Teaching in China

Barbara Sale moved from Detroit with her son David to teach
at Xiamen International School. Here is her story.

Barbara Sale remembers her first day in China very well.

"It was hot. Devilishly hot," she said. August in Xiamen is almost insufferable. We had an extremely long flight. I was exhausted to begin with. By the time I got here and climbed seven flights of stairs to our new apartment, I almost threw up. We just collapsed on the bed."

Welcome to China. Home to one fifth of the world's population, the land of temples and rice paddies, Mao and the cultural revolution and ping pong. And a surging, charged economy that is changing the face of world trade and the lives of all Chinese. One result of that growing economy is an increasing need for foreign investment, capital, and teachers. Teachers like Barbara Sale. A first grade instructor at a Detroit private school, Barbara left Detroit to teach children at an international school in Xiamen, a bustling city of over one million in the southeastern province of Fujian, across the strait from Taiwan. But two years ago, she was not thinking of life overseas, let alone China.

Born in Cleveland, Barbara moved to Detroit after college in 1979, where she met and fell in love with Peter Weber. "We were each other's best friend, closest confidante, deepest love," explains Barbara. Married in 1982, both were active in the peace and justice community in Detroit, where Peter had helped start a soup kitchen, the Catholic Worker Day House, and a local chapter of Amnesty International. Her life took a wrenching turn when Peter contracted a very rare and aggressive form of sarcoma. Still, the cancer was in remission for two years,during which time they decided to have a child, David, born in 1984. But the cancer returned, and Peter died in 1987.

She continued her teaching career, which included instruction of disabled children as well as preschool, kindergarten and first grade. While finishing her masters degree in 1996, she was making plans to move into a teaching position for at-risk children in Detroit. Then, two events changed her direction. One was a month spent traveling with her son David in France and Germany. "It was a life changing experience," she explained. "It opened me up in ways I can't even put words to. I loved the traveling, seeing the sights and differences in the people."

The other event was meeting a woman who had taught in international schools in France, Korea and Ecuador. "She talked about the places she had been, the amount of traveling she could do, and the children and families she met." After that meeting, says Barbara, "The thought of becoming an international school teacher began to grow inside me."

She enrolled in an Atlanta job fair for overseas teachers, and interviewed there in March of 1997. Her first choice was a school in Malaysia, but unable to connect there, she explored other countries, eventually accepting a job at a new school that was still being built, the International School of Siam in Bangkok, Thailand. But then the economy woes hit Thailand and the banks renigged on the loans for the school. Three weeks after accepting the job she received an e-mail from the director, saying the school would not be able to go on, and all thirty teachers who had been hired were released from their contracts.

"It was on April 1, too," says Barbara, " and David thought it was an April fools joke. He burst into tears. I was in tears too." Already mentally on her way overseas, Barbara did not want to stay in the states, so she plunged back into the job search via the internet. She pursued leads in Laos, South America, and Indonesia, but found problems with all of them. She also heard about a school starting up in Xiamen, China, sent in her application, and had several phone interviews.

While exploring another school in Malaysia, Barbara received a message from Xiamen. They wanted to hire her. "Xiamen was pursuing me, but they had no headmaster yet. It seemed kind of chancy, but I decided to go with it. I really wanted to be overseas, and I knew it would be an extraordinary experience to live in China. This city sounded like the best of all possibilities in China."

She accepted in May, then spent a frantic summer finishing her masters project, finding storage for her Detroit household, writing final reports for her first grade class, and spending time with her family and friends. "I was utterly exhausted."

Her family was supportive, though amazed. "They thought I was nuts," says Barbara with a laugh. "They've always hoped that I would move back to Cleveland. I've always been the adventuresome one in the family. But in the end, both my family and friends said go for it. Especially difficult was leaving One by One, the music group she'd sung with for ten years. "Leaving One by One was really hard. I knew I would not find that kind of musical experience again."

Besides the heat that first day, Barbara recalls vividly her first walk through the neighborhood fruit market and her first taxi ride. "It was white knuckles all the way. And it was raining, and very hot. I didn't know where I was going. I knew none of the language." Armed with a survival pack supplied by the school that included Chinese phrases, Barbara found the written words didn't help much. " In Mandarin, it means very little to read the words. You need to hear the tones."

Her son David, now 14, has found is easier to learn Mandarin, the language spoken by the majority of Chinese. David converses readily with taxi drivers and shop keepers, falling easily into the singsong intonations of this tonal language. But Barbara has found learning to speak very demanding. It can be a fiendishly difficult language for westerners to learn, especially adults. There is a Chinese saying, "Nothing is more terrible above or below than a foreigner speaking Chinese."

Language is at the heart of many issues in China, as it is at Xiamen International School, where Barbara began teaching last September. Xiamen, known as the cleanest city in China, is a port city across the straight from Taiwan. It was one of four original special economic zones named in China in 1980, where foreign investment was encouraged and business restrictions eased. It's now exploding with construction as companies pour money into the region. The mayor of the city, looking for ways to improve the investment climate in Xiamen, found that many families of foreign businessmen and women were not living in Xiamen since there was no school for their children.

He approached a wealthy businesswoman named Ms. Yang Ying to help. A remarkable Chinese rags to riches story, Ms. Yang Ying had started as a maid 18 years ago. She began selling food in the marketplace, then began organizing the farms in the region into a cooperative. Seven years later she built the first mechanized pork facility in Xiamen, which sells 80% of the pork the city buys. Then followed real estate, banking deals, a fertilizer factory. Denied the right to go to school in her younger years, she was keenly interested in education, and three years ago built the Ying Cai School.

A sprawling complex, the private boarding school for well-to-do Chinese families has 1100 Chinese students who attend classes and live in dorms on the campus. Ms. Yang Ying agreed to help fund Xiamen International School, (XIS), which will begin to build it's own campus soon on 3 acres next to the Ying Cai School. In the meantime, Xiamen International School uses classrooms and other facilities at the private school.

Stepping into Barbara's class of three, four and five year olds is like stepping into a mini United Nations. The children of foreign businessmen living in Xiamen, her twelve children came from Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Sweden, England, Germany and the U.S. The classrooms are bright and airy, with all the posters, blocks and drawing materials you'd expect to find at any kindergarten. And the children are bubbly and energetic, yet well-behaved, which belies the rocky start to the school year.

"The beginning of school was extremely challenging," explains Barbara. "We had children who were very indulged. Some of the children had never had No said to them." She recounts how the children had the habit of coming up and hitting the teachers on the backside. "A few children would slap us on the butt. I had seen them do it to their parents too. I would whirl around and take their hands to startle them, look right in their faces and say, 'Don't do that again.'"

Some children had never even dressed or fed themselves. "It was a zoo at lunchtime. A few would do everything but feed themselves. The first couple days it was like a tornado. There was so much misbehavior, and many times my partner teacher and I had to make sure that the children would not run out of the room. At times we would just keep them in our laps and wrap our legs around them to keep them from running."

Barbara's partner from the beginning is named Jenny, a young kindergarten teacher from Shanghai. Each XIS classroom has an English speaking teacher paired with a Chinese teacher. The school's mission statement calls for a bilingual curriculum in English and Mandarin. But adding to the early difficulties was Jenny's poor grasp of English. Says Barbara, "Not only was I struggling with the kids, one of whom put his fingers in his ears every time I opened my mouth, because he was not going to learn English. But I was also struggling with Jenny too. But she was a trooper. She backed me up all the way.

The situation slowly improved. Jenny learned English. The new western style toilets were connected and began to flush. Air conditioning was installed. Now the children move orderly from one activity to another. They sing songs in English and Mandarin, often accompanied by Barbara on her autoharp.

This hot, humid afternoon, two of her boys are napping as Barbara strokes their backs and sings softly to them. The other children are working on drawing projects or playing quietly together. All the children switch effortlessly from English to Mandarin, usually talking to one another and calling out in English. As they line up to leave, Barbara jokingly sings out their names, "Jasmine, Olivia, Li Xiang Fan", then leads the column down the stairs and out to the waiting buses.

Barbara's son David also goes to the international school. He is in a combined class of seventh and eighth grades and multiple languages. "David has become extremely independent," explains Barbara. "He's able to ride buses and taxies by himself and travel to friends' homes. And he goes shopping by himself. I don't have any qualms about him. Taxi drivers are very respectful. He's able to speak to them, tell them what he needs and where he wants to go."

And while his education in China has not been everything Barbara would like (he's been bored and unchallenged in some subjects), Barbara is thrilled with his broader education. "He's learned about kids from all over the world, with friends from Venezuela, friends who have lived in India and Africa. He's come to understand the many different kinds of experiences people can have growing up in different cultures. And he's very respectful of other cultures; willing to try to communicate, to try different foods. To see others' points of view. You can't get that except through experience."

All the students, as well as the teachers, are picked up and dropped back home by one of three of the school's buses. They live in apartments scattered throughout the city. Barbara and David live a half hour ride away, in a large apartment complex called Jin Ji ting. Seven flights up, and no elevators.

A typical day starts early. "It's difficult to sleep past 6 o'clock," explains Barbara, "because so much construction is going on. They built a high school directly across from our living room, and the screeching machines started at 6 a.m. Luckily I'm an early riser."

The two bedroom apartment is modest but spacious enough for them. It was furnished by the school. The kitchen is small, with low counters built for the smaller statured Chinese. The bathroom would look familiar to any westerner, with one exception. "The bathroom has a shower head, but no bathtub and no shower curtain. So everything gets wet. It took us a while to figure it out so everything didn't get soaked. After a shower you have to wipe down the whole room. But we have a luxury bathroom compared to many. The average person in China has nothing like this. We're upper class."

That type of optimistic view has carried Barbara through many trying times in China. She has a quick laugh and a ready smile, and can speak with a chuckle even about her apartment flooding. "We had a leak in our kitchen twice. Once when we went to Hong Kong in October, apparently something broke and flooded the entire apartment. The water was going for three days before anybody at the school was notified about it. I was told there was four inches of water all over the apartment, and no one could get in because I had all the keys. We're on the top floor, so a worker got on the roof and came down on a rope to our balcony, then let himself in and turned off the water. When we got home our neighbor on the sixth floor was just talking up a storm. He was not pleased with us."

"This is a third world country, and they just don't have the resources," she notes. So everything breaks within a very short period of time," "You can see it with buildings around Xiamen. This province is known for poor workmanship. And things deteriorate quickly because of the climate."

Yet in the next breath Barbara is quick to tell of her love for the country. "There are some things I hate about China," she says. "But overall I really love being here. I enjoy experiencing this culture, and Xiamen is a very friendly city. It's a small city too, so it's easy to negotiate. And I love it here because my life has slowed down so much. My life was such a fast track in the states. I appreciate having time. I love being able to walk places."

When going further afield Barbara and David now take taxis, which cost one to two dollars U.S. They used to use a clean, double decker bus that came by their apartment, a bargain at just 12 cents U.S. But that was soon replaced by a dirtier, smellier model. "It even quit going up the hill once. We all had to get out and walk to the next stop. So we don't take the bus that much anymore."

Western foods are rare in Xiamen. And shopping has its own difficulties. "Shopping is a real challenge here," says Barbara. You want to get juice, you have to go to one particular store for juice that tastes anything like what we're accustomed to. Then you have to go home in a taxi because of the heavy bags, or in a bus if you're brave. Next you have to go out to get cereal, because that's in another store. And that means climbing another seven slights of stairs! I have often spent most of the day on Sunday getting the food we need for the week." If you eat as the Chinese do, prices are very low; less than a dollar a day explains Barbara. Western foods however are hard or impossible to find and more expensive that in the U.S. "We eat a mixture of foods. Lots of stir fry, local vegetables, fruit, ramon noodles, rice. We get bread from the French bakery, and milk, juice and nuts."

When Barbara and David socialize, it's with the other teachers and their families. A group they call the Expats. They will meet for dinner, and share American movies on Video CDs, a prime source of entertainment in this country without malls or movie theaters. They also travel together, as Barbara recently did with another American family to Yunnan Province in western China.

Language is naturally a barrier here between Westerners and Chinese, as are cultural differences. Children, for instance. "The Chinese like to rough them up," says Barbara. "They grab their cheeks. And they grab and sometimes even gently bite the skin on their hands. Because they think they're so cute. They're rough in their affection. And they're even more so to blond hair, blue eyed kids." A westerner is still a novelty here, and children even more so.

"The western children have had a difficult time," says Barbara. "The local people grab the kids, even pick them up and take them away from their parents to show their friends." An American teacher at the school and her husband have a three year old named Tao, she says. They've almost given up going to the park, for instance, because of all the attention, hair ruffling and rough handling.

Yet Barbara is quick to point out the many similarities, "Many things are just plain human...children manipulating parents, people arguing over high prices in the market, groups of young people walking together and laughing at jokes, couples breaking up in McDonalds (there are 3 in Xiamen). The woman's crying. It's not hard to figure out the body language. And there's basic human affection, of parents and grandparents toward children."

Ask Barbara about something she cannot do without, and she'll quickly point to her laptop computer. When she first arrived in Xiamen and did not have an internet connection, she would head to a place called the Internet Cafe, where she could log on for $1.25 per hour. "I spent a lot of hours in that place. Having a lifeline to my home and family, having the ability to communicate with my friends has meant an extraordinary amount to me. It has made my life very livable here. It's been a gift to me. I've recorded a lot of my impressions, reactions and deep responses to China in my e-mails home."

Now she doesn't need to leave her apartment. "When we got e-maiL capability in the apartment, it was like, FREEDOM (singing the word). Now when I wake up at 3 in the morning I can go on the internet." Besides e-mail, she also keeps up on world news with the ABC News and Washington Post web sites. And she plans trips, finding information on hotels and flights schedules.

"I rely on the internet for my connections. I e-mail every day, usually twice."

And she reads. She's read a number of books to David, including the Bible. Barbara's Christian faith continues to be an important part of her life. She attends a Catholic Church in Xiamen along with about 70 regulars, many of whom are Western expatriates. China allows Christian Churches to operate as long as they don't rock the boat. But evangelism is not allowed, and outspoken priests and other religious have been persecuted and even jailed.

While she misses the more active faith community she had in the states, Barbara says, "In some ways I have grown closer to God. My prayer is much more active now. And I often am aware of how thankful I am to be given this opportunity to live in another culture and travel."

Barbara will be moving with David to Tokyo in the fall to teach at the American School in Japan. " We will miss our place here at Jin Jiting and the city of Xiamen," says Barbara, "and especially the friends we have made here, but we are both ready to be working and studying in an established school." Barbara is especially excited to see David start high school there, where he'll have his choice of many programs including sports, drama, music, and photography classes.

Barbara is happy and proud of the progress of her students at Xiamen International School "The children continue to be extraordinary," she says. "speaking in two or more languages, working and playing together, and always learning". As the school year winds down she's looking forward to a June trip to Tokyo to find an apartment, then to a summer at home with her family in Cleveland.

Barbara looks forward to her new adventure in Japan with confidence and a heady anticipation. She has weathered difficulties in her life with a rare perseverance and humor. Her resolve and religious faith seem only deepened with every new challenge. Reflecting on the death of her husband, Barbara says, "His death brought me many gifts. I no longer question my ability to do something with excellence. I took care of him with excellence, and supported him to his death with excellence.. I weathered the grief, took care of myself, and sought God's comfort, as well as therapy and support groups. My 'well' of human experience, feeling, and understanding lies very deep. I am a person of character."

Indeed.

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All text and photographs © Dwight Cendrowski