Good gravy, is it February yet?
In preparation for the oncoming winter camp, we have been given 10 whole days at work with absolutely no schedule. No classes and no responsibilities! We are expected to spend our time preparing for the winter camp, when we will have to teach 8 1-hour classes each day.
I think that Angel believes that this translates to 16 different lesson plans, but what she fails to understand is that the English language abilities of the students between grades 3 and 6 are all relatively similar. Sure, there are quantifiable differences in their abilities, but not enough of a gap to create special tailored lessons for each age group. Moreover, we are not teaching "English lessons" for the camp. We have all been given "fun" topics to cover at the camp, and it has been made clear that the expectation is for the kids to have fun and maybe learn a little bit, as opposed to learn a lot and maybe have a little fun.
Laura has been assigned the topic "Music". She is being really creative with it, and has turned her lessons into a quick crash course through the last 100 years of western music. Covering Jazz to Rock and Roll to Hip Hop and Pop, I think that the kids will have a lot of fun with her lessons.
Similarly, I have been given the topic of "Culture". Since I am a big foodie, I was originally going to talk about different ethnic cuisines all over the world. After a little bit of working though, I have decided to present the children with four "lesser known" ethnic groups in America. Since their exposure to the USA is mostly limited to movies and music, all of which gets put through a big government filter, Chinese kids mostly just know about America through the Transformers series and Taylor Swift.
With that in mind, I have designed four different lessons around the groups "African Americans", "Hispanic Americans", "Native Americans", and finally "Chinese Americans. Using these lenses, I plan on introducing the kids to some history they may not know, some movie clips from films they won't have seen, some more music to augment Laura's lessons, and most importantly introduce them to a lot of food and customs.
I picked African Americans and Hispanic Americans because they make up the largest minority groups in the country and yet the Chinese seem almost completely ignorant of either, at least from what I have observed this year. I picked Native Americans because they were the first Americans, and are another group that the kids have almost zero exposure to whatsoever. Finally I picked Chinese Americans because Asian Americans are another important ethnic group in the USA, but I thought that the kids would be particularly interested in people with a more similar cultural heritage. Also, Chinese people hate Japanese people.
It's true. It's one of the most accepted forms of racism here. In fact, there are still many restaurants and shops in China that have signs that say "No Japanese allowed". This is not true so much in Foshan, or in big cities like Beijing, but my coworkers have all been to places in China that forbid the patronage of Japanese people.
Obviously this is a bad thing, and those doors need to be broken down eventually, but I do not feel that it is within the scope of these light, fluffy lessons to try and change hundreds of years of prejudice...
The segment of the winter camp lessons I am most looking forward to out of everything is the one on American Chinese Food. It is so fundamentally different from Asian Chinese food that I think the kids will be genuinely perplexed. It's also become a topic of interest for me as of late, and I've done a lot of reading on the topic. The cuisine that Americans think of as Chinese is the product of over 100 years of Chinese immigrants doing the best job they could with a severe lack of money and a total lack of the necessary ingredients. The result then got tailored over the century into what sold to Americans. I think it's a cool distinction that I hope the children can appreciate. I love both Chinese food and American Chinese food, and it's strange to live in China and miss "Chinese food" nearly every day.
Why not "white" or "European" or "Caucasian" Americans? Mostly because I think that the children at this school are already exposed to this quite a bit. Most of the foreign teachers that get hired at schools in China are white Americans, and the majority of the media that comes here from the US features white Americans. Even this year, all of the culture and Holiday lessons that I have done have focused on my family and my culture. So I thought this time around I would do something different.
So yes, the work involved in making roughly 4 lesson plans over the course of 10 days failed to fill up the workweek very much. Even having to share a computer with Laura only added a few hours to the total work time.
It's been a struggle to pass time in the office. We've been taking longer lunch breaks, and by Thursday and Friday we just went home after lunch. During the few hours we were in the office we would play games and joke around. This may sound fun, but it has been extremely tedious.
Lacking any real work to do has caused me to have some small existential crises in 2015. What am I doing here? Am I really accomplishing anything? I'm not making much money and I'm also stuck at this office so much that I don't even get to travel around as often as we were led to believe would be possible. Was it a mistake coming here? All of my colleagues and classmates who graduated with their MA when I did already have jobs, connections, and seriously decent payrolls coming in. I am falling behind the curve and I am forgetting probably more than I ever learned about Psychology in the first place. B.F. Skinner who???
My Chinese studies still continue, at a slightly slower pace now that our schedules are so wishy washy. This week I hit the 400 character mark. Theoretically I can now read roughly 45% of all Chinese writing. Sometimes I feel like it, too, like whenever we go to restaurants. Other times, such as when I am commuting to work on the bus and I pass the same sign for the 5,000th time and still can't read it, I feel as though I still have so far to go.
In an effort to bolster my own self-study, I located a woman who has a Masters in English and in Chinese who is based in Guangzhou. She gives lessons either in-person or on Skype, and she seemed really nice. She gave me a freebie lesson and I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately her rates are quite high, and because the holiday is coming up I did not book a second lesson with her. Perhaps after February I will look into her again.
Friday was our first night at KTV in nearly 5 months. That's all I have to say about that.
Sunday we took a day trip to Kaiping with Leon and Zac. This was an interesting one. Kaiping is known primarily for one thing, which are the Diaolous. Essentially there are thousands of mysterious and strange towers littered all over the countryside surrounding Kaiping and Kaiping county. The UN dubbed them a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007, and since then they have become a bit of a tourist attraction.
Surprisingly enough, though, there was very little information on Kaiping beyond that. My usual websites and guidebooks that I use for planning Chinese adventures all came up blank. Even the wikipedia entry for the towers was sparse, scarcely mentioning more than their honorific title as the only Chinese UNESCO entry for 2007. In fact, I only discovered their existence while looking through the 2008 edition of a China Lonely Planet travel book that our coworkers on the 7th floor have in their library. Subsequent LP editions leave out the Dialous.
So, not only do the towers look cool and mysterious, but they seemed somewhat unknown outside of China, and there was a dearth of information on the subject to be found in books or the Internet. I KNEW I HAD TO GO.
Kaiping is only about 100KM from Foshan, so we got up bright and early on Sunday and departed. The bus ride was largely uneventful, although I learned that Kaiping is better known in China for its faucets. I kid you know, for 20 minutes as we drove down through town to get to the bus station we passed only stores selling faucets. Easily a thousand stores! I thought it would never end.
We got off of the bus and were immediately hounded by men on bikes and men in vans offering to take us to the Diaolous. In reality we did want to hire the services of one of these guys, but our first priority after the bus ride was to find lunch and to find a bathroom. I am starting to get used to pushy guys in China, trying to get you to choose their cab or their tuk tuk or their bike, but I have never dealt with a group more pushy and in your face. They actually chased us down the street. We were all shouting "NO" and "GO AWAY" and "DON'T WANT" in Chinese at them and they still would not give up.
Finally we found a KFC and went inside. Luckily we were not followed in, but a dude actually waited just outside the door for us! He watched us the entire time we ate! It was super creepy and unnerving. This is how horror movies begin (or end), I thought to myself.
After downing some mediocre chicken (it was the only choice! All the other stores were sink stores), we had a quick dialog with one another. Did we want to hire this guy? He seems creepy, but we ultimately need to get someone to take us to these places. The Diaolous are all over the place in Kaiping. Once upon a time there were over 3,000, but estimates now indicate that there are still 1,800 or so. While it's possible to take a taxi or public transport to the various towers, my research indicated that hiring a dude with a van was the best choice.
Okay, we agreed. We would not go over 400 RMB. $60 US divided by 4 people for roughly 7 hours or so of schlepping us around seemed reasonable. We agreed to lowball the guy and really haggle. *deep breath* time to make this happen.
We stepped outside and the guy was suddenly much more friendly. He offered to take us to all 4 major clusters of towers as well as something called "Movie city", and then he offered to do it for 300. We were so shocked at how much lower his offer was that we just said "okay fine" and we got in his van.
Still a little nervous, the crew of 4 foreigners kept an eye out. There are plenty of stories of scam tours in China, the kind where the driver agrees to take you to somewhere, but makes a pit stop at a rug factory or a jewelry store. These stories do not end violently or in a scary way, but they usually end with foreigners being forced to pay through the nose for low quality counterfeits and knock offs.
Just to ease the tension here, I want to assure you all the nothing bad happened. In fact, we had a really great day, and by the end of it we really liked our driver. I think he enjoyed that we were polite and that Leon and I knew a little bit of Chinese. He most likely also enjoyed the fact that he made 300 RMB for what ended up being only about 5 hours of driving us around. At that rate, he actually made more money than we usually do at our teaching job!
The towers themselves were stunning. The history of the diaolous is really interesting, and is tied in with American history, as a matter of fact. In the 1800s, a large number of Chinese immigrants came to the USA to seek their fortunes. Some of them actually managed to make a killing the in the California gold rush and decided to move back home.
They came home heroes. Millions of dollars richer, and with knowledge of new kinds of food, fashion, furniture, and ideas, these trans-pacific Chinese returned to Kaiping county and started building mansions for themselves. These mansions fused Chinese and Western styles, both inside and out. They were built extra tall, not only to be show-offy, but because a lot of the villages in the area had trouble with roving bands of thieves and bandits. The returning Chinese families built their mansion towers in such a way that they could keep guards on the top and protect the village from future interlopers.
Since then, some of the towers have been continuously lived in, while others have been abandoned. Now that they are UNESCO sites, though, they are being protected and a lot of them are being refurbished.
The towers are, as I've said before, literally everywhere. Driving around the Chinese countryside is fun enough as it is, and is always a welcome break from the dreary gray of the city, but driving around Kaiping and seeing an architectural oddity every few minutes takes it to an interesting new level.
The four main clusters are all in these protected ancient villages. You have to pay an admission to get into them (or get the 4-Village-Discount-Ticket!), but once you are inside it is like stepping back in time. The villages are quiet, serene, and beautiful. Unlike a lot of other things I have seen in China so far, nothing about these villages seems fake. The people who live here are hard at work tending to their crops or carrying water to and fro. Chickens run wild everywhere, and in the larger fields Asian water buffalo can be seen.
We knew from the moment we stepped into the first village that it was going to be a challenge to leave again. The peaceful atmosphere of the Zili village was just so captivating!
This first site had about 6 towers in it, and 4 of them were explorable. From the outside these monoliths feature faded concrete in a variety of colors and also Roman-esque pillars. The one guidebook that mentions them talks about how the Diaolous blend western and eastern design, and it's definitely obvious when you see one up close.
From the inside, it is like visiting Greenfield Village. The homes are perfectly preserved with period furniture and knick-knacks. Family photos on the wall give the place a sense of history.
I will say that, by the end of the day, after having entered about 15 Diaolous, we get a little sick of them. The exteriors were all different and beautiful, but the interiors were all the same. I am not sure if it is a result of the UNESCO people just filling them with the same time-appropriate stuff, or if the families that once lived in them all went shopping at the same place.
Something we never tired of was the view. The view from the top of the Dialou is what kept us going inside each and every one and climbing 7-8 flights of stairs to the top. Seeing the Chinese countryside from that vantage point, without almost any smog at all, was something I will never forget.
Other things on the tour were interesting for different reasons. The "movie town" was a major let down. Apparently 1 movie was filmed in Kaiping. Just a single movie, once, back in 2011. They left all the sets up and have turned it into a big tourist trap. At one of the ancient villages there was a starfruit orchard. It was completely free to pick as many fruits as you wanted in the orchard, provided you had paid for entry into the village. Watching the Chinese people take advantage of this "free" fruit was the ridiculous. People had 2, 3, and sometimes 4 garbage bags absolutely full of these things.
I picked one just to try it, and I have to say it was pretty tough to stomach. Basically it tasted like a waxy apple-flavored warhead candy. I almost retched on how sour it was. The tour guide/driver dude was REALLY into these starfruit. He kept pointing and saying "starfruit" in Chinese over and over.
All in all it was a really good day, and a big recharge for the month. There is only one week left until our big trans-Asia tour! Suddenly it feels like there isn't enough time to get the few last-minute things that we need done.
Finally, Laura went to a hair salon and got her hair cut this week. She was a bit nervous because of the language barrier, but she printed off a photo of what she wanted and it all went pretty smoothly. Her hairdresser was named Kiki. She knows that because it was just about all the English he knew, and he told her about 6 times.
Chinese hair cuts also come with a complimentary finger massage, and when they wash your hair you get to lay on a massage chair. Laura said that the massage chair was built for Chinese-sized people, and also was very intense. She literally is covered in bruises from the chair. But, like everything else in China, it was really cheap. She got the whole thing done for about $12 US.
Pictures up soon, folks!
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