Shanghai'd

The People's Liberation Summer Camp

2009-09-08T21:37:00.001+08:00

Last night, without much enthusiasm, I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and trudged down the stairs to hit the track. I don’t really enjoy exercise (shocker, I know), but I’m making yet another go of it this semester. Slow and steady, right? I’ve just been a bit heavy on the slow and a bit light on the steady.

Our track, like most, I imagine, is usually pretty sparsely attended in the evenings. There are a few students who run, more who stroll, and a generous smattering who lurk in dark corners making out with their girlfriends. From time to time I think of purchasing one of those battery-powered emergency floodlights and bringing it and a megaphone to the track at about 8:30 PM. You can get pretty close to those making-out couples before they notice you, and the comedic possibilities are endless. But I digress.

When I got to the track last night, it was completely overrun with students in groups of twenty, each girl wearing a full uniform and clutching a water bottle. At the head of each group was a young man in an army uniform – our students were still in the throes of freshmen military training.

It isn’t compulsory military service; at least, not in any recognizable sense. As far as I can tell, it seems to exist mostly to instill a vague sense of patriotism and discipline in the students. It only lasts for a week, and it consists primarily of three things: wearing bright blue camouflage uniforms, standing or sitting in ranks, and listening to speeches from real soldiers. There’s also a bit of marching and running, although the marching is a little shabby looking, since they only have a week to perfect their technique. In my mind, any productive military training would have to involve weapons of some kind, but I concede that the officers in charge might have a better idea of what constitutes ‘productive’ than I do.

Last night, the students were sitting in groups, watching their commanding officers make speeches, sing songs, and tell jokes. Two of the officers appeared to be putting on a skit of some kind, and another officer on the other side of the field was conducting vigorously while his group belted out what I took to be some martial chorus. Other officers (I say officers, but they were wearing camo and it was dark, so I’m not sure) practiced martial arts forms. It was intimidating at first, walking across a track full of soldiers, but a rigorous lack of discipline became apparent pretty quickly. One of the students waved me down.

“Hi, Dave!” she called. “I am Snoopy! Do you remember me?” She was attempting to master an advanced technique that involved marching in lockstep, turning her head ninety degrees, and saluting (presumably at a flag), but she and her allies kept getting about three goose-steps into the march and dissolve into giggles.

Other students broke ranks to wave or laugh. “Hello, I love you!” one girl shouted every time we passed her, to the laughter of her squadmates. Others were clapping and singing, and one girl was trudging across the field in her camo jacket and cap, neon green gym shorts, and flip-flops. Even the soldiers were less imposing than they had first appeared – one was away from the others, putting the moves on an older student, and another waved and said “Hi, hi! Hello!” as we crossed behind his group.

What looked rather ominous from a distance turned out, on closer inspection, to be rather benign. In fact, it was a lot like the Wilds, with more camouflage and communism. The only question I have now is this: where in the world are you supposed to hide if you’re wearing bright blue camo?

Dave

P.S. Forgive my lack of pictures ... something's not coming up on the site. I have a picture, and I'll post it as soon as I can, I promise!

The Mind of a Child

2009-08-26T03:06:00.002+08:00

If you're a parent and/or a thoughtful person (in the sense that you think about things, not in the sense that you don't ask your impoverished grandmother to pick up your lunch tab for you), you may have wondered what babies think about.

I certainly do. Chloe emerged two months ago. She sleeps, eats, and ensures that her excretory system is in good working order. She waves her arms, clenches her fists, wiggles her fingers and toes, and kicks her feet vigorously. She looks at things around her (especially lights and other bright things). Sometimes she frowns; sometimes she smiles. Last week, I discovered that if I caught her eye (harder to do than it sounds) and grinned, she'd smile, too, and even laugh. Sometimes she cries, and occasionally she out-and-out screams.

And that makes me wonder. What's going on in her brain when she does all this? Does she think "I wonder what that light is for?" "I wonder why I can't get any milk out of Daddy's arm / the chair / the carpet / my hand?" Does she even realize that the hand is hers? Does she experience life like the sperm whale in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

I have a theory: that being born is kind of like being shown onto the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise. "Here's your ship!" the attendant says, and then walks out, leaving you with no crew and no instruction manual. So you spend the next four or five years pushing buttons and pulling levers more or less at random, trying to figure out what to do in order to reverse the polarity on the deflector array or reprogram the warp nacelles or something. Occasionally you figure out that this sequence of buttons does this thing, and eventually, everything works so well that you can't remember not being able to do things (like we are as adults). But in the meantime, the captains of the vessels around you have a good laugh at your expense as you beam the mess hall into space, shoot yourself with your own phasers, and commit other various indignities.

The real kicker is that once Chloe's old enough to actually tell us what she's thinking, she won't be able to remember any of it. All we can do is hope that she gets control-savvy enough to manage the waste disposal sooner, rather than later.

Dave

Grandpa's Backyard

2009-08-14T02:26:00.001+08:00

Lying back and crushing spikes of grass,
Blueness reaching out eternally on every side,
Except a thousand maple leaves above us
That keep us cool and shady;
Chloe and I, staring up at the sky.
She laughing,
I loving.

Dave

The Life of the Party (on the Plane)

2009-08-06T04:28:00.006+08:00

If I was still in sales or worked in marketing, I might begin my post today like this: Do you travel much? Do you ever wonder how you can ingratiate yourself with your fellow travelers? If so, I have some great news for you – a SURE-FIRE, 100% GUARANTEED method of making friends FAST! There are no tricks – no strings attached – no gimmicks – and you can master this method in TEN MINUTES! When you get off the plane, everyone around you will LOVE YOU!

Sorry about that. I get these little ads that pop up on Gmail or Facebook with some regularity that say things like “SECRETS YOUR DOCTOR WON’T TELL YOU!” as though he hates you and is out to get you. Invariably, the text under the ad has something like what I’ve written above. But seriously, this would work – so maybe you’re curious. The way to win friends and influence people on an airplane is to bring one little thing with you … (wait for it) … a baby.

Or, more precisely, a tiny, cute, (and most important) sleeping baby. There are three steps in the process of winning the hearts and minds of your fellow travelers:

First, get on the plane carrying a baby. This will immediately make you the center of attention, mostly consisting of sideways glances as you walk down the aisle and whispered prayers of “Please, not next to me, please please please not here …” This might not seem like a good thing, but it’s a crucial first step because it gets everyone focused on you. If you walked down the aisle by yourself, nobody would give you a second glance, and they probably wouldn’t be that impressed with you later on.

Now we’ve got everyone’s attention, and particularly that of the people who are sitting near you. They’ve probably flashed you a few tight-lipped smiles. The really blunt ones might be ignoring you, making faces out the window, or scanning the rest of the plane for empty seats. A few friendly people might be complimenting you on your baby, but even they are wondering just how colicky she is and how long it will be before she wakes up. This is where step two comes in: apologizing in advance and showing off the kid. You know everyone’s thinking of your child as a ticking time bomb of misery, so you may as well acknowledge it and clear the air. A wry grin, and a sincere “Sorry-for-my-child-disturbing-your-sleep-later-but-she’s-only-three-weeks-old” will ingratiate you with your fellow passengers. It establishes you as not being one of the Evil Parents who view the world as a stage for their children to shine on, since you’re acknowledging the inconvenience. Plus, she really is cute, so the non-hardened people will feel a little bit guilty for wishing you ill earlier. They’ll probably admire the baby and then settle back down into their chairs, assured in the knowledge that at least you didn’t bring the child maliciously in order to inconvenience them.

Step three is the tricky one: ensuring that the baby sleeps for the remainder of the flight. (I recommend putting in a request for a sleepy kid when she’s conceived.) It’s best if she wakes up once or twice, and even if she cries a little (say, less than thirty seconds). This will awaken fear in those who are around you, which will then be immediately assuaged and will further convince them that there’s nothing to worry about and that your kid really is very cute.

By the time the plane lands, the people who inwardly cursed you when you got on will be smiling and complimenting your infant as you shuffle around and wait for the first-class passengers to get off. Even the most unfriendly will grin at your baby as you walk out of the plane, and everyone in your vicinity will remark (silently or aloud) at how surprisingly good your baby was and how they were dreading the flight for nothing. Their whole day will be brighter, and all thanks to you and your child!

The only thing I haven’t gotten down is the marketing aspect of this plan. Maybe I could sell a realistic sleeping baby doll that frequent flyers could carry around with them in order to make friends. I’d buy one myself, but I’m all set with cute sleeping babies for right now.

Dave

Let me see! I want to see!

2009-07-21T23:33:00.001+08:00

There’s some basic human impulse, deep within all of us, that makes us want to see what other people are seeing. Who among us could resist the temptation to look up, if we saw half a dozen other people staring at a point above our heads? Let’s call it the me-too response. For some reason, the human psyche is hard-wired to want to know what the interesting thing is that other people are looking at.

As you might know if you’ve spent much time traveling, basic human impulses like these are expressed differently in different cultures. And if we can call this impulse, as experienced by North Americans, the me-too response, then in China, it’s the me-four or me-eight response. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.

This afternoon, Des and I went to the local supermarket to pick up some groceries. The baby, dozing in her stylish sling, accompanied us. Chloe is adorable, especially in such fashionable gear, and so naturally she draws looks and comments wherever she goes. But today, we did something we haven’t done before: we stopped to let someone admire her. A pair of old ladies, trailed by a little girl, corralled us and insisted on doting on Chloe for a few moments, which we were happy to let them do. A few seconds later, a college student stopped and began to translate their questions and remarks. A housewife wandered over from the vegetable stand. A sunburned man peered over my shoulder and chuckled at Chloe’s little hands waving in the air. In less than thirty seconds, we were obstructing the aisle, and people were converging on us from every display within a hundred feet. We fled the scene while there were still escape routes open to us.

On Sunday, a friend and I were driving through one of the busier parts of Shanghai when traffic came to a complete standstill. We inched forward for five minutes until we came in view of perhaps fifty or sixty people standing in the center of the intersection blocking traffic. Old men in their pajamas, guys in suits, hardhatted workmen stripped to the waist with shovels over their shoulders, ladies holding shopping bags, and the like were crowding in, trying to get a glimpse of what was obviously an accident. There were so many people that, even as we drove by, I could hardly see what was happening. I spotted what I think was a guy sitting on the pavement, and possibly a policeman talking to him. The cops weren’t even trying to get people to leave.

Maybe this is just another way that gregarious, uninhibited societies like the Chinese express themselves, and things are the same in places like Brazil. Or maybe the traffic accident was a fluke, and my daughter has some kind of mysterious Pied Piper-like power over other people, even in her infancy. As long as I’m immune, I’m hoping for the latter.

Dave

Nine things I did not expect to happen when I became a father

2009-07-15T19:53:00.006+08:00

* The hospital food to be delicious. I mean, seriously – whoever cooked those vegetables, can I get a recipe?
* My child to be cute. I’m well aware of massive bias that may be warping my perceptions, so take this one with a chunk of salt. But for what it’s worth, it’s not just that I think most newborns have a semi-human, vaguely Cro-Magnon appearance, it’s that I expected my daughter to look like that too. Take a look at the pictures and form your own judgments.
* Thirty-seven students and co-workers to come and visit us. I definitely didn’t expect people that I had never even met to come by just to see the baby. It was a lot of fun.
* Thirty-seven people to bring presents for the baby, from finger puppets to peaches to dresses to ceramic figurines to custom-made calendars to Italian language-learning toys.
* To be given six blocks of imported Extra-Sharp Cheddar because one of our friends knew that western people like cheese, and it would help Desiree recover quickly to eat her favorite food.
* To discover that the baby can be made to stop crying by tossing her up in the air. She doesn’t seem to like it, but she stops crying. Weird, huh?
* To feel compelled to take pictures of little Chloe in every conceivable position and activity. I think I’ve taken more pictures in the last two weeks than in the previous two years combined.
* To be deluged by traditional Chinese advice, mostly for Desiree (“You shouldn’t walk! You shouldn’t get out of bed! You should have stayed in the hospital for another two weeks! You should turn off the air conditioner! You should drink tea/ginger/weird stuff! You shouldn’t take any medicine! You should make your husband do all the cooking and cleaning!”), much of which seems to be ignored by the advice-givers. Well, except for the part about me doing all the cooking and cleaning.
* To derive so much enjoyment from a non-sentient, non-aware, mostly unconscious and basically non-interactive person. And I figure it can only get better from here.
Dave

The REAL Ghost Towns of the Yangtze (or maybe the Huangpu)

2009-06-30T11:04:00.003+08:00

I don’t know much about economics. In my cart at Amazon.com there is a copy of Economics for Dummies. I added it a few months ago when Iceland went bankrupt. I spent a week reading articles online trying to figure out why and being stymied by byzantine paragraphs occupied with things like transnational investment funds. Occasionally, I see things (other than my Roth IRA statement) that seem to me to be connected in some way with the global finance crash, but I mention this deficiency of mine at the beginning of this article in order to caution you that there may actually be no link between my observations and the current (recent?) economic crisis. Draw your own conclusions.

Right now Desiree and I are staying at a friend’s house while we wait for the baby to arrive (she’s four days late as I type this). Our friend is employed by an important multinational corporation which has put him up in a nice duplex; the second-largest dwelling I have seen during my two and a half years in China (the largest was inhabited by a British employee of an even more important multinational corporation).

It, along with a few hundred similar duplexes, is part of a big community, fully equipped with a wall, two gates, a complement of uniformed guards, three or four playgrounds, a decorative canal filled with water lilies, and other such pleasant amenities. I was out strolling through these amenities tonight when I came to a small river dividing this property from the one next to it. Across the water was a cluster of low- and medium-rise apartment buildings, painted a muted blue. It reminded me vaguely of a prison.

I had been walking along the river for a minute or so when I suddenly realized what was so uninviting about those apartments: all the lights were off. In all the windows. Another moment’s inspection confirmed that there were no strings of clothes hanging out to dry (a completely ubiquitous feature of any Chinese apartment building), no curtains, no posters, and no vehicles in the parking lot. It was completely uninhabited.

I walked the length of the wall that abutted the river, and did some counting. There were eleven small buildings, each with forty-eight visible units, and six large buildings double the size of the small ones. That means that I could see eleven hundred apartments (give or take) – all empty.

It definitely wasn’t an old complex, nor an uncompleted one. The paint job looked as fresh as any paint job ever does here, and the runty little palm trees that had been installed as landscaping starters were still surrounded by slabs of turf that showed ugly seams of earth between them, like Frankenstein stitching along the ground. There was a bright and shiny and un-played-upon playground, and I could see the green glow of EXIT signs through the stairwell windows on every floor.

So that means that someone, or more likely, a lot of people, decided to build one thousand one hundred plus apartments, with all the accoutrements, without ever obtaining one single human being to live in them.

Now maybe that’s par for the course. I’m not a builder or an investor. But I do know two things that seem important to me. First, an empty building is not a happy building. Somebody built that thing with this kind of math in his head: (1100 apartments x (3000 yuan per month – regular expenses)) – overhead = Lots of money for MEEEEE!!! And now he’s having to do some less pleasant arithmetic. I used to see abandoned buildings in Greenville – the empty Future Shop and K-Mart on Laurens Road, or the perpetually failing restaurants on Wade Hampton, across the bridge from BJU. They never looked happy either.

Second, I’ve seen far more empty buildings here in Shanghai than I ever did in Greenville. The complex that I saw tonight is less than half of the size of a major community on the same road as our school. It was empty for two full years, and even now only appears to be about one-quarter full. I’ve probably seen ten more just like it, all new. If you’re counting new and old abandoned buildings, then I have no idea how many I’ve passed.

So what gives? Is it that Shanghainese builders were banking on an emerging market that never emerged? Did the crash in investments prevent a new wave of Chinese professionals from obtaining newer, better accommodations? Is this some weird Shanghai way of doing business, necessitated, perhaps, by local laws and permits? Are the apartment buildings actually being used by invisible space vampires, bent on world domination (beginning with the Pudong district)?

Unfortunately, I have no idea. I sent an inquiring message to the Oracle of Stephen the Guy Who Knows Something About Everything, but I never heard back. If anyone else has any keen insights, feel free to pass them along. Until then, I’m steering clear of those empty complexes. Just in case it’s the vampires.

Dave

Under the Radar

2009-06-30T11:02:00.000+08:00

You may have been wondering why we haven’t posted on this blog since May. Some of you have asked me as much. While busyness and sloth play their usual role, the main reason is that the blogger.com domain has been unavailable to us (and to everyone in China) for about a month and a half. Safe in the warm embrace of the Motherland and protected by the vigilant gaze of the guardians of social conformity, we have been saved from falling into that abscess of lawlessness that is blogging. Thanks, guardians!

And in the meantime, of course, we’ve been prevented from contributing to that abscess. I’ve finally decided to work around this wonderful safety net by sending our compositions to a buddy in the States, who posts them for us. Anway – we’re back! Tell all your friends!

Dave

Why I hate electronic translators: Part II

2009-05-13T10:29:00.008+08:00

You might remember a previous post about this same problem, but recent student papers have made us remember our loathing of these little tools. What can we say, there's a reason that people still need to learn languages. But some of our students still need to learn this lesson....

From one student's research paper:

"Although collects the impression profound breadth, some regions have not represented, for example the watering can, in the Japanese sado's Ming time last stage and the cake tray the incense and candle box which does. Overall, [the topic] has some 7,000 Chinese artware--from Stone Age to the present--900 are just now bright the ceramics. Although collects makes the person impression profound breadth, certain domains have not sent representative to attend, if supplies the watering can, incense box and cake tray in latter Ming dynasty time Japanese sado."

Anyone want to guess her topic?

Desiree

Top Seven Things I Have Learned from Student Papers

2009-04-14T15:00:00.004+08:00

Well, it's research paper season, and even though we're only in the outline stage, I have already discovered some surprising new facts from my students. If you're into facts for the day or top ten lists, please enjoy the following trivia for this week:

7. The Eiffel Tower was built for the French Revolution.

6. Winfrey’s mother can not stand the crazy child’s behavior, she intends to put the Green into the justice, the beds happen to children is full, she was out. (What I really learned from that sentence: Electronic translators are bad! . . . Oh, wait, I already knew that.)

5. The mummies of the Egyptian pyramids had been protested well.

4. Princess Diana was a good mother because she never let her sons join the recreation.

3. Martin Luther King, Jr., signed the emancipation proclamation.

2. If you stand under the Eiffel Tower, you can feel lots of poems and writers who are come from the last century.

1. The destruction of Pompeii was not a bad thing because it can promote tourism development.

Desiree

Pregnancy Pictures

2009-04-10T10:43:00.004+08:00

Sorry! I posted some pictures on Facebook and totally forgot to put them on our blog. But for those of you interested . . . here they are! This is at about 6 months.

The Name Game

2009-04-09T19:48:00.011+08:00

It was always a girlish dream of mine to sit around with my husband and discuss baby names. (You know, girls are forever discussing these kinds of things—like wedding colors, for instance.)

That dream ended shortly after Dave and I got married.

While there are loads of things that Dave and I enjoy discussing, it became obvious very fast that naming our future children—especially those who would be female—was not going to be one of them. Conversations went something like this:

Her: What about Madeline*?
Him: No! That sounds so pretentious.
Her: Oh! I know! Sylvia*! I love the name Sylvia!
Him: That makes me think of an old lady. . . Hey! How about Prometheus!
Her: Dave! That's not even a girl's name!
Him: Promethia?
Her: Dave!
Him: You know what I think is a cool name? Magor-mis-abib! It means "Fear on every side."
Her: ::Stunned silence::

So we stopped talking about it—until it became absolutely necessary. In fact, I decided I wasn't even going to bring up the subject until we knew whether we were having a girl or boy—to cut down on the discussion as much as possible.

After we found out we were having a little girl, my mission could not be put off any longer. I had us both sit down and write a list of at least 10 names that we both liked. (Dave ended up with 8, and I ended up with 15, but it was a good start.) It was a surprising success for two reasons: 1) The name Magor-mis-abib did not appear on either list, and 2) we actually had quite a few names that we both liked!

In case you're interested, here they are (in no particular order). We're going to keep thinking about them until Baby Talbert actually makes her appearance. Please feel free to comment on them or give us other suggestions!

Possible first names:
Evelyn
Chloe
Fiona
Katherine (to be called Kate)
Pheobe
Sophia

Possible middle names:
Marie (my middle name)
Elizabeth

We'll see what actually happens come June (or July).

Desiree

* I apologize if this is your name. Please know that I love your name. It would have been one of my first choices!

Through a Student's Eyes

2009-03-23T15:53:00.003+08:00

The following is an only-slightly-edited paper that was turned into me for the assignment 'write a detailed description of one of your teachers.' If you're not a friend of mine, this might not do much for you, but it left Des and me in tears. I've included a recent picture of myself for reference.

Dave is a tall and big man. He has a large strong body with a small head. He does not have very dense hair on his head. But he has bushy eyebrows and big eyes. So he has big eyes, his eyes are shortsighted. I always have many questions about College English and the Art of Public Speaking. I always go to ask his question and stand beside his large strong body as a monster. I like standing his large body side because it looks just like bird.

There are dense brown moustaches on mouth. The brown moustaches has a little long. The appearance that Dave touches the moustaches is handsome curiously just like a supter start. His mouth is not very big with pink color as a cherry. Dave’s skin is more white than me as the Princess White Snow. His mouth matches with his nose. Dave’s hand with much meat. I think you have very great power. I can feel that when his interviews me, he shake hands with me.

Dave’s waistline is one time the size of me. Through Dave’s clothes, I can see your chest swell proud flesh. When he takes our class and he was so excited that his chest became electric motor. He feet are so huge that they can endure a heavy pressure. Dave is always wearing a blue-color shirt and brown-color overcoate like Helmet first. I don’t know whether Dave always wears the same trousers.

The first time I saw Dave was in front of building Eight. Dave made me surprised and frightened. He is too huge that maybe can crush me to pieces. After Dessire described her husband at class. He is tall, fat, bald and so on. I know Dave and Dessire has married. Dave is very humorous when having a class.

Dave’s personality is as lovely as his body. He always make all the student largh. He have expression used for overstating very much when speaking Maybe if Dave don’t give me many lovely and beautiful vocabulary, excited quiz and test, and difficult homework*, he will be a perfect man in [Chinese].

by [name withheld to protect those on Facebook]

Dave

*I have an in-class habit of always describing my quizzes, tests, handouts, and homework in glowing terms, hoping that my enthusiasm will rub off on the students. So far it hasn't.

Hooray for Food Poisoning!

2009-03-14T13:58:00.003+08:00

Well, maybe not quite "hooray." But a year or so ago, a friend of mine was robbed, and he sent an email (in the spirit of Matthew Henry) enumerating what he was thankful for on that occasion. I've been thinking about that email recently, particularly since I spent half of this week moaning and groaning and hanging out close to the bathroom door.

I don't know why I got sick. The popular Chinese phraseology would be that "I ate some not fresh food." That seems about right, although nothing that I had consumed in the 24 hours leading up to my attack of the plague appeared suspicious. For whatever reason, though, I did, and I've put together a little mental grist for just such a situation. I am thankful ...

• That I had only food poisoning, and not Sumatran Creeping Doom or flesh-eating disease or that thing I saw on Star Trek where your head turns into grape Jell-O.

• That although food poisoning can be lethal, it did not prove to be so in my case. I’m not even paralyzed! Not even from the waist down!

• That I was afflicted only with gastrointenstinal suffering, and not with breathing difficulties. I’ve had breathing problems before – worst feeling in the world.

• That I have a job where I can take time off if I’m sick, rather than being employed as a U.S. Marine or an enslaved salt miner or something like that where they make you work no matter what you feel like.

• That I had an illness that actually allowed me to do a lot of desk work, rather than being confined to my bed.

• That I could stay at home instead of going to a hospital and being put in a quarantine ward with nurses in HazMat suits. My insurance probably wouldn’t cover that.

• That I have an audiobook version of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (a modest 33 hours long), so that I could listen to something interesting even if I felt too sick to read. Some people can only listen to the radio or watch TV – two possibilities worse than silence.

• That I have an incredibly kind and loving wife who took care of me and made pitying faces at me all week instead of spending her time rereading the life insurance policy.

• That I have a lot of loving friends who live close to me and kept dropping by, asking about my health, offering me medicine, etc.

• That a lot of those friends are nurses, so their offers of medicine have actually helped me instead of making me shrivel up and die or go into raving delusions.

• That I live in a nice little apartment with a modern bathroom instead of in a tent out on the tundra somewhere.

• That I got better after only three days and was actually able to reschedule some of my classes, so I’m only a little behind.

• That my students sent me kind (if occasionally incoherent) messages wishing me good health and a speedy recovery and offering me sometimes dubious medical advice. They didn’t even seem to be too upset when I revived in time to teach a few English classes on Thursday.

In short, it really turned out great. In fact, writing this list has me half-convinced that it was some kind of a vacation.

Then again, that might just be the medicine talking.

Dave

Baby bump benefits

2009-03-02T15:39:00.006+08:00

Last week, I accomplished a great feat. Last week, I succeeded in looking pregnant.

This is an important task in China because being pregnant (as long as it is accompanied by looking pregnant) comes with a few key benefits.

The most important of these is The Right to Sit in the Yellow Seat. You see, all buses in China have three sections:
1) The standing section--the sad domain of the majority of travellers. It is uncomfortable because of the terrible braking and veering that inevitably tosses you around, and it is especially bad when the bus is crowded because it means that you may end up practically plastered to the slightly inebriated gentleman or the woman carrying the live chicken (common occupants of the bus realm).
2) The normal seats (usually blue, green, or gray). This is the best you can hope for. People have been known to trample slightly inebriated gentlemen and women carrying live chickens for one of these seats.
3) The special seats (a.k.a. the yellow seats). These four or five seats are reserved for three types of people: Women with babies, old people (usually frail-looking old people), and pregnant women. Other people may sit in them, but they will be quickly be shown to the standing section by the ai-yi* if one of the privileged types boards the bus.

The other day, I got on the bus, saw that no seats were available, and tried to find a comfortable corner to stand in for the rest of my trip. With my coat on, I didn't think that I looked pregnant enough to try to take advantage of my new status. However, after she took my money, the ai-yi patted my tummy for confirmation and suddenly grabbed at the man sitting in the closest yellow seat. She indicated that I should sit and seemed to even apologize to me (I heard her say, "I didn't know!").

This weekend, I went shopping with some students and had to take a dreadfully crowded bus. I didn't think that the ai-yi could even see me, and I noticed that at least two of the yellow seats were already occupied with mothers carrying small children. Almost immediately, my two students called out in unison to the ai-yi, and she made her way to the last yellow seat, plucked out the student who had been sitting there, and told everyone to let me sit. I was very thankful to have a seat on that bus ride in particular, and afterward, I told my students how much I appreciated them speaking up. One of them responded, "No problem. It is your right!"

So, while prenancy in China does have a few disadvantages (such as being scolded by students any time I hop, jog, or use my cell phone), it definitely has its privileges. I just better not use my cell phone while I'm sitting in the yellow seat.

Desiree

*Pronounced I.E., this is the woman that gives out bus tickets. Actually we use this Chinese word (which literally means "aunt") for almost any woman in a blue-collar job.

Useful Things I Have Learned This Week

2009-02-27T19:21:00.004+08:00

1. If you take three things to the copy center and and ask them to make 115 copies of each, and then you accidentally leave your lesson plan there, the copy center staff, ever diligent (and unable to read much English), will make 115 copies of your lesson plan. These can then be used for paper hats.

2. If, while making a serious point in class during which is it crucial to have the attention of all sixty students, you accidentally launch a glob of spit onto a girl in the front row, your serious point will be lost in a chorus of shrieking and laughing.

3. If your class of sixty students is shrieking and laughing, and one girl in the front row is jumping up and down and wiping her coat with a kleenex, it will take a minimum of thirty seconds to restore order.

4. If the students' Chinese psychology teacher happens, out of an interest in English, to drop in on your class and observe your lesson, the students' responsiveness and attention to said lesson will increase markedly.

5. If you teach a critical thinking class in which your definition of logic plays a central role, and the same students in your English class the next day cannot recall that definition, nor any of the words therein, nor even if there be such a thing as logic, you will be disappointed. Don't take it too hard. You probably did that to your teachers, too.

6. If a student fails a test, sometimes she will cry. This is a bit awkward, but pretending to receive a phone call and rushing from the room is not the wisest course of action.

7. If you steal a french fry belonging to your wife and replace it with a lemon slice of roughly the same size and weight, she will still somehow see through this clever ruse. I recommend that you try this with your own spouses and resport the results; perhaps mine is preternaturally alert.

8. If your sister tells you that she is planning to make an explosive device "just for fun" when she visits her friends over the weekend, and you point out to her that this is completely insane and on the level of someone who says she is going to learn to juggle flaming chainsaws over the weekend, your sister will think you are angry.

9. If your exercise routine for the past three months has consisted of strolling down to the kitchen to see if there are any brownies left, pushups are hard to do.

10. A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.

Dave

P.S. You didn't really think I did that to the crying student, did you? I gave her a tissue. I mean, what else could I do?

Whatever You Do, Don't Click on the Penguins!

2009-02-18T23:19:00.003+08:00

This is entry number eleven on today’s to-do list: get group computer set up. Looks small and innocent enough, doesn’t it? But oh, how deceptive small sentences can be.

Most of the teachers who work here own their own laptop computer. One (a Mac cultist) even went so far as to lug his humongous Apple desktop in his suitcase. We also have a wheezing, grimy old group computer that sits in the kitchen. Mostly, it gets used when someone’s personal computer is acting up, or when you just want to check your email really quick in between chopping the carrots and stirring the pasta. At least, we did have a group computer. One day last semester, it let out a monstrous groan and went dark.

A few moments later there was a tap at my door. One of my colleagues stood there, looking apologetic. “Hey, Dave. Something’s wrong with the computer . . . ?” I get this a lot. I love computers. I worked in IT for six months, and I’ve studied for (though not yet taken) my A+ certification exams. In the land of the blind, they say, the one-eyed man is king. So I’m happy to tinker with people’s equipment – always have been. It’s an opportunity to help out. But with seventeen teachers, the position of unofficial computer support person is sometimes rather time-consuming. Especially in China.

You might think that since all of the computer equipment you own (usually down to the component parts) is stamped with MADE IN CHINA, working on computers in the far east would be essentially the same as working on computers in North America. You’d be wrong. Today’s computer setup (the group computer replacement) was pretty standard – I worked on it for three hours, and it’s almost functional.

Sure, we have our normal issues here – slow connections, mysterious error messages, and spam emails. But we also have more unusual difficulties. In the interests of helping computer users who may find themselves here in the Middle Kingdom, I shall enumerate some common problems and my recommended solutions.

1. Dancing penguins. In our offices, these are known as the Penguins of Death. The frolicking little beasts, which merrily skip about your open web browsers, are feared and loathed as harbingers of doom. With appropriate prayers and repeated virus scans, the deadly arctic fowl may be driven away. If they appear on your desktop when no browser is open, you have been Infected and your computer will soon die. Other users will shun you. Should you attempt to use a USB flash drive in someone else’s computer after being Infected, that person is within her rights to physically attack you to prevent you from doing so. There is no known cure for the Penguins of Death. I recommend that you format your hard drive, then take it out and burn it.

2. Printers. Perhaps there is a printer on your desk which is not printing your documents. This is by design, to encourage you to improve your penmanship. There is no printer paper, anyway. Only one computer in the entire building can print, and it belongs to Annie. She accepts Visa and Mastercard. I recommend Mastercard.

3. Windows Validation Notifier. You may be perturbed by the messages that constantly appear in the corner of your screen, telling you in a concerned-aunt tone of voice that your copy of Windows XP may not be legitimate. The only way to make these disappear is to actually purchase a valid copy of Windows. Unfortunately, only two such copies are available in all of China, and they are currently held up in customs. I recommend that you treat the message as a little in-joke between you and Bill Gates. Imagine him reading it and winking.

4. Cables. Not all computer cables (network cables, power cables, and the like) are created equal. Functional ones are produced in China and exported to the rest of the world for sale. Factory rejects are bundled in brightly-colored packaging and sent to Chinese retail. Connecting your computer to anything – the wall, another computer, the network, your mouse – is an exciting process, since you never know what will happen. I recommend that you smuggle some extra cables in your luggage when you come over to China from somewhere else. And bring some for me, will you?

5. The Internet. The network here is likely to be a low-cost solution. That means that using the internet is kind of like a hundred people with straws all trying to drink from one can of Coke. There isn’t that much to go around (unless you wake up at three in the morning and drink a bunch of Coke while the other hundred people are sleeping. This is a valid strategy and I recommend it if you don’t mind being up at three in the morning). You may also find that the port in the wall may suddenly decide to stop connecting you to the network. This problem can only be resolved by the Computer Staff Member. Unfortunately, our school has no Computer Staff. One will be dispatched within the week. I recommend that you take up Ping-Pong or knitting while you wait.

Dave

Roman Candles in Shanghai

2009-02-09T21:12:00.006+08:00

As I write this, I can hear the explosions. Some are close – just across the canal behind our school – and others farther away. Some are loud, booming reports that echo through the open spaces between buildings; others are fast strings of staccato pops, like the frenzied death knell of the world’s biggest roll of bubble wrap. It’s been going on since four thirty, and it will continue until midnight or so. If there’s one thing you can count on in a Chinese holiday, it’s fireworks.

Tonight is the Lantern Festival. I haven’t been in any Chinese homes today, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that there are lanterns aplenty. In our school (nadir of eastern values that it apparently is), there’s nary a one. I didn’t even realize that it was today until a student sent me a text message with holiday wishes. Really, though, the pretense doesn’t matter. People here just like to set off fireworks.

It was a little nerve-wracking for the first week or so of my time here in China. I kept thinking that I heard gunshots, and since there didn’t seem to be anything near our school to hunt (seeing as it’s all semi-suburban), I chalked it up to some kind of sporadic military exercise . . . or something. The first time I saw fireworks at night over the city, I poked my head out into the hall to alert my colleagues. “Hey, guys – there’re fireworks out there! What holiday is it?” My experienced co-workers shrugged indifferently. “Who knows?” said one. “Probably just a wedding or something.” “They shoot off fireworks for weddings?” I asked, somewhat incredulously. She laughed. “They shoot off fireworks for everything.”

It’s true. I hardly notice them now. There’s an old commune-style housing center directly across from our school. It’s surrounded by tiny patches of crops and inhabited by maybe ten families of farmers. But those ten families are shooting off firecrackers – and sometimes full-fledged rockets – at least a couple of times a month.

As you probably know, fireworks (a development of gunpowder) originated in China some 700 years ago. Since ancient times, they’ve been an expression of celebration and a symbol of good luck. The people here use them to celebrate weddings, birthdays, the arrival of a new child, the opening of a business, the completion of a building, and any number of other positive developments that fall along the same lines. And of course, for holidays.

In Canada, land of my youth, fireworks are a controlled substance, like industrial dynamite or nuclear warheads (OK, maybe not exactly like nuclear warheads). I remember as a child going with my parents to a hill overlooking Calgary and watching the feeble four-minute display of fireworks that City Hall put on to commemorate Canada Day.

In China, by contrast, I’m told that the fireworks are constant throughout the week-long New Year’s festival (the main event in the Chinese calendar). I told a friend last year that Des and I hadn’t been able to be in China for a New Year’s festival yet. “Lucky you,” he said, only half-joking. “At least you got some sleep.” “Was the partying that noisy?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it’s the fireworks. They never stop, and the noise keeps me up. I’m a mess at New Year’s.”

Of course people get hurt every year. In a city with sixteen million people, most of whom are interested in at least lighting a sparkler or two, simple math leads you to the conclusion that there will be some casualties. But even though I’ve mentioned that I’m not a fan of the lassiez-faire approach that the Chinese take toward safety, I think my homeland could learn a thing or two from them. Standing on my balcony with the wind in my face, with my wife snuggled up against me for warmth (and the occasional kiss), watching the lights blossom and shimmer on the dark horizon and listening to the all-percussion ensemble, it’s hard not to love it.

Dave

Don't Brust To Me. I'm Serious.

2009-02-05T09:59:00.004+08:00

I have four days left. In four days, a horde of students is going to descend upon my classrooms, filled with all the joie de vivre and enthusiasm for knowledge that you might expect from a post-holiday student, or possibly from a floor lamp. I have anticipated this difficulty, and I'm trying to get ready for them by making English IV as exciting as possible.

But before I can do that, I need to organize what I left behind in a hurry at the end of English III. As I'm poking through dangerously precarious stacks of student writing, I'm finding some good stuff.

As usual, a lot of it comes from students wrestling with slang. I taught them one slang phrase in each class: knock it off, what's up?, give me a break, chill out, take it easy, and the like. Students' brains, however, are often a bit like blenders: what you put in isn't exactly destroyed, it just doesn't come out in the same configuration.

That's why, when I asked them to write a sentence using the slang phrases above, I got answers like these, from the close . . .

I am working hard, so please give me a bread.
Just break me off!
You are bothering me. Cut it off.

. . . to the not-so-close.
I hope you will fed it out soon.
Don't brust to me.

Even specific questions didn't always pan out. Those irregular verbs are tough!
36. Write a sentence using the word 'dude.'
Answer: She dude the test carefully.

We spent some time last week visiting my parents in Canda. While we were there, my father picked up a bar of dark chocolate that was 99% cocoa. Inside the wrapper was a foil insert labelled "Tasting Guide," which purported to tell you how to enjoy chocolate that's 99% cocoa (short version: you'll probably hate it the first few times; just keep eating it until you like it). In the same vein, I offer you a reading guide to the final slang screw-up: for best results, imagine one of my students actually attempting to greet an English-speaking person using these words.

42. What is the slang phrase used to greet someone?
Answer: gerk
This is crossed out, and after a little space is written nerd.
This is again crossed out, followed by nut.
This is scratched out, and she finally decides on jerk, which she underlines for emphasis.

At any rate, I'd better get back to my piles of paper. I know I've been delinquent with this space, and I intend to improve it in the coming semester. Until then, give me a bread, OK? In fact, make it a whole sandwich. It's lunchtime over here.

Dave

All Grace

2009-01-16T10:51:00.002+08:00

Shanghai is the business and industrial capitol of China, and it shows. There are certainly enough impressive office towers and walled-off factory compounds to go around – they loom on every corner, with bored guards lounging in shacks by the entrances. But driving down the street, you’re likely to see just a few basic kinds of establishments: restaurants (of every shape and kind), shops selling 80’s-style clothing in appropriately tiny sizes, shops selling mobile phones, street vendors selling counterfeit DVDs, shops and street vendors selling bottled drinks and snacks, and places offering massages.

I was a little suspicious of the latter when I first arrived here in China. I’d been raised to believe that “massage parlor” was just a polite way of saying “brothel” (although I knew that there were legitimate masseuses out there; there was something suspicious about the word “parlor,” apparently). But it didn’t take me long to realize that unlike back home, everyone got massages in China.

I don’t know enough to say why, although I’d guess it’s related to the deeply ingrained Asian folk culture of health and holistic medicine. Whatever the reason, massages are popular, and massage shops ubiquitous. For about fifty yuan (nine dollars), a masseuse will rub, pound, knead, and otherwise abuse your back, neck, head, and shoulders for half an hour or so. That’s just the beginning. Most of these establishments also offer foot massages, aromatic oil massages, Japanese massages, pedicures, manicures, and a host of other more ominous-sounding services with names like “hot earwax cleansing” or “traditional physiotherapy.” It’s inexpensive enough that everyone can afford to have a massage once a month or so without putting a serious dent in her pocketbook. You can get them even cheaper if you’re not too picky about how clean the place is.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really notice storefronts offering massages. They’re just part of the landscape of our semi-urban Chinese lives. But for the past two days, I haven’t been living my normal semi-urban Chinese life. Since we’re expecting our first child sometime around the end of June (for those of you that I thought I told already, but didn’t – surprise!), Desiree and I thought we’d do one last weekend getaway, just the two of us, and explore a little bit of this gargantuan city that we live in. We booked a nice, relatively low-cost hotel just off the Bund, the old and glamorous riverfront drive that makes up the heart of Shanghai. We’ve spent the time looking at French colonial architecture, sneaking pictures of the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, and wandering around old streets.

We were walking back to our hotel Monday evening after snooping around some beautiful European Concession buildings on the waterfront and eating Japanese noodles for dinner. We wanted to get something to drink, so we made for the lights of a small convenience store about a block from our hotel. Having purchased a few suitable beverages, we strolled back down the street through scattered Chinese commuters. I glanced idly up at the lighted storefronts as we passed them: a collection of dirty shops selling socks, phone cards, or battered tools arranged in plastic trays, each with a bundled-up shopkeeper staring vacantly into a tiny television on the counter. A massage shop caught my eye for professional reasons: three-foot letters along the top of the window read MGSAGGE, accompanied by a string of Chinese characters. I grinned and looked past the sign into the store. It was normal enough: a front desk, two low couches with a glass coffee table, a few sick-looking office plants in the corners, and a doorway leading into the back. Three remarkably attractive young ladies were perched on the couches, waiting for customers. They were laughing – one of them had apparently just made a joke. Another of the girls was bent over, wiping the glass coffee table with a rag, and I noticed intricate inked patterns swirling across her shoulders and upper arms. “Cool tattoos,” I commented to Desiree, nodding at the girl. “What makes them cool?” my wife shot back playfully. I was preparing a suitably witty reply when I glanced one final time into the shop and immediately looked away again. On the back wall was a huge poster that would have been more at home in the pages of Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition, or worse.

I was momentarily puzzled as I stepped around an electrical pole and dodged an oncoming cyclist. Then everything clicked in my mind: the shocking poster, the massage shop in the middle of the hotel district, and three beautiful young women wearing skimpy summer clothes in January.

I’ve never seen a prostitute before, to my knowledge. I knew they existed, of course. I’ve seen suspicious pamphlets in Chinese hotel rooms marked “Spa – Men Only” with spa prices ten times the normal amounts. I’ve even heard stories from friends about getting phone calls in their rooms from strange women when they check in. But I’d never encountered one myself.

There was something deeply disquieting about seeing them there, clustered all together on the end of the couch, looking for all the world like a group of my fresh-faced nursing students giggling over some secret joke. I can see them now in my mind’s eye – just waiting for customers; ready to sell their attentions to the next out-of-town businessman who walks through the door. Ready to sell themselves.

What must it take, to press a hot iron onto your conscience night after night, to feel the disapproving glances of the grandmothers who hurry past your shop or to meet the gaze of little girls who peer curiously and innocently through the glass? What must it take to enter into employment in such a business – to walk into the shop for the first time, to meet the other girls, to check out the magazines, to have your outfit inspected as though it were a costume in a play?

I can answer that question. It takes humanity. It takes a fallen, cursed nature that rebels against the law written in our hearts. It’s the same human nature that it takes to enter such a place of business and to put your money down on the counter as though this woman were selling a haircut or a loaf of bread, and to push from your mind the fact that she has brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles; that she attended elementary school somewhere; that she frets over the price of makeup and has a beloved cat named MoMo; and that she is not simply a tool for temporary amusement.

I felt weary as we walked back into the hotel, and I cast sideways glances at everyone I met, suspecting them of the most heinous sins. Those girls disturbed me because I knew that I was not different. Deeply entrenched in my soul is the same deviant impulse that rips at the restraints of conscience and that calls out eagerly to temptations, “Yes! Take me with you!” That impulse is what it takes to beat down conscience, self-respect, and public morality for the sake of money or pleasure.

And even in the midst of those disturbing thoughts, I felt thankful. Not, God forbid, that I am not as other men, even as this prostitute, for I fast twice a week and give tithes of all that I get. But instead that He has been merciful to me even though I am like her. I am no less desperately wicked inside – inside, where it counts. And in spite of that, He loves me. He has rescued me from the enemy. One day, He will utterly liberate me of that wrongness and I will be free indeed.

And I hope – I ask – that He’ll do the same for them. Maybe one day I’ll meet that girl with the tattoos again at the foot of His throne, and I’ll give her a hug and we’ll talk about how it happened. I know it will have been grace – all grace.

Dave

The Awesomeness of Nonsense

2008-11-10T16:47:00.003+08:00

Sure, it's not always awesome. I should know -- I read a lot of it. But sometimes, nonsense is really great.

Seen on a student's sweatshirt:
Sometimes I think your girlfriend is THE ONE.
(And frankly, imagining Keanu Reeves as anyone's girlfriend is kind of scary. Awesomely scary.)

On the side of a trendy-looking green and white tote bag:
Minutemen Meatpuppets Descendants Angst
(That is some awesomely post-modern poetry right there. Or possibly words chosen at random; it's hard to say.)

In a description of the movie Wuthering Heights:
This movie is full of agon-blessedness and crackdown.
(Not just agon-blessedness. That would be awesome enough. But crackdown! What more could a moviegoer ask for?)

Explaining the sentence "She didn't come, but it's not a big deal":
It means she didn't come, but it's not a brain sample.
(No, no, it's not. That would be too awesome for my test.)

Asked to use a slang word in a sentence:
I always play computer games, so my friends call me Chuck.
(There's a superficial resemblance between the name "Chuck" and the word "geek," so that may be what she was going for, but I prefer to think that "Chuck" is the new and awesome word for people who play computer games.)

Attempting to make a sentence with the word "awesome":
I want to awesome something.

Really, what more awesome use of language could you imagine than to turn awesome from an adjective (a superlatively useful one, admittedly) into a verb? That's some awesome nonsense.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to awesome these papers.

Dave

China Sidelights II: Food Too Cute to Eat

2008-11-04T15:33:00.005+08:00

It's been a while since I wrote anything about our summer trip, and you may have forgotten about it entirely. Even I may have forgotten. But what better way to escape the bleakness of late fall than to relive the memories of an exciting summer trip? Our intrepid group of five world travellers had seen the Forbidden City, climbed the Great Wall, feasted on Beijing duck, gazed upon the Ming Tombs, and marvelled at the details of the Terra Cotta Army™. That kind of stuff works up an appetite.

So it was, then, that with the Terra Cotta Army™ behind us, we arrived back at our hotel, footsore and hungry. We showered, changed, and met our guide (the impossibly perky Tracy) out front for some traditional Xi’an cuisine.

Tracy led us across the square, through a street-crossing tunnel, and across another square to our destination. The restaurant owners weren’t shy about their capabilities: the sign (which took up nearly the entire front wall) proclaimed that The Legendary DeFa Chang Restaurant is Renowned for its Superior Delicious Dumplings.

That’s right – dumplings! Like Beijing, Xi'an also has a food specialty. Tracy informed us that at one point Xi’an was the home of an emperor who had a particular fondness for the little delicacies and whose staff satisfied his cravings by creating eight hundred varieties of them. I say “an emperor” because I have sadly been unable to trace this tradition any farther than our irrepressible guide. But historically accurate or not, the results are the same: the Xi’an Dumpling Feast. If Xi’an were a city in the United States, the welcome center would hand out literature proclaiming it to be the “Home of the Dumpling” and it would have a water tower in the shape of a two hundred foot tall pot-sticker.

Whether because that would be tacky in the imperial capitol or because the Chinese are just behind the times when it comes to water towers, the only evidence of the Xi’anese specialty are a profusion of restaurants, each attempting to out-boast the others in signage.

Tracy saw to it that we were comfortably seated, ordered the appropriate feast for us, and cheerfully bowed out, leaving five Westerners, two Chinese waitresses, and a vast array of steamed dumplings. They would bring two or three woven paper-lined serving dishes, each of which contained five of some particular variety of dumpling. When we had each consumed our assortment, the servers would whisk the dishes away and bring out a new set.

The servers spoke no real English, but they had a nice system: when a new dish was brought out, the younger girl would step forward and say “Excuse me!” Once she had gotten our attention, she would point to the various dishes and say things like “Chicken. Pork. Vegetable.” Then she would leave us to our food. Sometimes, even her identifications were unidentifiable. I feel quite sure that once she pointed to a plate of dumplings and said “Excuse me! Garbage.”

After a few rounds of this, Brian tried to strike up a conversation with her while she was going through her routine. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asked, just as she said “Excuse me!” She stared back, uncomprehending and clearly thrown off by the interruption. “Your name?” he repeated, slowly and clearly. “My name—“ (indicating himself) “—is Brian. What is your name?” She frowned, as though greatly irritated, and loudly replied “Excuse me! Tomato! Beef!” Then she whirled on her heel and strode off, leaving us to console Brian by laughing uproariously.

The dumplings, eighteen kinds in all, were exquisite both in form and taste. There were spinach dumplings, tomato-and-pepper dumplings, duck dumplings (shaped like little ducks), fish dumplings, and apparently garbage dumplings (which were fantastic). Our final course was lucky soup, which contained perhaps a dozen miniature dumplings about the size of blueberries, and which conferred good fortune based on how many dumplings you happened to ladle out into your dish – without looking, of course!

As we were leaving, Desiree stopped at the display table by the front door. “Oh, look!” she squealed. “Even more cute little dumplings! Oh, we didn’t get the ones shaped like fish . . . and look – frog dumplings! I want to take them home with me!” Since that was apparently not an option, she had to settle for taking pictures.

I close with a personal recommendation: the Beijing duck was good, and worth trying. But the dumplings were awesome. If you have the good fortune to live in the region of a Xi’an style dumpling restaurant, I urge you to go and order the dumpling feast. You shall not be disappointed.

And seriously, try those garbage ones. They’re great.

Dave

P.S. Either my connection or Blogger is being dumb right now . . . pictures coming soon.

P.P.S. OK, two days later I still can't add pictures. It says "your picture has been uploaded!" Except . . . it hasn't. I'll keep working on it. In the meantime, just imagine some really cute and delicious-looking food.

P.P.P.S. Finally! Hooray for Blogger!

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Blog . . .

2008-10-24T15:18:00.000+08:00

I’m not really happy about using the blog for public service announcements, but here it is anyway. For our friends living in Greenville, this seemed the best way to tell you that we will not be in South Carolina again until August.

I know we had planned to do stuff – I know! And I apologize for canceling it. I especially apologize to those of you with whom we had already canceled. But we wouldn’t be doing things this was if we didn’t think it was important.

We have an opportunity that I can’t really get into here on the blog, and it requires that we go to Canada during our winter holiday. Since the holiday is only two weeks long, that doesn’t really leave time for much else. Actually, it doesn’t leave time for anything else. We’ll be flying more or less straight to Calgary, and we’ll stay there for the duration.

Suffice it to say that we love you all, and we’ll miss you very much. We look forward to seeing you all again at the end of this school year. Until then, there’s always Skype!

Dave

Bam! Hamburger!

2008-10-18T15:26:00.009+08:00

First, I apologize for my dreadful delinquency. It's been three weeks since my last post -- I know, I know! I'm beating my head on my desk right now. Seriously. I mean, I was when I wrote this.

Anyway, I'll have a for-real post coming later. Now, let me try to appease you with more wacky massacring of the English language. We've just begun rehearsals for this year's Christmas play: an adaption of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. There were some hilarious misreadings during the auditions, and more than once I had to pretend to scratch my nose to hide my grin.

Student A, reading Scrooge: Why are you here?
Student B, reading Marley: Because I'm crazed!
Me, scratching my nose: That's cursed, girls. Cursed.

Later . . .
Student c, reading Scrooge: Merry Christmas? Bam! Hamburger!
Me, scratching furiously: Bah, like in bottle. And it's not hamburger, it's humbug.

Still later . . .
Student A, still reading Scrooge: Why are you cursed? You were always a good businesswoman.
Student B, still reading Marley and getting confused about my previous correction: I cursed too much about business! I should have cursed more about the people around me!
Me: (Unable to speak, shaking from silent laughter, covering my face and waving at the girls to continue)

That was two weeks ago. Right now, I'm grading another rather humorous assignment. I showed the (very) short film Lifted to my students last week and asked them to describe what was happening; you may remember it as the hilarious animated short that went with the Pixar movie Ratatouille, in which a hapless alien struggles futilely to pass a human-abduction exam while his instructor looks on.

Problem is, the word 'alien' is apparently not in my students' vocabulary. I've gotten quite a range of alternatives, though:

> There are two ET in the UFO.
> The strange person want to take the boy out of his room.
> Two organisms come to Earth.
> One monster want to take the human out.
> Two nonhuman beings download the earth.
> A small creature and a fat creature try to take a person.
> Two frogs come in a UFO.
> There are a big green and a small green.
> The small hero wanted to let a sleepy man come out of the house.
> A stranger animal wants to operate the machine.
> Two cartoons live the UFO.
> The beasts are in a plant. (Plant, plane, what's the difference?)
> The mechian person controlled the real person. (I don't know what she meant either)
> We can see two fingers in a fly ship which is like a plate. (I have no idea what she was going for, but 'finger' was definitely not it)>

. . . but no alien! Such are the difficulties of the English language. Until next time (which I promise will be sooner!),

Dave

What a strange teacher we have . . .

2008-09-29T13:37:00.003+08:00

One of the more common things that we do in an attempt to improve our students’ listening skills is dictation. This consists of reading a passage to the class while they attempt to write it down. Sounds simple, but amongst the reasonably accurate transcriptions there are sometimes rather bizarre (and occasionally unprintable) typos. Grading them can be a hilariously Mad-Gab-like exercise.

This is what the students thought I was saying as I dictated a paragraph about our vacation at the beach.

I didn’t want to go to the beech, because I thought it would be boiling. (True . . . boiling trees can be dangerous. Of course, I meant boring.)

I realized that the ocean and the sand and some guy were actually all very preteen. (Ten points if you can figure out what I said.)

I relaxed in red and interesting book.

We cut many animals that live in the water, such as carbs. (It was a very violent, but low-calorie, vacation.)

I was sorry to live. (That's what a relaxing week at the beach can do to you, folks)

Dave

UPDATE: Alfredo (see the comments section) has guessed correctly. Ten points for you, Alfredo. You can redeem those for flights starting at fifteen thousand points.

China Sidelights I: Duck . . . but NOT RICE!

2008-09-16T22:37:00.003+08:00

The Chinese take their food very seriously, as well they might. We benighted North Americans tend to think of Chinese food as takeout – sweet and sour whatever, various permutations of chicken, some rice, and an egg roll or two on the side. And, of course, fortune cookies. That is rather a misrepresentation of authentic Chinese food.

The Chinese have eight major schools of cuisine (or ten, if you include Beijing and Shanghai as separate schools) that are as different from each other as Amish from Tex-Mex. Each style has a dozen or more signature dishes that range from volcano-hot stewed tofu to live shrimp soaked in liquor. A formal meal here, no matter what style of cuisine is being observed, is an impressive sight to behold, and a far more impressive feat to consume (as you're aware if you’ve been following this blog).

Knowing this, we wanted to sample the specialty food of each locale that we visited. We started with Beijing Duck (sometimes called Peking Duck) in, uh, Beijing. We asked our tour guide in for directions to a good duck place near our hotel, and finally found the place some three blocks away. Its sign was nearly hidden beneath a mass of brass plaques, each one denoting an award won or some government recognition achieved. This looked promising, so we strolled in and were directed by a veritable conveyer belt of bowing, gesturing waiters and hostesses to a table near the kitchen.

Beijing duck is a pleasantly simple meal, which is good, since we had to order it all in English, and the servers were clearly not used to tourists. We ordered duck for five people, and then sat around sipping Coke and waiting for the arrival of the unfortunate waterfowl.

In perhaps ten minutes, a businesslike chef appeared, pushing a cart topped with a platter bearing our duck. It had roasted to a crispy and mouth-watering brown, and smelled delicious. Without so much as a glance at us, the chef got to work slicing the meat off of the bone in small, thin strips. As he did so, a stream of smiling servers brought us dainty plates bearing slivers of carrot, celery, and cucumber, and shallow bowls filled with the tangy black sauce for which Beijing duck is known. There was also a wooden dish containing something like flour tortillas, but very small and so thin that they were translucent.

In fact, Beijing duck is eaten a bit like a burrito – the thin tortilla-things are filled with an assortment of vegetable slivers, a few slices of roast duck, and a daub or two of black sauce, then rolled up and devoured by the discerning gourmet. It is, as the Chinese would say, very delicious.

Unfortunately for us, not all present were discerning gourmets – at least, not in the eyes of our Chinese hostess. Our companion Brian, hungry from sight-seeing and less concerned with authenticity than with sustenance, ordered a bowl of rice to go with dinner. So far, so good. When it arrived, however, he decided to supplement the diminutive little wraps, and began spooning a generous helping of it into his wrap. He was interrupted in this operation by a cry from behind our table – the hostess had spotted us.

“No, no!” she said, rushing to the aid of the hapless (and obviously clueless) American tourist who was about to ruin his culinary experience. “No” being the limit of her English, she communicated through gestures and a torrent of passionate Chinese that putting rice in one’s duck wrap was Not A Good Thing and was Not Done by cultured people. She then slowly coached Brian through the process of undoing his mistake, obviously concerned that he be educated out of his barbarism.

Brian (amid gales of laughter from his unsympathetic friends) objected that he didn’t care if it was the right way to do it or not – he was hungry! After a few fruitless rounds of protest, however, he caved in and meekly allowed the hostess to direct him.

Having cast her pearls before swine, the hostess retired, leaving Brian to furtively stuff rice back into his tortilla and cram it into his mouth before she could catch him. The exchange may not have been culturally sensitive (on either side), but I think it was the funniest dinner show I’ve ever seen.

And when combined with the fine two-liter bottle of Coke, it proved to be more than worthy of all the brass-plate endorsements I can imagine. What more could the discerning gourmet wish for?

Dave

Mixed Messages: T-shirt sighting of the day

2008-09-10T12:14:00.002+08:00

One cute little freshman was wearing a black t-shirt. On the front, in white block letters, was ARMY.

On the back, at the very top, in small glittering gold script, was call me pusspuss.

I guess she's trying to tap that aggro-cute vibe. Or something.

Dave

Vocabulary mayhem

2008-09-09T13:41:00.007+08:00

We gave an evaluation test to the incoming freshmen last week. Whereas many of them decided to leave certain questions blank, a few brave souls attempted to write sentences for the vocabulary words we gave them.

Some were successful. Others . . . well, others were successful in making me smile while grading this afternoon. Here are some gems of malapropism.

Sneak is a very dangerous animal.

Young people should not eat more sneaks.

(No, because that would be canabalism.)

This kind of sneak is very popular with students.

Nowdays, more and more young people are interested in sneak.

Don’t tube anybody.

Tube it right now!

(To tube, or not to tube . . . ?)

English is a very important curse to students.

(Hmmm . . . I’ll assume she meant course.)

My study life is very busy. I have many curses.

Finally, the doctor cursed the patient.

She accurated me because I didn’t open the window before I left.

(And this is an example of why English is just so tricky. I believe that the student accurately identified accurate as a synonym of correct. Correct, however, can be a verb, while accurate . . . well, you know the rest of that English lesson.)

I revive the cake happily.

I have revived the book.

In order to develop my English, we should revive my English after the class.

I want to ask my friend to tell me about the meaning of devastate.

(But I’m glad you didn’t—because that would be cheating.)

Desiree

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair

2008-09-03T15:12:00.008+08:00

There’s nothing after a hot day of climbing the Great Wall of China than to head back into town and get into a refreshing . . . train. Actually, I can think of several things more refreshing than a train, but since we were determined to see all of China’s cultural relics in as little time as possible, a train was what we got. Another overnight train, to be specific – this one from Beijing to Xi’an.

One of the things that Des and I really liked about our trip was that Beijing and Xi’an are, in many ways, the opposite of Shanghai: ancient, storied, and steeped in cultural history. Shanghai, by contrast, is a thoroughly modern metropolis with practically no history at all – it wasn’t even a walled city until 1553. Of course, it's got to mean something that one of the upstart young settlements in China is twice as old as some people's whole country.

The first amazing thing that we were taken to see was the famous Wild Goose Pagoda, built at the beginning of the 6th century by Empress Wu in honor of the monk Xuanzang. No doubt you’re nodding your heads in recognition right now. The Pagoda (so named because – no joke – a bunch of wild geese once flew by it) is actually a large compound containing not only the pagoda, but also a library, temple, art museum, interpretive center, some very nice bathrooms, and a few dozen Buddhist monks. It was all pretty enough, but I mostly spent a lot of time wandering around, looking at the extremely extensive embossed brass paneling that detailed the life and enlightenment of Xuanzang and trying to figure out what on earth was going on. So now he’s on an elephant – and who are these women with what look like laser beams shooting out of their heads? – and why is this guy on fire? If anyone from the Wild Goose Pagoda interpretive center is reading this, please! Put some of those signs in English!

As thrilling as the legendary Wild Goose Pagoda was, however, surely there can hardly be a greater artifact of Chinese cultural heritage than The Terra Cotta Soldiers™ (yes, I know, I said all the same stuff about the Wall last week. I’m telling you, that’s what it’s like to travel in China!). So famous are the crumbled members of this army that you can buy terra cotta warriors of all shapes and sizes virtually everywhere. In Xi’an, however, the marketing of these earthen individuals is particularly egregious. Before we could be taken to the actual tomb of Qin Shi Huang and see the actual army which he actually ordered to be built for him, we first had to go to the Terra Cotta Soldiers™ Factory, from which millions of warriors, great and small, pour forth every year. Several thousand of those warriors, I estimate, were thrust under my nose to the shouted chorus of “Three dollar! Very nice!” As an aside, it’s always bad when you’re quoted prices in USD. Very bad.

Having escaped from the factory with my wallet unscathed, however, (much to the chagrin of the factory workers) we made our way to the tomb, which we learned is an active dig site where archaeologists (who must have had the day off when we were there) are busily extracting the remainder of the army. It was not really what I had expected, and though I very much enjoyed it, I suspect that Desiree was a bit disappointed. “I thought it would be underground,” she said more than once. “This is just like a big gym.” Which, in all fairness, it was. It was like a big, hot gym crowded with thousands of people and a few hundred priceless relics.

The warriors themselves, though rather farther away than I would have liked, were just as interesting as I had imagined. Indeed, the whole tomb was amazing – Qin Shi Huang (whom you may remember from earlier posts was the first emperor of unified China) ordered construction to begin the year after his ascension to the throne of the Qin kingdom, at the tender young age of 22, which seems to me to be a bit young to be pondering your ultimate demise. Maybe he was just morbid.

At any rate, it seems that one can have quite an impressive tomb built if one is willing to wait for thirty-six years. In fact, the only Qin building that rivaled his tomb was reputed to be his five-kilometer-long palace, which was unfortunately burned shortly after his death. The Terra Cotta guys aren't all of the mausoleum -- not by a long shot. It seems that Qin's actual resting place (the central mound of which the pottery army is only a fringe decoration) was built as a miniature replica of his earthly kingdom, complete with jeweled constellations studding the roof and flowing rivers of mercury. I was crushed to learn that this central tomb has not yet been excavated, although the archaeologists' scanning devices (X-rays, ultrasonic rays, Ouija boards, or who knows what) have given them some confidence that the tomb is undisturbed. Of course, the automated poison crossbow traps (not kidding) may have helped with that.

It is rather ironic, though, that a man as capable and ambitious as Qin Shi Huang should have met such an end. He survived numerous assassination attempts, but this king of kings, who was such a tyrant that he tried to burn all the books and execute all the scholars in all of China, apparently died from swilling mercury pills that his court doctors hoped would make him immortal.

Now, his big fancy tomb is swarmed every day by zillions of camera-wielding tourists and local entrepreneurs hoping to make a quick buck selling replicas of the replicas of the soldiers that he condemned to guard him for all eternity. Kind of funny, really.

Dave

What? No Escalator?!

2008-08-25T16:23:00.006+08:00

After we left the Ming Tombs, our little group headed for that most famous symbol of the Orient: the Great Wall of China. I asked Samantha, our guide, how often she came to the Wall. "Two or three times a week," she replied. "And you climb it every time?" I asked. "No!" she responded with a short laugh. "I will be so tired!" I laughed too, little realizing that the joke was soon to be on me.

Like many of the great engineering feats of ancient China, the Wall was built over a long time; in fact, there have been several walls constructed at different periods in Chinese history. The most popular existing wall (the one you generally see in pictures) was built by the Mings, starting in the mid-15th century. Whether you're a history buff or not, though, the Great Wall is impressive -- extremely impressive. As is so often the case, pictures do not adequately convey the sense of size and weight that you feel when you stand at the base of the Wall, or the awe that washes over you when you realize that the little line running over the hills on the horizon is still the Great Wall.

(I pause to insert a myth-busting parenthesis here: claims that the Wall is visible from the moon are true only if you have had your eyes surgically enhanced with telescopes. It would be comparable to seeing a human hair from two miles away. It is possible to see the Wall from low Earth orbit. Barely. On a crystal-clear day. If you know exactly where to look.)

We went to the Badaling section of the wall. The gates there protected the Imperial capitol, Beijing, from invasion through a strategic mountain pass, and trust me, it would take some serious invading to get through that twenty-five foot high wall. If I'd been a barbarian, I would have just turned right back around and gone home. In fact, the thought crossed my mind as I gazed up -- and up and up -- at the stairs leading from the lowest gate to the first guard tower. Great Wall of China my foot. They should call it the Great Ladder of China. It seems incredible to me that armies, no matter what their condition, could have ever marched across the Wall. It's not that it's too narrow; on the contrary, it's about fifteen feet wide in most places. The problem is that it's ridiculously steep and completely uneven. The average height of a step is probably about double or triple that of a normal staircase like you might have in your home, but each stair is different. One will be six inches high, the next one two feet high, the next eighteen inches, and so on. The widths of the steps varies in a similar manner. Fortunately, the Chinese (not the Mings, but our present administration) have helpfully bolted a handrail to the Wall. This makes thing much easier, but is not always as useful as it may seem, since the steepness of the stairs means that the handrail is sometimes at knee height or lower for a tall man. And yes, I'm a tall man.

Don't get me wrong. The Wall is absolutely worth doing. But for a person with acrophobia, it's quite a feat to get down. Getting up is simply a matter of having enough leg power -- not a problem. Getting down is all about willpower.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I'm writing this post, however, I did make it down eventually. I rewarded myself with a bottle of water, which was available for quadruple the normal price, along with Great Wall t-shirts, Great Wall Commemorative Photos, Great Wall plushies, Great Wall keychains, and the ever-popular red star caps, which seems to show up nearly anywhere there are tourist stands.

Samantha popped up eventually, smiling and looking fresh. "Where were you?" I asked, wondering if there was some kind of lounge where tour guides chatted and sipped iced drinks while their clients dragged themselves, gasping and wheezing, up the worn flagstones of the Wall. "Over there," she replied, waving in the direction of a nondescript hillside. Considering that she'd been gone for three hours, I suspect that my original guess was correct. They probably have closed-circuit TVs in the lounge so that they can keep track of their tourists and take bets on which ones will plummet to their doom or be run over by those infuriating adventurer types who disdain the handrail and always seem to be descending at a run, leaping over three steps at a time like mountain goats and talking and laughing with their friends in some European language while they're doing it.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Dave

A Brief Exercise in Historical Imagination (Beijing Continued)

2008-08-14T04:34:00.012+08:00

By the dawning of our third day in Beijing, we knew the drill pretty well. We met Samantha in the lobby, and were soon on our way for the most important step of the tour -- getting all the tourists from the lobby. It took an hour and a half of driving around the city to retrieve our tour group, which consisted of a nice family of Austrians who didn't speak much english, and a nice family of English people who didn't speak any German, and us.

We started off at the Ming Tomb (actually one of multiple Ming Tomb sites; ours was the Chang Ling tomb). The centerpiece of the site was a gigantic marble stele inscribed with the name and deeds of the emperor. The stele was a dingy red color and covered with scratches and faded graffiti. Samantha caught my questioning look and said, "Yes, long ago this monument was white. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards came here and tried to destroy it. They burned it and stained it red."

This is the kind of thing you hear a lot on a tour of China. For those of you who don't know much about Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution was a movement whose stated goal was "to rid China of its liberal bourgouise elements." In practical terms, it encompasses more or less a decade of violence, chaos, and destruction beginning in 1966, peaking in 1969, and (in most people's minds) ending with the arrest of four of its key proponents in 1976. Gangs of semi-legitimized thugs (the Red Guards) swarmed over the country closing schools, shutting down businesses, destroying relics of Chinese history, plundering people's belongings, and humiliating, beating, or killing those whom they decided were not sufficiently enthusiastic about the reign of the proletariat. As you may have guessed, the only sure-fire way to be sufficiently enthusiastic was to participate. Apart from the apalling human cost of the Cultural Revolution, many artefacts of China's unrivalled history were damaged or lost. Such as? Well, a home and temple compound was almost completely destroyed and its scrolls burned by a rampaging mob of students and staff from Beijing Normal University; it had belonged to a prominent ancient philosopher named Kong Fuzi. You may know him as Conficius.

So I wasn't surprised that the Red Guards had made an attempt on an imperial tomb. I did find it vaguely amusing, however (as I have at other places) that these thugs were so ineffective. Here's what apparently happened -- some young punks are hankering to go out and break things and hurt people (all in the name of revolution, naturally), and one of them says, "Hey! The tombs of those Ming oppressors are just a day's hike or so! Let's go smash 'em!" (of course, he said it in Chinese). His cohorts enthusiastically follow, and they kick the gates in, shouting revolutionary slogans and waving their revolutionary implements of destruction. They chop up the available woodwork and line up to spit on the imperial altar. Then they head for the stele -- it would be the most obvious target for destruction, since it's a twenty-by-five-by-ten slab of white marble. "Haha!" they shout, as they kick it and hack at it with their crowbars. "Take that, you capitalist-road filth! No-one will revere your memory any longer! Long live the rule of the people!" After about fifteen minutes, this gets a little old, and they decided to actually break the thing, not just take a few small chips out of it. "Ok, who brought the heavy equipment?" says the leader. "Ropes? Block and tackle?" Everyone looks around at each other and there's a long silence. "This pig isn't worth our time!" pipes up one of them eventually. "Let's just burn it!" A cheer goes up. They build a fire around the slab, scribble graffiti like WANG WAS HERE AND SPITS ON THE EMPEROR, sing a few revolutionary songs, and wander off in search of a doctor to beat up.

Ultimately, however, the most devastating rebuttal to the Cultural Revolution isn't a Canadian making fun of it; it's the fact that virtually no-one cares about the art and aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution, but millions of people (foreign and Chinese) pour into these sites every year to admire the splendor of those parts of Chinese heritage that endured every attempt to destroy them. History is not without a sense of irony.

But seriously, setting fire to a marble slab? That was dumb.

Dave

Beijing: Louis XIV was an amateur

2008-08-05T00:19:00.007+08:00

Day two in Beijing began at the Guanzhou Hotel's breakfast buffet, where my father-in-law was anxiously waiting. Dad Werner is serious about food (when we were planning our wedding reception dinner, he told us that the meal had to be good, "because years later, nobody will remember who got married, but they'll remember the food."), and as we strolled out of the elevator, he trotted up to meet us.
"I came down here at 6:00 to check things out," he said confidentially. "They were just setting up, but they let me in to have a look. Seems like a real classy joint. Got a lot of Chinese food, though."
Dad was correct -- the joint was as classy as I could have wished for, and the food was delicious.

Our guide -- an endearing and informative girl named Samantha -- met us in the lobby and we soon found ourselves stepping out of the bus and into the back gate of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City, palace of the Chinese emperors, sits in the middle of Beijing and was built over a period of fifteen years (starting in 1406) by more than one million workers. Its moat, walls, and 980 buildings(originally totaling 9,999 and a half rooms) cover an area of 720 hectares -- and that's just the palace area itself, not the three huge parks that border it on three sides.

Now let those numbers sink in for a moment. One. Million. Workers. That's roughly the same size as the entire U.S. Army. All in one place. For fifteen years. Building a home and an office. For one family.

The numbers don't really do it justice, either. The Forbidden City is absolutely colossal, and each imposing gateway or stunning courtyard vista seems to open onto another just like it. Samantha told us that more than 10,000 people lived in the palace during the height of the Qing dynasty. It was cool to imagine uniformed officials hurrying this way and that while soldiers drilled in the courtyards and tittering concubines pretended not to admire them. Since there were probably ten thousand tourists there, it wasn't too hard.

Our tour group was great. Aside from the five of us, there was a Romanian flight attendant on a day trip and a family of Canadians (from Calgary -- small world, huh?) exploring their Chinese heritage. The three little girls (Stephanie, Sandra, and Melissa) were adorable and, considering that our day consisted of six-ish hours of walking in the heat, very well-behaved. We were delighted to be able to speak in english to children after being in Shanghai with college students for four months, and as kids are wont to do, they came up with some real gems. "Wow!" exclaimed Sandra as she was shown a replica of a Qing emperor's silk ceremonial robe complete with gold embroidery. "That's a really big t-shirt!"

The little girls also seemed very pleased to learn that Desiree was my wife, and immediately set about pushing Brian and Lena (our Romanian flight attendant friend) into a similarly blissful state.
"Are you married too?" inquired five-year old Melissa as Lena and Brian were snapping photos of the Temple of Heaven. Upon being informed that they were not married, she opined thoughtfully, "Well, you look like you're married. Maybe you should get married."
"What a naughty girl you are!" retorted Lena, laughing.

The Imperial Summer Palace (a few miles up the road and our final destination for the day) was only slightly less impressive than the Forbidden City. Samantha ushered us through the gate and along a beautiful covered walkway, explaining that no-one but the emperor and those to whom he specifically gave permission were ever permitted inside the walls of the Imperial Palaces. As the walkway opened onto a beautiful view of a broad, placid lake bisected by a shaded causeway and ringed with verdant hills, I exclaimed, "This looks just like Hangzhou!" (Hangzhou is another ancient imperial center near Shanghai which we have visited before.)
"Yes," replied Samantha, "the emperor liked Hangzhou so much that he built the summer palace as a replica. The lake and the hills are man-made."
We are not talking about a small lake here, people. We crossed on a boat to an island in the center and it took us ten minutes.
"Wow," muttered Dad, an excavator by trade. "All with hand tools, too."

There were loud lamentations on the way back to the hotel when our little friends (the smallest of whom we had been taking turns to carry around all day) discovered that we were not going with them on the next leg of their trip.
"But I want to go with Desiree!" moaned Sandra, and grumped around the bus until she fell asleep.
Melissa contented herself with playing with my beard (quite a novelty, apparently, since her father didn't have one) while Stephanie asked each person in turn which animal they would like to be and why. She wanted to be a hippopotamus, herself, "because no-one would bother me. Actually, or maybe a turtle. Or a kitty cat."

We were sorry to see our new-found friends go, but comforted ourselves with ice cream and thoughts of the Great Wall to come. I was not entirely comforted, but it was probably because Dairy Queen was out of blackberry.

Dave

Beijing: The Saga Begins

2008-07-24T05:26:00.007+08:00

One of the most common questions that I get from inquisitive Chinese friends is, "Have you travelled in China?" I don't know if this is a formal question to which no real answer is expected (like "Have you eaten?" Now that can be confusing if you're not ready for it, since it sounds to North American ears like an invitation). Whether it is or not, I have always reluctantly answered "Not much . . . but someday soon I will!"

It was with great anticipation, then, that I peered through the window as we trundled out of the Shanghai Railway Station and commenced our ten-day, mostly-inclusive, fully-featured tour of China's Highlights. Desiree and I were accompanied by her parents (seasoned world travellers in their own right, though this was their first trip to Asia) and our friend and fellow teacher Brian.

The first leg of our trip was an eleven-hour train ride to Beijing, the capitol city of China. The train was a "soft sleeper" which departed at eight-thirty p.m. or so, and the plan was to sleep all night on the train and arrive in Beijing feeling fresh, happy, and ready for a day of sight-seeing. I was skeptical. No matter how soft the included beds may be, I am far taller and wider than the average Chinese citizen for which they were designed. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when the couch/beds on the train turned out to be just long enough for me to stretch out for a decent snooze. True, my slumber was more fitful than what I get from the average hotel bed, but the average hotel doesn't usually get up and walk 900 miles during the night.

We rolled into Beijing right on schedule, and as the train was slowing to a stop, an eager-looking young man with a backpack came jogging up alongside our carriage, banged on the window, and held up a sign with DAVID AND DESIREE TALBERT printed on it. He grinned widely and flashed us a thumbs-up. If his goal was to impress us, he had succeeded. Never before have I heard of someone being met by their local contact before the transportation they came in on had stopped moving.

The young man's name was Jeff, and he grabbed our bags and headed for the exit. Jeff was only our guide to and from the hotel, but he made up for it by talking non-stop all the while. His english was excellent, and while his topics of discussion were often politically incorrect to the point of being surreal, he was an engaging conversationalist. Jeff was widely read, especially in english-language newspapers and magazines, and he took a deep interest in discussing international politics as our driver weaved through traffic. He seemed particularly taken with the recent mortgage banking crisis in the US--something which (despite my background) I had not really followed with any interest--and he was not above cheerfully placing some personal blame at our feet for the recent downturn in his own fortunes. "I lost a lot of money in stock, you know," Jeff said, nodding sagely. "Thank you for that. The Chinese banks were together with the international banks, and they all lost money in your -- how to say it? -- housing. Your housing market. So now I am much poorer than before. Many Chinese are." I felt vaguely guilty, especially since he seemed to think that it was a conspiracy on the part of homeowning Americans to deprive Chinese citizens of their savings.

On the topic of the Olympics, Jeff was just as cavalier. "I am a guide, so I must work during the Olympics. But actually, I don't want to. It will be too crowded -- I would rather stay at home." Since those sentiments sum up my feelings on the Olympics exactly, I just nodded in agreement.

Jeff dropped us off at a plush hotel several blocks away from Tiananmen Square, wishing us well in our attempt to get to the Memorial in time to see Mao's body (in which attempt we failed), and took off, leaving us to our own devices.

Our own devices turned out to be a walking tour of Beijing that Desiree had printed out from an Internet site -- we tooled around a big lake where men were fishing with twenty-foot poles, saw a famous historical site of a famous historical person whose name I have already forgotten (though I do remember a line from the plaque in the garden: "This crabable tree was planted when here was a garden. Mrs. [Famous Historical Person] enjoyed make crab bubble preserves in her free time."), and watched some old people playing Turbo Nuclear Ping-Pong in a public exercise yard. We also stopped in and visited the home of a famous Beijing Opera performer. We were slightly disturbed that it took us ten minutes to figure out that this performer was, in fact, a man, rather than a woman.

After finishing our tour of Creepy Opera Thing's house, we immediately became lost (a crucial part of any holiday), and were saved by a passer-by who took pity on the four foreigners crowding around a map and arguing. She sent us to a nearby bus station and, as rain began to pour down on us, we finally set soggily out on the right path back to our hotel.

I concluded the day's exertions (somewhat dampened by the lack of solid sleep the night before) with a traditional McDonald's Chicken Sandwich, staggered into my room, and passed out with visions of the Forbidden City -- the next day's agenda -- dancing in my head.

Dave

The End of the Semester: A Numerical Journey

2008-07-17T13:17:00.005+08:00

June 20th to July 4th: the last two weeks of second semester two thousand eight

Final exams supervised: 3
Number of students caught cheating: 0
Number of students actually cheating: I will seriously pay you like fifty bucks to find out.
Number of words graded: 67,850
Average grade: Not high enough to make grading sixty-eight thousand words fun
Number of colleagues who helped grade multiple choice questions: 4
Amount of gratitude felt: 6x10^17
Number of wooden models of the Eiffel Tower given to us by students as parting gifts: 1

Birthday parties attended: 3
Weight of gourmet teppanyaki eaten at Matt's second birthday party (including reindeer and amphibian): 1.22 metric tonnes
Tab for said birthday party: A very large amount of RMB
Amount we paid: 0 RMB, thanks to Awesome Stephen The Awesome Guy of Awesomeness
Number of times I won Stephen's weird German boardgame: 1. I'm the king of the WORLD!
Number of times Matt was wrongfully executed during Mafia because of the prophetic indications of flourescent lighting: 1

Suitcases carried: 11
Hugs given: 6
Weepy moments: almost 1
Hours spent moping around in an empty dormitory building: 6
Colleagues who permanently left for the U.S.: 3
Large pairs of shoes that that the new people will have to fill: 3

Eras ended: 1

Dave

Things You Don't Want To Hear As a Mock Job Interviewer (But That I Did . . .)

2008-06-19T20:27:00.002+08:00

Me: What unit of the hospital do you prefer to work in?
Student 1: Surgical.
Me: Why?
S1: Because I like to see people's organs.
Me: Uhh . . . you what?
S1: I like to see the organs. It's very interesting.

Me: So what position are you interested in at the hospital?
S2: This! (pointing to the line on her resume that says "Computer Programmer")
Me: You want to be a programmer?
S2: Yes, yes, yes!
Me: And you studied nursing?
S2: Yes!
Me: Exactly what are your career goals?
(much confusion . . . I explain this several times using different words)
S2: Oh, yes! I want to have a big shop.
Me: A shop?
S2: Yes! It will have many, many, many beautiful clothes!
Me: OK. Um, since you studied nursing, let me ask you what your idea of a good nurse is.
S2: If the patient is very poor, I will not take his money. I will treat him for free!
Me: Uh . . . great. We'll call you.

Me: What do you think is your greatest weakness?
S3: Sometimes, if I have a lot of work to do, and I think it's too hard for me, and I can't do it, I will get depressed.
Me: And how do you deal with that?
S3: Well, I eat a banana.
Me: A banana.
S3: Yes.
Me: And that works?
S3: Yes. It's very help me.

Me: So what kind of work experience do you have?
S4: I am . . . I work . . . I was . . . A-S-S-I-S-T-A-N-T. In shop.
Me: And why do you want to be a nurse?
S4: It is my . . . my . . . D-R-E-A-M.
Me: (smiling and nodding outwardly, weeping and gnashing teeth inwardly)

Dave (eating a banana)

Lessons from a Cricket

2008-06-09T11:11:00.002+08:00

On Saturday afternoon, we had a miniature typhoon. It was one of those brief summer storms that build in the stifling air for four or five days in a row, and then explode in a quickly spent fit of rage. I was sitting in my room, chatting with Brian, one of the other teachers, and glanced outside when the rain began slamming against the walls and windows in sheets. It was an impressive display -- tiny whirlwinds scudding across the surface of the canal, trees bent double, farmhouses obscured by the downpour -- but I felt safe and warm inside, and so thought no more about it. Until I remembered my cricket.

Desiree, gripped with remorse for so cruelly imprisoning our pet, Qin Shi Huang, had urged me to release him. "He can't fly," I pointed out, "and what about all of the frogs that live near the fountain? He'll just get eaten if we let him go."

"Well, we can put him on the balcony," she suggested, brightening up. "That way, if he wants to go, he can, but it will be his choice." Indeed. I'm sure that Jean-Paul Sartre would have had a field day with a statement like that. We carried out her plan, however, and discovered that either by choice or incapacity, our little emperor never clambered over the threshold of the balcony to seek his fortune in the wide world. He seemed content to stroll around in circles, chirping the day away.

What would be his plight, however, in such a terrible storm? If he was knocked over by a gust of wind, he might not be able to right himself, and he would die. I went to the window and peered out, searching for my pet and not finding him. I was just on the point of going outside when I spotted him, huddling up under the air condition on the lee side of the balcony in the only dry spot still remaining. Ah, good, I thought to myself. He's OK.

But scarcely had I taken my seat and resumed my conversation when I remembered that little Qinny Qin Qin would most certainly not be OK. The balcony was equipped with a drain, which was located on the same side as the air conditioner. Well and good, except that the drain was prone to clogging. I had gone outside after previous storms to find the entire balcony under an inch of water. And if a human child can drown in two inches' worth, how much would it take to kill my cricket?

I bounded again to the window and saw that my worst fears were being realized -- the drain was already backing up, and Qin's six little legs were churning furiously, trying to keep him pressed up against the wall and away from the water. "Quick!" I shouted to Brian, "I need a cage -- a cup -- something!" My glance fell upon a decorative tin of tea that had been given to us by a student, and I scooped it up. Pulling the foil-wrapped packet of tea out of the box and throwing it on the desk, I open the balcony door and stepped out into the downpour. I could see a wave of water (a small wave, true, but it looked big enough compared to Qin Shi Huang) sloshing across the tiles toward the little insect, and crying out "Don't worry, cricket! I'll save you!" I thrust the open tea tin underneath the air conditioner. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe the cricket had an inkling of the seriousness of his situation, but he scrambled into the tin without any further urging, and I retreated inside, slamming the sliding door behind me.

I thought about that rescue operation later, after the storm had passed and my cricket was once again scrambling around on dry ground. It occured to me that I am very much like that cricket in many ways. I found myself in a helpless position. I had no more ability to protect myself than that poor flightless cricket did to escape the rising water. Not only that, but neither of us even realized the extent of the trouble we were in. But just when I needed help most, Someone far, far above me reached out of the storm and called, "Don't worry! I'll save you!" Just like Qin Shi Huang, I was rescued. But in my case, I was rescued from the domain of darkness, and placed, not on a dry balcony, but into the kingdom of a glorious Son.

If that's the only thing that I learn from having this cricket, he will have been worth his weight in gold.

Dave

T-Shirt Sighting for May 21st, 2008

2008-05-22T06:27:00.002+08:00

Sometimes I see a shirt that looks like it's trying to say something serious and edgy, but doesn't quite succeed.

A student yesterday was wearing a tee upon which were three leering skeletons, partly green and partly white. Each was wearing a helmet and gripping a weapon in its bony fingers -- one had an AK-47, another a grenade, and the third . . . was a bit indistinct, actually. Underneath this grim scene, in dripping letters, was the hard-hitting phrase "WE ARE RGHFY?"

And people say that the counter-cultural movement is dead.

Dave

Sentences Encountered Whilst Grading Today

2008-05-19T17:48:00.005+08:00

"Don't fudge a book by its cover." (If you must add something to the fudge, go for walnuts instead.)

"True love is from the bottom of the heard." (but all I can think of is 'herd')

"She is a chop off of the old mother." (Feebly grasping at 'chip off of the old block.')

"I feel that Chinese nursing techniques are pay attention to modality and most nurses are very striped-pants." (She isn't talking about uniforms, I don't think . . .)

"The rain in the spring is mizzle, like a smile." (This reminds me of one from my last test. I asked the student to write a sentence using the word 'grocery.' She wrote, "In fact, the Egypt is grocery." Which is pretty awesome, frankly.)

"Driving car is different [from riding a bicycle], you just need to sit there and use your hand to control the steering wheel, after a long time, fats deposited on your abdomen." (Want to lose weight? Stay away from steering wheels!)

"The main body [of a business] is made up by members who are the main driveling force that makes plans into reality." (Having worked in business for a while, I couldn't agree more.)

"When students have a terrible test, their minds will be exchanged." (Which, in some cases, might be advantageous to their grades.)

Dave

Invention of the Year

2008-05-16T12:58:00.004+08:00

It's nearing mosquito season here in Shanghai. In the States I never thought much about this rather annoying time of year because usually it simply meant borrowing a little insect repellent from a friend at the occasional backyard barbecue or outdoor ice-cream party.

But here, it's quite a different matter. Last year, our office became a favorite hangout for a pretty hefty percentage of the local population, and what I always considered a nuisance evolved into a major problem when I left my office after a long night of work and discovered dozens and dozens of bites on my legs. (The next day, I counted 57 bumps on one leg alone.) My mom always said I had sweet blood that attracted the horrible beasts, but the real problem is this: there are no window screens in China. Combine that with the fact that they have this thing for fresh air and that air conditioners aren't quite as prevalent, and you've got a blood-donation center and insect sanctuary right here in our building.

Enter my new best friend: the electric mosquito racket. This clever little tool—unheard of in America, illegal in Australia—is readily available on the streets of Shanghai. And when he left, our dear friend Elijah passed along his to us. If I see one of these vampiric monsters, I just grab my trustee racket and start swinging. The best part is that when I make contact with the little beast, there is a very satisfying spark and a popping sound (and occasionally a small trail of smoke) to signal the end of his parasitic existence.

Once I stock up on AA batteries, I'll be completely ready to battle the vicious horde.

Desiree

My kingdom for a carrot!

2008-05-13T12:34:00.005+08:00

Qin Shihuang was the first emperor of unified China following the Warring States Period. He is also my pet. Sometimes I push bits of carrot through the bars of his cage and watch him hungrily stuff them into his mouth. Occasionally he will pause and look up at me, but I'm not really sure what he's thinking. I'd guess from the way that he twitches his antenna that he's happy.

Qin Shihuang is my cricket -- or perhaps my locust; we're not entirely sure. Des returned from a day trip with some students two weeks ago and told me that she had bought a present for me. "Cool!" I said. "I didn't realize you were going anywhere near the electronics market! How did you know what CPU socket to get?" "Ha, ha," she replied without apparent mirth. "Here it is!" She drew from behind her back a small wooden cage in which was what appeared to be a dessicated insect corpse.

"Is it glued to the bottom of the cage?" I asked, thinking that this might represent another of my wife's forays into traditional Chinese art (albeit a rather less beautiful one than I've become used to). Then the corpse rolled over and waved its legs in the air.

Apparently, she bought it from a cricket dealer. Cricket fighting is still something of a hobby among older Chinese men, and the passengers on the bus during her return trip to the school peppered her with questions about where she bought it and how much she paid for it, no doubt marvelling at this foreign woman's discernment in obtaining such a fine specimen of insectoid fury. I imagine that this would be rather like a good old boy seeing a sari-clad Indian matron climbing into the driver's seat of a NASCAR racer -- yet another one of our multicultural experiences.

I thought the name was suitably martial, but I haven't asked my students about the propriety of naming a simple insect after the founder of the Qin dynasty (and pretty much everything that came after). He came in a cute-looking traditional wooden cage, but it was pretty small, and Des fretted that he would wither away in it. "It's so tiny!" she wailed. "He doesn't have any room to move around!" "He's a cricket," I countered, "he doesn't even have a brain!" A fierce debate ensued about whether or not he did and did it even matter and crickets have rights too, mister. A few hours later we had established that A) crickets do indeed have brains, albeit small ones and B) we would be moving him into a suitably roomy new cage.

After some searching, Des discovered an old basket with a wire bottom that, when turned upside-down, provided a fine enclosure for the little conqueror. "He doesn't have anything to play with," she fretted after observing him for a few minutes. "He's bored. I need to find some toys for him!" Her first attempt to create a cricket playground consisted of a heavy ceramic teacup that she placed on its side. Though initially promising, this had two disadvantages: first, Qin Shihuang showed no interest whatsoever in it, and secondly, the cup rolled when the cage was moved. Des nearly crushed the poor guy to death the first time she tried to feed him. Her second innovation -- a plastic toy dug out of a box somewhere -- has been much more succesful.

So what does the cricket do, you ask? Well, mostly he sits there in his cage, staring vacantly into space. Maybe he's hungry. Perhaps he's meditating. For all I know, he could be contemplating suicide: If only I had opposable thumbs and a really small rope and vertebrae, I could end this torment! The only really interesting thing that he does is chirp -- so loudly, in fact, that we move him to another room when we're sleeping.

My guess, though, is that he's inherited a little bit of his namesake's ambition, and he's eyeing the rest of the room for his empire. After all, a new Qin dynasty has to start somewhere.

Dave

T-Shirt Sightings May 8, 2008

2008-05-08T16:32:00.002+08:00

A white t-shirt with the stylized image of some type of animal, possibly a dog or a cat or a camel on both the front and the back. To the left of the image on the front were the words . . . well, at least, were the following characters:
FUN
L@@K 8
FOR
KID 8
(and below these in giant star-spangled letters)
P.E.T.

Another student was wearing a black long-sleeved tee with an adorable cartoon monkey dozing under a tree. Her shirt bore this inscription:
SUNSMNC
wrhkj fbjgkl ferwu csdc

Dave

The Truth about American "Chinese Food"

2008-05-04T17:19:00.005+08:00

Did you know that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendys combined?

Did you know that Fortune Cookies originated in America?

For more fun facts about Chinese food in America, read this very funny excerpt (taken from the Reader's Digest website) from the book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. If you have some time, read it. And if you like it, you can buy the book or visit her blog.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Why is Chinese food so all-American? One woman's delicious discoveries.
By Jennifer 8. Lee

A Winner
At 8:30 a.m., the state of Tennessee had a Powerball winner waiting for the prize office to open its doors. James Currie worked the night shift as a systems operator at Pinnacle Foods, parent company of the Duncan Hines and Aunt Jemima brands. He lived in Jackson and dreamed of buying a Cadillac. Now, at the lottery office in Nashville, he was holding a set of winning numbers—28, 39, 22, 32, 33 and final number 40—which had been drawn in the multistate Powerball lottery the night before.

The office staff asked Currie how he had selected his numbers.

"From a fortune cookie," he replied.

He had been using birthday and anniversary dates, he explained, but then he switched to a fortune cookie number. He'd gotten it from a Chinese take-out restaurant near his home called Dragon 2000. He'd had a good feeling about those numbers.

At 11:18 on that same morning of March 31, 2005, another winner, in Idaho, reported using a fortune cookie number. Same with Minnesota at 12:06 p.m. and Wisconsin at 12:09 p.m. From coast to coast, across the 29 states that participated in Powerball, officials heard the tale over and over, though the details were different. They had gone to a Chinese restaurant. It was take-out. It was sit-down. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was lunch. It was dinner. It was where they ate out with colleagues during the week or took their families on weekends. And at the end of the meal, the winning number had been found in a fortune cookie they'd cracked open themselves.

Reading this story one morning on the New York City subway, I perked up. The March 30 Powerball had an unusually large number of winners—110 in all—many due to fortune cookies. There are roughly 43,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings and KFCs combined. And I'm obsessed with them.

Like many Americans, I first discovered Chinese restaurants in my childhood. I grew up during the 1980s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Broadway is sometimes called Szechuan Alley for the density of Chinese restaurants along it. My parents had first settled in the area when my father was studying for his PhD in math at Columbia University. Because my mom never learned to drive, our family never moved out of the city.

My siblings and I are known as ABCs—American-born Chinese. We're also known as bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and Twinkies (which has more of a pop culture ring to it). There are a lot of inside jokes among immigrant families. My family even has one embedded in the children's names. My parents named me Jennifer, my sister is Frances, my brother is Kenneth. If you string together our first initials, you get JFK, which, my parents tease, is the airport they landed at when they first came to America.

My parents arrived here courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which opened the doors to educated and skilled workers like my father and dramatically shifted the balance of immigration away from Europe. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea and India stood ready to offer the best products of their meritocratic educational systems.

My mom took care of the home and did most of the cooking, while my father worked on Wall Street. But like many families in our area, we'd order Chinese take-out when she was too busy to cook. As a girl, I would run down to the neighborhood restaurant with a crisp $20 bill in my pocket. Barely tall enough to see past the counter, I'd solemnly order dishes from the big white menu, using the Chinese names that my mom had taught me. (Without exception, the vocabulary words that Chinese American kids—and immigrant kids in general—know best are related to food.)

Then I'd lug home my treasure: a plastic bag of steaming, generously stuffed trapezoidal white cartons. Our family gathered around the table and pulled out the boxes, each one bursting with potential. Would it be the amber-colored noodles of roast pork lo mein? The lightly sweetened crispiness of General Tso's chicken nestled in a bed of flash-cooked broccoli? Or the spicy red chili oils of mapo tofu? Each untucking of the lid released a surge of aroma and a sight to spark the appetite.

Out came the chopsticks, and we'd douse the virginal white rice with steaming sauces, simmered soy sauce, piquant vinegar, slivers of ginger and fragrant garlic. The Chinese food begged to be mixed together: sweet, sour, salty and savory flavors layering upon one another. Then we'd break open the crunchy fortune cookies for the message inside, rarely eating the cookie. The cheerfully misspelled but wise words of the fortune cookie sages gave me comfort. My parents' bookshelves were lined with Chinese philosophical classics like the Analects of Confucius and the I Ching. For a girl who could not untangle the thicket of Chinese characters in those opaque and mysterious books, the little slips of insight represented the distillation of ancient Chinese wisdom.

It Can't Be True!
Then came a shocking revelation.

Fortune cookies weren't Chinese.

It was like learning I was adopted. How could that be? I had always fervently believed in the crispy, curved, vanilla-flavored wafers with the white slips inside.

It was in middle school, while reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, that I first became aware of the mass deception. In one of Tan's tales, two Chinese women find jobs in a San Francisco fortune cookie factory, where one is utterly perplexed to learn that the cookies and their cryptic messages are considered Chinese.

I asked my mom if she had known all along that fortune cookies weren't Chinese. She shrugged. She said when she first got to the United States from Taiwan, she'd assumed they were from Hong Kong or mainland China. China is a large and fractured place. She had never been to mainland China.

Neither had I.

The Americanness of fortune cookies hit home a few years later, in a 1992 front-page story in The New York Times with the headline "A Fortune Will Greet You in an Endeavor Far Away." The article announced that Brooklyn-based Wonton Food planned to sell fortune cookies in China. It added that in Hong Kong, the cookies were already marketed as "genuine American fortune cookies."

The Americanness of fortune cookies should have served as a hint of what else I was to learn about Chinese food. Only now, looking back, do I find it obvious. As a child, I never considered it strange that the food we ordered from Chinese restaurants didn't quite resemble my mom's home cooking. My mom used white rice, soy sauce, garlic, scallions and a wok. But she never deep-fried chunks of meat and drenched them with rich, flavorful sauce. She cooked with ingredients that were pickled and dried and of strange shapes and that never appeared on the take-out menu.

Her kitchen was filled with jars and bags of all sorts of unusual things: white fungus, red beans, pungent black mushrooms, porous lotus roots. She used preserved foods: eerily translucent eggs, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, vinegared mustard greens. Her dishes involved bones and shells, boiled garlic shrimp, chicken feet.

At the seafood stores in Manhattan's Chinatown, my parents would pick through the bins of live crabs, sluggish but still menacing to a wide-eyed six-year-old girl. We would haul the writhing creatures back home and deposit them in the kitchen sink. Then, in my mother's wok, we would steam the life out of them, their waving pincers gradually slowing to a halt. The Chinese holistic approach to crab was not the sanitized, edited version of Red Lobster. Our crabs burst forth with weird colors and textures.

The goopy orange paste, called gao, was the best part, my mom said. My parents were always annoyed when we went to the "real Chinese restaurants" in Flushing, Queens, and I asked for beef with broccoli and lo mein. (Broccoli is not a commonly used Chinese vegetable.) My parents inevitably ordered dishes that had eyeballs, like steamed whole fish with ginger and scallions; my siblings and I turned up our noses at the bitter hot tea. My parents were exasperated. They had thrown their children into a pool of cultural heritage in America: Chinese camp, Chinese chorus, Chinese martial arts, Chinese folk dancing. (Perhaps 90 percent of all Chinese American girls have twirled a silk ribbon at some point in their lives.) Yet on the issue of food, our taste buds were firmly entrenched. My parents groused about our inability to appreciate "real Chinese food."

I never really understood what "real Chinese food" meant until I went to China. Years of study in Chinese Saturday school, daily classes in college and a semester in Taiwan had opened up the world of the dense, opaque characters of my mother's books. China was a foreign country to me, but one where I happened to speak the language. I spent my fellowship year studying in Beijing, but in reality I educated myself by traveling cross-country from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the lakes of Sichuan to the peaks of Tibet. Alongside the McDonald's and KFCs that penetrate China's core, I encountered a variety of cuisines that were more akin to my mom's cooking than the ones of America's Chinese restaurants.

I began spitting bones out onto the table and drinking watery soup after a meal to wash it down. I even drank hot tea—no fortune cookies to be found. I began to roll my eyes at the take-out Chinese food I had grown up with; it wasn't authentic.

Tracing a Cookie Trail
As interesting as the local food was to me, I was interesting to the locals. You could see their minds processing: She looks perfectly Chinese, she speaks Chinese perfectly, but something is amiss. Perhaps it was the way I moved, the way I dressed, the way I laughed. I wasn't, they felt, of China. Hong Kong? Taiwan? they asked. "I'm American," I explained.

Their reply: "No, you're Chinese. You were just born in America."

I thought, Maybe the same thing was true of Chinese food back home: It's Chinese. It just happened to be born in America.

Or maybe the truth was closer to this: It's American. It just happens to look Chinese.

That morning on the subway as I read about the Powerball winners, people swarmed around me as usual. I wondered, How many had eaten Chinese food in the last week? How many had read their fortunes and saved their favorites? How many might have played the lottery with those lucky numbers? I was entranced by the idea that so many people took that same leap of faith on March 30 and played the identical numbers from a fortune cookie.

Right then and there, I decided to track the winners back to where they'd eaten. Following the Powerball fortune cookie trail, I believed, would help me understand why nearly every one of us has a go-to Chinese restaurant in our lives. (Yes, you could charitably describe me as passionate about Chinese food, though I'll admit that the line between passion and obsession is a wobbly one.)

Within hours, I identified one of the Powerball restaurants, Lee's China, in Omaha, Nebraska. I looked up the number online and dialed. A woman picked up.

I started out by introducing myself in Mandarin Chinese. I received the telephone equivalent of a blank stare.

I switched to basic Cantonese.

More blankness.

I tried English.

The woman cut me off. "We're Korean," she said in a thick accent.

And she hung up.

Over the next year, I compiled a list of the Powerball restaurants and winners, drew up an itinerary and began a consuming journey that crisscrossed the country. By the end, I had visited 42 states. I had driven cars until bugs splattered across my windshield like egg whites dropped in soup. I'd taken red-eye flights, pulled all-nighters driving on interstate highways, stewed on buses for 23 consecutive hours and crashed in the relative air-conditioned comfort of Amtrak trains.

At the end of my travels, I had many ponderous food-related thoughts along with a well-tended stomach. I also had this, delivered as if it were a deep insight: "Do you know how to tell if it's a good Chinese restaurant?" people would ask. Then they'd lean over conspiratorially and say, "Look inside the window. See how many people eating there are Chinese."

Monty McCarrick, a truck driver from Wyoming with a long black ponytail and a receding hairline, called his wife, Joyce, from Iowa, where he'd stopped during a trip across the country.

"Are you sitting down?" asked Monty, whose right arm is marked with a tattoo of an American flag.

"You wrecked the truck," Joyce said anxiously.

No, he crowed. They'd won $100,000 in Powerball.

Two months earlier, they had gone to their favorite Chinese restaurant, in Powell, Wyoming (population 5,000-plus). There, Monty found his lucky numbers in a fortune cookie. Five weeks later, he bought the fateful ticket in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on his way to Ohio.

I dropped by the McCarricks' home, a modest one-bedroom apartment they shared with their cat, Coco, who sometimes accompanied Monty on his road trips. The couple's most valuable asset was their extensive Elvis memorabilia until Monty won the Powerball drawing. They paid off $20,000 in credit card debt.

In Monty's drives across the country, Chinese restaurants were reliable, accessible eating establishments. "They are pretty much in every town you go to," he told me. "And they're fairly inexpensive. You get all you want to eat for anywhere between five and seven dollars." What's nice, he noted, is how predictable they are. "You get the sweet-and-sour pork, the lo mein noodles and the egg foo yong. It's pretty tasty."

He explained that there are some exceptions, like egg rolls. But for Monty, the predictability is reassuring. "I don't like a lot of change. I'm a simple person."

Louisiana had two of the 110 Powerball winners, but, more important, it had Cajun Chinese food. When informed of my quest, a colleague told me I should visit Trey Yuen Cuisine of China, in Mandeville, outside New Orleans, to try dishes like Szechuan alligator and soy-vinegar crawfish. Trey Yuen had been serving Szechuan alligator since the late 1970s, shortly after alligator meat became legal. It was one of the more popular dishes.

Trey Yuen was owned by five brothers named Wong, whose great-grandfather had taken a boat to San Francisco in the late 19th century, seeking work. The brothers traveled across the states, working in Chinese restaurants, until they found the opportunity to open the original Trey Yuen. Their mother used to tell them, "You guys are like my five fingers. Individually, you are not very strong. Together"—she would form a fist—"you are solid." Together, the five brothers have owned their restaurants for more than 35 years.

Trey Yuen's Szechuan alligator dish ended up being light-colored chunks of meat mixed with ginger, garlic and crushed pepper. The alligator looked like cooked chicken but tasted surprisingly springy and tender. "I call it bayou veal," said Tommy Wong, the fourth of the five brothers, in a Texas twang. "Some people are squeamish about trying alligator," he added. Of course, he eventually does tell those who dine on bayou veal the truth—"after they've eaten it."

Tommy showed me a plate of raw chicken lying next to a plate of raw alligator. I would not have been able to distinguish between them if it weren't for the fact that the alligator meat came in long, pale strips. "See how nice and lean it is, and clean. High in protein," said Tommy.

Chinese cooking isn't a set of dishes, I was discovering. It's a philosophy that serves local tastes and ingredients. That idea continued to reverberate as I encountered creations like cream cheese wontons (also called crab Rangoon) in the Midwest and Philly cheesesteak rolls (egg rolls on the outside, cheesesteak inside) in Philadelphia. Chinese food, it seemed, does not have to originate in China.

And some so-called Chinese restaurants are not even Chinese. In the early days before P.F. Chang's became known as a national chain, customers would genially ask how Mr. Chang was doing. There is no Mr. Chang. The "P.F." stands for Paul Fleming, a creator of Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar and the founding visionary of Chang's restaurant chain.

As American as Chinese Food
In Rhode Island, home to five of the Powerball winners, I stopped at a century-old eatery in Woonsocket called Chan's Egg Roll and Jazz. In its latest incarnation, the owner, John Chan, had turned it into a nightclub featuring prominent jazz acts. This part of New England features the fabled chow mein sandwich, a subject of study for Professor Imogene Lim, a Canadian who speaks better Swahili than Chinese.

I dragged along my friend Lulu, a girl whose doe eyes and round cheeks make her appear like a thinly disguised anime character. Though born in China and raised mostly in Hong Kong, Lulu speaks flawless English. Her parents, both lawyers, still live in Beijing, but she spent most of her academic career in English-language schools—mostly in Hong Kong, as well as a brief period in New York City. When she was six years old, she glimpsed her parents' green cards with their photos and "resident alien" stripped along the top. At the time, Star Trek: The Next Generation was popular, so the idea of extraterrestrials was in her head. Are my parents aliens? she thought in shock. Her parents snatched the cards away.

When the chow mein sandwiches were set in front of us, Lulu looked at them with a combination of mock horror and genuine fascination. Trapped between two pieces of white Wonder bread was a crunchy pile of fried Chinese noodles slathered in a brown gravy flecked with bits of celery and onion. It was moist and soft and crunchy. Lulu giggled. We weren't sure how to approach it. The gravy had softened the bread, making it too messy to pick up with our hands. I attempted to attack mine with a knife and fork. Lulu plucked the crispy noodles out of the bread. It wasn't bad; the gravy gave the sandwich a lot of flavor, and the textural mix of crunchy noodles, sodden bread and flavored liquid was intriguing. In some other life, we might even have thought it was good. But that day, we couldn't get our minds around the idea of a starch-on-starch sandwich.

I learned that for many people, though, the chow mein sandwich captured memories of growing up: Mom's home cooking. Hanging out after school. Flirting. First dates. The sandwich evoked both family and friends. Locals even shipped the mix overseas, unleashing the force of the chow mein sandwich on foreign soil. And during the first Gulf War, in '91, residents sent chow mein mixes to local men who were serving abroad.

When I heard these stories, I was reminded of a phone conversation I'd had after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I was in Washington, D.C., and a number of my friends had been swept up in the historic journey: cynical journalists, idealistic nation builders, mercenary contractors.

Many of these people informed me of the two improvised Chinese restaurants that had popped up next to the landing pad of a military hospital in the Baghdad Green Zone, a ten-minute stroll north of Saddam Hussein's palace. The restaurant in the back was slightly more popular because patrons figured it would be less likely to be damaged by an insurgent attack from the street.

These Chinese restaurants in Baghdad had neither Chinese nor Arabic on their menus, only English. And though the Chinese restaurateurs had never been to the States, they certainly knew how to attract large crowds with American-style offerings like sweet-and-sour pork and panfried dumplings.

Among those friends of mine who had been deployed to Iraq was Walter, a foreign service officer who resembles a bookish version of James Dean. We would chat by phone (his cell phone in Baghdad had a 914 area code, as if he were only just north of New York City, in Westchester County). In one of our conversations, I wondered aloud why the Chinese restaurants were so popular with my friends in Iraq when, after all, diners in the Middle East should indulge in the authentic local cuisine of kebabs and hummus.

"It's a taste of home," Walter responded. Even against the whirl of medevac helicopters, Chinese food had become a beacon for American patriots. "What could be more American than beer and take-out Chinese?" he added.

Favored cuisines become refuges in times of crisis. On September 11, 2001, my friend Daniel and his friends, after their high school classes were canceled and they learned that their parents were all safe, headed to a local Chinese restaurant called Chop Stix, in Scarsdale, New York. Together they watched the news and ate stir-fry. Chinese food was comfort food for them. It was something predictable and familiar when they needed an anchor in an explosion of uncertainty.

I reflected on my journeys to numerous Powerball restaurants across the country. American Chinese food is readily available and has a broad appeal to our national palate. It's something that nearly every one of us has grown up with—both young and old. I marveled that on a single day, Chinese food had united so many different people from different parts of this country: a schoolteacher in Tennessee, a farmer-veterinarian in Wisconsin, a microbiologist in Kansas, a police sergeant from New Mexico, retired septuagenarian snowbirds from Iowa, a bank clerk from South Carolina, a salesman from New Hampshire.

Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie.

But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?

Apparently, "Not To Be"

2008-05-02T13:42:00.003+08:00

Yesterday, while making my way through the crowds of people enjoying May Holiday (or International Labor Day) at Qibao, a small but festive Shanghai neighborhood with traditional architecture and lots of small shops and food stands, I saw a t-shirt.

It was a women's t-shirt hanging in a small clothing stand. Hot pink, with large black letters, it screamed "WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE."

Maybe the designers ran out of space. Or maybe they are answering an age old question. We may never know.

Mang Guo Bu Hao! (Bad Mango!)

2008-04-29T11:08:00.012+08:00

I have a fondness for exotic fruit. And many fruits that are either unavailable or extremely pricey in the States are quite affordable here in the PRC. Things like papya, dragon fruit, and mango.

I love mango. If it’s one of the options when ordering a smoothie, icecream, or yogurt, it’s usually the favored fruit. (I have particularly fond college memories of making my own mango smoothie whenever I worked a shift at Spill the Beans.) Mango salsa, mango chutney, mango pocky sticks—I have yet to meet a mango I didn’t like.

But last week, I found a mango that really didn’t like me. Or a part of the mango, to be more specific.

It all started when we were invited to have dinner at the home of one of my students. We went to her house on Saturday around 10:00, watched a short outdoor display of singing and dancing in her apartment complex (it seemed to be some kind of show to celebrate and promote recycling), and then pretty much feasted Chinese-style until about 2:00.

For those of you unfamiliar with this custom, let me elaborate. We entered their lovely apartment at around 11:00 and were immediately ushered to the living room, where there was a very nice display of fruit, nuts, chocolates, and tiny elaborately decorated cakes on the coffee table. They poured us some orange juice, and we ate small amounts of the beautiful spread of food, knowing that this was just the appetizer.

In about 20 minutes or so, it was time to begin the real meal. We moved about 8 or 9 feet over to the dining table and sat next to my student and her classmate who had come to join us. Her parents, however, immediately disappeared into the kitchen. They were our chefs and were required in the kitchen. On the table, there were about five small bowls of food (in traditional Chinese meals, you eat small portions of many different dishes). Each place was set with a tiny bowl (used as a small rest stop for your food as it travels from the main bowl and then into your mouth), chopsticks, and a small plate (used not for food but for leftovers—things like bones and shells that you must discard*).

For the next hour or so, her parents brought out dish by dish of what ended up being a 15-dish meal. I’ll try to give you a quick run down of all the delicious food we ate:
• unknown green vegetable (a finely chopped spinach like vegetable with what appeared to be equally finely chopped mushrooms)
• beef (finely sliced with sauce)
• fish #1 (small dried whole fishes that looked rather scary but ended up being one of my favorite dishes)
• salad (basically an interesting mix of potatoe salad with a bunch of mayo)
• chicken #1
• fish #2 (large whole fish cooked in a sauce)
• baby bok choy (the favorite green vegetable in China)
• chicken #2 (fabulous BBQ wings--her father’s specialty)
• mushroom soup (a basic broth with about four different kinds of mushrooms)
• shrimp (the biggest and best I’ve every tasted--cooked in some kind of divine sauce)
• rice
• broiled mushrooms
• unknown vegetable-like seafood
• desert “soup” (don’t know any other word for it) with small glutinous rice balls
• more fruit (eaten at the end of most meals as it is believed to aid in digestion)

It was an amazing meal. Her parents are truly talented cooks (not their profession but their hobby). At the very end of the meal, they came in and sat at the end of the table and ate just a few items from the table, all the while making sure that we had eaten our fill. This was a particularly good time to be with our friend and fellow teacher, Matt, who seems to be a bottomless pit when it comes to food. The family happily watched as he continued to eat even after most of us had become full.

We left the table, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the food. Remember that beautiful spread on the coffee table? Well, as we headed back into the living room to talk and watch a little TV, the family continued to offer us delicious things to eat. I was able to avoid most of the post-dinner offers, but after about a half an hour, I finally succumbed to the offer of a delicious mango. My students even taught me a new way to eat it (because, after all, the trouble of getting the mango off its pit and out of its skin was the main thing that kept me from eating mangos all of the time).

Many Chinese eat mangos by peeling them with their fingers (actually quite a simple task, and less messy than it sounds) and then biting into them directly. My students peeled half of the fruit, ate it, and then peeled the rest. So I did the same.

And that, was my big downfall. But of course I didn’t know the danger I had exposed myself to at the time (namely, mango skin**). I happily ate the fruit, and as we left the house her mother insisted on putting all of the other mangos in a bag for me to take home. So later that night, I ate another mango (Chinese-style), and the next day, I ate one at every meal (didn’t want them to go bad, you know).

On Monday, I had a small blister on one corner of my mouth, and by Wednesday, I had puffy itchiness all the way up to my left eyebrow. Thankfully, I have an entire staff of wonderful nurses on call here at the school (thanks, ladies!), and on Friday I was able to go to the doctor and get a prescription for steroids and powerful antihistamines. My face is pretty much back to normal now. The down side is that I need to avoid mangos in the future (at least the skin, anyway). But on the positive side, I got to give my students a really good example of some vocabulary I taught them: allergy, allergic, and allergic reaction.

Desiree

*In our experience, the main difference between Chinese food and Western food is that Chinese chefs rarely debone or shell any of the meat before cooking or serving. Most food requires the diner to put it into her mouth (or hold with chopsticks) and attempt to eat around the bones and shells. The most difficult things to eat are chicken and shrimp. While Americans often use chopped chicken breast in a stir fry, Chinese cooks will simply chop all parts of the chicken, leaving the meat firmly attached to the bones. I have seen Chinese people stick most of a whole shrimp into their mouths and then spit out all of the extra parts. It is truly an amazing feat that seems quite beyond me. Most of the time, I try to order things that are cut up very small and seem to have already been separated from the bones.

**I found out later that most people who are allergic to mango are allergic to the skin, not the fruit itself. The mango tree is actually related to the poison sumac family. Very interesting stuff, really. As long as it doesn’t affect you personally by making your face blow up into a huge mass of itchiness.

The Culture of Cute

2008-04-21T16:30:00.007+08:00

As I walk around Shanghai, I’m struck by the subtle (and not so subtle) differences in fashion. Although you can find outfits that are more traditionally Asian (especially silk jackets for children and older women), there are two trends that are much more noteworthy.

The first notable difference is that, while American fashion seems to have run full-force back into the late 80s and early 90s, youth fashion in China never really left them. My analysis is based on photos I’ve seen from the past few decades as well as what I see every weekend in the subway station: spiky hair, stiletto heels, chunky metal accessories everywhere, bright colors and tight jeans (again, with metal accessories). The young men here seem to especially embrace these fashions, and more than once, sitting on the bus, I’ve said to myself, “Wow. That boy looks a lot like Edward Scissorhands!”

The second fashion creates a very strange juxtaposition. I call it The Culture of Cute. In downtown Shanghai, in a city that boasts sophistication equal to that of New York City, it’s not uncommon to see women carrying small, pink items one would imagine created specifically for junior high girls. The best example is Hello Kitty.

I’ve seen a Hello Kitty bobble head in a fellow teacher’s car (she’s married but has no children yet). One of our dear office staff has a plush Hello Kitty frame around her computer monitor: complete with head, arms, and feet that stick out from all sides. There are Hello Kitty scooters, cell phones, toasters. And Hello Kitty doesn’t have a monopoly on the market. If I go shopping with my students, some of their favorite things to purchase are little knick-knacks and jewelry, little sticker rhinestones and pearls to add to their cell phones. The markets that sell these things are out of this world. Imagine an underground system that contains never-ending booths of key chains, beaded necklaces, and plush purses. It’s like Claire’s took over the entire mall.

While I find the first trend a little frightening (I have yet to welcome a pair of gauchos back into my closet), the later is rather endearing and refreshing. Pink and plush aren’t limited to little girls—they’re for sophisticated professional women who aren’t ashamed to embrace the cuteness of Hello Kitty and her counterparts. I haven’t purchased any of them yet myself, but I gladly display the items given to my by my students. I may not be safe from the underground mall forever, though. Cute is catching.

Desiree

T-Shirt Sighting of the Day

2008-04-14T14:13:00.002+08:00

I saw a student today wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt that had a picture of Betty Boop on the back of it. Ms. Boop was grimacing and thrusting her chubby finger, Uncle-Sam-like, at the viewer; beside and below her were the words "All of the Everything is Betty. No to war." Above her head floated a sequined numeral 5.

Oh, and she was wearing a hat bearing the legend "SWEET SMILE." Just for good measure.

Dave

The Princess Bride . . . again!!

2008-04-12T13:57:00.003+08:00

Ah, spring! That magical time of year when a young man's fancy turns to . . . the Princess Bride. At least, if the young man is me, it does. II showed this to my lovely students last week and had them write papers on a few related topics. Here are some choice comments from their writings.

As you may be able to guess, the prince was unversally loathed. "Prince Humperdinck was a rude and flabby man," said one, and others decried his unsavory actions toward the poor lovers: "The prince tortures Westley and kills him away from Buttercup."

Inigo was quite a favorite. His famous saying was somewhat garbled, but still pretty scary, really: "He loves his father, he likes to say 'I'm Inigo, you bring me life and killed my father. And now, I'm kill kill you.'"

Little Fred Savage always seems to evoke squeals of delight, especially when he protests the contents of Grandpa's book -- "I like the active boy. His grandfather always said 'kiss.' He thought this thing didn't suit his age. He was sensitive to 'kiss.'"

Several of the descriptions of Westley were . . . interesting: "He wants to save Buttercup, so he is intrepid and warlike. Westley's traditional martial arts was good." They also swooned at his defense of the titular princess. Said one, "when the big mouse aggressed the Buttercup, Westley almost protected her." This was meant as a compliment.

I'm always surprised at how many students like the R.O.U.S. To me, it looks like a big floppy rat suit. To them . . . well, you can see for yourself. "The big mouse is a interesting negative character. And it's hardly for a person to crawl on the ground and fighting with a man, so it's my favorite character."

And, invariably, there are some instances of AEDS -- Acute Electronic Dictionary Syndrome; it's also called Talbert's Disease. Symptoms include handing in homework at the last second and always choosing the first definition listed, even if there are fifty of them. "The important man role is a courageous man. He gets the important woman role at the end. I liked this movie, because the simplex and beautiful gut."

Sure. That's what I was going to say.

Dave

Frightening In My Heart Forever

2008-03-28T15:27:00.003+08:00

The following is an unaltered piece of writing by a student. She was assigned to write on the topic "a frightening thing that happened to you."

One day, I went home. I found a little sound and only me at home. I am every afraid of me. I think there is a mouse at home. I shouted "Oh no! This mouse is very dislike and frightening." Suddenly, I look at a fat mouse in my eyes. I shouted "Oh! Don't come on"

I run to my house's corrior. Then, I was crying. I was shy. The mouse still run to me and it seem not to listen to me. I shouted again and my face became red. I hoped my parents would go home at once. I know they didn't until midnight go home, because I called them. The mouse run to me again. I run quickly. I was awaying from this mouse. It is very terrible in my heart. I shoued angrily: "Go out!" I didn't want to look at it. This mouse run to me again. I awayed from it again. Finally, My parents went home. I was peaceful. That day is frightening in my heart forever.

I hope you didn't read this right before going to bed. I probably should have warned you.

Dave

The Horrible Truth About My Life

2008-03-25T16:33:00.003+08:00

The horrible truth about my life is that it's so wonderful, no-one would voluntarily read a blog post about it. Most people only want to read posts with titles like "Ten Things I Hate About Everyone" or "I Just Met A Big Jerk" or "Defenestration Hurts." So I must resort to trickery in order to get people to read this stuff. My hope is that once you've gotten this far, you'll be resigned to your fate and keep going until you get to the end.

I have the world's greatest job. I've been a librarian, which was pretty good, and a helpdesk technician, which was great, and a mortgage broker, which was lousy, and a security guard, which was weird and kind of fun, but nothing compares with teaching. It's not for everyone, but by golly, it sure is for me. I love my students. I love explaining stuff. I love that look of dawning comprehension that comes over their little faces as they realize that that's how they use semicolons. It's just the best ever.

I have the world's most superb living arrangements. I live in a tiny apartment (more like a hotel room, really) on a floor with thirteen other wonderful people. We all live together and work together and hang out together, and we like it that way. We cook and eat dinner together four nights a week. We celebrate birthday parties as a group. We lift weights together and take vacations together. Every morning, I can get up and go down two flights of stairs to my office. When I'm ready for class, I get to walk five hundred feet to work. If I need some groceries or something, I just hop on a bus. I make enough money to live comfortably, but not so much that I worry about what to do with it. Every five months, the school pays to fly me back to the USA so I can see my friends and family on the other side of the ocean. It's just the best ever.

I am posessed of the world's most amazing wife. Desiree is intelligent, careful, thoughtful, funny, cute, diligent, caring, inquisitive, creative, beautiful, fun, organized, talented, hospitable, and helpful, and I didn't just grab a thesaurus for that sentence; evidence of every single adjective on the list appears on a regular basis. We do everything together and still wish that we had more time. In spite of the cynical predictions of my co-workers when I first got married, we're approaching our fifth anniversary, and not a day goes by that I'm not amazed that I have her. She's just totally the best ever.

Sure, there are a ton of other things that I love about my life -- the friends, family, weekends, books, music, games, ideas, education, hobbies, goals, and growth, but I can't even talk here in this blog about what's really most wonderful. All of the stuff I've written about already doesn't compare to my divine sonship, or my confidence about my eternal destiny, or my being transformed day by day from lesser into greater glory. Best of all, those most important things are the things that anybody can have, because they're free gifts of our loving Father.

So if you ever hear me complaining (as human nature is wont to do), just forward me a link to this page. It might just be my best blog post ever.

Dave

The Well of Lost Teachers

2008-03-18T14:48:00.004+08:00

One of the big goals that Desiree and I have for our tenure here (however brief or long it may be) is to overhaul the English program within our International American department to make it more robust and easy for new personnel without prior English teaching experience to move into. We're introducing a big-time new emphasis on vocabulary, writing detailed lesson plans, and focusing the individual semester emphases more tightly. I teach the second year of English, and second semester second year (i.e., the one we're in now) attempts to emphasize development of writing skills.

Practically speaking, this means that I teach a particular type of writing (narrative, descriptive, argumentative, and so on) and assign the students various and sundry papers to write in order to see if they've understood it. I then grade the papers, carefully marking their mistakes, and give them back to the students so that they may learn from their misdeeds (and, usually, from their misspellings).

I have one hundred and eighteen students. Teaching a writing course for the first time to one hundred and eighteen EFL students is kind of like living at the bottom of a deep well. A well filled with papers, specifically. Some of them are good, more of them are bad, and a few of them are plagiarized. I spend my time struggling to swim upward through these papers, and every few days, just about the time I get my head above the crimson ink and scribbled corrections, the students peer over the edge far above me and shovel another load of unfiltered syntactical obscenities down into the well. Sheets of A4 stock white flutter down onto my head, and, brandishing my red pen like an oar, I doggedly make my way for the surface again.

"No problem!" I shout up to the students. "Bring me another one on Monday -- 250 words, double spaced, and watch the infinitives this time!" The students, for their part, don't say much, although occasionally I'll hear a faint voice calling down to me, "Teacher, I have not typed my paper. Is it OK?"

Sure, sure, whatever. When you're drowning in comma splices, it doesn't make much difference whether the curlicues are Times New Roman or not. I vaguely remember that Elijah, my predecessor, didn't get out much. "D'you want to watch a movie tonight?" we'd ask. "Well," he'd reply reluctantly, "I'd like to, but I have about two hundred papers left. I'd better not." We'd make consoling noises and leave him to his work. Little did I realize that the reason we didn't see him that much was that he was stuck at the bottom of a well.

For my part, I don't really mind it down here. Sometimes you read some funny typos, and a few of the papers are genuinely interesting. If I find the bones of one of the previous teachers, though, I'm telling the students that we're watching movies for the rest of the semester.

Dave

A brief gem . . .

2008-03-11T14:39:00.002+08:00

. . . from a paper entitled "My Best Teacher." My student writes, "In my life I have had many good teachers. They are all very respectable. But for me, Miss Wang, who was my class teacher in my high school, left the deepest depression on me."

Apparently, it remains to this day.

Dave

A perfect man

2008-03-03T20:56:00.003+08:00

First, let me apologize for my late posting. The Internet must have gotten confused somehow and mistakenly backdated my post so that it's now late. That's the only possible explanation I can think of.

So with that out of the way, I'd like to continue to the next installment of "Speeches My Students Have Made." Since we were studying Jane Eyre, I had some romantically themed speech topics. One of them was "What kind of man do you like?" This, as I had hoped, produced some rather amusing results. In terms of the most popular traits overall, the ideal male specimen would be tall ("maybe not too tall, but taller than me!"), kind, funny (or, as the girls say, "humorous"), responsible, and respectful to parents and elders in general.

Some were more particular. "He must love small animals," declared one young lady, "because I love small animals, and we can have many of them in our house." "The best boyfriend will be very romantic," said another. "He will think of a wonderful surprise for me every week." "He must be handsome," noted a third. "And he must have good skin."

A few of my students had more . . . unusual tastes in men. Three of them said that they wanted men that were slightly ugly, generally unmotivated, and possessed of less than scintillating personalities. Their reasoning (wait for it) was that "then no other girls will want him, so he can only stay with me." Others, perhaps losing something in translation, said that their perfect boyfriend would be "macho," or even "a male chauvinist." One girl said she thought that "fat is handsome, so I want a little fat man." Based on my experience with Chinglish, I adjudge that she means a man who is slightly fat, not a spherical man.

One noble girl said, "My best man will not wash dishes or do housework at all, because I can do all these things for him." The earth trembled slightly when she said this, but it was probably just Glora Steinem rolling over in her grave (all the more impressive considering that she's not dead yet). The girl's classmates all clapped at this line, though.

Others took a different approach. "He should think I am right even if I do something wrong," said one girl firmly. Another, summing up her speech (to peals of laughter), concluded "The most important thing is, he must obey me very well." On financial matters, one reasoned, "The money we have should go to me, because if a man have a lot of money, he will do bad things." Others expressed suspicion about men in general. One explained that men must be watched carefully, "because men always pretend themselves until after marriage."

My favourite line from the whole speech, though (and one of the favorites of the class, to judge from the volume of laughter) was from Emma, who, in explaining her ideal man said "He needn't be rich, like Bill Gates, or handsome, like Tom Cruise, or lovely, like Dave, but he must love me very much."

That's right, friends. You are reading a post by the ne plus ultra of loveliness. I am to lovely as Bill Gates is to rich. You can look it up in the dictionary. In fact, go ahead -- I'll wait.

Dave

The ontological argument for the existence of schools

2008-02-21T15:43:00.005+08:00

Students, it may surprise you to learn, are an opinionated lot. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that their beleagured English teachers, faced with the prospect of having to grade yet another round of one hundred and twenty papers spanning six topics, encourage their students to think creatively. I speak of what I know when I tell you that it's much better to read ten dreadful papers on ten different subjects than to be forced to read ten papers on the subject "My Lovely Dog." The same goes for speeches.

So when I asked my students last semester to give a speech about what, in their opinion, constituted the ideal school, I expected that I would receive some bizzare or amusing replies. I also, naively, hoped that some of the more academically-minded students would describe something along the lines of a well-staffed graduate program (more or less my ideal). Here, instead, is what my dear students consider to be the definitive educational experience.

The students gave a lot of attention to the landscaping of the school, declaring "it must have a big and clean lake." Others wanted "a large garden," "many trees everywhere," "a lot of flowers," or "a huge mountain." One girl declared "the ideal school has a forest with some strange animals in it that we can play with, like Harry Potter."

Harry Potter, in fact, proved to be a popular template. "The school has a magic railroad like Harry Potter. It is between the dormitory and canteen, so I do not have to run to class every morning." Others insisted that a school cannot truly be complete without "a lot of shops to buy the things which we like," "many entertainment things like restaurants and KTV [a kind of karaoke place very popular in China]," or "swings so if I am tired, I can sit on the swing and feel relaxed."

Some girls felt very strongly about what kind of rooms should be available to the students. In the ideal school "the showers are not far away, because now we have to walk very far to have a shower and it is so suffering in the winter. We want to have a shower to get warm, but when we go back we are colder than before."

Above all, the ideal school apparently has a very different educational philosophy than the boring old real school that they're all attending. "We don’t study nursing classes," declared one student. "We study everything we want to know, such as cooking, dancing, swimming, fighting each other, and magic classes like Harry Potter, except not nursing. After school, we go everywhere all over the world to get a job such as FBI and protect the world," apparently as part of the notorious FBI Cooking and Dance Unit. Although some students claimed that the ideal school "has no classes," one young lady wisely observed that "we should have a few classes, otherwise we will feel bored."

Others decried the barbarous practice of formal testing, explaining that in the ideal school "there are no tests." Or, in a more moderate approach, "there is only one test, and the points on the test don't matter." Others posited a less traditional approach to classroom education by suggesting that "we can always sleep in class," or alternately, that the ideal school has a somewhat solipsistic bent to it: "In the ideal school, I pass everything easily and don't study. I am number one."

One flirtatious girl rather unsurprisingly explained that the ideal school "will have a lot of handsome boys and beautiful girls. My ideal school has a lot of love." Another girl (one of my best students) depressingly told us that the ideal school "has no classes. We search for everything which we like on the internet. So it is called Internet School."

And me? I just sat in the back, taking notes and wavering between wanting to laugh and wanting to cry. When it was all over, I was just glad that nobody had said that the ideal school didn't have any crazy teachers. Even in the realm of fantasy, some things are just unthinkable.

Dave

Popsicles in Shanghai

2008-02-13T09:48:00.001+08:00

That's what we felt like when we got in last night. If you've been following the news, you may have noticed that there's been some major cold-weather activity across China, including heavy snowfall here in Shanghai. One of our students told me that the news people said that it was the heaviest in 50 years.

I believed it when we walked into our rooms yesterday for the first time in three weeks. The power had been off, of course, and they were like refrigerators. That wouldn't really be a problem if the heater/air conditioner were a little more . . . robust. I switched it on and turned the heat all the way up to the "surface of the sun" setting, since we were feeling chilly, and waited. And waited.

After about 30 minutes, the little device apparently warmed itself up to the point where it decided it was capable of actually emitting heat, so it started dribbling out warm air. After two hours or so, it had raised the temperature in the room to about 10C (50F). We huddled together in bed, clad in socks, exercise pants, long-sleeved T-shirts, coats, and anything else we could find to keep us warm, and offered up thanks that we didn't usually have to do things like this.

This morning was much better; after chipping the ice off of my blankets to get out of bed, and snowshoing across the room to the shower, I felt positively warm. And they call this subtropical.

Dave

Hot Pot!

2008-01-22T01:13:00.000+08:00

Now that we're back in America, we're able to have all kinds of yummy food that we miss when we're in China: cheddar, Hershey's chocolate, Mozzarella, really good Mexican food, real Italian, Stilton, Brie, Parmesan . . . . But the truth is that (aside from missing cheese) we really love the cuisine in China. And when we're craving western food, we can usually get what we want if we're willing to pay a little extra (usually still less than what we'd pay in the States . . . well, with the exception of cheese).

Our favorite things to eat in China are dumplings, noodles, and hot pot--a kind of do-it-yourself soup. Noodles and dumplings are easy to get because they're available at our school cafeteria, but some of our favorite experiences with Chinese food can only be had when we're with a Chinese friend. Many restaurants are set up in a family style, where people order a variety of dishes and then share them all from the middle of the table. These dishes tend to be more complicated to order (judging from the amount of negotiating and discussing we hear from our Chinese friends and the waitresses), and usually we're limited to places that have pictures on the menu or that we have experience ordering from.

A few weeks ago, however, we felt extra brave and set out with a group of friends to order hot pot. It was awesome. We ordered a variety of meats, lots of potatoes, cabbage, noodles, mushrooms, and other veggies. The "pot" sits in the middle of the table and can be split into two sections--one for spicy broth and the other for non-spicy. The broth has garlic, ginger, peppers, and lots of other spices and herbs that we couldn't recognize. It's wonderful!

Desiree

We're Just Following Orders

2008-01-20T20:41:00.000+08:00

Well, I see by my dashboard notifier that it's been eighteen days since I last posted . . . we'll shoot for perfect attendance next term. Things get a little hairy at the end of the semester, as you can imagine. As I write this, I'm sitting in the living room of our friends the Snyder's house in Detroit. We'll be down in Greenville between about the 4th and the 11th of February. In case you were wondering.

One of the cool things that we got to do this last week was to help out some of our 3rd-year students with a big speech competition that they had been entered in. We've done a few of these extra assignments so far, and while they're interesting, and we're glad to help, they can be a little confusing sometimes. What usually happens is that one of our superiors strides into the office and says something like "Our school has been chosen by the government to give a speech at the UN / to abolish poverty / to take the One Ring to Mount Doom and cast it into the fire / etc and we want you and Desiree to help these two students with that. It's very important. OK?" "Yeah," we reply, "Are we doing it next month?" "We will do it tomorrow." This doesn't really give us much time for planning or even thinking of excuses to get us off the hook, so we just say "Sure! No problem!" and try to squelch our panic.

We've discovered in our few short months here that instructions given for such activities tend to be rather general and (what's worse) fluid. I try to ask very specific questions about what's expected ("So all we need to do is help the students prove the existence of tachyons, right?"), to which we receive a typically Chinese reply ("Yes! YesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesofcourseOK?"). These instructions, however, are commonly amended at a later date ("Right, but of course the students need to demonstrate using the tachyons in faster-than-light-travel. I mean, why would we want to see just tachyons?! Haha!").

Even so, it's always nice to spend some quality time with our nervous pupils. I think our presence has a calming effect on them, which is useful, since they're generally as confused as we are and a lot more worried. As we were flying out yesterday morning, our girls Helen and Nora were diligently sweating it out over the pronunciation of the word "privileged" and the outline of the speech on the relationship between the Chinese and Australian culture. I hope they did well on their speech . . . and that we'll have our excuses ready for next time.

Dave

The Great Brain Training

2008-01-04T10:02:00.000+08:00

27. That’s how old my brain is, according to Dr. Ryuta Kawashima. That would be OK, except that I’m 26, and possessed of a graduate-level education. Frankly, I expected better of the ol’ gray matter. The “brain age” figure (as you may have encountered in your neurology textbook or some Popular Science article or other) is basically a measurement of mental flexibility, based on the fact that young peoples’ brains process information more quickly, retain it more easily, and generally perform faster and more efficiently than geezers’ brains.

So I’m doing math problems as fast as I can, counting how many people enter and leave a house, attempting to rapidly memorize a set of words and write them from memory, and dreading the appearance of the horrible Stroop Test, all in an attempt to pull off the mental equivalent of the splits.

All this is thanks to a little piece of software designed by Dr. Kawashima that I picked up a few weeks ago called “Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!” It runs on my Nintendo DS, and I’d heard about it before. It seemed like an interesting idea, so when I saw it at Yu Yuan market, I grabbed it. I mean, I grabbed it and paid for it. Don’t get the wrong idea.

Now Desiree and I (plus fellow teachers Paul and Brian) spend the titular minutes a day trying to whip our brains into shape. The holy grail here is a brain age of 20 (the lowest age the software measures), and so far 27 is my best attempt. Paul, young whippersnapper that he is, has managed a brain age of 24, but I hope to unseat him with diligent effort. Brian has proved to be frustratingly adept at fast mathematical calculations, and holds the top spot in almost every one of the training programs. He also has the distinction of being the only one of us to have a brain age lower than his real age (it helps that he’s older than we are). We’re also required to draw things like bulldogs, locomotives, and the Mona Lisa from memory (in order to “stimulate the prefrontal cortex” or some such foolishness), and Desiree’s marvelous artistic talents have stood her in good stead. I thought my rendition of a collie looked pretty good until the program compared it to hers, at which point it appeared to be a cross between a horse and a lizard.

All such competition, of course, is designed to push us to ever greater feats of mental gymnastics. So if you’re feeling a bit dull, pick one up! Me, I’ll just be struggling to keep the speed-reading crown away from that pest, Brian.

Dave

Why I hate electronic translators . . .

2007-12-26T16:55:00.000+08:00

. . . and why I feel certain the world will continue to need English teachers

From a paper I recently received:

One is not the how profound movie, even is simple so has divorced from the reality, does not have the too winding strange plot, has not the magnificent scene which the human is dazzled, has not made the stunt effect which one praises to the heavens, only then simple black and white, actually because of had him and she among, but lets us immerse, the feeling time is unable to cancel purely and happy, closely is affecting the innumerable happy young moods.

Remembered is on 12 year-old Sunday warm afternoons, first time looked the [movie title], all of a sudden completely is charmed. Has been infatuated with the purity which the Hofn graceful makings are ignorant of affair, but has been infatuated with the parker erudite Confucian scholar the humorous gentry charm. At that time, only thought she was in this world the most perfect female, but he is in this wolrd the only perfect man. Because of [the movie], I have remembered the Hofn pure beauty, also has remembered the parker affection look.

Ten points to anyone who can name the movie this paragraph is about!

Love Story: A Fairy Tale by Cherry and Vivian

2007-12-19T22:48:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time, there was a group of animals in the forest. A tiger named Rake was very ferocious. He lived nearby the river, and ate many animals around the river. All the animals were afraid of him.

Another rabbit’s family lived near the river. There was a rabbit named Mary lived in this family. She was very beautiful. Her hair was very white which looks like the white snow. Her eyes were like rubies. She was the most beautiful rabbit in the forest.

One day, while Mary was walking along the river, Rake was going out of his house. Rake watcher her for a long time and was fascinated by Mary’s beautiful eyes. At that time, Mary didn’t know anything. She bent her head and was taking a walk slowly. Suddenly a loud voice came up to her, “hello.” Mary raised her head quickly. She saw the tiger was dumbfounded. The tiger’s appearance made her so frightened that she fell into the carelessly. Rake quickly ran into the river and then saved her. Later, Mary was moved and they fell in love. After that, Rake never ate in animal.

Every afternoon, Mary and Rake would meet beside the river. They loved each other very much. They would play together and chat together.

After 3 years, Mary and Rake decided to marry each other. The Mary told her mother the whole story, but her mother didn’t allow her to marry Rake. Mary was very say. She asked her mother why she couldn’t marry Rake. Her mother told her that Rake was their enemy. Fifteen years ago, Rake killed Mary’s father and then ate him. After hearing the truth, Mary cried sadly and ran out of the house. She ate an poisonous mushroom. Because she blamed herself so much, she killed herself in order to make up for fault.

Mary’s mother was very sad, she told Rake the bad news. Rake suddenly dumped into the river and also killed himself. At last, Mary and Rake became two mandarin ducks and lived together forever!

Dave (weeping mixed tears of sorrow and joy)

P.S. That's the last of my student fairy tales. Hope you liked them!

The King and the Tiger: A Fairy Tale by Sylvia and Yvonne

2007-12-13T09:39:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time, in a far country, there lived a king who was very bad and despotic. He did not love the inhabitants in the kingdom at all. He killed many animals. He was very aggressive, and always declared war on other countries.

The years went by, the inhabitants couldn’t bear having such this king, so they went to the fairy’s house. The fairy was nice and provided with bewitchment. When she heard that, she used the magic to make the king become a tiger. “You did a lot of bad things, as punishment, I make you become a tiger. If you can do three good things, then you can become the king again,” said the fairy to the king.

The tiger knew that he was wrong, so he wanted to offset his offences. The first thing he did was planting a lot of trees around the country to make the country clear and beautiful. Then he killed the worst man in a country close by and saved many proles. On his way to the kingdom, he saw a girl was seized by some bandits. He killed the bandits and saved that girl.

The fairy knew the tiger had done three good things already, so she used the magic to make the tiger the King again. Then the King became kind and loved his inhabitants.

A few days later, the girl saved by the King came to the kingdom. Actually, she was the princess of another country. When she knew the tiger was the king, she was very surprised. In the end, she married the King.

Dave (nodding approvingly at the moral recovery of the King)

The Oriental Health Safety Abomination: OSHA East

2007-12-08T10:07:00.000+08:00

To be honest, I've never considered myself much of a safety nut. I mean, sure, I'm afraid of heights, so ramps without handrails make me queasy, and yeah, I did injure myself at work seven years ago, but that was my own stupid fault. A lot of the guys that I've worked with over the years seemed to regard safety regulations as the evil twin of Orwell's comparatively benign Big Brother. Especially when I worked for a year at a construction-related company, guys were always griping about how much easier/better/cooler things would be if we didn't always have those OSHA party poopers breathing down our necks.

What a difference a little comparison can make. Shanghai is in a constant state of construction. I can see cranes from any window I look out of, and the dulcet tones of drills and jackhammers are never far away. They're putting up an entire apartment complex and shopping center (I think) across the street from our school, and they're building a new bridge across the canal behind the school. And no matter where you are, new construction is never more than a block away.

All that exposure means that you're bound to run into a few things that are different. Now, I'm no expert, but there are some . . . common practices, we'll call them, that just strike me as downright crazy. I'll let it go that they build all of their scaffolding out of bamboo tied together with twine, no matter how tall the building is. I guess it must not actually collapse, and I'm sure it's light and cheap. Just seems a bit less sturdy than it might be otherwise. And while leaving huge piles of rubble everywhere rather than carting it away might not be aesthetically pleasing, it's probably not unsafe.

No, I'm talking about things like setting up said scaffolding on a building face and leaving space for people to walk into the front door underneath it. Doesn't sound dangerous? No, I didn't think so either, until the workers above me started dropping their wrenches and screwdrivers down to their mates while I was walking by. I'm talking about pushing brick-laden wheelbarrows over the bamboo slats above . . . with bricks falling off.

The real killer was the time that we saw a crew of guys cutting plywood. They had a circular saw set up on the edge of a table at the bottom of a short flight of stairs so that they could cut a few pieces and then pass it up to their comrades working at the top of the stairs. Of course, these stairs were also being used by people walking in and out of a building (including yours truly). I watched incredulously as the entire group of workers carried some wood up to the front of the building, and then sat around, chatted, and took a break. While saw was still running. Unattended. On a waist-level platform. At the bottom of a flight of stairs. Broken, uneven stairs.

All it would have taken was one misstep, and I'd have been dictating this blog post. So the next time that you see some poster urging you to work safely, don't roll your eyes. Be thankful—it beats going through life being called 'Stumpy.'

Dave

Meet Unexpectedly: A Fairy Tale by Becky and Alisa

2007-12-04T19:17:00.000+08:00

There was a pig in the forest and she is the only one in the world. She had no friend because all other animals thought she was so ugly that it had no qualification to be their friend, so she felt inferior and sad. Thereupon, she decided to leave this forest. When she walked along a river, she became sadder and sadder. At that time, it became dark gradually. She suddenly had a thought that she wanted to commit suicide. Then she walked to the river. The moment the water had submerged half of her body, a farmer suddenly held it in his arms from the river and gently put it on the riverside. She turned round and saw the farmer. To her surprise, the farmer was her husband in the past, but he didn’t recognise her and she can’t be acquainted with him because there are something happened between them in the past . . .

In the past, she was a fairy. She came down to world, and she fell in love with this farmer. Even she got married with the farmer furtively. However happy life was very shot. Her father knew her thing and he was furious and asked her to come back, otherwise they will be punished. She was not willing to come back, so they receive penalty together. The cruel penalty is that the farmer can’t recognize her and she become a pig.

When she saw the farmer again, she didn’t want to die and she bent on following the farmer and protecting him. Marvellously, the farmer realized her thought. Then farmer lived happily with her as a pet.

Dave (sniffing and wiping his eyes)

P.S. Here's a gem I missed from the last test: "When two people love each other, they can destroy everything." I think she was going for "overcome anything," for what it's worth.

The Love of Prince: A Fairy Tale by Betty and Jesse

2007-11-29T19:45:00.000+08:00

This is one of the fairy tales that my students wrote for me last week. Enjoy :-)

Long long ago, in a desolate castle, there lived a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Tom always wanted to eat Jerry, but he never succeeded. Jerry hadn’t eaten anything because of escaping from Tom. In the midnight, Jerry was so hungry that she must look for something to eat. She shambled along the wall. Suddenly she saw a cheesecake beside Tom who was sleeping. Though she was very afraid of Tom, the delicious cheesecake attracted her very much. As she touched the cheesecake, Tom rushed to Jerry and caught her. Tom ate Jerry at once.

Suddenly, a shadow fell over the whole castle. The desolate castle became magnificent. Tom changed into a handsome prince. He reminded everything. One hundred years ago, he lived with Jerry who is a very beautiful girl, but a witch was very jealous of their happy life. She put a curse on them that prince was changed to a cat and Princess was changed to a mouse. They would be opposite forever until Tom eats Jerry.

Tom was so regretful, but everything happened. Later, Tom killed the witch. He never falls in love with other girls in his rest of life.

Moral: True love is beyond life.

Dave (struggling to hold back tears)

Happiness is a Frog Prince

2007-11-27T09:48:00.000+08:00

This past week has been crazy-running-around time. Between Thanksgiving, class observations, two writing assignments, and a test, I confess that I haven't thought much about the blog.

On the other hand, all that student writing provides me with ample material for your amusement . . . or at least, for my amusement. If you don't think it's funny, get your own blog ;-)

We've been studying fairy tales, and I assigned the students to write their own fairy tales. Some of those were hilarious. Here are a few choice lines. Those crazy words make so much difference!

-The farmer saw an injured snake, and decided to help the snake to its feet. (one of those pre-Fall snakes, apparently)
-The demon laughed and said, "I am not a true demon. I am an angle." (Whew! Just some innocent geometry . . .)
-Pam saw Cindy playing with a ball. He ran to her and pillaged the ball.

I also had some humorous responses on the test. One of the questions asked what nearly every fairy tale taught would make a person happy. The rather obvious choice, of course, is true love. One student, either from poor reading comprehension skills or truly bizzare priorities, wrote that what makes people happy is Frog Prince.

I mean, it's on my Christmas list. Stay tuned for some fine examples of student fairy tales.

Dave

Seeing double

2007-11-12T14:22:00.001+08:00

**SURGEON LT.’S WARNING** Due to the potentially boring and soporific content of this blog post (i.e. grammar), please do not read while operating heavy machinery. Come to think of it, you probably shouldn’t read anything while operating heavy machinery, except for, say, instructions for said machinery.

One of the projects that Dave and I are working on this year is a massive vocabulary list to use as a foundation for our two-year English curriculum. We hope to use this list to teach our students some of the most frequent and useful English words. That’s when we found [drumroll, please] . . . the Oxford 3000. Yes, the Oxford 3000! The keywords of the Oxford 3000 have been carefully selected by a group of language experts and experienced teachers to fulfill all of your vocabulary needs! . . . Well, maybe not, but it’s a pretty good list, and while 3000 words might seem like overload, have no fear, the list begins with a and includes words like Thursday, November, and teacher. So we’re hoping to pare it down quite a bit by finding out what words most of the students already know.

The past few days, we’ve been talking a lot about words. And once again I’m reminded of how difficult this crazy language is. Take the word light, for example. Did you know that it has no fewer than 15 different definitions? Or how about words like subject and record. They can be nouns; they can be verbs. We don’t change the spelling if we use them as verbs or nouns, but we do pronounce them differently (by emphasizing the first or second syllable). Or how about those countable and uncountable nouns? (We can have three apples, but not three rices.) Those really trip up the Chinese, who have neither plural forms of nouns nor articles. And what about nouns that can be both countable and uncountable? (The three gossips spread gossip all over town.)

But I think nothing is more troublesome than the word double. The basic meaning is simple, but the nuances in usage are a nightmare. You name a part of speech, it’s there. (The Oxford 3000 lists it as adj., det., adv., n., v.) According to the American Heritage ESL Dictionary, it has 18 different definitions of its own, not to mention the trail of other entries listed after it (double-breasted, double-check, double-cross, double-digit, double standard, etc.). And I can’t just ignore it—it’s everywhere. Can you double that? I need that on the double! Would you like double cheese? Give him a double dose. It doubles as a paperweight. Still haven't quite figured out how to approach it, though.

Desiree

**Photo: A Chinese wedding cake with a traditional wedding wish on top: "Double Happiness!"

Friday: Round Two

2007-11-11T13:17:00.000+08:00

We had just been prodded, poked, weighed, measured, and ultrasounded (see "Friday: Round One"). We were hungry and restless, so we headed out for our trip to YuYuan (or, in English, Yu Garden).

I'd heard about Yu Garden plenty of times from the girls; apparently it's something of a shopper's paradise made up of little stalls and big stores all selling pretty well everything you can imagine. Not really being the shopping type, that description didn't excite me much. But the girls kept talking about it, and since we were already well down into Shanghai proper, I figured I might as well go and see what all of the fuss was about.

It's really a lovely place. I don't know the origins of the area, but it looks like a large complex of original pre-Communist buildings (which, outside of the Bundt, are less common in Shanghai than I could wish for), so the architecture is all classic Asian: sloped roofs, black tiles, and big wooden beams with characters painted on them. That was enough to ingratiate Yu Garden to me, even if it is just a glorified mall.

Once inside, we chowed down on some traditional Asian McDonalds food and headed out to look at the shops. This can be a bit hard to imagine if you've never been outside North America. In the West (at least, most places I've been), you tend to have several big stores. Here, you see dozens of tiny stores (and tiny is no exaggeration; some were just big enough for a display counter and a chair), most of which sell the same thing. If you want to buy a scarf, there are probably twenty tiny shops that sell scarves. If you want fancy chopsticks, please check out any of our fifty chopstick specialists, most of whom will be carrying the exact same items. It's kind of weird at first, but you get used to it.

My main interest was in "authentic" Chinese items; art, gifts, clothes, etc. Of course we wanted to get some gifts, but I think that traditionally-styled Chinese art is very beautiful, and I just like to look at it. Although I did get one bit of art as a present for someone, my personal acquisitions consisted of incense (to freshen up the room a bit), a deck of playing cards (purchased because every card features a picture of Our Glorious Leader, and the top card on the deck had a shot of Mao with the word JOKER stamped across it in big letters), and some kind of hacked Nintendo DS game.

The main activity in Chinese-style shopping is bargaining. When someone (particularly a rich-and-stupid-looking foreigner) strolls into a shop, picks up an item, and asks the price, the discerning Chinese shopkeeper will quote a price three (or more) times higher than what they are willing to sell it for. The seller and buyer then engage in verbal fisticuffs: the former bewailing his poverty and the needs of his family, while the latter decries the apalling greed of the former and repeatedly insists that the item is really worth nothing at all, and that he is interested in it only by way of boredom or charity. Even if you don't want anything, merely entering a 10' zone surrounding the seller is enough to make them start shouting "Hello! Hello! Looky-looky! Best price!"

If you don't spend at least two solid minutes arguing about the price of something, you're getting ripped off. I learned this with my deck of playing cards; I asked the price, and she said 40. "Si shi [forty]?" I scoffed, "Ar shi [twenty]!" "OK," she replied. D'oh! I should have paid five! The negotiations often become personal. When I was haggling with the seller over my DS game, the seller began to reinforce her offers by telling me that I was very handsome, and she was offering me the handsome price.

Fellow teacher Paul Wagner learned the hard way that even attempting the ridiculous is no guarantee of being left alone. We were standing by a ladies' clothing store, waiting for my wife to finish purchasing a jacket, when Paul made the tactical error of glancing in the direction of a fancy chopsticks shop ten feet away. The shopkeeper immediately lunged across the counter and thrust a few of her choice products under Paul's nose. "Very nice! Very beautiful! Only 350!"

Attempting to escape, Paul mumbled "Tai kue le, tai kue le" (too expensive).

"What's your best price?" countered the seller.

"Uh . . ." responded Paul, thinking not quite fast enough, "50."

"50?" the woman fairly screamed, feigning a myo-cardial infarction, "No, no! True best price?"

"50," repeated Paul stubbornly, hoping that the woman would move off. His hope was in vain. For the next fifteen minutes, Paul argued with the chopsticks-seller. Each round, she would offer a slightly lower price. Each round, Paul would doggedly reiterate that he would not pay more than fifty. After the first such exchange, he began to add that he did not really want the chopsticks at all and that he was just waiting for someone. Several times, he attempted to leave the shop area, only to be seized by the diminuitive owner and physically dragged back to the bargaining counter. When Des was ready to leave with her coat, Paul was the not-so-proud owner of a fine pair of jade chopsticks, purchased for a mere fifty RMB. And I have to say, he's an inspiration to us all.

Dave

Friday: Round One

2007-11-05T16:22:00.000+08:00

One of the delightful Oriental cultural experiences available to those working here is -- you guessed it -- the visa application process. My colleagues and I were informed a while back that we would all have our files submitted for the "Foreign Expert" qualification. Now, this is actually very helpful; it means that we won't have to have our visas renewed every ninety days, and it just looks good sitting there in your drawer, you know what I mean? Of course, we had a few papers to submit: a current resume, photocopies of all of our academic and professional qualifications, passports, eight 3x5cm photos, and a health certification. And we had to submit them by the next day. C'est la vie, as the French say. At least, they do when they're in China.

The problem, of course, is the health certification, which none of us had. So the school cancelled all of our classes this past Friday and herded us onto a bus at (or shortly after) 7:00 AM. We were going to get physicals!

The bus drive lasted for approximately 7,000 years -- years which seemed longer because the bus was made for much shorter people than I am and because we had been instructed not to eat before we went. Some of us were a bit hungry. Matt told us that he was dying (this statement was shouted down by the nurses, who set about explaining to him the vast reserves of energy that his body possesses. Such killjoys, nurses). It probably also didn't help that the driver (not our usual guy) appeared to have a rather dim acquaintance with the area. At one point we drove half a block down a one-way street (the wrong way, of course). This wouldn't have been so bad, except that it was under construction. And that there was no place to turn around. And the bus doesn't really reverse so well. At one point, we were moving construction barriers around so that the bus could drive on top of the roadwork-in-progress in order to escape.

We arrived at the Foreign Clinic at 9:30ish, and were (in the greatest medical tradition) given forms to fill out. We did so. And waited. After another hour or so, during which Matt claimed that he could feel his stomach chewing its way out of his body, we were whisked into another room and given numbers.

They took us, one at a time, into the Back Hallway and gave us our Approved Medical Attire, which consisted of a one-size-fits-all bathrobe and little purple footies to place over your shoes. The problem, of course, was that one size does not fit all. At least, it does not fit me. I was deeply grateful that I was allowed to retain my pants (as, no doubt, was everyone else). I was then seated in the hallway, clutching my form, with my bathrobe ties creaking ominously. It was Foreign Expert Medical Exam Time!

My blood was taken by a hematological choreographer who alternated between stabbing, drawing, telling people to "press hardly!" on their wounds, and hurrying them out of the room, all the while maintaining a pleasant expression. I was given a chest X-ray by a couple of technicians who were (rather ominously) laughing as they dismissed me. My blood pressure was taken, although the cuff didn't fit (they solved this problem by jamming up as high as it would go on my elbow). I was given a vision test. I received an ultrasound (!) during which it was confirmed that I do, in fact, have a liver. A serious-looking doctor listened to my breathing. And finally, I was given an EKG (a rather off-putting experience, if you've never had one; I kept expecting the doctor to unveil a huge switch connecting the clamps all over my body to a lighting rod, or to say something like "I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five . . ."). The whole time, the various clinic personnel were marking off boxes on my form as though I was part of some kind of medical scavenger hunt ("Person with a liver: check!").

To tell you the truth, though, I wasn't really bothered by anything except for the last blank on my form. I was greatly relieved when they told me that I could get dressed and I gave the form back with that blank unfilled. I just don't know that a gynecology exam would agree with me.

Dave

Making Lemonade from Chinese Lemons

2007-10-23T10:26:00.000+08:00

Life on the outskirts of Shanghai carries with it certain inescapable realities. One of those is distance. There are approximately twenty million people who live in the greater Shanghai area, and although the population density here is truly remarkable, you still have to account for some spreading out. Of course, there are plenty of amenities close to home, but several of the things that we teachers enjoy from time to time(western restaurants, English-language establishments, museums, cultural whatnot, and the like) are right down in the heart of Shanghai.

Getting to that means bus rides. Now, I have nothing against buses per se; I rode a bus to and from Henry Wise Wood High School every day when I was younger, and I have served three tours of duty in taking the Greyhound from Calgary, Alberta to Greenville, South Carolina (and let me tell you what, there's nothing like riding on a bus for three unshowered, unshaven, barely-sleeping days to give you some perspective on people). The Chinese bus rides are just rather longish (generally between sixty and ninety minutes one way), and I often don't have a seat, which means that I'm either wedged into a corner with people jabbing me in the side with their elbows, or I'm trying not to fall down as the driver shifts from third to park without a clutch. Or both.

That's where technology comes in. Three years ago, I succumbed to the pressures of society and purchased for myself an Apple iPod Mini. This device is now hopelessly outdated and obsolete, but my geriatric MP3 player and I have powered our way through many a boring bus ride. In my opinion, an iPod is to a Chinese bus ride as general anesthetic is to major surgery; they make a painful necessity bearable.

I listen to music sometimes, though the bus is usually too noisy for me to properly appreciate the delicate strains of a Bach organ fugue. More often, I tune in to class. I've worked my way through both semesters of David Calhoun's History lectures from Covenant (found at www.covenantseminary.edu) and am currently chewing on John Frame's class on Apologetics at Reformed (www.rts.edu), both of which have been excellent. Other teachers here listen to the latest lesson from Mark Minnick, Jim Berg, or someone else. Elijah would spend his time practicing Chinese.

Whatever you happen to enjoy, it helps pass the kilometers. Even if you are standing in the corner.

Dave

I don't know what it is, but it likes ESPN2...

2007-10-16T08:05:00.000+08:00

Sorry for the lack of posting last week . . . I'm a bad Dave! Bad! One of my big goals for this term was to post every week, so hopefully getting it out in front like this will spur me on. It's not like nothing ever happens here.

I gave my first test last week, and as bonus questions, asked them to write a sentence using one of the slang phrases that I've taught them. A few students got them right. Many more failed in spectacular ways. Most of the difficulties centered around the phrase "couch potato." Seems simple enough, right? Maybe to you. A few of the (erroneous) attempts at capturing this phrase follow.
- He is a couch tomato.
- I was a sofa tomato.
- We should not be couch pasta (I know it's some kind of starchy food!)
- We are sofa and Pomato on the holiday.
- My sister likes laying Tomato, she always sitting on sofa.
- Tom A Couch Plato (These are not the ultimate Doritos, but merely shadowy copies of the true form).
- you watch TV, you will be crouch potato (Looks like the three-point stance to me)

And, in a guess at "baby boomer":
- After the 2th World War, many boom babies borned.

Dave

Does this tie go with these bunny slippers?

2007-10-03T09:58:00.000+08:00

One of the quirks that I've observed here in China is the Chinese attitude toward clothes. Sure, my students wear clothes -- often the same clothes for a week at a time -- but it's what they wear that strikes me as a bit . . . different.

For one thing, the Chinese seem to love uniforms. Everyone has a uniform. The nurses have uniforms, the guards have uniforms, the cleaning ladies have uniforms, the gardeners have uniforms. Des wanted to go to a hair salon last week to get her hair trimmed, and every single man working there (it was a big place) was wearing what looked for all the world like some sheriff's uniform, complete with spangled epilauts and (I kid you not) holsters. Holsters with scissors and combs in them.

For another thing, they just don't really seem that concerned about what they wear around. I've never been to Europe, but I've been told that in Paris, Berlin, Rome and the like, people tend to dress up to go out, even if it's just to do some shopping. Here, it's kind of the opposite, at least for men. It's not at all unusual to see men walking around wearing sleeveless t-shirts ("wife-beaters," as we called 'em in college) or even no shirt at all. Sure, it's hot here. But I hardly ever saw anyone in Greenville doing that.

The thing that really threw me for a loop, though, were the pajamas. They wear pajamas outside. I've kind of gotten used to seeing groups of girls in their PJs and slippers wandering over to the campus store at 8:00 PM. I had sort of assumed it was a kid thing. After all, they are pretty close to their rooms. Yesterday, though, I learned differently. Des and I were riding the bus down to Puxi. At the Century Mart stop (about 10 AM), the doors opened and man scrambled on. He was wearing blue plaid cotton jammies (button-up shirt and pants) and a pair of blue flip-flops. He rode the bus down four or five stops and hopped off. This guy was probably forty years old.

So I'm thinking about teaching next week in my bathrobe. I mean, why not? The students might appreciate that I was finally coming around to their point of view.

Dave

T-Shirts I Have Seen This Week

2007-09-26T11:48:00.000+08:00

A shirt with a picture of Snoopy (who is extremely popular here), underneath which are the words "Sometimes I feel compelled to justify my existence . . ."

A pink shirt bearing the picture of a party balloon and the words "Microtube Technology? Piece of Cake!"

A sweatshirt with a leaping bunny, his rump emblazoned with a capital A, shouting "I want to be your dog!"

A shirt (worn by one of my more tiny and adorable female students) with the word STUD written across it in flowery sequined letters.

Kinda makes you wonder if your friend's Chinese tattoo really says "Love," doesn't it?

Dave

P.S. I would love a shirt like the one in the picture :-D

Chinese proverbs on books and learning

2007-09-19T17:00:00.001+08:00

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

A book tightly shut is but a block of paper.

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

Typhoon Wipha

2007-09-19T16:28:00.000+08:00

Our students were very disappointed in the typhoon today because it didn't give us enough rain or wind to convince our school to cancel classes. Right now we're getting some rain off and on and of course we keep getting burst of wind. But so far, the typhoon has steered clear of us. We'll see what happens next.

Last night several of us had tickets to go to a Women's World Cup match in downtown Shanghai, but we were asked to stay home. (Apparently someone in the government called our program's administrator to tell him that all foreigners should stay at the campus.) People have been evacuated, but those have mostly been people in mobile homes or dilapidated housing. We're all snug as a bug in our nice apartment building, teaching during the day and then staying dry the rest of the time.

Thanks for thinking about us. We'll continue to give updates if anything changes.

Desiree

I Sold My Soul on E-Bay (no, not mine!)

2007-09-18T20:07:00.000+08:00

I Sold My Soul On Ebay
This book was a gift from a friend. Actually, as far as that goes, I’m not really sure what you’re trying to communicate, Katherine. Are you suggesting that I would identify with the author? That I should give it a try? That I already have?

OK, kidding, kidding. In fact (as Katherine suspected) I enjoyed reading this account of a self-described “friendly atheist” Hemant Mehta who sells service attendance to the highest bidder online. He goes to a very, very wide variety of assemblies, ranging from traditional to liberal to emergent to parochial. He then critiques each of the services that he attends on how well (in his opinion) it reached him.

In general, Mehta’s broad assessment of the need to ‘walk the walk,’ particularly in meeting people’s physical needs, was a valid comment (though overstated). I also appreciated his oft-repeated refrain that there often seemed to be a vast gulf between the current practitioners of the movement in question and its founder. What Mehta writes about Ted Haggard was extremely interesting to me in light of recent events. Of course, hindsight’s 20/20, but the things that bothered him about Haggard should, I think, have bothered him.

On the other hand, he was entranced by Joel Osteen and was delighted that such a high-profile leader has been able to set aside doctrinal issues to get to the real heart of things. This, unfortunately, misses the point entirely: without doctrine, there are no real issues. In addition, the things Mehta heard that he was most disturbed by were often things that lie at the core of true exposition (such as his distress at the line “every knee will bow”). He is so well-entrenched in an atheist worldview that he entirely misses the significance of some of the things he heard, reasoning that since “that’s not my truth, there must be some other explanation.” It apparently never occurs to him that there may in fact be a truth that is truer than his.

Overall, it was worth a read and provoked some valuable self-examination. Thanks, Kat.

Dave

P.S. If you're feeling a bit lost by some of my vocabulary choices, I understand your frustration. There are, unfortunately, some things that I can't just come right out and say on this blog. Hopefully you understand.

The Great Divorce (no, not ours!)

2007-09-18T19:44:00.000+08:00

OK, people. You must read this book. And I mean read it next, not just put it on your list. If I could just pick one recommendation from all summer, it would be this. Let me enumerate the reasons that you, and not only I, must read this book:

1) It’s short. Some people quail at reading lists, envisioning all the time gone by. I read this entire book out loud to my wife in about four hours. So can you. Well, unless you don’t have a wife.

2) It’s different. I mean, it’s a book about a guy who takes a bus from hell to heaven. Top that.

3) It’s by C.S. Lewis. Maybe you don’t like some of Lewis’s ideas. Neither do I. But for crying out loud, why would you only read books you agree with? Lewis is worth reading, if for no other reason than for his absolute mastery of concise language and his ability to use narrative to cut instantly to the heart of a problem.

4) It’s brilliant. Lewis manages to capture (in my opinion, far better than anyone else I’ve ever read, including Bunyan) what’s at the heart of life after death. He masterfully explains why and how people choose which direction they go, and he illustrates his points with riveting dialogues between the damned and those (now exalted) who were their friends in life.

5) It’s thought-provoking. His ideas force you to back to the text (no, not Lewis’s text) in order to reconcile what exactly we are told about these things. Does he get it all right? I don’t think so. Lewis (as in much of his writing) places too much emphasis on philosophical symmetry. But for those of us who share a similar background, it’s a welcome and necessary challenge.

So open up a new window in your web browser, go to Amazon, and order this book. Now. When it arrives, cancel your plans for the evening (or better yet, gather a few friends) and sit down to think about what comes after you die.

Dave

Chinese proverb of the day

2007-09-16T16:48:00.000+08:00

Chinese proverb
Don't open a shop unless you like to smile.

My version
Don't teach English in China unless you like to speak slowly and repeat yourself.

So maybe it's lacking that proverbial pithiness. But it's so true!

Desiree

The full Chinese experience

2007-09-15T12:00:00.000+08:00

Well, last night was Friday, what I like to call "Date Night" (even though the real date night typically happens only one Friday a month). Dave and I planned to go into Zhou Pu for dinner and to buy some groceries. At lunch, the duo became a trio when a new acquaintance, Jim, asked if he could go with us. Jim is one of the very first male Chinese students to form a friendship with us. (Students in our particular program are all female, and most male students do not usually strike up conversations with us--we're not sure why. It may be standoffishness or maybe just lower English ability.)

But Jim is decidedly different. He first met Dave out at the track and field and began a conversation, which led to lunch, which led to a group outing to Zhou Pu. Unlike most students, Jim is not from Shanghai but from a about 5 hours north, so he is unable to go home during the weekends. The school looks like a ghost town after 3:00 on Fridays, so we were happy to be able to spend time with Jim and keep him from a lonely evening in the dormitory.

Going out with us also gave Jim the opportunity to practice his English. (And whatever Jim lacks in vocabulary and grammar knowledge he makes up for in bravery--he certainly doesn't shy away from trying to use his English.) Even during the few days between seeing Jim on the track and eating lunch with him, his skill had already improved. Friday evening would stretch him even further and would give us a good lesson in culture (and as it ended up, patience).

Upon entering the town, we asked Jim where he wanted to eat, only to discover that he wasn't hungry. (Hadn't we told him we were going there for dinner?) So we walked around a bit to work up an appetite. After a while, we all decided to find some Chinese food, Jim leading the way to a good restaurant. He felt responsible to show us around, but unfortunately, because he doesn't live in this area, he knew his way around even less than we did. Finally we made our way to a familiar restaurant, one that has a dish that we actually know how to order. This is when Chinese regionalisms became apparent.

Again, Jim wanted to help by ordering for us, but he didn't know what the food was called. (In his area, they apparently have different words for it.) This is what led to what I like to call the full Chinese experience: taking 5 times longer than you expect to order something, only to then get something other than what you ordered. In our normal, insulated state of being around Americans and Chinese who speak English quite well, we don't get to experience this very often. I felt like the night was a success, really. You shouldn't live in China and never experience these kinds of things. How dull would that be?

The real fun came when we started back for home and asked Jim if he would come back with us or stay and visit an internet cafe (Jim had told us he likes to "surf the net" in Zhou Pu):

Us: "It is time for us to go back home."
Jim: "Oh, yes, it is late."
Us: "So, will you come back with us, or will you stay here and surf the net?"
Jim: "Huh?"
Us: "So, will you come back with us, or will you stay here and surf the net?"
Jim: "Yes, it is time for you to go home. You are very busy."
Us: "So will you go back to the school, or will you stay here?"
Jim: "Yes."
We stop asking questions and wait to see if Jim will get on the bus.

When we got back, Dave and I just laughed. It was like being on a first date where both people are trying to think of things to do, each trying to do what the other person wants even though they don't really know what that is. You end up feeling like neither of you actually did what you wanted. But, hao, it's ok. We wanted food, and Jim wanted to practice English and get out of the dorm. But as we patiently helped each other, we get something more: friendship.

And, actually, what I've come to learn about teaching in China is that friendship with students is definitely part of the experience.

Desiree

First few weeks

2007-09-07T14:54:00.000+08:00

Several helpful souls have given me rules for the first few weeks of teaching: Don't smile. Don't laugh. Be very strict because it's always easier to lighten up than to get tougher toward the end of the semester. Not sure about the last one. But as far as the first two go, I'm failing miserably.

I know this because the first day, when I asked my students to stand up, introduce themselves, and tell us all a few things they like to do outside of class, three of them came out with comments like, "I hope we will become best friends!" "You are very beautiful!" "I love your smile." I sigh, knowing that a dutifully dour-faced teacher would not be subjected to such heinous words. Words that spell impending doom for class discipline.

They certainly don't make it easy for me. What's a teacher supposed to do when a student stands up to introduce herself and says, "Hello. My name is Alice. And I like to eat meat." (Fortunately for Alice, she also likes to play sports, so her meat-eating is not a problem, she promises us.)

Seriously, though. I can't help but smile when I look at all of these fresh faces, surprisingly eager to learn and to get to know their foreign teachers. Today was Teacher Day in China. I have received M&Ms, Dove chocolate, and two Hello Kitty lollipops. I love my students. And I cannot help but smile and look for ways to speak with them and learn about them and teach them what I can about this crazy English language.

Desiree

Summer Reading, Part I

2007-08-29T09:45:00.001+08:00

I read a lot this summer, though still not as much as I would have liked to, given the time that I had available. That said, I still think I have too many to put into one post. If you have one in your area, I highly recommend Half Price Books (which we stumbled upon in Ohio) for their excellent selection. Here's a brief rundown of books read in alphabetical order:

A Separate Peace
This was a gift from a very well-read friend. She gave it to me when I asked for something short, compelling, and not greatly taxing to read on the flight back. It's a beautifully written and thought-provoking coming-of-age story that deals with love, hate, war, and jealousy (even if you can guess the ending from about the fifth page onwards). It's something I'd like to give to a mature teen. Thanks for the recommendation, Alison.

The Bear and the Dragon
I had read a Tom Clancy book a long time ago and remembered enjoying it. Since this one was about China, I picked it up. I don't know if I had just forgotten about all of the objectionable stuff in the other book or if there was a lot more of it this time around, but I heaved it into a trash can after about two chapters. Now I'll never know if they meant to kill Golokov or not.

Beyond Suffering
Started on Dr. Talbert's (Uncle Layton to certain of us) study of Job entitled Beyond Suffering, and greatly enjoying it so far. I plan to finish this one up as my next reading project. If you haven't read his work on providence (Not By Chance) it's worth picking up. And I promise that's not just nepotism.

In Complete Armour
Still chipping away at William Gurnall's monolithic Puritan classic. I'm not quite "in comlete armour" yet; I'd say I only have about one glove on, though I think some of the credit for my slow progress has to go to Gurnall's exhaustiveness. At about page 200, I'm on the phrase "we wrestle not against flesh and blood." He's just spent 10 pages expounding on the word "wrestle." Although I certainly am finding it worthwhile, at my current rate I will finish it in approximately 2050.

The City of Light
I read an interesting book that I just stumbled across entitled The City of Light, which is apparently an account of a 13th-century Jewish Italian merchant's journey to the Chinese port city of Zaitun. I say "apparently" because there is some controversy about the genuineness of the manuscript, but the evidence for it being a fake is (in my mind) not at all convincing. Worth reading, especially for the shockingly modern philosophical perspectives that he encountered (and, in some cases, espoused). Truly, there's nothing new under the sun. If you do pick it up, skip chapter 5. I didn't, and wish I had.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I'd read the first three Harry Potter books about five years ago in undergrad (got 'em from Mack Library, as a matter of fact), and since we were staying with a Harry Potter-crazed family during the time surrounding the release of the last book, I thought I might as well see what all the fuss was about, especially since I recalled enjoying the first three. The books were entertaining; I especially liked her characters (Hagrid, Luna, and Neville being my favourites). The weakest part of the books, in my humble opinion, is Harry himself. He generally comes off as a whiny, selfish, demanding teenager. An accurate portrayal of the modern teen mindset? I suppose. Fun to read? Not so much. He grows up quite a bit in the last book, thankfully. Overall, I could take them or leave them.

A History of Asia
I started in on volume one of Samuel Moffat's history, which was recommended by a professor in a history course I took. I'm liking it so far and looking forward especially to his discussions of the revival in the Tang dynasty and to the rapid modern expansion in South Korea.

In the Presence of My Enemies
I read Gracia Burnham's autobiography, which I recommend (if you don't remember her, she and her husband were kidnapped by terrorists in the Philippenes a few years ago). I remember her being given an honor during the commencement exercises in 2003 (a medal, if memory serves); her account of the time she spent in captivity is moving and prompted a healthy amount of introspection.

The Writings of John
Since I'm teaching through John, I decided to take my study time during this vacation to read all of the works of John over and over. His emphasis on love made a particular impact on me, and has formed the basis for some of our group discussions here already.

Dave

A retrospective

2007-08-29T09:31:00.000+08:00

This morning I woke up in Shanghai. It's a nice feeling to be home and to have a semester of work ahead of you. Here's what I was doing in the US instead of posting on this blog:

Learning Chinese: Des and I are working on Pimsleur's Conversational Mandarin (thanks in part to the persuasion of our good friend Elijah Wilcott, who's probably in classes in Chengdu right now; he is sorely missed). It's a great audio program (I impressed our administrator Mr. Wang last night with a few phrases in Mandarin), but I feel like a total dope trying to make it come out right. When nearly all of your skillsets rely on your mastery of language, starting over again can be disheartening.

Reading: For this, I'll probably post something in greater detail next week. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed a great deal of reading during the vacation.

Playing: If you know me, you know that I like to play games. I gave Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword a thorough playing and loved every minute of conquering the Germans (and the Incans, and the Romans, and everyone else) right off of the planet. Benson Quattlebaum (my very oldest friend; we've been hanging out for like 22 years) and I made the world safe for democracy in Battlefield 2, and Adam Dierking (my great college buddy) and I defeated the alien menace in Unreal Tournament 2004. Carrie Sapp, Des, my sister Laura, and a bunch of Carrie's friends (including her mother) tested our kung-fu moves on one another and quested for treasure long into the night. The Snyder brothers and I combated terrorists at some arcade and tested our moves in DDR (at which venture I utterly triumphed). It was all grand. Games can definitely be fun by themselves, but games + friends = great.

Working: We had the unexpected opportunity to go up to Ohio and help my mother clear out my grandfather's house in order get his affairs in order and prepare his house for rental. Grandpa is living in Texas right now with my aunt, and he's no longer being treated for his cancer. Since my parents were in the US, he asked Mom to take care of things there in Ohio for him. The three of us (and my sister Laura later on) spent a week cleaning his house, organizing his belongings, and selling many of them in a giant garage sale. I reflected at length on the truth of Solomon's words when he says that it's better (when confronted with death) to go to a funderal than a party, since "that is the end of every man, and the living should take it to heart." I also decided that, from this point on, I am pursuing a minimum-stuff approach to life. Grandpa's house was crammed to the gills, mostly with stuff that wasn't worth saving, and I don't want anyone to have to try and organize all that on my behalf someday.

Visiting: I was particularly happy to be able to visit Mt. Calvary while we were in Greenville. There's nothing like old friends. While we were in the States, we were greatly impressed by the generosity of our friends and family in insisting on putting us up. I was reminded many times of what John recorded about love for others being the cardinal distinctive of our lives. We spent time staying with the inestimable Sapp family in Greenville, my wife's parents in the Chicago area, and our great friends the Snyders in Detroit. Since words cannot express how I feel about these people, I won't even try. These are the best of the "good things" that he fills my life with.

There's more, but this post is already too long. I'll probably write more about the vacation later. For now, I'm going to be trying to get things in order for my first semester teaching the sophomores. That's enough for me.

Dave

Those Who Can't: A Case Study

2007-07-04T08:32:00.000+08:00

Before I came here, I thought of teaching as a simple and relaxing occupation, somewhat akin to professional mattress testing or food sampling. After all, a teacher had a comprehensive grasp of his or her subject, so the actual teaching part was simple: just go into the classroom and talk about whatever bit of knowledge strikes you as important. Unfortunately, this has not proved to be the case.

I had also been told that in Chinese culture, teachers are held in high regard and are treated with reverence and respect. I had visions of students clustering eagerly around me, pleading with me to dispense just one more gem from the English language. The textbook I was given only reinforced this delusion with such ridiculous propositions as “Have the students form themselves into small groups to discuss the environmental challenges facing the world today. Because of the specialized vocabulary, some students may be tempted to use some Chinese words. This should be discouraged.” I now suspect that the developers of the textbook created their exercises in a more rarified environment, such as the Garden of Eden.

What I did not envision was a classroom full of students who snoozed at every opportunity, text-messaged their pals, chatted with their classmates in Chinese, and shouted “Class is over!” at each lull and "This is so boring! We hate it!" at every new activity. Clearly, this was going to be somewhat more challenging than I had imagined.

Thankfully, things like that usually only happen on the bad days. I hustle out the door at ten to eight, clutching my briefcase and water bottle, the two non-negotiables of teaching. I drink a lot of water. The first thing I do when I leave the building is sweat; Shanghai is on the same latitude as Austen, Texas, and the low altitude and coastal setting make for some hot, humid days. It would be warm even if the classrooms had air conditioning (which, naturally, they do not), but I make do by swigging water like it’s going out of style and keeping the shirt sleeves rolled up and windows open.

I teach 8:00-4:00, Monday through Thursday, which keeps me hopping. Each class has its own personality, and what flies with my studious and subdued Class 1 usually blows up in my face with my raucous Class 4 or the downright adverserial Class 2. That means that I always have to be ready to change up the plan if things get too hairy.

Part of the problem is that intermediate foreign-language study is not as fascinating a subject as, for instance, boyfriends and mobile phones (two topics my students are deeply interested in). So I try to compensate by being highly animated and by involving the students as much as possible. This caused some problems early on with my students, who were more used to traditional Chinese lecture methods. “Stop walking around!” they complained. “You make us feel sick!” At the beginning, the most common question I got from my students is “Are you crazy?”

After class, I generally stagger back to my office and collapse, but I rouse myself to grade the seemingly never-ending stream of papers, to write tests, or to meet with students who have English (or non-English) questions to discuss.

In the evenings, I work on the next day’s lesson or spend time with Desiree. We also use this time to try to get closer to students by playing games, talking, watching movies, or doing anything else we can together when our school duties (on both sides) don't preclude it. It’s often difficult since everyone’s time is limited, but we continue to work on new ways of making friends.

This week was final exam week, and I bid a fond farewell to my students. Even in the space of three and a half short months, I've grown attached to them. Teaching here may not be the utopian lifestyle I had imagined it to be, but it is eminently rewarding and challenging. And for those who may be considering their options: I recommend it over mortgage brokering.

Dave

No place like home

2007-06-18T23:15:00.000+08:00

Well, we've have had a slight change in plans for the summer.

Instead of coming back to the States on July 25th, we'll be going home on July 7th. We're very excited to have some extra time to visit family and friends, so please be in touch. We'd love to see as many of you as we can.

(Extremely) tentative plans:

Arrive in Greenville July 7

Leave Greenville TBD (maybe August 7)

Head for Illinois

Head for Michigan August 18

Return to China August 28

If you don't have our contact information but would like to meet up with us during this time, please leave a comment, and we'll e-mail you. Also, please keep us in your thoughts these next few weeks as we teach our last two weeks of classes and then give and grade final exams.

Can't wait to see you!

Desiree

Thanks, Dave!

2007-05-28T20:06:00.000+08:00

Well, here are some of the photos that Dave wrote about last week. I have to say how thankful I am for the wonderful anniversary gift. It will always be a special memory of our first year in China.

My student, Lucy, who was the one responsible for organizing our little adventure, was so kind and patient. Of course, I think she rather enjoyed dressing up her English teacher in different outfits and seeing her get all fixed up. Dave was bored the whole time, but he was a real trooper, in spite of having to dress up in a suit, sit around doing nothing, and being told to smile and tilt his head at just the right angle. (I was also told to curl my little fingers--note my hands holding the umbrella. I guess it's a symbol of femininity or something.) Sometimes I even suspected that he was enjoying himself.

We took photos in traditional Chinese clothing, Japanese clothing, and Western clothing. (Well, I dressed up in different clothes—Dave stuck with the traditional black suit due to the fact that the traditional Asian outfits were traditionally small.)

One of my favorite parts of the day was watching the lady who did my hair and makeup. She was amazing! I felt like I was back at Rodeheaver Theater getting ready for a production. I learned all about traditional hairstyles. The most impressive was the Japanese. I never knew I could have so many different things stuck to my head! (There were flowers, chopsticks, a comb, jewelry, hair extensions, and a sufficient amount of hairspray to anesthetize a small animal.)

I also love how the Chinese aren't afraid to use photoshop. They seem to have this thing for making pictures perfect. Even when we went into Zhoupu several weeks ago to get passport pictures, the guy ended up playing with them a little--erasing a stray hair here or there, fixing the lighting. It was much better than my quick-jump-in-the-car-and-go-to-Walgreens-at-10:30p.m. passport photos from the states. And they were about the third of the price.

Desiree

He's good at what?

2007-05-27T16:29:00.000+08:00

I had occasion a little while ago to show Pride and Prejudice to my students, and, as always, had them write about what they had watched. As with the Princess Bride, this produced some humorous results.

Chinese students sometimes have difficulty with English names. In the essays, I encountered main characters named Elizarbeth, Elizabtth, and Euzabeth. The leading men fared no better, as students variously transcribed their names as Dancy, Parcy, Daray, Darzy, and Binghy.

Their attempt to render the plot in English was also somewhat . . . less than accurate sometimes. Said of the first ball: "They all fall in love with themselves." Oh, what a difference those silly pronouns make.

"Mr. Bennet had five burly daughters." Y'know, 'burly' is not what springs to mind when one thinks of Keira Knightley.

Speaking of which, some people had difficulty grasping the relationship between the movie, the book, and the real world: "In the book, Elizabeth's name is Keira Knightley."

Neither were they entirely clear on the origin of the story: "The director is Jane Austen." Alternately: "The book's name is Jane Austen."

As always, the most bizzarely mangled English comes from those students who rely too heavily on direct translations with their electronic dictionaries: "Mr. Bingley looks kind, good at sociable smell hormone." And that, my friends, is the most important quality in a refined aristocratic gentleman.

It almost makes me want to show Macbeth, just for kicks.

Dave

Enjoy it without me!

2007-05-27T11:08:00.001+08:00

A little while back, I was accosted in the hall by one of the tiny office staff. “Dave!” she said, “Will you be enjoying fishing on Monday?” This is a typically Chinese construction (at least, it is around here; everyone sounds like they read books with titles like Greater Motivation Through Your Vocabulary Choices), and the obvious answer, of course, is “Yes.”

Apparently, the last time I went fishing I was four years old. I say “apparently” because I have no memories of the event (doubtless I repressed the horrific experience of killing and disemboweling a helpless ichthyoid), but I have seen incriminating photographs. I figured that the worst that would happen was that I’d have lots of time to read my book and practice my Chinese, so I stowed the necessary reading material in Charlie’s bag and headed out. I was particularly looking forward to getting out into the great green beyond (there is precious little of this in Zhoupu, which sometimes appears to be shooting for “Most Post-Apocalyptic Town of the Year” award). I knew we’d be doing this because Victoria had messaged us telling us to bring some food for lunch. We would be fishing “in a wild place where there is no restaurant.” Great! Less concrete = better.

We clambered onto a bus, plus Wang Xin (our adminstrator) and Victoria (a secretary and friend of ours) and took off down the Zhoupu side streets. After a stop to purchase some fishing gear, our bus stopped in front of an apartment building, and our guide stood up. “Now let’s enjoy fishing!” Wang Xin said brightly, gesturing toward the bus door. I peered out the window. Apartments to the left. Stores behind us. Peach orchards to our right. Buildings everywhere. Somehow, my Western-Canadian trained mind had envisioned “wild place” as involving more wilderness and less . . . humanity.

My sense of doubt increased when we walked through another block of apartments and rounded a garlic field. A tiny canal stretched listlessly in front of us, complete with algae-covered light bulbs bobbing against the shore. Surely not, I thought. “Here we are!” exclaimed Wang Xin. A dead fish looked mockingly up at me from the bank. A feeling that was not quite encouragement washed over me.

Once I got over my initial disappointment, however, it really wasn’t bad. There was a nice grove of bamboo overhanging the far bank which provided great amusement, as Charlie immediately and inextricably entangled his line in a bamboo shoot while attempting to cast into the shade. His gyrations, and the Chinese guide’s accompanying shouts of dismay, provided all the hilarity I could have asked for.

I have heard otherwise intelligent and deep-thinking men extol the virtues of fishing. It promotes introspection, they say. It puts you in touch with creation. It’s relaxing. It’s the thinking man’s sport. Baloney, I say. There’s nothing I did while I was fishing that I couldn’t have done lying in my bed in my air-conditioned apartment, except get a sunburn. I cannot imagine an activity more boring.

“What about catching fish?” I hear you cry in protest. Yeah, you tell me, punk. What about catching fish? I wouldn’t know, as I certainly didn’t catch any. My method consisted of baiting the hook with some kind of cornmeal mixture, putting the line in the water, waiting fifteen minutes, pulling my line out of the water, and looking at my now-empty hook. I would sometimes spice up this routine by looking across the canal at the Chinese dude, not one hundred feet away, and watching him reel another one in. It was disgusting.

From now on, I’m sticking to tuna sandwiches. The lousy fish can stay where they are.

Who knew English was so difficult?

2007-05-23T11:06:00.000+08:00

idiom (ĭd'ē-əm) n. A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements*

teaching idioms (tēch'ing ĭd'ē-əmz) n. The process of imparting knowledge of idioms to non-native speakers of a language, sometimes resulting in confusing and humorous turns of phrase**

e.g. Throw out the person with the bath water.
Throw out the baby with the window water.
Throw out the philology with the toto water. (This is what happens when electronic dictionaries go bad.)
When you are clumsy, you are all fingers and tongues.
When you are eager to listen, you are all years.
You were born with a deep skin in your mouth. (Silver spoon + skin deep)
If you are rich from the womb, you were born with a golden soup in your mouth.
If you die suddenly, you bite the bust.
I escaped by the skin of my knowledge!
He can hardly sit still. He has cats in his pants.
Hurry up! Stop dragging your pants!

When we were little children, we expect urgently to grow up. We will roll out the red carpet to welcome the coming of puberty.

Desiree

*From the American Heritage Dictionary
**From the Talbert Dictionary of Teaching English in China

OK-Hao!

2007-05-21T18:41:00.000+08:00

Well, this weekend we had another one of those crazy cross-cultural experiences. The 10th was our fourth wedding anniversary (doesn’t seem like it, though), and since my first anniversary present for Des fell through, I was open to suggestions for something else. That’s when I found out about the photo studio.

Many women that I’ve met have this weird idea about pictures. If I go to some amazing scenic place, for instance, I’m going to be taking pictures of the scenery, not of myself and my wife (for some reason, she doesn't share this perfectly rational outlook). And if someone suggests that we get our picture taken at some professional studio, my reaction is invariably, “Why? I know what I look like.” I just don’t see the appeal. In fact, I go one step further – I hate sitting around getting my picture taken.

So I was less than excited when I heard about an AMAZING OPPORTUNITY that had just presented itself – there was a professional Chinese-style portrait studio near a student’s house, and wouldn’t it be a great idea if we all went and got our picture taken? Maybe. But there was a bright side to all this: Des was gleeful about the possibility of getting her picture taken, and I was in need of an anniversary present. You can guess what happened next.

That was how I found myself sitting in a photo studio waiting room with my wife and student on Friday afternoon, watching a Chinese model in a funky blue feather dress get glitter applied to her face and shoulders. These studios aren’t like your Wal-Mart Quick-E-Photo back home; think Glamour Shots. Plus some.

After a short wait, we were hustled across the street and up a flight of stairs into the studio itself, where the make-up girl went to work. And work. And work. This gal has some serious skills. Des, as you may know, was a professional makeup artist for a while when she worked at BJU, and she was duly impressed. I was duly bored, since I had nothing to do but sit in the chair, listen to Mariah Carey (the same CD, on repeat, for four hours), and try to remember my Chinese vocabulary. The photo assistants were happy to help me perfect my pronunciation, since they had as much to do as I did (read: nothing).

After a short ice age had passed, my wife was clad in some kind of traditional outfit, topped with traditional hair, covered with traditional makeup, and ready for the traditional digital camera poses. Me? I was wearing a black suit. They brought out a few traditional outfits for me to try on, but . . . yeah. I could get the vests on (sort of), but I would have split them if I’d clapped my hands.

The shooting itself was hilarious. None of the staff spoke any English, and of course, we don’t speak any Chinese worth mentioning. This meant that the patient photographer would elaborately pantomime whatever he wanted us to do. If that didn’t work, our student companion (the inimitable Lucy Liu) would bounce around, gesturing and alternating between English instructions and Chinese clarifications. When even those failed, the photographer’s assistant would impersonate both my wife and myself as we ought to be – sitting just so, holding his head just so, looking just so. It was hilarious.

He also brought a never-ending stream of props for the photos – a parasol, a fan (held just so! No, just so!), a book for me (the People’s Liberation Army Manual, in fact), flowers, balloons, more flowers, a shawl, different flowers, etc. The funniest were the bubbles. The assistant balanced precariously, on one foot on a rickety stool, and leaned out over us; then, while the photographer barked orders, he blew stream after stream of bubbles down on us.

So of course you’re wondering at this point where the pictures are. Patience, friends. We expect them in about a week. Probably Photoshopped and all (just like our passport photos). Wait and see.

P.S. “Hao” is Chinese for “good.” “OK-Hao” is one of those multicultural encounters you keep hearing about. It was all our photographer ever said.

Dave

A vigil of gratitude

2007-05-09T23:36:00.000+08:00

Well, caffeine doesn’t usually affect me, but tonight it did. That was a good thing while I was grading papers until 10:30, but not such a good thing when I lay down to go to sleep at 11:00. So I decided to do something useful with my wakefulness and write down a short list of things that I’m thankful for. And I decided to go ahead and share it with you.

• A friend in Guam who sends me chocolate (and really good coffee : )
• Family and friends who love me and read my blog to find out what’s going on in my life
• Family and friends who keep me in their thoughts while I’m in China
• A husband who has officially (as of May 10) been married to me for four years
• A mother who sends me chocolate all the way from America
• Students who turn in all of their homework (this was not my experience when I taught in the States)
• Students who seem to really want to learn and who work hard at improving their English
• Fellow teachers who help me as I learn the ins and outs of teaching
• People who can translate Chinese to English and vice versa
• Someone who provides for all of my needs and answers my requests
• Someone who forgives me when I fail
• Someone who watches over me and protects me (I’m especially thankful for this anytime I’m on a bus in Shanghai.)
• A five-minute (walking) commute to work
• Facebook, Gmail, and Blogger
• May holiday (China’s spring break/labor day)
• Really good, really cheap Chinese food
• Beautiful, 75-degree (that’s in Fahrenheit) weather
• The ability to rest

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Goodnight, friends.
Desiree

Electrophorus electricus

2007-05-05T21:00:00.000+08:00

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m interesting in . . . well, pretty much anything. One of the things that I have always found particularly fascinating is biology. I remember when I was a kid, I found this book on the family bookshelf called “I Am Joe’s Body,” which was a collected series of Readers’ Digest articles about different organs in the human body. It sounds mind-numbingly dull, but I thought it was awesome and read it like three times.

Anyway, this week was May Holiday (more on that later), and on Wednesday, we went with some students up to the Shanghai Aquarium. I really like aquariums, and I wasn’t disappointed. They had lots of cool fishies, neat tank setups, sea turtles, sharks, jellyfish, and some electric eels.

I was so fascinated by the electric eels that I read a bunch of stuff on the Internet about them as soon as I got back to the room (for this, I refer you to wikipedia.org). I just thought I’d pass some SUPER-AMAZING info along about one of the humbler parts of creation. Keep in mind this is the very-simple-and-possibly-even-slightly-wrong version, as befits my unscientific background. Any marine biologists, feel free to correct me.

Almost the entirety of the electric eel’s long snakey body is taken up with it’s electrical organs -- all of the vital organs are squeezed into the front bit just behind it’s head. The electrical organ responsible for zapping the unwary is basically just a big organic battery made up of long chains of weird muscle cells. The thing that’s weird about them is that, unlike regular muscle cells, they don’t contract when they’re stimulated. Instead, by an amazing process of chemical wizardry, the cells’ polarity changes and they discharge electricity. This, frankly, isn’t that impressive, since each cell only discharges a teensy-weensy bit of juice—not even enough for an adult human to feel, probably.

No, the impressive part is this—there are thousands of these cells all jammed in together. Now we’re getting somewhere. There’s just one problem, though; the cells are arranged lengthwise along the body, which means that some are further away from the brain than others. That means that the nearer cells will receive their signal from the brain sooner than the farther cells. Normally, that’s not a big deal when you’re doing something slow and clumsy like walking and chewing gum. But when you’re talking about electrical discharge, it’s important for the cells to all fire at once; otherwise, instead of one big ZAP!, you’d just get a longer, weaker PHHBBBBT. So, get this! The nerve cells connecting to the NEARER battery cells are doubled over into all kinds of squirrelly loops, so that they’re longer and thinner. Longer means that the signal takes longer to travel, and thinner means that the signal travels more slowly. Who cares, you say? Well, this AMAZING mechanism allows all the battery cells to receive their signal to discharge at the same time instead of at different times.

That means (for an adult electric eel) that five to seven hundred watts of pure electrical power can go blasting into whatever the eel is touching, stunning or killing it so that the eel can have a tasty fishy snack. In case you didn’t know, by the way, 600 watts is enough to kill an adult human under the right circumstances, so kids—don’t try this at home!

So why even bring it up? Who cares? Aside from the fact that it’s just SO AMAZINGLY SUPER COOL, it’s frankly pretty incredible to look at an ingenious and intricate design like this and think that it all just evolved out of . . . amino acid chains. Yep, pretty incredible . . . in-credible, I say. “In” being the operative prefix.

Dave

What English are we teaching?

2007-04-28T12:00:00.000+08:00

Ok, quiz time everyone. Can anyone guess which of us is #1 and which is #2?

1.

70% General American English

10% Yankee

5% Southern

5% Midwestern

5% Upper Midwestern

50% General American English

20% Yankee

15% Southern

5% Midwestern

5% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

A land flowing with . . . squirrel-shaped weavers

2007-04-26T19:17:00.000+08:00

About a month ago now, Dave and I hopped into a bus with one other teacher (a Brit named Bob) and about 20 Finns, who have come as foreign exchange students, and headed to the “Paradise of China”: Hangzhou. We were really excited about the trip—not because we believed the guidebook, which told us that it was “a land that flows with milk and honey”—but because it
was our very first opportunity to leave Shanghai and see other
parts of China. Four bus-ride* hours later, we arrived at this beautiful city.

The best part was that there were green, living things all around us. (As opposed to Shanghai, which is very metropolitan and quite
gray.) One of the main
attractions is West Lake. People walk around the lake or take boat rides. It’s absolutely beautiful, even on a rather hazy day.

We also visited a tea house (which ended up being 80 percent sales pitch) and saw a Chinese show that included amazing costumes, acrobatics, singing, a story (mostly in Chinese) of the history of Hangzhou, and several outstanding special effects.

One of the most interesting parts of the trip happened shortly after visiting the Leifeng Pagoda. We took a nice stroll around the lake and then stopped for a quick lunch. We are somewhat limited as to what places we can eat at because we really like to order food from a menu that has either English or pictures. We found a place that looked promising, so we took a seat and started perusing the menu. As soon as I saw the words “Squirrel-shaped weaver,” I knew what I was going to order. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to find out a weaver was, not to mention a squirrel-shaped one. Dave and Bob ordered something sensible, and then we waited . . . and waited.

Now you have to understand that food here normally takes about 5 to 10 minutes to prepare back in the kitchen. I guess it’s the nature of stir-fry. So after 20 minutes passed, we got the waitress’s attention and pointed at the receipt. We were running out of time. She was really nice—she took our receipt and headed back to the kitchen. But then she returned a few minutes later and casually set the receipt back on our table. Another person from the wait staff passed. And we had a replay of the same actions. Finally, after 30 minutes had passed (and we now had no time to eat our food), we had to leave. I guess I’m doomed to live without knowing what a squirrel-shaped weaver looks like.

What followed next was a rather brisk walk back to the bus and a trip of about 4 hungry-bus-ride** hours back to Shanghai. All in all, a really fun time. Hope you enjoy the pictures that follow.

Desiree

* 1 bus-ride hour seems equal to approximately 1.25 normal hours, making our trip feel like 5 hours.

**1 hungry-bus-ride hour seems equal to at least 1.5 normal hours.

File under "Juxtapositions to Remember"

2007-04-19T18:54:00.000+08:00

Elijah brought this to my attention and it was too funny not to pass it on, given my academic heritage. This is from an article entitled The World's Most Controversial Religious Sites. That Foreign Policy (hardly a third-rate rag) could put these places in the same category blows my mind.

Dave

Princess Bride: Through Chinese Eyes (But English Tongues)

2007-04-17T22:18:00.000+08:00

Some of the things that our students write are inadvertantly hilarious. When we watched Princess Bride a while back, I asked them to tell me what their favourite and least favourite characters were, and why. Here are a few that elicited a laugh (at least from me).

Christina's Favourite Part:
Westley fights with the big animal which is like a chimpanzee. He is very in dangerous, but in the end, he wins.

Jessie's Character Evaluation:
Who is your favourite? Farm boy. Why? Handsome. Who is the worst in the film? Buttercup. Why? I love farm boy, but he loves Buttercup.

Janet's Least Favourite Character (so much for damsels in distress):
Who is the worst in the film? Buttercup. When her lover Westley has danger she becomes stupid don’t know what to do.

Helen's Least Favourite Person:
I hate the little boy. He always interrupt the story when I really want to know what happened next.

Jacky's Favourite Line (somewhat lost in translation)
"Hello, I'm Inigo. Prepare to die!"

Meet the Press

2007-04-17T21:43:00.000+08:00

Friday we had a press conference. By "we," I mean the Shanghai Institute of Health Sciences. We were all 'strongly encouraged' to be there, so I figured, hey, why not? Can't be too bad. I thought it would be best if I wore a suit, since I didn't know who else would be there or what they would be wearing. This proved to be my great mistake.

When we arrived, the Finns (Finnish exchange students who are always extremely cheerful, despite understanding even less of what's going on than we do) were already there. We all trooped over to the big conference room, made ourselves comfy in the big leather chairs at the back of the room, and waited. And waited.

After about half an hour of dozing in the fancy chairs and checking our watches, there was a sudden flurry of activity and the administration of the school, trailed by twenty or thirty reporters and cameramen, trooped in. 'Great,' I thought, 'Now we just sleep in our back-row seats for the next hour or two, and-- '

But it was not to be. The head of the international division bounced up and imperiously gestured at a chair at the conference table. "You will sit here, yes?" It wasn't a question. Curse my fancy suit! I was the only teacher wearing one.

I sat at the table for the next hour and a half, looking seriously and thoughtfully from speaker to speaker, wishing I could understand Chinese and praying that no-one would ask me a question. Knowing a few words in Chinese is perhaps better than knowing none at all, but it makes the speeches sound like this: "Blah blah blah blah we blah blah blah two blah blah blah blah blah Shanghai blah blah we blah blah. Ha ha ha ha!" This kind of thing is rather trying to one's nerves.

I actually spent most of the time darting envious glances at the reporter across from me, who was entirely engaged in trying to prop his chin up on his notepad so that he could sleep. He wasn't even pretending to stay awake. The only really scary part was when one of the reporters stood up and began speaking in English. As soon as she did, I knew she was going to ask me a question. Thankfully, I babbled some pablum about how Chinese students work hard to secure a better future for themselves and sat down again without embarassing myself too much.

Maybe I'll show up on the Shanghai evening news. It's happened to other teachers. Next time, I'm wearing my pajamas.

Dave

Easter eggs

2007-04-10T20:05:00.000+08:00

Easter was a beautiful day in Shanghai. Before the weekend, however, I shared a little bit of Easter tradition with my students. We talked about how Americans celebrate this day, and that led to one activity I just couldn’t pass up: coloring Easter eggs. This required that I first purchase 130 eggs from the market near the school. I bought 40 one day and 90 the next. I think that the people at the market think I’m crazy. The first day, I had a crowd of about 7 people watching me as I counted out the eggs. The second day, the man that I had purchased from before was not there. When I looked around for eggs, one of the girls saw me and said, “Egg” as she pointed to the next store.

I tried to find the lightest colored eggs that they had. The duck eggs were white, but I wanted to stick with what I knew (and most chicken eggs we find are brown here). The first day, I really hit the jackpot: 40 cream-colored eggs.

My next set of students weren’t quite so lucky. I warned them that the eggs I was used to were white and that the brown eggs might not turn out how we expected. But that didn’t keep some of my students from attempting to dye a brown egg purple. One of them came up to me after she had created a sort of brownish-gray egg. “Purple!—Awh?!” she cried, more than a little disappointed. But most of the other colors turned out quite well.

Then, to make sure that all of the people at the market definitely think that I’m crazy, I went back to buy 15 more to make colored eggs for the teachers. When I walked in, all of them just stared and smiled at me. They must think, “Wow, Americans really like eggs.” I know that few if any of them have heard of Easter.

Desiree

As you wish . . .

2007-04-10T17:27:00.000+08:00

Today, since we were all caught up in the textbook and I wanted to do an extended listening exercise with my girls, I borrowed Elijah's digital projector and watched The Princess Bride. Four times. In a row. And all I have to say is . . .

This movie is awesome! It's probably been ten years since I watched this movie (before today), but I have to say that if you're one of the few people I know who hasn't seen it, you're missing out big time. It's got something for everyone. A few favourite exchanges:

"Truly, you have a dizzying intellect." "Wait till I get going! . . . where was I?"

"We'll never survive!" "Nonsense; you're only saying that because no-one ever has."

"Give us the gate key." "I have no gate key." "Fezzik, tear his arms off." "Oh, you mean this gate key."

And of course, our personal favourite: "It's possible . . . pig." If you haven't ever heard Des and I say this, just get one of us to say "It's possible." The other has to finish the quote!

Dave

Driving Miss Crazy

2007-04-01T19:32:00.000+08:00

Transportation in China is an interesting proposition. With 1.3 billion people and a transportation infrastructure lagging behind a bit, most people use bicycles or public transportation. In fact, on city streets, there are three lanes to a side -- two for vehicles, and one for bikes . . . and the more impatient motorists. You won't see many of the traditional rickshaws (in fact, I haven't seen any; sorry Dad W.), but you'll see lots of busses. And taxis. Tons of taxis, in fact. Floods of taxis. Forests of taxis. Taxis everywhere. Accessibility of transit is not a problem.

The transit itself, however, is . . . well, like most other things here, it's a bit different. Busses are generally clean and comfy (if you get a seat; good luck with that), and many around Shanghai are even equipped with television screens to display the local and world news. Bus drivers here don't put a premium on smooth shifting, however, and you can pretty well expect to do your best unintentional headbanger impression. Some, in fact, appear to be only marginally aware of the existence of the clutch, and cheerfully lurch from one gear to the next while completely stopped -- a transition accompanied by the most hideous grinding noises.

Taxis are much smoother and, naturally, quicker. The incredibly low cost of taxis by comparison with the Western world make them very useful when speed or space is at a premium. We took a taxi from downtown Shanghai to our front door in thirty minutes last night and spent 90 RMB (split three ways; it works out to about $3.75 a person). The same trip by public transit takes two hours and costs 10 RMB, or about $1.25.

The really interesting part of travelling around urban China is the driving itself. Chinese drivers have only one goal in life: to overtake the person in front of them, no matter how close or far away that person may be. Oncoming traffic in the other lane merely provides an amusing challenge. Lane markers are viewed as the barest of suggestions, rather than fixed rules, and I have only once ever witnessed the use of a turn signal (it was probably a terrible oversight on the driver's part, and I pretended not to notice).

When changing lanes, passing, turning, tailgating, speeding up, slowing down, or doing anything else, Chinese drivers honk their horns. This can be a bit alarming to a first-time passenger in a Shanghai taxi (did I mention that taxis have their seatbelts removed?), as his driver will zoom through red lights, nearly annihilate bicyclists, execute U-turns on the highway and the like, all the while honking furiously. I have been in the front seat of a taxi which attempted to pass an entire caravan of slow-moving trucks by driving in the opposing lane for perhaps a quarter of a mile while the driver laid on the horn and oncoming busses swerved into the bicycle lane to avoid hitting us.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this chaos is that no-one seems to be bothered by it. Drivers do not shout, curse, or even gesture at other cars. It seems that a few honks suffice, no matter what the offense. I have not yet witnessed an accident (though pedestrians are responsible to avoid accidents, not motorists), but hey -- there's a first time for everything.

I just hope I'm not in the taxi when it happens.

Dave

Hello! My name is Jello!

2007-03-19T20:58:00.000+08:00

Chinese naming conventions are a funny thing. To say the least. As you may (or may not) know, real Chinese names are written with the family name first, as in “Mao Zedong.” Mao was not his first name; he was in fact Mr. Mao.

When you add English to the mix, it becomes much more interesting. All of our students take an English name when they begin studying English. Usually that’s just a first name, although some of them have middle names. (When I was explaining to some girls today that you do not give your middle name when you are introducing yourself, they became rather annoyed. “Why do you have it, then?” demanded Abbey.)

Sometimes these names are assigned by their first English teachers. Other times the girls choose their own names. And by western standards, the choice of name can be . . . different. I had one class explain to me why they chose their English names. Some of them picked names that they thought were pretty. Some, like Crystal, chose names that have similar meanings to their Chinese name. Many picked names that sound like their Chinese name, like Faye and Lucy. And some . . . well, I asked Garfield why she chose to name herself Garfield.

“I love to eat food, like Garfield the cat!” she cheerfully replied.

“But do you know that Garfield is a man’s name?” I queried.

“Yes, but I don’t care.”

Other girls in my classes have names like Shine, Keno (formerly Hawaii), Elvis, Snoopy, Corona (“I am named after a famous beer”), Jelly, and, yes, Jello. I am told that highlights of past years included such appellations as Sheep, Dang-Dang, Tissue, Eleven, and Porky. Seriously. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

Dave

Is there an editor in the house?

2007-03-15T21:15:00.000+08:00

Being surrounded by another language has made me notice everything I see that’s written in English. It’s kind of annoying, really—my eyes are drawn to all kinds of advertisements that I would have just glanced right past in the states. But sometimes I am rewarded by a real gem of mistranslation. Come with me on a stroll through a grocery store, and you’ll see what a mean. (Click on photos for a closer look.)

First we’ll get some food. Can’t have this because it contains peanuts, but its challenge to “make the ture qualities of our own return to reality” is quite tempting.

For obvious reasons, I decided to go ahead and skip the paste.

But I did get some hair dressing.

After a little more shopping, I take note of when the BonuY days are taking place.

And then it’s off to the heckiout!

The editor in me wants to scream when I see these atrocities, but I really have to just laugh (and always have a camera ready). Who knows, maybe my editorial skills will come in handy.

Desiree

Wouldja like fries with that?

2007-03-09T20:28:00.000+08:00

This is Friday. That means that tonight is date night—the time that Desiree and I have set apart to spend together. We live on a hall with nine other American English teachers, and while they’re great, it’s nice to be by ourselves once in a while, right? Well, as alone as you can get in a city of twenty million people, anyway.

So, we’re going out for dinner. This is trickier than it sounds, since we aren’t exactly experts at getting around. Plus, Des wants to go to a mall that’s half an hour away (which is practically next door by Shanghai standards). We manage to catch bus 624 into Zhoupu (pronounced “Joe-pooh”), then hop the 581 towards Shanghai proper. Somewhere along this bus route is CenturyMart, a mall in which Des was hoping to find a romantic little sushi restaurant.

We managed to disembark at the right place, but just as we were walking into the mall, we realized something: no Benadryl. Worse yet, I had also somehow managed to forget my little notebook that contains my helpful “no peanuts” phrases. No notebook + no Benadryl = no Chinese food. We searched the mall for an alternative, but finally concluded that there was only one place that was absolutely safe to eat: KFC.

If you’ve seen our other pictures, you might already know that people love KFC in China. It’s the most popular American restaurant, and they have helpful picture menus. Theoretically, a foreigner should be able to just point at what he wants . . . but in reality, it’s not always that easy. Des pointed out some popcorn chicken, corn on the cob, and a funky peach custardy-looking thing. I figured I’d keep it simple and ask for “Number Two, please,” and then, when the cashiers looked at each other and started speaking Chinese, I helpfully added, “with fries.” This is important, because it could also come with some kind of weird corn-slaw. The cashier smiled at me and said “Pepsi?” I nodded, and she rang me up: 52 yuan, or about seven dollars. I started adding in my head; the stuff I had ordered only amounted to about 41y, but by the time I got it figured out, they were bringing out our food . . . and then some. We left the counter with one more order of fries and Pepsi than we had ordered, reasoning that we could save everyone confusion and embarrassment by just eating our extra food. Only, when we sat down and started eating, one of the cashiers came up, set another chicken sandwich on our table, gestured helpfully at it, and left.

So our first Chinese date out turned out pretty well. Romantic ambiance? Not so much. Food? American, and WAY more than we wanted. But we made it out and back without dying. I call that a good date. And seeing the lettering on that kid’s jacket made it all worth it.

Dave