Hateful Wife-Beater
Euufff. That’s the sound of having just had my first tough week in China after 3 exhilarating ones. I suppose the honeymoon with the kids wears off eventually, perhaps the big hairy laowai novelty that has veiled my ineptitude thusfar won’t last forever. One particularly wet Wednesday, 8 x 40 minute periods and 10 hours in total spent at the school will cause sweat-soaked Nam-style flashbacks for years to come. The kids weren’t allowed out into the pouring rain for their morning exercise or break-times, so they were confined in their classroom for the 12 hour duration of the schoolday. They were absolutely seething with aimless energy, fighting, shouting, chasing, playing with toys, throwing putty, smearing eachother with chalk, all-the-while the great white baboon was standing shell-shocked in the centre vainly trying to catch their attention… Apocalypse Now.
F*ck it, I came in a week later loaded up with stupid games and stickers, it didn’t feel like great teaching at the time, but I am beginning to re-assess the standards by which the roundeye laoshi (teacher) is to be judged. Recently, I have found out that most succesful laowai teachers are the flakiest. These ankle-biters work from 7 or earlier till 7 in the evening, and when they spot the laowai, typically some nomadic backpacker, then they expect to p*ss about discipline wise, grab you, let off steam etc. So I channeled this through the TPR (Total Physical Response) method, playing various energetic games. The toughest part was presenting the new material, trying to drag their attention through the 10 minutes actual-learning section of the lesson. Of course, the best way to deal with this is to present the material in a fun way. Body parts were the lexical area for the week, so I would drag a boisterous kid to the front, and put him on a stool. I tap his head and ask:
What’s this?
A chorus of Head! in response.
The same process with shoulders, arms, tummy (I gave the unsuspecting kid a hollow slap on the belly, and he invariably giggles), leg, until I get to foot. I lift his foot into the air, causing him to teeter a little and grab me for support. foot! the clever ones say. Then I grab his shoe and start to pull it off, to the student’s immensely startled resistance and a class in genuine hysterics. I fling it out the window, grab his toe. A couple of them manage to blurt out the answer. I then feign repulsion from the supposed stink of his foot, as he hops off the chair and scurries off after the shoe. Even the supervising Chinese teachers, busily chipping away at their immense loads of marking, tend to breakdown at that.
Aren’t I so funny! I appear to be saying. Don’t be Grinchy about it. Have no fears, I recognise that the applicable humour for a class of Chinese 5 year olds is very unique.
If the presentation isn’t entertaining, then the best way to hold their attention is to isolate and poke whimsical-fun at the disinterested ones. The easiest way is to creep up to them, fix your face barely an inch from theirs, and as the growing gasps of the class impel them to look up at the apparent commotion, they meet the questioning face of the hairy ape and recoil in terror. Projectiles are also handy. Evan, the Aussie, has become very competent at chalk-throwing, while my weapon of choice is the gimp-ball. If perfectly thrown, the bounce off an apathetic kid’s crown will be a perfect point of symettry between two lazy, deep parabolas. Other times I have written on the unsuspecting with chalk, held sopping wet mops over their heads, threatend to empty the contents of a bin on them and just plain lifted them out of their seats and spun them around to thunder-struck yelps.
To the games proper. I would put the fifty or so kids into 3 teams, call out representatives from each, and if they managed to answer a facile English-language question (with the whispering help of the able students) they could take part. The first game I used was throwing the famed gimp-ball into a bin, a play on China’s astounding basketball obsession. I would take this premise and develop it to include darts and bowling ball games. For body parts, I would utter the name of a body-part and time how long it took for one team’s representative to write it correctly on a Post-it note and run to the front to stick it on the unfortunate student standing on a stool. The student has often been knocked off his perch by the frenzied momentum of a team member trying to beat the clock . Running-around touching pictures and signs taped to the walls games are also decent. And of course, there is always the reward of stickers, a large 1.5 kwai (less than 10 pence, conversion fans) sheet sufficing the whole class. This prompts waves of thank you! thank you! You very good teacher! I kid you not. And the real young kids not only say very good! according to the stickers, but also when you lift them up and throw them, or lift them up just with one arm, or spin em around. They certainly are difficult criteria to adjust to having spent the last 2 years in an off-shore banking environment. Autographs in most classes too! Madness. That Kindergarten Cop thing is spot on, aside from the Mafia Headhunters tracking me down.
The suggestive quips I have received about relations with my colleague could not be more badly timed. I assumed that my main difficulties in China would be lots of Chinese people, not another laowai, but thats how it has proved. Now I have bitten through my tongue, the amount of patience I have used in 8 weeks. I’m fairly passive in general. But her arrogant, domineering, sanctimonious ways have just worn me out. It became ground zero last weekend. Now Chinese western style toilets are narrow, But I’m very conscientous about it not being blocked for the next user. I have a track record of exactly zero blockages. Now you realise that this is starting to sound somewhat petty and crude. But then all domestic arguments of this ilk are, these facile complaints are but the tip of an iceberg. She blocked it one night. Prior to this, she had to call a DIY guy twice, and has also bought a plunger. I saw it, andthought, not again, so held on to it for outside facilities. However, she came back the next day and shouted at me, why haven’t you fixed it? I replied that it wasn’t my blockage, and didn’t want to sink my arms into her filthy faeces water. Cue her clomping on her shoes, and slamming the door with her pudgy little arm. Now its unfortunate that the girth of her droppings exceeds the bowls narrow aperture, but heck, I’m not going to bail her out, to use a bad pun. The upshot of this is that weeks before I asked to use her computer for an article I was planning to send to the local rag. I recognised that asking a favour of someone of this nature could well prove to be a mistake, but never thought how bad! Speaking to her the next day, she refused to let me use it. I asked if i could download the file, and thus never have to use it again. She replied only if you change how you live your life. Now I’m relaxed, passive, to a fault, but the only apt response I could muster to that condescending line was f*ck off. Taking my document, written despite tiredness of teaching, hostage! I haven’t suddenly become a misogynst or a wife-beater, but 8 weeks in her company would do the same to any man. I told her, rightfully, that I had regretted the apartment sharing from the first moment, that I would work 48 lessons a week to not live with her and her selfish, domineering ways. This release of bottled up rage astounded her, and she maturely replied that I was sub-human and when I suggested that living with her made me feel like I was on trial at Nuremberg she replied well you are! As far as I remember Goerring was not hung for refusing to plunge a toilet or leaving a can of shaving foam in too close a proximity to the sink. She is Howard Hughes’ lovechild, lines of bottles filled with the day’s urine sample and all I reckon. Anyway, I shut her up by suggesting she ask one of the teachers if she could live with them. She knows full well that I could be the only one to tolerate her for more than 10 seconds, and that they all recognise that I drew the short (and stubby) straw. I’ve spent the last few days around their apartments in a funk rather than with swamp thing herself, but of course thats no way to go. And this is no secret love-hate thing. She looks like Hoggle, the friendly bridge Troll from the film Labyrinth. But she has none of Hofggle’s redeeming qualities unfortunately. When drunk, she did once lick my unsuspecting fingers. After a half-hour with a scourer and several shots, I can report that I have a clean bill of health.
Now this is of course a huge distraction from teaching. While I’m on this good run, its just about bearable. But if i have a day of bad lessons its going to be hellish.The next picture you see of me may be on the cover of the local rag, under the headline gentle giant inexplicably murders female with plunger.