Christmas Performance

Yet another performance where we embarrass ourselves onstage in front of thousands of students! This one comes complete with Christmas carols!

In the end, we had a lot of fun with this performance, but it was kind of a rocky road getting here. All our problems came from the administration, of course. If you've been reading my blog you know how much I LOVE the administration at this school, but this time was particularly frustrating. When starting this blog, I wanted to record the good and the bad of my experience here, so if you read further, be prepared for a heated rant:

About a month and a half ago, the school asked us to put together a skit/dance/song performance for Christmas Eve. Now, performing on a stage is not exactly on my list of fun activities for Christmas, but the students always love it, so we agreed. After a lot of stress over the last performance due to miscommunication, we asked a lot of questions about this one before creating our act. They told us they wanted it to be ten minute long, they wanted singing and dancing, they wanted it to be about Christmas, and they wanted us to lip sync. So we put together a performance that did all of these things. Brenna didn't want to sing, so she read from the poem and danced while the rest of us recorded ourselves beforehand (which was a very complicated process), and figured out dances to go with our songs. Some of us even spent a whole day in Chengdu finding costumes, such as the angel wings and the bow ties. Then we canceled a previously planned trip to Emei Mountain so that we could practice it this weekend and get it perfect before Christmas Eve. In the end, we had five songs, and a pretty good little show.

Then, at the dress rehearsal, we hit a few small snags. First of all, when we went up to rehearse (in front of all of the other acts, so we had a pretty large audience), the sound crew played our songs completely out of order, even though we had given them the impossibly clear names of Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, Track 4, and Track 4. So they cycled through all of our songs, making it embarrassingly clear that we were lip syncing, before figuring out the correct order. Finally, we got the sound all figured out and went through our routine. It went off without a hitch, and we left the stage feeling confident and satisfied with our performance...only to find out that suddenly the administration thought it was "too long". Even though they had specifically asked us for ten minutes, they now wanted it cut down to five.

We were beyond frustrated. We had spent a LOT of time getting these songs ready. We had canceled a planned trip to perfect them. And now, for no substantial reason they wanted us to completely scrap two of the songs. The best explanation we got was that they expected it to be more "active". I'm sorry, I thought I was hired to be a teacher, not a singer/dancer/performer.

Anyways, they told us all this the night before our actual performance, so we had to spend the next day figuring out what song to cut, how to change our entrances and exits, and revising choreography so that it could all tie together without the two other songs. But we did succeed, as you can see, and the students thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, the only complaint I heard from one student was that it was too short! Hah!

Merry Christmas from Pengshan!

While I wasn't at home with my family for Christmas, it still ended up being a fabulous holiday. The festivities kicked off Christmas Eve at the Christmas performance. Our part consisted of reading "Twas the Night Before Christmas" interspersed with Christmas carols (a video of this will come shortly). The rest of the acts didn't really have anything to do with Christmas at all. Some of the other parts included a routine by cheerleaders dressed in camouflage, a beat boxer, some traditional Chinese dances, and then there were also a couple dances to some Christmas songs. It was fun, and it was also our last performance of the year, so that made it all the more enjoyable.

After the show, we all trouped back to my apartment to listen to Christmas carols, drink mulled wine and hot buttered rum, and exchange Secret Santa gifts. It was a really great evening, and finally felt like Christmas.

On Christmas itself, I skyped with a lot of different family members, opened presents from my students and friends, and ate a huge Christmas brunch with the other American teachers. The presents were pretty hilarious. I got a scarf and a snowglobe (pretty standard Christmas presents), but then I also got a nightlight in the shape of s clump of mushrooms, a pillow in the shape of an enormous teddy bear head, and a  rhinestone encrusted picture frame. 

Being far away from home at Christmas time is tough, but it helps to have a lot of good friends to spend it with.

Happy holidays everyone!

More pictures from last weekend that my students sent me:

Channeling the Spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

There's generally a wide range of English levels among my students. Some can hold deep philosophical conversations, others prefer to keep their answers short and sweet. Their essays tend to reflect this variety. But every once in a while, there comes an essay that is simply too good not to share.

This past week, I assigned my News English classes to write a short essay detailing their opinions on the Death Penalty (we were learning about the justice system in class). One of my students wrote that he supports the Death Penalty, and I would like to pluck out my favorite quote:

"(The Death Penalty) holds people responsible for the horrible content of their character. This fulfills what MLKJ always wanted: judge not by the color of your skin, but by the content of your character. The character of these criminals warrants death."

I laughed for 3 minutes straight. I'm sure it's exactly what MLK always wanted.

Thanksgiving, Floating Lanterns, and the Countryside!

It's been a pretty full week here in Pengshan China. Even though we are not living in America, Thanksgiving surprisingly still ended up being a fun and busy holiday for us foreign teachers. I say "surprisingly", because we had actually just planned on having a small get together and maybe trying to make some American style dishes to eat...but it turned into so much more.

To start with, our "small get together" somehow kept adding people until we had a full house of about 15 people coming over to eat dinner at our combined apartments. Nonetheless, it was definitely doable. We went shopping the weekend before in Chengdu to acquire necessary ingredients, and some of our Chinese friends planned to do the brunt of the work by getting enough food to make jiaozi (dumplings) for all of the people coming. We were all very excited about our little Thanksgiving party.

And then, on Thursday afternoon, about three hours before our dinner was scheduled to start, the school decided to inform us that they were throwing us a Thanksgiving dinner. They had apparently gone through a lot of trouble to get a hold of a turkey and other traditional foods, and the president of the university wanted to eat with us. Which would have been lovely, if we hadn't already been planning our own Thanksgiving party for a few weeks. Once again, the Chinese administration was a little lacking in foresight. Big surprise.

After a little last minute scrambling, we managed to reschedule our own part for the next night, and we all at turkey (which tasted amazing) and a variety of other "American" dishes. Some of the highlights of these dishes was a fruit salad (apples, bananas, and cherry tomatoes in a honey-mustard dressing), chow mein, pasty mashed potatoes, and stir fried green beans. As I was eating, I couldn't help but wonder if this was what Chinese people felt like when they went to "Chinese" restaurants in the United States. So many of the dishes looked similar to their authentic counterpart, yet really tasted nothing alike. Ah well, they had done their best to supply us with American food, and we certainly appreciated the sentiment (and the turkey!).

The next night proved to be a great success, and it ended up being a great idea to have it on the Friday night instead of on Thursday. For one, I had a makeup class Thursday evening which means I would have missed most of the festivities. Secondly, it ended up being on the same day as a Chinese festival, so after our Thanksgiving dinner we had a night's worth of entertainment.

Dinner itself was spectacular. Making jiaozi has been one of my favorite experiences since coming to China, and this time did not disappoint. We spent a few hours together just talking, drinking wine, listening to music, and making jiaozi.

In addition to the jiaozi, some of the other foreign teachers brought/made some food. Devin and Jono brought the wine, James grabbed some green beans from a nearby store, and Brenna made a delicious apple crisp in her rice cooker somehow. I also made a big batch of mashed potatoes!

After dinner, we happened to look out the window and spotted some strange lights in the sky:

 Upon further investigation, we discovered that they were hundreds of floating lanterns being lit out on one of the university's quads, for a festival in honor of one of the Chinese minorities. Despite being stuffed full of Thanksgiving dinner, we managed to set off in the direction of the floating lanterns. What we found when we arrived was a festival, indeed. In addition to the floating lanterns lighting the scene, there was also a band playing on a stage, as well as three bonfires in the middle of the quad. It ended up being quite the night!

It was a wonderful night, spent with good friends. However, my favorite part of the weekend ended up being on Sunday, when some students invited me to go out to lunch with them. I was surprised when we didn't go out to a restaurant or to the river for a barbecue. Instead, I found myself being led on a trek away from the school, and out to the Chinese countryside. We passed out of the commercial area surrounding the school and were soon among small farms and quiet, if a little grimy, side streets. The house we went to was the home of one of the students, and it was a very small brick farm house tucked away behind a little bamboo grove. Altogether there were about 20 students and their teacher, and they were all so welcoming and sweet. Their English was fairly basic, but we communicated well with a mix of Chinese and English.

Together, we harvested some vegetables from the farm fields, and then went back to the house and cooked an AMAZING lunch together. We used a traditional Chinese stove, which consists of a humongous wok built into a counter top. It's heated by a wood fire that burns underneath, which we had to keep feeding while we cooked.

It was a really amazing experience, and I feel very lucky to have gotten away from the university bubble and seen a different side of China. The food itself was, of course, spectacular, and they even let me help with some of the dishes!

It was a fabulous day. I made a lot of new friends, ate a lot of good food, and have already made plans to go strawberry picking together this weekend! 

What a day. What a life!

The upside of walking around with a cane all of today: I kind of felt like Watson from the BBC Sherlock series. Limping with attitude.

Unexpected Encounters with Sexism

 Yesterday afternoon I ended up twisting my ankle pretty badly while playing basketball. The perks of this were that I got to sit in bed, browsing the internet all day today without feeling guilty about it. The bad news is that I have to make up the three classes I missed today (no substitute teachers in China) and that if I have to hear one more person connect my injury with my gender, I swear to Jesus, Mary and Joseph that I will lose it.

I've been living in China for over three months now and have visited here many times before, but this is the first time that I've encountered sexism so blatantly. Of course I knew that it existed in China. Here at my college, my English majors are made up almost completely of women, and the engineering and math majors are largely male. One of my male friends was taking part in an English speech tournament and told me without shame that “boys usually get special treatment because there are less of them.” My own students will casually perpetuate sexist ideas. In many of our class discussions, I have come to understand that it is the male who is expected to buy the house, hold down a job, buy a car, and support the family. The women, on the other hand, usually gets a few years in the workforce after college before settling down and having a child by (at the latest) 30 years old. This is, of course, a terrible situation for both sexes—men are under huge pressure to be the providers for the family, and women have almost no choice but to get married and become a stay at home mom.

Anyhow, I'm getting sidetracked. I am plenty aware that sexism exists in China, but this is the first time that it has been applied directly to me. I have been spoiled in so many ways as a visitor here, and my Western label serves as a pass for many Chinese cultural norms. In China, women tend not to drink, go out to bars, or work out a lot. They also don't wear shirts that reveal their collarbones or shoulders. As a foreigner, I get to bypass all that and am for the most part free to stick to my familiar Western etiquette. Since twisting my ankle, however, I have received countless seemingly harmless comments. Let me list a few:

“Girls need to be more careful when they play basketball.”

“You probably shouldn't have been playing with boys, they are more rough.”

“Be more careful, girls are weaker than boys.”

“You need to go to the gym more to strengthen your legs so you won't get hurt.”

The last comment in particular irked me because since coming to China, I have been working out almost every day (more than most of the male teachers or students I know), and have been very proud of how strong and fit I've become.

But apparently, if I'm a girl, I must only be going to the gym to watch the strong, muscly men at work.

China is a fascinating, captivating place, but sometimes I forget that it is still, in many ways, a developing country. Sexism can seem like a relatively harmless thing when it's just an idea, but suddenly when it affects you personally, it becomes very real, and incredibly infuriating.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

I made a pillow fort today. That is all.

We Can Dance if We Want to

So I know I promised this post a LONG time ago (along with the Chongqing video, which is still in the works), but it's finally here!!

At long last, you get to see our National Day Performance, in which the foreign teachers dance a self-choreographed dance in front of thousands of people. I have done theater in the past, but this was by far the biggest audience I've ever been in front of, and it was both terrifying and tons of fun.

Without further ado, here is the video and you can see for yourself just how ridiculous the whole thing was. Unfortunately, the video cuts off the end of our dance, which is actually the most impressive part, but you'll just have to use your imagination for that. We were just one act among many, many others--though the others were much more professional. Regardless, we had a ton of fun with it, and the students loved it.

Silent Reading

30 eyes glued to their paper,
their lips crumpling,
tongues coiling with
silent words.
The air is filled with the faint hiss
of breathy syllables,
all weaving together
into a blanket of white noise.

Visitor!

This past week, I've had a visitor come and visit me in Pengshan: my good friend Nicole! She and I took many Chinese classes together in college, and this month she was traveling around China doing research on animal rights for a research paper in her final year of college. When I found out that she was coming by Chengdu, I insisted that she had to stay with me while she was here! Over the last week, we've had a blast. On Sunday, I took her into Chengdu and we visited a couple places that I have been meaning to go, but haven't gotten around to seeing yet: the local antique market and the Chengdu Zoo.

We went to the antique market first, and it was delightful! It consisted of a ton of stalls full of old Chinese artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, and other knickknacks.

One stall even had an old phonograph!

I could have spent hours there sorting through everything, but we had other things planned, so after an hour we headed off to the Chengdu Zoo.

Actually, we had originally planned to go see the Panda Research Base, which Chengdu is so famous for. However, google maps led us astray and instead of taking us to the breeding grounds for adorable pandas, it took us to a very industrial part of Chengdu, with no pandas to be found. Luckily, when we consulted the map, we discovered that we weren't actually far from the zoo, so we decided to catch a bus there instead.

Zoos have always been a conflicting experience for me. On the one hand, I love animals, and it's a treat so see so many exotic, beautiful animals in one place. But on the other hand, it's always slightly depressing to see them pent up in cages. And yes, I know there are a lot of justifications for zoos and that it's not like they can just release zoo animals into the wild, but that doesn't change the fact that zoos always make me a little uncomfortable.

The Chengdu Zoo, however, was even more depressing than usual. Their selection of animals was impressive and varied. I got to see some animals that I had never seen before in any American zoo:

This was my first time seeing a Golden Monkey. They're native to Sichuan!

The squirrel monkeys were adorable.

A beautiful White Tiger.

Some baby deer.

A hippo at feeding time. Look at that jaw!

But, while the animals themselves were gorgeous, their habitats left a lot to be desired. With the exceptions of the pandas and some of the monkeys, most of the exhibits were far too small for the animals containing them. The tigers, in particular, were almost all on edge, pacing the lengths of their enclosures. Additionally, most of the cages were open to the sky, which meant that visitors were throwing them bits of food to tempt them closer to the windows. At nearly every cage, the animals were right up near the edge, begging for food. Lastly, some of the animals' sleeping areas had large windows in them, which not only meant that they did not have somewhere to retreat to when they became agitated, but also that people were constantly banging on the glass, trying to get the animals to wake up and do something more interesting!

The lack of "zoo etiquette" was astounding. Simple things that are pretty ingrained in our culture (don't feed the animals! don't bang on the glass!) were simply ignored, and it made me realize how much I've taken that for granted. I can't say that going to the zoo was a pleasant experience, but it certainly made me think. What else is common in our society that is an anomaly elsewhere? What else have I taken for granted?

Halloween in Chengdu

For anyone who doesn't know, my favorite holiday out of all of the holidays (yes, including Christmas), is Halloween. I'm not totally sure what makes it my favorite; it's a combination of many different things. I love the spooky atmosphere, the unashamed delight in macabre subjects. I love scary movies and stories. I love carving jack-o-lanterns, feeling the squishy mixture of goo and seeds slip between my fingers as I scoop it out of the center. I love the crisp autumn weather and the smell of dead leaves and chimney smoke. I love the costumes, the ghouls and the ghosts, the witches and monsters. But most of all I love the childish nostalgia that Halloween brings. On All Hallow's Eve, everyone is a child again. We all feast on candy and play pranks and run underneath the pumpkin orange moon because we can, because we're alive, and tonight corpses and death are only a joke that we can laugh at and dance away.

And I was going to be damned if being in China meant missing out on Halloween, which is why, on Friday after school let out, all of us Americans banded together in our quest for Halloween festivities and made the hour long trek to Chengdu.

We spent the afternoon stopping by The Bookworm, our favorite coffee shop and bookstore, and then headed over to People's Park. It was my first time seeing the park, and it did not disappoint. Unlike western parks, it did not have many open places, but was instead a network of trails that wound around trees and streams and hills.

A monument at the edge of the park.

Vendors sold fruits and nuts along the street outside.

Sunset at Tianfu Square.

After poking around Chengdu, it was time to head back to our hostel and get ready for a night out. Brenna and I were actually the only ones that put any effort into our costumes. I went as a broken China doll, and Brenna made a lovely zombie.

Our taxi driver got quite the scare.

After hanging out at the hostel for a little while, we met up with some of our Chinese friends at a bar downtown. We spent a couple hours just hanging out an chatting.

Devin and Wayne had beautiful singing voices

Around 12, we left the bar in favor of the nearby clubbing district, and danced into the night. In the end, it turned out that Halloween wasn't a very big holiday in China, and while I saw a few other people with costumes, we were definitely not the norm, and drew even more attention to ourselves than usual. Do I regret it? Not one bit. I got tons of complete strangers telling me that they loved my costume, and even more doing horrified double-takes as I walked by, which I treasured even more than the compliments. I might live in China, but there's no way I wasn't going to celebrate my favorite American holiday.

As a reward for the crazy night, we all slept in late the next day, and treated ourselves to brunch the next morning. It'd been ages since I had a western breakfast (and breakfast is by far my favorite meal), so it felt like sunshine and rainbows on my taste buds.

See that expression on Brenna's face? Pure bliss. PURE. BLISS.

Pengzu Shan or Bust

This weekend James, one of the other foreign teachers, helped to organize a trip to a nearby local landmark, Pengzu Shan. This mountain is where Pengzu, supposedly one of the oldest men in all of China, was buried. Pengshan, where I am living, was his hometown, and is subsequently famous for longevity.

On Saturday after eating lunch, we all grabbed our bikes and hit the road, ready to get out of the town and see some of the surrounding area. The road getting to the mountain was an adventure, to say the least. The street itself was very narrow and had so many cracks and potholes in it that a dirt path would almost have been better. Along with a fairly steady stream of traffic, the bike ride was more than a little nerve-wracking. But the scenery on the way was well worth it. We biked along the Jinjiang river and went through a tiny old ghost village that was full of run down buildings, as well as finally got to see some of the beautiful forests enclosing our town. 

Devin is ecstatic that he hasn't been hit by a car yet.

When we got to the mountain itself, we discovered that our cardio for the day was far from over:

So. Many. Stairs.

Luckily, I love to hike and it felt fabulous to get out and do some real exercise outside of the gym. Breathing in the fresh air and walking among the unfamiliar trees was soothing in a way that's difficult to find outside of nature. All along the path, there were places to turn off and stop to see different landmarks or temples. The first one we came across was a shrine to give homage to Pengzu. Except on all of the English signs, they refer to him as "Methuselah", I guess because that's the oldest person a Westerner could relate to. Pengzu, it is said, was around 700 or 800 years old.

In the first little shrine, you could pay a donation to get a prayer ribbon. You are supposed to write down the names of the people that you never want to die, and then tie the ribbon to the shrine. We all bought one for 5 yuan, and the caretakers of the shrine were very excited as they watched us write down the names in English before tying the ribbons up. Pengzu, they said, would recognize any name, whether it's in English or Chinese.

Some other highlights were seeing the famous double Buddha and visiting the grave of the Fairy Queen.

I also feel like I should mention this...fruit? Root? Vegetable? The question marks are because I'm not totally sure what it was. Some of the Chinese students that came with us bought it from a vendor on the side of the path, it was very unique. It had the texture of an apple, but the flavor of an uncooked potato, and before we peeled it, it looked like a white turnip. Since none of us had any clue what it was called in English, we dubbed it a "papple".

Mmm...Papple.

At the very top of the mountain was a beautiful, massive temple complex dedicated to the grave of the Fairy Queen and to Pengzu. I'm not totally sure who or what the Fairy Queen was because none of the Chinese students could effectively explain it. But apparently during January, people bring her clothes, and she died when she was around 13 years old. The temple itself was tucked away in the trees, and was one of the most beautiful, colorful places that I've been to yet in China.

After spending some time wandering around the temple complex, we made our way back down the mountain. We stopped at the bottom to drink some tea at a local tea house before hitting the road, which turned out to be a mistake because as soon as we got on our bikes it began to sprinkle. The sprinkle turned into quite the downpour about halfway back to the school. But biking through a rainstorm isn't the worst thing in the world, and being from Oregon, the rain just made me feel right at home. Nothing that a warm shower, a blanket, and a cup of hot chocolate couldn't fix!