Archives for October 2008
Feliz Halloween
I have consistently gone trick-or-treating over the years, even though I’m well past the “appropriate” age, because I believe that, as long as you wear a costume, you are entitled to free candy. Of course, not everyone sees it that way, so I have to blend in with my nephews and play off the fact that, hey, I’m taking these kids out trick-or-treating! Give me something, too!
Sadly, trick-or-treating didn’t happen this year… for obvious reasons. Man, I already miss that huge sack of candy you nurse for several weeks until it gets down to nothing but suckers that you eventually throw away. Halloween in China just doesn’t have the same presence it does in America. The stores here do sell Halloween masks and decorations, but they’re relegated to a small shelf instead of being strewn all over the place. And who are they for, anyway? I only saw one witch hat outside of the World English school.
Oh. Right. World English threw a Halloween party. I didn’t have a lot to work with when it came to costumes, but I did manage to make a Mexican getup out of a newspaper, a bedsheet, and a black plastic folder. The following picture could jeopardize the reputation of my entire blog, but it’s Halloween. Scary pictures are meant to be circulated:
Mother Scolds Horse
A great way to study Chinese is to browse the children’s section of the bookstore. It’s my own, little library where I can keep the books I check out! (Let’s not point out the fact that I could just go to the real library, okay? I’m just happy I know where the bookstore is.) One book had several rhymes and tongue twisers to help with pronunciation. My favorite was about a mother who scolds a horse, because it’s too slow. This is a great example of the importance of tones in Chinese:
妈妈 骂 马
Mother scolds horse
You could also tack on the neutral tone of “ma” and make it a question! Isn’t Chinese great? Actually, I find tones to be the least of my worries. There are only four tones, after all, and mastering them is simply a matter of breaking old habits. But once you’ve done that, you’re given a false sense of security when you start talking to friends online. To type Chinese, you write the pinyin, then select the character you want from a list. Your expectation is to see only four or five characters after you type “zai,” but nooooooo. There are 25.
This is the real trouble with Chinese. The same “word” can mean too many different things! In the fourth tone, “zai” can mean “at” (Wo zai jia; I’m at home) or “again” (Ni keyi zai shuo nage ma; Can you say that again) or even denote present tense (Wo zai yong jiandao; I’m using scissors). And that’s just what I know. It’s not a big deal for people who are used to Chinese, of course, but for those of us just learning, it can get confusing to hear “zai” and think, “Whoa, wait a minute. I thought that meant ‘again.’ How does that apply here?”
The Zoos of China
Chinese zoos are interesting experiences that can just as easily leave you with a positive impression of animals as they can destroy your faith in human decency. In 2005, I had gone to a zoo in Suzhou where the animals lived in small, dirty cages, and the patrons found sport in throwing food and garbage at them. Amongst the mess, it was startling to see two white wolves holding hands paws through the bars that separated them, like they were trying to comfort each other as the humans danced and whooped like morons.
Yesterday, I went to the Yancheng Zoo in Changzhou, not really sure what to expect. I mean, Chinese zoos don’t have to be sick and depressing. In fact, they can be kind of fun, because the animals are so close to you. You can pet a giraffe and look a white tiger in the eye with only a pane of glass separating you. You can even hang your arm into the lion cubs’ play area, and they’d chew it off if they weren’t so interested in wrestling with each other.
Unfortunately, people take advantage of this closer proximity by throwing food at the animals and banging on the walls. And the zookeepers don’t do anything about it. While it never reached the cynicism of Suzhou’s zoo, watching a grown man hurl rocks at an alligator is still infuriating. But I don’t want this to sound like Chinese people are inherently rude to animals. Not everyone was being a jackass. I’m sure if American zoos weren’t so stringent, there would be plenty of rock-throwing at those alligators, too. Wherever you go, you’ll run into people who secretly enjoy animal cruelty. It’s just that in China, it isn’t much of a secret.
Then I walked past, and everyone forgot all about trying to feed the monkeys junk food. Even the monkeys were surprised to see me. The presence of a foreigner at the zoo was just as much of a spectacle as the animals themselves. It’s a shame I wasn’t wearing an information card that described my origins, though if it came to that, I should probably start expecting people to also poke me with sticks and feed me popcorn and whistle, “Hello, laowai. Hello, hello, hello!” Oh, wait, they already do that.
Everyone Poops, Even in China
The book Everyone Poops has circulated through my family as a gag gift for years, so I was justifiably drawn to this Chinese children’s book about the very same thing: the wonders of going potty. They had several books that cartooned bodily functions, including one that explains where tears, sweat, blood, and boogers come from and another book all about breasts. But, um… that one was just a little too unsettling to buy.
A mighty fine poop.
Facing to Facing
It’s strange that Chinese culture is supposedly so adamant about “keeping face,” and yet people are quick to point out the flaws of others and embarrass them. Foreigners are always being told, “You are too fat,” or, “You have a big nose.” This comes as a shock to us, having grown up in a place where you don’t say those kinds of things to new acquaintances! You could argue that China is simply a more open society (and it is; it’s not taboo to ask a person’s age, either), but that doesn’t mean Chinese people enjoy being called fat any more than we do.
I have a friend who isn’t fat at all, but she’s not as thin as the typical Chinese woman, so her friends and peers often tell her she needs to eat less. She says she hates this kind of advice. What really gets me, though, is how my students, whenever I bring up the word “fat” in a lesson, all point at the biggest kid in the room, as if to say, “See, Teacher? He’s fat! We know what fat means! We are so clever!” But the victimized student starts flailing his arms in defense. He doesn’t like being called fat, either.
This reminds me of when my World students said cutting in line was bad manners but then admitted that they do it, too. I have to sigh, because it only perpetuates the problem, though I don’t know if this has anything to do with gaining face at the expense of others or if it’s just the byproduct of the unfortunate mindset that, “What goes around comes around… and I’m going to make sure it comes around.”
No Respect for Foreign Teachers in China
The jump between Grade 3 and Grade 4 isn’t enormous, but you still run the risk of falling into the crevasse and dying if you didn’t stretch properly beforehand. Grade 4’s vocabulary is definitely stronger, so it’s easier to teach them my weekly useful phrases without a lot of the kids whining, “Shenme yisi…” But I’ve noticed Grade 3 is better behaved as long as a Chinese teacher is present. Fourth graders are restless and chatty no matter how you cut it, but third graders at least have enough sense to not act up in front of those who can chew them out in their own tongue.
Unfortunately, the Chinese teachers have been skipping class an awful lot lately. And this leaves me with the daunting task of classroom management, something which is never easy no matter what part of the world you’re in. There’s the obvious language barrier to contend with, but the real problem is that Chinese kids have little respect towards foreign teachers. They’ve been trained at an early age to treat foreigners as a huge spectacle. Outside of class, then, they are always clawing at me and waving their hands in my face and heckling me, and inside of class, they simply laugh at and mock any attempts I make to discipline them.
I would love to initiate a positive reinforcement program, but I haven’t yet figured out what I can do for a class of 50 students I only see once a week. Besides, it’s more rewarding to punish a noisy team by moving its game piece back a space and seeing the kids freak out. Another thing I’ve started doing is making the class stand and sing “Hello, How Are You” when they won’t settle down. They find it funny at first, but it soon grows old. In one class, we spent most of our 40 minutes together singing. The following week, we didn’t have to sing once! But there are other classes that just never get it. I feel bad for them, because they’re falling behind. At least their singing is improving.
The biggest annoyance, though, is that the students continue to call me Laowai when they could, at the very least, call me Laoshi (Teacher). I finally confronted one class about this, saying, “My name is Mr. Nielsen. My name is not Laowai, and it is not Waiguoren.” Ugh. Saying things like that just makes it worse. I still believe “laowai” isn’t necessarily an offensive term—they only mean to say “foreigner,” after all—but if you had a teacher from another country at your school, you wouldn’t call him Mr. Not-An-American to his face, would you? I fail to see how this is acceptable.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Many foreigner teachers are hired without any prior experience (uh… like me) and quickly discover that the easiest way to get through class is to goof off and make the kids laugh, regardless if anything is being taught. Then a new teacher comes along, and the kids expect the same kind of song and dance. The kids expect a monkey, more or less. Foreign teachers are monkeys! Monkeys are fairly smart, capable animals, and you can learn a lot from observing their behavior. Most people, however, aren’t interested in paying money to watch a monkey solve a jigsaw puzzle; they just want to see the monkey drink its own urine.
Mario is Missing
A toy booth outside the supermarket has this picture on display. The Chinese writing, from what I understand, is saying something like I’m teasing you or making fun of you. Maybe this jest is aimed at Mario, whose severed head is nowhere to be found. And while we’re on the topic of video games, here’s a picture of the arcade I frequent, where the games are six cents a pop:
Well, this section is a traditional Chinese arcade (wow, the words traditional and arcade sure seem odd together) where it’s just line after line of shoulder-to-shoulder cabinets. Most of the games are fighting games, and most of the fighting games are King of Fighters. I’m surprised how popular this game is. There was an arcade in Wuwei where every game was King of Fighters; that’s all they had. This arcade did have enough sense to install two Bust-A-Move cabinets, though, so while all the cool guys fight, I match colored marbles.
The rest of the arcade is a little more modern and has a lot of light gun, racing, ticket, and rhythm games, including my favorite, Percussion Master. You better believe I’m dominating the high scores! They have another drum-based rhythm game that’s hooked up to a real drum set. It’s so tempting to play, but whoever plays it draws a huge crowd. If I play it, everybody is going to watch, and if I suck (which is likely to happen the first few times), I’ll never be able to show my face in that arcade again.
I Left my Legs in Hangzhou
My father has been known to push his family to the limit when it comes to sightseeing. I suppose I should be thankful for this, because it usually meant we got to see everything, no matter what the cost, but this makes it difficult to retain any fond memories of a vacation. Take Disney World, for example. All that comes to mind is sitting on the last tram back to the entrance of the park, thinking about how much my feet hurt while cradling my new Figment doll.
That’s kind of how I felt yesterday in Hangzhou, except I didn’t have a stuffed purple dragon to console me. Because I got into Hangzhou late Friday night and had to leave early Sunday morning, I only had one full day to see the city. So I followed in my father’s footsteps and busted my butt to hit up as many attractions as possible. Unfortunately, one of those attractions was a big freakin’ lake. And I walked it. Other highlights include stone carvings, temples, and a glowing pagoda:
The prize attraction of Hangzhou, though, is the lake. Having already been to Yangzhou, whose selling point is Slender West Lake, a smaller and sexier version of Hangzhou’s West Lake, the spectacle lost some of its impact. Nevertheless, Hangzhou is a beautiful city, and as soon as my legs stop aching, I will be able to recommend it with a straight face. Now roll that beautiful lake footage:
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