See, technically speaking, I’m not tutoring little 9 year old Asudan. I mean, her parents aren’t paying me, and she tests me on my Chinese as much as I test her on her English. Our Saturday afternoons consist of me talking to her, with a notebook infront of me, writing out points of grammar, and her sucking it all in like the little sponge that she is. Then I write out some practise sentences, and get her to repeat them for me. Then she tests me on what all the sentences mean in Chinese. We teach each other our vocab (with her generally learning it quicker than me), and she’s a right strict little teacher, correcting me sternly when I get the pronunciation wrong.

So today, at the end of the lesson, I could hear that Kang Laoshi was swanning around in the stairwell, talking to the workmen who have come in to re-jig the internet LAN wiring (much needed work – the wires were slung from window to window outside, making the place look like it was in the middle of an orthodontic procedure from the outside). Hearing Kang Laoshi downstairs was enough to make me a little nervous, cause even though I’m not really tutoring Asudan, I’m sure he’d see it that way. I didn’t want to send Asudan out of my apartment if Kang Laoshi was there to see her go. So our lesson went for half an hour longer than it should have, while we waited for the ruckus to die down. During that time, instead of having formal cross-teaching, Asudan decided that her time would be much better spent playing with Mushuk. After a bit of adjusting, Mushuk has decided that Asudan is part of his pack. He has not seen a single small child since he moved in with me, so I think that was part of what he was uncomfortable about.

Here the two of them are. This pic gives you an idea of how big my Mushuk has gotten, and how little Asudan is.

She really is a bright little spark, and she’s actually a perfect Chinese teacher, cause she speaks slowly, with a perfectly anunciated accent (despite the fact that she’s Uyghur). Not only that, but she’s confident enough to correct me when I’m wrong. And on top of all this, she’s young enough to not get embarrassed when she gives the wrong answer (isn’t yet weighed down with the Chinese notion of “saving face”, thank god) she just ploughs on and corrects herself.

Today we looked at the simple future tense (I think that’s what it’s called – “I will + verb root”), and so now I can easily talk to her about my plans over the next few weeks, with the confidence of knowing that she’ll understand that I’ll be away.

And Carla, we went through JL’s letter, and she’s writing her response over the next fortnight (I’m not going to see her for that long, cause the holidays are coming and I’ll be in Kashgar with my mum and her friend). She was pretty excited about having an American penpal!

That’s all for now folks!

Charlotte

I went to the school this afternoon with the intention of taking photos of how beautiful it’s been made for the school inspection. However, my brilliant plan was foiled when faced with so very many gorgeous kiddy faces all smiling up at me and begging with their sheer adorability to be photographed. I couldn’t nearly put in all of the cuties, but here are some of the cuter pics:

This is just some of the kids from my grade one and two classes. They are SO outgoing, and couldn’t resist making faces. The one who looks like a rabbit on ecstacy is Maddison, a smart little Uyghur kid.

***

Here are three of my lovely kinder kids, left to right: Grace, Summer and Clover. Of course, I have no idea what their Chinese names are. I know the Chinese names of literally one kid. And that’s only because Apple’s always telling him off in class and calling him by his Chinese name…

***

Here is little Aaron, in grade three. His English is good enough that he can take part in my and another browncoat’s little experiment – a sino-american penpal project, between here and Florida. Stand up Carla (aka csteinme) and take a bow! She sent me a package with five utterly gorgeous letters from children in her son’s class, to children in my grade three class. I hope that they keep going with it after I leave!

***

Here is Stella, Vicky and Jordan. Stella is one of my star students (ar ar ar), and could be described as a kiss arse by the other students, but as it is MY arse she kisses, I’m all for it. Get your heads out of the gutter, paedaphile witch hunters – this little cutie is one of the three or so kids in each kinder class who helps me not only clean the board and gather up my flashcards and such, but she also authoritively carries my teaching materials back to the staff room for me. She’s a cute, and I like her. She’s usually thick as theives with Tessa, who I think had gone home by this stage.

What beautiful kiddies, it must be said. I LOVE teaching kindergarten.

For the school inspection is coming!

Tomorrow, our school is being inspected by the “school leaders” from Kelamayi. They’ll probably come to look in on some of my classes as well as many other classes, and the school has been doing its utmost to put on the best face possible.

I showed up for class this morning running a little late, and rushed into my office (which I share with three other people, all three of them my teaching partners), expecting to see King already in the grade three class room. But once I’d whooshed through the door, feeling a little sheepish for my tardiness, I saw that all three of my office-mates were embroiled in a serious sounding conversation. I assumed (probably correctly, but it is irrelevant to my story) that they were talking about the impending inspection, so I sorted out what materials I needed for my grade three class, yanked up my guitar, and opened the door, saying “grade three, anyone?” I seem to have had a different teaching partner every day this week for that class. All three of them looked up at me with a surprised expression, half rose out of their seats and all spoke at once, “today they have their maths test”, ” their maths test will go for a long time”, “oh, Charlotte, you have not (sic) English class with the grade threes today”.

“Oooh,” I said. “What about the grade twos and ones – I have class with them next?”

At this point, Guo Laoshi, who has the most superior English (she’s been teaching it for 25 years), stepped in and said “Charlotte, you know that tomorrow the Leaders-From-Kelamayi will come to visit our school. So we will ask the grade twos and grade ones to write down English words to put on the walls, and draw pictures to put in the hallways. So this morning, you have no class.”

Cue big grin on Charlotte’s face. “Oh,” I say nonchalantly. “That’s OK. I shall go home and prepare my lessons.”

In my head these days, I recognise “prepare lessons” as a euphamism for sitting out on the balcony reading a book with a glass of apple juice and a cat on my lap. So this morning has been a delightful morning of sitting on the balcony, performing the aforementioned activities, feeling warm and sunlit.

It has been brought to my attention that I have been lax with photos over the past few blog entries, so let me remedy this at once. Here is a pic of my balcony, now more accurately dubbed my “sunroom”:

The Sunroom WAS a storage room during winter, and was filled with boxes and rubbish that I’d been too lazy/too weakwilled in braving the snow outside to take to the garbage hopper over the road. The floor was also covered in dirt that Mushuk had managed to spread around from his litter box. Kinda gross. So last week, in a fit of frenzied fanaticism, I attacked the mess head on (I believe one calls it “Spring Cleaning”?), and have transformed the junk room into a lovely balcony retreat, with chair, hanging plants, and lots of sunshine. It makes me happeeeee!

The Aussie community in our little apartment block is an absolute godsend, I must say. Yesterday night, we had a big cook-up. We did the full on Western Meal thing. I’ve used knife and fork only a handful of times since coming to China, and although we all have our own set of knives and forks, I’d not even considered using them for our meal last night till Pat suggested it. I would have dived for the chopsticks, despite the fact that we were eating steak, mashed potato, and cauliflower cheese, none of which are terribly condusive to chopstick use.

Christine is a skilled purveyor of steak, mashed taters, garlicy oniony cooked tomatoes, and carmelised cabbage and carrot; Pat stirs up a bitchin’ fruit salad; and my cauliflower cheese was actually not too bad, made as it was with real Australian Extra Tasty Coon Cheese (Mr Coon started the company, put your antiracist banners away, non Aussies!), generously provided by my lovely mother, kindly imported by the adorable Miss Jessie when she came to visit.

Here’s a pic to commemorate the occasion –

Cheers for now, lovelies!

Charlotte

Today? Great day. Saturday, for one thing, which is always a good day. I slept and slept, and even managed to get up before midday. I went for baozi with Christine and Robin (another excellent thing) (“Hey, fresh bao!” Watch more Firefly if you don’t understand the reference!), followed by one of my favorite shopping things to do – the DVD shop. And Saturday is a good day for it, cause today’s the day when we get NEW DVDs in.

Returning home, replete with xinde diezi (new dvds), pre-skinned pineapple and baozi in my belly, I actually managed to muster enough getupandgo(tm) to clean my apartment a little. Not alot, just enough.

Then for my newest Saturday ritual – lessons with Asudan. I’ve not yet blogged about this, methinks. Let me give you the long version, seeing as we’re all here.

A few weeks ago, before it turned warm, I was repotting some plants, and went out to my balcony to get some potting mix. I looked down, to see an older bloke, a Uyghur, staring up at my apartment. This irritated me somewhat, but I sucked it in, and went about my business, thinking that if some people didn’t have better things to do with their time to gawk at the foriegner’s apartment, then that was their problem.

But every time I went to the windowsill to do something plant related, there he was, gawking up at me. The fourth time I went to the window, he was there with a little girl, both of them staring up at me from the ground outside. “Ahhh,” I thought. “Now I understand. They are here for their amusement: ‘look, child, behold the foreigner in her natural setting.’ ”

I was irritated enough to stay away from my window by this stage, and in fact went up to visit Christine, and watch some episodes of Alias. I left my door open, as I usually do, to let Mushuk roam free (he cries and cries when I leave him locked up, a sound that strangely resembles the siren on the Ghostbusters’ car) and so was easily able to hear the ringer on my intercom/doorbell go off.

My intercom is broken, however: people on the ground can hear my voice, but I can’t hear them (a simple matter to get fixed, but it requires me to write Kang Laoshi a note to get a repairman in. This I have been too lazy to do, alas.) At any rate, I can just as easily stick my head out the window. I NEVER let in strangers.

So anyway, I hear my buzzer go off, and stick my head out of Christine’s window, to see that the pair of gawkers have actually rung the doorbell. They’ve not been just gawking for their own amusement – they actually want to talk to me, perhaps. I reluctantly tear myself away from Alias, and bounce down the stairs to see them. It turns out (predictably by this stage) that they want me to teach the little girl, who’s name turns out to be Asudan. The unpredictable thing about this story is how quickly I develop a liking for this child.

She’s a bright little spark, and was the one who did most of the talking for her dad, in English no less. She’s 10 years old, and has the English speaking ability of a three or four year old. Think about that for a moment. Three or four year olds in Australia speak better English than most of my college students could last term. I will pause in my commentary while you oooh and aaah.

You must understand just how many people have asked me to tutor their children. I get it all the time. My normal answer when I first arrived was to look confused and tell them that I didn’t understand what they were talking about, cause I didn’t have the language skills to tell them that I don’t really have time to teach other kids. That’s what I say now, which is in fact a little white lie. I do have plenty of free time, but I put such a value on that free time that noone could possibly pay me enough to give up some of that free time to teach their little ankle biter.

Asudan is the exception, though. I’d teach her for free, cause she’s effortless to teach. And I do. Teach her for free, that is. We’ve got a little routine worked out now, where ever second Saturday, she comes to my place for lessons, and every other Saturday, I go to her place. Today was the first time I went to her place, and I was served tea and juice and a huge array of biscuits and nibblies by her mother, after a lesson that went for about half an hour longer than it should have. She’s so easy to teach, and she has possibly one of the best ears for new sounds that I’ve heard so far in China. Which should not surprise me, cause she’s Uyghur, and I’ve noticed that they generally pronounce things better than many of the Han (an aside – can anyone else hear the word “Han” without immediately getting images of the Millenium Falcon in their heads?)

So, I’ve gone ahead and broken my own rules. I’m tutoring, against the express wishes of my boss. I told Asudan and her mum to be careful how they talk about our arrangement – we’re “friends”, not teacher and student.

And just to prove my point about how often I get asked to tutor kids, I was walking home from Asudan’s house, and met a guy who I recognised as the judge from the Women’s Day skipping competition. I knew, the moment he called me by the title, “Laoshi” – which means teacher – that he wanted me to teach his kid. He told me that he was 12, and that his English was not at the level that it should be for his age. Alarm bells started ringing, and I knew the best way to stave this one off. “Oh,” I said offhandedly. “My boss, you know him, Kang Laoshi, has told me not to teach other children without ok-ing it with him first”. Kang Laoshi is like as not to say “no”, but if he doesn’t (this guy is, after all, high up in the college hierarchy), then I can feel not guilty in charging LOTS of money, cause I know the kid’s folks are totally well off. Is that capitalist of me? Well, yes! I’m exercising my awareness of my work-leisure choice: teaching Asudan is not work, and is therefore leisure. So they don’t need to compensate me for teaching her. But a kid whose English is substandard? Sounds like work to me. Therefore, gimme de cassssshhhhh!

This particular point needed it’s own entry. Today, walking back from lessons with Asudan, I bumped into an old friend – Eric aka Django, the swoonworthy guitar player who was in my college class last semester. I’m not teaching at the college level anymore, cause all the guys and gals in my class have since moved on to jobs around Xin Jiang, for the final phase in their hospitality & tourism degrees.

He was looking great, hair a bit longer (*drool*), big smile for me (*melt*), and I could have just died of happiness to see him, as much because I’d missed all the kids from my old class as because I still had the vestiges of a crush on him. Anyway, he asked me when I was next going up to Kelamayi (he lives there), and told me that next time I was there, to give him a call, and we’d go out for drinks and music at Culture of September. And so it was that I saw the last of him for this time, clutching a cherished scrap of paper with his mobile phone number.

A number of you have admonished me over my drooling over a student, in particular this one. But my question for you is: if he’s no longer my student, am I allowed to drool?

Spring is spring, the grass is rizz.

Isn’t it amazing how a little sunshine can just transform a town and its people? Today, my classes were effortless and fun, the kids’ concentration levels were way up, and I felt like we were acheiving something.

And wow, it’s so warm and sunny (relatively speaking – you still need a jumper in the shade), everyone’s happy and smiling, and the town has just sprung to life. Even the smells are different, and I suddenly realised that the euphoria that I experienced when I first arrived didn’t wear off because I was sick of the place, but because it had gone to sleep. And now Dushanzi is waking up after a long cold lonely winter, and here comes the sun, doo doo doo doooo, here comes the sun, and I say, “it’s alright”… ba badeba badeba badeba badeba bada-bada.

Sorry. That song has been my theme song for the past month. Harrison. What a guy.

Today I: Saw my first butterfly of the season; went to the tailor’s to get some spring and summer clothes made; had my photo taken infront of the traditional RED background for employee photos (red = good little commy, don’tcha know?); bought and gobbled up a punnet of the first ripe strawberries of the season; and went to the post office.

Now, please pick the one that was the downer of my day. No, not the butterfly. Think harder.

That’s right kids, the post office. Man, could they have a stupider system? I went to post off a little something for a fellow browncoat’s son’s school project (the gingerbread man, for those of you keeping track), and I wanted to put a tiny little jade pendant in the envelope for this little boy. They told me that I couldn’t put it in the envelope, because they said it would get broken. I told them that it was a sturdy, tiny peice of jade, and it would NOT get broken. Then they said “sending it international, the lump will break OUR stamping machines”. So I said, OK, so give me an envelope that I CAN send it in.

Thus ensued the stupidest display of Chinese bureaucracy I’ve ever seen. I was expecting them to pull out a Western style padded tough bag, like the Aussie post ones, but they didn’t have any, and that if I wanted to send anything bigger than a peice of paper overseas, it would have to be in a foot x foot box. So they were basically telling me, that unless I wanted to spend more than 100 quai (ie 20 aussie dollars, and about a day’s wages) on some sheets of paper and a tiny little jade pendant, they had no way for me to send this little present.

Word cannot express my irritation. I stayed in there for ages, cajoling, pleading, smiling sweetly, asking them if there was ANYTHING they could do for me. But all to no avail.

So, Carla, I’m very sorry that there is reference in the letter to A about the pendant, when in fact it is not in the final envelope. Blame ChinaPost. They know how to ruin a sunny day.

But I shall not be discouraged. I think that the sun is here to stay. Aussie Pat has managed to procure sunburn already, and the shops have stopped selling waterproof umbrellas, and have started selling lacey parasols instead. Now, if I can just find some sunscreen…