Early Impressions: Part II The Wider World

(First Written November 2016)

I feel my star may be on the rise for a couple of days ago on the spooky night of Halloween Callum and I were greeted warmly on the bus by some loquacious middle-schoolers. Most children in this part of China now have a certain level of English that far outstrips the abilities of their parents and many will shout Hello to you on the streets if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky they’ll shout foreigner (laowai) perhaps in the vain hopes that you had forgotten and will see fit to reward them for the service of reminding you about your Caucasian skin. These students were, however exceptionally talented and put a number of my university students to shame. We were having a very pleasant chat about our plans – them a party, me my bed - and feeling like there was nothing else to say I informed them that I taught at the university. There was a pause and, from the back of the group a lone voice uttered Stephen? And like a wave the recognition spread. Knowingly the others echoed Stephen, Stephen, this must be Stephen.

I might have been tired and this might all be a concoction of that steadily inflating ego but I am sure I never told them that my name is Stephen. In fact, a few of us give fake names when talking to strangers here for our own safety so I’m forced to conclude that the Stephen Legend is steadily growing. Duyun is still being built and the skyline is ever punctuated by the swinging arms of cranes building tower blocks of housing. I’ve developed a fantasy of old Stephen, wizened and frail returning one last time to his old home in China like Bilbo Baggins visiting the elves and seeing a 50 foot golden statue of his younger self immortalized for ever. Stephen Higham, the plaque will read So Tall, So Handsome.

The job and your reputation precede and follow you around here. Video phones are constantly present in our classes, we are recorded by them and watched on them, there is no point trying to hide from them. It is not uncommon that a student’s family are too poor to buy them glasses so one way that they might get around the problem of reading off the board is by sharing one pair of glasses between two or three, the glasses passed along like a cheeky hip-flask in the back row. The other way is that they take photos of the board on their phones. I’ve caught glances of myself in various positions, gesticulating emphatically before a board filled with English words and my own tawdry illustrations. The recordings are not deleted at the end of class.

Sam went to Guiyang one weekend and upon entering his class on Monday morning was confronted with cries of Where were you? Where did you go? Baffled, he asked how they knew that he had gone away. Someone the student replied, far more ominously than was perhaps intended took a photo of you. In the bus station. That someone wasn't even one of his students.

I hate it, Sam told me it’s like there’s no escape, it’s like having paparazzi following you around. Like being famous but with none of the good things, none of the money.

It is not all easy sailing in the celebrity spotlight. I might be more used to standing in front of a class but I am still performing to 50 students in an alien tongue and that certainly can be nerve wracking. I have always been a worrier. Some of my earliest memories are a very little Stephen worrying about where he put his 50 pence or how to get out of the tree in the garden and when I say worry, I mean agonise. Agonise as though life, death and the revolution of the Earth were at stake. I do it now, all the time, I sit up at night worrying about global warming or whether or not I’m happy and why I’m not happy and wondering if the reason I’m not happy is because of global warming or the fact that I worry so much. Aimee has been a great help in the moments when I start winding myself up. I sat in the office, many weeks later looking at third of the listening textbooks that I had ever marked a power-chord of self-loathing strumming with every wrong answer I read. This is all my fault, I thought and came out with a stream of paranoid waffle. I can’t do this, this is mad, I’m entirely unqualified for this job. She was able to talk me down until I opened up the next textbook and saw a perfect set of answers in lovely, neat handwriting so I can’t be failing all of them.

There are really nice benefits to being a teacher here too. For one thing the students are eager to befriend you and are even more eager to make you feel comfortable and welcome (outside of class.) Aimee broke something in her leg as a result of what I can only describe as a misguided attempt to exercise. She spent two nights in hospital and was accompanied at all times by two students on rotating shifts set by the university. 

I myself have befriended - entirely within the realms of the professional teacher-student sphere – two young men in my Listening Class 3. If I ask them to get a key for my classroom door (almost always locked when I’m meant to be teaching there) they will run to get it and recently they offered to buy me my water (I always keep a bottle of water on my desk during lessons as my students’ listening involves a lot of Stephen talking loudly and clearly). I let them buy it for me but insisted on paying them back. Ha ha said Daria (an English teacher in his own right who doesn’t always laughs but often says Ha ha) You foreigners are always drinking so much water! This is one of the strange, unexpected cultural differences that I have come across. Drinking water is one of my weird Western habits that I parade in front of my classes, sometimes to their audible amusement.

Another episode that revealed to me how out of touch I was with the Chinese youth involved a boy Allen. I have developed a routine in class of making sure that there is always writing to support the students’ listening as they find it difficult to connect the sound of words with their meaning but know the sight of them. This leads to a lot of chalk on my clothes and about six black-board cleans per lesson. One lesson I realised too late that someone had removed my chalk duster and so I took a small tissue from my bag and cleaned the board with that, leaving ugly smudges wherever it went. Half way through my fruitless task I was joined at the front of the class by this student who had whipped out a large cloth and scrubbed the board clean in seconds. Laughter rang through the classroom and like the yolo-er I am I joined in with a teacher-y chuckle that I made sure everyone could hear so that the power remained with me. 

I had assumed that this event was so funny because I had been trying to clean two sizeable chalkboards with one diminutive facial tissue but as my class filed out the next one filed in (Hi Stephen, Hi!) with the pronunciation teacher, David. I began to clean my board but he stopped me and murmured helpfully but entirely seriously in my ear No, this is not a job for you. This is the board monitor’s job. It was just one of those faux-pas, like drinking water (which Chinese people don’t do) or pulling the sides of your eyes out in a cruel mockery of the beautiful, oriental visage (which I certainly do not do). I am a teacher now and not only do I deserve respect, I am expected to command it like one commands a student to clean a board.

Early Impressions: Part I The Teaching

(Originally written November, 2016)

As an English as a Foreign Language Teacher (Or English as a Secondary Language Teacher to people who trained themselves in a different online course to TEFL) one of the most time-consuming parts of my life in China is the teaching. I have a part-time contract which affords me a lot of movie watching, novel writing and bumming about the flat time but in addition to my seven two-hour classes per week there is the energy that goes into marking, planning lessons, assembling slide-shows and agonizing with nerves over the minutia of communicating with people who have been taught English primarily by memorizing Shakespeare plays (accuracy of this piece of wisdom from the TEFL course may vary from student to student.)

My main responsibility in the Qiannan Normal College is a big one, I am the English Listening teacher of all 200-odd English major freshmen. I also teach half of them Extensive Reading. For seven weeks now I’ve been stumbling along amicably, though I hope not incompetently, I can see that I have come a long way. My first class was a nightmare, a turn up to school in your underwear, a singing a song at the end of About a Boy nightmare but really I can’t see how it could have gone any other way.

I came to China, with flatmate Callum, through a private company affiliated with the CEAIE called The China Teaching Experience. The flat fee at the start of the emigration process covered one-to-one support with the CEO Andrew, help navigating our way around the expensive and often unpredictable Chinese emigration process and TEFL training. The training was made up of two parts. First an online course consisting of eight modules and a tick-the box test which mostly assumed I would be staying in a different part of China and mostly assumed I would be teaching high school or primary school students. The second component was supposed to be two weeks of practical in-class training, observing teachers and getting experience placing ourselves in charge of class rooms. I spent those two weeks playing Lego Marvel Superheroes on the X-Box 360 and teaching myself how to make steak pie (badly.) I waited and waited for an update that wasn’t coming about my Chinese visa.

In the English Department the university is lucky enough to have eight foreigners teaching. Callum and I from The CTE; Lettice and Aimee from The British Council, Sam and Ethan from the Peace Corps and a married couple named Cliff and Rebekah from Georgia who have lived in Duyun for four years now and studied Chinese at the university before taking on teaching positions. Aimee had the experience of taking a practical training course called CELTA before applying through the British Council and Lettice has traveled the world and is naturally self-assured as a teacher should be. Cliff and Rebekah know the culture, the customs and the language. Ethan and Sam, most impressively of all were given a three-month training session in Chengdu with time in class and Mandarin training. Callum and I have our online, multiple-choice-examined course.

I don’t want to dwell on my first lesson. It certainly taught me that it is impossible to adequately prepare for something when you don’t know what needs preparing. On that first day I ran about twenty minutes short of the hour and forty minutes that I was supposed to fill. The first ten minutes were consumed with my failing to operate the computer and power-point (turned off at the wall) and the last with my belligerently uncommunicative students not asking me questions when I had clearly written in my lesson plan “Students will ask questions about me and life in Scotland.” I even forgot to take the register.

Following that awful first lesson I sat, shell shocked in the Foreign English Teachers’ office staring into the middle distance. Aimee and Ethan were about to begin their Oral lesson which included a similar personal introduction section to mine. How did it go? asked Aimee and with the horrified aura of a trauma survivor I replied They don’t talk, they never talk. And the lesson! It was 20 minutes short because they just don’t talk! Luckily this was enough warning for her to begin thinking about some additional games and exercises to fill the time if her lesson ran short too.

I was able to talk to a number of my co-workers over the course of that afternoon and they each had some well-chosen words of comfort. You’ll have a horrible first week Sam assured me, You just will. They’re not used to foreigners and since most of them are girls they won’t be used to the fact that you’re a man either. Certainly this is true, my students come mostly from rural backgrounds and apparently most rural parents in this part of the world have stricter control over their progeny than we are used to. Hence the discovery of B. O. Y. S. doesn’t come until they move away from the constraints of home to arrive in university. It’s like middle-school here, I remember Ethan telling us. Comfortingly enough he also later told me that my first class, class Number 4, are exceptionally shy and that even with a year’s teaching experience under his belt he had difficulty getting them to talk.

Shyness is not the only reason that a class might refuse to answer you. They’re all about getting things right, Cliff told me. In class, all throughout their education they’ve been told by their teachers that this is something they need to learn and this is right and this is wrong, they’re terrified of being wrong. What’s more there is a high chance that your students simply do not understand you. Exceptional readers and proficient writers as they are, these students are the result of a system wherein vocabulary is memorized and shouted back and forth. Memorizing Shakespeare’s plays is considered to be the best way to learn English because, after all is Shakespeare not the master of the English language? (Again, this fact was brought up in the TEFL course and I’ve found many of its nuggets of wisdom to be lacking in the authenticity department.) For these reasons I came to forgive myself for my atrocious first class (though I would understand if my students have not) and I came to see that my co-workers really are the best resource available.

The classes have calmed down in my company as they’ve gotten more used to me and their work has noticeably improved over the course of these seven weeks. I also think that they have become more attuned to my accent which is more or less the only thing I have to offer over a fully qualified teacher. That said, the moment I realised that I was probably going to be OK over here for my year abroad was when I sat down in front of my second listening class and a voiced called out You are really handsome!

Why yes I am, and we’re going to get along just fine. We have, too. Class 03 are brilliant. I suspect the cat-caller, was King, a shameless and enthusiastic student. Back then she was just a voice in a crowd.

I learned quickly to adapt my classes, living in adamant fear of one of my classes running short again and the agonizing embarrassment that that entails. By my third listening class I was using all of the tricks that my co-workers had told me about. To my introductory lecture about myself I had added two slides, one for each of my sisters. It will be the easiest class you teach Ethan imparted They just like looking at pictures of white people, we fascinate them. Elder sister Lucy, my students now know is a fencing instructor. She likes physical activity and (controversially enough) spending time with her friends. Annie is another wacky character who likes reading books and going hiking. She is studying to be an architect. 

They’re shy so they won’t like talking about themselves Sam had told me Get them to work in pairs and then ask them to introduce each other. Strangely enough, the three students that I asked to introduce their partners refused and talked about themselves instead. They keep you on your toes.

Despite shameless filibustering and excessive slow talking my third class also had a baggy ten minutes before the break so I followed Amy’s advice Games, play lots of games. They love Pictionary. So Pictionary we played. I went to the whiteboard and, knowing how exciting they found kilts I etched a hairy highlander on the whiteboard and drew an arrow pointing at his sporran. The class roared with laughter and silence fell. So, what is it? I asked. A girl nodded, yeah she knew It’s, I forgot the word. It’s the skirt. Fair enough, I wrote the word kilt on the whiteboard. Who is next? I asked, there was some twitching and some murmuring. I rephrased Who would like to draw something on the board for us next? One girl, clearly the resident artist (I now know her well as Judy) was elected to participate by the gazes of her peers. Giggling she drew a little bespectacled man with a quiff and a tartan kilt. Stephen in a kilt, it wasn’t quite the leap of imagination that I had been hoping for but at least we all got to laugh warmly together at the notion of teacher wearing a skirt.

The girls can be utterly shameless in their collective catcalling in direct contrast to their manner when asked a question individually before the class. They have established a curious mythology around myself and the Peace Corps boys to the point where we barely recognize their descriptions of us. I think in their minds there’s no difference between Sam, Ethan and Stephen and One Direction or George Harrison, Paul McCartney and John Lennon (I guess that makes Callum Ringo.) They have their little sayings about all of us as though concocted simultaneously through a Hive mind. So Tall, So Handsome! They say of me, Stephen You Are Cute, So Tall So Handsome. Apparently this chant is an inherited one as Ethan was once So Tall, So Handsome. Now that he has grown his hair and beard he is So Handsome, An Artist! The students insist against all contradiction from him that he is An Artist whether or not he has skills with a paintbrush or guitar. Sam, much to his bewilderment is So Shy, So Handsome. I don’t get it, he told me I just talk to them normally like Ethan does but they insist I’m shy! Still, If I could be known as shy and handsome; a handsome artist or tall and handsome the latter isn’t a bad one to be. It plays havoc on the ego.

Chiang Mai Chatter

Thailand is to China as Spain is to Great Britain. It’s where the richer families go on holiday, it’s where the retirees go to live out their golden years. Due to the low income of many Chinese citizens, especially in the area where we live, if they leave China at all in their lives then it will be to go to South Korea or Thailand. The Qiannan Normal University must have a partnership with a university in Thailand because a couple of students who were lucky enough to study abroad studied there. My impressions of Bangkok were not stellar, it was dusty, polluted and the roads were packed but if I ever got the opportunity to retire abroad, Chiang Mai would be a decent choice of location.

The ex-pat community is bustling there, a couple of our coworkers - a couple - escaped the ice-chill of a Duyun Winter to stay in the Chiang Mai area over Christmas. They rented an apartment, enjoyed chilling by the pool with relaxing music and enjoyed the relative (to Guizhou) luxury of a Thai hospital as they brought a new baby into the world (word up to Sadie Grace). They weren’t the only foreigners there either. Our hostel was co-owned by a Canadian, a Brit and a local Thai partner. The manager who we got to know the best was the Canadian, a nice man who lived what looked like a completely carefree life. He knew everything about the local area, right down to which bar Callum could be kicked out of for asking the wrong person about weed. He lived the life that all Suits pertain to dream of, shorts, sandals, beard, pot belly and all.

For us, perhaps the most incredible thing about being in South East Asia was the ease of life and nowhere was this clearer than in Chiang Mai. The tourism industry is perhaps the biggest source of income for the area. Anyone who can scrub a shoe or drive a red bus is benefiting from the constant stream of travellers. As a holidaymaker you are spoiled for choice with hostels, bars and transportation to your next destination. We were taken aback when we made it into CM in the late afternoon of our second day out of Duyun, walked to the nearest travel agent’s and got three tickets for the hotel, bus and boat trip from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang in Laos leaving the very next day. The hostel itself was loaded with enough flyers for local attractions to keep even the most picky traveller busy for weeks. And, for the lazy they simply had to ask any receptionist on duty what to do the next day and they would have a day of activities and transportation booked within the next ten minutes plus discount thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of opportunities and phone numbers. The hostels were allowed to offer discounts to customers as a kind of finders fee, you were rewarded for being lazy. What a country - what a depressingly desperate and exploited people. Hail Britannia.

The temperament of Chiang Mai is far more relaxed and cool than its energetic sister, Bangkok. Being further North, the sandal-melting heat is replaced with a modest breeze and cosy, shorts-friendly warmth. The urban area is nestled neatly behind three sides of a square moat which makes navigation easier for the hapless traveller, just go that way until you reach water and go round until you see something you recognise. There are also religious sites a-plenty for the enthusiastic temple-hopper. One of the best days we had together featured a walk from the hostel in the direction which was vaguely opposite to the moat. Each street corner had some attraction or other, from strange, trinket baring museum to majestic golden Buddhist temples.

One of the most striking things about these temples, besides their extravagant number was the extravagance of their architecture and interior design. After the wonder wore off at the sight of the stone exteriors, wrought into such unbelievable designs one was then taken aback by the munificent Buddha head which stretched for feet upon feet up into the ceiling. The chamber would have been crammed with wandering tourists were said interior not so massive. The other thing that was massive was the lavish donations box which would have comfortably fit a Callum and a Stephen. It shadowed over what, to my foggy memories looked like tiny battered suitcase with a slit in the top, plain and inconspicuous in contrast to its lavish companion. The suitcase was for the money to donate to the poor, the donations box was for money to go to the temple. Victor Hugo could have filled a good thousand pages with my thoughts on that. The other thing about the Chiang Mai temples which rubbed me up the wrong way was the men’s pavilion - no chicks, it demanded, they dirty. I did go in, but on principle I thought it was shit. We had coffee and I wrote postcards to console myself.

Look, a mango tree.

We found a lot of good spots to relax in Chiang Mai, it came at the midpoint of our holiday and after many days of flights, cruises and bumpy bus rides in ovens it was nice to put a few days aside for nothing. There is a large cluster of hostels and restaurants near to the moat and we found it easy to locate numerous spots to enjoy drinks and Pad Thai. One of the nicest places we found was a garden cafe sheltered by overhanging trees. It also had a comfortable hammock perfect for reading the Kindle and overhearing every word of your friends’ intense conversation. The coffee in Thailand is great, especially after living in China. Of course South East Asia is a hot-spot for coffee production, Cambodian blends are delicious. There was even, and I was amazed to see this, a Starbucks 3 stories high in the square. I visited for the sake of novelty (I hadn’t seen one in four months) and was happily reminded what it felt like to spend three pounds on a cup of muggy brown water. I didn’t go back. Well, I did enter the Bangkok Starbucks but I really needed to use the facilities.

Thailand is also a great location to receive a Thai massage. I went along one day to get my feet done which was extremely pleasant, like walking on marshmallows. I think I made the right decision too as Callum and Aimee emerged from their beds with the look of shell-shocked bombing survivors. My rule is, don’t touch me above the kneecaps and we’ll get on fine. If more people in the world followed my rules it would be a far more boring, introverted and safer place. The following day I went back to our friendly masseuse for a foot scrub. I needed it, Trump had just moved into the White House and was waging his one-man war on intelligence and common sense.

A major part of the hosteling experience is getting to meet new people, whether you want to or not. Even I, who could quite happily remain silent for a good month and a half, got to speak to a few new people. During each stage of our journey we met an interesting person travelling which who conveniently fit into three separate posts. As we were travelling in a group of three we would often end up sharing a room with one outsider. In Chiang Mai we met, lets call him, Harriet. Harriet had left university in the States and was going to take up a position in a financial firm in New York but he was taking six months out to see the world before sticking his nose to the grindstone. He was nice, an ex-American Football player, casual weed smoker and bore a resemblance to Tom Hardy. A less grizzled Tom Hardy, perhaps. He was placed in our room and on his first night was regaled by Callum about the merits of recreational marijuana imbibement. He invited himself along on our adventures for a couple of days and no-one minded too much, Aimee who is a fan of the American University lifestyle was positively thrilled to have an insider to talk to about it with.

The Chiang Mai area has a number of beautiful, natural sites turned into fiendishly chargeable tourist hot-spots. We visited a deep lake surrounded on all sides by heavily excavated cliff faces. The place had deck chairs, an expensive cafe and a cliff for jumping off. It had also, amusingly, been named The Grand Canyon, though I’ve seen grander, even if it was only pictures on a Google search. It amounted to little more than an outdoor swimming pool but Callum, Aimee and Harriet did get to jump off the cliff. I got to eat watermelon and struggle with Terry Pratchett’s convoluted prose style.

Chiang Mai is the home of the Doi Suthep, a vast hill which would take the best part of a day to climb. It is topped with a spiritual temple/ visitor centre and Harriet recommended we go there to watch the sunset. We took one of the red busses, like taxis but with fewer seat-belts and available to any number of strangers travelling in a similar direction. As with any of the services in this part of the world, the price was open to negotiation so we were lucky that Harriet was not the sort of man to take shit from a red bus driver. Our journey to the temple was winding, fast and uncomfortable but it was preferable to the journey back. Our driver, who had made us wait for about twenty minutes until his cab was full (it was the end of the day after all) stopped half way down the hill on the side of what amounted to a pavement-less dual-carriageway. “This is where the real view is!” He told us. “Get out, come and see!” Something smelled fishy so we just stayed in the bus until he gave up trying to wheedle more money out of us and we went back into the city.

On our final night, once Harriet had departed, we decided to go to the safari. The location had come highly recommend and even though we weren’t quite sure what the place offered we hired a minivan and it drove us far out of the city to the safari. Much like Disneyland or any other family day-out centre it was packed with statues, entertainers and that eerie sense of falseness. There were shows all around including a rodeo-style event in the main courtyard. The Thai performers threw historical accuracy to the wind combining traditional Eastern dancing women with lasso-wielding, stetson-wearing blokes. One of them even got to ride a horse, I think he was in charge. The fire displays and cracking whips were almost too terrifying to bare. The performers were not separated from the audience by anything other than a few feet so one was made hopelessly aware of the potential for any small child to wrestle themselves free of their parent’s arms and find their way in front of a disfiguring danger.

As with any attraction featuring performing animals the Safari seemed quite appealing on paper. I had my phone out and was excitedly recording the fact that Aimee, Callum and I still had faces, that we were sitting in an audience and that we were about to watch a lion show. When said lions were brought out, however looking emaciated, threadbare and forced to do humiliating tricks for scraps of meat I put the camera away, thinking that I’d really rather no one knew that I had financially supported the creatures’ evidently unpleasant lifestyle. The best part of the experience was the actual safari. We were packed into plastic chairs on charming busses and we got to squint out through the dark night at zebras, giraffes and all manner of furry beasties. We bought vegetable to feed them but I got a bit overexcited throwing them unsuccessfully to some far-off bears and didn’t have any left when we came up close and personal to some deer and a zebra who was eating out of people’s hands. It’s like the old Aesop’s Fable of the boy who threw away his carrots and didn’t have any left to feed a zebra which he wanted to do. It’s uncanny, actually.

Chiang Mai also offers tourists the opportunity to watch people beat the ever-living shit out of each other in a local form of boxing. Every day matches were advertised with faces of people you’ve never heard of plastered on flyers around the city. We went along one night because we were in Chiang Mai and it’s a thing that you do when you’re in Chiang Mai. The whole event was quite impressive with live music playing during each fight and crowds of loud people getting steadily drunker match after match. The music was played with a type of reed-instrument that sounds a bit like the thing you’d expect a snake-charmer to play so it all felt very cultural. I enjoyed the not-so-open bar and laughed about how seriously everyone was taking the over-glorified punch ups much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a sweaty American who was appreciating the artistry on display. In the end the night was cut short because a fighter was knocked unconscious. I had a headache in the morning and it served me right.

 One of my favourite memories from Chiang Mai involved a group of noisy, inconsiderate youths and Aimee and Stephen not enjoying conversation about sex and drugs taking place loudly outside of their thin bedroom walls. We had come back from a day of something and aforementioned crowd had set up camp in the restaurant area right next to our bedroom window. Aimee and I had tried to relax in our beds but the noise was unbearable so we decided to sit on the patio outside the main entrance. I left my sandals in the room because I didn’t intend to be walking very far. Aimee called her mother and I relaxed with a book or some YouTube videos (that detail has unfortunately been lost to history.) A good hour passed and there was no change in the volume of the party so we stayed. It was irritating but we dealt with the inconvenience stoically. The hours kept passing, however and the bawdy conversation got, if anything, even louder. Eventually I vented some frustration by emphatically lying that if it didn’t stop I would be complaining tomorrow, moving hostels and asking for my deposit back. Immediately our Canadian host shot out of the front doors and told the group off loudly and without room for question. (He was clearly well practised in the art.) Aimee and I realised that the party would soon be leaving the comfort of the restaurant and would see us sitting there, the only people who could have complained. We ran out the gate, down the street and went for a nice, brisk walk through the city at night. We were like little kids running away from bullies because they had got them into trouble with the teacher. And I still wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Chiang Mai is truly worth your time. The hosteling experience wouldn’t be complete without friendly cities like Chiang Mai to soak up your time. There’s plenty of bars and clubs for late night revellers and plenty of hotels, museums and temples for the more distinguished travellers. It served us well for a good six days but we could have been contented staying there for even more time. Next up… (hopefully not in three months…) Laos.

The Guizhou Experience - CEAIE Feedback

Me Being Teacher-ey

 I was asked to feed back on the experience of working in Guizhou Province for the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE) outlining the good things about working as a foreigner in this part of the world. I was asked to keep it positive so this isn't the whole story but there was plenty to write about. Here it is:

"My name is Stephen Higham and I have been teaching in Guizhou Province for the past 8 months. I teach in the Qiannan Normal College of Nationalities which has been a rewarding and exciting experience. Perhaps the best thing about teaching in this region is the amount of opportunities there are for a foreigner. It seems as though each month brings me the chance to do something new and interesting. I have sung in concert to around 1000 audience members, had the chance to travel to different areas and lecture about British culture and I have appeared in an episode of Chinese television. All of this is in addition to teaching 200 Freshman students, it has been a joy getting to know a number of them well.

I have been treated very well by the university and its staff. We are invited to banquets, provided with extra money to buy lunch on campus and we have also made friends with a number of our Chinese coworkers. It feels great to walk around campus and be greeted happily by students and teachers alike. We are truly a part of the faculty.

The Guizhou landscape is incredible - the dramatic, rolling hills have proved unforgettable since we drove through them when we first arrived - and the fledgling “International City” of Duyun is no exception. Whilst it is very interesting to live in a city that doesn’t have a Starbucks there is no lack of things to do here. During our first week living in Duyun, a student took us on a tour of the city, through the underground supermarket up to a monastery on a hill, still in the process of being built. A monk invited us to stay for tea and chat. This was one of the first instances when we realised how hospitable some of the local people are, even with a language barrier in place.

Duyun is just small enough that one can feel as though they are a part of a community. I love coffee and have frequented most of the coffee shops in the city, there are waiters and waitresses in all of them who are pleased to see me when I come in. They remember my regular orders and are keen to share what little English they have with me and I am happy to share my minuscule amount of Chinese with them. I also sometimes see students walking around the city who are always very excited to tell me about their days. On our street there are a number of business owners; dumpling vendors, stationary shop workers and restaurant owners who are overjoyed to have regular foreign customers. It has been an important part of creating this home-from-home.

The Guizhou experience is a great opportunity for English teachers. What there is here in challenges is made up for in opportunities and a strong sense of Chinese hospitality. It’s not hard to see why there is a small but strong community of laowai who have made this area their home."

Callum Being Teacher-ey

Later I received a reply from CEAIE asking me to outline more specifically my experience of the university in a paragraph. I thought I had so I just plucked the university references and rearranged them like this.

"The Qiannan Normal College has proved very hospitable. During our first semester I taught Listening, Reading and spoken English to Freshmen students which was a challenge but not too difficult. The teachers at the university are very welcoming and have given me support when I asked for it. For the most part, however lessons are left solely up to the teacher who has a great deal of freedom in the classroom. I mostly work from textbooks which were provided by the university which add structure to the syllabus. There is also a good deal of opportunities available for us, working here. We have been offered the chance to make extra money through the university working in kindergarten, as personal tutors, as lecturers and as television extras. Staff are also given extra money on touch-cards to help pay for their meals which are available on campus from a great number of high quality restaurants and stalls."

What fun.

Gander at Guiyang (Not a Male Goose, the Other Meaning of the Word)

It had been announced that the weekend would be extended in honor of the Chinese Tomb Sweeping Festival. Last minute announcements about our schedules had become par for the course in our China experience. During Semester 1 we were given a week's holiday after only a few lessons and about a fortnight later we took another week off in honor of Sports Week. The holiday announcements follow a tradition of being rumored, being implied, being suggested at and then officially announced about 20 hours before a brand-new class needs to be written for Saturday which we work on to make up for missed lessons on Monday. It keeps you on your toes.

Tomb-Sweeping Festival is a sacred time for the Chinese people and a time for family and so most of the students whose relatives live in nearby towns took the opportunity to spend the long weekend with their relatives, ceremonially sweeping and decorating their deceased friends and ancestors' graves. There were a few students (and foreign teachers) who did not live close enough to their dearly departed' graves to make the journey home worth their efforts, or funds. For us, the long-weekend was going to pass by in a very similar way to our regular weekends; for Stephen, coffee and lie-ins (the two potentially being connected); for Callum, cigarettes and music blasting from Apple, standard issue earphones; and for Aimee socializing and presenting a well-loved face to the community. It was a nice surprise when opportunity came knocking on the door of the Foreign Teachers' Office. It was, in fact Qihan knocking. And his name is pronounced chee-haun.

English-named Caesar, Qihan had become a familiar face in the Foreign Teacher's office. I knew him best as the “Monitor” of Class 1 – the student-teacher go-between. Caesar is striking for several reasons. Physically he towers above the other students, being just a little taller than me. Caesar also stood out because of the amount of effort that he put into class and his extra responsibilities as Class monitor. He has a very distinct concentration-face which I had seen many times in his first semester as he translated my words into Chinese and then mentally translated his response from Chinese into English. Caesar is probably the most attentive monitor. Aimee had noticed that if she made an offhand comment in class about how (for example) it would be helpful if some students maybe bought notebooks to be their homework books, then the next week every student in the class would have a brand-new jotter sitting in front of them. He came to me, once, after one of my earliest lessons to ask for constructive, verbal feedback about his class' performance and how they could develop in the future. As an untrained improviser who had made it through five weeks in the job by the absolute seat of his pants I couldn't conjure any feedback more helpful than "Do your homework" but I did arrange some special office hours just for Class 1 - a unique opportunity for them to enjoy some out-of-class casual chatter with me. Given that casual chatter with me can be a strenuously awkward experience, language barrier notwithstanding, it was perhaps just as well that this special occasion was only attended by four students - Caesar among them.

It is not unusual for us to spend time with certain students outside of the classroom. Caesar had once arranged for some of the foreign teachers to spend an evening with some of the freshmen. No doubt encouraged by the event’s success Caesar was in the staffroom to invite Aimee and I on a trip to Guiyang, the major neighbouring city, for the long weekend. Agreeing to go was an easy choice. Caesar organised our trains, the hotel and our daily activities. After visas and busses and arguments during the South-East Asia trip this weekend break was looking to be very relaxing

Guiyang is a city of grey. That weekend the sky was fogged over with a cocktail of exhaust pollution and mist. The concrete of the streets, the overhead motorways and the parks cast a monochromatic stupor over the senses. Our hotel was situated 14 floors above an Orwellian courtyard surrounded by 30 stories of windows. It was impossible to shake the feeling of being watched. An unnerving yet soporific atmosphere lollops over the urban wasteland of Guiyang. There is strong evidence to suggest that the city is full of people – the skyscrapers of housing, the monstrous mega-malls - and yet whilst walking along the streets one rarely comes across another lonely, travelling soul. The parks are lovely though, it turned out that everyone was visiting the parks.

The students took us to two different parks and it would look very professional if I could recall either of their names. The first park we visited constituted a whole day out in itself. We went relatively early in the morning to beat the amassing hoards. There were lots of things to see. First we took a walk up a steep mountain path to visit some temples. The locals were placing burning incense before statues and carvings reverentially. The sight and smells were pleasant and suitably “efnic” for the satisfaction of these foreigners but the scene was somewhat undermined by the ubiquitous Guizhou HAAAWK and spit which we cannot escape, no matter how far we run. As pellets of spittle and phlegm rained down on this sacred mountain we also took interest in the great number of wild monkeys swinging from the trees and the railings of the pathway. The monkeys had a favourite pastime – showing off to the park visitors; a common problem of being antagonised by said visitors and a staple diet of empty Oreo boxes.

We spent a couple of pleasant hours rowing on a lake in a perilously capsize-able boat. For the sake of balance, I had to sit dead centre on the back bench which was a shame because it may have looked to the misguided observer as though I was not doing my fair share of rowing, spending the time nattering with Aimee. This couldn’t be further from the truth as balance was my chief, altruistic concern.

In case you are ever in Guiyang, looking for a way to pass the day I should also mention that there is a zoo in the park. We visited it. There were animals.

Our second full day was also fun. As an average-average large man from the UK I have found shopping for clothes and shoes to be difficult in my new home town. Lettice and I once spent a whole afternoon visiting every shoe-shop in Duyun before finding – miraculously – the only pair of trainers that fit me in the whole of China (allegedly.) I felt that the trip to Guiyang would be well spent visiting one of the aircraft-carrier malls to update my scruffy wardrobe. It would be a treat for the students as much as me. Probably. Possibly. Perhaps it was a little selfish to ask some students to help me fulfil one of the basic tenets of adulthood – buying oneself clothes that fit – but as none of the three had been to the city before they didn’t necessarily have a better idea of what to do. What’s more the notion of helping the foreign baby-man appealed to their deep-seated Chinese urge to protect and nurture their guests (those hospitable Chinese people are the ones who don’t react to foreigners in their midst by HAAWKing and spitting at their feet.)

The second park that we visited in Guiyang reminded me of the Royal Botanical Gardens with its long walkways and stunning, over-priced cafes. We took a leisurely stroll around the lake, almost walking along an enticing footpath before the sign cautioning the presence of deadly snakes spooked us and we turned back. One of the attractions in the park was a traditional, Chinese garden. As we waked over arched bridges and under attractive canopies, by still rock pools and running waterfalls Caesar asked whether there were any significant differences between British parks and Chinese ones. The traditional Oriental Garden was lovely so he was probably feeling a strong sense of patriotic pride in the Zen scene before us. I considered his question and realised that in the past decade and a half I had not been to a park that didn’t have, somewhere, an oriental rock garden installed that was not equally, if not more representative of China than this one in China. Much like the burrito, the Zen garden is one item that has been so successfully appropriated by the global culture that this Chinese rock garden was in fact making me homesick for the nostalgic memories of its counterpoint in Edinburgh. I thought it might be too difficult to express the complex irony in simple, learner-friendly English so I resorted to using a classic student answer to a question about the difference between the Chinese culture represented in Disney’s Mulan and real-life Chinese culture. Some same, some different.

The Foreign Language Teaching job offers a lot of interesting opportunities. Our role on campus is somewhere between “scary Chinese teacher” and humble student. For a few of the students who are closer to us it’s a pseudo-elder sibling relationship which means that we are sometimes presented with opportunities like this to spend time with them outside of the workplace. I’m sure that each of our three student companions benefited from the experience by developing their spoken English skills and we enjoyed getting to learn some new things about Chinese culture. Also, I got some new outfits.

Banging on about Bangkok

Intrepid Exploration

The first half of our holiday itinerary read; from Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Laos back to Chiang Mai and then again to Bangkok. For the sake of concision and a streamlined narrative (jajaja) I'm going to boil my thoughts on the illustrious land of Thai... land and present half of them in this post before deeply analysing the passing thoughts and fleeting fancies that I experienced in Chiang Mai.

Bangkok is one of those cities you've heard of due to its undeniably funny name (remove the g and add a space and it becomes Bank OK, tee hee.) Host city to The Wolfpack in Shakespearian mega-hit The Hangover 2 and the location of numerous colourful characters like those Lady-boys its reputation precedes it and, in some ways it lives up to it.

I'm not a traveller who engages much with his surroundings on a book-learned level. I don't feel much need to visit prominent sites or holy temples. I don't even learn the names of streets, I more follow other people or build up a mental map in my head based on my wanderings.* It is lucky, therefore that the tourist zone in this town is one long and bustling street. We managed to book both of our hostels just off of this street, it contained an Indian restaurant that made one of our number sick and the bar where, weeks later we would have an explosive argument and stop talking for days. Burger Kings and Seven Elevens jostle for attention next to charming independent Thai restaurants (owned by French ex-pats) and stunning Hindu temples. At one end of this street is the illustrious public park which played host to an international fair of stunning breadth and ambition, on the other end is the Bangkok Seashell Museum. Who, indeed, could ask for anything more?

We stayed in a different hostel each time we visited Bangkok. The first is called The Puck Hostel and it entirely lives up to every cliche you could hope for from a Hostel. Blond Europeans lounge around on beanbags in the foyer, chattering in English about how cultured they are, how travelled they are and how attractive they are. Everyone you see is wearing beige shorts and looks as though they haven't washed their hair properly in several months. The rooms offer massive bunk beds with the blessed luxury of hangings that afford you at least a modicum of privacy as you are sharing your room with six strangers each of whom will take eye-contact to mean "I am very interested in your travels, your culture and your slammin' bod." There was a couple staying in our room even though they weren't supposed to be together. If they weren't a couple then I am forced to conclude that the man had accidentally dipped his hand in superglue before offering to help dust chalk off of the woman's right buttock.

The other hostel we found ourselves in was The Smile Society. We were asked not to take any pictures inside this hostel as a couple years earlier the taking of photographs inside a Bangkok hostel had been instrumental in a terrorist bombing plot. With this comforting notion in mind we trekked up four flights of stairs to find our room. FUKKINELL, Callum observed when we opened the door. It was tiny, much like a broom-cupboard with two bunk beds squeezed into it. As Callum pointed out in three loaded syllables there was not very much space which would hider our ease of movement. This wasn't a problem, in my opinion as my bed turned out to be among the most comfortable of the beds that I slept in during that holiday. The toilets in the Smile Society were, I might add exquisite. Due to an unfortunate lapse in brainpower I had the singular opportunity to experience a shower in both a male-designated and a female-designated shower cubical. I'd say the the women's showers were a little nicer. The only thing about the Soc that I found peculiar were the breakfasts - a boiled egg, a blueberry muffin, a piece of toast with butter and a hot-dog sausage. I'll allow you to ponder that for a moment.

It was in the blazing heat of an equatorial Winter that Callum and I went for our first explore. We made it to the end of our side-alley and immediately recognised the need to reacquaint ourselves with some air conditioning. We entered a Seven Eleven and received a blast in the faces from the past (although that may have been the aforementioned, conditioned air.) If there is a contender for "happiest time in my life" then the medal has to go to the Japan holiday in 2015. The streets were clean, the company was good, the country was welcoming and there was convenient food available in Seven Elevens on every street corner. The smell sparked a synesthetic flash-back to those days a year and a half earlier and I was washed through with a sense of calmness. This was all very familiar, after four months in Duyun we suddenly had access to such luxuries - working refrigerators, shop workers with a basic knowledge of English and bread!

Bangkok is a city with lots of character, I'm just not sure its the good guy for in spite of these comforts the city still suffered from an inescapable big city-ness. Even in streets as wide as ours there were so many cars, motorbikes, pedestrians and, worst of all, tourists that getting from point A to point B invariably involved a short visit to point XYZ. The Winter heat also came as quite a shock and so our first day as a unit involved walking up the street to visit a temple before walking down the street to sit on a dirty bench. We stopped for a good half hour and chatted in the shade. It was unanimously decided that crossing the road seemed like too much trouble. I also found, as a young man that walking alone, off the beaten path, was an uncomfortable nigh-distressing experience. I couldn't take more than five paces without a woman-menu being thrust at me or some sordid invitation being proffered. All I wanted was to enjoy my audio-book and sip on a Pepsi Max. I could have done without such unsavoury aspersions being cast upon my character. Bank OK indeed...

I would find more to my liking at our other stop in Thailand, Chiang Mai. As they say in Mamma Mia "Dot. Dot. Dot. *giggles."

*These wanderings closely resemble the actions of a blind-folded darts player. Sometimes I hit the bulls-eye but the rest of the time I'm just lucky if the whole affair doesn't end in bloodshed.**

**That was a joke, Mum. Please don't worry.

The Travelling

One of the great advantages of these gap-year-type-things (besides maintaining a strict blogging schedule L. M. F. A. O.) is taking advantage of the chance to see the world. Seeing the world, or at least seeing parts of the world where you don't normally live at.

Callum and I had a plan to holiday. We had a plan, and on that plan, in the space next to the months of January and February were written in biro - HOLIDAY. This was all. If we had been left to our own devices we probably would have ridden the tidal wave of the last few weeks of term and then indulged ourselves in several weeks of hibernation. Come mid-February I'm sure one of us would have woken up at four o'clock in the afternoon, looked the other in the eye and said "So now what?".

It was very fortunate for us therefore that our coworker, who is not called Amy, is a grown up and has numerous friends and family members who have wandered the South-East Asia trail. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand are far-off, mysterious lands with laxer drug-laws and currencies on the weaker end of the scale. As-such this part of the world contains more Westerners than a small United State (exaggeration?). Our holiday would take us by boat, bus, plane, train and minivan across some of the most majestic landscapes and bumpiest roads in this fascinating and tragic part of the world.

Callum and I stayed in Duyun for a week longer than Aimee. She had plans to meet an old friend in Thailand and we had plans to watch movies and drink coffee. I certainly needed a break after the end of term which brought more stresses and celebrations than I could have imagined. The Chinese Winter was in full-effect with rain-clouds and mist casting a sombre mood over the dusty streets of Duyun. I took the opportunity to revisit some blockbusters of my youth (Back to the Future, and the adventures of Dr. Jones in particular.) I also experienced some new ones, Gladiator was an interesting experience as I loathed every minute of it but have since found its story and characters revisiting me from time-to-time in my day-to-day life. The Terminal was an interesting experienced because I thoroughly enjoyed it but it has dissolved from my mind like a marshmallow in tepid hot-chocolate. I was warm in my bedroom with my radiator and ventured out only once a day to get some food or plan my journey to the train station (there are two) (both have names in Chinese) (I don't speak it). It was a pleasant, sort of twilight existence cut short when I realised our flight was a day earlier than I thought.

It was in a haze of improvisation and panic that we started our journey. We got a taxi from our flat to the fast-train station or "Duyun East" which I had smartly written into a translator on my phone as opposed to expanding my knowledge and learning some new words and phrases. We arrived at the station 4 hours before our train to Guiyang left as I had only been able to find information about the slow trains to Guiyang online. #Chinaproblems.

The train station of Duyun East is a chilly, tiled, warehouse sized room with a freezing, tiled, warehouse sized room one story above it. It is like a dentist's waiting room if a dentist's waiting room were actually purgatory. The station is similar to most waiting rooms in the world, barren and containing columns chairs just waiting to make your bottom as numb as your immortal soul. This station had two convenience stores containing cured tofu snacks and beef with rice and a sauce that gives new meaning to the word "indigestion" not to mention the word "pungency". It also had a gang of rebellious men smoking next to the No Smoking sign in the toilets. In Summer time there would have been a beautiful view of the Guizhou mountains but instead there was a view of thick, smoggy mist as far as the eye could see. I was listening to the audio-book of Stephen King's It on my iPod but Stephen King's The Shining would have resonated more thematically.

We took the fast train for 40 minutes to reach the airport Longdongbao. It wasn't my first time on one of these vehicles as a year and a half ago Callum and I had travelled down and up Japan with our other half, Andrew and Aaron. Of course that train had given us the chance to see stunning views of rice fields and mega-cities. On this train Callum sat in an old lady's seat but didn't realise it. I felt too sheepish to ask him to get up so I offered her my seat. She didn't want my seat because she actually wanted her seat. I remained seated because whilst I would give up my seat for an old lady I wouldn't give up my seat for Callum. So this train-ride was memorable in its own way. I lay awake at night sometimes wrestling with the guilt.

We had two flights from Guiyang to Thailand. The wait in the middle was thrice as long as the flight-time combined but it was nice to be in an airport again. All of your favourite airport friends were there and it was very odd to see them in China; Toblerone bars; Australian backpackers; that pang of melancholy; Tom Hanks with a long beard and a vaguely un-place-able accent. (That was a The Terminal joke for you. I get that reference now. I hope you enjoyed it. I had to wrack my memory banks.)

It was with a lethargic lurch, indicative of my patchy, two-month-old memories, that we found ourselves in Thailand. It was one o'clock in the morning and I realised that I had no idea how to navigate the immigration system of Thailand. Callum and I walked up and down a long, crowded corridor until we found some forms to fill in. There were three pens for a hundred people and a space on the form for passport photos, which we didn't have. Fortunately, before we spent a small fortune in the photo-booth a nice woman with no English was able to convey to me through gesticulation and weary shouts that this was not the form for me. It was with a little regret that I cast aside two forms, one spoiled and one completed with perfect handwriting and started my long wait in the international immigrants queue.

Before entering Thailand we noticed two interesting forms of local greeting. The first was a suggestion that we wear black tops and black ribbons out of respect for the recently deceased King. He was a pretty swell guy, by all accounts so it was with pride that I showed off my black t-shirt, hoping with futility that people might not notice the massive, tactless skull and crossbones daubed upon it. The other greeting was a request that tourists not purchase cheap, tatty Buddah statues or decide to tattoo the same onto their skin because, hey, deity over here.

I liked Thailand already. It seemed like a distinguished country, both welcoming and strong enough to establish clear boundaries within our burgeoning relationship. What's more, as we stepped out into the midnight air it was warm enough to wear a t-shirt and shorts. We were a long way from China, in more ways than one.

TBC, Tune in next time.