August 31, 2005
Keeping the feeling alive
The Chinese university culture still shocks me.
Exhibit A: Getting our class schedules. Each semester it’s been a different drill. Last semester I didn't get my class scedule until halfway through the first class I was supposed to teach. I tried to get this semester’s schedule at the beginning of summer vacation but was told the foreign teachers’ schedules wouldn’t be ready till later. The vacation passed and the beginning of school approached; with a little sleuthing and help from students I was able to navigate the school’s website enough to find what I thought were Naomi’s and my schedules: Foreign Teacher 1 and Foreign Teacher 2. I adjusted myself to the prospect of teaching Business Writing; I was to teach some of the same students I taught last semester, whom I liked. I had no classes on Mondays.
Sunday arrived, the day before classes began. We were summoned at about 10:00 in the morning to the English Department office to pick up our schedules. Lo and behold, my Foreign Teacher number was changed to 5. My classes were completely different from what I expected. I couldn’t have planned in advance if I’d wanted to. My first class was 8:00 the next morning.
Exhibit B: This morning one of my former students came over for my Chinese lesson. After we finished going over my lesson she pulled a stack of papers out of her bag: her classmates’ reports on their summer vacations. As the class monitor, she had to collect them. They were required by the school authorities to write 3000-5000 words about the "social practice" they did this summer – work, study, or practical experience – and have a form stamped by their employer. The form they were given at the beginning of the summer; the report they had learned about the day before. I asked if some of the students had “invented” material for their reports. Of course, she said. In fact, she had gotten a few extra blank forms stamped in case anyone needed one.
Exhibit C: Our first English department meeting of the semester. Four of the seven foreign teachers employed by the English department were in attendance, as well as a dozen and a half Chinese teachers. Mr. Sun, our “leader”, introduced the four of us, politely exaggerating our qualifications and experience. Then he said he trusted that, as foreign teachers, we would do our best to teach writing and oral English to ensure that the upcoming assessment of our school’s English Department by the Chinese Ministry of Education would be successful. This would include making “files” of our teaching, “doing research with our Chinese colleagues,” and “organizing last semester’s test papers.” The assessment is scheduled for next June. Thankfully, Naomi and I will be long gone by then.
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August 26, 2005
Before it's not too late
What would you say to a Chinese university student who started confessing to you one night over cell phone text messages that he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant but been unable to keep his word that he would study at the same university as her? That she’d died in a car accident, after he had cheated on her with another girl?
I know what I would say. I know what I did say last night when it happened. Last Friday was the one-year anniversary of her death, so he’s had a year to mull over it and be crushed by guilt; the wound is not fresh, but still raw. The students at our university have a penchant for jumping off the tallest building on campus (nineteen stories) when life gets too much to handle. I brought out the best weapon in my arsenal for fighting crippling guilt – Jesus’ bearing of our wrongdoing in his own body and the hope we have because of it.
If I weren’t depending on the truth of that as the basis for my own life, I have no idea what I would’ve told him. “There’s nothing you can do about it now, don’t feel guilty”? Ha, that’s not even easy to say!
This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten strange or very personal confessions from my students. It’s a phenomenon other foreign teachers in China have experienced also. As I’ve become more familiar with the university culture here, I’ve learned that students have no choice about who they live with; they are often on friendly terms with their roommates, but not close. Gossip is horrendous. Conformity is expected. It’s not common for universities to offer counseling. Many students don’t feel comfortable sharing personal things with their parents; or, they want to protect their parents from worry and so don’t mention depression, frustration, disillusionment or failure during their weekly phone chats and visits home.
And so we occasionally find ourselves offering a sympathetic listening ear to young(er) adults who feel there’s no one else to confide in. Maybe they also figure foreign teachers are on the outside of Chinese culture and won’t judge them. Maybe it’s more impersonal, less visceral, to talk about hard issues in a foreign language.
Maybe I don't understand all the reasons involved.
Posted by huzzlecoo at 05:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 18, 2005
For those who like words
I’ve told the story of huzzlecoo many times, but there are always those who haven’t heard. So, here it goes.
My cousin Jason was one of my heroes. Two years older than me, jack-of-all-trades, inexpressibly cool. He could pick out tunes on the piano, draw a picture while holding the paper on the top of his head, and always win at hide-and-go-seek.
One summer – I was probably about eight -- our family was visiting on vacation and my brother and I were hanging out with Jason, as we did whenever he was around and willing. We were in his room looking at various things when he pulled out a stack of index cards, saying they were vocabulary words he had to learn for school. On one of the cards was printed “huzzlecoo”. Did we know what it meant, he asked? No, we replied, wide-eyed at our cousin’s clearly superior lexical knowledge. “Heart-to-heart talk,” he said. My innocence and trust of Jason explain why I instantly accepted it as fact, but added to those was another reason word-lovers must approve: the sound of the word, almost onomatopoetic, matched the meaning he gave so perfectly. I couldn’t question it.
And for many years I didn’t. I think I was 15 or 16 before I turned to my brother one day and said, “Huzzlecoo’s not a real word, is it?”
My freshman year of college I was making a new e-mail account and my first name was already taken as an address, which deeply violated my sense of identity. To retaliate, I tried to think of a word or name no one could possibly have taken, and my memory lighted on huzzlecoo. Heart-to-heart talk. Appropriate for an e-mail address, I thought.
Four years before, at the age of 17, Jason had fallen asleep at the wheel, veered into a ditch and left us. So using “huzzlecoo” to identify myself is a means of treasuring (and sharing!) a dear memory – and a memorial to him.
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