“Of course I think it is very important for young people to know about history,” said Wang Laoshi. The four of us from the English Department were clustered together again at the lunch bench in the teacher’s canteen, and after somehow getting on the subject of family trees (”Family tree is jiapu! Say [...]
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My post titles are getting intentionally stranger and stranger as I think about what would most poetically capture what I want to say. I disclaimed a long time ago that this blog would be an “experimental prose testing ground,” though so far I’ve kept that largely at bay (both for coherency and intellectual property!) But [...] I just had a phone conversation with my grandma and I am psyched about it. Explication: she doesn’t speak English; I’ve never spoken much Chinese. She lives in China; I only just got here. She is the telephone grandma whose voice you come to love through the receiver of a handset, and [...] Even from the very beginning of our trip in Beijing over a month ago, I’ve had a distinctly different experience as an expat than the other Americans in the CTLC program. Obviously the glaring difference was that among all of us, I’m the only one who shares the skin color of the native Chinese [...] After my Walmart escapade of the day, and even after the school workers who showed up unannounced at my door to install security bars on my windows (in the process worrying me immensely as I watched their crazy-dangerous methods of doing so on the 4th floor), a more-or-less impromptu CTLC group reunion was arranged for [...] It’s my lunch break and I don’t have long to type, but it’s been a few days since you heard from me and I imagine that if your names together begin with an H and a Y then you might be a bit anxious for a more substantial update – so I’ll just try to [...] Taught a group of juniors (here that means 11-13 year olds) today for the first time. They were incredibly shy and reluctant to join in the activities that we’ve been instructed to prescribe to them. I imagine they aren’t used to the animated chaos of some Western teaching methods – either that, or the icebreaker [...] The internet goes on and off here – the wireless connection that my roommate and I had been jacking into has been missing since noontime. Posting could be infrequent; I’ll try to continue writing on an offline blog and update in the sporadic chances I can. I was reading something today about culture shock and culture [...] For the first time today I spoke in Chinese to a local and received the response that I had sought (as opposed to getting a beer instead of the green tea I asked for…that’ll dog me for a while). I didn’t understand what the hell the lady was saying, but it seemed vaguely about [...] I’ve been awake since 3:00 AM on August 2nd, and considering that it’s 8:30 PM August 3rd right now that makes me pretty tired. Most of the time was spent sitting on my ass in a plane, though, with ample time to think and ruminate on the implications of travel. The reality of leaving America finally [...] |
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