In the hot seat

I was trying to recall broadcast class from seven years earlier, trying to conjure my professional on-air voice. But for once I was not the one asking the questions; I was the one being interviewed. Some students had asked me to be a guest on the evening student broadcast over the school loudspeakers.

I stood in a cramped closet-sized room attached to the art building, inside just a couple of receivers and microphones and a fan in the corner. I leaned against the wall in the tight space with three senior students surrounding me and jabbing microphones in my face after each question.

I knew all of the students. One was my student in a senior 1 class. His English name was John. The other two were senior 2 students who had shown me around the city when I first arrived. Rachel was an outgoing, confident girl whose English was the best of all three. I had given the other girl her English name only hours before. Pippi after the children’s book character. The Chinese student Pippi was short and skinny with hesitating English.

John, Rachel and Pippi asked me how students could improve their English (speak more English, listen to more English, watch English TV and movies), where I had visited in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong) and how much I knew about Chinese history, including the dynasties (very little).

I could hear my answers echoing overhead through the loudspeakers. My voice sounded distant and unfamiliar, like I was listening to someone else speaking.

So far the interview was a breeze. Then Rachel asked me, “Because China has 5,000 years of wonderful history, do you wish you lived here as a child?”

I fumbled a moment, then found my voice and said, “I feel lucky I could live in the United States as a child and now live in China as an adult.” It wasn’t the most thorough or elegant response, but as simple as that statement was, it is true.

The interview lasted 15 minutes. At the end, the producer, also a student, said thank you and handed me a lollipop.

I walked with the three students toward the senior classroom building where they had to report for self-study period. Rachel had told me before the interview that this was her last broadcast show.

“My parents want me to stop. They want me to study more,” she told me as we talked through the now-darkened campus.

“Oh, but you’re so good!” I said.

I thought of saying something more, telling her that she should keep doing something if she loves it, of encouraging her to not give up on her dream. But I fumbled again and this time didn’t find my voice. She was 15 and her parents wanted her to quit. So I just waved and smiled to them as they climbed the staircase to their classroom building.

Panda Love

I wasn’t entirely convinced it was worth the 20-hour train ride to go to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, for one purpose and one purpose only -- to see China’s national treasure, the giant panda. But my friends were on a mission to adore, and I was on a mission to have a good time with them, no matter where we were or how far we had to travel. So a day after National Day, the five of us set off by sleeper car.

We headed for the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base the day after arriving in Chengdu. Because of the shrinking natural habitat of pandas due to development, breeding centers like the one in Chengdu are all the more important to maintain biodiversity. Some scientists estimate the giant panda will be extinct in two to three generations.

The pandas at the base might as well have been living in a bubble. Manicured lawns and bushes. Arched bamboo shafts along the path. The sprawling base contains several outdoor feeding and play areas for giant pandas and the raccoon-like red pandas, equipped with jungle gym and swings. We looked through a window into the kitchen where a woman wearing surgical mask and gloves was packing dough into mooncake-shaped molds. Panda bread.

“These pandas eat better that most people,” one friend noted.

I stood in the middle of a large and growing crowd outside the “kindergarten” pen wondering how these furry creatures could elicit delighted squeals from little kids to old men alike. I looked from the munching, hanging, climbing, rolling animals to the ogling crowd. I’m not sure if biodiversity was at the forefront of their minds when they watched the pandas straddling a tree branch.

But is the cute factor enough to keep a species alive that would be extinct otherwise? One BBC presenter has argued the giant panda is too expensive to try to save. He said the giant panda had “gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac.” He certainly has a valid point, but I think the cute factor is all too powerful.

It was in the Sunshine Nursery where I too fell into the trap of adorableness. Curled up in a moon-shaped crescent was a baby just a few months old, its black markings still covered by a soft white fuzz. And a whimper escaped me. I couldn’t help it. Something about that helpless little guy grabbed me and certainly biodiversity was not on my mind.

Back to the countryside

Having grown up in the suburbs and spent most of my adult life in a big city, I now jump at the chance to see the countryside. Maybe I hold too romantic a notion of what it is. I expect layers and layers of tree-covered mountains to disappear in fog, the river to flow lazy with its clear, cold water, the air to be so clean it is sweet.

One of my students, Huang Qiong, invited me her old home. She does not live there now, but her grandparents and many of her relatives still do. The town -- the name of it escapes me now -- was about three hours by bus. During the ride, Huang Qiong and three classmates played Chinese pop songs on their cell phones and sang along. They joked with each other, switching from the local dialect to Mandarin to English. (The English was limited to short phrases. "OK!" "Let's go!") School was on break for National Week and Mid-Autumn Festival, and our mood was light.

We stopped finally on an unpaved street lined with small stores selling clothing, shoes, snacks, meat and vegetables. Huang Qiong bought a slab of beef from a woman selling vegetables on the street. A cow leg dangled on a metal hook. The woman grabbed the bone with her bare hand and hacked with a cleaver. The five us walked down the road and was approached by an old woman with a bow-legged gait.

"My nai nai," Huang Qiong said. The woman was her father's mother.

The woman was a full head shorter than I. She grasped both my hands in hers. Her hands were small and round and rough. She smiled a yellow-toothed smile and said something to her granddaughter.

"She said you can't understand her, can you?" Huang Qiong translated. I turned to the grandmother and shook my head.

Nai Nai left us and we veered off the road onto a dirt path that wove through the tall grass. An unpicked squash lay unpicked on its side. About twenty meters down the path were a row of one-story cement homes. We walked through an open door into a small unlit room with a table in one corner and a wok over coals in the center.

In the room was another old woman with a weathered face but still mostly-black hair.This was Huang Qiong's wai po, her mother's mother. Wai Po led us into the back room, smaller with a table and benches along the wall, just big enough to seat the five of us. My students and I cracked peanuts and ate spicy seaweed and tofu as Wai Po prepared our lunch. From the other room came sounds of chopping and sizzling.

Everything cooked for us came from their own land. Rabbit with hot peppers, beef and celery, tofu. Even the rice was from the family's land. My friends and I always say you can tell when food is made with love, and this meal definitely was. Wai Po did not eat. She was waiting for Huang Qiong's grandfather to return from working on the land. She stood next to us and urged us to eat more, eat more.

After lunch, we took a ten-minute bus ride to one of the mountains where Huang Qiong said we could ride a boat on the river and get a better view of the scenery. The river was dammed where we entered, so we climbed what felt like a couple hundred stone steps to the river bank. My students told me not to talk. If the people who owned the boat knew I was not local they would charge more money.

The two women who sat on stools next to their boat wanted 50 RMB, about $7. Huang Qiong told them she rode the boat for 30 RMB last year, but the women would not budge on the price. So instead we left the boat ladies and started down a mountain path that took us to a cave Huang Qiong wanted to show me.

We walked for half an hour came upon a couple houses along the road. I was reminded again not to talk and to hide my bottle of water, apparently a sign of a non-local. Huang Qiong spoke with the couple in the local dialect and paid them. We continued along the path. Huang Qiong later told me that she paid 30 RMB for the five of us; usually the couple charges a couple hundred for entrance to the cave.

According to a granite slab outside the cave entrance, Fair Cave was formed centuries ago. Made of limestone, the cave was 200 meters long, 60 meters high and 30 meters wide. The sign continues, "Some earth and stones on the top of the cave have been eroded, just like opening many windows into the outside road. The exit of the cave is such a marvelous window which [sic] a waterful [sic] called 'longeviity waterful' runs down from the top of the cave. It is a magic heritage created by nature, which ranks to [sic] a world-class geologic relic."

The cave was cool inside and we clumsily walked over the rocks of a dried-up stream. The cave exit was in fact "a marvelous window." Soft, white light poured through an opening above and the stream reappeared. In that moment, I forgot where I was. I forgot I was an American in China. I forgot I was a teacher and they my students. We were all children, running over rocks, dipping our fingers into the ice-cold water, in awe of everything around us.

WARNING: I have been traveling for the past week and a half, so there is a backlog of posts.