Return to China, Day IV: Fish with Feet, Chinese Brides, Teaching in Chinese

Saturday, March 21: Qingdao, Shandong Province

Crab hunting in the low tidal flats of Qingdao.  . .

It’s a smoggy day! I rise at the absurd and uncharacteristic hour of 4:45 AM.  The morning is ripe for e-mails, preparing my materials, and organizing my luggage.  The breakfast buffet is luxuriant, with Chinese, English, American, and French breakfast items.  Belgian Waffles, tomatoes, baked beans, sushi, boiled greens, dumplings, watermelon, homemade yogurt.  I attack the buffet with abandon.

Mark Rosenblum soon joins me.  Mark is the Principal of the French-American School, northeast of Manhattan in Westchester.  He is a member of our multi- school marketing junket.  Not only he is clever, passionate, stylish, funny, earnest, cosmopolitan, multilingual and Jewish, but he and I have a lot of people in common.  He used to work at La Jolla Country Day with my friend Shannon Cleary, he taught the children of my friends Tammy and Cameron Rooke, and he once applied for a job at Wildwood that my wife ended up taking.  A small world grows smaller. . .

After breakfast Mark and I meet Tomas in the lobby for a morning excursion to old Qingdao.  We taxi west on coast road, cruising by sandy beaches, reef points, and harbors.  The water looks inviting to me, and many pedestrians stroll the sand, but we don’t see a single person swimming at all.  Why don’t any Chinese swim in the sea. . .?

This is the pagoda at the end of the  pier.
Find it on the label of a Tsingtao beer. . .

We disembark on the waterfront at the center of the old city.  This was the heart of the German concession, and indeed the European buildings lining the promenade by the sea evoke a sort of Qingdao Bund.  Hundreds and maybe thousands of weekend tourists wash over the roads and the waterfront on this crisp Saturday morning.  The tide is out, and hundreds of Chinese comb the rocks and sand for crabs.  Incredibly there seem to be crabs for everyone.  

A long pier runs out to a two story pagoda temple in the middle of the Bay.  As we turn to walk out on it, we notice all kinds of activity.  An elder woman cackles and throws bread at birds, who just ignore her. Older men in military dress stand above gruesome photos of and of Vladimir Putin laying a bouquet of roses.  Maybe they’re Communist veterans campaigning for pensions?  An elderly Chinese gentleman plays melodramatic music on the zither next to a stylized photo of a young soldier, probably him, while tourists toss coins  We the three foreigners quickly become the main attraction.  A small gaggle of Chinese teenagers interviews Mark, who is a magnet.  With his beard and three piece suit, he does cut a striking figure.

At the end of the pier we enter the pagoda where I see one of the most unsettling sights of my life: Fish with feet!  These strange, lizard-like creatures lie in the bottom of a water tank.  They mostly walk, and sometimes swim, but they have scales and gills.  They are essentially the missing link in life’s passage from sea to land, and I had no idea these mutants existed.  I am shocked, awed, and a little upset.

We stroll back up the pier and down into an underpass where merchants hawk every edible sea creature imaginable.  Shellfish, squid, urchins, oysters, abalone, octopi, flounder, anemone, sea stars, fish balls- it’s all here, and it smells like it too.  My senses are ultra-stimulated.  We emerge back into the central thoroughfare of Old Qingdao and stroll, stroll, stroll.  On a side street we pick up a bag of succulent strawberries and savor every bite.  

We climb a cobble-stone street to the soaring spires of the Catholic Church that overlooks the sea.  During Chairman Mao’s obliteration of culture during the Cultural Revolution, this Church was looted and battered, but it has risen again, and it’s now the premier photo studio for brides to be.  As we approach the Church Plaza we see no less than twenty distinct brides in white and red gowns posing for photo shoots.  Grooms, photographers, minders, entourage: It’s all happening.  We take a seat on a bench to eat bananas, soak in the sunshine, and admire the spectacle.  So many brides. . .

Time to work.  We taxi back to the Crowne Plaza, reset, and then taxi with our Chinese partner, New Oriental Group, to another hotel ballroom.  Hilariously, there is a bacchanalian Chinese wedding taking place in the adjacent ballroom, so as well as eager students and families, there are festive and inebriated men smoking in the hallways and wedding pomp everywhere.  I set up my Maui Preparatory Academy materials in a corner, meet my translator Sophia, accept chocolates and coffee from my hosts, and then survey the room of some fifty students and families.

Chinese Recycling

Stella delivers her polished, professional presentation of her Boston Christian school, and the French-American duo takes their first swing at addressing Chinese parents.  They do a fine job, but it does take some time to finesse these presentations, to understand the Chinese audience, and to realize that the common English level is lower than fluent.

Two days earlier I was asked to teach a sample lesson to these students and parents, to give a flavor of what an American classroom might feel like.  I had stayed up late and woken up early in the days previous to prepare for this moment.  I take the microphone, open my slideshow, and launch into a thirty minute lesson called “What does it take to succeed in America?”, replete with icebreakers, Q@ A, Cornell notes, and more.  It goes over reasonably well, and I take pains to demonstrate that both Barack Obama and Sun Yat Sen studied in Hawai’i in order to prove that one can study in these magical islands and change history.

Sometimes when I'm  teaching in Qingdao,  I have
to break out my air guitar. . .

After the presentation I retire to my table with my translator and my materials, where I spend the following hours speaking with eager, earnest, and bold Chinese students about their hopes to study in the U.S.A.  It’s always an interesting pleasure to speak with these brave young teenagers who dream of moving across the world to better themselves.  I wonder if one day American students will be so courageous to come and study in China. . .

I huff Starbucks coffee and snack on chocolate bites as students barrage me with their hopes and dreams.  Will any of them come to study in Maui?  Who can say?  It’s hard to know, but I’m throwing lots of bait, and they’re fish in the sea, and it’s always possible.

Closing time arrives as the final families slink away.  The Educatius group and the New Oriental Group snaps a photo together, and we taxi back to the Crowne Plaza Qingdao.  We all freshen up in our hotel rooms before riding in a taxi out to a hillock near the old city for a seafood feast.  The scene is familiar: Private room, large round table, lazy Susan, side table, personal waiters.  A celebratory feast ensues to honor the partnership, our traveling from so far, and of course the quality of Qingdao seafood.  As we entered I had passed aquariums full of fish, shellfish, crabs, shrimp, dun, dun, dun(Chinese for etc.).  Now it all begins to appear in front of me, covered in ginger, garlic, sweet and sour sauce, vegetables.  Fish cooked into looping circles, crunchy salt and pepper shrimp, abalone, beef simmered in its own fat, noodles. . . . .  As also occurs in most Chinese celebratory meals, we order far too much food.  Were I in America I would have had leftovers for days, but sadly I have to leave fallen soldiers behind this time.

The company this evening iss particularly excellent, as a Chinese gentleman name Zhi who had studied in Florida and Tuscaloosa kept us in stitches with his brazen, uncut, Louis C.K. style slice of life comedy routine.

After such a Chinese feast, only one activity remains: Sleep. . .