The state of things

Pretty much everyone is awaiting Wednesday, the day of the big announcement, when we will find out where we will be headed for the next two years. Just to remind everyone of the situation, there are approximately sixty PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) in Chengdu right now at three different sites, with approximately twenty at each site. To be precise, there are fifty-eight. We started out with sixty-one, but three have gone back to the States. Actually ours is the only one of the three sites not to lose a volunteer, though I attribute that more to chance than to anything about this particular group. Wednesday, we will all get together at the hotel in Chengdu and be given our assignments. Actually, those of us who are at Chengdu University already know quite a bit. We've been told that 15 of us will be going to Chongqing, which is about a four hour bus ride from here. One of us will stay in Chengdu and another four will be sent to locations in the Sichuan Province, which is the province that Chengdu is located in (You might want to think as the province as something like a state and the sity of Chengdu as a city in Sichuan Province). I am almost certain to go to Chongqing because they want to place me with the most advanced students and those would be in the big city, Chongqing. Once I find out for certain I will provide more information on Chongqing, but the short story is that it is a big, big city, which has its plusses and minuses.

So with model school over we now fill our afternoons with various meetings and discussions, as well as lose one hour of lunch (we used to start the afternoon session at 2:30 and now we start at 1:30). Today we just discussed how model school went in the first part of the afternoon and in the second part of the afternoon we discussed various unusual and perhaps uncomfortable situations we might find ourselves in as American volunteers: from being asked to tutor the children of various superiors and being given gifts as incentives to having fried snake pushed onto our plate during a banquet. There are two main concepts one needs to keep in mind in all interactions. The first is "mainzi," or face (or we might better understand as honor). One has to keep in mind, for example, that if someone invites you to dinner, or asks you to give a lecture, they lose face if you just flat turn them down. If you don't want to go, come up with a reasonable excuse. If you are playing a competitive sport, you have to realize there is probably much more at stake in terms of honor for them than for you. In the classroom as well, students are very conscious of face, and while embarrassment might work as a tool in the American classroom it is definitely not the thing to try over here. The other important notion is "guanxi," which is essentially "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.'' And the fact of the matter is that his is how things get done here (and probably anywhere, actually).. You will be doing favors for people as a way of storing up guanxi that you can then call in. We all remember the scene at the start of The Godfather where the undertaker comes to ask Don Corleone to help him avenge his daughter's being dishonored, and Don Corleone remarks how the undertaker has never visited him or invited him over. The Don then offers to do the deed but reminds the undertaker that one day he may well be called on to do the don a favor (and he does, when Sonny gets killed). Anyway, one would do well to keep that scene in mind, I think.