Snobby or Shy? Reclusive or Rude? (Marcus)

Well I feel like complete and utter crap. This never-ending cough which leaves me feeling like I can only breathe at one quarter capacity has certainly left a non-smile on my face for the past few days. I would like to write a few things about our trip to Suzhou; a really interesting place, but I just plain and simple cannot be bothered. I thought I was lucky not getting sick when Courtney has been on and off sick for weeks - even standing there before 55 kids with at least half of them coughing or sneezing. Back home I am not overly prone to colds, but it seems here my luck ran out. In fact day 1 of Suzhou I had that lovely short of breath feeling and just knew that the good stuff was on the way. I tried to curb it with a quick stop to get some medicine from a chinese pharmacy(which also involved a quick checkup from a female doc), but it didn't work, and I spent the majority of today sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself.

I doubt very much if I will teach tomorrow either. I just cant do it when I feel like this. The coughing becomes so non-stop it's a nightmare. A constant husky dry-cough that leaves me feeling exhausted. Then there's the fact that even mild activity has me feeling like I am out of breath - something Courtney said she experienced at the height of her sickness. She commented on having to stop to take a breath as she climbed up to the classrooms, well be damned, I did try and teach on Monday and experienced the very same as i struggled up to the top. I had to double over on the teachers desk pretending i was reading something, waiting for my breath to come back. God - if you smoke and stand chance of living your whole life this way, you totally suck! I don't know what's worse, the fact that every time I breathe I have that short of breath tickle deep in my throat and upper chest, or knowing that poor Courtney felt this sick for so long(though i promise i looked after her!). I swear if i knew she felt this rotten, I wouldn't have let her teach, period!

Sickness sidetrack aside - i was laying on the bed a few moments ago and was thinking about our situation here. We have been here for just under a month and a half now - which is a long stretch by anyones standards, and we barely know anybody. There are thousands of students here and litterally hundreds of teachers, but those we can count as 1) known and 2) know anything about we could safely take care of with one hand.

It pisses me off a little to think that they're all smiles in passing, or if they accidentally make eye contact, yet make absolutely no effort whatsoever to actually involve us in their lives - I wouldn't even go so far as to call it their lives, but their 'day to days'.

I was laying there thinking, whose fault is it? Are they that shy that it's just a permanent condition? Or has it transformed from shy to outright snobbery? Surely by now they realize we are just normal people like them. We eat the same food, we walk the same halls. We get cold when they do(well actually we get colder, and seemingly sicker too.)

Or is it our fault? Are we too reclusive? Our teaching day is depressingly a combination of go to class, teach, come back to apartment, muck around on our laptops. That's about it. Sometimes we'll mix it up by walking up to the shops, or watch a bit of the television abortion that is CCTV9, but most days, that's our day to day life.

I was sitting here earlier, in the spare room reading the Age website - it's nice to get familiar with what's going on back home as beyond those kind of websites, there's no information outlets. I looked out over my shoulder and there was Courtney, on her laptop, firstly doing some lesson work, then some just general web-browsing. And it's all we do! We very occasionally might watch a movie, but we don't always feel like watching movies. Sometimes we'll spontaneously go for a night walk around the campus which is quite peaceful; doing things like reading the news boards without having 500 sets of eyes staring at us - or cat spotting. But beyond that, life here is dull, horribly dull. Even if we head out for dinner, we're home by around 7:30pm at the latest because most Chinese seem to eat around 5pm on average, and some places aren't even open come 7:30pm!

Ok side-tracked again - but our day involves teaching then coming home. The Chinese teachers i believe teach on average around 2 classes a day - if that. We get paid a LOT more than them by their standards, and we are not bound to the teaching staff offices. They are. Big difference in working conditions right there. Even though most of the time they just seem to chat and browse the internet in silence, they still have to be there from class start to class finish, which is around 9pm. Do they resent us for this?

The other campus has a teaching office that we actually spend a little time in. Our Monday classes involves us getting to the school usually around 25 minutes early - so there's that time, then there's a gap of almost an hour between our second last, and last class, so we just sit in the office. As usual they're reading internet sites, sometimes marking, or just sitting there eating(one women seems to do absolutely nothing 24/7), but these women on the whole are really nice and friendly, and I could imagine if we spent more time in the office we would get to slowly know them - perhaps even outside of school. Although the woman who sits beside me who Courtney thinks is an English teacher(and I am thinking she's actually not) sort of cringed when I asked her in English, "What time is it?" then nodded up to the clock just behind us to which she sort of floundered for words in Chinese, big smile then asked someone else. My mission was to ascertain if the staff clock was correct, as consistently every clock in the school, no matter which campus, perhaps even every clock in the whole damned province, has a different time on it.

So are we perhaps a little too reclusive in their eyes? We were set aside two desks(in different teaching offices) to sit at and 'have a rest' in between classes - although in between classes is either 10 minutes, or almost two hours. As much as I want to meet and befriend some of these teachers, I am also not overly prepared to sit in the cold office(yeah windows open no matter what mother nature is cooking up) and attempt to make very basic chitchat for a few minutes(which we have done previously), only to have it quickly revert to silence, silence, the sound of someone slurping soup, tapping away on laptops or the partial grommit which involves hocking up a lugey but not actually releasing it. Mmm mmmh.

I think if we spoke a little more Chinese, our experience would be a lot different across the board. We can speak it better than when we first arrived, but most of it is just 'survival chinese', ie enough to get by on a daily basis. If we ask someone how they are: (ni hao ma?) and they answer in anything other than hao or hen hao for well or very well - or worse, add something else onto it, then we get those fun times that involves them talking in Chinese, us smiling and feeling stupid, a few wo bu mingbai's(we don't understand's) and us wishing like hell we hadn't even bothered.

So perhaps with all that considered, we are in fact the snobs, or the rude ones. Perhaps it should be like Courtney attempted last week - in places like the Canteen, we should rock ourselves up and invite ourselves down to one of their tables of a familiar face - which would then make them feel super shy having to forcibly use english, and likewise us feeling uncomfortable as we pick and choose random tidbits from our prison tray meals whilst they woof down their entire meal like a wolf that hasn't eaten in a month, only to hear the 'You westerners don't eat much when you are so tall and strong!" Yeah yeah, tall and strong, cough cough, more coughs and I am outta here to take my night cold n flu medicine before the afternoon stuff wears off.