Five Day Immersion in Yanqing

Wednesday, March 18th at 1:00 PM marked the start of my Chinese immersion program. A friend (doing the immersion with me), a teacher, and I boarded bus 919 and set out for Yanqing. I got on the bus and squeezed into the last row between the wall and my teacher. The 919 followed the Ba Da Ling highway, which runs north from the second ring road, passed by my house and the Olympic stadiums, crossed the 6th ring road (there are really only five ring roads but the first one is called the 2nd ring road), then into the countryside. I sat nervously with my backpack on my lap and a small duffle by my feet, eventually falling into an uneasy sleep. I woke up to see that we were passing by part of the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. Two hours later we arrived in Yanqing.
I applied to do this immersion program knowing little about what I was going to be doing. Our resident director said that for the first year, School Year Abroad China (SYA) had arranged for foreign students to attend classes and live with the students in a high school outside of Beijing (in previous years SYA students could only attend classes at Number Two Normal University, our host school). Students would live in the dormitories, attend classes, and then on the weekend go to a classmate’s home in the countryside. Students will speak only in Chinese for the five days on the immersion. Those last two sentences were pretty much all I knew about the program. Nevertheless, I applied and got accepted, thinking that afterwards they might provide more information. However since this was the first time SYA had done this program, they didn’t even have a packing list. The first pair of students to go on the immersion went a week before me. They came back with just three pieces of advice: bring a lot of homework, warm cloths, and a few gifts. Needless to say I did not know what to expect when I arrived.
When we got off the bus in Yanqing, my classmate and I were surprised. Our resident director had described the city as “a small town” outside of Beijing. After traveling in Yunnan for three weeks and staying in some very, very small towns, we took this to mean a town with one road down the middle and maybe a few convenience stores. Much to our surprise, the town had a developed retail district, complete with multiple full sized electronics stores, a pizza parlor, multiple malls, and even a KFC (although I was later told that, much to the dismay of the locals, the city still did not have a McDonalds). So at least we were not in the middle of nowhere, a good sign. We walked ten minutes to Yanqing Number One Normal High School, and were greeted by the principal at the front gate. We introduced ourselves and then were taken to our dorms.
Yanqing Number One Normal High school, like many Chinese high schools, has both students who live at school in the dorms (these come from the countryside and return home on the weekends), and some who live close enough return home every night. During my stay, I was living in the dorms. I would describe the dorms as basic but tidy. The floors were all concrete, and the walls painted white and green (ironically the exact same green that was painted on the walls in the high school I attended in Yunnan). My room contained four bunk beds, one in each corner of the room. Only three of which were being used, which means that I had five roommates. In between the bunks were lockers and a bookshelf. The beds were all neatly made with the quilts neatly folded on top of the pillows. I dropped off my stuff and was taken into my class.



Class number eleven was a 高一 class, the American equivalent of Freshmen (the difference is that there are only three years of high school in China). In front of the classroom door, the principal told me to go ahead and enter the room by myself. Alrighty then, no big deal I guess. I’ll just open the door here and pop my head in and…damn! They saw me, the brown head of a foreigner peaking his head the classroom. Aw, jeeze, now they are clapping, I guess I have to come in all the way. Ok. I am inside the classroom, but where do I go from here? I guess I will just stand up here awkwardly in front of the class until they stop clapping. What was that? Oh, introduce myself, sure. “我叫满汉声” Silence. Uh oh, that’s a bad sign. That means they don’t understand. Write the characters on the board, maybe that will help. A moment of realization followed by an “ooohhh” came from the students. “满…汉…声…” they repeated among themselves. Not exactly the introduction I had envisioned.



After that I followed my classmates’ schedule. I sat in on all of their classes, ate in their cafeteria, slept in their dorms, and made friends with many of them. The bulk of my time was spend in class. I went into detail about the Chinese classroom and learning experience in my previous post, any this was fairly the same. Because this was a freshman class, they had not picked weather they were going to follow the humanities or science path yet, so they had English, Chinese, Math, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, History, and Politics classes. The only classes I could even come close to following were English, Chemistry, History, and Politics. English was conducted in English so I understood most of it, but even with the whole fluent English speaker advantage I still struggled to answer their questions about when to use “who” and when to use “whom” (my answer: don’t use “whom”). In Chemistry class the notation is the same as in English so I could understand the reactions they were writing down, even though I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. As the teacher put it “chemistry is a world language”. Funnily enough I have heard math teachers in America say the same thing, during math class I could not understand what was being said or written down at all. Their math problems seem to involve lots of strange variables, very few actual numbers, and a lot of using algebra to manipulate the equations. I was completely befuddled. During History and Politics class I could pick up bits and pieces of the conversation, but the most interesting thing to me was their history textbook, which describes the Great Leap Forward in term of its effect on the economy and its plan to catch up with America and Britain in a few years, but completely leaves out the millions of people who died. It adds that “In many commune dining halls, you didn’t even need money to eat!” Not like there was anything to eat, but point taken. During most of these classes I just ended up doing my own homework and writing in my Chinese journal.
The day started at 6am (much to my dismay).We got up, brushed our teeth, made the beds (which required me to fold the comforter up on top of my blanket using a certain method, I wasn’t very good at this part), then went to breakfast in the cafeteria (they had a wide selection of food, none of it was especially tasty. It did the job though). Classes started at 7:45.




After the first two classes, students went to the field for morning exercises. Each class line up in four rows at the side of the field. Then each class would run in sync and in formation onto their spot on the field, chanting as they passed the teachers. Once everyone was line up on the field, the students spread out (still in neat little rows) to about arms length from everybody. It was all very organized and serious, almost military in nature. That’s why when the lullaby music with a cheesy voice counting 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 and telling you to massage your earlobes came on over the loudspeaker, I started to crack up. The first section required that students first massage their earlobes, then their temples, then their cheeks, and finally their skull. After the self massages were done, we moved on to the exercises. Its hard to describe these “excercises”, so I recorded a movie (the issue was that I had to participate as well, so the camera was hanging around my neck and it’s a little shaky at times). It should give you a pretty good idea of what 做操 is all about.



I found the exercises to be pretty useless. Not only do they provide very little actual exercise (I am sure that we burned more calories jogging out on to the field than we did waving our arms in time to the music), but it was also a waste of thirty minutes that I’m sure the students could use to relax a bit. Furthermore, in order to learn the steps to these exercises, they have a couple of classes a week to learn new steps, wasting even more time. The students I talked to all said they don’t enjoy the exercises either.



After the morning exercises, we had two more classes, and then lunch. Lunch was two hours long, so after eating I often played ping pong or badminton with friends, and it was one of the only times I got to really hang out with my classmates. After lunch there were two more classes, and then a study period. Dinner was fairly short, my friends usually just went back to the classroom and did homework after eating. After dinner there was two more hours of study hall until 9 PM. The study halls were completely self regulated; no teachers were in the room. One student was in charge of keeping the other 30+ students quite. This is not something you could pull off in the US, I was pretty impressed. After 9pm, boarders returned to the dorms, and the rest of the students went home. I spent the evenings chatting with my roommates and playing chess with a friend from a different room (he won, multiple times. It was ugly). Lights out at 11.



The school day was pretty intense. Students had little free time and a lot of homework. At one point I was switched into another class just to get to know some other students. This class had a total of 39 students, only four of which were male. The four males immediately started talking to me when I came in, detailing the pain and suffering that came with being in a class with 35 freshmen Chinese schoolgirls (they affectionately named their class 女儿国, or Girl Country). The worst part is that they stay in the same classes throughout high school, so they are stuck with this class for three years, for all of their classes (students stay in one class and the teachers come to the classroom; the opposite of the Western system).

I attended classes Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday morning (when they had another study hall). Saturday afternoon I went home with a classmate named 朱峰 (Zhu Feng). Zhu Feng and I took the bus about half an hour to his village (the name of which I never actually learned). The road from Yanqing was lined with trees and villages. The villages all looked the same, neat rows of single storey brick courtyard houses. Walking through the village reminded me of Beijing’s hutong and courtyard homes, from the outside all you see is a blank wall, and all of the interesting stuff is on the inside. Zhu’s home was clean but simple. Inside the courtyard they had a little garden, some bunnies, and inside his house they had a kang. A kang is a bed commonly used in northern China during the winter. It is essentially a large elevated bed, but the heat from the fire and the kitchen is routed underneath, so in the winter it is very warm and can sleep 4 or 5 people. I dropped off my stuff and he started showing me around the area.



We ended up walking on the main road (the one we had come in on) for a while. On either side of the road were corn fields, but now the corn had already been harvested and nothing had been planed yet so the land was bare. We chatted about this and that, and finally met up with another friend I had made while at school from the neighboring village. We walked through another village with a small retail section, then arrived at what seems to be the only thing close to a tourist attraction in the area – Old Town. The real Old Town was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so what stands today has been build in the last 20 years and is nowhere near as good looking as I expect the original architecture was. Today Old Town is a street full of stores with a bell tower at the end.

After going through the underwhelming Old Town (I shouldn’t be too harsh, this was a small village on the outskirts of the Beijing Municipality, not a metropolis) my second friend invited me to come over to his house for a bit. Zhu had to run some errands so I went along with my second friend to his house. Inside his courtyard his family owned three goats, something he seemed particularly proud of. In his house, his grandmother offered me some nuts, then some apple, then a local specialty that I HAD to try, then some tea, then some chicken, more nuts…a lot of food. Of course she was just being a good host, but I knew that my host family was preparing dumplings for dinner and that I would be expected to eat a lot, so I didn’t want to fill up just then. We talked for a little in my friend’s house, then went back out to the street and met up with Zhu Feng, who I returned home with.
That night we ate dumplings for dinner, and as expected, I ate a lot. I have gotten better at politely fending off zealous hosting trying to get me to eat more after I am stuffed (although as a 6 foot tall 16 year old boy, these people will always have a special place in my heart) and managed not to feel like a balloon by the end of the meal. After the meal I mentioned that I had taken some calligraphy classes in school, and my host grandfather (a little tipsy after four shots of 白酒 – Chinese grain wine. Think vodka+piss) insisted that we break out the ink and brushes. I wrote my name and 北京 (Beijing) on the newspaper in my best calligraphy. They were impressed that a foreigner even knew how to hold the brush properly. Zhu also enjoyed calligraphy and he was about 100x better at it than I was. That night we slept on the kang, it was not as soft as a mattress but I image that in the winter the heat makes up for the hardness.



The next morning Zhu took me out to explore a little bit more. He first showed me a PLA airport that was about a mile away from his house. Inside the fence lay more than 20 fighter jets and a long runway. We were able to get surprisingly close, about 500 yards away from the wall, which was about ten feet tall and didn’t even have barbed wire on top. I was surprised that the security was so lax around the area. Zhu said that the locals don’t really pay much attention to the airport, and that it is just really noisy when they take off.



We walked around the fields a little more and to a small river running through a forest. At this point we were both freezing from the wind, so we returned home a little bit to warm up. We had some time left so his grandma suggested that we go check out the dairy. At first I though “why in the world do I want to see the dairy”. On our way walking there I realized that small rural dairies like the one I was about to visit were the source of the melamine scandal that hit China earlier in the year. Inside the dairy I noticed that the cows had much less room than in The States. There were about seven cows to a pen the size of a small apartment. We peeked inside a building and saw a milking machine, but the workers wouldn’t let me take a picture. Zhu said that now the regulations are very tight on milk production so everyone was a little on edge.



Zhu and I headed back and I packed up my stuff. As a departing gift he gave me a copy of The Three Kingdoms (a classical Chinese story), a pen holder made from beads that his mom made, and two apples. I gave the family a bar of Scharffenberger dark chocolate and Zhu pirated copy of Forest Gump, a classical American movie. He accompanied me on the bus back to Yanqing and we said goodbye in front of the bus stop. I met up with my classmate (who had gone to another house in the countryside) and we took the bus back to Beijing together. Upon return to my host home in Beijing, I said “hi” to my host father and went straight into the shower. I hadn’t showered in five days.

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