JISHOU, HUNAN — I’ve been busy with a web development project of my own device, so I haven’t taken out time to write anything. So here we go.

This week has been a holiday for many people in China. It commemorates the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Oct. 1, 1949, their equivalent of the 4th of July. And like 4th of July weekend, good luck getting any action out of any government agency.

We turned in the paperwork for my residence permit the week before National Holiday, so as one might predict, I did not receive it before the week off started. That scotched my plans of visiting Zhangjiajie, where my friend Connie lives, and made me wary of venturing much beyond Jishou.

My liaison officer here, David, reassured me that I could in fact visit Fenghuang, a picturesque and very ancient town about an hour from here. It is within Xiangxi county, as in Jishou, so he said I could carry a copy of my passport and all would be well.

Maybe. I erred on the side of caution, and figured I could visit “Phoenix Town” when all my papers were in order and when it wasn’t mobbed by vacationing tourists.

Last Saturday and Sunday, we had classes, believe it or not, so that we would have exactly seven days off and not, heaven forbid, nine. Such a plan would not go over well at US colleges. Monday I spent lazing around the apartment, recovering from seven solid days of teaching.

Don’t laugh. Language teachers will know that teaching another language is exhausting work. I had no idea. I move around the class, pantomime while I talk, coax and cajole students to participate. I move around much more than I did when I was a physics teacher. (Of course, my classroom layout did not exactly lend itself to the teacher bopping around the room.)

Tuesday I decided sitting around was pointless, so after lunch I took a nice long walk into downtown. There were no angry mobs, so I was safe. One of my freshmen, who also stayed on campus, was concerned that I would be walking alone into the city. I assured her that New Yorkers are used to large crowds, noisy traffic, and kamikaze cab drivers.

We’re not used to being stared at, but I’m getting over it. Being a westerner here makes you somewhat of a celebrity. Last night, several students and adults wanted to have their picture taken with me, like I was some kind of movie star. Weird.

Anyway, my goals for this one-hour roundtrip walk was to see if I could buy more RAM for my laptop and eat at (yes, Louisvillians) the KFC. After weeks of rice and noodles, I was dying for a chicken sandwich. Along the way, I took a few pictures, passing by so many scooter and motorbike shops you would think every man, woman and child here would have at least two each, and many storefronts.

The typical Chinese store is not designed the way an American would expect. We’re used to stores that you can actually walk into, like a house. Here the little stores are just rooms with a missing wall. Shopkeepers sit outside on the sidewalk, or inside if there’s room, waiting for customers. I saw seamstresses, welders, restaurants, snack shops, door and window sellers, all set up this way. In the long run, it’s probably more efficient to run a business like this, especially if you happen to live above it.

The climate here is warm enough year ’round that having a store fully open to the outside is actually feasible. Climate control, under the circumstances, is out of the question, though.

Central Jishou is entirely different. Here it looks like any other busy metro area. There is a six-level shopping mall next to the KFC, which I walked through to scope out the merchandise. Prices were of course higher, because it’s a mall, but the selection was pretty comprehensive.

After my cursory tour of the mall, I continued walking toward the computer stores, which are past the KFC and over the bridge on the north side of town. I had been there before with one of my student guides, so finding it was no problem.

Communicating what I wanted was a different matter. I had written down my requirements, so I could show them to salespeople, but as it turned out none seemed to have what I needed. My laptop is a little out of date, it seems. One salesperson invited me to sit down and eat a Hunan orange (tiny, delicious green things with tiny seeds you can eat) while someone else checked the stock room. No luck, but we had a nice chat.

After hitting several stores, I figured that I would probably need a translator to get much further in this investigation, so I headed back toward the KFC. There, I successfully ordered a number 2 combo, consisting of a chicken sandwich, an orange juice drink and a side of corn relish. You have to ask for soda pop. I did not see any french fries, and the regular side (corn with diced carrots, cukes and peppers in mayo) was tasty enough that I didn’t miss them.

Beginning on Wednesday evening, I started work on a Moodle site for my students to use. Moodle is a course management system widely used across the US and the world. I had been emailing my students, but email is a one-way street usually and I wanted something more interactive. This project took the better part of Wednesday night and Thursday, so I was basically incommunicado until Friday.

Friday I just puttered around, until a few of my frosh invited me to go rollerskating. Well, I figured, I need the exercise and just maybe I’ll remember how to rollerskate after 40 years. (Not that I was any good then.)

It wasn’t a total disaster. I fell down four or five times (on concrete — hurts more than on wooden rinks) and looked pretty timid out there, but I started getting the hang of things about the time my legs started to give out. So I sat and waited for my students to finish their skating, while talking English with another frosh in the music department. Like many of the students I talk with (or IM with), she was profusely apologetic about her poor English, but in fact her speaking skills were really quite good. We had a real conversation.

QQ is the Chinese equivalent of AOL Instant Messenger and AOL. Every student it seems has a cell phone and a QQ account. I signed up with QQ as soon as I arrived (there’s an English language client, mercifully) and gave my QQ number to my students.

Word spreads. If I go online with QQ, I can expect not only several of my own students to chat with me, but students from the Teachers College and not-so-nearby cities in Hunan. So if I need to get any work done, signing on to QQ is not a good idea. But it is fun when I have the time to chat with seven people at once.

I’m still trying to wrap the size of Hunan around my head. Many of my students stayed on campus because their hometowns are more than six or seven hours away by train, but are still within the province. There are almost 67 million people in Hunan province living in its nearly 82,000 square miles. That’s half the size of California with almost twice as many people. The transportation system is excellent, but with so many stops, trains take hours to traverse the province.

So students who would need to travel almost a day to get home just stay on campus. There’s also the cost factor. For most of these students, going to college requires an enormous investment by their families. There is no such thing as financial aid here. While the university is publicly funded, it does charge tuition. For a farming family, sending a child to college is a major deal.

As a result, my students’ ages range more widely than they would in the States. My youngest frosh is 17, but many are as old as 20. One senior is 25. With the costs and examinations required to enter university, some students have to wait to go. Once they’re here, they have to watch their money. Trainfares, while hardly exorbitant, can be hefty when you have to pinch your pennies. It’s all relative, as they say.

October 3rd, 2008 | Tags: China, kfc, mall, national day | Category: China | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL