My lesson plan the week of Thanksgiving consisted of teaching the students a brief history, making some artsy hand turkeys and watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It was a laid back lesson as I've been doing because I find drilling vocabulary all the time into the students was way too heavy handed and they pretty much got that all day from their Chinese English teachers. I was told by the previous girl who worked as a foreign teacher here that not only were cultural lessons better because the students were more receptive, but they were easier to make. She couldn't have been more right. I haven't given a single test really except for one time when the senior class pissed me off with their incessant talking and lack of attention during a vocab lesson. Then half of them cheated and I made the cheaters retake a harder test. They fell in line more after that.
Thursday though was unbelievably mellow. I taught my lesson, went home and cleaned up and a student visited me. Her English name was Sandy. Sandy is a shy 17 year old sophomore girl who loves American pop music (in particular Avril Lavigne), reading books, shopping and she is extremely interested in traveling abroad. So she visits my apartment every week to chat and try to practice her English. It's endearing. I've had students grant me small favors of kindness but since we're all awkward introverts, well it just makes things delightfully awkward and as much as I try to force myself to be outgoing sometimes I'm just stuck for conversation topics. I'm not the exciting, bold, boisterous American they probably expected but I'm generally liked and somewhat popular despite this.
After Sandy left, I organized some school papers, half-heartedly listened to a Chinese lesson, downloaded a movie and grabbed my leftover KFC dinner that was soon to be my "turkey" dinner. As I nibbled my first bite around 6pm I got a message on my messaging app WeChat from Rose. "Hey what are you up to? Happy Thanksgiving! Do you want to grab dinner!"
Rose is a local Chinese English teacher who speaks incredibly fluent English at an international learning school across the street from my school. She loves taking selfies, talking about herself, American boys, shopping, and talking about all her outfits she bought for the day.
Our dialogues mostly consist of "how do you say <insert garbled English word here>?," "I want an American boy," "I want a RICH American boy," "I want to go to America," "Can you take this picture of me?" and "What should I wear? Do you like this?"
Needless to say, I can take her in small doses and luckily she is not a clingy friend. Yet her westernized attitude about sex and relationships, frustration with her traditional Chinese family (she's 28 and unmarried and her mother pairs her up on blind dates with older, unattractive Chinese men) and her mulling over her silly encounters with boys and what she wants to do when she gets to America kind of make for a strange, bizarre entertainment.
At the same time, Rose can also be generous often treating me to dinners, paying cab fares, introducing me to friends (she has many both Chinese and foreign), being a tour guide and loaning me helpful advice on getting around and/or Chinese culture.
It beat eating leftover KFC in my house watching Hulu so I took her up on the offer.
I met her at the school where she was wrapping up a lesson with a bunch of young children aged 9-11 and she was teaching them tourist places in Beijing. Yvette and Lisa were the two most outspoken. Yvette, a small frail girl in a white little sweater over a blue dress her hair in a ponytail, asked me if I could speak Chinese. "Not really," I replied. "Why don't we practice?" said Rose. She staged a introductory Chinese dialogue and then had them ask some questions in English directed towards me about the reading they were doing ie "Do you like to travel?" "How do you travel?" It was actually sweet and the kids spoke incredibly well. Actually , better than most of my high school students.
"They speak so well," I said to Rose after the class was over.
"REALLY?," she said. It was enough to stroke her ego into talking about how she's selective with the kids she chooses to stay in her class and her frustration with less qualified (as compared to her) teachers botching kids pronunciations of words. Also, her desire to not confuse them with American/British dialogues (the textbooks they used were British, as are most in China).
"What do you want to eat?" she said as we entered the cab.
"I don't know. I'm up for anything really."
"Do you want to try some traditional Chinese food? It'll be cheaper than the Mexican restaurant we went to the other day."
I hesitated. I actually since orientation in Shanghai had not had any local Chinese food. Each region has specialties and Wuxi is known fish as it is a town surrounded by water, rivers and lakes. I am usually a huge fan of seafood but the way fish is prepared here in China usually doesn't whet my appetite. Perhaps it's the smell as it is particularly strong but also somewhat pungent. In terms of looks, the meat gray and the bones are left in. Despite all that, I thought it would be nice to break my custom and try something that actually would immerse me more into the local culture....at least try. I had only had the cafeteria food at my school and even the staff here hated the school food. Perhaps in a restaurant it might be different.
This is Rose. Here's her taking one of her many selfies of the night. Her many, many, many selfies (btw she wanted me to take this picture of her taking a selfie...yeah.)
This soup is a specialty here in Wuxi. I really wish I could remember the name. But it was fish, some octopus and and some greens. It actually didn't taste bad, a bit salty, but the texture was kind of gluey and the fish smell was kind of unbearable. I mustered and braved through a half a bowl.
This was fried octopus and it was probably the best thing I've ever had here in my life. The sauce over it was kind of slightly tangy and sweet. It kind of also had a sandy texture to it but it was great. I love octopus.
This was a seafood assortment with leeks and carrots on a seashell. Rose didn't explain it any further than "seafood." I ate it anyway and asked no questions. Sometimes that's best when it comes to Chinese food...something will often look good till I realize what part of the animal its from.
This was actually duck and inside (you can kind of see poking out) was rice but it was a special kind of rice usually put inside buns. It was a sweetish rice, with fatty duck mean, and a sweet grounded up powder to dunk it in on the side. It was ok, I think the duck was mostly fatty parts than meat and it was near the end of the night so I don't think they put as much love into it as they should have.
Needless to say it was a lovely time. We went shopping where she bought some hand lotions and we looked out at the beautiful city lights as we walked around cobblestone alleyways littered with small shops selling food, clothes and beauty products making our way back to the street to take a taxi home.
It was a different, but lovely Thanksgiving.
Hope yours went well.
This was actually duck and inside (you can kind of see poking out) was rice but it was a special kind of rice usually put inside buns. It was a sweetish rice, with fatty duck mean, and a sweet grounded up powder to dunk it in on the side. It was ok, I think the duck was mostly fatty parts than meat and it was near the end of the night so I don't think they put as much love into it as they should have.
Needless to say it was a lovely time. We went shopping where she bought some hand lotions and we looked out at the beautiful city lights as we walked around cobblestone alleyways littered with small shops selling food, clothes and beauty products making our way back to the street to take a taxi home.
It was a different, but lovely Thanksgiving.
Hope yours went well.
