Wo Xi Huan Wo De Xue Sheng

Next week marks the third and final week of model school! I'm sad that it's almost over. My students are hiliarious and want to discuss everything from the one-child policy to why they would rather be a Transformer than King Kong.

Me and my students

I'm really glad we have model school because it's given me the opportunity to test out a variety of activities to see which the students respond well to and which they don't. For example, on the one hand they love dissecting song lyrics for every fragment of meaning, but on the other hand they don't quite understand the idea of a "cocktail party" (a standard ESL teaching technique of having the students mingle and talk in English about a pre-set topic). Whenever I try to do this kinds of activities they just stare at me blankly. They're simply not used to classroom activities that involve so much participation on their part. If not for model school, I would have walked into my classroom totally clueless as to what Chinese students are used to. Considering that in a few short weeks I'll finally found out my two-year site placement this info is priceless.

Overall, I've been having a ridiculous amount of fun and can't believe that a whole month has already passed! If things continue at this rate, the next two years are going to soar by.

I hope you're all well. I've finally figured out how to mail letters (it's much more complicated than you'd expect), so I'll write and send things as soon as I have time.

Teaching, Singing, Climbing

Model school starts tomorrow!! My class has fifteen students: nine boys and six girls. I've been told that this is pretty unusual for English classes in China and that at my final site my classes will have about 90% female students. Since all of my students are recent high school graduates, the first week I'm doing "College Life" and basically pretending that they've all moved to America to attend college. We'll have different activities designed around this, such as doing housing interviews (What type of roommate do you want? Do you want to live on-campus or off?) and selecting majors and classes. I think this will be a pretty comfortable theme for them and get them talking.

Any suggestions for second and third week themes? Please?

As a break from regular language class on Friday, all of our laoshis (teachers) got together and taught us how to sing a traditional Tibetan folk song called Kangding Qingge. Tibetan folk music is my new favorite thing. :)

Our laoshis in action

To recover from our week of lesson-planning and intense Chinese study, yesterday two other volunteers and I went to a rock-climbing bar downtown where you can simultaneously drink and climb a rockwall (sans-harness). I know it sounds like a bad idea, but believe me, it was awesome. Plus, we got to meet the #1 rock climber in China who just happened to be there practicing.

Climbing in khakis like a pro

#1 Rock Climber in China and his devoted fans

That's all for now, dear friends! Write me!

The Host Family and Various Stuff

My host family is wonderful; there’s just no other word for it. I’m the third Peace Corps volunteer they’ve hosted and so they seem used to my Meiguoren (American) tendencies. The second I arrived, they hooked up my computer and told me I should check my email. Over breakfast and dinner each day, my host mother reviews the words I’ve learned in class with me. She is so patient with me and my perpetually uncooperative mouth, which still refuses to grasp the four tones. Whenever I do get something right I almost get a standing ovation, they’re so proud. I love it!

The host family

Both of my host parents work at Sichuan Normal University: my host father teaches Chemistry and my host mother works at the university library. I'm the same age as my host sister (22), who is just finishing her senior year studying public health. She cracks me up because she absolutely loves to play World of Warcraft.

My host sister, me and my host mom downtown

My host family's house is nicer than anywhere I’ve ever lived. I have my own room, complete with balcony (!). We live on the sixth floor of our building and there’s no elevator, so I’m going to be toned when I leave here. Watch out, Chinese men!

I've realized that moving to a foreign country where you don’t know the language is kind of like going suddenly deaf. Whenever I’m walking somewhere around campus alone, I pretty much hear nothing because I can’t understand a single thing being said around me. Every day after language class, though, it’s as if I’ve gained a tiny bit of hearing back, such as when I heard a little girl say “he shui” (drink water) yesterday and understood what she meant. I wanted to shout, “Yeah! He shui! He shui forever!”

On the actual-reason-I-came-here front (i.e. to teach): model school starts on the 23rd of this month. During model school the other trainees and I will teach Oral English classes to Chinese students for 90 minutes a day five days a week in order to practice teaching in a Chinese classroom. Once we finally get to our permanent sites we may have up to 80 students of varying levels in one class, so this practice will be invaluable. The Peace Corps gives us complete freedom as to the course content (except, of course, for a handful of taboo topics), so right now I’m spending a lot of time debating what I want to teach. I’m hoping to be offered a literature course or writing course at my final site, so I’m trying to work some of that material into model school (even though it’s Oral English). I’ve contemplated throwing some postmodern literary theory at them but doubt that’ll go over well. I’ll probably just stick to discussing Disney movies as my host sister suggested. If you have any suggestions on what I should teach, let me know!

I miss you all!

Chen Ke'er (my Chinese name, which I can't pronounce correctly)

Whoa!

Finally! After a week of trying to figure out how to create a blog through the Great Firewall of China, I've succeeded! This post is a tad bit long since I have a lot to catch up on.

On the twelve hour plane ride from San Francisco to Beijing, I read Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone. In the first essay I came across the following quote: “One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains, the feature that makes our grey matter so much smarter than any machine yet devised […] is our ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us.” Why am I boring you with Jonathan Franzen quotes? Basically, this is my main fear during my two years in the Peace Corps: that I will forget all the exciting, strange, scary, and beautiful things that happen to me. So, in an effort to impede my brain’s natural function of forgetting, I’m going to try and write down as much of what happens as I can and post it here. Here it goes…

After five days at a fancy hotel where my fellow China 13s and myself received briefcase-sized medical kits and instructions to not drink the water or eat fruits/vegetables unless they’d been washed with chlorine, we departed to three different training sites to stay with host families. This meant being separated from a few other China 13 volunteers I’d really come to bond with, which was sad. It’s been overwhelming meeting so many amazing people at the same time and then suddenly losing them. I was thrilled, however, to finally get into real life in China and meet the family I'd be living with until September.

The incredibly well-stocked medical briefcase

The first night with the host family was not at all what I expected. After I’d gotten settled my host mother told me she loved dancing and I said I’d like to go with her someday. She wasted no time and took me that night. Now, when she said dancing I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Val, Jake, Tasha and I had stumbled across a group of 50-odd middle-aged women dancing in unison outside a mall a few nights before (apparently this happens every night), so I had expected line dancing of some sort. Nope. Instead, I was ballroom dancing with some hardcore dancers. If you've ever seen me dance, you know that I dance like I have elbows for knees. They didn’t seem to notice, though, and I was passed around the room from man to man. After about an hour and a half of this I was ready to pass out and I went home to a cool shower and stiff bed. I have to say the beds are taking some getting used to. The beds I’ve slept on here so far have both been very, very hard. I had a Tempurpedic bed at home (it’s the astronaut bed!) and so I’m completely spoiled when it comes to sleep. I’m sure that eventually my body will adjust and my spine will stop harassing me.

In terms of food, things have been pretty good so far. Being a vegetarian hasn’t been as much of a nightmare as I thought it would. I’ve usually been able to find something good to eat. Plus, my host family is amazing and has been willing to make me tons of delicious veggie food (and not too spicy! Woohoo!). Today I bought spinach and onion dumplings for lunch that cost 2 kuai, which equals roughly .50 cents. That’s right. Ten dumplings for half a buck. Amazing? I know! Some of my more expensive meals have rung in around $2. I have to keep in mind, though, that I’m living on $1.50 a day here right now, so those .50 cent dumplings add up. One sort of sad note concerning food (but kind of a funny story): July 4th was my five year anniversary of being a vegetarian and that day at lunch we ordered vegetable noodles. Piled on top of the noodles was a huge glob of meat, much of which had mixed in with the noodles, thus my anniversary was marked with the forgotten taste of meat. (Don’t worry. It didn’t make me want to convert back to the wicked ways of my past.) Hopefully I’ll soon be able to speak well enough in Mandarin to avoid this type of situation.

Learning Mandarin is quite a challenge, but for only having been in country a week, the other trainees and I have learned an astonishing amount of information. I now actually know what the letter “X” sounds like in Chinese! The language teachers are great and the language program is so well designed. Four hours of language each day followed by more Mandarin at home may be exhausting, but I know it’s working and one of these days my brain will catch up with everything that’s going on around it.