My friend Derrick has a post up that I’ve been meaning to write for a while. It’s something every foreign teacher seems to run across a few times a week.
A student (mine or not, doesn’t matter) will ask how they can improve their oral English. Not their English, no one seems to want to practice reading or writing. Sometimes they ask about listening. I used to give a fairly detailed response, based on my experience learning Italian and trying to learn Chinese. It involved immersing oneself in the language, watching TV and listening to the radio, using a voice recorder and getting books on tape.
I get a lot of nods and open-mouthed stares. I don’t think much of it sticks. I’m pretty sure I could be explaining string theory and I’d get the same response (”OK, so get this: the universe as we know it actually exists in 11 dimensions and matter is made up of tiny loops of energy–strings–that vibrate in different ways….” Don’t get on me if this isn’t exact. I’m not a physicist).
Derrick goes through a similar run-down:
I say that they should practise English outside the classroom. They say they have no way to do so. I say try English corner. They say not enough foreigners go there. I say that they don’t necessarily need foreigners in order to improve their English, I say they could spend 10 minutes a day practising English with each other. They say they have no time. I say they could do it at lunch time. They say it is too strange to speak English with another Chinese person. Excuses, excuses, excuses! I say they need to get over it and just speak to each other.
Seriously.
These days, I’ve narrowed it down to a one-liner: “Same way you get to the Apollo. Practice, practice, practice.”
Then I get a strained look and the student usually reaches for his electronic dictionary, the one every student seems to have and likes to use instead of actually studying, looking for a translation of “practice.”
“How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?”
— Homer J. Simpson
My Chinese is awful. After three months of rather casual study, mostly focusing on saying things that get me to and from work and a meal somewhere between, I’m up to the point of saying simple sentences and butchering most of the language.
My Italian, on the other hand, is getting steadily worse. Now, I was never fluent in Italian, but I was leagues beyond what my Chinese is now. Hell, I could operate anywhere in the Old Country without a problem. I can still hold a conversation in la bella lingua when the mood or need strikes me.
Lately, though, my rudimentary Chinese has been pushing Italian vocabulary out of my brain. I catch myself saying things like “bu shi male” or “Nihoa, come stai.”
Since I tend to look at my Chinese phrases and ask myself, “Can I say that in Italian?” I suspect this is only going to get worse.
This is what happens when your internet connection is routed through a handful of other servers in other parts of the world. Sometimes the Internet thinks you’re in Germany.
That’s fine, really. So long as it doesn’t know I’m in China, I’m OK and I can update this blog and do all the other fine upstanding things I like to do online (like freeing Tibet, declaring Taiwan’s independence and talking about Tiananmen, or just downloading American TV shows). I just have to figure out how to say “Publish” in German.
But today, this site came up in Chinese. I don’t get that at all. I can’t view the site from China without a proxy server, but when I do, everything is in characters, which I can’t read. This makes no sense at all.
Isn’t censorship fun?
Quote of the Day:
Grandpa Simpson: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
OK, so I didn’t actually get INTO North Korea, but I got about as close as anyone with an American passport is likely to get without some diplomatic connections or a desire to be shot at. Personally, I’m opposed to being shot at. Shoot near me, away from me, somewhere in the same general vicinity, I can handle on occassion. But being shot at is not for me.
That said, you can get awful close on the river. Sam and I paid 15 RMB (just under $2) each for the speed boat tour. The guy made a few passes and we got closer than I expected. The guards didn’t seem to take notice of us; I suppose they get a handful of these a day, every day, and our twilight cruise was nothing unusual.
“What do you suppose they think of us?” Sam asked above the noise of the outboard motor. Our cramped speed boat was just turning to make another pass. I didn’t have an answer for her. Still don’t.
I imagine we’re not the novelty to them that they are to us. Maybe we represent all they’re supposed to oppose: capitalism, exploitation, consumerism and bad taste. We’re here staring at their country, and paying almost two dollars to do so, because we can, and because we’re fascinated that they can’t come do the same on the Rio Grande or the English Channel.
Heading back to shore, we passed under the two bridges. One spans the river, the other goes halfway and drops into the cold Yalu. American fighter planes strafed the old bridge early in the Korean War, and this is what remains.
That it’s still here is telling. China has rebuilt entire cities in its effort to modernize, and cranes are a regular part of the skyline everywhere in the country, even in this worn out border town, yet the bridge hangs persistently and obviously over the river. China is not a land of subtlety.
Traveling has a funny effect on me. Maybe everyone goes through this, I’m not sure. I find out rather quickly what places I miss and would actually like to be. It’s a weird thing to wake up in a city you’ve never been to, a day after you arrived, and find yourself musing about some other place you haven’t been in months or years. It’s happened a lot in China, and I’m sometimes surprised by the places I catch myself drifting off to.
Italy was the first place I pined for, mostly during that first week in Beijing, when I was questioning this whole China adventure. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about two days after getting off a plane–with no ticket home or onward–and remembering I’d signed up to be in this country a year. I haven’t been to Italy since 2003, when I spent three months in Siena on a study abroad program, but the Old Country holds some of my fondest memories and a beautiful language I can still operate in (though my rudimentary Chinese has been pushing out the Italian lately).
I don’t often miss Valencia, the town I generally consider home. I grew up there, cut all ties to it (parents not included) midway through college, then wound up back there when I found out that journalism rarely pays enough for recent grads to make proper rent payments. Hopefully, China will lead me somewhere else, because the hometown always feels like a step backwards.
More often, I wake up with half-preserved images of Santa Cruz in my brain. My old college haunts were always more welcoming that the suburbs of Southern California. “Why do I keep leaving that place?” I ask myself sometimes. Most of my friends have left Santa Cruz, too, although a few returned after trying to make it elsewhere. What I think is most appealing is that it was the first place I carved out my own identity. At home I’m always my parents’ son, even on my best days.
And today, at some unmarked hour on the busride from Dandong, I found myself missing Dalian. I’ve wanted to be back here before. Shenyang practically sent me screaming back here the first day. It’s just never connected, though. This city is starting to feel like, well not home, but a place I don’t mind sticking around so much. I liked Dandong far better than Shenyang (read: I didn’t hate it). It’s a small town by Chinese standards, with only about 700,000 residents, and it doesn’t seem to get much tourist traffic except what’s directed toward North Korea. The friends I met there don’t seem eager to leave, and there were moments when I thought, “I wouldn’t have minded coming here.”
And then I rolled back into Dalian, and I walked out of Victory Square onto Zhongshan Lu and looked up at the tall buildings and wide streets and thought, “This is my kind of city.”
Sure it’s freezing right now, and I plan to complain about that more in this space disproportionate to the drop in temperature, and I still don’t speak as much Chinese as any given two-year-old in town, but this city has grown on me, and that’s not something I’ve said about a lot of places.
So, where do you miss?
Coming soon: Strange memories, plus video of North Korea
Well, I finally made it to Dandong. I rolled into town about 6:30 last night on a crowded bus (they’re always crowded) from Dalian. I’m glad I waited a week and came alone, actually. I had planned to come last weekend with two Dalian friends, but both canceled at the last minute so I held off until now. Coming alone, I could crash on a friend’s couch up here, hang out with some local foreigners and just generally get a bit deeper into things than I otherwise would.
I met Keith (the friend with the couch) at his school here and I immediately became to local celebrity. It’s a common enough thing over here, a new foreigner is a curiosity, and I’ve been taking a lot of photos with new Dandong friends. Kids swarmed me at the school, everyone asking the usual questions: What is your name? Where are you from? Are you the new teacher here? I had fun with it, and their English was better than most of my college students, especially a nine-year-old named Genius.
Today has been all over. I rode out to the ferry port with two friends in the morning. In a minute I’m heading over to the Museum to Commemorate US Aggression and the Yalu River tour. A new Chinese friend, Wayne, offered to drive me all over town.
I’m dropping in on an English Corner tonight, where hopefully I’ll get a chance to chat with some North Korean students. Tomorrow I’m hitting the eastern end of the Great Wall, then it’s another crowded bus back to Dalian.
My oral English classes are doing presentations this week. I told them to talk about a foreign country they’d like to visit or live in, and I offered extra credit if they could find a country I’d never heard of. The speeches haven’t exactly been inspiring. Mostly it’s been students blatant lyplagarizing travel books and Wikipedia, staring down at the podium and asking me if they can speak Chinese (No. It’s an English class). But at the end of class Monday, a student told me I needed to add two groups to my list next week, when we’re finishing things up. Four students weren’t in class this week, or last week when I made sure everyone had a group and a country.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“In dormitory,” he said.
“Why?”
“They are sleepy.”
“Why are they sleepy?”
“They play basketball.”
Basketball, it seems, has so worn them out that they’ve missed class for the past two weeks (we only meet once a week). “Tell them this is their midterm,” I said to their messenger, who slinked away.
Option 2: Forget it’s an English class
Here’s a simple assignment: Choose a city you’d like to visit and plan a trip there. Pick any city in the world. Write down what you’re taking, how long you’ll stay and why you want to go. Easy, right?
So why is it when I ask you where you’re going, you stare at me as if I just told you to calculate the diminishing gravitational pull between the Earth and a launching space shuttle, accounting for changes in relative mass from spent fuel. Now, if you’d studied a day in your life, you might be able to understand the question, “Where are you going?” This is an English class. I’m speaking English. You should consider learning English.
Option 3: Do what you did last year, when you failed.
Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve had students come into my classes asking to join, saying they failed last year and need to retake the course. Now, this isn’t a problem, really, as 41 students isn’t any more impossible to teach 90 minutes a week than 40 students. There’s just one thing that puzzles me:
It’s week 10 in the semester. My graduate courses have eight weeks left. If we had material for this class (we don’t, really) we’d be half way through it. And you, my newest lollygagger, have no way have knowing that, because you’ve been somewhere else for the past two and a half months. Could this be why you failed last year?
I woke up this morning to a horror, something I thought I wouldn’t see until at least December: Snow.
White, flaky, melting on the ground but still freaking cold, snow. I’ve never lived anywhere that sees regular snow. I’ve seen it, sure, but mostly on ski slopes or far away mountains, where it should be.
“It’s nothing,” my friends keep telling me. Last year was something huge, apparently. When I ask about last winter, locals usually hold a hand about chest high. That was a real snow, they say.
I grew up in Southern California. I’m already wearing the warmest jacket I own, plus my gloves and hiking boots. I have no idea how to handle a real winter.
Meanwhile, just to taunt me, Yahoo! Weather says it’s 80 degrees back in Valencia, where my folks are likely playing tennis in shorts.
Update: OK, so the snow only lasted a day, but it’s still a bit north of comfortable. Also, here’s a video I took from the safety and warmth of the a coffee shop:
Well, I’d like to say I’m blogging from the edge of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea right now. Hell, I wouldn’t mind saying I’m at a wangba having just returned from a hike over Tiger Mountain Great Wall. Unfortunately, I can say neither of these things. Instead, my students got to learn a new vocab word yesterday: Balked. As in, “All my friends balked on the trip to Dandong this weekend.”
Everybody backed out at the last minute, claiming a shortage of time or money or something else they thought was more important than a Yalu River tour. So North Korea will have to wait, hopefully no more than a week. If I dither any longer, it’s probably going to be too cold.
So, internet, you have more time to give me ideas for Dandong. I’m still looking for a good, cheap place to stay. Any suggestions on good ways to see the DPRK (without being shot, arrested or deported) are more than welcome.
