I do have some bad days. In those first weeks, as I trudge up the hill to teach each morning, a voice in my head often whines: ‘Someone else should be doing this job, someone who could do it better and more easily. I haven’t got what it takes,’ while another retorts: ‘You’re the one who’s here. Just do it’.
As I return to the flat after teaching, I hear other internal murmurs. If the lessons have been disastrous, there’s the censorious voice: ‘You haven’t got the hang of this at all – and not nearly enough preparation.’ If the lessons have been a success, I catch the confidential whisper: ‘That was a fluke, wasn’t it! They made it so easy for you, but – watch out – eventually they’ll find out what thin ice you’re skating on.’ This, I know wearily, is not humility but a familiar, self-defeating formula. I know no way of dealing with this, other than just keeping going.
As the weeks wear on, however, I learn another strategy. Whatever my teaching may be like, those around me compliment me warmly on it. What they really think of my performance I’ve no idea, but they’re determined to keep me comfortable. Their reassurances do help, and I realise finally that I have nothing to lose by taking the same line. ‘I’m quite a good teacher,’ I tell myself, ‘and – even if I’m not – it’s more comfortable for everyone if I say I am. Nobody’s interested in failure here.’
Cherry says that she’ll report back to the teachers’ meetings the new things she’s learned, but I doubt if they’ll be any help in teaching the formidable Chinese exam syllabus, with its emphasis on memorisation of multitudes of fine points of grammar and a wide vocabulary for performing reading and writing exercises.
Several English teachers, including an enthusiastic Mr Li, have started asking me obscure grammar questions from a textbook they use. It has the appearance of an old railway timetable – yellowish paper with minute print. Using the English of colonial administrators sixty years ago, it provides hundreds of exercises of the grammatical nit-picking variety. To these teachers, English is as absolute as an abacus, while native speakers know it is a slippery fish in which new forms can evolve between the question and the answer. The themes and situations of the exercises make my eyelids heavy, but presumably not those of the students, who’ve acquired a high standard of reading and writing using this book.
What of our New Zealand teaching world, leaning heavily on glossy pictures, ‘game’ activities, the flicker of variety? How can you compare systems that are out of sight of one another? But things are changing here. Chinese English teachers are encouraged to sit in on my lessons. This is new. They tell me they think my lessons are ‘kind’ and ‘interesting,’ but I’ll bet they also think they’re too casual.
For anyone without a fog horn voice, teaching here’s not easy; the competition’s tough: 1200 fiercely expressive students in unlined brick and concrete, five construction sites in the school grounds, and a loudspeaker system relayed to every classroom, that without warning announces, urges or admonishes. The windows are open at present, and every classroom has two doors always open onto a wide balcony.
I lug my enormous tape recorder up and down dozens of stairs from lesson to lesson. Ellen urges me not to bother: ‘Our classrooms all have tape-recorders.’ She’s very keen I should know they’re up with the play. How can I point out to her that as only half of the tape recorders are fully functional, and about as many of the classroom power points, the odds on a successful tape-based lesson relying on the classroom equipment aren’t good? So I continue to tote my recorder, and don’t mess with the power sockets myself, or ask for student help. I’ve already watched a student feed two bare wires into a socket, while my New Zealand-bred nerves screamed. Instead, my pockets bulge with an arsenal of size D batteries.
Enthusiastic Mr Li, one of the few figures who ever hurries in the school grounds, tells me he gives English lessons at five other schools as well as this one. Perhaps this explains why he strides out, legs flashing under his sagging tweed coat, swinging a large briefcase, an eager smile but a knitted forehead.
For one of his lessons this week, he’s going to give every student a picture and ask them to describe the mood, in English – an exciting departure from the teaching norm. For him to lay his hands on twenty-eight pictures suitable for use in class is a feat in itself. He must have caught a vision from foreign textbooks of other ways of teaching beyond the chalk, talk and drill that they do so efficiently here. I contribute some pictures from an old UNICEF calendar, and in return he photocopies and passes on some possible teaching material from a staff training booklet from Emirates Airlines. I’d give anything to know the link between an exotic luxury airline and this engaging tweed-swathed figure in front of me, deeppickled in the spirit of China. Was it passed to him by a cleaner who found it tangled in the bedclothes of a Chongqing hotel room after airline staff left, or did it attach itself to a student’s father, returning from discreet oil deals under palm trees in one of the Emirates. The truth’s probably stranger still.
He’s an intriguing character. I wish that my eye and attention didn’t stray constantly to the strange line his shaver’s taken – skirting certain tufts, and seemingly set on high-cut in other areas to leave some scrub. I’d like to observe one of his English classes, to see how a Chinese teacher teaches Chinese students. He says he’ll ask the authorities. His pioneering spirit must open windows for his students. I wonder how this effects his relationship with the school establishment.
Surprisingly, permission is eventually given to attend Mr Li’s English class. This really is opening up to the outside world. The students are mostly aged fourteen. They’ve prepared a performance – and though it’s disappointing to be shown a set piece, the students are delighted to have an excuse to perform. In the 40-minute period before, everyone in the class memorised a 25-line interview in English, and now in quick-fire succession, each pair races up to the front of the room, like soldiers on an exercise, and declaims the piece in strong, clear voices. As Mr Li fires questions around the class afterwards, it’s clear they understand what they’re saying. This is surprising in itself. Often it seems to be enough to achieve the magic incantation on the air or magic squiggles on the board. The word is the word.
Li is energetic and eager, and his demonstration – on his desktop – of drumming, with an invitation to the class to join him in a deafening tattoo on desk lids, is brilliant. The students learn. He speaks in English throughout the lesson (a requirement at this school, although tired teachers with only a basic grasp of spoken English must sometimes slip back into their native tongue. Would virtuous, literal-minded students ever ‘tell’ as a perceived public duty?)
Mr Li’s English is far from perfect, hasn’t the idiomatic ease many of his students have picked up from tapes and videos, but he’s determined and encouraging, and what he can’t do he can still teach. Using memorisation and recitation and helped by a new Longman textbook, he’s filling his students’ heads with useful English, and they look as though they’re enjoying every minute of it.
The teachers have their own library, and I begin the necessary crab-wise approaches (the bee-line isn’t favoured here) to lifting something from the teachers’ library to supplement the basic rations I brought with me: a coffee-stained Bible with untidy marks of study and struggle; ‘Pride and Prejudice’, slim and leather-covered like an elegant glove; and a book about central Italy – in memory of travel plans abandoned when China sidled into view, and as comfort in possible moments of regret.
I ask Hilda if she’ll come to the library to interpret for me, but she seems unenthusiastic. Maybe taking out a library book is like liberating a bar of gold from Fort Knox. I’m rather concerned over what choice of books I’ll have. The romantically-inclined students have shown such a passion for the Brontes, that I picture shelves of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘ Wuthering Heights’ and feel I may be obliged, cornered in Southwest China, to give them the detailed attention they deserve.
We walk up the path to the creeper-covered brick building
. Hilda knocks uncertainly on the library door and inches in. One librarian is reading a book and the other a newspaper. They look as though this is what they do. It’s a great effort for them to get up from their chairs, but in the end they take us through two padlocked sets of doors, and stand doubtfully in a large room marked ‘storeroom’. It is empty of all but wooden bookcases containing neat sets of card-covered books printed on yellowed newsprint. The covers of the books are stained with grime and ink. They’ve been comprehensively catalogued, and are patched with smudged stamps, numbers and codes. The cards of the books I examine show no book has been borrowed more than twice.
‘Aesop’s Fables’, ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’, Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Hardy’s ‘The Return of the Native’, a Margaret Drabble, Graham Greene’s ‘The Human Factor’. It seems an extraordinarily arbitrary collection until I realise I’m looking at the texts printed in China for the study of English Literature. ‘Are there any more?’ The librarians look in a worried way down the aisle from where we’re still standing. Perhaps they’ve never been down there. The air’s full of a thick musty book smell and it’s so still – the tomb of English Literature. I grab the Hardy, Graham Greene and, from among the row of books in English by non-critical foreign travellers, a copy of New Zealander Rewi Alley’s ‘Travels in China. 1966-71’.
The librarians look relieved, sensing it’s over, and Hilda writes ‘Jane’ carefully on the cards.
‘When do I need to return them?’ There’s a long conversation.
‘At the end of this semester.’
No-one seems to know when that will be.
The books aren’t a bad choice. Rewi Alley’s writing expresses his own unqualified support for Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China, and his passionate hope for a brave new world for the poor Chinese people he loved so well. He served them and Mao with all his larger-than-life physical and moral strength. But every day here, in the stories of the parents of my students – not much younger than I am – I’m brought into contact with the other side of the revolution. So many of them lost all educational opportunities except those – ardently promoted by Mao – of re-education in the countryside, and their lives subsequently in terms of jobs and opportunities have been severely circumscribed. The same revolution that mercifully opened doors on a far brighter future for so many Chinese, slammed doors resoundingly in the faces of others. And China today, desperately trying to give sufficient educational opportunities to her millions of young people, can offer no second-chance education for their elders.
Hardy, in his tale of going away and coming back, could be writing about my own life here. He describes an environment where one physical feature – the heath – conditions all characters, influences all incidents. In Chongqing, it’s the fierce rock on which she’s built: ‘Accommodate me,’ it seems to rasp. ‘I’m the heart of the city.’
I feel triumphant at having stormed the teachers’ library, and wonder if I can make any progress over my other source of reading, my mail from New Zealand. There are padlocked lockers for teachers’ mail at the gatehouse, but when I first arrived here the presiding official told me they had no locker for me.
‘All in use. Sorry.’
I sense they’re tired of delivering my inconvenient wealth of foreign mail up five floors – letters are arriving later and later. I decide to try again for a locker.
On my way to the gatehouse I meet Anne, who agrees to interpret for me. She explains the problem of the tardy mail delivery in such a crisp, bossy tone that I feel hopeful. I think she’s used to ruling the roost. Sulkily, the official concedes that I might share the locker of the Russian teacher. I wonder how Boris will feel about this, but it seems he receives very little mail. On one of our shared outings courting the bureaucracy, he told me he expected to receive a letter from Moscow in about three weeks. What a long, lone expectation – and he’s been away from home for two years. The official reluctantly gives me a key which equally reluctantly opens yet another of the school’s padlocks and the shared locker. I can now collect my own mail and a more or less regular, complimentary copy of the ‘China Daily’.
I thank Anne who looks pleased to have helped me. But she has more important things on her mind. The air pollution in Chongqing (remarkable even among Chinese cities) and widespread heavy smoking, damage the lungs of countless Chongqingese, and Anne’s husband has lung cancer.
Anne may lose her husband. I think of mine. Not many letters from him will find their way to my locker here, but I hear his rich-toned voice on the phone every Wednesday. Definitely no flattery in that voice, but there’s a sort of muscular support. He’s always been quick to support me against the outside world, and though I don’t seem to have any enemies here, it’s reassuring to know he’d fight them lustily if I did.
I think of our marriage of thirty years. After the disappearance of the Austrian, and a few other romantic episodes – most tentative, one unwisely confident – I felt drawn, in an entirely different way to this entirely different man, and we married. Ever after, I’ve wondered how – knowing so little about myself or anyone else in my middle twenties – I managed to see, beyond the fire and smoke of a stormy courtship, that this was right. He was good for me, exploding the boundaries of my inexperience, and teaching me about loyalty and deep, simple goodness. Whether I’ve been as good for him, I don’t know, but I’ve learned to choose the right books for him, and this has to be important. Most valuably, marriage began to expose to me – as a good marriage must – the illusions in my perspective, and more importantly my illusions about myself. I thought that, as I’d been – most of the time – an acceptable daughter, sister, student, music teacher and friend, I’d automatically be an acceptable wife – most of the time. Surely it would only take good will and hard work? I cringe now as I remember that, but it’s better said. It wasn’t like that of course; nothing was automatic this time. Probably neither he nor I realised how many new roads I had to walk in order to join worlds with him. My illusion that I’d be an adornment to his life faded fast and painfully; my areas of competence were largely irrelevant in a world that turned on livestock prices, land sales and practical skills. My ego’s imaginary castle of domestic bliss toppled, but on the cleared site, there was the chance to build – with him – something truthful, something that might even last the distance. My parents had gone their separate ways; I didn’t want that.
Then and since, I’ve sometimes wondered if my capacity for intimate relationships might be limited. It was on my way to China this time, that the question caused me the acute misery which has kept it formatted in bold in my mind.
I spent a day in Kowloon in Hong Kong between flights. I checked into the hotel, locked my two bags in my room, and walked out onto Cameron Road. The camera round my neck and a small recorder in my pocket guaranteed me future proofs of presence. I wore a cap, sunglasses, and carried my passport, flight ticket, some cash and a credit card. I realised that I, and my two bags, held everything I’d need for a year. An awareness of freedom I hadn’t known since I was a child spun me in its arms – I felt weightless, ageless, all but invincible. With only myself to carry, anything felt possible. Maybe I could fly. My New Zealand work and household were in order, and with farewells to family and friends completed, communications from now on would be confined to the occasional phone call and more regular letters.
In the middle of a sigh of relief, guilt struck – hard. What sort of monster faces a year away from all those they love with a sigh of relief at the prospect of fewer communications. I knew it was possible I might never see them again; things can happen. I felt sub-human. And yet I loved deeply those I’d left. I was sure of that. I’d stopped spinning by now, and trudged up to Nathan Road to sit in the garden of the Presbyterian Church, hoping that some good influence might find me there. I watched a small mother cat walk across the garden, her shape and her purposeful, watchful ways suggesting she had kit
tens somewhere and was on her way to feed them. She, at least, had a sense of responsibility, I thought gloomily. Even more than ashamed, I felt confused. I seemed to be sleep-walking away from every good thing I’d found and built, in determined and committed search of … of what? I suddenly wondered if this journey had to do with passion. It’s not difficult to see what most people’s passion is. But I suspected that no-one who knew me could confidently point to my passion. Nor – I realised with some unease – could I. I could feel it burning away inside me, but I seemed to have hidden it so well – for whatever reason – that not even I could see it. What was it?
CHAPTER
FOUR
A BREATH
OF THE WEST
Suddenly I’m overcome with homesickness. It so often approaches by stealth. I’ve been guarding the front door of my mind, telling myself firmly that this piece of living is worth the inevitable price of temporary exile, but misery now flows quietly in the back and rises around me.
A friend has sent me Vikram Seth’s lucent translation of works by three Tang poets. One of them, Li Bai, local Sichuan hero, knew about this sort of homesickness. In the 8th century, he wrote: I lift my head and watch the moon. I drop my head and think of home. Now, as then, homesickness eventually recedes. It passes – for the present.
The fog has cleared and for an hour or two I drink in the colour of the sky, the sense of space. High puffs of cloud are still there, but in between there’s a faint but unmistakeable blue, and I can see a ring of mountains around as much of the horizon as my balconies command. I want to dance with delight. The sun’s showing and I hang over my balcony with the warmth on my shoulder, and watch a woman washing her long hair over an enamel basin. In the evening, though the fog’s beginning to creep back, there’s still something faintly luminous in the air, and I enjoy watching the light. I think about the shape life’s taking on for me here. The flat and I have come to terms with one another, and it’s proving a useful retreat for the students who come here at lunchtime or in the evening between dinner and evening school, partly to speak English, partly to see what’s new on the walls, but mostly, I suspect, because within the school grounds there are few other places to go. The classrooms are locked against thieving, and the other teachers don’t want their students’ company out of classroom hours. The dormitories, I’ve been told, are crowded, grubby, noisy, and not attractive to return to. This leaves, as pleasant places to gather, the stone seats under the straggly trees, or my flat where they can study the map of New Zealand, pinned over the door, and the inflatable world globe hanging from the ceiling. It spins in the breeze, and reassures me the world doesn’t end with China. I’ve covered the walls with pictures, keeping one wall for a photo of every student who visits the flat. I don’t often feel the urge to decorate, but here I’ve needed to make my mark, to say who I am.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 6