On my second morning in Sānmíng, Allen, the English teacher who served as my liaison at the university, picked me up in his black Volkswagen to take me to meet my students. It was a hot autumn morning; the sun was already dazzling at 8 a.m.; the droning of the cicadas was ubiquitous and loud, like a never-ending fire alarm. As we drove across campus in Allen’s car, I asked if the students would be able to understand my English. Allen assured me that they could, as long as I spoke slowly and clearly.
He seemed to sense that I was feeling anxious—not just about meeting the students for the first time, but about everything—so he told me about his relationship with Coca-Cola. He drank Coke all the time. The Chinese word for Coke was Kěkǒu-Kělè—a word that, like most Chinese transliterations, almost but not quite captured the original English. He told me that the students called him Allen Coke because he drank so much of it.
We pulled up in back of the building—a crumbling, five-story eyesore known as the teacher education department. Allen stopped the car and killed the engine. “This is it,” he said. He unscrewed the red cap of his cola and took a sip. “Now I try to drink less Coke, because it’s not very healthy.” I nodded in appreciation—but my body felt light and weak, as if I had just spent a few days swimming in a giant tub of Fluff. “Ready?” Allen said. I looked at the door’s handle. It suddenly seemed daunting and dangerous, like a power tool that your dad insists you use with no instruction. Pull the handle, Will. Open the door.
I was wearing jeans and a checked red and black shirt that I tucked in for the occasion of entering the classroom. I had no idea whether I was dressed appropriately or what I was going to say when I got in front of the students. “How long should I talk to them?” I asked as we walked inside.
“Ten minutes is okay,” he said.
Ten minutes seemed inconceivably vast and uninviting, like a Walmart parking lot when you have no idea where you left your car. I followed Allen into the building. I told myself: high energy, high energy. (I figured this is what entertainers must tell themselves before they perform.) I had a vague idea that teachers are supposed to speak loudly and be physically expressive, which are things I couldn’t do. I didn’t even know how to smile for photographs.
As Allen and I climbed the stairs to the classroom, passing students who turned to gawk and giggle as we walked by, one panicked thought rolled through my head. If it were a free-verse poem, it would look like this:
I am going to walk in there and the
students are going to know immediately
that I am a boring idiot.
I will talk to them for zero seconds
Before my head will explode of humiliation.
I suck at everything. Why am I here?
Maybe I’ll get lucky and die before the students notice me,
And no one will feel sad or mourn or anything,
Not because I was a bad guy,
But because they would somehow just know
That given a choice between this anxiety, and oblivion,
Anyone would unquestioningly choose the latter.
Is this what alcoholics feel?
Allen led me to a door in a quiet, dimly lit hallway with sunlight streaming in at the end. There was a moment of silence as he opened the door, and then a loud squealing noise as if a bomb had just gone off. Then I realized that the students were clapping their hands and beaming and cheering, as if my arrival were important.
There are few natural reactions to a whole room of people cheering for you, except to bow and wave and blow kisses, or sing a song and break into a soft-shoe, and I wasn’t about to do those things. I stood uncomfortably at the front of the room and a willowy, pale girl stood up and handed me a bouquet of flowers. “Welcome to China. I am Susan,” she said weightily, as if bestowing knighthood upon me.
I talked at the students for four minutes. I told them my name, made a lame joke about my surname and making shoes (which they actually laughed at), and told them how old I was and where I was from. They were so un-self-conscious and sweet it made me blush: they let out a collective “Waaaah” at almost everything I said. I glanced at Allen as I spoke, looking for some kind of encouragement—but it was clear from his expression that he wasn’t even listening.
When I ran out of things to say, I told them I would see them again soon, waved goodbye, and said, “That’s all for now. See you next time.”
“SEE YOU!” they cheered back in unison, startling me.
I felt a little bit like a cat that has just been thrown into a swimming pool—traumatized, jumpy, adrenaline-high. If somebody had come and tried to dry me off with a towel, I would have been able to run 100 miles an hour. But it had been fun to have 50 college students—girls at that, only a few years younger than I was—listening to me speak as though I possessed the charm and smooth boyish handsomeness of a young Leonardo DiCaprio. If all of our classes were going to be like this, teaching was going to be fun.
Of course, their reaction was only 70 percent genuine, 30 percent performance. Chinese college students know how to flatter. It’s a necessary survival tactic in an education system in which class sizes are huge, teachers undercompensated, and everybody is pretty much just a number. There was also a cultural element to the reaction: I was a visitor, and a foreigner, so for reasons of cultural and perhaps even national pride the students had to give me an overwhelmingly positive first impression. If I had walked into the classroom wearing cowboy boots, leopard-print spandex, and a yellow satin cape, their reaction would have been precisely the same.
In the years to come, I would see this interaction hundreds of times between groups of Chinese people and foreigners new to China. Over time, it started to seem a little creepy: if the foreigners were tight-lipped and refused to reward their Chinese hosts’ enthusiasm, they seemed cold and impassive; if they smiled and laughed and bought the Chinese greeting wholesale, they seemed naive and narcissistic. It was a bit like watching someone from New York City meet someone from Michigan. I never really figured out which way of dealing with such greetings seemed best, so I aimed for the middle: a modest smile, a polite nod, allowing myself to be 70 percent flattered—kind of like how Máo Zédōng was 70 percent right.
But in the beginning I was blind to it all—the complexity, the subtlety, the intersecting currents of genuineness and performance, real human feeling and cultural obligation. I stepped off the lectern, Allen nodded and smiled politely—Okay, let’s get on with it, he seemed to be thinking—and we walked out of the classroom together.
This is how I knew that the students’ reaction was at least 70 percent genuine: as we closed the door behind us, the sound of 50 students’ voices roared riotously—and it seemed to me, happily—to life.