But Andrew cannot remember exactly which class Melissa is referring to that might have caused him similar grief. For the first weeks every class seemed to blend together: twelve session of 50 ninth graders, each of them wearing the same blue school uniform, made distinguishing each class’s peculiarities and quirks very difficult, and their behavior seemed to all be one mass murmur of general controlled chaos. This has suited my teaching style, as I can deal with a certain amount of energy in the classroom so long as I am able to channel and direct it with activities of my own design (and this loud drum major baritone doesn’t hurt either – Tu My, those little girls are sometimes so forward as to proclaim to me that my voice is beautiful to their ears; you had better quickly launch one of your insults my way to make sure my ego stays where it should). As I’ve said before, for some reason Chinese students seem enthralled by loud voices – the girl teachers among us CTLCers seem to have more trouble controlling their kids than us guys who can project our voices more resonantly. According to my students, a “powerful voice” gives an impression of, well, power, and since I can boom out instructions without seeming to actually yell punitively, the kids were duly behaving themselves.

But as time has gone by, some brats have become emboldened and some slower students have tuned out. The latter I am sometimes able to coax back into cooperation with some quickly whispered words in Chinese, but a second development, this time in the English Department office, has guaranteed more difficulties with both groups: with the urgent shadow of the high school entrance examinations hovering over every 9th grade student and teacher’s head, the other English teachers have requested that I assist them in covering book and listening exercises from their own textbooks and class materials that they themselves have no time to get to. While the preference among foreign teachers is to design our own lesson plans, my contract states that I must stick to school curriculum when asked to do so, so I gave it a shot.

These circumstances led to the first time I lost control of my voice.

This week’s lesson plan – on movies and genres – would be relegated to the remaining class time after first going over the textbook’s speaking lesson and the listening comprehension activity, I told each class. My formerly rambunctious and eager pupils let out collective moans of resignation and protest as they pulled out their hated English textbooks. The original speaking lesson was reprehensible, but as long as I could do the instructing, I could salvage something useful and entertaining for the students – but the listening comprehension portion turned out to be my Achilles heel.

“Just play them the tape,” advised Nana and Hu Laoshi. “The audio file has instructions and English sentences that they will have to recognize.” In principle this seems idyllic for a teacher – sit back and relax for ten minutes while an audio tape does the teaching for you! – but the students hated it and without my helmsmanship each class quickly devolved. On the last class of Thursday, five boys in the front did not have their materials and instead settled for making as much noise as they could. Among them were a few who did not understand my English instructions and made up for their insecurities by being little punks and steadfastly ignoring everything I said, modeled, mimed or translated for them. After half an hour of their disrespectful mischief I amped up my baritone in their direction with a stern direction to be quiet – but did not realize that I had already turned the dial as high as it could go. “BE QUIET,” I thundered and pointed, “AND DO NOT SPEAK WHILE I AM TALKING.” The class hushed immediately and in the quiet I was startled to notice that my throat rasped. I was beginning to lose it – but not so much as I did when one of the boys in offense threw his head back and imitated my yelling by cackling like a hyena.

“SHUT UP,” I yelled at him. He quieted.

I turned back to the rest of the class and continued the lesson like nothing had happened, but my throat was seriously hurting now and despite my nonchalant teacher facade I was breaking a sweat and feeling fairly piggish, especially about having just told one of my students to shut up. The other, more obedient students in the class continued as if nothing was wrong and in fact later they all swarmed me after class with yet more rock-star entreaties for the foreign teacher celebrity, but I felt hot and ashamed, a failure of a teacher and not worthy of their misplaced respect and admiration. I tried going to the boys and speaking to them in Chinese. They seemed a bit rattled and wary of me, and I do not know if they understood my bad attempts to tell them in Chinese that I just wanted them to try as hard as they could even if they were not able to completely do everything I asked them to. The swarm of obedient student-fans followed after and blocked me from them though, and seemingly from among them their head teacher materialized in front of me with a bemused look on her face.

“These boys like to talk, don’t they?” she asked me with a smile in Chinese. I blushed and stammered in bad Chinese yes, a little, it seems. “They can be very naughty,” she added, looking at them. I was abashed. She had probably heard my yell through the walls and the windows. Perhaps the whole school had. Before I could say much more in either explanation, defense, or apology, the throngs of student-fans crowded around to coo at my Chinese and to pester their head teacher if she could speak English as well as I could. She batted them away again with a bemused expression and I scooted out of their fast.

Along the way back to the office many students did the “Hello Teacher” bow and gaggles of giggling girls fell over each other when I passed, making me just feel worse. All of this misplaced adoration was certain to dissipate as soon as I yelled at them next, or as soon as somebody told them of the incident that had just happened, I thought. I returned to the English office where some of the other English teachers were working quietly, but I did not storm in as Nana had done. I sat at my desk and stared at the textbook lesson and my Excel spreadsheet of a curriculum for half an hour, silent and still. Perhaps later my colleagues will pick up on my mannerisms and know when I am (actually) upset, but for now – especially with Nana’s dramatic flourishes covering me – I was left alone.

It seemed like a crack in my voice could shatter the feeling of security that I had nestled into here. The goodwill and generosity of my Chinese acquaintances is, I realized, largely dependent on my behavior, and if I seem to be a bad teacher, I may damage that goodwill. I spent the evening brooding in my room in front of my computer.

Then a somewhat overwhelming thing happened.

In America we often use AIM and Gchat to instant message each other, but in China the popular service for the same is called QQ. I had installed it to speak to the other English teachers, but a few students had figured out how to find me through it and happily assaulted me with internet chat questions in broken English. This had been happening since the first week to some low degree, with my having to occasionally handle conversing with a student once every evening, perhaps.

That evening would be different – one of them leaked my screenname to his friends, maybe? – because soon I was dealing with a barrage of student requests and invitations. They popped up on my screen one after the other, almost overloading my computer. In an hour I was juggling no fewer than fifteen conversations at once with my students. Upon seeing the pace of my responses become slower and slower, a few enterprising ones eventually started a group chat, where I could speak with all 70 of the students assembled on the Internet at once.

“Teacher, we heard you were not very happy today,” one chirped.
“Do not worry about Class 9 – they are a very naughty class,” another one supplied.
“My name is MonkeyRay,” offered another.

So it went, for hours until midnight when my students eventually went to sleep (”WAH there is a chemistry test tomorrow everybody we have to go to bed!”). I was cheered considerably. If you’re ever in a bad mood, it helps to be treated like a rock star, it turns out. Dunno what the movie stars are complaining about.

The next morning I approached my class with the resolve to not let things get out of hand again. With a sterner approach and more preemptive discipline on my part, things went much more smoothly, even despite the aggravating lesson plan additions that I had to incorporate (although they are still taking up the majority of my lesson time, leaving little room for the actual movie and genre lesson itself – something I will have to discuss and argue with the English teachers later). In the hours and days since I became upset with those boys I have gone from wondering about whether I am currently a deserving teacher to wondering how I will be like as a parent. Hopefully I learn a few things now before I let my kid turn into one of those pesky boys.

I should probably go find some cough drops, too. It’ll be a long year. Teachers and teachers-in-waiting: do you have any advice for this, haha, impostor?

This repeated itself at today’s morning meeting with all of the teachers. As soon as we were released, I had a schedule thrust into my hand by the head of the English department, with hasty introductions following. I looked it over cursorily and found a problem; they’d given me classes to teach on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, when the CTLC teachers are all supposed to go to Futian District for Chinese classes. I mentioned it to Ms. Wan, the secretary who’d been taking care of me all this time, as well as to Li Laoshi, apparently my new contact teacher (chosen recently by virtue of his English, which sounds very nice and makes me wonder why they didn’t give my job to him). Ms. Wan shuttled me off to make copies of my contract, to lunch, and then took me on a tour of the classrooms so I’d know where to go. As the secretary she was bombarded by questions and people through the whole way, and I thanked her for the time. In better English than she had previously let on that she knew, she told me “Because my daughter is soon going abroad for school, I want her treated well too.” Looks like I lucked out.

Meals in the shitang (cafeteria) are pretty good, and would be very cheap – 1 kuai for breakfast, two for lunch, and six for dinner. But apparently there is some deliberation over whether I should pay at all. Ms. Wan haggled at the serving staff, telling them to remember my face and allow it to jauntily walk on past the card swipe. I was a bit uneasy with this. “Wan Laoshi, ni gancai shuo wo keneng bu yao yong ka – zhe bu hao yisi,” I said (Ms. Wan, you said earlier I wouldn’t have to use the card – this is not right/good/proper). She told me that the principal would be consulted on the matter. Hm.

As for the principal, I have to find him alone sometime to deliver the reverse-housewarming gift that all us CTLC teachers brought from home – one for our headmasters and one for our contact teachers. My headmaster is easy enough, even though I haven’t yet found him alone yet – there’s just one of him. But unlike the other CTLC teachers who have by now developed lasting and singular relationships with a contact teacher, only yesterday was I assigned to Li Laoshi, who is apparently not a teacher but some kind of support staff overseer (I’m not yet sure). I’m even sharing an office with him in the staffing building, apart from all the other teachers’ offices. But I do not know him very well, and beyond that, Ms. Wan is still helping me a lot – if the two of them will spy me from across a room, like they did this morning, it is Ms. Wan who will come fussing over. I’ve already given Ms. Wan and her daughter Stephanie some spare gifts I had on hand, but I think I should wait until I get to know Li Laoshi better before I give him his. Besides, I’m not sure for how much longer I will really be in his charge, as a drop-by with the English department revealed that Hu Laoshi, the English head, wanted me to sit in their bullpen-style office with the rest of the department. I think it would suit me better to be with them. After introducing me to the office ladies and teachers, Hu Laoshi took me to fix the schedule problem – walking straight back into the cafeteria and finding the lady responsible as she was eating her lunch.

All in all, the sense I am getting is that I will not have a single person taking care of me in the way that Kami’s contact teacher Sky does, or Hunter’s contact teachers do. That one-to-one relationship is not really working out for me. But something that nobody else seems to have encountered so far is happening: I feel very much like a part of a network now (or at least I am a shared obligation to multiple people) – the English department, Ms. Wan, my pseudo-contact Li Laoshi, the guards (who were quite happy when I delivered a melon to them the other day), and the ground staff (the director of general affairs helped me carry my groceries up the stairs the other night). So now I have to figure out how I’m going to parcel out the five spare gifts I have amongst a whole lot of people.

Cab rides, though, are a completely different story. I love riding in cabs, but not primarily for the ease of transportation. The fees in Shenzhen can’t beat the buses for the distance. But what makes the price worth it is the built-in opportunity to practice your Chinese speaking skills with people who are used to interacting with foreigners and are always grateful for conversation. Better yet, you can use the same conversation on them all the time because they’re always different people, so even though you may not have any more vocabulary than you did the last time you took a cab, your fluency improves a lot. Tonight I cabbed it back from the Shijie Zhichuang (Window of the World) station after being unable to find a bus going back to my place.

Here’s a transcript of how this particular 15-minute ride’s conversation went, in the pinyin that Kedar requested and with notes indicating the specific’s relevance to the general:

Andrew: (approaches cab door.) “Hui dao Yucai Sanzhong ma? Zai Gongyeqi lu he Houhai Dadao lukou.“  [Can you get to Yucai Third Middle?  At the intersection of Gongyeqi Road and Houhai Avenue.]

Cabbie: (nods.)  “Xing, jinlai.”  [I can do that, come in.]

* If I am with other foreigners, we all stuff in at this point, and eventually the cabbie asks where we are from because my presence has confused his initial assumption that we are all European or American.  In these instances I begin with the origin story and then go to the work query.  If by myself I start with the work query, and when they say something I don’t understand, I apologize about my Chinese and this leads to my origin story.  Sometimes this goes on to an ethnographic discussion about huaqiao (overseas Chinese) and huayi (ethnic Chinese) and the distinctions between the two, which no two cab drivers have yet been able to consistently explain to me – although a quick dictionary check did the trick afterwards, tonight.

Andrew: (after a brief pause.) “Ni jintian wanshang hen mang ma?” [Has tonight been very busy?]

Cabbie: (nods.)  “Ah, ah.  Shi blah blah blah“  [*some kind of affirmative; they're always busy.   They ask me something I don't understand.*]

Andrew: (laugh and look sorry.) “Duibuqi, wode Zhongwen hai hen cha.  Wo bu dong.” [Sorry, my Chinese is still pretty bad.  I don't understand.]

*This will spur the cabbie’s curiousity, and automatically caution him to keep his Chinese vocabulary to a rudimentary level.*

Cabbie: (looks confused.)  “Ah, na ni shi naguo ren?  Ni haoxiang shi Yazhouren.“  [Oh, which country are you from?  You look Asian.]

Andrew: “Meiguo.” [America.]

Cabbie: “Hm, wo gangcai yiwei ni shi Zhongguo ren, yinwei nide koyin bucuo.“  [Hm, earlier I had thought you were Chinese, because your accent's pretty good.]

*This part differs from cabbie to cabbie, but each will generally compliment my Chinese – I’m pretty sure they’re all just saving me face.  Some cabbies think I am Korean or Japanese at first, and one has even mentioned that my accent sounded faintly Taiwanese after I mentioned having been taught by Taiwanese teachers in school.*

Andrew: “Wo zai Meiguo chusheng de, danshi wo de fumi zai Zhongguo chusheng hai zhangda de.  Tamen mei jiao wo Zhongwen, suoyi wo ziji xue.” [I was born in America, but my parents were born and/or grew up in China.  They didn't teach me Chinese, so I've been learning myself.]

*Sorry Mom and Dad; this is the best I can explain the situation given my poor Chinese.  The cabbie will then usually immediately ask what my impression is of China, xihuan bu xihuan, if I like it or if I don’t, and/or ask why I came back to China (usually in an incredulous tone of voice).  I never know the implied depth of this question, so I always hedge by clumsily saying Wo xihuan (I like it) to cover my political bases and then explain yinwei wo zhangda de difang meiyou beide Zhongguo ren, wo meiyou hao renshi Zhongguo, suoyi wo yao lai renshi he lianxi shuo Zhongwen, or, “because there were no Chinese people where I grew up, I am not very familiar with China, so I came to familiarize myself with it and to practice my Chinese.”  This usually satisfies them and they nod sagely.*

Hm, I’m getting tired of doing this dialogue formatting – you get the idea, I’ll just go back to paragraph explication.  Besides, there wasn’t much that was actually funny in this, just insightful stuff.

After speaking about me for so long, I’ll try to go back to them by asking “Ni jintian wanshang jidian kaishi gongzuo?” (What time did you start work tonight?).  I’ve learned that the cab drivers are a very hardworking lot, usually starting in the evening and working 12-hour shifts through the night and till the morning.  My sympathy sentences weren’t very proficient until today, when I remembered the word xinku (exhausting).  It’s usually used in a pity sentence, and the cab drivers will sigh and say “Dui, hao xinku” (yes, very tiring).  If, however, they reply with harder words and I don’t know them, I just repeatedly apologize and say that I don’t understand.  The apologies are to hedge my bets and guard against their possible frustration with their inept conversation partner, and so far it’s worked – they chuckle, and seem to treat it as an interesting challenge to reduce their vocabulary down to a level I would understand.  I learn a few new words sometimes, too.

Tonight I asked my guy about the distinction between huaqiao and huayi.  “Wo ting ren shuo wo shi huaqiao, ye tingguo ren shuo wo shi huayi.  Wo buzhidao, huaqiao he huayi butongyi ma?” (I’ve heard people call me huaqiao, but some people also call me huayi. I don’t know, is there a difference between the two?)

I had known before that there is some emotional freight carried by one of the two words, buoyed, I suspect, partly by nationalism and partly by sorrow.  There is a lot to the conditions that drive a diaspora to begin its exodus.  Each cab driver who I ask this question shakes his head just like an adult would shake his head if a child asked him or her about where babies come from or where people go when they die, and emphatically said “Huaqiao he huayi bu yiyang.” (They are not the same.)  Today’s cabbie actually explained it fairly well to me, saying “Huaqiao shi waiguoren, tamen meiyou Zhongguo hukao.  Huayi shi Zhongguoren zhu zai waiguo, you Zhongguo hukao” (Huaqiao are foreigners without Chinese residence.  Huayi are Chinese who live abroad and have Chinese residence.)  Except later I came home and found out that he got it backwards – my dictionary says that huaqiao are “overseas Chinese” and huayi are “ethnic Chinese.”  Ms. Wan, my contact teacher, has been introducing me to people as huayi waijiao (ethnic Chinese foreign teacher), so I will defer to her somewhat more reliable knowledge.

This whole huaqiao business has been very curious to me, especially after I found out about Shenzhen’s various Huaqiaochengs (Overseas Chinese Towns), which are basically theme parks.  I don’t know if they are built and funded by Overseas Chinese or if they initially began as communities for the Overseas Chinese, but there is one in Yantian District and another one here in Nanshan District.  I’m a bit curious about going there sometime.

In short, though, our school picked up four of us to go to the Yucai School Group.  From there we were each taken by a set of contact teachers – except that for three out of the four of us, our regular contact teacher was not back from the summer break yet, so I ended up being shuttled around by the Third Middle school’s secretary and her daughter, who translated.  I think I spoke more Chinese today than I ever have in my life before, although I realized my gross inadequacy for the millionth time.  Wan Laoshi and her daughter Stephanie have really helped me a great deal and I am very grateful to them – they got my internet working in no time and seemed to pull out random people from every corner to help me in some way (like the IT staff specialist who apparently lives here too) or to just say hello (like the headmaster, whom I met a bit out of turn and shares our surname Fu – something I will bring up with him later when my Chinese is a bit better).  Everyone is very accommodating (the headmaster has even offered to let me use his spare phone, something that I will need to figure out a way to decline) and way nicer than I thought they would be to an ABC like me.  More on that later, anyway.  There’s a Walmart that’s pretty damn insane near here, where I got a few things from, though I’ll return to it tomorrow to figure out more things.

I should go to bed, but before that I should take a shower.  I’m a little intimidated by my shower though.  The toilet is inside it.  I have honestly been putting off taking one for the last hour by pottering around and unpacking bits and pieces.

I haven’t had the leisure yet to try superimposing an auditory track over the Shenzhen scenery, but I think it is a much more natural fit.

Where Beijing had historical signifiance rooted in its culture, Shenzhen has none – my mother notes that the last time she visited the place, it was a small fishing village.  That picture shows the difference today (it’s of a busy street in the Dongmen electronics shopping area in Futian District).  Beijing feels very Chinese; Shenzhen feels, as one other annoyed CTLC teacher put it, “like I’m just in New York or Miami.” The skies here are blue with white fluffy clouds and the traffic is moderately Angelino in sanity, as opposed to Sisyphean. Greenery is lush and plentiful (especially in Nanshan District!) and palm trees are in abundance here, and the climate is weightfully humid, but not too much so as to be oppressive.   A cab driver yesterday told us, “Nanshan haizi hen you qian” (Nanshan kids [though Shenzhen ones in general] are loaded with cash.”

It feels, in other words, very American, or at least American-geared like many other tropical tourist destinations.  The urban wasteland of factory plants that I had expected to find hasn’t materialized yet (perhaps they’re all in Bao’An or Longgang Disticts, though).   Listening to “This Is Why I’m Hot” by MIMS would no longer feel cheekily ironic here.  But I think it would still be significant, just as Shenzhen itself is.  Other American teachers who get disgusted by Shenzhen’s newness, brashness and shininess are missing the point, and even coming dangerously close to an Orientalist expectation for an exotic East.  This is China’s flagship city of growth, experimentation and development.  These are the characteristics that China wants to impress the world with and which demonstrate in a single microcosmic environment the principles that China holds for advancement.  Every wrinkle past that must be read in this context and not merely brushed away as “something I could have found at home.”  We are standing witness to a new, changing China, and being in Shenzhen is the best place to watch how it unfolds.

For instance, last night I was at a bowling alley with friends (it was the last night we would be together before we split up to go live at our own schools today).  Bowling in China is regarded as a fancy elite sport – far different from Westwood Lanes back home in Olympia!  The family across from us brought in their two shaved poodles and a few children.  We spent most of the time ogling the poodles (who we always thought were just on the verge of running down a bowling lane) but I couldn’t figure out, in my head, the children.  How many of them were there?  Were they actually siblings or just cousins?  Eventually a young couple came to watch the girls, and for parents the resemblance was there but the age certainly was not.  I had heard before that if you were a) a Party official or b) rich you could sidestep the one-child policy, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it.  None of our practice-teaching kids in Beijing had siblings, and when asked about it they were quick to defend their country’s reasoning, despite their own personal desires for brothers and sisters.  I wonder if the kids in Nanshan will show up with the same opinions – or show up with brothers and sisters.

Enough for  now; I have to go jump into a suit and join the contract-signing ceremony.  This is the moment where the 100-strong group of Americans disperses and we begin living by ourselves as lone foreigners in China; this is the end of training and the beginning of my real adventure.  At the end of the ceremony, representatives from each school will take each of us to our schools.  I feel a little bit like a puppy at the pound waiting for adoption.

The next day was our last in Beijing, and the conclusion of our practice teaching was kind of an anticlimax: our kids were too busy practicing the English skit they were going to show the school officials later in the day to pay attention to whatever lesson plan Benj and I had worked up for them. So we just sat back and watched them sing Disney songs for a period, then went off to take our own dust-up examinations. That evening would end in a Chinese banquet room receiving our fancy TEFL certifications disguised in PKU diploma cases and with us trying dishes that later necessitated my first tryst with Immodium.

The day afterwards we all tousled out of bed and rolled to the Forbidden City. We only had an hour to tour the place, so we essentially made a straight line from its northern gate to the Tiananmen side. I did remember seeing these places before with my family in a summer of 2006 and before again when I was five, but I didn’t reflect much on any of it. The whole group was just a bit antsy to get on with the day and into the train, especially because our hotel rooms were now off limits to us and our things stored away in a temporary area.

We’d been warned a lot about how busy and rife with thieves the Beijing train station would be, but overall it turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax. The train ride itself might have been notable, but I was asleep for most of it, tucked away on a hard board that served as the middle bunk. Each train car had separating walls that divided the car into open compartments, with three bunks attached to each side of the wall (making for 6 bunks per compartment). Things were very cramped, but clean enough, and I spent most of the 24 hours lying inserted into the bunk (it wasn’t tall enough for me to sit up in) and trying to jot down a plot outline for my novel. Everyone was very happy to get off the train a day later!

(I did see the Chinese landscape pass by from the train window, and most of it was rural. The skies cleared after the northern areas and the scene looked actually very beautiful – blue skies with white clouds over green terraced farms and rolling forest hills. I was curious about whether we ever passed through Fujian, where our family descended from, but I couldn’t tell.)

Edit: I guess we didn’t pass through Fujian after all. Here’s the map:

View Train Ride! in a larger map

We got off the train at about 9pm at the Shenzhen railway station. Didn’t see the hookers that I was told to expect. We swam through more crowds of people, emerged into the Shenzhen night (muggy as hell!) and bussed over to the hotel where we’re currently at, which is somewhere in the Futian district (or is it Luohu? I’m getting them mixed up). Here we are getting health examinations, signing work forms and being interviewed by the Shenzhen police bureau. By Saturday we’ll know for certain where we are working and we’ll be shipped off to those locations too.

I know that I’ll be working somewhere in the Nanshan district, as those were the papers I was signing just earlier. More specific knowledge will have to wait till Saturday, it seems.