Teaching English

Teaching English is not what I am supposed to do here, except for introducing new words associated with Strategy, Organizational Behavior or Leadership to kids who might not know the technical meaning of a word like ”Vision” or “Socialization” or “Charisma” as applied to those academic areas.  Nevertheless the greatest, almost universal demand here among young people, say up to thirty years old or so, is to speak English. 

 If word gets out that you are a native English speaker here in China, ninety-eight percent of the people you meet, however you meet them, will ask you if you will help them learn English.

More correctly it is “to speak English,” not to learn English.  Learning English is a major past-time here, bookstores are overflowing in a variety of English learning books, DVDs and reference material including years of BBC, CNN and other English language media materials.  On any street of appreciable length, there will be a couple of commercial storefronts purporting to teach English - most always have people in their lobbies.  Between primary and high school, kids get about six years of English, much of which I gather from talking to people is memorizing a lot of big words. 

Students are more current on movies from the west that you are and can download virtually any film or TV show they want to see — free — in less than an hour, some with subtitles, most without.  They hear English everywhere.  Sometimes during between class periods on the campus here, the campus-wide public address system plays English-language interview and commentary programs.

One of the reasons Chinese government officials and pronouncements sound so stiff and silly is how people in China learn English — including memorizing a zillion big and arcane words — the more complex the better — sans nuance or inflection, but without a lot of insight as to how they are commonly used or if they are used with any frequency at all. 

Here is what a kid wrote in a Strategy assignment:

“The profit abilities that the competition strength together comes to a decision a company, and point out the strategic core of company.”   He had good words there……..no shortage of good English words in China; but there is a big problem of context and a huge problem in spoken English for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.

I know a bunch of English words,  but do not recollect ever seeing “solecism” until I came to China.  Some kid used it, correctly, in a paper.  I had to look it  up - it means a breach of good manners or etiquette.  Or how about virescence?  Terrific word — never heard of it before a Chinese student used it in a paper about the environment.  It means the state or condition of becoming green especially with plants due to the development of chloroplasts in plant organs (as petals) normally white or colored.

Chinese kids I see do not need to learn the words for ball, cat, truck or flower; or even for government, gradiant or gigantic – they do need to know how to use them and say them so someone else understands what words they are saying and knows what they are talking about.

In fact, a business major in most Chinese colleges takes two or more classes in what are called “professional” subjects like marketing or finance using English-language textbooks taught  by a Chinese teacher in a mix of English and Chinese to assure comprehension.  Seniors in undergraduate programs in China write 30,000 word essays on assigned topics as their senior thesis which usually has to include articles they find somewhere that are written in English that they have to translate. 

Try getting a senior in a US undergraduate program to do the equivalent in a core course in his or her major.

Chinese kids are very facile with technology so they use cell phones (mobiles) and instant messaging (MSN and the Chinese version called QQ) incessantly (that means all the time for people who do not memorize zillions of big English words).  The don’t use e-mail much at all, since comparatively it’s too slow. So there are always typed messages flying around and I get them all the time.  What is curious is that kids and older people who have a terrible time with spoken English are pretty coherent in a typed message.  And some of them can carry on very sophisticated conversations on any topic with almost complete transparency — as though they were using English all their lives. 

The unusual thing is that some of these same people, if you meet them in person are stuck dumb at the thought of speaking the sentences they can so eloquently type!.  Sometimes it is like meeting two different people if you meet one of these folks in person — very weird. 

Part of the reason is that there are nowhere near enough native English speakers in China (meaning English is their first language so they are fluent and speak it well).  The numbers in China are so huge, there may never be enough.  So what happens is that most Chinese people are taught spoken English - how to say the words they know and can write and understand - by other Chinese people who were taught by other Chinese people, none of whom got to practice or interact with a native English speaker.  The result is like playing Gossip and by the time the third generation teacher gets to a student — no native speaker can easily recognize what they are saying. 

Speaking any language is all about confidence and knowing that you sound like you know what you are talking about.  Chinese are smart and like anyone else don’t want to make asses of themselves so unless they are sure about how to say something — most of them stay mute.  It’s a shame.

I’ve had about a thousand students now and it’s the same with most of them.  No confidence, no practice, no speakee. 

This is also true of people you meet in the street — shopkeepers, waiters, people in the market, on the bus almost everyone is trying to learn to speak English.   I was on a city bus not long ago going into get parts of me pushed around by that massage girl.  I was talking to two people on the bus — students whose English was passable — and the driver commented to them in Chinese that they were so lucky to be practicing English with a native speaker!

The demand is so great that there are native English speakers from all over the world in China, some qualified and legitimate and some shady characters on the lam from somewhere, teaching some version of English. There are some very spookie people traveling around Asia masquerading as teachers of English, the demand is so great and vetting so poor.  That odd duck pulled out of Thailand not long ago after “confessing” to killing JonBenet Ramsey is one of them.

 Since there are lots of places in the world that use some derivation of English as their native tongue, they come from places like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and all over the US.  It can be totally confusing to a Chinese kid trying to pronounce words like machinery, mercantile or Michigan with all those accents.  Most of them can “see” through the accents better than I can.  One kid is going to graduate school in Scotland — that should be a trip.

I know enough about technology to know that the answer lies there since there will never be enough native English speakers in China to teach a billion people.   But many of the language learning companies that use technology to teach English haven’t figured out how to design a hybrid system that takes what the Chinese have already been exposed to and builds on it to fix context and spoken English.  Most start from zero and teach basic words, albeit in novel and effective ways, but don’t do what people want.  There are electronic learning devices in all the malls and stores that will do that for kids — touch the picture - hear the word; say the word - light up the picture; stuff like that. And the rest don’t use the technology very cleverly at all.  I am not sure why, perhaps the myopia of engineers and designers who think they know all there is to know without leaving home.  With voice recognition and speech synthesis that is available today — much wasted on video games and animated movies, somebody is going to make a ton of money teaching a zillion Chinese people how to say what they can write and be confident about it.

But there is a good chance that online and handheld translators like Google translate in a cell phone or the speaking calculators here now will beat a smart teaching tool to market and perhaps make teaching good, colloquial spoken English unnecessary.

What things cost.

Every week I take the bus to Xiamen, which is an island city of about a million and a half people.  Jimei is at the end of a causeway that connects Xiamen Island to the mainland.  Mass transit rules here so there are lots of busses that crisscross all points everywhere.  Getting from Jimei to any part of Xiamen — think near Laguardia to anyplace in Manhatten — costs 3 RMB which is about 45 cents depending on the exchange rate. 

One of life’s little pleasures here is massage — the legitimate kind — not the Elliott Spitzer kind — and the prices are significantly better than he ever got.  There are less legitimate massage and sauna places all over too; it’s as normal and accepted a part of the culture here as 7-11 or Starbucks it seems, but my weekly regimen takes me to an upscale and legitimate place where a foot massage extends to the knee and takes ninety minutes and the full body massage takes two hours and extends as far at decency permits. 

Women can get massages too, of course, but it’s a guy’s world here still so seeing women in these places is infrequent and the majority of the folks giving the hands-on treatment are young women. Judy and I did a couple of these when she was here a few months back.  My girl was prettier than her girl, but she cared less about that than I did.  In the upscale places each girl gets a name tag and a number so you refer to your favorite by number.  My girl is 888 which is a lucky number in China — lucky for me! 

This is ol’ 888 and yes, that’s my foot down there and I’m attached.  All the girls wear uniforms and that’s her ID tag with her number there hanging around her neck.

You change into something like a cross between PJs and operating room scrubs….  The deal starts with a head massage and proceeds to kneading almost everything else whether you need it or not.  These are small people, but they can kill you.  This kid pushes and bends and twists and at various intervals doesn’t hesitate to use all kinds of leverage and inflict pain.  The best part is midway through where you are face down with your face in the donut hole of the massage table, shirt off and hot towels are piled on your back layer by soothing layer.  After a decent interval that about puts you to sleep, they get removed, a dry towel replaces them and ol’ 888 climbs up on the table and then on you and prominades on your back.  

And THAT, boys and girls feels pretty damned good.  You can’t get that in the States……..with the size of our females these days, you could end up with a collapsed lung or worse.

During lulls in this ceremony, another attendant brings in a bowl of fresh fruit, soup,  water or a soft drink — what have you.  At the end of this magnificent Chinese tradition, you get another head massage and if you can still walk, you can find your way out of the place after paying the bill.  The event takes two-hours, start to finish and the bill comes to about $23.  That’s it.  Ridiculous.

Food is really cheap.  What you might know as Lo Mein — wheat noodles — cost about 80 cents for enough to have a second meal of leftovers.  I like fried rice and the sidewalk place I frequent throws in a bunch of tiny shrimp — three scoups, I like shrimp — and a huge plate of that plus a bowl of broth costs me five RMB, about 70 cents.

Local people don’t usually order something to drink with lunch so it is customary to serve a bowl of hot chicken broth with most meals — free soup they call it.  There are fresh vegetable and meat markets all over and for a buck you’ll get enough carrots, cabbage or what-have-you for a couple of meals.  I have no idea what they use to grow veggies over here — some things you do not want to know — but everything looks the size of pick-of-the-crop gourmet gardens.

The most expensive food is the western franchises which are all over the place.  KFC, Pizza Hut, Micky D’s and Burger King.  At the Hong Kong airport there is a Krispy Kreme Donut place that charges 10 $HK for one donut.  That’s about US$1.50, or two complete lunches of fried rice with soup — cooked fresh.  Large Mickey D’s fries cost 8.5 RMB which is about US$1.25.  A Big Mac with cheese, medium fries and a medium coke can be had in Xiamen for 21 RMB or just over US$3.  Pizza Hut seems most expensive, but like all the other franchises is hugely popular with primo spots including one that’s on the top floor of a high-rise office building overlooking the harbor where you’d expect a high-end restaurant to be.  Pizza Hut has it. 

There is a difference in philosophy among the francises.  Micky D’s is identical to Mickey D’s in the States — same menu, same taste, including the breakfast items.  KFC modified it’s menu and has soups, some kind of Chinese roll-up, very spicy chicken and other things for the Chinese taste buds.  Burger King spiced up their burghers to better match the Chinese preferences — not so good if you are used to a US made Whopper.  Pizza Hut has a mix,  but it’s 50 RMB or seven bucks for a personal size pizza — before a drink.  Nevertheless, all of them are packed all the time and Pizza Hut always has a line of folks waiting at meal times.  They are building a new Micky D’s here in Jimei on the best corner location imaginable and with 40,000 college students in this town, they’ll probably do OK and will take some of the strain from the only KFC in town and the Chinese versions of western fast food joints that sell chicken, fish sandwiches and fries. 

They’ll make not a dent in the noodle and rice places.

Apart from busses and taxis, most people get around here on motorbike.  Whole families and delivery men, overloading bikes completely.  A new bike from Honda or a Chinese maker goes for around 4,500 RMB which is about US$650.  These are not Harleys, but they seem to do the job and I’ve seen four people piled into one with no trouble and pieces of freight and merchandise you would not believe.

Cheap……….and that goes for jewelry, oil paintings, stone and tile, marble counter tops and almost anything else.  Cheap for now at least.

 

 

 

Earthquake

 

Monday was a beautiful day in Xiamen; low humidity, bright sunshine and a perfect day for running the Olympic Torch through town which in a town of almost two million is a pretty big deal.  Most classes were cancelled since while the administration didn’t sanction it, many of the kids had arranged to go see the torch somewhere along the route.   Every body was pretty happy when the foreign teachers did what many of the Chinese teachers had done. 

It would be silly to tell your grandchildren that you sat on your butt in some silly class when the Olympic Torch was making its way through town on a beautiful day.

Busses, the principal means of transportation in these parts were packed and finally stopped running by noon when the roads into Xiamen Island were closed.  The run hit the peak areas of town about 2:30 and was televised on local stations.  Nobody felt a thing.

I’m not sure what geological structures prevented the coast here from feeling the earthquake in Sichuan Province when it was felt in Taiwan, Hanoi, Tokyo and Beijing, but no one I know sensed anything. 

You’ve probably followed the news………they’re still trying to get to many areas since the weather was terrible in the aftermath and most of the roads and bridges are out.  The numbers keep going up and many kids here are affected.  I know two in particular who are from the area directly involved and they report that their families are safe, but that their towns and everything they had there is destroyed.  Of course a college student from those parts knows the local schools pretty well, so they’re having a hard time of it.

For the CNN/Jack Cafferty fans, the local media is covering all the details in real-time as is the Beijing media………good and bad, warts and all.  It makes that business with Katrina look like the efforts of a third world country.  I wonder if Cafferty has commented on that yet. 

The College is doing what it can and has asked the teachers to check with students who are affected and is taking up the usual collections for aid agencies.  Nothing you wouldn’t see anywhere else.  All the kids are using their phone networks and the Internet to keep in touch and they’ve asked the school to keep the Internet in their  dorms up after 11 PM — it’s practice here to turn it off at 11 so kids aren’t up all night playing online games or chatting with each other. 

All is well in Xiamen, but its a terrible time for China.

 

Yes, Sam………I am still in China

A good friend of mine from Texas asked me if I was still in China since I’ve not posted anything in a long time.  I’ve been busy. 

The school year here lasts forever it seems — from Late February after the Spring Festival until The middle of July.  There is only one short break for the May 1st Labor Day holiday and one of three days of holiday is Saturday so it really doesn’t count.  Most US colleges are finished by the end of May.

College kids here work hard too and have it much harder than I do.  I’ve got twelve ninety minute classes I teach on odd numbered weeks and eleven ninety minute classes on the even numbered weeks and a total of about 500 kids in all the classes combined.  So giving a quiz is painful and takes a long time to correct; giving a written assignment of any length is more painful still.   Four of my classes are in the evening, from 7 to 8:30 and by that time, most of the students have already sat in nine classes for the day. 

I have no idea how they do it.

Also taking some time is a little business venture which envisions buying stone, pearl and glass jewelry here and in Hong Kong and selling it in the States.  Even with shipping US prices can very reasonable and the stuff is really nice.  There are also a couple of artists I’ve found here who can paint an exact copy of any photograph in oils and give you a perfect portrait or scene that you couldn’t touch in the States for six times the price.  (You can send your orders for paintings or jewelry to Silkroadtrader@live.com.)

Here’s one of my son and a rather impressive fish he caught in Western Maryland:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the Olympics coming up in August (I will be back in the US by then), there’s been lots of news about China recently, much of it bad.  Some of it’s wrong.  Jack Cafferty on CNN called the Chinese a bunch of goons and ranted about the toy factories, toothpaste and “crackdowns.”  Of course he did not say that Chinese authorities closed half the factories making toys in Guandong Province once they got word of the problems.  I always liked Cafferty, he was a  NY City news guy for years before making it big as CNN’s answer to Andy Rooney.  But CNN has been getting it wrong about China where I know about the facts personally.  

In March, the Dodgers and Padres came to Beijing to play a couple of Spring Training games in China for the first time ever.  This was at the peak of the Tibet stuff where a well-orchestrated series of protests around the world brought attention to the Chinese equivalent of taking over the Sioux lands in the Dakotas. 

Anyway, CNN and other news outlets reported that the “Chinese Crackdown” eliminated a bunch of Boy Scouts from being in the baseball game ceremonies and that the National Anthem tradition of a US ballgame was also eliminated.  Well, I didn’t go to the Saturday game, but I was in Beijing for the game on Sunday.  I never saw any Boyscouts looking downtrodden after being denied participation, but I saw, heard and sang the US National Anthem and saw and heard the Chinese anthem just like a regular game.  Here’s a picture of the teams lined up, caps off while the anthem was played:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These swarthy characters are ticket scalpers; they’re the same all over the world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Chinese media used stories from the US press to illustrate how carefully cropped news photos suggested impressions of protests that were a little different from reality.  One most frequently shown was a widely distributed photo of two protesters apparently facing truckloads of Chinese soldiers singlehandedly.  The uncropped photo, also shown in the US media, showed a whole crowd of people pelting the trucks with rocks.   

Of course there is no story to sell if the headline reads “Chinese authorities reasonable and restrained in the face of organized violence.”   “Hillary Under Sniper Fire” sure made a better speech than strolling from the plane to the flower girl in Bosnia too.

Don’t believe everything you read or everything a self-serving politician or CNN pundit says either.

Maybe I’m “going native” but my view of this place is very different from what I am reading on CNN, Fox and the others.  Some of my students wanted to go march in front of Carrafour, the big French department store chain that has a store here in Xiamen.  The French were a little nasty during that Olympic Torch run. Their Chinese teachers advised them not to bother the French store and that it would look bad for the school and for China. 

As an aside, there were people from all over the place at the ballgame.  No vendors in the stands, but they sold beer and cold hot dogs and everybody seemed to have a good time.  Major League Baseball paraphenalia was all over the place and they made a bundle selling merchandise at prices that could feed a large family for a couple of months.  Nobody clapped or made much noise at the game.  Instead, the practice here is to take two inflated plastic tubes and beat them together to make appreciative noise.  Same thing at a concert.

This young lady threw six strikes in a row……..and fast too……someone from the Dodger’s Organization was talking to her after her demonstration, but of course human rights problems in the States prevent women from being part of many professional sports teams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So that’s a little of the news from China…busy, busy, busy…….but the next post won’t be so long in coming.  I promise.

Weather Update

It is not snowing in Xiamen, being close to the ocean and as far south as it is saves Xiamen from any of that. But the weather has been miserable for the last ten days, heavily overcast with rain or drizzle and temperatures in the 40s.

Provinces to the west and south of here, Guangdong in particular, where the elevation is higher have been getting a lot of snow and cold and as has been illustrated in the media, China is a mess.  Complicating things is the holiday, Spring Festival, where everyone with any chance at all, tries to get back to their ancestral home city or village to visit family.  It’s the one time of the year they can.  There are few other breaks of any duration. 

Having a billion and a third people and having tens of millions of them working far from home (because that’s where the work is for many), means that tens of millions take plane, train or bus — or all three — to get from their temporary place of work and living to their homes and families.  Throw some ice and snow into the middle of that, in places like Georgia or Mississippi where ice, snow and cold are rare and you get what we’ve got over here.

People travel a long way the hard way.  Some of my students here have daunting journeys home.  One has a three hour plane ride, a four hour train ride and then takes a bus for half a day.  Another takes a thirteen hour train ride and then spends a day on a bus to get home.  Getting home in China takes longer for many people that getting home from China for me

There is no inside heating here other than the occasional electric space heater.  Stores leave the doors open; the big overhead garage doors in most smaller shops and store clerks stand around bundled up in coats, sweaters, gloves and scarves.  It’s impossible to tell a shopped from a store clerk.  Restaurants are mostly the same and even personal apartments are often found with windows and doors open and people just bundled up.  

 Longjohns are popular and sold every where. 

Friends here in Xiamen say it’s the worts winter they can remember, for thirty years or more.  The Chinese say it’s the worst in fifty or sixty years for most of the country.  Even  Hong Kong, where I will be for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is about ten degrees (F) colder than normal for this time of year.   In the ’50s as a kid I remember one day waiting for the school bus in Poughkeepsie and it was 40 below (look it up, it really was), and dry as anything so you squeaked when you walked on the snow.  Those times may be coming back — an odd side effect of global warming. 

I don’t think I’ll like that much. 

Nanjing

In early January I went to Nanjing (Nanking) where a piece of history sticks in the Chinese psyche like a burr under a saddle.  During the Japanese War, which many other people call World War II, Nanjing was the capital of China or at least of the part run by the Nationalists. 

World War II started early for China and Japan.  By 1937 they had been at it for more than a year and a lot of China particularly along the coast was occupied by the Japanese.  By the 13th of December, 1937, the Japanese marched about 200 kilometers inland from Shanghai and took Nanjing.  

There, depending on who you talk to, the Japanese army went nuts.  they attacked US and British representatives, but paramount for the Chinese, they killed 300,000 people, many if not most civilians in a brutal wave of horror that lasted until mid-January 1938.  Iris Chang, an American writer of Chinese descent, wrote “The Rape of Nanking” which popularized the tragedy for a while,  but the Chinese never forgot.

Ask a Chinese about either Nanjing or the Japanese and you’ll see that they neither forgot nor forgave.  Young people, old people, students or shopkeepers, they all know.  One returned overseas Chinese guy I know startled me when he said that if the Japanese don’t acknowledge and apologize for their transgressions in Nanjing, there would be war. 

The problem seems to be that Japan has always had a problem coming to terms with the Second World War and their part in it.  And the Chinese quickly contrast Japanese post-war behavior with that of Germany where the latter owned up to it’s deeds and took steps toward atonement.  Japan, from schoolbooks to politicians kind of ducks and weaves………… alluding to transgressions maybe, but either couching them in ambiguous language or discounting them as minor side effects of noble actions. 

A substantial museum in Nanjing, built on a mass grave site of perhaps 10,000 victims of the 1937 events, recounts what apparently happened and is marked by what seems like a court-like presentation of evidence as proof.   Eye witness accounts, survivor accounts, contemporaneous newspapers accounts by Chinese and Japanese alike make a compelling case.   

Outside the museum in Nanjing there are several statues and these are accompanied by footprints of survivors cast in bronze along a pathway……….

Inside the museum are many artifacts and documents, including the records of a substantial western community of Europeans and Americans who witnessed what happened, tried unsuccessfully for the most part to intervene and successfully maintained a small enclave or safety zone that saved some lives.  Ironically, one of the leaders of the efforts was a German who represented Hitler’s goverment in China at the time, so swastikas are among the artifacts and documents too, including on a set of “red cross” flags.

Part of the museum reveals human remains……….

And part has the tables and artifacts used at the Japanese surrender to the Chinese in 1945, appropriately staged at Nanjing.

Japanese scientists and troops conducted some gruesome experiements with chemical and biological agents using Chinese and some western POWs as test subjects.  This is the depiction of uncovering the remains of some of those victims and the precautions necessary to protect researchers from still-active chemical or biological agents.

A great hall near the museum entrance is lined with stone and the names of victims.  Here on a wide black backdrop, photos of victims in a slowly paced slideshow fill the laureled oval, one after another.

Nanjing is a pretty city, surrounded by a mostly still intact wall on the banks of the Yangtze River.  A tributary runs through the city creating opportunities for picturesque bridges and banks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

END

 

What you really wanted to know……..

My Uncle Mike Spisso, one of the last of his generation at 98 if he makes it to August 1st of this year, was in China at the end of World War II.  He spent some time in Tianjin the closest seaport to Beijing and says he got to the Great Wall.  One of his oft-repeated stories about China concerns bathroom habits when he found himself squatting across from some women in a communal public toilet.  I haven’t found any communal public toilets here, everything is clearly marked with male and female silhouettes, but squatting is still the dominant form for doing one’s business here and squatting is something these folks do quite naturally. 

And they can stay squatting forever it seems — waiting for the bus, eating lunch, having a smoke or playing cards………….a Chinese at rest is a squatter.

It’s not like the duckwalk squat in gym class or like squatting exercise in aerobics or kindergarten, but a full, on-your-haunches squat that seems to defy centers of balance while encouraging cramps.  They Squat here a lot.

Most bathrooms require squatting unless you are in a big hotel or some other place with western influence.  Porcelain inserts in the floor with ribbed sides for foot grips and a recessed bowl are the deal.  For foreigners without significant camping or other field experience achieving balance in the squat while perfecting blind aim into the recesses of the elongated bowl is akin to bombing through clouds with an optical bombsight.  There is a tendency to miss and a miss can bring with it unintended collateral damage.

Some combination of the WTO, western influence, affluence and bombing error seem to have combined to create a small shift in plumbing preferences, at least in parts of Xiamen and Jimei where supply houses and showrooms have what we would call modern fixtures, thrones or reading appliances.  Actually it could be improvements in universal literacy that is the real factor and the Chinese need a quiet place to read.  In any event, there are very modern fixtures including electronic flushers with heated seats for the especially affluent or perpetually cold.

So there is a slow migration, but most places, including places like Walmart, McDonalds and KFC retain blind bombing squatters so be prepared. 

And speaking of being prepared, unless you are in a western hotel or maybe in somebody’s home, you bring your own TP.  While there is no shortage of paper products I can see, there is a decided shortage of distribution of same in places where it’s most needed.  Everybody carries their own in small personal kleenex like packages sold in all the stores and in attended WCs where they happen to be.   Being unprepared in this category is something you do not want to contemplate and I suspect more than one westerner has yielded all or part of something valuable here and there before they got the habit of always taking along a package of paper.  Why that is defies logic and reason, but it is what is is. 

You’ve been warned.  Squat on……………….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes Virginia…….there is Christmas in China

A friend of mine from Virginia dropped me a note a couple of days  ago in which he suggested that Christmas was probably not too well recognized here in China.  Au contraire………. 

Xiamen has a long history of association with the west, all the way back to the Dutch, who were about the first Europeans here.  And the place is among the more prosperous of Chinese cities in the middle of the trade boom where all your dollars for all that stuff for the holidays end up in or near here, all or in part, since most of what you went and bought came from China.

So it’s entirely appropriate that these friendly folks have adopted Christmas as a big commercial event and signs of it are all over.   The Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend saw the lobby tree-lighting at the Sheraton Hotel where the unhappy angel was. 

He and a bunch of kids from a music school on the small island of Guilan Yu sang a couple of Christmas songs for the amusement of a small crowd and a large wedding party sharing the lobby.  It was a little unusual to my eyes to see the angel’s and chorus in the background and the back of the wedding couple in the foreground as they greeted wedding guests entering the hotel lobby.  But standing in back of the bridal party offered a good view of a Chinese wedding ritual where every arrival discretely hands the white-gowned bride a small red envelope stuffed with cash.  The bride, with the aplomb of an illusionist, discretely stuffed each stuffed envelope into her mothers purse, itself stuffed with a whole lot of red envelopes. 

Those two got a good start. 

The kids in my classes knew the date of Christmas better than they knew the date of the end of the school term.  Some of them think I look like Santa Claus and when I joked that I actually was Santa Claus, they hit me up for their gifts………..stupid me. 

There are a number of big, multi-storied malls downtown here, one operated by a Philippino consortium is called the SM (for Shopping Mall, not for bizarre entertainment) and there is no Chinese translation which is interesting.  City busses have SM on their name-boards and if you tell any Taxi driver “SM” they know exactly where to go.  The place has six floors, a huge Walmart in the basement and rivals the biggest ones in the States.  Whole floors are  dedicated to specialities — one for furniture and an entire floor to electronics — these guys live by cell phones. known here as “mobiles.”  There is a food court as big as a football field where you can get anything from octopus and squid to funny hotdogs they eat on long sticks, kind of a cocktail party h’ordeurve on steroids.

The malls, including the SM, like malls almost everywhere got decorated for Christmas at Thanksgiving (the latter holiday is not well-recognized).  The Sheraton advertised a Thanksgiving Dinner, but their turkey missed the plane so they moved the dinner (part of a big buffet) to Friday night.  The fellow who does guest services didn’t realize that the specific day counted that much.  I’ve been to some peoples homes for thanksgiving and the interminable delays waiting for all or part of the meal suggested they and the Sheraton guy were on the same page.

Classes are held here on Christmas Day just like any other.  The holiday is completely commercial except for the Christian community which includes no few Chinese.  The first Christian Church was established in Xiamen (when it was called Amoy) in the middle of the 19th Century.   I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve got a book somewhere with the address.

So foreign teachers can actually take Monday and Tuesday off if they want to, but doing that screws up the sequence of all the class sections for the week so it’s better to keep it just another day.   January 1st is a regular holiday though, no classes at all.

So, yup Virginia, there is Christmas here………..they’re only a couple of years ahead of the States…….the whole thing is already totally commercial.

Cultural Selfishness

A friend of mine who taught here at Jimei University gave me a good idea for solving a grading problem with team projects.  He’s working in Kunming now, but before he left he passed on his idea.  Most U.S. business schools use projects or case studies to illustrate business problems and form student teams to work on them.  This approach gets students used to working together, helps them understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and simulates most workplace environments where people are supposed to work together.

With a team project it’s often difficult for the teacher to know the individual contributions of each team member.  Projects are usually presented by one speaker or submitted in written form where you really don’t know who wrote what.  One way to grade the project is to give the team a single grade and have each team member get the same grade.  My friend suggested that you give a single team grade, but that the teams multiply the team grade by the number of team members and then have the teams figure out how to allocate their budget among team members.  So if a team has six members and the grade is eighty, the team has a budget of 480 which the team, by consensus, divvies up among the team.

Some of my students had a problem with my friend’s idea.  Some teams wanted to keep grade distribution more “Chinese” and give everyone the same grade.  Others thought those who contributed more ought to get the better grades.  Some complained that allocating grades based on contribution was selfish – not the Chinese way.  These kids were friends.  Some had lived together in the same dormitory for four years.  So keeping friends was important.  And some kids actually argued that the smarter kids should do the hard work anyway since they were more capable which left added time for the less capable kids to play video games.

I’m not sure any of this has anything to do with being Chinese.  Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote of a fictional character, Tom Sawyer, who made a habit of tricking friends into doing his work.  Tom Sawyer pulled his trick in Misouri or something.

I promised my students at the beginning of the term that I would teach them how business really works, so I explained merit systems and differential pay.  That’s how business works……sometimes.

A difficult problem for new managers is being fair and equitable in evaluating individual contributions particularly when some of the people he or she is evaluating are old friends.   Many new managers come from the ranks and have friends they’ve known for as long as or longer than my college seniors.  And some new managers sometimes choose friends over the business.

I think when one becomes a manager; he or she leaves one club and joins another.  While they can go to the old clubhouse and the meetings from time-to-time, they have to remember they are now in a different club. They left the worker-bee club and joined the management club.

There is kind of a rule in business that one can’t hold membership in both clubs at the same time. Of course they can keep their friends, but they can never compromise their position as a neutral, objective judge of performance – in reality or in perception.  In their new club, being a dispassionate judge of performance is what they are paid to do.  Sometimes they’ll lose a friend or two, but I think the one’s they lose, probably weren’t the friends they thought they were. 

Managers get performance budgets to divvy up too, whether it’s the skew of performance evaluations, the salary budget or the bonus pool.  They’re expected to allocate rewards and sanctions according to contribution.

That’s the way business works.

Unusual things in Xiamen, China

There is some weird stuff here.  

The most popular form of transportation is the motor bike.  Most people have one and they pile on everything in ingenious ways.  It is not unusual to see someone with a TV, five gallon bottles of water, almost anything tooling around taking something home or for a commercial delivery. 

Motorbikes and bicycles.  On the bicycles, particularly on this campus at Jimei, kids are always hopping on someone’s bike getting rides.  They either sit on the small flat luggage carrier over the rear wheel, or stand over the rear wheel on extenders on the axle that leave just enough room for a smallish Chinese foot.  Nobody I have seen does the handlebar trick, which may be a practice abandoned due to bad experiences. 

Traffic here and the ways and wisdom of driving protocol is a hoot.  The rule is that first gets the right-of-way, no matter the vehicle, lane, intersection, whatever.  If you’re first, you win and if you get hit, it’s their fault.  This idea kind of makes rear-view mirrors superfluous……………….everybody focuses ahead of them, maneuvering to get there first.  What happens behind them ain’t their problem.

So except for within Xiamen proper, where tooting your horn is outlawed, the deal is you blow your vehicle horn continuously and go like hell.  It makes for quite a racket but surprisingly few accidents.  And the protocol applies to pedestrians, most of whom have no horn, so they are non-competitive with any sort of vehicle from semis to bikes.  It is not unusual for a motorbike or a car to go barreling along a pathway, jammed with kids going between classes, blowing it’s horn madly and bothering not a bit for people who may be in the roadway.  Pedestrians seem to get it and move, some barely in time.  Deaf Chinese aren’t very plentiful, which probably is a result of Darwin’s observations and flattened people with bad hearing.

Despite some pretty bad air pollution that takes the sharpness and clarity out of the picture of anything in these parts, things are pretty clean.  In Xiamen and elsewhere, there are streetsweepers everywhere, people that is, with bamboo shafted leafy branches sweeping up leaves, trash and anything else.  The efficiency of leafy tree branches in sweeping is remarkable.  They used to use straw brooms the same way in Paris when I first traveled there.  In later years the Parisian’s replaced the natural material with plastic that is supposed to resemble straw or twigs or something.  Here, they stick with the natural stuff and it seems to work better.

There are also more conventional streetwashers, tank trucks that drive around the city spraying high pressure water to clean the streets.  The unusual part about this process is that the trucks are equipped with amplified speakers and play “Happy Birthday” in a high-pitched single horn rendition that is startling, but instructive. I have no clue as to why they’d pick “Happy Birthday” as the streetwasher song, but if you are in Xiamen and hear the strained refrain of “Happy Birthday” you will know to step lively and avoid a soaking.

Nevertheless, the food is plentiful, really cheap and very, very good.