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.

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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! ... [Continue reading this entry]