(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.
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