Monthly Archives: March 2014

Chengdu and Pixian

Pixian is a suburb of Chengdu that I heard a few people refer to as “the country” despite it having a population density higher than you could find anywhere in the Maritimes. There in Pixian is Chengdu Technological University, and there at CTU was me, this past month, and not much else besides. I had expected to be somewhat closer to Chengdu proper, but just go ahead and add that to the list of things I had expected. What Pixian did have in spades, I will say, is cake. There was a bakery a couple of blocks down from the hotel I was living in that made all kinds of things I liked, but especially this cake that tasted like vanilla pudding. It was, I think, my primary source of lipids in China, because I could get roughly a pound of cake for around two dollars, and cookies and things too.

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Chengdu was a much more interesting town. On the weekends, I would go in there for a couple of nights and look around. There were too many disjointed things happening to tell a non-rambling story about it, but there are some pictures up on Tumblr.

It may shock you to learn that when I was in high school, I skipped more than a few classes. I think the statute of limitations has expired on this by now. The thing is, I had so many classes that I gained absolutely nothing from, that were just a waste of my valuable youth. My old friend Simon was a particularly good class skipping buddy, and I still remember laying in the grass outside the Charlottetown Mall, eating licorice and looking at the sky with him. It was one of those perfect moments, the kind of genuine happiness that comes in a year a number of times you can count on your fingers. Besides that, I really think I learned more of lasting value on those days than I would have in class. Coleridge knows what I mean (“Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House, and Sent By My Little Boy to the Person to Whom They Are Addressed”):

One moment now may give us more

Than fifty years of reason;

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

My second Friday of teaching was the nicest day weather-wise of my entire stay. If you were talking to me at the time, you know that I was still really struggling to teach effectively. If not, what you need to understand is that these students did not speak English. Maybe a little, but to boil it down to a yes or no, no. When the sun came out in the afternoon, I thought about laying in the grass and looking at the sky. The grass that day finally looked green in the sunlight, not the grey-brown I thought it was. You can guess the rest of this  story, I think. We spent that afternoon on a soccer field, to which the students brought snacks and beer and a kite like they were drilled on it twice daily. That made me some more friends among the students, which got me to a bar called Helen’s in Chengdu that weekend, where beer is just 100% free between 9:00 and 10:00 (aka how many beers can you drink in an hour). I feel like this afternoon outside was the best decision I made in my entire time in China.

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The line for free beer forms on the right. Also on the left and in the middle. There are no lines in China.

God Laughs

I’m sorry for the lack of timely posts on this trip. A combination of very little free time and very poor internet connection have made it difficult. Today, though, I’m rained out in Suzhou, a tourist town of canals and gardens, which means I have time to read and write some things. The internet connection is still terrible, so it’ll be a while before I post them, but it’ll get done.

I’ll start at the beginning, the weekend after my arrival. Most of that time is just jet lag and lesson plans. There’s a William Gibson book that expresses the idea that jet lag is caused by the fact that a soul can’t travel as fast as a body. If you go too fast, you need to go without it while it catches up. It’s not a bad description.

I asked Yang Ni, who I can only describe as my handler at the university, if I could go see the classroom on that weekend, before class, to get everything properly set up. The answer was a shifty no, an answer that gave me a feeling that the question I had asked was somehow stupid, and that I was being spared the embarrassment of an explanation of how. I would, in time, get used to getting these answers. I should note at this point that I don’t aim to cast Ni in a negative light, because she was enormously helpful almost all the time that I was at the school and a very pleasant person to be around. She seemed quite confident that everything would be fine for the first day, and was a generally comforting person, so I ended up feeling okay about it. It was just as well, because by that weekend, it was much too late to solve my problems.

Monday, March 3rd was my first day of teaching. That morning, I was feeling pretty good about it. I was nervous, but in a shy new kid kind of way, not a “not at all prepared” kind of way. Most of the time, I’m not much of a planner. Make a plan, and God laughs, right? Ask my father, though, and he’ll tell you I spent an awful lot of time planning for this class. In retrospect I think it was more of a way to suppress anxiety than anything else, but I had lesson plans done for the first two weeks, my first few in especially deep detail. There were a few things I had been told to expect, which these plans were based on:

  • Students with good English skills. I “might sometimes” need an interpreter, for especially complex concepts.
  • Two textbooks, supplied to me by Holland College and described as the course texts.
  • A computer lab, with a computer for each student. On this one, I will admit that looking back, I made an assumption about what the capabilities of those computers would be, but I didn’t think I was expecting much.
  • Human students. I include this as a way of looking at the bright side, in that at least one thing I expected did turn out to be true.

I walked in to the classroom about 15 minutes early, which to my surprise did turn out to be enough time to get set up. The WiFi astounded me by working completely fine, and the projector was fine as well. As the class got started, I introduced myself and told the students a little about me. I noticed they were somewhat unresponsive, seeming to look through me a little and not eager to answer questions or follow directions. Students, I figured. The first thing I had planned was to have a little discussion about class rules. An instructor at Holland College had shown me a website he used to do polls in class, which seemed like a great idea to me. So, I thought, let’s have a few polls about what our rules should be.

When asked about my teaching in those days, I invariably used the phrase “shit show”. The students did not, in fact, speak English very well at all, and especially not the technical terms that make up roughly 25% of any discussion of programming. Some phrases they didn’t understand until at least four rephrasings and repetitions: “You have an assignment to do”, “Click here”, “Syntax error”, and so on. The textbooks supplied to me by Holland College bore no relationship whatsoever to the textbooks actually present at the school in Chengdu, other than, I suppose, being from the same general field of study. When I tried to do my online polls, the bottom really fell out. None of the students had internet connections. This was an entire computer lab full of offline computers. For the first time, I wanted to go home and eat a Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffin. This would become another recurring motif.

On Friday, Joanne and Jolene from Holland College arrived and Mr. Xiang, one of my fellow instructors in Chengdu, gave a lesson so that they could see how it was done there. It turned out that there was actually an internal network that I could use for sharing material with the students. No one had bothered to tell me about it.

Thinking about this even now makes me want a muffin more than anything in the world.

Traffic Outlaws

I’ve forgotten to take pictures so far on this trip, which I apologize for and will fix soon. Without them, a description of my first few days would be pretty dry, so let it suffice to say that I’ve been for a few long walks and start teaching tomorrow. I’m a bit conflicted about that, because my two main feelings at the moment are paralyzing anxiety and desperate loneliness, and I suspect the former will be increased (probably) and the latter decreased (maybe). Anyway, we’ll see what happens. A story that I don’t think needs pictures, though, is the one of my first taxi ride.

To begin, it might be good for you to look up a video of a negotiated intersection, if you’ve never seen one. This is a decent example of one in Phnom Penh:

Now, I was travelling between my hotel and Chengdu Technological University, both on fairly major roads, and the intersections we went through were all well marked. It didn’t seem to matter very much. This drive and many things I’ve seen on my walks have made me wonder whether anyone in Chengdu has been ticketed for anything ever, or indeed whether there are traffic laws at all and the signs are more than convenient suggestions. Keep the image of that intersection in your mind as we proceed.

I was riding along with Ni and John, a staff member and a student from the university, on the way to have a look at the campus. As we got in the car, I reached habitually for my seatbelt and couldn’t quite reach it. I turned to look for it, and found that it was actually torn all the way through and had been tied back in a knot to keep the useless, flapping strap from getting in the way. Presumably a previous accident had caused an unfortunate passenger to be flung forward with such force that they ripped right through their belt. I began to feel a little bit nervous. Ni, John, and the driver were all unsecured as well, so I decided to go with it. Who hasn’t ridden in the back of a pickup truck? At least this is safer than that, I assured myself.

The driver swung a wide U-turn across the 12-lane intersection he picked us up at, drawing several honks and shouts.

As I braced myself against my door, I felt that my collar was a little tighter than I remembered. Still, as I said, this wasn’t terribly unusual for the city. Recall the negotiated intersection image. It did, however, place this man firmly in the “offensive driver” camp. We drove down the road in silence for some few hundred meters or so before the driver nosed his way around a few cars into a right-hand turn. Ni immediately said something in Chinese and gestured down the road to the left. The driver responded in what seemed like a fairly vehement tone and gestured straight ahead down the road he had turned down. The movement of his arm was strong enough to rotate his entire upper body, which caused him to turn the wheel back and forth slightly and drift across the lane divider. A passing bicyclist rang a cute little bell at him. At this point, I upgraded the driver’s style from offensive to outright hostile and antagonistic.

The turn he had taken turned out to be a shortcut on to a larger road. His insistence on quickly finding a larger road became understandable when I saw that this was a man who used all the road available to him. He lived in the open spaces of the highway, revelled in them, drank them in like a wild stallion. He was truly in his element. The open spaces I refer to include: the split between lanes, gaps in oncoming traffic, and oncoming lanes in which he made his own gaps. The car was conveniently equipped with a screen showing how far you had gone, how much your fare was, and the car’s current speed (to two decimal places, for some reason). We reached 140 km/h and not once were we on what I would call a clear straightaway.

I imagine we did save some money on the fare, though, which is a plus. Our driver on the return trip wasn’t nearly so aggressive, and I have to admit I felt the ride lacked a certain something. Anyway, it was a good look around the city and the university, and I’m glad I got a bit of recon in. I still have a couple of touches to put on my lesson plans, so I’m off to do that. Next time: some thoughts about teaching, I would guess.