Beijing Part IV: Beijing Opera

I have chosen to talk about the Beijing Opera last because I hate it.  There is no delicate way of saying it; I hate Beijing Opera. I mean, I am not a fan of other operas (one music listening class in college was enough to teach me that), so I don't really know why I thought I would enjoy this....which might lead you to the question: well, if you didn't think you'd like it, why'd you go in the first place?

And I think we all know the answer to that question.  I wanted to be all cultural and traveled and profound and stuff.  There is a wonderful and rich tradition behind Chinese opera and it's all very interesting. This is a tradition that is starting to fade in China, and the Chinese are struggling find those interested in preserving this tradition, and I do believe that it would be a loss to Chinese culture if it were to be forgotten. However, that does not make me like the sound of Beijing Opera any better and an hour or more of it was pure torture. Pure, unadulterated, aural torture.

My second trip to Beijing occurred in the summer, when a friend of mine came to visit from home, Becky. She got to be the lucky one who went to Beijing Opera.  I didn't ever drag anyone else through this experience again, having absolutely no desire to hear it myself.   We talked to our hostel about opera venues, and the hostel had an arrangement with a local theater.  So the hostel set everything up for us and told us when we would be picked up and taken to the opera.  I would definitely recommend hostels as places to stay; they are cheap, clean, and safe.

We arrived at the theater and were seated in the balcony--hey, it was a hostel, so our seats were not great, that's what your zoom on your camera is for.  Plus, with the exception of the face paint, the whole point of opera is the sound.  The unique and very distinctive sound.

The costumes and the face paint are beautiful, of that there is no question.  The amount of work, training, and dedication that goes into becoming a Beijing Opera performer is both impressive and praiseworthy.  Beijing Opera, however, is just not my thing.  But hey, don't take my opinion on it; check out the video below and form your own opinion.

Despite Beijing Opera (and other kinds of opera) not being my particular cup of tea, if you find yourself with some free time in Beijing, I would recommend seeing it; it is unique, you can't find it too many other places, and it is cultural and stuff.  I will probably continue going to operas and stuff, even if I am pretty sure I am not going to like it, because you should do these things when you travel, and if I had cut out opera all together, I would have missed Sichuan Opera.  If you ever get the chance to see Sichuan Opera, definitely do that, because that is really freaking cool.

Beijing Part III: Generation Gap

My decision to go teach in China was somewhat chaotically planned, even if the decision was not impulsive. After I decided to go and had heard back from the school, my grandmother brought out this scrapbook and told me that my great-great grandfather also taught in China.  Now, I had heard this before, vaguely, over the years.  Now that I was about to travel to one of the countries my great great grandfather traveled to, I was exponentially more interested in this ancestors experience.

I flipped through the scrap book, which my grandmother was nice enough to give to me, and decided, somewhat impulsively to take a few of them out and bring them with me.   I did not, at the time, know how much traveling I would be able to achieve, but I had some vague notion that I would try and recapture these shots while I was in China.

My great great grandfather had his doctorate in entomology and he worked at Cornell University.  He spent a few years teaching abroad, and some of those years were spent at Beijing Normal University.  He took with him his daughter, who I believe was the photographer of most of these pictures.  She took many pictures of Beijing, many places which are still open to the public, albeit changed somewhat.  When I visited Beijing (and on one of my trips, I was able to visit Beijing Normal, as a friend of mine now lives and works there--life can be so weird, am I right?) I made it my goal to recreate these photographs to the best of my ability.  I feel like I was largely successful.

I wish I was able to find more of the pictures that they took, but it was a challenge with some of them.  The Ming Tombs are extensive, and not limited to Beijing; without a bit more information, some of the pictures were hard for me to replicate.  Of course, many of these sites also look very different; many have been renovated or remodeled.  In the case of the temple of heaven, there were some gates that were reconstructed, making it difficult for me to get the angles right.  However, I am pretty happy with the shots I was able to get.  It was also really cool to stand in some of these places and look at the photos and see the differences.  And it was cool to stand in some of these places and know that almost 100 years earlier, family of mine had stood there too.

Ming Tombs...I thought climbing on these was a bad idea...but then I saw half the Chinese doing the same thing, so I decided to go ahead and try it on just one statue, for photo recreating accuracy...

Ming Tombs Gate...Yeah, I think this was probably rebuilt...

Ming Tombs Camel Statue

Temple of Heaven....their was a gate right behind me, and I could not really back up an further or zoom out, so the angle is not quite the same. 

I wanted to talk ab little bit about the Temple of Heaven, as it is also one of the more recognized monuments of Beijing. What I have been able to garner from signs, brochures, and automated tours, the Temple of Heaven was the place of ceremonies in ancient China.  Offerings to the crown and to deities were brought to the Altar of Heaven (located down the lane from the Temple itself) and ceremonies were held at the temple.  It seems largely to be a place of worship restricted only for the aristocracy.  Today, it is mostly open to the public; people can walk through and visit both the temple and the altar.  In other buildings alongside the temple and the rather long corridor that leads from temple to altar are buildings that have items on display from past centuries, like mini museums.  Of course, many of them are also souvenir shops.  If you want to know more about the history of this site, check out the UNESCO world heritage page here http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/881.

I love the stone railings that are all over this place, and have about a billion pictures of said stonework.  I think one of my favorite moments each time I visited was visiting the Altar.  First, because it is nothing but that fantastic stonework, and second because you can sit on the altar's stone.  People are pretty good about taking turns doing this too, which is nice, since there are no park authorities regulating this section; its just a free for all.  It is really cute to see the kinds of poses that people come up with for picture time with the stone.

The forested park surrounding the temple is enormous and it is typically filled with elderly Beijing citizens (you can buy a pass that just lets you into the surrounding park, and not the historic sites, and it is less money).  These seniors gather on nice-weather days to socialize and also to exercise.  There will frequently be elderly Beijingers dancing, doing tai chi ( or taiji, 太極拳), or doing aerobics.  And it's just so cute.  I like the Temple of Heaven because it is in the middle of this mini-forest in the middle of one of the most populated cities in the world.  So it feels less crowded, and for some reason, it is just easier to breathe here than it is elsewhere in the city.

Alter of Heaven...there was a wall around it, so I could not get quite the same shot. 

I couldn't quite get the same shots, but I still think these are pretty cool.

A Difference in Values: Education

I have been subbing for about three weeks now, and what I am thinking about most is the difference how Americans value their education and how other countries value their education.  Of course, I can only really speak of two countries, my own and China.  And I can only speak to China's values as an outsider, using only what I have observed.

In America, our students do not seem to value free, public education.  I realize I am about to make some gross generalizations here, so forgive me; I am aware that there are many Americans who value highly their education, I am merely talking about Americans on a whole, when you compare them to other places.  I see, day after day, kids who view their time spent each day in school as a kind of prison.  While they are there, they devote an enormous amount of energy to not doing work or to disrupting learning.  I watch students come in to the classroom, and I watch teachers waste 10 minutes of class getting everyone settled into the classroom.  I watch them be interrupted constantly because students are talking, playing with their phones, or getting into arguments with each other.  I watch them stop the lesson time and again to address these issues.  I watch students fail to grasp basic concepts across curriculum all the way up the high school level.  I watched an 11th grader fail to tell me from which country the United States declared their independence.

I began seriously considering these differing values after talking with one of the security guards at the schools, a man who was born in the Caribbean and traveled extensively while in the military.  We both witnessed a confrontation between a student and another teacher, which ended in the student walking away talking about how much he hated school, how he didn't want to be here, and that every thing was expletive, expletive, stupid, expletive.  The guard talked about how much he valued school, and how he enjoyed it.  I talked about how I may not have enjoyed high school, but I knew where it would take me...college, a better job, a better future.

In China, most students begin seriously concentrating on their academics at age six.  Yeah, that's right, age six. What were you doing at age six?  I was finger-painting, chewing on blocks, and being yelled at for running with scissors. In China, the goal as of age six is grades.  You need to get good grades in primary school, so that you can get into the best middle school.  You need to get the grades in middle school to make it to the best high school.  And I am not talking about just "good grades", I am talking about the best grades. Because if you graduate from the best high schools (where the students with the best grades go), then there is a pretty good chance (unless you totally bomb the college entrance exams) that you are going to get into one of the best universities.  And getting into the best university is the goal of almost every Chinese student and their families from the age of six.

Maybe in America Mom and Dad will make a savings account when you turn six, on the off chance you go to college, you'll have a bit saved up.  In China, families save from the time their child is born to cover whatever expenses are not covered by the government.  In addition to being in school for 8 hours every Monday through Friday, parents spend a lot of time and money on tutoring their children.  They send them to private schools on the weekend.  That's right, the weekend, the most sacred time to Americans; the time where we have the right not to do work.  Many will also attend private schools during the summer, and those who cannot afford the schools will be tutored by family or friends of the family.  These students go to school for several hours on their weekends and during the summer to do more school work, so that they will hopefully have that edge over their peers that will get them into those schools.

As for teachers, they hold a position of respect in China.  I never had students or parents or administrators tell me that my students failing was my fault.  And when students came to me asking why they did not get the grade they wanted, and I told them it was because they didn't' turn in assignments, or didn't participate in class (in our speaking classes, 50% of their grades was in class participation), they accepted this failing grade as a consequence of their actions.  They did not (as a whole) have a litany or excuses, ask me for extra credit, or storm out of the room in a cloud of profanity.  My students would constantly email me or ask me after class questions about assignments, because they wanted to get the best possible grade...before they turned it in.   In America, you are fired if your students don't pass state exams.  In America, parents tell you that it is your fault if their child cannot sit still or pay attention in class or turn in their homework--that it is the teacher's responsibility to provide all discipline for behavioral issues in class.   Of course this is not true for all parents or all schools, but it is common.

Something that these students do not seem to understand, and I am not sure I understood this at 18 either, is that high school is pretty much the last place where someone is going to care about you.  I am not saying all teachers are saints.  Some are in it because they don't know what else to do, and just like there are bad lawyers, doctors, and personal trainers, there are certainly bad teachers.  We've all had a bad teacher. But most teachers get into teaching because they want to help kids succeed.  They tend to be nurturing, to put the needs of their students long before any of their personal lives, and they spend large chunks of their free time thinking up new ways to teach their students.  I mean, teachers work for 8 hours each day and then they go home and grade student work and lesson plan.  And it's not like they get paid a whole heck of a lot, so I can't say that teachers are in it for the money.

Now, just like when I made generalizations about Americans not valuing their education, I am also making generalizations about the Chinese.  Of course there are Chinese who do not place value on education, just like their are many Americans who do.  And being a teacher in China is not some kind of educational utopia, far from it; there are problems. However, as a whole in China, the students, their families, and the society itself seems to place a much higher value on education than what I am seeing in my own country.  Free, public education...not too many countries can boast that they provide that to their citizens.  You don't even have to worry about getting into the "best high school" because, at least in theory, every student gets the same quality education in every public school in America. And if you fail a grade? Well, you just repeat it; and you get the chance to repeat these grades over and over again until you are 21 years old.  This is virtually unheard of in many places around the world; you only get one chance to make it through.

There just seems to be a vast difference in how China and America (again, making huge generalizations here) view education.  I am not sure what the future is going to look like for America if we continue to view education in this light.