Alice's Rabbit Hole

Step over the threshold into Room 513, Teaching Building 5, and it’s like sliding down Alice’s rabbit hole. Before stepping into the room, I’m a giant, a good head taller than some of the male faculty and possibly two heads taller than laborers weaving rickety barrows through the streams of students down on the street. But when I step over the threshold of 513 (and every doorway has something to step over—I’ve tripped in many), I'm dwarfed by my two teaching comrades, both in their twenties and both haling from St. John’s in Minnesota.

Still, Room 513 is nothing compared to the the brick path from my apartment in the foreign teacher village (Ban Zhun Cun – bamboo village). That brick path leads to two radically different time zones.  If I go down the hill and cross the big city street, I’m at Gate Six of the university, an awesome entry to a walled campus formally designated a botanical garden with magnificent buildings, lily ponds, and fifty thousand students, many of whom are talking on cell phones as they speed by on motorbikes. It's very much the 21st century.

 

If instead I go up the hill and cross the ridge behind the apartments, I find myself in another world, on a mountain path high above the Jialing River, with dwellings hugging the mountain on one side. It could be 1300. Nothing about the dirt path or little dogs running under the mahjong tables suggests that there are skyscrapers, lots of them, less than two miles away. The old men with bamboo shoulder poles or simple buckets move along steadily, seeming to see everything and nothing as they go. (More. . . way below.)    

Back in Chengdu, aesthetics could shift with the snap of a finger. I spent two months in Chengdu at Sichuan Shifan Daxue, a smaller campus, where we studied Chinese and taught English in Model School. I could spin on my heel and one minute face the dirty photocopier shown on the right. If I needed photocopies for teaching, I would use this machine (with directions in Chinese, of course), one of many old photocopiers wedged under stairways or in between jiaozi shops. Many of the tiled walkways were uneven, possibly a reminder of the 2008 earthquake, and sometimes the nearby squat toilets reeked in the summer heat. And yet, if I spun around on my heel and looked forty feet behind the photocopier pictured here, I'd see the beautiful little garden, one of many throughout the campus, pictured below. Competing with the hum of cicadas in the lush, magnificently groomed gardens might be the steady rhythm of voices . . .a student under this tree, another under that, reciting lists of exam terms.