A year of living culturally

Inspired by a story in Get Up & Go magazine, Cas and Jenny Aarts took the plunge to do something totally different in their retirement.

Not so long ago, if a fortune-teller had told me I would one day live and work in China, I wouldn’t have believed it. But nevertheless, my husband Cas and I, inspired by a feature we read in Get Up & Go magazine in 2005 on teaching English overseas, became filled with a strange, restless yearning.

We decided that instead of retiring and growing petunias in the backyard we would get up and go and do something different. So by the end of 2005 we’d completed a TESOL course in Sydney and in February 2006, to our utter amazement, found ourselves living in an apartment on campus teaching English to 16-year-old Senior 1 students at Yudu Middle School in Jiangxi province, China, along with a woman named Katherine from Adelaide.

We three were the only foreigners living in this small town (by Chinese standards) of around 100,000 people. Our pupils fell off their chairs laughing on hearing that the population of Sydney, our biggest metropolis, stood currently at around four million residents. Shanghai, their most populated city, has 17 million! Needless to say, we were the focus of attention wherever we went, and not having any transport, we walked everywhere.

Limited communication was possible with the aid of our trusty Mandarin phrase book, enhanced by some highly entertaining Marcel Marceau imitations. But the people were friendly and reciprocated with their only claim to English, the ‘hellos,’ amidst much giggling at their own audacity. When we first responded with ‘nihao’ (Mandarin for ‘hello’) they looked most disappointed, so we joined in the chorus of ‘hellos’ from then on and the locals beamed with delight.

We dined at restaurants every night. Meals were extremely cheap, delicious and spicy, rather like Sichuan cuisine. The waitresses would run off with our phrase books to study English in the kitchen whilst we were preoccupied with eating and washing the food down with green tea and ‘bing pijio’ (cold Chinese beer).

On fine weekend nights there’d be dancing atop the row of shops by the river, a graceful mixture of ballroom and tai chi, while below, in the courtyard, reed-like young people worked out in aerobics classes. Sometimes, a troupe of mostly elderly traditional musicians played in the main street, their music scores pegged up like washing on a clothesline. Tai chi, ladies’ fan dancing and badminton took place in the park at 6am.

We taught 14 different 45 minute classes each a week as well as two ‘English Corners’, where keen students from any year had the opportunity to practise their spoken English with native speakers. We aimed to make our lessons as interesting and dynamic as possible, since each class had only one oral English session a week.

Classes consisted of 55-60 students. Our main task was to coax the shy students into conversations ¡­a difficult task, as they hated making mistakes in front of their peers. In such big classrooms, you needed to walk up and down between the rows of desks constantly, otherwise you’d find the boys at the back catching up on their beauty sleep, boys and girls blatantly doing Chinese homework, reading Chinese comics and love stories or plugged into their MP3 players. Anything to avoid the dreaded oral English!

Many students were reluctant to speak English because they couldn’t see the necessity, but it’s compulsory for every child to learn it. Chinese students are a delight – friendly, good-natured, curious about us and our life in Australia.

We were each allocated a waiban (minder) to ease us into the Chinese culture and help us to solve any problems – which turned up quite often! Our waibans, students and Chinese English teachers couldn’t do enough for us, especially the seniors who came faithfully to English Corner. They threw many curly questions at us ¡­we neatly sidestepped the really hot potatoes¡­but we had many laughs together, especially when the subject of Aussie slang came up.

One day at English Corner, the senior girls told me I needed to choose a Chinese name.

Bestowing of a name on someone is not undertaken lightly in China.

After much deliberation, they said my name should be Lan Fei Lin. ‘Lan’ is a foreigner’s name from one of the minority groups while ‘Fei Lin’, loosely translated, means ‘a wise person who flies free over the fields’. I was overwhelmed.

One Saturday afternoon (their only free time in the week), a group of senior students escorted us on a short bus ride back in time, passing rice paddies on the outskirts of town still being ploughed by water buffalo. They wanted to show us a ‘well-kept secret,’ their local mountain park, which featured hundreds of steps leading up to serene pavilions, an old but working temple with many legends of famous beauties and heroes and charming vistas around every twist of the path.

A school excursion took in some of the outlying villages, where although the people were extremely poor they smilingly welcomed us. Jiangxi is one of the poorest provinces and yet it is developing at an astonishing rate, just like the rest of China. We saw the cave where the Red Army hid their supplies and the house in Yudu where Chairman Mao lived before his army crossed the river and began the Long March across China.

One Saturday, we taught English to wildly enthusiastic workers at a motorbike gearbox factory. A young man from a village an hour away, crazy to speak English, made a special trip on Easter Sunday, presenting us with a box of fancy biscuits and a bag of apples. We nicknamed him ‘the Easter Bunny’.

We’re so glad we ‘got up and went to China’!

Travel facts

The agency we dealt with was www.bucklandgroup.org. "be warned, they do send you off to woop woop (the real ‘outback’ China) and work with middle schools and a few primary schools, not universities." – Jenny Aarts