Chest Cold, Basking, Literature and Reality

For several days my lungs have been feeling uncomfortable. At first I thought it was because of the lack of rain and increasingly bad air that results from that. But then it rained, and my chest was still feeling bad--if anything worse. Finally yesterday I had to admit that I had a nasty chest-cold, complete with sore throat and disgusting wet cough. Still, I made an effort to go to class yesterday morning. But I wasn't too crushed when the class wasn't there.

I had my bike, so I went slowly out the east gate and then south toward the Hypermart. I thought I might pick up a few things, including some vinegar to clean the turtle tank and maybe some treats for them and me. Traffic around the Hypermart was insane. And remember, I'm on a bicycle, and there's a dedicated bike lane. Still, I got stuck in traffic for some time, and was getting pretty thirsty. A melon-slice seller behind me started up his pitch "yi kuai yi kuai YI KUAI" (1 RMB) in such a lusty loud voice that I turned around. Sometimes you can tell by looking at it that it's about the best melon you'll ever taste. So I had a slice. "How is it?" he asked proudly, already knowing the answer. "It's really good!" I said, "better than the others'." It was. It was perfectly sweet all through, and crisp with cool freshness, very soothing to my poor aching throat. Of course, it was a trick to enjoy this treat while maneuvering my bicycle through traffic, so after I crossed the street I paused to finish eating it. A policeman materialized next to me. "You know you shouldn't eat those," he said. "They come from--" I think he said Xinjiang? I think he said they're somehow dirty? It wasn't clear just what the objection was, but it was clear that I wasn't supposed to be eating them. I protested, "But this one is especially good." He just shook his head and walked off. If policemen really don't want you to eat them, they shouldn't let people sell them on every street corner. But maybe he was just trying to be friendly. Anyway, I will never find another melon as good as that one, so I might as well give them up.

I puzzled over greens in the Hypermart for quite some time. According to websites like this one, turtles are supposed to be offered some greens, and they give lists of good and bad ones. But that list doesn't mention whether such greens as dragon-this or unidentifiable-grass-radical that are okay or not. I eventually settled on kongxin cai (empty-stem vegetable) because it seemed the most harmless. I didn't succeed in finding any fishy things that looked healthful for turtles. The website says that prey should be live or freshly killed, but these guys are too small to take anything but the smallest live prey, and I'm not up to chopping things up just yet. Maybe later little turtles. For now, how about turtle pellets? When I got home, I managed to catch them basking. Yes, they can climb the plate-ramp! I saw Queequeg up there balanced on the bottom of his shell with all his four limbs poking straight out. He looked incredibly comical, and even more so a second later when he saw me and scrambled hurriedly back into the water. When I leave them alone and close the curtain in front of them, they climb out again, which is how I got these pictures, though I apologize for the quality--they are really fast snaps!

By the time I had cleaned out their tank, I was pretty exhausted. So I lay in bed for several hours with my computer, reading The Scarlet Letter. I have been really grateful for online literature sites like this one, because buying books in English here seems expensive and pointless. But I still do crave books in English even though I ought to be concentrating on improving my Chinese. In this case, it was actually for the sake of the Tuesday literature class that I like so much, so it was somewhat justified. As for The Scarlet Letter, which I had never read before--it's quite a story, actually. Hawthorne is dislikable when he's too preachy or sentimental, but he knows how to do a plot. I will add, though, that as much as I like online books, the ads that appear beside them are sickening:

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The last one was especially persistent in appearing at the bottom of each chapter. So after each chapter, you get the message: "Don't Waste Your Time!" --i.e., don't waste your time reading this thing (as well as trying to write an essay on it). Just get one from us. Then you don't even have to read it.

You know you've got uncomfortably comfortable with a country that does not guarantee freedom of speech when you catch yourself thinking, "They should shut down websites like that!"

I hadn't quite finished the novel when I had to leave for my 2:40 class. I admit it was a real effort to drag myself out of bed and down to my bicycle. But I was kind of late, so I had to pedal fast, veering through traffic with an almost Chinese recklessness. Also, the class would have to be on the 5th floor (no elevator). I was at least 10 minutes late by the time I got there. It was to have been LL's class on the Dao de jing, and it wasn't there. At first I had some dark suspicions such as that he had moved the class without telling anyone but his favored students, in order to reduce enrollment. But then I saw a (rare!) note on the board saying that he had fallen ill and there would be no class today. I could empathize. I was feeling pretty ill myself.

I bought some more green oranges on campus, and then went coughingly back to my room and finished The Scarlet Letter, rolled around miserably, looked at stuff on the internet, and sneaked peeks at the basking turtles. I felt pretty wimpish, and almost decided not to go to the evening literature class. But by 6 PM I was also feeling pretty bored, just a bit too scatter-brained to do any work, and kind of lonely. So I thought I'd take myself out to dinner and then see how I felt.

The place I decided to try was a little restaurant quite nearby. It turned out to be a bit of a fancy place, with a big fat picture menu and a 1:1 staff/customer ratio. They always look at me funny when I come to eat alone. I looked through the menu while the waiter hovered attentively. I told him apologetically that I would need some time and he said that was fine but kept on hovering. I saw an awful thing on the menu, which was one of the exact same kind of turtle I had seen in the Walmart, except this one was "swimming" in red broth surrounded by vegetables. I turned the page fast. Why do I somehow feel less bad about ordering lamb--a mammal like me? I guess I just have a greater affinity with reptiles, or maybe it was the fact that the little soft-shell was served whole. Anyway, the lamb and greens I ordered to go with it were pretty good and nourishing, but really extremely spicy! And not just red-pepper (though there was plenty of that) but also numb-spice.

I took a long time to eat the big dinner, but by the time I was done, I felt quite refreshed. Maybe because my mouth was burning so much I didn't feel my lungs aching. So I walked down to the campus and went to the class (which is from 7:10-8:50). I'm really glad I did. The professor got quite inspired discussing some poems by Li Bai and Du Fu, and although I didn't know them well, and had barely passed my eyes over them, I felt inspired as well. All the same, I thought he was introducing an excessively simplistic theory about literature. It goes as follows:

What is the relationship of literature to reality?
It's not simple imitation. He offers examples of literature that contains fantastical elements. Then he offers more subtle examples of realist and naturalist works that pretend to strive for nothing more than faithful mimesis, but shows how they differ in artistically superior ways from the writers' actual experiences.
It's not just an expression of the writer's emotions. He makes some arguments about how no one exists in a vacuum, and life experiences will always affect their work.
Literature surpasses reality through the act of creation. A work of literature creates something that was not there before.

All well and good. But it is an awfully simplistic idea of reality, as if reality were some transparent pool we could all look into. Furthermore, once the act of creation has occurred, doesn't the product become part of reality? Or is reality just material reality, in which case the problem would be much bigger than the relation of literature and reality, but really more like the relationship of reality to mind, or to anything abstract. So my answer to his repeated question, "What is the relationship of literature to reality?" would, I suppose be something more like "Literature is one part of reality, maybe one that helps us understand and organize our perceptions of other parts of reality in non-obvious ways." Something like that? Of course even though I might be able to approximate that in Chinese, I don't get the sense that it would be appropriate for me to say in class. After all, it's just an undergraduate survey, aimed more at getting people to appreciate literature and have at least some concept of what it's about, than at profound theorizing. Anyway, the fellow's strength is in discussing the concrete, which is mostly just good practice for my listening comprehension, as he has a beautiful voice and way of speaking.