In some ways, the whole place seemed to be an elaborate maze of contrivances. The foreign teachers seemed to operate under a microscope, and I heard that the Chinese teachers endured regular brow-beatings from the leadership. On several occasions my classes were selected to receive visiting observers, including officials from the Provincial Education Office. Teachers in our office seemed unusually nervous ahead of these visits, and I tried to convince them that they would be fine if they just stuck to the basics.
“Just be yourself,” I said. “Always prepare, enjoy your work and you’ll do fine!”
The looks I received after such comments suggested they thought I must be out of my mind.
Visiting spas, eating off-campus, going to nature parks and shopping were among the limited activities to pursue in Changchun city when I was not working. I looked forward to devouring large portions of pig’s feet, pork ribs with meat that fell off the bones, or honey-cured guo bao rou, a style of sugary orange-colored baked pork served in northern China. I happily took long weekends and holiday breaks in other cities around China including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Hangzhou.
But culture class experiences left me in a bad mood. I am usually very polite but my disposition was severely tested when going to a restaurant for dinner and being told by the waiters that items I ordered from the menu were unavailable. After ordering substitute items, I was informed several minutes later that these items were also not available. Eventually, I left the restaurant in disgust without eating anything. What a waste of time. I proceeded to another favorite restaurant and this time had to wait unusually long for my food. I observed other newly-arriving customers being served before me. Their cooked dishes appeared similar to my order. This is old, prejudicial bullshit, I told myself, feeling my anger rise. Exactly the kind of inhospitable behavior that I had experienced in California, Illinois, and parts of the American South where my presence and money were not welcome.
It has been said that China is a bundle of contradictions, but I doubt that I am any less complicated. Some say I am generous, but besides dedicating my life to teaching, for many reasons I prefer solitude. It was somewhat difficult for me to adjust to the mix of friendly and unfriendliness that I encountered. One moment you might be enjoying the company of some person, and the next second face an icy stare fixing to cut out your heart.
17
Another Prison
When the second set of gates closed, I immediately experienced a weird sense of claustrophobia. I felt like a trapped bird. The sound of the third and final gate slamming shut sent my whole body into a spiraling feeling of utter helplessness.
Working inside the Indiana Reformatory for Men in Michigan City gave me a good sense of what it was like to be locked away. There was no getting out of that place. Luckily for me, I was only inside as a temporarily substitute teacher for three hours. Resident inmates had to feel utterly doomed along with a smoldering anger. Inside is inside. Interacting with cons, bullies and conniving mental cases boils down to pure hell for first-timers and the blindly innocent.
I was committed to fulfilling a promise, and now could not welch out even if I wanted to. I walked across a small open yard towards a low, one-floor building where my class of inmates would be released to meet me.
“Hey Bro! What you doing in here? Where you going?”
A lone man a few yards away pumped a stack of barbells. Dark-skinned and prone, he was “benching” beneath a gleaming silver bar without a spotter, lifting what looked like a ton of barbell plates. Probably around the weight of a car. Somehow, while pressing these huge round iron stacks, his voice emerged loud and clear.
“Eh! Eh man! I’m talking to you! What you doing here?”
He gave a short grunt, expelled air from his chest, and pushed the barbells up to the rest stand. He was waiting for my answer.
This prison yard was only slightly different from others in Michigan City and Marion in Illinois, San Quentin in California, and the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh where, in later years, I would be involved in other communication programs with inmates. The P.A.C.E. (Public Action Correctional Effort) program was spear-headed by the Disciples of Christ and the Methodist churches and through my Seminary classes, I was a volunteer for the project.
“I-I’m going to meet my class,” I stuttered. “It’s in that building over there.”
“Oh, you’re the new teacher. We heard you were coming. Good luck!”
I hurried on but my legs were trembling and weak, and it took me forever to reach the next doorway. There were no guards or other inmates in sight. I could not help but wonder why this human hunk was alone in this section of the yard. Why did the guards send me without a chaperone? Too late to get out now. There were at least three iron gates between me and the outside world. Now I was also an inmate.
The prison facility in Indiana was surrounded by miles and miles of plain fields and cornstalks, like most federal and state penal facilities. The impassive, steely eyed, stone-faced guards wore crisp, starched and sharply-creased uniforms and they seemed to enjoy slamming the metal gates and getting that echo. There were the sound of mixed human voices swirling in the distance. Someone may have been singing, or howling, I could not tell the difference. This was not a place I wanted to be for any long stretch of time. Most of the inmates that I saw were Black, like me. It seemed like prison was a holding pen for angry Black Americans.
I had no college teaching experience at that time and was quite “green” having just graduated from university with a Bachelor’s degree. I was doing substitute teaching, “baby-sitting” in the public schools. But the monthly prison visits were educational, involving two-hour, one-on-one chats and sometimes lectures to several dozen inmates at once.
It was easy to see how their valuation of human life had diminished. Many felt victimized by the system, hence had no qualms about striking out blindly against anyone, unfortunately often including innocent bystanders. But if their own lives were viewed as meaningless by society, then everyone outside was against them, perpetrators of an unfair system. Outsiders deserved punishment. It was a twisted form of vengeance.
By this time, I had roughly three or four years of university teaching under my belt. Not a seasoned professor, just a PhD “grad-ass”. I viewed the act of teaching as being merely a lecturing activity in which the teacher spouted out facts and theories, using ten dollar words. I was lecturing them about basic communication theoretical models, the five elements being: Source, Message, Channel, Receiver, and Environment. No doubt the inmates were bored stiff. In truth, at that time, I could have learned more from them than the reverse.
During one lecture, a younger guy in the front row was showing interest in a closer examination of my Meersham Bowl smoking pipe. It was an attractive caramel and beige fusion piece, in an out of my mouth even when unlit. In those days smoking in classes was allowed, and the pipe served as my crutch, being my attempt to overcome my youthful appearance.
“I like that pipe,” the tough-looking brother.
“Thank you,” I replied and continued my less-than-compelling lecture.
“I really like that pipe.” The guy was insistent. And just in case I was not getting the point, he finally declared. “Let me hold that pipe!”
There was a dead silence in the mid-sized room filled with thirty to forty guys sitting or leaning against the walls in the back. It was stuffy in that room.
“Brother, can I see that pipe?”
The “Pipe Yearner” was not going away. The class was on hold. We had the makings of a situation. I frowned because I did not want some stranger holding my pipe. Furthermore, I doubted if I would ever see that pipe again, because it would definitely get passed around and disappear.
I simply stared at this impediment seated in front who was now leaning forward. I was tongue-tied and could think of nothing to say. Suddenly, from the back of
the room another voice shouted:
“Aw man, leave the brother alone. We trying to learn something. If you don’t wanna learn anything get your ass outta here!”
There were a number of assenting growls from around the room and I continued my run to the end. Somehow, before the end of class we ended up talking about poetry. I have no idea how that came about but the room really lit up. This was an area that was also much closer to my heart, protest poets and themes that the Black writers focused on. Names popped from their mouths like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Malcolm X. And lo’ and behold I found some friends in that room.
The older man who had interceded for me against the “Pipe-Yearner” was also a poet named John Horton. We became pen pals, and years later I was honored to share and perform some of his work.
I will never forget that day in the prison classroom. It was a one-time experience, but it caused me to re-examine how I presented myself when teaching. I also became keenly aware of the need to make lectures relevant to different learners at varying interest levels.
When a distant buzzer rang, the men seated slowly rose and shuffled with heads down back from whence they had come. I was relieved to have survived. The class had ended on a high note, but at that moment I had no wish to stay inside.
18
In the Trenches
After about two years teaching in China, I became frustrated hearing not only students, but also teachers regularly mispronounce English words and garble sentences. I started making a lists of common mistakes and word glitches.
“Lice tastes berry good wiff-out sauces or gravy.”
“I s-i-n-k this a good idea...”
“Happy Bur-s-day to you!”
Creating exercises and ways of training to correct such errors became my preoccupation. Simplicity is always the best approach, so I focused on ways to make lessons meaningful, fun, and easily applicable to specific problem areas. Using short rhymes and tongue-twisting sentences containing alliterations, my work stressed four basic consonants: TH—W—L—V. English words containing these tend to give Chinese speakers fits.
One special focus in oral English classes was on physical mouth and tongue movements for sound production. I instructed students to place a small object (usually a clean pencil) in their mouth while practicing. We all looked silly doing this and had fun as I participated in the exercises along with them. I was happy to see the students experience progress in their personal articulation challenges.
Part of my teaching process involved telling students personal stories about problems I had faced as a Black student competing against White students, but the comments that speech contest judges would write on my contest ballots about my English articulation, it turned out, were not part of that. I found them hurtful at first, but I was determined to be successful, and I found the comments helped me. Speaking English correctly takes commitment and I wanted my students to get a glimpse of elements they could focus on for personal speech improvement. A willingness to take small steps is all that matters. One must begin somewhere.
I come from California, and all of the Black people I associated with growing up used “proper” speech. Black people from California like me speak the same as white people from California. I came to the state of Indiana after years of speech training and competition, captain of two debating teams (California and Nebraska), state and national honors. I just happened to be inside a dark skin. During the 1960s, Blacks in leadership roles like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis were not speaking “sloppy” English.
So what is “Black English”? It’s a false generalization that does not fit an entire culture of people. It’s like saying that “Chinglish” should be accepted and advanced because a large segment of China’s population uses it. Speech is not “colored”.
In my early speech competitions, the judges were not criticizing me because I was a Black kid competing against Whites. Listening to myself on a tape recorder when practicing, I noticed that, indeed, I had a problem one judge called “lazy lips”. I needed to pay attention to the physical aspects of my vocal sound production. I started listening to myself as I spoke. I placed a pencil in my mouth to encourage better tongue movement. This was WORK. Attention to details involved more than dropping slang and word contractions from my vocabulary. At home, my parents never used sloppy language; local vernacular was viewed as “street talk” and not allowed in the house. So our parents were onboard with my teachers at school when it came to communication standards. “Sloppy” talk was simply viewed as a sign of laziness, as well as low class. “Where did you hear that from?” ”Why are you using that word? That is not proper English.” “Stop hanging around the wrong crowd!” That’s what I heard at home when my speech slipped.
I remember as far back as elementary school, a student using the word “ain’t”, and tried to justify it saying he had heard it on television or in a song. The defense failed. I remember a fourth grade teacher chastising one of my schoolmates, saying, “If you want to get a job in the future, you’d better learn how to use English properly!”
Yet on our high school bus in San Bernardino, Black kids would tease students who did not use vernacular. “Oh, listen him. He’s trying to sound White. Ha! Ha! Ha! Who do you think you are? You ain’t White, brotha!”
Even after graduating from college years later and going to a seminary in Indiana, some Pentecostal church people would tease me about always having “proper” speech. They said it was pretentious and that my speech really was not “Black enough.” This was in the early 1970s.
It was several years later when the issue of Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English (AAVE) came to center stage. The questions raised included: Should non-standard “sloppy talk” be accepted and considered a cultural dialect? Was it unfairly discriminatory for teachers to react negatively to “Black” speech? Should educational materials and texts be produced that contained AAVE in order to facilitate elevation of low-achieving students? Many songs, movies, television shows and standup comics seemed to validate the non-standard, low-class communication behavior, and some of it was embraced by many Black Americans. They did not see ridicule in these TV show characters but rather acceptance by the ruling class, those controlling the media. In effect, we were being encouraged to laugh at ourselves, to stay underachievers, to stay the way we were.
As I saw it, reliance on non-standard English was lazy. Black people from the Caribbean had become successful in America by working hard to assimilate and by making standard English their speech. My grandfather, who was from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, spoke really broken, hardly intelligible English but he would have been very unhappy if his son and grandchildren were not masters of “the King’s English.” On the other hand, it was also said our grandad spoke seven languages.
Non-standard English speech is not a genetic deficiency that a Black person needs to accept. This issue is a particular sore spot with me. I worked on my diction problems. It took dedicated effort and attention to physical details to overcome non-standard word and sound production, and I found that my experiences were useful in helping Chinese students to improve their English.
In China, use of non-standard English by Chinese is called “Chinglish”, which describes grammatical misuse of English words and non-standard sound production. Simply put, speaking English forces Chinese to use mouth, lips and tongue in a manner not required when they speak their native language. It takes physical changes and focus to achieve standard English word sound production. Many Chinese speakers excel in this. There is no genetic issue that prevents standard-sounding speech.
Recently, I attended a writer’s workshop in Beijing where the facilitator was a young Black woman from New York. The promotional literature pitched her as being associated with a prestigious East Coast university, and she had recently received an award for a short-story. I was excited to get
an opportunity to meet other writers and also hear a person from my homeland. Her Brooklyn accent was not unfamiliar to me since many of my relatives hail from the Bronx in New York. They all speak in that distinctive “New Yorkese” style. But as the session progressed, I became irritated by her non-standard English. In her introductory speech and explanatory comments, she constantly slipped into non-standard “sloppy talk”—“d’ese” for “these” “d’ose” for “those” and ”d’ems” for “them.” It made me uncomfortable. This was an educator? I felt embarrassed. This girl from the States and myself were the only two Black faces at the event, and she was not, to my way of thinking, “representing” correctly. I have no idea what others in the audience were thinking, but it was difficult for me not to cringe on hearing certain words. I am simply “Old School”.
Hard work is essential if you really care about what you do and who you are. That’s the essence of “Old School”. It is unfortunate that in social media today, it seems that anything goes. Standards seemingly no longer exist, but they do count. I know it.
Back in the classroom in Changchun, I found that the best strategy for encouraging class involvement was to inject elements of competition into the process, both in terms of individual efforts and for groups. Using the basic Pavlov’s Dog concepts of reward and punishment, small competing units were formed in each class early in the term. They would name their group, design a symbol for it, and create a slogan and carry this identity with them during many English class projects. Sometimes I would give special privileges or little gifts to the most outstanding performing groups or individuals. In an effort to keep students on their toes, I found that hiding special treats under chairs or in different areas of the classroom before students arrived, were incentives for attention, listening and comprehension. There were times when the most outstanding groups would compete for the reward of a special field trip. True, many of these elements required a personal investment of time on my part, but the results in terms of teaching attentive, enthused students made it well worth the effort.
Black in China Page 9