Roy Wilson
1 April 2002

My name is Roy Wilson and I work in China as an English teacher in a rural Teacher's College in Nanyang which is located in south-western Henan province. Nanyang is famous in China as the home of Zhuge Liang - a famous military strategist in the three kingdoms period, and for Zhang Heng - an astronomer of the Han dynasty.

It is a small town for Chinese standards with around 300,000-500,000 people living in it's environs. In the past it has been quite isolated and indeed continues to be, though this is changing slowly with many local government initiatives to open up the area and attract foreign-business people. Locally Nanyang produces jade and has a few jade markets in the town. It is also a carpet -weaving centre with a few European continental buyers coming to purchase them from time to time.

I came to China with VSO - a British voluntary organisation that sends people to disadvantaged communities in the world to share skills with local people.I graduated from London University in 1999 after doing a degree at the School of Oriental & African Studies. VSO accepted me with this qualification plus a TEFL course.

In the Teacher college I assist with the spoken English of students. Most students are aged between 18-22 and study at the college for 3 or 4 years. The majority of them are originally from rural communities - villages or small towns and on graduation are likely to return there to teach English in middle schools. China now puts emphasis on three subjects in particular- Chinese, English and Maths.

Of course most students long to go to wealthier parts of China to find work, but for most, this will remain just a dream. During the course of the four years many of them come to realise that they must in fact return to their home towns to teach. This situation has various effects on them - some prepare themselves well while others are really quite depressed by the idea. A lot of my work involves motivating the classes to use spoken English although for many of them, they do not use it outside of the classroom or as yet cannot see the benefit of learning it well.

The students whom I teach often have quite interesting stories to tell me of their lives and families and I would like to encourage them to write down their experiences and views on a variety of topics which I think would be of interest to UK readers. These compositions would give an insight into what people are thinking here and into the society. On the students side I hope they would be interested to know that people in the UK are reading about their views. Of course I will have to stick to non-controversial topics as the college would be quite averse to students writing on certain topics. In this way there is a lot of censure still in place in China.

The main reason I would like students to write articles is to discuss issues of being Chinese, and being a young person in China which can cover anything from relationships to the environment. Additionally, If any Dimsum readers are interested in sending letters to students here I'm sure many would like to correspond as pen-pals. Many students here are very interested in making contacts in the rest of the world - their written English is quite good compared to their spoken English. If you would like to write introducing yourself I can match you with a student. Snail mail is best as it means a lot more to receive a letter by this means rather than by e-mail.

Hopefully over the next year my students will be able to write some good articles which I will be able to send to Dimsum readers. Knowing that people in the UK are interested in them will motivate my students and give them a personal experience of English which they might not have had before. I hope these articles will also give people in the UK insight into the minds of young people here in China.

My address is:
Roy Wilson
134 Wo Long Lu
Nanyang Teachers College
Nanyang
Henan 473061
China