From Nankai Rob’s Chinese New Year 2012 post “Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load“:
“…parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.”

For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:

• Happy Rabbits! Chinese New Year 2011 fireworks from Tianjin, China!
• Photo Gallery: Tianjin 2009-2010 Fall & Winter
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!

Last Friday I started teaching a month-long EFL “Winter Camp” program for nine Beijingers aged 8-13 who arrived the night before. We have English class in the mornings and field trips in the afternoons. They’re all staying with Canadian families and it’s a shocking cultural adventure for them. Almost everything is different. It’s rare to get a group this “fresh”, and I plan to have fun with it.

We’re using a classroom in a posh local private school that is pretty impressive even by Canadian standards, so the facilities and grounds are really nice; they were awed by the interactive white board, for example. But they were also excited just to walk down the hall to the bathroom, armed with their cameras, taking photos of everything from the vending machines to the high school classes in session with their doors open. I’ve taught this kind of EFL gig before, and sometimes the kids have already traveled so much that being in a developed Western country isn’t so special, but not these kids. They’re apparently doing this kind of thing for the first time. I felt like a celebrity in the classroom with all the cameras aimed at me.

I’ve decided to keep the fact that I can speak basic Mandarin a secret from them for as long as I can, so I can listen in on their conversations as much as I can. Between my limited Mandarin, my teaching responsibilities, and the fact that four excited 12-year-old girls babbling away at once is hard to decipher in any language, I don’t get to tune in to their conversations near enough to satisfy my curiosity, never mind pausing to scribble down notes of what I hear. But it’s still funny what I do catch.

Friday morning was their first morning in Canada after their first night and breakfast with a Canadian family. Before class started they were animatedly telling one another about how BIG everything in their homestays’ house is, even the bookshelves. Then they were talking about what they were fed for breakfast and what was packed in their lunches, how it was either gross or they didn’t know what it was. It was funny in its own right, but extra funny to hear the “foreigner” experience in reverse. We’ll see what the next month brings!

Other experiences of teaching Chinese students in Vancouver:

• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Survived ESL camping
• When ‘our’ food is the foreign food
• First trips to church
• Teaching ESL in Vancouver
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?

You can browse all of our ESL/EFL teaching post here.

Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA — in contrast to Chinese from other countries — are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It’s Bad Out There.

It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don’t play well among their American classmates. For example:

“They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate.”

“One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again.”

As soon as I saw this in our mailbox today, it reminded me of something I’d read in the news a couple years ago. A certain religious group in China, famous for being brutally persecuted by the gov’t in the late 90′s, was apparently squandering Western public sympathy by selling tickets to Chinese cultural stage performances that contained explicit (but unadvertised) political and spiritual messages. This was making some Euro-Americans feel deceived. People felt ripped off that they’d come for a family show and got explicit politicking and proselytizing.

I didn’t know if this was them or not. My suspicious were heightened when I read the vague but very spiritual introduction section and this statement:

A performance like Shen Yun can no longer be found in China today because many of China’s best artistic traditions have been lost in recent decades.

The last page confirmed my guess. Turns out the performance advertised in the pamphlet (not mailed but hand-delivered to our door by an elderly Chinese man) is put on by the “evil cult” at the top of the Chinese government’s hit list — one of the largest, most viciously persecuted Chinese religious groups in the last fifteen years. There were propaganda posters in our neighbourhood in Tianjin denouncing them (see here for images and translations), and you have to walk past their demonstration to get into the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. To avoid tempting China’s net nanny I won’t write their name here, but here’s a picture:

I don’t blame them for presenting their religion and protest message through art and entertainment like they do. We Westerners are, after all, well-accustomed to ideological propaganda in our entertainment; that — and money — is what our entertainment is all about. But it takes a little more nuance and subtly to do this effectively to a Western audience, as evidenced by the negative reactions they’ve provoked (here’s an example). Who knows, maybe this go around they’ve tailored their message a little better.

Anyway, it’s interesting to find yet another example of China popping up in the daily life of Canadians. For more about this particular “evil cult”, see:

• Recent propaganda from Tianjin, China: evil, scheming, bloodthirsty cults! (China Hope Live)
• Shen Yun Performing Arts
• Politics and art blend in contentious Chinese show (Toronto.com)
• Shen Yun’s Display of Traditional Chinese Culture Scares Chinese Regime (Epoch Times — the ‘evil cult’s’ news agency)

P.S. – “Shén​ Yùn” refers to charm or grace in art and poetry. Literally it is “God/spirit/divine” (神) + “beautiful sound/charm/appeal” (韵). Here are some different dictionary entries.