This time from Seoul!

Our trip has continued to be excellent, overall. We accidentally bought train tickets for Tuesday instead of Wednesday and  ended up having to stand a lot for a long time rather than having the relaxing afternoon watching the country roll by as we had planned. But on Wednesday morning we walked up to the top of Busan, including at least part of the 1,000 steps that are apparently famous. We went to a huge lovely bookstore yesterday, and I now have The BFG; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and A Wrinkle in Time to give to Xiaoxuan when I visit her family fort the lunar new year in February (going back to Chinaaaa!). We then ate some excellent Vietnamese food and saw Tron: Legacy in 4D (meaning 3D glasses and seats on hydraulics so when the characters swoop, we swoop).

Today we are staying in until evening, when we're going to Hongdae to do whatever is done when the year changes at midnight. Jei and Christian are going to make me watch the 1st and 3rd Indiana Jones because I don't think I've seen either of them in their entirety.

Christian and I put off buying any travel tickets until we'd actually left and were worried that it would make this an expensive trip, but we bought plane tickets back home from Seoul (since we came by boat from Jeju to Busan and train from Busan to Seoul) and they only cost us 30,000won (less than $30) each. It was a very new airline, so I'll be able to tell you better on Sunday WHY they were so cheap, but I am confident they will at least get us home.

As far as things-Christian-says updates, which should probably become a regular facet of this blog, he has periodically channeled the spirit of New Yorker (or something like it) Odysseus, or "Ody" for short ("'ey, c'mon, we're pals, right?"). He also informed me that he is naturally built like Brad Pitt, with a slightly larger nose. But is allergic to "stupid poop-heads" and since he spends so much time with ME, is always swollen.

A kind man.

Coming to you from Busan, South Korea

Hello fair reader! I am in the PC bang (computer room/cafe) in the shared floor of a Jimjilbang. The women's sauna is on one floor, the men's on another, and the shared sleeping floor, with cafe and computer room and massage chairs, on yet another. Christian is on his way up, he's just texted me, and we'll be spending the night here before spending another half-day in Busan (the highlights of which will be the beach, again, and the RussiaTown near the train station) before catching our train up to Seoul to stay with a friend there through new years. We took an over night boat from Jeju-si last night, and didn't sleep much. We got into Busan port a little before 6am and have been wandering ever since, so I'm not feeling too bad about having hit the sauna around 8pm and just chilling for the rest of the evening.

More updates when I'm back home!

Movement and Stillness; Silence and Sound

There is a magic in traveling, whatever the distance. It takes me out of myself and gives me permission to look at the world. Even taking the bus home from my school a few towns over, feeling the landscape rolling past me puts my place in the world into more perspective. I can see more clearly how far I have traveled and how much world there will always be left to explore.

In part I owe this to the motion sickness that I sometimes view as a tragic irony. I can't read in cars or especially on buses and only sometimes on trains or planes. I sometimes can't hold conversations well because I can't keep turning my head to look at the person I'm talking to.* I have always gotten motion sick, as far as I can remember, which has meant that car rides (and more recently plane and train rides) have left me with nothing to do but be in my mind. It makes me a less-than-ideal travel partner; as soon as I sit down in a car, my brain sets to meditative work.

I love thinking about the world without being altogether in any one part of it. I love tracing a line that has connected who knows how many other people. And I love that my responsibility is just to be wherever I am. "I'm on the bus, dude." or "I'm on a train, dude. In China." and "I'll deal with it when I get there." It is an opportunity to turn off my responsibility/stress mind and just think about whatever comes.

It is often when I am traveling and staring absent-mindedly into the distance that I am able to articulate myself the best.

This year has probably been my richest ever in terms of travel. I was on Jeju staying with Christian for six weeks just after the year began, then I went 'home' to Nanjing for Spring semester. Afterwards I traveled to Chongqing by 25 hour train, then to Yichang by three-boat on the Yangtze river, then by 13 hour train to Beijing. There I was picked up by Xiaoxuan and her father's entourage, and hosted in Langfang and Guyuan, near Inner Mongolia. I went home for three and a half short weeks, and zigzagged my way all over the Mighty Midwest seeing people I love. I've been in Korea for a few months now, spending most of my time on Jeju but some in Seoul, and Christian and I have another trip to Busan and Seoul in just over a week. **

What matters the most, of course, are people. It is wonderful to travel with or towards people I love, but I also like to travel alone. I have had some lovely conversations and even made friends on trains and waiting for them. It is very easy for me to feel isolated sitting home alone, or when I am at work with no one to talk to. But even if I am by myself on a bus, I feel connected to the people riding it and to the places I pass. And as I begin to learn the history of whatever place I live in, I begin to be able to trace lines back through the reasons for and implications of what people say and do, what kind of work they do and where. It is magic that there are so many lines to trace and to continue.


*I was recently lovingly reminded that much of this may be in my head. I am better in motion if I am not struggling with anxiety, if I have been taking care of myself mentally and physically. I am better if I have someone's hand to hold, and that has little to do with my inner ear.

**that was a really long brief overview...

My heart is often in Iowa

My grandparents have had an extremely difficult year, and after finally moving back in with my grandfather for less than a week, my grandmother is back in the hospital. She has always planned on "getting to 90 and then slowing down," and did just turn 90 last month. She has been incredibly brave in a year of being moved back and forth, from her home to the hospital to an assisted living home to a nursing home, another nursing home. I think that she and my grandfather have spent more time living in separate places this year than they have together, which would be unfair any year but is unbearable to think about as the list of things her body is surviving keeps getting longer.

It breaks my heart to be on the other side of the world while they are both facing things they shouldn't face alone, with only my thoughts and love and too-infrequently my voice in Iowa. But I am wary of the short trips home I might be able to finagle with my brief vacation days-- I don't want to have to leave before I feel like I'm home and lose the buffer-money that will be letting me stay in Ames when I do get there, almost certainly at the end of July. I have been trying to decide if this is wisdom or selfishness, and am not sure. In any case, my heart is in Iowa.

Me-update

Sorry I didn't post earlier in the week! All is well. This is solely a Kara-update, my mind hasn't been coming together for a more thoughtful topic.

I think I have decided to get a masters of education and teach middle school science, and then get certified to teach in montessori schools. I don't just want to do the montessori thing by itself, I believe, because I want to be more flexible in where I can work and because I am pretty sure I want to work with middle-school aged students. This is such an important age to be encouraged and empowered, as youth are becoming aware that they are both intelligent and mature, but often not being given ways to use those qualities constructively, I think that I can feel good about spending my whole life with them.

I have just recieved (from my dear mother!) and begun reading a book about the Montessori philosophy. But it is essentially based around Maria Montessori's discovery in late 19th century Italy that all children have a spontaneous interest and self-discipline for learning, when they are given the help and encouragement to act on them.

I am looking for Masters of Ed programs and may be applying for next fall to a couple with late deadlines, but will probably wait to ensure that I have applied for sufficient funding.

Christian and I are going to visit Seoul and Busan (the capital/biggest city in SK and the second biggest, respectively) the week after next for our vacations. We're taking a boat from Jeju to Busan, a train from Busan to Seoul, and a plane from Seoul back to Jeju.

The first week of January my school is hosting a joint English Camp with a few other schools (including Christian's) and I'll be teaching about 15 4th-6th graders a day on the exciting topic of "money." We'll be designing our own currency and ending with a treasure hunt.

Words, words, words.

I read a lot, and have since I learned how. I must say that part of my motivation to read when I was a child was the praise it got me and, as Christian can attest, I still want someone to witness my reading progress. Another reason is often escapism. I prefer novels-- the longer the better-- because they allow me to spend the most time in a world outside my own, and especially when I was young loved most to re-read favorites, because I knew I could be prepared for whatever happened. I still like stories that are long enough for me to spend time in a world, and I still love to relive stories-- but maybe not quite as often as I used to.

I also write, but less confidently (naturally, I suppose). I journaled more or less regularly through middle and high school, but have had trouble keeping a regular journal since then. Most of the time, though, when I sit down to write I have to write my head into order before I can even pretend I am writing about anything other than the state of my mind. Hence most of the contents of this blog. I am trying to write creatively, but with my current project am teetering on the line between knowing I have a story I want to write that will give me room to explore all the things I want it to, and feeling that all the pieces of it are spiraling out and should never have been connected. That's a little melodramatic but, y'know, I live in my mind so little things in here often seem pretty big to me.

I brought almost all new books with me to China last year, and decided halfway through the year that it had not been the best plan-- the living on the other side of the world business was enough 'new'ness and I wanted familiar stories. So, I brought more with me this time-- in large part through that previously mentioned e-reader, though I am filling up the shelves here with books anyway.

I have been reading a lot on Jeju, in between the teaching, spending time with Christian, and large amounts of sitting and thinking which fill my days. I have read:
1) the remainder of Red Mars, and about half of Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
2)The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (again)
3) The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
4) The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (again-again)
5) Briar Rose by Jan Yolen (again)
6) about half of Anne Frank's diary in German
7) about a third of 藏地密码 by 何马
8) a couple of stories in my 科幻小说集 (science fiction anthology)
9) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (again)
10) most of China Mieville's The City and the City
11) The beginning of Tintenherz by Cornelia Funke

Goodness, I was thinking to talk about each of them a bit but that's a long list.  They are all recommended!

Thoughts on 'race' and living in Asia

Living in Asia has been a lesson in living as a minority-- on getting extra attention and being treated as not quite a real person. Don't get me wrong: My experience bears little or no relation to the experience of underprivileged minorities in their home countries. I am a very privileged minority here. And there's something more than that: this is not my home. I do not have to take responsibility for the demons here, and even if they did affect me negatively, it would be more like the misunderstanding of strangers than the disapproval of a parent.

I learned during my first two months in China, over the summer of 2006, how much I used 'race' to define people in my mind, despite education and good intentions to the contrary. You see, whatever the majority of people in a person's life look like is what they will spend the most time defining. Growing up in predominantly White Iowa, I noticed a lot more about the variations in skin, hair, and eye color in white people I met than I did about others. For the most part, I probably would not know more than a couple people in a given minority in any particular social group, so their being Black or Asian or Latino/a or Native was enough to give them a unique identity in my mind.

I'm not sure that this tendency itself qualifies as racism*, but it is definitely a convenient jumping-off place for discrimination. When I have put everyone who is not The Same As Me into handy categories, it is very easy to attach any label or stigma to all of them at once, instead of having checks built into my mind to remind myself that no one characteristic, even one as defining as heritage, can tell you what is most important about a person.

So, when I came to China, at first everyone just looked Chinese to me. Everyone had black hair and skin a different color than mine, and my mind was overloaded. There were simply too many people to fit into a convenient Minority category, and I had to start paying attention to what they actually looked like.

What I realized was that Chinese people look a lot like the White people I was used to describing more carefully in my mind's eye (and, I have since had time to confirm, a lot like people from many other races and backgrounds). There are Chinese people with long faces and thin noses, with melancholy eyes and mouths that droop in the corners. Tall and wide with booming voices, thin and pale so that it seems an unkind word could knock them over. Over and over again I looked at someone and realized that if their skin was a just a little lighter, or the lines in their face had slightly different angles, I would think of them as White rather than Chinese.

I am always afraid when I attempt to voice realizations like this that it will sound like I have been amazed to find that other humans are human, which feels horrible. What amazes me is to find that despite always having known and professed that all humans are human, I still use racist shortcuts in classifying people in my mind. I am sure that I do this is all kinds of ways. Living in China and Korea, and especially trying to function in Chinese, has made it easier for me to remember that a persons ability to express themselves in a language I understand is not a good indicator of their intelligence, but it is still much easier for me, in a frustrating situation, to think of people who I can't communicate with as stupid. I know I make assumptions about people's gender or intelligence or even just interests based on things that are simply convenient and not all that meaningful. Perhaps all of the evidence I use does mean something about a person's identity, as race certainly can, but they are not all-meaningful.  I am grateful for my constant opportunities to re-learn how to pay attention to who a person really is.

*so I'd love to hear what you think!

And when I wake for goodness' sake, these are the songs I'll keep singin'

I have been reading a translation of Anne Frank's diary into German*, just saw at the back an advertisement for a book by a childhood friend of Anne's and knew that Jacqueline van Maarsen could not have guessed when she was a child that that particular friendship would be a topic which thousands of people would want to read about later. It put me back in touch with the truth that you cannot treat any human being with too much respect. It makes me wonder how many of the people whose lives are tangent to mine, how many  old classmates and acquaintances or current Facebook friends, are living with thoughts too big to share with me, and even too weighty to share with the people much closer to them. 


I have been working on being alright with myself, on feeling confident enough about who I am and what my past joys and mistakes have been to see who I want to become. A friend introduced me to a video called "How To Be Alone" yesterday, and it gave me a lot of momentum.


I have been seeing so many people who didn't mean to end up where they are or, worse, don't want to be there. I think it would be more than alright in many ways to know a few things about myself and just see where they take me. That may, in fact, be the genuine best life path. 


At the same time, though, I want to know that my goals are formed of more than convenience or ambition. I want to become something(s) that I want to be, and not things for which I want to be recognized, and not things things that just don't make me uncomfortable.


I have been thinking about expectations and their dangers. We expect children to learn in a classroom, often on teachers' terms and not according to the individual shape of students' minds. We expect ourselves to be happy with reasonable situations, and don't allow for the emotions that run in monthly or yearly or decade-ly cycles and can pull us from functioning to stuck in our thoughts or to exhilaration at merely being alive in the space of a thought.


Goodness, I thought this was a post with a point but I am wandering again. Ah well, welcome to my mind.


This talk that a friend shared has helped me a lot in finding words for what I have been struggling with: Brene Brown at TEDxHouston. She talks about
*it was originally written in Dutch. I had been certain it was German to begin with, but the Frank family moved to the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. So by the time Anne started writing in 1942 she was functioning in Dutch.


Title is from Weezer's Heart Songs

"All this living's so much harder than it seems// you know, this livin's not so hard as it seems"

So I've had kind of a strange couple of weeks. I was rather low for awhile and this was compunded by my feeling foolish for feeling low and it took me a while to, first, give myself permission to not be happy and, second, to investigate why I wasn't happy.

This is a phase that I go through regularly; I want to say once or twice a year. I have to re-realize that being unhappy does not make me a failure, but it is probably telling me something important about myself. It trips me up and makes me realize I've been crawling. I have been thinking about this article (Depression's Evolutionary Roots, in Scientific American), which discusses depression as an evolutionary necessity, as the mental analogy to a physical fever-- an automatic response that helps to eradicate another problem.

Other than dealing with my emotions, as always, I've started seriously looking into education as a career. I'm looking into Iowa state certification, Chinese language teacher training, and Waldorf and Montessori certification. My ego will be a bit upset with me if I don't decide to pursue higher education in Science and become part of my generation's Badass Female Scientist League, but I think I might be happier as an educator. I see many of our problems today rooted in the fact that students don't learn to investigate truth on their own in school; they learn to mimic those 'smarter' (probably really only more educated) than themselves, so that after school all important issues easily become a competition between sides who have already decided what they think. (There will be more on education later, I hope, as I have yet to understand to my satisfaction the difference between the Waldorf and Montessori philosophies.)

Basically, after a couple of weeks of mental bewilderment, I have come to the conclusion that what I need to decide what direction to move in my life is a systematic exploration of topics I am interested in... like, maybe, a weekly blog series! I am too clever for myself, sometimes.


Title is from Jack Johnson's "Dreams be Dreams."

Searching for a language that fits

I don't really like the way my "exploring the world" series is feeling. It's too vague, and not really helping be systematic in my decisions about myself and my future.

What I need to be searching for, or deciding on, this year is a language. Maybe German or Chinese or perhaps even Korean, but I don't feel I'll completely have to choose between them. I know that studying and reading books in foreign languages will always wake up my mind and my motivation and I'll be able to use them for whatever I do.

I have to choose an angle; I need a primary language through which to view the rest of my life's learning. I don't know if it should be a scientific language-- Chemistry's language of atoms and the push and pull of electrons between them driving life's processes, or Geology's language of the bones of the world. I could study the rise and fall of landforms and the dance of continents around the globe. Or then maybe Biology's tapestry of genes and food webs and the struggle to quantify what keeps life going. Physics would give my quantitative brain a lot of joy and would still let me zoom to any scale of study-- planets swirling through space-time or quarks spinning inside electrons.

Education is important to me-- I would like to continue teaching. I had the great opportunity to work in a Waldorf preschool while I was myself only in sixth grade. The Waldorf community speaks a language much more similar to the language of homeschooling than of public school. They both speak of children's ability and desire to learn on their own terms; to let children use their minds rather than push them to be used.

Living in Asia I have seen a different educational language: one that places discipline at the center and speaks not of what is in a student's mind, but what can but put there. Both of these have some wisdom-- I think it is dangerous to encourage children to search in their minds without also teaching them how to search outside of them-- but on the whole I think that it is more dangerous to teach them only to look outside themselves for wisdom and guidance. I am not sure how to translate these thoughts into a path.

So, in my previous post I tried a bit of writing in the Geologic tongue, and will find a different language for next Thursday. 

Sorry!

I spent the weekend in Seoul at the behest of the TaLK program. I was apprehensive about it, but it turned out just lovely. However, it put me behind for this post. I thought I could throw some links together at least, but my mind just won't show up for it.

On Thursday I will be posting a re-thinking of my second blog series.

Jeju Island Geology, for a start

I have been enjoying living on an island. It is perhaps the exact opposite, geographically, from living in the middle of Iowa. Jeju Island was formed by a volcano-- similar to the Hawaiian island. The volcano, Halla-san (san means mountain in Korean), stands tall in the center of the island, almost always shrouded in humidity and clouds, sometimes poking its head out above them. I have only seen the whole thing clearly once so far. My co-teacher says that it is usually only visible for 10 days a year, or that's what people say.

There are scattered around the island about 360 "parasitic" volcanic cones-- that means that for at least part of the time that Halla-san was active, the amount of magma underneath it was so great that the main volcano was not big enough to release it and it pushed its way through all over the place. The small peaks are visible all over the place-- in Jeju's dialect of Korean they are called "oreum." I have climbed a couple so far, and I love to see them in the distance and imagine the lava shooting out and pooling over the landscape. This would have been a truly dramatic place to live a few hundred thousand years ago.

There are remnants of Jeju's dramatic past all over: the sharp divide between land and see, sometimes dropping off from basalt cliffs to deep water; the oreum scattered across the island, sometimes with their feet in the water; and the lava tubes. Christian and I visited one lava tube called Manjang cave.
I wasn't able to get a good shot with my camera, so here's one from Discover Korea.

It is a place where lava pushed through-- perhaps taking advantage of a crack in the rock--  the outer layer of lava solidified and the rest kept flowing. This picture is of the end of the tunnel that is open to tourists (Manjang cave being one of two or three sections of tunnel open anywhere on the island, out of I think 5 or 6 known tunnels-- one of which is more than 13km long). As we were leaving, I noticed that a lot of the ceiling had light patches. I wondered what they were, and Christian suggested that they might be minerals leached from the soil above. I said, naahh, that's possible, I guess, but highly improbable. Well, one of the first sentences in the UNEP report is that that is exactly what happened, and that is it rare. So, I feel silly, but not completely silly?

It's a beautiful place! Come visit!

--Pretty much all of the information in this post that isn't a personal anecdote is from the United Nations Environmental Project Report on Jeju island as a World Heritage Site, which you can download for your very own self! It's only about 6 pages long, and chock-full of great information.

--also, please note that each of these 'exploring the world' and china series posts are labeled as such, and the tags are at the top of the list on the righthand side of this page. If you just want to view one of these series, just click on its label!

我整天做梦 (a beginning exploration of Chinese language)

My first introduction to China was through language. I chose to start Chinese my sophomore year of university because I had studied German and a little Spanish and wanted to try something away from Europe, and farther historically, culturally, and linguistically from the US (Europe and the US have a lot of important differences, but many of our differences take place upon common assumptions and values).

Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.

There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.

Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.

Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.

Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'

The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.

A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind,  English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.

Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.

*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.

The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"

Be careful what you do-- because the lie becomes the truth

One of the most important things I learned last year in China was about myself and about how I am motivated. I was used to being a good student. I was used to getting good grades because I did the reading and the work, because I was intelligent and ready for class every day, and perhaps most importantly: because I am mentally quick enough to keep up with professor lectures (many of which cater more to the professor's mind than the students').

I was not a good student in China. I struggled to make it through half of the reading for most of my classes. I did finish, but rarely. My Chinese ability was average for my classes-- meaning that I ended up with passing grades but was not ever the smart one in a class. I couldn't keep up with lectures, felt a fool many times a week when a professor asked a question in class and I couldn't answer.

I am embarrassed by how thoroughly feeling like a poor student threw me completely off track, even when I was getting through just fine, really. I was embarrassed to talk about how well I was understanding course material, and had trouble staying motivated to do reading because it took so long to look up the characters I didn't know, and even when I did my comprehension was low.

When I did actually talk to classmates about schoolwork, we were always in more or less the same place: struggling and embarassed about it. A friend who was in a different program in nanjing said she thought herself lucky she had already had so many experiences as a good student-- she remarked that if feeling this way had been her first experience in school at five years old, she would probably never have recovered and would have spent her whole life thinking of herself as a bad student. This put into clearer focus some thoughts about the way that my brother and I were treated and spoken of when we were both in elementary school, and about the education system in general that I will hopefully explore more fully in a later post.

It was definitely not my best year socially, either, and I'm still working on trying to figure out why. In some ways it was a product of my surroundings-- living in close quarters with large groups from different cultures left a lot of differences of understanding in the open, and it also underlined how much more comfortable people were overall with classmates with the same native language. There were many friendships across the Chinese-Foreigner line (and I'm happy to say some were mine!) but much of the time groups from one background or the other dominated people's social lives.

I know there is more I could have done, was capable of doing, to improve to social feeling in the Center. Trying to pick up the pieces and get more out of last year will, I think, be very important for how I feel about myself this year.

Title is from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", which has been stuck in my head for the last few days because a friend of mine introduced me to this excellent cover by Aloe Blacc and The Grand Scheme.

Exploring the World Series Introduction

Writing goal number two!

Is to think about/research again something involving environmental science, different countries, education, economics... basically to try to organize my thoughts about what I have learned and experienced... um... while I have been alive. Mostly not involving China.

I have spent time as a homeschooler, which allowed me to spend a lot of time figuring out how I learned; experienced my parents' divorce, which allowed me to deeply examine how I thought and felt (as in, the processes that lead me to various thoughts and emotions, not just examining the thoughts and feelings I had then); gone through grades 7-12 in the Ames public school system; earned degrees in International Studies and Environmental Science at the University of Iowa; and been able to spend time in Germany, Egypt, Korea, and China, last year earning a graduate certificate in Chinese Studies.

Sometimes I'm happy with what I've done so far and where it seems to be taking me, but overall the last year or so I don't know what I want to do with this range of experience. My goal this year is to calm down and let myself figure that out (as my darling mother assures me is inevitable). I know that teaching will be stressful, especially at first, but I have always enjoyed working with kids and after a while I think I will be able to settle into a routine and relax. Especially since my contract involves working only 15 hours a week with comfortable-living's pay.

These posts will go up on Thursdays, as this one is, and I'm hoping that I'll find some answers about what my focus should be by what topics I am drawn to explore. I'll be starting out looking around where I am more in depth-- Jeju island geology and a little history, the Korean language. I've been looking for more music from China and from Germany, to better keep up my language skills, and I'm not sure if the things I find will just surface here as post titles and asides or if I'll find an idea to tie together a whole post or two. I would really appreciate comments and questions, as always, to help me root out all the corners of each topic. Thank you! Love!

China Series Introduction

Okay, here is my first writing goal for the next year.

Every Monday, I will post a China-centered article. I have a lot of China study and experience to process, and writing is my best hope.

I have been trying to figure out who I am as a traveler (I am almost resigned to the fact that I will be fervently trying to figure out who I am for the rest of my life, in one way or another). I am often unsure of how to talk about my experiences to others-- to Chinese people, to other foreigners in China, and especially to other Americans who haven't traveled, or have traveled only as tourists. I am realizing that much of the time what an outsider says about a country is about 90% a reflection of themselves and only 10% a reflection of the country they are describing.

I come back to the quote in "84, Charing Cross Road" (which I don't remember precisely and can't look up from the dorm room in Korea where I'm writing this) in which Helene Hanff tells Frank Doel that when she comes to London, she will be looking for the London of Classic English literature. Of Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens. He replies that if she looks for it, it is there.

This is a lovely moment in a sweet story, but outside of Helene's story, I am torn about what to think of it. It is very true, for just about any version of any country. If you go to China expecting to see a country ravaged by the evils of socialism, you will find evidence to support that and could easily come away with a renewed love for capitalism. If you go to China expecting to find a country where people value community and avoid the isolation and greed of the West, you will find it. If you come to China looking for an economic wonder, the next global superpower in the making, it is there.

Of course, if a traveler in China has meaningful conversation with anyone while in China, they will have some of their horizons broaden and some of there understandings deepened, but I don't think it's by any means necessary that they will come away with even the beginning of an accurate view of what China is, or what it feels like to live there.

I am hoping to put down on paper (or, well, the internet) what I experienced studying about and living in the Middle Kingdom, and in doing so begin to sort out what's me and what is China. I will choose a topic a week- a place, a concept, a tradition, a historical change.

Bonus Picture Saturday

First, here is a photo of one view from the westernmost beach in Hamdeok (a 15-20 minute walk from my place):

Next, here's one of the best shots I've taken so far. It's a picture of sunset over Jeju taken from Udo-- a very small island to the east of Jeju itself.
And last, here is the cereal I have been eating. I was drawn to it because it is 1) Cheap and 2) Terrifying. It is also Italian.


(If you click on the pictures, they'll get bigger)

It's the room the sun and the sky

Writing goal number three* for this year is the most informal. It's basically just to keep my pen on paper; not to let things I need to express pile up because I'm not sure how or when to say them. I've journaled to keep myself sane since I was about ten years old, I think. I have a paper journal for which this might often be more appropriate, but I'm going to try to just write down something about HOW my life is every week. This will also allow me to keep titling entries with song lyrics that probably only relate to the post's content in my head. Win all around, really.

To begin with, here's a bit about what it feels like to teach afterschool English at Hado Elementary School on Jeju Island:

The fifth and sixth grades are often the easiest to relate to, but also the classes where power struggles are most likely. I'm hoping this will continue getting better as I figure out what games they like and they feel they can trust me to have a point to what I want them to do ("point" here probably also being a game). Sixth grade was excited about the game "four corners" for about two solid weeks. I haven't played it in a little while because I want it to still be exciting. The only thing I've gotten the fifth grade excited about so far is telling scary stories. Which was awesome-- I said "What is a scary story?" and they immediately listed about twenty possible characters, starting with Dracula and kumiho. I've been using them to teach the past tense, and am hoping I can find some more things they'll be interested in so they don't get tired of them. They are the class that chose names like "Valkyrie," "Black Hole," and "Dark Knight," for which I can do nothing but congratulate them, but they are clearly too cool for school most of the time. There's hope for a future full of English practice involving video game characters and tales of violent death, but there will be rocks along the way.

Fourth grade is my smallest class and third grade is my largest (with 5 and 11 students, respectively. All my classes are beautifully small). Fourth grade has been the easiest so far-- they've been happy with the activities I've planned for them-- they've been feeling the power of being able to spell things by sounding them out phonetically, I think, and really like playing Uno even if they have to describe their cards in English to play each turn. The range of language level in my third grade class is challenging. There is one girl who has complained a number of times to my co-teacher that she ALWAYS raises her hand and ALWAYS knows the answer and I NEVER call on her. I do call on her, sometimes, but I know that she really does always know the answer very fast, and a few of her classmates generally need the question repeated and/or re-explained.

First and second grade have the most trouble finding value in sitting in a chair for forty minutes at a time, but they might still be my favorites. They are all young enough to just "know" that all adults understand everything they are saying all the time, so they speak to me in Korean all the time. I have them kind of fooled so far, by luck. I always have a Korean co-teacher in class who fields their relevant questions, and thus far the only questions they've asked me outside of class concern where I'm going-- one of the ten or so things I understand. Thus far they still believe that I respond in English to challenge them and make them keep practicing, and not because I only speak about twenty words of Korean.

Only a couple of the other teachers in my school have had real conversations with me. Most don't speak English well enough (or aren't confident, at least). But a couple of teachers who don't really speak English have brought me coffee a couple of friday afternoons while I lesson plan in the library, so overall it's nice to be there.

*er, goals one and two start next week. They're more scheduled. You'll be seeing them. Transmission ended.

Title is from "Lazy Eye" by the Silversun Pickups

Beginnings on Jeju Island

I am safe on Jeju, and apologize for not updating here sooner! Our first five days on the island were spent finishing out orientation at a hotel with no wifi, and my evenings were spent wandering around Jeju-si or sleeping.

I stayed with Christian for about a week, as his room at our "pension"* was open way before mine. First, though, he had to fly to Osaka at the last minute to get a new visa because of some poorly worded forms at the Consulate in Chicago.

Our rooms are right next to each other, the only ones in the building on this side of the cluster of structures that our landlord (who was introduced to us as "the Master") owns. There is a waterwheel and a gazebo in the middle, and a bench swing to the side of my window, next to the hole in the wall that houses our washing machine. My place consists of one large room-- kitchen, bedroom, and living room in one-- and a small bathroom. There are plenty of windows and we get a lovely breeze, so when it's not crazy hot outside they're open.

I've only taught one day so far, and will head to my second day of classes in a couple of hours. My intended first day was canceled by a typhoon, which in the end turned out to be just spotty gusts of wind and a few downpours. I definitely haven't gotten a good handle on my students' abilities yet. We've just made namecards (and picked English names!) and gone over class rules. My first graders think I'm super cool, my fourth graders may stage a revolt before too long.

It feels SO GOOD to have my own place, and now a cellphone and internet, and soon a desk and chair. I'm calming down from last year in China and from traveling all over the place this summer. I think it's gonna be a really good year.


*this is the first time I've heard the word 'pension' used to describe something not to do with money after retirement. Here it means "vacation house," something like "bed and breakfast" which is rented out by the day during tourist season, and much cheaper by the month in the off season.

Korea!

So, I know that I told friends and family about Korea and Jeju island, and confused them and myself about how big each population is.

There are a lot of people. Everywhere.

Korea is about the same size as the state of Indiana (100,000 square kilometers), with a population of 50 million. 50 million is one sixth of the population of the united states. Jeju itself is about 1.5 times the size of story county (an average sized county in Iowa), with a population of 565,000 people. It's a lot.

... more on other things later. I am getting a bit more nervous and much more excited about teaching with each lecture that we have during orientation.

Here safe!

Hello all!

I am safe in Korea-- I flew into Seoul (the Incheon airport) this afternoon, where I met TaLK program folks and was painlessly placed on a bus to Jochiwon, our orientation site. We'll be busing back up to Seoul tomorrow for the opening ceremony, which is apparently going to be on national Korean television.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

:P

in transit announcement, hope of actually catching up.

I am in the Detroit airport with a couple more hours to wait before I can check in for the next leg of my journey. I am far less stressed than I was moving to China last year; I have a much better idea of what I'm getting myself into in Korea. This is a foolishly long layover, but changing it would have changed the ticket price from Awesomely Cheap, so here I am anyway.

I had a lovely whirlwind of visits in my 3.5 weeks in the USA, and am looking forward to living here again, eventually.

After Commencement: Yangtze part 1

So, Saturday June 19th (the day after my graduation ceremony at the HNC) I went to the Nanjing Train Station (南京站）and boarded a 28-hour train bound for Chongqing. I bought tickets for a sleeper bunk, so it was a very comfortable journey of napping and reading and chatting to the very friendly woman in the bunk opposite me (in the morning, she fed me roasted peanuts and lychee, and I helped her wind a skein of yarn into a ball).

Chongqing has been one of the cities to most benefit from the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which has made a long stretch of the Yangtze river navigable for large ships and made Chongqing a major port. A friend, Melody, met me in Chongqing on Monday, after my train ride and a stay in a hostel, and before boarding our Three Gorges cruise ship in the evening, we walked along the river.

I liked the traditional-style roof in the same shot as the middle-of-river construction

here are ships like the one that we rode, and big buildings and bridge of downtown Chongqing (...actually, I'm not sure there is one 'downtown' or that this is it, but saying so makes cities in Iowa seem less tiny)

Our cruise lasted from Monday evening through Thursday morning (when we de-boarded the ship straight onto a Three Gorges Dam tour bus, and, y'know, toured the Three Gorges Dam). The first morning we toured the "Ghost City of Fengdu," a 'city' of temples built for ghosts' use after departing this life. One temple was actually in use by monks, but I think most of the buildings were built more with tourists in mind than anything.

a map of the "Ghost City"- the central of three sections is being built in the shape of a King into the Mountain.

here's his head.

this is the gate to the top temple on the right-hand side of the City.

That evening we toured Zhangfei temple, which was full of calligraphy and very fun, though by that point I was nursing a sunburn from falling asleep on the sun deck (I was in the shade when I sat down! The ship turned after I fell asleep!) and a little cranky. Um, though I don't seem to have and pictures of the calligraphy. I think my camera had died... I will see what I can find later.

Many of my favorite pictures were just of the river.

boats next to us as we left the ship the first time

view of the rising sun over the Yangtze

River!

The first and most dramatic of the Three Gorges- it looks like the river slices through the middle of a mountain.

I'll post this now and put the rest of the cruise in a separate entry. Stay tuned!

Home Safe!

I am in Ames and feeling good. I think I will mostly be hanging out quietly at home for the next couple of days- resetting my sleep schedule and fulfilling a month-old date to stay up all night watching movies with my brother. But I will start to make phone calls and lunch dates to catch up with anyone else in the area soon. Also try to catch up my blogging on all the travel in the last few weeks.

1am, and I am in transit again

Not a complaint, though the thought of finding a place to live in for more than a year at a time makes me ache a bit. I'm getting pretty good at packing, getting pretty good at not being attached to belongings and being ready to let things go, and I love always having new things to discover and new people to meet. But I would love to make some friends and know they will be around, that I will be around. That we might celebrate each others' birthdays more than once together.

That's a pretty angsty thought, given that before this year I lived in Iowa City for five years, and that before that I had lived my whole life in Iowa. But living around college students is a constant transition of relationships. Everyone is still deciding who they are and where they are going, and holding on to any one person too tight risks losing yourself.

We had our HNC commencement ceremony this afternoon. It was really nice. I have been so caught up in disappointment in myself, frustrated that I have been struggling so much with my own things (I am full of FEELINGS and sometimes it's a problem) and not taking full advantage of where I am that I have often lost sight of what a unique program I am in this year. I received (in an unashamedly fusia cover) a joint certificate in Chinese Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University. Stephen Roach, the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and Zhang Yibin, Nanjing U's liberal arts vice president, were our commencement speakers. My classmates are truly warmhearted and have a lot of vision and commitment. I know that I personally really need a break to figure out how I want to use this experience, as well as my undergrad degrees, but this has been an incredible place to be. I am qualified to call myself a China expert, of sorts anyway.

I am looking forward to traveling and being around people I love in the next month and a half, and very much looking forward to the reflection and clarity of mind that both of those things bring me. Next year is going to be a more personally focused one. I am hoping to write a lot (knock on wood; if I set myself up with expectations now I'll drown in them by august) and clear my mind out a bit. Hopefully one of my next entries will begin to outline possible writing for the next year. I'm looking forward to it.

Love!

This post gets lots of hits too. Why, I ask you?

Previous title:  More of a pledge than a post

Hello, all! I have been sitting in our student lounge at the HNC for about nine hours. Not consistently, obviously, as I have been doing homework and thus taking every possible excuse to go somewhere else and do something else, but I have been here a long time. I have mostly solidified plans for a cruise on the Yangtze river in a couple of weeks. I will be finalizing them in a couple of days. I am hoping that it takes less time to upload photos here when I'm in the States. I am hoping to do posts on the World Expo, the Nanjing Massacre Museum (which I can promise will be aptly summed up with the word INTENSE), the Yangtze cruise, my time in Hebei with Xiaoxuan's family, and maybe the four days I'll be spending in Seoul before I head back to the States. Hopefully, hopefully.

I am really excited about the cruise (er, obviously) and about going to Langfang in Hebei province. Xiaoxuan told me on Friday when we ate out (at a Muslim restaurant on the Nanda campus-- no pork) that I will be the first foreigner any of her grandparents has met, except possibly her one grandfather who was a soldier in the Korean war. But, in her words, "that was maybe not so favorable." To give you some more of her words on a completely unrelated matter, one evening after a very long day of classes and lectures I kind of hyperventilated at her in mock-freak out that I couldn't decide what book to read in the few minutes I had before falling asleep.
"The Center is so cruel to you," she said calmly.
"Yes, you phrased that well," I replied, "it's not that I am crazy, it's that the Center is cruel."
"Actually, my meaning is that the Center is cruel and so you became crazy," she explained.
"Oh," said I.
"So it's still the Center's fault, but your situation is not so good."

I seem to attract this kind of lovingly mocking friendship. It works for me.

She's generally more encouraging than mocking. Today I was muttering at our Center T-shirt, trying to find where my Chinese name was written.
"Sorry," I said, "I'll go back and talk to myself in the lounge soon."
"And I will go to the library and talk to myself there," replied Xiaoxuan, "and we will leave a quiet dorm room"

I have been well, overall. I spent another weekend in Shanghai, commemorating the ascension of Baha'u'llah by saying prayers at 3am with five friends on the 29th of May. That was lovely, and together with other awesome friend-time made it a very recharging weekend for me. Since then I have been a lot better about waking up early enough in the morning that I have time to pray and meditate a little, and start my days with clarity rather than rushing and feelings of guilt.

I think that my Yangtze-Hebei adventures are going to involve two more day-long train rides. I am very excited. I love sitting on trains and looking out the window, knowing that I won't be arriving soon enough to worry about and all I need to think about is the meaning in the scenery, more than pretty much anything else I have done in China. I love trains.

Quick Update

Among my methods of schoolwork procrastination has been changing my mind repeatedly about my summer plans, and obsessively looking up plane tickets on vayama.com. These culminated tonight in the purchase of a round-trip ticket from Seoul to Des Moines and back- putting me in Iowa or thereabouts from Tuesday, July 6th until Sunday, August 1st.

Hope I'll be seeing you soon!

The end of the semester approaches!

I am outlining and researching for a paper comparing Renewable Energy Law in Germany and China. This points my research at the intersection of economic development and environmental protection in the two legal systems. It needs to be 5,000 characters by the end of the semester, which in double-spaced English would be upwards of 15 pages and in Chinese will be 10 or so.

The Chinese constitution mentions environmental protection in it's "General Principles" section, but does not include a clean environment in its fundamental rights (or Bill of Rights). The Environmental Protection Law is extensive, and the largest problem is that it is not enforced locally. It includes a clause stating that the appropriate government department will "in accordance with the national standards for environment quality and the country's economic and technological conditions, establish the national standards for the discharge of pollutants."

I am hoping to get a feel for the different strengths and weaknesses of approach between 'developed' country with relatively strict environmental policies (ie, Germany) and a quickly 'developing' country where economic development still for the most part takes places with little or no regard to environmental protection.

Not sure why this blog post gets so many dang views

Previously titled: 罗亚死了，罗亚死了

April has been a good month in a lot of ways.

First, a friend of a friend visited Nanjing, and in helping to show her the city I finally saw a bit of the city myself. We went to Purple Mountain:

(this buddha statue was created as a tourist attraction in the late 90's, and we saw some other folks sitting on his lap, so we decided we wouldn't be disrespecting him or anyone else by following suit)

And visited a temple and a Ming Dynasty city wall that are both within 30 minutes walking distance from my Center. Who knew?

Pagoda in the temple:

View of the lake and Ming wall from the top of the pagoda:

I have ALSO been buying myself some books. These include: an anthology of Chinese fantasy writing from 2008, "Swordbird" (a book written by an 11 year old Chinese girl who lives in the US in both Chinese and English. Think Redwall series, except birds. Holding swords), a Chinese dictionary (not Chinese-English. Just Chinese), and a copy of China's National Geographic (or 黄夏地理). Xiaoxuan just helped me order a science fiction anthology and a selection of Lu Xun's writings (linked to Wikipedia). He was a very influential thinker in the decades after the Nationalist revolution in 1911. Many Chinese have to read bits of his writing in high school, and the woman that I have been helping to practice English highly recommended reading his complete stories (as in full texts, not necessarily everything he's written).

I am feeling good about my life plan. This is good. I have been feeling foolishly insecure all year about one thing or another. The plan a little farther out: I am moving to Korea next year, then I think back to China to work for a year and reapplying to grad schools for fall 2012. Then I'm hoping somewhere will let me teach and take students abroad, and maybe I'll work on a PhD.

I've realized I need to actually post about China more, and not keep this blog so self-centered. Now that I feel like I've got myself figured out a little more (haha, ask tomorrow) that is my plan. If you've got questions to guide my writing, I'd love to hear 'em!

Title is from one of the fantasy stories I'm reading, yo. "Luoya is dead, Luoya is dead"

She may cry but her tears will dry when I hand her the keys to a shiney new Australia

Welp, I have some major updates on the status on my brain and future plans.

Update Eins: I did not get into grad school. Despite the feelings of numerous friends and relatives, I do not seem to be the end-all, be-all of prospective researchers. Since I’d decided that I NEED some time away from school, this is really okay. My ego remains slightly bruised, but my ego generally needs to be taken down a notch or two.

Update Zwei: I am planning on moving to Korea in the fall to teach English for a year. This will give me some more experience teaching, and hopefully help me decide if I’m aiming to teach kids or older students. After I get the lesson planning figured out, it will also give me lots of time to work on other projects and figure myself out.

Update Drei: I’m afraid that right now I’m not planning on coming back to the US this summer. Plane tickets are expensive, and I’ve decided to use the money to travel around China since I’ll still have a visa to be here the rest of the summer. This I’m traveling with a Canadian friend and then visiting Xiaoxuan’s family in Hebei Province, near Beijing.

Update Vier: I love you!

Title is from "Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog"

Final thoughts on Bazhong

I’m not really sure where to start updating you about the rest of the week. Definitely the best and most important part was working with the kidsI think pretty much all of them were excited about my class simply because it took them away from normal assignments and classwork (as any self-respecting seventh grader should be) and many were also excited to meet us.

Playing Jeopardy in our second lesson with each class was hilarious. It wasn’t exactly Jeopardy, we had lots of questions about US culture and such divided into two groups: Easy and Hard. When I explained the game, I first told them that I’d be asking them questions and some of them would be hard, then that they were in groups, then that each group would choose either an easy question or a hard one. Whenever Genbao finished translating that, everyone would yell “Easy!” and I would put my hands up and say “but! And easy question is worth ten points, and a hard question is worth thirty” and a hush would be followed by whispers of “三十”[thirty]and sometimes a round of yelled “Hard!” They were attentive and excited about the questions. I didn’t tell anyone out loud if they were right or not- half the time looking back at the kids anxiously before doing so. The scores were always greeting with cheers and groans.

I think I mentioned before that Genbao was a fantastic co-teacher. He helped a lot (one could also say “did most of the work”) lesson planning, and then the night before we first taught he said “I think that because you are native speaker, you should teach. And I- I will translate!” He was great.

We got a good reputation because we spent a lot of time of phonics the first day- all the teachers who sat in on our class did all the phonics work along with me and the kids.

The more ridiculous things are usually a better story, but I’m afraid that focusing on them too easily gives a skewed vision of my life in China.

Ridiculous Thing 1, I already mentioned, was in my mind the fact that we met with the mayor and local Communist Party Secretariat. They wanted to meet with us to support our visit, and possibly the fellowship that’s supposed to be happening in Bazhong next year. It was a kind gesture, overall, but still a strange one.

Ridiculous Thing 2 involved our return trip. On the way there I and three other classmates rode a train to Guangyuan, the nearest train station. We rode the public bus, which is scheduled to take three and a half hours, driving on mountain rodes and stopping now and then to let passangers off. Our trip back to Guangyuan took only a little more than two hours. Why, you ask? And I will tell you. We took a different road, a highway. Why does the public bus not use this highway? Well, I’ll tell you that too. It isn’t finished. No one uses it. We loaded onto a bus, our luggage crammed in around us, with two students in a small silver sedan along with the school’s headmaster leading the way. The sedan and our bus flashed their hazard lights the whole way- “foreigners on board-foreigners on board-attention.” We breezed past a family car stopped at the blockade and onto the unopened section of the highway. We had to turn around on one overpass, the middle of which was blocked off with piles of construction materials, sending us down an entrance ramp and back up the other side. We passed many groups of construction workers who got out of the way for us to pass.

Overall, the trip was awesome. I got closer to some classmates, got to interact with a bunch of really bright students both in my classes in the middle school and at the high school English Corner. I returned worn out but very happy.

Sichuan updates

Updates that I wrote while I was in Bazhong are below, dated according to when I wrote them (I'm just uploading them tonight). I'm working on an entry covering the rest of the week, but it'll take me a little longer.

Love!

Eigentlich konnten wir uns freuen

A good first day of teaching! Although I really don’t know what to do with the teachers and their expectations- as far as they are concerned this trip has been one of misunderstandings and silly expectations- the kids are fantastic. Teachers (at least two, up to five) sat in on every one of our classes today. Genbao kept saying how nervous it made him during our breaks, and I kept telling him not to worry about them; just focus on the kids. The teachers stared at us pretty stonily most of the time, but I managed to ignore them pretty effectively. Apparently one of the high school teachers pulled aside one of the HNC students teaching there and asked if we were teaching majors. No. No, we are not. We are English speakers, and that’s all we got. I think they’re expecting us to revolutionize their teaching methods. Whatever. I’m sure someone saw that we are from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies and decided they wanted us to be teaching majors and passed that wish along.

Anyway. The kids are fantastic. They are attentive and curious and really excited to speak English with us. I am teaching seventh grade or 初一， the first year of junior middle school. The kids are twelve or thirteen and look about nine. They just about swoon when I manage to catch a single student’s eye and smile at them. They told me that that I am very beautiful (a stretch, at best) and my handwriting is very good (an outright falsehood) and after two of the five classes I taught today I was surrounded by a swarm demanding I autograph their textbooks or notebooks or the flags that Genbao and I gave out as prizes for our most challenging activity. Our third class asked for my phone number. I said, Chinese or American? and they said Chinese of course! but none of them have called or texted me yet.

We were told to assume that the seventh graders would know next to nothing, and were pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t true. They definitely can’t have very elevated conversations, but they can follow my instructions that have to do with the textbook and the activities in it. We asked what they wanted to be when they grow up and everyone who answered in English (we told them they could speak Chinese in the hopes that they would give us real answers and not just convenient ones, but few of them complied- I think all the teachers in the back were making them nervous too). We got quite a few “I want to be a policeman/woman. Although it is a little dangerous, the work is quite interesting.”s and another set of “I want to be a reporter. I will meet interesting people every day.”s and quite a few “I want to be an English teacher, because English is very interesting”s. I’m not sure how much of a difference we can honestly make in two class periods with each class of eighty (for a total of an hour and a half of very divided attention for each student). I am trying, and Genbao has been awesome at reminding me, to walk up and down through the classroom while I am talking and having them answer questions or practice pronunciation so that I can hear more of them and they all feel like they have been close to and approved by a Native English Speaker (more than that: An American).

Every time the class split into pairs there was always a student or two who ended up by themselves, by coincidence, their choice, or their classmates’ judgment I was never sure. It gave me the chance to pair up with them. I got a few pretty awesome facial expressions when I said “Can I be your partner?” Eyes went wide with a mixture of joy and pure terror. Most of the kids did really well for their level of English.

One boy sat in the back and didn’t understand enough to pay attention unless Genbao was translating. I did the “Is Mary doing her homework?” exercise with him one-on-one when he ended up alone. He had a lot of trouble- didn’t know any of the recent vocab, pronunciation was way off and very very hesitant. He looked at me like he was waiting for me to give up on him and move on to a smarter student- his smile seemed to shrug and his eyes apologized even while they were begging for approval. We went through a couple and he successfully said and (I really think) understood “No, she is eating dinner.” I told him good job and smiled at him so that I hope he believed me, but I don’t really think he did. Another girl I talked to one on one wasn’t too good at English, but I got the feeling it was because she didn’t care. This kid didn’t seem to think he had the right to care (I infer from kids like him I have known). He was paying attention and willing to work, and I’m sure if he had just a little extra help he’d be able to do just fine- I’m pretty confident that he will end up with no option but to go back to his home village. Kids don’t end up with expressions that hopeless if English is the only subject they’ve been convinced they’re hopeless at. I’d be angry, but there isn’t anywhere constructive to direct it, so I’m letting the anger go. There are over a thousand students in each grade, about eighty in every class. These teachers are not the best (though they are decent), or many might have chosen to live somewhere other than Bazhong. So I’m just resolved to keep trying to keep eye contact with him and the others who look like they don’t think they belong in school.

So, we were told we were coming to 中国一个非常贫困的地方－one of the poorest places in China. This is not true. Bazhong is definitely out of the way, and not one of the places that tourists generally frequent, but it is only poor and under-developed enough not to be too embarassing to the Chinese government. One of my classmates who’s also on this trip spent some time as a volunteer English teacher with an organization focused on sending teachers to poor villages. Most of her colleagues, she said, ended up in cities where they were not needed because they were not allowed into the really poor areas. The Chinese government is very sensitive to being seen as 落后 (backwards) and is growing tired of lectures on 人权 (human rights) , and wants the world to marvel when we realize that all of their problems are solved rather than continuously telling them what they do wrong (I think). This is a complicated country.

We are being banqueted (again- the school administrators already fed us very well last night, and our HNC administrator took us all out for hotpot tonight) by some higher-ups in the regional government tomorrow. I think at the expense of our time at the high school English Corner, which... would not be my choice of priorities. But one surrenders some amount of judgment about time management when entering into arrangements like a week of teaching English in China. We are actually quite sheltered from bureaucracy at our little Center, though of course we complain about what we do encounter.

The man who picked Genbao, Sean, Fan Yi and I up from the high school where we ate lunch and took us back to the middle school to teach wore an electric blue jacket with neon green and black polka dots (which, I later discovered, were carefully coordinated with electric blue plush sneakers). His hair, without any product that I could detect, put of the rest of us to shame with its rebellious and care-free volume. His ride was bright red, something like a shortened PT Cruiser. He was blasting what Sean informed me was like Tibetan techno,; it switched back and forth between an instrument I would describe as “beautiful” and “traditional” and a rousing chorus of “If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck” all over a thumping bass line. Sean asked if I had ever been to the Tibetan Plateau (which includes part of Western Sichuan and much of Qinghai province as well as Tibet itself). When I told him I had not, he helped put the song in a more 地道 (authentic) context. He said that Tibetan men –truly manly men- ride around on motorcycles, long black hair flowing out from under their cowboy hats, with techno blasting from speakers on the back of the bike. A cloud of dust, the gleam of sunlight on high cheekbones, the increasingly insistent thump of techno: this is my impression of Tibetans. I would like to get to the plateau and round it out a bit, but I’m not sure it’s in the cards this trip.

Yang Genbao and I spent about an hour and a half (close to two hours, actually) finishing our lesson plans for tomorrow. Wu Dai, who’s teaching the other 初一 class, joined us for a while. The kids’ English is seriously multiple times better than we were told to expect, so we’re trying to make our lesson plans more complex. We have three more new classes tomorrow morning (we had five today) and then have two second-time classes in the afternoon.

Teaching is hard work, eh?

Though actually each of the English teachers here is only in charge of one or two classes that meet every day, and not eight different classes five in a day with no future idea of what to expect from them. I’m sure they’re still plenty worn out when they get home.

Okay, heading to bed. It’s 11:40 and they come to pick us up at 7:50.

[Things one does not miss after leaving China: grey-black pollution boogers. I may have said this before. I seriously will not miss them at all. They seriously happen a lot. No hyperbole. Blackness. In my nose. From the air.]

Xavier Naidoo's "Eigentlich Gut"

In which I continue to overwork the gentle comma and the sisters parenthetical

Long distance train rides will make a documentarian out of anyone. The scenes that flash by demand explanation. How were these mountains formed? When were they terraced? How many generations have used oxen to plough that field?

I got to the Nanjing Train Station with my three classmates/traveling companions about forty minutes before our train was scheduled to leave. We found the aisle waiting to board the K290 bound for Chengdu already full, and so threw down our backpacks and bags of food and sat in the aisle next to it. A boy probably a bit younger than us was going around with a cup begging for change. He stopped in front of Yang Genbao and then me; Genbao suggested I make a trip to the restroom after it became obvious the kid wasn’t going to give up. I don’t like ignoring people who obviously need help, but at the same time giving a mute boy one Yuan isn’t long term help. And also, once you have definitively revealed yourself as an easy mark in public spaces in China, you will get no rest.

Train station waiting rooms are frequented by beggars, as well as vendors walking around with maps and newspapers. It has worked out all right for me in that by telling beggars that I am not going to give me money I often let other train-waiters around me know that I speak Chinese, and a conversation can start.

This time, however, I already had people to talk to, so when our train was 20 minutes late, I wasn’t bored.

We rode in a hard sleeper car, which I think I described for my trip from Guangzhou to Nanjing. I slept in the middle bunk this time, which was a hundred times more comfortable than the top bunk. I could see out of the window from my bed this time, and had a bit more room to move around. I tried going without the Dramamine, since I ended up still uncomfortable for the whole train ride with it last time (as well as unconscious for the majority of it...). I drank lots of water, and slept a fair amount, and didn’t feel sick at all.

I learned a three-person Chinese card game (with Mitch and Genbao) called 抖地主or “Overthrow the Landlord” (which Mitch and I speculated is probably at least forty years old).

Our 25 hours on the trian passed more or less without event. The scenery was beautiful in the morning when we had reached Sichuan province (Genbao said we had passed Xi’an- where the tomb of the first Chinese emporer and his ceramic warriors hang out) in the night without knowing it. Spring is well on its way here.

The view from the train was incredible in the morning. The terraced mountains were highlighted with the occasional line of yellow safflower fields, and the light green of new deciduous tree growth seemed to be gentle waking up the dark evergreens. I love trains. I could listen to music and look out a train window happily for days, I think.

The bus from Guangyuan to Bazhong was supposed to take three and a half hours. We spent an extra hour sitting on the side of the road with cars and trucks honking at us after our driver realized he had lost the key to the luggage compartment. He left the bus’s Karaoke (卡拉OK) television on though, and I had snacks, so it wasn’t too bad.

To People Living With- living with- living with- NOT Dying from Disease

I'm sure not what's caused this recent eruption in thoughts I want to share here but I think it portends good things about my mental health, so let's go with it.

The title is from the song "La Vie Boheme" in RENT. I can't say that I am a proponent of the 'bohemian' lifestyle, but I am very much a proponent of the fearlessness and freedom in this soundtrack. So, I guess, if the choice is between la vie boheme and condemning those who choose it, color me bohemian.

The oft-quoted "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle" (or something like that?) comes to mind. We are all living with disease, and it has only been in reminding myself of this that I have recently started climbing further out of it. All of us have things that drag us down if we don't name and face them. We're much like the witches of fairy tales that way; "tell me your true name, and you are in my power." To addiction, fear, and self-loathing and I say: we are stronger than you.

The thought has often occurred to me that those of us with something to recover from- disease, addiction, war, divorce- are the lucky ones (that is, of course IF we get help. otherwise we are just spectacularly in the dark). I think that lives are measured more in direction than in places, and it is easier for us to see the low we are coming from and point ourselves up. If we started at Content, how would we see which way fulfillment lies? Really, though, I think the challenge is for people who think they are supposed to be content, and can't see why they aren't. There are so many shades of pain and struggle that go unnamed and untreated. Let me say this (to myself as much as anyone else): if you are unhappy there is a valid reason. You deserve help, and help is possible. Keep looking for it.

I think that sometimes addiction and disease are almost attractive because of that earlier thought, though. If you have a problem that obvious, it can (from the outside, at least) make it easier to see what would make your life better. And I have seen the depth of love and wisdom that many survivors have been able to reach through their circumstances. I am grateful for all of my struggles, as they've pushed me into the direction I'm going. At the same time, I don't really think it is pain that makes us beautiful. Perhaps pain is just one of the things that shows us our beauty most clearly.

I don't think there is any limit to joy that we humans can experience. I don't think there is anyone who cannot be happier, healthier, stronger. I think that is a blessing.

These thoughts started while I was sitting in Ecoffee (壹咖啡）reading for my East Asian Economies (东亚经济) class. I was reading the World Bank's report on the "East Asian Miracle" (yes, in Chinese. No, not understanding everything). In the last century, we have done a lot of naming. We have named inequalities and injustices, and I think many people get discouraged, frustrated, or even angry at the growing list. But I urge us all to see it as progress. The more problems we name, the more problems we can overcome.

This sentence resonated on this chord for me: “东亚经济增长最快的国家和地区，即日本和”四小虎“也是收入分配最公平的经济实体” It says that the countries and regions with the fastest economic development, Japan and the "Four Little Tigers" [Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong] are also the countries with the most equal distributions of income.

Equality is not a goal for the sake of those currently at the bottom. It is for all of us. I do not demand sanity and happiness purely for my own sake; with them I will be best able to better the world. If women's status in the world becomes equal to men's, it will not just be women who are better off. All of humanity will benefit from their knowledge, wisdom, and perspective. At the same time, all of humanity would lose greatly if men's status was dragged below women's (this same holds true for the gaps between people of different races, classes, backgrounds, nationalities, etc).

You are not doing anyone any favors by accepting unhappiness. Seek help, seek enlightenment, demand help, offer love and friendship freely. Love life, accept nothing less than wonderful.

(Not much of a travel blog, is this?)