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.