D - Socializing with Chinese characteristics

Well, this has been an easy week for me. Currently I have 4 sections of students. 2 of those sections only have 1 class this week (8-9:30 Friday and 10-11:30 Friday), and the other 2 sections have shipped off to the island of Hainan for some hands on ship training. While my charges are enjoying the cramped splendor of a Chinese freighter, this means I have Monday through Thursday totally off. Really it's just the calm before the storm. Next week the freshmen, who have been marching around the first 5 weeks of school for required military training, will begin their class for the semester. The impact for us is that our measly 8-9 hours a week of teaching will rise to 12, 14, and finally 16 during certain weeks. It won't be too bad though because now we have a few lesson plans stored up.

So what have we been up to the last few days? Well last week we were conferring with our Danish friends about our trip to Xi'an when one of the student volunteers stopped by. She wanted to formalize the group of students who help the foreign teachers and students into a "Student Union" (Club) and she needed a good name. We bandied about several ideas but eventually she settled on my suggestion - "Foreign Friendship Volunteers". The criteria were that the name be "easy to remember" but "clearly state what our purpose is". Now in Chinese, this is easy - slap down 3 or 4 characters and you can tell the history of a dynasty it seems. In English though, you need a lot of letters!

Once the name was chosen, this volunteer wanted to organize a party for the students and the foreigners to celebrate the official kick-off of the student union. We helped draft their advertisements which were sent out via email and posted on the outside of the foreign teachers building. Well last Saturday was the day for the big event. It took place in the Student Activity Center on campus. The volunteers had a staffed bar serving (warm) beer and soda, and a nicely appointed dance floor replete with the requisite disco balls, light patterns, and spotlights. The evening kicked off with several dance performances. A few Chinese girls did some hip hop, while there was even a bit of Latin dancing from an older Chinese couple, who were followed by their younger proteges. There were two vocal performances in English by the winners of their equivalent to the American Idol contest at DMU. They also managed to talk Derek, a foreign teacher into playing the guitar and singing a few songs - he regaled the Chinese students with Oasis and John Denver. He had quite the singing voice, I was impressed. The evening continued with a bit of slow dancing. C and I were recruited on to the dance floor, but separately. I tried to dance with some Chinese girl, and some Chinese guy tried to show her the dance. Sadly we were not too successful but at least we gave it try. Finally, the rest of the evening was caught up in an epileptic's worst nightmare as the Chinese students flooded the dance floor to break it down to the world's best english techno. Apparently dancing all night to electronica is the Chinese night life, although they didn't so much dance as rotate in concentric human circles.

We topped off Saturday night with a brief visit to "Noah's: For your ark bar" with a few of the foreign teachers. We had some Asahi (very dry Japanese beer) and enjoyed some pizza from their oven, which wasn't all bad. All in all it was a good night. The student volunteers did a great job putting the event together on incredibly short notice. They are really great to us. All the teachers keep raving about the students. DMU should really advertise that the student volunteers exist - without them this experience would not be the great thing that it's been so far. We are certainly getting better at navigating with our limited Chinese but there are times it is invaluable to have a fluent speaker. It's also just a great cultural exchange. For example, we needed to go to the post office to mail our absentee voting request to our districts back in the US. We asked our volunteer to help us mail them. "Could you give us some help, we're trying to VOTE?"

On the way to the post office our volunteer remarked that it would be very expensive for 1.3 billion Chinese to vote in an election. A very astute economic observation no doubt, but nothing good comes cheap!