A Chinese Birthday

The last few years I’ve celebrated my birthday with fireworks. For the entire weekend or three days in a week, Matt and I go firework hunting, driving to all neighboring towns – even a two hour drive and a sleep over at my sister Sara’s house to the best fireworks in the state in Greenfield. Now that I am in the birthplace of fireworks, I can’t get them on the second-third-and-fourth of July – fireworks are only easy for foreigners to buy around Chinese New Year, though there are often random displays at night.

In addition, a lot of our friends are away on vacation this week as we cover their breaks, so there’s no opportunity for getting a KTV group together. So instead of a big party, Matt and I had a romantic birthday weekend away to Hangzhou, a city Marco Polo called “the finest and most splendid city in the world”.

Before leaving Nanjing, after class and a run to the gym on Friday, we went to Baker’s Pizza on Walking Street. Walking Street, or Lion Gate Street, is a stone-lined street where cars and bikes are not allowed, with tons of restaurants, food vendors, and all the pretty neon lights of a little Hong Kong. Baker’s Pizza has cheap, decent-for-China deep dish pizza, 20 RMB each, and really excellent chocolate mousse cake. We bought a bottle of decent-for-China red wine from a convenience store, which the waitress uncorked and gave us two mugs for without batting an eyelash, and ordered a Garden Veggie Pizza (surprisingly with no corn!) and a canned-peach-and-maraschino-cherry pizza (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it).

After ice cream cones from McDonald’s and blowing out my number 0 candle in a cup of HandiSnacks pudding, we went to bed early so that we could get up for our 8 AM bus to Hangzhou. (I’m proud to say that I bought the tickets myself in Chinese, asking the lady how long the bus took compared to the train and how much each was. I’ll never stop being grateful to all the Chinese people who speak slowly and clearly to me, as if I was a hard-of-hearing child.) Fulvio recommended we take the bus instead of the train because it was shorter and cheaper, but it didn’t end up being shorter, and though it was cheaper, the train station is in the center of the Hangzhou while the bus station is a 40 RMB cab ride away, about an hour in traffic, so we didn’t save any time or money in the end.

Hot and tired, eager to see the sights in our short trip, we went to the first and cheapest hostel in the Lonely Planet, but they only had 4 person dorm rooms available. I think I’m getting too old for hostel dorms shared with strangers – when we walked in, the beds were all a mess and there were clothes all over the floor, wet towels hanging from the stairs of the bunks. To boot, our roommates had also taken the lower bunks, though we were assigned them, even though there were signs every where saying to take your assigned bunk. I ended up having to climb up the towel-strewn steps to the hot stuffy bunk. Seeing the mess, without seeing our roommates, and seeing the tiny doll-sized shoes, I had assumed we were sharing space with a young Chinese girl, perhaps someone who was living there over the summer. I was surprised, when we returned home, to see that we were sharing space with a British couple our age on vacation, who never did clean up their mess.

After washing up, we went to a temple to eat at their vegetarian restaurant. They provided versions of local specialties – I successfully asked the waitress what was the best dish and she told me the fake fish. We also had fake shrimp that looked very life like, and asparagus with some kind of fake sausage. After, we went for a walk near the lake and rented a tiny, very slow, motor boat to putter around a small signed-off area of the lake while the sun set. The one nice thing about the pollution in China is that the sun starts to get all orangey early, so you have a nice long sunset. (I used my Chinese again to rent the boat, because the signs were all in Chinese, though it was a little tricky because the word for ten and the word for four (and hence forty) sound kind of identical to me in Hangzhou-ese.)

At night, we did some shopping at stalls and in a very pretty old-Chinese looking area and even saw a heated debate (not a fight – no bunches thrown) widely attended by on-lookers. After a long day in the sun, we slept really well to wake up at seven AM the next morning.

On Sunday, we looked to rent bicycles. Hangzhou has a fantastic public bicycle system. You put a 300 RMB deposit down for a card, and then you can get a bike from any of these public bike stalls by swiping the card to unlock the bike. The first hour is free, and then it starts to take money off of your card like a metro card. The only problem is, it’s mostly for long-term visitors or locals. To get your 300 RMB deposit back, you have to wait ten days. So instead, we rented bikes from a convenience store stall guy (his place had no door and was smaller that my studio in Foggy Bottom). The bikes were only 40 RMB for two, for the whole day. (I asked “For how many hours?” a new phrase I’ve learned, and he shook his head and said something I didn’t understand, so I said “dou tian?” which is definitely not how you say “all day,” but the best I could come up with, and he nodded vigorously. Our receipt for the 500 RMB deposit was written on the back of some paperboard container.)

We biked around a part of the lake before turning on to Longjing Road. Longjing means “Dragon Well” and Hangzhou is famous for Dragon Well Tea. We biked through fields and terraces of tea shrubs along the mountain sides, past shiny pools of water lined with willows and flowers and other pretty plants. Eventually, the slope became too steep, as the bikes had no gears and very little thrust behind one pedal, so that I couldn’t bike up the mountain, so I pushed it up the rest of the way in the hot sun. (You would think going to the gym everyday, I would at least be able to keep up with my husband in a bike ride, but I was hot, sweaty, and my heart was pounding in my throat as I pushed that bike up mountain curve after mountain curve.)

We took a rest at a tea house (really, someone’s house where they serve tea), ordered two glasses of longjing tea to recuperate. I asked directions in Chinese for the village and, more importantly, understood the directions. (When I talk to older Chinese people, especially if they are from areas other than Nanjing, the conversation often goes like this:

Chinese person: Oh, it’s not too far, maybe a kilometre
Me: Is it far?
Chinese person: No. It. Is. Not. Far.
Me: How many kilometeres?

Chinese Person: Boats are 140 yuan for one hour.
Me: How much is the boat?
Chinese Person. One. Hundred. Forty. Yuan.
Me: For how many hours? Etc.

I’m often not able to understand what they are saying unless I can predict it – that is, by asking the question. But this time, I was able to understand what they were saying even if I hadn’t asked the question previously – a big step for me!)

The tea village was atop the mountains, over looking the terraced rice fields. The houses were very, very nice, with shiny wood roofs and marble floors. Apparently Long Jing Tea is good money! I asked one restaurant owner if I could drinks some tea, eat something, and look at the fields – he had windows overlooking the terraces. He said “Mei you difan zuo,” no place to do. I asked again, and again he said there was no place to do. So I left. We went to a place with a balcony instead, had yet more tea (they bring you a giant thermos of hot water so you can keep refilling your cup) and rice and tomato and eggs.

The ride back down the mountain was a breeze, speeding through all of the tea fields. Our brakes were terrible, so we were often going too fast, and we made what had been an entire morning’s journey up in about three minutes down. We stopped at the tea museum, which has beautiful tea shrubs and lovely wandering gardens – I really recommend it – in addition to an exhibition hall, where you learn all about the history of tea and the process of making it. They’re also building a new hall about the appreciation for the tasting of tea, which likes like it’s going to be multi-media.

When you think about it, tea tells a lot about a society. It’s not intoxicating, and it’s not a necessity – there are no calories, so it is a real luxury commodity. Tibetans would trade horses for tea, and local people would pay taxes to the royals in tea. Think about what that means about the prosperity of an area, if you’re willing to trade your horse for tea. There were texts written on teas about how to brew them and the proper ceremony – very early technical writing pieces. The Chinese thought about tea in the way we think about wine – there were scholars who devote their lives to the proper appreciation of it. It was even considered a sort of mental activity. Often, the museum talked about brilliant Chinese people who, it seemed to say kindly, couldn’t reach their potential because of the times (I imagine the politics), so they set themselves to studying tea. The museum also talked about the decline of the quality of Chinese tea production when Western countries started barging in, and showed the gold medals given to the men who helped to rescue the tea industry with modern procedures.

After the tea museum, we biked around the rest of the lake before heading to the bus station. On the other side of the lake were beautiful buildings, museums and universities I guess. The lotus garden had big pink flowers that, if I could stand on water, would probably reach my chin. Hangzhou is a really classy city, a beautiful place to spend a mini-vacation for a birthday.

American Vacation Schedule

We hope to see you all in our four weeks (July 13-August 13 ish) back home. To see our schedule, a work in progress, go to : http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=lkyser%40gmail.com&ctz=Asia/Shanghai

Let us know when you’re free so we can get together!

Cricket Champions!

Matt was a member of the winning team in the Nanjing Cricket tournament this weekend. He played on a very diverse team – a star Pakastani player, two Australians, two Americans, and two Englishmen – and beat the Shanghai Bashers, a team that has toured in North Korea and is scheduled for a tour in Cuba.

From Cricket

About Matt’s bowling (ie, pitching), his teammates said, “When you’re on target, you’re unplayable.”

Here’s a picture of our champion captain, my boss, getting doused with celebratory beer (amber fluid in Oz-ese):

From Cricket

Rain Flower Terrace

This Saturday, I went sight seeing with some new friends from Canada. Gladys and Jenny are Chinese-Canadian, here on an internship with our department from York University.

Yu Hua Tai is a park with a museum of beautiful stones, many of them swirly agate. In Chinese style, many of the stones have pictures in the way clouds can be pictures, and ancient stories to go along with these images. The rocks are so plentiful that they used the pretty, Easter-egg-esque stones to line the walk way

From Yu hua tia

From Yu hua tia

There was also a little tea field and a tea museum with equipment for making tea, but the desciptions were in characters.

From Yu hua tia

The Revolutionary Martyrs’ Memorial is also their, a stone statue dedicated to the Chinese students who were massacred by the Kumingtang.

From Yu hua tia

Lots of things to see, but to be completely honest, we spent a lot of time bargaining in the gift shop, where they sold pretty stones and jewelry made out of the stones. My favorite part of shopping, though, was listening to the girls speak in Chinese. I can understand so much better when foreigners speak Chinese, or younger students, but understanding older people is difficult. Foreigners pronounce their words slowly, stress tones, and provide inflection that helps me to make sense of new words. In contrast, middle-aged Chinese people speak quickly, without inflection, and slur their words, which makes it difficult for a beginner like me!

When I first became a career teacher, as opposed to teaching with nonprofits part-time, I was moving from a job as an organizer, where I connected with people through their interests and built friendships with students, to a position where I felt I had to clearly draw the lines – I am a teacher, not a friend. I connected with students through their work, and through their career and college aspirations, but not through knowing their families, their hobbies, their daily lives. Partly, this was because, as a new teacher in a community plagued with giving excuses, I felt I had to separate myself from the very real troubles of their lives – day care, court dates, medical issues, anger issues – in order to instill discipline so that learning could happen. Also, I wanted them to learn what it would be like in the world after high school, without loving, understanding, coddling teachers, counselors, parents. Even in their part-time jobs, they often sabatoged themselves, expecting their supervisors to extend the kind of understanding, leniency, and receptiveness to their personal problems that they experienced at home and in the school systems. And, finally, I separated myself from their personal lives because I didn’t believe I could manage both roles, as a counselor and as a teacher.

Which is not to say that I didn’t connect with them. When an issue arose, with day care or housing, we found the appropriate staff person who could assist them with resources. I started reading circles around books they chose and learn about their lives through the connections they talked about in their groups. To stop quieter, lonely students from skipping, I engineered work groups with students I thought would eventually be friends. The statistics survey projects gave me an insight into their interests. I spent time with them during lunch breaks working on their portfolios, letters and essays for college – but always, the connection was around their work and their academic goals.

This means, of course, that I knew less about them personally than other teachers, but I also thought it provided some fairness – no one was getting slack because their uncle had recently died, or because they’d had an abortion, or because they were battling substance abuse. And this, I thought, is the reality of life.

Now, in China, where drug abuse, teen pregnancy, homelessness is not a problem for my students, I feel left out when I don’t know as much about a student’s life as the other teachers. In addition, our structured mathematics curriculum doesn’t really provide time for writing personal essays or giving speeches that helps me to learn about them. Even in computer class, students can create power points about their hobbies, but the methods of doing algebra usually add little insight into someone’s past.

Here at the college, we focus on English language acquisition first and foremost – the other subjects are, in a way, a means to this end. English language scores are their ticket into an Australian or US university, not their math scores or business sense. So, whereas in Boston we were taught to honor their “L1″, or first language, here, we have strict rules – only English in class, no Chinese. To enforce this rule, many teachers have adopted a policy of assigning the entire class an essay when we hear Chinese, with the number of words increasing with each spotting. I hate giving out punishment, I’m the queen of threats, but today, I collected my first “Speak English” essay. I asked them to write about themselves (the word count reached 40 words), and this, I’m realizing, may be my ticket into learning more about these students, all without taking up class time. Quite a neat trick. Feel free to steal it, math teachers out there.