Illustration by Mice Hell
Cormac Shine
Staff Writer
The road from Shanghai airport into the city itself is a pretty good introduction to modern China. Cranes and building sites abound everywhere, with skyscrapers, roads, flyovers and power lines being thrown up as fast as possible, with a thin layer of smog hanging static in the near distance, all unfolding before me while my taxi driver took the opportunity to shave, brush his teeth and gargle out the window, whether the car was moving or not. This was the scene confronting me when I arrived in July to teach English in the remote Jiangxi province, a region of 40 million people and more than twice the size of Ireland. That Jiangxi doesn’t even register with most Chinese people (“Shaanxi?”, “Oh, you mean Guangxi?”, “Ah, Jiangsu!”) illustrates the sheer scale and diversity of Chinese society, and introduced me to a whole different side of life in this massive country.
A fifteen-hour train ride and a spin on a bus brought me to my destination: Badu, central Jiangxi. This town lies at the convergence of the many rice-farming villages that stretch out in every direction, and it was there that eight volunteers taught 400 kids between us. Only in places like this does the value of education really become apparent: pass your middle school exams and you will progress to high school, and hopefully a better job. Fail and go to trade school or back to the farm for years of back-breaking manual labour. The feeling that we couldn’t exactly slack was always there, as this was probably the only time they might meet a native English speaker.
I taught 13-year-olds who had been studying English for a number of years. The standard of their pronunciation is what one would expect from a school in rural China, with pupils taught by teachers who have mostly never left the area, let alone visited an Anglophone country. Indeed, my host mother told me that I was the first foreigner she had ever seen, and that it was just like in the movies. On a visit to the hospital, as I lay overcome by exhaustion my doctor asked if he could take a photo with his smartphone, which he proceeded to show off to the nurses as I was hooked up to an IV.
The contrasts of China today were very obvious in Badu. Farmers work on the rice paddies as they have for thousands of years, with little change apparent apart from the advent of television and Wifi in many homes. Growth has also exploded. In the last five years, the town’s elders informed us, the town’s revenue has increased from just under 6 million yuan (€765,000) to 400 million yuan (€51m). The town also looks like one that has been built in a hurry – the cheap concrete buildings being thrown up gave an unlikely reminder of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger.
One of the things that surprised me the most was the attitude of many towards the government. I heard during my travels (albeit in the relative safety of English) a young teacher from Shanghai berate the government’s treatment of the Mongolian minority, a software developer from Xian applaud the 1989 demonstrations as we stood in Tiananmen Square, and a college student angrily criticise the One-Child Policy, blaming it on the “dead body in the square”. The only reminder that we were in a one-party state, a fact clouded by the seeming lack of road rules or any kind of regulation in many areas, was the fact that hostels scan your passport on arrival, internet cafés take a photo of you before you can surf the net, and the periodic visits from the local police to make sure we were who we said we were. Oh, and CCTV’s Soviet-like coverage of the London Olympics, complete with heroic montages of that day’s medal winners and endless replays of the table tennis finals. Miraculously, Katie Taylor’s final was one of the few non-Chinese victories I managed to see live.
The drinking culture also took me aback. My preparation pack had ominously warned me that “guys are usually expected to drink with the males at the meal, which can sometimes turn into a contest of masculinity with friends or relatives at more formal gatherings… If you do accept the offer, girl or boy, prepare to drink a lot.” As it turned out, the only inaccuracy of this statement was the use of “sometimes”. Over the course of five weeks, I was forced to drink a concoction of beer mixed with baijou (a 52% spirit that translates as “white spirits”, and tastes like it too) by my host family, only to be sent to school on my very own moped five minutes later; I downed a bottle of beer while the First Secretary of the Badu Communist Party cheered me on at a formal dinner; took a volley of toasts from eight retired party officials at lunch; and partook in a deadly serious contest with the school’s board of directors, which took on the atmosphere of Cold War negotiations as each team plotted who to toast and in what combination in their respective languages. As far as I could tell, the key to advancement in the Communist party seems to be an ability to stomach large quantities of beer, begging the question why the Irish haven’t given Communism a go yet.
Overall, it was a pretty surreal experience. Never before have I been so lost looking at a sea of Mandarin characters in restaurants and train stations. My ability to mime questions greatly improved (chugga-chugga-choo-choo really works when looking for the train station, it turns out). Never before have I been asked to pose for pictures four times in one day in the capital of a supposedly worldly country, just because I’m different. And never before have I seen such a difference in the lives of citizens of the same country up close. From the farmers of Badu to the young Shanghai rich boys posing with champagne in nightclubs, China is changing pretty rapidly and a truly fascinating place.
