China Exchange 1999 - International Programs @ TCC

For a person living in China while drawing an American salary prices are quite cheap. Dinner in a local restaurant might average about two US dollars per person. This being the case, I have made a plan to dine with each of my students at least once while I am at BBI. Each class has a leader or monitor who acts as a liaison between the students and teacher and also assists the teacher as needed. I have talked with each of the class leaders about organizing small groups of three or four students that I can take out to dinner each week. Jiao Li Yang, whose English name is Alan, arranged the first dinner on Thursday of this past week. Alan is the class monitor for my Tuesday morning class. We dined with two of his classmates, Liu Jing and Liang Tao.

Jiao Li Yang (Alan), Liu Jing, and Liang Tao are third year students in my Tuesday morning class. Liang Tao is a noted athlete on campus whose favorite sport is tennis.

One thing we talked about was the great disparity in income in China at this time. As China moves toward a market economy there is a great disparity between those involved in business and those who paid a regular salary. Generally, those on a salary, including people like physicians and professors make relatively little money. The average salary in Beijing is about 100 dollars a month. Conversely, anyone involved in some type of entrepreneurial endeavor makes much more. This means that street peddlers in Beijing have higher incomes than most professionals. Alan's father is a medical specialist, a bone surgeon. In our country, of course, he would be very, very wealthy. Though I did not ask how much he earned, Alan indicated that it was not a great deal. (I could of asked, there is not the taboo of asking about income or age in China that there is in the West.) He said that, like in our country, physicians work very hard, some of the operations he performs might last from early in the morning until late at night. They spoke of a famous professor in Beijing, a woman with two PhDs, who makes seventy five dollars a month.

We ate a new restaurant very near the campus. Dinner for four was about seven dollars.

One of the questions that I asked my students was how their parents fared during the Cultural Revolution, a very difficult time for many in China. Alan said that his parents, like many, were moved from the city into the country. Many city dwellers and intellectuals were sent from the cities to work on farms during this period and had very difficult lives. Liang Tao said that his parents were too young to be greatly effected by the Cultural Revolution. Liu Jing indicated that her father actually fared quite well during this period of Chinese history since her father served as a bodyguard to the Premier, who later sent him to the university to study. Liu Jing's father is now a professor. He teaches Japanese at a university in Beijing.

Checking out the web page in my apartment after dinner.

The students pointed out that one benefit of these get togethers for them was an opportunity to converse with a native speaker of English and polish their language skills. I said that it wasn't doing much for my learning Chinese. We agreed that next time we would speak English for half of the evening and Chinese for the other half. After dinner we stopped by my apartment so that I could show the group my web page. This was a help to me, they pointed out many of my spelling errors in the Chinese names that I included on my page. They seemed very interested in the page and in seeing some of my art work.

I couldn't ask for better company than I had for dinner that evening but I haven't even mentioned the food. I got married when I was in graduate school and my wife and I used my only student loan to go to Paris for our honeymoon. I was asking people what restaurants to go to in Paris and was advised that it didn't matter, where ever we went was going to be wonderful, that there are no bad restaurants in Paris. It was true. I feel the same way about China, the food is terrific everywhere.

NEXT: 3/29 Naming traditions

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ED GIBBS
egibbs@tcc.edu
 
 

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