Friends of English

English grad goes to China to teach

• Rachel Benish (CAS '05), who spent the year after graduation teaching English in China, reports: I signed up with a good friend, and together we were established as "foreign experts" in a spacious apartment overlooking the Hubei Professional Institute in Xiaogan, a small town just north of the Yangtze River. To buy “western” foods like spaghetti and peanut butter, we took an hour's bus ride to Wuhan , a city of nine million residents that I had never heard of before I learned I would live nearby. Most of the time we had internet access, although we didn't always have heat; we considered ourselves lucky to have hot water in the kitchen. We were also happy our apartment had both a western and a Chinese-style “squat” toilet. Life wasn't always comfortable, but it was always an adventure.
  
  Our work wasn't easy—facing a classroom of fifty Chinese students who barely speak English is pretty daunting—but it brought surprising rewards. We were in rural China , and neither of us knew any Mandarin. Needless to say, we didn't have many people to talk to, so our students became our friends. They were only a few years younger than we, and they were happy to spend their time practicing English and enjoying foreign customs. Some of them had never seen an American before they arrived in my classroom. Slowly, as I learned to speak clearly and choose my words carefully, my students taught me about their culture, about life as one small student in the vast country of China . I taught them to play Ultimate Frisbee, and they taught me to chat with shopkeepers and bargain for the lowest price. We showed them how to make pizza and chocolate chip cookies—the pizza was "delicious" but the cookies were "too sweet"—and they filled our kitchen with steamed dumplings and Wuchang Yu, a local specialty famous as Chairman Mao's favorite fish.
  
  Before I went over, a friend told me to take long books to read. I couldn't imagine wanting to read with so many new things to experience just outside my door, but he was right: living in an alien culture is exhausting, and having those books brought me home. Despite busy class schedules and frequent visitors, I found myself reading old, dusty books I'd always meant to read but never had time for in America . I had no one to talk to about the books I was reading so after my stay in China I decided to go back to school. Now I'm back at CWRU completing a Master's in English and working with international graduate students. I love hearing their observations about American culture and comparing their stories to my glimpse of Chinese life away from the tourist zone.
  

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