Quietly Productive; Blue Socks!

No trouble keeping my promise to write a shorter post. Almost nothing happened yesterday, in terms of blog-worthy events. I talked with Colin on Skype for an unusually long time because we got into a lovely discussion about some of his lectures. After having such a good, long, and satisfying talk, I was somehow able to settle down quite well and did practically a record amount of dissertation-writing, more than five double-spaced pages or, let's see, for those of you who count words it's about 1800. That does include quotes but doesn't include footnotes, so I figure it's fair. It's the first productive streak I've had in quite a while, and I felt so proud. And decently good stuff too. I always discover things as I write, and in this case felt particularly satisfied with my discoveries. I am almost done with my long long chapter 2, at least its first draft.

It was late afternoon before I came to a good stopping place, and since I'd only had bread and instant soup for lunch, I decided to treat myself to a good Korean dinner. I went to the restaurant beside the ring road bridge, and had a big dish of bulgogi and vegetables. It was not easy, but I managed to eat the whole thing (I think it was sort of a two-person portion). Well, I was hungry! On the way home, I had some bubble tea as well, which I think of as tapioca tea because it has big marble-sized tapioca-like black "pearls" in it. A sort of eating+drinking experience all in one. I had never had it warm before, but I can now attest that it is good warm.

And then I came home and read and wrote blogs all evening. Such a quiet day, but I'm not complaining. If I had more days like that, I might actually manage to write a dissertation.

On the way in from dinner I checked my mailbox and in it was a package from my mum! Thanks for the socks mum, here is me wearing them. For some reason, I adore them especially. Ambivalent thanks for the novel, The Mercy of Thin Air. I'm not saying it isn't fascinating, because unfortunately it is. I'm just saying, it was probably really bad of me to stay up until 3 AM reading it. New rule: no more reading fiction at bedtime!! Although on the other hand, what are Saturday nights for if you can't do something ridiculously foolish once in a while?

My Sticky-Ball Brain

So yesterday was Friday again, and for all I'm lonely and homesick I've got to say that the weeks fly by with amazing speed.

Unfortunately, I was a bit late to my Chinese lesson. Partly a result of a late start (I've got to remember that 35 minutes by bike to my Chinese lesson is not the same thing as 30 minutes on foot with a little room for fudging to the rest of my classes!), partly the result of my rear tire being low--I was slower and more effortful than those other cyclists on the road, which is pretty rare. I mean considering that some old geezers are biking by with their canes tucked into their belts. Biking is such a way of life here.

I called my Chinese teacher, AL, at 10 sharp to tell her I'd be a few minutes late. She seemed fine with it, but when I actually got there she seemed a little stressed out. Just very busy I think.

Slowly I learn more things. Yesterday morning I was feeling like a crazy Japanese video game I saw once (can't remember what it's called; perhaps CM will tell me), where your character is a sticky-ball that rolls over things and picks them up if it can. It starts small, but since it adds things (people, animals, trees, cars, sail-boats, houses…) to itself, it naturally gets bigger and bigger, and at the same time the perspective gets bigger so eventually you can pick up skyscrapers, overpasses, and ocean-liners. Or whatever. At the time I first saw it, I considered it an abhorrent fantasy of materialist self-gratification. Now, however, I am ready to reconsider it as a (possibly equally abhorrent) metaphorical fantasy of cultural/intellectual attainment. My brain is like a tiny little sticky-ball rolling around Beijing and picking up words and street-vendors and poems and customs and expressions on people's faces and bus numbers... all indiscriminately and all the time. And while my brain isn't getting any bigger, it certainly feels like it's getting more and more full.

(To illustrate the concept, here is a photo of me with a citrus fruit about the size of my head. It's so big, I'd determined I could only eat about a quarter of it at a time, so I'd stripped the peel off the quarter I was planning to eat. As it was I ended up eating the quarter of it in two sittings. It was HUGE!)

Anyway, that was my Chinese lesson. Oh and also I managed to recite the two poems I'd memorized from last week, but not very smoothly. I get an absurd moment of stage-fright when I try to recite memorized poems in front of anyone. I'm just not much of a performer. But I did remember them. I have to add, for those of you who might think that memorizing poems is a whimsical activity, that here in China it is an important part of the school curriculum. Any Chinese person with even a high school degree can probably rattle off at least half a dozen poems from the Tang dynasty. If you don't get it (and you can't really understand them unless you've seen them written and studied them some) then you end up feeling left out and looking like a culture-chump. So I am plugging my way through the "best of the best" corpus.

AL was too busy to have lunch with me, so I went out, stopped by a bike shop to get my tire pumped up (they made fun of my helmet but graciously helped me with the "do it yourself" pump which I couldn't figure out how to do myself), and then biked toward home. I made up my mind to try a brand new restaurant on the way. I'm rather a timid soul, so I have to steel myself for these adventures. But this time I found a real gem! Below I post a photo-essay about the place I found, and first let the pix speak for themselves.







Unlike most of the Western food here, which is dispensed from familiar franchises that are just similar enough to the ones back home to be depressing and boring, but just different enough to be alienating as well, and all over-priced, the Papaya Diner was cute and unique and reasonably priced ($2.50 for the meal pictured here). It was mostly populated by high school kids. The menu contained jokes, and had a inter-cultural mix of foods clearly calculated to appeal to foreigners of all types. The club sandwich, which I ordered (and ate 1/4 of before I remembered to take a picture) was distinctly peculiar, as it contained bacon and chicken and eggs and tomatoes and cucumbers and mayonnaise and sesame seeds. But it tasted good anyway, and was presented so cheerily on the plate with an orchid. Papaya milkshake is delicious, also, even if it in the photo it doesn't look as good as it tastes.

After the delightful interlude in the diner, I got mildly cheated by a street vendor on the way home. Well, I wanted to try this weird yellow steamed cake kind of thing, but as usual with these tall cakes, you can't get just a little. I don't understand their little scale things, even though they weigh stuff and ostentatiously show you the results. I just don't understand the results, you know? Anyway, I got some steamed yellow cake. Upon inquiring, I learned that it was made from millet and maybe some chestnuts? It was laced with sugared sweetened plum halves as well and some raisins. It was a bit gluey, but tasted good while hot, less good when cool. I liked the edges better than the middle because they were less gluey and more chewy. Always an adventure!

I spent the afternoon working on my translation, and was pretty productive. At evening I went out for pulled noodles again. I thought I had got the routine down just right, but then I came up for my noodles when it was really someone else's noodles, and this threw us all into consternation, which I made worse by trying to explain that I was so eager to eat the noodles that I had come up too early by mistake. This made them all feel like they needed to hurry, which wasn't my intention at all. But then one of the counter girls slipped an extra piece of meat into my bowl, which gave me a warm feeling despite my consternation. Another of the girls who worked there and had got off work came over and chattered to me, bouncing around in her seat and asking me all kinds of questions. Before I realized she was one of the girls who worked there, I responded to her question of "how's the food" by saying it was great and how impressed I was by how the noodle chef made the noodles. "See that?" she shouted over to him. "She's saying good things about you!" Then I was sort of embarrassed, but amused and pleased too. The noodle chef brushed off her teasing and looked on gravely.

I had about decided that the whole pulled noodle staff was one of those great cultural mysteries that I was just never going to figure out, and that the best way to have a satisfying interaction with them was to do everything according to the proper ritual, exactly the same each time just like the order of toppings they put in my bowl and the way they gesture to the condiments and invite me to add my own, although they know very well that I know. It's just the ritual of the thing, and would soon become comfortable and familiar as the taste of the noodles as long as I could avoid messing it up. But now here was this chattering girl and I wasn't quite sure what to say to her, but I at least did a good job of understanding her questions. I just hope it's not a prelude to some permanent disruption of the comfortable ritual. How mortifying if--I dunno--the noodle chef were to make a pass at me or something. It seems impossible, for surely he's married and such. But perhaps my admiration for his noodle-making is out of line. How awful that would be, to see the dignified and hard-working noodle chef humbled by such an unworthy situation. Okay, I'm being totally silly I know. This discussion is ending here.

On another subject, I have been keeping tabs on AtomicTumor and his gravely damaged wife. Since he's unlikely to come looking at my site, I am going to say something that has been bothering me about the whole thing. Before his wife's misfortune, AT professed to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic. Naturally, given her critical condition and oscillation between the land of the living and the land of the dead, there had been a lot of praying going on, and a lot of god-talk. I say "naturally" because I figure that from a psychological point of view it's natural. But philosophically speaking… well, perhaps I'm just influenced by Colin's Phil 101 lectures on the problem of evil, but I can't help thinking that they're just not praying to an O3 god (tidy abbreviation for Omniscient Omnipotent Omnibenevolent). It's hard to see why an Omnibenevolent god would put them through so much suffering in the first place, or why praying to an Omniscient god would do any good--because wouldn't he already know all the facts of the case and already know the best outcome?

As near as I can figure from the fragments of theological thought posted by AT and his commentators, this is how their theology works: stuff happens in the world mostly for the same reason that an atheist thinks it happens. A person gets sick because of bacteria, she is in a vegetative state because of a brain hemorrhage, and so forth. (And she is--it's awful. I don't think he wants to think about what bad news it is when nurses cry every time they see him. He's still in the stage of being relieved because at least SOME people wake up from brain hemorrhages; at least there's a chance. I don't think it's blind hope really--he's just tired of total hopelessness and is trying something new.) It's not explicit that God has struck her down, or called her to him, or anything like that. Things happen to her (and everyone) mostly in a normal, scientific, causal way.

On the other hand, there seems to be a parallel range of causal possibilities connected with the efficacy of prayer--if you pray hard enough, God will intervene and change the normal causal chain to your benefit. My personal philosophy tutor suggests that this is not the O3 God of Christian theology but a much more pagan sort of god, one that "has his own stuff going on" like the dudes on Mt. Olympus or the Old Testament god, whose default mode seems to be destroying things and people, and is only with difficulty talked down from destroying the world again. Not to put down these folks at AtomicTumor, or minimize the psychological benefits of believing in whatever kind of god they want to, but I just kind of worry, as I always worry when a lot of praying starts happenin', about what kind of god they're really creating for themselves, and what the implications are if you really think them out.

Myself, I'm not a believer, but if I were, my personal choice to resolve the O3 contradiction would be letting go of the omnipotence leg of the triangle. That makes for a watered-down god something on the level of Julia Cameron's "Good Orderly Direction," but I think of the three (still unlikely) O2 possibilities that's the least unlikely.

I suppose a big emphasis on prayer is probably letting go of the omniscience side: God is all-good and all-powerful but we just have get through to him by sustained and persistent efforts, like trying to make a call when the lines are jammed. Lines jammed=not omniscient.

(Letting go of benevolence is just scary, c.f. Jonathan Edwards, and no one in their right mind would want that sort of O2 god.)

Anyway, time to stop babbling naïve philosophy of religion and get back to work; actually this issue is somewhat related to my work today, but that's a rare circumstance.

I should really write shorter posts. Next time. I promise.

Linguist Quiz

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Question: was the Pacific Northwest even an option here? Or does America for this person only mean stuff east of the Rockies? Just curious. But obviously I don't have an accent. I talk normal! (Except in Chinese, where I suppose I still have a "midland" accent, but they just call it American. :P) But it's good to see in confirmed. What about you?

Tired of Classes; Leaves from My Internet Album

Yesterday was supposed to be a long day of classes, but after four hours worth (starting at 8 again, ugh!), I was done. I sometimes go through these phrases where I get completely fed up with classes and say to myself, what's a post-generals doctoral student doing spending all this time in classes, anyway? Shouldn't I be teaching the classes instead? Of course, it makes good sense for me to sit in classes. Some of my best class-room buddies are university lecturers here on "enrichment" visits. They go to a whole of classes, and in the same I do--without really doing any of the work, just there to see what's up.

Anyway, the classes were good when I could stay focused, but after lunch I opted out of the next four hours worth of them and just went home and lay in bed wearing my red sleep-sack because of the cold air seeping in through the window-glass. Overtired, in need of a bit of downtime. Then I spent way too much time reading blogs, thanks loads Repressed Librarian for posting this link to the NaBloPoMo randomizer. :P Boy is it ever addictive to read blogs. Of course for me every month is "blog every day month," and I do my very best to do it. If I don't blog quite every day, I at least blog about every day, to the point where some of you who don't know me in real life (and some of you who do) are probably bored stiff. Hey, not my problem. I deliver the goods, and y'all can take or leave them.

Actually what I wanted to say, though, was that my repeated trips to the randomizer turned up one that was really something--a perfectly ordinary everything/nothing blog, AtomicTumor, that suddenly became an intense many posts per day and highly emotional nightmare whirlwind when the wife of the couple suddenly contracted a mysterious, life-threatening infection and went from playing tennis on Saturday to being near death on Monday. And there she stays, lying in a hospital bed on a respirator and not conscious. And meanwhile her man lays bare his soul on the interweb for your…what, not enjoyment exactly, but it's definitely a powerful experience to read it. The rest of the internet community seems to agree, as he had enough hits to crash his server--working fine now, after some technical adjustments, but it was an amazing thing. I don't know if anyone leaves snotty comments--you'd have to be a monster to do that--but he's gotten a lot of good supportive ones, and it really seems to make a difference to him.

I've always thought that the problem with reality TV is that it puts real people in unreal situations. The thing that I like so much about blogs is that it's real people in real situations, their own real lives. Sometimes their situations are wild and extraordinary or nightmarishly unbelievable like the above. Sometimes mundane, or quietly awful, or deliriously happy, or overwhelmed. But I like to wander through their variously decorated pages and thing about all those real lives out there so different from mine.

Okay enough random musings.

I realized I have stopped posting news items, probably because I've been so busy lately. But there's one I thought worth mentioning: Wednesday night the sociologist and the legal historian were getting highly incensed about some recent dog-suppression campaigns in Chinese cities, especially considering that the dogs were being destroyed in some pretty low-tech ways. I didn't have much of an opinion, because though I by no means advocate cruelty toward animals, I also think it's not an issue worth spending huge amounts of energy on. Isn't there enough cruelty to humans to concern those of us who feel the need to be concerned? Mencius and the sociologist agree that compassion for animals is the root of a bigger, more all-encompassing compassion for humans. But I can't help thinking that's a little backwards and unexamined. Why do we feel so little for our own species that we have to get our compassion started on some other species?

Also, I just don't have an "oh how cute response" to puppies; I just don't.

Anyway, yesterday I then read this article, which starts, "Over-sized dogs and those without photo identification in Beijing are being snatched by the city police to curb the spread of rabies, which has killed about 200 people a month in China this year." Excuse me, did they say 200 people a month?! Could this figure possibly be correct? (I mean it is a notoriously unfree press, but bad news is usually suppressed, not exaggerated!) Now let's just say that an animal-born disease were killing 200 people a month in the U.S.--would there not be a pretty extreme public outcry, which might well include rounding up and destroying the animals in question? We vaccinate against rabies, but what if there were some new dog plague? Would we really not kill dogs to save humans, especially if we lacked the technology to sort the healthy dogs from the sick ones, or the resources for widespread vaccination? And if we wouldn't do what China is doing now, then I'd say there's something wrong with US.

Yes, hate to say it, guys, but for now I'm siding with the Chinese government on this one. My colleagues are thinking about the cute sad-eyed and sickly curly-haired puppies being sold off blankets at every subway stop, but I'm thinking of Cujo. And 10 deaths in the capital alone--that's Beijing, where I am! I am so not going near any dogs here, and that’s for sure. The article is right that the real mistake was to make vaccinations and legal ownership so prohibitively expensive, while meanwhile the dogs themselves are cheap and freely available in the "informal economy." But now the damage is done and--hate me if you want--if it's dogs or people, I'm taking the species-ist path and voting people.

But then at least half my ancestors lived in a country where dogs are considered food so I'm probably not the best person to talk to about canine rights!

A Too Social Day

Wednesday: Nothing makes me more appreciative of 10 o'clock classes than having a couple days in a row of 8 o'clock classes. Wow, what a difference! I ambled out of my apartment building at 9 and got breakfast from the table just outside. My new favorite breakfast is: 1 egg custard, 1 Chinese donut (deep-fried rice-flour dough rolled in sesame seeds and a sweet red bean center!), and 1 cup of hot soy milk. And this place right outside my apartment makes the best of everything, and I know because I've tried the others too.

Then I strolled to campus. As I was walking toward my class I saw this woman come out of a building with two full bags of pure white steamed buns. Somehow, I just really liked the way she looked, walking down the street in the morning light. I didn't get my camera out quite fast enough and had to take the picture in a rush--so it's not quite focused. But still, it captures the moment, and has the composition I wanted if not the clarity.

Today was the last day of proper lectures in the Myth and History class. It was a good one--as with most of them, it's on a subject I don't really want to study myself, but it's good to have a basic familiarity with it. Listening to the active, energetic professor somehow makes it more exciting.

I also found out what he means by "discussion class"--he means that each classmate will choose a topic and give a one-hour presentation. Er, no discussion involved, apparently. I guess it's good for them, but, grumble. It has effectively changed my classroom experience from listening to lectures by a well-known and skillful professor to listening to lectures by nervous, under-prepared, and mumbling graduate students. Maybe I'll bring my crocheting to class…

Quick flurry of text messages toward the end of class regarding my next engagement. It so destroyed my concentration, but was at the same time so unobtrusive, that it made me think how cell-phones should be categorically banned from classrooms. How to make it work? I don't know, but that's how it should be. It's way too easy to check your brain out, somehow much more absorbing than just writing ordinary notes.

No, XYs, my little waiter friend, did not want to have lunch with me. How about coffee at 12 instead? I said that I at least would have to get some lunch first, and would meet him at 1 instead. I had bebim bap again at Farm Garden. It's a good thing I am not a real Korean. I have already noticed that people here have no compunctions about serving you things in a chipped dish--the height of discourtesy, at least in my father's Korea. They call it, "having a tooth missing." In this case, though, the "missing tooth" ended up almost costing me a tooth, as it was still in the bowl and I accidentally bit down on it! No real Korean would stand for it.

To be fair, the black stone bowls they serve the dish in are probably not made to stand up to the intense heat of the gas burners they're slammed down onto day after day. And having chips of stone in your food is not as bad as having glass in your food. Still, I was a wee bit put off. It gives a whole new meaning to the saying, "watch what you eat."

I was also interested to notice that the Farm Garden has a "Muslim pure food" eating area, with no impure foods (pork and alcohol, I guess?) allowed. I knew China had quite a large Muslim population, but still I found this surprising and interesting because I had never seen one before. Alcohol, by the way, is freely sold in cafeterias here. I'm not sure that drinking age is something they try to regulate here, but if they do, it's definitely legal for college kids to drink. And do they ever drink! But people do most of their activities during the day, and this includes getting drunk. So occasionally you have the weird experience of seeing a reeling drunk teenager being dragged along by his friends in midafternoon. Boys will be boys.

Well, speaking of boys, I went to New Island Coffee with XYs. I had never been to New Island Coffee. It had a glass elevator up to an elegant seating area. Table service, more like a European café than an American one. Surprisingly good coffee too, for here. XYs had never had coffee before. I guess I forget how much of an acquired taste it is, having acquired the taste long ago. He thought it was awful, but bravely drank the whole cup. Poor kid, but it was also kind of comical.

He asked me what sort of food Americans like to eat. This question always make me feel at a loss for words. All kinds of food really… But they don't stir-fry things, right? He wanted to know. Well, we do, I said. It's just that when we stir-fry things then we generally consider it to be Chinese food or somehow associated with Chinese food. Americans eat more meat, right? (he's big into cultural generalizations) whereas we Chinese prefer vegetables? I suppose you could say that, I said, but there are lots of vegetarians in the U.S. and not a lot of purely vegetarian food in China. He didn't really listen to me say this. I'm not sure if he just doesn't listen very well or if he gets too impatient because I talk slowly (for a Chinese person) and kind of tunes out.

He proceeded to tell me that Americans are tall because they eat meat and Chinese are short because they don't. I think it has more to do with genes, I suggested. Sure, he concedes. But for generations they could only eat vegetables, so they were short and then they passed those genes to their kids. (I supposed he's obsessed with shortness because he himself is so short, shorter than I.) I tried to explain that it didn't work that way--in fact, it was a perfect indication that Lamarckianism is alive and well, at least in the popular mentality! I considered explaining about this, but decided to go for basics first. Did Chinese schools teach evolution? I wanted to know. Yes of course! Darwin etc. Obviously! It's not so obvious, I offered. Some places in America either don't teach it or don't want to believe it. Why? He wanted to know, mystified and contemptuous--though his own grasp on the concept was clearly a bit tenuous. It has to do with religion, I tried to explain. Blank look. Well, if God created man than he can't have gradually developed from something more like a monkey, can he? I could see him filing it away under "bizarre American beliefs." Well, that's deserved. I mean, I personally am all for evolution but as a "cultural ambassador" (ha ha!) I think the world deserves to know the truth about how foolish we can be at times.

It was oddly discouraging talking to XYs, and I was glad to go. Talking to someone ten years younger than you can be interesting if they're bright and curious and enthusiastic--and the type of person you tend to like, but XYs, just isn't as it turns out, any of these things. He's just…sort of ordinary. At least he was more into hitting on the waitresses than on me, so my firmness on that front at least sank in. (I've heard horror stories from others, but having a boyfriend, even a distant one, really comes in handy here.) I think I won't be spending any more of my Beijing time that way, but we'll see.

All told, I drank too much coffee and felt very jittery. Rested and worked in bed for a while to calm down, and then set off to my last engagement of the day. I have now gotten into the bad habit of assuming everything will take 30 minutes of travel time because that's how long it takes to get to school. WRONG! It takes 30 minutes to get to Wudaokou by bike, but for some reason I forgot to get my bike and set off on the bus instead. I have to remember that taking the bus at rush hour is an impossible proposition.

While I waited, staring morosely at multiple lanes of interwoven and totally stationary traffic, I witnessed a sad thing. One of the weathered sweet potato ladies was clinging to the wheel of her tricycle trailer yelling and hollering and crying. Two policemen were harassing her and trying to talk her into letting go. A crowd of silent observers had gathered, and when I say gathered, I mean it: pressed in close, and radiating about six feet in all directions except the street one. Completely silent but massively present. It's no wonder that the government here is afraid of its populace. It's as if their very gaze has a kind of power. Or that beneath the deep deeply-ingrained cautiousness there's a reckless streak that's waiting for its big chance to bust out. The people went on staring, the woman cried out to the heavy city sky and babbled incomprehensibly. Then suddenly it was over. The two policemen were stuffing her into a cop-car with all its lights flashing. The tricycle trailer with its hot barrel and humble roasted potatoes had disappeared. The crowd dispersed. Someone passing just two minutes later would be completely unaware that anything had occurred.

No, I didn't take a picture! What do you think I am, crazy?

But it was vivid in my mind. You can take a bet that her quality of life had just taken an enormous hit. Just dumb bad luck, or had she failed to pay the right sort of protection money?

I got to my meeting half an hour late, but because I was meeting with American graduate students, everyone else was half an hour late too. Sigh, why do we have to be so predictable, even if conveniently so!? We had a nice dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant. Sushi here should seem like a totally sketchy proposition, especially since all the sushi was half-price! but I suffered no ill effects. LK, who had recommended the restaurant, has a really touchy stomach, and I figured if it didn't bother her it wouldn't bother me. A good gamble in this case. Also, had lots of tea and wasabi, both of which are supposed to help.

When everyone was done eating we each ran through a quick summary of what we were working on and our specific activities in Beijing. It was fun, but one of those occasions where one particular person talked way to much, making everyone else (me included) especially antsy to talk and therefore more prone to rudely interrupt even the non-motor-mouth. One good thing to say about us, though, is we can be fairly forgiving of such things.

One person was working on the problem of street-vendors being busted, how a propos! He had a lot of interesting things to say about it, including that it was done in the name of having "an orderly market," which vague phrase is freely interpreting on a very low local level. He has done all his research on a couple of streets in Nanjing, just tracking everything that goes on there and getting to know all the vendors really well. It was a pol.sci. project, but it sounded kind of like anthropology. So interesting. That one was my favorite to hear about, though I also really liked chatting to tall KP. She is such a no bs type of person; I think she's great.

A chocolate parfait at a Chinese Japanese restaurant is about 50% cornflakes, about 25% whipped cream, and the rest is chocolate ice-cream and quite a lot of banana slices. Very weird. It was more like eating breakfast than dessert.

I guess it was a pretty stimulating time, but as usual I felt like a grad school dunce. Grad students seem to be all about posturing and proving that they can talk in long sentences with lots of abstract terms. Somehow that's not what I'm about and sometimes I worry about it. Are they all secretly judging and dismissing me because I always just want to tell it like it is? I guess I too want to prove that I'm smart, but I want to do it by having interesting results, not jargon-hued verbal fireworks.

Still, when it really comes down to it there's something disingenuous about my preference for simplicity… cause I think I probably couldn't talk like that even if I wanted to. I think I could back when I was an undergrad and somewhat into the whole pomo thing. But pomo consciousness has totally faded from my life because it just couldn't prove its usefulness in my field of study. It couldn't earn its keep or keep a place on my reading lists, which were ever more dominated by primary sources. As a result, I'm not even really an informed opponent of theory. I just have a sense, which may or may not be right, that it can't do much for me. And I have no natural enjoyment of it. Shrug. Maybe it'll mean I can't get a job, or maybe somewhere there'll be enough of the old guard around that I will. Ooh, probably I shouldn't talk like this on a not-all-that-anonymous blog. Oh well. I'll probably take this blog down when I'm back from Beijing and potentially on the market, so maybe anyone who reads this now will not make the connection by then. :P

An interesting thing I noticed and felt proud of in comparing my spiel to those of the others is that I'm the only one in the group who is making an effort to really get a sense of the traditional literary culture. It's a discipline thing, I think. People in modern western-originated disciplines tend to consider traditional culture for the most part an obstacle at best. To someone who's studying abandonment of female infants (for example), traditional culture comes down to a tendency for son-preference that is slowly leading to a demographic disaster, not to mention a lot of girl-babies in orphanages.

From the outside, in short, traditional culture can look pretty useless.

But the more you get into it, the more you see how integral it is. Even if they seem westernized, they all had to memorize Tang poetry in high school! Now I am memorizing some too--just the best of the best, my teacher says, to get a taste of it. It's actually fun to do it in a one-on-one tutoring situation, though I still get nervous reciting, and something I've practiced a hundred times suddenly drains out of my brain and leaves me blank. I'm really not good with public speaking, even to an audience of one.

Anyway, the meeting lasted until about half past nine, and shortly thereafter I made the unpleasant discovery that the bus I needed to take stopped running at 8. Damn morning people! At 10 on a weeknight, the whole area seems to shut down. Nothing but lonely taxis. After experimenting with some other buses, none of which brought me to within walking distance of my destination, I felt so fed up and exhausted that I finally took a taxi home. The taxi driver muttered a little at the short fare, but he took me graciously enough to my front door and I shelled out the minimum fair, which was $1.25. No tipping here, to anybody. Anyone giving you cultural advice about China will add fervently, "And don't get them started expecting it!" Well, it certainly is a bargain, I'll say that.

Chance Meeting, Work Meeting

Tuesday: another 8 AM class, this one in the opposite direction at Renmin University. I left a bit late but made it on time, as I had figured out a more efficient way to get there. It was interesting, although I have found the specific edition of the book that they're using. I brought my own version, but the page numbers of course are not the same. Also, I have to work extra hard to copy down the professor's Powerpoint notes before he changes them--I just don't write very fast. Probably I don't need to copy them, but I like to have something to mull over afterwards. Too often, when thinking in a foreign language, my thoughts will be there one moment and gone the next.

Anyway, after class I went up to him and introduced myself so he would stop staring curiously at me. He asked if I could understand his lectures and I said that he could. He seemed skeptical, probably because he'd noticed me busily copying notes at times when he was discussing parts of the texts that weren't in my version of the book. But ah well. It doesn't really matter what he thinks of me. And professors are always a little bit pleased if you come to listen to them lecture anyway. So no worries.

After the class, I went home and worked busily on the material for my meeting with LGs. He had asked me to make a big chart, and I managed (barely) to finish it. Then I headed in and had lunch, printed out the stack of stuff that needed printing out. After lunch, I was just idly browsing some books for sale out on the sidewalk when all of a sudden, I heard by name in English. Who here knows me by my English name!?

It turned out to be ZY, my classmate from home, here on a brief post-generals celebratory visit--first to Beijing to clear up some visa stuff, then back to her home-town. I had managed to run into her on her very last day here! She was staying with friends in their dorm-room, which I was able to inspect. Four people, two bunk beds, one utterly tiny room (in case you can't tell from the picture), no electricity after midnight, showers in the public bathhouse afternoons only! She confided in me that it would be hard to go back to living like that, sad though that is. She's been spoiled by our really quite decent graduate housing.

We only chatted briefly, as I was on my way to my meeting and she was packing to go home. But I am happy I ran into her.

Here is a mule I saw on my way to LGs's house. It looks tired and stubborn. But it was better off than most mules because instead of a cartful of bricks, it was pulling a cartful of fruit.

My meeting with LGs was pleasant as always. He gave me an article I had been thinking of translating for him, and outlined the book he thought could be made out of it. He said he is too old to write it and has other projects, but I should seriously consider doing it, he would make a present of it to me and give me a sense of direction and all the needed sources. Too bad it's not all as easy as he makes it seem, but it may be worth a shot as a post-dissertation project. We chatted some more about the main project, which has a close relationship to my current dissertation, and exchanged various articles and pieces of data. Collaboration is strange, but I really like it a lot. It gives me a feeling of excitement about working, and the sense of not being lost in it and all alone.

I think LGs's wife ZWx likes me again. She was a bit suspicious of me, I think, being worried that I would tire LGs out. But I told her she was the boss, and since then have kept our meetings to her declared time-limit. And this time she was very warm and friendly to me.

Afterwards, I went to the great bookstore that is practically in their backyard. I bought a whole stack of books, more than $20 worth! They have a lot of stuff that other places don't have, that's for sure. Also, the place has a really pleasant atmosphere. Here are the pumpkins lined up along the stairs inside the store. Boy did I love the look of those pumpkins. I can't help it, pumpkins just make me happy.

Library as Usual; Moon Illusions

Monday: I barely managed to drag myself out of bed. I think my body was still tired from the long cold of Sunday's activities. Horrible 8 AM classes, how I hate them! Although this particular instance of class was good and worthwhile, I hate them as a concept. :P And it was still exceedingly cold out.

After my class, I got on a bus outside the East Gate. An odd moment on the bus, not déjà vu but another feeling, like the moment was memorable for no particular reason: but I remember everything about it. The pattern of sunlight, the mostly empty bus, where I was sitting, near the front where I watched the driver shifting gears. The gears of a Chinese bus are exactly backward from an American car--first gear in the lower right, second gear in the upper right, and third and fourth in the lower and upper left respectively. Interesting. Almost hypnotic.

But then time speeds up again. I got off the bus and dashed into the National Library. If things went smoothly, I thought, I could copy the article I needed and be back in an hour and a half, in time for a lunch meeting I had planned with one of my classmates.

Well, nothing ever goes smoothly at the National Library. I requested the book (I know the ropes now!) and waited…and waited. After an hour I was starting to get really annoyed. Then my number appeared on the "We can't fulfill this request" section of the sliding LCD display.

I sent a text message to cancel my lunch meeting.

I negotiated with several different people, went back and forth about computer entries. They're bad with Western book titles. They always make a spelling mistake or two and then blame you when the record won't come up. They sent someone else to look for the book. He found it, both copies! I was very very pleased, far more pleased than annoyed. When something actually does go right, it's easy to forget all that has gone wrong.

Back at home, I ducked in for a pulled noodle lunch. The noodle chef is very busy at lunch time, but they all treated me like the regular I am anyway. It's subtle--they can't really do much extra for you or anything--but just saying "the usual?" instead of asking you what you want, giving you an extra smile or nod, it's enough to make a person feel good. I was happy to see that they were so busy; I had been worried about their fate only seeing them at dinner hour. But now I see that they won't be going out of business anytime soon! The office worker crowd comes down out of its skyscraper and consumes many bowls of noodles.

Worked until my evening class, went to it, had dinner, came home. Nothing much to report, except that I ought to be more productive. And I had a strong case of the moon illusion, where the moon near the horizon looks huge. It was full, and it really looked huge! Also, above the tall, light-partitioned wall of my apartment building, it had a grandly alienated urban look--yes? I tried to take a picture of it but without a tripod of course nothing is much in focus. The other picture is the same scene with a little wiggle of my hand.

The Fragrant Mountain; A Leaf Bug at Last

Sunday: I go with a group of expats to see the autumn leaves at Fragrant Mountain, north and west of the city.

It was hard to get out of bed, so I ended up taking a taxi to Wudaokou, where we were meeting, in order to get there at 9. The taxi driver complained to me that traditional Chinese culture was being destroyed by Western culture. I don't consider myself part of that problem. If anything, I am part of the solution.

You never know what taxi drivers are going to say to you. It must make people crazy driving around in Beijing traffic day after day and I think foreigners who speak Chinese must be a favorite target of ranting, theorizing, and all sorts of babble. One time a taxi driver (along the same route) expounded at great length on how the U.S.'s two greatest friends in the world were Israel and Japan. I suppose it's possible that's true, but I've just never thought of looking at the world like that.

Anyway, I got there with time to spare. A lot of time to spare. Aside from me, KP was the first to arrive. We stood in front of the el, I drinking hot black tea with milk that I'd brought from home, her drinking cold black tea she'd bought from a nearby stand. About a quarter after 9, LK (expedition organizer) showed up. Then, because there was an icy wind despite the bright sun, we retired to a nearby bakery to wait for the fourth person, who claimed to be on his way. He showed up after a further half an hour and declared it necessary to partake (slowly) of baked goods while we sat waiting and trying not to be impatient. So much for our early start though.

Chinese people wonder why we have such an aversion to doing things in groups. Perhaps when they get together they don't experience this phenomenon, that inertia seems to increase exponentially with the number of people, so that by the time there are four or five it's practically impossible to get moving at all.

Finally, we caught a very crowded bus.

The Fragrant Mountain was actually in the direction of my apartment. I believe it may be the mountain I look out upon when the weather is fine.

The crowds there were intense.

The fall colors could not compare with New England or even Eugene, but the fact that such huge numbers of people had come to see them made them somehow more interesting. The people did so outnumber the trees! And it was clear that each brilliant-hued tree upon the path played a lead role of hundreds of different photographs every hour!

The narrow paths up the mountain were so crowded that sometimes we couldn't move at all. It was like a traffic jam for people. There were even traffic cops directing the flow of people as they hiked up or down the mountain. (If you look carefully ata this picture you can see them.) And it was no small hike either--probably about like climbing the Butte in Eugene. But mobbed, all the way up. It was the first time I had had this kind of experience in China, and all of a sudden I could see what the guidebooks were complaining about. Clearly it's best not to do things on weekends if it can be avoided at all. Though on the other hand, the crowds are also an integral part of the experience.

Here was a victory: I found a person who was selling leaf-origami, such as I had glimpsed and unfortunately passed up earlier on. I wasn't passing it up this time, and bought a magnificent preying mantis. That was about halfway up, but we knew we weren't coming down that way again, so I had to buy it. I then spent the whole rest of the day holding and trying to protect this fragile leaf creature. I didn't care; it was worth it to me. Especially since it was the only thing in the whole day that left me feeling victorious. Also, it startled people and made them do double-takes because it looked so much like a real preying mantis. That was fun.

At the top, we sat awhile. Here are my companions. I was the only one with a camera. I just realized, looking more closely at this picture, that I was also the only one who without sunglasses. Haven't worn sunglasses in ages, because I depend so heavily on my actual prescription glasses and have a bad tendency to lose clip-ons. Well anyway.

The wind was icy. The temperature dropped steadily. We had decided to take the cable-car down because one of our party had bad knees. We didn't realize we would have to wait in line for 45 minutes to do so. And it was cold. My teeth were chattering. If the preying mantis had teeth, its teeth would be chattering too. I admit it was a pleasant view though.





Standing in line, I struck up a conversation with the fellow in front of me, or perhaps he struck one up with me. He asked all the usual sorts of questions, and I gave the usual sorts of answers. We chatted intermittently, the way strangers in line do. But I felt a certain sense of privilege because I realized I was just exotic enough to be noticed (unlike Asian-American LK) but not so exotic that I looked scary (like the other two people in our party). No one was talking to them. But I am…I guess, safe but interesting. Of course it's not always an advantage to get into conversations with random people, as sometimes you just want to think your own thoughts. But standing in line on an icy mountain-top--it helps in passing the time.

The cable car was a ski-lift type thing. When I saw it, I felt a sudden fear of heights that I always get when I think about riding a chair-lift. But it's not really a phobia, just a kind of giddiness. I took pictures as we swooped down the mountainside and into the valley.

It was extra cold in the chair-lift. We all felt chilled to the bone. It's a good thing that being cold doesn't actually cause you to catch cold, because otherwise I would have. Hurray for my immune system; it is serving me well.

By the time we got to the bottom, we could barely stand on our numbed feet. We didn't much enjoy the little park there either, despite its pretty flowers, colorful leaves, and whimsical little log figures. Okay, I enjoyed the log figures, but I think my companions didn't really enjoy waiting for me to photograph them. I just snapped these shots really quick.

What they reminded me of more than anything was some of the later books in the Wizard of Oz series. I was always especially delighted by the sawhorse coming to life. I wonder if it's just a coincidental resemblance or whether the person who made these had also read those books?

We took a taxi down off the mountain and back to Wudaokou, feeling stiffer and creakier than the log figures.

There we had Korean food together, from a restaurant near LK's place. We really needed it by then. We had bibim bap, kimchee duk bokum, tofu chige, and scallion pancake (I ought to know how to say that in Korean, but I've forgotten; also my spelling of the romanization is probably way off). Also large amounts of hot tea. We were almost recovered from our hypothermia by the time we had to go out and brave the arctic wind. But we all got cold again really fast.

A bright and merciless day.

I hadn't worn my new coat or long underwear because it had looked like it would be warm. How wrong I was. Street vendors were doing a brisk business in hats and gloves.

By the time I got home, all I felt like doing was putting on my long underwear and coat, and huddling under the covers with my laptop to provide extra warmth to my lap. Who says a processor that generates a lot of heat is a bad thing? It's not bad in a Beijing November chill before they've turned on the heat in your apartment! The only day I'm looking forward to more than November 15 (turning on the heat day) is December 14--I'll let you guess why. (Only 1 month, 6 days, 6 hours, and 27 minutes as I am writing this. Google Desktop kindly furnishes me with a countdown.)

Porridge and Purchases

I am sorry I am such a bad blogger lately. Some weeks are worse than others. Anyway, Saturday I stayed in until I went out. That was lunch-time. I went across the street to the scary isolated row of restaurants there. Scary because many of them have people dressed in traditional costumes waiting to grab you and drag you in if you walk to close. One I walked to specialized in duck necks, and that was about the least gross thing they had on offer. This time, though, I went into one which featured in giant font the Chinese character zhou for porridge (or congee, as the mysterious translation English has it).

Now porridge is a bit boring the world round, but I have found it especially bland here. It's stuff you get for breakfast, usually made of millet and water and nothing else, not even salt. I've realized that people drink it instead of water--a sort of slightly more filling water. If you think of it that way, it's actually not bad. But I was mystified as to how a whole restaurant could be run on this concept. I had once overheard a fellow FBer say, though, that she liked where she was living because, among other attractions, there was a zhou restaurant around the corner. So there must be something there aside from stuff only a Chinese person could love (duck necks...).

Brilliant surprise: lunch zhou is delicious. I had one that was made with chicken and almonds and white rice, seasoned to perfection. Chinese chicken soup with rice. It was great. I am totally going back to the porridge restaurant as the weather gets colder. For dessert I had a whole plate of steamed fried buns with sweetened condensed milk. All to myself, ha ha ha! It's kind of amazing that I'm still losing weight, given the number of sinful treats I have discovered. But it seems like tension and walking and biking and the occasional gigantic excursion do the trick because the clothes I brought with me are all getting inconveniently large.

After lunch I went to the National Library. This was a dead loss because everything's closed on Saturday. Sigh.

I'd had a headache since morning, but I ignored it and went to the Carrefour on the way home. There I obtained a set of long underwear (red) and a new coat. The long underwear was the largest I could find in women's sizes (XL) and it barely barely fits. I'm in this uncomfortable in between realm where nothing available here fits me but everything I brought is too big. Good thing I don't care much about clothes. I have a suspicion that long underwear is a must here, however, due to the amount of it that is being sold (and bought) in every store I walk into. "Go with the crowd" is generally a good motto in China. The guy in front of me at the check-out was buying four sets!

As for the coat, the only coat I brought with me is my long grey wool one, which tragic experience shows does not go happily with bike riding. So I thought it would be good to get a shorter coat as well. Now I know how Colin feels trying to buy clothes. One's choices are severely limited when you have to hold out for XXL. But it's oddly liberating to know that there's no point in even trying anything smaller. Darn broad shoulders. Fortunately, there were some super-discount coats that were ALL XXL, presumably the reason for being discounted. Not sure, but anyway, here's me in my $7 coat. It's nice and warm. In fact, as the weather just keeps on getting colder, I have taken to wearing it in my room. The heat goes on November 15. I am counting the days!

I like this coat, in the way that I sometimes take to things that are "not at all me." Colin says it looks very Chinese. I think it makes me look like someone else, but an interesting someone else. Maybe a padded white bunny. Or maybe I do just like it because of its delicious soothing insulation properties...

Since blogger is being so well-behaved tonight, I also post below a picture of the gorgeous Saturday night sunset.

Fish-bags and Panda Philologists

As usual, I had an intense Friday morning Chinese lesson. I had gotten my front bike tire replaced the previous day after thinking it was low and then, when I got to the bike-fixing station, realizing it was completely split. Stupid cheap piece of crap bike. I guess that's what one can expect from a $20 bike, though! Anyway, it runs much more easily now.

I realized that I keep forgetting to mention the fish-bags. This was an amazing sight I saw while biking along the same route to my Chinese lesson, but a couple of weeks ago. It was a man with a tricycle trailer all full of big inflated garbage bags. At first I thought they were full of garbage, but no, they were smooth. As I got closer, I realized that each one was half full of water and half-full of air. And in the water of each big garbage bag: a big long fat fish! We're not talking goldfish here. We're talking something approaching the size of salmon, being kept alive in partly inflated garbage bags and sold on the street from the back of a tricycle trailer. What a sight!

My Chinese lesson was very good as usual. I asked all my questions, we studied two poems very commonly learnt in Chinese secondary school, and a whole host of sayings. Afterwards, I had lunch with my teacher in the nearby cafeteria. I am hoping that she had lunch with me because she wanted to and not because she felt obligated, but it would have been easy for her not to--she would only have to wait until I left first as she usually does. Instead she came down with me and asked me if I was going to have lunch. So I think it was okay. We had an interesting chat.

All this left me very tired, however.

Still, on the way home I was determined to pick up a package I had been notified about. It turns out that if I'm not home when they try to deliver a package to me, they put a slip in my mailbox and I have to go pick up the package at the appropriate post-office. I wasn't sure where the post-office was, but the slip had the number. I paused on my bike and called it, when I thought I was nearly in the right neighborhood. She gave me directions all right, but I didn't understand them. I found a different post-office in the huge construction site that is the Haidian Book City. From them I got different directions. Also in the process, I managed to buy a four-book series I'd been looking for--it's on the old side, so rarely found in bookstores, but I found it in this tiny hole-in-the-wall place which had (given the construction) holes its walls as well.

The package was from my parents and contained, among other delights, a bag of my mom's home-grown lavender. I had requested this, as I'd heard that smelling lavender before going to bed seems to promote better and more restful sleeping. Worth a try, right? I have so many stresses and worries here that sometimes it's hard to sleep! Amusingly, in order to get the package I had to fill out a form in Chinese. The lady at the post-office was very very gracious in telling me what to write, and even how to write the characters that I had a mental blank about. Chinese characters are so treacherous in memory. They slip out of your brain like fish from a net with too-big holes. But in the end I got my package.

I tried again to go to the Chinese department and register, but no luck.

Then I went home. I almost forget a dinner engagement I had, but in the course of a rather lazy late afternoon of novel-reading, I suddenly remembered it.

This was dinner with the communication association. Here is a big formal picture.

It was an interesting time. I talked to many people. One girl I spoke to, an accounting major with what seems to be a very bright future in the field of consulting, I talked to for a long time. She was such a tiny girl, but very full of confidence, a senior, currently going through a job interview process. She was polite but not the slightest bit shy, young but never at a loss. She asked what I did? I explained, and she said that she considered people who do philology to be very rare and precious, like pandas. I was really delighted by the comparison. It seems important to protect and encourage pandas, even if they're expensive and no one can come up with a damn think that they're useful for. Most people think they shouldn't go totally extinct!

Scholarly; Leaf Poem

Thursday: I got up early and went to my meeting with LGs. Although I was very anxious beforehand, I think these meetings are getting progressively more comfortable. I learned quite a lot, as usual. And he suggested an outline for the first article. My only fear is that I may have too little to contribute. But I shall do my best.

A cautionary note that he did sound: he wanted to make sure that the work that he and I did together did not end up being to the credit of Beida--he told an unfortunate story of how a student asked him to be a de facto PhD advisor, but his Beida advisor had ended up with all the credit. LGs is quite loyal to his own university and even suggested I could transfer there if I wanted--he could pull the strings for me. I certainly don't want to do that, as my relationship with YHz is very good now as things are. However, I hastened to assure him that my work with him and my work at Beida are two completely separate things, which is quite true, and any work we produce together will definitely have his name and university at the top, not buried in some acknowledgments! I explained that since in China I am a non-degree student, affiliation with Beida is mostly bureaucratic as far as my situation is concerned, and in reality I am very free here--only my advisor back in the States really has a say in what I do. He seemed reassured.

He gave me a homework assignment, which pleased me very much, and arranged at time for our next meeting. All off this occurred within the two-hour time-span allotted to us by our boss, his wife ZWx, and I think I did not tire him out particularly. I think he is pleased at our collaboration. Being a scholar is lonely work, at least as far as I have seen, and perhaps being a retired scholar moreso (though he is still very active going to conferences at local universities). I hope it's nice for him to have a student again.

After the meeting I felt enthusiastic and spent most of the afternoon working on the homework assignment he had given me. The only other thing I did was drop by the Chinese department and try to register with them. However, the person I was looking for was not in. They do not keep very regular hours in their administrative offices here! I did take this picture of the hallway in the department, however, because I thought the sun coming in the windows looked pretty. We've been having great weather, more like September than October, sunny and too warm for sweaters, though too cool for t-shirts--and crystal clear, not like the thick smog of the summer. Really nice.

I waited a while for the office person to come back (she didn't) and while I was waiting sat under a tree on the lawn, a sort of quad where lots of people sit and study or bring their children to play. The ground under the tree had a few fallen leaves, and imagine my surprise when I picked this one up! I'm not sure if the poem is an original composition or a quote from something. Google search is inconclusive--it seems like a heavily allusive musing, perhaps? I am not a great translator of poetry (corrections welcome!), but it seems to say:

Also I have seen the red leaves that fill the sky:
Falling, they fly in drifts--
This floating, this fading.

Some romantic soul! I took a picture but left the leaf itself there under the tree for someone else to find and be delighted by.

Against Discussion Classes, and Down with Culture Class Too!

Wednesday morning, I slept in a bit and then went to my History and Legend class. I think this class has been going very well, but the professor started of by saying he's not at all satisfied and wants to change everything completely. "Discussion seminars" or taolun ke are all the rage here as far as pedagogy goes, but no one has quite figured out how they work. I could tell them a lot, but of course no one has asked me.

The first problem is that there are no seminar-type rooms--no rooms with tables, or even chairs that can be arranged in a circle. They're all big lecture-hall style classrooms with bolted-down benches and a podium at the front. Professors' ideas of discussion seminars seem to be that each student in the class should make a presentation. In effect, this seems to mean that it's still a lecture class, but lecturing duties rotate among one's classmates. As someone who's been a student for over twenty years, I have to say that I don't think this is likely to be pedagogically very useful. And I don't say that entirely for selfish reasons. The kids here are so over-booked that they can barely pay respectful attention to a professor, let alone a fellow kid just bumbling through. Sleeping and doing other work on laptops is par for the courses!

As far as actual discussion goes, most people are not going to dare to speak up. The problem is that in an atmosphere of dead silence, any question or objection is a big deal. Too big a deal. Words matter here; they're not just so much wind. Even the emptiest of speculations have to have reams of evidence (even if shakily cobbled together) to support them. So no one is going to feel comfortable just "throwing something out there," no matter how appealing the idea of a discussion seminar may be to overbooked professors who would prefer not to have to prepare lectures every week. In short, I think the whole taolun ke fad is a big fat mistake. Even in the U.S. it's often done very inefficiently. Hint: running a proper discussion class should not be less work for the professor than giving a lecture, but lots of professors tend to coast...not naming any names...

Meanwhile, the Hist and Legend professor was also having people sign up for paper topics as well as presentation topics. I of course being an auditor didn't sign up for either, but one of the paper topics really caught my eye. I like the H&L prof a lot, despite his underrating of his own teaching. I like his bright black bird-like eyes, and his energy. Also, on this particular morning, he had done a strange contorted dance and succeeded in dislodging from the collar of his clean striped white button-shirt an enormous black spider, which he swiftly dispatched with his foot and went back to what he was saying, hardly missing a beat. Full points for composure!! Anyway, while people were signing up, I bravely went up to him and said that I was really interested in this topic and if I followed his recommended research guidelines, would he be willing to take a look at what I'd found, even though I was just an auditor? He said that certainly he would, and his manner was, if not actually warm, at least not overtly cool. So I think there is another opportunity to make a connection, if I can find time to do that research.

I had a quick and excellent lunch of bebim bap at the Farm Garden cafeteria. They had it in a black stone bowl, which, when you ordered it, they tossed onto an impressively large gas flame so the bowl and its contents got all hot and sizzling. Delicious.

Then I sat in the library dutifully reworking a state of the field paper I had written a year and a half ago, with an eye toward translating it into Chinese. That's going to be a big job.

In mid-afternoon, I headed off to a class one of my classmates had recommended I check out. It was a class on "Chinese culture" taught by a soft-spoken Taiwanese gentleman, who reportedly was a really good lecturer. I actually think he was a pretty good lecturer, but the content was so uninteresting to me that the class was pure torture. He started off with the ways in which post-modernism and Daoism are alike, and went from there into a lot of comparative religious stuff. I just can't get excited about comparative religion, even when an informed view of pre-modern Chinese religions is one of the points of comparison. It just doesn't float my boat! I alternately slept, attempted to listen, and made various types of lists in my notebook. "To do list." "To ask my Chinese teacher list." "SOF article revisions list." "Books to look for list."

I got a mystery call toward the end of class. My phone was on vibrate but outside my bag so I noticed it at once. There is no voicemail here, so if it's a mystery call the only way to find out who it was is to call back. I did that as soon as class was out and was informed that my petition to switch departments had been successful. (It was no small job!) I could go to the foreign students' work unit and pick up the paperwork whenever convenient. I went right away!

Then I had some dinner, bought some books, and tried this new kind of candied fruit, which was absolutely delicious. I couldn't understand the answer to my query as to what sort of fruit it was, but my best guess is sweet yellow tomatilloes. Anyway, it was the best candied fruit yet!

Halloween Funeral, Another University, Dissertation Support

Tuesday was October 31, Halloween. Other people were busy putting up ghost stories on their blogs, some with enough verisimilitude to feel chilling. Halloween is not much of a holiday here, though there were a few costumes and carved pumpkins in stores. And I don't have any ghost stories to post. I hesitate to mention what I did do, which was only coincidentally appropriate to the date, because I don't want you all to think that I've gone off my rocker.

But it was like this: by about mid-morning, it was clear to me that Yojo was not indeed deceased and not just in a torpid reptile coma. But living in a high-rise as I do, there are no convenient pet cemeteries, not even any land that would serve such a purpose. Every inch of earth that hasn't been paved over--and all of the paved parts as well--are simply crawling with people who would, I think, look askance. And given that toilets here are too temperamental even to handle toilet-paper, I felt that burial at sea was also not a viable option. Really the only way of disposing of things is the garbage. But it didn't seem right to just throw him away. He was a good pet, even if for not very long. So I thought at least I would give him a semi-final resting place.

I had bought some fish some time ago to try to tempt the turtles' appetites, but when they showed total lack of interest, I had frozen the fish (probably a month's supply of food for them at least) in a good plastic container I had. So I put Yojo on the bed of frozen fish and on top of him I put a yellow origami table I had folded, because it reminds me of the many turtle sculptures around here, turtle a tall tower on its back, turtle holding up the world. Then I filled the rest of the container with some strips of newspaper, and wrote an epitaph for him. You may think I am silly, but I was really quite sad. I folded up the epitaph and put it in the container, and that was the end of Yojo's funeral.

Of course I don't believe in the immortality of the soul, much less of the turtle soul, or that grave-goods serve any purpose whatsoever as far as the deceased is concerned! But somehow it is comforting to send something along with them when you bid them goodbye. It makes it easier to understand the extravagant funerals of Chinese antiquity, which I studied in archaeology class, though they went so far as to sacrifice people as grave-goods, which is pretty awful any way you look at it. I mean great works of art are one thing but...

The rest of the day, I hasten to assure you, was pretty ordinary. I got up very early to go to the class at a neighboring university, which had been recommended to me. I didn't have the text, because I wasn't quite sure which part of the massive ten volume history the professor would be discussion. Even so I was able to follow along well enough. He used Powerpoint, which was both a blessing and a curse! On the upside, I didn't have any trouble reading it, as I do with people's handwriting. On the downside, there was so much information, I had no way of copying it all before he changed the slide, let alone understanding it. All the more reason to practice writing faster!

It was interesting being on a different university campus. I had been anxious about finding the right building, but I had been able to locate a map on the internet, and took a picture of it, then brought my camera and was able to navigate by zooming into the digital image of the photo. Cool huh? The woman who had recommended the class, WW, was also there, and sat with me, and generally took care of me in that cute way that Chinese classmates do. After class, she chattered to me for about half an hour, all about the many different classes she goes to at all the universities in the area. She is what we would call a non-traditional student--is considering getting her PhD in what I would estimate to be late middle-age. She is someone who knows how to get her way, that's for sure, and has no hesitation to express her opinions. An interesting person to have as an acquaintance.

I didn't do much of anything until evening, when I went out for the inaugural meeting of our Beijing "dissertation support group." It devolved into dinner for four at a Thai restaurant, and not much talk about dissertations but one or two organizational comments. As usual lately when meeting Westerners, I felt like I said too much and afterwards felt strangely drained and wasteful. It's not that they weren't interesting people--they were--just that I had a weirdly strong feeling that I wasn't spending my time in the right way. This is not what I'm here for, is the thought that kept popping into my head.

It didn't help that I live much farther away than everyone else, meaning my commute time is at least half an hour longer, perhaps as long as two hours depending on where we meet. But I will try to stick with it for a while. It might come in useful. In fact, it did come in useful in an oddly unrelated matter, which was that they explained to me how the public transportation "swiping card" works. Like everything here, it's a declining balance card, but can be used on buses and subways both, even at a discount on some buses. And no more need to buy tickets since all you need to do is swipe it over the appropriate panel, just like a Chicago Card. Pretty cool!

Well, we'll see how this group goes and whether it will prove worthwhile. I know I should at least give it a try.

New Friends, A Rose, A Sad Event

Monday is my long day of classes, and it was as usual hard getting up to get to school in time for that first class at 8. I think 8 AM classes should be banned. But I at least managed to stay awake this time.

I had brought my computer to school for the first time, because I realized that I could be getting a lot of things done in the two hour blocks of time I have free. It's not enough time to make it worth going all the way home and coming back again, but it is enough time to get settled somewhere and accomplish something. If only the entire campus weren't so incredibly crowded! It is just not set up to provide as many study areas as people need. Finally I found a chair in the library. It was reminiscent of the rows of seats at an airport gate, but at least it was better than sitting six inches away from the people on either side of you at one of the incredibly cramped and crowded tables, which makes me feel like I'm actually on a plane! The side-facing row of chairs (no table) was a weird place to work, but not bad. I got stuff done.

My afternoon class went very pleasantly because Prof. YHz was downright warm and friendly to me, full of more suggestions about books, and would I like to borrow such and such a series? She could give it to me if I came to her office after class. Also her class was especially useful. Yeah, everyone things research methods classes are pretty boring--until they do a project when they realize how essential all the tricks and tips are. I have done and am doing such projects, and I listen very attentively. YHz is a good teacher, and not appreciated as she should be by the undergrad exchange students, mostly rowdy Koreans!

After class, an older woman joined us in walking back to YHz's office. YHz introduced me to her with glowing praises embarrassed me. I found out later that this lady is thinking of going back to school and so has been attending classes all over the neighborhood. She suggested a class on Shiji at nearby Renda, which I subsequently went to. It's good to meet someone who's really in the know, even though it's already halfway through the semester.

Then I had a pleasant little talk with YHz, and she suggested I should try to publish something in the Beida research journal, which she edits. I agreed that I would be amenable to that. I'm sure Chinese publications don't mean as much as English ones, but they mean something, and I like the idea of reaching a Chinese audience, frankly. It's like the mother-ship. And I think it would please YHz. I have something written, just the sort of thing she'd be looking for I think; I just have to polish it, update it, and--the big kicker--translate it. That's the rough part but maybe my tutor can help and I'll probably learn a lot. We'll see. I am thinking I'll probably give her a really rough translation and the English original, and she or someone else can do the editing? Anyway, something to think about.

After I left her office, I saw this late-autumn rose blooming its red heart out in the dusk, and thought it very beautiful.

By the time I got to my last class of the day, from 5-7 PM, I was really tired. Still, I gamely chatted with a lady I had talked to several times before--it seems we are in almost all the same classes--and this time we exchange contact information. I found out that her and her friend are teachers from universities in far-flung places, and they're here for a year sitting in classes at China's most famous university and studying teaching techniques. This made them very interesting people to talk to, and although I was too tired to talk very well, I hope I gave at least a reasonably pleasant and friendly impression.

I came home to a sad event. The turtles, Yojo especially, have been very healthy and active lately, probably because of the warmer weather and the sunlight. But when I got home after being gone for something like 10 hours, Queequeg was basking as usual but Yojo was floating. And not resting--floating very still. I don't understand it because he had been doing so well. I put him in some warmer water to see if maybe he was just too cold or something, but he was totally unresponsive. I decided to leave him on the basking spot overnight to make sure... but I knew already it wasn't good. I felt very sad for Yojo, and like an extremely bad turtle owner. Colin said, sometimes little turtles just aren't meant to live. But it was so strange that it was healthy active Yojo, who has actually been eating and growing and swimming, rather than sickly little Queequeg... though I suspect Queequeg is not going to be blessed with any particular longevity either. I conclude that turtles are too hard to raise unless you have a fully equipped pet-store or a fully heated apartment. :(

Two Meetings, No Work

Alas I am behind again and very very tired, so I will have to give the last few days shorter shrift than they deserve.

On Sunday I was planning to have a good long morning of work and then meet two different acquaintances. I'm not sure why I've been so sociable the past few days; it's unnatural and rather hard on me. Anyway, my plans were not realized because I stepped out of the shower only to hear my phone receiving a text message: "I'm here, where are you?" I sent back in pretty succinct and quick texting Chinese that a time had not been mentioned for our rendez-vous and would 45 minutes from now do? I probably could have made it in less, but I don't like feeling rushed or being considered late.

The person I was meeting was a kid I had met at a restaurant where I was eating alone and he was a waiter. It sounds like the beginning of a bad romance-novel episode, I know, but it's nothing like that. We had bits of conversation in Chinese and English and then he asked if he could have my e-mail address. I gave him a throwaway one, and when he wrote to me later I send back a very very clear message that I was about ten years older than him and spoken for and wasn't interested in anything sketchy, but I'd be happy to chat and help him practice English if he wanted. That seemed fine with him as he sent back a long message telling about himself--an economically disadvantaged kid from Hunan who is taking a year off from college to work in Beijing for a year; I got the sense it was for financial reasons. If he makes it back to college next year, he will be a sophomore.

He had many questions about the States, some a bit horrifying, other interesting. His English is so rudimentary and he is so shy of using it that I get a better deal in the language exchange game. I told him I don't really like to speak Chinese on the phone, so he doesn't call. And in general, it is interesting to know a different sort of person than I usually encounter. I told him what I hope were some inspiring stories about language-learning, which inspired him anyway to buy a dictionary. The dictionary came in handy when we met at my campus for a strong, a chat on a bench, and then lunch in one of the cafeterias. He was stunned that I didn't know the phonological system they use to express the sounds in English. (A variant of IPA? I'm not really sure, because I only know IPA for Chinese-type sounds, not English ones.) How do you know how things are pronounced when you are first learning to read? He wanted to know. How do you? I countered, but they use a romanization system, pinyin. Besides, Chinese characters are tenuously rather than systematically phonetic. I mean, so's English from a certain perspective, but nowhere near as unfathomable as Chinese. So it's not a good analogy. Still I persisted: before they had pinyin, how did kids learn to read? Got him there! He'd never thought about it before. Anyway, the dictionary most fortunately had the phonetic system, so we could consult it as needed. He complained a bit that I pronounced things differently than he had learned, but hey, I'm a speaker of pretty darn near standard English. I am not, however, a very experienced English teacher, and as I mentioned, it was better conversation practice for me than for him.

Well, anyway it was an interesting morning. I made my way home and had a few hours' rest in which I didn't get any work done. Then I got a call from my other friend, CC, whom I had got to see 798 with the day before. She was willing to come all the way out to my neighborhood for dinner and a look around. I went down to the subway at Wudaokou to meet her. While I was waiting, I thought I would snack on some roasted chestnuts. But the vendor (I think) was annoyed that I only wanted 5 RMB worth instead of 10, and gave me a defective bag. Or maybe the back was defective by accident, I'm not sure. Anyway, when I was about ten steps away, chestnuts started dribbling out. I considered going back and asking for a better bag, but instead I found an out of the way place to sit and at enough that I could fold the rest up in the remaining pieces of bag. They were not as good as the other ones I had had, sloppily roasted so they were partly burned and very oily--confirming my fairly low opinion of what Wudaokou has to offer.

Another interesting thing that happened was, as I was standing there looking at the big crowd of street-vendors who were selling all sorts of things from the beds of their tricycle trailors…all of a sudden they all leaped onto their tricycles and disappeared at top speed, with ever appearance of great anxiety and haste. A few moments later, a police car drove by with lights flashing. Ah cell phones. But even before cell-phones I bet there was a network...

I hadn't realized that street-vending was illegal. It is so prevalent and pleasant--well, except for sub-par chestnuts. Huh, go figure.

My friend eventually arrived and we rode the bus back toward my neighborhood. I had already picked out a restaurant, a Korean place I had been to once before, which was quiet and had a pleasant atmosphere. We grilled meat and it was high quality and delicious, much better actually than the all-you-can-eat place I had been before. The meat came with lettuce and mouth-wateringly good sauces, and overall I was most pleased. I managed to pay the bill, too. I'm getting better at that. And why not? I live so economically that there's no reason not to treat my friends.

Amusingly, the waitress remembered me from the one other time I had been there. She remembered where I had been sitting and what I had ordered.

After dinner, CC became the first person I have shown my apartment too. We sat on the window seat and talked for a long time. I found out many things, such as that CC is actually a bit older than me. I would have put her age at 24 or 25 at most, but no, we graduated college in the same year, imagine that! She's doing the long-distance thing too, and to make matters worse is applying for a job for next year too. She's a photographer and artist currently working on a project I might call alternative alternative energy, quirky ideas for energy sources that have never been considered before. She is just visiting Beijing for the weekend, but it was nice to talk to her... although I talked too much... I do that, when I am deprived of human companionship for too long. I wonder if it shows...

CC is also a serious cook, and has made a cake in her rice-cooker. (No ovens here.) I was so impressed!

I would have seen her back to the subway station, but she opted to take a cab there. (It really is a pain to get there from here. Even by bike it takes half an hour! The buses are about the same, with a cab maybe half that.) Anyway, a pleasant evening. I felt as usual more relieved that things had gone well than truly happy, but it's good enough!