BBQ

Most students at the school have gone home to celebrate mid-Autumn Day with their families. My class, mostly coming from the far reaches of Guangdong, did not have enough time to go home and stayed at school. They decided to celebrate the upcoming holiday together by holding a BBQ and were nice enough to invite Janet and myself along.

So at 7:30 on Saturday night, we walked down from our apartments to meet the students in the courtyard in front of the school canteen. We were greeted by about 25 students and three "grills" they had constructed out of stacking bricks in the shape of a rectangle in the courtyard. A table sat in the middle of the grills, filled with bowls of chicken, beef, pork, hot dogs and little meatballs made out of fish.

Some students spread charcoal out on the make-shift grills and soon, the warm glow of three fires lit up our BBQ area. The students, perhaps removed from the formal classroom setting, seemed much more talkative than normal. This class is in their final semester of college, so many are able to hold English conversations fairly well. Since they will be graduating with the Spring Festival (in early February), a common topic of discussion was the anxiety of finding a job. I tried to reassure them that graduating students in America face the very same fear! In Tianjin, a college student told me that there are about 5 million college graduates in China each year and so the competition for good jobs is very fierce. While I can not vouch for the accuracy of this figure, if so, I certainly understand being a bit anxious.

To help the mood, I brought down some speakers from Janet's apartment so that we could listen to music outside, which was a big hit. By this time, I had a skewer of fish meatballs and beef cooking for me over one of the grills. A few minutes later (and hoping the meat was cooked to the proper temperatures), it was time to try it out.

They were good and I have not yet gotten sick, so I'm guessing they were cooked fine. I was also impressed that the class had planned and organized the BBQ together. I can't think of any class that I took in college where we might do something similar. Of course, the two education systems are very different; here my students have all of their classes together for all three years of their education. Events like the BBQ are a plus of this system, where the class has grown together over time like a family. A downside might be that it is relatively more difficult to meet and make friends with people from other parts of the school.

The evening was a lot of fun and offered the students a chance to practice their English and get to know us better. Outside of the formal classroom setting, many of them were much more talkative. I hope that they will continue to talk even more in class as they get to know me better.