Teaching in China - The First Day.

             

The day I stood before the door leading to the first classroom I ever entered in China, I paused with my hand on the door handle for quite some time before my brain stopped sending down the "Panic! Run away! Disappear through a hole in the floor!" messages and switched to "Open door".

I was already floored to find out that lectures here took place in large school classrooms, were furnished with old-fashioned desks with hinged lids, green chalk-boards and adults sitting scrunched into them so thickly there wasn't a spare seat in the house. Like so much in China, the architecturally modern, streamlined exterior wasn't necessarily any indication of what pertained behind that public presentation.

I was unprepared also for lugging armfulls of forms and books and notes and schedules up six flights of stairs, in a stone building whose cold cement treads struck through thin sandals on a hot late-summer day.

But most of all I was unprepared for the sheer chaos that pertains to going from one place to another in China.

 There were, as is ever the way of staircases, some people - well, a seemingly impenetrable mass, actually - intent on descending the staircase while others were equally determined to ascend.  No system for them being able to achieve their goals simultaneously, it soon became clear, had, to date, suggested itself. Brute force and tenacity was the only solution to be applied as yet.

 My airy expectation of someone offering to give me a hand with my tools-of-trade so as to prevent me from collapsing on the fourth floor; was suddenly revealed as a bad choice.Finding myself abreast with a corridor , I staggered into it, leaving the heaving mass on the central staircase to battle it out. There had to be a fire-escape, didn't there. I'd just shin up - or down? I'd lost all sense of direction, time or space in the melee, (along with vast swathes of notes) so I looked up to find what floor I was on.

That, on my first day, had hammered home to me something I'd known, but hadn't assimilated - numbers as well as words are of course written in Chinese! I was absolutely stranded.

In the end it was a wandering cleaner who rescued me that day, as he was to do quite often. He didn't understand a word of English and spoke a thick local dialect so that even when I did pick up words in Putin wa, we still were fairly unintelligible to each other.  Yet we became friends and, if I couldn't get to a canteen and back in between lectures he'd let me sit in his domain to eat whatever street food I'd been able to grab outside the building.

That first day he sat me down in a wicker chair and gave me a cup of cold green tea from his thermos. And then led me up and deposited me outside the correct door. The worst was over - it might have been hell getting there - but on the other side of this door was a familiar world. I was ok inside there - it was on THIS side of the door that I'd been assaulted by all manner of strange experiences.  Now I could relax - the excitement was over. I knew how to do this part.

It was a good thing I'd had a little time to collect myself, before I pushed that door open, because the next thing that caused me almost to goggle was Walt Disney. Never in my wildest surmises about higher education in China, had he ever before made an appearance.

 This was a class of Second years; and there they sat amongst a welter of Minnie Mouse water bottles, Goofy rulers (Rulers? In a course about Western Literature?) Little Princess backpacks, Mowgli trainers, and stickers, stickers, stickers on every surface they could be stuck on: phones, calculators, hair ornaments, book covers.  I had a fleeting compulsion to start off their foray into Western Literature with a rousing chorus of "The Wheels On The Bus."

I had arrived in China from my own Uni - the University of Queensland - to which I would return in a year's time. Now, even if you've never heard of UQ, differences between  a sprawling riverside campus in the North of Australia, and a Chinese University, would be expected.  And I had expected them. In a completely alien fit of planning ahead which astounded all who knew me, I had arranged to arrive three weeks ahead of time in order to experience the most daunting of culture-shocks, to know my way around a campus - which encompassed two complete villages; and a complex for retired academics - and to get myself over the inevitable "Dheli belli" "Territory Trots"-type of belly adjustments which usually accompany an abrupt change of diet.

But nothing had prepared me for the culture shock of walking into a roomfull of Chinese students.  Green chalk-board or not.

And by the time I'd reached the podium I'd noted that every female in the room was wearing heeled shoes and some...even in the 38 degree temperature... stockings! From there I surveyed the dead silent classroom openly and saw, perched on top of some desks, were handbags! Not battered leather carry-alls; not natural-fibre cavernously huge bags; not crocheted, unravelling shoulder-sacks, but handbags! Tiny little pastels showcasing unicorns, or cavorting bears, or polka-dot wearing mice - often picked out in glitter.

We stayed like that for a few seconds - surveying each other. It felt like about twenty minutes  - and my prepared Introductory Lecture was immediately consigned to the waste basket in my mind. Many of them had never seen a Western Woman (that's the polite term, I was to find out. It's the routine smooth translation of every racist epithet by which we are, in fact, being addressed or referred to.) I had never seen so much Disney gathered together in one space. We were all a little culture-shocked. So I shoved my hands in my pockets, sauntered to the front of the desk and perched  with one-cheek-on-and-one-cheek-off insouciance  on the corner of the desk.

"Hi guys." I said. And went right on saying it every day for the next 7 years.