The Canning Room

Doesn't even phase me anymore...

I can't remember what it's like to actually have traffic laws! This was taken in Shantou, and is exactly what the streets are like here...on a good day. I think I might even miss it a little!

And Happy Father's Day to my dad and all dads!

the crunch and the museum

sorry for the lapse, all. Finals are quickly approaching and the last few days, my life has been reduced to writing annual reports, nursing papercuts from thumbing through all these essays and blisters from constant stapling of quizes every moment I have between classes. I have to finish them all by tomorrow at 6pm, when Kate and I leave for Shanghai for the weekend. Woo-hoo!! The crunch will be worth it.

Last weekend's trip to the museum was fascinating. The museum itself was impressive, but the trip there was really something. 8 of us went- 3 teachers, 1 staff, 4 students. We took the public bus to the town where it was, then asked folks on the street how to get there. We followed their directions then got to this place that was a huge touristy park full of temples and a lake and little restaurants. They gave us a map and one of the students asked if this was where the cultural revolution museum was. The guy just pointed to a place on the map- It didn't make sense because according to the map, that place was a temple. I was sure we were in for another typical Chinese wild goose chase and that the guy had misunderstood us or we were in completely the wrong place. But we went in anyway.

The other thing was that it was raining and there was literally nobody else there. They took our money at the gate, but everything else in the park looked abandoned. It was surreal- like some David Lynch movie, walking past empty restaurants and paddle boats and brightly colored dragon sculptures, but everything was closed. We still kept walking...up this path that went straight up the mountain, surrounded by lots of trees, random chickens, and a stream...all eight of us and our umbrellas. Finally, we came to the top, looking out over Shantou, and sure enough, there was a big building up there that looked just like...a temple. The doors were all shut, but somebody saw us coming and opened up the doors and voila! Temple on the outside...but all kinds of cultural revolution stories, poetry, art, photos and paraphanalia on the inside. I have to wonder if it was intentionally "mislabeled" on the map...it had to be, right? Anyway, It was remarkable and beautifully done. Everything was in Chinese, but the pictures etched into the black marble walls got the message across. It was not a time in history that should ever be repeated.

The students translated a little for us, but mostly they just looked and read and didn't say much about it while we were there, or on the way back even. It didn't matter to me that this didn't open up a big heavy discussion about what we do or don't know about history, or even that I couldn't understand any of it. I'm glad that we got to see it and now 4 more students, who are sophomores, know that it exists, what it says and how to take the bus to get there.

I have photos still in my camera, but flickr seems to be off limits these days. We'll see if I can get to it next week.

the other side of illiteracy

First of all, I would never say that illiteracy is ever a good thing, but I was having coffee with a friend today, a researcher from the medical school studying bird-flu, and he said something interesting. He's from Spain and like me, still can't read Chinese. He said, "My mind is quieter here because I can't read anything." It seemed like a funny thing to say in the middle of Shantou, kamikaze motorbikes zipping around us, horns constantly honking at annoying levels, taxis yelling "nali? nali?" (where?!). How on earth could a mind become quieter in this place? But it's true. I agree, and it is because we can't read.

There are just as many billboards, street signs, directions, shop signs, advertisements and whatnot here as anywhere else. For the first few months, it was really frustrating to not know what they said. It was scary to not have a point of reference when I was in an unfamiliar part of town because I couldn't read the street signs. It was humiliating to go into a store and have to guess whether a bottle was shampoo or conditioner just by the shape of it. After a while, though, you do start relying on other visual cues, and you figure out other ways of knowing where you are. Ways that have nothing to do with words. And you just keep living.

I still wish that I had learned more, but the thing about not having access to all of those words, all of those advertisements, all of those commercials, all of those warnings, is that it's just so easy to ignore them when you don't understand them. They're just pretty chinese characters with a history so deep that I can't begin to understand it. I can just look at them as art and my thoughts inside my head can continue, uninterrupted, to be my own. It's a freedom that we rarely get to experience in our media-rich world today.

That said, I am really looking forward to knowing what's going on around me again.

This Week's Class Unit: Censorship

I came to China with a very neurotic mind. I probably came here with more fear about what I shouldn't do and what I shouldn't say or ask than was good for me, actually. Even now, I'm much more relaxed, but it's still hard to say for sure. On one hand, this is China. On the other hand, China is changing so, so quickly. Nobody ever told us what not to talk about. I try to notice patterns, but it seems so inconsistent. Blogs go up and blogs go down. Websites get blocked and then they're back again. TV shows suddenly turn into dancing penguin cartoons. Phone conversations get cut off just when they start to get interesting. Not always, just sometimes. Was that...? or was it just technology failing us again? It's hard to say. The closest thing we'd get to any sort of direction is "Just stay away from sensitive topics". Great. Thanks. Communication is so subtle and indirect here, one has to just pay attention. Very, very close attention. There are rules, but there are always exceptions to the rules.

The first ever (and maybe only?) Cultural Revolution Museum in China is right here in Shantou. It was funded and established by Li Ka Shing, one of the 10 richest men in the world, and also the founder of Shantou University. Many of the students call him "Uncle Li". He came from this area. That kind of money gives you special privileges, like the privilege of a blind eye being turned. There's no advertising about the museum, but it's there. A bunch of students went last weekend to see it with another teacher. I saw one today at the store and she told me how shocked they were. That's just not in the history books. They just didn't know. People who lived through it don't talk about it. They just want to forget about it. I'll try to go next weekend. I think Mr. Li is a good man.

So we'll see how this week goes. I'll open up the unit with a few scenes from Pleasantville...I've found that keeping things light and humorous is the only way to keep the students open. I didn't do that last semester during this unit and I might as well have been posing questions to the walls. I may just invite some of my students next weekend to come along with me for the ride.

already packing

Ughh, the heat and humidity is setting in. As crazy as it sounds, I got out one of the two suitcases I'm allowed to bring back to the states and started packing this morning. I still have over a month to go here, but that time is already filling up with tests and papers to grade and a final weekend-horrah trip to Shanghai with Kate (we managed to find really cheap tickets there for June 14-17). As I'm deciding what must physically stay in China and what I'll bring back, I'm also taking inventory of what it is that I've been doing here for the past 10 months, what I've learned, what I haven't, and the gazillion pieces and experiences that I'll mentally pack up and say "Come on, whatever you are, get in the bag, I'll make sense of you later". Most of my mental luggage will be like that, I think. We'll see what comes of it. An art show? A book? A collection of digital stories? A couple of hours over coffee with friends? Who knows? I'm trying hard not to focus too much on what I haven't done here...like learning the language. I could give a whole list of circumstances that prevented me from learning more Chinese this year...then in the same breath, I could provide another list of things that I could have done to learn it anyway, but didn't. There are so many other things I have learned, though. So many.

Today, I had lunch with Peter Arnett, who of course had lots to say about the way media is handled in the world today. He's an amazing storyteller. Tonight, I'm giving a training for some law school students, then I'll be camping at the beach with some of my former and current students tomorrow and Sunday.

Just another crazy night

First of all, Happy Belated Mother's Day to all and big congrats to 2 of my favorite women who recently announced that they're pregnant: Jenn and Tasha! Woo-Hooo!!

Tonight was one of those nights in class that I REALLY wished I could get my hands on that video tape taken from the ceiling corner of the classroom. The kids did role-plays today about women at war. I won't go into too many details, but I'll just try to paint a mental picture...it was surreal.

One group got up and started throwing chalk at each other(bullets/bombs), while opening and closing umbrellas all over the room. A guy, playing a female soldier, kept screaming "It's sunny! It's raining! It's sunny! It's raining!" (That woman's job was to predict the weather, apparently.) Another group's woman announced in a loud dramatic voice "I'm so grateful that my children are in the loving hands of their father!" while the "father" was asleep in a chair and the "kids" were beating each other to a pulp.

Meanwhile, I spent most of the class tonight trying to maintain my composure at the back of the room while laughing hysterically with the students, swatting at the mosquitos swarming around my head and feet, and mumbling to myself something about hating Dengue Fever.

Back from Beijing

Last week was the May Holiday week and I met my Dad and Mary Beth up in Beijing. Kate and her parents went there too. Poor Dad didn't do so well with the food, but apart from that, we hit all the major Beijing sights- Forbidden City, Great Wall, a Kung-Fu show, a Tea ceremony, Pandas in the zoo, temples and old neighborhood streets. Check out Flickr (under links) for photos!

Another DStory Success!

Some things never change. On Friday morning, I found myself running out the door, hair still wet, coffee in hand, loaded down with my laptop, a bag of tech equipment and rolls of poster-paper. Even in China, I am still That girl. It was the last of the 5-week workshop that I was giving here. There were 11 participants- 7 students and 4 teachers. The personal multi-media stories that they made are beyond
amazing. There's still a lot of technical cleaning up to do before we promote them, but wow... I don't even
know where to start- the girl who was raised by her grandparents because she was sickly and, well, a
girl..., the one about cafeteria food, the one about growing up in the cultural revolution, having a great-grandmother with bound feet, catching the humongous fish that were swimming down the street on campus last year after a typhoon flooded the lake...growing up in a fishing village and being tied to the houseboat as a baby while one girl's parents left every day to fish...i felt emotionally exhausted but very alive and grateful after that morning's work. The other stories that came out during the making- just to be shared in the group and not intended to go public- were a great reminder to me of what this process is really about.

THEN I had to rush to put together a presentation about them for that same evening. (yes, I had agreed to present something to the university that didn't even exist yet!- It didn't exist until a few hours before the presentation! Why do I do this to myself??) The presentation went really well, lots of people are asking when the next training will be (sound familiar!?) and I am now packing to leave for Beijing to meet Dad and Marybeth for the week! When the stories are posted on the web, I'll make sure to provide the link here.

gunpowder

On Thursday evening, one of my former students, Kingson, stopped by after my class and invited me to go see a fireworks show downtown that night. I had a 4 hour Digital Storytelling workshop and a 2 hour lecture to prepare for the next day, but he was very convincing. There were 5 of us in a cab into town- myself and 4 students. There had to be 10,000 people there. I've never seen so many people in one place. Nothing like that ever happens in Shantou- it was part of a promotional thing to make the city look more attractive to foreign investors- they had a week of big concerts- musicians from Hong Kong and Shanghai came, and it all ended with those fireworks. The local people are skeptical about how much of a difference this will really make to the economy here, but one thing is for sure... The Chinese really know how to do fireworks. It was amazingly beautiful.

Gunpowder was one of the four great inventions of China, along with paper, printmaking and the compass. Guns came around later from somewhere else. Gunpowder competes with the sounds of birds here on campus. Our campus may look like a serene oasis, but it sounds like a warzone. Really. The mountains to the north of us are constantly being blown up to create building materials. Peter Arnett is a pulitzer-winning war-journalist teaching here for the semester. When he arrived, he laughed and said, "My God, it sounds just like Baghdad here!". The mountains to the south of campus are filled with graves. A couple of weeks ago, there was the Chinese equivalent of "Dia de los Muertos" when the families go out and take care of the graves and burn money and set off firecrackers for their ancestors. The fircrackers are supposed to scare away any evil spirits. So dynamite to the north, firecrackers to the south and little boys running around campus shooting bb guns at each other... but all the while you're looking at the beautiful lake and the koi and the little pagodas and the bamboo trees. It's just so funny how a place can look so much like peace and sound so much like war. Kind of like fireworks.

For your consideration...

I'm showing "The Pursuit of Happyness" to my classes now- to go along with our unit about careers. First of all, it's such a dilemma whether or not to show the English subtitles while they watch movies here. If I don't show them, most of the students are lost and I have to keep stopping the movie to explain things. If I do show them, the subtitles are all WRONG...I mean really really wrong, gramatically. For me, it's hysterical. For them, it's baffling. Just about any dvd bought here is some kind of bootleg. You're lucky if you get one that doesn't have some guy standing up in the theater between the camera and the movie screen. Big problem, yes. But that's what we're working with here.

So anyway, we had two major assignments- they had to create their own business plan in small groups and present their ideas to the class, and then they each had to turn in a sample cover letter for a job they'd like to have.

The companies they chose revealed so much! There were, of course, the cosmetics companies that make your skin whiter (like China needs any more of those...), but there were also several environmental consulting companies- to send experts to factories and make suggestions about how to make their systems safe and still efficient (!!!). There were a couple of mobile toilet companies for Shantou- because of the lack of clean toilets in this town. ( Here here!! ) There were services to help shy men declare their love to women. And there were several counseling services. A number of students talked about how it's hard for people dealing with depression or mental illnesses to get help- often because of the stigma and social pressures around it. So one group came up with the idea that they would have psychologists who would meet their clients out in bars and restaraunts, so from the outsider's point of view, they just look like friends having a conversation.

I have no idea what kind of a world these kids will be graduating into, or what opportunities will be available for them, but if they get the chance, I could see them creating some very good things for China.

Now here's a real treat: If I took some of the best lines from those letters of interest I got, and put them together into one grand cover letter, this is what we'd have:

Hello, my dear manager, I am Running.
Let me intrude myself to you. I would like to take the position of exploitation manager. I got large nibbles for this position. Now, I don't have a job. I need much money for my life. I need this job very much. I have two sisters studying in the University. I should help them finish. I love to work. I'll keep working very hard. I will pour all my energy on the job when I am working. That is to say, I am absolutely a good worker. Moreover, I am a sunshine man! My friends and teachers all love me very much. Maybe we will be friends in the future. I look forward to you giving me the job.
Best wishes to you,
Running