Keeping Up Appearances or Good Things Come In Threes

It has been far too long since I last updated, but in any case...

There is trouble in paradise. It seems like teachers have been dropping like flies over the past few weeks. And honestly, most of it can be blamed on the college.

First, one teacher left because of some pretty extreme fallout from the school. He and his (Chinese) wife had been facing abuse from certain administrators of the college because of their interracial relationship. It appears that these senior bigots had not been told that these two were married and assumed that he had started a relationship with a student (despite the fact that the college had in fact been informed in advance). He was warned to be polite when he tried to correct this "misunderstanding." The abuse went to the point that he was essentially refused medical treatment when he became sick and ultimately lost a lot of weight. Finally, he decided to break contract and leave early so that his health would not suffer further.

Another teacher runs an exercise and martial arts club that is pretty popular with the students. As retribution for repeatedly defeating a local tough/student in organized bouts, he and some students were attacked by a group of mooks/students carying knives and clubs. They escaped with nothing but some nasty bruises and shallow cuts, but the college stepped in and tried to prevent them from either going to the police or receiving proper medical treatment. Some senior admistrators threatened to expell the club members if their teacher tried to go outside the college to the police or US Embassay, protecting the gangsters in order to keep the Shengda's name out of the paper.

Yet another teacher slipped an broke her ankle in a teaching building because the floor was covered in water. She requires multiple surgeries. The college has tried to avoid paying for the medical expenses at every step of the process, generally conceding only when legal action is threatened. Mr. Yang, the new (and much despised) head of the FAO tends to forget how to speak English or to not be in his office whenever things need to be arranged to help her out, but he is very thourough in making sure that her pay be docked if friends don't cover her classes (for free) while she is in the hospital.

On top of this, there are undoubtedly countless problems for the students and innumerable minor problems for the other teachers (my difficulty getting my ticket to England reembursed is quite minor compared to these sagas of abuse and neglect). But all of this is being shoved under the rug. Founder Wang is coming next week and we are expected to wear formal clothes and be on our best behavior. Despite the daily highs in excess of 32 degrees (that's not freezing, more like 90 degrees Farenheight for those of you living in America or Yemen) and the utter lack of heat management in the classrooms, tank tops and shorts are not allowed. I'm debating what form my entirely meaningless protest will take. The formal clothes are a minor annoyance compared to what they represent. Options I'm considering: going as informal as possible - tank top (or no shirt) and the shortest (or longest?) shorts I own, doing the Fresh Prince thing - wearing formal clothes but in an entirely informal manner, or perhpas cutting the sleves off the cheap and enormously undersized polyester dress shirt I was given for Chinese New Year by Founder Wang.

This servicing of appearances over actual progress is absolutely universal in Chinese society. My friends and students have told me countless stories about certain students being asked to stay home from school, books being hidden or taken out and all manner of other rituals being performed the day political leaders arrive. Whole towns will ship beggars off to the countryside and force local businesses to purchase flower displays for inspection day. Every once in a while, the street carts I love so much mysteriously dissapear for a day or two, apparently bribed or threated to leave for the days of a VIP's visit.

In fact, VIPs almost certainly see very little of what China is actually like. At every restaurant, no matter how small, every museum, sports venue, hotel, etc., there is a special area for VIPs, and in many cases several different levels of VIPs. The Swiss architects of the Beijing Olympic stadium were told to prepare special spaces for more than 100,000 VIPs, 20,000 VVIPs and several thousand VVVIPs, whatever that means. Every meeting in China begins with some junior-level Important Person introducing the other VIPs present. In fact, sporting events begin with an introduction of a seemingly endless number of sports and culture administrators who then spend the rest of the game looking bored or even sleeping in their prime seats. They go so far as to broadcast these introductions on CCTV 5 (the main sports chanel in China) whenever they broadcast a CUBA (China University Basketball Association) game.

Keeping this phenomenon in mind, it is no wonder that the Chinese government often makes decisions that hurt their people. The most infamous case of keeping up appearances was a little thing known as the Great Leap Forward, the worst famine in the history of the world and an entirely avoidable one at that. The Chinese know this under a decidedly 1984-esque carefully-chosen understatement of a name: "The Two Bad Years." While there were droughts and crop failures during The Two Bad Years, the primary cause of famine was the almost universal over-reporting of crop yeilds. Some localities even went so far as to replant crops from several different fields in the ones that bordered on the road so that their reports would be visually confirmed when the high cadres passed in their motorcade. The result was that the government ordered the collection and storage of ever-increasing quantities of grain. Millions of people starved just tens of miles away from where cereals were rotting in Beijing warehouses or being exported to help fund the industrialization craze.

And while Wang Guangya is no Mao (he would certainly prefer to be compared to Confucious), he has taken some cues from the revolutionary icon. Wang's picture is everywhere on campus. Every classroom appears to be required to have a poster of him smiling wanly down on it. And there are at least three major murals of Founder Wang on campus: the one by the gate is probably the most expensive, although the least bothersome given that it only pictures Wang and a map of where he has founded schools; the one on the library is in two parts, Wang is on the left surounded by computers and other modern technology, Confucious is on the right ringed by a group of students, and we are left to draw our own comparison; the one in the new technology building is by far the wost, it is a picture of the Statue of Liberty with Wang's face substituted for the nameless French woman who presumably modeled for the original, leaving me unsure of whether I am more offended by the symbolism, the terrible irony or the abject hideousness of the thing.

So yeah, we have three enomous carvings of Founder Wang to offset the three sick or injured foreign teachers left untreated the past three months, or if you prefer, to make up for the three degress cooler it might be if the money had been spent on insulating the classroms instead of trying to build a cult of personality. I mailed my three-piece suit home three weeks ago so to put forth the proper front for Wang I think I'll refrain from doing three things: shaving, wearing a shirt and caring any more about what happens to this excuse for a school.