Where am I?

I'm in a grassland. I'm in a city. One minute I'm surrounded by white capped Muslims, the next I'm up to my gills with American Christian missionaries. I'm in a market selling monks' robes and horse saddles. I'm in a giant shopping mall eyeing overpriced counterfeit khakis.
I'm with a Tibetan. I'm with a Han. I'm with an American.
They all operate in independant spheres, showing indifference to one another.
Smiles are indignant or do not occur at all.

None of the Chinese students want to be here. For them this is a third rate college in a third rate city. Their writings tell of the anxiety of reaching Xining, their anger and frustration at first seeing the "dusty, yellow mountains" as bear as "a monk's head." Why have they been banished to this end of the earth, this border town in a province once only seen as a prison cell on the government's maps.

The Tibetans want to go home, or they want to go somewhere else. It is but a period of fun and freedom before they end up doing all sorts of things - or doing nothing at all. The rate of success for graduates of Qinghai Shida is not to be envied. Most students will go home to their villages to teach English, a few will work with NGOs or non-profits, and a pinch will go on to study in the Philippines, or (with some sort of God's good grace) in the US.

Is the simple life a better life? So many of my students in all my classes are either from farming communities or from nomadic families. The Americans preach a good "simple life" and tout their babies, cookies, and pasta as a carving out of the simple and the pure.
They come from a privileged position, the students from hardly any position at all.
Yet they all agree that the family is to be missed and they all agree that life can be very difficult and very sad.

So maybe Xining is actually united by qualities of longing. Longing for the simple, for family, and for change. Be it change of scene, or change in others' religions, change is in the air. Its a change that is being inspired by people's desires to create the better and from their frustrations with the status quo in their uncomfortable new homes. Perhaps the largest difference is just what they gave up to experience this discomfort. Many Tibetans gave up a hard and abusive life. Many Han gave up a generational pattern of farming. Many Americans gave up all of their creature comforts to come live in a place so foreign and so challenging to their ideas of the mundane. Does this make the Americans more brave? For they were the ones who gave up the best to pursue the less desireable. However, the safety net of a land far away lies with them, not with the citizens of China. For many of the students, if they fail at this college, they may never have another opportunity for a college education again. They may end up as taxi drivers, waitresses, low ranking government officials, or as owners of convenience stores, selling cigarettes and pumpkins seeds late into the night.

Xining is a place which defines discomfort. It is a place that calls for bravery. It is a place that strives for the sea but remains, firmly, rooted deep within the mountains, rivers, fields, deserts, valleys, and wastelands of China. Far from its sea.

Settling In

Seems to involve mostly drinking. Just my luck I end up back in a terrible drinking culture.
Baijiu, pijiu, putaojiu, it follows me wherever I go. There are some HARD drinkers here, HARD and full of STAMINA!

I have realized just why they gave Ligaya and I all of the writing classes = fat stacks of boring and mundane writing about techan and the four seasons. Its A LOT of work if you have any desire to actually correct the grammar.

The geography class and writing class are a lot of fun, though. Geography means I can make my own curriculum, and the students are very respectful, and literature means I can fully lecture them (trust me, deviation from this model is NOT a good idea) just like when I was a freshman at UW. So I get to resort to the resources of the world wide web to dig up historical and cultural goodies. It's actually a good educational experience.

Also,
www.imagingtibet.org
will, with any luck, soon display the images of the promising youths of the plateau. Elena, and Australian ETP teacher, runs the program and has been lending them cameras and film and asking them to take photos of the aesthetically pleasing or of the ethnographically relevant.
I get to the web-designer and web-teacher, and can hopefully aid the students with photography as well. Unfortunately, I feel that perhaps my knowledge is a bit too technical. If they are using point and shoots or disposables, maybe I can aid them a bit by teaching composition. Rule of thirds! Too busy!! Ugly person!!!! Contrast issues!!! The images I saw were a mixed bag, with some serious finger-over-the-lens issues, but the students with the high-end digital cameras and film SLRs had some nice work.

What else?

I lost my iPod after a night on the town... am getting out of town tomorrow! YEAHH!

The University Army

I first showed up at the running track at 3:30 pm. I had come for a jog, but was immediately shocked to find hundreds of soldiers on the running field. Every summer large numbers of students become soldiers for a few months. They put on generic green soldiers’ fatigues and bum around on campus sports fields day in and day out.
It is quite the sight to behold, all of these green ants basking under the sun, surrounded by a drab concrete stadium with an inner wall painted to depict massive red and yellow tulips. I sat down and took it all in. Three troops in plastic riot gear helmet were the focus of the exercise. Marching back and forth across the field with a flag, they resembled a high school color guard.
The leader of the young army was a balding Chinese man with a ferocious face. He also happened to be the technical expert for this regiment and in between barking orders at the three tormented students, he switched around the CDs of the generic military music that blared from speakers placed all over the field.
Most of the students had been placed in little battalions that would haphazardly march around the field. When they stood at attention they looked like cub scouts mimicking an army, everyone out of line and half the kids pushing each other or hesitating to stand up. The marching was undeniably ridiculous. I thought of the made-for-TV movies I often saw bits of on CCTV. A small group of Chinese soldiers is running from an imposing Japanese or Kuomintang patrol, they bumble around frantically, throwing stones at opportune times or make semi-comical attempts to hide behind bushes or overturned canoes. A whole army of children being prepared to be unprepared.
In sneakers and old boots the kids moved up and down the running track in staggered lines, feigning a disciplined step and stifling smiles. A few of the columns of girls that passed me were visibly embarrassed at being spotted by a confused laowai gawking at their silly exercises.
A crowd of other students with soccer balls waited at the side of the field, biding their time until the soldiers left so that they could take over the inner green to play soccer. I asked what time the exercises would finish. This was to be the final day of exercises, one of them told me, and they should be done by four or five in the afternoon, if not sooner.
In the back of the field some students broke rank and chased each other down the track. No one seemed to care. How long could this honestly go on for?
At 5 p.m. I came back and found the field pretty much the same. The plain-clothed leader was still fumbling with counterfeit march CDs and yelling at the color-guard through his microphone. The flag-bearing threesome were visibly distressed at this point, wondering what they had to deserve the worst job in the university military. The soccer players had lost their patience and were now playing in one corner of the field, their balls occasionally hitting the troops sitting along the track.
Of the hundreds of students laying wait in giant seated squares on the track, one or two groups would occasionally stand up and kick their legs up and down. Seldom a group would march a little, and upon colliding with the always-mobile color-guard, would clumsily return back to position. The other squads remained leaderless and directionless, and sat sweating under the hot sun, throwing empty water bottles at each other and engaging in other schoolyard shenanigans. I was expecting the fearless combed-over leader to call order and reprimand his farcical army, but instead he was scolding the flag-bearer for not swinging his left arm with enough gusto. Some kids ran into the field and mock goose-stepped with a pitiful mass of soldiers. No one seemed to notice the distraction. I decided to come back later.
The next day I came back to see if the troops were still there. Perhaps they had to practice a camp-out maneuver and where still there, sneaking up on each other tents and scratching them with their fake guns in an attempt to scare the girl soldiers. No such luck. Instead I found the summer-end graduation ceremony coming to a close. The ranks were still in tatters and some of the soldiers were posing for photographs and crying. Their parents descended onto the fields to whisk them away. The army was on leave for another ten months.