Helen's Town and School

 

 

Initially, Helen told me that her town was a 5 hour train ride from Harbin.  She neglected to mention that after you get off the train, you have to take a bus for 2.5 hours and then a car for another 30 minutes.

So, in reality, her town is about 8 hours from the nearest major city.  In a country of ubiquitous skyscrapers and overpopulated megacities I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the remoteness of this tiny place.  

In fact, as we made the day-long journey to the tiny village of Dong Da Pao (and I stared out the window for hours on end)there were two things that struck me:

l   I never believed Helen’s (and Erika’s) stories of how beautiful the world could look when covered in snow, but now I can concede that the endless white tundra was truly breathtaking.  I actually couldn’t peel my eyes away.

l   My experience in China has been that there are people EVERYWHERE. It felt so bizarre to travel for hours and to see virtually no one.  It made Helen’s hometown feel so distant and lonesome.

 

The picture on the left is a town that we stopped in about 1.5 hours from Helen's village.  She told me that when she was a teenager she came here occasionally to for shopping and she thought it was SO fancy and awesome. 

I asked: Did you brain just explode the first time you went to Shanghai and you saw the shopping malls?

Helen: Yes.  You can’t believe how different this looks to me now.

Helen’s village is only accessible by water.  In the summer we would’ve had to take a boat across but, since it was winter, her brother-in-law picked us up and drove us across the frozen river.  I took about a million photos of the experience, including the one on the right and the one below of the sun setting on the ice.  

I asked Helen if anyone does any ice fishing but she said no one could afford the machine they would need to cut the ice. 

 
Our first morning in the village we bundled ourselves up and did a little walking tour.  With a population of about 500, it's entirely a farm community with sheep, pigs, chickens, mules (and the occasional rat!) running around everywhere. All of the residents have a garden and pretty much everyone has an outhouse.  A few families have indoor plumbing but most, like Helen’s family, have to go to the public bathhouse every couple of weeks to get cleaned up. 

As we walked through the town, Helen pointed out all of the familiar places from her childhood: her uncle’s old house, the former primary school building, the field where she used to chase her brother and his friends.

She peppered this with colorful stories about rural life; like how her mom regularly tied a rope around her waist and lowered her into the root cellar to get radishes for dinner or how the town store used to set up mahjong tables so people could come and hangout all day, playing with their friends and chatting with people that came into shop.

 
Helen thinks that the town population was closer to 1000 when she was a kid and remembers it as a vibrant place with lots of community gatherings.  However, the Chinese migration phenomenon of the 80’s and 90’s  obviously hit the town hard.  Most young people have left to find work in the big city (many still send money home to help support relatives, though that it becoming increasingly less common.)   

The building above is the home of the town leader. (The guy in the orange hat.)  He saw us from the window and waved us to come inside and say hello.  We found them inside assembling a giant pile of boxes.

They had made thousands of small, frozen dough balls which they were now packing and prepping to take to the city and sell.  We staying for about an hour and helped them pack the boxes, then left with a big bag of dough balls as a thank you.

The dough balls were filled with some kind of fruit or bean.  The boxes we were packing looked legit, if I were to buy these in a supermarket I'd swear that they came from some factory...but no, they were made in someone's kitchen in a farmhouse in rural China.  Weird how people don't really know where their food comes from.


Everywhere I go in China I've become accustomed to open and unabashed staring and here there was some of that, but mostly I noticed a lot of people quickly averting their eyes whenever I entered a room. (Though conversation would stop and I could feel them staring when I wasn’t looking.)

Even the children would gawk at me like an alien but the second I looked their way they would scowl and look away. 

I mentioned it to Helen and she said, “Ashlee these people are just very shy.  They do not know what to do, I think. Even with me. Those men packing the boxes, I can feel that they really want to talk to me but they don’t know how to start.  They know everyone in this town, they are not used to meeting strangers.”

 

 

I love these people with their little outhouse that says 'WC' on it.  I know they probably mean it unironically but I like to think they're being cheeky.  'WC' is a bit of a stretch for a place where you pee into a hole in the ground.

 

 

 
 
 
 

Helen in front of the school where she used to teach.

One of the things Helen and I were most excited about was visiting her old school.  She had contacted the teachers prior to the trip and asked if she could bring her foreign friend in to teach some English lessons.

The teachers were excited too.  The day before our lesson we visited one of the teachers in her home and she asked if I'd like to just come in and teach for the whole day.  To which I responded, "Uh........."

I had no intention of teaching all day but the morning of the school visit I told Helen we could extend our two hour lesson by adding a craft.  Did she think we could find any craft supplies?

The lesson I had planned was based on a Chinese New Year event I wrote for Disney.  I'd brought with me flashcards for several of the zodiac animals and wanted to teach the students the sentence structures,

"What's this? It's a horse." "Happy New Year!" "Happy Year of the Goat!"

 

Helen and I went to the store (pictured above on the left) to find supplies for making goat hats.  Pickings were slim but I ended up purchasing 13 glue sticks (all they had), markers, clear packing tape, and several pair of scissors.  They didn't have any kind of hard paper so....

we wrangled 20 giant empty cigarette cartons from the owner which we cut up into pieces.

 

(Don't judge me, China doesn't have any sort of anti-tobacco culture.  Nobody batted an eye, I assure you.)

Like most primary schools in China there is a dorm attached to the school where children and teachers can live.  The picture above is the outhouse that's surrounded by ice and lit by a naked light bulb.  We had to scramble out there to it at night after dinner.  It's awesome.....

I can't imagine being a teacher and sending kids who have to go to the bathroom out there during class.

 
Helen's old classroom! Most of the classrooms are unused so they're in disrepair.

When Helen was a teacher here she has a full kindergarten class of 30 and the rest of the classes were also full.  Now, with most children being sent to board at primary schools in the city, the school has whittled down to 18 kids.  However, it retains a staff of seven teachers.  In the Communist system it's virtually impossible to fire any of them no matter how redundant their position.

The capitalist in me is horrified by the situation but I should add...the average salary for these teachers is 500RMB a month (the equivalent of about $80).  None of these teachers have above a middle school education.

Student art made from recycled cigarette boxes (see! I told you!) and one of the two classrooms currently in use.

 Chalkboard in the Kindergarten/1st grade/2nd grade classroom.  Also a poster that hangs on the wall.  The right side is a common chart used for checking vision. (Because the students are too young to read Chinese characters).  The left side is instructions for facial massage excercises.  I've been in Chinese primary schools where during different parts of the days students stop what they are doing and participate in group facial massage while numbers are counted on the intercom.

Pictures of our lesson and craft time.  We played lots of fun English games (basically versions of Hot Potato, Telephone, Slap Jack, etc.) sang an English song about New Year's, and had a great time! I haven't been in the classroom in awhile and it was good to remember that the Disney English teaching methods really do work when executed properly. 

All of the students were producing the target language pretty well!

Considering that they recieve very little English instruction and then it's mostly just reading and writing, these little smarties were learning fast!

 

I was totally enchanted by this little darling.  She didn't stop smiling the entire time we were there and   spoke every word confidently duing the lesson.  Love that sweet rainbow and stars she's drawing on her hat.

(She's the smallest one, in the front, in the group picture below)

 

 In the end it was about and hour of hanging out with the teachers, 2.5 house of instruction, and 30 minutes of picture taking and autograph signing (I'm not kidding, kids were scambling to have Helen and I sign everything that they own.)

Days before we left for the trip I called over to a friend in the Disney Corporate Citizenship Department, told him what I was doing and asked if he had some stickers I could take to the kids.  An hour later this giant box of 30 pencil cases was delivered to my desk! These were AWESOME pencil cases with calculators, magnifying glasses, rulers, and more inside! I carried them to Da Dong Pao in a giant backpack and they were a hit. 

Helen's mom kept bringing them out to show all her friends and neighbors. (There was more than one request from friends who wanted to take them to their children and grandchildren.)  We passed these out to the kids at the end of the lesson with some Monster's University souvenir cards that my boss had given me for them.

 These cutie little twin boys followed us home from the school, walking about ten feet behind us.  I called them over to take a photo and then we waved goodbye.  Later, we were at Helen's and I looked out the window to see their two little heads peering at me over the wall in the front yard.  They'd snuck back to linger at her front gate and duck down when I waved at them.
  
Helen called at them to come inside and gave them tea.  I used my very poor Chinese to ask them they'e names, how old they are, which brother was older, did they like Mickey Mouse?, how about Spiderman?, how about Captain America? (Mickey and Captain America were cool but Spiderman was out.) 

After that, I couldn't communicate much with them so Helen happily chatted with them about how much fun they'd had in English class :)

That evening the teachers invited us back to the dorm for dinner.  The kids ate at a nearby table and then ran off to play, wholly unsupervised.

The teachers brought out a giant case of Harbin beer and very, very strong bai jiu (rice wine) which we drank from bowls and they took several pictures of me eating with chopsticks. (It always surprises Chinese people when foreigners eat with chopsticks.)

 

The man on the right is named Ji Wei.  Helen has told me many stories about him, once telling me that she thinks that she never could’ve left her town and gone to the big city if she hadn’t met him.  He was so different from anyone else she knew.  Knowing him helped her dream that she could live a different life.

Probably the most hilarious person I've met in China.  This man has a reputation for being gregarious, talkative, and down right eccentric.  He was desperate to talk to me and resorted to acting out elaborate charades to try and communicate.  I died laughing as he made Chaplin-esque facial expressions at me, scrambled around for every English word he knew, and force fed me drinks saying, “Cheers! Cheers!”

Helen was beaming.  Sitting at the table she was surrounded by a thousand old memories of her six years at that school.  Then she was just a teenager, looking up to colleagues 20 years older than her. Now, she had returned a worldy and accomplished adult.  I had the feeling she was so proud to finally be sitting there, not only as the equal of these teachers but as their honored guest. 

 

 

 

After a long dinner, Ji Wei called a friend with a car to come and get us and we drove about 15 minutes to a nearby village.  There, he and another teacher which he had given the English nickname ‘Old Fox’, took us to a small ‘barbeque shop’.  This was basically a room with a mahjong table, a glass case of snacks and drinks, and a hibachi grill on the porch.

 

There he told everyone in the room that I was his American friend and entertained us all with more beer, stories about living in the countryside and silly charades.

 

We stayed for several hours and towards the end of the night I became distracted by the woman cooking and serving.  She was sweet faced and spoke quietly, walked with a difficulty that I thought might indicate some kind of cerebral palsy.  She spent the evening shuffling in and out of the front door where she knelt grilling sticks of various types of animal parts and delivering them to tables with small pots of cumin.  When I ordered a beer she didn’t make eye contact with me and barely spoke above a whisper.

 

I kept thinking, what on earth would it be like to live way out here in the middle of nowhere China, with a physical disability and serve snacks all day?  I can’t imagine a life more different from mine.

 

When the other customers had left this woman quietly found a seat on a bench about 10 feet away.  I could feel her staring at me but every time I’d look her direction she’d quickly look down at her hands.    

Finally I told Helen, “This woman is so funny.  She can’t stop staring at me.”

 

Helen: Of course, Ashlee.  This is probably the only chance she will have in her life to see a foreigner.

Me: You think so?

Helen: I know it.  Ji Wei and all of those teachers, none of them have ever seen a foreigner before.

Me: Really? You think none of them have? But they can go to the bigger towns now.

Helen: No, Ji Wei told me in his 42 years he has never met a foreigner.  He said he thinks this is one of the most important moments of his life.  He is very proud to have you here.   

As we left, I tried to tell the woman in Chinese, “Mei nv, this food was very good.  Thank you.”  She sort of half smiled and looked away fast without saying anything.  My American accent was so strong she may not have understood, or maybe I was just making her nervous.