Cheers to the Tongliang Teachers

School ended in early July. The marathon end-of-year grading was barely behind me when I found myself trying to keep my balance on Bus 565, wedged between the man holding three live chickens, a young worker holding the overhead rail--armpit about an inch from my nose, and about twenty other people standing in the aisle. It was a hot day, close to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-eight Celcius), so it was relief when I met three other Peace Corps volunteers and our Tongliang hosts and their air-conditioned cars. We were headed for a two-week summer project in the rice bowl of China, where we would work with Chinese primary school and high school teachers who wanted to improve their English. The trip from Chongqing to Tongliang was stunning, with terraced mountains crowding the highway. At one point our host took a wrong exit ramp—no matter. He just backed down the ramp, creeping backward onto the highway, until he found his way into the fast lane.

Terraced hillsides in western Chongqing

Western China doesn’t bother with ugly urban sprawl. Lush green mountains and rice paddies dominate the scenery, although every so often an urban geyser erupts with scores of thirty-story buildings. Tongliang is a somewhat non-descript city of about a half-million people, also exploding with new construction. The skyline was filled with cranes—the metal kind—and every other shop featured kitchen appliances or bathroom sinks. We were spoiled with our hotel's western accommodations and air conditioning, although the whole city was without water for spells during the heat wave.

Waiting for water on July 13th

Our two-week workshop was held at Bachuan Middle School, an impressive private school with uniformed guards controlling the entry way and carefully manicured courtyards, even in the upper levels of the buildings. (Yes, you’d walk out a fifth floor classroom into an upper courtyard with beautifully potted plants and trees.) The sculpted privet on the hillside spelled out slogans in Chinese characters. Only a handful of our teachers taught there; most taught in public schools somewhere within a two-hour radius. The primary school teachers told us their classes usually had about seventy students. Our very charming hosts, "Alice" and Chen Laoshi, looked after us carefully, walking us home to our hotel the first day, and escorting us every noontime to and fro a canteen five or six blocks away dedicated to teachers. There we were joined by other educators, including a man who had been one of Peter Hessler’s students in Fuling. (Peter Hessler wrote River Town, a book chronicling his Peace Corps teaching experience in Fuling. Hessler happens to hail from the same college town in Missouri that I do and is indebted, as I am, to Doug Hunt's mentoring.)

Bachuan Middle School - view from a fifth floor balcony

Evenings we had to ourselves, and we were usually the first act in a street-side circus. While eating noodles outside (under red umbrella, below), the cook and his wife pulled up plastic stools and peppered us with curious questions. Shop owners from neighboring stores stood outside and watched, as did other passersby, so that about thirty people stood in perforated concentric circles, watching us eat.

Shops along the way from our hotel to school in Tongliang

We’d walk the mile to school every morning and again every afternoon—given that the lunch break was long enough to return home to rest. I walked around men shoulder deep in trenches, delivery-men, babies, workers. One delivery man stopped his truck, left it and its AC running, while he took a boxed high chair up to the fence enclosing some high-rise apartments, and just heaved it over the ten-foot fence into a courtyard (below).

Tongliang streetscape

In the classroom, kept tolerably cool with 20 foot ceilings and half a dozen fans, we modeled English lessons that our teachers actually did, partly to improve their own English, partly as a basis for discussion about teaching.  (Their English, however, was orders of magnitude better than our Chinese, mine especially.) They wanted to do plays and we secured a big room at the end of the first week so that the other class could join us—at our teachers’ request. No sooner did the first thespians open their mouths than a string of firecrackers went off as intense as the grand finale of any US Fourth of July celebration, lasting perhaps fifteen minutes. Below us we could see hundreds of helium balloons lifting into the air and what appeared to be a graduation ceremony. Later a small crowd of brave custodians ran up to to ask me my age. They were disappointed. They clearly had me pegged for thirty years older, for just about everyone dyes his or her hair in China until they’re something close to ninety.

We all took a hand at teaching and modeling and asking questions—and we westerners learned as much from our Chinese colleagues as vice versa. We were all teachers teaching teachers—that’s what it was all about.

On the way from Tongliang to Dazu

I was admittedly tired—with passport/visa anxieties gaining tsunami-like strength as the days dwindled and more visits to police stations in far flung cities were called for—but I was also excited—with a day journey to nearby Dazu to see ancient rock carvings. Who knew what a netherworld Buddhists could create—with both a knife-wielding hell and a knee-splitting hell among many other hells under a panoply of Buddhas. (Dazu is an amazement that exceeded my expectations and warrants its own separate blog entry.)

Dazu ancient Buddhist rock carvings

But fatigue and ecstasy mixed when our beloved program manager, Peng ChuanZhong, showed up in Tongliang today with passport and new visa in hand. Scores of Chinese people at every administrative level (as well as Peace Corps director Jon Darrah) have helped push this seven-week ordeal to closure—I can now, thanks to all of them, fly to Shanghai on Sunday. Many, many thanks to this whole special population that made my upcoming trip possible!

(Because I'll be traveling--from Shanghai to Hangzhou, Yangshuo, the Three Gorges, Xi'An, and Beijing, I may not be able to post anything on July 26th--I just don't know.)