A Brief Respite

Well, the quarter's finally over. I finished both of my finals on Wednesday, an experience which makes me think that someone somewhere should introduce a bill prohibiting a department from scheduling finals from two of its 400-level classes on the same day. I walked out of there that afternoon as physically as emotionally spent; even fully-caffeinated coffee, which normally affects me so dramatically that it makes me physically ill, failed to do much more than increase the space between synapses in my brain. So now I'm in the part of the quarter that, ironically, in some sense I actually hate the most: vacation. Because even though I get to relax a little - kind of - I spend at least half of the break wringing my hands while I wait for my grades. Especially lately, because I'm so close to graduating. I'm watching my goal of graduating magna cum laude slipping further and further away. It's especially frustrating since if I do miss the mark, it will only be by 0.02 or 0.03 of a GPA point.




And even though I won't call it a "vacation" per se - I still have to spend the bulk of the next two weeks doing preliminary research on what is shaping up to be an overly ambitious honors thesis topic - I am finding myself with a little more free time than usual. John and I are at his parent's house this weekend visiting with the family. Randy and Jess and the girls are here for Christmas, which would normally make for a full house if the new house wasn't so amazingly huge. The new baby is sweet, and Abby is as precocious as ever. It's nice to get a chance to visit with them before the house is flooded with people for the holiday.

This evening I was chatting on MSN with a language partner in Taipei. When Abby discovered I was using the internet for communication, she asked me who I was talking to. I told her it was a friend from China (an a-political answer for the purpose of simplification; how do you explain the China-Taiwan problem to a three-year-old?), and she promptly asked his name.

"Jiang Xiaozong," I said.

And Abby, laughing hysterically, said, "I don't believe you.

"It's true. It's a Chinese name."

"No," said Abby. "It's a silly name." And then, noticing the picture of a giant panda that takes up the desktop on my computer: "Oh! Is that a panda bear?"

"Yep."

"Where can you see pandas?"

"I dunno. At the zoo?"

"Which zoo?"

"The one in China."

"Ohhhhh." Her eyes lit up with understanding. "Is it next to a Chinese restaurant?"

I explained that I thought, yes, the likelihood of a Chinese restaurant being somewhere near the Chinese zoo was pretty high. Abby then proceeded to type gibberish messages to my Taiwanese friend and ask me to translate them into legible English. Most of them said "I love my auntie" and "my auntie is the best." Well, I love my niecie too.

Thanksgiving 2005

We spent a delightful Thanksgiving with our friends Ryan and Jackie and their son Charlie this year. I also dragged along my Taiwanese language partner, Ned, who insisted on helping cook. He made a delicious fried tofu dish, which ended up being more popular than the traditional food. Even Nate liked it. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Nate doesn't eat tofu.




I have to say that I have never seen so much food in one place in all my life.
After dinner we all watched a kung fu movie - the only thing we could be sure that Ned would understand - and Amy chased the 1-year-old Charlie around the house. Not a traditional Thanksgiving, I'll grant you, but one of the best holidays I've ever had. I am so blessed to have such amazing friends and such a wonderful family.

The Munch Man

And you thought you liked your computer....

And now for something completely different: John Michael, who has always had a bit of a reputation for being a sleep walker/talker, always goes to bed before me because he has to work so early in the morning. Consequently, he was asleep when I went in to bed one night earlier this week, but it didn't stop him from having a conversation with me.

"Munch man has to pee," he said matter-of-factly.

"Oh," I said. "Who is Munch Man?"

"It's me," he said. "Because I'm carrying munch food."

"What is munch food?"

He gave me a look of utter disdain, completely repulsed by my obvious ignorance. "You know!" he said. "It's the food you eat to regain your health after you fight the bandits!"

I should add a little background knowledge here. We have a game for our XBox called Fable - really a fantastic game; even I'm hooked on it - in which you have to fight bandits in a mideval fantasy world. Throughout the game you find bits of food like apples and tofu, which you can eat later to make yourself feel better after the bandits have beaten you senseless.

"Oh," I said. I was trying to sound apologetic without outright laughing, even though I knew he wouldn't remember any of this the next day. "I didn't know it was called munch food."

"Well that's what I call it, anyway."

And then he went back to sleep.

After that I tried to ground him from video games, but when I came home from school yeseterday he was playing again. I'm afraid I'm suffering from the plight of the common wife: complete impotence as far as any influence over her husband's entertainment habits.

Chinese and the City

Somewhere in the madness of the past few weeks, I've found time to finish a precious little gem of a book called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It absolutely stole my heart. If you have any interest at all in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, pick up this book. It'll be well worth your time.

During the week, during breaks between classes, I've been meeting with my good friends and fellow Chinese majors Lindsey and Leslie for lunch. I think the regular meetings were originally intended to be pseudo-study sessions (we all have classical Chinese together), but lately has morphed into more of a girl talk - slash - complain about the professors and compare homework session. It was a little odd to me in the beginning, since under the kung-fu influence most of my good friends in the past decade have been male, but I'm starting to settle into it. It's kind of like Sex and the City, if the girls in that show ate vegetarian soup instead of drank coffee and talked about academics and politics instead of men. I mean, we talk about men, but not that often. Smart girls have more important things to think about, I guess. Like how to save the world.

So the other day we were sitting in the campus lounge eating our vegetarian soup (Lindsey's a fellow vegan, and I think Leslie feels left out when she's eating meat), and a woman came in and sat down at the table next to us with two very small kids. The smallest one was maybe a year old at the most, and he was making all kinds of cute little-kid noises and banging his plastic spoon on the tabletop. And Lindsey said:

"Oh, look at the baby...."

I have to mention here that babies couldn't be a more foreign topic for the three of us to discuss, but we did find ourselves staring a little bit longer than I think any of us would have liked to admit afterward.

The thing of it is, all three of us have close friends with small kids. And all three of us, it turns out, have at some point wished that we were that kind of person. Not that we had kids, mind you, just that we were the kinds of people who could be content with that kind of a life. These women are women who have direction in their lives without having to scramble to find their self-worths in the pages of a book or between the double-spaced lines of an honors thesis. And the three of us - especially myself and Lindsey, who both plan on pursuing careers as college professors - are looking forward at another decade of school, followed by several more years of establishing our names in academic fields that still remarkably favor men over women. Do the experiences I've had and the people I've met make the sacrifice seem worth it? Yes, of course. But sometimes only marginally.

It's just that it's really freaking hard to be an American woman in the 21st century. It's not that I'm complaining - I'd rather be a woman now than at any other time previous to now; can you picture me cooking and cleaning? Pshaw! - but there's just so much pressure. If you want to be independent and have a career, people think you should be having a family. If you decide to devote your life to a family, people think you are wasting your potential. And of course you have no idea who to listen to, so you end up doing both, just to be on the safe side. And on top of it all, there's still some strange social stigma that keeps men feeling like pansies if they help with the housework. You can't win.

Growing Pains

It's difficult to believe that it's been so long since I last posted. The quarter is absolutely flying by. I actually had to register for next quarter's classes last week, which always kind of throws me a little. It's one of those interesting little quirks associated with the quarter system: you register for the next term's classes just as you're starting midterms, and then as soon as you finish midterms you have to start studying for finals. I think it's more shocking this quarter than it has been in the past, too, because it's starting to hit me that this is my last year at the UW. Only two more quarters to go, and then I have to *gasp* start thinking about my future. So every study session I go to, every conversation I have with a friend, starts to take on the quality of being one conversation closer to the last conversation I will have with them. With as terrible as I am with goodbyes, this could turn out to be a very long year.

But by the same token, I'm definitely ready to get on with my life. College, while it's a great place to find yourself, starts to feel like a rut all its own after a while. Preparations loom for the trip to Taiwan, which means more scholarship applications and school applications and - in the grand Chinese tradition - miles and miles of proverbial and not-so-proverbial red tape. Am I crazy for applying to study Chinese literature in a Chinese-speaking country? Um, yes. But no one ever said I was compltely sane.....

Sunset in Kalama

The view from the front porch of the Forland house, overlooking the Columbia River.

Update City

A recent visit to John's parents' house rapidly turned into a visit to Noah's Ark. In addition to their own two cats and the two dogs, the neighbor's three dogs make regular appearances. One of them is a great dane, and you can literally hear him coming long before you can see him....

I'm approaching the fourth week of classes, which actually means that I'm really only a week or so away from having to tear my hair out over midterms. Already. I really like the quarter system - it makes the year go by so much faster - but there are times when it goes by so quickly that I can't keep up with myself. My body runs around and I just stand there watching it, utterly helpless. It's kind of like babysitting a five-year-old boy with ADD.

I ended up dropping my philosophy class, which was devoted almost entirely to 20th-century metaphysics and honestly had me lost in the first five minutes of the first day. So now I'm only taking ten credits, and yet somehow I'm still spending between four and five hours a day studying. All that, and I'm still coming away with atrocious grades on all of my tests. I'm starting to wonder: why exactly am I doing this again? It seems a little ironic, at least. One would assume that you would study a language so you can expand your horizons, see more of life. Not live so you can study the language. And with as long as I've been studying, it's kind of depressing how low my level still really is.

John, stressed beyond any real measure, ended up dropping his classes in the second week in favor of taking a little time off. He was so overwhelmed, and he's been working so hard for so long, I think he postponed burnout as long as humanly possible before it finally just got to him. What it means now, however, is that he has lots of extra time to throw pancakes across the room like frisbees, play with legos, and make farting jokes with Nate.

Once Again, It Starts...

Ok, David, this one's for you. I told you I'd do it ;)

Yesterday was the first day of school. I actually passed my test, which means I start each morning bright and early with a 400-level Chinese class; we started out by reading a China-US joint communique, just to give you an idea of the workload I'm facing. I tell you, 9 am is WAY too early to be speaking Chinese. All in all, though, I've been pretty surprised at how well on par I am with the rest of the class, but I've only gone twice. We'll see how it goes as things progress. I'm taking Classical Chinese as well - which is about as close to modern Chinese as Latin is to modern English - and a 20th-century philosophy class that I'm already lost in. It doesn't help that, even though it's only the second day, I'm starting to come down with a pretty bad case of senioritis, which means I have no motivation to do anything at all. At this point it also means that, armed with my haphazard Chinese and inherent absentmindedness, I could be a little dangerous.

In other news, John finally got his Apple PowerBook and his graduation-present iPod, and now he's got so many little gadgets to play with that I haven't seen him for three days. He started school yesterday as well, and he says the classes at his new university may kill him. I remember the hell I went through when I transfered, and now I'm a little frightened to live with him for the next couple of weeks...har har.

The Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Test

The greater part of the last two weeks has been spent in an almost valiant effort at re-acclimating myself to being both an American and and American student, neither of which has been either especially inviting or especially easy. I miss my baozi, I miss my friends in Shanghai, I miss speaking Chinese with silly taxi drivers. And I miss the sense of adventure that accompanies every step I take when I'm in China. It sounds odd, but I really miss that sense of not knowing that hovers over me everywhere I go, like anything at all could happen and very often does. Life here just seems so...normal, and I'm not entirely sure I've got a grasp on how to get used to it again.

Of course, part of the issue may in fact be that I wouldn't have the luxury of completely leaving China behind even if I wanted it. I wasn't a tourist, I was there because a big part of my life was already in China before I even set foot there. And I've had to spend a huge chunk of my time in the last two weeks reviewing for a Chi
nese placement test that I had to take today. So while I have no shortage of Chinese friends who are eager in every way to help me prepare - which I am eternally grateful for, by the way - and certainly have had no shortage of things to study, I'm finding that miring myself so deeply in such a stressful situation, especially one in which I have to tangle myself so completely in the culture that I just left, it probably doesn't do much for the re-acclimation process.

Tests, I might add, suck. I won't know the results until Tuesday, but let's just say I've prepared myself for the worst.

We did, however, go to the zoo on Wednesday, and the boys just stood and watched us with raised eyebrows as Amy and I had little conversations with and cooed over all the animals. It was a good day to go; a lot of the animals who are normally sleeping decided to get up and walk around, so we got good pictures of the grizzly bear and the wolf for the first time ever. It's kind of nice to have another animal-loving girl around. Now I can watch "The Planet's Funniest Animals" without feeling guilty.

I Can Breathe!

Well, I'm home. And largely intact, unless you count the raging jet lag. I feel a little bit like Eeyore, with the minature rain cloud following me around above my head. It was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn't sleep on the airplane, so by the time I finally arrived in Seattle I had been awake for nearly 48 hours straight. And then they lost my luggage, told me they'd found it, and then lost it again. By the time I got home I couldn't hold my head up. I slept for the next two days.

But I'm alive and starting to feel a little better at least, which ought to count for something. Nate and Amy are living with us while they try to get their feet on the ground in Seattle, so the four of us are crammed into our tiny on-campus apartment. It's actually not as uncomfortable as it sounds, but maybe it's just because I haven't been awake enough to notice anything for the past week. Other than that I've just been studying; as fun as Shanghai was, the educational side of my trip left something to be desired. I'm a little nervous about my return to my Chinese classes. I'm afraid they will find me woefully behind.

The Baozi Girl

Today when I went to get my baozi after class, the red bean ones weren't ready yet. They told me if I hung around for eight minutes or so they'd be ready, and of course I said they were more than worth it, which was greeted with a great amused guffaw from one of the guys behind the counter.

One of the girls there, my favorite one, came out from the little shop to get some fresh air and sat down on the side of one of the bicycle carts. "Have a seat," she offered, scooting over and patting the space next to her.

The first part of my brain, the spoiled American part, the first thing it thought of was the fact that I was wearing white pants and would be sitting on a space that was decidedly not white. But then the second part of my brain, the part that loves China and kind of likes dirt and knows that logically it can always buy another pair of white pants, looked at the girl and her dingy uniform and her sweat-covered face and thought, American brain, I can't believe you're complaining.

So I sat down next to her. She said, "so when do you go home?"

"Saturday, but I'm not really sure I want to yet."

"Why?"

"We don't have baozi there." This should have been a joke. And it was, kind of, but not really. The truth is that baozi is just another one of those little slices of China that I miss terribly when I'm away, and somewhere inside my head these little steamed rolls have become symbolic of everything I have to leave behind.

"What!" She looked at me like I was crazy, like people can't exist in a place where there's no baozi. And maybe she was right. Maybe this is why Americans are a bit cranky at times, they need their red bean. And she asked, as though it was in keeping with the subject, "do you have a lot of friends here?"

"Yeah," I said. "A lot. I'm going to cry when I have to leave."

"Oh," she said soothingly, "don't be sad. Ultimately every place is home, right?"

"Maybe," I said, but I didn't mean it.

She said, "Sometimes we get homesick too. Our family's in Anhui Province, and we only go home once every few months."

"Do you like Shanghai?"

She cocked her head and looked at me. "Yeah," she said, "it's ok. But you know, we don't get much time to go out and have fun. We have to work very hard. Maybe 12 hours a day. And it's so hot in the summertime...it's just really, really difficult."

And I looked at her and I looked at the baozi stand, at the guys behind the counter shuffling huge steaming containers around in a space that has to be over 100 degrees, at the dirt on their uniforms and the sheens of sweat that cover their faces. And I looked at her eyes, so big and kind and pretty and sad. She's my age, maybe a couple of years older. We always say there but for the grace of God go I, right? But what happens when you have to think, there but for the grace of God was I born and raised and stuck in a place I won't ever get out of? It could have been me. If life was fair, maybe it would have. There is nothing that I have that she doesn't deserve at least as much, maybe more. And there she was, so quiet and sweet, and she wasn't complaining at all. She was just simply telling me the way things are.

Sometimes, every once in a while, I wonder why I decided to take the path that I did. The Chinese, the traveling; as much as my choices have baffled other people, they've confused me almost as much. All I knew was that I was following my heart. But then I have experiences like I had today, tiny little episodes that look so ordinary but fill my head with awe at life and my heart with love for other people, and I think maybe I made the right choice after all. I am so lucky, so blessed. And people are just so darn cool. It's amazing to me how people can have such a powerful impact on your life and not even know it. I will never see the baozi girl again. But I know for a fact that I won't ever forget her.

Maybe she was right, maybe every place is ultimately home. Everywhere you go there are people who want to love and be loved in return, which is really the same thing I guess. Is this too philosophical? Next time I'll stick to the funny stories.

The Perpetual Armageddon

So the countdown has begun to the end of the world. Well, the end of my stay in Shanghai anyway, which as far as I'm concerned is really pretty much the same thing. It's Sunday afternoon on my last weekend here, and I'm really starting to feel emotional about it. On Thursday night I went to a club with James and Sig and I went out with Norman on Friday and Saturday nights, and now that I finally have a bit of time to myself I'm wondering how on earth I'm going to leave these amazing friends that I've made. And I think life is so funny, the way things are constantly changing, the way you have to keep moving forward even though a lot of times you'd rather spend your effort and your energy looking backward. Or better yet, standing still. And every time you have to be separated from someone or your life has to move in a different direction or you find yourself looking at things in a different way it's like the end of the world all over again. And no matter how many times you go through the process, no matter how many times you tell yourself that things have to end so other things can begin, it still hurts a little somewhere deep down inside in that fundamental, central core part of your soul. And the really bloody ironic thing, the thing that makes it so truly confusing, is that the fact that the ending hurts is what makes the entire thing so beautiful to begin with.

On an entirely different and far less somber subject, I've decided to write a book: 101 Ways to Get Killed in China. The concept started out as a joke between myself and James, because he kept injuring himself on his skateboard and I kept nearly losing my life when I tried to cross the street, but it's developed into a sort of a game. Every time one of us comes close to dying we make a mental note of it and add it to the list. And the list, it's getting pretty darn long.

"What are you going to do if you end up with, like, 150 ways?" Norman asked when I told him.

"I don't know," I said. "Change the name of the book, I guess." Whereupon Norman pointed out that 101 sounds far cooler than 150, and we arrived at the conclusion that I most likely will be whittling a great deal of the list down in order to keep it at its 101-item limit.

"Maybe I can lump things together into subcategories," I said. For example, at least five things on the list have something to do with taxis and/or their drivers. Another good ten or so involve being run over by something or someone. A great many have to do with food and natural disasters of the stomach. I might be able to squish some of them together, in a pinch.

The last week here promises to be rather busy, what with saying good-byes and taking final tests and packing and shopping and etc. etc. etc. As much as I'm going to miss Shanghai, I am looking forward to getting home and seeing John and Nate and Amy and all of my friends and my soft mattress again. I'm ready to start school again so I can finally graduate. And I'm looking forward to the clean Seattle air. You know how when you hit twelve or thirteen or so you start going through this phase where you can't remember what it was like to really believe in Santa Claus? I'm starting to feel that way about fresh air. Like, I know at one point I thought it existed, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't just a product of my own imagination. At any rate, I'm all suited up for my next Armageddon, ready to move on to the next thing and find the blessings in that, too.

Life is such an adventure.

...And All of the People

I just had a thought...we spend so much time and effort trying to find ourselves. What if we get to the end of the journey and find out that there was nothing there to find to being with? And would that really be so bad?

Ah, but I digress.

Most of my friends have now departed Shanghai; Carol left early last Monday morning and Haruka, who was supposed to stay here for a year, had to go home to Japan for emergency surgery. Of course I miss them terribly. In the brief time I knew her Carol became like a little sister to me, and Haruka...well, what can I say but you know you're good friends when you don't speak the same language and you can still communicate like there's no barrier there at all.

So I've been spending a lot of time talking to and hanging out with my language partner James, who really is the coolest Chinese guy I've ever met. He's completely taken with western music - real music, too, not the syrupy love songs that dominate modern Chinese culture - he rides a skateboard, and his English, in spite of the fact that he's never had a native speaker for a teacher, is at near-native fluency. Not only that, but he is one of the more conscientious Chinese I've met as well; in this time of dramatic change for the Chinese, it's kind of rare to meet someone with a well-developed social conscience. And he's got it in spades. He's incredibly concerned with the world around him. It's amazing. He's unique not just as a Chinese, but as a person, period.

I am blown away by the people I've met this trip. I think that never before in my life have I forged so many amazingly deep friendships in such a short period of time. Is it right that anyone should be this blessed? I hardly feel deserving of it.

Last night I went to the Shanghai aquarium with James and his friend Sig and, let me tell you, if you're one of those people who doubts God has a sense of humor all you need to do is visit this place and it'll clear that right up for you. I have never seen so many strange fish in one place before. And when I say strange, it's not the kind of strange where you cock your head and say, "hm, that's kind of weird." It's more strange like "oh, that's where all the dinosaurs went" kind of strange. And boy howdy, some of these suckers were ugly. The eels made me cry, they were so gross. And they had an underwater tunnel with sharks. BIG ones.

I liked the sharks. Although after seeing them up close I have to say I find the whole Finding Nemo fish-are-friends-not-food scenario significantly less believable.

At dinner last night James gave me an amazing present: a book written by his dad. It's a memoir of his experiences during the cultural revolution, which he spent in the fields in North China doing penance for his family's capitalistic past. It's signed, dedicated to me and dated, which is especially amazing considering there are only 5,000 copies in print. James says it's an underground book. I was so touched I almost started to cry. My Chinese isn't quite good enough to read it yet, but it gives me something to work toward. In the meantime it's wrapped in plastic and sitting in the back of my closet so the cover doesn't get bent.

I am, at this moment, completely in awe of life, of the beauty it has in its transcience, of the little blessings that lump together to make one gigantic - albeit slightly messy - lump of blessings. And it just sits there in front of us waiting for us to open our eyes and look at it, and most of the time we just sit there with our eyes squeezed tight shut. I am, at this rare and quiet moment, at a near-loss for words. Almost.

The Earth According to Google

Just a small aside here...my friend Chia-chi turned me on to this awesome program called Google Earth. If you don't have it yet, well, where have you been? It's a program that allows you to view the earth via satellite and zoom in on pretty much anywhere you want. I can find my apartment in Seattle; Chia-chi used it to show me his apartment in Taipei. Seriously. Get this program. I've never seen anything so addicting. It even puts solitaire to shame.

http://earth.google.com

After the Storm

Ok, so I've never been in a tropical storm of any kind, so the recent typhoon kind of threw me for a loop. I was trapped in my room most of the day, which gave me WAY too much time inside my own head. But it cleared overnight, and the next day Carol's family invited me to go with them to Hangzhou, a couple of hours away from Shanghai by car. In the morning all the streets in Shanghai were flooded - and so was the taxi I took to get to their house.

"Hey, siji, you have a small lake back here," I told the taxi driver in Chinese, but only after I'd accidentally stuck both of my tennis shoes ankle-deep into the puddle in the back seat of the car. The driver, his only response was to turn around and say, "a lake" in English, and then give me a proud grin. We ended up practicing our English for the entire 45-minute ride to Gubei.

Shanghai truly was a mess. Half the trees at Carol's apartment complex had been uprooted by the wind, and an uncomfortably large part of the city was under at least two feet of water. We actually saw people wading knee-deep in the water, using old bicycle baskets to fish in the streets. In the middle of the city. And they were catching things. I'm not making this up.



But the storm had benefits other than providing me with my humorous anecdotes for the weekend. In Hangzhou, Carol's mother's friend told us it was the clearest day she'd ever seen in the city. It was cool and the air was blessedly clean, a welcome retreat from the hot filth of the city. I love Shanghai, and it's ever so much cleaner than Beijing, but I can still wipe my face three times a day and come away with a black handkerchief every time. Hangzhou kind of reminded me of Seattle, only a little richer - yes, I can't believe it either - and a little more Chinese, obviously. But just a little, which may or may not be sad depending on your opinion on China's recent boom in development.

But either way, Hangzhou was truly beautiful. The Chinese have a saying: in heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou. I haven't been to Suzhou yet - I'm working on that one - but I can definitely see where they would get that idea. The lake there is amazing. Carol and I took a boat out onto the water and just relaxed for an hour. Could be the first time I've relaxed like that all summer, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I love my yoga, but there's really nothing like an hour in a rickety old traditional Chinese boat on a traditional Chinese lake (even if it is in a no longer-so-traditional Chinese town) to loosen you up.

Carol and I also made an attempt to feed our fast car habit by visiting the luxury car dealerships which seemed to be all over the place in Hangzhou. I got to sit in the front seat of my beloved Porsche 911 Turbo, Carol tried out a Ferrarri Scaglietti. Once again we drew confused looks from the male salesmen, who I think were utterly confused by two girls so completely into race cars. But we figured it was probably the closest either of us would get to our dream cars for a long time, so we decided to swallow our pride.

Monday saw me back at school, where my classes are getting less and less organized and more and more frustrating. They moved us up a level after the first month, so we're reading long, academic essays on things that should be much harder to wax academic about: fashion trends in Shanghai, Shanghainese food, etc. etc. The lessons are far too long and complicated, with way too much new vocabulary every day, for it to be possible to completely prepare even if one were to spend every moment of her time studying. Which one is becoming less and less inclined to do, because one is getting very overwhelmed and slightly fed up.

Under the Weather

And this time, it's not a metaphor. Shanghai is experiencing the outer edges of a local typhoon today, which means heavy rain and winds not even Nevada can equal. I tried venturing out for my daily baozi during a break in the rain, but ended up getting stuck in a torrential downpour with a broken umbrella. So now I'm confined to my room, which actually isn't so bad because I might get bored enough to actually spend some time studying. Unfortunately, it also confines my diet for the day to the culinary offerings of the convenience store in the downstairs lobby, most of which consist of Oreos and oddly flavored potato chips. The sushi and cucumber flavors have garnered the most attention here, though I can't personally vouch for them. I did try the green tea flavor - whether out of curiosity, bravery, or stupidity I can't really tell you - and found them decidedly not to my liking. They tasted like really crispy seaweed, just in case you're wondering.


Mmmm....baozi. The best food in China.

Carol and I went go-karting yesterday, which seemed like such a culturally backward thing to do in China that there was no way I could pass on the opportunity. The original plan was actually bungee jumping, but after John voiced concern as to the quality of most Chinese products and the general Chinese lack of attention to safety procedures, we decided that delivering our lives into the hands of a Chinese bungee cord didn't sound quite as intelligent as it had in the beginning. In the end it turned out that go-karting was quite the adventure in itself. The track was in a warehouse deep down a back alley somewhere in the heart of town, and the entryway to the building reminded me of an abandoned carnival in a horror movie, all peeling paint and broken statues. But once we revved those engines, man, we were hopping. We were getting funny looks from the guys who worked there; I can only imagine that, what with the slightly different cultural outlook on the separation between the sexes, they don't get a lot of business from girls. Especially girls who aren't accompanied by guys. Even more especially, girls who are wearing skirts and have to keep stopping on the track to tuck the hems up so they can keep their clothes on as they're flying around the curves. But Carol and I are both big car lovers, and we had an absolute blast. Fast cars, even the miniature ones, are super sexy.

So Kwai Mei left on Thursday morning, which makes me sad. I have no idea who I'm going to eat vegetarian meals with now. There are a few people who will grudgingly accompany me, but they spend most of the time asking, "where's the beef?" and giggling like it's a really original joke. Carol is also no longer living at school, though her parents are in town and she's staying with them at an apartment near Norman's place. But it's faaaaaaar.

Speaking of Carol, I met her parents and the rest of Norman's family when I went to dinner with them for Carol's family birthday party. It was fascinating; they have all these little Chinese birthday traditions, and it was the first traditional Chinese birthday party I've ever been to. Well, almost traditional: we did have a big very western-looking cake. I think Norman's dad had difficulty remembering my name or something, because by the end of the night I had a nickname. He kept addressing me as Meiguoren laowai: American foreigner. Or if you want to get even more literal, old American outsider.

Shanghai only continues to grow on me the longer I stay. It's not that there aren't flashes, brief nano-seconds of time, where the clean air and the personal space in Seattle seem a little too far away, but those moments are few and far between. All in all I'm fascinated by Shanghai, by the people I've met here and the experiences I've had. I'm learning as much about myself as I am about Chinese culture. I think this is what life is all about; the little experiences that make you up as a person. I am so, so blessed.

Mission: Accomplished

CarolParty3
Originally uploaded by beccamozart.

Well, it's official: yes, you can buy a yoga mat in China. After traipsing up and down the greater Shanghai area for a little over a month and expending a great deal of my hippie energy points, I have finally come across the yoga mat of my dreams. I had to take a taxi across the river, get lost and found again, and climb four flights of stairs to find it, but I have it now. And actually, it's better than the one I have back in the States. I'm feeling quite miserably like a spoiled westerner at this point, but my bed is nothing more than a slab of wood with a half-inch pad on it. My back has been killing me, not to mention the fact that without my daily yoga pieces of my mind have been scattered all the way from here to Pudong. That, and it's just way too hot to be running outside every day. Gotta get the exercise somewhere.

My friend Carol had a birthday party last weekend at the Cloud Nine bar in the Grand Hyatt at the top of the Jin Mao tower, and it was pretty fun. Carol and Kwai Mei are both going home this week, which will leave me rather lonely, but at least I'll have time to study now. I've been feeling slightly under the weather - I don't know whether I'm dehydrated or the change in my diet has affected my blood sugar levels or both - and it's getting more and more difficult to get out of bed and go to class. Of course, if I went to bed at a decent hour it would probably help too. Darn Shanghai and its interesting things to do....

They Say You Can't Go Home Again...

Pudong2
Originally uploaded by beccamozart.

Ah, yes, it's been ages since my last post. But Shanghai really is keeping me busy. Between studying and shopping and vegetarian restaurants, I can hardly keep my head on straight.

So I was talking to my language partner James today, who was telling me that during the cultural revolution his parents were displaced from Shanghai to a rural area in the Northeast. He said that after their "work study" people had difficulty returning to the city for much the same reason that Vietnam vets had trouble returning home: they simply weren't the same people.

So it makes me wonder if I didn't kind of catch the same bug after my last trip to China. Not that I have the unbearable audacity to compare myself to people who have experienced that level of suffering, but there is an element of feeling out of sorts in my own skin when I'm in the states now. And I've had nary a pang of homesickness since I've been here. I think my brain swelled in Beijing, and it wasn't until I got here to Shanghai that I found new clothes to fit it. Is it possible to have reverse-homesickness? I've heard that for people who live abroad for a year or two the process of returning home is infinitely more difficult than is the process of leaving in the first place, but I don't think I understood it until now.

I other less philosophical news, I've posted some of the pictures I've been taking. If you're interested, you can look at them at www.flickr.com/photos/chinabecca/. I'll continue to blog, but flickr is easier and doesn't take up as much space on my blog. Besides, now you can look at my pictures without having to read all my random miscellaneous ponderings.

Episode III: The Food in Shanghai

Well, I was going to impress you with pictures of every imaginiable kind of food, all of which is readily available in Shanghai and most of which I have personally sampled, but for some reason the blogger website is being stubborn. So what you get instead is my simple and inadequate description. If the site's mood suddenly decides to improve, maybe the pictures will come next time.

So I met another vegetarian, and she and I have been hitting the Shanghai vegetarian restaurant scene pretty hard. (Which makes it sound a little like we've been smoking pot, I know, but our version of the pursuit of enlightenment doesn't carry a mandatory 15-year sentence in China...). The Chinese can do amazing things with food, and thanks in part to the Buddhist side of their long heritage - lots of monks who don't eat meat and have enough free time to play around with wheat gluten - they can do amazing things with fake meat as well. Really, this stuff tastes just like the real thing. Vegetarianism has apparently been enjoying a recent trendiness in the East, and Shanghai has some amazing vegetarian restaurants. We usually have to wait for at least half an hour for a seat, even on weeknights, which might irritate us if we didn't find it such a big part of the experience. It's rare to have to wait for a seat in a vegetarian restaurant back home.

Somewhat more intimidating curiosities consist of the dog meat served in the Korean restaurant down the street, which I obviously didn't try, and which nobody who did try actually liked, toast served topped with nothing but chocolate syrup, and pigeons served with their heads still on, eyes in and all.

There are plenty of western-style restaurants here too. I've never seen so many KFC's in one place before. Of course, I've never seen a lotus-root salad served at a KFC either. McDonald's has kiosks on street corners and on the banks of the river, like little ATM's for ice cream cones and french fries. They also serve taro root pies alongside the apple ones, which for the record are delicious. And in Starbucks yesterday I had a green tea and red bean mousse cake, which was great but which I'm also guessing they would have a hard time selling in the states.

Oh, and of course my favorite food in the world...red bean baozi, little steamed buns filled with sweet read bean ground into a delicious paste. There's a little shop down the street that sells the best ones ever, which makes me absolutely ecstatic because, to be honest, red bean baozi are 80% of the reason I came back to China in the first place. You just can't get them in the states. And so cheap! Three buns costs me less than 20 cents U.S.

Last year I lost ten pounds when I came to China. Somehow I have a feeling I won't be experiencing the same problem this time...unless, of course, people keep ordering dog meat. Then I may never eat again.

Settling in in Shanghai....

Well, I'm finally at school and starting to get settled in. It's turning out that all my fears about a sudden drop in quality of life were ill-founded; the dorms are incredibly comfortable, in a brand new building, and we even have air conditioning and our own private bathroom with a western-style toilet. Which is truly a blessing, because try as I might I still can't for the life of me figure out how to use a squatter. I've tried. I really have. And I'm not a stupid person. I don't know how something so simple could escape me so completely.

I had my first day of class yesterday, which was quite an ordeal; I tested into too low a level, so I asked to be moved up a class. But they didn't have any space in the next level up, so they put me in the highest level. The textbook was do-able, but I couldn't understand the teacher at all. They finally found a spot for me in the appropriate level, which I'm grateful for, but all in all the experience was slightly exhausting. Over the course of the morning I had to argue with several people in Chinese, all of whom thought all of my problems could easily be fixed if I would just ask the teacher to please speak a little more slowly.

"You're talking to me now, aren't you?" one of them said. "So you must understand something."

So now I'm in the second-to-the-highest level, which is kind of alarming because I had no idea my Chinese was this good. Or at least I had no idea I could fake my Chinese being this good. I'm still finding it a little difficult, and I have to spend a lot of time studying every day, but it's definitely workable. I will say, though, that I'm going to be pretty darn fluent when I get home.



One other thing that seems interesting enough to mention: my roommate speaks no English. She's from Japan, and her parents are both from Beijing. So she speaks fluent Mandarin with a Beijing accent, but that's the only way we can communicate. It's been great for me, because the worst part of my Chinese is my listening comprehension. It's been great for her, because she keeps asking me how to say things in English. The only problem with that is that I'm finding more and more things that have no literal translations. But it really has been beneficial to both of us, I think. I spoke with a Chinese friend on the phone today who told me he simply couldn't believe how quickly my Chinese has improved. I have a feeling that the majority of what I learn on this trip won't be in the classroom.




We took a cruise on the Huangpu River tonight, which would have been beautiful had it not been for the pollution. Seriously, you have an amazing night view of the entire downtown area of Shanghai, old and new, but you can only see it for about ten minutes before it disappears behind a haze of smog. It's kind of ironic, really, because the price they've paid for all this modernization is that now that they have it, they can't see it.

So other than that I've just been hanging out a little. I bought a bike, which in a silly way makes me feel a little more Chinese. I've made a ton of new friends, all of us bonded by the camraderie of not knowing what the heck we're doing, which has been fun. I even went to a karaoke bar for the first time the other night. Shanghai feels weird because it doesn't feel weird. I feel like I already know this city, like it's already part of me. I must have lived here in a past life. I don't know how else to explain it.

The View from the Radisson

A couple of the pictures that I took this morning from the window of my hotel room. (And you thought road construction was chaotic in the U.S....)



...And a word about the signs of affluence in Shanghai. In Beijing, this street corner would be nothing but old bicycles. Here, though, scooters are really common. The rows of second-hand bikes have virtually disappeared from the city.




It's raining right now in Shanghai. [One of the consequences of studying a foreign language is that now I'm critical of everything in English, too: what, exactly, is the "it" that is raining?] I'm on the nineteenth floor of the Radisson SAS in Shanghai, and it really is a beautiful view, if a little smoggy. I spent the better part of the day wandering the streets trying to find a power adapter for my laptop (unsuccessfully), and I just got back in. I feel a little strange, because in a lot of ways I feel like I never really left China. Everything feels so familiar to me, like I've been here thousands of times. I'll admit, though, that Shanghai seems a little tamer than Beijing did. Beijing seemed like it was constantly in a state of flux and didn't know what to do about it. Shanghai is more like it's in a flux, it knows it, and now it's time to settle back with a beer and put its feet up and enjoy the ride. Taxi drivers are friendly and cooperative, the streets are (relatively) clean, and nobody really gawks when I walk by. They stare, sure, but at least they have the common courtesy to pretend that they aren't staring. I'm not nearly the rarity here that I was in Beijing.

Which on the one hand is a great thing, because I'm finding it a little more comfortable of a city for a long-term stay than I think Beijing would have been. On the other hand, though, I'm finding it was the little things that annoyed me most that burned Beijing into my memory the way it did. It was kind of amusing to feel like a walking tourist attraction, and the availability of western conveniences here makes it feel just a little less like China and a little more like everywhere else.

Of course, ask me after I've moved into the (a/c-free) dorms tomorrow, and I may have a very different opinion....

Next Year I'm Going to Japan (or) Where do They Put All the Japanese?

Well as of about an hour ago I'm finally in Shanghai, and I have to say that the flight was blessedly unremarkable. Absolutely nothing happened. Which, compared to last year, is a huge improvement. I have all my luggage, I got vegetarian meals on the flight, I managed to avoid getting completely ripped off...all in all, a pretty good trip. Not only that, but for some reason I now seem to be able to access my blog, which means that updates should be a little more frequent than they were last year.

So I had an hour and a half layover in the Tokyo airport today, and it gave me plenty of half-conscious pause to wonder two things: 1. why didn't I study Japanese instead? and 2. um...where are all the Japanese? The first question came because the airport was beautiful; even the bathrooms were perfect. They didn't have stalls, they had individual little private rooms. And even the kids' play area had a wall of computers so kids could connect to the internet. And here I go to a country that's absolutely notorious for its gross restrooms and it takes me half an hour to connect to the internet in my hotel room. The second question came because all of the signs were in English, and I could have sworn that there were at least as many white people as there were Japanese in the terminal. Add the Chinese where there, and the Japanese were probably outnumbered two to one. Granted I was in the international terminal waiting on a flight to mainland China, but still...is Japan just so great that the Japanese don't want to go anywhere?

In other news, Shanghai is murderously stuffy, I had a really strange meal on the flight today that tasted like sweet potatoes with mint chutney, and the bed in my room feels like I'm sleeping on a brick wall. And I love all of it. Well, maybe excepting the mint chutney.

More later...I'm going on my twenty-third hour awake, and I'm starting to drag.

The Cutest Baby in the World

John and I spent the afternoon today with our good friends Ryan and Jackie, who just bought a new house. Their son Charlie is getting so big. He turned a whole year old on the 14th of June. I remember visiting him in the hospital when he was born last year! Quite frankly, I'm not sure I was prepared for his first birthday. It just makes me feel too darn old.

Ryan and Jackie are two of my favorite people in the world, and I guess it's only fitting that they should have given birth to my favorite baby in the world. So now they're my favorite family in the world. And Charlie really is the cutest child ever.

*Gasp* A New Posting

Ni hao, everyone.

Well, I'm exactly one week to the day away from boarding an airplane bound for the other side of the planet, and I'm already exhausted. The upside of the situation is that I'll be able to kill most of the 18-hour plane ride sleeping. The downside is that I'll also kill most of the rest of my last week here sleeping. Materially, I'm ready to go, literally shopped out (which as most of you know is a considerable feat), but I'm afraid that when the actual day arrives it will find me woefully unprepared both mentally and academically. I keep having dreams that I forget my passport or I get stuck at the airport in Tokyo or I lose my luggage. Of course, whenever I start getting stressed out I just remember my flight to Beijing last year, which I survived with almost all of my limbs more or less intact. This year's flight might be as bad, but there's not much chance of it being any worse. And I've been chanting this like a Hindu mantra.

On a totally unrelated tangent: I was at the mall the other day when I saw an Indian family (Indian Indian, not Native American Indian) walk by me. The dad and mom were in regular American street clothes, but the grandmother with them was dressed in traditional Indian dress. It's not really so unusual a sight around here, but on this particular occasion it struck me - it's weird how random situations will do this, just walk up and hit me upside the head for the fun of it - that you almost never see a young Indian woman in traditional dress. It's always the elder women. I could certainly be showing my cultural ignorance here, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I wondered how, if I ever have kids, my children's world will be different than the one I see now. Will my daughter ever stand in a mall watching a woman in traditional Indian dress, or will this sort of thing have died out by the time she's 24? Me, I take it for granted. If little Lucy (the pre-determined name of my future hypothetical daughter) sees a woman dressed like this, will she gape and stare because it's such a foreign sight to her? And what other things in the world will have changed? Will China be the new superpower, and will Lucy be forced to take four years of Mandarin in high school (poor kid)? Will they invent lima beans that taste good and chocolate ice cream that makes you lose weight? And how many of the changes will be for the good, and how much of it for the bad?

And of course the most pressing and slightly disturbing question: how much of the change for the good will I personally have inspired, and how much of the change for the worse will I have failed to prevent?

At Last...an Update

I know, I know. It's been FOREVER. And I have to apologize doubly, because it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about as punchy as they come. But I figured that I ought to try to write something, even if it's just to dispel the myth that I've met some untimely demise. As my darling Mark Twain wrote, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

So my best friend Chia-chi, whith whom I've been practically attached at the hip for the past two months, left to go back to Taiwan yesterday, and he left a bit of a Chia-chi shaped hole in the pit of my stomach that I'm sure will last at least two more days. I'm finding all efforts to avoid thinking about it fruitless; everything reminds me of him, including the piles of miscellaneous household items that he left with us when he went home. It's just so quiet around here without him. He was over here so much that toward the end he was taking to just putting his groceries in our refrigerator, because lugging them back and forth the one block between our two apartments was becoming too much of a bother.

In other news, John finished his last assignment of the quarter this evening and is henceforth tentatively officially graduated from North Seattle, barring some unfortunate circumstance. I'm so proud of him; he's worked very hard to get where he is. Me, I leave for Shanghai on July 6th, and the stress of another international trip is starting to wear me a little thin. I only just got the paperwork to apply for my visa a few days ago, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be processed in time. In the meantime, the ever-present UW red tape is keeping me busy with every manner of paperwork.

More to come later, when I'm a little less tired.

Down With PETA and The Ravings of a Mad Vegetarian

When I first went vegatarian, my naive little self thought that PETA was actually a good thing. I didn't know that much about them at the time, except for the fact that their tactics were a little guerilla-ish (pouring red paint on women's fur coats, etc.). But I thought a support group for compassion-minded people had to be basically decent and well-intentioned, even if their way of expressing it was a little socially...off. At any rate, I figured, it got the message out there. It educated people about vegetarianism. It got people looking at the food on their plates and asking questions. Whether they became vegetarians or not, it made people more conscientious about where their food was coming from, which couldn't be a bad thing. Surely if the ends didn't justify the means, they must at least have excused them.

But the longer I've been a vegetarian the more I've learned, and the more irritated I've become. I used to become so frustrated and hurt when people would get on my case about being a vegetarian; after all, what does anyone else care what I put (or don't put) in my own body? I couldn't figure out why it offended so many people. But the fact is, PETA's outlandish, over-the-top tactics haven't succeeded in opening society to a vegetarian lifestyle. All PETA has done is serve to further isolate it on the fringes of left-wing extremism. They do horrible things like stand outside elementary schools telling the children that their parents are murderers. They expose society at large to horribly offensive billboards, like one last Christmas showing Santa Claus looking unhappily down his pants and declaring in large letters that milk makes you impotent. And I'm sure everyone has heard of the campaign they mounted where they parallelled images from the Nazi concentration camps alongside pictures of slaughterhouses.

This is why people automatically distrust me when I say I'm a vegetarian. This is why parents have a cow (an especially appropriate pun, I thought) when their teenage daughters tell them they're phasing out meat. It's not because society at large is cruel and compassionless, as PETA would have us believe. It's because groups like PETA have made vegetarianism about fighting "the man." No longer is it simply a way to practice compassion. These days it's nothing more than an especially self-righteous form of social rebellion. A disproportionately large number of animal activists will out-and-out tell you that they fully sanction the use of violence if it means what they call "complete and total animal liberation." I'm not even sure what that means, and nobody's a bigger animal lover than I am. Regardless, these people have the audacity to compare themselves to MLK and Gandhi, saying that they're fighting for a cause.

But there's an oh-so-huge difference: King and Gandhi are famous for preaching non-violence. There were other people fighting for the same causes as they were, but these men achieved great things because they were full of compassion. And what I wonder is: how did we get to this place? How did something so obviously rooted in empathy become a cause that not only tolerates but endorses violence? You can't have compassion for animals without having it for humans, and ultimately you can't have compassion for humans without having it for animals, because it all comes from the same place in the heart. Why must they be mutually exclusive?

I want to go on record here: I am horrified at the fact that we even eat meat anymore, let alone at the way we do it in America. I am horrified at the way some people treat their animals. I am horrified at the fact that lots of animals are tortured unnecessarily at testing facilities. But what we need as compassionate people isn't another war. What we need is to take a pragmatic approach to the situation. We can't simply let every animal in captivity go; it would be mass chaos. We can't simply up and elimiate animal testing; there are hundreds of people (including the diabetic vice president of PETA) who rely on animal products for their survival. What we can do is educate people. The vast majority of people still believe that vegetarianism is horribly bad for them, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. We can offer incentives to scientists so that they can find techological and synthetic alternatives to animal testing. We can live our own lives in ways that make people realize that not eating meat doesn't necessarily mean giving up on life.

Look, it's just a fact that things have to die for other things to survive. It's the natural order of things. Our job is to cause as little suffering as possible. I don't eat meat not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I believe that our current technology and wealth of food choices make it an unnecessary evil in America, especially with the way we go about it with our greedy little selves. I could go on about all the other incentives, how if we used all the grain we fed to cattle we could feed most of the third world and how the vast majority of the rainforests are being destroyed for cattle farms, but I'm sure PETA's already told you all of that. And if you really think that animals don't have a soul, come on over and meet my dog Hunter. He'll change your mind in one of his little heartbeats. Change - real change - takes time. I'd much rather it be slow and painful and lasting than a passing fad. To be perfectly honest, I'm not holding my breath while I wait for the rest of the U.S. to go vegetarian. I'd be happy just having people accept the fact that I've done it. After that, who knows? Maybe when my grandchildren are growing up this won't even be an issue.

Yes, I have a life. Yes, I get plenty to eat. I'm healthier than most of the people I know. Last time I got blood work done my protein and calcium was at the high end of the scale, even though I haven't eaten meat in four years and haven't had any milk in two. I've lost fifty pounds since I went vegan. I've already inspired two other people to become vegetarians without proselytizing or laying on the guilt.

All this, and I've never once poured red paint on a fur coat.

Spamalot

For those of us who are looking for something a little different in our showtunes, Broadway now offers something for husbands with strange senses of humor, too. We were watching The Daily Show one night a couple of weeks ago and the guest for the evening was Eric Idle of Monty Python fame. Apparently the newest show to grace our favorite street is none other than a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with coconuts and starring Tim Curry and David Hyde Pierce. Seriously. I couldn't make something like this up.

I had almost forgotten about it until tonight, when I saw a little blurb about the show's opening night on CNN. Word on the street is that it got rave reviews. I'm just wondering how they did the killer rabbit and the catapulting cows on a stage...

Granted, it's a little odd, but John and I are already planning for a post-graduation trip to New York just to see it. Just something a little different for those of us who eat ham and jam and spamalot :)

A Happy Day in the Peer House

Many happy congratulations to John (my language partner Chia-wei, who has difficulty saying his name, calls him Joohhnnn), who today celebrates his three-weeks-as-a-vegetarian anniversary. I haven't heard him pine for meat at all, unless you count the time he commented that he wished he'd tried the new hot dot place up the street before he'd given up meat for good. He even threw out a half a bag of frozen fish sticks yesterday evening when he was cleaning out the freezer, declaring that he would no longer have any use for them. Now the only meat left in the house is a can of tuna and a package of instant turkey gravy, which John won't let me throw away in case the local food bank suddenly finds itself short one tin of mushy fish and something to put on their mashed potatoes.

I have to say that I am so proud of the man John has become, at the way his social conscience and his compassion have just flowered. He's gone from being a man who didn't care about anything at all when I first met him to being a man who wouldn't talk to anyone for a whole day after Kerry lost the election. You may or may not agree with his politics, his beliefs, or his now meatless lifestyle, but that isn't the point. The point is that John cares, about me most of all, and I am so lucky to have a man with such a huge, kind heart.

Girls Can Kick Butt, Too

So I was having a little bit of trouble at Jeet Kune Do on Monday night. I was working with my sometime partner and alltime friend Travis, and I kept punching him in the head without actually meaning to. It'd be a useful tendency in an actual fight, but when you're not actually trying to hurt your opponent it can be a little frustrating.

"I'm so sorry," I finally said after I nailed him in the jaw. "Maybe I should be home knitting instead."

"Oh no," he responded. "Knitting is the last thing you should be doing."

Seeing it in print now makes it look like he thinks I'm a real tomboy (either that or just really uncoordinated with my hands, which may actually be the case), but I was pretty flattered at the time. It just illustrates one of the things I love about that class; never once have I been treated like a girl. I've always been encouraged by all of my 200-pound kung fu brothers to be the very best I could be, in spite of the fact that I lack 30% of their upper body strength and 90% of their physical endurance. People ask me from time to time whether it's ever been awkward being a girl and learning from Taky Kimura, one of the most respected martial artists in recent American memory, and it always throws me off guard because it's always been so extremely the opposite of awkward. It's been amazing; it's one of the few places in my life where I've actually felt like I fit in. The only thing that might make it a little awkward is that many times I'm the only girl in the class, just for the fact that I feel like a tabby in a room full of lions. I mentioned this to one of the instructors, though, and he just laughed at me.

"You're going to be one of the few females to come out of the Kimura camp," he said. "If anything you're doubly lucky."

I humbly, totally agree.

Drunk Birds?

Apparently humans aren't the only animals who love a good time...here's a story about some birds who were - and I'm not even remotely kidding; who could make this stuff up? - flying drunk.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6982867/?GT=6190

...

One more picture...I'm having trouble getting the hang of this picture posting thing.



...

A Cute Little Picture

So I'm normally not the biggest fan of e-mail forwards, but my aunt sent me these pictures that she received by way of some e-mail chain and I just had to share them. Apparently this couple found the deer on their front step, seemingly motherless, and decided to take it in until it can get its strength back. As the story goes, the dog has completely taken over the task of caring for it; the fawn even sleeps in the dog's bed.



A deer with a dog. Think they're aware of the alliteration?

All Hail Mao Zedong...

I got to see my friend Kaman today, who I've seen almost none of since I got back from Beijing. She's from Hong Kong, and helped me out with a linguistics project by recording herself saying all kinds of ridiculous sentences in Cantonese. ("He gave us two ducks. Is that hen yours? No, it's not mine. It's his." Etc. etc. etc.)

She's always wanted to go back to Hong Kong once she graduated. She just got hired on with one of the big four accounting firms (Arthur Andersen, I think?) and she's graduating this spring. When I asked her if she'd be transferring back home in her newfound capacity as an Internal Auditor she just sighed and shrugged.

"I don't know if I want to," she said. "These days if you work at a big company there three weeks out of the month you're in the mainland. And you know how much I hate it."

I do. When we were there together it was hard to miss her less than favorable opinion of her homeland's Big Brother (pun intended). The food was bad. It was boring. The people were racist. (They were, actually, especially against her ironically enough, but that isn't really the point.) What is the point is that she, like most of her fellow Hong-Kongians, are now subject to a corrupt government that they pretty well detest.

It got me to thinking about two things: one, why? China gives all kinds of political justifications for its reunification of Hong Kong, and I suppose from a political science standpoint a lot of them are probably valid. But why should a people have to be subject to a government just because it had been at some time in the past millennium? Most of them call themselves Chinese, but they don't identify with China. They identify with Hong Kong, which until the past twenty years couldn't possibly have been more different. So why is it so necessary, under some vast and sweeping pretext of unity, to subject a people to anything they don't really want to be a part of?

Okay, so Hong Kong is at least understandable, because there's some economic benefit to China in its reintegration. But how about Tibet? That's just greedy. There's nothing there but a bunch of Buddhists, and as much as we all love the Buddhists, how much national benefit could come of its takeover? It's not as though they're contributing anything to the gross national product. We're talking about a whole race of people whose lives are based on sitting around staring at walls and humming to themselves. If they'd rather chant in Tibetan than in Mandarin, why stop them? Who are they hurting?

Which brings me to question number two: what is it about our own patriotism that makes us want to force it on others? Why is it that Abraham Lincoln was so obsessed with not letting the south break away? Why can't the blue states form their own countries, if they feel so underrepresented? These aren't rhetorical questions, either, but genuine curiosities. After all government is, at least to some extent, just an artificial social structure. A necessary one, but not one set in place by the forces of nature. George Bush is still just a man. Jacques Chirac is still just a man. And the Chinese are starting to figure out that Mao was just a man. We support the governments of the people we think share our morals, we pooh-pooh the people who do things differently, and in the meantime my friend Kaman doesn't feel safe raising her children in the place where she grew up.

Maybe I've been reading too much John Locke, but doesn't this defeat the purpose of government in the first place? Isn't the whole point kind of a safety in numbers kind of deal? And how did it end up that, even in America, in the end it's still just the rule of the many by a few idiots with really white smiles?

中文版

我 剛才發現了我在電腦裏寫得 到 漢字。 這個讓我很高興； 現在我可以讓每個中國人哈哈大笑。 是的，我的中文真的那麽懷。所以我對讀這封信的中國人說：非常對不起。我從來沒說我會說中文說得很好。 哎呀，英文我都不會說吧。就是寫中文的時候可以玩一下， 也讓別的美國人覺得我很聰明阿。:)

I just figured out that I can type Chinese characters on the computer. This makes me really happy; now I can give all the Chinese people a good hearty laugh. Yes, my Chinese really is that bad. So to all the Chinese people who are reading this I say, I am really sorry. I never said I could speak Chinese well. Heck, I can't even speak English. It's just that I can have a little fun writing in Chinese, and it makes other Americans think I'm really smart. :)

Untitled Because I'm Cool Like That

I have to start out by apologizing for the fact that I haven't posted anything in almost a month; my parents were up for Christmas, and after that school started back up again, and to be frank I've had hardly a moment to myself since I sat down to write my last post. But I'm still alive - at least I think I am, though I'll admit I've been looking a little ashen in the mirror lately - and thought a small update would be appropriate for those of you who still either are desperately looking for ways to kill time on the internet or are serious gluttons for punishment. Because I should think, seriously, that by this time all the impatient riff-raff would have been weeded out from my readership. You all are the special ones. Or one, as the case may in fact perhaps be.

We've been keeping ourselves ridiculously busy; myself with a full courseload of Chinese classes (including a course in Chinese linguistics, which covers such course matter as all seven dialect groups and the memorization of the International Phonetic Alphabet), and John with his math, physics, and programming. I'm still mulling over the dilemma of whether or not I should apply to graduate school next year or wait awhile; the GRE's are rapidly approaching, and still I change my mind every day. John keeps telling me to make a list of the pros and cons, but I'm afraid that I'm so moment-minded that any foresight with organization of that magnitude completely escapes me. Besides, I can't much see the value in this methodology: it stands to reason that some pros and/or cons are potentially going to have more weight than their opposing counterparts. By the time I wrote the appropriate mathematical formula for figuring it all out and programmed it into my graphing calculator, I could have already made the decision the old-fashioned way. I'm starting to see the attraction in flipping a coin.

I'm reading two books right now: Carter Beats the Devil - so far intriguing, but I haven't gotten past the second chapter, so maybe not that intriguing - and Sourcery, one of Terry Pratchett's hilariously fantastic Discworld novels. Great stuff, those. John bought me a signed first-edition of Going Postal two weeks ago, which I ploughed through in two days before wrapping it in bubble wrap and putting it in a safe. I'm sure we all wish I was exaggerating. I've been writing, too, much thanks to John who pushes me endlessly (he says it's because he believes in me; I say it's because he wants me to write a runaway blockbuster so he can live high on the hog. Or tofu. Either way, his support is a lifesaver. I'd have given up on myself a long time ago if it wasn't for him.)

And that's it. I will try to post more often, though probably not every day. Which is more boring, a person who could fill the entire allotted memory of her blog with one long page of random information, or a person who feeds you small bits of random information on a daily basis? This isn't a rhetorical question, either. I'm a writer. I need to know these things.