The freshmen students think I live in the office!! I discovered this when several said, at different times, "Oh, I came to see you in your dormitory, but you weren’t in." Slowly it sank in with me that they’d been knocking on the door of the office when no one was there.

Ruth, Elizabeth and I have been making a unified effort to make our two-room shared office more hospitable. It had been a storage area for years before we inherited it last year, and we were at first overwhelmed by the filth and accumulated junk and discarded furniture. Little by little, we’ve taken control. This year, we even have a floor mopping rotation among the three of us. We have house plants. We have washed and dried all the slipcovers and bedding – no mean feat in a land without launder-mats. (My secret ambition is to open a chain of them in Gansu.)

The place is looking great. And the students think I live there. I quickly realized that their assumption is completely rational, completely plausible.
1. College faculty always live on campus. Ours, with no faculty housing, is an anomaly, perhaps unique in all of China.
2. People in China generally live where they work. My local grocer lives behind a partition in her tiny store. Our gate man lives in the gatehouse. For me to live apart from my job is ... not normal.
3. The fact that there is no bathroom, no cooking facilities in our office is not unusual. Naturally, I use the hall toilet. The waste pipe overhead (from the toilet above) drips on my back while I squat over the hole. And I get my hot water from the boiler plant, in my giant thermos bottle, like everyone else. And I eat in the communal canteen, like everyone else. The food is abundant and delicious. In fact, most college support staff on our campus live in exactly this way.

A student points to the most fluffy-looking cot in the office. "Is that your bed?" I’m a little embarrassed to tell her, "No, I live in Lanzhou city. I have my own apartment."

It makes my head spin, how many people there are, here in China. If every one of them gets the idea that a hot shower in the morning (a luxury I regularly enjoy) is a good idea, the world is in trouble. (Our students must go to the public bath and pay 2 yuan – a large sum, for them. I think they go weekly, if that.) I kick this idea around in my head and think, well, this scenario might go either way. If people in developing China demand the comforts we take for granted in the west, maybe we’ll finally get going and figure out how to produce those comforts without depleting so much un-renewable energy. Or maybe we’ll just deplete all the planet’s energy at an accelerated rate, and everyone will have to get used to sleeping in the office and washing up in a plastic dishpan!

November 7 (Election Day!!) Predictably, I have too much to tell you and too little time to write. I have uploaded a bunch of new photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahsays/sets/72157594377242831/

This week, I’m giving midterm exams to my seven classes of first-year students, for whom I now teach Oral English. (I can’t help thinking this sounds like the name of a communicable disease – well, at least it’s communicable.) This is actually week 11 of our 18-week term, but because of freshman orientation and military training (more about that anon), we are a little behind schedule.

The exam I’ve constructed includes a brief listening exercise (a dictation, in this case) followed by one-minute individual speaking performances. Last week I rehearsed both of these activities with the students, so, in theory, there are no surprises – at least for the students. The speaking task involves looking at a picture and either describing it or telling a story about it. For pictures, I use cartoons from the New Yorker with the captions removed. If you have the magazine you can try this out for yourself; you’ll see how it works. Most of the cartoons are simply drawings of ordinary people doing ordinary things. A man in the doctor’s office. A family at the dinner table. A woman talking to a man behind a large desk. I have to choose judiciously, because my students have such a limited range of experiences. (For example, the man in the doctor’s office signaled "illness" for only one student out of 20. The examining table and lab coat were unfamiliar to many of my rural Chinese students.) But these simple drawings are a rich mine of speaking material.

I’d barely begun assessing my 260 students when I was reminded of a psych study I had read about during the summer I came to China, in 2005. The article is: "Cultural variations in eye movement during scenic perception," by Hannay Faye Chua, Juliet Boland and Richard E. Nisbett, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, August 30, 2005, V. 102, n. 205. To read the whole article: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/35/12629.

Here’s the abstract:
"In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with a focal object on a complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene."

I’m not about to say that my students’ take on New Yorker cartoon images affirms or contradicts the study. But I do assert that these students’ responses are qualitatively different from what I might expect from students living in the U.S. A predictable result: I hear more platitudes. An unpredictable result: more students perceive conflict in drawings where it isn’t obvious. A result that seems to affirm the study: Chinese students ascribe significance to small background details that might escape the notice of American students. My Chinese students are definitely more sensitive to perceived facial expressions. Some examples . . .

Image: A woman is storming out the door carrying a suitcase in each hand. A man is running behind her, apparently pleading. Several students noted squiggles in the drawing that might be debris on the floor or wall, pointing to a violent argument where crockery had been hurled by the "husband."

Image: A smiling woman is addressing a group of small children. One student told an elaborate story about a student who broke a window with a football, and then lied to the teacher about the damage. Other students simply had the "teacher" reminding the children to follow their dreams, "no pain no gain," and other inspiring phrases that are hugely popular here.

Image: A man in an easy chair with a newspaper; a small child speaking to the man. Without exception, students viewed this as a scene of humiliation for the child, who had failed at school. In the most culturally-charged narrative I heard, the child would be more harshly punished because he had the audacity to make eye contact with his father!

Image: A couple is seated at a restaurant table; a waiter is in attendance. There is a cat sitting in the middle of the table. Surprisingly, few students said anything at all about the cat. It’s hard to say if they simply overlooked this "focal" object, considered it unimportant, or were so perplexed by it that they couldn’t frame a response in their limited English.

In other midterm exam news, I publicly failed two students on the listening part when I found them comparing answers on the worksheet. Later, a student gave an excellent speaking performance and then handed me a score sheet that had gotten soggy in her sweaty palm. "I’m not in this class," she confessed. Come to find out, she is a student in another group who was standing in for a friend! (If you are a teacher accustomed to fewer than 40 students in a group, my inability to detect this duplicity may seem weird. But she was a familiar face, so I was taken in.)

I try to warn my students not to cheat – and I take extreme measures to prevent it – but they don’t get it. Cheating on exams here is largely overlooked and/or condoned. It’s part of the Confucian tradition, or at least that’s the way it’s currently perceived in the classroom. The whole academic ethic, as well as the underlying concept of what constitutes achievement, is completely different from ours in the U.S. Every Chinese person I know vocally deplores the plague of official corruption in this country. Yet there seems to be no inclination to connect that problem with the prevalence of academic dishonesty.