Dear pen pal

I got an enthusiastic "YEAH" when I asked my tenth grade students if they wanted to make American friends. Tucked under my arm was a first-class envelope from the USA; inside, 60 letters from eighth graders at a south-side Chicago school, the cause of weeks of my students' anticipation.

My friend is a teacher in Chicago. Before I even started teaching in China, we started discussing having our students be pen pals. Many of his students have lived in Chicago their whole lives and most have never left the city. The same with my students. The furthest they have gone may be the school we are at now. A pen pal would show them a slice of the world that they aren't able to see themselves. My friend and I weighed the option of going electronic. It would take less time and cost less money to send. But we are both a bit old-fashioned when it comes to these things and in the end we both favored traditional snail mail. There's an intimacy in handwritten letters that an e-mail just can't capture, a bit of magic in "being able to open letters that traveled all that distance," he pointed out.

Last week I picked up from the school office a plump cushioned envelope containing the letters and eight snapshots of the students in their classroom. The Chicago students introduced their families, listed their hobbies and asked what life was like in China or, as one student put it, "over there." They wrote about Chicago, nicknamed "The Windy City." "Probably because it gets really windy," one boy wrote. Another student wrote that Chicago has "a lot of big buildings. Like the Sears Tower in Down Town Chicago. We eat a lot of greasy food, which is why we are the fattest country in the world. What about you?"

The Chicago students' curiosity was evident in their questions. All kinds of questions, about family, school life, the Olympics (Did you see the Olympics? ... I saw the Olympics and it was really cool.) In one letter (in fact, in just one paragraph alone) a girl asked, "What is your favorite sport or thing to do? What kinds of food do you like? What things are popular in China? How's life and do you have any problems?"

Sentence by sentence, my students uncovered the meanings behind the crooked, rounded or scrunched up letters that looked so unfamiliar to their own neat script. Sometimes we ran into cultural hurdles, words that not even their dictionaries could explain. One Chicago student wrote, "How are you? I'm feeling chipper." ("Um, it's like really happy," I translated.) "And what are enchiladas?" one of my students asked about her pen pal's favorite food. My crude explanation: They're like flat pieces of bread with meat and sauce in the middle. It's a kind of Mexican food.

My students eagerly offered their friendship, as well as services as tour guides in the future. "If you come to China, I can act as your guide." They suggested seeing the Great Wall and offered to take their new friends to their hometowns for delicious food. They closed their letters with "Welcome to China."

Wandering the streets of old China

My school gives us weeklong breaks every month. I know, it's a bit ridiculous. It's an awful schedule for learning but an awesome one for making quick trips within the province, which is what I did last weekend.

Feng Huang -- which means phoenix -- has retained much of the feeling of ancient China, especially in its architecture. Overlapping rounded shingles, curved rooftop eaves, carvings of fish and animals, a Red Wall now faded to a muddied crimson. If you can ignore the Las Vegas neon lights at night, the village is quaint and quite charming.

Feng Huang is home to the Miao ethnic minority group. Tiny old women in turban-like hats hawk colorful woken mats and scarves and silver trinkets. It's easy to get lost (which we did the first night) in the narrow side streets and alleys lined with shops that sell more woken scarves, more silver trinkets, rice wine and candied kiwi slices (highly addictive).

Along the river, tourists can pay 3 RMB (the equivalent to about 50 cents) to don the attire of the ancients. OK, probably not even close to the attire of the ancients since these costumes were made of polyester, but I still felt like a princess for 30 minutes. (Yes, that's me in hot pink and sneaks.)



Maybe it's residual Maoist militarism -- it was also popular for women to dress up in olive military uniforms adorned with red Commy stars and pose with plastic machine guns. (Peek through the bushes like you're about to ambush the Japs!)

My favorite part of this trip (and probably my favorite part of life) was eating. At night the streets line up with outdoor grills with a sizable display of skewered vegetables, meats and tofu, noodles and rice, whole fish. Without the grill, it would look just like an outdoor market. The great thing about this type of ordering is you don't have to say a word, just place the skewers in a plastic basket and the man behind the grill will prepare to perfection with some sauces and spices.



The village is ideal for being lazy. Eat late, sleep in and walk around aimlessly. Click below for more photos from the trip.

The Joy of Cooking

I wouldn't say I am a bad cook -- just an infrequent one. I cook a few things and I cook them well, but my repertoire is very limited. When I told my students that the main dish I make is fried rice, they immediately offered to whip up a meal for me. Teach the teacher. I was in charge of providing meats and vegetables, and they would do the rest.

Unfortunately, I failed at even this simple task. I inadvertently bought pork instead of beef, marinated eggs instead of regular eggs and and probably triple the amount of potatoes we needed. Nonetheless, my students are resourceful. Seven students descended on my apartment. A few who learned the art of cooking from their grandmothers took charge in the kitchen. I stood idly back, admiring their skill aloud.

Another food shopping faux pas I made -- I did not buy enough peppers. So while my kitchen steamed and clanked with the sounds of delicious food being made, I scrambled to the street outside of the school hoping the vegetable vendors were still around. No small green peppers, the kind found in nearly every dish. But I did find a larger variety that is not as spicy. I was also lucky enough to run into my neighbor and Chinese tutor, Mr. Tang, who offered to lend me some spicy pepper sauce when he heard my dilemma.

Being the resourceful girls they are, my students were unfazed by my failed mission. They started chopping the too-big, not-spicy-enough peppers. I saw they had finished two dishes already and were making two more. I had bought an eggplant that I thought would just end up in the garbage since I was leaving town the next day for a week. But my students had cleared out my refrigerator, including the eggplant, and were making the most of everything I had.

We ate in the living room, toasting orange juice and milk. The girls were happy in a way I never got to see in the classroom. When we finished off every last bit of food, they started taking silly pictures of each other. During class, my students are one mass of faces and black hair. But here with a handful of them hanging out with me in my home, I could pick out the personalities -- the goofy jokester, the serious brooder, the nice girl, the shy girl, the leader of the pack.

They called their head teacher to tell her they would be late for the evening self-study. I was afraid they would get in trouble, but they insisted that they could take time off from self-study, especially now since so many students were sick and not showing up in the evenings. But they could not miss the second self-study period and reluctantly left after helping me clean up.

"We'll do it again," I told them as they left. "I will buy beef next time."