An English Teacher in China: October 2014

Mr. Tian and I at the State Hotel

October 1st is China's National Day, the day the country celebrates its founding. This year the school has generously given its teachers and students 13 days off to celebrate the holiday. Normally the holiday is split with one week for the mid-autumn festival and one week for National Day. However, this year they decided not to take off for the mid-autumn festival and instead they added both weeks together to the National day holiday. Most of my students have decided to take this time to travel home so the school is mostly empty. I decided that I too would travel and visit with some old friends. Originally, I had planned to go to Shanghai but that didn’t work out with one of my friends. So, I’ve spent most of the holiday in Langfang practicing my English and playing with friends. However, I did make a few small journeys.

My first journey was not for pleasure but, rather, for business. This year, I was informed that I was being nominated for the Outstanding Foreign Experts of Hebei award. I was told that all foreign workers in the Hebei province were eligible and not just teachers. This meant that engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and anyone who has Foreign Expert status is eligible. I was told that I was competing against 2000 other candidates so I figured I wouldn’t win. But, being nominated was honorable enough for me. However, I was informed right before the holiday that I had won the award. Out of the 2000 foreign experts, 20 were selected to receive the award. Only 8 out of those 20 were educators and my name was among the 8. So my boss, Mr. Tian, and I travelled to the province’s capital to accept the award. The capital of Hebei is Shijiazhuang (Chinese: 石家庄; Pinyin: Shíjiāzhuāng), which is nearly impossible for me to pronounce properly. To give a feeling of the scope of the event: Hebei has over 71,854,000 people and Shijiazhuang has over 10,163,700 people. So this is a pretty big event. There were photographers, media, and a whole host of government officials. Mr. Tian and I were invited to the State Hotel, a five star hotel, where we were given three meals and a room for the night. We would meet the following morning with the leaders of the province, including the secretary for foreign affairs. We arrived on Friday night and were fed in the hotel’s restaurant. At 10:00 am the next morning we were to meet in the state’s main meeting hall for the ceremony. Each of the selected foreign experts were to give a three minute speech followed by their selected interpreter giving the Chinese translation. Mr. Tian served as my translator. The meeting went well and each of us were personally thanked by the secretary for foreign affairs. It was an amazing experience. However, there was one bad part. The hotel used smart technology to sense the location of guests in the hotel room. This means that special sensors were setup to turn lights off and on based on your location and movement. However, there was a slight malfunction with this system. In the middle of the night all of the system shutdown. I was left in the dark with no way to turn the lights on. I went to the door and tried to get the electricity to turn on again in my room. Nothing worked. Finally, I had the idea to step outside of the room and re-enter the room using my key. In retrospective, this was not the best of ideas. If my key didn’t work then I would have been stuck outside of my hotel room in just my sleeping pants. Nevertheless, the trick worked and the room’s electricity came back on when I reentered the room. I was rather annoyed by this as it was 2:00 am in the morning I just wanted to A/C to be on while I slept. Apparently, I don’t toss and turn enough during the night to keep the sensors on.

My second journey to Shijiazhuang was not so official. Instead, I was invited down to spend the weekend with one of my old friends. Sunny, my friend, was a student at Langfang Teachers College who often came to the English Nights in my apartment. She was never my student but we were still good friends. Sunny graduated this past year and is now working on her master’s degree in Shijiazhuang. Sunny only had three days off for the holiday so I decided to visit her and her family during those three days. I went there by train and it takes about 4-5 hours to get from Langfang to Shijiazhuang by train or by bus. The bus is the direct route. The trains, however, have to go north to Beijing and then south to Shijiazhuang. Both end up being the same time. I prefer traveling by train because you can get a bed to lay down on and a bathroom to use. It’s a little bit more expensive for a train ticket but it’s a much nicer way to travel. Sunny's family lives out in the countryside so it took an hour-and-a-half by public bus to get to her hometown from the city's train station. Her hometown was literally the last stop on the bus line. We bumped along down dirty roads and bounced over potholes. When I say that her family lives in the countryside, it is very close to being third-world out there. It is a large farming area where most of the crops are planted and picked by hand. You can see a legion of people out working the corn fields from morning to night. Sunny's hometown is a very small village. I was the first foreigner to ever visit this village and all the locals came by her family's home to get a look at me. Sunny's family was very nice. None of them could speak English, but still they were very hospitable. Their home is built in the traditional Chinese style with an outer wall, inner courtyard, and separate buildings for each room. There is a separate building for the kitchen, the living area, and sleeping areas. However, their house is missing a bathroom. Instead, you have to go outside the outer wall to a public outhouse with a concrete slab over an open pit. A bit barbaric but nothing I haven't seen before. The family fed me very well with some excellent home cooked and locally grown food. We had hotpot, dumplings and I even got to cook an enormous fish for the family. They wanted to have one American style dish so I fried fish fillets in apples and honey. Everyone loved it and they all wanted to cook it themselves. Sunny's older sister had a new baby girl and she was just lovely. I would play guitar and sing for her and she would laugh and smile at me as she watched me play. I finally said goodbye to the family as Sunny and I traveled back to Shijiazhuang. Sunny would go back to her school and I would go off to the train station. Sunny told me as I was leaving that she loves her home but she would rather live in the modern comforts of the city than out in the countryside. I agreed with her.

My last story for today’s blog actually takes place in Langfang. My good friend, Renee, recently invited Janakie and me to experience a tea ceremony. I’ve experienced one before but Janakie has not. So it was a great new experience for her. Renee's good friend owns her own tea shop and we went there one afternoon for a private ceremony. We were greeted by the host, sat down at a special table, and the ceremony began. Our tea server showed us the various tools and how they are used. We were given several tea samples to taste including oolong and a sweet black tea. My favorite was the black tea. The owner of the shop also bought us some cookies from the bakery next door, although, that’s not normally part of the ceremony. Our ceremony was a bit informal. We sat around the tea table talking and laughing the whole afternoon. Janakie was asking many question about the tea tools. Both Renee and I acted as translators between the tea server and Janakie. At last, I ended up turning into the teacher as I was helping the tea server say some simple sentences in English. Then, in the evening, we went to Renee’s home where her husband cooked a wonderful dinner for us. It was a very good day.