Dongbei Days

Extracts from a memoir about the ten months I worked as a foreign editor for a Chinese publishing company, located in the foothills of the Changbai Shan or Ever-white Mountains.

Friday 31 October 2014

A Barefoot Teacher





Local university student Helen, whom we met by chance during her Summer break in her native city, and who thereafter insisted on showing us all that Tonghua had to offer, insisted that we visited her  uncles.

 One of them was an English Language teacher. We passed through an archway from a back  street into a courtyard flanked by of four-storey pink-washed blocks. It reminded me of  the small Somerstown estate in London, to the East of Euston Station,  but only so far as the layout was concerned. Nothing could be more different from the flowery window-boxes and flapping sheets and the small children running across  the courtyards of this lively compound

At the main entrance arch  a barrier was raised to allow us to pass, under the scrutiny of a young man whose job it was to check on visitors.  We spotted a sign outside one of the flats that announced:  Yingyu Shijie or English Language World’.
 
As we walked towards the building,  a smiling man in shorts with bare feet came down the stairs to meet us, followed by a brown-haired woman with Eurasian features. They were the English teacher, Henry, and his wife, parents to the hyperactive youth, Helen's cousin, David, whose favourite English expression was 'Let's go!'

With a wave of his arm and a smile the uncle ushered us into a downstairs room furnished with long desks and benches and a blackboard on the wall. Rows of silent children craned to get a better view of the visitors.

The desks and benches had been painted over many-times, as rainbow layers of flakes and patches revealed. The floor was bare cement. Strangely enough, the Chinese believe that the less there is to distract students in a school room the better, because then they are able to concentrate on their studies. There were none of the posters and pictures that adorn Western classrooms. In fact, this room resembled the one where I'd taught Summer School in the Southern Province of Zhejian in 2000. The only difference was that the children sat in pairs instead of rows.

Our host pulled forward  wooden stools which he covered with worn satin cushions.
 
Henry told us  he usually did extra coaching during his forty-day holiday because he had four children to educate, two of them in university. He said he sometimes had a hundred students in his classroom, which must have been a squash, but I knew enough by now about the Chinese craze for English Language learning not to doubt his word.
 
On the afternoon of our visit there were thirty or so smiling pupils, aged 9-11.  They were reciting a dialogue Where is Shenzhen? Is it near Beijing? No, it is near Hong Kong. The teacher would call on one student to call the phrases solo and then the others would repeat in unison, then over again with a different student in the solo part.

Katharine was asked to talk to them, which she hated, always shrinking from addressing groups of people. When she complimented them on their English and  exhorted them to continue to study hard you'd have though, from the clapping, that it was the best speech they'd ever heard
 

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