YOU’RE GETTING A LITTLE FAT,’ my student Tina said to me. Other students filed out of the classroom, chatting gleefully with their friends on the way to their next class. I stopped erasing the chalkboard. ‘Pardon?’ I said, wiping chalk from my hands, ‘Maybe you like Chinese food too much,’ she said. And then she left, her message delivered.
I was in my third month of teaching English in China and, by then, I’d begun to grasp the various ways my students were often direct, sometimes blunt. It cropped up in their journals, where I’d asked them to record their daily thoughts on anything that interested them. Usually they wrote about their classes or friends, but sometimes I appeared, in slight caricature. My nose was large, my skin dotted with freckles and too tanned. I spoke too loudly and laughed too much with the other foreign teachers between classes. And now I was fat.
But, by then, I’d learned that my students weren’t being rude. They were making observations of the world in front of them - just as Td asked. It certainly wasn’t what I’d expected when I suggested it. And that’s how it crept up on me: a lingering case of culture shock.
During my first weeks of living in China, bumbling through the language and sorting out the basics - like how to feed myself- every day was an adventure. A mall near campus had an entire floor of tiny restaurants - more than a dozen - and I tasted my way across China - the spices of Sichuan, Hunanese, Guangdong-style seafood and local Jiangsu’s sweet and sour flavours. I made friends with the staff, winging it with basic Mandarin and a dictionary, learning where they were from and how many kids they had.
A few days after Tina’s diagnosis, I wandered into the campus printing office, a tiny space in the administration building with two archaic laser printers. The only person on staff was a slight, birdlike woman named Miss Xu who darted between the printer trays and cubbies that lined the wall. I held up a worksheet for my students and said ‘60’, not really knowing the Mandarin word for copies.