Spring 2010

In the past few weeks I’ve done a couple of notable things. For the first time, I served as a judge for an English competition. A parent of one of the young students at my school invited me to an English competition held at his company. I took along a British friend since they asked me to find a woman to serve as the second judge. We were picked up and driven to a building near the Nanjing port on the Yangtze River. The company is a subsidiary of the national oil and petrochemical company Sinopec. The main business of this Nanjing-based subsidiary is selling diesel to ships in the port, among other shipping and port services. May 4th was Youth Day, which honors people from in their teens and 20s. All of the company’s under-28 employees, about 70 in all, took an English exam and the top eight were selected for the competition. Two Chinese executives and my friend and I scored each contestant on a self-introduction and their answer to a question that we asked them, chosen from a long list of possible questions. There was supposed to be a karaoke part where we judged their singing ability in English, but thankfully the karaoke system broke down during the first song, a rendition of Hey Jude, so we only had to listen to half a song instead of eight.

There was also a long segment on business English relevant to the company’s industry. It was extremely technical and seemed to involve language that employees use when communicating with foreign ships, such as “What is the capacity of your secondary fuel tank?” “According to MARPOL standards, you must connect to our barge before extending the diesel hose...” The contestants had to translate phrases like this from English to Chinese and vice versa, examine charts of a ship’s statistics (fuel levels, temperatures, chemical content), which where just a mix of numbers and percentages, and then pick out the one value that was beyond the normally permitted bounds. There was also a segment of questions where a national flag was displayed and they had to name the country. There were a number of Asian countries, in addition to Liberia, Panama, Greece, and Cyprus. About 1/3 of the ships at the Nanjing port, which is maybe 150 miles inland but still in pretty deep water, are from countries other than China. Because of favorable laws in those last four countries, a disproportionate number of ships are registered in those nations. Overall, the contestants were really good at these technical questions and the relevant English, which didn’t make much sense to me, but were really poor at understanding and answering the questions that we gave them (What kind of books do you like to read? Who is one person who has influenced you?).
After the competition, eight older men, executives or members of the board of directors, talked to everyone about how valuable their young employees are to the company and how English is so important to everyone’s work. They went on and on for about one hour. Finally, some of the execs took the judges and the winner of the competition out for dinner at a nice hotel down the street where we had a huge feast of some local vegetable and duck dishes, three kinds of local fish, and steak, shrimp, and squid.

On April 30th I went to Changzhou and spent most of May 1st there before coming back to Nanjing for some English classes on the second. The weather was really nice and hot that weekend. Since it was a three-day weekend for the Labor Day holiday, the subway to the train station was packed (it was so crowded, stuffy, and hot that a woman next to me fainted). The train to Changzhou was also packed. Even though I bought my ticket nearly a week ahead of time, all the seats were sold out so I was given a “standing ticket.” I’ve never been relegated to a standing ticket before, but a nice family with a young girl crammed into three seats and offered their fourth seat to me. They were coming from an inland province to go see the World Expo in Shanghai and were pleased to have a chance to chat with me.

I stayed in the old place where I used to live in Changzhou. My three old roommates are all still living there, although the school has moved to a newly built campus. I had a fun night with them and then had a picnic and played Frisbee and soccer in a park the next morning. I spent the afternoon in downtown Changzhou, which wasn’t very pleasant because it was full of people and loud construction. I went to two large parks but could never find a quiet spot and was never left alone. When many people are off of work and school all at the same time, the public spaces in China’s cities become overwhelmed with people. National holidays also coincide with shopping sales, which makes the city crowds even worse.

Lately I have found some time to get out and do some serious running again. It feels good to have really warm weather and be active again. There are some minor running events in Nanjing and I may join one of the big marathons in the fall with a friend and do a half marathon. Last weekend Nanjing Normal University had a sports meet for graduate students. I missed the one for undergraduates last year because of work, but this time I rearranged my Saturday English classes and joined the sports meet for the opening ceremony and competed in two events. The opening ceremony was very official and highly coordinated, like most events in China, whether big or small. One by one, a group of 20-30 students representing a different college or department and dressed in uniforms and carrying banners marched around the track and paused at the main stands to do a brief performance. My classmates were told to wear something representative of our home country. I was told to wear a suit but choose to wear a T-shirt, running shoes, and shorts instead. Only some of the girls in my class from different Asian countries wore traditional outfits. I thought my Nike shorts and Asics running shoes were typical enough for American dress. I did the long jump and my best jump was 4.8 meters, which was okay (around 10th place) but turned out to be about a meter short of the longest jump of the day. My other event was the long distance run, which was 1500 meters. A few days before all of the runners had to go to the university clinic to have our heart (an EKG) and blood pressure checked. I’ve encountered so many ridiculous things in China that nothing really surprises me anymore. It was hard not to laugh however, when a nurse asked me if I thought I could run 1.5 kilometers and needed to do this health check just to make sure. I just said “yes,” and didn’t bring up the fact that I’ve run a marathon – 42 kilometers – without a problem. I was in the last heat, and there was one guy with the look of a fast and extremely fit runner, who also turned out to be from the sports and kinesiology department, and he blew us all away. I came in third out of 15 runners. There was no final heat and I’m not sure where my time stood among all the runners. It was a fun time and I hope to get a lot more running in before the rainy season starts. In June it’s often in the 90s and it rains almost every day. The weather in May is quite ideal, however, and it has been that way so far.

There are some recent pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59071041@N00/

A piece about the English competition: http://www.zshcr.com.cn/news_view.asp?id=2523

25

I'm now 25 years old, which is a milestone that warrants some reflection as I'm no longer in my early 20s, I'm much closer to 30 than my teenage years, and have already lived a full quarter of a century.

This semester I've been taking graduate level courses in Chinese and education. My teachers last semester suggested that I apply for a scholarship and in the middle of the school year it was not possible to apply for the undergraduate Chinese language program. I had completed year two and was going to go on to year three of the language classes. There were ten spots available for spring enrollment in a relatively new program - a master's in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. The classes are more challenging than the language classes I was in before because they're lectures and involve a some independent reading, writing, presentations and projects. My classmates all have very good levels of Chinese so it's pushing me to work harder and keep up. As a teacher, I also find the classes quite useful because our courses cover education related topics such as pedagogy, second language acquisition, and cross-cultural communication. There are no universities that I know of in China that offer an MA in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages), so an MA in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages is an adequate substitute, not to mention that everything is conducted in Chinese and with a scholarship it's free and includes a small monthly stipend on the side. My classmates are pretty diverse, coming Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia and the Ukraine), South Asia (Sri Lanka), central Asia (Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia). There is one other American and we are the only students who's home country is in the western hemisphere and we're the only native English speakers.

In recent weeks I've been busy with my old job teaching little kids, though I've cut down my hours and now have started tutoring high school students at Nanjing Normal University through a training center that helps prepare students to study abroad. I will become more involved there this summer when I have more time and when summer classes will be organized for SAT and TOEFL exam preparation. There may also be AP classes depending on what AP subjects students plan to take the exams for.

We had midterm exams in late April and now I'm working on a project and two papers due at the end of the semester in June.

It's really warm and so far pretty dry. It is not uncommon to have temperatures in the 80s during the day and in the 70s at night now. June is the wettest month of the year, when it rains nearly every evening, so I'm waiting for the regular rainstorms to come soon.