“Foreign Expert”

It occurred to me somewhat suddenly the other day that many of you may not actually know what I’m doing over here. Even some of my closest friends seem to be a little hazy on the subject of Lara’s Job. Common responses range from “intergalactic opera star” to “professional nerd” (both of which are, of course, correct). So, since we’ve been here for four months already, and I’m preparing my final exams, I thought I might fill you in on the glamour that is my professional life.

To be fair, doing what I do in China is quite different from doing it in the States – it actually is a little glamorous, in fact. Being a foreign teacher is only a few clicks away from “rockstar” in local university culture, especially when you’re 6’1” and full of piercings. My official status (get this) is “Foreign Expert,” with my own special passport and everything, and the title has included such perks as when, a week ago, Paul and I were invited to be the “Distinguished Guests” at the closing ceremonies of the biennial Foreign Languages festival at our university. This meant that, upon arriving at the performance hall, we were immediately set upon by three tiny identical young women in powder blue air stewardess uniforms and ushered to our reserved seats in the front row, right next to the judges’ panel, and then introduced by the emcees to a thronging, screaming crowd of several hundred students all waving multicolored glo-sticks.

The ceremonies themselves consisted of a three-hour parade of students singing “American Idol” style, in English and other languages. It’s difficult to describe the kind of post-modern pageantry of which China is capable: a girl in a sleeveless grandma sweater and hot pants yelled a Cyndi Lauper classic at the absolute tune-free top of her lungs; a boy in a cape and shiny Mardi Gras mask sang “The Phantom of the Opera” to a whiny wisp of a girl in a white dress shaped like a cake; a balding young man croaked some atrociously sappy love song that everyone else knew the words to, but which I only recognized as a melody from department store elevators; a fabulously incongruous guy in a suit strummed a guitar and did a dead ringer version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” sounding for all the world like John Denver himself; a rather plump woman who had inexplicably ratted her hair into a spiky nest and ringed her eyes in raccoon black marched in circles on the stage belting out a Christina Aguilera hit which I, in my willful pop-ignorance, did not know – this act impressed me beyond words as the first evidence I have seen in this country of soul in the sweaty, gutsy, gospel sense of the word – from what depths she summoned that big-mama voice I cannot imagine; a teensy doll-like creature with face glitter did a beautiful cover of Dido’s “Thank You”; and let’s not forget the woman who sang in Spanish curled onto a bar stool while an interpretive dancer flung herself into dramatic poses in the back of the stage – or the totally excellent teenager in an enormously fluffy blue prom dress who, to everyone’s surprise, sang opera – in Italian. These scenes were followed up with some uncharacteristically sexy dance teams who somehow acquired the most interesting break-beat trip hop I think I’d ever heard, and, of course, the entire Russian studies department prancing in formation in shiny green-red-gold, Vulcan boots and dangly headdresses to a live accordion. So, this job does have its benefits.

When I’m not busy witnessing closing ceremonies or judging speech competitions (which were last month), I’m a teacher at Sichuan Normal University. The “normal” part doesn’t mean “ordinary,” in the “community college” sense of ordinary – it’s a term that comes from the French educational system, and implies normal in the sense of “normative,” or “setting a standard.” This is a teachers’ university, in that all of the students here, regardless of major or academic concentration, will probably go on to be educators at the primary or high school level. The “normal” aspect of the university is its accreditation as an institution that prepares future teachers for the standards they will be required to meet in order to attain their licenses. As a linguist and a language teacher, my work centers around the departments of Education, Linguistics, and Foreign Languages, although I am the joint intellectual property of the office of International Education, as well. I’m here as a “visiting scholar,” a term that makes me sound both smarter and more serious than I feel; last year I heard about something called the English Language Fellow Program – a competitive fellowship that takes experienced language teachers and sends them around the world to do training and to set up programs and resources in places of need. The Fellowship is coordinated and administered through Georgetown University, but the U.S. Department of State has its fingers in it too, in the same way the Department of Defense is affiliated with the Peace Corps. This association made me uncomfortable at first, but as a friend pointed out, “Lara – what could be better – it may be the government who buys the ticket, but whose ideas do they get? Yours.” The grand irony of it turned out to be irresistible, and so I applied, with the explicit condition that I would go to China and only China – although over 50 countries were possible, it was the only one that had the potential to further and enhance both my own career and that of my husband, who is an acupuncturist and practitioner of Chinese medicine. My university put in a proposal for an instructor, arranged for teacher housing, and was awarded the grant for a Fellow position by the U.S. consulate here in Chengdu. To my surprise, of the four Fellows selected for China (a popular destination), I was one, and here we are. Of course, I never got to read the proposal that Sichuan Normal put forth, so what their intentions were for me, I have no idea. As soon as I arrived, I was transformed from a Fellow with a “project” to a “Professor” with a full load of courses, most of which I’d never taught before, and few of which I would even be qualified for, back in the States. While I’m struggling to create the teacher-training situation and future material resources I was selected as a Fellow to do, I am having an amazing time teaching well above my academic “station,” and learning a tremendous amount in the process. My resume looks great these days.

First off, I am only teaching ten hours this term. This sounds like part-time work, but when you take into account that half of my courses are at the graduate-level and I only have an MA myself, add that to adapting to a totally new academic system, meditating through culture shock, navigating a new city where I’m functionally illiterate, plus studying Chinese 7½ hours a week and doing taiji quan and qi gong every day, it definitely becomes full-time. Besides my actual teaching, I’m also organizing discussion groups for English teachers in an attempt to create a peer network for sharing ideas, materials, techniques, and mentoring. So far, this concept has been mind-blowing for most of these educators, whose senses of professional self are primarily ones of stress and administration-driven inadequacy; I anticipate that this collective will become the bulk of my project-legacy.

This is the view from the reading room in the Foreign Languages Institute. The old man depicted by the statue is Confucius.

Six hours of my ten are what is unfortunately termed “Oral English” here, a phrase I somehow can’t get comfortable with. “We usually just call it ‘Speaking,’ or ‘Conversation,’” I tried to explain, but it comes from a direct translation from the Chinese: “kou (third tone) yu (third tone),” literally mouth language, or oral language, so the name has stuck, with all of its connotations of sex and dentistry. My Oral English groups are all sophomore English majors, which makes them around 19 years old, going on 12. Because this is a teachers’ university and “teacher” has the same covert gender in China as it does in the States and much of the rest of the world, the vast majority of the students are female. Between my two sophomore groups, I have a total of 60 students, exactly four of whom are male. Lucky them. So, these classes have all the giggly, jewelry-wearing, moony-sighing, slumber party vibe one might expect. Culturally, Chinese youth are much more physically affectionate with one another than they are in the States, particularly if they are young women. This means that all during class these girls are holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, rubbing each other’s backs, twisting someone’s sweatshirt string around their fingers, leaning on shoulders, and generally cuddling and petting in a manner that still occurs to my American sensibilities as hypersexual, although they’d be shocked to hear so, since at this age, fewer than a quarter of them have even had sex yet, with a partner of either gender (or so says the Party). They all have pencil cases with teddy bears and puppies and duckies on them, and scribble vocabulary in little notebooks with balloons and hearts on them and covers that read things like, “A friend is what makes world and so loveliness ever in our pure hearts be true like dewdrop.” On our first day of class, I was giving them a chance to adjust to the overwhelming shock of having an enormous, scary Westerner at the front of the room and to ask me personal or cultural questions to break the ice. One girl said, “I have two questions.” “Shoot,” I said. “One, how long will you be here?” “A year,” I answered, “two semesters.” She nodded, businesslike. That seemed acceptable. “And two,” she went on, “do you love us?”

Despite their cupcake exteriors, these young women (and men) also have a cleverness to them, a mild devious streak that impresses me with its naughtiness. They test limits, like any group of young people will do – they are not the Confucian models of obedience so often related in hearsay accounts of China’s educational system. Their culture has not exactly encouraged outspoken and opinionated debate over the course of its history – while we say this is true of the States, as well, power has worked in the U.S. to suppress the voices of the charismatic and visionary, but has left a general allowance for private expression that should not be taken for granted. This allowance has no precedent in China, and so ways of making one’s feelings and opinions known have acquired a profound metaphorical and contextual artistry that I admire, even if I cannot always read the expressive intent. These young women find ways to be obedient, charming, and polite, while simultaneously (and deniably) hinting at criticism, playfulness, and biting humor. It’s difficult to describe, but fascinating and maddening to watch. Even in English, we are speaking very different languages.

Every week I spend three hours with each of these two groups. The three hours are, unfortunately, scheduled all in a row, so rather than the pedagogically sounder one-hour-three-times-a-week model, we have all three hours starting at 4 PM on either Monday or Tuesday evenings. If you’re a language teacher, you know how absurd this is: a three-hour conversation class at dinnertime? For a 20-week semester? Great idea. On the positive side, I have had time to try out some longer, more complicated activities, and since the students themselves are so brilliant, we have had some very interesting evenings together. I found out only a handful of weeks ago that these two groups are not indicative of the kinds of students many teachers here have, in terms of both ability and motivation. I have been consistently blown away by their level of English mastery – what they lack in naturalistic usage they make up for in depth of vocabulary. Chinese students may not have the most practice in lateral thinking or logical analysis, but their memorization skills are tremendous, which is why my students frequently produce sentences like, “And so we must endeavor to overcome these tribulations,” or “We seize and strive for the realization of dreams.” One can hear a (fading) echo of Maoist slogans from the revolutionary period in many of their more hopeful sentiments. As it turns out, my groups are “experimental.” This means that they were put together based not on random assignment, as most classes are, a practice which frequently results in students with a wide range of skill levels learning in a single classroom, but rather they were grouped according to their college entrance exam scores – and these students were all at the top of the incoming class of 2006. That this arrangement would be considered “experimental” amuses me – “I wonder what would happen if we taught students by skill rather than age?” is hardly a mysterious research question, but a number of my local colleagues are in the process of producing papers based on it, so I encourage them heartily in whatever ways I can. Another grim fact about the Chinese academic system: all instructors, even adjuncts, are required to publish in a national, peer-reviewed journal twice a year in order to keep their jobs. That’s a new piece of research every six months, or once a semester. I will withhold my blazing holy judgment of this practice for another time.

My graduate classes are an entirely different story. I teach two: Sociolinguistics, a course for linguistics masters students, and Second Language Research Design, which is for education masters preparing to write their dissertations. Luckily, I took both of these courses in my own masters’ program, and have had the benefit of looking over my old notebooks while simultaneously reading every text on the subjects in English that I can get my hands on. The week before I started teaching, I had a total freak out about the research class, in particular. Sociolinguistics is fun and fascinating, and something I can yammer on and on about ad nauseam even in mixed company (I’m lots of fun at cocktail parties), but even when I was in grad school, research was my weak spot – too many rules, too many hoops to jump through; I wanted ideas! Examples! Anomalies! I hated the mirroring self-examination of validity justifications and the obsessive nit-pickery of APA citation format. I emailed my former mentor/thesis advisor/research professor in a panic – who knew better than he about my shortcomings in this matter? And in typically awesome fashion, he promptly shot back about a year’s worth of lecture notes, plus advice on textbooks and syllabus creation. I was saved. Or so I thought.

As it has turned out, this course has been much more complex a problem, albeit one I am singularly better fit to deal with than I would have been for a more traditional graduate course on research methods and planning. I marched into the classroom that first day, brimming with ideas about parameters and post-positivism and internal and external validity and literature reviews, and I opened my mouth and out poured all this carefully-constructed wisdom and warm-up queries and notes on the importance of scheduling and the heat of the pursuit of knowledge and so forth and when we consider what the fundamental collective project that is language research really amounts to, we may find that…er…

A thunderous silence.

In the ensuing pause, I took a moment to assess the situation. I think a tumbleweed must have floated for weeks across the Pacific Ocean, and then bumped and tossed its fragile way halfway through the continent of Asia, only to fall in the window of my classroom and roll across the floor. A cricket chirped in the back. A pin dropped.

You see, my research students don’t actually speak English. This is interesting, since they are all either planning to be English teachers, or have already been teaching English, some for as long as thirty years, now returning for more education due to revised curricular demands on the part of the Ministry of Education. And they didn’t understand a single word I said.

So. This term has been a learning opportunity for all of us. I have been learning how to take a textbook written for PhD students and render it sensical to readers with a fourth-grade vocabulary; I’ve been learning how to distill concepts that I once found impenetrable and boring into workable, fresh ideas that can be translated into drawings and simple classroom activities; I’ve been learning what research really entails, and how important certain concepts are to ensuring the usefulness and trustworthy nature of the shared pursuit of knowledge. My students have been learning a hell of a lot of vocabulary; they’ve learned that they need to read more; they’ve learned that their dissertations will be both more valuable and more difficult than they ever imagined (did I mention they have to be written in English?); they’ve learned that American teachers are crazy and will do anything for a laugh. And their English has gotten better, too. I adore them, and I’m so proud of the amount of effort they have put into meeting me halfway in this practically impossible project. They seem to like me, too – they’ve taken Paul and me out for dinner; they’ve shown me temples and gotten me drunk on nasty Chinese baijiu and photographed me driving a boat under the influence; they bring me presents of thermoses and home-baked bread; they erase the blackboard for me on breaks and after class. They have asked me to teach them again next term, and I will be serving as their research advisor for the duration of their proposal-writing processes. Many of them are much older than I am, but have shown me nothing but attention and respect. I am honored to be their friend.

My Sociolinguistics class is something like an educational wet dream, on the other hand. My students speak passably good English – their writing is, overall, outstanding, and I can more or less lecture like I would to a native English-speaking group, albeit with more body language and concept checks. They are interested and curious, have good foundations in basic linguistic theories, and often ask excellent questions that push me to really know my shit. I spend hours a week studying. This is the class where I get to geek out for two periods every Thursday morning on things like the ways Kwakiutl speakers categorize countable nouns, or the regional phonetic variations of diphthongs in English, or incite furious debate over the semantic distinction between what constitutes a “language” versus a “dialect,” and then smooth over the controversy with sociopolitical explanations and examples from Mandarin and Cantonese. I even got to do my version of “Why we Love to Hate Benjamin Whorf,” (Google the inaccurately named Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the better-suited term “linguistic relativity principle” if you’re interested. I’ll send you lecture notes,) and they were on the edge of their seats, hanging on every word and scribbling every diagram. They love Universal Grammar hypotheses. These are word nerds – my kind of people. I’ve gone out to tea with a few of them, and whiled away hours comparing impressions of Hallidayan functional grammar; some send me emails looking for more things they can read on conversation analysis or pronoun mismatches, or ask me to solve the problems that keep them up at nights, ridiculously large theoretical questions, like: what’s the relationship between pragmatics and the maintenance of social hierarchies? Or, how can I connect sociolinguistics with second language acquisition? I love these emails, and spend almost as much time answering them as I do writing lectures and activities. I have them keep journals, and I have learned so much about both Chinese culture and the varieties of language present here just from tracking the musings and intellectual growth of my students and the way they relate our topics to their own experience as linguistic creatures. I am grateful for the chance to work with them, especially since a PhD is generally required to teach this level of course in the States. I feel like this opportunity is a little gift from the universe to me, my own teachers’ fantasy made real for as long as the spell holds – before I return to a place where my 10 years’ experience and Master’s degree can’t even land me a full-time gig with health insurance.

The trade-off is worth it. Besides, next term I’m teaching Semantics – a course I never even took in school. I have a lot of reading to do over the break. We’re heading into finals, and as much as I’m looking forward to the five weeks of winter vacation, I’m going to miss these classes – all of them. 20 weeks of work in the system has given me enough of a sense of how this colossal bureaucracy operates to make me feel I can do more in the coming spring. No longer fumbling in the dark, I have at least managed to echo-locate the sharper corners, and have found some allies in the process who not only have flashlights – they speak Chinese! My colleagues are supportive if distant. I’ve invited several to our Solstice party this week; I’ll see if I can transform them into friends.

~ by knifemaker on December 20, 2007.