A White Day

It's my own fault for writing that fog was my favorite weather.

Monday was a very white day, a thick fog outside my window like marble pressing in through the glass. Cold mist all morning, that even found its way into buildings. And still into the afternoon things looked soft but cold. Leaves are coming down without fanfare. The north wind is bringing a change of season.

The night before I had asked the waiter, "Is it fall or is it winter?"
"It's fall, but winter will be here very soon. Seasons," he added, "are only a habit. We still have everything."
Things are funnier and much more profound when taken out of context.

Barely, I made it to my 8 AM class on time, drinking hot tea from my thermos bottle. I listened with good attention and understood most things. After class I asked a silly question about a book, and the answer was no.

I went to the library. It was so cold. The reference room is only accessible from an outside corridor, and the lockers are there, outside. I got my computer and a book out of my bag and locked up the bag with a tiny lock, and a tiny key. I sat in the reference room, trying to make the most of my time.
An hour later I left for lunch and two librarians who were leaving for lunch too thought I was stealing a book and yelled at me. "It's my book," I said. They inspected it, looking angry. "You should have registered it when you went in," they said, as if this were transparently obvious, and I was no just a fool but dishonest as well. They wanted to take my book away but they couldn't think of a good reason. As if anyone could steal books given that no concealing bags are allowed in and all the library books have magnetic strips and elaborate detectors. Life in a closet totalitarian state.

This is a courtyard near the classroom. It is a semi-official semi-unofficial space. The grate, the one golden tree, laundry hanging, bare stark box of a building.

I had eggplant for lunch, because a lot of other people were having it. It was good, but had a lot of garlic. I smelled it all afternoon.

YHz's class at 12:30, after a two-week hiatus. The Koreans were rowdy, and everyone upset when she collected the assignment from those who had it and told those who didn't that they could have another week. They pretend that they want leniency but just like little kids, there's a part of them that longs for the strictness of consistently applied rules. That is exactly NOT the name of the game around here.

I had a short talk with YHz during the break but she seemed off. Still jet-lagged or is there something changed in her attitude toward me? My Chinese tutor says: "Don't mistake every tree and blade of grass for swords." This is an old Chinese proverb meaning one shouldn't be over-sensitive. Maybe it was the garlic, ha ha. I did ask her a few things, one about getting access to an M.A. thesis from another university, another about attending a conference. The answers were both yes.

Then the undergraduates thronged Yhz--probably she is still jet-lagged--and I went back to my seat and chatted with my classmate WW. WW is a non-traditional student who drives to class. I think she must be the wife of some powerful person. She is bossy and opinionated. She was talking about translation, a conversation we continued after class: she said how what really needs to happen is that there needs to be a new translation of the Shiji, or Hanshu, done by Chinese people, "because it's really impossible for Americans to understand the cultural subtext and really tell the stories as they should be told. Then an American should check it over." I said that cultural subtext is something that we (Americans who study China) are constantly working to learn. She said it was impossible. Only a Chinese person could do the job right. "After all, that language--it's even hard for us." (Let alone you poor loser barbarians.) "Fortunately," I said tactfully, "there are many good commentaries on these works to help us ALL figure out what they are trying to say." She made dismissive noises and returned to her theme of how a Chinese person should really undertake this task.

I changed tactics and said that, indeed, the Hanshu is a woefully undertranslated text. "There are quite a lot of Shiji translations," I started to say. "They're all BAD," she cut in. I wanted to ask, had she read them herself? I seriously doubted it. But I was on good behavior and suggested only that some were quite scholarly and well-informed. She made more dismissive noises. I asked which professor she had been talking to about this. She was evasive, but made some indications that it was YHz. I was annoyed but didn't show it. I only said, conciliatingly, that it's true that a bad translation is very unfortunate, a waste of everyone's time and effort. But I felt very angry.

Colin's l'esprit d'escalier (upon hearing my sad tale): Yep, it's true--only a person from that culture could do justice to this ancient Chinese work. So what we really need to do is dig up someone from the Han dynasty to do the translation. Failing that…

Anyway, translation is scut work.

I spent the hour between classes working on some background research for my dissertation.

ZM's history of literature class was beautiful as it always is. On this occasion he discussed Su Shi's shi poems, especially the short and charming and rather prosaic ones, and some prose. He did not discuss the "Rhapsody on the Red Cliffs" because everyone in the class had it memorized. I only fell asleep once, for only five minutes or so. I only lost one poem.

I had grabbed a bit to eat before class, but I thought I'd grab one after too, soup and a roll and I also wanted a little bowl of fruit. I swiped my card fine to pay for the soup and roll, but when I went to the separate stand where the fruit is, my card wouldn't work. I had just refilled it, so I knew it wasn't out. "You need a password," the girl stated. "I don't have a password." "A password, you need a password." "I've never needed a password before. I didn't need a password when I bought this just now," I gestured to the soup. The shades of willful unreason came sliding down behind her eyes. "A password," she said again. I think the real problem was that my card was slightly bent. But she displayed the price on the screen and said that was what I had to pay, somehow or other. "Can you take cash?" "No." Oh, forget it.

I had my soup and bread and headed home. What a cold night it was, after a cold day.

Accidentally, I stayed up until 1:30 in the morning reading blogs. I didn't mean to. The time just slid away.

"Let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again."--Moby Dick, "The Whiteness of the Whale"