It has been a very bright and brilliant day today, but yesterday was a white day. I stayed in all morning, eking out a couple of hard-won paragraphs in Chinese. Can I say that if writing a dissertation in English is hard, trying to write similar level scholarship in Chinese is like pulling teeth and bashing your head against bricks, at the same time? Maybe that's the secret to writing a dissertation. First, try writing it in your non-native language. Then it's such an extravagant joy to get back to your native language that all the anxiety simply melts away. I can dream, can't it?
In the late afternoon, I rode my back to the library for a book I needed in order to eke out the next couple paragraphs. On the way over a few flakes of snow started to fall, but then no more fell. I felt oddly good. It's nice to break the routine, and to actually get some of the dread writing done.
At the library, I got distracted. I have recently discovered the "Social Science Area." It is one of the rooms of the library, none of which allow you to bring in bags or books but some of which, like this one, have open stacks. It is a strange combination room, containing philosophy, history, and literary criticism in Chinese and Western languages. I find it especially amusing that literary criticism counts as a social science. I think that in Chinese the line between literary criticism and history is just too fine to be able to sort them out, and that's why they're rubbing elbows in the Social Science Area.
And what else was there? A defective copy of Gregory Maguire's Wicked--apparently someone understood it as being a historical work? I was tempted, but given that it's missing pages 187-215, I decided it would just be a recipe for suffering. Instead I opted, at random, to look at Bobbie Ann Mason's Feather Crowns. This was not a real copy of the book, but actually just a bound, uncorrected proof. Given that the book actually came out in 1994, the proof probably should have been destroyed (as instructed on the cover) some years ago. But instead here it is in a Chinese university library.
The typeset is awful, but premise eye-catching (based on a true story): woman in rural Kentucky, spring of 1900, gives birth to quintuplets. This being before fertility treatments made quints a relatively familiar phenomenon. It's probably my biological clock acting up, but I'm a sucker for a birth story. Also, it is this sense of, I dunno, American rural peculiarness that ain't quite wholesome but it ain't wholly unwholesome either. It reminds me of my childhood on the farm. I was hooked and read right up until closing time, but I was wise enough not to check the book out. Hey, it's nearly 500 pages long. If I checked it out I just would have kept on reading all night.
Instead, just in time, I remembered to borrow the book I was actually there for. Then I collected my bike and took it over to the shop. It was becoming a matter of urgency for me to put some air in the front tire. I was determined to do this on my own this time! And I did it, after only a little fumbling. The way the nozzle works is pretty confusing, but I think I have it down now.
Flushed with victory, I headed off to get a little dinner before going home to get some work done. I decided on jiaozi, that is, bits of minced filling wrapped in a thin flour case and boiled or steamed (these were boiled). I always feel that eating them is healthy, though I don't know for sure. In any case, they are satisfying but simple.
I had just sat down and got started when a skinny little guy sat down across from me. This is not uncommon when the cafeteria is crowded, as it was. But it turned out this one actually had sat there because he wanted to strike up a conversation. I was wary. While Chinese women are generally fine, Chinese men who randomly start talking to you can be problematic.
This one turned out to be fine though. Actually, he was a professor, teaching art I believe. The conversation followed the usual course. He was stunned by how good my Chinese was. I never take this to heart. It has less to do with my Chinese--which is good enough mostly to communicate, but rarely stunning--and more to do with my face. If I had an ABC face, people would be stunned by how bad my Chinese was. Though probably they wouldn't strike up a conversation with me in the first place, as I would be less conspicuous.
Anyway, skinny art professor recounted going out drinking with a fellow art professor, an Italian who spoke no Chinese. Neither of them spoke much English either, and so after getting frustrated with English, they switched to drawing pictures. I actually found that story very charming.
Skinny art professor then observed that all American seem to love exercise. I was non-committal. He has a friend who runs marathon, he said. Do I run? Not at all, I said. I used to when I was in high school, I added jokingly, but now I'm too fat and it makes my feet hurt. Skinny art professor considered me. I suppose you are a little fat, he owned.
Cultural difference cracks me up. I am quite used to being told I am a little fat by now, though I admit that the first time it was a bit of a shock!
Skinny art professor had much to say on the subject of marathons. I contributed my standard response, which is that they can't be good for you since the first person to run one died of it. That's about all I have to say on the subject of marathons. The 10ks of my adolescence have convinced me that running a marathon is something I don't need to be spending my time and energy doing, even if it is good for one's confidence or mental focus or whatever.
After all this, I went home and played more solitaire than I should, and read more blogs than I should, and generally didn't get anything done. Talking to strangers gets me all jittery, and I have to spend a lot of time calming down. I did finally get some more written, though.
Then today, this bright gorgeous day with only a slight scum of brown haze on the horizon, I rode my bike to my Chinese lesson, practicing the poem in my head but not getting lost this time. Colin says, when I get very depressed about the air pollution, that it is a solvable problem and once they start using catalytic converters things will improve considerably. Though not burning high sulfur coal would also be a good step.
The lesson went well as always and along the way AL attempted to convince me of the following proposition as regards being and catching cold:
When you get warm, your pores open up. Then if you are exposed to a cold wind, the wind comes into your pores before they have a chance to close. Then they close, and the wind stays trapped in your body. Then it moves around in there and causes your body to hurt, and also may cause you to get sick. Then she further tried to convince me that the application of vacuum cups could get rid of the wind that is trapped in your body, and although it hurts in the process, after that it feels very good. Also they cause giant hickeys, though naturally that wasn't the word she used!
I am fairly skeptical about the whole thing. She argued that if you haven't "caught a wind", the vacuum cup doesn't stick or do anything but just slides off. But if you have, it makes you feel very good afterwards. Why should that be, if there weren't something to the idea that the wind gets in you? And furthermore, Chinese have been doing this for centuries, and they wouldn't do it if it didn't work, right?
If anyone out there has thoughts on this wind and vacuum cup thing, feel free to share them!
Meanwhile, she says she will try it out on me one of these weeks, which I will be very interested to see.
I am very cavalier about getting cold. I feel that it's a matter of what you're used to. Changes of season are hard on me, and I am invariably more cold in November than I am in January, even though objectively it's much colder in January. At this point, I'm so used to the temperature--and it has been quite a mild winter so far anyway--that it hardly bothers me at all. Also, my body doesn't hurt if I get cold. Why, sometimes I even go from the library to the coffee-shop without retrieving my coat from the library locker. It's only a few steps after all. I prefer to think of it as "bracing." AL says I have then most certainly caught a wind. We shall see!
I was very tired by the time I biked all the way back home, although my bike is in reasonable working order. An hour and a half of biking a one-speed up and down overpasses is quite a lot when you only do it once a week! Especially when one is a little bit fat. Though AL says that I have lost quite a lot of weight. I think I'm gaining it back since my discovery of deep fried eggs. But since I have no scale here, there's no way to tell and that's okay by me.
Anyway, I rested at home for an hour or so, ate an omelet (deep fried eggs) and headed to the library. Yes, I confess, the fact that I wanted to read some more of Feather Crowns DID play a part in my decision-making process. But hey, I photocopied one article that bears a methodological relationship to my dissertation, and I checked out another book that I need for this stage of the writing. Then I abandoned myself to the joys of historical fiction for an hour and a half. It's Friday! The babies are born and the problem of getting them enough milk is looming serious. Every time they need to eat (and that's often), it's a big worry. The doctor think they pick out the strongest ones and let the others die. The neighbors keep bringing over cow's milk. The only nursing mothers that live near enough to help out are an unwed one and a someone's black servant. Is it okay to get the black woman's help? For some reason, this is an issue for them, and they're not sure, but they do. They were just trying to get the babies started on cow's milk (but how to get the cow's milk into the babies? no bottles in sight) when that distinctive music started up, and the canned announcement that it was time to leave the library. If I hadn't already reached my five book check-out limit, I surely would have borrowed the book.
And why, as an aside, do I have a five book checkout limit, dammit?! It is very clear from other people who borrow books that THEY don't have a five book checkout limit. Furthermore, I had a pay a heft 500 RMB deposit, which they didn't have to pay (that's over $60)--which is enough to buy a whole stack of uncorrected proofs and defective printings, even in the US, so I don't know what they're worrying about! Grumble. How can a body live with only five library books at a time? I've had to pirate several just so I don't have to do a juggling act.
(Getting a whole book photocopied here is lamentably easy and economical. You drop it off at the copy shop and collect it the next day, slightly enlarged and nicely bound--with glue and a card-stock cover and everything--all for about $2.50. It's nearly irresistible, but I only do it for books I couldn't buy or which would cost me more than $50. Because face it, until or unless I have a research budget, $50 books are off limits.)
Here is the picture of the tall tall trees on the campus near the library. I took it just as I was coming out at 4:30, and the light was pretty. It was such a clear day it might almost have been autumn.I ran out of cash recently and had to get more (I tend to do that only twice a month), so today I walked around with that rich payday feeling. I'd been stringing out my last hundred for days, mostly just from laziness. But on the way home I bought jello and chocolate and a whole jin of roasted chestnuts. How much is a jin? Search me. Something like a pound or a kilogram, but I'm not sure which or whether it's not something different entirely. I just know that a jin of chestnuts costs 10 RMB and it's about twice as much as I could eat in one sitting, if I were making a whole meal of chestnuts.
But I did not make a whole meal of roasted chestnuts. As it was still early, and I was still full from lunch, I made another bean soup. This one was the best yet, with garlic, rosemary, some roasted chestnuts, and--in the last stage--some peppers and onions that I had fried up. It was done by 8:30 and now my stomach is happy! Colin watched me eat it over skpe, and got really jealous. :)
1 comment:
Is it BUAA?
oh，I'm sure!!!
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