Christina in China

Due to laziness, I’ve forgotten to post about several important things (i.e. my weeklong SALT orientation in Akron, PA), so I’m going to introduce something fun called a “retro post.” A post from the past, if you will.

So, SALT orientation. In case you don’t remember, SALT is one of the groups that I’m working with for my time in China. SALT stands for “Serving and Learning Together” and is a program focusing on language study, host family living, and service stuff. There are 18-20something people going to the Caribbean, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, and before we went, we all spent a very good week in the teeny, slightly-bigger-than-Houghton-sized town called Akron, PA, where MCC’s headquarters is.

MCC has a little village called the “Welcoming Place” there: little houses with dorm-style rooms, except way cooler. The “village” has four houses: Africa House, Asia House, Latin America House, and Europe/Middle East House. (I didn’t take pictures, but I’ll be there for the re-entry retreat next year, so I’ll take some there.) Each house is decorated with Ten Thousand Villages crafts made in each different region, so there were neat tapestries on the walls, carving, books of pictures from each region, clothes hung up on the walls, etc. I was entranced. I have a new silly dream, folks, in addition to my other silly dreams: Writing a book, visiting all seven continents (three down, four to go!), learning to bake, living abroad long-term (check!). There are others that I can’t remember, but oh well. Anyway. My new silly dream is, when I eventually have a little house or a little apartment, to have different rooms decorated in crafts from different countries, preferably that I bought myself in my visits to said countries. But yes. SALT orientation.

I’ve been impressed with MCC throughout the entire process but was more impressed with MCC during my time there. The first few days, I felt a bit out-of-it but gradually got to know the others there a little bit. It was cool to sit around a dinner table and stand around and drink tea with people who love God, who are compassionate and aware about international issues, who are very intelligent and interesting, and yet fun to be around.

The orientation was very good–run by a lady named Eva, who is over the SALT Program, and is very good at it, being a native of the former Czechoslovakia and having moved to the U.S. over ten years ago. She was very candid, talking about being in a new place where, when you open your mouth, everyone knows you’re not a native. Feeling frustrated and angry with people in a different culture. Going from being a well-educated college professor in her home country to going to the U.S. and working menial jobs. Plus, she is very funny, dryly funny, and had some really good insights about life abroad and getting over your rich-American-guilt-trip complex. A favorite quote, paraphrased: “We can empower others by allowing them to give to us.” Every day, we went to the conference room and had worship led by SALTers (which was also wonderful–a mix of favorite Menno Group songs, favorite Houghton worship songs, and favorite First Church songs–also with good prayers and meditations) and then had sessions about cross-cultural adjustment/communication, spirituality, sessions about MCC, personality types (I’m an Extrovert Intuitive Feeling Perceiving), and, surprisingly, some really moving ones about racism awareness.

We got to see the place where they store the relief kits and donated things (Menno Groupers: I saw where our school kits go), see the offices, and visit the gigundo Ten Thousand Villages Store, where they have everything from necklaces to furniture. And the SALTers had dinner at the Tea Room there, with good international food and tea and Mexican chocolate cake. Some of the tables were close to the floor so that we could sit on pillows, something I’d always wanted to do.

So now I have people I know that are all over the world: Shalom, an applied linguistics major and Victoria, BC, native, in Cambodia teaching English; Trisha, an engineering major from Toronto in Hong Kong doing computer work for a company that connects human rights groups; Patrick, a nurse from Ontario, in Bangladesh; Judy, a history major who’s doing editing work in Vietnam; Emily, who’s in Zambia living in a village and teaching English to pastors. Pretty neat thing, and I’ll see them again in a year, when we have many more stories to tell.

On the last day, the president of MCC talked to us, and then Emily, Nelson, Judy, and I led worship. We had a corporate confession of sin, sang songs (“How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” a Taize chorus from the Iona Community, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”), said the Prayer of St. Francis, and were led in a meditation exercise from The Celebration of Discipline. And then we sang the doxology, all of us, a capella: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Amen.

This morning, I read this article (one of the headline articles on Yahoo, which automatically pops up on my computer) about the growing gap between rich and poor in China. I would recommend giving it a read; I think it’s a pretty well-written article.

This is something I’ve been able to observe here, even in my short time so far. In Beijing and Chengdu, I saw technology and relative wealth to rival that of the U.S., but last weekend, on a trip to Nanchong, a city a few hours away, I saw the other side of this. Farmers’ houses, some even made of mud and mud-bricks, which Eunice told me was a sign of the poorest farmers. CCTV9, the English channel, features shows on travel, art, culture, and other things that tell about a growing number of rich elite in this country, but even just a thirty-minute walk away from campus brings me in contact with manual laborers (“workers”), women and men digging through trash to get the recyclable paper or plastic bottles in order to get some money from turning them in, farmers who definitely don’t buy designer shoes or hand-tailored silk clothes or BMWs.

A couple Sundays ago, a lady at the Jiangyou church was talking to Eunice. She was a social worker from Beijing and was talking about her recent trip to Gansu Province, north of Sichuan, sandwiched in-between Sichuan, Qinghai (which borders on Tibet), and Inner Mongolia. The farmers in Gansu, the social worker said, were the poorest in China, and she said that she was afraid that if something didn’t happen soon, there might be an uprising.

There are definitely big differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” between businesspeople who send their kids to private schools and the less affluent, some of whom can’t even pay the fees to send their kids to primary school (elementary school). Thoughts to ponder. And definitely to pray about.

I had a week after I arrived in Jiangyou to settle in a little before I started teaching. I had to go to Chengdu (about three hours drive) for a medical exam in order to get my visa changed to a one-year visa. There’s a medical clinic that seems to exist for the purpose of making sure that foreigners entering China for over a month aren’t plagued with diseases and that Chinese that are traveling around aren’t plagued with diseases, either. I saw three other laowai there, which is more than I’d seen in one day since I’d come to Jiangyou. It was a sight to see. The medical clinic is a very strange thing. I went with Wendy (Miss Xiong) from our department, who translated things and got me water and cookies and was generally wonderful, a school driver, an official who had to go to Chengdu on business, and one of the foreign students from Thailand.

Basically, I walked from station to station, carrying a paper and having people abruptly perform various medical tasks on me. First stop: having blood drawn. They do an HIV/AIDS test and who-knows-what else on the blood. I was actually pleasantly surprised that they stuck me so quickly. No one can ever find a vein on my arm. Next stop: downstairs to have an ultrasound for some reason. The woman said, “Shirt up,” and proceeded to lift my shirt before smearing this cold wet stuff on my stomach, running some device over it, and scribbling on my paper. Then, I went to station three, where a doctor actually did an EKG on me. He was a little more descriptive: “Shirt up, bra off.” Then he stuck all these little suction cup-type things all over me. Stop 4: chest x-ray. Stop 5 (final stop) was where a man looked at my eyes, ears, and tested my smelling capabilities. Apparently, they aren’t too hot, since I misidentified alcohol as vinegar. And there we were. It was strange, no doubt, but not that bad, and Wendy and I talked about her family in Chongqing, Chinese weddings, kids playing computer games, and various other interesting things.

I started teaching a few days later and basically had little idea what to expect. CEE has a teaching curriculum, of which I’m using Book One. The book starts out with introductions and greetings and goes to various things you do and say when making friends. It teaches you to carry on a conversation in English, which is a pretty neat approach, in my opinion. The first lesson is (predictably) teacher introduction, student introductions to each other (“My name is…,” “I am from…”), class rules, filling out the ever-handy index cards, and the name game with the students’ new English names.

The students seem to get a kick out of my introduction. I tend to overexaggerate gestures to act out the words I’m saying, make goofy faces, etc. They’re all astonished at how tall my brother Paul is, that my mom is a nurse and a teacher, various things like that. Just inmy few weeks teaching, I can tell why they say China is a group-oriented culture. When I ask a question, the entire class choruses a “yes” in unison. If I ask questions to individuals, they confer with five or six of the nearest people to them before answering (although a lot of this is because they don’t understand me or the question). It’s very group-driven and yet very competitive, which plays itself out in a lot of blatant cheating. I haven’t decided how I’m going to deal with that yet. I haven’t really, since most of the things I do are in-class exercises that I just check for completion.

The hugest challenge is the varying levels of the students. In one class, I have a student who is reading Charlotte’s Web and visits my apartment to chat in English, a student who writes well and wants to be an interpreter (and who, incidentally, answers every question I ask in class…my just desserts for being a know-it-all student for years), but many more who can’t understand simple questions like, “How are you doing today?” or “What is your name?” I feel like I’m boring them and going way over their heads, often both during the same class.

CEE has a teaching curriculum, complete with already-formulated lesson plans, which I’m using and adapting a little, along with using their listening book. The CEE curriculum focuses on developing basic conversational skills in English: introductions, telling about yourself and your family, asking questions, etc. So my students are learning how to use English to make friends and carry on a conversation, which is pretty cool to me. So far, we’ve learned a “jazz” chant, which helps them with intonation, pronunciation, and rhythm, done introductions, learned about formal and informal greetings, worked on the difficult “th” sound, done some dialogues, and a listening exercise. I talk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and use small words, which is hilarious after last year, of reading literary criticism and scholarly stuff. I feel like a refugee from academia, and I’m enjoying it.

I do like teaching, even though some people are already skipping class (which I take note of and mark them down for) and even though it’s very difficult to teach freshmen who only know a little English. But I’m definitely enjoying myself. My students (mostly all girls) have beautiful smiles, and some of them are so excited to talk to me, see pictures from home, and come to my apartment to practice their English. They like to point out their hometowns on a map and talk about the things there, and they like to teach me Chinese words. Teachers are honored here in China; a couple weeks ago, there was a holiday called Teachers’ Day, where students give teachers cards, gifts, and other little trinkets. I got a jewelry box from one of my classes, a mug that says “FBAISE” (not a word in either English or Chinese, to my knowledge) with a picture of a strawberry, and a little wind-up music box thing that has Winnie the Pooh carvings that spin around on some sort of a Ferris Wheel. Never a dull moment.

I’ve had a ton of help from Wendy and from Miss Xiao, another teacher in the department. I am in awe of Miss Xiao, in a completely different way that I’m in awe of Wendy. She is friendly but more quiet, tall and beautiful, with long hair, and she has over twenty years of experience in education. She first worked at a high school for several years and so knows a lot about English teaching. I’m impressed with the calm and graceful way she carries herself, the way she tells about things she knows while also asking me about the best way to phrase something in English, the way she is willing to help and genuinely cares about her students and their progress.

“This is a strange thing we’re doing,” Hugh remarked one day, about how we foreign teachers were here in China, teaching and navigating our way through daily life and the educational system. I have to agree with him. It’s a fun thing but a very strange thing, nonetheless.

Before I go further, I guess I should write a little about this crazy place I’m living. I may have blogged before about this, but the word that epitomizes my China experience so far is “contrast.” Jiangyou fits the bill there, too. Like I mentioned before, downtown Jiangyou is called Zhong Ba. It’s like any other city–big by West Virginia or western New York standards but small by China standards. There are big billboards and ritzy department stores, places selling bootleg DVDs and computers, places with shoes or jewelry or clothes or anything you want. We even have a KFC, but we aren’t big enough for a McDonald’s. I can’t say I’m sad. And, as you may suspect, there are restaurants everywhere–from fancy restaurants with cloth napkins to hole-in-the-wall joints (where I eat), where you order whatever you want, grab a pair of chopsticks, and eat, spitting the bones on the floor or on the table.

There are people everywhere here. China is the most populous country in the world, and Sichuan is the most densely populated province in China. And with people, there is traffic. All kinds of traffic. On a Jiangyou street, there are green official taxis, some private cars, city buses, public buses (like a Greyhound, except a minibus), motorcycles, motorcycle cart-type things, bicycle cart-type things (like a rickshaw?), bikes, gray skinny minivans that will take you back and forth from campus for 1 yuan each way, farmers toting baskets with vegetables or fruit or grains on their backs or on a cart, people walking, people, people people. There are clear traffic lights and traffic patterns. Technically. But a double-yellow line means nothing if the coast is clear…or if the coast isn’t clear, but you think you can make it while still missing the other person by at least six inches. There are two main rules: 1) Every person for him/herself, and 2) The biggest vehicle has the right of way. Sichuan drivers also like to honk; I think it’s a way of confirming their own existence or something, kind of like how Samuel Beckett characters talk all the time or how Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” A new phrase to paint on the side of taxis: “I honk, therefore I am.” I haven’t yet seen a car with a seatbelt. So you hold on to the handle, say your prayers, and enjoy the ride, basically.

I enjoy just walking down the street, seeing the women carrying babies (with a conveniently-placed slit in the bottom of their pants so that the babies can do their business at will), watching men and women carting dirt and gravel, looking at the people near campus that sell fruits and vegetables or that roll wontons (called hun dun), seeing them putting rice or corn out to dry on a bamboo “tarp” they put on the sidewalk and spreading it with a rake, seeing people selling shao kao–Sichuan barbecue, which is shish kebabs of meat, green beans, green onions, peppers, lotus root (crunchy and quite good), and what looks like some kind of potato. It’s certainly different here.

I like the bustle of things, but it’s also nice just to relax a bit, drink some tea and relax by the canal downtown, despite the fact that people always walk by, wanting to shine your shoes for 1 kuai (slang for 1 yuan, kind of like how “buck” is slang for “dollar”), give you a massage, sell you peanuts or orange, clean your ears (yes, this is true–they carry around these strange metal rods), etc. Chrysanthemum tea is becoming a favorite. People drink a lot of green tea here–loose leaf, strong green tea in a clear glass, without any sugar. But chrysanthemum is my favorite, with (obviously) chrysanthemum flowers floating in the glass, along with red dates and other flowers. It’s quite beautiful and has a good, mild flavor. It’s about 3 or 4 kuai for a bottomless glass, which is nice and relaxing to drink under an umbrella while reading or writing.

The other day, I sought out some more (relative) peace and quiet. The school is outside town, near the fields. I went on a walk away from the school and turned left on a random road, then walked down that road for about forty-five minutes. It was a dusty, dirt-and-concrete road that snakes around beside the rice fields. It’s a very soothing sound, the sound of the rice swishing in the wind–a mix between the rustling of trees and the swaying of grass. A good sound to listen to. The farmers were out harvesting the rice, which they do by putting the long-grasslike blades into stalks and drying them until they look like something Americans put on their porches at Halloween or Thanksgiving. When the stalks are dry (I think–I’m obviously no expert), they take the stalks and smack them against a large basket. To get the rice free, I think. Then they eventually gather these into larger bundles and burn everything, as they dry the rice and the corn on every bit of spare concrete in town.

Not to say that this road was particularly quiet. There were still occasional vans and motorbikes, construction workers building, children laughing, the sounds of life. It was odd, though, how different it seemed on that road than on the main road going to the school. Everyone looked at me, of course, as I was probably the only foreigner to travel that way in a while, to look at the brick or concrete farmers’ houses, to walk out near the baijiu (hard liquor) factory, to watch a man forming clay roof tiles and pots by hand. I almost felt bad about looking at them, even though they were blatantly staring at me. I said “nimen hao” to the children that were amused at seeing me, and one little girl smiled and waved back, her eyes crinkling and hand flapping over on itself in a clumsy motion.

I almost felt like I was invading, intruding on the place where they lived and worked and raised their families, in a way that I rarely feel like I’m intruding on campus, with its students that come and go. Sometimes I’m far from excited to see the way people live here. It’s not pristine, with trash thrown in the river, vehicle exhaust spewing out of cars, smokestacks from the nearby coal-burning power plant pouring smoke into the air. I was almost sad to the farmers doing the harvesting with a machine, and then I realized that who am I to say that people should harvest all their rice by hand, straining their muscles to whack the thick stalks and loosen the rice? It’s stupid to think that people should do everything by hand, for the sake of being “quaint.” People have a right to machines and motorbikes and things that in many ways will make lives that are harder than I can imagine a little easier. And yet it’s upsetting to see some of the environmental devastation here, with trash thrown in creeks and the smokestacks belching out pollutants. Not to say that the Chinese aren’t taking good steps, offering money for recycling paper, plastic, glass, and other things. In many ways, the recycling programs are better here than in the U.S. But modernization, what some call “progress,” is both a curse and a blessing.

In Chinese, jiang means “river,” and you means “oil.” So the name of my town, essentially, is “river oil.” Contrary to what I believed at one point, there is a river, the Fujiang, running through town. The “oil,” according to Eunice, is natural gas, which Jiangyou is supposed to have a fair amount of. I think of rivers as natural, of oil as a pollutant, something unnatural, foreign, and that is what Jiangyou seems to me. On a clear morning, I can look out the third floor of Building 9 and see the blue mountains in the distance, an outline that’s jagged and beautiful against the gray sky, that makes me want to hop a bus and go to them, where the air is clearer and I can see them up close. Usually, though, it’s smoke from the smokestacks and from the steam engine trains that I see. It clouds the mountains and the sky until I can’t see anything but smog and dust, few blue skies, few stars. But in a way, when I do see blue skies, they’re all the more beautiful.

My first few days in Jiangyou felt very full and very strange–but a good kind of strange. The kind of little-kid excitement that I normally have, except up another level.

My apartment is not bad–in fact, sometimes I forget that I’m here, thinking that it’s very much the same as an apartment in the U.S. Everything that I need is here–semifunctional computer, good air conditioning, a bed, a sort of grubby shower that has lots of hot water most of the time. I even have some good bug spray, which is useful to kill some of my inch-long creepy-crawly roach “friends” that kept visiting me. I sprayed one night, and the next morning, thirteen of them had crawled out to die.

The first day I was here, Eunice showed me around the campus. There are 9 or 10 main class buildings, plus a couple student dormitories and teacher apartments, an office building (called “the library”), outdoor student cafeterias, and a nice auditorium and square where there are performances and such. The campus is very nice, actually. Nothing plush, but there are some pretty flowers and shade trees. It’s a good break from all the concrete that seems to quickly be taking over China. I sat in on one of Eunice’s sophomore conversation classes, which was an excellent glimpse of teaching for me and helped me feel more at home. We went to the office, got my desk, and met some other teachers.

I must say that I have tremendous admiration for Chinese teachers. Some of them teach up to 25 or 26 50-minute class periods a week, and these are classes with somewhere between 35 (for a small class) to 55 students. Many of them teach intensive English reading or composition classes, where they have to read huge stacks of papers. They have hundreds of students, and none of them have a private office, just a big departmental office of about 30 or so teachers and teachers’ assistants (called “head teachers”), where each one has a desk. They’re required to be in the office every period when they’re not teaching, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. In other words, they work hard.

I was prepared for no contact in English with my coworkers, but I was pleasantly surprised. I ate lunch my first day (and, well, all the subsequent weekdays) in the teachers’ cafeteria, affectionately referred to as the “push-in-line buffet.” The three foreign teachers (Eunice, Hugh, and I) eat at a table with Miss Li and Miss Xiong, whose English names are Sicily and Wendy. Both of them speak very good English, and so does Miss Xiao, another teacher in the department, who teaches Intensive Reading, Composition, and English Teaching Methodology (whew). Wendy is amazingly fluent: she teaches oral English and acts as translator for Hugh and me a lot of the time, and she’s used to dealing with foreign teachers. So she’s a huge help. She’s also very warm, very funny, and very accomodating, always saying that it’s a pleasure to help. She’s small and petite, with a ponytail and glasses and a huge smile. According to Eunice, she and her husband, who is an engineer and has traveled to the U.S. on business, are about the cutest couple ever.

The evening of my first day, Hugh, the other foreign teacher, took me out to eat, and we took a little mini-tour of the area near the school. Now I should introduce Hugh, who will definitely be a recurring character in my blog. Hugh is 51, my mom’s age, which I remind him of. He’s tall and has thick curly black hair with gray streaks in it, and when he’s thinking, his eyes get huge as he tries to think about how to say something to a student. When I asked him what he did before coming to China, he said that his main occupation was “academic spouse” and that he worked various odd jobs and had been a lit grad student at the University of Washington before he decided that he wanted to read actual literature, not just theory, and decided not to be a grad student anymore. And then when being an academic spouse didn’t work out, he “ran off and joined the Peace Corps.” He was in nearby Mianyang for nine months before being evacuated because of SARS, and when he came back, he got a job here, at Jiangyou Normal School, and has been here for about two years, I think. Oh, and Hugh’s Chinese name is Jin Hu (translated from Hugh Jenkins), which means “golden tiger.” He always has his students over to his apartment, and he ends up watching teenybopper movies like Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. He says that the first time he came to China, he brought textbooks about linguistics and the history of the English language, and now he’s wised up and brings twenty fashion and hair magazines from the U.S. Hugh is funny, this kind of dry sense of humor that reminds me of my brother Paul or someone like Allen Barry or Carl Gay from high school.

Anyway. Hugh and I walked around the school, then across the railroad tracks and to the part of town near the market, one of the places where you can catch a bus to Zhong Ba, which is what people call downtown Jiangyou. I don’t know what it means. Zhong means “center,” so Zhong Ba probably means “center” something.

I go to bed early here. I usually go to bed between 10:30 and midnight, but sometimes I fall asleep at 8:30 or 9:00 pm, with the construction workers still working on the new dormitory behind my building, with the sounds of students walking and chatting outside my window, in another language that I can barely understand, and it’s all so new and yet oddly soothing.

Four days and a bit less jet lag later, I got to board a plane from Beijing to Chengdu, the closest airport city to Jiangyou. This was my first experience with intra-China air travel, and it mostly went smoothly. Somehow I ended up with two bags and a carryon (what was allowed on my international flight), but the allowance for domestic flights is apparently less…40 whole kilograms less, so needless to say, I had oversize baggage charges. Kathi graciously helped me through the line, and I found my gate, only to discover that that gate was not the gate for Chengdu. In fact, I couldn’t see any gates that said Chengdu on them. This was 7:45, and my plane was set to leave at 8:00.

At about 7:53, I got up the nerve to talk to the man who was holding a ticket that looked like mine. “Ni qu Chengdu ma?” I asked. (“Are you going to Chengdu?”) “Yes,” he said back in English. “Your Chinese is very good.”

I will digress here. The Chinese are the most gracious people in the world to praise foreigners’ Chinese, no matter how awful it is. They are also the most modest people in the world, saying that their English is poor, despite the fact that their English is ten times better than my Chinese. End of digression.

The man, I learned, grew up in Jiangyou but was working in nearby Mianyang. He was carrying boxes of fruit, it looked like, and was trying to offer me a ride from Chengdu to Mianyang, where I could catch a bus to Jiangyou. Somehow, I couldn’t manage to make it clear that I had a ride. At 8:05, the word “CHENGDU” came up on one of the airport marquees. The nice man and I walked to the line and were told that this was the wrong Chengdu flight. At 8:07, another Chengdu flight appeared. We went through the gate and were shuttled via minibus to the plane. I think I actually got on the plane at about 8:20, and we took off at maybe 8:30 or so.

And thus begins my experience of being the only white girl in sight. The word for foreigner is laowai, which literally means “old foreigner.” Here I was, a laowai on a flight with maybe 200 Chinese, eating breakfast, which consisted of fruit, bread, and vegetables. During the flight, I watched the inflight movie, which basically looked like a Chinese tourism video, and read my Chinese book, trying to learn emergency phrases. One time in the flight, I got up the nerve to ask my neighbor, “Qing wen, ji dian zhong?” (“May I ask what time it is?”) He pointed at his watch.

It was a very odd experience, to say the least, to be sitting in a sea of voices speaking in a language I barely know. Occasionally, someone would say something funny, and everyone would laugh. I started to think that all these people were geniuses to be able to speak this language. For the uninitiated, Mandarin Chinese (putonghua) has four tones: the high tone, the rising tone, the rising and falling tone, and the falling tone. And if that wasn’t enough, of course, the Chinese use characters, which always make me think that you have to have a Ph.D. to read a newspaper. This is, of course, not true. It’s an amazing thing, though, language–how we can rattle off words without a thought, and these series of sounds, of stops, of voiced and unvoiced sounds, vowels and consonants and intonation, can carry almost any meaning that you want them to. On the plane to Chengdu, the fact that we can communicate with our vocal cords and our lips seemed like a miracle to me.

When we landed, Eunice was standing at the gate, waving. I had met Eunice once before, in Akron, PA, where I was doing MCC orientation. Eunice used to be a nurse in Lancaster, PA, before coming to China and staying for four years. She speaks good Chinese, sings, cooks, plays basketball, entertains student visitors practically every night of the week, and is basically a legend around here. But I digress again. Eunice, Dean Zhao (the dean of the foreign language department), and a driver were here to pick me up. Eunice was the only one who spoke English, so she was relegated to the job of being go-between/translator, which she didn’t seem to mind. We ate a big meal–fish and vegetables and lots of Sichuan spice. Sichuan cuisine is famous for being super-spicy. They grow a pepper here that they call lajiao and a pepper that they call huajiao. They’re by far the hottest peppers I’ve ever tasted. You don’t eat them, but they make everything you eat hot, so hot that your eyes water and your lips start to tingle and lose feeling. You eat rice to counteract the spiciness. I was still not good with my chopsticks, so Dean Zhao got me a fork, much to my sadness. But the food was wonderful: something that’s called xiao bai cai (a leafy green vegetable that literally means “little cabbages” but isn’t much like cabbages), soft doufu (tofu) and peanut soup, fish, some other meat. And then we did a little of the favorite Sichuan pastime of playing cards and drinking green tea during the after lunch nap hour, kind of a Chinese siesta. I forget the word.

During the three-hour car ride to Jiangyou, I talked to Eunice about the school, the students, things here in general. And I stared out the window, looking at the houses, at the farmers working in the rice fields, at the billboards, at the expressway. Such a contrast, to be driving on a modern road that would rival any interstate highway but beside brick houses with baked clay tile roofs, with farmers drying the rice for harvest a few hundred yards away from the expressway.

They had no host family yet, Eunice informed me. They were looking for a good family, a family that spoke pretty good putonghua. I could go ahead and stay in a teacher’s apartment at the school until they did, which was fine. The little apartment I’m living in has the CEE library in Jiangyou: three bookcases full of books about China, and Christian books, and classic & literary fiction, and young adult/kids books. Oh, there’s also a bedroom and a bathroom and a shower, but that’s less important. 🙂

So it was a long day, a strange day, but a good one. A day that finished with noodles at a noodle shop right outside the school gate, good noodles in a spicy soup, noodles that I watched the man pull and slice right beside our table.

It’s nice to be in home sweet home, even at a home I’ve never been to before.

Sorry that it’s been so long between posts, readers and friends. For the dates on these entries, I’m putting the dates they happened, not when I’m typing them. So be informed…

In the last episode, you may remember that I was in London, after an all-night flight and before another all-night flight. Well, after some fish & chips, buying some Typhoo tea, and meandering back to the airport, I sat in the airport for a few more hours and then boarded my flight to Beijing. All the plane staff spoke English, of course, since it was British Air, but it was my first experience (but far from the last) of being a spectacle. On the Boeing 777 plane with probably close to 300-400 passengers, I think there were maybe thirty-five non-Chinese on the plane. We did have good movies, though, and I had some good conversation with a Filipina girl from Oslo, Norway, about traveling and culture and how it was impossible to find good basketball shoes in Oslo.

My first impression of China: “Wait, is that the sky?” They weren’t lying; the sky in Beijing actually looks like a mix between cloud and smog. One of my bags was lost, but a nice woman in the airport helped me get a form filled out, and I got through customs without a hitch. Customs always makes me nervous, but I was hassled way less here than I’m hassled in either British, Canadian, or American customs.

At the airport, Kathi Suderman, one of the heads of CEE (China Educational Exchange), met me there and hosted me in her home for my couple days in Beijing, being “oriented,” sleeping off some jet lag, and seeing a few Beijing sights. I have to say that I was in awe of Kathi. She’s petite and tall and blonde, with laugh lines around her eyes, and she wears lots of streamlined black outfits and speaks fluent, musical-sounding Chinese. She somehow coordinates everyone’s travel, cooks meals, buys plane tickets, packs lunches and helps her kids with homework, does CEE stuff, and navigates the insane streets of Beijing, all without seeming frazzled at all.

My entire time in Beijing felt like a dream, as cliche as that sounds. There are people everywhere, all kinds of people: migrant workers building apartment buildings, taxi drivers, people selling fruit and vegetables and liquid yogurt on the street and in the market, people on bicycles and motorcycles and bicycle-cart things, women and men carrying produce in baskets on their backs, women carrying babies (and holding the babies out to *ahem* relieve themselves in the street), modern businesspeople and students and workers and migrant farmers. A sea of people. And a sea of traffic, with buses and bikes and motorcycles and motorcycle carts and these rickshaw-type things and private cars. The main rules of traffic: 1. don’t get run over, and 2. the biggest vehicle has the right of way.

I got to do ordinary things like going to the supermarket and not-so-ordinary things like going to the regular market, which has basically everything–fish and eels swimming around in tanks, just-killed chickens, live chickens that can be killed for you, sides of meat (with flies buzzing around–better cook these well), all kinds of fruits and vegetables, including some that are native to Thailand and other southeastern Asian countries and imported here. With the help of Kathi’s friend Hong Tao, I got to do some sightseeing, too. He took me to see the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, which was built for the emperors back in the 17th or 18th century, I do believe, and sacked and ruined during by Anglo-French forces during the Opium Wars. A sad history–I can imagine how beautiful these buildings were (even the ruins were beautiful). It was a good introduction to China’s complicated relationship with countries in the West. And the “New” Summer Palace, which is still intact, with gorgeous pagodas and authentic Chinese architecture. It made me want to squeal for joy–at last, the inspiration behind all of those tacky Chinese restaurant buildings! I have lots of pictures, I may add, which I hope to post soon, when I can upload them onto Eunice’s computer.

And, of course…the food is amazing. In Beijing, I had hotpot, a Sichuan specialty, where there is a pot of boiling, spicy broth, in which you dip raw chicken, tofu, spinach, noodles, sprouts, potatoes, and other things, and they cook instantly. We also had jiaozi–called “dumplings” but more like Chinese pirogies, thin wraps with meat and vegetables inside, which you dip in a soy sauce/vinegar mixture.

There’s much more of Beijing I would like to see, and I hope to get back before I leave China. Maybe when someone comes to visit and/or I have a break, I can get back to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, and all those cool things.

Learn about Jiangyou, teaching, walking along the rice fields, fun with speaking and listening to Chinese, the complexities of buying yogurt, the excitement of Chinese traffic patterns, why I hear “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” multiple times in a day, and more…in your next installment of Christina in China. 🙂

I’ve been between worlds for a few days now. Orientation at MCC headquarters was wonderful, peaceful in every sense of the word, and a nice combination of restful and energizing. I’ll write more later because…

…I’m in London! Wandering around in Houndslow borough for a few hours before I have to be back to catch my flight to Beijing. I will update more then, from my country directors’ house. British Airways is treating me quite nicely, though. I’m off to go have a Lilt soda and a jacket potato with tuna, which both sound very nice right now, and browse in the WH Smith since I can’t find a Blackwell’s.

Cheers, all.

This is one thing I’ve learned: I never feel ready for big events. I never have had this level of serenity and perfect mental and emotional readiness before I start something new and fairly extreme. I just kind of jump in, and life and God kind of carry me along until I’m adjusted to the new pace.

Everyone keeps asking if I’m nervous or excited. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, least I hope not. The more stories I hear about evening conversations with students, their eagerness to learn in conversation classes despite frustration with the educational system, the way mountains in the south of China seem to jut up irregularly from the rivers and lakes, and (call me shallow) Chinese food, I’m excited about going. But I’m still nervous, the type of nervousness I get before piano recitals or public speeches or roller coasters, except it’s lasted a week and a half.

I know a fair amount of introductory Mandarin (shopping, traveling, talking about family, making appointments, etc.). I’ve been reading and have crash courses on Chinese history and culture. I’ve worked on a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course. My friends, family, and church congregation have helped me raise a little over $4000. I have textbooks and dictionaries, a Lonely Planet guide and memoirs about China, a journal from Maryellen and my trusty backpack.

About a month and a half ago, I said to Josh, “I have to stand up in a room full of fifty students and teach them English. I can’t do this.” Josh was sitting on my living room couch, eating what I’m sure was either Raisin Bran or an enormous bowl of ice cream, and he looked up at me and evenly said, “Don’t you think you should have thought of this before?” Then he went back to eating whatever was in the bowl. It was classic.

A little bit about my excursion: I’ll be in Akron, Pennsylvania, for a week at Mennonite Central Committee headquarters with about 60 other people who are going to various placements in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. (I actually had never given the Mennonites any thought at all until I started researching different service organizations last summer. Oddly enough, I ended up going to a Mennonite group at college during my last year.) After that, I fly from Philadelphia to London and from London to Beijing, where I’m going to have some time to get over jet lag, sightsee a bit, and have an orientation to China with a couple named Rod and Kathi Suderman, who are country directors for China Educational Exchange, the program I’m serving with.

After all this travel, I will end up in Jiangyou, a “village” of 120,000 people, in Sichuan province in southwestern China, teaching at Jiangyou Normal School, taking classes in Mandarin, and living with a Chinese host family. I’ll be teaching English conversation classes to English majors who will be secondary school teachers in rural provinces after they graduate. (Side note: According to Josh’s friend Anna, who lived in China, the word “jiangyou” means “soy sauce” in Mandarin. Interesting….)

I know that everyone hates to get mass emails, so I’ll be updating this blog occasionally with stories and pictures. (Prepare for stories about amusing and ridiculous language faux pas and all that.) You can post comments in the comments box, so feel free to stop in and say hi!