Break

I'm back in Tucson for a month.  My life here isn't that interesting so I'm going to take a break from the blog for a while.  I'll be heading out to Hong Kong on January 19th, though, and from there I will be taking trips to Macau, Thailand, and probably Taiwan before settling in Guilin until June, so check back in.

婚礼 (Wedding)

Today I went to a wedding.  It started in a spray of bubbles and ended with a piggy back ride, and at some point in between I suspect that two people got married.

The ceremony was held in a massive, three story restaurant/ “fishing village,” and the agenda consisted of, among other things, balloon-blowing contests, a woman in knee boots and short shorts gyrating to nineties pop, and rounds of “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”  The most impressive display of the evening was put on by the newlyweds themselves.  The bride, dressed in a red sequined dress (her third dress of the evening, after a white and a baby blue one) stood up on a chair, a glass of wine gripped in her hand, and held onto the groom’s shoulder as he stood below her.  Then she put all the wine in her mouth.  As the crowd went wild she leaned over, raised her eyebrows, and spit the wine in a jet straight into the upturned mouth of the groom.  Not a drop was spilled.

The food was exciting, too.  We ate cow veins, lake snakes, and, in a move that earned a gasp from both my host sister and myself, little turtles that were served to us individually in small ceramic bowls.  I stuck to the pumpkin.

最后一午饭 (Last Lunch)

Today my host father invited me to a “small lunch with friends” in Gaochun, a city about a mile outside of Nanjing that has been famous for its crabs for at least a millennium.  The restaurant was in the city’s old town.   My father, his friends, and myself arrived to find four young women waiting for us, two of them ethnic minorities and one of them wearing a lime green jacket and golden contact lenses.  The lime green jacket girl seated herself next to the man who I soon found out was my father’s boss.  As the meal went on it became clear that she had some special relationship with him, and I assumed that she was his daughter because she was easily several decades younger, but that opinion changed when I saw them kissing on the balcony of the villa where my father’s office is located.

Incidentally, my father’s office is in a villa, and is surrounded by a moat full of fish and shrimp.  And the company car?  A Roll’s Royce, which I got to ride in all afternoon.

幼儿园 (Kindergarten)

Yesterday I helped a friend teach a kindergarten class.  It was held at a public school and started at five and went until six at night, and it was meant as an afterschool activity for the kids who arrived at school at seven in the morning.  The agenda for the day consisted of construction paper Christmas trees.  Naturally, my composure and brawniness seems to intimidate the students, and because of that and because of my masterful craftsmanship I was soon relegated to gluing ornaments on trees while the kids reviewed the English vocabulary they had learned.  It all seemed like fun and games until the parents showed up; as the students cleaned up the room, their mothers and fathers paged through the English flash cards my friend had creating, copying down all the words so that their kindergartener could review the vocabulary at home.

  This statue is along the river near my apartment.  I think it might be more appropriate in the Sex Museum, though, possibly in the subliminal art category.

名胜古迹 (Scenic Places of Historical Importance)

Today I walked to where the Qinhuai River meets the Yangtze, a location so important to Nanjing’s history that the government has erected an enormous sculpture of shooting red stars and dammed the smaller river.  The water pours over the dam in mossy green waves.  Then it slowly circles around for a while, foaming and not really going anywhere, until it final meanders into the Yangtze and floats by the rusty ships on the shore and the dead trees on the banks.  It would have been a depressing scene, except that there were several men on the bank flying identical kites and loud nationalist music playing over some hidden loudspeakers. 

During my walk, I saw two dogs dressed in camouflage.  We must not become incautious. 

Research has informed me that the statue commemorates a battle between the People's Liberation Army and the Koumintang  

地锅 (Diguo)

Tonight several friends and I went out for what will likely be our last diguo of the semester.  Diguo is a large wok filled with beef broth, piled high with a delightful array of ingredients (potatoes, noodles, cabbage, bitter melon, and unidentifiable spices to name a few), and then covered with thin pancake noodle thingies.  It tastes like a really thick, savory soup that everyone can share, and if you order the chicken one you can fight over who gets the head and the feet. Tonight we ordered a beef and potato one and a cabbage and noodle one, both of them with extra pumpkin added, and a plate of lotus root on the side.  It was delicious.   

皮肤问题 (Skin Problem)

Two nights ago my program held an elegant farewell dinner for homestay families and because the conversation had died down and because my host mother was bored she took out her camera, leaned across the table, pushed aside an arrangement of purple flowers, and took a picture of a zit on my cheek.   “Look at this,” she said, viewing the image on her camera’s screen.  My host father peered in too, and then they both looked up at me again, brows furrowed and mouths smiling, assuring themselves that the blemish wasn’t a trick of the camera.

My family has avidly followed the rise and fall of this pimple.  They show no compunction about asking about it when I see them, or about pointing it out to guests who come over for dinner (“Remember Kevin, the American?  Look at his face!”).  I attribute this fanaticism to two characteristics of Chinese culture.  First, they tend to be very open about every aspect of one’s appearance, as evidenced by our dinnertime chat one night about my sister’s armpit hair, complete with comparisons between her shaving proficiency and my mother’s.  Second, Chinese skin tends to fall into two categories: completely unblemished and utterly wracked by acne.  It is extremely uncommon to see a person with one or two pimples on their face, so my single, unaccompanied zit has become just another feature that separates me from the millions and millions of people living around me.

Another interesting tidbit, and reason for the picture: according to a survey a classmate completed, when Chinese people are asked to use one word to describe their country, "dragon" is one of the most common answers, regardless of the fact that it is not really an adjective.

6:35

My alarm clock goes off at 6:35 on school days. It is programmed to sound like cows, ringing bells and dance beats and I don’t know how to change it, so for a brief moment every morning I feel as though I have been transplanted to some strange disco farmhouse. Then I remember that no, I haven’t, and that I still have a freezing cold morning ahead of me. The worst part of it is the darkness. The sun doesn’t rise until I’m already on my bicycle headed to school, a big red spot in a grey sky that I can look straight at without going blind.

The good news is that I finished classes yesterday. So long, 6:35!

进步 (Progress)

I have only 10 days left in China (before I come back for another 120), and although I will leave with a wealth of memories, my progress has not been as exponential as I had hoped.  I still cannot successfully order fried noodles on my first try.  I can’t understand the radio broadcasts that I listen to in taxi cabs, either, nor can I read the newspaper articles that we study in class. It’s at times like this that Chinese seems insurmountable.  It’s not that I’m bad at it, because I’m keeping up with the rest of the class, it’s just that the language is so intricate, so memorization-intensive, and so basically different from English that I find it difficult to retain the material I’ve learned.  We recently studied a saying that goes, “those who know how to be satisfied will always be happy,”; it seems this might be the most healthy attitude to take towards learning the language.

On the bright side, though, I wrote 800 characters of my final paper in just half an hour this afternoon.  And that newspaper article?  It was about test tube babies, clones, and embryonic malformations, three topics that I doubt will prove especially useful in my future career.  

The picture is an advertisement for study abroad in Norway.  It describes my experience pretty well, though, except that it leaves out all the sitting around in a ski jacket, watching TV shows, and brushing away the crumbs that fall on my stomach from the cookies I eat (currently watching: The OC, Battlestar Gallactica, Glee, True Blood, So You Think You Can Dance and, every so often, Big Love).

南瓜战争 (Pumpkin War)

China has amazing pumpkins.  Oval shaped and brown on the outside, they don’t look like American pumpkins, but they are unbelievable.  Every so often my family has pumpkin soup for dinner, and even though it’s really just a bunch of pumpkin pieces floating around in some warm water it sets off a battle at my dinner table.  My mother and father tend to eat it at the beginning of the meal.  It’s a sweet soup, though, so I would rather have it after I have finished all the salty food, but I panic when I see them start it.  It only worsens the problem that my sister, who usually doesn’t eat very much, tends to have the entire bowl suddenly and unpredictably pushed in front of her by my mother at the end of the meal, because it’s one of the few foods that she will eat.  Therefore I have to gauge when it is most advantageous to help myself, and how much I can take without appearing greedy.  This is more stressful than it sounds.  

喝醉的中国人 (Drunken Chinese People)

The official word for ‘drunk’ in Chinese is ‘he zui.’  Several weeks ago I asked my tutor for other, less formal terms.  Plastered?  Smashed?  Wasted?

“No,” she answered.  “Just ‘he zui’.”

I find this dearth of synonyms confusing (and probably not truthful), especially considering how frequently I seem to be surrounded by drunken Chinese people.  At the fancy dinner party I went to last week, one woman became loud and raucous after several shots of baijiu, Chinese hard liquor.  Her performance was nothing, though, compared to the man who started a fight and then collapsed on the floor of the Latin Music Pub, an establishment whose depressing ambiance was only compounded by the inaccuracy of its name.  Most uncomfortable of all, though, was the man who shared a taxi with me two nights ago.  He was passed out in the backseat, and the driver assured me that he wouldn’t mind if we took a little side trip to drop me off at my apartment.  The drunken man’s friends, however, caught us before we left, and had a loud argument with the driver while their girlfriends staggered around in their high heels and threatened to toss their cookies all over the hood of the car.

漫谈性交 （A Casual Talk about Sexual Intercourse)

Yesterday six of my friends and I woke up before sunrise, rode a train for two hours, and then hired a black taxi in order to visit Tongli, a pretty canal town outside of Suzhou and current home of the Chinese Sex Museum.  Although tasteful might not be the best word to describe this establishment, several other adjectives come to mind.  Poetic, perhaps, for gracing several exhibits with beautiful captions like:

“There was a wooden penis inside a wooden pillow and it was used by a nun.”  Eclectic would also be appropriate, considering the baffling display of a T-Rex skeleton battling a Stegosaurus skeleton, or maybe desperate, as evidenced by the innocuous looking flautist sculpture that was labeled, simply,
“a musical prostitute,”  and the innocent chair that “two people could have intercourse on.”  Regardless of the truthfulness of the exhibits, a good time was had by all, and it gave us a chance to rest our feet and listen to the birds in a lovely garden surrounded by enormous genitalia.

餐厅 （Cafeteria)

Today I ate lunch at the school cafeteria.  This experience proved to me that, for all the cultural misunderstandings Chinese and American students will continue to encounter for decades to come, we will always have cafeterias in common.  It was set up like a food court at home, where you could choose whatever ‘restaurant’ had the best looking food and then pay with a special student debit card.  The only real difference was the food itself; understandably, it was all Chinese, and it all appeared to have been recently drenched by an oil typhoon (pun!).  I had a broccoli and meatball dish with a bowl of rice, accompanied by an ice-cold glass bottle of freshly packaged yogurt.