or 20, at the ways in which many of them are refreshingly uncynical. I am moved by how they take care of each other, how they get along remarkably well for post-adolescent young women, how they hold hands or link arms naturally as they walk.

In the streets of Zhong Ba, when I feel lost, when people are staring at me like I’m a different species, whispering about my big nose, or shouting “halloooo,” I forget why I’m here and want to catch the next plane back to the U.S. But then when I am back, walking around the campus, watching a volleyball match, in the classroom, or at my apartment, I remember. I am here for wo de xuesheng, my students. For wo de pengyou, my friends. And sometimes I wonder if I am here to love or to be taught to accept it from others.

The first question students ask me in conversations is, “Do you like China?” The second is, “How do you like Chinese food?” I tell them that I love it. And I do.

There are enough bad Chinese restaurants in the U.S. for Chinese food to warrant its own post, if nothing else than to dispel the myths. I live in Sichuan province (sometimes horribly transliterated as “Szechwan”), the land of thick accents and spicy food. Spicy food. The two cooking ingredients Sichuan people can’t live without are both hot peppers: lajiao and huajiao. People refer to Sichuan food (or Szechwan food, as you may have seen it horribly spelled) as ma la, ma referring to the literally lip- and tongue-numbing spice of the huajiao, and la referring to the blazingly hot spice of the lajiao. These spices are in everything, from green vegetables to meat. Toto, we’re definitely not in America eating General Tso’s Chicken anymore.

Ah, but it’s so much better. One thing that Sichuan people (and Chinese in general) do particularly well is green vegetables. In the U.S., we butcher green vegetables, boiling them until they turn yellowish-green and then smothering them in some sort of butter or cheese sauce. Here in China, they take xiao bai cai (literally, “small white vegetable”–green, leafy cabbage), sijidou (literally, “four season beans”–green beans), and cong xin cai (literally, “empty heart vegetable”–spinach) and stir fry them with lajiao and oil. Wonderful. I also enjoy eating turnips, pumpkin and other squash, white sweet potatoes, bean sprouts, and other vegetables I never thought I’d like that much.

It’s a good thing I like the food, both because eating is kind of important in China and because basically, there’s no Western food to be had (other than the KFC, the Taiwan chain called Dicos that’s basically a KFC knockoff, and the “pizza” place, all of which are downtown, all of which are fairly expensive for here, and all of which I haven’t eaten at). Around mealtimes, instead of saying hello to your friends and acquaintances, you say, “Ni chi fan le ma?” (“Have you eaten?”) However, I can count the number of overweight people I’ve seen thus far on one hand, proving that if you don’t eat lots of sugar and French fries and you get lots of physical exercise, you won’t get fat even if you eat food that’s bathed in oil. Which the Chinese, at least in Jiangyou, definitely do.

Chi fan, the phrase that refers to eating, literally means “eating rice,” and rice is obviously the staple of Chinese food. Up north, in Beijing and thereabouts, they eat a lot of jiaozi, these dumpling-like things with meat and vegetables inside, and lots of noodles, but here in good ole Sichuan, it’s rice. I usually eat rice two meals a day, unless I do hun dun (wonton) soup, miantiao (pulled noodles), or jiaozi for dinner. The rice is stickier here, nice clumps that you pick up with your chopsticks and shovel into your mouth. Touching your mouth to the bowl is completely okay. Rice bowls are multipurpose, too–if you’re eating with friends, you will rarely all order separate dishes. You order a few dishes and share them, putting the dishes in the center of the table, picking out what you want piece by piece from the dishes, and putting some in your rice bowl on the way to your mouth. So everyone’s spit is in the communal bowl, but what the heck. It’s not great for hygiene, but it is good for variety and camraderie and all that good stuff.

The Chinese eat a ton of meat, too. For some reason, I wasn’t expecting this. I was expecting a nation of budding vegetarians, for some reason, not people who get half their calories from pork. Pork is the most common meat here, and the word for it, rou, just means “meat”. Chicken (ji rou or “chicken meat”) and beef (niu rou or “cow meat”) are also common, and occasionally you get something like lamb or fish. In the faculty and staff cafeteria where I eat, we have something called hui guo rou, which people translate as “twice-cooked pork,” every day–numbing peppers, spicy peppers, green peppers, and the fattiest pork I have ever seen in my life. It makes West Virginia bacon look like Weight Watchers cuisine. It’s pretty common to tear the meat off the fat with your teeth and discard the fat. Also, since a lot of times, the meat is chopped into small pieces with an enormous cleaver, there are still big pieces of bone, which you eat around and then drop (or spit) on the table. Good times.

Another thing I was a bit surprised about: the death of table manners! Along with the not-so-graceful-rice-to-mouth-shovel that I’m working on perfecting, people also feel free to drop food on the table, spit out bones on the floor or the table, drink from their bowls, slurp, blow their noses at the table, wipe their faces (because they’re sweating from all the spice), and occasionally do the classic hock-and-spit. I don’t mind it at all. I’ve always been chastised for my bad table manners, so (yay!) finally I don’t have to worry about it. It’s lovely.

Chopsticks are also quite fun to use. One of the few things from American Chinese restaurants that actually are Chinese. Some authentically Chinese foods: wonton soup, sweet and sour pork (but different), chao fan (fried rice), stir-fried vegetables…but there the recognizable foods end. When was the last time you had stir-fried spinach at a Chinese restaurant? Fried wontons don’t exist, and I haven’t even seen an egg roll. The deep fried meat smothered in sugar sauce just isn’t done here. It’s all spice, spice, spice in stir-frys. Or thick noodles. Or little hot-as-fire shish kebab skewers of chicken, pork, potato, pepper, green beans, small bird eggs, lotus root, doufu (tofu), and other things called shao kao (Sichuan barbeque).

Or huo guo, another Sichuan specialty, which they translate as “hotpot.” Hotpot is cool in the way going to Japanese steakhouses in the U.S. are cool–you get to see the food cooking at your table. There’s a little gas burner at every table where the waiters or waitresses put a large pot with broth. You can choose the real hotpot, with tons of lajiao, or the hotpot for wimps, which is not as spicy and has dried dates floating in it. The broth heats until it’s boiling, and then you (or the waitress, if she thinks that you, as an incompetent laowai, don’t know how to do it right) put in the meat and vegetables and let them cook. What do you put in hotpot? Anything. Chicken, pork, lamb, fish, potato, noodles, lettuce, carrot, lotus root…yes, even dog, I’ve heard. (Side note: Eunice has eaten dog and says it’s not actually that bad. Hmmm.) After the food’s sufficiently cooked, you take it out and swish it around in your little bowl (where, of course, you have more spices) and eat. Hotpot broth makes a good soup, too, with some spices added.

And then there are the specialty foods, the “wonderful” banquet foods that you are expected to try because they are delicacies. Somehow, at banquets or big meals that I think of as pseudo-banquets, sandwiched between 10-20 or so plates of absolutely amazing food, there are the one or two weird things that you would never touch of your own accord. However, these foods are delicacies, and you are the foreigner that they want to give the very best to, so of course, someone physically puts it on your plate. Or subtly (ahem) suggests, “You should try the pig ear.” Or the shark fin. Or the intestine. Or the bladder. Or the strange solidified animal blood (don’t know how they do it). Or the cow’s foot. All of which I have eaten, all of which were disgusting, none of which I have thrown up because of.

But for every time I had to eat something disgusting, I’ve had twenty chances to eat amazing food like gan bian sijidou (dry-fried, spicy green beans), yuxiang qiezi (fish-flavored, breaded, fried eggplant), spicy spareribs, hotpot, tang yuan (sticky rice-flour balls with sweet fillings in a soup), hu pi qing jiao (“tiger skin peppers”–stir-fried green peppers), and so on. Also, good snacks like sunflower seeds, peanuts, and sweet breads, which the Chinese do amazingly well. (The other day, a lady on the street was making small sweet bread bites on what looked to me like a waffle iron.) And light meals like pulled noodles, wonton soup, fried rice, jiaozi, shao kao, “across-the-bridge” noodle soup (with meat, veggies, and broth) from Yunnan Province, little flatbread pitas filled with spicy noodles and sprouts, a popcorn stand with sweet popcorn, and so on. There’s enough street food that I could try something new every day, and it would still take me a while to go through it all. And more keeps appearing, from large skewers of fresh pineapple to baked sweet potatoes that you buy and eat on the street.

So I’m eating well. Still losing weight, I think, because my sugar intake has gone way down, but eating marvelously well. Drinking lots of lu cha (loose-leaf green tea) and ju hua cha (chrysanthemum tea–my new favorite) for less than 50 American cents a cup. Eating lots of fresh fruit I buy–a pound for about 15 cents American.

This is the life.

It’s odd how I, a lover of people, sometimes feel scared of them here. I rely on people so much, for my energy, inspiration, and laughter. But somehow it feels threatening and fascinating all at once: hundreds of people chatting in a language I don’t know much of, in a dialect that would be hard to understand even if I spoke good Mandarin, good putonghua. Mandarin Chinese already has an astonishing number of what I (and the Lonely Planet) would call homophones, distinguished only by a different tone or sometimes only a different character.

Here, they call the dialect Sichuanhua, the language of Sichuan, where the “zh” sound becomes “z,” the “ch” sound becomes “c,” the “n” sometimes becomes an “l,” and the second tone or third tone (I can’t remember which) becomes the quick, falling fourth tone. I’ve heard someone say that Sichuan people often sound angry even when they’re not at all because of the sharp fourth tone and the way they speak furiously fast.

Or maybe it just seems furiously fast. During my first weekend in Jiangyou, I had dinner with Eunice and two of her friends and former students, whose English names are Janet and Anna. Janet is apparently very intelligent, at the top of her class, and recently got a job teaching in nearby Mianyang because she could teach an entire language in English. Anna is extremely bright, too, Eunice tells me, with very good English. We sat at the table after dinner, as Janet tried to eat her muffin with chopsticks (kuaizi). Eunice, Janet, and Anna switched back and forth between Chinese and English, almost like it was a secret language, sometimes saying three English words, then two Chinese words, then three English words again.

Anna wears blue-tinged glasses and has a longer, more angular face than many Chinese. She was recently baptized in the Christian church and has been a Christian for about six months. That night at dinner, she was talking about the creation account, an interpretation that ranged from the orthodox to the quirky and weird–like how ever since the Fall, women have never been able to resist eating. This, according to laughing Anna, was why pregnant women eat so much and eat so much junk food.

Halfway through her explanation, I stopped trying to pick out words that I know, as I normally do when listening to people speak Chinese. I just watched her, saw how her dark eyes flashed, listened to her foreign speech, observed her lips moving faster than I think I’ve ever seen lips move before. As Eunice and Janet nodded, I couldn’t help but think how odd and amazing language is: that a people can choose a set of sounds and somehow, over time, build up a system that conveys such complex meanings. Arbitrary and conventional (with an obligatory nod to Mr. Saussure). I’ve never given much thought to how much of a uniting or dividing factor language is. The simplest tasks suddenly seem daunting.

It’s a nice place to be, very good for my humility and for my spirit. I thank God for helping me buy apples, helping me pay the check at a restaurant, helping me ask the price at the internet bar, helping me have a short conversation in Chinese with some students who don’t speak much English, all of which I’ve done in the past weeks. There have been bad moments–one Chinese class I was put into, where the teacher spoke impossibly quick and then fired questions at me, which made me upset, so I sat there crying and, even better, trying to disguise the fact that I was crying. But then there have been little triumphs–when I successfully tell the yogurt man that I don’t want to buy yogurt; I want to get the refund for bringing my bottles back. Or when I ask someone’s name, order at a restaurant, pay for something, make some small talk, or tell a waitress that the food is delicious. Even when, at Jiuzhaigou, the national park, I make a friend and hang around with her for two days, using only very poor Chinese. (More later.)

But there are hilarious moments, too, usually seeing the English that’s on signs (even official-looking signs) and products for sale. The other day, I was at the supermarket looking for a towel. I am now the proud owner of one that has the phrase “INNOCENT CATS IN BOSTON” written on it, complete with a little semicoherent poem, two or three marching soldiers, a green and tan Union Jack, and, of course, the two innocent cats. The students here call the funny, sometimes nonsensical English “Chinglish.” I get a kick out of it, while at the same time realizing that the Chinese on signs in English-speaking countries is probably equally hilarious and awful.

It all reminds me of the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis, the story way back in chapter 11, even before Abraham sets off for the Promised Land, far back where history and myth and religion and our collective unconscious, if there is such a thing, all seem to intermingle. “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech,” the verses read. The people have an idea and say to each other, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

In the beginning, the Scripture says, God created the heavens and the earth, saying, “Come, let us,” just as the people at Babel say. Their language is the same. And language is powerful–God knows this. He scatters them throughout the earth, and the place is called Babel–“because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.”

It is humbling to be deaf and mute and illiterate in a different language, I think as I sit at my ancient computer, with Chinese characters labeling all the buttons and programs, with students in the dormitory behind my building laughing and shrieking and babbling in Chinese. Sometimes I feel like, with my pronunciation exercises and dialogues and role plays and English corners, that I’m helping to build the tower of Babel again. But I am not in Hong Kong, not in Shanghai, not in Beijing, not even in Chengdu. I am in Jiangyou, a town with only six foreigners and little English spoken. God scattered the people at Babel. And he scatters us still.