I Just Got Schooled

I love days like today. They are the days that I get to remember just how different China life is from the life I led back in the States. The day started off pretty normal, and therefore pretty well. I was picked up by Aaron, and driven to school with two other girls who help him practice his English; we talked about "images" and first impressions which ended up being a pretty interesting conversation. Then, once at school, things were pretty standard as well: we had corn, some noodles, and a little bread for breakfast. Classes were after that, and my Bernstein Bears drama lesson went even better than planned, which is always nice. Then after doing store with the big kids of ILP C, it was time for lunch. Michael that wonderful man made us his fantastic spaghetti which I admit was a happy surprise. I ate way more than my fair share, and by the time I was done my stomach was in the happy state of fullness - a rare feat in this country ;) I skipped cooking class to work on my lesson plans, and then I got the invite to go play pool and eat cake with our friend Sean. I admit, I was border line on whether or not I wanted to go, but I am so much more than glad that I did. Not only was pool really fun, and the cake really delicious, but afterwards Sean invited us to go see his old high school and middle school which was right across the street.

          It was kind of funny because once we accepted his invitation to go, Sean began to worry that we would not actually be allowed to enter. He explained to us that he had often tried to go back to visit but had been denied access by the guards. Perhaps it was overly pompous of us, but we were confident that we would have no trouble getting in. My head teacher, Dianna, simply turned to him and reassured him that we were white and American. Guard or no guard, there is practically no place other than a government building that we will be kept from entering. The injustice of the thought makes me sick, but sadly it is true. Sean offered to try to talk to the guards by the entrance and explain our purpose to see if maybe they'd be lenient, but we told him that we'd just try our luck at our way first and if they tried to stop us then he could try the explanatory way. Just walk with confidence - walk with purpose and no one will question you. As predicted, the guard didn't even give us a second glance. Sean was practically hiding behind us trying to look inconspicuous, but the rest of us just kindly offered a "Ni Hao" to the guard and walked on in. It was pretty funny I guess.

        Once we were inside I became keenly aware that I don't really know what it means to be a teacher in China. See, I work in a private kindergarten where the tuition is nearly 10,000 dollars a semester and the atmosphere is like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Granted we are a school for children 2-6 and not teenagers, the scholarly level of this high school blew my mind! As Sean described his last six years of his secondary education I could not help but compare it to my drastically different experience with West Chester, Ohio's Lakota Local School District. I mean, I never felt too challenged in High School, but I assumed that that was really just the universal experience. On the contrary. As I walked the huge Zhongshan Public School campus I marveled at the stories related to me. Not only do the kids study at the school from 8am to 10pm, but they also live there regardless of how close they are to home. Sean, for instance, lives less than three blocks from the school, and yet for nearly six years other than the two month summer breaks he only spent Saturday nights at home with his own parents. The Chinese go so far to keep their students from distraction. That is the main reason they are confined to the school. Additionally,  no distractions means only uniforms, no long hair for girls, only short hair for boys, one two hour break for dinner and free time, and no dating type relationships of any sort. Boys and girls aren't even allowed to walk together on campus, and you never see it.  According to Sean there is a lot of rebellion, but it is very secret rebellion because the teachers have no tolerance for it. The kids are extremely good at keeping up pretences. 

The long hair rule for girls was semi recently abandoned because of the mess that was made with it. A girl who had long hair was taken to a barber and given a boy's hair cut as punishment - she went to the media, and supposedly the news and reporters made a large enough deal of it that the policy was changed, but it is just insane to think about. As I walked by their dormitories with all their laundry hanging from the windows all I kept thinking was about the many kids I knew in high school who had never even done their own laundry. All of the cleaning on the campus is also done by the students, and you frequently see them mopping floors and wiping down handrails. The classrooms themselves were, however, by far the most crazy thing for me to see. The students don't move from class to class, but rather, the teachers move to them subject by subject. Thus, these kids desks are littered with book after book and stack upon stack of papers. Many students even keep one of those large Tupperware type containers next to their desks to hold the rest of their readings. As we walked by the classrooms, most of them were empty because it was dinner time, but in each room there were still about five or six students dutifully scribbling away at their work. When I questioned Sean as to how they could study so late into the hours he said it is because the teachers literally monitor them as they complete their homework making sure they do it and in a timely fashion -every night until 10pm. I cannot imagine. The school blew my mind. Rather than filling me with a sort of sorrow however it filled me with such excitement. I think it is the most giddy I have felt since the first day I landed in Hong Kong. I was just a big bucket of smiles and I'm not sure why perhaps I can only describe it as sort of exhilarating to see and be a minor part of that surreal dedication to education. It made me wish for a small moment I had been part of such a system. In so many more ways I am glad that I am not, but I love their dedication to learn. They all have such a motivation to excel and accomplish so much. It is unfortunate that so many do it for the wrong reasons perhaps, but all the same I am amazed by this place. I amazed by the reality of the severity and discipline on which it runs. Not to mention I just loved seeing these students faces during free time; I loved watching them look up from their books and have a broad smile spread across their countenance as they saw my own white little face staring back at them. China really is a wonderful place. I cannot put into words what it feels like to be here, and that sad truth makes it impossibly hard to leave here because I know that as my memory of it fades it will only be these inadequate words on which I will have to turn.

American Noodles

 Last week was one of my most fun weeks in China. The girls and I decided that we needed to get a little closer with our Chinese friends, so we invited them all for dinner. On Saturday we pulled it off Chinese stlye with Candice, Sparky, Chlorris, Fanny and Jesse. The apartment was burning hot with twelve people running around trying to cook and prepare for the meal, but other than that everything went soo well. We ate classic foods like cucumbers, tomatos and eggs, dried raddish, hot peppers, broccoli, rice, spicy green beans, and cabbage. All were fried in a ton of oil, and it tasted delicious as usual. We also had some salad and ranch dressing to appease the American tastes, and I attempted to make some noodles. For the past month or so I've been working on the development of an extremely good noodle recipe that I can take home to make for friends and family as a good Chinese meal; I recently perfected it, but when I went to make it for the group all I got in response was Sparky telling me over and over again that I was doing it wrong. It was pretty funny. His attention to what I was doing brought our other friends into the kitchen, and it was determined that I was making "American noodles" for everyone because obviously they weren't Chinese. Luckily, once they tried them they loved the taste and ate a ton of it, but it was evidently not authentic Chinese nor does it have anything to do with American style anything, so I guess I just discovered a great "Courtn-ian dish."
     It was so fun just sitting around our tiny table all sharing the same dishes. See, in China the way you eat your meals (even at restraunts) is not to dish up a plate full at a time. You basically just grab what you want with the chopsticks you are using, and put it in your bowl throughout the meal. You almost never have much on a plate unless it's rice. In part this is because the food generally comes out continually until you are done with the meal, but either way I dont think my dad would handle China well for this reason (I can just picture him smacking my hands or fork when I take something straight out of the bowl and put into my mouth). Grabbing food willy nilly with my chopsticks, however, is a cultural etiquette pratically designed for me.
   Saturday went so well that Jackie, Kalie, and I decided to try it again with our good friend, and Kung Fu instructor, Spring. He requested an American meal, which made the preparation and cost extremely different than the first meal, but suprisingly enough it ended up going off as good or better than the first. We certainly had a lot more bumps in the process. At one point (30 min before he was supposed to arrive) we found out that we had no way of procurring the main ingredients for our dinner nor desert, but due to some brilliant improvisation we were able to come up with a phenominal final product. If I were going to live in China permanently, I think that I would open a restraunt and serve our dinner permanently. We had fruit salad with yougurt; taco salad complete with picco de giao, lettuce, ranch dressing, fry bread, and the best beef you've ever had; my own homemade french fries; and chocolate peanut butter no bakes to top it off. It was sooo good, and we had leftovers for two days, which was actually kind of strange because you never have leftovers with Chinese food. There are always a TON of dishes, but they are a lot smaller so you finish them off. Loading as much as you can onto one plate was sort of a forgotten concept for us, but I guess it's like riding a bike and we got back into the swing of things easily. That night was definitely the most full I've felt in a long time - especially in China.
   Wednesday we were supposed to do dinner again for some friends of ours in the band at Peter's Place, but they ended up backing out last minute because of work. We'd planned with Ben (our American neighbor and drummer in the band) to make Chicken Parmasean, and it would've been AMAZING but I guess we'll just have to wait for another week!
   I cannot believe it's almost May - the time is flying by and I wish I had a remote to make it all go slower. Hopefully, when I get home I will have no regrets with how I spent my time; got to live it up! Love you all!

Beijing in Red

    From the beginning of my stay in China up until some point late last week, I have never truly felt as though I were in a communist country (at least, not the stereotypical one that we generally view in opposition to American politics). See, Zhongshan is a little piece of southern paradise. The people are sweet and charitable; the weather is warm, humid and full of sunshine, and the overall greenery, complete with palm trees and Charley plants, hardly comes together as the working portrayal of an autocratic governance. Instead, it mostly just feels like a vacation - a home away from home. Between my travels to Hong Kong, Guilin, and Shanghai those feelings have generally remained constant; however, Beijing turned my Chinese world on edge. Perhaps I am not fair in my judgement, after all, Beijing certainly has a lot to offer; the Great Wall, Imperial Palaces, and Terracotta Warriors match or exceed the aw with which I have seen anything up to this point, and yet I find, now that I am back home, I have no considerable desire to ever visit them again. I am sure that I could see Guilin, Shanghai, or Machu Picchu one thousand times and still not tire of their splendor, but Beijing is a different kind of marvel.

    Even on my very first night in the city, I could feel something different. I'll allow that a large part of that difference stemmed from the fact that it was nearly 1 in the morning, I was lost, it was dark, raining and cold, but aside from that, there was an added eeriness by the desertion of the streets. Beijing is the largest city in China, and yet on our hour walk to the hostel, we saw not a single soul aside from the few uniformed guards marching along Tian'an men Square. I am sure we were quite the sight to see - seven young girls in the dead of night lugging suitcases behind them, and we felt the awkwardness as we walked block after block. Though most of the walk I was focused on my ever numbing face and hands, I do not think I will easily forget that first sight of that yellow star of China's red flag as we passed that empty square where so much history has taken place. It was more numbing than drizzling rain, and I could feel my heartbeat slow. There was no real reason to be scared; it was mostly just the recognition that the movie depiction of communism, for that moment, did not seem too far off. The cold, empty streets felt oppressive. Mao's domineering portrait did nothing to aid the situation, and for the first time, I really could not believe that my feet were standing where they were standing. I had heard stories of this place. Stories that were nothing more than pages of texts and famous pictures. This place was real. The people that supported this man were real; his leadership, cruelty, and deceit were more real than anything imaginable.   

     Five days after my first steps in Beijing, I was again standing at Tian'an Men square, except this time it was a beautifully clear day, and I was beside more than 5,000 of the other daily viewers who comes to pay respect and bring flowers to the preserved body of their national hero, Mao. Beijing is littered with tourists wherever you go, but when it comes to Mao, most set their sights elsewhere; I was one of approximately ten other Westerners that day who was interested enough to wake up early, stand in line, and view his remains. The 5,000 visitors between 8am and 12pm are almost entirely made up of elderly Chinese men and women who were alive during Mao's reign and revolution, and their devotion to him is uncanny. It amazed my apparently naive American psyche how much democracy is not necessarily wanted throughout the world. I talked with one shop owner for nearly an hour as he explained the image on one the shirts he was selling; it depicted our President's face outfitted in a Chinese military uniform. Initially, I assumed the shirt was meant to stand as an insult as it might in the States. I have often heard people politically belittled by being called a "Commi" and my first thought was that that was what was trying to be portrayed. However, as I continued to talk with this man, it quickly became evident that the opposite was true. He explained that the shirt was mostly sold to Chinese people, and that it was seen as a symbol of hope. It depicted the desire (shared by many Chinese) for Obama to bring Communism to America so that there "can be peace in the world." His words rustled my democratic paradigm to say the least. I knew that not everyone wanted democracy in their own country, but I really never considered that people honestly sought to bring it down and replace it in my own. I rephrase, I know that there are many people in this world with malicious intentions. There are people who seek personal power through the oppression and submission of other's agency; however, it is unduly naive to assume that all communists are this way. Many, if not most, of them are genuinely good hearted and charitable people who seek to bring Communism to America much like we seek to bring Democracy to them. 

   Perhaps from this entry you may see Beijing in a darker light, but I admit that is not my intention. Beijing was eye opening for me. It was the first time I really felt the culture shock I had come to expect, and it has deepened my understanding of God's children. I will always love and appreciate Beijing for this. It is a culturally rich epicenter. It is just a shame that its history has come at such a high price. Its glory has been built through the reign of two particularly ruthless men, and though I marvel at the works created by those hands under their direction, I cringe to know the price that they were so willingly to pay when it was never theirs to offer.