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...