Letters from China No 13

21^st September 2008

It’s back to class tomorrow for an extended week of teaching our new freshmen. The National Day holiday is one of the three-day holidays that the government extends to a full week by having everyone work the previous weekend. This is called a “golden week” and is usually accompanied by a shopping spree throughout China and Hong Kong. HK usually expects at least half a million visitors in a day to walk through the border, several million over the week. It’s a time to avoid Hong Kong, yet the weekend before is Halloween which the Hong Kongers celebrate in style. The first time Barbara and I visited HK together was after we had spent 13 months in Beijing and Quingdao.

Beijing had had its ups and downs, the biggest down when we were plagued by the SARS crisis. All had been well until all the schools, Universities etc were quarantined. That meant effectively that if you were on campus, you stayed there until the crisis was over. Food and drinking water were left at the gates for people to collect and no contact was allowed with “outsiders”. If you happened to be outside the campus when the gates were shut, there you remained as happened to one of our colleagues who just happened to have been visiting her boyfriend over night. He then had a house-guest for the next two months! Fortunately we were living in an apartment and not living on ant campus. When the crisis was almost over, i.e. when the death figures were becoming acceptable to the WHO and the government, our school was allowed to re-open, but we were still effectively marooned in Beijing as all other cities required us to stay in quarantine at our own expense if we arrived by train, plane bus etc. The tales we heard from our mature students of what was actually happening in the city were horrific. One instance was of a young girl who had been quarantined at her university, only to find that her entire family had died in the epidemic. Her teachers rallied round and generally adopted her and basically prevented her from killing herself. Others did kill themselves through the despair if discovering that they had been the carriers of the disease that killed the others in their family. It was something we had never thought about and discovering that literally hundred, if not thousands of people had chosen to end their lives was extremely distressing. We too were living at the edge of things with our finances extremely stretched having no income for over three months.

We caught the first of the trains out of Beijing the day after the WHO took the city off its list of dangerous places to be! We headed for the seaside at Qingdao, where just recently the Olympic sailing events were held. The school was abysmal and we were housed in the old Dutch Consulate which had been left to decay after the revolution. The only saving grace was the beach, two minutes walk away and the amazing Jimmie from Mongolia who had somehow or other become the owner of a bar/restaurant on the beach. Our evenings spent eating wood-oven pizzas and drinking Quingdao beer whilst listening to the lovely Mr. Wong playing flamenco guitar become too bizarre to contemplate, but were in reality our saviour in their distraction from out teaching schedule. It was in Quingdao that I first saw the reality of poverty in the school system, classes of sixty kids, some doubled-up at their desks. One student aged about twelve come vividly to mind. A young boy, thin and wearing a threadbare tee shirt who eagerly sat in the front row absorbing every word I said and bending his head down over his scrappy notebook screaming out in his actions how much he wanted to learn everything, anything, to better himself.

These are some of the reasons we have stayed in China for over six years now.

Well, tomorrow we will start to meet our new students, all 100 of them. We are still short-staffed, so some of the students will have Chinese teachers for their oral English for a month or so until the foreign staff come to replace them. We can’t complain having a rather short semester which includes the National Day holiday, Christmas and the first half of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). All in all we will work for 13 of the 20 weeks – can’t be bad........!!!!!