35 Kids in a Room

BY PERRIN

Kindergartens are rowdy places... this one's rowdier.  Kindergartens are noisy places... this one's noisier.  Kindergartens are places with toys and colors... this one doesn't have any.  What does this one have?  It has books, pencils, backpacks, desks, chairs, and a loud teacher in a room of 35 five-year-olds... to whom we had to teach English.

We are in Xizhou, a village about 20 minutes away from Dali, in southwestern Yunnan province, a popular tourist destination with streets full of buyers and sellers.  We are here for two weeks so we wanted to do something to help the community.  We decided to volunteer at a local kindergarten/preschool right down the road from where we are staying.  We didn't know what we were in for.

The first day, as we walked to the school with my mom, Andrew, who helped us set up the teaching, told us that the teacher was "super nice" and would help us for the first day and tell us what to do.  I was happy about that and expected to see a room full of toys and kids playing.  I was in for a big surprise.

When we got there Andrew introduced the teacher to us and I looked around.  All the kids were in their classrooms and I could see that the ages ranged from 3-6, depending on the class.  The children were all crammed at desks or wandering around aimlessly.  Some were practicing their Chinese characters while others stared at us like we were aliens.  Andrew and my mom left and the teacher ushered us into the older kids' classroom (5-6 year olds) and gave us a bucket of plastic fruits and tiny animal figurines.  My sister and I stood there in the front of the class speechless and confused.  We were supposed to stand there for an hour and make 30 kids say fruit names?  The teacher looked at us expectantly as the kids' chatting grew louder, so I did the only thing that made sense.  I took the apple out of the bucket, held my hand up and said, "APP-PLE."  The class quieted down somewhat and about half of it echoed, "AP-PLE."  I said it a few more times and then took out the banana and taught them BA-NA-NA.  After about half an hour of that, the kids understandably started to get restless and some started wandering around in and out of the classroom.  Two kids at the back of the classroom actually walked out the door and then climbed back in through the window onto a desk!  The teacher was in the back picking her wart with a needle and ever ten minutes soured, "AN JING!" which means QUIET!  We got through the whole hour, though not very gracefully, and knew that we needed a lesson plan for the next day.

That night, our mom, a Montessori teacher, and Andrew, who had taught English to kids before though in a much easier environment, helped us plan a lesson and Andrew taught with us the next day.  We played a few games and only the ones that we attempted to do outside totally failed. All the other kids came out of their classrooms to watch us and there was too much noise and distraction.  However, it went much better than the day before.

The rest of the week went reasonably well and so did the next week, but it surprised us how hard it was to find games that would work with that many kids in such a tiny room.  We looked at a website that Andrew had used when he taught English to kids in China, but most of them required more space than we had, so we only found about 5 games that would work.  Andrew was surprised at how hard the teaching was and what a contrast it was to his prior experience teaching in Hangzhou.  There, he had only ten well-behaved kids in a big room.

It was useful to learn what the hardest kind of teaching is like.  After this, any other teaching will be simple.  I am glad that we did the hardest teaching first so whenever we're in another challenging teaching situation, we can always say, "We've had worse!"

The Amazing Life of the Linden Centre

The Linden Centre

BY CARLY

I walk out of my room at the Linden Center and the door creaks closed behind me.  I inspect my surroundings.  There are two courtyards that I can see as well as an exercise room, and a bar.  Where to go first?  I will start at the entrance and give you a tour.

Hhhemm.  Hello folks!  My name is Carly, and I will be your tour guide today.  First of all, this is The Linden Centre, a beautiful, old courtyard house located in Xizhou, Yunnan province, China.  This house was built in 1948, just before the Chinese revolution.  It was built by the Yang family, one of the four wealthy families that lived in the town.  Only one year after it was built, the Communist government came and kicked the merchant and his family out and made the house into government offices.  This turned out to be a good thing because it would have been destroyed by the Red Guards if the government hadn't been stationed there.  (The Red Guards destroyed almost everything that was "old", wealthy or religious during the 1960s and 70s.)  Finally, in 2008, the Lindens, an American family that now runs the Linden Centre, signed a contract with the government to lease it for 20 years (everyone leases everything because the government owns it all.)

The Buddha Pool

Let's get back to the present.  We are now in the first courtyard that you walk into every time you enter.  When you walk in through the main doors, to your immediate left you get to take a look at the Buddha pool with a large white wall behind it that, in the old days, was supposed to reflect the last few hours of sun into the rooms directly across from it.  Today the space on the bottom floor is the front desk.  Above the front desk is the old family altar room.  I can see why they wanted to have extra light in there, otherwise, when they were meeting a guest, it would have been dark and gloomy.  The room that is now the front desk used to be  the elders' room.  They got that room because it had more light and was in the first courtyard that was for some reason considered the best.

To the left of the front desk there is the game room and to the right there is a library and yet further to the right there is the dining room, kitchen and a staircase.  As you walk up the stairs, take a minute to look at the swallow's nest that is perched on a light.  The best time to see the baby swallows in the next is when their parents fly by and they open their beaks and squeak in their high-pitched voices, pleading for food.  At the top of the stairs turn left to go to the playroom, which has many toys and games, such as LIFE or LEGOs.  Past the playroom is the Mahjong room.  Mahjong is a traditional Chinese game.  If you saw town folks playing, you would think it was the hardest game in the world because their hands move like lightning, but once you learn it, it is not difficult at all.

If you were to go straight at the top of the stairs you would find yourself passing the movie room and the conference room and then you could keep going straight, down the second staircase, or left, to the gift shop.  Let's go down the stairs.

Welcome to the second courtyard :) !!  At the bottom of the stairs take a sharp left and walk a few paces and you will find yourself in front of a bamboo shade.  If you lift that up you are standing in the doorway of the bar and across from you there is another door that connects to the first courtyard.  Let's not go back there!  The bar used to be Mr. Yang's office.  Right outside the bar there are some columns holding up the second floor gift shop.  One of the columns is partly hollow and is thought to have been used for storing valuables.

Facing away from the bar there is another white wall that reflects the light into the bar.  There is a reflecting wall here that reflected light into the old office.  There is a doorway five feet to the left of the reflective wall and another five feet to the right.  Go through either because they both end up in the third courtyard!

This courtyard has only guestrooms.  There is a bamboo shade in the middle of the section on the right side and another on the left side.  There are two rooms on both of the first floors and two rooms on the top floor of both sides.  There is a large garden in the middle of this courtyard and a small coffee table in front of it.  The garden is full of antique, stone Chinese lions that Brian Linden collected along with many other antiques such as a 1,000 year-old Buddhist tombstone that is also in the garden.  He bought this for a very low price because the person who sold it to him said it was bad luck, but in America, who wouldn't buy a 1,000 year-old tombstone for such a good price?!

Stone lions in the garden

There is one last garden beyond the doorways at the end of courtyard #3.  This garden also has a small porch that overlooks a small portion of the many rice patties that exist outside of the Linden Centre walls.  At the right end of the porch there is a metal spiral staircase that connects to the terrace.

The terrace has three tables and one swinging char that looks somewhat like a giant egg that someone cut in half.  This chair provides shade and much pleasure.  While relaxing in this chair or by sitting at a table you can see the rice fields and you can also get a fabulous view of the mountains in the distance.  I expect some of you to be eating dinner up here because it is a lovely place to relax and enjoy food.

View from the terrace

Ok everyone!!  That is the end of our tour!  If you are stopping by Dali or better, Xizhou itself, the Linden Centre is one fabulous place to stay!!

White

BY PERRIN

When we left Taiwan, we wanted to take a trip with our Taiwanese friends, Frank, Jennifer, Julian (4), and Ning Ning (1) to say goodbye.  We first visited Jinmen, an island that is part of Taiwan but is right off the coast of China.  Then we went to Xiamen, which is a city on the south coast of China about 20 miles away from Jinmen.  Jennifer's dad owns a wedding dress factory in Xiamen and he and his associates gave us a tour.

First we explored the cloth storage room where hundreds of bolts of cloth were stacked on the floor and all the way up to the ceiling.  There is one person who examines each and every bolt of cloth for holes and flaws and if they find one, they put a sticker on it so it doesn't end up in the dresses.  The first floor is where the skirts of the dresses are made.  There were people cutting, sewing, pinning, unpinning, lacing, and folding the cloth that would result in beautiful dresses.  

One thing that shocked me about the factory is that EVERYTHING was WHITE.  The room was white, the cloth was white, the lace was white, the sewing machines were white, and everything not white was covered in something that was.

Pleating

Taking out pins

The second floor was where the bodices are made and sewed onto the skirts.  Jennifer's dad told us that pleating (making lots of little folds) is one of the hardest things to do while the task of taking out pins is the least difficult.  This room looked similar to the room below except the work was more detailed and looked more like a dress than just white cloth.  People were fitting the dresses to cloth mannequins, which were sized from 1 - 32.  The largest mannequins are called "big mamas."  Jennifer explained that most of the "big mamas" are for Americans but the factory sells the most dresses in Spain.

"Big Mama"

The third floor was for beading and the finishing touches, but the designers worked there too.  The factory has 1,000 different designs of dresses each made with different cloth, shapes, beads, and sizes.  They also make custom dresses designed to fit individual people.  

Carly and I got to try a few on and it was really funny because they didn't fit very well.  I liked the longer dresses while Carly's favorite dress was a medium length and the skirt was made up of enormous, spirally flowers.

Giving the mandatory "V" signs

That night we had a great time with Jennifer's family and her dad's business partners singing, dancing, playing an accordion and being silly at a delicious dinner before practically sleep walking to bed.  I had learned a lot of random facts and interesting information about wedding dresses, cloth, lace, and design and was ready to go to sleep.  It had been a long day of traveling and wedding dresses.

The Toilet Stalls of Death

BY CARLY

The tiny mini-bus had stopped at the bathroom stop but, as usual, it was bouncing up and down because when the bus was in neutral, the engine didn't appreciate it.  I stepped out of the bus with some toilet paper expecting the typical Chinese bathroom: no toilet paper, squat toilets and some stalls on which the lock is usually broken.  I stepped around the wall and a horrid smell filled my nostrils.  I looked at my feet.  There were many spots of who knows what.  As my eyes met the row of toilets I spotted the lady that had been sitting next to me on the bus pulling up her pink lacy underpants.  The foot positioning was tricky and she was trying to avoid getting her pants into the muck.  I walked carefully over to one of the toilets that was a slanted ditch with a 3-foot wall separating it from the other ditches.  This is gross, I thought.

After going to the bathroom and fleeing from it, I crossed the road and hopped back on the bus.  I asked my Mom for a wet wipe because do you expect a bathroom like that to have a sink?  I sat back down, grabbed my Kindle and started to read.

Jinmen Knife Factory

Maestro Wu is in the back with the blue shirt

BY CARLY

I tried to cover Julian's eyes again but he shoved my hands away.  We were in a knife factory watching a knife being made.  At the moment we were watching the knife being zapped with a long tool that shoots sparks out of the end and apparently that could make you blind if you look at it too long.  That's why I wanted to cover Julian's eyes, "If you look at that too long you will be like this, 'Ohhh what is this? What is this...????'"  I said the best I could in the jumbled assortment of Chinese words I knew.  We watched as the knife maker, Maestro Wu, put the knife into the oven full of hot, red coals, flattened the blade in a pounding machine, and finally it looked like a knife with a pointy metal stick that, later, they would put the handle onto.  I thought the knife was interesting but I would have rather have been browsing around the shop than watching the knife actually being made.

The finished knife without a handle

The cool thing about the knife making, though, is that they are made of mortar shells.  The knife business has been going for three generations.  In 1937, Wu Chao-Hsi inherited his Dad's knife business.  Later he became known as "Maestro Wu," by carrying his forging furnace on his shoulder around the towns of the small, Taiwanese island of Jinmen, near China's coast.  There was not enough steel, so he decided to take the left over bombshells from the Chinese and Taiwanese conflict and use them instead.  Over one million bombshells were left on the island after the conflict and the Chinese kept bombing Jinmen all the way until 1978.  Fun Fact: You can choose your own bombshell from either inside the shop or bring one in and have him make a knife out of it.

The bombshells

We exited the workroom and entered the shop.  I was kind of relieved to leave the workroom because finally there weren't banging and sizzling noises surrounding us.  There were tons of knives.  There were long sword-like knives, there were tiny pocketknives, and there were thin knives.  There was one knife in particular that most of us liked because it had a fat, oval blade and it was incredibly beautiful.  We all inspected the interesting knives until it was time to go to the ferry.

More bombshe

We had just backed out of the parking lot when my Dad started obsessing over a knife that he had wanted.  "Then go back and buy it!" my Mom said.  "Nah, it's ok," said my Dad.  I could almost feel my Mom rolling her eyes.  I chuckled in the back seat as we drove up onto the highway.

Puppets In The Rice Fields

BY PERRIN

Vietnam has many rice fields.  Actually, the majority of the Vietnamese are farmers.  All day they harvest or plant or tend their fields under the hot Vietnam sun with their conical bamboo hats and towels wrapping every piece of exposed skin.  But they are people, and people like to have fun.  They must have had some kind of entertainment while working in the rice fields... So what was it?  They invented water puppets!  Water puppets are wooden figures about a foot tall that have movable joints controlled by strings.  They are made out of the lightweight wood from a jackfruit tree so they float and then are lacquered with bright colors so they are waterproof.

We went to a tiny village in Vietnam to see a water puppet show and we loved it!  Instead of doing the show in the rice fields like they did in the 11th century, the puppets were performed in a big, rectangular, concrete, manmade pond in the middle of the village.  The water was far from clean and there was a big structure that looked like an ornate temple on stilts in the middle of the pool.  We watched as the show started with the music and voice accompaniment coming from a shaded area to our right.  The voices were high pitched and screechy and the instruments were all traditional Vietnamese instruments including drums.  There was also a man narrating the play but we couldn't understand him because he was speaking Vietnamese.

The puppets started appearing from behind the cloth hanging in front of the temple structure.  They paraded in the water around the front of the pond.  After the parade, two puppets came out and started fighting with each other and then some water buffaloes fought too.  The whole scene looked incredibly real and the people controlling the puppets were all the way behind the screen!  I can't imagine being able to do that.  The other scenes were of traditional fishing techniques and an intriguing scene of frog fishing.  The puppeteers made a puppet holding a fishing pole hook the line onto a frog puppet.  It was incredible how they maneuvered the puppets while the puppeteers were more than 2 meters away!

Our tour guide, Diep, translating the explanation of the water puppets.

When the show ended after about 30 minutes, we were invited to go back to where the people controlling the puppets were.  Putting on puppet shows wasn't their job but they did it for fun.  Most of them were farmers.  When we went behind the screen and structure, we saw that the men were up to their chests in water.  Two of them were on a platform not in the water so they could hand the puppets to the people in the water.  The puppets were on long sticks and had strings to control them but lots of them require several people to make them work.  All of the farmers have had years of practice to learn how to work the puppets and sometimes even carve them.  When we had to leave, we said, "Gam un," which is thank you in Vietnamese.  I loved the show and learning about this incredible Vietnamese tradition.  It is amazing that it has survived for 1,000 years and I hope the tradition isn't forgotten in the future!