This article was written by Sara Duncan Widness. It is the first in a series of features where we highlight individuals whose lives have been altered by travel.
Over the years I have become accustomed to luxurious, sybaritic travel. My work requires taking journalists to elegant hotels and resorts, work that is cushioned by expense accounts and hovering hosts. So imagine this summer the surprises of a four-week foray to China to teach English to Chinese youngsters – an adventure laden with flies, probably fleas, grain-stuffed pillows, kids who spit in the classroom and bad chalk. I didn’t realise at the time, but I was the one being taught a lesson – that some things in life you only learn while travelling.
Forewarned that this would be a difficult journey, the only concessions to “haute” that tagged along were an expensive backpack on wheels and a black leather carry-on embossed with a client’s emblem. This carry-on, a client’s gift to me for good work done the previous year, was to become a reminder of past lives.
The Plan
The initial premise of the trip, as organized by a Chinese-American woman with altruistic ties to her homeland, was for a group of 12 Americans to travel for just over a month on buses full of middle-school youngsters exploring China while helping the kids hone their English as they began a several-year preparation targeted at becoming hosts of the 2008 Olympics.
Doubtless, admonishments against spitting would have been part of that curriculum. But there wouldn’t have been blackboards requiring the use of lousy chalk.
And the Reality
However, best laid plans for travel and, it would be come clear, for life immediately went awry. Upon arrival in Beijing and after the first night of sleeping on grain-filled pillows, three of us were immediately siphoned off from our group and assigned to teach in Heze, southeast of Beijing, far away from tourist sites but very close to kids.
The remainder of the group would be toured for two weeks and then replace us while we toured. Quid pro quo. We would teach for two weeks and as compensation tour – all expenses paid — for two weeks, compliments of China. Turns out that this was a monetary transaction between Heze’s New Century School that paid a bounty for our heads to a Chinese tour operator. Mr. Lee underestimated the Americans’ tolerance for fleas and stretched his budget amongst us as far as it would go. And he neglected to advise before we left North America with airline tickets we had paid for that the intent of the program had changed.
Settling into a Routine
Chinese lore is big on ghosts. And that’s what the Olympic host hopefuls and an extended bus tour with the kids became to us as we three established a routine in Heze that included five hours of teaching from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. including Saturdays. There were always three daily cafeteria-style meals with minimally three green vegetables at each, varied by eggs and rice depending on the time of day. We each had a roommate, mine the Beijing University girl assigned to smooth our way, who referenced Mao in reverent terms while dreaming of leaving China.
Heze days fell into a pattern of early rising, perhaps spending a few minutes looking out the seventh story, barred (against what?) window of the dorm room in the New Century School. The view was of cement and cinder block dwellings replete with winged-roof spirits, a view leading down a dusty path to a canal with a solid surface of garbage. Heze days were hazy, with blood red suns infrequently breaking through the pollution.
Reading became part of the routine — about China in fact and fiction so that an understanding of the world’s most populous, 6,000-year-old culture began to emerge. This reading competed with the self-imposed “lights out” at 9 p.m., as my roommate watched her favorite television programs from Japan translated into Chinese.
There was something bordering on excitement as we daily witnessed the progress of a road outside New Century School. In two weeks this road was transformed from two feet of cement-colored dust upon our arrival to dust suffused with water to wet dust covered with hay and plastic to compact the dust. Eventually the road was surfaced. Most of this effort took place with scant benefit of heavy equipment as bicycles and vegetable carts skimmed across the dust.
There was something resembling accomplishment as we daily imposed on the headmaster, who had a car, to drive us through the dust to a hotel in Heze (a town purportedly of 8 million people that isn’t even on most maps of China). At the hotel the bartender translated our three-fingers signal and poured each a glass of red wine. We three then commiserated over the lack of materials to work with, spitting kids and bad chalk. We wove in victories that were our daily due: students who used prepositions correctly or who sang a song in English or who learned to “think out of the box” while writing an essay on “my life as a mountain” after pondering the assignment for 30 minutes. It appeared that the creative side of their schooling – at least in English — had never before been challenged.
Lessons Learned
There was something heralding contentment in being away from clients, business worries and the electronic world. However, peeking onto a computer in the headmaster’s office revealed that I might be justified in my worries over business as problems back at the office had multiplied while clients hadn’t since I left home two weeks before.
Excitement? Accomplishment? Contentment?
For the first time in years my focus was on people — not tasks; on faces — not machines; on communication –not reports; on children – not clients.
A friend who has sometimes been part of my now-endangered luxury travel cautions that this essay may preclude my rebuilding a client base because business folk who adhere to politically correct may perceive this as too outspoken.
However, just as with many Chinese with whom I interacted at New Century School and while traveling, I feel new urges to assume a more liberated stance, to distance myself from ways of being that posit tasks, reports, machines and clients as more important than people, faces, communication and children.
If achieving this freedom means climbing seven flights of steps several times a day because New Century School’s elevator shuts down to conserve energy, or wishing with the students that the sun would break through the fossil-fuel-imposed tarnish, or squatting over hole-in-the-ground latrines, or performing for two weeks with nary an English book in sight – then China’s New Century School accomplished what a vacation’s supposed to.
If achieving this freedom means conducting a New England-style “town meeting” in a Heze classroom to demonstrate a way of decision-making, or receiving the kids’ kudos for singing American songs in an impromptu karaoke evening, or being part of the school’s finale where students played ancient Chinese instruments and demonstrated their mastery, in English, of an Ibsen sketch – then China’s New Century School accomplished what a vacation’s supposed to.
I had gained a new grip on reality. This reality became even more profound as I gripped my embossed, black leather carry on, that vestige of luxury, and checked myself into the Art Deco-world of Shanghai, ensconced in a multi-star hotel for two nights before the journey home.
Calligraphy Photo by decafinata, sun by jiazi, children by planet love
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This is an inspiring post. I have always found being away from home a great way to learn about myself – what I take for granted, what I can do without and what I’m made of. I wouldn’t have missed any of those lessons for the world, even if they were sometimes hard at the time.
Love the images – both the photo’s and those created by your words…