February 2012
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not an ending

I’m going home!

This last week in Hong Kong went by in a flash. Packing, mailing, and e-mailing things amounted to a whirlwind of things that kept me from being able to write a few more posts that I wanted to tack up here, but hopefully I can get to it later after I return [...]

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some east-west vignettes, not conquered yet

I was thinking again the other day about coming here, and whether I accomplished what I thought I might, or if I even had figured out what that was to begin with.  I realized that sometimes when you look into a dark corner, you don’t always necessarily find out what’s there.  Sometimes you just find [...]

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last day

After five grueling classes, I’m finished being a teacher in China.

Some nice things kids said to me today:

“I will not forget you.”

“You will become a doctor, but I think you should become a teacher.”

“Your shirt is ugly.”

By the end of the school day I was back in the English office scribbling away madly, filling out [...]

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friendly fire

In the Malaysia post I talked about China’s racial homogeneity and how it is a far more definitive element of the Chinese identity than most people realize.  After 6000 years of inexorably assimilating minority tribes and even conquering outsiders (the Mongols and Manchurians) into the Han culture, the Children of the Yellow Emperor all harbor [...]

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printshop

The English office doesn’t have a printer. I’m not really sure how an entire school functions without ever printing anything out, but I’ve gotten used to it. I keep all my lesson plans and notes in digital files, or I scribble them out into a notebook. Saves trees and ink, I guess.

But [...]

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logjam

My writing project didn’t end with NaNoWriMo, but then it hardly began with it, either. Every time I write a sentence down, I go back and hack away at the rest of it until I remember that the rest of my plot is in shambles anyway and I should probably fix that first. [...]

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holiday questions

I’m sitting in a Starbucks – the one at the Coastal City megamall complex a few blocks north of my school. I took the bus to get here thinking that I needed to restock on frozen dumplings and could also use another space heater since it’s getting a little chilly again. But I guess I [...]

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kettles and drums

I was cooking/destroying some dumplings at my makeshift window kitchenette and watching the kids down in the courtyard play basketball. I always have to keep the window open while I cook/destroy things, which is a lesson I learned after the smoke detector went off the first time. Since it was open I could [...]

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they say kafka was an honest writer, but honestly, i’ve never read him

Even though I’ve frequently visited the shopping venues right next to it, I hadn’t actually gone near Shenzhen’s Kempinski Hotel until today, when I came to find my parents who had just crossed the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. For American prices it’s a good deal to book, I hear. But I [...]

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epiphanic badmintonic

I went to play badminton at the school courts today. Whenever class finishes, the back yard of Yucai Third Middle becomes a teeming crowd of basketball players (mostly boys), joggers on the track (mostly girls), and badminton players (mostly teachers). On the way to the badminton court I even saw a few people [...]

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