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.

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

Chris is probably the cockiest person I’ve ever met. Not in a 19-year-old, blinded-to-danger-by-testosterone kind of way, but in a “my family is so deep in the Party that I’m untouchable and I know it” kind of way. And it was true — he got away with everything. He racked up multiple written warnings for things like scamming the other students and the school. But the school was afraid to risk ticking him off because he was too connected. And he knew it. He had this permanent smirk on face. He swaggered around the school, flirted and felt-up his showpiece most-made-up-girl-in-the-school girlfriend while ignoring the teachers and texting during class.

It was only after a tantrum where he threw a water bottle at foreign teacher’s head during a face-losing showdown in front of a large group class when the teacher forced him to obey a rule he was trying to openly flaunt — and the teacher told the school that he would never teach Chris again, period — that he finally left for good (I don’t know if they actually kicked him out, but I doubt it).

When you looked at him, you knew you were looking at one piece of China’s “symphony of privilege,” the kind of Chinese who would yell things like “My dad is Li Gang!” (see here, here, here, here and here) or “Who dares call the police?” (here, here, here and here) or possibly even worse.

A recent post by Yaxue Cao’s on Seeing Red in China called “Traitor of the Chinese People” reminded me that I once had my own drama with Chris. I once had to, with the help of two other students, physically escort him out of class. It was a free talk group class. The students were supposed to talk about whatever they wanted, so long as they used English. They were all adults. One older man, a retired philosopher named Alex who’d been “sent down” for several years during the Cultural Revolution, started saying some negative things about Mao (Alex would criticize Mao at every opportunity, in his slow, calm, 60-year-old Chinese philosopher kind of way — it was both shocking and entertaining to see). Chris immediately jumped to Mao’s defense. They argued back and forth, quickly switching into Chinese. Alex remained calm mostly, but Chris got livid. He was on his feet yelling and waving his finger in the older man’s face. Would not switch back to English. He got so out of control, rude and unmanageable that we eventually physically forced him out. A few hours later, when I figured he’d calmed down, I went to talk to him:

“Chris, I don’t care what opinion you express in class, but you must be respectful of the other students. Especially older students.”

“But you didn’t hear what he said about Chairman Mao!”

“I don’t care what he says about Mao, or what you say about Mao — you can have whatever opinion you want — so long as you are respectful to each other in class.”

“But he can’t say those things about Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao is like a god to us!”

Those were his exact words. I didn’t know what to say, though a whole lot came to mind!

Not every Mainlander has a positive view of Mao, but the vast majority of them do, and sometimes the younger, more privileged ones are the most devoted. It shocked us when we first arrived. Newbies be ye warned!

You can read more about Mao’s seemingly unassailable mythical status here:

• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Why Mainlanders are taking it personally, racially, and facially – the short answer
• Mainlanders & their emperors
• Why they still love Mao: “Liberation”
• 汉奸
• “Traitor of the Chinese People”

Chinese ways of showing interest, care or concern for someone often take the form of unsolicited advice about things foreigners consider very personal, usually with humourous (if the foreigners are well-adjusted) or tearful (if they’re not) results. Here’s what one of my bald coworkers received in a Chinese Valentine’s Day card from one of our students:

I had an experience of touching your head. It was not slipped as I imagined. but it was nice. At last, I have a suggestion: lose some weight! You’ll more handsome, no the most handsome if you lose your weight!

Have a baby soon.

For more about this quirky (to us) Chinese way of showing interest, care or concern see:

• Please Stop Paying Attention to My…
• 关心 talk – so offensive it’s funny
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?
• “You’d better put socks on that baby or else…”

In my (riveting) “Movie Class” this afternoon, I ask the students to tell me the kind of content that affects a movie’s rating. They start throwing out answers.

“Violence.”
“Nudity.”
“Sexuality.”
“Bad words.”
“Religion.”

“What?”

“Religion.”

“Why do you put religion in the same category as violence, nudity, profanity and sexuality?”

“Because it is harmful to the children.”

“Who told you religion is harmful to children?”

“My primary school teacher. She said we must believe in the science…”

“Well, who told her?”

Awkward giggles, but not too awkward. The students (all adults) know where I’m going with this. “You know a lot of scientists are also ‘religious’, right?”

My university age student isn’t trying to argue a point; he’s just repeating the answer he’s been told. He actually doesn’t know that religion doesn’t factor into movie ratings. Neither does a lot of the class,

“No, wait,” say some of the girls in the front, “They go to church at the end…”. The movie we’re discussing is Lassie, and they’ve just realized that the church scene apparently isn’t enough to tarnish its G rating.

“Right. Outside China religious content doesn’t affect a movie’s rating. Now, who remembers the proper word for ‘blood and guts’…?”

When I hear someone use “religion” and “harmful to children” in the same sentence, I immediately think of the “New Atheists”, not China’s education system. It’s funny — and telling — that I was reminded of them in this way. Apparently Chinese Communist Party education and New Atheist propaganda share certain similarities — who knew? ;)

On the 30th I had a free talk class of mostly college-age students from richer families. Since it was almost Halloween and a Party organ has listed the rise in superstition as one of seven symptoms of moral decay among government officials, I picked “superstitions” as the topic and asked the students to tell me about common Chinese superstitions. I was interested to see how they defined the term and what things they would consider “superstitious.” We also talked about why people do certain things, about how belief is only one of several reasons a person could have for their “superstitious” behaviours.

I asked about the stuff taxi drivers hang from their rear-view mirrors, and that led the students to produce, from around their necks and wrists, a surprising number of Buddhist trinkets. I see these things all the time, especially the round wood bead bracelets on men, but I was surprised at the number of Buddha (for the girls) and Guanyin (for the guys) necklaces. They said their parents buy them from monks in the temples — one girl said her mom paid 300元 for hers ($45!). The monks perform some sort spiritual service on behalf of the child, and there’s something about power being place in the object or released from the object — their English level wasn’t high enough for me to get the theological details out of them and I suspect they wouldn’t really know anyway. As visions of Martin Luther and medieval Catholic indulgences flitted through my mind, my students said: “But we’re not superstitious. We just have these for good luck. And protection.” I wish I’d had time to press them on that, but it was funny to see how they were serious; they didn’t seem to see any contradiction at all. Apparently we’re working with different definitions of “superstitious”!

“Superstition” is 迷信 (mouseover the Chinese!).
The Chinese term my students were translating as “protection” is 避邪 (“avoid evil”).

I’ve written several times about this kind of thing, including:

• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• Sending Winter Clothes to the Dead in Tianjin
• There’s hell to pay
• Chinese funeral next door

In class today the students had to read the following recruitment ad for a turn-of-the-century north pole expedition and guess the destination:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

I had one student read it to the others, and it went something like this:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold…”

“Sounds like Shanxi.”

“…long months of complete darkness, constant danger…”

“Haha, definitely Shanxi.”

“…safe return doubtful.”

“It must be Shanxi!”

Shanxi (山西) is in the heart of China’s coal mining region. That means it’s super-polluted, mine bosses are super rich (“Shanxi coal mining boss” is a cliché), and coal miners are underpaid, under-protected, and killed on a regular basis in mine accidents that occasionally make the news because there are too many to cover up all of them. North Pole or a Shanxi coal mine — not sure which is the more hazardous expedition.

It’s time for all the university sophomores in Tianjin to do their mandatory military training. According to my students, this means they have to buy a super-low-quality blue camouflage uniform (the seats split on several of my student’s classmates when they sat down) and march around in formation all day for a week or two. According to what we hear and see out our windows in the sports field beside our apartment, it means a lot of goose-stepping and yelling one-two-three-four. My students didn’t like doing it but said it made them more patriotic.

I didn’t set out to go get a picture, but we were out taking a walk happened upon a … squadron? … doing their drills. Here’s a shot of the young ladies:

I asked my students about it and this immediately led to a common and annoying language problem that plagues both English speakers learning Chinese and Chinese speakers learning English.

Basically, in everyday Mandarin it’s context rather than grammar that determines the difference between “they made me” and “they let me.” My EFL students routinely say things like, “My boss let me work late yesterday” or “they always let us work overtime” because in their heads they’re thinking in Chinese, and in Chinese they’d use the same verb to express both of the above concepts (ordering sb. to do something and allowing sb. to do something). A student today tried to tell me that the drill sergeants “let them” stand very still for a long time, so I hammered out some sentences with her and double-checked with my Chinese coworkers:

The military training officer doesn’t let us (让) talk or look around.
教官不让我们说话或者左顾右盼。
jiàoguān búràng wǒmen shuōhuà huòzhě zuǒgùyòupàn.

The military training officer makes us (让) goose-step for a long time.
教官让我们踢很长时间正步。
jiàoguān ràng wǒmen tī hěn cháng shíjiān zhèngbù.

Sure, people could use other words to say it more specifically, but they don’t! They just say “让” and expect you to know what they mean from the situation. If I try to use more specific words when speaking Chinese, it comes off sounding funny because usually they wouldn’t bother in most situations. Like much of China, that’s just how it is; you can like it, you can leave it, but you’re not gonna change it.

We’re playing a Taboo-style English exercise where I give a student a word and she has to make her classmates guess it, but she can’t say the word or certain specified related words. I give one mid-20′s female student Japanese, along with China and island.

“Who do we all hate?”
“Japanese!”

It was the fastest correct guess all class.

For more about common Mainlander feelings toward the Japanese, see:

• Why they hate the Japanese

For some Chinese people, that stuff we hear about in the news or read about in history textbooks is real life.

I’m sitting in the office with a student. Students often come in to chat during office hours — this one’s in her early 20′s. She asked about us planning to eventually have another child, and then started casually telling me how she “was supposed to have a little brother” but the government wouldn’t allow them to “so they just killed it” in the second or third month of pregnancy. She says she doesn’t know the details, but “at that time it was very strict” and they couldn’t just choose to pay the fine for breaking the One Child Policy and have their second child (like some of my other, richer and better-connected students have). Then she went on wondering what it would have been like to have a brother.

It makes sense that she’s talking about it so casually. I’ve read enough about China (and heard enough of those horrible radio ads for “3-minute” “painless” abortions: “Oh no! I’m pregnant! But I just started a new job — what about my career?” “Don’t worry about it! You can just…”) to understand how these kinds of situations are so common that regular people like my student naturally talk about it like it’s no big deal. Of course, the fact that a person could discuss this kind of situation so nonchalantly only demonstrates just how extra horrible it is; the brutality is not just barbaric, it’s also commonplace.

It’s always interesting when the things you read about in the news and in history books suddenly appear before you in the life of someone you know. Like a sudden reminder that no matter how well we get along, the world my students come from is very, very different from my own.

A similar reminder happened in class two days ago — that’s two days before June sixth, a major but unmarked anniversary (I promise you know what happened in China on that day, even if you don’t recognize the date). I was facilitating a free talk session with about fifteen students. One of them was 32 years old and living in Tianjin in nineteen eighty-nine, another was 19 and living in Shanghai. Others were only children at the time, while some weren’t born yet. All they wanted to do was talk about the event, about what they remembered, what happened in their cities and what they saw — none of them were sympathetic to the gov. I wanted so bad to ask so many questions, but if it came out that I instigated or encouraged discussion of that particular topic I’d be risking trouble with my employer. I tried to steer the discussion elsewhere several times, and the students kept bringing it back. Anyway, it was interesting to see history come alive in memories and stories of my students. It’s easy to talk with them everyday and forget that they’ve experienced some crazy stuff and have all kinds of stories to tell.

Related stuff:

• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• Famous Chinese novelist writes on the enforcement of China’s family planning policy
• What can happen to a 6-month illegally pregnant women in China
• ‘Painless abortion’ and ‘female surgery’ ad campaign hits Chinese university campus
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”
• Free Baby Accessories, compliments of Tianjin & the One Child Policy