Changsha, with a population pushing that of London, is small fry when compared to China’s five great cities. No matter that high rise buildings are sprouting up like mushrooms after rain or that, in any one portion of the horizon, you will see around seven cranes, Changsha is comparatively titchy. Although it can’t complete with the big boys like Tianjin, Wuhan or Guangzhou (nope, I’d never heard of them either), it does has some strings to its economic bow. Changsha is known not only for being a centre of the textile industry and a ‘party town’ with a good night life, but also as an “important creative centre for TV and entertainment arts”. And what could be more important or creative than that jewel of TV broadcasting the ‘game show’? Well, dear followers, while this blog may have a readership of roughly three- myself included - I have now made a tit of myself in an obstacle course on national television in a country of over 1.3 billion people.
After a fairly exhausting morning teaching the kids to make rattles from plastic cups with a mild hangover from the several large bottles of beer I’d felt obliged to drink the night before, every single foreign intern was ushered into a bus and driven to a mystery studio somewhere deep in the heart of suburban Changsha. I say suburban; it was surrounded on all sides by 30-storey apartments, and I could count at least eleven cranes. China, while economically well ahead of almost everyone else, is a world leader neither in their sophistication nor their attitude to health and safety. We were greeted with the sight of a pretty but obviously heavily polluted and schistosomiasis-infected lake filled with garish, kitsch, automated death traps or ‘obstacles’. Oddly-dressed, obnoxious presenters bounced around the main stage screaming Chinese catch phrases, while equally obnoxious-looking celebrity contestants bounced through the obstacles and were hurled with great force into the murky bilharzia-ridden waters below.
The course consisted of six herculean hurdles, each one probably in violation of several international health and safety laws. The ‘foreign teachers’ were divided into four teams each with a name subtler and wittier than the last; Dramarama, “Dancing Queens”, Babestation (translated as “Horny Girls”) and my own team “Boys with Toys” (translated as “Dirty, slutty Boys”). After being asked to scream a catchphrase, perform a humiliating dance, in my case “Who let the dogs out”, followed by the YMCA, we were balanced on a surfboard and hurled very fast down a very steep slope towards a very slippery inflatable platform. Those of us who landed on the platform and scrambled onto the first island had to swing, Tarzan-style, from a sopping wet rope suspended from a crane onto the next island. On the next island were three large polystyrene ‘prizes’, which we had to carry across four rapidly-rotating platforms before jumping onto another inflatable mat. If you got that far, you had to cross two massive fast-spinning windmills, jump across four unhinged freely-rotating beach balls and finally climb a climbing wall on a treadmill while being pelted with water. Out of the >30 contestants who were filmed over the few hours we were there, only one guy managed to get to the end, where he was greeted by a not obviously attractive but nonetheless not awful looking western girl and her entourage of brightly dressed muscley Chinese men to receive a shiny new top range television.
When my own turn came, fresh from the most embarrassing performance of the YMCA I have done all week- there have been a lot- I was loaded onto the surfboard of death, screamed “for queen and country” and was hurled headfirst onto the slippery rubber mattress below. Having caught my breath I jumped onto the rope swing and, instead of flinging myself into the abyss and beyond, hopped lightly off the platform and landed gently on the next. I almost forgot to grab a polystyrene prize but remembered just in time and picked up a token for a £100 air conditioner. I hopped from the first to the second to the third spinning platform but, here, my luck ran out. I put my foot on the boundary between the last two spinning plan forms and was hurled quite literally heals over head into the air. I landed hard, first, on the edge of one of the platforms and then into the foul tasting murky water below. My plan had been to play dead as a joke until someone came to fish me out, but I was jolted into action by the mouthful of rank water coupled with the terrible pain in my backside as well as a deep seated fear of vector borne parasites that only several terms of lectures from the worm fetishist Professor Nick Mascie Taylor can instil.
My bottom still hurts and I’m fairly sure S. japonicum cercaria are currently morphing into schistosomulum and preparing to migrate to my liver where they will produce god knows how many thousand necrosis inducing eggs per day. On the plus side, however, before I was flung into the water I apparently made the first two obstacles look effortless, I very nearly won an air-conditioneder and I can now say that I’m “big in China”, so I guess every cloud has a silver lining.
Wednesday 27 July 2011
Friday 22 July 2011
In a class of my own
No portion of your anatomy will go unscathed.
I nicknamed this affable young fellow ‘Limpet Opik’.
Over the nine-day summer camps, I teach a total of seven individual lessons three times each to three classes. Lesson themes include ‘story telling’, ‘maths’, ‘science’, ‘colour and beauty’, ‘music and rhythm’ and ‘love and gratitude’. Every afternoon, with the help of my wonderful local assistant teachers, we try to teach the poor bastards the curiously-worded camp song Shining Friends and, every so often, participate in a number of ‘fun’ activities such as dumpling making, where the kids rub flour in your hair, or ‘the water festival’, where the kids throw water in your face. Lesson plans aren’t provided, and the school’s advice went no further than ‘go in there and teach them whatever the goodness you want’. So far I’ve had the kids making paper aeroplanes, pretending to be pigs, and making rattles out of rice and plastic cups (disastrous). The pinnacle of awkwardness was certainly the water festival where four of the 22 ‘western teachers’ are plucked from their comfort zones, dressed in ridiculous costumes, very hastily taught a very difficult dance and then attacked by some 180 crazed water-wielding Chinese children and a power hose of the type used to remove encrusted grime from garden patios.
Costumes before the deluge.
Every second evening, or thereabouts, we have to host one of three other activities: the ‘Western Festival Rave’, the ‘Game Salon’ and the ‘Camp Fire’. I ended up re-enacting Hallowe'en dressed as (you guessed it) Harry Potter, getting them all to play sleeping lions, and teaching 90 impressionable young things The YMCA respectively. The novelty of The YMCA wore off the next day, however, when my teaching partner and I had to perform it impromptu, three times in quick succession in the boiling heat to the parents of every one of my students.
You’re a wizard Duncan (whether you like it or not)
I have just started my second week and while it is, I feel sure, an invaluable and ultimately rewarding experience, I currently just want to hide my head in the sand and cry. There’s another ‘Game Salon’ tonight, and I think it may kill me. On the bright side, at least I don’t have to perform in the ‘`Water Festival’ for another week.
When the male is showing off his strength to attract a mate, or to ward off
predators, he starts off in a stiff-legged trot, jumping up into the air
with an arched back every few paces and lifting the flap along his back…
this ritual is known as ‘pronking’.
predators, he starts off in a stiff-legged trot, jumping up into the air
with an arched back every few paces and lifting the flap along his back…
this ritual is known as ‘pronking’.
Wednesday 20 July 2011
Downtown in the Big City
Followers of my previous peregrinations will know that I am usually an avid travel blogger, and my desire to record whatever wanders past my eyes and into my head has, for the last few years at least, bordered on the obsessive compulsive. When I say, then, that I have been too busy over the last few days to write a word, it is no exaggeration. School has been around 13 hours a day, ten days a week, and the free time I have had has been filled with hastily preparing lessons for classes full of excitable students. I spent half of today, our “day off” preparing for tomorrow's second ‘opening ceremony’. I’m itching to write more about teaching, but first I should tell you more about the city where I’m staying.
Changsha is famous for being (very near to) the birthplace of chairman Mao and my first impressions of the city were not altogether favourable. With a population, in 2003, of at least 6 million people*, it sprawls for miles in every direction and its south side, while doubtlessly full of personality, isn’t easy on the eye. The city centre, however, is just lovely as long as you ignore the smog. I have now had time to visit the city centre thrice, once when I went to ‘bar street’, yesterday when I went for a meal with my wonderful teaching assistants, and today when I absolutely failed to find Mao’s university.
Changsha’s city centre, far from being the higgledy piggledy mess of many ‘developing’ cities I’ve visited, is nearly pristine and filled with restaurants and shops selling clothes, expensive alcohol and a cornucopia of western luxury goods. Squint through the smog and you can see large well-kempt shopping centres, tree-lined streets, temples, pagodas, bulletin boards and restaurants. Although there are obvious signs of poverty, while Kampala and Hyderabad have as much effluence as affluence, there is not a piece of rubbish to be found in central Changsha thanks, solely, to the armies of orange-clad litter pickers, who ceaselessly patrol every inch of the metropolis.
A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be.
Nightlife in Changsha, if that’s what your into, is also very good. Take a trip to the imaginatively named ‘Bar Street’ and you’re presented with a choice of about thirty funky, wood-panelled Chinese bars. Personally I think it would make more sense to spread them out over the city, but if you’re after a shot of “Jack Benign’s” vodka, a glass of brandy and sweet green tea, or a game of surprisingly enjoyable Chinese dice, you can’t go far wrong.
The university district of Changsha is also rather verdant and, when I went with a couple of friends to find chairman Mao’s old university, it was lovely. We popped off the bus and passed a picturesque lily-covered lake, where Chinese men in hats were fishing for pointlessly tiny fish. We passed a few university buildings and climbed what we thought to be the famous hill on which Mao used to sit and think about the doctrines of communism. Up and up we climbed, past bamboo forest, gravestones and beautiful city vistas until we happened on a teacher and a group of children who informed us that Mao’s university was a few miles down the road and the hill we were on wasn’t famous in any way shape or form.
He shall have a fishy on a little dishy
Anyway, it all starts again in seven hours, so I’ll leave it there for now. Tomorrow is another opening ceremony and I have to be as fresh as I can be.
*To put this in perspective, Norway has a population of roughly 4.7 million and New Zealand 4.3 million.
Thursday 14 July 2011
Camp Song
The Lyrics (transcribed by the editor)
In case you can’t read the words on the screen in the last picture of the previous blog entry, here they are, verbatim:
a little faith brightens a rainy day
life is difficult you can’t go away
don’t hide yourselves in the corner
you have my place to stay
sorrow is gonna say goodbye
opens up you’ll see th? ?????
Duncan’s arm is covering up the last words. Could they be “the sky”? -- “goodbye” doesn’t rhyme with “the smog”!
Wednesday 13 July 2011
What is going on? and is there any way of stopping it?
Class of 2012
By law, education in China, as befits a good Communist country, is exclusively state run. In this Utopian Heaven, central control acts to prevent the development of those social distinctions which would nucleate the class of wealthy bourgeois pigs that every good communist worth their salt learns to loathe at a young age. One would therefore be forgiven for thinking that all schools in China are equal. But, to pinch a phrase from George Orwell, some are more equal than others. The SZT School in Changsha, the capital of the Hunan Province, is one such institution and, given that they have the money to ship over a plane-load of foreign teachers for a four-week summer camp, is not surprisingly very equal indeed.
An oasis of green in the dirty, dusty, smog-drenched developing urban jungle of Changsha’s south side, the school is violently juxtaposed against its grimy surroundings. To obtain a place at this elite institution, parents have to make a ‘voluntary’ donation to SZT Group so their kids can be taught at what has to be one of the most lavish ‘state’ schools in China. It is here that, after three days of lacklustre ‘TEFL’ training in London, I find myself teaching nouns to classes of excitable six and seven-year-olds from that wealthy middle class that Mao invested such a good deal of energy in destroying during the Cultural Revolution.
The Oasis of STZ bathed in what we wish were low-hanging cloud.
Apart from their unusual approach to the doctrines of Communism, one thing the Chinese have in buckets is a strong work ethic. To give you just one example, the classes here, instead of being called the usual ‘Classes one, two and three’ or ‘Classes orange, blue and mauve’, are named after world-famous universities. My own three classes bear the impressive appellations of ‘Class Massachusetts Institute of Technology’, ‘Class California Institute of Technology’ and ‘Class Columbia University’, and I often glimpse students, giggling happily as they skip past my window, from ‘Class Oxford’, ‘Class Cambridge’ and ‘Class California Berkeley’. I do feel I should tell my charges in ‘Class CalTech’ that it is very unlikely that any of them will ever end up studying in America, but I guess ambitions don’t hurt. Mental images of my own son, the young master ‘Oxford Cambridge Stibbard Stanford Hawkes’, receiving his own rejection letters do, however, make me wonder if the poor wee nippers are perhaps being set up for inevitable disappointment. Poor, poor Oxo; all those years of being bullied were for nothing.
A girl from class MIT prepares for her entrance exams with balloon practice.
The main downside of the Chinese work ethic, at least from my point of view, is that it extends to the foreign English teachers at SZT, including me. To say we’ve been dropped in the deep end would be quite an understatement. I arrived in Changsha last Friday afternoon and was hoisted from my bed on Saturday morning for a day of what was deceptively labelled ‘resting’. Resting, in the Chinese sense of the word, involved being bussed into school, being given our marching orders, being told lists of rules and, then being introduced to ‘the leaders’. Having met ‘the leaders’, our jet-lagged day of rest continued with the teachers of the school ushering us through a door and into a room which, to our great surprise and bewilderment, was a large auditorium filled with a couple of hundred expectant faces. Holding our eyes open and forcing smiles, we introduced ourselves and stood, grinning and grimacing, through a 15-minute speech in Chinese. Our trials not yet over, we were then told that the opening ceremony would be tomorrow and that we were to prepare our ‘dance’. The ten allotted dance-preparation minutes having elapsed, Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ came on the speaker system and we staggered around the stage wondering what on earth was going on and if there was any way of stopping it.
Our confetti-filled act in the hastily prepared ‘opening ceremony’, which explains the title of this entry.
I could write more. There is a lot more to say and I am yearning to say it. However, as I have to get up in about six hours and as I have been working an average of twelve hours a day, I should perhaps go to bed. I could tell you stories of chickens’ feet, of being thrust in front of my first class to teach a lesson with close to zero experience and of dressing children up in Hallowe’en masks and re-enacting All Hallows Eve for the peculiarly-named ‘Western Festival Rave’. These anecdotes will have to wait for another day, that is, if I ever have any free time ever again.
‘Yours truly teaches the peculiarly worded ‘camp song’ to the semi-interested California Institute of Technology Class.’
Tuesday 12 July 2011
Size Matters (Sunday, 10th July)
You may have heard that China is the next big thing. This is not completely true. From my limited experience, it seems quite clear that China is the current biggest thing, it’s just that not many people outside China know it yet.
Head first
I arrived in Changsha yesterday afternoon and was greeted at the airport by a teacher from the school at which I will be working. As we drove towards our hotel, the first thing that struck me was the number of skyscrapers in various states of construction surrounding us on all sides. Huge skyscrapers, everywhere, standing next to huge roads with hundreds upon hundreds of cars. What surprised me even more, however, was that the teacher I was with kept describing it as the ‘countryside’. I thought, at first, that it was a mistranslation but it turns out that the district in southern Changsha in which we are staying is miles from the city centre and is, by the estimation of the local population, “rural”. Rural shopping centres, rural stadiums and rural main roads, as far as the eye can see in either direction. Apparently, compared to central Changsha, the miles of heavily developed urban sprawl that surrounds me on all sides is positively rustic. And this, a city of some 9 million people, is considered small. China is not the next big thing, it is the current big thing and the next global superpower.
“Rural”: A view of the slightly-less-developed side of Changsha from my hotel room. (I live in a house, a very big house in the country).
As I was the first to arrive, the school were kind enough to buy me dinner and we went to a humble local restaurant to sample some of Changsha’s famously tasty cuisine. Unluckily for me, as well as being famously tasty, the cuisine here is famously spicy and the starter, when it arrived consisted of cucumber coated in chopped red chillies. Marshalling the stiff upper lip of the British, I readied my chopsticks and ploughed forward but the acute pain that washed over my tongue must have shown in my expression. My host, slightly puzzled, asked if the food was too hot. Apparently she could not taste the slathering of raw chillis at all, and rushed off to warn the chief of my delicate constitution. The subsequent dishes were by and large chilli free, though still hot enough to make you gasp.
Cucumber and chilli seeds: “Not hot.”
I could go on to tell you about Chinese table manners and how fish heads are a delicacy, but I’m starting to feel the ill effects of the jetlag and might take this chance to catch 40 winks. Interestingly, its very rude to move communal dishes in China and so all the food is placed on a rotating glass surface in the middle of the table (Above). When you want something, you simply spin the table around and grab what you want with your chopsticks. I leave you with a picture of someone from the school eating a fish head. The fish was, of course, covered in chillis.
Buy Penguin Books (Friday, 8th July 2011)
Guangzhou or ‘Canton’ is the largest city of the Guangdon province and one of the five national central cities of China. I know almost nothing about the Guangdon province, but can at least confirm that the great firewall of China hasn’t censored Wikipedia. It is in Guangzhou’s Baiyun International Airport that I find myself sitting, already travel-weary, waiting for the next flight to ‘Changsha’.
“What are you doing here?”, one may well ask. Actually, I am wondering the exact same thing. There are several answers, though the simplest reason I am here is that a little more than three weeks ago I applied, on the off-chance, to a ''Teach English in China” scheme advertised on my University’s summer job board. The Friday before last, the day I got my final exam results, I received an e-mail asking if I was still interested. The following Sunday, when recovered from my hangover, I received a call confirming my place on the scheme. I went to London on the next Tuesday to submit my passport application, contracted a horrible cold on the Thursday and graduated on the Friday. I graduated last Saturday, weny to London on Sunday, did three days of rather slap-dash TEFL training between Monday and Wednesday, flew to Guangzhou via Dubai yesterday, and now find myself basking, bleary eyed, in the Friday midday Guangzhou sunshine waiting for the next flight to ‘Changsha’, where I will be ‘teaching’ English at a summer school.
An incongruous horse in the Guangzhou Airport Hotel. Incongruous horses are all the rage in China.
The last two weeks have been exhilarating and exhausting in fairly equal measure. The highlight was results day, when the father of a friend, the CEO of a fairly (universally) well-known publishing company bought me and my girlfriend a £50 bottle of Champagne to go with our celebratory meal. He was impressed with our results and, apparently, our modesty. I doubt my modesty has impressed anyone before and don’t think it ever shall again, but the evening was much enjoyed. Suffice to say that when an e-mail arrived about the China scheme later that day, I was not quite in a condition to appreciate its significance.
More could be said about the following week and a half; the trip to London for visas via Camden market, punting up the Cam, hurriedly packing my University things, a toast to the fellows of Robinson College, graduation, a new camera, TEFL etc. but the fact that I was going to China didn’t really hit home until yesterday when I landed in Dubai airport.
If it was not immediately clear that Guangzhou Airport is very big, giant fake palm trees help illustrate that Guangzhou Airport is very big.
Dubai airport is an interesting and not altogether savoury mix of Western luxury goods, Huqqa pipes, dates, moustachioed men draped in white cotton, sand, palms and blazing sunshine. I didn’t get a chance to escape into central Dubai, but the place looked to contain the worst points of Western consumer culture and middle-eastern weather. Not a generous assessment, but, at 4am UK time on very little sleep, I wasn’t inclined to be charitable.
My first impressions of China were a lot better, if a little confused. The first thing that struck me was the size of Guangzhou's Baiyun Aiport. The place is huge, roomy and a lot easier to navigate than London’s own Heathrow and of a comparable scale (perhaps slightly smaller) than Tokyo’s ‘Narita’ airport. For a city I’d never before heard of, the airport’s gigantism was, and still is, a touch disconcerting. Gasping at the humidity, I was then ferried by taxi to the airport hotel, an establishment divorced from any species of food shop by at least a mile. I dined in style on instant noodles and a canned sweet kidney bean, water chestnut and lily-root porridge that I purchased under the mistaken belief that it was fruit juice. After sending a few e-mails and probing the great firewall of China (Google is blocked. along with Facebook and this blog), I headed to bed and slept for a full nine hours.
The last few hours have been spent returning to and cheerfully wandering around the hypertrophied Baiyun Aiport. I have partaken in the delights of plum tea and overpriced goose soup, though passed up the opportunity to buy ‘fruit juice pork bars’, salted plums and knock-off Angry Birds soft toys. Perhaps I shall go and sample some pickled egg cakes before my flight leaves.
The incongruous horse speaks no words but you can tell he is judging you.
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