Writing to you tonight from the tail end of a one week visit to our school by a delegation of students and teachers from our sister school in London; the King Alfred School. Imagine for a moment that you live in a culture as the only foreigner building relationships and finding your friends and enemies before 24 as-foreign-as-you-can-get randoms drop out of the sky for five days before vanishing as quickly as they came, how would you feel? Up until this week Matt and I had been the representatives of the outside world to this small corner of China. Many of my kids have never seen a foreigner in person other than the two of us, let alone talked with one. We could control their impressions and try to bridge the gap with the year and a half of gained cultural sensitivities that seperates us from the posh London crowd. I know that this kind of exchange should be the sort of thing that I'm here to encourage, but I can't help feeling that these are my kids, not theirs, and in a way I don't want them to meet other foreigners. This visit brought home to me how protective I've become of these kids.
Reading this back again, it sounds much harsher than my feelings actually are. It was an absolute joy to see how excited our kids got about the chance to meet and talk with some of their English counterparts, but I think one of my students summed it up best in saying "Mr. Dan, this week you're Chinese, you're not interesting. Next week you can be interesting again." So, here's looking forward to next week...

Photos added

Added new photos to the dispatches photo site from Chengdu, Kanding and Tagong from my trip to western Sichuan Province last May.

The Purple Tablecloth

Just thought I'd add this quickly, a bit of my larger scale impressions in China from a journal contest

Visiting China for the first time is like being dropped off outside a house containing an immeasurable variety of experiences. The door to those experiences is locked not with deadbolts, but with secrecy and insecurity, with suspicion and inexperience, with shame and certainly with showmanship. The exterior, on the other hand, is ornate, beautiful, truly unique in the world and, in most cases, open to anyone who wants to visit. After all, who cares about going inside when out on the lawn you can look at the Forbidden City, Shanghai’s Bund or the Terracotta Warriors of Xi'An? The Chinese, whose pride is enormous are happy to accommodate and would rather you see the Great Wall than the dusty floors of a peasants home, yet in a country where sixty percent of the population are spread out over rural areas and most cannot afford to travel to see the Great Wall, it is the latter that is truly a greater part of China today. I came to China with the hope that teaching would provide a different opportunity. Certainly I was excited to travel and see the sights. Ever since my childhood bedroom was decorated with pandas, the traditional imagery of China had been lurking in the recesses of my mind. For the first few months I saw the sights and marveled at the novelty, but when the shine and gloss had faded from the newness of it all, I found it hard to see exactly where I fit in. No longer simply a traveler, I hoped to move beyond the tourist sights and into the world in which most of the Chinese people live. This has left me to confront the question, if I'm not a tourist, then what am I?
Wai – guo - ren /'waI gwכ rεn/ n 1 literal translation meaning “outside country person” 2 a term used by Chinese to describe anyone non-Chinese. The far more common slang form is ‘laowai’, a simple phrase repeated until it becomes burned into the mind. Any foreigner living in China outside the traditional big city foreigner enclaves of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong knows this phrase, having no doubt heard it murmured, shouted, whispered, stated, cackled, and otherwise thrown in your direction just about every time you walk down the street. While the attitude of this statement is as varied as its intonation, the ultimate truth behind it is always the same. “You are not the same as us. You don't come from the same place. You are an outsider. You are irrevocably different.” How do you begin to go about breaking down this wall and finding acceptance? Living as a foreigner in China is to be forever seeking the indefinably vague concept of “fitting in”. For me, a white skinned, blue-eyed boy, living in rural Hunan province means standing out obviously as a part of the ‘them’ in the us and them mentality that is so central to the Chinese psyche. It is difficult to avoid this single aspect of who I am pervading and altering every other aspect of my identity. Not a teacher, but a foreign teacher. Never the friend, always the foreign friend.
In a sense, this role is a tremendous responsibility. While in power, one of Deng Xiao Ping's greatest achievements was the beginning of the reform and opening up movement of China. My Chinese name, Deng Xing Hai, shares the same family name and I have always tried to look at this as a symbol for the role I'm to play while I'm here. Deng Xiao Ping's vision for the future of China was one of interaction with the rest of the world, not of the isolation and self-dependence preached by his predecessors. WorldTeach is in part a symbol of the realization of this vision, a constant exchange of thoughts and ideas between Chinese and non-Chinese. A good deal of this takes place in the classroom. Everyday when I look out at sixty faces and they look back at me, we cannot help but to exchange aspects of our cultures and to learn about each other.
However, this characterization of my identity is predicated on the assumption that the foreigner is fundamentally different. A flash of color in a monochromatic world. In fact, for most Chinese, I am to be kept at a distance from anything that might disturb the international perceptions of this People's Republic. I am a guest to be treated with kindness and respect, but ultimately better to be held at arms length. Yet, there are times when the barrier falls away for a moment or two and I am no longer the foreigner, but simply Dan or even Teacher Deng. These are the moments I find myself living for while in China. For me, the challenge of living and teaching in Liuyang has become how to move beyond the glossy surface of the face China presents to the rest of the world and to delve into the marrow of the nation. It is an attempt to acknowledge what lies outside, but also to continue into the home, and to see and experience the place where a family truly lives and where it keeps its soul.
In a row of nondescript white tile buildings just five minutes walk down the dusty country road that leads to my school sits a restaurant that has become one of these places. The Purple Tablecloth, as we like to call it, is not the sort of restaurant to which my school would have ever taken me. There are no young xiaojies dressed finely in elegant, traditional qi pao waiting to open the door for me, in fact there are no doors at all. Five small tables sit in a single room open to the road. The floor is unfinished concrete, the walls whitewashed and unadorned except for a calendar advertising Chinese medicine wine. When I arrive, two fans hang from the ceiling, one motionless and the other whirring slowly at the other end of the room keeping a lazy watch over two shirtless men digging into a dish of dried fish and peppers. A fluorescent light buzzes in the opposite corner with a chorus of flies adding their harmony. As always, the smells wafting out from the kitchen reassure me I am in the right place.
I had stopped in for a quick dinner with my friend Matt, just some dan chao fan and maybe some of Matt's favorite eggplant dish, qiezi bao. Walking into the back room we began to survey the ingredients of the day and to order from ­­­­­­Liu Mei Hua, the woman who makes up half the ownership and always greets us with a toothy smile. Her husband and the other half is Old Li, a wiry man whose standard uniform is plastic yellow sandals, a pair of dark slacks rolled up to just below the knee and a thin, white undershirt and who is responsible for every dish cooked in the place. This time there would be no qiezi bao as Liu Mei Hua quietly asked if instead we might not like to eat with them that evening. We eagerly accepted and sat down listening to the sounds of Old Li’s knife from the kitchen. A few cups of slightly bitter green tea later he emerged from the kitchen smiling with the last of ten succulent dishes. Lotus root, eggs, cucumbers, peppers, carrots and pork silenced us for a few moments, before we relaxed to share our latest news.
It wasn’t long until a few strangers stopped by the restaurant to see just what was going on. They bided their time, waiting in the darkness outside and eyeing us carefully before coming in and beginning their interrogation.
“Who are the foreigners?” they asked.
“Teachers” replied Old Li quickly, “up the road at Tian Jiabing.”
“Where are they from?”
“This one” indicating me “from America, that one from England” Liu Mei Hua answered.
“How long have they been in China?”
“More than one year.”As the questions continued, I realized that Old Li and his wife knew the answers to every one of the standard questions that Chinese always ask of foreigners, but that they also knew more. We shared not only dinner with each other, but also when things weren't going well at work, when someone we all knew had died a few weeks earlier. That evening we had sat together as friends and talked about our days, our work and mutual friends; all the things people talk about as equals. Those few hours encapsulated nearly everything I have come to seek in this place that has become a home to me. As we were leaving Old Li took me aside, smiled and told me next time he would make sure to cook qiezi bao, but it really doesn't matter. I don't come to Old Li's Purple Tablecloth Restaurant for the food anymore.

Toast

Who thought you could forget how to make toast? Well, I came back from Changsha this weekend and proved that you can. I spent the last few days of a relatively uneventful National Day holiday last week with my friend Zhao XiaTing in Changsha celebrating the Mid-autumn Moon Festival. While the moon watching was foiled by a dastardly and untimely two days of clouds, we did manage to get out to the Metro store that had eluded me all of last year. Metro is a sort of German Costco that has branches in some of the bigger Chinese cities and is the place to go for luxury foreign goods. My shopping bag included such decadences as three loaves of bread, pasta sauce, boneless chicken breasts, butter and microwave popcorn for Colin among a few other things. Foremost among the reasons for going was getting the proper ingredients to take advantage of the toaster-oven left to me by my friends John and Erin when they left to go back to America at the end of last term. I returned home to Liuyang brimming with excitement about the large number of pieces of toast I was planning on eating. I popped my first piece of bread in and sat down to watch it. Unfortunately the toaster was set to 'slow-roast' and didn't do much of anything for a while. I gathered my wits and tried again, this time managing to 'broil' the top of the toast and leave the bottom untoasted. My third attempt came to a rather flaming end as I put the toast below the rack and far to close to the heating element. At this point, I'm a little nervous because it's really hard for me to go get more bread and I'd gone through three pieces without success. I popped in prospective toast number four certain that I had set everything correctly. I sat and watched to toast through the window to make sure nothing would go wrong and while water may not boil if you watch it, toast still toasts and a few moments later I pulled the perfectly golden brown toast out of the oven, slathered it in butter and reveled in one of those 'little things'.

Senses

If it weren't so gradual, it would be debhabilitatingly overwhelming. And yet still there's always a moment of recognition, and in this case the moment seemed realized in all its aspects via an attack on my senses.

The trigger is the acrid smell filling and burning my nostrils. It's been inescapable in the valley these past few days, drifting in through doors and windows from its source, the regenerative burn of the rice paddies. It says something for the strength of the smell that we even notice it in a place where most of the industry is concerned with regularly blowing things up in the process of inventing and refining fireworks.

As if in an attempt to match the bitter scent, a dull haze hangs between the hills turning photographs into water colours by stealing their clean crisp lines. Individual trees on the hills are blurred to an indistinct blurred dark green. Stopping to take a look around me on my way down the road for a dinner at another small resuruant know only as The Purple Tablecloth, I can see the fields have lost the lush green color that surrounded the school when I arrived replaced with a mottled pale green and gold, some fields ripening before their neighbors. The soft texture and lush sway of a nearly infinite number of ripening stalks have also given way to a countable number of stunted and sharp stalks and roots left to be burned as fertilizer for the next year's crop. Anywhere there is smooth concrete, the streets are paved in a pale gold layer of drying rice. The view brings thoughts in my head of the yellow brick road of Oz.

The taste of the moment is one of dry dustiness. Otherwise rare throughout the year, the short fall brings a few weeks of satisfying respite to bridge the oppressive funrnace of a Liuyang summer and the damp bonechilling cold of an unheated winter. The leaves along the road must also feel this as I notice them covered in a dull reddish coat kicked up by the occasional passing truck. While the farmers race finish the harvest before the cold and rain arrives, these leaves must hope that moment hurries along. I for one can at least quench this thirst with a cold beer at my destination.

The only sound I notice is the rhythmic whirring and whining of the hulling machine. A husband and wife, neither more than five and a half feet tall stand by the side of the hulling machine. A cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, he greets me with a soft 'ni hao', audible but delicate enough that the ash holds it's loose form at the end of the cigarette rather than falling to the ground, before turning back to his work. He is collecting the valuable rice into enormous bags while it's discarded armour plinks to the ground cracked and defeated. His wife, concerned only with maintaining the steady beat of the hulling machine stares following my progress down the road, her right arm, cranking and turning the dark brown wooden handle with muscle memory as its infallible guide.