This sums up so much

Here is a picture of Xiyangyang and HaiTaiLang (Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf) at Zhongshan Park last week.  Allie and I wanted to take a picture with them but it would have cost us a whopping 10 kuai to snap a photo with my favorite Chinese cartoon characters.

Then we turned around and saw them on a smoke break and being served strawberry ice cream by some little fellow extortionist.

My First Communist Holiday

Taken from The China Daily, "Model workers' receive honors in Beijing"

This weekend is the Workers' Day Holiday and we have Monday off from school.  Many other businesses and schools are closed between 4-5 days and I feel pretty ripped off.  This is not celebrating my labor, Communist Party.

I have also changed my weekend job schedule and now teach on Saturday mornings and afternoons, leaving my Sundays free (yippee!).  Otherwise, I've been pretty busy this week listening to my students' midterm exams, meeting with real(?) Canadians, and pretending I am in America by sitting at Starbucks.  Nothing terribly interesting, but I am also really tired right now... yawn.  Goodnight, residents of the free world.

Three day weekend

three day weekend...

three day weekend...

 three day weekend...

come faster, please!

Hello there, Spring

Yesterday afternoon I went over to Zhongshan Park with Allie to see the cherry blossoms which are now opening up.  It was a perfect day, 60 degrees with clear blue skies and a slight breeze.  It was also a Friday afternoon so there weren't too many people out there.

And by "not too many" I really mean this by China standards.  It was still super crowded by American terms and resembled DC during the peak times of the Cherry Blossom festival.  Another thing reminded me of DC too:

wedding photos with the cherry trees!  We saw several couples posing, but this couple was probably my favorite on so many levels.  That pink!  The poof!  The hair!  His bad mariachi band outfit!  Damn, like seriously.

Then there are the Chinese girls who take photos with the blossoms with little-to-no expression on their faces but with some important body placement.  Lots of leaning against trees and smelling the flowers, not to mention the couples wearing matching outfits in front of the trees.

When in Rome, right?  入乡随俗.

I also went out to dinner to celebrate my friend Anna (from Poland)'s birthday with some of her other friends.  We had some really yummy Korean barbeque and then finished it off with a XiYangyang cake.

We all went out to Le Bang for drinks and dancing, so I sent Tian Jian a text message and he showed up with his drunk friends.  It was a really fun night!  Here is a photo of Anna, Tian, Kana (from Japan), me, and Chris (from the UK). 

Overall, Spring is here!  It's finally here!  I could not be happier for its arrival.

The good and the bad

Follow-up to the Day of Mourning

As usual, the Chinese government always manages to make even the most solemn of days and turn it into a propaganda campaign.

Domestic media coverage has been tightly controlled, with reporters instructed to focus on the heroism of rescue workers and to avoid stories about the thousands of Buddhist monks who dug through debris or handed out food from the trunks of cars. 

(The New York Times' article can be found HERE.)

I'm not shocked that they did this, but I am still embarrassed and saddened that this happens in a country that I am living in and helping to educate.

In an interview on Wednesday, Woeser, an influential Tibetan blogger who is in frequent contact with people in the earthquake zone, said several monks told her that they had been ordered to leave Jiegu in recent days, although such accounts could not be immediately confirmed. 

Whenever the Tea Party "activists" or any other similar protest group in America claims to be suppressed by the government, they should be reminded that in other corners of the world there are more drastic measures taken to suppress any unsavory opinions and viewpoints.  Being in China (both times) has made me really proud to call myself an American and proud to be living in a country of freedoms.

OMG RU 4 REAL?!?! NOWAI

I taught my students slang this week using dialogues that Matt and I co-wrote this weekend.  Here are the dialogues that they had to read:

(calling on the cell phone)
A: What’s up?
B: Not much, you?
A: Nothing really, just hanging out with my friends.
B: Oh that’s cool.
A: Hey wanna meet up after class?
B: No, I can’t. I’m swamped with homework.
A: Bummer. I want to go to the new coffee shop. Catch you later!/ See ya!
B: Alright, later!

(at school after a test)
A: How was the test?
B: Oh my gosh, I think I bombed the writing section.
A: Seriously? You’ve been studying your butt off!
B: Yeah, I totally froze and forgot everything.
A: That sucks.

(after seeing a movie)
A: That movie was awesome!
B: Yeah it was pretty tight. / Yeah, it was really legit.
A: What did you think of the actor?
B: I thought he was really hot.
A: Truth, but the dialogue was pretty lame.

After hearing 55+ students repeat "that sucks!" and "seriously?" I realized that I might be teaching them to sound like valley girls and bros.  I nevertheless found this pretty funny and I think that they had fun learning more informal words rather than stuff from a formal textbook.

I also taught them about IM (they knew we didn't use QQ but thought we used MSN... weird, right?), AIM and Gchat.  I also listed out some nice little words for them to use when IMing me or their friends, such as nm, brb, h/o, ttyl, gtg, thnx, and jk.  Many of the ones that they use online are numbers.  For example, they type 886 because the numbers "ba ba liu" sound like "bye bye le."

What was even better was when I drew an upward arrow to explain the levels of laughter online.  I listed the ones I use most frequently: hehe, haha, HAHA, lol, lmao, and lmfao.  They have all sorts of weird ones here, including "嘻嘻“ (sounds like 'shee shee') which is somewhere between haha and HAHA to them.

One of my students was IMing me tonight and actually typed "ttyl" to me and I was so excited that he (a) remembered what I taught her on Tuesday and (b) put it to good use.  Success!  Being a teacher means finding fulfillment in the little things like this.

Tomorrow I will go see the cherry blossoms downtown with my friend Allie.  Hopefully I'll also get to meet up with Anna, a Polish girl I have met at my Chinese school, and go out.  I love warm spring weekends. 

Qinghai Earthquake

Today has been declared as the National Day of Grieving for the earthquake in Qinghai.  After class I went to visit my students' lobby coffee shop and witnessed them have a moment of silence.  It was really touching and I said a prayer for all the victims and victims' families of the earthquake.  Even Baidu (a music downloading site and google equivalent) and Google Music are shut off in silence to show their support for Qinghai.

So please take a moment out of your day to think (or pray) for the people of Qinghai , a region that most people didn't even know existed until this terrible disaster.

Fratting?

Is it considered fratting with the enemy if I hung out with the dog's owner?

I should give a quick update first about the chubby, gimp leg puppy though.  She is no longer tied up to the fence.  Apparently it was only for a day or two and lately she's been running around like before.  Hopefully they don't do it again, but they have put a makeshift collar on her made out of old plastic coated electrical wire.

After class today, I helped coach some of Joe's Tourism major students.  They are headed to Nanjing tomorrow to take part in a National Tour Guide Competition and have prepared these awesome speeches about various historical sties in China.  They were really sweet and I hope they win!

 Joe and I went to dinner at a restaurant across the street that I had never been to before.  We ordered so much food, including fish, eggplant, egg fried rice, and these strange cereal covered sweet potato balls.  I was feeling pretty guilty because I knew that Joe was treating me to dinner, but it turns out that the owner of the restaurant was his former student.  So we had a huge dinner for free and even got some leftovers to take home.  Sometimes I do love the whole Chinese 关系 ("relationship") concept.

My class fifteen is doing their "practical training" this week and are basically set up to say "Good morning/afternoon/evening" at the entrance of the Hotel Management building from morning to night.  They also have to bow at various doors and man a makeshift convenience store in the lobby.  We teachers have started to notice that each class is setting the bar higher and higher and I can only imagine what it's going to be like at the end of the semester.

This is my first class up to the challenge though and I am like a proud mama!  They have set up a cute little coffee lounge in the lobby (music was added a few weeks ago by another class).  I went to visit them this evening and bring them some snacks because I had way too much food from dinner.

On the way back, the dog ran towards me as always and I picked her up and brought her back to the shack she lives in.  After greeting the 阿姨 ("auntie") she invited me into her house and we sat down and chatted.  She showed me her collection of foreign bills and we ate oranges while talking about random subjects.  I was having a lot of issues understanding her husband (?) because of his accent so she ended up translating a lot for me.

And during this entire visit, her dog was sitting on my lap and not moving.  Then when I tried to leave, the dog tried to run after me and had to get chased back to her house.  Oh dear.  If she "mysteriously" disappears they will totally know it was me who stole her.

Oops.  Otherwise, I had a very busy, but normal day in China.  It is finally warming up and it was a solid 60 degrees today in the middle of the afternoon!

Identity crisis, the sequel

Today at lunch I met a Chinese English teacher who teaches most of my classes Hotel English.  He was really nice even though his English was spotty and probably worse than my Chinese.  I was glad to meet my Hotel English counterpart and I think he was glad to meet me because my students had been telling him about me.

I asked him what they thought of me, forgetting how blunt the Chinese can be at times, and was told that some of the students think that it is a "pity that [I] am not a blonde eyed, blue haired American girl."

Well, um, gee, thanks for the compliment?  

I understand that the students would ideally like a "blonde eyed, blue haired American girl," but I'd like to think that after my students' initial period of time when they were trying to figure out what exactly an Asian-American was, that they now see me as an American.  At the beginning, it was almost as if I was a lost Chinese girl who was shipwrecked on the far away island of Singapore, was shipped to America in a box by accident, and has finally returned to the motherland, the Middle Country, the Peoples' Republic of China.  Now my students forget I actually speak Chinese and have no questions that I am American.

At first I was asked things like "Why is your hair black?" and "Are your parents Chinese?" which seem pretty obvious to us, but to many Chinese people there is no concept of the hyphenated Asian-American.  I thought most of my students had gotten over this by now.

I guess they haven't. 

I'm giving my students the benefit of the doubt, though, since I do have so much direct contact with them and face-to-face time with me speaking American English and absolutely no Chinese.  The way I walk, dress, hold myself, and even write my number '6' (a constant war between me and my students) is completely different.  Maybe it was just this one teacher who did not expect the 'foreign teacher Alison' to look so Chinese.  Perhaps he himself has more prejudices than my students and would not learn English from me, but rather a white person even if they are an uncaring and overall crappy teacher.

These are the frustrations I have faced almost every day here.  I am an Asian-American.  I am Chinese.  I am a U.S. citizen, have voted in the past two elections, hold a drivers license, and have completed thirteen years in the American educational system.

The thing is that China is so very homogeneous.  There may be fifty-one minority groups, but most (92% according to Wikipedia) of the people you see are Han.    There is no Korean-Chinese or Canadian-Chinese.  Only Chinese.

The plus side is that there is a word in Chinese "华人“ (overseas Chinese) which indicates I am of Chinese decent, but my family settled in Singapore all those decades ago.  Step one, check.  Step two is to explain how I can be both American and Chinese at the same time.

Cue shrill sound of a bomb dropping and exploding.  

And that's where the logic ends.  So here I am, somewhere between fully American and fully Chinese to the, um, real Chinese?  Cool.  Thanks guys.  I appreciate it.  I'm just going to continue to teach you American English with some hopes that you too one day will go to America, and possibly even have your own little Asian-American children yourself.  That will be the day.