About six years ago, I was in a Chinese Political Studies class, and I had to do a presentation on the government's handling of religion. This presentation was half an hour long, and was full of me pulling out all sorts of backstories and weird shit, y'know, just doing whatever to stretch out 5 minutes worth of actual relevant content. After the presentation, my professor approached me and asked if I'd like to be a volunteer accent coach in China over the summer. I told her that I'd love to go but that I didn't know a word of Mandarin, so she said "You don't need to! You'll have a translator!" I was so excited because I had never left the country before, so I said "yes" without any further questions.
Our flight went from my state of Hawaii to South Korea (Incheon Airport is fucking awesome btw), then transferred to go to Kunming province in China. Upon arrival, a security guard pulled me aside into a dark, tiny room with an old-school transmitter radio where some dude was shouting Chinese into it. I got a form to fill out in Chinese and I just basically said in English "Hi I don't speak Chinese." So finally, the guard that brought me in pointed at me and mimed coughing. So I just shook my head and said "No, I'm not sick." They let me out and I rejoined my group. Weird.
The shock of that wore off after a while since we checked into a four-star hotel, had our first communal bathing experience, then spent a day wandering around Kunming to buy cheap CD's/DVD's/candy/whatever we could get our grubby little hands on. What was weird is that whenever we ate a meal, our professor would leave us and share a meal with a group of businessmen that we never saw before or talked to, but nothing was said of it so we assumed they were her friends. The day after that, we boarded a giant schoolbus and drove out to the countryside, miles from civilization, and found our way to Qin Lai Private School, which was a private university funded by Chinese first successful tobacco farmer. It was totally state of the art, and we were enjoying it until midday, when the power and water stopped.
My professor ran out to investigate what was going on, and the rest of us huddled on our dormitory doorstep, playing poker to pass the time, and comforting one of the translators who was shocked that this was happening to her (she was a native of Kunming). Around 10-o-clock, my professor came back with a lighters, candles, and a bunch of coke and wine. She got all of us into one of our dorms and closed the door, checking the room for... something. She told us that our curriculum was changed: we weren't going to teach the kids how to speak English. We were going to teach them how to sing a song in English.
Well, we did our best in that regard, I taught my class (35 kids, all middle schoolers) how to sing "Stand By Me." One of our dudes passed out mid-class and I had to carry him back to his dorm. The stress of the situation had him come down with a cold.
Eventually our teaching ended, and we boarded our buses back. Due to our flight arrangements, our group was split up into pairs to go to different parts of China, and since we had an odd number of people in our group, I was the only guy who would be going solo. I spent the night with a host family whose son was really excited to have a foreigner in their house, while the parents were really... well let's just say they looked less than thrilled, as if they were doing a job. I helped them go grocery shopping, we played tennis, we hiked up a mountain ridge.
Then I got sick.
I found this out because the child walked in to check on me while I was sleeping and felt my head to see if I had a fever. Sure enough I did. At this point, I got a phone call from a friend of my professor's (who happened to be an English teacher), who told me she was taking me to the Red Cross, and that they were booking me in a hotel room. I got treated with an IV while talking with said friend. She said I should probably check on my folks to let them know I was okay, so I sent my mom a text. She never responded.
I spent another day in Kunming, but as I was walking through the streets, I was always accompanied by someone, usually a student of the prof's students. Meanwhile I'd get the rap about America secretly being a dictatorship from each of them, and most of the time they'd ask if I could take them out to McDonald's (it's super expensive by their standards, dirt cheap to me). Anyway, the prof's friend came to my hotel room late that night, and said "I've been trying to call you all evening! Anyway, I got you a flight to Shanghai tomorrow." So after a quick dinner at a Mexican Restaurant (yes) famous for having filtered water (yes), I went to bed, got up early, and flew to Shanghai.
I was arranged to stay with another host family, this time it was a couple and their daughter who was a few years younger than me. They were definitely more "Westernized," in that the father had a collection of French music in his car, the mom was fawning over her iPod, and the daughter was so good at English that she actually imported her favorite book series over in the original English to see how different the translation was (spoiler: that book series was Twilight). Again, I didn't really spend time with the parents, but the daughter took me around on what I would describe as an intellectual date, since all of our stops were to historic places, punctuated with high quality meals, and ending the day in which we watched the sixth Harry Potter movie. It kinda sucked that the few Chinese words I learned in Kunming were useless due to Shanghai having its own dialect, but most people there spoke English (thank god) so at least I could do that.
The day after this, the father got a call and told me that I was to fly out this afternoon, back to my home state. He was bummed because he was hoping I could stay longer so they could do more stuff (and so did I), but he had to do it. We went back to the airport, and I checked in as normal, and hopped back on to my flight headed to Korea.
I stepped off the plane into Incheon Airport again, and as soon as I turned my phone on, I got bombarded with shitloads of text messages and missed calls and voicemails. Most of them was my mom freaking out not knowing what was going on, and I found the missing phone calls from my professor's friend. I guessed that I must've done something illegal and the Chinese government bricked my phone while I was in the country. I immediately called my mom and told her that I was okay and that I was heading home. I also called my professor's friend and told her the same.
When I finally got back to Hawaii, it was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one (no coal burning!). Eventually I sat my professor down when she finally returned a month later, and asked her what the hell happened. Here's what she told me.
My professor, unbeknownst to me was originally a member of the Red Guard, a teenage "soldier" in the service of Chairman Mao during
The Cultural Revolution, and she fled to America when she was forced to kill a doctor for being a "counter-revolutionary." During her stay in America, the PRC actually monitored her on campus with some of their overseas agents, disguised as students. When she would leave us during her meals, she was actually talking to PRC officials about what she was intending for us to do there. The power/water shutdown was meant as a means of testing her loyalty to the party. The first host family I stayed with turned out to be the head of Foreign Affairs in his province, and I was checked into a hotel because his division was trying to find a link between the Swine Flu outbreak and bio-terrorism from America. The "students" I was talking to were, again, plain-clothes agents, trying to see if I'd say anything that would label me as a threat. My flights to Shanghai and then to home were all means to get me out of the country as fast as possible before I'd get detained.
In the end, while I was really happy for the good times I had during the trip, there were so many things lurking behind it that it's easy to be afraid of it. I never realized how far the PRC's influence reached until I was home "safe."
On a sidenote, remember the Twilight fan girl? I sent her an invite to Facebook when I got back. She obviously couldn't since the PRC has that site banned. However, a few months later, she arranged to study abroad in London where she could register an account, and she learned about everything that was happening in her own country that she was never aware of. She is now a legal citizen of the UK and is married to some white guy.