Lots of Drama in Hangzhou …

(Joseph)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I think someone already took that line, but I’ll steal it briefly to summarize the past week of my experience at Hangzhou.

Let’s get the “worst” out of the way first.

Last week I slipped on a wet outdoor tile and badly twisted my ankle here at the high school. It was bound to happen sometime; there is wet, dangerous tile in many places here in China. This would definitely not meet our much stricter American building codes. If this had happened in the United States, I could have sued the school for the obvious safety hazard; here in much-hardier China, the attitude is: if you fall, it’s your fault. Survival of the fittest. Better luck next time. Maybe pray a bit more to the gods (I’m sure there’s a god of fall here—I need to go find some incense pronto). Regardless, when I fell, I heard a loud brrrriipppp! I thought I had definitely broken or torn something in my foot, but it turns out that the only thing that ripped was my pants—at the knee. Thus for days I hobbled on a bum foot with an inflamed mound of an ankle.

A few days after I slipped and fell, Andrew and I got the worst case of food poisoning while visiting Shanghai. We were sick and sleepless for days. The irony? Of all the interesting and potentially “risky” food we have eaten here in China, we have narrowed down the bad food to one meal that Andrew and I both had: a Western-style breakfast (eggs, ham, sausage, and muffin) in a trendy European café. What are the odds? Of all the places I would have thought the food to be safest and most sanitary, the breakfast meats we ingested at this Western-style meal had apparently gone bad (since everyone enjoyed the same eggs and muffins). What irony. I took a combination of the antibiotic Cipro and some traditional Chinese herbal medicine to calm the boiling bacteria in my stomach, but it took a few days to completely recover. As my appetite was non-existent for nearly three days, I lost a few pounds in the process. Nope, food poisoning is not fun. Not fun at all.

After sustaining these health setbacks, I was reminded of what I should have blogged about weeks ago, when I met an American expatriate family that is currently living here in Hangzhou while both husband and wife work at a hospital in Beijing. I visited them when we were touring the beautiful and relaxing green tea plantations, and I had a great opportunity to hear the husband’s story of how he came to China, and why he chose to stay here. With a burgeoning interest in Asian culture and medicine, he chose to defer his admission to Middlebury College back in the 1990s to give himself an opportunity to study abroad in China. While here, he began to become increasingly interested in traditional Chinese medicine, and it was a weirdly fortuitous accident that sent his life spinning onto a less than traditional path for most of us Americans. He suffered a bad motorcycle accident and a badly broken leg that he chose to remedy with traditional Chinese medicine instead of the traditional Western remedy for the broken bone, which would have involved re-breaking and resetting the bone, lots of pain medications, and a cast worn for months. Instead, he explained that his wound was lanced and drained to prevent swelling (which, he explained through a wince of memory, was extremely painful), the bone quickly reset, and the leg allowed to be exposed to fresh air. No cast or heavy medications were involved. What would have taken months to heal the “Western way” (while a cast would get increasing cruddy and full of bacteria) took weeks to heal the “Eastern way.” And thus his new course of life and career was set: he would attend a Chinese university to learn traditional Chinese medicine, and he now travels around the world setting up and advising such programs (which, he tells me, are increasing in both quality and standards). Because he shares many of my own suspicions of Western medicine, I quickly grew to like this man very much, and I wish I had more time with him to learn about this amazing life experience. His family looks like it could have come from any affluent American suburb, but his is the transplanted ideal American family choosing to live abroad: a beautiful wife, a few children, and numerous dogs all living amidst the serene green tea fields of Hangzhou (where, he explains, the air is much cleaner than in many parts of China). It was indeed strange to see and hear their young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter speak nearly fluent Chinese and mingle with her Chinese neighbors as if she were family.

Now, onto the “best” of the past week…

Working with the drama-interested students here in Hangzhou has been very rewarding for me...and very much welcomed by the students who thirst for more creative opportunities here. Last week I started working with 24 students who made the first cut (from over 50 interested students) for a national high school drama competition. I chose a scene for the students that I found online: a bunch of teenagers who believe they have spotted a celebrity who is visiting their town (it just so happens that the scene is based on a play called The Leader by Eugene Ionesco, who also wrote Rhinoceros, the play I directed at Dover-Sherborn High School last year). Basically, the teenagers make a lot of comments about how they would do anything to meet this celebrity, and the scene shows how they imitate and model themselves after this unnamed celebrity. In short, it’s satire of how people often idolize celebrities—but it’s a light-hearted scene that will challenge students because there is so much in the comic timing of the very short lines of each character. But the students and teachers here seem to love the scene I have chosen for them, even when it gets absurd (at the end of the scene, one teenager believes that the celebrity has lost his head, and a few of the teenagers express their desire to decapitate themselves).

For the past few days, I have seen the “audition groups” meeting on their own time to rehearse the scene in the hope of being one of the eight chosen students for the competition. We have some serious talent over here, and it will be a difficult process to cut these 24 dedicated and enthusiastic students down to a mere 8, which will be happening tomorrow. I do not look forward to making this decision and creating hurt feelings, but I have been assured that Chinese students have thick skin and will survive, and that many are just happy to be a part of the audition process and to have the opportunity to work with an adult director.

Speaking of which, I was invited to speak to the school drama club last week and was shocked to learn the following. First, only sophomore students are allowed to pursue drama here at the high school; junior and senior students should not have the time to pursue drama while they are focused entirely on their lessons for the major national exam (I wonder if this is also because Hangzhou High School’s ranking as the best school in the city has faltered in the past several years due to somewhat lower national exam scores). Second, the drama club is run entirely by students, and no adults work with the students. The plays are written, cast, and directed all by the club president with the help of maybe one or two upperclassman—but no adults. I am left to wonder what the quality of the shows is here, but it’s unfortunate that the creative arts have been sacrificed to an exam. There does not seem to be (m)any creative or physical outlets for these overworked teenagers here. When I told them of our high school drama program, they were filled with envy. I’m somewhat glad I could not show them photos of our previous drama productions because this may have inspired a student riot—well, maybe not, but I did not want to ignite any further envy. On the bright side, the recent audition process (which has taken over two weeks here) has given many of these students an opportunity to exercise their creativity, and from what I’ve seen, many students have been waiting for this outlet as they seem to burst with enthusiasm. I only wish I were around for more of the rehearsal process over the next month before the competition in May, but the final cast of competing students will be off to an excellent start because of the time we’ve spent working on re-acting (my first lecture in any acting class is how acting should really be considered re-acting, which makes “acting” a lot easier).

The good news is: the creative potential and “spark” exist within many students here in Hangzhou High School, but they exist in a dormant state where they are rarely called upon. I am again reminded of how the arts are often the first subject on the American educational “chopping block” when budget cuts are necessary. The focus of the world, including both China and the United States, seems to be on math and science much to the potential detriment of the humanities. I personally think we need to be wary of this. Who’s with me?