Dragon Boat Races

A couple of days ago, I asked my Mandarin teacher, if she could give us some details about the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival celebrations. We have a school holiday next weekend and I was wondering where we should go to celebrate. None of our contacts seemed know about any festivities - not our Mandarin teacher, nor the folks at the admissions office, nor our friend Fenny. They all agreed that the Dragon Boat Festival was celebrated by eating zongzi - a type of sticky rice. I had read that there were dragon boat races in Jimei, a city rumored to be nearby and, the admissions office was able to verify this on the internet. Thankfully, our former classmate, Maria, let us know that we could take city bus 18 to get there.

We arrived in time for the opening ceremonies. Jimei had a huge dragon boat pool, which looked like it was specifically constructed to host races. Teams were doing short bursts of warm-ups and group-shouting to get themselves psyched.

The judge's "booth"

Dragon boats awaiting the races

Teams arriving

Pre-competition shut-eye

Embarking

As soon as we chose our final viewing spot, but before we actually sat down, Calliope made an English-speaking friend. He had come to root for his school's team. There were about seventy teams competing from mainland China, the United States, Guam, Malaysia, Hongkong, and Taiwan, broken out into student and club divisions as well as mens and womens teams. This I gleaned from the internet as nobody in our vicinity could make out what was coming from the loudspeakers. Each race was short, but fun to watch. One team member sat in front, facing the rowers beating a drum, keeping the rowers synchronized.

After a few hours at the races, we headed over to check out some of the other activities, which included duck-catching, greased-pole-grab-the-flag, opera, drumming, and shopping.

Lunch with Fenny

On our first day here, we checked into getting cell phone service. In the process, we met Fenny, an English teacher at Xiamen University. We made plans to have lunch today. She picked us up in front of our classroom in her car. Since few people have cars here and we take the bus, riding in a small vehicle was a new experience. Fenny zipped around the one-way campus roads as if there were no pedestrians and no other cars to worry about.

Fenny picked a first class restaurant on the beach not too far from campus. Brightly-lit fish tanks lined the walls throwing off a vibrant glow. A variation on this theme are buckets of various sea critters for sale at street markets.

Back to lunch. Fenny ordered a series of appetizers so that we could taste lots of novel foods. What fun! First came the green bean cakes, a gelatin type of dessert. Then came a citrus flavored, cold, tapioca soup. There were mixed interpretations amongst the critics - Calliope tasting a mango flavor. This was followed by a cold black seaweed jelly soup and some cooked greens. There are many varieties of cooked green leaves in Xiamen. And the way we say vegetarian seems to conjure up cooked green leaves in the minds of Xiamen restaurant staff. We have eaten a number of varieties of lettuce, mustard, and cabbage. But we may be eating wild, unkown greens as well.

Back to lunch. More dishes came out, but I was too busy eating to take more pictures. In my last food entry, I mentioned that in Xiamen, vegetarian eating was easy. In the last couple of days, it has gotten a bit trickier. I ordered spicy tofu two nights ago and got a tasty dish with pork bits scattered throughout. Fenny, who was born and raised in China, did all the ordering today. She empahasized and reiterated that many of the dishes should contain no meat and no seafood. But one came with bits of pork and another with bits of shrimp. We still had PLENTY of vegetarian food. And they were most apologetic. Apparently, it's not just a foreigner's inability to order properly. I suppose that's good news and bad news. The good news is that we order properly. The bad news is that it doesn't matter.

Fenny drove us back to campus. Leaving the restaurant, there was a traffic divider that prevented her from turning left. Or so I thought. There was no oncoming traffic in either direction, so what does it matter which side of the road you drive on? Cyclists routinely travel on the wrong side of the road here; we pass them on the bus every day. I have heard it said that in China, lane markers, traffic signals, road signs are taken as suggestions.

A tasty lunch, new foods, and a new friend. What a treat! Fenny insisted on paying for the meal. The Chinese people continue to impress me with their overwhelming hospitality.

Mandarin Study

Hilda and I study Mandarin every day from 9-11:30 AM. Our program is offered by the Overseas Education College of Xiamen University. Thus all of our classmates are all students from abroad. There is actually a word for “student studying abroad” in Mandarin – liúxuéshēng. I have learned enough of the pinyin, so that I know how to pronounce that word just by reading it – and let me tell you that it is not pronounced like it looks! So pat myself on the back. I can also tell a little bit about what it might mean, even if I didn’t know the word, because I’ve already learned that xué means to study and xuéshēng means student. So, sometimes, I can even apply logic to it. But by the time I do that, the rest of the class has learned another three words.

Our Classmates

Speaking of the rest of the class, as far as I can tell, they have ALL studied Chinese before. And, even if they hadn’t, most of them arrived with a home court advantage. The Thai students speak Thai, which has six tones, so intonating properly comes relatively easy to them. They seem to have no trouble rattling out full sentences without hesitating over the tones. I just found out that Japanese characters are very similar to Chinese characters! Actually, it’s more complex than that, but the bottom line is that the Japanese students could probably get the gist of a Chinese newspaper article without even knowing Chinese. How could I go through fifty years on this planet and not know that? I haven’t asked the Korean students about their language, but I think Korean shares a good portion of its vocabulary with Chinese. Then there’s Hilda. She knows a good chunk of Mandarin and is fluent with what she knows.

The upshot of all this is that I am constantly in a a fog as to what the teacher is saying. And everybody else seems to understand just fine. Generally, when I find myself in this situation, I just ask a lot of questions, until everything is cleared up. This strategy is not working that well this time round. We have two teachers. One teacher focuses on writing. The first week she explained new vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, and a wee bit of grammar - all in Mandarin! Then, at the end, she would say “Understand?” Well, no, I don’t know any Mandarin and I’m not even sure what page we are supposed to be on. She is so sweet that it’s hard to be critical. Just recently we worked out this kink. She explains everything in English now. Our other teacher focuses on listening and speaking. By the end of a class session with her, I have amassed, on the order of, thirty new vocabulary words. Even a young person, with a young brain primed for language learning, would have trouble integrating that much new material.

Our Teachers

Complain, complain. Despite my near constant fog, I am learning something. And everybody, including my classmates, is exceedingly patient with me. I still think the Chinese need to get their act together and get a phonetic alphabet, but until then, studying the characters is actually rather interesting. Here’s one for you. The Chinese characters for mother are 妈妈. 妈 is actually made up of two parts: 女 means female and 马 means horse. I will leave you to interpret this on your own.

Visit to a Local High School

Today, Hilda and I took advantage of a free afternoon to visit a local residential high school. Loren, an English teacher from the U.S., invited us and then generously escorted us to observe one of his classes in action. I was amazed to find out that Loren has learned almost no Mandarin during the 2 1/2 years he has spent here. Considering the difficulty we have had doing the simplest of things, I find this mind boggling. Perhaps his English-speaking, Chinese wife runs some interference for him. But, we couldn't hold back our curiosity as to how he handled the day-to-day activities of eating, buying, and getting around on his own. Loren responded by pointing to his cell phone. When he gets stuck, he calls a bilingual friend. For example, if he's at the store, he has a friend speak to the store clerk over the phone. Then his friend relays the answer to him in English. He also collects business cards from the establishments he frequents to use with taxi drivers. And a prerequisite for choosing a restaurant is that they have food you can point to or an English menu. So now you know.

The students at Loren's school attend class, until 4:30 each day and leave the classroom weighted down with five hours of homework on average! This leaves no time for after-school activities and creates a sleep-deprived student body. There are no competitive school sports. No one has time for it! Upon arrival in the classroom, some students lay their heads down on their desks, perhaps still groggy from the required rest period immediately before the class. It was a pleasure to watch each student get up before their peers to modestly present a short speech based upon several questions about an English song.

Afterwards, we toured the campus with May, a Chinese teacher of English. When we visited the gym, we saw teachers warming up for a badminton tournament. Badminton and ping pong are big here. The highlight of the tour was the "Garden of Natural Sciences" (that's my name for it, and remember, this is a school). There were a series of large rocks along a nicely landscaped path. Each rock showcased a theme, from bugs to volcanoes to maps. Quite unique. Our delightful guide, May, watches U.S. television to keep her excellent English in top-notch condition. We discussed "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives". The world is getting smaller and smaller.

We returned to the island of Xiamen via the school's scheduled bus for teachers and staff. This is one of the perqs the school offers, since it is set plop in the middle of new, mostly unfinished, residential,\high-rise, developments. The bus was plush and punctual. The bus driver tried to leave one minute early at 4:59pm, but several teachers came running on board at 5:00pm.

Calliope and I had dinner with Loren and some friends he gathered together -

• Apple, a Chinese woman who runs Apple Travel,
• her husband Choy (sp?) who is half Chinese and half Australian and who maintains the "What's On Xiamen" website,
• Choy's long-time friend and housemate, who was born and raised in Germany, but is now Australian,
• a Chinese man, who used to teach English at the same school with Loren, but is now helping develop markets for an export business

As usual, such eclectic mixes generate interesting conversations. My eyes were opened a bit more to some of the ramifications of China's one-child policy. More on that as I learn more.