Pictures and Update

So as you can see, I got a slideshow up and working on this site (although not without a lot of time and effort), but it's a little bit small, so if you'd like to see larger pictures, go here.

We went to Hangzhou on Monday, and stayed at Eric's uncle's apartment (this is a different uncle).  I didn't know what there was to do in Hangzhou, so Cherry and Eric just took me around to a few different places, including some markets and a beautiful park on a lake.  We also met up with Tracey and a few of her friends; it was nice to see her again so we could say goodbye properly.

Tuesday held much of the same, and Wednesday morning we left for a day trip to Shanghai.  As most of you probably know, it is the largest city in China (a good deal larger than NYC), and so this was a different experience to our time in Hangzhou.  The city is very westernized, and there wasn't anything particularly historic that we went to see, most of it had its analogue in the West.  Later, we had dinner with a former teacher of Eric's, an eccentric New Zealander who I came to like a great deal, and then we took a late train back to Hangzhou.

Thursday was a travel day, as we had a flight to Beijing, which ended up getting delayed for several hours because of fog.  Today, we went shopping in the morning and worked on some loose ends in the afternoon, including sorting through all the pictures (there were a lot) and picking the better ones to upload, as well as tabulating some expenses.

We may go to the Great Wall tomorrow, and I will upload more photos as they are taken.  Good night.

Day 21: Fin

Today was our last day. We woke up at 8:00 to see Mike off, and then spent most of the day doing accounting and marketing for the park. It rained all day, so we didn't get a chance to see the park, but it is essentially finished, except for a little cleanup. I wrote a one-page, single-spaced, account of the making of the park, which I think will be given to various potential donors. Once I revise it to a final draft, I will post a copy here for those of you that are interested. It's a bit more cohesive than these posts, but it won't give you any new information.

This evening the principal of the local school took us out to dinner at what I think is the only restaurant in Gaoxiang. We hadn't eaten there yet, and although the facility is somewhat plain, the food was pretty good. I'm not sure what it was about this dinner, but Eric's uncle started asking me lots of questions about my life, so I ended up speaking a fair amount of Chinese at dinner. I didn't mind the questions, and it was very helpful for me to practice Chinese. Perhaps the most frustrating part was trying to explain my father's job. He's a consultant, but I don't know how to say that, and moreover, neither Eric nor Cherry knew how to say it in Chinese, so I had to go through a somewhat clumsy Chinese-language description of what he does.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we've spent three weeks (to the day) here. It feels like it went very quickly, but it also feels like we accomplished a great deal. I'll at least be posting to let you know where I am, and I'll also post when something interesting happens. But this post essentially concludes commentary on the park. Obviously that is subject to change if more happens.

Sorry for another short post, but today was another fairly low-key day. Good night.

Day 20: Things Are Winding Down

Although there was no typhoon, rain hassled us, but we continued to approach the finish line.

There was of course no typhoon here; we are a little too far inland for it to actually be an issue, but as I mentioned yesterday we had no class just to be safe. As a result, I got to sleep in until 8:00, which was pretty nice.

In the morning we did a little bit of work, mostly moving rocks and shoveling dirt. We were waiting for a friend to arrive. Mike Poon is a mutual friend and high school classmate of Eric's and mine, and he is giving a presentation on our project to a businessman from Shanghai, so he came by to survey our work and get a feel for what we've done. Our intention was to put him to work in the afternoon, but this turned out to be difficult, as there was little work to do. All we did was help move the tables and benches into the park. These are quite heavy, but it certainly wasn't a full afternoon's worth of work.

This post is probably the shortest that I have written thus far, but there are very few things of interest occurring at this point, so tomorrow may also be like this. Tomorrow will also probably be my last daily post, as we leave on Monday. After that, my posts will become more sporadic: sometimes more than one post a day, some days no posts at all. It will depend on how interesting my time in Shanghai is. On the 19th, I'm returning home, so there should be at least some level of posting going on until then. See you tomorrow.

Day 19: Typhoon Warning (And Other Stories)

Hints of a typhoon, though for today we only had rain.

Because of the aforementioned typhoon (warning), we aren't teaching English tomorrow, so today was our last day. We didn't find this out until about halfway through this morning's session. I was teaching my students the names of the months as well as the first few ordinal numbers (i.e. first, second, third...), but once we found out that this was our last day, we decided to do something fun. The kids asked us to teach them how to sing an American song. Because of our earlier karaoke experience (from a couple of weeks ago) the only song that we all knew the words and melody to was "I Want it That Way" by the Backstreet Boys. The kids of course insisted on hearing us each sing it individually, so that was interesting. But we managed to get them to learn the melody, as well as get the appropriate alternate pronunciations ("wai-ee" as opposed to "why," etc.), while of course making sure to point out that the lyrics were incorrect grammatically ("ain't nothin' but a heartache" is a double negative, as well as slang). It was quite an odd experience, listening to a classroom full of young Chinese students with severe accents sing a quintessential American pop song, but the experience can at least be described as fun.

After lunch, we made the 25-minute walk out to the "waste management facility" that Eric's father built. It is essentially a large incinerator, and may not look like much to us Westerners, but it is a fairly crucial service, as disposing of refuse is important, and often quite difficult for locals. The walk itself was absolutely stunning, as we came down the mountain on whose side Gaoxiang rests, and walked on a road that meandered between two others. The green was all around us, and the intermittent rain and fog provided a serene aesthetic. We also saw a buffalo by a small creek near the side of the road. It was a great, hulking, creature, and it stared right at me (just like the locals do) as if it too acknowledged that I was an outsider. This is not really an exotic experience, as buffalo exist in the U.S., but I had never been so close to one – we were only about five feet away, which gave us a wonderful (or terrifying) perspective on its size.

Upon our return, we set to work helping with the park, fulfilling our tasks of cleaning up the worksite and hauling stones for them to place in the path. We worked through the rain, and the work that the locals did, placing the rocks into the path, looks quite good, and it almost made me feel that the many hours we spent picking those rocks was worth it. We were interrupted by a visit from one of our students, who brought us each a gift for teaching her English. I haven't opened it yet, but I was again taken aback by the generosity of the villagers, and I feel glad to have developed a personal relationship with some of them.

After dinner, we went into town to buy water, and ran into another student (who lives next to the convenience store). We bought him a coke, and he invited us into his home (the first floor of which is a barber shop as his father is a barber). We were brought watermelons and we hung around to talk with him and his father. It was very interesting for me as an outsider to observe how different socializing is in China. Food is always involved, and it is much less casual than in the U.S. We in the barber shop, no door to the street, so that anyone we knew might come in and join us (and a few of our students did).

We only have a couple of days left here, and I can say that many parts of me are ready to return to the comforts of home, but I already know that I will soon feel the twang of nostalgia, as this experience has been one so totally outside any other I have heretofore experienced. With that, I must go to bed, so I have the energy to make the most out of my last two days. Good night.

Day 18: The Wet Season Sure Has A Lot of Rain

A railing went up and the rain came down.

Our day began as usual at 7:30 with English class, and it marked my second day of teaching alone. I have adopted a somewhat eccentric manner with these students for two reasons: 1) they are younger and it keeps their attention better, and 2) it is at times a good substitute for my lackluster Chinese. I essentially reviewed what I taught yesterday, as their are still a good number of blank faces when I ask questions. I will consider it an accomplishment if these kids master what I taught on the first day by the end of the week (our last day of teaching is Saturday). They are having a fair amount of trouble with the phrase "What day of the week is it?" They know what it means and they know how to respond to it, but it is a lot of words for them to say all in a row, and most of them don't have a great deal of reading skills, so they have to rely mostly on memorization to learn the question. The new material I did teach today was numbers. They knew everything up to one hundred, and I continued teaching them all the numbers up to one million. Towards the end of class, they seemed to grasp the way our number system works (where we have a new word for a number every multiple of 1000). They also are starting to understand the rationale behind our names for numbers (7500 is called "seven thousand five hundred" because it is the sum of 7000 and 500).

After class, some policemen came by and asked to see our documentation. This is not all that unusual in China, as they just want to keep their constituents safe. That, and they don't have all that much to do (case in point: they sent five officers to check on us). Tao Yuan and Cherry do not need paperwork, as they are Chinese citizens, but Eric and I had to get our passports (Eric is an Australian citizen).

It rained in the afternoon, but some work was done in the morning (although obviously not by us). A railing was put up around the upper tier of the lower worksite, and after going down to see it, I can say that it looks really good.

I realized as I was writing this that I haven't to this point attempted a physical description of where we are building our park. As you may have guessed, there are two small-ish worksites. The larger one is about 200 feet by 200 feet. Being on a hill, it has two level tiers. The lower level is mainly covered in the tiling that I mentioned, but there is also that large sandbox and a dirt patch in the corner where we will be placing a large rock for aesthetic value. The upper tier has a very large tree, more tiling, and the path that we dug out. It is around this part that the railing was put up. The upper worksite (closer to town) is smaller, only about 50 feet by 100 feet, and this is right next to a small pond, so will mainly serve as a pavilion sort of area. There will be the same tiling (which hasn't yet been laid down) and some tables and seats (which we have already picked out).

Given that we are nearing completion, we decided on Monday as the date for our departure from Gaoxiang. The park should be finished by then, and we can do the accounting/marketing off-site, while Eric tours me around some other parts of China. We will probably spend a couple of days in Hangzhou, as well as a few days in Shanghai, before I return to Beijing for my flight home.

Tao Yuan left this morning, as he had business to attend to at home. So now there are only three of us, but there is less work to do, so it should be fine. At this point, I am probably the most useless, because the accounting hasn't yet been translated into English (and won't for a couple of days), and it is done in very obscure and technical Chinese, with which I have exactly zero experience.

I am rather tired (you may have noticed my post last night was later than usual), so I should head to bed. See you tomorrow.

Day 17: A Day of Gifts

Though the thunder roared all afternoon, the sun never faltered, and the rain held off until nightfall.

Word of our English class has by this point made its way around the village; this is evidenced by the fact that although we started with two classes, we have been expanding and today split into four separate classes. The youngest class (of kindergarteners) is rather small, only seven or eight students, but the others are all fairly full. As there are only four of us, I have to teach my own class. I taught the age group up from the kindergarteners today (the second youngest group of four). I was a bit apprehensive coming into today, as these kids know even less English than those I was teaching before, and thus I will have to use Chinese more, but I soon discovered that I can use my Chinese to express most of what I want to say; it just won’t be pretty. The kids were patient with me, though, and for that I am grateful. I started by giving them a simple, sample, conversation: just an exchange of greetings and “How are you”s. This went fairly well, so I continued teaching basic English. I covered numbers, which they seemed to already know to some extent, and then math, which they did not know. By math, I mean I taught them the English words for “plus,” “minus,” “times,” “divided by”, and “equals” (I realize there also exists “add,” “subtract,” and “multiply,” but in the simplest construal of mathematical sentences, these words are not used). I also taught them how to answer the question “How old are you?” Later, I taught them the days of the week, the word “week,” and the word “weekend.” With each topic, some of them had studied it previously, but most hadn’t. It sounds like I covered a lot, but I’m sure that I will have to revisit all of these categories in the coming days.

About halfway through our class session today, the four of us were called outside to meet with some journalists. Unbeknownst to us, the principal of the school had also prepared gifts for each of us: a small desk organizer and a certificate (the translation reads “Honorary Credential” but that isn’t quite right; “Certificate of Honor” would probably be closer). The certificate reads: “During your summer vacation of 2009 in Gaoxiang, you wholeheartedly provided guidance for the students of Gaoxiang. This is an obvious and resounding achievement, and therefore the local people think highly of you. We give you this certificate to express our gratefulness.” This is obviously an imperfect translation, but such language is not used often in America. We were photographed with the principle holding our certificates, and then each of us said a few words on camera. At first I spoke in English (for which Cherry wrote a Chinese translation) and then I spoke in Chinese (I didn’t read the translation; I just greatly simplified what I said). I could care less about the media coverage, but I thought the gifts were a nice gesture, and I was a bit taken aback. I am told that this is a common custom in China, but it still made me feel good, which I suppose was the desired effect.

After lunch, we all rested a bit (as today was excruciatingly hot all day), and then we headed out to the worksite. As I mentioned in a previous post, most of the work at this point is at least semi-skilled, so we are limited in what we can do. All we did today was move up some marble slabs for the workers to install. The paths we dug out obviously lie below the surrounding ground, and these slabs are being placed on the sides as a sort of wall.

We had to cut our work short as one of our students (Feng Jichen, who I believe I mentioned previously) invited us over for dinner as a thank you. There were several of our other students there (related to her I think), and we spent about two hours eating an extravagant meal. Then one of her relatives (a very young student of ours) played some traditional Chinese music on the hŭzhēng (I don’t believe there is an English word for it). It is a long stringed instrument, which one plucks, and in order to play it one wears finger picks (like for a banjo). The music itself was beautiful, although it is always a bit startling to hear music that is so foreign to my ears as the Chinese microtones.

Today was a rather emotional day. I hope this does not sound too condescending, but although I am grateful for the gifts I have received, I can’t help but feel a little bit sad that I am taking something from someone who has so much less than me in the way of material goods. I know it is custom and they think nothing of it, in fact they are happy to do it, but it is still difficult to receive something that they worked so hard to give when what I offered in return (English lessons and the park) did not require sacrifice on my part.

On that note, I should probably go to bed, so that I can be refreshed for another day of teaching on my own. Good night.

Day 16: Sandboxes and Cicadas

Today was another beautiful day, which meant no rain from the sky, but plenty of sweat on our brows.

I had to teach for a short time this morning by myself, as Cherry had business to attend to regarding the park (Cherry is interested in architecture, and as such, she is in charge of the park's design). This was a test of my Chinese skills, but I came away feeling pretty good about it. We taught our students emotion words today; this is related to yesterday's teaching of description as you can sometimes describe people by what emotions they are feeling (e.g. "You look _____."). A distraction to today's class were cicadas, which several students (boys) had brought in to school. So I taught them the word "cicada," and they taught me how to say "cicada" in Chinese (zhī liăo).

At a break in class, some of the boys asked me to come out back with them to play basketball. As some of you may know, my basketball skills leave something to be desired, by which I mean that I am awful. This was not as big an issue as I had anticipated, as I am a lot larger than my students, which made up for it somewhat. When I returned to class however, I was drenched in sweat. I also played more basketball after class, so I was a little bit tired, even before lunch.

After lunch, we headed out to the lower worksite to dig a sandbox for the kids. This was probably the largest sandbox I have ever seen: it was 3 meters long, 2.5 meters wide, and 30 centimeters deep. Our students came by to visit, and some of them even helped us dig. It was a nice scene, and we appreciated their gesture.

At dinner, Eric's uncle joked with me that if he had a daughter, he would have liked to marry her to me. This may seem a bit creepy, but in China this is a very nice thing to say, and I was quite flattered, although Eric and the others teased me about it to no end.

Tomorrow we will be taking some of the stones we picked yesterday and placing them in the path we dug. The tiling continues, and is nearing completion, and after that, there are only a few finishing touches to add before we can deem the project a success.

I am tired after what has been a long day physically, so I'm heading to bed. See you tomorrow.

Day 15: Here Comes The Sun

Another song reference? Yes. We had a full day of sunshine today; it was hot and humid but the rain stayed away.

Today in class we taught our students how to describe people. We divided the adjectives into certain categories, such as physical appearance and personality traits. We still haven't gone over what I would call the "mental traits" category (this would include words like "smart"), and we plan to also teach the words for various common emotions. This return to vocabulary was brought on by an acceptance of some of our limitations as teachers. The main one is that we aren't trained, and so teaching grammar, which is a very complicated task, has been a struggle for us, and it hasn't seemed to make as much of an impact on the students as straight vocabulary. These sessions go well, and most students remember more than half of the words that we teach on any given day. I brought the camera into class and got some great shots of the kids, which I will put up once we get back to a city. Tao Yuan stayed home today, as he had his hands full with some of the accounting work I mentioned in yesterday's post.

We headed out to work immediately after lunch. We took a public bus to the outskirts of Tonglu, and we walked to a local riverbank, which had many stones on it. We need these stones to put on our paths at the park, in order to form a nice pattern on the cement. Therefore, we had fairly strict standards (which, admittedly, loosened as the day wore on and our patience wore thin) for which rocks to choose. We needed thousands of stones, and we were hand-picking them one at a time. This was a tedious task, made ever more excruciating by the presence of a strong Sun. It was not physically onerous work, but by the end of the day (we worked for about four hours) I was extremely tired, both mentally and physically.

For dinner, we went into Tonglu. There had been another student from Hangzhou who spent a couple of days helping us teach English; his name is Ken. I hadn't mentioned him before because he only spent that time with us and he didn't do very much of the teaching. But his parents took us out to dinner as a thank you (this is Chinese custom). In China, eating seafood is a sign of wealth, so of course they ordered seafood, which is not my favorite genre of food (I really only like fish). But I was obligated to eat many of these foods out of politeness. It wasn't terrible, and the non-seafood dishes were actually quite good. Afterwards we picked up some groceries and headed home.

I didn't get a chance to go see the progress that was made on the park today, as I wasn't in town all day. But I imagine that we are close to finishing laying the tile, so the stones are one of the final pieces of the puzzle. I'm heading to bed now as I am thoroughly exhausted. Good night.

Day 14: The Pieces Are Coming Together

It's amazing how it's only towards the end of a project that you see how much progress you have made.

Today we continued our teaching of time-telling with an exercise where we had the students talk about their days. They paired up and they each found out the other person's schedule. One person was to find out what the other person's usual schedule was (present tense), and the other person was to find out what the first person did last Saturday (past tense). As with the map, this went well for some students and poorly for others. Cherry and I have decided that it would be best to place a few of the kids who are struggling more in the class that Tao Yuan and Eric are teaching, so that we might progress a bit faster and make the class more worthwhile for the other kids.

Towards the end of class, a girl I had never seen before came up to me and asked me if she could have a word with me. I went outside and she and her friend explained that they were local high school students who had heard that we were here and were curious as to what we were doing. They were especially excited when they found out that I was American. So I spoke to them, sometimes in English and sometimes, when they couldn't understand, in Chinese, and told them about the park and our teaching English. They were also interested in what my life was like in America, so I talked about that a little bit, too. We exchanged e-mail addresses and they went home. I share this anecdote for two reasons: first, because this sort of practice would be considered unusual in America and thus illustrates another cultural difference, and second, to again highlight how much of an outsider I am here. I have been here two weeks now and still people stare whenever they see me. I don't mind much, but I'm surprised at how little they try to conceal their interest.

After lunch, we waited out the rain and headed out to work. However, a couple days ago (when we were lifting those marble slabs), Eric's grandmother saw us coming home and thought we looked tired, and so she yelled at Eric's uncle and told him that he made us work too much. He is now a bit more hesitant to give us what we consider to be our fair share of work. Additionally, the project is nearing completion, and this stage requires at the very least a semi-skilled laborer, which we are not. So our tasks are now restricted to hauling materials, shoveling dirt or stone, and moving rocks. Today we did all three. The pebble bed has been laid down in the paths we dug, and cement poured on top of that. Now we have to pick out attractive stones to place in the cement to make a pattern. We have to finish tiling the designated areas of the park, and move in the tables. This should take no more than three or four more days, if the weather cooperates.

Because we are not able to do as much labor, we have started to work on some of the other projects that Eric's father has already completed, including the building of a bridge and the opening of a waste management facility. Our tasks include financing (this evening we sat and copied the invoices from this project onto the computer) and marketing. As these efforts are entirely donor-funded, the accounting must be particularly meticulous. As far as marketing goes, we must make the project look attractive, not only to the businessmen who are potential investors, but also to the locals themselves, so that they see the projects as a positive contribution.

That's about it for today, but I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on our efforts with these other projects as well as the final stages of the park.

Day 13: Rain = Short Post

Easy come, easy go. It rained steadily throughout the day, and the fog has persevered into the evening, which does not bode well for tomorrow.

We continued teaching directions today, using a slightly different technique. We separated the kids into groups, and had them each pick a location where they were to start, and then they were to pick a mutual location where they would "meet up," and then they would tell us how to get from where they were to the meeting place. It went very well in some cases and not so well in others. The word "intersection" seems to be quite a stumbling block for them; they tripped over the word and forgot it many times. By contrast, 路口 (lukou), Chinese for "intersection," is very simple. After we finished that exercise, we moved on to telling time. Most of them had at least studied this before, so it went more smoothly, although there were a few students who didn't have a masterful grip on numbers, without having to incorporate the time aspect. We nevertheless explained different ways to say certain times (4:10 as "ten past four"; 5:45 as "a quarter of (or to) six"). Luckily the Chinese have an analogous practice in their language, so it wasn't difficult to explain.

The afternoon was disappointing in that we were confined to the indoors. I mostly read, and also did some coding. I'm trying to learn Java over the summer, as I don't really have room in my schedule for a computer science course, and Eric and Tao Yuan are helping me out, as they are both computer science majors. Other than that, the day was decidedly unproductive. I am hoping against hope that we can get at least an hour or two of work in tomorrow.

If anyone knows an anti-rain dance, I'm all ears.