Thanksgiving in Taiwan*

It’s widely understood that holidays are difficult when you are far from family, but we did our best to make the most of our situation this year.  We decided to spend most of the week talking about Thanksgiving in our classes, and we developed several different lesson plans that all centered around Thanksgiving.  

With our listening and conversation classes we watched “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.”  We watched “The Great Pumpkin” for Halloween and the students really enjoyed it, so we figured they’d appreciate an encore.  And they did.  It was more entertaining watching the students than the movie at times.  There’s one scene where Snoopy sets the table and perfectly executes a difficult “bishop’s hat” napkin fold with a simple flick of his wrist.  The students in the hospitality majors literally squealed with delight when he did that.  We guess they’ve had to do that before.

Our English Honors classes have been working on a unit about “happy endings,” so we took one hour of the writing classes to have them think of bad things and spin them in a positive way that they could be thankful for.  As you can imagine, responses varied from inspirational to bizarre.  Here are some of their thoughts:

• I am grateful my sister ate my cake so I don’t get fat.
• I am grateful for gross meals because it means I have food to eat.
• I am grateful for arguments with my mom because it means I have a family.
• I am grateful my dad blames things on me because it means I still have a dad.
• I am thankful for the broken TV because it makes me more hard working.
• I am thankful for missing the bus because it makes me meet the handsome boy at the next bus.
• I am thankful for those stupid guys because it means I am not the stupidest person.
• I am thankful for a dirty bathroom because it makes me know how to clean it.
• I am thankful for the runny nose because I can have such a charming voice.
• I am thankful for the broken car because it makes me see some beautiful view.
• I am grateful for the crying baby because it reminds me I am not alone.
• I am grateful for the drillmasters becaue it means someone noticed me.**
• I am very thankful for Hulk because he bit Rocky away. ***
• I am thankful for I can run because it means I don’t have paralysis.
• I am grateful I don’t have much money, so I could enjoy anything in life.
• I am grateful for bad friends because they let me know what kinds of people shouldn’t be friends.

I suppose Lauren and I could do a similar exercise and express our thankfulness for being far away from family because it reminds us how much we really do love and miss and need our families, or our gratitude for living in a place where we struggle to communicate with others because it forces us to speak more openly with one another and strengthens the bonds of our relationship.

         We did a small art assignment, the classic turkey hand, with some of our other students and made them write four things they are thankful for: one small thing for the pinky; one person they love for the ring finger; one thing they own for the middle finger; and something they think, feel or believe for the pointer finger.  Again, we received a wide range of responses from our students.  We picked a few of our favorite turkeys—or at least a few of the strangest—and put them up for your enjoyment.

This is supposedly Bane, the bad guy from the latest Batman movie.  He obviously dislikes bats and takes steroids. 

Hopefully you all ate turkeys at least this big for Thanksgiving.  Not because it's important to eat the traditional food, but because it's important to prevent these Goliath Turkeys from taking over the planet.  Not all of them are amiable like this one.

Angry Birds: what every adolescent discreetly plays under the table while their great uncle chronicles his medical history.

The 'hamsa' turkey.  It tastes delicious and protects you from evil.

I don't know what to say about this mutant bird, other than I know it is wearing thong underwear (and now you know that too, and you probably don't want to know that.  Oh well.  Sorry).  I know that because I made the student erase what they had originally drawn.  This is what we ended up with.  I have no idea.

I thing I want to become bread master too.

Chowder is one of my favorite students and it is in no small way because of her amazing name. 

Everything about this Turkey is beautiful.  Except maybe the excrement.

This turkey has caught on to Chic-fil-A's clever advertising techniques.   Not the homophobic ones,  you know, the ones where the cows ask to live and suggest chiken as an alternative. 

Short answer: not really.  Better answer: I sure hope so.

         These activities kept us busy all week, but they didn’t diminish our excitement in the least.  If anything, they amplified our eagerness.  When four thirty finally rolled around on Thursday afternoon, we booked it home and began making our meal.  We described the whole thing in some videos, so I won’t waste space on written explanation.  Suffice it to say: We ate good.

         After dinner, we watched the “Seinfeld” Thanksgiving special and The Blindside.  Watching the latter seemed appropriate because it has scenes of the family at Thanksgiving, and there’s a good deal of football in the movie.  I doubt there are very many people reading this who have not seen the movie, but if you haven’t, you may want to head to your favorite Redbox or internet piracy website**** and procure a copy for the evening.  It’s good fun for the whole family.  Here's the trailer in case you've never seen it:

         In the end, it was a great day.  We did miss our families, but we know that you love us and we feel your love, even from afar.  We love you too.  We are so thankful for your love and support.  We will leave you with the indelible words of Linus van Pelt:

In the year 1621, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving feast. They invited the great Indian chief Massasoit, who brought ninety of his brave Indians and a great abundance of food. Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish were honored guests. Elder William Brewster, who was a minister, said a prayer that went something like this: 'We thank God for our homes and our food and our safety in a new land. We thank God for the opportunity to create a new world for freedom and justice.’*****

* I have been reading a lot of work by David Foster Wallace lately, and am paying homage to the late, great writer in this blog post.  Please forgive my neurotic use of footnotes.

** Our school has a strong military presence and several guards, or drillmasters, patrol the hallways during class time looking for students who are breaking school rules (cell phone use, sleeping, being loud).  You don’t want to be noticed by the guards, obviously.**b

**b Lauren had an unfortunate dealing with a guard who didn’t approve of her approach to classroom management.  Lauren was allowing group work, and students were talking to one another while completing their assignment.  This notoriously bitchy**c guard interrupted her class to reprimand the students (completely ignorant of what the assignment was, I might add) for being off task.  Apparently, she’d have had a word with Lauren too if she were more confident in her English abilities.  After leaving Lauren’s class she phoned Steve, our office director, and told him that foreign teachers should not be allowed to teach third year students because we can’t handle them.  And there’s more! She went to the discipline office and filed a formal complaint against Lauren, so Lauren had to explain why her students were misbehaving even though they weren’t.  Lauren’s classy answer was, I encourage my students to work together and talk in their conversation classes.  It’s incredibly annoying to have these military marionettes monitoring our every move.  <sarcasm>I’m sure it does a lot to foster free thinking and free expression in our students.  I know the students love it.</sarcasm>

**c Lauren feels it is important to clarify that this adjective is taken directly from our Taiwanese co-workers, and that she would never refer to someone using that term.  Rob doesn't feel apologetic, or a need to explain himself, for using adjectives, especially when they apply. 

*** Your guess is as good as ours to the meaning of this enigmatic statement.  My best research suggests it may be referring to a scene in Rocky III where the boxer named Thunderlips (played by Terry Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan) has a dirty fight with the title character, Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone.  There are a few problems with this theory, however.  For one, Rocky didn’t lose the match, it was declared a draw.  Secondly, this movie is now thirty years old and came out at least thirteen years before this student was even born.  There was also an episode of “The Incredible Hulk” TV show where the Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner (under the pseudonym, David Benson), is mugged by a couple of thugs and subsequently rescued by a man named Rocky (who is coincidentally a boxer).  This theory seems even less probable than the first though due to the show’s even older age and far less widely distributed release, and obviously because Rocky actually saved the Hulk in this instance.

**** I’m sure my lawyer brothers would advise the Redbox alternative, even though I know at least one of them has proclivities for certain Russian websites. ****b

****b If anyone reading this is in any way affiliated with the MPAA, I would like to publicly state that I do not endorse internet piracy. I was simply acknowledging its existence, ease and affordability.

***** Historians suggest Brewster’s invocation is apocryphal.  Nevertheless, it embodies much of the American spirit which permeates the holiday.