I spent the last day at Yucai Third Middle gifting these boxes to teachers and administrators as farewell presents, and taking group photographs with students who requested them. All of them have treated me very kindly this year, so while the Center for Teaching and Learning in China, the organization that brought us foreign teachers to Shenzhen, did not recommend or mention procuring farewell gifts, I still wanted to show my appreciation. I even got some wonderful farewell gifts of my own from some administrators, including a miniature crystal replica of an ancient imperial vase and a long scroll inlaid with calligraphy and paintings from Kaifeng. Students were coming and going as well, asking me to sign “yearbook” like sheets and giving me class photographs with warm goodbye messages written on their backs. One student even gave me a dual-language book, a handmade card proclaiming how moved his heart had been by my casual coursework and a little Chinese flag upon which he had written “No matter where you go, you will always be a Chinese!” And two hugs.

So you can imagine how my heart sort of fell when I woke up this morning in Fuzhou to two emails from unnamed students.

“Do you like bitch?You always sleep with bitches!!
Fuck you!!!
You deserve a foreign teacher!!!
You are so ugly!!
你还以为自己很帅是不是？！！自恋狂！！其实你丑的要死！！还留胡子干嘛！！丑死了！不要脸！！中文又不会说！！亏你还是中国人！！死在美国算了！！就好别污染了中国的土地！！
天天make love小心得Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome！！
还那么矮！！矮子一个！！
快点死到美国去吧你！！
傻子一个！”

Here’s the bottom half via Google Translate:
Do you think you handsome is not it? ! ! Narcissism! ! In fact, you die ugly! ! Why has a mustache! ! Ugly dead! Shame! ! Chinese can not speak! ! Loss you’re Chinese! ! Death in the United States forget! ! Like not pollute the land of China! !
Make love every day of getting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome! !
Also so low! ! A dwarf! !
Early death in the United States go you! !
An idiot!

[I assume that it's Google Translate that makes it more incomprehensible.]

The second email had a picture of a dog, and some Chinese underneath it that mentioned something about the inviolability of my dog-ness and that I eat shit.

After some initial shock, I began wondering what to do. At this moment my grandma came in the room and asked me in Chinese if I was ready to come join breakfast. I smiled for her and replied in my shoddy but improving Mandarin that I would be there in a second. When she turned around to leave, I signed onto QQ, the Chinese version of AIM and GChat, and sought out a Yucai teacher to lodge a complaint.

The teacher I found on QQ was perhaps the one I had the best relationship with. She said “Oh, maybe it is because they love you too much…I have some students who hate me too.” She would look into it, she promised me, and with that I left her alone. I think I am Chinese enough to know that it’s embarrassing to drag others in to do my disciplinary work. But I was tired of these students constantly harassing me, and these words nettled me to the core.

After leaving QQ, I wondered again if this was really the best way to deal with the situation, and thought about one past episode that had also left a bad taste in my mouth. A few months ago as I was finishing a lesson for Class 12 and bidding them farewell, I overheard a girl mutter in Chinese “and don’t come back.” I raised an eyebrow and indicated my understanding. The girl flustered. “You didn’t hear anything!” she and her mates yelled at me in English. I was less than pleased. Insult me first, and then deny my displeasure the next? But I left it alone and left.

Class 12 is the one which I have the most peculiar relationship with; they were the class that claimed me the most, and simultaneously aggravated me worst. Clever and rambunctious, they were unimpressed with my lessons unless they were games, which I could sympathize with – given the circumstances of our employment, all of us foreign teachers were quite aware that our teaching was for surface appearances only, since our once-a-week “communicative language teaching” techniques are too soft and fuzzy to really help Chinese students tackle their difficult entrance examinations. At the best of times, the classes we each taught were passed in frivolous fun as ways to let kids blow off steam. Some students appreciated this levity more than we expected and more than (English) words could describe. But at the worst of times, our lessons were considered laughable, and ourselves, as foreign goofballs who were wastes of clumsy effort.

Class 12 embodied both the best of times and the worst of times. Usually they paid as little attention to my lessons as they could, chatting with each other loudly while I lectured, playing video games, or making fun of me in Chinese. Only competitive games could get their prolonged attention, and to be fair, they excelled at them, showing the full range of their cleverness. But they also treated me like a celebrity buddy instead of a teacher, always reaching out to shake my hand and calling my cell phone at all hours of the day (I never found out how they discovered my telephone number, and they refused to tell me). Even the videos you saw from Monkey Ray on this blog came from that class. It was all a lot of affection, but a little too much and was starting to get in the way of work, I thought. So after “don’t come back” girl opened her mouth, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could draw a line in the sand. That evening I logged onto their QQ chat network and started ruffling feathers, asking for the name of the offending girl. My inquiries were met with some alarm. “Why is he making such a big deal out of this?” they typed to each other in Chinese they assumed I didn’t understand. “andrew, just forget it, OK? u are being sensitive to much,” a few told me in English. Eventually, a few students came forward. “Andrew, the girl is a friend of a friend of mine, and they tell me that she was only joking, and that it is not a big deal, OK?” I was dubious, having actually seen her disposition in person. But if they were going to play Spartacus, there wasn’t much I could do.

After that episode I warily retreated again from dealing too much with Class 12 outside the classroom. But the celebrity idolizations continued. My phone kept ringing, and they found new phone numbers to call from faster than I could log each number into phone memory. A few girls tried to bully me into having lunch with the class, and they kept badgering me about it till the end, refusing to accept my explanations that I had no time. My email inbox filled. That was okay; it was less of an intrusion than the phone calls, especially since I had given them my email address, but some of them seemed more like love letters than regular emails, one girl even going so far as to dedicate a post in her blog to me. It was nice to a point; after which it became a little worrisome (especially in the comments where I noticed they were trading my phone number around like it was a Pokemon card). I recognized that I was not only dealing with some cultural gaps; in teaching middle school students, there would also be a maturity difference, and while communication might help bridge the first, only about five years could fix the second. So I decided to try to put some more distance between my students and I.

But distance hadn’t worked, as this email evidenced. I reflected again on that time, and how uncomfortable my sleuthing around for the girl’s name had seemed to make them. The teacher on QQ to whom I had reported today’s email had also seemed to want to downplay it as much as possible. Maybe my raising a scene was just as culturally off-putting for them as their evasions were for me. I suppose it is, after all, pretty American to raise hell. In China, maybe it’s better for everyone’s pride if the conflict can be dealt with quietly, and as few people implicated in public as possible. And Andrew, shouldn’t you know how to deal with these things? You’re a Chinese, aren’t you? According to the mystery student’s email, no, I’m evidently a lousy excuse for one. But Chinese or not, I can still play anthropologist.

Maybe it would be better if I engaged with the surly kid myself. I replied to the email telling them that I was very upset, and asked if they really meant these opinions. A more thought-out, cordial reply came back. “In China,do not reply another’s email is a very not polite thing. I know, I am a little 过分。So, I am sorry. I hope you will reply your students emial in the future.” Well. It is so “very not polite” that it’s worth telling me that I sleep with dogs, that I’m narcissitic and that my beard is ugly? I mean, come on! My beard is quite handsome.

Then I thought that perhaps the kid just didn’t think that he or she had really been that offensive, as terrible as it sounded to me. I recollected that every day in class I routinely overheard my students telling each other in casual Chinese to fuck off, or that they’d fuck each other’s mothers. “We were never like this when we were growing up,” my parents noted. “We were very good.” Be that as it may, I also remember one day speaking to one of my favorite students from Class 7. She was in the middle of telling me about her family when a boy came by to tease her in Chinese. She whipped her head around and let fly in Chinese “I hope your baby is born without skin” and then turned back to me sweetly without missing a beat. “Oh, you understood that?” she said, not very shy. The class laughed around us.

After a few more emails exchanges, the kid sent one that read “And,you are a Chinese,but you said you wasn’t a Chinese,and I think you don’t love China. I am very disappointed……
Ok,goodbye…I don’t want to talk to you either…”

Arguably, this is the point that bothered me more than threats of fucking (the word is so cross-cultural) or AIDS-getting did: that I wasn’t “Chinese.” (I don’t think I ever actually said that I wasn’t Chinese to my students, but for that matter I also never claimed to be handsome – they said that of me, and I always demurred. Very perplexing, and possily pathological.) Anyway, it’s not that I think I have anything to prove in that department. But an accusation of my un-Chinese-ness is not exactly how I wanted to end a year in which I was trying to explore my Chinese-ness and Chinese society. It is such a narrow-minded, jingoistic thing to hold against me. Suddenly things clicked together – crazy people who jump off buildings, crazy people who stab kids, crazy people who emigrate and raise Amy Tans and Maxine Hong Kingstons and crazy people who torture landowners and intellectuals with public beatings. The feeling was as if, upon being kicked out of the circle of hospitality and told to fuck off, I saw all of China’s shames and pathos as an outsider might. I didn’t want to consider this the definitive picture of China. But as I’ve walked through the haphazard and gritty market streets of Fuzhou with my grandma clutching at my arm, I kept wondering if my time in Shenzhen had been spent being entertained by a pleasant fantasy, a superficial veneer of politeness underneath which still lay a distrust of my belonging, my loyalty, and my identity.

If so, it might be because much of the treatment and goodwill towards me here has been extended on a perhaps shaky basis: the assumption that I am just like them, and that my Chinese blood speaks for the rest of my body and mind. On occasion, these same kinds of all-encompassing assumptions on the part of Americans have bothered me too, though they manifest in an opposite way – because my thinking and behaviors are American, my foreign colleagues sometimes maintain that they ought to override whatever ancestry I have. When you come to America, you’re expected to speak perfect English or at least be learning to, and you had better assimilate into American culture, otherwise you’re a lazy immigrant. If you’re one of the Overseas Chinese who is returning to the Mainland, you are forgiven some eccentricities, so long as you can already speak your “mother tongue” perfectly and you fervently proclaim your love for your “mother country.” Both of these attitudes are so narrow-mindedly tiresome.

America and China are opposite sides of the coin in ideology and culture, but in the demand to assimilate with the majority to the exclusion of all else, they are just the same as the rest of the worst of humanity. “You’re either with us, or against us,” said Bush, and Minutemen rednecks and the Arizona legislature nod their heads in agreement. “You’re either one of us or you’re not,” says this student, and every Chinese guy who told me to shave off my beard to look “more Chinese” and the students who whispered that I was “a Japanese” in class think the same. How terrible our tribes can be.

Interestingly, though, while America’s worst will villify and persecute the “other,” mainstream Mainland society seems to not care to deal with it at all. Cultural isolation and holding us “foreign experts” at a polite arm’s reach away from doing any real work/damage in class demonstrates this. In fact, it seems to be that it’s the things that the Chinese don’t consider as “other” that are threatened instead – me and certain contested geopolitical territories. (If they can read between lines, that should be the dig that gets this blog banned for good.)

I had realized this a few months ago, but my student’s accusation brought it to mind once again. It touched a nerve because it was right for all the wrong reasons – all of them offensive in their narrow-mindedness. It’s true that I don’t love China – that would imply a blind devotion. I’m an independent thinker, like the best of Americans. Hell, I don’t even love America (though I appreciate it). But isn’t it a very Chinese characteristic to still be proud of your family, no matter how shitty it is? I am proud of China. I’m proud to be a part of the singular, magnificent heritage and culture it has stewarded, even if I am wary of the racial homogeneity and circular logic that also sustains this pride. I can’t love faults like those. And the longer I have been here, the more I have seen. But I became teary at the Olympics opening and I still defend China’s perspective when Westerners bludgeon it with their neoliberal New York Times accusations. No matter what you think, you can’t escape your ancestry. Blood is thicker than water and rhetorical arguments.

I told the student this. “I am proud of China, but it is different. You grew up in only one country, with one culture. I do not think you understand our feelings.”

He or she responded with an ameliorating “well, can you tell me now if you are already back in America?” and “Are you really going to report me?”

Hahaha, you’re a funny kid. Little fucker.

The history of Fujian Province and its habit of letting loose its inhabitants upon the seas is partially to blame.  Craggy hillsides covered by mist-covered forests coat the area with the richest ecology amongst the seaboard provinces, and yet because of this topology Fujian’s development and agriculture have historically lagged behind the rest.  So the Fujianese turned to the sea for both their diet and their livelihood, and after the Ming Dynasty sent the Chinese seafarer Zheng He abroad to explore the world in the 15th century, many Fujianese emigrated to the Southeast Asian countries he landed at to develop trade relations.

Later exoduses of Fujianese migrants would occur during the transition from the Ming Dynasty to the invading Manchurian Qing Dynasty in the 17th century, and over the next two centuries of Qing rule, Ming loyalists and ethnic Han dissidents based in or with ties to Fujian would rebel against the Qing. Among them was the pirate Coxinga, who chased Dutch colonialists out of Taiwan and established its first Chinese state from which to fight the Manchurian dynasty. There is a gigantic statue of Coxinga in Xiamen, where he is much celebrated because he and many of his followers came from Fujian. Dad believes that we are descended from one of Coxinga’s top ministers, and for a few days after this genealogical discovery he danced around the house telling my mother that she had married the son of a pirate king. Mom is very patient.

Dad’s revolutionary ancestry also includes Oei Tjie Sien, who fathered one of Indonesia’s richest business magnates of the 19th century, Oei Tiong Ham, or the “Sugar King of Java.” Old Man Oei set his son up for greatness by giving him the reins of the Kian Gwan Company that he started in Indonesia after first fleeing Fujian and the Qing armies marching down on it. That had been during the height of the Taiping Rebellions, when anti-Qing revolts were springing up everywhere and being violently put down. By 1860, the Qing had wiped out everyone save for those in remote Fujian, where the last of the Taiping revolutionaries were huddling, and as an anti-Qing conspirator himself Oei did the smart thing and got out of dodge. By doing this he was following the other Fujianese of his era who had already come to Indonesia, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian countries, where even now regional Fujianese dialects like Teochiu, Hakka, and Hokkien are taught to baby Chinese 华裔 before Mandarin is.

More recently, a third wave of Fujianese emigration has flowed towards the Eastern seaboard of the United States, with New York City’s Chinatown as a preferred destination. According to Jennifer Lee, these recent emigrants have over the last three decades come mostly for work in Chinese American restaurants, sometimes making shady deals with Fujianese snakeheads to get into the States illegally. Just as Fujian and Guangdong are neighboring provinces in the Mainland, so too now are older Chinese Americans usually of either Fujianese or Cantonese extraction, with the Cantonese having a stronger presence in the West Coast thanks to the San Francisco Gold Rush.

But my family owes its own global spread to having left China much earlier during the first and second waves of Fujianese emigration. With more time since then and now, we have all become more Westernized thanks to our adopted countries (Holland, Germany, Canada, and America, to name a few), where all save my father’s immediate branch of the clan (a unique situation that I won’t get into) have lived for at least a few generations now. Those who stayed in Southeast Asia have also become very accustomed to Western ways thanks to the centuries of colonial imperialism in that sector, and a few have even broken into Western histories themselves (Oei Tiong Ham’s daughter married Wellington Koo, making him I suppose a kind of great-grandfather for me, and grandma Oma frequently mentions that we are somehow related to Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew, though I don’t know how and it’s unlikely he knows either).

See Dad? I have been listening to your family stories after all! : )

I know all this thanks to Dad’s industrious work uncovering his family history, and I even know that his ancestral village (which is as important an identifier here in China as how old you are or what you do for a living) where all these revolutionaries, barons, and runaways presumably came from is now the Fujianese city of Zhangzhou. Mom’s 老家 is also in Fujian, near the rapidly developing township of Shishi (its English name “Rock Lion” is a little cooler). So despite also being in Fujian, Fuzhou is hardly our ancestral village at all and my relations there can’t even speak its particular dialect. It’s just where my relations happen to live today.

Those relatives include my grandmother Popo and her cousin’s family. I know a lot about my father’s family history, but my mom’s ancestors must have been more civil than my dad’s revolutionary troublemakers because they largely stayed in China. As a result, most of them still speak Chinese as their primary language, and communication with them has been difficult for me. I hoped that by visiting them for two weeks I could get to know them better and improve my Chinese.

What followed were two weeks of pleasant quiet and jaunts about the city with family. Many thanks to cousin Vivien, whose excellent English and willingness to take me on daily adventures around Fuzhou helped to improve both my Chinese and my conception of Chinese cities and societies better than a whole semester of being in Shenzhen did. Also many thanks to Jiu Gong and Jiu Po, my granduncle and grandaunt, who cooked wonderful hotpot and found breakfast treats every day, and to Biao Jiu and Biao Jiu Ma, Vivien’s parents who provided me and Popo with a guest room, helped drive me around places, and showed me the inner workings of the lightbulb factory where Biao Jiu Ma works as a QC supervisor. And of course it was wonderful to see my grandmother, who I can now have a good conversation with! Besides trying to fit everything presented to me into my stomach (I think I’ve gained a few pounds just from being there), Vivien also took me to see a zoo, the Fujian Provincial Library, the youth-frequented Dongjie Street where we met a young cardshark magician, a new old-looking place (a reconstructed street mimicking old Chinese architecture with open shops and boutiques) where I think we were briefly caught in the background of a CCTV childrens’ broadcast, and many other sights.

Among family, the self-doubts I have about my place and identity in China as a 华裔 melt away, and I was comfortable with just being me again. While the Chinese family unit is popularly known in the States as intrusive and overbearing thanks to stories like The Joy Luck Club, being in Fuzhou reminded me of how sacredly it is regarded here as a support network that keeps people grounded and secure in a country that can sometimes be as brusque and unforgiving as it can be friendly. After coming back to Shenzhen, I’ve noticed that I’m now more comfortable talking to Chinese people and less conscious about my identity, and that now I speak Chinese a little more loudly, a little more confidently. It’s still a long ways away from feeling like the “homecoming” one aunt suggested, but it’s a start towards answering the question I posed to myself in coming to China that historical knowledge alone couldn’t satisfy: my place as a Chinese American and how I can mediate the gap between my heritage and my personal identity especially when Mainland Chinese seem to have a different concept of the Overseas Chinese heritage than we do. This deserves its own post so I won’t go into it here, but I have the sense that I could not have made the progress I have without feeling at home amongst my family in Fuzhou. I can’t help feeling like it’s been stumbling upon a fundamental “duh” that everyone around me has known since childhood!

A tidbit I only figured out recently: the “Fu” in “Fujian” is the same word that you often see on lucky signs during Lunar New Year, as it means “fortune.”

Skeletal connotations aside (unless we’re talking about the recent update schedule of this blog…sorry), today and tomorrow will be interstitial time. Yesterday I returned from about six days spent in Hong Kong with family, and on Sunday I’ll be navigating Chinese domestic airspace to visit my grandmother and extended family in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. Today I’m sitting in a Starbucks again, attempting to get some writing output done with Enrico (another CTLC teacher based in Luohu District). We’re back in the COCO Park Starbucks and we’ve found a corner and we’re (supposed to be) taking no prisoners. But mostly we’re just chatting and not getting done what we intended to (fiction for me, political commentary for him).

I’ve been reluctant to write about my time or observations in Hong Kong here, mostly to preserve my family’s privacy there. Otherwise they would become recurring characters here for how often I venture over, and I don’t know how they would like that. So instead of writing those experiences into this blog, I’ve been saving them for my fiction, working them over in my head until I can get some kind of anonymous honesty balanced out. Hopefully you’ll see the results in a few months’ time, outlined in a first draft!

(You have no idea how much I am looking forward to upgrading to a new four pound laptop next year. I am thinking feathers and pixie dust weight. Like nothing at all!)

I’m starting to realize how variable teaching can feel like. Last Wednesday I became grumpy after I attempted to get the kids to practice their speaking skills in a game of Telephone (kids line up in rows and I give one end a sentence to say. They report the sentence up along the row like a bucket brigade might, and then the last kid runs up to the board to write down the sentence and I check for consistency). Cheating abounded, which was alright in and of itself (I can play marshal alright) but one of the better students started yelling “this is a dumb game, let’s play hangman.” Annoyed, I singled him out to copy sentences while everyone else played.

At the end of class I went to him and told him I wanted to talk to him. He ducked his head and opened his arms in an invitation that seemed too obsequious to be at all sincere. I asked him what he felt the flaws of the lesson plan had been, and what he thought I could do to better assist his education. He said in near-perfect English, “because everyone cheats at this game it loses its value and becomes meaningless. Vocabulary practice would be helpful.”

I had learned already to not mind the trouble kids who sit in the back and heckle in Chinese; they have decided to be lazy and I do not need to bother with them. But when the intelligent and studious ones develop an attitude, I do become very annoyed. I thought of a time long ago when I interrupted my sixth grade math teacher’s lesson to ask what the homework assignment would be. He stopped the class to reprimand me on my lack of respect and patience. I remember feeling ashamed but also rather unjustifiably upbraided; I had only meant to be more efficient. But I learned about propriety and how to behave under a certain code of conduct that day. On Wednesday I guess I learned the difference between a smart kid and a smart ass.

Yet, when I try to structure classes to challenge them better, I sometimes am met with absolute befuddlement, as I had been right before Smart Ass’s (which I shall now deem him henceforth) class. Then it is like pulling teeth, no matter how engaging I try to be and how many little hooks I lay (a lesson plan can have hooks just like a pop song can, I’m learning). I still need a class to be upbeat and to be paying attention to me. Today, for instance, I did a lesson on slang words and culture. The first class was rioting in choruses of “wanna”s and “gonna”s and fist bumping each other out the door. The second kept scribbling at their geometry homework and looked up to humor me with one-word responses only when it seemed necessary.

Many of my dear friends are engaged in teaching programs right now for their career ambitions of doing a real version of my fake job. (Emmo, your comments on previous teaching posts on this blog have definitely helped me improve my classroom-management schemes.) I Skyped with Preet, currently doing her Master’s at Columbia for bilingual education, the other day and also asked her if she knew what I could do better. “There are going to be days like that all the time,” she told me. Yen related a conversation she had with one of her own professors that seemed to echo my sentiments – “how am I going to teach in a way that will challenge the good students and pull up the slower ones?” “It’s a common feeling, Pouw,” she said.

I suppose what makes it all worth it are the days when an entire class seems electrified, and when quiet students come up later with questions in better English than you thought they had. I also have to place my course and this year in perspective, I’m learning: today I asked another of the brighter students “how can I make this lesson more interesting?” after a particularly distracted session.

“I think there are some students who just do not understand enough English to know what you are saying,” she chirped. “Do not worry about them though.”

“But even you were working on your math homework during class!” I pointed out.

She paused mid-chirp. “Well, we have midterm examinations next week and some feel that this class is not as important.” Smiles.

I really can’t argue with that – these kids are under a lot of pressure, and sometimes when I step into a classroom to take over from the last teacher I can’t understand what’s written on the board myself (does a physics introduction to levers and fulcrums really have to begin with a problem involving 3 fulcrum points at once?). If I were a real teacher, with real grades and real material that might be useful for most of them, I could deserve their respect and attention. But I’m the Conversation teacher. Not the English teacher. I should remember what this year is to me – an out, an escape route, a relaxing year off before medical school starts. The students certainly seem to treat my class as a relaxing 45 minutes off from their normally intense days. I guess I shouldn’t take it too seriously myself.

….Except this still isn’t the way I wanted them…Ryan, can you tell me sometime how you embed your Flickr photo albums into your blog posts?

Baby Aidan is very cute!