Journey to the East

Perhaps I spoke too soon about warm weather. Yesterday, temperatures in Ji’nan dropped suddenly and dramatically. And it snowed. So, now, not even a week after I boldly declared an end to winter, it’s winter again.  I suppose that March in Ji’nan will be no different from March in the Eastern US: In like a lion…

Unfortunately, this turn in the weather dampened one of the most interesting parts of Spring Festival: Lantern Festival, which marks the very last night of the holiday. True to its name, Lantern Festival features all kinds of illuminated display, the setting off of paper lanterns (you light them and the hot air propels them into the sky like otherworldly object, floating up towards some completely unknown end… I’ve seen lots of lanterns lit, but I’ve never seen one coming down from up high, so I can truly say that I have no idea where a lit lantern goes), and eating what I’ve just come to call Lantern Soup, known in Chinese as 汤圆, Tāngyuán, ( which is a dessert course consisting of small, sweet, round dumplings in a slightly sugary broth (kind of like gulab jamun, for those of your familiar with Indian food, but not as syrupy and  not fried).

Tāngyuán, a traditional Lantern Festival dessert (thanks to Google for the image).

Of course, yesterday’s weather conditions were not ideal for any of the traditional lantern festival celebrations: try setting off a lantern made of paper in a driving snow storm and heavy wind. The square was deserted, with would be revelers staying inside rather than trying to navigate the slippery, treacherous, tiled morass that QuanCheng Square becomes when a little moisture is added. Even the extravagant light displays at Baotu Springs (which are traditional for lantern festival and are kind of like those drive-through Winter-Wonderland/Christmas Light displays in the US) were closed down due to snow (a shame, because I’d really wanted to check them out… I’m hoping that maybe they’ll still be open for today).

This past weekend was also marked the end of the Fall Semester for Aston. Soon, I’ll have a new batch of classes with different students and different Chinese Teachers working alongside me. There will be new foreign teachers, too. Already many of the Aston employees who were only signed on to teach here for six months have moved out and headed for their various destinations away from Ji’nan. Simultaneously, new staff have started to arrive and so it feels as if we’re stuck in a very strange period of limbo in which we must all say goodbye to old friends while meeting lots of new people. In this sense it’s neither a beginning or an end. Rather, it’s both at once. I can only imagine what it must feel like to be a new arrival at this time, trying to meet everyone in a very new and different environment, only to realize that many of them are imminently leaving. A strange thought indeed.

The next couple of days will bring in lots of changes. I’ll have plenty to say about it, I’m sure. Also, be sure to check in, as I’ll FINALLY be putting up lots of photos from previous travels. Stay tuned…

Since yesterday, December 6, was St. Nicholas Day (a holiday that was always celebrated in my house growing up, and marked a “beginning” of sorts to the larger Christmas season), I thought I’d write a little bit about what I’ve experienced of Christmas in China. Of course, Spring Festival (or Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year or Tet as it is variously known) is the major winter holiday in this country. This year, Spring Festival won’t occur until nearly the middle of February. Christmas, however, does have a growing importance in China.

Slowly but surely, signs that it’s Christmas time have begun to emerge, even here in Ji’nan. Today, as I walked up the stairs to the third floor of the building where I work at Aston 3, I saw a familiar sight through the glass doors: A Christmas tree. At first, I was a little taken aback, as I didn’t realize that Aston even owned a fake tree. There it was, though, standing near to the entrance, newly assembled, the front desk staff busy adding adornments– mostly tinsel in multiple color varieties. This is the latest in a series of very subtle recognitions of the Christmas season throughout Ji’nan. A series of Christmas-themed bus-stop sized advertisements for iced-tea have  sprung up. They feature young Chinese people in their fuzziest holiday sweaters and scarves building snowmen and enjoying a refreshing beverage. Most of the businesses, hotels and restuarants that are western/geared towards westerners have installed some sort of Christmas decoration in their stores: The Crowne Plaza Hotel, the Simpson-Hotel (A 4 star, ping-pong themed Hotel near Quan Cheng Square), and WAL-MART have all put up some sort of Christmas display, often complete with lights and some representation of a tree.  The McDonald’s on Jing Er Lu where I grab my morning cup of coffee before work has even gone as far to put up a large holiday themed wall hanging, erect a plastic tree, and play pop-versions of Christmas songs over their speakers. It all gives a strange feeling of familiarity. Sitting there at 7:00 AM on Saturday, in a hazy state of half-sleep, drinking my coffee, I felt like I could have been back at home. Mostly, though, these signs are hard to notice. About half of Ji’nan is lit up like LasVegas all the time, and the addition of Christmas lights makes for a very  subtle, if not altogether unnoticed change in most cases. I find all of this very curious. I’ve been told that Christmas is a holiday which is observed by many people in China, but not in a major way. It does seem, though, that the commercial aspects of the day have certainly caught on over here.  We’ll see, as December 25th draws near, exactly how big of a deal this imported holiday is.

The next couple of weeks should be exciting, as I’ll be headed to Shanghai next Sunday, and probably Beijing the week after. I’ll have lots to report on, for sure. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do it from a brand new laptop (cross your fingers). More to come later.

So… I’ve just spent the entire weekend giving midterms. Midterms at Aston are all Oral Exams, which focus on correct spoken English, as that is Aston’s priority (spoken English from native speakers). Each student takes the exam one on one. So, I gave about 200 of them. Needless to say, I don’t care to ask another seven year old “Do you like bananas?” for a good long while. I’m pretty drained, even though this was a considerably lighter weekend than a normal full slate of classes. And of course… there’s grading to be done, mostly in the form of on-going assessment forms which must be done before parent’s weekend next week. 

So, I’m sort of curious about my readership here. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they’ve been keeping up. I’d love to be able to keep up in return. So… if you drop by and read this entry, just leave a comment and let me know you were here. I’ll try and get back to you before too long. There’s a lot coming up this week, so stay tuned.

My holiday has not been as festive as it would usually be– I had to teach today, as it is a Saturday. So, I made sure to carve out a good 10 minutes from every lesson to properly explain the concept of Halloween to my kids. This made me realize just how American the holiday is (or, rather, has become). As anyone who has been abroad on Halloween, or tried to teach foreign children about Halloween will tell you: other countries simply don’t celebrate Halloween like the US does.  Even in the West, it seems, there’s not as much buzz or anticipation of the holiday (Even my British co-workers today joked with me, “Today’s Halloween. You’re an American. Shouldn’t you be in costume all day or something?”). Certainly, the US is among the only major countries of the world which does trick-0r-treating. Like many other countries, then, Halloween isn’t really a huge deal in China. I’ve seen a few Halloween items for sale at the local RT Mart (A domestic competitor for WAL-MART) and I’m told at the Ji’nan WAL-MART there are costumes for sale. Also, in a shopping center nearby the major square in town I did see the displayed results of a pumpkin-carving contest: about 15 or so very small jack o’ lanterns. So, it’s clear that Halloween has some fringe-level awareness in this country, but it’s certainly not what I would call a huge, mainstream holiday. The major Autumn festival, Mid-Autumn Day, has passed, and holiday-wise the next big thing coming up is Christmas (which is also sort of a foreign curiosity to most Chinese people). When I was planning lessons, I began to wonder just what my students would know or be able to understand about today.

As it turns out, they knew more than I suspected. Almost immediately, when I asked about the day, at least one kid(often several kids) usually said something about candy. So, there is a general understanding of the basic premise of trick-or-treating: I come to your house; you give me candy; everybody wins.

The particulars of the arrangement are a little more fuzzy. For instance, that you have to wear a costume. In fact, the idea of a costume was one that was difficult for me to get translated into Chinese today (though I don’t know why… perhaps because the word that was being used by my translators–服装, or fú zhuāng– has a similar meaning to just plain “clothes”). The best I could work out was “to put on funny/strange clothes.”  Also particularly difficult to understand was asking “trick-or-treat?”  (and the meaning the phrase carries) instead of just marching up to the door and demanding “Give me candy!” When I explained the general concept of the term to the kids (i.e. “if you don’t give us candy we’ll pull a prank on you”) they seemed to expect that it came with some kind of eye-for-an-eye understanding of reciprocity, as if when someone told you that they didn’t have any candy in the immediate next moment, in plain view of the offending party, you were entitled to TP their yard, which the owner must accept as consequence for not having sweets.  I tried to explain that this was merely an expression, and that doing such things was often thought of as being pretty nasty and was frowned upon. I think the point came accross.  As you can imagine, I felt somewhat like David Sedaris in the chapter of Me Talk Pretty One Day, when in a French class full of non-French speakers that could only communicate through their pidgin French he attemped to explain the concept of Easter to someone who’d never heard of it (“He calls his self Jesus and then he die one day on two….morsels….of lumber.” … “He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here to say hello to the peoples.”).

In the end, it was fun to explain the traditions that we are so accustomed to. It made me remember a lot of the little details about the holiday. We didn’t really celebrate today, as we have a full work day tomorrow, though I believe something is in the plans for tomorrow night, after the day has passed. None the less, I hope that everyone is enjoying themselves in on this day today in the US. I wish you, who are in a country where today is infinitely more significant than it is here, a Happy Halloween! Hope it’s a good one!

Soon, very soon, I promise that I’ll put some pictures up (I’m working on the technical aspects of that at the moment). However, since the weekend is fast approaching, meaning that I’m headed back for another 20 hours of teaching English, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my job here. It is afterall, the reason that I’m in China in the first place, right?

I work at Ji’nan Aston English School #3. Of the three Aston English locations in this city, it’s the smallest, and the furthest away from the city center. We’re staffed by 7 western teachers (including myself): 5 Americans and 2 from the UK. There’s also a legion of Chinese teachers who work with us in the classrooms. Usually a class lasts for two hours and is team taught by a western teacher and a Chinese teacher. These classes make up the majority of my teaching day. The age range… well it’s quite large. I teach kids who are everywhere from about 5 or 6 to about 14. I should note that age doesn’t necessarily equate with skill in English communication. Some of my six year olds are on an almost even level with some of my 13 or 14 year olds, I think.

My teaching schedule is sort of weird. It’s like having an inverted weekend. Monday through Thursday are free, but Friday through Sunday are absolutely booked. I’m sure that I’ll adjust to it, but it’s still a little strange to think that Sunday night is the big night for going out amongst the Aston School employees (I’ve been told to think of Sunday nights as “Aston’s Friday”). It’s a strange mentality to get used to, but around here we all live for Sunday nights. Or for the sleeping in we get to do on Monday mornings.

Tonight, my classes will begin at about 7:00 and go until about 9:00. In this sense, it’s a light day. But tomorrow, I’ll wake up at 6:30, be in to work by 7:30, be teaching by 8:00 and will have finished by 7:00 in the evening. Sunday, I’ll turn around and do it again. Quite an exhausting few days. Well… I’ve still got some last minute planning to do, so I’ll wrap this up for now. More updates (with pictures? maybe?) to come.