Week 35 - Making some changes
After last week's less-than-positive update, I started to
feel better. It was good to let out a little of steam, and everyone has been
extremely supportive. As of now, we have about 15 weeks left of work. That
number is feeling slightly daunting, but I am going to continue to take it one
day at a time and try my best!
The real reward, the veritable carrot at the end of this
Chinese stick is that we are going to Indonesia in July. Indonesia is a place
that I never considered much before, but after the idea came to me it has been
totally intoxicating. I cannot stop thinking about it! I've been spending a lot
of my free time looking at travel guides and researching. Planning this trip
has been a great release, and a big distraction from the particularly tough
days.
The work this week was good, which also went a long way in
reinvigorating my desire to stick this job out. I've been enjoying the most
recent music-themed unit that I have been teaching. Music is something I am
passionate about and find very easy to discuss. The kids have also been very
active in class, probably because I have been showing plenty of music videos
and concert/recital footage fromyoutube.
One incident that arose from showing off so many videos is
that I've been able to really examine the way that these children perceive
people of different cultures. I've shown videos of male and female musicians,
as well as multiple races and ethnicities. Pleasantly enough they seemed pretty
ready to accept any and all kinds of people, save for a few outliers ("HE
IS A BLACK PERSON!!!!").
But then I showed the xylophone video. Xylophone, for some
reason, was one of the main vocab words from the unit. Anyway, I found a great
video of a young female virtuoso at a recital. The girl was from Japan, and
once the kids realized she was Japanese they went absolutely nuts.
I am not sure how well everyone knows this, but the Chinese
hate the Japanese. Historically there are a lot of reasons behind this, but
prejudice is never a good thing, obviously. Nevertheless, racism against the
Japanese is completely okay and is even encouraged in China. There are still a
large number of restaurants and business, mostly outside of big cities, that
proudly display signs reading, "NO JAPANESE ALLOWED INSIDE".
I had had hopes that my kids, at the early age of 9, would
be more supportive and progressive. Plus, the video was not of the highest
quality, and the girl's finer features were quite blurry. Ultimately though, I
didn't think about it. It was the best example of a xylophone recital that I
could find, and the race of the performer did not register for more than a
second.
These children, the kids that I have spent the better part
of 8 months getting to know, completely flipped like a switch. They espoused
some of the most blatant and disgusting racism I have ever personally
witnessed. Several children pretended to get sick, and begged me to turn the
video off.
One kid said that they were going to have nightmares. Perhaps the
most upsetting was when one child stood up and said "LET'S MURDER
HER" and pretended he had a machine gun and shot up the screen. This was
accompanied with raucous cheers.
That class did not end well. In fact, it ended with a rather
stern lecture from me. Sadly, and only partly due to the language barrier
between me and my students, I was unable to get through to them at all. They
just didn't understand why it wasn't okay to say terrible things about someone
they didn't even know based solely on their looks. Keep in mind that they couldn't
actually even see her face.
This thought really stuck with me for a few days and, by
Thursday I had had an idea. Thursday was the day that I had a lesson with
CIPP1, a completely different group of kids who are all of the same language
level and therefore use the same textbook as my other class.
For CIPP1, when I presented the video I skipped past the
part with a subtitle indicating the performer's name and nation of origin. I
also told the kids that she was a Chinese musician. Would it work, I wondered?
Would they see through the ruse? I honestly wasn't sure if her features were
clearly Japanese enough to be seen through the out of focus, zoomed out video.
Not only did the kids not suspect a thing, they had a
completely different reaction to the video. They absolutely loved it. It was
their favorite clip of the whole day, and they kept exclaiming "She is so
beautiful!" and "She is so good at the xylophone!". This was a
far cry from CIPP2, who had been shouting things like "What a
monster!" and "She has scary tentacle hands!".
I think the lesson here is pretty clear, so I will not beat
a dead horse. I do however think it is worth underlining once more that these
are kids. Some of them aren't even 9 yet. Sure they can be naughty and nobody
is perfect, but by and large these are my two favorite classes. They are all
smart, well-behaved, adorable children. Yet, even at this age, their prejudices
are so deeply programmed that they became immediately hateful to a terrifying
degree as soon as they were presented with a culture that they think of as
lesser.
The other hot topic of the week was preparing for the open
lessons. On Friday the 27th, hundreds of parents will descend on the school and
come to observe just how good we all are as teachers. While most of the foreign
teachers are quite confident in our abilities, the Chinese teachers who are our
bosses and coworkers are all freaking out. Things have been extra chaotic
lately, almost as though they are trying to break all previous records of
classes cancelled/rearranged. This past Wednesday it hit a fever pitch that was
nearly unbearable. However, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I came
through the other end of the crucible with an unexplainable smile on my face.
Perhaps it was the shear absurdity of it all. Maybe I just
had a good lunch that day (just kidding, that is never the case), but whatever
the reason I have found myself to be cheerfully happy for the rest of the week.
I hope I can hang onto this feeling!
After nearly 5 months away, Laura and I went back to
Guangzhou this weekend. This was another moment that felt like a breath of
fresh air. It felt good to be walking around in a big, modern city. Even though
Guangzhou is not very far or very different from Foshan, it is always
sufficiently different to be a proper diversion. Accompanied by our buddy Leon,
we hit up an amazing Turkish restaurant (THE BREAD YOU GUYS), and went to Ikea.
The Ikea trip was mostly to pick up some candles, but we treated ourselves to
some Swedish candies and chocolates as well.
We spent the rest of the day just meandering around and
enjoying the peace and quiet of a lovely day in the middle of a big loud city.
A lot of time was spent exploring new areas, and we found some interesting
looking restaurants to check out some other time. What does Tibetan food taste
like? I hope to report back with that answer before too long.
All in all, this has been a good week to help remind be why
I am here, and to make me confident that I can stick it out through to the end.
I've been in a cheery enough mood that I don't even feel like complaining about
the constantly leaking pipes in our bathroom that the plumber actually made
worse before he left, or the electrical problems that our flat has been plagued
with ever since the repairmen tried to fix a burnt out light.
Bring on next week!
(No pictures this time around. Sorry folks)
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