Kindergarten Combat

*This blog was written November 8th, 2006*

I teach at a campus about 30 minutes outside of the city of Changsha. So, everyday day I take a bus to and from the school. Today, at the end of the day as I was walking across my campus on the way to the bus to go home, I noticed a small group of students standing in a circle and shouting about something. I couldn't quite see what was going on, so I walked closer to investigate. As I approached, the students stepped aside to reveal a scene straight out of a kungfu movie. Only, this grisly movie was being acted out by kids who couldn't have been older than third graders.

It was a fight; a really rough fight. I watched, horrified and shocked, as I saw two pint-sized students engaged in mortal combat. It was brutal. There was eye-gouging, choking, and even kicks to the head.

I ran over and pulled the two of them apart just as one was digging his fingers into the other's eye socket. They were both panting heavily, but once I stepped in they seemed to calm down. For my part, I felt lucky that these kids were less than half my size and that I could so easily stop them. After I separated them, they remained silent as I held them arms-length from one another, but there was fire burning in their eyes.

Luckily, they both came out of the scrape in pretty good condition. One of them had a bloody nose and the other's shirt was torn, but these certainly weren't life-threatening wounds. I asked them to apologize in English, but they didn't understand. I asked again in Chinese, but they still remained silent. I really wanted them to make nice, but clearly it wasn't going to happen. Feeling slightly defeated, slightly awed, and mostly feeling disturbed, I called a Chinese teacher over to clean up the scene and I ran to catch my bus.

Oh China... Land of mortal kindergarten combat.