Since the beginning of July, I have been in Chengdu with all the other PCTs for Chinese language, TEFL, and safety and security training.  I spent this past week in Jiangyou, which will be my home for the next two years.  It’s in the same province (Sichuan) and only two hours north of Chengdu by bus.  It is still a city but much smaller than Chengdu, and near my university there is so much GREEN: hills, farms, trees, etc.  My apartment is on the campus of my university, which is called Sichuan Preschool Educators College.  It’s a pretty small campus. I walked around with the Peace Corps volunteer, Mary, who has been there for a year. She is a China 17, meaning she is part of the 17^th group to come to China with the Peace Corps. I am a China 18.  It seems like you can get almost anywhere on campus within 15 minutes, or at least what I saw of it.  Katie, a China 16 who this year finished her two years in the Peace Corps, had set up an English corner in a classroom near the art department, and there are tons of books on teaching English, kids’ books, and novels in English, as well as several drawers of DVDs. I am also living in the apartment she lived in, and she left me a bunch of clothes, baking supplies, an electric blanket, a hair dryer, and some cleaning supplies.

 A little information about the college: it is a three year school, and most of the students who go there are somewhat low-level in English, because pretty much the only people who become preschool and kindergarten teachers are those who failed the gaokao, which is the university entrance exam.  I have heard that classes may be unexpectedly cancelled for student dance and song performances. Sometimes teachers take part in the performances.  Mary tells me that I have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what and how I teach.  My classes will be Reading and Listening but how I teach the students is up to me, and having the students watch movies or listen to music in class is totally acceptable.  I can also incorporate art projects especially ones that they could use with their future students.  Students will probably ask me to go hiking, and Mary often has students over to bake yummy things.  Plus there is a huge art department on campus and I may be able to take classes for free.   I feel like I couldn’t ask for a more perfect placement!!! It sounds like I will be able to do all the things I love with my students: dancing, singing, baking, art and crafts…. It’s too good to be true!!  I’m sure there will be a lot of challenges but I will maintain sanity with all those good things. 

                I stayed with a host family in Jiangyou, and they were very nice but didn’t speak any English except for the 13 year old son, Jerry. It was Jerry’s parents and grandparents, and there often cousin, aunts, and uncles coming in and out.  Plus they speak the Sichuan dialect which is pretty different from Mandarin, in that they use different words and also different pronunciation even of the words that are shared.  It was frustrating because many times when we all sat together, people in the family would say something to me really fast, and I would stare blankly at them. Sometimes I asked them to repeat but I felt like they got really frustrated with me for not understanding them.  So mostly I would just stare until they gave up.  Jerry was pretty oblivious and would often be playing on his phone or just not realizing that I kept saying ting bu dong, ting bu dong, which means I don’t understand (ting=listen, bu=don’t, and dong= understand). I would have to ask him directly to translate because it rarely occurred to him to come to my aid.  I think a lot of people get the idea that just because I can ask certain questions and say some sentences in Chinese that I am fluent or that I understand everything I hear. False! What I say is all I know.  I kept telling them that I only have been learning Chinese since July.  The worst part is that I could tell when they were talking about me, because they would either point or I’d hear them say, ting bu dong.  I wanted to say, I may not ting dong Chinese but I do ting dong “ting bu dong”!  I discovered, however, that they like playing card games and they loved Uno.  Thank goodness for that! We played many card games this week and it was a great icebreaker and time passer especially in the evening when the whole family was home and sitting around. I felt like they expected me to lead a discussion with them or entertain them somehow but I was completely at a loss at what to say after exhausting my few sentences of small talk in Chinese.  After the first night, I just would pull out my cards every night and it totally saved me.  We also watched a few movies this week (Real Steel and Kung Fu Panda 2) which I appreciated because it allowed me to just zone out.  I don’t want to give a bad impression of my experience because I did have a good week, but it was just frustrating sometimes.

                My time in Jiangyou really made me appreciate my Chengdu host family even more.  They are really patient with me when I speak Chinese and they don’t seem bothered by the fact I often forget words even if I hear them repeatedly.  As I’ve said before, they have hosted two other Americans (Peace Corps volunteers) so I think they understand American etiquette and behavior a little more than other people’s host families, and they understand that I don’t know very much Chinese at all. They let me have my space and don’t bother me if I am in my room working on stuff.  Plus I have my own bathroom. The bathroom at my Jiangyou host family was shared by everyone in the family, and the lock didn’t work so I was always concerned that someone would come in on me.  My Chengdu family is super low key and it’s just the host parents so I don’t have a bunch of people constantly staring at me or jabbering at me a mile a minute.  I definitely enjoyed my site visit in Jiangyou but I was really happy to be in Chengdu and with my host family here. I never thought I would miss this big city but it was great to be back in familiar territory. The night I got back (Friday) I hung out with PCTs.  We didn’t have class Saturday for once so we went clubbing and I didn’t get home until 4 in the morning. It was so great to see some of them again! I had missed everybody this past week.  I’m really going to miss the other volunteers but I think once I get back to site I will be pretty busy with teaching and preparing lessons so it will be ok.