May 2002, assorted notes

I hit the burnout point over a month ago. The Shanghai vacation helped, but then I had to come back to Guilin. The situation is this: Guilin is an ugly city with a useless climate; I'm sick of China and everything Chinese; when I decided to return for a second semester I told myself the motivation was teaching, but my faltering relationship with my students and my discouraging assessment of their ability and inclination to learn have together undermined my sole purpose for being here. I'm stuck swimming in the consequences of all my mistakes last semester as I learned a little bit about how to teach the hard way - showing up and teaching. The more experienced foreign teachers seem to have an easier time of it, and the unexperienced volunteers are much more cheerful and undemanding than I am.

So when I came back from Shanghai I told myself that I simply had to stop caring about the success or failure of my teaching - just go through the motions, as the Chinese tend to do, and try to finish out the semester without losing it, whatever _it_ might be. I went in with Zhang Ming on a DVD player, and have been amassing and trading a collection of pirated DVDS (generally a dollar each), catching up both on old movies I never saw (Godfather Trilogy) and lightning-fast bootlegs (Spiderman, Star Wars II).

The other day, though, I may have gotten a glimpse of the third way - Zen teaching, the place you get to after you've abandoned both caring and not caring. A few students were talking steadily as one student stood at front giving a speech. After a minute of this, I interrupted the speaker and politely and without anger, asked the students to stop talking and to apologize. They stared at my blankly, the default Chinese response to just about any stimulus. After a few rounds of careful explanation ("This is your friend up here. Why are you talking while your friend is speaking?") and steady stares, they finally stood and apologized, and we continued. (The speech was awful, and unintelligible, but that I file under the previous don't-care policy.)

One of the students that I've flunked for plagiarism called to ask if she needed to come to class or take the final. "You're welcome to come to class, and hand in homework, but you won't be taking the final," I replied. "Ma Xia (the dean of English) said I could retake the final."

Recall that, in Chinese schools, the final is almost synonymous with the final grade, and recall also that, if a students flunks the final, the student can retake the final and still pass the class.

I spoke to Ma Xia. "My understanding of our agreement was that the students would get zeros for the class, and would have to retake the entire class." "Why not compromise?" "We did compromise. Your school rules call for much more serious punishment for the first cheating offense, and in my background students are expelled after one offense." After some hemming and hawing, Ma Xia finally agreed that a permament zero for the class, with no retake, had been our deal.

"Now," I said, "I want to ask you how many classes a student can miss." Her face lit up, and we calculated that a student can miss five classes without consequence, but at six absences the student gets a zero. "I have one student with four absences." "Is it ...?" "Yes, it's that student." She was positively gleeful at the prospect of nailing this student, a hard-core slacker who blew off the midterm with a shit-eating shrug.

"How come you care so much about absences, but not cheating?" She didn't have a coherent answer, but I could tell the truant student had gotten under her skin. The student bothers me, too, but I not to let it get to me. "If a student gets a zero due to absences," I asked, "can the student just retake the final and pass the class anyway?" Yup. Pretty rigorous system. Don't let anybody give you any crap about Americans not taking responsibility for themselves.

The other student whom I've flunked for cheating continues to attend every class and hand in his homework. He asked about research for the final, and I said, "no need, you're not taking the final." He insisted, "I want to do it, I want to show that I can do it." A voice at the back of my head says that he's laying groundwork to undermine the zero and finagle a grade, but I've decided to take him at face value and let him take the final. Actually, though, a solution has just occured to me. I'll let him hand in sources for the final, and I'll let him take the final, just not in class. "Here you go, buddy, since you're getting a zero in the class and you say you want to take the final for honor or for learning, just get a watch and time yourself. Three hour limit, take it whenever you want and hand it to me before I go home and I'll correct it and give it a letter grade, but not a score."

I've gone to English corner maybe twice this semester. One time, I promised to give at least one more lecture. (I suppose I should be grateful that I have a fan.) The second time, I went because the students were putting on a performance, The Little Mermaid (Disney has become primary source material; no-one seems aware that Tarzan used to be a series of books or The Little Mermaid a - what was the original incarnation of the Little Mermaid story, anyway?). Although the normal speaking volume in Chinese is nearly a shout, the students were Acting, and Speaking English, so it was almost impossible to hear them. I stepped away to answer questions about the final exam, and when I stepped back I asked Mrs. Fisher, "Which one is the mermaid?" She didn't know.

A month or two after the promise, I finally gave a talk on "How to make an HTML page, for beginners." It was originally scheduled for 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, the usual time for my lectures last semester, but it got bumped to 3:00 for unexplained and presumably arbitrary reasons (the room was available all afternoon). Since most students have class then, it was poorly attended (about 10 people), which was just as well because I didn't prepare very well. If my fan was in the audience, I didn't recognize him.

The Chinese Air Force continues to fly circles around Guilin, though fortunately much less frequently than last semester. After an argument with Zhang Ming about which model the planes are, I finally sketched out what I was seeing and went to fas.org. It's almost certainly a Mig-21 variant, but there are three or four Mig-21 variants in local manufacture. Now I have to try and get a better look at the nose, the front part of the fuselage, and the shape of the fins and tail. Although the planes fly overhead less than a mile up, the sky is almost always hazy or cloudy, and either way there's a lot of glare. Guilin is the only place I've been where visibility is better during a rainstorm than on a clear day, thanks to the San Bernadino Valley-like pollution levels.

Several of my students have complained that I mix up all of their names. I have an excuse, though not an acceptable one, nor one that'll I'll offer to them. It's just not my fault, because they all act the same, speak the same broken English, and exhibit exactly the same shallow, superficial interests (and complete lack of interest in class or learning or English). I don't even understand how they can tell themselves apart, much less expect me to do so. They're just not face cards.

So far I've gotten electric shocks from: the case of my computer, when the monitor cable is attached and the monitor is plugged in; the microphone in one of the classrooms, when I picked it up by the metal stand and my pinkey brushed the metal of the plug housing; and one other microphone which hurt too much to use trial and error to diagnose the grounding fault. It's never to late to belong to a zero-child family ....

Lots of construction: first, the ground in our small apartment complex was pierced by trenches to install a sewage system (not sure where it was going before; the buildings are three to six years old). The giant dirt pile next to the complex was bulldozed into hills, covered with turf (in little one-foot patches that make the whole thing look somewhat like a computer drawing or art project), lined with stone paths, and finally decorated with trees. And last week, workers spent a few days installing a thigh-high brick wall along one side our apartment complex, at the top of a steep hill leading down to the ground-floor balconies. I think it's to block the rats.

Oh, those poor trees. They chop them out of the ground leaving, at most, a three-foot radius of roots and dirt wrapped in rope at the bottom, then stick them on trucks and haul them through town. The Fishers were actually on a bus that got stuck behind a tree coming up the street, blocking traffic in both directions, overturning sandwich carts, and presumably terrorizing small dogs. Once the trees are replanted, they have to be propped up with up to a dozen wooden poles, probably for years. I'm so frequently amazing that anything organic - trees, dogs, even people - can survive in Chinese cities.

Construction workers tend to live on-site, in temporary housing that they build for themselves; there's been a twenty-foot ditch cutting through the tennis courts for two months, and a plastic tarp tent with a wood stove next to it the whole time. Sometimes it seems like the construction is just an excuse to find land to house people. The embankment next to the enormous cement basketball field last semester is still a shanty-town housing dozens of people in haphazard huts.

The construction company in charge of the new buildings is more on the ball than any other I've seen in China. Most people on site actually wear hard hats, and some of them seem to made of fairly substantial plastic, though the rest are identical to the standard motorcycle helmet: flimsy plastic shells worn unstrapped, unlikely to protect a construction worker from anything heaver than gravel, or to stay on a cyclist's head for more than a millisecond after a collision. But the worker housing is very impressive - a long brick row that's actually a straight line, with white-washed interiors and real windows in neat wooden frames. The front row of the site has large work boards and chalkboards, and the whole thing seems quite organized.

This is apparently because they have to finish these buildings in less than six months, so that they'll be reading for an extra two or three thousand new students next semester, as GUET continues to grow like a cancer. Actually, I've decided to use the more accurate GIET, since the school isn't really a University, Da Xue, a fairly well-defined term having to do with certification, though they've chosen to promote themselves one level in English.

In order to finish the buildings, they're working close to twenty-four hours a day. Klieg lights keep the site illuminated all night, and bulldozers worked round the clock to excavate the site. But we've grown used to the sound of heavy machinery outside our windows all night and day and most of us can sleep through it. And when they poured the foundation, the nights were almost peaceful. But then they installed the cranes.

The crane erection process (heheh) was interesting, and I got to see more glimpses than even in Seattle, which has been very crane-happy the last few years. First, a mobile crane comes on site and puts up a few tower sections, plus the machinery-laden top tower. Then it lifts horizontal sections into place to be bolted on. You end up with a full-length crane about thirty feet above the ground. The stationary crane can then pick up its own new vertical sections and bring them to its tower, where (and I didn't see this bit happening, so I'm guessing) they seem to slide into a big sleeve after the crane winches itself up ten feet to leave space in the sleeve. However they do it, we had a big crane up in three days, and another, slightly shorter so that the first crane could pass over it, days later.

And here's where the relative professionalism of the construction company runs into local habit and gets beaten like a red-headed stepchild. I woke up one night, at about one in the morning, to the sound of a chorus of screaming, tortured young women. I tend to ignore these sorts of sounds, as the students (both male and female) are all big fans of shrieking like women, but this was louder and longer than usual. Finally I looked out the window and saw the crane trolley moving along the arm. Yeah, that's right, the crane rails and wheels haven't been cleaned or lubricated, probably since it left the (Japanese) factory. I'm still not clear on the cultural origins of the aversion to maintenance, but it's a formidible (non-)habit.

So the last week we've been hearing the shrieking crane at all hours, plus the saws cutting steel rebar, plus the usual banging noises. The only respite is at lunchtime and, usually but not always, from 2 am to 5 am. But not last night.

Last night was one of those "survive until dawn and you're a hero nights" that we all have from time to time, but much more so in foreign countries and when suffering food poisoning. My general theory on the food is that, it's not _necessarily_ a problem if the cook handles raw (unrefrigerated) meat all day in between grabbing other ingredients, as long as the food goes straight from the gas-fired blast furnace that is the wok to a clean container (usually a plastic bag) and then to my mouth. But I'm sure that that sort of thing wouldn't pass the health inspections that they don't conduct and doesn't help the statistics that they don't keep.

This time, actually, I think it wasn't even bacteria, just an overdose of hot pepper, that caused my gastrointestinal distress. I woke up, suffered quietly, listened to the steel crane rails suffer loudly, meditated, made a few trips to the bathroom, and then spotted the inch-long insect in the hallway, at least half an inch thick and either a beetle or a cockroach. I will no longer make my way through the apartment at night without turning on all of the lights. Unable to sleep due to the combination of stomach upset, loud noise, and fear of the giant beetle/roach, I stayed up until four am huddled under the covers inside the mosquito net, reading Ubik, a typically freaky, paranoid, reality-bending Philip K. Dick novel which I found in the library. Perhaps not the best choice, but it did keep me distracted from my own problems.

I encountered either the same insect or a close relative this morning in the stairwell, when I went out to purchase chocolate for my breakfast oatmeal. (I've been carefully monitoring my chocolate intake to insure that it doesn't drop below a safe level.) In the light of day, the insect - assuming it was the same one - wasn't an inch long. It was three inches long, two wide, and had wings. I don't know what the hell it was, but I had to walk past it as it clung to a window screen on the second floor, and it hadn't budged when I came back. It's almost two pm, and I have students due at 2:30, so I should go and get some lunch, but between the dim prospects of finding palatable, safe food and the risk of having to walk past said insect twice more, I'm putting serious thought into an extended fast. I have at least another day of water, and my phone card still has money on it, so I could call and move class to my spare room.

Oh no, the crane has started again.

30 May 2002 The Storm

I woke up a bit before one a.m. last night, and it took me a bit to figure out why. A storm was doing its thing outside, with a dense low fog that diffused every lightening strike so that it seemed to come from everywhere. The interior of the bodroom was lit up - through the curtains, bright enough to read by - every few seconds, but the thunder was more rare.

My glasses were nearby, inside the mosquito net, and I had a book on my stomach, bookmark missing. I had fallen asleep reading, as usual, and what woke me up, I think, was the sudden darkness of the reading lamp, caused by the power outage. I got up, walked to the various windows to check stuff out, unplugged the inert computer just in case. (Later I learned that the storm probably fried the hub in our building; two days later, still no Internet.)

It's almost time for morning class now, and the power is still out, and I'm actually pretty happy about it. I didn't need electricity for my gas-powered hot shower, nor to cook my chocolate oatmeal. What's so blissful is the silence. There was no 6:30 Wake-Up martial music, or morning announcements andcadence for Morning Exercise. The construction cranes haven't budged, much less squeaked, and the rebar saw is inert. There's no traffic noise, and almost nobody to be seen, and any remaining noises are cloaked by the now-softened rainfall. Two of the newly planted trees fell over in the night.

I'm typing on my portable keyboard, class is in a few minutes, Tasmanian Michael from Guangxi Normal came by last night and returned the hat I'd left at his apartment so I'm fully rain-equipped again (Pearl Izumi yellow bicycle rain coat with integrated hood, sealed seams, vents, and retractable butt flap - yellow is the color of the emperor, and of pornography, I was told by the Party secretary for the English department; REI rain pants that fold up into their own pocket, a trick of wwhich I never tire; sturdy boots with wool socks for the puddles and streams I will encounter; and now my hat, for when the rain lightens again). In all, a happy morning.

The Debacle

This afternoon, I had teachers' class. The second group - the first meets on Wednesdays, the second on Thursdays. Group one class yesterday was a pleasent surprise. I should perhaps explain, or recap, the circumstances. This class is for teachers in other departments to prepare for certification as English-language instructors, an achievement which will double their per-class stipends and lead to a salary level exceeding that of a manual laboror, a height to which they can otherwise reach only be taking a second job or sticking around for ten years to get a few promotions. I'm supposed to teach Writing English, and the Fishers Reading and Speaking between them, but in the complete absence of curricular guidance, and in consultation with the Fishers, I decided to turn the bulk of my class into practice.

I gave lectures the first two weeks, on plagiarism, sources, and pedagogical methods. The last focused on the idea that listening to lectures is fairly fruitless, and that the only way to learn is to do. So everybody signed up to give lectures in English, two per class, ten to twenty minutes each. After each lecture, everybody fills a sheet of paper with "one good thing, one suggestion, the three main ideas that you remember from the lecture, their tone of voice, zero to ten, ten being best, their body movement, zero to ten, and did they make eye contact with you? Complete sentences, please use complete sentences." I've been doing the same thing, albeit with three-minute time limits, in my undergraduate class.

My expectations have sunk pretty low; most student speeches are stilted recitations of insipid homilies or tired jokes from English Journal and other wretched publications. But from time to time I'm happily surprised. One undergrad student presented a lecture, complete with computer presentation slides, on how to write a love letter. (Sadly, none have yet presented on _why_ to write a love letter.) Another student asked questions of the audience at the end of his speech, and handed out chocolate pieces for correct answers. In the teachers' classes, we've gotten a lot of people copying passages from books, and then reading them to us while we stare at the screen.

But Wednesady was a happy surprise. Both speakers were well prepared, and went past the twenty minutes, including fielding questions and engaging the audience (a little bit) during their lectures. Each got into extended exchanges with audience members, though here their English broke down and they couldn't always understand the questions. Even better was the feedback from the audience - most of the sheets had several good suggestions, consistent observations, and helpful comments.

Today didn't work out that way. Only five teachers showed up. I asked everybody to move to the front row, since there were so few, and one student (the most fluent English speaker) refused. Okay, whatever. Let's hear the lectures. Only one of two scheduled speakers was there; she gave a painfully stilted and clearly memorized speech, not a lecture; it lasted five minutes and was notable mainly for the number and variety of words that she made plural for no discernable reason ("The Japanese give a bowings ....")

I turned to the few students and asked them to write down their feedback. The same student who had previously balked (let's call her Echo, because that's her English name and I see no reason to use a pseudonym) did so again. "I don't think there's a need." Following her lead, or what they perceived as the path of least resistance, the others sat motionless. I turned to the speaker: "Would you find it helpful to have feedback." She had sussed the power dynamic: "There's no need." At least she didn't say "no needs." I handed her my written feedback and stood up and started gathering my things. "Okay, I guess we had a pretty short class today."

Echo spoke up. "If you're going to do class this way, you should stop." Funny, that's what I was thinking.

"Well, if nobody has prepared, and you're not willing to help this student, I don't see what we're going to do."

"You can teach us."

"Teach you what?"

"Reading. Writing." Arms folded across the chest.

"What reading? What writing?"

"You're the teacher." Angry.

I spent another five minutes or so talking - trying to talk - to this flower of the Chinese education system.

"Why don't you want to write down your feedback for the speaker."

"I told her."

"Can you tell her again, so I can hear?"

"No."

"Why not?"

An angry stare and something in Chinese that sounded rude. "I will tell her after class."

Another student commented, "We are beginners. We can't do this."

"She just did very well for a beginner, and your English is as good or better than hers. Why don't you give a lecture next week?"

"Okay, if I have time." In a tone that made it clear he didn't intend to have time.

I was pretty pissed off at this point. I should be clear that I haven't generally taken a very good attitude into the class myself, but I have put forth effort every week to smile, behave politely, and take at least the time in the classroom seriously. But waves of hostile attitude were rolling down from the seated teachers - an attitude I recognized from my students. At one level, it's the irrational belief that I, that any teacher, has some mystical power to imbue knowledge. That if I would just _teach_ them, they would, by dint of showing up and sitting in a chair in a room while I spoke, they would gain ability. That by not doing so, by my avoidance of the passive model/passive listener mode, I was withholding something from them. I was being difficult.

This interpretation was reinforced by a conversation I had with Alvin, the heroic Engineering student who attends my class, who has previously complained of his disappointment that the English majors don't speak English in English class. He opined, after getting harsh feedback from students after his speech, that movement in lecturing was overrated, that it wasn't necessary. I interrogated him.

"How many classes do you have?"

"Ah ... ten ... too many to count."

"Okay, how many of the teachers move?"

"um ... none. Only you."

"Who do you pay more attention to? I know it's not a fair question, I speak English and they speak Chinese, but ..."

"You. Because you pay attention to us."

Gratifying as that is, I actually think there's a deeper reasoning underlying the attitude - now thankfully gone from my undergrad students, who've either grown up a little or just despaired - that the teacher should pour knowledge into the students, and that a teacher who refuses to lecture is withholding magic knowledge-giving. The deeper reason is that the lecture model is familiar. I've now sat in on English classes by three of the Chinese teachers, two of whom I've spoken with extensively, and grown to like and respect, and the third who seems like a very nice guy. In the classes I watched, the teacher stood at the front and spoke, and students sat. Essentially the only positive thing I could find was that the Chinese teachers all took pains to speak virtually no Chinese.

In one class every student I could see had a second book hidden inside the textbook, and was surreptitiously studying something else. In one class they spent forty-five minutes reviewing the answers for a practice test - multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank. Or rather, the teacher spent forty-five minutes bellowing answers and occasionally explanations, and the students did whatever. I played chess. In another class, the teacher would occasionally bark a question, and there would be dead silence for ten seconds. Except for three times, when a student stood up and delivered an impromptu speech of an answer. Twice it was the same student.

Only in Leon's Communicative English class was there any real amount of student participation. At the beginning of class he called on several students to come to the front and read prepared speeches, which they did with numbing earnestness. Throughout class he called on specific students to stand and deliver English translations of Chinese passages. Although I found it tedious, it was head and shoulders above the other classes and I'm not surprised that his class has been cited overwhelmingly as the only class the students enjoy.

As near as I could tell, learning simply doesn't occur in Chinese classrooms. It happens outside of the classroom, in the incessant studying and homework and morning speech practice as students declaim from books into the empty air, but it doesn't happen in class.

So why do the students, and the teacher students, resent alternatives? Why do they hate anyone who tries for conversation, for question and answer, for deviation from rote? Why are they suspicious of a teacher who doesn't lecture? My theory is that it breaks their role modeling and sends them into uncharted water. It's against _the system_. If you sit and listen while someone drones on, you know what your supposed to be doing and it's easy. You're not risking any face; you don't have to think, and you don't have to take responsibility for yourself. You just have to sit there. By asking for something different, I'm being _difficult_.

So why did one group of teachers rally to the challenge, and the other mutiny? Who knows. And besides, next week Group A will probably revert and go for blood, and Group B change course and suddenly gel, as they all respond to invisible cues in the air, signals that no waiguoren can see or hear. Nothing stays the same for long in China these days.

Anyway, to finish up the disaster of Group B this afternoon:

"Okay, I have three reasons for asking you to write down your comments. First, it makes them anonymous, so you can give more honest feedback and the speaker needn't take it personally. Second, it gives me a chance to see all of the feedback. Third, it gives the speaker something to look at later. Do you agree with these reasons?"

A curt shake of the head.

"You don't think any of the reasons is good?"

A curt nod of agreement.

Another student chimed in: "Tell us about American culture."

"Uh, what do you want to know? What aspect?"

A blank stare.

"Well, I thought that by teaching this class in this way I was showing you ... ah, forget it. We're not going to get anywhere this way today. This is the end of class this week. If you want to come next week, and people are prepared to give lectures, then I will listen and I will give feedback even if nobody else will. Good bye. If not, maybe we won't do this class any more." And I walked out, twenty minutes into a ninety-minute class.

The Mountain

After the debacle, I ran around campus to do some errands, and then saw a poster, remembered something Jim Fisher had said, and realized he was giving a lecture just one floor above the classroom I had walked out of an hour before. I swung back and snuck in, sitting in the back and vigorously ignoring conversation attempts from the guy who moved from six seats away to sit next to me. I listened to the end of the lecture, which was a slide show of water buffalo pictures by the Fishers and their visiting friend, Michael, and after the lecture hooked up with them for dinner. We headed to the little noodle place on the road in front of the school. I talked to the Fishers' visiting friend Michael, who is considering coming back next semester to teach. I tried to figure out why the Fishers have such a smooth time of things I a rough time. At one point, Echo came up to chat. She talked to the Fishers, who complimented her on her poem. She didn't look towards me. I studied my noodles.

As we were polishing off our noodles (right order on the second try), we noticed that Yao Mountain looked exceptionally close, as the morning rain had scraped away almost all of the perpetual smog and the sky had cleared to admit rays from the setting sun. So we jumped in a taxi and hastened to the base of Yao, only to discover that the chair lift closed at 4 pm. Ann took the cab back, and Michael and I decided to climb part-way up the mountain, just high enough to get some good photos of the spectacular Guilin panorama that is visible only immediately after hard, sustained rainstorms. After twenty minutes of scrambling up the slightly muddy clay trail, stepping over enormous, hairy centipedes, and walking through spider webs, we aborted the mission. On the way down, I climbed partway up the ladder on one of the chairlift towers, only to discover that our trip had been hopeless anyway - the indefatigable Guilin smog had already reclaimed most of its territory. Ah well.

Later that night, I opened my door to go to the Very Special English Corner and surprised two sizable rats chewing at the garbage bags on the landing. (How big do people expect wild urban rats to be, anyway? Everyone is always emphasizing how terribly big their rats were, and while I admit that I was startled by the size of these rats, I think it's time we all recalibrated our expectations of rat size. These were probably eight inches long in the body, and that seems quite normal to me now.) After a bit of stomping on my part, they reluctantly ran up the stairs. I made my exit, only to discover that a third rat had fled _down_ a few steps. He sped further down as I followed, stomping quite loudly. The third floor landing also featured gnawed garbage bags, and on the second floor - on which the light is out and I resorted to portable illumination - a takeaway box was wide open and had clearly been sampled thoroughly.

In our stairwell, the east door on each floor is steel (new this semester) and opens into a Foreign Teacher apartment, and the west door is flimsy wood and opens onto a mirror image but much grungier apartment housing three Chinese teachers. You may recall the Fishers' campaign, soon after arrival, to encourage everyone via bilingual signs to put their garbage out in the morning, just before it's picked up by the little old ladies, instead of during the day or evening when it becomes rat bait. The garbage was on the same side on each floor, and it seems quite superfluous at this point to spell out which side that was.

So, after chasing The Third Rat all the way down the stairs, I was very much in the right mood for English Corner. I went this week because I was specifically invited, our English department having coordinated with Guangxi Normal to put on an extended sequence of games, drama performances, and comedy. It was held in the gym, a cavernous structure with the awful acoustics you might expect. We occupied only one end, a string of four or five bare light bulbs providing enough illumination that my white skin attracted a steady stream of conversationalists. I avoided them by talked mostly to my students, answering questions about the final and their research as we waited for the (late, of course) beginning of the planned program. As we waited and talked, a student (not one of mine) "entertained" us on a keyboard wired to a large speaker.

Klingon technology is notoriously backwards except as regards weapons, a field in which Klingon achievements are second to none. Similarly Chinese technology is poorly implemented, rarely maintained, typically outdated, and often inappropriate, but when it comes to sheer volume, the Chinese will not be outdone. So we listened to our pianist's Casio stylings at a volume that rendered conversation difficult, and from time to time he would fiddle with the cables and send a massive burst of static into the room that caused even the Chinese students, jaded and deafened by growing up in an assaultive environment, reeling and clutching at their ears.

The fifth time this happened, I marched over to him and chewed him out (in English), and he or his cohorts understood the drift well enough to reduce the volume to merely annoying rather than painful.

As soon as the show started, Our Foreign Guests were introduced, which was my queue to retreat back behind a few rows of spectators. I'm damned tired of being introduced, and I no longer feel remotely honored, just displayed like a trophy. I spent much of the next hour lurking at behind two or three rows of students, chatting in low tones with Forrest and other of my students. At one point, a singer (that I know) bravely performed in English the entirety of some overwrought teen ballad. I asked Forrest, "Do you know what notes are?"

"Yes."

"Go and explain to him."

Later, after the word guessing, we had a lengthy costume drama. That is, the protagonist and antagonist (it was hard to tell which was which, though one was a witch) wore costumes, and all the other actors wore whatever they'd been wearing all day. This at least had the advantage of making the key figures easy to identify, though the plot never became clear. Although they spoke in English, amplification was spotty and echoes and accents rendered almost all of the dialog impenetrable. To me, at least - others followed quite well as the plot had apparently been lifted from a traditional Chinese story. Also, many of the characters and props were helpfully labeled in large Chinese characters (and, to be fair, occasionally in English).

A random stranger approached on my left and asked if I understood the performance. I did not. As I was answering, Hunt crept up on my right and asked if his topic about the WTO was suitable for the final exam. As I was answering him, Forrest came by and complained that he could not leave as he didn't have his mahjongg set. I craned to look, and sure enough his new mahjongg tiles were spread out on the table, in active use as props in the unintelligible drama.

Finally this was over, and, legs aching from two hours of standing and ear aching from two hours of victimization, as the Fishers (who had cheerfully stood and waved for their introductions) gave a brief speech about how delighted they were to be there, I bid a Very Special English Corner adieu.

Walking home from the gym, I overtook a few students. I was pleasantly surprised to realize they were speaking English to each other; I didn't recognize them, so perhaps they were Guangxi Normal students. When I heard what they were saying, I immediately took notes on my Palm Pilot so I could be sure to accurately recount their words:

(paraphrase) "I have finished my homework for Unit 10." (exact words) "I have a lot of homework to do, so please lend your homework to me to copy."

May 31

Tonight I dug out the television and wired it up to the wall jack for the roof antenna. It's the first game of the World Cup. Reception is pretty good, but the play in unengaging and the picture is breaking up and pixellating every ten or twenty seconds, accompanied by an English tag at the bottom: "1101 MPEG TEST SERVICE." It's only the world's number one televised sporting event, and they've only had four or five years to prepare; I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the problem's not on the Korean end. And the editing - I want to blame the Chinese, out of habit at this point, based on a year of observations of endemic incompetence, technical and otherwise, but I don't know who's editing the feed so maybe that's out of place - is frustratingly bad. I judge this by the simple criterion that I keep noticing it.

After twenty-five minutes of France dominating Senegal in cycles of ten seconds of ball handling followed by five seconds of action that's impossible to see because the picture locks up, I'm giving up on the game and skipping to the second part of tonight's planned entertainment - The Godfather Part III on DVD. We're not seeing very much of the French defense, as the ball rarely strays to their half off the field. Although, I must say that the Senegalese forwards are very fast and aggressive on their infrequent breakaways and - just as I was forming this thought in my head, they staged a breakaway and scored the first goal of the game. And then the scorer ran to the corner and removed his jersey, clasped hands with his teammates, and danced a brief jig in a circle. That was weird. (I'm philosophically opposed to celebrations of any sort following scoring, preferring Jerry Rice's approach. After he catches a touchdown pass, he doesn't spike the ball, he just runs off, and, in passing, drops the ball on the ground as if nothing just happened that hadn't happened hundreds of times before. And even if you don't score as prolifically as Jerry Rice, it's clearly cooler to act as if you do.

Well, the picture got better, so I spent the rest of the game watching out of the corner of my eye whilst writing much of the previous verbiage. When I hear screams from the other buildings, I look at the screen and catch the replay of the near miss. Once I heard a bunch of girls shrieking but there was no shot on goal; I guess that was just more shrieking for its own sake. I'm tired of living in a shrill country; which countries are more phlegmatic? France dominated start to finish and lost zero to one, as Senegal was saved repeatedly by desperate goaltending and fat goalposts. I guess it's a big upset, though I can't check since the internet is still down. I've gotten so spoiled, this semester, that I'm back to being upset when the internet connection goes down for two or three days with no ETA for restoration. Too late to start The Godfather (Part Three), so I guess it's bed time.