China, Round 2: Chapter 1

Wow! Here I am again! Two years later, I’m married and moving back to China to teach English with my lovely wife. Who would have guessed? I had no idea!

I don’t often feel like I understand God’s action or providence very well, but I am continually struck by the strength of His leading in this. I am fully confident that we are here by His grace and at His direction – never have I experienced such a continued sequence of events, prayer, decision making, and encouragement to have led me to a place and a time. I am reminded of a song I sang in high school at RVA in Kenya – “for such a time as this,” see below.

If you haven’t heard, we are here in China for a year-long teaching internship with Mennonite Partners in China, henceforth MPC. MPC used to be known as China Educational Exchange, and it facilitates the exchange of a number of teachers going both ways across the Pacific every year.

We’ll post updates as much as we can, hopefully at least once a month. We may eventually expand beyond just newsletters to articles about specific things (like Mandarin!), but for now, we hope to at least keep you updated.

Here is our first update, kindly written by my beloved – enjoy!

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After a lovely wedding on August 10^th, Christian and I spent some good time with family, headed off to a week-long getaway in the George Washington National Forest, then returned to Harrisonburg, VA to pack up for China. Packing and sorting ended up being much simpler than we expected, with more space in our bags than we had anticipated, which was very nice. On Saturday the 24^th of August we got up early — before 4 am — in order to carpool to Washington DC with two EMU grads in our program to fly out. We flew from DC to Los Angeles, where we picked up the last member of our crew, and from there flew to Nanjing, China, and from there to Chengdu (成都), arriving at our hotel in 成都 after midnight on Sunday night. Unfortunately, one of our bags did not make the trip as successfully as we did. And, due to a lack of a Chinese phone number and address, our baggage claim report was incomplete at best. One of our Chinese friends later called the airport and said she arranged things, but that they said it would take a very long time to ship the bag to Nanchong from Nanjing (or Los Angeles, since we didn’t know how far it had gotten the first time around).

We stayed in 成都 only Monday, walking around with an MPC employee and her five-year-old son who lived just down the street. She showed our group some good places to eat 包子 (baozi, a pastry filled with vegetables and/or meat) and 面条 (miantiao, noodles), and we explored the enormous public library. It was really neat to see all of the resources (ranging from books to instrument rooms to dance classes) that are available for free to those in the city who have time to look!

[Here we would have a picture of us playing rook, but we lost it].

Monday afternoon, after playing some Rook in the library, we left for the train station, rolling our suitcases down the wide streets to the subway on our way to the train station. Speeding through the Chinese countryside at over 120 kph (sometimes we got up to 200kph!) was an interesting experience – in many ways it doesn’t feel much different than the Mombasa-Nairobi train, except it was much greener, lush, and mountainous. We trained through several tunnels, some of which lasted what felt like 10 minutes.

The train let us off in 南充 (Nanchong), where we were met by a student from our university 西华师大 (Xihua shi da, China West Normal University), who helped us load our 16 bags and 5 people into a minivan and a taxi. We were dropped off right at our new apartment building, where we were met by the housekeeping staff (although we don’t actually have anything like that normally…) who took us all up to the 6^th floor, where each of the three other guys had their own apartment in the same little landing as we did. However, before we began unpacking, the staff decided that four of the five of us needed to move apartments for various reasons – hot water not working, water pressure not what they thought we needed, etc – so that Christian and I landed on the 5^th floor, one guy was left on the 6^th, and two ended up in apartments on the 8^th floor (the 7^th floor was already half-occupied).

In the process of being told to migrate, but that they had to clean the new apartments first, two other 外国人(waiguoren, foreigners) showed up, introducing themselves as the two Peace Corps teachers who lived on the 7^th floor, the only other residents in the 11 story building. They took us to eat at a 冒菜 (mao cai, chopped and stewed vegetables and/or meat) place and were incredibly helpful, answering all of our questions about their experience last year as foreign teachers at 西华师大. They told us that last year they were assigned one class around September 20^th, but then didn’t teach rest of their classes until mid-October, because the freshmen at 西华师大 are doing their required military marching for all of September, and foreign teachers often teach freshmen. So we’ll see when we start class! The university technically starts today (September 2), but chances are we won’t start for at least two or three weeks.

The last couple days since arriving on Monday have been very relaxed, full of getting together with the other 3 guys in our program, and the 2 Peace Corps workers occasionally, to get food, explore the area, and one day to take the bus downtown and walk around the old campus of our university (where we’ll probably teach most of our classes this semester). We’ve also unpacked and done some homemaking kinds of things, but since food is incredibly cheap on the street (a large meal of fried rice with veggies, pork, and egg mixed in is 10元, which is less than $1.5), we haven’t actually made any food in our apartment yet, although the space did come with many brand new kitchen appliances.

In many ways, 南充 reminds me a lot of East African cities that I’ve frequented – the streets are busy, there are lots of walkers, bikers (both manual and motorbikes), and lots of tuktuk things, although these are more for carting food stands than people. Traffic here actually does stop for the stoplights most of the time, although the pikis and carts don’t as much. I had heard a decent bit about air pollution being a big deal in China, but as of yet I have barely noticed anything where we are – the area around us is beautiful, very green, and many streets are lined with trees. In fact, all the roads are much wider, the sidewalks more like roads, making everything feel very spacious and not crowded at all, even though most buildings are upwards of 10 stories tall. Unlike Chicago, each street is still bright and accessible to the sky, which also makes for a cheerier outlook. I was only surprised by the sheer amount of people at the train station in Chengdu (成都) – outside of that smaller space underground, these cities (成都 and南充) feel very spacious, again, I think because of using more space to lay out the city (which is probably possible because everyone here lives in apartments, meaning that less square footage on the ground is used for housing, which is a huge part of US cities and suburbs).

In general, 南充 is a strange mix of modern and old, as most Chinese cities are. While people walk everywhere and street food is common, you also have to avoid getting hit by walkers or bikers who are too engrossed in their smartphones to watch where they’re going. Each little storefront is very small, but the two supermarkets that we’ve been to have been accessible only via escalator – because they are extensive underground caverns beneath the skyrises. Every little motorcycle-pulled street food stand has QR codes on the stand so that everyone can use WeChat pay, the main mode of exchanging currency. Our friend in Chengdu told us she hasn’t handled cash for herself in years! Our apartment is also very clearly on the edge of the city, as one direction you can see the expanse of 南充 on the horizon, and the landscape in the other direction is farmed by workers we can see out of our window. This province, Sichuan, is known in China for its beauty, and it’s true!

There are several things that weren’t as I expected: we have access to many things that we were told we couldn’t access – like sweet treats, cotton swabs, and toothpaste. Like Kenya, there are several things and household items that seem to have a twist – the dustpans have 2.5 foot handles, which means you don’t have to get down on the ground to sweep up! But the broom handle is the same height, meaning you have bend incredibly far to do the rest of the job. Buildings we’ve seen are built of cement (or sometimes marble), and no floors are carpeted (which to be clear, is not surprising, but another way it feels like Kenya). I had heard before that beds are hard in China – one of our group, when he was living here with a Chinese family, had a wooden board between his sheets and mattress – but once we flipped our mattress over so the wood was at the bottom, it really is quite comfortable!

We are hoping that as our main liason with the school returned this weekend from his hometown, we will hear more from the school about our schedules and see about getting residency. After we have residency we can finally see about getting phone service and Chinese bank accounts (very important because WeChat pay is used for literally everything here!). Other than that we are doing well, greatly enjoying the vast amount of cheap, delicious local food that we can get right outside the school gate and getting to know the five other foreign teachers that we’ll be partnering with this year!

In Christ,
Leigha and Christian

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Prayer requests:

• Relationships with the other teachers – both a praise and an ongoing prayer!
• Our students, though we haven’t met them yet; that they would be excited, engaged, and interested in our classes, and would meet Christ in us.
• That we would find time and energy to be diligent, especially with few classes for the next month; that we would study, move outside our comfort zones, and prepare well for class.

Praises:

• Safe travels to Nanchong.
• Our lost bag showed up yesterday! Christian has shoes again!
• Our first meeting with the foreign affairs office (外班, waiban) went well.