Last Day of School

Today is my last day of Mandarin class. I am leaving Xiamen a week before my class ends and this makes our classmate Germán sad.

German when he is happy. He wants me to pick where we all go to eat lunch today. Germán is studying at two schools, and he has invited one of his classmates from the other school to join us for lunch. We get to talking and it turns out that she has just finished her junior year of high school in the U.S., and she has taken on studying Mandarin, teaching English, and teaching SAT preparation for her summer in Xiamen. WOW.

She is staying with some Chinese family friends. They are grandparent age for her and they are doing their best to make her feel part of the family. Every night they gather to smoke together. They are quite insistent that she join them. She says it's no use talking to them about tobacco and health issues. It is quite irrelevant as this is about coming together in community. And if they get to drinking, they are just as insistent that she join them.

I know that different cultures have different norms concerning alcohol, tobacco, and child-rearing, but this still caught me off guard. For many in the U.S., parents and grandparents do their best to discourage their children from smoking and drinking. In China, the importance of family and relationships cannot be overstated. Families build very strong bonds. Maybe this is just one more way to accomplish this - one that is perhaps from a different era (?).

I was surprised by this conversation in much the same way I am surprised when a group of two or three unchaperoned six year olds hop on a Xiamen public bus on their way home from school. Or when almost everybody in a high school English class in Xiamen stated that they had never been lonely, because they had never been alone. They were always with a family member or good friend, even when they left home or started a new school. I think that what I find surprising and similar in these examples has to do with the family expectations of young family members. Of where priorities are placed. But actually, I can't quite put my finger on it.

Our lovely lunch winds down. Several of us go over to the large banyan tree for our last Tai Chi class. Finally, after many thank yous and warm smiles, my classmates have all gone their separate ways. Who knows if our paths will cross again? We have all come here to study Mandarin for different reasons. For some it is job-related. One student is getting the last credit he needs to graduate college. A couple of students giggled from one end of class to the other, so perhaps their parents made them come. Hilda wanted to pin down pinyin and learn simplified Chinese characters. I, myself, truly enjoy the study of foreign language.

Correspondingly, we are all taking away vastly different learning experiences. In fact, I think that some of my classmates may have found that having me in their classroom was a cultural experience in and of itself. For the first two weeks, I was the only person to ask questions, when I didn't understand a new word or some piece of grammar. And since our teachers kept explaining things in Mandarin, I had to ask a lot of questions. Most of my classmates were Asian and I later learned that most may consider it disrespectful to ask the teacher a question. It indicates that the teacher has done a poor job explaining something. As for me, after two months I feel that I know very little Mandarin - certainly not enough to go traveling on my own and enjoy it. On the other hand, on the food front, I expand my knowledge of Chinese cuisine almost daily. And I continue to expand my cultural understanding. Just today at lunch, I learned a little more about family norms in China ...