April 28:

Live from Lanzhou, It's Saturday night!

In our China, the holiday giveth and the holiday taketh away. May 1 is Socialist Labor Day*, and we get some much-needed time off, but not without sacrifice. Early last week we finally received the “make-up” schedule for this holiday. We will not teach from Tuesday, May 1 through Monday, May 7. But we are teaching our Friday classes on April 27 and again on April 28, and our Monday classes on April 29 and again on April 30. This results in eight days of nonstop teaching. For me, it means that I will have taken only three full days off since the first of April. Ugh! (*Ironically, Labor Day heralds the beginning of Golden Week, a time that is designed to be a consumer feeding frenzy.)

I am in the midst of giving midterm exams, so I was reluctant to start a new teaching unit, or even take on serious content, for the four classes who are getting an overdose of me this weekend. Not to mention that I'm exhausted, and secretly hoping that some of my students will opt to leave early for the holiday – any sign of rebelliousness in my Chinese students gives me a little thrill of happiness. So I'm hauling my heaps of back issues of China Daily to the classroom, along with scissors, glue sticks, magic markers and big sheets of newsprint. I'm inviting the students to make collages. A few are freaked out at the idea of “wasting” the newspapers, butchering up their icon of information and intelligence. But they get over it. A good mess has been made by all – I'd be in trouble with the cleaning staff, if there were one! And the collages are gorgeous.