Random Thoughts About Living In China

During the spring semester of 2012, I taught at Sias University in Henan Province, China.


Here are some of my random thoughts about things I experienced in China:

• I played a John Hyatt song for my students and one of them said to me, “Oh, you like crazy music?”
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• Emily told me that she doesn’t want to have a baby boy.  When she gets pregnant, she wants a baby girl.
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• When I stayed in Beijing, I paid $20/night for a hotel and I thought that was a great deal. Then the next time I stayed in a hotel, with another person, we paid $10/night each. Then I stayed in another hotel with two other people and we paid $7.50 each.  Last night I stayed in a hotel and it cost us about $4.50 each.  I think I have reached the bottom of what I will pay and tolerate in hotel accommodations.
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• According to a story I read in China Daily (March 30, 2012), the average price for a license plate for a car this year is 58,000 Yuan (about $8500), almost half the price of a new car.
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• I also read that the birth sex ratio is 117 males for every 100 females.
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• I spent the day with medical students today and they complete their medical training through a five year college program.
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• I visited a section in Zhengzhou where there are 10 universities in one area and about 200,000 are enrolled in these schools. All of these students have access to hot water between 6PM and 8PM only.  They wait in line with their big two liter thermos and fill their thermos and lug them up to their dorm rooms.  That is their hot water supply until the next day.
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• For some reason, the women get their men to carry their purses.
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• Most people in China are atheist.  And I have never heard so much discussion about integrity, honesty and goodwill as I have from the Chinese people that I have met.  They are very principled and it is very important to them to be honorable.
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• There is a law that does not allow the dead to be buried.  They have to be cremated because farm land has become too valuable so no land can be wasted.
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• My students think the Dali Lhama is a despicable person who is manipulating the world into believing that he is a man of peace, when in fact, he is a made of war and is trying to engage China in war.
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• We just finished two days of sports competitions.  All classes were cancelled and we had an opening ceremony, similar to the Olympics.  The school band first played the Chinese national anthem and then they played the USA anthem for the foreign teachers.  My students wanted to know why we cheered at the end of the song.
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• The school’s cheerleading squad has 200 members but they never cheer at any events. They did perform for the opening ceremonies and they took up the entire field.
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• One of my students told me that she learned in her history class that Gorbachev is in exile in the US because of his role in bringing down Communism in the USSR.  He is portrayed by the Chinese government as cowardly and an enemy of China and communism.
• When people sneeze in Chinese, no one says “God bless you.”
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• Most days, I don’t spend any money and when I do spend money, it’s only about $1.
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• One evening, around dusk, I went to turn the light on in my classroom.  Then I realized that the light was already on.
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• Key changed her name to Kay this week. Sun changed her name to Vita. I told the students that they are not allowed to change their names anymore while I am here.
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• There are some universal expressions used on campus; “it is a pity” is a popular expression.
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• The Chinese language has sounds that I have never heard before.  So when I walk though campus, I don’t hear words, just unrecognizable sounds.  One day, I was walking with my student and she said to me, “Do you know that man?”  “No”, I told her.  “Oh, he just said hello to you and you didn’t answer him.” My own language isn’t registering with me at times.
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• My students only know two worlds: China and the USA.  They have a slight bit of information about London and Germany.  But they never heard of Cambodia, Viet Nam, Laos, Burma, South America or Canada.
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• My student asked me if I owned a gun.  It is her impression that every American owns a gun and she can’t understand why we need guns.
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• My students tell me on a regular basis that they want to travel the world, just like me.  I ask them where they want to go.  They want to go to the US and Tibet.
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• We have a three day holiday this week for Tomb Sweeping Day.  Students go home to their families and honor the dead.  But in order to take this holiday, we have to make up all of our classes on Saturday and Sunday.
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• On any evening, students may be summoned to a class meeting at the whim of the class monitor.
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• The foreign faculty makes $5000/year.
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• Most of the employees in the university live in the dorm.  The foreign faculty dorm is filled with small apartments.  The Chinese faculty lives in the student dorms with the three bunk beds.  They don’t have six to a room.  They usually only have two adults to a room.  But the three bunk beds stay in the room.
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• There is a shopping mall near campus and it is named DENNIS.
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• The students address the Chinese professors as “Teacher” and they address the foreign faculty (AKA- The Americans) by their first name.
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• Middle school education was just recently mandated throughout the country.  But many of the farm children still do not go to middle school.
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• I still can’t get used to having people laugh when they see me.  Many times it is the first time they have ever seen a foreigner. Yesterday, while I was waiting for the train, I had to pose with multiple babies which made me very uncomfortable.  They all have those jumpsuits with the slits in the crouch so they can just eliminate when they want.  This saves a small fortune on diapers and solid waste.  Anyway, one baby wasn’t cooperating and crying and taking way too long.  He finally posed to his mother’s satisfaction and he didn’t wet me so I survived.
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• I was sitting on a stool, getting my shoes polished when one of my students came by.  She told me the shoe polisher wanted to ask me many questions.  I told her to go ahead.  My student translated and the woman giggled and told my student, “I don’t know what to ask?’
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• There is an abundance of foreign faculty who are conservative Christians on this campus.  I was told that Sias University purposely recruited this faculty group because the labor was cheap.  But it did not make sense to me.  Why would an atheist government recruit evangelicals?  But today at lunch, one Christian woman told me that the evangelical colleges in the USA promote opportunities for their graduates to teach in China as sort of a missionary calling.  It is her belief that the communist government looks the other way because the “spiritual people” do a much better job than the nonspiritual people.  She believes the spiritual people are more interested in the education of their students.  And the first step to enlightenment is education.
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• Tuition and board at Sias University costs each student about $1200/year which is three times more expensive than other universities in China.
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• I wandered in to an apartment complex that had several Ma Jong tables and they were all electronic.  So the players shove their Ma Jong tile into this hole in the middle of the table and then push a button and the blocks emerge from the bottom, all lined up and looking like the Great Wall of China.
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• Many Chinese people do not age well.  Years of harsh exposure to the sun ages they and many have faces as wrinkled as prunes.  So there is an expression often used to complement an older woman:  “I think you must have been beautiful when you were younger.”
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• One of the foreign faculty is a history buff and a photographer.  He has photographed over 57,000 photos of the ancient world. (www.garyleetodd.com)
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• One of the foreign faculty (from Ohio) has 7 children and they all practice Kung Fu. They performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
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• Every freshmen student has to take military training and they march around campus every day.
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• Some of the toilet facilities accommodate men and women together. And this only adds to my stress of using squat toilets.
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• The foreign faculty is forbidden to talk to the students about religion. The foreign faculty holds a religious service on Sunday nights and the students are forbidden to come to the faculty dorm at that time.
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• The foreign faculty were allowed to reschedule their classes on Thanksgiving Day and they were allowed to cook a tradition meal together.  However, it was a little hard to find turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin, and various other traditional foods.
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• Three forbidden topics:  Tibet, Taiwan, and religion.   And any discussion about Tienanmen Square is so forbidden that it is not even on the list of forbidden topics.
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• The Communist Party Secretary has an office right in the administration office.
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• This university is affiliated with Fort Hayes University in Kansas which is mostly an on-line college.  Several of the Sias students go there for graduate school, looking for the ultimate study abroad program.  I wonder if they are disappointed when they step off that plane and see the great expansion of the mid-west farm lands.
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• There isn't quite the police force here in my city as there is in Beijing.  But I do see video cameras in very odd places.
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• The campus is designed to represent the world. So we have Italian Square, German Street, French Street, Moscow Square and the castle.  Sometimes I feel as if I am walking around Disneyland.  Feel free to take a look at their website (www.siasuniversity.cn) but I have to throw out a little disclaimer, all of the photos have been greatly enhanced through Photoshop.  I am not on the campus that is displayed through the photos.
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• The president of the university built himself a huge mansion.  It reminds me of Monticello.  And it stays empty most of the time since he spends most of his time in California.  But when he is on campus, he stays in the dorm with us.  He stays at the end of my hallway and sneaks in and out through the back stairway.
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• Every student on this campus is learning English.  That’s 24,000 students saying hello to me every day.
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• When I walk the streets, the local people stare at me.  Sometimes, parents and grandparents will bring their children over to me to shake their hands because they have never seen a foreigner before and they want to talk with me. And when I open my mouth and speak in English, they laugh hysterically, as if my sounds are the funniest sounds they have ever heard.
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• The longer I am in China, the worse I am getting with my chopsticks.  Today I tried to use  them and I was so awkward. It felt as if it was the first time I had used chopsticks.
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• I was standing on a corner, watching an old woman collect plastic bottles from pedestrians.  I quickly took her picture and in the process, caught her attention. She came over and said something in a loud voice.  I thought she was annoyed with me.  But she wanted to tell me that I come from “a wonderful country”.  A long time ago, she met an American and he was polite to her so she thinks we are all polite.  She stared at me a little bit, checked me up and down, laughed to herself and then went back to her task.   She gets 1 yuan for every 10 bottles she collects.  So she gets 10 Yuan for every 100 bottles and that is about $1.75.  She told me she collects about 30 bottles a day. So she makes about 50 cents a day.  She is 80 and this is her daily income.  The government sends her 10 Yuan a month .
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• Today, one of my students noticed that I had blue eyes so she came right up to me to take a closer look.  We were just about nose to nose and I was a little uncomfortable with my lack of personal space.  And when she moved away, I saw that a line had formed and the other 8 students wanted to have a look as well.
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• There is a new building going up right next to my dorm.  Workers have been working from 630Am to 700PM, seven days a week for the entire time I have been here.  They must be behind schedule because last night, around 2:00AM, I heard a car outside.  It woke me up and I got up to see what was going on.  The car drove right in to the construction site and six adults got out of this small car.  Three of them were women and they were holding small children, swaddled in blankets.  They placed the children down on the ground in a corner of the exposed building and the six adults went to work, the front lights of the car serving as their only source of light.
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• A student offered me some food from her plastic bag.  “It is delicious”, she tells me. When I looked it, it was filled with fried chicken feet.  NO THANKS.
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• I had a wool jacket tailor made for me- $40.
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• We were in a hot pot restaurant and food just kept coming to our table.  A jelled block of something brick color arrived.  I asked what it was.  “Goat blood. It is delicious.
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• Selia met a man from Poland.  “Have you ever heard of Poland?” she asked me. I told her a little bit about Poland and she told me, “I think I have to teach myself about the world”.
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• I am at the airport, waiting to go home.  Our flight is delayed so tea is served to everyone.