Back in my Zibo days, my old university would sell me to local middle schools for several afternoons a week. These classes were at once refreshing and horrifying: the kids were a welcome change from the apathetic university students, but the classroom shenanigans and conspicuously absent teaching ‘assistants’ often made for quite a stressful experience.
Lesson plans for these junior middle school stints didn’t revolve so much around language acquisition; classroom pacification and survival were the primary goals. Games and fun topics were the order of the day. Did they learn anything? Anyone who has taught a class of sixty 10 year olds in the Chinese system already knows the answer to that. But hey, I considered class a success if they weren’t throwing basketballs at each other.
One afternoon, Jeremy (from the States) got his middle school kids to invent and draw their own superheroes. What kid doesn’t love superheroes? Apparently the class went really well and he came out of there with tons of hilarious heroes and equally hilarious drawings. While we were waiting for out ride back to the university, he showed us some of their insane creations. The one that we just couldn’t stop laughing at was some scribbled hairy monstrosity (very anatomically correct, if I remember). This beast was clutching some giant machine gun, and the kids had named it Ape Rifle. A legend was born.
I tried the superhero lesson in my classes, and it also worked really well. I got such crazy heroes as Sex Change Man ( a woman during the day who changes into a man at night to beat people up). However, none of them came close to Ape Rifle. That hairy monkey came to represent all the comical absurdity we were encountering daily in small town, industrial China. We just couldn’t stop laughing about it, and the fact that it had come out of the minds of middle school students. Who says Chinese kids lack creativity?
The whole thing became an inside joke among the teachers at my school, with “Ape Rifle lives!” heard on occasion thereafter. Discussions were had about possible book deals, movie trilogies, copyright issues with the middle school kids (yeah, we were bored, and SARS made things even more boring).
So what is the meaning behind the title of my blog? I’m not really sure. To find out, you would have to go back to the source: that middle school near the smelly pharmaceutical factory in Zibo, Shandong province. There you might still find the twisted little mind with a penchant for fur and weaponry. You can ask him what it’s all about. Ape Rifle Lives.