Christina in China

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.

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