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.

FREEDOM!!!!!

Well, I've finally done it; I've finished my finals. I would apologize for not posting for a while if I felt bad, but right now I don't. I'm so numb from stress that I won't be able to feel anything, much less guilt, for at least another two days. Next to finals themselves, this is the worst time of the quarter: I've become so adjusted to running non-stop that now my body doesn't understand that there's nothing especially pressing that needs to be done. It's like getting off of a roller coaster. It's fun (or in this case, tolerable) while you're on it, but after you get off you feel kind of nauseous.

I completely BOMBED my Chinese Lit test this morning. Which makes me wonder: do I really want to be this educated? All I really wanted was to learn another language, maybe stretch my brain a little. But just a little. I don't really care what Xi Kang ate for breakfast in Fujian provice on April 12, 485 CE. The thing about all these 400-level classes is that suddenly, for the first time in my entire fifteen years in school, they want me to think. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen. No longer am I required to simply spew forth information previously spoon-fed into my eager young brain. Now - somewhat late in the game, if you ask me - I am actually required to think for myself, a practice at which I have virtually no experience. Why didn't anybody tell me I was going to have to do this? I'm disappointed and more than a little disllusioned.

Ode to a Si Bak

I found out late last Wednesday that my kung fu si bak, Taky, had a heart attack on the preceeding Sunday and had to spend Wednesday on the operating table undergoing a quadruple bypass surgery. I think it was a little bit of a shock to everybody; he's one of the most amazing people I've ever met, really kind and a genuinely kindred spirit. He's also shorter than I am and can throw a man twice his size across the room, which makes him truly my hero; I've spent so long thinking that I and my stubby legs could never amount to anything remarkable, at least in terms of the martial arts. Taky, however, has proven me wrong, and has welcomed chubby little old me into his kung fu family with open arms. I would appreciate it if everyone would keep him in your thoughts and prayers: he's doing well and coming home from the hospital today, but he's in for a long recovery.

Ryan and Stephen went over a few days ago and completely redid si bak's room, laid all new carpet and everything, which I think was so sweet. I just hope that he's not so surprised he has another heart attack...