Ryan ChartrandWhen guests enter her house, Susan McKee politely asks them to take off their shoes before stepping inside. It’s a habit she learned in China, and one she still likes to keep, along with hanging Oriental watercolors on the wall behind her.
As two “60-somethings,” McKee and her husband Robert decided nine years ago to embark on the kind of adventure that many half their age aren’t bold enough to do. Selling their cars and renting out their comfortable home in San Luis Obispo, the two accepted a Mormon humanitarian mission to teach English to college students in a rural village in China.
When she returned home to San Luis Obispo, McKee decided to write the story of their 16-month experience at Zhejiang Wanli University in Ningbo, China. The result was the recently-published “Days Like Floating Water, A Story of Modern China.”
In 1999, the couple decided they wanted to be able to do some sort of mission for their church, and having spent some of her adolescent years growing up in Asia, McKee said she knew she wanted to return to that part of the world.
The Chinese government, meanwhile, was actively looking for English teachers to come in to the country, and the match seemed perfect. The only catch: As Americans and as Mormons, the McKees would be watched and monitored constantly to make sure everything they taught was acceptable by the country’s Communist standards – there would be no mention of religion and no discussion of politics.
Apprehension aside, the couple boarded a plane and arrived in the village of Chuga on their 40th wedding anniversary.
From the get-go it was an adventure.
They were given a little cottage on the university campus, but were warned it could be wiretapped.
The village, so far removed from the conveniences of modern Western life, turned the simplest tasks into day-long chores. Paying bills and buying groceries meant navigating through crowded streets, riding on dirty buses and pushing through lines of people.
“The Chinese don’t understand standing in line,” McKee said with a laugh.
And these were just the tasks of daily living. The McKees now had to overcome the challenges of the class they were teaching.
“The students had never seen a foreigner before; they were really afraid of us at first,” she said. “It was to the point where if you asked one of them a question, their eyes would start watering and their chin trembling.”
Add to that the fact the students had nowhere near the English-speaking skills the McKees had been expecting, and the full scope of the task before them became evident.
“Their idea of English was pretty strange,” McKee explained. “The high school teachers who had taught them could read English, but not speak it. It was interesting.”
But somehow, over the course of the next year and a half, the gap between the two aging American missionaries and the class of adolescent Chinese college students began to close.
“I really wasn’t prepared for how much I would start to like these kids,” McKee said. “Our two cultures were sort of foreign to each other, and yet they became like extended family.”
Given that their small house was on campus, the McKee’s started inviting students to come over in the evenings for informal chats in English, which quickly became an open-door policy for students who wanted to come over to talk, help cook dinner, play Chinese chess or even take piano lessons.
“As we were leaving the students would say, ‘Remember always, you have sons and daughters in China,'” she said.
McKee related the story of one young Chinese woman called “Judy,” who McKee said was one of their more outgoing, talkative students, “a free spirit.”
“Sometimes she would start trying to tell me something in English, but it would come out so funny and pretty soon she’d be firing off in rapid Mandarin Chinese, and I couldn’t follow anymore,” McKee explained. “By the end, we’d both be doubled over laughing.”
The McKees tried various tricks to liven up the formal atmosphere of the Chinese classroom as well – “the desks are bolted to the floor” – so they started bringing music into the classroom, playing guitar and singing.
McKee started writing “Days Like Floating Water” before she even knew it, in the stories she described in the e-mails she sent home. Upon her return to the United States, several friends told her that they had really enjoyed the correspondences she’d sent out, and that she should consider compiling them into a book.
But sitting down to the task, McKee quickly realized that in order to be a good book, it had to be more than just a collection of e-mails. Using those e-mails as a framework, she began to write, laboriously at first, until she “really began to enjoy it, and to relive the experience in that way.”
The result was “Days Like Floating Water, A Story of Modern China.”
The working title of the book was “Pieces of My Heart” since, as the author said, “It is a piece of a world we know so little about.”
Coming home to the United States was somewhat of a culture shock for the McKees, perhaps more so than going to China.
“Everyone seemed a little chubby coming back to the U.S.,” she smiled. “A little too comfortable.
“We’d really come to appreciate the simple dignity of the people over there,” she said. “It was a chance for us to focus on something other than ourselves, to not worry about things like paying for gas or bills.
“It was hard coming back here. We tried at first to keep living that way, but pretty soon we were buying cars and motorhomes again.”
Growing up as an “army brat,” McKee already had a lifetime of bouncing around the world under her belt long before embarking on the teaching mission to China. As a child, her family was constantly on the move with the military. She even went to high school in Japan, where she came to appreciate the Asian culture that still influences her life and her home.
McKee married into the military again when she met Robert, who went on to head the Army ROTC program at Cal Poly for several years. But even they wanted to lay down roots somewhere, and San Luis Obispo seemed like the perfect place to do it.
“Growing up, I never thought that would actually happen, that I would settle somewhere,” McKee said, laughing at the fact that now, 30 years later, the couple is still calling San Luis Obispo their home.
McKee said she already has the makings of another book in mind, inspired by the love letters between her parents and the family military memorabilia she recently rediscovered.
Also a lifelong artist, McKee found ample inspiration in China amidst the quiet whisperings of her students and loud bustling of the town streets. One of her ink and collage pieces, aptly titled “English Teacher in China,” graces the cover of her book, and several more of her ink drawings and watercolors line the inside.
Even when she writes, McKee’s words are like light brush strokes across paper, painting a picture of a culture thousands of miles away but still etched in her and her husband’s minds.
The first paragraph of the book opens, “Gray is the color, so much gray. Concrete buildings with little thought of ornament, utilitarian, barred windows, winding streets awash with two and three-wheeled bicycles hauling people, rusted propane bottles, sugar cane, chunks of cement or rocks, absolutely anything. People are in gray, with dashes of color here and there. The sky is often gray, too. It’s winter here in Chuga, a small village on the edges of the ancient city of Ningbo, China, a city of 1.2 million souls lurching into the twenty-first century, anxious to be rid of its past of crumbling buildings, wearing its adolescence in tall towers and taxicabs rather self-consciously. In the cold rain, and it seems to rain often here, umbrellas bloom in colors, but the heavy gray seems to mute even those.”
“Days Like Floating Water” is currently available for sale at Novel Experience Books in downtown San Luis Obispo, Coalesce … A Bookstore & More in Morro Bay, and Volumes of Pleasure in Los Osos.