words
chapter eleven @ 2001 May
life in suzhou - part I
my first time in Suzhou
I first came to Suzhou in the summer of 1998 while on summer vacation from Jinzhou Teachers' College. I spent the summer teaching at a "Summer English Camp" sponsored by a Suzhou International Foreign Language School, a private primary and secondary school on the outskirts of Suzhou. In 1999, I returned to teach at Suzhou University and Suzhou Zhongshan Technical
College. I lived in Suzhou from February, 1999 until February, 2000.
Suzhou is a great city - very interesting, clean (by China standards), and lots of culture. You can learn more about Suzhou in Chapters 8, 9 and 10.
For Chapters 11 and 12, I thought I'd collect some of my favorite stories (and some of my favorite people) from my life in Suzhou. There are a lot more stories to tell. I guess you'll have to wait for the book.
Suzhou is great - a beautiful city, nice people and lots of fun. Suzhou International Foreign Language School a/k/a SIFLS, it's acronym (pronounced like "syphilis"), on the other hand, sucked. It's a privately-owned K through 12 school for rich kids. The president is allegedly a Chinese-American but his English is so poor God (or the Democratic Party) only knows
how he obtained U.S. citizenship. The huge picture of him shaking hands with President Clinton which hangs in the school office and this article may explain that. His much younger wife is the school's principal. Her education credentials, I believe, are limited to the fact that she once attended school when she was growing up.
Nevertheless, they built this huge, tacky campus in the middle of the rice fields outside Suzhou and they have convinced large numbers of wealthy parents both in China and Taiwan to part with large amounts of RMB for their child's education. Sending your child to SIFLS is kind of like joining a country club in the U.S. You pay an initiation fee (in the tens of
thousands of RMB) and for that, you get the privilege of paying even more RMB in tuition.
But a country club, SIFLS is not. It looks like someone's idea of what it would be like if Disneyland built a school in the middle of a rice field... But without the amenities.
Disney on Rice
Photo Copyright © 1998 Suzhou International Foreign Language School
We went 5 days with no electricity and only occasional water. This was in the middle of August when daily temperatures were 100+ degrees (40 C). Not only were the air-conditioners out of service, you couldn't shower either to relieve the heat. (Some of the high school brats found a solution - using daddy's credit card, they went into Suzhou, got hotel rooms and
just skipped classes). Disneyland was never like this.
Amidst the rice fields outside Suzhou
rises a large, Disneyesque school called
Suzhou International Foreign Language School
a/k/a SIFLS (pronounced like "syphilis").
Photo Copyright © 1998 Suzhou International Foreign Language School
I arrived in July, 1998 along with a crew of really cool Americans and a Canadian. They had all just graduated from college and were doing the "teach-in-China-for-the-summer" gig. This is a popular and growing thing here and more and more westerners are doing it as a way to see China for a couple of months and do some good at the same time.
(A lot of the regular foreign teachers here complain about "these backpackers coming here to teach" but you won't hear this old regular teacher complaining. There is a real need for any kind of interaction with foreigners all across China. Anyone, young or old or in-between who wants to do something useful, interesting and worthwhile for a month or two in China, I
highly encourage them to come and contribute. Go to my Links page for further info (and that's as close to an advertisement as you'll find on my web pages, folks - but it's free!).)
Suzhou was hot and green and beautiful and we were ready to go.
Our Su Live Krew:
Bryan from Florida. I met Bryan in Jinzhou where he was teaching at a school on the other side of town. He had been in China for a couple of years already and was actively studying Chinese and could converse with anyone on the street. He wasn't doing anything for the summer of '98 so I told him about this teaching gig at SIFLS and he signed on.
Jennifer, a Canadian from Vancouver who was the kindest, gentlest soul I have ever met, and who would go on to post-graduate study back home. I hope she never forgets her China experience because she, of all the people, Chinese and foreign, whom I have met on my three + year odyssey here in China, embodies the best of all cultures. In a perfect world, she would
be Ambassador of the Universe.
Billy and Sharon from Ohio and PA. Billy was the first person I have met in China who could kick my butt in basketball. He and Sharon convinced the school they were married so they could room together. (UPDATE: They are now married and living happily in Philadelphia where she is pursuing a post-grad degree at U Penn and Billy is teaching Chemistry in a Philly
High School.) Billy had a Sony Camcorder with Infrared and many a night Billy, Sharon and I would wander up the road to the local convenience store, and buy some beer, sit outside the store where the owner had plugged in a TV and Video Recorder and watch video movies with the locals - the countryside answer to the "drive-in" movie. Billy would record it all on
video. And back at the school, in the dark of the midnight, he's use that infrared feature to record the rats running under (what they thought) was the cover of darkness. But see my next story on THAT problem.
David, who reminded me a lot of myself when I was his age. He liked to do his own thing. (Hell, what do I mean "when I was his age"? I haven't changed!) David had actually planned to continue teaching when the summer ended and had a job at a university in western China, but I think he got hooked on the "benefits" of Eastern China while we were in the
Suzhou-Shanghai area. He really wanted to stay there when the summer ended. Then he was off to Italy, last I heard. David? You out there brother? Your Suzhou friends miss you!
Robert, a reticent, but talented guy. Robert was going on to begin law school at Washington and Lee and was studying mandarin. Perhaps law school will change him (I hope not!) but Robert was too quiet, I'm afraid, to become a future everyday lawyer. On the other hand, he has all the makings of becoming a superlative diplomat in the future if that's the course he
chooses: quiet, studious, hard-working (his SIFLS classes were always diligently prepared), and observant. He would quietly watch as the rest of us went about our business. A potential American Ambassador to China in, say, 2030.
Roxanne, the absolute, 180 degree, polar opposite of Robert. We shared in common the same alma mater - Notre Dame - but I am 23 years her elder. She would go on from our SIFLS summer to teach in western China. From there, who knows?
Mary Ann Jackson from Minnesota - she came along on the trip to Suzhou. She never came to China to teach (perhaps in the future she'll reconsider). She just accompanied the others from the U.S. to China as they did the short-list tour (Xi'an, Wuhan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou). She stayed but 4 or 5 days at SIFLS and then returned to her regular rock in
Minneapolis where she's an editor for Unisys. Still, she got a taste of China and saw that she might someday make a difference if she can spare a few months or a year teaching here. I hope to run into her again in China someday.
Though we got here in mid July, we were able to meet two of SIFLS' regular foreign teachers before they headed out for THEIR summer travels: Stephen from Australia and Lynn from New York. They were also cool and were invaluable in clueing us in on the good (Suzhou) and the bad (SIFLS).
Krew and the Gang in the Suzhou New District
(temperature circa 104 ºF - 40ºC)
(L to R): Jennifer, Robert, Billy & Sharon, Roxanne (hiding in the arc) and David
Mano ã Ratto ã Catto
Our first impression of SIFLS: Rats..... Everywhere. Big. Arrogant. Cocky.
Even in the cafeteria, they had the guts to strut, as in walk - not run, into the cafeteria while we were all eating. Here I am referring to the furry, four-legged, long-snouted, long-tailed kind. Lao Shu 老鼠!
One day, I was dumping my lunch tray into the slop bucket after lunch when I saw this huge rat just sitting there under the bucket. He just looked at me like, "Thanks for cleaning your tray and emptying the leftovers in MY slop bucket. You can leave now, boy!."
So I did. Real fast!
One night not too long after I got here, I was on my computer when one slipped under the door and into my room. I caught a glimpse of fur shoot from the doorway and I looked up and saw him disappear into the bathroom. So I grabbed the baseball bat I had brought with me from Jinzhou. I peeked into the bathroom. No sign of that dirty
rat. I poked the shower curtain, looked in the toilet (western-style, of course-the toilet, that is.) I poked the towels. No sign of him. Perhaps he had slipped out the door while I was poking around. So I put down the bat and walked over to the sink and flicked the water on to wash my sweaty brow (yeah, I'll admit it! Rats scare me and I was sweating a bit.) As the
water swished on........ WAHHH!!!!...... the rat jumped out from under the sink! He skittered across the tile floor (he really should get those nails trimmed) and, I swear on Confucius' grave this is true: he took one hop up onto the ledge of the bathtub and, with another hop, he had
scrambled up the water hose and was perched red-eyed on top of the shower head glaring down at me. Like, "Hey, that crap you left at lunch a few days ago wasn't enough. I've come to your room to find the cookies and chocolate. So stay out of my way!"
Rat Haus
The teachers' dorm at SIFLS. My room, second floor, far left.
Site of Mano ã Ratto ã Catto - Suzhou 1998.
Photo Copyright © 1998 Suzhou International Foreign Language School
My knees were shaking, my cheeks aflame. But I jumped up, picked up the bat and took a step towards the tub. The rat had his wits about him - he actually though he was Superman (Mighty Mouse?) at this point because he shot straight up from the showerhead thinking (I guess) he could crash through the drop-ceiling in the bathroom and escape that way (and again, I
swear this is true!). Instead, the ceiling held and he plopped straight down into the tub, and without missing a beat, shot out of the tub, out the bathroom door and into my room. Here's Chuck flailing like an idiot with a baseball bat in hot pursuit. First the rat scoots under the bed but a quick lift of the shabby frame and out he shoots. With a quick leap (this rat
is NOT vertically-challenged) he's into the window curtains. I can hear him scampering around on the outside of the curtains (Ah, now I understand why he shuns pedicures) and can see his lumpy body's impression as he seeks shelter in the curtain's folds.
Hah! Plan 1: A prize enfolded in fabric and I with a large stick. Hey, I'm multi-cultural, A rat and a bat. I decide to play piñata with my new friend. I almost win. Almost. I get a few choice hits in, but not enough. And while I'm spanking the curtains on the right side, I see him slip out from the left side and scamper back across the room and back into the
bathroom. He seems a little tired, but so am I. I run over and slam the bathroom door. But first.... an excerpt from an e-mail home around that time ....
It's summer at SIFLS and only two of the regular, full time teachers are here. Our crew, a gang of 8, are only here for the summer. The two regular teachers, Stephen and Lynn have already filled us in about SIFLS. Among a myriad of other problems in teachers' conditions at SIFLS (pay, teaching hours, living conditions, treatment, etc) they had
to complain for months on the rat problem before the school finally deigned to listen and then attempt to solve the problem in typical fashion. (Here, let me say that having lived and worked here for three years, I feel qualified to say that in many instances, administrators in China adopt the following approach to problem-solving: (a) state the problem doesn't
exist; (b) hope the problem doesn't exist; (c) take you out to "have a meal" in the hopes that YOU forget the problem doesn't exist; (d) realize [but not admit] that the problem does exist but hope you forget it and stop bothering them about it; (e) tell you "it doesn't matter"-the problem will go away. It rarely does go away; (f) hope and pray the problem will go
away [Again, it rarely does]; (g) try again to take you out for "a meal" hoping against hope that you, too, will forget about it; (h) deal with the problem in the easiest, least expedient and least costly way-which means wasting still more effort and money on convincing you that (i) it isn't really a problem, and (ii) you shouldn't worry about it because "when in
Rome, do as the Romans do". Rather than actually addressing the problem head on and solving it, many administrators here prefer the "Hey don't worry about it, this is China, things will work out, OK?" mode. Which is why at any given moment of any given day in any given local administrative office you will find (a) the "big bosses" are still at lunch 3 hours later
eating, drinking and singing; and (b) the rest of the staff is back at the office holding down the fort-while sitting at their desks reading newspapers, drinking tea, and playing mahjong in the back room.
But I digress.
So, back to Rat v. Chuck. I decide on a new course of action: Plan Two. After numerous complaints, the solution that SIFLS had at last come up with on the Lao Shu problem was, of course, a cat!
(A cheap, easy, quick, and - I guess if it wasn't successful - a delicious and nutritional solution, too.)
The school had given the teachers' building a cat a few months earlier. Of course, everyone liked the cat so we kept it on the 4th floor where the kitchen/lounge was. It liked being there because there was lots of tuna fish in the pantry. We had lots of tea and newspapers and the Video CD machine was hooked up to the TV there so we could all hang on 4, sit on the
couch, sip tea, eat popcorn, watch movies or read....and stroke the cat. A cat's dream job, no doubt.
Meanwhile, the rats were running rampant around the first three floors. So back to the original set ..... The Lao Shu is now securely locked in my bathroom. I scamper up to the fourth floor and grab the cat. "Time to go to work cowboy!" I said to him as I dragged him away from his tuna fish, green tea and newspaper.
I took him back to my apartment on the second floor, opened the bathroom door, tossed him in (actually, I slid him in gently for you PETA readers, no animals were harmed in this scenario) and waited for natural instincts to go to work......And waited.....And waited......No hint of scuffle could I discern. No screeching, no skittering, no scrambling around
(remember, that rats nails screeching along the tile would drive a spinster batty). Nothing!
I waited ten minutes for the cat to do it's job. Fifteen minutes. Now twenty minutes later and no sound from the bathroom. So I opened the door and peaked in. The cat was sitting right where he had begun - squatting in the middle of the bathroom. An approps pose, this being China and all. The rat? He had regained the high ground. He was again perched on top of the showerhead. The cat was looking at the rat
like, "Hey, dude, you messed up my thing. I was on the 4th floor eating tuna fish, watching the VCD and you gotta come in here and mess with my crib." The rat is looking at the cat, like "Hey, bro, I was just trying to score some chocolate. Gimme slack and I'll score you some, too."
The cat, to it's credit, didn't seem to be buying that. But that was as far as he was willing to go: "I'm not going to eat you, but you ain't getting past me either. I mean, I have to save face with my laoban. A diplomatic deadlock had seem to have been reached in my bathroom.
That's all well and good and peachy and keen for the rat and the cat, but hey! This is MY Crib! So on to Plan 3.
In July, 1998, my spoken Chinese wasn't too good. It was - to be honest -horrible. One of the Gang of 8 was a good friend of mine who had also been teaching in Jinzhou at another school there. Bryan's Chinese was really good. So I knocked on his door and asked him to accompany me to tell the maintenance staff
that I had a potential hostage situation in my apartment: A large rat was attempting to gain control of my apartment by holding the bathroom, the cat, and by extension, me hostage to his whims. [Post 9/11, Bush Regime edit: One of the Gang of 8 was a good friend of mine who had also been teaching in Jinzhou at another school there. Bryan's Chinese was really good. So I knocked on his door and asked him to accompany me to tell the
maintenance security staff
that I had a potential hostage situation terrorist in my apartment: A large TERRORIST rat was attempting to gain control of my apartment by holding the bathroom, the cat, and by extension, me hostage to his whims terrorist demands.] Westerners will not admit this freely, unless under duress, but if you seize the western-style commode, all else will fall into your control in short order. And that's how I
saw the Cat and Rat predicament. They were holding me hostage to my western toilet. [Which is why I refuse to refer to the American EP-3 plane crew as "hostages". If the Chinese really wanted to make them hostages, they'd have put them in accommodations with squat holes for toilets and THEN made them sing "Welcome to the Hotel California!"]
Cat v. Rat were at a standoff. And in my bathroom of all places. So I enlisted Bryan's help and he and I went to the custodian's building. We aroused him from his sleep (or mahjong game) and Bryan in perfect Chinese explained the foreigner's predicament to him. "The "laowai" has a rat in his room who seems to have no intention of vacating."
"What? You don't have rats in America!?!" he declaimed. If he would have spoken English, he would have added, "So deal with it!" But he didn't.
"Well, yeah, we do, but we don't give them the run of the house," was my response and when Bryan translated it for him things fell into place.
The custodian shook his head, grabbed his keys, and followed us over to the teachers' building. The whole way he was shaking his head and (probably) cursing under his breath. "Foreigners Fe!" Or worse.
When we arrived at my room, he laughed at the baseball bat resting against the wall. Then he went straight to the bathroom, threw open the door and the rat, the cat and the rest of us all jumped up! The rat dropped off the showerhead as pretty as you please, skittered across the floor, and shot out the apartment door (which The Custodian had smartly left open) and
out and down the hall. He no doubt skittered into one of the other rooms down the hall. But in China, problem-solving exists, if it exists at all, in simply hoping the problem goes away. No thought at all is given as to where the problem went away too, and worse, what caused the problem in the first place. "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" isn't a Chinese proverb.
But it's the truest proverb I can quote for what life is like in China. DENOUEMENTThe cat breathed a sigh of relief and scampered back up to the fourth floor to tea and stroking.
And the Custodian gave us a "Can I get back to my mahjong game, now?" look and I was, like, "Yessir!".
Bryan was looking a little happy, because of his excellent translation work, but a little concerned, I think, because that rat had run down the hallway and who knows which room it had scooted into. Maybe his?.
And me? Well, I reflected deeply on this whole incident (as you can tell). On the one hand, I found it kind of stupid that I would worry so much about a large, fat rat running around my room but ......... hey folks, sorry, I did.
On the other hand, I think it is rather funny that I had resort to throwing an untrained cat into the room to solve the problem because what passes for "conventional wisdom" here (and may I point out to all our western readers that "Tom and Jerry" is the most popular cartoon running these days on China TV) is that cats chase rats. And that, buying a cat, was the
cheapest, easiest (the LCD) solution they could come up with, hoping the problem would go away. But let me tell you this, at SIFLS, the rats rule the roost.
Around 1980, Deng Xiao Ping broke 30 years of Maoist thought when he proclaimed that China should open-up to the world and embrace capitalism, albeit with "Chinese characteristics" as he posited. This was anathema to many Party people (they called themselves Communists, after all) and so, when questioned on how to square up the idea of capitalistic trends with
Chinese-Marxist ideals, Deng is reputed to have said, "It doesn't matter if it's a white cat or a black cat. As long as it catches the mouse."
Many people like to quote that brilliant statement these days. As in "Capitalism-Communism! Who cares what it's called. As long as we get we are seeking!" And, in fact, China seems to be progressing firmly upward upon that path. I have been here for 3 years. I can attest that the lives of people, the putong ren, get better almost on a daily basis. Things change in
China these days faster than you can imagine.
Deng said, "It doesn't matter if it's a white cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice."
That SIFLS cat failed the Deng Xiao Ping test. It failed to catch the mouse (rat). But old Deng had it right. Many people in China today have focused on the first part of Deng's proclamation - black cat or white - communism or capitalism. They say, "Hey, it doesn't matter what you call it! Capitalism-Communism. Black-White! Who cares!" But they forget the second
part, it has to catch the mouse.
The problem is that still no one knows how to catch the mouse. But they're working on it.
NOTE: Following the Su Live Krew's Summer of 1998 experience at SIFLS, various complaints about foreign teachers' conditions were registered with the appropriate authorities who followed up on them with SIFLS. Conditions may well be different there now. If you go to teach there now, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Hopefully, the electricity is back on, the water is
running again and a new cat, black or white, is now actively patrolling the premises.
Chuck
PETA DISCLOSURES:
No animals or rodents were harmed in the events chronicled herein .
Other than the canned tuna fish the cat ate, no fish nor cans were otherwise harmed in the events chronicled herein.
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