If I lived in China, I'd have some Chinese children

Thanks, Emily, for the song quoted in the title of this post. It pretty accurately describes my life at the moment, even though I have no Chinese children of my own (yet. I've been carefully heeding the advice many of you gave me before I left). It goes something like this:

If I lived in China, I'd have some Chinese Children
If I lived in India, they'd still be Chinese children
No matter what I do, they're Chinese through and through

They're not just Chinese in the sense that they're from China. Even at their young age -- eight, most of them -- they've begun to demonstrate well-known Chinese cultural tendencies. For example, the obsession with mingxiao or "name schools". During the ten minute break in my private after-school English class, Albert, one of the students, asked me, in Chinese, "Do you go to Harvard?" I replied in Chinese, "No, I go to Yelu Daxue," continuing in English, "Can you say it in English, 'Yale.'" He promptly repeated "yellow" and ran off to tell his friends, "The teacher is from Yale."

Aside from demonstrating the age at which the importance of going to a good school is impressed upon Chinese children, it showed me the extent to which the company I am working for uses my background as a marketing tool. On Friday morning last week, I was summoned to the company's office to "interview some adult students and determine their English level." It turned out that the meeting was with some young employees of China Mobile who worked at the airport and needed English to help their foriegn "VIPs" with their flights. As it turned out, I wasn't actually asked to interview them, I was merely required to be present at the meeting where JESIE, my company, pitched their English training to China Mobile. Of course, my background wasn't omitted from my introduction.

I find all of this fuss particularly ridiculous since two and a half years at Yelu, as well as whatever aptitude landed me there, has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability as a teacher. I've gotten over my nervousness since last week, but I still have a long way to go before I'm effective at getting the students to learn the material. It's nice to be working hard at something so different from studying, and I hope I'll get better as time goes on.

In the meantime, I've been settling in to my life here in Nanjing. The other teachers in the program are certainly a set of characters, and I've been enjoying getting to know them. The head teacher is Val, a 33-year-old Lithuanian guy, former Baltic sea oil pipeline quality control manager and published Russian language poet. There's Karl, a somewhat distant Iowan who is a great teacher and a funny guy, Shannon, self-proclaimed "ex-ghetto punk" Canadian, and Huw, a half-Welsh former nerd whose Chinese girlfriend's mother takes them to video arcades together. I'm living with a 20-year-old Australian girl named Melissa, whose bizarre set of Australianisms hasn't yet ceased to amuse me. Who knew a duvet was actually called a duna?

I got a bike this weekend, which is an excellent way to get around. In addition to giving me a healthy dose of exercise, it allows me to get places much faster and more conveniently than I could on the bus. It's the best of both worlds: fast, but not prone to getting stuck in traffic. It's also free from the fear of being run over that comes with city biking in the US. There are bike lanes separated by fences on most major streets, and drivers are used to dodging the array of motor scooters, pedestrians, and bicycles that are prone to erratic behavior.

Tomorrow: 7:30 a.m. middle school. I think I'm going to teach them some tongue-twisters. We'll see how that goes over...