Shorn and Grouchy

Saturday: I stayed in. I did some work, and also spent a lot of time reading Ursula, Under. I had mixed feelings about Ursula, Under. The author does know some things about China, but there are also some horrible howlers. Probably the worst, which had me howling at least, is that the assertion that the alchemist character Qin Lao had "the same surname as" the First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. Um, no. Qin, from which (it is true) our word China derives, is the name of the First Emperor's original state, which was ruled by his family for generation upon generation. Qin Lao would have heard of the guy. He was the king of the land. In fact, if Qin Lao was living that close in time to the unification, it is highly unlikely that he would have had such a long and peaceful life. As far as I know, alchemists were not exempt from the draft, and there was a lot of war and turmoil going on…

In any case, unless Qin Lao was royalty, he and the First Emperor would probably not have had the same surname, and either way, it would not have been Qin. And then there's the question of where Qin Lao got his surname in the first place. If he was found on a doorstep and adopted by his alchemist teacher, why didn't he take his teacher's surname? That would have been more normal. There are many small consistency problems like that, and others harder to put my finger on. The Chinese parts just didn't feel very…well, very Chinese. I'm not a huge fan of Amy Tan (I tend to prefer Maxine Hong Kingston if I'm going to read Asian-Am lit) but at least she gets the mental voice right.

From all this I conclude that I should just steer clear of American fictional representations of China. They're just not that pleasant for me to read. There's no taste of the exotic for me. I'm living the dream, ha ha, sigh.

The rest of the book was fairy enjoyable, though I found the constant ancestor coincidence-pointing too heavy-handed. The echo and reflection of motifs reminded me a little of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Salt and Rice which I also liked pretty well except for the long religious digressions. He does it with reincarnation instead of relatedness, but the same effect. I liked the mining camp story, despite its being so sad.

I am supposing the author must be a Mormon, given the fact that she has twelve children and an obsession with ancestors. Interestingly, Mormon libraries are the best resource for people who are interested in research topics related to Chinese genealogies. Traditional Chinese families kept careful records called jiapu, but they became a liability during the Cultural Revolution, and somehow or other the Mormons ended up buying up a whole lot of them. You might think you'd want to go to China to study Jiangnan lineages, but no, you're better off going to Utah. Just a by the way. I myself don't actually do that kind of history.

In the evening, I went out and got a haircut. My hair had been getting really shaggy, and I was tired of it. I decided to try the place that just opened up on the ground floor of my building. They didn't give a massage, alas! But they did give a better haircut than the other place and didn't try to talk me into a perm, thank goodness. The guy who cut my hair was charmingly homely, and didn't have that overwrought rock-star look that most male hairdressers do here. He was kind of ugly and wore a baseball cap. It put me at ease and made me feel comfortable. He asked only the usual ordinary questions, so I was able to answer fine, and he quoted Zhuangzi. He flirted with me in a professional, good-natured way: "Is your boyfriend Chinese or American?" "American. How did you know I had a boyfriend?" "All pretty girls have boyfriends!" Like that. Again, just enough to make me feel pretty and to diminish the insecurity of being blind whilst listening to scissors snipping around my ears. Not enough to be uncomfortable.

I don't usually get along very well with hair-dressers of either sex. They usually expect me to care more about my appearance than I actually do--I just don't have anything to say about it, and spend as little time or money on it as possible. This is alienating to people who make a living off people who care about their appearance. Sigh. But this time was okay in that regard. I didn't succeed in taking a good picture of the results--front a little too short, back a little too long, but in general not bad and better than last time I think--but Colin gives it the seal of approval, insofar as he can see via the $7 webcam and the touchy skype connection.

Sunday I left the house early just so I could say I went somewhere. Also I was out of milk, and I can't drink my morning tea without milk, so I thought I'd have it in the coffeeshop instead. I got a couple good hours of work done there, delving into the "events in the life of" the fellow I'm researching. Interesting how we don't have a very good word for that, which in Chinese is the (very commonly heard) nianpu, a chart of years. "Chronological biography" is most descriptive, but a bit clunky sounding. Anyway, here is my computer and the coffeeshop in the background.

I went and had lunch. I was feeling irritable, probably from having coffee instead of tea and having it later than I'm used to (because it ALWAYS takes me too long to get out of the house). The cafeteria was full of people, and they were clearly not students because they were queuing up on the cash station. Paying cash at the cafeteria is possible but complex. You decide what you want, get a ticket, pay the person at the cash station, take the receipt back to the food section, and then get your food. There was only one person at the cash station, and the line was fairly long. I shrugged it off and ordered a random stir-fry from one of the food sections. Do you have a card? the server asked me warningly. I produced it, she handed over the food, I swiped the card, and started to turn away.

Then I hear a brassy voice in Chinese saying, "Hey, classmate! Can I give you cash and use your card?" I understood perfectly. But you know what? For all the disadvantages of being a foreigner, there have to be at least one or two advantages. And I think, given how often people assume I don't understand when actually I do, I should have a right to pretend not to understand when it suits me. I know, I'm mean and wicked. If it had been a hapless and confused American student, I would have done it no problem. But this was someone who wasn't confused--she just didn't want to wait in line (or pay the 15% surcharge) and so hoped to swap her inconvenience for mine. No, the boundaries of good citizenship (or really good alien-ship) did not extend that far today, and I walked away as if I had no idea someone was calling after me, "Hey! Classmate!"

I know I'm bad. But you know what, fortune doesn't always favor the bold.

Here is a scene I saw on my way through the campus. It's kind of amazing that you can see scenes like this in the middle of a modern city, on the campus of (so they say) the best university in the country. Doesn't it look like some poverty-stricken village somewhere? Hard-packed dirt and crumbling bricks...

I got bad karma for my lunch-time misbehavior, because when I went back to the coffee-shop it was nothing but trouble; some girl sprawled at a table right next to mine, so I had trouble getting in and out, and had to ask her to move her legs each time. Her boyfriend chain-smoked until I thought my eyeballs would smother. And in between sprawling and smoking, they did a sort of languid cuddling thing, which seemed to be more for show than anything. Okay, maybe I just added that because I've been too long away from my sweetheart. Yeah, I know, it's only been 18 days since he left. But it's been a LONG 18 days!

For some reason, while I was eating my instant noodle dinner, I ended up watching a television historical drama about the conflict between the states of Wu and Yue during the Warring States period. It was horribly melodramatic, but I'm such a sucker for those, and this one was actually dealing with a period I knew. It was fun, and also cool to know that I can follow a story quite well with only Chinese subtitles. (It would have been hard without the Chinese subtitles, because there was so much classical Chinese sprinkled in--most historical dramas have them.)

I watched that for way too long and then was feeling low about my unproductivity, so I did something that often cheers me up: I set a timer and worked for fifteen minutes on each of my projects, for a total of one hour. I call this "a gallop" because it feels like galloping through things at high speed. Is it really that productive? I don't know. It might add up if I did it every day (I don't). Mainly, it just creates the illusion of productivity, and makes an hour pass amazingly fast. But it also gets my spirits up. I may have wasted a lot of hours, but here's one that wasn't wasted.