The Jewish Guy

I had the most bizarre experience at school today. I was walking across campus on my way home from class, headphones in my ears, when a tall guy in a yarmulke walked up to me and said cheerfully, "Hi!"

I hesitated for a second and didn't even bother to take the headphones out of my ears. My school is really big and really liberal, and it's teeming with all kinds of political nutjobs and proselytizers who fly just below the social radar but won't hesitate to mentally accost you and goad you into a heated debate when they think they can get away with it. At my school, the best policy is usually just to ignore the strangers who are trying to talk to you.

"Hi," I said at last.

With a big smile, he said, "Are you Jewish?"

"Um...I don't think so. Why, do I look Jewish?"

He cocked his head to one side and studied me for a moment before he wrinkled his nose and said, "Um, yeah, not really." He stood there like that for a full two seconds before I finally smiled and politely told him that I needed to go.

Ok, Seattle is weird sometimes. UW, even weirder. But I think that was probably the weirdest exchange I've ever had at school. I can't help but wonder what was going through his head.

Happy New Year (Again) !!

Today is Chinese New Year. Or at least, in China today is Chinese New Year. In the US we have to wait until tomorrow to play with our firecrackers and annoy our neighbors.

Oh, how I wish I was there....this year, I have to settle for Chinatown.

But we're hoping that the year of the dog turns out to be a little more auspicious for us than the year of the chicken was - and I'm a chicken! what's up with that?! The car broke down last week, to the tune of $2200, which is almost as much as the whole thing is worth all by itself. We didn't have any choice but to fix it; with John working two jobs it was almost impossible to survive without the car. He was getting up at 1 a.m. to catch a bus to Costco and coming home from his second job at the Times around 5 p.m. I literally haven't seen him for a week and a half.

But with the help of some family and a little finagling with some payday loan places, we were able to scrape together the money we needed to get the darned thing fixed, so we've traded the stress of exhaustion for the stress of no money. Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds. When you're a student, you're used to both kinds of stress, and we've found that the no-money kind of stress is decidedly the more tolerable of the two. The thing I find especially ironic in a grim sort of way is the fact that I sold my piano last week - two days before the car broke - to get some money to put toward the impending move halfway across the world. Instead I got to spend it on rent and a new head gasket.

And I miss my piano. It may be the closest I'll ever get to having a child. And since it's been gone, I've had to get my stress out by banging on John instead.

Is This Blog Starting to Get Repetitive?

Nothing new to report. Stop reading now. I'm very serious. I'm just going to bore you, because once again I've started school. Once again I don't know how I'm going to manage to pull through. Once again I'm going to do it, much as it exhausts me, I'm going to write some random self-important blog entries about the plight of the female college student and aspiring professor in modern-day America, maybe mixed in with a few playful anecdotes about multi-cultural interactions, and then you are going to fall asleep. Because, really, you've heard it all before.

Do I sound tired? Overwhelmed? Disillusioned? If I don't, I'm either not a very good writer or not trying hard enough.

Really, now that the new year has come, the focus is starting to shift from getting through school to getting through graduation, which may sound like the same thing but actually isn't anywhere close. Suddenly I'm faced not only with what I'm going to do after I graduate - which is intimidating enough - but also with how I'm going to make it through the entire process. It's a process which involves graduation applications, graduation announcements, finishing a nearly impossible honors thesis, and trying to keep my grades up high enough that I still have a reasonable chance of going to graduate school. It's piling up emotionally to the point where I don't really want to do anything at all, which is bad. I'm surprised every college senior in the United States isn't on a federally mandated daily dose of prozac.

I am, however, excited about graduating and eager to see what life has in store for me next. WHICH BRINGS ME TO AN ANNOUNCEMENT: my graduation ceremony is scheduled for June 10 of this year, just to give a heads-up to anyone who might want to come. I won't be sending out official announcements until probably April, and I know that that might be too short of notice for some of you. So....there it is.

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....