As previously noted, I was one of the thousands of lǎowài who flock to China every year with no idea how to teach and a blithe confidence that the teaching will somehow just work itself out. I had tried to read up on how to teach English in China, but it was hard to find one book that was definitively useful—not to mention that learning to teach is not something you can do with books alone. I needed a training course or a mentor, but neither was forthcoming. The only directive Allen or anyone at the university gave me was, “Make the students talk.”
I told Allen that the thing I needed most in my new apartment—more than water (which was broken), more than a toilet (which was also broken, and caked in brown guck)—was internet. A few days after I arrived, a tech guy delivered a computer to my apartment, a couple of students helped me navigate the Chinese-language operating system, and I was online. Problem solved… but not really.
The internet is wonderful for specific, useless things: videos of people getting hurt and/or falling out of boats, extensive information on all the kinds of cancer that you probably have, and meaningless news about what Hollywood celebrities are doing with their lives. (It’s also the world’s number one purveyor of porn, but I assumed that the university was monitoring my internet traffic, so I didn’t dare look at any for at least two months.) But it sucks at most substantive things, such as helping people get along with others, making life simpler, and teaching me how to do my job.
The textbook Allen had given me was a flimsy blue book called Oral Workshop: Reproduction. It had been published in 1990 and updated in 2002, but it looked like it had been written in the 1940s. The first chapter was a dialog between a man and a woman, with a creepy little Kafkaesque ink drawing above the chapter head. After meeting my students for the first time, I went back to my apartment (which had apparently been previously occupied by coal miners, because everything was covered in soot), sat on my sofa, and read this:
TEXT B
Could I Speak to Jim, Please?
A: Hello, 332440.
B: Oh hello, Sally. This is Dave Thomson here. Could I speak to Jim please?
A: I’m afraid he’s not in at the moment, Dave. He went out about an hour ago and he’s not back yet.
B: Any idea when he might be back?
A: Well, he shouldn’t be long. He said he was just going to get some paint. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s stopped off at the pub on the way back.
B: O.K. well , tell him I’ve called, will you, and I’ll try again later.
A: All right. Goodbye, Dave.
B: Thanks then Sally. Goodbye.
The language was painfully stiff and in places just bizarre. I had never known a world in which people recited their phone numbers when answering calls. And why was Jim stopping at the pub on his way home from getting paint? Were my students supposed to infer that foreigners are willing to get drunk anytime, even in the middle of construction projects?
I threw the book aside and went back to the computer. I had nothing to do for the rest of the day except plan my first class. I figured that if I focused on classes all afternoon and evening, I would eventually come up with something. I had no printer, so I couldn’t print off any materials for the students. I had to think of a lesson plan that would require only a blackboard, and occupy 90 minutes of class time.
In the end, I settled on a highly innovative activity called “Introduce Yourself” and a writing exercise, and sometime after 1 a.m. I went to bed. I tossed and turned for most of the night—I was still jet-lagged, exhausted during the day and unable to sleep at night. In the morning when sunlight poured through my tattered blinds, I got up, took a sponge-bath (still no water, and I hadn’t showered in five days) and went to class.
For my first class, everything went wrong, including most of the things I didn’t know could go wrong. I expected that the classroom would be the same as the one I had seen the previous day: fifty chairs, movable desks, and a blackboard. Instead, it was an “electronic classroom” with desks installed in the floors and a computer at every seat, many of which were broken. The computers that weren’t broken were turned on, and students were already watching movies on them. On every student’s desk rested a textbook that I had never seen before. (Allen had neglected to tell me that this course had two textbooks, not one.)
On top of that, the room was enormous, so most of the students couldn’t hear me. I started explaining “Introduce Yourself,” shouting as loud as I could. The students glanced at me and went back to their movies.
“Introduce Yourself” was simple enough: Each student was supposed to say her name, her hometown, and three things about herself; two of those things would be true and one would be a lie. The other students then had to guess which one was a lie.
But some of the students didn’t have English names, and wanted my help choosing one. That was fine, except that they hated my suggestions and couldn’t explain why. Then, many students refused to say a made-up fact about themselves, and the ones who did say a made-up fact about themselves made it so obvious that nobody around them even cared to guess which one it was. Of course, I didn’t know which one was a lie, because I am a stupid American.
Finally, Chinese students’ English names are often impossible to remember or even understand. Some of the English names from the roster of that day’s class were Apple, Head, Merchell, Pepper, Synel, Vailing, Quiet, Jolice, Abner, Dinky, Snail, Khaki, Cameal, Silvio, Roning, and Living (all women). Asking someone’s name in China is a delicate matter, requiring finesse and indirectness, and it’s generally considered rude to repeatedly ask someone’s name. So the students gave me exasperated looks when I couldn’t understand their names and asked them to spell them aloud.
It took almost an hour to complete the “introductions” activity, including a five-minute break in the middle—about 45 minutes longer than it should have taken. I ended the hour-and-a-half lesson by giving them time to write about themselves and what they wanted to learn in my class. When the bell rang, they gave me their papers and rushed out of the classroom to join the crush of students in the dining halls. I stuffed the composition papers into my bag, and walked back to my apartment without getting lunch.
Back on my sooty sofa, I took out the papers and leafed through them. Most of the students had written the same thing: they wanted to learn more words, improve their grammar, learn about American culture, and improve their oral English. Some admitted they didn’t like English and just wanted to learn how to be primary school teachers. The only “takeaway” from my first-ever English class was that I couldn’t do “Introduce Yourself” ever again.
I had more classes the next day. I stayed up late that night, trying to think of something to teach, and came up with nothing. All I had was the book: Oral Workshop: Reproduction. I read the first few passages over and over, writing discussion questions in the margins. I realized that I was just as clueless about how to teach from the book as I was about how to make my own lessons. I had set some big goals for myself in China—learn how to teach an English class, learn Chinese, become adept at life in China—and I was not feeling very confident in my ability to achieve any of them.
Some people are undaunted by a task like moving to China. Those people are obviously way tougher than me, and are probably capable of doing awesome and meaningful things, like war journalism and driving manual transmission cars. The difference between them and me is our relative capacities, or lacks thereof, for self-doubt. They probably don’t have it—or if they do, they have figured out some way of managing it. For them, I imagine that doubt is a helpful and friendly little squirrel in a top hat and tuxedo that reminds them when they are about to do something bad. For me, self-doubt was something I dealt with every time I opened my mouth or put on my jacket—a man-sized electric jellyfish that I carried on my head, which let me relax only when it sensed that I might soon die of fright.
On this, my third day in China, it seemed thoroughly possible that I wouldn’t be able to hack it. Another few weeks of this, and I would probably be a quivering blob of anxiety, and my parents would have to get on a plane to escort me back to New Hampshire, where they would have no choice but to check me into some sort of treatment facility where I would wear diapers and play “Go Fish.”
I had only one way of dealing with the jellyfish, a method that originated in my childhood in New Hampshire, when my mom took me on hikes in the White Mountains. Back then, she’d drive us to a trailhead and tell me that we were going to hike for eight hours, and I would think, You’re fucking crazy, lady.
But as I got older and started to like hiking, I learned the key to enjoying a walk in the woods: Don’t look up. If you think about where you’re planning to end up, or how long the enterprise will take, the whole thing seems absurdly drawn-out and your legs feel impossibly fat and weak. So it’s important to keep your goals carefully circumscribed—Keep your head down; don’t look at the mountaintop—until the rhythm of walking, the smell of the trees, and the sound of the wind takes over the senses, and your brain’s commercial-jet-engine anxiety dims to a manageable droning.
China’s smells and sounds were far less soothing than a forest or a mountain. But I gave myself the same goal: Don’t look up. Tonight, go to sleep. In the morning, go teach your classes. It doesn’t matter yet if your teaching is shit; it only matters that you get through these first few weeks without going AWOL.
I slept terribly for the first few nights, and I spent one long morning in a panic, waiting for sunrise and questioning what I had done with my life. But as time went by I felt better, and stopped worrying about my far-away goals, and just did what was in front of me. That made it easier to relax and learn.
Eventually, the jellyfish more or less went away on his own.