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I was in my
hotel when my adult students arrived with flowers, the whole class in one
little room in Lan Ting. The school had neglected to inform them that my
class was cancelled due to my recurring illness, so once they'd all found
themselves in a classroom without a teacher they'd decided to come over
en masse to wish me well for my recovery. I'd set them homework
the day before, we had planned to hold a 'Show and Tell' to give them an
opportunity to talk about something they knew. So we had 'Show and Tell'
in my hotel room, me in my white pyjamas listening as they showed photos
and told stories in English.
We'd had a lesson
on the meaning of Christmas the day before. Chinese law forbids any foreign
teacher to discuss matters of politics or religion in class, and so I was
surprised when Guan Ya began handing out leaflets to all students, printed
in Chinese and English, on the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
I was asked by the headmasters to discuss Christmas in several of my classes,
it was only with the adult class that I gave a candid assessment of the
Western holiday, the pagan origins, the interpretation of Bible passages,
the Coca Cola Santa Claus. The majority of the class were advanced students,
so the textbook Guan Ya had given me to teach them, which started out with
'hello, how are you?' turned out to be inappropriate. So I had taken to
giving lectures for listening comprehension practice, and the three hourly
weekend sessions had become very interesting. It was almost naughty, we'd
mock the textbook and discuss effective ways to study English at home so
that when the course was over, they'd be able to keep up the energy of
the classes.
It was flattering
and surprising to be told I was a popular teacher by my workmates and students.
I staggered back to class when my health began to return and was greeted
with cheers and laughter. My colleagues had warmed to me, and I began to
feel I was making genuine friendships amongst them. They were encouraging
and supportive, both with the teaching and the language, I started to become
overwhelmed with dinner invitations. In the classroom I lost any inhibition,
I had students running around the class, leaping between and over desks,
we took out the neon lights for concentrated pronunciation practice in
darkness, tossing the balloons that had been taped to the ceiling for Christmas,
I think even the sternest of the Chinese teachers were entertained at times.
Many of the
Chinese teachers live in a dormitory nearby the school, where their curfew
seems to have been relaxed recently. It was snowing one night as I walked
a few of them home after dinner at a traditional Manchurian restaurant,
we were all rolled up in thick long coats and sweaters and triple layers
of pants like fat bears. The streets looked fantastic, every tree had a
string of lights around it; there were few people around at this time,
and the roads were clear and smooth in ice. The others skidded across sheets
of polished ice like kids, laughing bronze faces, the snow alighting on
hot pink smiling cheeks, fluffy white ear muffs, the reflection of a bright
apple-red lantern swimming over a kohl-black iris.
Afterwards,
I walked to government square, it was close to midnight just before Christmas.
A clock struck it; a line of taxis were circling the square and the foreigner
it contained like vultures. It was excessively decorated in colour, spotlights
were focussed on the gold sunbird pillars in the centre, and I went to
stand beneath them and look up at the gold. I had cancelled my return ticket
to New Zealand, thankfully, aware that the factor of mood which had compelled
me to rush home was just another symptom of the winter sickness. I had
forgotten about all the reasons I had come here, underestimated my progress,
failed to catch the dignity between the dirt.
I managed two
Christmas parties as my fitness was returning. One was more formal, a Guan
Ya company do at a local bar. It was a serious affair to a point, the function
was hosted by a pair of the more well-spoken teachers acting as MCs, a
few karaoke performances were given, and the teachers were all lined around
a few long tables in a designated area of the bar. I was attempting not
to play too hard, watching the health, so coke and pizza served as the
festive fare. The highlight was a surprise; one of my 12 year old students
, Sally, appeared in a traditional Chinese costume with a zither and gave
a demonstration of her musical ability. I snuck up next to her and crouched,
watching her play. I've always enjoyed world music, I was delighted to
be treated by one of my best little students, and she seemed pleased to
impress her foreign teacher as well, insisting on a photograph together
when it was time for her to go home. Hu Ping, my counterpart in teaching
Sally, clucked over her protectively.
As the party was winding up, I found myself following Hu Ping, Sun Ya Tao, Lawrence, Lily, and two of the new Chinese teachers to what they claimed was 'the largest bar in China'. It turned out to be a relatively sizeable bar (the Cat King) that was managed by one of the new teacher's boyfriend, thus the exaggeration. I gave up my cosy seat on the wagon and ordered a Corona on the house, as a bizarrely placed jazz band played old standards under a rock tribute decor that featured images of Elvis, the Beatles, and Angus Young of ACDC. On Christmas day itself I was back in bed again, as I'd feared, owing to a lack of caution on my own part. I'd reclaimed Shenyang, having come through a very dark patch of sickness, I'd found myself given Shenyang back for another chance at befriending the city, and I was happy with it this time around. Suddenly I found Shenyang to be a city of friendly faces, kinsmen in shouldering the pitfalls of the environment and local character. This is where the splendour in Shenyang lies, in the resilience of the community to survive the winter of the culture. I felt a sudden rush of energy and wanted to enjoy my time here as much as possible, perhaps before my strength was back at its optimum level. I didn't let the illness stop me from sneaking across to Lan Ting for the foreign teacher's Christmas party, though, which was a quiet gathering of the Americans and a few friends amongst the Chinese staff. Thus was Christmas marked in Shenyang, Peter once again sitting in the Lan Ting common room on the floor trying to fix the VCD player, Myself and Lawrence daring to talk about girls, untouched bottles of inferior Chinese wine, the hotel attendants periodically passing by with looks of naive bewilderment. Photos from the Foreign Teachers' Christmas Party People
Something about the sun on the fresh snow made Shenyang seem a better place to be than it had been in past weeks. I was inspired to get up earlier, tried to see more of the city than I had been bothered to look at before, talk to more people at the schools where I taught. I worked on my mental map of Shenyang so as to bring together the pieces of suburbs I'd visited into a plan, make more of a home for myself here. Good travelling practice involves converting the foreign into the familiar, and I wanted to be able to wake up in the mornings with a better sense of where I was. I spent more time at the schools where I worked less often than Zhongshan, namely the Shen He school and the Tie Xi branch. My Shen He students were some of Guan Ya's worst - virtually none of the students had any interest left in the language, and had changed teachers so many times they were slow to show any interest in my lessons. Their Chinese teacher, Tracy, was also new, the bride of one of the American teachers who had spent two years perfecting his Chinese in her home town of Harbin. Tracy was frustrated with these classes she'd been laden with, together we worked on motivating the students, her authoritatively, myself by attempting to come down to the student's level. It was a system which ultimately failed, but we did manage to get some laughs out of them. At Tie Xi, I spent most of my time playing secretary with Millet, who herself had better English than many of the teachers, but was of the opinion that teaching was a lame profession. She spoke Chinese way too rapidly for me to understand much, but I managed to amuse her and Laura, the Tie Xi headmaster, with my primitive skills in Mandarin. I also tried to improve my friendships with the teachers who acted as translators for my adult classes, Joy, Cindy and Lucy. My adult class had long since lost the need for any translator, so I used them instead as sounding boards for teaching ideas during class breaks. New Year's Eve was even cosier than Christmas, despite the cold. There were even more pretty lights, I went for a walk after my late class with Sun Ya Tao and we decided to go to Tai Yuan Jie together to see in the definitive entry to the new millennium, as opposed to the mere zeroing of the odometer that was celebrated the year previous. Sun Ya Tao had become my chief cultural informant; knowledgeable in matters of geography, history, literature and linguistics, we spent many dinner engagements exchanging poor jokes. We headed for McDonald's (slurred in Mandarin as Mai Dan Lao, which when toned correctly sounds disturbingly similar to Michael Arnold) to make use of our newly acquired New Year's Eve promotional coupons. I was more comfortable in Mai Dan Lao nowadays; when I'd first retreated there to find familiar food, I was totally unprepared - I'd never considered that I might have difficulty ordering a Big Mac in a Chinese McDonald's, because it was a term I'd never thought to study up on (Big Mac is Ju Wu Ba - which means 'incomparably huge'). The mood was good. I ducked outside to find a phone; eventually I located a booth store which had one - these are little glass cubicles which serve as miniature convenience stores in which a lone attendant sits with a TV and heater. The bulky red phones are hooked up via a small electronic counter which calculates the price of your call, for which you pay the attendant in cash. She was absorbed in a dull novel and seemed tired - I knocked on the window as I left and delivered a Xin Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year) in Chinese and got a broad smile in repayment. Back at Mai Dan Lao I made Sun Ya Tao suffer the embarrassment of fetching my fourth free coffee refill and we interrupted our discussion of poetry to count in the new year by ourselves going by the second hand of my wristwatch. Later, we walked most of the way back to Zhongshan school, past rows of quiet stores, past the statue of Mao reaching for Ekin's cellphone, past the unrelenting piles of dirty snow, past the uncountable rows of apartment blocks sheltering unthinkable numbers of sleeping Chinese people who had more sense than to walk out there in the freezing wind. I fell on my bed at Lan Ting hotel in a peaceful exhaustion. Bei Ling in Winter
On New Year's Day, one of my friends at Zhongshan School, Bessie, was scheduled to wed. She had invited me to the wedding and I was thrilled at the thought of attending; the directions I was given, however, were extremely poor and I ended up totally unable to locate the restaurant. It was nearby Lan Ting, she had told me it was very close to the theatre by Bei Ling park. What she neglected to mention was that it was also across the road and around a corner, and then down an alleyway. I stood in the falling snow in my suit and thick jacket, all around was quiet with passers-by ignorant of a restaurant the name of which I'd only half remembered anyway. Presented with a free morning all of a sudden, it made sense to entertain myself somehow, and so I decided to revisit Bei Ling tomb to see the Manchurian structures under snow. It was a different park in the winter; people were skating and horse riding on the frozen river, a snow machine was piling up a slippery slope for sliding, others were braving the temperatures for the mere sake of catching the beauty of snowflake-whitened hanging branches of the willows at the river bank. The buildings of the tomb itself stood with their burned-orange rooves undimmed by snowfall, grey brickwork standing warm under the white cloth. I spent a good few hours wandering through the complex, wondering at my next moves in China. I was due to finish at Guan Ya very soon, and had indistinct travel plans to follow after. A week ago I had been itching to leave the city, now, I had to concede that Shenyang was a dirty and familiar home, somewhere that was comfortable to be once I'd learned what to focus on and what to ignore, which is how the locals survive the darker aspects of life here. The mildly introspective mood was broken by the evening, when I had finally accepted my adult students' invitation for a grand dinner at a local restaurant in Hua Xiang. We ordered a lavish selection of dishes, enjoyed conversation in a mixture of Mandarin and English, and emptied a fair few bottles of local beer. Somehow we made it to a karaoke venue nearby, I mispitched several Wang Fei numbers and crawled home, under escort, at around 2am. |
