It all started during
Fashion Week. Not the official one held in fashion capitals such as Paris and
Milan, but the one I conducted during class last week, which roughly coincided
with the official Fashion Week.
Every semester I ask my
students what they would like to talk about. Being young, and for the most part
female, the topic of fashion ranks high on their list of favorite subjects to
discuss. Until this semester I offered up fashion tidbits at the start of
class, something to the effect of: ‘wearing high heels over a long period of
time can damage your bones, spine, tendons and muscles’, and a ‘clean face is a
beautiful face’. Because this is a topic of ongoing fascination I decided to
compile what I could about the various aspects of fashion and style into a
presentation, leaving plenty of time for discussion of whatever grabs their
attention.
This semester I have the
privilege of teaching only sophomores, which means I only have 3 classes and
I’ve worked with each of those groups last academic year. Some I’m happy to
work with and some I could have lived without ever having to address again (See
My Pet Foreigner entry, posted July 2013).
What would these kids
want to know about fashion? As young (mostly) women, I presumed they would like
a mish-mash of information, ranging from hair and makeup to clothing and
jewelry. Of course, fashion/style in the America would be a major point of
interest, so I did my best to incorporate a comparison between Chinese and
American fashion trends.
On the Western front I
portrayed corsets as particularly barbaric because they taper a woman’s ribcage
to conform to the ‘hourglass figure’ standard of beauty. Nowadays corsets are
generally not worn however, beauty pageant contestants sometimes wear one.
YOUNG pageant contestants: 8, 9, 10 years old. Point of interest, and something
that piqued my students’ curiosity: the guitar and other string instruments are
actually modeled after the ideal woman’s form.
Equally tortuous was the
Chinese mania for small feet, called ‘lotus blossoms’, causing infant girls
indescribable pain because their foot bones were broken and rebroken, and those
poor little appendages were then wrapped in wet linen, which shrinks while
drying. The smaller the foot the more dainty and desirable the woman. While my
girls sneered at the west’s inhuman pursuit of beauty, they quickly stopped
their chortling when confronted with their own culture’s callous practice. Some
even confided their great-grandmother has bound feet and that even today she
must bind her feet tightly or live with the agony of screaming bones. That is
to say: they live in agony all the time; it is worse with their feet unbound. Of
course, said grandmothers cannot walk without a cane… if they can walk at all.
To teach new vocabulary
regarding clothing, I raided my own wardrobe. How else to demonstrate the
difference between a button down shirt (men) and a blouse (women)? They loved
learning that, in the old days men dressed themselves while women had a maid to
dress them. Thus the buttons on women’s clothing are on the left and men’s
clothing are on the right… presumably because everybody was right-handed in
those days. I could even illustrate that difference with the (men’s) slacks I
brought, versus the jeans I was wearing.
Modern day Chinese wear
western-style clothing: jeans, sweats, tee-shirts and the like. They did not
know the names of various types of clothes, nor could they make a distinction
between a sweat shirt and a sweater. One poor soul, unaware that a skirt starts
at the waist averred that she likes to wear skirts and nothing else. After this
lesson, she knew that dresses were what she likes to wear. A fine, but critical
distinction.
And then, there was the
hoodie.
Often I incorporate current
event items in my lessons, or make a lesson out of them altogether. While
presenting the hoodie I told them that such garments are preferred by hip-hop
dancers and, by proxy, gangstas. Dancers prefer them for when they do head spins
and gangstas adopted them… for whatever reason. Much was made in the media of
Trayvon Martin wearing a hoodie; in fact, because of that incident the humble
hoodie surged in popularity. George Zimmerman believed Trayvon was a gangsta
because of the hoodie, and is now news/tabloid fodder and there are still
groups who seek justice for Trayvon. All of this I relayed to my class.
That got their attention!
I decided this week’s lesson will segue nicely into a talk about American
history: the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights movement, and then into
the hip-hop culture and the gang scene, as much as I know about it. After that,
off we go into Freedom Writers movie, the impactful story of Ellen Gruwell and
her students in room 203. That’s 4 weeks of lessons, all wrapped up! I love it
when I can plan my schedule like that.
I’m always anxious if I
am not prepared for lessons, or even if I don’t know my material very well.
You’d think it would be a simple matter of recycling curriculum from one
semester to the next, but I don’t seem to want to make things easy for myself.
Besides that, some lessons taught in the past are no longer relevant to the
crowd I teach today. For the next few weeks, I do not need to plague myself
with worry: I have 4 weeks worth of lessons ready. That is a good thing,
because I’ve been tapped to coach our debate team for competition in 2 weeks!
More on that later…
Little did I know that
while I was downloading pictures of rappers and dancers, and gloating over my
well planned lessons, ten people from an extremist group were entering the main
railway station in Kunming, armed with knives and machetes. They hacked up
twenty-nine victims and injured one hundred thirty more before police put a
stop to them, killing 2 in the process. This type of terrorism has as yet been
unseen and is unthinkable in modern day China.
Now there are ripples of
fear. Might such a group strike in Beijing? Xi’an? Wuhan? What should we be on
the lookout for? How can we protect and/or defend ourselves?
Collective unrest grows
as rampant, conspicuous consumerism overtakes this formerly impoverished, fatalistic
people. It is not just a matter of wealth gap and capitalism but of social
mores in decline. The group that targeted those passengers in that railway
station was from one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities. The Uyghurs, previously
limiting themselves to yearly, relatively tame riots in their own province are
now striking out against the Han majority. They do not, and never did want
secondary businesses or a stake in the tourist trade. They want their segment
of land returned to them with full rights and privileges. They want indigenous
people in government and locals to staff police and fire brigade units. They
even balk at school children being taught in Putonghua – the common language,
and their dialect being taught as a secondary language. To their reckoning, in
their province the Han are a minority and should be accorded minority status.
Yes, discrimination is
prevalent in China. Not so much against foreigners, who are decided outsiders,
but between the ethnic minorities and the Han.
Sam is getting wrinkles.
Not only does his beautiful Penny work all hours and walk home alone, but she
has been tapped as a part of the emergency relief crew. Because she works in a
military hospital and because she specializes in infectious disease care, she
might be sent to Kunming to enlarge their nurses’ roster. The poor guy is
having a hard time letting her out of his sight, let alone sending her to a
place of recent terrorist activity.
I have another lesson to
add to my roster: self defense. I too fear for Penny, but also for all of my
students. Granted they travel in pairs or groups but they are young,
inexperienced and absolutely unaware of how to protect or defend themselves.
Sally, a genuine sweetheart, believed those men who told her they had lost
their train ticket and could not return home. Could she spare them some money?
She had none on her and could not leave her current position, so she handed
them her bank card and told them her pin. They assured her they’d only take
150Yuan, and would be right back. Of course, they cleaned her out and she never
saw them again.
That is how unprepared
these kids are for the real world. I’m not their parent, I know, or even the
adult responsible for them. However, I feel I have a responsibility to them.
Life isn’t all peaches
and cream. Not everyone in China comes from a small village and/or a good
family, and there are certainly scammers and bruisers out there. Foreign
teachers aren’t all about having fun and making students laugh. At least this
one isn’t. These next few lessons just might save their life.
Now I’m anxious.
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