No. 8

Date: June 30, 2016

Status: Reflecting on my classes

              Hello. 
              Good evening. Good EVVVVVVVVEning. No, not Eve Laoshi. EVENING. 

              I'm an English teacher in China. And as much as I try to teach my own language (with those tricky Vs so absent in Chinese) and culture to my students, I end up learning quite a bit more about their culture and just how differently things can be interpreted here.

Candy and Andy are really into stickers.

              Today I thought I'd record some thoughts on this to benefit...someone. Perhaps you're aspiring to be an ESL teacher in China and are looking for a cultural heads up. Or maybe you're the parent of an ESL student, and you want to know how you can make your teacher's life a little bit less insane. Or maybe you're just a curious stranger. Who knows. 

No. 7

Date: April 29, 2016

Status: Learning to do everything on a bicycle

              I've always liked riding my bicycle. And I suppose that's lucky because I do an awful lot of cycling around Yangzhou, China. It's a wonderful way to travel. You get to see everything at a brisk, yet manageable, pace. You have time to take in the smell of the sweet potato man's furnace/cart. You get to smile at the staring children packed onto the back of mommy's e-bike. And you can take a moment to laugh at the Fedex man's precarious load. 

Here we see the wild parcel-delivery man, retrieving a
lost parcel, saving it from an uncertain fate.

The parcel-delivery man replaces the young parcel.
Both will live to see another day.

               And I've certainly gotten better at biking overall. I've gotten faster, and I can now overtake my coworker Angelo's little e-bike without too much effort. Having reached a satisfactory level of actual cycling skill, I've also developed some related skills.

              Following is a list of things I can now do on a bicycle: 

No. 6

Pink-tailed demon.

Date: April 15, 2016

Status: Thinking about home

              Having lived in China since September of 2015, I seem to alternate between days of habit and days of: "Where the heck am I, and what the heck am I doing?" Today was a weird day. It started off feeling like habit: go to the teachers' workshop meeting, chat with coworkers, and teach my evening class. But the day felt like anything but habit when I went to KFC for dinner. I was met with a Chinese line. (Some would call it a writhing mass of pushing people.) An older gent pushed ahead of me when I was clearly next. And while I ate, a fluffy dog with a pink tail ate fries off of a nearby table with its owners looking on.
               This sudden shift in the tone of my day has gotten me thinking about the habits I'll most likely drop upon returning to the ol' US of A. So here are my top ten China habits: 

No. 5

Date: March 28, 2016

Status: Dripping on the rug

              After a lazy Monday morning and a lunch of questionable dietary value (are yogurt, nuts, and dried squid a lunch?), I put on the latest episode of the "This American Life" podcast, cranked the volume, and hopped in the shower. As I sudsed up my long hair, I strained to hear the quieter moments of the podcast, but I got the gist of it. Soon I moved to the conditioner, lost in the story of a family whose take on the American Civil Rights Movement varied from generation to generation. As I began to rinse the conditioner from my hair, I heard a sound that didn't seem to fit with the podcast. In fact, it was louder and seemed much closer. I realized that someone was knocking on my door, though I didn't expect anyone in all of China to be doing so. Who could it be?

No. 4

Date: Sept. 24, 2015

Perhaps Oreos are the closest thing to Western-style cookies
that a Chinese supermarket carries. But you won't find
flavors like this in America: peach and green grape!

Status: Licking my fingers

 
              Sitting in the office at the English school, I glanced at my work schedule. I had something labelled “bake cookies” coming up in forty-five minutes. Next to “bake cookies” was David’s name and the room number. Great! I would get to observe how David did the monthly cookie-baking birthday celebration! 
              David walked by my desk. “All ready to bake cookies?” 
              "Yeah, I guess so."
              He nodded. “Got a recipe?”  
              “What? I…I’m baking the cookies? I’m leading it?” 
              Ok, I shouldn’t panic. I used to bake cookies all the time back home. I was a pro at tweaking the recipe on the back of the Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip bag to get the best chewy chocolate chip cookies known to mankind. I could handle a little birthday cookie demo. 

No. 3

A work of art from a student named Peter.

Date: Sept. 20, 2015

Status: Pretending to know how to teach

              At Shane English School, I’m just a teacher in training. Soon I’ll be taking over Suzy’s classes as a full-fledged foreign teacher. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking to realize that in the future, those students will communicate with another English-speaker, and my voice will come to their minds as they search for the right words.

No. 2

Date: Sept. 16, 2015

Status: Listening to the streets of Yangzhou 

              It’s nine o’clock in the morning, Thursday September sixteenth in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. Back in the States, I was a night owl, unable to accomplish anything before noon. In China, I am a morning person, awake and alert an hour before my seven-thirty alarm, ready to read a book, check my phone, cook breakfast, wash dishes. Maybe it’s just the lingering jet lag or maybe it’s the streets’ constant honking and screeching that crescendos to its daytime volume around six-thirty each morning.