Nanchong: SSTers’ home in China
We arrived in Nanchong August 24 and spent a week unpacking, setting up our apartment, and doing a variety of things to get ready for SST – buying bus passes for the students, setting up a bank account, registering at the police station and meeting with key people who will help us with logistics this semester. Nanchong is a city of almost a million people, with another 6 million in the surrounding prefecture of rural areas and smaller towns.
The SST program is hosted by China West Normal University and its Foreign Affairs Office is our liaison here, and has been very helpful. As its name suggests, CWNU is largely a teacher-training school, but there are a wide variety of majors (most linked to becoming a secondary school teacher). Nanchong is also home to a medical college and an engineering school related to the petroleum industry. Our family lives on the CWNU “old campus” near downtown Nanchong; almost all SST classes will take place on the new campus, which was built in the early 2000s on the northwest side of the city.
During our first four days here we were invited to dinner four times by friends of Goshen College here in Nanchong. Some were CWNU English Department faculty who spent time on the GC campus as exchange scholars in previous years. Others were families who had hosted SSTers in 2008 or helped with the SST program. For example, we were treated to a meal by Wang Xingquan, whom we had gotten to know when she was at Goshen College in 2006. Her father, Wang Shiwei, had also been an exchange scholar at GC in 1981, and her daughter later spent some of the summer of 2009 in Goshen.
A popular local meal is hot pot (火锅 [“fire pot”]). The meal’s host places various ingredients – meats, vegetables, tofu, quail eggs and mushrooms – into a kettle of boiling spicy oil in the middle of the table. Sometimes the kettle is divided and there is a section of boiling (non-spicy) broth in addition to the spicy oil. After the ingredients have cooked, diners dig in with chop sticks and enjoy. No doubt every SST will be taken to several hot pot meals while in Nanchong.
