Chinese trip
I went on a weekend trip with the English Department to Huaiyin, what the Chinese consider to be in the fourth rank because it only has a million or so people. Cities that are big enough to be their own administrative districts like Beijing and Shanghai are rank one, provincial capitals like Nanjing are rank two, and other important developing cities (Wuxi, Suzhou) are rank three. The hotel had better food than accommodations, and after a day of museum hopping we had a big banquet and I learned a Chinese card game called “Beat the Eggs,” the latest and most complicated version of the original “Beat the Landlord.”
We visited a museum dedicated to Zhou Enlai, the People’s Republic’s first foreign minister, and the Zhou Enlai city park. It really was a pretty park, with this strange tree that flowers bloomed right off the branch, so it looks like a tree without any leaves, but with purple flowers outlining its shape. Since I didn’t understand anything the museum’s guide said, the only thing I learned is that his wife was also prominent in politics, the ideal first lady by American reckoning, judging by some of the panels that had been posted in English.
I learned more at the Opera Museum; while the official tour guide was lecturing the professors in Chinese, one of the other museum employees and I eased into a conversation and, with the help of the dictionary in her phone, she explained some of the opera to me. The thing I found most interesting was origin of unusually long sleeves. The longer the sleeves, the more it indicated that the wearer did not have to work for a living, since some of those sleeves would make it impossible to even write, never mind do physical labor. I recall at least one culture that felt the same way about letting fingernails grow to unusual lengths as well.
We went to a museum about Huaiyin cuisine that went all the way back to the invention of rice. The only part I understood was this machine I found where you play a food pyramid game. If you pick the percentages of four categories of food to feed the computer illustration character, it shows the result as too fat, too thin, or just right. On the other hand, the building did include a lot of interesting paintings and carvings from ancient times of cooks, bakeries, and so on.
There was a Museum of Urbanization, illustrating the glories of urban development, mostly with images of real buildings from around the world and illustrations of their future plans for Huaiyin. I noticed that none of the illustrations included the smog, which is usually bad in China. Outside the Enlai park, a couple of teenage girls wanted to take photos with me, and then I offered to use their camera to take a photo with both of them in it. I do this a lot, actually, since Chinese people love taking photos of each other at famous places but the person with the camera is often left out. When I framed up the photo of them, I included the main building of the park just to the left, but the smog was so bad that the building wouldn’t show up. It freaked me out.
Then was the Museum of Marriage History, which had almost nothing inside it except for a giant bell you could bong for good luck, and the “Journey to the West” Museum, dedicated to the various depictions of this Chinese epic novel. It’s really dozens of folk tales tied together by a scholar about a monkey that drank from the waters of enlightenment, gained the intellect of a human and the powers of a minor god, but retained the basic attitude of a monkey. He was kicked out of the Heavens for drinking all the wine at a party he wasn’t invited to, and eventually allowed to redeem himself by protecting a Buddhist priest on his way to India to find the original Buddhist scrolls, defeating quite a number of demons and monsters along the way. I realize India is to the south of China, but given the terrain, at the time it was safer and probably faster to go around the mountains instead of straight through. The stories have been turned into operas, movies, television serials, and children’s cartoons. The Monkey King has also shown up as secondary characters in a movie played by Jackie Chan and a paranormal novel …
I never learned the name of the last museum we visited, but it specialized in photography. At first I thought the main exhibit was about women in the revolution, by which I mean from the beginning of the civil wars up to the introduction of color photography, since all but one of the photos was in black and white, but not all of the photos matched that theme. When I asked one of the professors, she explained that all the photos were taken by a Chinese general who not only loved photography but was also unusually fond of his wife (who was also in the army), so by extension lots of the photos were of women’s revolutionary groups in both the army and civilian life.
A side exhibit was of photos of rocks, which is more interesting than it sounds. I found it a little disorienting to realize that without context I had trouble telling the size of the rocks or the distance the lens was from the surfaces. It’s not that hard to imagine a rock you could hold in your hand made ten times the size that would look exactly the same if you were ten times further away. It says something about the patterns of nature that I don’t feel qualified to speak upon.
We visited a museum dedicated to Zhou Enlai, the People’s Republic’s first foreign minister, and the Zhou Enlai city park. It really was a pretty park, with this strange tree that flowers bloomed right off the branch, so it looks like a tree without any leaves, but with purple flowers outlining its shape. Since I didn’t understand anything the museum’s guide said, the only thing I learned is that his wife was also prominent in politics, the ideal first lady by American reckoning, judging by some of the panels that had been posted in English.
I learned more at the Opera Museum; while the official tour guide was lecturing the professors in Chinese, one of the other museum employees and I eased into a conversation and, with the help of the dictionary in her phone, she explained some of the opera to me. The thing I found most interesting was origin of unusually long sleeves. The longer the sleeves, the more it indicated that the wearer did not have to work for a living, since some of those sleeves would make it impossible to even write, never mind do physical labor. I recall at least one culture that felt the same way about letting fingernails grow to unusual lengths as well.
We went to a museum about Huaiyin cuisine that went all the way back to the invention of rice. The only part I understood was this machine I found where you play a food pyramid game. If you pick the percentages of four categories of food to feed the computer illustration character, it shows the result as too fat, too thin, or just right. On the other hand, the building did include a lot of interesting paintings and carvings from ancient times of cooks, bakeries, and so on.
There was a Museum of Urbanization, illustrating the glories of urban development, mostly with images of real buildings from around the world and illustrations of their future plans for Huaiyin. I noticed that none of the illustrations included the smog, which is usually bad in China. Outside the Enlai park, a couple of teenage girls wanted to take photos with me, and then I offered to use their camera to take a photo with both of them in it. I do this a lot, actually, since Chinese people love taking photos of each other at famous places but the person with the camera is often left out. When I framed up the photo of them, I included the main building of the park just to the left, but the smog was so bad that the building wouldn’t show up. It freaked me out.
Then was the Museum of Marriage History, which had almost nothing inside it except for a giant bell you could bong for good luck, and the “Journey to the West” Museum, dedicated to the various depictions of this Chinese epic novel. It’s really dozens of folk tales tied together by a scholar about a monkey that drank from the waters of enlightenment, gained the intellect of a human and the powers of a minor god, but retained the basic attitude of a monkey. He was kicked out of the Heavens for drinking all the wine at a party he wasn’t invited to, and eventually allowed to redeem himself by protecting a Buddhist priest on his way to India to find the original Buddhist scrolls, defeating quite a number of demons and monsters along the way. I realize India is to the south of China, but given the terrain, at the time it was safer and probably faster to go around the mountains instead of straight through. The stories have been turned into operas, movies, television serials, and children’s cartoons. The Monkey King has also shown up as secondary characters in a movie played by Jackie Chan and a paranormal novel …
I never learned the name of the last museum we visited, but it specialized in photography. At first I thought the main exhibit was about women in the revolution, by which I mean from the beginning of the civil wars up to the introduction of color photography, since all but one of the photos was in black and white, but not all of the photos matched that theme. When I asked one of the professors, she explained that all the photos were taken by a Chinese general who not only loved photography but was also unusually fond of his wife (who was also in the army), so by extension lots of the photos were of women’s revolutionary groups in both the army and civilian life.
A side exhibit was of photos of rocks, which is more interesting than it sounds. I found it a little disorienting to realize that without context I had trouble telling the size of the rocks or the distance the lens was from the surfaces. It’s not that hard to imagine a rock you could hold in your hand made ten times the size that would look exactly the same if you were ten times further away. It says something about the patterns of nature that I don’t feel qualified to speak upon.