bugs make good stories

A few weeks ago I was at my host family’s house for dinner. Their little girl noticed that there was a mosquito in the room and their son scampered off to get what I like to call “the magic wand of destruction.” The magic wand looks like a tennis racket. Except instead of tennis strings there is a metal mesh. By pressing a button on the handle of the racket and waving the metal mesh in the direction of the mosquito, it magically dies. There is a blue light. It is wonderful. I commented to my host mother that I had never seen this magical object before and she told me that almost everyone in Taiwan has one.
At first I thought I didn’t need one myself. And then last week, in the space of an hour, I was bitten 7 times on my leg. Things were getting out of hand. On the weekend, I bought a magic wand of destruction for my own apartment. However, I wasn’t entirely sure how the magic wand worked. I knew a blue light was supposed to come. But after unpacking the wand from its packaging and pressing the button I saw no blue light. “Is it working?” I wondered. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to investigate this question by touching the metal mesh. It was working. The “magic” that I speak of is more scientifically known as electricity. And the “blue light” only appears after a bug is blasted into hot dust by the electric current running through the metal. So that hurt.
But it was a valuable discovery. Later that night, Shiela, Billy and I saw a mosquito. We made Billy kill it. I was wary of the wand after the above incident. Shiela and I moved across the room just to be safe. We weren’t sure how we would know that the mosquito had been finished. Then there was a loud “zap!” and a flash of blue light (the color I had been waiting for all along). Billy expressed surprise. He asked how we knew that the bug was really dead. I said if the wand caused me pain, we could probably conclude that the mosquito was a gonner.
The first mosquito going up into a magical poof of electric blue light was followed by a lot of “We shoulds” and “Better Nots.” You know: “We should keep a tally of how many mosquito’s we’ve zapped.” “We should use that thing to wake up Shiela and Rebekah in the morning “ (Shiela objected to that one). “We should press the button and throw it out into the rainstorm” “Better not press that button and drop it in my bathtub.” “We should press the button and drop it into the fish pond in the courtyard” (can you imagine all of those goldfish simultaneously flipping over??).
The magic wand is a good toy. Here is Billy daring a mosquito to come close. (Note: another thing that people in Taiwan do that we’ve started doing as well is wearing face masks when we’re sick and don’t want to infect others).

Oh. That's cute. Part 2.

I think this might have to be a weekly thing. Or bi-weekly. Or monthly. Depending on how long my motivation holds up. In any case. I have more examples of cute:

I have an office in one of my schools which is huge. Like a room. For me and one other American English teacher. Thus, this room serves other purposes. For example, during the school wide naptime (after lunch) 3 or 4 girls from the student government come into my office to do work. They are my friends. One day they kept coming in the room and sneaking up behind me. They thought this was funny. Once I jumped rather violently. I used one of my not-actually-so-useless vocabulary words that I’ve picked up: “creepy.” It took them a while to figure out what I had said because I’m pretty sure my accent/tones are unintelligible. Eventually Shirley figured out what I meant. She said “Ohhhhhh” and mimed a Frankenstein walk. Cute. The next day I’m told that when the other English teacher that works in the school came into the office the girls had written “we like you Kate” in English and Chinese. This made my week. It would have made my month if I had been there to see it. Still, cute.

“Tina 3” is on the school’s traditional hip-drum dance team. I watched part of their practice. Cute.

A phrase I have come to understand at my schools is “American teacher.” This is because at my schools wherever I go, my skin and hair provokes a lot of stopping, staring and uttering of this phrase. I was taking a nap during school wide naptime (naptime is a beautiful feature of Taiwanese schools). During said nap I heard a little voice say in Chinese “American teacher.” I opened an eye and saw a Kindergartener’s face (only her face, that’s how short she was) peering in the class window watching me sleep. Creepy. But cute.

Oh. That's cute.

After my first week of teaching in Kaohsiung, I already have a handful of examples of how cute, enthusiastic and precocious the kids that I teach are:

On my first day of work, the first Taiwanese student I ever had a conversation with was a second grader named Tim. I was waiting in the hallway for one of the teachers. Time moseyed up to me and opened the conversation with “No Chineeeese?!?!” I confirmed that my chinese skills were a negative. I asked Tim if he was seven. He said that this was correct but was vastly uninterested in the subject. He pounded his chest and said “I am TIM!” Then he moseyed off to attend to other business. Cute.

The other day I walked to the bus stop from my school at the same time that the kids got out and were going home. I walked part of the way with one of my fifth graders. I couldn’t remember her name. I asked what it was. She said “My name is Tina 3” (There are three Tina’s in one of my classes). Cute.

In addition to teaching in the classroom, part of my job is to teach a dialog at the “English Village” every Monday and Friday. I work in a room that is set up to look exactly like a real grocery store. The students are my customers and I am a "clerk." A portion of the dialog that happens in this "supermarket" goes like this:
Clerk: Hello, can I help you?
Customer (student): Yes, I would like to buy _______ (the student is assigned a food item)
At this point in the dialog I normally have to hold up a vocabulary word such as “carrot” in order to get them to tell me what food they would like to buy. One group of students was special. When I got to this part in the dialog, the students paused, as usual, for my to tell them a food item. All except for one rascally fellow who enthusiastically yelled “CANDY!!” Cute.

Another time at English Village, students were helping me spell pillow. They loudly and enthusiastically said “P-I-“ellow”=”ellow”-O-W.” I was really sad that I had to correct this. Cute.