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"

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"

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.

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.

// 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.

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!