The Chengdu Chronicles

A quick 3 hour flight from Beijing to Chengdu on Air China. We were greeted at the airport by Mr. Lee and Angela, representatives of the Chengdu Experimental Foreign Language School, and 12 students and their parents. They were holding bouquets of flowers and panda toys for our students. Our students were introduced to their host families and off they went in different directions for the night.

Day One

The next morning the students were brought to school by their host families at 7:15. The Chengdu Foreign Language School is a five day boarding school—the students live in dormitories from Monday to Friday and go home after class on Friday at 7:30 P.M. Our host students who live within 20 minutes of school stayed with their parents all week allowing our students to have true home stays. On our first morning the students attended classes with their hosts while Lorenzo and I taught two classes.

Chinese students at this school study English for 2 hours a day and they were excited to share their conversational skills with us.

Each classroom consists of 62 students and they sit at their desks from 7:00 AM to 7:30 PM with a break for lunch, a one hour nap in their dorms, and sports. The teachers move through each classroom every 40 minutes for different subjects.

After two classes the entire school—4000 students plus 500 teachers and administrators—met in the huge central courtyard for an all-school meeting. The students stand at attention in rows during the meeting. Mr. Wen, the Head of the School, gave a brief welcome speech to us under a huge red banner stretched across the front of the main school building which bore the names of both schools. Our students were given school uniforms, gifts were exchanged, and Mr. Baker gave a brief speech which was translated by CDEFLS students.

After the speech we boarded a bus and went for lunch. Our accompanying teachers Yang Zhaohui (Clark) and Yang Quin (Judy) made our selections for us. We were each served a huge bowl of steaming broth and plates and plates of different foods to place in the broth—Noodles, pieces of beef, garlic cloves, greens, chilies, mushrooms, whatever you wanted. Our students are very skilled with chopsticks!

After lunch we went to the Panda Research Center. It was located in a beautiful park and the pandas roam about their naturalistic enclosures. We were there at feeding time. Workers bring huge arm loads of bamboo to the pandas. They each eat 80 lbs. of bamboo a day, but they receive very little nutrition from their sole food source and must conserve energy and so do not move around much. When we returned to school the host families were again waiting for us and it was off to restaurants in Chengdu.

Day Two

This morning we boarded the bus for a trip Lishan, home of the Great Buddha carved out of a sandstone cliff, the Buddha was begun in 730 AD by a monk who was troubled by the number of boatmen who disappeared in the treacherous currents at the confluence of two rivers. The Buddha took 90 years to carve from the mountain. We hiked to the top of the Buddha and then descended a very steep set of stairs carved into the cliff with 25 switchbacks. At the base we could look out at the rivers and look up at Buddha whose huge image along with some later dredging has made the waters safer and more navigable. During the 4 hour round trip we were able to see some of the countryside outside Chengdu. Every tiny plot of land is planted with vegetables. Oranges were ripening on trees. The land is terraced for growing and at this time of year winter crops of broccoli, cabbage, radishes, bok choy and mustard greens are being harvested and warm weather crops are being planted. Great expanses of fields are yellow with mustard flowers. Everywhere we go there are street sweepers. They sweep the edges of the road with the brooms made of bamboo handles and branch heads. Sometimes the heads are fuzzy cloth but mostly they are long graceful branches tied into the handle. We passed a tea plantation where thousand upon thousands of tea bushes were growing upon terraced hills.

Day Three

Today we boarded the bus and ascended from the bowl that holds Chengdu up the rim of the bowl to the mountains. During our 1.5 hour drive through the mountains, many snow covered, revealed themselves through the haze. As we grew closer the air was clearer. The landscape here looks like a traditional Chinese painting. Mountains loom in the distance some of the trees are deciduous and others still hold their leaves in this moderate climate. Our students are becoming fine travelers. They watch and listen and are open to new foods and new ideas. We hiked up a mountain to a Taoist temple and on our return we had lunch at a farm. The farm grew trees and our meal was served out of doors and the food included many mountain specialties and wild-gathered foods. We noticed at the tree farm two topiaries each made of six mature trees which had been trained into the shape of a very large pagoda. After lunch we went to a massive irrigation system that was built 2,300 years ago. It provides the water for the city of Chengdu and its ingenious system which includes a mountain that was cut in half and an island that was built by hand and an ingenious system of diversion.

The students will spend the weekend with their host families and will no doubt experience hot pot, a lip-numbing caldron of boiling oil filled with hot peppers which is heated at your table by a gas burner built into the table into which you cook various foods. When Lorenzo and I had hot pot with our accompanying teachers, we cooked seaweed, noodles, mushrooms, duck tongues, duck feet, pork sausages, live catfish, lotus slices, potatoes and parts of the inside of a chicken which we could not identify and perhaps the strangest of all Vienna sausages—who knew?!

- Jan Baker