邱老师

This Friday, we had a Chinese class that was much more interesting than most. Our teacher, Qiu Laoshi (teacher qiu (the title of this post)), went off on a tangent that ended up lasting about 45 minutes. She was trying to describe the definition of a word that meant 'way of thinking', and started talking about how in the Mao era, there was only one way of thinking. She started telling us that when she was growing up (30-40 years ago) people wouldn't answer the phone with the now typical 'wei' or 'ni hao'. Instead, they would answer with communist slogans, because they were never sure of who was calling them on the phone. She said that no one had their own thoughts. Whatever Mao said was simply repeated by everyone as the truth. That's all there was. In everyone's house there hung a picture of the chairman, and before each person went to work they stood and talked to the portrait. They told him what they were going to do that day. When they got home they would tell him how hard they had worked and what they had accomplished. Talk about cultural differences...

Qiu Laoshi also talked to us about where she lived when she was younger. For 7 years she lived in what I think we would call a cow shed. I wasn't sure of some of the words that she was using, but I gathered that she lived in a building with cows, and that before she went to sleep she needed to shovel out the cow dung so that there would be room on the floor. She lived that way for seven years. She mentioned that a few years ago she returned to that place where she grew up and just started crying.

Between 1966 and 1976 the cultural revolution was in full force. Qiu laoshi told us that all of the city youth was sent out to the countryside to work and be "reeducated" by the peasants. For those 10 years, all universities in China were shut down. Not until Deng Xiaoping and the opening to the west did university activity resume. Qiu laoshi was in the first university class after the cultural revolution in 1976-77. She has quite the life story, and I'm really glad that she shared some of it with us. It's amazing to see people here who are in their 50's and 60's and think of what they've lived through.