AronWithOneA

Reno, one of the freshmen, playing at the English majors' speech contest a couple weeks ago. He stopped taking lessons after the only accordion teacher in Jishou got arthritis.

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He lives in the mall area, where he walks around in circles dragging kids around in a cart.

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It finally happened: Jishou has a KFC. Five of my students have jobs there. The interviews were apparently extremely competitive, and most of the girls who got hired already had some karaoke hall waiting experience. The training process seemed pretty intense, and required them to go to the nearest KFC (a two hour train ride away, in the next prefecture over) to apprentice for a weekend. I don't really understand why so many people want the job—the starting wage is 8.6 yuan an hour, which is about half what they can get for tutoring primary school students. At least two of them could easily get tutoring jobs, which must mean I'm missing something.

One of the students invited me to the opening party on Monday. I could only stay for half an hour, but the party involved speeches (from which I learned that China already has 2,560 KFC locations), free food, and dancing waitresses (barely visible behind the leftmost student below).



KFC's success has been explained to me as having a lot to do with young people wanting to date—in Chinese restaurants, people generally get up and leave as soon as the last bite of food is eaten, and it's uncommon to linger for conversation. But at KFC, a boy and a girl can order a soda with two straws and stare into each other's eyes for three hours. McDonalds tends to arrive after KFC, and goes more for the kids' birthday party market. (This is all cribbed almost word-for-word from a conversation I had with a PiA alum in Beijing.)



Above: happy cartoon stomachs on the KFC placemats. The white-on-red text says: "good habits for scientific eating."

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The Happy Traveler, our school's student English magazine, recently had an essay contest. I've copied the winning essay below. (The photo is from the essay contest awards ceremony. The author, Kiki, is second from left, in white.)


Tonight, while listening to a National English Speaking Competition I saw the words: “No one is born a winner or a loser.” Suddenly, I realized that I can use this sentence as my compositions topic.

I have been in the Normal College of Jishou University for about one year. I took part in so many competitions, but unfortunately, I failed every one, not only in our college, but also in our class.

Another thing that deeply touched me was: today, I interviewed for a job at KFC. While I writing my composition, I don't know the KFC manager's decision, whether to hire me or not. Frankly speaking, in my opinion, I think I failed this time. That doesn't mean I'm not confident. The reason is that I didn't prepare for the interview. The manager asked me: “Do you have some questions to ask me?” Waiting a short time, I smiled at him and said: “I am sorry. I have not thought it out, yet.”

When I got back to the dormitory, I told the experience to my roommates. Anna said: “Once I read a book, it said: “If you don't ask the manager a question that says you don't care about this job.” Then I recognized maybe I had failed.

But now, I read the words: “No one is born a winner or a loser.” I have a lot of feelings. I think even though, I have failed so many times, I can gain so much experience form all these things. Just as saying goes: “Failure is the mother of success.” I think in the future, I will not lose my courage, I will be more confident. Even though, I have failed so many times. I will overcome all my difficulties one day.

So, next time you will see a completely new me. I will try my best to reach my goals, and will never give up.

I believe firmly that I am not always a loser. I will become a winner.

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A lot of my sophomores are going to Changsha this weekend to take the College English Test or CET. It's an optional English assessment that they can only take once and goes on their resume as proof of English ability. They say it's essential for finding jobs that require English skills.

I found a flyer while I was on break from class, posted right across from the department office. It wasn't clear to me at first glance what it was, so I took it into my freshman class and asked them about it. They thought it was really funny that I'd noticed it, and said it was an ad for a test-cheating service: apparently there are people with connections to the testing system who can give you a copy of the answers beforehand. Another girl told me that the price was probably around 300 yuan. When I asked the sophomores about it, they clammed up and asked me to change the subject. (I doubt they're cheating, if only because 300 yuan is a lot of money for them, but maybe they thought I was accusing them. Dunno.)

Anyway, here's the flyer:

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...in panorama. Click to enlarge. Taken from Lover's Peak, 30 minutes' hike from the college. The college is barely visible about 5/8 of the way across from the left, a big brick red building poking up from the hill.

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I realize I sort of stopped posting in December after my apartment was broken into and my laptop stolen. I've been using a desktop with a CRT monitor since then, which means that sitting in front of the computer for hours is much less enjoyable than it used to be, which I think is mostly a good thing. Anyway, I'll try to start posting again, hopefully the habit will stick.

After several months of reading James Gurney's blog, I've started trying to sketch regularly. The following images are: a statue of Luo Shengjiao, a distinguished alumnus of our school who threw himself into a freezing river to save a drowning girl and died in the process; a stone lion, one of a whole zoo of animals carved out of living rock on Huaguo Mountain behind the school.

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Had a Hanukkah party over the weekend. All four of the other Jishou Americans came over, as well as a German, Bjorn, who comes to Jishou on weekends to teach language classes. I assume Bjorn hadn't really heard of the holiday before and read the basic facts off Wikipedia right before he came, because as soon as he walked in the door he handed me a big bag of white candles. We made some pretty good latkes and played Mahjong till midnight.

Speaking of Jews in China, I bought these books last week after hearing about them at English Corner from a senior at the college.




What really grabbed my attention was the following passage in the preface of The Complete Book of Jewish Wisdom (which is a better translation of the title of the first book above):

The Jews are extraordinarily intelligent, and depend on their cleverness
and talent to invigorate to every field of activity in the world. Among the most prominent are Heine, Beethoven, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Chaplin, Picasso, and so on.

I've decided that I want to try and translate this book. I'll work on it a little bit every day and post the translation in sections. It should be good Chinese practice, and if nothing else, it'll get me to blog more regularly.

Labels: china, jews in china, jishou

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I went to my first meeting of the Student Art Association last week, where I spent an hour and a half drawing a still life setup with the sketching section of the class. The focus of the composition was a broken bust of Gorky, the identity of which I wouldn't have known except that a couple of the students mentioned it. The Chinese seem to like Gorky a lot: his portrait hangs in two of my classrooms alongside those of Marx and Lenin, and I remember a Chinese teacher quoting him in class during the summer Chinese course I took last year. Whatever else can be said about him, his mustache is pretty impressive.


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Some students took me on a hike last weekend in the hills behind the school. It was great. First we walked up one hill with a spring at the peak where a lot of people get their drinking water. We passed three hills covered in tombs (Chinese custom apparently dictates that people be buried on mountains) on our way down to a tangerine grove, where we bought some fruit. You could see into the next valley over, which seemed to be mostly farmland. I took these pictures of Jishou from near where the spring was. My school would be somewhere near the lower left of the picture.


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Season 3, Episode 8 from my bootlegged set of Arrested Development DVDs gave me one more reason not to bring the show into class:

The actual dialogue (GOB speaking): I'm dating this Christian girl right now. She wants me to be honest and reconnect with my son, and I'm trying to get her to renounce God and **** me.

What the Chinese subtitles say (translated back into English): I'm having some problems with my girlfriend. She wants me to become a better person and to reconnect with my son, and I want to help her become a better girl.



Devotees (Andy) will also appreciate that "hot ham water" is translated as "hot ham soup," effectively killing another pretty good joke.

Labels: arrested development, art, china, jishou

Posted by Aron at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments

Just finished a trip to Chongqing and the Three Gorges Dam during the week long National Day holiday, and I'm back to teaching. I've noticed before that a lot of Chinese people seem to have trouble with "much" vs. "many," so I did a lesson with my freshmen on count and non-count nouns. A chalkboard illustration:


The diagrams above represent:

1. A little chicken
   
2. A little chicken
   
3. A few chickens
   
4. A lot of chicken
   
5. A lot of chickens

Chinese actually has a much easier distinction between count and non-count nouns than English has: every noun is understood to be a mass noun unless you specify otherwise. This gets rid of some of the arbitrariness (since you don't have to memorize the class of noun to which a given word belongs) but adds some new arbitrariness (since there are dozens of different "unit" words that you use to distinguish count from non-count nouns, and while there are some rules as to how to use them (i.e. there's one count word for big things with a stable base, one for long skinny things, and so on), there's still a lot of memorization involved). Given what seems like it'd be a pretty intuitive distinction, it's not clear to me why Chinese people would have trouble with "many" vs. "much," but I've heard the mistake often enough that it seemed like it'd be worth going over in class.

Labels: china, jishou, school

Posted by Aron at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments

Dan and I both did lessons on gay marriage this week (or rather, Dan came over to discuss a lesson he was planning for his third-years on gay marriage, and I borrowed it for my sophomores). Getting the class to talk can be hard: if the students ever get the feeling that the foreign teacher is asking them to comment on something they recognize as controversial, they clam up pretty fast. So the major appeal of gay marriage as a discussion topic was that it was interesting, politically relevant, and comfortably distant from China.

I spent the first hour of class lecturing and introducing vocab ("liberal" and "conservative" were new words for them). The students really like seeing pictures, and really like hearing about my personal experience; so when I was explaining the legalization issues in California, I showed them some pictures of the San Francisco City Hall, and told them about driving to the Asian Art Museum with my family and seeing a line of hundreds of couples stretching around the whole block. When I asked for questions, one girl raised her hand and asked, if California had a law banning gay marriage, how was the mayor of San Francisco able to declare it legal? which seemed like a good question as far as comprehension. It seemed to go over pretty well, overall. During the second hour of class, I had them do a "debate": I assigned half of the class to argue that gay marriage should be legal in America, and the other half to argue that it should be illegal. I gave them fifteen minutes to prepare arguments, and then had students come one at a time to the podium at the front of class to speak for two minutes or so, alternating "for" and "against." Something surprising came out of this. I'd taken a seat at the back of the classroom and told them that they had to speak clearly enough for me to be able to hear. The result of this was that because I wasn't at the front of the class moderating, the students got a lot more confident -- students started to ask questions of whoever was behind the podium about points he or she had raised, and the speaker would answer them. Seeing them discuss without any prompting was great, and while it isn't something I can take any credit for -- the fact that they were able to do that must reflect some previous experience with classroom debates -- it was good to know that I'd hit on a topic and format that they could get enthusiastic about.

My students are, perhaps predictably, pretty conservative on the topic of gay marriage: several of the students I'd assigned to the "for" side complained to me that they didn't think it was true, so they couldn't come up with any reasons. During the debate itself, they came up with a lot of the same talking points that you'd expect Americans to bring up: on the "for" side, there was a lot of legal equality for all and love can't be legislated; on the "against" side, a lot of arguments from tradition, it's bad for the children, and such. Another popular argument against was that it was a selfish thing to do, and that potential gay couples should think about how sad it would make their parents and friends. I don't think I'd ever heard this before, and it struck me as particularly Chinese.

Because most of the English I speak is to students with limited English ability, I'm starting to pick up some new speech habits, like shouting, overenunciating, and hypersensitivity to whether I've missed some crucial bit of background information. These habits have been seeping into otherwise ordinary conversations: with Dan over lunch, for instance, or on the phone with my parents. I expect that by the time I come back to America, the habit will be pretty much ingrained, and I'll be pretty annoying to talk to for a couple weeks.

Labels: jishou, school, teaching

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Jishou Teacher's College is sort of a bottom-tier institution: most of the students come from Hunanese farming families, and ended up here because they couldn't get in anyplace else and because teaching is a lot better than farming. The Teacher's College is a branch/ugly little brother of the much larger Jishou University, whose main campus is on the other end of town. (The main difference between the two is that the College grants three-year degrees that are basically pre-professional, while the University grants four-year academic degrees.)

The Friday before the freshmen began classes (which, since there is a period of mandatory basic military training for all incoming freshmen, was about three weeks into the regular semester), I was called into the Teaching Affairs Office to help interview transfers into the English major. There were incoming freshmen who had been accepted into the college in some department other than English and now wanted to transfer into the English major. English is the most popular major at the school -- the assumption is that a student's career prospects are going to be a lot better coming out of a teacher's college with a degree in English than in, say, in Primary Education (most of my students say they want to work for a foreign company after graduating). There were about fifteen applicants and six open spots, and the interview consisted of me and two Chinese members of the faculty asking simple questions in English (like, Why do you want to study English? or Can you tell us about your hometown?). The students were for the most part so nervous they could hardly talk -- partly because I don't think they were expecting to see a foreign teacher, partly because one of the Chinese teachers was pretty aggressive in asking questions, and partly because the interview was going to decide a lot about their future. It made me a little uncomfortable to know that I was responsible for an interview, and also to know that the decision was being made based on questions that were often less than perfectly grammatical. But in the end, there were six candidates who were much better than the rest, so now they're my students.

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One of my classrooms. Each grade within the English major is divided into several sections, each of which takes all its classes together. The schedule is structured such that a class is always in the same room, and the teachers come and go each period. All my classrooms have the teacher standing on a raised platform at the front. Several of my classrooms are decorated with posters of famous Communists with inspirational quotes in Chinese ("Fewer pretty words, more plain deeds!" -Lenin). When Dan moved into his apartment, there was a giant poster of Stalin on the wall of his living room. There were foreign teachers living in the apartment before Dan arrived, so this was probably China-kitsch rather than genuine decoration, but even so it was hard to keep a straight face when the College people were showing us around.

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Some figures, anecdotal.

Tuition, Jishou Teacher's College: 2225 RMB/semester

Standard teacher's salaries, urban:

• Primary: 800-1000 RMB/month
• Secondary: approx. 1200 RMB/month
• College instructor: approx. 2000 RMB/month
• College professor or specialist: 3000-4000 RMB/month

Standard teacher's salaries, rural:

• Primary: 400-500 RMB/month
• Secondary: 700-800 RMB/month

(One dollar is around 7.5 RMB.)

Labels: china, jishou, school

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We had a couple days off due to the upcoming festival, so I went to Guangzhou to visit Thomas and David, the Princeton in Asia teachers there. It was fun. Thomas and I get along well, which probably owes a lot to the fact that we both lived in the sixties-holdover co-ops at our respective big public schools (he went to Michigan, which has a co-op system a lot like Berkeley's), and the similarities in disposition that implies. Some photos:


What I found most striking about Guangzhou as a landscape was that banyan trees are everywhere. The younger ones are indistinguishable from any other kind of ficus tree except for the mass of reddish stringy roots that hangs below the foliage (this is usually kept trimmed somewhere above head level). Some that we saw must have been a hundred years old or more (the most impressive that we saw were on Shamian Island, which is the sandspit where the French and English colonial headquarters used to be) and had two or three trunks enmeshed in twisting roots. This picture is from Yuexiu Park, which occupies a big part of the north of the city. The tree is growing over a piece of the old city wall that runs through the park.


This sign was over every urinal in Yuexiu Park. The translation would run something like: "One small step closer to the urinal is one huge step towards being civilized." (Note: I know I'm kind of invoking it here, but "Oh, those Chinese and their funny ways" is a trope I actually kind of hate.)


We went to a big wholesale market in serch of Christmas lights for our respective apartments and finally found them at a Christmas supplies vendor.


We went to IKEA. Thomas bought Swedish meatballs and a picture frame. I bought coffee and a bedspread cover (the one that came with the apartment furnishings is an autumn leaf pattern that at first glance suggests someone having bled all over the surface of the bed) and some desk lamps. This guy was hanging out in the living room display section. It seemed photo-worthy. (Note: "East meets West" is another trope I actually kind of hate.)

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Brought my Collected Nonfiction of Joan Didion for reading on the train and plane. Finished The White Album and Salvador. Fact: Joan Didion's first Berkeley residence (the Tri-Delt sorority) is right across Warring Street from my last Berkeley residence (Castro co-op). There was some plot among the co-opers at some point to steal one of the big deltas that formed the sign on their house, this made me feel a little guilty in retrospect.

Labels: china, guangzhou, photos, pia

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During the couple days Dan and I had had to kill in Guangzhou, we went to the art museum there. The museum has a permanent exhibit devoted to a cartoonist named Liao Bingxiong, whose career encompassed WWII, the Liberation, and the Cultural Revolution. The work was amazing, I found a couple images online:


This painting is from 1957. The left column of text reads: "Flowers must all point upwards. The sun is only permitted to rise. Pictures of people must be smiling. These are the three clear admonitions for artists."



Titled "Self-mockery," painted in 1979, three years after the Cultural Revolution ended. This seems to be the iconic Liao Bingxiong image: it had a wall to itself in the gallery, and was the most reproduced on the web of all his work. Liao: "What evil was it that imprisoned good people, stuffed them into jars to become deformed? Why, when the jars imprisoning them were broken, were they still curled up, immobile, struck dumb with fear? This painting is me and you and countless others. How is it that thirty years after we all hailed a nation finally risen to its feet, a people taking their stand at last -- how is it that we still can't stand up?" (Note: not a very rigorous translation.)

If these pieces seem grim and devoid of much hope, I'd say that pretty much sums up the exhibit. What may not come through in these samples is that the work was on the whole very funny. One particularly bright spot was a set of about twenty small paintings labeled as set designs. They seemed to be gouache, and were painted in a way that reminded me of old animation backgrounds.


The art museum itself was sort of a strange place: three floors, 20,000 square meters, a huge number of individual galleries and exhibits, and no visitors besides us in the whole place on a Sunday afternoon. Some other people finally showed up around four or five, including a kid cruising down the marble floor on roller skates.

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Postscript to the last entry: I'm pretty sure that I had this picture somewhere in the back of my mind while I was painting the self-portrait in the last post. This is William Holman-Hunt's portrait of a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Labels: art, cartooning, china, guangzhou, illustration

Posted by Aron at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

I'm finishing up preparations for my first day of class, but thought I'd put this up since I've been bad about posting lately. It's been raining pretty steadily over the last couple days, so I decided to try to learn how to use the set of gouache paints I bought at the Art Museum in Guangzhou. Since I couldn't go outside to sketch and apparently have deeply narcissistic tendencies, I decided to try a self-portrait.


So far, gouache seems to allow me better than any other medium to express my obsessive attention to detail, which is both good and bad. I should learn how to do this sort of sketch faster; I should also break out the other colors at some point. Also, if the picture quality isn't so great, it's because the image is a digital photo, not a scan. I'm still considering this as "in progress" at this point (see: hair, ears, anything below the chin), although I doubt I'll work on it much more now that school has started and the rain has stopped.

Labels: art, gouache, jishou, self-portrait

Posted by Aron at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments

Haven't been posting much lately, but here's a shot from a project I've been working on for BCM. Done in Flash, intended for animation.
Getting close to my departure. I'm going to try and get in the habit of posting more regularly, especially once I get to China.

Labels: animation, art, flash, illustration

Posted by Aron at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

The theme for the end-of-semester banquet at my co-op was "Bilbo's Eleventy-First Birthday." I went as Bilbo Baggins, and made what I consider to be some fairly successful (if somewhat pubic) hobbit-feet. The fur is twine, unwound into its component threads and painted brown, and attached to my feet with liquid latex (same material I used for the Halloween costume, which is the second picture below).

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Illustration for the Daily Cal review of the Massive Attack/DJ Shadow concert Friday night. The nonsensicality comes with the deadline, I guess.

Posted by Aron at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments

It's thunderstorming outside, and I'm sitting at my desk listening to NPR and drinking hot chocolate. Making hot chocolate was actually kind of an endeavor, requiring me to mix a bar of hazelnut chocolate with boiling water and powdered milk. The resulting concoction is rich and sweet, very good once I fished the hazelnuts out.

As the thunderstorm hit, I was engaged in what has become my favorite after-class activity, namely riding around on the bike I bought on Tuesday. It's a fairly sturdy mountain bike with a fresh coat of silver paint, which I assume means it was either ugly or stolen before being resold. Despite the stories (all true) you've probably heard about Chinese drivers and traffic, bicycling seems fairly safe: every street has a pretty broad bike lane; and even though cars, cyclists, and pedestrians all tend to disregard traffic lights when they can, nobody's going very fast. My bike is a one-speed, but that's okay since the entire city of Beijing is totally flat.

Tomorrow will be my sixth day of class, which means that my program is about 25% finished. I got my final class placement two days ago: I'm in the fourth level (where the first is designed for students with no exposure to Chinese and the sixth is for fluent speakers), which is hard enough that I can't actually keep up without doing a couple hours of preparation every night. It seems like a good course, though, especially the reading and writing portion: the each chapter of the textbook consists of four articles from different newspapers about the same event. Formal writing is the biggest gap in my knowledge, so I'm hoping this will help some.

My dorm situation is pretty comfortable: in addition to a bed and a desk, my room now has two clotheslines running across it; a bowl for washing fruit; teacups and four kinds of tea as well as instant coffee; and a pair of the kind of black cloth slippers that old Chinese men wear. My roommate is a National Guard accountant who's getting married two weeks after the program ends. I forgot his name within a couple minutes of meeting him, but that's not really the sort of thing you can ask again after living in the same room for five days, so I had to resort to some small-scale espionage and obtain the information from a classmate of his (it's Daniel, which is now the name of fully 50% of the roommates I've had, and 75% if you count middle names).

This isn't a particularly meaty entry, but now that I've settled into Beijing I'll hopefully have some more interesting things to report. For now, here are some pictures from a class trip to the Great Wall last weekend. The pictures you've probably seen are of the restored portions of the Wall; however, at the particular place we visited, you could walk past and see an unrestored section, which was a caved-in ruin with a forest growing on top. Pretty, though.

Posted by Aron at 4:39 AM | Permalink | Comments

in Beijing yesterday morning on the 6:30 train from Xi'an. My dorm is a caricature of a seedy motel from the 60s or so, complete with mothball smell and mysterious stains on the bedspread, but it has a real bathtub, a view into a garden, and its own internet connection, which is really more than I could have asked for. I'm posting some photos from Xi'an. I imagine I'll work through the photographic backlog eventually, but these are the most recent.

This is Jenny. Her English is great, and she's generally a joy to talk to. She's the girl I was talking to about Pearls Before Swine/Zithers Before Cattle.


This is Shaojie, with whom I biked around the city walls (see the last post). He was vaguely connected to Jenny through a German exchange student named Torben who was studying at her university, and I spent a couple evenings hanging out with the three of them (all of us speaking Mandarin, of course). Torben's an interesting guy too: he's even more serious about his Chinese handwriting than I am (his looks like xingshu, a slightly abstract calligraphic style). I remember one time in particular: several of us were hanging around the hostel and I was writing the ancient zhuanshu style character for "country" as part of a disagreement with Liu Yang over its stroke order. When Torben saw me writing, his face lit up and he slammed a zhuanshu dictionary that he'd just bought down on the table, which struck me as the sort of thing I could only have seen myself doing (my second year Chinese teacher has a zhuanshu dictionary, which I visit her to consult a couple times a semester when I need it for art projects; I've been looking for one in the US for a year and a half, with no success).


These are the folks from the Qi Xian Hostel that I got to be pretty good friends with. From left: Xiao Xiang, who took me to the Drum Tower and the Muslim Quarter the first day; Jenny, see above; Xiao Wang, who was reading The Little Prince anthologized in one of his textbooks; Xiao Song, who laughed a lot and would shout "I'll beat you!" whenever I teased her, which was therefore frequently; and Liu Yang, who was really serious about English and made me drill him on the difference between "sculpture" and "statue" when something related came up in conversation once.

This is some sculpted calligraphy from the Great Mosque in the Muslim Quarter. I think it's a Ming Dynasty building, and is an interesting mix of styles: picture a minaret tower with a sloping Chinese roof.


This is my token tourist photo from the Terra Cotta Warriors site. I wasn't expecting to be impressed, but I was: one thing that's not obvious till you're there it's probably 20% excavated, if that, meaning that the museum was actually built up around an active archaeological site.

Oh, let me know if the photos come out funny or something. Since this blog (but not the posting page!) is censored in China, I haven't actually seen it in a couple weeks.

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