China: Being Miracled in Beijing

“So you must be Oracle then, right?” I asked, pointing my pen at the student in front of me. I had my pen poised and ready to mark a check mark next to his name on my clipboard attendance sheet.

“No teacher, I am Oracle,” a voice accompanying a raised hand said from across the room, nowhere near where I was.

“Oh, right. So is it Skipper then?” I scanned through my attendance sheet without any idea who this student was. 

“No teacher, that’s me,” another hand in another quadrant of the classroom.

I was five minutes into my first class. I had just spent the last 20 minutes before class looking over their ID card pictures to make a good impression with my class by putting faces to names. I was failing.

“Ok, we have a Jasmine, a Jamie, and a Jericho. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I got this,” I said almost pleading with them. I could sense them willing me to get it right, to ease the tension and end this torturous introduction.

I felt out of my element. I was off-kilter in a way I am not accustomed to in the classroom. I had no go-to shticks to break the ice like I did in Turkey and the culturally appropriate jokes and play-on-words I used in Turkey would be of no help to me here. I was floundering.

 I couldn’t really tell if I was thrown off by their ridiculous sounding names or the fact that I was staring at 25 bespectacled and attentive students. The students were poised and ready with open notebooks and sharpened pens watching me fumble through their names. I stood at the front of a classically arranged classroom with row after row of students and me at the pedestal in the front of the class. The classroom was pristine with nothing but notebook ands dictionaries on the desks.

 “Jasmine, Jamie, Jericho…hmmmm.”

 I had no idea. I thought I knew their names but they all look the…

 “I know!” I thought to myself, “A joke!”

“Has anyone every told you guys that Chinese people’s names all look and sound alike?”

So there we have it folks. The introduction to the first class I would have on the first day of my new job in China. A borderline racist joke told by a sweating, fumbling bald guy awkwardly wearing a tie he had just learned how to tie and belting out culturally insensitive jokes because he didn’t know who Skipper, Oracle, and Jericho were.

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Well guys, it has been about a month here so I wanted to give you all a recap on how it has been going. I meant to do this a lot sooner but to be honest, Becky and I have just recently come up for air. Getting used to our new jobs, new social life, and new schedules has been a bit of a chore but we are finding a rhythm, getting into a groove, and even have plans to have people over for “Necky Enchiladas.”

Our adventure, as some of you well know, started out front of our old apartment in Kadikoy, Istanbul with a somewhat teary and a tad bit emotional goodbye (seriously, who cries at goodbyes?) with some of our closest friends in Turkey. We made our way to the airport with less than adequate time to spare before we boarded our plane.

Becky, acting as if we were not uprooting ourselves and our entire lives, promptly fell asleep on my arm where I lay awake for the entire flight, experiencing all the stages of waking-drunkenness that are usually reserved for being sprawled out in a dreamless sleep.

We arrived and met our HR correspondent, Emma, whom we had been corresponding with on a daily basis before we left Turkey. Emma had us picked up and driven out to the campus where we would call home for the next couple of years.  We arrived bleary eyed and in dire need of a shower. We were taken to our room in the teacher’s building and given papers to read and sign. Up to this point, everything felt as unceremonious and drab as the account of the events I am writing now. Emma was going through the motions, obviously busy and probably needing to turn right around and go back to the city to get more new teachers.

Our apartment was surprisingly better than we had anticipated. We got two adjoining apartments but one would have been big enough for both of us (except the closet apparently-- Becky told me she would need the entire space for herself). The kitchen was nice, the bathroom was big, and the flat screen TV had HBO. Upon closer inspection, we would discover that the beds were without linen, the bathrooms  void of toilet paper, and the water cooler was bone dry. This was only discovered as Emma was closing the door behind her, silently taking her leave and scurrying down the hallway before we could volley anymore questions her way.   



Starfish Becky in our bedroom

Too tired to sleep and not awake enough to unpack, Becky and I wandered around the campus for a while. Neither one of us were talking much but I imagine Becky was thinking what I was thinking, which was what the hell had we gotten ourselves into?

The campus was nice enough; big buildings with grassy islands and clean walkways. The school was silent as the returning teachers had not yet returned  and all the new teachers (who had arrived a day before us) were off in the city running errands.  





Campus

 When I say city, I should explain. Although we technically live in Beijing, we are quite far away from the city center. Our campus is on the subway line but with the transfers it takes about an hour and  twenty minutes to get to the city center. We live in an area of Beijing called Chang Ping. Chang Ping is the nearest suburb so any shopping that needs to be done gets done in Chang Ping.

We walked around the empty campus until we saw someone coming our way. He stopped and introduced himself as Joe. It turned out that Joe was the teacher that I had been communicating with prior to our arrival and he had been incredibly helpful. It didn’t stop with emails.

“Are you guys hungry by any chance? I was just heading into the village,” Joe asked, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, approximating the direction of the village from our general location.

We both replied without needing to consult the other.

“This will be my eleventh year at Hui Jia,” Joe said in response to my question regarding his tenure at the international school.

We were walking through the neighboring village that sits between Hui Jia and Chang Ping. The village is a less-than-sanitary, semi-paved strip of underdeveloped land that inhabits around 500 people. Walking through the village reminded me a lot of Vietnam - eateries, food stalls, and shops lined both sides of the street and it was in constant and dusty motion. The people in the village were going this way and that, honking their horns, buying their produce, and riding their bikes. It was about a 10 minute walk from the campus and we had to walk through it to get to Chang Ping and the restaurant we were going to.

 “Wow, something must be keeping you around then,” Becky said, happy to know that this gig might not be as bad as she had thought.

 “Yeah, I have my reasons. I’m sure if you make it through your first month you will find yours as well,” he said with a shrug, implying that this place is not for everyone.

 Joe took us to his favorite restaurant in the village: a small place with cold beer and delicious food. We ate, got the run-down about the job, and got to know each other a bit more.





A rainy night out in the village

  

As I write this, I realize that I do not think Joe knows how important he was to Becky and I on our first day in this place. We were lost, had no toilet paper, and were sleeping bare-bed, using our clean t-shirts as blankets. He must have sensed that we needed a bit of reassuring because he took us out for dinner, paid for our bill, then woke up the next day to take us to Walmart for our essentials.



A Becky Mustache

 This was a theme that did not stop with Joe. Every day we met more and more people that welcomed us in so unbelievably warmly. People were there to answer any of our questions, invite us out for beers, tell us where the best markets were, and bring us into the fold of their community. Becky and I even coined a term for it: “being miracled”. And we weren’t only being miracle at Hui Jia. Everywhere we went, foreigners were going out of their way and above and beyond to help us, make us feel more comfortable, and make sure we got where we needed to go. We talked about this recently with some friends at the bar and someone summed it up like this:

“China is a fucked up shit show man. Without this (air motion of hand with palm down revolving in circular motion around table of people) we’d all be on the first plane back to wherever the fuck.”

She teaches elocution.

The school itself, on the other hand, has taken some getting used to. The Chinese system of doing things makes Turkey look like Scandinavia. Every little thing that happens around the school has us asking why they would think that is a good idea or how could they think we can teach like this.

In the high school, we are all putting money in squares of a pool to see when the school will fix the photocopier that has been broken since last spring. As it stands, we all have to go down to the middle school with several different signed pieces of paper acting as jumped-through hoops to get copies made for students. Only suckers are betting on squares for October.

The school is by no means poor by the way. They have an Olympic size swimming pool, a state-of-the-art gym, and an equestrian club with 50 horses on campus, and an inflatable dome to enclose all of these things to protect them in the winter. But I guess you do not have to be in China long to learn this valuable lesson: A picture of a photocopy machine on a brochure of a school does not help filling enrollment coffers.

Becky approached the shocking photocopy situation a bit differently. When she was first told about the photocopying protocol she went down to the middle school with her appropriate signatures and whatever document she needed to get copied. She arrived in the room to see stacks and stacks of paper on tables, a single photocopy machine being unused, and a Chinese attendant playing on her phone.

First day of school ceremony

“Hello, I’d like to get some copies, please,” Becky said, extending said copies in her general direction.

“Oh, very busy. Very busy. It will take one week,” she responded behind a stack of paper, not even moving from her chair to take the copies from Becky.

“What do you mean? No one is using the machine. I only need 20 copies.”

“Yes. One week. Very busy.”

Now I do not know exactly what happened next as Becky has been quite vague about it, but I do know this: Becky got her copies, the photocopy girl now gives Becky preferential treatment when she walks into the room, that same day a campus-wide change in policy occurred regarding teachers receiving codes to be able to use the photocopy machine themselves, and people whom Becky had yet to meet  were calling her “Becky the Bruiser”-- an aptly placed epithet I might say.

That was on day 1.

  

So as Becky and I kept reassuring ourselves in those first days, things are, in fact, getting better. Becky and I both got promotions. She is a PYP homeroom teacher in grade 1 and I am the head teacher of IB grade 11 in the Diploma Program of the high school. The students I am dealing with are so unbelievably talented that it has been a fun challenge to come up with tough lessons plans for them to complete to keep them engaged and attentive. I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks getting accustomed to the IB curriculum and exam formats and I now have a pretty confident understanding of how the classes operate.

Lake district of Beijing

Every time Becky and I go into Chang Ping, we buy something for our kitchen and apartment, slowing transforming our place into a cozy home for us.  Becky even found a few western-style grocery stores that have pretty much anything you could get in America for comparable prices. I have joined a bunch of the teachers in a volleyball league, I am a part of a club that plays ultimate Frisbee with 12^th graders, and I even joined a hiking club in central Beijing that takes us out to different places along the unrestored sections of the wall.

Last weekend, I took the bus about 2 hours north of the city for a 6 hour hike along a section of the wall that hasn’t been restored and is well off of the tourist track. It was incredibly beautiful and unlike anything I have ever done. At times the wall less resembled a wall and more resembled a ladder, steeply climbing up the mountainside and extending into the distance out of eyesight. It is something that I have started to do regularly and hope to one day convince Becky to join me on J 

Beijing itself is a ridiculously cool city. Lots of awesome and old fashioned neighborhoods, beautifully ornate- styled Chinese houses, and delicious restaurants with any cuisine you could imagine. The city is speckled with lakes, temples, museums, cool cafes, and bars that sell things other than Efes and Tubourg and for half the price. Becky and I even found a micro-brewery that sells bacon cheeseburgers! Score!

Mexican for her and Vietnamese for me.

Since it is so far away (not that we have much energy after work anyways) we have been generally staying up in Chang Ping during the week and staying in hotels in Beijing on Friday and Saturday night. There is a  bar and a couple of restaurants in the village that we meet up with friends at during the week, but it’s generally on the weekend that we go out and do things in the city.

Johnathan's birthday

Just like Vietnam, the Chinese love their karaoke, so Becky and I have been belting out our ballads on a regular basis. Last week a bunch of us went to a puzzle palace where they lock you in a room which is connected to 3 other rooms but to pass through the first room to get to the next, you have to answer a series of questions. It was awesome, as long as you don’t have to use the facilities while you are in the room.

Another issue you might be wondering when I was going to get around to is the pollution. The pollution sucks. Let’s just get that out there. When we first went to Beijing and stepped out of the metro, Becky’s and my eyes and nose instantly started burning – apparently on a day that was not so bad as well. Sometimes it feels like we are enshrined in a cloudy mist but it’s really just the pollution enveloping the city center. Luckily, where we are in Chang Ping does not have the same problem (or as bad of a problem) as the city center. We get lots of blue skies and days that are good enough to bike around the city and the beautiful parks of Chang Ping. Regardless, it is something that we have had to get used to but getting out of the city and going hiking on the weekend has helped me immensely.



Our first day in Beijing's city center.

 

Although I have come a long way from my first day of class and Becky a long way from her threatening the Chinese staff, not a day goes by where we don’t somehow talk about Turkey or America in some capacity - the city, our apartment, our families, and all the friends that lie between. It has been hard going from what we had to Turkey to have to start over in a new place with new people, but having each other has made all the difference. We have been keeping busy with IB workshops, lesson planning, and Chinese lessons but we still have time to stop and think about the lives and friends we have left behind and hope that everyone is doing well and know that we miss the shit out of them.

And even though Becky and I are getting along fine in a new city, we are very happy to be seeing a couple of familiar faces next week!



Melis and Leedham in Beijing!

Look for more posts from our trip when we meet up with Melis and Leedham and head to ZhangJiajie National Park during the week long National holiday!