[No. 3 Contents | JAST Homepage]

Every year, as thousands of non-Americans and especially Asians look for means of reaching American soil to live an American Dream which for them is intact, Americans who are themselves native to the land leave for far-away places, bitten by Wanderlust--or perhaps the downsizing in academia. The editor has decided to share with JAST readers a letter she received from Douglas Cooper, an American scholar whose article "Chinese-American Cinema" was published in the Fall 1995 issue.

. . . Here in China life moves at a slower pace than in Turkey. My teaching load in the fall was ten hours with three preparations per week; in the spring it was eight hours with two preps, along with advising some seniors. These days I'm lucky and can finish my teaching Wednesday, leaving a four-day weekend. In class the students respond slowly and speak slowly and the fifty-minute hours go by quickly. The students are conscientious though immature. After class I take an hour for lunch and then join all of China for a midday nap lasting an additional hour or more. If you need something here you must plan to catch administrative staff between 9:00 and 11:30, and between 2:30 and 4:30. No wonder China is still a developing country. The school's policy crackdown this week requires all office help to stay at work until noon and again until five.

By China's standards Guangdong Foreign Studies University ranks high. Its campus is green and nicely sited in the city's suburbs at the foot of a scenic mountain, though traffic and noise are constantly encroaching. Never mind that the standards of public cleanliness are far different from those in the West; I'm well outside the city's traffic and pollution, which one of my students described (unprompted) in a paper as "like a pot of boiling oil, giving out greasy dirt blackening the sky." It's not that bad out here, where a small river traverses the campus (albeit a river littered with debris that the women street sweepers ignore in their daily chores). It passes beneath tall trees which survive from the days of the school's founding as a forestry research park.

We have liberal terms of office here. I'm among some twenty "foreign experts" who are given apartments in a separate building at one end of the campus, each furnished with air conditioner, color TV, phone, clothes washer, etc. Next to the building, a restaurant is where the American, Australian, Japanese, French, Belgian, German, and Russian teachers sometimes gather in groups for lunch. Experts are given free round-trip transportation to China and, if renewed, a free air ticket for home leave. A school bus takes us into town three different places twice a week. I've survived here without a bike because public buses cost so little (the equivalent of 12 US cents) and go so many places (a bus map helps).

If salaries are low by Western standards, costs are so low and needs so few that I've spent little. Most schools here even give foreign teachers a small travel stipend and at least one month's vacation time at the lunar new year, or "spring festival." Then the stipend along with my saved salary took me to two Southeast Asian countries. I went by courier flight to the Philippines for two weeks and spent another two weeks traveling in Viet Nam, going overland for most of the journey from Saigon to Hanoi before returning to classes in Guangzhou.

I find Guangzhou's grey landscape of construction rubble wreathed in traffic, crowds, and noise unremittingly ugly. Yet all of China sees the city as a success story. It is one of China's several Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Since China "opened to the outside world" in 1981, Guangzhou has been a principal gateway. Money has poured in and buildings have been razed to make room for skyscrapers and a subway. Now, especially with the current subway excavation, it's like a giant construction site. One estimate puts the crowds of people moved here for economic opportunity at 40 percent of the city's population. The train station is a mob-scene from hell, with several thousand unwashed migrants squatting on the pavement with all of their belongings.

When I arrived (not by train) for the fall semester I expected to hear the Cantonese dialect which used to be heard throughout this province and across the border in Hong Kong, yet all but a few of the locals have adopted the official Mandarin or have brought it with them from other provinces.

Guangzhou has been one of the nation's gateways for 1000 years. It's located in a key position on the Pearl River delta, some 74 miles (120 km) northwest from Hong Kong. Known to the West as "Canton," it's one of the oldest cities in China, the sixth largest, and the capital of Guangdong province. It was here in Guangdong that in the 1920s Mao Tse-tung, Zhou Enlai, and Chiang Kai-shek all started their careers under Sun Yatsen. It is known throughout China for its excellent cuisine and infamous for its taste for dog, which I saw being sold live with all the other foods at our local market. Guangdong is also known for the noisy rudeness of its people. The same composition assignment, "First Impressions of Guangzhou," drew this from a student from the north: "they shout at each other which makes you confused because you are not sure whether they are talking or quarreling." At the same time, economic success has gained Guangzhou such élan that some of my students regard the guttural Cantonese dialect as somehow stylish.

With the necessary multiple-entry visa I can cross over to Hong Kong whenever I want a change of pace from life in Guangzhou. I take a train south for about two and a half hours to the boom town of Shenzen on the border. At midnight 30 June 1997 this new city will have fewer barriers between it and Hong Kong. On the footbridge crossing from China's immigration checkpoint to the one for Hong Kong a large sign flashes in red the number of days remaining until Britain's handover of the colony. Several colleagues have taken a bus or ferry to another new economic zone, Zhuhai, across the border from the old Portuguese enclave of Macao with its new international airport, all soon to be returned to Chinese rule as well.

Weather dominates my life here. Humid heat rules from May until sometime in October without the sea breezes that relieve Hong Kong's summer. The winter cold comes quickly after only a few weeks of autumn weather. No building in the south has anything like central heating. I bought one of those enormous Chinese greatcoats with the huge fur collar and wore it around my apartment mornings and evenings, since the temperature here sometimes drops to about 10º C, and the little heater in each apartment is uncomfortable if it's used for more than ten minutes or so.

When I'm not taking trips or crossing to Hong Kong, I'm often glued to television at night-in fact, I seldom do much work after dinner. There are two English language channels broadcasting from Hong Kong which have movies almost every night. The weather "girls" and most announcers these days have American accents (it was all British ten or fifteen years ago). Of some twelve other stations here, many have Hollywood movies with Chinese dubbed in. The English language channels show Sesame Street every day in the afternoon and 60 minutes and 20/20 weekly. Programs in the popular series like NYPD Blue and The X-Files used to come on every week until they were moved to the cable service. Every weekday at 7:30 a.m., just as I'm getting ready to walk to my classes, Dan Rather intones the (prior night's) CBS Evening News, and many specials whether current or not are replayed from months before.

The Chinese television censors blank-out most politically sensitive and damning news broadcast by the English language channels in Hong Kong. Now and then a few moments of a news story slip by while they're napping. This happened occasionally during the recent "trial" and sentencing of Wei Jingshen in December, the controversy over child neglect in orphanages in January, and the Taiwan elections in April. Lately they've started to allow the audio to continue in English along with much of the video. They now cover the subtitles which translate the English into Chinese. Well, you can see what I've been doing with my evenings. Almost every night after the news I lean back with a 640-ml bottle of San Miguel or Tsingtao 3.2 beer and some peanuts and watch the movie.

Recently, a delegation visited the university's English department to talk about fostering American Studies links. It seems the Hong Kong America Center (HKAC) now serves as the Asian dissemination site for Crossroads.

My own contribution to American Studies have been two courses (one was only half related to the US) for postgraduate students. For the fall semester I taught a course in modern British and American drama. I enjoyed rereading many plays, especially Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the spring semester my postgraduates and I read American short stories in a course that surveyed the genre historically and regionally, then looked at stories by minority and women writers. It was a real treat for me.

American movies play an important part of American Studies, too. Regularly the university's audiovisual department schedules movies on the weekends, and sometimes I can get a ticket (one yuan, or 12 US cents). They showed Braveheart when it won an Oscar, and soon after that, Waterworld. During the warm dry months of autumn some films were shown outside, projected against a wall, but I doubted my back could endure the unsupported seating arrangements. Even when Waterworld was screened indoors, I knew that the audience were being eaten alive by mosquitoes as we sat there in the dark, since the place had no screens on any of the windows. Well, this is China! That's all for now. Whenever the bayrams are, I hope you spend them happily,

Cheers,

Doug