My wonderful friend Jenna is teaching English at a rural public school here in Cili. As a special lesson for two of her classes, she brought me in as a special guest. They were given the opportunity to ask me questions about anything they like, and then afterwards wrote 10 sentances about me or to me. I get to do this one more time before I leave (today, with her advanced English class!) and so far it has been very fun. As well as somewhat awkward because it allows time for a group of 50 students to stare at me.
The actual “interview” is kind of funny to me. The students are mostly shy at first, but then gradually warm up. The first questions are along the lines of “how tall are you?” “where are you from?” and “do you like China?”. I am silly and when I answer, 6 feet tall, they stare at me, and I don’t know the conversion to centimeters, so I follow up with- very tall, which makes them laugh.
Inevitably, one of the girls asks if I have a boyfriend, to which I answer yes. Jenna prompted them with asking his name, and I say, “Szili”, which sounds the same as the name of their town, “Cili” (silly for Americans…) to which they all get a kick out of. Then some of the boys ask me if I think they are cute, to which I awkwardly laugh and say I’m not answering. Adolescents… they are funny.
In a lot of their letters, they ask me for my QQ number… which I think is a chat thing? Also, some of my favorite questions were, “can you teach me to play guitar?” Well, I don’t know how to play guitar, but I did say I liked listening to guitar music. “Can you help me improve my English?” Uh, no, but your teacher can. 😉 “Can you take me to America with you?” Again, probably not, because I can barely feed myself. It’s cute they think I have a lot of free time to help them, and they really appreciated me coming into their class, which was a lot of fun.
The follow up question to my height was always, “do you play basketball?” Sounds similar to what I hear in America. They were seemingly disappointed when I said no, but held out hope with, “well do you watch the NBA?” And ultimately disappointed when I said no to that too. I heard about that a lot in my letters. She doesn’t like the NBA or playing basketball. That’s all the boys needed to hear really, and I was done. Haha.
Also, this letter is funny because he only gave me 3 options for what my favorite subject could be. If it wasn’t one of those 3- not interested. Also, he wasn’t really listening, because he thought I was a new teacher… not quite Mike.
This letter is cute because she assumed I wouldn’t like vampire fiction. (Accurate, even though I’ve read all of twilight, I hated the majority of it.) I also wanted to share it with you because in many of the letters, the students called me beautiful. They talked about my long curly blonde hair and my blue eyes… in just about every letter. It’s really nice to hear that, even if it’s from a bunch of Chinese student strangers. I was on a total compliment high for the rest of the day. Maybe that’s what all the staring is for.
I’m getting interviewed by Jenna’s favorite class today, and I’m pretty excited. Also, it’s my last day in Cili, which is sad, but it has been an incredible week getting to catch up with my best friend. 🙂
seekingmygreaterperhaps 