Third Week of China

Yikes. What a week. For lack of more time to write I'm going to have to keep this update short.

Teaching can be brutal when you realize it takes five or six hours to prepare for class. But living in a village can be fantastic when you have the chance to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

Highlights of the week in bullet form:
1) Meeting a red/black striped snake in the process of devouring a huge toad. A farmer took a hoe and clamped off its head, but we learned later the snake would've killed one of us (poison) if we weren't careful.
2) Having a Holiday Learning Day, where we taught kids about Thanksgiving and other types of holidays. It was pretty awesome.
3) Spending LOTS of time with my teaching partners and my students, which is the biggest blessing ever. It's getting me thinking about my personal identity as either Chinese, Taiwanese, or America. Or none? I love the students here, both my partners from Nanjing (some of the most competent people I've met) and my students in the village. I've come to realize that I share much more in common with the people here, and I'm many, MANY times more comfortable with their way of living than in America. But more on that when I have more time. It's hard to unpack.
4) Much of this experience is preparing me implicitly for a real challenge in Beijing later in the year, and I'm trying to master the Chinese language as well as the underlying cultural norms that surround the perhaps-sensitive topic. Many of my students have parents who are migrant workers, and it's interesting to be able to see how they cope in the villages.

Out of time. Will write more later =p

In the Middle of China

After a nine hour bus ride we finally arrived at our village. It's called "ai ming" or "love people." Of all the village assignments, we received the one with the best natural environment. There is so much beauty here, and our host family even grows their own tea.

My host is called Principal Pan, and he lives with his son (Messi) and wife in a small home. Alick, Ivy, and Mischa live in this host home. We have some fantastic food every day, mostly beans, gourd, some kind of vegetable, and a rare taste of meat. The majority of food is literally from the ground to the table, grown in the surrounding farmland. Principal Pan's wife (we call her "a yi") is a master chef and does wonders with chilis, vegetables, and some herbs. Every evening, we are offered beer or some other alcoholic beverage, and Principal Pan tries to get us to drink up. The beer here is the only cold beverage you'll get: every other beverage is tea. But then again, I love the latter, since the tea is ridiculously fresh and would cost a fortune anywhere else in the world. Lisa, who is Messi's cousin, is living with us because her parents have moved into the city to find work. She is a perceptive 14 year old, quite immature at times, but showing wisdom beyond her years. She likes to push me around and make fun of me, and she gets along well with all of us.

My team consists of Matt Watson (you might now him--Allen and he are rock climbing buddies, and he lived in Faisan), Malin (a freshman from Georgetown), Alick (a first year graduate student at Nanking university studying political economics), Clam (a biochemistry graduate student), Ivy, Winnie, Mischa (an American student from New Mexico State), and Heidi. The nine of us work together to teach about 200 students ranging from 1 - 12 grade.

I really enjoy village living in spite of its hardships. The community feeling here is one that I wish I could find at Stanford. Perhaps it's because there's so LITTLE privacy: everything you do is public. The "sanitary pit" is truly a pit in the middle of nowhere, and if anyone wanted to, they could say hello to you while you were at it. I need to bathe outdoors (usually under the moonlight or starlight, which is quite an experience when it is breathtakingly beautiful outdoors--more on that in a second), and anyone who wanted to look around could say hello while I were at that. I sleep with two roommates, and have to change in there. I eat with the same people every day at the same time, and we talk about everything that day (the conversations usually revolve around language [our dialects or English], food [what we like to eat, how to cook, how to make noodles, how to make dumplings], or students [how we can revise our teaching plans, etc]). We tease each other about our love lives mercilessly, and what's most interesting, we've really only known each other about one week and I feel a connection much deeper than I've felt with any of my American counterparts in Shanghai.

The first week of teaching, as always, in grueling. The first week of teaching has just ended, and I'm honestly a little relieved. I'm teaching two classes of middle school students, most of them either too shy to speak, too proud to listen, or too distracted to care. With around 50 students in total, I'm spending most of my day preparing lesson plans with my teaching partners, working out suitable games (holy smokes--that's hard when your students don't give a jiffy about "immature" games), planning the class, and reading their assignments. I love my students dearly in spite of their frustrating reactions to my teaching at times.

Ai Ming is one of the most breathtaking places in the world. It rivals Yosemite in its natural beauty. The surrounding mountains are carpeted by poetic bamboo and tea groves; a river runs through the valley, with crystal clear water and teeming with life. The moon rises to its zenith (full moon was yesterday) and peeks over the mountain tops, shrouded in fog and equally poetic in its majesty. It seems like the whole place was sculpted.

I've just run out of time at the internet cafe, so I'm going to wrap this up by saying I'm well and good :).

Shanghai

Finally found internet!

Currently sitting in a hostel in Shanghai preparing for our trip to Anhui. Orientation, to be honest, has turned out to be much more relaxed than I had first imagined. We spent about one hour talking about the program, and most of the day we're just wandering the city visiting places. Some highlights have been the Shanghai Aquarium, the underwater tourist tunnel, the "Bund" (which is a fantastic walk down the shoreline of the Huang Pu river), and the Orientatial Pearl.

First, prices vary massively from place to place, ostensibly because the rich are ridiculously rich and the poor remain relatively poor. From beragged beggars to yuppies in designer clothing, the streets of Shanghai remain a place of disparity.

People here are all but shy, crossing the road with no consideration to the traffic signals or pedestrian signals, shouting at restaurants, and hawking goods (everything from kites to roller blades) mercilessly. At the same time, there is a heart-warming quality to some of the storekeepers and restaurants.

Two more days of orientation and we're headed off!

Last Night in Taiwan

After 3 Japanese restaurants, over seven meals of seafood, a few hours of hiking, three hours playing golf with my father, hundreds of hours spent with my family, sixteen different types of fruit (and counting), and plenty of reminiscing, I'm officially leaving Taiwan tomorrow.

In a brief sojourn at home, I've discovered a beauty to Taiwan that I'd forgotten in the months before. Where the mountains meet the ocean, a dialogue begins, ranging from subtle whispers of the breathing tide upon granite to an altercation of waves against equally stubborn rock. The resulting landscape has a deliberate quality, reminding me how seemingly disparate elements complement each other.