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From Magic City Morning Star R.P. BenDedek
STORIES FROM CHINA 2005 In the article manager at Magic City where I put all my stories for publication, there are two 'hidden' files containing the seminal seeds of two 'Stories from China' articles, but I can never seem to get around to writing them.
I leave home in the morning at 6:50 am to arrive at Wuhan University at 7:30am with time to spare before my mornings 4 Chinese language classes. When they are finished, I have lunch and catch a bus to DongHu (East Lake) campus of the Hubei Radio and Television University (at Luxiang), where, at 1:50 pm I start my English classes which last till 4:50 pm at which time I head downstairs to catch the Staff bus back to Luxiang. By the time I shower, change, eat, and sometimes do some shopping, I am exhausted. At that point I have to either choose to study irrespective of my tiredness, or collapse into bed with an alarm clock set for 3am so I can get up and do homework and study. I don't get much chance to do much else. I have no social life. Right now, I am in the middle of a 7 day holiday to celebrate 'Labour day'. I spent the first 3 days with a visitor from HongHu, but now am alone again. Now I must study. On Sunday I start classes again. Usually I have no classes of any description on the weekends, but when there is a holiday, the lost time must be made up by extra classes on the weekends. Go figure!
My visitor left Tuesday lunchtime, and I immediately sat down and studied. I spent 5 hours on Chapter 19 of my main textbook. Went back to it on Wednesday for another 3 hours, before moving on to look at some of the exercises and vocabulary from another textbook. After that I set to work on Chapter 18.
This morning I spent a few more hours on Chapter 18. Then I decided to start on Chapter 20. Before Sunday morning, I have to be confident that I know everything from Chapter 16-20 of the main textbook; go through all the vocabularies of the other textbooks, run through all the exercises, run through the dictionary I have created, and generally make sure that I know every word, its' meaning, its' tone in Chinese, and how to write it in Chinese (Hanzi), and let's not forget, the need to understand the grammar. On Sunday I have a big exam.
So why with all this work am I typing this story? Well, I'm bored. Not just bored, but tired. Not just tired, but physically lethargic. I need to do something physical. I was going to go for a walk, but then it started to rain. In HongHu this would not have stopped me, but here? At the time of leaving Hong Hu, I had already been accepted by Wuhan University as a student of Chinese language. I had also applied for a teaching position at this university (Hubei Radio and TV university), but they declined to accept me when they discovered that I was determined to study in the mornings, leaving me only the afternoons in which to teach.
Just before I left Wuhan for Australia, they contacted me to say that they had had a change of heart, and would not only accept me as a teacher, but would do everything they could to assist me in my studies. They have been exceptionally accommodating, often anticipating difficulties and resolving them before such things had occurred to me. While in my day to day life I have no time to socialise, during this holiday I have plenty of time, but as stated, I have a lot of study to do. Such study is necessitated by virtue of the fact, that two weeks prior to this holiday time, my brain went on strike!
English Language study for the Chinese, is not about how much you can speak, but about how many words you know and how much you can read. This is the same approach taken in teaching Chinese to foreign students. Given the paucity of free time, and the amount of time spent in doing homework, I have discovered that I am not 'absorbing' as much of the language that I ought.
Despite getting reasonable exam results to date (75-82%), I find that what I am learning, has not been digested to the same degree as all those things I learned in the previous two years. In Rebellion, my brain went on strike, to such a degree, that I could write a word 25 times, and immediately not remember what I had written, how to write it, what tone it was, or its meaning in English. I gave up!
Now you know why I am studying so hard at the moment. It is the only time I have to catch up, and to really absorb the language. It's kind of funny, because, now that I am studying Chinese, I have no time to speak to regular Chinese people, whereas before, when I had no teacher, I spent a lot of time speaking Chinese.
It is a high tech industrial centre. Modern shops, expensive everything, no communal bathhouses, no back street massage therapists, no common eateries and no muslim restaurants. Everything is ultra new. I have walked or been on a bus down the length of the four main crossroads just down the road from the university, and it is all the same. The closest peaceful place for me to walk, would be down behind Wuhan University, where it meets one corner of East Lake. That is about a 10 minute direct drive from here. It's where the staff bus drops me off every morning as it heads to the campus at which I teach. That little back gate to WuDa (Wuhan Da xue) is just a five minute walk from where I study. One morning when I got off the bus, there was a gale blowing, and the lake was being whipped up into a frenzy that actually made me homesick. Coming from a coastal area, I am used to seeing the waves of the ocean crashing onto the shore, and that morning, the lake was doing the same thing.
When I first started, I used to sit up front so I could get a good look at the area, but if you have ever lived in China, you will understand me when I say, that it did not take too long for me to choose a seat toward the middle of the bus, because I found I was arriving at school quite stressed out. Traffic in China is not only erratic, but frightening. My personal belief is that there are only two traffic rules in China. The first is, that there are no rules; and the second is that you should always obey the first rule.
BUT THAT CHANGES NOTHING! Our bus driver hurtles along at who knows what speed, with his hand constantly on the fog horn of the bus, daring people and cars NOT TO GET OUT OF HIS WAY. I often wonder what would happen if one of those poor pedestrians tripped and fell while fleeing from the path of the oncoming bus. I have already see the result when a poor dog failed to make it.
We go down to the roundabout and turn right and follow the main road down to a university where we pick up some teachers. Doubling back to the roundabout, we turn right again down the other main road to another university where we do the same. Doubling back to the roundabout again, we turn right again and follow a circuitous route to the front of WuDa, before proceeding around to the back (where I disembark), before it continues to follow the lake road onto the DongHu Campus.
Every morning I run into a Chinese student with whom I speak for exactly 5 minutes before his bus arrives, and then I proceed to the classroom. In the two weeks before the holiday, when my brain was on strike, I went to the student cafe to drink coffee and chat.
By we, I mean the two girls from Bangladesh, the two girls from France, the girl from Brazil, and myself. As soon as there are about 10 students in attendance (out of 23), the teacher begins class. Some days, we need to wait 20 or so minutes for class to begin. The Vietnamese are the worst, for both attendance, and paying attention in class. They just like to play. South Koreans when in class are extremely attentive. Far er Han, the little boy from Bangladesh, is probably the worst one for talking while the teacher is talking, and everyone has taken to telling him to shut up. Elijah who is from South Africa, turned up to class one morning without a hangover, and no one knew what was wrong with him. Then there is the new boy. He's Chinese, but comes from Japan. He speaks no Chinese, and apparently neither do his parents. None of us can communicate sufficiently with him in Chinese to understand his story, but whatever his reason for learning Chinese, his methodology is to absorb it through his pores as he sleeps IN EVERY CLASS.
The two girls from Bangladesh, Elijah the South African, and Clara the French girl, all speak extremely good English. As for the rest, if you want to converse with them, it must be in your mutually limited Chinese. This happens a lot.
Sometimes he comes to class and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he sleeps and sometimes he doesn't. He's a nice boy who likes to hold my hand when we are not writing. Now the brain must be an incredible computer, because I have discovered, that while I don't seem to mix up English and French, or English and Chinese during class time, I do however mix French and Chinese. Because I do spend time speaking in French, particularly to the Brazilian girl Ma Xia, I find that I am constantly throwing in Chinese words into the conversation, and when in non official dialogue with the teachers, do the same. It's like the brain says 'NO ENGLISH', but doesn't mind mixing the other two languages. WuDa, apart from being famous as an educational facility, has another reputation, that of being a place in which every spring, one can witness the blossoming of the Japanese Cherry Blossom trees. One Friday, rather than having class, we were given a tour of the cherry blossoms, and it was not until that day, that I realised, that I was the only white male in the class. (We have since been joined by two white French men).
My group got held up in its touring progress, while I got mobbed for about 15 minutes, by tons of Chinese boys and girls who all wanted individual photographs with 'the foreigner'. Now of course we were ALL foreigners, but that didn't mean anything to the Chinese students. I was the Rich, White, Blue Eyed, Christian, English Speaking AMERICAN. You think I'm kidding, right?
Judy, the Chinese American who taught for 6 months in Hong Hu, is also currently studying Chinese in WuDa, albeit in a different class. One of my teachers asked me if I knew two foreigners with good English, who would like to earn some money doing 'dialogue' recording for an English textbook. Judy and Eric (another ABC - American Born Chinese) had both done this before, and so I introduced them to my teacher. She took their particulars, which she passed onto the organisation that had requested her assistance. They it turns out, were not interested in Judy and Eric, because they wanted REAL FOREIGNERS! True!
The other day I was walking down to the supermarket, when I saw two young boys coming toward me. They had not seen me, and I could predict what was about to happen. As the crossed in front of me, they looked up. As I prepared to smile at the inevitable 'Laowai!' (foreigner), one boy said 'MeiGuoRen!' (American!). I spun around and in a strong full voice, screamed in Chinese, I am not American! I don't know who got the biggest shock. The bystanders, the boys themselves, or me. You see, it was an instantaneous reaction, without any thought given to what I was saying. That declaration in Chinese was completely automatic. As an Australian, I hate being called American. Firstly because I am not, and secondly because the sheer ignorance of the statement annoys me. I must also admit that, as being called foreigner is less insidious than being called American, I do like to put people into their place by demonstrating their ignorance.
They look severe as they stare at you. You can never tell what is in their mind (those inscrutable Chinese!). I object to the staring (looking is OK), so I always endeavour to do or say something to make them absolutely aware that they are as curious to me as I am to them. Invariably, whatever I do, their instantaneous reaction is to break into a huge smile. It is such a pleasant look, that I really think that they should do it more often. I spent years working in the tourist industry in Australia, and it always annoyed me to hear Americans comment on how friendly Australians were. I always felt tempted to say "Why don't you try it at home sometime, maybe then we would not be so special!" Ah! I'm actually feeling a little better having written this. Sometime I must get around to writing those other articles. If you are interested in reading of some other people's experiences in China, just do an internet search using the word 'Waiguoren'. You will find heaps. Have a nice day! Remember to smile! Remember that you live in a free country, where people have the right to disagree with each other without resorting to civil war! ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS
R.P.Bendedek Email: rpbendedek@hotmail.com R.P.BenDedek is the pseudonym of the Author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' (www.kingscalendar.com), and he is a guest columnist at Magic City Morning Star News. An Australian, he currently teaches Conversational English in China. Stories From China. "The King's Calendar" is a chronological study of the historical books of the Bible (Kings and Chronicles), Josephus, Seder Olam Rabbah, and the Damascus Document of The Dead Sea Scrolls. © Copyright 2002-2008 by Magic City Morning Star |
