Reading through old files on my computer today, I came across this piece written around the time of my birthday while living in China.
Remembering that birthday in China from the comfort of my American living room has been a delight. I've chuckled throughout the remembrance, reassured myself that I could only do it because I was young, and wondered about the current status of restaurants, drains, and heating in China. Please come to my party and enjoy this sweet birthday memory with me.
January 14, 2002
Inner City Fuzhou, Fujian, China
Dear family and friends,
The year clicked over to 2002, and the Chinese population automatically upped their ages by one year. At least that is how one friend explained it to me. January first is the universal birthday. The Chinese are masters of keeping everyone on the same page. For instance, even though the country extends further east to west than the United States, there is only one time zone which in America would mean it’s the same time in New York City as it is in Los Angeles. So in true socialist fashion, on January 1st they all moved up a year.
In fact, this birthday thing is even more interesting because many Chinese gauge their birthday from conception, so on the day they leave their mother’s womb and enter the world, they are already one year old, or thereabouts. When someone mentions age, I wonder—is that really how old you are? Or is your age from conception? Or is that the January 1st universal birthday? The Chinese are an enigmatic and mystifying people.
I had to wait a week until January 8th to click up a year, too. I was actually born into the world on the 8th, and my parents began counting my age from that date. No mystery there. Despite encroaching age, I feel great, not even one minute of illness in China ... Mao’s Revenge has skipped me. That in itself is a miracle, considering sanitary conditions. Consider, for example, these two examples.
The Chinese have a disconcerting habit that makes me shiver and quicken my pace, in one direction or another when walking through the city. I call it the “Chinese national anthem.” It can be heard at any hour of the day, in any place, at any time ... restaurant, bus, theater, close quarters ... and it results with most foreigners, at least, coming to focused attention. The anthem is about to begin when a person coughs a bit and then starts to roll that cough out of their lungs up through their throat at which point (I never look)...I hustle as fast as I can away from the inevitable end of this guttural emptying of the saliva glands. I’ve never been hit, but there have been a few close ones. Bikers are the most dangerous. They pass at a clip with the wind in their faces, and an unsuspecting pedestrian can really get an eyeful. When I was a child I played that sidewalk game, “step on the crack, break someone’s back.” Well, the game here is hop, skip, and jump around the heaps of sputum on the sidewalk. Hence, the custom of removing your shoes whenever you enter a house. Everyone, always, removes shoes at the door. The sputum and shoe removal make for plenty of local color.
The second sanitary problem has to do with rodents of which there appear to be a small nation. Now, I have a cat, Oreo, back in Pennsylvania whom I treasure. He’s fat, sassy, and loves a good romp after critters in the backyard, but I wouldn’t want to see that prize feline tangle with these fellows. They have taken over the country and are currently vying with the ruling politburo for control. I was in a tea house the other day, and one strolled, not ran or sought cover, he literally sauntered past our table in the middle of the floor. No scurrying along the wall for these brutes.
Our trash heap behind my apartment building is just that... a heap. No dumpster. So it attracts its share of rodents, but the real heartbreaker was finding out that my favorite restaurant, the local greasy spoon of the neighborhood where I dine at least twice a week because it reminds me of a Chinese version of our Clarks Summit Gourmet Diner, hosts a variety of these long nosed, long tailed patrons on a regular basis. Hence, another custom and often repeated mantra from the Chinese, “If food drops on the table from your chopsticks, leave it there.” Easy for them to say. Most of what they eat with chopsticks makes it to their mouths. I could go hungry.
So my fifty-third birthday finds me healthy but evidently aging. One of my young Chinese teacher friends has adopted the title “Jo Ann’s Chinese Son,” and the faculty refers to him in that way. Daniel has been my translator and right hand man. He’s the guy I call for emergencies if Ming Guan, my neighbor, isn’t around. One day I had a spider in my apartment. Spider is a gentle term for this creature whose span appeared to dwarf a human hand and its exterior was black and furry. I had no doubt of how he gained entrance. The plumbing from the sink in the bathroom falls directly, straight as an arrow to the sewer, covered only by flagstones, which runs along the street. All any self-respecting spider from the street sewer has to do is walk up the pipe. I gained a new appreciation for those crooked neck pipes under our sinks at home. The children’s ditty “the itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout” has taken on new meaning. So this Charlotte roamed up and down the walls of my apartment. I made no attempts to swat her with my towel or throw a shoe at her, fearing retribution. Instead, I called my knight in shining spectacles, Sir Daniel, who knocked him on the floor and slammed a book on him, creating a mess beyond civil description.
Anyway, Daniel gave me a lovely Christmas/birthday gift ... long underwear. When I gently probed the reason for this intimate gift, he said that if I am his Americna mother, he should give me what he would give his own mother ... something to keep her warm in winter. Nothing shows love here more than long underwear on a cold day in China..
Without central heating things can get nippy. Another of those famous unwritten Chinese rules is that only homes north of the Yellow River are heated. Everything south of the river is unheated ... no matter how cold it gets. It’s the rule. My best reading time happens when I crawl into bed at night, but in the winter in southern China when I crawled under the covers for warmth to read, the heat of my body and the cold of the air worked together to fog up my glasses, and my breath formed a cloud around my head. No reading in bed in winter.
Despite cold temperatures, the Chinese have this thing about “bad air.” The temperature might be 40 degrees Fahrenheit near the East China Sea in mid-winter, but the windows must be kept open. Every room of the school has its window open, rain or cold. In fact, we teach and the children learn with coats and gloves on and a wind whistling through, but we’ve blown out that bad air. Even the taxi drivers zip around town in cold weather with the windows rolled all the way down. Now, if you ever visit my home in mid-winter, you know I have a fireplace and room temperatures that have made visiting Jamaicans break out in a sweat. The other day I got in a taxi, and the windows were up! I took a closer look at the driver to make sure that he was really Chinese. He was. Not only that, he had the heat blasting. I curled my toes up to the dashboard, and I was tempted to say, “Just ride me around town, honey, until I warm up.” What a birthday treat! Maybe he has a thyroid problem too.
Besides adding another year to my age, I crossed some kind of line with language. For seven months now I have been deaf and mute in a country whose tongue I have been helpless to discern. Mrs. Chen, the school’s gatekeeper, and I have a lovely relationship of waving arms and pantomine. Whenever I leave the school grounds, she and I go into our friendly gyrations which communicate something while we both jabber away in our own language. The other day as I was leaving, Mrs. Chen started waving to me, and she said something that ... I UNDERSTOOD! I stopped in my tracks and looked at her, wondering what she had done with my favorite gatekeeper, but it was still Mrs. Chen, and she had asked me (another famous Chinese question), “Where are you going?” We jumped around and hollered some more in that wonderful moment of revelation. Trouble was: I didn’t know how to answer her, except with another pantomine.
The birthday festivities were unforgettable. The girls in my weekly Bible study group know that my favorite Chinese food is dumplings (phonetically, “joutsa”), so they took me to a “joutsa” house, kind of a Chinese version of Perkins Pancakes or Howard Johnson’s with fifty varieties. There were “joutsa” with duck and mushroom, pork and cabbage, shrimp and vegetables, even peaches. A dumpling lover’s heaven. After the dumpling house the Suns from across the hall piled into my apartment with birthday cake and my name written in Chinese characters ... those sweet people.
It’s always blessing upon blessing here, and it’s unquestionable that I am receiving more than I am giving even though I ask the Father daily to make every moment among these dear people count for Him and matter for their eternity.
The school term ends here in one week, and then the nation settles down to the serious business of celebrating the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, the most significant event of their year. Another blessing: my son Bryan and my friend Donna will come here for the holiday. I am so eager to have my two worlds meet and to show Bryan and Donna the wonders of the Middle Kingdom and the work for the Highest Kingdom.
Getting older certainly has its up side.
Remembering fondly all of you who are aging along with me and looking to the ultimate celebration.
Jo Ann
America Was Founded and Built
on Faith in God
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
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| John Adams America's Second President |
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| Thomas Jefferson Author of America's Declaration of Independence America's Third President |
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| General George Washington America's First President |
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| James Madison Primary Author of the U.S. Constitution America's Fourth President |
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| Benjamin Franklin A signer of both America's Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. One of the leading theorists of the American Revolution |
"I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth - that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?
Blessed is
the nation whose God is the Lord,
the people He chose for His inheritance.
Psalm 33:12 (NIV)
Fuzhou Foreign Languages School
Fuzhou, Fujian, China
A New Year's Memory with an
O. Henry Ending
December 31st and January 1st are holidays in America. Not so in China where it's business as usual. School is in session.
But on December 31st, 2001, at the Fuzhou Foreign Languages School in Fuzhou, China, students and faculty took a slightly different approach to the school day by celebrating their "First Foreign Language Festival."
Established by Irish missionaries at the turn of the 20th century, the school had lived through the end of an empire, a civil war, Mao, a Communist take-over and the Cultural Revolution when teachers were often sent off for re-education in the countryside, but the Fuzhou Foreign Languages School had survived. And in 2001-2002 their first native English-speaking American teacher had taken up residence at the school.
Her name was Miss Jones, an easy-to-pronounce English name compared to Mrs. Walczak as she was known in her high school back in Pennsylvania where "Walczak" created pronunciation problems even for the best English speakers.
The "First Foreign Language Festival," Miss Fang's brain child, would cultivate the use of spoken English, encourage a spoken English milieu, and utilize its American teacher. English was one of only four required school subjects because speaking English provided one way up the economic ladder.
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| Miss Fang |
If you watched the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics on television, you know the Chinese have a flair for spectacle, drama, and excess in productions that should make the producers of the Super Bowl half-time shows pale.
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| The Chinese have a flair for performance even in daily morning exercises at school. |
Miss Fang's show featured 20 student and teacher presentations: songs, poems, speeches, dances, and plays. From behind the stage curtain I watched, thoroughly impressed with their creativity and ingenuity. In fact, we weren't past the first number, and I knew I was out of my league. I could speak English, but I couldn't sing like Dolly or dance like Travolta. I would be a woeful disappointment to Miss Fang, my mentor and supervisor.
Machines pumped fog across the stage for a troupe of Japanese kimonoed dancers. Synchronized dance numbers featured fans and banners swinging in rhythm. Sixty ballroom dancers in gowns moved in perfect formation until I was ready to sashay out the back door of the theater and forget I had a part in the performance.
But the everpresent Miss Fang would not let her only native English speaker escape. She was at the door, in my face, and generally everywhere at once. Always smiling and bowing, this in-charge lady was a task master, a workaholic, and a perfectionist, who had become one of my best friends in the four months I had been in her charge. Driven by love for the school and its students, she taught me much about the art of teaching and the joy of serving her school, but this diminutive pack of dynamite had nearly become my nemesis over the last few weeks.
Before Thanksgiving (a thoroughtly American holiday not celebrated in China), I had a call from Miss Fang to report to her office, not an uncommon occurrence.
"Jo Ann, we will be having a Foreign Language Festival at the end of December, and at the Festival I would like you to do two hours of English word games at English Corner in the courtyard, teach the teachers several songs in English to sing at the Festival, and perform a play with your spoken English class."
My stomach churned for a month like the Chinese wringer washer on my apartment balcony.
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| Some of the Foreign Language School teachers under a bell tower built by the Irish. |
Those lovely Chinese teachers did whatever they were told, uncomplainingly. At the Festival they sang their hearts out, but most were too nervous to "smile big" because they were concentrating on remembering the words. Our performance did not take the show by storm, despite Miss Fang's efforts to add excitement by having glitter fall from the rafters during our songs. A surprise to all of us, it served to break the concentration of my Chinese colleagues who promptly forgot the words.
But it was the play that dominated by attention in the month before the Festival. Our American short story writer, O. Henry, appeals to the Chinese for his clever and ironic endings. I rewrote his story "The Policeman and the Anthem" in seven short scenes of easy English. The story is about a homeless man in New York City who, faced with winter cold, tried his hand at a variety of crimes to get himself arrested and sent to a warm jail cell.
Our cast of about 25 students practiced for an hour every day. Most students
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| One of our policemen and Allen on the right. |
Cherry, our narrator who spoke wonderful English, would become incensed with Allen's garbled English during rehearsals and stop in her recitations to give him the dirtiest looks and rail at him in Chinese. Who knows what she said, but her looks were venomous.
Michael was a "reader," like a Greek chorus role. He turned out to be highly nervous and as the curtain on performance day was rising, he was yelling to me, "How do I say 'Enjoy, enjoy'?"
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| Our policeman, Vince Carter on the left. |
Vince Carter did a superlative job with his line, "Is there a problem here?" And Jordan's, "What are you doing here?" was convincing, though not entirely discernible.
Steven had a wonderful swagger and gave a hearty laugh on cue, but his "Poor slob!" had too many p's and b's, and it ended up mostly spit.
Disney couldn't get his lines out fast enough. He speaks English at record pace, and he managed to run on stage, spew out his lines and hustle off in a flash.
But our star, Allen, did a wonderful job. He managed to look perpetually cold on a snowy winter day, eat sloppily in a diner, and fall realistically when shoved around. If only he had remembered to turn on his lapel microphone.
The art teacher and the school carpenter had been dragged into the mix by Miss Fang, also. The carpenter made a sign for each store scene on our New York street, and the art teacher rigged up a window that dropped a giant crack when hit by Soapy's rock.
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| Barry (Cihan) holding American flag. |
These super Chinese teens put forth a great effort, despite the
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| Classes averaged 50-60 students. |
In 2018 Allen, our Soapy, now in his early 30's and working for a Chinese corporation, came to Texas on business. He remembered his American "Spoken English" teacher at the Fuzhou Foreign Languages School who talked about Pennsylvania, her home. A few emails to old schoolmates, and Allen located me and made the trip up from Texas to visit in my home ...
Nearly two decades and half a world later,
Soapy showed up On Layton.
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| Allen, "Soapy," On Layton almost 2 decades later. |
... And he came with a message. He hadn't forgotten the "Soapy" of Fuzhou. Soapy, he said, had changed his life and given him the incentive he needed to develop courage, confidence, and personal strength to step out and speak up in his school and career. Allen knew if he could perform as the lead in a play, speaking a foreign language as a teen, he could do most anything with his life ... and he has.
An unexpected event brought success and hope to our main character.
New Years are like that. They can be the beginning of new grace and new hope.
A satisfying resolution worthy of O. Henry ...
and characteristic of our Sovereign God
who loves happy endings.
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| Barry (Cihan), my English student/scenery constructor, first visited On Layton in 2019. Working with Amazon in Washington D.C., he has traveled the world with his company and came to Layton several times... He speaks marvelous English. |
*Note to readers: My memory did not retain all of these details. During my year teaching in China, these specifics were related in emails to friends in the US. Those letters were my memory source. Other Chinese students have also come to visit On Layton. Miss Fang and I have visited several times since 2002 in China. Some of my Chinese colleagues continue to teach at Fuzhou Foreign Languages School.
*Regarding student names: With 50-60 students in a class, remembering Chinese names and pronouncing them correctly would have been a task worthy of Demosthenes. So every student chose an English name, usually of the American English strain. We had five Michael Jordans in one class, known as Jordan 1, 2, etc. We even had an Orange. Some students still use their English names.
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| Dad's specialty on the road - grilling hot dogs. |
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| Our Cross-America van. |
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| In a snow field. Glacier National Park, Montana. |
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| The boys and giant Sequoias. |
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| Lake Louise, British Columbia |
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| My grandmother's 70-year-old peonies on Layton. |
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| John and Colette Hughes' Covid- escape flower garden. |
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| Colette, lost in squash. |
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| John and his beanstalk |
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| John Hughes and his cuke trellis. |
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| Day lilies in bloom. |
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| Virginia Richardson in her English garden. |
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| Aberfan, Wales. Buried under 140,000 cubic yards of mining waste. |
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| Funeral for 81 of the 116 children killed in the Aberfan landslide, 1966. |
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| Welshmen singing in the mines. |
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| Grandpa and Nana Jones sing at the piano on Layton Road. |
