American History in Hohhot

These faculty members from the Foreign Language Institute were my first “students” at Inner Mongolia Normal University. They were uniformly polite and attentive. And very nice!

When my colleague Yongsheng Sun asked me if I’d be interested in participating in an exchange with his former university in China, where he had studied and taught in the 1980s, the prospect was exciting, but also daunting. What would I teach? I’m trained as a historian of American history, which is primarily what I teach at Columbia Basin College, along with classes in Native American, Pacific Northwest, and World History. Would students or faculty at Inner Mongolia Normal University be interested in any of those topics?

The answer is, well, a resounding “kind of.” The truth is that here at Inner Mongolia Normal University (called Shi Da, or Teacher’s University for short) ALL of the “foreign experts” from the United States teach English. Did they really want some American blowhard teaching American history? Were undergraduate students ready for an American history class taught entirely in English?

Administrators here—like university administrators everywhere--are very practical: their undergraduate students are not ready to take a college-level discipline-specific course in English. And yet, due primarily to the tireless efforts of Yongsheng, whose former classmates and colleagues now occupy positions of authority within the college administration, Shi Da decided to have me teach a series of seminars on American history to their junior faculty during their “short semester,” August 6 through September 7, with seminars also continuing throughout the long semester, from September to January.

But, as of August 6, when Yongsheng left Hohhot for the United States, I had no idea when I would be teaching these seminars, how many I would be teaching, and on what topics. In fact, I had no answers to these questions until my first day of class, August 10, when Mrs. Wu Yunna, the Vice Dean of Instruction, called me at 9:30am to schedule a meeting at 10:00am, at which time she told me I'd be teaching my first class to the Foreign Language faculty at 2:30pm that same day. To be fair, she apologized profusely for asking me to perform on such short notice.

The next question was: what would my topic be. Mrs. Wu Yunna wanted know exactly what I'd be speaking on, and I told her that the first day would be an introduction. But apparently Ms. Wu Haiyan, the Vice Dean of the Foreign Languages Institute, wanted something more specific. She came over and I met with her in Mrs. Wu Yunna's office. I told her that I'd like to introduce myself and ask the junior faculty what they were interested in learning. She suggested that, rather than asking them, that I discuss and provide a list of topics on American history from which they could choose topics of interest. So that was the plan.

By this time, I'd been in Mrs. Wu Yunna's office for close to two hours on a day that must have been in the mid 90s. With no air conditioning, I was beginning to wilt. The previous night (and days) had been really, really hot, and I was having a problem cooling off. Our south-facing fourth-floor flat was 90 degrees (no air conditioning or fans, although later we would get fans). I had woken up the night before soaked in sweat. I gave myself two sponge baths, but still couldn’t cool off. That day was even worse. After my meeting with Mrs. Wu Yunna and Ms. Wu Haiyan, I had only two hours to prepare my first class, but spent most of it taking cold showers and holding a frozen water bottle on my head in an effort to cool down. I took three iboprofen, and still felt like I was burning, although I didn't have a fever.

At 2:00pm I went to meet Mrs. Wu Yunna who walked me to my first class at Shi Da. When I walked in the classroom, there were about 25 students (instructors, actually) waiting for me. Mrs. Wu Yunna and Ms. Wu Haiyan, the Vice Deans, seated themselves in the front row. I was introduced by Ms. Nar, the chair of the department, and there I was, giving my first American history class at Inner Mongolia Normal University.

To tell the truth, it was the first time I'd felt truly comfortable since I'd been in China. Not only was the classroom cool and breezy, but it was a classroom--a familiar environment that I understood. The streets of Hohhot were still chaotic and unfamiliar, but this was well-known territory. A Chinese classroom looks the same as an American classroom, except perhaps in the degree of attentiveness that the students give the instructor.

I introduced myself and discussed my list of topics in American history. It took about forty-five minutes and then I asked if anyone had suggestions for what they would like to learn (drawn from the topics) and what we might cover in class the next week. No one spoke. Finally, the departmental chair, Ms. Nar, spoke up and suggested that we begin with Native Americans. “Good, are there any other suggestions,” I asked. After another long pause, another brave instructor suggested that she would like to learn about American Christianity, starting with the Puritans. I had my first two lecture topics: Native Americans and the origins of Christianity in America.

Over the next five weeks, I taught weekly “seminars” to junior faculty in the Foreign Language Institute and the International Exchange College. (I place quotes around “seminars” because, although they were supposed to be seminars, they were actually lectures: more on this below.) The faculty chose the topics: Native Americans, American Christianity, the Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, and American Foreign Policy.

Every “seminar” followed a similar trajectory. I lectured for about an hour and then we had a question and answer session where, sometimes, I elicited some discussion. In the first two weeks, though, there was often just applause followed by a respectful silence.

In "Encountering the Chinese," Hu Wenzhong and Cornelius Grove note that "Chinese students and trainees usually present themselves as an attentive, respectful, and, above all, passive audience. They arrive, they listen, they take copious notes, they depart. Even when invited to make comments or ask questions, they are reluctant to speak." Generally speaking, that describes my experience during the first few weeks of seminars. At Columbia Basin College, I feed off student comments, trying to establish common ground that can be used as a launching pad for further learning. These lectures, however, were purely unilateral. I was the "sage on the stage," as American educators pejoratively refer to this style of teaching, filling my students with wisdom as if they were empty receptacles waiting to be filled with my knowledge and wisdom.

Playing the “sage on the stage” is okay as long as you receive non-verbal cues from the audience that your points, your jokes, your ironies, are taking hold. All it takes sometimes is an extremely attentive student to let you know if your message is breaking through or bouncing off. In my classes with the foreign-language faculty, for instance, the British educated Vice Dean, Wu Haiyan sat in the front row and nodded and smiled. After the first weeks, her enthusiasm seemed to rub off on the other faculty members, who began to ply me with questions at the end of my lectures. Later Wu Haiyan would tell me in an email that she “had not expected that the teachers could be so active in the A & Q session, as most of our teachers are normally very quiet in such academic seminars. I think the reason why they were so engaged is because of your excellent presentation[s] and your rich knowledge on American history.”

Her compliment was well-received, but it didn’t assuage my concern that the seminars were not particularly useful or desirable. The junior faculty, I feared, were attending my lessons only because they were told to do so. I was receiving positive feedback all the time, but everyone is so polite here that I doubted they would really tell me how they felt (not really a problem when dealing with American faculty, who are so outspoken and egotistical you can’t get a word in edgewise).

In the end, the seminars were very nice. The teachers were kind, attentive, and, seemingly, very interested. I can’t say that I learned a lot myself—after all, I was teaching things I already knew, and when I asked questions of them, I never really received satisfying answers. For instance, after discussing the connections between Transcendentalism and the origins of the modern environmental movement (think Thoreau to John Muir to Edward Abbey), I asked if there was an environmental movement in China. No one knew.

But teaching these seminars was a great beginning to my short career here at Shi Da, and it certainly had its moments.

-- On the first day in all my seminars I asked everyone to come next time with written questions about American history. Out of fifty teachers, three actually did this.

--In my first lecture on Native Americans, Ms. Nar, who was operating the powerpoint for me, single-mindedly clicked through the slides at her own brisk pace, ensuring that my lecture was quite succinct. I finished what should have been an hour-long lecture in about forty-five minutes.

-- Before my only lecture to another group of English teachers from the new campus (who teach English to non-English majors), I ate a large plate of noodles from the small store behind our apartment and then had milk tea and mutton meat pie from a Mongolian restaurant up the street. At the beginning of my lecture, I began to feel dizzy. I started to have meat-pie hallucinations and milk tea burps. I thought I was going to faint. I had to stop a few times as they watched me with quiet concern. I told them about the milk-tea burps. They laughed, but laughs in Chinese classrooms sometimes conceal embarrassment. Was I funny or embarrassing? Not really sure. But I struggled through it and it went well in the end.

Now I’m teaching undergraduates English, which is an entirely new and different experience for me. But I’m also expecting to continue teaching seminars to faculty on either American history or teaching methods in America (their idea).

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.

Dave

Below I’ve listed some questions that the junior faculty asked me over the course of the American history seminars (I’ll spare you my answers!):

Q: Do traditional Native American names have given and sur names, and if so, do the sur names relate to the person’s clan or family?

Q: Are Mongolian peoples and Native Americans connected with each other genetically, linguistically, and culturally?

Q: The first Europeans benefited from Native American generosity: why then, did they subsequently support the massacre of Native peoples?

Q: Was the Assimilation Policy (Native Americans) really “Progress”?

Q: Why did Quakers and Puritans wear hats--what does it mean?

Q: Someone told me that 'You cannot understand American history and society without understanding the Puritans'--what do you think?"

Q: How are the Old and New Testaments connected?

Q: If Christianity was originally the religion of Jews, how could it happen that while the Jews were universally persecuted, their religious beliefs, like the Old Testament, were universally read and accepted?

Q: Do Americans actually read the bible?

Q: Is the younger generation of Americans still joining the Christian church?

Q: Why do American people always change their jobs? Is it not accepted to stay in one place all the time? Is there any job discrimination?

Q: What is a typical American hero?

Q: What do Americans think about the Vietnam War?

Q: Why haven't Americans learned from history?

These guys were on the other side of the room.