David's Big Adventure in China

This time I am going to write mostly about how schools here work. From elementary school through college, kids are put in a class and that group of students does most everything together. My students are all freshmen and when they arrived here they were assigned a class number from 1 to 12 (there are 12 classes of 40 freshmen each). They are assigned to classes in a manner to ensure that the average college entrance exam test scores are about the same for each class and that each class has some students with high scores and some students with low scores. I teach Writing to classes 3 and 4 and I teach Listening & Speaking to class 3 so class 3 is my primary class. Another teacher teaches Reading to both class 3 and 4 and teaches Listening & Speaking to class 4. The students have almost all their classes together as a group and they also form sports teams from their class for intramural competition. Doing almost everything together facilitates them forming a strong bond that will last a lifetime and reinforces the group culture here. I know people here in their 40’s who still often get together with their high school and college classmates. These former classmates become part of their guanxi (network of contacts) that acts as an “old boys network” would in the west.

I learn a lot from reading my students journals that are part of their Writing class. One thing I learned about is a meeting that the class held to assess the previous semester. Some of the group felt that they were not unified enough as a class so they talked at length about how to become more unified. Shortly after the meeting there was a basketball game between my class and another class (1st and 3rd quarters were played by the girls and the 2nd and 4th quarters were played by the boys). Most of the class members who were not playing attended the game (as I did) to cheer on their classmates. They were playing a team that had more talent but because of their strong efforts, they were leading near the end of the game. The other team made a strong effort to tie the game and we went into overtime. During overtime, the kids in my class just ran out of gas and were overpowered and lost. Even though we lost, the entire class felt proud and unified because they had really pulled together and fought hard.

The school requires the kids to do some “society practice” such as spending some time teaching at an elementary school or something similar. Some of the kids went to a school for the blind to do some teaching. China is not handicapped friendly as very few places are handicapped accessible. It was nice to learn that there are some special schools for the handicapped. The kids are also required to do some work on campus such as lawn work. They don’t really have typical lawn care tools that would make the work easy so they make up for it by using a lot of manpower (the students). They do get some college credit for this work “class”.

A few weeks ago I saw the students having some sort of meeting outside one of the buildings. When I asked them what was it about I was told that it was a meeting to recruit them to join “the party”. I was told that most of them signed up to join. Being part of the party will help them down the road with their career and will also increase their guanxi (network). Many of them will probably not stick with it long term as most people I know are not active members of the party. The ones that join will be required to attend a lot of meetings to learn about the party and keep up with new developments in the party.

The last thing I will write about is the anniversary of the earthquake in Sichuan Province that occurred on May 12, 2008. There were over 85,000 people killed and millions that were made homeless. I don’t know how many are still living in temporary shelter but I know that they are building like crazy to try and get them in homes. I read about one town where 50% of the population of 10,000 were killed. Some of the worst hit towns have been fenced and made off-limits and they are building a new town nearby. Here is a link to reports provided by NPR (National Public Radio). NPR reporters happened to be in Sichuan last year when the quake occurred and they returned to report 1 year later. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90430135

Well it’s been 2 years since I left my job and began this little adventure of mine. I arrived in China on May 10, 2007, and it’s been quite a ride. I’m still having fun but working harder than I care too. If not for the economic crisis wiping out more than 40% of my net worth I’d probably find an easier job even if it didn’t really pay enough to support me. Originally I thought I’d do this for 4 or 5 years then fully retire but now it looks like I’ll need to keep going a bit longer. Because of the economic crisis it seems there are more people coming here looking for jobs which creates a more competitive job market for the foreign teachers. My school recently fired a teacher due to student complaints and I heard that the Dean made the comment that it’s easy to find new teachers now because of the economic crisis. My student evaluation scores were good so hopefully I won’t have any problems.

A while back we had the Tomb Sweeping holiday and May 1 was the Labor Day holiday. One of the customs for the Tomb Sweeping holiday (like Memorial Day) is that people go to their ancestors’ graves, clean them off and leave food for the ancestors to eat. After leaving the food at the tomb for a short time, they take it back with them and eat it.

I’ve seen on tv recently talk about intellectual property rights and they have shown local authorities destroying hundreds of illegal copies of dvd’s, etc. Of course you can still buy whatever you want. At the small dvd stall next to the fruit juice stall where I often buy watermelon juice, I saw MS Office software for sale. I asked the lady how much and she told me 8 yuan which is about $1.20 U.S. Amazing! One thing I forgot to mention about buying my toaster oven at Wal-mart is that it’s common practice that anytime you buy something electrical here that they take it out of the box, plug it in and turn it on to show you that it really works. Obviously, the Chinese don’t have a lot of confidence in the quality of their own products. My last shopping story is about my visit to an upscale shopping plaza here. I went into the BMW store (goods with the BMW car company logo) and looked at the prices on a couple things. The polo shirts were priced at more than $175 U.S. I was shocked since not many people in the U.S. would pay that much for a polo shirt no matter what logo it has on it. There were no customers in the store so they probably don’t sell much and what they do sell is probably to people who buy it just so they can brag about how expensive it was.

I saw an interesting demo on the street a couple weeks ago by a guy that was apparently selling some sort of miracle powder. He was putting wooden skewers straight through the head of a live chicken. After putting about 5 of them through he then took them out, poured some powder into the holes in the chickens head, then folded the head under the body and put the chicken in a basket which he covered. Then he ate some of the powder. After talking for a few minutes he began to pull the chicken out of the basket but teased us a few times before he actually pulled out. After he pulled it out, he hit the chicken on the head a few times before it started walking around. I didn’t stay to see if anyone purchased any of his miracle powder.

A recent lesson was about food and the chapter in the book had a page talking about strange foods eaten in different places around the world. I asked my students what was the strangest thing they had eaten. One of the students told me that she had eaten human placenta. They make a soup out with it and consider it to be like medicine to make you stronger. You can only get it if you know someone at the hospital that can obtain it for you. I was told by a friend that it was common years ago when you had a baby to ask them to give you the placenta from your own birth. I’ve been pretty brave about trying the different foods here but I’m not sure if I could try this one. I did a quick Internet search and found that there were references to eating this on the net.

I have one last comment on the topic of babies. I may have mentioned this before but I was reminded of it recently when talking to a couple of the ladies that work in the office that are pregnant. It is illegal here for a doctor to tell parents the sex of their baby before birth. This is because of the one child policy and the strong preference for sons. Well that’s enough for now.