Video Redux

I've made a few videos in these last two years in China, and some of them are total crap. But there are a few I'm really proud of, and would like to share them with you (again).


My first time traveling solo, a long weekend in Macau in October 2006. Little did I know this trip would be the seed that would blossom with me going to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and a bunch of other Southeast Asian countries. I got a real taste for being on the road on my own, and this is kind of where it all started.


Making dumplings with my students and friends in Zhanjiang. My first time making dumplings ... I think I've gotten better now.


I love this guy making cotton candy on the back of his bike.


A cameo from Flargin in this one, Patch made a great video of my trip all over China with my siblings last year.


And for some reason, I really love this one, from New Years. Probably the music.

♪♫ You Can Never Hold Back Spring ♫♪

♪♫ Remember everything that spring can bring ♫♪

Thank you, Tom Waits. You never cease to amaze me. What a shame I won't be able to see you on tour this summer. But if I had to miss it for anything, I'm glad it's for a month of travel in Europe with my brother and sister. (The real sting is how he'll be just about a week behind me in European tour dates ... but so many things have come together for this trip, I can't possibly complain.)

The weather is beautiful here in Jilin, warm sunny days and (believe it or not) a blue sky or two. My finals are finished, a pile of notes on performances and pronunciation waiting to be deciphered into legible marks so that I may turn in honest grades next week, despite the fact that I know BeiHua is going to just toss them in the trash and make up their own marks anyway.

And so the term comes to a close. The warm weather brought a sports "meeting" (as in track "meet") last weekend, an all-day affair where students ran and jumped and threw disuses (not disci, surprisingly). Each class also prepared a performance, a dance number or something. But when you have so many classes performing and so many students running, they all got jumbled into a big mess, the gun for the next race sounding in the middle of a performance (effectively cutting them off), an ADD crowd that couldn't be bothered to watch anything for longer than two minutes before they switched focus to a new race or dance. Typical China, I guess.


Kennedy represents the foreign students at Bei Hua.


The nurses in their retro uniforms. (They're not being ironic. It's what they wear.)


My student Alvin looks on as his classmates (the girls in the black and gold dresses) do a dance in front of hundreds of ambivalent students.

My finals were really great this year. The "exam" itself was simple: groups of four to five students had seven to ten minutes to do a performance. Anything goes. And I demanded costumes, props, music, vocabulary, and creativity. Probably the best thing I've done as a teacher in China, because it forced students to actually create, tweak, and speak a piece of English, while also letting their imagination run wild. Short of a few rouges who tried to get by on crap stories fished from the internet, they were great. I spent two weeks doing the exam: the first week was a "practice" exam, a dry run to make sure people were actually doing work, and as expected, nearly half of the students hadn't done a damn thing. So some stern talking-to's from Matthew, etc., and within a week everyone was on the same page, work had actually been done, practice and improvement was evident, and in the end the plays were spectacular. I wanted some photos of the costumes, but it was also our next-to-last-class for many (final class for some), so there was a lot of photo-taking and fond farewells.

Be warned: the students are (to be gentle) goofy. And there are some goofy/cute/ridiculous things being done in these photos that no twenty-three year old should be proud of. But they say China changes you, and at first you scoff, and then two years later you find yourself doing this:


Yeah. Giving myself dimples.


The girl on the left, in white? She was God.


Some students even made sets.


These girls took a Chinese story, and turned it into an English comedy. Well done.


Three little pigs ...


... and the big bad wolf.

Far too many embarrassing pictures here.

My Walls are Naked (Oh, it's June!)

My walls are naked, the posters promising me Chinese words and characters I never learned taken down, the art projects I fished from the art room's trash have been peeled away, and now I walk into a big ugly white room with soot-framed boxes on the wall where cool colorful things used to be.

I am getting ready to leave Jilin, and I am happy.

I almost wrote "and I have mixed feelings," but I don't, because the surge of good times and goodbyes can swell inside you and make you forget how difficult and long the year has been. It can create an almost false sense of happiness. False isn't the right word, because it's real: when you take photos with students and you talk to them for the last time, when you eat meals with Jim and James and Kevin and Jenny for the last time, when you run by the Song Hua river for that last glimpse of a Jilin afternoon. It's real, and it's strong, and it reminds you of all the good times this last year, and you thankfully forget the long cold empty months of winter, the isolation and the dislocation and all that other bad stuff. So in some ways it's really nice to trick yourself into thinking Jilin was easy and a breeze and maybe even worth doing again ... but year two in China is all I have patience for. That same tricked worked in Zhanjiang, and I came back to China and realized just what another year entails, only the second year has lost the glimmer of the new and has nothing but a slow fading afterglow.

So I've got naked walls, an empty wardrobe, a pile of clothes that are too big for me that I'll be dropping off at the seminary soon, and a long list of to-dos before I go. I can't believe this year is drawing to a close. I can't believe by the end of this month Zhanjiang, Jilin, China will be in my past, I can't believe all the stuff I have to pack and do before I leave, and I can't wait to see what I'll be doing next.

The HIV/AIDS Lesson

James has been coming to help me teach some make-up classes this week, finishing up a two-part lesson that began with me showing Philadelphia, and has concluded with a long, somewhat interactive lesson on HIV/AIDS that goes into gloriously redundant detail in ultra-simple English. I've even strategically placed some Chinese within the lesson, to explain more complex words like syndrome and virus (as opposed to bacteria) and condom.

The class has been going well, and I'm glad, because beyond being extremely practical in its goals, it's also something the students are familiar enough with that they don't feel completely unmoored from everything. Even the bored arms-crossed-head-down-in-abject-exhaustion students seem to be focusing, however drowsy-eyed, on what we're saying. It took a bit of planning and revision to make the lesson simple yet not shallow, a careful dance of information and simplification followed by re-emphasizing (sometimes again and again) later. But beyond just what we're reading in class, giving a lesson with someone else there is a welcome change.

I often feel like teaching here is kind of like being a stand-up comedian. (Well, it's kind of like a lot of things, but I'm in a good mood so I'll limit my comments to just the one.) I begin a lesson on Monday, and it's crude and clumsy, a freakish Quasimodo of ideas. By the end of the week, I've cut, trimmed, revised, and refined it down to a nucleus of effectiveness, if not learning. This can mean using groups on Tuesday after I thought solo work would do on Monday, to an extra page of examples and vocabulary after one class bombed, to telling the same stupid story or joke at the same moment to keep the class engaged and awake. And now with James in class, it's like a comic duo, playing off each other, setting each other up for questions and hitting cues like the Marx Brothers.

And there's a certain satisfaction that comes from hitting all the right notes in a lesson, from seeing heads nod in understanding, that quiet murmur of assent when students comprehend what we're talking about. That's been easier to achieve with this lesson, and I don't know if it's been James, the preparation, or what. Who knows, it could be his brief American Sign Language lessons at the end of each class? Or the one-two punch of the film and the lesson, the human face on the ideas and the disease? The students have really been responding to it well, and sometimes, I actually feel like a real teacher.

But I gotta say, there's another kind of satisfaction, and that only comes from ordering thirty people to say things like "condom" and "vaginal fluid" out loud, until you're satisfied.

Is it June yet? (And: Thoughts on a Chinese party)

I feel intense hatred toward linear time right now, because I cannot honestly believe it's still May and I'm still here. This has been the slowest month in China by far, and while the days seem busy enough, the fact that it's only May 26 and not, oh, I dunno, June 11, really pisses me off.

This term, in addition to my freshmen, I've been teaching a class of prospective post-graduate MBA students who will (if all things visa-related go well) travel to Madison, Wisconsin to study at Edgewood College in September. I use that word "class" loosely, though, since it's really only been two men (and a third student, a woman who is perpetually coming next time). I've given them the English names Paul (a mid-twenties office-type who studied and worked in Beijing) and Brian (a mid-thirties bank clerk who has risen to the top of Jilin's Bank of China). It was supposed to be Mike and Brian, after my uncles, but Paul didn't like the name Mike (blame some NBA player named Mike who fouled Yao Ming once). So I asked Paul what his name meant in Chinese, and he told me stone, and so I got all biblical and gave him Paul. Then I realized two weeks later that I'd mixed my Christian P's, it should have been Peter, but he liked Paul so the name stuck.

This class has been an interesting way to meet some Chinese who don't fall under the umbrella of obscenely sheltered undergraduate English majors. Brian has a family and a damn good job as the president (or something ... important, he assures me) of the Bank of China in Jilin, and when we had dinner at his home and I met his parents, I realized Brian is the ideal of the new upwardly mobile generations in China, a man from humble origins whose parents were laborers who has gone on to a good job, a nice home, a car, money, affluence ... he's like a poster-child for what most people in China shoot for, of the success China hopes the white-hot economy and its one-child policy can create. Paul, a little younger but also educated, has lived in the capital and seen more of China in his twenty-odd years than most of my other students will ever see. They're both smart guys that have the money and clout to get into a program that will send them abroad and earn them a bona-fide American diploma, and that's a write-your-own-ticket kind of deal here.

The class has been good, if awkward. Brian began the class pretty much incapable of speaking English, whereas Paul was pretty good from the start. Through a lot of effort on his part, Brian has improved a great deal, but I still think he'll have a rough go of it in the states (that's assuming he passes the English interview for his visa). Our class has been a four-hour block of class on Saturday afternoon for the past ten weeks, with no book, no material, no final exam, no help whatsoever from the "school" I'm supposedly employed at that keeps cashing all those tuition checks. I asked the jackass in charge what I was supposed to teach in this class, and he told to just show them a movie each week, or have them take me out to eat. First class, BeiHua. Anyway, I've been doing my best to make the class useful for them, but as anyone that's ever tried to study a language can tell you, a once-a-week four-hour cram session is, shall we say, less than ideal.

In class I've tried to balance practical vocabulary (like directions, eating, shopping, and dealing with every-day problems) with concerns about their medical insurance, costs of living, work-study jobs, and life in America. We've looked at the maps of Edgewood and Madison and tried to get a feel for where they'll be living, alongside learning how to order a drink in a bar and not get a glass of chardonnay (all alcohol in China is called 酒, jiu, which translates to wine, so I've had to explain what "wine" is in the West and how to make sure you get whiskey or beer when you want it). We've met outside of class as much as we've met in class, for meals or at Brian's home to meet his family, and this has really been an extraordinary glimpse of real life in China. And last Saturday, in lieu of our final class being another dull round of vocabulary in a classroom, Brian invited Paul and I out to a party for his co-worker's wife's father's sixtieth birthday. A tenuous connection, that, but why not?


Brian and his son, who calls me Superman.


He also talks to me in Chinese like we're best pals. All I can do is nod and smile.


Paul, me, and Brian, and 弟弟, didi, little brother.


Why not? The puddle was already there! (Bonus caption: man that kid had to go!)


Paul, 弟弟, and Paul's girlfriend.


For the party, they chartered a boat at the Song Hua Hu (松花湖), the same lake where I was camping a few weeks ago.


The boat landed on an island, and after we walked a ways, we came up to a tiny restaurant that seemed like the closest China has had to Woodloch. The whole restaurant was rented out for the big party.


Balance beams!


Made it there and back!


At the party, Brian pours us some 白酒, baijiu, "white wine." This unspeakably horrid drink is the drink of China; it is to China what vodka is to Russia, Guinness to Ireland, Coke to America. This "white wine" is closer to nail-polish remover (or, barring that, hard alcohol) than it is cab-sauv, but herein lies the root of the wine =/= alcohol conundrum for Chinese learning English.


Those two plastic cups are water. I swear.


At the party, the host had to go to each table and make a toast, probably several. Brian, being a higher-up at the bank, had to do the same. Thankfully they had switched to beer at this point, because ...


... yours truly got in on the next toast. The man on the right of the picture is Brian's co-worker, and it's his wife's father whose birthday was being celebrated. Which means he was toasting all day, and getting quite drunk.


After the big meal, we waited out the rain on the porch of a tiny cabin. Paul and his girlfriend along with Brian and his wife. I can never say her name correctly so I just call her 姐姐, jiejie, big sister.


Back to the boat.


Naturally beauty, where you been all my life? (那个地方有山有水.)


And back again.

I realized at the party that it's not Jilin that's getting to me, it's not China. (Well, it is, but that's only half of it.) It's missing home. It's wanting to spend my Saturday at a birthday party for someone I actually know, someone I can have a meaningful conversation with. It's wanting to spend time with my friends and family back home, and not flop around awkwardly like a fish in a bucket of milk at a dinner party where I can barely speak the language. It's an incredibly isolating experience sometimes, being here and having no one to really talk to. I have the other Maryknollers here at BeiHua, true, but it's hard talking to the same people in such a small group for so long without any outside input. It's hard to live in a place where no one speaks the language well enough to have an honest talk, where you sit there and are amazed at the pat tripe you spew out to students and other English learners, because they can't handle or understand how you really feel. That's what I felt at this party: it was nice, it was a good experience, and I was happy to go, but being there just made me realize how forever alien this place will be to me, and I to it.

Reverse Culture Shock

It's strange, as I go through this slow extraction process, how I am begging to feel like I felt when I first arrived nearly two years ago in Zhanjiang, when I was deep in the throes of culture shock. I was exhausted, impatient, mentally unfocused, quick to anger, and all sorts of other unpleasantness. And now, like a novel that begins to echo itself in its final chapters, I find that I am once again often tired, and extremely unmotivated, and grumpy. I feel apathetic toward so many things here, a thick stubbornness growing in my mind, attitudes about this place shifting as I march toward the exit and begin to forgive less and less of every-day China.

What's the reverse of culture shock? Culture saturation? I've been wading through China for nearly two years now, and my attitudes have shifted dangerously close to how things were in the beginning. Well, not close, but let's say the first impressions weren't far from the mark.

I first arrived in China terrified to say anything bad about the place, fearful of being an ugly ethnocentric foreigner. I was happy, even quick to criticize America and the West, so familiar and so clearly in error in many ways, whereas here was China, a place I accepted at face value and was too ignorant of to talk intelligently about, let alone criticize. I was confused and angered by a lot of the foolishness (and yes I know that sounds like a grandma word) I saw in China all the time, but I swept it all under the mental carpet of "wow this is amazing these people are beautiful YAY!" A novice to the language, I looked at it as an incomprehensible mess of strokes and symbols that three lifetimes of effort could never decode. And now I've swung from passive acceptance of all that every-day ugliness to once again being angry about it, but not being afraid to say so; to once again being able to look at a piece of paper, to understand how the language and the characters are put together, and still chalk it all up as hopeless.

I got in a fight with a cabbie the other day. It was raining pretty hard, and James and I were coming back from the gym. Flag the cab down, heading to campus, the guy was speeding like a madman, incredibly unsafe *in the rain*, and trust me, it's a feat bordering on a deathwish to be in a cab in China and feel especially unsafe. This guy managed to do that. We told him to slow down a bunch of times, but he only grinned, a slow stupid smirk showing on his face in the rear-view mirror. He continued to cut people off, use the horn instead of the breaks, and drive with needless abandon. We arrived at the gate to our campus, still raining, and the jackass refused to drive in through the gate and up to the door. We asked, prodded, told him it was OK, and he just returned some bullshit answer in the typical bored Chinese male attitude, the "too bored to even consider whatever it is you're suggesting" voice. "你是白痴," "Ni shi bai chi," "You're an idiot," I said, threw the money on the seat, jumped out and slammed the door. He opened his door and was yelling at James and I as we just walked toward our dorm in the rain.

I guess that's how you know you've been here too long: when you're calling people idiots for being idiots, in the native language, not feeling impressed that you said it correctly, not even caring.

This Is How The Journey Ends

Not with a bang, but with a long, profound groan.

I've been showing Philadelphia to my students this weekend, part of a two-class lesson on HIV/AIDS that will wrap up next week with a short quiz on the film, some shamelessly fact-dropping dialogues, and well-anticipated awkward silences as I talk about sexual-transmitted diseases in front of a group of students who still laugh at the equivalent of peek-a-boo. Yesterday the film went over pretty well: Chinese subtitles on (because there was no way in hell my students would understand a second of the film otherwise), the students were a great audience, laughing and sighing and nearly crying right where the director wanted them to. Today, well, not so much. I guess tonight was the stragglers, the lets-go-to-Matthew's-movie-and-sleepers, the twinkling screens of re-re-re-checked mobile phones creating a constellation of boredom in the yawning high-ceilinged lecture hall. Some paid attention, some tried to understand, some must have enjoyed the film, but all it did was leave me with a profound longing for home, mixed with feelings of intense resentment and venomous apathy for the rest of the classes I have to teach here in Jilin.

But what am I complaining about? All I have is a wildly unfulfilling job that is inexorably albeit slowly coming to a close. There are far more serious problems in the world, in China. To wit: estimates of up to 50,000 dead and missing as a result of the Sichuan earthquake. I was having a drink the other night with Kevin Clancy, Father Brian (the chronically busy Maryknoll priest here in Jilin), Kevin, Jenny, and Jim, and Jim raised an interesting point. This is China, the land of the One Child Policy. Now that's policy, friends, not a law: many people can and do have more than one child, but it's rare, and it only seems to happen if you're especially wealthy, live in a province with really lax enforcement, live in the country, or (this is China, after all) you know the right people. But for the most part, families do have one child.

And now, for many families, that child is gone, as an unimaginable number of children perished in the disproportionate number of cheap, poorly-made schools that collapsed in the quake.

“Our grief is incomparable,” said Li Ping, 39, eyes rimmed red, as he and his wife slowly, carefully pulled a pair of pink pajamas over the bruised, naked body of their 8-year-old daughter, Ke. “We got married late, and had a child late. She is our only child.”

The earthquake has effected the entire country. And maybe that was why my students didn't care to see a movie about AIDS, about more death and sadness. From having a student break down crying in my class because her boyfriend from Sichuan was unreachable, to having students comment on 2008 being a "terrible" year for China when just days ago they were beaming with Olympic pride ... it's been a strange time here, just five days from the event. When Americans mourned for Hurricane Katrina, where just under 2,000 died, we were saturated with grief. China, and my students, are still reeling from a far more profound disaster.

Well that's quite a pluralistic combo, complaining about being here and then indulging in the human vantage living here affords. That's the paradox, the combination of frustration and insight, that this place brings. I learned from Father Brian that my blog is being read on the radio, on his radio show, here in Jilin. Well, this should make for interesting broadcasting.

Some good news to close: James just finished running a marathon along the Great Wall of China, just outside Beijing. This time last year, Nicki was about to hop over to Hong Kong to run a half-marathon there. For what it's worth, I just ran all the way from campus, along the river, to the heart of Jilin city, for the first time. Not exactly a marathon, but, well, one landmark at a time.