Thinking about the teachers at IUP

Sorry about the retrospective entries...I just left Taipei to return to Yale--maybe I will write a Taipei vs. Beijing entry soon.

For inspiration, I looked through the topic suggestions from the Light Fellowship--I thought about one related to contact with local Chinese people. Frankly speaking, IUP kept me too busy to meet that many local Chinese, so I couldn't answer the Light questions perfectly, but I'll talk a bit about what I did learn from associating with my teachers at the program on a daily basis, since they were the Chinese I had the most contact with.

In language class, you generally don't end up having full-fledged discussions about politics or anything else, although Bush and the war in Iraq seemed to frequently come up. My teachers were always quite tactful & careful not to assert their own assumptions when phrasing their questions asking us to talk about the education system, etc. in the U.S. I did have classmates mention teachers who frequently made comments such as, "Aren't all Americans really wealthy?" So, what do they really think about Americans after all? I'm not sure.

Almost all of the teachers were young and female, and the age/gender factor made it easy to feel comfortable having classes with my teachers. Although I never spent time with any of the teachers outside of class, I was quite chatty especially with my morning one-on-one teacher, who I saw for an hour everyday.

While we didn't have in-depth conversations, I felt that my teachers formed a truly helpful contrast to the Beijingers who I encountered outside of IUP. On the street, everyone comes off as aggressive and rude. People never apologize when they bump into you; if they see you coming from the other direction, they never move to the side; and bus & car drivers really don't seem to be concerned about whether or not they come within an inch of running you over. But as one of my teachers said, Chinese people may be willing to be rude & cheat you if they don't you, but once you know them & are considered a friend, they will suddenly be incredibly kind and generous.

I highly doubt any of my Chinese teachers would cheat anyone, whether or not they knew them, but their kindness was definitely a sort of soothing balm on the general hectic craziness of Beijing. Since I saw three of my teachers everyday, when I started to get sick & miss class, they were the most concerned. I spent all of my spring semester at Yale being afraid that my professors thought that I was lazy, and I had the same worries at first when I started missing school at IUP. But instead, they were the ones to urge me to take care of myself and try seeing a doctor. I still remember the hugs they gave me before I left! In any case, it's good to know that there are good people there for you in a foreign country when you're having a hard time.