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What teaches you most about China

By Robert Webber (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-06-06 12:22

What teaches you more about China: learning the language or making friends with Chinese people? Doing both would be ideal of course and maybe some people would say you cannot separate the two. But let's humour me in this question for a few hundred words and see. I arrived in China in September 2010 and have been fortunate over the last year to teach English at a small university in Zhejiang province, about half an hour from Hangzhou. Despite starting off with the best of intentions to learn Chinese (I even had some preliminary lessons in Canada before I left), in each semester something seemed to throw me off track. In the first semester it was a bad cold and judging some public speaking contests, and then in the second it was the death my father that sent me home for a while.

The author with his Chinese friends. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

But if I was fated to miss out on Chinese lessons this year I was also fated to meet and make friends with several of the Chinese teachers at the university who also teach English. It's been a wonderful thing to be welcomed into their lives, to be taken and trusted as a friend. My Chinese friends and I have dinner together every Friday night, do our grocery shopping together, and hang out for hours in the local Starbucks at the weekend and talk about anything and everything. And like all real friends in China, we text back and forth rather a lot during each day! Over this year these friendships have removed the distinction between being in China and being at 'home'. It is often said, of course, that home is where the heart is. And part of my heart is forever with my Chinese friends. They have supported and listened, talked and shared, just like any friends would.

It has reminded me that while language is important to understanding people and cultures, opening your heart and mind are far more important. I've concluded that while my lack of progress in speaking Chinese is quite disappointing to me, even the best foreign Chinese speaker will never understand anything about China if they can't open their heart to the people they live and work with here. I of course, have been lucky that my Chinese friends speak close to perfect English.

What has surprised me is that many foreign teachers don't make the effort to make friends with their Chinese counterparts. Some do of course, and I am by no means unique. But I do feel like something of a minority. It's easy when you live in China to get overwhelmed by day to day difficulties and annoyances: the way of doing things in China and Western countries does differ in some key respects (even if the gaps are narrowing). When things are going badly and you feel like you are on a downward roll, as they will for anyone from time to time, it's easy to see everyone and everything in China as part of the problems. But if you do this, if you create a wall of stereotype that justifies your irritations, you cut yourself off from the real people whose warmth can help you transcend all this little stuff, and help make your China experience the deep and rich one you hoped it would be. What I've learned is that my Chinese teacher friends share the same grumbles that I have: unnecessary rules, too many forms to fill out, lack of central heating, cheap rice served in the canteen, too much textbook teaching, and so on. But together, through friendship, we lift each other above it.

I don't speak much Chinese (yet) but this hasn't stopped me appreciating the best of China: its people.

Dr. Robert Webber teachers Oral English, Reading Newspapers, and a Survey of English Speaking Countries at Zhejiang Yuexiu University of Foreign Languages in Shaoxing, East China's  Zhejiang province.

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