Learning life lessons
When a group of American tourists stopped by Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, during their three-week tour of China, they were invited to meet with 24 rural women teachers.
The English teachers were both excited and nervous at the meeting, because it was their first time casually speaking English with native speakers.
"That experience gave them a strong boost of confidence. They discovered they could do it," says Tang Yungmei, 67. Elegant and keen-witted, Tang impressed locals with her big sunglasses and a signature cigarette in hand.
Hailing from New York, the noted educator has just completed the spring term of teaching English to rural Sichuan teachers.
The program was developed by the Guangya School in cooperation with Intel. Qin Guangya, headmaster of the Guangya School, invited Tang to the program, which started on March 5. Each week, Tang taught her students for 20 hours.
Because their English level varied from elementary to relatively advanced, Tang prepared her lessons very carefully and spent weekends and evenings reading their exercise books.
"It was really challenging and energizing but also meaningful, for the teachers will be teaching more rural primary school kids with what they have learned from the program," says Tang, who graduated from Columbia University with several degrees in education.
Tang dismisses rote learning and discourages the students from using their Chinese-English dictionaries. "I encourage them to first try to guess the meaning from the context and only look at a Chinese dictionary to check if they are correct," she says.
Although she can understand Chinese, Tang encourages students to only speak English during class.
In addition to classroom teaching, Tang works to broaden the horizons of her students, most of whom are not English majors.
In April, she invited her friend Ma Xuefeng, headmaster of Chengdu Bright Future English School, to lecture on how to teach English to Chinese. Ma's school has trained more than 1,000 students over the past few years.
Yuan Xue, an animation film major and one of Tang's former students, said Ma's lecture was popular among the students, who asked him to offer more tips.
In May, a parade for the First International Festival of Intangible Cultural Heritage was held in the city. Tang cancelled her morning class and took her students to view the parade of singers and dancers from different parts of the world.
"The parade was so colorful, like those held in New York City," says Tang, who has lived in the Big Apple for more than four decades.
She was happy to have to take her students to the nearly two-hour parade to experience a cultural cornucopia of events.
"None of my students knew what intangible cultural heritage meant. Most of them said they had never seen anything so grand in their lives. Some said they would remember the parade forever," Tang says.
Tang, who has worked as a teacher for more than 20 years in New York City's private and public schools, as well as in Xi'an of China's Sha'anxi Province, was deeply influenced by her mother, the world-renowned author Han Suyin.
Tang was born in Chengdu and adopted by Han, who took the 2-year-old to England. Tang did not return to her birthplace until 1972.
Tang's given name Yungmei (old pinyin for Rongmei) means "plum blossom of Chengdu". She got the name because she was born in the first month of the Chinese lunar calendar, when plum blossoms are prevalent in the city.
At age 12, she learned Mandarin with a private Chinese tutor after regular school hours. She was puzzled by why she had to learn Mandarin, because her mother spoke English with her and nobody around her spoke Mandarin.
"My mother said: 'because you are Chinese'," Tang recalls.
When she was 28 - after the end of a short marriage and the birth of her only daughter - Tang enrolled in Columbia University for what would be a decade-long period of part time study, during which time she earned a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters of Arts and a Masters of Education.
Tang is extremely interested in the culture and folk customs of Chengdu, where she has met several painters and visited many museums.
Her favorite place was the Jinsha Site Museum, which opened this April on the site of an archaeological excavation in 2001 that turned out many important cultural relics.
Marveling at the museum's displays, Tang took a closer look at the English signage and corrected many mistakes among the translations.
Last month, a friend invited her to a farmhouse in Pixian County, hometown of Han's father Zhou Yingtong, who studied railway engineering in Belgium in 1902.
Tang witnessed a traditional ceremony as a young man for the first time visited his girlfriend's family for a banquet with his own family and friends.
The strength of family ties is an essential foundation for any future relationship in a person's life, Tang says.
Han, now 90, lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. "My mother was very happy when she learned I had chosen education as my career. She said it was admirable that her daughter hoped to work as a teacher to help rural kids," Tang says.
(China Daily 07/10/2007 page20)
