Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 5
A student with a slight squint in the back row of this class chooses Albert Einstein as his English name. Writing about himself, he quotes his mother’s exasperated words to him: ‘You can play TV games and table tennis very well, but why don’t you study?’
He begins to write his own defence, but unfortunately when the class ends the sentence is unfinished.
This classroom scarcely has the most basic equipment. As there’s no platform from which to reach the top of the blackboard, I struggle to pin the butcher’s paper board-sheets to the plaster walls above. Three tall boys, geniality and willingness unbounded, sit at the back of this basement class, and one or other of the back-row giants always comes loping forward to help, encouraged by yells from his classmates. Classes like this one celebrate anything that gives a break from the hell of unbroken reading and writing – anything physical, unexpected, disastrous, funny, mistaken or extreme is seized upon, bodies leap in their seats, heads go back as the boys roar and the girls shriek. The class is given to deafening, heartfelt exclamations. I’m always surprised that exclamations – spontaneous responses to universal experiences – are not the same the world over. Awe here is ‘Wah-ah-ah’, breathed in a soft gust in class when shown a picture of a sun-soaked New Zealand beach, or a large mob of sheep on a road in the high country. This banished class has a warm, as well as a fierce heart. Several of the students whose English will stretch to it ask me whether I miss my family. They worry about me, so far from my own country, and take high delight in telling me that New Zealand’s been in the television news as Jim Bolger has visited China. I’ve already seen polite write-ups in the ‘China Daily’ – always referring to him, with scrupulous respect, as James Bolger.
Their teacher, Cherry, is eager to learn too. The welcome to her class is warm but crisp – no flattering of the foreigner here. As her students try to impress with their spoken English and do her proud, her face shows amusement not anxiety. I think she’s a straight-shooter.
One of the first tasks for her class is to imagine they are all on a three-day plane trip to Beijing, and are allowed to take only ten items in their baggage. After some discussion, the students try to come up with a common list. Most look painfully blank. Cherry explains to me afterwards that the parents of these only children would always do the packing for their child’s holidays. At fifteen, the students have never packed a toothbrush. Foreign teachers learn in time, but the students too make many bewildering journeys into the cultural unknown.
An older class finishes its lesson by making an airport shop in the classroom with props brought from my flat. In each of the lower stream classes where parents pay for schooling, there is at least one student who can talk urbanely of the difference between the textbook airport and Los Angeles, while the rest of the class barely know what an airport is and don’t know that Chongqing has one. I naively expect that the shop will encourage a useful exchange, between customer and shop assistant, about sizes and colours and preferences. Instead shop assistant and customers haggle at length about price, loudly encouraged by their classmates. One customer, in his final outburst, retorts: ‘If you want me to take away this rubbish, give it to me as a gift!’ Commercial negotiation obviously begins early.
A class at the same level has been studying, from the British textbook, a unit on food. Motivation is high because food is a passion, and because they like to learn everyday Western customs. We look at a picture of an expensive London restaurant and a useful but boring conversation between two conservative customers and the waitress. We also study the menu, and the bill which is incorrect. Predictably, beyond an interest in the possibility of deliberate overcharging in the bill, no fire is struck, and they break into groups to prepare action and words for a similar scene in a restaurant to be presented to the class. There are some imaginative offerings: two flies in soup, one mouse in beer (planted by a customer) and a poisoning. The final offering is the most creative. A customer is appalled at being charged millions of dollars for an African dinosaur steak he’s just enjoyed. He protests, but the waiter draws him aside: ‘Ah, but Sir, that was the last African dinosaur, and the world will want to know what happened to it.’
This senior class leaves in a few days on a trip to a mountain five hours away, and invites me to join them. The prospect of a dip deep into country life is attractive, but I learn that the school cannot allow me to go with them, because there is no hotel and the students are to stay with farmers. The students themselves have lively fears of rats on the floors and fleas in the beds. The school authorities guard both my safety and my ignorance, and I must guard against seething at such restrictions. Chinese life has crevasses. They know where they lie – I don’t.
From what the students say and write, I’m slowly learning about their world and how they see it. I also need to understand what they think learning a foreign language is all about. One class studies a passage about Jackie, who went to London to study to become a professional dancer at the National Dance School. The students are asked to imagine they are Jackie and write a short letter to her friend Maria, describing her life in London. Most of the offerings are predictable and passably relevant, but one is strikingly original:
‘Dear Maria:
How time flies! My Miss Zhao is one of the most popular teachers in the school. Yesterday morning she came into class as usual. There was a big smile on her face. Well, I must stop now. Please write soon and tell me all your news. Dear, may the joy and warmth of Christmas fill your home with happiness.
With love from Jackie.’
Is this from a letter tucked away somewhere in their old Chinese textbook, or has the student used her photographic memory to string together strands from a number of sources? This ties in with what I’ve seen on class blackboards – chunks out of English books and poems, in archaic and complex language, dutifully copied by the students under the direction of their Chinese English teachers. The language taxes my own understanding. So understanding isn’t always the point here.
I, on the other hand, thought for many years that understanding was the key to unlocking all life’s secrets. At school, my understanding won marks. Then and later, there were warnings that understanding would only take me so far – wisdom was still a long way off. But I simply wanted to pass life well and be left in peace. I didn’t listen to the message.
The early years of our marriage strained our resources, as they do most couples, as we struggled to make a ‘we’ while holding on to the necessary ‘I’. I tried hard to understand him, and to understand myself – and failed in both. I couldn’t hear the drum this man I loved was marching to. It seemed he couldn’t hear my drum either, but more worrying was that I couldn’t hear it myself. I was marching alright – but to a drum I couldn’t identify. Perhaps I didn’t want to. Who was beating my drum, and what was it saying? I thought about our drums, and I wrote, and I read – but understanding was behind none of the doors I opened. Looking back, I’d have been better walking the hills. But against all the evidence, I still believed that relating was essentially a head-business. I felt I loved him across a chasm that held the secret of why he was as he was. I wanted to understand. I wouldn’t accept the mystery, and couldn’t simply respect it. Instead, I opened still more notebooks dedicated to understanding, and continued writing.
When I started teaching music, I was determined to give the children understanding of what they were doing. Otherwise, what was the point of learning? Conscientious and committed, I worked hard, preparing sheets of explanations the students never read. After all, they just wanted to do it and, in a very few cases, to hear it. Who cared about why?
One afternoon, Hope, the beautiful wraith-like teacher who met me at the airport, calls at the flat. She taught in Australia for six months and knows foreign teachers have needs.
The direct way she’s identified these, and acted, makes me look at her thoughtfully. Her face reminds me of the bluebell fairy in a book for which I had a childhood passion, but this 24-year-old with th
e soft lilting voice may have steel to her. She’s procured a key for the school piano – effectively my right of speech – and offers to find me a kitten. I take the rusty key but much as I long for something soft in this rock world, I decide to flag the kitten and tell her that for the present I’ll just talk to the other teachers’ pets. I’ve been amazed to find that the apartment buildings at the school are alive with cats and dogs, but brought up in a country blessed with space, I can’t face confining any animal to this tiny flat.
I collect my music scores and wander up the path. The music room opens off the end of the junior classroom block. The key graunches in the padlock securing the door. Eventually it creaks open. Framed and faded prints of Chinese composers line the walls and a red flag sits above the blackboard, on which is some interesting and unfamiliar musical notation. The floor is covered in grubby papers and drink cans, a twig broom abandoned in an aisle. The windows are iron-barred on the inside, but where they are open the trees fan in a breeze. The piano is small and plain and black – marked ‘Pearl River’, with three rusty locks roughly screwed to it, one on the lid and two on the keyboard cover. All the locks are broken. It is thick in dust from another of the school’s construction sites. Some of the lower bass notes have died and others whisper. A low B flat has seized, but the rest of the piano seems well in tune, with a sweet tone.
Students put their heads in the window as they pass and call out a friendly hello. I call back and smile, but I keep playing. I don’t want requests at this minute for their current loudspeaker favourites – the World Cup football song, ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ or ‘One Hundred Miles’. I need to play Bach – and a Prelude and Fugue take the air, high-minded and imperturbable here as everywhere else. The imperfect piano even rises to the ardour and conviction of a Beethoven Sonata.
While I am playing, a man and a woman clean the music room with twig brooms. Dust rises in a choking cloud as cans and papers bounce and swirl in the aisles. I’ve already heard evidence that a passionate love for music and rich student talent is fostered in this unpromising environment. From the classroom block at night, massed voices roar their country’s songs – the fervour and commitment carrying across the dark and deserted sports ground.
I need more music than an hour or two a week at the piano can provide. I’ve bought some tapes of traditional Chinese music, and play them at the flat at appreciative volume, both out of enjoyment and to show the neighbours I’m settling in. Many of the instruments are strident and shrill to a Western ear, but there are also instruments that pour out subtleties and suggestions, oblique and elusive. The wind sings sadly in the ocarina, as in a vast cave by the sea, and the volatile family of bamboo flutes suggest a Chinese Pan.
Some passages in traditional Chinese music sound histrionic to me, but how do they sound to the Chinese ear? I also hear a great beauty that’s strange but also familiar – as though I once knew it. Is the Eastern world simply a part of ourselves that we’ve lost?
The tapes of European music I brought with me are even more vital daily rations. My sometimes precarious hold on mental order feels as though it owes at least as much to Mozart as to the soothing effects of jasmine tea. His music, celestially serene, is proving healing to my Western psyche, disturbed at living in this land of mirrors under veiled sun and stars. I listen to one of his piano concertos as I stand on my balcony in the evening and watch the boys playing soccer. When I climb into my sleeping bag for a break from China, I play Mozart’s Requiem, and in the evening, after I’ve watched the glories of China’s latest leaps forward on the 7 o’clock news, I listen to the Clarinet Quintet, as a reassurance that there’s more to life than practicalities and economics – at least for those who have enough to eat and leisure for listening to music.
Each evening, all ages in the teachers’ families join the slow wander around the athletic track. It’s almost too dark to recognise companions in the gloom, but there are the shadowy forms of old people, hands behind their backs and bandy legs, chattering huddles of young teachers, occasional small dogs, pale and feathery, trotting beside their owners. Small children sit on their haunches and watch, and an equally small lone soccer player shoots – in his imagination – the winning goal for China in the World Cup. The retired teachers’ tai chi group is practising for its forthcoming competition. There are a few wobbles among the stouter matrons, but the other aging bodies flow back and forth as though blown by the wind.
Joining the leisurely evening promenade for the first time, I find with relief that the gathering shadows, wrapping me against constant scrutiny, allow me to walk more freely. I also find that many of the women are walking backwards. This seems natural to them, so I simply try to avoid collisions. I meet Mrs Yu, a compactly-built woman in her fifties with an unassuming manner, who tells me she studied in Newcastle when she was younger. She’s a highly-respected senior teacher of English, and one of the four teachers in the school who have ‘special knowledges’ – which must mean unusual expertise in her field. Her English is unusually competent and relaxed, and she looks at me with a calm, frank eye. For some reason, I feel she reads me accurately. She insists that I turn round and walk backwards too: ‘It’s very good for women of our age – it exercises our stomachs.’
I wheel obediently in the gloom, and join the teachers, chatting where language allows about the small business of the school, watching the quiet cells of light in the accommodation buildings, hearing the noisier cells of the classroom block. We retreat around the track with dignity, like a video in slow reverse. I know I’m supposed to adapt to local conditions, but there must be a limit. The picture of myself reversing around a sports ground of a school in southwest China is somehow disturbing.
Mrs Yu disappears into the darkness. I hope I’ll see her again. The people around me all have a very strong sense of who they are – they’re Chinese, and that’s enough. But in this overwhelmingly Chinese world, with the autumn fog now creeping in, who am I? It’s reassuring that Mrs Yu seems to know.
The gifts students bring me are disturbingly generous. Some appear to be gracious courtesies, while others seem more warm-hearted gestures. Many students, in their cards, say thank you for the away-from-the-textbook teaching that only foreign teachers here have a chance to provide. I’ve brought with me, to use in the classroom, a hand-puppet kiwi that allows them to thrust their hands into another world; maps of our unthinkable part of the globe; coloured pictures, some with glittering expanses of the mythical sea; and games they can learn from with frightened delight. No-one else uses games for learning under the Chinese system. There are also tapes of New Zealand songs, astonishingly casual to the students, of which the most popular has been one sung by a young Maori with a guitar and a soft husky voice that suggests summer, eager movement, and warm brown eyes very like those around the classroom. ‘Tahi, rua, toro, wha,’ the students roar, in the spirit of the World Cup song that belts out from the loudspeakers at 6.30 each morning.
My classes often ring with laughter and excitement, but then I’m not teaching an exam curriculum. Sometimes I feel as though, in teaching terms, I have the only shop in town that’s allowed to sell ice-creams. I know many Chinese teachers, too, would like to sell ice creams. I’m surprised they don’t resent me more than they do. Their hands tied by the rigid examination system, they say longingly: ‘We’d like to be able to be kind to the students as you are, but we don’t feel we can.’
My official brief here is to teach spoken English, and I’d like to give the students what the examination system leaves no time for and their teachers generally haven’t the resources to give – the chance to learn everyday, up-to-date conversational English. Many of these students will travel to Western countries for further study. I’d like to help to equip them to make their way through an ordinary Western day with confident ears and mouths. Perhaps most of all, I’d like them to realise the simple truth that learning a foreign language allows you to make friends you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Albert
Einstein, the fifteen-year-old in the basement class whose mother is less than happy with his study, sends me a message in one of the school cards: ‘No laugh. No happy only reading, writing and moaning. You take laugh, happy and health to our. Thank you very much! (A little exaggerate) I want to ask your small question: “Do you hate take an examination education in China?” I only know I very hate it! Chinese friend: Albert Einstein’
The outside of the card shows a photo of the school, gleaming under a bright blue sky. It’s such an unlikely sky for Chongqing that I point this out to one of the older students – one I’m sure has a sense of humour – with the suggestion that the colour’s more promotional than realistic. But he replies earnestly: ‘No. The sky was that colour. I remember the day – it was in 1995.’
Having my company sought by the students, and being given gifts, really isn’t good for me. I’m pitifully easy to flatter, and the Chinese are so good at it. It takes real character to resist the suggestion that you’re an important person, and I don’t think I have it. Maybe I’ll just enjoy it; it’s such a change from real life.