ARRIVING at a darkened airport in 1987 didn't bode well for poets John Rosenwald and Ann Arbor on a Chinese adventure. But it proved the start of a long love affair with China which still sees the couple give innovative lectures in Hangzhou. Xu Wenwen takes notes.

On a windy night in the fall of 1987, American poet couple John Rosenwald and Ann Arbor arrived in Shanghai on a flight from Hong Kong, only to find the airport in darkness, and that the vehicle waiting to pick them up was a truck.

As they drove into town along bumpy roads with barely a street light, the driver did not bother turning on the headlights, thinking it unnecessary.

When the truck reached a residential area where people had set up tables in the middle of the road and were playing cards, the driver sounded the horn for the card players to move. Once the truck passed, they put the tables back on the road and resumed their game.

This is how the poet couple started their "adventure" in China, a place they see as a second home and have returned to repeatedly over the past 25 years, teaching, translating poems and visiting poets.

"We've been fortunate enough to watch the fascinating development of the country, which is one of the great stories of the 21st century," says Rosenwald. He likes to compare the new and old Pudong which he knew as a place to grow watermelons.

The couple hail from Maine in the eastern United States. Rosenwald, 69, is co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal and president of the Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation. Before his retirement in 2010, he was professor of English for 34 years at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

Arbor, 58, is a photographer, novelist and poet. She has also taught from kindergarten to graduate school and coached varsity college basketball.

In 1987, Shanghai's Fudan University and Beloit College began an exchange program and Rosenwald was chosen as an exchange professor, teaching English language and English literature at Fudan for six months.

When Rosenwald, who sports whiskers, visited China 25 years ago, people called him "Karl Marx." More than 20 years later, with his beard now white, the academic is greeted as "KFC Colonel" and "Santa."

Despite the city just having started its modernization, the couple enjoyed their work at Fudan University, and decided to come back.

"The teaching situation back then was the world's best," Rosenwald tells Shanghai Daily when giving a lecture at Zhejiang University of Technology. "Students were both brilliant and curious about the world; they trusted us to give them more information. As a teacher, what more could one wish for?"

"We also return because we love the superb students, our friendly colleagues and the thoughtful staff at Fudan University's Office of Foreign Affairs," adds Arbor.

Arbor taught at Fudan University in the fall of 1989; Rosenwald joined her in 1990, and from 1996 to 1997, he participated in the United States international educational exchange program known as the Fulbright Program.

In that semester the couple gave 37 courses at 23 universities in places including Tianjin, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Xiamen, Chongqing and Chengdu. "During that year we went to so many places that when people ask 'have you been to …' we just say yes," Rosenwald jokes.

Since 2001, through the Fulbright Program, they have spent time teaching in Hangzhou, and come to the city almost every year.

Currently, they are involved in a trans-disciplinary education pilot project at Hangzhou Normal University, supported by a grant received by Professor Yin Qiping.

The course, entitled "Creating a Self, Building Community," is taught in English, but is not just a language class. It combines philosophy, culture and science, spanning everything from food and architecture to the environment and human emotions.

The couple team-teach, an unusual teaching concept in China.

In a class combining concerns about food, they ask students to sit in a circle, "just like Chinese people do when they eat," so everyone can contribute.

Next, poetry reading and circle dancing are used as warm-up activities - something rarely seen in Chinese classrooms.

After that, students get materials, which list various points about food which they discuss and give English presentations. Rosenwald and Arbor offer encouragement and guidance - plus some funny performances.

They often use song and take the role of characters to get a point across. The audience makes its own contributions too.

"I am serious, and Ann is hilarious, so we strike a balance," says Rosenwald. "Our goal is not to have so-called only-one-right-person to tell the truth, but to let everyone in the room who has the element of truth work together."

Guan Nanyi, English teacher of Hangzhou Normal University who sometimes assists the couple's class in translating, says they have a zeal for transmitting knowledge.

Active role

"They could teach English poetry in the conventional way, but choose a challenging method that requires a huge amount of preparation," Guan says.

"This is because the couple really want to do meaningful things for Chinese students," he adds.

Poets themselves, Rosenwald and Arbor have taken an active role in promoting Chinese poetry.

In 1989, they published one of the first English collections of new Chinese poetry available in the United States.

Their arrival in China came at a time when Chinese poetry was booming, with big names such as Bei Dao, Hai Zi and Gu Cheng. Poetry events they organized at Fudan would attract over 500 people coming, reading poetry in Chinese and English together.

Young people's passion to poetry and a lack of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation encouragedthe duo to translate.

Between late 1988 and early 1989, they spent 30 to 40 hours a week translating with Sun Li, the then chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Fudan, and Chu Mengdan, a student at the university.

In 1989, a red-covered booklet with hand-written Chinese poems and English translations was published, featuring an introduction and a substantial essay, plus collaborative translations of 22 poems by nine poets.

The publication, entitled "Smoking People: Encountering the New Chinese Poetry," features poets including Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng and Wang Xiaolong.

In the years since, the couple have visited many Chinese contemporary poets in China and in America, with Arbor photographing them.

In 2001, the couple found another creative interest in "peasants' paintings. They have collected more than 600 works and become friends with some artists, particularly Ding Jitang, who began the peasant painting movement near Xi'an in 1956.

They have also organized exhibitions at museums in Chicago, Wisconsin and Maine in America.

"We collect them because they are beautiful and we exhibit them because the art gives a sense of ordinary people in China," says Arbor. "We want to show the art made by people living in rural communities like our own in Maine."

In all their work, Arbor and Rosenwald say they are attempting to build a bridge between two countriesthat they love.