Huey, Dewey, and Louie

Today began oddly enough, waking in the spare bedroom of one of the Luodong girls’ apartments. At 5:00, I rolled over and went back to sleep. At 6:00 I did some fuzzy and questionable calculations, decided that I wouldn’t have enough time to shower and dress if I decided to return to my apartment in Yilan before getting to the Teaching Center by 8:30 am, rolled over and went back to sleep. At 7:00 I rolled over, faced the facts, and got out of bed. I then stood dumbly in the center of the room, wondering what to do. Mary and Nell, the other two girls in the apartment, still seemed to be asleep. So I wandered out of my room, moseyed over to both their doors, noted that everything was quiet, and then bumbled over to their common room to gaze out the eleven (or so) stories at the city-and-farm view below, sharing the moment with the jailbird toy suctioned to one of the windowpanes, one of the few items left behind by that apartment’s ETAs from last year. (Our apartments were found for us by the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the Taiwanese half of the Fulbright—the other half being the US State Department. These apartments roll over from year to year, being handed down the line of ETAs. Those who leave, we discovered upon first entering our new homes, leave behind things for the next year’s group, which can be very useful and quite heartwarming. My own apartment was left an assortment of eating and cooking utensils and dishware, a blanket, a yoga mat, canned food in case of a typhoon, a router [that didn’t work, oh well], soap, and some other odds and ends. It’s all luck of the draw, however, as I saw a couple days ago when I visited a friend’s apartment and took in their cluttered entryway. This group had been bequeathed a construction paper turkey and a palm-sized pink rubber soccer ball sprouting feet from every angle, among other notable items. Another group had been left a bike, but could find it nowhere…thieves?) After a few more befuddled tours of the apartment, I decided to shower on my own and use my shirt from yesterday as a towel. This worked quite well. The only thing I regret is that in my haste to finally shower and be done with it, I forgot to turn on the gas and hot water heater on the balcony, and therefore missed out on my first hot shower since arriving at Yilan, which, I must admit, had been the true deciding factor when it came to deciding against returning to my own apartment. (I have had no hot water in my apartment since—we think—the hot water heater battery died and we were too busy/lazy/ignorant to replace it. But that is hopefully fixed now since yesterday’s euphoric trip to the supermarket.) Mary lent me a shirt and tank top which looked very nice, though a bit wide on the shoulders so that I kept having to adjust them, making me feel a little risqué in front of the…

LETs.

LET stands for “Local English Teacher,” the Taiwanese teachers who instruct the children in English. We the ETAs will be working with/under them as sort of “specialists” in the field. We’re there to fill the kids in on American culture, to provide living, interactive examples of American pronunciation and inflection, to help with explaining/teaching technical aspects of the language, and to make learning English seem cool and interesting, instead of merely tedious, pointless, and frustratingly impossible.

Today we met the LETs for the first time, which I think was exciting for the LETs and ETAs alike. Finally it seemed real to us, that we would actually be going to teach in a classroom. I admit the realization made me a bit nervous. We were split into two groups, one for the 30-odd elementary school LETs and 12 ETAs that would be working with them, and one for the LETs and ETAs assigned to junior high schools.

But to backtrack a little…After getting dressed, I went down with Mary to meet the shuttle in front of the Luodong apartment. (Nell had left earlier to buy some breakfast.) The shuttle, a white van with rounded corners and letters in yellow, red, and green letters proclaiming its name across its flanks, soon pulled up. All the girls from Luodong (that being every ETA from Luodong, since the only two guys on the program share an apartment in my complex in Yilan) piled into the shuttle, which was no simple feat, as the van was already filled. Along the road, it made a few more stops before reaching the train station, where we disembarked for the 20-minute trip to Yilan. Each time the shuttle stopped in front of a line of people waiting for a lift, my heart sank just a little more. Oh, how we squeezed. The seats were filled and the aisle was jam-packed, and it was clearly not designed for that. There were no handholds, so each time the shuttle came to a sudden stop (and I remember an astoundingly tumultuous one in particular), we aisle-crammers all fell on top of each other, leaning over like a gruesome stack of human dominoes. In a country where the elderly are expected to be honored, it is quite mollifying to find yourself stepping on the foot of an elder, while your elbow jabs her in the side. Aside from some grunts (at the van, not the people), there were no complaints, though, so I guess this is a common occurrence. During the ride, I remembered my friend Liz’s recollection of riding city buses in Beijing. There, apparently, the driver crams in as many people as possible and then half a hundred more, so that even if you are on an air-conditioned bus there is no way you would ever know it. The Beijing driver then shunts about the road, ripping into bus stops and shuddering to a standstill, and freely tearing the bus over to the side of the road so she can turn around and yell at the passengers, who have just been swung against one side or other of the bus, well, as much as one can be swung in such a packed environment. When we finally got to the train platform, a Taiwanese guy walked over to our group and asked if we were here to teach English. This is a common question here, since what else would a foreigner be doing in Yilan County? Although, yesterday or today some lady asked me if I was here to have fun, and I almost laughed. Come to Yilan or Luodong for kicks? These actually are fun places to see and be in, but I don’t know of any foreigner that would decide to go to Taiwan for these two cities. There are areas around, though, famous for hot and cold springs, hiking, etc, and so I guess her question made sense after all and I’m the silly one. Anyway, I figured this guy with a round face, soft voice, and bright red cap with multi-colored starbursts at the back and sides was another curious Taiwanese interested in brushing up on his English, and I’m embarrassed to say that I turned my back on him and focused instead on my plastic-packaged slice of brioche bread. It was early in the morning and I didn’t have patience to smile and chat and be pleasant. So some other girls in the group chatted with him, and he revealed within one sentence that he was also here to teach English, that he was in fact one of the LETs on the way to meet with us at the teacher training center, and that his name was Brian (in English). At that point I turned around and joined in the conversation. I don’t think he noticed. Along the way, he told us about some schools nearby, and that four of them were for Taiwanese aborigines.

And now back to the LETs. I went with the junior high group, since I will be teaching middle schoolers. One of the questions asked me by the LETs was why I chose junior high over teaching the elementary school kids. I will explain that to you now, since you are probably wondering the same thing. Working with junior high schools is new this year for ETAs, initiated because of their success with the elementary schools. Of our group, only four are teaching in junior high schools (me, Jill, Jaime, and Brett). This was a hard decision for me, since Taiwanese elementary school-aged children are so cute and it would be so much fun to work with them. We would be able to do fun things, like draw, read picture books (to them, not with them), sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” hand out cookies, and regularly use funky costume props for reading exercises. But I thought it would be more fun and rewarding to be able to converse with my students and joke around with them a bit, which junior high students can do, though only at a very low level in English. (We looked at some of their textbooks last week, and the material is quite elementary.) Teaching junior high students would also let me work more with English grammar and explaining idiomatic expressions, instead of mainly working on phonetics and repeating dialogues like “Hello. How are you? Fine, thank you, and you?” which we would have to do with the younger kids. Finally, junior high is a pretty stressful time in Taiwanese education. The students have to pass an exam at the end of junior high in order to get into high school, and from high school must again take an exam to get into college. One teacher told me that only a third of the students go on to college, but I might have misheard that. The fact is, though, that not every student can go to college, not by a long shot. Many do not even go to high school. If they don’t go to college, they go to vocational schools, and can end up as farmers and trash collectors (though probably also some pretty decent fields, like plumbing and electrics). So their studies in junior high are very important for giving them access to higher education and a chance to pursue their life goals. Eight grade (which we will be teaching) is relatively laid back, as it is the first of the three junior high years. Ninth grade, though, is sheer torture. The kids go on their graduation trip before the start of ninth grade (at least in one school) so that they can have some fun before settling down to long months of endless study. On the slideshow shown us at the beginning of orientation it even said that the national exam at the end of ninth grade is a “nightmare.” In teaching at a junior high, I would like to make the material as fun as possible to lessen the tedium and give the kids a chance to enjoy learning English, instead of despising it. But perhaps more importantly, I intend to give the students as solid a foundation in English as possible to help them prepare for the exam. I would like all of my students to be able to go to college, even though I know that is not a realistic wish. If they were to choose not to attend college, I would think it unfortunate, but there is something painfully tragic about that fact that they cannot all go, that most are forcibly turned away. I see trash collectors and street sweepers every day here, and it hurts to think that they might have wanted to be something else, but could not.

In our meeting, first the ETAs and then the LETs presented their self-introductory slideshows. It was a lot of fun to see what the other ETAs had written, and to find out more about their families and college and camp experiences than what had come out during our week-and-a-half of living together. It was kind of funny, though, since the ETAs each had upwards of five slides full of personal information, and the LETs kept it to 1-2 slides, 1 reserved for information about their school if there were two slides. We ended up using the internet a lot to show more about sporting event (curling), pets (sugar gliders!), and the local junior highs. There were seven high school LET presenters, though it looks from a handout that there are eight total. Fortunately, we will be working with two schools, and will therefore choose a pair of LETs. They all seemed so nice that it will be hard to choose amongst them, so it’s nice to know that we’ll at least work with two. After the slideshow presentations, we played bingo, where we had to go about the room finding people who fit certain qualifications (allergic to mango, know the name of Obama’s wife, can bike between Yilan City and Luodong in 20 minutes, etc) in order to break the ice (though it seemed pretty broken to me after our presentations and chatty question-and-answer sessions after each one—I was asked which was my favorite children’s book, and so we did an internet search for Howl’s Moving Castle, which the LETs knew by name in Chinese) and get to know each other a bit more. Then it was lunch time, and we sat down in the main conference room (our meeting had taken place in a lecture room on the 3rd floor, across from the computer lab) with everyone to eat. When Jaime and I remarked on how much better Taiwanese rice was than American rice, James, a junior high LET, told me that the rice comes out better when packaged in a bamboo box, such as had been provided at today’s lunch. It was another good chance to speak with the LETs, and I really enjoyed speaking with James and Cathy. (These names are their English names, which they choose in school, much like we Americans are assigned Chinese names. The difference is that our Chinese names are generally passable as serious names with a given name and surname provided. The Chinese go for only one name—the first—and this can be anything that appeals to them. Our group of LETs is quite conservative, being limited to Linda, James, Grace, Cynthia, Bess, Cathy, Candy, and Mr. Yeh [who we have not yet met, in addition to having a Chinese surname]. But one of the elementary school LETs goes by Apple, while the coworker of a former ETA dubbed herself Rafiki. Linda herself introduced the three boys in one of the pictures on her slide as her sons, noting that the one to the far left was Huey. Huey? I though, who would pick Huey? Granted this was and English name applied at whim by a Taiwanese, but still. What was going on? Couldn’t she hear how un-modern that was? And then later in her presentation she explained that her other sons were named Dewey and Louie, and that she had done this on purpose. And then it all made sense, and I have to admit that I really loved it. In addition to picking whatever name or noun suits their fancy, Taiwanese children are apt, I am told by fellow ETAs, to sporadically change their names during the school year. Minnie today, Rainbow tomorrow.

After lunch, Dr. Trites taught us all about developing lesson plans, which was pretty interesting. At one point, we watched a series of lesson segments on video, and then filled out a sheet with LETs to break the lessons into their various components. The LETs I was working with (Bess and Cynthia [and Doris, and administrator]) seemed a bit confused, which placed me in the awkward position of trying to guide along teachers far more experienced than myself. I think part of the confusion at least was resolved when one of the LETs asked me what a canopy was. We had watched a clip of a teacher teaching her (first grade?) class about the rainforest. Much of the clip had focused on defining and identifying the canopy of the forest (but not fully, since this was a review lesson, the material having been taught to the students the prior day or two). So I explained about forest, bed, and storefront canopies and how they are all coverings.

At 3:45, the lesson was over (ended a little sooner so that Evie, Nell, Ann, and I could go to Fo Guang University to take a placement exam for Chinese lessons). The other ETAs had scooter practice. The exam was alright. I definitely missed a bunch of stuff, and some of it definitely things I had learned before and that nagged at me when I saw them and could not place them. I ran out of time at the end, and didn’t do the last two reading passages, but figure I probably could have done at least half of the second one had I had time, the sections getting progressively harder. Mainly, though, I was pleased to see how much I could read, given that I had not reviewed at all this summer (which was just plain dumb). There is tons of Chinese in Yilan, obviously, but I have not been able to read as much as I read on the exam since the signs are in Traditional characters (instead of the Simplified that I studied my second two years at Columbia), and since they are names of businesses and restaurants instead of conventional sentences with conventional word groupings. So the exam actually afforded me quite a bit of relief and (likely misplaced) gratification. But we’ll see what the results are.

On completing the exam at six pm, Evie, Nell, Ann, and I joined the rest of the ETAs at a restaurant to eat dinner with Dr. Wu. We took a taxi from Fo Guang, and Kelly called me on the way to make sure we were en route. I asked if we’d still be able to catch dinner. We were expecting something along the lines of our dinner the night we arrived in Taiwan, so we were completely blown away by the extravagance of the meal before us. Jiuqiandai, the restaurant, placed 3 bowls and a large sectioned box at each seat, each filled with all manner of curious and visually entrancing food. There was so much that Evie said she didn’t know where to start, but I figured on simply plowing through everything, whatever my fingers and eyes first reached. This is not an admiral portrait of me, but then again, you have not seen the dishes that faced me. Evie asked Kelly several times, and I asked Evie several times if the stuff that looked like shrimp and other assorted seafood was really vegetarian (as we had requested), and were assured that they were. Hearts at ease, we ate with gusto, along with everyone else. Everyone said they had not eaten so much in a long time. There was so much, though I will accede that not everything tasted good, and, in fact, not everything had a taste. The fascinating purple drink in a glass goblet set amongst the dessert plate was itself rather curiously and disappointingly devoid of taste. Or maybe none of us has a sufficiently delicate palate. The dinner was in fact a buffet, and, while eating the mesmerizing selection before me, I kept my eye on what other curiosities people were bringing back to their seats. Once finished with my basic meal, I went on a tour of the restaurant, freely adding one of each vegetarian item to my plate and taking pictures of everything, the spitting image of the world’s most aggravating tourist. But some occasions call for that. My Taiwanese friend in New York sometimes takes pictures of the food we eat together, and I never understood that until now. I remarked to Evie that I was fulfilling every worst stereotype of the glutinous, all-consuming American and that I didn’t much give a damn. En route, a college student (lives in Yilan, studies in Taipei), filled me in on some of the mysterious food items and made recommendations. She smiled a lot and seemed really friendly and I think she wanted to talk with me more, but I didn’t have much to say. I felt bad about that, especially as she was so friendly and helpful. I made a second tour for dessert, and then went back for shaved ice. Shaved ice is just that—a bucket of ice shavings that you scoop into a bowl and then top with condensed milk or chocolate syrup, fruit, and/or gelatinous stuff that the Taiwanese like and the Americans need some getting used to. If you eat some fruit with a chunk of ice, your mouth will go numb, but if you eat the meltings, it’s deliciously sweet and fruity. And this, I think, is the solution for how to concoct the perfect fruit soup. We ate a feast out of a novel, and Evie said how funny it was that I asked Kelly if there would be any food left for us when we got there. We were wondering why people were dressed informally at this place of wonders, and how they could have afforded to bring their small children along, too. It turn out that a meal per person is 400-500 NT, quite affordable, though not something you would do daily. I asked the receptionist at the front desk if the vegetarian dishes were cooked in separate pots from the meat dishes, and she said they were, though this is of course something my parents would want to recheck when/if they visit later in the year (cough). From the restaurant, Evie, Ann, and I walked home (a bit later than everyone else since I was still eating), and passed a theater house (homey, the kind that community members would perform in), people practicing taiqi in the parking lot, a group of middle-school-aged guys rehearsing dance moves (breaking dancing for one, and moon-walking/tap for another, others lolled around a bit) and a couple leafy trees lit with blue Christmas lights. It was a lovely night and a pleasant, short walk home, where I have been writing this blog post ever since.