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.