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Published: January 27th 2010
Hello all, Happy 2010! January whizzed by cold and rainy. Winter in Shaoguan doesn't bring snow or severe cold, just a monotonous, damp cold that chills to the bone, even though the thermometer never drops below 40. All this will end soon so really an easy winter compared to what Chicago, Hartford and other places experience. Until this week, I've been buried in the crush of students' final exams and presentations. With that behind me, I'm looking forward to 6 weeks of holiday. I'll be in Hong Kong for 5 days, then Xiamen for 8, with a later jaunt to Guangzhou to experience the newly completed high-speed railroad. (The new RR cuts the 3-hour trip to 37 minutes --I've read the train averages 360 mph!)
It will be fun to do some traveling. I've invited my former assistant Yuky to go with me for all of it. She and I will travel by bus to HK this Thursday, and then by air from HK to Xiamen on the 1st, so we're all set. In addition, there are three more students who will join me in Xiamen IF we can get them there. Amazing how difficult it is to travel anywhere
in China in the weeks before Spring Festival. To travel by train means you are only able to purchase tickets some unverifiable number of days before you travel. It's communication by rumor and hearsay -- there doesn't seem to be any definitive information source. The web site says 9 days, but in busy cities like Guangzhou, it's anyone's guess. Once you've made it to the ticket window, you must have the Resident ID for each person for whom you buy a ticket. This is to avoid scalping -- which of course could be a huge problem since everyone is desperate to get "home". So everyone deals with the same chaos. Three of us traipsed down to the train station at 8 am Sunday morning (8 days early), to find four lines each snaking its way out of the station. The three of us split up to beat the game of chance I call "queue-up roulettte". It was good we did. After 30 minutes, Yuky's line had not moved an inch -- due, so she heard, to the computer being "down"! My line had moved only a few feet as there seemed to be one big family after another who needed
lots of discussion with the agent. But Mary's line was great, moving like hot taffy. After waiting in line for an hour, we made it to the window, only to be told that since the train to Xiamen does not ORIGINATE in Shaoguan but in Guangzhou, we would have to buy the train fare IN Guangzhou. Can you imagine if this were the system in the States? Think of all the travel that wouldn't happen if you had to be physically in a city from which you wanted to travel in order to book the ticket!!! Fortunately Mary lives in Guangzhou, so she collected each girl's ID and headed home earlier than planned. When she got to Guangzhou Sunday night, she was told she would NOT be able to buy the tickets until Wednesday -- 5 days before the Feb. 1 travel date. So far, we have spent a combined 12 hours waiting in lines and we still don't have the tickets. So we've thrown in the towel on the train idea. The girls are now scheduling time to go to the bus stations in two different cities tonight and tomorrow to see what they can come up with. Oops,
I just got a call from Mary -- Success!!! She was able to buy 3 bus tickets to Xiamen for the 1st. Great!!
As I'm sitting here blogging, it's about 9:00 pm. I can hear 3,000 freshmen yelling, chanting and singing the patriotic slogans that are part of their military training. This week, pretty much only the freshmen are left on campus. They're all decked out in camouflage-colored military fatigues, with green sneakers. From 6 am til 10 pm, they spend every minute with their 50 co-ed unit buddies. They march around all over the campus, in drill formation, yelling the Chinese equivalent of "Left, Left, Left-Right-Left", or they stand stiffly at attention, absolutely motionless, for an hour or more. Then, at night, they converge in the outdoor stadium, where their singing and chanting climbs to the level of a roar. The Chinese residents take no notice, but I'm non-plussed. Just another reminder of what control the government exerts over its citizens.
The past few weeks included some fun outings. In December, the Education Ministry for the prefecture invited Ken Yates and me for a special day in the schools of northern Shaoguan Prefecture. The people in the
group shots are education administrators and a couple teachers. Before getting to the schools, however, we drove north toward Danxia Mountain to an orange grove farm to pick oranges. Really fun! The farmer and his wife were hospitable, and we picked fruit for an hour -- until we'd filled our bags and baskets. The orange groves were lush and green, with beautiful, perfect oranges. 2nd Place prizewinners at a regional agriculture fair. So sweet and juicy! We also were invited to pick vegetables from his huge, well-tended vegetable garden. I went into the building housing the kitchen with the Mrs., a tiny woman who had amazing energy, drawing bucket after bucket of water from the well for us to rinse our shoes after orange picking. After a big lunch at a restaurant in a village near the farm, we then were driven to the small town of Ren Hua, in the shadow of Danxia Mountain. We went first to a middle school English Corner for an hour of English talk and songs. A couple hundred 13- and 14-year olds had been told they would be able to get out of their seats to surround us to talk. But with no
microphones at first, it proved impossible to be heard over the din. When the entire group of students converged on Ken and me at once, we were overwhelmed! The teachers quickly went to Plan B, telling half the students to follow me out to a courtyard where there was a staircase. I asked the students to sit on the stairs, which turned the courtyard into an ampitheatre. It worked well. Everyone could see me, and we could talk, sort of -- not really possible to carry on a two-way conversation with 100 students. After my monologue answering their questions about how I came to be in China, can I eat with chopsticks and do I like the food, I taught them the old camp song "Bingo!". ("There was a farmer had a dog, Bingo was his name-O! B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, Bingo was his name-O!"). They loved it, especially as we dropped off the letters and just sang the chorus mentally. From there, we were driven to the high school. First we met for an hour with the English teachers, comparing notes about the challenges of teaching English as a second language. It was interesting that we all seemed to have
a similar problem -- motivating teenage boys to overcome their extreme embarrassment about looking foolish learning a foreign language. Next, we walked down to the entrance plaza for the English Corner. Amazing the noise the students generated as they yelled to friends to come see the foreign teachers. Everyone running and following us, with lots laughing and shouting, it felt like we were rock stars! The shot of the crowd is just one small section of the pavilion. Multiply the numbers you see by 3 and you'll have an idea of what it was like to be surrounded by 1000 16- and 17-year-olds. Ken and I got the crowd singing Christmas songs. Jingle Bells was a hit. Afterward, dozens of students came up to get their pictures taken with us. They all said we were the first foreigners they had ever seen "live"! I'd like to go back in the spring. English would be much more fun to learn if they could speak with native English speakers every so often.
There have been other fun times, like the day I spent with my artist friend Teacher Zhao and my fashion friend Vaness. I call the day my Wonderful Wednesday.
A mild, sunny morning found me and my assistant Mary on bus #7 going to visit Teacher Zhao, the retired teacher who taught herself to paint AFTER retiring in 2001. She showed me more of her work, exquisite traditional paintings of flowers. Her specialty is the peony, China's most traditional flower. There are many styles of painting them, but I am a fan of Teacher Zhao's method, which is called the Luoyang method, after the ancient city in western Henan province where this style of painting peonies originated (Tang Dynasty, 700-900 AD). The peony has so much tradition to it. An ancient symbol of riches and honor, for centuries Chinese families have hung pictures of peonies in their homes. It is also considered a symbol of love and affection as it represents the feminine Yin, opening its petals to receive the dew, the masculine Yang. At Teacher Zhao's, I ended up buying a painting, and then she gave me another. This makes 4 of her paintings I now own, my own Zhao collection! They are stunning, each one unique and vibrant with color and movement. The paintings were hung this afternoon and look so beautiful. Finally I have life and
Ren Hua orange pickers
Our host, Mr. Zhou, second from leftcolor on my white walls.
After the visit with Ms. Zhao, Mary and I met my dress designer Vanessa and her assistant for lunch at Joseph Wong's Cafe Sydney Bar. I'm delighted with the cashmere dress she made for me. Vanessa is 7 months pregnant and was eager to have me memorialize how big she's looking these days (so SHE thinks now -- she'll have a different idea in a few more weeks!). I'm happy for her and her husband, but she's a bit downcast. She's been told she's having a girl. Her parents, particularly her mother, are very disappointed. I was surprised by this. Her mother and father are successful business owners, well-educated and sophisticated. That they harbor the same biases in favor of boys as are held by rural farmers is discouraging. Such a shame that this young first-time mother should feel sad about such a joyful event.
Lunch over, Mary and I walked back to Zhongshan Park to catch the bus. On the way, we passed hundreds of people enjoying the nice weather, huddled in various groups watching games of Chinese chess and cards, as well as sitting around enjoying impromptu singing.
All for
now. I'm packing for Hong Kong and Xiamen.
Warm regards,
Jo Anne
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James Gannon
non-member comment
Your Travel travails
Dear Jo Anne, I love your descriptions of your activities. You exude such good will and enjoyment of all that happens. I hope your train trip ws all that you expected, I'd like to try it, also! I imagine being a "rock Star" gets to be a little wearing after forty photos or so. Your description of handling the crowds shows your wonderful spirit and imagination. I'm sure your students don't just appreciate you but they must love you! Jim