Zhibo: Hello, Can You Teach Me English?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe. If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.

Thus far, my time on YingKe has been all about Chinese. Getting better at Chinese was the whole reason I started spending my days raising my eyebrows at my phone like a crazy person, after all.

This seems like normal behavior

And there’s certainly no objection to my using YingKe as a particularly unorthodox study tool. As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, foreigners are already a rarity, and a foreigner streaming at all, let alone in half-decent Chinese, is a statistical anomaly. People are always happy to teach me new words, be impressed by my occasional successes, and chuckle at my many, many failures. I get improvement; they get entertainment. Everyone wins.

But, there’s another way a whole lot of Chinese netizens see me — and for that matter, every white face: as a source of potential English improvement. Of course, as it happens, I actually do have a decent amount of experience teaching English in China — but that fact is neither a known quantity nor a consideration for the thousands of people asking me if I can teach them English.

And “thousands” is in no way an exaggeration. You have to remember, studying English in China isn’t like taking a few years of French in college — it’s a huge part of almost every student’s life from the day they start school. English plays a key role in the gaokao (college admission exam), which is arguably the most terrifyingly soul-crushing *academic* experience ever devised by humans. Speaking good English isn’t just for people hoping to go abroad; it’s a direct path to better-paying jobs here in China across a wide variety of industries.

So, I get a LOT of messages about English ranging across the spectrum of normalcy. Plenty of people just ask if I’ll speak some English during my broadcast, which of course I’m more than happy to do. Unfortunately, quite a few people are *less* ok with it, and I can usually count on one hand the number of seconds into an English sentence it takes for this message to pop up: “别用英语，我啥都听不懂!” (Don’t use English, I don’t understand it at all!) Usually, I just say that if you send an English message, I’m happy to respond in kind, and anyone who doesn’t understand need not fear, for the foreigner’s nonsense (废话／胡说) isn’t worth their consideration (punctuated with a very over-the-top wink).

Semi-pro tip: rattling off tongue-twisters is a surprisingly effective way to make people laugh while stemming the tide of requests for a bilingual broadcast

But then there’s the private messages. YingKe also has Facebook-style private messaging that you can check when you’re streaming or at any time from your profile. And it’s here where a bit of discomfort has started edging its way into my increasingly public life.

When I get a private message asking can you please teach me English and my initial jokey response is met with no seriously please teach me, I’m at a bit of a loss. Gross sexts I can handle, but how do I tactfully explain to a high school student that sorry, no, I’m not gonna just go become your English teacher? You might be thinking that I’m overestimating my importance — I usually am — and sure, 90% of the time these sorts of conversations end on a perfectly pleasant note, but I’ve had enough indignant people — perfect strangers, mind you — demand to know why I won’t take their money for private classes despite having never offered such a service. In fact, I almost never actually refer to myself as a teacher on YingKe, not that it makes any difference. It’s a purely-skin-color-based assumption.

Of course, I am actually a teacher. I don’t teach full-time anymore, but it’s still a major part of the hodgepodge collection of part-time jobs, consulting gigs, writing work, and other entrepreneurial nonsense I use as an excuse to avoid moving home and getting a real job. And the very fact that I spent at least 10 minutes on the previous two sentences illustrates how uncomfortable I am with identifying myself as “a teacher.” There’s the fact that opening that door on YingKe would likely quadruple the messages I get and don’t know how to deal with; but there’s also the fact that I am, on a more basic level, uncomfortable with my *English teacher* status.

Working in and around the ESL industry — and make no mistake, it is an industry — in China is a tricky and often unpleasant reality. China has a massively underserved need for native English teachers; this is a country with more students of the English language than anywhere else on Earth, and impossibly few native speakers living here. As a result, foreign teachers at most Chinese schools are paid far too much for far too little, and are rarely accountable for results or any kind of professionalism. They’re frequently hired based solely on their picture and their passport, and once schools have gone to the trouble of arranging a visa, housing, and transport halfway across the world, they can often be nearly impossible to fire. Being unprepared for classes, failure to produce any kind of results, and showing up to work blatantly hung over — or not showing up at all — are all the kinds of things that should get you replaced. But — and this is a problem of China’s own making, unfortunately — it’s way harder than it should be to replace native English speakers here.

The point is, despite the fact that it raises my value (and teachers are respected and even feared in China), I don’t love being referred to as a “teacher” by thousands of people with no additional contextual knowledge of my life in China. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a paranoid feeling; it’s increasingly popular in China to point out the *Loser Back Home* phenomenon of foreigner English teachers. Streaming audience members come and go in seconds — I don’t have the luxury or required level of patient self-obsession to tell every single person I meet on YingKe my life story in an attempt to convince them that I’m not like *those* foreigners.

And besides, I don’t say any of this from a soapbox. I was hired as a foreign teacher by a Chinese school after a single Skype conversation a few months before I graduated. No experience, no real qualifications; I showed up and the combination of my nationality and skin/hair color guaranteed me not only classes at the best branch of the school, but gave me immense leverage in negotiations over scheduling. My middling Chinese skills and desire to be in China had nothing to do with my initial good fortune here, and certainly had nothing to do with the work visa and free (albeit horrifying) apartment I spent my first year in. All following successes and career advances I’ve made started with a job I didn’t deserve.

I’m not trying to sell myself short here. I ended up being a good enough teacher that the school ended up offering me a behind-the-scenes job managing foreign teacher training and HR for their newest branch. But any skills I developed on the job and/or competence have nothing to do with the opportunity that was handed to me on a golden platter, and I think it’s always important to properly separate those things out.

So back to YingKe. At the end of the day, I do want to offer some kind of English assistance. Selfishly, it boosts my popularity. At the risk of sounding cliché, I’d like to give back on some level to a community that is dramatically boosting my Chinese reading and speaking abilities on a daily basis. On a practical level, I’m personally and financially invested in a world where Chinese people are more excited about English.

So honestly, I’m not sure what to do. I can keep jokingly deflecting until the end of time (that’s kinda my whole thing), but I’d like to find a way to give out a bit of English advice and assistance beyond just correcting people’s spelling when they tell me to go fack/frk/fuk myself. Perhaps I’ll open the world’s first subway-based school.

***

| Zhibo Column Archive |[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Photo of the Day: Wang Dongling’s “Bamboo Path”

Full-size image

OCAT Shenzhen recently opened a new exhibition for veteran calligrapher Wang Dongling, who is known for his tendency to create large-scale, monumental works using his experimental “chaos script” (乱书) writing style.

For The Bamboo Path, Wang applied chaos script to stalks of bamboo, which are “planted” in OCAT’s warehouse-like space in Shenzhen’s OCT Loft art zone to create an artificial forest. On each stalk is carefully painted a short text extolling the virtues of bamboo itself, a material historically near and dear to Chinese artists and literati.

Read more about Wang Dongling and “chaos script” here.

National Robot Warfare Competition Strikes Chord with China’s Video Game Youth

One week ago, university students from across China gathered in Shenzhen to compete in the finals of the 2017 RoboMaster competition.

The competition, in case you didn’t infer by now, is a team-based robotic fight to the death. There hasn’t been much interest in robot fighting in the US in recent years, but I remember being glued to the TV screen with my brother in the early 2000’s, watching BattleBots with untainted fascination. The cybernetic carnage of the lifeless machines, goring each other with axes, drill saws, and flamethrowers was everything a kid in that time could hope for.

If I’m being honest, at first comparison, RoboMaster seems kind of lame. There are no weapons. There are no robot knockouts, where one bot succumbs to damage and bursts into flames. The fighting is all done by beams and sensors, essentially reducing the 21st century gladiatorial spectacle of a robot deathmatch to a game of laser tag. But there are some elements that make RoboMaster interesting and unique in its own right.

Right off the bat, the team-based competition structure is worlds away from the one-on-one no holds barred robot fighting of my youth. There are five kinds of robots: hero, standard, engineer, base, and aerial. Hero and standard do the bulk of the damage, engineer can pick up obstacles and use them to hamper opponents, base is like a stationary turret that your team has to protect, and aerial is a drone. You didn’t think China would let this shindig go off without drones, did you?

So it’s not the MMA (mechanical martial arts) battle of my childhood that I look back on so fondly. But it is managing to tap into some of the major currents affecting Chinese youth today – things like e-sports, technology, money, and the struggle to elevate oneself to a position of unique respect among one’s peers. And drones.

China Global Television has an on the ground look at the finals, which you can check out above.

Photo of the Day: Cellar Window

Click for full-size image

This is Part 6 of a six-part photo essay by Beijing-based student and artist Liu Qilin, who recently finished his freshman year of undergraduate study at Beijing Normal University. Liu, who goes by the English name Jady, is founder of the Beijing Hutong Team, a loose collective of artists and creatives united in a desire to document Beijing’s inner-city alleys (胡同, hutong), which are currently undergoing a process of “renovation” that many feel is stripping them of their historical and cultural charm.

Liu Qilin says about this photo:

At the time I took this, I was helping a friend shoot a documentary about the hutong. The scene outside hutong bar Cellar Door looked like a jungle fire. They’d lost their door and converted it into a service window, and the addition of a smiling rabbit graffiti — a common tag in the area — was the crowning touch.

Follow Beijing Hutong Team on Facebook or WeChat (@BeijingHutongTeam)

We Tried Chewing Betelnut, the Psychoactive Favorite of Taiwanese Taxi Drivers

I was in Taipei last week on a visa trip outside the mainland. We were sitting in a circle on the floor, in the apartment of a tenuously connected new friend, when I heard someone say “betelnut” for the first time.

What is it? Betelnut, areca nut, or what Taipei locals call bing lang (槟榔), has been around for thousands of years and doesn’t look ready to leave soon. The nut grows all over the tropical Pacific, where people chew it medically and recreationally for its natural psychoactive ingredients, the most important being arecoline. Consuming the nut in any of its forms gives the user a warm, stimulating buzz, making it a product of choice with taxi drivers, long-haul truckers, and other workers who rely on the nut to make it through long shifts.

betel nut drug

Betelnut seller in Taiwan packaging product (Flickr: bignosetw)

In Taiwan, the common form of consumption, and the one we purchased at a run-down roadside booth, is the fresh nut, still green, wrapped in betel leaf for flavor. Slaked lime collected from seashells tops it off, and keeps the alkaloids chemically available for absorption. Traditionally, Taipei has been a hotspot for the distinctly Taiwanese phenomenon of “betelnut beauties” – young, marginally-clothed women who sell bags of the product from neon-lit windows. What started as a successful marketing strategy for a single countryside betelnut outlet in the 60’s grew into a nationwide trend. Up until the 2000’s, betelnut beauties were a reliable sight at major intersections across the country. Eventually lawmakers realized their minimal dress marked them out for exploitation, and by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, betelnut beauties were all but extinct. We pulled out a fifty New Taiwan Dollar coin (about $1.65) and handed it to the fully dressed middle-aged woman who operated the booth, in exchange for a plastic bag full of betelnuts.

We felt the best way to put this experience down into words was in the form of a time trial betelnut challenge. I’m going to set a timer for fifteen minutes, and chew three consecutive betelnuts at a rate of one nut per five minutes. For context, you should know that chewing this stuff generates a bright red blood-like liquid that you have to spit out (another reason government bodies have been trying to curb its popularity). Also it’s carcinogenic. So while you’re reading this, imagine me sitting on my bed, spitting betelnut juice out into a bucket and giving myself cancer. Ready? Let’s go.

chewing betel nut drug

Nut one of three

Nut Number 1 (0:00)

I bite into the nut. It’s got a surprisingly peppery, fresh kind of spice to it, which I suspect is mostly the betel leaf it’s wrapped in. Immediately, juices begin to seep out of the cracked husk and into my mouth. I spit the red blood into the bucket, wondering where it all went wrong for me. Soon my lips and gums start to tingle, and then lose feeling. I am relaxed. The relaxation spreads from my gums to my shoulders and chest. I can see how people could get into this.

Nut Number 2 (5:00)

I spit out the first nut and pop in the second. The worn, crushed husk is replaced by the sharp fresh bite of a new nut. Almost immediately, my pleasant feeling of relaxation is joined by nausea. I realize that I’m chewing at an incredible rate, squeezing more and more arecoline juice out of the nut. My legs sink down into my bed and stay there. My whole body, I notice, is feeling warm, slow, and numb. I give a lackluster effort at conversation, tossing over some description of the sensation to my friend Stewart, who is also chewing a betelnut out of sympathy. He doesn’t understand, as I am already on my second nut, and too far removed to communicate effectively. That was the last go we had at a conversation.

Nut Number 3 (10:00)

Who picked these nuts? I start trying to picture the Taiwanese farmer who brought this sensation down on me. I chew my nut in silence, sinking deeper and deeper into the fibers of my Taobao mattress. What music is this? It’s definitely too trippy for three nuts deep. As my movement gets infinitely slower, my chewing only speeds up. I’m squeezing too much juice out of the betelnut, which I’m unable to stop myself from swallowing, compounding both my buzz and my nausea. The effort required to position myself over the bucket and spit is immense. My eyes are stuck in place, and I start wondering how much time has passed. The chewing continues without input from my conscious brain. The warm spice of the bing lang is pretty evenly distributed throughout my body now. I’m at peace with the bing lang. He and I have reached our understanding.

So in a nutshell (!), it was like chain smoking the fruit of the areca palm. I get why people are into it – it’s essentially a widely available, all-natural cigarette, that you can pick off a tree and chew to get buzzed. And as someone who doesn’t smoke cigarettes, I definitely felt the effect.

Betelnut culture is problematic. Betelnut beauties, oral cancer, black teeth, and red spit on city streets. But it’s an important thing to a lot of people. Bing lang has always been chewed, since an old man’s greatest great grandfather was a young boy. A bride and groom’s parents will chew it when they talk over the marriage. Doctors and herbalists have used it in traditional medicine for everything from dissipating stagnation to shocking the life out of tapeworms. It has nowhere near the number of harmful chemicals you’d find in a single cigarette. In the end, people will do what they do. And next time you visit Taiwan, maybe you will too. Just be cool about where you spit.

Photo of the day: Traditional Stone Carving in the Hutong

Click for full-size image

This is Part 5 of a six-part photo essay by Beijing-based student and artist Liu Qilin, who recently finished his freshman year of undergraduate study at Beijing Normal University. Liu, who goes by the English name Jady, is founder of the Beijing Hutong Team, a loose collective of artists and creatives united in a desire to document Beijing’s inner-city alleys (胡同, hutong), which are currently undergoing a process of “renovation” that many feel is stripping them of their historical and cultural charm.

Liu Qilin says about this photo:

One day while walking in the hutong I came across these very delicate stone carvings, a vivid and lifelike tableau of bird feathers and foliage. The four characters at the top, 百鸟朝凤, are a Chinese idiom translating to “all birds look up to the phoenix” — this is both an image and phrase common in traditional Chinese art, and also the name of a recent Chinese film about the traditional musical instrument, suona.

Follow Beijing Hutong Team on Facebook or WeChat (@BeijingHutongTeam)