Eighth Week

We’re nearing the end. I’ve been ready to go for a while, but now that it’s nearly over, I’m going to miss the teachers and students.

This week our focus was Chinese news. In order to save paper, Chinese newspapers shrink article sizes, and therefore reading newspapers is extremely difficult. Many connectors, nouns, and verbs, essential to Chinese learners, are omitted, and only through years of reading newspaper can one get used to the modified system. Whereas American newspapers are written using middle school vocabulary, Chinese newspapers are substantially harder to read. The teachers required us to listen or read Chinese news for three nights in order to discuss them during our one-on-one sessions the next day. We were to speak for 30 minutes pertaining to news. Most students gave up after not understanding very much of the fast-spoken news reports and the esoteric newspapers and turned to CNN or the New York Times online. The teachers understood, and we were able to talk about world news that wasn’t horribly filtered by the government. In addition, the time after our weekly test was devoted to a debate. We were divided into 3 groups to debate topics such as the rate of democratization in China, corporal punishment of children, and China’s abortion policies.

Saturday was our talent show, a showcase of skits, music, and dance. I accompanied the third years as they sang “Kan guo lai” (Look over here) and “Yueliang daibiao wode xin” (The moon represents my heart). I also played “Liang zhu” (Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto-the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet) while Ming Min danced. A lot of the second year programs took American songs and rewrote the lyrics so that they were in Chinese and had something to do with HBA. I was thoroughly impressed until I heard someone mention that the teachers did it all. Some teachers also performed: male Wang Laoshi and Luo Laoshi represented third year. Wang Laoshi sang some kind of Cantonese song I think. I was too busy grimacing to understand. My favorite act of the entire night was Luo Laoshi’s awkward performance of a combination of Peking Opera and fast speaking (if that’s what it was: I couldn’t tell). As soon as he got on stage, nervously gripped the microphone and started bobbing his head to the piercing music I couldn’t stop laughing.