Last Friday I started teaching a month-long EFL “Winter Camp” program for nine Beijingers aged 8-13 who arrived the night before. We have English class in the mornings and field trips in the afternoons. They’re all staying with Canadian families and it’s a shocking cultural adventure for them. Almost everything is different. It’s rare to get a group this “fresh”, and I plan to have fun with it.

We’re using a classroom in a posh local private school that is pretty impressive even by Canadian standards, so the facilities and grounds are really nice; they were awed by the interactive white board, for example. But they were also excited just to walk down the hall to the bathroom, armed with their cameras, taking photos of everything from the vending machines to the high school classes in session with their doors open. I’ve taught this kind of EFL gig before, and sometimes the kids have already traveled so much that being in a developed Western country isn’t so special, but not these kids. They’re apparently doing this kind of thing for the first time. I felt like a celebrity in the classroom with all the cameras aimed at me.

I’ve decided to keep the fact that I can speak basic Mandarin a secret from them for as long as I can, so I can listen in on their conversations as much as I can. Between my limited Mandarin, my teaching responsibilities, and the fact that four excited 12-year-old girls babbling away at once is hard to decipher in any language, I don’t get to tune in to their conversations near enough to satisfy my curiosity, never mind pausing to scribble down notes of what I hear. But it’s still funny what I do catch.

Friday morning was their first morning in Canada after their first night and breakfast with a Canadian family. Before class started they were animatedly telling one another about how BIG everything in their homestays’ house is, even the bookshelves. Then they were talking about what they were fed for breakfast and what was packed in their lunches, how it was either gross or they didn’t know what it was. It was funny in its own right, but extra funny to hear the “foreigner” experience in reverse. We’ll see what the next month brings!

Other experiences of teaching Chinese students in Vancouver:

• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Survived ESL camping
• When ‘our’ food is the foreign food
• First trips to church
• Teaching ESL in Vancouver
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?

You can browse all of our ESL/EFL teaching post here.

Foreigners and locals in China both routinely but superficially interact with street vendors. One young researcher spent a few days with a street vendor family and wrote about it here, giving us a more intimate look at the lifestyle, struggles with the authorities, and living conditions of China’s street market migrants: Street Vendor Life in China

You can read about a similar project here: Thirty Days in a Fuzhou Barbershop

For more about street market migrants and the chéngguǎn (bylaw enforcement thugs), see: The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game and Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Foreigners and locals in China both routinely but superficially interact with street vendors. One young researcher spent a few days with a street vendor family and wrote about it here, giving us a more intimate look at the lifestyle, struggles with the authorities, and living conditions of China’s street market migrants: Street Vendor Life in China

You can read about a similar project here: Thirty Days in a Fuzhou Barbershop

For more about street market migrants and the chéngguǎn (bylaw enforcement thugs), see: The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game and Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Foreigners and locals in China both routinely but superficially interact with street vendors. One young researcher spent a few days with a street vendor family and wrote about it here, giving us a more intimate look at the lifestyle, struggles with the authorities, and living conditions of China’s street market migrants: Street Vendor Life in China

You can read about a similar project here: Thirty Days in a Fuzhou Barbershop

For more about street market migrants and the chéngguǎn (bylaw enforcement thugs), see: The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game and Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Millions of young Chinese are developing a sense of individualism. That’s one of the insights revealed in the pages of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The author suggests that the previously unknown degree of personal freedom offered by factory work in a city far from one’s village is a big reason that migrants are willing to tolerate the conditions in the factories and the lifestyle that comes with it. She compares the suffocating social world of the village (and the traditional Chinese subjugation of the self to family and nation) to the new-found degree of independence in the migrant worker life:

When I read my grandfather’s diary, or watched the adults gang up on Min and her sister during a village wedding, I felt as if I were witnessing over and over where China went wrong. The concerns of the family and nation were overwhelming, and they trapped a great many people–millions upon millions–in lives they never would have chosen. …it was also why my father suppressed so much emotion. It had led my aunt Nellie to express her feelings through poetry, and it had driven Lijiao’s children to diminish the past. Only Zhang Hong had chosen to remember, and for him this memory had become a kind of torture.

And perhaps I, too, am more Chinese than I knew. Because now I understand all of them–understand why a person would choose not to tell her story, or be unable to tell it, or not admit to any feeling, because the emotion would overwhelm you otherwise. [p.382]

The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue to go on after you are gone. Spending time in Min’s village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when they first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it. [p.293]

There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. …their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own. [p.383]

I’ve heard people point to the often sub-human treatment of strangers as evidence that individualism is on the rise in China. I think that’s backward; the way Chinese treat outsiders comes out of their communalism, not individualism (though individualism is certainly no guarantee that strangers will be treated well; and in certain contexts communalism can encourage great hospitality toward strangers — though obviously, not in China). And even the sprouting individualism described in Factory Girls still has a long way to go before it reaches the point of actually ascribing value to the individual (and I don’t at all assume that that is inevitable). Still, young people making personal life decisions based on personal, rather than other people’s, desires is a huge step.

Here’s some related stuff:

• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves
• Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us
• Empty chairs: the pain of rural China’s Moon Festival

Millions of young Chinese are developing a sense of individualism. That’s one of the insights revealed in the pages of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The author suggests that the previously unknown degree of personal freedom offered by factory work in a city far from one’s village is a big reason that migrants are willing to tolerate the conditions in the factories and the lifestyle that comes with it. She compares the suffocating social world of the village (and the traditional Chinese subjugation of the self to family and nation) to the new-found degree of independence in the migrant worker life:

When I read my grandfather’s diary, or watched the adults gang up on Min and her sister during a village wedding, I felt as if I were witnessing over and over where China went wrong. The concerns of the family and nation were overwhelming, and they trapped a great many people–millions upon millions–in lives they never would have chosen. …it was also why my father suppressed so much emotion. It had led my aunt Nellie to express her feelings through poetry, and it had driven Lijiao’s children to diminish the past. Only Zhang Hong had chosen to remember, and for him this memory had become a kind of torture.

And perhaps I, too, am more Chinese than I knew. Because now I understand all of them–understand why a person would choose not to tell her story, or be unable to tell it, or not admit to any feeling, because the emotion would overwhelm you otherwise. [p.382]

The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue to go on after you are gone. Spending time in Min’s village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when they first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it. [p.293]

There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. …their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own. [p.383]

I’ve heard people point to the often sub-human treatment of strangers as evidence that individualism is on the rise in China. I think that’s backward; the way Chinese treat outsiders comes out of their communalism, not individualism (though individualism is certainly no guarantee that strangers will be treated well; and in certain contexts communalism can encourage great hospitality toward strangers — though obviously, not in China). And even the sprouting individualism described in Factory Girls still has a long way to go before it reaches the point of actually ascribing value to the individual (and I don’t at all assume that that is inevitable). Still, young people making personal life decisions based on personal, rather than other people’s, desires is a huge step.

Here’s some related stuff:

• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves
• Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us
• Empty chairs: the pain of rural China’s Moon Festival

It started with an unengaged substitute teacher, escalated with white kids throwing unprovoked juice boxes and insults at the Chinese kids, peaked with a fistfight between one of my Chinese tutoring students and two local black kids, and ended (hopefully) with a two-day suspension from school. My student ended up with a long, nasty scratch across his shoulder and chest.

I get that cafeteria scuffles will happen, and that race is only one factor among many and perhaps not even the main one. But the local students were swearing at the ESL kids in Chinese — they’ve been around Chinese classmates enough to pick up the swear words. It’s his first semester in Canada, but it’s not the first time he’s been randomly accosted for being Chinese. Getting cursed at in your own language by passing locals seems to me to be a little bit worse than having random Chinese people yell “老外！” at you.

Since we’re back in Vancouver, Canada for a few months I’ve picked up some ESL tutoring students. This one, like many, came to Vancouver to finish high school because his parents knew he wouldn’t do well on the 高考, the Chinese college entrance exam. He’s in a grade 11 ESL program at a local public school, with generally poor English, and it’s interesting to hear him relate his fight at school yesterday from a second-language, only partially-understood perspective (for example, he knows he was being taunted and challenged but doesn’t know exactly what they said to him, aside from the Chinese swear words). But it also makes me rethink about the experiences of Chinese students in Canadian schools. I don’t want to imagine what kind of impression he and his mom are getting.

I assume that my white majority perspective, growing up and being educated in a multicultural environment, maybe gives me a rosier-than-reality view of the current Asian Canadian racial experience in Vancouver. I’m not accusing Vancouverites of being exceptionally racist; although I think we’re generally much less civilized than we think we are, it was just one schoolyard scuffle, and I didn’t notice any racism when I was a white student among a large minority of Indians and Asians. But incidents like that of my student yesterday start me wondering if perhaps some of the sunshine and rainbows of our multicultural utopia shine a little less brightly for the immigrants and international students than they do for us in the white majority.

More about Asian Canadian and ESL student experiences:

• Belatedly starting to understand my Asian Canadian high school classmates
• Amy Chua’s Chinese “Tiger Mother” and the Myth of the Model Minority
• Why Chinese moms are superior mothers, and why their kids need serious therapy
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……

About racism in China:

• Heads-up to foreigners: “racism in China” is a cross-cultural conversation landmine
• A closer look at Han racism
• China’s Changing Views on Race

It started with an unengaged substitute teacher, escalated with white kids throwing unprovoked juice boxes and insults at the Chinese kids, peaked with a fistfight between one of my Chinese tutoring students and two local black kids, and ended (hopefully) with a two-day suspension from school. My student ended up with a long, nasty scratch across his shoulder and chest.

I get that cafeteria scuffles will happen, and that race is only one factor among many and perhaps not even the main one. But the local students were swearing at the ESL kids in Chinese — they’ve been around Chinese classmates enough to pick up the swear words. It’s his first semester in Canada, but it’s not the first time he’s been randomly accosted for being Chinese. Getting cursed at in your own language by passing locals seems to me to be a little bit worse than having random Chinese people yell “老外！” at you.

Since we’re back in Vancouver, Canada for a few months I’ve picked up some ESL tutoring students. This one, like many, came to Vancouver to finish high school because his parents knew he wouldn’t do well on the 高考, the Chinese college entrance exam. He’s in a grade 11 ESL program at a local public school, with generally poor English, and it’s interesting to hear him relate his fight at school yesterday from a second-language, only partially-understood perspective (for example, he knows he was being taunted and challenged but doesn’t know exactly what they said to him, aside from the Chinese swear words). But it also makes me rethink about the experiences of Chinese students in Canadian schools. I don’t want to imagine what kind of impression he and his mom are getting.

I assume that my white majority perspective, growing up and being educated in a multicultural environment, maybe gives me a rosier-than-reality view of the current Asian Canadian racial experience in Vancouver. I’m not accusing Vancouverites of being exceptionally racist; although I think we’re generally much less civilized than we think we are, it was just one schoolyard scuffle, and I didn’t notice any racism when I was a white student among a large minority of Indians and Asians. But incidents like that of my student yesterday start me wondering if perhaps some of the sunshine and rainbows of our multicultural utopia shine a little less brightly for the immigrants and international students than they do for us in the white majority.

More about Asian Canadian and ESL student experiences:

• Belatedly starting to understand my Asian Canadian high school classmates
• Amy Chua’s Chinese “Tiger Mother” and the Myth of the Model Minority
• Why Chinese moms are superior mothers, and why their kids need serious therapy
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……

About racism in China:

• Heads-up to foreigners: “racism in China” is a cross-cultural conversation landmine
• A closer look at Han racism
• China’s Changing Views on Race

I don’t personally have any feelings about Steve Jobs and this comment ultimately isn’t about him. But I do have feelings about the interconnected world of the products we buy and the people who make them. So when we think about Steve Jobs, the Apple legacy, and how we all love Apple products (which are great, no question), let’s remember that — and here comes an unpopular bit of reality — the factories making our Apple products have to hang suicide nets on the buildings to stop the workers from jumping.

Just google “Foxconn suicide nets Apple”. Or see:

• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• Inside Foxconn’s suicide factory
• Foxconn Rallies: Employees Pledge To Cherish Their Lives
  (Normally I don’t link to this trashy website — be ye warned.)
• Foxconn suicides
• The dark side of shiny Apple products
• Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech
• In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NYT)
• BSR: New York Times’ Apple-Foxconn article contains untruths, inaccuracies, and misleading info (Mac Daily News)

I don’t personally have any feelings about Steve Jobs and this comment ultimately isn’t about him. But I do have feelings about the interconnected world of the products we buy and the people who make them. So when we think about Steve Jobs, the Apple legacy, and how we all love Apple products (which are great, no question), let’s remember that — and here comes an unpopular bit of reality — the factories making our Apple products have to hang suicide nets on the buildings to stop the workers from jumping.

Just google “Foxconn suicide nets Apple”. Or see:

• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• Inside Foxconn’s suicide factory
• Foxconn Rallies: Employees Pledge To Cherish Their Lives
  (Normally I don’t link to this trashy website — be ye warned.)
• Foxconn suicides
• The dark side of shiny Apple products
• Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech
• In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NYT)
• BSR: New York Times’ Apple-Foxconn article contains untruths, inaccuracies, and misleading info (Mac Daily News)