Chinese Countryside: Day 2

Aside from the Netherlands wasting my valuable time by losing to Spain at four in the morning, today turned out to be a great day. We spent the morning and early afternoon at Song Jia Zhuang Elementary (above), a boarding school which serves students in grades three through six from 27 surrounding villages. Principal Li, a charismatic man somewhere in his forties (?) welcomed us into his office with plentiful offerings of fruit and tea, and gave us a brief overview of the school's stats. Believe it or not, Song Jia Zhuang is a boarding school. Students are allowed to go home once a week to visit their families, and spend the rest of their time studying the usual elementary school staples – math, science, grammar, etc. – plus a few unique ones like morality. Shudder. Here's a picture of the schoolyard:

In general, daily life for the 600 something students at Song Jia Zhuang proceeds as it would for any American child. There are no assembly lines churning out math whizzes, no propagandists calling on students to surpass the US, no evil overlords bearing down on them to ace every test. The kids like to play and have fun, and surprisingly none of the questions they had for me were education-related. I was expecting extensive inquiries about the American university system, but all we got were things like, 'Are we like American kids? What are the differences?' and, 'What do American kids like to do for fun?' I was not prepared to answer them. Struggling, I offered, 'Well, American elementary school students don't speak Chinese...' missing the obvious, 'They don't board,' but oh well. Another difference I discovered later lies in the workload. Each student has 40 minutes of homework per class per night. That's about what I had in high school on a busy night, but looking at their smiling faces you'd never know.

We traveled next to Xigubu, a village that was established in what used to be a fort/castle/lookout. Constructed almost entirely of earthen bricks, the place is a perfect demonstration of China's current position at the confluence of ancient and modern lifestyles, as you can see here:

Everyone was really excited to see us, and all welcomed us into their homes to look around. Each consists of a main courtyard where families plant subsistence crops, and an indoor part where people live one family per room and sleep and eat on a giant bed called a kang. In keeping with the theme of defying expectations, the rooms also had electricity, TV, and computers. It was absolutely not what I imagined. We quickly made friends with some little kids, who followed us around for the rest of the day asking us questions and making fun of our rudimentary Chinese skills. At the edge of the village was a temple, from which you could get the sense that Xigubu would become a tourist attraction in a few years as soon as the rest of the world realized it existed. With time to spare, we wandered aimlessly through it until dinner.

For dinner we ate mule.

After dark, we gathered with pretty much everyone else in town at a giant outdoor stage to watch a kind of performance that would never fly in America – several farmers dressed in 'fireproof' suits launching ladle-fulls of molten iron at a stone wall, which erupted into fireworks upon impact. Amazing. Anyone watching the looks on our awestruck faces would have thought us no older than the ten-year-olds we were with. By the end of the night, we had become such great friends with these kids that we decided to give them English names – one of our favorite if not slightly imperialistic pastimes of this trip. It was then that something strange occurred that I still can't wrap my mind around. The boy whose name I chose, Cody, became immediately quiet and reserved after receiving it. He seemed not to like it for some reason that I couldn't understand, nor would he talk to me about the problem. Things got awkward from there, and I left that night not really knowing what had transpired. I got different answers from every teacher I asked, 'The name has no meaning to him', 'Boys are shy when it comes to English', and 'Maybe it was too hard for him to pronounce' to name a few. The whole experience left a sour enough taste in my mouth to wash away the delicious muley flavor that lingered long after dinner had ended. Oddly enough, although I'd been speaking and interacting in a foreign language the whole time, in a village I'd never been to, this was the only part of the day I feel like I didn't comprehend.

再见
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