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.

No. 1

Date: Sept. 13 & 14, 2015

Status: Flying to Shanghai

              Totally unprepared and perfectly destined, before sunrise I step out of the minivan of my poor, worried mother. She somehow finds more advice to give me before I leave, even though the past two weeks have been nothing but planning and advice. But Lord knows I need every word of my mother’s advice—if not for the information, for the comfort of knowing she cares.

              I have to get going. I’ve never flown alone before. I think if you’re flying alone, you’ve got to be extra nice and ask a lot of questions of a lot of people using your best plaster smile. And eventually to get to all the right places in Milwaukee and you make your connecting flight in Chicago even though you waited in the wrong lines twice at the gate—and those signs were in English! And pretty soon you’re on a flight to Shanghai where you’ll be picked up by a man, who doesn’t speak any English, called Mr. Chi. And you’ll have to trust him to take you on a two to three hour drive to the “small” Chinese city of Yangzhou, home to approximately 700,000 people, most of whom know less of your language than you do of theirs (you assume).