Surprise, surprise...

On Saturday I had to teach my 3.1 class (my favorite students). Usually I don't teach at all on Saturdays, but this was a special deal because a bunch of parents were on campus, attending classes with their kids. About an hour before class I realized that I hadn't typed anything up to give to the parents as a sort of "welcome to class" formality. I went to the administration building--which houses the one printer and one photocopier on campus, that all 100 teachers share--to quickly type something up. As I was printing out these cheesy and impersonal letters, I was approached by our human resource director--one of two people who met us at the airport when we arrived--who wanted me to follow her to her office. I walked in, and there was our surprise guest, all smiles and mustache. It was an older man, and I had no idea who he was. He was very excited to see me, though, so I pretended that I recognized him, enthusiastically shaking his hand and saying "Ni hao" over and over. He showed me one of my old business cards--one that still said Asian Affairs Center and had my email address written in pen. Then he handed me one of his cards. All in Chinese. The only thing I recognized was a yin yang. I apologetically told both of them that I had to go to class, and they somehow communicated that Mr. Mustache would wait in the office until my class was over. I walked to my office, and I showed the business card to the first person I saw. It was my colleague, Bill, and he explained that the man was a professor of Chinese medicine. I immediately remembered him then.

I ran to my class with a few minutes to spare, and I stood outside the door with all the students' relatives, peeking in at my 3rd graders and their math teacher. According to my schedule, my class was supposed to be from 9:00-9:40. The math teacher went over by about five minutes, though, and had to be asked to finish class. A whole group of people was ushered into my tiny classroom. Not only was the classroom jam-packed with my students; but also with moms, dads, sisters, grandmas and 8 other Chinese teachers. All watching me teach their kids. In Korea, when there was a similar "experiment", it was really funny to watch all the kids clam up and become shy. This was not the case with my students this time, however. Before I even set my bag down or opened my book, little kids were all around me, pulling my arms and hugging me and giving me fake kisses. It was almost like they were proud to show off their foreign teacher to their parents: "look, mom and dad, this is the American lady that I get to see everyday and you don't..." It was a really cool feeling. Bill got up and introduced me to the parents (in Chinese) while I passed out my letters (in English) to all of these people who wanted me to prove myself.

So we started talking about seasons and weather, doing some dialogues from the book, along with some dialogues that I had typed up myself. The day before I had taught them all the "How's the Weather?" song, using their new vocabulary. It went over really well, but I was a little nervous that they wouldn't be able to deliver in front of their parents. But they stood up and sang (screamed) all five verses. Twice. Proudly. It was awesome. There was a Chinese teacher running around the room, taking pictures and video of the kids singing and of all the parents clapping.

After that it was 9:45, and even though I was having a good time with the kids and their parents, I also had a visitor waiting for me. I announced that class was over and that I had to go, and all the Chinese teachers started saying "class is not over. 5 more minutes...10 more minutes..." I showed them my schedule that said 9:00-9:40 and tried to explain that I had a visitor waiting for me. This all went on in front of the parents, so I hope it didn't look too unprofessional. But this day in particular, I wasn't willing to stay later just because I was forced to start later--it wasn't my bad.

Rory was waiting for me in my office. I told him about our visitor, and we walked up to the director's office. It was all a really funny and odd encounter. This man spoke no English, and we speak very, very little Chinese. But he was very friendly. After we had first been in Weihai for (maybe)a week, we took a public bus from downtown back to our school. We sat next to our "surprise visitor" on the bus that day. Luckily, at that time, there was a young woman on the bus who spoke English really well, so she translated for us. The man talked about Chinese medicine and how he would love to teach us some time. I gave him my makeshift business card, we got off of the bus, and we didn't really think anything of it. Until we were sitting across from him in the HR office of our school more than a month later. He had evidently remembered where we worked, and he had hunted us down to formally invite us to his home and to learn Chinese medicine (acupuncture and massage).

It sounds really interesting, so we accepted his invitation, and we will meet him this weekend. We'll have to start learning some more Chinese, though. I'm sure we will learn very specific things, like "needle" and "pain", but overall our Chinese should improve, just from being around this man. We'll see what happens, but how's that for a distinctly Chinese experience? I mean, we can bring back chopsticks and tea sets and things like that as gifts for people when we ultimately leave China, but if we brought back some massage and acupuncture techniques (learned from a real Chinese doctor), that would be pretty cool, too. China rules!