So Many Questions

I get a lot of questions from students and teachers a like. Sometimes they are fun. Sometimes I try to avoid them. Here are just a few of the common ones.

From students:

• How old are you?
• Are you married?
• Are you engaged?
• Are you and Bie Laoshi (Teacher Bie, my male Chinese cofellow) good friends?
• What do you eat in America? (For a simple question, this one's actually pretty difficult to answer. I usually settle for something about a lot of different kinds of food and give a few examples. What would you say?)
• When is your birthday? (They look so disappointed when I say June...)
• Will we be punished if we test badly? (The day of or before the midterm.)

From teachers:

• Have you accustomed yet? (This is one of the most common questions. Sometimes it's just asked generally, sometimes they ask specifically about lifestyle and food. I always answer "yes, I've accustomed", but of course this is an oversimplification. As used to squat toilets as I have gotten, I'd still rather have a western toilet. As much as I do enjoy the food here, sometimes I really want to bake and eat biscuits. Or apple pie.)
• How tall are you? (I addressed the complexities of this in an earlier post.)
• Have you gained/lost weight here?
• Do you miss your family?
• Where is your boyfriend? (Followed by, I don't believe you, you must have one!)
• How are Chinese children different from American children?

Some important education officials came to visit our school the other day and had their own questions. Most of the questions I only understood about half of the words, but tried to get the gist of it enough to answer the questions appropriately. On the spot. And in Chinese.

From officials:

• What's wrong with China's education? (On the one hand, where do I start, and on the other hand, how do I say this politely?)
• What's your approach to education in our context?
• What should local teachers do differently?
• Is what Teach for China is doing enough?

Oh...and they asked me about missing home and whether I had a boyfriend too. About 20 minutes after meeting me.