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Making Friends
Entry 3 of 10 | show all | print this entry |
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The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy and a lot has happened. In the meantime weekly (or sometimes bi and tri-weekly) visits to the teahouse have become a habit. In fact, we're at the teahouse as I'm writing this. Teaching is becoming pretty routine now, and though I had trouble falling asleep at night because I kept thinking about teaching the first couple of weeks, I hardly think about it anymore when I'm off work. Planning my lessons is becoming easier too, and I find that I can finish planning my classes for the entire week and then have time at work to socialize with the TAs or study some Chinese. My Mandarin has improved some since we moved here, but not nearly as much as I thought it would. It's hard to get enough practice, because everyone speaks English to us at work. But at least I'm picking up a few phrases from when my students talk to each other in class. Some things I've learned from them are: scissors, glue, coloring, tiger, panda, crocodile, "what are you doing?!", and of course peepee and poopoo. Important stuff. But when she has time, Luna, the head of staff, gives Pete and I Chinese lessons on our day off at the university library. The university we go to for that is one of several Zhejiang University campuses, Zhejiang university being one of the top schools here in China. And although it can't quite keep up with Cornell's, the campus is certainly beautiful for being in the middle of a big city. The library where we meet Luna is more like a lounge, where you can order hot chocolate and bubble tea. After the Chinese lesson, we've gone to play sports a couple of times, with Pete playing soccer on the university soccer field, with Adrian and Summer, another staff member, and me playing badminton with Kate, my TA. Both times Kate's taken us out to eat at the dining hall afterwards, where there are many choices of quite healthy Chinese dishes. She's taken me to the gym a couple of times too, where we've done "women's shaping class", spinning, and hot Yoga. Not really understanding much of the Chinese Yoga instructions, I've been doing everything backwards and opposite, which was pretty amusing to everyone else. Spinning class, on the other hand, I had no trouble with, as the instructor kept shouting everything in English, like "one, two, three, four" and "let's go" to the beat of loud techno music. So Kate and I are becoming pretty good friends. She even invited us to her aunt's wedding celebration last Sunday. We were seated at a table with seven other people whom we didn't know, while Kate was busy being the bride's maid. We didn't really make conversation with anyone the first hour or so, but towards the end, Kate's now uncle in law had gotten pretty talkative after consuming a bottle or two of rice wine. He had very limited English, but that didn't prevent him from talking to us. He kept toasting with Pete and saying "Maria very beautiful". At some point, the bride and groom came to every table to toast with everyone, and hand out and light a cigarette for every male at the table. Pete had to accept the cigarette even though he didn't smoke. Then Kate came by and introduced me to her cousins. And while I was teaching Kate some basic ballroom dance moves and talking to her cousin about basketball, Kate's uncle had engaged Pete in a very lively conversation that involved hugging and more beer. We had a good time. Being invited to Kate's aunt's wedding was a huge honor of course, but besides that we've been taken out to eat by a whole bunch of other people too. Luna's friend Guo, for example, took us out to dinner at the most expensive Thai restaurant in town. Guo is a very successful 40 year old man, whom I'd already met last summer. His English is really good and he seems to really like Americans. He set Pete up to play soccer with yet another group of people too. Then there was also dinner with my first student Jenny, who is now long gone to boarding school, but whom I still keep in touch with via email. She and her mother took us out to eat at a small restaurant near West Lake where we got a private room and got to look at and choose from a whole pantry full of freshly killed or live sea food (which was not so appetizing for me personally). I guess now I can say I've tried snails, crab, and mussels. But we did have some really good dark rice wine with dinner. And then we also had some authentic home-cooked Chinese food at my friend, "the water lady"'s house. I met her last summer, when I would always buy bottled water from her. A couple of weeks ago, I decided that my Chinese again was as fluent as it had been over the summer and I could go visit her and be able to have a "conversation". They remembered me, of course, and had gotten the postcard I had sent them from Ithaca. The water lady has a husband and two children and they all moved here from rural Sichuan (her and her husband's accents are very hard for me to understand). Her son lives with his grandparents these days, but Lu Ming, her eight-year-old daughter
was around and was really excited to see me. We went to play at the playground for an hour, and I taught her some English. She's an adorable little girl. I promised to come again the next week and teach her some more English and have dinner with them. So the next time Pete came too, and Lu Ming invited us to play play-dough with her and draw. She was very impressed with Pete's sculpting and my drawing skills. After a good hour or two of playtime, Lu Ming decided that we should start eating dinner without her parents, so we had some beef, chicken feet, and stomach Sichuan style and some Coca Cola. Half way through, her parents and two other men showed up and her mom cooked a couple more veggie dishes that were actually pretty delicious. At the dinner table, Lu Ming kept experimenting with mixing different soft drinks and making fun of her dad's Sichuan accent. We'd told her we had to leave at 9 but she wanted to go to the playground with us still, so when she realized it was already 8:30 she gobbled down her whole bowl of rice in 30 seconds, which was a hilarious performance. Then we went to the playground where we played a round of hide and seek with her friend before we left. I went to visit her again today. I showed her Pete's camera and took pictures of her and her mom and promised to print them out for them. Lu Ming treated me to ice cream and also insisted on buying me some tiny little pearls that you apparently put in water and they expand and become "colorful and pretty". We've also been meeting some people through couchsurfing.com. One of them is Yarui, a university student who's half Miao, half Han Chinese. She's very worldly, and has lived in Norway and is planning to leave for grad-school in Europe this summer. We went to a Korean restaurant together and then took a leisurely stroll in the lotus gardens around West Lake, where we had some more delicious dark rice wine at a small "rice winery".
Yarui was really nice and I hope we can hang out with her again. But really, even if we don't socialize much outside of work, just interacting with my students is pretty good already. My class of 6 and 7 year olds is my favorite, most of the students like me and I get to draw dinosaurs and crocodiles for them every lesson. After I finished drawing a dinosaur for Justin on one such occasion, I asked him "What do you say?" and he looked at me and then gave me a kiss on the cheek. So cute! I also have two student's whose English is advanced enough to have real discussions. One of them, Julie, teaches fashion marketing at a university and we mostly talk about fashion (yes, I'm actually able to have a conversation about fashion for an entire hour, and it's pretty interesting). The other is Lucy, my boss's daughter. We talk about many things, including such topics as beggars and poverty in China. She told me that there are companies here in China that cut off people's limbs for money, so that they can look more pitiful and make more money begging. She also told me that many poor people rent their kids out to similar businesses and that she had just recently seen a starved boy on a leash who was made to jump through a burning ring. Pete and I haven't seen anything like that yet. We mostly only see these two beggar ladies in front of the tea house, who know us by now. I just asked them today where they are from and they told me that they're sisters from Anhui and came here to earn money for their kids back home. I'm not really sure how that pays off, having to come all the way here and going back, but I plan to talk to them some more when we leave the teahouse.
The weather here's been getting warmer and warmer and the temperature is almost perfect these days (I think it could be warmer, Pete thinks it could be cooler). Trees are blooming everywhere in all different colors and it's pretty amazing. We just realized last week that there is a river five minutes from our house along which you can walk on a beautiful path with palm trees, benches, pavilions, and many different kinds of flowering trees. Paradise. We've also discovered a pretty nice bamboo park not far from West Lake and also finally stumbled upon the Tea Museum, which I had wanted to go to since last summer.
The Tea Museum itself is your usual themed historical museum, but it is surrounded by actual tea terraces in the hillside, with many little tea "cafes", where you can sit and drink tea or play mah jong. It was nice finally getting out into the countryside a little bit, so peaceful and relaxing. Next week we think we might bike all the way out to the actual tea villages, where the tea farmers still live a traditionally rural lifestyle. But I've heard rumors at work that first, I might go to Suzhou as part of a promotional school trip and that Pete might go to Hong Kong to extend his Visa (which expires in less than a month).
Oh yeah, I guess I didn't mention any of the more unpleasant things. So Pete and I each got sick one more time, and Pete had his bike stolen (after accidentally leaving the keys for the lock with the bike). We've also had to endure a visit from a rather annoying trainer from corporate to make sure we were following their system. Except that if we really did follow it, we would end up not teaching the kids any English, as the program was designed to teach native English speakers with dyslexia how to read. And I question its validity even for that purpose. Oh well. We sort of half follow it and half do our own thing. Which is how things work in China anyway. And then of course there's the Tibet thing. It has only marginally made the news here, and people don't talk about politics much anyway. Our colleagues are barely even aware of it. But I don't feel that there is hostility towards Tibetans among the Chinese I know anyway, but more of a feeling of puzzlement over why the Tibetans aren't happy with what they have. Tibet is the province that the government pours the most money into after all, and they get free education, healthcare, and stipends for university. Kate told me that the news said that the government pardoned several of the rioters after "it was found out" that they were coerced into rioting by the monks or the Dalai Lama, or something of that effect. I've also come across the opinion that the Chinese government blames the Dalai Lama for inciting the riots so that Han Chinese won't simply blame ordinary Tibetans for being ungrateful and violent, which would further increase tensions. Certainly there is something to be said for the Chinese view of things, as the West often romanticizes Tibet. I've found a couple of resources on the internet that paint a more complete picture of the Chinese perspective on Tibetan independence:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7279789.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_tibet#Positions_on_Tibet_after_1950
http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve06/1288tibet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tibet#Rule_of_the_People.27s_Republic_of_China
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQnK5FcKas
What has been on my mind lately is how Tibet came to be such an important issue on so many Westerner's minds. How did it get chosen out of the myriad of minorities struggling for independence out there? One cynical, but not unfounded theory is that the West wanted to see Tibet break free from China to spark a chain of independence movements across China's minority populations, thereby breaking up the impending menace of a Communist world power. Google "CIA Colorado Tibet" if you want to find out more about that. I'm not taking sides, but I thought I'd write about how things are perceived by the Chinese, since I'm already here.
Latest Comments (3)
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i am chinese (reply)
Feb 28, 2009 06:46 EST by 286252144
1,nothing will change though so many people care tibet,china is powerful.
2i do not think the west want to china be a rich,like usa cost so many oil,the earth can not affort
3we do not like corruption party .we do not trust the west more.
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about Tibet... (reply)
Apr 11, 2008 00:12 EST by maria_nussbaum
Okay, so maybe some people got offended by my comments on Tibet...but hey, that is how a lot of Chinese do seem to think about it here (and I never said that I agree with it)...and come on, if you're gonna have an opinion on an issue, you really should inform yourself on the different viewpoints of everyone involved, otherwise how are you gonna address the problem? If Pro-Tibetan Westerners contin... show all
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no title (reply)
Apr 3, 2008 11:47 EST by jknyu
Sometimes corporate can get in the way but I can tell that you're a good teacher; you spend a lot of time planning your lessons ahead. If you do choose to apply for another occupation, you should boast your ability to organize efficiently -- a definite plus.
Ha ha; everybody loves Pete! And he probably doesn't even say or do much to trigger that attraction!
And alcohol being the unoff... show all
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