I wouldn't have a picture of my tutor except that she needed one for some public relations purpose, and her camera was out of batteries. Wasn't it sneaky of me to offer my camera for the purpose? I e-mailed her the picture, but now I have one too!New Friday lunch tradition: lunch at Papaya Diner. It becomes a tradition the second time you do it, right? It was almost the end of the tradition, frankly, because the place was so packed with rowdy kids in sloppy school uniforms that it was more like a school lunchroom than a diner. I couldn't get a table and had to sit at the knee-stubbing bar--still contiguous with the room with the kids in it mind you--and then a lady sitting next to me at the bar was rude to the waitress, lit up a cigarette, smoked it, and then left without ordering anything. Not a top-notch Papaya Diner experience. However, the nascent tradition was saved by two things. First, the spaghetti with meat sauce I ordered was absolutely delicious. Sounds simple, right, but oregano is a scarce commodity and there's no pre-made tomato sauce in any of the places I shop, so spaghetti sauce has been out of the question for months. Never thought I'd miss it, but they sure make it good at PD. Then, the waitress apologetically gave me two 2 RMB off my next order coupons as I was going out the door. Now 2 RMB is barely pocket change, but you know, it was the thought that counted. So I'll go back again next week and hope for a table.
From there I went straight over to campus where I spent more than two hours helping HJ with her writing sample. Rough stuff. She wrote her paper on Kafka and the Bible, a complex topic about which I fear she took as being far simpler than I think it really is. Problem the first: she made no distinction between OT and NT. That would have been tricky even if Kafka were a Christian but, I pointed out, he was Jewish. But that was only later in his life, HJ protested. Before that, he was a Christian, right? So I explained, to the best of my own limited knowledge, about ethnic Jews and religious Jews and that it's important not to imply someone was a Christian when he wasn't, and so on. Why? she wanted to know. Ah the fluster of trying to explain a part of your own culture that you have unreflectively absorbed. "The relationship between Christianity and Judaism is something of a sensitive issue," I said, using the term that often gets used in talking about the changing winds of Chinese politics and what you can and can't talk about. It is, though, isn't it, sensitive in sort of that way? Something about which it's somehow easy to go wrong, so you usually don't feel qualified to discuss it…
I was interested to hear the horror stories of how connections can help more than they hurt. If you thought academic politicking in the U.S. was bad…. Professor A promises to get you into very prestigious school X, but refuses to allow his recommendation letter (which you wrote) to be used for any other school but school X, because to apply anywhere else would suggest that you don't believe in Professor A's clout with school X. Then Professor B, your advisor, puts you in essentially the same situations with slightly less prestigious school Y! And since Professors A and B don't get along with each other, there's no hope of being frank about the whole thing and your desire for some kind of safety net--because while connection are important in grad school admissions, everyone has the intuition that something could potentially go wrong somewhere along the line, and then Professor A or B could conveniently forget his promise, or fob you off with some consolation prize that you don't want, or whatever. Good grief.
I suggested: apply to school X with Professor A's letter and school y with Professor B's letter, and rustle up some other letters (I mean, since you write them yourself they're a much smaller deal--all you have to do is get a professor to agree to sign them) for some other schools, and don't tell anyone anything! That's only my intuition, though; in reality I'm not sure what the right answer is. Well, the right answer is to make the best damn application you can so you've a hope of getting in on your own merits. But with a writing sample like that [shakes head]… it read like an undergraduate paper to which I would give a B on a generous day. So I don't know.
At home I rested a bit. I was online when I got the bad news that fellow blogger AT's wife has suffered a final stroke and is now beyond hope, brain-dead. She fell ill some weeks ago of some terrible mysterious infection and the fight to save her life has been tremendous and of course very emotional. After all, she was two years younger than me, and had two little kids and a husband who loved her very much.... The hard-core prayin' people have had to go find something else to pray about, and I'm sad. It would have been worth being proved wrong about the lack of efficacy of prayer, if she actually had made a miraculous recovery. But no alas. It's one of those things that really makes you think about life; I'll leave it at that.
Friday night: LK the sociologist had sent me an e-mail inviting me out to pizza. So I guess I was wrong about our mutual antipathy, or it was an olive branch, or who knows. The restaurant, Kro's Nest, was awesome. It was a tiny piece of America, and one of the better kinds of pieces. Also, the ethnic ratio in it was roughly what you might find in an average American college town, no more that about 20% Asian; funny. The pizza was best in Beijing. It tasted right, and real. The owner himself dropped by for a chat about dogs and cats. I had a double gin and tonic because it was Friday and also because I feel I should get back in training. G&T, what a nice buzz; I'd almost forgot since I hadn't had a drop to drink in over two months! The pizza was so generous that a large was too much for three people. Here's a picture of LK and her friend and a small cat that wasn't quite tame but wasn't quite wild either and seemed to have a fondness for our table. LK does not possess a camera and seemed slightly annoyed by my photographic activities, but aside from that I was on my best behavior and I think it went all right.
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