Black in China

by Vessup, Aaron A. ;

  At the end of it, we finally drove away, the landlady having been fined and the husband severely reprimanded. It was my hope that my next landlord would not be such a problem. But this proved to be a vain hope. I was gradually learning that greed knows no locality restrictions.

  PART II

  LOCAL FOREIGNER

  16

  Welcome to the Girl’s Prison

  My goal was to check out three solid teaching positions that I had been offered. One was in Ningbo, a port city south of Shanghai, and a second at the University of Guangzhou further south. The third was in Changchun in the northeast of China, close to Korea and on the way to the Russian border. I had met the university people in Guangzhou further south, but despite the good vibes there, I felt I must at least take a look up north.

  The city of Changchun in Jilin Province was smaller and more rural than Changsha. Absent were the hordes of motorcycle taxis and street shoe-shine entrepreneurs. There also seemed to be fewer KTV establishments, but many more spas and footbath facilities. The biggest draw for me to join the foreign languages institute in Changchun was that I would no longer be the only foreign teacher working there.

  An obvious, dramatic difference in Changchun in the far north of China was weather. The summers were drier than the south, and the winter much, much colder. My wardrobe immediately came under scrutiny. The population of the city was several million, just as Changsha’s but it gave the impression of being smaller. My search for coffee bars uncovered several choices although none of them a Starbucks. My new campus was nestled amongst a cluster of academic institutions and there were students everywhere.

  I leapt into getting to know the local sights, but again my Chinese colleagues seemed to have little or no interest. Most had never visited the Movie Land theme park, the International Sculpture Park, the Chinese Film Museum, or other history buff touristy haunts. It took much persuading to induce a few colleagues to attend a few CBA basketball games with me. Sometimes I went alone. The local professional soccer team was constantly ridiculed. I was told with pride that the city was the home of China’s first Automobile manufacturing plant. A light-rail system was under construction, which thankfully reduced reliance on slower buses and taxis. It was, in truth, a dull, quiet place, and allowed me to focus on completing many projects.

  I arrived in the early spring of 2006, with twenty-five large, sturdy, gray shipping bags containing my most prized possessions. My new employer was the Huaqiao Foreign Languages Institute, established in 1995 and located on the outskirts of Changchun city. It was a small, private college of approximately six thousand students, a mix of Han Chinese and ethnic Korean Chinese, and four-hundred teachers, of whom thirty-five were foreign.

  The campus was much better-run than the media college in Changsha. The grounds were immaculately groomed. The hall floors sparkled as if polished by master custodians dedicated to their tasks. There was no graffiti anywhere and the toilets were deodorized. The physical environment alone made me feel relaxed. It seemed that the people here cared about their place of work. The coordinators for the building where the foreign teachers lived, Thor and Finn, were two young men who showed maturity, responsibility and competence in organizing and following through on things. We were provided with schedules for events, and I received a booklet outlining basic school policy and expectations of staff and teachers. The campus had a post office and two small convenience stores. A bus was provided each weekend to carry teachers into the city center for shopping. Most happily for me, the Bursar’s Office efficiently handled all pay disbursements which came exactly at the dates and times posted. You could privately count you money before signing a receipt. My introduction to the staff included a friendly game of billiards at an upscale pool hall in town. I felt this was the right place to continue plying my teaching trade. Initially I felt welcome and appreciated.

  Among my teaching colleagues, several were from the United States, which was most welcome. There was an instant rapport between us, and I felt excited to be part of a highly motivated team. This also helped me to tolerate the sounds of gospel music and prayer services held in the apartments above or below mine several times a week. Because these Americans were Christians from a special training school back in the States, and their mission in China was to promote their faith, even though proselytizing was specifically forbidden in our contracts. Other teachers came from Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Korea, and Japan. I was also no longer the only dark-skinned person on campus. My three dark-skinned colleagues were a man from France and two girls, one from the USA and the other from Jamaica.

  So Changchun was a welcome change, but it also required me to become conditioned to constant noise. If it wasn’t alarm clocks it was the sound of marching feet, droves of students moving almost in lock-step to and from class, the girls hooking arms in tight-knit groups with boys straggling behind, alone or with their buddies, lost looks on many spectacled faces. Overlaid on that were the musical tones of hundreds of voices speaking Chinese. They all hoped to reach their destinations before an overpowering female voice boomed over the P.A. system: “It is time for class! Please go to class and get ready!” This announcement was repeated at fifty-minute intervals, and I could not help but think that I was part of some kind of Kafkaesque experiment. Students referred to the campus as “The Girls Prison.” Girls outnumbered boys at least five-to-one.

  It was initially difficult getting used to living on a private campus, surrounded by fences with security guards. Almost all students lived in on-campus dormitories and were not allowed to leave except on weekends. Most of the teaching faculty also lived inside the fence, but even those who resided off the reservation seemed oblivious to the many attractions of the surrounding community. My colleagues were constantly complaining about course work overload and having no time for themselves. “How many classes or hours are you teaching?” was a question so frequently asked that I quickly tired of responding.

  As for talking with the Chinese English teachers, only a few seemed to really understand the English they spoke or taught, beyond over-rehearsed questions such as “What are you doing now?” and “Where are you going?”

  But I found my campus involvement rewarding, and organized it in a way to afford me time for my own publishing projects. I served as sponsor of the “English Corner” and an “English Club”, and the “Music Lovers Club” advisor. I was also invited to judge several campus competitions, and arranged time regularly to eat lunch or dinner with groups of students. I found myself once again coaching speech competitors, after doing the same thing in the States for over a quarter of a century.

  One event that I judged involved presentations of original poetry with pictures and music on a huge auditorium screen. We were all impressed by one student’s presentation in particular, and I was shocked to learn that the winner claimed the materials used were her own written works, when it was obvious they were not. Later she admitted that she had used some materials she had found on the internet because she had not had time to write anything original.

  This attitude towards research, the concept of ‘original work’, and what constitutes plagiarism are serious issues in China. One fellow teacher requested comments on an academic paper, but I was reluctant to do so and thereby place our friendship in jeopardy. For her, taking materials authored by others, cutting-and-pasting, was viewed as authentic scholarship. It seemed to be the way theses and degrees were made or earned in China. Who did I think I was, coming to this campus, telling people what were acceptable or unacceptable conventions for writing, thinking and learning?

  I went into the city frequently, gained a decent knowledge of local attractions and took several outstanding student groups to special events or venues as motivational incentives. I was constantly surprised by the limited knowledge teachers had of the various educational options in the city: the International Sculpture Park, the Changchun Historical interactive motion picture m
useum, the Movieland theme park, the huge indoor swimming entertainment center with its automatic wave machine. I made a point of introducing my classes to many of these activities, and perhaps in return, the students often gave me simple surprise gifts.

  At the “Girl’s Prison”, the girls far outnumbered the boys. Girls seemed to hold hands with each other a lot, and sometimes also did the young boys. But I learned there was nothing necessarily sexual about this, it was just the Chinese way. I was told that strict campus rules also forbad males and females from having relationships. On only a few occasions did I see traditional couples seeking shelter in various campus nooks and crannies.

  The environment was garden-like with a cluster of classroom and administrative buildings linked in great matrix. One could feel isolated from the world, being able to reach virtually every building without ever stepping outside. Even after two years, I would still find myself occasionally being late for class simply because I was lost.

  The connection to the outside world was also tenuous. The more adventurous students engaged in the forging of official passes to escape campus, especially on weekends, and some stayed overnight in nearby hotels when they missed the 10pm curfew. One adult female Chinese teacher was said to have broken a leg jumping the fence in an effort to get out.

  The walls of the campus buildings were covered with plaques and various signs. In hallways and inside each classroom, there were famous quotations and platitudes. Pithy sayings were also written by students on small, green chalkboards propped against hallway walls: “Clothes do not make the man”; “In with a bang, out with a whimper.” The chalkboard sayings changed daily.

  My apartment in the Changchun campus was a problem for some time. Appliances were faulty, there were water leaks which took weeks to get repaired, washing machine problems. Most annoying was the fact that my television did not work with my DVD player, so there was no pirated movie watching.

  I taught and had three courses to prepare for: World Cultures and Film, Business English for seniors, and Advanced Writing for post-graduates. Holding eight different classes a week with two hours per session was a strain. I was promised relief from the overload, but an additional teacher or help did not materialize, and the extra 180 RMB (US$25) I received per month for the overload seemed like a bad joke.

  My Chinese departmental colleagues were a complex mixture of politeness, mystery and distance, but it was a relief to find that they at least had higher English language capabilities than those at my former campus. I was frequently approached by Chinese teachers looking for clarifications over what seemed to me to be simple English spelling or grammar issues. They had been accustomed to asking the senior Chinese teacher there, but he was now waving them off, clearly having become tired of it. After playing these games for a while, I would merely tell them WHERE to go for their answers.

  A suspicious character entered my social life. Her English name was Elsie, she was 28-year-old, vivaciously attractive and a bit flighty, and it seemed like she had a mission to keep an eye on me, day and night. She was highly attracted to me, or so she said, but all our encounters seemed to be for her to extract information with little or no reciprocity. During our times together, she was in almost non-stop communication with her mobile phone. She seemed only able to confidently respond to my comments or questions after she had consulted the phone. This was long before translation apps existed. At first this was amusing, but after a while I realized that she was immature and playing a game.

  A new character in my department, a man everyone called Dictionary Wang, was hard to figure out. He and I were the only male teachers in an office with four females. He was twelve years my junior, with rapidly thinning black hair and owlish eyes peering from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He had an unusual habit of rapidly squinting and blinking his eyes.

  We sat with our backs to each other. We were both divorced and both now single. He had a teenage son who was going to study in the USA the following year. Two years previously, Dictionary Wang had been a visiting scholar for a while at a university in North Carolina. His office role was that of wise counselor overseeing the more junior teachers. He had been at this campus at least six years. One day, I was able to get him to have lunch with me, but our brief conversation in the school cafeteria was intense and strained. I tried an assortment of conversational openers but nothing seemed to work. Eventually, we settled into a mutual silence. Slowly and mechanically, he shoveled food into his mouth, squinting and swallowing. Occasionally he glanced over his shoulder as if conscious of being watched. Around us were the festive sounds of laughter and chatter, other teachers and students. Was he worried about saying too much, or the wrong thing? This was most unusual for a person who, when on the school bus, chatted loudly and effusively.

  Most of my lunch hours I would eat with the female teachers, with the administrators whom I felt more at ease with, or with students who had requested a lunch chat. The male and female students often wanted advice and consolation on their discrete but failing romances, but some students were serious about getting career guidance or information on educational opportunities abroad.

  For a short period, a Chinese teacher from my office, Nancy, routinely had lunch with me. She was mature and interested in discussing a variety of topics, quite unlike the Chinese teachers I had met in Hunan. She was also engaged to be married, so we had fun talking about weddings and family. I even had several dinners with her fiancé, so our relationship was quite comfortable. Nancy left the campus after two years due to student complaints that she was too demanding in terms of her class requirements. After their marriage, Nancy and Theo departed for the US where he received a teaching position related to his doctorate in scientific research. We have remained in contact.

  I learned that all Chinese teachers residing on campus had duties regarding monitoring students outside the classroom. This requirement was regarded as distasteful by many teachers, who resented being used as prison guards and spies.

  I was concerned about the fact that student evaluations of their teachers seemed to carry much clout with the campus administration. Like it or not, teachers were involved in a popularity contest: the maniacs were running the asylum. Chinese teachers could be punished for being too demanding of their classes, and teachers from Hong Kong seemed to come in for particular criticism. I made a point of going to observe other classes and it would often be clear where teachers had simply “given up”, thrown in the towel. Head down, face buried in lecture notes, or zipping mechanically through PPTs while three-quarters or more of the students chatted, worked their mobile phones or brazenly slept.

  My classes during the first few weeks were very enjoyable; it was a pleasure to see such student enthusiasm and responsiveness. After a while, however, I noticed a change in some classes in terms of attendance, attention and occasional altercations between the students. Generally, I found that the student mentality at this college, with ages ranging from nineteen to twenty-three, was much like Junior High school or High School freshmen in the United States. Student academic levels were suspect even at the most basic levels. Test results and classroom behavior bore this out. Some students, “English Majors”, could not comprehend the question “What is your name?” When I enquired of the other teachers about the placement and screening evaluation procedures these kids had been through to get accepted by the college, the responses were either embarrassed shoulder shrugs or stiff-faced silence.

  For the students, it was their money, their game. A few expressed it this way: “Hey! I came to class most of the time. This should be enough for me to pass the class. So what if my assignments are not turned in?”

  Sometimes I met petulance.

  “Please leave me alone, I’m not in the mood to do anything today!”

  The outburst from the student hit me and there were several beats of silence that seemed to last years.

  The class had been assigned to choose interview partners
while preparing for mock interviews to be videoed the following week. Each student was armed with their resume and ten questions.

  I came out of my state of shock, and told the girl that in the work world you may not always be in the mood to deal with customers or even show up, but you have to anyway. It’s a question of whether you are an adult or a child.

  Some administrators say that there is no such thing as a bad student but only bad teachers, but all students are not all alike. There is plenty of research illustrating that different teaching styles have different levels of effectiveness with students. Also, students do not all have the same mental capacity, nor the same level of motivation. Test scores usually differentiate the aptitudes and skills. Beyond this, there are students who are mentally incompetent or have psychological disorders. It would be a mistake for a teacher to assume that just because an individual is physically in your class, that they have the same goals as their classmates. While one person may be seriously interested in the subject matter, another may be attending simply to be with a friend or perhaps to get a friend. Depression is a major problem the world over.

  Problems in the connection between teachers and subjects, between students and the educational process, and between students and teachers are also universal, not just in China, although they certainly stands out here. To deal with these problems, I developed materials and held workshops in the Changchun college on topics including Classroom Management and Creativity, and have done similar events elsewhere since. Effective teaching involves much more than simply information delivery, and alert students cannot be fooled. But the lack of attention by students, a problem created by the Chinese national examination system, helps no one. This is one reason why many Chinese parents, those with the means to do so, send their kids abroad for education. Inspiring young adult learners to develop their creativity may sometimes be met with creative defense mechanisms. But does the teacher give up? No. Being smart about how to respond is crucial.