There's a very lifelike cardboard cutout of Tony Leung leaning against that pole.
2006-09-06: Today's Wednesday so I've been in China for a week. It's turning out well. Last Friday we all did a test to stream the classes, and I was put in the advanced class. I expected it to be just me and a bunch of fluent Koreans, but it's very mixed. There are plenty of Koreans and also a Dane, some Americans, a Slovakian boy, couple of Japanese etc. We have one Japanese classmate, Mr. Ridgefield, who's 62. He studied Chinese at university, but during the Cultural Revolution, so he never had an opportunity to come to China or generally practise his Chinese. Now (presumably having retired) he's taking advantage of the times to redress the balance.
I was afraid my Chinese was ridiculously below the requirements, especially after I saw the 高级班 textbooks. Actually it's going to be about right. I can understand everything that goes on in class, and on the other hand I think the teachers are going to expect a lot of us. We've got oral, listening, written and reading language classes, and we'll be working on more literary Chinese sometimes, and learning 成语 (pithy four-character proverbs which are essential to sounding very Chinese) and stuff like that. Today, we just all introduced ourselves, but at a fairly encouraging level. I think we'll also get to choose extra subjects like calligraphy, tai ji quan, history, film, stuff like that. If I have to choose one it'll be calligraphy, though I'll be sorely tempted if there's a film class.
My family continue to be lovely. I'll pay them the first month's rent tomorrow and then I'll feel better about barging in on their lives. I hope I'm not too much of a pain in the neck. I eat with them as part of the arrangement, which is great but means they have to think about me, you know? I don't like giving them more to think about. Heck, 13-year-old Clear Logic works even longer hours than his parents - out of the house from 6 till 6 and then homework (and still chirpy).
Teacher Order and Clear Logic took me to the edge of the xiaoqu last Sunday, through a gate and straight into the countryside. I've never travelled around in China so I've never been in Chinese countryside before. It's really strange - the general idea is the same as home, but the ground, hill and tree shapes are different and when you look closely the leaves are different. It's common land there, just outside the xiaoqu, so it's wild, lush and scrubby for a couple of metres until you come to a patch of ground someone's borrowed to plant aubergines, soya beans, ground cucumbers (地瓜呢?), peas, maize, sorghum etc. and then it's wild again. The people who plant the food sell it half a kilometre away at the other side of the xiaoqu, where people can buy it on their way home from the bus stop.
We stopped to talk to two of the women who were planting little crops there. They had a bag of soya beans, which I had never seen in the pod before. They were very interesting and I was amazed to understand them. The women, not the beans. Teacher Order asked them all kinds of questions about their crops and where they lived and how much they earned. They were tiny and wrinkled and looked at me, Teacher Order and Clear Logic and asked if we were a family - Teacher Order hesitated and told them I was a "foreign friend" (stock expression, strange context). He felt the need to explain to me afterwards that they were 'laobaixing', 'old hundred surnames', i.e. common citizens, who 'don't have the understanding that, say, university professors do.' I said I was glad he'd stopped to talk to them because I wouldn't have, I would have been afraid I wouldn't understand them.
The xiaoqu is an interesting concept when it's done poshly like this one, and has attractive communal space. It's a bit like suburbia (houseproud, growing vegetables, good jobs, musical instruments being practised) but it wastes a lot less space (lawns are from hell), allows a better sense of community and probably has less impact on the environment relative to the number of people who live in it.
If you're reading this, it means I've found some way to post it. Well done me. The update page is blocked from within the uni network at least - haven't tried elsewhere yet. Oh, and I now have a nice blue Nokia phone which does Chinese. I bought a pale blue phone necklace to go with it, a small tortoise (in the hope that "ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it"). Two of Teacher Order's students were with me and helped me by haggling and by knowing where the market was in the first place. Also, I've been parched since I got here: nobody drinks when they eat, and who wants to keep buying bottled water? The solution is to get a Nalgene-like bottle (it always cracks me up that there's a brand known in America for making outstanding plastic bottles) and carry it around like a hunter would a gourd or goatskin. Most buildings have a dispenser of permanently scalding water which is quite nice to drink once it's cooled a bit. Even nicer is to chuck some tea-leaves/flowers in first. So I've now got an outstanding plastic bottle emblazoned "富光 NEW CENTURY Tea-filter Space Cup, MADE BY FUGUANG, FuGuang FuGuang FuGuang." Why the fuss, you might think, but hydration had really been bothering me.
Better go, up at 6.30 tomorrow... and every day for the next year! Love,
Kay