The Good, the Bad, and the Inconsequential

As I travel, I find that my day is full of doing in a way it only rarely is during my daily life at home. Once I have lived someplace doing the same thing for more than a month, I often get into a rhythm, with the regularity and predictability of the National Anthem. Sure, you can emphasize different words and sing it with different accompanying instruments, but the words and the tune remain the same.

Oh say can you see by the dawns early light... I wake up to music as my alarm goes off. Sometimes I snooze it and sometimes I just listen to the song before getting up to take a shower and eat breakfast. ...What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming... I drive or walk or moped to work. ...Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight... I begin my morning work and prepare for the day ahead.

And so on and so forth. I have a routine that stays more or less the same day by day until the last hours of the evening, where I sometimes go wild and change things up, like singers so often do with the last note of the Star Spangled Banner.

But not so during travel. There is no cruise control. Doing anything requires doing something. Finding transportation requires research and booking. Reading requires finding a comfortable, hopefully bug-free place to do it. Even eating requires searching for a good, clean (enough) restaurant if you don't want to just eat packets of chips or McDonalds.

I generally enjoy this doing. It can endow a small but significant feeling of accomplishment with each successful doing. The taxi is using the meter? That is what I am talking about! I found a nice cafe to read? Well done! I didn't get sick after that meal? High-five!

For me, this doing corresponds and interacts with happenings (meeting people, seeing a show, missing a plane), and together I find they form my memories of a place.


Over the past three days, the happenings have been playing a much more pronounced role in my travel than usual.

After I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, I made my way to meet up with Heng, a friend of mine who I met years ago in Hong Kong as we couchsurfed together and traveled around the city. He lives a ways outside the city, so I had to change metro lines twice to get there. As I arrived at the last interchange, sweating from the sweltering heat and the weight of my pack, I was told there was a train malfunction and I would not be able to get to Heng by metro. When I asked where I could get a taxi around there, they suggested I go back two stations to where I had just come from.

Frustrated but resigned, I got back on the metro and buried myself in my book. At the station, I finally found the taxi cue and lined up, glad to be close to an air conditioned car, with my nose still as close to my book as it could be without dripping sweat on to it. I finally got to the front of the line and dumped myself and my things in the cab and told the driver where I wanted to go. Only to find out that I had to get a ticket at another counter and then come and get in the taxi line. I dragged myself and my things out of the car and dripped my way to a second line at the taxi ticket counter. Feeling ready to shower and sleep and be done, I opened my backpack to get out my book and read my way through one last line. Only it wasn't there. I looked again, checking every pocket in the backpack and even in my wrinkled linen shorts. It was gone, left behind in that beautiful, comfortable, damned taxi that was already speeding away to someone else's destination.

Thus I lost my Kindle. Here, certainly, was a confluence of doing and happenings that would undoubtedly be remembered as "The Bad." The evening of sweat and a missing Kindle. It sounds like an Encyclopedia Brown story.


The next day I resolved to find a way to get a new Kindle. I was reminded of endeavoring to do the same thing five years ago when I first met Heng after my Kindle of the moment had broken during a hike outside of Hong Kong. Well, I had succeeded then, and I would find a way to do so again. With more than three months left of travel and many books left on my reading list, failure was not an option.

Online I found that there was one main company selling Kindles in Kuala Lumpur. It could send with one day shipping, but with my short stay that wouldn't be fast enough. I got in touch with them and was happy to hear that I could go to their office and pick it up there. I got a GrabCar (Malaysia's response to Uber) with the help of Heng and headed to a technology complex on the far side of the city.

The shop was far from obvious. The complex seemed more like an industrial park than anything else. I searched for the company, seeking out the words "Kindle Malaysia" on all the buildings. Nothing. I looked for the color patterns from their sleek website. Nothing. Well, nothing but the familiar sweat streaking down my face. I shouldn't have worn my light purple shirt, I decided, as dark splotches appeared around my neck and armpits. Finally, though, I find it, tucked away inside another office building and completely hidden from the outside. I approach the door only to see a sign on the door: "Out for Lunch 1-2." Another half hour of sweat never hurt anyone, right?

Once I finally get in to talk with the owner of the shop and his assistant, everything goes smoothly. More than smoothly, really. It takes a while because my card doesn't have the chip in it that most everywhere else in the world besides the US has already mandated. Nonetheless, it is a fun and memorable experience, as we shared our tastes in books and video games, suggesting authors and games to each other and making connections that I had neither sought after nor expected. After everything was finished, the owner took a picture (below) and helped me get a taxi into town.

The next day, I took the metro to the airport from Heng's apartment without any trouble. It was smooth sailing as I checked in for my flight to Penang, Malaysia and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they offered a free checked bag. I zipped off my day pack and positively flew through security, happy to be much less encumbered than normal. On the plane, my good fortune continued as I found my seat to be an aisle emergency row seat. After a short flight, I had no trouble getting on a bus to my hostel in George Town. It was only then that my luck failed, leaving me feeling like I had gotten punched in the gut and could only splutter and gasp in response.

While my bag was checked, someone had gone through it and stolen $251.70. Two countries earlier, in Thailand, I had taken out money in USD in preparation for Myanmar, where, until recently, the US Dollar was the only currency you could use to pay for tourist-related industries (you can, it turn out, now use either the USD or the Myanmar kyat). I had kept it perfectly flat (in Myanmar, people regularly refuse to accept USD if it is too old or blemished in any way) in a red envelope in my backpack, mostly forgotten now that I had arrived in Malaysia. I kept my USD, my credit card, and one USD worth of the currency of every country I had visited so far (Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar) in the envelope. And now it was all gone. Well, all gone, other than my credit card, 22,000 Vietnamese Dong (=1 USD) and a 10 Thai Baht coin (=.30 USD).

Gone was all of my US currency, 1,200 Myanmar Kyats (=1 USD), and 25 Thai Baht (=.70 USD). The rest seemed to have been stuffed carelessly back into the red envelope and shoved into my bag. It felt like my privacy had been violated and my trust betrayed. My trust in checked baggage, my trust in Malaysia, my trust in people. For some reason I cared about the lost USD least. It was the Kyats and Baht that really got to me. I had carefully set aside my favorite bills in both currency, planning my last day in each country meticulously so that I would have a single dollar's worth of currency left. I had kept the bills that, in my eyes, were the most interesting, the ones that had the most character. All for nought.

Thank goodness I had moved the collection of stamps I have been purchasing for my grandma into another location.


As I dealt with airport and airline bureaucracy for the next hour in order to file a report for the stolen money (only to be told, unsurprisingly, that I would not be reimbursed because I had not reported it when I was in the baggage area - even then I doubt I would have seen any sort of reimbursement since it was cash that was stolen), I pondered at how trips and travel are remembered. Looking back at these past few days in a month or a year, what would I remember? Staying with Heng, sure. Losing and buying a new Kindle, definitely. And certainly having my money stolen. Everything else, though, would be more or less forgotten. Not completely, no. But their individual memories would fade into a general feeling of place, not time. I will remember Malaysia as good food, hot, humid weather, and terrific diversity lacking throughout much of the rest of Asia. But the memories that make up that place will merge and meld and generally be forgotten.

All that is left is the Good, the Bad and the Inconsequential.

The Things I Carry

I have left Hanoi, Vietnam and arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. My time in Vietnam with Ida and Brenda was terrific. While I had two books for the country, The Things They Carried and Matterhorn, in the end I only read the former. I got through the first chapters of the latter only to decide that I had had enough of the Vietnam War. The Things They Carried was nonetheless an excellent choice for the country. As a member of a generation focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was eye-opening to read a first hand account of the war that, in some ways, laid the foundation for how Americans currently view our presence abroad. It was also fascinating reading about how American soldiers viewed Vietnam as I pleasantly traveled around what they would have called North Vietnam. It also made me think about the things that I carry. The things that I packed for my four months of travel around the world.

Pictures and more about my time in Vietnam will follow. For now, The Things I Carry or an international travel packing list.

I carry:

• One 55 L travel backpack with an un-zippable 15 L daypack, which even zipped together I can take on planes without checking it
• Travel pillow
• Sunglasses in case
• Glasses with case and cleaning cloth
• Journal
• Pencil case with pens and pencils
• Sharpie with duct tape
• Kindle with case
• Laptop
• Small bluetooth mouse
• iPod touch
• Headphones
• Cellphone
• DSLR Camera with kit lens and telephoto lens
• Charger for kindle, phone, iPod, camera, and laptop
• Plug adapters
• External hardrive for photos and movies
• Folder for e-visa applications, visa photos, and other important documents
• One small travel towel
• Watch
• Water bottle
• Clothes line
• Two pastic bags
• Snacks
• Clothing, including:
• Four button-up shirts
• Five t-shirts
• Two sweaters
• Two pairs of jeans
• Two pairs of shorts
• One swim suit
• Nine pairs of socks
• Ten pairs of boxers
• One raincoat that can fold into itself
• One belt
• One pair of hiking shoes
• One pair of sandals
• Two packing bags that help keep it all organized
• One toiletries bag with:
• Shampoo
• Lotion
• Face wash
• Sun tan lotion
• Four pairs of contacts (for swimming)
• Contact solution and case
• Comb
• Toothpaste, toothbrush, and floss
• Electric razor
• Deodorant
• Hand sanitizer
• Sewing kit
• Tide to-go pen
• Super glue

All in all, quite a load to fit into my small pack. That said, I think I will use all of it. Of everything I packed, I believe that I probably have more shirts than are necessary. The water bottle may also be unnecessary, especially considering how much space it takes up. The one thing I would like to add is a small bag for dirty laundry. We will see how I feel about all of this as the travel continues.

The First Book on the List

Over the next four months, I will be traveling around the world as I leave China and make my way back to the United States for law school in the Fall. On the way, I will travel for 131 days to, as I now have it planned, 18 countries (not counting China or the United States). In order to attempt to best connect with each country I am visiting, I have put together an around-the-world book list. Below I have listed each country I will travel to as well as the books I am planning to read in/about the country. I tried to chose a variety of books that would keep me interested and engaged while truly helping me understand the country (or, sometimes, Americans' relationships with the country). I was limited to books that I could obtain in eBook form, as I cannot trek around the world with 30 books on my back, as much as I may wish I could. There are therefore many books left off the list that I now plan to read when I am in a place where physical books are an advantage rather than a burden.

I welcome any thoughts and recommendations!

China

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng

Vietnam

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Thailand

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Myanmar
Burmese Days by George Orwell

The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma by Thant Myint-U

Freedom from Fear by Aung San Suu Kyi

Malaysia
The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw

Nepal

Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

India
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Tamas by Bhisham Sahni

Jordan

Married to a Bedouin by Marguerite van Geldermalsen

Israel
Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour

Turkey
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Crescent and Star by Stephen Kinzer

Germany
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Morocco
The Caliph’s House by Tahir Shah

Austria
Winterfische by Paul Kolhoff
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Italy
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt
Selected works of Cicero

Netherlands
Rituals by Cees Nooteboom

The UK
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Iceland
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent


I am still looking for a book for the Czech Republic. Please let me know if you have any suggestions!

Home Visits on my Own

After a difficult week dealing with disruptive students in class (see my previous post for specifics), I was pleased to have two of my smarter and better behaved students, Isaac and Logan, invite me to come to their home the following weekend. They said that they lived about an hour away, and that there were several other students from other classes that lived there, so I would be able to do multiple home visits at once. I planned to hike with them back to their home Saturday morning, leaving Dazhai Middle School at eight in the morning, about an hour after they normally leave to go home. At the same time, I spoke with one of my more disruptive students, Daniel, who lives in Dazhai proper, to do another home visit on Sunday morning.

I have written about home visits before, but I never made it clear exactly what I as a teacher hope to get out of them. Often I simply want to spend more time with my students outside the classroom context. I hope to get a clearer idea of the students' home environment, and how it affects their motivations in my class. Whenever possible, I want to speak with the student's parents, both to better understand the student and to either thank them for their well-behaved child or discuss their child's issues in my class. At a more personal level, I want to get a better understanding of the community in and around Dazhai, and, in some ways, I really just want a tour guide and companion as I hike the beautiful surrounding mountains.

That said, it can be difficult to know what I (and the student) will actually get from a home visit until we are on it. Students' personalities can vary dramatically from their in-class persona. Some of my most disruptive students can become quiet and uncommunicative in their home, while quiet students can become talkative and playful once they have seen their teacher sweat and stumble up the small mountain path to their village. For me, discovering this other side to my students is one of my favorite aspects of home visits.

Part I: Saturday

Unsure of what I would get out of the day, I woke up Saturday morning at seven o'clock at the sound of my students knocking on my door, asking whether I was ready to go. After ineffectively trying to explain the difference between seven and eight (my students don't really have a way to tell time other than the school bells), I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed, grabbed a hunk of bread from the loaf I had made a few days before, and went to meet with my students, regretting the part of me that scheduled anything early ever.

Along with Isaac and Logan, two girls from other bans, Hero and Adele, were waiting for me as I emerged from my sanctuary. I asked my students where their village was, and somewhat daunted as they gestured to a group of trees on the top of a mountain in the distance. My students chided me playfully for my tardiness as they started down the road (my protestations that I had told them eight, not seven, fell on unsympathetic ears), and I hiked up my camera strap and set off after them.

We started off going down through Dazhai before turning off the main road onto a narrow dirt path passing through terraced fields before climbing steeply up the mountain toward their village. Although it was cloudy and cooler than I had expected, I still found myself quickly sweating through my thin shirt as we worked our way higher and higher up. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the hike, as the company was good and the scenery was beautiful. My students were talkative and helpful, chatting with me and each other about school and their homes and telling me the names of the plants we passed. As we hiked, we passed several bushes with yellow, raspberry-like berries on them, and my students eagerly picked a dozen to give to me. At one point, Logan ran off the trail, coming back a few minutes later with a handful of small, hard peaches to share with us all. Later, as it began to lightly rain, I started to silently curse my lack of foresight in not bringing an umbrella before Logan offered me his. I took pictures as we hiked (see below) of both the scenery and the students. While Isaac and Hero originally were not fans of being photographed, they later warmed to it, especially Isaac, who began posing as we walked and loudly insisting that I take his picture.

Finally, we arrived at their village a little less than two hours after we left and almost double the time my students had said it would take (to be expected - if a student says it will take an hour, expect at least an hour and a half, and if they say two hours, expect three). My first stop was Isaac's home, or at least what I first thought was Isaac's home but later realized was his uncle's. As we arrived, Logan, Hero, and Adele left to go to their homes, planning to come back and get me after I finished there.


It was a pleasure meeting Isaac's uncle, one Mr. Chen. In general, communication during home visits can be difficult. Parents generally speak pretty strong dialect, and grandparents (who almost always live with the parents) are almost incomprehensible with the mixture of dialect, accent, and lack of teeth. Thus, I have generally had to communicate with parents through their children, which is less than ideal (especially if you want to discuss the students' problems). But not so with Mr. Chen. Mr. Chen is an elementary school teacher, so he spoke impressively standard Chinese, making communication smooth and easy. It was also nice that he was a teacher, giving us plenty of topics to talk about. While Isaac, Mr. Chen, Isaac's younger brother, and I talked and watched the NBA, Isaac's grandmother and aunt made lunch over a coal fire.

After lunch, several of my students arrived to show me around the village, including Elissa, who was hurt that I had not informed her that I was coming, and who was only somewhat mollified when I told her that I hadn't realized she lived there. As we went around the village from student's house to student's house, I was interested to see who lived with the students. Some students had both parents, a sibling, and a grandparent, while others just had a sibling and a grandparent. When they did have parents at home, the parents were usually away at work in the fields, leaving the kids at home. The students were not, however, simply allowed to play at home over the weekend. Elissa was tasked with taking care of a younger sibling and two younger cousins, so as we walked around, the three of them trailed along beside us. Logan had to 放牛, taking his family's cow out to pasture after I left. All of my students at some time during the year had to help pick tea leaves (my students explained to me that there were three tea picking seasons, and that we were just coming to the end of one). The amount of responsibility hoisted on these twelve to fourteen year olds is enormous.

That is part of the reason why I so thoroughly enjoyed my morning and afternoon with them. As they showed me around and introduced me to their families, their homes, and their lives, I saw their maturity and the weight of their great responsibility. And yet, at the same time, as the afternoon went on and as we got more comfortable with each other, I was able to see their childish, care-free side that is almost never visible in school. They really began enjoying the photography, both taking pictures themselves and having their pictures taken, and it was fun to see them get silly and creative with it. Later on, when I had left the village with Isaac, Adele, Elissa, and Isaac's uncle to see the elementary school they had all attended, we played ping-pong together with loud, Serena Williams-esque grunts whenever we hit the ball. We went into their old classroom, where I gave a playful lesson on how to say "He looks like a rabbit," and they gave me a comically strict class on Chinese characters.

Along with the joy of spending time with my students and their families, there came a definite satisfaction at having been able to do it so successfully on my own. Before coming, I had been nervous about communicating and potential awkwardness, but in the end it was an absolutely lovely day. While I did not know if it would have been so enjoyable with other students, I had proved to myself that I could do it.

Part II: Sunday

I had a chance to test whether it would be as successful with other students the very next day, when I met with my student, Daniel, a disruptive student who lives close to the school, to go to his house on a home visit. He arrived at the school gate somewhat late to pick me up, bringing with him another of my students, Ford, and an eighth grader, both of whom are his neighbors. We walked down the road and through some twisting alleyways before arriving at his house, only about eight minutes from the school (Daniel is part of the small minority of the school, about 8%, who does not live at school).

As we walked, I tried to think about what exactly I wanted to get from this home visit. Daniel is not a bad student, but he is an extremely disruptive student. Whereas other students will talk and make noise because they don't care about the class or because they disrespect me or other students, Daniel does so (as far as I can tell) because he has a lot of trouble focusing. He is endlessly talking or making noise as we go through class, and I have to constantly remind him to be quiet and pay attention. I would not be at all surprised if he had ADHD. Other students will sometimes take advantage of this by bothering him during class, either with noise or by touching him, in order to get a response out of him. While I can and do try to help him by dealing with those students, Daniel certainly needed a push in the right direction too.

As we arrived at Daniel's home, I met his mother and father, who were eating breakfast. They offered some to me, and I declined, giving a brief hello before deciding to wait to have the real conversation with the parents until later and heading into a small living room with Daniel and his neighbors. I played two rounds of chess with Daniel's neighbors before getting up to talk with the parents. I walked into the outside courtyard and realized that they had already left to go work in the fields for the day, leaving us to our own devices. With the parents gone for the day, I decided to try to do as best I could just by talking with Daniel.

I returned to the living room and sat next to Daniel. I asked him what he had done the day before and whether he had completed his homework. He showed me his finished homework, which I went over with him, trying to instill in him the importance of focusing on his work and really ensuring that it was done well. As for the day before, he had spent it playing on his smartphone, which he was currently playing games on with Ford. As I asked other questions about my class, about other classes, about home life and school life, and about his likes and dislikes and his hopes and dreams, his rather single-minded love of playing phone games became apparent.

With that in mind, I took Daniel aside and made a deal with him. If he could get through a class without moving a single rung up the consequence ladder, then I would let him come to the office with me and play on my cell phone for five minutes. He eagerly agreed, and said that he would make sure not to be loud in my class. With that, he walked with me back to the middle school, and we parted.

While the Sunday home visit was much more low key than those on Saturday, I nonetheless felt that it was successful. Even if the method did not work, it was a way forward, something largely lacking before the visit. Moreover, I felt a closer connection with Daniel, and I sensed that he appreciated my taking the time to go to his house with him to, as he saw it, play.

This week, Daniel was quiet and quite well-behaved during both of my classes with him, getting his name written on the board only once (instead of the usual three or four) and thus getting to play on my cellphone once. As I taught his class, when other students began getting disruptive and I started feeling worn out and annoyed, I had only to look at him sitting attentively to get another spurt of energy and patience. He was making the effort and making a difference, so I guess I could too.

 The path behind us going back toward Dazhai, about halfway up the mountain.

 As my students saw me taking so many pictures, they began offering suggestions of what I should photograph. This was one of their better ideas. Their suggestion of a dead bug later on was not quite so photogenic.

  Adele, Hero, Logan, and Isaac

 With the weather cloudy and cool, the mountains around us had a beautiful, mysterious quality to them

 Isaac with his family

 Logan's family keeps bees, and they offered me some of the delicious fresh honey

Logan with his father and grandmother. After we left his house, Logan had to return not long after to put the family cow to pasture

Although Isaac had started out fiercely anti-photo, he eventually grew to love the camera, posing and then begging me to take the photo.

Isaac of the grass

Isaac and Logan

 Alice, her grandmother, and her 调皮 younger brother

Isaac and the duckling

Logan and the frog

 One of my favorite photos. Elissa, her mother, and her grandmother. Three generations.

Me with Elissa, Logan, and Adele

Me with Isaac, Elissa, and Adele

Dylan and the duckling

Isaac started wanted his picture taken everywhere...

Adele and Elissa agreed. This is them being monsters

Elissa and I taking in the beauty of the flowers

Parent Student Conferences in Rural China

As an American, I am quite familiar with the concept of parent teacher conferences. Often routine, sometimes forced by bad behavior, they give the parent a chance to see how their kids are doing in class and give the teacher an opportunity to share the issues or successes of the student.

That was more or less my thought process when I went to one of my home room teachers with Aiden, a disruptive and disrespectful student from Class 185. Class 185's home room teacher, Mr. Luo, scolded Aiden for several minutes, interspersing stern words with a slap to the head and a kick to the leg that made me flinch, while Aiden stared dejectedly at the ground, occasionally spouting excuses and finally angrily muttering that he wanted to 退学, or quit school.

While children in China are legally required to continue study until the end of middle school (ninth grade), some quit once they reach fourteen regardless of grade level while others simply stop coming (generally to begin work as a migrant laborer in larger cities).

I will admit that I felt a slight sense of almost relief on hearing that, imaging Aiden's disruptive presence no longer throwing my class into chaos. With that I felt deeply sad at my inability to motivate Aiden and slightly ashamed at my readiness to get rid of him. I would like to say that this realization hardened my resolve to motivate Aiden in my class, but to be honest, after five classes that day, I was exhausted and mostly just wanted to return to my room and collapse in bed with a good book.

But not yet. First, I had to finish disciplining Aiden with Mr. Luo. After we both talked with Aiden for several minutes about his behavior, Mr. Luo called his mother, asking her to come the following day (market day, the ideal day for parents to come to the school, since they will likely be in town anyway) to speak with him and Aiden about her son's disruptive behavior. With that, we parted; Mr. Luo sat back down at his desk in the teacher's office, Aiden stalked back to Class 185's classroom, and I limped back to my room. As I left the office, I passed two home room teachers, Ms. Yang and Ms. Chen, shouting at students. Outside, another, Ms. Min, strode in front of three taller boys like an officer reviewing privates, slapping and berating them as three girls watched on the sidelines. I returned to my room, my sanctuary, mentally and physically drained.


The next day, I was in the teacher's office preparing for Chess Club when Aiden, his mother, and Mr. Luo came in for the parent teacher conference. Aiden's mother was worn beyond her years. Her spine was already partially bent from a lifetime of manual labor in mountainous fields. Her hair was black with a spattering of white, her face prematurely lined by the sun and her sons. She looked to be in her late fifties, but I would be surprised if she were older than forty.

Mr. Luo began by explaining that Aiden had misbehaved not only in my class, but several other classes as well. Aiden was disruptive, disrespectful, and did not listen to the teacher. He did not want to continue his schooling. What followed was not the parent teacher conference that I expected, but rather a parent student conference. A meeting both full of and utterly bereft of intimacy.

Aiden's mother, seated uncomfortably and ill-at-ease in a comfortable faux-leather teacher's chair, turned to her son, who was standing a meter to her left, staring at the ground in sullen silence. She launched into a sad, high-pitched scolding, starting with the importance of respecting and listening to his teachers (especially, she would say, gesturing at me, this 外国老师), briefly touching on the considerable impact of education on his future along with a reminder of how hard she had worked to insure his ability to stay in school, and repeating intermittently his status as a twin (and both how it made things more difficult for her and how it meant he should do better, like his brother). Eventually, most of her words were drowned out by sobs. Aiden remained sullen, staring at the ground, speaking only when forced to by Mr. Luo or, more rarely, his mother.

About fifteen minutes into the scolding, as Aiden's mother's sobs began fading away, Aiden's twin brother, Jerry, cautiously entered the room. Aiden and Jerry are identical twins (in different classes, both of which I teach), and they have most of the same clothing, making it hard to differentiate them at times. Aiden has a small scar on this right cheek that I now know well after having had to find him and make him write lines during one lunch. They wore different clothes now too. Aiden wore dark, torn jeans, a shirt with one mismatched button, and an orange and blue jacket while Jerry had jeans on that are four inches too long and an over-large sweatshirt. Both wore brown leather slip-on sandals that most every boy in the school wears (along with many of the male teachers).

While Jerry is by no means a star student, he has never been as disruptive as Aiden. Not long after I had made Aiden write lines during lunch, I asked Jerry about his brother. It ends up that Jerry is the older brother. While this may seem like splitting hairs to you, it has a large effect on his place in his family and therefore on his behavior. In Confucian philosophy, there is a rigid hierarchical family structure where the younger defers to the elder, and even after sixty-six years of tradition-bashing communism, this aspect of Chinese culture is very much still evident. Thus, Jerry is treated as the elder brother and mostly acts the part, more responsible and less disrespectful than his younger twin.

As Jerry entered the office, his mother turned toward him without interrupting her chastisement of his twin. She began to direct her words toward both of them until Jerry interrupted her, complaining, “妈！我不吵！(Mom! I wasn't noisy)” Eventually he was able to position himself by her side, and his mother started using him as an example rather than including him in the scolding. From there he watched the happenings with a mixture of interest and worry that the focus might return to him. His mother continued to castigate Aiden, mostly repeating herself by now as she told Aiden that he should behave in class and listen to the teacher and respect the teacher and study hard so he could succeed. Aiden got in barely a word edgewise, nor did he want to; he was busy staring at the dirty concrete floor, giving only one word answers when forced to respond by Mr. Luo.


As Aiden's mother's words continued to crash over Aiden's unresponsive features, I began to realize the great distance between them. Aiden, like the great majority of my students, lives in the school during the week, only going home Saturday morning for one night before returning to school for evening study hall on Sunday (students have to walk anywhere from one to four hours to go home, so their time at home is incredibly limited). Aiden's father, like many of my students' parents, works in the city for the majority of the year, only returning to Dazhai once or twice each year. Furthermore, when Aiden is home, he often has to work, constructing houses or working in the fields picking tea leaves. Aiden may be twelve, and may be going through puberty with the elegance of an elephant seal on land, but he does not have the privilege of remaining a child.

It made me extraordinarily sad. There had been no hug when his mother had arrived, either for Aiden or for Jerry. There was no touching at all in fact. The distance between them was extraordinary, a gaping absence longing to be filled. We teachers attempt to fill that role, but it is impossible, like trying to shove the square block through the round hole in the children's game I remember so well from my babysitting days. Or, more appropriately, trying to shove three hundred and sixty square blocks through three hundred and sixty round holes, one for every student I teach. Yes, we are able to make connections. Yes, I believe we make a difference. But we cannot replace parents. And there Aiden was. Alone in the world at the age of twelve, with his mother and twin mere feet away from him.


About forty minutes after the parent student conference had begun, the bell rang for the start of afternoon study hall, and Jerry grabbed some fruit from his mother's bag before jauntily turning to return to his class. I too had to leave; my manager was waiting for a phone call from me. I briefly apologized to Mr. Luo (perhaps the second time I had spoken during the whole affair) before walking between Aiden and his mother and out the door.

As I walked to my room, I turned to look back at the office. I wanted to see Aiden admitting his faults and his mother hugging him before she returned home. I wanted to see Aiden coming out of the office with an ashamed, yet confident look on his face, the face of a reformed man. I wanted to see that awful, oppressive distance between Aiden and his mother filled with something, anything. I wanted to see a conclusion.

The sky was a sharp blue with barely a cloud to be seen. Mountains rose up majestically behind the teaching building, terraced farms and small villages built into their slopes by many generations' of effort. The sun shone hard and bright on it all, throwing the office and its occupants into shadow, and I saw nothing at all.

Aiden at Tomb-Sweeping Day, several weeks before the parent teacher conference

Reflection on a Semester in Dazhai

Winter has arrived in Yunnan. For my last weeks in Dazhai, I spent my nights bundled up under several sweaters and my (admittedly thin) coat when I wasn’t in my room warmed by my small heater purchased on Taobao (like eBay for China, but better). Yet even during Yunnan’s harshest weeks of winter, during the day when the sun is out and shining there is little need for more than a light sweater, and even that can seem overkill during a game of basketball or a particularly heated round of ping pong. With winter has come several developments and realizations.

Dazhai Middle School ended the semester with a week of testing proceeded by two weeks of preparing to test. My students got more and more used to having a foreign teacher, leading some to feel more comfortable talking with me and others to feel more comfortable talking during my class. I completed a glasses project at the school, beginning with a massive effort to test all nine hundred students’ eyesight and ending with the distribution of free glasses to two hundred excited and somewhat self-conscious students. Construction on the new student dorm and bathroom at Dazhai neared completion, with the start of the new semester named as the perspective end date. The six month mark of my time in China came and went without much commotion. Ida’s and my spring festival travel began with a six-hour, four part journey from Gengga to Lincang (bus to Xiqian, mianbaoche to Fengqing, bus to Yunxian, bus to Lincang), where I picked up my passport and new visa, followed by a nine-hour bus odyssey to Kunming. Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan for the start of our real spring festival travel.

Before we leave for six weeks of travel, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the past semester, its successes and failures, and the hopes I have for the future.

Around half way through the semester, I began doing project-based learning (PBL) in my classroom. Whereas before I had stuck closely to the textbook and the material my students’ other English teachers were teaching, with PBL I introduced new material (some of it still from the textbook) which I taught through a central project requiring teamwork and creativity. The project that I did with my kids was A Day in the Life of a Dazhai Middle School Student. I taught the students English that they could use to describe their school and their daily lives, which they would then use within a small group to write a booklet about their lives at the middle school. As an incentive, I told the students that the creators of the best booklets in each class would be able to go with me to the nearby elementary school to introduce middle school life to 5^th and 6^th graders and thereby help prepare them for middle school life. Originally I planned to meet with each group or a representative of each group three times during the project for each of three units to monitor progress and improve my relationships with students. I also planned to give three tests to the students, two unit tests and one final test.

Right off the bat I faced a number of challenges. I faced the fundamental challenges that presented their fearsome faces most every class no matter the content: lack of student motivation or interest; lack of self-confidence, instilling the internal mantra of “I can’t (不会)” in many students; massive, sixty-student classes that allowed for minimal individual or even group attention. Chinese students also have very little experience in teamwork, so introducing a team-based project required an intense amount of planning, from deciding group members to assigning seating to choosing group names to describing the basics of how students should work together in a group.

Other problems presented themselves along the way. In two of my classes, time given for group work quickly degenerated into chaos, with perhaps half of the students working with the rest acting as though it were recess. A lack of resources quickly showed itself with the turning in of the first page of their booklet, almost all of which had haphazard pencil drawings instead of the neat color drawings that were expected; only a very few students had access to markers or colored pencils. My own very limited time also became painfully obvious as I tried to meet with students for the first unit. While this combined with Thanksgiving and a visa trip to Hong Kong to make for an incredibly busy two weeks, I realized that even with full weeks and groups made up of four to five students, I would not have enough time to meet with every group. 360 students split into groups of four or five made about 85 groups, which were impossible to meet with in the miniscule amount of free time given to middle school students (they have two hours for lunch and rest in the afternoon and an hour and a half for dinner in the evening – every other minute of their day is given to classes or study hall). Finally, time constraints again challenged me during the aforementioned two weeks of test-prep. I had counted on being able to teach until the week of testing, but instead found my classes taken away in order to give students practice tests, taking away my last four classes with my students along with the vital last steps of the project, including finishing their booklets and the final test.

In the end, I was able to salvage booklets of varying quality from four of my six classes, but had no time to give them grades or go to the elementary school with them (I plan to revisit the plan next semester). I was able to find time to test one class, which they did surprisingly well on considering time constraints. I saw impressive group work in a few of my classes along with several truly creative and well-written final booklets. After I started providing markers for the students to use, most groups turned in bright and colorful booklet pages. Many students were well-motivated by the project’s close connection to their lives. Some students even went so far as to retain the knowledge.

However, in two classes I had to abandon the project altogether. After 184 and 185 bans repeatedly descended into chaos during group time, I suspended the project and taught the material through tighter and stricter lessons with little to no time during which students could go wild. They still found ways, of course, yet slowly but surely I reasserted control over the classroom. I was never able to meet with all the groups. I gave two tests, but had not scheduled time to go over them with the students, rendering them much less useful than they could have been. We never made it to the elementary school (I still plan to do this next semester). Several students were wholly unmotivated by the project and continued to disrupt class whenever possible. In several groups, one or two students took control and did the project themselves with little or no help from the rest of their group members.

Even with these numerous failures, I consider the project an overall success. I have learned dozens of valuable lessons for next semester, when I plan to start another project. With the help of this experience, the support of local teachers and my program manager, and extensive planning, I believe that I can create a really successful project with my students.

Outside of the classroom, I was happy to complete a glasses project at the middle school. With the help of Education in Sight, my co-fellows, and three eye doctors from nearby Yunxian, I was able to provide free glasses to two hundred students. It was incredibly challenging at moments, which made it all the more satisfying to see my students wearing their glasses during the last weeks of school.

               Implementing the project first required applying to Education in Sight after discussing the idea with co-fellows and the school administration. Simple and straight-forward. After being informed that I had been accepted as a Sight Leader for the program, which would provide funding and support for getting glasses for my students, I had to test the eyesight of all 900 students in my school. We had to identify which students likely needed glasses, who would then be tested by the local eye doctors when they came to the school. Since I would not be able to test all the students myself, I needed the help of the banzhuren (home room teachers). A co-fellow helped me describe what help I needed during a meeting. Unfortunately, it was said at the tail end of a meeting while about half of the teachers were playing games on their cell phones, so the message was only half listened to. I had to go speak to teachers individually and attend a banzhuren meeting later in the week before I felt assured that all the banzhuren understood what I needed.

               Collecting the information about which students needed glasses from the banzhuren was another task. Some teachers gave the information to my co-fellow rather than me (an issue in communication), while others didn’t give them to anyone. I had to seek out every banzhuren over the course of a couple days to collect all the necessary information. Still I found myself lacking the eyesight information for two classes. The students informed me that they had been tested, but that they had already given their information to the eye doctors. I was very confused for a day or two until I found out that another teacher, one of the main school administrators, had brought in a friend or relative who was an eye doctor in Yunxian to give them eye tests and sell the students glasses. It became a rather awkward situation.

While we shared a desire to improve the lives of our students by improving their sight, the school administrator also wanted to provide customers for his friend. Since he was an important person in the school, I could not (and did not want to) simply say that he couldn’t do it. Instead, I had to haltingly discuss the issue with him and the principal (haltingly because of their difficult accents and dialect-filled speech) and convince them that free glasses through an unknown was better than costly glasses through a friend. I also offered to put his friend in touch with Education in Sight so that he could work with them in the future to provide glasses to students throughout the region. It was enough.

The eye doctors game a week later and tested about three hundred students throughout one day of classes. We stopped briefly for lunch and dinner, but other than that worked more or less throughout the day.  My co-fellow and I went from class to class to ask teachers if we could borrow their students for a while to have their eyesight tested. I took pictures of students being tested and trying out glasses frames and strengths. Seeing them point out places and objects on the mountains surrounding Dazhai, seemingly seeing them clearly for the first time, made the exhausting day worth it.

Two weeks later, I bused to Yunxian to pick up the glasses, and a couple days later my co-fellows and I handed two hundred students their new glasses. Many were excited. Most were self-conscious about how they looked. They all were able to see the board clearly no matter where they were sitting. It will still require more work. I plan to meet with banzhuren next semester to discuss how best to make the students wear their glasses. I personally told students that they had to wear them while in my class. I also plan to arrange a meeting of the students to discuss glasses care and how it is important that they wear them in order to preserve their eyesight. About sixty percent of the students are wearing their glasses now. I plan to bring that number up to one hundred percent next semester.

Now we are on vacation. School is over for six weeks, but it is never far from the mind. Stories of students and our work are brought up often as we introduce ourselves at the hostel in Kunming. People are surprised and interested. It is hard to explain how challenging the work is though. It is difficult to say how rewarding it is for us and yet how incredibly frustrating it is for us. We rely on stories and anecdotes.

The next semester is six weeks away, yet it is hard not to plan on how to create a better project, a better classroom, a better teacher. Both Ida and I have planned out how we will begin the semester, but there is the constant feeling that we could do more, do better.

We work to improve our Chinese in our spare time to reach personal goals. We wonder whether learning the local dialect would hurt our Chinese. We wonder how to learn the local dialect.

Most of all, we are on vacation. Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan, the first stop in our travel plans. From there we will fly to Shanghai, where we will see my co-fellow, then on to go to Zhejiang to visit Ida’s co-fellow. Train to Beijing to see my friend at Beida and for Ida to interview for an internship before my Dad and Charlotte will fly into Beijing and we will begin our travel with them. On to Harbin for two freezing days of fun before flying to Xi’an for spring festival with Ida’s co-fellow there. Another flight to Guilin to relax and bike around the beautiful karst landscape of Yangshuo. Finally a short flight back to Kunming and a long bus ride home to Dazhai before sending my Dad and Charlotte back to Beijing and their flight home by way of Shanghai. Six weeks of travel. A wonderful adventure ahead of us. Off we go into the air.

One of the better final projects for the project we did on my students' lives at the Middle School

Taiwan meets Dylan

Now, my Dad might say that Charlotte forced him to take this picture with her near the Temple of Heaven, but we all know she was actually humoring him.

Traveling in Rural China

               It has been quite a while since my last blog post. As often happens with me and blogs, I paused for a little bit (in this case, to travel over National Holiday), and when I returned I wasn’t quite sure where to start. Part of me always wants to start where I left off, but another part of me knows that if I start there I will likely never make it to the much more pertinent present. Now, after several weeks of inaction, my own nagging as well as sweet messages from family friends and family about my blog has gotten me writing once again.

               Since my last post, I have done quite a bit of traveling. First I went to Gengga and Changning with Ida, and then, again with Ida, to Dali for National Holiday. Later I went to Lincang City for a conference with Teach for China. Most recently, I went once again to Changning to celebrate Halloween with other Teach for China Fellows.

               While I have become accustomed to getting around in rural Yunnan, it is nonetheless a fascinating, sometimes frustrating process that deserves an in-depth description. While trains are the transportation of choice in most of China, the bus reigns supreme in the great majority of Yunnan.

I should say that the bus reigns supreme as a form of mass transportation, because if looking at just transportation in general, motorcycles would undoubtedly top the charts, especially in the more remote villages. I happened to be in Ida’s very remote placement, Gengga, when parents were arriving to pick up their kids, and the traffic jam of motorcycles outside the school gates resembled a game I used to play when I was younger called Rush Hour, where you had to move cars, trucks, and vans out of the way one square at a time in order to allow the one red car to drive off the board. But in this iteration, the board was completely packed with exclusively motorcycles, and there were no open squares to move into at all. If the red car were there, it would have had to wait several hours to get to its destination.

This same phenomenon occurred in Lincang City during the Teach for China conference, but with cars (motorcycles are still common, but cars are more so due to the prosperity of the city). We were returning to our hotel from an activity when we ran into an awful traffic jam. We originally assumed it was the result of a bad car accident, but as we saw students in middle school uniforms weave in and out of the cars (some of which we now realized were empty), we realized that the six-lane road in the middle of the city had essentially been turned into a parking lot while parents were picking up their children.

Anyway, back to the bus, the king of mass transportation in Yunnan. The bus has won out over the train here in Yunnan because of Yunnan’s mountainous terrain and relatively dispersed population. It is hugely expensive to lay railroad tracks through the mountains and, compared to the rest of China, Yunnan is not very densely populated (though still much more densely populated when compared to similar areas in the United States), making railroads less economical in general, so trains only go to Yunnan’s largest and most central cities or tourist destinations (like Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang). Thus the only option to the majority of Yunnan is the bus.

In Dazhai, this option is cheap and convenient. Buses leave from Dazhai to go to Yunxian, the nearest large city, every 15 minutes from about 6:30am to 6:30pm for about $3.50. The bus has, in my experience, never filled up, making it a flexible and easy option. However, from the smaller town of Gengga, there are only three or four buses going to the nearest city of Changning each day, and they are almost always full, making it much more difficult and inconvenient to travel. That variety is part of what makes travel in Yunnan unique and, sometimes, frustrating.

Buses also serve an auxiliary role as package carrier for the villages on their route. When boarding the bus, there will often be several packages in the middle of the floor that will be dropped off throughout the trip. I often wonder who receives the money for those packages – the bus driver or the company. One time a woman stopped the bus and handed the driver an open bag of green beans and other vegetables, which he took and dropped off a dozen miles later with an older woman waiting at the side of the road. Another time several crates of chickens were strapped to the top of the bus and dropped off on the way to our destination.

Other than that, how do these buses differ from, say, Greyhound or Megabus? There are three main types of buses in China in my experience. The most common in rural China is a minibus, about two-thirds the length of a Greyhound bus with seats that are somewhat smaller and closer together and with a larger open area in the center for luggage or extra people. In between larger cities you usually find larger, Greyhound-style buses will four seats per row and luggage storage underneath. Both of these types of buses have seatbelts, which bus station officials will actually make sure you buckle before you leave (this in a society where any helmet on a motorcycle is uncommon and actual motorcycle helmets are rarer still). Finally, for long distance nighttime buses, you often find sleeper buses, which have short bunk beds (especially short for us tall Americans) rather than seats. In my recent travel, I was mostly on minibuses, with a few larger buses for longer hauls (for instance, to Dali).

In all of my travel over the past month, I have had two especially interesting experiences in my journeys. First, when Ida and I were on the bus from Changning to Dali over National Holiday, the large bus we were on got in an accident, hitting the small truck in front of us, which in turn hit the SUV in front of it. It was a bad crash for the cars involved, but luckily no one was hurt. Most interesting for me was what happened afterward. Right after the crash, the cars stayed exactly where they were in a rather dangerous, steep spot, leaving only one lane open. That lane was used by cars going in both directions, with a speed and recklessness (around a corner) that made Ida and I think that another accident would soon follow.

Most everyone on the bus ended up out on the road (mind you, this is a major road, though only two lanes across) to see the accident, get fresh air, and/or smoke. Ida and I did go out to see what had happened and actually felt safer on the side of the road after seeing what a precarious spot the bus was in with other trucks and buses zooming by with little thought of cars coming in the other direction (in the same lane). We were actually a little concerned that we might cause an accident ourselves with all the rubbernecking we got from passing drivers due to our being foreigners.

Eventually the police did arrive along with what appeared to be an official from the bus company to take pictures of the accident and write down the story. After pictures were taken, the cars were finally moved more toward the side of the road. Meanwhile, we bus passengers were left without any idea of how we would be getting to our destination. We watched and waited, hoping that we would somehow end up in Dali. Finally, about an hour and a half after the crash, another bus showed up that would take us onward. As we left the scene of the crash, we also left our old bus driver, all three crashed cars, and some police still there. I like to think that the crash was resolved without too much trouble and that the look of anguish on the drivers’ faces were due to the immediate situation rather than its effect on their future. However, I have no idea about how such things are resolved in China, so I have no way of knowing.

The second adventure in my recent travel was in my return journey from Gengga after Halloween. As I wrote before, there are only three buses to Changning from Gengga every day. Since I had to get back to Dazhai by the early evening for an evening study hall with Class 185, I took the earliest bus, at 8:00 am. However, the ride from Gengga to Changning to Yunxian to Dazhai is a long one, and the first two legs actually overlap by about 40 minutes (the road from Yunxian to Changning forks and goes to Gengga), so I determined to get off at the fork and figure out a way to get to Yunxian from there. I originally planned to wait for a bus to Yunxian to go by, which I would simply flag down and take the rest of the way. This is a common way to get around, and works well as long as the bus isn't already full.

However, as soon as I arrived at the town where the road forks to Changning and Gengga I was offered a ride to a town in between there and Yunxian by a woman driving a small silver minivan already holding four other passengers. She assured me that I could get to Yunxian from that town, so I agreed to her price of $2.50 and hopped in the front seat. The woman drove a rather frenzied pace to the town, stopping here and there to drop off people and pick up others until the car was full, when she began shaking and waving her hand at people waiting for a ride on the side of the road to show that there was no room. As she drove and passed slower cars (a necessary evil on a two lane mountain road with many slow, over-laden trucks), the driver answered called and made others herself (bus drivers are rarely better and will often smoke as well). We nonetheless made it quickly and easily, safe and sound.

She dropped me off directly next to a minibus heading from the town to Yunxian, which I hopped on just a minute before it left, nabbing the last window seat available (while the aisle offers more leg room, the window is necessary if people start smoking or if your seatmate smells particularly badly). I arrived in Yunxian quickly and easily, and was conveniently able to catch a bus to Dazhai within minutes.

While this second adventure may hardly seem an adventure to my dear readers, it was much more of one as I lived it. I felt rather like I was stepping out of a door with a blindfold on, unsure of what exactly I would land on (if anything). While I ended up finding relatively simple and easy transportation each step of the way, I could have also waited by the side of the road for an hour with only full buses going by.

But no, that is rarely how China works in my experience. It is a place where things crazily, haphazardly, wildly sort out and work out. Many ways of doing business and of living here seem like they should not work, but somehow, day after day, they do. It is something that mystifies and invigorates me about living in China. Somehow this massive, complex, diverse society gets along day by day, month by month, year by year, century by century. Things change and things stay the same, and life goes on.

 During National Holiday, Ida and I spent two nights in Changning as we waited for a bus with available tickets to take us to Dali. As we walked around one day, we ran into the one person we knew in the city of tens of thousands - Huang Laoshi, one of Ida's local teachers. He invited us to his home and then took us with his daughter to visit a really beautiful park.

A boy fishing for minnows in the park in Changning.

Unhappy campers waiting for salvation after the bus crash on the way to Dali.

The police photographing the scene of the crash.

Once in Dali, we immediately found delicious cheese and meat sandwiches to meet our cravings.

Wheat bread and cheddar with Japanese beer and a book. A good day.

I found two packages awaiting me when I returned home, this one from my Dad. What a treasure box!

And another from a close family friend, Kit. The pillow underneath the goodies was also included in the box, and now sends me softly to sleep every night. Thank you!