China hates the blues. (And don't even get them started on the White Stripes)

(I know, don't you enjoy my rampant generalizations for an entire people based on my very narrow experiences in the classroom? In my defense, collectivity is a prized element of the Communist credo.)

We've been studying music for the last few weeks, so one of the things I did was put together an audio slide show of different musical genres, from jazz, blues and bluegrass to rock, rap and reggae. (On a side note: Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a somewhat inoffensive clip of rap music? Happily, I don't think a single student knew what 'ejaculation' was.)

So I threw a little Muddy Waters in there to illustrate the blues, and almost without exception, the students would shudder and wince and write down words like 'strange' and 'ugly' when asked to respond. Finally, in one class I pleaded, "Doesn't anybody like the blues?" Silent stares. "You guys are breaking my frickin' heart."

This, they found hilarious. Hearty-guffaw, slap-eachother-on-the-back funny.

(I should explain, to this point they have largely ignored my muttered asides. Sample monologue: "Can anybody tell me the answer to such-and-such? Raise your hand. I'll give someone 100 yuan to raise your hand right now. Who am I kidding, you're not going to raise your hands. You never raise your hands. You're just not big hand-raisers."

They don't even blink.)

The White Stripes represented for rock'n'roll, and aside from a few rebel rockers in the class, mostly earned looks of dismay. A few girls in the front put their hands over their ears. 'Too loud,' they wrote.

Now, bluegrass they absolutely loved. Give those kids a little hillbilly banjo music, and they'll rock out in their seats all day. Johnny Cash was also a big hit, though Bob Marley and reggae were not.

When asked who they thought was the best musical performer of all time, about 80 percent of the students said Michael Jackson, followed by some unexpectedly robust support for Ludwig Van Beethoven, and a few dark-horse votes for John Denver ("Country Road" is a karaoke favorite out here.)

Most popular of all? A screening of "School of Rock," on the somewhat shaky justification that it was about music, and was in English, hence belonged in the music unit of my oral English class. And it wasn't the 'humorfulness' that won them over, it was the heart-wrenching tale of a young man's struggle to overcome obstacles in pursuit of his dream -- a fresh interpretation of the Jack Black classic, if ever I heard one. (Although, when asked, most of them wrote that the character they liked the best was the "class monitor.")

Here's a musical sampling from the last few weeks: The funeral horn players; a student named Allen who can't speak a word of English but turns out to have this amazing voice; the Shem women, who sing plateau songs in the office all day every day; and an in-class rendition of "We Will Rock You" that didn't quite get to the heart of the assignment, but was entertaining enough to get a passing grade anyway.