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British couple visits 30 years after teaching stint
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There used to be few people and fewer cars. You could cross roads with ease, and maybe run across a horse-drawn cart. Residents often spent time on side streets in front of the houses, washing clothes, playing chess and having meals.
It was Hangzhou of 30 years ago, and British couple Bernard O’Connor and Kate Chevallier caught those precious scenes on their camera while teaching English at Zhejiang Agricultural University (today’s Huajiachi Campus of Zhejiang University) from 1983 to 1985.
Last week, they were back in Hangzhou, with another task: correcting English mistakes of signposts near West Lake at the invitation of local officials.
“It’s a very interesting job and I’m glad to be back to beautiful Hangzhou.” Chevallier says in Chinese, adding her connection to the city goes way back: her grand-grandmother was born in Hangzhou.
The work started last week and will be finished by year’s end. Targets include signposts and instruction boards in parks and museums in the West Lake Scenic Area, and street names and guide boards around the lake.
The couple and six language professors from local universities comprise the panel.
O’Connor and Chevallier are both ESL teachers at Bradford School in the UK. O’Connor has taught humanities and worked in the fields of geology, archeology and history; and Chevallier has two master’s degrees, including one in Chinese language and literature.
O’Connor last week lectured on what Hangzhou looked like 30 years ago.
In 1982, as girlfriend and boyfriend, they toured China. On the train to Shanghai, they came across two Americans teaching English in Zhejiang Agricultural University who were finishing their work and asked if the English couple could replace them.
While three other universities offered them jobs, they still chose Zhejiang Agricultural University, largely because O’Connor used to be a geology teacher.
In August of 1983, O’Connor and Chevallier started teaching in Hangzhou after getting married in the UK, since they didn’t know how long they would stay.
Thirty years ago, O’Connor and Chevallier were given a Phoenix bicycle — which was a status symbol at the time — from the university, with which they toured every corner of the city.
O’Connor, a photography fan, with an Olympus camera, took hundreds of photos of Hangzhou, covering city scenes and people’s life.
In O’Connor’s photos, even Yan’an Road, the busiest downtown road, was uncongested. After 7pm, stores shut down and the roads were nearly deserted.
Sometimes horse carts appeared, and O’Connor believed they were farmers coming to the city to sell vegetables, fruits and meat.
Though the country began advancing more rapidly, at times it wasn’t easy for the couple to get used to life in a developing country.
They recall that in winter their apartment leaked, the floor iced up and their quilt froze solid. In summer, O’Connor had to bath in cold water several times a day to keep cool.
Their diet was pork, cabbage and rice, and little else. But they enjoyed the simple life, and 30 years later, they still remember how people dried fish and vegetables in the sunshine, repaired shoes with pieces of car tires and got a shave on the street.
In the early 1980s, China was just beginning to modernize. The couple photographed buildings beginning to rise, construction sites and neon lights.
During the lecture, most Hangzhou locals could not identify the locations in the photos because of so much change. Back then, roads were narrow and houses were flat, mostly traditional two- or three-story buildings.
O’Connor and Chevallier greeted people by saying tongzhi hao (Hi, comrade). In urban areas, young people would mug for the camera, while senior citizens and people in the countryside would cover their faces with their hands.
So as not to stand out as “a rich foreigner,” O’Connor did not take his Olympus when visiting the countryside.
In the early 1980s, most Chinese wore dull clothes — white shirts in summers and black, blue, gray coats in winter — as the photos showed. “Children were the only people wearing color,” O’Connor says.
The couple say they now see “loads of confidence” in the faces of people in Hangzhou.
What also impressed the couple was “there were like only 50 foreigners in the city in 1980s, but many more today,” O’Connor says.
The couple was delighted that West Lake did not change much — thanks to a policy keeping the height of buildings around West Lake below 20 meters.
They say it was amazing to see something that had not changed.
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