So I finally made it to my town Zhangjiagang (pronounce Jong-Jeeyog-Gong….still working on it). I had a little breakdown yesterday, but things are looking up after I spent some time with the two other American English teachers who are here. This entire past week had been a crazy, fun, busy week, but it has also been filled with Americans and held in a crazy, fun, busy city and I knew that wouldn’t last. The high school (I am teaching 13-16 year olds) is located a couple of blocks outside the center of town and yesterday, on my walk to the grocery store to buy toilet paper alone, I was overwhelmed by the tiny shops lining the street that are more like caves then shops, just alcoves with signs above them and a garage type door that pulls down at the end of the day. The dusty beat up couches and dress models that they were selling made me believe that I was in deep China, away from civilization. I, however, am not. There are also a couple of other English speakers here, British people working for some program called English First that I haven’t yet met but hope to at Malone’s, the famed (thanks to Wikipedia) American style bar that Candice, one of the other two girls here, pointed out to me on our way to dinner last night.
I’m not completely anxiety-free yet though. My first classes start tomorrow and I have five-count-em-five periods to get through. Each one is only forty minutes so hopefully it won’t be too painful. I have twenty classes a week which totals sixteen hours. This is a lot more than the Chinese English teachers have to take on, but I think that they get paid less than we do. This past week during orientation there was some time devoted to teaching tips and we even had to do a practice lesson in front of everybody for twenty minutes. I sort of screwed mine up with a complicated game that was confusing everyone, but everyone said my diction was clear and free of extraneous language and idioms, which is what I was concentrating on so hard that I stopped making complete sense. We had two experienced teachers who started with CIEE and have stayed in China teaching as independents for several years help us out. I still don’t feel really prepared, but I figure it’s a sort of learn as you go process. The other two girls here actually were with CIEE last year and came back on their own and so I have been asking them questions and am glad to have them both as resources. One girl, Candice, actually worked here at the Foreign Language School. (sidenote: the flags that line the driveway from the gate to the parking lot say Forrign Language School) The other girl, Mary Beth, worked at another town that is an hour bus ride away where a bunch of other CIEE people were sent this year. The two of them know each other from College of Charleston which they graduated from in 2006.
I want to devote a little bit of time to decribing the lead-up to my breakdown. I didn’t sleep much on Friday night. A group of people went out to a club but I stayed back with some other people, got wine at a little convenience store by the hotel we were staying at in the Shanghai Jiaotong University campus, and hung out in the park. I got to bed late and woke up at 6:30 with my roommate, Emily--a girl I got along with really well, who was leaving at 7:30 to catch her flight to her town, Baoding, that is right by Beijing. I then proceeded to pace and wring my hands until I got picked up by a Chinese-American teacher named Ken (obviously his English name, all students when they are very young pick an English name that stays with them). His English was alright--there was still a lot of miscommunication between us--but he was pretty nice. He just moved here two weeks ago from way up North in a town close to Russia and he has never taught before so he wasn’t so great at answering the questions that I had. After the hour and 45 minute car ride from Shanghai we stopped to get some lunch. Chinese meals at restaurants all work the same way. Someone orders a ridiculous amount of food that the people at the table could never possibly finish and they are brought out in random spurts and put on a lazy susan which you pick from with your chopsticks and put onto a tiny plate or into a tiny bowl. As a guest I got to make some suggestions. I told him meat made my stomach upset because Chinese people don’t get not eating meat. I said I liked tofu and fish dishes. He ordered a tofu dish that was good along with fish FACE, pig ear strips, chicken claws, eggs with shredded boiled pork skin, and some delicious orange colored soup with mysterious and dense tan colored balls that I ate without questioning. I laughed to myself at the selection of foods and then abruptly stopped laughing when the driver of the car pulled off the left side of a fishes face, like the flat bone part where the eye is, and shoved it in his mouth. Oh yeah, they also ordered shrimp which they eat with the shell, eyeballs, and tail on. My teeth can’t freaking even grind through that. Their esophagi must be lined with steel.
Afterwards I got to my apartment which is nice. I have tall ceilings and dorm-like furniture: a double bed (!), a desk, a tv I doubt I will never watch, a nightstand, some built in shelves, and a huge cabinet/closet. The walls are full of like sticky stuff and tape from the crap other people put up in the past. I have my own bathroom which is a little gross. According to Candice, the guy who lived here before me was sort of gross and messy. The sheets on the bed smelled like Watermyn (the condemned co-op I lived in my senior year at Brown) but I bought new ones yesterday along with a phone! I am so glad Candice was there to help me out she speaks pretty good Chinese that she learned here last year. My number is 1377-628-8703.
I have so much to tell you, there is so much here that is new and exciting or strange to me and it is sometimes extremely overwhelming but I am also starting to feel some ownership already. What I mean by ownership is that feeling of familiarity with the culture. In Amsterdam that meant when I was riding my bike and hissing at tourists or when I would see something and think to myself “oh that it so quintessentially Dutch” and smile. It happened the other day when I left the hotel to buy a bottle of water and I was walking through the park and I heard the music and saw the little ladies who practice dancing with their fans every morning in the park alongside the old people practicing tai chi. On the other hand, there is also a lot of distance created by the way I, as an American and a Jew and a neurotic, express emotion compared to the Chinese. It seems difficult to truly connect and make friends with Chinese people, especially in this town where few people outside of the Chinese English teachers speak English. I am kind of hoping that through this experience I can learn a little bit from them about how to approach life and grow up and outside of myself. By that I mean to fill my mind not with the constant and consuming self-reflection but more with the workings of the outside world. That’s why I think I like traveling so much and that is why I am excited for the upcoming months even though there are times when I don’t think that I am strong enough to do this.
I took a million notes on the past week since I have been here and I have a lot to say but I think that this is enough for now. When i figure out how to post photos I will.
-Rachel
