Vietnam

I am a lucky girl. I am lucky because I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a good portion of my Spring Festival vacation in Vietnam. I crowdsourced most of my funding using Go Fund Me (wouldn't use the service again because it was quite expensive, but you live and learn). I was constantly amazed by the generosity of the people in my life. People gave what they could, even if it was no more than $10. I spent two weeks on the coast of Vietnam exploring all the cities and towns I could fit in. As it turns out, two weeks wasn't nearly enough. Vietnam is so beautiful and so complex that I think a month is the bare minimum I would have needed to spend there to do everything. I didn't even get to touch the highlands or the inner Mekong Delta. But it was still one of the greatest things I've ever done.  

I traveled solo, which was a pretty scary concept. Single woman, traveling alone in Southeast Asia. I thought I would be lonely. I thought I would get bored. But really, it turns out I love traveling by myself. I get to do whatever I want whenever I want. I can eat whatever funky street food or mystery meat I please. I can wander whatever alleys and nooks look interesting to me without having to consider if another person wants to, or if they're tired, or if they're veg or vegan or whatever dietary restrictions most of my friends seem to have. It was extremely liberating.  I also made friends along the way.

This is Khoi and Nga, we had grilled goat together in Saigon. They're pretty cool.

I could totally live in Saigon. I loved how graceful the city was. All the lovely French architectural elements blended with Vietnamese character into something really special. 

And the local flavor abounds.

I also went boating on the Mekong River.

And I also adored Saigon's beer street in the backpacker district. You pretty much just grab a chair and start talking. Instant friends.

Hoi An is one of my favorite places in the world. 

Who couldn't love that view? I almost up and moved there on the spot. Perhaps deciding against it was a bad call? I want to live in Vietnam. It's a wonderful place. Maybe State would station me there? Dreams sometimes can come true...

Mama Li

I wanted to write this post a month ago, didn’t have time, and now all the brilliant thoughts I had on this topic have been edged out by all the busy that has happened since. We’ll see how this goes.

It all started with Christmas. More accurately, it began with the Christmas shopping season, which in China involves a hellish worst nightmare of tinny pop versions of Christmas carols set to a pop beat and backed up by the most frightening children’s choir available. It also involves sales and demented-looking Santa Clause faces plastered everywhere. In short, it involves all the worst parts of Christmas without any of its redeeming qualities.

I am not allowed to evangelize to my students, nor would I want to, but Chinese Christmas was invented by WalMart to sell crap and all the hype made me sick. My students had absolutely no idea that Christmas was supposed to be about anything but buying things. There was no sense of togetherness or goodwill or any of the lovely things I associate with the season. Christians in the US are upset by the commercialization of Christmas, but they should see China. Many people in the US no longer celebrate Christmas religiously, but they still have the cultural background of Christmas, which gives the holiday depth. China’s big togetherness holiday is Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, so it doesn’t matter that Christmas is a big buying spree to them. But it mattered to me.

They were pretty perplexed by Thanksgiving, spending a whole day being thankful and all that, so I decided to teach them about giving back and charity during the holidays.

The Chinese don’t have the same concept of community service that historically Judeo-Christian or Muslim countries do. Confucianism, filial piety, and communism essentially made it unnecessary. If you lived with your family for your whole life, nobody was truly lacking. Giving to the less fortunate is also unnecessary in communism. Regardless of reality, in communism everyone is equal, nobody experiences need and charity would probably be considered bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. There is also no need for volunteerism because the state takes care of all those causes people would normally volunteer for.

The problem now is that the old ways are fading away. The one child policy means that there are only two children caring for upwards of four relatives. And the move away from communism means that there is virtually no safety net for the old and dispossessed. Community service is necessary for the first time in China, and people are beginning understand why.

For the lesson, I had the students close their eyes and imagine their perfect world. In groups they then had to agree on a pressing problem and create a poster for a community service project to tackle it. I explained how Christmas and the holidays are traditionally a time of giving and that many people participate in community service projects during this time. I was intrigued to see what problems they chose. The most common issue by far was the environment.

The second most popular issue was the ubiquity of stray dogs and cats in Linyi.

I was delighted to see the students care about issues. The environment is a huge issue here, not just smog, but trash. But I also found it intriguing that they cared more about homeless dogs and cats than homeless people. Granted, homelessness is not a huge problem in Linyi. In a farming community, it’s unlikely that anyone will be homeless. However, this does not mean that there is a lack of want. So that lesson was a mixed bag for me emotionally. On that one hand I was so proud of my students for having opinions and for caring about an issue, on the other hand I was disappointed that they didn’t seem to care very much for their fellow human beings.

But then Mama Li came over. In my eyes, Mama Li is the epitome of all that is good about the Confucian family system. Apparently the Li house was undergoing some serious renovation, so Mama Li decided to come visit her daughter for a few days. It was glorious. She cooked for us, cleaned, never let us do the dishes. She showered love and affection on us in every way possible. She pushed food like crazy. She taught me how to make dumplings!

Having her around made the constant ache for my own mother subside slightly.  

If every family were as caring as Mama Li and insisted on caring for its members in the same way that she cares for Mary and I, then I can understand why community service isn’t necessary. If you family is your community, then the service happens every moment of every day. If the system works as it should, then your whole life becomes one long act of service. In a way it’s far more sincere than volunteering, which comes into most people’s lives when it’s convenient. But when you live with the community you serve, there is no convenient time. You serve. And that can become a greater act of love than any seasonally-dictated giving ever could be.

Hong Kong

Last week I made the traditional foreigner's visa trek to Hong Kong. It's pretty much impossible for a foreigner to get a work visa before entering China, but it's also not possible to get said visa switched in mainland China. Thus, every foreigner ever mobs the Hong Kong visa office on a daily basis to get their various visas switched to more Kosher kinds. 

This was about half of the line waiting to get into the visa office. That's a lot of laowai. 

I fell in love with the city so quickly that I was a little frightened. How is it possible to feel such an instant and deep connection with a place? I loved seeing the diversity of colors, lives, and views. The financial district is crammed against the port, which buts up against the wealthy enclaves, which overlook traditional fishermen on the bay. British ownership is still keenly evident in Hong Kong. Everyone speaks at least conversational English. City planning is very European. But the soul of the city is still Chinese.

The city feels like a love child of London and Shanghai. 

And I am always a sucker for a city shrouded in mist.

Not to mention they specialize in my favorite foods.

In short, I want to live there forever. It took moving to Yuncheng for me to realize finally that I am a city girl at heart. I love the dense feeling of people crammed together. The bustle of it all is heady and intoxicating. People watching is the best in big cities, and there is every kind of food you could ever dream. If only Hong Kong were cheaper. It's still cheap-ish by Western standards, but definitely about five times more expensive than Yuncheng. I came back so broke my wallet squeaks. That's an exaggeration, I was actually quite careful, but I still spent an absurd amount of money for 36 hours. Probably because I drank lots of this:

Hong Kong was so wonderful, in fact, that I have been experiencing a good deal of culture fatigue since I've been back. Or perhaps it's more accurately called Yuncheng fatigue? I had finally arrived at a place where I had come to terms with my life for the next year. And then Hong Kong reminded me of what I really want from life. I will re-adjust, I am sure, but I miss having nice things. This is my year of simple living. It will not kill me, in fact, it's probably very healthy (I mean, I've lost a ton of weight), but I need to let Hong Kong motivate me. I have a new goal or at least a dream, and I need to let it give me power, not cause me to mope. I am in a good place, I am working towards my goals, I am extremely fortunate. 

Information

If you have any interest whatsoever in keeping up with current events you know that the Chinese government enforces some strict Internet censorship. No Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, or any other unsanctioned social media/news outlet. This very blogging site is blocked.

As a foreigner, these restrictions hamper me less. I have subscribed to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which sends my Internet traffic through servers in the US and allows me to access the entire Internet. If I do my thing on the Internet, using VPNs and criticizing the Chinese government on occasion, I am 98% sure I won’t have secret police knocking down my door. It’s an insane level of privilege.

Chinese people have developed a vibrant online community without Facebook. Their equivalent is QQ. If you don’t have a QQ account, you get the same incredulous stares if you said you didn’t have Facebook in the US. It is the way people connect online. Giving out your QQ number is the equivalent of becoming Facebook friends, you do it as a social gesture and you have lots of QQ friends you never talk to. China also has its Twitter equivalent, Sina Weibo. It serves the same purpose as Twitter, mostly self-absorbed broadcasts about oneself, interspersed with important commentators.  The state watches both of these sites closely to remove posts and accounts that don’t toe the line.

So China has a strong online community. The problem is that the average Chinese Internet user does not have a VPN, or the desire to get one, and so their access to news and information free from state bias is slim to none. Most Americans, including me, do not make enough of an effort to read multiple sources of news bias. This, however, is our own damn fault. In a country where you can get arrested for reading the wrong news, there is an even larger portion of the population who swallows the government line than in the US. Combined with the fact that critical thinking is not a cultivated skill, you are left with a huge population that will believe anything coming from Beijing.

My students face another hurdle entirely. They are not allowed Internet access, period. There is no wifi or Internet access on campus. The classrooms can only access the Internet if the teacher has a special access code. There is an Internet café across the street from the school, but if they are caught there, they will be punished. My students live in an information vacuum. The only information they are allowed comes from their textbooks (which are decidedly sub-par) and their teachers. They have no grasp on what the outside world is like. I know more about their own country than they do.

A lot of this sort of information isolation could be solved with a network of decent libraries, but I have not seen a single library since I’ve been here! China has plenty of impressive public projects, but libraries have not been part of the effort. In the US, some of our proudest structures are our libraries, and we even have street signs pointing the way. It’s possible there are libraries in the larger cities, but they certainly aren’t advertized or even celebrated. It’s funny how it took me this long to notice.  You don’t really look for libraries when you can’t read the language. But it’s unsettling once noticed.

The other night I had dinner with some of my school’s representatives. The man in charge, Mr. Dong, likes to educate us foreigners on the finer points of Chinese history and that night the topic was the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap was an economic policy under Mao. He decided that China needed to be a modern industrial country. The best way to do that in his maniac brain? Produce steel. Tons of it. And because he was a communist, he thought that everybody in China should produce steel. Totally logical, right? No way that could backfire. The upshot was that everybody inflated their production values of everything from crops to steel and so when tax time came, the government took the resulting level of goods. But the inflated production levels meant the central government took too much food from the countryside. Something like 30 million people died from starvation as a result. The other American at my school told me that there are very few people around his age (53-56) because they all starved to death as children during the Great Leap.

The part that was frightening was that Mr. Dong told us that the famine happened because China had to pay off its debts to the USSR. Not because Chairman Mao was a dictator in love with his own fantasy. The free exchange of information is critical to a thriving society but there is way for Mr. Dong to find alternative sources of information without breaking the law. There are no repositories of knowledge he could peruse to find alternative narratives. There is no free Internet, there are no libraries. Libraries do not lend themselves to homogenous idealisms or cults of personality.

I’m not entirely sure what my point is here. I would like to say that if China had libraries, the Communist Party would fall, but really, I know that is not true. The CCP’s grasp on power is much more insidious. Libraries would be a step, but on their own, they are not enough. It would take a whole change in this country’s mental attitude toward freedom and the role of government. Like I said, libraries wouldn’t be enough on their own, but perhaps they would be a first step.

A Good Day

Today was a good day. 

I want to take a moment to remember that this happened, because so many days are such struggles. It doesn't take much, really. I woke up and read the New York Times (the government is still shut down? How embarrassing.). I Skyped with my dad and a friend (she is getting a dog!). I swept and mopped my floor, and I did some yoga. I learned a couple new Chinese phrases. I can now ask my Chinese friends if they want to go somewhere with me. Just before class, I did some last minute tweaks to my lesson plan, and then I taught three classes. The kids were great today. They were involved and they did what I asked them to do. I bribed them into participating with some candy, but at least they decided that candy was worth speaking in class! The headmaster took me out to a lovely dinner, and he kept trying to play drinking games with me. Taught three more classes after dinner, and they were even better than the first three. These kids are my super enthusiastic group. I didn't even have to bribe one of them! They just up and volunteered!

All around today was a good day. I was content. I did not want to hop the first flight out of here. I did not want to run away and hide from the children. I didn't feel displaced. I didn't feel like the worst teacher in the world. The day turned itself around, even though I woke up with a pounding heart from some ridiculous anxiety dream about packing for China.  

I need to remember what days like this feel like, and more importantly, I need to remember how to get to this place. Days like this will be what makes it possible for me to stay. I can't just live for my weekends, when I can see friends and socialize. I need to be content where I am. I'm too much of a homebody for it to be any other way. The more days I can have like this, the closer I will be to contentment, and that is all I can ask for.

Teaching

How do I put this? Teaching is…simultaneously the hardest, easiest,
and most tiring thing I have ever done. Just so you have an idea of my
schedule, I teach 23 classes of about 60 kids each, for a grand total
of over 1,200 students. This is a pretty standard class size for
China. If you have 1.2 billion people, you can’t have class sizes of
30 or less. It just ain’t gonna happen. Because English conversation
is considered a “light” subject, I teach mostly in the evening, when
all the electives take place. Some days, like today, I don’t finish
teaching until 10 pm.

And this is what makes teaching hard or easy. The kids I have earlier
in the day are wonderful. They are engaged, excited, and eager. The
ones I start teaching at 9 pm are an utter nightmare. For example, the
other day, I taught my earliest class at 11 am. The kids were great. I
was doing a unit on jobs. They were having great discussions about why
people choose their jobs. This one girl wrote such an awesome
advertisement for a tour guide job that I just about burst from pride.
I wanted to frame her paper and keep it forever. It was an awesome
day.

And then there are days like today. My 8 pm class didn’t do their
homework. Not a single person in a class of over 60 people. And it
wasn’t like I assigned anything much. They were supposed to make a
nametag with an English name for their desks. No big deal, right?
Except none of them did it! So I tell myself, ok, fine, I teach an
unimportant subject, they might ignore the homework. So I move along
with the lesson. There is your standard amount of not paying attention
for that time of the night. I have to use all my breath support not to
strain my voice. The usual. But then we move into the activity where
they write their own ad for a fictional job at a fictional company. I
heard a good buzz of conversation for the fifteen minutes and I even
saw some people bent over their desks like they were concentrating.

Boy was I wrong.

Not a single group completed the task.

They didn’t even try! Not a single group! I’m used to a few slackers,
but not an entire class. I have never been so mad in my life. I
threatened them with everything from Hell to the headmaster if they
ever pulled anything like that ever again. Hopefully it will be
enough. I have no idea what to do with this sort of classroom
management situation. None whatsoever.

I have been struggling with what to do about my class size and
learning dynamics. I have been fortunate to have an excellent
education with personal time with my teachers. These experiences were
invaluable to my academic and personal development. I want to give
these sorts of experiences to my students, but there is no way I will
learn all their names, much less get to know any of them.

And then there’s the problem that English conversation is considered a
fluff topic because it’s not covered in the gaokao. The gaokao is the
dreaded Chinese high school exit examination. English grammar is an
integral part of the test, but speaking and listening are excluded.
The result is an entire generation of Chinese who can read away but
can’t think to carry a simple conversation.  So my class is
unimportant. The head teacher even made a point of telling my
assistant that I could play hooky whenever I want because my class is
pointless.

This attitude is pretty pervasive in the student body as well. There
are the great students who love English and learning, but there are
also those who don’t give a rat’s ass. I have been struggling with
these different forces in determining how much I should put into my
job. On the one hand, I want to inspire these kids and make them want
to learn this language I love so much. On the other, there is such
institutional inertia that this is unrealistic. On the one hand, I
want to help the kids who struggle, but on the other hand, I have so
many students that there is no way I can even identify them
accurately.

A lot of the expats I have met tell me I should teach the ones who
want to learn.

On my good days, I bristle at the suggestion. I want to teach them
all! And they’re all going to be brilliant, and have doors opened to
them, and have awesome lives! Each individual is special and needs to
be nurtured! These are the thoughts I have when I leave a good class.
It’s very American of me to think that everyone deserves a shot and a
fair try. China does not work this way. I can feel the Chinese
teachers and my assistant as well just look at me knowingly. They
think I will lose this idealism. They are probably right, but it’s
easy on good days.

And then there are days…like today… when I understand why Chinese
teachers still beat their students.

9/11

September 11, 2013

Passed my first 9/11 in a country that doesn’t care a whit about 9/11.
To be perfectly honest, I am so wrapped up in my own tensions and
fears that I forgot the significance of the date until late afternoon.
And I suppose, in the most technical sense, it wasn’t 9/11. In the US,
it was still the 10th, but it still felt strange to be the only person
for miles and miles who even noticed for a minute that this day was
even remotely different.

As a person with ambitions in international politics, I struggle with
how to remember 9/11 appropriately. On the one hand, I feel compelled
to remember how terrible that day was. I was just short of 11 years
old when it happened, and to this day I have a perfect mental picture
of the towers burning. This is the emotional side of remembrance, and
it is worthy of recognition. The political side of me, however, is
uncomfortable with this response. Every year I feel the need to look
up clips of news footage and watch it over and over. In my head I
rebuild the significance of the date, but it has been 12 years now.
The response to the attacks did not make us better as a nation. In
fact, I think our fear has caused us to cheapen what we hold dear. The
executive stretches the limits of its power every term,
anti-immigration sentiment is rife (although the tides may be shifting
again), we see threats everywhere, and we as a nation are so weary of
conflict that public sentiment can’t even be roused when a dictator
gasses children to death in their homes.

I want to remember, because this day has profoundly shaped who I am
and who I will become, but when does remembrance become a hindrance to
action in the present? When do the fears of the past become irrelevant
to our present battles? How do we balance letting go with memory?

These are questions I cannot answer, but it is cathartic to ask them anyway.