Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet: On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas

Chapter Nine: How to Remember

How to Remember C onfucius, discussing student-teacher relations, said that the student must be insatiable in learning, the teacher indefatigable in teaching. Fatigue came easily to me on that ship, but my students, especially the older ones, seemed endlessly hungry for knowledge. They gobbled up vocabulary words like sweets, and they seemed to like many of our lessons. Particularly successful was one about prepositions. We collected a variety of objects from the classroom—a few pens, some cigarettes, exercise books, jars of tea, and a jacket or two—and heaped them into a complex pile on, under, and around one of the chairs. The students took turns telling me where things were—“tea is top chair!”—and varying the arrangement and describing it. This activity was so successful that it lasted longer than I’d planned. When I told the class we should finish because it was past time for them to go to dinner, several of them said, “Finish?” with what seemed like disappointment. It was most gratifying. In the second or third week of classes, I brought the morning class a tape player and a recording I had made of a storybook. The UWP: Kendall: Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet page 162 162 UWP: Kendall: Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet page 163 163 people who could read would be able to listen to the tape while following the words, and so improve their pronunciation and listening comprehension. I didn’t know how effective a teaching aid this might be, but it might provide amusement and it couldn’t hurt. Xiu, the tall, skinny mechanic who had no background in English , claimed the tape player first, and took it away to his room even before he went to dinner. After the meal, I saw him in the bar, sitting hunched over the book, listening to the headset. I had bought half a dozen small cassette players and what I thought would be enough blank tapes. But pretty soon all the machines were lent out, and I had filled all the tapes, recording just about every book I had. I also taped thousands of vocabulary words, everything from inventories of tools to the names of the parts of the ship. For Lin, I recorded a series of questions and answers pertaining to his job as a steward—things he might want to say to future guests on the ship. For Mr. Ding I taped the English names of all the meals he prepared, as well as some common expressions about food. “This is stewed chicken feet,” I repeated, slowly, into my tape recorder. “Would you care for some sow’s ears?” The only problem with all the tape activity was that the batteries required recharging. I’d had enough foresight to bring along a small recharger, but I couldn’t find anywhere to plug it in. When I explained the problem to Wang, he took me downstairs and showed me a part of the ship I’d never seen before. Below the dayroom and the bar was the main deck, which included the crew’s quarters, the washing machines, some showers, and, further aft, the huge tool shop. On that level the air felt suffocating and greasy, as if the fumes from the engine room, one deck down, were rising. I’d never explored much down on that level, because it was the crew’s living area and I didn’t want to surprise anyone in the sleeping cabins or the bathroom. Once, however, when I was doing laundry How to Remember and everyone else was upstairs, I had glanced into the men’s shower room. Water lay in cold puddles on the gray floor, and the shower stalls were rusted and rotten looking. I saw no soap anywhere. A few limp rags, probably used as washcloths, lay like dead rats in corners of the stalls. In a rusty holder on the wall, several battered toothbrushes hung, the bristles mashed flat with years of use. But on the day he was helping me with my battery quest, Wang led me through a hatch that I had never opened. Cold air chilled us as we walked into a large, brightly lit room, which looked far more modern than any other part of the ship. Long fluorescent bulbs illuminated every corner with solid white light, and the linoleum gleamed. Neat wooden counters lined the sides of the room, surrounding...