Further life and times of *liltayinchina*

Almost three weeks ago now, a fifth-grade girl at my school fainted in her Chinese teacher’s office early in the morning and was taken to the nearby hospital. After only minutes in the hospital she was pronounced dead – a combination of a fatal heart attack and damage to her brain when she struck her head upon falling. The girl had suffered from a rare heart illness, which she inherited from her mother, her whole life but no one knew about it until her death two Thursdays ago.

I was walking through the school gates a little late Thursday morning, having walked to a nearby dumpling stand for breakfast. Upon entering the gates, I noticed a commotion and a large crowd surrounding a small group of devastated young girls. The girls were walking with a teacher and a man pushed his way through first to allow the girls to pass quickly under the curious stares of strangers. As I walked slowly along one avenue towards the school buildings, the girls continued in their huddle along the parallel avenue, sobbing and moaning loud enough to send chills down my spine.

I mentioned this scene to several of my English co-teachers and no one heard a thing until the following morning. As Julia and I were making our way to first period Friday morning, Jade, a Chinese English teacher for grade six, seized Julia’s arm and unloaded her terrible news. The little girl was dead. She had been one of the brightest pupils in the fifth grade. She had been Mustafa’s student, not Lisa’s. She was dead.

For the rest of the day, I walked around in an irritable haze. At ten o’clock, as usual, the students marched to the field and were prepped for the fanfare that would welcome an envoy of students and teachers from Singapore the following Monday. I watched incredulously as the music went on and the students did their daily calisthenics to one of my favorite songs, “Tonari no Totoro”, which happens to be a Japanese song and comes from a Japanese cartoon, but in the song that was blaring across the field, a Chinese woman sang the song using Chinese words and changing the idea to suit Chinese children’s imaginations. I became furious.

This little girl had died, tragically, unexpectedly and students throughout the school were being forced to pretend nothing happened. I realized that we, the teachers, were grownups and were required to have a certain level of programmed personal risk management, but death isn’t something easily understood by children; it brings some adults to tears everyday. I needed something to be opened up. I needed the opposite of the school’s suppression. I was suffocating. And yet, the days went by, have continued to go by, and nothing. I think about the fact that a little girl died so suddenly and my mind sort of dances around the fact as if it is a roadblock threatening to cut off an otherwise enjoyable haze.

All this has really shown me is that I am not well suited to dealing with tragedy. Eileen admitted to me that she felt very distant from the fact, even though she and Winnie taught a class next door to the little girl’s own class the following morning. Eileen and Winnie heard the collective sobs of the little girl’s classmates for the duration of their forty-minute class. Maybe I take things too personally. Maybe I can’t let things go as I should. But do me a favor, think of how this tragedy could be your own and tell me that you’d wish for those around you to “just let it go” or to suppress the potential hysterics of children coming to terms with death for the first time at the age of seven or eight or ten.

The worst part of all is that I find I’m daily growing resentment for the way the school is run. And I’d be alarmed that maybe a future working relationship with all things Chinese isn’t such a great idea except that in talking with those Chinese whom I trust and love, they seem to be just as disillusioned with the school as me, which is a greater tragedy since these good, dear friends and colleagues of mine cannot leave.

The imbalance of how the foreign teachers are recruited and then paid compared to the years of work and study and preparation that the Chinese English teachers go through to get paid one fourth of our own salary is enough to make me daydream of setting up monthly lotteries to distribute half of my income to much more deserving teachers.

I’ve only got 34 days left in China and it seems a damn shame. I feel I’ve done plenty of good things and traveled enough; I know this is where I want to aim my future, but I feel I’m leaving China on bad terms. And that, to me, is the shame. So, now that I’ve spent a good three weeks feeling disconcerted and saddened, I think I’ll spend the rest of the time making up with China. When I think about it, I’ve only had two previous major growing pains during this year away from home: there came a point in Shanghai when I was angry with everyone and everything and I contend that the sweat made me go crazy, and then there was a lowness around the western New Year when I had to say goodbye to my mother and return to my insane co-habitants of this moldy mansion I call home. This third growing pain has been a strange mixing of frustration with the “Chinese way” and with the school and how it is run, and I’ll be honest, since this isn’t my “real life” – the teaching and the frustration with the school, that is – my tendency has been to shrug off each disappointment and frustration and to focus more on the daily subterfuges and to LOSE SIGHT of the 180 reasons why I am here: my 1st and 2nd graders, and more dubiously, my Kindergarteners. So from now on, I’ll revel in the chaos that is this school’s administration and I’ll look more carefully at my students each day, for as morbid as it is to say this, I could lose one any day and never have the chance to say goodbye.