Saturday, August 22, 2009

I’ve been frustrated in my attempts to upload dozens more pictures. I wrote to Kodak Gallery and asked them why this batch won’t upload and, at the suggestion of Juan, their live chat consultant, I rebooted, reinstalled and retried. Nothing worked. Yesterday I complained to Ying about my problem, and she told me that there had been an underwater earthquake somewhere that has disrupted one of the major fiberoptic cables connecting the US and China. She said she hadn’t been able to get Hotmail and her husband Kongli back in Dedham, MA couldn’t get any of his usual China sites. So in two days, I’ve uploaded six pictures and feel pretty proud of that! I have invited people to view them and will let you know when I have the rest of them snuggled onto the Gallery.

After final presentations for Session 2 (more about that later) Duo, Jiao (Jamie) and I went went to Houhai, a great hutong (old neighborhood) near the Beijing Academy for Dramatic Arts which is, as you can guess, a pretty artsy-fartsy area of the city. Both D and J lamented how touristy it’s become, and there certainly were many Westerners there, but I enjoyed visiting the many small shops--filled not only with souvenirs for tourists, but also interesting artwork of unusual colors and designs. It was here that Jiao had got the gorgeous earrings she gave me at the end of Session 1. I wanted to get a couple more pairs as gifts. Alas, when we got to the spot where the store had been, it wasn’t any more--just a shell of a place, with wrecking tools lying around. This happens a lot around here. On the corner of my street was a breakfast shop until yesterday morning, now it’s been knocked down but the breakfast shop has reappeared further up the road

A man about my age at KFC the other day said, in English, “Where are you from?” “America,” I replied. He gave me a blank stare & big, vacant, smile. “The United States,” I said. Blank stare & big smile. “Wo shi meiguoren,” I said. Big smile & “Ah, American!” He understood my Chinese! Almost a first. I still can’t pronounce my name correctly. It’s “Hao Si Ting”, Hao is a last name that doesn’t mean anything except that it’s a last name, “Si” is “silk” and “ting” means “elegant pavilion,” but together, they mean something like “elegant silk lady.” It’s a lovely name I’m told. But I have to show people the little card with my name written in Chinese for them to understand it. There are so damn many ways to pronounce every syllable--it’s not just that there are four tones, but there are dozens of homophones with the same tone, and context means so much. So often, people have no idea what I’m saying, even though I have practiced and practiced the “si” with the tongue on the roof of the mouth and lips pursed...

A man with a baby in my parking lot said to me, in Russian, “I don’t speak English, but I do speak Russian.”. I said, in English, “Sorry, I don’t speak Russian, but I do recognize you are speaking it!.” We smiled and I said, “Ke ai,” (cute baby, in Chinese.)

I’m getting a neck & shoulders massage every day for seven days to try to get rid of this persistent knot. I think what will really get rid of the knot is to get home...

Today was going to be a trip to the Jietai Temple, about 30 km from Beijing, where Ying and I were going to have a serene morning, looking at the giant Buddhas and meditating in some of the sacred spaces. But she called this morning and said we were going to Beihai Park instead, a favorite inner city spot near the Forbidden City with its own temples, pagodas, and many Beijinger families. When we were almost there, she said, “Oh, by the way, we are meeting a student from the International Training Center (of Beijing Union U.) who hadn’t been able to take the first course and wants a chance to speak with an American teacher.” Turns out there was supposed to be another student, too...Ying couldn’t find a parking place, so I met the young man and we walked around the park together while Ying circled the park twice. Then we went to lunch. Tommy is a pleasant young man, about to begin his Ph.D. studies in Finance. But it was another working day and not the meditative morning I had been looking forward to.

This afternoon, after my massage (which isn’t all that much fun, as you can imagine), I’ll meet dear Amelia for dumplings and then on to the Peking Opera. I’m not sure which show we’re going to, but this is going to be more of the real thing that the snippet I got last night at the LaoShe Tea House (which was tons of fun!--Logan, one of the professors from the first group of students at BCBUU, brought me there. It was built in 1988 and has attracted lots of attention--it’s like a 19th C teahouse, with a show that is a revue of Chinese entertainment--some traditional music, a comic, a magician, an acrobat, some dancers, a scene from Peking Opera, and some handsome flying kung fu artists.)

I want to tell you a little about final presentations of first year students in our second summer session. There were, as I think I told you, 64 kids enrolled in the class. Only 57 actually showed up. We had to choose the 30 that would be allowed to take their college classes in English. Before Kacie left, we had determined that the kids would do a 3-5 minute speech (with illustration, either Powerpoint or poster) on one of the following: family, vacation, food, or hobby. Ten kids didn’t even show up for the final. Of the ones who did, most gave very good speeches, all used powerpoint.

A few notables: the best of all was a young woman who talked about her hobby--chess. She learned when she was six and has been in numerous competitions. She had pictures of herself from her very first match to the present. She also talked about being one of a 100 that a world master played simultaneously (he won all the matches) and she showed a slide of Kasparov playing Deep Blue. She was lively, entertaining, and informative--as good as it gets!

One that was funny but also very sad was a girl who talked about her family. She showed her family tree, and said off the bat, “You will see that my mother is fat. (She wasn’t at all by my standards!) When she was pregnant with me, my father wanted a healthy baby, so he made her eat many eggs. She gained a lot of weight and has been fat since then. You will see that my father looks like a monkey. Everyone says he looks like a monkey, don’t you think he does? You notice that there are no pictures for my grandparents on my father’s side. That’s because they wanted a boy and when I was born they would not admit I was their grandchild. They still do not. So I have no grandparents on my father’s side.”

You know how I hate it when I don’t pronounce Chinese correctly and the kids laugh at me? Okay, okay, so I called a kid “Donkey...” Well, this is to show you my self-restraint: A third young woman gave her talk on her family’s vacation to Inner Mongolia. She had absolutely gorgeous slides of lakes and grasslands and a happy family. In one, she is sitting on the grass with a foal. She said, “And here I am with a whore.” (And I am thinking, it’s okay, it’s just one little word.) And then she says, “And here is my father on a whore. He loves to ride whores on vacation.” And I had to lower my head and cover my mouth because I had a coughing fit.That’s it for now.

Thanks for reading.
Love,Chris