Chinglish

One of the greatest sources of comic relief in China is the large amount of Chinglish (Chinese-English) products. With everything from detergent to clothes, if it was made in China and has English on it it’s usually a little off. The best are the shirts and sweatshirts though. People here love English on their clothes, and they either don’t understand what it means or they don’t pay attention. Here has been some of the best I’ve seen:
“I’m going to knock some secret into you”
“Every little make a mickle” (a sign in my classroom)
“The best d*** green thing” (worn by a teacher at my school)
“Fake” (under a Channel logo)
“Verybody makes mistakes” (A Brittney Spears shirts)
“Kennedy Funneral Home” (Sweatshirt)
“NEKI” (With a Nike swoosh)
“Faint the town red”
“camp THE blue” (my new favorite sweatshirt I bought)

Speaking of Chinglish, I recently judged an English competition for Elementary students. Competitors were from all over Wuhan, and it was a huge deal. Kids at my school had been preparing performances, reciting stories, and writing essays for weeks. The competition was an absolute riot the first 6 hours…after that it got pretty mind numbing. These kids were under so much pressure from their parents and they were so nervous! Some of them, to get an edge of the competition, decided to “dress to impress.” Monkey suites, boys wearing makeup, and 5 year olds in wigs and fake eyelashed were not uncommon. It felt like something strait out of a Little Miss Sunshine pageant But I did write down my favorite answers to some of the questions I gave to 4th-6th grade competitors:
Question: Pick a number between 1 and 15 (so we could read them that number question)
Answer: No, I’m sorry I cannot.

Question: Describe what you see in this picture.
Answer: This boy looks sad. Maybe his mother bit him last night.

Question: What do American children do on Christmas day?
Answer: Maybe they go to the library

Question: What day is Halloween?
Answer: Maybe it’s September 13.

Question: What is your father’s job?
Answer: Can you say it in Chinese please?

Through my Chinese lessons and my interaction with my students, I have come to appreciate the vast differences between our languages. They are hugely different and therefore make it very difficult for one to learn the other. Most of the time, you can’t just translate the words directly from Chinese to English and have it make sense. For example, the other day my co-teacher came up to me and ask if it’s correct to say “I am so angry at you I could spit blood.” I looked bug eyed at her and said “why on earth would you want to say that?!” She told me that that is a common phrase used in Chinese, and she wanted to say it to the students when they’re being loud. I explained to her that we never use that phrase. I could go on and on with examples of these kinds of differences between the languages. The Chinese language is laced so tightly with their culture that it’s hard to experience one without the other. I’ve started to try and learn characters, because I feel that I am missing out on so much by not being able to read anything around me. I know that I won’t be able to get very far in the next 5 months, but I’m enjoying learning the common characters and then getting excited when I see them and I know what they mean. My goal is to learn 5 new characters a week, 100 by the time I leave. I’m still really struggling with learning the spoken language. I came here saying I wouldn’t use the excuse “Chinese is very hard” not to learn the language, but it honestly is sooo hard! Partly because of the reasons I just explained, and partly because our western tongues just don’t like to make those sounds! The tones are a killer…I can’t hear them and I can’t say them! Every other country I’ve visited…I’ve noticed that you can kind of say the words brokenly and people will understand what you’re saying. But not Chinese…if you have the tone wrong they won’t understand you! Sometimes I’ll hear my co-teacher say a word or phrase over and over in class. I’ll ask her about it after, and she’ll have no idea what I’m saying. I’m thinking “how could you not understand? You just said it like 10 times!” Then when she finally does know what I’m talking about, she’s repeat the word back to me. I’ll of course reply with “ya, that’s exactly what I said isn’t it?” After being here for almost 5 months, I can finally get a taxi driver to understand my home address about 90% of the time without having to wip out my hand notebook. I’m really trying to keep my spirits up when it comes to learning this language…I’m taking lessons and studying outside (that’s the key I’ve learned), and hopefully it will click very soon!

Christmas in China

I apologize that it has been so long since my last post. It seems that life got so busy in December…but in a good way. The highlight, of course, was my Christmas trip to Hong Kong to visit one of my closest friends Jeanette, who is from there but is currently teaching English in China, and also my friends Alyssa and Matty who are also English teachers in China. It was a great “reunion” and I was so happy to be able to spend Christmas with close friends! The school gave all the foreign teachers Christmas Eve and day off, and I took an extra day to be able to make the trip. It was a busy trip full of shopping, eating, and catching up! Hong Kong is an amazing city and I couldn’t help but wish that Wuhan was a little more like it. It’s very Chinese, but also very western at the same time. It’s much more civilized then China (NO spitting…amazing!) and English is spoken there and very well. You’ll be walking down the street and hear Chinese teenagers speaking perfect English to each other, and then throw some Cantonese in there. The city reminded me a lot of China town in San Francisco. The downtown is full of skyscrapers and little shops all packed in tightly. And then the outskirts of town is very green and has some beautiful beaches and mountains. I loved every moment of my time there and would go back in a second!

Jeanette and I by the bell tower

Hot Pot! A Hong Kong specialty.

Alyssa and I by the Stanley Beach

Being away from my family during the holidays wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, because it never really felt like Christmas. I mean, there were Christmas decorations around Wuhan, and people talked about Christmas (it’s more of a shopping holiday in China than anything else…lots of things go on sale), but it never quite felt like Christmas. I’m ok with that though…after 21 amazing Christmas’s, I can handle one that’s a little different. Plus, in about 3 weeks I have a 5 week (paid) holiday! How cool is that? It’s for Chinese New Year. The first 2 weeks I am going to travel with my friend Tiffany, who is currently living in Beijing, and her friend from school. We’re going to do a week of Shanghai, Nanjing, and the surrounding areas. Then, we’re going to spend a week on the white sand beach of Boracay, Philippines, which I’m stoked about because I’ve been there and it’s amazing! Then, my dear mother will be flying in to Shanghai and we will travel for 3 weeks! We’re going to spend a couple days in Shanghai, then take a train to Wuhan and show her around my hometown. Next, we’ll take a train to the Southern province of Guangxi, where we will see some of the beautiful (and hopefully warmer) sights and explore rural villages (put my Chinese to the test). Then we are hoping to fly up to Xi’an, where we will see the famous Terracotta Warriors, and perhaps make our way to Beijing so she can get a look at that little wall thing before she leaves for New Zealand to see my sister. I am overly stoked about this holiday. The only problem is that, and anyone who’s worked in China will tell you this, Chinese people cannot plan ahead for the life of them. We have been pressing them to give us the dates of our holiday all semester, and we just got the date of finals this last week (3 weeks in advance). Now we’re trying to get them to tell us when we need to be back after the holiday, and they cannot tell us. You would think that as big of a school as they are, they would have the dates of the biggest holiday of the year set out before the school year starts. But they don’t think that way. And they don’t understand that we have to book flights and make plans. The other day I asked my co-teacher what she is doing for the holiday. She told me she hasn’t planned anything because it’s too far away to think about it. I planned the trip with my mom off of what I thought was going to be our starting and ending date of the break, and now it’s a little bit different but I’m just going to have to tell them that I already made these plans in absence of them giving me any information. That’s just kind of how to you have to do things here. I feel like I’ve built up enough repor with the school and with my co-teachers too that they will understand.

And speaking of my co-teachers, I’ve been wanting to tell you all about them. They are the Chinese women who co-teach my classes with me. I have 3 of them for 4 different classes, and they are all VERY different. We see each other every day, both in and out of class. The class I teach with them is “foreign teacher class”, which means I run the class. Then they teach their own class with the same kids as well, which they run. Working with someone from another culture and with limited English has been very challenging at times, but I also feel very blessed that I got put with them….most of time that is :) I sort of see my relationship with them like a marriage. I have one who I teach grade 1 with, and we’re like the married couple that lives in the same house but have completely different lives. We rarely talk…I just go in and do my thing; she translates when necessary and tries to keep the class under control. Then I say goodbye and leave. That’s about as far as our relationship goes. Then I have a co-teacher that I teach grade 4 with…we are the couple constantly in a power struggle. She always wants to do things her way, which wouldn’t be a problem except that I don’t agree with many of her teaching methods. For example, she will interrupt me in the middle of the lesson and tell the kids to do something in Chinese, so I can’t understand. She does this because she knows I would tell her I don’t want to have them do it if she asked me first. This leaves me in a very awkward position, because I’m standing in front of the class and have no idea what’s going on. I’ve been very upfront with her about these things and have had take the reigns in that class, and we’re doing better. And then I have a co-teacher who I teach a grade 1 class and a grade 4 class…and we have a very healthy marriage. She is a really good teacher and I trust her a lot. She gives me her suggestions (which I trust because she’s a good teacher with a lot of experience) but ultimately lets me teach my class and steps in when I need her. She’s very strict and keeps the class extremely tame, which helps me SO much! She always defends me when the students gripe about an assignment or something, and I trust that when I’m not there, she’s not doing something I wouldn’t like. I guess you could say she has my back. We also enjoy just chatting, and sometimes we’ll just chat away while the kids are working on an assignment. I’ve learned a lot from her, and I’m really going to miss her when I have to leave.

Fun Fact: I have yet to see a fortune cookie...