April 20th: pigment fuss and Greek epic blunders

Day 216

This week's lesson is all about swimming and such, with related vocab and the "swimming pool" song as a finale. I first quiz them as to why they enjoy summer and a few of them said they didn't. One boy answered, "I do not like summer because I am a yellow person and in summer I am a black person." I glossed over it saying, "Ah, so you don't want to get burned." He nodded. Whew.

I didn't want to get into a possible discussion about racism because my kids would be lost and I'd be fighting generations of deep-seeded ignorance. There is a quote from a Chinese college student stating: "There is no racism in China because there are no black people in China." Riiiiiiiight. Even if that bit of nonsense held water, I have seen first-hand on the BBC, anti-Japanese protestors exclaiming into the camera "I hate-a Japanese!" It seems two indoctrinated bits of school memorization are "Mao is a great man" and "Japan is bad." Whatever happened to "I before E except after C"?

Another reason I didn't want to prematurely leap onto the soapbox is my lad probably meant it as he didn't want to be dark. The Chinese equate tans with being a farmer, so the more white you are, the more wealthy you likely are. One trip down the supermarket's beauty aisle reveals all manner of skin-whitening products. The men who fancy themselves well-to-do will grow out their pinky nail (no matter how grimy it becomes) to prove they don't use a shovel. My little boarding school quipster was most likely railing against farmerhood. I would have been lecturing at the wrong venue. China's veneration of the NBA will probably soften their perspective some, after all, if it's ok for national hero Yao Ming to high-five a soul brother, why not the rest of them?

In my last class, a boy was sitting in the back room by the water cooler, clearly separated from the other students. "Why is he back there?" I asked. No one said anything, a few laughed. One kid answered in Chinese. "In English!" (my battle cry) A few said "Sahs. Sahs."

"What?! SARS?"

They nodded, "Outbreak."

Then they started laughing. They had fooled Mr. Willis. The kid was sent back there for talking. Little bastards. I was proud of them. I didn't think they had it in them.

I ate in the dining hall, chain-drank tea trying to get my sinuses back under control and stave off losing my voice. I rode up to the middle school just ahead of a storm that was coming in. I always like the suspense that precedes it: the stillness, distant lightning flashes (which I now have to second guess as fireworks), the sudden bursts of warm wind carrying a peal of thunder on its wings. It's a kind of doomsday exhiliration.

I sat with the crew at the blue pacman, then afterwards we gathered in Heather's to watch "Alexander." It's been said that Oliver Stone has had this project in the works for years and I think ambition blinded him. Some moments are agonizingly formulaic (the breaking of the wild horse, for one) and not worthy of an auteur like Stone (this is the same chap who made "U-turn" and "Natural Born Killers" after all). There is the obligatory "St. Crispin's Day" speech ripoff where the leader on horseback is rallying his army with a spirited glory monologue. (It seems contrived in every film but Lord of the Rings). Why did the cast have Irish accents except Angelina Jolie, who as Montana pointed out had a Romanian accent. Rhys said we ought to forgive her since it was at least some sort of Balkan tongue. Oh well.

After three hours we all wound down and turned in. Mike had disappeared earlier, but then he was five drinks ahead of everyone else and was entitled.