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.