Teaching at Yangshuo

The school is located right in town and from the roof there is a wonderful view of the Karst mountains and the rooftops of the houses. Most of the houses in this neighborhood look relatively new and there are solar water heaters on the roofs. Yangshuo is located as far south as Key West Florida and while it has no frost, the weather in the winters is very cool and misty. We have had very few clear days in south China including Hong Kong and Macau.

This Monday to Friday we will be going out to countryside villages and teach English to third to sixth graders. The schools have mandatory English starting in the third grade but generally don't have enough English teachers to satisfy the curriculum. The Owen School where we are staying in Yangshuo provides ESL teachers to these villages. Each day at 1pm we are taken by van to a different village and teach two classes of English to the Chinese students.

On Sunday we had a quiet day, walked around the commercial part of Yangshuo where the shops, stalls and cafes are located. Richard was still cold so we shopped for and bought a fleece for him. I don't know if it was a real Timberland or a knock off but the zipper seems a little cheaper than what I would have expected for a real one. We took a small tour on the Li River in a motorized Bamboo. The raft holds maybe 8 people but we were her only customers. The weather was overcast and cool so it wasn't an optimal time for floating down the river but the scenery was beautiful. The scenery was beautiful and she told Judy in Chinese what the names of each of the mountains were and refused to continue on until she took a picture of each site. The mountains are other worldly but just like they have been depicted historically on Chinese scroll paintings. After about a cold hour on the river we were dropped at the quai and went to a cafe for a real coffee. The Chinese drink tea not coffee so it is difficult to find real cups of coffee except in the districts that cater to foreign tourists. We found a small in just off the tourist commercial district and ordered our drinks. There we met a Chinese couple from Guandong and spent several hours talking with them. She is a business student in an MBA program at Columbia University in New York, he was a lawyer. Her English was quite good while his was marginal. We had a wonderful talk with her about modern times, the economy, the Chinese cultural revolution, nationality and ethnic identity. It was a relaxing and informative afternoon. We exchanged email addresses and went on our ways.

Monday the weather cleared and we had blue sky and warm weather in the Yangshuo valley. We spent the morning walking around the town, visiting the local park and orienting ourselves in town. We headed back to Owen College for lunch. The meals are quite good and the food is copious. Rice is served at all three meals. In the morning it is in the form of a rice porridge while at lunch and dinner it is served to accompany the stir fry dishes. Breakfast also has noodles, steamed buns and Beijing sticks, which are kind of like crullers but not sweetened.

After lunch we were taken to Moshan a small village about 20 minutes from town. We were greeted by the principal of the school who thanked us for coming and offered us boiled water before the class started. Since the water in China is uncertain, we will only drink the water if it is boiled. We are generally eating fruit and vegetables if they are peeled. We have seen along Li river that people wash their vegetables with river water, and we were told that there is little sewage treatment and that waste flows into the river. We taught two classes a 4th and 5th grade class. It was kind of like doing Sesame Street live. We did a song with them, acted out the meaning of each line and then had them perform it. We discussed the English words for body parts, colors, foods, and positional prepositions by acting out each word or phrase. The class rooms were very stark, with wooden desks, white concrete walls, floors and ceilings. There is no heat in the rooms and the children were wearing their outdoor clothing during the class. While it had warmed up it was still chillly inside. There were about 16 pupils in a class and they weren't the well behaved children we had expected. They tended to not pay attention, and talk to each other. I'm not sure if it was the substitute teacher syndrome that we all know from our own childhoods or there is a new sense of freedom and unruliness sweeping modern China. It is challenging, exhausting but satisfying to go into these agrarian villages and teach the children English. It seems that even if the U.S. fades as the predominant power in the 21st century, China's decision to teach all its school children English starting in the thrid grade will leave English as the common language (lingua franca?) of world business and tourism. Most of the classrooms had pictures of the pantheon of communism above the black board, namely Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Sun Yat Sen a nationalist and father of modern China but not fitting with the others. Those pictures are probably 30 years old or more but Mao is a continued presence in modern China with his photo on all the money.

Our mornings are free so on Tuesday we rented bicycles to get around town and visit the countryside. China outside of the city is an agrarian peasant society. Just 15 minutes from town the villages are agricultural, poor and run down. At the same time the gardens and plots are neat, well cared for and varied. We could see every sort of vegetable and fruit growing between rice fields. The rice was in various states of growth from just being planted, to flooded to large stalks coming out of the ground. Everything gets used and reused, piles of sticks, bales of rice straw, vegetable and fruit peels are each in their proper place. Old tree stumps are made into furniture. The people for the most part are tending their fields by hand with hoes, shovels and the fields are plowed by hand with a man directing a water buffalo pulling a plow. The valleys around Yangshuo are very smokey and hazy. There is a lot of burning, for cooking, for clearing fields, by the trucks powered by two stroke engines, by motorcycles and cars.

Bicycling through town is an experience. No one seems to really pay attention to the traffic laws. It is survival of the strongest here. If you are a bicycle, yield to motorcycles. If a car, yield to trucks. Every vehicle moves slowly enough so that somehow it seems to work but when on the bike, I find it necessary to scan the complete horizon in all directions to feel safe. We are driving, one gear girl's bikes with hand brakes and thick wheels. Anything faster that this would be dangerous to handle in this town. I can't imagine zipping through the city with my 20 speed racing bike.