Chapter 5

What is Normal?

Several people have asked us to describe what a ‘normal’ day in our new lives of teaching look like. I’m not really sure if we can capture exactly how our schedule and lives are functioning now, but I want to “have a try” (Chinglish phrase) at describing our new version of normal.

Normal means consistently waking up fairly early, mostly by choice, but occasionally because Christian needs to catch the 7:30 bus to get to class at the other campus by 8am.

Normal means eating out every meal (yup! Never thought I’d have this lifestyle) because it is comparable, if not cheaper, to buying ingredients and cooking at home – especially Western food, for which ingredients are sparse and not quite the same. Even bread is almost impossible to find – the Chinese make their bread strangely sweet and cake-like in texture. So we eat out, most often noodles (面条) or fried rice (炒面or炒饭) or dumplings (饺子). These are all delicious and simple meals that we enjoy a lot! We also frequently eat ‘dishes’ (四川菜 – more like a fancier restaurant with multiple plates that everyone eats off of) or ‘drypot’ (干锅 – a stir-fry-ish thing with meat and potato chunks and veggies – delicious!). Eating out also tastes better, gives us opportunities to interact with and get to know friendly vendors, and consistently eat in groups.

Normally eating outside of our apartment also means that we spend about 2-3 hours every day eating, since we leave for every meal (yes, even breakfast). Even though I’m not convinced that cooking ourselves would be worth it financially or time-wise – there are so many spices that we would need to buy, and more time spent getting groceries and cooking – we do want to branch out and learn to cook some things, at least.

Normal means spending a mere 10 hours a week in the classroom, but still finding time flying by so quickly! We have only two lessons to plan each week (one for our non-English-major students, and one for my English major students), but we do still take quite a bit of time being intentional with these 80 minute lessons. We’re still new to teaching, and although we’re getting faster, this takes up some time.

Normal for a day of teaching means getting to the classroom no earlier than 10 minutes before class (often closer to 3-5 minutes before), usually because the school’s “teacher bus” is late or because there is a class in the room before mine, and the professor goes 5 minutes late into the 10 minute passing period. It means trying to wrestle to get 35 students (or 60-70 non-English-major students in Old Campus) to all practice speaking English, while utilizing our chance to be perhaps the only foreign teacher these students will ever have.

Normal for me (Leigha) means two 90 minute classes every day – Monday and Tuesday both include one English-major class and one Chinese class (as a student), Wednesday has two Chinese classes (as a student), and Thursday and Friday both have me teaching two classes back to back. However, the times for these classes vary greatly – most of the time I teach in the later afternoon, since the period after lunch doesn’t begin until 2:30.

“Normal classes” for Christian is a bit more sporadic. He teaches Wednesday through Friday, two classes each day, and then attends Chinese classes with me Monday through Wednesday when he can.

So normal also means spending 6 or so hours as students in Chinese class, along with 20 or so students from various African countries.

Of course, normal also means that each week at least one Chinese class gets canceled. One teacher has cancelled her class at least 6 times. In an 8 week semester so far…

Oh, yes, normal for this university (and Chinese universities more generally, we think) means that each class only meets once a week, so we only see each class of our students once a week, and we have 3 separate Chinese teachers.

Normal means Leigha sweeping our tile-floored apartment multiple times a week, wishing she could be just a tad shorter to fit the broom.

Normal means bracing for disappointment every time we see something that looks very soft and comfortable or something that looks very sweetly delicious. Neither really exist in China, although we have found some exceptions. 

Normal means venturing out often, and practicing our Chinese with vendors, only to find that, because we have a tone or two wrong, we face vast misunderstandings. One waiter gave Christian a paper with her phone number on it instead of taking our order of pork strips with green peppers this week.

Normal means getting together with three other foreign teachers for a Bible Study group every Wednesday. Currently we’re reading through the gospel of Luke.

Normal now also means attending the only Protestant Church in our 6-million-person region on Sunday mornings. We enjoy the singing, most of which we can get the gist – especially the couple familiar tunes with Chinese lyrics. The sermons are a bit (a lot) harder to understand, but it’s still really fun to try to figure out what’s going on. We have a Chinese-English Bible, which is very handy, but it’s still hard. Yesterday’s sermon text was Romans 12:1-2, and the words I heard the most were fumu 父母 (parents) and Shangdi 上帝 (God), although both sounded a bit warped from the pastor’s dialect accent. So I’m still not exactly sure what was going on – there was also a lot of mention of gan’en 感恩 (grateful, thankful), but it would’ve been really neat to be able to understand more. It is very encouraging to see how much our Chinese is improving, though!

Normal means attending English Corner every Friday (and sometimes Sunday) evenings, meeting and developing relationships with students who want to practice their English. We actually get to have good conversations, and I look forward to English corner every week, collecting questions about what we see around us to ask the students that week.

Normal means running tap water through the water distiller we bought to make it clean enough to drink – leaving a filthy orange-tan film coating the distiller’s insides. That means it’s working, right?

Normal means that we now have 2+ distinct ways of speaking, including one for other native English speakers and one for students, for whom we must speak much slower and alter our vocabulary a little bit – although not too much! They can read and write very well in English, but they have much less experience actually using it as a spoken language. However, having multiple ‘dialects’ also means that sometimes I get mixed up, using my student voice on the American and Canadian visitors we had several weeks ago, or realizing 10 minutes into teaching a class that I am speaking slowly as I should, but in a Swahili accent, since I had just been talking with one of the Tanzanian students in our Chinese class. 

Normal means pretty dreary weather on the whole, although there are occasional beautiful sunny days. It hasn’t rained as much as I expected it to, and I for one am greatly appreciating the weather that is still in the upper teens (Celsius, the mid-60s Fahrenheit). Every time I resign myself to the fact that it’s going to be overcast all winter, we get another sunny day or days. Yesterday was the first day that the haze was very visible (our Air Quality Index was just about 100, which is getting worse but not awful), but usually we don’t notice a difference in our air. The US doesn’t have very advertised AQI ratings, but looking up Minneapolis right now, at 5am MN time the AQI is 55 (on the low end of moderate – we’re usually between 20 and 50 here). We haven’t had a problem with air quality as of yet.

Finally, normal means that everything is subject to change. I don’t know if we’ve had any purely “normal” week yet – there are so many activities that spring up, many of which we are not fully aware of until the day or two before. Since the national day holiday, we have had many different weeks:

• A week including classes on Saturday (make up for the holiday… although only Monday and Friday classes got the make-up days, even though classes for every day were canceled during the week-long break)
• A week including a visit from the director of our program in Nanchong, together with a group of almost 30 older folk touring China
  • We got to eat a couple meals with these folks and welcome them into our classrooms (and a massive English corner) for a day, and they did great! The students loved talking to more foreigners, and it was cool to see how well they were received. It was an incredible bonus to our month, and a highlight for my students!
• Another week of make-up classes for me (Leigha) on an early Saturday morning
• A short week of class and a 2-day trip with all 60 foreign students and the foreign affairs office to another city to participate in (mostly observe and be token foreigners) a festival commemorating Li Bai, a Chinese poet.
  • This festival was pretty impressive, like all of the Chinese decorum that we’ve seen thus far. We attended a play about Li Bai’s life that had incredible production effects (see gallery and videos below – very impressive! Of course, in Chinese style everyone was lip-syncing, but the effects were great), as well as a ‘global youth dialogue’ that was still a bunch of speakers in what appeared to be a Model United Nations layout. This was a good trip and break, but also a really neat opportunity to get to know the foreign students better. I loved getting to spend more time with the African students – a refreshing difference for me from both the Chinese people we are surrounded by and our American cohorts.
  • That week, last week, also had Christian traveling to Chengdu to renew his passport, since it will soon run out of pages and we didn’t know how long it would take to process – we’ll have a required program retreat in Malaysia in mid-January, after we wrap up exams for the semester.
• This past week, our director and his wife again visited the city, this time without the large group, and we had dinner with them in Nanchong’s gigantic mall, then gathered at another MPC teacher’s apartment for goodies and some chill hang-out time.

The following video was also from the welcome ceremonies, after all the dignitaries had left. You can’t have only one screen ever in China! Also, the electric guitar seemed a bit out of place at the celebration of a poet from 1300 years ago… It also came up some in the play about his life!

So normal means so many things! And really, even though normal is so fluid with so many other events getting thrown into our weeks, we are really settling down and getting the hang of things this semester. We continue to greatly enjoy our time in China, and getting to know our Chinese friends and students. We still haven’t learned to take enough pictures, but we hope to continue getting more!