It's Time to be Angry.

Those of you who know me well, those of you who know my heart, know that I am not someone who gets angry. When I am wronged, I feel pain, I feel hurt, I feel disappointment, but I do not feel anger toward another. I forgive; I understand. But I don’t get angry. Anger is an emotion that I have done my best to avoid. The anger of others, others with significant roles in my life, has left me scarred. There have been things said to me in anger and things done to me in anger which have left me with deep-seeded fears, insecurities, and heartbreak. Words said to me in anger remain embedded in my mind, convincing me that I am not good enough, no matter how hard I try. Bruises inflicted on me in anger, the hands that have struck me in anger, have left me with the belief that I do not deserve love; I deserve to feel small, meaningless, worthless.

I have recently come to realize that these lies that have infected my heart and soul are the reason that I won’t allow myself to feel anger. I fear that I will be responsible for saying and doing things in the heat of the moment which will leave those I love irrevocably damaged. But I have not only been damaged by others’ expression of anger, I have also been damaged by my own failure to allow myself to feel anger. For so long, I have thought that I am not an angry person. But only because I have not let myself be.

 In the last several months, the unraveling of particular events has forced me to realize that there are situations for which I should have been angry, and I should have let myself experience the rage worthy of wrongs done to me in the past. The anger, it seems, has remained locked somewhere deep inside of me, and my failure to process it at the appropriate time is now having a severe effect on me. I have begun to have nightmares; awful, tormenting nightmares. For the last two months, there have been very few nights when I have not been awoken from my sleep in sobs. I literally wake up crying because of the pain and anger I am experiencing in my nightmares. My insomnia has always plagued me; this takes it to another level.

So now I am angry. ANGRY. And I finally feel like it’s ok to be. I’m angry that I have done everything I could do to be the best I could be, and it has never been acknowledged or appreciated by those who I have worked hard to make proud. I’m angry that I have worked my ass off only to have my accomplishments degraded by those who are meant to support me. I’m angry that I have given so much time and energy to people who didn’t deserve it. I’m angry that I have always said yes to others at the cost of saying no to myself. I'm angry that people have taken me for granted and have come to me only in times of need. I'm angry that 'close' friends have neglected me only because they know I'll be there waiting when they come back. I’m angry that I have sacrificed so much in relationships for people who always prioritized everything else before me. I’m angry that someone who was too afraid to be honest with me has robbed me of my ability to trust all men I become involved with, making me feel sure that everyone is charming me with deception as their only aim.

I AM ANGRY, and I want to be free. Anger doesn’t have to be a bad thing. And it doesn’t have to hurt other people. Anger doesn’t have to have the effect that I fear it will have-- as long as I handle my anger appropriately; as long as I deal with my anger at the appropriate time, rather than years later; as long as I also let go of the anger once the time for feeling it has passed. Aristotle said, “Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.” I have to learn how to experience and master the emotion of anger in the same way that I have done with joy, love, and forgiveness. Anger does not have to be a weapon; it can also be a means of healing and moving on. Sometimes even the nice girl needs to say f*$& off. Yes, I am finally angry. And maybe, hopefully, I can finally be free.

Everything Just Takes a Bit of Getting Used To...

I know…I don’t usually post boring day to day things on my blog.  I usually just write about life realizations or something equally tragic and dramatic every 4-5 months, but now that I’m in China and several people have asked for regular updates, I’m here to bore you :)

It might help a bit if I explained exactly what my job is here in China.  I am teaching in a pretty high-class middle school here in Hangzhou, and my students are seventh and eighth graders.  I am an oral English teacher.  The students have Chinese teachers who teach them English reading, writing, grammar, etc.  My job is simply to make them practice speaking English.  I teach 20 classes a week and each class is a different group of students, about 45 students in each class.  This means I have about 900 different students!  That’s a lot, and it really keeps me from doing things I like to do with my classes, like give gifts and remember names!  But at the same time, it creates less work for me as I only have to prepare one lesson per week…I just have to teach the same lesson 20 times which could potentially be unbelievably boring for me, but the students are all so different that they keep it interesting and dynamic. In most of my classes, the students’ Chinese English teacher comes along to act as an assistant to me, aiding in translating difficult concepts and that sort of thing.  Some of them are awesome and they undoubtedly make the class go over more smoothly.  Some of them are absolutely useless snobs who sit in the back of my class with their noses in the air refusing to help me; I could do without them, thank you very much. Those also happen to be my WORST classes; somehow the students are far more disruptive and defiant in the classes with those kinds of teaching ‘assistants.’  I am very tempted to tell the principle I don’t want them coming to my class, but I’m not really in a position to be making enemies.

Overall, each day last week got better and better with the students.  I quickly learned how to best engage them and every day felt easier than the last.  However, I have some really challenging groups of students on Mondays.  It is already becoming clear to me that Mondays will be a constant rollercoaster.  It is the day I have the most classes, 6, and they are each so different from one another.  Some of the classes are very active and complete their work and present and share so many ideas, while other classes literally make me want to scream. 

I’m also finally starting to make some friends at school.  The highlight of my week was probably when three of the teachers actually CHOSE to sit with me at lunch last Wednesday.  Honestly, it felt like one of the best moments…ever. They sat and talked with me, and the four of us have had every meal together since!  Two of them don’t speak English too well, but one of them, Elsie, is one of the English assistants who helps in two of my classes and she is my absolute favorite person here.  She tells me so many things about the school and the city that I would never know without her and she is so friendly and talkative.

I had a really great weekend as well. I just spent Friday night at home, doing nothing, but it was nice.  Saturday I decided I would venture out into a particular part of the city.  I was preparing myself for the inevitably of failed communication and confused taxi drivers and heading out the building door when I turned around, went up the stairs, walked up to my next door neighbor’s door and knocked.  Eric lives next door to me and he is one of the three teachers who eats with me at lunch/dinner.  Most of the students and teachers had gone home for the weekend, but Eric is from another province and stays for the weekends so I thought he might be lonely, and I wanted to invite him into the city with me.  He immediately and excitedly agreed, put his shoes on, and ran out the door to meet me.  We got a cab and headed for the shopping district.  Not that I had any desire whatsoever to shop (as if I even could in this country), but we walked around the area for about an hour or so.  We then decided to go to the natural history museum.  Not that there was ANYthing special about it; we didn’t even really look at anything.  We walked past every display with complete disinterest; we obviously cared far more about the air conditioning!  I’m pretty sure it’s the only real reason we went inside. Afterward we sat in a small café where Eric ordered a couple of sweets to offer me…he then made me eat it all by myself and he didn’t have anything.  That’s the way we do things in our country, he explained.  Great; Greece #2. Mercilessly stuff me up like a turkey at Thanksgiving.  We headed back toward the school, but got out at a part of our district that I had never been to before and walked to the school from there.  It was a really nice area and apparently has one of the top food streets in the city.  That night, I went to a bar called Coco Banana to meet my friend Jamie and his classmates.  I also met some more American teachers.  And I got to the bar all by myself with no troubles (after taking a picture of the address to show the taxi driver, of course).  On Sunday, Jamie and I went to West Lake.  It was awesome.  I really liked that area so much.  It was beautiful and felt peaceful and there were a lot of great shops, restaurants, etc around.  We decided to go into a shopping mall for a bit and ended up stumbling across the videotaping of auditions for China’s Got Talent.  Needless to say, we saw a couple of unbelievably funny auditions.  We went out to the lake as it got dark and watched a water fountain show they put on every night. It was really such a nice area and I can see myself going back there pretty frequently.

So, things are going well!  I’m settling in, getting to know a few people, and learning how to deal with my students. In the end, everything just takes a bit of getting used to.  

[Some of my students working on this week's presentation]

The Beginnings of Life in China

Well, I have officially begun my new life in Hangzhou, China! I arrived Thursday evening in Beijing where the company who hired me is located. I spent one night and day there doing logistics like learning how best to teach Chinese students and opening up a Chinese bank account. Friday night I boarded an overnight train and arrived the following morning in my new home city of Hangzhou.

I have free accommodation and meals on the school grounds. There are few teachers who speak English, and I am the only Western teacher at the school. My first lunch in the canteen was awkward to say the least. The food was amazing, but no one could speak to me. The teachers talked about me amongst themselves, laughing and showing sheer awe at the fact that I know how to eat with chopsticks. I felt like quite the display! Since then, I feel like people avoid sitting with me! I think they are afraid that they will have to try and speak English with me, so they avoid that possibility.

A part of me is quite uneasy about the fact that I won’t really have anyone to speak to here, until I meet some people (hopefully!) outside of the school. I am very fortunate, however, to know someone else living in this city for the year, someone I met while traveling in Cambodia just over a month ago. Saturday he came to the school to visit me and we went out that night to a bar downtown where I also met a few of his classmates from England. The only problem is that this city is MASSIVE…8 million people. It took Jamie about an hour and a half to get to my school, so I’m not exactly close to them. We also met some other people out on Saturday who told me that they have many Western teachers in the schools were they work; it kind of seems like I’m the only one around here going solo on this one.

I do feel a bit imprisoned here, however. There is tight security on the school grounds, with massive walls and gates all around campus. All the other teachers, as well as the students, live here. I have a 10 pm curfew and must be back on school grounds by then. I asked if I could come back later on the weekends so that I could go out, and they said I could come back ‘a little bit later.’ I sure hope that by that they mean 2 or 3 a.m. is ok! Haha. I did come back at 3 a.m. Saturday night before I knew about my curfew and had no problem being let into the gate, so hopefully it will be ok. Apparently the English teacher before me went out to a bar for a World Cup game and ended up drunk and passed out in front of the school yard, so they have concerns, but I think you all know I’m not likely to follow in his footsteps!

My schedule is pretty scattered throughout the week, with the busiest day being Monday, but I only teach 20 hours a week, so I foresee a lot of boredom in my future. Not quite sure how to fill all this time. It would be really great if I could somehow find another small job to do on the side, but I think the inconsistency in my schedule might make this pretty difficult. Coming out of an insanely intense anthropology Master’s program makes three hours of work seem like absolutely nothing, so I can imagine myself going a bit stir-crazy if I don’t find something else to fill up a bit of my time. I would love to take a Chinese class, or try to teach myself some Chinese. I also really wish I had a lot of books here and more DVDs/TV show seasons. I’ve seen everything I own soo many times! I’m going to try to find a bookstore with English books somewhere in the city.

I taught my first classes today. Six classes, all the same lesson. In fact, my other 14 classes this week will also be the same lesson as I have 20 different groups of students. Needless to say, the material is going to be ridiculously repetitive and boring for me, but the good thing is that I only have to prepare one lesson per week. The students are unbelievably shy. It is so difficult to engage them and get them to speak. This class is meant to be oral English only; no grammar, spelling, writing, reading, etc. But it’s very hard to conduct class when you have 50 little pairs of eyes staring at you without speaking. Class dynamics make some groups of students more fun than others, as is usual when teaching. I have a couple of classes that are a lot of fun, and some where no one wants to speak at all. Honestly, I’ve finished my first day of teaching feeling overwhelmingly frustrated. I was close to bursting into tears by the end of my sixth lesson. This experience is making me very nostalgic for Tanzania and my students there. I think it may be too early to really know how I will like this experience, but I do know that if I could actually make money teaching in Tanzania, I would have gone back. I am doing my best not to psych myself out, though, and not to dwell too much on thoughts of loneliness and language barriers. This is something to be expected when moving to a country where you can’t speak the language and very few people can speak your own. I am sure that in time I will make some friends and I will travel, and in the end it will be something very good for me. One student who spoke well and offered a lot of information, and who just started at this school, said something that resonated with me so much, and something I probably needed to hear at that moment. She said, “This is a very new experience for me. And I am missing my friends a lot. But even though it is hard, I know that this will open my eyes and it will teach me a lot about myself.” She is so very right.

[Below are images of my room and the school's campus]