In L.A., his own wall of China

Zhao yan feng finally lost his cool minutes before the bell sounded, signaling the end of fourth period.

For nearly two hours, his classroom had teetered on the edge of anarchy. Students chatted on their cellphones. They put their feet on their desks. Some had their heads down, sleeping. A clique of girls loudly debated where best to shop for jeans.

“I need your cooperation,” Zhao pleaded in a clumsy Chinese accent. “If you don’t want to learn this language or be in my class, just don’t interfere with others learning. I’m just a guest teacher.”

It had been three weeks since Zhao (pronounced Jow), 27, left his hometown in northern China to join a program that sent dozens of Chinese teachers to school districts across the United States.

His two-year assignment: teach Mandarin at Dorsey High in South Los Angeles, where test scores are well below the state and national averages, two-thirds of the students live near the poverty line and most have had scant exposure to Chinese culture.

“Why do I do this?” he said to the students, who were silent for the first time. “Because I want to be your friend.”

Two girls in the back of the classroom giggled at the remark. Others stared at their desks. The bell rang, and the teenagers charged out of the room -- except for a boy who was still asleep. Zhao tapped him on the shoulder and told him to leave.

It was the end to another humiliating day.

“Two years,” Zhao said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I’ll do it.”

Before he left China for Los Angeles, Zhao, a university instructor, had been optimistic. A partnership between the College Board in the U.S. and Hanban, China’s language council, had selected him and other teachers to bring Mandarin to American students.

Imparting a language to others, he thought, was a profound gift.

“I want my parents to know their son isn’t a common person living a common life,” he said a few weeks before starting at Dorsey. “I think it’s meaningful to teach these kids Mandarin, to give them something you have.”

Zhao had been told by other Chinese teachers that American high schools could be tough. They said the neighborhood around Dorsey was dangerous and that he should always carry $30 in cash. If he was ever mugged, they said, the money could save his life.

When he arrived, he saw police stationed in squad cars outside the campus. He assumed there had been an incident. He soon learned the police are there all the time.

He thought Dorsey looked like a prison. The campus is surrounded by a tall fence, and just getting in and out was a challenge.

Zhao immediately stood out. He seemed to be the only Asian on a campus divided between black and Latino students jawing loudly about their summer vacations.

During his first week, he decided to poll the class.

“What do you know about China?” he asked.

One student said she’d heard of Shanghai. The room fell silent except for the groan of the air conditioner.

Zhao tried again.

“Do you know what the Great Wall of China is?”

More silence.

Then a student looked around and asked, “What’s the Great Wall?”

One morning a few weeks later, Zhao woke up in a cold sweat. The situation with his students had only gotten worse. He had dreamed that all his hair fell out. It wasn’t far from the truth. The last few days, he’d noticed clumps of hair in the shower drain. This morning, like every other, Zhao left his tiny Chinatown apartment at 6:30 and caught the first of two buses that would get him to Dorsey by 7:45. He would give his first quiz. He wasn’t expecting many of his students to get more than half the questions right.

Zhao had heard a rumor: Another teacher in the program -- somewhere in the Midwest -- had quit and returned home. Zhao was secretly jealous, but he knew he’d lose tremendous face if he left, especially so soon.

Still, he felt the weight of the cultural differences. He was grappling with the way some of his students treated him. In China, teachers traditionally command unquestioned authority. At Dorsey, the few good students were being overshadowed by those who walked around the classroom to talk to friends, sent text messages and defied Zhao’s orders to pay attention. He could not understand why his efforts -- traveling all the way from China to share a resourceful language -- stood for nothing to so many.

It didn’t help that the students could not understand Zhao’s stilted English at times, and that he rarely offered encouragement. In China, a simple “hao,” meaning “good,” is often the extent of teachers’ praise.

“You can’t put these characters together, it’s wrong,” Zhao sternly told a girl during a writing exercise. As Zhao walked away, the student carried on, unsure how to complete the exercise correctly.

Zhao decided he had to try something new. He hoped that Chinese paper cutting, or gifts such as chopsticks and watercolor paintings, would provide some incentive. He stayed up until 3 a.m. making name cards with Chinese characters for each of his approximately 50 students in both his classes.

He told a girl that he would give her one if she would participate just once in a dictation exercise. She told him she didn’t care if she got one or not. Zhao gave her the card anyway, and she started mouthing the words moments later.

Now it was time for a quiz -- 15 true-or-false questions, a translation exercise and then a stab at writing Chinese characters for a few basic words. This was the first time Zhao would see if his students had learned anything.

As he dropped the tests on their desks, a girl picked hers up, examined it and loudly blurted out an expletive. For the next 45 minutes, the class seemed to fall in and out of consciousness. Some attempted to answer such questions as: “Chinese culture was the cradle of Japanese, Korean and some Southeast Asian cultures -- true or false?” Others looked as though they were sleeping with their eyes open.

But something changed the moment Zhao started explaining the answers. A competitive spirit emerged among some in the classroom.

When they got a question correct, they cheered. When they got another one right, they started moving their shoulders in a dance.

“I knew that one. I’m a genius. That was easy,” said a playful Alena Monet Cox, a 12th-grader who straddled the line between those who misbehaved and those who paid attention. She selected Chinese because she was tired of studying Spanish. She had visions of visiting China one day.

Her enthusiasm set the tone for the class. When she participated, so did the clique around her. On this day, Zhao was impressed. Monet, as she chose to be called, had even remembered how to write her name in Chinese characters. She had signed her quiz that way.

A boy next to Monet raised his hand.

“How do you say in Chinese, ‘You a G?’ ” -- slang for hoodlum.

Monet rolled her eyes.

“How do you say ‘stupid question’?”

Zhao packed his things, waited for the bell and walked out smiling.

A few minutes later, he was in the teachers’ lounge, meeting with Sharon Markenson, a veteran Dorsey instructor charged with coaching neophytes like Zhao.

Zhao again recounted how much trouble he was having controlling the class. Though he had seen progress in the quiz, some students didn’t write anything. “I don’t know how to deal” with it, he said.

“The way to get them cooperating is to hold them accountable,” Markenson said. “This is a work environment. Break up the friendships and racial groups.”

Markenson reminded Zhao that many of Dorsey’s students live in poverty and lack family support. “Some of our students are depressed,” she said. “That’s why our scores are so low.”

Zhao had never seriously considered the effect of poverty on his students. In China, 900 million of the 1.3 billion people are still essentially farmers. Being poor was commonplace -- but so was studying hard no matter your lot in life. He remembered a banquet he had attended a few days earlier in Chinatown. Many of the guests immigrated decades earlier and spoke about eking out a living in America. They toasted the news that one of their children had been accepted to Harvard. It made Zhao think that Chinese parents would do anything to ensure their children get the best education.

Zhao thanked Markenson for her suggestions. He promised to think about setting boundaries and developing activities for his students. All good ideas, he thought, but could he put them into practice?

He would come close to answering that question several weeks later. Zhao was losing patience with a student using her cellphone. She had repeatedly ignored his orders to put the device away. Sitting to the side of the room grading papers that day was Noah Lippe-Klein, a popular history teacher whose students would file in once Zhao’s class ended.

Zhao asked Lippe-Klein to step into the hallway.

“I don’t know what to do about this student,” Zhao said. Lippe-Klein told Zhao he needed to confiscate the phone. Zhao was reluctant. He wanted to see Lippe-Klein do it. Moments later, Lippe-Klein took the phone. Within days, Zhao was taking away students’ cosmetics and phones. He stared down those who talked over him.

Scolding students didn’t give Zhao any satisfaction. But now that he was beginning to control his classroom, he was pleased with how much more time he had to teach the students who had a keen interest in Mandarin.

That faction grew over the months, joining the likes of Monet. Antonio Carrillo, 17, was a quiet student in Zhao’s fourth-period class who was growing more interested in Chinese each week. To him, it felt exotic compared to Spanish or French.

The burly 12th-grader spent the semester in the front row, usually with his skateboard at his feet. Sitting there meant avoiding the distractions at the back of the room.

Antonio cringed any time his classmates mocked Zhao’s English. It wasn’t fair, he thought. His own parents struggled with English when they moved to L.A. from Mexico. He felt no one had the right to disrespect others for their accents.

Antonio and other students distinguished themselves by asking questions and staying after class to chat with Zhao. They came alive when he discussed Chinese culture. He showed pictures of modern Shanghai and once played a video about haute Chinese cuisine. They shrieked when they saw a photo of a whole fish with its tail and head hanging out of a bowl of soup. The students quizzed Zhao on everything from “Are there Wal-Marts in China?” to “Do you know martial arts?”

On the last day of school before a three-week winter break, Zhao reviewed the last few weeks of work.

On the white board were intricately drawn objects: a watch, a hand, a watermelon, maps of America and China. Zhao was so detailed that he drew the folds of skin on the knuckles of the hand and the stripes and seeds on the watermelon.

He drew two columns -- one for the boys, one for the girls. They would have to compete against each other, pointing at the objects he named in Chinese.

Slowly, volunteers started coming to the front of the class.

“Xigua,” Zhao said, prompting a girl to push her male counterpart aside and stab her finger at the watermelon.

“Meiguo.”

The girl pointed at the outline of America.

“Excellent job,” Zhao said. “Oh, my God, all correct. Excellent, excellent.”

More students began raising their hands to come to the front. They cheered and argued over who had pointed first. Students in the front did a dance every time they scored correctly.

When a usually uncooperative boy in the back of the room interrupted to ask Zhao if he could go to the bathroom, two-thirds of the class shouted, “No!” In recent weeks, students had been taking matters into their own hands. They’d sometimes snap, “Bu yao shuo hua. Qing anjing.” “Stop talking. Be quiet.”

Zhao zeroed in on a boy near the middle, his eyes half-closed.

“Ni xiang mai shenmo?” “What do you want to buy?”

The boy looked bewildered. “What?”

A classmate next to him explained the question in Spanish.

“Que quieres comprar?”

The boy gave it a try, slowly.

“Wo . . . xiang . . . mai . . . xigua.” “I want to buy watermelon.”

When class was over, a boy carrying a guitar thanked Zhao and said he would try to visit Chinatown during winter vacation. Zhao gave him his cell number and told him to call if he wanted a tour of the neighborhood.

At the end of the next period, a student used his cellphone to record digital video of Zhao explaining the meaning of characters he’d written on the white board.

Antonio picked up his skateboard and asked Zhao what he planned to do over the break.

“Just hang out,” Zhao said. “I need more rest.”

Antonio jotted down Zhao’s e-mail so that he could continue to practice the language while he visited family in Mexico. Then the two said goodbye.

“Zaijian.”

Zhao and his students returned to class last month. Maria Hernandez rattled off all the Chinese nouns she could remember for the class to hear. The 15-year-old, wearing hoop earrings the size of coasters, said the words so fast that Zhao couldn’t keep up recording them on the white board. At the back of the room, three boys played cards below their desks, oblivious to the lesson.

During the next period, some students participated in a spirited vocabulary review. But they were distracted by another student who was loudly chatting with other classmates. Twice, Zhao took her into the hallway, telling her to stop.

It had become his routine: limit the damage done by the unruly students and continue to reach the interested ones.

It’s not the dream of teaching in America that Zhao had when he arrived, but for now it’s the best he can do.

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david.pierson@latimes.com