Arts & Entertainment
Local Author Regales with Tales of the Far East
Audubon resident Donna Gottardi treats Moorestown Library guests to recollections of her experiences as an English teacher in Siberian China.
For Donna Gottardi, discovering her passion lay in trip halfway around the globe.
Gottardi, whose book Raining Cats and Rats: Lessons and Life in Chinese Siberia recounts her experiences as an English teacher in China, says her journey to discovery began with a trip to Vietnam and India. There, Gottardi “felt like I had found my community.”
The author, who hails from Audubon, spoke about her experiences in Asia to an audience at Wednesday night. Her presentation was part of the library’s summer reading program, Novel Destinations.
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“Asia blew my mind,” says Gottardi, now a sociology professor at St. Joseph’s University and Rutgers University-Camden. “A month wasn’t enough. I felt like I had to go home too soon.”
Gottardi answered an online ad seeking Western instructors for Chinese English-language teachers in 2003. After the SARS outbreak in Southern China scotched her plans to teach in the more urbanized southern provinces, she was dispatched to Fu Yuan, a town in the Heilongjiang province along the Russian border.
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“You will teach in Heilongjiang?” asked one of her Chinese immigrant students at Community College of Philadelphia.
“Why there? No one go there, not even the Chinese. Why not find a job in Shanghai, where there are things to do?”
Despite the admonition, Gottardi survived two tours of duty in Fu Yuan in the summers of 2003 and 2004. The resulting experiences were enough to fill a memoir of her time there.
Gottardi’s photos of Main Street in Fu Yuan show concrete and glass buildings before which horse-drawn carts are parked alongside cars and retrofitted motorcycle taxis. Next to the hotel where she stayed was an apartment building that seemed abandoned until she saw one of her students exit it and say, “This is where I live.”
The mix of students in the class gave Gottardi a microcosmic sampling of contemporary Chinese politics and culture. One of her students, to whom she refers by the pseudonym, “Star,” had been imprisoned for her adherence to Falun Gong, a spiritual movement declared heretical by the country’s Communist leaders in 1999.
“The students didn’t want to associate with her for her association with the group,” Gottardi said. “Her mother, who sold buns in the open-air market in town, had to pay to secure her release from prison, and it broke them [financially].”
One of her favorite students, a converted geography teacher named Tian, was remarkable to her for his strong command of English, which was entirely self-taught.
“Many of [my students] had never even had a chance to speak to a native English speaker,” she said.
Gottardi also recounts how her extensive travels throughout Asia made her an unofficial ambassador for American politics.
“I walked over the border from India to Nepal to meet a friend traveling from England, and a Nepali tea house owner tried to get me to explain to him in Hindi how George W. Bush got re-elected in 2004,” she said.
“People around the world are weighing in on our policies in places where you would never think these things are happening.”
Farther south, she visited the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Sichuan Province.
The center allows guests to hold a baby panda for $50 to help defray its operational costs; as $50 was a three-day budget for her, Gottardi chose the more affordable $7 option—holding an arboreal Red Panda.
“The pandas were so cute,” she said. “They are just a wonder. I really got to see why the world and China is fascinated by them.”
In Tibet, she saw champas of the Gansu province, an encounter that further underscored the country’s ethnic diversity. She saw the palace of the exiled Dalai Lama, and it drove home for her the impact of the government crackdown on the Lhasa people.
“It’s the decimation of a culture, and that culture is beautiful,” Gottardi said. “China is just concerned about the territory, unfortunately.”
Gottardi, who conducts ongoing social justice work in the Dominican Republic, says she is likely to head there next.
“Part of my research interest is fairly traded goods, and so I also am going to Nicaragua with a colleague who studies coffee growers,” she said, “but I do chocolate.”