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Cracking China …
Release date: February 2010
New in Paperback: Cracking China A memoir of our first three years in China By Rod MacKenzie Definitions of Cracking: to survive, to make a success, excellent (British Slang), to understand a code, to joke. There are three good reasons I can think of to read Rod MacKenzie’s book. Firstly, he writes beautifully. Secondly, you’ll understand more about the fastest-growing economic powerhouse in the world and thirdly, it will give you something other than crime or racism to talk about at dinner parties. ~ David Bullard Travelling home by train one day, Rod MacKenzie closed his eyes and suddenly had a vision of red lanterns and himself teaching Chinese children English. “Go to China,” something told him – and just like that, he did. Cracking China is an interesting, funny and thought provoking memoir of a South African who teaches English in China. It’s an off-the-wall account of the author’s discovery of Chinese Culture, from a largely western point of view, and manages to ‘crack’ open the not-so-subtle nuances of Chinese culture, exposing the in-your-face squalor and intrusiveness, while demonstrating the easy-going and childlike nature of its people. Written in the witty style typical of Rod’s popular blogs, this memoir takes a candid look at China through the eyes of a Westerner, using humour to enlighten and enrich readers on the world’s most rapidly developing country that is still feeling the effects of Mao’s cultural revolution. This book is invaluable for anyone who wants to travel to or conduct business in China. Rod MacKenzie’s insight into the human psyche engages you on a level that is deep and true. ~ Aliki Karasaridis, Mail & Guardian Price: R195.00 Size: 210mm x 142mm 240 pages ISBN: 978-0-620-45107-9 PROLOGUE: MERRY ENGLAND The train clanked its way back to Southampton where we lived, passing sodden, emerald fields and shore waters crowded with yachts. I breathed deeply, closed my eyes and meditated to calm down – a practice I had learned from reading various books and going on retreats to a centre in Hartebeespoort dam in South Africa. I suddenly got an image of red lanterns and me teaching Chinese children English. I opened my eyes, mulling over the unexpected image. I knew nothing about China. “Go to China,” something said inside me …. CHAPTER ONE The flight from Paris to Shanghai was the noisiest I have ever been on. Usually a flight is like an airborne, humming library. But this was my first introduction to Chinese people who live in China, not the ones I know who were born and bred in South Africa and cannot speak their ancestral lingo. After suspiciously eyeing Air France’s breakfast offering of tasty cheese omelettes, they instead munched noisily on sunflower seeds, tofu and greasy noodles, and chattered loudly … ************* “We are a bit late for lunch,” said Felix. There was a look of desperation on his face as he hurried us past the front steps of the college, which were covered in bonsai. I looked at my watch in surprise. It was half past eleven …. We turned left down a narrow road to the canteen, which was in a building on the fourth floor. All the buildings had that cheap, thrown together look we had seen everywhere thus far. I realised this was the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in China ….. …. The cooks reminded me of the doctors in England in bygone centuries who wore their surgeon’s aprons like butchers advertising their trade …. CHAPTER TWO After dinner, in summer, the subway stations in Shanghai fill up with families and friends who come here to sit and chat, most of them wearing pyjamas: the real dandy ones, with red and blue stripes, making the dads look like walking rock candy sticks. Many grandfathers prefer old green shorts, green sneakers and white vests, perhaps a relic of the Maoist green uniform. They stare at me, the lawai (foreigner), as if I am the source of amusement, not them. Freshly washed, sons and fathers sit and play card games while mothers supervise homework or cluck with friends. The summers are a hot, wet blanket; using air conditioners is expensive, beyond the average citizen’s means. So they squat on the marbled steps and floors of the cool subways with little to do except watch the human traffic mill through the turnstiles … ************* Lit candles in the intense summer, in winter the trailing willow branches are snuffed out, their smoke and shadows burning in the canals of Shaoxing. Here the washing women bang their laundry against the huge steps that descend to the ancient canals. Centuries later, the men are still trying their hand at fishing … The grandmothers, mending or washing clothes in the shadows under the bridges, smile at the men’s luck and know their ancestors smile too …. …They are sad the young men do not know the benevolence of their ancestors and cluck among themselves about the days before the Cultural Revolution and the Great Step Forward. There are fewer of these elderly women now. Somehow they survived. Their faces, leathered from decades of work, hold many secrets …. CHAPTER THREE My students all came up with their own English names, as their real names were deemed impossible for foreigners to pronounce. Their personal christenings were off the wall. I had names like Ice Sucker, Ice Queen, Spring Flower, Blue Tree, two boys called Sin and Christ in the same class, Answer and W.C. (as in the old-fashioned name for a toilet). There were students who called themselves by a variety of random numbers such as Seven and Eleven. Others called themselves Pig-pig, Shark-winner, Blossom, Nut, Spoon, King, one boy called Queen and another boy called Ellen. My classes included past and present public enemies such as Hitler and Osama, personal insults including Fatty and Idiot, and animal names such as Fish, Chicken and Monkey. There were two girls called Twin A and Twin B. They were identical twins and Twin B arrived in this world about five minutes after Twin A. Sometimes Twin A and Twin B disagreed as to who was A and who B when I asked one of them to read her answers to comprehension exercises … CHAPTER FOUR Near our home was one of the many canals that wound through Shaoxing. On the banks, columns of ancient willows trailed branches through the waterway. In the morning we would walk past women practising t’ai chi. I quickly picked up the habit of walking backwards down the waterway as they did in one of the many t’ai chi exercises … … It is hair-raising to watch. Often the scooter will have the entire family on it: Mom perched on the back, the child sandwiched in between with shopping bags on the sides, and Dad at the helm, ducking between vehicles and pedestrians … CHAPTER FIVE There they stood: men and women and children in a semi-circle, all thoughtfully appraising me as if I were some recently discovered masterpiece now on display in the Louvre. I could hear one man encouraging his boy to say hello and ask for my name. It was like being an unusual species in a safari park, everyone taking pictures and whispering excitedly to each other, hoping the animal will not bolt off. Shhh. Be quiet. It might run away … ************* A duck appeared with his feet and solemn head cooked in the meal. This was soon followed by raw pigs’ brains, undamaged and freshly scalloped from the skulls, placed on plates and ready for the hotpot in the middle of the Lazy Susan. Feasters would skewer off a chunk of fresh brain with chopsticks and dangle the portion in the hot water for a moment, then slurp it up … CHAPTER SIX … Good God, Chook!” I exclaimed to my wife, “A foreigner! Just there, on the other side of the road! Two o’clock and closing!” For about two months in Shaoxing we never saw a fellow westerner – except for the occasional, teasing glimpse just before he or she disappeared around a corner like some rare, shy species … ************* Mainland China was still feeling the hangover of the Cultural Revolution: a time when everyone spied on everyone to check that they were happy with Maoist Communism. Those who were deemed unhappy – guilty or not – were sent off for “re-education” …. CHAPTER SIX “Oh, can I come walk with you?” he said, a hint of pleading in his voice. “Yes you may,” we said, looking at each other, knowing we had another lonely Chinese student coming under our wing. ************* First under the wing was Sunshine. Star was not long in following. She was one of Sunshine’s friends, but in another class. My first encounter with Star came in the form of a letter passed over the classroom desks up to mine while I laboured away at trying to explain idioms such as “he is a sandwich short of picnic” and “his lift does not go all the way to the top”; amusing descriptions – or so I thought – of wacky people. My explanations were busy winging their way far above the students’ heads when the letter arrived. Sir we don’t want for learning these exercises, we want you talk with us. Remember be happy every day ... CHAPTER SEVEN … we arrived at the lake and wandered around, looking at the giant lotuses that had reared up since our last visit. They were now the size of sofas and they crowded the shores of the lake. You could see why the lotus was an image of spirituality and enlightenment that came so readily to Buddhists … CHAPTER EIGHT Felix was sitting with me and Marion in one of the directors’ offices at Zhejiang College and we were being interviewed by Shaoxing Television. The television presenter, a man called Zhou, had wanted to learn more about us prior to starting the project … … Some other girls came pealing past, tittering and jostling before the camera and asking if it was on. As soon as they discovered I was going to try to interview them in English, they squealed in horror, covered their faces, and, clinging to one another like Velcro pads, also raced off … CHAPTER NINE … But tofu with the quality of mercury required greater skill than picking up clots of rice and sweet and sour chicken. I was also amazed at how Chinese picked up nuts with their chopsticks … … The carvings had an electric charm in the way the sculpting followed the original curve and growth history of the wood’s busy contours. This eventually found its way into one of my poems about China … ************* … Some of the Shaoxing folk liked to turn the turtles upside down to examine the bellies while the creatures’ flippers waved about. The folk would poke the belly, testing them – somehow – while chattering to each other about the turtles’ quality. I have never had the stomach to enquire what they were looking for … CHAPTER TEN The assignment I gave to my students was to correct the Chinglish in the signs. Twin A, for the park sign about “little grass has life”, penned, “Don’t touch me.” “What if your boyfriend wants to touch you?” I asked, pretending to stalk her with my hands groping air … CHAPTER TWELVE … In China, when I told my students and friends about this spaciousness in Western countries like South Africa, they were worried about feeling lonely if they ever went there … CHAPTER FOURTEEN “I had to fire my cooks,” said Davy sadly. “Why?” I asked, munching on a large mouthful of his tasty braised beef and noodles flavoured with a piquant garlic and coriander sauce. “Because this cooks been spitting in the customers’ food,” he whispered confidentially, shaking his head and sighing. “Very bad, this one…” CHAPTER FIFTEEN … Like the college in Shaoxing, the school often forgot to tell us about changes in timetables, leading to missed classes or the Chook or I huffing into a class ten minutes late … “The school principal wishes to know, hmf, why you are not in class.” You know very well why, I would think. Because you haven’t told us ... yet again … CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Why?” I exclaimed. “Because they do not want the students to learn English taught by a person with an Irish accent. But they are happy with Marion, as she is British.” “What?!” I exploded, “I don’t have an Irish accent!” trying to make sense of the outlandish reasoning … CHAPTER NINETEEN Foreigners sometimes half-jokingly quip that because the Chinese language only has a present tense, many of them only think in the now, and therefore take no thought for consequences to actions … CHAPTER TWENTY No wonder the Chinese stare.
All Chinese people love the Chook but some find Rod intimidating, perhaps because he looks like a retired rugby prop and can get rather impatient at times. He holds a postgraduate degree in English and has previously published his poems in an anthology called Gathering Light.
Author's Blog: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/rodmackenzie
However, the author’s picture on the back cover has to be the goofiest and least-flattering I have ever seen, which cheered me. At least it looked like he would not take himself too seriously. I was right, and enjoyed this much more than I expected or even hoped to. Mackenzie and his wife Marion, “the Chook”, taught in several schools, colleges and universities in various centres, which many other South Africans have done. He recorded their experiences as they unfolded and then turned them into this book, again, as several others have done. However, several things make this book stand out from the others. Firstly, the author made a concerted effort to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese, which set him and their subsequent experiences apart from the many other foreigners living and working in China. His descriptions of the well-known Chinese chauvinism are amusing, as person after person appears bemused and unable to believe that “the words coming out of my mouth were in Chinese”. The Chinese are known for their superiority complex, content in their misapprehension that theirs is the oldest and most sophisticated culture in the world, and that their language is too complex for any foreigner to master. The second quality that sets this book apart from similar memoirs is that MacKenzie is the first I have come across to offer more than just observations and reminiscences. He also provides some penetrating analysis and interpretation of contemporary China and its culture that I found perceptive and meaningful. He is also a gifted writer of lyrical prose and an accomplished poet, some of his works adding to the enjoyment of this book. That said, I did find it a little self-conscious, if not self-indulgent at times, with constant repetition of how large a man MacKenzie is and how bad his temper can be. He is obviously also devoted to his wife and I found the endless references to “the Chook” became cloying.
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An interesting, funny and thought provoking memoir of a South African who teaches English in China!
A born-and-bred South African, Rod MacKenzie has lived and taught English in China since the beginning of 2005. He was born in 1963 but does not feel it: teaching children has kept him young. He lives with his wife Marion, AKA the Chook, who also teaches.
HAVING long-distant family roots in China and visited it myself, I have had to review several books on China, few of which I liked particularly. Consequently, I sighed when this book landed on my desk. It is the latest in the crop of memoirs by locals who have ventured to the land of bamboo sprouts and chopsticks to teach English as a foreign language (EFL).