When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over by Zierman Addie

Author:Zierman, Addie [Zierman, Addie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781601425461
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Andrew and I arrived in China through a series of murky connections: a college professor knew a guy who knew a guy who put us in touch with F. S. Zhang, the current president of Shin Sheng High School in Pinghu. Andrew had been hoping for placement within a Chinese business to give him the foreign experience required to complete his international business degree, but there was nothing. Just this. Just F. S. Zhang and his school full of Chinese students in Pinghu. Not ideal—but good enough to satisfy the school requirement. We signed a contract, committing to teach English there for one year.

The rest of the American English teachers here knew one another before they came. They were graduates of an ultraconservative college in Michigan, where they had lived in close quarters for the past four years. This college, we learned, was fed by the homeschooled children of an older generation of fundamentalist Christians. They came from families of twelve, thirteen, fourteen—families who did not believe birth control to be part of God’s plan, families who sent their children to the College in Michigan, a steady dripping, one after another, until the school became a sort of giant, extended family.

I had never seen anything like them: this group of college grads moved in the halting, awkward manner of people still controlled—some willingly, some less so—but all of them still held hostage by the school they came from, the school that sent them here, the College in Michigan, seven thousand miles away. There were rules that made my fussy evangelical upbringing seem wild: No listening to music with drums. No movies with a rating exceeding PG. No public displays of affection.

But the most bizarre of the school-enforced restrictions was that which addressed the issue of wardrobe. The women were to wear skirts or dresses at all times—knee-length, minimum. Pinghu sweltered in the summer. The dishrag sky would wring itself over the town, leaving everything streaked gray, plastering the long skirts against the legs of the Michigan girls as they walked from class to class. Then, in the winter, the icy winds came, making the long hours of teaching in unheated classrooms unbearable. The girls took to wearing layers of tights and pants underneath their skirts to ward off the cold. The skirts lay awkwardly over the layers, puffy and cumbersome, someone’s misconstrued version of modesty. Constantly getting in the way.

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