With Great Power Comes Greater Chance of Embarrassment

Taigu in the fall was like homecoming.  I had nary seen this place half as beautiful—hot, but not nearly as humid and muggy as my summer of travel had been, still warm enough for shorts in the daytime, clear with a crisp chill in the air at night.  It was coming home in the literal sense, of returning to China after a long, nearly one month bid in the Southeast Asian peninsula.  But it was also a very visceral homecoming, in the degree to which I care and feel connected to Tagiu with this past year—replete with struggle, challenge, and triumph of all stripes—now safely under my belt. 

Starting my second year, I feel like I'm looking at this place through a fresh set of eyes.  All the familiar sights and people seem newly animated.  Old students have been re-imagined—some as more distant acquaintances following the long break, and others, as full-blown friends without the “student” signifier.  Almost all of our favorite restaurants are still operational, but with such a long hiatus, they may as well be serving up dishes that we're trying for the first time.  With two new Fellows in tow, showing off this school has made me re-think and chronicle everything that I have learned over the past year.  It's as if I'm downloading all of my experiences onto a memory chip that can then be uploaded à la The Matrix into the minds of my contemporaries for faster processing.

But then there are those things that actually are different.  The man-made lake project that had just barely gotten off the ground last semester is now in full swing—though in a way I didn't expect.  It turns out that the lake project was scrapped in favor of what I can only describe as a “scenic area.”  The final design hints at a small, crescent moon-shaped stage in front of a plot of cement tiles, surely to be used for class photographs.  Behind it, the vice-president's house is obscured through the outstretched branches of tan oak trees and flora sprouting from a make-shift garden.  As my Chinese tutor Francis put it during one of our walking lessons, it looks like it could have been modeled after the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, save for the giant tombstones listing off the names of the deceased.

The proposed site of the man-made lake project.  In typical Chinese fashion, plans tend to change at the last minute.

Construction crews now arrive daily to cart away wagon-loads of discarded earth and rubble, and are laying the concrete foundation for the base.  As such, the cafeteria where we used to take our lunches was finally demolished in the process, as was the filthy, but endearing AV room, where we had our last party of the year and, according to Taigu lore, had once been the site of actual classroom learning.  Nearby, another colony of shabbily-built row-houses has been wiped away to make room for a new parking lot, a testament to the rapidly-growing income rate of SAU faculty and students.  Still more, North Yard has seen a slight cosmetic makeover.  The streets have been widened to allow for greater ease of access, but don't try squeezing through there during the peak lunch and dinner hours—it's still as tight as a cattle car. 

In the cafeteria's place, we are now eating in the connected eave to Gerald's new house—a spiffy-looking kitchen and dining room ensemble that ironically looks like it came out of an Ikea catalog under the entry: “American diner.”  It's got a potted plant on the windowsill, off-white checker-print blinds on the windows, and a generally cheery interior, if you allow for the faux-wood veneering that lines the floor.  What's more, outside of prescribed lunches during the work-week, the spacious new kitchen gives us plenty of room to cook those larger, family-style meals on the weekends that we came to enjoy so much as a substitute for going out to eat.  Even my own modest living quarters got an upgrade this summer.  Unbeknownst to me, the Foreign Affairs Office replaced the outside screen door, gave my walls a fresh new layer of white-wash, and re-fastened the ceiling tiles so it doesn't feel like the roof is going to collapse at any moment.

Alexandra, one of the two new Fellows, posing with one of our daily lunches, prepared by the Office's do-it-all chef Rui Ping.

In the midst of all these changes, James and I have found ourselves in a new position of leadership—no longer wayward sheep herded indiscriminately by our own Senior Fellows, but this time the very shepherds ourselves, with a small flock at our beck-and-call.  It's been strangely empowering—this feeling of being the authority on a place.  Whereas one year ago, I knew close to nothing about Taigu and had to rely almost entirely on Nick and Anne to get around, I have been amazed at how fast I've been able to accrue information.  It feels like any new experience—“growing up” being the most obvious metaphor here—where within a few years time, you've outgrown crawling, blabbering incoherently, and spilling food all over yourself, to being able to walk, piece together strings of words into sentences, and, generally, limiting the amount of food that adorns your body.

I venture to contend that my growth and development in Taigu has been similarly profound.  I'm stealing a page out of Brittany's playbook here when I say this, but my authoritative knowledge on Taigu includes but is not limited to: singing Chinese karaoke songs at KTV, hosting amazing dance parties, buying train tickets to Beijing, locating the best public squat toilet when in a pinch, toasting everyone at a banquet without getting wasted, and refusing first-year students who want me to teach them English for free.  Not too shabby.  But I still can't take solace from the inscrutable musical fountain, escape being victim to the spontaneous whims of the Foreign Affairs Office, and outsmart the rats that insist on keeping me company on winter nights.  It's true what Brittany wrote, that, “once we reach a certain level of proficiency, it’s easier to see how far we are from the top instead of how far we have already come. But to those around us just starting off, we ARE the authority, just by having more tallied experience than the newcomer.”

So, what's it really like being the Senior Fellow?  Being in charge of going to dinner.  That, and generally making the decisions that effect what we as a group choose to do on a daily basis.  That's been no small adjustment especially when you consider my largely indecisive nature, but one that gets easier everyday.  Oh, and somewhere along the way, getting to the point where you understand things.  Like, for instance, about the way Taigu works—how to cope with the little surprises and disappointments that occupy each day, how everything seems to go wrong at the last minute, letting go of any claim to even the slightest shred of privacy or personal space, and how to interact with the people who populate this tiny town at the edge of the world.  Most exciting of all, I feel like my Chinese is finally reaching a pleasant state of proficiency.  Coming back to a place where I can communicate with people to a reasonable degree and feel like I can be a valuable and knowledgeable resource to the new Fellows has been a great blessing. 

But sometimes all the experience in the world isn't enough.  There have been countless occasions already where my perceived “expertise” has been put to the test and failed, leaving us at best, needing to change restaurants for lunch, and at worst, stranded in the capital city of Taiyuan for the night with no transportation to return home.  Aside from filling you with a bloated sense of assurance, being the “authority” makes you all the more acutely aware of the things you cannot do.  Sure, it's great that I can put money on my phone, but what good does it do to the new Fellows that I can't negotiate the terms of a new service plan without the help of a Chinese friend?  It's just like Uncle Ben said: “with greater power comes great responsibility.”  But little did he account for the grief and shame that his nephew faced when he wasn't always able save the world from evil—or in my case, from embarrassment.

It's been an interesting role-reversal.  When I talked with Anne last year about my lack of excitement regarding my second year and the new Fellows, she told me that one year prior she had felt the same way—that coming back to Taigu from a long summer holiday filled her with equal parts dread and anxiety, fear of what was to come, and disappointment at potentially not meeting her first year's expectations.  I was also nervous about retuning to Taigu, but for different reasons.  I was entirely ready to settle down into a routine again in the closest place to a single “home” I've had in over four years.  But I was anxious about how different that home would feel.  In Taigu, it's the people that make the place, and without Nick, Anne, and Dave, three friends who had been as close as siblings this past year, I had no idea how I would reconcile the weight of their absence.

When I first came to Taigu, I was panic-stricken by the thought that my core group of friends had shrunk from two or three dozen to as many strangers as I could count on a single hand.  No longer did I have the luxury of meeting up with friends who occupied more niche roles in my life—the friend I see movies with, or the friend I go running with, for example.  Now I would have to rely on every one new friend in Taigu to fulfill the role of three or four friends back home.  But I can safely say that with a year of experience under my belt, it's been working out shockingly well.  Aside from the usual drama that comes with our Big Brother-style living arrangements, and that fact that we may as well be six strangers marooned on a desert island with a film crew and a captivated international audience scrutinizing over our every move, things have been good. 

It also doesn't hurt that two of the six foreigners from last year are still with me in Taigu now.  Living with James and Gerald has been an enormous comfort, and one that I am not taking for granted.  The new Fellows have delighted in comparing my relationship with James to that of The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix (I'll let you guess which is which).  Our every-day interactions take on something close to that of a married couple—James will insist on buying new things for the house that I deem as costly and unnecessary, and I'll ask him to clear out his books and papers from the living room every time we have guests over.  Our new regime is a decidedly benevolent one, and compared to last year's world order, we've certainly cut down on the drinking and partying culture, which, banquets aside, has probably shrunk to about a tenth of where it was this time last October.  What's more, I am lucky that the new Fellows have been so great and interesting thus far and I'm excited to continue to get to know them better.

Life in Taigu sort of feels like freshmen year at Oberlin.  You travel in a pack, take your meals together with the rest of your hall, and feel like you are constantly inundated with people.  It's as if you have been sucked into a bubble without any control over your own life, the decisions that you make, or the choice to individual freedoms.  It can be alarming to those on the outside, but like with any new community, it is critical to build a strong foundation in order to ensure group harmony in the long run when everyone eventually branches out on their own.  And that harmony starts at home.  Whereas last year, I found myself spending a great deal of my free time at Nick and Anne's house, I'm finding that my house is now becoming the central congregating space for the usual slew of social activities that keep Taigu bearable.  As might be expected, we can't help talking about last year—the stories and the memories that comprise our shared friendship.  But more even than the past, we're all looking forward to the hope for many more new stories in the year to come.

Perhaps the biggest change of all this year is that this time around, I have an idea of what to expect.  Though part of me knows that everything will be different, at least I can say that I have experienced a winter in Taigu, caught a student cheating on his homework, or gone without water and electricity during a blackout.  Teaching is easier in general because I have already accrued an inventory of successful lesson plans with which I can mine for my new classes.  Now, it's just a matter of believing in my abilities to make it through the year.  I'll end with this metaphor.  Walking alone at night, I no longer feel trepidation or anxiety over the darkness of Taigu's rural countryside.  Even if I can't see anything, I can still tell where I'm going because the surfaces feel different—smooth tar roads converge with narrow pebble tracks, and diamond-shaped stencils line safe markers in the grass.  I let my feet guide me—putting my mind to rest—and trust my instincts and my confidence to navigate those uncertain paths back to safety.

Lessons Gleaned from Student Mugshots

Last week was our first week of class.  And like I did with my first crop of students last year, the first day saw me playing host to a Q&A session from my students.  First, I had them give a self-introduction, then helped them choose an English name. Afterward, I made them pose with said names for a photo to allow me to connect their new names with their faces more easily.  Then came the panel discussion where the topic felt more than a bit self-serving.  More often than not, the questions were not particularly beguiling—most revolved around my perceived differences between America and China, whether I liked the taste of Chinese food, some general details about my academic and personal background, where I've been in China and abroad, whether I've adjusted to life at the university, and if I'm able to eat with chopsticks. 

But every now and then, your students will surprise you.  If nothing else, their questions, in conjunction with their mugshots, gave me more insight into their collective psyche.  I don't consider myself much of a portrait photographer, but these are a sampling of some of the most interesting.

This month I am temporarily teaching two additional classes as a substitute for the final foreign teacher who is expected to arrive in Taigu sometime in October.  Their English level is on the whole not as good as that of my regular students, but the Office was desperate, and I'm getting paid a hefty bonus to do it.  Both classes were previously Gerald's, some of whom I knew only in the context of dance parties and social gatherings last year.  They seemed to remember me just as well.

What never fails to go unasked in each of my classes is the classic, “do you have a girlfriend?” question, to which I respond with, “it's a secret,” to mild irritation and fits of laughter.  However, with my first class I made the mistake of saying that I would tell them later.  Virginia, one of the feistiest and most free-thinking students in the class, asked me again before I dismissed class, “so, are you or are you not available?”  I had to tell her the truth.

What amazed me was how differently each student reacted to my impromptu photo shoot.  Since this was the first criterion with which I could use to judge them, I figured that most students would want to make a good impression.  But where some smiled brightly and struck a pose, just as many were shy, gawky, or merely devoid of life.  To put it simply, some treated it like a birthday still, others, like they had waited for six hours at the DMV, and still more, like they were posing for their middle school yearbook photo.

A lesson on name choosing: Candy is not a stripper name.  Neither is Cherry, Angel, Lotus, Snow, or Sky.  Spring is a boy's name.  As are Breath, Caitlin, and Dandelion.  Obama is a mild-mannered sophomore who sits in the back of the class and doodles on his homework.  Salt, Water, Rock, and Sea, are no longer strictly elements of the natural world.  Never underestimate the power of a student's imagination.

What struck me most about Monet was not the way he looked or carried himself, and certainly not his English level (which was nearly non-existent), but the style that he seemed to exude.  It was no surprise then to discover that he was an art major, the first of any student I've taught.  He studied drawing and painting as an undergrad and wanted a name to suit his personality.  And thus Monet was born.

“This woman in the picture, is that your—”

“Yes, that's my mother.”

(Collective intake of breath.)

“But she looks Chinese.”

“She is Chinese.”

(Collective gasp.)

“And that old man hugging you in the other picture—”

“He's my father.”

“So you're—”

“Half-Chinese and half-American.”

(Excited whispers and applause.)

“Oh.” (Beat.) “Your mother is very pretty.”

One student refused to have his picture taken in conjunction with his name, sighting the generally unsavory connection between a picture of a student holding a name placard and the mugshots of hardened criminals from American movies he had seen.  At his request, I allowed him to take his picture without it.

Never let your approval for the name “Apple” be overstated.  Then you might have three or four of her neighboring classmates all vying for the names of other fruits, with one of them sorely mouthing in Chinese that she had wanted to be Apple all along before some girl stole it from under her.  “Peach,” evidently, is not pleasing to the ear.  But “Grape” is.  Go figure.

One student asked me, “if there were only two girls left in the world—a Chinese girl and a Japanese girl—which one would you choose?”  It was supposed to play on the negative opinion our students generally hold of their neighbors to the east, but I was too smart to bite.  Both, I thought to myself.  After all, I have to repopulate the Earth.

Move Over Jackie Chan, Taigu's First Sitcom Goes Viral!

Over three months of painstaking work later, and the sitcom that was once no more than a hatch-brained joke has turned into a reality.  The end result was way better than any of us could have expected, but it's not to say that there weren't doubts as to whether or not it would ever make it out of post-production.  With bad weather and hectic end-of-semester schedules foiling the movie-making process at every turn, we only finished shooting the raw footage of the film with four days left to spare until we would all be skipping town.  Even then, more corners were cut when we realized that we missed a couple of key shots and had to pick them up, out of chronology, and at times with months in age added to our main actors.  Both Dave and Anne were planning to leave Taigu a little earlier due to extenuating circumstances, so most of the group was content to let the sitcom sit in Gerald's hands for the summer and watch it whenever it was finally completed online.  That predisposed, of course, that we wouldn't be able to watch it together as a group, which was kind of the entire reason for wanting to make the sitcom in the first place.  The sitcom (antithetical to me posting it online) was for us—to celebrate how far we had come in a year of living together and to commemorate the incredible amount of free time we will surely never have again—and that was reason enough to act quickly.

Gerald was the first to recognize this, and with an incredibly limited window of time to do all of the editing, it was then that we put him under house arrest.  To be fair, it was largely at his own request, but for four straight days he was left with only the bare essentials: water, ramen noodles, periodic check-ins for dizzy spells, and a 3-sleeve variety pack of Oreos.  He had two laptop cooling pads running around the clock, and still his computer had sporadic breakdowns due to heat exhaustion, leaving segments of unsaved work swallowed up by the ether.  We left his girlfriend Ida in charge of attending to his other responsibilities—tabulating the final grades for his classes, taking him leftovers from meals, and making sure he retained consciousness long enough to finish editing—while the rest of us, begrudgingly, went about our normal routines stricken by his absence, but knowing full well that he had committed himself to a worthwhile cause.

On the forth day, G[eral]d created “It's Not Jackie Chan.”  Hours upon hours of raw footage were consolidated into a shiny 22-minute final product—a real life sitcom, and the first in Taigu's history.  In the intervening days, Anne and I secured a classroom with a projector to be able to show it on a big screen in all of its HD glory.  Our friendship with our Chinese friend Bobby gave us top billing rights to use his classroom, normally reserved for organizational meetings of the Rubik's Cube club, for which Bobby is the president (in previous months, we were invited to attend a “party” for the club that had us facetiously compete in games of skill and had remarkably little to do with Rubik's cubes).  On opening day, we dressed to the nines and rolled out the red carpet in anticipation of our theatrical debut—what was to be the show's world premiere.  Save for Gerald, none of had seen the finished project—only bits and pieces gleamed from watching him edit in various capacities over the last four days.

Gerald introduced the sitcom and each actor to a room full of applause.

Our guest list wasn't particularly long, but friends from all over came out to see it.  Like the heartwarming season finale to a long-running show, so too was how my first year in Taigu came to a close.  I was overcome with how many of my students took the time to come out for the premiere, skipping out on other obligations just to show their support.  At the end of the night, the entire room was booked solid—there was not an empty seat to be found and we had rows of people crowding around in the back to watch.  The reaction to the sitcom was largely good, though many of my non-English majors (not surprisingly) had a fair bit of difficulty understanding all of the dialogue.  Many simply nodded and smiled: “funny” they said, before graciously heading to the exits.  At the end of the day, the sitcom (despite all of our time and energy spent) was really just a warm-up for Gerald's next project: a feature-length film to be shot in Taigu next year.  It was a way to work out all the kinks with his camera and practice the entire movie-making process from start to finish.  In retrospect, there's a lot that we could have done differently, but I'm still really proud to have my name slapped across the opening credits.  Special thanks go to all of the actors involved, because this wouldn't have been possible without all the work they contributed to the project.

And now without further ado: “It's Not Jackie Chan!”

It's Not Jackie Chan (Episode 1) from Gerald Lee on Vimeo.  For slower connections, it might be best to wait a little while for the whole video to load.  Don't forget to stay tuned past the ending for a special surprise!

What They Don't Teach You in Teaching School

In most non-coastal cities in America, area blackouts are about as common as getting struck by lightning or becoming infected by West Nile Virus.  If it happens once or twice in your lifetime, you might count yourself among the victims of random chance and move on, and any more than that, you'd probably start looking for a new place to live.  They're so rare in fact, that the simple mention of a date and place alone can often conjure up memories of an exact moment in a person's life.

In Taigu, area blackouts occur about as frequently as trips to the dry cleaners or paying a utility bill.  Rare is it that a few weeks pass without our breakers going haywire and the school losing power to one half or the other of its campus.  If we're lucky, we're spared the wrath that propels convenient stores and student dorms into total darkness on the north-side, but just as often, it's the paths and streetlamps that line our locality that turn off and our houses that go dim.  Sometimes that loss of power is just for a few hours, and at other times, for an entire day or more.

In these moments without power, there comes a harkening back to an older time, when sunlight was the sole arbiter of sleep cycles and the intensity of a given workday.  Blackouts, especially in the evening, find us in one of two situations: one, going to sleep early for lack of suitably engaging activities; or two, attempting to offset our boredom with our own fun—in other words, trying to make the best of a difficult situation, often involving a few candles, a case of beer, and a board game at our disposal.

The latter is where we found ourselves on the latest occasion without electricity.  It was about 7pm, still early enough in the spring to be able to sit in my living room with the front door opened and the blinds drawn, and subsist from the modest amount of light that was bleating through the glass panes before sunset.  Four of us were there making small talk and generally passing the time, a scene reminiscent of the front stoops outside of walk-up brownstones in my neighborhood back home.  Though the sun was still out, we knew that it would not last long, and began to make preparations.

What would help more than anything in the case of a blackout would be forewarning, some time to prepare beforehand both one's mental and physical state, as well as a few items of utility—a flashlight, some water, perhaps a portable music player to listen to—but like most forces of nature, it is precisely this time that is governed by the tides of chance.  When one minute you could be taking a shower and the next losing power is anyone's guess.  You just have to hope that, despite the suddenness, it doesn't catch you at an inopportune time.  The same can be said of a particular group of students heading into exam period.

At the end of every semester there are those students—their numbers comprising a very small minority of the total, but a population nonetheless—who have attended less than a handful of classes all year, but who are convinced of their entitlement to a passing grade.  Despite it being an Oral English class, whose very purpose is to instruct students in the ability to speak and understand English with more competence and fluency, most of this subset of students can barely spout more than the most common English stock phrases, nor understand the things that I say in class.

Last semester, it was less of a problem because the campus was locked-down for two months of the year due to the H1N1 epidemic, and I forgave students who used it as an excuse for not being able to return to school—whether or not I thought it was true.  This semester there was no such calamity, and the students who didn't show up did so at a much more alarming rate—attendance for all of my classes dropped by about a-third to a-half, and those offending students nearly stopped coming altogether.

Disheartened and frustrated, I gave a warning to all of my students.  I told them that those who didn't start regularly attending class would receive a zero for a final grade.  For the first week following my announcement in May, attendance spiked, but it wasn't long before it began to stagnate again.  Finally, at the end of the month I instituted a cap for attendance: those who attended less than 20% of my classes all year—an incredibly minimal requirement considering that attendance is the crux of my grading policy—would not be allowed to take the final exam.

When I set out this final measure, I didn't think there would be much, if any, push-back on the part of my students.  Surely students who had never come to class and who had never handed in a single homework assignment knew that they would be failing my class.  I had laid out all of the class guidelines at the beginning of the semester, and had taken my students on a step-by-step breakdown of their grades.  Still, I took for granted one simple fact: that this was China, and students who got into college—regardless of what they did therein—were destined to pass.

Most were well-versed in this unwritten rule of the Chinese educational system: that passing the final is means for passing the class, regardless of attendance record.  But when suddenly I wrenched that single chance from their hands, they were forced to confront a much more grave predicament.  So the reaction I got from these students wasn't surprising.  They begrudgingly returned to class, most with a mixed demeanor of shock, embarrassment, hostility, and desperation.  After I explained, again, my rationale, each time with another third of the class watching, I thought I had finally put the issue to rest.

But like the blackouts that wreck unforeseen havoc on my living quarters, so too did that subset of students who one-after-the-other came to discuss the matter more fully at my house.  Unannounced and uninvited, they dropped by at all hours of the day and evening.  Most brought gifts, or the prospect of future gifts—a lavish dinner, a trip to the massage parlor, beautiful girls at a nightclub.  One came with a “translator”—one of the better students in the same class—and another with a Chinese friend of mine who thought he could use that relationship with me to improve his grade.

I surprised even myself by my own lack of sympathy.  I was ready to hardline to the death on this, what I considered to be the most basic requirement to ask of a student.  Without coming to class, there was no way to have learned anything I taught, so what could they possibly contribute to the exam?  I got all kinds of excuses for missing class—full-time jobs in other cities, experiments that lasted for months—but none of them got at the real issue.  Finally, I told them that if they could explain to me in English why they thought they deserved the chance to take the exam, I would let them take it.  None of them did.

Where it would have been much easier to give in, I stayed firm.  I lied at first, saying that it was a rule my boss had imposed, then finally owned up to it myself.  I wanted to teach them a lesson that I felt as graduate students they should have learned a long time ago.  It wasn't long before word spread and students in classes that weren't even my own began to find out.  Other students tried to petition for their struggling classmates—pleading with their own foreign teachers to get me to change my mind.  But my decision was final.

My goal as a teacher is to reward effort.  It doesn't bother me if a student's English level is not high so long as he or she makes some kind of an effort to improve—coming to class, following the lesson, asking questions if he or she doesn't understand.  My only hope is that the student's English level at the end of a semester is better than where it started.  It was clear from current performance, as well as looking at the grades from the past semester, that this wasn't the case for these students.  But all the while, I was beginning to doubt myself.

On the day of the blackout, I had already sunk into my own well of self-pity.  James caught me shirtless in my room, lying sprawled out on my bed and listening to Habib Koite at the highest volume my speakers could reach, the swoops and crashes of the African drum beats washing over my body like waves.  I told him that I wanted to cleanse my entire being, as if this music—other worldly as it sounded—could scald my skin down to its core and regenerate it anew.

I could hardly live with myself.  I was devastated by the belief that I had ruined these students' lives—that because of the stubbornness of my own principles, their paths could be unilaterally changed for the worse.  It didn't matter that I didn't believe they deserved a second chance.  They hadn't grown up in a culture and an educational system that enforced this way of thinking, so perhaps it wasn't fair that I was subjecting them to something so utterly foreign.  Their excuses would have been valid for most Chinese teachers, so why not for me too?

As the hour neared to when we would have to start lighting candles, there came a rap at my screen door.  By then the room was filled with a soft pale glow and most objects and faces were dimly distinguishable from one another, accented only by occasional movement.  I immediately recognized the figure at my door as my student, Susan.  Unlike my other flunkies, during the previous semester she had performed at the top of her class, but this spring I had seen her but a few times all year.  Despite my esteem for her as a student, I had an obligation to be fair.  I asked her friends in class to tell her that due to her absences, she would not be allowed to take the final exam.

She came to my house alone, a single silhouette in the door frame.  Outside, the sun had set, and already a grainy fog was filling in the sky like the backdrop to a film noir.  In her hands was a bundle of bananas—a bribe-of-sorts, but one that somehow felt more genuine than most.  Her eyes would hardly meet mine at first—oscillating between her shoes and the horizon in the distance behind my house.  Despite a cordiality to come in, she preferred to keep a certain distance.  As the others inside the house engaged in conversation, I went to greet her at the door.

Like most girls here, she wore plain clothes, no make-up, and kept her hair in a simple ponytail.  She began to explain the reason for her disappearance from class.  I was surprised by the degree to which she could still make herself understood in English, despite the long hiatus.  Her speech started slowly, then grew fast like a confession.  In the beginning of March, she got pregnant.  Her boyfriend, also a graduate student, was still legally single at the time.  A child out of wedlock in China was cause for scandal, so her parents wanted a marriage.  But first was the issue of the baby.

The couple discussed at length the measures they should take.  On the one hand, abortion was a relatively cheap and easy solution, but with it came a host of other moral dilemmas.  She herself came from a farming family, her parents the conservative devotees of Mao.  So the decision they made was to keep it, to bring the child into the world (her words).  And so, a marriage was in order.  Her parents made preparations for the shotgun wedding (my words).  Her boyfriend, as well as his parents, were amazingly obliging through the entire process, though everything about the pregnancy was kept under wraps.

The marriage was held in May, a small ceremony with just their closest friends and family.  Following that, she returned back to school, and began briefly attending class again—a story that checked out with my own attendance records.  But then there were the complications from the pregnancy.  Waking up feeling sick every morning, wanting to throw up.  Her parents wanted her to return home and not come back to school.  Not knowing the alternative, she agreed.

By now, the night sky was cascading hard across her face.  Activity along the small bypaths outside my house had slowed to a pitch.  I could tell by the creases in her eyes that Susan was on the brink of tears.  This was an incredibly embarrassing thing to admit to anyone, not least of which to a foreign English teacher.  She told me she would be taking the next year off from school in order to give birth, and afterward, might not come back to finish her degree.  If I had to guess, I would speculate that very few people knew about her predicament.  I asked her but one question: Why now?  She explained: I wanted to tell you earlier.  I just didn't know how.

As I looked out at the swirl of gray and black behind her, the entire scope of human experience became clear to me for a single instant.  Just one year earlier she was a child.  Now standing before me she was a mother-to-be, four-months pregnant, waiting for me to hand down my judgment.  She was just barely older than me but looked years younger.  I could only think of her in class.  Susan in the fourth row.  Susan in the stretchy dress, hands clasped around her stomach like a life preserver.  She was the first pregnant person my age that I had ever met.  Given the right circumstances, it could have happened to any one of us.  I took a long breath before responding.  Ok, I told her.  You can take the exam.

Great Expectations

About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote a letter to my future self.  On the top, written in plain script was the word “Expectations” accompanied by the date: January 23, 2009.  The content that followed was everything you might expect given the header: a list of all of the things I had hoped to accomplish and experience in my first year in Taigu.  Almost inconceivably, that first year is quickly coming to an end, and it is at this juncture that I was given the chance to revisit those goals.  Inside an airmail envelop mailed to my current residence came a single sheet of paper, which I would hardly have recognized had it not been indited in my own penmanship.  It would appear that I had written it at the tail end of the TESOL Winter Term, a requirement of the Fellowship that had us applying lectures and textbook lessons about how to teach English to actual students in a classroom setting throughout the month of January.  And though I still can't precisely place when and where it happened, I'm happy that this little reminder has reached me across the cosmos.  Like the kitsch of a childhood time capsule, or the relief of a secretly stowed twenty dollar bill, letters like this provide a rare opportunity to see the past in a new light.  Let's see how well those promises have stacked up in the last nine months:

• To make a good network of friends who speak Chinese and immerse myself in the culture. : In addition to Chinese friends who have been passed down from Anne and Nick, I've made quite a few on my own (mostly my own students) who I plan to continue to be close with heading into next year.  I would certainly maintain that I have immersed myself in the culture. 
• To work tirelessly to become as fluent as I can in Chinese. : Though I take twice-weekly lessons and study on my own, Chinese often takes a back seat to other activities.  My work ethic could certainly use some ramping up in this department.
• To fall into a good and effective teaching regiment when lesson plans come relatively easily and I find good ways to assess my students' learning. : Coming up with weekly lesson plans has gotten a lot easier, and I have been able to assess my students' learning in the degree to which they can comfortably communicate with me in English.
• To travel and visit at least three other countries / three other Fellows. : I've visited ten Fellows already (not including the other three in Taigu), and have been to exactly three countries (if, unlike most Chinese people, you consider Hong Kong as being separate from China).
• To write approximately 10-15 pages a week and keep up a blog that I am proud to share with friends and family. : This blog (for which I am proud to share) has remained relatively updated, but non-blog writing has taken quite a hit.  I've only written a handful of poems and a couple of non-fiction pieces since last August.
• Find a balance between alone time and making friends. : As with the majority of my life up to this point, I still struggle a lot with this one.  When I'm alone, I want nothing more than to be in the company of others, and in their presence, I feel guilty for not working on the things I need to be doing on my own
• Try my best to get along with / live with James. : Though, like any two roommates, we still have our ups and downs, one of the unexpected upshots of the Fellowship is that James and I have really grown to become good friends and even better roommates.
• Become friends with the other Fellows but don't rely on them too much. : I feel very fortunate that Anne and Nick (as well as Dave and Gerald) have become incredibly close friends here.  Though at the start, James and I were admittedly a little spoiled by our Senior Fellows, at this point we all have enough going on to keep ourselves busy independently from each other.
• To work out / exercise as much as I can. : I still exercise at least four times a week, and have been assisted greatly by our recent discovery of an actual weight room, previously only accessible to the school track team, but graciously opened up to us as foreign teachers.
• To try to inflict as little damage to my lungs as possible. : I haven't smoked a single cigarette despite the heavy prevalence in the culture here and I try not to exercise outdoors when the air is especially bad.  Still, I can't help the place where I live.
• To be more patient and become more comfortable with change / the unknown / spontaneity. : Though I would estimate that most friends wouldn't exactly call me "manic," I have been known to freak out in the presence of the unknown.  Living in China, and consequently having to deal with last-minute planning, everyday disappointments, and unexpected changes as simple facts of life, has made me infinitely more patient.
• To learn to cook a good number of Chinese dishes and be able to fend for myself. : This is one that I haven't made any headway on whatsoever, and will certainly be a project I take on more seriously come next year.
• To keep in touch with friends and family back home as best I can. : I can definitely do a better job in this department, despite it also being one of my newly-minted goals for the second semester.  I have a stack of letters that need mailed responses and a lot of Skype dates to catch up on.
• Pique my curiosity of other cultures. : This has been without a doubt one of the biggest take-aways of this experience so far.  Like my study abroad bout in Osaka, living away from home has only increased my appetite to see and experience other places and other cultures around the globe.