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!

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

So, you might be wondering, what sort of students am I teaching? In many ways they are just like middle school students from the US, but with several key differences. The following are some of my students’ answers to a survey that I conducted during the first week of classes:

Oliver dreams of being an astronaut and likes playing ping pong.

Maya wants to join the army and likes playing badminton.

Kit wants to be a doctor and likes playing badminton.

Tybalt wants to be a doctor and likes playing basketball.

Claudio wants to be a sniper and likes playing ping pong.

Zander wants to be a police officer and likes playing chess.

Bailey wants to be a fashion designer and likes singing.

Stan wants to be an inventor and likes playing basketball.

James doesn't want to join the mafia and likes playing basketball.

Percy wants to attend college and likes playing basketball.

Serena wants to be a teacher and likes jumping rope.

Luna wants to allow her parents to live a comfortable life and likes running.

Rose wants to be a detective and likes reading.

From these few examples, you can see the broad trend of what my students like to do outside of school and what they dream of doing later in life. The most common favorite activities were basketball (by a landslide), ping pong, badminton, jump rope, singing, and listening to music. The most common dream jobs were doctor, soldier, teacher, inventor/scientist, attend college, and police officer.

For me, the answers that most revealed my students’ differences with American students were some of their favorite hobbies (ping pong and badminton especially) and some of their answers to “What is your dream job?” (allow my parents to live comfortably, soldier, and attend college especially). While I believe that one could find almost all of these answers in US middle schools (depending on where you are), their frequency and the overall attitude betray to me some part of that which is uniquely Chinese.

In other news, I received my first piece of mail today here in Dazhai. Many thanks to my Mom for sending the beautiful card that, after about three weeks in transit, arrived here today (the address works!). The card is now hanging proudly on my wall! 

The Giving of Names

               There is a mob 15 students crowded around my computer, anxiously watching what I type, not understanding a single word (until I pointed out that they had learned the word “what” when they learned the sentence “What’s this in English?”). They beg for me to play music, but other than that seem content to simply watch me type.

               It was a break in between periods of evening study hall Friday night with seventh grade Class 183 that I had been assigned just hours before. The school administration makes it so most teachers can go home early (we would consider it slightly late in the US – around 5:30) by assigning the three periods of evening study hall (this name is slightly misleading – while some teachers do just allow their students to study and do work during evening study hall, most, including me, teach lessons, though Friday is generally an exception to the rule) to one teacher per class. Thus, Friday night from 6:40 to 9:15 found me teaching seventh grade Class 183.

               While I did allow the students to study by themselves for most of the time, I spent the first period reviewing their newly given English names. Many of the students had trouble pronouncing their English names, and I had yet to give them name tags to write them down, a task that also required time and supervision (telling them explicitly how and where to write it [large, clear, and on one side, with their Chinese name on the other] and correcting any misspellings). The students also laughed at some of the names for no apparent reason (Anna, Olivia, and many more). I like to think that I would have caught any names that sound like dirty words in Chinese, but that is really just wishful thinking. Still, I do think that for a lot of them it was just strange and funny to hear the sounds their classmates and I were saying. Finally, by the end of the period all 60 kids in the class were equipped with their English names, from Allen to Walter.

The giving of English names was a task unto itself. I have around 360 students in six different classes, and I wanted, for the most part, to give a different name to each student. Moreover, if possible, I wanted to make the names significant for the student and, if possible, for me. Finally, there were some names I had to avoid do to difficulty in pronunciation or due to their meaning in Chinese (for instance, I stayed away from the name Ben or Benjamin because in Chinese笨, or ben, means stupid).

I began the process of naming by going to the surveys I gave during the first week of class. On these surveys, I had asked students to write their name, their age, the amount of time they had studied English, their parents’ jobs, their own dream job, and their hobbies. I also asked them to write down their English name if they had one, which in the end applied to about 10 out of my 360 students. With the first class I gave name to, Class 187, I tried to make English names fit to either the sound of their Chinese name or to their dream job or favorite hobbies (or better yet, both). Thus, I gave the girl whose Chinese first name was “li” the name Lisa, the girl who said she wanted to be a star and who loved to sing Adele, and the girl with the character 红or “red” the name Scarlett. This strategy worked for the first 20 to 30 students, but it was astonishing how long it took me to figure out how to read the names (the names were often messily written, and characters used in names are often used few other places in Chinese, making them difficult to recognize) and how quickly I ran out of ideas for names.

I then found myself seeking additional sources of inspiration. Enter friends and family, Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Arrested Development, Neil Gaiman, All the King’s Men, the Wheel of Time series, and a website with the most popular boys’ and girls’ names in the US in 2013. Harry Potter names alone took care of a Class 184 (I left out the strangest names like Minerva, Severus, and Albus, going only as far as Horace and Percy) while Shakespeare covered about half of the honors class, Class 188 (again, I stayed away from the very difficult names like Malvolio, Mercutio, and Benedick, but was too tempted not to name students Prospero, Cordelia, Portia, and Beatrice). Meanwhile, the website filled in any leftover names. In the end, I had around 300 unique names. While I was unable to give them all names that meant something to me or to them, I was able to give what I consider good, interesting names to the all of them. Right now, some of the names have personal or literary significance to me (like Laura or Pip) while others are just cool names (like Aspen and Zander), but I think that by the end of my two years in Dazhai, they will all mean a lot to me.

Dazhai Middle School has a scholarship that past fellows started that gives money to the top performing and best behaved students of the school. Pictured here is Principal Feng and my third year co-fellow, Yang Yue.

All the scholarship winners along with Yang Yue, Hanxiong, Principal Feng, and several vice principals.

The weather was far from ideal for the ceremony, and the grounds around the construction site (which we have to walk through to get from the dorm to the teaching building) were flooded and muddy.

My first real attempt at cooking. Those who know me well will be unsurprised to see I decided to make chocolate chip pancakes.

Pancakes, book, and a view.

A terrible translation. It is not, in fact, "Subtropical chicken tail juice," but rather passion fruit juice. Not sure where they got that translation from.

After my first haircut in Dazhai.

The barber shop floor got its first taste of blonde(-ish) hair.

Beautiful, huge local vegetables. The cucumber was about as thick as my calf.

While the rain brought muddy grounds, it also brought beautiful, dramatic skies.

Hot Plates and Home

              My Chinese co-fellow Hanxiong and I have begun to really make ourselves at home in the teacher’s dorm at Dazhai. We have our rooms arranged more or less to our liking and everything from previous fellows cleaned and made our own. Importantly, we also got our kitchen set up this weekend and have begun cooking our own food for many of our meals (so far this has meant Hanxiong cooking and me cleaning, but I will nonetheless say “we have begun cooking” with the assumption that that will alter as time goes by).

               For me there were three elements key in making the dorm home. First, the floor is made of (rather unevenly) poured concrete that seems impossible to clean fully, so buying soft puzzle tiles normally used for the floors of children’s play areas was essential to allow me to be comfortable in my living space. Second, internet is now available in our rooms, making Skype and blogging available to me at a speed and convenience that help make the room home. Finally, I hung a tapestry and many posters and pictures that helped me claim the dirty, white walls for my own. All in all, it is a good place to live.

               Buying and cleaning all the bits and pieces necessary for the kitchen also helped make the school as a whole feel more and more like home. When the fourth and final TFC fellow (a third year fellow – someone who decided to stay on past the two year program to try to achieve more) arrived at the school, we were finally able to sort through the closet of things left by past fellows to help furnish our own rooms and, more importantly, our kitchen. There were many things, from a refrigerator to pots and pans to a hot plate all waiting for us. It was less like the picking of gleaming appliances from well-ordered and clean boxes that I had, for some reason, imagined, and more like the dusty, hard work of rehabilitating things left in a drafty shed after a dust storm. Simply put, there was plenty of cleaning to do. Hanxiong and I spent a weekend washing everything and drying it the strong, high-altitude sunlight.

               One of the appliances most in need of our attention was a hot plate left by one of the previous fellows. While originally a fairly good hot plate, it had not been treated well. It looked like it had been used often and perhaps cleaned once or twice by a person unable to use more than 5 or 10 pound of force due to a recent back surgery. Anyway, it was filthy, with a thick layer of dirt and grease obscuring the brand and controls from view. I spent a good half hour scrubbing away at it with soap and hot water from our newly purchased electric kettles. Finally, it was clean. Hanxiong and I decided we should probably buy a new scrub brush after we tossed the one I had just used to clean the hot plate, but it was worth it. It was as good as new. We let it dry in the sun for an hour to make sure any water that got inside it while cleaning it was completely gone, and then we excitedly plugged it in to see what we were working with.

               But it didn’t work. Once we plugged it in and turned it on, the letters “EO” flashed on the small screen accompanied by a consistent, annoying beep. Heat did not accompany any of this, leaving the hot plate cold and lifeless. I assumed it stood for “ERROR,” and that my time spent cleaning it had been spent in vain. We played with it for a good ten minutes to no avail, and making both Hanxiong and I prepare ourselves mentally for spending the money to buy a new hot plate the next day.

               The next day was market day in Dazhai (it happens every five days, bringing dozens of sellers of appliances, vegetables, meat (mostly pork with one or two fish sellers), fruit, clothes, and most anything else you can imagine to the streets of Dazhai), so Hanxiong and I left around 11:00 am to buy needed appliances and food. We came back around 2:00 pm with a new rice cooker (the one left by the previous fellow was literally held together by string), a new hot plate, and a backpack full of a fish a many vegetables (we went out again later to get a huge bag of rice). In the end, we had gotten a good deal on a relatively good hot plate and rice cooker, and we had only spent about USD$65 on them both. We were happy with our purchases and excited to make food for ourselves for the first time. Thus, when we got back, we almost immediately wiped down the new hot plate, plugged it in, and tried it out.

               We were disappointed and confused to yet again see “EO” pop up on the hot plate, presumably meaning that this hot plate too was experiencing an error. I sighed disappointedly and unplugged it. It must be an issue with the electricity, which was probably good in terms of what it meant for the other hot plate but bad for what it meant about us cooking anytime soon. I nonetheless decided to check the instructions booklet that came with the hotplate. I turned to the page explaining the different error codes and found that what it actually said was “E0” (number 0 rather than letter O). Beside the code was an explanation saying that “E0” meant “无锅” or, in English, “No pot.” Hanxiong and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

               We now have two hot plates.

My room more or less how it looks now. You will notice the puzzle tiles on the floor. The room used to be part of a larger room that is now divided into Hanxiong's and my bedrooms and our shared common area/kitchen. The rooms were divided using a thin metal wall that make it so Hanxiong and I can easily shout to each other through the wall asking if the other is hungry or want to play chess. Nice for communication. Bad for privacy.

Hanxiong and I had to get copies of our keys made at the market. Here you can see the very simple key duplication process taking place in front of a woman reading another woman's fortune.

Fresh tomatoes from the market. Cheap (60 cents per kilogram) and delicious!

The excellent first meal that Hanxiong prepared for us: Steamed fish, tomatoes and sugar, and tomato fried egg with rice. I was and continue to be impressed by Hanxiong's cooking. 

Hanxiong posing with his meal.

The sky on a clear, moonless night in Dazhai. Hanxiong, who is from the large city of Tsingdao in Shandong Province, was absolutely amazed by the number of stars in the sky. It was beautiful.

I left the shutter open around ten minutes for this shot of the stars over the surrounding mountains.

Moving home to Dazhai

I have moved into my dorm on the Dazhai Middle School campus! It is, all things considered, a very nice room. Hanxiong and I both get our own individual rooms and share a larger common area where we can cook and relax. Moreover, we are on the first floor, so no need to climb stairs every day. That said, we have only public showers and bathrooms that leave much to be desired. You can see a picture of the boy’s bathroom below. I will leave out the usual descriptive language, as I believe them to be both unnecessary and likely to make you stop reading now.

That said, it is a very nice housing situation. Right now, the school dorms are rather tight for teachers and extremely tight for students. The school knocked down an old dorm building earlier this year and the new dorm has yet to be built, so the students are stuffed into dorms like sardines and they are having trouble finding enough room for us teachers. For the students, the result is, I am told, about 20 students in each room, meaning that students have to share beds, sometimes with up to three kids on one bed (the size of the plank bunk-beds I stayed in at Dayao). I have yet to see the rooms with all the students in them myself, but I can only imagine the utter lack of personal space and the sweaty smell of pubescent, seldom-washed middle-schoolers when all the students are there. The new building should be finished within the next couple months, alleviating conditions significantly.

But in the meantime, I am here in my new room, and I have an address, so I can be sent things! My address is as follows:

孔德临 (Dylan Kolhoff)

中国云南省临沧市云县大寨中学 （675809），P.R. China

电话：18408858586

Dylan Kolhoff

Dazhai Middle School

Lincang Prefecture, Yun County

Yunnan Province

P.R. China

ZIP Code: 675809

               Print out both the Chinese and the English and send letters or packages through USPS. I would love to hear from people, and, especially now that I have my room, I would love care packages. If you are wondering what you can send that would be useful, I can offer a few suggestions of things I want and need (credit to Ida for many of these great ideas):

1.       A watch – Something I definitely should have invested in earlier, since it is very difficult to get through a lesson timely without knowing how much time I have left. A plain, pragmatic, and still good-looking and professional watch would be perfect.

2.       Letters and pictures and art – I have large, dirty, white walls in my new room, and messages, pictures, and art from home would go a long way in making these walls home.

3.       Postcards from your home – It would be really sweet if you could write a short message to my students on it and include it in a package or just send it by itself. Through my teaching, I would like to try to begin introducing my students to the wider world (and to the US in particular), and messages from (for them) exotic places would go a long way toward that goal.

4.       Maple syrup – I have really been longing for western breakfasts, and now that I have a place I can cook I have the ability to make it myself. And while pancakes are easily made most anywhere, pancakes without real maple syrup are barely worth making. Maple syrup would be much appreciated.

5.       Chocolate – I prefer dark chocolate, but it is all good. German chocolate (like Rittersport or Milka) and things with caramel or mint are particular favorites. Candy in general would be great, and it would be really fun to share that piece of US culture with my students (I would have to have at least 15 pieces to share with my kids) – for example, Swedish Fish or Sour Patch Kids.

6.       Peanut butter – Only available in big cities in China, and always enjoyed by me and my co-fellows.

7.       Cookie butter – From Trader Joe’s, this would be an amazing treat in rural China. Really any snacks from Trader Joe’s would be great – they last well and are delicious.

8.       Tide detergent pens – The type that you can take out and use to clean stains in the moment. I brought one of these with me to China, and it has proved invaluable as I always seem to manage to splash spicy broth from my noodles onto my shirts.

9.       Cheese – Stuff that doesn’t need to be refrigerated (parmesan, other?) would be terrific in cheese-less China.

10.   Welsh’s fruit snacks – Because they are delicious.

That said, anything at all would be so very much appreciated, from a postcard to a package. I should say, though, that I can easily get basic cleaning supplies and toiletries here in China, so while I am living with shitty toilets (Ha. Funny.) and showers, I at least have easy access to soap and toothpaste and such.

The boys bathroom. I think the picture says it all really.

And yet there is also such extraordinary beauty in Dazhai. Here is the morning view outside of the window of the hotel I just left.

My first day of middle school

Yesterday, Monday, September 1, was my students’ first day of middle school classes. In China, that means that it was their first day of seventh grade. It was a big day for them and also for me, as it was the day I taught my first class at Dazhai Middle School.

The day began with an opening ceremony that took place in the central courtyard of the teaching building. It began at 9am while the most of the courtyard was in the shade, but by the end of it around noon the sun was shining brightly on the assembled students and teachers. Interestingly, as the minutes ticked by and the cool shadows retreated to one corner of the courtyard, so did the majority of the teachers. While the students, the principal, and the vice principals sweated under the strong, hot sunlight, most of the teachers retreated to the cool shade, with many of them talking and holding conversations as if the ceremony weren’t happening.

This part in particular interested me. While I couldn’t blame them for wanting to get out of the sun (beyond the sun being very strong and hot in high-altitude Dazhai, it is necessary to know that in China, being whiter rather than being tanner is generally considered more beautiful, especially among women, so the social pressure to avoid the sun is very strong), it was strange to me how they could hold obvious side conversations and pay so little attention to the speakers. It seemed like a bad example for the students, who were having enough trouble paying attention in the sunlight seated on the concrete without the addition of talking teachers. Paying attention, or even just the pretext of paying attention, could have gone a long way toward walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

That said, it is easy to judge and difficult to understand. As I saw this happening, I was led to wonder what led to this state of affairs. First, there was the sun. Chinese cultural preferences for white skin along with blazing heat led the majority of us teachers to abandon the official central benches for a jumbled set of benches and stools in the shade. Without the pomp and circumstance of the central area, the assumed prohibition against talking seemed that much weaker.

At the same time, with no meeting the day before and with teaching schedules actually being handed out by school leaders during the ceremony, teachers found themselves with the newly discovered fate of their semester in their hands and no previous opportunity to discuss it. Meanwhile, the content of the ceremony was not all that pertinent for the teachers who already knew the information.

Finally, in my small experience, this type of ceremony or meeting is commonplace in China, and they are generally long on time and short on substance. They are often more about giving face to local officials and higher-ups than about relaying information. Thus, I imagine the general attitude toward such ceremonies and events is more relaxed, especially regarding paying attention, even when there is real information being relayed (as was the case today). So perhaps the teachers were not acting as bad examples, but rather displaying to the students exactly how to react to such events if they are to live in a ceremony-filled world. For me, nothing is obvious besides my own lack of cultural understanding.

Another interesting part of the ceremony was that, when prizes were handed out to the top performing students of the previous year, the rewards weren’t books or simple certificates as they would have been in Richmond, Virginia (or, Hanxiong confirmed, Tsingdao, Shandong, aka less rural China), but cold, hard cash. Top scorers and best-behaved students were given either 10 or 20 yuan (1.5 to 3.5 USD), often in addition to a certificate, for their reward, sometimes multiple times if they performed well in multiple areas. Both Hanxiong and I thought it was a curious system of rewards and wondered how effective it was. Personally, I remember well envying friends whose parents gave them money for good grades, but I did not remember how effectually it worked in pushing them to study. Another curious unknown.

As I wrote above, during the ceremony I was given my teaching schedule for the next semester. I was glad to see that I had the classes I had expected, twelve classes a week with six different classes of seventh graders (about 4 to 10 classes fewer than many of the teachers here – Dazhai Middle School is in desperate need of more teachers). I was somewhat surprised to see that half of my classes were during the evening study hall periods that go from 6:40 to 9:20. That seemed like a small price to pay to have only 350 students instead of 650 and to be able to see each of my classes twice a week, so I was quite satisfied with my schedule, if a little guilty for having only 12 classes per week compared to some teachers’ 20 or more. I was also happy to see that on Mondays my first class was at 6:40 and on Fridays my last class ended around noon, meaning that weekend travel would be much more doable.

My first class that I would teach was that night at 6:40, seventh grade class number 185 (each class is given a number, with the newest grade given higher numbers). I arrived in the classroom five minutes early to prepare and to write the class rules on the board. When class began a few minutes later, I turned from writing on the board to find the classroom half-empty (or was it half-full?). The class’ 班主任, or home-room teacher, came in to introduce himself and tell me that the majority of the boys were all in their dorms being taught how to make their beds, so I should wait for them to start class. Expecting the boys to come back at any moment, I told the rest of the class that they could rest for a few minutes until they returned.

After six minutes of sitting awkwardly in the front with no sigh of the boys, I announced that we would play a game while we waited for them, even as I desperately tried to think of a game we could play that would have something, anything to do with English. The only game I could think of was the flyswatter game, so I went with it and began drawing letters of the alphabet on the board. I asked two students to come up at a time and had them race to slap the letter I said, and then had the class tell me if it was capital or lower-case and then repeat the letter name several times.

I also had the class do cheers for their classmates who came to the board, which they found hilarious. I had them say “WOW!” as they spelled it out with their hands forming two W’s and their mouth forming the O. I don’t think they had ever seen a teacher jumping up and saying “WOW!” as a form of encouragement, and they both loved it and found it ridiculous. The few boys that were in the class were particularly reluctant to potentially make fools of themselves, so I had to do it several times until they got into it and enjoyed it. I also had them say “Looking good, looking good” as they brushed off their shoulders for another cheer, which they found even more ridiculous and fun.

After twenty minutes (of a forty-five minute class) of playing games and practicing cheers and still no sign of the boys, I decided to present some of my planned class even though I would have to repeat it the next class. I introduced myself as Mr. K (or 孔老师 outside of English class) and went over the class rules, their implications, and the reason why they are important for our class. Finally, as the end of class neared, I taught the kids our daily sign-out: See (point to your eyes) You (point away from you) Later (point behind you). Finally, the bell rang and, with one last “See you later,” my first class at Dazhai Middle School was finished.

The school prepared a long strong of firecrackers for the opening ceremony, which was very exciting and very loud. Also it ended only about 15 feet from some of the students.

A vice principal handing out money to some of the school's best students as rewards.

The students standing in the hot sun as a vice principal gives a speech.

The day before the opening ceremony, Hanxiong, Shuchen, another fellow at the school, and I went to the nearby larger city of Yunxian to get teaching materials and to get bank cards. We also had a great meal of western(ish) food. And yes, of course pizza is supposed to be eaten with chopsticks. Can you imagine what would have happened if DeBlasio had used chopsticks rather than just the far-too-civilized knife and fork?

I got a steak, which was lit on fire as it was served. Quite delicious, but pretty weird and not actually very western.

Arrival in Dazhai

               I have arrived in Dazhai (大寨), the small town in Lincang, Yunnan where I will spend my next two years teaching at Dazhai Middle School. But much has passed between my arrival here and my last blog post, so I will back up briefly and describe what I have been up to over the past few weeks.

               When I last wrote, I was in Dayao, Chuxiong, Yunnan, China, where the Teach for China Summer Institute took place. My time in Dayao was mostly spent preparing to teach class, teaching, going to class myself, and spending time getting to know my co-fellows better.

My fourth grade students were a pleasure to teach. They were, for the most part, smart and eager to learn, though I certainly had to learn to manage the classroom effectively to keep them under control in their wilder moments. It was especially challenging (in a good way, as it is a skill that will undoubtedly be essential here at Dazhai) to manage a student while still keeping them involved and engaged with the lesson. In my less successful moments the result was the steely, fiery look of resolute resistance that I mastered in my own youth. However, my successes resulted in an orderly, fun classroom with students who were engaged and excited.

At the end of the teaching practicum (summer camp for the students), each of the classes put on a brief performance in front of the teachers and their peers. My class prepared a dance routine to a wildly popular Chinese song called 小苹果. I was really impressed by them because somehow they managed to prepare and organize the entire routine themselves (the girls did, that is – the boys were supposed to sing and stand behind the girls [separated by sex by choice of those who wanted to sing and those who wanted to dance – I would have preferred to force mixture if I had been completely in charge rather than working with my co-fellows] while they danced, but in the end they essentially just vaguely sang and awkwardly sat behind the girls as they danced). The best part was the outfit that three of the girls wore for the performance – red fake leather that was mildly reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange or some twisted, modern retelling of the Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution. I believe that one of the girls’ mother is a dance teacher and they were able to get the outfits from her. As Ida commented when she saw them though, that may have just been my mind looking for excuses for the ridiculous(ly awesome) outfits.

After Summer Institute officially ended, we were divided up depending on our region. Most all of us were given three or four days off before regional orientation, so a large group of us left Dayao and traveled to Dali for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and, most importantly, western food. It was a fun, expensive weekend full of good people and delicious food.

While in Dali, Ida and I stayed at the same hostel I had stayed at three years before when I first went to Dali, the Five Elements. It was strange to see how it and other places I remembered vividly had changed in the past years. The hostel had expanded and was now about two times the size it had been when I first visited. The bar that I had gone to with Michael during my first visit to Dali, while unchanged in name and atmosphere, had moved several blocks over, completely throwing off my sense of direction.

The changes made me realize how much I had changed since then. When I first arrived in Dali in the summer of 2011, I had taken only one year of Chinese and could barely communicate. I had had one scoliosis surgery, was in regular pain, and was preparing for another surgery once I got back to the US. I was enamored with the idea of meeting people as I traveled (I had Couchsurfed in most of the cities I had stayed in previously), but I had little idea of how to actually do it. I was a student researcher getting my first taste of China.

Now I have taken Chinese for four years. I have lived in Beijing for a year and traveled around more of China than the majority of Chinese people I have met. I am able to hold a passable conversation in Chinese about just about any topic. I have had three surgeries for scoliosis and am essentially pain-free. I have friends from around the world who I have met while traveling (though I still don’t really know how that happened). I am a college graduate preparing for two years of teaching in rural China. Both Dali and I have changed.

Once we got back to Dayao, we had just two short days before my region, Lincang, would leave for the region’s main city, Lincang City, for regional orientation and meeting our principals. It was strange saying goodbye to the middle school that had become home and the people that had become family. The hotel staff (and for that matter, the owners of all the establishments we had supported during our time in Dayao) were sad to see us go, and we were sad to go.

We took a large bus and a truck packed with luggage and rode about nine hours to our hotel in Lincang City. Lincang City is slightly larger than Dayao, but still not a large city by Chinese standards. Teach for China fellows (and, for that matter, local teachers) will often spend weekends in the city. While it does not have a Walmart (unlike Xiaguan in the Dali region) or a KFC (unlike Baoshan City in the Baoshan region), it does have a Salvador’s, a restaurant especially beloved by American fellows for its western food and good coffee.

We had time to relax and get to know Lincang City that evening. The following day was also free apart from a short presentation on the region (mostly repeated or unnecessary information) and a scavenger hunt designed to introduce us to important places in the city (like the supermarket, the best place to get bubble tea, and Salvador’s). Mostly we just relaxed and enjoyed one of our last days together before separating further to our individual regions.

The next day (Friday, August 22) was Principal Day, the day we would all meet our principals to get to know each other and discuss their expectations, the school, our living situation, and the classes we would teach over the next year. The day started early with everyone meeting together in an auditorium in a local middle school across the street from the hotel, where we were told to sit with the principal and the other fellows from our schools. My Chinese co-fellow, Hanxiong, and I found our principal and a local teacher who came with him and began one of the longest, most tiring days of Teach for China thus far.

The first day and a half of meeting with Principal Li, the principal of Dazhai Middle School, were difficult. It seemed like he was interested in Teach for China solely for the benefits it could provide for him. However, it ended up that he would actually be leaving Dazhai for another middle school within a week or two to be replaced by another principal, so we did not have to deal with him long.

After two days of getting to know Dazhai with Hanxiong, I finally had the opportunity to meet the new principal. Feng Xiaozhang (Principal Feng) seems to be, in many ways, the opposite of Li Xiaozhang. They are both similar ages (40 and around 45-ish respectively), similar heights, and similarly balding, but the similarity stops there. Feng Xiaozhang wears glasses over somewhat watery eyes that, along with his voice, betray his emotion as he discusses students. His face is genuine, and he asks and answers questions in a straight-forward, sincere manner.

Principal Feng seemed eager not only to get the most out of having us at the school, but also in ensuring that we would be content as we did it. In discussing classes, he arranged for Hanxiong to teach only three rather than six classes on politics and changed it so I would be teaching Oral English to only the six classes of seventh grade rather than seventh and eighth grade. He asked if I thought I could teach them twice a week (a total of only twelve classes a week) without being too tired. I said yes, and he responded by saying if I did find it to be too much, they could lessen the load.

He went on to say that Hanxiong and I could live together if we wanted to, having our own rooms along with a common area where we could cook. We couldn’t move in yet because it was the old principal’s room, so we would have to wait for him to move out. We will see whether we actually end up being given those rooms, but the change in tone was substantial and meaningful.

Beyond the very positive developments in our class schedules and our living arrangements, Feng Xiaozhang was in general much more receptive of having us there. He was eager for us to start programs and extracurriculars with the students (we were told by the previous fellow that under the previous principal, there were generally only extracurriculars when government officials visited). He wanted us to give suggestions about management and teaching style. He spoke about trying to help connect our students, many of whom have never been outside of Dazhai, with the outside world.

An interesting point of the conversation came up when Feng Xiaozhang began talking about how he wanted us to make sure we paid attention to the worst students. He said that if we did not take care of them, they would drop out of school and become burdens to society. For me, my instinct would be first and foremost to consider the individual student. I would want to help even the worst students realize their potential. While that was my first instinct, I imagine Feng Xiaozhang’s focus on the bad students’ negative impact on society would work well in securing both teacher and government support for those students (teachers in China often focus on the best students with the thought that the bottom will fail out anyway, so they should focus on the students that want to be taught and who can improve their test scores). Also, I imagine that it would help to remind teachers that every student matters even when they are teaching more than three hundred students a week.

All in all, the meeting with the new principal was an overwhelmingly positive experience. I felt like there was a lot of room for me to learn and grow as well as a lot of aspects where I could contribute positively. Here was the sort of relationship I was looking for with my principal. Whereas Li Xiaozhang made me feel like I had to be careful of what I said in any conversation with him, Feng Xiaozhang made me feel empowered, like I wanted to do everything I could for the school. Two very different methods of leadership (one seemingly with an eye up the promotion ladder and the other with all his attention on the students) and two very different responses in me. I hope that my future interactions with Feng Xiaozhang will prove him to be the compassionate, genuine man he appears to be.

For now, I wait, I relax, I walk around Dazhai, I try to get to know locals and teachers, I prepare, and, very rarely, I blog.

Note: My internet is too slow at the moment to upload pictures - they will follow when I have better internet.

Local Laoban Outings

     Over the past week, plans have often been co-opted by the owner of the local hotel that we stay at on the weekends. If you haven't read the previous post in which the hotel Laoban took our photo and asked to hang it in the lobby, I suggest you check it out. After that, my friend Ida and I ran into the Laoban after one of our days teaching at the elementary school. It ends up that the Laoban has a sixth grader who was attending the Teach for China summer camp at the school.
     As soon as he saw us, the Laoban invited us to have lunch with him. Ida and I looked at each other with a kind of bemused expression that visits our faces often in rural China. After a quick interchange of shrugs and half-nods, we responded positively (I should really say "I responded" - the Laoban essentially always speaks with me and not with Ida. She has reported to me that they have made eye contact at least once). However, we were worried that we would not be able to eat and still get back to the middle school for our classes that would begin in under 50 minutes, so we said that we should probably go back with the rest of the fellows and that we could get lunch another time. The Laoban would have nothing of it. He assured us that he would get us back on time and that he would drive us back himself. While we were worried about time, we were also very tired of the school cafeteria, so we agreed and followed him to a restaurant right next to the school. In the end, we had lunch with the Laoban, his wife, his sister, his nephew (who was actually one of Ida's students), and, for some reason, three of the school's security guards. The food was delicious and the Laoban managed to get us back to the school and to our Chinese class earlier than we normally get there. A lesson on why to say "yes" to opportunities that present themselves in rural China.

     This weekend, I was planning on getting all my lesson planning (and blogging) done for the next week or so in the comfort of the hotel. Thus Saturday afternoon found both Ida and myself working on lesson plans and blogging when we were interrupted by a call from the hotel Laoban. Since we were in the midst of being productive, I was tempted not to take the call, but was convinced to by Ida, who wanted to get out and move. When I answered the phone, I was surprised not to hear the Laoban's gruff Chinese, but the excellent English of Yuan Yuan, a Chinese staff member. She told me that she was in the car with the Laoban, and that he was inviting us to go to a nearby ancient town with him (and Yuan Yuan and another Chinese staff member, Stephen, both of whom had been touring Dayao with the Laoban during the morning). Ida and I again shared a brief exchange of shrugs, nods, and raised eyebrows before agreeing to meet them by the hotel (the Laoban's hotel, it should be mentioned) in ten minutes.
     The day after that was full of interesting and fun exploring. We went to a nearby town and visited a Buddhist temple, an old government building, a pond full of flowering waterlilies, and an excellent restaurant. We ran into some other Teach for China fellows who had found their way to the town and struggled to explain how exactly we had found ourselves there with Yuan Yuan, Stephen, and the Laoban. It was hard to describe how we had gotten there. It was somehow connected with us saying yes at questionable yet key moments. I'll have to remember that as I go off to placement.

Mushroom sellers near the ancient town.

The making of canola oil - fascinating.

Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms - Yunnan is famous for wild mushrooms.

Alleyways that remind me of the ancient town in Dali.

Some patterns in a Buddhist temple that made me think of my Mom's zendoodles.

Flight to China and Teach for China Summer Institute

               What was I expecting as I awoke with a jolt of adrenaline two short hours before the first leg of my flight to China and twenty-five long hours before I was due to arrive in Kunming? I had nominally been preparing for this moment and for the two years teaching English in rural Yunnan through Teach for China that would follow for the last month since I had arrived home from my road trip, but serious preparation, both physical and mental, had only really begun over the past week and a half, and it wasn’t until three hours before I woke up for my flight that I had finished packing. But there I was, fully packed and energized by adrenaline, a couple hurried spoonfuls of cereal, and expectations of things to come.

               I didn’t expect much from the flight other than uncomfortable sleep, dry air, a few good stories, and, if I was lucky, an on-time arrival in Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province). My expectations and hopes for once I arrived were much more varied and confused. Near the top of my list was my desire to improve my Chinese, and I was fairly confident that two years in rural China would do so whether I wanted to or not. I hoped to meet and really get to know other American and Chinese Teach for China fellows, but I expected some significant amount of loneliness once I arrived at my placement after the Summer Institute. I expected difficult conditions both at Summer Institute and my placement, but I really had little idea of what sort of details to expect, so I mostly tried to keep expectations low. One of my haziest expectations were of what I would actually be doing during Summer Institute and once I arrived at my placement. While I expected teaching to, of course, be the main object of my attention for the next two years, I had little idea of what that would come down to in terms of how I spent my time day-by-day. Finally, I hoped that I would be able to find a way to continue my study of International Relations (and especially of Sino-American relations) during my next years, whether through a blog or more scholarly articles.

               I had a lot of expectations as I drove with my family to the airport, but I knew that unknown unknowns and thrown expectations were more likely than anything else to define my next two years teaching in rural China.

               The first leg of my flight was uneventful with the exception of excited and emotional goodbyes from most of my parental units at the airport as I left. I slept and prepared myself for the next few challenging legs of the journey. My flight to Vancouver was a little more exciting, as I had the opportunity to sit next to and talk with a very interesting mother and daughter pair. They were headed to Vancouver for an Alaskan cruise (along with, it seemed, about half the plane), and were quite the pair of travel buffs. However, while they had traveled a lot, they had never been to China, which the daughter (eighteen years old) was especially interested in. However, she bemoaned the fact that you needed to have been vaccinated in order to go to China. I nodded sympathetically until I fully realized what she had said, at which point I said something about vaccinations being important for staying healthy in China. The mother tentatively agreed, saying that if her daughter did get vaccinated to travel to China, at least it would be now rather than when she was younger, since “those things are awful for you.”

Around then, I realized that while I might share a love of travel with my seatmates, our worldviews varied rather significantly. We went on to share uncontroversial travel stories until I told the mother about my trip to Machu Picchu and Peru, at which point she responded by saying that, “oh, I believe that is the place that –insert difficult-to-discern name here- meditated and discovered the healing power of energy.” Not quite sure of how to respond, I answered by saying that I didn’t know about that. Well, she was ready to tell me all about it, including a demonstration in which she cupped my left hand in her hands and asked whether I could feel the healing energy. Not wanting to make an enemy out of my seatmate for the next hours or a liar out of myself, I told her that I could not feel anything, likely because of my skeptical mind. The mother, with the confident motion of a missionary, brushed away my doubtful response and focused more closely on my hands, saying that while my skepticism would make it take longer to feel the energy, I would nonetheless feel it. Thrown off by my failure to delicately extract myself from her grasp, I caved and admitted that yes, I did feel some tingling (which seemed consistent to me with simply focusing on it and having it grasped in her hands for five minutes), which achieved the hoped-for result as she released my hand triumphantly, leaving me to my rational skepticism and the mother to her credulous conviction.

      

            When I left Richmond, I had been told that I would have to pick up my bag in Vancouver, go through Canadian customs, and then check it back in for my flight to Beijing. All of this would have to be done in a very short ninety minutes (assuming we arrived on time). When I finally arrived in Vancouver, I was relieved to see that my flight to Beijing was delayed, making it much easier to make it there in time. I also discovered, after forty minutes of waiting for my baggage, that I did not actually have to recheck my luggage, which was good to hear (though it would have been much nicer to hear an hour before). The delayed flight also meant that I would miss my connecting flight in Beijing to Kunming, so I had to talk with Air Canada people to get on a later flight.

Luckily, while Air Canada’s delays and policies were rather infuriating, their staff were an absolute delight (unlike, as I would discover later, some of Air China’s staff). The woman I spoke with not only figured out what flight I could get on to get to Kunming, but also snagged an emergency exit row seat for me and got me a meal ticket for Vancouver.

Thus, with baggage checked away and meal ticket in hand, I was able to enjoy my last meal in North America (sushi) along with the last game of the world cup (my fellow passengers and I hypothesized that the pilots had delayed the flight only because they wanted to watch the world cup final).

While I was waiting for the flight to take off, I ran into Ida, a friend of a William and Mary friend who was headed for Kunming and Teach for China as well. Our mutual friend had shown us both pictures of each other, but with only the vague memory of Facebook pictures to go off of, it took several discrete looks, hesitant eye contact, and questioning mouthing of “Ida?” and “Dylan?” across the gate boarding area to make the connection. We spent the next half hour chatting about our friend and Teach for China and watching the World Cup (we missed the extra time goal by Germany, but were informed of it by our pilot as we prepared to take off) before boarding the plane for Beijing, China, and Teach for China.

My seat on the plane was extraordinary. Emergency exit row seats have the ability, in this very tall man’s opinion, to make a flight, even a thirteen hour flight, comfortable and fun. It was on this flight that the transition to being in China began, with Chinese and English (and French) being broadcast over the intercom, and with two Chinese seatmates. I was seated immediately next to an older Chinese woman who had been visiting her daughter in Canada and a younger Chinese woman who was attending college in the US. The older woman almost immediately tried to set us up with each other, but was disappointed to find out that the younger woman already had a boyfriend. The rest of the flight proceeded uneventfully, with ample amounts of stretched-out sleeping and plenty of movie watching and reading.

The Beijing airport presented another set of challenges and frustrations. To begin with, we had to pick up our luggage and go through customs, a thoroughly frustrating a tiring process (especially for those with luggage for living in China for the next two years). I was relieved to have all my luggage arrive in Beijing (three transfers, including a delay and a flight change, seemed like it might be too much to ask). However, my friend Ida was not so lucky. Though she originally rushed ahead to try to grab her baggage and make it to an earlier flight to Kunming, we ran into each other at the baggage claim as we waited for our luggage and nervously joked about our luggage not showing up. While my two bags and one of Ida’s bags did finally arrive after an agonizingly long amount of time, Ida’s second bag never showed up. The light of hope after finding the first bag was slowly replaced by a mixture of exhaustion, dismay, and slight hysteria brought on by the ridiculousness of it all. Finally, after luggage stopped coming around the carousel, we reported the missing bag to Air Canada with little hope of ever finding it again and entered the chaos of the 3^rd Terminal of the Beijing Airport.

After an annoying interaction with an Air China employee where they made Ida buy a new ticket and made me pay for my second bag again and after a much nicer interaction with another Air China employee who allowed me to pay less than I might have had to for the second bag, Ida and I made our way through security and on to the last leg of our journey (that day) to Kunming. The flight was largely uneventful, with the exception of sitting next to an eight year old boy returning from a trip to Beijing who quizzed me on everything I knew about China and what I was doing there and where I had been. We arrived in Kunming after midnight, about 36 hours after I had left for the Richmond airport, picked up our luggage, and took a taxi to our hostels, exhausted but happy to have finally arrived.

The next day, a large group of fellows made our way, with our mountains of luggage, to the Kunming bus station on to a four-hour bus ride to Dayao, Yunnan, China, where the Teach for China Summer Institute would take place over the next four and a half weeks. As we arrived in Dayao, we were greeted by enthusiastic Teach for China staff and dozens of golden dragonflies skimming all around us in the cool air of Dayao after rain.

Dayao is a very small city in Yunnan known for walnuts and a somewhat significant Confucian shrine. By the looks given to us foreigners by locals, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Teach for China Summer Institute is the most significant influx of foreigners Dayao has ever seen. In general, locals have been very friendly and rather surprised that we would deign to come all the way to Dayao from the United States. We are staying at a middle school in Dayao, living in the dorms normally occupied by the students. Luckily, we share the rooms with only three other fellows rather than the 12 students staying in them during the school year (students in Yunnan and many other more rural parts of China stay at the school during the week and only go home over the weekends). The rooms were a far cry even from the hostel that we stayed at in Kunming, with a cement floor covered in dust and dirt and six metal bunk beds with wooden planks as mattresses (when we arrived, they were also layered with cardboard boxes that appeared to have been used as cushioning by the past residents). However, with a quick cleaning and a thin mattress and sheets purchased from the local market, the room eventually became something approaching homey.

In general, at Summer Institute I have been incredibly and perhaps irrationally content. While Summer Institute has been exhausting and utterly frustrating at times, the people have made it a pleasure to attend. While our beds are wooden planks, our business-casual is jeans and a shirt with a collar, our bathrooms are fly-ridden shitholes, our food is oil-laden, repetitive “fried” vegetables, fatty meat, and rice, our housing is mosquito-filled, dusty dorm rooms shared with three roommates and lacking any trace of privacy, and our seating for classes is two-by-fours nailed to two A-frames supposedly fitting into the genus “bench,” the other Teach for China fellows and staff and the kids that I began teaching last Monday have made the experience thus far one of the happiest times of my life. The other American fellows are, for the most part, intelligent, kind, and dedicated. Many have similar interests as I, but they vary just enough to keep things interesting. The second-year fellows here as our teachers and guides are excellent and experienced, making the whole of Summer Institute feel worthwhile. The Chinese fellows are interested in the much fewer American fellows, and are themselves very smart, talented, and driven. I have had many great conversations with them and look forward to many more. My students, while I have only had them for one week, already provide the necessary context for all of Summer Institute and, for that matter, for Teach for China as a whole. 

Flight over the Pacific

We had a scavenger hunt activity that introduced us to Dayao. Here we are at the end, after hiking up hundreds of steps to the White Tower.

I went for a walk into rural Dayao with Ida - this picture was taken just before we had to get off the road to let a man with a large pig get by followed by a luxury BMW.

On the weekends, we all like to go into the town to relax and stay out later than the 11pm curfew of the Middle School. The morning after just such a night as we were turning in the hotel room key, we found the hotel Laoban (boss) waiting for us, asking if we would take some pictures with him. While several of us were still groggy from the previous night's festivities, we acquiesced. The next weekend, the Laoban showed us this framed gem and asked if he could hang it in the hotel lobby. In short, we are now famous in Dayao, if not China as a whole.

Sunset in Dayao.

For our first day of classes, one of my co-teachers (we each teach one period of math, English, and history respectively and then jointly teach a class of music, art, or games) drew pictures of each of us and our hobbies on the board - the students had to guess which hobbies applied to whom.

We set up an incentive system where the student groups can earn points for participating and being proactive (and lose them for failing to follow class rules) - when they get 10 points as a group they are allowed to roll a die and move their piece on the prize board I drew on the blackboard in the back of the room.

The view from the boys dormitory across the basketball court to the girls dorms and the mountains beyond.

Fourth graders lining up on the first day of classes.

My class of 22 students (I will have many, many more when I go to my placement school).

All the doors at the elementary school have this on it "请讲普通话" or "Please speak Mandarin." Yunnan is full of minorities, and many kids' first language is not Mandarin. When they attend school, they can thus confront an additional barrier of being unable to speak the language used in classroom instruction.

A view from the boys dorm in the pouring rain and the simultaneously shining sun. It rains most days in Dayao, making roads muddy and umbrellas essential.

During one of our music classes, I taught the kids "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes," which we proceeded to perform in every conceivable way. In this picture, they were all squeezing onto the platform in the front of class to act as the teacher while I acted as the student. They found my performance lacking and took away 30,000 points from my group.