Letter: Over the Sea and Into a Rut

Dear Friends,

Your intrepid China correspondent is currently lost in the uncharted depths of the tertiary education system. I have realised that the only way to communicate with the natives is to first teach them all to speak english. One of the methods I use to achieve this is a weekly "talk show" in my classes. Each week I choose a different topic (marriage, music, etc), and we brainstorm a list of questions. Then the students discuss the topic in groups. Finally, three "experts" come to the front and the class fires questions at them while I listen and write down some advice about how to improve their oral english. I am more than halfway through the 16 week semester already, which means I can start counting down the weeks (and days) instead of counting up, and for that I am very very glad.

In my last letter I complained about my job. I said I wouldn't put up with it for much longer. Yet here I am teaching again, and I regret it.

At the start of this month, I realised that I hadn't actually done anything significant except work since coming back to China. I have classes from Monday to Friday, and it usually takes me Saturday and Sunday to prepare my lessons for the next week. If I lose my weekends, then I lose the opportunity to move beyond the borders of my narrow world of home and college. Thinking about how long it had been since I visited my friend Li Qingtao, who only lives half an hour away in Dalian, my isolation really struck me.

Wait, don't pity me yet—it really shouldn't take that long to prepare my lessons. I always thought that procrastination was the problem, but I finally realised that it's not quite so simple as that. Even when I force myself to concentrate, I tend to spend whole days just pacing back and forth thinking, thinking, thinking. I might have several ideas for activities, but I am reluctant to start working out the details too early in case I get a better idea, or in case I decide that the activity doesn't fit with my overall "vision" for the lesson. On one hand it's a kind of perfectionism, and on the other hand it's my way of solving problems where I can't set pen to paper until I have all the components of the lesson neatly ordered and arranged in my head.

But since realising that the problem lay with my work style, I have been able to make some changes. Over the last few weeks, I have managed to finish my lesson plans faster and free up enough time to visit "Tiger Beach" in Dalian, see a garden of cherry blossom trees, go for a nice walk in the hills, and finally catch up with Qingtao. Writer Lu Xun said: time is like the water in a sponge, there is always some left if you squeeze it.

An Easy Job?

According to consensus, the hardest working students in China are upper middle school students. The competition for a place at a university drives them to spend most of their time on study. In fact a lot of students who finally make it to university feel that it's time to slow down a bit and enjoy life.

And according to the students, university teachers have it pretty easy too. Just 12 or 16 hours of classes per week, compared to their banzhuren (main class teacher) at middle school who they probably saw several times each day. I think that the students are ignoring the difficulty of teaching at a university level, and also the expectation on university teachers to do research in their field. But having said that, some teachers have admitted to me that their job is not too time-consuming, so I suppose this view is true to some extent.

Another way that I have come to lead an increasingly sheltered existence in China is that I have all but given up trying to meet new people. When I first arrived I was eager to meet new friends from all walks of life. But once I had established a handful of close friendships, I lost interest in talking with other people. This is a pity, because one of my goals while living here is to learn more about chinese culture, and culture is people. When Liu Jun (the policeman who I recorded some english sentences for) invited me to drink tea with him, my first urge was to make an excuse. But then I thought about how long it had been since I had a conversation with somebody who wasn't a university student or teacher. So I had tea with him and, after hearing his stories about tea and his plans for international trade, I wasn't disappointed.

Chinese university students speak of "stepping into society" after they graduate. Although they are free to come and go from the campus (abiding by the 10:30pm curfew, of course), it does seem that they spend most of their time in the college. They sleep there, eat there, and buy their daily necessities from the campus supermarket. Most of the students in my college come from other cities, so they don't have any friends or relatives outside the campus. It really feels like a small community. In Australia, most students attend a college in their home city, and most live off-campus, so it's quite a different situation. In this regard, I think the chinese college system resembles the American system more.

The college has been a safe and secure place for me too. I have escaped the kind of horror stories that I have heard about certain privately run english schools in China: not being paid, having classes rescheduled at short noticed, being threatened with visa cancellation, and so on. I have had the opportunity to interact with students and colleagues without having to wonder what they want from me. But as I enter my second spring in China, and see the now-familiar jianzi appearing again, I feel that I have fallen into a routine. I am ready to step into society too.

Love Todd