It’s Fun Being Famous!

     Like we said before, one thing we have found being here in China is that we are famous!

     Jinan does not have a lot of foreigners and we get stared at a lot. Many people come up to us and want to have their pictures taken with us. We get a lot of smiles and Hi’s as we walk around the campus and on the streets.

     Our students especially seem to love us. We are generally the first foreign teachers that they have had. Their enthusiasm is almost a little over the top at times. When I go out to our west campus to teach, the students meet me (Dave) at the bus when I arrive and want to help me carry all of my stuff to our classroom. They don’t have multimedia in most of the classrooms so I have started carrying our little notebook computer and a small PC projector that we got here to run PowerPoints for my lessons. With all of the cords and other things, my backpack is pretty heavy. My classes are mostly (90%+) girls for some reason. The girls are generally quite short and thin. The average weight is maybe 100 lbs. Anyway, they want to help me (who weighs more than two of them) carry the backpack to our classroom. If one of the boys is with them I let him carry it but if there are only girls I can’t bring myself to do it even though they seem quite disappointed.

     The students have the social maturity of maybe middle school kids in the USA. They are physically and mentally as mature as USA college students but socially they seem like mid teens or so. None of the college students are married and they just don’t do that until they are finished with school. They are even quite giggley when we discuss dating or boy/girl relations just like you might expect from an eighth grader. They are very cute about it and their innocence is quite refreshing.

     Yesterday I had my first experience with the “English Club” that some of the students here have organized. Linda Gold (one of the other BYU teacher) attended along with me. To begin with, a few of the students took us to lunch at the student canteen. Let’s just say that it is not somewhere I would want to eat every lunch. Following lunch we walked back to one of the large classroom buildings to join with other students in the English Club. I expected maybe 20 or so students but when Linda and I walked in there were about 80 students waiting patiently for us. They all clapped when we came in like we were some kind of celebrities or rock stars. They even voted me the new president of the English Club…..quite an honor! They wanted us initially to introduce ourselves and they asked a few questions. They then wanted to have us mingle with them so that we could speak (English) and answer questions. It turns out that it is difficult to mingle with 80 people all at once. We ended up breaking into two main groups with Linda taking one and me taking the other. They arranged for me to have a seat and then started asking questions. One of the first questions was “Do you like Beer?” I thought that was a little strange but told them that, no, I don’t drink beer. The girl then asked: “Then why do you have such a large belly?” They don’t seem to have any problem asking such personal questions or making such comments. I told her that it was probably more related to eating too much junk food and not too much beer. Another young woman asked me how old I was. I told her that in the USA that it wasn’t appropriate to ask people, especially old people, how old they are. She came right back with “well, we are in China now so can you tell me how old you are”. I told them that I was 58. They were impressed!

     Soon after those questions one of the girls asked if I could sing for them. This took me a little by surprise and I told them that I really couldn’t sing. They kept insisting so I tried to think of a simple song that I could teach them. I decided to teach them “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. I did my best to sing one round, which wasn’t very good and then tried to get them to sing it. It turned out that there were too many words that they didn’t recognize so I had to move to something different. I finally decided on “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. They liked that with all of the body movement and we did several rounds of it. Can you imagine doing that with college students in the USA? I don’t think it would quite go over too well! These kids loved it!

     We eventually ran out of time and needed to break up. Many of them wanted to take pictures with us so they could share them with their friends and families.

It’s fun being famous!