losing face

Today was my first real experience with losing face. I feel bad for the girl because I know it was my fault, but my own cultural background told me it was ok. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it, at least not so vocally.

In my writing classes, I always begin class with a 10 minute writing warm up that I collect after time is up. After the warm up, I have a grammar touch-up exercise that includes correcting a short passage or a number of sentences. The goal is to fix some basic stylistic or grammatical mistakes that I can see most of the students make in their writing. The topic for the writing warm up today was "Whom do you admire the most, and why?" Looking at some of the papers while the students were writing, I glanced at Bella's composition entitled "A Angel". When time was up, I asked my monitor to collect all of the essays except Bella's. Coincidentally, the grammar touch-up exercise was when to use "a/an" and "the" (indefinite and definite articles).

Bella didn't take this the right way though. I had intended to show here why it was wrong and allow her to correct it, but when I asked her to hand her paper to me to show the error, she put her head down on her desk and refused to look at me. I froze for a second and then continued with the grammar correction. When I looked back at Bella again, I could see her face was flushed and her eyes were glassy as if she had been crying. After the grammar touch-up I went over a few phrases and idioms: "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride" and "Luck favors the well-prepared". I called a break early in order to leave enough time to go over the story book assignment due next week.

During the break, a student came up to ask me a question about the "beggars would ride" phrase, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Bella ripping her composition up into little pieces. I acted as if I didn't see it. After class ended I called Bella over and spoke to her privately. She had visibly calmed down and apologized numerous times for destroying her paper. I explained that I didn't single her out because her essay was bad, but because I wanted her to correct the gleaming mistake in her title: "A Angel". I also apologized and told her to bring me a new copy the following week. Phew.

After class a couple students, Tovell (from my advanced oral English class) and Jane, winner of the CCTV cup English competition, met me at my classroom and asked me to come to the English corner. I congratulated her again for winning the Xi Hua competition and asked her when the next round would be. It turned out the Sichuan Province-wide finals were last week, and, according to Jane, the winner was, "a very nice boy from a university that I can't translate into English. Electric something..." Thanks, Jane.

I was surprised to see so many people at the English corner. There must have been about 75, and the vast majority of them were freshmen. The topic of the corner was "What are your dreams?" As the only foreigner and native speaker there, I was asked to give a welcome speech and tell what my dreams were. I started off with the, "Hello!" and everyone responded "Hello!" to which I made the stereotypical D.A.R.E. teacher response, "You can do better than that! I can't hear you!" And all of the students answered in a chorus at the same level. Oh well. As a crowd pleaser, I explained that my dream was to come to China. I saw some of my own students there as well, including one junior girl who never says a word and sits and stares out the window half the time. At the corner she was eager to say hello and ask me some questions. Her English is nearly perfect, and the writing I've graded of hers is by far the best in the class. She's too arrogant to be shy, she must just think the class is too easy or unstimulating.

I wish the topic was something more substantial than "What is your dream?" because god knows I don't have a dream and I certainly don't think I could tell any of the Nanchong English freshmen students how to pursue theirs. Maybe something about the relation of English to socioeconomic status in developing countries would have been more suitable. I could have whipped out my thesis.

After giving the speech I was swarmed by almost all of the freshmen who had come to the English corner. About 90% of them were girls. One by one they asked me questions and I did my best to answer them as completely as possible. Unfortunately most of the questions were the typical ones I hear like, "What is your favorite Chinese food?" (Beijing kaoya), "What do you think about China?"(Wow! The people are so friendly and the food is delicious!), "Can you speak Chinese?" (yi dian dian), "Do you like Sichuan food?" (No Sichuan food is horribly revolting and too spicy to be enjoyable by anyone without a steel tongue.. No I mean I like it oops!). I managed to get a couple pictures which really made the whole experience worthwhile. When the English corner ended at 9:30, everyone wanted to take a picture with me on their camera phone. It's probably the closest to celebrity-dome that I'll ever get. Everyone wanted my phone number and e-mail. Many girls told me I was very handsome and that they were afraid to talk to me. That's probably because I just reek of unharnessed sexual intimidation, hah!