Zhangye Rock City

Along with the English language, Western culture is making inroads in China. American movies, for example, are readily available on DVD in Zhangye and all over China. Many of the textbook readings for English students talk about Western countries and their culture and history. But one of the areas that I've felt is lacking is Western music. There are a few English songs popular in China, and a top five list would look something like this:

1. The Carpenters - Yesterday Once More
2. Michael Learns to Rock - Take Me To Your Heart
3. Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On
4. Groove Coverage - God is a Girl
5. Emilia - Big Big Girl

Many Chinese students can sing these songs and any foreigner living in China will smile in recognition, but anyone reading this at home will think "huh?" Students are always surprised when I tell them the English songs they like are practically unknown in America (and no one would like them), and at home I haven't heard "My Heart Will Go On" for maybe 10 years.

Thus, this term I've made it my mission to introduce real Western music to the students. I wanted to start an English Music Club much earlier but never had a decent singer available to help out; this term my friend Stefanie is here, and "Zhangye Rock City" was started. Only 30 or 40 students show up per week, but we enjoy it and the students (mostly my freshman) are enthusiastic about it.

Picking songs is a little tricky, as they need to meet a lot of criteria: A) students will like the song B) we like the song, or at least don't mind it C) the words are sung very clearly, and not too fast D) there are not too many words E) the singing is not too low, as 90% of the students are female F) it was popular in the West, or at least can represent Western music. So as much I would love to go over a good PJ Harvey or Arcade Fire song, we stick to things like "The One I Love" by REM and "Last Kiss" as done by Pearl Jam. Last time we did "Do You Realize?" by The Flaming Lips. Chinese popular music tastes are quite firmly in realm of melodramatic love songs, so "Last Kiss" was particularly popular.

The way this works is we give the students copies of the lyrics, discuss the song, listen to it several times while singing along, and finally play it without the recording. Below are videos from music club of "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs and "Imagine" by John Lennon. The instrument that Stefanie plays is an American folk instrument called the Autoharp that she dragged all the way from California to northwest China. Suggestions for other songs to use in music club are welcome.

Video - Guzheng Performance

A performance from my guzheng teacher:



And a performance from another student/teacher at the school, on an instrument called the xinzheng (新筝) which has the same range as the piano:

Guzheng with Western Characteristics

Andrew pointed out to me a video featuring the guzheng (古筝), the ancient Chinese instrument I was making an attempt at learning. Although there is now a guzheng sitting in my apartment (music department friend Sarah, seen in the picture, bought one and practices in my home) I seem to have given up on it. I don't think I have the patience for learning a new instrument at this point. Also, I found out that the guzheng is an instrument for girls.

The video is about a Chinese woman residing in America who was classically trained in Beijing on the guzheng, but has been influenced by experimental musicians in America and has applied this knowledge to the guzheng. Almost as interesting as the video itself are the comments I am seeing left by the Chinese who have watched it, which I will attempt to translate:

She can't even play one section well! Don't slander classical music!

Rotten. How is it she is considered a musician.

Very disorderly; guzheng should not be used for experiments. Sounds awful (the Chinese phrase, 难听死了, would translate literally as something like "difficult to listen to to the point of death").

This is simply disorganized playing.

What irritates me the most is the English amongst the Chinese.

It looks like this is causing some controversy.

Before I give a false impression of my Chinese ability, I did have to look up words like "slander." And there are a few comments which I don't quite grasp, despite understanding the words. The video can be found here. More traditional guzheng performances can be found by searching for "guzheng" on YouTube.

Live in Zhangye Prison

As probably goes without saying, performing rock music inside a prison to a crowd of Chinese criminals was memorable. For some reason, none of the Chinese people I was with seemed to find it as amusing as I did. The daily stares from Chinese people haven't fazed me for a long time, but as we walked through the room towards the stage, I couldn't help but feel self-conscious about a few hundred convicts turning in unison to watch my every move. The performance was on a rather official-looking stage in the cafeteria, with a red banner about World Aids Day; it seems the prison has a decent entertainment budget.

I hadn't practiced with them for months, and even on the stage I had not the slightest idea what songs we were playing. I finally asked Little Ma what song we were going to play first, and he just said "don't worry, we're playing the songs you know". For some reason the Guitar Club is not keen on learning new songs. The music went over pretty well with the audience, which included the guards at the front, and Little Ma knows how to entertain a crowd (not that I ever know what he's saying). The power went out during the middle of a song, which was slightly awkward (I'll refrain from making any cheesy comments about our "rocking out" here), but otherwise things went well. A few of the inmates actually performed, with mixed results, and I was unfortunately talked into a poor performance of an English song. I refuse to sing in front of a crowd of three in America, yet in China somehow I'm willing to sing in front of more than 200 prisoners. And Hotel California reared its monstrous, outdated head again, with just me and Little Ma playing guitar. I hope there aren't any serious long-term effects on my taste in music from my stay in China. But I think my favorite moment was near the end, when my friend encouraged the crowd to join him in a sing-along of a song that everyone but me seemed to know by heart, and I was treated to the spectacle of dozens of hardened young men singing their hearts out to a daydreamy Chinese song from the inside of a prison. Just when I think there are few surprises left in Zhangye...

Jawdropper, Showstopper, Collarpopper

Little Ma, the "rock star" of Zhangye, called me this afternoon for the first time in a while. He told me he wanted my help translating something that was in English. The idea of trying to translate Chinese for someone sounded exciting, although I was sure I was in over my head, whatever it was. That's him in the picture, which is from an earlier night at a dance club (and Gary can be seen doing what he does best in the background). When I arrived at his shop, there was an amusing scene: Little Ma and several of his friends hunched with furrowed brows over a big, fancy effects pedal for electric guitar, which had instructions and markings that were entirely in English. It was an elaborate, complicated effects pedal which would take me a couple of long afternoons in a basement to master even in English, so I wasn't of much use at all. Oddly, the Chinese for things like "flanger" and "effects parameters" haven't come up in my textbooks yet. However, I did get the chance to pick up a few useful guitar-related words along the way. I'm meant to go back tomorrow afternoon for practice, and then perform with his band at 3:00. I asked where the performance was, and he laughed and said at a jianlao, a word I didn't know. So, I looked it up in the dictionary: prison. Apparently a policeman invited him to perform there (he seems to know a lot of people). He also mentioned 1000 something-something which I didn't understand, and I can only hope he meant there would be one thousand inmates there. This should be interesting. I've been getting bored of his guitar shop, but maybe he's worth staying friends with after all.

Take Me To Your Heart

Today I had my second English Corner, the after-class English extravaganza that gets held sporadically at schools throughout China. My own students organized it, so I had too many invitations to get out of it had I wanted to. Actually, I'm always game for the things they throw at me here; I like the mystery of not knowing what I'm getting myself into. They had insisted that I play and sing a song, so I prepared the easy "Wishlist" by Pearl Jam, but managed to get out of it when they didn't give me a microphone for my voice, and I instead did a quick instrumental. They of course put the foreign teachers up on a platform, filming us and taking our pictures, and handing us microphones with no warning whatsoever to make speeches with instructions like "talk about life". I fielded questions from the crowd about how to learn English (you get to be a pro after answering similar questions 200 times) and why Americans are "crazy", helped Phillip through a questionable version of "Wonderwall", and was taken to dinner by students afterwards.

I forgot to mention an incident that happened a couple of weeks ago. I was waiting at the school gates on Tracy who was visiting, when a boy came out of nowhere and announced "I want to sing an English song for you". He promptly launched into "Take Me To Your Heart", one of the two or three most popular English songs in all of China, and also one of the worst songs you might ever have the displeasure of hearing. It's actually a translation of a Chinese song, and the band Michael Learns to Rock (who I'm told are a "rock" band, hah) are making completely unfair amounts of money in Asia. I had to physically bite my lip not to laugh at the silliness of it, and then thanked him very politely for his song. The moral of the story is: if you are a foreigner in China, try not to stand in one place for a long time.

I was coerced into dancing again by Danielle, but this time with four mutual students of ours. To my amusement this included Hank and Sunshine, two students in different classes who are dating. Hank is very tall, wears a shirt that says "Caution You Are Leaving the Security Semir [no, I don't know what a 'semir' is either]", and looks like a mechanic. Sunshine is fully deserving of her English name, and has one of the most unceasingly bright smiles I've ever seen. She's hard to look at straight in the eye. I think they make a funny couple, and it's a little unusual to see dating students present themselves in front of me, rather than immediately dropping hands and walking in different directions in the hope that I didn't notice. Once a student actually gasped at seeing me, dropped her boyfriend's hand like so much dead fish, and hid behind him as he walked (I was sure to give a friendly hello).

Because we didn't realize the place didn't open until 9:30, we had a lot of time to kill. I thought I'd take them to Xiao Ma's guitar shop (I'll now refer to him as Little Ma because that is what "xiao" means and it's more amusing) because I hadn't been in a while, but this turned out to be incredibly awkward, with none of them saying a word to us and a drum lesson going on in the background. We then went to our bar with our students, which proudly proclaims itself the "Drear Bar" in English (misspelling of "dream") and features swings instead of seats. When we finally arrived at the dance club (English name: Hot Ball Place), it was in full swing, and I was positively shocked to see the two poles being occupied by very scantily clad dancers from the club. Not in Our Zhangye, surely.

Within four minutes of being on the dance floor, a middle-aged man in a suit grabbed my hand, and held it tightly as he danced along with me. Sadly, this is more likely than my hand being grabbed by any young females in Zhangye, where close same-sex physical contact by males or females doesn't raise an eyebrow but public kissing is scandalous. He then passed me onto his "friend", who I would've assume to be his wife, who seemed to be casting too many glances in my direction during the night after our awkward 40-second dance. At 11:00 sharp, Dance Time was over, and Sing-Song Time/Male Dancer in Amazing Puffy Pink Outfit Time/Weird Skits Involving Angry Kitchen Staffs Time commenced. This was our cue to leave, not to mention that the student dorms are locked and the lights turned off at 11:30 (I should mention this was Saturday night).

I'll end with a selection from the English Menu extravaganza that graces the food markets in a certain spot in Zhangye, which I enjoyed the other day: Braising in soy sauce the meat rubs the fish. That it does.

Military Training

Of the many things that are part of university life in China that American students would never, ever, even consider putting up with, military training is surely one of the most bizarre. This week is military training for the freshman at Hexi, which means that instead of having class they wear matching uniforms and march in line while shouting the numbers "yi! er! san! si!" or "for the service of the people!" all day, every day. Each class has its own military officer, and they were already going at it when I woke up at 6:30 this morning. The girls are particularly amusing to watch, as they usually look like 15 year-olds. This week has been cool but apparently it's common for students to march until they feint in hot weather. The shouting is so loud outside that it's actually pretty distracting while trying to write this.

However, my students are all sophomores so I didn't get out of any classes this week. For some groupwork they had to tell a story about visiting a foreign country. There's been the expected romance in France and kangaroos in Australia, but there have been some more interesting selections - today a student visited Iraq and heard a local complain about the war, and one group described North Korea as a wonderful place to visit, with interesting history and nice scenery. Groups in two different classes chose Japan, but my hopes for the first positive words about the place from Chinese people were let down as they went on about the shocking treatment of women, who are supposedly routinely beaten by their husbands and lacking the hard-won equality of women that the Chinese enjoy. I decided not to mention that China is the only country in the world where more females commit suicide than males. One of these groups asked me to describe Japanese food, and it was obvious they hadn't so much as heard of sushi. That says something about Chinese-Japanese relations that I know more about Japan than they do. More than one group has also gone to Egypt to visit Mohamed, the teacher who left last term, and a group this morning visited New York to attend my wedding.

There are two new young American teachers in Zhangye named Danielle and Stephen, both from the Peace Corps, who look to be bringing a small taste of home to the place. We went out last Friday, one of the few Western "nights out on the town" I've had here so far, and they taught me a Chinese card game. Before meeting them that night, however, it was time for another very vaguely-described performance. I was given an invitation to a "party" (which could mean anything) at 7:30 being put on by the Environmental Society or something of that sort, and told to bring my guitar along. I said I would probably come, but just for a while because I would have other things to do. Of course, when I got home at 8 after dinner I saw I had five missed phone calls, and when I arrived at the music building with my guitar three of my students were standing outside the building waiting for me. There was an official performance list with my name on it, and even better, Andrew's name, next to "harmonica," because once he had made the mistake of playing a simple song he knew in class. He wanted none of that and went to Church, but I dutifully ended up on stage with my rusty-stringed acoustic, performing a brief acoustic version of my song "Seattle" in front of the crowd of over 500, who were crowded into the aisles. Despite my students' best attempts to convince me before I went onstage, I did not wear make-up.

Some Boys Like to Collect Girls' Underwear

Learning Chinese is best undertaken by masochists. The spoken language has four tones, which must be pronounced clearly and accurately to be understand and to distinguish the many similar-sounding words (the sound shi can mean "to be", "ten", "time", "city", "to try", "an event", "lion", "wet", "teacher", "lose", "reality", "knowledge", "stone", "food", "arrow", "style", "the world", and many other things depending on context and pronounciation). It's the only major world language with no alphabet, and thousands of characters must be memorized before you can start reading and understanding Chinese. Mastering a word in spoken Chinese tells you nothing about how to write it, and there's no way to be certain of how to pronounce a character you've never seen before. Spoken and written Chinese are separate enough that it's like learning two difficult languages, and experts describe Chinese as around five times as difficult to learn as Spanish. Local dialects are so varied that Chinese people can find communication with people from other areas difficult. That said, I came here for a challenge, and I enjoy the punishment. I'm trying to re-double my efforts after losing ground while traveling, especially when I have trouble being understood and my Chinese teacher says things like "I see your listening hasn't improved over the summer."

Of course, learning English is no simple task for Chinese people, and all of them have to do it. They have the most difficult time doing it, as the total lack of grammatically correct English in public in China goes to show; even a large, fancy, and surely expensive hospital sign set in stone in Zhangye says "Zhangye city mumicipality." I could probably count the number of absolutely perfect English sentences my students have written on one hand. This week some students went over an old reading final exam with me, and some multiple-choice questions had either no right answer or several. Sometimes I have a very frustrating time getting my students not to speak Chinese when doing big groups activities, so I'll have to keep with smaller groups. One of these small group activities this week required students to answer the question "what is the strangest hobby you have heard of?". Many involved eating something, whether it was glass, soil, stones, or centipedes. A couple described things that would include my family - having a snake for a pet and enjoying fishing even if you don't catch anything. One shy boy stood up and said "I have heard that some boys like to collect girls' underwear."

My first few days back in Zhangye after traveling felt strangely underwhelming, but I knew once the teaching started my enthusiasm would pick back up. All in all I consider my students some of the most wonderful people I've met, and I enjoy things like office hours that ought to dreaded as "work." Usually an ideal group of only 4-10 people show up for my office hours, and last week's were particularly good, as a few students vented intelligently about some problems with Chinese teaching methods (namely, 'memorize and be quiet') being used for language and their appreciation of what the foreign teachers do. One of my favorite students wanted to ask if I knew about an English book she had heard about, that she wanted to look into because the main character was a rebel and older Chinese critics warned against it. She didn't know the English title, but she said the author's Chinese name was something like "Sha Lin Jia", and I immediately perked up and asked "do you mean Salinger??". She indeed meant The Catcher in the Rye, so I let her borrow the copy I brought, which made my day.

There is a holiday in China called Teacher's Day, which happened last Sunday. In America those kinds of holidays tend to get marked on a calendar somewhere and never brought up, but this one seems important in China. A few students stopped by to see me and give me fruit, and many called to wish me a happy Teacher's Day. Both of my new classes gave me nice gifts - a stylish thermos, and by far the most entertaining, a toy guitar that lights up and plays children's songs when you touch it. The English department also had an extravagant hot pot dinner for all its teachers, in which the foreigners were placed together in the same room and the few Chinese teachers joining us said little. There was also the expected 30-course banquet for welcoming the new teachers (an older couple from New Zealand via Northern Ireland and a young Peace Corps volunteer) a mere two days later.

Finally, there was another performance with the "Guitar Club" Saturday evening, which was mentioned to me in a phone call three hours beforehand. Luckily two student friends happened to be in my apartment, and Xiao Ma's garbled Chinese was translated to me. This was at the Zhangye Medical College, a few of whose students I have met through the teacher Julian last term. Being nursing rather than English majors, they made my students sound like members of the House of Lords. Perhaps because they get less entertainment than Hexi (not that it's exactly a non-stop party here) they were so enthusiastic as to give the impression Chinese people do like rock music. I was told to play a song on my own towards the end, and Xiao Ma felt the need to summon an English-speaking teacher on stage to talk to me. She started with ni hao (hello), so I said ni hao in return, which was all it took to excite the crowd. She said in English, "your Chinese is very good!", and as I haven't let learned "don't patronize me" in Chinese, I only replied "I think it's just ok." I was asked to tell the audience about myself, and had to ignore Xiao Ma's scolding in my right ear about not saying it in English; I'm here as a teacher, not a novelty act. Though I've matured well past the point of enjoying guitar heroics, after so many performances of strumming on a barely-audible acoustic to songs that are absolutely boring for me to play, combined with many listless hours among a group I can't communicate well with, I felt a patriotic duty to show them how we play in America, and pulled out every obnoxious rock star behind-the-head-as-fast-as-possible-show-off move I could remember. This went over well, and someone shouted something like "one more song, how about it!", so I played and sang the one White Stripes song I know the words to, which received noticeably less enthusiastic applause. The quest to find an English singer has begun in earnest.

Love Doctors and Big Buddhas

The second term of teaching at Hexi has begun, and I've picked up where I left off here. Zhangye feels pretty normal, but going back to America might blow my mind. Six of my eight classes are returning from last term, so it's a relief to see familiar faces who don't have to warm up to me for several weeks before they want to talk. I can end up in a half-hour conversation with some of my more talkative students when I run into them. It's nice to teach at a university. The first week I've eased the students into talking English again with an "advice column" lesson I found on the internet, including getting them into mock therapy groups in an activity called "Love Doctor." Some students have taken this chance to ask me about my personal life and offer advice, which has been amusing: "what are your problems? We are all doctors here."

I haven't properly returned to Zhangye until Xiao Ma has vaguely mentioned us playing at the school the next day, and I end up performing with the band in front of 500 students, which is what happened on Thursday. It was an entertainment extravaganza for the new freshman, so we just started it off with two songs. The highlight was surely the student who sang Italian opera, and was amazing. Andrew told me he saw the large stage being set up on the basketball court and thought "ah, Dan will surely be playing on that." Despite becoming more Chinese than many Chinese-Americans he also says he's not sure about getting another job in China after going home for the summer and re-discovering that there are countries where things work properly and bathrooms are cleaned. I wonder what going home will do to me.

Normally I'm pretty enthusiastic about saying "no" to the many random job offers that come my way, but occasionally I can be talked into doing one lesson at a school in my spare time. Today I rode an hour-and-a-half bus to the town of Shandan with my student Peter, who asked me to come to the school he worked for over the summer, and I agreed because I had heard good things about the town. I gave an hour-long lesson to 9 year-olds, which was 5% showing them photos, 10% going over "hello, how are you?" and 85% improvisation. Photos from home are a sure winner but in this case were a mistake, as I was literally stampeded by students leaping from their seats to grab them. They eagerly set about looking at/destroying them, and at the end of class ran out with them all before I remembered to ask for them back. I also made a little boy cry. That sounds terrible, but all I did was ask him "What do you like to do?" when we were working on that, and I terrified him so much I saw tears forming in his eyes. The lesson actually went fine, and a sycophant from the school went so far as to applaud my brilliant teaching "strategy" of just using English, instead of Chinese and English, to teach the children. The high point of the day was a visit to the "Great Buddha Temple", which they guessed with great uncertainty was 1000 years old. It was a fantastic seven-story pagoda that housed an absurdly large Buddha statue, with the face painted in gold. They claimed it was the largest seated Buddha statue in all of China, but they also claimed that the nearby horse breeding-ground is the largest in the world, which I cast a skeptical eye on. Funny that places like this just lie about unnoticed in China; I had never heard of this Buddha temple until, say, 11:45am today.

I also had the pleasure of facing Miss Mao in ping pong. Miss Mao is the highly energetic, highly entertaining, and highly taller-than-normal waiban of our school, who is the person keeping an eye on the foreign teachers and being bothered when our toilets don't work. I called to let her know I was back, and she mentioned ping pong in answer to my question about her summer. I had barely finished mentioning we should play sometime when she said "tomorrow morning!". When I showed up, before I could greet her or even cross half of the room she said "lai! ("come" or perhaps "let's go!")" in a loud voice and marched to a table. I held my own, but that's not to say I won any of the many games. I think she was just toying with me.

Due to a mysterious woman we are calling the "vice-dean" because we don't care for learning names, things seem strangely organized this term. We even had an English department meeting, unbelievably, the first "meeting" I've seen of any kind. There was even a hand-out, with only one English mistake. Things are shaking up around here, sort-of, and seeming almost "job"-like. Of course, I was called and told about the 10:30am meeting at exactly 10:27am, so I can take comfort that some of the general chaos and disorganization will remain. Otherwise the place wouldn't be the same.

The Token Foreigner

Tomorrow I will finally hand in my grades and hopefully take off traveling, some weeks after many foreign teachers have gone home. With classes over people have been coming out of the woodwork to invite me to their school/English function/whatever, which can make you feel like the token foreigner after a while. I've turned down summer jobs from both students and random people in the street I don't know. On Wednesday, I got a phone call in Chinese that I finally realized was a woman from the guzheng school asking if I could come then for a lesson. Usually the lesson is on Thursday and I just practice whenever I feel like it, and I had this strange feeling I was going to be videotaped or photographed at this lesson. Obviously I'm getting a sense for China, because sure enough they filmed a short promotional film of Teacher Zhang giving me a lesson as soon as I arrived. Which was fine, but it was a little irritating that she didn't have time to give me an actual lesson and handed me off to one of her students.

On Friday I was invited by two of my students to visit a private school in a nearby town called Gaotai. They will work at the school over the summer, and the headmaster asked them if I could come to talk to the students, who were about 8-11 years old. After hearing some stories from other foreign teachers about vaguely worded invitations that actually involve giving lessons or an hour-long speech I was hesitant, but decided to give it a chance. We took a "one-hour" bus (over two hours) to Gaotai, and the first seat I tried was so small that more than being uncomfortable, there was physically not enough room for my legs. When the bus stopped in Gaotai, someone threw a bag from the roof of the bus, which landed with a heavy thud; it was full of parts of animals, with a few legs sticking out. Upon arrival, I met the extremely young headmaster of the English school (who speaks no English) and the teachers, all hilariously dressed in matching zebra-like outfits. As it turned out very little was required of me - I went from classroom to classroom greeting groups of students and answering questions they had prepared, such as "what is your favorite color?" and "can you sing us a Chinese song?" (for better or worse I know the chorus of one of the pop songs now). More than one student stood up and said only, "you are cool!". I would actually have been happy to do more, and I spent no more than 20 minutes in the classroom that day. And of course, there were a few rounds of pictures to be taken at the end. I only told my students that I would definitely come late the night before, but they were obviously expecting me; there was one of the ubiquitous red banners set up, this one saying something like "Welcome foreign teacher, who has come to our school to communicate with the students".

After a lot of resting (they have a talent for this which I admire) and the "work" of the day, they didn't have to tell me what was coming next: the round-table banquet in a classy restaurant with all the teachers, with leftovers fit for a sumo wrestler. There was one mysterious dish I couldn't identity, until someone translated it: "pig's feet". It was.... worth trying once, I suppose. They wanted to know which dish was my favorite, and lo and behold another round of it came after about five minutes, which was totally unncessary. The afternoon was leisurely, including a visit to the park, fruit market, and most surprising, a Red Army memorial (some interesting Communist army artwork). I asked my student Jason to translate one of the propaganda sentences I noticed on a city wall (I've seen them in each city, in huge characters), which meant something like "The reason you're able to relax is because we're taking care of everything". The headmaster insisted we take a taxi back so it would be quicker, even though this was certainly more than ten times the cost of the bus. When we reached the gate of the university an unidentified woman got into the taxi, and when we reached my home the headmaster, the woman, and one of my students all followed me inside. The whole day they had been unusually generous and if this wasn't something arranged by my students I would have had a bad feeling they were about to strong-arm me into something terrible. But no, the woman introduced herself as the headmaster's brother (she could speak English) and explained that "I'm sorry to be so forward, but... we don't know how much to pay you for today". The thought hadn't really occurred to me that in addition to the pampering I should be paid, and I tried to refuse in light of all the money they had spent, but they would have none of it. I told them to just give me 20 yuan if they really had to, but they just laughed and insisted I take 100 yuan, an excessive amount for the actual work I did. I suspect that for foreign teachers who choose to work at a school that's never had a foreign teacher, the special treatment gets out of hand.

The next day was outrageously busy from 8am-11pm. Xiao Ma and his "guitar club" put on an extravagant all-day party, which involved bringing drums and a full band setup, a generator, banners, tents, stools, massive amounts of food, cooking supplies, and 60 people on a bus to the Black River. Xiao Ma made his most blatant "let's show off the foreigner" move yet, so I started off the day a little irritated. He had repeatedly encouraged me to bring friends, but when I showed up with three of my student friends he was visibly annoyed, and said "I thought you were going to bring foreign friends". They also hadn't joined the "M-Club" and contributed money like everyone else, so it was obvious they were not welcome, and they left to look for jobs. However, the day was generally fun and the idea of setting up a full-band performance in the middle of nowhere appealed to me, but without a single English-speaker in attendance there were long stretches of boredom for me. We were put into groups for some strange games, the most bizarre being a game that I would describe as "gather as much mud, stones, watermelon shells and whatever the hell else you can find and make something out of it, and do it better than the other groups". This quickly escalated into chaos as each group tried to destroy the other sculptures, and soon mud and water jugs were being tossed in every direction while they laughed hysterically. I stayed out of it, as much as I enjoy being covered in mud, but they had other ideas. A little later in the afternoon they grabbed a party-goer by each limb and threw him into the river. This was going on in the background and I didn't pay much attention until I heard them say laowai, which means "foreigner", and as I turned around I saw they were coming for me, and sure enough I also got my turn in the river. At the end of the afternoon I also made my public singing debut, performing The White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground", which was unspectacular. I didn't so much want to sing as to finally perform a song I enjoyed and wasn't completely boring to play. However, the keyboard player decided to spontaneously join me even though he's never heard the song, which sounded terrible, not to mention my poor singing voice in the first place.

I left the party early, in time for another English event I was talked into, by an English teacher I've met at the guzheng school. This one wasn't nearly as rewarding, and involved reading out questions in English that the young students had memorized the answers to (pages and pages of them) and had to recite. When I was told it would be in the square I had a bad feeling it would be on the big stage in front of 1,000 people, but it was on a small stage setup with only a couple of hundred onlookers. The teacher, Shirley, would translate into Chinese, and she was almost as nervous as the students. They were going as fast as humanly possible in order to ensure that all the meaning of the sentences was definitely lost, so I tried to maintain a reasonable speaking voice, but was told several times I was going too slow. The questions were often quite random for beginning English learners, such as "Why do you want to study English?" "Because I want to join a joint-venture", or "Do you want some whiskey?" "Sure, I would also like some, thank you". There were also a few blatant mistakes in the script, such as "How fat is it?" instead of "far" and my favorite, a statement read by Shirley that went "Don't go out! Shut up!". This is how learning goes on in China, rote memorization, and I'm sure the audience was impressed with the "English level" of the students, though I doubt any of them were capable of holding any kind of real conversation. As an example, today a high school student walked up to me looking to practice her English, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: "So... do you live on this campus?"
Her: (blank stare)
Me: "Do you live at this university? Do your parents work here?"
Her: "Yes, my father is a teacher and my mother works at the library."
Me: "Oh, I have a question you could help me with. I had trouble buying a train ticket today, and they wrote this down. What does this sentence mean?"
Her: (blank stare)
Me (pointing again to a Chinese sentence): "What does this sentence mean?"
Her (after a long pause): "Have you ever been to Beijing?"
Me: "Um... yes, I was there for a day."
Her: "Is China better?"
Me: "Is China better than what?"
Her: "Thank you, goodbye."

Tonight was Round 2 of the English competition, and it must have been obvious how much I didn't feel like being there, because Shirley immediately said "oh, you look so serious!". During the inevitable pictures, I obviously wasn't smiling enough, because the photographer walked up to me and physically raised my mouth into a smile with his hand. Of course, the whole thing was also filmed. Shirley asked me, "so have you taken many pictures in China?", and I had to control my laughter. On the first day the announcer unexpectedly turned around and asked me a question in Chinese, which I didn't understand at first and completely stumbled over an answer for, but I fared slightly better tonight, coming up with such witty remarks as "Yes, I like studying guzheng" and "no, I can't play a song for you". The guzheng school made guest performances each night, and the announcer was obviously telling the audience about my studying there and asking the performers about how I was doing. Hopefully I don't do anything in China I want to keep a secret.

After so much over-exposure this week during my holiday I'm exhausted, and feeling particularly foreign. Friday night I watched Lost in Translation with Cynthia, and the movie carried a whole new meaning after having the experience. My travels will involve hours upon hours on the train and bus, but I'm rather looking forward to having nothing to do and no one being able to do a thing about it.

Good Performance, Bad Performance, Music Lessons

This week is the last of classes, and things have been busy now that the end of the term is approaching. Xiao Ma's new thing is the "M-Club" (for "music" and "movies"), so all the people who frequent the guitar shop now have matching t-shirts, and there will sometimes be "parties" with "activities", which could mean anything. He's also more serious about forming a real band, which includes me, so I'll be spending more time there (every day if he had his way). We had a performance last weekend, which they told me about around 2 hours before it happened. It was in an internet cafe, oddly, and along with the music included unusual performances like street dancing and bicycle tricks. There was a band with a female singer who sang two English songs, both by the Cranberries, one of the five or six Western bands whose music can be bought in Zhangye. I was dragged to the front for a game I didn't understand, that involved pressing the space bar on a computer to get a number, after which someone in the place apparently won, what I don't know.

Last week one of my classes was invaded by a foreigner, namely Andrew. There was mild chaos as he suggested we go outside for pictures during the break, and then the students talked him into talking me into abandoning the rest of the class and drinking apricot tea and talking in Chinese. After we went back inside, Mohamed caught wind of the chaos after finishing an exam and joined the room, so the excitement in the students reached a boiling point with all three of their young foreign teachers in the same room. We were talked into singing Chinese and Scottish songs and generally fooled around. Very difficult job, this. I think both students and teacher have been losing their enthusiasm after 17 weeks of class, so I didn't mind being irresponsible for 50 minutes.

Andrew had a friend named Chris visit, another foreign teacher in another province in China. He was from Denmark, and only about an hour from where I spent the summer doing archaeology, so it was good to reminisce about Denmark and show my total incompetence in pronouncing Danish place names ("could you spell that?"). An example of just how complimentary Chinese people are: one of our student friends complimented Chris' Chinese as having "great improvement"; she had known him for two days.

Tonight was a performance in honor of the Communist Party, in which all of the Chinese English teachers were forced to sing, and have been practicing daily for a couple of weeks now. The foreign teachers were invited to participate, and if I'm to overcome my dislike of singing in public, it certainly wasn't going to be tonight. But as my co-teacher was pestering me I agreed I would still come, which I thought plainly meant that I would watch the performance. Lo and behold, last night I receive an e-mail from my co-teacher telling me that I need to meet at 5pm to get my t-shirt, and arrive at the performance by 7:00 for make-up, and that I better eat beforehand so I don't spoil the make-up; I was meant to just stand there on the stage while the English department was singing. He was shocked and appalled when I said I had no interest in being paraded on a stage just because the judges wouldn't embarrass foreigners with a low score (I didn't say it in those words but we heard that is why they wanted the foreign teachers up there, even if they didn't sing). So, I had to meet him at 5pm, and with a pouty-face on he led me to see the Dean of English Department, which maybe he thought was intimidating, but there's only so much authority someone can muster when they have to keep asking you if their English is correct. The Dean put on a disappointed face, but I explained I never agreed to this and Americans are not keen on being displayed on a stage doing nothing, make-up or not (talent doesn't have that much to do with getting on a stage in China, and some performances in the square have been endearingly amateur). My co-teacher is a strange, uptight man who sent a page-long e-mail criticizing me for not responding to a minor e-mail in time, and I'm hoping not to hear much from him in the future. Many of the other foreign teachers didn't go but I was only one given such a hard time about it, because of him. The whole thing was kind of amusing, because Chinese people in authority are used to having a lot of control over their subordinates' lives, and they have little control over the foreign teachers, and if anything we're the ones who intimidate them, because they have to use their English to talk to us.

I now have a new hobby - learning the gu zheng (古筝), an ancient Chinese instrument called the "zither" in English that has 21 strings, is laid out on a stand over your lap, and played with picks taped to your fingers. There is a school in Zhangye that usually performs in an area of the square in the evenings, so I got talking to them, and decided that what the hell, I'll sign up for lessons on an instrument I've never seen before from a teacher who doesn't speak English. As it turns out the teacher is well-known in these parts, and will travel to Vienna in the summer, which is pretty much unheard of around here. She's amazing at the instrument, and so far I enjoy the lessons. I can figure out most of the important things she is saying, and I otherwise learn by watching her demonstrate. It's not a very difficult transition from the guitar, though it is strange being a beginner at an instrument again. Sarah, one of the excitable music students me and Andrew know, also wants to learn gu zheng; she'll come when I do, which should keep the lessons adequately enthusiastic at all times. Every teacher should be so lucky as to get students like the ones here.

An Explosive Re-Opening

Friday was the grand re-opening of Xiao Ma's guitar shop after he renovated the place, not something to be done with subtlety in China. The extravaganza got started around 11 in the morning with the largest fireworks display I've yet seen in Zhangye. The Chinese like to announce things like store openings and weddings with a round of firecrackers in front of their store, and in this case they set out an excessive amount of fireworks in the shape of a guitar. Once it got going we had to run for cover, with shrapnel flying in every direction and the smoke making it hard to breath. Then a truck arrived with tables and they set about making what was obviously a stage in front of the store, and a few of them summoned me away for lunch. Lunch was in several private rooms on the third floor of a luxurious hotel, and became a three hour event with a revolving table of dishes. I was coerced into 10 shots of baijiu, the most suspicious being the three shots I had to do because the fish on the table was pointing at me. There was no one with a decent standard of English in my room so by the end of lunch I was as bored as I was drunk.

Around 4pm the music performances began, and didn't end until 10pm. I was under the impression a few of us would play a couple of songs at some point, and was surprised by the hours-long parade of mostly talented musicians I had never seen before. I was called to the stage four times, usually with little to no warning, including the time I was told "go up and play a song by yourself". Gary had also come down by that time and they also called him onstage and set him on the drumset, where he sat there looking bewildered until he finally got down. That may well be the extent of my concert-going experiences in China, so I enjoyed it while it lasted.

A Music Competition

I was looking forward to a relaxing week's vacation, but despite leaving Zhangye for only one day I had a busy May Day holiday in which among other things I saw the Great Wall, took second place at a music competition with Xiao Ma, took part in the grand re-opening of his store, and had my bicycle stolen.

I was originally planning to visit the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang and the Great Wall at Jiayuguan with the Cynthia, the Peace Corps volunteer at Hexi, and four teachers from Lanzhou and Chongqing she knows. However, the final rounds of the Hexi University music competition I had promised Xiao Ma I would see through to the end with him were inconveniently scheduled for the same time, and I ended up cancelling so I could play. I could tell Xiao Ma's spirit was crushed when I told him I would go to Dunhuang at that time, and he had previously made me pinkie-swear I would play with him (which he would remind me of by raising his pinkie with a disapproving look). I did spend a day with the Peace Corps teachers when they came to Zhangye, which was fun and highlighted by bowling (Zhangye actually has bowling, to my great surprise) made unnecessarily complicated by communication difficulties with the staff. The place was completely dark until we came, so they had to spend five minutes turning everything on, and for some reason set the machine for one bowler; our best explanation was that in the true collectivist spirit, bowlers don't compete in China but rather take turns sharing one score for the good of the group. Before dinner I had also been dragged to a rather theme-parky public park in Zhangye with Xiao Ma's gang, in which my camera was commandeered and no less than 70 pictures were taken in the half-hour I was there.

I was a little hesitant to cancel my travels for a competition I knew little about, but it ended up being good fun. It wasn't at the university like the first round, but on a fashionable walking street near the city center. I have trouble understanding the title of the song we played even though I know all of the words, and my best guess at translation is "How Could You Not Care About How Sad I Am?". It uses a lot of jazzy chords and I like it quite a bit for a Chinese song. We were the only ones to play instruments again, and actually came in first place on the first day. I'm not sure how many competitors there were to start with but on the next and final day there were still 25. This time they stepped the fanfare, starting the whole thing off with a round of cannon fire that surely didn't go unnoticed in about a third of the city. The night before we went over a new song for no more than 20 minutes, which I wasn't remotely familiar with, so I was glad when Xiao Ma made a last minute change and wanted to play the same song as the day before. They also insisted I greet the crowd in Chinese, and gave me two sentences of new words right before going on, which I botched horribly when I tried to say it on stage. Three of Xiao Ma's friends I see often at the shop also performed and did well, and for a while we were in first and second place, but were overtaken at the end by a girl who did a Middle-Eastern style dance routine and came in first. The ending ceremony was long and elaborate, as we were summoned the stage one by one and men I didn't know in suits shook our hands and handed us our trophy. We also got a certificate (which says "Ma Yu Long" but not my name) and an enormous winter blanket, all in bright pink with embroidered flowers. Xiao Ma got the trophy and certificate, I got the blanket. The whole event was filmed, for local TV I believe, and an unnecessarily friendly man who owns a sports clothing shop on that street keeps giving me gifts and asking me to play guitar in his store.

Yellow Submarine

Last Thursday night me, Andrew, and Phillip stopped at the Xinjiang restaurant where my friend plays the dutar for some lamb kebabs and music. This time I brought my guitar, much to their delight, and of course I had to sing many an English song. Me and Ehkbet attempted a guitar-dutar duet, with mixed results, and as we were outside we attracted an audience that reached 30 during the night. Me and Andrew have the same students, and a large group of them who passed by stayed to listen and take loads of photographs (that's Andrew in the picture). They fed us three platefuls of kebabs and a few beers, and refused to take payment at the end of the night.

I have finally claimed the bicycle the school gave me, in time for a bike ride with Andrew, Mohammed, two students Mohammed knows, and Miss Mao from the Foreign Affairs Office and her husband. Miss Mao is always full of personality, and usually wearing the brightest red clothing I have probably ever seen. She clearly had no plan but eventually led us to a fishing pond outside the city, where Mohammed failed to outsmart the Chinese fish, and through the Muslim quarter to a good restaurant. I had pictured every Chinese town having a street of half-dead sheep lying on the pavement and unidentifiable animal parts, and now I have seen Zhangye's, complete with sheep's heads and bloodied wool coats. I had asked Miss Mao about the possibility of a cleaning service for my apartment, and she unexpectedly recruited the two English students with us, which is good news but feels exploitive somehow.

Saturday night MoMo called to invite me to a "party" of Xiao Ma's, which I figured could mean anything after the "game" at Hexi University. It turned out to be a big get-together at a restaurant (hot pot as per usual), which wasn't too thrilling after having already eaten and not understanding any of the conversation. The next day MoMo helped me with some shopping I had to do, and in true Chinese style I was able to ride my bike with a small girl on the back. After I was finished and about ready to go home she suggested he go for a hike, in a place that "wasn't far". After 20 or 30 minutes of riding against a strong wind with a second person on the back, I was getting rather tired, and I asked how much farther it was. She said another 20 minutes; it was also about 5pm, an awkward time to be arriving somewhere 40 minutes out of the city for a hike. Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese think we are as illogical as we think they are.

This week in class I'm doing a lesson on music, and I do love a job in which I can bring my guitar to work. Most of my students don't so much as know who The Beatles are, so I figured it was time to educate them. It's been a fun lesson so far, perhaps highlighted for me by having the students write out on the blackboard what they think the words are to Yellow Submarine after listening to it ("and he told The Beatles' life" instead of "and he told us of his life", "and our friends all live in a stone" instead of "and our friends are all aboard" etc.). I get asked to sing so often here that it no longer bothers me to do it, and leading the students in "Let It Be" with their sweet angelic voices has been worth it. I'm not too bothered about public speaking anymore either, or the fact that a male friend is likely to leave his hand on my knee while talking; I guess it takes something like living in China to break down some barriers.

A "Game" with the "Music Team"

Well, I knew the time I was spending with Xiao Ma at his guitar shop would lead to something unusual, but I very surprised to find myself performing with him on-stage at a singing competition last night at the university in front of hundreds of students. We had been practicing a song he wrote and through an English-speaking student he had asked if I would promise to join his "guitar club" and take part in a "game" with him, but I often don't know what they are talking about and didn't pay much attention to it. Even as late as yesterday evening I didn't realize what was going on, until they suddenly announced we were going to Hexi University for the "game", and when we arrived at the school there was a large stage set up with a crowd cheering on the performing students. It was generally karaoke-style and I think we were the only ones to play instruments, but we didn't win. That was one of the largest audiences I've played for, and I've definitely never gotten that much applause for taking the stage. There was a big laugh when I finally looked up from setting up my guitar into the crowd and the lights with a bewildered look. His song is pretty good as far as the singing goes, but my attempts to suggest that three guitar solos might be too many and that the music should change at some point were either not understood or ignored. Actually, apparently not satisfied with the amount of soloing that would go on, he added an additional minute-long introduction at the last minute. There is another competition soon, and he is pretty well set on us playing "Hotel California" (universally adored throughout Asia) and trading singing on the verses with me. No amount of explaining that I neither can nor want to sing on a stage in front of 400 people has worked so far, so we'll see what happens here. And it's best if I just keep the fact that I don't like "Hotel California" in the first place to myself.

There was a singing competition Friday night as well, and it's been satisfying to see some kind of entertainment going on on the campus. I was there with Mohammed, the teacher from Egypt, and I was glad to overhear some students he had been talking to taking their leave to go to a party, the first sign of some students letting loose on the weekend. However, what it turned out to be was a Communist Party meeting; they had joined the Party and were going to attend a two-hour lecture on the virtues of the Socialist Motherland, at 9pm on a Friday. Even Xiao Ma, the living Spinal Tap stereotype of the hard-rocker, brought everyone back to his store after our performance only to have noodles and go to bed at 11:30. And also to put a muzak version of "Hotel California" on repeat for about 40 minutes.

Yesterday I was also invited to fly kites again by my friend Wang Ya Mo, or "Mo Mo" as her friends apparently call her. The way she pronounces it it sounds like "Mama", so I'm not sure how often I will be calling her that. The city square was taken over by a serious-looking military procession, so she took me to a park instead, which turned out to be well outside the city by bus. With her limited English and very quiet personality I often don't know what's going on; after walking about two minutes into the park we had gone out of our way to get to she said only "I think we are wrong" and turned back. So we went across the street into a dusty, barren landscape with nothing but a telephone pole and a few farmers while I silently wondered "where the hell are you taking me?". I eventually got it out from her that there were too many trees in the park for the kite, so after having as much fun as you can with a kite in a desert we headed back into the park to basically walk around and try to think of things to say. She wants me to help her with her English but like most Chinese will not get more specific than "my oral English", and this is definitely a good way to learn Chinese words. When we were almost at the guitar shop where she would again act as translator, she said not to mention we had gone to the park, and waited to enter the store 20 minutes after me. I didn't press her about that but I'm not sure how common it is for men and women to be friends in China, and Xiao Ma is the type to tease her endlessly. She's very hard to read and she knows my stay here is limited and we can barely communicate, but I'm hoping she doesn't have any ulterior motives besides kite-flying and learning English, knowing that the Chinese idea of dating is only of the "Romeo and Juliet" one-love forever variety. That's probably the biggest negative of my stay here; in a city of traditional Chinese values and only two Western women (in their 40's), my dating life isn't looking too promising.

An Unusual Instrument

I went out of town this weekend and saw Lanzhou, the provincial capital, for the first time. Gansu is a good-sized province and it's a nine-hour overnight train trip to Lanzhou. With 3 million or so people it is considerably bigger than Zhangye, and has considerably more foreigners. I even passed Westerners on the street, always a head-turning experience. There is a Western grocery store where you can get exotic imports like cereal, cheese, and coffee (at Western prices), but I was more interested in the DVD and CD shopping. I was also thrilled to get a new book in English, a collection of translated Chinese short stories actually. At least one study has given Lanzhou the honors of "most polluted city in the world", and though the shopping is superior to Zhangye it's a crowded and mostly character-less city and I didn't come away wishing I had chosen my job offer in Lanzhou.

The reason I went to Lanzhou was because I was invited by Julian, the Peace Corps volunteer who teaches at the Zhangye Medical College. We met his friends there on Saturday, who were having a birthday party for a girl turning 23. It was basically like being in college again, playing frisbee and drinking with young Americans. Most of them are near the end of the two years and trying to get out early; you don't get to pick where you are sent by the Peace Corps and I don't know how many of them adored China ("I think we've seen enough cultural things... I'm all about the beach next trip"). They spend their weekends partying and the straight-edge, vegetarian image I had in mind for Peace Corps volunteers was thoroughly destroyed Saturday night. There are a lot of Peace Corps teachers in Lanzhou, and about 15 in one room during the party - more than all the foreigners in Zhangye. The party was fun for sure, but I'm still glad to be in a place cut off from Americans, and would hate to spend my time abroad watching seasons of Six Feet Under on DVD and making homemade kegs. I did get to hear more about teaching at International Schools however, since a teacher named Meredith expects to do that in Africa after she's done with the Peace Corps. International Schools are schools abroad for children of diplomats and other ex-pats, such as the children of Su and Chris from OWDC, where all the students speak English and the classes are regular curriculum, but it happens to be in another country. I would need to get a Master's in education, but this is something I have considered doing, and much more of a serious career possibility than what I am doing now.

While shopping and wandering the streets on my own Sunday, I was reminded that I wasn't in sleepy Zhangye anymore. There was a row of street sellers lined up next to each others, and I bought a number of posters with Chinese paintings for my apartment. I was then looking at the selection of the next seller when all of them suddenly grabbed their carpets of goods and started making a break for it, like something out of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. I looked behind me, and several men in suits in an unmarked van were getting and grabbing the street sellers. Still holding my posters, I didn't wait to find out if they were ununiformed police or thugs or what, and casually walked on down the street to get my bus. It hadn't really occurred to me that the goods were likely stolen, and I smiled as I pictured the scene of police in western China trying to figure out what to do with a foreigner they have to arrest.

Back on Thursday night, me and Phillip stopped by the Xinjiang restaurant with the young man who plays the two-stringed instrument (called the dutar, literally "two strings" in Persian) for some kebabs and music. Andrew, Gary, and a friend of theirs from Lanzhou also saw us and stopped by, and we ended up staying several hours, while Andrew talked with our new friend Aqbar and I started to get the hang of playing the dutar. Xinjiang being the Muslim Autonomous Region, it's traditional music is much more Middle-Eastern than Chinese, and the dutar is played mostly on one string while the other is left open to act as a drone. After playing guitar for so long and watching Aqbar (who can be seen in the photo in this post) play it, I can improvise songs in my own way on the dutar and learned a few good melodic runs from Aqbar, though I certainly am not playing it the way he does. I expect to visit Xinjiang during the week-long May holiday and am tempted to buy a dutar if one is affordable enough, though I think taking it back home on a plane might be mildly tricky. Aqbar of course does not speak English, and once again music has become a great in to making local friends despite my fledgling Chinese skills.

Ping Pong and Paper, Rock, Scissors

Had a very decent weekend, and the most Chinese so far. On Friday me and four of the other foreign teachers (Andrew, Mohammed, Cynthia, and Gary) met for dinner and had some good conversation, mostly at the expense of our students. The main dish was a local favorite that would translate literally as "big plate of chicken", which is exactly what it was. I was excited to find not only the chicken's claws but the head within the mess; the Chinese are not a people to waste anything. I tried my best to eat the claw, but there wasn't too much meat and it was a little disturbing anyway. We took turns playing with the chicken parts and taking pictures, which I thought might be a little rude until I remembered just how much we are stared at and generally made a spectacle of. Towards the end of the meal we were all shocked into silence as we watched an unknown foreigner walk into the restaurant, an older man and the only non-teacher I have seen so far. It was our turn to stare at the foreigner, who pretended not to see us and sat far away. Like proper Chinese spectators, we all wanted to know where he was from and why he was here but no one wanted to ask.

On Saturday I went down to Xiao Ma's guitar shop again, this time with Gary, the Canadian foreign teacher who's been in China 14 years and knows Xiao Ma. My friend Wang Ya Mo, the primary school teacher and "translator" between me and Xiao Ma was there again as well, although Gary sometimes had to actually translate between me and her. As always there were a lot of students hanging out there, and I ended up performing "Hey Jude" against my will twice, the first time with Gary at least. Two high school girls kept giving requests and were mystified that I didn't know anything by Shakira, Mariah Carey, or China's all-time favorite Western pop group, The Carpenters. Xiao Ma's girlfriend cooked dinner for about 10 of us in the back room (this is where the picture above is from), a spectacular meal with 13 dishes besides the rice. The Chinese often play games during dinner, and this time it was rock, paper, scissors. I'm not sure how our hosts were able to destroy us at a game that doesn't involve skill, but they did. It's easy to get the impression that the Chinese don't have as much fun as us because they work long hours and don't do much of what I think of as "entertainment" (movies, bars, rock shows etc.), but I'm starting to notice how much they enjoy each other's company. I can only picture a group of Westerners getting that excited about rock, paper, scissors if they hadn't seen each other in 8 years or were on drugs, which I think is a compliment to the Chinese. During some of the rounds the losers had to sing a song, which few Chinese have any reservations about. Me and Gary, on the other hand, were struggling to think of something when we lost, and of all the songs we knew we ended up singing a rousing rendition of "Oh My Darlin' Clemetine" (not my pick). On the walk home (at about 11pm, after about 7 hours at the shop) there was a man from Xinjiang Autonomous Region (the large, Muslim, northwestern-most part of China) out in front of his restaurant playing a Xinjiang two-stringed sitar-like instrument. He was happy to sing us a few traditional songs, and seeing my guitar, let me play the instrument for a minute, which made for a memorable end to the night.

On Sunday I socialized only with Chinese people for the first time. I spent the morning and early afternoon with Wang Ya Mo, who called me at 9:30am to invite me to fly kites in the city square, which is such a wonderfully innocent thing for one 22-year old to ask another that I couldn't possibly say no. Her "little brother" (cousin) was there flying his kite, but I don't think he said a word, certainly not to me. Ya Mo's kite was broken as it turned out, so I bought one and made pitiful attempts at getting it to fly in the slight wind. Going back to what I said about the Chinese enjoying each other's company, I was amused to see a middle-aged couple in the square sharing one jump-rope and obviously having a blast. Of all the things to be going on in Zhangye there was what looked like a small pop concert going on on the other side of the square, so we went to investigate. A crowd of mostly straight-faced middle-aged men in suits was watching a girl singing on a stage that was set up, with a giant pink banner behind her and suspicious-looking pink umbrellas set up all around. At the end of each song, there was an eerie silence, and I didn't know whether to take that as a sign that they hated the music or pop concerts are so new that they didn't know they were supposed to clap. Ya Mo explained to me what the elaborate set-up was for: to advertise a brand of milk. The People's Republic your parents knew and feared is gone indeed.

Once the entertainment potential of flying a kite with someone you have trouble communicating with was exhausted, we wandered around town for a bit, highlighted by the sight of two ridiculous costumed cartoon characters walking around to advertise something or other. Ya Mo invited me to have lunch with her mother in her apartment, my first invite into a Chinese home. I think her mother was a bit surprised to see me, and the first thing she said was "I don't speak English" in Chinese, as if I were accustomed to English speakers in Zhangye and this would come as a shock. Lunch was quite good and more than adequate, as can be expected. I will not be cooking for any Chinese until I become a master chef, which is not in my foreseeable future. Typically when I eat with Chinese people they will eat little while insisting I have more and more, which I don't object to but feels a little strange to my Western concepts of politeness. After lunch Ya Mo played some music for me that she likes on the computer. The Chinese love their sentimental music (meaning, all of it) to come with slow video montages of mountains and river valleys, and the traditional-style music was pretty good if you ignored the "fashionable" drum samples and guitar riffs layered on top of it. She wants to work on her English and I am obviously in need of learning more Chinese, so I'm glad that we will "make good friends".

Even earlier than Wang Ya Mo, a few of my students had called me in the morning to see if I wanted to play badminton in the gym with them. They suggested 3:30 for a time, and said they would call again at 3. At precisely 3:00 my phone rang, and it was "Sonya", one of my students. She had obviously been running and was completely out of breath, and wanted to know if I wanted to meet with her and her friends. I said sure and wanted to know when to meet, so she replied "oh, right now. I am waiting for you outside of your building". I had only just gotten home and intended to relax for 10 minutes, but instead had to rush out the door to meet my students. She was in fact not standing outside of my building, and I correctly guessed she thought I lived in the same building as Andrew and some of the other teachers. She was still out of breath when I found her, and we met some of her classmates and went to the gym.

For the next hour or so I faced an unending series of my students on a ping-pong table, a match-up I have long awaited. They were almost all better than me but not by too much, which made for some good matches, though the only person interested in keeping score was a very serious and very random man who took over for 10 minutes and was definitely not my student. I finally quit the ping-pong for the basketball court, where a pick-up game was started and I realized how woefully out of shape I am. However, on this side of the world I am definitely a better basketball player than at home. The gym also had badminton, which I tried briefly, and Chinese chess, which I did not.

After exhausting myself, the students invited me to eat at the canteen with them, and refused to let me pay for my meal. I hadn't been there before, and the large cafeteria atmosphere won't be drawing me back too often. After this I invited the three students who were left, some of my most outgoing and talented at English, to see my apartment. Or rather, they invited themselves, but I was happy to accomodate. They thought it was too big and lonely, and not homely enough for their tastes. I was told by "Vivien" that when she heard they would have a new American teacher this term, she thought I would wear very fashionable clothes. Obviously, I am a poor representative of my country in that department. I was also asked why I don't dress "very open" like the American pop stars they see on TV, and they are convinced that most Americans must be completely different than me. They played me music they like, typical Chinese pop which I tactfully described as "not my style", and I was surprised when they took to the Pavement and Morrissey I played for them, and more surprised when they claimed to know Chinese singers who sounded similar. I will likely spend more time with students in the future, which should be interesting, or at the very least sharpen my ping-pong skills.

Making Chinese Friends

Went back down to the Rock and Roll Guitar Pub last Saturday. The owner Xiao Ma ("Little Ma"; Ma is the surname, and this is how friends of the same age refer to each other in China) was glad to see me again, and insisted on stopping what he was doing and changing my guitar strings for me even though I'm fully capable of doing it myself. As he speaks no English I was again lucky to have someone there who does, his friend Wang Ya Juan who is a primary school teacher our age with a lot of "young and naughty" students. According to Miss Wang, Xiao Ma (the "x" in Chinese Pinyin sounds like "sh") wants me to join his "guitar team" and come down every week. She was translating literally from the Chinese and was not grasping the word "band". So, yes, I have been invited to form a band with Chinese students who love Guns 'n Roses and speak no English. Needless to say, I will not be passing that up.

Xiao Ma has a dream of buying an American Fender guitar, a dream I was forced to crush over the course of the afternoon. He was looking to buy a good guitar from America and have it shipped to him - for about $100. Through Miss Wang I delicately explained that a reasonable Fender guitar will cost a minimum of $300 or $400, not including shipping. He was eyeing Eric Johnson's guitar and wanted to know if he could get it for $100, so I looked it up on the internet: $2,000. After an extended period of looking at guitars on musiciansfriend.com, I think reality finally set in, and that was that.

Xiao Ma also took me and Miss Wang to dinner, hot pot once again. I then proceeded to fail at handling my chopsticks, stain my shirt with hot sauce, blow my nose around 20 times (not very polite in China, though spitting is fine), and very nearly die from a hot piece of fish containing about 40 small bones. Miss Wang is a very nice girl but her English is unspectacular, and my Chinese is much worse, so conversation was a bit limited. However, I have actual Chinese friends now, at a guitar shop no less, definitely a step in the right direction. After dinner we went back to the shop to play some more music. I knew they would force me to sing so I brought the lyrics to "Let It Be", and I can only hope the language difference helps mask my terrible voice. Random students hang out there, so there was a girl on drums for some songs. When I finally left at 11pm they watched me take a taxi to make sure I didn't walk home, and Miss Wang called me at home to make sure I was "safe". As an American this was hilarious to me, and you would know why if you saw Zhangye.

To help my Chinese studies I bought a large Chinese-English dictionary this week. It was published in 1978, and therefore serves two purposes: a) looking up Chinese words, and b) good old-fashioned propaganda. Here are some of the example sentences used in the dictionary: "Thanks to the leadership of the Party, we are leading a happy life today"; "When the enemy halts, we harass him" under a word for "rest" or "halt"; "Wherever the troops went, they never infringed on the peoples' interests" under "army"; and my favorite so far, "No one is born with a proletarian world outlook; one acquires it only through ideological remoulding". I couldn't find an entry for Confucius besides "Confucius and Sons: as in the popular slogan, 'Down with Confucius and Sons!'".

I have also had the bizarre experience of a haircut in China. Walking into a haircutter's and saying only "I want" while making a hair-cutting motion, I spent the next half-hour having my hair washed and shampoo-ed, then my scalp massaged for five minutes (by a guy, while my hair was full of shampoo so it was extremely hard not to laugh while looking at the mirror), then my hair washed again, and then cut, followed by another round of wash and shampoo. This set me back all of $1.25, a full ten times cheaper than home.

I don't find it too hard to get by in daily life, but most everything is just slightly different somehow. My campus doesn't seem all that different from a Western campus, but you notice little things like students reading to themselves out-loud from books while standing outside, possibly because of the limited study space you have with 6 or 7 to a dorm room. There is also a loudspeaker system outside, which at certain times plays inspirational music or messages in Chinese or English.

Yesterday, a group of students from class six, my most motivated, invited me to watch the basketball game with them after class. It turns out that different classes form their own basketball teams that play against each other, so me and my students watched their classmates from the side of the court while cheering "Liu Liu! Jia you! (Six Six! Come on!)". I can't say much for their talent, but they have heart. After about 20 minutes they insisted I had better go to get inside, because it was too cold out for me. They want to play basketball or ping-pong with me this weekend, and I suspect they are better at ping-pong than basketball. My students are only about two years younger than me, and I can have actual interesting conversations with them outside of class, one reason I'm glad to be at a University rather a middle school.

Shy Teacher

Today I had my first "real" classes, as in the first ones in which I had the class for the second time, had given them a reading assignment, and had to really teach them something. It was quite a lot of fun actually, especially when I give the students a creative outlet and let them surprise me. The reading, from the textbook, was about how Native American names are given to them as a way to describe someone's character. As suspected they haven't learned about Native Americans, so I gave a quick lecture on the culture, and then had them pick Native American-style names for each other and myself. I had two classes and was called Shy-Man and Shy-Teacher (they haven't really gotten past "shy" and "handsome" in describing me, although "friendly" might have been thrown in there once or twice), and they picked names like Naughty-Girl, Big-Head-Cat, Snoopy, and Tomato-Salad-Girl for each other. I also had them write about what they thought of the name given to them. An excerpt: "I'm really a naughty girl. Many classmates are afraid to play with me. In our life, we should have much smile and happy. So, I think, naughty is not my fault, but my advantage. Do you think so? I very like this name". I also found an appropriate New York Times article online about how Chinese students like to pick oddball English names in the classroom (http://www.bebeyond.com/LearnEnglish/BeAD/Readings/PickNameChina.html) which I shortened and had them read in class, told them about Western names and gave them a list of their own English names with meanings (I had them share a few copies and mild chaos ensued), and had them describe Chinese names to me and think of some Chinese names for me. It's a scary idea at first, but I expect to find having total freedom in the classroom to be ideal. The students can also be really enthusiastic at times, and will do things like standing in unison to greet me when I enter the room and erasing the blackboard for me.

Last Saturday, I had dinner with Phillip and an English woman named Tracy who is teaching at a Zhangye middle school, both of whom are also going through OWDC for their jobs. Afterwards we went to my place and shared a bottle of baijiu, the popular and potent Chinese rice wine, which I was looking forward to trying. It's probably most similar to vodka but with a strange, vaguely fruity taste and a little stronger. It was a new experience for me to be hosting adults in my own apartment, fellow teachers no less. Only now am I starting to feel like anything resembling an adult, and I do enjoy the freedom and the idea of having my own money and lifestyle.

On Sunday I went shopping for a guitar, and surprisingly I found three or four shops. Generally they had to dust them off, and without fail all of the strings were completely slack as if ready for a lengthy storage. In one shop, the owner was giving a young girl a piano lesson, and both stopped the lesson to stare at me for the first five minutes as I tuned a guitar, until I finally told them to continue. I didn't find anything that grabbed me; that is, until I stumbled into the Rock and Roll Guitar Pub near the city square. There were maybe 7 or 8 university students in there sitting on stools and playing guitars, with their young guitar teacher running the store. The place was full so the (possible) owner insisted that one of the guys stand so I could sit, which I found a little embarrassing. Of course, as soon as I sat down with a guitar everyone stopped playing to watch me. Eventually they got brave enough to talk to me, since one or two could speak some English. They asked me to plug in an electric and play, and the owner sat down with his guitar to play along. Someone requested "Restaurant in California", so the two of us went through a rousing rendition of "Hotel California". This is the one Western rock song most revered in Asia (certainly Thailand), and he knew the solo by heart. The owner couldn't speak English but had his friend translate, and was quite excited about having me in his store and playing with me. We took some pictures together and exchanged phone numbers, and he wants me to come back, which I will. I did buy a guitar from him as well, a decent acoustic for about $50. The other foreign teachers have been a great source of help and outlet for my social life, but I will hopefully also make more Chinese friends as time goes on.