Five thousand miles overland

The end is nigh!

As I'm sure all five you who read this have noticed, there have been some definite phases to my time here in Henan. Not all, unfortunately, were conducive to writing a witty and entertaining blog, as was my goal in establishing this. However! This time has passed, and I will tell you why.

Now is the time for optimism, largely because I have somehow managed to survive the majority of this second semester, and have amazing, AMAZING plans for my exit from Asia. I never really re-read my own posts, so I don't know if I mentioned this before, but after the incident in which I was fired and almost deported for daring to question the various beliefs held by my students regarding such topics as the ethnicity and political allegiance of Genghis Khan, the bondage in which all Taiwanese are kept, and for using the Great Helmsman as part of a logical argument when discussing whether one person was ever worth more than another - after that episode, my work ethic went way, way up. I was terrified, I couldn't afford to fly myself home! And guilty! I knew that, unrepentant as I might be regarding my delight in aggravating others with the Socratic method, I wasn't a very good teacher. So, after my re-assigning, I resolved to try my very best to learn how to become the teacher that these kids deserved. And I did, too! I actually tried to work for a living for the month that I had (all this happened right near the end of the semester, so I only had a little while with my new students). I made lesson plans, I tried to be entertaining, I read books and many internet articles about how to be a real teacher. By the end of that semester, I felt pretty good that I had managed to go from showing up in class and spending the first twenty minutes hemming and hawing until simply picking a random topic and assigning discussions on it, to using power points and including vocabulary.

And you know what happened when I turned in all of my actually graded final grades? My co-teacher told me that the grades were too high, and that only bell curves were acceptable. Maybe some of you are more familiar with how things are done in the American school system than I am, but I was incensed by this. I had assigned the grades that these kids had earned, and a bell curve would totally screw over most of my students, which it did. After that, I realized that aside from a few bleeding sores that shouldn't be prodded, the system that I was participating in was largely insensate to anything that I did. The students didn't care about the class, and they would rather do anything else than attend it. The school clearly didn't care if the students learned anything (this was made even more obvious several months after, when I took the CET-6 for fun and to see just how thouroughly these kids were tested on English - see my other post about Chinese standard tests for an idea of what the CET was like), so why the hell should I care either?

This was the attitude that began my second semester. The first thing I did was to tell all of my classes that attendance would never be a factor in their grades, which was the truth as far as I could tell, since the school didn't expect any kind of accuracy in grading, it just wanted its bell curve and no students complaining to it. Then, I told the students that their grades would be based entirely on 'how hard they tried', and that there would be no tests or assignments of any kind. My theory, I explained, was that the point of my class was assisted English practice, and so that was what we were going to do. Then, I also made them re-arrange all of their classes with me so that I would never have to wake up earlier than 9am, and also had four day weekends every week.

This tactic was a success, and is currently a success, because my attendance dropped off by about 90% in the second week, and now, one month out from the end of the semester, I am averaging one or two students showing up per class. This makes my life, and I'd like to think, their lives, much easier and more productive. I figure that since I'm a terrible teacher, and not willing to force myself to become a good teacher, the less time of theirs that I waste on my inept presentations and bungled activities, the better for everyone. They seem to agree, because this whole year I have gotten away with this without a murmur of suspicion from my employers, who are presumably unaware of the fact that my average class size is one and half, and that my average class length is around thirty minutes, usually revolving around walking with the student to get lunch or buy snacks, after which I go home. If I manage to get away with this for the entire semester, it will be by far the biggest con of a job that I have ever even heard of (outside of nepotism-based employment, I guess), and quite frankly the last one that I ever want to participate in. I'm so bored, you see! I'm starting to look forward to my classes as a break from having SO MUCH free time in which there is nothing to do! Well, that's not the only downside, if it even is a downside, it's the paranoia that's really getting to me these days. If anyone had even the slightest idea how it is that I do my job here, I have no doubt that not only would they fire me but they'd run me out of this town so fast that I wouldn't even have time to grab my fake new Mona Lisa hanging in my bedroom.

And on to the next topic, this paranoia is compounded by the fact that I actually want to stay until the end of my contract now! I have spent some time thinking about how it was that I actually wanted to leave, considering that I'll be free of my 'obligations' here easily two or three weeks before my residency permit expires, and what started as a vague desire to take a long train journey has become something truly epic. Having an unhealthy predisposition for hostile landscapes, and an inexplicable desire to spend multiple days on a chinese train, I found that I could combine the two into a trip to Xinjiang, China's far north-west province. At first, it was just a train ride from here to there, with half of my time being spent on the trains just covering the vast distances required. Then, I saw that Mongolia and Xinjiang share quite a bit of border, and I remembered that Mongolia loves Americans so much that we don't even need visas to stay in their country for up to 30 days. So, I figured that I could stay in Xinjiang up until the last day allowed by my residency permit, and then hop the border over into Mongolia and kick around there for a week or two before flying back to the States from Ulaanbaatar, the capital and location of half of the country's population.

But then, I realized that getting my legal time in China extended was pretty cheap, and the plan expanded to include about double the time in Xinjiang so that I could travel around the entire rim of the Taklamakan desert by bus and car, seeing the many ancient ruins of the silk road civilizations as well as the fast-fading Uighur culture. As I priced out the costs of travelling by bus and car, and staying in decidedly non-touristy cities, I realized that the less people wanted to go somewhere, the cheaper it was for me, and that practically nobody wanted to go where I wanted to go. So, my time commitment went up, and my daily costs went down - and then I read that Mongolia is the number one country in the world for camping and hitchhiking.

So currently, the plan stands as thus: Spend two to three weeks in Xinjiang, traveling around the driest and hottest desert in Eurasia during the hottest month of the year, and then attempt to cross the China-Mongolia border at a point that is 'rumored' to have allowed one or two foreigners through in the past three years, but is primarily crossed only by trucks bearing Chinese goods or oil from the Xinjiang oilfields. Once I've successfully charmed/bribed/annoyed my way through over the border, I'll be three hundred miles south across the Altai Mountain range from the nearest Mongolian city of 90,000 people, Khovd. Khovd is almost 1,600 miles from Ulaanbataar, and according to Wikipedia, 'is considered remote even for Mongolian standards.' The middle of nowhere for the most sparsely populated country in the world. Once I make to this part of the plan, I'll have about twenty days or so to make my way to the capital in order to catch my flight on time. I have no idea what will occur during this time period, and I am making no plans, but I am bringing a fair amount of cash, a tent, a sleeping bag, and things like vodka, cigarettes, and candy in order to make friends.

So, you can see that I have a lot to be excited about these days, and pretty much spend all of my copious free time reading about Xinjiang or Mongolia, learning Mongolian and Cyrillic from the 1993 Peace Corps language handbook, and watching Frasier. Since I'm saving money as much as possible until this awesome, awesome trip, probably nothing exciting will happen between now and probably a week after I get back to America and have time to write about what happened. Plus, I won't shave until I get home! I have this image in my head that showing off the luxurious neck beard that my Dutch genetics have blessed me with will make me friends among the Muslims in Xinijang. While this is normally a rule for me, I get the especially strong feeling that I'll need to ingratiate myself to as many strangers as possible in order for me to survive this journey without a good deal of suffering at the hands of my own clueless foolhardiness.