White Tiger Path 4.1 - The Year of the Rat has Arrived - January 2020
We arrived in Chongqing around 10 pm on the Friday and drove to the district of Beibei where we would meet our host families. A single time zone in China made everything feel a little off in terms of when we actually arrived on our internal clocks.
Chongqing is claimed to be the largest city in the world with a population of ~36 million people; but it is broken into 40 or so districts that are each kind of their own little city. To get from Beibei to the downtown it was about a 2-hour metro ride. When riding the metro into the city one day, my mind went to The Hunger Games and how the districts are divided with great swaths of green and what looked like farmable land dividing them. Chongqing is a city under direct control of the central government, which confused me because it seems like all cities are under direct control of the central government. My understanding is it essentially means that Chongqing has preferential treatment from Beijing and the central government: they get things first, more attention is paid to them because of their potential, maybe more money for projects, etc. Think of the teacher’s favourite student they want to see blossom.
Chongqing is a forest made of concrete trees built on the multiple layers of the city. GPS is, for the most part, rendered useless and all the hills make bikes impossible, a staple everywhere else I’ve been in China. At night the downtown of Chongqing strikes up images of a futuristic dystopian environment. Classic Bladerunner pops into my head quicker than any other reference.
My host family was very kind and warm to me. The family was made up of Jacky (the father), Lucy (the mother), Jerry (age 11, the eldest boy, named after Tom & Jerry), Baby Kevin (age 1.5, the younger brother), and a grandmother and grandfather, who I affectionately referred to as Ayi (Aunt) and Shui Shui (Uncle). Although the grandparents didn’t live in the apartment (around 162 sq. metres) with us, they had an apartment in the next building over. They were there when I woke in the morning and when I went to sleep at night. The grandparents also did almost all the cooking, all the cleaning, and looked after Baby Kevin when Lucy and Jacky went to work. It’s like there were two sets of parents in the house. It seemed to work really well. Shui Shui quickly became my favourite person. He was a retired military commander who was now a very sweet man, always with a smile and loved drinking with me at meals.
In general, the time spent living with a host family, for most people, is always an extremely impactful experience. You get a true sense of what lives being lived looks like, what the value systems are and what it means to be a person from that community. My time with Jacky and his family was no different. It surpassed my expectations and provided a level of exposure and enrichment to the experience in a way that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
Jacky, Lucy, and Jerry, whenever they were home, regardless of how long they were home for, would change in warm and comfortable PJ’s. Jacky would be home for less than 30 minutes, but for those 30 minutes he was in some very fleecy attire.
I also played a lot of table tennis with the family. I was proud to be second best in the household after Jacky, who would play at 50% of his skill set, and still was 50% better than me. I was happy to have something I was reasonably competent at to bond over with the family, other than my poor dumpling making skills, which were on display more than once and still provided a delicious meal for the mouth if not for the tongue.
The family made sure we toured around the world’s largest city, taking me to different tourist sites and lots good restaurants. Most often these trips were scored by MJ and choreographed by Jacky dancing in the car. He had a couple moves that just cracked me up beyond all get out.
On many of these car trips we took, everyone would pile into the family vehicle and the two people in the front seat, often Jacky and I, would put seatbelts on, and everyone else just wouldn’t. To take this one step further, little baby Kevin would essentially be given free range to roam where his little heart desired within the vehicle, often standing up in the middle looking over the dividing console between passenger and driver bucket seats to get a better glimpse of the action. He could do no wrong yet, he could do whatever he wanted.
Jerry, the older boy in the family would very often be the recipient of some serious yelling from his parents and grandparents because his 90% in mathematics wasn’t good enough, evidently, he had graduated to an age where he could now do wrong and be reprimanded for it. There is so much pressure on both the kids and the parents for children to do well in school and get a good job. With a population of 1.6 billion, every competitive advantage has to be considered and pursued. The thing I liked about Jerry is he gave it back just as good as he got it. The kid had pipes. Vicky, a fellow Canadian who grew up in Taiwan, confirmed this culture to me and said she went through her own form of nudges in the “right” direction from her parents.
Life on campus at South West University was also very enjoyable. We taught English to a 3rd year class of Chinese students who were training to become English teachers. I felt woefully under-qualified to teach such a class, as we focused on English literature, and I have come away with a new appreciation for how much prep work teachers do for their classes. I think I spent 8 hours of prep for each hour I taught. A lot of time was spent in the library and the Canadians found a little sanctuary on the 9th floor, filled with comfortable couches and carpeted rooms; this was one of the only places in Chongqing where I didn’t wear a jacket inside – temperatures weren’t ridiculous or extremely cold, especially when compared to Canada, but the lack of heating and insulation made it impossible to transition out of outwear when moving inside; it wouldn’t be uncommon to walk into the class I was teaching in at 8 am to see two of the four windows wide open mid-December. Chinese fresh-air is the pinnacle of fresh air with regards to impact on brain development.
One of the most bizarre things about library culture in China is how much time students spend there. Now that makes me sound like an awful student but let me explain. Because Chinese students live in dorms with either 3 or 5 other students in a pretty standard sized North American dorm room, I can imagine they want to get away from those people as much as possible, and because of this they will show up around 8:30 or 9:00 am and stay there at the library until 6:00 or 7:00 pm in the evening. Taking naps at the desk for hours on end is a regular siting. It wouldn’t be uncommon for me to be at a table surrounded by 7 other students, 5 of whom would have their head down and covered by their jackets sleeping a good portion of the day away. They would then get up for lunch, leaving everything there, including their laptop to save their spot, and return after for more work and more sleep.
One of the funniest things I would often see in China, and quite commonly at the SWU library was lots of couples dressing up in exactly the same outfits. Same tracksuits, coats, socks, t-shirts, and even the same shoes. I saw a couple, on one such occasion, in matching outfits, cellphones in one hand, each others in the other and eyes slammed shut, sleeping peacefully away in the lobby of the library strewn all over only semi-comfortable seating. It was very cute. It lasted for more than an hour.
In addition to our teaching commitment we had the opportunity to do cool cultural activities like archery, paper cutting, knot tying, badminton and Tai Chi which were a lot of fun. Tai Chi is much more difficult than it looks and is really a good work out. Remembering all the different steps is difficult, but it is something I would like to continue with into the future.
A trip to China’s South West would be wasted without a trip to Chengdu to see the Panda’s which we did, and was excellent but my favourite time was Christmas back in Chongqing. We gathered at one of the host family’s homes, and we celebrated Christmas. It’s always tough being away from home for Christmas, both on me and also my mother and family, but if I had to be away, the way we celebrated was a good way to do it. The family provided us a roast chicken and cakes and we all brought different things from noodles to dumplings to cookies and our own cakes and boozies. To cap the night off, I dressed up as Santa Claus and we all partook in more festivities and karaoke. The stars of karaoke are often the Chinese, as they often seem to have these naturally beautiful singing voices and a high level of skill for other natural talents.
Chongqing was a wonderful place to be; it is certainly a different beast from Shanghai or the other tier 1 cities, even though it is a focus and priority city for the CPC. It gave me a different lens to look through and living with a host family provided the avenue to ask the questions I couldn’t get answered elsewhere - for example - what is the social safety net available to citizens - there is something available to chinese citizens, but I was unable to grasp the extent or details surrounding this governmental program, shit I don’t even know which level of government would be in charge of this type of thing. I highly recommend living with host family, even with some of the sacrifices to lifestyle one inevitably has to make when staying with a family that is not your own.
Thank you Jacky, Lucy, Jerry, Kevin, Ayi, and Shui Shui for welcoming me into your home and treating me like family. I will be forever grateful for the experience you allowed and provided for me.
End of Part #2
-Bai Hú