East Meets West

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As I write this, I’m sitting in a KFC having a cup of milk tea. This particular KFC -- it's one of three in Xiasha -- is situated in a huge circular shopping mall a few blocks east of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, where I teach. The mall is baby blue, very high design, with a round courtyard in the center surrounded by restaurants and cafes. There’s a Dairy Queen, a Pizza Hut, and a KFC standing alongside Chinese franchises like Hsu’s Hot Pot, The Straits Café, and "Potato," a walk-up that sells nothing but French fries.

KFC is considered pretty upscale, with colorful interior decoration, and Western pop music pouring out of the sound system. College kids are eating fried chicken, drinking Cokes, and surfing their smart phones.

China’s is definitely a first world economy, one in which any Westerner would feel at home. There are barely any traces in this town of traditional Chinese culture, although we did have a bit of a cultural emersion last weekend. A Chinese colleague and her husband, both of whom studied in the States, picked us up on Sunday morning and drove us into Hangzhou to visit Lingyin Buddhist Temple. The temple is actually a collection of structures, one leading to the next up the side of a mountain. Each building contains a giant Buddha carved of camphor wood and covered in gold leaf. In one temple, monks were chanting. Everywhere, people were bowing and praying and burning bundles of incense in bathtub-sized cauldrons.

My colleague explained the mythological origins of the temple. In ancient times, she said, the land was flat and a farming village stood on the spot. In the village lived a monk who was known as Crazy Ji Goong, one of those iconic figures much admired in Buddhist Asia for their refusal to submit to the staid conventions of monastic life. The old guy lived alone, ate meat, drank wine, and went around the village playing pranks and generally making a pain in the ass of himself.

There was, however, another side to our Ji Goong. In a previous incarnation, he’d lived in heaven and had acquired the gift of fore-knowledge. Now endowed with this power, he divined that a mountain was floating across the sky in the direction of the village and would descend and bury it in just a couple of days. He ran around trying to warn everybody, but of course, nobody believed him. “Another of his pranks,” they said, “more ravings from that nut job monk.”

As the fateful day approached, Crazy Ji became more and more frantic, pleading with the villagers to run for their lives. Finally in desperation, he stole a young girl and ran away with her. “This time,” they said, “Crazy Ji Goong has gone too far.” They grabbed their pitch forks and gave chase, vowing to punish him when they finally got hold of him.

But no sooner had they left the village than the mountain came down out of the sky, burying it, just as Ji Goong had predicted. The villagers found the girl unharmed and realized that Crazy Ji had saved their lives. So they built a monastery on the side of the mountain in his honor.

I asked my colleague how religion is regarded in modern China. She said that people are free to worship as they choose. Furthermore, she said, a lot of students at the University had converted to Catholicism, which is only fair I suppose , considering how many Westerners have converted to Buddhism. I mentioned this to a couple of my fellow teachers over dinner a few nights later, and one of them said, “Maybe so, but they really don’t like Bible thumpers here. If you get caught actively trying to convert people, they’ll kick your ass out of the country.”

After the temple tour, our friends took us to a posh hotel for a great Chinese meal, and then drove us through downtown Hangzhou to a huge members-only box store called Metro Mart where we shopped for stuff generally unavailable in the local markets; Danish butter, Italian pasta sauce, American peanut butter, and my favorite, “Kellogg’s Chocolate Balls.” I checked into digital recording devices, which are made here, but which cost way more than identical devices available at Wal-Mart and BestBuy. It’s one of the inscrutable riddles of international trade that Chinese goods are more expensive here where they’re made, than there in the US where they’re consumed.

Teaching is keeping me busier than I thought I’d be. I teach two days a week, Wednesdays and Fridays, two sections of an hour and a half each. One section consists entirely of English majors, the other of kids from other disciplines like economics, engineering, and organic chemistry. The gender ratio is about like what you’d find on an American campus. In one class of nineteen, only three are boys; in the other, two boys to eleven girls. I’m told that the ratio is flipped in the Engineering school, where only 20% of the students are female.

Needless to say, the English majors are more fluent, but what the non-English majors lack in fluency they make up for in sheer determination. They’re real troopers, willing to tackle whatever the teacher assigns. If you say get up and give a speech, they get up and give a speech with zero P&M.

My favorite saying with regard to teaching comes, I think, from the Book of Tao; “To know something; read. To learn something; write. To master something; teach.” I’ve been giving speeches since I was a kid, but I’ve never taken a course in it. Whatever I know about it, I’ve learned in the trenches. But doing it is one thing. Teaching it is another. I’ve had to do some studying to figure out the best way to convey the basics in an organized and intelligible way.

Here’s the dilemma faced by anyone who would dare to teach a subject like public speaking; you have to model what you’re teaching. If you tell your students to deliver an impromptu speech without notes, then you’d better be prepared to deliver one yourself to show them how it’s done. This is only fair. So my lectures are delivered in the format I’m trying to get them to learn.

I’m also learning a lot about how to structure my talks so the students will be able to understand and retain the material. I give them lots of pointers, lists, and catchy phrases like, “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”

Kids here are respectful of their teachers. If they’re called upon to answer a question, many of them will stand to answer it. I don’t know how it is outside of the universities in China, but in the classroom pretty much anything goes and no subject is out of bounds. Kids will openly discuss controversial issues and say what’s on their minds. A few of them have picked up on American slang and incorporate it into their speeches. One kid yesterday gave a talk about gaining the competitive edge. He compared Chinese society to a big tree full of monkeys. “Standing under it and looking up,” he said, “all you can see are dicks and assholes.” Not terms I’d use in a public forum, maybe, but the speech was entertaining, and I had to admire the guy for his testicularity.

After class, the students will often crowd around the podium to schmooz and ask questions. The other day one of the girls said, “Mistah Don, can I ask how oda yoo?”

“I’m sixty-four,” I replied. This admission hit them like a thunderbolt. I couldn’t tell if they were reeling back in horror (“What, you not dead yet?”) or else just surprised that someone as ancient of days as great grandpa here was still able to sit up and take nourishment, much less to prance around making wise cracks and giving speeches.

People here are not at all shy about coming up and asking questions, most likely to practice their English, but also because they’re intensely curious about the West ̶ America in particular. The other day I was seated alone in a restaurant writing in my journal when three young girls came up and started talking to me. “Where you from? How oda you? Can we take picture wiz you?” which they did do, each in turn, by means of their cell phone cameras.

It’s this unself-conscious openness and friendliness that I most admire and appreciate about the Chinese people. They're always smiling, and they greet you with a thumbs up, and wave to you out of shop windows and passing cars. That sunny demeanor lights up my day, whatever the weather.

This just in: no rain today, and the sun’s been out since this morning. Come on, sunshine!

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Comments

[kate]

being old in china
Dear Don , I love reading your blogs , especially about the cultural nuances that you capture so succinctly ! I'm off to New Zealand in a few days .... see you in a few months and keep writing ! Kate