I spent that day with two of my students. We spoke only Chinese, which was my goal. For the most part, I have no idea what they said. I just repeat the verb that I hear so it sounds like I know what's going on. In return for them having the patience to talk with me in Chinese, I made us a spaghetti dinner with fruit salad and coffee. They liked the spaghetti, or the "Italian noodle" as they called it, and they liked the "tomato jam." But to them the fruit salad was weird and they wanted to know why I didn't do something special with the fruit and said only foreigners eat fruit for a dish. Then they invited me to go climb a mountain with them next week. They are seriously so cute. They were complaining about how there are no girls to date and I was trying to make suggestions and told them they could go for the freshman once military training was over. But they also said a girlfriend would distract them from their work, although they said they would not be completely distracted.

Class on Monday morning consisted of my students doing performances of American holidays. Every skit involved someone crossing themselves like Catholics do and someone saying, "God Bless America." My favorite skit was the show portraying Memorial Day. One boy knelt on the ground crying and said, "Jack, Jack, fucking Nam man!! Why Jack!!" I was so surprised to hear him say this. Where did he get it from? Is this a line from a movie? My other favorite skit was about New Year's Day. The group talked about eating Blackeyed peas, hogs, and cabbage, the traditional American foods for new years. Where did they get that information? The students who put on the Easter celebration decorated a bunch of eggs with famous Chinese poems in Chinese characters all about being far away from home and they gave the basket of eggs to me. They said because I am far away from home, these eggs are symbolic of hope and life. They hoped I would never be homesick. How can I not give them an A+?

I also collected some essays for my US history class which were supposed to be about whether or not blacks were free after the Civil War, or whether or not being free from bondage was not enough to be really free and to explain why. I had a lot of responses that said, "In ‘Braveheart,’ they wanted freedom, just like the blacks did in America," or, “I like the movie ‘Gone with the Wind.’” However, one student wrote, "The US is sometimes described as 'the epitome of a free society' but when you
can be jailed for years for smoking a joint (or snorting a line of coke) in the privacy of your own home, when your house can be stolen from you by the government because your son stashed a baggie in the attic, when the mere possession of a 'controlled substance' (whether or not planted on you by crooked police) is enough to ruin your life and the lives of your family, then
it is ridiculous to claim that the US is a free society. It is more accurately described as a crypto-fascist state—meaning that it's a fascist state but that this is carefully hidden from most people: no jackbooted torchlight parades, just the complete dominance of state power over civil liberties and the natural right of citizens. In the US, despite the rhetoric and propaganda, a ruthless and authoritarian federal government has come to trample on the natural rights of the pole, and many citizens, especially those that do not belong to the racial majority or do not fit into the corporate-capitalist model of society, are imposed for victimless 'crimes and lose both liberty
and property."

When I read this I was cracking up laughing. This was obviously copied from something but very funny nonetheless. Not only did she copy it but she did not even bother to read it and understand that it came nothing close to something I might accept. Plus, if you could see the sweet face of the young girl who wrote this it is so much funnier. There is a big problem with students who copy here. It is a difference between West and East. In the West we emphasis individual creation but in the East it does not matter if something is copied or not. Art schools consist of copying other art until it is a perfect recreation. Classes consist of copying and memorizing other people’s thoughts and words. All foreign teachers talk about how much they hate when they receive copied materials from students. Chinese students do not understand how horrible we find this. I try to not get too upset but also it is very hard to emphasize that I will not accept something copied. No matter how much I emphasize this fact I still receive copied material from some of my best students.