Paul in China

Learning Chinese is Fun

2008-01-13T16:24:00.002-08:00

This is a picture of one of the professors I had in Beijing.

[NOTE: I've removed this picture of my fashionable sassy Chinese teacher wearing cool shades because I didn't want her getting into any difficulties with her school. The picture is very tame and the odds of any trouble coming from it are slim but I didn't want to take a chance.]

[ANOTHER NOTE: In order to see the entire travelblogue that follows, you'll eventually need to start clicking on the individual blog entry buttons under "Blog Archive" at the top of this blog and to the left. You can do it now or you can do it once you reach the end of the "Dali" blog entry. The posts are in chronological order (sort of backwards for a blog). It's a bit of a nuisance, so I apologize, but just keep clicking. The final entry of the entire travelblogue is called "Class photo, last day". If you don't see that you haven't seen the whole blog).]

You probably have your own notions of what learning Chinese must be like, if you've thought of it at all since you found out I've been doing that. This image might change your notions a little bit but, you know, change is good.

The great thing about this picture is that she was so very much not like this in class. It wasn't until much later in the semester when I was off teaching kids in a poor remote region of China that my friend from Switzerland found himself alone in class with her one day and started to discover that she not only was a lot of fun to kid around with and had a great laugh but, as some of us had gradually begun to suspect, she was kinda hot, as the kids say.

This was in distinct contrast to what little we knew of her at first. She wore remarkably unflattering glasses and kept her hair tied up tightly. She was very strict, much more strict than our other two teachers. If you were just a few minutes late she would curtly tell you to "hurry up" without even looking at you.

My friend and she slowly slowly started down the road to romance, slowly as you only could with a traditional Chinese woman, even a slightly non-traditional Chinese woman. He is an artist and told her that he wanted to paint her. He asked if he could use my camera to take pictures of her as he was trying to discover how he'd paint her and that's how I came to have this photo to share with you.

To look at that photo above might inspire a strained allegorical stretch to illustrate at one stroke What China Is All About Now... the rapid changes and the confusing clash of the modern and traditional that those changes have created in China, etc. Or... it might not, especially if it weren't for this half-baked little photo caption of mine encouraging you to do so. But if you look at it along with the next photo, a photo of the painting that my friend finally made -- one that was painted with love, he said -- you might make that stretch all on your own.

[NOTE: I've also removed this picture for now; in contrast to the photo (not) posted above, this painting was much more traditional, both in subject and composition.]

And my friend would hit me on the head with a shovel if he knew I was painting such a sentimental picture of him here. Anyway, this is one of the last pictures from my stay in China. The travelogue of my three trips to China in the past year follows below in chronological order from October '06 to August '07 (sort of a backwards blog) but I start with this picture because it seemed right and, more importantly, because I lost the cable that hooks my camera to my computer and only just added this last photo.

There's a lot of information below, of an amount that only a mother could read. Indeed, one of the reasons I started this thing is because Uncle Paul didn't have time to put on a slide show the last time he visited the family. It's gotten a little out of hand since then, so if you want a guide for skipping maybe skip down to "on the long road to a small village." There is more of a narrative flow to that section, maybe, and less editorializing. Maybe. Either way, this whole thing could use some serious editing that I hope to get to later.

But not before I give you one more chunk of blather in a disclaimer kinda way:

I was returning from that remote region of China with the documentary crew that had been filming me teaching and living there. We were exhausted and relieved to have finished a month of hard work and just wanted to get on the train back to where we came from. I waited with the cameraman and the rest of the crew by the equipment and luggage in the vast square in front of the railway station while two others went to get the tickets. But they didn’t head to the ticket window as I'd expected but waded off into the sea of people wandering around the square. As Wang Wei, the Chinese cameraman, explained it to me, all the tickets for our destination had long ago been bought up at the window by scalpers who would resell them to people who actually wanted to get on the train. Every ticket to be had was to be had like that. That’s just the way it ‘worked.’ Hmm… And so, after months of marveling at the wonder of living in this complex and wildly interesting new world and after months of living intimately amongst Chinese who love their country (though their government is another issue) and after months of couching any negative comments I had about China in terms that wouldn’t alienate my wonderful Chinese friends, in my exhaustion and relief at that moment I just let it be said without any varnish at all, “Man, China is screwed up” (though I didn't speak quite so elegantly as that). Wang Wei didn’t miss a beat. He just laughed and said “Yes, it is.”

Yes, China is screwed up in some special ways, and the bit with the train tickets is just a minor instance though maybe indicative of the larger problems. But that is far from being the whole story. The history of the place, the language, the culture, the fascinating and immense changes it's going through right now, all make it a wonderful and incredible place to be. And the people are great. I won't bother touching on the government right now but I loved the people (and I apologize to my Chinese friends for any misrepresentations or flat-out stupidity regarding China contained herein). I wish good things for China. It’s had a twisted history for the past two centuries and has a long road ahead of it, but for its people and for the world, I wish good things for it. True, there are things about a successful China that might not be in our (U.S.) national interest. But those are things we know how to deal with. We’ve dealt with them before and we can deal with them again. But, if China were to fail, it would fail in ways and on a scale that we’ve never seen before that would not only be bad for China but bad, even catastrophic, for the rest of the world.

Pardon the hyperbole. Just trying to keep things interesting... I know it’s been a while since the last photo. All this is just to say that there is what might appear to be a negative tone running throughout this travelblogue, a frequent pointing out and appraisal of the things that are “wrong” with China. This is mainly the result, I think, of China’s recent history, its mad dash through what could rightfully be more than a thousand year's worth of history squeezed into the short span of two centuries, never mind the unprecedented scale of change that the past two decades have witnessed. And bad news always makes for a better story than good news and the Devil always has more interesting lines than God. But I will have given you the wrong impression of my experience in China if you come away with a negative feeling. It was an incredible time and I'm a lucky guy to have been there. I want to go back.

So, on to China.

My night of magic with Gong Li

2008-01-13T16:24:00.001-08:00

Okay, I lied. One more little thing before we get on to the chronological portion. A little off topic here but I thought you might enjoy this. This was taken in New York, in between my first and second trips to China. Gong Li is a huge movie star in China. She stars in more than one of my favorite movies. She was in town promoting the new Zhang Yimou movie she was in, "Curse of the Golden Flower." A friend of mine who's a reporter was assigned to interview Ms. Li. She asked if I wanted to be her photographer. I said yes.

Working with limited equipment and light and skill, this is what I came up with. Gong Li, of course, recognized upon seeing me that I am more of a swordsman than a photographer and invited me to prove my skill. I'm not one to kiss and tell but let's just say my friend left without me whereupon I did much to reduce our trade deficit with China, if you will.

Here's Gong Li goofing off with me after the interview waiting for my friend to take the hint and leave us alone.

[NOTE: Everything in this travelogue is the god's honest truth, except for one little lie. If you can spot that one lie, you may be eligible for a prize.]

Okay, on to the chronologically organized remainder of this travelogue.

baby's first picture

2008-01-13T16:23:00.002-08:00

This is the first picture from the camera that I bought right before I left for China. That's the guidebook and accessories to the camera on the desk in my room at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Interessant, non?

Hutongs

2008-01-13T16:23:00.001-08:00

Once I had established my studying habits I started taking in the city. I had a nice long stroll through some hutongs on one of those first days of exploring. Hutongs are narrow alleys weaving through closely-knit communities and past courtyard houses (some would say 'cramped' some would say 'close-knit'... depends on how you take it). It's an old style of living that until recently had been about the only way to live in Beijing. It's quite a contrast to the modern Western-style suburb where the intent is to be separate and to have your own little estate and where everything you need is a car ride away. Hutongs however are built on a human scale and the feeling is nice. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, curious to see this old style of living before it met with the bulldozer in Beijing's race to destroy everything that's distinctive about their city in the run-up to the Olympics.

People are starting to realize what a treasure in these hutongs is being bulldozed away in the eagerness to 'modernize' and 'westernize.' So some developers are now taking old courtyard homes and restoring them to their original beauty and in the process also installing the modern conveniences... or at least a private bathroom (and these modern conveniences are, as far as I can tell from speaking to Beijingers, the only thing that makes the high-rises that are spreading all over Beijing better than a hutong).

The beautiful old courtyard pictured below was in the process of being restored when I stumbled on it halfway through my hutong stroll. Nice timing, too, because it was time to eat. I stuck my head in and asked if I could take a picture. They said 'sure' and since lunch was about to arrive from the little shop across the alley they invited me to stick around. Lots of eating and toasting and declarations of friendship. A good time. The guy with his arm around me is the representative from the bank or whoever or whatever was putting up the big bucks for this. I think it's because he was there that day that we had such a good spread. After seeing something like this it's not hard to feel that restoring or maintaining the old courtyards is a better way to develop than what's generally going on now in Beijing but of course there aren't enough old courtyards to go around for the thousands of people flooding in from rural China.

Studying in China was working out really well so that answered the question of whether or not I'd be coming back to China soon. So I left town to see more of the country because when I came back I was just going to be hunkering down in Beijing and studying.

Kunming

2008-01-13T16:22:00.001-08:00

I first went to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province in the central part of southern China. While I was there I saved a woman from being robbed. She and her family were so pleased about this that they insisted on treating me to dinner at a nice Tibetan restaurant with authentic food and authentic performers from that distant region (though 'authentic' should be in quotes here because what I saw was probably more like the government's propagandized Disney version of Tibetan culture than the reality. It uses this to support the myth that the minority peoples in the far-flung regions of China are happy to be part of China and are not resisting but just want to dance and sing. The Chinese government seems to be winning its struggle to keep these regions subdued but the price they're paying to do this is pretty steep and so life for these minorities is definitely improving in some important respects -- new modern roads provided by the government, better communications, better education [or indoctrination into the majority Chinese culture] -- but the rich culture of these minorities is disappearing).

The food and the company was good but the lighting was bad. I didn't think to pop open the flash so it's hard to make out much from these pictures. There was plenty of blessing going on, done by tossing a long white scarf around the person you were blessing. I still have the scarf that one of the singers used to bless me. He's in the picture with me and the woman I saved from being robbed.

Half the people there joined some of the performers in a big circle dance around the restaurant. It took me a while to catch on but I eventually got it. That white blob in the middle is me dancing. Some people were trying to get a picture of me, the only foreigner there, dancing the native dances, which made me understand even better why the locals at tourist sites don't like having their picture taken.

I also ate dog in Kunming. First time. Only time. I had just gotten a massage and my masseuse wanted to show me her city (there are many nice things about Kunming and one of the nicest is that you can get a very good massage there for $13 and if your masseuse likes you and you can speak some Chinese, she'll ask you to stick around for an extra hour so she can take you around Kunming when she gets off work -- but you'll have to sneak out quickly because the employees aren't allowed to fraternize with the clients). It was very late in this city which like most Chinese cities had very little street lighting, so the stalls where we went to eat (big tables of raw food under a bare bulb next to a grill) stood out like beacons in a dark sea, if you'll pardon the poesy. So I blindly followed her regarding direction and diet and I had the first bite from whatever she'd ordered for us almost in my mouth when she said "by the way, that's dog." I'm sorry to report that it tasted pretty good. The photo further down of a little 'quiky-mart' in LiJiang should give you a good idea of what it's like to come upon one of these late night food stalls in the middle of a long dark stretch of nothing.

Below is another massage joint (a street-side massage joint so it's probably even cheaper than the relatively up-scale place I went to), and a restaurant that let me pretend I was shooting a Wong Kar Wai movie.

Lijiang

2008-01-13T16:21:00.002-08:00

I went from keeping the streets of Kunming safe to some well-deserved R&R at the two old towns, Lijiang and Dali, that help make Yunnan province famous. When the husband of the woman I saved from being robbed offered to help me reserve a plane ticket to LiJiang, I accepted, not knowing that he also intended to buy the ticket for me. When I found out about that it was too late and he insisted on it, refusing to let me pay him.

The first picture above is of some of the locals getting ready to serve the many tourists who crowd this old town. I'm sure these two gals were very happy to get back into their jeans and fashion-ready t-shirts as soon as they got off work.

Mainland China hasn't done much to preserve its history recently. Indeed, seemingly taking its lead from the Europeans who made themselves a little too welcome in China a couple centuries ago, China during the Cultural Revolution worked pretty hard at destroying as much of their culture and history as they could. They did a pretty good job too but with thousands of years of history to obliterate they were bound to miss some spots. Such as LiJiang. Now, like so many Americans who travel from their poorly-designed cities and visit places that were built generations ago on a more human scale, thus making them more inviting to, uh, humans, say, rather than to cars, Chinese people are visiting the 'old towns' in truckloads, now that some of these Chinese people have edged into the middle class and can afford to do so, having managed to catch a few of the droppings from the huge buckets of money that are being made by the raging development that is turning the places where they live into places to leave. As Walker Percy called Atlanta the Los Angelization of the South, I call this the Los Angelization of China. Welcome to LiJiang.

The picture above of small walkways over one of the little streams that ran through town was taken from the rear of the restaurant where I took the photo of the waitress walking in front of that sea of weeping willow tree branches. Good food, good scenery. The gargoyles (?) were part of a tall tower that overlooked the city. There's also a picture of the woods that I walked through as I took what I hoped would turn out to be a shortcut to the tower. It was.

Those lanterns pictured above called to me down a narrow sidestreet and happily turned out to be singing the praises of a little bank of internet access all tucked away in a tiny shop where the young shopowner lived and sold purses and scarves. And lanterns, too, I suppose. There were three computers, each with a little antenna on top, so the connection was slow but it worked. It was a strange thing to see popping up in the middle of this purposefully old town but I'd been needing me some internets so I didn't care. The smiling kids were friends I made when I went around the corner to get something to eat.

I took the next photo when I wandered way off the tourist path into where some of the locals lived. As in so many cities in China, there was not a lot of street lighting. While I was taking this picture a kid saw me and started shouting something like "Westerner taking pictures" which I think was a sort of warning to folks living there that another Westerner was gawking around invading their privacy (though privacy is a vague concept in China or not very well-established so who knows. It did seem to be a warning, though, rather than an invitation).

Dali

2008-01-13T16:21:00.001-08:00

The city of LiJiang was feeling too Disneyfied and full of row upon row of shops selling trinkets so I pretty soon set about leaving (the outskirts of LiJiang have some mountains which are supposed to be amazing but I was trying to squeeze in a lot in a little and was focusing more on cities at the time). It would finally dawn on me months later while visiting yet another old town that most old towns in China are like this. And that's all right. Who can blame people looking to get by in China's shifting economy for trying to make a little money off of someone's search for the 'authentic', whatever that is. Though I do wish I could have made it to Dali or Lijiang ten years earlier. Or even just five years. People who've seen LiJiang both now and as recently as five years ago say the change is incredible. It really just used to be an old town doing nothing but being an old town. Now it's a Thing. But most of the excitement of China today isn't to be found in the little eddies and backwaters of history that have been embalmed and set aside for tourists. Though of course, if you look carefully there's some great stuff in these old cities. So that's why I pushed on to Dali.

At first, Dali seemed to be more of the same so by the morning of the second day I was ready to go and not ready to "look carefully". But I'd already missed the only quick way out of there that day. So I had an entire extra day forced on me in Dali. It was either that or spend eight hot hours on a bus with a driver who would be tooting the horn at least every fifteen seconds (that's not an exaggeration about the horns... It seems that the only thing you have to know about driving in order to get a license in China is how to toot the horn. They do it All The Time. And nobody anywhere ever pays any attention at all to anybody blowing a horn!). But it was a good day. I'm glad I got stuck.

I rented an old bike with bad flabby tires and worse brakes and rode it to the ferry that takes you across the lake. There was yet another old town on the other side of the lake and I thought I might find what I was looking for there. But I got a late start and I didn't have much time left before the last ferry back to Dali. So, I pedaled like crazy on my wonderfully crappy bike, almost getting blown off the road by construction trucks (a new highway going up there to serve the expected continued droves of tourists, I suppose) and flying down hills past kids driving herds of goats.

I was hustling and sweating and calculating and slowly realizing there was no way I was going to make it to the new old town when I saw this guy fishing on the lake. I dumped my bike right there and decided I wasn't going to the old town. I was going to get this picture.

It's a nice picture but don't romanticize this. These people were very poor. I passed the huts where these fishing people lived, huts made out of sticks and paper and huddled up against the mountain just a few feet from the busy highway. I think this picture captures some sense of their lives. I hope it does.

I made it back to the ferry just in time, sweating like a pig. And then back into town where I came across this shop selling Mao ZeDong memorabilia. After I asked the woman you see in this photo if I could take a picture of her shop she invited me to have dinner with her family that night. They were celebrating their daughter's sixth birthday. That's the daughter in the photo. They lived in a beautiful old courtyard house that you absolutely could romanticize, as I did.

These are some more photos from the extra day I snatched in Dali.

There are the motorcycles parked outside a construction site and the women inside in helmets and aprons doing heavy construction. There were more than a few women on this construction site. I made myself welcome there and strolled around surprisingly undisturbed until an official-looking man came up to me and pointed proudly to his helmet which said "safety" something on it. I pretended I didn't know what it meant and told him he had a nice hat. There were some good pictures to be had there but I finally behaved like the good tourist and left.

Below are some photos from a shop that made vases. I stumbled across this just outside of town. You can see the rental bike that almost killed me lying in the entrance to the shop. Picked up a vase here for my mom. Later I saw a wall of these vases for sale at the airport in the capital city in Kunming. There they cost more than twice what I paid at the shop. Had fun bargaining with the clerk at the airport just for kicks. Or just for practice. I got pretty good at bargaining after a while, or at least never taking the first price that was offered, though I'm sure I still paid a portion of the unspoken "foreigner's tax."

Not-quite-a-postcard from my second trip to China

2008-01-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

If you want a postcard picture of the Summer Palace, one of Beijing's main tourist sites and rightfully so, I don't have one for you but you should be able to google it. In the meantime, here's a shot I took from one of the high spots of this incredible spread that a Chinese Empress had built for herself a couple centuries ago with money squandered from the Navy. A misuse of public funds for sure and I'm not one to condone malfeasance but hey... it's a nice place to go to to get out of the city without getting out of the city. Clearly it's not summer in this photo. I had already been back and forth to the States at this point and was in the middle of my second trip to China. These folks were strolling on the ice of the big lake which is one of the central features of the palace. A sort of abstract photo for a my-trip-to-China travelogue, I'll admit, but it does capture the feel of the place, the vast etc. of it.

Okay, here's one that's a bit more like a postcard. The Great Wall. I was expecting a stroll but it was more than that. Quite a workout. The last stretch of wall we climbed was as vertical as climbing a ladder, but with nothing to hang onto. Those are my classmates in front of me. We were happy to be going downhill at this point.

Not really in chronological order here but since they're like postcards we've got some shots below from my 36 hours in Hong Kong. I organized my long stroll through Hong Kong around trying to find scenes from Wong Kar Wai's movie "Chungking Express". I didn't find much but I did go up that long escalator that Tony Leung's flight attendant goes up. Eh, maybe it's not for you but I had fun. A good way to organize a tour but I was hustling so I didn't pause to take too many pictures.

I'm also adding some pictures I took in Fenghuang, another old town that's attracting tourists now and inspiring postcardy pictures. Really beautiful old place, in spite of the tourist kitsch. Baifan, the producer of the documentary I worked on, took us to Fenghuang after we finished shooting. He took very good care of us throughout the shoot and this was a nice topper to the whole experience.

Badminton, baozhi, etc.

2008-01-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

Everywhere in China you can find people playing badminton. With or without a net. Usually without. And wherever they happen to find themselves... outside work, home, in the park, on campus. It seems almost as ubiquitous as bikes are in China or at least as representative of China as bikes are to a non-badminton-playing non-bike-riding Westerner's eyes. This picture was taken on the campus of my university. The bulletin boards on either side are where the day's newspapers were posted, page by page. This used to be much more common in China but you still can see it here and there.

I'm not much of a student of Chinese history so I might not be quite accurate here but I'm pretty sure that had it not been for this tradition of newspaper posting then what is familiar to some western students of Chinese history as the "Democracy Wall" would never have happened. And without the "Democracy Wall" the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests would never have happened. The "Democracy Wall" preceded the Tiananman Square massacre (or "incident" to use the language of the Chinese government) by only a couple of years or even only a matter of months and can be viewed as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square protests. I don't know how familiar this is to students in China where information about this is suppressed, though not as much now as it used to be. Still, very few Chinese students are aware of the iconic photo that's so familiar to the rest of the world of that lone guy blocking a line of tanks moving through Tiananmen Square.

You could always see a handful of people reading the day's newspapers at this spot. This was in a bucolic little stretch of campus and I liked to study there with my tutors and language partners. On either side of the bulletin boards in this photo you can just barely see the benches where we used to sit and from which I'd sometimes zone out on a pair of feet moving methodically through the day's news as I struggled with some new (or old) aspect of the Chinese language.

If you can't quite make the badminton connection, the squirrely white thing trailing up is the birdie (shuttlecock, I believe, to the purists) and the other whooshes are the racquets swinging. I had just made a resolution to start carrying my camera around more so that I could be ready for anything when I saw these two women playing. Of course the resolution hadn't stuck and I had to race back to my apartment on my bike (which was at that time only days away from being stolen) and get the camera. When I came back they had just stopped playing but I asked them if they could play a bit longer which they did though they thought it was kind of strange.

It was also at this spot that I met Yan Yuqian. This happened in the middle of my third trip to China and it was a very lucky day.

That's Yuqian in the picture. She was camped out at BLCU, staying at the hotel on campus until she found a foreigner who could speak Chinese for the documentary she was working on. It was about education in China and this was one of her assignments. And if you need to find a foreigner who can speak Chinese in Beijing, BLCU is known as the place to go. I'd already been approached a couple times to be in TV shows that I passed on but what Yuqian described to me was something else... a month in a remote part of China that not many Westerners see, staying with the locals and teaching the children who lived there.

BLCU is also known as the place to go to find foreigners with money.

One night a girl who was about 19 or 20 stopped me and asked if she could use my cell phone. She was stranded far away from home with no money and needed to call home and ask her brother to come and get her. It didn't take long to figure out that this was not a scam. She had been doing farmwork in her hometown. She and her family and the region itself were very poor and she had come to Beijing to find work. But after about two weeks of trying she had spent all the money she had and had found that there is no work in Beijing for a woman from the country with no education. Later that night she told me that she had just dreamed that there would be work for her in Beijing and that's why she came.

Her brother couldn't come to get her for another two days but he was coming. She was very grateful when I gave her enough money to stay in some relatively safe place until then but when she saw how much I had given her she said 'the train ticket doesn't cost much more than this'. Well, long story short, before the night was over I'd paid for her train ticket, treated her to a meal at McDonalds (it was where she wanted to go... she was pretty excited about it. McDonalds is actually relatively expensive in China) and bought a sweater for her because it was kind of cold and she didn't have much to keep her warm in the small knapsack she was carrying. It sounds like a perfect sob story but it was true. I've been in touch with her many times since by text message. She keeps inviting me to visit her and her family in her hometown and I hope I can take her up on that someday. Her gratitude to me for the little thing I did for her is overwhelming. She will never forget me, she says.

Since she made it back home she's gotten engaged to the boy she left behind (she actually sort of ran away after a fight with her parents over that) and been flooded out of her home by the rains that swept through southern China near the end of the summer. And she's gone back to farming, and that's probably what she's going to do for the rest of her life. But she's able to say she's been to Beijing. Even though she was angry at her parents, she was going to get up early the next morning before the train left to make a pilgrimage to Tiananmen Square to buy a little something for them just to show that she'd been to Beijing, to Tiananmen Square, the heart of China.

If it feels like we're whipping through a lot of time with no pictures, the truth is I sort of stopped taking pictures. I think that's because after a while I was no longer a tourist but a resident and most residents don't carry cameras. And besides, if you're carrying a camera around all the time I feel that you're always one step removed from the event. My friend who painted the picture of our professor [see "Learning Chinese is Fun!"] carried his video camera and his late grandmother's chair around with him everywhere he went in China every day for six months. This was for a film he was shooting. I think the story behind it is that his grandmother had always wanted to go to China but never made it and this chair of hers which she used to sit in all the time was very connected to my friend's fond memories of her. So he took it all over China and got it into various settings and situations and shot video of it... He had a blind musician play cello while sitting on it on the Bund in Shanghai... He convinced workers to hang it from a towering crane and had it flown high over a construction site. I've only seen bits of the 40-min movie but it looks really good. If you're in Switzerland it's playing now at an installation there. Maybe I'll add a link later if he's got one or I'll at least add a shot of the rare Chinese stripper that he finally found to dance on the chair. But the point is, after six months of carrying a camera around he, like me, had no interest in carrying a camera any more. So I don't think I took any more pictures until I left for Hunan.

On the long road to a small village

2008-01-13T16:18:00.002-08:00

We went deep into Hunan, a province in southern China about a thousand miles from Beijing. A few Communist party officials had to be wined and dined before Baifan, the producer of the documentary, was able to get us into this area to shoot. Lots of hosting and toasting. That's such a big part of doing business in China. I've seen Baifan in action and he was clearly a master at it. You have to be a bit of a bullshitter to do it right and he was proud to tell you he was a master bullshitter. He taught me a few of the basic points -- just enough so that I wouldn't embarrass myself or offend anyone at meals we had with important officials (and I, as the visiting Westerner, usually had the most important seat to the left of the host, or the second most important seat to the right (or the left?) of the host -- the most important seat generally being where the host would sit, the seat facing the door of the private room where we'd gathered. By the way, the least important person would sit in the seat with the back facing the door). I did a lot of toasting and felt pretty good about it but supposedly only barely scratched the surface of mastering the subtleties of it.

There were many stops along the way before we got to the village that we would call home for the next month but these two photos represent pretty well the extremes that we saw:

First is the picture of the dudes hanging out in one of the few air-conditioned spots in the grim 'frontier' town that was our last stop before we got to the village which was an hour away by cab. I don't know if 'frontier' is the most accurate description of this town, or 'grim', but it did feel a bit like a mining boom town. Indeed, more than likely, it is many times better than it was ten or twenty years ago, and might be on it's way to getting better still. But if this is a transitional period it's one that looks to these poorly informed eyes like a 'grim, frontier' town. Because there is a lot of mining going on in this part of China making a few people really rich really fast and this town in the middle of nowhere seemed to have all the disparity of wealth and hardship that comes with that sort of thing. But even though it was grim in some respects I met some really friendly people there and got treated by them to some good food so, yeah, I might be exaggerating, but I like the effect so I'm going with it. I can only speculate but I think it's pretty good speculation that these dudes were among the lucky few to be reaping the big rewards from the mines. And I can only speculate that the row of "hotels" that lined an entire long street of this relatively small town were not entirely meant for sleeping, but where's the fun in not speculating?

The second photo is the closest I could come to capturing what is the fun and charm of the dangerous business in China that is the sharing of rides with family, loved ones, boyfriend, girlfriend, friends on whatever two-wheeled vehicle, motorized or otherwise, can be found. I would roll down the window and start firing off pictures whenever we passed somebody precariously and casually sitting side-saddle on the back of somebody's bike as they whipped through crazy traffic. I never got the perfect picture but I like this one of the girl and her father. This was taken in Changsha, the capital city of Hunan Province and our first stop after a three-hour plane ride from Beijing. [I'm not sure what 'extremes' I was thinking of when I first posted and compared these two photos. Openness and sincerity against corruption and cynicism, maybe? Sit-up-straight or slouch? I dunno.]

That's Changsha in the photo below taken from my hotel room and a good look at the pollution that's being generated in China by the rapid economic growth of the past 20 years. It looks like this pretty often although this was during the summer and it's worse then. In August I went from Beijing to a place that's about an hour away by rapid train. Lots of country in between. I was looking forward to getting away from the pollution for a bit but even the wide countryside that we passed through was covered with this gray haze.

This rapid development can be haphazard. That big ferris wheel you can see was built in some frenzy of exuberance about the future but now it just sits there, barely used. Not that that's necessarily representative of Changsha's economy, because the joint did seem to be jumping even though it looked overbuilt. I asked if the many recently built buildings were more or less fully occupied and was told that they more or less were but the answer seemed a little vague or evasive.

Changsha is also the birthplace of the insanely popular Chinese version of American Idol. I was told that the distinguishing feature of ChangSha is its long and famous history of being an entertainment capital.

But no wave of western-style political correctness has hit Changsha's entertainment venues. Baifan took us to see one of Changsha's best variety shows. A good time and a good show -- like the Ed Sullivan show on a good night, maybe, but without Ed -- so I hope my Chinese friends will forgive me for focusing now on what Westerners might view as a negative.

Chinese hatred of the Japanese is not mild, to put it mildly. I don't condone this but given their recent history with Japan you can hardly blame them and it seems like it would be this way even if the government didn't occasionally fan the flames of this hatred whenever they find it helpful. Be that as it may, it did seem very strange to this Westerner's eyes to watch this skit making fun of and excoriating the dirty Japs, all done in broad slapstick by a troupe of dwarfs... Ah, China, your delicate beauties are ever before my eyes. I'm tossing in the photo where you can't see much of anything but a beam of light to give you a sense of how much the audience loved the Japanese bashing and how much excitement the dwarfs caused when they marched a little Japanese soldier at gunpoint through the audience.

Below are some pictures of the overnight train we took from Changsha. We slept stacked three to a wall. Cozy. Many people say they can't sleep at all on these things but I slept like a baby to the rocking of the train.

Below is an alley in the 'frontier' town. This looked to me like it could be right out of one of those dystopian Asian animation flix so I thought it was a cool picture for that reason. But seen in context it wasn't quite as grim as all that. All you had to do was turn around and you'd see a fat clump of fruit stands right there bursting with color.

Here's an addendum to the two-wheeled ride-sharing photo from above. Don't know why this fascinated me so much. Of course, bikes are such an important part of being a city in China and I loved seeing the various combos of people on bikes and imagining the stories connecting them. I'm pretty sure this guy was actually working. Kind of a taxi service. I think I took these pictures in the city where our overnight train let us out. Back in Beijing I'd sometimes see little kids singing softly and swinging their legs straddled on the back of a bike while tapping in rhythm on their parent's back as they rode to school.

And below is a kid taking another form of transportation to school. We later saw other trucks like this crowded with people on their way to the market. I took this picture as we were coming down the final stretch of our journey to the village in a cab. It was an hour-long ride and in spite of our weariness from all the traveling there was a lot of picture taking going on and a lot of marvelling by all parties at the beauty and strangeness of this place that most of us until then had only seen in photos.

Arriving

2008-01-13T16:18:00.001-08:00

This is a shot from our first day there -- our walk to the village. The taxi driver would only take us so far. He refused to subject his cab to the conditions of the road leading to the village. So we had to get out and walk, and lug all the stuff we'd need for the month.

The story that Baifan set out to create for the doc is that Tianshu, my Chinese teaching partner, and I are eager teachers wanting to witness first-hand what education in rural China is like while we teach the children and share some of our teaching ideas.

If you look closely you can see Minnie with a boom mic and the cameraman Wang Wei standing out there in the middle of China. They were getting shots of Tianshu and me, the intrepid teachers, making our way to the village. Like most Chinese youth during the Cultural Revolution, Minnie's mother had been "sent down"... sent from the city to the countryside to learn from the peasants. A lot of twisted history to that period, of course. Minnie's mother feels that what she learned was valuable and she was very happy when she found out that her daughter was going to be living with the peasants for a month. Like me, Minnie had never seen a rice paddy before and her mother thought that was a terrible thing that should have been rectified long ago. We took care of that soon enough.

We had just gotten out of the cab when this dude came walking by with a huge bundle of stuff on his back, looking very much like a peasant. An iconic image of this sort of place but one that none of us had ever seen in the flesh so there was a lot of hustling to get the shot. Of course, like many other things here that we'd never seen before, that soon became a very familiar image to us. Unfortunately for that very reason -- the familiarity -- there are some good shots I never got because I always thought I'd have another chance.

elephants, wolves, bulls, fairies, trees, markets...

2008-01-13T16:17:00.003-08:00

We had 22 kids to teach, ranging in age from 3 to 8. All taught together in the same classroom. Quite a challenge. As it was explained to me, the nut of this doc was supposed to be about examining the differences between Western-style teaching and Chinese-style teaching. I was recruited to represent Western-style teaching but the simple fact that I’d been taught in the West was my only qualification. Many of the people in the village had never met a Westerner before.

As for Chinese-style teaching, it’s more like stuffing a duck, as my Chinese teaching partner described it to me none too fondly. Lots of rote memorization and lots of spitting it back on tests. And at the very end of it all in the last few days of the lives of every high-school kid across the country there's The Test -- the all-important and all-painful test that will determine the very course of the rest of your entire life right then and there because it will precisely determine which university you can go to. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but it's not too far off. There's no such thing as a 'personal statement' on college applications in China, that's for sure. Just The Score. This test rules a kid’s every waking moment for the three years preceding it. There is so much pressure that everything else that could be part of a kid’s life is ruled out. There is no room for imagination or innovation, and no encouragement to do anything imaginative with all that information that's been stuffed in -- just spit it back as well as you can on The Test. The Chinese government has recognized for years that this is a problem -- unimaginative teaching creates unimaginative workers and any country that wants to prosper in this era must have imaginative and innovative workers -- but they lack the resources to deal with it effectively or maybe they lack the imagination to break the hold that this mythic test has on every Chinese parent. Or, more likely, maybe they know that you can't have innovative thinking without free thinking and a repressive one-party government can't survive with a lot of free thinking running around.

All this worked right into my plan, which was to teach these kids how to tell stories and then to act them out dramatically. Or if not ‘teach’ them exactly, then explore that process with them and guide them to discovering the fun of telling stories, while keeping to myself how important that is. Because it is important for kids to be able to tell stories about their own lives. I actually said something quite eloquent on camera, I think, believe it or not, about why I feel this is so important... something like "without imagination you can’t keep hope alive" in a remarkably off-the-cuff moment that felt like it hit... but I can’t remember now exactly what I said so you're stuck with this clunky little phrase.

I wanted to have these kids taking one of those stories that they made up and putting on a big production of it in the back of this classroom by the end of the month. My old girlfriend, Andrea Dishy, used to do this sort of thing in public schools throughout New York City with an organization called Creative Arts Team. Andrea has an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU and is a recipient of the Paul A. Kaplan Fellowship for excellence in the field of Theatre-in-Education. This teaching plan that I wanted to try was inspired from having watched her at work. She spent a couple of very long international phone calls with me holding my hand and giving me some guidance before I left for this adventure. What I did was but a pale imitation of the great work that she did but what I did was pretty wonderful and I couldn't have done it without her. Thanks, Andrea!

Speaking of challenges, it was almost impossible to get these kids to raise their hands at first much less use their imaginations to be elephants or wolves or trees (there's a Chinese saying: "the nail that sticks up gets pounded down"). They were very used to the Chinese method of teaching and really quick and responsive when presented with that but very uncomfortable or confused when confronted with any different sort of approach. I was also slowed toward my goal because Teacher Zhang thought that what I was doing was a waste of time and he didn't understand why I wasn't drilling the kids in English vocabulary. So, to keep the peace, I started pretending I was teaching English, but it was really just another way to get into the storytelling. I would give the kids a new English word or two and ask them to come up with a story using those words, or I would teach them the English version of a couple good words from a story they'd just made up (and Tianshu was always standing close by, ready to help me when I stumbled with my Chinese, which was pretty much all the time, but it worked).

Luckily, we happily had them doing all that I'd hoped for by the end of our time there. All this came together in the very last class with Tianshu and I up the night before getting ready for the big final production really wondering if it would happen at all. The story the kids came up with was so good and hit on so many things about their lives, it really made me happy. We had every little kid in that class involved and laughing and loving it, playing elephants, wolves, bulls, fairies, trees, markets... Unfortunately, though that incredible burst of imagination and freedom from all the kids was filmed, I have no pictures of it. Just know that it was wonderful to see these kids doing this, especially after the struggles of the first few weeks.

That’s Teacher Zhang in the classroom. He lived right across the schoolyard. We had all our meals with him and his family. This is one of the shots I fired off very quickly when I started to realize that just because this stuff was getting shot for the doc didn't mean I was going to have any record of it. For instance, I don't have a picture of me banging on the bell above the door to call the kids to class. If you need a little spur to imagine me doing this, you could watch a movie called "Not One Less", by Zhang Yimou. A nice movie. The people and the place and the teaching going on in that movie are very much like what and where we were, though our setting was much more lush and beautiful than what you see in the movie.

So, I basically slept on a board for a month. Here's the board. With a wider reverse angle looking out the door of my bedroom. I, along with Tianshu, had the luxury accommodations (the crew had to sleep two to a 'bed' in one big room). The classroom was right next door to my bedroom. By the way, that picture of the classroom was taken during "reading time". It seems that you must shout when you're learning Chinese in some parts of China (Teacher Zhang was always telling me to speak louder whenever he saw me studying Chinese). And since these kids of all different ages were all at different reading levels they would all read on their own. At the same time. Out loud. Very loud.

Below we have the obligatory photo of the outhouse... better known as squatting-on-boards-over-an-open-pit. It was at least a week into our stay there before we started to confess to problems with 'splashback'. As the days wore on, we enjoyed sharing our own private solutions to the problem and how we'd arrived at them and the fine-tuning of same as time passed. Everybody came up with slightly different solutions and we actually had a little argument one night about whose was the best.

The place where they lived

2008-01-13T16:17:00.001-08:00

The kids would ask me if I liked the place where they lived. I said I did. Told them the scenery was beautiful. They agreed. They liked it there and I could tell they were glad that I felt the same way.

Lilly

2008-01-13T16:16:00.001-08:00

This is just a cute picture of one of my favorite kids there getting hugged by one of her friends. This was taken during the first weekend before we really got to know everybody. Her Chinese name is Shi Lijuan. We gave her the English name, Lilly. You'll probably see her in a lot of the later photos, hanging around and always getting involved and always smiling. I made her cry on our last day there, less than an hour before we left. I still feel bad about that, especially when I look at her smiling face here. She and Wu Fanfan would go jogging with me. At the time it was frustrating because they were always stopping to pick flowers to give to me, so it was hard for me to break a good sweat. But I told myself that I'd soon forget that I didn't get a good run in that day and would long remember them stopping to pick flowers for me and occasionally flopping on the ground playing at being exhausted and refusing to move. I'm going to get their shoe size and send them some running shoes. They were running on rutted rocky roads in plastic sandals with torn straps. Lilly started limping but refused to admit that she was hurt as she kept shoving flowers in my hands. I want to give her the shoes because she could use them but also because it breaks my heart every time I see her smiling open face here and how much it changed after I made her cry.

The reason she cried on that last day was because I took a book out of her hands that she suddenly decided that she wanted but which I was going to give to someone else more able to read it. This was during some last minute gift giving. I did then give Lilly a notebook with a picture on the first page that I drew of the two of us running with Wu Fanfan. She wouldn't stop crying though. She really seemed betrayed. I think I finally made her feel better. At least she started smiling though her eyes were still swollen from crying.

kids wear my hat

2008-01-13T16:13:00.003-08:00

random pictures taken by the kids

2008-01-13T16:13:00.001-08:00

The kids would always ask if they could use my camera. Or my tape recorder. I had a little tape recorder that made decent recordings. They would take it and sing into for a long time, enjoying hearing themselves. I still have some tapes that they made. They sound pretty good and they all sang very passionately but naturally. I at first thought they were singing native tunes handed down from generation to generation, and I felt privileged and lucky that they wanted to share these treasures with me and to preserve them as part of their village's noble history on my tape recorder but it turns out they were only singing the latest pop hits, some of them with lyrics that were pretty risque for 12-year-olds. Oh well. It's no surprise, I suppose. The sense that we had walked back in time to a place untouched by the changes of the past 200 years was always set right by the common sight of a big satellite dish in the yard of an old house. I never took a good wide picture of the village which is a shame. It was quite a sight. Except for the satellite dishes and some electrical wires strung loosely here and there it was very easy to look around and feel like this place hadn't changed at all in 200 years, maybe longer. The water buffaloes, the roofs, the paths between the endless rice paddies, the people up to their knees in the rice paddies planting rice. The satellite dishes. Except for the satellite dishes it looked like a painting from long ago. I'm sorry I don't have a picture of it. The light was always very flat there and I kept thinking I'd have a better opportunity.

Anyway, this is a small sampling of some of the pictures they would take. And one example of the garlands that they used to make for us. And of the soccer ball that I bought for them. And a picture of Shu Xia's grandmother. Shu Xia is sitting next to her grandmother sipping one of the drinks that Saozi used to give the young students if they came into the house and asked for it. I got the sense that the one they gave to Shu Xia's grandmother was taken kind of clandestinely. Shu Xia's grandmother seemed to think it was quite a treat. She came back with her water buffalo one night near the end of our stay there. More on that later. The kids liked to help me study Chinese. There's a picture that one of them took of me studying on my own just outside my room.

Below is Shu Xia twirling. She was quite proud of that dress and seemed pretty intent on getting it photographed that day. I didn't see this picture until later. It's a nice picture. I think they had figured out that the place where I sat them to take their pictures in my hat had good lighting. This picture was taken in the same place in the back of the classroom. It was raining that day and a little moisture had gotten on the lens, which was a happy mistake since it adds nicely to the feeling of the picture. This is certainly one of the pictures that I'm going to print and send to China.

to market, shaving, eating, flowers

2008-01-13T16:12:00.001-08:00

Here are some pictures from a day at the market. The market was a 45-minute walk and a half-hour bus ride away. It happened every five days and you had to get everything you needed for those five days and then cram it on the bus for the return trip then haul it on your back from the bus stop to home. I took this picture of rice paddies as we walked along the road that day. There were rice paddies like that everywhere. Every family had been allotted a plot of land by the government years ago and it was from these rice paddies that the families got most of their rice for the year. It got confusing as generations split up the plots but made for some good conversation as it was explained to us. That's Yuqian on the right with Tianshu, my teaching partner (I'm happy to say that Yuqian has just arrived in New York and is getting her Master's degree at my alma mater, NYU).

Get a good look at the meat table and the rest of the big market streaming below and behind it.

We, being the rich and delicate people from the city, took a "taxi" most of the way back. Here's the view from the back of the taxi, which was actually a motorcyle with two wheels in the back and a box with shelter above it where the passengers would ride. The woman on the left is our beloved "Saozi", which actually means 'elder brother's wife' but is what we called Teacher Zhang's wife. Saozi could carry more on her back than I could on mine.

And here I am shaving. Sort of had to have a picture of this. The kids were fascinated with my shaving. Many Chinese people were also curious about the hair on my arms. More than once, people I had just met would satisfy this curiosity by reaching over without even asking and tugging at the hair on my arm. I think I had actually just finished shaving at this point and was only pretending to shave for the photo op.

The kids could come up with stuff to do with just about anything hanging around (like the message in leaves you'll see later). The flowers that you see above were made from palm leaves and then bunched together using more palm leaves. The final product looks complicated but it was actually easy to make and a nice way to kill time. They even taught me how to do it. They were always giving things like this to us. One of the kids hung this 'bouquet' in the curtains of my window and it stayed there until we left. I don't know how to fit these expressions of a vibrant imagination into the larger story of the Chinese education system... So, uh, how about another picture?

This is where we ate our meals, in Zhang Laoshi's home across the schoolyard from our rooms. These pictures were taken quickly on one of the last days of our stay there. I realized that for all the filming that had been going on I hadn't taken many pictures of a lot of the interesting things there. For instance, there is no picture of me wearing a conical hat and carrying two pails of water from the well on a pole across my shoulder and nudging big water buffalos out of my way on a narrow path between two flooded rice paddies. The photo with the big blur is of the place where our meals were cooked, and on the left side of that photo you can see the chunks of cured pork hanging on hooks - really more like fat hanging on hooks - that was the special stuff, but I couldn't eat it. One of the few things that I couldn't eat there. Or anywhere, come to think of it.

Ni hui jiao women yingyu ma?

2008-01-13T16:11:00.002-08:00

"Ni hui jiao women yingyu ma?" means "can you teach us English" and it's what a few of the older kids who hung around asked me one day.

These kids are aware by now that an ability to speak English is more than helpful in the new Chinese economy. But there are no native English speakers in this region and the only teacher anywhere nearby who would occasionally teach English could barely speak English himself. So it seems that the odds of them ever being able to speak fluently are pretty slim and I think these older kids are not too many years away from realizing this and also realizing how limited their chances are in this new ecomony. All this made their eagerness to learn that much more heartbreaking and made my eagerness to teach them Something in the short time I was there that much more urgent. But China is changing so rapidly now so who knows.

I do know that I loved teaching these kids.

This is a picture of Liu Dan, one of the kids who first asked me to teach them English. There's a nice story to go along with this picture which you can read about further down.

On one night at the high point of my impromptu English lessons I had about 20 students. Mostly older kids, but also a few younger ones from Teacher Zhang's class that we were teaching in the morning for the documentary. That night I even had a couple 18-year-old punks show up (and I mean punks in a judgment-free Ramones-punk kinda way, not a 'you lousy punk ya' kinda way). They probably only came around just to see what was going on and goof off a little bit but I did what I could to teach them. It had gotten around that a Westerner was giving free English lessons. Some of the parents were pretty excited about it, I think, and most of the students showed up ready to work hard and really learn, the few who could afford it even showing up with small notepads. And Teacher Zhang would always seem to stop in at just the right time with another piece of the precious and carefully hoarded chalk.

A couple times during the life of this great little run of impromptu classes I had to kick out kids who were goofing off too much and ruining it for kids who really wanted to learn. The rowdy ones were mostly boys (the punks only showed up once) and I felt bad because one of the boys seemed to be a good student, but he ran with his crowd.

And here's at least one picture of some of the boys who were finally not too shy to come around and stand still for a photo. The second boy from the right is the one I felt bad about kicking out.

One of the girls I tried to kick out (she kept coming back) was one of the kids who visited us regularly. She was a nice kid but would quickly get annoyed if she wasn't being given the amount of attention she felt she deserved. One of the other kids asked me one day if I knew that this girl would sometimes swear at me with a smile on her face and then get a kick out of me smiling right back at her without a clue. So that's why she was laughing all the time... Oh, well. I haven't spent much time learning Chinese swear words. Maybe it's time to learn. Maybe I should have asked her to teach me.

After I kicked out the rowdies, the students who remained were even more devoted. I think that's because they saw that I was devoted to them.

Later on I passed the punks in their tie-dyed hair and cheap but earnest funkster clothes perched on a hill and watching over the cows. We smiled and waved to each other as I jogged by.

The village chief

2008-01-13T16:11:00.001-08:00

After the first impromptu English class, that small handful of kids and I agreed to meet again for another English class at 5:30 the very next day. But the next morning the crew and I were invited to the village chief's house for dinner that night. I was torn about going because I'd just made this promise to the kids but you could hardly turn down the village chief and they told me he was quite a character. Happily It all worked out as you'll see in the next post. But first -- the village chief:

We took the opportunity while we were there for dinner to interview him for the documentary. We were trying to get some honest talk from him about conditions in the village and prospects for better education for the kids. Predictably he wasn't too forthcoming about that or just wasn't too well informed. He wasn't too well informed about many things we'd expected him to be on top of, such as the electricity outages. At random times and for hours at a time the electricity in the village would just stop. Supposedly it had to do with the mining that was going on all around and from which we could occasionally hear the long low rumble of distant explosions.

It was quite a feast. He supposedly got first dibs on the food in the village. Zhang Laoshi told us to notice how the village chief and his wife were fat, unlike the rest of the people in the village. (maybe they were fat but not by American standards. Just like me. Nobody there had any problem telling me I was fat, though now that I'm back in the States I'm at a stroke if not thin then relatively not fat even though I've put on a few pounds since I've been here.)

Throughout the meal I had been sort of quiet. I was enjoying picking up what I could from the animated conversation and I didn't want to slow it down with my halting Chinese. But I was very curious to know what the village chief thought of the US. I knew that if I asked him a simple little question like "uh, what do you think of America?" it would get a simple little answer. I finally decided to ask him if he remembered Nixon's visit to China in 1972. That got the ball rolling. Nixon's trip was a huge event in China (I'd already learned this from other older Chinese people I'd spoken to) and he remembers it well. All of a sudden we were chatting away about all sorts of things and eventually declaring that China and the US are now great friends. And before it was over the Chief and I were also the greatest of friends. In the middle of all this I said to him "It looks like we are the only two people still eating." Which was true. There were about ten of us at dinner that night and a whole tableful of different kinds of food had been set before us to pick and choose from family-style as is common in China. And if there's food in front of me, I'll keep eating. He took this as a great symbol of our friendship and was soon loading both of us up with more rice and beer and making challenges to see who could eat and drink the most. We became the hit of the show that evening and everybody was laughing at us and enjoying it all, laughing all the more when I'd get up to fill my bowl with more rice.

This is the village chief's house. Over the door is a sign that says something like "Village Family Planning Center". The chief, it seems, was quite proud of how well his village had maintained China's one-child policy and I'm sure there are some brutal and heartbreaking stories to go along with that. Inside in a prominent place were hung plaques from the government honoring the village for achieving this goal.

When it was over and we were saying our goodbyes the chief got me in a bear hug and wouldn't let go. It was quite a night for international diplomacy. Though not as nice as the night of what you might call international diplomacy I'd had with Gong Li. [REMEMBER: there's a prize.]

Message to me on stone

2008-01-13T16:10:00.002-08:00

Luckily my new students came around and saw me at the village chief's house. They had already read the note that I left them telling them I couldn't make it. I don't know how they found out where we were. I guess news travels fast there. Anyway, they knew which way we would have to go to get home and they left a note on stone to me so that I could see it. We had to step right over it. It says "Teacher Paul, we're waiting for you to come back. Can you teach us English? We're at Teacher Zhang's house waiting for you." And then on the right side of the stone they all signed their names.

Good night

2008-01-13T16:10:00.001-08:00

This was a great night. It was long enough before we were leaving that there wasn't much sadness about that yet but I think everybody knew that something special was happening here. We had a lot of friends at this point and everybody was used to coming around to the school and hanging out or playing or learning English. Sometimes it was hard for me and the crew to grab a needed minute or two of peace but it was still a cool place for everyone to be.

There was a craze of photo-taking that night and I don't know what inspired it but everybody was there and everybody wanted to be in the pictures. Even the boys were getting into it. It might have started because Shu Xia's grandmother came around with her water buffalo and the kids started playing with that. It might have been because the sun had just gone done and it was a nice evening. It might have been because Shi Mei's little sister was especially goofy that evening and inspired everyone else to get goofy.

I love these shots but I especially like the one of the girl peeking out from behind another girl in the middle of an otherwise uninteresting photo. That girl was so shy you could almost say she was scared. I think she had some sort of learning disability but the other kids seemed to treat her kindly. She would often come and hang around with everybody else but always way out on the edge and too afraid to get very involved. So it makes me happy to see her here very involved and smiling. I think one of the kids took this picture.

And then you've even got me doing the two-finger salute along with everyone else (by the way, to answer your question, the two-finger salute doesn't mean anything... believe me, I've asked). Anyway, it was a special time. After that the pending departure started to weigh in and every gathering seemed to have an elegiac tone to it. Don't get me wrong, elegiac has its place and makes for some great footage but give me this anytime.

Kids from boarding school

2008-01-13T16:09:00.001-08:00

This is from the last day of an English class I taught once a week for the documentary. We got this picture in a hurry just as we were leaving and saying our goodbyes. It was at a boarding school where all the kids from miles around would go after they graduated from the highest level that was taught in the villages. It was over an hour's walk away from our village. Maybe even an hour and a half. Some of the kids made the walk every day because their parents couldn't afford the $80 a year that it would take to house and feed them there. I used to pass them when I was jogging in the morning. The boys and some of the girls would start jogging with me. I would try to get them to stop -- I thought they were crazy... they had to walk for over an hour and yet here they were running and sweating with me! I liked it though.

Anyway, this is from the last day. The class that day was the best class I taught the whole time I was there but it wasn't filmed. I had come up with a lot of good ideas about teaching English from the impromptu sessions I'd started having with the kids from the village. We really made some fun progress that day. Even the few kids who didn't seem to care about learning English were getting into it. The first class we'd had there a month earlier -- which was a disaster -- was filmed. Oh well. We'd sort of had a falling out with the headmaster of this school just before this and we'd already gotten all the footage we needed from this place so on this last day we were just fulfilling a promise we'd made to the kids. I just wish I could have done more.

The girl in the back of the crowd was so sweet. She was a good student but like many of the other students she'd get so nervous in her eagerness to learn that she had a hard time catching her breath when you worked with her one on one. I'm glad my camera happened to choose her to focus on. She was short and had been scooting around behind the other kids trying to get into the picture. When you see her here I had just picked her up and plopped her on the desk that she's kneeling on.

Cool graphics. Homework waiting to be graded

2008-01-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

These are the notebooks the kids used in the boarding school. These were stacked up on a teacher's desk in the office waiting to be graded. It reminds me of another time in the States -- the aerodynamic whooshes and the racing forward into space and beyond, etc...

More random pictures taken by the kids

2008-01-13T16:07:00.001-08:00

Here are some more random pictures that the kids took when they were running around with my camera. The cage that the boy is holding is his cage of birds, the closeup of which is to the left.

Some students would always be crowding around our doors, very curious about us. You can get a sense of what that looked and felt like in the picture with the two fingers. Whoever took the picture and whoever belongs to those two fingers must have been sitting on my bed. It was cool to have the kids hanging around, but we did have to initiate some sort of control over it or it would have gotten out of hand. I, being a big softy, of course was not the one to initiate this, but I was happy that it happened. The kids got quite good at saying "may I come in" in English.

Saozi kills a chicken for daughter's return

2008-01-13T16:06:00.003-08:00

We had a bit of a feast when Teacher Zhang's daughter came home at the end of her school year. Saozi even killed and plucked one of the chickens that had been running around the yard. You can't quite see it here but there was a big gash in the neck where she had drained the blood. It was all in a day's work and the kids hanging around didn't pay much attention to it. Of course I had to take a lot of pictures of it and write an entire paragraph about it in this little travelogue. There were many chickens and much crowing left in the schoolyard after the loss of this one chicken. Indeed, I wished that instead she had killed the rooster that would start crowing every morning at 4am, sometimes earlier (note: roosters are Loud!)

Teacher Paul, we love you

2008-01-13T16:06:00.001-08:00

I came back from shooting some footage with the documentary crew one day to find that Shi Lifeng, Liu Dan, and Shu Caili, my three best English students, had left a message for me. They had lined up the desks in the classroom and using leaves had spelled out "Teacher Paul, we love you." They also used leaves to draw a heart on the floor. Shu CaiLi wanted a picture of herself sitting in the middle of it. She was a very good student but would get such a nervous laugh when asked a direct question that she could barely catch her breath and hardly speak. I could hardly speak when I saw these leaves.

I've bought a tape player and four sets of English courses that I'm going to send to the village for these three. The tape player is specially designed for language learning (I got one for myself when I was in China and all I can say is I wish I'd had it sooner). This should keep them occupied for a while and make up for my not being there. After that, I don't know.

Last minute pictures

2008-01-13T16:05:00.001-08:00

I plan to send some gifts to some of the kids now that I'm back in the States. The best way to do that is to send it through Teacher Zhang, so I needed to take some pictures to identify all the kids so he would know whose package was whose. It also made for some nice pictures.

Last night

2008-01-13T16:04:00.001-08:00

A lot of excitement on our last night there: happiness about all the new friends but also the weight of the pending departure and sadness about that. And some last bits of fun. Some of the kids with gifts we had given them. One of the kids, Shu Xia, very sad that we'd be leaving the next day.

You can't really tell from these photos but there was a lot going on around us while these pictures were being taken. A lot of running around and ungrouping and regrouping for different photos. It was getting late and the kids had to leave soon to get home before it got too dark. I think I was carrying around the pen that you see in my hand because I was still hustling to get those last minute pictures of my kids holding up the sheets of paper that they'd signed their names on. Also a lot of preliminary goodbyes and plans being made by the older boarding school kids to stop by early the next morning for a final goodbye before they started the long walk to their own school. And much of it being captured on camera by Wang Wei for the documentary as he hustled around trying to Capture the Moment. The funny thing is that now as I reconstruct the memory of this night and indeed of my entire time there, I'm hardly aware of any cameras being there. The kids we were teaching and the people we were with and the time and place overwhelmed everything else.

Last day, class photo. Back to Beijing

2008-01-13T16:02:00.000-08:00

Last day of class. Moments before we left the village for the last time. I've already told some of you that tears were shed when we left. I think the boy on the left is actually sneezing but the girl rubbing her eyes had spent the morning with us crying. They were happy kids but sad that day that we were leaving. I was, too.

But leave we did and I took my memories of this amazing time and all that I'd learned from these wonderful people and went back to Beijing.

I got back just in time for my finals and did pretty well considering I hadn't been to class for a month. I had some pretty good teachers while I was gone though.

And then I decided to stick around for another two months. I had some things I wanted to do yet and I had to make up for the month that I'd spent away.

During that time I started shooting a little film that I plan to continue here in the States and finish when I go back to China. All I had time for was a little test shoot of a couple important scenes. My cameraman and good new friend, Cai -- he found me stranded by the side of the road one day and gave me a ride back from the distant wilds of Beijing where the huge and new Chinese Cinema Museum that I'd been visiting sits all alone; we had chatted briefly at the museum where he works and he recognized me as he was driving by -- wanted to try out a new kind of camera and I wanted to explore the visual possibilities of a great location that the wonderful Eva found for us.

Eva is a young woman who'd been recommended to me as someone who'd never worked on a film shoot before but who was very eager to do whatever needed to be done because she's eager to work in film, specifically documentaries, and just wanted to be on the set. When I met her she was in that limbo that so many Chinese students have found themselves: waiting to see if she was going to be granted a visa to study abroad. The production manager who'd recommended Eva turned out to be unavailable and by then I had wisely scaled back my ambitions for this round of shooting and before it was all over Eva ended up wearing the hats of location scout, production manager, and even actor. Eva had found some actors for us to audition but as I was sitting there watching the actors audition and watching her I realized that she'd be great for the lead role. Which she was. I think she liked it and I'm really lucky to have found her. Any lack of experience was more than made up for by her intelligence and coolheadedness and I would never have guessed that she'd never worked on a film shoot. I was very happy when I heard she got her visa. She's studying in England now and I think she's going to be very successful at whatever she decides to do. That's her in the video below.

I was going to do a little rough cut of the scenes that we shot and add it here but since it was just a workout, a little shoot-around, if you will, I've decided not to ruin you as potential viewers of the final product so all you get now is this tantilizing clip of the artist at work. I don't know if Cai shot this knowing that this moment must be preserved for posterity or if he hadn't quite figured out how to work the on/off button yet.