Getting Settled in Hunan Province

Jishou University, not surprisingly, is located in Jishou City. But, in the fall of 2003, they moved their foreign language students a couple of hours train ride to the south, where they shared a campus with Zhangjiajie College.

I was assigned three classes, each with about 40 first-year English majors (ages 18-20), and given the flexibility to pretty much make up my own lesson plans.

At this point in their education, most of the students had studied the language for five to seven years, but few, if any, had ever had the opportunity to talk with a native English speaker.

Naturally, they were a bit shy, at first. Every experience in their schooling had conditioned them to listen quietly to the teacher and repeat words and phrases when directed.

My teaching style, coupled with my outgoing personality, must have been quite a shock the first few weeks. I wanted them to communicate and not to worry about mistakes. If I could figure out what they were trying to say, and they could understand me, I called that a victory.

Sometimes, I would challenge them to speak with me in English, while I tried to speak in Mandarin. I really think this made them feel more comfortable when they made mistakes in pronunciation or grammar.

By the way, I should probably note at this point what I saw as one of the most profound differences between Chinese and American students.

Now, let me preface this by saying that my Chinese students were some of the brightest, talented, and most hardworking individuals I could imagine. Nevertheless, there was one skill nearly everyone I met in Central China lacked -- the ability to guess.

I noticed this one day after being particularly frustrated trying to get a campus cafeteria worker to scramble an egg in with my vegetables. The Mandarin word for egg is "dan." As with pretty much all Chinese words, you have at least four ways to pronounce it, all with different meanings that can be further complicated by the way in which it is used. (For example, saying, "I want to go to the train station," is the same as, "I want to have sex with the train station" -- just a different tone on the verb.)

In any case, to get my egg, I was eventually reduced to squawking like a chicken and pretending to pull something out of my rear end. Finally, I managed to get my point across, much to the lasting amusement of the campus culinary staff. But, I remember thinking, "If the pronunciation is pretty close, and you're in a kitchen, well, take a guess." (Same thing happened when I was walking with Chinese friends and practicing my directions. I would say, "Go left," and everyone understood. Then, I would say, "Go right," and not get the tone correct, and there was no understanding whatsoever of what I was trying to express.)

So, I went back to my students and tried an experiment. I said, "I will speak in Russian, and you answer in English." The standard response was, "I don't speak Russian." I would say, "I know. See if you can guess my meaning."

I would say, "Menya zavoot Lance (my name)," pointing to myself. Then I would say, "Kak vas zavoot?," pointing to them. I'm still not sure why only one in a hundred could figure that out.

By now, you're probably wondering who the pretty Chinese woman in the picture is. Her English name's Scarlette, and, at the time, she was a teacher at Zhangjiajie College. We had long conversations about everything from politics to relationships, and she became my best friend during my nine-month stay in Hunan Province.

She has since married and moved to Guanzhou where she gave birth to her first child.