The classrooms in our college are large enough to hold 60 students in two-person wooden desks that are bolted to the floor in rows. The benches attached to the desks are designed to be so uncomfortable that falling asleep in class is physically impossible. Tall windows stretch the length of one wall, filling the room with sunlight, which is good because the electricity is too erratic to depend on for lighting.
When I am teaching, my eyes are drawn to these windows. From one, I can gaze across the hills to our neighborhood pagoda. From others, I see the new library or the cavernous student canteen and beyond that, a jagged horizon of mountains. Nothing I see resembles Cambridge. But for the eight hours a week that I attend Chinese classes, I have no idea what the view is; my eyes are glued to my teacher's mouth, trying to understand what she is saying.
I can't say the life of a student is a complete surprise for me since I have studied several semesters of Chinese at Harvard Extension School. However, as you might guess, my experience as a Harvard student was completely different.
One time, our teacher here swept her arm around the room, pointing in all directions, trying to mime the word "walls." My classmates thought the concept she was expressing was "dirty." I can understand their confusion. The desks and seats are so dusty that it's a good idea to wipe them before sitting down. Crumbled papers and used tissues litter the cement floor, which is inevitably tracked with mud if it has been raining. Over winter vacation, the walls were replastered; before then, they appeared to have been attacked with hand grenades.
In Cambridge, I was not actually the oldest student in my Chinese class, although I certainly was in the most senior tier. Here, however, my classmates are young enough to be my children and they respectfully refer to me, in Chinese, as "Auntie." They *only* refer to me in Chinese because that is our one common language; four of my young classmates are from Vietnam and one is from Laos.
Xiang Jiang, the cheerleader for John's "Bu Bu Gao" performance, is the only other female student. At age 25, she is considered the big sister of the other students. She always sits next to Ran Haiyin and it would be easy to mistake them for lovers except for her smacking him upside the head when he makes a mistake. However, Ran Haiyin's Chinese is actually better than hers. He is earnest and attentive, studying Mandarin so he can eventually learn Chinese traditional medicine.
Tong Xiaolong, the Laotian, stands out as the class genius. He has mastered Chinese in one semester and our teachers say he sounds just like a native Chinese speaker. Strangely, to our teachers, his academic excellence is not as noteworthy as his skin color. Though not at all unusual in a nation with real racial diversity, it is darker than anyone else's in the class. How sick he must be of always having his skin color used an an example of darkness, difference, or destiny. The worst student, Li Songlin, is easy to ignore because he rarely comes to class and never participates unless he is called on to read aloud. Even then, the rest of us have to coach him in whispers since it's clear to everyone that he can't read even the simplest characters.
Finally, there's my most distinctive classmate, Huang Jinping. He has outbursts like someone with Tourette's syndrome. Sometimes he sings his responses to our teacher's questions. He has the widest grin I've ever seen on a human face, more or less constant enthusiasm, and is so eager to participate that he raises his hand to answer even when he has no idea what the answer actually is. In our speaking classes there are enough outlets for him, but towards the end of a reading class in which the teacher does most of the talking and all of the moving around, Huang Jinping sometimes spontaneously announces, "Hen gui, hen gui, hen gui, hen gui, hen gui." That particular phrase means "very expensive," which is not relevant to anything except perhaps his own thoughts.
Ever since my second semester at Harvard, my teachers have spoken to us almost entirely in Chinese. However, it has been a long time since I really had no idea what the teacher was saying, and I've never before been unable to get a whispered English explanation from a classmate. Teacher Zhang, our speaking teacher, speaks slowly and clearly, writing key words on the board, and doing everything possible to make sure we understand. Our reading and writing teacher, Teacher Liao, however, is teaching a language for the first time and seems unfamiliar with techniques for enabling us to better understand her. She speaks at a normal pace, which is to say lightning fast. On top of that, she has heavy Sichuan accent which means "shi" sounds just like "si," "cha" sounds like "ca," and "zhu" sounds like "zu." As far as I'm concerned, even with standard pronunciation, Chinese has way too many homonyms; listening to Teacher Liao, it seems there are almost twice as many!
The only way I can possibly guess what she is saying is by following the textbook carefully. Here's where my years at Harvard have paid off--I simply know many, many more characters than my classmates do, so the textbook they struggle with is not inappropriate for me. This is not to say it's a piece of cake. I still have to look up a few characters, but by and large I can read these newspaper excerpts without difficulty. My classmates still have some distinct advantages. Not only are their mother tongues other tonal Asian languages, but they also live with Chinese roommates. My roommate/husband only speaks English and refuses to practice Chinese with me at all.
In the speaking class, we learn extremely practical words and expressions. At Harvard, I learned two different words for "to implement" (i.e. a policy), but until last week, never learned the verbs to bite, swallow, rub, or grab. At Harvard, I learned the vocabulary needed to discuss environmental pollution, imperialism, communism, war, and healthcare reform. These are topics that lend themselves to lively discussion in Cambridge, but in Kunming, I have never needed to talk about the ozone layer and until very recently, I would have been unable to name even half the objects in my own bathroom. It would be great if this vocabulary were reinforced in our reading and writing classes, but there we read about education, tourism, the environment, and business. Despite the kindness of our teachers, I have to say that educationally, these classes leave a great deal to be desired. However, since I don't pay tuition, I have no right to complain.
So, with all this study plus twice a week sessions with my tutor, just how good is my Chinese now? ZXY teaches my classmates grammar at the same time that I am teaching English. The other day, I asked her who speaks Chinese better, Huang Jinping or me? Since I consider Huang Jinping's nearly incomprehensible Chinese to be the second worst in the class, I expected her to say, "Deborah, don't be ridiculous! Of course, your Chinese is better!" However, in the embarrassingly long silence that followed, I understood the truth. She finally mustered a diplomatic response: "You speak more clearly, but his tones are more accurate."
Obviously, I still have a long way to go!
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