Countdown to Christian: 16 days.

The wisdom's in the trees// Not the glass windows

I have been stressing a bit recently. I have not been having a bad time. I have already, in fact, celebrated my birthday twice. Shirin's birthday was on Monday, so on Saturday she and Rong Fan and Xiaoxuan and I ate hotpot. Hotpot is, I think, from Mongolia, and involves a pot of boiling water (kept boiling by a burner in the table) in the center of the table and ordering whatever ingredients you want to eat. I really like mutton and tofu "skin" (羊肉 and 豆腐皮). Shirin and I then got hour-long oil massages for about $10. On Monday Shirin invited me and two other friends to her place and we made curry and drank tea.

Today I am bringing chocolates to my first class, since today may be the only time in my life that I have class on my birthday and I have never had the opportunity to be the kid who brought birthday treats before. I have been waiting long, but I won in the end.

Then I'm going back to the bookstore where Xiaoxuan and Xiaochun took me and gonna buy myself an idiom (成语) dictionary, and perhaps something else. Got sweet mugs there. We'll see.

The weather here is quite nice. It is a sunny 50 degrees for my birthday today. I miss snow, but I'm hopeful we'll get a bit sometime in the next few months. We are very lucky to have central heat in our buildings, which was not permitted when most of the buildings in Nanjing were built, so many people are very cold in the winter.

Anyway, to stop the stressing, today is going to be a day for praying and meditating and eating chocolate and not worrying about school. Hopefully this will help me to be clear and focused enough tomorrow to make real progress on papers again. It will definitely make me happier about whatever I do.

I love you!

Today's title brought to you by Breakdown by Jack Johnson

As I face my final papers

You should imagine me standing in whatever intimidating martial arts pose you choose, sword in hand, ready to cut them down, with This Song playing. The only martial art I've been studying is Taiji, however, so to be at all realistic you'll have to imagine the subsequent beat-down happening in a slow and relaxed kind of way.

In any case, here I go.

If I turn into another// Dig me up from under what is covering// The better part of me

I am still working on being open and present, in my day to day relationships and in the deeper relationships with friends and family that may only surface in too-infrequent emails and phone calls and holidays, but offer a mirror of my progress and a reminder of who I am.

I am still working to put all the pieces of myself together. To see who I have been and who I am and who I want to be. I struggle sometimes with the self I see reflected in others. For instance, after my parents' divorce it was hard for me to interact with quite a few people who'd known me for a long time. They (you) saw the same person they had seen before, but all the pieces of me had come apart and I didn't know for a long time which ones to keep. I had defined myself by my family's life together, by our house and neighborhood, by the fact that I homeschooled, by the time I had for my friends, and I lost those things. It took a while for me to get my feet under me again, and even after I did old relationships were often a sharp reminder of how much had changed. This has been true of other transitions since then, though to a lesser extent. I change and want to move on, and don't always know how to interact with people I knew before.

I don't want that to stay true. I don't want to see my own struggles in your faces. I am learning to define myself as the intersection of all of your lives, as this beautiful point of opportunity to learn from you and share something of what I see. I am learning to look forward to the worlds of people and experiences I have ahead of me.

One of the clearest things I feel about my own identity is the necessity of travel. I didn't apply to ISU because I grew up in Ames, I grudgingly stayed in state for the tuition, and did not even consider staying in the US after I graduated. I don't have anything against the US, but it just felt wrong to be there last year and seriously added to the stress of my last year at UIowa. As much as I am struggling with my classes and my self this semester, I am definitely on the right continent.

In school news again, yesterday I wrote almost 1,000 characters of my civil law paper on the way that the Stubborn Nail House owners (钉子户） (who refuse to move when the government licenses their land for development) and their treatment in the media signal the recent developments in civil society in China. Woohooooo. I have done very little today.

Today's title brought to you by Dig by Incubus
Today's almost title #1 brought to you by 23 by Jimmy Eat World (I felt for sure last night// That when we said goodbye// No one else will know these lonely dreams)
Today's almost title #2 brought to you by Wasting Time by Jack Johnson (Nobody knows anything about themselves// 'Cause they're all worried about everybody else)

Countdown to Christian: 24 days (24, Christian Yetter! Fools round down!)

Instant coffee and coconut milk. It's working for me.

As I try to stay motivated through my final papers (they are each 3,000 words long, one in English and three in Chinese), I am looking forward to future adventures! I will be crashing in Korea on January 10th. "Crashing" here is probably pretty literal. This semester has been a challenge, and I am already very much in need of a break. There isn't really much of a plan between arriving and leaving in February, but I don't really think anything needs to be added to a month and a half on an island south of Korea with Christian. Hopefully this thought will propel me through 12,000 words and two languages of papers (though I should say that while 3,000 words of English is about 10 double spaced pages in English, 3,000 Chinese characters is only 5 or 6).

And THEN, next semester, my mother and friend (there's a better word for you in Chinese than English, dear- 阿姨, friend who counts as family）and aunt are coming during my spring break in April. I am really excited to show them around, and to see more of China myself.

AND THEN, next summer Nicole is coming! For two weeks. This will also be excellent times.

After that, Xiaoxuan has invited me to stay with her family in Hebei province for a little while, and then I'll fly out of Beijing and finally see North American again! Hopefully by that time I will know what I'll be doing in North America. I'll be getting decisions from grad schools in February and March, but may deferring to spend some time in the real world before I dive back in to more grad school. It's a little crazy in here.

Xiaoxuan and Xiaochun took me to a fantastic book store on Saturday. I wanted to buy some things to read over winter break so that my Chinese doesn't atrophy. I have the first in a series of books about Ming dynasty history, which are written in a novel-like manner and are some of the most popular books in China right now. Xiaoxuan also recommended a book about a man during the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命）who gets sent to the countryside of Inner Mongolia to be re-educated. She says that both she and her father like it very much. It's called 狼图腾, or Wolf Totem. All by myself I picked out the most recent issue of an academic journal, which Xiaochun later told me was quite influential. It has a couple dozen articles, mostly having to do with deciding where China is and should be heading as a country.

I am going to go back and buy a dictionary of Chinese idioms, or 成语，because I hardly know any right now and they are necessary for understanding Chinese and not sounding very unsophisticated and awkward when I speak. Then I will have way more than I can possibly ingest over the next couple of months, and will call it good.

Countdown to Christian: 26 days.

"Say 'hello' to all the apples on the ground"

I am reading Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About America," which has actually been very timely for my international politics class- I read his summary of Huntington's theory of the clash of civilization's the same day a classmate presented on it (though D'Souza and I feel differently about its ability to describe reality). I am working on articulating my thought on it. It has, at the least, pushed me to put my thoughts on my own American-ness as someone who has spent time in Germany, Egypt, and especially China into words.

I am reading another excellent article by a scholar (John Lewis Gaddis) which is tugging at similar strings of my identity. And a historian from the State University of New York at Buffalo was here last week and gave an excellent presentation on his current quest to understand world history and China's place in it. I am hoping to write a coherent post on my American identity when all of these things have percolated in my mind a bit longer, but I am thinking I will probably wait until I get to Korea after my semester ends and post then. I have started writing it three times now and am still struggling.

The essence of what I want to say is this: America has been the center of world civilization for at least half a century, and it's Western predecessors for centuries before that. D'Souza spends a lot of time on why this is justified, and makes a number of important points. However, a central civilization, a model nation, are not what the world community is looking for. As far as the principles of science, democracy, and capitalism (the three principles that D'Souza argues are Western civilization's greatest contributions, and justifications for their leadership) are concerned, they have found a model. What we are trying to find is not the country that everyone wants to live in, but a way for all of the countries in the world to work together.

I know that my voice is a very recent addition to the academic conversation on these topics, but I simply do not believe we are living in the same world as we were two centuries ago, and I don't think that my perspective can be dismissed entirely as naive. We are not living in a world where any one civilization or nation will be The Source of learning and progress- D'Souza is right in saying that in many ways that is the role the West has been playing. Humanity is developing to the point where we are learning how to function as a whole.

... I'm definitely gonna post on this again when I am not painfully aware that I have a lot of other homework to do.

In other updates: I am loving my International Politics class. I am learning so much. I am loving the many perspectives and the deep thinking in our readings and after every lecture I feel like my brain is on fire with thinking. Shi Bin is a fantastic professor. My other classes are all decent.

My Chinese is improving, but slowly. My vocabulary is still frustratingly limited but in my conversations, especially with Xiaoxuan and Rong Fan, I am finding myself more and more able to at least describe a word or concept, even if I don't know the translation.

I am going to Shanghai with Shirin tomorrow (so yes, I should really be doing homework). I love train rides. I'm very excited.

I have had a lot of lovely conversations, in English, in Chinese, through Skype, through email, and in person, this week. It has been really good.

Today's title brought to you by The Nurse Who Loved Me by Failure

Countdown to landing in Korea and seeing Christian Yetter: 29 days.

Funny ol' world, enit?

Berkeley emailed and asked for a one sentence summary of my research interests. I gave them this:

"Rural voice in Chinese environmental policy, social geographies in post-Marxism."

and I feel rather pretentious for my vocabulary. Also, had I not sent this immediately after waking up and reading the request on a Saturday morning, I might have thought more carefully and not said "post-." Though Reform and Opening starting in the 1980s has ended the 'collective period' of China's social (and especially land) organization, a number of banners in the National Day parade proclaimed that Marxism is still the official line ('马克思思考万岁!'－'May Marxist thought last ten thousand years!').

Did any of you watch this parade? I watched the soldiers march and the banners wave for a couple of hours, but I couldn't last the whole thing through. National Day is October 1st, so I'm a little behind on talking to you about it.

Here's a video of the first ten minutes: President Hu Jintao Reviews Chinese Troops
Interesting country, I'm living in.

It's, like, open source microfinancing!

Guys guys guys guys!

I just discovered this awesome awesome site called Kiva.org, that works with micro-finance organizations around the world. You can sign up and make a small ($25 minimum) loan to an entrepreneur. Many of them are in developing countries. You get your money back (98% of the time, in the site's history) and you help someone to work their way out of poverty. Sweet deal.

I'm gonna test it out with one small loan and see how it goes. I will report back.

also: working on Minnesota's application. Then I need to write a paper in Chinese on the equality of women and men in Chinese society, and work on one in English about Tai Lake.

Walking around town, lyrics solidify as titles in my mind, but they don't always stay

Jon Huntsman, the US Ambassador to China, visited our center today. He spoke well, and it was nice to have another Important Person tell me that I am doing something smart by being here at the Center studying China. He said some interesting things about the history of Sino-US relations, nodding to some of his ambassadorial predecessors, but the thought that is most stuck in my mind right now has to do with US politics. Mostly.

He was appointed by president Obama earlier this year (and has just been in China for a few months). He was happily serving as governor (of Utah, I believe) before that, and talked about his phone call and subsequent conversation with Obama. He said that he knows why they built the Oval Office: because it is impossible to say 'no' if the president asks you to do something while you are in the Oval Office. He mentioned being honored and humbled by being asked to serve. He also mentioned that, despite his being a republican and Obama a democrat, that they have very similar ideas and goals when it comes to China. He said that relations with China have involved thirty years of bi-partisan cooperation.

That made me very happy, on the one hand (though, thinking about it, I suppose many developed international relations HAVE to be bi-partisan, or they are simply incomplete). On the other hand, it again underscored to me how foolish partisan politics are. And I don’t think I’ve formally recorded my thoughts on that in super-official blog form, so here I go!

I guess I should start by saying that what the ambassador said really is true, and I have felt it in this Center. The terms “conservative” and “liberal” have some small meaning, but they are usually more useful describing differences between countries; the words “republican” and “democrat” have almost none (here referring to my interactions with other students). China itself does not have a political line dividing its citizens into opposing camps (that is also not to say that I’d trade the US political system for the Chinese one. I definitely wouldn’t).

I get very worn out very quickly in political debates, and I appreciate that many of the folks that I know realize that they are not a good base for relationships, and even when y’all talk about political things, try to keep it from being personal. But it is silly bordering on ridiculous in my mind that people are divided up based on what they think the best political decisions might be. As if we don’t already have enough differences to sort through, enough veils separating us from each other. I mean, of course we have different opinions. There are, in fact, upwards of 6 billion human brains on the planet. Hopefully we have different thoughts. I don’t think that they can even be grossly summarized into two camps, and I think that dividing ourselves into groups and slapping labels on each other does a lot of harm.

What I mean to say is, I love you all very much, and I hope that you have your own ideas. I’d really like to hear them, especially if we can agree that having different ideas doesn’t make either of us less human.

Eek!

I submitted my application to Berkeley! I am now terrified, in spite of having a couple people read it and looking over it again myself, that it is full of typos and unfinished sentences. I ain't gonna look, though, because no matter what I'll find something I wish I could change, and I can't fix it now!

Hopefully, now that I have an SOP I like, revisions for other schools will go much faster.

It is past midnight and I have classes tomorrow, however, so further updates will have to wait a while.

i'm just a little bug who tries real hard

I am not in Wuxi! But I have a ticket for tomorrow morning, so I will have to stop sitting around and being a lame-o by 9:06am or I will have wasted 54 yuan.

I have been having trouble getting myself going, and kind of letting little things pile up. I am currently trying to figure out how to get a package from Fedex, but so far have been unable to find anyone who know their number, or where I might look for it. I have sent an email to a member of our super helpful administrative staff, and hopefully that works out. I just finally added money to the sim card on my cell phone, so I can keep making phone calls without worrying about it. I am going to do one final revision of my SOP and then finish Berkeley's application- it's due Tuesday! Ahh!

A friend knocked on my door an hour or so ago and said that through a professor's student she was being interviewed in Chinese about Thanksgiving and wondered if I would join her. I did, I told them that I generally eat food and hang out with family on Thanksgiving, and that what I am most thankful for are all the wonderful people in my life. Then they took some footage of Anna and I reading and writing Chinese, to make their segment more impressive.

And here I am, back again! I am gonna do some homework. For serious.

(oh, and my title refers to Morris)

"Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower?"

I have been delighted to discover over this Thanksgiving break that there is a cornucopia of English-language literature on the internet. I read The Little Prince again today, and am seven chapters into On Human Bondage by W. S. Maugham. I also read (mostly) a Chinese article on globalization for International Politics. I intended to get some writing done on my Anthropology essay; I listened to a lot of music and have greatly improved by sudoku-solving-time.

I took a walk the other day, and am going to finally upload a few photos of our corner of Nanjing:














Whose dog is this, you might want to ask?
I have no idea, so it would probably be better not to.

This is Beijing West Road- 北京西路－ the street our dorm window looks out on (though we're up at tree-top level on the third floor).


Looking the other way! There is a bike/motorcycle/scooter lane on each side of most roads here, separating smaller, more vulnerable vehicles from the car traffic in the middle.








This one is cool! There are these strips in the sidewalks all over China, ostensibly for blind people to follow with their canes. The dots in the distance signal a change of direction or material. Sadly, every Chinese I have asked about them assures me they have never actually see a blind person use them. Good try, though, guys.
... I spend a lot of my time thinking about these as I walk around town.

So, uploading photos is ridiculously slow, and I am afraid that I am giving up. Those three just took the better part of an hour of clicking "upload" and fiddling on the internet and waiting...

Love!

Allow me to add some "-spection" to that "-version"

I have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test a few times and my result is always the same: INFJ, for Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging, though not on the end of the spectrum for any of the traits they try to measure (this time I was "moderate" in three of the traits, and "distinctively intuitive").

The website I just took this test on (yes, there are other better things I could be doing with my time... pthbthh) links to a description of INFJ's as "Idealist Counselors" which describes me, among other things, as "difficult to get to know" because so much of what matters to me goes on beneath the surface.

I do not think that personality typing like this provides any ultimate answers in self-understanding, but it is both interesting and reassuring that my answers to different sets of questions all lead objective outsiders to a number of true conclusions about me, basically because it shows that the 'me' I'm getting to know is real.

Sometimes it's like Charades or Pictionary

But most often attending classes in Chinese is like a long game of Telephone. We read, looking at characters and sometimes understanding a whole sentence or a (glorious, wondrous!) paragraph. Then our professor presents, asking us questions of which we understand words and sometimes a whole (glorious, wondrous!) concept. We answer, based on our mishearing, and he attempts to bring our answer back into the realm of What He Was Trying To Discuss.

I guess it would be more exactly like telephone if he left us to discuss on our own and then tried to recognize where our confused conversation had left us by the end of the hour, but I stand by my analogy.

It's tiring.

I'm not sure how I got so lucky

I will try to tell you about my last week. No, it’s too much, I will sum up :P

Okay, so last Wednesday began more or less normally. I walked around the city a bit in the morning running errands, went to International Politics and learned a lot (the unusual item in that class being the announcement of a test next week of which we internationals, at least, had been completely unaware). I spent my two-hour afternoon break online doing nothing in particular. I went to Anthropology and learned some, and had some trouble following my professor’s train of thought. Class ended, a classmate asked me if I was hungry, I told her I sure was, and we started towards the cafeteria.

Normal so far, yes? We switch to the present tense, the better to keep up with the events.

Halfway down the stairs from our classroom, I glance ahead to the lobby area, where I see Christian Yetter. But this is impossible, so I stop and stare. (I am told for about ten seconds. I am told with a rather hostile expression.) The apparation continues to smile at me and look exactly like Christian Yetter, so I continue walking down the stairs. Slowly. (I am told that the hostile expression accompanies me). This cannot actually be real. I have accepted that after the last time I saw Christian Yetter -at the end of July- I will not see him again until I fly to Korea in January. I begin to wonder if I am asleep. However, attempts to pull myself out of dreaming come to nothing, and I can clearly remember a whole normal day before this point. I keep walking. Zero seems to equal one no matter how I turn the facts around.

About halfway down the stairs the 服务员 at the desk enters my field of vision. She looks at me quizzically and points at Christian. She can see him too. I start to walk a little faster, I think. I end up in front of what I have almost accepted is, in fact, Christian Yetter. I repeat the word "How?" a number of times. My friend (I realized later) says she'll see me later.

Christian Yetter is a jerk.

(I was considering going a different direction in that last sentence, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna stick with the "jerk" line.)

He accompanied me as I fumbled around in confusion back to my dorm room, then most of the way to the cafeteria, then off campus to a dumpling restaurant instead.

He flew back to Korea this afternoon. I am hopeful that he landed almost an hour ago. I got him on the way to the airport a couple of hours before his flight, but he hasn't been able to get online or had a cell phone he could use to call and tell me if he made it okay.

It was a good five days. You're a good'un, Christian Yetter.

"But everything looks perfect from far away..."

You all may notice that my posts here get more frequent in proportion to the number of other things I should be doing. I am trying to just let myself be productive in whatever way I can, however, so I've decided that's ok. My courses are honestly far less demanding (at least so far, you can ask me again when term papers are due) than most years at U of Iowa, so it will probably work out.

I am still stressing about my presentation on Monday, but I have more or less convinced myself that the stress + my worn-out state from the rest of today make it not worth working too hard tonight. I am instead trying to regain my emotional and intellectual strength for tomorrow. I am doing so by drinking tea, reading fiction, and journaling.

I helped out teaching 5-6 year old boys again this morning, probably for the last time. Getting up very early on a Saturday morning, on top of the discrepancy between my energy wavelength and that of kindergarteners, leaves me ill-equipped to be much use to them. I have found other venues for out-of-school productivity though, so don't be too unhappy for me.

I climbed a mountain today! I was an awfully small mountain- when we first got off the bus Xiaoxuan turned to me and said "山在哪里？" (where's the mountain?)- but I still give myself a lot of credit for climbing it.

Xiaoxuan told me the other day that she had been worried about living with an American, she wasn't sure what cultural problems might arise, but that her fears were misplaced because I am more like her than most people. She, and independently a number of other Chinese classmates both male and female, has told me that I am more like a Chinese student than an American. I am too 文静 (gentle), too 安静 (quiet, peaceful). This is perhaps in large part due to stereotyping, but also to the fact that Americans can be of ridiculous when they travel abroad. Perhaps especially in China, where the first impression people have of foreigners is: FOREIGN, and one quickly realizes that it will be impossible not to stand out.

One thought this repeated observation about myself has led to is that I must be a very odd (perhaps eerie?) presence a lot of the time. I try to let people know I approve of them. I don't sit in silence out of spite or frustration, though perhaps occasionally out of self-doubt. Mostly, I just find a lot to think about in the spaces between the lines on a highway, or the different ways houses seem to greet the world with the lines of their eaves and the sizes of their windows, or the sentences people choose to say when they don't want everyone to know what they are thinking. I am not sure I would not call this wisdom; I seldom reach meaningful conclusions. I just see a lot of interesting paths for my thoughts to travel and generally feel it's better to take them.

Can I tell you a secret? I don't really like to travel that much. I am not very good at transitions. They leave me feeling tilted and worn-out, and it can take a long time for me to recover. I think it took more than a month for me to be okay with Nanjing, and I think I probably won't really have anything solid to say about how I feel about this city until I leave in January and come back in February. But I think that the patchwork quilt of places spread across our planet is one of the greatest gifts we have as residents here. If one dimension of the universe can be described with math and physics, in describing the shapes of the lines that connect all its points, another can be described with biology and ecology, in all of the incredible diversity that those elegant essential truths can combine to create. Another more complex dimension is human, sometimes messier to sort out but all the more poignant for its layers. And all of these are woven in and around and through one another all over our beautiful planet so that whole worlds exist in any one place, and even beginning to draw a line between two of them is magic.

If I chose each day what I would most like to do, I would almost always end up sitting someplace sunny, drinking tea, reading, writing, twirling my hair absent-mindedly, rambling in mutter-y and introverted kind of way, and looking out of windows.

I cannot promise that after next summer I will have seen all the sights in Nanjing, or sought out all of the worthwhile people I could have. I am so grateful for my chance to just be here for a year and let the reality of the place sink in to my consciousness.

Academia!

I just took my only exam of the semester. It was in English, for Environmental Economics. I think I did alright, though essay exams can be deceptive. I had long answers for everything that seemed quite complete to me! We'll see how my professor feels.

I have had one (5 minute) presentation so far in a Chinese class and have another (15-20 minute) presentation in International Politics in Chinese on Monday. After that, the rest of my semester will be composed entirely of reading, attending classes, and writing papers.

I got through my short anthro presentation alright. I wasn't terribly happy with the level of thoughts I presented, but I was (and remain) quite certain that the professor wasn't actually grading the presentations on more than completion, so that is okay.

On Monday I will be presenting about the changing nature of military alliances. This should not suggest to you that I am in any way qualified to act as an authority on military relationships, but everyone had to sign up for a topic and that's what I picked from the list. A student or two present at the beginning of each class, and the the professor takes over and leads discussion for the rest of the time. In talking about alliances and collective security I am planning on discussing the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network that I learned about at the conference in Egypt last winter. It is pretty cool. Though it is not an institution with authority, it is a network of scientists and managers in the ten countries whose land includes part of the Nile watershed who work together to research discuss issues of river geomorphology and management. It is not a military institution, but I think that the existence of groups like this greatly reduce the role of military alliances. Hopefully there will at least be some good discussion.

Xiaoxuan and I are going on an HNC-arranged trip to Qixia Mountain on Saturday. Hopefully I will remember my camera :)

It is November already! I am making progress on my graduate school applications. Here are the places I am applying: University of California-Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, Clark University, University of Texas-Austin, and University of Colorado-Boulder (in the order in which their applications are due, if you were wondering). What's-His-Face is also applying to schools in Ohio and North Carolina, and since I'm planning on deferring for a year to work before I would actually start any of these PhD programs (er, Austin is just a Masters, I guess) (if, you know, I get in) I may end up living in one of those places for a while. It's a big country, folks! But it is smaller than the Pacific Ocean.

Good news is that as I have been working on my grad school apps I have been getting more and more excited about Geography and the questions it would allow me to professionally investigate about the world.
... I just had an excited conversation about it in my head but it all happened too fast for me to write down...MAN and then I tried to find a good summary on one of the department websites and they're all too exciting and I couldn't pick one...
Okay: Geographer study a wide range of questions, from physical environmental sciences to more or less anthropology. Geography is "the study of spatial relationships," which can be put to a lot of uses.
...Yeah, I'm gonna need to think about this and make it another post. Or possibly try to write about it when I am less caffeinated.

Happy Thursday!

Shameless, shameless

If any of you would care to read and critique an SOP with which I hope to apply to Geography PhD programs, I will add another star by your name on my List of Favorite People.

That is all for today.

Love from Nanjing!

Put heart, I'm coming on a horse

There are so many levels of comprehension that I am struggling with. When doing readings for class I struggle with the vocabulary, I struggle with the implications of the basic information being presented, and I struggle with the implications of authors' choices to use some words and not others. I am beginning to appreciate the common vocabulary used by Chinese authors and how it is different from Western ones- 'radical' and 'revolutionary' are the same word, for example- but really only beginning. I'm still getting up to 20 new vocab words per page of reading (less if I decide to just read for an overview and not try to understand everything, or it is a Civil Law reading which repeats the words "civil rights and liberties" and "civil responsibilities" enough to account for half of the vocab on their own).

The language is fascinating enough that I really can't complain. I am simply certain that by the end of the year I might be fluent in Chinese compared to most Americans, but I will still be a far cry from fluent compared to the average Chinese.

My title is a choppy translation of a sentence in Chinese: "放心，我马上来" which should be translated as "don't worry, I'll be right there."

Hmm. More later. I'm trying to post at least once a week, so here you go for now!

Also! Please feel free to leave comments or email meeeee! and tell me about your life. I am so grateful to be able to share my thoughts and experiences with you through this blog, but I feel a little full of myself doing all the talking :)

Love to you all!

I need to stop compulsively buying bread-products

I decided I needed a break from my room and my books this afternoon and went to the store. I purchased some "High Fiber Wheat Bread" whose brand logo includes stars and stripes, so I am reassured that I am in their intended market. Their brand name, "Mankattan," is a little disheartening, but I'll take it.

Last week, I purchased some "Well Chosen Oatmeal" from Lubin. It has served me well.

I also found a produce store that sells my beloved Juse VERY cheap, and sells good quality fruit. So that's exciting.

I have been sick this week. It's kind of sad, but if you all will consider for a moment my track record of illness which generally includes one or two bouts of flu or something similar every year and keeps me out of school for at least half a week or so each semester, the fact that I have digestive problems, allergies, and am just generally a weenie, I think that you will appreciate my accomplishment in not getting sick in China for two whole MONTHS. These months including solo international flights, busy orientation schedules, solo cross-country train rides, and the stress of taking classes in Chinese.

Xiaoxuan has, of course, been very helpful in taking care of me. I have not been awfully sick. I missed one class Friday morning because I concluded I would not be able to focus enough to understand a Chinese lecture, and the sound me trying to breath with my raspy lungs and plugged-up nose might also impede my classmates' comprehension. Xiaoxuan has been instructing me on what I am and am not allowed to eat (my peanuts are too heavy and full of oil, so on my shelf they sit, and wait for me) and reminding me to drink lots of water. We went out to eat yesterday, and to the supermarket a couple of days ago, and she consulted me on the health benefits of different dishes I was considering. I have been calling her "Doctor Hao," (in English) which makes her and any of her friends who happen to be in the vicinity laugh every time. So, y'know, overall this illness hasn't been much of a downer.

I was talking to Shirin, a friend I met in Macau who's attending Nanjing Univerity, about how strange that kind of is. Usually when I am sick it is an emotional as well as physical affliction. I can't concentrate, I am exhausted, and I quickly become depressed with my inability to do anything. I've been very cheerful with my cold-symptoms and low-grade fever for the last few days, and they are both on their way out. I had some very strange fever-dreams Wednesday night. One of them which I wrote down is entitled "The Devil is a Stop Sign," if you're curious. Both my mother and Christian Yetter can attest that it is quite trippy.

Anyway.

I just bought my plane tickets to Korea over winter break. I'll land on Jeju-do at 1:40pm on January 10th! Woohoo!

I'm also plotting out my plans for Thanksgiving break. Since most of the country will not be off work (different from our two other week-long breaks) it's a prime time to travel. I think I am going to be heading to Shanghai for a couple of days to get my Korean visa and travel around, and then stay in a hostel in Suzhou for the rest of the time, and see how much time I can spend near Tai Lake, whose management challenges I am researching for my Environmental Economics term paper.

Since I've been sick, I did not meet with my Five Project family today, but I'll be heading to their house next week to hang out again.

I have my first presentation in a Chinese language class tomorrow. I'm talking about representations of the famine during the Great Leap Forward in the movie The Blue Kite, and in one of our class texts.

Okay, I think I've procrastinated my International Politics readings for about as long as I can justify. I'd like to leave you with another music video; Year of the Rat by Badly Drawn Boy. I think that the title is meant to signify a time of great opportunity, but it actually doesn't matter at all. Just watch the video (er, if you'd like).

// but ain't none of the glory mine

I spent time with my Five Project family for the second time today. I wasn't really sure how it was going to work out after meeting with them last week. As I said- although the goals and participants of the Five Project are clearly explained, they assumed I could tell them how autism is understood and worked with in the US. I can tell them about the people I've met, of course, but my goal in this project is just to build a friendship and support them. I don't have any expertise. The father, son, and a young cousin came to the HNC today and we hung out in the courtyard for a little over an hour. It was a little uncomfortable at first as we got used to the place and the father kept trying to make his son be polite, or whatever, for me. Which isn't really a concept that applies to people with autism, in my understanding. They communicate what they are experiencing to the best of their ability, which is simultaneously much less and much more than many of us are capable of.

Anyway, after a while the father decided he was ok with me just hanging out with his son (he stayed in the courtyard- one of his parents is going to be there at all times to make sure his needs are taken care of). I talked to him a bit, but sadly cannot really understand much when he talks. Most of his communication is nonverbal anyway, though, so it's less of a problem than with most people. He feels strongly about the value of picking up leaves and flowers and putting his hands in water. On these things we agree.

I am continually trying to get my head around what is happening when I (or a classmate) try to communicate outside of our native language. Much of the time I am still thinking in English, so Chinese feels like an extra layer that blocks me from the meaning behind someone's words. I try to trace the meaning of Chinese words by lining up the points of English I know they touch, but this keeps me at least one step removed from the deeper form and significance of what is being said. I am trying to shift to thinking in Chinese and just filling in the necessary gaps with English, but it's coming in more fits than starts, I feel.

NOTE: the title of this and the previous entry are lyrics from Gnarls Barkley's song "A Little Better" They ain't mine.

well, I can sing you a storyline// and if you like my story, fine

Well, dear ones, here I am again. I was not very busy at all over the National Day break, but I spent most of my extra time letting myself just be in Nanjing without having to do anything. I did a bit of reading and a good deal of thinking for all of my classes, and also a bit of random wandering around the city.

Xiaoxuan and I (with a few other classmates) had decided to get out and see some of the sights in Nanjing during our week off, but our trip to 夫子庙 （Fuzi Miao- the Confucious temple) convinced us that this was not a good plan. The crowd exemplified the Chinese phrase 人山人海 (ren shan ren hai- mountains and seas of people). Xiaoxuan and Rong Fan both asked me at different times if I had ever seen crowds like that in the US. I told them ‘kind of.’ I’ve seen groups of people that tightly packed in big cities or big malls in the US, but the knowledge in China that this population density stretches across such vast areas, the knowledge that in Nanjing I am surrounded by 8 million people in one (granted, quite large) municipality, is overwhelming on a new level. That evening we decided against paying 30 yuan to go into the park itself and instead walked back to “Aqua City,” a large shopping complex with a lot of expensive foreign stores. I bought myself a coke and just walked around looking at people and stores, explaining that in the US most of my clothes come from second-hand stores. Clothes in most stores were about as much as new American clothes are in the US, some slightly more expensive since it is so foreign and fashionable.

Another evening an American friend and I ventured to Nanjing’s Downtown. We, again, mostly just walked around. She needed a set of drawers for her closet, and we both decided it was wise to buy economy-packs of toilet paper. We quickly realized, however, that the evening before National Day was not the best choice of times. We found ourselves heading home around the same time (about 10:30pm) that the vast majority of taxi drivers had decided was quittin’ time. After half an hour or so of unsuccessfully trying to hail a cab at one of the busiest intersections in downtown Nanjing, Stephanie left me standing by the side of the road with her drawers and our collective 40-or-so rolls of toilet paper and ventured upstream to try her luck in less populated waters. About another 20 minutes later she pulled up in a taxi, with the driver crying “hurry! I’m not supposed to stop here!” I threw the TP in the backseat and pulled the drawers in behind me. We had a lovely chat with the driver on the way home. Also: we made it home. I called it a win.

I actually started drawing over break, which I’ve hardly ever done before. I don’t let myself draw, I say “I can’t draw,” because I’m not very good at making realistic pictures. It is, however, a fantastic exercise for my brain to just let myself start filling a page with shapes. It’s interesting, because when I worked at Prairie Flower (Waldorf) Preschool, that’s what we told kids to do. Not to worry about what they were representing, but just to enjoy the process of colors happening on paper. But I still feel like it’s illigetimate a lot of the time, I stop myself from picking up my pencil because I don’t know what will be on the page when I finish. I’ve (once again) proven to myself that this doesn’t matter. I’ve got a few pages that are really fun, if not amazing technically. And drawing them helped me wake up my brain in ways that no amount of article-reading or paper-writing can.

Let’s see. I’ve let too much time pass and am going to dump a lot of stories on you at once, I’m afraid.

I met with a family last Sunday through The Five Project, with hooks volunteers up with families of children and young adults with autism or other mental challenges. They assumed that since I was American I could tell them all about how autism is treated in the US and what they should do with their son. I, and the Five Project coordinator who came with me, corrected them that I just want to provide a “friendship” flavor of support, and they seemed like they might be ok with that. They’re coming by the Center this Sunday afternoon, and we’ll see if we can make our relationship productive. Their son was very sweet. He learned my name and made eye contact (on his parents’ promptings) and thanked me for coming to their home. I think his memory of me, however, will be most involved with the strange way my hand smelled (like my soap, I hope), which formed the main topic of our personal interaction.

I am helping out at a weekend school where another friend works tomorrow morning. More on that after it’s happened, perhaps :)

…You can, perhaps, tell that I decided a while ago that I was spending too much time on the Center and with other Center students, and have been trying to add more variety to my schedule. I may have overdone it, but not of my weekend commitments come with obligation at this point, so it should work out happily in the end.

My conversations with classmates are benefitting as we all get more comfortable in our “target” languages and are feeling like we can talk about real things, and not just what we are doing today or which state or province we were born in. That is really cool. Hmm. I’m having trouble saying something both meaningful and Chinese-internet-appropriate about them, though. I’ll report back when I can articulate myself.

To complete your snapshot of my life: other than the above, I spend time just about every day talkin’ to a cool dude in South Korea, some more time wishin’ I was in South Korea with him, a fair amount of time reading, a lot of time twirling my hair and staring out of windows, and am happy almost all of the time.

All’s well in Nanjing, friends.

Here are the things I am spending my time on when I really should be reading for classes:

Geography quizzes! Click on the words! Check out the link! I know all the countries in Africa now! There are 54, and no one had told me.

Books about resource productivity and the next industrial revolution which can (and perhaps has begun to) come about through the understanding that business and engineering designs that aim to be 'in line with nature' by minimizing resource use and integrating as far as possible into the natural system (as in, using solar energy directly as it comes from the sun rather than only using the solar energy that has been processed by plants or earth surface processes) isn't just better for 'the environment' separately from humanity, it is the most efficient, rational, and lucrative for humans.
... I may move to Germany just for the run-on sentences. You're in my blog so you'll have to put up with my grammar, I'm afraid...
I also checked out a book with a bunch of recent essays from Chinese scholars on sustainable development, but have not gotten very far with any of them yet.

So much music.

We have a break starting in two days for China's National Day Holiday. I'll give you more "Things that have happened" updates then.

So, this 13 hour time difference is confusing me. When I send emails to the US, I'm getting used to the fact that the day there passes while I'm sleeping, so replies seem to magically and almost immediately appear. I came back from dinner this evening thinking a day would have passed for you in the US while I was eating.
No, Dear Self, the US is not part of a time-warp, and neither is China. You're just on different sides on the planet.

Carry on, all!

School schedules

This year's mid-autumn festival coincides with the National Day holiday in China, so we have an extra long break so that students and staff can go home and be with their families, or travel, or observe this 60th year anniversary of the foundation of the PRC (中华人民共和国）however they see fit.

These two overlapping reasons to celebrate do not, as it happens, mean that our program should have more days off than a normal National Day holiday. So, to make up time, we have classes tomorrow (Sunday the 27th) and the Saturday after break (October 10th).

I'm spending my one precious weekend day in the library (图书馆）staring at an indecipherable text on the development (阶梯 literally: ladder) of law. When I go to class, I understand what my professor wants us to get out of these readings. When I read them, I get very little.
I also have 8 consecutive school-free days beginning Thursday. So there's balance, in the end.

I'm going to move on to International Politics now. The article I'm working on for that is called "Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionary Thought" (现实主义， 理性主义， 革命主义）。

I'm gonna make it! I'm gonna make it! I'm gonna make it...

In other news: I started a Taijiquan class yesterday, and it feels really good to have something that makes me use my body thoughtfully. I think it's going to help me a lot. A classmate has also started offering yoga classes three times a week, and I'm gonna join in as soon as I buy myself a yoga mat.

I also am going to be hanging out with a local family who has a 5-year-old son with autism, (through a very cool NPO called The Five Project, which was founded by a Center alumnus) for an hour or so every week. More on that after I meet them!

Xiaoxuan (which is actually just her given name. Her full name is Hao Xiaoxuan) met with an American classmate yesterday. They are going to be "language partners" and practice speaking an hour of English and then an hour of Chinese a couple times a week. She inspired her friend Rong Fan and I to make a similar alliance. Hopefully this will help my comprehension of classes as well as my confidence in spoken Chinese.

Goodness, but I have plans for myself. We'll see what works out. It'll be a good year whatever happens, I think.
Life is good.

It's harder for me to write about places when I'm living in them

It's difficult for me to pick out which parts of my day are important to my life and which simply happen.

There is a constant flow of traffic outside our dorm window. Beijing West Road (北京西路) is not the busiest street in Nanjing, but it’s busy enough. We’re not too far from downtown here. There is a 28 story building (if I counted right) across the street from us, though it, like many buildings including our dorm, has a terrace a couple of floors up to provide more space for growing things and being outside.

The streets are lined with trees. So much so that it’s hard to see what’s going on. As I told my brother yesterday, there is Something that drives by multiple times a day chiming the same four-tone tune over and over again, and it has become the Great White Whale of my dorm experience. It haunts my days and my dreams, and I cannot see the street clearly enough to be sure of what it is. Often, this sound is accompanied by a water-spraying, street-cleaning truck, but whether the sound and truck go together by design or coincidence is yet to be determined.

The Hopkins-Nanjing Center is centered around a courtyard. The cafeteria, some offices, fitness center, and dorm floors are wings of the west building, and administration, classrooms, and the large auditorium are in the east building. There is a goldfish (金鱼 ) pond in the courtyard, surrounded by benches and flanked by a couple of small lawns. My roommate, Xiaoxuan, and I have thus far not been able to find fish food in our supermarket, but I’ve located another market and will be trying again soon. The fish will, one day, know me as their friend.

I am taking four classes: three in Chinese and one in English. They changed a little from what I’d decided on when I first looked at the class list, and I’m very happy with what I’ve ended up with. I’m taking 当代国际政治 （Contemporary International Politics), 人类学与中国研究 （Anthropology and Chinese Studies), 中国民法 (Chinese Civil Law), and Environmental Economics (环境经济)。 I’ve been struggling through readings (I have yet to truly finish something) and at first hardly understood anything my professors were saying. Mostly, I have been making huge vocabulary lists from each of my Chinese readings, and these have been helping me to read a little more (it is already possible for me to sometime read a sentence or two of an academic essay without having to use a dictionary). My professors’ lectures have also been shifting from frighteningly mysterious, speech-like puzzles in which I was proud to pick out words, to something like cohesive presentations. I definitely cannot yet understand everything they say, and often struggle to keep up, but I have been able to at least follow the overall flow of ideas in all my classes this week. It is possible that I will pass my classes. This is a relief.

My classmates are awesome. We come from a pretty wide range of backgrounds, but everyone here is really dedicated, not just to language, but to building ties between China and the US (or wherever, not all the internationals are American) and finding constructive ways to working in/between countries.

One of our Chinese colleagues informed my roommate and I at the end of Orientation that we were 窄女， or women who stay inside, because neither of us like to party or spend much time in bars. I think we’re just good roommates. I should say, so that you don’t think that he was just very rude, that this same young man also told me that my future was bright and full of possibility. My interests are wide and varied, and the fact that I speak Chinese and have taken engineering classes (be they only four or five in number) impressed him greatly. I’ve since made it clear that I have a boyfriend already, and I think (hope) that I did so tactfully enough that we are still friends.

I have been meaning to take pictures of the cafeteria food. It’s very cheap, and made of very good quality ingredients. It is, however, still cafeteria food, and thus very boring to eat.

There are a lot of excellent little restaurants and food vendors very close to the Center. Two classmates (one from the southern US, the other from France) showed Xiaoxuan and I a cheap little dumpling （饺子）joint about five minutes from our front gate, and yesterday we ourselves discovered a little noodle/hotpot-ish place one more street away. I already have a favorite little bakery where I buy my red bean-filled mooncakes and other snacks.

Last weekend a couple of US classmates had birthdays, so they arranged to go out for KTV (or K歌， or Karaoke). It was the first time I’d gone, and it was a lot of fun. I can’t really sing any Chinese songs yet, but one of Xiaoxuan’s friends knew that I could sing “Hey Jude” because I’d joined in when she was singing it to herself once, so she had me sing that.

I had heard Beijing Welcomes You, which was made for the Olympics last year. If you haven’t seen/heard it yet, I recommend it.

My favorite song was: 我不是黄蓉。 I think y’all will be able to follow this link, but let me know if it doesn’t work (or: if you’re upset that it doesn’t work. Perhaps you are indifferent to my tastes in Chinese pop music. I shouldn’t assume).
Xiaoxuan and I are, of course, constantly teaching each other language. We are also having a long-term competition over whose language is better. So far, Chinese is winning for being able to express a lot of things much more simply than English. For example, NiXing 逆行 has to be translated into “walking against the current,” and what’s worse: the word Tang 烫 single-handedly describes “unbearably hot food or soup.” So if you think of any particularly elegant or useful English phrases that I could use in this battle, please send them along.

ALSO. I just met a dude in my Environmental Economics class who is interested in working in environmental policy/education/who knows. The point is: so am I. There is someone else here who is definitely not going into the business/finance world, and I am super stoked about it (stoked being a rather technical term for “excited.” Sorry if I left you behind on that one).

My favorite fruits are almost exactly Clementine oranges, except their peels are green and mottled instead of orange. They are called juse (橘色）and they are delicious.

Okay. That's what I have for Random Thoughts on My Life for today. Love from China! I hope you are all well and happy!

Everything is exciting!

My lunch today included both Shepherd's Pie and stir-fried lotus root. It's a good day.

PSA

We interrupt this normally scheduled evening of study to bring you two important announcements:

ONE: After hours of banging my head over this article in Chinese, I flipped to the end in frustration for about the billionth time (if here you'll accept "billionth" as an approximation for "seventh or eighth, maybe") and realized it had been translated from an English article. I looked it up on Jstor, and began reading it in English. I no longer feel foolish at all for having struggled with the Chinese. I am sad that academic pretension translates so thoroughly.

TWO: www.nciku.com is my savior this semester. It is a chinese-english dictionary where you can input english, pinyin, or copy-and-pasted characters.

That said, I'm going to continue trying to comprehend academia in Chinese. Right now I'm reading an article called 中华民族的多元一体格局，which means something like: "an overview of the many components of Chinese minority culture." I think.

EDIT: DUDES. I just read like three lines of text without having to look up a single word. I am a rock star.

My Introduction to the HNC

Nanjing Train Station （南京火车站）has exits to the subway, the street, and a dedicated underground driveway for taxis. I was actually very grateful not to have received my luggage when I found myself walking down a few flights of concrete steps into a large crowd waiting to grab a taxi (打车). The crowd was eventually funneled into four lines, which were then combined back into a single line where a traffic-controlling policeman was standing. A wave of taxis would drive in two by two, and he would ask each person how many people were riding with them, and then direct them to a car.

I hopped in and said hello (你好－ nihao) which seemed to take the driver slightly by surprise. I told him I was going to Nanjing University, and he asked me which campus. I said I wasn’t sure which part of town (I didn’t know Nanjing) but I had been told to use the entrance off of Shanghai Road. That was enough for him, and off we went. When I studied in Tianjin I had a few very interesting conversations with taxi drivers, but I let this fifteen minute drive pass more or less in silence- I was worn out.

I was worried that he wouldn’t take me to the right place- the HNC is not in the main NJU campus. It’s right next door, but I wasn’t sure how quickly I’d be able to find it. But as the driver slowed the taxi down and asked me if this was the right place, I saw he was pointing to a sign that said, in English, “The Johns Hopkins and Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies.” “Yes yes yes!” I cried, then realized that I should speak Chinese. I cleared my throat. “It is,” I said, “thank you.” I paid him and crossed the street.

There’s decent security here at the center, though that first day the gate guard just let me walk in because I looked foreign and like I thought I belonged there. I was directed to take a mask off of a table (to keep from spreading the H1N1 I may have been exposed to during my travels) and go inside. In the lobby I was told to wash my hands with sanitizer and then asked a lot of questions in Chinese which I had to have repeated to me a few times. Finally, the staff was satisfied with my personal and travel information, I had my key and my packet of information, and I went up to my room.

This is probably the nicest dorm room I’ve ever lived in. There are large closets with hanging space, cupboard space, and drawer space. My roommate and I each have a big desk with five drawers and a bunch of shelves on top, and there is plenty of room under each of our beds to store empty suitcases and shoes. This is China, so one cannot be expected to function without hot water to drink and there is a faucet at the end of each hallway (we’re using five floors of the dormitory this year) which dispenses hotter-than-boiling water. One of my classmates used some of my Neosporin today after spilling some on his toe and burning himself a nice big blister. Most importantly: we have a private bathroom, with a large show, huge sink, and Western toilet.

I hadn't understood clearly from the people in the lobby whether I was supposed to do anything that first day, but I decided that I probably didn't and took a long shower. It was beautiful. I even had one more clean shirt in my backpack to change into. I hung out in my room for a while afterwards, wishing that I had a password to access the Center’s wireless network or my luggage to start unpacking, but overall completely relieved to have actually made it here.

I started meeting people at dinner. Most of my fellow internationals are from the US, but there are also Korean, Japanese, Canadian, Spanish, and French students. More than half of the students here are Chinese who will be studying in English with Johns Hopkins professors, the rest of us will be studying with Chinese professors mostly from Nanjing University.

This first week has been Orientation. We’ve met the Chinese and American co-directors, heard from the staff, joined the local internet network, and had presentations on using the library, on public safety, and fire safety. Most of these were in Chinese, some of these I hardly understood at all. Happily, I’m not the only one, but sadly this does not make me any more prepared for my classes next week. For which I’ll register tomorrow, after I’ve started attending them. The classes I’m hoping to register for are: 中国现代化中的社会问题 （Social Issues of China’s Modernization), 中国民法 (Chinese Civil Law), 人类学与中国研究 (Anthropology and Chinese Studies) in Chinese, and Environmental Economics （环境经济学）in English. More later on how that works out!

From Macau to Nanjing

Well, dear ones, I have not ever been terribly good about keeping a regular journal. Internet restrictions had me worried for a while that I wouldn’t be able to share much with you, so I was slightly less motivated to write than I should have been.

It has been an eventful week. I left Macau a week ago this morning, heading out from my friends’ apartment at about 10am to catch a taxi to the mainland border at Zhuhai. The 服务员 (Fuwuyuan, or service worker) in Macau customs let my red and sweating countenance pass because I assured them that I had not been anywhere but Macau for the last week, and that my temperature was raised because of the 95°F weather, the 90% humidity, and definitely not H1N1.
I changed money just after crossing the border into Zhuhai (from the Macau Patacas a Baha’i had used to pay me back when I bought her something with my debit card) and then boarded a bus to Guangzhou. I bought the ticket and boarded my bus with the help of a middle-aged bus station worker who was selling magazines and commiserated with me (in Chinese- he was delighted to find I understood him) that I was moving internationally and carrying everything with me.

It took about two hours to get to Guangzhou (the capital of the province we in the West formerly called Canton). It took another half an hour to get to the last stop, which the driver told me was closest to Guangzhou Train Station, whence I took a taxi and proceeded to drag my luggage all over in a sweaty, undignified, and in the end nigh-hopeless manner, before I finally located the ticket counter. After purchasing my ticket for the next morning, and eventually evincing the location of the luggage station from the overworked 服务员 at the counter, I was again unceremoniously dragging my luggage through the afternoon heat when a girl about my age walked by and asked where I was going. I told her, and she helped me carry my luggage over and explain to the 服务员 there what needed to be explained (they spoke Mandarin, but with an accent, and were more comfortable with Cantonese). We chatted for a while with one of the workers while waiting for my final receipt. He went off on a long tangent which started with something about coming to China and actually talking to people and studying the language and traveling and ended a couple of minutes later with me smiling as politely as I know how. My new friend turned to me and asked if I had understood (“你听懂了吗？“) I said that I hadn’t, really (“…没有“) and she said “he thinks you’re very cool” (“他说你很棒“)。 As we were leaving the train station my new friend told me to call her “Wing” in English, gave me her phone number, and told me if I ever came back to Guangzhou I should call her and she would show me around. Then she gave me a hug, pointed me to my subway stop, and got on her bus.

I found the subway with minimal problems- only a few taxi drivers stopped me and insisted I let then drive me for “only” four times what it should have cost to get to my hostel. Once I was in the subway directions were all clearly posted in both English and Chinese and I made it to my hostel about half an hour later.

Let me just say that Hostelling International is fantastic. I stayed in one of their hostels in Shanghai three years ago, and this one was just as great. They have clean, comfortable beds, wireless internet, English-speaking staff, bicycles for rent, and the dorm-style rooms cost less than $10 a night. Moving on.

I found a restaurant around the corner and then wandered up and down the walkway next to the Pearl River for quite a while, thinking about development and trying to decide where I belong in the world. I left the US almost a month ago, and I just realized today that it would be possible for me to be homesick. I’m not. I love it here, despite the noise, the crowds, the pollution, and the language barrier. China is magnetic. During introductions among the internationals here at Hopkins-Nanjing on Monday, so many people talked about how they had studied here and then gone back to the US and just felt wrong. But! I am getting ahead of myself.

I came back to the hostel, talked to my mother and some dude in Korea via Skype, and went to bed quite early. I woke up at 5:45, changed, grabbed my things while trying not to disturb my three roommates, turned in my key, and headed back to the subway and thence the train station (广州火车站)。 I got to my excessively air-conditioned waiting room about two hours before my train boarded. I took my non-drowsy Dramamine and my vitamins, and eventually moved my backpack off the seat next to me so a middle-aged local woman could sit down, and made a friend. She asked me a bit about myself, but her accent was strong enough and my Chinese is pathetic enough that we didn’t get very far before we decided mostly to smile and occasionally remark to each other on how very cold the air conditioning was. She shared her towel/makeshift blanket with me, and watched my bag while I bought water.

We boarded the train about ten minutes before it departed, and I found myself on the top bunk in a “hard sleeper” car, which meant that there were two bunks below me and I did not have room to sit up on my berth. The car was open, with walls separating every other column of beds into six-person compartments. There were a total of 66 people in the car. I was definitely the only foreigner.

I climbed into my bunk thought to myself for about ten minutes about how this was probably the longest train ride I would take this year in China (it was scheduled to take 25 hours) and I should really take advantage of the view out the window from the few seats provided below before I passed out. “Non-drowsy” is a very hopeful label.

I woke up sometime that afternoon to the train’s 服务员 asking me for my social security number. I informed her that I didn’t have one, and she accepted just my name.

I went and sat on a fold down seat next to a small table attached to the wall and looked out the window. A young man came and sat across from me, and asked me in English what my name was, what I was doing in China, etc. He told me he was on his was to college after three years with the People’s Liberation Army, and we chatted a bit about his experiences and plans for school before lapsing to just looking out the window and occasionally asking each other how to say something in each others’ language.

After half an hour or so of that, a couple of women in the compartment behind me starting talking about me in Chinese. “See that foreigner? She’s rather pretty, don’t you think?” “What do you think about her clothes?” Then they asked a man sitting across from them about me. “Do you see that foreigner? Where do you think she is from? Somewhere in Europe? England, maybe?” I turned around and said, in Chinese, “I am from America.” The women said “Ohhhh. She understands.”

What followed was an hour of half a dozen passengers asking me (and another dozen or so listening to me talk) about myself, my family, my studies, my plans, my thoughts about China, my thoughts about the US, until we got to a level of questioning that my language skills simply could not handle and I bid them adieu and passed out in my bunk for another 5 fours or so. I slept most of the rest of the time.

We got into the Nanjing train station (南京火车站) at about noon the next day, and after about three and a half hours I gave up on my luggage appearing that day and headed to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which adventure I will discuss in my next post.

… that was a really long post!

Macau Pictures

Okay, so first of all? I am in love with these trees. There are more pictures of them below. They are huge knots of stems growing up from the ground and roots growing down from the branches (that's right! Aah!), into earth, rock, cement, or whatever is available, and they are EVERYWHERE (this one was at the "youth village" -otherwhere known as summer camp facility- where I spent my first week).

Below are some pictures of Macau itself at night:
Left is the sidewalk in downtown Macau (away from the massive casinos, but still downtown)







Right is the view down an old street.
















Scaffolding is made of bamboo!














This lamp. It glows.





Okay. After I left Coloane Island and the "youth village" and moved to Taipa, one of my hosts spent the days running errands and showing my around Macau and old Taipa. Observe:

ROOT TREES. LOOK AT THE ROOTS:































A street in old Taipa.






And another lamp! I love 'em!

Macau Thoughts

I moved in with a Baha'i woman and her granddaughter in Macau on Monday (specifically Taipa island, and not the Macau peninsula, but I wasn't really sure where Macau was at all before I got here, so don't worry about that too much). I had an incredible week with the Baha'is at orientation! It is always such a gift to spend time with a group of Baha'is; they are so focused and loving, so practical and active in working to transform our global civilization. I am so excited to carry this learning and spirit into my relationships on the Mainland. This is going to be a great year.

The global culture that is being built, and the ease of communication around the world right now are truly amazing. I have been keeping up (with perhaps more than a hint of jealousy) with the post-college adventures of friends, many of whom are exploring more parts of the world in more ways than was really thinkable a generation ago. From clowning missions in Peru, to teaching English (and being a writer) in South Korea- on an island, no less!- to biking across the US and building housing for low-income families, there are so many choices of ways to serve humanity and improve our world. It's fantastic.

I'm also getting more and more excited about my program, since I'm beginning to appreciate how truly unique this opportunity is. In some exchange programs, students travel to another country where they spend the majority of their time with other internationals. Perhaps their teachers are local, perhaps they're speaking in the local language, but the deepest bonds they create (and they can be deep, and fantastic in their own right) are with either other students from their home country or international students from other countries. In others, students simply enroll in a local school, and do their best to learn through being immersed in the culture they are visiting (this is actually probably the best way to discover another culture). HOWEVER! The center where I'm headed is half internationals (mostly Americans) and half Chinese, structured in a way that will allow the two cultures to be shared and investigated on equal footing.

Every step of the way

I'm sitting right now some where in Hour 2 of my 10.5 hours in the Toronto airport. They told me it was no problem if I stayed here overnight, but most of the lights are currently out and there are a couple of people riding floor cleaners (that I'd like to call Zambonis, but are Zambonis just for smoothing ice rinks?) and just a handful of other travelers. One lovely Canadian is on her way to spend two weeks in Jamaica and she and I have agreed to sleep and watch each others' luggage in shifts. She is, right now, looking for vending machines or at least a drinking fountain.

Life is good, even through 11 hour layovers.

I also had a lovely (and relaxing!) weekend in Chicago. We spent a lot of time napping and reading, and buying groceries. It was perfect preparation for a couple days' worth of travel, and what with the huge layover and all, I don't really have to hurry at all to do much of anything. Getting from the Hong Kong airport to where I'm staying in Macau is probably going to be hairy (especially with all this luggage! Why do I have to own things?!), but I pretty successfully stayed cool through ridiculous traffic driving into Chicago, and I don't think it will really be any worse than that. I have to figure things out, but not be responsible for other peoples' lives. In fact, I won't be driving again until at least next summer. That's wierd, friends.

Me Oh My

I fly in less than a week!

I've been having "last" visits with family and friends for a while now, trying to get my head around what I'm about to do. I had very organized intentions about blogging regularly this summer. I was going to get my thoughts and feelings laid out and tabulated. Then, there is too much to pay attention to next week and my emotions start churning out of their banks I could say "Ah, Homesickness, I was expecting you" or "Yes, Jetlag, I know. Please shut up." It turned out that I mostly needed to sit and ponder a lot (again, while I, personally, choose to think of myself as a Thinker, Philosopher, or Visionary, even, there are those who label me Airhead). I've studied a bit, and organized a bit, and let myself slowly collect and sift through the things I think I will need for a year. I've been losing what ability I had to carry on coherent conversations; most of my thoughts are consumed by plane schedules, layovers, negotiating ferry rides and taxis and an overnight train ride with a year's worth of luggage.

Also, taking graduate level classes in Chinese.

What I think I'm trying to say is that I'm very very self absorbed right now, and only a little sorry about it so far.

Today is my last in Ames, or Iowa. Mom and I are driving to Chicago to stay with a friend there, Mom will return on Saturday and Nicky will see me to the airport on Sunday evening. Then I have a two hour flight up to Toronto (I'm flying Air Canada, you see) and will spend 12 hours- overnight- chilling in the Toronto airport (YYZ, if you wanted to know). Then I fly for 15 hours to Hong Kong, from where I'll take a ferry straight from the airport over to Macau, and then a taxi to the building I'll be staying in for the first week. Then I have ten days at another gracious friend's home, and then on September 4th I'll take an overnight train up to Nanjing and move into my dorm on Saturday, September 5th. It is going to feel really great to finally get somewhere I know I'll be staying for more than a matter of weeks.

Some pictures

Once upon a time last summer, there were three friends who liked pie. Like so.
Another time this spring, a friend shoved me in a suitcase. Observe.
More to follow.

Look what I can do!

I thought it might take a little work to figure out how to put pictures into this blog. There is, in fact, a little button on the blog-dashboard thinger which allows me to do so quite painlessly. This picture is me being cool (as I really can't help, right? Right?) in front of a Pyramid at Giza.

I'm feeling rather drunk with this power and am going to look through what pictures I have on this computer and figure out what kind of a post I can inflict on you, dear readers.

And I'll miss it very much

Scenic Iowa has a lot to offer.

"gain-seeking and corrupt men will for profit and sensuality defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive revenue from the vice and misery of my people."
-Chinese Emperor to British plenipotentiaries (my new English vocab word for today!), again refusing to legalize opium in 1842.

plenipotentiary: "a person, esp. a diplomat, invested with the full power of independent action on behalf of their government, typically in a foreign country."

Chinese is, unsurprisingly, rather difficult

I have plans to reinvigorate my Chinese skills this summer. They involve ChinesePod lessons via the magic of the internet, old textbooks, a couple of books my old language partner gave me (including a book of children's rhymes and Chinese for Leisure Life, which will teach me vocab for small talk and tourism), and watching Chinese-language movies.

I was planning on making myself only watch Chinese movies without subtitles (and then with them to understand more, and then again without to cement new words), but that didn't work at the first go. I can understand a bit and kind of stumble along with the plot, but I was getting quite bored missing all the jokes and subtleties of the dialogue, so I think my plan is now to watch movies first with subtitles and then again just once without them. Hopefully I'll be able to return to Plan A and maybe even be able to just understand movies by watching them in Chinese by the time I fly. Probably not, but I'll aim for it.

Um, also? August 16th is not very far off. And keeps getting closer. I've said this a lot of times to anyone who's been willing to listen to me think out loud about China recently, but I'm freaking out a bit. Part of me has been so ready to go live abroad, actually live abroad and not know when I'm coming home so I can really let myself get used to it, that watching friends graduate and move away (even just move on with their lives in IC) has been torture. But, as my departure keeps marching closer, another part of me has been gaining volume. "Iowa's really not so bad, yeah? Let's not- let's not do anything rash here, ok? China is pretty freaking far away," It says.

I keep realizing a little bit at a time just how far I'll be going and just how many people I won't see again for at least a year, even if I don't get a job in China after I finish my certificate. China is really far. I am going to miss you very much.

The Opium Wars

After taking my physics final last friday, I went to the IC Public Library to get myself some not-required reading to celebrate. I came away with four Chinese movies (all of which I have yet to watch) and four books, three of which focus on China.

I immediately began reading The Opium Wars (and I'd like you to all to take a moment to appreciate how well I know how to relax and enjoy myself. Opium Wars). Personally, before going to China the first time I had heard of the Opium Wars but could not really say anything about them. This is not too surprising and should not, perhaps, cause despair for American educational institutions; my grasp on history has never been terribly strong. However, I have since realized that these are Wars which had and continue to have a huge impact on the way that China interacts with the (especially Western) world, and I would probably do well to have some kind of understanding of them.

I am about halfway through the three-hundred page tome and my overall learning so far can be summed up thus: "Foreign relations misadventure today can't hold a candle to the shit that went down two centuries ago." British merchants starting selling India-grown opium in China in the late eighteenth century because, basically, Great Britain had recently fallen in love with Chinese tea, and their government was losing vast sums of silver (the only form of payment China would accept) each year to keep their people in tea. They needed some way to lessen the debt, but were in possession of precisely nothing for which China was interested in trading. So, Parliament stifled its moral objectors and allowed the opium trade to explode.

To keep from writing my own three-hundred page retelling of what happened, here is a brief summary in dialogue-form:

A few people in England: Opium is addictive and does awful things to people! Selling it is very wrong!
The Majority of British merchants: If we don't sell it, someone else will.
Chinese bureaucrats to foreign merchants: Stop selling opium or we will confiscate it and kill you.
Chinese bureaucrats to Chinese: Stop using opium. We'll help you for 18 months and if you're still using, we'll kill you.
Chinese Emporer to Queen Victoria: Please stop this immoral trade. I hope you can appreciate, with your small barbarian mind, the horror you are wreaking on my country.
Queen Victoria: *never got the letter, as one copy was lost in the mail and the sailor who delivered the second was told by a member of Parliament the the Queen wouldn't be interested*
Chinese Bureaucracy/Army: *confiscates and destroys twenty thousand chests of British opium*
British Army: *begins invading China with vastly superior military and equipment, suffers almost no losses and massacres Chinese civilians as well as soldiers*
Chinese Bureaucracy to Chinese Emperor: You're the best! The British are running away!
Everyone: Why won't you all acknowledge my innate superiority and do what I say?!

I don't mean to belittle the events or people involved by saying I completely understand their motives or the way these wars affected lives, but that's what I've got so far. Diplomats and military leaders on both sides were repeatedly fired for not having produced the results their governments wanted, and were replaced by people with even less understanding of the foreign culture they were interacting with. Eventually China was forced to cede major ports and allow opium to be pumped into the country ad nauseum. The country broke down in a lot of ways, as millions and millions of people became addicted to opium. When Chinese thinkers/officials asked British government or merchants to please stop bringing in this devastating drug, the reply they received was to tell their people not to use it anymore. I am so glad we don't live in that world anymore, friends.

(The next book I get to read is called What Does China Think? (中国怎么想）and appears ready to give me much hope for the future...)