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."

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.

My day as a country gal

My neighbor Zhou Jie -- Big Sister Zhou -- invited me to the countryside for a birthday bash. Her friend's mother was turning seventy. Zhou Jie said I probably had never seen the countryside here. I told her I had barely seen the countryside in America. She said the celebration would be very re nao -- lively.

Two of Zhou Jie's friends picked us up in the morning from downtown Lengshuijiang. As we drove, the road became one lane and then narrowed. I stared out the window at the small crop plots and the wooden houses built throughout the terraced green hills. The huge black SUV we rode in seemed out of place in this simple landscape.

We drove for an hour before we turned off the narrow road and pulled onto a winding dirt path until there was nowhere to go by car. Then we climbed a hill and followed a rock-strewn footpath toward the sound of a marching band. On an outdoor stage a dozen men and women in red military jackets and caps played their rusty trombones, trumpets, baritones and a booming bass drum.

We followed the path as it curved around a lily-covered pond and through a giant inflatable arch before reaching a two-story brick house. Along the way, the path was scattered with red paper -- firecrackers. The men unfurled and lit the firecrackers, then ran up the hill away from the smoking and popping.

On another outdoor stage closer to the house, women wore the traditional qi pao dress and waved bright red scarves. A man on a stool in front of the stage played the erhu, the quivering two-stringed instrument sometimes drowned out by the pop!pop!pop! of firecrackers.







Huge red and yellow banners with Chinese characters covered the front of the house. At the main door sat a woman accepting cash-filled red envelopes, birthday gifts. Surrounding her on the front porch were about ten small tables with people seated playing cards and eating sunflower seeds and peanuts.

We squeezed into the main room of the house, a large space with concrete floors and bare walls. An eight-tiered birthday cake was displayed at the back of the room and in front of it sat the 70-year-old mother surrounded by her great-grandchildren. Before we ate, the mother's eight daughters performed a song and dance with the erhu in the main room. Then each of her children's families bowed before her and wished her a happy birthday and good health.




Before the speeches ended, Zhou Jie, her friends and I sought out a table, knowing the food would be served soon. Tables and benches appeared in every room of the house. The 500 guests found seats on the front porch, in the house or in neighbors' homes. Then we feasted for two hours. First there was chicken, turtle, rabbit ears and pork. The pig was the family's own and had been slaughtered that morning. Later the pig's intestines were served with some celery-like vegetable. When we all said we were full, more food came. Shrimp, duck, fish. The food tasted real, from the earth. Nothing processed.

I spent a sleepy afternoon watching the women play mahjong while the rest of the guests watched a countryside singing and dancing troupe perform on the outdoor stage. The women played mahjong through the performance and until the sun went down. Then we ate again, more chicken, shrimp, fish, and also winter melon soup, a favorite of mine.

As we prepared to return to the city, we heard a boom overhead. I looked up as hundreds of yellow and red and purple lights burst and then fell toward the earth. We watched the fireworks from the car and then slowly went back the way we came on the darkened dirt path.