A Big Hairy Laowai’s First Day
The way was clear only briefly. A single shrill cry of laowai! brusquely interrupted my daze, another of Tom! confirmed my mistake of walking past the first grade classroom on the way out. A trickle of them scampered over and grabbed at my legs, clung onto my arms and tugged at the hem of my T-shirt, followed by the crash of another thirty pair of feet. I was engulfed within moments. My arms were being squeezed to see just how big they were, my sideburns were being violently pulled and patches of stubble pinched and ripped at. One student was hanging off my daypack, drawing me backwards with his suspended weight. The few cries of Tom had given way to laowai [old outsider], which swiftly gained the synchronicity of a chant, Lao – wai! Lao – wai! As the first few had clambered on me, I feigned difficulty in walking, but as the Lilliputian load increased I became absolutely immobilised. I searched around for help, but I was met only with the shamelessly broad grin of their Chinese form-teacher. Gulliver had been subdued by 40 rampaging Chinese five-year olds.
This was the clamorous moment of comprehension. I had employed a consciously nonchalant, intriguing spiel detailing my future plans the length of the Australian East Coast, but only now, on the first day of a 6 month contract, did this pretentious pontification mean anything. My employers termed themselves as a School of English, and from the images on their website, I assumed that these modern offices in the central business district would house corporate work. The logo, coloured with cold blues and whites, depicted two businessmen, stiffly postured, their fore-arms allowed the liberty to share a deeply formal, unquestionably symmetrical handshake. The days would require preparation, I would need a vast bank of technical knowledge to satisfy the demands of these motivated learners, but having garnered the respect of these gentlemen, it would transmute into nights of being showered with Beijio (56% proof clear spirit) at expensive, neon-soaked Chinese bars, all the while their behaviour expressing to me Yes. We respect you as a teacher, and believe we have achieved the optimum symbiosis between the hungry student and the wise, generous teacher. Indeed, your tender years that we so doubted at first, belie the strong current of sagacity within. Ha ha. But enough of such matters. Let us drink and prove ourselves to be so very crazy at such times.
Instead, I was informed that I would be teaching 24 lessons a week in a Chinese Primary school. Average class size: 50.
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The creeping anxiety in the pit of my stomach churned its first at that moment, and did not particularly abate until the moment of teaching. I doubt that my Primary teachers did wear pastel blouses and tan cardigans and all have rosy-red cheeks, but that is the lingering imprint of memory, and as such is my conception of what such a teacher should be; well-dressed, non-intimidating, prim, female. So it came to my first day at school, and fighting the debilitating fug of early morning, I waited outside my apartment for one of the lackeys in my organization to take me there. He was (and is always, as I have since discovered) late. He rattled in on his electric scooter, took me to the bus stop, shepherded me on a bus for the duration of one stop, shook his head, made me retrace my steps to the original bus-stop, took me on another bus for 2 stops, anxiously flipped out his mobile to call his superior for directions, asked various passer-bys similar questions, urged me onto another bus for 7 stops, fretted and pivoted on a quiet street, hailed a taxi, and was told that the school was a minute walk down the road. None of this was in any way comforting, nor was the fact that I was already 15 minutes late for the first class. Rushed past the sentry at the front gate, I was taken into a five-story faded-pink teaching block, led up 3 flights of stairs into the English Language staff room, and met with muffled astonishment as I burst in; no time for any real introductions, I was then taken by the supervising Chinese English-Language teacher up a further 2 flights to my first class. The muted reaction at the staff room I was now to experience in its unfettered form. As the students swivelled one by one to see me walking in from the back of the class, a gusty waaaaaaa… rose incrementally until I stood behind my desk, the focus of scrutiny for the pair of eyes belonging to each desk in the nine rows and the six columns.
Adrenalin borne of fear kicked in. Fortunately, I had inherited a purple, inflatable rubber ball spanned with soft little spikes from a previous teacher at the organization. I christened it the gimp ball. I blurted out my name, wrote it on the blackboard in shaky script that trailed diagonally away, and threw the ball at the nearest student. Out of fear, he curled his trunk close to the desk and drew his arms in, the ball bounced off his shrunken form and limply spun under his neighbour’s desk. This time, a shorter, instantaneous waa. I motioned him to pick it up. I asked the boy with the stupefied hanging mouth, what’s your name? I didn’t remember it. But then I asked over a thousand children that question in a week. The ball came back, and I flung it to an opposite corner of the room. Then another student, and another. The persisting incredulity of the students was puzzling; this seemed a practical, entertaining way to make introductions. I quickly perceived how lucky I had been with the ball idea, as it played on the rampant Chinese obsession with basketball. Images of the retired Michael Jordan were omnipresent in Chengdu, on a scale I would have associated with the standard impression of oriental Beckham idolatry; NBA games ran constantly on TV, and as I would see from break-times, the backboard drew far more children than table-tennis or football combined. The ball dealt effectively with the issue of the aloof, too-cool-for-school contingent, as when they caught it they would pivot, feint, loop it back; if ever too hard, then a stern look, arched eyebrow and guttural Hey! I then motioned for the students to throw the ball to one another, and practice the question and answers for themselves, and then repeated the system with asking ages, and where you come from.
I introduced my hometown. It is our inherited didactic right, as a peculiarity of the crown, as the stop-off point for a conquering Norman Lord, to excruciate anyone ignorant of our forty-five square kilometres aware of exactly who we are with a lengthy, instructional lecture. It is a niggardly characteristic diffused through the hard nuggety potatoes we consume. No, not New Jersey you kind-hearted fool, but… wait for it… Old Jersey! Yes, you see how every American name is New something well don’t you think there is an original etc etc. I didn’t have the crutch of Bergerac with these kids; I know that it has made it wide and far, and proclaimed a beautiful, scenic Island where the tunnel, transgressing accepted notions of time and space, directly links St Brelade’s Bay on one side to Gorey on the other, and bobs some unfortunate cadaver in St Aubin’s once a week like clockwork, but I hadn’t seen it on the box in Chengdu yet. So I drew a map of the world on the board, well of North America, Great Britain, France, China and Australia and left out the incidentals. I asked them to vote by raising their hands as to where I came from. The same timid reaction. Not apathy, but fear of acting out independently; upon further coaxing they did. One by one I crossed out each country until it left England. A cry of celebratory cheer from a section of the students, though many of them were of the mindset that voting for every possible option in a poll ensures you’ll never be wrong. Except I then crossed out England to another waaa.. but this time a sharply rising, befuddled one. I drew a tiny x between England and France, told them it was called Jersey, and was an island like Australia only smaller. I invited, well wheedled, a child up to the front, explained the term population to the class, and asked them to chalk up the numerical population of China, eight zeroes, a three and a one. I followed by putting the jersey population directly underneath, zero zero zero zero and then a nine. Waaa.. of exclamation. So introductions over, and still five minutes to run in a class of which I had already missed the first fifteen minutes… Hangman! A simple, engaging game that involves 40 kids, every ESL teacher’s sordid little secret, cheap, nasty, vulgar but fairly easy and satisfying. Great White Shark, if you’re interested. As an aside, If you are interested in employing me for the purposes of playing Hangman, then I have a number of excellent references, am steeped in experience at all levels, and assiduously research the discipline to break fresh, innovative ground.
The bell rang, and a portion of the class ran up bearing sheets of paper, profile cards and even their bare arms for the new round-eye to sign. They then hurried off to join the bustle of Morning Exercises. Streams of students in their pastel red and blue tracksuits jostled past, innumerable tails of bright red neckerchiefs trailing down the stairs. A rousing, deep-bellied horn instrumental juddered from the PA, a piece that had been playing in some schools for the better part of a century. The older students jogged the outer perimeter of the teaching building, the younger ones half-stumbled round grids in the playground area in the central enclosure. The younger kids were then put in lateral lines, and bunny-hopped across the grids, while others were instructed by form teachers to do step-ups. In a bizarre Proustian stirring, I was put in mind of winter rugby training back home, glaring floodlights, mud and pervasive cold. Oh, and Chamier’s pink shorts. I switched back in time for the pick of the day’s surreal crop. The entire primary school had assembled in the interior. The propaganda composition abruptly ceased, some rapid, shrill instructions issued over the PA, and then a thudding beat, jangling lite-guitar, beeps and an vigorous Chinese male voice that implored several times in the English language refrain, c’mon dance with me. Chinese Europop. A thousand children were dancing in formation with identical movements, swaying, jarring head jolts, arm rolls, Macarena-style mini-hops, and truly satisfying, spirit fingers to end. Suppressing manic giggles, I contorted my face into an attempt at unfazed placidity. This is what happens when Globalisation swamps native cultures, I considered. This is the dark underbelly. Freddie Prinze Junior films will cross the divide and be considered a cultural norm.
Leading each grade with exemplary choreography was two or three students with pieces of white card pinned to their upper-arms, replete with either one or two red stripes. This is how such an immense body of children is to be controlled, by creating a influential sub-rank below teacher. Although we are familiar with this concept, the significance is altogether different in China. Head boys and Prefects are a useful link between teaching staff and students back home, but will never side with their generals against the rank and file, nor in truth would they ever be asked to. They would be ostracised. It is an honour at this school to be awarded these stripes however, and the grateful recipients act determinedly and coldly against their classmates to maintain the reputation that they have achieved. It is one way of differentiating yourself from the surging masses of youth driving towards a limited number of prestige jobs in a developing country. Later in the morning, gentle, jaunty string music commenced with alacrity on the lesson end bell, and a soft feminine voice ebbed up and down through the Chinese single digits. The striped ones rose to the front, one at the board, another stalking up and down the columns and rows. The undistinguished others plunged their fingers into their eye sockets and traced the shape of each number in synchronicity with the voice. Anyone not complying with the daily Eye-Exercises would be listed on the board, indicating their guilt to their temporarily absent form teacher.
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The morning was spent teaching the higher Primary grades, but come the afternoon I would be with the ankle-biters, classes of 5, 6 and 7 years old. However, lunchtime first, all three hours of it. While staff and students trailed away to their on-site dormitories for a well earned nap, I spent this gaping interim alternating between slumping fruitlessly over my desk, directing choice English-language vocabulary at a ponderous net connection, and exploring the surrounds of the school, all to the soundtrack of a faltering Nutcracker being played to death in the music room above.
A central boulevard runs from the tight curls of the shimmering steel gates (with adjoining sentry box) and bisects the primary and middle school blocks. It terminates at an immense triple-storied cafeteria, dwarfed in turn by countless lines of dominoes, recognisable as dorms by the numerous strings of washing lines. A third horizon is blocked behind the shoulder of the middle school building by the school’s sports stadium, on which NBA obsessed stragglers forsake the appointed siesta-time to play basketball. The remaining boundary opens out to a yawning construction site, where in typical Chinese fashion, listless activity is puzzlingly leading to rapid growth. The site is attended by five hunched cranes, below which diggers and dozers trundle, and at the fore of the site a man is labouring to toss shovels of mixed sand through a gauze into a skip. The site’s basic foundations, caked in coppery-red earth, aspire to the gleaming high-rise hub of the city-centre further west.
The boulevard widens to a vast tiled quadrangle halfway down, in which a Chinese flag gently ripples at the top of a lofty flagpole. A statue depicting a famous Shanghai meeting between George Bernard Shaw and a notable Chinese intellectual dominates the centre. Its relative age or perhaps poor craftsmanship is discernible in dull green streaks that mottle the original brassy pallor. Old habits die hard; Shaw sits in scholarly repose imparting wisdom on his younger, dynamic comrade, who restrains his restless arms behind his back, yet on first sight the showpiece creates the impression of an entirely different collaboration. Shaw’s dense, squat beard is reminiscent of the standard Marx image, and his sharp eyebrows, taut forehead and bald-head Leninesque; and who could his stocky progeny possibly be but Uncle Joe, with a thick, flat moustache, a broad, bulky brush of a hairdo and enveloping flat green long-coat. As a digression, the word tongzhi (comrade) has shifted from its previous party connotations to act as slang for homosexual, a hint at how rapidly the country’s attitude is shifting westwards, however unwilling some of its members are to admit.
The primary block is horseshoe shaped, and encloses a mini-sports area for the younger kids. At the top of the central wall, underneath burnished Chinese characters, runs the legend English is fun! in playful multi-colours. Around the walkways and stairwells, letters loop into cartoons, and there is an interesting cultural hot-pot of Cubism, English watercolours, Japanese anime, traditional sketches of pagodas, daunting mountain ranges, blasted trees and delicate waterfalls, and Chinese scrolls. On the face of each individual stair runs a single proverb or axiom, and just about every one has been defaced by the removal of at least one of the colourful stuck-on letters. The gamut runs from the standard (Patien_e is a virtue), to the esoteric though comprehensible (He that run_ fastest gets t_e ring), some totally inappropriate for children (D_unken days ha_e all their tomorrow), others lack basic grammar (Many small makes a great) while several are just plain wrong (Make ha_te, not spe_d). That the country is in a period of cultural transition is obvious from the conflict between some of these maxims; the party philosophy that Union is strength is followed only steps later by the big business bottom-line, Time is money, and while we are informed that The first blow is half the battle, the wisdom four levels down is that Everything comes to he who waits. My personal favourite is Sweets are the uses of adversity; one misplaced letter transforms an adage about character building into an endorsement of comfort-eating.
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The school resumed just before 3, reinvigorated save for its on-loan zoo exhibit. The lower grades could not write I was told, and would lack the ability to understand even the basic mini-lecture on my background. How to fill in the time? I needn’t have worried. The successive reactions of astonishment I’d experienced in the morning were mild compared to my first-grade kids. Lumbering through the door-frame, the class didn’t just waaaa…, but tumbled out of their seats and launched themselves at the interloping laowai – I was saved by the supervising teacher, who barked One! Two! Three! The children scampered back to their places, sat bolt upright and replied in unison Sit up straight! She followed up reproachfully Where are your arms? They folded them stiffly over. On my desk! This rigidity lasted moments; back out of their seats, though not daring to come to the front, they yelled in disparate waves wassyour name teacher! Teacher teacher! Wassyour name!
Slowly and clearly: My-name-is-Jon!
Tom! Tom! Hello Tom!
Tom is one of a pool of perhaps 10 western names that their English textbook has taught them to recognise. Accordingly, I was to be Tom for the next 16 weeks.
I initiated the same repetition drills of asking and answering questions of name, age and hometown as before. However, when I brought out the gimp-ball to toss around as a medium for these patterns, their faces became animated with feral desire. Imploring calls of Teacher! Let me try! soon collapsed into Lemme try! Lemme try! as they escaped from their seats, and clambered over me trying to grab the ball. Think of the BBC Wildlife footage showing hordes of red ants swamping a large tarantula and picking its flesh clean. A further snap of 1-2-3!, and they instantly descended and slotted back in their seats. It was bizarre; although every time this disciplinary measure was performed they reacted out of constant, unwavering fear, it invariably collapsed within moments to sheer chaos. It was an interesting counterpoint to the older students, always mindful of the rebuke, though knowing and cynical (however mutedly) in their reaction to it.
As semi-order was restored, I circled the classroom and chose students at random to throw the ball to and participate. It was accompanied by an imploring chorus of primal whines, as if having the ball in their hands and then throwing it back was their only objective in life, which I guess is how it might seem to a 5 year old. Often, the student lacked the co-ordination to successfully catch it, and the resultant fumble initiated an immense scramble, where it was my job to pluck out students one by one from the pile until only one remained at the bottom, curled protectively around the prize. I asked him (invariable the naughty kid at the back) the resultant question, and the horrible truth that he had to answer an English-language question dawned on him. He looked back at his classmates for a clue, classmates he had just been shoving and wrestling with to win the ball; I waited a moment for somebody to help him out, but the wall of tiny, sullen faces, squashed in disappointment, were unforthcoming. I helped him out with the smattering of ghetto-Chinese I had picked up.
The educational novelty of the ball (at least for the dogmatic formality of the Chinese educational system) produced genuinely hilarious reactions, even considering the first-day trauma. I would motion for the student to pass back the ball, and several would squat fully down, spring up and launch the it as high and hard as they could, often bouncing off an overhead light and causing it to swing back and forth. The rest stepped back with a fearful ahhhh! wondering what the great white gorilla would do to them in vengeance, though as soon as this notion passed the errant bouncing ball prompted a further scramble.
I also taught the kids how to express the very basic emotions. First the standard question How are you? Bang the desk to establish stress patterns, establish the chant over and over, then a smiley face drawn on the board (comprehensible input, visual stimulus to link between the signifying sound and the signified object or idea) and I ask What’s This? A couple of students respond enthusiastically with an incidental Chinese linguistic twist Happyee!!! I initiate class repetition and then pick out individuals with the ball, a neutral face drawn on the board elicits so – so! followed by the same method of practice, then a frowning face drawn on the board and the same few yell sad! Finally, the ball is flung around again but this time the students must make a free choice, as I vary between thumbs up, wavering hands and thumbs down to represent the three basic feelings, Happyee! So-so! Sad! Although the vocabulary areas became more complex, and the games far more interesting (I realised that catching a ball wouldn’t suffice for the whole term), the standard system of Presentation (teacher produces and elicits the new items of the Target Language for the lesson), Practice (repetition of sounds that the teacher models) and Production (students use the material in free play) remained consistent.
As the lesson proceeded, one of the goldfish dropped to the floor and began crawling commando-style under the desks in his row. I walked over, picked him up by the scruff of his tracksuit and placed him back in his seat. This simple act would have far-reaching consequences. The horde rose as one, and pressed me to the front wall of the room, pleading bao yi!, their arms raised straight up in the air, exposing their flanks, handles by which to throw them in the air. Bao yi I later found out, is addressed to a parental figure and means to both hug and to lift. I flung a few of them up (and also caught them), but the numbers didn’t seem to be diminishing. The 1-2-3! reprimand was now proving useless, and even when the Chinese teacher succeeded in pulling a student away from the mob, he or she would simply run to the opposite side and resume their desperate entreaties. It was proving a Herculean demand to work through the class, so the bell rang with sweet punctuality.
The legend of the big hairy laowai rippled through the school. Casual walks down hallways, strolls in the recreation grounds and even the supposed sanctuary of the staff room were beset with galloping children insisting bao yi! In the midst of one fourth grade class, a sharp streak of pain running down my forearm was instantly explained by the sight of a grinning boy holding a length of sellotape straggling with my body-hair. The onset of the humid Sichuan summer and resultant short wearing stirred further fascination with the playful ape’s fur. It entranced students; a sixth grade class going as far as to refer to me as monkey for the remnant of the semester.
It became obvious that I was not only to be an Oral English teacher, but an entertainer (worrying visions of David Brent just a chilled-out entertainer yeh…), a curio from a distant land, the missing link and even a confidante. Despite their awareness of my total lack of Mandarin, glum-faced kids would wander up and wordlessly grab my hand as I was walking. As I walked into lower-grade classes, students would rush up and present drawings to me, and wait eagerly for words of approval. In this boarding school environment, pupils are in classrooms for 12 hours a day, with a discernible lack of male teachers, so it is little surprise that I took on the older-brother identity, although it was a little awkward to become accustomed to at first, particularly coming from the hyper-sensitive social climate in the west. This casual big-brother regard certainly compromises the laowai teacher’s disciplinary powers. I was left on my own with a second grade class at the mid-semester point. They began to act frenziedly during a game, so I took another foreign-teacher’s advice, and sat down (which I never normally do) and refused to say a word, with a frown fixed to my face to demonstrate displeasure. This will have a powerful effect on older kids, who are wary of misbehaviour getting back to their class teacher. It did not have the desired effect at this age level. En masse, they ran up and jumped on me murmuring sorry sorry sorry, patting my head and stroking my hair in an attempt to mollify me, until I started to smile begrudgingly and said OK OK OK. During this turmoil, a stern-looking class monitor had been standing on a chair at the front, yapping various castigations at them in Chinese and writing the names of particularly naughty kids names on the board. The presence of this 5-year old aspiring drill sergeant alone prevented the slide into complete anarchy. Such is the powerlessness of the physically imposing waiguren [foreigner] in Chinese schools. I gave her a couple of shiny stickers for her trouble though.
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A friend has compared my reception in Chinese schools to a scene from Return of the Jedi. The small furry tribe of Ewoks happen upon the shiny gold droid C3PO and in their untrammelled fascination revere him as a strange, exotic deity, capable of capricious acts both of benevolence and terror. Its a fairly accurate analogy, save for who’s furry and who’s not. In the words of the majority of my students, unable to pronounce consecutive consonants without throwing a vowel in for good measure,
Good–a–bye!
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