Fourth Day of Classes: Getting Selective, Don Quixote, the Book Draft

Yesterday morning was a continuation of "out of the loop"--I went to find a class on Song poetry and ended up in a building all full of construction workers and terrifically noxious chemical smells. There were other students in there trooping up and down the stairs, so I was temporarily fooled. But I think the thing with the other students was that they were just as confused as I. The building was being renovated, clearly, but the construction workers didn't try to prevent anyone going in or out. They just looked on patiently and a bit dully, probably high on the fumes!

So I schlepped over to the Chinese Department again, and noted the room change, and then trudged over to the place where the new room was, arriving about 10 minutes late by this time. The class turned out to be way over my head. It was one of those things were graduate students are used as slave labor for the production of some publishing project. Of course it is very educational for the graduate students too--not saying that it isn't. In fact, under the right circumstances I would be very happy to take part in some such collective project. But not in a subject I know nothing about, and which has nothing really to do with my dissertation. I ducked out in the half-time break and went back to the class I had been skipping to try out the Song poetry class.

That was part two of the "History of Chinese Historiography" Class, which I had found so incomprehensible on the first day. I was curious to see if I would still find it incomprehensible, and sure enough, I did! Not wholly, of course. I listened very carefully, and ascertained that whenever he touched upon a text I knew something about, I could understand what he was saying. But I didn't get any more out of that than I already knew. It's kind of like the old joke about Classical Chinese: "Classical Chinese is easy, as long as you already know what it says." I won't say the Historiography professor was speaking in classical Chinese, but he was very difficult to understand. I think I will just give up that class. I don't see that I'm going to get anything out of it.

Today I was very much more organized about what to do with the time between classes. I think I'm getting the hang of things at last. I went to the cafeteria and had an excellent vegetarian eggplant dish with a nice crusty bread patty (yeah I know that sounds weird but I don't know how else to describe it). Then I headed north a bit, past the statue of Cervantes and toward a small pond that is slightly detached from, and much closer than, the Unnamed Lake. A note on the statue of Cervantes. It is funny to find it there. As I may have mentioned earlier, one of the people giving the tour (trying to be helpful) told us he was some sort of Spanish ruler. Actually, he just wrote a book about a loser. I once wrote a little story in Chinese, an homage to Don Quixote. Therein, I invented my own translation of the name, Dong Qixiu 董齊修, which excited quite a lot of comment among my teachers, though not one of them realized that it was supposed to have anything to do with Don Quixote--I clearly had no grasp of the principles of allusion through partial-phonetic translation. They did think it was a marvelous name, though, and wanted to know where I got it.

The assignment had been, "write a story about someone who seems foolish but is really smart." I wracked my brains for a long time over this assignment, and eventually thought of a story to fit it. The hero of my story, Dong Qixiu, was once out walking with a con-man, and the con-man sold him the Brooklyn Bridge for quite a large sum of money. Everyone laughed at Dong Qixiu for being such a foolish and gullible fellow. But he seemed not to hear them, and instead would insist on taking any new acquaintance with him to stroll on "his" bridge, remarking on its excellent points, and expressing to one and all the joy he took in owning it. To the end of his days he could not be made to understand that he had been cheated. And who's to say that he was. Perhaps it was Dong Qixiu who was smart and the world that was foolish. (This is just a paraphrase of course, not a direct translation.) Anyway, it was just a silly little story I wrote for Chinese class, but the surprising appearance of Cervantes on a Chinese university campus brought it to mind.

I found a nice spot by the pond, and sat there on a thin slab of rock that projected amusingly out over the water. The picture at left is not a very good picture of me, and I am crouching over so my head won't get cut out of the photo (the camera was balanced on a rather low rock), not because my posture is that bad. All the same, it's the only one that captures the amusingness of this seat. I sat there for some time, writing about people in my "person book." The only disadvantage to an otherwise lovely spot was that there was a next of tiny ants quite nearby, and tiny ants kept running up my arms and biting me. Ordinarily, this would upset me most extremely, but I think my standards have gotten lower, or my tolerance of discomfort higher, since I have become a foreign exchange student. I just thought about the book I had recently finished reading, Angels and Insects, in which ant nests play an interesting role, and I didn't make war with the ants or change my seat to escape them. I only squished them if they bit me. (By the way, I thought the first half of Angels and Insects pretty interesting, if long-winded, but the second half I didn't like at all.)


By some miracle, I actually found my afternoon class. It was the second session of the classical Chinese class, and I had carefully prepared the text for it. In fact, I had prepared it so carefully that I was rather bored. The class, a quite a large lecture, consisted of the professor "lecturing on the text," which means, translating it into modern Chinese in a quite conversational and amusing manner. This is a skill all its own in Chinese pedagogy, and done well it can quite fun. The downside, though, is that while I understood the classical Chinese just fine, I couldn't do so well with the rapid-fire modern Chinese--I missed all the jokes. What good is that? So I'm not sure it's so worthwhile for me to continue with that class. The only really useful thing he did was that for every grammar point or notable usage, he wrote on the board a list of examples from other texts where the word is used in the same (or in an alternate) way. I think that this is good pedagogy for classical Chinese, though it only works, of course, if your students already have enough vocabulary and skills to decipher the other examples, the ones they hadn't prepared. Some of the students were in quite a panic, as became clear when they encircled the professor during the intermission, waving their open books and asking questions at top speed. He answered these for some time, and when he returned to the podium he said something conciliatory about how there was no need to understand everything all at once, and people should freak out about the pace and should just get what they can out of it.

I haven't decided whether I should continue with this class. It is not being taught by the famous person who is listed as teaching it in the course schedule, and whose class is reputed to start with oracle bone texts. This class starts with the Zuo Chronicle, considerably later, and is mostly only useful insofar as it causes me to go carefully through some texts, and also for the examples. But the examples only do me any good when he writes them on the board, and occasionally he doesn't write them on the board, saying almost gleefully that the foreign exchange students will of course have trouble but he doesn't want to take the time. So I am undecided. I may skip a few and try other things that happen at the same time, then maybe come back if I feel like it and there's nothing better. At least the classroom assignment for this one seem relatively stable.

Given that all these courses were not looking to work out, I decided that I should make a serious effort to take the course on Laozi Dao De Jing by the famous LL, even if he didn't want me there. So long as he didn't actually drive me personally away, I decided, I would stay. And I would make an effort to be a productive, contributing member of his class. To this end, I actually sent a message to my classmate KS (yes, my former roommate, to those of you who were wondering!) asking advice about preparation. I knew KS would have done his homework, and he had. When he called me back he had several good suggestions.

I bought some books on the way home, by way of furthering my LL class aspirations. I have decided that it is incumbent on me, it is actually my duty, to spend at least 100 RMB per day on books. After all, it's not like I'm just getting them for pleasure. They are books for work, and I am currently assembling my professional library. Besides, if KS can spend 100-200 RMB every day on food, I should be able to spend that much on books (since I only spend 20 RMB/day on food, if that!). For those of you who might have seen the wonderful anime series Read or Die, think "the book draft"--a tremendous tide of books that comes pouring out of the three sisters' house every time someone opens the door. Then you will begin to understand what Colin's and my apartment will look like next year. Colin is already shaking in his shoes!