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I’m in a restaurant a few blocks from the school having another adventure in communication. No one here speaks English but my Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook proved invaluable once again. The staff eagerly grabbed it from me once they realized what it was. I had opened it to the food section and they searched for dishes they have. Another customer took part in this and I ordered quinzheng yu (chingzen yoo): steamed fish in a marinade of soy sauce, garlic and spring onions. The customer recommended this. Everyone writes that fish is a bit risky but what the heck! I’ve eaten it three times here already and so far I have only suffered mild diarrhoea. The restaurant has a little bit of class, with uniformed staff and a girl in a Cheong Sam (Chi pao in Mainland

… Uniformed staff seems to be a reliable indicator that a restaurant claims a good standard of hygiene. One of my favourite places has become the Parisienne Cake Shop, five minutes from the school. The staff wear clean uniforms which remind me of a British Lyons Tea House in my childhood. It is the first place I was taken to other than the hotels where I was feasted when I arrived. I returned the next day and was befriended by two young ladies who tried very hard to speak English to me. One has become my resource there and borrows my Phrasebook to study whenever I am there. I suppose I could say Sun is the first friend I made other than school staff and expatriates. She tells me she is working there for six months to save money to go to college and learn about computers. Her English is the best I have come across other than teachers’.…  I have just had fun miming and writing to make my order clear in a restaurant. Before that I went for a bit of a walk looking for something new to eat. I have tried a variety of eating places in my neighbourhood and was going to eat at the Parisienne Cake Shop, my most frequent haunt; but the place looked as though as though a bomb had gone off inside it. The inside had been stripped and there was a pile of rubble on the footpath. I hope it has not closed but Sun told me a little while ago that they are all going to get dressed up for a couple of weeks this month. Putting the two together I think they are refurbishing and opening with a different style. That option unavailable I continued on my way around a couple of blocks till I came to an arcade of eating places I discovered last week. The arcade is lined with cafes and restaurants of varying standards and I wandered through noting which seemed the cleanest and hoping to catch a glimpse of someone eating a dish which appeared particularly enticing. I continued down a side street at the other end as there were more eating places along there. They were all on the footpath and it was too cold to eat outside. At the end of the street I came upon a crowd watching a magician on a small stage. I joined them and for once people’s attention remained on the show rather than turning to focus on me. The magician did things which seemed clever but not very exciting as a performance. He was followed by a boy of about nine or ten who climbed on top of the speakers and onto a tall unicycle. He started with circles, went on to figure-of-eights, hopped on it to music, then spun a hoop with one foot while riding. He concluded after spinning four hoops with his arms and one with a foot while retaining control of the cycle with the other foot! (Eat your hearts out my street circus friends!) I came back through to a clean looking restaurant at the entrance to the arcade. The two young ladies at the entrance were chatting and didn’t see me until I was close to them. They recoiled in horror and tried to close the door when I loomed up at them. I would not be refused admission and a senior staff member came and made them let me in. I think this bulky bearded barbarian must have triggered some ancient racial memories of waves of invasion from

 In most restaurants of small to medium size the cashier’s counter is also the bar. It is often the cashier who is the more educated staff member and the one who tries to remember a few English words and eagerly grabs my Phrase Book when I produce it. She always appears to be in charge of the floor staff. The meal I finally managed to order was a chicken and mushroom soup. By the time I finished everyone realized I was friendly and invited me to come back. They laughed and understood when I mimed that maybe next time they would not be scared of me. 

This is the first teaching situation I had in China. I was placed in a middle school in a minor Chinese city in Hubei province. A big place by western standards, it is considered small by the locals and other Chinese. There are six years of middle school. I taught the lowest grade and two classes of the highest. I really enjoyed teaching English and have a good rapport with my four classes of eleven to twelve-year olds and gained some respect from my two classes of eighteen-year olds. I taught the little ones three times a week and the Seniors once. The young ones were taught from a book and I drilled them in pronunciation then they did written exercises which I corrected as they finished. If the class worked quickly I tried to fit in a word game or something else to increase the breadth of their experience. The Seniors are really amazingly good at everyday English but needed challenge in full comprehension. Their knowledge of grammar is probably better than mine and I think I was brought in not only to let them hear a native English speaker but to give them (again) a broader experience of the language. I decided that the best way I could extend their understanding and appreciation of the English language was to expose them to short pieces of high quality writing, mainly poems. This was not successful and that was a mystery to me until I had enough experience in the culture to understand some of the deficits of the Chinese education system. You can find my ideas on my Bloggerparty blog about it. I led them through a process of responding to and analyzing the poem. I started with “The Stolen Orange” by Brian Patten. Three teachers and a student teacher sat in and they loved it. Next week I will do Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Taken” (true title, the other is an excerpt). I really enjoyed researching and analyzing the poems to prepare. A couple of really bright students enjoyed the exercises and so did the teachers but students who had been encouraged to repeat teachers opinions and pass exams through regurgitation of memorized material were ill-equipped to think for themselves and look for the meaning under the text. My good idea was a failure. What could have been a popular class exercise in a Western educational setting was a big flop here. Don’t try it if you come to China.

I have written elsewhere about my arrival in China and Shanghai airport. See Where can I go and What can I see in China for that.  My generally critical pieces on life in China, China – Critique, etc. will give you another perspective on the joys and tribulations of living here. In fact, there’s a lot on this site about one person’s experience of China. This series of short blogs is more lightweight but it could be pretty worthwhile to anyone wanting to teach in China.

Two days after I arrived there was a light snow. It was the first I had seen for twenty three years as my last visit to Britain finished in the autumn. The trees soon turned russet and every day was cold, I would guess never reaching more than about eight degrees. I have had to buy two more jumpers and a two layered quilted jacket, or it could be described as two jackets which zip together. I suspect I will need both layers before winter is over. I had a cold for two weeks and it went into my chest. It came and went a bit but eventually turned into a light flu. I went to the hospital (few GPs in China) where my chest was listened to carefully. I was x-rayed, had my blood tested and my temperature taken. My lungs were not seriously affected, temperature just slightly up, and the blood was put immediately into a machine which indicated I had a flu. No x-ray film was used but the radiologist watched through a monitor and wrote down her findings for the doctor. My liaison officer was the daughter of two doctors and the school has close links with the hospital so I was given VIP treatment and there was no waiting. I took penicillin and concentrated liquorice and something that has no English on the packet. I also had to drink hot water. The treatment has worked well and I my symptoms cleared quickly.

On TV there is an English language channel, CCTV 9, and I discovered a programme on learning Mandarin hosted by a brilliant Canadian named Da Shan who is word and tone perfect. This man performs the Chinese comic dialogue, a fast talking stand-up comedy, but not on his teaching show. I thought then the main block to my learning the language was a lack of resources but now I realize I was just unaware of the best ways to approach it. If I had got stuck into reading and writing Mandarin, and persuaded some of my Chinese friends to speak Chinese with me as much as possible instead of speaking English to increase their ability, I would have made more progress.