College Invitation

Tuesday night, after returning from the Silk Museum, we took a trip to another nearby college. One of the English teachers at this college had been at the conference, heard our panel presentation, and apparently decided that his students needed to be exposed to native speakers, so he invited us, via Qian, to his college. We didn't really know what to expect when we arrived, having only been told that we would be speaking to groups of students.

When we got out of the van, there was a crowd of students waiting for us with signs for each of the various members of the group. Each of us was adopted by a set of 4 students and taken to the student cafeteria to eat dinner. Most of the others went through the cafeteria-style line with their students, but I was seated at a table with two of my hosts at a time while the other two went to fetch food. When they came back, the placed all of the small bowls of food in the center of the table and set the trays aside, so we could eat communally, like they do with families (and in restaurants) here. I quizzed them about what was in each dish, causing much referral to the cell-phone dictionary for words like "cucumber" and "kelp" (pronounced "klep"). I found out that all the girls, and all of their classmates as well, were International Trade majors, which entails classes in English, Chinese, math, economics, and, of course, Mao Tse Dong. Mao was pronounced their favorite class, because it had the least homework. I had to promise not to tell their English teacher. It also turned out that they had their math final the next day, but had been told by their English teacher that they would have many foreign visitors to host that evening. They very diplomatically said that they thought they would learn more talking to us than they would cramming for their exam.

After we finished eating, they flagged down a cab to take us over to the classroom buildings. Their campus is in the process of being built, and in general very new, so the classrooms are a little ways from the dorms. Other people said they just walked with their students, though, so I think my girls just didn't want to be so hot, which I could completely sympathize with. When we got to the campus, they showed me around their main classroom building, and a little bit of the outside when their teacher shooed us out of the building so he could get ready. They pointed out the pretty streetlights that seem to be on all the campuses around here and said that their teacher said the some teachers think the artistic tops are in the shape of flying birds and they hope all their students will be like those birds and fly away after graduation, and others think that they are Vs for Victory in final examinations.

When we saw that most of the other groups of students had arrived, we went back in to the lecture room. We were one of the first groups in, so we were sitting near the front. When Lee's group came in, the girls all giggled and said, "Is he Chinese?" I explained that his family was from Taiwan, but he moved to the US when he was 2 years old, so he really considers himself American. One of them said, "Ah, we call him a 'banana,' because he is yellow like us on the outside, but white like you on the inside." I thought it was a clever observation, and was impressed with her English explanation, but I didn't tell Lee, because I'm not sure what he'd think about that label. When all of the students who hadn't been in a dinner group arrived too, the teacher called things to order and introduced each of us. Then he turned the microphone over and we each gave a short version of our conference topic, since that was what he requested we do. I was lucky in that mine was easy to modify for a student audience instead of an instructor audience, and they all seemed to smile and understand what I was saying. By the end of the presentations, though, they were tuning out.

Luckily, we then broke into four smaller topic groups to talk about Sports, Dating and Weddings, American TV, and Cultural Immersion. I was one of the people who volunteered for Cultural Immersion, which of course Eva was in charge of, and we had by far the smallest group. Eva would have just launched right into a mini-lecture in her own rambling style, but I managed to jump in and ask an important question, which was whether any of them knew what "cultural immersion" meant. They didn't, so I explained it, and tried my best to bring some of Eva's subsequent points back to a level that non-English-major undergraduates at a business school might find understandable and relevant. I hope they at least got a little bit out of it.

Then it was back to the lecture room for wrap-up, thank yous, good-byes (with some very shy flirting with Lee on the behalf of one girl, which we watched with amusement), and then back in the van to go back to our own college.