To the Losers Go the Spoils

Last Friday, our bosses came to James and I for help. Simply put, there was a problem at the school. As a result of not passing the foreign teacher-taught oral English classes over the last year, just under 60 graduate and doctoral students were in danger of flunking out of Shanxi Agricultural University. This is not the first time I have written about these students, nor do I expect it to be my last. The students had all failed our classes for a variety of reasons. Some had plainly never once attended class. Others had come for one or two classes before deciding to stop altogether. Others had taken a leave of absence after finding employment in another city or county. Still others never took the final exam either of their own volition or because of our mandates prohibiting students who had missed a certain percentage of classes from doing so. Regardless, school policy states that if a student fails even one class, he or she won't be able to receive a diploma.

From a Western educational perspective, this would not be so great of a problem. After all, it was the individual choices by these students that resulted in their failing grades and not a fault of the university. But from a Chinese point of view, this is a great problem indeed. After all, if of the 380 or so students who matriculate every year in graduate school, 60 are not graduating, that's over 15% who aren't getting their degree. This reflects badly on the university and serves as a warning for prospective students that they only stand an 85% chance of graduating. Like most of the cultural conflicts we Westerners come across in China, this too is a matter of “face”—in other words, a high statistic effectively discourages new students from applying, thus bringing down the school's credibility. In a country like China where ratings for high schools and colleges are weighed even more heavily than in America, every failing student can make a difference.

In truth, America sees its own shortcomings when it comes to higher education. No college likes to have a low graduation rate, in the same way that no college wants a high freshmen transfer rate. Both are indicators of a certain dissatisfaction on the part of the student body—and dissatisfaction translates to loss of prestige. Even in my high school, there had been a rumor that everyone in jeopardy of flunking out was expelled before they reached their senior year for fear that they would bring down the school's perfect 100% graduation rate. That's where supposed grade inflation may factor in to high-end Ivy League colleges and where cheating teachers flub standardized test results at Chicago public schools (see the incredibly smart Freakonomics). Still, it was nothing compared to the proposal that our bosses in Taigu schemed for me and James.

If our bosses Zhao Hong and Xiao Fan weren't the final word on the decision, they were, at least, the masterminds behind the proposition that followed. In order for all of those students not to fail, they would have a retest. That retest—in the form of a written essay in English—would come on a Sunday following two days of classes—two on Friday and two on Saturday, each for two hours. The classes were scheduled to be taught, we soon learned, by James and I, as well as a Chinese English professor—with me and James splitting Friday classes and the other teacher taking the Saturday ones. The business of administering the final exam and the grading would also fall to the Chinese English teacher. When asked about the content of those classes, our boss Zhao Hong simply smiled and laughed. Anything, she told us in Chinese. You can even scold the class for the entire two hours if you want. James and I were flatly appalled. The administration was essentially telling us that coming to four classes and taking a makeshift final exam is all that it takes to pass oral English at Shanxi Agricultural University.

It would have been easier had the Foreign Affairs Office taken a more lenient approach to disciplinary enforcement in the past. Quite the contrary, Zhao Hong was our biggest advocate last spring when it came to ­failing the scores of students who had only in the last week started coming to our classes. Now, it seemed she was telling us the opposite: that you can be a bad student and there will be no consequences to your actions, and what's more, the system will do everything in its power to help you succeed! Zhao Hong assured us that it wasn't an easy decision. With one or two failing students, it wouldn't have been a problem, but 60 was too huge a pill for the school to swallow. Under pressure from her higher-ups, she relented, despite the fact that she recognized it wasn't fair—both to us and to the dozens of students we had taught who actually deserved the grades they received. But ultimately, as is want to be the case in China, there was nothing she could do to change it. What she was asking of us, then, was to teach those make-up classes, even if we treated them as nothing more than a favor to her.

James was very resistant at first, and for good reason. It felt like all of our conventional Western wisdom was turned on its head—that those who work hard and ultimately reach the top are rewarded, and that cheaters and low-lives are punished by society. It immediately became apparent that the very act of “failing” a student may be a totally Western concept. It would seem that other departments at the school didn't have this problem—that even students who never once showed up to class were still buoyed along to subsequent grades by the Chinese education system. That might explain, at least, how we have students in our classes who have taken over ten years of English and can barely read the alphabet. Furthermore, it made English, and more specifically, our English classes, come off as meaningless—that students should not be held back or denied their degree for failing something as petty as an oral English class. With James away for the weekend in Beijing, it was up to my guilty conscience to eventually suck up my pride and agree.

*

On Friday morning, I felt like I had walked into a cold, dead place. On the front door, a crude bolt-lock opened up to a room full of lethargic spirits and dull, blank stares. The classroom lent itself to the kind of place where learning goes to die—more so than my regular classroom, the lighting seemed ghostly and hollow, the arrangement of the desks felt entirely impersonal, and the drywall paneling had undergone torpor with age. Photographs of Mao paired with inspirational quotes lined each of the four walls. The teaching building directly overlooked North Yard, and all of the honking, shouting, and loud music from the street wafted its way up to my classroom even with the windows closed. I felt like I could have been entering a rehab facility for drop-outs and delinquents—it was clear that no one, myself and my boss included, had any desire to be there.

My boss was the first to address the class. Generally an incredibly mild-mannered and sweet woman, Zhao Hong never sounded more fierce. She bluntly told the class of flunkies that they were there because of school policy and not because they deserved a second chance. She herself commented on the injustice of how coming to four classes is not a substitute for an entire year's worth of English classes and talked at length about the enormous opportunity that they had wasted—the chance to take English classes with an actual American—an opportunity that other, perhaps more motivated, students would have killed for. At the end of her spiel, she took attendance—a regulation, she told me earlier, of assessing that the students are at least capable of attending any class—before gracefully exiting and handing the floor over to me.

In truth, I was much more nervous about teaching this class than usual. Based on the nature of the class, Zhao Hong originally wanted me and James to teach because we would at least have a scant degree of familiarity with the students. After all, they were students who had had Nick, Anne, Gerald, and James and I as teachers last year, so our faces would at least be recognizable to them. The unintended consequence of that, though, is that I was once again face-to-face with the dozen or so students that I had personally failed, as well as dozens more who were in a similar predicament. It was like being a judge and getting put in the slammer right alongside the criminals that you yourself were responsible for convicting. Even more, most of the students I didn't recognize were significantly older—local politicians and businesspeople who had careers and lives outside of graduate school—who were probably looking at me and wondering who this scrappy youngster was standing in front of them and why they should give a damn.

Still, I had just been listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech with all three of my classes of graduate students this week and was feeling confident. I started class by asking in Chinese who among them could speak English. Seeing as how my good students have a hard enough time participating, I wasn't surprised when no one raised their hands. So I asked them again. Still, nothing. So I decided to be a little cruel. It's no wonder none of you can speak English, I told them in Chinese. Perhaps you would have if you had come to class last year. It was then that I decided to teach the class in Chinese. I said that they had already wasted enough of my time for having me teach them on my day off, but that I was going to waste as little of theirs as possible by not requiring them to have to decipher my spoken English. I wrote a single statement on the blackboard. In all capital letters, it read: Writing Exercise: Give the reasons why you did not come to class last year. And while they wrote for thirty minutes, I sat reading Blink, and finished class by listening to each of them stand up and recite their alibis.

A part of me wanted to humiliate them, because I too had been humiliated. Last semester I rested on a moral high ground after having failed these students in good faith. I was confident in my decision—with the strength of the Foreign Affairs Office behind me, and in spite of the numerous efforts on the part of those students to win me over, using bribes, reasoning, and guilt at their disposal. And yet here I was, nine months later, with the only result of having put my foot down in the first place was in making more work for myself. I was like a puppet dictator, trying everything I could to assert my will and dominance, but knowing deep-down that I actually wielded no power. Students were there that I had explicitly failed once before, but regardless of what they did or did not do in class that day, the very fact that they were there meant that they would pass.

For my second class, I had them write on a slightly more benign topic: What makes a good student? At lunch, Alexandra talked me down from my original writing prompt: Writing Exercise #2: Why do you think you deserve to pass this class? I was clutching my chopsticks over a bowl of noodle soup, still visibly upset and shaking with anger. I told her that I was genuinely curious in their answers—in the face of every moral and ethical query, how could they possibly believe that they had the right to pass oral English? No matter the excuse, the heart of the matter was the simple fact that they had not come to class. Sensing how worked up I was getting, she reminded me not to take it personally. Irresponsible students make headaches for teachers across all disciplines—this was not a problem unique to us as English teachers. She encouraged me to give them my “nothing” as anything approaching my “all” would have been far more than they deserved.

That afternoon, I was decidedly more hands-off. No more was the gnawing emotional vexation boring its way under my skin, and no longer did I sit, fuming, at the front of the class as I tried to appear blithe and indifferent as I read my book. Instead, I was a pale drone of myself—stern, robotic, and emotionless. For that hour of my life, it felt odd to abandon everything that I've ever learned about teaching. I made no attempt whatsoever to pretend that I was enjoying myself or give them the slightest satisfaction. There was no excitement about the English language or praising them for good work. I was past the point of empathy. I was irate. These students were slackers and good-for-nothings, and there was nothing that they could possibly learn in two days that would make up for a year's worth of careful lesson planning and dedicated teaching.

The reasons they give for missing class last year were largely predictable. Most were a combination of having to do a research project or an experiment in another city, working a full-time job, taking care of aging parents, newborn children, or a sick wife, being sick themselves, or just being so bad at English that they felt simply being in class was a waste of their time. All of them spoke at some length about how sorry they were, their obligation to their own education, and how thankful they were for these make-up classes to improve their oral English. Similar, were their stock responses for the characteristics of a “good student”: a person who tries their best, helps others, is respectful of their teachers, is hard-working, does their homework, goes to class, is responsible, has a “burning desire to learn,” and “does everything possible to achieve their goals.” Most, if not all, were probably educational propaganda slogans drilled into their heads when they were young. Few, if any, seemed to pick up on the overt irony of the question being aimed as a direct attack at their own ineptitude as graduate students.

It came as a shock to me then that, all things considered, their English levels were actually better than I expected. Most enunciated their words clearly and their accents were comprehensible enough that I didn't struggle with what they were trying to say. No more was this true than for the girl sitting in the front row. Whereas all of the other students sat as close to the back wall as possible, she sat alone, dead center in the front of the classroom. She wore glasses, thigh-high rhinestone boots, and a brown sweatshirt. A thick coif of her hair swooped seductively over her right eye. When I asked her for the reasons why she missed class, she said that she had been traveling and meeting friends in other cities. After college, it was hard to keep in touch with old classmates and there was nothing going on in Taigu anyway. She told me that class was boring and that she thought she could get away with not going. Still, she wrote, it wasn't fair to James, to her other classmates, to the school, or to me. She lamented the lost time and the wasted opportunity, and when I looked hard at her, I almost thought I could see her cry.

In that exact moment, I wanted to take everything back—the anger and frustration, the slow change to sadness, the feelings of abandonment and rejection. Hearing her story, it almost made me want to forgive her right then and there. I had so internalized her narrative that I was left only with a feeling of guilt. The truth was that this was just an honest girl who made an honest mistake. And whereas few students took responsibility for their actions in their essays, she plainly did, and actually seemed to feel badly about it. There was no fabrication or rationalization. She understood that what she did was wrong and was repenting, so who was I to punish her further? I thanked her for reading and after she sat down, I fought my way through the next fourteen essays with a resolve so strong that, by the time I dismissed class, I felt like my body would crumble beneath me.

On the way back home, one of the female students approached me after class. I had intentionally left the classroom a little later to avoid bumping into anyone, but apparently she had been wise to my aversion. She was unimaginably cheery, serving as a perfect counterpoint to my dejected moodiness. Tripping over English phrases and switching intermittently into Chinese, she begun asking me some of those basic questions reserved for first-time encounters. But it was clear, at least to me, that I had no intention of making polite conversation. Rather, I wanted to lock myself in my room and never have to think about these failing students again. Finally, she stammered out, I hope that we can still be friends. I thought for a moment, letting a deep breath rise slowly in my chest and exit through my lips. I turned to her and asked in Chinese, Who was your foreign teacher last year? She paused for a minute. Actually, she told me, I can't quite remember.

The Adventure of the Disheveled Desk

Here's one for the Sherlock Holmes fans out there. Imagine that you have just entered an unfamiliar place. Your surroundings are shrouded in darkness, above you is a drip that keeps licking from the ceiling, and the ground beneath you is unfurling like a great Persian rug that can be swept from under your feet at a moment's notice. You have never been more aware of your surroundings. Everything is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying and you're half-expecting some bedraggled skeleton to sneak up from behind you at any minute. A position, where the door at the end of a long hallway holds every hope and fear you have ever imagined. You move slowly forward to open it, with each heavy breath and passing moment leading you closer to the end. And you have the uncanny sensation that soon—perhaps very soon—you will uncover that thing you've been searching for, or, in the infamous words of 50 Cent, die tryin'.

This feeling, often reserved for underground caverns, dingy narrow alleyways, and only the seediest of London bars, is curiously the same sensation I have in Taigu after returning home from a long vacation. In the year-and-a-half that I've lived here, I haven't had a particularly good track record when it comes to going back home. Take my return from a summer of travel last August—entering my room only to be met with my posters and tapestry ripped savagely from my walls, my books and papers lying in unorganized heaps across my shelves, and everything on my desk either shoved aside, toppled on to the floor, or lumped on top of my bed. I soon learned that the Foreign Affairs Office had hired workers to come in and repaint and repair our houses while we were gone, though no one had bothered to tell us before we left that we should expect to return to rooms that looked as though they had been ransacked by thieves.

Exhibit A: My desk in utter ruin following my return to Taigu in late August of last year.

For anyone who knows me, I keep my living space meticulous. Books are never so much as misaligned, stacks of papers are neatly squared, and every item on every table surface retains its composure and spatial placement in harmony with those around it. It's not to say that I don't have clutter, because I do, but even the clutter seems to have an imbued sense of purpose and resolve for where it exists and why. I joke with James that if he so much as came into my room and used a tissue, I would notice, but in all honesty (and haplessness), I truly believe that I would. What's great about my relationship with James, though, is that rather than criticize each others' obsessive compulsions, we provide mutual commiseration for their breeding. Case in point: James has to check the front door three times before he leaves the house to make sure he hasn't left something undone (unplugged the space heater, turned off the stove), whereas I go into a mental flurry when I realize that someone has been in my room, borrowed something from my kitchen, or washed their hands in my sink, no matter how seemingly insignificant the infraction.

It came, then (at least to me), as little surprise that someone had once again come into my house uninvited during the time I was away during break. As far as I know, the only people who have the keys to my house are me, James, and, perhaps ironically, the Foreign Affairs Office. In the past, they have used this privilege for both good and evil—sometimes to fix leaks in our bathroom when we are out of the house, but also to ambush us on Saturday mornings with news that we have an impromptu banquet to attend or a scientific paper that needs English revision. To most people, this would come as a gross breach of privacy, and to be sure, it took me a while to put aside my American need for personal space and accept the notion that I can be walked in on or interrupted at any moment. But since there was nothing I could do to change that, I realized that I'd simply do my best to plan accordingly.

What I haven't yet been able to put aside, however, is the thought of someone entering my house without forewarning while I'm away and making a mess of my belongings without a legitimate reason to account for the intrusion. In the case of the summer, the mess was attributed to house repairs. This time, it may have been a simple matter of having a clean room to greet me when I returned. The irony, though, is that whatever “cleaning” was done in the way of dusting corners and sweeping my floor, was undone in the sheer amount of time I had to dedicate to painstakingly rearranging back all of my belongings to my liking. However, the strangest thing about all of this is that unlike the summer, when all of my possessions were somewhat understandably tousled due to the refurbishing, this time around, there was hardly rationale to explain why someone would have been as deeply entrenched in my belongings as they were. Rather than simply being stolen or indiscriminately scrapped, many of the situations in which I found my things were so utterly bizarre that I had to make a list detailing all of the oddities:

1. Flash drive inserted into one of the ports on my USB hub, despite the fact that it wasn't attached to my computer.
2. Cap to my flash drive found at the bottom of my laundry hamper.
3. Two AAA batteries removed from their box in my drawer.
4. Empty bottle of jasmine tea found on the shelf above my bathroom sink.
5. Discontinued 10 RMB currency note missing from my collection of foreign money.
6. Five blue binder clips separated from a box of multicolored clips in my drawer and arranged in a circle on my desk.
7. A single match removed from my matchbox and lit.
8. A short clip of staples removed from a box of staples in my drawer and put on my desk.
9. External hard drive noticeably manhandled and instructional insert removed from its case.
10. Student gift unwrapped and separated from its cardboard sheath.
11. Peacock feather removed from my wall.
12. Two napkins used and discarded in various parts of my room.

It helps to reiterate here that none of these acts, even in my wildest dreams, are things I could have possibly left unattended to leading up to a two-month vacation. The real mystery to me is that aside from the 10 RMB note, nothing (to my knowledge) was explicitly stolen, and it's not like there weren't other valuable things in my room—all kinds of foreign currency, books, electronics, clothing, etc. And still, there are so many other questions left unanswered, like: Why specifically blue binder clips? Why take only one bill and leave the dozens of others untouched? Why light a match? Why mess with my flash drive and external hard drive but not actually steal them? The only thing clear to me now is that whoever had come into my room was not trying to be discrete, or at least, didn't know who he was dealing with. After I showed pictures I had taken of the state of my room to the other foreigners, some joked that a similar thing could have happened to them and they wouldn't have even noticed. Is it my fault for being entirely too anal?

I'm questioning even now whether or not I should bring it up with the Foreign Affairs Office. There were no signs that my house had been forcibly entered, so they are the only people who would have been able to come and go. And although I wouldn't accuse them of foul play, I don't trust the integrity of the workers they hire to come in and do repairs. To this day, they have never mentioned a single bad thing associated with their mid-vacation check-ins, and even if they did trust that I was telling the truth, it still may be impossible to pin down exactly who was responsible for the hi-jinks. I'm upset with myself for letting this get to me, but at the same time, it is frustrating and really quite eerie knowing that someone was so clearly taking liberties with my belongings, potentially lifting information from my drives, or at the very least, being crude and disrespectful in a stranger's home.  I still can't help but feel violated. If I can't be sure that my own house won't be broken into every time I leave it, then I can't truly feel safe in Taigu. As Scooby and the gang might say: It looks like we got a real caper on our hands!

Homecoming and the Construct of Home

Nearly two months—indeed, my longest time ever untethered to even the scantest conceptualization of home—and exactly zero blog posts later, I'm back in chilly Taigu, getting used to snow, air pollution, and the dry chalky feeling that I wake up with in my mouth each morning. By most accounts, the transition hasn't been easy. As it is, I'm still picking sand from the bottom of my backpack and going through intense withdrawal from condensed milk-saturated coffee and banana juice. But through it all, I came back from the end of break eager and excited to start my last semester here in Taigu—a thought that simultaneously excites and terrifies me—both because of how mentally prepared I feel to be back in America and how anxious I am at the thought of extricating myself from the little town I have called home for the last two years. More serious than that, though, is the fear that I won't have enough time to follow through with all of my goals for the next four months.

So far, things have been going to plan well. Four out of four weekdays in my first week back I had dinner with Chinese friends and have been painstakingly trying to get my Chinese back to where it was before my two month hiatus from almost all manner of speaking and reading. One of my closest Chinese friends—Crystal—who was once just another non-student who I reluctantly let sit in on my English classes, has recently left for work in Beijing. She found a teaching job, one that suits her interests perfectly—early education and tutoring in English—but even knowing how happy she will be there as opposed to being stranded in Taigu halfway between college and grad school still doesn't quiet my sadness at losing one of the friends I've known the longest here.

But not all of the news has come with a heavy heart. One of my former students told me that she is getting married in May and invited me to what will be the first wedding I have ever attended on any continent. After dinner at my favorite hot pot restaurant, I got treated to a night of mahjong and girl talk in one of the dorm rooms of some of my closest female Chinese friends. In the interest of expanding our male friend base, James and I started trying our hand at a popular collectible card game (think the Chinese version of Magic: The Gathering), and made a morning of playing it with our Chinese tutor and a couple of his male colleagues. And just this week, I finally mustered enough courage to ask my student from Shenzhen to teach me Cantonese, and in our first lesson, was struggling through new palatal placements with a difficulty not too dissimilar from my first time learning Mandarin.

Of course, traveling had its perks too. Under the pretenses of eating incredible food, seeing new places, and meeting up with old friends (though not necessarily in that order), traveling led me to places far and wide, but mostly, just away from China. Culturally, it couldn't have felt more different—listening to mosques blaring the “call to prayer” in Islamic Northern Sumatra in Indonesia, seeing churches lit up with gleaming red crosses at night in Korea, or hearing monks chanting in Buddhist wats all over Laos and Northern Thailand. Overall, the whole trip was incredibly rewarding (if more than a little exhausting), but if I had the chance to do it again, I would probably leave out one country, spend the extra 10 days scattered amongst the remaining ones, and come back to Taigu a couple days earlier. At this point, I feel like I've got a decent sense of Southeast Asia so that the next time I come back, I will have a more clear idea of what I want to see. This trip was more like an appetizer sampling plate—lots of different things to try, but only a tiny bite of each. Next time, I'm ordering the main course.

Though I haven't stopped trying to challenge myself, I can't help but feeling that since I've been back, the things I'm doing here in Taigu aren't especially new or groundbreaking. By most accounts, it's been back to the old comforts and routines of teaching, writing, exercising, and going out to big dinners with friends. As a town, Taigu has hardly budged in the two months I've been away. As one of my former students roughly put it, “the restaurants are still bright and gaudy and the road still looks like shit.” But for exactly that reason, there is a certain comfort that comes with being in a familiar place. I never realized how much I genuinely liked China until I came back this time around. I've been here long enough now that even moving around Beijing comes with a high degree of intimacy. In spite of the shoving and shouting, the poverty and the grime, the censorship and the corruption, it feels, somehow, cathartic to be in a place again where I can speak the language, interact meaningfully with the locals, and adjust to the local diet, all without having to adapt to a new environment every two or three days during travel.

Indeed, the closest thing I get to travel nowadays is on local buses through town, that, rather than being marked in big English letters with the names of famous sites and tourist attractions, adopt their Chinese stop names from those of local landmarks like “Agricultural Bank of China,” and “Shanxi Agricultural University, Student Dormitories.” On my last bus trip on my way to the supermarket, I saw a traditional farmer funeral going on in the street. It was maybe the second time I had ever seen one here—a procession led by old men and women (presumably good friends of the deceased) dressed in white head scarves and robes covering the majority of their bodies. Their heads were bowed and their hands adopted a praying position in front of their chests. Behind them, a caravan of white pick-up trucks adorned with large peacock-colored wreaths—quite like the psychedelic flashing lights you might find outlining pinball machines—systematically bore through town, obscuring the flow of traffic.

I've been contemplating starting a new blog entitled "China Big Red Balloon" as these things are literally everywhere.  Here's one in front of one of our new favorite restaurants in town.

This certainly isn't the first time that this reference has been made, but I feel like I've got one foot in one world and one in another. One need look no further than the smog that has been blanketing the school of late—when afternoon trips to the gym yield clipped footprints in the snow, long silhouetted shadows, and near desertion in the streets. James and I have gone ahead and started a new lifting program, knowing full well that we won't be here long enough to see it through to completion. Such is the feeling that consumes my everyday. Why start something that you know you can't finish? Why foster new friendships that will only be doomed to failure? Why keep studying Chinese when you will only fall behind in America? What I realized was that unlike the transience of travel, this is my life—that the seemingly trivial elements contained therein are nonetheless substantial and meaningful, and no matter what the future has in store for me, I have to live the next four months with the resolve of one facing an ever-expanding present, laid out before me like patched cobblestone streets, brick smokestacks, and fiery pink sunsets.

I Won't Be Home for Christmas, Again

There's something vaguely poetic to be said about your first Christmas away from home. When you are young, Christmas and home are about as inseparable as a newborn from its mother, so it only follows that observing Christmas in the place of your youth—arguably the most memorable and sepia-toned years of your life—has a mythology built around it of family, tradition, and nostalgia. If the holiday specials on network TV aren't the first to capitalize on it, then certainly Hallmark has made a dent in our collective psyche that Christmas is a season to cherish and remember. There are those images you can't help being drawn to—your first Christmas tree fastened to the roof of the car, the warm glow of the fireplace, the halcyon angel placed quietly at the top of the tree, the sharp engine whistle of a miniature train set, the stiff, plush lap of the Santa Claus at Macy's.

To be fair, this year wasn't my first Christmas away from home—last year found me in an eerily similar predicament—in my one-story flat in rural China with six other foreigners who have been the closest thing to family I'd had for the last five months. Christmases in years past saw me, most notably, playing guest at my cousin's birthday party, as we helped to unpack and re-construct the plastic Christmas tree and decorate it with tiers of gaudy gold and silver tinsel, frosted glass bulbs, and Disney-themed ornaments. My uncle's house was decked out in holiday festivity—as the sound of Christmas compilation albums steadily pumped in from the TV speakers. My uncle spent the better part of the day cooking his famous “holiday ham,” while my mother quietly peeled vegetables as my aunt made off-handed comments about her dish-washing technique and how she needed to get a real job. The yearly gathering was perhaps the closest thing to a reunion my family got, where the cousins and aunts-once-removed I hadn't seen since the previous year's party all came out to celebrate Christmas and their prodigal niece. I was never sure what made me more uneasy, the fact that I was expected to make conversation with adults I hardly knew or that those adults were giving me presents I felt I hardly deserved.

Decorated wreath on Ray's door.  Ornaments courtesy of IKEA Beijing.

At these sorts of occasions there was always a musical interlude, where me, my sister, my cousin, and two of my second-cousins would each take turns playing our various instruments to the amusement of the crowd. It was a relatively unbiased way of assessing our auditive worth, which could then be extended to other areas of our lives. I played the cello, my sister the violin, and my three cousins (all about my age) played the piano. Because of the size of my instrument, I always performed last, but by then there was hardly anyone left in the audience who had any interest in whatever slapdash rendition of Handel or Mozart I could put together without sheet music. At the end of the night when nearly all the guests had left to go home, my sister and I would beg my mother to stay overnight, no matter how much we knew she disliked sleeping in a different house or how much we would all regret it by the next morning. Some years she would relent, much to our amazement and glee, while on others, she held fast to the notion of trudging through the snow to the nearest subway stop and riding the two hours back home. But regardless if it was in the morning or at night, each year when we came back to our tree-less, decoration-less apartment, there was the same feeling—of not being good enough.

It turns out my mom and my sister didn't make it to my cousin's house this year—only the second time that had ever happened. The first time was when my sister, my dad, and I went to Barcelona to celebrate the New Year during my junior year of college—the closest thing to a “family vacation” I've ever experienced. Apparently, the day after Christmas this year was marked by a blizzard, blanketing the city with snow, and in typical fashion, city officials had little idea how to handle it. Subway service was suspended until further notice, and besides, my cousin was turning 23—and who needs a fancy birthday party at that age anyway? Such is where Christmas found me this year—balancing a yearning for a bygone childhood and the curiosity and wonderment that comes with an entirely unsympathetic re-imagining of Christmas in a foreign land.

China, as a secular country, does not celebrate Christmas—at least, not in the way your average Christian family does in America—complete with midnight mass on Christmas Eve and the life-sized 'Jesus in the manger' nativity displays drawn up alongside blow-up reindeer as front lawn decorations. In the days leading up to Christmas, me and three of the other male teachers decided to make a trip to Beijing for a sort-of “boy's weekend out.” Simply given the nature of the gender split among the foreign teachers, I've probably been exposed to more male energy in Taigu than in any other place I've ever lived, but we wanted quality time, actively spent in pursuit of each other's company. So on the ramshackle 12-hour night train from Taigu, we were fortunate to get a private 4-bunk soft sleeper cabin, meaning that we could hold a conversation in relative comfort—perched on the second-story of adjacent bunk-beds, taking swigs of beer from giant glass bottles, and having “lights out” at our own discretion.

What China does do to celebrate Christmas is commercialization, though even that is different than in America. As night fell on my first day in Beijing, I found myself at a Yoshinoya, a Japanese fast food chain, having my second of two beef bowls of the day (and my second of two meals total), while waiting to meet my friend Emma who's birthday I came to Beijing partly to celebrate. I went on to write in my journal that in that moment, I was at the height of cultural confusion. Everything about the situation seemed off. For one thing, Christmas music was blaring on loop from the overhead speakers—literally, the first I had heard all year—and the interior of the combined Yoshinoya/Dairy Queen was decked out in wreaths, ornaments, bows, and other decorations, hanging from below the oversized menus and scattered around the check-out counters. Even the women behind the cash registers were wearing Santa hats to match their red-and-white aprons. Since I hadn't been home for the last two Christmases and it had been quite a while since I so much as heard “Jingle Bells” or “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” the very thought of being bundled up on a cold Beijing night and approximating Christmas to any small degree was simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

Coffee with a side of Christmas, Grandma's Kitchen, Wudaokou, Beijing.

I couldn't help feeling like an outlier—a traitor to my family who I hadn't spoken to in weeks, or more generally, to the country that I had—if not for good, then at least for the time being—left behind. It felt odd then for this to pass as my reminder of Christmas—in a country where the depth of knowledge on the holiday goes about as far as an “old man” and a string of long socks. When I was studying abroad in Osaka, I missed Thanksgiving, probably my favorite American holiday, but I had made it back home in time for Christmas. If past Christmases have taught me anything, it isn't to say that I'm missing out on much—if anything, really—and that I feel at all regretful to be abroad, but it just strikes me somehow as odd. In the same way that I want to be a good cultural ambassador of America to China, I also want to be the same for my family and children in the future. How will I reconcile the part of me that waits in a lonely apartment in rural China on Christmas Eve knowing full well that there won't be anything to greet me in the morning, with the iconic yarn of Christmas specials, the gathering of the presents around the tree, baking chestnuts in the oven, and setting out milk and cookies for Santa?

One of my students asked me recently where my home is, and though I've answered that question countless times before, it made me pause to think—what home do I really have to come home to for Christmas? I moved away from Oberlin in May of 2009, away from Ithaca in late July, and finally, from New York and my mom's apartment in August. The only real home I have to go back to at this point is in Taigu. At Yoshinoya, separated from the other foreigners I had come with, I chewed on the delicious flash-fried strips of beef, thinking about globalization and how American fast food in Asia must reveal the “Americaphile” in everyone on this continent. Outside of actually seeking out foreign friends with whom to converse and build a relationship with, there is seemingly no easier or more satisfying way to feel like you are experiencing the intricacies and customs of the West, then by munching on a Big Mac in a Chinese McDonald's. KFC has been capitalizing on this well, especially during the holiday season, with targeted advertisements that pair a family's consumption of a bucket of fried chicken with sledding and making snowmen on a blustery winter's day, all traditions that are not native to China.

But Chinese aren't the only ones itching for a taste of American culture. It would seem that Western food abroad has had a similar effect on me. With nothing that comes close to approximating Western fare in Taigu, Beijing has come to embody the stuff of fantasy. Going to Beijing is like reaching the promised land in many ways—familiar food, people who speak English, and tons of exciting things to do. That part of the experience alone has had a way of blindsiding me to all of my actual responsibilities in Taigu and furthered my impression that I was living in a dream world. And while expectation is folly, so too can reality be stultifying. The truth is that Beijing has nearly everything we could possibly want, and while living in Taigu has its benefits, comfort and security are not among them. But, really, who goes to live abroad without expecting some degree of adversity?

Secret Santa gifts by the radiator, in all of their beautifully-wrapped glory.

Even compared with Beijing, in Taigu, Christmas isn't nearly as elaborate an affair. There are few reminders that it is even a holiday at all, save for the tiny windowsill effigies of Santa Claus and the handful of decorated fake trees at restaurant entrances that work to drum up business. It is said that most of the recycled PVC plastic that goes into making fake trees comes from China, so it should be no surprise that they are in high supply. There are certainly no mechanized window displays like in the warm fronts of luxury department stores in America or the fresh smell of evergreen wafting as you walk down a crowded street. Many Chinese take Christmas to be the equivalent of Chinese New Year on the mainland—a traditional and reverent holiday spent doing things together with family. With the emphasis on togetherness, everyone I talk to is shocked when I reveal that I won't be going home at all for the holidays. When I say it's about money, most wave it off, unable to see the connection with cost when there's an innate obligation to one's family. “Won't your parents miss you,” students ask me, in between mouthfuls of braised pork and garlic shoots at our end-of-year banquets. “Probably,” I say, noncommittally, just before we toast to the end of the first semester and the new year to come.

As far as restaurants go, hot pot is apparently the place for young Chinese to go and celebrate Christmas. Peeking into a few on Christmas Day, restaurants that usually have room to spare were booked solid, and it took using our guanxi with the boss of one place to even get a table. But Christmas Eve saw us in a very different predicament. Holding true to our tradition from last year, we decided to cook a big meal together and eat it in the spacious, friendly comfort of Gerald's living room. Christmas Eve in Taigu also saw an immense shipment of apples to the town. In accord with Chinese tradition, Christmas Eve finds people exchanging apples (and, to a lesser extent, other fruits) as Christmas presents. What most people here don't know is that it is purely a Chinese convention and has no grounding in America. Decorated apples overflowed from fruit stalls all along North Yard, with some wrapped in colorful foil, others in individual boxes, some dipped in various candied lacquers, and still more, engraved and carved with designs. My living room soon became so littered with all the periphery plastic and cardboard by-products from these student gifts that we had more apples than we knew what to do with.

For dinner on Christmas Eve, we decided to cook Mexican food, since Gerald and James had bought taco seasoning on a trip to Shanghai. Cooking dinner came to mean nearly as much fun and revelry as the eating itself. All seven of us were responsible for our own parts of the meal—James made the salsa, Gerald seasoned the meat, David and Robert made tortillas, Alexandra and Ray baked cookies from scratch, and I prepared the vegetables and rice. Everyone insisted on wearing Santa hats while they cooked too. In fact, Gerald has worn his ever since in lieu of an actual winter hat. It doesn't keep you particularly warm, but it's something. He says he'll keep wearing it until it's culturally inappropriate. Judging from the plastic Christmas tree still propped up in an old Taigu lynchpin since May of this year, I think it's safe to say that day may never come.

Taigu Family Christmas Photo 2010 (photo courtesy of Gerald Lee).

There was a spirit and camaraderie to the meal absent from many of our previous group activities in Taigu thus far this semester. There truly is something to be said about the holidays having a unifying effect that forced us to come together in a way similar to how the swine flu crisis of last year infiltrated our group consciousness and made us stronger as a unit. Prior to the dinner, we had all drawn Secret Santa recipients and though some people had enough foresight to buy their gifts during our trip to Beijing, I led a second group in making a trek out to Walmart in Taiyuan after our classes had ended for that very purpose. Though our own families have different traditions on when exactly to open gifts, we decided that Christmas Eve was as good a time as any, so after dinner and clean-up, we divvied out our presents and languished in the slow afterglow of the holiday spirit. We even paired dinner with a brief Hanukkah ceremony, where Ray melted candles onto a ledge and we each chanted while lighting one in reverse age order. After that came the tradition to end all traditions—watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” around Gerald's oversized computer monitor. It got me thinking about how our own ragtag group here in Taigu would compare had we been anthropomorphized as Peanuts characters.

Ray would undoubtedly be Schroeder—the introverted, musical character who doesn't play a huge part in the show but is integral, if only for guest appearances and giving the series a sense of whole. James would be Linus—reverent, thoughtful, and moral—who delivered the prayer in the Christmas musical in the cartoon just as the real James said grace at our Christmas dinner. Gerald would be Snoopy—the feisty, sarcastic wisecrack, with a penchant for making trouble. He lives in his own separate orbit from the group, but without him, we wouldn't have enough entertainment quota for a show. David would be Pig-Pen, if for no other reason than because his hair tends to stick up in weird places, and his relatively constant state of illness can mistake him for being forlorn and unclean. Alexandra would be Lucy—which is not to say that she is obnoxious or a know-it-all, but because her temper can sometimes get the best of her and she isn't afraid to speak her mind. That leaves me as Charlie Brown, the slightly pathetic, but good-intentioned protagonist who seems to get blamed more for society's failures than for it's triumphs, but takes it upon himself to care for and support the group just the same.

We woke up on Christmas morning not to a flurry of snow and residual holiday cheer, but to the harsh, dry coldness of Taigu. Gone were the early wake-up days of childhood spent haranguing parents from sleep in a giddy fervor to open gifts. In fact, the only presents left resided under Ray's foot-high foam cut-out tree that we bought from Walmart along with most of our Secret Santa gifts. They had originally been mailed unwrapped to her by her parents, but she had wrapped them herself and piled them neatly above the radiator for the sake of upholding even the barest shred of tradition. The streets were all but deserted as we got a late jump on lunch and most of the students opted to eat in their dorm rooms or the school cafeteria for fear of braving the elements. It was as biting cold as any day we had seen in Taigu this year—the kind of cold that makes your hands hurt to leave them uncovered.

Like Christmas last year, we decorated and floated up a sky lantern with the help of our Chinese friends, hoping to make good on our wishes for the new year.

I was coughing and my nose was running when I left my house to get lunch. I had spent the better part of the week getting over a cold, and the pervasive arid climate only compounded the misery I felt traversing the shaky cobble steps out past my front door to the lop-sided dirt road of North Yard. Especially on this windy day, SUVs and taxis alike came rumbling across the narrow path, honking incessantly as frigid pedestrians clustered on either side, narrowly dodging their advances. It could have been any ordinary day in Taigu. I went to eat baozi for lunch, tender round buns stuffed with meat and scallions at our usual place, across from the hair salon and three meters to the left of the intersection. Just as I was walking in, something caught my eye. On the floor, slightly obscured by lingering traces of dirt, I found an ornament, a modest red ribbon adorned with the stylized text “Merry Christmas,” still in its original packaging. I dusted it off and cradled it in the crook of my elbow back home. In spite of a tree to hang it on, I fixed it on a hook adorning my front door—its holiday message apparent to all who visit—offering small redemption for the estranged Christmases of my youth.

Day 18: I Get Older, They Stay the Same Students

Like all good English teachers, we like to make jokes about our students. But rather than being intentionally mean-spirited, we do it as a way to stay sane and relieve our own stress at the challenge of becoming proficient in another language. Learning a language, as opposed to most other skills, comes with an incredibly high risk of embarrassment, considering that verbal slip-ups are often associated with a great deal of humor. But not being afraid to make mistakes is a mantra I often drill into my students, and it would be hypocritical then, if I didn't stop to laugh every once and a while. And besides, it's not like the feeling isn't mutual. Chinese friends and teachers here do it to us all the time—including drawing attention to an especially embarrassing slip of mine that confounded “medical insurance” as “beverage insurance” that I will seemingly never live down.

The boy's half of my "K" class posing for photo-ops after our last class of the spring semester last year.

But in the same way, when it comes to students, you can't help but get frustrated by the same things. In a given class, it's entirely too easy to generalize and envision them as a sea of clones. Everyone has similar tendencies to aversion and exhibits the same sorts of behaviors—confusing gender pronouns, sticking out their tongues when they're embarrassed, whispering to neighbors in Chinese when they have no idea what's going on. Especially when it comes to our first-year English majors, it's almost as if their every response has been pre-programmed by years of Chinese education. Everyone seems to know the “right” thing to say—that is, non-controversial, generally positive, and at times, blatantly nationalistic.

But even among the stand-outs, certain archetypes begin to crop up, forging similar strains between this year's students and last's. There always seems to be, for example, the smart student in the front row who is a go-to for answering tough questions. The outspoken girl who's volunteering in class is purely crush-motivated. The cute girl in class who you secretly have a crush on. The mild-mannered boy in the back who will surprise you with how much he knows. The former English major know-it-all with a chip on her shoulder. The student who is always missing class for work obligations in another city. The gutsy group of girls who are the first to befriend you outside of class. The athletic bunch of guys you play basketball with on the weekends.  The older student with a spouse and child who you wonder why is enrolled in graduate school. The dumpy, clueless boy who understands nothing save for how much he can glean in Chinese from his neighboring seatmates. The adventurous and creative student who excels in role plays and class skits.

The girl's half of my "K" class posing for photo-ops after our last class of the spring semester last year.

I suppose it doesn't help then, that this year's lesson plans are almost mirror carbon-copies of last year's. It's been wonderful being able to capitalize on those lessons that worked and fine-tune the ones that fell flat. I now feel like I have a coursebook that I can draw ready-made lessons from for nearly any situation. In grading student essays and class presentations I assigned for homework, I've also taken careful note of especially juicy tidbits. Compiled and categorized, I give you a short “best of” sampling of student essays from this year and last, centering on the topics of self-introductions and food. I'll save the more profound and touching responses for a forthcoming post. It might be my jaded teacher-side talking, but if all of the bad English parody sites out there have taught me nothing else, it's that there will be plenty more examples in the months to come.

The unintentionally suggestive:

“Guoyan is very famous for nuts. I invite you to have a taste of our nuts.”
“I think a lot of people like to my hamburgers.”
“In this festival, I want to do once your family personally. In a round round holiday sweet sweet honey.”

The needlessly detailed:

“When we cook this noodle, we use pieces of cutter to cripple the white collar into pieces and then use water to boil them.”
“The Datong hot pot is reasonable, it is consist of the chassis, the pot body, the copper gland, the fire tube, and the cap part.”

The absurd:

“When I eat the sweet meat, my temper will become so sunshine at once.”
“You'll feel a strong burning in your mouth, what a wonderful feeling!”
“I don't know whether you have already saliva, but I must suggest you can't eat more.”
“It's difficult to point out the most favorite food. But I find gruel plays a more and more important role in my daily life.”
“Often eat fried foods, due to the lack of vitamin and moisture, easy to lose, constipation.”
“I like to eat something that can be called food, so I have a weight that makes others worried about me.”
“My cat is a haughty cat. She doesn't like embracing.”
“When I lost passion, I will speak to me: 'Go, Go, Tony, hard working to be a excellent student.'”
“Please lead us to swim in the ocean of English and we will do our best.”

The hopelessly mistranslated:

“My family is very warm and fragrant.”
“I look forward to make a chronical friendship with you.”
“Every year, many tourists travel to Hongtong, one of the countries in Linfen, to sacrifice their ancestor.”
“She is a fan of telling horrible stories.”
“Koalas are my favorite. They are very cute and naïve.”
“Dumplings mix up some meat and vegetables like a pie with vinegar.”
“I like noodles because they are delicious and good-looking.”
“My favorite food is cattle.”
“Nowadays, fast food is so bandwagon.”

The non-sequitors:

“She hates chicken and selfishness.”
“All these activities enrich my extra-curricular life very much. Oh. I also dislike mango.”
“Folk music is my favorite. Anyway, I feel great pity for our country's singers.”
“You look like my sister. I must study hard.”

And the down-right incomprehensible:

“...add spring onion until fragrant go fishing.”
“Oh! I like drink is milk. I don't know cooked. Sorry! I will try to cook some food.”
“The hobby widely cause me to be substantial; the numerous friends cause me to feel urgently richly!”