Reflections from the Bottom of a Swimming Pool

Actually, this post title is a bit of a misnomer. There weren’t any physical reflections at the bottom of the pool. Instead of having a sheet of glass stretched beneath its surface, the pool is outfitted with a dingy, off-white tiled floor that simply collects debris for lack of an adequate filtration system. Luckily, it’s piled up predominantly on the shallow end, where scores of Chinese students waded all through October during a sorry excuse for P.E. class. Their lifeguard “instructors” stood on the sidelines shouting commands at them—of which even the simplest could rarely be completed successfully. Most of the students here don’t know how to float, let alone swim. Swimming is definitely a marker of status in China. If you know how to swim, you probably come from a relatively privileged background, in that you had access to a swimming facility and the means to have been taught at a young age.

The lifeguards themselves are a gaggle of 30-somethings, who, in my experience, might just as well be older men who like hanging out at the pool. I have never once seen any of them enter the water. They wear swimsuits and occasionally robes when it’s colder and lounge on beach chairs that are lopsidedly perched at various intervals over the pool’s length. But they prefer to stay by the deep end, smoking, playing cards, and eating sunflower seeds, every once in a while taking a glance up to see the happenings on the other side. The reason filtration is so bad in the pool is because it is purposely not filled to capacity so that students have a less likely chance of drowning. The filtering turbines are located at the very tops of the walls of the pool and are in a perpetually dry state. As it is now, the lifeguards certainly have their work cut out for them—the water level just reaches my chest in the deep end and on the shallow side barely makes it past my knees.

Today, the pool closed early for the second day in a row—a combination of not enough students showing up that late, and the fact that the entire swimming complex was plagued with dense mist. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. By the time I noticed it, the handful of Chinese students in the Olympic-size pool had already gone and me and James were the only ones left, silently counting laps and staring at the rust on the white tiled floor. Standing on one end, you literally couldn’t see past the middle of the pool to anything on the other side. That half of the pool just dropped off from view, like a scene out of Pirates of the Caribbean during the ominous moment before an enemy ship comes into frame. Anne reasoned that this was because the warm air from the water collides with the cold air from outside that seeps in through the badly insulated walls to create fog. But rather than simply posting a lifeguard on the other side, or multiple ones at the intervals in between, the lifeguards opted to shut the place down, leaving the pool like Taigu in the early morning—a veritable ghost town, the fog reminiscent of trips to the cemetery in Flushing, Queens on particularly spooky days.

This newest setback was particularly disheartening because I had been diligently going to the pool all week, as this week, unlike in weeks past, I had a revelation. But first, a quick anecdote. I wear huge goggles when I swim—goggles that, if they were sunglasses, would almost certainly be in the aviator family. In reality, though, there is a very practical reason for why I own them. When I was younger, and before I could even swim that well, I became very interested in scuba diving, for which these goggles are ideally suited. My dad bought them for me and my sister in lieu of more traditional swimming goggles, and I have used them ever since. I can almost unilaterally guarantee that no one at SAU, and I daresay no one in all of Shanxi Province, owns these kind of goggles. Unlike aviator sunglasses, they also aren’t earning me any cool points with the ladies—as living in China has made abundantly clear. Recently, a female student of mine approached me at an informal gathering. Since practically all Chinese students spread gossip like mad about the foreigners as it is, she told me a story that she had heard about us. It was something to the effect of: the foreigners go swimming a lot and one of them wears these ridiculously huge goggles (which she demonstrated with her hands as if she were holding a shoebox in front of her eyes). Eventually I told her that that ridiculous-looking foreigner was in fact her teacher. But it’s like the old saying goes: the funnier you look in swim goggles, the better you do in real life. Or did I just make that up?

I have never been a good swimmer, and I don’t consider myself one now, but I think that I’ve finally had a breakthrough moment when it comes to the sport. My mechanics are better now than they have ever been before—I’m learning to keep my head low enough in the water that my legs stay buoyed and I end up relatively straight. This in turn, has made it much easier to get my breathing down and also has increased my endurance at least three-fold (I’m taking breaks every 3-4 laps now instead of after every one). My aviator goggles do present a bit of a challenge, though, in that their extra pocket of air tends to propel my head above water—like having a tiny swim float wrapped around my head like a bandana. But I’m learning to cope with it well, dipping my head under water after each breath and kicking my feet up so that they just graze the surface. Even my racing turns are getting smoother. I’m confident that if I keep up this pace, I will eventually be able to swim a mile at a time—a feat I never thought I was capable of accomplishing in my life.

Staring at the bottom of the pool, you have a lot of time for meditative thought, as unlike other exercises, there's no one to communicate with and almost nothing worthwhile to look at. And so, not surprisingly, I have been thinking a lot about blogging. Yitka, one of my best friends, wrote a great piece recently on why she keeps a blog, even though (like my own) it makes no money, can be awfully time-consuming, and has no real quantitative benefit in terms of a future career. She gave a lot of good reasons, most that I too would agree with, but I could especially relate to the last one: “It keeps me out and about, making the most of Seattle and my life, if for nothing else than thinking of it all in terms of being able to write about it later…Perhaps that's a good thing to aim for in life, then: a life worth writing about.” And it’s true. Keeping a blog in Japan and even at Oberlin forced me to do things that I perhaps would never have thought to do before—or at least would never have found the significance in to write about. Blogging makes it easy to share those things I do and find interesting with the rest of the world. Even relatively mundane activities like cooking or exercise became subjects of long, sprawling posts. I found myself hungry for new experiences, at times for no other reason than the chance to write in detail about them later.

In all of this reflection came a small epiphany. Oftentimes, I find myself bogged down—wanting to write perfectly about a particular event, crafting it countless times in my head, and taking days and weeks just to finish typing it out. This obsession with polished writing for some nebulous “posterity” has resulted in a few long and detailed posts, but ones that come without the spontaneity and newness of an on-the-spot thought. I have been in the habit of grouping experiences into broader categories, which I can then tackle completely as a full-length story at a later time. Sometimes, though, experiences are best expressed simply, without the fanfare of transitions or flowery language. It’s not to say that I will stop using them (quite the contrary), but I will try to be more flexible about what I allow myself to write about. For example, I have been very averse to shorter posts that consist of no more than a bulleted-list of observations, but I realize that in many ways they are just as valid. As my friend Xavier pointed out recently, some people will read long-form essays, but others who perhaps don’t know a person as well will just want to keep tabs on them by reading shorter snippets here and there. He cited the remarkable online diary of George Orwell as a prime example, and though I don’t plan to go into such minute details about my own everyday, a few shorter, more frequent posts would probably do this blog well. After all, frequent posts retain visitors better and shorter posts are more likely to be read to completion (anyone out there still with me?).

In short, blogging keeps me connected to the people I care about and also keeps me in the habit of writing, both of which have been made more difficult since graduating from Oberlin. I hope that in the same way that this blog recently underwent an aesthetic makeover, its content too will better be able to reflect those sentiments, especially as I head into a long stretch of vacation come January.

[EDIT: 12.21.09] I just completed my first mile-long swim this afternoon! It wasn't always pretty, and it certainly wasn't fast, but I did it! My body's been thanking me all night for it, too—even after two dinners and a late-night nap, I'm still hungry and tired. Plus, I'm waiting until the morning for the real soreness to kick in. Here's to the next milestone—two miles under my belt before my time in Shanxi is up!

A Change Is Gonna Come

I'm pretty sure this is what Sam Cooke had in mind when he coined those words.

With a recent redesign by friend and fellow blogger Brittany, I decided that my little corner of the internet could use a face-lift since it’s inception over six months ago. To be sure, it was just minor cosmetic surgery, as almost all of the original elements are still intact. And at least to the naked eye, it would seem as if nothing save for the color scheme changed at all. But for the obsessive compulsive (i.e. me), design is truly in the details. Almost all of the elements have actually been modified in one small way or another, most just to minute degrees only visible to the utterly insane. For you see, instead of actually updating this blog with any sort of regularity, I end up spending all of my time tinkering with the "Layout" tab on Blogger until everything looks right. And then I wake up the next day and go right back to playing with it some more.

And so with that, and no further interruption, I am pleased to announce the first-ever Travel Breeds Content Reader Participation Survey!

Change has never looked so...ordinary (at least since Obama took office). It's almost as thrilling as scrolling up and looking at the top of this page!

Is the new template a revelation? Should I stick with the original? Didn't even notice? Couldn't care less? Whaddya think? I want to hear from you!

The World Outside Is Dying...

…But inside, the stovetop ramen’s frying,

Beyond the tall gates, an entire city outlying.

Clouds of coal dust in the air keep flying,

As we try to suppress our loneliness by smiling.

I’ve been doing a lot of freestyle lately. And that ain’t even lyin’.

*

Prior to my arrival, I received no shortage of warnings about winters in Taigu. Taigu is not only the one Shansi site to get yearly snow, but it’s also the only one that comes at a significant risk to one’s respiratory health—a number of previous Fellows have developed asthma as a result of the air quality, especially during colder months. It was one of the first indications that my two years in China wouldn’t come without its fair share of adversity. After all, there had to be something about the place that prompted Beth, former Shansi Fellow and previous occupant of my house, to write, that: “The initial adjustment to living in rural China, really the whole first year, was hard for me. I made lots of friends pretty early on, which helped, but the new environment made me sick all the time, and the poverty and idleness of Taigu was palpable. This place, though charming and very special, is a dilapidated coal-dust covered town in the middle of northern nowhere, and sometimes I feel like we're literally on the edge of the world.” Despite any degree of cynicism I had about having lived through four Ohio winters at that point, I knew that I would be in for something life-changing, and, at the same time, almost caustically different.

After the big snow that hit Taigu shortly after Halloween, there’s been a big freeze—snow has been cleared from the major streets, but all of the smaller paths are still glazed over with a thick sheet of ice built up from compacted snow and temperatures routinely below freezing. Winter is officially in full swing. The SAU campus is masked in a perpetual haze like silky gauze, veiling everything as blunted outlines and shapes. We speculate that part of it is from winter fog in general, but we attribute a lot to the coal dust that billows out of Shanxi’s famously abundant factories and goes toward powering our heat and electricity. In addition, people here routinely burn garbage, as incineration is one of the most popular forms of waste management. The smell is almost palpable at times—the scent of burning plastic, compost, and filament slowly peppering the air with black pockmarks. Without exception, every restaurant on campus has now closed its doors—a combination of the swine flu scare and the snowfall creating an insufficient amount of business. In the mornings, the smog is so thick that seeing twenty feet in front of me on my way to class is sometimes infeasible. I routinely hawk up black phlegm and now find myself drinking twice the amount of water I normally do to cope with the excessive dryness. On good days and when the sun is out, we have slightly off-color blue skies and the smell of Shanxi vinegar to dilute pollutants in the air. Temperatures tend to dip from a sultry 32° in midday down to the teens at night. Thankfully, the classrooms are moderately heated, but I still find myself wearing my coat in most indoor places.

As a result, the cold has unfortunately brought with it a pretty heady depression—indicative of most winters for most people everywhere—but here again, there are a few differences. As China doesn’t believe in daylight savings time (or time zones in general), it gets dark before 5:30pm every night, and the night air is so thick that it sometimes feels like we are wandering through a haunted graveyard. The pervasive gloominess, coupled with the fact that we still can’t really leave campus due to H1N1, has made for solitary nights in our segregated foreign homes. In those homes, we have become landlords to a sizeable population of rats. Even non-perishable food had been regulated to the fridge in an effort to deter the rodents, but they still come because of the heat. The incessant scurrying and squeaking kept me awake at nights until we began cracking down. Though snap traps have proven to be wholly ineffective, we often come home to find a new baby rat, yelping, stuck to one side of a glue trap, and do the nasty deed of disposal. On the rare occasions when we catch a live one, we leave it to Mumu or Boots (Anne and Nick’s cats) and let nature run its course. Sometimes we let the cats roam our house in the day to let the feline smell serve as a warning—just enough not to aggravate James’ allergies. I have even caught myself picking off cat dander and heaping it in spots where I have found rat excrement and sawdust filings from where the rats chewed through our walls.

Everyday seeds the same familiar mainstays. Motorcyclists pass with their hands thrust into giant arm warmers and surplus cargo tied precariously to their backs. The Chinese couples who routinely made out on park benches and in the so-called “Lover’s Forest” have now had to double their efforts because of the cold. They brush away ice and sit statuesque, girl atop boy, and carry on as no more than a rough silhouette of insulated jackets. The underground supermarket on campus has effectively become the social hub for the entire student body. Essentially no more than a heated indoor space with shops and a few tables, its main draw is that it is more spacious than the overwrought dormitories where students are crammed four to eight to a room. We have come to make almost daily trips ourselves, stocking up on yogurt and fruit for lack of more meaningful activities. The cult known as “Crazy English”—an immense group of students dedicated to learning English through a method of repetitive shouting and memorization—is still in full force, setting up shop behind the now-abandoned bus depot. It’s amazing how much their zealous yelling sounds like a student uprising not unlike the Tiananmen Square protests—except this time, in English. As native speakers, we keep a low profile when we pass, careful not to be cajoled into their unorthodox language study.

For the vast majority of the time, I am happy, content, and constantly inundated with things to do. But especially with the holiday season coming up, I have been thinking more and more about home. It’s been difficult embarking on a journey like this so fresh out of college. On the one hand, you are coping with the usual amount of loneliness at losing contact with the people you’ve spent the last four years. And on top of that, there’s the entire culture shock of being in a new place, getting used to the changing relationships you will inevitably have with everyone you’ve ever known. I imagine how easy it would have been to spend an FTL year at Oberlin or to be living rent-free (and jobless) in Brooklyn. It’s certainly not what I would truly want for myself, but in times like these, it’s an incredibly comforting thought. I brought a slew of mementos from family and friends in an attempt to stave off homesickness—a teapot from my dad, a Peru souvenir from Lauren, an Olympics-themed money pouch from Margaret, a journal from Yitka, a handful of letters from Aishe, the blue tapestry from my room in Oberlin, and a number of photos taken at Oberlin Commencement. But inevitably, every time I talk to someone, the familiar nostalgia tugs at my heart, and I am again forced to remind myself that college is over and I won’t be going back home for at least another seven months.

*

Thankfully, though, there have been a few respites from the winter grind. Exercise, as always, has been the first. Since the Taigu air has made it hard for my prissy, fair-weather running self to exercise outside, it is fortunate that the indoor swimming pool has finally reopened after its one-month hiatus from the H1N1 panic. We were all beginning to feel the weight (literally) of the measly indoor floor exercises and the rare outdoor sports that we managed to accomplish. But since the Chinese seem to be even more reactionary than I about physical activity in the cold, the pool has been nearly deserted. Though the pool is heated, it’s definitely not what one would call comfortable by most means. The water is downright frigid, requiring us to constantly do laps for fear of freezing. I realized that the majority of the reason why the pool felt warm in the fall was because it was packed end-to-end with students. And even then, more than half of them forewent real swimming of any kind in favor of holding conversation—like having a board meeting in a body of water. But on the plus side, it’s getting me to swim like I never have before. I’m still terribly slow, but at least I’m pulling in a half-mile a day—the silent, almost meditative quality to repetitive laps coursing over my body with each intake of breath.

The same can be said about the dance parties that we throw every other week at my house. First conceived as a way to give our students an outlet to relax and release their pent up anxieties, it’s now just as much a reason for us as teachers to let loose—seeing as how the winter has made us all slightly more crazed and short-fused than usual. At first I was extremely hesitant to invite my students, but it’s ended up working out really well. My students get to see a side of me that is reserved for friends, but back in the classroom, we’re back to being teacher and students, all without the slightest hitch. Because of the curfew instated by the school, the parties start at the ungodly hour of 8pm and end just before midnight—quite different from a traditional “night life” taken in the states. Additionally, the concept of “fashionably late” must purely be a Western notion—by 8:15 the room is already packed with students swirling to the disco ball lights and the bass from the massively-large, inherited speakers in my living room. We have had a handful of issues with drunk students getting out of hand, but by and large, it’s been tremendously fun. The playlist is a complete mix of songs from previous Fellows, Chinese friends, Korean and Japanese top-ten hits, and my iTunes collection—I still play “Love Me Down” and pretend that I’m at a dance party at my house in Oberlin.

But far and away, the greatest boon has been the incarnation of Taigu’s first ever “Open Mic Night.” Without classes to deter us from staying up late on Thursday nights, after dinner we have started a once-weekly tradition of performing spoken and musical acts reminiscent of a fifth-grade talent show. Gerald, who lives with the only other non-Obie, David, and who has been generous enough to offer up his living room for the occasion, came up with the idea because of the absurd amount of studio equipment he brought with him to Taigu, including two mics, a mic stand, an electric guitar, a preset, and an amp—not to mention a slew of expensive audio software that can play instrument samples, create beats, and utilize auto tune. This, combined with the fact that a mic is nearly irresistible to fiddle around with when left in the open, was how Open Mic Night came to be a bastion of otherwise ordinary Thursday evenings in Taigu.

Open Mic Night in Taigu! From left to right: Melody, Susan, Cathy, Lucy, David, James, Nick, and me (photo courtesy of Gerald Lee)!

We started out slow at first, keeping it limited to the six foreigners (plus our German friend Matthias) at our weekly get-togethers. We would buy a 24-pack of beer and a few snacks from the supermarket, and entertain each other for perhaps more time than we should have been able to. Eventually, we all got to be pretty creative. Matthias read his poetry in German (followed by an attempt at translation), Anne sang folk songs, David told jokes, James recited poetry, Gerald rocked out on his guitar, and Nick performed stand-up comedy. As for me, I did freestyle rap. The inspiration didn’t come from a single source. To be sure, a lot of it originated from my memories as a first-year at Oberlin, rapping in the dining hall while my friend Niels provided the beat. But I’ve also found myself listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, paying an unusual amount of attention to the lyrics (though this has had the unfortunate consequence of putting to rest my extensive collection of Ja Rule and Mystikal). Ever since watching the ground-breaking and Academy Award-worthy film Notorious, I have been inspired to try my hand at rap—not as any kind of career but, somewhat ironically, as a way to stretch my capacity as a writer. And so when Gerald, who is in the business of producing content for up-and-coming musical artists, came to me with the idea of doing a rap song, I jumped at the chance.

The song is still in the works, but Open Mic Night lives on. What’s most interesting, I think, is how much we are all beginning to stretch our comfort zones. I started to do a little stand-up for the first time since being in the “Stand-Up Comedy Club” (an actual student organization) with Scott during my senior year of high school. James has gotten into freestyle and has proven to be surprisingly adept, prompting Nick, who is also known to drop rhymes, to comment on his flow. Gerald has transitioned from playing Green Day punk ballads to performing his own songs. And even Anne has begun utilizing Gerald’s audio software, with a tradition of performing her student’s essays to a rap beat. In a place like Taigu, it helps that your audience and the people you live with are one and the same—and you know that no matter what happens, they will always be there to support you. In recent weeks, we have even begun to pair Open Mic Night with a home-cooked dinner, and the company of some of our Chinese friends. It’s the best we can do, at a time when wanting a family and the comforts of home are the most precious things we could ask for.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like November

I keep my window shades closed for the majority of each day, due largely to a general lack of privacy when it comes to the foreign houses here. Chinese students routinely cross paths by my house to get to other places on campus and have even been known to stop on the front porch right outside my window to chat with friends and take photos. Oftentimes, leaving the blinds open is an invitation for peering visitors, and the occasional knock on the door from pathetic undergraduate students asking to “be their friend and practice English.” It’s the kind of attention that I am happier not receiving. And so, it came as a total shock to me when last week I opened my front door, fully dressed for class in black shoes and a light jacket, to discover that everything in my sight lines was covered in a foot-and-a-half of powdery snow.

The view of campus from outside my window.

I knew that snow was not uncommon in Taigu, thanks to the video Guy showed us during Winter Term Orientation as a brief introduction to the different Shansi sites in Asia. The old film clips of Taigu couldn’t have been less than 20 years old—grainy footage of snow falling on red-topped pagodas and gathering in clumps around the courtyard of the university. But yet, since having moved to Taigu, I realized that not much about that scene has changed. The “old” sections of Taigu still look, well, old, and the people here seem to go about life in more or less the same way. The addition of cars hasn’t done away with a significant percentage of bicycles, three-wheeled buggies, and motorcycles from the road. The majority of people still rely on agriculture to sustain their livelihood. And the winter still brings with it the stuff of schoolchildren’s dreams and commuters’ worst nightmares.

Whoever said this town didn’t get snow must never have heard of global warming. The snow this year didn’t stop with the initial 10 inches. Over the next few days, Taigu saw quite a bit more snowfall—sheets of white that covered tree boughs and blanketed narrow stone walkways. Our boss, Xiao Fan, told me that he talked to a man who had lived in Taigu his whole life—over 60 years—and had not once seen snowfall as heavy as the one we received this year. But that enigmatic old man wasn’t the only one to be flabbergasted at the sudden appearance of snow. Authorities and civilians all throughout Northern China were astonished at the swiftness and intensity of the snowfall. Cars were stranded from Beijing to Shijiazhuang in the north, and there were a number of casualties, predominantly dotting Shanxi Province. News sources corroborated the old man’s story, citing that snowstorms were the worst since 1955 in some places. And according to David’s mom, record-breaking snowfall in Taiyuan (the capital of Shanxi) even made headlines on CBS News in America.

Snowfall on my walk to class.

But thankfully, the situation wasn’t nearly as dire on SAU’s campus as it was in the real world. Like Oberlin, college in general tends to frame a bubble where all of the world’s problems become secondary to one’s own. And thus, the snowfall here was seen less as a scourge than as a godsend. Students and teachers alike, needing some kind of respite from the terribly suffocating restrictions imposed by the college thanks to H1N1, found their savior in fluffy clumps of water vapor falling from the sky. With no means to escape campus, snow provided students the chance to fill their otherwise monotonous weekends with an outdoor activity that could still be enjoyed within the safe boundaries of the university walls. And enjoy it they did. Within a few days, the campus was transformed into a winter wonderland, with snow sculptures, messages in the snow, and snowball fights turning up in every direction. The two outdoor tracks and the basketball courts, though completely unsuitable for their original purposes, became the closest things Taigu’s had to an ice show, with meticulous pieces of art lining their circumference.

A Chinese birthday cake, complete with fruit and a chocolate cookie, fashioned out of snow (photo courtesy of Rebecca).

Not surprisingly, that kind of boundless excitement and enthusiasm also turned up in the classroom. My students, hungry for the chance to get outside and play, seemed almost American in their relentless pleading to have a snow day. Only this time, I had switched roles—from the anxious student fidgeting in class to the pensive teacher debating how best to satisfy both my responsibilities and the whims of my pupils. In the end, I did what I had wished every teacher of mine from 1st through 12th grade would have done. With twenty minutes to spare at the end of class, I marched outside with an entire class of 30 graduate students, and proceeded to have a snowball fight. In the first moments, everyone was extremely hesitant, and it took the raucous young hot shot, Alva, to throw the first snowball at his teacher. But once that was done, there was no stopping my other students. The tentative air quickly turned tenacious, as I found myself greatly outnumbered, eventually getting help from some of the male students who initially turned against me. I walked home from class that day, my shoes more than a bit soppy and my blazer in dire need of a trip to the dry cleaners, but with a lightness I hadn’t had in weeks.

It wouldn’t be the last time I had a snowball fight either. With the help of the other foreign teachers, I was able to get back at some of my students. After class one day, Nick, Anne, and I organized a small outing with a few of each of our students and a couple of our Chinese friends. The snow was remarkably good for forming snowballs, and I got to make use of my Northeastern upbringing to the fullest extent. Teams rotated organically for the most part until the very end, when Nick, me, and our two Chinese friends, Duncan and Tiger, were pitted against four of my students. By the time we were finished, we had their backs up against a wall—me, Duncan, and Tiger were sporting remarkable (and uncharacteristic) long-distance aim, and Nick got himself armed with a bucketful of pre-made snowballs—enough to eventually force their surrender.

Students aside, even we as teachers couldn’t help reveling in the snowy weather. For an entire week, we played tricks on each other, ambushing each other’s classes with armfuls of snowballs aimed squarely at the front podium. In addition to eliciting much amusement on the part of my students, I came out of the surprise attacks with a half-soaked lesson plan to boot. Anne and our friend Lynn also made delicious hot chocolate one afternoon, using some of the stock chocolate available at the supermarket, paired with a generous helping of cocoa powder brought back from the states. They even constructed a snowman in front of Anne’s house, using anise stars for the eyes, twigs for the eyebrows and mouth, a sun hat and a bandana as accessories, and all topped off with a cigarette. Students from far and wide came to pose with the unconventional snowman, along with the sprinkling of others set-up around campus.

The precocious-looking snowman outside of Anne's house.

For, as I learned, Chinese students love to take pictures of themselves and their friends in any snow-related context. One needn't walk far before spotting a couple or a group of friends posing with their cell phone cameras. This was made all the more apparent when a group of students (who I adore) asked if I would join them one Saturday afternoon to take pictures in the snow. Not knowing what I was in for, I agreed, only to be led for two hours through every “scenic spot” that the university had to offer. We paused at old buildings, in front of interesting architecture-work, and by each of the university’s ornate gates. We were modeled by master photographer and previous snowball fight-instigator, Alva, who thought up many of the creative poses on display. By the end, each of my students was trying to one-up the last in their individual pose pictures with me. Finally, when all the picture-taking was said and done, I followed the students back to their dormitory and relished the chance to rest for a bit and incite some warmth back into my extremities.

One of a few dozen staged photographs concocted by my graduate students (photo courtesy of Alva).

I find it incredibly interesting that Chinese people clear snow on the roads with sheer manpower—as there are no snowplows, snow blowers, or any other similar machines at their disposal. Students and workers armed with shovels scoop away at embankments of snow meter by meter until they are gone, just as they did for leaves in the fall with rakes and brooms. They don’t even use salt to break down sheets of ice—probably hard-pressed to use it in food served in the cafeterias instead. At times, workers even go so far as to chop away at it with metal dustpans, but those efforts are often futile. Thus, ice, perhaps the most hazardous consequence of the snow cycle, is the part that perpetually remains on all of the roads and walkways after the snow is cleared.

It's no wonder then that students are getting injured all the time. One texted me recently when she couldn’t make it to class. It was shortly after we had a lesson on clothing, and I sauntered into the classroom looking like a regular Salvation Army—wearing hats, scarves, gloves, ties, and almost every conceivable type of shirt and jacket combination you can imagine. After granting her leave, her message back to me read: “Thank you very much. The weather is so cold. I suggest you to wear coat, scarf and glove.” I’m thankful that even in this festive weather, my students are still absorbing what I teach—or at the very least, trying.

Mostly Better News: Halloween and H1N1 (Pt. II)

One of the other setbacks of the H1N1 situation was the cancellation of the annual Halloween party. For as long as there are Fellows to report, every Halloween has been met with an all-out crunk fest. We’re talking ordering in hundreds of bottles of beer from a wholesaler in Taiyuan, vats full of bai jiu cocktails (that’s Chinese liquor mixed with from-concentrate fruit juices), and a ton of guests. Each of us teachers (there are six of us) was expected to invite all of our students, and with over a hundred students to a teacher, you don’t have to do a lot of math to figure out the crowd-size. Not only was it a way for our students to relax, it was also a chance for them to see us as teachers in a more informal light. It is the one time every year that the Foreign Affairs Office begrudgingly gives us the key to the old AV classroom, a space big enough to accommodate at least the first few hundred off the lengthy guest list (with the rest either pushing their way in or opting to go back home). We were all so excited that we came up with live performances to boot. Dave, Nick, and I were planning to do our own rendition of Biz Markie’s seminal “Just a Friend,” Anne and a couple of her Chinese friends wanted to cover a C-pop song, and Gerald was going to rock out on his electric guitar. We joked that this year we could wear N95 face masks, in addition to the myriad of creative costumes we had schemed.

Two more students posing with their newly-carved pumpkin.

That was until our boss told us that the biggest party of the year was canceled due to H1N1. It was like telling Delta fraternity in Animal House that they had all been put on double secret probation. The school administration was worried that so many people in such a crowded indoor space would make for easy spreading of the disease, regardless of the state of some of their other institutions. But unlike the gang in Animal House, we did not have our revenge. Instead, we ended up spending Halloween night sequestered in our own homes, with even the possibility of a smaller house party ruled out because of the scare. With our spirits and excitement crushed, we relegated the possibility of a party to the backs of our minds—as we did the return of the campus to pre-H1N1 normalcy—with the hopes that perhaps by December we could entertain the idea of a Halloween-Christmas celebration on an open and safe campus.

But as we soon learned, parties are not the only way to have fun during Halloween. On Nick’s suggestion, I decided to bring some of the holiday spirit to my classes, as they were some of the few things not disturbed too greatly by the scare. I spent the first class before Halloween going over the requisite vocabulary, being careful to include “trick-or-treat,” “costume party,” and “bobbing for apples,” before having my students write and present ghost stories to the class. With no subtle hint of irony, I spent the week after Halloween talking about vocabulary for symptoms and illnesses, in addition to performing a skit about patients going to the see both a Western doctor and a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. But the class immediately preceding Halloween was when things really got interesting—when I walked into class carrying a huge drawstring bag of pumpkins and a shoebox full of spoons and knives.

Some of the pumpkins carved in my Group K class. I am particularly fond of the rabbit design in about the middle of the picture.

Procuring said pumpkins was no small task. The only place to buy them was at a quaint little vegetable market a bit of a ways off campus, which also featured a plethora of other stands selling everything from eggs to vegetables to fresh meat. But with the campus recently closed and my having forgot my identification, I had to really hound the guards to let me through the gates—citing my bad Chinese and the fact that I didn’t look like any of the actual students. Eventually I made it through and spotted the woman whom I had ordered 45 pumpkins from the day before (fifteen for each of my three graduate student classes). However, having not fully put this plan into motion previously, the fact that 45 pumpkins could be quite heavy seemed to have slipped my mind (though they were astoundingly cheap). And so, I left the vegetable market in two trips, each time with a drawstring bag in excess of 70 pounds slumped over my shoulder as I made my way back to campus. Ironically, this was when I seemed to engender the fewest stares from passersby—probably assuming I was just another Chinese farmer, doubled over wearing a plain brown jacket and slacks.

The classes dedicated to pumpkin carving were perhaps the best I’ve had so far. I started with a lesson on knife safety and a rough impromptu step-by-step on to how to actually do the carving. Having not done it myself in well over ten years and with the internet temporarily out of commission, I was worried that my slapdash directions would prove ineffectual, but my students quickly proved me wrong. After a lottery system to decide who would go first, each pumpkin was doled out randomly to groups of two students—some big, some small, some long, and some downright ugly. Unlike pumpkins in America, Chinese pumpkins are all green on the outside, though some students shaved away at the outer layer to reveal a yellow-orange hue beneath. With hardly any direction from me (I brought a book into class to read for the second-half while my students carved away), my students jumped wholeheartedly into the project—wowing me with the extent to which they removed the seeds, scooped out the inside, and drew and gutted the face. More than that, I was incredibly impressed with the creativity they exhibited. Though a fair bit were what one might call “normal,” others were decadent specimens with delicate attention to detail, careful pre-planning, and the addition of outside props. And all this from students who had not only never carved a pumpkin before, but who had probably never seen a jack-o’-lantern in real life.

But perhaps even more can be said of the old saying that “the real learning takes place outside of the classroom.” Since indoor gatherings were strictly off-limits, we decided to turn the tables on the administration’s orders. On the morning of Halloween we organized a huge pumpkin carving party with Anne, Dave, and James’ classes in the little courtyard area outside of Dave’s house. Since Nick and I already did carving during our classes, our students didn’t make an appearance, but we got to meet a whole bunch of other eager youngsters, most of whom were completely enthralled with the notion of other foreigners, as we reluctantly posed for one photo-op after another. In between being used for my native English by some enterprising, and more than a bit obnoxious, non-students who were drawn to the party, I ended up carving my own pumpkin, taking some cues from my students who gave me no shortage of inspiration. Since the face was admittedly a little plain, I decided to go ahead and carve my Chinese name in the back using a slightly smaller knife and some finesse. All in all, over sixty students showed up at various points during the four-hour jaunt. In addition to a lot of misplaced paint (that we brought for students to further decorate the pumpkins), we only had two knife-related injuries, which, considering the circumstances, was pretty good.

My Chinese name that I carved into the back of the pumpkin (Da Lin read top to bottom).

In the last couple of days, the school finally received its share of the H1N1 vaccines and has begun distributing them to its faculty and students. First came the first- and second-year undergrads who were presumed to be the most at risk (mostly because the first student to be hospitalized came from an undergraduate dorm), and next came all of the graduate students. On Friday, all of us foreign teachers were woken up early and marched out to the reasonably shady campus hospital to get administered for our own shots. Prior to going, we got a short briefing in Chinese about the protocol and a handful of English photocopies off the WHO website. For all intents and purposes, it seemed safe enough (there have been no reported vaccine-related deaths in China) and it was said that the vaccine is even safer in China than it is in America. Along with a small prick in the arm, we were instructed not to shower, eat spicy food, eat lamb, or drink alcohol for the next three days. Needless to say, China has a lot of interesting customs when it comes to sick-culture (not to mention pregnancy and child rearing) that I hope to address more in a forthcoming post. And so, a slightly smellier and sober Daniel will stumble his way through Taigu for the next few days, but after a full week, the vaccine will have run its course. With any luck, the collective immunity of the campus will gradually start to usher back a return to the way things were.