Chris In China

Warning: Strolling along the streets of Baoding often can be a stomach-churning activity.
A human can endure a great deal of sensory assault, but the constant barrage of repulsive smells, gooey substances, constant noise and thick layers of dust that turn green trees gray can be too much to bear. I try to ignore the depressing bushes and blaring car horns, but slipping on a slimy, sloppy mixture of phlegm and swill makes me sick.
This city is like many Chinese cities. During the average day, hundreds of thousands of people roam the streets breathing in the equivalent of more than three packs of cigarettes worth of bad air. Most of the pollution comes from coal-dust and car fumes. Sidewalk restaurant stoves are heated with coal, as are homes, and basic fuel emission standards do not exist.

The exhaust from these energy consumers combines with the dusty loess in the air and gets into everybody’s sinuses, throats and lungs. Many people wear doctor’s masks to protect themselves from the larger particles, but many more people do not. For them, the big particles gather in the back of throats, clogging up the airways.
An everyday walk along the street unexpectedly erupts into a lesson in hawking a loogie when a nearby man or woman decides to purge the particles. First, he or she empties their sinuses into the back of the throat with a quick, beefy inhale through the nose. Then, in a loud throat-clearing fashion, the person combines the sinus-muck with the dusty saliva. Next, the individual pushes the mixture into a puddle on his or her tongue and, with great force, blasts it through a round opening between the lips, creating a liquid projectile as it exits the mouth. It sounds something like: “Hwaaarkk! Pthooo! Thud.” The “thud” means the expectorator delivered a successful piece of discharge to the sidewalk. It’s up to me to remember to avoid stepping in the perpetrator’s accomplishment.
Avoiding these splotches of saliva on the ground while walking Baoding streets is like playing a hybrid game of Frogger and Minesweeper.
Pedestrians are not the only people using the sidewalks to deposit waste. Instead of using diapers, mothers and fathers let their infants and toddlers do their business in the bushes that flank the sidewalks through slits cut into the bottoms of the child’s trousers. Nearly everyone litters plastic wrappers, which contain everything from eggs to single serving socks. And, it is acceptable for restaurant owners to sweep cigarette butts and other trash out the door and dump used kitchen water onto the sidewalks. Even the owners of outdoor eateries simply dump their dregs into clogged sewer drains, resulting in a slippery mess of rancid meat bits and rotten vegetables, the smell of which beckons flies to come and feast.
I have not had the unfortunate experience of slipping and falling into one of these piles of refuse, but I know splashing around in it on a hot summer day would be very unpleasant.
Don’t get the wrong idea. All of China is not like this. It is not like people are walking around spitting (or worse) everywhere at all times, and many restaurants refrain from dumping onto the street. However, this type of behavior can be seen anywhere and has gone on for a very long time, making the habits difficult to break.
Despite this, things have changed, according to reports. The government has pushed and continues to push social reforms to eliminate these bad habits, along with a few others.
As a response to the outbreak of SARS in 2003, the government placed a ban on public spitting. That ban was not rigorously enforced as a sanitary measure, but it was renewed this year as part of the effort to clean up the streets and China’s image to the outside world in the lead up to next years’ Olympics.
The task of curbing public spitting, punishing those who litter and encouraging organized lines (most queues in China are a chaotic mass of people pushing and cutting in front of each other) has fallen to the Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the official etiquette watchdog.
Changing the minds of reluctant citizens is not easy. But the public information campaign meant to make citizens aware of the new rules and to gain their support has been rigorous. It tells citizens, in polite yet forceful language, to stop doing things they have done for hundreds of years — public spitting, littering, cursing and cutting in line — for the sake of the international public’s perception of Beijing. The campaign has even initiated a “voluntary stand in line day” every 11th day of each month (the number 11 represents two straight and orderly lines).
While the scheme seems to be working in Beijing and Hong Kong, where fines for those caught spitting can reach $130 (in U.S. dollars), and lines seem to be more civilized, the plans do not seem to have had any effect on the innumerable cities like Baoding, where there is more poverty and working-class citizens. The people are set in their ways, and it is hard to enforce change when even the police, who are meant to do the enforcing, can be seen blowing snot-rockets themselves.
Even with the vast pace of change to economy and infrastructure that is taking place in China, some things seem like they will never change. Only when littering and spitting becomes taboo will those changes take place, which seems a distant accomplishment.
In the meantime, I don’t mind. I have grown accustomed to cleaning my shoes everyday and suppressing the desire to vomit. By the time I go back home, I’ll have the stomach of a goat.

Chris Gauthier is a recent Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts graduate who is spending a year in China teaching English at Hebei University. He will be writing regular columns for The Advocate during his stay in China. To read all of his Advocate columns, visit blogtheberkshires.com. Readers can also read more about his experiences on his own blog at chrisinchina.wordpress.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 4:37 PM | Permalink

It should not come as a surprise that I have found teaching a foreign language and learning a foreign language very difficult. People say learning through immersion is the most effective way to become fluent, which is probably true, but it still involves a lot of studying and hard work.
Sometimes I wish learning by immersion meant learning by osmosis.

My main reason for being here is not to learn Mandarin Chinese. It is one of my reasons, but primarily, I am here to teach Chinese students how to speak and write English more proficiently. With this in mind, I’d like to reveal a few observations that I’ve made with regard to the difficulties, differences and similarities that have arisen.
To begin with, these students’ English ability far surpasses my Chinese; the main reason is the amount of time they have devoted to learning a foreign language. Officially, all schools are now required to begin teaching the language when students reach the third grade, but in some schools, students can begin learning English in kindergarten.
There are many immersion schools in America, but foreign language as required by the government is unheard of. What the government does require under current policy (No Child Left Behind) forces teachers to decipher cryptic state-issued lesson plans with unrealistic and opaque objectives. They need a translator to teach English.
When I walk into the classroom, I do not have to worry about translating the lesson into Chinese: half of their learning experience is being immersed in the speech of a native English speaker. I can teach like any college-level English teacher would back home, using formal words and elevated speech in a way that makes my points more precise. Often I have to repeat or define some unfamiliar words, but I can always do it in English, and usually, the majority of the class understands in less than a moment.
Although my Chinese language class was, in the same way, taught by immersion, I had nobody there to hold my hand. From the very first class, billed as “A First class in Chinese for beginners,” I was lost amidst “ni haos,” “xie xies” and a flurry of “wo shis” — all without English translation — making my head spin and saturating it with the seemingly insane repetition of indistinguishable new sounds. I felt like saying, “If I didn’t get it the first time, I certainly won’t get it the 40th time, either.”
Our teachers taught using Chinese characters and Pinyin but only spoke Chinese and only spoke at one pace: fast. It served as a valuable lesson, because the pace and constant Chinese forced me to take on the challenge of learning the language with a more diligent approach.
Pinyin was developed in the 1950s under Chairman Mao. Mao envisioned it as a system give Chinese words a Romanized spelling so it would help foreigners with the sounds of Chinese language. But it hardly makes things easy. One word can have many meanings, and each word can have up to five different tones associated with it. Western languages are structured and spoken in a completely different way.
But my students cannot get enough of my attempts to throw in a Chinese word or two into my lectures, and whenever I give them praise in Chinese by saying, “right” or “very good,” they giggle with delight. I take that as encouragement and give them the same. From my (American) perspective, they deserve it.
Education the Chinese way typically involves excessive repetition followed by admonishment for mistakes and no praise for success. I have learned this by observing other classes and reading about the Chinese education system. Students are expected to know the correct answer, regardless of how it was reached. This is very different from the American style, where a student’s ego is constantly stroked and report cards track the student’s effort. You would never hear a Chinese teacher saying, “Nice try!” when a student got it wrong.
This fundamental difference in style between American teachers and Chinese teachers highlights a significant difference in the psychology of teaching between the two nations. It is true, both countries have an inherent entrepreneurial spirit, and both value hard work. But Americans are quick to praise, believing positive reinforcement garners positive results; whereas the Chinese are quick to rebuke, believing negative reinforcement is the most effective way to get the right answer.
Much to my dismay, this emphasis on being correct leads to constant cheating on quizzes and compositions. On the first day of class for each of my four classes (with whom I only meet once a week, each), the head of the English department came into the classroom to discuss plagiarism with the students. But because she said it in Chinese, I can only assume she told them how the West views this offense, and that the students should be on guard against it. Although I have yet to notice any flagrant violations, it is evident that some students take the easier path to success than others.
I cannot put the fault entirely on them. In reality, the system and society has taught them, over many generations, that there is nothing wrong with cheating, as long as the answer is correct. In fact, a student does not even have to be taking the examination in order to pass. There are students willing to take tests for them, charging anywhere between $50 and $3,000 to take English finals, nursing certifications and even college entrance examinations. To them, there is nothing wrong with skipping the studying and hard work.
When I asked a friend of mine who does this often about what happens if she gets caught, she said, “I took a test in human resource management on Saturday. I got caught and they told me to leave.”
“What happened to the person you were taking the test for?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “She paid me half, and I’m taking the test for her again in a month.”
It’s almost too simple and pragmatic for me to comprehend.
But learning to understand the Chinese way is the biggest difficulty of them all.

Chris Gauthier is a recent Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts graduate who is spending a year in China teaching English at Hebei University. He will be writing regular columns for The Advocate during his stay in China. To read all of his Advocate columns, visit blogtheberkshires.com. Readers can also read more about his experiences on his own blog at chrisinchina.wordpress.com.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 1:39 PM | Permalink