Wednesday, December 9th

Dear readers! I've been neglecting my blogging duties lately, mostly because my internet is always causing me grief, but I've also been busy with lots of things - like being a judge for an English competition and going to Chinese student talent shows. (As evidence of my laziness, I'm just linking to Jessica's and Tae's posts on these events). I feel like the past week has been filled with an endless amount of good news/bad news moments. As Grizz Chapman would say, "It's just a roller coaster ride of emotion in here." The good news? I'm going to travel to Laos this winter with my friend Hanna, an all-around awesome person who I haven't seen in years. The bad news? I found out I have to stay in Dalian later than I thought, while most of my friends leave me for sunnier and more exotic climates. Meh.

More good news has included receiving wonderful packages (my sweet cousin Julie sent me DVD box sets of The Wire), and talking to friends back home online and on Skype. Chandler came to visit this weekend, which was great. I've successfully infected Jessica with a love for "30 Rock." The kindergartners finally respect me and we have had some awesome, funny classes lately.

Bad news? Personal relationship problems. Having NO idea what to do next year (stay in China? move back to NYC? Try California?) Being invited to English departmental meetings where everyone only speaks in Chinese. WTF.

...it's pretty obvious that I'm not in the best mood today, but luckily these sorts of days have been few and far between in Dalian. I think with the semester wrapping up, lots of things are coming to a head and I'm just letting them all get to me. Time to take a deep breath and grade some papers! Westward ho the wagons!

"Hello, Teacher!"

Maggie, can you tell us more about your classes and what you do with them? Either here or on the blog? I feel like I still don't have a good sense of what the teaching part of your trip is like. Is grading papers as fun as it sounds? Because it sounds AWESOME.

Ask, Freya Ariel Bellin, and ye shall receive!

I realize that aside from talking about my student crushes, I haven't done too much reporting on my teaching life here. Mostly it's because I'm still feeling my way through it. I've only been doing this for about a month and a half - and while I teach eight classes a week, I only teach two lessons (Speaking and Reading) and I've spent most of the time trying to figure out how to be sorta kinda effective.

So far in my speaking/listening class, we've done a variety of things: introducing your classmate, speeches on your favorite musician, a mock job fair, an activity where one person describes a criminal & one person draws the police sketch, dictation exercises, songs, tongue twisters to work on pronunciation, discussions about the differences between Chinese and American university systems, a movie, and a few games. So far, so good.

In my reading class, it took a little longer to get the swing of things. We have a textbook, which I hate, and the classroom is not conducive to reading nor discussion. (It's pretty much a language lab with computers) Plus, I view reading as a solitary activity, so how do you build a class around it? It turns out, you get your act together and figure out the computer situation in the room, and make Power Point presentations that correlate with the readings. I like this, because I make really beautiful Power Point presentations.

This week was probably one of the best reading classes I've taught. The text was on American symbols, such as the Statue of Liberty, and what makes something or someone "typically American." I began by asking them to name some qualities they consider to be typically American or typically Chinese. It was easy to get them to name positive Chinese traits: "Hard-working!" "Humble!" "Peaceful!" "Friendly!" "Unified!" They seemed less enthusiastic to name negative qualities, but some of the more advanced students took a gander at it. "Rigid." "Bureacratic." "Selfish." It was interesting to see what they came up with.

They view Americans as hard-working and creative, but also "aggressive" and "racist." I wrote "fat" on the board and they laughed. Ho ho ho obesity epidemic. While discussing the State of Liberty, I showed them a clip from The Immigrant (thanks MOMI!) and we talked about what the statue represented. Symbol #2 was Barbie, and I had some photographs of the original dolls and some of the newer ones. They all knew what Barbie was, although few of my students had them as children. The text mentioned that the doll was modeled after a German joke doll that looked like a "woman who sold sex."

Me: "What's another word for 'woman who sells sex'?
Student: "...Bitch?"

Well, not quite, but thanks for playing. We talked about prostitution for a little bit, where it's legal, and where it isn't. They thought the term "sex worker" was pretty funny. I talked about why Barbies are sometimes considered controversial, which they seemed to grasp. ("Math class is tough!") The next symbol was the "American Gothic" painting, and they loved the parodies of it. Symbol #4 was the buffalo nickel, which I had never heard of, but I guess it's around, and memorializes the destruction of both the buffalo and the Native American people at the hands of the settlers. One student asked if Native Americans are still around, which led to a long ramble on my part about reservations and the government and casinos and alcoholism and poverty. Straight up: I really enjoy hearing myself talk.

We had a quick discussion of Symbol #5 ("Uncle Sam") and I showed them some depressing political cartoons that I had hastily added before class.


Then I passed back their quizzes, which are always too easy for them, and collected the final drafts of the scary stories I told them to write. Some of them forgot to attach the rough draft, and I tried my best to act like a real teacher. "Well," I sighed. "I guess if you don't have it, you don't have it." A couple more students came up to me to tell me they also forgot. "I'm really disappointed," I said. They all looked stricken, but I'm a terrible actress, and I think they knew I was bluffing.

There's more, but I'll stop my rambling for now - our friend Chandler is coming up from Hangzhou to hang out for a few days, so I have to get out of my pajamas and into something presentable. Thanks for following along, dear readers. Shabbat Shalom!

Art and Gender at 798 Art Zone

I know I posted about 798 a while back, after my trip to Beijing, but I was going through my photos and realized there was some more cool art that I wanted to share, specifically about gender. I'll try not to ramble, but just quickly: in the past few years, feminism has had a big, big impact on me. It grew slowly, from taking courses at school and meeting people like Helen O'Connor and Alice Mishkin, who grew up with feminism in their lives & souls, to centering my film thesis on some of these issues, to reading feminist books and blogs, and working on women's issues documentaries, et cetera.

I get nervous when I talk about this stuff, because it begins to sound really evangelical. I start using phrases like, "When I found feminism..." and I feel like the word "Jesus" is just going to slip in there accidentally. But I'm sincere! For me, it was like something clicked - so many parts of my (limited) life experience suddenly made sense. Feelings I didn't have a name for suddenly had a name. Things that I just assumed were part of life suddenly seemed absurd. 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime? How is that a statistic that we're okay with? How is that not considered an emergency?

Okay, off my soapbox! (I think 1:15 a.m. is not the best time to write blog posts) Anyway, I find all these things really interesting, when not infuriating. 798 had some cool art about gender issues. One exhibit was a pair of photographs by Jeong Meyoon, a Korean artist. One was called "Tess and Her Pink Things." The other was called "Terry and His Blue Things."



Isn't there something both unsettling and pleasurable about those photographs? You can see more on her website, where she also notes: Pink was once a color associated with masculinity, considered to be a watered down red and held the power associated with that color. In 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, an American newspaper, advised mothers to “use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

The other piece of art that I liked was in a little gallery with only a few items, the main attraction being two large metal cutouts of the classic male/female shape.

Guests were welcome to climb into the shapes and stand there. The gallery owner helped me into the female shape, but I was too short for it, so it was really uncomfortable and awkward. The rest of the gallery was filled with photographs of people doing the same.



I thought it was a really fun and clever way to demonstrate the difficulties of fitting into a prescribed idea of "male" and "female." I got a kick out of it.

(Okay, I should go to sleep now. Ah, the life of a night owl. 我 要 睡 觉)

Thanksgiving Recap

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! My internet has taken a break from hating me, and I'm using this opportunity to recap our holiday, which was really nice.

First, we got all dressed up and went to the New World Hotel, downtown. There were a bunch of other Westerners there and while they're perfectly nice, we were all feeling horribly anti-social and sat at our own nice little table and drank red wine and ate delicious Western food and mostly ignored everyone else. The food couldn't compare to my aunt Adria's cooking, but it was still pretty good - turkey, lamb, pasta, vegetables, sushi (!), bread, cake, and so forth. I think we were all really happy with the whole meal.


After the food and the red wine I was feeling tired, but luckily for me, my friends have lots more energy and force me to do things that I'm later grateful for. So it was onwards to a jazz bar, which turned out to be awesome. It was a weird, dark, oddly romantic place with lots of bizarre old-fashioned furniture and paintings and expensive drinks.


And of course, since this is Asia, they had to add flat-screen TV's and neon lights - just in case the room was too classy or something.


To add to the fun, the saxophonist came over and chatted with us (well, mostly Tae) while his son crooned English songs and his wife played piano. We all just hung out and drank and felt very old-fashioned with our high heels and martinis. This photograph doesn't even capture it, but Chris looked 100% like he could have walked off the set of Mad Men.


While parts of me really wished I could have been in New York or Maine (Andy, that whole thing looked amazing! I'll blow out some metaphorical turkey candles in your honor), I had a very nice Thanksgiving. Next celebration I'm excited for? 我的生日！

Some Thoughts, Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof

I've been having some conflicting thoughts lately, about the Chinese people and repression and government and the private thoughts of everyone around me. I asked my students whether they considered American cities to be safe or dangerous, and they all shouted in unison, "DANGEROUS!" My instinct was to disagree, to tell them that they've been swayed by the media, but then I thought: well, in comparison to many Chinese cities, they're right. Some American cities are much more dangerous. So whose perspective do we privilege here?

Luckily I'm reading a book now that articulates my thoughts better than I can. Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn wrote "China Wakes" in the early 90's, but I think a lot of it still applies. It's a great book, very smart, and has Kristof's trademark sense of childlike wonder, combined with some fairly scathing criticism. Today at lunch I was reading a chapter that seemed to glorify capitalism too much for my liking (a free market is not the answer to all of life's problems!) when then I came across a passage that really resonated with me:

"I couldn't help thinking what would happen if a Chinese journalist roamed the United States reporting about crime. He would travel around, visiting the urban slums, entering the crack dens, interviewing the rape victims, consoling the children of the slain. No doubt he would be indignant at the senselessness of the crime, at the government's failure to control guns, at society's inability to confront the drug problem. And his passion would come through in his articles. His material would be accurate, and it would leave his Chinese readers feeling that America is a violent, dangerous, uncivilized country. Talking all the time to crime victims, he might well conclude that the United States is a society reverting to the jungle. The government would seem fundamentally immoral for looking the other way as people are gunned down in the schools and the streets.

But when this reporter dropped by ordinary middle-class homes - like those of the Kristofs in Yamhill, Oregon or of the WuDunns in New York City - he would find conversations a bit puzzling. The Kristofs and the WuDunns would certainly agree that crime is terrible, but then they would cheerfully move on to other topics. The reporter would single-mindedly bring the conversation back to crime, asking how they could live with the knowledge that they might be shot down any time they walked on a public street. The Kristofs and WuDunns would shake their heads soberly and grumble that the streets really are awful, and then they would move on to discuss the day's news or some recent book or film. The reporter would ask about rape and burglary and bank robbery, and a few awkward silences would result. If the Chinese reporter asked whether the United States government would collapse in the next few years from the crime problem, he would get funny looks. And when he left, the Kristofs and the WuDunns would say to each other, "This guy may know his crime statistics, but he sure doesn't know America."

As I flew back to Beijing from my interview with Boss Zhang, I wondered if that was the kind of role I was playing. Was I so obsessed with human rights violations that I missed the rest of the tableau of China and the buds of a civil society? Was my writing so focused that, however accurate, it was misleading? Was I deceiving myself?"

While there are some fundamental problems with China, for sure, I sometimes wonder how much of a double standard I have about my own country. Anyway, "China Wakes" is great food for thought. (Oh, and Freya, I plan on reading River Town very soon! Thanks for the recommendation!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Even though it's the middle of the night in The States, it's officially Thanksgiving Day in Dalian, China! As my sister says, I am the future. Tonight we're going to a hotel, where we all plan on eating a disgusting amount of food, in the American tradition. I'm going to borrow Jessica's royal blue dress and just live it up. The dress sort of makes me feel like her.

 

So what am I thankful for, this Thanksgiving? Many things. 

 

1. Wonderful family and friends back home. 

 

2. My health, and the health of my loved ones.  

 

3. Having the opportunity to travel abroad. 

 

4. The community of people I lucked into, here in Dalian. 

 

5.  Access to good movies, books, newspapers - free of censorship! (At least when I'm in America).

 

There's a lot more (mostly involving food) but that's enough for now. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

 

 

A Conversation with my Speaking Partner

Last week I met up again with Anne (not her real name) and we had a nice time, as usual, practicing our respective foreign languages. During our English time, we talked a lot about President Obama and his recent trip to China. She's a pretty big fan of Obama's, as am I, and so we chatted about why we like him. She is optimistic that he won't interfere in China's business, and I like that he's smart, thoughtful, and a good communicator. I also mentioned that I liked him much more than his predecessor, and an interesting conversation ensued. (Keep in mind that these issues are still very sensitive here, and that they don't have freedom of information or press). 

Anne: Why don't you like President Bush? 

Maggie: I didn't like President Bush because I didn't like a lot of his policies. Also, we went to war in Iraq, and during that time there was a lot of torture and human rights abuses. 

Anne: Do you think China has human rights abuses?

Maggie: Well, I think a lot of countries do, including America. But yes, I think China does have some human rights abuses. For example, people being in prison for a long time without a trial - 

Anne: But, have you seen the movie - the Shank...?

Maggie: The Shawshank Redemption? Yes, I have.

Anne: Well, that man was in prison for a long time and he was innocent.  

Maggie: Absolutely, it happens in America as well, and it's terrible. But I think it also happens in China. 

Anne: Perhaps there are a few cases, but I think the news you get is not always right. It's not always accurate. Do you read the BBC news?

Maggie: Not really, I mostly read The New York Times. 

Anne: Well, sometimes one event will happen, and they will take a photograph of another event, and use that photograph in the story. It happened this summer, with Xinjiang. It makes me so angry! China is not an aggressive country. When there are problems in Xinjiang or in Tibet, they have to go in there, just to...I'm not sure how to say...

Maggie: Keep the peace?

Anne: Yes! To keep the peace. China just wants to have harmony. Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang - it is all one China. 

[Awkward pause]

Maggie: Well, that's why it's good for me to talk to people like you, and see what you actually think. Because you're right, the news I get in America is not the same news that you get. 

We talked some more, but that gives you the main idea - I still think she's super smart and spunky and awesome, but as an official member of the CPC, she clearly believes the party line. I may not be an expert on the country, but I do know that China has lots of human rights issues. I would check Amnesty International to give you some cold, hard facts, but the website is blocked - of course. Oh, China!